-lrb- applause -rrb- david gallo : this is bill lange . i 'm dave gallo .
and we 're going to tell you some stories from the sea here in video .
we 've got some of the most incredible video of titanic that 's ever been seen , and we 're not going to show you any of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the truth of the matter is that the titanic - even though it 's breaking all sorts of box office records - it 's not the most exciting story from the sea .
and the problem , i think , is that we take the ocean for granted .
when you think about it , the oceans are 75 percent of the planet .
most of the planet is ocean water .
the average depth is about two miles .
part of the problem , i think , is we stand at the beach , or we see images like this of the ocean , and you look out at this great big blue expanse , and it 's shimmering and it 's moving and there 's waves and there 's surf and there 's tides , but you have no idea for what lies in there .
and in the oceans , there are the longest mountain ranges on the planet .
most of the animals are in the oceans .
most of the earthquakes and volcanoes are in the sea , at the bottom of the sea .
the biodiversity and the biodensity in the ocean is higher , in places , than it is in the rainforests .
it 's mostly unexplored , and yet there are beautiful sights like this that captivate us and make us become familiar with it .
but when you 're standing at the beach , i want you to think that you 're standing at the edge of a very unfamiliar world .
we have to have a very special technology to get into that unfamiliar world .
we use the submarine alvin and we use cameras , and the cameras are something that bill lange has developed with the help of sony .
marcel proust said , " the true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes . "
people that have partnered with us have given us new eyes , not only on what exists - the new landscapes at the bottom of the sea - but also how we think about life on the planet itself .
here 's a jelly .
it 's one of my favorites , because it 's got all sorts of working parts .
this turns out to be the longest creature in the oceans .
it gets up to about 150 feet long .
but see all those different working things ?
i love that kind of stuff .
it 's got these fishing lures on the bottom . they 're going up and down .
it 's got tentacles dangling , swirling around like that .
it 's a colonial animal .
these are all individual animals banding together to make this one creature .
and it 's got these jet thrusters up in front that it 'll use in a moment , and a little light .
if you take all the big fish and schooling fish and all that , put them on one side of the scale , put all the jelly-type of animals on the other side , those guys win hands down .
most of the biomass in the ocean is made out of creatures like this .
here 's the x-wing death jelly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the bioluminescence - they use the lights for attracting mates and attracting prey and communicating .
we could n't begin to show you our archival stuff from the jellies .
they come in all different sizes and shapes .
bill lange : we tend to forget about the fact that the ocean is miles deep on average , and that we 're real familiar with the animals that are in the first 200 or 300 feet , but we 're not familiar with what exists from there all the way down to the bottom .
and these are the types of animals that live in that three-dimensional space , that micro-gravity environment that we really have n't explored .
you hear about giant squid and things like that , but some of these animals get up to be approximately 140 , 160 feet long .
they 're very little understood .
dg : this is one of them , another one of our favorites , because it 's a little octopod .
you can actually see through his head .
and here he is , flapping with his ears and very gracefully going up .
we see those at all depths and even at the greatest depths .
they go from a couple of inches to a couple of feet .
they come right up to the submarine - they 'll put their eyes right up to the window and peek inside the sub .
this is really a world within a world , and we 're going to show you two .
in this case , we 're passing down through the mid-ocean and we see creatures like this .
this is kind of like an undersea rooster .
this guy , that looks incredibly formal , in a way .
and then one of my favorites . what a face !
this is basically scientific data that you 're looking at .
it 's footage that we 've collected for scientific purposes .
and that 's one of the things that bill 's been doing , is providing scientists with this first view of animals like this , in the world where they belong .
they do n't catch them in a net .
they 're actually looking at them down in that world .
we 're going to take a joystick , sit in front of our computer , on the earth , and press the joystick forward , and fly around the planet .
we 're going to look at the mid-ocean ridge , a 40,000-mile long mountain range .
the average depth at the top of it is about a mile and a half .
and we 're over the atlantic - that 's the ridge right there - but we 're going to go across the caribbean , central america , and end up against the pacific , nine degrees north .
we make maps of these mountain ranges with sound , with sonar , and this is one of those mountain ranges .
we 're coming around a cliff here on the right .
the height of these mountains on either side of this valley is greater than the alps in most cases .
and there 's tens of thousands of those mountains out there that have n't been mapped yet .
this is a volcanic ridge .
we 're getting down further and further in scale .
and eventually , we can come up with something like this .
this is an icon of our robot , jason , it 's called .
and you can sit in a room like this , with a joystick and a headset , and drive a robot like that around the bottom of the ocean in real time .
one of the things we 're trying to do at woods hole with our partners is to bring this virtual world - this world , this unexplored region - back to the laboratory .
because we see it in bits and pieces right now .
we see it either as sound , or we see it as video , or we see it as photographs , or we see it as chemical sensors , but we never have yet put it all together into one interesting picture .
here 's where bill 's cameras really do shine .
this is what 's called a hydrothermal vent .
and what you 're seeing here is a cloud of densely packed , hydrogen-sulfide-rich water coming out of a volcanic axis on the sea floor .
gets up to 600 , 700 degrees f , somewhere in that range .
so that 's all water under the sea - a mile and a half , two miles , three miles down .
and we knew it was volcanic back in the ' 60s , ' 70s .
and then we had some hint that these things existed all along the axis of it , because if you 've got volcanism , water 's going to get down from the sea into cracks in the sea floor , come in contact with magma , and come shooting out hot .
we were n't really aware that it would be so rich with sulfides , hydrogen sulfides .
we did n't have any idea about these things , which we call chimneys .
this is one of these hydrothermal vents .
six hundred degree f water coming out of the earth .
on either side of us are mountain ranges that are higher than the alps , so the setting here is very dramatic .
bl : the white material is a type of bacteria that thrives at 180 degrees c.
dg : i think that 's one of the greatest stories right now that we 're seeing from the bottom of the sea , is that the first thing we see coming out of the sea floor after a volcanic eruption is bacteria .
and we started to wonder for a long time , how did it all get down there ?
what we find out now is that it 's probably coming from inside the earth .
not only is it coming out of the earth - so , biogenesis made from volcanic activity - but that bacteria supports these colonies of life .
the pressure here is 4,000 pounds per square inch .
a mile and a half from the surface to two miles to three miles - no sun has ever gotten down here .
all the energy to support these life forms is coming from inside the earth - so , chemosynthesis .
and you can see how dense the population is .
these are called tube worms .
bl : these worms have no digestive system . they have no mouth .
but they have two types of gill structures .
one for extracting oxygen out of the deep-sea water , another one which houses this chemosynthetic bacteria , which takes the hydrothermal fluid - that hot water that you saw coming out of the bottom - and converts that into simple sugars that the tube worm can digest .
dg : you can see , here 's a crab that lives down there .
he 's managed to grab a tip of these worms .
now , they normally retract as soon as a crab touches them .
oh ! good going .
so , as soon as a crab touches them , they retract down into their shells , just like your fingernails .
there 's a whole story being played out here that we 're just now beginning to have some idea of because of this new camera technology .
bl : these worms live in a real temperature extreme .
their foot is at about 200 degrees c and their head is out at three degrees c , so it 's like having your hand in boiling water and your foot in freezing water .
that 's how they like to live .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dg : this is a female of this kind of worm .
and here 's a male .
you watch . it does n't take long before two guys here - this one and one that will show up over here - start to fight .
everything you see is played out in the pitch black of the deep sea .
there are never any lights there , except the lights that we bring .
here they go .
on one of the last dive series , we counted 200 species in these areas - 198 were new , new species .
bl : one of the big problems is that for the biologists working at these sites , it 's rather difficult to collect these animals .
and they disintegrate on the way up , so the imagery is critical for the science .
dg : two octopods at about two miles depth .
this pressure thing really amazes me - that these animals can exist there at a depth with pressure enough to crush the titanic like an empty pepsi can .
what we saw up till now was from the pacific .
this is from the atlantic . even greater depth .
you can see this shrimp is harassing this poor little guy here , and he 'll bat it away with his claw . whack !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the same thing 's going on over here .
what they 're getting at is that - on the back of this crab - the foodstuff here is this very strange bacteria that lives on the backs of all these animals .
and what these shrimp are trying to do is actually harvest the bacteria from the backs of these animals .
and the crabs do n't like it at all .
these long filaments that you see on the back of the crab are actually created by the product of that bacteria .
so , the bacteria grows hair on the crab .
on the back , you see this again .
the red dot is the laser light of the submarine alvin to give us an idea about how far away we are from the vents .
those are all shrimp .
you see the hot water over here , here and here , coming out .
they 're clinging to a rock face and actually scraping bacteria off that rock face .
here 's a tiny , little vent that 's come out of the side of that pillar .
those pillars get up to several stories .
so here , you 've got this valley with this incredible alien landscape of pillars and hot springs and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes , inhabited by these very strange animals that live only on chemical energy coming out of the ground .
they do n't need the sun at all .
bl : you see this white v-shaped mark on the back of the shrimp ?
it 's actually a light-sensing organ .
it 's how they find the hydrothermal vents .
the vents are emitting a black body radiation - an ir signature - and so they 're able to find these vents at considerable distances .
dg : all this stuff is happening along that 40,000-mile long mountain range that we 're calling the ribbon of life , because just even today , as we speak , there 's life being generated there from volcanic activity .
this is the first time we 've ever tried this any place .
we 're going to try to show you high definition from the pacific .
we 're moving up one of these pillars .
this one 's several stories tall .
in it , you 'll see that it 's a habitat for a lot of different animals .
there 's a funny kind of hot plate here , with vent water coming out of it .
so all of these are individual homes for worms .
now here 's a closer view of that community .
here 's crabs here , worms here .
there are smaller animals crawling around .
here 's pagoda structures .
i think this is the neatest-looking thing .
i just ca n't get over this - that you 've got these little chimneys sitting here smoking away .
this stuff is toxic as hell , by the way .
you could never get a permit to dump this in the ocean , and it 's coming out all from it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's unbelievable . it 's basically sulfuric acid , and it 's being just dumped out , at incredible rates .
and animals are thriving - and we probably came from here .
that 's probably where we evolved from .
bl : this bacteria that we 've been talking about turns out to be the most simplest form of life found .
there are a number of groups that are proposing that life evolved at these vent sites .
although the vent sites are short-lived - an individual site may last only 10 years or so - as an ecosystem they 've been stable for millions - well , billions - of years .
dg : it works too well . you see there 're some fish inside here as well .
there 's a fish sitting here .
here 's a crab with his claw right at the end of that tube worm , waiting for that worm to stick his head out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bl : the biologists right now can not explain why these animals are so active .
the worms are growing inches per week !
dg : i already said that this site , from a human perspective , is toxic as hell .
not only that , but on top - the lifeblood - that plumbing system turns off every year or so .
their plumbing system turns off , so the sites have to move .
and then there 's earthquakes , and then volcanic eruptions , on the order of one every five years , that completely wipes the area out .
despite that , these animals grow back in about a year 's time .
you 're talking about biodensities and biodiversity , again , higher than the rainforest that just springs back to life .
is it sensitive ? yes .
is it fragile ? no , it 's not really very fragile .
i 'll end up with saying one thing .
there 's a story in the sea , in the waters of the sea , in the sediments and the rocks of the sea floor .
it 's an incredible story .
what we see when we look back in time , in those sediments and rocks , is a record of earth history .
everything on this planet - everything - works by cycles and rhythms .
the continents move apart . they come back together .
oceans come and go . mountains come and go . glaciers come and go .
el nino comes and goes . it 's not a disaster , it 's rhythmic .
what we 're learning now , it 's almost like a symphony .
it 's just like music - it really is just like music .
and what we 're learning now is that you ca n't listen to a five-billion-year long symphony , get to today and say , " stop ! we want tomorrow 's note to be the same as it was today . "
it 's absurd . it 's just absurd .
so , what we 've got to learn now is to find out where this planet 's going at all these different scales and work with it .
learn to manage it .
the concept of preservation is futile .
conservation 's tougher , but we can probably get there .
thank you very much .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today to start a revolution .
now before you get up in arms , or you break into song , or you pick a favorite color , i want to define what i mean by revolution .
by revolution , i mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave - the way we think and the way we behave .
now why , steve , why do we need a revolution ?
we need a revolution because things are n't working ; they 're just not working .
and that makes me really sad because i 'm sick and tired of things not working .
you know , i 'm sick and tired of us not living up to our potential .
i 'm sick and tired of us being last .
and we are last place in so many things - for example , social factors .
we 're last place in europe in innovation .
there we are right at the end , right at the bottom , last place as a culture that does n't value innovation .
we 're last place in health care , and that 's important for a sense of well-being .
and there we are , not just last in the e.u. , we 're last in europe , at the very bottom .
and worst of all , it just came out three weeks ago , many of you have seen it , the economist .
we 're the saddest place on earth , relative to gdp per capita - the saddest place on earth .
that 's social . let 's look at education .
where do we rank three weeks ago in another report by the oecd ?
last in reading , math and science . last .
business : the lowest perception in the e.u.
that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society .
why as a result , what happens ?
the lowest percentage of entrepreneurs starting businesses .
and this is despite the fact that everybody knows that small business is the engine of economies .
we hire the most people ; we create the most taxes .
so if our engine 's broken , guess what ?
last in europe gdp per capita .
last .
so it 's no surprise , guys , that 62 percent of bulgarians are not optimistic about the future .
we 're unhappy , we have bad education , and we have the worst businesses .
and these are facts , guys .
this is n't story tale ; it 's not make-believe .
it 's not .
it 's not a conspiracy i have got against bulgaria . these are facts .
so i think it should be really , really clear that our system is broken .
the way we think , the way we behave , our operating system of behaving is broken .
we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform bulgaria for the better , for ourselves , for our friends , for our family and for our future .
how did this happen ?
let 's be positive now . we 're going to get positive . how did this happen ?
i think we 're last because - and this is going to be drastic to some of you - because we are handicapping ourselves .
we 're holding ourselves back because we do n't value play .
i said " play , " all right .
in case some of you forgot what play is , this is what play looks like .
babies play , kids play , adults play .
we do n't value play .
in fact , we devalue play .
and we devalue it in three areas .
let 's go back to the same three areas .
social : 45 years of what ?
of communism - of valuing the society and the state over the individual and squashing , inadvertently , creativity , individual self-expression and innovation .
and instead , what do we value ?
because it 's shown the way we apply , generate and use knowledge is affected by our social and institutional context , which told us what in communism ?
to be serious .
to be really , really serious .
it did .
-lrb- applause -rrb- be serious .
i ca n't tell you how many times i 've been scolded in the park for letting my kids play on the ground .
heaven forbid they play in the dirt , the kal , or even worse , lokvi , water - that will kill them .
i have been told by babas and dyados that we should n't let our kids play so much because life is serious and we need to train them for the seriousness of life .
we have a serious meme running through .
it 's a social gene running through us .
it 's a serious gene .
it 's 45 years of it that 's created what i call the " baba factor . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and here 's how it works .
step one : woman says , " i want to have a baby . iskam baby . "
step two : we get the baby . woohoo !
but then what happens in step three ?
i want to go back to work because i need to further my career or i just want to go have coffees .
i 'm going to give bebko to baba .
but we need to remember that baba 's been infected by the serious meme for 45 years .
so what happens ?
she passes that virus on to baby , and it takes a really , really , really long time - as the redwood trees - for that serious meme to get out of our operating system .
what happens then ?
it goes into education where we have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years , that values rote learning , memorization and standardization , and devalues self-expression , self-exploration , questioning , creativity and play .
it 's a crap system .
true story : i went looking for a school for my kid .
we went to this prestigious little school and they say they 're going to study math 10 times a week and science eight times a week and reading five times a day and all this stuff .
and we said , " well what about play and recess ? "
and they said , " ha . there wo n't be a single moment in the schedule . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we said , " he 's five . "
what a crime . what a crime .
and it 's a crime that our education system is so serious because education is serious that we 're creating mindless , robotic workers to put bolts in pre-drilled holes .
but i 'm sorry , the problems of today are not the problems of the industrial revolution .
we need adaptability , the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative .
we do n't need mechanized workers .
but no , now our meme goes into work where we do n't value play .
we create robotic workers that we treat like assets , to lever and just throw away .
what are qualities of a bulgarian work ?
autocratic - do what i say because i 'm the chef .
i 'm the boss and i know better than you .
untrusting - you 're obviously a criminal , so i 'm going to install cameras .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- controlling - you 're obviously an idiot , so i 'm going to make a zillion little processes for you to follow so you do n't step out of the box .
so they 're restrictive - do n't use your mobile phone , do n't use your laptop , do n't search the internet , do n't be on i.m.
that 's somehow unprofessional and bad .
and at the end of the day , it 's unfulfilling because you 're controlled , you 're restricted , you 're not valued and you 're not having any fun .
in social , in education and in our business , do n't value play .
and that 's why we 're last , because we do n't value play .
and you can say , " that 's ridiculous , steve . what a dumb idea .
it ca n't be because of play .
just play , that 's a stupid thing . "
we have the serious meme in us .
well i 'm going to say no .
and i will prove it to you in the next part of the speech - that play is the catalyst , it is the revolution , that we can use to transform bulgaria for the better .
play : our brains are hardwired for play .
evolution has selected , over millions and billions of years , for play in animals and in humans .
and you know what ?
evolution does a really , really good job of deselecting traits that are n't advantageous to us and selecting traits for competitive advantage .
nature is n't stupid , and it selected for play .
throughout the animal kingdom , for example : ants . ants play .
maybe you did n't know that .
but when they 're playing , they 're learning the social order and dynamics of things .
rats play , but what you might not have known is that rats that play more have bigger brains and they learn tasks better , skills .
kittens play . we all know kittens play .
but what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially .
they can still hunt , but they ca n't be social .
bears play .
but what you may not know is that bears that play more survive longer .
it 's not the bears that learn how to fish better .
it 's the ones that play more .
and a final really interesting study - it 's been shown , a correlation between play and brain size .
the more you play , the bigger the brains there are .
dolphins , pretty big brains , play a lot .
but who do you think with the biggest brains are the biggest players ?
yours truly : humans .
kids play , we play - of every nationality , of every race , of every color , of every religion .
it 's a universal thing - we play .
and it 's not just kids , it 's adults too .
really cool term : neoteny - the retention of play and juvenile traits in adults .
and who are the biggest neotenists ?
humans . we play sports .
we do it for fun , or as olympians , or as professionals .
we play musical instruments .
we dance , we kiss , we sing , we just goof around .
we 're designed by nature to play from birth to old age .
we 're designed to do that continuously - to play and play a lot and not stop playing .
it is a huge benefit .
just like there 's benefits to animals , there 's benefits to humans .
for example , it 's been shown to stimulate neural growth in the amygdala , in the area where it controls emotions .
it 's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening .
as a result , what happens ?
we develop more emotional maturity if we play more .
we develop better decision-making ability if we play more .
these guys are facts .
it 's not fiction , it 's not story tales , it 's not make-believe ; it 's cold , hard science .
these are the benefits to play .
it is a genetic birthright that we have , like walking or speaking or seeing .
and if we handicap ourselves with play , we handicap ourselves as if we would with any other birthright that we have .
we hold ourselves back .
little exercise just for a second : close your eyes and try to imagine a world without play .
imagine a world without theater , without the arts , without song , without dancing , without soccer , without football , without laughter .
what does this world look like ?
it 's pretty bleak .
it 's pretty glum .
now imagine your workplace .
is it fun ? is it playful ?
or maybe the workplace of your friends - here we 're forward thinking .
is it fun ? is it playful ?
or is it crap ? is it autocratic , controlling , restrictive and untrusting and unfulfilling ?
we have this concept that the opposite of play is work .
we even feel guilty if we 're seen playing at work .
" oh , my colleagues see me laughing . i must not have enough work , " or , " oh , i 've got to hide because my boss might see me .
he 's going to think i 'm not working hard . "
but i have news for you : our thinking is backwards .
the opposite of play is not work .
the opposite of play is depression . it 's depression .
in fact , play improves our work .
just like there 's benefits for humans and animals , there 's benefits for play at work .
for example , it stimulates creativity .
it increases our openness to change .
it improves our ability to learn .
it provides a sense of purpose and mastery - two key motivational things that increase productivity , through play .
so before you start thinking of play as just not serious , play does n't mean frivolous .
you know , the professional athlete that loves skiing , he 's serious about it , but he loves it .
he 's having fun , he 's in the groove , he 's in the flow .
a doctor might be serious , but laughter 's still a great medicine .
our thinking is backwards .
we should n't be feeling guilty .
we should be celebrating play .
quick example from the corporate world .
fedex , easy motto : people , service , profit .
if you treat your people like people , if you treat them great , they 're happier , they 're fulfilled , they have a sense of mastery and purpose .
what happens ? they give better service - not worse , but better .
and when customers call for service and they 're dealing with happy people that can make decisions and are fulfilled , how do the customers feel ? they feel great .
and what do great customers do , great-feeling customers ?
they buy more of your service and they tell more of their friends , which leads to more profit .
people , service , profit .
play increases productivity , not decreases .
and you 're going to say , " gee , that can work for fedex out there in the united states , but it ca n't work in bulgaria .
no way . we 're different . "
it does work in bulgaria , you guys . two reasons .
one , play is universal .
there 's nothing weird about bulgarians that we ca n't play , besides the serious meme that we have to kick out .
two , i 've tried it . i 've tried at sciant .
when i got there , we had zero happy customers .
not one customer would refer us .
i asked them all .
we had marginal profit - i did .
we had marginal profits , and we had unhappy stakeholders .
through some basic change , change like improving transparency , change like promoting self-direction and collaboration , encouraging collaboration , not autocracy , the things like having a results-focus .
i do n't care when you get in in the morning . i do n't care when you leave .
i care that your customer and your team is happy and you 're organized with that .
why do i care if you get in at nine o 'clock ?
basically promoting fun .
through promoting fun and a great environment , we were able to transform sciant and , in just three short years - sounds like a long time , but change is slow - every customer , from zero to every customer referring us , above average profits for the industry and happy stakeholders .
and you can say , " well how do you know they 're happy ? "
well we did win , every year that we entered , one of the rankings for best employer for small business .
independent analysis from anonymous employees on their surveys .
it does , and it can , work in bulgaria .
there 's nothing holding us back , except our own mentality about play .
so some steps that we can take - to finish up - how to make this revolution through play .
first of all , you have to believe me .
if you do n't believe me , well just go home and think about it some more or something .
second of all , if you do n't have the feeling of play in you , you need to rediscover play .
whatever it was that as a kid you used to enjoy , that you enjoyed only six months ago , but now that you 've got that promotion you ca n't enjoy , because you feel like you have to be serious , rediscover it .
i do n't care if it 's mountain biking or reading a book or playing a game .
rediscover that because you 're the leaders , the innovation leaders , the thought leaders .
you 're the ones that have to go back to the office or talk to your friends and ignite the fire of change in the play revolution .
you guys have to , and if you 're not feeling it , your colleagues , your employees , are n't going to feel it .
you 've got to go back and say , " hey , i 'm going to trust you . "
weird concept : i hired you ; i should trust you .
i 'm going to let you make decisions . i 'm going to empower you , and i 'm going to delegate to the lowest level , rather than the top .
i 'm going to encourage constructive criticism .
i 'm going to let you challenge authority .
because it 's by challenging the way things are always done is that we are able to break out of the rut that we 're in and create innovative solutions to problems of today .
we 're not always right as leaders .
we 're going to eradicate fear .
fear is the enemy of play .
and we 're going to do things like eliminate restrictions .
you know what , let them use their mobile phone for personal calls - heaven forbid .
let them be on the internet .
let them be on instant messengers .
let them take long lunches .
lunch is like the recess for work .
it 's when you go out in the world and you recharge your brain , you meet your friends , you have a beer , you have some food , you talk , you get some synergy of ideas that maybe you would n't have had before .
let them do it . give them some freedom , and in general , let them play . let them have fun at the workplace .
we spend so much of our lives at the workplace , and it 's supposed to be , what , a miserable grind , so that 20 years from now , we wake up and say , " is this it ?
is that all there was ? "
unacceptable . nepriemliv .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so in summary , we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave , but we do n't need a workers ' revolution .
we do n't need a workers ' revolution .
what we need is a players ' uprising .
what we need is a players ' uprising .
what we need is a players ' uprising .
seriously , we need to band together .
today is the start of the uprising .
but what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution .
you need to go and share your ideas and your success stories of what worked about reinvigorating our lives , our schools , and our work with play ; about how play promotes a sense of promise and self-fulfillment ; of how play promotes innovation and productivity , and , ultimately , how play creates meaning .
because we ca n't do it alone . we have to do it together , and together , if we do this and share these ideas on play , we can transform bulgaria for the better .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education .
we have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity .
but i want to tell you the story of pisa , oecd 's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world , and it 's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat look at how the world looked in the 1960s , in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school .
you can see the united states ahead of everyone else , and much of the economic success of the united states draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education .
but in the 1970s , some countries caught up .
in the 1980s , the global expansion of the talent pool continued .
and the world did n't stop in the 1990s .
so in the ' 60s , the u.s. was first .
in the ' 90s , it was 13th , and not because standards had fallen , but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere .
korea shows you what 's possible in education .
two generations ago , korea had the standard of living of afghanistan today , and was one of the lowest education performers .
today , every young korean finishes high school .
so this tells us that , in a global economy , it is no longer national improvement that 's the benchmark for success , but the best performing education systems internationally .
the trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do .
look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets , while employers say they can not find the people with the skills they need .
and that tells you that better degrees do n't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives .
so with pisa , we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly .
and we took a very special angle to this .
we were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school , but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations .
now , some people have criticized us for this .
they say , you know , such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people , because we test students with problems they have n't seen before .
but if you take that logic , you know , you should consider life unfair , because the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school , but whether we are prepared for change , whether we are prepared for jobs that have n't been created , to use technologies that have n't been invented , to solve problems we just ca n't anticipate today .
and once hotly contested , our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard .
in our latest assessment in 2009 , we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy .
this chart shows you the performance of countries .
in red , sort of below oecd average .
yellow is so-so , and in green are the countries doing really well .
you can see shanghai , korea , singapore in asia ; finland in europe ; canada in north america doing really well .
three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in shanghai and 15-year-olds in chile , and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance .
there 's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today 's economy .
but i want to introduce a second important dimension into this picture .
educators like to talk about equity .
with pisa , we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity , in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances .
and we see that in some countries , the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very , very strong .
opportunities are unequally distributed .
a lot of potential of young children is wasted .
we see in other countries that it matters much less into which social context you 're born .
we all want to be there , in the upper right quadrant , where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed .
nobody , and no country , can afford to be there , where performance is poor and there are large social disparities .
and then we can debate , you know , is it better to be there , where performance is strong at the price of large disparities ?
or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity ?
but actually , if you look at how countries come out on this picture , you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity .
in fact , one of the most important lessons from this comparison is that you do n't have to compromise equity to achieve excellence .
these countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all , a very important lesson .
and that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people .
and ever since those results came out , policymakers , educators , researchers from around the world what 's behind the success of those systems .
but let 's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started pisa , and i 'm giving them a colored bubble now .
and i 'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students .
if money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes , you would find all the large bubbles at the top , no ?
but that 's not what you see .
spending per student only explains about , well , less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries , and luxembourg , for example , the most expensive system , does n't do particularly well .
what you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results .
you also see - and i think that 's one of the most encouraging findings - that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries , and poor and badly-educated ones , a very , very important lesson .
let 's look at this in greater detail .
the red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country 's wealth .
one way you can spend money is by paying teachers well , and you can see korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession .
and korea also invests into long school days , which drives up costs further .
last but not least , koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop .
they invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things .
all that costs money .
how can korea afford all of this ?
the answer is , students in korea learn in large classes .
this is the blue bar which is driving costs down .
you go to the next country on the list , luxembourg , and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for korea , so luxembourg spends the same per student as korea does .
but , you know , parents and teachers and policymakers in luxembourg all like small classes .
you know , it 's very pleasant to walk into a small class .
so they have invested all their money into there , and the blue bar , class size , is driving costs up .
but even luxembourg can spend its money only once , and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well .
students do n't have long hours of learning .
and basically , teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching .
so you can see two countries spent their money very differently , and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education .
let 's go back to the year 2000 .
remember , that was the year before the ipod was invented .
this is how the world looked then in terms of pisa performance .
the first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller , no ?
we spent a lot less on education , about 35 percent less on education .
so you ask yourself , if education has become so much more expensive , has it become so much better ?
and the bitter truth really is that , you know , not in many countries .
but there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements .
germany , my own country , in the year 2000 , featured in the lower quadrant , below average performance , large social disparities .
and remember , germany , we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees .
very disappointing results .
people were stunned by the results .
and for the very first time , the public debate in germany was dominated for months by education , not tax , not other kinds of issues , but education was the center of the public debate .
and then policymakers began to respond to this .
the federal government dramatically raised its investment in education .
a lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage .
and what 's really interesting is that this was n't just about optimizing existing policies , but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying german education .
for example , traditionally , the education of the very young children where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten .
pisa has transformed that debate , and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in germany .
or traditionally , the german education divides children at the age of 10 , very young children , between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers , and that mainly along socioeconomic lines , and that paradigm is being challenged now too .
a lot of change .
and the good news is , nine years later , you can see improvements in quality and equity .
people have taken up the challenge , done something about it .
or take korea , at the other end of the spectrum .
in the year 2000 , korea did already very well , but the koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence .
they took up the challenge , and korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading .
well , if you only focus on your brightest students , you know what happens is disparities grow , and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction , but still , an impressive improvement .
a major overhaul of poland 's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools , turn around many of the lowest-performing schools , and raise performance by over half a school year .
and you can see other countries as well .
portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system , raise quality and improve equity , and so did hungary .
so what you can actually see , there 's been a lot of change .
and even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like pisa is just an artifact of culture , of economic factors , of social issues , of homogeneity of societies , and so on , these people must now concede that education improvement is possible .
you know , poland has n't changed its culture .
it did n't change its economy . it did n't change the compositions of its population .
it did n't fire its teachers . it changed its education policies and practice . very impressive .
and all that raises , of course , the question : what can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity , high levels of performance , and raised outcomes ?
and , of course , the question is , can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere ?
of course , you ca n't copy and paste education systems wholesale , but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share .
everybody agrees that education is important .
everybody says that .
but the test of truth is , how do you weigh that priority against other priorities ?
how do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers ?
would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer ?
how do the media talk about schools and teachers ?
those are the critical questions , and what we have learned from pisa is that , in high-performing education systems , the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education , their future , more than consumption today .
and you know what 's interesting ? you wo n't believe it , but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school .
those things really exist .
but placing a high value on education is just part of the picture .
the other part is the belief that all children are capable of success .
you have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages .
you know , students are divided up , reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards .
but usually that is linked to very strong social disparities .
if you go to japan in asia , or finland in europe , parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed , and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior .
when we asked students what counts for success in mathematics , students in north america would typically tell us , you know , it 's all about talent .
if i 'm not born as a genius in math , i 'd better study something else .
nine out of 10 japanese students say that it depends on my own investment , on my own effort , and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them .
in the past , different students were taught in similar ways .
high performers on pisa embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices .
they realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents , and they personalize learning opportunities .
high-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum .
every student knows what matters .
every student knows what 's required to be successful .
and nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers .
high-performing systems are very careful in how they recruit and select their teachers and how they train them .
they watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling , and how they structure teacher pay .
they provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice .
and they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers .
in bureaucratic school systems , teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching .
high-performing systems are very clear what good performance is .
they set very ambitious standards , but then they enable their teachers to figure out , what do i need to teach to my students today ?
the past was about delivered wisdom in education .
now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom .
high performers have moved on from professional or from administrative forms of accountability and control - to professional forms of work organization .
they enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy .
they provide them with the kind of development they need to develop stronger pedagogical practices .
the goal of the past was standardization and compliance .
high-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive .
in the past , the policy focus was on outcomes , on provision .
the high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher , the next school around their lives .
and the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system .
you 've seen finland doing so well on pisa , but what makes finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools .
every school succeeds .
this is where success is systemic .
and how do they do that ?
they invest resources where they can make the most difference .
they attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools , and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom .
last but not least , those countries align policies across all areas of public policy .
they make them coherent over sustained periods of time , and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented .
now , knowing what successful systems are doing does n't yet tell us how to improve .
that 's also clear , and that 's where some of the limits of international comparisons of pisa are .
that 's where other forms of research need to kick in , and that 's also why pisa does n't venture into telling countries what they should be doing .
but its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing .
and the example of pisa shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems .
you know , some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards .
you just ca n't rely on the people out there to help you with this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but pisa has shown what 's possible in education .
it has helped countries to see that improvement is possible .
it has taken away excuses from those who are complacent .
and it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world 's leaders .
if we can help every child , every teacher , every school , every principal , every parent see what improvement is possible , that only the sky is the limit to education improvement , we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper .
headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change , and headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog .
they are both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science .
recently the headlines looked like this when the intergovernmental panel on climate change , or ipcc , put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system .
that report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries .
they wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic .
and all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers , from 113 countries .
it 's a big community . it 's such a big community , in fact , that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world .
over 15,000 scientists go to san francisco every year for that .
and every one of those scientists is in a research group , and every research group studies a wide variety of topics .
for us at cambridge , it 's as varied as the el niño oscillation , which affects weather and climate , to the assimilation of satellite data , to emissions from crops that produce biofuels , which is what i happen to study .
and in each one of these research areas , of which there are even more , there are phd students , like me , and we study incredibly narrow topics , things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules .
and one of the molecules i study is called isoprene , which is here . it 's a small organic molecule . you 've probably never heard of it .
the weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion - 10 to the 21st - molecules of isoprene .
but despite its very small weight , enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet .
it 's a huge amount of stuff . it 's equal to the weight of methane .
and because it 's so much stuff , it 's really important for the atmospheric system .
because it 's important to the atmospheric system , we go to all lengths to study this thing .
we blow it up and look at the pieces .
this is the euphore smog chamber in spain .
atmospheric explosions , or full combustion , takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car .
but still , we look at the pieces .
we run enormous models on supercomputers ; this is what i happen to do .
our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each , on minute timescales .
and it takes weeks to perform our integrations .
and we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what 's happening .
we also fly all over the world looking for this thing .
i recently joined a field campaign in malaysia . there are others .
we found a global atmospheric watchtower there , in the middle of the rainforest , and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower , to look for isoprene , and of course , other things while we were there .
this is the tower in the middle of the rainforest , from above .
and this is the tower from below .
and on part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us .
and this plane , the model , ba146 , which was run by faam , normally flies 120 to 130 people .
so maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today .
but we did n't just fly it . we were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule - incredibly dangerous stuff .
we have to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements .
we hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering .
we have to get special flight clearance .
and as you come around the banks in these valleys , the forces can get up to two gs .
and the scientists have to be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while they 're on board .
so , as you can imagine , the inside of this aircraft does n't look like any plane you would take on vacation .
it 's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule .
we do all of this to understand the chemistry of one molecule .
and when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule , they write one scientific paper on the subject .
and out of that field campaign we 'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules .
and as a body of knowledge builds up , it will form one subsection , or one sub-subsection of an assessment like the ipcc , although we have others .
and each one of the 11 chapters of the ipcc has six to ten subsections .
so you can imagine the scale of the effort .
in each one of those assessments that we write , we always tag on a summary , and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience .
and we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers , in order to make headlines like these .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i have just one request .
please do n't tell me i 'm normal .
now i 'd like to introduce you to my brothers .
remi is 22 , tall and very handsome .
he 's speechless , but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators can not .
remi knows what love is .
he shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless .
he 's not greedy . he does n't see skin color .
he does n't care about religious differences , and get this : he has never told a lie .
when he sings songs from our childhood , attempting words that not even i could remember , he reminds me of one thing : how little we know about the mind , and how wonderful the unknown must be .
samuel is 16 . he 's tall . he 's very handsome .
he has the most impeccable memory .
he has a selective one , though .
he does n't remember if he stole my chocolate bar , but he remembers the year of release for every song on my ipod , conversations we had when he was four , weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of teletubbies , and lady gaga 's birthday .
do n't they sound incredible ?
but most people do n't agree .
and in fact , because their minds do n't fit into society 's version of normal , they 're often bypassed and misunderstood .
but what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case , although they were not seen as ordinary , this could only mean one thing : that they were extraordinary - autistic and extraordinary .
now , for you who may be less familiar with the term " autism , " it 's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication , learning and sometimes physical skills .
it manifests in each individual differently , hence why remi is so different from sam .
and across the world , every 20 minutes , one new person is diagnosed with autism , and although it 's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world , there is no known cause or cure .
and i can not remember the first moment i encountered autism , but i can not recall a day without it .
i was just three years old when my brother came along , and i was so excited that i had a new being in my life .
and after a few months went by , i realized that he was different .
he screamed a lot .
he did n't want to play like the other babies did , and in fact , he did n't seem very interested in me whatsoever .
remi lived and reigned in his own world , with his own rules , and he found pleasure in the smallest things , like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between .
and as he grew older , he grew more different , and the differences became more obvious .
yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique : a pure and innocent nature , a boy who saw the world without prejudice , a human who had never lied .
extraordinary .
now , i can not deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family , moments where i 've wished that they were just like me .
but i cast my mind back to the things that they 've taught me about individuality and communication and love , and i realize that these are things that i would n't want to change with normality .
normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us , and the fact that we are different does n't mean that one of us is wrong .
it just means that there 's a different kind of right .
and if i could communicate just one thing to remi and to sam and to you , it would be that you do n't have to be normal .
you can be extraordinary .
because autistic or not , the differences that we have - we 've got a gift ! everyone 's got a gift inside of us , and in all honesty , the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential .
the chance for greatness , for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else .
please - do n't tell me i 'm normal .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form .
from mother to daughter , preacher to congregant , teacher to pupil , storyteller to audience .
whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the internet , human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable .
we are inveterate storytellers .
but where , in our increasingly secular and fragmented world , do we offer communality of experience , unmediated by our own furious consumerism ?
and what narrative , what history , what identity , what moral code are we imparting to our young ?
cinema is arguably the 20th century 's most influential art form .
its artists told stories across national boundaries , in as many languages , genres and philosophies as one can imagine .
indeed , it is hard to find a subject that film has yet to tackle .
during the last decade we 've seen a vast integration of global media , now dominated by a culture of the hollywood blockbuster .
we are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation , not story , is king .
what was common to us all 40 years ago - the telling of stories between generations - is now rarified .
as a filmmaker , it worried me .
as a human being , it puts the fear of god in me .
what future could the young build with so little grasp of where they 've come from and so few narratives of what 's possible ?
the irony is palpable ; technical access has never been greater , cultural access never weaker .
and so in 2006 we set up filmclub , an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions .
if we could raid the annals of 100 years of film , maybe we could build a narrative that would deliver meaning to the fragmented and restless world of the young .
given the access to technology , even a school in a tiny rural hamlet could project a dvd onto a white board .
in the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the u.k. , with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes .
the films were curated and contextualized .
but the choice was theirs , and our audience quickly grew to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide .
the outcome , immediate .
it was an education of the most profound and transformative kind .
in groups as large as 150 and as small as three , these young people discovered new places , new thoughts , new perspectives .
by the time the pilot had finished , we had the names of a thousand schools that wished to join .
the film that changed my life is a 1951 film by vittorio de sica , " miracle in milan . "
it 's a remarkable comment on slums , poverty and aspiration .
i had seen the film on the occasion of my father 's 50th birthday .
technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema , find and pay for the print and the projectionist .
but for my father , the emotional and artistic importance of de sica 's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends , " in order , " he said , " to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation . "
in the last shot of " miracle in milan , " slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms .
sixty years after the film was made and 30 years after i first saw it , i see young faces tilt up in awe , their incredulity matching mine .
and the speed with which they associate it with " slumdog millionaire " or the favelas in rio speaks to the enduring nature .
in a filmclub season about democracy and government , we screened " mr. smith goes to washington . "
made in 1939 , the film is older than most of our members ' grandparents .
frank capra 's classic values independence and propriety .
it shows how to do right , how to be heroically awkward .
it is also an expression of faith in the political machine as a force of honor .
shortly after " mr. smith " became a filmclub classic , there was a week of all-night filibustering in the house of lords .
and it was with great delight that we found young people up and down the country explaining with authority what filibustering was and why the lords might defy their bedtime on a point of principle .
after all , jimmy stewart filibustered for two entire reels .
in choosing " hotel rwanda , " they explored genocide of the most brutal kind .
it provoked tears as well as incisive questions about unarmed peace-keeping forces and the double-dealing of a western society that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind .
and when " schindler 's list " demanded that they never forget , one child , full of the pain of consciousness , remarked , " we already forgot , otherwise how did ' hotel rwanda ' happen ? "
as they watch more films their lives got palpably richer .
" pickpocket " started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement .
" to sir , with love " ignited its teen audience .
they celebrated a change in attitude towards non-white britons , but railed against our restless school system that does not value collective identity , unlike that offered by sidney poitier 's careful tutelage .
by now , these thoughtful , opinionated , curious young people thought nothing of tackling films of all forms - black and white , subtitled , documentary , non-narrative , fantasy - and thought nothing of writing detailed reviews that competed to favor one film over another in passionate and increasingly sophisticated prose .
six thousand reviews each school week vying for the honor of being review of the week .
from 25 clubs , we became hundreds , then thousands , until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids in 7,000 clubs right across the country .
and although the numbers were , and continue to be , extraordinary , what became more extraordinary was how the experience of critical and curious questioning translated into life .
some of our kids started talking with their parents , others with their teachers , or with their friends .
and those without friends started making them .
the films provided communality across all manner of divide .
and the stories they held provided a shared experience .
" persepolis " brought a daughter closer to her iranian mother , and " jaws " became the way in which one young boy was able to articulate the fear he 'd experienced in flight from violence that killed first his father then his mother , the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey .
who was right , who wrong ?
what would they do under the same conditions ?
was the tale told well ?
was there a hidden message ?
how has the world changed ? how could it be different ?
a tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children who the world did n't think were interested .
and they themselves had not known they cared .
and as they wrote and debated , rather than seeing the films as artifacts , they began to see themselves .
i have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller .
in a moment she can invoke images of running barefoot on table mountain and playing cops and robbers .
quite recently she told me that in 1948 , two of her sisters and my father traveled on a boat to israel without my grandparents .
when the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions , it was these teenagers that fed the crew .
i was past 40 when my father died .
he never mentioned that journey .
my mother 's mother left europe in a hurry without her husband , but with her three-year-old daughter and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt .
after two years in hiding , my grandfather appeared in london .
he was never right again .
and his story was hushed as he assimilated .
my story started in england with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents .
i had " anne frank , " " the great escape , " " shoah , " " triumph of the will . "
it was leni riefenstahl in her elegant nazi propaganda who gave context to what the family had to endure .
these films held what was too hurtful to say out loud , and they became more useful to me than the whispers of survivors and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo on a maiden aunt 's wrist .
purists may feel that fiction dissipates the quest of real human understanding , that film is too crude to tell a complex and detailed history , or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth .
but within the reels lie purpose and meaning .
as one 12-year-old said after watching " wizard of oz , " " every person should watch this , because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart . "
we honor reading , why not honor watching with the same passion ?
consider " citizen kane " as valuable as jane austen .
agree that " boyz n the hood , " like tennyson , offers an emotional landscape and a heightened understanding that work together .
each a piece of memorable art , each a brick in the wall of who we are .
and it 's okay if we remember tom hanks better than astronaut jim lovell or have ben kingsley 's face superimposed onto that of gandhi 's .
and though not real , eve harrington , howard beale , mildred pierce are an opportunity to discover what it is to be human , and no less helpful to understanding our life and times as shakespeare is in illuminating the world of elizabethan england .
we guessed that film , whose stories are a meeting place of drama , music , literature and human experience , would engage and inspire the young people participating in filmclub .
what we could not have foreseen was the measurable improvements in behavior , confidence and academic achievement .
once-reluctant students now race to school , talk to their teachers , fight , not on the playground , but to choose next week 's film - young people who have found self-definition , ambition and an appetite for education and social engagement from the stories they have witnessed .
our members defy the binary description of how we so often describe our young .
they are neither feral nor myopically self-absorbed .
they are , like other young people , negotiating a world with infinite choice , but little culture of how to find meaningful experience .
we appeared surprised at the behaviors of those who define themselves by the size of the tick on their shoes , yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered .
if we want different values we have to tell a different story , a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person 's identity , that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity , and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group .
because when these people get home after a screening of " rear window " and raise their gaze to the building next door , they have the tools to wonder who , apart from them , is out there and what is their story .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great time to be a molecular biologist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- reading and writing dna code is getting easier and cheaper .
by the end of this year , we 'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros .
biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector .
it has the power , potentially , to replace our fossil fuels , to revolutionize medicine , and to touch every aspect of our daily lives .
so who gets to do it ?
i think we 'd all be pretty comfortable with this guy doing it .
but what about that guy ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- in 2009 , i first heard about diybio .
it 's a movement that - it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone , not just scientists and people in government labs .
the idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate , it could really stimulate innovation .
putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they 've got the best idea of what their needs are .
and here 's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road , all these associated social , moral , ethical questions , and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we 're doing in those labs .
so would n't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff , do it hands-on ?
i thought so .
so , three years ago , i got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations it 's a nonprofit , a community biotech lab in brooklyn , new york , and the idea was people could come , they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open , friendly atmosphere .
none of my previous experience prepared me for what came next . can you guess ?
the press started calling us .
and the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy , the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next frankenstein , and as a result , for the next six months , when you googled my name , instead of getting my scientific papers , you got this .
-lsb- " am i a biohazard ? " -rsb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was pretty depressing .
the only thing that got us through that period was that we knew that all over the world , there were other people that were trying to do the same thing that we were .
they were opening biohacker spaces , and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did , more regulations , less resources .
but now , three years later , here 's where we stand .
it 's a vibrant , global community of hackerspaces , and this is just the beginning .
these are some of the biggest ones , and there are others opening every day .
there 's one probably going to open up in moscow , one in south korea , and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of .
let me take you on a little tour .
biohackers work alone .
we work in groups , in big cities - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and in small villages .
we reverse engineer lab equipment .
we genetically engineer bacteria .
we hack hardware , software , wetware , and , of course , the code of life .
we like to build things .
then we like to take things apart .
we make things grow .
we make things glow .
and we make cells dance .
the spirit of these labs , it 's open , it 's positive , but , you know , sometimes when people think of us , the first thing that comes to mind is bio-safety , bio-security , all the dark side stuff .
i 'm not going to minimize those concerns .
any powerful technology is inherently dual use , and , you know , you get something like synthetic biology , nanobiotechnology , it really compels you , you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups , because they have better infrastructure , they have better facilities , and they have access to pathogens .
so the united nations did just that , and they recently issued a report on this whole area , and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative , and they even looked specifically at the diybio community , and they noted , not surprisingly , that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics .
as a matter of fact , diy people from all over the world , america , europe , got together last year , and we hammered out a common code of ethics .
that 's a lot more than conventional science has done .
now , we follow state and local regulations .
we dispose of our waste properly , we follow safety procedures , we do n't work with pathogens .
you know , if you 're working with a pathogen , you 're not part of the biohacker community , you 're part of the bioterrorist community , i 'm sorry .
and sometimes people ask me , " well , what about an accident ? "
well , working with the safe organisms that we normally work with , the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating , like , some sort of superbug , that 's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the sahara desert .
now , it could happen , but i 'm not going to plan my life around it .
i 've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk .
i signed up for something called the personal genome project .
it 's a study at harvard where , at the end of the study , they 're going to take my entire genomic sequence , all of my medical information , and my identity , and they 're going to post it online for everyone to see .
there were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion .
the one i liked the best is , someone could download my sequence , go back to the lab , synthesize some fake ellen dna , and plant it at a crime scene . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but like diybio , the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk .
now , you might be asking yourself , " well , you know , what would i do in a biolab ? "
well , it was n't that long ago we were asking , " well , what would anyone do with a personal computer ? "
so this stuff is just beginning .
we 're only seeing just the tip of the dna iceberg .
let me show you what you could do right now .
a biohacker in germany , a journalist , wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- yep , you guessed it . he threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs , analyzed the saliva , identified the dog , and confronted the dog owner .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i discovered an invasive species in my own backyard .
looked like a ladybug , right ?
it actually is a japanese beetle .
and the same kind of technology - it 's called dna barcoding , it 's really cool - you can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga , if that sushi is really tuna , or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat 's .
in a biohacker space , you can analyze your genome for mutations .
you can analyze your breakfast cereal for gmo 's , and you can explore your ancestry .
you can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere , collect microbes , see what 's up there .
you can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water .
you can make some sort of a biofuel cell .
you can do a lot of things .
you can also do an art science project . some of these are really spectacular , and they look at social , ecological problems from a completely different perspective .
it 's really cool .
some people ask me , well , why am i involved ?
i could have a perfectly good career in mainstream science .
the thing is , there 's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you ca n't find anywhere else .
there 's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project , and you do n't have to justify to anyone that it 's going to make a lot of money , that it 's going to save mankind , or even that it 's feasible .
it just has to follow safety guidelines .
if you had spaces like this all over the world , it could really change the perception of who 's allowed to do biotech .
it 's spaces like these that spawned personal computing .
why not personal biotech ?
if everyone in this room got involved , who knows what we could do ?
this is such a new area , and as we say back in brooklyn , you ai n't seen nothin ' yet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
that was whistling .
i 'm trying to do this in english .
what is a chubby , curly-haired guy from holland - why is he whistling ?
well actually , i 've -lsb- been -rsb- whistling since the age of four , about four .
my dad was always whistling around the house , and i just thought that 's part of communication in my family .
so i whistled along with him .
and actually , till i was 34 , i always annoyed and irritated people with whistling , because , to be honest , my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior .
i whistled alone . i whistled in the classroom .
i whistled on -lsb- my -rsb- bike . i whistled everywhere .
and i also whistled at a christmas eve party with my family-in-law .
and they had some , in my opinion , terrible christmas music .
and when i hear music that i do n't like , i try to make it better .
so " rudolph the red-nosed reindeer " - you know it ?
-lrb- whistling -rrb- but it can also sound like this .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- but during a christmas party - at dinner actually - it 's very annoying .
so my sister-in-law asked me a few times , " please stop whistling . "
and i just could n't .
and at one point - and i had some wine , i have to admit that - at one point i said , " if there was a contest , i would join . "
and two weeks later i received a text message : " you 're going to america . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , okay , i 'm going to america .
i would love to , but why ?
so i immediately called her up , of course .
she googled , and she found this world whistling championship in america , of course .
she did n't expect me to go there .
and i would have lost my face .
i do n't know if that 's correct english .
but the dutch people here will understand what i mean .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i lost my face .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and she thought , " he will never go there . "
but actually i did .
so i went to louisburg , north carolina , southeast united states , and i entered the world of whistling .
and i also entered the world championship , and i won there in 2004 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that was great fun , of course .
and to defend my title - like judokas do and sportsmen - i thought , well let 's go back in 2005 , and i won again .
then i could n't participate for a few years .
and in 2008 i entered again in japan , tokyo , and i won again .
so what happened now is i 'm standing here in rotterdam , in the beautiful city , on a big stage , and i 'm talking about whistling .
and actually i earn my money whistling at the moment .
so i quit my day job as a nurse .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i try to live my dream - well , actually , it was never my dream , but it sounds so good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , i 'm not the only one whistling here .
you say , " huh , what do you mean ? "
well actually , you are going to whistle along .
and then always the same thing happens : people are watching each other and think , " oh , my god .
why ? can i go away ? "
no , you ca n't .
actually it 's very simple .
the track that i will whistle is called " fête de la belle . "
it 's about 80 minutes long .
no , no , no . it 's four minutes long .
and i want to first rehearse with you your whistling .
so i whistle the tone .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- sorry . i forgot one thing .
you whistle the same tone as me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i heard a wide variety of tones .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- this is very promising .
this is very promising .
i 'll ask the technicians to start the music .
and if it 's started , i just point where you whistle along , and we will see what happens .
oh , hah .
i 'm so sorry , technicians .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm so used to that .
i start it myself .
okay , here it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- whistling -rrb- okay .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- it 's easy , is n't it ?
-lrb- whistling -rrb- now comes the solo . i propose i do that myself .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- max westerman : geert chatrou , the world champion -lsb- of -rsb- whistling .
geert chatrou : thank you . thank you .
i 'm here to show you how something you ca n't see can be so much fun to look at .
you 're about to experience a new , available and exciting technology that 's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives .
what i have here is a cinder block that we 've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material .
it 's called ultra-ever dry , and when you apply it to any material , it turns into a superhydrophobic shield .
so this is a cinder block , uncoated , and you can see that it 's porous , it absorbs water .
not anymore .
porous , nonporous .
so what 's superhydrophobic ?
superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface .
the rounder it is , the more hydrophobic it is , and if it 's really round , it 's superhydrophobic .
a freshly waxed car , the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees .
a windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees .
but what you 're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees , and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic .
so as part of the demonstration , what i have is a pair of gloves , and we 've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating , and let 's see if you can tell which one , and i 'll give you a hint .
did you guess the one that was dry ?
when you have nanotechnology and nanoscience , what 's occurred is that we 're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits .
and we 're talking really small here .
the way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers , and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter , and to put some scale to that , if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick , and you put it side by side , and you had 50,000 of them , you 'd be the width of a human hair .
so very small , but very useful .
and it 's not just water that this works with .
it 's a lot of water-based materials like concrete , water-based paint , mud , and also some refined oils as well .
you can see the difference .
moving onto the next demonstration , we 've taken a pane of glass and we 've coated the outside of it , we 've framed it with the nanotechnology coating , and we 're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle , and you 're going to see , it 's going to spread out on glass like you 'd normally think it would , except when it hits the coating , it stops , and i ca n't even coax it to leave .
it 's that afraid of the water .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what 's going on here ? what 's happening ?
well , the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface .
you 'd think it 'd be smooth , but it 's actually not .
and it has billions of interstitial spaces , and those spaces , along with the nanoparticles , reach up and grab the air molecules , and cover the surface with air .
it 's an umbrella of air all across it , and that layer of air is what the water hits , the mud hits , the concrete hits , and it glides right off .
so if i put this inside this water here , you can see a silver reflective coating around it , and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that 's protecting the water from touching the paddle , and it 's dry .
so what are the applications ?
i mean , many of you right now are probably going through your head .
everyone that sees this gets excited , and says , " oh , i could use it for this and this and this . "
the applications in a general sense could be anything that 's anti-wetting .
we 've certainly seen that today .
it could be anything that 's anti-icing , because if you do n't have water , you do n't have ice .
it could be anti-corrosion .
no water , no corrosion .
it could be anti-bacterial .
without water , the bacteria wo n't survive .
and it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well .
so imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work .
and i 'm going to leave you with one last demonstration , but before i do that , i would like to say thank you , and think small .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's going to happen . wait for it . wait for it .
chris anderson : you guys did n't hear about us cutting out the design from ted ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lsb- two minutes later ... -rsb- he ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part .
it 's happening !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality .
and my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital .
i was burned very badly .
and if you spend a lot of time in hospital , you 'll see a lot of types of irrationalities .
and the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me .
now , you must have all taken a band-aid off at some point , and you must have wondered what 's the right approach .
do you rip it off quickly - short duration but high intensity - or do you take your band-aid off slowly - you take a long time , but each second is not as painful - which one of those is the right approach ?
the nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one , so they would grab hold and they would rip , and they would grab hold and they would rip .
and because i had 70 percent of my body burned , it would take about an hour .
and as you can imagine , i hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity .
and i would try to reason with them and say , " why do n't we try something else ?
why do n't we take it a little longer - maybe two hours instead of an hour - and have less of this intensity ? "
and the nurses told me two things .
they told me that they had the right model of the patient - that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain - and they also told me that the word patient does n't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or ...
this is not just in hebrew , by the way .
it 's in every language i 've had experience with so far .
and , you know , there 's not much - there was n't much i could do , and they kept on doing what they were doing .
and about three years later , when i left the hospital , i started studying at the university .
and one of the most interesting lessons i learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way , and you can try to examine this question , maybe learn something about the world .
so that 's what i did .
i was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients .
so originally i did n't have much money , so i went to a hardware store and i bought a carpenter 's vice .
and i would bring people to the lab and i would put their finger in it , and i would crunch it a little bit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i would crunch it for long periods and short periods , and pain that went up and pain that went down , and with breaks and without breaks - all kinds of versions of pain .
and when i finished hurting people a little bit , i would ask them , so , how painful was this ? or , how painful was this ?
or , if you had to choose between the last two , which one would you choose ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i kept on doing this for a while .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then , like all good academic projects , i got more funding .
i moved to sounds , electrical shocks - i even had a pain suit that i could get people to feel much more pain .
but at the end of this process , what i learned was that the nurses were wrong .
here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience , and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time .
it turns out that because we do n't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity , i would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower .
it turns out it would have been better to start with my face , which was much more painful , and move toward my legs , giving me a trend of improvement over time - that would have been also less painful .
and it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain .
all of these would have been great things to do , and my nurses had no idea .
and from that point on i started thinking , are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision , or is it a more general case ?
and it turns out it 's a more general case - there 's a lot of mistakes we do .
and i want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities , and i want to talk to you about cheating .
and the reason i picked cheating is because it 's interesting , but also it tells us something , i think , about the stock market situation we 're in .
so , my interest in cheating started when enron came on the scene , exploded all of a sudden , and i started thinking about what is happening here .
is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things , or are we talking a more endemic situation , that many people are actually capable of behaving this way ?
so , like we usually do , i decided to do a simple experiment .
and here 's how it went .
if you were in the experiment , i would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve , but i would n't give you enough time .
when the five minutes were over , i would say , " pass me the sheets of paper , and i 'll pay you a dollar per question . "
people did this . i would pay people four dollars for their task - on average people would solve four problems .
other people i would tempt to cheat .
i would pass their sheet of paper .
when the five minutes were over , i would say , " please shred the piece of paper .
put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack , and tell me how many questions you got correctly . "
people now solved seven questions on average .
now , it was n't as if there was a few bad apples - a few people cheated a lot .
instead , what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit .
now , in economic theory , cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis .
you say , what 's the probability of being caught ?
how much do i stand to gain from cheating ?
and how much punishment would i get if i get caught ?
and you weigh these options out - you do the simple cost-benefit analysis , and you decide whether it 's worthwhile to commit the crime or not .
so , we try to test this .
for some people , we varied how much money they could get away with - how much money they could steal .
we paid them 10 cents per correct question , 50 cents , a dollar , five dollars , 10 dollars per correct question .
you would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases , people would cheat more , but in fact it was n't the case .
we got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit .
what about the probability of being caught ?
some people shredded half the sheet of paper , so there was some evidence left .
some people shredded the whole sheet of paper .
some people shredded everything , went out of the room , and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars .
you would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down , people would cheat more , but again , this was not the case .
again , a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit , and they were insensitive to these economic incentives .
so we said , " if people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations , to these forces , what could be going on ? "
and we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces .
at one hand , we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves , so we do n't want to cheat .
on the other hand , we can cheat a little bit , and still feel good about ourselves .
so , maybe what is happening is that there 's a level of cheating we ca n't go over , but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree , as long as it does n't change our impressions about ourselves .
we call this like a personal fudge factor .
now , how would you test a personal fudge factor ?
initially we said , what can we do to shrink the fudge factor ?
so , we got people to the lab , and we said , " we have two tasks for you today . "
first , we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school , or to recall the ten commandments , and then we tempted them with cheating .
turns out the people who tried to recall the ten commandments - and in our sample nobody could recall all of the ten commandments - but those people who tried to recall the ten commandments , given the opportunity to cheat , did not cheat at all .
it was n't that the more religious people - the people who remembered more of the commandments - cheated less , and the less religious people - the people who could n't remember almost any commandments - cheated more .
the moment people thought about trying to recall the ten commandments , they stopped cheating .
in fact , even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the bible and we give them a chance to cheat , they do n't cheat at all .
now , ten commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system , so we said , " why do n't we get people to sign the honor code ? "
so , we got people to sign , " i understand that this short survey falls under the mit honor code . "
then they shredded it . no cheating whatsoever .
and this is particularly interesting , because mit does n't have an honor code .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , all this was about decreasing the fudge factor .
what about increasing the fudge factor ?
the first experiment - i walked around mit and i distributed six-packs of cokes in the refrigerators - these were common refrigerators for the undergrads .
and i came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of coke - how long does it last in the refrigerators ?
as you can expect it does n't last very long ; people take it .
in contrast , i took a plate with six one-dollar bills , and i left those plates in the same refrigerators .
no bill ever disappeared .
now , this is not a good social science experiment , so to do it better i did the same experiment as i described to you before .
a third of the people we passed the sheet , they gave it back to us .
a third of the people we passed it to , they shredded it , they came to us and said , " mr. experimenter , i solved x problems . give me x dollars . "
a third of the people , when they finished shredding the piece of paper , they came to us and said , " mr experimenter , i solved x problems . give me x tokens . "
we did not pay them with dollars ; we paid them with something else .
and then they took the something else , they walked 12 feet to the side , and exchanged it for dollars .
think about the following intuition .
how bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home , compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box ?
these things feel very differently .
would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference ?
our subjects doubled their cheating .
i 'll tell you what i think about this and the stock market in a minute .
but this did not solve the big problem i had with enron yet , because in enron , there 's also a social element .
people see each other behaving .
in fact , every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating .
what does this cause us ?
so , we did another experiment .
we got a big group of students to be in the experiment , and we prepaid them .
so everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment , and we told them that at the end , we asked them to pay us back the money they did n't make . ok ?
the same thing happens .
when we give people the opportunity to cheat , they cheat .
they cheat just by a little bit , all the same .
but in this experiment we also hired an acting student .
this acting student stood up after 30 seconds , and said , " i solved everything . what do i do now ? "
and the experimenter said , " if you 've finished everything , go home .
that 's it . the task is finished . "
so , now we had a student - an acting student - that was a part of the group .
nobody knew it was an actor .
and they clearly cheated in a very , very serious way .
what would happen to the other people in the group ?
will they cheat more , or will they cheat less ?
here is what happens .
it turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they 're wearing .
here is the thing .
we ran this at carnegie mellon and pittsburgh .
and at pittsburgh there are two big universities , carnegie mellon and university of pittsburgh .
all of the subjects sitting in the experiment were carnegie mellon students .
when the actor who was getting up was a carnegie mellon student - he was actually a carnegie mellon student - but he was a part of their group , cheating went up .
but when he actually had a university of pittsburgh sweatshirt , cheating went down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this is important , because remember , when the moment the student stood up , it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating , because the experimenter said , " you 've finished everything . go home , " and they went with the money .
so it was n't so much about the probability of being caught again .
it was about the norms for cheating .
if somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating , we feel it 's more appropriate , as a group , to behave this way .
but if it 's somebody from another group , these terrible people - i mean , not terrible in this - but somebody we do n't want to associate ourselves with , from another university , another group , all of a sudden people 's awareness of honesty goes up - a little bit like the ten commandments experiment - and people cheat even less .
so , what have we learned from this about cheating ?
we 've learned that a lot of people can cheat .
they cheat just by a little bit .
when we remind people about their morality , they cheat less .
when we get bigger distance from cheating , from the object of money , for example , people cheat more .
and when we see cheating around us , particularly if it 's a part of our in-group , cheating goes up .
now , if we think about this in terms of the stock market , think about what happens .
what happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way ?
would they not be able to see it this way ?
of course they would .
what happens when you do other things , like you remove things from money ?
you call them stock , or stock options , derivatives , mortgage-backed securities .
could it be that with those more distant things , it 's not a token for one second , it 's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time - could it be that people will cheat even more ?
and what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them ?
i think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market .
more generally , i want to tell you something about behavioral economics .
we have many intuitions in our life , and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong .
the question is , are we going to test those intuitions ?
we can think about how we 're going to test this intuition in our private life , in our business life , and most particularly when it goes to policy , when we think about things like no child left behind , when you create new stock markets , when you create other policies - taxation , health care and so on .
and the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson i learned when i went back to the nurses to talk to them .
so i went back to talk to them and tell them what i found out about removing bandages .
and i learned two interesting things .
one was that my favorite nurse , ettie , told me that i did not take her pain into consideration .
she said , " of course , you know , it was very painful for you .
but think about me as a nurse , taking , removing the bandages of somebody i liked , and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time .
creating so much torture was not something that was good for me , too . "
and she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her .
but it was actually more interesting than that , because she said , " i did not think that your intuition was right .
i felt my intuition was correct . "
so , if you think about all of your intuitions , it 's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong .
and she said , " given the fact that i thought my intuition was right ... " - she thought her intuition was right - it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong .
but in fact , this is the situation we 're all in all the time .
we have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things - our own ability , how the economy works , how we should pay school teachers .
but unless we start testing those intuitions , we 're not going to do better .
and just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition , and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions .
thank you very much .
today i am going to teach you how to play my favorite game : massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling .
it 's the only game in the world that i know of that allows you , the player , the opportunity to experience 10 positive emotions in 60 seconds or less .
this is true , so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute , you will get to feel joy , relief , love , surprise , pride , curiosity , excitement , awe and wonder , contentment , and creativity , all in the span of one minute .
so this sounds pretty good , right ? now you 're willing to play .
in order to teach you this game , i 'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly , and we 're going to do a little hands-on demo .
while they 're coming up , i should let you know , this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists ' collective in austria named monochrom .
so thank you , monochrom .
okay , so most people are familiar with traditional , two-person thumb-wrestling .
sunni , let 's just remind them .
one , two , three , four , i declare a thumb war , and we wrestle , and of course sunni beats me because she 's the best .
now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , we 're the gamer generation .
there are a billion gamers on the planet now , so we need more of a challenge .
so the first thing we need is more thumbs .
so eric , come on over .
so we could get three thumbs together , and peter could join us .
we could even have four thumbs together , and the way you win is you 're the first person to pin someone else 's thumb .
this is really important . you ca n't , like , wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute .
that is not how you win .
ah , who did that ? eric you did that .
so eric would have won . he was the first person to pin my thumb .
okay , so that 's the first rule , and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node , but if you feel ambitious , you do n't have to hold back .
we can really go for it .
so you can see up here .
now the only other rule you need to remember is , gamer generation , we like a challenge .
i happen to notice you all have some thumbs you 're not using .
so i think we should kind of get some more involved .
and if we had just four people , we would do it just like this , and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time .
perfect .
now , if we had more people in the room , instead of just wrestling in a closed node , we might reach out and try and grab some other people .
and in fact , that 's what we 're going to do right now .
we 're going to try and get all , something like , i do n't know , 1,500 thumbs in this room connected in a single node .
and we have to connect both levels , so if you 're up there , you 're going to be reaching down and reaching up .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - before we get started - this is great . you 're excited to play . - before we get started , can i have the slides back up here really quick , because if you get good at this game , i want you to know there are some advanced levels .
so this is the kind of simple level , right ?
but there are advanced configurations .
this is called the death star configuration .
any star wars fans ?
and this one 's called the möbius strip .
any science geeks , you get that one .
this is the hardest level . this is the extreme .
so we 'll stick with the normal one for now , and i 'm going to give you 30 seconds , every thumb into the node , connect the upper and the lower levels , you guys go on down there .
thirty seconds . into the network . make the node .
stand up ! it 's easier if you stand up .
everybody , up up up up up !
stand up , my friends .
all right .
do n't start wrestling yet .
if you have a free thumb , wave it around , make sure it gets connected .
okay . we need to do a last-minute thumb check .
if you have a free thumb , wave it around to make sure .
grab that thumb !
reach behind you . there you go .
any other thumbs ?
okay , on the count of three , you 're going to go .
try to keep track . grab , grab , grab it .
okay ? one , two , three , go !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- did you win ? you got it ? you got it ? excellent !
-lrb- applause -rrb- well done . thank you . thank you very much .
all right .
while you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game , let 's do a quick recap on the positive emotions .
so curiosity .
i said " massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling . "
you were like , " what the hell is she talking about ? "
so i provoked a little curiosity .
creativity : it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node .
i 'm reaching around and i 'm reaching up .
so you used creativity . that was great .
how about surprise ? the actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising .
you heard that sound go up in the room .
we had excitement . as you started to wrestle , maybe you 're starting to win or this person 's , like , really into it , so you kind of get the excitement going .
we have relief . you got to stand up .
you 've been sitting for awhile , so the physical relief , getting to shake it out .
we had joy . you were laughing , smiling . look at your faces . this room is full of joy .
we had some contentment .
i did n't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing , so you were totally content to be playing .
the most important three emotions , awe and wonder , we had everybody connected physically for a minute .
when was the last time you were at ted and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room ?
and it 's truly awesome and wondrous .
and speaking of physical connection , you guys know i love the hormone oxytocin , you release oxytocin , you feel bonded to everyone in the room .
you guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else 's hand for at least six seconds .
you guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds , so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other . that is great .
and the last emotion of pride .
how many people are like me . just admit it .
you lost both your thumbs .
it just did n't work out for you .
that 's okay , because you learned a new skill today .
you learned , from scratch , a game you never knew before .
now you know how to play it . you can teach other people .
so congratulations .
how many of you won just won thumb ?
all right . i have very good news for you .
according to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , this makes you a grandmaster of the game .
because there are n't that many people who know how to play , we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess .
so congratulations , grandmasters .
win one thumb once , you will become a grandmaster .
did anybody win both their thumbs ?
yes . awesome . okay .
get ready to update your twitter or facebook status .
you guys , according to the rules , are legendary grandmasters , so congratulations .
i will just leave you with this tip , if you want to play again .
the best way to become a legendary grandmaster , you 've got your two nodes going on .
pick off the one that looks easiest .
they 're not paying attention . they look kind of weak .
focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm .
as soon as you win , suddenly stop .
everybody is thrown off . you go in for the kill .
that 's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling .
thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game .
wooo ! -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the first idea i 'd like to suggest is that we all love music a great deal . it means a lot to us .
but music is even more powerful if you do n't just listen to it , but you make it yourself .
so , that 's my first idea . and we all know about the mozart effect - the idea that 's been around for the last five to 10 years - that just by listening to music or by playing music to your baby -lsb- in utero -rsb- , that it 'll raise our iq points 10 , 20 , 30 percent .
great idea , but it does n't work at all .
so , you ca n't just listen to music , you have to make it somehow .
and i 'd add to that , that it 's not just making it , but everybody , each of us , everybody in the world has the power to create and be part of music in a very dynamic way , and that 's one of the main parts of my work .
so , with the mit media lab , for quite a while now , we 've been engaged in a field called active music .
what are all the possible ways that we can think of to get everybody in the middle of a musical experience , not just listening , but making music ?
and we started by making instruments for some of the world 's greatest performers - we call these hyperinstruments - for yo-yo ma , peter gabriel , prince , orchestras , rock bands . instruments where they 're all kinds of sensors built right into the instrument , so the instrument knows how it 's being played .
and just by changing the interpretation and the feeling , i can turn my cello into a voice , or into a whole orchestra , or into something that nobody has ever heard before .
when we started making these , i started thinking , why ca n't we make wonderful instruments like that for everybody , people who are n't fantastic yo-yo mas or princes ?
so , we 've made a whole series of instruments .
one of the largest collections is called the brain opera .
it 's a whole orchestra of about 100 instruments , all designed for anybody to play using natural skill .
so , you can play a video game , drive through a piece of music , use your body gesture to control huge masses of sound , touch a special surface to make melodies , use your voice to make a whole aura .
and when we make the brain opera , we invite the public to come in , to try these instruments and then collaborate with us to help make each performance of the brain opera .
we toured that for a long time . it is now permanently in vienna , where we built a museum around it .
and that led to something which you probably do know .
guitar hero came out of our lab , and my two teenage daughters and most of the students at the mit media lab are proof that if you make the right kind of interface , people are really interested in being in the middle of a piece of music , and playing it over and over and over again .
so , the model works , but it 's only the tip of the iceberg , because my second idea is that it 's not enough just to want to make music in something like guitar hero .
and music is very fun , but it 's also transformative .
it 's very , very important .
music can change your life , more than almost anything .
it can change the way you communicate with others , it can change your body , it can change your mind . so , we 're trying to go to the next step of how you build on top of something like guitar hero .
we are very involved in education . we have a long-term project called toy symphony , where we make all kinds of instruments that are also addictive , but for little kids , so the kids will fall in love with making music , want to spend their time doing it , and then will demand to know how it works , how to make more , how to create . so , we make squeezy instruments , like these music shapers that measure the electricity in your fingers , beatbugs that let you tap in rhythms - they gather your rhythm , and like hot potato , you send your rhythm to your friends ,
who then have to imitate or respond to what your doing - and a software package called hyperscore , which lets anybody use lines and color to make quite sophisticated music . extremely easy to use , but once you use it , you can go quite deep - music in any style . and then , by pressing a button , it turns into music notation so that live musicians can play your pieces .
we 've had good enough , really , very powerful effects with kids around the world , and now people of all ages , using hyperscore .
so , we 've gotten more and more interested in using these kinds of creative activities in a much broader context , for all kinds of people who do n't usually have the opportunity to make music .
so , one of the growing fields that we 're working on at the media lab right now is music , mind and health .
a lot of you have probably seen oliver sacks ' wonderful new book called " musicophilia . " it 's on sale in the bookstore . it 's a great book .
if you have n't seen it , it 's worth reading . he 's a pianist himself , and he details his whole career of looking at and observing incredibly powerful effects that music has had on peoples ' lives in unusual situations .
so we know , for instance , that music is almost always the last thing that people with advanced alzheimer 's can still respond to .
maybe many of you have noticed this with loved ones , you can find somebody who ca n't recognize their face in the mirror , or ca n't tell anyone in their family , but you can still find a shard of music that that person will jump out of the chair and start singing . and with that you can bring back parts of people 's memories and personalities .
music is the best way to restore speech to people who have lost it through strokes , movement to people with parkinson 's disease .
it 's very powerful for depression , schizophrenia , many , many things .
so , we 're working on understanding those underlying principles and then building activities which will let music really improve people 's health .
and we do this in many ways . we work with many different hospitals .
one of them is right near boston , called tewksbury hospital .
it 's a long-term state hospital , where several years ago we started working with hyperscore and patients with physical and mental disabilities .
this has become a central part of the treatment at tewksbury hospital , so everybody there clamors to work on musical activities .
it 's the activity that seems to accelerate people 's treatment the most and it also brings the entire hospital together as a kind of musical community .
i wanted to show you a quick video of some of this work before i go on .
video : they 're manipulating each other 's rhythms .
it 's a real experience , not only to learn how to play and listen to rhythms , but to train your musical memory and playing music in a group .
to get their hands on music , to shape it themselves , change it , to experiment with it , to make their own music .
so hyperscore lets you start from scratch very quickly .
everybody can experience music in a profound way , we just have to make different tools .
the third idea i want to share with you is that music , paradoxically , i think even more than words , is one of the very best ways we have of showing who we really are . i love giving talks , although strangely i feel more nervous giving talks than playing music .
if i were here playing cello , or playing on a synth , or sharing my music with you , i 'd be able to show things about myself that i ca n't tell you in words , more personal things , perhaps deeper things .
i think that 's true for many of us , and i want to give you two examples of how music is one of the most powerful interfaces we have , from ourselves to the outside world .
the first is a really crazy project that we 're building right now , called death and the powers . and it 's a big opera , one of the larger opera projects going on in the world right now .
and it 's about a man , rich , successful , powerful , who wants to live forever .
so , he figures out a way to download himself into his environment , actually into a series of books .
so this guy wants to live forever , he downloads himself into his environment .
the main singer disappears at the beginning of the opera and the entire stage becomes the main character . it becomes his legacy .
and the opera is about what we can share , what we can pass on to others , to the people we love , and what we ca n't .
every object in the opera comes alive and is a gigantic music instrument , like this chandelier . it takes up the whole stage . it looks like a chandelier , but it 's actually a robotic music instrument .
so , as you can see in this prototype , gigantic piano strings , each string is controlled with a little robotic element - either little bows that stroke the strings , propellers that tickle the strings , acoustic signals that vibrate the strings . we also have an army of robots on stage .
these robots are the kind of the intermediary between the main character , simon powers , and his family . there are a whole series of them , kind of like a greek chorus .
they observe the action . we 've designed these square robots that we 're testing right now at mit called operabots . these operabots follow my music .
they follow the characters . they 're smart enough , we hope , not to bump into each other . they go off on their own .
and then they can also , when you snap , line up exactly the way you 'd like to .
even though they 're cubes , they actually have a lot of personality .
the largest set piece in the opera is called the system . it 's a series of books .
every single book is robotic , so they all move , they all make sound , and when you put them all together , they turn into these walls , which have the gesture and the personality of simon powers . so he 's disappeared , but the whole physical environment becomes this person .
this is how he 's chosen to represent himself .
the books also have high-packed leds on the spines . so it 's all display .
and here 's the great baritone james maddalena as he enters the system .
this is a sneak preview .
this premieres in monaco - it 's in september 2009 . if by any chance you ca n't make it , another idea with this project - here 's this guy building his legacy through this very unusual form , through music and through the environment .
but we 're also making this available both online and in public spaces , as a way of each of us to use music and images from our lives to make our own legacy or to make a legacy of someone we love .
so instead of being grand opera , this opera will turn into what we 're thinking of as personal opera .
and , if you 're going to make a personal opera , what about a personal instrument ?
everything i 've shown you so far - whether it 's a hyper-cello for yo-yo ma or squeezy toy for a child - the instruments stayed the same and are valuable for a certain class of person : a virtuoso , a child .
but what if i could make an instrument that could be adapted to the way i personally behave , to the way my hands work , to what i do very skillfully , perhaps , to what i do n't do so skillfully ?
i think that this is the future of interface , it 's the future of music , the future of instruments .
and i 'd like now to invite two very special people on the stage , so that i can give you an example of what personal instruments might be like .
so , can you give a hand to adam boulanger , ph.d. student from the mit media lab , and dan ellsey . dan , thanks to ted and to bombardier flexjet , dan is here with us today all the way from tewksbury . he 's a resident at tewksbury hospital .
this is by far the farthest he 's strayed from tewksbury hospital , i can tell you that , because he 's motivated to meet with you today and show you his own music .
so , first of all , dan , do you want to say hi to everyone and tell everyone who you are ?
dan ellsey : hello . my name is dan ellsey . i am 34 years old and i have cerebral palsy .
i have always loved music and i am excited to be able to conduct my own music with this new software .
tod machover : and we 're really excited to have you here , really dan . -lrb- applause -rrb- so we met dan about three years ago , three and a half years ago , when we started working at tewksbury . everybody we met there was fantastic , did fantastic music . dan had never made music before , and it turned out he was really fantastic at it . he 's a born composer .
he 's very shy , too .
so , turned out he 's a fantastic composer , and over the last few years has been a constant collaborator of ours . he has made many , many pieces .
he makes his own cds . actually , he is quite well known in the boston area - mentors people at the hospital and children , locally , in how to make their own music .
and i 'll let adam tell you . so , adam is a ph.d. student at mit , an expert in music technology and medicine . and adam and dan have become close collaborators .
what adam 's been working on for this last period is not only how to have dan be able easily to make his own pieces , but how he can perform his piece using this kind of personal instrument .
so , you want to say a little bit about how you guys work ?
adam boulanger : yes . so , tod and i entered into a discussion following the tewksbury work and it was really about how dan is an expressive person , and he 's an intelligent and creative person . and it 's in his face , it 's in his breathing , it 's in his eyes . how come he ca n't perform one of his pieces of music ? that 's our responsibility , and it does n't make sense .
so we started developing a technology that will allow him with nuance , with precision , with control , and despite his physical disability , to be able to do that , to be able to perform his piece of music .
so , the process and the technology - basically , first we needed an engineering solution . so , you know , we have a firewire camera , it looked at an infrared pointer .
we went with the type of gesture metaphor that dan was already used to with his speaking controller .
and this was actually the least interesting part of the work , you know , the design process . we needed an input ; we needed continuous tracking ; in the software , we look at the types of shapes he 's making .
but , then was the really interesting aspect of the work , following the engineering part , where , basically , we 're coding over dan 's shoulder at the hospital extensively to figure out , you know , how does dan move ?
what 's useful to him as an expressive motion ?
you know , what 's his metaphor for performance ?
what types of things does he find important to control and convey in a piece of music ?
so all the parameter fitting , and really the technology was stretched at that point to fit just dan .
and , you know , i think this is a perspective shift . it 's not that our technologies - they provide access , they allow us to create pieces of creative work .
but what about expression ? what about that moment when an artist delivers that piece of work ? you know , do our technologies allow us to express ?
do they provide structure for us to do that ? and , you know , that 's a personal relationship to expression that is lacking in the technological sphere . so , you know , with dan , we needed a new design process , a new engineering process to sort of discover his movement and his path to expression that allow him to perform .
and so that 's what we 'll do today .
tm : so let 's do it . so dan do you want to tell everyone about what you 're going to play now ?
de : this is " my eagle song . "
tm : so dan is going to play a piece of his , called " my eagle song . "
in fact , this is the score for dan 's piece , completely composed by dan in hyperscore .
so he can use his infrared tracker to go directly into hyperscore .
he 's incredibly fast at it , too , faster than i am , in fact .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tm : he 's really modest , too .
so he can go in hyperscore . you start out by making melodies and rhythms .
he can place those exactly where he wants .
each one gets a color . he goes back into the composition window , draws the lines , places everything the way he wants to . looking at the hyperscore , you can see it also , you can see where the sections are , something might continue for a while , change , get really crazy and then end up with a big bang at the end .
so that 's the way he made his piece , and as adam says , we then figured out the best way to have him perform his piece .
it 's going to be looked at by this camera , analyze his movements , it 's going to let dan bring out all the different aspects of his music that he wants to .
and you 're also going to notice a visual on the screen .
we asked one of our students to look at what the camera is measuring .
but instead of making it very literal , showing you exactly the camera tracing , we turned it into a graphic that shows you the basic movement , and shows the way it 's being analyzed .
i think it gives an understanding of how we 're picking out movement from what dan 's doing , but i think it will also show you , if you look at that movement , that when dan makes music , his motions are very purposeful , very precise , very disciplined and they 're also very beautiful .
so , in hearing this piece , as i mentioned before , the most important thing is the music 's great , and it 'll show you who dan is .
so , are we ready adam ?
ab : yeah .
tm : ok , now dan will play his piece " my eagle song " for you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tm : bravo .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is the venue where , as a young man , some of the music that i wrote was first performed .
it was , remarkably , a pretty good sounding room .
with all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere , it actually sounded pretty good .
this is a song that was recorded there .
-lrb- music -rrb- this is not talking heads , in the picture anyway .
-lrb- music : " a clean break -lrb- let 's work -rrb- " by talking heads -rrb- so the nature of the room meant that words could be understood .
the lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood .
the sound system was kind of decent .
and there was n't a lot of reverberation in the room .
so the rhythms could be pretty intact too , pretty concise .
other places around the country had similar rooms .
this is tootsie 's orchid lounge in nashville .
the music was in some ways different , but in structure and form , very much the same .
the clientele behavior was very much the same too .
and so the bands at tootsie 's or at cbgb 's had to play loud enough - the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down , shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing .
since then , i 've played other places that are much nicer .
i 've played the disney hall here and carnegie hall and places like that .
and it 's been very exciting .
but i also noticed that sometimes the music that i had written , or was writing at the time , did n't sound all that great in some of those halls .
we managed , but sometimes those halls did n't seem exactly suited to the music i was making or had made .
so i asked myself : do i write stuff for specific rooms ?
do i have a place , a venue , in mind when i write ?
is that a kind of model for creativity ?
do we all make things with a venue , a context , in mind ?
okay , africa .
-lrb- music : " wenlenga " / various artists -rrb- most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in west africa .
and the music there , i would say , the instruments , the intricate rhythms , the way it 's played , the setting , the context , it 's all perfect . it all works perfect .
the music works perfectly in that setting .
there 's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms .
the instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification , etc . , etc .
it 's no accident .
it 's perfect for that particular context .
and it would be a mess in a context like this . this is a gothic cathedral .
-lrb- music : " spem in alium " by thomas tallis -rrb- in a gothic cathedral , this kind of music is perfect .
it does n't change key , the notes are long , there 's almost no rhythm whatsoever , and the room flatters the music .
it actually improves it .
this is the room that bach wrote some of his music for . this is the organ .
it 's not as big as a gothic cathedral , so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate .
he can , very innovatively , actually change keys without risking huge dissonances .
-lrb- music : " fantasia on jesu , mein freunde " by johann s. bach -rrb- this is a little bit later .
this is the kind of rooms that mozart wrote in .
i think we 're in like 1770 , somewhere around there .
they 're smaller , even less reverberant , so he can write really frilly music that 's very intricate - and it works .
-lrb- music : " sonata in f , " kv 13 , by wolfgang a. mozart -rrb- it fits the room perfectly .
this is la scala .
it 's around the same time , i think it was built around 1776 .
people in the audience in these opera houses , when they were built , they used to yell out to one another .
they used to eat , drink and yell out to people on the stage , just like they do at cbgb 's and places like that .
if they liked an aria , they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore , not at the end of the show , but immediately .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and well , that was an opera experience .
this is the opera house that wagner built for himself .
and the size of the room is not that big .
it 's smaller than this .
but wagner made an innovation .
he wanted a bigger band .
he wanted a little more bombast , so he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there .
-lrb- music : " lohengrin / prelude to act iii " by richard wagner -rrb- okay .
this is carnegie hall .
obviously , this kind of thing became popular .
the halls got bigger . carnegie hall 's fair-sized .
it 's larger than some of the other symphony halls .
and they 're a lot more reverberant than la scala .
around the same , according to alex ross who writes for the new yorker , this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet - no more eating , drinking and yelling at the stage , or gossiping with one another during the show .
they had to be very quiet .
so those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls .
it meant that there could be extreme dynamics , which there were n't in some of these other kinds of music .
quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting .
but because of the reverberation in those rooms like carnegie hall , the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural .
-lrb- music : " symphony no. 8 in e flat major " by gustav mahler -rrb- this is mahler .
it looks like bob dylan , but it 's mahler .
that was bob 's last record , yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- popular music , coming along at the same time .
this is a jazz band .
according to scott joplin , the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs .
again , it 's noisy . they 're playing for dancers .
there 's certain sections of the song - the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked .
and they 'd say , " play that part again . "
well , there 's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers .
so the bands started to improvise new melodies .
and a new form of music was born .
-lrb- music : " royal garden blues " by w.c. handy / ethel waters -rrb- these are played mainly in small rooms .
people are dancing , shouting and drinking .
so the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that .
same thing goes true for - that 's the beginning of the century - for the whole of 20th-century popular music , whether it 's rock or latin music or whatever .
-lsb- live music -rsb- does n't really change that much .
it changes about a third of the way into the 20th century , when this became one of the primary venues for music .
and this was one way that the music got there .
microphones enabled singers , in particular , and musicians and composers , to completely change the kind of music that they were writing .
so far , a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music , but singers , like frank sinatra , could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone .
other singers after him went even further .
-lrb- music : " my funny valentine " by chet baker -rrb- this is chet baker .
and this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone .
it would have been impossible without recorded music as well .
and he 's singing right into your ear .
he 's whispering into your ears .
the effect is just electric .
it 's like the guy is sitting next to you , whispering who knows what into your ear .
so at this point , music diverged .
there 's live music , and there 's recorded music .
and they no longer have to be exactly the same .
now there 's venues like this , a discotheque , and there 's jukeboxes in bars , where you do n't even need to have a band .
there does n't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever , and the sound systems are good .
people began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems .
and , as with jazz , the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others .
so the early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections .
-lrb- music : " rapper 's delight " by the sugarhill gang -rrb- the mc would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies .
and another new form of music was born .
live performance , when it was incredibly successful , ended up in what is probably , acoustically , the worst sounding venues on the planet : sports stadiums , basketball arenas and hockey arenas .
musicians who ended up there did the best they could .
they wrote what is now called arena rock , which is medium-speed ballads .
-lrb- music : " i still have n't found what i 'm looking for " by u2 -rrb- they did the best they could given that this is what they 're writing for .
the tempos are medium . it sounds big .
it 's more a social situation than a musical situation .
and in some ways , the music that they 're writing for this place works perfectly .
so there 's more new venues .
one of the new ones is the automobile .
i grew up with a radio in a car .
but now that 's evolved into something else .
the car is a whole venue .
-lrb- music : " who u wit " by lil ' jon & the east side boyz -rrb- the music that , i would say , is written for automobile sound systems works perfectly on it .
it might not be what you want to listen to at home , but it works great in the car - has a huge frequency spectrum , you know , big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle .
automobile music , you can share with your friends .
there 's one other kind of new venue , the private mp3 player .
presumably , this is just for christian music .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in some ways it 's like carnegie hall , or when the audience had to hush up , because you can now hear every single detail .
in other ways , it 's more like the west african music because if the music in an mp3 player gets too quiet , you turn it up , and the next minute , your ears are blasted out by a louder passage .
so that does n't really work .
i think pop music , mainly , it 's written today , to some extent , is written for these kind of players , for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail , but the dynamic does n't change that much .
so i asked myself : okay , is this a model for creation , this adaptation that we do ?
and does it happen anywhere else ?
well , according to david attenborough and some other people , birds do it too - that the birds in the canopy , where the foliage is dense , their calls tend to be high-pitched , short and repetitive .
and the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls , so that they do n't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor .
and birds like this savannah sparrow , they tend to have a buzzing -lrb- sound clip : savannah sparrow song -rrb- type call .
and it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs .
other birds , like this tanager , have adapted within the same species .
the tananger on the east coast of the united states , where the forests are a little denser , has one kind of call , and the tananger on the other side , on the west -lrb- sound clip : scarlet tanager song -rrb- has a different kind of call .
-lrb- sound clip : scarlet tanager song -rrb- so birds do it too .
and i thought : well , if this is a model for creation , if we make music , primarily the form at least , to fit these contexts , and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls , and if we write software to fit existing operating systems , is that how it works ?
yeah . i think it 's evolutionary .
it 's adaptive .
but the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there .
this is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view .
the romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion , and then somehow it gets shaped into something .
and i 'm saying , well , the passion 's still there , but the vessel that it 's going to be injected into and poured into , that is instinctively and intuitively created first .
we already know where that passion is going .
but this conflict of views is kind of interesting .
the writer , thomas frank , says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests , that voters , like a lot of us , assume , that if they hear something that sounds like it 's sincere , that it 's coming from the gut , that it 's passionate , that it 's more authentic .
and they 'll vote for that .
so that , if somebody can fake sincerity , if they can fake passion , they stand a better chance of being selected in that way , which seems a little dangerous .
i 'm saying the two , the passion , the joy , are not mutually exclusive .
maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds .
we adapt .
we sing .
and like the birds , the joy is still there , even though we have changed what we do to fit the context .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- on march 14 , this year , i posted this poster on facebook .
this is an image of me and my daughter holding the israeli flag .
i will try to explain to you about the context of why and when i posted .
a few days ago , i was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store , and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other , and the owner was explaining to the client that we 're going to get 10,000 missiles on israel .
and the client was saying , no , it 's 10,000 a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- " 10,000 missiles " -rrb- this is the context . this is where we are now in israel .
we have this war with iran coming for 10 years now , and we have people , you know , afraid .
it 's like every year it 's the last minute that we can do something about the war with iran .
it 's like , if we do n't act now , it 's too late forever , for 10 years now .
so at some point it became , you know , to me , i 'm a graphic designer , so i made posters about it and i posted the one i just showed you before .
most of the time , i make posters , i post them on facebook , my friends like it , do n't like it , most of the time do n't like it , do n't share it , do n't nothing , and it 's another day .
so i went to sleep , and that was it for me .
and later on in the night , i woke up because i 'm always waking up in the night , and i went by the computer and i see all these red dots , you know , on facebook , which i 've never seen before .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was like , " what 's going on ? "
so i come to the computer and i start looking on , and suddenly i see many people talking to me , most of them i do n't know , and a few of them from iran , which is - what ?
because you have to understand , in israel we do n't talk with people from iran .
we do n't know people from iran .
it 's like , on facebook , you have friends only from - it 's like your neighbors are your friends on facebook .
and now people from iran are talking to me .
so i start answering this girl , and she 's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come , because they do n't have a computer , she asked her family to come to see the poster , and they 're all sitting in the living room crying .
so i 'm like , whoa .
i ask my wife to come , and i tell her , you have to see that .
people are crying , and she came , she read the text , and she started to cry .
and everybody 's crying now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i do n't know what to do , so my first reflex , as a graphic designer , is , you know , to show everybody what i 'd just seen , and people started to see them and to share them , and that 's how it started .
the day after , when really it became a lot of talking , i said to myself , and my wife said to me , i also want a poster , so this is her . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because it 's working , put me in a poster now .
but more seriously , i was like , okay , these ones work , but it 's not just about me , it 's about people from israel who want to say something .
so i 'm going to shoot all the people i know , if they want , and i 'm going to put them in a poster and i 'm going to share them .
so i went to my neighbors and friends and students and i just asked them , give me a picture , i will make you a poster .
and that 's how it started . and that 's how , really , it 's unleashed , because suddenly people from facebook , friends and others , just understand that they can be part of it .
it 's not just one dude making one poster , it 's - we can be part of it , so they start sending me pictures and ask me , " make me a poster . post it .
tell the iranians we from israel love you too . "
it became , you know , at some point it was really , really intense .
i mean , so many pictures , so i asked friends to come , graphic designers most of them , to make posters with me , because i did n't have the time .
it was a huge amount of pictures .
so for a few days , that 's how my living room was .
and we received israeli posters , israeli images , but also lots of comments , lots of messages from iran .
and we took these messages and we made posters out of it , because i know people : they do n't read , they see images .
if it 's an image , they may read it .
so here are a few of them .
-lrb- " you are my first israelian friend . i wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians , anyway nice to see you ! " -rrb- -lrb- " i love that blue . i love that star . i love that flag . " -rrb- this one is really moving for me because it 's the story of a girl who has been raised in iran to walk on an israeli flag to enter her school every morning , and now that she sees the posters that we 're sending , she starts - she said that she changed her mind , and now she loves that blue , she loves that star , and she loves that flag , talking about the israeli flag ,
and she wished that we 'd meet and come to visit one another , and just a few days after i posted the first poster .
the day after , iranians started to respond with their own posters .
they have graphic designers . what ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- crazy , crazy .
so you can see they are still shy , they do n't want to show their faces , but they want to spread the message .
they want to respond . they want to say the same thing .
so . and now it 's communication .
it 's a two-way story . it 's israelis and iranians sending the same message , one to each other .
-lrb- " my israeli friends . i do n't hate you . i do n't want war . " -rrb- this never happened before , and this is two people supposed to be enemies , we 're on the verge of a war , and suddenly people on facebook are starting to say , " i like this guy . i love those guys . "
and it became really big at some point .
and then it became news .
because when you 're seeing the middle east , you see only the bad news .
and suddenly , there is something that was happening that was good news . so the guys on the news , they say , " okay , let 's talk about this . "
and they just came , and it was so much , i remember one day , michal , she was talking with the journalist , and she was asking him , " who 's gonna see the show ? " and he said , " everybody . "
so she said , " everybody in palestine , in where ? israel ?
who is everybody ? " " everybody . "
they said , " syria ? " " syria . "
" lebanon ? " " lebanon . "
at some point , he just said , " 40 million people are going to see you today .
it 's everybody . " the chinese .
and we were just at the beginning of the story .
something crazy also happened .
every time a country started talking about it , like germany , america , wherever , a page on facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories , so at the beginning we had " iran-loves-israel , " which is an iranian sitting in tehran , saying , " okay , israel loves iran ?
i give you iran-loves-israel . "
you have palestine-loves-israel .
you have lebanon that just - a few days ago .
and this whole list of pages on facebook dedicated to the same message , to people sending their love , one to each other .
the moment i really understood that something was happening , a friend of mine told me , " google the word ' israel . " ' and those were the first images on those days that popped up from google when you were typing , " israel " or " iran . "
we really changed how people see the middle east .
because you 're not in the middle east .
you 're somewhere over there , and then you want to see the middle east , so you go on google and you say , " israel , " and they give you the bad stuff .
and for a few days you got those images .
today the israel-loves-iran page is this number , 80,831 , and two million people last week went on the page and shared , liked , i do n't know , commented on one of the photos .
so for five months now , that 's what we are doing , me , michal , a few of my friends , are just making images .
we 're showing a new reality by just making images because that 's how the world perceives us .
they see images of us , and they see bad images .
so we 're working on making good images . end of story .
look at this one . this is the iran-loves-israel page .
this is not the israel-loves-iran . this is not my page .
this is a guy in tehran on the day of remembrance of the israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an israeli soldier on his page .
this is the enemy .
what ?
-lrb- " our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in bulgaria " -rrb- and it 's going both ways .
it 's like , we are showing respect , one to each other .
and we 're understanding . and you show compassion .
and you become friends .
and at some point , you become friends on facebook , and you become friends in life .
you can go and travel and meet people .
and i was in munich a few weeks ago .
i went there to open an exposition about iran and i met there with people from the page that told me , " okay , you 're going to be in europe , i 'm coming . i 'm coming from france , from holland , from germany , " of course , and from israel people came , and we just met there for the first time in real life .
i met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time . and we just shake hands , and have a coffee and a nice discussion , and we talk about food and basketball .
and that was the end of it .
remember that image from the beginning ?
at some point we met in real life , and we became friends .
and it goes the other way around .
some girl that we met on facebook never been in israel , born and raised in iran , lives in germany , afraid of israelis because of what she knows about us , decides after a few months of talking on the internet with some israelis to come to israel , and she gets on the plane and arrives at ben gurion and says , " okay , not that big a deal . "
so a few weeks ago , the stress is getting higher , so we start this new campaign called " not ready to die in your war . "
i mean , it 's plus / minus the same message , but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it .
and again , something amazing happened , something that we did n't have on the first wave of the campaign .
now people from iran , the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent , you know , their foot and half their faces , now they 're sending their faces , and they 're saying , " okay , no problem , we 're into it . we are with you . "
just read where those guys are from .
and for every guy from israel , you 've got someone from iran .
just people sending their pictures .
crazy , yes ?
so - -lrb- applause -rrb- so you may ask yourself , who is this dude ?
my name is ronny edry , and i 'm 41 , i 'm an israeli , i 'm a father of two , i 'm a husband , and i 'm a graphic designer . i 'm teaching graphic design .
and i 'm not that naive , because a lot of the time i 've been asked , many times i 've been asked , " yeah , but , this is really naive , sending flowers over , i mean - " i was in the army . i was in the paratroopers for three years , and i know how it looks from the ground .
i know how it can look really bad .
so to me , this is the courageous thing to do , to try to reach the other side before it 's too late , because when it 's going to be too late , it 's going to be too late .
and sometimes war is inevitable , sometimes , but maybe -lsb- with -rsb- effort , we can avoid it .
maybe as people , because especially in israel , and maybe that little thing can change something .
and really , we can be our own ambassadors .
we can just send a message and hope for the best .
so i want to ask michal , my wife , to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image , because it 's all about images .
and maybe that image will help us change something .
just raise that . exactly .
and i 'm just going to take a picture of it , and i 'm just going to post it on facebook with kind of " israelis for peace " or something .
oh my god .
do n't cry .
thank you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm jessi , and this is my suitcase .
but before i show you what i 've got inside , i 'm going to make a very public confession , and that is , i 'm outfit-obsessed .
i love finding , wearing , and more recently , photographing and blogging a different , colorful , crazy outfit for every single occasion .
but i do n't buy anything new .
i get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores .
aww , thank you .
secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet .
i get to meet all kinds of great people ; my dollars usually go to a good cause ; i look pretty unique ; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt .
i mean , what am i going to find today ?
is it going to be my size ?
will i like the color ?
will it be under $ 20 ?
if all the answers are yes , i feel as though i 've won .
i want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what i packed for this exciting week here at ted .
i mean , what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her ?
so i 'm going to show you exactly what i brought .
i brought seven pairs of underpants and that 's it .
exactly one week 's worth of undies is all i put in my suitcase .
i was betting that i 'd be able to find everything else i could possible want to wear once i got here to palm springs .
and since you do n't know me as the woman walking around ted in her underwear - -lrb- laughter -rrb- that means i found a few things .
and i 'd really love to show you my week 's worth of outfits right now .
does that sound good ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so as i do this , i 'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that , believe it or not , i have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new .
so let 's start with sunday .
i call this " shiny tiger . "
you do not have to spend a lot of money to look great .
you can almost always look phenomenal for under $ 50 .
this whole outfit , including the jacket , cost me $ 55 , and it was the most expensive thing that i wore the entire week .
monday : color is powerful .
it is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you 're wearing bright red pants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you are happy , you are going to attract other happy people to you .
tuesday : fitting in is way overrated .
i 've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in .
just be who you are .
if you are surrounding yourself with the right people , they will not only get it , they will appreciate it .
wednesday : embrace your inner child .
sometimes people tell me that i look like i 'm playing dress-up , or that i remind them of their seven-year-old .
i like to smile and say , " thank you . "
thursday : confidence is key .
if you think you look good in something , you almost certainly do .
and if you do n't think you look good in something , you 're also probably right .
i grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out .
but it was n't until i turned 30 that i really got what this meant .
and i 'm going to break it down for you for just a second .
if you believe you 're a beautiful person inside and out , there is no look that you ca n't pull off .
so there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience .
we should be able to rock anything we want to rock .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- friday : a universal truth - five words for you : gold sequins go with everything .
and finally , saturday : developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word .
it 's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what i 'm wearing , and we 've had great conversations .
so obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase .
so before i go home to brooklyn , i 'm going to donate everything back .
because the lesson i 'm trying to learn myself this week is that it 's okay to let go .
i do n't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner , there is always going to be another crazy , colorful , shiny outfit just waiting for me , if i put a little love in my heart and look .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is about a place in london called kiteflyer 's hill where i used to go and spend hours going " when is he coming back ? when is he coming back ? "
so this is another one dedicated to that guy ...
who i 've got over .
but this is " kiteflyer 's hill . "
it 's a beautiful song written by a guy called martin evan , actually , for me .
boo hewerdine , thomas dolby , thank you very much for inviting me . it 's been a blessing singing for you .
thank you very much .
♫ do you remember when we used to go ♫ ♫ up to kiteflyer 's hill ? ♫ ♫ those summer nights , so still ♫ ♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫ ♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫ ♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫ ♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫ ♫ some nights i think of you ♫ ♫ and then i go up ♫ ♫ on kiteflyer 's hill ♫ ♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫ ♫ and somewhere in the city beneath me ♫ ♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫
♫ and i wonder if ever just briefly ♫ ♫ do i creep in your dreams now and then ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ my wild summer love ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ have the years been kind ? ♫ ♫ and do you think of me sometimes ♫ ♫ up on kiteflyer 's hill ? ♫ ♫ oh , i pray you one day will ♫ ♫ we wo n't say a word ♫ ♫ we wo n't need them ♫ ♫ sometimes silence is best ♫ ♫ we 'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫
♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ my wild summer love ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ do you think of me sometimes ? ♫ ♫ and do you ever make that climb ? ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ my wild summer love ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ have the years been kind ? ♫ ♫ and do you ever make that climb ♫ ♫ up on kiteflyer 's hill ? kiteflyer 's ... ♫ ♫ -lsb- french -rsb- ♫ ♫ where are you ? where are you now ? ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫
♫ kiteflyer 's ... ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- gracias . thank you very much .
i was asked by wilsonart international , a plastic laminate company , which is the largest plastic laminate company in the world - they asked me to design a trade show booth for exhibition at the international contemporary furniture fair in new york , in 2000 .
so looking at their three main markets for their product which were basically transportation design , interiors and furniture , we came up with the solution of taking an old airstream trailer and gutting it , and trying to portray laminate , and a trailer , in kind of a fresh , new contemporary look .
when this trailer showed up at my shop in berkeley , i 'd actually never stepped foot in an airstream trailer , or any other trailer .
so i can be somebody that can look at this in a totally fresh perspective and see if i can optimize it in its most idealistic fashion .
i decided i had to do some research and really figure out what had gone wrong somewhere along the history of airstream .
what i discovered in these interiors is that there was a disconnect between the exterior shell and the interior architecture of the pieces .
in that the shell was originally conceived as a lightweight , modern , futuristic , high-tech pod for hurtling down the freeway , and the interiors were completely out of sync with that .
in fact it appeared like they referenced a mountain cabin .
that seemed really like a crisis to me , that they had never been able to develop a vocabulary about escape , and about travel , and modernity in this trailer that was consistent with the shell .
we really needed to do some archeology in the trailer itself to figure out what 's authentic in an airstream trailer , and what feels like it has true purpose and utility .
we stripped out all the vinyl and zolatone paint that was covering up this just fantastic aluminum shell .
we took off all the visible hardware and trim that was kind of doing the country cabin thing .
i literally drew on the walls of the trailer , mocked it up in cardboard , we 'd come in and cut , decide things were wrong , pull it out , put it back in .
the main goal was to smooth out the interior , and begin to speak about motion , and mobility , and independence .
the biggest difficulty on one of these trailers is that when you 're designing there 's actually no logical place to stop and start materials because of the continuous form of the trailer .
there 's no such things as two walls and a ceiling coming together , where you can change materials and shapes .
so that became a challenge .
compounding that , the material of choice , laminate , that i was trying to highlight , only bends in two dimensions .
it 's a compound curve interior .
what i had to devise was a way of fooling the eye into believing that all these panels are curved with the shell .
what i came up with was a series of second skins that basically float over the aluminum shell .
and what i was trying to do there was direct your eye in the space , so that you would perceive the geometry in a different way , and that the casework would n't break up the space .
they also gave us a way to run power and rewire the trailer without tearing out the skin , so they function as an electrical chase .
that 's the trailer , pretty much finished .
that trailer led to another commission , to participate in whats called tokyo designers block .
its a week of furniture design events in tokyo , in october .
teruo kurosaki , who owns a furniture company called idee , he asked me to ship him two trailers to tokyo .
he said one he would like to make a real trailer , functioning , and we would sell that one .
trailer number two , you have a blank slate , you can to anything you want .
we came up with a fantasy scenario of a dj traveling around the states , that would collect records and go on tours .
this trailer housed two turntables , mixer , wet bar , fridge , integrated sound system .
it 's got a huge couch , fits quite a few people , and basically we 'd had a great time with this .
and so in this trailer i took it upon myself to think about travel , and escape , in an idiosyncratic sense .
a lot of these ideas migrated into the production trailers for airstream .
this brings us up to the time that i started consulting to airstream .
they came to me and said , " well , what can we do to freshen this thing up ?
and do you think kids , you know , skateboarders , surfers , rock climbers , would use these things ? "
and i said , " well , not in that interior . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i went out to airstream about six times during the process of building this prototype , and it 's called the bambi prototype .
i thought , " finally , oh yeah great , big company , i 'm gonna work with somebody with money for tooling and molding . "
and i walked in their prototype facility , and it 's exactly like my shop , only bigger - same tools , same things .
so the problem became - and they set this dilemma to me - that you have to design the interior using only our existing technology , and there 's no money for tooling or molding .
the trailers themselves are actually hand-built .
all the casework is hand-scribed in , uniquely , so you ca n't just cut 100 parts for 100 trailers , you have to cut them big , and every single one is hand-fit .
they did n't want to go to a componentized system .
and there it is , that 's the bambi 16 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist , so i put children to sleep for a living .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm an academic , so i put audiences to sleep for free .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i actually mostly do is i manage the pain management service at the packard children 's hospital up at stanford in palo alto .
and it 's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that i want to bring to you the message this morning , that pain is a disease .
now most of the time , you think of pain as a symptom of a disease , and that 's true most of the time .
it 's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation .
but about 10 percent of the time , after the patient has recovered from one of those events , pain persists .
it persists for months and oftentimes for years , and when that happens , it is its own disease .
and before i tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it , i want to show you how it feels for my patients .
so imagine , if you will , that i 'm stroking your arm with this feather , as i 'm stroking my arm right now .
now , i want you to imagine that i 'm stroking it with this .
please keep your seat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a very different feeling .
now what does it have to do with chronic pain ?
imagine , if you will , these two ideas together .
imagine what your life would be like if i were to stroke it with this feather , but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling - and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain .
in fact , imagine something even worse .
imagine i were to stroke your child 's arm with this feather , and their brain -lsb- was -rsb- telling them that they were feeling this hot torch .
that was the experience of my patient , chandler , whom you see in the photograph .
as you can see , she 's a beautiful , young woman .
she was 16 years old last year when i met her , and she aspired to be a professional dancer .
and during the course of one of her dance rehearsals , she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist .
now you would probably imagine , as she did , that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person 's life .
wrap it in an ace bandage , take some ibuprofen for a week or two , and that 's the end of the story .
but in chandler 's case , that was the beginning of the story .
this is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain .
you can see that the arm is discolored , purplish in color .
it was cadaverically cold to the touch .
the muscles were frozen , paralyzed - dystonic is how we refer to that .
the pain had spread from her wrist to her hands , to her fingertips , from her wrist up to her elbow , almost all the way to her shoulder .
but the worst part was , not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day .
the worst part was that she had allodynia , the medical term for the phenomenon that i just illustrated with the feather and with the torch .
the lightest touch of her arm - the touch of a hand , the touch even of a sleeve , of a garment , as she put it on - caused excruciating , burning pain .
how can the nervous system get this so wrong ?
how can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame ?
well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house .
in your house , wires run in the wall , from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb .
and when you turn the switch on , the light goes on .
and when you turn the switch off , the light goes off .
so people imagine the nervous system is just like that .
if you hit your thumb with a hammer , these wires in your arm - that , of course , we call nerves - transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires , new nerves , take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt .
but the situation , of course , in the human body is far more complicated than that .
instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion , in fact , what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions - laterally , vertically , up and down in the spinal cord - and they start interacting with other adjacent cells .
these cells , called glial cells , were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together , like the nerves .
but it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation , amplification and , in the case of pain , the distortion of sensory experiences .
these glial cells become activated .
their dna starts to synthesize new proteins , which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves , and they start releasing their neurotransmitters , and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells , and so on and so forth , until what we have is a positive feedback loop .
it 's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch , the toilet flushed three doors down , or your dishwasher went on , or your computer monitor turned off .
that 's crazy , but that 's , in fact , what happens with chronic pain .
and that 's why pain becomes its own disease .
the nervous system has plasticity .
it changes , and it morphs in response to stimuli .
well , what do we do about that ?
what can we do in a case like chandler 's ?
we treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time .
we treat them with symptom-modifying drugs - painkillers - which are , frankly , not very effective for this kind of pain .
we take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet , and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics .
and most importantly , what we do is we use a rigorous , and often uncomfortable , process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life .
and we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency , despair and depression that always accompanies severe , chronic pain .
it 's successful , as you can see from this video of chandler , who , two months after we first met her , is now doings a back flip .
and i had lunch with her yesterday because she 's a college student studying dance at long beach here , and she 's doing absolutely fantastic .
but the future is actually even brighter .
the future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem , as we have now , but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells , or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate , that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up , or plasticity , that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain .
so i have hope that in the future , the prophetic words of george carlin will be realized , who said , " my philosophy : no pain , no pain . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep , so dark , so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon .
it 's a place of myth and legend .
it 's a place marked on ancient maps as " here be monsters . "
it is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed .
instead , they just make me green with envy that my colleague from iucn was able to go on this journey to the south of madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep .
we are talking about the high seas .
the " high seas " is a legal term , but in fact , it covers 50 percent of the planet .
with an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters , in fact , the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this earth .
it is , in theory , the global commons , belonging to us all .
but in reality , it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it .
so today i 'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark .
we 're going to voyage to some of these special places that we 've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care .
and then finally , we 're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that 's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation , but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect .
so here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above - that area in the darker blue .
to me , as an international lawyer , this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen , for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean , the global ocean , that provides us all with carbon storage , with heat storage , with oxygen , if you can only protect 36 percent .
this is indeed the true heart of the planet .
some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws - for example , shipping - provide more protection to the areas closest to shore .
for example , garbage discharge , something you would think just simply goes away , but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore .
as a result , we have garbage patches the size of twice-texas .
it 's unbelievable .
we used to think the solution to pollution was dilution , but that has proved to be no longer the case .
so what we have learned from social scientists and economists like elinor ostrom , who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale , is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all .
and these include a sense of shared responsibility , common norms that bind people together as a community .
conditional access : you can invite people in , but they have to be able to play by the rules .
and of course , if you want people to play by the rules , you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement , for as we 've discovered , you can trust , but you also need to verify .
what i 'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing in the high seas .
for a group of very dedicated individuals - scientists , conservationists , photographers and states - were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you .
that is , we 're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling .
and how did we do that ?
well , as i said , we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process .
but we also spent many hours in the basements of the united nations , trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed .
so within three years , from 2003 to 2006 , we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling .
instead of " go anywhere , do anything you want , " we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you 're going and a duty to prevent significant harm .
in 2009 , when the u.n. reviewed progress , they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected .
this does not mean that it 's the final solution , or that this even provides permanent protection .
but what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed , to create a new regime .
so i 'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true , blue perspective for this beautiful planet .
sylvia 's wish provides us with that leverage , that access to the heart of human beings , you might say , who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes , but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles , who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas .
today , we 're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas , just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain .
the sargasso sea , for example , is not a sea bounded by coastlines , but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there .
it 's also known as the spawning ground for eels from northern european and northern american rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they 've actually stopped showing up in stockholm , and five showed up in the u.k. just recently .
but the sargasso sea , the same way it aggregates sargassum weed , actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region .
this picture does n't exactly show the plastics that i would like it to show , because i have n't been out there myself .
but there has just been a study that was released in february that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the sargasso sea , and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the sargasso sea for its protection and its food .
the sargasso sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat .
it also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs .
but what i 'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection .
thus , the government of bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the sargasso sea within its national jurisdiction - but the vast majority is beyond - to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area .
spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now : the ross sea in the southern ocean .
it 's actually a bay .
it 's considered high seas , because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims .
so anything in the water is treated as if it 's the high seas .
but what makes the ross sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what , till recently , has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem .
but unfortunately , ccamlr , the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources , is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region .
the captain of a new zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the ross sea killer whales , who are directly dependent on the antarctic toothfish as their main source of food .
so what we need to do is to stand up boldly , singly and together , to push governments , to push regional fisheries management organizations , to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing , so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime .
coming closer to here , the costa rica dome is a recently discovered area - potentially year-round habitat for blue whales .
there 's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long .
but what 's unusual about the costa rica dome is , in fact , it 's not a permanent place .
it 's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis .
so , in fact , it 's not permanently in the high seas .
it 's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five central american countries , but it moves with the season .
as such , it does create a challenge to protect , but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it .
we can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are , in order to close the area when it 's most vulnerable , which may , in some cases , be year-round .
getting closer to shore , where we are , this was in fact taken in the galapagos .
many species are headed through this region , which is why there 's been so much attention put into conservation of the eastern tropical pacific seascape .
this is the initiative that 's been coordinated by conservation international with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area .
that is , it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative .
it 's protecting five world heritage sites .
unfortunately , the world heritage convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction , at present .
so a place like the costa rica dome could not technically qualify the time it 's in the high seas .
so what we 've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the world heritage convention , so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these world heritage sites , or we need to change the name and call it half-the-world heritage convention .
but what we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the eastern tropical pacific seascape .
these happen to go down to a vast south pacific gyre , where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this , or as bycatch .
so what i 'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up .
we need to work locally , but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide .
we have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative .
we 've heard about the tagging of pacific predators project , one of the 17 census of marine life projects .
it 's provided us data like this , of tiny , little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home .
they fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year .
so we have the tools and treasures coming from the census of marine life .
and its culminating year that 's going to be launched in october .
so stay tuned for further information .
what i find so exciting is that the census of marine life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators ; it 's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column , where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found .
and fortunately , we 've been able , as iucn , to team up with the census of marine life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers .
we have the support of governments now behind us .
we 've been revealing this information through technical workshops .
and the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots , hotspots .
at the same time we 're saying , " yes , we need more . we need to move forward . "
but many of you have said , if you get these marine protected areas , or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place , how are you going to enforce it ?
which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science , which is outer space technology .
i wanted to be an astronaut , so i 've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor earth from outer space - and that we have incredible tools like we 've been learning about , in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean .
we can also tag and track fishing vessels .
many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they 're doing .
but not all the vessels have those to date .
it does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate , if you 're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources , we need to know - someone needs to know - where you are and what you 're doing .
so it brings me to my main take-home message , which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons .
we can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas .
but we need to think broad-scale . we need to think globally .
we need to change how we actually go about managing these resources .
we need to get the new paradigm of precaution and respect .
at the same time , we need to think locally , which is the joy and marvel of sylvia 's hope spot wish , is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas , and to bring people to the table , if you will , to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management .
and third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management .
our species are ocean-basin-wide .
many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide .
we need to better understand , but we also need to start to manage and protect .
and in order to do that , you also need ocean-basin management regimes .
that is , we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone , but we need to scale these up , we need to build their capacity , so they 're like the southern ocean , where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization .
so with that , i would just like to sincerely thank and honor sylvia earle for her wish , for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction .
it 's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote .
so on this tour , i hope i provided you with a new perspective of the high seas : one , that it is our home too , and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea .
actually , it 's a really big idea .
but to get us started , i want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world .
now i bet , in this audience , you 're thinking of some really incredible technology , some stuff that i have n't even heard of , i 'm absolutely sure .
but i 'm also sure , pretty sure , that absolutely nobody is thinking of this .
this is a polio vaccine .
and it 's a great thing actually that nobody 's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted .
this is a great technology .
we can take it completely for granted .
but it was n't always that way .
even here in california , if we were to go back just a few years , it was a very different story .
people were terrified of this disease .
they were terrified of polio , and it would cause public panic .
and it was because of scenes like this .
in this scene , people are living in an iron lung .
these are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before , and then two days later , they can no longer breathe , and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs , but also their breathing muscles .
and they were going to spend the rest of their lives , usually , in this iron lung to breathe for them .
this disease was terrifying .
there was no cure , and there was no vaccine .
the disease was so terrifying that the president of the united states launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it .
twenty years later , they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine .
it was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s .
finally , a vaccine that could stop this awful disease , and here in the united states it had an incredible impact .
as you can see , the virus stopped , and it stopped very , very fast .
but this was n't the case everywhere in the world .
and it happened so fast in the united states , however , that even just last month jon stewart said this : -lrb- video -rrb- jon stewart : where is polio still active ?
because i thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated .
bruce aylward : oops . jon , polio 's almost been eradicated .
but the reality is that polio still exists today .
we made this map for jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists .
this is the picture .
there 's not very much left in the world .
but the reason there 's not very much left is because there 's been an extraordinary public / private partnership working behind the scenes , almost unknown , i 'm sure to most of you here today .
it 's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease , and it 's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic .
but just last year , we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just is n't good enough with a virus like polio .
and this is the reason : in two countries that had n't had this disease for more than probably a decade , on opposite sides of the globe , there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks .
hundreds of people were paralyzed .
hundreds of people died - children as well as adults .
and in both cases , we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses , and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries .
they had come from thousands of miles away .
and in one case , it originated on another continent .
and not only that , but when they came into these countries , then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like russia , where , for the first time in over a decade last year , children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years .
now all of these outbreaks that i just showed you , these are under control now , and it looks like they 'll probably stop very , very quickly .
but the message was very clear .
polio is still a devastating , explosive disease .
it 's just happening in another part of the world .
and our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis .
so i want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership , the polio partnership , is trying to do .
we 're not trying to control polio .
we 're not trying to get it down to just a few cases , because this disease is like a root fire ; it can explode again if you do n't snuff it out completely .
so what we 're looking for is a permanent solution .
we want a world in which every child , just like you guys , can take for granted a polio-free world .
so we 're looking for a permanent solution , and this is where we get lucky .
this is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary .
this virus can only survive in people .
it ca n't live for a very long time in people .
it does n't survive in the environment hardly at all .
and we 've got pretty good vaccines , as i 've just showed you .
so we are trying to wipe out this virus completely .
what the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on earth .
now we do n't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this , to eradicating diseases .
it 's been tried six times in the last century , and it 's been successful exactly once .
and this is because disease eradication , it 's still the venture capital of public health .
the risks are massive , but the pay-off - economic , humanitarian , motivational - it 's absolutely huge .
one congressman here in the united states thinks that the entire investment that the u.s. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days - in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs .
and if we can finish polio eradication , the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone .
so those are the kind of stakes that we 're after .
but smallpox eradication was hard ; it was very , very hard .
and polio eradication , in many ways , is even tougher , and there 's a few reasons for that .
the first is that , when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago , more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox .
and there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries .
so it was a massive effort .
the second challenge we had was - in contrast to the smallpox vaccine , which was very stable , and a single dose protected you for life - the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile .
it deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we 've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it 's exposed to too much heat , and we can tell that it 's not a good vaccine to use on a child - it 's not potent ; it 's not going to protect them .
even then , kids need many doses of the vaccine .
but the third challenge we have - and probably even bigger one , the biggest challenge - is that , in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy - every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash .
so you could get around the disease ; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off .
with polio it 's almost completely different .
the vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease .
so you ca n't see the enemy most of the time , and as a result , we 've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox .
we 've had to create one of the largest social movements in history .
there 's over 10 million people , probably 20 million people , largely volunteers , who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime .
these people , these 20 million people , vaccinate over 500 million children every single year , multiple times at the peak of our operation .
now giving the polio vaccine is simple .
it 's just two drops , like that .
but reaching 500 million people is much , much tougher .
and these vaccinators , these volunteers , they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest , densest urban slums in the world .
they 've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote , difficult to reach places in the world .
and they also have to dodge bullets , because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children , even in areas affected by conflict .
one reporter who was watching our program in somalia about five years ago - a place which has eradicated polio , not once , but twice , because they got reinfected .
he was sitting outside of the road , watching one of these polio campaigns unfold , and a few months later he wrote : " this is foreign aid at its most heroic . "
and these heroes , they come from every walk of life , all sorts of backgrounds .
but one of the most extraordinary is rotary international .
this is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years .
they 're right at the center of the whole thing .
now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication - more than 15 years , much longer than it should have - but once it was built , the results were striking .
within a couple of years , every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses , with the exception of four countries that you see here .
and in each of those , it was only part of the country .
and then , by 1999 , one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide - proof of concept .
and then today , there 's been a 99 percent reduction - greater than 99 percent reduction - in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease .
when we started , over 20 years ago , 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus .
last year , it was 1,000 .
and at the same time , the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas .
it 's been working to help control pandemic flu , sars for example .
it 's also tried to save children by doing other things - giving vitamin a drops , giving measles shots , giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns .
but the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us , the international community , to reach every single child , every single community , the most vulnerable people in the world , with the most basic of health services , irrespective of geography , poverty , culture and even conflict .
so things were looking very exciting , and then about five years ago , this virus , this ancient virus , started to fight back .
the first problem we ran into was that , in these last four countries , the strongholds of this virus , we just could n't seem to get the virus rooted out .
and then to make the matters even worse , the virus started to spread out of these four places , especially northern india and northern nigeria , into much of africa , asia , and even into europe , causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades .
and then , in one of the most important , tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world , we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have .
in conditions like this , the vaccine just could n't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to .
now at that time , there was a great , as you can imagine , frustration - let 's call it frustration - it started to grow very , very quickly .
and all of a sudden , some very important voices in the world of public health started to say , " hang on .
we should abandon this idea of eradication .
let 's settle for control - that 's good enough . "
now as seductive as the idea of control sounds , it 's a false premise .
the brutal truth is , if we do n't have the will or the skill , or even the money that we need to reach children , the most vulnerable children in the world , with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine , then pretty soon , more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year .
there 's absolutely no question .
these are children like umar .
umar is seven years old , and he 's from northern nigeria .
he lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters .
umar also has polio .
umar was paralyzed for life .
his right leg was paralyzed in 2004 .
this leg , his right leg , now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl , because it 's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends , keep up with his brothers and sisters , than to get up on his crutches and walk .
but umar is a fantastic student . he 's an incredible kid .
as you probably ca n't see the detail here , but this is his report card , and you 'll see , he 's got perfect scores .
he got 100 percent in all the important things , like nursery rhymes , for example there .
but you know i 'd love to be able to tell you that umar is a typical kid with polio these days , but it 's not true .
umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances .
the reality of polio today is something very different .
polio strikes the poorest communities in the world .
it leaves their children paralyzed , and it drags their families deeper into poverty , because they 're desperately searching and they 're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have , trying in vain to find a cure for their children .
we think children deserve better .
and so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago , when people were saying , " we should call it off , " the polio partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions , new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again .
in northern india , we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this , so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters , so we could get to the millions of children on the koshi river basin where there are no other health services .
in northern nigeria , the political leaders and the traditional muslim leaders , they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence .
and now they 've even started using these devices - speaking of cool technology - these little devices , little gis trackers like this , which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators .
and then they can track them , and at the end of the day , they look and see , did these guys get every single street , every single house .
this is the kind of commitment now we 're seeing to try and reach all of the children we 've been missing .
and in afghanistan , we 're trying new approaches - access negotiators .
we 're working closely with the international committee of the red cross to ensure that we can reach every child .
but as we tried these extraordinary things , as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics , we went back to the vaccine - it 's a 50-year-old vaccine - and we thought , surely we can make a better vaccine , so that when they finally get to these kids , we can have a better bang for our buck .
and this started an incredible collaboration with industry , and within six months , we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted , just two years ago , the last two types of polio in the world .
now june the ninth , 2009 , we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine , and it turned out to be a game-changer .
the new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had , and we immediately started using this .
well , in a couple of months we had to get it out of production .
and it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world .
and we did n't start with the easy places .
the first place this vaccine was used was in southern afghanistan , because it 's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this .
now here at ted , over the last couple of days , i 've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible .
so this morning at about seven o 'clock , i decided that we 'd try to drive chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from india again , so that you could see something that 's just unfolding today , which proves that the impossible is possible .
and only two years ago , people were saying that this is impossible .
now remember , northern india is the perfect storm when it comes to polio .
over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio - uttar pradesh and bihar - 500,000 children every single month .
sanitation is terrible , and our old vaccine , you remember , worked half as well as it should have .
and yet , the impossible is happening .
today marks exactly six months - and for the first time in history , not a single child has been paralyzed in uttar pradesh or bihar .
-lrb- applause -rrb- india 's not unique .
in umar 's home country of nigeria , a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year .
and in the last six months , we 've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history .
ladies and gentlemen , with a combination of smart people , smart technology and smart investments , polio can now be eradicated anywhere .
we have major challenges , you can imagine , to finish this job , but as you 've also seen , it 's doable , it has great secondary benefits , and polio eradication is a great buy .
and as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus , it 's a stark reminder that we are failing , as a society , to reach children with the most basic of services .
and for that reason , polio eradication : it 's the ultimate in equity and it 's the ultimate in social justice .
the huge social movement that 's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children .
it 's ready to reach them with bed nets , with other things .
but capitalizing on their enthusiasm , capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago .
finishing polio is a smart thing to do , and it 's the right thing to do .
now we 're in tough times economically .
but as david cameron of the united kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio , " there 's never a wrong time to do the right thing . "
finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do .
and we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years .
we have a new vaccine , we have new resolve , and we have new tactics .
we have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history .
but if we blink now , we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease .
here 's a great idea to spread : end polio now .
help us tell the story .
help us build the momentum so that very soon every child , every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bill gates : well bruce , where do you think the toughest places are going to be ?
where would you say we need to be the smartest ?
ba : the four places where you saw , that we 've never stopped - northern nigeria , northern india , the southern corner of afghanistan and bordering areas of pakistan - they 're going to be the toughest .
but the interesting thing is , of those three , india 's looking real good , as you just saw in the data .
and afghanistan , afghanistan , we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly .
it keeps getting reinfected .
so the tough ones : going to get the top of nigeria finished and getting pakistan finished .
they 're going to be the tough ones .
bg : now what about the money ?
give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year .
and is it easy to raise that money ?
and what 's it going to be like the next couple of years ?
ba : it 's interesting .
we spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year .
that 's what it costs to reach 500 million children .
it sounds like a lot of money ; it is a lot of money .
but when you 're reaching 500 million children multiple times - 20 , 30 cents to reach a child - that 's not very much money .
but right now we do n't have enough of that .
we have a big gap in that money . we 're cutting corners , and every time we cut corners , more places get infected that should n't have , and it just slows us down .
and that great buy costs us a little bit more .
bg : well , hopefully we 'll get the word out , and the governments will keep their generosity up .
so good luck . we 're all in this with you .
thank you . -lrb- ba : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up in new york city , between harlem and the bronx .
growing up as a boy , we were taught that men had to be tough , had to be strong , had to be courageous , dominating - no pain , no emotions , with the exception of anger - and definitely no fear ; that men are in charge , which means women are not ; that men lead , and you should just follow and do what we say ; that men are superior ; women are inferior ; that men are strong ; women are weak ; that women are of less value , property of men , and objects , particularly sexual objects .
i 've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men , better known as the " man box . "
see this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man .
now i also want to say , without a doubt , there are some wonderful , wonderful , absolutely wonderful things about being a man .
but at the same time , there 's some stuff that 's just straight up twisted , and we really need to begin to challenge , look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing , redefining , what we come to know as manhood .
this is my two at home , kendall and jay .
they 're 11 and 12 .
kendall 's 15 months older than jay .
there was a period of time when my wife - her name is tammie - and i , we just got real busy and whip , bam , boom : kendall and jay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when they were about five and six , four and five , jay could come to me , come to me crying .
it did n't matter what she was crying about , she could get on my knee , she could snot my sleeve up , just cry , cry it out .
daddy 's got you . that 's all that 's important .
now kendall on the other hand - and like i said , he 's only 15 months older than her - he 'd come to me crying , it 's like as soon as i would hear him cry , a clock would go off .
i would give the boy probably about 30 seconds , which means , by the time he got to me , i was already saying things like , " why are you crying ?
hold your head up . look at me .
explain to me what 's wrong .
tell me what 's wrong . i ca n't understand you .
why are you crying ? "
and out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box , i would find myself saying things like , " just go in your room .
just go on , go on in your room .
sit down , get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a - " what ?
-lrb- audience : man . -rrb- like a man .
and he 's five years old .
and as i grow in life , i would say to myself , " my god , what 's wrong with me ?
what am i doing ? why would i do this ? "
and i think back .
i think back to my father .
there was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family .
my brother , henry , he died tragically when we were teenagers .
we lived in new york city , as i said .
we lived in the bronx at the time , and the burial was in a place called long island , it was about two hours outside of the city .
and as we were preparing to come back from the burial , the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city .
and the limousine empties out .
my mother , my sister , my auntie , they all get out , but my father and i stayed in the limousine , and no sooner than the women got out , he burst out crying .
he did n't want cry in front of me , but he knew he was n't going to make it back to the city , and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women .
and this is a man who , 10 minutes ago , had just put his teenage son in the ground - something i just ca n't even imagine .
the thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me , and at the same time , he was also giving me props , lifting me up , for not crying .
i come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men , this fear that just has us paralyzed , holding us hostage to this man box .
i can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy , a football player , and i asked him , i said , " how would you feel if , in front of all the players , your coach told you you were playing like a girl ? "
now i expected him to say something like , i 'd be sad ; i 'd be mad ; i 'd be angry , or something like that .
no , the boy said to me - the boy said to me , " it would destroy me . "
and i said to myself , " god , if it would destroy him to be called a girl , what are we then teaching him about girls ? "
-lrb- applause -rrb- it took me back to a time when i was about 12 years old .
i grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city .
at this time we 're living in the bronx , and in the building next to where i lived there was a guy named johnny .
he was about 16 years old , and we were all about 12 years old - younger guys .
and he was hanging out with all us younger guys .
and this guy , he was up to a lot of no good .
he was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder , " what is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys ? "
and he did spend a lot of time up to no good .
he was a troubled kid .
his mother had died from a heroin overdose .
he was being raised by his grandmother .
his father was n't on the set .
his grandmother had two jobs .
he was home alone a lot .
but i 've got to tell you , we young guys , we looked up to this dude , man .
he was cool . he was fine .
that 's what the sisters said , " he was fine . "
he was having sex .
we all looked up to him .
so one day , i 'm out in front of the house doing something - just playing around , doing something - i do n't know what .
he looks out his window ; he calls me upstairs ; he said , " hey anthony . "
they called me anthony growing up as a kid .
" hey anthony , come on upstairs . "
johnny call , you go .
so i run right upstairs .
as he opens the door , he says to me , " do you want some ? "
now i immediately knew what he meant .
because for me growing up at that time , and our relationship with this man box , " do you want some ? " meant one of two things : sex or drugs - and we were n't doing drugs .
now my box , my card , my man box card , was immediately in jeopardy .
two things : one , i never had sex .
we do n't talk about that as men .
you only tell your dearest , closest friend , sworn to secrecy for life , the first time you had sex .
for everybody else , we go around like we 've been having sex since we were two .
there ai n't no first time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the other thing i could n't tell him is that i did n't want any .
that 's even worse . we 're supposed to always be on the prowl .
women are objects , especially sexual objects .
anyway , so i could n't tell him any of that .
so , like my mother would say , make a long story short , i just simply said to johnny , " yes . "
he told me to go in his room .
i go in his room . on his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named sheila .
she 's 16 years old .
she 's nude .
she 's what i know today to be mentally ill , higher-functioning at times than others .
we had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her .
anyway , johnny had just gotten through having sex with her .
well actually , he raped her , but he would say he had sex with her .
because , while sheila never said no , she also never said yes .
so he was offering me the opportunity to do the same .
so when i go in the room , i close the door .
folks , i 'm petrified .
i stand with my back to the door so johnny ca n't bust in the room and see that i 'm not doing anything , and i stand there long enough that i could have actually done something .
so now i 'm no longer trying to figure out what i 'm going to do ; i 'm trying to figure out how i 'm going to get out of this room .
so in my 12 years of wisdom , i zip my pants down , i walk out into the room , and lo and behold to me , while i was in the room with sheila , johnny was back at the window calling guys up .
so now there 's a living room full of guys .
it was like the waiting room in the doctor 's office .
and they asked me how was it , and i say to them , " it was good , " and i zip my pants up in front of them , and i head for the door .
now i say this all with remorse , and i was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time , but i was conflicted , because , while i was feeling remorse , i was excited , because i did n't get caught .
but i knew i felt bad about what was happening .
this fear , getting outside the man box , totally enveloped me .
it was way more important to me , about me and my man box card than about sheila and what was happening to her .
see collectively , we as men are taught to have less value in women , to view them as property and the objects of men .
we see that as an equation that equals violence against women .
we as men , good men , the large majority of men , we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization .
we kind of see ourselves separate , but we 're very much a part of it .
you see , we have to come to understand that less value , property and objectification is the foundation and the violence ca n't happen without it .
so we 're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem .
the center for disease control says that men 's violence against women is at epidemic proportions , is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad .
so quickly , i 'd like to just say , this is the love of my life , my daughter jay .
the world i envision for her - how do i want men to be acting and behaving ?
i need you on board . i need you with me .
i need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men - that it 's okay to not be dominating , that it 's okay to have feelings and emotions , that it 's okay to promote equality , that it 's okay to have women who are just friends and that 's it , that it 's okay to be whole , that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman . -lrb- applause -rrb- i remember asking a nine-year-old boy , i asked a nine-year-old boy , " what would life be like for you , if you did n't have to adhere to this man box ? "
he said to me , " i would be free . "
thank you folks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ten years ago , on a tuesday morning , i conducted a parachute jump at fort bragg , north carolina .
it was a routine training jump , like many more i 'd done since i became a paratrooper 27 years before .
we went down to the airfield early because this is the army and you always go early .
you do some routine refresher training , and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you .
and you put on the t-10 parachute .
and you 're very careful how you put the straps , particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs .
and then you put on your reserve , and then you put on your heavy rucksack .
and then a jumpmaster comes , and he 's an experienced nco in parachute operations .
he checks you out , he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed , your shoulders are crushed down , and , of course , he 's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well .
then you sit down , and you wait a little while , because this is the army .
then you load the aircraft , and then you stand up and you get on , and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this , in a line of people , and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft .
and you wait a little bit longer , because this is the air force teaching the army how to wait .
then you take off .
and it 's painful enough now - and i think it 's designed this way - it 's painful enough so you want to jump .
you did n't really want to jump , but you want out .
so you get in the aircraft , you 're flying along , and at 20 minutes out , these jumpmasters start giving you commands .
they give 20 minutes - that 's a time warning .
you sit there , ok .
then they give you 10 minutes .
and of course , you 're responding with all of these .
and that 's to boost everybody 's confidence , to show that you 're not scared .
then they give you , " get ready . "
then they go , " outboard personnel , stand up . "
if you 're an outboard personnel , now you stand up .
if you 're an inboard personnel , stand up .
and then you hook up , and you hook up your static line .
and at that point , you think , " hey , guess what ?
i 'm probably going to jump .
there 's no way to get out of this at this point . "
you go through some additional checks , and then they open the door .
and this was that tuesday morning in september , and it was pretty nice outside .
so nice air comes flowing in .
the jumpmasters start to check the door .
and then when it 's time to go , a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes , " go . "
the first guy goes , and you 're just in line , and you just kind of lumber to the door .
jump is a misnomer ; you fall .
you fall outside the door , you 're caught in the slipstream .
the first thing you do is lock into a tight body position - head down in your chest , your arms extended , put over your reserve parachute .
you do that because , 27 years before , an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that .
i have no idea whether it makes any difference , but he seemed to make sense , and i was n't going to test the hypothesis that he 'd be wrong .
and then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open .
if you do n't get an opening shock , you do n't get a parachute - you 've got a whole new problem set .
but typically you do ; typically it opens .
and of course , if your leg straps are n't set right , at that point you get another little thrill .
boom .
so then you look around , you 're under a canopy and you say , " this is good . "
now you prepare for the inevitable .
you are going to hit the ground .
you ca n't delay that much .
and you really ca n't decide where you hit very much , because they pretend you can steer , but you 're being delivered .
so you look around , where you 're going to land , you try to make yourself ready .
and then as you get close , you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line , so that it 's not on you when you land , and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall .
now the army teaches you to do five points of performance - the toes of your feet , your calves , your thighs , your buttocks and your push-up muscles .
it 's this elegant little land , twist and roll .
and that 's not going to hurt .
in 30-some years of jumping , i never did one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as soon as i hit , the first thing i did is i 'd see if i 'd broken anything that i needed .
i 'd shake my head , and i 'd ask myself the eternal question : " why did n't i go into banking ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'd look around , and then i 'd see another paratrooper , a young guy or girl , and they 'd have pulled out their m4 carbine and they 'd be picking up their equipment .
they 'd be doing everything that we had taught them .
and i realized that , if they had to go into combat , they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders .
and i realized that , if they came out of combat , it would be because we led them well .
and i was hooked again on the importance of what i did .
so now i do that tuesday morning jump , but it 's not any jump - that was september 11th , 2001 .
and when we took off from the airfield , america was at peace .
when we landed on the drop-zone , everything had changed .
and what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very , very real - and leadership seemed important .
but things had changed ; i was a 46-year-old brigadier general .
i 'd been successful , but things changed so much that i was going to have to make some significant changes , and on that morning , i did n't know it .
i was raised with traditional stories of leadership : robert e. lee , john buford at gettysburg .
and i also was raised with personal examples of leadership .
this was my father in vietnam .
and i was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful ; they did n't lie , cheat , steal or abandon their comrades .
and i still believe real leaders are like that .
but in my first 25 years of career , i had a bunch of different experiences .
one of my first battalion commanders , i worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with lt. mcchrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march , and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds .
and i 'm not sure that was real interaction .
but then a couple of years later , when i was a company commander , i went out to the national training center .
and we did an operation , and my company did a dawn attack - you know , the classic dawn attack : you prepare all night , move to the line of departure .
and i had an armored organization at that point .
we move forward , and we get wiped out - i mean , wiped out immediately .
the enemy did n't break a sweat doing it .
and after the battle , they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an " after action review " to teach you what you 've done wrong .
sort of leadership by humiliation .
they put a big screen up , and they take you through everything : " and then you did n't do this , and you did n't do this , etc . "
i walked out feeling as low as a snake 's belly in a wagon rut .
and i saw my battalion commander , because i had let him down .
and i went up to apologize to him , and he said , " stanley , i thought you did great . "
and in one sentence , he lifted me , put me back on my feet , and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure .
when 9/11 came , 46-year-old brig. gen. mcchrystal sees a whole new world .
first , the things that are obvious , that you 're familiar with : the environment changed - the speed , the scrutiny , the sensitivity of everything now is so fast , sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it .
but everything we do is in a different context .
more importantly , the force that i led was spread over more than 20 countries .
and instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them , i 'm now leading a force that 's dispersed , and i 've got to use other techniques .
i 've got to use video teleconferences , i 've got to use chat , i 've got to use email , i 've got to use phone calls - i 've got to use everything i can , not just for communication , but for leadership .
a 22-year-old individual operating alone , thousands of miles from me , has got to communicate to me with confidence .
i have to have trust in them and vice versa .
and i also have to build their faith .
and that 's a new kind of leadership for me .
we had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations .
an emerging opportunity came - did n't have time to get everybody together .
so we had to get complex intelligence together , we had to line up the ability to act .
it was sensitive , we had to go up the chain of command , convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium .
we failed .
the mission did n't work .
and so now what we had to do is i had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force , rebuild their confidence - me and them , and them and me , and our seniors and us as a force - all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder .
entirely new requirement .
also , the people had changed .
you probably think that the force that i led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons .
in reality , much of the force i led looked exactly like you .
it was men , women , young , old - not just from military ; from different organizations , many of them detailed to us just from a handshake .
and so instead of giving orders , you 're now building consensus and you 're building a sense of shared purpose .
probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference , the ages , had changed so much .
i went down to be with a ranger platoon on an operation in afghanistan , and on that operation , a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team .
we talked about the operation , and then at the end i did what i often do with a force like that .
i asked , " where were you on 9/11 ? "
and one young ranger in the back - his hair 's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold afghan wind - he said , " sir , i was in the sixth grade . "
and it reminded me that we 're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness , and yet he has different experiences , in many cases a different vocabulary , a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than i do and many of the other senior leaders .
and yet , we need to have that shared sense .
it also produced something which i call an inversion of expertise , because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot , that suddenly the things that we grew up doing was n't what the force was doing anymore .
so how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they have n't done what the people you 're leading are doing ?
and it 's a brand new leadership challenge .
and it forced me to become a lot more transparent , a lot more willing to listen , a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower .
and yet , again , you 're not all in one room .
then another thing .
there 's an effect on you and on your leaders .
there 's an impact , it 's cumulative .
you do n't reset , or recharge your battery every time .
i stood in front of a screen one night in iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces .
and i remembered his son was in our force .
and i said , " john , where 's your son ? and how is he ? "
and he said , " sir , he 's fine . thanks for asking . "
i said , " where is he now ? "
and he pointed at the screen , he said , " he 's in that firefight . "
think about watching your brother , father , daughter , son , wife in a firefight in real time and you ca n't do anything about it .
think about knowing that over time .
and it 's a new cumulative pressure on leaders .
and you have to watch and take care of each other .
i probably learned the most about relationships .
i learned they are the sinew which hold the force together .
i grew up much of my career in the ranger regiment .
and every morning in the ranger regiment , every ranger - and there are more than 2,000 of them - says a six-stanza ranger creed .
you may know one line of it , it says , " i 'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy . "
and it 's not a mindless mantra , and it 's not a poem .
it 's a promise .
every ranger promises every other ranger , " no matter what happens , no matter what it costs me , if you need me , i 'm coming . "
and every ranger gets that same promise from every other ranger .
think about it . it 's extraordinarily powerful .
it 's probably more powerful than marriage vows .
and they 've lived up to it , which gives it special power .
and so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing .
and i learned personal relationships were more important than ever .
we were in a difficult operation in afghanistan in 2007 , and an old friend of mine , that i had spent many years at various points of my career with - godfather to one of their kids - he sent me a note , just in an envelope , that had a quote from sherman to grant that said , " i knew if i ever got in a tight spot , that you would come , if alive . "
and having that kind of relationship , for me , turned out to be critical at many points in my career .
and i learned that you have to give that in this environment , because it 's tough .
that was my journey .
i hope it 's not over .
i came to believe that a leader is n't good because they 're right ; they 're good because they 're willing to learn and to trust .
this is n't easy stuff .
it 's not like that electronic abs machine where , 15 minutes a month , you get washboard abs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it is n't always fair .
you can get knocked down , and it hurts and it leaves scars .
but if you 're a leader , the people you 've counted on will help you up .
and if you 're a leader , the people who count on you need you on your feet .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i tried to do a small good thing for my wife .
it makes me to stand here , the fame , the money i got out of it .
so what i did , i 'd gone back to my early marriage days .
what you did in the early marriage days , you tried to impress your wife . i did the same .
on that occasion , i found my wife carrying something like this .
i saw . " what is that ? " i asked .
my wife replied , " none of your business . "
then , being her husband , i ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth .
i do n't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler .
then i understood this - adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days .
then i immediately asked her , why are you -lsb- using -rsb- that unhygienic method ?
she replied , i also know about -lsb- sanitary pads -rsb- , but myself and my sisters , if they start using that , we have to cut our family milk budget .
then i was shocked . what is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget ?
and it 's called affordability .
i tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads .
i went to a local shop , i tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet .
that fellow looks left and right , and spreads a newspaper , rolls it into the newspaper , gives it to me like a banned item , something like that .
i do n't know why . i did not ask for a condom .
then i took that pad . i want to see that . what is inside it ?
the very first time , at the age of 29 , that day i am touching the sanitary pad , first ever .
i must know : how many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad ?
they are not going to touch that , because it 's not your matter .
then i thought to myself , white substance , made of cotton - oh my god , that guy is just using a penny value of raw material - inside they are selling for pounds , dollars .
why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife ?
that 's how all this started , but after making a sanitary pad , where can i check it ?
it 's not like i can just check it in the lab .
i need a woman volunteer . where can i get one in india ?
even in bangalore you wo n't get -lsb- one -rsb- , in india .
so only problem : the only available victim is my wife .
then i made a sanitary pad and handed it to shanti - my wife 's name is shanti .
" close your eyes . whatever i give , it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring , even a chocolate , i will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it .
close your eyes . "
because i tried to make it intimate .
because it 's an arranged marriage , not a love marriage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so one day she said , openly , i 'm not going to support this research .
then other victims , they got into my sisters .
but even sisters , wives , they 're not ready to support in the research .
that 's why i am always jealous with the saints in india .
they are having a lot of women volunteers around them .
why i am not getting -lsb- any -rsb- ?
you know , without them even calling , they 'll get a lot of women volunteers .
then i used , tried to use the medical college girls .
they also refused . finally , i decide , use sanitary pad myself .
now i am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon .
armstrong . then tenzing -lsb- and -rsb- hillary , in everest , like that muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe .
i wore a sanitary pad . i filled animal blood in a football bottle , i tied it up here , there is a tube going into my panties , while i 'm walking , while i 'm cycling , i made a press , doses of blood will go there .
that makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect . that five days i 'll never forget - the messy days , the lousy days , that wetness .
my god , it 's unbelievable .
but here the problem is , one company is making napkin out of cotton . it is working well .
but i am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton . it 's not working .
that makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research .
you need first funds .
not only financial crises , but because of the sanitary pad research , i come through all sorts of problems , including a divorce notice from my wife .
why is this ? i used medical college girls .
she suspects i am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls .
finally , i came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood , but even after that , you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material . again , a stop-up .
then i spend another four years to create my own machine tools , a simple machine tool like this .
in this machine , any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant , anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall .
that is my invention .
so after that , what i did , usually if anyone got a patent or an invention , immediately you want to make , convert into this .
i never did this . i dropped it just like this , because you do this , if anyone runs after money , their life will not -lsb- have -rsb- any beauty . it is boredom .
a lot of people making a lot of money , billion , billions of dollars accumulating .
why are they coming for , finally , for philanthropy ?
why the need for accumulating money , then doing philanthropy ?
what if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one ?
that 's why i am giving this machine only in rural india , for rural women , because in india , -lsb- you 'll be -rsb- surprised , only two percent of women are using sanitary pads . the rest , they 're using a rag cloth , a leaf , husk , -lsb- saw -rsb- dust , everything except sanitary pads .
it is the same in the 21st century . that 's why i am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across india .
so far , 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries .
now i 'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational , transnational giants - makes all mba students a question mark .
a school dropout from coimbatore , how he is able to sustaining ?
that makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all iims .
-lrb- applause -rrb- play video one .
-lrb- video -rrb- arunachalam muruganantham : the thing i saw in my wife 's hand , " why are you using that nasty cloth ? "
she replied immediately , " i know about napkins , but if i start using napkins , then we have to cut our family milk budget . "
why not make myself a low-cost napkin ?
so i decided i 'm going to sell this new machine only for women self help groups .
that is my idea .
am : and previously , you need a multimillion investment for machine and all . now , any rural woman can .
they are performing puja .
-lrb- video -rrb- : -lrb- singing -rrb- you just think , competing giants , even from harvard , oxford , is difficult .
i make a rural woman to compete with multinationals .
i 'm sustaining on seventh year .
already 600 installations . what is my mission ?
i 'm going to make india -lsb- into -rsb- a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime .
in this way i 'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that i 'm going to create .
that 's why i 'm not running after this bloody money .
i 'm doing something serious .
if you chase a girl , the girl wo n't like you .
do your job simply , the girl will chase you .
like that , i never chased mahalakshmi .
mahalakshmi is chasing me , i am keeping in the back pocket .
not in front pocket . i 'm a back pocket man .
that 's all . a school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad .
i am becoming a solution provider . i 'm very happy .
i do n't want to make this as a corporate entity .
i want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe . that 's why i put all the details on public domain like an open software .
now 110 countries are accessing it . okay ?
so i classify the people into three : uneducated , little educated , surplus educated .
little educated , done this . surplus educated , what are you going to do for the society ?
thank you very much . bye !
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'd like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in china , the night i met my husband .
it was a city so long ago that it was still called peking .
so i went to a party .
i sat down next to a stout , middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bow tie , and he turned out to be a fulbright scholar , there in china specifically to study sino-soviet relations .
what a gift it was to the eager , young foreign correspondent that i was then .
i 'd pump him for information , i 'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories i plan to write .
i talk to him for hours .
only months later , i discover who he really was .
he was the china representative for the american soybean association .
" i do n't understand . soybeans ?
you told me you were a fulbright scholar . "
" well , how long would you have talked to me if i told you we 're in soybeans ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " you jerk . "
only jerk was n't the word i used .
i said , " you could 've gotten me fired . "
and he said , " let 's get married . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " travel the world and have lots of kids . "
so we did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and what an alive man terence bryan foley turned out to be .
he was a chinese scholar who later , in his 60s , got a ph.d. in chinese history .
he spoke six languages , he played 15 musical instruments , he was a licensed pilot , he had once been a san francisco cable car operator , he was an expert in swine nutrition , dairy cattle , dixieland jazz , film noir , and we did travel the country , and the world , and we did have a lot of kids .
we followed my job , and it seemed like there was nothing that we could n't do .
so when we found the cancer , it does n't seem strange to us at all that without saying a word to each other , we believed that , if we were smart enough and strong enough and brave enough , and we worked hard enough , we could keep him from dying ever .
and for years , it seemed like we were succeeding .
the surgeon emerged from the surgery .
what 'd he say ? he said what surgeons always say : " we got it all . "
then there was a setback when the pathologists looked at the kidney cancer closely .
it turned out to be a rare , exceedingly aggressive type , with a diagnosis that was almost universally fatal in several weeks at most .
and yet , he did not die .
mysteriously , he lived on .
he coached little league for our son .
he built a playhouse for our daughter .
and meanwhile , i 'm burying myself in the internet looking for specialists .
i 'm looking for a cure .
so a year goes by before the cancer , as cancers do , reappears , and with it comes another death sentence , this time nine months .
so we try another treatment , aggressive , nasty .
it makes him so sick , he has to quit it , yet still he lives on .
then another year goes by .
two years go by .
more specialists .
we take the kids to italy .
we take the kids to australia .
and then more years pass , and the cancer begins to grow .
this time , there 's new treatments on the horizon .
they 're exotic . they 're experimental .
they 're going to attack the cancer in new ways .
so he enters a clinical trial , and it works .
the cancer begins to shrink , and for the third time , we 've dodged death .
so now i ask you , how do i feel when the time finally comes and there 's another dark night , sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. ?
this time it 's on the intensive care ward when a twentysomething resident that i 've never met before tells me that terence is dying , perhaps tonight .
so what do i say when he says , " what do you want me to do ? "
there 's another drug out there .
it 's newer . it 's more powerful .
he started it just two weeks ago .
perhaps there 's still hope ahead .
so what do i say ?
i say , " keep him alive if you can . "
and terence died six days later .
so we fought , we struggled , we triumphed .
it was an exhilarating fight , and i 'd repeat the fight today without a moment 's hesitation .
we fought together , we lived together .
it turned what could have been seven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious .
it was also an expensive fight .
it was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care , and of healthcare for all of us .
and for me , for us , we pushed the fight right over the edge , and i never got the chance to say to him what i say to him now almost every day : " hey , buddy , it was a hell of a ride . "
we never got the chance to say goodbye .
we never thought it was the end .
we always had hope .
so what do we make of all of this ?
being a journalist , after terence died , i wrote a book , " the cost of hope . "
i wrote it because i wanted to know why i did what i did , why he did what he did , why everyone around us did what they did .
and what did i discover ?
well , one of the things i discovered is that experts think that one answer to what i did at the end was a piece of paper , the advance directive , to help families get past the seemingly irrational choices .
yet i had that piece of paper .
we both did .
and they were readily available .
i had them right at hand .
both of them said the same thing : do nothing if there is no further hope .
i knew terence 's wishes as clearly and as surely as i knew my own .
yet we never got to no further hope .
even with that clear-cut paper in our hands , we just kept redefining hope .
i believed i could keep him from dying , and i 'd be embarrassed to say that if i had n't seen so many people and have talked to so many people who have felt exactly the same way .
right up until days before his death , i felt strongly and powerfully , and , you might say , irrationally , that i could keep him from dying ever .
now , what do the experts call this ?
they say it 's denial .
it 's a strong word , is n't it ?
yet i will tell you that denial is n't even close to a strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through .
and i hear the medical professionals say , " well , we 'd like to do such-and-such , but the family 's in denial .
the family wo n't listen to reason .
they 're in denial .
how can they insist on this treatment at the end ?
it 's so clear , yet they 're in denial . "
now , i think this maybe is n't a very useful way of thinking .
it 's not just families either .
the medical professionals too , you out there , you 're in denial too .
you want to help . you want to fix .
you want to do .
you 've succeeded in everything you 've done , and having a patient die , well , that must feel like failure .
i saw it firsthand .
just days before terence died , his oncologist said , " tell terence that better days are just ahead . "
days before he died .
yet ira byock , the director of palliative medicine at dartmouth said , " you know , the best doctor in the world has never succeeded in making anyone immortal . "
so what the experts call " denial , " i call " hope , " and i 'd like to borrow a phrase from my friends in software design .
you just redefine denial and hope , and it becomes a feature of being human .
it 's not a bug .
it 's a feature .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we need to think more constructively about this very common , very profound and very powerful human emotion .
it 's part of the human condition , and yet our system and our thinking is n't built to accommodate it .
so terence told me a story on that long-ago night , and i believed it .
maybe i wanted to believe it .
and during terence 's illness , i , we , we wanted to believe the story of our fight together too .
giving up the fight - for that 's how it felt , it felt like giving up - meant giving up not only his life but also our story , our story of us as fighters , the story of us as invincible , and for the doctors , the story of themselves as healers .
so what do we need ?
maybe we do n't need a new piece of paper .
maybe we need a new story , not a story about giving up the fight or of hopelessness , but rather a story of victory and triumph , of a valiant battle and , eventually , a graceful retreat , a story that acknowledges that not even the greatest general defeats every foe , that no doctor has ever succeeded in making anyone immortal , and that no wife , no matter how hard she tried , has ever stopped even the bravest , wittiest and most maddeningly lovable husband from dying when it was his time to go .
people did mention hospice , but i would n't listen .
hospice was for people who were dying , and terence was n't dying .
as a result , he spent just four days in hospice , is a pretty typical outcome , and we never said goodbye because we were unprepared for the end .
we have a noble path to curing the disease , patients and doctors alike , but there does n't seem to be a noble path to dying .
dying is seen as failing , and we had a heroic narrative for fighting together , but we did n't have a heroic narrative for letting go .
so maybe we need a narrative for acknowledging the end , and for saying goodbye , and maybe our new story will be about a hero 's fight , and a hero 's goodbye .
terence loved poetry , and the greek poet constantine cavafy is one of my favorite poets .
so i 'll give you a couple lines from him .
this is a poem about mark antony .
you know mark antony , the conquering hero , cleopatra 's guy ?
actually , one of cleopatra 's guys .
and he 's been a pretty good general .
he 's won all the fights , he 's eluded all the people that are out to get him , and yet this time , finally , he 's come to the city of alexandria and realized he 's lost .
the people are leaving . they 're playing instruments .
they 're singing .
and suddenly he knows he 's been defeated .
and he suddenly knows he 's been deserted by the gods , and it 's time to let go .
and the poet tells him what to do .
he tells him how to say a noble goodbye , a goodbye that 's fit for a hero .
" as if long-prepared , as if courageous , as it becomes you who were worthy of such a city , approach the window with a firm step , and with emotion , but not with the entreaties or the complaints of a coward , listen to the sounds , the exquisite instruments of the musical troops , and bid her farewell , the alexandria you are losing . "
that 's a goodbye for a man who was larger than life , a goodbye for a man for whom anything , well , almost anything , was possible , a goodbye for a man who kept hope alive .
and is n't that what we 're missing ?
how can we learn that people 's decisions about their loved ones are often based strongly , powerfully , many times irrationally , on the slimmest of hopes ?
the overwhelming presence of hope is n't denial .
it 's part of our dna as humans , and maybe it 's time our healthcare system - doctors , patients , insurance companies , us , started accounting for the power of that hope .
hope is n't a bug .
it 's a feature .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , there 's a small country nestled in the himalayan mountains , far from these beautiful mountains , where the people of the kingdom of bhutan have decided to do something different , which is to measure their gross national happiness rather than their gross national product .
and why not ?
after all , happiness is not just a privilege for the lucky few , but a fundamental human right for all .
and what is happiness ?
happiness is the freedom of choice .
the freedom to chose where to live , what to do , what to buy , what to sell , from whom , to whom , when and how .
where does choice come from ?
and who gets to express it , and how do we express it ?
well , one way to express choice is through the market .
well-functioning markets provide choices , and ultimately , the ability to express one 's pursuit for happiness .
the great indian economist , amartya sen , was awarded the nobel prize for demonstrating that famine is not so much about the availability of food supply , but rather the ability to acquire or entitle oneself to that food through the market .
in 1984 , in what can only be considered one of the greatest crimes of humanity , nearly one million people died of starvation in my country of birth , ethiopia .
not because there was not enough food - because there was actually a surplus of food in the fertile regions of the south parts of the country - but because in the north , people could not access or entitle themselves to that food .
that was a turning point for my life .
most africans today , by far , are farmers .
and most of africa 's farmers are , by and large , small farmers in terms of land that they operate , and very , very small farmers in terms of the capital they have at their disposal .
african agriculture today is among , or is , the most under-capitalized in the world .
only seven percent of arable land in africa is irrigated , compared to 40 percent in asia .
african farmers only use some 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare , compared to 144 in asia .
road density is six times greater in asia than it is in rural africa .
there are eight times more tractors in latin america , and three times more tractors in asia , than in africa .
the small farmer in africa today lives a life without much choice , and therefore without much freedom .
his livelihood is predetermined by the conditions of grinding poverty .
he comes to the market when prices are lowest , with the meager fruits of his hard labor , just after the harvest , because he has no choice .
she comes back to the market some months later , when prices are highest , in what we call the lean season - when food is scarce - because she has to feed her family and has no choice .
the real question is , how can markets be developed in rural africa to harness the power of innovation and entrepreneurship that we know exists ?
another notable economist , theodore schultz , in 1974 won the nobel prize for demonstrating that farmers are efficient , but poor .
meaning , in fact , that farmers are rational and profit-minded just like everybody else .
well , we do n't need , now , any more nobel prizes to know that farmers want a fair shake at the market and want to make money , just like everyone else .
and one thing is clear , which is at least now we know that africa is open for business .
and that business is agriculture .
over two decades ago , the world insisted to africa that markets must be liberalized , that economies must be structurally adjusted .
this meant that governments were to remove themselves from the business of buying and selling - which they did rather inefficiently - and let the private market do its magic .
well , what happened over the last 25 years ?
did africa feed itself ?
did our farmers turn into highly productive commercial actors ?
i think we 're all in this room , probably , because we know that , in fact , africa is the only region in the world where hunger and malnutrition are projected to go up over the next 10 years , where the food import bill is now double what it was 20 years ago , where food production per capita has stagnated , and where fertilizer use has declined rather than increased .
so why did n't agriculture markets perform to expectations ?
the market reforms prompted by the west - and i 've spent some 15 years traveling around the continent doing research on agricultural markets , and have interviewed traders in 10 to 15 countries in this continent , hundreds of traders - trying to understand what went wrong with our market reform .
and it seems to me that the reforms might have like its agriculture , africa 's markets are highly under-capitalized and inefficient .
we know from our work around the continent that transaction costs of reaching the market , and the risks of transacting in rural , agriculture markets , are extremely high .
in fact , only one third of agricultural output produced in africa even reaches the market .
africa 's markets are weak not only because of weak infrastructure in terms of roads and telecommunications , but also because of the virtual absence of necessary market institutions , such as market information , grades and standards , and reliable ways to connect buyers and sellers .
because of this , commodity buyers and sellers typically transact in small circles , in narrow networks of people they know and trust .
and because of that , as grain changes hands - and i 've measured that it changes hands four , five times in its trajectory from the farmer to the consumer - every time it changes hands - and i 've seen this all over rural africa - it also changes sacks .
and i thought that was incredibly peculiar .
and really realized that that was because - as traders would tell me over and over - that 's the only way people know what they 're getting in terms of the quantity and the product quality .
and that actually has huge implications for the ability of markets to quickly respond to price signals , and situations where there are deficits , for example .
it also has very high cost implications .
i have measured that 26 percent of the marketing margin is simply due to the fact that , because of the absence of grades and standards and market information , sacks have to be constantly changed .
and this leads to very high handling costs .
for their part , small farmers , who produce the bulk of our agricultural output in africa , come to the market with virtually no information at all - blind - trusting that they 're going to have some sort of demand for their produce , and completely at the mercy of the merchants in the only market , the nearest local market they know - where they 're unable to negotiate better prices or reduce their risk .
speaking of risk , we have seen that price volatility of food crops in africa is the highest in the world .
in africa , small farmers bear the brunt of this risk .
in fact , in my view , there is no region of the world and no period in history that farmers have been expected to bear the kind of market risk that africa 's farmers have to bear .
and in my view , there is simply no place in the world that has grown its agriculture on the kind of risk that our farmers in africa today face .
in ethiopia , for example , the variation in maize prices from year to year is as much as 50 percent annually .
this kind of market risk is mind-boggling , and has direct implications for not only the incentives of farmers to invest in higher productivity technology , such as modern seeds and fertilizers , but also direct implications for food security .
to give you an example , between 2001 and 2002 , ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest .
that in turn , because of the weak marketing system , led to an 80 percent collapse in maize prices in the country .
this made it unprofitable for some farmers to even harvest the grain from the fields .
and we calculated that some 300,000 tons of grain was left in the fields to rot in early 2002 .
not six months later , in july 2002 , ethiopia announced a major food crisis , to the same proportions as 1984:14 million people at risk of starvation .
what also happened that year is in the areas where there were good rains , and where farmers had previously produced surplus grain , farmers had decided to withdraw from the fertilizer market , not use fertilizer and actually had dropped their use of fertilizer by 27 percent .
this is a tragic example of arrested development , or a budding green revolution stopped in its tracks .
and this is not just specific to ethiopia , but happens over and over , all over africa .
well , i 'm not here today to lament about the situation , or wring my hands .
i am here to tell you that change is in the air .
africa today is not the africa waiting for aid solutions , or cookie-cutter foreign expert policy prescriptions .
africa has learned , or is learning somewhat slowly , that markets do n't happen by themselves .
in the 1980s , it was very fashionable to talk about getting prices right .
there was a very influential book about that , which was mainly about getting governments out of the market .
we now recognize that getting markets right is about not just price incentives , but also investing in the right infrastructure and the appropriate and necessary institutions to create the conditions to unleash the power of innovation in the market .
when conditions are right , we know and see that that innovation is ready to explode in rural africa , just like anywhere else .
nearly three years ago , i decided to leave my comfortable job as a world bank senior economist in washington and come back to my country of birth , ethiopia , after nearly 30 years abroad .
i did so for a simple reason .
after having spent more than a decade understanding , studying , and trying to convince policymakers and donors about what was wrong with africa 's agricultural markets , i decided it was time to do something about it .
i currently lead , in ethiopia , an exciting new initiative to establish the first ethiopia commodity exchange , or ecx .
now , the commodity exchange itself , that concept , is not new to the world .
in fact , in 1848 , 82 grain merchants and farmers got together in a small town at the crossroads of the illinois river and lake michigan to establish a way to trade better amongst themselves .
that was , of course , the birth of the chicago board of trade , which is the most famous commodity exchange in the world .
the chicago board of trade was established then for precisely the same reasons that our farmers today would benefit from a commodity exchange .
in the american midwest , farmers used to load grain onto barges and send it upriver to the chicago market .
but once it arrived , if no buyer was to be found , or if prices suddenly dropped , farmers would incur tremendous losses .
and in fact , would even dump the grain in lake michigan , rather than spend more money transporting it back to their farms .
well , the need to avoid these huge risks and tremendous losses led to the birth of the futures market , and the underlying system of grading grain and receipting - issuing warehouse receipts on the basis of which trade could be done .
from there , the greatest innovation of all came about in this market , which is that buyers and sellers could transact grain without actually having to physically or visually inspect the grain .
that meant that grain could be traded across tremendous distances , and even across time - as far forward as 18 months into the future .
this innovation is at the heart of the transformation of american agriculture , and the rise of chicago to a global market , agricultural market , superpower from where it was , a small regional town .
now , over the last century , we tend to think of commodity exchanges as the purview of western industrialized countries , and that the reference prices for cotton , coffee , cocoa - products produced mainly in the south - are actually a reference price , or a price discovered in these organized commodity exchanges in the northern countries .
but that is actually changing .
and we 're seeing a shift - powered mainly because of information technology - a shift in market dominance towards the emerging markets .
and over the last decade , you see that the share of western exchanges - and this is the u.s. share of exchanges in the world - has gone down by nearly half in just the last decade .
similarly , there 's been explosive growth in india , for example , where rural farmers are using exchanges - growing here over the last three years by 270 percent a year .
this is powered by low-cost vsat technology , aggressively trying to reach farmers to bring them into the market .
china 's dalian commodity exchange , three years ago , 2004 , overtook the chicago board of trade to become the second largest commodity exchange in the world .
now , in ethiopia , we 're in the process of designing the first organized ethiopia commodity exchange .
we 're not trying to cut and paste the chicago model or the india model , but creating a system uniquely tailored to ethiopia 's needs and realities , ethiopia 's small farmers .
so , the ecx is an ethiopian exchange for ethiopia .
we 're creating a system that serves all market actors , that creates integrity , trust , efficiency , transparency and enables small farmers to manage the risks that i have described .
in the design of our commodity exchange in ethiopia , we 've done something rather unique , which is to take the approach of an integrated perspective , or what we call the ecx edge .
the ecx edge pretty much creates the entire ecosystem in which the market will develop itself .
and this is because one of the things we 've learned over the last decade of studying market development in africa is that the piecemeal approach does not work .
you 've got one donor trying to develop market information , another trying to work on or sponsor grades and standards , another ict , and yet another on warehousing , or warehouse receipts .
in our approach in ethiopia , we 've decided to put together the entire ecosystem , or environment , in which trade takes place .
that means that the exchange will operate a trading system , which will initially start as an open outcry , because we do n't think the country 's ready for full electronic trading .
but at the same time , we 'll do something which i think no exchange in the world has ever done , which is itself to operate something like an internet cafe in the rural areas .
so that farmers and small traders can actually come to a terminal center - what we call the remote access terminal centers - and actually , without having to buy a computer or figure out how to dial up or any of those things , simply see the trading that 's happening on the addis ababa trading floor .
at the same time , what 's very fundamental to this market is that - and again , an innovation that we 've designed for our exchange - is that the exchange will operate warehouses around the country , in which grade certification and warehouse receipting will be done .
and in turn , we 'll operate an in-house clearing system , to assure that payment is done appropriately , in the right amount and at the right time , so that basically , we create trust and integrity in the system .
obviously , we work with exchange actors , and as we 're developing the exchange market itself , we 're also developing the regulatory infrastructure and legal framework , the overarching legal framework for making this market work .
so , in fact , our proclamation is going to parliament next month .
what 's really important is that the ecx will operate a market information system to disseminate prices in real time to farmers around the country , using vsat technology to bring an electronic price dissemination directly to farmers .
what this does is transforms , fundamentally , the farmers ' relationship to the market .
whereas before the farmer used to think local - meaning that he or she would go to the nearest local market , eight to 10 kilometers away on average , and sell whatever they happened to have , without any idea of what the price premium or anything else was - now farmers come with knowledge of what prices are at the national market .
and they start to think national , and even global .
they start to make not only commercial marketing decisions , but also planting decisions , on the basis of information coming from the futures price market .
and they come to the market knowing what grades their products will achieve in terms of a price premium .
so all of this will transform farmers .
it will also transform the way traders do business .
it will stop them from doing simple , back-to-back , limited arbitrage to really thinking strategically about how to move grain across long distances from -lsb- surplus regions -rsb- to -lsb- deficit areas -rsb- .
can ethiopia do this ?
it seems very ambitious .
but it will create new opportunities .
we believe that this initiative requires great political will , and we 'll have to align the financial sector , as well as the ict sector , and really even the underlying legal framework .
we believe that the winds of change are here , and that we can do it .
ecx is the market for ethiopia 's new millennium , which starts in about eight months .
the last parliament of our century opened with our president announcing to the country that this was the most important economic initiative for the country today .
we believe that the stakes are high , but that the returns will be even greater .
ecx , moreover , can become a trading platform for a pan-african market in agricultural commodities .
ethiopia 's domestic market is about one billion dollars of value .
and we feel that over the next five years , if ethiopia can capture even 40 percent , just 40 percent , of the domestic market , and add just 25 percent value to that market , the value of the market doubles .
ethiopia 's agricultural market is 30 percent higher than south africa 's grain production , and , in fact , ethiopia is the second largest maize producer in africa .
so the potential is there .
the will is there .
the commitment is there .
so we feel that we have a winning value proposition to transform farmers ' choices , to grow our agriculture , and to change africa .
so , we are in the business of finding our happiness .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'd like to start off with is an observation , which is that if i 've learned anything over the last year , it 's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast .
i seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city , studio to studio , interview to interview , serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks .
because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down , but they want to know how to slow down really quickly . so ...
so i did a spot on cnn the other day where i actually spent more time in makeup than i did talking on air .
and i think that - that 's not really surprising though , is it ?
because that 's kind of the world that we live in now , a world stuck in fast-forward .
a world obsessed with speed , with doing everything faster , with cramming more and more into less and less time .
every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock .
to borrow a phrase from carrie fisher , which is in my bio there ; i 'll just toss it out again - " these days even instant gratification takes too long . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you think about how we to try to make things better , what do we do ?
no , we speed them up , do n't we ? so we used to dial ; now we speed dial .
we used to read ; now we speed read . we used to walk ; now we speed walk .
and of course , we used to date and now we speed date .
and even things that are by their very nature slow - we try and speed them up too .
so i was in new york recently , and i walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course , a new evening course .
and it was for , you guessed it , speed yoga .
so this - the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to , you know , salute the sun , but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it .
i mean , these are sort of the extreme examples , and they 're amusing and good to laugh at .
but there 's a very serious point , and i think that in the headlong dash of daily life , we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us .
we 're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives - on our health , our diet , our work , our relationships , the environment and our community .
and sometimes it takes a wake-up call , does n't it , to alert us to the fact that we 're hurrying through our lives , instead of actually living them ; that we 're living the fast life , instead of the good life .
and i think for many people , that wake-up call takes the form of an illness .
you know , a burnout , or eventually the body says , " i ca n't take it anymore , " and throws in the towel .
or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we have n't had the time , or the patience , or the tranquility , to be with the other person , to listen to them .
and my wake-up call came when i started reading bedtime stories to my son , and i found that at the end of day , i would go into his room and i just could n't slow down - you know , i 'd be speed reading " the cat in the hat . "
i 'd be - you know , i 'd be skipping lines here , paragraphs there , sometimes a whole page , and of course , my little boy knew the book inside out , so we would quarrel .
and what should have been the most relaxing , the most intimate , the most tender moment of the day , when a dad sits down to read to his son , became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills , a clash between my speed and his slowness .
and this went on for some time , until i caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people .
and one of them made reference to a series of books called " the one-minute bedtime story . "
and i wince saying those words now , but my first reaction at the time was very different .
my first reflex was to say , " hallelujah - what a great idea !
this is exactly what i 'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more . "
but thankfully , a light bulb went on over my head , and my next reaction was very different , and i took a step back , and i thought , " whoa - you know , has it really come to this ?
am i really in such a hurry that i 'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day ? "
and i put away the newspaper - and i was getting on a plane - and i sat there , and i did something i had n't done for a long time - which is i did nothing .
i just thought , and i thought long and hard .
and by the time i got off that plane , i 'd decided i wanted to do something about it .
i wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture , and what it was doing to me and to everyone else .
and i had two questions in my head .
the first was , how did we get so fast ?
and the second is , is it possible , or even desirable , to slow down ?
now , if you think about how our world got so accelerated , the usual suspects rear their heads .
you think of , you know , urbanization , consumerism , the workplace , technology .
but i think if you cut through those forces , you get to what might be the deeper driver , the nub of the question , which is how we think about time itself .
in other cultures , time is cyclical .
it 's seen as moving in great , unhurried circles .
it 's always renewing and refreshing itself .
whereas in the west , time is linear .
it 's a finite resource ; it 's always draining away .
you either use it , or lose it .
" time is money , " as benjamin franklin said .
and i think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation .
time is scarce , so what do we do ?
well - well , we speed up , do n't we ?
we try and do more and more with less and less time .
we turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line - a finish line , incidentally , that we never reach , but a finish line nonetheless .
and i guess that the question is , is it possible to break free from that mindset ?
and thankfully , the answer is yes , because what i discovered , when i began looking around , that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better , and that busier is best .
right across the world , people are doing the unthinkable : they 're slowing down , and finding that , although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down , you 're road kill , the opposite turns out to be true : that by slowing down at the right moments , people find that they do everything better .
they eat better ; they make love better ; they exercise better ; they work better ; they live better .
and , in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration , lie what a lot of people now refer to as the " international slow movement . "
now if you 'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy , i 'll just give you a very quick overview of what 's going on inside the slow movement . if you think of food , many of you will have heard of the slow food movement .
started in italy , but has spread across the world , and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries .
and it 's driven by a very simple and sensible message , which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate , cook and consume it at a reasonable pace .
i think also the explosion of the organic farming movement , and the renaissance of farmers ' markets , are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable .
they want to get back to slower rhythms .
and out of the slow food movement has grown something called the slow cities movement , which has started in italy , but has spread right across europe and beyond .
and in this , towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape , so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another .
so they might curb traffic , or put in a park bench , or some green space .
and in some ways , these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts , because i think when a slow city becomes officially a slow city , it 's kind of like a philosophical declaration .
it 's saying to the rest of world , and to the people in that town , that we believe that in the 21st century , slowness has a role to play .
in medicine , i think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine .
and millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine , which tend to tap into sort of slower , gentler , more holistic forms of healing .
now , obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies , and i personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever , you know , gain mainstream approval .
but other treatments such as acupuncture and massage , and even just relaxation , clearly have some kind of benefit .
and blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work , and what we might learn from them .
sex . there 's an awful lot of fast sex around , is n't there ?
i was coming to - well - no pun intended there .
i was making my way , let 's say , slowly to oxford , and i went through a news agent , and i saw a magazine , a men 's magazine , and it said on the front , " how to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds . "
so , you know , even sex is on a stopwatch these days .
now , you know , i like a quickie as much as the next person , but i think that there 's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex - from slowing down in the bedroom .
you know , you tap into that - those deeper , sort of , psychological , emotional , spiritual currents , and you get a better orgasm with the buildup .
you can get more bang for your buck , let 's say .
i mean , the pointer sisters said it most eloquently , did n't they , when they sang the praises of " a lover with a slow hand . "
now , we all laughed at sting a few years ago when he went tantric , but you fast-forward a few years , and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops , or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms , finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex .
and of course , in italy where - i mean , italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure - they 've launched an official slow sex movement .
the workplace .
right across much of the world - north america being a notable exception - working hours have been coming down .
and europe is an example of that , and people finding that their quality of life improves as they 're working less , and also that their hourly productivity goes up .
now , clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in france - too much , too soon , too rigid .
but other countries in europe , notably the nordic countries , are showing that it 's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic .
and norway , sweden , denmark and finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on earth , and they work the kind of hours that would make the average american weep with envy .
and if you go beyond sort of the country level , down at the micro-company level , more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug - to take a lunch break , or to go sit in a quiet room , to switch off their blackberrys and laptops - you at the back - mobile phones , during the work day or on the weekend , so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought .
it 's not just , though , these days , adults who overwork , though , is it ? it 's children , too .
i 'm 37 , and my childhood ended in the mid- ' 80s , and i look at kids now , and i 'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework , more tutoring , more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago .
and some of the most heartrending emails that i get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout , pleading with me to write to their parents , to help them slow down , to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill .
but thankfully , there is a backlash there in parenting as well , and you 're finding that , you know , towns in the united states are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month , so that people can , you know , decompress and have some family time , and slow down .
homework is another thing . there are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years , and now they 're discovering that less can be more .
so there was a case up in scotland recently where a fee-paying , high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13 , and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said , " what are you - you know , our kids will fall " - the headmaster said , " no , no , your children need to slow down at the end of the day . "
and just this last month , the exam results came in , and in math , science , marks went up 20 percent on average last year .
and i think what 's very revealing is that the elite universities , who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much , are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling . these kids have wonderful marks ; they have cvs jammed with extracurriculars , to the point that would make your eyes water .
but they lack spark ; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside - they do n't know how to dream . and so what these ivy league schools , and oxford and cambridge and so on , are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit .
and in harvard , for instance , they send out a letter to undergraduates - freshmen - telling them that they 'll get more out of life , and more out of harvard , if they put on the brakes , if they do less , but give time to things , the time that things need , to enjoy them , to savor them .
and even if they sometimes do nothing at all .
and that letter is called - very revealing , i think - " slow down ! " - with an exclamation mark on the end .
so wherever you look , the message , it seems to me , is the same : that less is very often more , that slower is very often better . but that said , of course , it 's not that easy to slow down , is it ?
i mean , you heard that i got a speeding ticket while i was researching my book on the benefits of slowness , and that 's true , but that 's not all of it .
i was actually en route to a dinner held by slow food at the time .
and if that 's not shaming enough , i got that ticket in italy .
and if any of you have ever driven on an italian highway , you 'll have a pretty good idea of how fast i was going .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but why is it so hard to slow down ?
i think there are various reasons .
one is that speed is fun , you know , speed is sexy .
it 's all that adrenaline rush . it 's hard to give it up .
i think there 's a kind of metaphysical dimension - that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger , deeper questions .
we fill our head with distraction , with busyness , so that we do n't have to ask , am i well ? am i happy ? are my children growing up right ?
are politicians making good decisions on my behalf ?
another reason - although i think , perhaps , the most powerful reason - why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we 've erected against slowing down .
" slow " is a dirty word in our culture .
it 's a byword for " lazy , " " slacker , " for being somebody who gives up .
you know , " he 's a bit slow . " it 's actually synonymous with being stupid .
i guess what the slow movement - the purpose of the slow movement , or its main goal , really , is to tackle that taboo , and to say that yes , sometimes slow is not the answer , that there is such a thing as " bad slow . "
you know , i got stuck on the m25 , which is a ring road around london , recently , and spent three-and-a-half hours there . and i can tell you , that 's really bad slow .
but the new idea , the sort of revolutionary idea , of the slow movement , is that there is such a thing as " good slow , " too .
and good slow is , you know , taking the time to eat a meal with your family , with the tv switched off .
or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work .
or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life .
now , one of the things that i found most uplifting about all of this stuff that 's happened around the book since it came out , is the reaction to it .
and i knew that when my book on slowness came out , it would be welcomed by the new age brigade , but it 's also been taken up , with great gusto , by the corporate world - you know , business press , but also big companies and leadership organizations .
because people at the top of the chain , people like you , i think , are starting to realize that there 's too much speed in the system , there 's too much busyness , and it 's time to find , or get back to that lost art of shifting gears .
another encouraging sign , i think , is that it 's not just in the developed world that this idea 's been taken up . in the developing world , in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status - china , brazil , thailand , poland , and so on - these countries have embraced the idea of the slow movement , many people in them , and there 's a debate going on in their media , on the streets .
because i think they 're looking at the west , and they 're saying , " well , we like that aspect of what you 've got , but we 're not so sure about that . "
so all of that said , is it , i guess , is it possible ?
that 's really the main question before us today . is it possible to slow down ? and i 'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes .
and i present myself as exhibit a , a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic .
i still love speed . you know , i live in london , and i work as a journalist , and i enjoy the buzz and the busyness , and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things .
i play squash and ice hockey , two very fast sports , and i would n't give them up for the world .
but i 've also , over the last year or so , got in touch with my inner tortoise .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what that means is that i no longer overload myself gratuitously .
my default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic .
i no longer hear time 's winged chariot drawing near , or at least not as much as i did before .
i can actually hear it now , because i see my time is ticking off .
and the upshot of all of that is that i actually feel a lot happier , healthier , more productive than i ever have .
i feel like i 'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it .
and perhaps , the most important measure of the success of this is that i feel that my relationships are a lot deeper , richer , stronger .
and for me , i guess , the litmus test for whether this would work , and what it would mean , was always going to be bedtime stories , because that 's sort of where the journey began . and there too the news is rosy . you know , at the end of the day , i go into my son 's room .
i do n't wear a watch . i switch off my computer , so i ca n't hear the email pinging into the basket , and i just slow down to his pace and we read .
and because children have their own tempo and internal clock , they do n't do quality time , where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you .
they need you to move at their rhythm .
i find that 10 minutes into a story , you know , my son will suddenly say , " you know , something happened in the playground today that really bothered me . "
and we 'll go off and have a conversation on that .
and i now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list , something that i dreaded , because it was so slow and i had to get through it quickly .
it 's become my reward at the end of the day , something i really cherish .
and i have a kind of hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon , which goes a little bit like this : a few months ago , i was getting ready to go on another book tour , and i had my bags packed .
i was downstairs by the front door , and i was waiting for a taxi , and my son came down the stairs and he 'd made a card for me . and he was carrying it .
he 'd gone and stapled two cards , very like these , together , and put a sticker of his favorite character , tintin , on the front .
and he said to me , or he handed this to me , and i read it , and it said , " to daddy , love benjamin . "
and i thought , " aw , that 's really sweet .
is that a good luck on the book tour card ? "
and he said , " no , no , no , daddy - this is a card for being the best story reader in the world . "
and i thought , " yeah , you know , this slowing down thing really does work . "
thank you very much .
i am a reformed marketer , and i now work in international development .
in october , i spent some time in the democratic republic of congo , which is the -lsb- second -rsb- largest country in africa .
in fact , it 's as large as western europe , but it only has 300 miles of paved roads .
the drc is a dangerous place .
in the past 10 years , five million people have died due to a war in the east .
but war is n't the only reason that life is difficult in the drc .
there are many health issues as well .
in fact , the hiv prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults .
this might not sound like a large number , but in a country with 76 million people , it means there are 930,000 that are infected .
and due to the poor infrastructure , only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need .
which is why , in part , donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost .
and so while i was in the drc , i spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms , including damien .
damien runs a hotel outside of kinshasa .
it 's a hotel that 's only open until midnight , so it 's not a place that you stay .
but it is a place where sex workers and their clients come .
now damien knows all about condoms , but he does n't sell them .
he said there 's just not in demand .
it 's not surprising , because only three percent of people in the drc use condoms .
joseph and christine , who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms , said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost , and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them , their customers do n't buy the branded versions .
they like the generics .
and as a marketer , i found that curious .
and so i started to look at what the marketing looked like .
and it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms : fear , financing and fidelity .
they name the condoms things like vive , " to live " or trust .
they package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of hiv , put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them , show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently .
now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is it that you think about just before you get a condom ?
sex !
and the private companies that sell condoms in these places , they understand this .
their marketing is slightly different .
the name might not be much different , but the imagery sure is .
some brands are aspirational , and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative .
and this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing : understanding who 's the audience .
and for donor agencies , unfortunately , the audience tends to be people that are n't even in the country they 're working -lsb- in -rsb- .
it 's people back home , people that support their work , people like these .
but if what we 're really trying to do is stop the spread of hiv , we need to think about the customer , the people whose behavior needs to change - the couples , the young women , the young men - whose lives depend on it .
and so the lesson is this : it does n't really matter what you 're selling ; you just have to think about who is your customer , and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior .
it might just save their lives .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- 18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit , so i 'm going to dive straight in , right at the point where i get this thing to work .
here we go . i 'm going to talk about five different things .
i 'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable .
i 'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together , and actually talk about this a bit more than we do .
i 'm going to talk about feasibility as well , of course .
i 'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging .
and then i 'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about , you know , how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong , namely , by actually doing something about it .
i 'm going to do that in two steps .
how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension - which i 'm going to define as 30 years , applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start - to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging .
namely , essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year - or indeed , to get sick in the first place .
and of course , the last thing i 'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step , that point of maybe 30 years life extension .
so i 'm going to start with why we should .
now , i want to ask a question .
hands up : anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria ?
that was easy . ok .
ok . hands up : anyone in the audience who 's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing ?
ok . so we all think malaria is a bad thing .
that 's very good news , because i thought that was what the answer would be .
that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging .
and here is that characteristic .
the only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does .
now , i like in an audience , in britain especially , to talk about the comparison with foxhunting , which is something that was banned after a long struggle , by the government not very many months ago .
i mean , i know i 'm with a sympathetic audience here , but , as we know , a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic .
and this is actually a rather good comparison , it seems to me .
you know , a lot of people said , " well , you know , city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time .
it 's a traditional part of the way of life , and we should be allowed to carry on doing it .
it 's ecologically sound ; it stops the population explosion of foxes . "
but ultimately , the government prevailed in the end , because the majority of the british public , and certainly the majority of members of parliament , came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society .
and i think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades .
what part of this do people not understand ?
it 's not just about life , of course - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it 's about healthy life , you know - getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun , whether or not dying may be fun .
so really , this is how i would like to describe it .
it 's a global trance .
these are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging .
and , i mean , ok , i 'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless .
there are some good points to be made here , things that we ought to be thinking about , forward planning so that nothing goes too - well , so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging .
but these are completely crazy , when you actually remember your sense of proportion .
you know , these are arguments ; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about .
but the question is , are they so dangerous - these risks of doing something about aging - that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite , namely , leaving aging as it is ?
are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death ?
you know , if you have n't got an argument that 's that strong , then just do n't waste my time , is what i say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong , and here it is .
people worry about overpopulation ; they say , " well , if we fix aging , no one 's going to die to speak of , or at least the death toll is going to be much lower , only from crossing st. giles carelessly .
and therefore , we 're not going to be able to have many kids , and kids are really important to most people . "
and that 's true .
and you know , a lot of people try to fudge this question , and give answers like this .
i do n't agree with those answers . i think they basically do n't work .
i think it 's true , that we will face a dilemma in this respect .
we will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate , or a high death rate .
a high death rate will , of course , arise from simply rejecting these therapies , in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids .
and , i say that that 's fine - the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice .
what 's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future .
if we vacillate , hesitate , and do not actually develop these therapies , then we are condemning a whole cohort of people - who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies , but will not be , because we have n't developed them as quickly as we could - we 'll be denying those people an indefinite life span , and i consider that that is immoral .
that 's my answer to the overpopulation question .
right . so the next thing is , now why should we get a little bit more active on this ?
and the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks .
it 's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging .
aging is ghastly , but it 's inevitable , so , you know , we 've got to find some way to put it out of our minds , and it 's rational to do anything that we might want to do , to do that .
like , for example , making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all .
but of course , that only works when we have both of these components .
and as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear - and we might be in range of doing something about aging - this becomes part of the problem .
this pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things .
and that 's why we have to really talk about this a lot - evangelize , i will go so far as to say , quite a lot - in order to get people 's attention , and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard .
so that 's all i 'm going to say about that .
i 'm now going to talk about feasibility .
and the fundamental reason , i think , why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that i 'm giving here .
a very simple definition .
aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place , which is to say , metabolism .
this is not a completely tautological statement ; it 's a reasonable statement .
aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars , and it also happens to us , despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms , because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect .
so basically , metabolism , which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next , has side effects .
those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology .
that 's a fine definition . so we can put it this way : we can say that , you know , we have this chain of events .
and there are really two games in town , according to most people , with regard to postponing aging .
they 're what i 'm calling here the " gerontology approach " and the " geriatrics approach . "
the geriatrician will intervene late in the day , when pathology is becoming evident , and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time , and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon .
of course , it 's a very short-term-ist strategy ; it 's a losing battle , because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on .
the gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface , because , you know , prevention is better than cure .
but unfortunately the thing is that we do n't understand metabolism very well .
in fact , we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work - even cells we 're not really too good on yet .
we 've discovered things like , for example , rna interference only a few years ago , and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work .
basically , gerontology is a fine approach in the end , but it is not an approach whose time has come when we 're talking about intervention .
so then , what do we do about that ?
i mean , that 's a fine logic , that sounds pretty convincing , pretty ironclad , does n't it ?
but it is n't .
before i tell you why it is n't , i 'm going to go a little bit into what i 'm calling step two .
just suppose , as i said , that we do acquire - the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age , let 's say 55 .
i 'm going to call that " robust human rejuvenation . " ok .
what would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today - or equivalently , of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive - would actually live ?
in order to answer that question - you might think it 's simple , but it 's not simple .
we ca n't just say , " well , if they 're young enough to benefit from these therapies , then they 'll live 30 years longer . "
that 's the wrong answer .
and the reason it 's the wrong answer is because of progress .
there are two sorts of technological progress really , for this purpose .
there are fundamental , major breakthroughs , and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs .
now , they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames .
fundamental breakthroughs : very hard to predict how long it 's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough .
it was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun , and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it .
but after that , things were pretty steady and pretty uniform .
i think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight .
we can think , really , that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one , if you like .
the incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore .
this is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough .
and you see it in all sorts of technologies .
computers : you can look at a more or less parallel time line , happening of course a bit later .
you can look at medical care . i mean , hygiene , vaccines , antibiotics - you know , the same sort of time frame .
so i think that actually step two , that i called a step a moment ago , is n't a step at all .
that in fact , the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension , even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive , will be at some sort of cusp .
they will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years .
in other words , they will be staying ahead of the game .
the therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us .
this is a very important point for me to get across .
because , you know , most people , when they hear that i predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more , they think that i 'm saying that we 're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more .
i 'm not saying that at all .
i 'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough .
they 'll never be perfect , but we 'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of , before we have any 200-year-olds .
and the same for 300 and 400 and so on .
i decided to give this a little name , which is " longevity escape velocity . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , it seems to get the point across .
so , these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live , in terms of remaining life expectancy , as measured by their health , for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive .
if you 're already 100 , or even if you 're 80 - and an average 80-year-old , we probably ca n't do a lot for you with these therapies , because you 're too close to death 's door for the really initial , experimental therapies to be good enough for you .
you wo n't be able to withstand them .
but if you 're only 50 , then there 's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and , you know - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense , in terms of your youthfulness , both physical and mental , and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes .
and of course , if you 're a bit younger than that , then you 're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes .
so this is a genuine conclusion that i come to , that the first 150-year-old - we do n't know how old that person is today , because we do n't know how long it 's going to take to get these first-generation therapies .
but irrespective of that age , i 'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 - subject of course , to , you know , global catastrophes - is actually , probably , only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old .
and that 's quite a thought .
alright , so finally i 'm going to spend the rest of the talk , my last seven-and-a-half minutes , on step one ; namely , how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity ?
and in order to do that , i need to talk about mice a little bit .
i have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation .
i 'm calling it " robust mouse rejuvenation , " not very imaginatively .
and this is what it is .
i say we 're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse , which basically means mice that live about three years on average .
we do exactly nothing to them until they 're already two years old .
and then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them , and with those therapies , we get them to live , on average , to their fifth birthday .
so , in other words , we add two years - we treble their remaining lifespan , starting from the point that we started the therapies .
the question then is , what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone i talked about earlier for humans ?
which we can now , as i 've explained , equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity .
secondly , what does it mean for the public 's perception of how long it 's going to take for us to get to those things , starting from the time we get the mice ?
and thirdly , the question is , what will it do to actually how much people want it ?
and it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question , and it 's extremely hard to answer .
one has to be very speculative , and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation , that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more .
i say that 's nonsense .
i say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this .
we need to give our best guess as to the time frame , in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities .
so , i say that we have a 50/50 chance of reaching this rhr milestone , robust human rejuvenation , within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation .
15 years from the robust mouse .
the public 's perception will probably be somewhat better than that .
the public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are .
so they 'll probably think it 's five years away .
they 'll be wrong , but that actually wo n't matter too much .
and finally , of course , i think it 's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance i spoke about earlier , the coping strategy .
that will be history at this point , because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans , since it 's been postponed so very effectively in mice .
so we 're likely to end up with a very strong change in people 's attitudes , and of course that has enormous implications .
so in order to tell you now how we 're going to get these mice , i 'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging .
i 'm going to use this word " damage " to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology .
because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology , the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life , starting before we 're born .
but it is not part of metabolism itself .
and this turns out to be useful .
because we can re-draw our original diagram this way .
we can say that , fundamentally , the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage .
and i 'm going to explain exactly what damage is and geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology .
and the reason it 's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate .
so there 's a third approach , if we look at it this way .
we can call it the " engineering approach , " and i claim that the engineering approach is within range .
the engineering approach does not intervene in any processes .
it does not intervene in this process or this one .
and that 's good because it means that it 's not a losing battle , and it 's something that we are within range of being able to do , because it does n't involve improving on evolution .
the engineering approach simply says , " let 's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage - not necessarily repair them completely , but repair them quite a lot , so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist , that causes it to be pathogenic . "
we know that this threshold exists , because we do n't get age-related diseases until we 're in middle age , even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born .
why do i say that we 're in range ? well , this is basically it .
the point about this slide is actually the bottom .
if we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging , we will be here all night , because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another .
this list is just for illustration ; it is incomplete .
the list on the right is also incomplete .
it 's a list of types of pathology that are age-related , and it 's just an incomplete list .
but i would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete - this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage , side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end , or that might cause pathology .
and there are only seven of them .
they 're categories of things , of course , but there 's only seven of them .
cell loss , mutations in chromosomes , mutations in the mitochondria and so on .
first of all , i 'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete .
of course one can make a biological argument .
one can say , " ok , what are we made of ? "
we 're made of cells and stuff between cells .
what can damage accumulate in ?
the answer is : long-lived molecules , because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage , but then the molecule is destroyed - like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis - then the damage is gone , too .
it 's got to be long-lived molecules .
so , these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news , because it means that , you know , we 've come a long way in biology in these 20 years , so the fact that we have n't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there 's no extension to be done .
however , it 's better than that ; we actually know how to fix them all , in mice , in principle - and what i mean by in principle is , we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade .
some of them are partially implemented already , the ones at the top .
i have n't got time to go through them at all , but my conclusion is that , if we can actually get suitable funding for this , then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years , but we do need to get serious about it .
we do need to really start trying .
so of course , there are some biologists in the audience , and i want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have .
you may have been dissatisfied with this talk , but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff .
i 've published a great deal on this ; i cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based , and there 's quite a lot of detail there .
the detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that i 'm predicting here .
so if you think that i 'm wrong , you 'd better damn well go and find out why you think i 'm wrong .
and of course the main thing is that you should n't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because , as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field , you know , you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously .
so , you know , you 've got to actually do your homework , in order to understand whether this is true .
and we 'll just end with a few things .
one thing is , you know , you 'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time , and everyone said , " well , it 's obviously impossible . "
and you know what happened .
so , you know , this does happen .
we have various strategies - there 's the methuselah mouse prize , which is basically an incentive to innovate , and to do what you think is going to work , and you get money for it if you win .
there 's a proposal to actually put together an institute .
this is what 's going to take a bit of money .
but , i mean , look - how long does it take to spend that on the war in iraq ?
not very long . ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's got to be philanthropic , because profits distract biotech , but it 's basically got a 90 percent chance , i think , of succeeding in this .
and i think we know how to do it . and i 'll stop there .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : ok . i do n't know if there 's going to be any questions but i thought i would give people the chance .
audience : since you 've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it , why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ag : because i am an old man . i am actually 158 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- audience : species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate .
however , as far as i know , all the species have evolved to actually die , so when cells divide , the telomerase get shorter , and eventually species die .
so , why does - evolution has - seems to have selected against immortality , when it is so advantageous , or is evolution just incomplete ?
ag : brilliant . thank you for asking a question that i can answer with an uncontroversial answer .
i 'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question , which i happen to agree with , which is that , no , aging is not a product of selection , evolution ; -lsb- aging -rsb- is simply a product of evolutionary neglect .
in other words , we have aging because it 's hard work not to have aging ; you need more genetic pathways , more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly , and that carries on being true the longer you push it out .
so , to the extent that evolution does n't matter , does n't care whether genes are passed on by individuals , living a long time or by procreation , there 's a certain amount of modulation of that , which is why different species have different lifespans , but that 's why there are no immortal species .
ca : the genes do n't care but we do ?
ag : that 's right .
audience : hello . i read somewhere that in the last 20 years , the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years .
if i project that , that would make me think that i would live until 120 if i do n't crash on my motorbike .
that means that i 'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old ?
ag : if you lose a bit of weight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- your numbers are a bit out .
the standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade .
so , it 's not quite as good as you might think , you might hope .
but i intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible .
audience : i was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo , and that the brain cells last 80 years or so .
if that is indeed true , biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation ?
if there are cells in my body that live all 80 years , as opposed to a typical , you know , couple of months ?
ag : there are technical implications certainly .
basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate , especially neurons , but we do n't want to replace them any faster than that - or not much faster anyway , because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function .
what i said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification .
there are species that have no aging - hydra for example - but they do it by not having a nervous system - and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells .
last year when i was here , i was speaking to you about a swim which i did across the north pole .
and while that swim took place three years ago , i can remember it as if it was yesterday .
i remember standing on the edge of the ice , about to dive into the water , and thinking to myself , i have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening .
the water is completely black .
the water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade , or 29 degrees fahrenheit .
it 's flipping freezing in that water .
and then a thought came across my mind : if things go pear-shaped on this swim , how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean ?
and then i said to myself , i 've just got to get this thought out of my mind as quickly as possible .
and the only way i can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my ipod and really revving myself up , listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to puff daddy , and then committing myself a hundred percent - there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind - and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water .
and that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds , and it felt like 18 days .
and i remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers , and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because - you know , we 're made partially of water - when water freezes it expands , and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst .
and the most immediate thought when i came out of that water was the following : i 'm never , ever going to do another cold water swim anyway , last year , i heard about the himalayas and the melting of the - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change .
i heard about this lake , lake imja .
this lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier .
the glacier 's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake .
and i firmly believe that what we 're seeing in the himalayas is the next great , big battleground on this earth .
nearly two billion people - so one in three people on this earth - rely on the water from the himalayas .
and with a population increasing as quickly as it is , and with the water supply from these glaciers - because of climate change - decreasing so much , i think we have a real risk of instability .
north , you 've got china ; south , you 've india , pakistan , bangladesh , all these countries .
and so i decided to walk up to mt . everest , the highest mountain on this earth , and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of mt . everest .
now , i do n't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to mt . everest , but it 's quite an ordeal getting up there .
28 great , big , powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain - i do n't just have my speedo , but there 's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world .
the other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude .
i wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level .
so it 's right up in the heavens .
it 's very , very difficult to breath . you get altitude sickness .
i feels like you 've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time .
that 's not the worst part of it .
the worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on mt . everest .
many , many people have died on mt . everest , and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain .
and when you 're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before , and , in fact , no fish - there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters - when you 're trying to do that , and then the bodies are coming past you , it humbles you , and you also realize very , very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are .
and we walked up this pathway , all the way up .
and to the right hand side of us was this great khumbu glacier .
and all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice .
and then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of mt . everest , and i prepared myself the same way as i 've always prepared myself , for this swim which was going to be so very difficult .
i put on my ipod , i listened to some music , i got myself as aggressive as possible - but controlled aggression - and then i hurled myself into that water .
i swam as quickly as i could for the first hundred meters , and then i realized very , very quickly , i had a huge problem on my hands .
i could barely breathe .
i was gasping for air .
i then began to choke , and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water .
and it all happened so quickly : i then - i do n't know how it happened - but i went underwater .
and luckily , the water was quite shallow , and i was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air .
and then i said , carry on . carry on . carry on .
i carried on for another five or six strokes , and then i had nothing in my body , and i went down to the bottom of the lake .
and i do n't where i got it from , but i was able to somehow pull myself up and as quickly as possible get to the side of the lake .
i 've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have .
i have never , ever heard such utter bollocks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have .
i got myself to the side of the lake .
my crew grabbed me , and then we walked as quickly as we could down - over the rubble - down to our camp .
and there , we sat down , and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on mt . everest .
and my team just gave it to me straight .
they said , lewis , you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim .
every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming , you must forget .
every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the british army , about speed and aggression , you put that to one side .
we want you to walk up the hill in another two days ' time .
take some time to rest and think about things .
we want you to walk up the mountain in two days ' time , and instead of swimming fast , swim as slowly as possible .
instead of swimming crawl , swim breaststroke .
and remember , never ever swim with aggression .
this is the time to swim with real humility .
and so we walked back up to the mountain two days later .
and i stood there on the edge of the lake , and i looked up at mt . everest - and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth - and i said to myself , just do this slowly .
and i swam across the lake .
and i ca n't begin to tell you how good i felt when i came to the other side .
but i learned two very , very important lessons there on mt . everest , and i thank my team of sherpas who taught me this .
the first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well , does n't mean it 's going to work in the future .
and similarly , now , before i do anything , i ask myself what type of mindset do i require to successfully complete a task .
and taking that into the world of climate change - which is , frankly , the mt . everest of all problems - just because we 've lived the way we have lived for so long , just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long , does n't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on .
the warning signs are all there .
when i was born , the world 's population was 3.5 billion people .
we 're now 6.8 billion people , and we 're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050 .
and then the second lesson , the radical , tactical shift .
and i 've come here to ask you today : what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment , which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world , and most importantly , in a sustainable world ?
and i ask you , please , to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make , which will make that big difference , and then commit a hundred percent to doing it .
blog about it , tweet about it , talk about it , and commit a hundred percent , because very , very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it .
so thank you very , very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design , and it makes perfect sense that i should be the one to do it because i have a bachelor 's degree in literature .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of design within reach catalogs , so i pretty much know everything there is .
now , i 'm sure you recognize this object ; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at los angeles international airport over the past couple of days .
this is known as the theme building ; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky .
and it is perhaps the best example we have in los angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture .
it was first excavated in 1961 as they were building lax , although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 before common era , when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants .
it is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located , of course , at stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design , the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously , the much better access to parking .
when it was uncovered , it ushered in a new era of streamlined , archaically futuristic design called googie , which came to be synonymous with the jet age , a misnomer .
after all , the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often , preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ah yes , a table .
we use these every day .
and on top of it , the juicy salif .
this is a design by philippe starck , who i believe is in the audience at this very moment .
and you can tell it is a starck design by its precision , its playfulness , its innovation and its promise of imminent violence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is a design that challenges your intuition - it is not what you think it is when you first see it .
it is not a fork designed to grab three hors d 'oeuvres at a time , which would be useful out in the lobby , i would say .
and despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism , it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts .
it is in fact a citrus juicer and when i say that , you never see it as anything else again .
it is also not a monument to design , it is a monument to design 's utility .
you can take it home with you , unlike the theme building , which will stay where it is forever .
this is affordable and can come home with you and , as such , it can sit on your kitchen counter - it ca n't go in your drawers ; trust me , i found that out the hard way - and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design .
one other thing about it , if you do have one at home , let me tell you one of the features you may not know : when you fall asleep , it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , what is this object ?
i have no idea . i do n't know what that thing is .
it looks terrible . is it a little hot plate ?
i do n't get it .
does anyone know ? chi ?
it 's an ... iphone. iphone .
oh yes , that 's right , i remember those ; i had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days .
no , i have an iphone . of course i do .
here is my well-loved iphone .
i do so many things on this little device .
i like to read books on it .
more than that , i like to buy books on it that i never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and i never look at them again and it 's perfect .
i use it every day to measure the weight of an ox , for example .
every now and then , i admit that i complete a phone call on it occasionally .
and yet i forget about it all the time .
this is a design that once you saw it , you forgot about it .
it is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life .
unlike the theme building , this is not alien technology .
or i should say , what it did was it took technology which , unlike people in this room , to many other people in the world , still feels very alien , and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate .
and unlike the juicy salif , it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain , rather , it simply attaches itself to your brain .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you did n't even notice it happened .
so there you go . my name is john hodgman .
i just explained design .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've always written primarily about architecture , about buildings , and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions .
an architect designs a building , and it becomes a place , or many architects design many buildings , and it becomes a city , and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places , at the end of the day , you can go and you can visit them . you can walk around them .
you can smell them . you can get a feel for them .
you can experience their sense of place .
but what was striking to me over the last several years was that less and less was i going out into the world , and more and more , i was sitting in front of my computer screen .
and especially since about 2007 , when i got an iphone , i was not only sitting in front of my screen all day , but i was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that i carried in my pocket .
and what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed .
in this very short period of time , you know , whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online , or the last , you know , four or five years of being online all the time , our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided . you know , we 're both looking inside the screens and we 're looking out in the world around us .
and what was even more striking to me , and what i really got hung up on , was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own .
if you went and looked for images of the internet , this was all that you found , this famous image by opte of the internet as the kind of milky way , this infinite expanse where we do n't seem to be anywhere on it .
we can never seem to grasp it in its totality .
it 's always reminded me of the apollo image of the earth , the blue marble picture , and it 's similarly meant to suggest , i think , that we ca n't really understand it as a whole .
we 're always sort of small in the face of its expanse .
so if there was this world and this screen , and if there was the physical world around me , i could n't ever get them together in the same place .
and then this happened .
my internet broke one day , as it occasionally does , and the cable guy came to fix it , and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch , and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard , and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall .
and then he saw a squirrel running along the wire , and he said , " there 's your problem .
a squirrel is chewing on your internet . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this seemed astounding . the internet is a transcendent idea . it 's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions .
it was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but that in fact seemed to be the case .
a squirrel had in fact chewed on my internet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it . where would it go ?
was the internet actually a place that you could visit ?
could i go there ? who would i meet ?
you know , was there something actually out there ?
and the answer , by all accounts , was no .
this was the internet , this black box with a red light on it , as represented in the sitcom " the it crowd . "
normally it lives on the top of big ben , because that 's where you get the best reception , but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation .
the elders of the internet were willing to part with it for a short while , and she looks at it and she says , " this is the internet ? the whole internet ? is it heavy ? "
they say , " of course not , the internet does n't weigh anything . "
and i was embarrassed . i was looking for this thing that only fools seem to look for .
the internet was that amorphous blob , or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it .
it was n't a real world out there .
but , in fact , it is . there is a real world of the internet out there , and that 's what i spent about two years visiting , these places of the internet . i was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit , and i visited places like this , 60 hudson street in new york , which is one of the buildings in the world , one of a very short list of buildings , about a dozen buildings , where more networks of the internet connect to each other than anywhere else .
and that connection is an unequivocally physical process .
it 's about the router of one network , a facebook or a google or a b.t. or a comcast or a time warner , whatever it is , connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network , and that 's unequivocally physical , and it 's surprisingly intimate .
a building like 60 hudson , and a dozen or so others , has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings .
there 's a very short list of these places .
and 60 hudson in particular is interesting because it 's home to about a half a dozen very important networks , which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect europe and america and connect all of us .
and it 's those cables in particular that i want to focus on .
if the internet is a global phenomenon , if we live in a global village , it 's because there are cables underneath the ocean , cables like this .
and in this dimension , they are incredibly small .
you can you hold them in your hand . they 're like a garden hose .
but in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive , as expansive as you can imagine .
they stretch across the ocean . they 're three or five or eight thousand miles in length , and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated , the basic physical process is shockingly simple . light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other , and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that 's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood , and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna , and every 50 miles they amplify the signal , and since the rate of transmission
is incredibly fast , the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light , maybe a thousand times your own connection , or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams , but not only that , but you 'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers , but you 'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber , and then you 'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable , four going in each direction .
and they 're tiny . they 're the thickness of a hair .
and then they connect to the continent somewhere .
they connect in a manhole like this . literally , this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in .
this is in halifax , a cable that stretches from halifax to ireland .
and the landscape is changing . three years ago , when i started thinking about this , there was one cable down the western coast of africa , represented in this map by steve song as that thin black line .
now there are six cables and more coming , three down each coast .
because once a country gets plugged in by one cable , they realize that it 's not enough . if they 're going to build an industry around it , they need to know that their connection is n't tenuous but permanent , because if a cable breaks , you have to send a ship out into the water , throw a grappling hook over the side , pick it up , find the other end , and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over .
it 's an intensely , intensely physical process .
so this is my friend simon cooper , who until very recently worked for tata communications , the communications wing of tata , the big indian industrial conglomerate .
and i 've never met him . we 've only communicated via this telepresence system , which always makes me think of him as the man inside the internet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he is english . the undersea cable industry is dominated by englishmen , and they all seem to be 42 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago .
and tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables , one across the atlantic and one across the pacific , and proceeded to add pieces onto them , until they had built a belt around the world , which means they will send your bits to the east or the west .
they have - this is literally a beam of light around the world , and if a cable breaks in the pacific , it 'll send it around the other direction . and then having done that , they started to look for places to wire next .
they looked for the unwired places , and that 's meant north and south , primarily these cables to africa .
but what amazes me is simon 's incredible geographic imagination .
he thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness .
and i was particularly interested because i wanted to see one of these cables being built . see , you know , all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection , these sort of brief adjacencies , a tweet or a facebook post or an email , and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that .
it seemed like there was a moment when the continent was being plugged in , and i wanted to see that .
and simon was working on a new cable , wacs , the west africa cable system , that stretched from lisbon down the west coast of africa , to cote d 'ivoire , to ghana , to nigeria , to cameroon .
and he said there was coming soon , depending on the weather , but he 'd let me know when , and so with about four days notice , he said to go to this beach south of lisbon , and a little after 9 , this guy will walk out of the water . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he 'll be carrying a green nylon line , a lightweight line , called a messenger line , and that was the first link between sea and land , this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light .
then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship , and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place .
then you can see the english engineers looking on .
and then , once it was in the right place , he got back in the water holding a big knife , and he cut each buoy off , and the buoy popped up into the air , and the cable dropped to the sea floor , and he did that all the way out to the ship , and when he got there , they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie , and then he jumped back in , and he swam back to shore , and then he lit a cigarette . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then once that cable was on shore , they began to prepare to connect it to the other side ,
for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station .
and first they got it with a hacksaw , and then they start sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a - sort of working like chefs , and then finally they 're working like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up with the cable that had come down , and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together .
and when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw , you stop thinking about the internet as a cloud .
it starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing .
and what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology , as much as this is an incredibly new thing , the physical process itself has been around for a long time , and the culture is the same .
you see the local laborers . you see the english engineer giving directions in the background . and more importantly , the places are the same . these cables still connect these classic port cities , places like lisbon , mombasa , mumbai , singapore , new york .
and then the process on shore takes around three or four days , and then , when it 's done , they put the manhole cover back on top , and they push the sand over that , and we all forget about it .
and it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud , but every time we put something on the cloud , we give up some responsibility for it .
we are less connected to it . we let other people worry about it .
and that does n't seem right .
there 's a great neal stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires .
and we should know , i think , we should know where our internet comes from , and we should know what it is that physically , physically connects us all .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . -lrb- applause -rrb- a human child is born , and for quite a long time is a consumer .
it can not be consciously a contributor .
it is helpless .
it does n't know how to survive , even though it is endowed with an instinct to survive .
it needs the help of mother , or a foster mother , to survive .
it ca n't afford to doubt the person who tends the child .
it has to totally surrender , as one surrenders to an anesthesiologist .
it has to totally surrender .
that implies a lot of trust .
that implies the trusted person wo n't violate the trust .
as the child grows , it begins to discover that the person trusted is violating the trust .
it does n't know even the word " violation . "
therefore , it has to blame itself , a wordless blame , which is more difficult to really resolve - the wordless self-blame .
as the child grows to become an adult : so far , it has been a consumer , but the growth of a human being lies in his or her capacity to contribute , to be a contributor .
one can not contribute unless one feels secure , one feels big , one feels : i have enough .
to be compassionate is not a joke .
it 's not that simple .
one has to discover a certain bigness in oneself .
that bigness should be centered on oneself , not in terms of money , not in terms of power you wield , not in terms of any status that you can command in the society , but it should be centered on oneself .
the self : you are self-aware .
on that self , it should be centered - a bigness , a wholeness .
otherwise , compassion is just a word and a dream .
you can be compassionate occasionally , more moved by empathy than by compassion .
thank god we are empathetic .
when somebody 's in pain , we pick up the pain .
in a wimbledon final match , these two guys fight it out .
each one has got two games .
it can be anybody 's game .
what they have sweated so far has no meaning .
one person wins .
the tennis etiquette is , both the players have to come to the net and shake hands .
the winner boxes the air and kisses the ground , throws his shirt as though somebody is waiting for it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this guy has to come to the net .
when he comes to the net , you see , his whole face changes .
it looks as though he 's wishing that he did n't win .
why ? empathy .
that 's human heart .
no human heart is denied of that empathy .
no religion can demolish that by indoctrination .
no culture , no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy .
and that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people , you do something that makes a difference in somebody 's life - even words , even time .
compassion is not defined in one form .
there 's no indian compassion .
there 's no american compassion .
it transcends nation , the gender , the age .
why ? because it is there in everybody .
it 's experienced by people occasionally .
then this occasional compassion , we are not talking about - it will never remain occasional .
by mandate , you can not make a person compassionate .
you ca n't say , " please love me . "
love is something you discover .
it 's not an action , but in the english language , it is also an action .
i will come to it later .
so one has got to discover a certain wholeness .
i am going to cite the possibility of being whole , which is within our experience , everybody 's experience .
in spite of a very tragic life , one is happy in moments which are very few and far between .
and the one who is happy , even for a slapstick joke , accepts himself and also the scheme of things in which one finds oneself .
that means the whole universe , known things and unknown things .
all of them are totally accepted because you discover your wholeness in yourself .
the subject - " me " - and the object - the scheme of things - fuse into oneness , an experience nobody can say , " i am denied of , " an experience common to all and sundry .
that experience confirms that , in spite of all your limitations - all your wants , desires , unfulfilled , and the credit cards and layoffs and , finally , baldness - you can be happy .
but the extension of the logic is that you do n't need to fulfill your desire to be happy .
you are the very happiness , the wholeness that you want to be .
there 's no choice in this : that only confirms the reality that the wholeness can not be different from you , can not be minus you .
it has got to be you .
you can not be a part of wholeness and still be whole .
your moment of happiness reveals that reality , that realization , that recognition : " maybe i am the whole .
maybe the swami is right .
maybe the swami is right . " you start your new life .
then everything becomes meaningful .
i have no more reason to blame myself .
if one has to blame oneself , one has a million reasons plus many .
but if i say , in spite of my body being limited - if it is black it is not white , if it is white it is not black : body is limited any which way you look at it . limited .
your knowledge is limited , health is limited , and power is therefore limited , and the cheerfulness is going to be limited .
compassion is going to be limited .
everything is going to be limitless .
you can not command compassion unless you become limitless , and nobody can become limitless , either you are or you are not . period .
and there is no way of your being not limitless too .
your own experience reveals , in spite of all limitations , you are the whole .
and the wholeness is the reality of you when you relate to the world .
it is love first .
when you relate to the world , the dynamic manifestation of the wholeness is , what we say , love .
and itself becomes compassion if the object that you relate to evokes that emotion .
then that again transforms into giving , into sharing .
you express yourself because you have compassion .
to discover compassion , you need to be compassionate .
to discover the capacity to give and share , you need to be giving and sharing .
there is no shortcut : it is like swimming by swimming .
you learn swimming by swimming .
you can not learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you learn swimming by swimming . you learn cycling by cycling .
you learn cooking by cooking , having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , therefore , what i say , you have to fake it and make it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you need to .
my predecessor meant that .
you have to act it out .
you have to act compassionately .
there is no verb for compassion , but you have an adverb for compassion .
that 's interesting to me .
you act compassionately .
but then , how to act compassionately if you do n't have compassion ?
that is where you fake .
you fake it and make it . this is the mantra of the united states of america .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you fake it and make it .
you act compassionately as though you have compassion : grind your teeth , take all the support system .
if you know how to pray , pray .
ask for compassion .
let me act compassionately .
do it .
you 'll discover compassion and also slowly a relative compassion , and slowly , perhaps if you get the right teaching , you 'll discover compassion is a dynamic manifestation of the reality of yourself , which is oneness , wholeness , and that 's what you are .
with these words , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the kraken , a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales , and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island .
in assessing the merits of such tales , it 's probably wise to keep in mind that old sailor 's saw that the only difference between a fairytale and a sea story is a fairytale begins , " once upon a time , " and a sea story begins , " this ai n't no shit . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- every fish that gets away grows with every telling of the tale .
nevertheless , there are giants in the ocean , and we now have video proof , as those of you that saw the discovery channel documentary are no doubt aware .
i was one of the three scientists on this expedition that took place last summer off japan .
i 'm the short one .
the other two are dr. tsunemi kubodera and dr. steve o 'shea .
i owe my participation in this now-historic event to ted .
in 2010 , there was a ted event called mission blue held aboard the lindblad explorer in the galapagos as part of the fulfillment of sylvia earle 's ted wish .
i spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean , one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away .
mike degruy was also invited , and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean , and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he 's been involved with for a very long time , which is the hunt for the giant squid .
it was mike that got me invited to the squid summit , a gathering of squid experts at the discovery channel that summer during shark week . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which i emphasized the importance of using quiet , unobtrusive platforms for exploration .
this came out of hundreds of dives i have made , farting around in the dark using these platforms , and my impression that i saw more animals working from the submersible than i did with either of the remote-operated vehicles .
but that could just be because the submersible has a wider field of view .
but i also felt like i saw more animals working with the tiburon than the ventana , two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems .
so my suspicion was that it might have something to do with the amount of noise they make .
so i set up a hydrophone on the bottom of the ocean , and i had each of these fly by at the same speed and distance and recorded the sound they made .
the johnson sea-link - -lrb- whirring noise -rrb- - which you can probably just barely hear here , uses electric thrusters - very , very quiet .
the tiburon also uses electric powered thrusters .
it 's also pretty quiet , but a bit noisier . -lrb- louder whirring noise -rrb- but most deep-diving rovs these days use hydraulics and they sound like the ventana . -lrb- loud beeping noise -rrb- i think that 's got to be scaring a lot of animals away .
so for the deep sea squid hunt , i proposed using an optical lure attached to a camera platform with no thrusters , no motors , just a battery-powered camera , and the only illumination coming from red light that 's invisible to most deep-sea animals that are adapted to see primarily blue .
that 's visible to our eye , but it 's the equivalent of infrared in the deep sea .
so this camera platform , which we called the medusa , could just be thrown off the back of the ship , attached to a float at the surface with over 2,000 feet of line , it would just float around passively carried by the currents , and the only light visible to the animals in the deep would be the blue light of the optical lure , which we called the electronic jellyfish , or e-jelly , because it was designed to imitate the bioluminescent display of the common deep sea jellyfish atolla .
now , this pinwheel of light that the atolla produces is known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm and is a form of defense .
the reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish , but it 's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it 's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape .
it 's a scream for help , a last-ditch attempt for escape , and a common form of defense in the deep sea .
the approach worked .
whereas all previous expeditions had failed to garner a single video glimpse of the giant , we managed six , and the first triggered wild excitement .
edith widder -lrb- on video -rrb- : oh my god . oh my god ! are you kidding me ? other scientists : oh ho ho ! that 's just hanging there .
ew : it was like it was teasing us , doing a kind of fan dance - now you see me , now you do n't - and we had four such teasing appearances , and then on the fifth , it came in and totally wowed us .
-lrb- music -rrb- narrator : -lrb- speaking in japanese -rrb- scientists : ooh . bang ! oh my god ! whoa !
-lrb- applause -rrb- ew : the full monty .
what really wowed me about that was the way it came in up over the e-jelly and then attacked the enormous thing next to it , which i think it mistook for the predator on the e-jelly .
but even more incredible was the footage shot from the triton submersible .
what was not mentioned in the discovery documentary was that the bait squid that dr. kubodera used , a one-meter long diamondback squid had a light attached to it , a squid jig of the type that longline fishermen use , and i think it was this light that brought the giant in .
now , what you 're seeing is the intensified camera 's view under red light , and that 's all dr. kubodera could see when the giant comes in here .
and then he got so excited , he turned on his flashlight because he wanted to see better , and the giant did n't run away , so he risked turning on the white lights on the submersible , bringing a creature of legend from the misty history into high-resolution video .
it was absolutely breathtaking , and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended , it would have been as tall as a two-story house .
how could something that big live in our ocean and yet remain unfilmed until now ?
we 've only explored about five percent of our ocean .
there are great discoveries yet to be made down there , fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we ca n't even yet imagine .
yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we 've spent on space exploration .
we need a nasa-like organization for ocean exploration , because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on earth .
we need - thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- exploration is the engine that drives innovation .
innovation drives economic growth .
so let 's all go exploring , but let 's do it in a way that does n't scare the animals away , or , as mike degruy once said , " if you want to get away from it all and see something you 've never seen , or have an excellent chance of seeing something that no one 's ever seen , get in a sub . "
he should have been with us for this adventure .
we miss him .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , it 's great to be back at ted .
why do n't i just start by firing away with the video ?
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- man : okay , glass , record a video .
woman : this is it . we 're on in two minutes .
man 2 : okay glass , hang out with the flying club .
man 3 : google " photos of tiger heads . " hmm .
man 4 : you ready ? you ready ? -lrb- barking -rrb- woman 2 : right there . okay , glass , take a picture .
-lrb- child shouting -rrb- man 5 : go !
man 6 : holy -lsb- beep -rsb- ! that is awesome .
child : whoa ! look at that snake !
woman 3 : okay , glass , record a video !
man 7 : after this bridge , first exit .
man 8 : okay , a12 , right there !
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- children singing -rrb- man 9 : google , say " delicious " in thai .
google glass : อร ่ อยman 9 : mmm , อร ่ อย .
woman 4 : google " jellyfish . "
-lrb- music -rrb- man 10 : it 's beautiful .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sergey brin : oh , sorry , i just got this message from a nigerian prince .
he needs help getting 10 million dollars .
i like to pay attention to these because that 's how we originally funded the company , and it 's gone pretty well .
though in all seriousness , this position that you just saw me in , looking down at my phone , that 's one of the reasons behind this project , project glass .
because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life , how you want to connect to information .
should it be by just walking around looking down ?
but that was the vision behind glass , and that 's why we 've created this form factor .
okay . and i do n't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot , but i want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it .
in addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you 're out and about looking at your phone , it 's kind of , is this what you 're meant to do with your body ?
you 're standing around there and you 're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass .
you 're just kind of moving around .
so when we developed glass , we thought really about , can we make something that frees your hands ?
you saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there .
they were all wearing glass , and that 's how we got that footage .
and also you want something that frees your eyes .
that 's why we put the display up high , out of your line of sight , so it would n't be where you 're looking and it would n't be where you 're making eye contact with people .
and also we wanted to free up the ears , so the sound actually goes through , conducts straight to the bones in your cranium , which is a little bit freaky at first , but you get used to it .
and ironically , if you want to hear it better , you actually just cover your ear , which is kind of surprising , but that 's how it works .
my vision when we started google 15 years ago was that eventually you would n't have to have a search query at all .
you 'd just have information come to you as you needed it .
and this is now , 15 years later , sort of the first form factor that i think can deliver that vision when you 're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth .
this project has lasted now , been just over two years .
we 've learned an amazing amount .
it 's been really important to make it comfortable .
so our first prototypes we built were huge .
it was like cell phones strapped to your head .
it was very heavy , pretty uncomfortable .
we had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job , and then she almost ran away screaming .
but we 've come a long way .
and the other really unexpected surprise was the camera .
our original prototypes did n't have cameras at all , but it 's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family , my kids .
i just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment .
and lastly i 've realized , in experimenting with this device , that i also kind of have a nervous tic .
the cell phone is - yeah , you have to look down on it and all that , but it 's also kind of a nervous habit .
like if i smoked , i 'd probably just smoke instead .
i would just light up a cigarette . it would look cooler .
you know , i 'd be like - but in this case , you know , i whip this out and i sit there and look as if i have something very important to do or attend to .
but it really opened my eyes to how much of my life i spent just secluding away , be it email or social posts or whatnot , even though it was n't really - there 's nothing really that important or that pressing .
and with this , i know i will get certain messages if i really need them , but i do n't have to be checking them all the time .
yeah , i 've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more , doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video .
thank you all very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- like many of you , i 'm one of the lucky people .
i was born to a family where education was pervasive .
i 'm a third-generation phd , a daughter of two academics .
in my childhood , i played around in my father 's university lab .
so it was taken for granted that i attend some of the best universities , which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity .
unfortunately , most of the people in the world are not so lucky .
in some parts of the world , for example , south africa , education is just not readily accessible .
in south africa , the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority .
and as a consequence , today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education .
that scarcity led to a crisis in january of this year at the university of johannesburg .
there were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process , and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration , thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long , hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions .
when the gates opened , there was a stampede , and 20 people were injured and one woman died .
she was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life .
but even in parts of the world like the united states where education is available , it might not be within reach .
there has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care .
what might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate , for a total of 559 percent since 1985 .
this makes education unaffordable for many people .
finally , even for those who do manage to get the higher education , the doors of opportunity might not open .
only a little over half of recent college graduates in the united states who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education .
this , of course , is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions , but for many others , they do not get the value for their time and their effort .
tom friedman , in his recent new york times article , captured , in the way that no one else could , the spirit behind our effort .
he said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary .
i 've talked about what 's desperately necessary .
let 's talk about what 's suddenly possible .
what 's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big stanford classes , each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more .
so to understand this , let 's look at one of those classes , the machine learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder andrew ng .
andrew teaches one of the bigger stanford classes .
it 's a machine learning class , and it has 400 people enrolled every time it 's offered .
when andrew taught the machine learning class to the general public , it had 100,000 people registered .
so to put that number in perspective , for andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a stanford class , he would have to do that for 250 years .
of course , he 'd get really bored .
so , having seen the impact of this , andrew and i decided that we needed to really try and scale this up , to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could .
so we formed coursera , whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free .
we currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines , and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like .
-lrb- video -rrb- robert ghrist : welcome to calculus .
ezekiel emanuel : fifty million people are uninsured .
scott page : models help us design more effective institutions and policies .
we get unbelievable segregation .
scott klemmer : so bush imagined that in the future , you 'd wear a camera right in the center of your head .
mitchell duneier : mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind ...
rg : hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine .
nick parlante : for each pixel in the image , set the red to zero .
paul offit : ... vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus .
dan jurafsky : does lufthansa serve breakfast and san jose ? well , that sounds funny .
daphne koller : so this is which coin you pick , and this is the two tosses .
andrew ng : so in large-scale machine learning , we 'd like to come up with computational ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- dk : it turns out , maybe not surprisingly , that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free .
since we opened the website in february , we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries .
we have 1.5 million enrollments , 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted , and 14 million videos have been viewed .
but it 's not just about the numbers , it 's also about the people .
whether it 's akash , who comes from a small town in india and would never have access in this case to a stanford-quality course and would never be able to afford it .
or jenny , who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master 's degree .
or ryan , who ca n't go to school , because his immune deficient daughter ca n't be risked to have germs come into the house , so he could n't leave the house .
i 'm really glad to say - recently , we 've been in correspondence with ryan - that this story had a happy ending .
baby shannon - you can see her on the left - is doing much better now , and ryan got a job by taking some of our courses .
so what made these courses so different ?
after all , online course content has been available for a while .
what made it different was that this was real course experience .
it started on a given day , and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments .
and these would be real homework assignments for a real grade , with a real deadline .
you can see the deadlines and the usage graph .
these are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- at the end of the course , the students got a certificate .
they could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job , and we know many students who did .
some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit .
so these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort .
let 's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses .
the first component is that when you move away and design content explicitly for an online format , you can break away from , for example , the monolithic one-hour lecture .
you can break up the material , for example , into these short , modular units of eight to 12 minutes , each of which represents a coherent concept .
students can traverse this material in different ways , depending on their background , their skills or their interests .
so , for example , some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have .
other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually .
so this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education , and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum .
of course , we all know as educators that students do n't learn by sitting and passively watching videos .
perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it .
there 's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this .
this one that appeared in science last year , for example , demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice , where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions .
we 've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform , as well as other forms of practice in many ways .
for example , even our videos are not just videos .
every few minutes , the video pauses and the students get asked a question .
-lrb- video -rrb- sp : ... these four things . prospect theory , hyperbolic discounting , status quo bias , base rate bias . they 're all well documented .
so they 're all well documented deviations from rational behavior .
dk : so here the video pauses , and the student types in the answer into the box and submits . obviously they were n't paying attention .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they get to try again , and this time they got it right .
there 's an optional explanation if they want .
and now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture .
this is a kind of simple question that i as an instructor might ask in class , but when i ask that kind of a question in class , 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing i said , 15 percent are zoned out on facebook , and then there 's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it , and i as the instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer .
and so the lecture moves on before , really , most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked .
here , every single student has to engage with the material .
and of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story .
one needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions , and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions .
now , how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 tas ?
the answer is , you need to use technology to do it for you .
now , fortunately , technology has come a long way , and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework .
in addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video , we can also grade math , mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations .
we can grade models , whether it 's financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering class and we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments .
let me show you one that 's actually pretty simple but fairly visual .
this is from stanford 's computer science 101 class , and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image .
they 're typing their program into the browser , and you can see they did n't get it quite right , lady liberty is still seasick .
and so , the student tries again , and now they got it right , and they 're told that , and they can move on to the next assignment .
this ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you 're right or wrong is really essential to student learning .
now , of course we can not yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses .
specifically , what 's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities , the social sciences , business and others .
so we tried to convince , for example , some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy .
that did n't go over really well .
so we had to come up with a different solution .
and the solution we ended up using is peer grading .
it turns out that previous studies show , like this one by saddler and good , that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades .
it was tried only in small classes , but there it showed , for example , that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis .
what 's even more surprising is that self-grades , where the students grade their own work critically - so long as you incentivize them properly so they ca n't give themselves a perfect score - are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades .
and so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale , and is also a useful learning strategy for the students , because they actually learn from the experience .
so we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised , where tens of thousands of students are grading each other 's work , and quite successfully , i have to say .
but this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems .
around each one of our courses , a community of students had formed , a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor .
what you see here is a self-generated map from students in our princeton sociology 101 course , where they have put themselves on a world map , and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort .
students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways .
first of all , there was a question and answer forum , where students would pose questions , and other students would answer those questions .
and the really amazing thing is , because there were so many students , it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o 'clock in the morning , somewhere around the world , there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem .
and so , in many of our courses , the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes .
which is not a level of service i have ever offered to my stanford students .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community , they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom .
students also self-assembled , without any kind of intervention from us , into small study groups .
some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets .
this is the san francisco study group , but there were ones all over the world .
others were virtual study groups , sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines , and on the bottom left there , you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures .
there are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework .
the first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning .
because the data that we can collect here is unique .
you can collect every click , every homework submission , every forum post from tens of thousands of students .
so you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode , a transformation that , for example , has revolutionized biology .
you can use these data to understand fundamental questions like , what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not ?
and in the context of particular courses , you can ask questions like , what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them ?
so here 's an example of that , also from andrew 's machine learning class .
this is a distribution of wrong answers to one of andrew 's assignments .
the answers happen to be pairs of numbers , so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot .
each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer .
the big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer .
now , if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer , you would never notice .
but when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer , it 's kind of hard to miss .
so andrew and his students went in , looked at some of those assignments , understood the root cause of the misconception , and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket , which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively .
so this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers .
personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well , because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem .
educational researcher benjamin bloom , in 1984 , posed what 's called the 2 sigma problem , which he observed by studying three populations .
the first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom .
the second is a population of students that studied but with a mastery-based approach , so the students could n't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one .
and finally , there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor .
the mastery-based population was a full standard deviation , or sigma , in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class , and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance .
to understand what that means , let 's look at the lecture-based classroom , and let 's pick the median performance as a threshold .
so in a lecture-based class , half the students are above that level and half are below .
in the individual tutoring instruction , 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold .
imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average .
hence , the 2 sigma problem .
because we can not afford , as a society , to provide every student with an individual human tutor .
but maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone .
so the question is , how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph , from the blue curve , to the right side with the green curve ?
mastery is easy to achieve using a computer , because a computer does n't get tired of showing you the same video five times .
and it does n't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times , we 've seen that in many of the examples that i 've shown you .
and even personalization whether it 's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we 've shown you .
so the goal here is to try and push , and see how far we can get towards the green curve .
so , if this is so great , are universities now obsolete ?
well , mark twain certainly thought so .
he said that , " college is a place where a professor 's lecture notes go straight to the students ' lecture notes , without passing through the brains of either . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i beg to differ with mark twain , though .
i think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on .
so let 's go back even further , to plutarch , who said that , " the mind is not a vessel that needs filling , but wood that needs igniting . "
and maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students ' minds with content by lecturing at them , and more time igniting their creativity , their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them .
so how do we do that ?
we do that by doing active learning in the classroom .
so there 's been many studies , including this one , that show that if you use active learning , interacting with your students in the classroom , performance improves on every single metric - on attendance , on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test .
you can see , for example , that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment .
so maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities .
so to summarize , if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free , what would that do ? three things .
first it would establish education as a fundamental human right , where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves , their families and their communities .
second , it would enable lifelong learning .
it 's a shame that for so many people , learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college .
by having this amazing content be available , we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted , whether it 's just to expand our minds or it 's to change our lives .
and finally , this would enable a wave of innovation , because amazing talent can be found anywhere .
maybe the next albert einstein or the next steve jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in africa .
and if we could offer that person an education , they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1975 , i met in florence a professor , carlo pedretti , my former professor of art history , and today a world-renowned scholar of leonardo da vinci .
well , he asked me if i could find some technological way to unfold a five-centuries-old mystery related to a lost masterpiece by leonardo da vinci , the " battle of anghiari , " which is supposed to be located in the hall of the 500 in palazzo vecchio , in florence .
well , in the mid- ' 70s , there were not great opportunities for a bioengineer like me , especially in italy , and so i decided , with some researchers from the united states and the university of florence , to start probing the murals decorated by vasari on the long walls of the hall of the 500 searching for the lost leonardo .
unfortunately , at that time we did not know that that was not exactly where we should be looking , because we had to go much deeper in , and so the research came to a halt , and it was only taken up in 2000 thanks to the interest and the enthusiasm of the guinness family .
well , this time , we focused on trying to reconstruct the way the hall of the 500 was before the remodeling , and the so-called sala grande , which was built in 1494 , and to find out the original doors , windows , and in order to do that , we first created a 3d model , and then , with thermography , we went on to discover hidden windows . these are the original windows of the hall of the sala grande . we also found out about the height of the ceiling , and we managed to reconstruct , therefore , all the layout of this original hall the way it was before there came vasari ,
and restructured the whole thing , including a staircase that was very important in order to precisely place " the battle of anghiari " on a specific area of one of the two walls .
well , we also learned that vasari , who was commissioned to remodel the hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the grand duke cosimo i of the medici family , we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap .
one that we -lsb- see -rsb- here , masaccio , the church of santa maria novella in florence , so we just said , well maybe , visari has done something like that in the case of this great work of art by leonardo , since he was a great admirer of leonardo da vinci .
and so we built some very sophisticated radio antennas just for probing both walls and searching for an air gap .
and we did find many on the right panel of the east wall , an air gap , and that 's where we believe " the battle of anghiari , " or at least the part that we know has been painted , which is called " the fight for the standard , " should be located .
well , from there , unfortunately , in 2004 , the project came to a halt . many political reasons .
so i decided to go back to my alma mater , and , at the university of california , san diego , and i proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage .
and in 2007 , we created cisa3 as a research center for cultural heritage , specifically art , architecture and archaeology . so students started to flow in , and we started to build technologies , because that 's basically what we also needed in order to move forward and go and do fieldwork .
we came back in the hall of the 500 in 2011 , and this time , with a great group of students , and my colleague , professor falko kuester , who is now the director at cisa3 , and we came back just since we knew already where to look for to find out if there was still something left .
well , we were confined though , limited , i should rather say , for several reasons that it 's not worth explaining , to endoscopy only , of the many other options we had , and with a 4mm camera attached to it , we were successful in documenting and taking some fragments of what it turns out to be a reddish color , black color , and there is some beige fragments that later on we ran a much more sophisticated exams , xrf , x-ray diffraction , and the results are very positive so far . it seems to indicate that indeed we have found some pigments , and since we know for sure
that no other artist has painted on that wall before vasari came in about 60 years later , well , those pigments are therefore firmly related to mural painting and most likely to leonardo .
well , we are searching for the highest and highly praised work of art ever achieved by mankind .
as a matter of fact , this is by far the most important commission that leonardo has ever had , and for doing this great masterpiece , he was named the number one artist influence at the time .
i had also had the privilege since the last 37 years to work on several masterpieces as you can see behind me , but basically to do what ? well , to assess , for example , the state of conservation . see here the face of the madonna of the chair that when just shining a uv light on it you suddenly see another , different lady , aged lady , i should rather say .
there is a lot of varnish still sitting there , several retouches , and some over cleaning . it becomes very visible .
but also , technology has helped to write new pages of our history , or at least to update pages of our histories .
for example , the " lady with the unicorn , " another painting by rafael , well , you see the unicorn .
a lot has been said and written about the unicorn , but if you take an x-ray of the unicorn , it becomes a puppy dog .
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - no problem , but , unfortunately , continuing with the scientific examination of this painting came out that rafael did not paint the unicorn , did not paint the puppy dog , actually left the painting unfinished , so all this writing about the exotic symbol of the unicorn - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - unfortunately , is not very reliable . -lrb- laughter -rrb- well , also , authenticity . just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art . there would be a cultural revolution to say the least , but also , i would say , a market revolution , let me add . take this example :
otto marseus , nice painting , which is " still life " at the pitti gallery , and just have an infrared camera peering through , and luckily for art historians , it just was confirmed that there is a signature of otto marseus . it even says when it was made and also the location .
so that was a good result . sometimes , it 's not that good , and so , again , authenticity and science could go together and change the way , not attributions being made , but at least lay the ground for a more objective , or , i should rather say , less subjective attribution , as it is done today .
but i would say the discovery that really caught my imagination , my admiration , is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer , brown layer , of " the adoration of the magi . " here you see a handmade setting xyz scanner with an infrared camera put on it , and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath .
well , this happens to be the most important painting we have in italy by leonardo da vinci , and look at the wonderful images of faces that nobody has seen for five centuries . look at these portraits .
they 're magnificent . you see leonardo at work .
you see the geniality of his creation , right directly on the ground layer of the panel , and see this cool thing , finding , i should rather say , an elephant . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because of this elephant , over 70 new images came out , never seen for centuries .
this was an epiphany . we came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by leonardo da vinci , which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see , so thanks only to technology .
well , the tablet . well , we thought , well , if we all have this pleasure , this privilege to see all this , to find all these discoveries , what about for everybody else ?
so we thought of an augmented reality application using a tablet . let me show you just simulating what we could be doing , any of us could be doing , in a museum environment .
so let 's say that we go to a museum with a tablet , okay ?
and we just aim the camera of the tablet to the painting that we are interested to see , like this .
okay ? and i will just click on it , we pause , and now let me turn to you so the moment the image , or , i should say , the camera , has locked in the painting , then the images you just saw up there in the drawing are being loaded . and so , see .
we can , as we said , we can zoom in . then we can scroll .
okay ? let 's go and find the elephant .
so all we need is one finger . just wipe off and we see the elephant . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- okay ? and then if we want , we can continue the scroll to find out , for example , on the staircase , the whole iconography is going to be changed . there are a lot of laymen reconstructing from the ruins of an old temple a new temple , and there are a lot of figures showing up . see ?
this is not just a curiosity , because it changes not just the iconography as you see it , but the iconology , the meaning of the painting , and we believe this is a cool way , easy way , that everybody could have access to , to become more the protagonist of your own discovery , and not just be so passive about it , as we are when we walk through endless rooms of museums .
-lrb- applause -rrb- another concept is the digital clinical chart , which sounds very obvious if we were to talk about real patients , but when we talk about works of art , unfortunately , it 's never been tapped as an idea .
well , we believe , again , that this should be the beginning , the very first step , to do real conservation , and allowing us to really explore and to understand everything related to the state of our conservation , the technique , materials , and also if , when , and why we should restore , or , rather , to intervene on the environment surrounding the painting .
well , our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the renaissance , create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together .
we definitely need a new breed of engineers that will go out and do this kind of work and rediscover for us these values , these cultural values that we badly need , especially today .
and if you want to summarize in one just single word , well , this is what we 're trying to do .
we 're trying to give a future to our past in order to have a future .
as long as we live a life of curiosity and passion , there is a bit of leonardo in all of us . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in 1991 i had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life .
i was in the third year of my seven-year undergraduate degree .
i took a couple victory laps in there .
and i was on a college choir tour up in northern california , and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus , and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains .
and there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise , and as we sat there , over the mountains coming in from the north were these steven spielbergian clouds rolling toward us , and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley , so help me god , every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time .
-lrb- whoosh -rrb- this electric hush , as if they could sense what was about to happen .
and then the clouds came over us , and then , boom ! this massive thunderclap , and sheets of rain .
it was just extraordinary , and when i came back home i found a poem by the mexican poet octavio paz , and decided to set it to music , a piece for choir called " cloudburst , " which is the piece that we 'll perform for you in just a moment .
now fast forward to just three years ago .
-lrb- music -rrb- and we released to youtube this , the virtual choir project , 185 singers from 12 different countries .
you can see my little video there conducting these people , alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home .
two years ago , on this very stage , we premiered virtual choir 2 , 2,052 singers from 58 different countries , this time performing a piece that i had written called " sleep . "
and then just last spring we released virtual choir 3 , " water night , " another piece that i had written , this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries .
-lrb- music -rrb- and when i was speaking to chris about the future of virtual choir and where we might be able to take this , he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could .
could we do this all in real time ?
could we have people singing together in real time ?
and with the help of skype , that is what we are going to attempt today .
now , we 'll perform " cloudburst " for you .
the first half will be performed by the live singers here on stage .
i 'm joined by singers from cal state long beach , cal state fullerton and riverside community college , some of the best amateur choirs in the country , and - -lrb- applause -rrb- - and in the second half of the piece , the virtual choir will join us , 30 different singers from 30 different countries .
now , we 've pushed the technology as far as it can go , but there 's still less than a second of latency , but in musical terms , that 's a lifetime .
we deal in milliseconds .
so what i 've done is , i 've adapted " cloudburst " so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together .
so with deep humility , and for your approval , we present " cloudburst . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- piano -rrb- -lsb- the rain ... -rsb- -lsb- eyes of shadow-water -rsb- -lsb- eyes of well-water -rsb- -lsb- eyes of dream-water . -rsb- -lsb- blue suns , green whirlwinds , -rsb- -lsb- birdbeaks of light pecking open -rsb- -lsb- pomegranate stars . -rsb- -lsb- but tell me , burnt earth , is there no water ? -rsb- -lsb- only blood , only dust , -rsb- -lsb- only naked footsteps on the thorns ? -rsb- -lsb- the rain awakens ... -rsb- -lsb- we must sleep with open eyes , -rsb- -lsb- we must dream with our hands , -rsb- -lsb- we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course , -rsb- -lsb- of the sun dreaming its worlds . -rsb- -lsb- we must dream aloud , -rsb- -lsb- we must sing till the song puts forth roots , -rsb- -lsb- trunk , branches , birds , stars . -rsb- -lsb- we must find the lost word , -rsb- -lsb- and remember what the blood , -rsb-
-lsb- the tides , the earth , and the body say , -rsb- -lsb- and return to the point of departure ... -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- " cloudburst " octavio paz -rsb- -lsb- translation by lysander kemp , adapted by eric whitacre -rsb- eric whitacre : beth . annabelle , where are you ? jacob .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
hi . i 'm kevin allocca , i 'm the trends manager at youtube , and i professionally watch youtube videos .
it 's true .
so we 're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters .
we all want to be stars - celebrities , singers , comedians - and when i was younger , that seemed so very , very hard to do .
but now web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world 's culture .
any one of you could be famous on the internet by next saturday .
but there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to youtube every minute .
and of that , only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment .
so how does it happen ?
three things : tastemakers , communities of participation and unexpectedness .
all right , let 's go .
-lrb- video -rrb- bear vasquez : oh , my god . oh , my god .
oh , my god !
wooo !
ohhhhh , wowwww !
ka : last year , bear vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in yosemite national park .
in 2010 , it was viewed 23 million times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer .
but he did n't actually set out to make a viral video , bear .
he just wanted to share a rainbow .
because that 's what you do when your name is yosemite mountain bear .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he had posted lots of nature videos in fact .
and this video had actually been posted all the way back in january .
so what happened here ?
jimmy kimmel actually .
jimmy kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become .
because tastemakers like jimmy kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience .
-lrb- video -rrb- rebecca black : ♫ it 's friday , friday . gotta get down on friday . ♫ ♫ everybody 's looking forward to the weekend , weekend . ♫ ♫ friday , friday . gettin ' down on friday . ♫ ka : so you did n't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video i hope .
rebecca black 's " friday " is one of the most popular videos of the year .
it 's been seen nearly 200 million times this year .
this is a chart of what it looked like .
and similar to " double rainbow , " it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere .
so what happened on this day ?
well it was a friday , this is true .
and if you 're wondering about those other spikes , those are also fridays .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what about this day , this one particular friday ?
well tosh.0 picked it up , a lot of blogs starting writing about .
michael j. nelson from mystery science theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on twitter .
but what 's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience , accelerating the process .
and so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it .
and now there are 10,000 parodies of " friday " on youtube .
even in the first seven days , there was one parody for every other day of the week .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century , this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon - either by spreading it or by doing something new with it .
-lrb- music -rrb- so " nyan cat " is a looped animation with looped music .
it 's this , just like this .
it 's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year .
and if you think that that is weird , you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that 's been viewed four million times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even cats were watching this video .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- cats were watching other cats watch this video .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what 's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie , geeky internet culture .
there were remixes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- someone made an old timey version .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then it went international .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- an entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of .
because we do n't just enjoy now , we participate .
and who could have predicted any of this ?
who could have predicted " double rainbow " or rebecca black or " nyan cat ? "
what scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it ?
in a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute , only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have .
when a friend of mine told me that i needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in new york city , i admit i was n't very interested .
-lrb- video -rrb- casey niestat : so i got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane , but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ka : by being totally surprising and humorous , casey niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times .
and so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively .
and so it all brings us to one big question ...
-lrb- video -rrb- bear vasquez : what does this mean ?
ohhhh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ka : what does it mean ?
tastemakers , creative participating communities , complete unexpectedness , these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity .
i mean , as mentioned earlier , one of the biggest stars in the world right now , justin bieber , got his start on youtube .
no one has to green-light your idea .
and we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture .
and these are not characteristics of old media , and they 're barely true of the media of today , but they will define the entertainment of the future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . i 'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise , admiration and thank you , and having it be specific and genuine .
and the way i got interested in this was , i noticed in myself , when i was growing up , and until about a few years ago , that i would want to say thank you to someone , i would want to praise them , i would want to take in their praise of me and i 'd just stop it .
and i asked myself , why ?
i felt shy , i felt embarrassed .
and then my question became , am i the only one who does this ?
so , i decided to investigate .
i 'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility , so i get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction .
and sometimes it comes down to something as simple as , their core wound is their father died without ever saying he 's proud of them .
but then , they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him , but he never told the son .
it 's because he did n't know that his son needed to hear it .
so my question is , why do n't we ask for the things that we need ?
i know a gentleman , married for 25 years , who 's longing to hear his wife say , " thank you for being the breadwinner , so i can stay home with the kids , " but wo n't ask .
i know a woman who 's good at this .
she , once a week , meets with her husband and says , " i 'd really like you to thank me for all these things i did in the house and with the kids . "
and he goes , " oh , this is great , this is great . "
and praise really does have to be genuine , but she takes responsibility for that .
and a friend of mine , april , who i 've had since kindergarten , she thanks her children for doing their chores .
and she said , " why would n't i thank it , even though they 're supposed to do it ? "
so , the question is , why was i blocking it ?
why were other people blocking it ?
why can i say , " i 'll take my steak medium rare , i need size six shoes , " but i wo n't say , " would you praise me this way ? "
and it 's because i 'm giving you critical data about me .
i 'm telling you where i 'm insecure .
i 'm telling you where i need your help .
and i 'm treating you , my inner circle , like you 're the enemy .
because what can you do with that data ?
you could neglect me .
you could abuse it .
or you could actually meet my need .
and i took my bike into the bike store - i love this - same bike , and they 'd do something called " truing " the wheels .
the guy said , " you know , when you true the wheels , it 's going to make the bike so much better . "
i get the same bike back , and they 've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels i 've had for two and a half years , and my bike is like new .
so , i 'm going to challenge all of you .
i want you to true your wheels : be honest about the praise that you need to hear .
what do you need to hear ? go home to your wife - go ask her , what does she need ?
go home to your husband - what does he need ?
go home and ask those questions , and then help the people around you .
and it 's simple .
and why should we care about this ?
we talk about world peace .
how can we have world peace with different cultures , different languages ?
i think it starts household by household , under the same roof .
so , let 's make it right in our own backyard .
and i want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands , great mothers , friends , daughters , sons .
and maybe somebody 's never said that to you , but you 've done a really , really good job .
and thank you for being here , just showing up and changing the world with your ideas .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great honor today to share with you the digital universe , which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe .
and so i think we can roll the video that we have .
-lsb- the himalayas . -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- the flat horizon that we 've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite : unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste .
it was n't until we really left earth , got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself , that we could understand our planet as a limited condition .
the digital universe atlas has been built at the american museum of natural history over the past 12 years .
we maintain that , put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales .
what we see here are satellites around the earth and the earth in proper registration against the universe , as we see .
nasa supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the hayden planetarium so that we would share this with the world .
the digital universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do - our main space shows in the dome .
but what you see here is the result of , actually , internships that we hosted with linkoping university in sweden .
i 've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work , and the result has been this software called uniview and a company called sciss in sweden .
this software allows interactive use , so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live .
i captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called earth matters on the lower east side of manhattan , where i live , and it was done as a collaborative project with the rubin museum of himalayan art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology .
and so as we move out , we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies , as we see here , light-travel time , giving you a sense of how far away we are .
as we move out , the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long , we 're essentially backing up into the past .
we back so far up we 're finally seeing a containment around us - the afterglow of the big bang .
this is the wmap microwave background that we see .
we 'll fly outside it here , just to see this sort of containment .
if we were outside this , it would almost be meaningless , in the sense as before time .
but this our containment of the visible universe .
we know the universe is bigger than that which we can see .
coming back quickly , we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning , but these are positions , the latest positions of exoplanets that we 've mapped , and our sun here , obviously , with our own solar system .
what you 're going to see - we 're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system - these are the paths of voyager 1 , voyager 2 , pioneer 11 and pioneer 10 , the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system .
coming in closer , picking up earth , orbit of the moon , and we see the earth .
this map can be updated , and we can add in new data .
i know dr. carolyn porco is the camera p.i.
for the cassini mission .
but here we see the complex trajectory of the cassini mission color coded for different mission phases , ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon , titan , which is larger that the planet mercury , diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase .
this software allows us to come close and look at parts of this .
this software can also be networked between domes .
we have a growing user base of this , and we network domes .
and we can network between domes and classrooms .
we 're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-saharan planetarium in ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in columbia and a high school in cambodia .
and the cambodians have actually controlled the hayden planetarium from their high school .
this is an image from saturday , photographed by the aqua satellite , but through the uniview software .
so you 're seeing the edge of the earth .
this is nepal .
this is , in fact , right here is the valley of lhasa , right here in tibet .
but we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the ganges valley down below in india .
this is nepal and tibet .
and just in closing , i 'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on - here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out - so i 'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is .
because our home is the universe , and we are the universe , essentially .
we carry that in us .
and to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all , i think , in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , what i do is write for children , and i 'm probably america 's most widely read children 's author , in fact .
and i always tell people that i do n't want to show up looking like a scientist .
you can have me as a farmer , or in leathers , and no one has ever chose farmer .
i 'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies .
and you know , an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace .
you 've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany .
that 's a painting of a circle .
a friend of mine did that - richard bollingbroke .
it 's the kind of complicated circle that i 'm going to tell you about .
my circle began back in the ' 60s in high school in stow , ohio where i was the class queer .
i was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys ' room , until one teacher saved my life .
she saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers ' lounge .
she did it in secret .
she did it for three years .
and i had to get out of town .
i had a thumb , i had 85 dollars , and i ended up in san francisco , california - met a lover - and back in the ' 80s , found it necessary to begin work on aids organizations .
about three or four years ago , i got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher , mrs. posten , who said , " i need to see you .
i 'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults .
could you please come to ohio , and please bring that man that i know you have found by now .
and i should mention that i have pancreatic cancer , and i 'd like you to please be quick about this . "
well , the next day we were in cleveland .
we took a look at her , we laughed , we cried , and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice .
we found her one , we got her there , and we took care of her and watched over her family , because it was necessary .
it 's something we knew how to do .
and just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me , she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands .
and what had happened was the circle had closed , it had become a circle - and that epiphany i talked about presented itself .
the epiphany is that death is a part of life .
she saved my life ; i and my partner saved hers .
and you know , that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does .
it needs truth and beauty , and i 'm so happy it 's been mentioned so much here today .
it also needs - it needs dignity , love and pleasure , and it 's our job to hand those things out .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trees epitomize stasis .
trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations , but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs , trees become very dynamic entities , moving and growing .
and i decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists .
i simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig .
i waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas , and that produced art .
the piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a douglas fir , and what i learned was that different species have different signatures , like a picasso versus a monet .
but i was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it , so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree - which produced this painting - moved in a single year , i simply measured and summed each of those lines .
i multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year .
and so i was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year .
you might have a guess .
the answer is actually 186,540 miles , or seven times around the globe .
and so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs , we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities , but rather extremely dynamic .
and i began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees , to consider other entities that are also static and stuck , but which cry for change and dynamicism , and one of those entities is our prisons .
prisons , of course , are where people who break our laws are stuck , confined behind bars .
and our prison system itself is stuck .
the united states has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women .
that number is rising .
of the 100 incarcerated people that are released , 60 will return to prison .
funds for education , for training and for rehabilitation are declining , so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues .
i decided to ask whether the lesson i had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons , and i think the answer is yes .
in the year 2007 , i started a partnership with the washington state department of corrections .
working with four prisons , we began bringing science and scientists , sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons .
we give science lectures , and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting .
that , i think , is movement .
we partnered with the nature conservancy for inmates at stafford creek correctional center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in washington state .
that , i think , is movement .
we worked with the washington state department of fish and wildlife to grow endangered frogs - the oregon spotted frog - for later release into protected wetlands .
that , i think , is movement .
and just recently , we 've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call supermax facilities .
they 've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners .
they 're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day .
when they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals , they 're placed in immobile booths like this .
for one hour a day they 're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards .
although we ca n't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments , we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards , putting them on the walls , so at least they get contact with visual images of nature .
this is mr. lopez , who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months , and he 's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene , more calm , less apt to violence .
and so what we see , i think , is that small , collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope .
we know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks .
but if trees can create art , if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year , if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs , then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves , like grief , like addictions , like racism , that can also change .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as an architect , i often ask myself , what is the origin of the forms that we design ?
what kind of forms could we design if we would n't work with references anymore ?
if we had no bias , if we had no preconceptions , what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience ?
if we could free ourselves from our education ?
what would these unseen forms look like ?
would they surprise us ? would they intrigue us ?
would they delight us ?
if so , then how can we go about creating something that is truly new ?
i propose we look to nature .
nature has been called the greatest architect of forms .
and i 'm not saying that we should copy nature , i 'm not saying we should mimic biology , instead i propose that we can borrow nature 's processes .
we can abstract them and to create something that is new .
nature 's main process of creation , morphogenesis , is the splitting of one cell into two cells .
and these cells can either be identical , or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division .
if we abstract this process , and simplify it as much as possible , then we could start with a single sheet of paper , one surface , and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces .
we 're free to choose where we make the fold .
and by doing so , we can differentiate the surfaces .
through this very simple process , we can create an astounding variety of forms .
now , we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures , but rather than folding things by hand , we 'll bring the structure into the computer , and code it as an algorithm .
and in doing so , we can suddenly fold anything .
we can fold a million times faster , we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations .
and as we 're seeking to make something three-dimensional , we start not with a single surface , but with a volume .
a simple volume , the cube .
if we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again , then after 16 iterations , 16 steps , we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks , for instance , like this .
and if we change where we make the folds , if we change the folding ratio , then this cube turns into this one .
we can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape , or this shape .
so we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we 're making the fold , but essentially you 're looking at a folded cube .
and we can play with this .
we can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions .
we can begin to sculpt the form .
and because we 're doing the folding on the computer , we are completely free of any physical constraints .
so that means that surfaces can intersect themselves , they can become impossibly small .
we can make folds that we otherwise could not make .
surfaces can become porous .
they can stretch . they can tear .
and all of this expounds the scope of forms that we can produce .
but in each case , i did n't design the form .
i designed the process that generated the form .
in general , if we make a small change to the folding ratio , which is what you 're seeing here , then the form changes correspondingly .
but that 's only half of the story - 99.9 percent of the folding ratios produce not this , but this , the geometric equivalent of noise .
the forms that i showed before were made actually through very long trial and error .
a far more effective way to create forms , i have found , is to use information that is already contained in forms .
a very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye .
so , for instance , we can plot the length of the edges .
white surfaces have long edges , black ones have short ones .
we can plot the planarity of the surfaces , their curvature , how radial they are - all information that may not be instantly visible to you , but that we can bring out , that we can articulate , and that we can use to control the folding .
so now i 'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it , but instead i 'm establishing a rule , i 'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded .
and because i 've designed the process and not the form , i can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms .
these forms look elaborate , but the process is a very minimal one .
there is a simple input , it 's always a cube that i start with , and it 's a very simple operation - it 's making a fold , and doing this over and over again .
so let 's bring this process to architecture .
how ? and at what scale ?
i chose to design a column .
columns are architectural archetypes .
they 've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty , about technology .
a challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column .
i started using four cylinders .
through a lot of experimentation , these cylinders eventually evolved into this .
and these columns , they have information at very many scales .
we can begin to zoom into them .
the closer one gets , the more new features one discovers .
some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility .
and unlike traditional architecture , it 's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail .
these forms are undrawable .
an architect who 's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months , or it would take even a year to draw all the sections , all of the elevations , you can only create something like this through an algorithm .
the more interesting question , perhaps , is , are these forms imaginable ?
usually , an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing .
in this case , the process is deterministic .
there 's no randomness involved at all , but it 's not entirely predictable .
there 's too many surfaces , there 's too much detail , one ca n't see the end state .
so this leads to a new role for the architect .
one needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there .
for one thing , one can design many variants of a form , in parallel , and one can cultivate them .
and to go back to the analogy with nature , one can begin to think in terms of populations , one can talk about permutations , about generations , about crossing and breeding to come up with a design .
and the architect is really , he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes .
but enough of the theory .
at one point i simply wanted to jump inside this image , so to say , i bought these red and blue 3d glasses , got up very close to the screen , but still that was n't the same as being able to walk around and touch things .
so there was only one possibility - to bring the column out of the computer .
there 's been a lot of talk now about 3d printing .
for me , or for my purpose at this moment , there 's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale , on the one hand , and resolution and speed , on the other .
so instead , we decided to take the column , and we decided to build it as a layered model , made out of very many slices , thinly stacked over each other .
what you 're looking at here is an x-ray of the column that you just saw , viewed from the top .
unbeknownst to me at the time , because we had only seen the outside , the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves , to grow on the inside of the column , which was quite a surprising discovery .
from this shape , we calculated a cutting line , and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter to produce - and you 're seeing a segment of it here - very many thin slices , individually cut , on top of each other .
and this is a photo now , it 's not a rendering , and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work , ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer .
almost all of the details , almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved .
but it was very labor intensive .
there 's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical .
it took me several months to design the column , but ultimately it takes the computer about 30 seconds to calculate all of the 16 million faces .
the physical model , on the other hand , is 2,700 layers , one millimeter thick , it weighs 700 kilos , it 's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium .
and the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again .
but it is increasingly possible .
machines are getting faster , it 's getting less expensive , and there 's some promising technological developments just on the horizon .
these are images from the gwangju biennale .
and in this case , i used abs plastic to produce the columns , we used the bigger , faster machine , and they have a steel core inside , so they 're structural , they can bear loads for once .
each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns .
you can see a different column in the mirror , if there 's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion .
so where does this leave us ?
i think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object , but a process to generate objects .
i 've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature ; there 's countless other ones .
in short , we have no constraints .
instead , we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we could n't even have dreamt up .
and , if i may add , at one point we will build them .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- ok . we 've heard a lot of people speak at this conference about the power of the human mind .
and what i 'd like to do today is give you a vivid example of how that power can be unleashed when someone is in a survival situation , how the will to survive can bring that out in people .
this is an incident which occurred on mount everest ; it was the worst disaster in the history of everest .
and when it occurred , i was the only doctor on the mountain .
so i 'll take you through that and we 'll see what it 's like when someone really summons the will to survive .
ok , this is mount everest .
it 's 29,035 feet high .
i 've been there six times : four times i did work with national geographic , making tectonic plate measurements ; twice , i went with nasa doing remote sensing devices .
it was on my fourth trip to everest that a comet passed over the mountain . hyakutake .
and the sherpas told us then that was a very bad omen , and we should have listened to them .
everest is an extreme environment .
there 's only one-third as much oxygen at the summit as there is at sea level .
near the summit , temperatures can be 40 degrees below zero .
you can have winds 20 to 40 miles an hour .
it 's actually a wind-chill factor which is lower than a summer day on mars .
i remember one time being up near the summit , i reached into my down jacket for a drink from my water bottle , inside my down jacket , only to discover that the water was already frozen solid .
that gives you an idea of just how severe things are near the summit .
ok , this is the route up everest .
it starts at base camp , at 17,500 feet .
camp one , 2,000 feet higher .
camp two , another 2,000 feet higher up , what 's called the western cwm .
campthree is at the base of lhotse , which is the fourth highest mountain in the world , but it 's dwarfed by everest .
and then camp four is the highest camp ; that 's 3,000 feet short of the summit .
this is a view of base camp .
this is pitched on a glacier at 17,500 feet .
it 's the highest point you can bring your yaks before you have to unload .
and this is what they unloaded for me : i had four yak loads of medical supplies , which are dumped in a tent , and here i am trying to arrange things .
this was our expedition .
it was a national geographic expedition , but it was organized by the explorers club .
there were three other expeditions on the mountain , an american team , a new zealand team and an imax team .
and , after actually two months of preparation , we built our camps all the way up the mountain .
this is a view looking up the icefall , the first 2,000 feet of the climb up from base camp .
and here 's a picture in the icefall ; it 's a waterfall , but it 's frozen , but it moves very slowly , and it actually changes every day .
when you 're in it , you 're like a rat in a maze ; you ca n't even see over the top .
this is near the top of the icefall .
you want to climb through at night when the ice is frozen .
that way , it 's less likely to tumble down on you .
these are some climbers reaching the top of the icefall just at sun-up .
this is me crossing a crevasse .
we cross on aluminum ladders with safety ropes attached .
that 's another crevasse .
some of these things are 10 stories deep or more , and one of my climbing friends says that the reason we actually climb at night is because if we ever saw the bottom of what we 're climbing over , we would never do it .
okay . this is camp one .
it 's the first flat spot you can reach after you get up to the top of the icefall .
and from there we climb up to camp two , which is sort of the foreground .
these are climbers moving up the lhotse face , that mountain toward camp three .
they 're on fixed ropes here .
a fall here , if you were n't roped in , would be 5,000 feet down .
this is a view taken from camp three .
you can see the lhotse face is in profile , it 's about a 45 degree angle . it takes two days to climb it , so you put the camp halfway through .
if you notice , the summit of everest is black .
there 's no ice over it .
and that 's because everest is so high , it 's in the jet stream , and winds are constantly scouring the face , so no snow gets to accumulate .
what looks like a cloud behind the summit ridge is actually snow being blown off the summit .
this is on the way up from camp three to camp four , moving in , up through the clouds .
and this is at camp four .
once you get to camp four , you have maybe 24 hours to decide if you 're going to go for the summit or not .
everybody 's on oxygen , your supplies are limited , and you either have to go up or go down , make that decision very quickly .
this is a picture of rob hall .
he was the leader of the new zealand team .
this is a radio he used later to call his wife that i 'll tell you about .
these are some climbers waiting to go to the summit .
they 're up at camp four , and you can see that there 's wind blowing off the summit .
this is not good weather to climb in , so the climbers are just waiting , hoping that the wind 's going to die down .
and , in fact , the wind does die down at night .
it becomes very calm , there 's no wind at all .
this looks like a good chance to go for the summit .
so here are some climbers starting out for the summit on what 's called the triangular face .
it 's the first part of climb .
it 's done in the dark , because it 's actually less steep than what comes next , and you can gain daylight hours if you do this in the dark .
so that 's what happened .
the climbers got on the southeast ridge .
this is the view looking at the southeast ridge .
the summit would be in the foreground .
from here , it 's about 1,500 feet up at a 30-degree angle to the summit .
but what happened that year was the wind suddenly and unexpectedly picked up .
a storm blew in that no one was anticipating .
you can see here some ferocious winds blowing snow way high off the summit .
and there were climbers on that summit ridge .
this is a picture of me in that area taken a year before , and you can see i 've got an oxygen mask on with a rebreather .
i have an oxygen hose connected here .
you can see on this climber , we have two oxygen tanks in the backpack - little titanium tanks , very lightweight - and we 're not carrying much else .
this is all you 've got . you 're very exposed on the summit ridge .
ok , this is a view taken on the summit ridge itself .
this is on the way toward the summit , on that 1,500-foot bridge .
all the climbers here are climbing unroped , and the reason is because the drop off is so sheer on either side that if you were roped to somebody , you 'd wind up just pulling them off with you .
so each person climbs individually .
and it 's not a straight path at all , it 's very difficult climbing , and there 's always the risk of falling on either side .
if you fall to your left , you 're going to fall 8,000 feet into nepal ; if you fall to your right , you 're going to fall 12,000 feet into tibet .
so it 's probably better to fall into tibet because you 'll live longer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , either way , you fall for the rest of your life .
ok . those climbers were up near the summit , along that summit ridge that you see up there , and i was down here in camp three .
my expedition was down in camp three , while these guys were up there in the storm .
the storm was so fierce that we had to lay , fully dressed , fully equipped , laid out on the tent floor to stop the tent from blowing off the mountain .
it was the worst winds i 've ever seen .
and the climbers up on the ridge were that much higher , 2,000 feet higher , and completely exposed to the elements .
we were in radio contact with some of them .
this is a view taken along the summit ridge .
rob hall , we heard by radio , was up here , at this point in the storm with doug hansen .
and we heard that rob was ok , but doug was too weak to come down .
he was exhausted , and rob was staying with him .
we also got some bad news in the storm that beck weathers , another climber , had collapsed in the snow and was dead .
there were still 18 other climbers that we were n't aware of their condition .
they were lost . there was total confusion on the mountain ; all the stories were confusing , most of them were conflicting .
we really had no idea what was going on during that storm .
we were just hunkered down in our tents at camp three .
our two strongest climbers , todd burleson and pete athans , decided to go up to try to rescue who they could even though there was a ferocious storm going .
they tried to radio a message to rob hall , who was a superb climber stuck , sort of , with a weak climber up near the summit .
i expected them to say to rob , " hold on . we 're coming . "
but in fact , what they said was , " leave doug and come down yourself .
there 's no chance of saving him , and just try to save yourself at this point . "
and rob got that message , but his answer was , " we 're both listening . "
todd and pete got up to the summit ridge , up in here , and it was a scene of complete chaos up there .
but they did what they could to stabilize the people .
i gave them radio advice from camp three , and we sent down the climbers that could make it down under their own power .
the ones that could n't we just sort of decided to leave up at camp four .
so the climbers were coming down along this route .
this is taken from camp three , where i was .
and they all came by me so i could take a look at them and see what i could do for them , which is really not much , because camp three is a little notch cut in the ice in the middle of a 45-degree angle .
you can barely stand outside the tent .
it 's really cold ; it 's 24,000 feet .
the only supplies i had at that altitude were two plastic bags with preloaded syringes of painkiller and steroids .
so , as the climbers came by me , i sort of assessed whether or not they were in condition to continue on further down .
the ones that were n't that lucid or were not that well coordinated , i would give an injection of steroids to try to give them some period of lucidity and coordination where they could then work their way further down the mountain .
it 's so awkward to work up there that sometimes i even gave the injections right through their clothes .
it was just too hard to maneuver any other way up there .
while i was taking care of them , we got more news about rob hall .
there was no way we could get up high enough to rescue him .
he called in to say that he was alone now .
apparently , doug had died higher up on the mountain .
but rob was now too weak to come down himself , and with the fierce winds and up at that altitude , he was just beyond rescue and he knew it .
at that point , he asked to be paged into his wife .
he was carrying a radio .
his wife was home in new zealand , seven months pregnant with their first child , and rob asked to be patched into her . that was done , and rob and his wife had their last conversation .
they picked the name for their baby .
rob then signed off , and that was the last we ever heard of him .
i was faced with treating a lot of critically ill patients at 24,000 feet , which was an impossibility .
so what we did was , we got the victims down to 21,000 feet , where it was easier for me to treat them .
this was my medical kit .
it 's a tackle box filled with medical supplies .
this is what i carried up the mountain .
i had more supplies lower down , which i asked to be brought up to meet me at the lower camp .
and this was scene at the lower camp .
the survivors came in one by one .
some of them were hypothermic , some of them were frostbitten , some were both .
what we did was try to warm them up as best we could , put oxygen on them and try to revive them , which is difficult to do at 21,000 feet , when the tent is freezing .
this is some severe frostbite on the feet , severe frostbite on the nose .
this climber was snow blind .
as i was taking care of these climbers , we got a startling experience .
out of nowhere , beck weathers , who we had already been told was dead , stumbled into the tent , just like a mummy , he walked into the tent .
i expected him to be incoherent , but , in fact , he walked into the tent and said to me , " hi , ken . where should i sit ? "
and then he said , " do you accept my health insurance ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he really said that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he was completely lucid , but he was very severely frostbitten .
you can see his hand is completely white ; his face , his nose , is burned .
first , it turns white , and then when it 's completed necrosis , it turns black , and then it falls off .
it 's the last stage , just like a scar .
so , as i was taking care of beck , he related what had been going on up there .
he said he had gotten lost in the storm , collapsed in the snow , and just laid there , unable to move .
some climbers had come by and looked at him , and he heard them say , " he 's dead . "
but beck was n't dead ; he heard that , but he was completely unable to move .
he was in some sort of catatonic state where he could be aware of his surroundings , but could n't even blink to indicate that he was alive .
so the climbers passed him by , and beck lay there for a day , a night and another day , in the snow .
and then he said to himself , " i do n't want to die .
i have a family to come back to . "
and the thoughts of his family , his kids and his wife , generated enough energy , enough motivation in him , so that he actually got up .
after laying in the snow that long a time , he got up and found his way back to the camp .
and beck told me that story very quietly , but i was absolutely stunned by it .
i could n't imagine anybody laying in the snow that long a time and then getting up .
he apparently reversed an irreversible hypothermia .
and i can only try to speculate on how he did it .
so , what if we had beck hooked up to a spect scan , something that could actually measure brain function ?
just very simply , the three parts of the brain : the frontal lobe , where you focus your attention and concentration ; you have the temporal lobe , where you form images and keep memories ; and the posterior part of your brain , which contains the cerebellum , which controls motion ; and the brain stem , where you have your basic maintenance functions , like heartbeat and respiration .
so let 's take a cut through the brain here , and imagine that beck was hooked up to a spect scan .
this measures dynamic blood flow and therefore energy flow within the brain .
so you have the prefrontal cortex here , lighting up in red .
this is a pretty evenly distributed scan .
you have the middle area , where the temporal lobe might be , in here , and the posterior portion , where the maintenance functions are in the back .
this is a roughly normal scan , showing equal distribution of energy .
now , you go to this one and you see how much more the frontal lobes are lighting up .
this might be what beck would be experiencing when he realizes he 's in danger .
he 's focusing all his attention on getting himself out of trouble .
these parts of the brain are quieting down .
he 's not thinking about his family or anybody else at this point , and he 's working pretty hard .
he 's trying to get his muscles going and get out of this .
ok , but he 's losing ground here .
he 's running out of energy .
it 's too cold ; he ca n't keep his metabolic fires going , and , you see , there 's no more red here ; his brain is quieting down .
he 's collapsed in the snow here . everything is quiet , there 's very little red anywhere .
beck is powering down .
he 's dying .
you go on to the next scan , but , in beck 's case , you can see that the middle part of his brain is beginning to light up again .
he 's beginning to think about his family .
he 's beginning to have images that are motivating him to get up .
he 's developing energy in this area through thought .
and this is how he 's going to turn thought back into action .
this part of the brain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus .
it 's an area in which a lot of neuroscientists believe the seat of will exists .
this is where people make decisions , where they develop willpower .
and , you can see , there 's an energy flow going from the mid portion of his brain , where he 's got images of his family , into this area , which is powering his will .
okay . this is getting stronger and stronger to the point where it 's actually going to be a motivating factor .
he 's going to develop enough energy in that area - after a day , a night and a day - to actually motivate himself to get up .
and you can see here , he 's starting to get more energy into the frontal lobe .
he 's beginning to focus , he can concentrate now .
he 's thinking about what he 's got to do to save himself .
so this energy has been transmitted up toward the front of his brain , and it 's getting quieter down here , but he 's using this energy to think about what he has to do to get himself going .
and then , that energy is sort of spreading throughout his thought areas .
he 's not thinking about his family now , and he 's getting himself motivated .
this is the posterior part , where his muscles are going to be moving , and he 's going to be pacing himself .
his heart and lungs are going to pick up speed .
so this is what i can speculate might have been going on had we been able to do a spect scan on beck during this survival epic .
so here i am taking care of beck at 21,000 feet , and i felt what i was doing was completely trivial compared to what he had done for himself .
it just shows you what the power of the mind can do .
he was critically ill , there were other critically ill patients ; luckily , we were able to get a helicopter in to rescue these guys .
a helicopter came in at 21,000 feet and carried out the highest helicopter rescue in history .
it was able to land on the ice , take away beck and the other survivors , one by one , and get them off to kathmandu in a clinic before we even got back to base camp .
this is a scene at base camp , at one of the camps where some of the climbers were lost .
and we had a memorial service there a few days later .
these are serphas lighting juniper branches .
they believe juniper smoke is holy .
and the climbers stood around on the high rocks and spoke of the climbers who were lost up near the summit , turning to the mountain , actually , to talk to them directly .
there were five climbers lost here .
this was scott fischer , rob hall , andy harris , doug hansen and yasuko namba .
and one more climber should have died that day , but did n't , and that 's beck weathers .
he was able to survive because he was able to generate that incredible willpower , he was able to use all the power of his mind to save himself .
these are tibetan prayer flags .
these sherpas believe that if you write prayers on these flags , the message will be carried up to the gods , and that year , beck 's message was answered .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- penelope jagessar chaffer : i was going to ask if there 's a doctor in the house .
no , i 'm just joking .
it 's interesting , because it was six years ago when i was pregnant with my first child that i discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body .
now it 's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin .
and these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors .
that was the start of my journey to make this film , " toxic baby . "
and it does n't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue .
one is that you and i all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents did n't have .
and many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we 're seeing across industrialized nations .
i 'll show you some statistics .
so for example , in the united kingdom , the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation .
very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the u.s.
in canada , we 're now looking at one in 10 canadian children with asthma .
that 's a four-fold increase .
again , similar story around the world .
in the united states , probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities .
again , we 're seeing that trend across europe , across north america .
and in europe , there 's certain parts of europe , where we 're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects .
interestingly , one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the u.s.
so a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes , premature puberty .
so it 's interesting for me , when i 'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things , that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tyrone hayes : it was a surprise to me as well that i would be talking about pesticides , that i 'd be talking about public health , because , in fact , i never thought i would do anything useful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- frogs .
in fact , my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when i was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if i would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians , or my frogs .
it turns out , atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world .
it 's the number one contaminant of groundwater , drinking water , rain water .
in 2003 , after my studies , it was banned in the european union , but in that same year , the united states epa re-registered the compound .
we were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine - 0.1 parts per billion - that it produced animals that look like this .
these are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes , two ovaries , another large testis , more ovaries , which is not normal ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even for amphibians .
in some cases , another species like the north american leopard frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes .
and you can see these large , yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male 's testes .
now my wife tells me , and i 'm sure penelope can as well , that there 's nothing more painful than childbirth - which that i 'll never experience , i ca n't really argue that - but i would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in recent studies that we 've published , we 've shown that some of these animals when they 're exposed to atrazine , some of the males grow up and completely become females .
so these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship .
and not only do these genetic males mate with other males , they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they 're genetic males .
what we proposed , and what we 've now generated support for , is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance .
normally the testes should make testosterone , the male hormone .
but what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme , the machinery if you will , aromatase , that converts testosterone into estrogen .
and as a result , these exposed males lose their testosterone , they 're chemically castrated , and they 're subsequently feminized because now they 're making the female hormone .
now this is what brought me to the human-related issues .
because it turns out that the number one cancer in women , breast cancer , is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase .
so when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast , aromatase converts androgens into estrogens , and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads .
in fact , this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole , which blocks aromatase , blocks estrogen , so that if you developed a mutated cell , it does n't grow into a tumor .
now what 's interesting is , of course , that we 're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine , the number one contaminant in drinking water , that does the opposite - turns on aromatase , increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors , breast cancer , in humans .
what 's interesting is , in fact , the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine , the breast cancer promoter , now sells us the blocker - the exact same company .
and so i find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it , we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment .
pjc : so speaking of estrogen , one of the other compounds that tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol a , bpa , which has been in the news recently .
it 's a plasticizer .
it 's a compound that 's found in polycarbonate plastic , which is what baby bottles are made out of .
and what 's interesting about bpa is that it 's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy .
and there have been many , many , many studies that have shown that bpa leaches from babies ' bottles into the formula , into the milk , and therefore into the babies .
so we 're dosing our babies , our newborns , our infants , with a synthetic estrogen .
now two weeks ago or so , the european union passed a law banning the use of bpa in babies ' bottles and sippy cups .
and for those of you who are not parents , sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles .
but just two weeks before that , the u.s. senate refused to even debate the banning of bpa in babies ' bottles and sippy cups .
so it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is .
-lrb- video -rrb- pjc : with many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol a , it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent 's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children .
the baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure .
however , if we parents are unaware , we are leaving our children to fend for themselves .
th : and what penelope says here is even more true .
for those of you who do n't know , we 're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction .
scientists agree now .
we are losing species from the earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared , and leading that loss are amphibians .
80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline .
and i believe , many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline .
in part , amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they do n't have protection from contaminants in the water - no eggshells , no membranes and no placenta .
in fact , our invention - by " our " i mean we mammals - one of our big inventions was the placenta .
but we also start out as aquatic organisms .
but it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals , the placenta , can not evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we 're generating new chemicals that it 's never seen before .
the evidence of that is that studies in rats , again with atrazine , show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion .
because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones .
of those rats that do n't abort , atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man 's disease .
of those that do n't abort , atrazine causes impaired mammary , or breast , development in the exposed daughters in utero , so that their breast do n't develop properly .
and as a result , when those rats grow up , their pups experience retarded growth and development because they ca n't make enough milk to nourish their pups .
so the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to .
and given the life of many of these chemicals , generations , years , dozens of years , that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren 's grandchildren by things that we 're putting into the environment today .
and this is not just philosophical , it 's already known , that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen , pcbs , ddt cross the placenta and effectively determine and obesity and diabetes already when the baby 's in the womb .
in addition to that , after the baby 's born , our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they 're born .
we already know that chemicals like ddt and des and atrazine can also pass over into milk , again , affecting our babies even after their born .
pjc : so when tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ , i 'm thinking , how do i demonstrate that ?
how do you show that ?
and it 's interesting when you make a film like this , because you 're stuck trying to visualize science that there 's no visualization for .
and i have to take a little bit of artistic license .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- ringing -rrb- old man : placenta control .
what is it ?
oh what ?
-lrb- snoring -rrb- -lrb- honk -rrb- puffuffuff , what ?
perflourooctanoic acid .
blimey .
never heard of it .
pjc : and neither had i actually before i started making this film .
and so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child , it made me start to think , what would my fetus say to me ?
what would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- child : today , i had some octyphenols , some artificial musks and some bisphenol a.
help me .
pjc : it 's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this .
this is our issue , because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children .
we are in effect polluting our children .
and this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when i found out i was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat .
so my child 's death , my baby 's death , really brought home the resonance of what i was trying to make in this film .
and it 's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story , which is not what you originally intend .
and so when tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment , this is my contaminated environment .
this is my toxic baby .
and that 's something that 's just profound and sad , but astonishing because so many of us do n't actually know this .
th : one of this things that 's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at tedwomen is that , well , i think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said , " turn to the man at your table and tell them , ' when the revolution starts , we 've got your back . " ' the truth is , women , you 've had our back on this issue for a very long time , starting with rachel carson 's " silent spring " to theo colborn 's " our stolen future " to sandra steingraber 's books " living downstream " and " having faith . "
and perhaps it 's the connection to our next generation - like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago - perhaps it 's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area .
but for the men here , i want to say it 's not just women and children that are at risk .
and the frogs that are exposed to atrazine , the testes are full of holes and spaces , because the hormone imbalance , instead of allowing sperm to be generated , such as in the testis here , the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent .
it 's not just my work in amphibians , but similar work has been shown in fish in europe , holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from south america and in rats , an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well .
and of course , we do n't do these experiments in humans , but just by coincidence , my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count , low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine .
these are just men who live in an agricultural community .
men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine .
and the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine , up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men .
of course , most of them , 90 percent are mexican , mexican-american .
and it 's not just atrazine they 're exposed to .
they 're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin , which was originally used as a nerve gas .
and many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50 .
it should n't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us , just like rachel carson and others have warned .
as evident in this slide from lake nabugabo in uganda , the agricultural runoff from this crop , which goes into these buckets , is the sole source of drinking , cooking and bathing water for this village .
now if i told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes , the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear .
you would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it .
the problem is , in my village , oakland , in most of our villages , we do n't see that connection .
we turn on the faucet , the water comes out , we assume it 's safe , and we assume that we are masters of our environment , rather than being part of it .
pjc : so it does n't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue .
and i kept thinking over and over again this question .
we know so much about global warming and climate change , and yet , we have no concept of what i 've been calling internal environmentalism .
we know what we 're putting out there , we have a sense of those repercussions , but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things , or things are put into our bodies .
and it 's my feeling and it 's my urging being here to know that , as we women move forward as the communicators of this , but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children , bearing the children , we hold most of the buying power in the household , is that it 's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of tyrone and other scientists around the world .
and my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it 's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps , but it 's also about our children as well .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was in new york during hurricane sandy , and this little white dog called maui was staying with me .
half the city was dark because of a power cut , and i was living on the dark side .
now , maui was terrified of the dark , so i had to carry him up the stairs , actually down the stairs first , for his walk , and then bring him back up .
i was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day .
and through all of this , i had to hold a torch between my teeth .
the stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread .
for a shower , i walked 40 blocks to a branch of my gym .
but these were not the major preoccupations of my day .
it was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices .
i started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points .
i was n't the only one .
even in the rain , people stood between madison and 5th avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street .
nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology , and yet here we were , obsessed about being wired .
i think there 's nothing like a crisis to tell you what 's really important and what 's not , and sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter .
the self as we once knew it no longer exists , and i think that an abstract , digital universe has become a part of our identity , and i want to talk to you about what i think that means .
i 'm a novelist , and i 'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common .
they 're both stories , interpretations .
you and i can experience things without a story .
we might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless .
but the larger sense that we have of our lives , the slightly more abstract one , is indirect .
our story of our life is based on direct experience , but it 's embellished .
a novel needs scene after scene to build , and the story of our life needs an arc as well .
it needs months and years .
discrete moments from our lives are its chapters .
but the story is not about these chapters .
it 's the whole book .
it 's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness , the victories and the disappointments , but it 's because how because of these , and sometimes , more importantly , in spite of these , we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves .
our story , therefore , needs two dimensions of time : a long arc of time that is our lifespan , and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment .
now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment , but the one that narrates needs several moments , a whole sequence of them , and that 's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time .
now , the flow of time is embedded in everything , in the erosion of a grain of sand , in the budding of a little bud into a rose .
without it , we would have no music .
our own emotions and state of mind often encode time , regret or nostalgia about the past , hope or dread about the future .
i think that technology has altered that flow of time .
the overall time that we have for our narrative , our lifespan , has been increasing , but the smallest measure , the moment , has shrunk .
it has shrunk because our instruments enable us in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time , and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding of the material world , and this granular understanding has generated reams of data that our brains can no longer comprehend and for which we need more and more complicated computers .
all of this to say that the gap between what we can perceive and what we can measure is only going to widen .
science can do things with and in a picosecond , but you and i are never going to have the inner experience of a millionth of a millionth of a second .
you and i answer only to nature 's rhythm and flow , to the sun , the moon and the seasons , and this is why we need that long arc of time with the past , the present and the future to see things for what they are , to separate signal from noise and the self from sensations .
we need time 's arrow to understand cause and effect , not just in the material world , but in our own intentions and our motivations .
what happens when that arrow goes awry ?
what happens when time warps ?
so many of us today have the sensation that time 's arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once .
this is because time does n't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one .
we all know that the internet has shrunk space as well as time .
far away over there is now here .
news from india is a stream on my smartphone app whether i 'm in new york or new delhi .
and that 's not all .
your last job , your dinner reservations from last year , your former friends , lie on a flat plain with today 's friends , because the internet also archives , and it warps the past .
with no distinction left between the past , the present and the future , and the here or there , we are left with this moment everywhere , this moment that i 'll call the digital now .
just how can we prioritize in the landscape of the digital now ?
this digital now is not the present , because it 's always a few seconds ahead , with twitter streams that are already trending and news from other time zones .
this is n't the now of a shooting pain in your foot or the second that you bite into a pastry or the three hours that you lose yourself in a great book .
this now bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state .
its focus , instead , is to distract us at every turn on the road .
every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else .
are you reading an interview by an author ?
why not buy his book ? tweet it . share it .
like it . find other books exactly like his .
find other people reading those books .
travel can be liberating , but when it is incessant , we become permanent exiles without repose .
choice is freedom , but not when it 's constantly for its own sake .
not just is the digital now far from the present , but it 's in direct competition with it , and this is because not just am i absent from it , but so are you .
not just are we absent from it , but so is everyone else .
and therein lies its greatest convenience and horror .
i can order foreign language books in the middle of the night , shop for parisian macarons , and leave video messages that get picked up later .
at all times , i can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you , while i sustain the illusion that i 'm tapped into you in real time .
sandy was a reminder of how such an illusion can shatter .
there were those with power and water , and those without .
there are those who went back to their lives , and those who are still displaced after so many months .
for some reason , technology seems to perpetuate the illusion for those who have it that everyone does , and then , like an ironic slap in the face , it makes it true .
for example , it 's said that there are more people in india with access to cell phones than toilets .
now if this rift , which is already so great in many parts of the world , between the lack of infrastructure and the spread of technology , is n't somehow bridged , there will be ruptures between the digital and the real .
for us as individuals who live in the digital now and spend most of our waking moments in it , the challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous .
how does one live inside distraction ?
we might think that those younger than us , those who are born into this , will adapt more naturally .
possibly , but i remember my childhood .
i remember my grandfather revising the capitals of the world with me .
buda and pest were separated by the danube , and vienna had a spanish riding school .
if i were a child today , i could easily learn this information with apps and hyperlinks , but it really would n't be the same , because much later , i went to vienna , and i went to the spanish riding school , and i could feel my grandfather right beside me .
night after night , he took me up on the terrace , on his shoulders , and pointed out jupiter and saturn and the great bear to me .
and even here , when i look at the great bear , i get back that feeling of being a child , hanging onto his head and trying to balance myself on his shoulder , and i can get back that feeling of being a child again .
what i had with my grandfather was wrapped so often in information and knowledge and fact , but it was about so much more than information or knowledge or fact .
time-warping technology challenges our deepest core , because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget , even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable .
we want to clutch , and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments .
they 're like soap bubbles that disappear when we touch them .
by archiving everything , we think that we can store it , but time is not data .
it can not be stored .
you and i know exactly what it means like to be truly present in a moment .
it might have happened while we were playing an instrument , or looking into the eyes of someone we 've known for a very long time .
at such moments , our selves are complete .
the self that lives in the long narrative arc and the self that experiences the moment become one .
the present encapsulates the past and a promise for the future .
the present joins a flow of time from before and after .
i first experienced these feelings with my grandmother .
i wanted to learn to skip , and she found an old rope and she tucked up her sari and she jumped over it .
i wanted to learn to cook , and she kept me in the kitchen , cutting , cubing and chopping for a whole month .
my grandmother taught me that things happen in the time they take , that time ca n't be fought , and because it will pass and it will move , we owe the present moment our full attention .
attention is time .
one of my yoga instructors once said that love is attention , and definitely from my grandmother , love and attention were one and the same thing .
the digital world cannibalizes time , and in doing so , i want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves .
it threatens the flow of love .
but we do n't need to let it .
we can choose otherwise .
we 've seen again and again just how creative technology can be , and in our lives and in our actions , we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it .
we can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time .
we can choose to take time back .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- being a child , and sort of crawling around the house , i remember these turkish carpets , and there were these scenes , these battle scenes , these love scenes .
i mean , look , this animal is trying to fight back this spear from this soldier .
and my mom took these pictures actually , last week , of our carpets , and i remember this to this day .
there was another object , this sort of towering piece of furniture with creatures and gargoyles and nudity - pretty scary stuff , when you 're a little kid .
what i remember today from this is that objects tell stories , so storytelling has been a really strong influence in my work .
and then there was another influence .
i was a teenager , and at 15 or 16 , i guess like all teenagers , we want to just do what we love and what we believe in .
and so , i fused together the two things i loved the most , which was skiing and windsurfing .
those are pretty good escapes from the drab weather in switzerland .
so , i created this compilation of the two : i took my skis and i took a board and i put a mast foot in there , and some foot straps , and some metal fins , and here i was , going really fast on frozen lakes .
it was really a death trap . i mean , it was incredible , it worked incredibly well , but it was really dangerous .
and i realized then i had to go to design school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , look at those graphics there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i went to design school , and it was the early ' 90s when i finished .
and i saw something extraordinary happening in silicon valley , so i wanted to be there , and i saw that the computer was coming into our homes , that it had to change in order to be with us in our homes .
and so i got myself a job and i was working for a consultancy , and we would get in to these meetings , and these managers would come in , and they would say , " well , what we 're going to do here is really important , you know . "
and they would give the projects code names , you know , mostly from " star wars , " actually : things like c3po , yoda , luke .
so , in anticipation , i would be this young designer in the back of the room , and i would raise my hand , and i would ask questions .
i mean , in retrospect , probably stupid questions , but things like , " what 's this caps lock key for ? "
or " what 's this num lock key for ? " you know , that thing ?
" you know , do people really use it ?
do they need it ? do they want it in their homes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i realized then is , they did n't really want to change the legacy stuff ; they did n't want to change the insides .
they were really looking for us , the designers , to create the skins , to put some pretty stuff outside of the box .
and i did n't want to be a colorist .
it was n't what i wanted to do .
i did n't want to be a stylist in this way .
and then i saw this quote : " advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i had to start on my own . so i moved to san francisco , and i started a little company , fuseproject .
and what i wanted to work on is important stuff .
and i wanted to really not just work on the skins , but i wanted to work on the entire human experience .
and so the first projects were sort of humble , but they took technology and maybe made it into things that people would use in a new way , and maybe finding some new functionality .
this is a watch we made for mini cooper , the car company , right when it launched , and it 's the first watch that has a display that switches from horizontal to vertical .
and that allows me to check my timer discretely , here , without bending my elbow .
and other projects , which were really about transformation , about matching the human need .
this is a little piece of furniture for an italian manufacturer , and it ships completely flat , and then it folds into a coffee table and a stool and whatnot .
and something a little bit more experimental : this is a light fixture for swarovski , and what it does is , it changes shape .
so , it goes from a circle , to a round , to a square , to a figure eight .
and just by drawing on a little computer tablet , the entire light fixture adjusts to what shape you want .
and then finally , the leaf lamp for herman miller .
this is a pretty involved process ; it took us about four and a half years .
but i really was looking for creating a unique experience of light , a new experience of light .
so , we had to design both the light and the light bulb .
and that 's a unique opportunity , i would say , in design .
and the new experience i was looking for is giving the choice for the user to go from a warm , sort of glowing kind of mood light , all the way to a bright work light .
so , the light bulb actually does that .
it allows the person to switch , and to mix these two colorations .
and it 's done in a very simple way : one just touches the base of the light , and on one side , you can mix the brightness , and on the other , the coloration of the light .
so , all of these projects have a humanistic sense to them , and i think as designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship between our work and the world , whether it 's for business , or , as i 'm going to show , on some civic-type projects .
because i think everybody agrees that as designers we bring value to business , value to the users also , but i think it 's the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value .
and the values we bring can be about environmental issues , about sustainability , about lower power consumption .
you know , they can be about function and beauty ; they can be about business strategy .
but designers are really the glue that brings these things together .
so jawbone is a project that you 're familiar with , and it has a humanistic technology .
it feels your skin . it rests on your skin , and it knows when it is you 're talking .
and by knowing when it is you 're talking , it gets rid of the other noises that it knows about , which is the environmental noises .
but the other thing that is humanistic about jawbone is that we really decided to take out all the techie stuff , and all the nerdy stuff out of it , and try to make it as beautiful as we can .
i mean , think about it : the care we take in selecting sunglasses , or jewelry , or accessories is really important , so if it is n't beautiful , it really does n't belong on your face .
and this is what we 're pursuing here .
but how we work on jawbone is really unique .
i want to point at something here , on the left .
this is the board , this is one of the things that goes inside that makes this technology work .
but this is the design process : there 's somebody changing the board , putting tracers on the board , changing the location of the ics , as the designers on the other side are doing the work .
so , it 's not about slapping skins , anymore , on a technology .
it 's really about designing from the inside out .
and then , on the other side of the room , the designers are making small adjustments , sketching , drawing by hand , putting it in the computer .
and it 's what i call being design driven .
you know , there is some push and pull , but design is really helping define the whole experience from the inside out .
and then , of course , design is never done .
and this is - the other new way that is unique in how we work is , because it 's never done , you have to do all this other stuff .
the packaging , and the website , and you need to continue to really touch the user , in many ways .
but how do you retain somebody , when it 's never done ?
and hosain rahman , the ceo of aliph jawbone , you know , really understands that you need a different structure .
so , in a way , the different structure is that we 're partners , it 's a partnership . we can continue to work and dedicate ourselves to this project , and then we also share in the rewards .
and here 's another project , another partnership-type approach .
this is called y water , and it 's this guy from los angeles , thomas arndt , austrian originally , who came to us , and all he wanted to do was to create a healthy drink , or an organic drink for his kids , to replace the high-sugar-content sodas that he 's trying to get them away from .
so , we worked on this bottle , and it 's completely symmetrical in every dimension .
and this allows the bottle to turn into a game .
the bottles connect together , and you can create different shapes , different forms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and then while we were doing this , the shape of the bottle upside down reminded us of a y , and then we thought , well these words , " why " and " why not , " are probably the most important words that kids ask .
so we called it y water . and so this is another place where it all comes together in the same room : the three-dimensional design , the ideas , the branding , it all becomes deeply connected .
and then the other thing about this project is , we bring intellectual property , we bring a marketing approach , we bring all this stuff , but i think , at the end of the day , what we bring is these values , and these values create a soul for the companies we work with .
and it 's especially rewarding when your design work becomes a creative endeavor , when others can be creative and do more with it .
here 's another project , which i think really emulates that .
this is the one laptop per child , the $ 100 laptop .
this picture is incredible .
in nigeria , people carry their most precious belongings on their heads .
this girl is going to school with a laptop on her head .
i mean , to me , it just means so much .
but when nicholas negroponte - and he has spoken about this project a lot , he 's the founder of olpc - came to us about two and a half years ago , there were some clear ideas .
he wanted to bring education and he wanted to bring technology , and those are pillars of his life , but also pillars of the mission of one laptop per child .
but the third pillar that he talked about was design .
and at the time , i was n't really working on computers .
i did n't really want to , from the previous adventure .
but what he said was really significant , is that design was going to be why the kids were going to love this product , how we were going to make it low cost , robust .
and plus , he said he was going to get rid of the caps lock key - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and the num lock key , too .
so , i was convinced . we designed it to be iconic , to look different . to look like it 's for a kid , but not like a toy .
and then the integration of all these great technologies , which you 've heard about , the wi-fi antennas that allow the kids to connect ; the screen , which you can read in sunlight ; the keyboard , which is made out of rubber , and it 's protected from the environment .
you know , all these great technologies really happened because of the passion and the olpc people and the engineers .
they fought the suppliers , they fought the manufacturers .
i mean , they fought like animals for this to remain they way it is .
and in a way , it is that will that makes projects like this one - allows the process from not destroying the original idea .
and i think this is something really important .
so , now you get these pictures - you get up in the morning , and you see the kids in nigeria and you see them in uruguay with their computers , and in mongolia .
and we went away from obviously the beige .
i mean it 's colorful , it 's fun .
in fact , you can see each logo is a little bit different .
it 's because we were able to run , during the manufacturing process , 20 colors for the x and the o , which is the name of the computer , and by mixing them on the manufacturing floor , you get 20 times 20 : you get 400 different options there .
so , the lessons from seeing the kids using them in the developing world are incredible .
but this is my nephew , anthony , in switzerland , and he had the laptop for an afternoon , and i had to take it back . it was hard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it was a prototype . and a month and a half later , i come back to switzerland , and there he is playing with his own version .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like paper , paper and cardboard .
so , i 'm going to finish with one last project , and this is a little bit more of adult play .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some of you might have heard about the new york city condom .
it 's actually just launched , actually launched on valentine 's day , february 14 , about 10 days ago .
so , the department of health in new york came to us , and they needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free to the citizens of new york .
so a pretty big endeavor , and we worked on the dispensers .
these are the dispensers . there 's this friendly shape .
it 's a little bit like designing a fire hydrant , and it has to be easily serviceable : you have to know where it is and what it does .
and we also designed the condoms themselves .
and i was just in new york at the launch , and i went to see all these places where they 're installed : this is at a puerto rican little mom-and-pop store ; at a bar in christopher street ; at a pool hall .
i mean , they 're being installed in homeless clinics - everywhere .
of course , clubs and discos , too .
and here 's the public service announcement for this project .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- get some .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this is really where design is able to create a conversation .
i was in these venues , and people were , you know , really into getting them . they were excited .
it was breaking the ice , it was getting over a stigma , and i think that 's also what design can do .
so , i was going to throw some condoms in the room and whatnot , but i 'm not sure it 's the etiquette here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah ? all right , all right . i have only a few .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i have more , you can always ask me for some more later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if anybody asks why you 're carrying a condom , you can just say you like the design .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'll finish with just one thought : if we all work together on creating value , but if we really keep in mind the values of the work that we do , i think we can change the work that we do .
we can change these values , can change the companies we work with , and eventually , together , maybe we can change the world .
so , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much everyone from ted , and chris and amy in particular .
i can not believe i 'm here .
i have not slept in weeks .
neil and i were sitting there comparing how little we 've slept in anticipation for this . i 've never been so nervous - and i do this when i 'm nervous , i just realized . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organization called 826 valencia , and then i 'm going to talk about how we all might join in and do similar things .
back in about 2000 , i was living in brooklyn , i was trying to finish my first book , i was wandering around dazed every day because i wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m.
so i would walk around in a daze during the day .
i had no mental acuity to speak of during the day , but i had flexible hours .
in the brooklyn neighborhood that i lived in , park slope , there are a lot of writers - it 's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people .
meanwhile , i had grown up around a lot of teachers .
my mom was a teacher , my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching .
and so i was always hearing them talk about their lives and how inspiring they were , and they were really sort of the most hard-working and constantly inspiring people i knew .
but i knew so many of the things they were up against , so many of the struggles they were dealing with .
and one of them was that so many of my friends that were teaching in city schools were having trouble with their students keeping up at grade level , in their reading and writing in particular .
now , so many of these students had come from households where english is n't spoken in the home , where a lot of them have different special needs , learning disabilities . and of course they 're working in schools which sometimes and very often are under-funded .
and so they would talk to me about this and say , " you know , what we really need is just more people , more bodies , more one-on-one attention , more hours , more expertise from people that have skills in english and can work with these students one-on-one . "
now , i would say , " well , why do n't you just work with them one-on-one ? "
and they would say , " well , we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each .
this can lead up to 150 , 180 , 200 students a day .
how can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one-on-one attention ? "
you 'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers .
and so we started talking about this .
and at the same time , i thought about this massive group of people i knew : writers , editors , journalists , graduate students , assistant professors , you name it .
all these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the english word - i hope to have an interest in the english language , but i 'm not speaking it well right now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm trying . that clock has got me .
but everyone that i knew had an interest in the primacy of the written word in terms of nurturing a democracy , nurturing an enlightened life .
and so they had , you know , their time and their interest , but at the same time there was n't a conduit that i knew of in my community to bring these two communities together .
so when i moved back to san francisco , we rented this building .
and the idea was to put mcsweeney 's - mcsweeney 's quarterly , that we published twice or three times a year , and a few other magazines - we were going to move it into an office for the first time .
it used to be in my kitchen in brooklyn .
we were going to move it into an office , and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center .
so we thought , " we 'll have all these writers and editors and everybody - sort of a writing community - coming into the office every day anyway , why do n't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school , get extra help on their written homework , so you have basically no border between these two communities ? "
so the idea was that we would be working on whatever we 're working on , at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you 're doing , or you trade , or you work a little bit later or whatever it is .
you give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood .
so , we had this place , we rented it , the landlord was all for it . we did this mural , that 's a chris ware mural , that basically explains the entire history of the printed word , in mural form - it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road .
so we rented this space .
and everything was great except the landlord said , " well , the space is zoned for retail ; you have to come up with something .
you 've gotta sell something .
you ca n't just have a tutoring center . "
so we thought , " ha ha ! really ! "
and we could n't think of anything necessarily to sell , but we did all the necessary research .
it used to be a weight room , so there were rubber floors below , acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights .
we took all that down , and we found beautiful wooden floors , whitewashed beams and it had the look - while we were renovating this place , somebody said , " you know , it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship . "
and we looked around and somebody else said , " well , you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this is what we did . so it made everybody laugh , and we said , " there 's a point to that .
let 's sell pirate supplies . " this is the pirate supply store .
you see , this is sort of a sketch i did on a napkin .
a great carpenter built all this stuff and you see , we made it look sort of pirate supply-like .
here you see planks sold by the foot and we have supplies to combat scurvy .
we have the peg legs there , that are all handmade and fitted to you .
up at the top , you see the eyepatch display , which is the black column there for everyday use for your eyepatch , and then you have the pastel and other colors for stepping out at night - special occasions , bar mitzvahs and whatever .
so we opened this place . and this is a vat that we fill with treasures that students dig in .
this is replacement eyes in case you lose one .
these are some signs that we have all over the place : " practical joking with pirates . "
while you 're reading the sign , we pull a rope behind the counter and eight mop heads drop on your head .
that was just my one thing - i said we had to have something that drops on people 's heads .
it became mop heads . and this is the fish theater , which is just a saltwater tank with three seats , and then right behind it we set up this space , which was the tutoring center .
so right there is the tutoring center , and then behind the curtain were the mcsweeney 's offices , where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that .
the kids would come in - or we thought they would come in . i should back up .
we set the place up , we opened up , we spent months and months renovating this place .
we had tables , chairs , computers , everything .
i went to a dot-com auction at a holiday inn in palo alto and i bought 11 g4s with a stroke of a paddle .
anyway , we bought ' em , we set everything up and then we waited .
it was started with about 12 of my friends , people that i had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood .
and we sat . and at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalk and it just said , " free tutoring for your english-related and writing-related needs - just come in , it 's all free . "
and we thought , " oh , they 're going to storm the gates , they 're gonna love it . " and they did n't .
and so we waited , we sat at the tables , we waited and waited .
and everybody was becoming very discouraged because it was weeks and weeks that we waited , really , where nobody came in .
and then somebody alerted us to the fact that maybe there was a trust gap , because we were operating behind a pirate supply store . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we never put it together , you know ?
and so then , around that time , i persuaded a woman named nineveh caligari , a longtime san francisco educator - she was teaching in mexico city , she had all the experience necessary , knew everything about education , was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood - i convinced her to move up from mexico city where she was teaching .
she took over as executive director .
immediately , she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything , and so suddenly it was actually full every day .
and what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention .
the goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students .
you know , it 's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention , a student can get one grade level higher .
and so most of these students , english is not spoken in the home .
they come there , many times their parents - you ca n't see it , but there 's a church pew that i bought in a berkeley auction right there - the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored .
so that was the basis of it , was one-on-one attention .
and we found ourselves full every day with kids .
if you 're on valencia street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m. , 2:30 p.m. , you will get run over , often , by the kids and their big backpacks , or whatever , actually running to this space , which is very strange , because it 's school , in a way .
but there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different .
and the other thing was , there was no stigma .
kids were n't going into the " center-for-kids-that-need-more-help , " or something like that . it was 826 valencia .
first of all , it was a pirate supply store , which is insane .
and then secondly , there 's a publishing company in the back .
and so our interns were actually working at the same tables very often , and shoulder-to-shoulder , computer-next-to-computer with the students .
and so it became a tutoring center - publishing center , is what we called it - and a writing center .
they go in , and they might be working with a high school student actually working on a novel - because we had very gifted kids , too .
so there 's no stigma .
they 're all working next to each other . it 's all a creative endeavor .
they 're seeing adults . they 're modeling their behavior .
these adults , they 're working in their field .
they can lean over , ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other .
there 's a lot of cross-pollination . the only problem , especially for the adults working at mcsweeney 's who had n't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up , was that there was just the one bathroom . -lrb- laughter -rrb- with like 60 kids a day , this is a problem .
but you know , there 's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day , working one-on-one , getting all this attention - they go home , they 're finished . they do n't stall .
they do n't do their homework in front of the tv .
they 're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m. , enjoy their family , enjoy other hobbies , get outside , play .
and that makes a happy family .
a bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community .
a bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world .
so the key to it all is homework ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there you have it , you know - one-on-one attention .
so we started off with about 12 volunteers , and then we had about 50 , and then a couple hundred .
and we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster .
and we make it incredibly easy to volunteer .
the key thing is , even if you only have a couple of hours a month , those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder , next to one student , concentrated attention , shining this beam of light on their work , on their thoughts and their self-expression , is going to be absolutely transformative , because so many of the students have not had that ever before .
so we said , " even if you have two hours one sunday every six months , it does n't matter . that 's going to be enough . "
so that 's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast .
then we said , " well , what are we going to do with the space during the day , because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m. ? "
so we started bringing in classes during the day .
so every day , there 's a field trip where they together create a book - you can see it being typed up above .
this is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing .
you just point a camera at a class , and it always looks like this .
so this is one of the books that they do .
notice the title of the book , " the book that was never checked out : titanic . "
and the first line of that book is , " once there was a book named cindy that was about the titanic . "
so , meanwhile , there 's an adult in the back typing this up , taking it completely seriously , which blows their mind .
so then we still had more tutors to use .
this is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events .
the teachers that we work with - and everything is different to teachers - they tell us what to do .
we went in there thinking , " we 're ultimately , completely malleable . you 're going to tell us .
the neighborhood 's going to tell us , the parents are going to tell us .
the teachers are going to tell us how we 're most useful . "
so then they said , " why do n't you come into the schools ?
because what about the students that would n't come to you , necessarily , who do n't have really active parents that are bringing them in , or are n't close enough ? " so then we started saying , " well , we 've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster .
let 's just put out the word . " a teacher will say , " i need 12 tutors for the next five sundays .
we 're working on our college essays . send them in . "
so we put that out on the wire : 1,400 tutors .
whoever can make it signs up . they go in about a half an hour before the class .
the teacher tells them what to do , how to do it , what their training is , what their project is so far .
they work under the teacher 's guide , and it 's all in one big room .
and that 's actually the brunt of what we do is , people going straight from their workplace , straight from home , straight into the classroom and working directly with the students .
so then we 're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students .
then another school said , " well , what if we just give you a classroom and you can staff it all day ? "
so this is the everett middle school writers ' room , where we decorated it in buccaneer style .
it 's right off the library . and there we serve all 529 kids in this middle school .
this is their newspaper , the " straight-up news , " that has an ongoing column from mayor gavin newsom in both languages - english and spanish .
so then one day isabel allende wrote to us and said , " hey , why do n't you assign a book with high school students ?
i want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world . "
and so we went into thurgood marshall high school , which is a school that we had worked with on some other things , and we gave that assignment to the students .
and we said , " isabel allende is going to read all your essays at the end .
she 's going to publish them in a book .
she 's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form .
it 's going to be available in all the bookstores in the bay area and throughout the world , on amazon and you name it . "
so these kids worked harder than they 've ever worked on anything in their lives , because there was that outside audience , there was isabel allende on the other end .
i think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with them and so this worked out incredibly well .
we had a big party at the end .
this is a book that you can find anywhere . so that led to a series of these .
you can see amy tan sponsored the next one , " i might get somewhere . "
and this became an ongoing thing . more and more books .
now we 're sort of addicted to the book thing .
the kids will work harder than they 've ever worked in their life if they know it 's going to be permanent , know it 's going to be on a shelf , know that nobody can diminish what they 've thought and said , that we 've honored their words , honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts , six drafts - all this attention that we give to their thoughts .
and once they achieve that level , once they 've written at that level , they can never go back .
it 's absolutely transformative .
and so then they 're all sold in the store . this is near the planks .
we sell all the student books .
where else would you put them , right ?
so we sell ' em , and then something weird had been happening with the stores . the store , actually - even though we started out as just a gag - the store actually made money .
so it was paying the rent .
and maybe this is just a san francisco thing - i do n't know , i do n't want to judge .
but people would come in - and this was before the pirate movies and everything !
it was making a lot of money . not a lot of money , but it was paying the rent , paying a full-time staff member there .
there 's the ocean maps you can see on the left .
and it became a gateway to the community .
people would come in and say , " what the - ?
what is this ? " i do n't want to swear on the web . -lrb- laughter -rrb- is that a rule ? i do n't know .
they would say , " what is this ? "
and people would come in and learn more about it .
and then right beyond - there 's usually a little chain there - right beyond , they would see the kids being tutored .
this is a field trip going on . and so they would be shopping , and they might be more likely to buy some lard , or millet for their parrot , or , you know , a hook , or hook protector for nighttime , all of these things we sell .
so the store actually did really well .
but it brought in so many people - teachers , donors , volunteers , everybody - because it was street level . it was open to the public .
it was n't a non-profit buried , you know , on the 30th floor of some building downtown . it was right in the neighborhood that it was serving , and it was open all the time to the public .
so , it became this sort of weird , happy accident .
so all the people i used to know in brooklyn , they said , " well , why do n't we have a place like that here ? "
and a lot of them had been former educators or would-be educators , so they combined with a lot of local designers , local writers , and they just took the idea independently and they did their own thing .
they did n't want to sell pirate supplies .
they did n't think that that was going to work there .
so , knowing the crime-fighting community in new york , they opened the brooklyn superhero supply company .
this is sam potts ' great design that did this .
and this was to make it look sort of like one of those keysmith 's shops that has to have every service they 've ever offered , you know , all over there .
so they opened this place . inside , it 's like a costco for superheroes - all the supplies in kind of basic form .
these are all handmade .
these are all sort of repurposed other products , or whatever .
all the packaging is done by sam potts .
so then you have the villain containment unit , where kids put their parents . you have the office .
this is a little vault - you have to put your product in there , it goes up an electric lift and then the guy behind the counter tells you that you have to recite the vow of heroism , which you do , if you want to buy anything . and it limits , really , their sales .
personally , i think it 's a problem .
because they have to do it hand on heart and everything .
these are some of the products . these are all handmade .
this is a secret identity kit .
if you want to take on the identity of sharon boone , one american female marketing executive from hoboken , new jersey . it 's a full dossier on everything you would need to know about sharon boone .
so , this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape , and then you walk up these three steel-graded steps and then we turn on three hydraulic fans from every side and then you can see the cape in action .
there 's nothing worse than , you know , getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that .
so then , the secret door - this is one of the shelves you do n't see when you walk in , but it slowly opens .
you can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks .
it opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back . -lrb- applause -rrb- so you can see the full effect !
but this is - i just want to emphasize - locally funded , locally built .
all the designers , all of the builders , everybody was local , all the time was pro-bono .
i just came and visited and said , " yes , you guys are doing great , " in all five boroughs of new york in the back . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this is the space during tutoring hours .
it 's very busy . same principles : one-on-one attention , complete devotion to the students ' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas .
and this switch is flicked in their heads when they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store , right ?
so it 's school , but it 's not school .
it 's clearly not school , even though they 're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables , pencils and papers , whatever .
this is one of the students , khaled hamdan .
you can read this quote .
addicted to video games and tv . could n't concentrate at home .
came in . got this concentrated attention .
and he could n't escape it .
so , soon enough , he was writing . he would finish his homework early - got really addicted to finishing his homework early .
it 's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it , and to have it checked , and to know he 's going to achieve the next thing and be prepared for school the next day .
so he got hooked on that , and then he started doing other things .
he 's now been published in five books .
he co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroes called " super-has-beens . "
he wrote a series on " penguin balboa , " which is a fighting - a boxing - penguin .
and then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at symphony space , at a benefit for 826 new york . so he 's there every day .
he 's evangelical about it . he brings his cousins in now .
there 's four family members that come in every day .
so , i 'll go through really quickly .
this is l.a. , the echo park time travel mart : " whenever you are , we 're already then . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is sort of a 7-eleven for time travelers .
so you see everything : it 's exactly as a 7-eleven would be .
leeches . mammoth chunks . they even have their own slurpee machine : " out of order . come back yesterday . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- anyway . so i 'm going to jump ahead .
these are spaces that are only affiliated with us , doing this same thing : word st. in pittsfield , massachusetts ; ink spot in cincinnati ; youth speaks , san francisco , california , which inspired us ; studio st. louis in st. louis ; austin bat cave in austin ; fighting words in dublin , ireland , started by roddy doyle , this will be open in april .
now i 'm going to the ted wish - is that okay ?
all right , i 've got a minute . so , the ted wish : i wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you 'll then tell the story of how you got involved , so that within a year we have a thousand examples - a thousand ! - of transformative partnerships .
profound leaps forward !
and these can be things that maybe you 're already doing .
i know that so many people in this room are already doing really interesting things .
i know that for a fact . so , tell us these stories and inspire others on the website .
we created a website .
i 'm going to switch to " we , " and not " i , " hope : we hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools .
we hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community .
always let the teachers lead the way .
they will tell you how to be useful . i hope that you 'll step in and help out .
there are a million ways .
you can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers . they 'll always tell you how to help .
so , this is with hot studio in san francisco , they did this phenomenal job .
this website is already up , it 's already got a bunch of stories , a lot of ideas . it 's called " once upon a school , " which is a great title , i think .
this site will document every story , every project that comes out of this conference and around the world . so you go to the website , you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired by and then you add your own projects once you get started .
hot studio did a great job in a very tight deadline . so , visit the site .
if you have any questions , you can ask this guy , who 's our director of national programs . he 'll be on the phone .
you email him , he 'll answer any question you possibly want .
and he 'll get you inspired and get you going and guide you through the process so that you can affect change .
and it can be fun ! that 's the point of this talk - it need n't be sterile . it need n't be bureaucratically untenable .
you can do and use the skills that you have .
the schools need you . the teachers need you .
students and parents need you . they need your actual person : your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion , sitting next to them , listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time .
some of these kids just do n't plain know how good they are : how smart and how much they have to say .
you can tell them . you can shine that light on them , one human interaction at a time . so we hope you 'll join us .
thank you so much .
today i want to talk about design , but not design as we usually think about it .
i want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific , biotechnological culture , where , for really the first time in history , we have the power to design bodies , to design animal bodies , to design human bodies .
in the history of our planet , there have been three great waves of evolution .
the first wave of evolution is what we think of as darwinian evolution .
so , as you all know , species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments , and the pressures of those environments selected which changes , through random mutation in species , were going to be preserved .
then human beings stepped out of the darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution , which was we changed the environment in which we evolved .
we altered our ecological niche by creating civilization .
and that has been the second great - couple 100,000 years , 150,000 years - by changing our environment , we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve .
whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities , all the way through modern medicine , we have changed our own evolution .
now we 're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history , which has been called many things : " intentional evolution , " " evolution by design " - very different than intelligent design - whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet .
so i want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species , as well as our cultures , because of this change .
now we actually have been doing it for a long time .
we started selectively breeding animals many , many thousands of years ago .
and if you think of dogs for example , dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures .
there is n't a dog on this earth that 's a natural creature .
dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like .
but we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them .
we do n't have to do it that way anymore .
this is a beefalo .
a beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid .
and they are now making them , and someday , perhaps pretty soon , you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket .
this is a geep , a goat-sheep hybrid .
the scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards .
i think they said it tasted like chicken .
this is a cama .
a cama is a camel-llama hybrid , created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama .
and they are now using these in certain cultures .
then there 's the liger .
this is the largest cat in the world - the lion-tiger hybrid .
it 's bigger than a tiger .
and in the case of the liger , there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild .
but these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology .
and then finally , everybody 's favorite , the zorse .
none of this is photoshopped . these are real creatures .
and so one of the things we 've been doing is using genetic enhancement , or genetic manipulation , of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics .
and if that were all this was about , then it would be an interesting thing .
but something much , much more powerful is happening now .
these are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish .
we all know that some deep-sea creatures glow .
well , they 've now taken that gene , that bioluminescent gene , and put it into mammal cells .
these are normal cells .
and what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light .
once they could do that with cells , they could do it with organisms .
so they did it with mouse pups , kittens .
and by the way , the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that 's a bioluminescent gene from coral , while this is from jellyfish .
they did it with pigs .
they did it with puppies .
and , in fact , they did it with monkeys .
and if you can do it with monkeys - though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes - if they can do it in monkeys , they can probably figure out how to do it in apes , which means they can do it in human beings .
in other words , it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark .
be easier to find us at night .
and in fact , right now in many states , you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets .
these are zebra fish . they 're normally black and silver .
these are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow , green , red , and they are actually available now in certain states .
other states have banned them .
nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures .
there is no area of the government - not the epa or the fda - that controls genetically-engineered pets .
and so some states have decided to allow them , some states have decided to ban them .
some of you may have read about the fda 's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon .
the salmon on top is a genetically engineered chinook salmon , using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat , to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed .
and right now the fda is trying to make a final decision on whether , pretty soon , you could be eating this fish - it 'll be sold in the stores .
and before you get too worried about it , here in the united states , the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it .
so even as we worry about it , we have allowed it to go on in this country - much different in europe - without any regulation , and even without any identification on the package .
these are all the first cloned animals of their type .
so in the lower right here , you have dolly , the first cloned sheep - now happily stuffed in a museum in edinburgh ; ralph the rat , the first cloned rat ; cc the cat , for cloned cat ; snuppy , the first cloned dog - snuppy for seoul national university puppy - created in south korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo , which he had not .
he actually was the first person to clone a dog , which is a very difficult thing to do , because dog genomes are very plastic .
this is prometea , the first cloned horse .
it 's a haflinger horse cloned in italy , a real " gold ring " of cloning , because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings .
in other words , the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed .
but if you can clone that horse , you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud .
these were the first cloned calves , the first cloned grey wolves , and then , finally , the first cloned piglets : alexis , chista , carrel , janie and dotcom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in addition , we 've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species .
this is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create .
so with antithrombin in that goat - that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that gtc genetics wants to create .
and then in addition , transgenic pigs , knockout pigs , from the national institute of animal science in south korea , are pigs that they are going to use , in fact , to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them , instead of producing them in an industrial way .
these are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species .
the guar is an endangered southeast asian ungulate .
a somatic cell , a body cell , was taken from its body , gestated in the ovum of a cow , and then that cow gave birth to a guar .
same thing happened with the mouflon , where it 's an endangered species of sheep .
it was gestated in a regular sheep body , which actually raises an interesting biological problem .
we have two kinds of dna in our bodies .
we have our nucleic dna that everybody thinks of as our dna , but we also have dna in our mitochondria , which are the energy packets of the cell .
that dna is passed down through our mothers .
so really , what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon , but a guar with cow mitochondria , and therefore cow mitochondrial dna , and a mouflon with another species of sheep 's mitochondrial dna .
these are really hybrids , not pure animals .
and it raises the question of how we 're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology - a question that we 're not really sure yet how to solve .
this lovely creature is an asian cockroach .
and what they 've done here is they 've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top , and it 's on a big computer tracking ball .
and now , using a joystick , they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right , forwards or backwards .
they 've created a kind of insect bot , or bugbot .
it gets worse than that - or perhaps better than that .
this actually is one of darpa 's very important - darpa is the defense research agency - one of their projects .
these goliath beetles are wired in their wings .
they have a computer chip strapped to their backs , and they can fly these creatures around the lab .
they can make them go left , right . they can make them take off .
they ca n't actually make them land .
they put them about one inch above the ground , and then they shut everything off and they go pfft .
but it 's the closest they can get to a landing .
and in fact , this technology has gotten so developed that this creature - this is a moth - this is the moth in its pupa stage , and that 's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology , so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth , it is already prewired .
the wires are already in its body , and they can just hook it up to their technology , and now they 've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance .
they can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones .
it 's not just insects .
this is the ratbot , or the robo-rat by sanjiv talwar at suny downstate .
again , it 's got technology - it 's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres ; it 's got a camera on top of its head .
the scientists can make this creature go left , right .
they have it running through mazes , controlling where it 's going .
they 've now created an organic robot .
the graduate students in sanjiv talwar 's lab said , " is this ethical ?
we 've taken away the autonomy of this animal . "
i 'll get back to that in a minute .
there 's also been work done with monkeys .
this is miguel nicolelis of duke .
he took owl monkeys , wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved , especially looking at the movement of their right arm .
the computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways .
they then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm , which you see here in the picture , put the arm in another room .
pretty soon , the computer learned , by reading the monkey 's brainwaves , to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey 's arm did .
then he put a video monitor in the monkey 's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm , and the monkey got fascinated .
the monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm , this prosthetic arm would do .
and eventually she was moving it and moving it , and eventually stopped moving her right arm and , staring at the screen , could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves - which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms .
and it 's not just technology that we 're putting into animals .
this is thomas demarse at the university of florida .
he took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons - so these are just individual neurons from rats - put them on a chip .
they self-aggregated into a network , became an integrated chip .
and he used that as the it piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator .
so now we have organic computer chips made out of living , self-aggregating neurons .
finally , mussa-ivaldi of northwestern took a completely intact , independent lamprey eel brain .
this is a brain from a lamprey eel .
it is living - fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides , attached photosensitive sensors to the brain , put it into a cart - here 's the cart , the brain is sitting there in the middle - and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart , when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart , the cart moves toward the light ; when you turn it off , it moves away .
it 's photophilic .
so now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain .
is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts , sitting there in its nutrient medium ?
i do n't know , but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding .
so , we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes .
this is a mouse created by charles vacanti of the university of massachusetts .
he altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin , put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being .
genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation .
this is where we are in this process .
finally , not that long ago , craig venter created the first artificial cell , where he took a cell , took a dna synthesizer , which is a machine , created an artificial genome , put it in a different cell - the genome was not of the cell he put it in - and that cell then reproduced as the other cell .
in other words , that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent - it did not have an organic parent .
and so , asks the economist : " the first artificial organism and its consequences . "
so you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in fact , that 's not what frankenstein 's lab looks like .
this is a dna synthesizer , and here at the bottom are just bottles of a , t , c and g - the four chemicals that make up our dna chain .
and so , we need to ask ourselves some questions .
for the first time in the history of this planet , we are able to directly design organisms .
we can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power , and it confers on us a responsibility .
is everything okay ?
is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want ?
do we have free reign to design animals ?
do we get to go someday to pets ' r ' us and say , " look , i want a dog .
i 'd like it to have the head of a dachshund , the body of a retriever , maybe some pink fur , and let 's make it glow in the dark " ?
does industry get to create creatures who , in their milk , in their blood , and in their saliva and other bodily fluids , create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines ?
do we get to create organic robots , where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings ?
and then the final step of this , once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings , what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then ?
it 's already happening . it 's not science fiction .
we are not only already using these things in animals , some of them we 're already beginning to use on our own bodies .
we are now taking control of our own evolution .
we are directly designing the future of the species of this planet .
it confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now .
it is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me introduce to you rezero .
this little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the autonomous systems laboratory at eth-zurich .
our robot belongs to a family of robots called ballbots .
instead of wheels , a ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball .
the main characteristics of such a system is that there 's one sole contact point to the ground .
this means that the robot is inherently unstable .
it 's like when i am trying to stand on one foot .
you might ask yourself , what 's the usefulness of a robot that 's unstable ?
now we 'll explain that in a second .
let me first explain how rezero actually keeps his balance .
rezero keeps his balance by constantly measuring his pitch angle with a sensor .
he then counteracts and avoids toppling over by turning the motors appropriately .
this happens 160 times per second , and if anything fails in this process , rezero would immediately fall to the ground .
now to move and to balance , rezero needs to turn the ball .
the ball is driven by three special wheels that allow rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time .
due to his instability , rezero is always in motion . now here 's the trick .
it 's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very -lsb- dynamically -rsb- .
let 's play a little .
you may have wondered what happens if i give the robot a little push .
in this mode , he 's trying to maintain his position .
for the next demo , i 'd like you to introduce to my colleagues michael , on the computer , and thomas who 's helping me onstage .
in the next mode , rezero is passive , and we can move him around .
with almost no force i can control his position and his velocity .
i can also make him spin .
in the next mode , we can get rezero to follow a person .
he 's now keeping a constant distance to thomas .
this works with a laser sensor that 's mounted on top of rezero .
with the same method , we can also get him to circle a person .
we call this the orbiting mode .
all right , thank you , thomas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , what 's the use of this technology ?
for now , it 's an experiment , but let me show you some possible future applications .
rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks .
with a screen it could inform people or show them around in a fun and entertaining way .
in a hospital , this device could be used to carry around medical equipment .
due to the ballbot system , it has a very small footprint and it 's also easy to move around .
and of course , who would n't like to take a ride on one of these .
and these are more practical applications .
but there 's also a certain beauty within this technology .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
there are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography - women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it does n't work well at all .
do you know which group you 're in ?
if you do n't , you 're not alone .
because the breast has become are very political organ .
the truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press , politicians , radiologists and medical imaging companies .
i will do my best this morning to tell you what i think is the truth .
but first , my disclosures .
i am not a breast cancer survivor .
i 'm not a radiologist .
i do n't have any patents , and i 've never received any money from a medical imaging company , and i am not seeking your vote .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question .
she came to see me after discovering a breast lump .
her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s .
she and i were both very pregnant at that time , and my heart just ached for her , imagining how afraid she must be .
fortunately , her lump proved to be benign .
but she asked me a question : how confident was i that i would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one ?
so i studied her mammogram , and i reviewed the radiology literature , and i was shocked to discover that , in her case , our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin .
you may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the united states preventive services task force reviewed the world 's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s .
now everybody rushed to criticize the task force , even though most of them were n't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies .
it took the senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage .
radiologists were outraged by the guidelines .
the pre-eminent mammographer in the united states issued the following quote to the washington post .
the radiologists were , in turn , criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest .
but in my view , the radiologists are heroes .
there 's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms , and that 's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret , and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause .
but that very fact is telling .
where there is this much legal smoke , there is likely to be some fire .
the factor most responsible for that fire is breast density .
breast density refers to the relative amount of fat - pictured here in yellow - versus connective and epithelial tissues - pictured in pink .
and that proportion is primarily genetically determined .
two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue , which is why mammography does n't work as well in them .
and although breast density generally declines with age , up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause .
so how do you know if your breasts are dense ?
well , you need to read the details of your mammography report .
radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram .
if the breast is less than 25 percent dense , that 's called fatty-replaced .
the next category is scattered fibroglandular densities , followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense .
and breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense .
the problem with breast density is that it 's truly the wolf in sheep 's clothing .
both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram , and the x-ray often ca n't distinguish between the two .
so it 's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast .
but imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast .
that 's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts , but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts .
now it 's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer , but it turns out that it 's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer .
it 's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer .
at the time my patient posed this question to me , breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature , and very few women having mammograms , or the physicians ordering them , knew about this .
but what else could i offer her ?
mammograms have been around since the 1960 's , and it 's changed very little .
there have been surprisingly few innovations , until digital mammography was approved in 2000 .
digital mammography is still an x-ray of the breast , but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally , just like we can with a digital camera .
the u.s. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment , and what have we gained from that investment ?
in a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars , digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography , and in fact , it was worse in older women .
but it was better in one group , and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts , and in those women , digital mammography found twice as many cancers , but it still only found 60 percent .
so digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment , but it 's been a very small step forward for womankind .
what about ultrasound ?
ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies , so it 's not widely used .
and mri is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors , but it 's also very expensive .
if we think about disruptive technology , we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive .
think about ipods compared to stereos .
but it 's the exact opposite in health care .
the machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive .
screening the average young woman with an mri is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a hummer .
it 's just way too much equipment .
one mri scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs .
and sooner or later , we 're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation ca n't always come at a much higher price .
malcolm gladwell wrote an article in the new yorker on innovation , and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual 's genius .
rather , big ideas can be orchestrated , if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they do n't ordinarily talk about .
it 's like the essence of ted .
he quotes one innovator who says , " the only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this makes no sense , because physicians have all kinds of problems that they do n't realize have solutions .
and physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they do n't realize are problems .
now , take a look at this cartoon that accompanied gladwell 's article , and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so if you will allow me a little creative license , i will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient 's problem with a physicist 's solution .
shortly after her visit , i was introduced to a nuclear physicist at mayo who was a specialist in cardiac imaging , something i had nothing to do with .
and he happened to tell me about a conference he 'd just returned from in israel , where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector .
now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart , and it had even been tried to image the breast .
but the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge , bulky tubes , and they were filled with these scintillating crystals , and you just could n't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors .
but the potential advantage was that gamma rays , unlike x-rays , are not influenced by breast density .
but this technology could not find tumors when they 're small , and finding a small tumor is critical for survival .
if you can find a tumor when it 's less than a centimeter , survival exceeds 90 percent , but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases .
but michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he 'd seen , and this is it .
it 's made not of a bulky tube , but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector .
and i started talking to him about this problem with breast density , and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors .
so after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - michael hacked off the x-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out , and we attached the new detector , and we decided to call this machine molecular breast imaging , or mbi .
this is an image from our first patient .
and you can see , using the old gamma technology , that it just looked like noise .
but using our new detector , we could begin to see the outline of a tumor .
so here we were , a nuclear physicist , an internist , soon joined by carrie hruska , a biomedical engineer , and two radiologists , and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape .
to say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement , but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system .
this is our current detector .
and you can see that it looks a lot different .
the duct tape is gone , and we added a second detector on top of the breast , which has further improved our tumor detection .
so how does this work ?
the patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that 's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells , but not by normal cells , and this is the key difference from mammography .
mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue , and we 've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast .
but mbi exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors , and therefore , it 's impervious to breast density .
after the injection , the patient 's breast is placed between the detectors .
and if you 've ever had a mammogram - if you 're old enough to have had a mammogram - you know what comes next : pain .
you may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that 's regulated by federal law , and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study .
but with mbi , we use just light , pain-free compression .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and the detector then transmits the image to the computer .
so here 's an example .
you can see , on the right , a mammogram showing a faint tumor , the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue .
but the mbi image shows that tumor much more clearly , as well as a second tumor , which profoundly influence that patient 's surgical options .
in this example , although the mammogram found one tumor , we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors - one is small as three millimeters .
our big break came in 2004 .
after we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors , we used these images to submit a grant to the susan g. komen foundation .
and we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts , comparing a screening mammogram to an mbi .
of the tumors that we found , mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors .
mbi found 83 percent .
here 's an example from that screening study .
the digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue , but the mbi shows an area of intense uptake , which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor .
in this case , a one-centimeter tumor .
and in this case , a 45-year-old medical secretary at mayo , who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young , wanted to enroll in our study .
and her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue , but her mbi showed an area of worrisome uptake , which we can also see on a color image .
and this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball .
but fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes .
so now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast , we had to solve one very important problem .
we had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose , and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this .
and i 'm very happy to report that we 're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram .
and at this low dose , we 're continuing this screening study , and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram , but an mbi image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer .
so this is not just young women that it 's benefiting .
it 's also older women with dense tissue .
and we 're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that 's used in any other type of gamma technology .
mbi generates four images per breast .
mri generates over a thousand .
it takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding .
but i suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the mbi image .
but this is why mbi is so potentially disruptive - it 's as accurate as mri , it 's far less complex to interpret , and it 's a fraction of the cost .
but you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo .
after achieving what we felt were remarkable results , our manuscript was rejected by four journals .
after the fourth rejection , we requested reconsideration of the manuscript , because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology .
our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal radiology .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we still need to complete the screening study using the low dose , and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions , and this could take five or more years .
if this technology is widely adopted , i will not benefit financially in any way , and that is very important to me , because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth .
but i recognize - -lrb- applause -rrb- i recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science .
the mbi unit has now been fda approved , but it 's not yet widely available .
so until something is available for women with dense breasts , there are things that you should know to protect yourself .
first , know your density .
ninety percent of women do n't , and 95 percent of women do n't know that it increases your breast cancer risk .
the state of connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram .
i was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in chicago , and i was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is .
of course we should .
and if you do n't know , please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report .
second , if you 're pre-menopausal , try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle , when breast density is relatively lower .
third , if you notice a persistent change in your breast , insist on additional imaging .
and fourth and most important , the mammography debate will rage on , but i do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram .
mammography is n't perfect , but it 's the only test that 's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer .
but this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography 's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation .
some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later , and most women , thankfully , survive .
so it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer .
mammography 's the only one that 's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim .
it is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations .
we need to individualize screening based on density .
for women without dense breasts , mammography is the best choice .
but for women with dense breasts ; we should n't abandon screening altogether , we need to offer them something better .
the babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school , and the answer has been so slow to come .
she 's given me her blessing to share this story with you .
after undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer , she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy .
we can and must do better , not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters , but in time for you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dan holzman : please throw out the beanbag chairs . here we go .
barry friedman : there are all kinds of high-tech chairs here today , but this is really , i think , when it reached its peak as far as ergonomics , comfort , design , flexibility ...
dh : now obviously , this is not something we do on our regular show ; it 's something we just kind of learned for this , so we 're going to try . but can we have some inspirational music for the beanbag chairs ?
bf : nice show , daniel , nice show . you are the man !
nice show . man , that was good !
dh : thank you .
bf : you know , sometimes when people do those , they go all the way down .
you actually just did that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the kind of extra effort that 's gotten us where we are today ...
dh : all right , let 's show them something special .
bf : ... without a macarthur grant .
yeah , look at this . you know , all kinds of different ...
ted is about invention , let 's be honest . right ? dh : yeah , it is .
bf : last night , michael moschen showed some juggling props he has invented and working on .
right now , dan 's going to show something he actually invented .
dh : a type of juggling i actually invented , right after i saw another juggler do it .
bf : shut up . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : and this is a small excerpt from a longer piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- folks , this is shaker cup juggling . it 's not a showstopper but it certainly slows it down .
bf : oh yeah , it does . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- bf : oh , daniel .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : one more ? -lrb- drum roll -rrb- perfect . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- perfect . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- bf : ok . dh : oh ! all right .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm now pushing my luck : i 'm skipping right to six cups .
in order to do six cups , i must have perfect control over three with my right hand . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- bf : also three with his left .
dh : perfect .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now , all six cups . should i do it on the first try or should i miss once on purpose ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : first try ? once on purpose ?
-lrb- audience : once on purpose ! -rrb- dh : how about if i try first and then decide ?
bf : good idea . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's leave that . we 'll leave that door open .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dh : he 's looking at me .
bf : that 's all right , he does that . all right .
dh : oh ! it 's time for richard 's help . -lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , good . all right .
bf : you know , over the years , every year at the conference , it 's kind of become a tradition for us to do something dangerous with richard . and we 've always done something with the bullwhips in our act . it 's funny , for years i did it with daniel holding balloons .
and then we thought , " how stupid . "
dh : excuse me , could we work on the design of the microphone ?
bf : i think that 's the next session .
dh : next session ?
bf : yeah . and so we 've actually found a way to incorporate richard in this .
he actually assumes more of the danger in this .
dh : please stand up , richard . -lrb- whip cracks -rrb- oh , sorry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : now richard , please ... -lrb- whip cracks -rrb- bf : ok , sorry .
dh : jesus christ . richard , please stand in front of me .
richard wurman : can i say something ?
bf : sure .
rw : in all past years i 've rehearsed with them , the things that have happened to me - i have no idea what 's going to happen and that 's the truth .
dh : all right , please stand here in front ...
god , i hate that . put your hands out like this , please .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : no , come stay up with him .
dan used to actually hold them but now he 's got you for protection .
it 's kind of neat . ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : wow , you 've been working out .
bf : no , shut up !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- having a little bit of richard time . that 's nice , that 's good .
ok , here we go .
have him hold your wrist so i can ...
dh : please hold my wrist , will you . bf : yeah , hold this a minute .
there you go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
ok , hold on .
rw : hmmm .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : first one .
bf : all those mid-year phone calls are coming back to me now , richard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : so richard , what were we on the list ? like 1,020 ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what happened there ?
bf : i think we were just outside .
dh : i do n't get it . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : sorry . bf : having some bad flashbacks .
rw : do you want me to hold you or not ? dh : do n't hold me that hard .
bf : here we go , i 'm taking it . -lrb- balloon pops -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dh : one more , one more .
bf : we 've got one more we 're going to do .
rw : do i get to hold them ?
bf : you do n't want to hold these , trust me .
dh : could you spread your legs a little bit ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : gloria , you want to do it ? it 's very cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- one more try . man , i do n't want to get too close .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- could you just push that ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : wow ! boy !
bf : that 's cool . i always wanted to try that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : let 's jump this way , though .
now , we risked richard 's life , it 's only fair we risk our own lives .
so to do that , i will juggle these three razor-sharp sickles .
and if that was n't enough , and judging by your response , it 's not ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : wow ! bf : hoping for a little more build .
dh : true . barry ...
bf : i 'm going to run up behind him .
dh : leap over my shoulder .
bf : up and over his shoulders .
dh : grab the blades in mid-air , land right there in a pool of blood ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- still juggling . -lrb- laughter -rrb- impossible , you say ?
bf : incredible , you say ?
dh : why bother , you say ?
bf : here we go .
dh : just do it juggler boys , you say ?
bf : this guy , this guy invented air .
dh : i think so , that 's right .
even the pencil .
bf : he invented the pencil .
dh : all right , we 'll do this trick , but please remember it took us over 10 years to perfect .
bf : ten years to perfect , which you 're about to see .
dh : it 's not that difficult , we just do n't like to practice that much .
bf : no , it 's a hassle . traveling too much .
actually , we will take a second to prove - this could be fake - that the blades are indeed razor-sharp .
dh : will someone please throw a small farm animal up onto the stage ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or a virgin for a sacrifice ?
bf : anything ?
dh : where 's gloria ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : no , she 's got ... farm animal .
dh : do you have a small farm animal ?
just trying to play the odds . all right , here we go .
bf : over the top , over the top .
dh : how you feeling , barry ? you feeling all right ?
bf : yeah , it 's all right .
dh : do you feel everything 's ok ? the atmosphere , the ...
bf : yeah , a little sketchy .
dh : everything up here 's ok ?
bf : yeah .
dh : then here we go .
bf : this one 's a little ... who 's doing the lights ? could you point that a little more directly into my eyeballs ? is that possible ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- i can still see a little .
dh : and turn up the intensity ; we 're still pink in the middle .
we went too far . -lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : yeah , it 's too far . it 's too much of a visual .
the design of the body is a whole different thing .
dh : ready , barry ? bf : over the top .
dh : may we have our jumping music please ? -lrb- silence -rrb- may we have it a bit louder ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : they 're a good crew ! whoa !
dh : whoa , sorry . all right .
bf : we 're going on .
dh : all right , we 'll try again .
bf : all right ? oh my gosh . oh .
dh : all right , here we go . sorry about that .
bf : i thought i had the hard part . ok .
dh : whenever you 're ready .
bf : there we go !
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right , get up ! come on and dance ! dh : dance , come on . bf : come on and dance !
somebody dance ! come on !
-lrb- applause -rrb- wow , wow , ok , stop .
weird , no one dances . we 're two guys doing this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think that 's uncomfortable for everyone .
dh : the french judge ...
bf : one more quick thing .
dh : the french judge gives it a 5.2 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : well , you know ...
dh : there you go ... bf : oh , yeah . another one coming in .
dh : tell them about our bio and stuff .
bf : yeah . in our bio , some of you may have read that we 've won two world juggling championships .
and believe it or not , you do n't win juggling champions for doing things with bullwhips or shaker cups .
we 're going to show you right now an excerpt from a routine that we used to wipe out the other juggling team competition .
dh : that 's right .
bf : good .
dh : i know what you 're thinking : other juggling teams must really suck .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : juggling 's got a bad rap .
dh : but wait , barry , there 's still one more club lying there by my foot .
and look , it has a twin !
bf : shut up . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : there 's still one more by my foot .
what do you want me to do with it ?
bf : richard you tell him , it 's your last year . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : that 's a pretty good setup , richard .
bf : yeah , it 's a good setup . that 's a big setup .
dh : you ca n't get any better than that . all right . what i will do : i will use my panther-like reflexes .
bf : nice .
dh : i got that - to reach down and grab that club in my grip of steel .
bf : nice .
dh : i touched it , barry . that should be enough .
bf : it 's progress , that 's the thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : how about that ? i 'll do it again .
oh wait , it 's on your side , barry .
and it 's awfully windy over there .
bf : it is , it 's weird . you would n't think it would affect half the stage , but it is . it 's weird .
watch this : what i 'm going to do is slide the seventh one onto my foot .
dh : wow ! what a great trick , barry !
oh , look how it lies there .
oh , barry , is there nothing you ca n't do ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you are my hero . you 're my jim shea , jr .
too much olympics .
bf : from my foot , i 'll attempt to kick the seventh club . here we go .
dh : where , barry ? where ? tell us , barry .
-lsb- unclear -rsb- eagerly awaits your next syllable . what will it be ?
what gem of knowledge ?
what pearl of wisdom ?
do you want to buy a vowel , barry ?
is that your final answer ?
bf : all right ! you have to turn off the tv from time to time .
dh : i do , i do .
bf : from my foot , the kick up in the seven .
dh : we will juggle seven .
bf : from six to seven . dh : that 's a world 's record . bf : really ? dh : for us .
bf : yes .
dh : whenever you 're ready there , big guy .
put your tongue away , barry .
bf : oh , oh , whoa .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : please , please stay seated . stay seated . thank you .
because now , to make this twice as difficult , we 'll juggle the seven clubs back ...
bf : seven-club juggling .
dh : ... to back .
bf : thank you , that 's it .
bf : thank you guys !
dh : thank you very much !
so let me just start with my story .
so i tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college .
then i went on to tear my acl , the ligament in my knee , and then developed an arthritic knee .
and i 'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story , and , by the way , i married a woman who has exactly the same story .
so this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if i could n't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me .
so with that , let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we 're trying to explain .
narrator : we are all aware of the risk of cancer , but there 's another disease that 's destined to affect even more of us : arthritis .
cancer may kill you , but when you look at the numbers , arthritis ruins more lives .
assuming you live a long life , there 's a 50 percent chance you 'll develop arthritis .
and it 's not just aging that causes arthritis .
common injuries can lead to decades of pain , until our joints quite literally grind to a halt .
desperate for a solution , we 've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts , but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body , should n't we stop and ask if there 's a better , more natural way ?
let 's consider an alternative path .
what if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature , or within our own stem cells ?
this is the field of biologic replacements , where we replace worn-out parts with new , natural ones .
kevin stone : and so , the mission is : how do i treat these things biologically ?
and let 's talk about both what i did for my wife , and what i 've done for hundreds of other patients .
first thing for my wife , and the most common thing i hear from my patients , particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group , 70-year-old age group , is they come in and say , " hey , doc , is n't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee ?
i 'm not ready for joint replacement . "
and so for her , i put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that -lsb- knee -rsb- joint space .
and -lsb- the allograft -rsb- replaces -lsb- the missing meniscus -rsb- .
and then for that unstable ligament , we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee .
and then for the damaged arthritis on the surface , we did a stem cell paste graft , which we designed in 1991 , to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there .
so here 's my wife 's bad knee on the left , and her just hiking now four months later in aspen , and doing well .
and it works , not just for my wife , but certainly for other patients .
the girl on the video , jen hudak , just won the superpipe in aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee , as you see in the other image - and having a paste graft to that knee .
and so we can regrow these surfaces biologically .
so with all this success , why is n't that good enough , you might ask .
well the reason is because there 's not enough donor cycles .
there 's not enough young , healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us .
and the tissue 's very expensive .
and so that 's not going to be a solution that 's going to get us global with biologic tissue .
but the solution is animal tissue because it 's plentiful , it 's cheap , you can get it from young , healthy tissues , but the barrier is immunology .
and the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl , or gal epitope .
so if we 're going to transplant animal tissues to people , we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope .
so my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984 .
and i started first with cow achilles tendon , where we would take the cow achilles tendon , which is type-i collagen , strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template .
we would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient 's knee .
we 've now done that procedure , and it 's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases , so it 's an fda-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus .
and that 's great when i can degrade the tissue .
but what happens for your ligament when i need an intact ligament ?
i ca n't grind it up in a blender .
so in that case , i have to design - and we designed with uri galili and tom turek - an enzyme wash to wash away , or strip , those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme .
and we call that a " gal stripping " technique .
what we do is humanize the tissue .
it 's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it -lrb- laughter -rrb- , and then we can put it back into a patient 's knee .
and we 've done that . now we 've taken pig ligament - young , healthy , big tissue , put it into 10 patients in an fda-approved trial - and then one of our patients went on to have three canadian masters downhill championships - on his " pig-lig , " as he calls it . so we know it can work .
and there 's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending .
so what about the next step ?
what about getting to a total biologic knee replacement , not just the parts ?
how are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement ?
well here 's how we 're going to do it .
so what we 're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young , healthy pig , strip it of its antigens , load it with your stem cells , then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee , tack it on there , have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee .
so that 's our biologic approach right now .
we 're going to rebuild your knee with the parts .
we 're going to resurface it with a completely new surface .
but we have other advantages from the animal kingdom .
there 's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation .
we can harness those benefits .
we can use thicker , younger , better tissues than you might have injured in your knee , or that you might have when you 're 40 , 50 or 60 .
we can do it as an outpatient procedure .
we can strip that tissue very economically , and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global .
and so welcome to super biologics .
it 's not hardware .
it 's not software .
it 's bioware .
it 's version 2.0 of you .
and so with that , coming to a - -lrb- laughter -rrb- coming to an operating theater near you soon , i believe .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , i 'm going to show you again something about our diets .
and i would like to know what the audience is , and so who of you ever ate insects ?
that 's quite a lot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but still , you 're not representing the overall population of the earth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because there 's 80 percent out there that really eats insects .
but this is quite good .
why not eat insects ? well first , what are insects ?
insects are animals that walk around on six legs .
and here you see just a selection .
there 's six million species of insects on this planet , six million species .
there 's a few hundreds of mammals - six million species of insects .
in fact , if we count all the individual organisms , we would come at much larger numbers .
in fact , of all animals on earth , of all animal species , 80 percent walks on six legs .
but if we would count all the individuals , and we take an average weight of them , it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on earth .
that means that in terms of biomass , insects are more abundant than we are , and we 're not on a planet of men , but we 're on a planet of insects .
insects are not only there in nature , but they also are involved in our economy , usually without us knowing .
there was an estimation , a conservative estimation , a couple of years ago that the u.s. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year .
it 's a number - very large - a contribution to the economy of the united states for free .
and so i looked up what the economy was paying for the war in iraq in the same year .
it was 80 billion u.s. dollars .
well we know that that was not a cheap war .
so insects , just for free , contribute to the economy of the united states with about the same order of magnitude , just for free , without everyone knowing .
and not only in the states , but in any country , in any economy .
what do they do ?
they remove dung , they pollinate our crops .
a third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants .
they control pests , and they 're food for animals .
they 're at the start of food chains .
small animals eat insects .
even larger animals eat insects .
but the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals , still larger animals .
and at the end of the food chain , we are eating them as well .
there 's quite a lot of people that are eating insects .
and here you see me in a small , provincial town in china , lijiang - about two million inhabitants .
if you go out for dinner , like in a fish restaurant , where you can select which fish you want to eat , you can select which insects you would like to eat .
and they prepare it in a wonderful way .
and here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars , locusts , bee pupae - delicacies .
and you can eat something new everyday .
there 's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe .
that 's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we 're eating , like a cow or a pig or a sheep .
more than 1,000 species - an enormous variety .
and now you may think , okay , in this provincial town in china they 're doing that , but not us .
well we 've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally , but i can tell you that every one of you is eating insects , without any exception .
you 're eating at least 500 grams per year .
what are you eating ?
tomato soup , peanut butter , chocolate , noodles - any processed food that you 're eating contains insects , because insects are here all around us , and when they 're out there in nature they 're also in our crops .
some fruits get some insect damage .
those are the fruits , if they 're tomato , that go to the tomato soup .
if they do n't have any damage , they go to the grocery .
and that 's your view of a tomato .
but there 's tomatoes that end up in a soup , and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency , there can be all kinds of things in there , no problem .
in fact , why would we put these balls in the soup , there 's meat in there anyway ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of .
so anything is a good protein source already .
now you may say , " okay , so we 're eating 500 grams just by accident . "
we 're even doing this on purpose .
in a lot of food items that we have - i have only two items here on the slide - pink cookies or surimi sticks or , if you like , campari - a lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye .
the surimi sticks -lsb- of -rsb- crabmeat , or is being sold as crab meat , is white fish that 's being dyed with cochineal .
cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti .
it 's being produced in large amounts , 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the canary islands in peru , and it 's big business .
one gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros .
one gram of gold is 30 euros .
so it 's a very precious thing that we 're using to dye our foods .
now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me , for everyone on this earth .
the human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially .
where , at the moment , we have something between six and seven billion people , it will grow to about nine billion in 2050 .
that means that we have a lot more mouths to feed , and this is something that worries more and more people .
there was an fao conference last october that was completely devoted to this .
how are we going to feed this world ?
and if you look at the figures up there , it says that we have a third more mouths to feed , but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent .
and that 's especially because this world population is increasing , and it 's increasing , not only in numbers , but we 're also getting wealthier , and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat .
and meat , in fact , is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production .
our diet consists , -lsb- in -rsb- some part , of animal proteins , and at the moment , most of us here get it from livestock , from fish , from game .
and we eat quite a lot of it .
in the developed world it 's on average 80 kilograms per person per year , which goes up to 120 in the united states and a bit lower in some other countries , but on average 80 kilograms per person per year .
in the developing world it 's much lower .
it 's 25 kilograms per person per year .
but it 's increasing enormously .
in china in the last 20 years , it increased from 20 to 50 , and it 's still increasing .
so if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average , and a third of the world population is living in china and in india , we 're having an enormous demand on meat .
and of course , we are not there to say that 's only for us , it 's not for them .
they have the same share that we have .
now to start with , i should say that we are eating way too much meat in the western world .
we could do with much , much less - and i know , i 've been a vegetarian for a long time , and you can easily do without anything .
you 'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway .
but then there 's a lot of problems that come with meat production , and we 're being faced with that more and more often .
the first problem that we 're facing is human health .
pigs are quite like us .
they 're even models in medicine , and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human .
that means that pigs also share diseases with us .
and a pig disease , a pig virus , and a human virus can both proliferate , and because of their kind of reproduction , they can combine and produce a new virus .
this has happened in the netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak .
you get a new disease that can be deadly .
we eat insects - they 're so distantly related from us that this does n't happen .
so that 's one point for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's the conversion factor .
you take 10 kilograms of feed , you can get one kilogram of beef , but you can get nine kilograms of locust meat .
so if you would be an entrepreneur , what would you do ?
with 10 kilograms of input , you can get either one or nine kg. of output .
so far we 're taking the one , or up to five kilograms of output .
we 're not taking the bonus yet .
we 're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet .
so that 's two points for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's the environment .
if we take 10 kilograms of food - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it results in one kilogram of beef , the other nine kilograms are waste , and a lot of that is manure .
if you produce insects , you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce .
so less waste .
furthermore , per kilogram of manure , you have much , much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure .
so you have less waste , and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung .
so that 's three points for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now there 's a big " if , " of course , and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality .
well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein , or fat , or vitamins , it 's very good .
in fact , it 's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment .
and even in terms of calories , it is very good .
one kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs , or six big macs .
so that 's four points for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i can go on , and i could make many more points for insects , but time does n't allow this .
so the question is , why not eat insects ?
i gave you at least four arguments in favor .
we 'll have to .
even if you do n't like it , you 'll have to get used to this because at the moment , 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock .
that 's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding , but it 's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported .
we can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests , but there 's a limitation very soon .
and if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent , we 're not going to make it that way .
we could much better change from meat , from beef , to insects .
and then 80 percent of the world already eats insects , so we are just a minority - in a country like the u.k. , the usa , the netherlands , anywhere .
on the left-hand side , you see a market in laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night .
on the right-hand side you see a grasshopper .
so people there are eating them , not because they 're hungry , but because they think it 's a delicacy .
it 's just very good food .
you can vary enormously .
it has many benefits .
in fact , we have delicacy that 's very much like this grasshopper : shrimps , a delicacy being sold at a high price .
who would n't like to eat a shrimp ?
there are a few people who do n't like shrimp , but shrimp , or crabs , or crayfish , are very closely related .
they are delicacies .
in fact , a locust is a " shrimp " of the land , and it would make very good into our diet .
so why are we not eating insects yet ?
well that 's just a matter of mindset .
we 're not used to it , and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us .
that 's why we 're changing the perception of insects .
and i 'm working very hard with my colleague , arnold van huis , in telling people what insects are , what magnificent things they are , what magnificent jobs they do in nature .
and in fact , without insects , we would not be here in this room , because if the insects die out , we will soon die out as well .
if we die out , the insects will continue very happily .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we have to get used to the idea of eating insects .
and some might think , well they 're not yet available .
well they are .
there are entrepreneurs in the netherlands that produce them , and one of them is here in the audience , marian peeters , who 's in the picture .
i predict that later this year , you 'll get them in the supermarkets - not visible , but as animal protein in the food .
and maybe by 2020 , you 'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you 're going to eat .
and they 're being made in the most wonderful ways .
a dutch chocolate maker .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so there 's even a lot of design to it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well in the netherlands , we have an innovative minister of agriculture , and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry .
and when she got all the ministers of agriculture of the e.u.
over to the hague recently , she went to a high-class restaurant , and they ate insects all together .
it 's not something that is a hobby of mine .
it 's really taken off the ground .
so why not eat insects ?
you should try it yourself .
a couple of years ago , we had 1,750 people all together in a square in wageningen town , and they ate insects at the same moment , and this was still big , big news .
i think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects , because it 's just a normal way of doing .
so you can try it yourself today , and i would say , enjoy .
and i 'm going to show to bruno some first tries , and he can have the first bite .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : look at them first . look at them first .
marcel dicke : it 's all protein .
bg : that 's exactly the same -lsb- one -rsb- you saw in the video actually .
and it looks delicious .
they just make it -lsb- with -rsb- nuts or something .
md : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about what we learn from conservatives .
and i 'm at a stage in life where i 'm yearning for my old days , so i want to confess to you that when i was a kid , indeed , i was a conservative .
i was a young republican , a teenage republican , a leader in the teenage republicans .
indeed , i was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected ronald reagan to be the republican nominee for president .
now , i know what you 're thinking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're thinking , " that 's not what the internets say . "
you 're thinking , " wikipedia does n't say this fact . "
and indeed , this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these internets here .
wikipedia reports that this guy , this former congressman from erie , pennsylvania was , at the age of 20 , one of the youngest people at the republican national convention , but it 's just not true .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- indeed , it drives me so nuts , let me just change this little fact here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- all right . okay , so ... perfect .
perfect .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , speaker lawrence lessig , right .
okay .
finally , truth will be brought here .
okay , see ? it 's done . it 's almost done . here we go .
... " youngest republican , " okay , we 're finished .
that 's it . please save this .
great , here we go .
and ... wikipedia is fixed , finally .
okay , but no , this is really besides the point .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but the thing i want you to think about when we think about conservatives - not so much this issue of the 1980 convention - the thing to think about is this : they go to church .
now , you know , i mean , a lot of people go to church .
i 'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church .
and i 'm not talking about the god thing .
i do n't want to get into that , you know ; that 's not my point .
they go to church , by which i mean , they do lots of things for free for each other .
they hold potluck dinners .
indeed , they sell books about potluck dinners .
they serve food to poor people .
they share , they give , they give away for free .
and it 's the very same people leading wall street firms who , on sundays , show up and share .
and not only food , right .
these very same people are strong believers , in lots of contexts , in the limits on the markets .
they are in many important places against markets .
indeed , they , like all of us , celebrate this kind of relationship .
but they 're very keen that we do n't let money drop into that relationship , else it turns into something like this .
they want to regulate us , those conservatives , to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places .
because they understand : there are places for the market and places where the market should not exist , where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others .
they recognize : both of these things have to live together .
and the second great thing about conservatives : they get ecology .
right , it was the first great republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking - teddy roosevelt .
they first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources .
and then they began to teach us in the context of innovation , economics .
they understand , in that context , " free . " they understand " free " is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well .
that 's the thing i want you to think about them .
now , i know you do n't believe me , really , here .
so here 's exhibit number one .
i want to share with you my latest hero , julian sanchez , a libertarian who works at the , for many people , " evil " cato institute .
okay , so julian made this video .
he 's a terrible producer of videos , but it 's great content , so i 'm going to give you a little bit of it .
so here he is beginning .
julian sanchez : i 'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ...
larry lessig : so what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos .
this is this fantastic brat pack remix set to lisztomania .
which , of course , spread virally .
hugely successful .
-lrb- music -rrb- and then some people from brooklyn saw it .
they decided they wanted to do the same .
-lrb- music -rrb- and then , of course , people from san fransisco saw it .
and san franciscans thought they had to do the same as well .
-lrb- music -rrb- and so they 're beautiful , but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this .
here 's lesson number one .
js : there 's obviously also something really deeply great about this .
they are acting in the sense that they 're emulating the original mashup .
and the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing .
but this is also basically just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together .
it should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who 's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends .
ll : or ...
js : so that 's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here , remix is n't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement ; it becomes an act of social creativity .
and it 's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end , it 's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other .
all of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression .
it 's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art .
ll : and so then , what this libertarian draws from these two points ...
js : one remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience .
stage two , social remix , is really about using it to mediate people 's relationships to each other .
first , within each video , the brat pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group .
but there 's also a dialogue between the videos , where , once the basic structure is established , it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups ' social and physical worlds .
ll : and then , here 's for me , the critical key to what julian has to say ...
js : copyright policy is n't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity ; it 's about what level of control we 're going to permit to be exercised social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture .
i think it 's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind .
if we 're only focused on how to maximize i think we risk suppressing this different and richer and , in some ways , maybe even more important one .
ll : right . bingo . point .
freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture .
and for that to happen , you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected , to enable this kind of innovation , as this libertarian tells us , between these two creative cultures , a commercial and a sharing culture .
the point is they , he , here , gets that culture .
now , my concern is , we dems , too often , not so much .
all right , take for example this great company .
in the good old days when this republican ran that company , their greatest work was work that built on the past , right .
all of the great disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them , or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them , to celebrate this add-on remix creativity .
indeed , mickey mouse himself , of course , as " steamboat willie , " is a remix of the then , very dominant , very popular " steamboat bill " by buster keaton .
this man was a remixer extraordinaire .
he is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity .
but then the company passes through this dark stage to this democrat .
wildly different .
this is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the sonny bono copyright term extension act , extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years , so that no one could do to disney what disney did to the brothers grimm .
now , when we tried to challenge this , going to the supreme court , getting the supreme court , the bunch of conservatives there - if we could get them to wake up to this - to strike it down , we had the assistance of nobel prize winners including this right-wing nobel prize winner , milton friedman , who said he would join our brief only if the word " no brainer " was in the brief somewhere .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but apparently , no brains existed in this place when democrats passed and signed this bill into law .
now , tiny little quibble of a footnote : sonny bono , you might say , was a republican , but i do n't buy it .
this guy is no republican .
okay , for a second example , think about this cultural hero , icon on the left , creator of this character .
look at the site that he built : " star wars " mashups , inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon .
read the license .
the license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to lucas .
the mashup is owned by lucas .
indeed , anything you add to the mashup , music you might add , lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free .
there is no creator here to be recognized .
the creator does n't have any rights .
the creator is a sharecropper in this story .
and we should remember who employed the sharecroppers : the democrats , right ?
so the point is the republicans here recognize that there 's a certain need of ownership , a respect for ownership , the respect we should give the creator , the remixer , the owner , the property owner , the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff , and not a generation of sharecroppers .
now , i think there are lessons we should learn here , lessons about openness .
our lives are sharing activities , at least in part .
even for the head of goldman sachs , at least in part .
and for that sharing activity to happen , we have to have well-protected spaces of fair use .
that 's number one . number two : this ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create .
freedom , which means without permission from anyone , the ability to create .
and number three : we need to respect the creator , the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them .
now , this explains the right-wing nonprofit creative commons .
actually , it 's not a right-wing nonprofit , but of course - let me just tie it here - the creative commons , which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry .
so that we go from a " all rights reserved " world to a " some rights reserved " world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content , building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work .
these tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely .
and it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that 's obviously developed around these licenses , as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there , licensed freely in this way .
now that picture of an ecology of creativity , the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity , is that the ecology of creativity we have right now ?
well , as you all know , not many of us believe we do .
i tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week .
i created a video which was based on a wireside chat that i 'd given , and i uploaded it to youtube .
i then got this email from youtube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious wmg that matched their content id .
so i did n't think much about it .
and then on twitter , somebody said to me , " your talk on youtube was dmca 'd . was that your purpose ? "
imagining that i had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the dmca .
i answered , " no . " i did n't even think about it .
but then i went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced .
my whole 45-minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video , a video about fair use , that included warner music group music .
now , interestingly , they still sold ads for that music , if you played the silent video .
you could still buy the music , but you could n't hear anything because it had been silenced .
so i did what the current regime says i must do to be free to use youtube to talk about fair use .
i went to this site , and i had to answer these questions .
and then in an extraordinarily bart simpson-like , juvenile way you 've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak .
and i felt like i was in third grade again .
" i will not put tacks on the teacher 's chair .
i will not put tacks on the teacher 's chair . "
this is absurd .
it is outrageous .
it is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging .
and the question i ask you is : who 's fighting it ?
well , interestingly , in the last presidential election , who was the number one , active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech ?
john mccain .
letter after letter attacking youtube 's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system , that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the internet .
now , that was the story of me then , my good old days of right-wing lunacy .
let me come back to now , now when i 'm a little leftist - i 'm certainly left-handed , so at least a lefty - and i wonder , can we on the left expect to build this ecology of freedom , now , in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it , where even icons of the left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government-funded research ?
the president , who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements , which effectively lock us into the insane system of dmca that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes , you 're out that , of course , the rest of the world are increasingly adopting .
not a single example of reform has been produced yet .
and we 're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon .
so here 's the lessons of openness that i think we need to learn .
openness is a commitment to a certain set of values .
we need to speak of those values .
the value of freedom . it 's a value of community .
it 's a value of the limits in regulation .
it 's a value respecting the creator .
now , if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the right , if we can take them and incorporate them , maybe we could do a little trade .
we learn those values on the left , and maybe they 'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the right .
anyway , please join me in teaching these values .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to talk about is , as background , is the idea that cars are art .
this is actually quite meaningful to me , because car designers tend to be a little bit low on the totem pole - we do n't do coffee table books with just one lamp inside of it - and cars are thought so much as a product that it 's a little bit difficult to get into the aesthetic side under the same sort of terminology that one would discuss art .
and so cars , as art , brings it into an emotional plane - if you accept that - that you have to deal with on the same level you would with art with a capital a.
now at this point you 're going to see a picture of michelangelo .
this is completely different than automobiles .
automobiles are self-moving things , right ? elevators are automobiles .
and they 're not very emotional ; they solve a purpose ; and certainly automobiles have been around for 100 years and have made our lives functionally a lot better in many ways ; they 've also been a real pain in the ass , because automobiles are really the thing we have to solve .
we have to solve the pollution , we have to solve the congestion - but that 's not what interests me in this speech .
what interests me in this speech is cars . automobiles may be what you use , but cars are what we are , in many ways .
and as long as we can solve the problems of automobiles , and i believe we can , with fuel cells or hydrogen , like bmw is really hip on , and lots of other things , then i think we can look past that and try and understand why this hook is in many of us - of this car-y-ness - and what that means , what we can learn from it .
that 's what i want to get to . cars are not a suit of clothes ; cars are an avatar . cars are an expansion of yourself : they take your thoughts , your ideas , your emotions , and they multiply it - your anger , whatever . it 's an avatar .
it 's a super-waldo that you happen to be inside of , and if you feel sexy , the car is sexy . and if you 're full of road rage , you 've got a " chevy : like a rock , " right ?
cars are a sculpture - did you know this ?
that every car you see out there is sculpted by hand .
many people think , " well , it 's computers , and it 's done by machines and stuff like that . "
well , they reproduce it , but the originals are all done by hand .
it 's done by men and women who believe a lot in their craft .
and they put that same kind of tension into the sculpting of a car that you do in a great sculpture that you would go and look at in a museum .
that tension between the need to express , the need to discover , then you put something new into it , and at the same time you have bounds of craftsmanship .
rules that say , this is how you handle surfaces ; this is what control is all about ; this is how you show you 're a master of your craft .
and that tension , that discovery , that push for something new - and at the same time , that sense of obligation to the regards of craftsmanship - that 's as strong in cars as it is in anything .
we work in clay , which has n't changed much since michelangelo started screwing around with it , and there 's a very interesting analogy to that too .
real quickly - michelangelo once said he 's there to " discover the figure within , " ok ?
there we go , the automobile .
that was 100 years right there - did you catch that ?
between that one there , and that one there , it changed a lot did n't it ?
ok , it 's not marketing ; there 's a very interesting car concept here , but the marketing part is not what i want to talk about here .
i want to talk about this .
why it means you have to wash a car , what is it , that sensuality you have to touch about it ? that 's the sculpture that goes into it . that sensuality .
and it 's done by men and women working just like this , making cars .
now this little quote about sculpture from henry moore , i believe that that " pressure within " that moore 's talking about - at least when it comes to cars - comes right back to this idea of the mean .
it 's that will to live , that need to survive , to express itself , that comes in a car , and takes over people like me .
and we tell other people , " do this , do this , do this , " until this thing comes alive .
we are completely infected . and beauty can be the result of this infectiousness ; it 's quite wonderful .
this sculpture is , of course , at the heart of all of it , and it 's really what puts the craftsmanship into our cars .
and it 's not a whole lot different , really , when they 're working like this , or when somebody works like this .
it 's that same kind of commitment , that same kind of beauty .
now , now i get to the point . i want to talk about cars as art .
art , in the platonic sense , is truth ; it 's beauty , and love .
now this is really where designers in car business diverge from the engineers .
we do n't really have a problem talking about love .
we do n't have a problem talking about truth or beauty in that sense .
that 's what we 're searching for - when we 're working our craft , we are really trying to find that truth out there .
we 're not trying to find vanity and beauty .
we 're trying to find the beauty in the truth .
however , engineers tend to look at things a little bit more newtonian , instead of this quantum approach .
we 're dealing with irrationalisms , and we 're dealing with paradoxes that we admit exist , and the engineers tend to look things a little bit more like two and two is four , and if you get 4.0 it 's better , and 4.000 is even better .
and that sometimes leads to bit of a divergence in why we 're doing what we 're doing .
we 've pretty much accepted the fact , though , that we are the women in the organization at bmw - bmw is a very manly type business , - men , men , men ; it 's engineers .
and we 're kind of the female side to that . that 's ok , that 's cool . you go off and be manly . we 're going to be a little bit more female .
because what we 're interested in is finding form that 's more than just a function .
we 're interested in finding beauty that 's more than just an aesthetic ; it 's really a truth .
and i think this idea of soul , as being at the heart of great cars , is very applicable . you all know it . you know a car when you 've seen it , with soul . you know how strong this is .
well , this experience of love , and the experience of design , to me , are interchangeable . and now i 'm coming to my story .
i discovered something about love and design through a project called deep blue .
and first of all , you have to go with me for a second , and say , you know , you could take the word " love " out of a lot of things in our society , put the word " design " in , and it still works , like this quote here , you know . it kind of works , you know ?
you can understand that . it works in truisms .
" all is fair in design and war . "
certainly we live in a competitive society .
i think this one here , there 's a pop song that really describes philippe starck for me , you know , this is like you know , this is like puppy love , you know , this is cool right ?
toothbrush , cool .
it really only gets serious when you look at something like this . ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is one substitution that i believe all of us , in design management , are guilty of .
and this idea that there is more to love , more to design , when it gets down to your neighbor , your other , it can be physical like this , and maybe in the future it will be .
but right now it 's in dealing with our own people , our own teams who are doing the creating . so , to my story .
the idea of people-work is what we work with here , and i have to make a bond with my designers when we 're creating bmws .
we have to have a shared intimacy , a shared vision - that means we have to work as one family ; we have to understand ourselves that way .
there 's good times ; there 's interesting times ; and there 's some stress times too .
you want to do cars , you 've got to go outside .
you 've got to do cars in the rain ; you 've got to do cars in the snow .
that 's , by the way , is a presentation we made to our board of directors .
we haul their butts out in the snow , too . you want to know cars outside ?
well , you 've got to stand outside to do this .
and because these are artists , they have very artistic temperaments .
all right ? now one thing about art is , art is discovery , and art is discovering yourself through your art . right ?
and one thing about cars is we 're all a little bit like pygmalion , we are completely in love with our own creations .
this is one of my favorite paintings , it really describes our relationship with cars .
this is sick beyond belief .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but because of this , the intimacy with which we work together as a team takes on a new dimension , a new meaning .
we have a shared center ; we have a shared focus - that car stays at the middle of all our relationships .
and it 's my job , in the competitive process , to narrow this down .
i heard today about joseph 's death genes that have to go in and kill cell reproduction .
you know , that 's what i have to do sometimes .
we start out with 10 cars ; we narrow it down to five cars , down to three cars , down to two cars , down to one car , and i 'm in the middle of that killing , basically .
someone 's love , someone 's baby .
this is very difficult , and you have to have a bond with your team that permits you to do this , because their life is wrapped up in that too .
they 've got that gene infected in them as well , and they want that to live , more than anything else .
well , this project , deep blue , put me in contact with my team in a way that i never expected , and i want to pass it on to you , because i want you to reflect on this , perhaps in your own relationships .
we wanted to a do a car which was a complete leap of faith for bmw .
we wanted to do a team which was so removed from the way we 'd done it , that i only had a phone number that connected me to them .
so , what we did was : instead of having a staff of artists that are just your wrist , we decided to free up a team of creative designers and engineers to find out what 's the successor to the suv phenomenon in america .
this is 1996 we did this project . and so we sent them off with this team name , deep blue . now many people know deep blue from ibm - we actually stole it from them because we figured if anybody read our faxes they 'd think we 're talking about computers .
it turned out it was quite clever because deep blue , in a company like bmw , has a hook - " deep blue , " wow , cool name .
so people get wrapped up in it . and we took a team of designers , and we sent them off to america . and we gave them a budget , what we thought was a set of deliverables , a timetable , and nothing else .
like i said , i just had a phone number that connected me to them .
and a group of engineers worked in germany , and the idea was they would work separately on this problem of what 's the successor to the suv .
they would come together , compare notes . then they would work apart , come together , and they would produce together a monumental set of diverse opinions that did n't pollute each other 's ideas - but at the same time came together and resolved the problems .
hopefully , really understand the customer at its heart , where the customer is , live with them in america . so - sent the team off , and actually something different happened . they went other places .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they disappeared , quite honestly , and all i got was postcards .
now , i got some postcards of these guys in las vegas , and i got some postcards of these guys in the grand canyon , and i got these postcards of niagara falls , and pretty soon they 're in new york , and i do n't know where else .
and i 'm telling myself , " this is going to be a great car , they 're doing research that i 've never even thought about before . "
right ? and they decided that instead of , like , having a studio , and six or seven apartments , it was cheaper to rent elizabeth taylor 's ex-house in malibu .
and - at least they told me it was her house , i guess it was at one time , she had a party there or something .
but anyway , this was the house , and they all lived there .
now this is 24/7 living , half-a-dozen people who 'd left their - some had left their wives behind and families behind , and they literally lived in this house for the entire six months the project was in america , but the first three months were the most intensive .
and one of the young women in the project , she was a fantastic lady , she actually built her room in the bathroom .
the bathroom was so big , she built the bed over the bathtub - it 's quite fascinating .
on the other hand , i did n't know anything about this . ok ?
nothing . this is all going on , and all i 'm getting is postcards of these guys in las vegas , or whatever , saying , " do n't worry chris , this is really going to be good . " ok ?
so my concept of what a design studio was probably - i was n't up to speed on where these guys were .
however , the engineers back in munich had taken on this kind of newtonian solution , and they were trying to find how many cup holders can dance on the head of a pin , and , you know , these really serious questions that are confronting the modern consumer .
and one was hoping that these two teams would get together , and this collusion of incredible creativity , under these incredible surroundings , and these incredibly stressed-out engineers , would create some incredible solutions .
well , what i did n't know was , and what we found out was - these guys , they ca n't even like talk to each other under those conditions .
you get a divergence of newtonian and quantum thinking at that point , you have a split in your dialog that is so deep , and so far , that they can not bring this together at all .
and so we had our first meeting , after three months , in tiburon , which is just up the road from here - you know tiburon ?
and the idea was after the first three months of this independent research they would present it all to dr. goschel - who is now my boss , and at that time he was co-mentor on the project - and they would present their results .
we would see where we were going , we would see the first indication of what could be the successive phenomenon to the suv in america .
and so i had these ideas in my head , that this is going to be great .
i mean , i 'm going to see so much work , it 's so intense - i know probably las vegas meant a lot about it , and i 'm not really sure where the grand canyon came in either - but somehow all this is going to come together , and i 'm going to see some really great product .
so we went to tiburon , after three months , and the team had gotten together the week before , many days ahead of time .
the engineers flew over , and designers got together with them , and they put their presentation together .
well , it turns out that the engineers had n't done anything .
and they had n't done anything because - kind of , like in car business , engineers are there to solve problems , and we were asking them to create a problem .
and the engineers were waiting for the designers to say , " this is the problem that we 've created , now help us solve it . "
and they could n't talk about it . so what happened was , the engineers showed up with nothing .
and the engineers told the designers , " if you go in with all your stuff , we 'll walk out , we 'll walk right out of the project . "
so i did n't know any of this , and we got a presentation that had an agenda , looked like this .
there was a whole lot of dialog .
we spent four hours being told all about vocabulary that needs to be built between engineers and designers .
and here i 'm expecting at any moment , " ok , they 're going to turn the page , and i 'm going to see the cars , i 'm going to see the sketches , i 'm going to see maybe some idea of where it 's going . "
dialog kept on going , with mental maps of words , and pretty soon it was becoming obvious that instead of being dazzled with brilliance , i was seriously being baffled with bullshit .
and if you can imagine what this is like , to have these months of postcard indication of how great this team is working , and they 're out there spending all this money , and they 're learning , and they 're doing all this stuff .
i went fucking ballistic , right ? i went nuts .
you can probably remember tiburon , it used to look like this .
after four hours of this , i stood up , and i took this team apart .
i screamed at them , i yelled at them , " what the hell are you doing ?
you 're letting me down , you 're my designers , you 're supposed to be the creative ones , what the hell is going on around here ? "
it was probably one of my better tirades , i have some good ones , but this was probably one of my better ones . and i went into these people ; how could they take bmw 's money , how could they have a holiday for three months and produce nothing , nothing ?
because of course they did n't tell us that they had three station wagons full of drawings , model concepts , pictures - everything i wanted , they 'd locked up in the cars , because they had shown solidarity with the engineers - and they 'd decided not to show me anything , in order to give the chance for problem solving a chance to start , because they had n't realized , of course , that they could n't do problem creating .
so we went to lunch - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 've got to tell you , this was one seriously quiet lunch .
the engineers all sat at one end of the table , the designers and i sat at the other end of the table , really quiet .
and i was just fucking furious , furious . ok ?
probably because they had all the fun and i did n't , you know .
that 's what you get furious about right ?
and somebody asked me about catherine , my wife , you know , did she fly out with me or something ?
i said , " no , " and it triggered a set of thoughts about my wife .
and i recalled that when catherine and i were married , the priest gave a very nice sermon , and he said something very important .
he said , " love is not selfish , " he said , " love does not mean counting how many times i say , ' i love you . ' it does n't mean you had sex this many times this month , and it 's two times less than last month , so that means you do n't love me as much .
love is not selfish . " and i thought about this , and i thought , " you know , i 'm not showing love here . i 'm seriously not showing love .
i 'm in the air , i 'm in the air without trust .
this can not be . this can not be that i 'm expecting a certain number of sketches , and to me that 's my quantification method for qualifying a team .
this can not be . "
so i told them this story . i said , " guys , i 'm thinking about something here , this is n't right . i ca n't have a relationship with you guys based on a premise that is a quantifiable one .
based on a dictate premise that says , ' i 'm a boss , you do what i say , without trust . " ' i said " this ca n't be . "
actually , we all broke down into tears , to be quite honest about it , because they still could not tell me how much frustration they had built up inside of them , not being able to show me what i wanted , and merely having to ask me to trust them that it would come .
and i think we felt much closer that day , we cut a lot of strings that did n't need to be there , and we forged the concept for what real team and creativity is all about .
we put the car back at the center of our thoughts , and we put love , i think , truly back into the center of the process .
by the way , that team went on to create six different concepts for the next model of what would be the proposal for the next generation after suvs in america .
one of those was the idea of a crossover coupes - you see it downstairs , the x coupe - they had a lot of fun with that .
it was the rendition of our motorcycle , the gs , as carl magnusson says , " brute-iful , " as the idea of what could be a motorcycle , if you add two more wheels .
and so , in conclusion , my lesson that i wanted to pass on to you , was this one here . i 'm also going to steal a little quote out of " little prince . "
there 's a lot to be said about trust and love , if you know that those two words are synonymous for design .
i had a very , very meaningful relationship with my team that day , and it 's stayed that way ever since .
and i hope that you too find that there 's more to design , and more towards the art of the design , than doing it yourself .
it 's true that the trust and the love , that makes it worthwhile .
thanks so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me tell you a story .
it 's my first year as a new high school science teacher , and i 'm so eager .
i 'm so excited , i 'm pouring myself into my lesson plans .
but i 'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything .
this happens one day : i 'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology : viruses and how they attack .
and so i 'm so excited to discuss this with them , and i come in and i say , " can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool ? "
there 's silence .
finally , my favorite student , she looks me straight in the eye , and she says , " the reading sucked . "
and then she clarified . she said , " you know what , i do n't mean that it sucks . it means that i did n't understand a word of it .
it 's boring . um , who cares , and it sucks . "
these sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now , and i realize that all of my other students are in the same boat , that maybe they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook , but not one of them really understood the main ideas .
not one of them can tell me why this stuff is so cool , why it 's so important .
i 'm totally clueless .
i have no idea what to do next .
so the only thing i can think of is say , " listen . let me tell you a story .
the main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses .
these guys are blown up a couple million times .
the real bacteria and viruses are so small we ca n't see them without a microscope , and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick .
but what a lot of people do n't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick . "
now , the story that i start telling my kids , it starts out like a horror story .
once upon a time there 's this happy little bacterium .
do n't get too attached to him .
maybe he 's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere , and all of a sudden he starts to not feel so good .
maybe he ate something bad for lunch , and then things get really horrible , as his skin rips apart , and he sees a virus coming out from his insides .
and then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides .
if - ouch is right ! - if you see this , and you 're a bacterium , this is like your worst nightmare .
but if you 're a virus and you see this , you cross those little legs of yours and you think , " we rock . "
because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium .
here 's what had to happen .
a virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its dna into it .
the next thing is , that virus dna made stuff that chopped up the bacteria dna .
and now that we 've gotten rid of the bacteria dna , the virus dna takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses .
because , you see , dna is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make .
so this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots .
the workers still come the next day , they do their job , but they 're following different instructions .
so replacing the bacteria dna with virus dna turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses - that is , until it 's so filled with viruses that it bursts .
but that 's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria .
some are much more crafty .
when a secret agent virus infects a bacterium , they do a little espionage .
here , this cloaked , secret agent virus is slipping his dna into the bacterial cell , but here 's the kicker : it does n't do anything harmful - not at first .
instead , it silently slips into the bacteria 's own dna , and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell , waiting for instructions .
and what 's interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies , the babies also have the virus dna in them .
so now we have a whole extended bacteria family , filled with virus sleeper cells .
they 're just happily living together until a signal happens and - bam ! - all of the dna pops out .
it takes control of these cells , turns them into virus-making factories , and they all burst , a huge , extended bacteria family , all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts , the viruses taking over the bacterium .
so now you understand how viruses can attack cells .
there are two ways : on the left is what we call the lytic way , where the viruses go right in and take over the cells .
on the -lsb- right -rsb- is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses .
so this stuff is not that hard , right ?
and now all of you understand it .
but if you 've graduated from high school , i can almost guarantee you 've seen this information before .
but i bet it was presented in a way that it did n't exactly stick in your mind .
so when my students were first learning this , why did they hate it so much ?
well , there were a couple of reasons .
first of all , i can guarantee you that their textbooks did n't have secret agent viruses , and they did n't have horror stories .
you know , in the communication of science there is this obsession with seriousness .
it kills me . i 'm not kidding .
i used to work for an educational publisher , and as a writer , i was always told never to use stories or fun , engaging language , because then my work might not be viewed as " serious " and " scientific . "
right ? i mean , because god forbid somebody have fun when they 're learning science .
so we have this field of science that 's all about slime , and color changes . check this out .
and then we have , of course , as any good scientist has to have , explosions !
but if a textbook seems too much fun , it 's somehow unscientific .
now another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible .
if we want to summarize that story that i told you earlier , we could start by saying something like , " these viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their dna into a bacterium . "
the way this showed up in the textbook , it looked like this : " bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium . "
that 's great , perfect for 13-year-olds .
but here 's the thing . there are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there 's no way that we could ever give that to students , because it contains some language that is n't completely accurate .
for example , i told you that viruses have dna .
well , a very tiny fraction of them do n't .
they have something called rna instead .
so a professional science writer would circle that and say , " that has to go .
we have to change it to something much more technical . "
and after a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation , they 'd find fault with almost every word i 've used , and they 'd have to change anything that was n't serious enough , and they 'd have to change everything that was n't 100 percent perfect .
then it would be accurate , but it would be completely impossible to understand .
this is horrifying .
you know , i keep talking about this idea of telling a story , and it 's like science communication has taken on this idea of what i call the tyranny of precision , where you ca n't just tell a story .
it 's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know , who gives us all the details nobody cares about , where you 're like , " oh , i met my friend for lunch the other day , and she was wearing these ugly jeans .
i mean , they were n't really jeans , they were more kind of , like , leggings , but , like , i guess they 're actually kind of more like jeggings , like , but i think - " and you 're just like , " oh my god .
what is the point ? "
or even worse , science education is becoming like that guy who always says , " actually . "
right ? you want to be like , " oh , dude , we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness . "
and that guy 's like , " actually , it was 87.3 miles . "
and you 're like , " actually , shut up !
i 'm just trying to tell a story . "
because good storytelling is all about emotional connection .
we have to convince our audience that what we 're talking about matters .
but just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across .
i 'm reminded of what the architect mies van der rohe said , and i paraphrase , when he said that sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth .
i think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education .
now , finally , i am often so disappointed when people think that i 'm advocating a dumbing down of science .
that 's not true at all .
i 'm currently a ph.d. student at mit , and i absolutely understand the importance of detailed , specific scientific communication between experts , but not when we 're trying to teach 13-year-olds .
if a young learner thinks that all viruses have dna , that 's not going to ruin their chances of success in science .
but if a young learner ca n't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this , that will ruin their chances of success .
this needs to stop , and i wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems , and i beg them , i beseech them to just stop it .
but i think that 's unlikely .
so we are so lucky that we have resources like the internet , where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up .
there 's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple , understandable ways .
i dream of a wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand .
and i myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that i put on youtube .
i explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances , and i talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp .
the feedback that i get is sometimes misspelled and it 's often written in lolcats , but nonetheless it 's so appreciative , so thankful that i know this is the right way we should be communicating science .
there 's still so much work left to be done , though , and if you 're involved with science in any way i urge you to join me .
pick up a camera , start to write a blog , whatever , but leave out the seriousness , leave out the jargon .
make me laugh . make me care .
leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point .
how should you start ?
why do n't you say , " listen , let me tell you a story " ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . i am an architect .
i am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube , and this exhibition is the first one i did using paper tubes .
1986 , much , much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues , i just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure .
it 's very complicated to test the new material for the building , but this is much stronger than i expected , and also it 's very easy to waterproof , and also , because it 's industrial material , it 's also possible to fireproof .
then i built the temporary structure , 1990 .
this is the first temporary building made out of paper .
there are 330 tubes , diameter 55 -lsb- centimeters -rsb- , there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters , or four feet , wide .
as you see it in the photo , inside is the toilet .
in case you 're finished with toilet paper , you can tear off the inside of the wall . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's very useful .
year 2000 , there was a big expo in germany .
i was asked to design the building , because the theme of the expo was environmental issues .
so i was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes , recyclable paper .
my goal of the design is not when it 's completed .
my goal was when the building was demolished , because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year , we create a lot of industrial waste , so my building has to be reused or recycled .
after , the building was recycled .
so that was the goal of my design .
then i was very lucky to win the competition to build the second pompidou center in france in the city of metz .
because i was so poor , i wanted to rent an office in paris , but i could n't afford it , so i decided to bring my students to paris to build our office on top of the pompidou center in paris by ourselves .
so we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office .
we stayed there for six years without paying any rent .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . i had one big problem .
because we were part of the exhibition , even if my friend wanted to see me , they had to buy a ticket to see me .
that was the problem .
then i completed the pompidou center in metz .
it 's a very popular museum now , and i created a big monument for the government .
but then i was very disappointed at my profession as an architect , because we are not helping , we are not working for society , but we are working for privileged people , rich people , government , developers .
they have money and power .
those are invisible .
so they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture .
that is our profession , even historically it 's the same , even now we are doing the same .
so i was very disappointed that we are not working for society , even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters .
but i must say they are no longer natural disasters .
for example , earthquakes never kill people , but collapse of the buildings kill people .
that 's the responsibility of architects .
then people need some temporary housing , but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people .
so i thought , even as architects , we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing .
we can make it better .
so that is why i started working in disaster areas .
1994 , there was a big disaster in rwanda , africa .
two tribes , hutu and tutsi , fought each other .
over two million people became refugees .
but i was so surprised to see the shelter , refugee camp organized by the u.n.
they 're so poor , and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season , in the shelters built by the u.n. , they were just providing a plastic sheet , and the refugees had to cut the trees , and just like this .
but over two million people cut trees .
it just became big , heavy deforestation and an environmental problem .
that is why they started providing aluminum pipes , aluminum barracks .
very expensive , they throw them out for money , then cutting trees again .
so i proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong , but my budget is only 50 u.s. dollars per unit .
we built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites , so on .
and then , year afterward , 1995 , in kobe , japan , we had a big earthquake .
nearly 7,000 people were killed , and the city like this nagata district , all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake .
and also i found out there 's many vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a catholic church - all the building was totally destroyed .
so i went there and also i proposed to the priests , " why do n't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes ? "
and he said , " oh god , are you crazy ?
after a fire , what are you proposing ? "
so he never trusted me , but i did n't give up .
i started commuting to kobe , and i met the society of vietnamese people .
they were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park .
so i proposed to rebuild . i raised - did fundraising .
i made a paper tube shelter for them , and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish , i used beer crates as a foundation .
i asked the kirin beer company to propose , because at that time , the asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red , which does n't go with the color of the paper tubes .
the color coordination is very important .
and also i still remember , we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate , but it came empty . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i remember it was so disappointing .
so during the summer with my students , we built over 50 units of the shelters .
finally the priest , finally he trusted me to rebuild .
he said , " as long as you collect money by yourself , bring your students to build , you can do it . "
so we spent five weeks rebuilding the church .
it was meant to stay there for three years , but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it .
then , in taiwan , they had a big earthquake , and we proposed to donate this church , so we dismantled them , we sent them over to be built by volunteer people .
it stayed there in taiwan as a permanent church even now .
so this building became a permanent building .
then i wonder , what is a permanent and what is a temporary building ?
even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it .
even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money .
in 1999 , in turkey , the big earthquake , i went there to use the local material to build a shelter .
2001 , in west india , i built also a shelter .
in 2004 , in sri lanka , after the sumatra earthquake and tsunami , i rebuilt islamic fishermen 's villages .
and in 2008 , in chengdu , sichuan area in china , nearly 70,000 people were killed , and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor .
i was asked to rebuild the temporary church .
i brought my japanese students to work with the chinese students .
in one month , we completed nine classrooms , over 500 square meters .
it 's still used , even after the current earthquake in china .
in 2009 , in italy , l 'aquila , also they had a big earthquake .
and this is a very interesting photo : former prime minister berlusconi and japanese former former former former prime minister mr. aso - you know , because we have to change the prime minister ever year .
and they are very kind , affording my model .
i proposed a big rebuilding , a temporary music hall , because l 'aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed , so musicians were moving out .
so i proposed to the mayor , i 'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium .
he said , " as long as you bring your money , you can do it . "
and i was very lucky .
mr. berlusconi brought g8 summit , and our former prime minister came , so they helped us to collect money , and i got half a million euros from the japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium .
year 2010 in haiti , there was a big earthquake , but it 's impossible to fly over , so i went to santo domingo , next-door country , to drive six hours to get to haiti with the local students in santo domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes .
this is what happened in japan two years ago , in northern japan .
after the earthquake and tsunami , people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium .
but look at this . there 's no privacy .
people suffer mentally and physically .
so we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes , just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain .
however , some of the facility authority does n't want us to do it , because , they said , simply , it 's become more difficult to control them .
but it 's really necessary to do it .
they do n't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one .
look at this . even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing , so dense and so messy because there is no storage , nothing , water is leaking , so i thought , we have to make multi-story building because there 's no land and also it 's not very comfortable .
so i proposed to the mayor while i was making partitions .
finally i met a very nice mayor in onagawa village in miyagi .
he asked me to build three-story housing on baseball -lsb- fields -rsb- .
i used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable , within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same , but much more comfortable .
many of the people want to stay here forever .
i was very happy to hear that .
now i am working in new zealand , christchurch .
about 20 days before the japanese earthquake happened , also they had a big earthquake , and many japanese students were also killed , and the most important cathedral of the city , the symbol of christchurch , was totally destroyed .
and i was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral .
so this is under construction .
and i 'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i have 18 minutes to tell you what happened over the past six million years .
all right .
we all have come from a long way , here in africa , and converged in this region of africa , which is a place where 90 percent of our evolutionary process took place .
and i say that not because i am african , but it 's in africa that you find the earliest evidence for human ancestors , upright walking traces , even the first technologies in the form of stone tools .
so we all are africans , and welcome home .
all right .
i 'm a paleoanthropologist , and my job is to define man 's place in nature and explore what makes us human .
and today , i will use selam , the earliest child ever discovered , to tell you a story of all of us .
selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago .
she belongs to the species known as australopithecus afarensis .
you do n't need to remember that .
that 's the lucy species , and was found by my research team in december of 2000 in an area called dikika .
it 's in the northeastern part of ethiopia .
and selam means peace in many ethiopian languages .
we use that name to celebrate peace in the region and in the planet .
and the fact that it was the cover story of all these famous magazines gives you already an idea of her significance , i think .
after i was invited by ted , i did some digging , because that 's what we do , to know about my host .
you do n't just jump into an invitation .
and i learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools , 2.6 million years ago .
first entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old .
and evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old - beads .
and you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time .
and dna analysis of living humans and chimpanzees teaches us today that we diverged sometime around seven million years ago and that these two species share over 98 percent of the same genetic material .
i think knowing this is a very useful context within which we can think of our ancestry .
however , dna analysis informs us only about the beginning and the end , telling us nothing about what happened in the middle .
so , for us , paleoanthropologists , our job is to find the hard evidence , the fossil evidence , to fill in this gap and see the different stages of development .
because it 's only when you do that , that you can talk about - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it 's only when you do that , -lsb- that -rsb- you can talk about how we looked like and how we behaved at different times , and how those likes and looks and behaviors changed through time .
that then gives you an access to explore the biological mechanisms and forces that are responsible for this gradual change that made us what we are today .
but finding the hard evidence is a very complicated endeavor .
it 's a systematic and scientific approach , which takes you to places that are remote , hot , hostile and often with no access .
just to give you an example , when i went to dikika , where selam was found , in ' 99 - and it 's about 500 kilometers from addis ababa , the capital of ethiopia .
it took us only seven hours to do the first 470 kilometers of the 500 , but took four , solid hours to do the last only 30 kilometers .
with the help of the locals and using just shovels and picks , i made my way .
i was the first person to actually drive a car to the spot .
when you get there , this is what you see , and it 's the vastness of the place which makes you feel helpless and vulnerable .
and once you make it there , the big question is where to start .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you find nothing for years and years .
when i go to places like this , which are paleontological sites , it 's like going to a game park , an extinct game park .
but what you find are not the human remains , such as selam and lucy , on a day-to-day basis .
you find elephants , rhinos , monkeys , pigs , etc .
but you could ask , how could these large mammals live in this desert environment ?
of course , they can not , but i 'm telling you already that the environment and the carrying capacity of this region was drastically different from what we have today .
a very important environmental lesson could be learned from this .
anyway , once we made it there , then it 's a game park , as i said , an extinct game park .
and our ancestors lived in that game park , but were just the minorities . they were not as successful and as widespread as the homo sapiens that we are .
to tell you just an example , an anecdote about their rarity , i was going to this place every year and would do fieldwork here , and the assistants , of course , helped me do the surveys .
they would find a bone and tell me , " here is what you 're looking for . "
i would say , " no , that 's an elephant . "
again , another one , " that 's a monkey . " " that 's a pig , " etc .
so one of my assistants , who never went to school , said to me , " listen , zeray .
you either do n't know what you 're looking for , or you 're looking in the wrong place , " he said .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , " why ? " " because there were elephants and lions , and the people were scared and went somewhere else .
let 's go somewhere else . "
well , he was very tired , and it 's really tiring .
it was then , after such hard work and many frustrating years that we found selam , and you see the face here covered by sandstone .
and here is actually the spinal column and the whole torso encased in a sandstone block , because she was buried by a river .
what you have here seems to be nothing , but contains an incredible amount of scientific information that helps us explore what makes us human .
this is the earliest and most complete juvenile human ancestor ever found in the history of paleoanthropology , an amazing piece of our long , long history .
there were these three people and me , and i am taking the pictures , that 's why i am not in .
how would you feel if you were me ? you have something extraordinary in your hand , but you are in the middle of nowhere ?
the feeling i had was a deep and quiet happiness and excitement , of course accompanied by a huge sense of responsibility , of making sure everything is safe .
here is a close-up of the fossil , after five years of cleaning , preparation and description , which was very long , as i had to expose the bones from the sandstone block i just showed you in the previous slide .
it took five years .
in a way , this was like the second birth for the child , after 3.3 million years , but the labor was very long .
and here is full scale - it 's a tiny bone .
and in the middle is the minister of ethiopian tourism , who came to visit the national museum of ethiopia while i was working there .
and you see me worried and trying to protect my child , because you do n't leave anyone with this kind of child , even a minister .
so then , once you 've done that , the next stage is to know what it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- once that was done , then it was possible to compare .
we were able to tell that she belonged to the human family tree because the legs , the foot , and some features clearly showed that she walked upright , and upright walking is a hallmark in humanity .
but in addition , if you compare the skull with a comparably aged chimpanzee and little george bush here , you see that you have vertical forehead .
and you see that in humans , because of the development of the pre-frontal cortex , it 's called .
you do n't see that in chimpanzees , and you do n't see this very projecting canine .
so she belongs to our family tree , but within that , of course , you do detailed analysis , and we know now that she belongs to the lucy species , known as australopithecus afarensis .
the next exciting question is , girl or boy ?
and how old was she when she died ?
you can determine the sex of the individual based on the size of the teeth .
how ?
you know , in primates , there is this phenomenon called sexual dimorphism , which simply means males are larger than females and males have larger teeth than the females .
but to do that , you need the permanent dentition , which you do n't see here , because what you have here are the baby teeth .
but using the ct scanning technology , which is normally used for medical purposes , you can go deep into the mouth and come up with this beautiful image showing you both the baby teeth here and the still-growing adult teeth here .
so when you measure those teeth , it was clear that she turned out to be a girl with very small canine teeth .
and to know how old she was when she died , what you do is you do an informed estimate , and you say , how much time would be required to form this amount of teeth , and the answer was three .
so , this girl died when she was about three , 3.3 million years ago .
so , with all that information , the big question is - what do we actually - what does she tell us ?
to answer this question , we can phrase another question .
what do we actually know about our ancestors ?
we want to know how they looked like , how they behaved , how they walked around , and how they lived and grew up .
and among the answers that you can get from this skeleton are included : first , this skeleton documents , for the first time , how infants looked over three million years ago .
and second , she tells us that she walked upright , but had some adaptation for tree climbing .
and more interesting , however , is the brain in this child was still growing .
at age three , if you have a still-growing brain , it 's a human behavior .
in chimps , by age three , the brain is formed over 90 percent .
that 's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us , anyway .
but in humans , we continue to grow our brains .
that 's why we need care from our parents .
but that care means also you learn .
you spend more time with your parents .
and that 's very characteristic of humans and it 's called childhood , which is this extended dependence of human children on their family or parents .
so , the still-growing brain in this individual tells us that childhood , which requires an incredible social organization , a very complex social organization , emerged over three million years ago .
so , by being at the cusp of our evolutionary history , selam unites us all and gives us a unique account on what makes us human .
but not everything was human , and i will give you a very exciting example .
this is called the hyoid bone . it 's a bone which is right here .
it supports your tongue from behind .
it 's , in a way , your voice box .
it determines the type of voice you produce .
it was not known in the fossil record , and we have it in this skeleton .
when we did the analysis of this bone , it was clear that it looked very chimp-like , chimpanzee-like .
so if you were there 3.3 million years ago , to hear when this girl was crying out for her mother , she would have sounded more like a chimpanzee than a human .
maybe you 're wondering , " so , you see this ape feature , human feature , ape feature .
what does that tell us ? "
you know , that is very exciting for us , because it demonstrates that things were changing slowly and progressively , and that evolution is in the making .
to summarize the significance of this fossil , we can say the following .
up to now , the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because the fossils , the baby fossils , were missing .
they do n't preserve well , as you know .
so the knowledge that we had about our ancestors , on how they looked like , how they behaved , was kind of biased toward adults .
imagine somebody coming from mars and his job is to report on the type of people occupying our planet earth , and you hide all the babies , the children , and he goes back and reports .
can you imagine how much biased his report would be ?
that 's what somehow we were doing so far in the absence of the fossil children , so i think the new fossil fixes this problem .
so , i think the most important question at the end is , what do we actually learn from specimens like this and from our past in general ?
of course , in addition to extracting this huge amount of scientific information as to what makes us human , you know , the many human ancestors that have existed over the past six million years - and there are more than 10 - they did not have the knowledge , the technology and sophistications that we , homo sapiens , have today .
but if this species , ancient species , would travel in time and see us today , they would very much be very proud of their legacy , because they became the ancestors of the most successful species in the universe .
and they were probably not aware of this future legacy , but they did great .
now the question is , we homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet , possibly more .
so the question is , are we up to the challenge ?
and can we really do better than these primitive , small-brained ancestors ?
among the most pressing challenges that our species is faced with today are the chronic problems of africa .
needless to list them here , and there are more competent people to talk about this .
still , in my opinion , we have two choices .
one is to continue to see a poor , ill , crying africa , carrying guns , that depends on other people forever , or to promote an africa which is confident , peaceful , independent , but cognizant of its huge problems and great values at the same time .
i am for the second option , and i 'm sure many of you are .
and the key is to promote a positive african attitude towards africa .
that 's because we africans concentrate - i am from ethiopia , by the way - we concentrate too much on how we are seen from elsewhere , or from outside .
i think it 's important to promote in a more positive way on how we see ourselves .
that 's what i call positive african attitude .
so finally , i would like to say , so let 's help africa walk upright and forward , then we all can be proud of our future legacy as a species .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when we park in a big parking lot , how do we remember where we parked our car ?
here 's the problem facing homer .
and we 're going to try to understand what 's happening in his brain .
so we 'll start with the hippocampus , shown in yellow , which is the organ of memory .
if you have damage there , like in alzheimer 's , you ca n't remember things including where you parked your car .
it 's named after latin for " seahorse , " which it resembles .
and like the rest of the brain , it 's made of neurons .
so the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it .
and the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other .
the hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells , which are very densely interconnected .
and scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food .
so we 're going to imagine we 're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here .
and when it fires a little spike of electricity , there 's going to be a red dot and a click .
so what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment .
and it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike .
so we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal 's location .
and if we record from lots of different neurons , we 'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment , like in this square box shown here .
so together they form a map for the rest of the brain , telling the brain continually , " where am i now within my environment ? "
place cells are also being recorded in humans .
so epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring .
and some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town .
and place cells in their hippocampi would fire , become active , start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town .
so how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment ?
well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important .
so the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat 's in .
and when you expand the box , the firing location expands .
the one below likes to fire whenever there 's a wall close by to the south .
and if you put another wall inside the box , then the cell fires in both place wherever there 's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box .
so this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you - extended buildings and so on - is particularly important for the hippocampus .
and indeed , on the inputs to the hippocampus , cells are found which project into the hippocampus , which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it 's exploring around .
so the cell on the left , you can see , it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east , whether it 's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table , which the animals are running around .
and the cell on the right there fires whenever there 's a boundary to the south , whether it 's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart .
so that 's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it 's exploring around .
we can also test where we think objects are , like this goal flag , in simple environments - or indeed , where your car would be .
so we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember .
and then , if we put them back in the environment , generally they 're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was .
but on some trials , we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell .
in that case , we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment .
and what you see , for example , if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment , and then if you ask people where it was , but you 've made the environment bigger , where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out .
it 's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location , and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern .
that guides you back to the location that you want to remember .
but we also know where we are through movement .
so if we take some outbound path - perhaps we park and we wander off - we know because our own movements , which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back .
and place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell .
now grid cells are found , again , on the inputs to the hippocampus , and they 're a bit like place cells .
but now as the rat explores around , each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid .
and if you record from several grid cells - shown here in different colors - each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment , and each cell 's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells .
so the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one .
so together , it 's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment - a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you 'd find on a map , but using triangles .
and as it moves around , the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is , so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment .
do people have grid cells ?
well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry , the same orientations of grid , shown in orange here , it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we 're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between .
so we can put people in an mri scanner and have them do a little video game like the one i showed you and look for this signal .
and indeed , you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex , which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats .
so back to homer .
he 's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked .
and that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells .
he 's also remembering the path he took out of the car park , which would be represented in the firing of grid cells .
now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire .
and he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car .
and that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car 's actually there .
maybe it 's been towed .
but he knows where it was , so he knows to go and get it .
so beyond spatial memory , if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain , we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks , like remembering the last time you went to a wedding , for example .
so it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene , at least , of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them .
so if this was happening , your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint .
and grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space .
another kind of cell , head direction cells , which i did n't mention yet , they fire like a compass according to which way you 're facing .
they could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery , so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding , for example .
so this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we 're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- hammer -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- microwave beeps -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- you probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road .
it 's made of asphalt , and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on , but not always , especially not on these days as today , when it 's raining a lot .
then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt .
and especially if you then ride with your bicycle , and pass these cars , then that 's not very nice .
also , asphalt can create a lot of noise .
it 's a noisy material , and if we produce roads like in the netherlands , very close to cities , then we would like a silent road .
the solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt .
porous asphalt , a material that we use now in most of the highways in the netherlands , it has pores and water can just rain through it , so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides , and you have a road that 's easy to drive on , so no splash water anymore .
also the noise will disappear in these pores .
because it 's very hollow , all the noise will disappear , so it 's a very silent road .
it also has disadvantages , of course , and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur .
what is raveling ? you see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off .
first you get one stone , then several more , and more and more and more and more , and then they - well , i will not do that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but they can damage your windshield , so you 're not happy with that .
and finally , this raveling can also lead to more and more damage .
sometimes you can create potholes with that .
ha . he 's ready .
potholes , of course , that can become a problem , but we have a solution .
here you see actually how the damage appears in this material .
it 's a porous asphalt , like i said , so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones .
due to weathering , due to u.v. light , due to oxidation , this binder , this bitumen , the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink , and if it shrinks , it gets micro-cracks , and it delaminates from the aggregates .
then if you drive over the road , you take out the aggregates - what we just saw here .
to solve this problem , we thought of self-healing materials .
if we can make this material self-healing , then probably we have a solution .
so what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans , and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces , and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen .
so then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it .
then you need a machine , like you see here , that you can use for cooking - an induction machine .
induction can heat , especially steel ; it 's very good at that .
then what you do is you heat up the steel , you melt the bitumen , and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks , and the stones are again fixed to the surface .
today i use a microwave because i can not take the big induction machine here onstage .
so a microwave is a similar system .
so i put the specimen in , which i 'm now going to take out to see what happened .
so this is the specimen coming out now .
so i said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens .
we tested a lot of specimens there , and then the government , they actually saw our results , and they thought , " well , that 's very interesting . we have to try that . "
so they donated to us a piece of highway , 400 meters of the a58 , where we had to make a test track to test this material .
so that 's what we did here . you see where we were making the test road , and then of course this road will last several years without any damage . that 's what we know from practice .
so we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab .
so we did aging on the samples , did a lot of loading on it , healed them with our induction machine , and healed them and tested them again .
several times we can repeat that .
so actually , the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine - this is the big version we have made to go on the real road - if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road , which of course saves a lot of money .
well , to conclude , i can say that we made a material using steel fibers , the addition of steel fibers , using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road , double the surface life you can even do , so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks .
and now you 're of course curious if it also worked .
so we still have the specimen here . it 's quite warm .
actually , it still has to cool down first before i can show you that the healing works .
but i will do a trial .
let 's see . yeah , it worked .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- isadora duncan - -lrb- music -rrb- - crazy , long-legged woman from san francisco , got tired of this country , and she wanted to get out .
isadora was famous somewhere around 1908 for putting up a blue curtain , and she would stand with her hands over her solar plexus and she would wait , and she would wait , and then , she would move .
-lrb- music -rrb- josh and i and somi call this piece " the red circle and the blue curtain . "
red circle .
blue curtain .
but , this is not the beginning of the 20th century .
this is a morning in vancouver in 2015 .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- singing -rrb- come on , josh !
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- singing -rrb- go !
are we there yet ?
i do n't think so .
hey , yeah !
-lrb- music -rrb- what time is it ?
-lrb- music -rrb- where are we ?
josh .
somi .
bill t.
josh .
somi .
bill t.
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , yeah !
what i thought i would do is i would start with a simple request .
i 'd like all of you to pause for a moment , you wretched weaklings , and take stock of your miserable existence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now that was the advice that st. benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century .
it was the advice that i decided to follow myself when i turned 40 .
up until that moment , i had been that classic corporate warrior - i was eating too much , i was drinking too much , i was working too hard and i was neglecting the family .
and i decided that i would try and turn my life around .
in particular , i decided i would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance .
so i stepped back from the workforce , and i spent a year at home with my wife and four young children .
but all i learned about work-life balance from that year was that i found it quite easy to balance work and life when i did n't have any work .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not a very useful skill , especially when the money runs out .
so i went back to work , and i 've spent these seven years since struggling with , studying and writing about work-life balance .
and i have four observations i 'd like to share with you today .
the first is : if society 's to make any progress on this issue , we need an honest debate .
but the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance .
all the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue , which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family .
now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you 're in .
and the reality of the society that we 're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet , screaming desperation , where they work long , hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they do n't need to impress people they do n't like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's my contention that going to work on friday in jeans and -lsb- a -rsb- t-shirt is n't really getting to the nub of the issue .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the second observation i 'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations are n't going to solve this issue for us .
we should stop looking outside .
it 's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead .
if you do n't design your life , someone else will design it for you , and you may just not like their idea of balance .
it 's particularly important - this is n't on the world wide web , is it ? i 'm about to get fired - it 's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation .
now i 'm not talking here just about the bad companies - the " abattoirs of the human soul , " as i call them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm talking about all companies .
because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you -lsb- as -rsb- they can get away with .
it 's in their nature ; it 's in their dna ; it 's what they do - even the good , well-intentioned companies .
on the one hand , putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened .
on the other hand , it 's a nightmare - it just means you spend more time at the bloody office .
we have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life .
the third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance .
before i went back to work after my year at home , i sat down and i wrote out a detailed , step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that i aspired to .
and it went like this : wake up well rested after a good night 's sleep .
have sex .
walk the dog .
have breakfast with my wife and children .
have sex again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- drive the kids to school on the way to the office .
do three hours ' work .
play a sport with a friend at lunchtime .
do another three hours ' work .
meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink .
drive home for dinner with my wife and kids .
meditate for half an hour .
have sex .
walk the dog . have sex again .
go to bed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how often do you think i have that day ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we need to be realistic .
you ca n't do it all in one day .
we need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life , but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the " i 'll have a life when i retire , when my kids have left home , when my wife has divorced me , my health is failing , i 've got no mates or interests left . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a day is too short ; " after i retire " is too long .
there 's got to be a middle way .
a fourth observation : we need to approach balance in a balanced way .
a friend came to see me last year - and she does n't mind me telling this story - a friend came to see me last year and said , " nigel , i 've read your book .
and i realize that my life is completely out of balance .
it 's totally dominated by work .
i work 10 hours a day ; i commute two hours a day .
all of my relationships have failed .
there 's nothing in my life apart from my work .
so i 've decided to get a grip and sort it out .
so i joined a gym . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i do n't mean to mock , but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat is n't more balanced ; it 's more fit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- lovely though physical exercise may be , there are other parts to life - there 's the intellectual side ; there 's the emotional side ; there 's the spiritual side .
and to be balanced , i believe we have to attend to all of those areas - not just do 50 stomach crunches .
now that can be daunting .
because people say , " bloody hell mate , i have n't got time to get fit .
you want me to go to church and call my mother . "
and i understand .
i truly understand how that can be daunting .
but an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective .
my wife , who is somewhere in the audience today , called me up at the office and said , " nigel , you need to pick our youngest son " - harry - " up from school . "
because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening .
so i left work an hour early that afternoon and picked harry up at the school gates .
we walked down to the local park , messed around on the swings , played some silly games .
i then walked him up the hill to the local cafe , and we shared a pizza for two , then walked down the hill to our home , and i gave him his bath and put him in his batman pajamas .
i then read him a chapter of roald dahl 's " james and the giant peach . "
i then put him to bed , tucked him in , gave him a kiss on his forehead and said , " goodnight , mate , " and walked out of his bedroom .
as i was walking out of his bedroom , he said , " dad ? " i went , " yes , mate ? "
he went , " dad , this has been the best day of my life , ever . "
i had n't done anything , had n't taken him to disney world or bought him a playstation .
now my point is the small things matter .
being more balanced does n't mean dramatic upheaval in your life .
with the smallest investment in the right places , you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life .
moreover , i think , it can transform society .
because if enough people do it , we can change society 's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins , to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like .
and that , i think , is an idea worth spreading .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values .
now , it 's generally understood that questions of morality - questions of good and evil and right and wrong - are questions about which science officially has no opinion .
it 's thought that science can help us get what we value , but it can never tell us what we ought to value .
and , consequently , most people - i think most people probably here - think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life : questions like , " what is worth living for ? "
" what is worth dying for ? "
" what constitutes a good life ? "
so , i 'm going to argue that this is an illusion - that the separation between science and human values is an illusion - and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history .
now , it 's often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values , because science deals with facts , and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres .
it 's often thought that there 's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be .
but i think this is quite clearly untrue .
values are a certain kind of fact .
they are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures .
why is it that we do n't have ethical obligations toward rocks ?
why do n't we feel compassion for rocks ?
it 's because we do n't think rocks can suffer . and if we 're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects , as indeed we are , it 's because we think they 're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering .
now , the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim : this is something that we could be right or wrong about . and if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects .
and there 's no notion , no version of human morality and human values that i 've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes .
even if you get your values from religion , even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death - either to an eternity of happiness with god or an eternity of suffering in hell - you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes .
and to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim , which , of course , may or may not be true .
now , to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life , for human beings , we know that there is a continuum of such facts .
we know that it 's possible to live in a failed state , where everything that can go wrong does go wrong - where mothers can not feed their children , where strangers can not find the basis for peaceful collaboration , where people are murdered indiscriminately .
and we know that it 's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic , to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable .
and we know - we know - that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space .
would adding cholera to the water be a good idea ?
probably not .
would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye , so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors ? probably not .
there are truths to be known about how human communities flourish , whether or not we understand these truths .
and morality relates to these truths .
so , in talking about values we are talking about facts .
now , of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels - from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements .
but if we 're going to talk about human well-being we are , of necessity , talking about the human brain .
because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain - whatever happens after death .
even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife , in this life , his personality - his rather unfortunate personality - is the product of his brain .
so the contributions of culture - if culture changes us , as indeed it does , it changes us by changing our brains .
and so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can , at least in principle , be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind - neuroscience , psychology , etc .
so , what i 'm arguing is that value 's reduced to facts - to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings .
and we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings .
and i think of this as kind of a moral landscape , with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures , both personal and collective .
and one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access , that few people access .
and these await our discovery .
perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual .
perhaps there are other states that we ca n't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them .
now , let me be clear about what i 'm not saying . i 'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space , or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question .
i do n't think , for instance , that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child , or whether we should bomb iran 's nuclear facilities , or whether you can deduct the full cost of ted as a business expense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers , whether or not we can find them .
and just admitting this - just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish - will change the way we talk about morality , and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future .
for instance , there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal , where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board , hard , and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin .
and hundreds of thousands of children , incidentally , are subjected to this every year .
the locations of these enlightened districts , i think , will fail to surprise you .
we 're not talking about connecticut .
and the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious .
the creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod , lest we spoil the child - this is in proverbs 13 and 20 , and i believe , 23 .
but we can ask the obvious question : is it a good idea , generally speaking , to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is there any doubt that this question has an answer , and that it matters ?
now , many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined , and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed .
and so , how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being ?
well , consider by analogy , the concept of physical health .
the concept of physical health is undefined .
as we just heard from michael specter , it has changed over the years .
when this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30 .
it 's now around 80 in the developed world .
there may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability .
people will send you donations when you 're in that condition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- notice that the fact that the concept of health is open , genuinely open for revision , does not make it vacuous .
the distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science .
another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape : there may be equivalent ways to thrive ; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing .
now , why would n't this undermine an objective morality ?
well think of how we talk about food : i would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat .
there is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food .
but there 's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison .
the fact that there are many right answers to the question , " what is food ? "
does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition .
many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions .
so , for instance , if it 's really wrong to lie , it must always be wrong to lie , and if you can find an exception , well then there 's no such thing as moral truth .
why would we think this ?
consider , by analogy , the game of chess .
now , if you 're going to play good chess , a principle like , " do n't lose your queen , " is very good to follow .
but it clearly admits some exceptions .
there are moments when losing your queen is a brilliant thing to do .
there are moments when it is the only good thing you can do .
and yet , chess is a domain of perfect objectivity .
the fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all .
now , this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere .
consider the great problem of women 's bodies : what to do about them ?
well this is one thing you can do about them : you can cover them up .
now , it is the position , generally speaking , of our intellectual community that while we may not like this , we might think of this as " wrong " in boston or palo alto , who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags ?
and who are we to say , even , that they 're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable , or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way ?
well , who are we not to say this ?
who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this ?
i 'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil - women should be able to wear whatever they want , as far as i 'm concerned .
but what does voluntary mean in a community where , when a girl gets raped , her father 's first impulse , rather often , is to murder her out of shame ?
just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute : your daughter gets raped , and what you want to do is kill her .
what are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing ?
now , to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society .
for instance , this is what it 's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world .
now , granted , for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if we are in a reflective mood , we can ask , " is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women 's bodies ? "
i mean , is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children ?
probably not . ok , so perhaps there 's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance .
-lrb- applause -rrb- perhaps there are many such places - again , given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape .
but the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak .
now the irony , from my perspective , is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another .
and of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind , not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being .
in fact , the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering .
this is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue .
but the demagogues are right about one thing : we need a universal conception of human values .
now , what stands in the way of this ?
well , one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality - especially secular , academic , scientist types .
when talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we do n't in any other area of our lives .
so , for instance the dalai lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion , and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness .
on the other hand , we have someone like ted bundy ; ted bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women .
so , we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one 's time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- most western intellectuals look at this situation and say , " well , there 's nothing for the dalai lama to be really right about - really right about - or for ted bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science .
he likes chocolate , he likes vanilla .
there 's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other . "
notice that we do n't do this in science .
on the left you have edward witten .
he 's a string theorist .
if you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around , in my experience half of them will say ed witten .
the other half will tell you they do n't like the question .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , what would happen if i showed up at a physics conference and said , " string theory is bogus .
it does n't resonate with me . it 's not how i chose to view the universe at a small scale .
i 'm not a fan . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , nothing would happen because i 'm not a physicist ; i do n't understand string theory .
i 'm the ted bundy of string theory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i would n't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member .
but this is just the point .
whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded .
that is what it is to have a domain of expertise .
that is what it is for knowledge to count .
how have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise , or moral talent , or moral genius even ?
how have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count ?
how have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering ?
does the taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering ? no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this , i think , is what the world needs now .
it needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing , and morality relates to that domain of facts .
it is possible for individuals , and even for whole cultures , to care about the wrong things , which is to say that it 's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering .
just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality .
we live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less , and they will one day mean nothing .
we live in a world filled with destructive technology , and this technology can not be uninvented ; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them .
it seems to me , therefore , patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads , or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes .
we simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life .
and to do that , we have to admit that these questions have answers .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so , some combustible material there .
whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world , hearing some of this , may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing , after as well , some of them .
language seems to be really important here .
when you 're talking about the veil , you 're talking about women dressed in cloth bags .
i 've lived in the muslim world , spoken with a lot of muslim women .
and some of them would say something else . they would say , " no , you know , this is a celebration of female specialness , it helps build that and it 's a result of the fact that " - and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view - " that male lust is not to be trusted . "
i mean , can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist ?
sam harris : yeah , well i think i tried to broach this in a sentence , watching the clock ticking , but the question is : what is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations , and you 're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you do n't veil yourself ?
and so , if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil , or a very funny hat , or tattoo their face - i think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want , but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under .
and so i think we should n't be so eager to always take their word for it , especially when it 's 120 degrees out and you 're wearing a full burqa .
ca : a lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress .
but can you reconcile that ?
i think i understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that does n't become one dimensional , where we all have to think the same .
paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward , 100 years forward , how you would like to think of the world , balancing moral progress with richness .
sh : well , i think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail , then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail .
so , we 're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion , and we 're going to understand the factors that encourage it - whether they 're genetic , whether they 're how people talk to one another , whether they 're economic systems , and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space .
so , everything is not going to be up for grabs .
it 's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women .
i mean i do n't think we need an nsf grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea - but at a certain point we 're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them .
do people love their daughters just as much in these systems ?
and i think there are clearly right answers to that .
ca : and if the results come out that actually they do , are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues ?
sh : well yeah , modulo one obvious fact , that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system .
so , you can say like , " because i knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend , i chopped his head off . and that was the most compassionate thing i could do . "
if you get all those parts aligned , yes i think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love .
but again , then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context .
it 's all of us in this together , not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus .
ca : sam , this is a conversation i would actually love to continue for hours .
we do n't have that , but maybe another time . thank you for coming to ted .
sh : really an honor . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- salaam . namaskar .
good morning .
given my ted profile , you might be expecting that i 'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends - the one that 's currently got wall street and the world bank buzzing - how to invest in women , how to empower them , how to save them .
not me .
i am interested in how women are saving us .
they 're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities , polarities we 've taken for granted for a long time , like the ones between modernity and tradition , first world and third world , oppression and opportunity .
in the midst of the daunting challenges we face as a global community , there 's something about this third way raga that is making my heart sing .
what intrigues me most is how women are doing this , despite a set of paradoxes that are both frustrating and fascinating .
why is it that women are , on the one hand , viciously oppressed by cultural practices , and yet at the same time , are the preservers of cultures in most societies ?
is the hijab or the headscarf a symbol of submission or resistance ?
when so many women and girls are beaten , raped , maimed on a daily basis in the name of all kinds of causes - honor , religion , nationality - what allows women to replant trees , to rebuild societies , to lead radical , non-violent movements for social change ?
is it different women who are doing the preserving and the radicalizing ?
or are they one and the same ?
are we guilty , as chimamanda adichie reminded us at the ted conference in oxford , of assuming that there is a single story of women 's struggles for their rights while there are , in fact , many ?
and what , if anything , do men have to do with it ?
much of my life has been a quest to get some answers to these questions .
it 's taken me across the globe and introduced me to some amazing people .
in the process , i 've gathered a few fragments that help me shed some light on this puzzle .
among those who 've helped open my eyes to a third way are : a devout muslim in afghanistan , a group of harmonizing lesbians in croatia and a taboo breaker in liberia .
i 'm indebted to them , as i am to my parents , who for some set of misdemeanors in their last life , were blessed with three daughters in this one .
and for reasons equally unclear to me , seem to be inordinately proud of the three of us .
i was born and raised here in india , and i learned from an early age to be deeply suspicious of the aunties and uncles who would bend down , pat us on the head and then say to my parents with no problem at all , " poor things . you only have three daughters .
but you 're young , you could still try again . "
my sense of outrage about women 's rights was brought to a boil when i was about 11 .
my aunt , an incredibly articulate and brilliant woman , was widowed early .
a flock of relatives descended on her .
they took off her colorful sari .
they made her wear a white one .
they wiped her bindi off her forehead .
they broke her bangles .
her daughter , rani , a few years older than me , sat in her lap bewildered , not knowing what had happened to the confident woman she once knew as her mother .
late that night , i heard my mother begging my father , " please do something ramu . ca n't you intervene ? "
and my father , in a low voice , muttering , " i 'm just the youngest brother , there 's nothing i can do .
this is tradition . "
that 's the night i learned the rules about what it means to be female in this world .
women do n't make those rules , but they define us , and they define our opportunities and our chances .
and men are affected by those rules too .
my father , who had fought in three wars , could not save his own sister from this suffering .
by 18 , under the excellent tutelage of my mother , i was therefore , as you might expect , defiantly feminist .
on the streets chanting , " -lsb- hindi -rsb- -lsb- hindi -rsb- we are the women of india .
we are not flowers , we are sparks of change . "
by the time i got to beijing in 1995 , it was clear to me , the only way to achieve gender equality was to overturn centuries of oppressive tradition .
soon after i returned from beijing , i leapt at the chance to work for this wonderful organization , founded by women , to support women 's rights organizations around the globe .
but barely six months into my new job , i met a woman who forced me to challenge all my assumptions .
her name is sakena yacoobi .
she walked into my office at a time when no one knew where afghanistan was in the united states .
she said to me , " it is not about the burka . "
she was the most determined advocate for women 's rights i had ever heard .
she told me women were running underground schools in her communities inside afghanistan , and that her organization , the afghan institute of learning , had started a school in pakistan .
she said , " the first thing anyone who is a muslim knows is that the koran requires and strongly supports literacy .
the prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the koran for themselves . "
had i heard right ?
was a women 's rights advocate invoking religion ?
but sakena defies labels .
she always wears a headscarf , but i 've walked alongside with her on a beach with her long hair flying in the breeze .
she starts every lecture with a prayer , but she 's a single , feisty , financially independent woman in a country where girls are married off at the age of 12 .
she is also immensely pragmatic .
" this headscarf and these clothes , " she says , " give me the freedom to do what i need to do to speak to those whose support and assistance are critical for this work .
when i had to open the school in the refugee camp , i went to see the imam .
i told him , ' i 'm a believer , and women and children in these terrible conditions need their faith to survive . " ' she smiles slyly .
" he was flattered .
he began to come twice a week to my center because women could not go to the mosque .
and after he would leave , women and girls would stay behind .
we began with a small literacy class to read the koran , then a math class , then an english class , then computer classes .
in a few weeks , everyone in the refugee camp was in our classes . "
sakena is a teacher at a time when to educate women is a dangerous business in afghanistan .
she is on the taliban 's hit list .
i worry about her every time she travels across that country .
she shrugs when i ask her about safety .
" kavita jaan , we can not allow ourselves to be afraid .
look at those young girls who go back to school when acid is thrown in their face . "
and i smile , and i nod , realizing i 'm watching women and girls using their own religious traditions and practices , turning them into instruments of opposition and opportunity .
their path is their own and it looks towards an afghanistan that will be different .
being different is something the women of lesbor in zagreb , croatia know all too well .
to be a lesbian , a dyke , a homosexual in most parts of the world , including right here in our country , india , is to occupy a place of immense discomfort and extreme prejudice .
in post-conflict societies like croatia , where a hyper-nationalism and religiosity have created an environment unbearable for anyone who might be considered a social outcast .
so enter a group of out dykes , young women who love the old music that once spread across that region from macedonia to bosnia , from serbia to slovenia .
these folk singers met at college at a gender studies program .
many are in their 20s , some are mothers .
many have struggled to come out to their communities , in families whose religious beliefs make it hard to accept that their daughters are not sick , just queer .
as leah , one of the founders of the group , says , " i like traditional music very much .
i also like rock and roll .
so lesbor , we blend the two .
i see traditional music like a kind of rebellion , in which people can really speak their voice , especially traditional songs from other parts of the former yugoslav republic .
after the war , lots of these songs were lost , but they are a part of our childhood and our history , and we should not forget them . "
improbably , this lgbt singing choir has demonstrated how women are investing in tradition to create change , like alchemists turning discord into harmony .
their repertoire includes the croatian national anthem , a bosnian love song and serbian duets .
and , leah adds with a grin , " kavita , we especially are proud of our christmas music , because it shows we are open to religious practices even though catholic church hates us lgbt . "
their concerts draw from their own communities , yes , but also from an older generation : a generation that might be suspicious of homosexuality , but is nostalgic for its own music and the past it represents .
one father , who had initially balked at his daughter coming out in such a choir , now writes songs for them .
in the middle ages , troubadours would travel across the land singing their tales and sharing their verses : lesbor travels through the balkans like this , singing , connecting people divided by religion , nationality and language .
bosnians , croats and serbs find a rare shared space of pride in their history , and lesbor reminds them that the songs one group often claims as theirs alone really belong to them all .
-lrb- singing -rrb- yesterday , mallika sarabhai showed us that music can create a world more accepting of difference than the one we have been given .
the world leymah gbowee was given was a world at war .
liberia had been torn apart by civil strife for decades .
leymah was not an activist , she was a mother of three .
but she was sick with worry : she worried her son would be abducted and taken off to be a child soldier , she worried her daughters would be raped , she worried for their lives .
one night , she had a dream .
she dreamt she and thousands of other women ended the bloodshed .
the next morning at church , she asked others how they felt .
they were all tired of the fighting .
we need peace , and we need our leaders to know we will not rest until there is peace .
among leymah 's friends was a policewoman who was muslim .
she promised to raise the issue with her community .
at the next friday sermon , the women who were sitting in the side room of the mosque began to share their distress at the state of affairs .
" what does it matter ? " they said , " a bullet does n't distinguish between a muslim and a christian . "
this small group of women , determined to bring an end to the war , and they chose to use their traditions to make a point : liberian women usually wear lots of jewelry and colorful clothing .
but no , for the protest , they dressed all in white , no makeup .
as leymah said , " we wore the white saying we were out for peace . "
they stood on the side of the road on which charles taylor 's motorcade passed every day .
they stood for weeks - first just 10 , then 20 , then 50 , then hundreds of women - wearing white , singing , dancing , saying they were out for peace .
eventually , opposing forces in liberia were pushed to hold peace talks in ghana .
the peace talks dragged on and on and on .
leymah and her sisters had had enough .
with their remaining funds , they took a small group of women down to the venue of the peace talks and they surrounded the building .
in a now famous cnn clip , you can see them sitting on the ground , their arms linked .
we know this in india . it 's called a -lsb- hindi -rsb- .
then things get tense .
the police are called in to physically remove the women .
as the senior officer approaches with a baton , leymah stands up with deliberation , reaches her arms up over her head , and begins , very slowly , to untie her headdress that covers her hair .
you can see the policeman 's face .
he looks embarrassed . he backs away .
and the next thing you know , the police have disappeared .
leymah said to me later , " it 's a taboo , you know , in west africa .
if an older woman undresses in front of a man because she wants to , the man 's family is cursed . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- she said , " i do n't know if he did it because he believed , but he knew we were not going to leave .
we were not going to leave until the peace accord was signed . "
and the peace accord was signed .
and the women of liberia then mobilized in support of ellen johnson sirleaf , a woman who broke a few taboos herself becoming the first elected woman head of state in africa in years .
when she made her presidential address , she acknowledged these brave women of liberia who allowed her to win against a football star - that 's soccer for you americans - no less .
women like sakena and leah and leymah have humbled me and changed me and made me realize that i should not be so quick to jump to assumptions of any kind .
they 've also saved me from my righteous anger by offering insights into this third way .
a filipina activist once said to me , " how do you cook a rice cake ?
with heat from the bottom and heat from the top . "
the protests , the marches , the uncompromising position that women 's rights are human rights , full stop .
that 's the heat from the bottom .
that 's malcolm x and the suffragists and gay pride parades .
but we also need the heat from the top .
and in most parts of the world , that top is still controlled by men .
so to paraphrase marx : women make change , but not in circumstances of their own choosing .
they have to negotiate .
they have to subvert tradition that once silenced them in order to give voice to new aspirations .
and they need allies from their communities .
allies like the imam , allies like the father who now writes songs for a lesbian group in croatia , allies like the policeman who honored a taboo and backed away , allies like my father , who could n't help his sister but has helped three daughters pursue their dreams .
maybe this is because feminism , unlike almost every other social movement , is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it 's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it 's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women , far too often , hold ourselves .
and perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism , that the personal is in fact the political .
so that , as eleanor roosevelt said once of human rights , the same is true of gender equality : that it starts in small places , close to home .
on the streets , yes , but also in negotiations at the kitchen table and in the marital bed and in relationships between lovers and parents and sisters and friends .
and then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles , women like sakena and leah and leymah - but also women like sonia gandhi here in india and michelle bachelet in chile and shirin ebadi in iran - are doing something else .
they 're challenging the very notion of western models of development .
they are saying , we do n't have to be like you to make change .
we can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou , and we can be party leaders and presidents and human rights lawyers .
we can use our tradition to navigate change .
we can demilitarize societies and pour resources , instead , into reservoirs of genuine security .
it is in these little stories , these individual stories , that i see a radical epic being written by women around the world .
it is in these threads that are being woven into a resilient fabric that will sustain communities , that i find hope .
and if my heart is singing , it 's because in these little fragments , every now and again , you catch a glimpse of a whole , of a whole new world .
and she is definitely on her way .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so it 's 1995 , i 'm in college , and a friend and i go on a road trip from providence , rhode island to portland , oregon .
and you know , we 're young and unemployed , so we do the whole thing on back roads through state parks and national forests - basically the longest route we can possibly take .
and somewhere in the middle of south dakota , i turn to my friend and i ask her a question that 's been bothering me for 2,000 miles .
" what 's up with the chinese character i keep seeing by the side of the road ? "
my friend looks at me totally blankly .
there 's actually a gentleman in the front row who 's doing a perfect imitation of her look .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm like , " you know , all the signs we keep seeing with the chinese character on them . "
she just stares at me for a few moments , and then she cracks up , because she figures out what i 'm talking about .
and what i 'm talking about is this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right , the famous chinese character for picnic area .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've spent the last five years of my life thinking about situations exactly like this - why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us , and how we behave when that happens , and what all of this can tell us about human nature .
in other words , as you heard chris say , i 've spent the last five years thinking about being wrong .
this might strike you as a strange career move , but it actually has one great advantage : no job competition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong , or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong .
we get it in the abstract .
we all know everybody in this room makes mistakes .
the human species , in general , is fallible - okay fine .
but when it comes down to me , right now , to all the beliefs i hold , here in the present tense , suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window - and i ca n't actually think of anything i 'm wrong about .
and the thing is , the present tense is where we live .
we go to meetings in the present tense ; we go on family vacations in the present tense ; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense .
so effectively , we all kind of wind up traveling through life , trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything .
i think this is a problem .
i think it 's a problem for each of us as individuals , in our personal and professional lives , and i think it 's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture .
so what i want to do today is , first of all , talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right .
and second , why it 's such a problem .
and finally , i want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so , it is the single greatest moral , intellectual and creative leap you can make .
so why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right ?
one reason , actually , has to do with a feeling of being wrong .
so let me ask you guys something - or actually , let me ask you guys something , because you 're right here : how does it feel - emotionally - how does it feel to be wrong ?
dreadful . thumbs down .
embarrassing . okay , wonderful , great .
dreadful , thumbs down , embarrassing - thank you , these are great answers , but they 're answers to a different question .
you guys are answering the question : how does it feel to realize you 're wrong ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- realizing you 're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things , right ?
i mean it can be devastating , it can be revelatory , it can actually be quite funny , like my stupid chinese character mistake .
but just being wrong does n't feel like anything .
i 'll give you an analogy .
do you remember that loony tunes cartoon where there 's this pathetic coyote who 's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner ?
in pretty much every episode of this cartoon , there 's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff , which is fine - he 's a bird , he can fly .
but the thing is , the coyote runs off the cliff right after him .
and what 's funny - at least if you 're six years old - is that the coyote 's totally fine too .
he just keeps running - right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he 's in mid-air .
that 's when he falls .
when we 're wrong about something - not when we realize it , but before that - we 're like that coyote after he 's gone off the cliff and before he looks down .
you know , we 're already wrong , we 're already in trouble , but we feel like we 're on solid ground .
so i should actually correct something i said a moment ago .
it does feel like something to be wrong ; it feels like being right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is one reason , a structural reason , why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness .
i call this error blindness .
most of the time , we do n't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we 're wrong about something , until it 's too late .
but there 's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well - and this one is cultural .
think back for a moment to elementary school .
you 're sitting there in class , and your teacher is handing back quiz papers , and one of them looks like this .
this is not mine , by the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there you are in grade school , and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper .
it 's the dumb kid , the troublemaker , the one who never does his homework .
so by the time you are nine years old , you 've already learned , first of all , that people who get stuff wrong are lazy , irresponsible dimwits - and second of all , that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes .
we learn these really bad lessons really well .
and a lot of us - and i suspect , especially a lot of us in this room - deal with them by just becoming perfect little a students , perfectionists , over-achievers .
right , mr. cfo , astrophysicist , ultra-marathoner ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're all cfo , astrophysicists , ultra-marathoners , it turns out .
okay , so fine .
except that then we freak out at the possibility that we 've gotten something wrong .
because according to this , getting something wrong means there 's something wrong with us .
so we just insist that we 're right , because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe .
so let me tell you a story .
a couple of years ago , a woman comes into beth israel deaconess medical center for a surgery .
beth israel 's in boston .
it 's the teaching hospital for harvard - one of the best hospitals in the country .
so this woman comes in and she 's taken into the operating room .
she 's anesthetized , the surgeon does his thing - stitches her back up , sends her out to the recovery room .
everything seems to have gone fine .
and she wakes up , and she looks down at herself , and she says , " why is the wrong side of my body in bandages ? "
well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one .
when the vice president for health care quality at beth israel spoke about this incident , he said something very interesting .
he said , " for whatever reason , the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous .
this internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world .
and when we act like it is , and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong , well that 's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf of mexico , or torpedoing the global economy .
so this is a huge practical problem .
but it 's also a huge social problem .
think for a moment about what it means to feel right .
it means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality .
and when you feel that way , you 've got a problem to solve , which is , how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you ?
it turns out , most of us explain those people the same way , by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions .
the first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they 're ignorant .
they do n't have access to the same information that we do , and when we generously share that information with them , they 're going to see the light and come on over to our team .
when that does n't work , when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us , then we move on to a second assumption , which is that they 're idiots .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they have all the right pieces of the puzzle , and they are too moronic to put them together correctly .
and when that does n't work , when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart , then we move on to a third assumption : they know the truth , and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes .
so this is a catastrophe .
this attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly .
but to me , what 's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human .
it 's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds .
and we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing .
that is not true , and if it were , life would be incredibly boring .
the miracle of your mind is n't that you can see the world as it is .
it 's that you can see the world as it is n't .
we can remember the past , and we can think about the future , and we can imagine what it 's like to be some other person in some other place .
and we all do this a little differently , which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this .
and yeah , it is also why we get things wrong .
1,200 years before descartes said his famous thing about " i think therefore i am , " this guy , st. augustine , sat down and wrote " fallor ergo sum " - " i err therefore i am . "
augustine understood that our capacity to screw up , it 's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system , something we can eradicate or overcome .
it 's totally fundamental to who we are .
because , unlike god , we do n't really know what 's going on out there .
and unlike all of the other animals , we are obsessed with trying to figure it out .
to me , this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity .
last year , for various reasons , of the public radio show this american life .
and so i 'm listening and i 'm listening , and at some point , i start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong .
and my first thought was , " i 've lost it .
i 've become the crazy wrongness lady .
i just imagined it everywhere , " which has happened .
but a couple of months later , i actually had a chance to interview ira glass , who 's the host of the show .
and i mentioned this to him , and he was like , " no actually , that 's true .
in fact , " he says , " as a staff , we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme .
and the crypto-theme is : ' i thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead . ' and the thing is , " says ira glass , " we need this .
we need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work . "
and for the rest of us , audience members , as listeners , as readers , we eat this stuff up .
we love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings .
when it comes to our stories , we love being wrong .
but , you know , our stories are like this because our lives are like this .
we think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead .
george bush thought he was going to invade iraq , find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction , liberate the people and bring democracy to the middle east .
and something else happened instead .
and hosni mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of egypt for the rest of his life , until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son .
and something else happened instead .
and maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together .
and something else happened instead .
and i have to tell you that i thought i was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize .
and something else happened instead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this is life .
for good and for ill , we generate these incredible stories about the world around us , and then the world turns around and astonishes us .
no offense , but this entire conference is an unbelievable monument to our capacity to get stuff wrong .
we just spent an entire week talking about innovations and advancements and improvements , but you know why we need all of those innovations and advancements and improvements ?
because half the stuff that 's the most mind-boggling and world-altering - ted 1998 - eh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- did n't really work out that way , did it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- where 's my jet pack , chris ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so here we are again .
and that 's how it goes .
we come up with another idea .
we tell another story .
we hold another conference .
the theme of this one , as you guys have now heard seven million times , is the rediscovery of wonder .
and to me , if you really want to rediscover wonder , you need to step outside of that tiny , terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say , " wow , i do n't know .
maybe i 'm wrong . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- many times i go around the world to speak , and people ask me questions about the challenges , my moments , some of my regrets .
1998 : a single mother of four , three months after the birth of my fourth child , i went to do a job as a research assistant .
i went to northern liberia .
and as part of the work , the village would give you lodgings .
and they gave me lodging with a single mother and her daughter .
this girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade .
she was the laughing stock of the community .
her mother was often told by other women , " you and your child will die poor . "
after two weeks of working in that village , it was time to go back .
the mother came to me , knelt down , and said , " leymah , take my daughter .
i wish for her to be a nurse . "
dirt poor , living in the home with my parents , i could n't afford to .
with tears in my eyes , i said , " no . "
two months later , i go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief .
the women 's chief of the village has this little girl , fair color like me , totally dirty .
and all day she walked around only in her underwear .
when i asked , " who is that ? "
she said , " that 's wei .
the meaning of her name is pig .
her mother died while giving birth to her , and no one had any idea who her father was . "
for two weeks , she became my companion , slept with me .
i bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll .
the night before i left , she came to the room and said , " leymah , do n't leave me here .
i wish to go with you .
i wish to go to school . "
dirt poor , no money , living with my parents , i again said , " no . "
two months later , both of those villages fell into another war .
till today , i have no idea where those two girls are .
fast-forward , 2004 : in the peak of our activism , the minister of gender liberia called me and said , " leymah , i have a nine-year-old for you .
i want you to bring her home because we do n't have safe homes . "
the story of this little girl : she had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months .
she came to me bloated , very pale .
every night i 'd come from work and lie on the cold floor .
she 'd lie beside me and say , " auntie , i wish to be well .
i wish to go to school . "
2010 : a young woman stands before president sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together , their father and mother died during the war .
she 's 19 ; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them .
she 's highly athletic .
one of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship .
full scholarship . she gets it .
her dream of going to school , her wish of being educated , is finally here .
she goes to school on the first day .
the director of sports who 's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class .
and for the next three years , her fate will be having sex with him every day , as a favor for getting her in school .
globally , we have policies , international instruments , work leaders .
great people have made commitments - we will protect our children from want and from fear .
the u.n. has the convention on the rights of the child .
countries like america , we 've heard things like no child left behind .
other countries come with different things .
there is a millennium development called three that focuses on girls .
all of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally , i think , has failed .
in liberia , for example , the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls .
teen prostitution is at its peak .
in one community , we 're told , you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper .
girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night .
it 's disheartening , it 's sad .
and then someone asked me , just before my tedtalk , a few days ago , " so where is the hope ? "
several years ago , a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women .
it 's not enough to say you have two nobel laureates from the republic of liberia when your girls ' kids are totally out there and no hope , or seemingly no hope .
we created a space called the young girls transformative project .
we go into rural communities and all we do , like has been done in this room , is create the space .
when these girls sit , you unlock intelligence , you unlock passion , you unlock commitment , you unlock focus , you unlock great leaders .
today , we 've worked with over 300 .
and some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps , as young mothers , to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women .
one young woman i met , teen mother of four , never thought about finishing high school , graduated successfully ; never thought about going to college , enrolled in college .
one day she said to me , " my wish is to finish college and be able to support my children . "
she 's at a place where she ca n't find money to go to school .
she sells water , sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones .
and you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education .
juanita is her name .
she takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school .
says , " leymah , my wish is to be educated .
and if i ca n't be educated , when i see some of my sisters being educated , my wish has been fulfilled .
i wish for a better life .
i wish for food for my children .
i wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop . "
this is the dream of the african girl .
several years ago , there was one african girl .
this girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry .
angry , frustrated , really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children , this young girl started a movement , a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace .
i will fulfill the wish .
this is another african girl 's wish .
i failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls .
i failed to do this .
these were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman - i failed , i failed , i failed .
so i will do this .
women came out , protested a brutal dictator , fearlessly spoke .
not only did the wish of a piece of doughnut come true , the wish of peace came true .
this young woman wished also to go to school .
she went to school .
this young woman wished for other things to happen , it happened for her .
today , this young woman is me , a nobel laureate .
i 'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish , in my tiny capacity , of little african girls - the wish of being educated .
we set up a foundation .
we 're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential .
i do n't have much to ask of you .
i 've also been to places in this u.s. , and i know that girls in this country also have wishes , a wish for a better life somewhere in the bronx , a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown l.a. , a wish for a better life somewhere in texas , a wish for a better life somewhere in new york , a wish for a better life somewhere in new jersey .
will you journey with me to help that girl , be it an african girl or an american girl or a japanese girl , fulfill her wish , fulfill her dream , achieve that dream ?
because all of these great innovators and inventors that we 've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world , and all they 're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence , unlock the passion , unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves .
let 's journey together . let 's journey together .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you so much .
right now in liberia , what do you see as the main issue that troubles you ?
lg : i 've been asked to lead the liberian reconciliation initiative .
as part of my work , i 'm doing these tours in different villages and towns - 13 , 15 hours on dirt roads - and there is no community that i 've gone into that i have n't seen intelligent girls .
but sadly , the vision of a great future , or the dream of a great future , is just a dream , because you have all of these vices .
teen pregnancy , like i said , is epidemic .
so what troubles me is that i was at that place and somehow i 'm at this place , and i just do n't want to be the only one at this place .
i 'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me .
i want to look back 20 years from now and see that there 's another liberian girl , ghanaian girl , nigerian girl , ethiopian girl standing on this ted stage .
and maybe , just maybe , saying , " because of that nobel laureate i 'm here today . "
so i 'm troubled when i see them like there 's no hope .
but i 'm also not pessimistic , because i know it does n't take a lot to get them charged up .
ca : and in the last year , tell us one hopeful thing that you 've seen happening .
lg : i can tell you many hopeful things that i 've seen happening .
but in the last year , where president sirleaf comes from , her village , we went there to work with these girls .
and we could not find 25 girls in high school .
all of these girls went to the gold mine , and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things .
we took 50 of those girls and we worked with them .
and this was at the beginning of elections .
this is one place where women were never - even the older ones barely sat in the circle with the men .
these girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration .
this is a real rural village .
and the theme they used was : " even pretty girls vote . "
they were able to mobilize young women .
but not only did they do that , they went to those who were running for seats to ask them , " what is it that you will give the girls of this community when you win ? "
and one of the guys who already had a seat was very - because liberia has one of the strongest rape laws , and he was one of those really fighting in parliament to overturn that law because he called it barbaric .
rape is not barbaric , but the law , he said , was barbaric .
and when the girls started engaging him , he was very hostile towards them .
these little girls turned to him and said , " we will vote you out of office . "
he 's out of office today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : leymah , thank you . thank you so much for coming to ted .
lg : you 're welcome . -lrb- ca : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- hi . so i 'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day : our shoes , our handbags , our computers and cell phones .
now , this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt .
imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes , or the young chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your ipad .
we , the beneficiaries of globalization , seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make , and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves .
after all , what 's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iphone assembly line ca n't even afford to buy one ?
it 's taken for granted that chinese factories are oppressive , and that it 's our desire for cheap goods that makes them so .
so , this simple narrative equating western demand and chinese suffering is appealing , especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world , but it 's also inaccurate and disrespectful .
we must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways .
in fact , china makes goods for markets all over the world , including its own , thanks to a combination of factors : its low costs , its large and educated workforce , and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands .
by focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets , we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility , as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone .
chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for ipods .
they choose to leave their homes in order to earn money , to learn new skills , and to see the world .
in the ongoing debate about globalization , what 's been missing is the voices of the workers themselves .
here are a few .
bao yongxiu : " my mother tells me to come home and get married , but if i marry now , before i have fully developed myself , i can only marry an ordinary worker , so i 'm not in a rush . "
chen ying : " when i went home for the new year , everyone said i had changed . they asked me , what did you do that you have changed so much ?
i told them that i studied and worked hard . if you tell them more , they wo n't understand anyway . "
wu chunming : " even if i make a lot of money , it wo n't satisfy me .
just to make money is not enough meaning in life . "
xiao jin : " now , after i get off work , i study english , because in the future , our customers wo n't be only chinese , so we must learn more languages . "
all of these speakers , by the way , are young women , 18 or 19 years old .
so i spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south china factory city called dongguan .
certain subjects came up over and over : how much money they made , what kind of husband they hoped to marry , whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were .
other subjects came up almost never , including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life : 10 or 15 workers in one room , 50 people sharing a single bathroom , days and nights ruled by the factory clock .
everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances , and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural china .
the workers rarely spoke about the products they made , and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did .
when i asked lu qingmin , the young woman i got to know best , what exactly she did on the factory floor , she said something to me in chinese that sounded like " qiu xi . "
only much later did i realize that she had been saying " qc , " or quality control .
she could n't even tell me what she did on the factory floor .
all she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she did n't even understand .
karl marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism , the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor .
unlike , say , a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets , the worker in an industrial factory has no control , no pleasure , and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work .
but like so many theories that marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the british museum , he got this one wrong .
just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that , a piece of something .
what she does with the money she earns , what she learns in that place , and how it changes her , these are the things that matter .
what a factory makes is never the point , and the workers could not care less who buys their products .
journalistic coverage of chinese factories , on the other hand , plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make .
many articles calculate : how long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he 's making ?
for example , an entry-level-line assembly line worker in china in an iphone plant would have to shell out two and a half months ' wages for an iphone .
but how meaningful is this calculation , really ?
for example , i recently wrote an article in the new yorker magazine , but i ca n't afford to buy an ad in it .
but , who cares ? i do n't want an ad in the new yorker , and most of these workers do n't really want iphones .
their calculations are different .
how long should i stay in this factory ?
how much money can i save ?
how much will it take to buy an apartment or a car , to get married , or to put my child through school ?
the workers i got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor .
about a year after i met lu qingmin , or min , she invited me home to her family village for the chinese new year .
on the train home , she gave me a present : a coach brand change purse with brown leather trim .
i thanked her , assuming it was fake , like almost everything else for sale in dongguan .
after we got home , min gave her mother another present : a pink dooney & bourke handbag , and a few nights later , her sister was showing off a maroon lesportsac shoulder bag .
slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory , and every single one of them was authentic .
min 's sister said to her parents , " in america , this bag sells for 320 dollars . "
her parents , who are both farmers , looked on , speechless .
" and that 's not all - coach is coming out with a new line , 2191 , " she said . " one bag will sell for 6,000 . "
she paused and said , " i do n't know if that 's 6,000 yuan or 6,000 american dollars , but anyway , it 's 6,000 . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- min 's sister 's boyfriend , who had traveled home with her for the new year , said , " it does n't look like it 's worth that much . "
min 's sister turned to him and said , " some people actually understand these things . you do n't understand shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in min 's world , the coach bags had a curious currency .
they were n't exactly worthless , but they were nothing close to the actual value , because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one , or knew how much it was worth .
once , when min 's older sister 's friend got married , she brought a handbag along as a wedding present .
another time , after min had already left the handbag factory , her younger sister came to visit , bringing two coach signature handbags as gifts .
i looked in the zippered pocket of one , and i found a printed card in english , which read , " an american classic .
in 1941 , the burnished patina of an all-american baseball glove inspired the founder of coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather .
six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair .
they were fresh , functional , and women everywhere adored them . a new american classic was born . "
i wonder what karl marx would have made of min and her sisters .
their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated , surprising and funny than he could have imagined .
and yet , his view of the world persists , and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses , to imagine that we can know what they 're really thinking .
the first time i met min , she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory .
over the next two years , i watched as she switched jobs five times , eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory .
later , she married a fellow migrant worker , moved with him to his village , gave birth to two daughters , and saved enough money to buy a secondhand buick for herself and an apartment for her parents .
she recently returned to dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes , temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village .
in a recent email to me , she explained , " a person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose . "
across china , there are 150 million workers like her , one third of them women , who have left their villages to work in the factories , the hotels , the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities .
together , they make up the largest migration in history , and it is globalization , this chain that begins in a chinese farming village and ends with iphones in our pockets and nikes on our feet and coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think .
very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be .
when i first went to dongguan , i worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers .
i also worried that nothing would ever happen to them , or that they would have nothing to say to me .
instead , i found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous .
by opening up their lives to me , they taught me so much about factories and about china and about how to live in the world .
this is the coach purse that min gave me on the train home to visit her family .
i keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women i wrote about , ties that are not economic but personal in nature , measured not in money but in memories .
this purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine , sitting in your office or in the library , are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you , leslie , that was an insight that a lot of us have n't had before .
but i 'm curious . if you had a minute , say , with apple 's head of manufacturing , what would you say ?
leslie chang : one minute ?
ca : one minute . -lrb- laughter -rrb- lc : you know , what really impressed me about the workers is how much they 're self-motivated , self-driven , resourceful , and the thing that struck me , what they want most is education , to learn , because most of them come from very poor backgrounds .
they usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade .
their parents are often illiterate , and then they come to the city , and they , on their own , at night , during the weekends , they 'll take a computer class , they 'll take an english class , and learn really , really rudimentary things , you know , like how to type a document in word , or how to say really simple things in english .
so , if you really want to help these workers , start these small , very focused , very pragmatic classes in these schools , and what 's going to happen is , all your workers are going to move on , but hopefully they 'll move on into higher jobs within apple , and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement .
when you talk to workers , that 's what they want .
they do not say , " i want better hot water in the showers .
i want a nicer room . i want a tv set . "
i mean , it would be nice to have those things , but that 's not why they 're in the city , and that 's not what they care about .
ca : was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad , or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth , that things over time were getting better ?
lc : oh definitely , definitely . i mean , you know , it was interesting , because i spent basically two years hanging out in this city , dongguan , and over that time , you could see immense change in every person 's life : upward , downward , sideways , but generally upward .
if you spend enough time , it 's upward , and i met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago , and who are now basically urban middle class people , so the trajectory is definitely upward .
it 's just hard to see when you 're suddenly sucked into the city . it looks like everyone 's poor and desperate , but that 's not really how it is .
certainly , the factory conditions are really tough , and it 's nothing you or i would want to do , but from their perspective , where they 're coming from is much worse , and where they 're going is hopefully much better , and i just wanted to give that context of what 's going on in their minds , not what necessarily is going on in yours .
ca : thanks so much for your talk .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- the things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us .
we perish , they survive ; we have one life , they have many lives , and in each life they can mean different things .
which means that , while we all have one biography , they have many .
i want this morning to talk about the story , the biography - or rather the biographies - of one particular object , one remarkable thing .
it does n't , i agree , look very much .
it 's about the size of a rugby ball .
it 's made of clay , and it 's been fashioned into a cylinder shape , covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun .
and as you can see , it 's been knocked about a bit , which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879 .
but today , this thing is , i believe , a major player in the politics of the middle east .
and it 's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet .
the story begins in the iran-iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of iraq by foreign forces , the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change .
and i want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with , belshazzar 's feast - because we 're talking about the iran-iraq war of 539 bc .
and the parallels between the events of 539 bc and 2003 and in between are startling .
what you 're looking at is rembrandt 's painting , now in the national gallery in london , illustrating the text from the prophet daniel in the hebrew scriptures .
and you all know roughly the story .
belshazzar , the son of nebuchadnezzar , nebuchadnezzar who 'd conquered israel , sacked jerusalem and captured the people and taken the jews back to babylon .
not only the jews , he 'd taken the temple vessels .
he 'd ransacked , desecrated the temple .
and the great gold vessels of the temple in jerusalem had been taken to babylon .
belshazzar , his son , decides to have a feast .
and in order to make it even more exciting , he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun , and he brings out the temple vessels .
he 's already at war with the iranians , with the king of persia .
and that night , daniel tells us , at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall , " you are weighed in the balance and found wanting , and your kingdom is handed over to the medes and the persians . "
and that very night cyrus , king of the persians , entered babylon and the whole regime of belshazzar fell .
it is , of course , a great moment in the history of the jewish people .
it 's a great story . it 's story we all know .
" the writing on the wall " is part of our everyday language .
what happened next was remarkable , and it 's where our cylinder enters the story .
cyrus , king of the persians , has entered babylon without a fight - the great empire of babylon , which ran from central southern iraq to the mediterranean , falls to cyrus .
and cyrus makes a declaration .
and that is what this cylinder is , the declaration made by the ruler guided by god who had toppled the iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people .
in ringing babylonian - it was written in babylonian - he says , " i am cyrus , king of all the universe , the great king , the powerful king , king of babylon , king of the four quarters of the world . "
they 're not shy of hyperbole as you can see .
this is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we 've got .
and it 's written , as we 'll see in due course , by very skilled p.r. consultants .
so the hyperbole is not actually surprising .
and what is the great king , the powerful king , the king of the four quarters of the world going to do ?
he goes on to say that , having conquered babylon , he will at once let all the peoples that the babylonians - nebuchadnezzar and belshazzar - have captured and enslaved go free .
he 'll let them return to their countries .
and more important , he will let them all recover the gods , the statues , the temple vessels that had been confiscated .
all the peoples that the babylonians had repressed and removed will go home , and they 'll take with them their gods .
and they 'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way , in their own place .
this is the decree , this object is the evidence for the fact that the jews , after the exile in babylon , the years they 'd spent sitting by the waters of babylon , weeping when they remembered jerusalem , those jews were allowed to go home .
they were allowed to return to jerusalem and to rebuild the temple .
it 's a central document in jewish history .
and the book of chronicles , the book of ezra in the hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms .
this is the jewish version of the same story .
" thus said cyrus , king of persia , ' all the kingdoms of the earth have the lord god of heaven given thee , and he has charged me to build him a house in jerusalem .
who is there among you of his people ?
the lord god be with him , and let him go up . " ' " go up " - aaleh .
the central element , still , of the notion of return , a central part of the life of judaism .
as you all know , that return from exile , the second temple , reshaped judaism .
and that change , that great historic moment , was made possible by cyrus , the king of persia , reported for us in hebrew in scripture and in babylonian in clay .
two great texts , what about the politics ?
what was going on was the fundamental shift in middle eastern history .
the empire of iran , the medes and the persians , united under cyrus , became the first great world empire .
cyrus begins in the 530s bc .
and by the time of his son darius , the whole of the eastern mediterranean is under persian control .
this empire is , in fact , the middle east as we now know it , and it 's what shapes the middle east as we now know it .
it was the largest empire the world had known until then .
much more important , it was the first multicultural , multifaith state on a huge scale .
and it had to be run in a quite new way .
it had to be run in different languages .
the fact that this decree is in babylonian says one thing .
and it had to recognize their different habits , different peoples , different religions , different faiths .
all of those are respected by cyrus .
cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational , multifaith , multicultural society .
and the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen , and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by alexander .
it left a dream of the middle east as a unit , and a unit where people of different faiths could live together .
the greek invasions ended that .
and of course , alexander could n't sustain a government and it fragmented .
but what cyrus represented remained absolutely central .
the greek historian xenophon wrote his book " cyropaedia " promoting cyrus as the great ruler .
and throughout european culture afterward , cyrus remained the model .
this is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was .
and xenophon 's book on cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the founding fathers of the american revolution .
jefferson was a great admirer - the ideals of cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state .
meanwhile , back in babylon , things had not been going well .
after alexander , the other empires , babylon declines , falls into ruins , and all the traces of the great babylonian empire are lost - until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a british museum exhibition digging in babylon .
and it enters now another story .
it enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century : are the scriptures reliable ? can we trust them ?
we only knew about the return of the jews and the decree of cyrus from the hebrew scriptures .
no other evidence .
suddenly , this appeared .
and great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution , by geology , here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true .
it 's a great 19th century moment .
but - and this , of course , is where it becomes complicated - the facts were true , hurrah for archeology , but the interpretation was rather more complicated .
because the cylinder account and the hebrew bible account differ in one key respect .
the babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of bablyon , marduk .
and , not surprisingly , they tell you that all this was done by marduk .
" marduk , we hold , called cyrus by his name . "
marduk takes cyrus by the hand , calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of babylon .
marduk tells cyrus that he will do these great , generous things of setting the people free .
and this is why we should all be grateful to and worship marduk .
the hebrew writers in the old testament , you will not be surprised to learn , take a rather different view of this .
for them , of course , it ca n't possibly by marduk that made all this happen .
it can only be jehovah .
and so in isaiah , we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this , not to marduk but to the lord god of israel - the lord god of israel who also called cyrus by name , also takes cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people .
it 's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event , two different religious takeovers of a political fact .
god , we know , is usually on the side of the big battalions .
the question is , which god was it ?
and the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion .
and it 's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of isaiah , and yet , jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by marduk .
and there 's a slight sense that isaiah knows this , because he says , this is god speaking , of course , " i have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me . "
i think it 's recognized that cyrus does n't realize that he 's acting under orders from jehovah .
and equally , he 'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from marduk .
because interestingly , of course , cyrus is a good iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's 1879 .
40 years on and we 're in 1917 , and the cylinder enters a different world .
this time , the real politics of the contemporary world - the year of the balfour declaration , the year when the new imperial power in the middle east , britain , decides that it will declare a jewish national home , it will allow the jews to return .
and the response to this by the jewish population in eastern europe is rhapsodic .
and across eastern europe , jews display pictures of cyrus and of george v side by side - the two great rulers who have allowed the return to jerusalem .
and the cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan .
you all know what happened .
the state of israel is setup , and 50 years later , in the late 60s , it 's clear that britain 's role as the imperial power is over .
and another story of the cylinder begins .
the region , the u.k. and the u.s. decide , has to be kept safe from communism , and the superpower that will be created to do this would be iran , the shah .
and so the shah invents an iranian history , or a return to iranian history , that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the cyrus cylinder .
when he has his great celebrations in persepolis , he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the british museum , goes to tehran , and is part of those great celebrations of the pahlavi dynasty .
cyrus cylinder : guarantor of the shah .
10 years later , another story : iranian revolution , 1979 .
islamic revolution , no more cyrus ; we 're not interested in that history , we 're interested in islamic iran - until iraq , the new superpower that we 've all decided should be in the region , attacks .
then another iran-iraq war .
and it becomes critical for the iranians to remember their great past , their great past when they fought iraq and won .
it becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all iranians - muslims and non-muslims , christians , zoroastrians , jews living in iran , people who are devout , not devout .
and the obvious emblem is cyrus .
so when the british museum and tehran national musuem cooperate and work together , as we 've been doing , the iranians ask for one thing only as a loan .
it 's the only object they want .
they want to borrow the cyrus cylinder .
and last year , the cyrus cylinder went to tehran for the second time .
it 's shown being presented here , put into its case by the director of the national museum of tehran , one of the many women in iran in very senior positions , mrs. ardakani .
it was a huge event .
this is the other side of that same picture .
it 's seen in tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months .
this is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the west .
and it 's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means , what cyrus means , but above all , cyrus as articulated through this cylinder - cyrus as the defender of the homeland , the champion , of course , of iranian identity and of the iranian peoples , tolerant of all faiths .
and in the current iran , zoroastrians and christians have guaranteed places in the iranian parliament , something to be very , very proud of .
to see this object in tehran , thousands of jews living in iran came to tehran to see it .
it became a great emblem , a great subject of debate about what iran is at home and abroad .
is iran still to be the defender of the oppressed ?
will iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated ?
this is heady national rhetoric , and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return .
here you see this out-sized cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of iran .
it was a narrative presented by the president himself .
and for me , to take this object to iran , to be allowed to take this object to iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what iran is , what different irans there are and how the different histories of iran might shape the world today .
it 's a debate that 's still continuing , and it will continue to rumble , because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration .
it stands with the american constitution .
it certainly says far more about real freedoms than magna carta .
it is a document that can mean so many things , for iran and for the region .
a replica of this is at the united nations .
in new york this autumn , it will be present when the great debates about the future of the middle east take place .
and i want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures .
it will appear , certainly , in many more middle eastern stories .
and what story of the middle east , what story of the world , do you want to see reflecting what is said , what is expressed in this cylinder ?
the right of peoples to live together in the same state , worshiping differently , freely - a middle east , a world , in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate .
in the world of the middle east at the moment , the debates are , as you know , shrill .
but i think it 's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing , the cyrus cylinder .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what we 're really here to talk about is the " how . "
okay , so how exactly do we create this world-shattering , if you will , innovation ?
now , i want to tell you a quick story .
we 'll go back a little more than a year .
in fact , the date - i 'm curious to know if any of you know what happened on this momentous date ?
it was february 3rd , 2008 .
anyone remember what happened , february 3rd , 2008 ?
super bowl . i heard it over here . it was the date of the super bowl .
and the reason that this date was so momentous is that what my colleagues , john king and halee fischer-wright , and i noticed as we began to debrief various super bowl parties , is that it seemed to us that across the united states , if you will , tribal councils had convened .
and they had discussed things of great national importance .
like , " do we like the budweiser commercial ? "
and , " do we like the nachos ? " and , " who is going to win ? "
but they also talked about which candidate they were going to support .
and if you go back in time to february 3rd , it looked like hilary clinton was going to get the democratic nomination .
and there were even some polls that were saying she was going to go all the way .
but when we talked to people , it appeared that a funnel effect had happened in these tribes all across the united states .
now what is a tribe ? a tribe is a group of about 20 - so kind of more than a team - 20 to about 150 people .
and it 's within these tribes that all of our work gets done .
but not just work . it 's within these tribes that societies get built , that important things happen .
and so as we surveyed the , if you will , representatives from various tribal councils that met , also known as super bowl parties , we sent the following email off to 40 newspaper editors the following day .
february 4th , we posted it on our website . this was before super tuesday .
we said , " the tribes that we 're in are saying it 's going to be obama . "
now , the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes , studying these naturally occurring groups .
all of you are members of tribes .
in walking around at the break , many of you had met members of your tribe . and you were talking to them .
and many of you were doing what great , if you will , tribal leaders do , which is to find someone who is a member of a tribe , and to find someone else who is another member of a different tribe , and make introductions .
that is in fact what great tribal leaders do .
so here is the bottom line .
if you focus in on a group like this - this happens to be a usc game - and you zoom in with one of those super satellite cameras and do magnification factors so you could see individual people , you would in fact see not a single crowd , just like there is not a single crowd here , but you would see these tribes that are then coming together .
and from a distance it appears that it 's a single group .
and so people form tribes .
they always have . they always will .
just as fish swim and birds fly , people form tribes . it 's just what we do .
but here 's the rub .
not all tribes are the same , and what makes the difference is the culture .
now here is the net out of this .
you 're all a member of tribes .
if you can find a way to take the tribes that you 're in and nudge them forward , along these tribal stages to what we call stage five , which is the top of the mountain .
but we 're going to start with what we call stage one .
now , this is the lowest of the stages .
you do n't want this . okay ?
this is a bit of a difficult image to put up on the screen .
but it 's one that i think we need to learn from .
stage one produces people who do horrible things .
this is the kid who shot up virginia tech .
stage one is a group where people systematically sever relationships from functional tribes , and then pool together with people who think like they do .
stage one is literally the culture of gangs and it is the culture of prisons .
now , again , we do n't often deal with stage one .
and i want to make the point that as members of society , we need to .
it 's not enough to simply write people off .
but let 's move on to stage two .
now , stage one , you 'll notice , says , in effect , " life sucks . "
so , this other book that steve mentioned , that just came out , called " the three laws of performance , " my colleague , steve zaffron and i , argue that as people see the world , so they behave .
well , if people see the world in such a way that life sucks , then their behavior will follow automatically from that .
it will be despairing hostility .
they 'll do whatever it takes to survive , even if that means undermining other people .
now , my birthday is coming up shortly , and my driver 's license expires .
and the reason that that 's relevant is that very soon i will be walking into what we call a stage two tribe , which looks like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , am i saying that in every department of motor vehicles across the land , you find a stage two culture ?
no . but in the one near me , where i have to go in just a few days , what i will say when i 'm standing in line is , " how can people be so dumb , and yet live ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , am i saying that there are dumb people working here ?
actually , no , i 'm not .
but i 'm saying the culture makes people dumb .
so in a stage two culture - and we find these in all sorts of different places - you find them , in fact , in the best organizations in the world .
you find them in all places in society .
i 've come across them at the organizations that everybody raves about as being best in class .
but here is the point . if you believe and you say to people in your tribe , in effect , " my life sucks .
i mean , if i got to go to tedx usc my life would n't suck . but i do n't . so it does . "
if that 's how you talked , imagine what kind of work would get done .
what kind of innovation would get done ?
the amount of world-changing behavior that would happen ?
in fact it would be basically nil .
now when we go on to stage three : this is the one that hits closest to home for many of us .
because it is in stage three that many of us move .
and we park . and we stay .
stage three says , " i 'm great . and you 're not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm great and you 're not .
now imagine having a whole room of people saying , in effect , " i 'm great and you 're not . "
or , " i 'm going to find some way to compete with you and come out on top as a result of that . "
a whole group of people communicating that way , talking that way .
i know this sounds like a joke . three doctors walk into a bar .
but , in this case , three doctors walk into an elevator .
i happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book .
and one doctor said to the others , " did you see my article in the new england journal of medicine ? "
and the other said , " no . that 's great . congratulations ! "
the next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said , " well while you were , you know , doing your research , " - notice the condescending tone - " while you were off doing your research , i was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution . "
and the third one got the same wry smile and said , " well , while you were off doing your research , and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery , that eventually we 'll train monkeys to do , or cells or robots , or maybe not even need to do it at all , i was off running the future of the residency program , which is really the future of medicine . "
and they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back .
and the elevator door opened , and they all walked out .
that is a meeting of a stage three tribe .
now , we find these in places where really smart , successful people show up .
like , oh , i do n't know , tedx usc .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here is the greatest challenge we face in innovation .
it is moving from stage three to stage four .
let 's take a look at a quick video snippet .
this is from a company called zappos , located outside las vegas .
and my question on the other side is just going to be , " what do you think they value ? "
it was not christmas time . there was a christmas tree .
this is their lobby .
employees volunteer time in the advice booth .
notice it looks like something out of a peanuts cartoon .
okay , we 're going through the hallway here at zappos .
this is a call center . notice how it 's decorated .
notice people are applauding for us .
they do n't know who we are and they do n't care . and if they did they probably would n't applaud .
but you 'll notice the level of excitement .
notice , again , how they decorate their office .
now , what 's important to people at zappos , these may not be the things that are important to you .
but they value things like fun . and they value creativity .
one of their stated values is , " be a little bit weird . "
and you 'll notice they are a little bit weird .
so when individuals come together and find something that unites them that 's greater than their individual competence , then something very important happens .
the group gels . and it changes from a group of highly motivated but fairly individually-centric people into something larger , into a tribe that becomes aware of its own existence .
stage four tribes can do remarkable things .
but you 'll notice we 're not at the top of the mountain yet .
there is , in fact , another stage .
now , some of you may not recognize the scene that 's up here .
and if you take a look at the headline of stage five , which is " life is great , " this may seem a little incongruous .
this is a scene or snippet from the truth and reconciliation process in south africa for which desmond tutu won the nobel prize .
now think about that . south africa , terrible atrocities had happened in the society .
and people came together focused only on those two values : truth and reconciliation .
there was no road map . no one had ever done anything like this before .
and in this atmosphere , where the only guidance was people 's values and their noble cause , what this group accomplished was historic .
and people , at the time , feared that south africa would end up going the way that rwanda has gone , descending into one skirmish after another in a civil war that seems to have no end .
in fact , south africa has not gone down that road .
largely because people like desmond tutu set up a stage five process to involve the thousands and perhaps millions of tribes in the country , to bring everyone together .
so , people hear this and they conclude the following , as did we in doing the study .
okay , got it . i do n't want to talk stage one .
that 's like , you know , " life sucks . " who wants to talk that way ?
i do n't want to talk like they do at the particular dmv that 's close to where dave lives .
i really do n't want to just say " i 'm great , " because that kind of sounds narcissistic , and then i wo n't have any friends .
saying , " we 're great " - that sounds pretty good .
but i should really talk stage five , right ? " life is great . "
well , in fact , there are three somewhat counter-intuitive findings that come out of all this .
the first one , if you look at the declaration of independence and actually read it , the phrase that sticks in many of our minds is things about inalienable rights .
i mean , that 's stage five , right ? life is great , oriented only by our values , no other guidance .
in fact , most of the document is written at stage two .
" my life sucks because i live under a tyrant , also known as king george .
we 're great ! who is not great ? england ! "
sorry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- well , what about other great leaders ? what about gandhi ?
what about martin luther king ?
i mean , surely these were just people who preached , " life is great , " right ?
just one little bit of happiness and joy after another .
in fact , martin luther king 's most famous line was at stage three .
he did n't say " we have a dream . " he said , " i have a dream . "
why did he do that ? because most people are not at stage five .
two percent are at stage one .
about 25 percent are at stage two , saying , in effect , " my life sucks . "
48 percent of working tribes say , these are employed tribes , say , " i 'm great and you 're not . "
and we have to duke it out every day , so we resort to politics .
only about 22 percent of tribes are at stage four , oriented by our values , saying " we 're great .
and our values are beginning to unite us . "
only two percent , only two percent of tribes get to stage five .
and those are the ones that change the world .
so the first little finding from this is that leaders need to be able to talk all the levels so that you can touch every person in society .
but you do n't leave them where you found them . okay ?
tribes can only hear one level above and below where they are .
so we have to have the ability to talk all the levels , to go to where they are .
and then leaders nudge people within their tribes to the next level .
i 'd like to show you some examples of this .
one of the people we interviewed was frank jordan , former mayor of san francisco . before that he was chief of police in san francisco .
and he grew up essentially in stage one .
and you know what changed his life ? it was walking into one of these , a boys and girls club .
now here is what happened to this person who eventually became mayor of san francisco .
he went from being alive and passionate at stage one - remember , " life sucks , despairing hostility , i will do whatever it takes to survive " - to walking into a boys and girls club , folding his arms , sitting down in a chair , and saying , " wow . my life really sucks .
i do n't know anybody .
i mean , if i was into boxing , like they were , then my life would n't suck . but i do n't . so it does .
so i 'm going to sit here in my chair and not do anything . "
in fact , that 's progress .
we move people from stage one to stage two by getting them in a new tribe and then , over time , getting them connected .
so , what about moving from stage three to stage four ?
i want to argue that we 're doing that right here .
ted represents a set of values , and as we unite around these values , something really interesting begins to emerge .
if you want this experience to live on as something historic , then at the reception tonight i 'd like to encourage you to do something beyond what people normally do and call networking .
which is not just to meet new people and extend your reach , extend your influence , but instead , find someone you do n't know , and find someone else you do n't know , and introduce them .
that 's called a triadic relationship .
see , people who build world-changing tribes do that .
they extend the reach of their tribes by connecting them , not just to myself , so that my following is greater , but i connect people who do n't know each other to something greater than themselves .
and ultimately that adds to their values .
but we 're not done yet . because then how do we go from stage four , which is great , to stage five ?
the story that i like to end with is this . it comes out of a place called the gallup organization .
you know they do polls , right ?
so it 's stage four . we 're great . who is not great ?
pretty much everybody else who does polls .
if gallup releases a poll on the same day that nbc releases a poll , people will pay attention to the gallup poll . okay , we understand that .
so , they were bored .
they wanted to change the world . so here is the question someone asked .
" how could we , instead of just polling what asia thinks or what the united states thinks , or who thinks what about obama versus mccain or something like that , what does the entire world think ? "
and they found a way to do the first-ever world poll .
they had people involved who were nobel laureates in economics , who reported being bored .
and suddenly they pulled out sheets of paper and were trying to figure out , " how do we survey the population of sub-saharan africa ?
how do we survey populations that do n't have access to technology , and speak languages we do n't speak , and we do n't know anyone who speaks those languages . because in order to achieve on this great mission , we have to be able to do it .
incidentally , they did pull it off .
and they released the first-ever world poll .
so i 'd like to leave you with these thoughts .
first of all : we all form tribes , all of us .
you 're in tribes here . hopefully you 're extending the reach of the tribes that you have .
but the question on the table is this : what kind of an impact are the tribes that you are in making ?
you 're hearing one presentation after another , often representing a group of people , a tribe , about how they have changed the world .
if you do what we 've talked about , you listen for how people actually communicate in the tribes that you 're in .
and you do n't leave them where they are . you nudge them forward .
you remember to talk all five culture stages .
because we 've got people in all five , around us .
and the question that i 'd like to leave you with is this : will your tribes change the world ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the greatest irony in global health is that the poorest countries carry the largest disease burden .
if we resize the countries of the globe in proportion to the subject of interest , we see that sub-saharan africa is the worst hit region by hiv / aids .
this is the most devastating epidemic of our time .
we also see that this region has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease .
there are very few doctors and , quite frankly , these countries do not have the resources that are needed to cope with such epidemics .
so what the western countries , developed countries , have generously done is they have proposed to provide free drugs to all people in third world countries who actually ca n't afford these medications .
and this has already saved millions of lives , and it has prevented entire economies from capsizing in sub-saharan africa .
but there is a fundamental problem that is killing the efforts in fighting this disease , because if you keep throwing drugs out at people who do n't have diagnostic services , you end up creating a problem of drug resistance .
this is already beginning to happen in sub-saharan africa .
the problem is that , what begins as a tragedy in the third world could easily become a global problem .
and the last thing we want to see is drug-resistant strains of hiv popping up all over the world , because it will make treatment more expensive and it could also restore the pre-arv carnage of hiv / aids .
i experienced this firsthand as a high school student in uganda .
this was in the 90s during the peak of the hiv epidemic , before there were any arvs in sub-saharan africa .
and during that time , i actually lost more relatives , as well as the teachers who taught me , to hiv / aids .
so this became one of the driving passions of my life , to help find real solutions that could address these kinds of problems .
we all know about the miracle of miniaturization .
back in the day , computers used to fill this entire room , and people actually used to work inside the computers .
but what electronic miniaturization has done is that it has allowed people to shrink technology into a cell phone .
and i 'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world , in the third world countries .
the good news is that the same technology that allowed miniaturization of electronics is now allowing us to miniaturize biological laboratories .
so , right now , we can actually miniaturize biological and chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic chips .
i was very lucky to come to the us right after high school , and was able to work on this technology and develop some devices .
this is a microfluidic chip that i developed .
a close look at how the technology works : these are channels that are about the size of a human hair - so you have integrated valves , pumps , mixers and injectors - so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments onto a microfluidic system .
so what i plan to do with this technology is to actually take the current state of the technology and build an hiv kit in a microfluidic system .
so , with one microfluidic chip , which is the size of an iphone , you can actually diagnose 100 patients at the same time .
for each patient , we will be able to do up to 100 different viral loads per patient .
and this is only done in four hours , 50 times faster than the current state of the art , at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper than the current options .
so this will allow us to create personalized medicines in the third world at a cost that is actually achievable and make the world a safer place .
i invite your interest as well as your involvement in driving this vision to a point of practical reality .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you know how many species of flowering plants there are ?
there are a quarter of a million - at least those are the ones we know about - a quarter of a million species of flowering plants .
and flowers are a real bugger .
they 're really difficult for plants to produce .
they take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources .
why would they go to that bother ?
and the answer of course , like so many things in the world , is sex .
i know what 's on your mind when you 're looking at these pictures .
and the reason that sexual reproduction is so important - there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce .
you can take cuttings ; they can sort of have sex with themselves ; they can pollinate themselves .
but they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches .
evolution works that way .
now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen .
some of you may have seen some of these pictures before .
as i say , every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these .
and there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants .
and that 's actually rather useful for forensics and so on .
most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen , and that 's a very inefficient process , which is why it gets up our noses so much .
because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it , hoping that your sex cells , your male sex cells , which are held within the pollen , will somehow reach another flower just by chance .
so all the grasses , which means all of the cereal crops , and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen .
but most species actually use insects to do their bidding , and that 's more intelligent in a way , because the pollen , they do n't need so much of it .
the insects and other species can take the pollen , transfer it directly to where it 's required .
so we 're aware , obviously , of the relationship between insects and plants .
there 's a symbiotic relationship there , whether it 's flies or birds or bees , they 're getting something in return , and that something in return is generally nectar .
sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations - the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation .
the plant gets something , and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else .
plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way .
there are markings on many plants that look like other insects .
these are the anthers of a lily , cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it , the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with .
and there 's an orchid that might look to you as if it 's got jaws , and in a way , it has ; it forces the insect to crawl out , getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else .
orchids : there are 20,000 , at least , species of orchids - amazingly , amazingly diverse .
and they get up to all sorts of tricks .
they have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding .
this orchid , known as darwin 's orchid , because it 's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it - you can see that there 's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid .
and basically what the insect has to do - we 're in the middle of the flower - it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar .
and darwin said , looking at this flower , " i guess something has coevolved with this . "
and sure enough , there 's the insect .
and i mean , normally it kind of rolls it away , but in its erect form , that 's what it looks like .
now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators , then , just as in human sex , people might start to deceive .
they might say , " i 've got a bit of nectar . do you want to come and get it ? "
now this is a plant .
this is a plant here that insects in south africa just love , and they 've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom .
and this is the mimic .
so this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant .
and here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic , because the mimic does n't give it any nectar . it thought it would get some .
so not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant , it 's also - if you look very closely just at the head end , you can see that it 's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant , if only some botanist had n't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom .
this flower with its black dots : they might look like black dots to us , but if i tell you , to a male insect of the right species , that looks like two females who are really , really hot to trot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when the insect gets there and lands on it , dousing itself in pollen , of course , that it 's going to take to another plant , if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture , you can see that there are actually some patterning there , which is three-dimensional .
so it probably even feels good for the insect , as well as looking good .
and these electron microscope pictures - here 's one of an orchid mimicking an insect - you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye , have very , very different textures to what an insect might perceive .
and this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles .
and under the scanning electron microscope , you can see the surface there - really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at .
sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect , even to us .
i mean , i think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast .
it 's a wonderful , amazing thing .
this one 's clever . it 's called obsidian .
i think of it as insidium sometimes .
to the right species of bee , this looks like another very aggressive bee , and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away , and , of course , covers itself with pollen .
the other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects .
and this one does n't have anything for them .
so it 's deceiving on two levels - fabulous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here we see ylang ylang , the component of many perfumes .
i actually smelt someone with some on earlier .
and the flowers do n't really have to be that gaudy .
they 're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that 'll have it .
this one does n't smell so good .
this is a flower that really , really smells pretty nasty and is designed , again , evolved , to look like carrion .
so flies love this .
they fly in and they pollinate .
this , which is helicodiceros , is also known as dead horse arum .
i do n't know what a dead horse actually smells like , but this one probably smells pretty much like it .
it 's really horrible .
and blowflies just ca n't help themselves .
they fly into this thing , and they fly all the way down it .
they lay their eggs in it , thinking it 's a nice bit of carrion , and not realizing that there 's no food for the eggs , that the eggs are going to die , but the plant , meanwhile , has benefited , because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower - fantastic .
here 's arum , arum maculatum , " lords and ladies , " or " cuckoo-pint " in this country .
i photographed this thing last week in dorset .
this thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature - amazing .
and if you look down into it , there 's this sort of dam past the spadix , flies get attracted by the heat - which is boiling off volatile chemicals , little midges - and they get trapped underneath in this container .
they drink this fabulous nectar and then they 're all a bit sticky .
at night they get covered in pollen , which showers down over them , and then the bristles that we saw above , they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out , covered in pollen - fabulous thing .
now if you think that 's fabulous , this is one of my great favorites .
this is the philodendron selloum .
for anyone here from brazil , you 'll know about this plant .
this is the most amazing thing .
that sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long .
and it does something that no other plant that i know of does , and that is that when it flowers - that 's the spadix in the middle there - for a period of about two days , it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals .
so instead of having starch , which is the food of plants , it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it 's burning fat , metabolizing , about the rate of a small cat .
and that 's twice the energy output , weight for weight , than a hummingbird - absolutely astonishing .
this thing does something else which is unusual .
not only will it raise itself to 115 fahrenheit , 43 or 44 degrees centigrade , for two days , but it keeps constant temperature .
there 's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature .
" now why does it do this , " i hear you ask .
now would n't you know it , there 's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature .
and they get inside , and they get it all on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the plant showers them with pollen , and off they go and pollinate .
and what a wonderful thing it is .
now most pollinators that we think about are insects , but actually in the tropics , many birds and butterflies pollinate .
and many of the tropical flowers are red , and that 's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us , we think , and can see the color red very well .
but if you look at the spectrum , birds and us , we see red , green and blue and see that spectrum .
insects see green , blue and ultraviolet , and they see various shades of ultraviolet .
so there 's something that goes on off the end there .
" and would n't it be great if we could somehow see what that is , " i hear you ask .
well yes we can .
so what is an insect seeing ?
last week i took these pictures of rock rose , helianthemum , in dorset .
these are little yellow flowers like we all see , little yellow flowers all over the place .
and this is what it looks like with visible light .
this is what it looks like if you take out the red .
most bees do n't perceive red .
and then i put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very , very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what i got .
and that 's a real fantastic bull 's eye .
now we do n't know exactly what a bee sees , any more than you know what i 'm seeing when i call this red .
we ca n't know what 's going on in - let alone an insect 's - another human being 's mind .
but the contrast will look something like that , so standing out a lot from the background .
here 's another little flower - different range of ultraviolet frequencies , different filters to match the pollinators .
and that 's the sort of thing that it would be seeing .
just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property - no flower was damaged in the process of this shot ; it was just attached to the tripod , not killed - then under ultraviolet light , look at that .
and that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light .
so maybe the chemical in that would be useful .
finally , there 's one of evening primrose that bjorn rorslett from norway sent me - fantastic hidden pattern .
and i love the idea of something hidden .
i think there 's something poetic here , that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter , the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of venus - actually the clouds of venus .
that 's the main use of that filter .
venus , of course , is the god of love and fertility , which is the flower story .
and just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding , they 've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death , and particularly at marriage , which , when you think of it , is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the theme of my talk today is , " be an artist , right now . "
most people , when this subject is brought up , get tense and resist it : " art does n't feed me , and right now i 'm busy .
i have to go to school , get a job , send my kids to lessons ... " you think , " i 'm too busy . i do n't have time for art . "
there are hundreds of reasons why we ca n't be artists right now .
do n't they just pop into your head ?
there are so many reasons why we ca n't be , indeed , we 're not sure why we should be .
we do n't know why we should be artists , but we have many reasons why we ca n't be .
why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art ?
perhaps you think art is for the greatly gifted or for the thoroughly and professionally trained .
and some of you may think you 've strayed too far from art .
well you might have , but i do n't think so .
this is the theme of my talk today .
we are all born artists .
if you have kids , you know what i mean .
almost everything kids do is art .
they draw with crayons on the wall .
they dance to son dam bi 's dance on tv , but you ca n't even call it son dam bi 's dance - it becomes the kids ' own dance .
so they dance a strange dance and inflict their singing on everyone .
perhaps their art is something only their parents can bear , and because they practice such art all day long , people honestly get a little tired around kids .
kids will sometimes perform monodramas - playing house is indeed a monodrama or a play .
and some kids , when they get a bit older , start to lie .
usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies .
they 're shocked .
" now you 're showing your true colors , " mom says . she thinks , " why does he take after his dad ? "
she questions him , " what kind of a person are you going to be ? "
but you should n't worry .
the moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins .
they are talking about things they did n't see .
it 's amazing . it 's a wonderful moment .
parents should celebrate .
" hurray ! my boy finally started to lie ! "
all right ! it calls for celebration .
for example , a kid says , " mom , guess what ? i met an alien on my way home . "
then a typical mom responds , " stop that nonsense . "
now , an ideal parent is someone who responds like this : " really ? an alien , huh ? what did it look like ? did it say anything ?
where did you meet it ? " " um , in front of the supermarket . "
when you have a conversation like this , the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started .
soon , a story develops .
of course this is an infantile story , but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does .
in essence , they are not different .
roland barthes once said of flaubert 's novels , " flaubert did not write a novel .
he merely connected one sentence after another .
the eros between sentences , that is the essence of flaubert 's novel . "
that 's right - a novel , basically , is writing one sentence , then , without violating the scope of the first one , writing the next sentence .
and you continue to make connections .
take a look at this sentence : " one morning , as gregor samsa was waking up from anxious dreams , he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug . "
yes , it 's the first sentence of franz kafka 's " the metamorphosis . "
writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it , kafka 's work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature .
kafka did not show his work to his father .
he was not on good terms with his father .
on his own , he wrote these sentences .
had he shown his father , " my boy has finally lost it , " he would 've thought .
and that 's right . art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence , which is not much different from what a kid does .
a kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller .
kids do art .
they do n't get tired and they have fun doing it .
i was in jeju island a few days ago .
when kids are on the beach , most of them love playing in the water .
but some of them spend a lot of time in the sand , making mountains and seas - well , not seas , but different things - people and dogs , etc .
but parents tell them , " it will all be washed away by the waves . "
in other words , it 's useless .
there 's no need .
but kids do n't mind .
they have fun in the moment and they keep playing in the sand .
kids do n't do it because someone told them to .
they are n't told by their boss or anyone , they just do it .
when you were little , i bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art .
when i ask my students to write about their happiest moment , many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid .
learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend , or performing a ridiculous skit with friends looking like idiots - things like that .
or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera .
they talk about these kinds of experiences .
you must have had such a moment .
in that moment , art makes you happy because it 's not work .
work does n't make you happy , does it ? mostly it 's tough .
the french writer michel tournier has a famous saying .
it 's a bit mischievous , actually .
" work is against human nature . the proof is that it makes us tired . "
right ? why would work tire us if it 's in our nature ?
playing does n't tire us .
we can play all night long .
if we work overnight , we should be paid for overtime .
why ? because it 's tiring and we feel fatigue .
but kids , usually they do art for fun . it 's playing .
they do n't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family .
of course , there were kids who had to .
you know this gentleman , right ?
he had to tour around europe to support his family - wolfgang amadeus mozart - but that was centuries ago , so we can make him an exception .
unfortunately , at some point our art - such a joyful pastime - ends .
kids have to go to lessons , to school , do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons , but they are n't fun anymore .
you 're told to do it and there 's competition . how can it be fun ?
if you 're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall , you 'll surely get in trouble with your mom .
besides , if you continue to act like an artist as you get older , you 'll increasingly feel pressure - people will question your actions and ask you to act properly .
here 's my story : i was an eighth grader and i entered a drawing contest at school in gyeongbokgung .
i was trying my best , and my teacher came around and asked me , " what are you doing ? "
" i 'm drawing diligently , " i said .
" why are you using only black ? "
indeed , i was eagerly coloring the sketchbook in black .
and i explained , " it 's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch . "
then my teacher said , " really ? well , young-ha , you may not be good at drawing but you have a talent for storytelling . "
or so i wished .
" now you 'll get it , you rascal ! " was the response . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " you 'll get it ! " he said .
you were supposed to draw the palace , the gyeonghoeru , etc . , but i was coloring everything in black , so he dragged me out of the group .
there were a lot of girls there as well , so i was utterly mortified .
none of my explanations or excuses were heard , and i really got it big time .
if he was an ideal teacher , he would have responded like i said before , " young-ha may not have a talent for drawing , but he has a gift for making up stories , " and he would have encouraged me .
but such a teacher is seldom found .
later , i grew up and went to europe 's galleries - i was a university student - and i thought this was really unfair .
look what i found . -lrb- laughter -rrb- works like this were hung in basel while i was punished and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth .
look at this . does n't it look just like wallpaper ?
contemporary art , i later discovered , is n't explained by a lame story like mine .
no crows are brought up .
most of the works have no title , untitled .
anyways , contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation - essentially the same as i did .
of course , my work was very amateur , but let 's turn to more famous examples .
this is picasso 's .
he stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it " bull 's head . " sounds convincing , right ?
next , a urinal was placed on its side and called " fountain . "
that was duchamp .
so filling the gap between explanation and a weird act with stories - that 's indeed what contemporary art is all about .
picasso even made the statement , " i draw not what i see but what i think . "
yes , it means i did n't have to draw gyeonghoeru .
i wish i knew what picasso said back then . i could have argued better with my teacher .
unfortunately , the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art .
they get locked in .
that 's our tragedy .
so what happens when little artists get locked in , banished or even killed ?
our artistic desire does n't go away .
we want to express , to reveal ourselves , but with the artist dead , the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form .
in karaoke bars , there are always people who sing " she 's gone " or " hotel california , " miming the guitar riffs .
usually they sound awful . awful indeed .
some people turn into rockers like this .
or some people dance in clubs .
people who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the internet all night long .
that 's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side .
sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with legos or putting together plastic robots .
they go , " do n't touch it . daddy will do it for you . "
the kid has already lost interest and is doing something else , but the dad alone builds castles .
this shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed , not gone .
but they can often reveal themselves negatively , in the form of jealousy .
you know the song " i would love to be on tv " ? why would we love it ?
tv is full of people who do what we wished to do , but never got to .
they dance , they act - and the more they do , they are praised .
so we start to envy them .
we become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on tv .
" he just ca n't act . " " you call that singing ? she ca n't hit the notes . "
we easily say these sorts of things .
we get jealous , not because we 're evil , but because we have little artists pent up inside us .
that 's what i think .
what should we do then ?
yes , that 's right .
right now , we need to start our own art .
right this minute , we can turn off tv , log off the internet , get up and start to do something .
where i teach students in drama school , there 's a course called dramatics .
in this course , all students must put on a play .
however , acting majors are not supposed to act .
they can write the play , for example , and the writers may work on stage art .
likewise , stage art majors may become actors , and in this way you put on a show .
students at first wonder whether they can actually do it , but later they have so much fun . i rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play .
in school , the military or even in a mental institution , once you make people do it , they enjoy it .
i saw this happen in the army - many people had fun doing plays .
i have another experience : in my writing class , i give students a special assignment .
i have students like you in the class - many who do n't major in writing .
some major in art or music and think they ca n't write .
so i give them blank sheets of paper and a theme .
it can be a simple theme : write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood .
there 's one condition : you must write like crazy . like crazy !
i walk around and encourage them , " come on , come on ! " they have to write like crazy for an hour or two .
they only get to think for the first five minutes .
the reason i make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind , the artistic devil creeps in .
this devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you ca n't write : " people will laugh at you . this is not good writing !
what kind of sentence is this ? look at your handwriting ! "
it will say a lot of things .
you have to run fast so the devil ca n't catch up .
the really good writing i 've seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline , but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did in front of me with a pencil .
the students go into a kind of trance .
after 30 or 40 minutes , they write without knowing what they 're writing .
and in this moment , the nagging devil disappears .
so i can say this : it 's not the hundreds of reasons why one ca n't be an artist , but rather , the one reason one must be that makes us artists .
why we can not be something is not important .
most artists became artists because of the one reason .
when we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art , enemies appear on the outside .
mostly , they have the faces of our parents . -lrb- laughter -rrb- sometimes they look like our spouses , but they are not your parents or spouses .
they are devils . devils .
they came to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic , from becoming artists .
and they have a magic question .
when we say , " i think i 'll try acting . there 's a drama school in the community center , " or " i 'd like to learn italian songs , " they ask , " oh , yeah ? a play ? what for ? "
the magic question is , " what for ? "
but art is not for anything .
art is the ultimate goal .
it saves our souls and makes us live happily .
it helps us express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs .
so in response to such a pragmatic question , we need to be bold .
" well , just for the fun of it . sorry for having fun without you , " is what you should say . " i 'll just go ahead and do it anyway . "
the ideal future i imagine is where we all have multiple identities , at least one of which is an artist .
once i was in new york and got in a cab . i took the backseat , and in front of me i saw something related to a play .
so i asked the driver , " what is this ? "
he said it was his profile . " then what are you ? " i asked . " an actor , " he said .
he was a cabby and an actor . i asked , " what roles do you usually play ? "
he proudly said he played king lear .
king lear .
" who is it that can tell me who i am ? " - a great line from king lear .
that 's the world i dream of .
someone is a golfer by day and writer by night .
or a cabby and an actor , a banker and a painter , secretly or publicly performing their own arts .
in 1990 , martha graham , the legend of modern dance , came to korea .
the great artist , then in her 90s , arrived at gimpo airport and a reporter asked her a typical question : " what do you have to do to become a great dancer ?
any advice for aspiring korean dancers ? "
now , she was the master . this photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist .
in 1990 , she was asked this question .
and here 's what she answered : " just do it . "
wow . i was touched .
only those three words and she left the airport . that 's it .
so what should we do now ?
let 's be artists , right now . right away . how ?
just do it !
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- video : narrator : an event seen from one point of view gives one impression .
seen from another point of view , it gives quite a different impression .
but it 's only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what 's going on .
sasha vucinic : it 's a great clip , is n't it ?
and i found that in 29 seconds , it tells more about the power of , and importance of , independent media than i could say in an hour .
so i thought that it will be good to start with it .
and also start with a little bit of statistics .
according to relevant researchers , 83 percent of the population of this planet lives in the societies without independent press .
think about that number : 83 percent of the population on the whole planet does not really know what is going on in their countries .
the information they get gets filtered through somebody who either twists that information , or colors that information , does something with it .
so they 're deprived of understanding their reality .
that is just to understand how big and important this problem is .
now those of you who are lucky enough to live in those societies that represent 17 percent , i think should enjoy it until it lasts .
you know , sunday morning , you flick the paper , get your cappuccino .
enjoy it while it lasts .
because as we heard yesterday , countries can lose stars from their flags , but they can also lose press freedom , as i guess americans among us can tell us more about .
but that 's totally another and separate topic .
so i can go back to my story .
my story starts - the story i want to share - starts in 1991 .
at that time i was running b92 , the only independent , for that matter the only electronic media , in the country .
and i guess we were sharing - we had that regular life of the only independent media in the country , operating in hostile environment , where government really wants to make your life miserable .
and there are different ways .
yeah , it was the usual cocktail : a little bit of threats , a little bit of friendly advice , a little bit of financial police , a little bit of text control , so you always have somebody who never leaves your office .
but what they really do , which is very powerful , and that is what governments in the late ' 90s started doing if they do n't like independent media companies - you know , they threaten your advertisers .
once they threaten your advertisers , market forces are actually , you know , destroyed , and the advertisers do not want to come - no matter how much does it make sense for them - do not want to come and advertise .
and you have a problem making ends meet .
at that time at the beginning of the ' 90s , we had that problem , which was , you know , survival below one side , but what was really painful for me was , remember , the beginning of the ' 90s , yugoslavia is falling apart .
we were sitting over there with a country in a downfall , in a slow-motion downfall .
and we all had all of that on tapes .
we had the ability to understand what was going on .
we were actually recording history .
the problem was that we had to re-tape that history a week later ; because if we did not , we could not afford enough tapes to keep archives of that history .
so if i gave you that picture , i do n't want to go too long on that .
in that context a gentleman came to my office at that time .
it was still 1991 .
he was running a media systems organization which is still in business , the gentleman is still in business .
and what did i know at that time about media systems ?
i would think media systems were organizations , which means they should help you .
so i prepared two plans for that meeting , two strategic plans : the small one and the big one .
the small one was , i just wanted him to help us get those damn tapes , so we can keep that archive for the next 50 years .
the big plan was to ask him for a 1,000,000-dollar loan .
because i thought , i still maintain , that serious and independent media companies are great business .
and i thought that b92 will survive and be a great company once milosevic is gone , which turned out to be true .
it 's now probably either the biggest or the second biggest media company in the country .
and i thought that the only thing that we needed at that time was 1,000,000-dollar loan to take us through those hard times .
to make a long story short , the gentleman comes into the office , great suit and tie .
i gave him what i thought was a brilliant explanation of the political situation and explained how hard and difficult the war will be .
actually , i underestimated the atrocities , i have to admit .
anyway , after that whole , big , long explanation , the only question he had for me - and this is not a joke - is , are we paying royalties after we broadcast music of michael jackson ?
that was really the only question he had .
he left , and i remember being actually very angry at myself because i thought there must be an institution in the world that is providing loans to media companies .
it 's so obvious , straight in your face , and somebody must have thought of it .
somebody must have started something like that .
and i thought , i 'm just dumb and i can not find it .
you know , in my defense , there was no google at that time ; you could not just google in ' 91 .
so i thought that that 's actually my problem .
now we go from here , fast forward to 1995 .
i have - i left the country , i have a meeting with george soros , trying for the third time to convince him that his foundation should invest in something that should operate like a media bank .
and basically what i was saying is very simple .
you know , forget about charity ; it does n't work .
forget about handouts ; 20,000 dollars do not help anybody .
what you should do is you should treat media companies as a business .
it 's business anywhere .
media business , or any other business , it needs to be capitalized .
and what these guys need , actually , is access to capital .
so third meeting , arguments are pretty well exercised .
at the end of the meeting he says , look , it is not going to work ; you will never see your money back ; but my foundations will put 500,000 dollars so you can test the idea .
see that it will not work .
he said , i 'll give you a rope to hang yourself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i knew two things after that meeting .
first , under no circumstances i want to hang myself .
and second , that i have no idea how to make it work .
you see , at the level of a concept , it was a great concept .
but it 's one thing to have a concept ; it 's a totally separate thing to actually make it work .
so i had absolutely no idea how that could actually work .
had the wrong idea ; i thought that we can be a bank .
you see banks - i do n't know if there are any bankers over here ; i apologize in advance - but it 's the best job in the world .
you know , you find somebody who is respectable and has a lot of money .
you give them more money ; they repay you that over a time .
you collect interest and do nothing in between .
so i thought , why do n't we get into that business ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here we are having our first client , brilliant .
first independent newspaper in slovakia .
the government cutting them off from all the printing facilities in bratislava .
so here 's the daily newspaper that has to be printed 400 kilometers away from the capital .
it 's a daily newspaper with a deadline of 4 p.m.
that means that they have no sports ; they have no latest news ; circulation goes down .
it 's a kind of very nice , sophisticated way how to economically strangle a daily newspaper .
they come to us with a request for a loan .
they want to - the only way for them to survive is to get a printing press .
and we said , that 's fine ; let 's meet ; you 'll bring us your business plan , which eventually they did .
we start the meeting .
i get these two pieces of paper , not like this , a4 format , so it 's much bigger .
a lot of numbers there . a lot of numbers .
but however you put it , you know , the numbers do not make any sense .
and that 's the best they could do .
we were the best that they could do .
so that is how we understood what our method is .
it 's not a bank . we had to actually go into these companies and earn our return by fixing them - by establishing management systems , by providing all that knowledge , how do you run a business on one side - while they all know how to run , how to create content .
just quickly on the results .
over these 10 years , 40 million dollars in affordable financing , average interest rate five percent to six percent .
lately we are going wild , charging seven percent from time to time .
we do it in 17 countries of the developing world .
and here is the most stunning number .
return rate - the one that soros was so worried about - 97 percent .
97 percent of all the scheduled repayments came back to us on time .
what do we typically finance ?
we finance anything that a media company would need , from printing presses to transmitters .
what is most important is we do it either in form of loans , equities , lease - whatever is appropriate for , you know , supporting anybody .
but what is most important here is , who do we finance ?
we believe that in the last 10 years companies that we 've financed are actually the best media companies in the developing world .
that is a " who is who " list .
and i could spend hours talking about them , because they 're all kind of heroes .
and i can , but i 'll give you just , maybe one , and depending on time i may give you two examples who we work with .
you see we started working in eastern and central europe , and moved to russia .
our first loan in russia was in chelyabinsk .
i 'll bet half of you have never heard of that place .
in the south of russia there 's a guy called boris nikolayevich kirshin , who is running an independent newspaper there .
the city was closed until early ' 90s because , of all things , they were producing glass for tupolev planes .
anyway , he 's running independent newspaper there .
after two years working with us , he becomes the most respected newspaper in that small place .
governor comes to him one day , actually invites him to come to his office .
he goes and sees the governor . the governor says , boris nikolayevich , i understand you are doing a great job , and you are the most respected newspaper in our district .
and i want to offer you a deal .
can you please give me your newspaper for the next nine months , because i have elections - there are elections coming up in nine months .
i will not run , but it 's very important for me who is going to succeed me .
so give me the paper for nine months . i 'll give it back to you .
i have no interest in being in media business .
how much would that cost ?
boris nikolayevich says , " it 's not for sale . "
the governor says , " we will close you . "
boris nikolayevich says , " no , you can not do it . "
six months later the newspaper was closed .
luckily , we had enough time to help boris nikolayevich take all the assets out of that company and bring him into a new one , to get all the subscription lists , rehire staff .
so what the governor got was an empty shell .
but that is what happens if you 're in business of independent media , and if you are a banker for independent media .
so it sounds like a great story .
somewhere down the road we opened a media management center .
we started our media lab , sounds like a real great story .
but there is a second angle to that .
the second angle , like in this clip .
if you take the camera above , you start thinking about these numbers again .
40 million dollars over 10 years spread over 17 countries .
that is not too much , is it ?
it 's actually just a drop in the sea .
because when you think about the importance , some of the issues that we were talking about last night - this last session we had about africa and his hypothetical 50 billion dollars destined for africa .
all of those , not all , half of those problems mentioned last night - government accountability , corruption , how do you fight corruption , giving voice to unheard , to poor - it 's why independent media is in business .
and it 's why it was invented .
so from that perspective , what we did is just really one drop in the sea of that need that we can identify .
now ours is just one story .
i 'm sure that in this room there are , like , 15 other wonderful stories of nonprofits doing spectacular work .
here is where the problem is , and i 'll explain to you as well as i can what the problem is .
and it 's called fundraising .
imagine that this third of this room is filled with people who represent different foundations .
imagine two thirds over here running excellent organizations , doing very important work .
now imagine that every second person over here is deaf , does not hear , and switch the lights off .
now that is how difficult it is to match people from this side of the room with people of that side of the room .
so we thought that some kind of a big idea is needed to reform , to totally rethink fundraising .
you know , instead of people running in this dark , trying to find their own match , who will be willing , who has the same goals .
instead of all of that we thought there is - something new needs to be invented .
and we came up with this idea of issuing bonds , press freedom bonds .
if there are investors willing to finance u.s. government budget deficit , why would n't we find investors willing to finance press freedom deficit ?
we 've decided to do it this fall ; we will issue them , probably in denominations of 1,000 dollars .
i do n't want to advertise them too much ; that 's not the point .
but the point is , if we ever survive to actually issue them , find enough investors that this can be considered a success , there 's nothing stopping the next organization to start to issue bonds next spring .
and those can be environmental bonds .
and then two weeks later , iqbal quadir can issue his electricity in bangladesh bonds .
and before you know it , any social cause can be actually financed in this way .
now we do daydreaming in 11:30 with 55 seconds left .
but let 's take the idea further .
you do it , you start it in the states , because it 's , you know , concepts are very , very close to american minds .
but you can actually bring it to europe , too .
you can bring it to asia .
you can , once you have all of those different points , you can make it easy for investors .
put all of those bonds at one place and they sit down and click .
once you have more than 10 of them you have to develop some kind of a matrix .
what do investors get ?
on one side financial , on the other side social .
so that brings the idea of some kind of rating agency , morningstar type .
it says , you know , social impact over here is spectacular , five stars .
financial , they give you one percent , only one star .
now take it to the last step .
once you have all of that put together , there 's not one reason why you could n't actually have a marketplace for all of that , where you can not dispose of all of those bonds in a pretty quick way .
and in that way you organize the financing so there are no dark rooms , no blind people running around to find each other .
thank you .
so i really consider myself a storyteller .
but i do n't really tell stories in the usual way , in the sense that i do n't usually tell my own stories .
instead , i 'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories , people all around the world .
i do this because i think that people actually have a lot in common .
i think people are very similar , but i also think that we have trouble seeing that .
you know , as i look around the world i see a lot of gaps , and i think we all see a lot of gaps .
and we define ourselves by our gaps .
there 's language gaps , there 's ethnicity and racial gaps , there 's age gaps , there 's gender gaps , there 's sexuality gaps , there 's wealth and money gaps , there 's education gaps , there 's also religious gaps .
you know , we have all these gaps and i think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something , some smaller community .
but i think that actually , despite our gaps , we really have a lot in common .
and i think one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves .
i think this is a very old human desire . it 's nothing new .
but the thing about self-expression is that there 's traditionally been this imbalance between the desire that we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this , also , is nothing new .
since the dawn of human history , we 've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art , writing poems , singing songs , scripting editorials and sending them in to a newspaper , gossiping with friends . this is nothing new .
what 's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very traditional physical human activities , these acts of self-expression , have been moving onto the internet .
and as that 's happened , people have been leaving behind footprints , footprints that tell stories of their moments of self-expression .
and so what i do is , i write computer programs that study very large sets of these footprints , and then try to draw conclusions about the people who left them - what they feel , what they think , what 's different in the world today than usual , these sorts of questions .
one project that explores these ideas , which was made about a year ago , is a piece called we feel fine .
this is a piece that every two or three minutes scans the world 's newly-posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases " i feel " or " i am feeling . "
and when it finds one of those phrases , it grabs the sentence up to the period , and then automatically tries to deduce the age , gender and geographical location of the person that wrote that sentence .
then , knowing the geographical location and the time , we can also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the sentence .
all of this information is saved in a database that collects about 20,000 feelings a day .
it 's been running for about a year and a half .
it 's reached about seven-and-a-half million human feelings now .
and i 'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then visualized . so this is we feel fine .
what you see here is a madly swarming mass of particles , each of which represents a single human feeling that was stated in the last few hours .
the color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside - so that happy , positive feelings are brightly colored .
and sad , negative feelings are darkly colored .
the diameter of each dot represents the length of the sentence inside , so that the large dots contain large sentences , and the small dots contain small sentences .
any dot can be clicked and expanded . and we see here , " i would just feel so much better if i could curl up in his arms right now and feel his affection for me in the embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips . "
so it gets pretty hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions .
and all of these are stated by people : " i know that objectively it really does n't mean much , but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big pond , it 's nice to feel bigger again . "
the dots exhibit human qualities . they kind of have their own physics , and they swarm wildly around , kind of exploring the world of life .
and then they also exhibit curiosity .
you can see a few of them are swarming around the cursor right now .
you can see some other ones are swarming around the bottom left corner of the screen around six words . those six words represent the six movements of we feel fine . we 're currently seeing madness .
there 's also murmurs , montage , mobs , metrics and mounds .
and i 'll walk you through a few of those now .
murmurs causes all of the feelings to fly to the ceiling .
and then , one by one , in reverse chronological order , they excuse themselves , entering the scrolling list of feelings .
" i feel a bit better now . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i feel confused and unsure of what the hell i want to do . "
" i feel gypped out of something awesome here . "
" i feel so free ; i feel so good . "
" i feel like i 'm in this fog of depression that i ca n't get out of . "
and you can click any of these to go out and visit the blog from which it was collected . and in that way , you can connect with the authors of these statements if you feel some degree of empathy .
the next movement is called montage .
montage causes all of the feelings that contain photographs to become extracted and display themselves in a grid .
this grid is then said to represent the picture of the world 's feelings in the last few hours , if you will .
each of these can be clicked and we can blow it up .
we see , " i just feel like i 'm not going to have fun if it 's not the both of us . " that was from someone in michigan .
we see , " i feel like i have been at a computer all day . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are automatically constructed using the found objects : " i think i feel a little full . "
the next movement is called mobs .
mobs provides different statistical breakdowns of the population of the world 's feelings in the last few hours .
we see that " better " is the most frequent feeling right now , followed by " good , " " bad , " " guilty , " " right , " " down , " " sick " and so on .
we can also get a gender breakdown .
and we see that women are slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours than men .
we can do an age breakdown , which gives us a histogram of the world 's emotional distribution by age .
we see people in their twenties are the most prolific , followed by teenagers , and then people in their thirties , and it dies out very quickly from there .
in weather , the feelings assume the physical characteristics of the weather that they represent , so that the ones collected on a sunny day swirl around as if they 're part of the sun .
the cloudy ones float along as if they 're on a breeze .
the rainy ones fall down as if they 're in a rainstorm , and the snowy ones kind of flutter to the ground .
finally , location causes the feelings to move to their positions on a world map showing the geographical distribution of feelings .
metrics provides more numerical views on the data .
we see that the world is feeling " used " at 3.3 times the normal level right now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they 're feeling " warm " at 2.9 times the normal level , and so on .
other views are also available .
here are gender , age , weather , location .
the final movement is called mounds .
it 's a bit different from the others .
mounds visualizes the entire dataset as large , gelatinous blobs which kind of jiggle .
and if i hold down my cursor , they do a little dance .
we see " better " is the most frequent feeling , followed by " bad . "
and then if i go over here , the list begins to scroll , and there are actually thousands of feelings that have been collected .
you can see the little pink cursor moving along , representing our position .
here we see people that feel " slipping , " " nauseous , " " responsible . "
there 's also a search capability , if you 're interested in finding out about a certain population .
for instance , you could find women who feel " addicted " in their 20s when it was cloudy in bangladesh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'll spare you that .
so here are some of my favorite montages that have been collected : " i feel so much of my dad alive in me that there is n't even room for me . "
" i feel very lonely . "
" i need to be in some backwoods redneck town so that i can feel beautiful . "
" i feel invisible to you . "
" i would n't hide it if society did n't make me feel like i needed to . "
" i feel in love with carolyn . " " i feel so naughty . "
" i feel these weirdoes are actually an asset to college life . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i love how i feel today . "
so as you can see , we feel fine uses a technique that i call " passive observation . "
what i mean by that is that it passively observes people as they live their lives . it scans the world 's blogs and looks at what people are writing , and these people do n't know they 're being watched or interviewed .
and because of that , you end up getting very honest , candid , sincere responses that are often very moving .
and this is a technique that i usually prefer in my work because people do n't know they 're being interviewed .
they 're just living life , and they end up just acting like that .
another technique is directly questioning people .
and this is a technique that i explored in a different project , the yahoo ! time capsule , which was designed to take a fingerprint of the world in 2006 .
it was divided into ten very simple themes - love , anger , sadness and so on - each of which contained a single , very open-ended question put to the world : what do you love ? what makes you angry ?
what makes you sad ? what do you believe in ? and so on .
the time capsule was available for one month online , translated into 10 languages , and this is what it looked like .
it 's a spinning globe , the surface of which is entirely composed of the pictures and words and drawings of people that submitted to the time capsule .
the ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule .
you can sift through this data and see what people have submitted .
this is in response to , what 's beautiful ? " miss world . "
there are two modes to the time capsule .
there 's one world , which presents the spinning globe , and many voices , which splits the data out into film strips and lets you sift through them one by one .
so this project was punctuated by a really amazing event , which was held in the desert outside albuquerque in new mexico at the jemez pueblo , where for three consecutive nights , the contents of the capsule were projected onto the sides of the ancient red rock canyon walls , which stand about 200 feet tall . it was really incredible .
and we also projected the contents of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer space .
you can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a 45 degree angle there . this was amazing because the first night i looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that i talked about earlier - the differences in age , gender and wealth and so on .
but , you know , as i looked at this more and more and more , and saw these images go across the rocks , i realized i was seeing the same archetypal events depicted again and again and again .
you know : weddings , births , funerals , the first car , the first kiss , the first camel or horse - depending on the culture .
and it was really moving . and this picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two miles away , where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into space .
and there was something very moving about all of this human expression being shot off into the night sky .
and it started to make me think a lot about the night sky , and how humans have always used the night sky to project their great stories .
you know , as a child in vermont , on a farm where i grew up , i would often look up into the dark sky and see the three star belt of orion , the hunter .
and as an adult , i 've been more aware of the great greek myths playing out in the sky overhead every night .
you know , orion facing the roaring bull .
perseus flying to the rescue of andromeda .
zeus battling chronos for control of mount olympus .
i mean , these are the great tales of the greeks .
and it caused me to wonder about our world today .
and it caused me to wonder specifically , if we could make new constellations today , what would those look like ? what would those be ?
if we could make new pictures in the sky , what would we draw ?
what are the great stories of today ?
and those are the questions that inspired my new project , which is debuting here today at ted .
nobody 's seen this yet , publicly .
it 's called universe : revealing our modern mythology .
and it uses this metaphor of an interactive night sky .
so , it 's my great pleasure now to show this to you .
so , universe will open here .
and you 'll see that it leads with a shifting star field , and there 's an aurora borealis in the background , kind of morphing with color . the color of the aurora borealis can be controlled using this single bar of color at the bottom , and we 'll put it down here to red .
so you see this kind of - these stars moving along .
now , these are n't just little points of light , little pixels .
each of those stars actually represents a specific event in the real world - a quote that was stated by somebody , an image , a news story , a person , a company . you know , some kind of heroic personality .
and you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch some of these stars , that shapes begin to emerge .
we see here there 's a little man walking along , or maybe a woman .
and we see here a photograph with a head .
you can start to see words emerging here .
and those are the constellations of today .
and i can turn them all on , and you can see them moving across the sky now .
this is the universe of 2007 , the last two months .
the data from this is global news coverage from thousands of news sources around the world .
it 's using the api of a really great company that i work with in new york , actually , called daylife .
and it 's kind of the zeitgeist view at this level of the world 's current mythology over the last couple of months .
so we can see where it 's emerging here , like president ford , iraq , bush . and we can actually isolate just the words - i call them secrets - and we can cause them to form an alphabetical list . and we see anna nicole smith playing a big role recently .
president ford - this is gerald ford 's funeral .
we can actually click anything in universe and have it become the center of the universe , and everything else will enter its orbit .
so , we 'll click ford , and now that becomes the center .
and the things that relate to ford enter its orbit and swirl around it .
we can isolate just the photographs , and we now see those .
we can click on one of those and have the photograph be the center of the universe .
now the things that relate to it are swirling around .
we can click on this and we see this iconic image of betty ford kissing her husband 's coffin .
in universe , there 's kind of no end . it just goes infinitely , and you can just kind of click on stuff .
this is a photographic representation , called snapshots .
but we can actually be more specific in defining our universe .
so , if we want to , let 's check out what bill clinton 's universe looks like .
and let 's see , in the past week , what he 's been up to .
so now , we have a new universe , which is just constrained to all things bill clinton .
we can have his constellations emerge here .
we can pull out his secrets , and we see that it has a lot to do with candidates , hillary , presidential , barack obama .
we can see the stories that bill clinton is taking part in right now .
any of those can be opened up .
so we see obama and the clintons meet in alabama .
you can see that this is an important story ; there are a lot of things in its orbit . if we open this up , we get different perspectives on this story .
you can click any of those to go out and read the article at the source . this one 's from al jazeera .
we can also see the superstars . these would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and heroines in the universe of bill clinton . so there 's bill clinton , hillary , iraq , george bush , barack obama , scooter libby - these are kind of the people of bill clinton .
we can also see a world map , so this shows us the geographic reach of bill clinton in the last week or so .
we can see he 's been focused in america because he 's been campaigning , probably , but a little bit of action over here in the middle east .
and then we can also see a timeline .
so we see that he was a bit quiet on saturday , but he was back to work on sunday morning , and actually been tapering off since then this week .
and it 's not limited to just people or dates , but we can actually put in concepts also .
so if i put in climate change for all of 2006 , we 'll see what that universe looks like .
here we have our star field . here we have our shapes .
here we have our secrets .
so we see again , climate change is large : nairobi , global conference , environmental .
and there are also quotes that you can see , if you 're interested in reading about quotes on climate change .
you know , this is really an infinite thing .
the superstars of climate change in 2006 : united states , britain , china . you know , these are the towering countries that kind of define this concept .
so this is a piece that demands exploration .
this will be online in several days , probably next tuesday .
and you 'll all be able to use it and kind of explore what your own personal mythology might be .
you 'll notice that in daylife - rather , in universe - it supports both the notion of a global mythology , which is represented by something as broad as , say , 2007 , and also a personal mythology .
as you search for the things that are important to you in your world , and then see what the constellations of those might look like .
so it 's been a pleasure . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to enlist you in helping reshape the story about how humans and other critters get things done .
here is the old story - we 've already heard a little bit about it : biology is war in which only the fiercest survive ; businesses and nations succeed only by defeating , destroying and dominating competition ; politics is about your side winning at all costs .
but i think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge .
it 's a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines , in which cooperation , collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role .
and the central , but not all-important , role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room .
i started thinking about the relationship between communication , media and collective action when i wrote " smart mobs , " and i found that when i finished the book , i kept thinking about it .
in fact , if you look back , human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time .
humans have lived for much , much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization in small family groups . nomadic hunters bring down rabbits , gathering food .
the form of wealth in those days was enough food to stay alive .
but at some point , they banded together to hunt bigger game .
and we do n't know exactly how they did this , although they must have solved some collective action problems ; it only makes sense that you ca n't hunt mastodons while you 're fighting with the other groups .
and again , we have no way of knowing , but it 's clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged .
more protein than a hunter 's family could eat before it rotted .
so that raised a social question that i believe must have driven new social forms .
did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families ?
and if so , how did they make arrangements ?
again , we ca n't know , but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication must have been involved .
of course , with agriculture came the first big civilizations , the first cities built of mud and brick , the first empires .
and it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks ; marks on clay in that time .
not too much longer after that , the alphabet was invented .
and this powerful tool was really reserved , for thousands of years , for the elite administrators -lrb- laughter -rrb- who kept track of accounts for the empires .
and then another communication technology enabled new media : the printing press came along , and within decades , millions of people became literate .
and from literate populations , new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge , religion and politics .
we saw scientific revolutions , the protestant reformation , constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before .
not created by the printing press , but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy .
and again , new forms of wealth emerged .
now , commerce is ancient . markets are as old as the crossroads .
but capitalism , as we know it , is only a few hundred years old , enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies , such as the joint-stock ownership company , shared liability insurance , double-entry bookkeeping .
now of course , the enabling technologies are based on the internet , and in the many-to-many era , every desktop is now a printing press , a broadcasting station , a community or a marketplace .
evolution is speeding up .
more recently , that power is untethering and leaping off the desktops , and very , very quickly , we 're going to see a significant proportion , if not the majority of the human race , walking around holding , carrying or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be broadband today .
now , when i started looking into collective action , the considerable literature on it is based on what sociologists call " social dilemmas . "
and there are a couple of mythic narratives of social dilemmas .
i 'm going to talk briefly about two of them : the prisoner 's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons .
now , when i talked about this with kevin kelly , he assured me that everybody in this audience pretty much knows the details of the prisoner 's dilemma , so i 'm just going to go over that very , very quickly .
if you have more questions about it , ask kevin kelly later . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the prisoner 's dilemma is actually a story that 's overlaid on a mathematical matrix that came out of the game theory in the early years of thinking about nuclear war : two players who could n't trust each other .
let me just say that every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner 's dilemma .
person with the goods , person with the money , because they ca n't trust each other , are not going to exchange .
neither one wants to be the first one or they 're going to get the sucker 's payoff , but both lose , of course , because they do n't get what they want .
if they could only agree , if they could only turn a prisoner 's dilemma into a different payoff matrix called an assurance game , they could proceed .
twenty years ago , robert axelrod used the prisoner 's dilemma as a probe of the biological question : if we are here because our ancestors were such fierce competitors , how does cooperation exist at all ?
he started a computer tournament for people to submit prisoner 's dilemma strategies and discovered , much to his surprise , that a very , very simple strategy won - it won the first tournament , and even after everyone knew it won , it won the second tournament - that 's known as tit for tat .
another economic game that may not be as well known as the prisoner 's dilemma is the ultimatum game , and it 's also a very interesting probe of our assumptions about the way people make economic transactions .
here 's how the game is played : there are two players ; they 've never played the game before , they will not play the game again , they do n't know each other , and they are , in fact , in separate rooms .
first player is offered a hundred dollars and is asked to propose a split : 50/50 , 90/10 , whatever that player wants to propose . the second player either accepts the split - both players are paid and the game is over - or rejects the split - neither player is paid and the game is over .
now , the fundamental basis of neoclassical economics would tell you it 's irrational to reject a dollar because someone you do n't know in another room is going to get 99 .
yet in thousands of trials with american and european and japanese students , a significant percentage would reject any offer that 's not close to 50/50 .
and although they were screened and did n't know about the game and had never played the game before , proposers seemed to innately know this because the average proposal was surprisingly close to 50/50 .
now , the interesting part comes in more recently when anthropologists began taking this game to other cultures and discovered , to their surprise , that slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the amazon or nomadic pastoralists in central asia or a dozen different cultures - each had radically different ideas of what is fair .
which suggests that instead of there being an innate sense of fairness , that somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions , whether we know that or not .
the other major narrative of social dilemmas is the tragedy of the commons .
garrett hardin used it to talk about overpopulation in the late 1960s .
he used the example of a common grazing area in which each person by simply maximizing their own flock led to overgrazing and the depletion of the resource .
he had the rather gloomy conclusion that humans will inevitably despoil any common pool resource in which people can not be restrained from using it .
now , elinor ostrom , a political scientist , in 1990 asked the interesting question that any good scientist should ask , which is : is it really true that humans will always despoil commons ?
so she went out and looked at what data she could find .
she looked at thousands of cases of humans sharing watersheds , forestry resources , fisheries , and discovered that yes , in case after case , humans destroyed the commons that they depended on .
but she also found many instances in which people escaped the prisoner 's dilemma ; in fact , the tragedy of the commons is a multiplayer prisoner 's dilemma .
and she said that people are only prisoners if they consider themselves to be .
they escape by creating institutions for collective action .
and she discovered , i think most interestingly , that among those institutions that worked , there were a number of common design principles , and those principles seem to be missing from those institutions that do n't work .
i 'm moving very quickly over a number of disciplines . in biology , the notions of symbiosis , group selection , evolutionary psychology are contested , to be sure .
but there is really no longer any major debate over the fact that cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology , from the level of the cell to the level of the ecology .
and again , our notions of individuals as economic beings have been overturned .
rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor .
in fact , people will act to punish cheaters , even at a cost to themselves .
and most recently , neurophysiological measures have shown that people who punish cheaters in economic games show activity in the reward centers of their brain .
which led one scientist to declare that altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together .
now , i 've been talking about how new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped create new economic forms .
commerce is ancient . markets are very old . capitalism is fairly recent ; socialism emerged as a reaction to that .
and yet we see very little talk about how the next form may be emerging .
jim surowiecki briefly mentioned yochai benkler 's paper about open source , pointing to a new form of production : peer-to-peer production .
i simply want you to keep in mind that if in the past , new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth , we may be moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different from previous ones .
very briefly , let 's look at some businesses . ibm , as you know , hp , sun - some of the most fierce competitors in the it world are open sourcing their software , are providing portfolios of patents for the commons .
eli lilly - in , again , the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical world - has created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems .
toyota , instead of treating its suppliers as a marketplace , treats them as a network and trains them to produce better , even though they are also training them to produce better for their competitors .
now none of these companies are doing this out of altruism ; they 're doing it because they 're learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest .
open source production has shown us that world-class software , like linux and mozilla , can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we 've known them .
google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through adsense .
amazon has opened its application programming interface to 60,000 developers , countless amazon shops .
they 're enriching others , not out of altruism but as a way of enriching themselves .
ebay solved the prisoner 's dilemma and created a market where none would have existed by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner 's dilemma game into an assurance game .
instead of , " neither of us can trust each other , so we have to make suboptimal moves , " it 's , " you prove to me that you are trustworthy and i will cooperate . "
wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopedia with a million and a half articles in 200 languages in just a couple of years .
we 've seen that thinkcycle has enabled ngos in developing countries to put up problems to be solved by design students around the world , including something that 's being used for tsunami relief right now : it 's a mechanism for rehydrating cholera victims that 's so simple to use it , illiterates can be trained to use it .
bittorrent turns every downloader into an uploader , making the system more efficient the more it is used .
millions of people have contributed their desktop computers when they 're not using them to link together through the internet into supercomputing collectives that help solve the protein folding problem for medical researchers - that 's folding @ home at stanford - to crack codes , to search for life in outer space .
i do n't think we know enough yet .
i do n't think we 've even begun to discover what the basic principles are , but i think we can begin to think about them .
and i do n't have enough time to talk about all of them , but think about self-interest .
this is all about self-interest that adds up to more .
in el salvador , both sides that withdrew from their civil war took moves that had been proven to mirror a prisoner 's dilemma strategy .
in the u.s. , in the philippines , in kenya , around the world , citizens have self-organized political protests and get out the vote campaigns using mobile devices and sms .
is an apollo project of cooperation possible ?
a transdisciplinary study of cooperation ?
i believe that the payoff would be very big .
i think we need to begin developing maps of this territory so that we can talk about it across disciplines .
and i am not saying that understanding cooperation is going to cause us to be better people - and sometimes people cooperate to do bad things - but i will remind you that a few hundred years ago , people saw their loved ones die from diseases they thought were caused by sin or foreigners or evil spirits .
descartes said we need an entire new way of thinking .
when the scientific method provided that new way of thinking and biology showed that microorganisms caused disease , suffering was alleviated .
what forms of suffering could be alleviated , what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation ?
i do n't think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen ; it 's going to require effort .
so i enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so a couple of years ago i started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they 're supposed to hate ; we have them work in government .
the program is called code for america , and it 's a little bit like a peace corps for geeks .
we select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments .
instead of sending them off into the third world , we send them into the wilds of city hall .
and there they make great apps , they work with city staffers .
but really what they 're doing is they 're showing what 's possible with technology today .
so meet al .
al is a fire hydrant in the city of boston .
here it kind of looks like he 's looking for a date , but what he 's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in , because he knows he 's not very good at fighting fires when he 's covered in four feet of snow .
now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner ?
we had a team of fellows in boston last year through the code for america program .
they were there in february , and it snowed a lot in february last year .
and they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants .
but one fellow in particular , a guy named erik michaels-ober , noticed something else , and that 's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things .
so he did what any good developer would do , he wrote an app .
it 's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant .
so you agree to dig it out when it snows .
if you do , you get to name it , and he called the first one al .
and if you do n't , someone can steal it from you .
so it 's got cute little game dynamics on it .
this is a modest little app .
it 's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year .
but it 's doing something that no other government technology does .
it 's spreading virally .
there 's a guy in the i.t. department of the city of honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it , not for snow , but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens .
it 's very important that these tsunami sirens work , but people steal the batteries out of them .
so he 's getting citizens to check on them .
and then seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains .
and chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows .
so we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this .
and this has spread just frictionlessly , organically , naturally .
if you know anything about government technology , you know that this is n't how it normally goes .
procuring software usually takes a couple of years .
we had a team that worked on a project in boston last year that took three people about two and a half months .
it was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids .
we were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels , it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars .
and that 's nothing .
there is one project in the california court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars , and it does n't work .
and there are projects like this at every level of government .
so an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally , that 's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government .
it suggests how government could work better - not more like a private company , as many people think it should .
and not even like a tech company , but more like the internet itself .
and that means permissionless , it means open , it means generative .
and that 's important .
but what 's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government - not as the problem of an ossified institution , but as a problem of collective action .
and that 's great news , because , it turns out , we 're very good at collective action with digital technology .
now there 's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively .
it 's not just code for america fellows , there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities .
they have n't given up on government .
they are frustrated as hell with it , but they 're not complaining about it , they 're fixing it .
and these folks know something that we 've lost sight of .
and that 's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the dmv and all those other things that we 're really mad about , government is , at its core , in the words of tim o 'reilly , " what we do together that we ca n't do alone . "
now a lot of people have given up on government .
and if you 're one of those people , i would ask that you reconsider , because things are changing .
politics is not changing ; government is changing .
and because government ultimately derives its power from us - remember " we the people ? " - how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens .
now i did n't know very much about government when i started this program .
and like a lot of people , i thought government was basically about getting people elected to office .
well after two years , i 've come to the conclusion that , especially local government , is about opossums .
this is the call center for the services and information line .
it 's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city .
if you should ever have the chance to staff your city 's call center , as our fellow scott silverman did as part of the program - in fact , they all do that - you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues , including having an opossum stuck in your house .
so scott gets this call .
he types " opossum " into this official knowledge base .
he does n't really come up with anything . he starts with animal control .
and finally , he says , " look , can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves ? "
so that worked . so booya for scott .
but that was n't the end of the opossums .
boston does n't just have a call center .
it has an app , a web and mobile app , called citizens connect .
now we did n't write this app .
this is the work of the very smart people at the office of new urban mechanics in boston .
so one day - this is an actual report - this came in : " opossum in my trashcan . ca n't tell if it 's dead .
how do i get this removed ? "
but what happens with citizens connect is different .
so scott was speaking person-to-person .
but on citizens connect everything is public , so everybody can see this .
and in this case , a neighbor saw it .
and the next report we got said , " i walked over to this location , found the trashcan behind the house .
opossum ? check . living ? yep .
turned trashcan on its side . walked home .
goodnight sweet opossum . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pretty simple .
so this is great . this is the digital meeting the physical .
and it 's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game .
but it 's also a great example of government as a platform .
and i do n't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here .
i 'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others .
so one citizen helped another citizen , but government played a key role here .
it connected those two people .
and it could have connected them with government services if they 'd been needed , but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services .
when one neighbor helps another , we strengthen our communities .
we call animal control , it just costs a lot of money .
now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it 's not the same thing as politics .
and most people get that , but they think that one is the input to the other .
that our input to the system of government is voting .
now how many times have we elected a political leader - and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected - and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs , and then not that much changes ?
that 's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top .
and what 's under that is what we call bureaucracy .
and we say that word with such contempt .
but it 's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that 's working against us , this other thing , and then we 're disempowering ourselves .
people seem to think politics is sexy .
if we want this institution to work for us , we 're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy .
because that 's where the real work of government happens .
we have to engage with the machinery of government .
so that 's occupythesec movement has done .
have you seen these guys ?
it 's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that 's a response to the sec 's request for comment on the financial reform bill .
that 's not being politically active , that 's being bureaucratically active .
now for those of us who 've given up on government , it 's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children .
you have to see the enormous challenges that they 're going to face .
do we really think we 're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us ?
we ca n't do without government , but we do need it to be more effective .
the good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society .
and there 's a generation out there that 's grown up on the internet , and they know that it 's not that hard to do things together , you just have to architect the systems the right way .
now the average age of our fellows is 28 , so i am , begrudgingly , almost a generation older than most of them .
this is a generation that 's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted .
they 're not fighting that battle that we 're all fighting about who gets to speak ; they all get to speak .
they can express their opinion on any channel at any time , and they do .
so when they 're faced with the problem of government , they do n't care as much about using their voices .
they 're using their hands .
they 're using their hands to write applications that make government work better .
and those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better .
that could be shoveling out a hydrant , pulling a weed , turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it .
and certainly , we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along , and many people do .
but these apps are like little digital reminders that we 're not just consumers , and we 're not just consumers of government , putting in our taxes and getting back services .
we 're more than that , we 're citizens .
and we 're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship .
so the question i have for all of you here : when it comes to the big , important things that we need to do together , all of us together , are we just going to be a crowd of voices , or are we also going to be a crowd of hands ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- can i say how delighted i am to be away from the calm of westminster and whitehall ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is kim , a nine-year-old vietnam girl , her back ruined by napalm , and she awakened the conscience of the nation of america to begin to end the vietnam war .
this is birhan , who was the ethiopian girl who launched live aid in the 1980s , 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued , and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world .
this is tiananmen square .
a man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol for the whole world of resistance .
this next is the sudanese girl , a few moments from death , a vulture hovering in the background , a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty .
this is neda , the iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in iran only a few weeks ago , and she is now the focus , rightly so , of the youtube generation .
and what do all these pictures and events have in common ?
what they have in common is what we see unlocks what we can not see .
what we see unlocks the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community .
what these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others , however distantly .
what i think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves .
what these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions , across all faiths , across all continents - a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others , and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted , see injuries that need to be corrected , see problems that need to be rectified .
there is a story about olof palme , the swedish prime minister , going to see ronald reagan in america in the 1980s .
before he arrived ronald reagan said - and he was the swedish social democratic prime minister - " is n't this man a communist ? "
the reply was , " no , mr president , he 's an anti-communist . "
and ronald reagan said , " i do n't care what kind of communist he is ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ronald reagan asked olof palme , the social democratic prime minister of sweden , " well , what do you believe in ? do you want to abolish the rich ? "
he said , " no , i want to abolish the poor . "
our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full .
i believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith , and people of no faith .
but i think what 's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world .
we now have the capacity to find common ground with people who we will never meet , but who we will meet through the internet and through all the modern means of communication ; that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with ; and i believe that this makes this a unique age in human history , and it is the start of what i would call the creation of a truly global society .
go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from william wilberforce and all the protesters .
they protested across britain .
they won public opinion over a long period of time .
but it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful .
what could they have done with the pictures that they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people 's hearts and minds ?
or if you take eglantyne jebb , the woman who created save the children 90 years ago .
she was so appalled by what was happening in austria as a result of the first world war and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of austria , that in britain she wanted to take action , but she had to go house to house , leaflet to leaflet , to get people to attend a rally in the royal albert hall that eventually gave birth to save the children , an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world .
but what more could she have done if she 'd had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately ?
now look at what 's happened in the last 10 years .
in philippines in 2001 , president estrada - a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime , eventually brought it down and it was , of course , called the " coup de text . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- then you have in zimbabwe the first election under robert mugabe a year ago .
because people were able to take mobile phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations , it was impossible for that premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do .
or take burma and the monks that were blogging out , a country that nobody knew anything about that was happening , until these blogs told the world that there was a repression , meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and aung san suu kyi , who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world , had to be listened to .
then take iran itself , and what people are doing today : following what happened to neda , people who are preventing the security services of iran finding those people who are blogging out of iran , any by everybody who is blogging , changing their address to tehran , iran , and making it difficult for the security services .
take , therefore , what modern technology is capable of : the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally .
that , in my view , gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world .
foreign policy can never be the same again . it can not be run by elites ; it 's got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging , who are communicating with each other around the world .
200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery .
150 years ago i suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people , children , had the right to education .
100 years ago in most countries in europe , the pressure was for the right to vote .
50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare .
in the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism , anti-semitism , racism , apartheid , discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality ; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns that have been run by people to change the world .
i was with nelson mandela a year ago , when he was in london .
i was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation .
i was sitting next to nelson mandela - i was very privileged to do so - when amy winehouse came onto the stage . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and nelson mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and i was explaining to him at the time who she was .
amy winehouse said , " nelson mandela and i have a lot in common .
my husband too has spent a long time in prison . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nelson mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all .
he said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain , the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid .
he said that there was a greater challenge ahead , the challenge of poverty , of climate change - global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society .
we are the first generation which is in a position to do this .
combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally , with the challenges that we now face , most of which are global in their nature .
climate change can not be solved in one country , but has got to be solved by the world working together .
a financial crisis , just as we have seen , could not be solved by america alone or europe alone ; it needed the world to work together .
take the problems of security and terrorism and , equally , the problem of human rights and development : they can not be solved by africa alone ; they can not be solved by america or europe alone .
we can not solve these problems unless we work together .
so the great project of our generation , it seems to me , is to build for the first time , out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together , a truly global society , built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future .
we have now , and are the first generation with , the power to do this .
take climate change . is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem , where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that , when we want to create a global carbon market , but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem ?
one of the things that has got to come out of copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have got to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well , so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations .
take the financial crisis .
if people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in new york or starts in the sub-prime market of the united states of america .
if people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many , many times until it ends up in banks in iceland or the rest in britain , and people 's ordinary savings are affected by it , then you can not rely on a system of national supervision .
you need in the long run for stability , for economic growth , for jobs , as well as for financial stability , global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared , and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible .
so another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility , not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years .
then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world , the poorest part of the world .
we do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future , and yet , out of people 's desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done .
i have just been talking to the president of sierra leone .
this is a country of six and a half million people , but it has only 80 doctors ; it has 200 nurses ; it has 120 midwives .
you can not begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources .
or take the girl i met when i was in tanzania , a girl called miriam .
she was 11 years old ; her parents had both died from aids , her mother and then her father .
she was an aids orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for .
she herself was suffering from hiv ; she was suffering from tuberculosis .
i met her in a field , she was ragged , she had no shoes .
when you looked in her eyes , any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future , but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl 's eyes and if i could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment , i believe that all the work that it had done for the global hiv / aids fund would be rewarded by people being prepared to make donations .
we must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture , so that africa is not a net importer of food , but an exporter of food .
take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world .
burma is in chains , zimbabwe is a human tragedy , in sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent .
in the rwanda children 's museum , there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the children 's museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the rwandan genocide where a million people died .
there is a photograph of a boy called david .
beside that photograph there is the information about his life .
it said " david , age 10 . "
david : ambition to be a doctor .
favorite sport : football . what did he enjoy most ?
making people laugh .
how did he die ?
tortured to death .
last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death : " do n't worry . the united nations are coming . "
and we never did .
and that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in rwanda , and we never did .
so we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid , but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world .
so my argument today is basically this .
we have the means by which we could create a truly global society .
the institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors .
that global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work , but we should not lose the chance in this generation , in this decade in particular , with president obama in america , with other people working with us around the world , to create global institutions for the environment , and for finance , and for security and for development , that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples , our desire to bind the world together , and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist .
it is said that in ancient rome that when cicero spoke to his audiences , people used to turn to each other and say about cicero , " great speech . "
but it is said that in ancient greece when demosthenes spoke to his audiences , people turned to each other and did n't say " great speech . "
they said , " let 's march . "
we should be marching towards a global society .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we see with the eyes , but we see with the brain as well .
and seeing with the brain is often called imagination .
and we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination , our inscapes . we 've lived with them all our lives .
but there are also hallucinations as well , and hallucinations are completely different .
they do n't seem to be of our creation .
they do n't seem to be under our control .
they seem to come from the outside , and to mimic perception .
so i am going to be talking about hallucinations , and a particular sort of visual hallucination which i see among my patients .
a few months ago , i got a phone call from a nursing home where i work .
they told me that one of their residents , an old lady in her 90s , was seeing things , and they wondered if she 'd gone bonkers or , because she was an old lady , whether she 'd had a stroke , or whether she had alzheimer 's .
and so they asked me if i would come and see rosalie , the old lady .
i went in to see her .
it was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence , but she 'd been very startled and very bewildered , because she 'd been seeing things .
and she told me - the nurses had n't mentioned this - that she was blind , that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years .
but now , for the last few days , she 'd been seeing things .
so i said , " what sort of things ? "
and she said , " people in eastern dress , in drapes , walking up and down stairs .
a man who turns towards me and smiles .
but he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth .
animals too .
i see a white building . it 's snowing , a soft snow .
i see this horse with a harness , dragging the snow away .
then , one night , the scene changes .
i see cats and dogs walking towards me .
they come to a certain point and then stop .
then it changes again .
i see a lot of children . they are walking up and down stairs .
they wear bright colors , rose and blue , like eastern dress . "
sometimes , she said , before the people come on , she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor , which seem to go up to the ceiling .
i said , " is this like a dream ? "
and she said , " no , it 's not like a dream . it 's like a movie . "
she said , " it 's got color . it 's got motion .
but it 's completely silent , like a silent movie . "
and she said that it 's a rather boring movie .
she said , " all these people with eastern dress , walking up and down , very repetitive , very limited . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she has a sense of humor .
she knew it was a hallucination .
but she was frightened . she 'd lived 95 years and she 'd never had a hallucination before .
she said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing , that they seemed to come on by themselves , or disappear .
she had no control over them .
she said she did n't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations .
and none of the people or the animals , well , they all seemed oblivious of her .
and she did n't know what was going on .
she wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind .
well , i examined her carefully .
she was a bright old lady , perfectly sane . she had no medical problems .
she was n't on any medications which could produce hallucinations .
but she was blind .
and i then said to her , " i think i know what you have . "
i said , " there is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness .
this was originally described , " i said , " right back in the 18th century , by a man called charles bonnet .
and you have charles bonnet syndrome .
there is nothing wrong with your brain . there is nothing wrong with your mind .
you have charles bonnet syndrome . "
and she was very relieved at this , that there was nothing seriously the matter , and also rather curious .
she said , " who is this charles bonnet ? "
she said , " did he have them himself ? "
and she said , " tell all the nurses that i have charles bonnet syndrome . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm not crazy . i 'm not demented . i have charles bonnet syndrome . "
well , so i did tell the nurses .
now this , for me , is a common situation .
i work in old-age homes , largely .
i see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired .
about 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations .
and about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations .
you do n't have to be completely blind , only sufficiently impaired .
now with the original description in the 18th century , charles bonnet did not have them .
his grandfather had these hallucinations .
his grandfather was a magistrate , an elderly man .
he 'd had cataract surgery .
his vision was pretty poor .
and in 1759 , he described to his grandson various things he was seeing .
the first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair .
it was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles .
and he knew it was a hallucination .
you do n't have handkerchiefs in midair .
and then he saw a big wheel in midair .
but sometimes he was n't sure whether he was hallucinating or not , because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions .
so on one occasion , when his granddaughters were visiting them , he said , " and who are these handsome young men with you ? "
and they said , " alas , grandpapa , there are no handsome young men . "
and then the handsome young men disappeared .
it 's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash .
they do n't usually fade in and out .
they are rather sudden , and they change suddenly .
charles lullin , the grandfather , saw hundreds of different figures , different landscapes of all sorts .
on one occasion , he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe , and realized it was himself .
that was the only figure he recognized .
on one occasion when he was walking in the streets of paris , he saw - this was real - a scaffolding .
but when he got back home , he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high , on his study table .
this repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia .
with him and with rosalie , what seems to be going on - and rosalie said , " what 's going on ? " - and i said that as you lose vision , as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input , they become hyperactive and excitable , and they start to fire spontaneously .
and you start to see things .
the things you see can be very complicated indeed .
with another patient of mine , who , also had some vision , the vision she had could be disturbing .
on one occasion , she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant .
and he turned around . and then he divided into six figures in striped shirts , who started walking towards her .
and then the six figures came together again , like a concertina .
once , when she was driving , or rather , her husband was driving , the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads .
she had very mobile hallucinations as well .
a lot of them had to do with a car .
sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car .
he was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned .
and then when they came to a stop , the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff , 100 foot in the air , and then disappear .
another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination .
this was a woman who did n't have trouble with her eyes , but the visual parts of her brain , a little tumor in the occipital cortex .
and , above all , she would see cartoons .
these cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field , like a screen .
and especially she saw cartoons of kermit the frog .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i do n't watch sesame street , but she made a point of saying , " why kermit ? " she said , " kermit the frog means nothing to me .
you know , i was wondering about freudian determinants .
why kermit ?
kermit the frog means nothing to me . "
she did n't mind the cartoons too much .
but what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with rosalie , the faces were often deformed , with very large teeth or very large eyes .
and these frightened her .
well , what is going on with these people ?
as a physician , i have to try and define what 's going on , and to reassure people , especially to reassure them that they 're not going insane .
something like 10 percent , as i said , of visually impaired people get these .
but no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them , because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something .
and if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed .
in particular , the notion is that if you see things or hear things , you 're going mad , but the psychotic hallucinations are quite different .
psychotic hallucinations , whether they are visual or vocal , they address you . they accuse you .
they seduce you . they humiliate you .
they jeer at you .
you interact with them .
there is none of this quality of being addressed with these charles bonnet hallucinations .
there is a film . you 're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you , or that 's how people think about it .
there is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy , and sometimes , if one has this , one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past .
you 're at a particular road junction .
you smell chestnuts roasting .
you hear the traffic . all the senses are involved .
and you 're waiting for your girl .
and it 's that tuesday evening back in 1982 .
and the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations , full of feeling , full of familiarity , located in space and time , coherent , dramatic .
the charles bonnet ones are quite different .
so in the charles bonnet hallucinations , you have all sorts of levels , from the geometrical hallucinations - the pink and blue squares the woman had - up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces .
faces , and sometimes deformed faces , are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations .
and one of the second commonest is cartoons .
so , what is going on ?
fascinatingly , in the last few years , it 's been possible to do functional brain imagery , to do fmri on people as they are hallucinating .
and in fact , to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating .
when people have these simple geometrical hallucinations , the primary visual cortex is activated .
this is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns .
you do n't form images with your primary visual cortex .
when images are formed , a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe .
and in particular , one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus .
and it 's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus , they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces .
but if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus , they may hallucinate faces , and this is exactly what you find in some of these people .
there is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented , and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations .
there is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons .
it 's activated when one recognizes cartoons , when one draws cartoons , and when one hallucinates them .
it 's very interesting that that should be specific .
there are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes .
around 1970 , it was found that there were not only parts of the brain , but particular cells .
" face cells " were discovered around 1970 .
and now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells , which can be very , very specific .
so you may not only have " car " cells , you may have " aston martin " cells .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i saw an aston martin this morning .
i had to bring it in .
and now it 's in there somewhere .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , at this level , in what 's called the inferotemporal cortex , there are only visual images , or figments or fragments .
it 's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion .
and in the charles bonnet syndrome , you do n't go to those higher levels .
you 're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images , or figments , or fragmentary figments , all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells .
normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception , or imagination , and one is not conscious of them .
it is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted .
and instead of getting normal perception , you 're getting an anarchic , convulsive stimulation , or release , of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex .
so , suddenly you see a face . suddenly you see a car .
suddenly this , and suddenly that .
the mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this , but not terribly successfully .
when these were first described , it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams .
but in fact people say , " i do n't recognize the people . i ca n't form any associations . "
" kermit means nothing to me . "
you do n't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams .
well , i 've more or less said what i wanted .
i think i just want to recapitulate and say this is common .
think of the number of blind people .
there must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations , but are too scared to mention them .
so this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice , for patients , for doctors , for the public .
finally , i think they are infinitely interesting and valuable , for giving one some insight as to how the brain works .
charles bonnet said , 250 years ago - he wondered how , thinking these hallucinations , how , as he put it , the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain .
now , 250 years later , i think we 're beginning to glimpse how this is done .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that was superb . thank you so much .
you speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients .
have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about ?
oliver sacks : i was afraid you 'd ask that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , yeah , a lot of them .
and actually i 'm a little visually impaired myself .
i 'm blind in one eye , and not terribly good in the other .
and i see the geometrical hallucinations .
but they stop there .
ca : and they do n't disturb you ?
because you understand what 's doing it , it does n't make you worried ?
os : well they do n't disturb me any more than my tinnitus , which i ignore .
they occasionally interest me , and i have many pictures of them in my notebooks .
i 've gone and had an fmri myself , to see how my visual cortex is taking over .
and when i see all these hexagons and complex things , which i also have , in visual migraine , i wonder whether everyone sees things like this , and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit .
ca : that was an utterly , utterly fascinating talk .
thank you so much for sharing .
os : thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey , actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis .
as a child , i had two passions .
one was a passion for rodents .
i had all kinds of rats , mice , hamsters , gerbils , squirrels .
you name it , i bred it , and i sold them to pet shops .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i also had a passion for africa .
growing up in a multicultural environment , we had african students in the house , and i learned about their stories , so different backgrounds , dependency on imported know-how , goods , services , exuberant cultural diversity .
africa was truly fascinating for me .
i became an industrial engineer , engineer in product development , and i focused on appropriate detection technologies , actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries .
i started working in the industry , but i was n't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear , extracting and manufacturing mode .
i quit my job to focus on the real world problem : landmines .
we 're talking ' 95 now .
princess diana is announcing on tv that landmines form a structural barrier to any development , which is really true .
as long as these devices are there , or there is suspicion of landmines , you ca n't really enter into the land .
actually , there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they 're needed to produce , which is mainly in the developing world .
we chose rats .
why would you choose rats ?
because , are n't they vermin ?
well , actually rats are , in contrary to what most people think about them , rats are highly sociable creatures .
and actually , our product - what you see here .
there 's a target somewhere here .
you see an operator , a trained african with his rats in front who actually are left and right .
there , the animal finds a mine .
it scratches on the soil .
and the animal comes back for a food reward .
very , very simple .
very sustainable in this environment .
here , the animal gets its food reward .
and that 's how it works .
very , very simple .
now why would you use rats ?
rats have been used since the ' 50s last century , in all kinds of experiments .
rats have more genetic material allocated to olfaction than any other mammal species .
they 're extremely sensitive to smell .
moreover , they have the mechanisms to map all these smells and to communicate about it .
now how do we communicate with rats ?
well do n't talk rat , but we have a clicker , a standard method for animal training , which you see there .
a clicker , which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors .
first of all , we associate the click sound with a food reward , which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe .
once the animal knows click , food , click , food , click , food - so click is food - we bring it in a cage with a hole , and actually the animal learns to stick the nose in the hole under which a target scent is placed , and to do that for five seconds - five seconds , which is long for a rat .
once the animal knows this , we make the task a bit more difficult .
it learns how to find the target smell in a cage with several holes , up to 10 holes .
then the animal learns to walk on a leash in the open and find targets .
in the next step , animals learn to find real mines in real minefields .
they are tested and accredited according to international mine action standards , just like dogs have to pass a test .
this consists of 400 square meters .
there 's a number of mines placed blindly , and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets .
if the animal does that , it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field - just like dogs , by the way .
maybe one slight difference : we can train rats at a fifth of the price of training the mining dog .
this is our team in mozambique : one tanzanian trainer , who transfers the skills to these three mozambican fellows .
and you should see the pride in the eyes of these people .
they have a skill , which makes them much less dependent on foreign aid .
moreover , this small team together with , of course , you need the heavy vehicles and the manual de-miners to follow-up .
but with this small investment in a rat capacity , we have demonstrated in mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal - two dollars per square meter , we do it at $ 1.18 , and we can still bring that price down .
question of scale .
if you can bring in more rats , we can actually make the output even bigger .
we have a demonstration site in mozambique .
eleven african governments have seen that they can become less dependent by using this technology .
they have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the great lakes region , and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines .
but let me bring you to a very different problem .
and there 's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine , but worldwide last year , almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection .
especially in africa where t.b. and hiv are strongly linked , there is a huge common problem .
microscopy , the standard who procedure , reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability .
in tanzania - the numbers do n't lie - 45 percent of people - t.b. patients - get diagnosed with t.b. before they die .
it means that , if you have t.b. , you have more chance that you wo n't be detected , but will just die from t.b. secondary infections and so on .
and if , however , you are detected very early , diagnosed early , treatment can start , and even in hiv-positives , it makes sense .
you can actually cure t.b. , even in hiv-positives .
so in our common language , dutch , the name for t.b.
is " tering , " which , etymologically , refers to the smell of tar .
already the old chinese and the greek , hippocrates , have actually published , documented , that t.b. can be diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding from patients .
so what we did is we collected some samples - just as a way of testing - from hospitals , trained rats on them and see if this works , and wonder , well , we can reach 89 percent sensitivity , 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row .
this is how it works , and really , this is a generic technology .
we 're talking now explosives , tuberculosis , but can you imagine , you can actually put anything under there .
so how does it work ?
you have a cassette with 10 samples .
you put these 10 samples at once in the cage .
an animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent , so it goes extremely fast .
here it 's already at the third sample .
this is a positive sample .
it gets a click sound and comes for the food reward .
and by doing so , very fast , we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive , which are negative .
just as an indication , whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day , a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only .
a cage like this - -lrb- applause -rrb- a cage like this - provided that you have rats , and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats - a cage like this , operating throughout the day , can process 1,680 samples .
can you imagine the potential offspring applications - environmental detection of pollutants in soils , customs applications , detection of illicit goods in containers and so on .
but let 's stick first to tuberculosis .
i just want to briefly highlight , the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in dar es salaam on a population of 500,000 people , where 15,000 reported to get a test done .
microscopy for 1,800 patients .
and by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back , we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent .
throughout last year , we 've been - depending on which intervals you take - we 've been consistently increasing case detection rates in five hospitals in dar es salaam between 30 and 40 percent .
so this is really considerable .
knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people , healthy people , per year , you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives .
at least our hero rats have saved lots of lives .
the way forward for us is now to standardize this technology .
like , for instance , we have a small laser in the sniffer hole where the animal has to stick for five seconds .
so , to standardize this .
also , to standardize the pellets , the food rewards , and to semi-automate this in order to replicate this on a much larger scale and affect the lives of many more people .
to conclude , there are also other applications at the horizon .
here is a first prototype of our camera rat , which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims this is in a prototype stage .
we do n't have a working system here yet .
to conclude , i would actually like to say , you may think this is about rats , these projects , but in the end it is about people .
it is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult , expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks , and doing that with a local resource , plenty available .
so something completely different is to keep on challenging your perception about the resources surrounding you , whether they are environmental , technological , animal , or human .
and to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable world .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the value of nothing : out of nothing comes something .
that was an essay i wrote when i was 11 years old and i got a b + . -lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm going to talk about : nothing out of something , and how we create .
and i 'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within , and to follow the ted commandments : that is , actually , something that creates a near-death experience , but near-death is good for creativity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
so , i also want to explain , because dave eggers said he was going to heckle me if i said anything that was a lie , or not true to universal creativity .
and i 've done it this way for half the audience , who is scientific .
when i say we , i do n't mean you , necessarily ; i mean me , and my right brain , my left brain and the one that 's in between that is the censor and tells me what i 'm saying is wrong .
and i 'm going do that also by looking at what i think is part of my creative process , which includes a number of things that happened , actually - the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which i 'm creating something new .
and that includes nature , and nurture , and what i refer to as nightmares .
now in the nature area , we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something , perhaps in our brains , some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect .
and some people would say that we 're born with it in some other means .
and others , like my mother , would say that i get my material from past lives .
some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk - van gogh syndrome - that you have a little bit of , you know , psychosis , or depression .
i do have to say , somebody - i read recently that van gogh was n't really necessarily psychotic , that he might have had temporal lobe seizures , and that might have caused his spurt of creativity , and i do n't - i suppose it does something in some part of your brain .
and i will mention that i actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago , but it was during the time i was writing my last book , and some people say that book is quite different .
i think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis : you know , who am i , why am i this particular person , why am i not black like everybody else ?
and sometimes you 're equipped with skills , but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity .
i used to draw . i thought i would be an artist .
and i had a miniature poodle .
and it was n't bad , but it was n't really creative .
because all i could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way .
and i have a sense that i probably copied this from a book .
and then , i also was n't really shining in a certain area that i wanted to be , and you know , you look at those scores , and it was n't bad , but it was not certainly predictive that i would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words .
also , one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma .
and i had the usual kind that i think a lot of people had , and that is that , you know , i had expectations placed on me .
that figure right there , by the way , figure right there was a toy given to me when i was but nine years old , and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age .
i have some ones that were long lasting : from the age of five to 15 , this was supposed to be my side occupation , and it led to a sense of failure .
but actually , there was something quite real in my life that happened when i was about 14 .
and it was discovered that my brother , in 1967 , and then my father , six months later , had brain tumors .
and my mother believed that something had gone wrong , and she was gonna find out what it was , and she was gonna fix it .
my father was a baptist minister , and he believed in miracles , and that god 's will would take care of that .
but , of course , they ended up dying , six months apart .
and after that , my mother believed that it was fate , or curses - she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened .
everything except randomness . she did not believe in randomness .
there was a reason for everything .
and one of the reasons , she thought , was that her mother , who had died when she was very young , was angry at her .
and so , i had this notion of death all around me , because my mother also believed that i would be next , and she would be next .
and when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon , you begin to think very much about everything .
you become very creative , in a survival sense .
and this , then , led to my big questions .
and they 're the same ones that i have today .
and they are : why do things happen , and how do things happen ?
and the one my mother asked : how do i make things happen ?
it 's a wonderful way to look at these questions , when you write a story .
because , after all , in that framework , between page one and 300 , you have to answer this question of why things happen , how things happen , in what order they happen . what are the influences ?
how do i , as the narrator , as the writer , also influence that ?
and it 's also one that , i think , many of our scientists have been asking .
it 's a kind of cosmology , and i have to develop a cosmology of my own universe , as the creator of that universe .
and you see , there 's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen , trying to figure it out - years and years , oftentimes .
so , when i look at creativity , i also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress , my looking at associations in practically anything in life .
and i got a lot of them during what 's been going on throughout this conference , almost everything that 's been going on .
and so i 'm going to use , as the metaphor , this association : quantum mechanics , which i really do n't understand , but i 'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor .
so , in quantum mechanics , of course , you have dark energy and dark matter .
and it 's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen .
there 's a lot of unknown , and you often do n't know what it is except by its absence .
but when you make those associations , you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story , and what you 're finding is what matters . the meaning .
and that 's what i look for in my work , a personal meaning .
there is also the uncertainty principle , which is part of quantum mechanics , as i understand it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this happens constantly in the writing .
and there 's the terrible and dreaded observer effect , in which you 're looking for something , and you know , things are happening simultaneously , and you 're looking at it in a different way , and you 're trying to really look for the about-ness , or what is this story about . and if you try too hard , then you will only write the about .
you wo n't discover anything .
and what you were supposed to find , what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way , is no longer there .
now , i do n't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe , like many of our scientists have .
and so , i am going to just throw in string theory here , and just say that creative people are multidimensional , and there are 11 levels , i think , of anxiety .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they all operate at the same time .
there is also a big question of ambiguity .
and i would link that to something called the cosmological constant .
and you do n't know what is operating , but something is operating there .
and ambiguity , to me , is very uncomfortable in my life , and i have it . moral ambiguity .
it is constantly there . and , just as an example , this is one that recently came to me .
it was something i read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in iraq . and she said , " save a man from drowning , you are responsible to him for life . "
a very famous chinese saying , she said .
and that means because we went into iraq , we should stay there until things were solved . you know , maybe even 100 years .
so , there was another one that i came across , and it 's " saving fish from drowning . "
and it 's what buddhist fishermen say , because they 're not supposed to kill anything .
and they also have to make a living , and people need to be fed .
so their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning , and unfortunately , in the process the fish die .
now , what 's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors - actually , one of them is my mother 's interpretation , and it is a famous chinese saying , because she said it to me : " save a man from drowning , you are responsible to him for life . "
and it was a warning - do n't get involved in other people 's business , or you 're going to get stuck .
ok . i think if somebody really was drowning , she 'd save them .
but , both of these sayings - saving a fish from drowning , or saving a man from drowning - to me they had to do with intentions .
and all of us in life , when we see a situation , we have a response .
and then we have intentions .
there 's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do , and then we do something .
and the results of that may not match what our intentions had been .
maybe things go wrong . and so , after that , what are our responsibilities ?
what are we supposed to do ?
do we stay in for life , or do we do something else and justify and say , well , my intentions were good , and therefore i can not be held responsible for all of it ?
that is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me , and led me to write a book called " saving fish from drowning . "
i saw examples of that . once i identified this question , it was all over the place .
i got these hints everywhere .
and then , in a way , i knew that they had always been there .
and then writing , that 's what happens . i get these hints , these clues , and i realize that they 've been obvious , and yet they have not been .
and what i need , in effect , is a focus .
and when i have the question , it is a focus .
and all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question , and what happens is those particular things become relevant .
and it seems like it 's happening all the time .
you think there 's a sort of coincidence going on , a serendipity , in which you 're getting all this help from the universe .
and it may also be explained that now you have a focus .
and you are noticing it more often .
but you apply this .
you begin to look at things having to do with your tensions .
your brother , who 's fallen in trouble , do you take care of him ?
why or why not ?
it may be something that is perhaps more serious - as i said , human rights in burma .
i was thinking that i should n't go because somebody said , if i did , it would show that i approved of the military regime there .
and then , after a while , i had to ask myself , " why do we take on knowledge , why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us ? "
and it was the same thing that i felt when i was growing up , and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father , who was a baptist minister .
so i decided that i would go to burma for my own intentions , and still did n't know that if i went there , what the result of that would be , if i wrote a book - and i just would have to face that later , when the time came .
we are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of .
we come to this point and say , what do i as an individual do ?
not all of us can go to africa , or work at hospitals , so what do we do , if we have this moral response , this feeling ?
also , i think one of the biggest things we are all looking at , and we talked about today , is genocide .
this leads to this question .
when i look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable , and i consider what my intentions should be , i realize it goes back to this identity question that i had when i was a child - and why am i here , and what is the meaning of my life , and what is my place in the universe ?
it seems so obvious , and yet it is not .
we all hate moral ambiguity in some sense , and yet it is also absolutely necessary .
in writing a story , it is the place where i begin .
sometimes i get help from the universe , it seems .
my mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book , because it seemed i knew things i was not supposed to know .
instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally , from an overdose of opium , while having too much of a good time , i actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself , and that actually was the way it happened .
and my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother .
there are also things , quite uncanny , which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book .
in this case , i was writing a story that included some kind of detail , period of history , a certain location .
and i needed to find something historically that would match that .
and i took down this book , and i - first page that i flipped it to was exactly the setting , and the time period , and the kind of character i needed - was the taiping rebellion , happening in the area near guilin , outside of that , and a character who thought he was the son of god .
you wonder , are these things random chance ?
well , what is random ? what is chance ? what is luck ?
what are things that you get from the universe that you ca n't really explain ?
and that goes into the story , too .
these are the things i constantly think about from day to day .
especially when good things happen , and , in particular , when bad things happen .
but i do think there 's a kind of serendipity , and i do want to know what those elements are , so i can thank them , and also try to find them in my life .
because , again , i think that when i am aware of them , more of them happen .
another chance encounter is when i went to a place - i just was with some friends , and we drove randomly to a different place , and we ended up in this non-tourist location , a beautiful village , pristine .
and we walked three valleys beyond , and the third valley , there was something quite mysterious and ominous , a discomfort i felt . and then i knew that had to be -lsb- the -rsb- setting of my book .
and in writing one of the scenes , it happened in that third valley .
for some reason i wrote about cairns - stacks of rocks - that a man was building .
and i did n't know exactly why i had it , but it was so vivid .
i got stuck , and a friend , when she asked if i would go for a walk with her dogs , that i said , sure . and about 45 minutes later , walking along the beach , i came across this .
and it was a man , a chinese man , and he was stacking these things , not with glue , not with anything .
and i asked him , " how is it possible to do this ? "
and he said , " well , i guess with everything in life , there 's a place of balance . "
and this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point .
i had so many examples - i have so many instances like this , when i 'm writing a story , and i can not explain it .
is it because i had the filter that i have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things ?
or is it a kind of serendipity that we can not explain , like the cosmological constant ?
a big thing that i also think about is accidents .
and as i said , my mother did not believe in randomness .
what is the nature of accidents ?
and how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are , outside of a court of law ?
i was able to see that in a firsthand way , when i went to beautiful dong village , in guizhou , the poorest province of china .
and i saw this beautiful place . i knew i wanted to come back .
and i had a chance to do that , when national geographic asked me if i wanted to write anything about china .
and i said yes , about this village of singing people , singing minority .
and they agreed , and between the time i saw this place and the next time i went , there was a terrible accident . a man , an old man , fell asleep , and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm .
60 homes were destroyed , and 40 were damaged .
responsibility was assigned to the family .
the man 's sons were banished to live three kilometers away , in a cowshed .
and , of course , as westerners , we say , " well , it was an accident . that 's not fair .
it 's the son , not the father . "
when i go on a story , i have to let go of those kinds of beliefs .
it takes a while , but i have to let go of them and just go there , and be there .
and so i was there on three occasions , different seasons .
and i began to sense something different about the history , and what had happened before , and the nature of life in a very poor village , and what you find as your joys , and your rituals , your traditions , your links with other families . and i saw how this had a kind of justice , in its responsibility .
i was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using , a ceremony they had n't used in about 29 years . and it was to send some men - a feng shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses .
now you , as westerners , and i , as westerners , would say well , that 's superstition . but after being there for a while , and seeing the amazing things that happened , you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world , determining how things happen .
so i remained with them , and the more i wrote that story , the more i got into those beliefs , and i think that 's important for me - to take on the beliefs , because that is where the story is real , and that is where i 'm gonna find the answers to how i feel about certain questions that i have in life .
years go by , of course , and the writing , it does n't happen instantly , as i 'm trying to convey it to you here at ted .
the book comes and it goes . when it arrives , it is no longer my book .
it is in the hands of readers , and they interpret it differently .
but i go back to this question of , how do i create something out of nothing ?
and how do i create my own life ?
and i think it is by questioning , and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths .
i believe in specifics , the specifics of story , and the past , the specifics of that past , and what is happening in the story at that point .
i also believe that in thinking about things - my thinking about luck , and fate , and coincidences and accidents , god 's will , and the synchrony of mysterious forces - i will come to some notion of what that is , how we create .
i have to think of my role . where i am in the universe , and did somebody intend for me to be that way , or is it just something i came up with ?
and i also can find that by imagining fully , and becoming what is imagined - and yet is in that real world , the fictional world .
and that is how i find particles of truth , not the absolute truth , or the whole truth .
and they have to be in all possibilities , including those i never considered before .
so , there are never complete answers .
or rather , if there is an answer , it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything , and that is good , because then i will discover something new .
and if there is a partial answer , a more complete answer from me , it is to simply imagine .
and to imagine is to put myself in that story , until there was only - there is a transparency between me and the story that i am creating .
and that 's how i 've discovered that if i feel what is in the story - in one story - then i come the closest , i think , to knowing what compassion is , to feeling that compassion .
because for everything , in that question of how things happen , it has to do with the feeling .
i have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that .
we 've come to the end of the talk , and i will reveal what is in the bag , and it is the muse , and it is the things that transform in our lives , that are wonderful and stay with us .
there she is .
thank you very much !
-lrb- applause -rrb- thomas dolby : for pure pleasure please welcome the lovely , the delectable , and the bilingual rachelle garniez .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- bells -rrb- -lrb- trumpet -rrb- rachelle garniez : ♫ quand il me prend dans ses bras ♫ ♫ il me parle tout bas , ♫ ♫ je vois la vie en rose . ♫ ♫ il me dit des mots d 'amour , ♫ ♫ des mots de tous les jours , ♫ ♫ et ca me fait quelque chose . ♫ ♫ il est entre dans mon coeur ♫ ♫ une part de bonheur ♫ ♫ dont je connais la cause . ♫ ♫ c 'est lui pour moi . moi pour lui ♫ ♫ dans la vie , ♫ ♫ il me l 'a dit , l 'a jure -lsb- pour -rsb- la vie . ♫ ♫ et des que je l 'apercois ♫
♫ alors je sens en moi ♫ ♫ mon coeur qui bat ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- sanskrit -rsb- this is an ode to the mother goddess , that most of us in india learn when we are children .
i learned it when i was four at my mother 's knee .
that year she introduced me to dance , and thus began my tryst with classical dance .
since then - it 's been four decades now - i 've trained with the best in the field , performed across the globe , taught young and old alike , created , collaborated , choreographed , and wove a rich tapestry of artistry , achievement and awards .
the crowning glory was in 2007 , when i received this country 's fourth highest civilian award , the padma shri , for my contribution to art .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but nothing , nothing prepared me for what i was to hear on the first of july 2008 .
i heard the word " carcinoma . "
yes , breast cancer .
as i sat dumbstruck in my doctor 's office , i heard other words : " cancer , " " stage , " " grade . "
until then , cancer was the zodiac sign of my friend , stage was what i performed on , and grades were what i got in school .
that day , i realized i had an unwelcome , uninvited , new life partner .
as a dancer , i know the nine rasas or the navarasas : anger , valor , disgust , humor and fear .
i thought i knew what fear was .
that day , i learned what fear was .
overcome with the enormity of it all and the complete feeling of loss of control , i shed copious tears and asked my dear husband , jayant .
i said , " is this it ? is this the end of the road ?
is this the end of my dance ? "
and he , the positive soul that he is , said , " no , this is just a hiatus , a hiatus during the treatment , and you 'll get back to doing what you do best . "
i realized then that i , who thought i had complete control of my life , had control of only three things : my thought , my mind - the images that these thoughts created - and the action that derived from it .
so here i was wallowing in a vortex of emotions and depression and what have you , with the enormity of the situation , wanting to go to a place of healing , health and happiness .
i wanted to go from where i was to where i wanted to be , for which i needed something .
i needed something that would pull me out of all this .
so i dried my tears , and i declared to the world at large ...
i said , " cancer 's only one page in my life , and i will not allow this page to impact the rest of my life . "
i also declared to the world at large that i would ride it out , and i would not allow cancer to ride me .
but to go from where i was to where i wanted to be , i needed something .
i needed an anchor , an image , a peg to peg this process on , so that i could go from there .
and i found that in my dance , my dance , my strength , my energy , my passion , my very life breath .
but it was n't easy .
believe me , it definitely was n't easy .
how do you keep cheer when you go from beautiful to bald in three days ?
how do you not despair when , with the body ravaged by chemotherapy , climbing a mere flight of stairs was sheer torture , that to someone like me who could dance for three hours ?
how do you not get overwhelmed by the despair and the misery of it all ?
all i wanted to do was curl up and weep .
but i kept telling myself fear and tears are options i did not have .
so i would drag myself into my dance studio - body , mind and spirit - every day into my dance studio , and learn everything i learned when i was four , all over again , reworked , relearned , regrouped .
it was excruciatingly painful , but i did it .
difficult .
i focused on my mudras , on the imagery of my dance , on the poetry and the metaphor and the philosophy of the dance itself .
and slowly , i moved out of that miserable state of mind .
but i needed something else .
i needed something to go that extra mile , and i found it in that metaphor which i had learned from my mother when i was four .
the metaphor of mahishasura mardhini , of durga .
durga , the mother goddess , the fearless one , created by the pantheon of hindu gods .
durga , resplendent , bedecked , beautiful , her 18 arms ready for warfare , as she rode astride her lion into the battlefield to destroy mahishasur .
durga , the epitome of creative feminine energy , or shakti .
durga , the fearless one .
i made that image of durga and her every attribute , her every nuance , my very own .
powered by the symbology of a myth and the passion of my training , i brought laser-sharp focus into my dance , laser-sharp focus to such an extent that i danced a few weeks after surgery .
i danced through chemo and radiation cycles , much to the dismay of my oncologist .
i danced between chemo and radiation cycles and badgered him to fit it to my performing dance schedule .
what i had done is i had tuned out of cancer and tuned into my dance .
yes , cancer has just been one page in my life .
my story is a story of overcoming setbacks , obstacles and challenges that life throws at you .
my story is the power of thought .
my story is the power of choice .
it 's the power of focus .
it 's the power of bringing ourselves to the attention of something that so animates you , so moves you , that something even like cancer becomes insignificant .
my story is the power of a metaphor .
it 's the power of an image .
mine was that of durga , durga the fearless one .
she was also called simhanandini , the one who rode the lion .
as i ride out , as i ride my own inner strength , my own inner resilience , armed as i am with what medication can provide and continue treatment , as i ride out into the battlefield of cancer , asking my rogue cells to behave , i want to be known not as a cancer survivor , but as a cancer conqueror .
i present to you an excerpt of that work " simhanandini . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- jambo , bonjour , zdravstvujtye , dayo : these are a few of the languages that i 've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks , as i 've been to 17 countries i think i 'm up to , on this crazy tour i 've been doing , checking out various aspects of the project that we 're doing .
and i 'm going to tell you a little bit about later on .
and visiting some pretty incredible places , places like mongolia , cambodia , new guinea , south africa , tanzania twice - i was here a month ago .
and the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing , for lots of reasons .
you see some incredible stuff .
and you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe .
and the thing that you really take away from that , the kind of surface thing that you take away from it , is not that we 're all one , although i 'm going to tell you about that , but rather how different we are .
there is so much diversity around the globe .
6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people , all different colors , shapes , sizes .
you walk down the street in any big city , you travel like that , and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species .
how do we explain that diversity ?
well , that 's what i 'm going to talk about today , is how we 're using the tools of genetics , population genetics in particular , to tell us how we generated this diversity , and how long it took .
now , the problem of human diversity , like all big scientific questions - how do you explain something like that - can be broken down into sub-questions .
and you can ferret away at those little sub-questions .
first one is really a question of origins .
do we all share a common origin , in fact ?
and given that we do - and that 's the assumption everybody , i think , in this room would make - when was that ?
when did we originate as a species ?
how long have we been divergent from each other ?
and the second question is related , but slightly different .
if we do spring from a common source , how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe , and in the process generate all of this diversity , the different ways of life , the different appearances , the different languages around the world ?
well , the question of origins , as with so many other questions in biology , seems to have been answered by darwin over a century ago .
in " the descent of man , " he wrote , " in each great region of the world , the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region .
it 's therefore probable that africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee , and as these two species are now man 's nearest allies , it 's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the african continent than elsewhere . "
so we 're done , we can go home - finished the origin question .
well , not quite . because darwin was talking about our distant ancestry , our common ancestry with apes .
and it is quite clear that apes originated on the african continent .
around 23 million years ago , they appear in the fossil record .
africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time , due to the vagaries of plate tectonics , floating around the indian ocean .
bumped into eurasia around 16 million years ago , and then we had the first african exodus , as we call it .
the apes that left at that time ended up in southeast asia , became the gibbons and the orangutans .
and the ones that stayed on in africa evolved into the gorillas , the chimpanzees and us .
so , yes , if you 're talking about our common ancestry with apes , it 's very clear , by looking at the fossil record , we started off here .
but that 's not really the question i 'm asking .
i 'm asking about our human ancestry , things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room .
if they were peering over your shoulder , you would n't leap back , like that . what about our human ancestry ?
because if we go far enough back , we share a common ancestry with every living thing on earth .
dna ties us all together , so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms , if you go far enough back - over a billion years .
what we 're asking about though is human ancestry .
how do we study that ?
well , historically , it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology .
digging things up out of the ground , and largely on the basis of morphology - the way things are shaped , often skull shape - saying , " this looks a little bit more like us than that , so this must be my ancestor .
this must be who i 'm directly descended from . "
the field of paleoanthropology , i 'll argue , gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry , but it does n't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists .
what do i mean by that ?
you 're looking at a great example here .
these are three extinct species of hominids , potential human ancestors .
all dug up just west of here in olduvai gorge , by the leakey family .
and they 're all dating to roughly the same time .
from left to right , we 've got homo erectus , homo habilis , and australopithecus - now called paranthropus boisei , the robust australopithecine . three extinct species , same place , same time .
that means that not all three could be my direct ancestor .
which one of these guys am i actually related to ?
possibilities about our ancestry , but not the probabilities that we 're really looking for .
well , a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently - again , largely skull shape .
the first person to do this systematically was linnaeus , carl von linne , a swedish botanist , who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet .
you think you 've got a tough job ?
and he did a pretty good job .
he categorized about 12,000 species in " systema naturae . "
he actually coined the term homo sapiens - it means wise man in latin .
but looking around the world at the diversity of humans , he said , " well , you know , we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories . "
and he talked about africans and americans and asians and europeans , and a blatantly racist category he termed " monstrosus , " which basically included all the people he did n't like , including imaginary folk like elves .
it 's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-darwinian era .
except , if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago , in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity .
human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30 , 40 years ago - carlton coon is the best example - had been diverging from each other - this was in the post-darwinian era - for over a million years , since the time of homo erectus .
but based on what data ?
very little . very little . morphology and a lot of guesswork .
well , what i 'm going to talk about today , what i 'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem .
instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry , digging things up out of the ground , possible ancestors , and saying it on the basis of morphology - which we still do n't completely understand , we do n't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation - what we need to do is turn the problem on its head .
because what we 're really asking is a genealogical problem , or a genealogical question .
what we 're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today .
and as any genealogist will tell you - anybody have a member of the family , or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree , trace back in time ?
you start in the present , with relationships you 're certain about .
you and your siblings , you have a parent in common .
you and your cousins share a grandparent in common .
you gradually trace further and further back into the past , adding these ever more distant relationships .
but eventually , no matter how good you are at digging up the church records , and all that stuff , you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall .
a point beyond which you do n't know anything else about your ancestors , and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance .
who were these people who came before ?
we have no written record . well , actually , we do .
written in our dna , in our genetic code - we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species . and that 's what we study .
now , a quick primer on dna .
i suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist .
it is a very long , linear molecule , a coded version of how to make another copy of you . it 's your blueprint .
it 's composed of four subunits : a , c , g and t , we call them .
and it 's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint .
how long is it ? well , it 's billions of these subunits in length .
a haploid genome - we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes - a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length .
and the whole thing , if you add it all together , is over six billion nucleotides long .
if you take all the dna out of one cell in your body , and stretch it end to end , it 's around two meters long .
if you take all the dna out of every cell in your body , and you stretch it end to end , it would reach from here to the moon and back , thousands of times . it 's a lot of information .
and so when you 're copying this dna molecule to pass it on , it 's a pretty tough job .
imagine the longest book you can think of , " war and peace . "
now multiply it by 100 .
and imagine copying that by hand .
and you 're working away until late at night , and you 're very , very careful , and you 're drinking coffee and you 're paying attention , but , occasionally , when you 're copying this by hand , you 're going to make a little typo , a spelling mistake - substitute an i for an e , or a c for a t.
same thing happens to our dna as it 's being passed on through the generations .
it does n't happen very often . we have a proofreading mechanism built in .
but when it does happen , and these changes get transmitted down through the generations , they become markers of descent .
if you share a marker with someone , it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past , the person who first had that change in their dna .
and it 's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation , the pattern of these markers in people all over the world , and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history , that we 've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today .
these are two pieces of dna that we use quite widely in our work .
mitochondrial dna , tracing a purely maternal line of descent .
you get your mtdna from your mother , and your mother 's mother , all the way back to the very first woman .
the y chromosome , the piece of dna that makes men men , traces a purely paternal line of descent .
everybody in this room , everybody in the world , falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees .
now , even though these are simplified versions of the real trees , they 're still kind of complicated , so let 's simplify them .
turn them on their sides , combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up .
what 's the take-home message ?
well , the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within africa , among africans .
that means that africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer .
and what that means is that we originated in africa . it 's written in our dna .
every piece of dna we look at has greater diversity within africa than outside of africa .
and at some point in the past , a sub-group of africans left the african continent to go out and populate the rest of the world .
now , how recently do we share this ancestry ?
was it millions of years ago , which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world ?
no , the dna tells a story that 's very clear .
within the last 200,000 years , we all share an ancestor , a single person - mitochondrial eve , you might have heard about her - in africa , an african woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today .
but what 's even more amazing is that if you look at the y-chromosome side , the male side of the story , the y-chromosome adam only lived around 60,000 years ago .
that 's only about 2,000 human generations , the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense .
that tells us we were all still living in africa at that time .
this was an african man who gave rise to all the y chromosome diversity around the world .
it 's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world .
such an amazing story .
we 're all effectively part of an extended african family .
now , that seems so recent . why did n't we start to leave earlier ?
why did n't homo erectus evolve into separate species , or sub-species rather , human races around the world ?
why was it that we seem to have come out of africa so recently ?
well , that 's a big question . these " why " questions , particularly in genetics and the study of history in general , are always the big ones , the ones that are tough to answer .
and so when all else fails , talk about the weather .
what was going on to the world 's weather around 60,000 years ago ?
well , we were going into the worst part of the last ice age .
the last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago .
it went up and down , and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago .
lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types , oxygen isotopes and so on .
we hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago , but basically , from 70,000 years on , things were getting really tough , getting very cold . the northern hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets .
new york city , chicago , seattle , all under a sheet of ice .
most of britain , all of scandinavia , covered by ice several kilometers thick .
now , africa is the most tropical continent on the planet - about 85 percent of it lies between cancer and capricorn - and there are n't a lot of glaciers here , except on the high mountains here in east africa .
so what was going on here ? we were n't covered in ice in africa .
rather , africa was drying out at that time .
this is a paleo-climatological map of what africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago , reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that i mentioned before .
the reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere .
if you think about antarctica , it 's technically a desert , it gets so little precipitation .
so the whole world was drying out .
the sea levels were dropping . and africa was turning to desert .
the sahara was much bigger then than it is now .
and the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets , compared to what we have today .
the evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time , roughly 70,000 years ago , crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals .
we nearly went extinct . we were hanging on by our fingernails .
and then something happened . a great illustration of it .
look at some stone tools .
the ones on the left are from africa , from around a million years ago .
the ones on the right were made by neanderthals , our distant cousins , not our direct ancestors , living in europe , and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago .
now , at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience , basically there 's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups .
the ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right .
we are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago .
the tool styles do n't change that much .
the evidence is that the human way of life did n't change that much during that period .
but then 50 , 60 , 70 thousand years ago , somewhere in that region , all hell breaks loose . art makes its appearance .
the stone tools become much more finely crafted .
the evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species , at particular times of the year .
the population size started to expand .
probably , according to what many linguists believe , fully modern language , syntactic language - subject , verb , object - that we use to convey complex ideas , like i 'm doing now , appeared around that time .
we became much more social . the social networks expanded .
this change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in africa , and they allowed us to start to expand around the world .
we 've been talking at this conference about african success stories .
well , you want the ultimate african success story ?
look in the mirror . you 're it . the reason you 're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in africa - probably somewhere in the region where we 're sitting right now , around 60 , 70 thousand years ago - allowing us not only to survive in africa , but to expand out of africa .
an early coastal migration along the south coast of asia , leaving africa around 60,000 years ago , reaching australia very rapidly , by 50,000 years ago .
a slightly later migration up into the middle east .
these would have been savannah hunters .
so those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours , you 'll get to see what a real savannah is like .
and it 's basically a meat locker .
people who would have specialized in killing the animals , hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs , moving up , following the grasslands into the middle east around 45,000 years ago , during one of the rare wet phases in the sahara .
migrating eastward , following the grasslands , because that 's what they were adapted to live on .
and when they reached central asia , they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway , a grassland super-highway .
the grasslands at that time - this was during the last ice age - stretched basically from germany all the way over to korea , and the entire continent was open to them .
entering europe around 35,000 years ago , and finally , a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable , siberia , inside the arctic circle , during the last ice age - temperature was at -70 , -80 , even -100 , perhaps - migrating into the americas , ultimately reaching that final frontier .
an amazing story , and it happened first in africa .
the changes that allowed us to do that , the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us , allowing us to create novel cultures , allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one i 've just been on .
now , that story i just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world , the great paleolithic wanderings of our species .
and that 's the story that i told a couple of years ago in my book , " the journey of man , " and a film that we made with the same title .
and as we were finishing up that film - it was co-produced with national geographic - i started talking to the folks at ng about this work .
and they got really excited about it . they liked the film , but they said , " you know , we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins , where we all came from , using the tools of dna to map the migrations around the world .
you know , the study of human origins is kind of in our dna , and we want to take it to the next level .
what do you want to do next ? "
which is a great question to be asked by national geographic .
and i said , " well , you know , what i 've sketched out here is just that .
it is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet .
and it 's based on a few thousand people we 've sampled from , you know , a handful of populations around the world .
studied a few genetic markers , and there are lots of gaps on this map .
we 've just connected the dots . what we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more - hundreds of thousands of dna samples from people all over the world . "
and that was the genesis of the genographic project .
the project launched in april 2005 .
it has three core components . obviously , science is a big part of it .
the field research that we 're doing around the world with indigenous peoples .
people who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost .
so my ancestors come from all over northern europe .
i live in the eastern seaboard of north america when i 'm not traveling .
where am i indigenous to ? nowhere really . my genes are all jumbled up .
but there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the dna results .
that 's the focus of the field research , the centers that we 've set up all over the world - 10 of them , top population geneticists .
but , in addition , we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world .
how often do you get to participate in a big scientific project ?
the human genome project , or a mars rover mission .
in this case , you actually can .
you can go onto our website , nationalgeographic.com / genographic .
you can order a kit . you can test your own dna .
and you can actually submit those results to the database , and tell us a little about your genealogical background , have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort .
now , this is all a nonprofit enterprise , and so the money that we raise , after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components , gets plowed back into the project .
the majority going to something we call the legacy fund .
it 's a charitable entity , basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational , cultural projects initiated by them .
they apply to this fund in order to do various projects , and i 'll show you a couple of examples .
so how are we doing on the project ? we 've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world .
the most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public ; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago , which has raised around five million dollars , the majority of which , at least half , is going back into the legacy fund .
we 've just awarded the first legacy grants totaling around 500,000 dollars .
projects around the world - documenting oral poetry in sierra leone , preserving traditional weaving patterns in gaza , language revitalization in tajikistan , etc . , etc .
so the project is going very , very well , and i urge you to check out the website and watch this space .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been playing ted for nearly a decade , and i 've very rarely played any new songs of my own .
and that was largely because there were n't any .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 've been busy with a couple of projects , and one of them was this : the nutmeg .
a 1930s ship 's lifeboat , which i 've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in england .
and , so now , when the polar ice caps melt , my recording studio will rise up like an ark , and i 'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a j.g. ballard novel .
during the day , the nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse , and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast .
so that when it gets dark , i 've got plenty of power .
and i can light up the nutmeg like a beacon .
and so i go in there until the early hours of the morning , and i work on new songs .
i 'd like to play to you guys , if you 're willing to be the first audience to hear it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's about billie holiday .
and it appears that , some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night , until she reappeared in the morning .
but i know where she was .
she was with me on my lifeboat .
and she was hot .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ billie crept softly ♫ ♫ into my waking arms ♫ ♫ warm like a sip of sour mash ♫ ♫ strange fruit for ♫ ♫ a sweet hunk of trash ♫ ♫ panic at the stage door ♫ ♫ of carnegie hall ♫ ♫ " famous jazz singer gone awol " ♫ ♫ must have left the building ♫ ♫ body and soul ♫ ♫ on a creaky ♫ ♫ piano stool tonight ♫ ♫ as the moon is my ♫ ♫ only witness ♫ ♫ she was breathing ♫ ♫ in my ear ♫ ♫ " this time it 's love " ♫
♫ but love is a loaded pistol ♫ ♫ by daybreak she 's gone ♫ ♫ over the frozen river , home ♫ ♫ me and johnny walker ♫ ♫ see in the new age ♫ ♫ alone ♫ ♫ stay with me ♫ ♫ again tonight ♫ ♫ billie , time , ♫ ♫ time is a wily trickster ♫ ♫ still an echo ♫ ♫ in my heart says , ♫ ♫ " this time it 's love " ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i was basically concerned about what was going on in the world .
i could n't understand the starvation , the destruction , the killing of innocent people .
making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do .
and when i was 12 , i became an actor .
i was bottom of the class . i have n't got any qualifications .
i was told i was dyslexic .
in fact , i have got qualifications .
i got a d in pottery , which was the one thing that i did get - which was useful , obviously .
and so concern is where all of this comes from .
and then , being an actor , i was doing these different kinds of things , and i felt the content of the work that i was involved in really was n't cutting it , that there surely had to be more .
and at that point , i read a book by frank barnaby , this wonderful nuclear physicist , and he said that media had a responsibility , that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward .
and that fascinated me , because i 'd been messing around with a camera most of my life .
and then i thought , well maybe i could do something .
maybe i could become a filmmaker .
maybe i can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference .
maybe there 's a little change i can get involved in .
so i started thinking about peace , and i was obviously , as i said to you , very much moved by these images , trying to make sense of that .
could i go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on ?
because it 's obviously incredibly frightening .
but i realized that , having been messing around with structure as an actor , that a series of sound bites in itself was n't enough , that there needed to be a mountain to climb , there needed to be a journey that i had to take .
and if i took that journey , no matter whether it failed or succeeded , it would be completely irrelevant .
the point was that i would have something to hook the questions of - is humankind fundamentally evil ?
is the destruction of the world inevitable ? should i have children ?
is that a responsible thing to do ? etc . , etc .
so i was thinking about peace , and then i was thinking , well where 's the starting point for peace ?
and that was when i had the idea .
there was no starting point for peace .
there was no day of global unity .
there was no day of intercultural cooperation .
there was no day when humanity came together , separate in all of those things and just shared it together - that we 're in this together , and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated , then that might be the key to humanity 's survival .
that might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces - if we did it just for a day .
so obviously we did n't have any money .
i was living at my mom 's place .
and we started writing letters to everybody .
you very quickly work out what is it that you 've got to do to fathom that out .
how do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever ceasefire nonviolence day , the 21st of september ?
and i wanted it to be the 21st of september because it was my granddad 's favorite number .
he was a prisoner of war .
he saw the bomb go off at nagasaki .
it poisoned his blood . he died when i was 11 .
so he was like my hero .
and the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left , 23 came back , two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground .
and that 's why we wanted it to be the 21st of september as the date of peace .
so we began this journey , and we launched it in 1999 .
and we wrote to heads of state , their ambassadors , nobel peace laureates , ngos , faiths , various organizations - literally wrote to everybody .
and very quickly , some letters started coming back .
and we started to build this case .
and i remember the first letter .
one of the first letters was from the dalai lama .
and of course we did n't have the money ; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of -lsb- this mail -rsb- .
a letter came through from the dalai lama saying , " this is an amazing thing . come and see me .
i 'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace . "
and we did n't have money for the flight .
and i rang sir bob ayling , who was ceo of ba at the time , and said , " mate , we 've got this invitation .
could you give me a flight ? because we 're going to go see him . "
and of course , we went and saw him and it was amazing .
and then dr. oscar arias came forward .
and actually , let me go back to that slide , because when we launched it in 1999 - this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence - we invited thousands of people .
well not thousands - hundreds of people , lots of people - all the press , because we were going to try and create the first ever world peace day , a peace day .
and we invited everybody , and no press showed up .
there were 114 people there - they were mostly my friends and family .
and that was kind of like the launch of this thing .
but it did n't matter because we were documenting , and that was the thing .
for me , it was really about the process .
it was n't about the end result .
and that 's the beautiful thing about the camera .
they used to say the pen is mightier than the sword . i think the camera is .
and just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually .
so anyway , we began the journey .
and here you see people like mary robinson , i went to see in geneva .
i 'm cutting my hair , it 's getting short and long , because every time i saw kofi annan , i was so worried that he thought i was a hippie that i cut it , and that was kind of what was going on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i 'm not worried about it now .
so mary robinson , she said to me , " listen , this is an idea whose time has come . this must be created . "
kofi annan said , " this will be beneficial to my troops on the ground . "
the oau at the time , led by salim ahmed salim , said , " i must get the african countries involved . "
dr. oscar arias , nobel peace laureate , president now of costa rica , said , " i 'll do everything that i can . "
so i went and saw amr moussa at the league of arab states .
i met mandela at the arusha peace talks , and so on and so on and so on - while i was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense .
and then we were listening to the people . we were documenting everywhere .
76 countries in the last 12 years , i 've visited .
and i 've always spoken to women and children wherever i 've gone .
i 've recorded 44,000 young people .
i 've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts .
i 'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry , their art , their literature , their music , their sport , whatever it might be .
and we were listening to everybody .
and it was an incredibly thing , working with the u.n.
and working with ngos and building this case .
i felt that i was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day .
and the stronger the case and the more detailed it was , the better chance we had of creating this day .
and it was this stuff , this , where i actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened , it did n't actually matter .
it did n't matter if it did n't create a day of peace .
the fact is that , if i tried and it did n't work , then i could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite - until , it was in somalia , picking up that young girl .
and this young child who 'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic , and that young boy who was a child soldier , who told me he 'd killed people - he was about 12 - these things made me realize that this was not a film that i could just stop .
and that actually , at that moment something happened to me , which obviously made me go , " i 'm going to document .
if this is the only film that i ever make , i 'm going to document until this becomes a reality . "
because we 've got to stop , we 've got to do something where we unite - separate from all the politics and religion that , as a young person , is confusing me .
i do n't know how to get involved in that process .
and then on the seventh of september , i was invited to new york .
the costa rican government and the british government had put forward to the united nations general assembly , with 54 co-sponsors , the idea of the first ever ceasefire nonviolence day , the 21st of september , as a fixed calendar date , and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , but there were hundreds of individuals , obviously , who made that a reality .
and thank you to all of them .
that was an incredible moment .
i was at the top of the general assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen .
and as i mentioned , when it started , we were at the globe , and there was no press .
and now i was thinking , " well , the press it really going to hear this story . "
and suddenly , we started to institutionalize this day .
kofi annan invited me on the morning of september the 11th to do a press conference .
and it was 8:00 am when i stood there .
and i was waiting for him to come down , and i knew that he was on his way .
and obviously he never came down . the statement was never made .
the world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence .
and it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives , there and then subsequently all over the world .
it never happened .
and i remember thinking , " this is exactly why , actually , we have to work even harder .
and we have to make this day work .
it 's been created ; nobody knows .
but we have to continue this journey , and we have to tell people , and we have to prove it can work . "
and i left new york freaked , but actually empowered .
and i felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did , then maybe we would n't see things like that .
i remember putting that film out and going to cynics .
i was showing the film , and i remember being in israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film - that it 's just a day of peace , it does n't mean anything .
it 's not going to work ; you 're not going to stop the fighting in afghanistan ; the taliban wo n't listen , etc . , etc .
it 's just symbolism .
and that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways , because it could n't not work .
i 'd spoken in somalia , burundi , gaza , the west bank , india , sri lanka , congo , wherever it was , and they 'd all tell me , " if you can create a window of opportunity , we can move aid , we can vaccinate children .
children can lead their projects .
they can unite . they can come together . if people would stop , lives will be saved . "
that 's what i 'd heard .
and i 'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about .
and so i went back to the united nations .
i decided that i 'd continue filming and make another movie .
and i went back to the u.n. for another couple of years .
we started moving around the corridors of the u.n. system , governments and ngos , trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it , see if we could make it possible .
and after lots and lots of meetings obviously , i 'm delighted that this man , ahmad fawzi , one of my heroes and mentors really , he managed to get unicef involved .
and unicef , god bless them , they said , " okay , we 'll have a go . "
and then unama became involved in afghanistan .
it was historical . could it work in afghanistan with unama and who and civil society , etc . , etc . , etc . ?
and i was getting it all on film and i was recording it , and i was thinking , " this is it . this is the possibility of it maybe working .
but even if it does n't , at least the door is open and there 's a chance . "
and so i went back to london , and i went and saw this chap , jude law .
and i saw him because he was an actor , i was an actor , i had a connection to him , because we needed to get to the press , we needed this attraction , we needed the media to be involved .
because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there 'd be more - when we got into certain areas , maybe there would be more people interested .
and maybe we 'd be helped financially a little bit more , which had been desperately difficult .
i wo n't go into that .
so jude said , " okay , i 'll do some statements for you . "
while i was filming these statements , he said to me , " where are you going next ? "
i said , " i 'm going to go to afghanistan . " he said , " really ? "
and i could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest .
so i said to him , " do you want to come with me ?
it 'd be really interesting if you came .
it would help and bring attention .
and that attention would help leverage the situation , as well as all of the other sides of it . "
i think there 's a number of pillars to success .
one is you 've got to have a great idea .
the other is you 've got to have a constituency , you 've got to have finance , and you 've got to be able to raise awareness .
and actually i could never raise awareness by myself , no matter what i 'd achieved .
so these guys were absolutely crucial .
so he said yes , and we found ourselves in afghanistan .
it was a really incredible thing that when we landed there , i was talking to various people , and they were saying to me , " you 've got to get everybody involved here .
you ca n't just expect it to work . you have to get out and work . "
and we did , and we traveled around , and we spoke to elders , we spoke to doctors , we spoke to nurses , we held press conferences , we went out with soldiers , we sat down with isaf , we sat down with nato , we sat down with the u.k. government .
i mean , we basically sat down with everybody - in and out of schools with ministers of education , holding these press conferences , which of course , now were loaded with press , everybody was there .
there was an interest in what was going on .
this amazing woman , fatima gailani , was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the russians .
and her afghan network was just absolutely everywhere .
and she was really crucial in getting the message in .
and then we went home . we 'd sort of done it .
we had to wait now and see what happened .
and i got home , and i remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the taliban .
and that letter basically said , " we 'll observe this day .
we will observe this day .
we see it as a window of opportunity .
and we will not engage . we 're not going to engage . "
and that meant that humanitarian workers would n't be kidnapped or killed .
and then suddenly , i obviously knew at this point , there was a chance .
and days later , 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and like the general assembly , obviously the most wonderful , wonderful moment .
and so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back .
we put it into dari and pashto . we put it in the local dialects .
we went back to afghanistan , because the next year was coming , and we wanted to support .
but more importantly , we wanted to go back , because these people in afghanistan were the heroes .
they were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it , etc . , etc . - and they made it real .
and we wanted to go back and show them the film and say , " look , you guys made this possible . and thank you very much . "
and we gave the film over .
obviously it was shown , and it was amazing .
and then that year , that year , 2008 , this isaf statement from kabul , afghanistan , september 17th : " general stanley mcchrystal , commander of international security assistance forces in afghanistan , announced today isaf will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of september . "
they were saying they would stop .
and then there was this other statement that came out from the u.n. department of security and safety saying that , in afghanistan , because of this work , the violence was down by 70 percent .
70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least .
and that completely blew my mind almost more than anything .
and i remember being stuck in new york , this time because of the volcano , which was obviously much less harmful .
and i was there thinking about what was going on .
and i kept thinking about this 70 percent .
70 percent reduction in violence - in what everyone said was completely impossible and you could n't do .
and that made me think that , if we can get 70 percent in afghanistan , then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere .
we have to go for a global truce .
we have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce , go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities , both domestically and internationally , ever recorded .
that 's exactly what we must do .
and on the 21st of september this year , we 're going to launch that campaign at the o2 arena to go for that process , to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities .
and we will utilize all kinds of things - have a dance and social media and visiting on facebook and visit the website , sign the petition .
and it 's in the six official languages of the united nations .
and we 'll globally link with government , inter-government , non-government , education , unions , sports .
and you can see the education box there .
we 've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce .
and obviously the life-saving is increased , the concepts help .
linking up with the olympics - i went and saw seb coe . i said , " london 2012 is about truce .
ultimately , that 's what it 's about . "
why do n't we all team up ? why do n't we bring truce to life ?
why do n't you support the process of the largest ever global truce ?
we 'll make a new film about this process .
we 'll utilize sport and football .
on the day of peace , there 's thousands of football matches all played , from the favelas of brazil to wherever it might be .
so , utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action .
and ultimately , we have to try that .
we have to work together .
and when i stand here in front of all of you , and the people who will watch these things , i 'm excited , on behalf of everybody i 've met , that there is a possibility that our world could unite , that we could come together as one , that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues , brought about by individuals .
i was with brahimi , ambassador brahimi .
i think he 's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics - in afghanistan , in iraq .
he 's an amazing man .
and i sat with him a few weeks ago .
and i said to him , " mr. brahimi , is this nuts , going for a global truce ?
is this possible ? is it really possible that we could do this ? "
he said , " it 's absolutely possible . "
i said , " what would you do ?
would you go to governments and lobby and use the system ? "
he said , " no , i 'd talk to the individuals . "
it 's all about the individuals .
it 's all about you and me .
it 's all about partnerships .
it 's about your constituencies ; it 's about your businesses .
because together , by working together , i seriously think we can start to change things .
and there 's a wonderful man sitting in this audience , and i do n't know where he is , who said to me a few days ago - because i did a little rehearsal - and he said , " i 've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares , and one of them is white . "
and it then made me think about a glass of water , which is clear .
if you put one drop , one drop of something , in that water , it 'll change it forever .
by working together , we can create peace one day .
thank you ted . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . thank you .
one of my favorite parts of my job at the gates foundation is that i get to travel to the developing world , and i do that quite regularly .
and when i meet the mothers in so many of these remote places , i 'm really struck by the things that we have in common .
they want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful , to be healthy , and to have a successful life .
but i also see lots of poverty , and it 's quite jarring , both in the scale and the scope of it .
my first trip in india , i was in a person 's home where they had dirt floors , no running water , no electricity , and that 's really what i see all over the world .
so in short , i 'm startled by all the things that they do n't have .
but i am surprised by one thing that they do have : coca-cola .
coke is everywhere .
in fact , when i travel to the developing world , coke feels ubiquitous .
and so when i come back from these trips , and i 'm thinking about development , and i 'm flying home and i 'm thinking , " we 're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations , " you know , coke 's success kind of stops and makes you wonder : how is it that they can get coke to these far-flung places ?
if they can do that , why ca n't governments and ngos do the same thing ?
and i 'm not the first person to ask this question .
but i think , as a community , we still have a lot to learn .
it 's staggering , if you think about coca-cola .
they sell 1.5 billion servings every single day .
that 's like every man , woman and child on the planet having a serving of coke every week .
so why does this matter ?
well , if we 're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of millennium development goals that we 're set as a world , we need to learn from the innovators , and those innovators come from every single sector .
i feel that , if we can understand what makes something like coca-cola ubiquitous , we can apply those lessons then for the public good .
coke 's success is relevant , because if we can analyze it , learn from it , then we can save lives .
so that 's why i took a bit of time to study coke .
and i think there are really three things we can take away from coca-cola .
they take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product .
they tap into local entrepreneurial talent , and they do incredible marketing .
so let 's start with the data .
now coke has a very clear bottom line - they report to a set of shareholders , they have to turn a profit .
so they take the data , and they use it to measure progress .
they have this very continuous feedback loop .
they learn something , they put it back into the product , they put it back into the market .
they have a whole team called " knowledge and insight . "
it 's a lot like other consumer companies .
so if you 're running namibia for coca-cola , and you have a 107 constituencies , you know where every can versus bottle of sprite , fanta or coke was sold , whether it was a corner store , a supermarket or a pushcart .
so if sales start to drop , then the person can identify the problem and address the issue .
let 's contrast that for a minute to development .
in development , the evaluation comes at the very end of the project .
i 've sat in a lot of those meetings , and by then , it is way too late to use the data .
i had somebody from an ngo once describe it to me as bowling in the dark .
they said , " you roll the ball , you hear some pins go down .
it 's dark , you ca n't see which one goes down until the lights come on , and then you an see your impact . "
real-time data turns on the lights .
so what 's the second thing that coke 's good at ?
they 're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent .
coke 's been in africa since 1928 , but most of the time they could n't reach the distant markets , because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world , which was a large truck rolling down the street .
and in africa , the remote places , it 's hard to find a good road .
but coke noticed something - they noticed that local people were taking the product , buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places .
and so they took a bit of time to learn about that .
and they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs , giving them small loans .
they set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers , and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people , who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product .
there are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in africa .
in tanzania and uganda , they represent 90 percent of coke 's sales .
let 's look at the development side .
what is it that governments and ngos can learn from coke ?
governments and ngos need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well , because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places , their neighbors , and they know what motivates them to make change .
i think a great example of this is ethiopia 's new health extension program .
the government noticed in ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic , they were over a day 's travel away from a health clinic .
so if you 're in an emergency situation - or if you 're a mom about to deliver a baby - forget it , to get to the health care center .
they decided that was n't good enough , so they went to india and studied the indian state of kerala that also had a system like this , and they adapted it for ethiopia .
and in 2003 , the government of ethiopia started this new system in their own country .
they trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people .
in just five years , their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people .
now , think about how this can change people 's lives .
health extension workers can help with so many things , whether it 's family planning , prenatal care , immunizations for the children , or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery .
that is having real impact in a country like ethiopia , and it 's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008 .
in ethiopia , there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program .
so what 's the next step for ethiopia ?
well , they 're already starting talk about this .
they 're starting to talk about , " how do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas ?
how do you incent them based on the impact that they 're getting out in those remote villages ? "
that 's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people 's potential .
the third component of coke 's success is marketing .
ultimately , coke 's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a coca-cola .
now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow .
so , they rely on coca-cola in terms of its marketing , and what 's the secret to their marketing ?
well , it 's aspirational .
it is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live .
so even though it 's a global company , they take a very local approach .
coke 's global campaign slogan is " open happiness . "
but they localize it .
and they do n't just guess what makes people happy ; they go to places like latin america and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life .
and in south africa , they associate happiness with seriti or community respect .
now , that played itself out in the world cup campaign .
let 's listen to this song that coke created for it , " wavin ' flag " by a somali hip hop artist .
-lrb- video -rrb- k 'naan : ♫ oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ give you freedom , give you fire ♫ ♫ give you reason , take you higher ♫ ♫ see the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ you define us , make us feel proud ♫ ♫ in the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ as we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ celebration , it 's around us ♫ ♫ every nation , all around us ♫
melinda french gates : it feels pretty good , right ?
well , they did n't stop there - they localized it into 18 different languages .
and it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries .
it reminds me of a song that i remember from my childhood , " i 'd like to teach the world to sing , " that also went number one on the pop charts .
both songs have something in common : that same appeal of celebration and unity .
so how does health and development market ?
well , it 's based on avoidance , not aspirations .
i 'm sure you 've heard some of these messages .
" use a condom , do n't get aids . "
" wash you hands , you might not get diarrhea . "
it does n't sound anything like " wavin ' flag " to me .
and i think we make a fundamental mistake - we make an assumption , that we think that , if people need something , we do n't have to make them want that .
and i think that 's a mistake .
and there 's some indications around the world that this is starting to change .
one example is sanitation .
we know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation .
but there 's a solution : you build a toilet .
but what we 're finding around the world , over and over again , is , if you build a toilet and you leave it there , it does n't get used .
people reuse it for a slab for their home .
they sometimes store grain in it .
i 've even seen it used for a chicken coop .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea ?
well , you work with the community .
you start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that should n't be done in the village , and they agree to that .
but then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern , trendy convenience .
one state in northern india has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship .
and it works - look at these headlines .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm not kidding .
women are refusing to marry men without toilets .
no loo , no " i do . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , it 's not just a funny headline - it 's innovative . it 's an innovative marketing campaign .
but more importantly , it saves lives .
take a look at this - this is a room full of young men and my husband , bill .
and can you guess what the young men are waiting for ?
they 're waiting to be circumcised .
can you you believe that ?
we know that circumcision reduces hiv infection by 60 percent in men .
and when we first heard this result inside the foundation , i have to admit , bill and i were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying , " but who 's going to volunteer for this procedure ? "
but it turns out the men do , because they 're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it , and the men also believe it improves their sex life .
so if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development , we can change communities and we can change whole nations .
well , why is all of this so important ?
so let 's talk about what happens when this all comes together , when you tie the three things together .
and polio , i think , is one of the most powerful examples .
we 've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years .
so if you look back to 1988 , there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year .
in 2009 , we 're down to 1,600 cases .
well how did that happen ?
let 's look at a country like india .
they have over a billion people in this country , but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis , and clinicians , a huge reporting system in chemists .
they have two and a half million vaccinators .
but let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you .
let me tell you the story of shriram , an 18 month boy in bihar , a northern state in india .
this year on august 8th , he felt paralysis and on the 13th , his parents took him to the doctor .
on august 14th and 15th , they took a stool sample , and by the 25th of august , it was confirmed he had type 1 polio .
by august 30th , a genetic test was done , and we knew what strain of polio shriram had .
now it could have come from one of two places .
it could have come from nepal , just to the north , across the border , or from jharkhand , a state just to the south .
luckily , the genetic testing proved that , in fact , this strand came north , because , had it come from the south , it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission .
so many more people would have been affected .
so what 's the endgame ?
well on september 4th , there was a huge mop-up campaign , which is what you do in polio .
they went out and where shriram lives , they vaccinated two million people .
so in less than a month , we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program .
and i 'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio .
that 's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading , and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands ; they can save lives .
now one of the challenges in polio , still , is marketing , but it might not be what you think .
it 's not the marketing on the ground .
it 's not telling the parents , " if you see paralysis , take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated . "
we have a problem with marketing in the donor community .
the g8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years , but we 're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations are n't willing to fund polio any longer .
so by next summer , we 're sighted to run out of money on polio .
so we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we 're about to run short of money .
and i think that if the marketing were more aspirational , if we could focus as a community on how far we 've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease , we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us .
and if we could do that , we could stop vaccinating everybody , worldwide , in all of our countries for polio .
and it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet .
and we are so close .
and this victory is so possible .
so if coke 's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness , i 'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms .
to me , that is deep happiness .
and so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector , then in the future we make together , that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as coca-cola .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the allosphere : it 's a three-story metal sphere in an echo-free chamber .
think of the allosphere as a large , dynamically varying digital microscope that 's connected to a supercomputer .
20 researchers can stand on a bridge suspended inside of the sphere , and be completely immersed in their data .
imagine if a team of physicists could stand inside of an atom and watch and hear electrons spin .
imagine if a group of sculptors could be inside of a lattice of atoms and sculpt with their material .
imagine if a team of surgeons could fly into the brain , as though it was a world , and see tissues as landscapes , and hear blood density levels as music .
this is some of the research that you 're going to see that we 're undertaking at the allosphere .
but first a little bit about this group of artists , scientists , and engineers that are working together .
i 'm a composer , orchestrally-trained , and the inventor of the allosphere .
with my visual artist colleagues , we map complex mathematical algorithms that unfold in time and space , visually and sonically .
our scientist colleagues are finding new patterns in the information .
and our engineering colleagues are making one of the largest dynamically varying computers in the world for this kind of data exploration .
i 'm going to fly you into five research projects in the allosphere that are going to take you from biological macroscopic data all the way down to electron spin .
this first project is called the allobrain .
and it 's our attempt to quantify beauty by finding which regions of the brain are interactive while witnessing something beautiful .
you 're flying through the cortex of my colleague 's brain .
our narrative here is real fmri data that 's mapped visually and sonically .
the brain now a world that we can fly through and interact with .
you see 12 intelligent computer agents , the little rectangles that are flying in the brain with you .
they 're mining blood density levels .
and they 're reporting them back to you sonically .
higher density levels mean more activity in that point of the brain .
they 're actually singing these densities to you with higher pitches mapped to higher densities .
we 're now going to move from real biological data to biogenerative algorithms that create artificial nature in our next artistic and scientific installation .
in this artistic and scientific installation , biogenerative algorithms are helping us to understand self-generation and growth : very important for simulation in the nanoscaled sciences .
for artists , we 're making new worlds that we can uncover and explore .
these generative algorithms grow over time , and they interact and communicate as a swarm of insects .
our researchers are interacting with this data by injecting bacterial code , which are computer programs , that allow these creatures to grow over time .
we 're going to move now from the biological and the macroscopic world , down into the atomic world , as we fly into a lattice of atoms .
this is real afm - atomic force microscope - data from my colleagues in the solid state lighting and energy center .
they 've discovered a new bond , a new material for transparent solar cells .
we 're flying through 2,000 lattice of atoms - oxygen , hydrogen and zinc .
you view the bond in the triangle .
it 's four blue zinc atoms bonding with one white hydrogen atom .
you see the electron flow with the streamlines we as artists have generated for the scientists .
this is allowing them to find the bonding nodes in any lattice of atoms .
we think it makes a beautiful structural art .
the sound that you 're hearing are the actual emission spectrums of these atoms .
we 've mapped them into the audio domain , so they 're singing to you .
oxygen , hydrogen and zinc have their own signature .
we 're going to actually move even further down as we go from this lattice of atoms to one single hydrogen atom .
we 're working with our physicist colleagues that have given us the mathematical calculations of the n-dimensional schrödinger equation in time .
what you 're seeing here right now is a superposition of an electron in the lower three orbitals of a hydrogen atom .
you 're actually hearing and seeing the electron flow with the lines .
the white dots are the probability wave that will show you where the electron is in any given point of time and space in this particular three-orbital configuration .
in a minute we 're going to move to a two-orbital configuration , and you 're going to notice a pulsing .
and you 're going to hear an undulation between the sound .
this is actually a light emitter .
as the sound starts to pulse and contract , our physicists can tell when a photon is going to be emitted .
they 're starting to find new mathematical structures in these calculations .
and they 're understanding more about quantum mathematics .
we 're going to move even further down , and go to one single electron spin .
this will be the final project that i show you .
our colleagues in the center for quantum computation and spintronics are actually measuring with their lasers decoherence in a single electron spin .
we 've taken this information and we 've made a mathematical model out of it .
you 're actually seeing and hearing quantum information flow .
this is very important for the next step in simulating quantum computers and information technology .
so these brief examples that i 've shown you give you an idea of the kind of work that we 're doing at the university of california , santa barbara , to bring together , arts , science and engineering into a new age of math , science and art .
we hope that all of you will come to see the allosphere .
inspire us to think of new ways that we can use this unique instrument that we 've created at santa barbara .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i essentially drag sledges for a living , so it does n't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually , but i 'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year : " philosophically , does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving ?
after all , if it is being done somewhere by someone , and we can participate virtually , then why bother leaving the house ? "
i 'm usually introduced as a polar explorer .
i 'm not sure that 's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles , but i 've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the arctic circle , so i get out of the house a fair bit .
and in my nature , i guess , i am a doer of things more than i am a spectator or a contemplator of things , and it 's that dichotomy , the gulf between ideas and action that i 'm going to try and explore briefly .
the pithiest answer to the question " why ? "
that 's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap , the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back , second from the left , george lee mallory . many of you will know his name .
in 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of mt . everest .
he may or may not have been the first person to climb everest , more than 30 years before edmund hillary .
no one knows if he got to the top . it 's still a mystery .
but he was credited with coining the phrase , " because it 's there . "
now i 'm not actually sure that he did say that .
there 's very little evidence to suggest it , but what he did say is actually far nicer , and again , i 've printed this . i 'm going to read it out .
" the first question which you will ask and which i must try to answer is this : what is the use of climbing mt . everest ?
and my answer must at once be , it is no use .
there is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever .
oh , we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes , and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation , but otherwise nothing will come of it .
we shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver , and not a gem , nor any coal or iron .
we shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food . so it is no use .
if you can not understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it , that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward , then you wo n't see why we go .
what we get from this adventure is just sheer joy , and joy , after all , is the end of life .
we do n't live to eat and make money .
we eat and make money to be able to enjoy life .
that is what life means , and that is what life is for . "
mallory 's argument that leaving the house , embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun , however , does n't tally that neatly with my own experience .
the furthest i 've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004 . i still do n't know exactly what came over me , but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the arctic ocean .
i planned essentially to walk from the north coast of russia to the north pole , and then to carry on to the north coast of canada .
no one had ever done this . i was 26 at the time .
a lot of experts were saying it was impossible , and my mum certainly was n't very keen on the idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the journey from a small weather station on the north coast of siberia up to my final starting point , the edge of the pack ice , the coast of the arctic ocean , took about five hours , and if anyone watched fearless felix baumgartner going up , rather than just coming down , you 'll appreciate the sense of apprehension , as i sat in a helicopter thundering north , and the sense , i think if anything , of impending doom .
i sat there wondering what on earth i had gotten myself into .
there was a bit of fun , a bit of joy .
i was 26 . i remember sitting there looking down at my sledge . i had my skis ready to go , i had a satellite phone , a pump-action shotgun in case i was attacked by a polar bear .
i remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter .
we were both thundering through this incredible siberian dawn , and part of me felt a bit like a cross between jason bourne and wilfred thesiger . part of me felt quite proud of myself , but mostly i was just utterly terrified .
and that journey lasted 10 weeks , 72 days .
i did n't see anyone else . we took this photo next to the helicopter .
beyond that , i did n't see anyone for 10 weeks .
the north pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea , so i 'm traveling over the frozen surface of the arctic ocean .
nasa described conditions that year as the worst since records began .
i was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies , about 400 pounds . the average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35 . minus 50 was the coldest .
so again , there was n't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had .
one of the magical things about this journey , however , is that because i 'm walking over the sea , over this floating , drifting , shifting crust of ice that 's floating on top of the arctic ocean is it 's an environment that 's in a constant state of flux .
the ice is always moving , breaking up , drifting around , refreezing , so the scenery that i saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me . no one else will ever , could ever , possibly see the views , the vistas , that i saw for 10 weeks .
and that , i guess , is probably the finest argument for leaving the house .
i can try to tell you what it was like , but you 'll never know what it was like , and the more i try to explain that i felt lonely , i was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles , it was cold , nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day , the more words fall short , and i 'm unable to do it justice .
and it seems to me , therefore , that the doing , you know , to try to experience , to engage , to endeavor , rather than to watch and to wonder , that 's where the real meat of life is to be found , the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days .
and i would add a cautionary note here , however .
in my experience , there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what 's humanly possible .
now i do n't just mean in the field of daft macho edwardian style derring-do , but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer , there is something addictive about this , and in my case , i think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit .
i ca n't explain quite how good it is until you 've tried it , but it has the capacity to burn up all the money i can get my hands on , to ruin every relationship i 've ever had , so be careful what you wish for .
mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain , and i wonder if that 's the case whether there 's something in the challenge itself , in the endeavor , and particularly in the big , unfinished , chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us , and in my experience that 's certainly the case .
there is one unfinished challenge that 's been calling out to me for most of my adult life .
many of you will know the story .
this is a photo of captain scott and his team .
scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the south pole .
no one knew what was there . it was utterly unmapped at the time . we knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of antarctica .
scott , as many of you will know , was beaten to it by roald amundsen and his norwegian team , who used dogs and dogsleds . scott 's team were on foot , all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges , and they arrived at the pole to find the norwegian flag already there , i 'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized .
all five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey .
there is a sort of misconception nowadays that it 's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure .
when i talk about antarctica , people often say , " has n't , you know , that 's interesting , has n't that blue peter presenter just done it on a bike ? "
or , " that 's nice . you know , my grandmother 's going on a cruise to antarctica next year . you know .
is there a chance you 'll see her there ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but scott 's journey remains unfinished .
no one has ever walked from the very coast of antarctica to the south pole and back again .
it is , arguably , the most audacious endeavor of that edwardian golden age of exploration , and it seemed to me high time , given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels , that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job .
so that 's precisely what i 'm setting out to do .
this time next year , in october , i 'm leading a team of three .
it will take us about four months to make this return journey .
that 's the scale . the red line is obviously halfway to the pole .
we have to turn around and come back again .
i 'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting . you 'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before .
and it 'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question , " why ? "
and our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been . there certainly is n't much call for explorers nowadays . my career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option .
if i wanted to know , for example , how many stars were in the milky way , how old those giant heads on easter island were , most of you could find that out right now without even standing up .
and yet , if i 've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places , it is that true , real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge , from stepping away from what 's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown .
in life , we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to , and i think metaphorically speaking , at least , we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often , if only we could summon up the courage .
i certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what 's outside .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- about four years ago , the new yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of mauritius .
now , the island of mauritius is a small island off the east coast of madagascar in the indian ocean , and it is the place where the dodo bird was discovered and extinguished , all within about 150 years .
everyone was very excited about this archaeological find , because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton .
see , while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection , nobody - not even the actual natural history museum on the island of mauritius - has a skeleton that 's made from the bones of a single dodo .
well , this is n't exactly true .
the fact is , is that the british museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified , skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal , they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire .
if you go look at their website today , they 'll actually list these specimens , saying , the rest was lost in a fire .
not quite the whole truth . anyway .
the frontispiece of this article was this photo , and i 'm one of the people that thinks that tina brown was great for bringing photos to the new yorker , because this photo completely rocked my world .
i became obsessed with the object - not just the beautiful photograph itself , and the color , the shallow depth of field , the detail that 's visible , the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together - there 's an entire story here .
and i thought to myself , would n't it be great if i had my own dodo skeleton ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to point out here at this point that i 've spent my life obsessed by objects and the stories that they tell , and this was the very latest one .
so i began looking around for - to see if anyone sold a kit , some kind of model that i could get , and i found lots of reference material , lots of lovely pictures .
no dice : no dodo skeleton for me . but the damage had been done .
i had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my " creative projects " folder - it 's a repository for my brain , everything that i could possibly be interested in .
any time i have an internet connection , there 's a sluice of stuff moving into there , everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos .
the key that the marquis du lafayette sent to george washington to celebrate the storming of the bastille .
russian nuclear launch key : the one on the top is the picture of the one i found on ebay ; the one on the bottom is the one i made for myself , because i could n't afford the one on ebay .
storm trooper costumes . maps of middle earth - that 's one i hand-drew myself . there 's the dodo skeleton folder .
this folder has 17,000 photos - over 20 gigabytes of information - and it 's growing constantly .
and one day , a couple of weeks later , it might have been maybe a year later , i was in the art store with my kids , and i was buying some clay tools - we were going to have a craft day .
i bought some super sculpeys , some armature wire , some various materials .
and i looked down at this sculpey , and i thought , maybe , yeah , maybe i could make my own dodo skull .
i should point out at this time - i 'm not a sculptor ; i 'm a hard-edged model maker .
you give me a drawing , you give me a prop to replicate , you give me a crane , scaffolding , parts from " star wars " - especially parts from " star wars " - i can do this stuff all day long .
it 's exactly how i made my living for 15 years .
but you give me something like this - my friend mike murnane sculpted this ; it 's a maquette for " star wars , episode two " - this is not my thing - this is something other people do - dragons , soft things .
however , i felt like i had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it - i mean , it could n't be that difficult .
so , i started looking at the best photos i could find .
i grabbed all the reference , and i found this lovely piece of reference .
this is someone selling this on ebay ; it was clearly a woman 's hand , hopefully a woman 's hand .
assuming it was roughly the size of my wife 's hand , i made some measurements of her thumb , and i scaled them out to the size of the skull .
i blew it up to the actual size , and i began using that , along with all the other reference that i had , comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be , exactly how long , etc .
and over a few hours , i eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull . and i did n't mean to continue , i - it 's kind of like , you know , you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time ; you ca n't think about the totality .
i was n't thinking about a dodo skeleton ; i just noticed that as i finished this skull , the armature wire that i had been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be .
and one of the other things i 'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons , having collected a couple of hundred .
i actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them .
and so button by button , vertebrae by vertebrae , i built my way down .
and actually , by the end of the day , i had a reasonable skull , a moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis .
and again , i kept on going , looking for more reference , every bit of reference i could find - drawings , beautiful photos .
this guy - i love this guy ! he put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler .
this is the kind of accuracy that i wanted , and i replicated every last bone and put it in .
and after about six weeks , i finished , painted , mounted my own dodo skeleton .
you can see that i even made a museum label for it that includes a brief history of the dodo .
and tap plastics made me - although i did n't photograph it - a museum vitrine .
i do n't have the room for this in my house , but i had to finish what i had started .
and this actually represented kind of a sea change to me .
again , like i said , my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell , and also making them for myself , obtaining them , appreciating them and diving into them .
and in this folder , " creative projects , " there are tons of projects that i 'm currently working on , projects that i 've already worked on , things that i might want to work on some day , and things that i may just want to find and buy and have and look at and touch .
but now there was potentially this new category of things that i could sculpt that was different , that i - you know , i have my own r2d2 , but that 's - honestly , relative to sculpting , to me , that 's easy .
and so i went back and looked through my " creative projects " folder , and i happened across the maltese falcon .
now , this is funny for me : to fall in love with an object from a hammett novel , because if it 's true that the world is divided into two types of people , chandler people and hammett people , i am absolutely a chandler person .
but in this case , it 's not about the author , it 's not about the book or the movie or the story , it 's about the object in and of itself .
and in this case , this object is - plays on a host of levels .
first of all , there 's the object in the world .
this is the " kniphausen hawk . "
it is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a swedish count , and it is very likely the object from which hammett drew his inspiration for the maltese falcon .
then there is the fictional bird , the one that hammett created for the book .
built out of words , it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie , in which another object is created : a prop that has to represent the thing that hammett created out of words , inspired by the kniphausen hawk , and this represents the falcon in the movie .
and then there is this fourth level , which is a whole new object in the world : the prop made for the movie , the representative of the thing , becomes , in its own right , a whole other thing , a whole new object of desire .
and so now it was time to do some research .
i actually had done some research a few years before - it 's why the folder was there .
i 'd bought a replica , a really crappy replica , of the maltese falcon on ebay , and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference .
but i discovered , in researching further , really wanting precise reference , that one of the original lead birds had been sold at christie 's in 1994 , and so i contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original christie 's catalogue , and in it i found this magnificent picture , which included a size reference .
i was able to scan the picture , blow it up to exactly full size .
i found other reference . avi -lsb- ara -rsb- chekmayan , a new jersey editor , actually found this resin maltese falcon at a flea market in 1991 , although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to the auctioneers ' specifications , because there was a lot of controversy about it .
it was made out of resin , which was n't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made .
it 's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate it , because i can see it compared to this thing , and i can tell you - it 's real , it 's the real thing , it 's made from the exact same mold that this one is .
in this one , because the auction was actually so controversial , profiles in history , the auction house that sold this - i think in 1995 for about 100,000 dollars - they actually included - you can see here on the bottom - not just a front elevation , but also a side , rear and other side elevation .
so now , i had all the topology i needed to replicate the maltese falcon .
what do they do , how do you start something like that ? i really do n't know .
so what i did was , again , like i did with the dodo skull , i blew all my reference up to full size , and then i began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references .
so i took sculpey , and i built a big block of it , and i passed it through until , you know , i got the right profiles .
and then slowly , feather by feather , detail by detail , i worked out and achieved - working in front of the television and super sculpey - here 's me sitting next to my wife - it 's the only picture i took of the entire process .
as i moved through , i achieved a very reasonable facsimile of the maltese falcon .
but again , i am not a sculptor , and so i do n't know a lot of the tricks , like , i do n't know how my friend mike gets beautiful , shiny surfaces with his sculpey ; i certainly was n't able to get it .
so , i went down to my shop , and i molded it and i cast it in resin , because in the resin , then , i could absolutely get the glass smooth finished .
now there 's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish .
my preference is about 70 coats of this - matte black auto primer .
i spray it on for about three or four days , it drips to hell , but it allows me a really , really nice gentle sanding surface and i can get it glass-smooth .
oh , finishing up with triple-zero steel wool .
now , the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie , when they finally bring out the bird at the end , and they place it on the table , they actually spin it .
so i was able to actually screen-shot and freeze-frame to make sure .
and i 'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that as i 'm holding the light in the same position , i 'm getting the same type of reflection on it - that 's the level of detail i 'm going into this thing .
i ended up with this : my maltese falcon .
and it 's beautiful . and i can state with authority at this point in time , when i 'd finished it , of all of the replicas out there - and there is a few - this is by far the most accurate representation of the original maltese falcon than anyone has sculpted . now the original one , i should tell you , is sculpted by a guy named fred sexton .
this is where it gets weird .
fred sexton was a friend of this guy , george hodel .
terrifying guy - agreed by many to be the killer of the black dahlia .
now , james ellroy believes that fred sexton , the sculptor of the maltese falcon , killed james elroy 's mother .
i 'll go you one stranger than that : in 1974 , during the production of a weird comedy sequel to " the maltese falcon , " called " the black bird , " starring george segal , the los angeles county museum of art had a plaster original of the maltese falcon - one of the original six plasters , i think , made for the movie - stolen out of the museum . a lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie .
john 's grill , which actually is seen briefly in " the maltese falcon , " is still a viable san francisco eatery , counted amongst its regular customers elisha cook , who played wilmer cook in the movie , and he gave them one of his original plasters of the maltese falcon .
and they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years , until it got stolen in january of 2007 .
it would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly .
so here i had this falcon , and it was lovely . it looked really great , the light worked on it really well , it was better than anything that i could achieve or obtain out in the world .
but there was a problem . and the problem was that : i wanted the entirety of the object , i wanted the weight behind the object .
this thing was made of resin and it was too light .
there 's this group online that i frequent .
it 's a group of prop crazies just like me called the replica props forum , and it 's people who trade , make and travel in information about movie props .
and it turned out that one of the guys there , a friend of mine that i never actually met , but befriended through some prop deals , was the manager of a local foundry .
he took my master falcon pattern , he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me , and this is the bronze i got back .
and this is , after some acid etching , the one that i ended up with .
and this thing , it 's deeply , deeply satisfying to me .
here , i 'm going to put it out there , later on tonight , and i want you to pick it up and handle it .
you want to know how obsessed i am . this project 's only for me , and yet i went so far as to buy on ebay a 1941 chinese san francisco-based newspaper , in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped ...
like it is in the movie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i know !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there you can see , it 's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds .
that 's half the weight of my dog , huxley .
but there 's a problem .
now , here 's the most recent progression of falcons .
on the far left is a piece of crap - a replica i bought on ebay .
there 's my somewhat ruined sculpey falcon , because i had to get it back out of the mold . there 's my first casting , there 's my master and there 's my bronze .
there 's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things , which is that every time you throw it into silicone and cast it in resin , you lose a little bit of volume , you lose a little bit of size .
and when i held my bronze one up against my sculpey one , it was shorter by three-quarters of an inch .
yeah , no , really , this was like aah - why did n't i remember this ?
why did n't i start and make it bigger ?
so what do i do ? i figure i have two options .
one , i can fire a freaking laser at it , which i have already done , to do a 3d scan - there 's a 3d scan of this falcon .
i had figured out the exact amount of shrinkage i achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3d lithography master of this , which i will polish , then i will send to the mold maker and then i will have it done in bronze . or : there are several people who own originals , and i have been attempting to contact them and reach them , hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds , maybe to take a picture , or even to pull out the hand-held laser scanner
that i happen to own that fits inside a cereal box , and could maybe , without even touching their bird , i swear , get a perfect 3d scan . and i 'm even willing to sign pages saying that i 'll never let anyone else have it , except for me in my office , i promise .
i 'll give them one if they want it .
and then , maybe , then i 'll achieve the end of this exercise .
but really , if we 're all going to be honest with ourselves , i have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with , was it .
thank you .
i live and work from tokyo , japan .
and i specialize in human behavioral research , and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways , and to design for that future .
and you know , to be honest , i 've been doing this for seven years , and i have n't got a clue what the future is going to be like .
but i 've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there .
this is my office . it 's out there .
it 's not in the lab , and it 's increasingly in places like india , china , brazil , africa .
we live on a planet - 6.3 billion people .
about three billion people , by the end of this year , will have cellular connectivity .
and it 'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that .
and i mention this because , if we want to design for that future , we need to figure out what those people are about .
and that 's , kind of , where i see what my job is and what our team 's job is .
our research often starts with a very simple question .
so i 'll give you an example . what do you carry ?
if you think of everything in your life that you own , when you walk out that door , what do you consider to take with you ?
when you 're looking around , what do you consider ?
of that stuff , what do you carry ?
and of that stuff , what do you actually use ?
so this is interesting to us , because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you and end up using has some kind of spiritual , emotional or functional value .
and to put it really bluntly , you know , people are willing to pay for stuff that has value , right ?
so i 've probably done about five years ' research looking at what people carry .
i go in people 's bags . i look in people 's pockets , purses .
i go in their homes . and we do this worldwide , and we follow them around town with video cameras .
it 's kind of like stalking with permission .
and we do all this - and to go back to the original question , what do people carry ?
and it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff .
ok , that 's fair enough .
but if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are - across cultures and across gender and across contexts - most people will say keys , money and , if they own one , a mobile phone .
and i 'm not saying this is a good thing , but this is a thing , right ?
i mean , i could n't take your phones off you if i wanted to .
you 'd probably kick me out , or something .
ok , it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask .
but really , the question is , why ? right ?
so why are these things so important in our lives ?
and it turns out , from our research , that it boils down to survival - survival for us and survival for our loved ones .
so , keys provide an access to shelter and warmth - transport as well , in the u.s. increasingly .
money is useful for buying food , sustenance , among all its other uses .
and a mobile phone , it turns out , is a great recovery tool .
if you prefer this kind of maslow 's hierarchy of needs , those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in maslow 's hierarchy of needs .
yes , they do a whole bunch of other stuff , but they 're very good at this .
and in particular , it 's the mobile phone 's ability to allow people to transcend space and time .
and what i mean by that is , you know , you can transcend space by simply making a voice call , right ?
and you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience , and someone else can pick it up at their convenience .
and this is fairly universally appreciated , it turns out , which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected .
and they value that connectivity .
but actually , you can do this kind of stuff with pcs .
and you can do them with phone kiosks .
and the mobile phone , in addition , is both personal - and so it also gives you a degree of privacy - and it 's convenient .
you do n't need to ask permission from anyone , you can just go ahead and do it , right ?
however , for these things to help us survive , it depends on them being carried .
but - and it 's a pretty big but - we forget .
we 're human , that 's what we do . it 's one of our features .
i think , quite a nice feature .
so we forget , but we 're also adaptable , and we adapt to situations around us pretty well .
and so we have these strategies to remember , and one of them was mentioned yesterday .
and it 's , quite simply , the point of reflection .
and that 's that moment when you 're walking out of a space , and you turn around , and quite often you tap your pockets .
even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets .
and you turn around , and you look back into the space , and some people talk aloud .
and pretty much everyone does it at some point .
ok , the next thing is - most of you , if you have a stable home life , and what i mean is that you do n't travel all the time , and always in hotels , but most people have what we call a center of gravity .
and a center of gravity is where you keep these objects .
and these things do n't stay in the center of gravity , but over time , they gravitate there .
it 's where you expect to find stuff .
and in fact , when you 're turning around , and you 're looking inside the house , and you 're looking for this stuff , this is where you look first , right ?
ok , so when we did this research , we found the absolutely , 100 percent , guaranteed way to never forget anything ever , ever again .
and that is , quite simply , to have nothing to remember .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok , now , that sounds like something you get on a chinese fortune cookie , right ?
but is , in fact , about the art of delegation .
and from a design perspective , it 's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people .
and it turns out , delegation - if you want it to be - can be the solution for pretty much everything , apart from things like bodily functions , going to the toilet .
you ca n't ask someone to do that on your behalf .
and apart from things like entertainment , you would n't pay for someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf , or , at least , not yet .
maybe sometime in the future , we will .
so , let me give you an example of delegation in practice , right .
so this is - probably the thing i 'm most passionate about is the research that we 've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate .
so , the u.n. estimated - this is 2004 figures - that there are almost 800 million people who ca n't read and write , worldwide .
so , we 've been conducting a lot of research .
and one of the things we were looking at is - if you ca n't read and write , if you want to communicate over distances , you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with .
it could be a phone number , it could be an e-mail address , it could be a postal address .
simple question : if you ca n't read and write , how do you manage your contact information ?
and the fact is that millions of people do it .
just from a design perspective , we did n't really understand how they did it , and so that 's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing .
and it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation .
so they delegate that part of the task process to other people , the stuff that they ca n't do themselves .
let me give you another example of delegation .
this one 's a little bit more sophisticated , and this is from a study that we did in uganda about how people who are sharing devices , use those devices .
sente is a word in uganda that means money .
it has a second meaning , which is to send money as airtime . ok ?
and it works like this .
so let 's say , june , you 're in a village , rural village .
i 'm in kampala and i 'm the wage earner .
i 'm sending money back , and it works like this .
so , in your village , there 's one person in the village with a phone , and that 's the phone kiosk operator .
and it 's quite likely that they 'd have a quite simple mobile phone as a phone kiosk .
so what i do is , i buy a prepaid card like this .
and instead of using that money to top up my own phone , i call up the local village operator .
and i read out that number to them , and they use it to top up their phone .
so , they 're topping up the value from kampala , and it 's now being topped up in the village .
you take a 10 or 20 percent commission , and then you - the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission , and passes the rest over to you in cash .
ok , there 's two things i like about this .
so the first is , it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone - anyone who has a mobile phone - essentially into an atm machine .
it brings rudimentary banking services to places where there 's no banking infrastructure .
and even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure , they would n't necessarily be considered viable customers , because they 're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts .
there 's a second thing i like about this .
and that is that despite all the resources at my disposal , and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication , i know i could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this . ok ?
and , yes , there are things like grameen bank and micro-lending .
but the difference between this and that is , there 's no central authority trying to control this .
this is just street-up innovation .
so , it turns out the street is a never-ending source of inspiration for us .
and ok , if you break one of these things here , you return it to the carrier .
they 'll give you a new one .
they 'll probably give you three new ones , right ?
i mean , that 's buy three , get one free . that kind of thing .
if you go on the streets of india and china , you see this kind of stuff .
and this is where they take the stuff that breaks , and they fix it , and they put it back into circulation .
this is from a workbench in jilin city , in china , and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together .
they reverse-engineer manuals .
this is a kind of hacker 's manual , and it 's written in chinese and english .
they also write them in hindi .
you can subscribe to these .
there are training institutes where they 're churning out people for fixing these things as well .
but what i like about this is , it boils down to someone on the street with a small , flat surface , a screwdriver , a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads - because they often get dust on the contact heads - and knowledge .
and it 's all about the social network of the knowledge , floating around .
and i like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff , and build stuff , and potentially distribute stuff .
it challenges the norms .
ok , for me the street just raises so many different questions .
like , this is viagra that i bought from a backstreet sex shop in china .
and china is a country where you get a lot of fakes .
and i know what you 're asking - did i test it ?
i 'm not going to answer that , ok .
but i look at something like this , and i consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process .
and we look at this and we think , well , how does that apply , for example , for the design of - the lessons from this - apply to the design of online services , future services in these markets ?
this is a pair of underpants from - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - from tibet .
and i look at something like this , and honestly , you know , why would someone design underpants with a pocket , right ?
and i look at something like this and it makes me question , if we were to take all the functionality in things like this , and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network , how would we prioritize where to put stuff ?
and yes , this is quite trivial , but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks .
and what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural uganda .
this does n't have house numbers . this has phone numbers .
so what does it mean when people 's identity is mobile ?
when those extra three billion people 's identity is mobile , it is n't fixed ?
your notion of identity is out-of-date already , ok , for those extra three billion people .
this is how it 's shifting .
and then i go to this picture here , which is the one that i started with .
and this is from delhi .
it 's from a study we did into illiteracy , and it 's a guy in a teashop .
you can see the chai being poured in the background .
and he 's a , you know , incredibly poor teashop worker , on the lowest rungs in the society .
and he , somehow , has the appreciation of the values of livestrong .
and it 's not necessarily the same values , but some kind of values of livestrong , to actually go out and purchase them , and actually display them .
for me , this kind of personifies this connected world , where everything is intertwined , and the dots are - it 's all about the dots joining together .
ok , the title of this presentation is " connections and consequences , " and it 's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it 's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner , right ?
when everyone 's connected .
and there are four things .
so , the first thing is the immediacy of ideas , the speed at which ideas go around .
and i know ted is about big ideas , but actually , the benchmark for a big idea is changing .
if you want a big idea , you need to embrace everyone on the planet , that 's the first thing .
the second thing is the immediacy of objects .
and what i mean by that is , as these become smaller , as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater - things like banking , identity - these things quite simply move very quickly around the world .
and so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid , in a way that we just totally can not conceive , when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world 's population .
the next thing is that , however we design this stuff - carefully design this stuff - the street will take it , and will figure out ways to innovate , as long as it meets base needs - the ability to transcend space and time , for example .
and it will innovate in ways that we can not anticipate .
in ways that , despite our resources , they can do it better than us .
that 's my feeling .
and if we 're smart , we 'll look at this stuff that 's going on , and we 'll figure out a way to enable it to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design .
and the last thing is that - actually , the direction of the conversation .
with another three billion people connected , they want to be part of the conversation .
and i think our relevance and ted 's relevance is really about embracing that and learning how to listen , essentially .
and we need to learn how to listen .
so thank you very , very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i write about food . i write about cooking .
i take it quite seriously , but i 'm here to talk about something that 's become very important to me in the last year or two .
it is about food , but it 's not about cooking , per se .
i 'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow .
i 'm not a vegetarian - this is the old nixon line , right ?
but i still think that this - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - may be this year 's version of this .
now , that is only a little bit hyperbolic .
and why do i say it ?
because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined .
there was the bomb , and there 's now .
and where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives , but whether , if we could see the earth a century from now , we 'd recognize it .
it 's a holocaust of a different kind , and hiding under our desks is n't going to help .
start with the notion that global warming is not only real , but dangerous .
since every scientist in the world now believes this , and even president bush has seen the light , or pretends to , we can take this is a given .
then hear this , please .
after energy production , livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases .
nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production - more than transportation .
now , you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts , but methane is 20 times more poisonous than co2 , and it 's not just methane .
livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation , air and water pollution , water shortages and loss of biodiversity .
there 's more .
like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people , but to animals .
but lists like this become kind of numbing , so let me just say this : if you 're a progressive , if you 're driving a prius , or you 're shopping green , or you 're looking for organic , you should probably be a semi-vegetarian .
now , i 'm no more anti-cattle than i am anti-atom , but it 's all in the way we use these things .
there 's another piece of the puzzle , which ann cooper talked about beautifully yesterday , and one you already know .
there 's no question , none , that so-called lifestyle diseases - diabetes , heart disease , stroke , some cancers - are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world .
and that 's the direct result of eating a western diet .
our demand for meat , dairy and refined carbohydrates - the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of coke a day - our demand for these things , not our need , our want , drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us .
and those calories are in foods that cause , not prevent , disease .
now global warming was unforeseen .
we did n't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility .
maybe a few lung diseases here and there , but , you know , that 's not such a big deal .
the current health crisis , however , is a little more the work of the evil empire .
we were told , we were assured , that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate , the healthier we 'd be .
no . overconsumption of animals , and of course , junk food , is the problem , along with our paltry consumption of plants .
now , there 's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here , but the evidence is that plants - and i want to make this clear - it 's not the ingredients in plants , it 's the plants .
it 's not the beta-carotene , it 's the carrot .
the evidence is very clear that plants promote health .
this evidence is overwhelming at this point .
you eat more plants , you eat less other stuff , you live longer .
not bad .
but back to animals and junk food .
what do they have in common ?
one : we do n't need either of them for health .
we do n't need animal products , and we certainly do n't need white bread or coke .
two : both have been marketed heavily , creating unnatural demand .
we 're not born craving whoppers or skittles .
three : their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and earth-friendly diet .
now , let 's imagine a parallel .
let 's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy , while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy , knowing all the while that the result would be pollution , war and rising costs .
incredible , is n't it ?
yet they do that .
and they do this here . it 's the same deal .
the sad thing is , when it comes to diet , is that even when well-intentioned feds try to do right by us , they fail .
either they 're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness , or they are puppets of agribusiness .
so , when the usda finally acknowledged that it was plants , rather than animals , that made people healthy , they encouraged us , via their overly simplistic food pyramid , to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day , along with more carbs .
what they did n't tell us is that some carbs are better than others , and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food .
but industry lobbyists would never let that happen .
and guess what ?
half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness .
so , instead of substituting plants for animals , our swollen appetites simply became larger , and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged .
so-called low-fat diets , so-called low-carb diets - these are not solutions .
but with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local , or whether we 're being nice to animals , the most important issues just are n't being addressed .
now , do n't get me wrong .
i like animals , and i do n't think it 's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches .
but there 's no way to treat animals well , when you 're killing 10 billion of them a year .
that 's our number . 10 billion .
if you strung all of them - chickens , cows , pigs and lambs - to the moon , they 'd go there and back five times , there and back .
now , my math 's a little shaky , but this is pretty good , and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long , but you get the idea .
that 's just the united states .
and with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease , kindness might just be a bit of a red herring .
let 's get the numbers of the animals we 're killing for eating down , and then we 'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left .
another red herring might be exemplified by the word " locavore , " which was just named word of the year by the new oxford american dictionary .
seriously .
and locavore , for those of you who do n't know , is someone who eats only locally grown food - which is fine if you live in california , but for the rest of us it 's a bit of a sad joke .
between the official story - the food pyramid - and the hip locavore vision , you have two versions of how to improve our eating .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
they both get it wrong , though .
the first at least is populist , and the second is elitist .
how we got to this place is the history of food in the united states .
and i 'm going to go through that , at least the last hundred years or so , very quickly right now .
a hundred years ago , guess what ?
everyone was a locavore : even new york had pig farms nearby , and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion .
every family had a cook , usually a mom .
and those moms bought and prepared food .
it was like your romantic vision of europe .
margarine did n't exist .
in fact , when margarine was invented , several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink , so we 'd all know that it was a fake .
there was no snack food , and until the ' 20s , until clarence birdseye came along , there was no frozen food .
there were no restaurant chains .
there were neighborhood restaurants run by local people , but none of them would think to open another one .
eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic .
and fancy food was entirely french .
as an aside , those of you who remember dan aykroyd in the 1970s doing julia child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- back in those days , before even julia , back in those days , there was no philosophy of food .
you just ate .
you did n't claim to be anything .
there was no marketing . there were no national brands .
vitamins had not been invented .
there were no health claims , at least not federally sanctioned ones .
fats , carbs , proteins - they were n't bad or good , they were food .
you ate food .
hardly anything contained more than one ingredient , because it was an ingredient .
the cornflake had n't been invented .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the pop-tart , the pringle , cheez whiz , none of that stuff .
goldfish swam .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's hard to imagine . people grew food , and they ate food .
and again , everyone ate local .
in new york , an orange was a common christmas present , because it came all the way from florida .
from the ' 30s on , road systems expanded , trucks took the place of railroads , fresh food began to travel more .
oranges became common in new york .
the south and west became agricultural hubs , and in other parts of the country , suburbs took over farmland .
the effects of this are well known . they are everywhere .
and the death of family farms is part of this puzzle , as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato , even in summer .
eventually , california produced too much food to ship fresh , so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods .
thus arrived convenience .
it was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework .
now , i know everybody over the age of , like 45 - their mouths are watering at this point .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- if we had a slide of salisbury steak , even more so , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this may have cut down on housework , but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well .
many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad .
i , for one - and i 'm not kidding - did n't eat real spinach or broccoli till i was 19 .
who needed it though ? meat was everywhere .
what could be easier , more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak ?
but by then cattle were already raised unnaturally .
rather than spending their lives eating grass , for which their stomachs were designed , they were forced to eat soy and corn .
they have trouble digesting those grains , of course , but that was n't a problem for producers .
new drugs kept them healthy .
well , they kept them alive .
healthy was another story .
thanks to farm subsidies , the fine collaboration between agribusiness and congress , soy , corn and cattle became king .
and chicken soon joined them on the throne .
it was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began , the thing we 're only realizing just now .
listen to this , between 1950 and 2000 , the world 's population doubled .
meat consumption increased five-fold .
now , someone had to eat all that stuff , so we got fast food .
and this took care of the situation resoundingly .
home cooking remained the norm , but its quality was down the tubes .
there were fewer meals with home-cooked breads , desserts and soups , because all of them could be bought at any store .
not that they were any good , but they were there .
most moms cooked like mine : a piece of broiled meat , a quickly made salad with bottled dressing , canned soup , canned fruit salad .
maybe baked or mashed potatoes , or perhaps the stupidest food ever , minute rice .
for dessert , store-bought ice cream or cookies .
my mom is not here , so i can say this now .
this kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was n't all bad .
by the ' 70s , forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients .
we tended gardens , we became interested in organic food , we knew or we were vegetarians .
we were n't all hippies , either .
some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well .
meanwhile , food production had become industrial . industrial .
perhaps because it was being produced rationally , as if it were plastic , food gained magical or poisonous powers , or both .
many people became fat-phobic .
others worshiped broccoli , as if it were god-like .
but mostly they did n't eat broccoli .
instead they were sold on yogurt , yogurt being almost as good as broccoli .
except , in reality , the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream .
similarly , let 's look at a granola bar .
you think that that might be healthy food , but in fact , if you look at the ingredient list , it 's closer in form to a snickers than it is to oatmeal .
sadly , it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma , if not actually killed - the beginning of the heyday of value-added food , which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it .
think of the frozen chicken nugget .
the chicken is fed corn , and then its meat is ground up , and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder , and then it 's fried in corn oil .
all you do is nuke it . what could be better ?
and zapped horribly , pathetically .
by the ' 70s , home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like mcnuggets and hot pockets - and we all have our favorites , actually - made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home .
at the same time , masses of women were entering the workforce , and cooking simply was n't important enough for men to share the burden .
so now , you 've got your pizza nights , you 've got your microwave nights , you 've got your grazing nights , you 've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on .
leading the way - what 's leading the way ?
meat , junk food , cheese : the very stuff that will kill you .
so , now we clamor for organic food .
that 's good .
and as evidence that things can actually change , you can now find organic food in supermarkets , and even in fast-food outlets .
but organic food is n't the answer either , at least not the way it 's currently defined .
let me pose you a question .
can farm-raised salmon be organic , when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet , even if the feed itself is supposedly organic , and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens , swimming in their own filth ?
and if that salmon 's from chile , and it 's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles , whatever , dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere ?
i do n't know .
packed in styrofoam , of course , before landing somewhere in the united states , and then being trucked a few hundred more miles .
this may be organic in letter , but it 's surely not organic in spirit .
now here is where we all meet .
the locavores , the organivores , the vegetarians , the vegans , the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food .
even though we 've come to this from different points , we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food .
we need to start acting .
and this is not only an issue of social justice , as ann cooper said - and , of course , she 's completely right - but it 's also one of global survival .
which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue , the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food .
as i said , 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production .
how much livestock do you need to produce this ?
70 percent of the agricultural land on earth , 30 percent of the earth 's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we 'll eat .
and this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so .
and if the numbers coming in from china are anything like what they look like now , it 's not going to be 40 years .
there is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do .
and i say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life .
the most common argument is that we need nutrients - even though we eat , on average , twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed usda recommends .
but listen : experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week .
what do you think we eat per day ? half a pound .
but do n't we need meat to be big and strong ?
is n't meat eating essential to health ?
wo n't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless , sissy , liberals ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some of us might think that would be a good thing .
but , no , even if we were all steroid-filled football players , the answer is no .
in fact , there 's no diet on earth that meets basic nutritional needs that wo n't promote growth , and many will make you much healthier than ours does .
we do n't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition , we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition , and it 's killing us .
to suggest that in the interests of personal and human health americans eat 50 percent less meat - it 's not enough of a cut , but it 's a start .
it would seem absurd , but that 's exactly what should happen , and what progressive people , forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating , along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants .
i 've been writing about food more or less omnivorously - one might say indiscriminately - for about 30 years .
during that time , i 've eaten and recommended eating just about everything .
i 'll never stop eating animals , i 'm sure , but i do think that for the benefit of everyone , the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly .
ann cooper 's right .
the usda is not our ally here .
we have to take matters into our own hands , not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone - and that 's the hard part - but by improving our own .
and that happens to be quite easy .
less meat , less junk , more plants .
it 's a simple formula : eat food .
eat real food .
we can continue to enjoy our food , and we continue to eat well , and we can eat even better .
we can continue the search for the ingredients we love , and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals .
we 'll reduce not only calories , but our carbon footprint .
we can make food more important , not less , and save ourselves by doing so .
we have to choose that path .
thank you .
for the last 20 years i 've been designing puzzles .
and i 'm here today to give you a little tour , starting from the very first puzzle i designed , through what i 'm doing now .
i 've designed puzzles for books , printed things .
i 'm the puzzle columnist for discover magazine .
i 've been doing that for about 10 years .
i have a monthly puzzle calendar .
i do toys . the bulk of my work is in computer games .
i did puzzles for " bejeweled . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- i did n't invent " bejeweled . " i ca n't take credit for that .
so , very first puzzle , sixth grade , my teacher said , " oh , let 's see , that guy , he likes to make stuff .
i 'll have him cut out letters out of construction paper for the board . "
i thought this was a great assignment .
and so here is what i came up with . i start fiddling with it .
i came up with this letter . this is a letter of the alphabet that 's been folded just once .
the question is , which letter is it if i unfold it ?
one hint : it 's not " l. "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it could be an " l , " of course .
so , what else could it be ?
yeah , a lot of you got it .
oh yeah . so , clever thing .
now , that was my first puzzle . i got hooked .
i created something new , i was very excited because , you know , i 'd made crossword puzzles , but that 's sort of like filling in somebody else 's matrix .
this was something really original . i got hooked .
i read martin gardner 's columns in scientific american .
went on , and eventually decided to devote myself , full time , to that .
now , i should pause and say , what do i mean by puzzle ?
a puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer .
" fun to solve , " as opposed to everyday problems , which , frankly , are not very well-designed puzzles .
you know , they might have a solution .
it might take a long time . nobody wrote down the rules clearly .
who designed this ?
it 's like , you know , life is not a very well-written story so we have to hire writers to make movies .
well , i take everyday problems , and i make puzzles out of them .
and " right answer , " of course there might be more than one right answer ; many puzzles have more than one .
but as opposed to a couple other forms of play , toys and games - by toy i mean , something you play with that does n't have a particular goal .
you can create one out of legos .
you know , you can do anything you want .
or competitive games like chess where , well , you 're not trying to solve ... you can make a chess puzzle , but the goal really is to beat another player .
i consider that puzzles are an art form .
they 're very ancient . it goes back as long as there is written history .
it 's a very small form , like a joke , a poem , a magic trick or a song , very compact form .
at worst , they 're throwaways , they 're for amusement .
but at best they can reach for something more and create a memorable impression .
the progression of my career that you 'll see is looking for creating puzzles that have a memorable impact .
so , one thing i found early on , when i started doing computer games , is that i could create puzzles that will alter your perception .
i 'll show you how . here is a famous one .
so , it 's two profiles in black , or a white vase in the middle .
this is called a figure-ground illusion .
the artist m.c. escher exploited that in some of his wonderful prints .
here we have " day and night . "
here is what i did with figure and ground .
so , here we have " figure " in black .
here we have " figure " in white .
and it 's all part of the same design .
the background to one is the other .
originally i tried to do the words " figure " and " ground . "
but i could n't do that , i realized . i changed the problem .
it 's all " figure . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a few other things . here is my name .
and that turns into the title of my first book , " inversions . "
these sorts of designs now go by the word " ambigram . "
i 'll show you just a couple others . here we have the numbers one through 10 , the digits zero through nine , actually .
each letter here is one of these digits .
not strictly an ambigram in the conventional sense .
i like pushing on what an ambigram can mean .
here 's the word " mirror . " no , it 's not the same upside-down .
it 's the same this way .
and a marvelous fellow from the media lab who just got appointed head of risd , is john maeda .
and so i did this for him . it 's sort of a visual canon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and recently in magic magazine i 've done a number of ambigrams on magician 's names .
so here we have penn and teller , same upside-down .
this appears in my puzzle calendar .
okay , let 's go back to the slides .
thank you very much .
now , those are fun to look at .
now how would you do it interactively ?
for a while i was an interface designer .
and so i think a lot about interaction .
well , let 's first of all simplify the vases illusion , make the thing on the right .
now , if you could pick up the black vase , it would look like the figure on top .
if you could pick up the white area , it would look like the figure on the bottom .
well , you ca n't do that physically , but on a computer you can do it . let 's switch over to the p.c.
and here it is , figure-ground .
the goal here is to take the pieces on the left and make them so they look like the shape on the right .
and this follows the rules i just said : any black area that is surrounded by white can be picked up .
but that is also true of any white area .
so , here we got the white area in the middle , and you can pick it up .
i 'll just go one step further .
so , here is - here is a couple pieces . move them together , and now this is an active piece .
you can really get inside somebody 's perception and have them experience something .
it 's like the old maxim of " you can tell somebody something and show them , but if they do it they really learn it . "
here is another thing you can do .
there is a game called rush hour .
this is one of the true masterpieces in puzzle design besides rubik 's cube .
so , here we have a crowded parking lot with cars all over the place .
the goal is to get the red car out . it 's a sliding block puzzle .
it 's made by the company think fun .
it 's done very well . i love this puzzle .
well , let 's play one . here . so , here is a very simple puzzle .
well , that 's too simple , let 's add another piece .
okay , so how would you solve this one ?
well , move the blue one out of the way .
here , let 's make it a little harder . still pretty easy .
now we 'll make it harder , a little harder .
now , this one is a little bit trickier .
you know ? what do you do here ?
the first move is going to be what ?
you 're going to move the blue one up in order to get the lavender one to the right .
and you can make puzzles like this one that are n't solvable at all .
those four are locked in a pinwheel ; you ca n't get them apart .
i wanted to make a sequel .
i did n't come up with the original idea . but this is another way i work as an inventor is to create a sequel .
i came up with this . this is railroad rush hour .
it 's the same basic game except i introduced a new piece , a square piece that can move both horizontally and vertically .
in the other game the cars can only move forward and back .
created a whole bunch of levels for it .
now i 'm making it available to schools .
and it includes exercises that show you not just how to solve these puzzles , but how to extract the principles that will let you solve mathematical puzzles or problems in science , other areas .
so , i 'm really interested in you learning how to make your own puzzles as well as just me creating them .
garry trudeau calls himself an investigative cartoonist .
you know , he does a lot of research before he writes a cartoon .
in discover magazine , i 'm an investigative puzzle maker .
i got interested in gene sequencing .
and i said , " well , how on earth can you come up with a sequence of the base pairs in dna ? "
cut up the dna , you sequence individual pieces , and then you look for overlaps , and you basically match them at the edges . and i said , " this is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle , except the pieces overlap . "
so , here is what i created for discover magazine .
and it has to be solvable in a magazine .
you know , you ca n't cut out the pieces and move them around .
so , here is the nine pieces . and you 're supposed to put them into this grid .
and you have to choose pieces that overlap on the edge .
there is only one solution . it 's not that hard .
but it takes some persistence .
and when you 're done , it makes this design , which , if you squint , is the word " helix . "
so , that 's the form of the puzzle coming out of the content , rather than the other way around .
here is a couple more . here is a physics-based puzzle .
which way will these fall ?
one of these weighs 50 pounds , 30 pounds and 10 pounds .
and depending on which one weighs which amount , they 'll fall different directions .
and here is a puzzle based on color mixing .
i separated this image into cyan , magenta , yellow , black , the basic printing colors , and then mixed up the separations , and you get these peculiar pictures .
which separations were mixed up to make those pictures ?
gets you thinking about color .
finally , what i 'm doing now . so , shufflebrain.com , website you can go visit , i joined up with my wife , amy-jo kim .
she could easily be up here giving a talk about her work .
so , we 're making smart games for social media .
i 'll explain what that means . we 're looking at three trends .
this is what 's going on in the games industry right now .
first of all , you know , for a long time computer games meant things like " doom , " where you 're going around shooting things , very violent games , very fast , aimed at teenage boys . right ? that 's who plays computer games .
well , guess what ? that 's changing .
" bejeweled " is a big hit . it was the game that really broke open what 's called casual games .
and the main players are over 35 , and are female .
then recently " rock band " has been a big hit .
and it 's a game you play with other people .
it 's very physical . it looks nothing like a traditional game .
this is what 's becoming the dominant form of electronic gaming .
now , within that there is some interesting things happening .
there is also a trend towards games that are good for you .
why ? well , we aging boomers , baby boomers , we 're eating our healthy food , we 're exercising . what about our minds ?
oh no , our parents are getting alzheimer 's . we better do something .
turns out doing crossword puzzles can stave off some of the effects of alzheimer 's .
so , we got games like " brain age " coming out for the nintendo ds , huge hit .
a lot of people do sudoku . in fact some doctors prescribe it .
and then there is social media , and what 's happening on the internet .
everybody now considers themselves a creator , and not just a viewer .
and what does this add up to ?
here is what we see coming .
it 's games that fit into a healthy lifestyle .
they 're part of your life . they 're not necessarily a separate thing .
and they are both , something that is good for you , and they 're fun .
i 'm a puzzle guy . my wife is an expert in social media .
and we decided to combine our skills .
our first game is called " photo grab . " the game takes about a minute and 20 seconds .
this is your first time playing my game . okay .
let 's see how well we can do . there are three images .
and we have 24 seconds each .
where is that ?
i 'll play as fast as i can .
but if you can see it , shout out the answer .
you get more - down , okay , yeah where is that ?
oh , yeah . there , okay . j-o and - i guess that 's that part . we got the bow . that bow helps .
that 's his hair . you get a lot of figure-ground problems .
yeah , that one is easy . okay . so , ahhh ! okay on to the next one .
okay , so that 's the lens .
anybody ?
looks like a black shape . so , where is that ?
that 's the corner of the whole thing .
yeah , i 've played this image before , but even when i make up my own puzzles - and you can put your own images in here .
and we have people all over the world doing that now .
there we are . visit shufflebrain.com if you want to try it yourself . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is the exact moment that i started creating something called tinkering school .
tinkering school is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects , and be trusted .
trusted not to hurt themselves , and trusted not to hurt others .
tinkering school does n't follow a set curriculum , and there are no tests .
we 're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing .
when the kids arrive they 're confronted with lots of stuff : wood and nails and rope and wheels , and lots of tools , real tools .
it 's a six-day immersive experience for the kids .
and within that context , we can offer the kids time - something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives .
our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived , and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around .
nothing ever turns out as planned ... ever .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the kids soon learn that all projects go awry - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success , or gleeful calamity .
we start from doodles and sketches .
and sometimes we make real plans .
and sometimes we just start building .
building is at the heart of the experience : hands on , deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand .
robin and i , acting as collaborators , keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion .
success is in the doing , and failures are celebrated and analyzed .
problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear .
when faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities , a really interesting behavior emerges : decoration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation .
from these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before .
all materials are available for use .
even those mundane , hateful , plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger than anyone imagined .
and the things that they build amaze even themselves .
video : three , two , one , go !
gever tulley : a rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds .
video : yay !
-lrb- applause -rrb- gt : thank you . it 's been a great pleasure .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do n't know what the hell i 'm doing here .
i was born in a scots presbyterian ghetto in canada , and dropped out of high school . i do n't own a cell phone , and i paint on paper using gouache , which has n't changed in 600 years .
but about three years ago i had an art show in new york , and i titled it " serious nonsense . "
so i think i 'm actually the first one here - i lead .
i called it " serious nonsense " because on the serious side , i use a technique of painstaking realism of editorial illustration from when i was a kid . i copied it and i never unlearned it - it 's the only style i know . and it 's very kind of staid and formal .
and meanwhile , i use nonsense , as you can see .
this is a scottish castle where people are playing golf indoors , and the trick was to bang the golf ball off of suits of armor - which you ca n't see there .
this was one of a series called " zany afternoons , " which became a book .
this is a home-built rocket-propelled car . that 's a 1953 henry j - i 'm a bug for authenticity - in a quiet neighborhood in toledo .
this is my submission for the l.a. museum of film .
you can probably tell frank gehry and i come from the same town .
my work is so personal and so strange that i have to invent my own lexicon for it .
and i work a lot in what i call " retrofuturism , " which is looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow .
and they 're always wrong , always hilariously , optimistically wrong .
and the peak time for that was the 30s , because the depression was so dismal that anything to get away from the present into the future ...
and technology was going to carry us along .
this is popular workbench . popular science magazines in those days - i had a huge collection of them from the ' 30s - all they are is just poor people being asked to make sunglasses out of wire coat hangers and everything improvised and dreaming about these wonderful giant radio robots playing ice hockey at 300 miles an hour - it 's all going to happen , it 's all going to be wonderful .
automotive retrofuturism is one of my specialties .
i was both an automobile illustrator and an advertising automobile copywriter , so i have a lot of revenge to take on the subject .
detroit has always been halfway into the future - the advertising half .
this is the ' 58 bulgemobile : so new , they make tomorrow look like yesterday .
this is a chain gang of guys admiring the car .
that 's from a whole catalog - it 's 18 pages or so - ran back in the days of the lampoon , where i cut my teeth .
techno-archaeology is digging back and finding past miracles that never happened - for good reason , usually .
the zeppelin - this was from a brochure about the zeppelin based , obviously , on the hindenburg .
but the zeppelin was the biggest thing that ever moved made by man .
and it carried 56 people at the speed of a buick at an altitude you could hear dogs bark , and it cost twice as much as a first-class cabin on the normandie to fly it .
so the hindenburg was n't , you know , it was inevitable it was going to go .
this is auto-gyro jousting in malibu in the 30s .
the auto-gyro could n't wait for the invention of the helicopter , but it should have - it was n't a big success .
it 's the only spanish innovation , technologically , of the 20th century , by the way .
you needed to know that .
the flying car which never got off the ground - it was a post-war dream .
my old man used to tell me we were going to get a flying car .
this is pitched into the future from 1946 , looking at the day all american families have them .
" there 's moscow , shirley . hope they speak esperanto ! "
faux-nostalgia , which i 'm sort of - not , say , famous for , but i work an awful lot in it .
it 's the achingly sentimental yearning for times that never happened .
somebody once said that nostalgia is the one utterly most useless human emotion - so i think that 's a case for serious play .
this is emblematic of it - this is wing dining , recalling those balmy summer days somewhere over france in the 20s , dining on the wing of a plane . you ca n't see it very well here , but that 's hemingway reading some pages from his new novel to fitzgerald and ford madox ford until the slipstream blows him away .
this is tank polo in the south hamptons .
the brainless rich are more fun to make fun of than anybody . i do a lot of that .
and authenticity is a major part of my serious nonsense .
i think it adds a huge amount .
those , for example , are mark iv british tanks from 1916 .
they had two machine guns and a cannon , and they had 90 horsepower ricardo engines .
they went five miles an hour and inside it was 105 degrees in the pitch dark .
and they had a canary hung inside the thing to make sure the germans were n't going to use gas .
happy little story , is n't it ?
this is motor ritz towers in manhattan in the 30s , where you drove up to your front door , if you had the guts .
anybody who was anybody had an apartment there .
i managed to stick in both the zeppelin and an ocean liner out of sheer enthusiasm .
and i love cigars - there 's a cigar billboard down there .
and faux-nostalgia works even in serious subjects like war .
this is those wonderful days of the battle of britain in 1940 , when a messerschmitt me109 bursts into the house of commons and buzzes around , just to piss off churchill , who 's down there somewhere .
it 's a fond memory of times past .
hyperbolic overkill is a way of taking exaggeration to the absolute ultimate limit , just for the fun of it . this was a piece i did - a brochure again - " rms tyrannic : the biggest thing in all the world . "
the copy , which you ca n't see because it goes on and on for several pages , says that steerage passengers ca n't get their to bunks before the voyage is over , and it 's so safe it carries no insurance .
it 's obviously modeled on the titanic .
but it 's not a cri de coeur about man 's hubris in the face of the elements .
it 's just a sick , silly joke .
shamelessly cheap is something , i think - this will wake you up .
it has no meaning , just - desoto discovers the mississippi , and it 's a desoto discovering the mississippi .
i did that as a quick back page - i had like four hours to do a back page for an issue of the lampoon , and i did that , and i thought , " well , i 'm ashamed . i hope nobody knows it . "
people wrote in for reprints of that thing .
urban absurdism - that 's what the new yorker really calls for .
i try to make life in new york look even weirder than it is with those covers .
i 've done about 40 of them , and i 'd say 30 of them are based on that concept .
i was driving down 7th avenue one night at 3 a.m. , and this steam pouring out of the street , and i thought , " what causes that ? " and that - who 's to say ?
the temple of dendur at the metropolitan in new york - it 's a very somber place .
i thought i could jazz it up a bit , have a little fun with it .
this is a very un-pc cover . not in new york .
i could n't resist , and i got a nasty email from some environmental group saying , " this is too serious and solemn to make fun of . you should be ashamed , please apologize on our website . "
have n't got around to it yet but - i may .
this is the word side of my brain .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i love the word " eurotrash . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's all the eurotrash coming through jfk customs .
this was the new york bike messenger meeting the tour de france .
if you live in new york , you know how the bike messengers move .
except that he 's carrying a tube for blueprints and stuff - they all do - and a lot of people thought that meant it was a terrorist about to shoot rockets at the tour de france - sign of our times , i guess .
this is the only fashion cover i 've ever done .
it 's the little old lady that lives in a shoe , and then this thing - the title of that was , " there goes the neighborhood . "
i do n't know a hell of a lot about fashion - i was told to do what they call a mary jane , and then i got into this terrible fight between the art director and the editor saying : " put a strap on it " - " no , do n't put a strap on it " - " put a strap on it - " do n't put a strap on it " - because it obscures the logo and looks terrible and it 's bad and - i finally chickened out and did it for the sake of the authenticity of the shoe .
this is a tiny joke - e-zr pass . one letter makes an idea .
this is a big joke .
this is the audition for " king kong . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people always ask me , where do you get your ideas , how do your ideas come ?
truth about that one is i had a horrible red wine hangover , in the middle of the night , this came to me like a xerox - all i had to do was write it down .
it was perfectly clear . i did n't do any thinking about it .
and then when it ran , a lovely lady , an old lady named mrs. edgar rosenberg - if you know that name - called me and said she loved the cover , it was so sweet .
her former name was fay wray , and so that was - i did n't have the wit to say , " take the painting . "
finally , this was a three-page cover , never done before , and i do n't think it will ever be done again - successive pages in the front of the magazine .
it 's the ascent of man using an escalator , and it 's in three parts .
you ca n't see it all together , unfortunately , but if you look at it enough , you can sort of start to see how it actually starts to move .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pretty elegant . nothing like a crash to end a joke . that completes my oeuvre .
i would just like to add a crass commercial - i have a kids ' book coming out in the fall called " marvel sandwiches , " a compendium of all the serious play that ever was , and it 's going to be available in fine bookstores , crummy bookstores , tables on the street in october .
so thank you very much .
so magic is a very introverted field .
while scientists regularly publish their latest research , we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets .
that 's true even amongst peers .
but if you look at creative practice as a form of research , or art as a form of r & d for humanity , then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research ?
now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic .
and about three years ago , i started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic - tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster .
today , i 'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations .
it 's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system , or a digital storytelling tool .
could we bring down the lights please ? thank you .
so let 's give this a try .
and i 'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- terribly sorry . i forgot the floor .
wake up .
hey .
come on .
-lrb- music -rrb- please .
-lrb- music -rrb- come on .
ah , sorry about that .
forgot this .
-lrb- music -rrb- give it another try .
okay .
he figured out the system .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- uh oh .
-lrb- music -rrb- all right . let 's try this .
come on .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- hey .
-lrb- music -rrb- you heard her , go ahead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- bye-bye .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds . ♫ ♫ standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls . ♫ ♫ cutting through the veil of illusion . ♫ ♫ moving beyond past conclusions . ♫ ♫ wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere right now , ♫ ♫ i would want to be here . ♫ ♫ searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we 're throwing away . ♫ ♫ trying to see the world ♫
♫ through the junk we produce everyday . ♫ ♫ they say nothing lasts forever , ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here . ♫ ♫ and no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere in history , ♫ ♫ i would want to be here . ♫ ♫ the romans , the spanish ♫ ♫ the british , the dutch , ♫ ♫ american exceptionalism , so out of touch . ♫ ♫ the folly of empire repeating its course , ♫
♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time . ♫ ♫ but the world ca n't take it very much longer . ♫ ♫ we 're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we 're smarter and stronger . ♫ ♫ the world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere in time , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere and change things , ♫ ♫ it would have to be now . ♫ ♫ they say nothing last forever , ♫
♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here . ♫ ♫ and no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear . ♫ ♫ and the world ca n't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer . ♫ ♫ we 're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we 're smarter and stronger . ♫ ♫ the world 's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow . ♫ ♫ and the world ca n't take it , that you can see . ♫ ♫ if the oceans do n't make it , neither will we . ♫ ♫ the world 's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫
♫ somehow . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere in time , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere and change the outcome , ♫ ♫ it would have to be now . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is where i live . i live in kenya , at the south parts of the nairobi national park .
those are my dad 's cows at the back , and behind the cows , that 's the nairobi national park .
nairobi national park is not fenced in the south widely , which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely .
so predators like lions follow them , and this is what they do .
they kill our livestock .
this is one of the cows which was killed at night , and i just woke up in the morning and i found it dead , and i felt so bad , because it was the only bull we had .
my community , the maasai , we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them , and that 's why we value them so much .
so i grew up hating lions so much .
the morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock , and they 're also upset about this problem .
so they kill the lions .
it 's one of the six lions which were killed in nairobi .
and i think this is why the nairobi national park lions are few .
so a boy , from six to nine years old , in my community is responsible for his dad 's cows , and that 's the same thing which happened to me .
so i had to find a way of solving this problem .
and the first idea i got was to use fire , because i thought lions were scared of fire .
but i came to realize that that did n't really help , because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed .
so i did n't give up . i continued .
and a second idea i got was to use a scarecrow .
i was trying to trick the lions -lsb- into thinking -rsb- that i was standing near the cowshed .
but lions are very clever . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they will come the first day and they see the scarecrow , and they go back , but the second day , they 'll come and they say , this thing is not moving here , it 's always here . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so he jumps in and kills the animals .
so one night , i was walking around the cowshed with a torch , and that day , the lions did n't come .
and i discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light .
so i had an idea .
since i was a small boy , i used to work in my room for the whole day , and i even took apart my mom 's new radio , and that day she almost killed me , but i learned a lot about electronics . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i got an old car battery , an indicator box . it 's a small device found in a motorcycle , and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left . it blinks .
and i got a switch where i can switch on the lights , on and off .
and that 's a small torch from a broken flashlight .
so i set up everything .
as you can see , the solar panel charges the battery , and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box . i call it a transformer .
and the indicator box makes the lights flash .
as you can see , the bulbs face outside , because that 's where the lions come from .
and that 's how it looks to lions when they come at night .
the lights flash and trick the lions into thinking i was walking around the cowshed , but i was sleeping in my bed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
so i set it up in my home two years ago , and since then , we have never experienced any problem with lions .
and my neighboring homes heard about this idea .
one of them was this grandmother .
she had a lot of her animals being killed by lions , and she asked me if i could put the lights for her .
and i said , " yes . "
so i put the lights . you can see at the back , those are the lion lights .
since now , i 've set up seven homes around my community , and they 're really working .
and my idea is also being used now all over kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas , leopards , and it 's also being used to scare elephants away from people 's farms .
because of this invention , i was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in kenya , brookhouse international school , and i 'm really excited about this .
my new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness .
i even took my friends back to my community , and we 're installing the lights to the homes which do n't have -lsb- any -rsb- , and i 'm teaching them how to put them .
so one year ago , i was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father 's cows , and i used to see planes flying over , and i told myself that one day , i 'll be there inside .
and here i am today .
i got a chance to come by plane for my first time for ted .
so my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when i grow up .
i used to hate lions , but now because my invention is saving my father 's cows and the lions , we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict .
ashê olên . it means in my language , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : you have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours .
so you got this scholarship.richard turere : yep .
ca : you 're working on other electrical inventions .
what 's the next one on your list ?
rt : my next invention is , i want to make an electric fence.ca : electric fence ?
rt : but i know electric fences are already invented , but i want to make mine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : you already tried it once , right , and you - rt : i tried it before , but i stopped because it gave me a shock . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : in the trenches . richard turere , you are something else .
we 're going to cheer you on every step of the way , my friend .
thank you so much.rt : thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people , and that was in 1960 .
i 'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future , but i will not use digital technology , as i 've done during my first five tedtalks .
instead , i have progressed , and i am , today , launching a brand new analog teaching technology that i picked up from ikea : this box .
this box contains one billion people .
and our teacher told us that the industrialized world , 1960 , had one billion people .
in the developing world , she said , they had two billion people .
and they lived away then .
there was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world .
in the industrialized world , people were healthy , educated , rich , and they had small families .
and their aspiration was to buy a car .
and in 1960 , all swedes were saving to try to buy a volvo like this .
this was the economic level at which sweden was .
but in contrast to this , in the developing world , far away , was to have food for the day .
they were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes .
there was an enormous gap in the world when i grew up .
and this gap between the west and the rest has created a mindset of the world , which we still use linguistically when we talk about " the west " and " the developing world . "
but the world has changed , and it 's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world , and to understand it .
and that 's what i 'm going to show you , because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people just look how many .
the world population has doubled since i went to school .
and of course , there 's been economic growth in the west .
a lot of companies have happened to grow the economy , so the western population moved over to here .
and now their aspiration is not only to have a car .
now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly .
so this is where they are today .
and the most successful of the developing countries , they have moved on , you know , and they have become emerging economies , we call them .
they are now buying cars .
and what happened a month ago was that the chinese company , geely , they acquired the volvo company , and then finally the swedes understood that something big had happened in the world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there they are .
and the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes , they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago .
the new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions , the three billions here , which are also becoming emerging economies , because they are quite healthy , relatively well-educated , and they already also have two to three children per woman , as those -lsb- richer also -rsb- have .
and their aspiration now is , of course , to buy a bicycle , and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also .
but this is the world we have today , no longer any gap .
but the distance from the poorest here , the very poorest , to the very richest over here is wider than ever .
but there is a continuous world from walking , biking , driving , flying - there are people on all levels , and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle .
this is the new world we have today in 2010 .
and what will happen in the future ?
well , i 'm going to project into 2050 .
i was in shanghai recently , and i listened to what 's happening in china , and it 's pretty sure that they will catch up , just as japan did .
all the projections -lsb- say that -rsb- this one -lsb- billion -rsb- will -lsb- only -rsb- grow with one to two or three percent .
-lsb- but this second -rsb- grows with seven , eight percent , and then they will end up here .
they will start flying .
and these lower or middle income countries , the emerging income countries , they will also forge forwards economically .
and if , but only if , we invest in the right green technology - so that we can avoid severe climate change , and energy can still be relatively cheap - then they will move all the way up here .
and they will start to buy electric cars .
this is what we will find there .
so what about the poorest two billion ?
what about the poorest two billion here ?
will they move on ?
well , here population -lsb- growth -rsb- comes in because there -lsb- among emerging economies -rsb- we already have two to three children per woman , family planning is widely used , and population growth is coming to an end .
here -lsb- among the poorest -rsb- , population is growing .
so these -lsb- poorest -rsb- two billion will , in the next decades , increase to three billion , and they will thereafter increase to four billion .
there is nothing - but a nuclear war of a kind we 've never seen - that can stop this -lsb- growth -rsb- from happening .
because we already have this -lsb- growth -rsb- in process .
but if , and only if , -lsb- the poorest -rsb- get out of poverty , they get education , they get improved child survival , they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come -lsb- to live -rsb- here , then population growth will stop in 2050 .
we can not have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth .
and let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology .
here i have on the screen my country bubbles .
every bubble is a country . the size is population .
the colors show the continent .
the yellow on there is the americas ; dark blue is africa ; brown is europe ; green is the middle east and this light blue is south asia .
that 's india and this is china . size is population .
here i have children per woman : two children , four children , six children , eight children - big families , small families .
the year is 1960 .
and down here , child survival , the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school : 60 percent , 70 percent , 80 percent , 90 , and almost 100 percent , as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries .
but look , this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960 : one billion western world here - high child-survival , small families - and all the rest , the rainbow of developing countries , with very large families and poor child survival .
what has happened ? i start the world . here we go .
can you see , as the years pass by , child survival is increasing ?
they get soap , hygiene , education , vaccination , penicillin and then family planning . family size is decreasing .
-lsb- when -rsb- they get up to 90-percent child survival , then families decrease , and most of the arab countries in the middle east is falling down there -lsb- to small families -rsb- .
look , bangladesh catching up with india .
the whole emerging world joins the western world with good child survival and small family size , but we still have the poorest billion .
can you see the poorest billion , those -lsb- two -rsb- boxes i had over here ?
they are still up here .
and they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent , meaning that if you have six children born , to the next generation .
and the population will double in one generation .
so the only way of really getting world population -lsb- growth -rsb- to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent .
that 's why investments by gates foundation , unicef and aid organizations , together with national government in the poorest countries , are so good ; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world .
we can stop at nine billion if we do the right things .
child survival is the new green .
it 's only by child survival that we will stop population growth .
and will it happen ?
well , i 'm not an optimist , neither am i a pessimist .
i 'm a very serious " possibilist . "
it 's a new category where we take emotion apart , and we just work analytically with the world .
it can be done .
we can have a much more just world .
with green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty , and global governance , the world can become like this .
and look at the position of the old west .
remember when this blue box was all alone , leading the world , living its own life .
this will not happen -lsb- again -rsb- .
the role of the old west in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world - nothing more , nothing less .
but it 's a very important role .
do it well and get used to it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , gather around .
i would love to share with you a story .
once upon a time in 19th century germany , there was the book .
now during this time , the book was the king of storytelling .
it was venerable .
it was ubiquitous .
but it was a little bit boring .
because in its 400 years of existence , storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device .
but then one author arrived , and he changed the game forever .
-lrb- music -rrb- his name was lothar , lothar meggendorfer .
lothar meggendorfer put his foot down , and he said , " genug ist genug ! "
he grabbed his pen , he snatched his scissors .
this man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold .
history would know lothar meggendorfer as - who else ? - the world 's first true inventor of the children 's pop-up book .
-lrb- music -rrb- for this delight and for this wonder , people rejoiced .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- they were happy because the story survived , and that the world would keep on spinning .
lothar meggendorfer was n't the first to evolve the way a story was told , and he certainly was n't the last .
whether storytellers realized it or not , they were channeling meggendorfer 's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville , radio news to radio theater , film to film in motion to film in sound , color , 3d , on vhs and on dvd .
there seemed to be no cure for this meggendorferitis .
and things got a lot more fun when the internet came around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because , not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world , but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices .
for example , one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine .
one taiwanese production studio would interpret american politics in 3d .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate .
and after all this , everyone paused ; they took a step back .
they realized that , in 6,000 years of storytelling , they 've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting shakespeare on facebook walls .
and this was a cause for celebration .
the art of storytelling has remained unchanged .
and for the most part , the stories are recycled .
but the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure , consistent novelty .
and they remembered a man , one amazing german , every time a new storytelling device popped up next .
and for that , the audience - the lovely , beautiful audience - would live happily ever after .
-lrb- applause -rrb- b.j. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future .
he had a vision . when he got out , he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight , and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision .
he 'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was my first week in federal prison , and i was learning quickly that it was n't what you see on tv .
in fact , it was teeming with smart , ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the ceos who had wined and dined me six months earlier when i was a rising star in the missouri senate .
now , 95 percent of the guys that i was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside , but when they talked about what they did , they talked about it in a different jargon , but the business concepts that they talked about were n't unlike those that you 'd learn in a first year mba class at wharton : promotional incentives , you never charge a first-time user , focus-grouping new product launches , territorial expansion .
but they did n't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days .
for the most part , everyone was just trying to survive .
it 's a lot harder than you might think .
contrary to what most people think , people do n't pay , taxpayers do n't pay , for your life when you 're in prison . you 've got to pay for your own life .
you 've got to pay for your soap , your deodorant , toothbrush , toothpaste , all of it .
and it 's hard for a couple of reasons .
first , everything 's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you 'd pay on the street , and second , you do n't make a lot of money .
i unloaded trucks . that was my full-time job , unloading trucks at a food warehouse , for $ 5.25 , not an hour , but per month .
so how do you survive ?
well , you learn to hustle , all kinds of hustles .
there 's legal hustles .
you pay everything in stamps . those are the currency .
you charge another inmate to clean his cell .
there 's sort of illegal hustles , like you run a barbershop out of your cell .
there 's pretty illegal hustles : you run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell .
and there 's very illegal hustles , which you smuggle in , you get smuggled in , drugs , pornography , cell phones , and just as in the outer world , there 's a risk-reward tradeoff , so the riskier the enterprise , the more profitable it can potentially be .
you want a cigarette in prison ? three to five dollars .
you want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head ? three hundred bucks .
you want a dirty magazine ?
well , it can be as much as 1,000 dollars .
so as you can probably tell , one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity .
whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse , sculpting people 's hair with toenail clippers , or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs , prisoners learn how to make do with less , and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they 've learned to the outside and start restaurants , barber shops , personal training businesses .
but there 's no training , nothing to prepare them for that , no rehabilitation at all in prison , no one to help them write a business plan , figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises , no access to the internet , even .
and then , when they come out , most states do n't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background .
so none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years .
look , i lied to the feds . i lost a year of my life from it .
but when i came out , i vowed that i was going to do whatever i could to make sure that guys like the ones i was locked up with did n't have to waste any more of their life than they already had .
so i hope that you 'll think about helping in some way .
the best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons , because if we do n't , they 're not going to learn any new skills that 's going to help them , and they 'll be right back .
all they 'll learn on the inside is new hustles .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music by anna oxygen -rrb- -lrb- music : " shells " by mirah -rrb- ♪ you learned how to be a diver ♪ ♪ put on a mask and believe ♪ ♪ gather a dinner of shells for me ♪ ♪ take the tank down so you can breathe ♪ ♪ below ♪ ♪ movements slow ♪ ♪ you are an island ♪ ♪ all the secrets until then ♪ ♪ pried open i held them ♪ ♪ until they were still ♪ ♪ until they were still ♪ ♪ until they were still ♪ -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music by caroline lufkin -rrb- -lrb- music by anna oxygen -rrb-
♪ dream time , i will find you ♪ ♪ you are shady , you are new ♪ ♪ i 'm not so good at mornings ♪ ♪ i can see too clearly ♪ ♪ i prefer the nighttime ♪ ♪ dark and blurry ♪ ♪ falling night ♪ ♪ hovering light ♪ ♪ calling night ♪ ♪ hovering light ♪ ♪ in the moontime i will give up my life ♪ ♪ and in the deep dreams ♪ ♪ you will find me ♪ -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- excerpts from " myth and infrastructure " -rsb- bruno giussani : come back .
miwa matreyek !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement , to resonate other people 's feelings , thoughts , intentions , motivations , in the act of being with them .
as a scientist , i always wanted to measure that resonance , that sense of the other that happens so quickly , in the blink of an eye .
we intuit other people 's feelings .
we know the meaning of their actions even before they happen .
we 're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else 's subjectivity .
we do that all the time . we just ca n't shake it off .
it 's so important that the very tools that we use to understand ourselves , to understand the world around them , is shaped by that stance .
we are social to the core .
so my journey in autism really started when i lived in a residential unit for adults with autism .
most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals . this is a long time ago .
and for them , autism was devastating .
they had profound intellectual disabilities .
they did n't talk . but most of all , they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them , from their environment and from the people .
in fact , at the time , if you walked into a school for individuals with autism , you 'd hear a lot of noise , plenty of commotion , actions , people doing things , but they 're always doing things by themselves .
so they may be looking at a light in the ceiling , or they may be isolated in the corner , or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements , in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere .
extremely , extremely isolated .
well , now we know that autism is this disruption , the disruption of this resonance that i am telling you .
these are survival skills .
these are survival skills that we inherited over many , many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution .
you see , babies are born in a state of utter fragility .
without the caregiver , they would n't survive , so it stands to reason that nature would endow them with these mechanisms of survival .
they orient to the caregiver .
from the first days and weeks of life , babies prefer to hear human sounds rather than just they prefer to look at people rather than at things , and even as they 're looking at people , they look at people 's eyes , because the eye is the window to the other person 's experiences , so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away .
well , they orient to the caregiver .
the caregiver seeks the baby .
and it 's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind , the social mind , the social brain , depends on .
we always think about autism as something that happens later on in life .
it does n't . it begins with the beginning of life .
as babies engage with caregivers , they soon realize that , well , there is something in between the ears that is very important - it 's invisible , you ca n't see - but is really critical , and that thing is called attention .
and they learn soon enough , even before they can utter one word that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want .
they also learn to follow other people 's gaze , because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about .
and soon enough , they start to learn about the meaning of things , because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something , they 're not just getting a directional cue , they are getting the other person 's meaning of that thing , the attitude , and soon enough they start building this body of meanings , but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction .
those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others .
well , this is a little 15-month-old little girl , and she has autism .
and i am coming so close to her that i am maybe two inches from her face , and she 's quite oblivious to me .
imagine if i did that to you , and i came two inches from your face .
you 'd do probably two things , would n't you ?
you would recoil . you would call the police . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you would do something , because it 's literally impossible to penetrate somebody 's physical space and not get a reaction .
we do so , remember , intuitively , effortlessly .
this is our body wisdom . it 's not something that is mediated by our language . our body just knows that , and we 've known that for a long time .
and this is not something that happens to humans only .
it happens to some of our phylatic cousins , because if you 're a monkey , and you look at another monkey , and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you , and that is considered to be a signal or threat , well , you are not going to be alive for long .
so something that in other species are survival mechanisms , without them they would n't basically live , we bring into the context of human beings , and this is what we need to simply act , act socially .
now , she is oblivious to me , and i am so close to her , and you think , maybe she can see you , maybe she can hear you .
well , a few minutes later , she goes to the corner of the room , and she finds a tiny little piece of candy , an m & m.
so i could not attract her attention , but something , a thing , did .
now , most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people .
now , for this girl , that division line is not so clear , and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like .
now remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences .
now , what she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging moment by moment as she is isolating herself further and further .
so we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic , the brain determines who we are going to be .
but in fact the brain also becomes who we are , and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction , this is what 's happening with her mind and this is what 's happening with her brain .
well , autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders , and it 's a brain disorder .
it 's a disorder that begins much prior to the time that the child is born .
we now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism .
there are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled , but there are those that are gifted .
there are those individuals who do n't talk at all .
there are those individuals who talk too much .
there are those individuals that if you observe them in their school , you see them running the periphery fence of the school all day if you let them , to those individuals who can not stop coming to you and trying to engage you repeatedly , relentlessly , but often in an awkward fashion , without that immediate resonance .
well , this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time .
when i started in this field , we thought that there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 , a very rare condition .
well , now we know it 's more like one in 100 .
there are millions of individuals with autism all around us .
the societal cost of this condition is huge .
in the u.s. alone , maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars , and you know what ? most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled , individuals who need wrap-around services , services that are very , very intensive , and those services can cost in excess of 60 to 80,000 dollars a year .
those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment , because now we know that autism creates itself as they diverge in that pathway of learning that i mentioned to you .
were we to be able to identify this condition at an earlier point , and intervene and treat , i can tell you , and this has been probably something that has changed my life in the past 10 years , this notion that we can absolutely attenuate this condition .
also , we have a window of opportunity , because the brain is malleable for just so long , and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life .
it 's not that that window closes . it does n't .
but it diminishes considerably .
and yet , the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years , and in disadvantaged populations , the populations that do n't have access to clinical services , rural populations , minorities , the age of diagnosis is later still , which is almost as if i were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe .
so i feel that we have a bio-ethical imperative .
the science is there , but no science is of relevance if it does n't have an impact on the community , and we just ca n't afford that missed opportunity , because children with autism become adults with autism , and we feel that those things that we can do for these children , for those families , early on , will have lifetime consequences , for the child , for the family , and for the community at large .
so this is our view of autism .
there are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism . in fact , we believe that there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism , and genetic anomalies , much more than just genes .
and we actually have a bit of a question here , because if there are so many different causes of autism , how do you go from those liabilities to the actual syndrome ? because people like myself , when we walk into a playroom , we recognize a child as having autism .
so how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity ?
and the answer is , what lies in between , which is development .
and in fact , we are very interested in those first two years of life , because those liabilities do n't necessarily convert into autism .
autism creates itself .
were we to be able to intervene during those years of life , we might attenuate for some , and god knows , maybe even prevent for others .
so how do we do that ?
how do we enter that feeling of resonance , how do we enter another person 's being ?
i remember when i interacted with that 15-month-older , that the thing that came to mind was , " how do you come into her world ?
is she thinking about me ? is she thinking about others ? "
well , it 's hard to do that , so we had to create the technologies . we had to basically step inside a body .
we had to see the world through her eyes .
and so in the past many years we 've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking .
we can see moment by moment what children are engaging with .
well , this is my colleague warren jones , with whom we 've been building these methods , these studies , for the past 12 years , and you see there a happy five-month-older , it 's a five-month little boy who is going to watch things that are brought from his world , his mom , the caregiver , but also experiences that he would have were he to be in his daycare .
what we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory , but in order for us to do that , we had to create these very sophisticated measures , measures of how people , how little babies , how newborns , engage with the world , moment by moment , what is important , and what is not .
well , we created those measures , and here , what you see is what we call a funnel of attention .
you 're watching a video .
those frames are separated by about a second through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds , and we freeze one frame , and this is what the typical children are doing .
in this scan pass , in green here , are two-year-olds with autism .
so on that frame , the children who are typical are watching this , the emotion of expression of that little boy as he 's fighting a little bit with the little girl .
what are the children with autism doing ?
they are focusing on the revolving door , opening and shutting .
well , i can tell you that this divergence that you 're seeing here does n't happen only in our five-minute experiment .
it happens moment by moment in their real lives , and their minds are being formed , and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers .
well , we took a construct from our pediatrician friends , the concept of growth charts .
you know , when you take a child to the pediatrician , and so you have physical height , and weight .
well we decided that we 're going to create growth charts of social engagement , and we sought children from the time that they are born , and what you see here on the x-axis is two , three , four , five , six months and nine , until about the age of 24 months , and this is the percent of their viewing time that they are focusing on people 's eyes , and this is their growth chart .
they start over here , they love people 's eyes , and it remains quite stable .
it sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months .
now , let 's see what 's happening with babies who became autistic .
it 's something very different .
it starts way up here , but then it 's a free fall .
it 's very much like they brought into this world the reflex that orients them to people , but it has no traction .
it 's almost as if that stimulus , you , you 're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives .
now , we thought that those data were so powerful in a way , that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life , because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-older , you 'd be surprised by how social those babies are .
and what we see in the first six months of life is that those two groups can be segregated very easily .
and using these kinds of measures , and many others , what we found out is that our science could , in fact , identify this condition early on .
we did n't have to wait for the behaviors of autism to emerge in the second year of life .
if we measured things that are , evolutionarily , highly conserved , and developmentally very early emerging , things that are online from the first weeks of life , we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months , and that 's what we are doing now .
now , we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children , but this would be for naught if we did n't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community .
now we want those devices , of course , to be deployed by those who are in the trenches , our colleagues , the primary care physicians , who see every child , and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice , because they have to see so many children .
and we want to do that universally so that we do n't miss any child , but this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention , for treatment .
we need to be able to work with the families , to support the families , to manage those first years with them . we need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment , because those treatments are going to change these children 's and those families ' lives .
now , when we think about what we -lsb- can -rsb- do in those first years , i can tell you , having been in this field for so long , one feels really rejuvenated .
there is a sense that the science that one worked on can actually have an impact on realities , preventing , in fact , those experiences that i really started in my journey in this field .
i thought at the time that this was an intractable condition .
no longer . we can do a great deal of things .
and the idea is not to cure autism .
that 's not the idea .
what we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times , the profound intellectual disabilities , the lack of language , the profound , profound isolation .
we feel that individuals with autism , in fact , have a very special perspective on the world , and we need diversity , and they can work extremely well in some areas of strength : predictable situations , situations that can be defined .
because after all , they learn about the world almost like about it , rather than learning how to function in it .
but this is a strength , if you 're working , for example , in technology .
and there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities .
we want them to be free of that .
we want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths but to fulfill their promise .
well thank you for listening to me . -lrb- applause -rrb- so here 's the good news about families .
the last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family .
we have blended families , adopted families , we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house .
but through it all , the family has grown stronger .
eight in 10 say the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in .
now , here 's the bad news .
nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of family life .
every parent i know , myself included , feels like we 're constantly playing defense .
just when our kids stop teething , they start having tantrums .
just when they stop needing our help taking a bath , they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying .
and here 's the worst news of all .
our children sense we 're out of control .
ellen galinsky of the families and work institute asked 1,000 children , " if you were granted one wish about your parents , what would it be ? "
the parents predicted the kids would say , spending more time with them .
they were wrong . the kids ' number one wish ?
that their parents be less tired and less stressed .
so how can we change this dynamic ?
are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress , draw our family closer , and generally prepare our children to enter the world ?
i spent the last few years trying to answer that question , traveling around , meeting families , talking to scholars , experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to warren buffett 's bankers to the green berets .
i was trying to figure out , what do happy families do right and what can i learn from them to make my family happier ?
i want to tell you about one family that i met , and why i think they offer clues .
at 7 p.m. on a sunday in hidden springs , idaho , where the six members of the starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week : the family meeting .
the starrs are a regular american family with their share of regular american family problems .
david is a software engineer . eleanor takes care of their four children , ages 10 to 15 .
one of those kids tutors math on the far side of town .
one has lacrosse on the near side of town .
one has asperger syndrome . one has adhd .
" we were living in complete chaos , " eleanor said .
what the starrs did next , though , was surprising .
instead of turning to friends or relatives , they looked to david 's workplace .
they turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in japan to startups in silicon valley .
in agile , workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time .
so instead of having executives issue grand proclamations , the team in effect manages itself .
you have constant feedback . you have daily update sessions .
you have weekly reviews . you 're constantly changing .
david said when they brought this system into their home , the family meetings in particular increased communication , decreased stress , and made everybody happier to be part of the family team .
when my wife and i adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters , it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born .
and these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes .
so what is agile , and why can it help with something that seems so different , like families ?
in 1983 , jeff sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in new england .
he was very frustrated with how software got designed .
companies followed the waterfall method , right , in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below , and no one had ever consulted the programmers .
eighty-three percent of projects failed .
they were too bloated or too out of date by the time they were done .
sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas did n't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time .
he read 30 years of harvard business review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called " the new new product development game . "
it said that the pace of business was quickening - and by the way , this was in 1986 - and the most successful companies were flexible .
it highlighted toyota and canon and likened their adaptable , tight-knit teams to rugby scrums .
as sutherland told me , we got to that article , and said , " that 's it . "
in sutherland 's system , companies do n't use large , massive projects that take two years .
they do things in small chunks .
nothing takes longer than two weeks .
so instead of saying , " you guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network , " you say , " you go off and come up with one element , then bring it back . let 's talk about it . let 's adapt . "
you succeed or fail quickly .
today , agile is used in a hundred countries , and it 's sweeping into management suites .
inevitably , people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families .
you had blogs pop up , and some manuals were written .
even the sutherlands told me that they had an agile thanksgiving , where you had one group of people working on the food , one setting the table , and one greeting visitors at the door .
sutherland said it was the best thanksgiving ever .
so let 's take one problem that families face , crazy mornings , and talk about how agile can help .
a key plank is accountability , so teams use information radiators , these large boards in which everybody is accountable .
so the starrs , in adapting this to their home , created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores .
so on the morning i visited , eleanor came downstairs , poured herself a cup of coffee , sat in a reclining chair , and she sat there , kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs , checked the list , made themselves breakfast , checked the list again , put the dishes in the dishwasher , rechecked the list , fed the pets or whatever chores they had , checked the list once more , gathered their belongings , and made their way to the bus .
it was one of the most astonishing family dynamics i have ever seen .
and when i strenuously objected this would never work in our house , our kids needed way too much monitoring , eleanor looked at me .
" that 's what i thought , " she said .
" i told david , ' keep your work out of my kitchen . ' but i was wrong . "
so i turned to david : " so why does it work ? "
he said , " you ca n't underestimate the power of doing this . "
and he made a checkmark .
he said , " in the workplace , adults love it .
with kids , it 's heaven . "
the week we introduced a morning checklist into our house , it cut parental screaming in half . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but the real change did n't come until we had these family meetings .
so following the agile model , we ask three questions : what worked well in our family this week , what did n't work well , and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead ?
everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on .
and suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters ' mouths .
what worked well this week ?
getting over our fear of riding bikes . making our beds .
what did n't work well ? our math sheets , or greeting visitors at the door .
like a lot of parents , our kids are something like bermuda triangles .
like , thoughts and ideas go in , but none ever comes out , i mean at least not that are revealing .
this gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts .
but the most surprising part was when we turned to , what are we going to work on in the week ahead ?
you know , the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves , and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids .
our kids love this process .
so they would come up with all these ideas .
you know , greet five visitors at the door this week , get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed .
kick someone , lose desserts for a month .
it turns out , by the way , our girls are little stalins .
we constantly have to kind of dial them back .
now look , naturally there 's a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week , but the truth is it did n't really bother us .
it felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that would n't light up their world for many years to come .
three years later - our girls are almost eight now - we 're still holding these meetings .
my wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom .
so what did we learn ?
the word " agile " entered the lexicon in 2001 when jeff sutherland and a group of designers met in utah and wrote a 12-point agile manifesto .
i think the time is right for an agile family manifesto .
i 've taken some ideas from the starrs and from many other families i met .
i 'm proposing three planks .
plank number one : adapt all the time .
when i became a parent , i figured , you know what ?
we 'll set a few rules and we 'll stick to them .
that assumes , as parents , we can anticipate every problem that 's going to arise .
we ca n't . what 's great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what 's happening to you in real time .
it 's like they say in the internet world : if you 're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago , you 're doing the wrong thing .
parents can learn a lot from that .
but to me , " adapt all the time " means something deeper , too .
we have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts .
the truth is , their ideas are stale , whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas to make groups and teams work effectively .
let 's just take a few examples .
let 's take the biggest issue of all : family dinner .
everybody knows that having family dinner with your children is good for the kids .
but for so many of us , it does n't work in our lives .
i met a celebrity chef in new orleans who said , " no problem , i 'll just time-shift family dinner .
i 'm not home , ca n't make family dinner ?
we 'll have family breakfast . we 'll meet for a bedtime snack .
we 'll make sunday meals more important . "
and the truth is , recent research backs him up .
it turns out there 's only 10 minutes of productive time in any family meal .
the rest of it 's taken up with " take your elbows off the table " and " pass the ketchup . "
you can take that 10 minutes and move it to any part of the day and have the same benefit .
so time-shift family dinner . that 's adaptability .
an environmental psychologist told me , " if you 're sitting in a hard chair on a rigid surface , you 'll be more rigid .
if you 're sitting on a cushioned chair , you 'll be more open . "
she told me , " when you 're discipling your children , sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface .
the conversation will go better . "
my wife and i actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations because i was sitting above in the power position .
so move where you sit . that 's adaptability .
the point is there are all these new ideas out there .
we 've got to hook them up with parents .
so plank number one : adapt all the time .
be flexible , be open-minded , let the best ideas win .
plank number two : empower your children .
our instinct as parents is to order our kids around .
it 's easier , and frankly , we 're usually right .
there 's a reason that few systems have been more waterfall over time than the family .
but the single biggest lesson we learned is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible .
enlist the children in their own upbringing .
just yesterday , we were having our family meeting , and we had voted to work on overreacting .
so we said , " okay , give us a reward and give us a punishment . okay ? "
so one of my daughters threw out , you get five minutes of overreacting time all week .
so we kind of liked that .
but then her sister started working the system .
she said , " do i get one five-minute overreaction or can i get 10 30-second overreactions ? "
i loved that . spend the time however you want .
now give us a punishment . okay .
if we get 15 minutes of overreaction time , that 's the limit .
every minute above that , we have to do one pushup .
so you see , this is working . now look , this system is n't lax .
there 's plenty of parental authority going on .
but we 're giving them practice becoming independent , which of course is our ultimate goal .
just as i was leaving to come here tonight , one of my daughters started screaming .
the other one said , " overreaction ! overreaction ! "
and started counting , and within 10 seconds it had ended .
to me that is a certified agile miracle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and by the way , research backs this up too .
children who plan their own goals , set weekly schedules , evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives .
the point is , we have to let our children succeed on their own terms , and yes , on occasion , fail on their own terms .
i was talking to warren buffett 's banker , and he was chiding me for not letting my children make mistakes with their allowance .
and i said , " but what if they drive into a ditch ? "
he said , " it 's much better to drive into a ditch with a $ 6 allowance than a $ 60,000-a-year salary or a $ 6 million inheritance . "
so the bottom line is , empower your children .
plank number three : tell your story .
adaptability is fine , but we also need bedrock .
jim collins , the author of " good to great , " told me that successful human organizations of any kind have two things in common : they preserve the core , they stimulate progress .
so agile is great for stimulating progress , but i kept hearing time and again , you need to preserve the core .
so how do you do that ?
collins coached us on doing something that businesses do , which is define your mission and identify your core values .
so he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement .
we did the family equivalent of a corporate retreat .
we had a pajama party .
i made popcorn . actually , i burned one , so i made two .
my wife bought a flip chart .
and we had this great conversation , like , what 's important to us ?
what values do we most uphold ?
and we ended up with 10 statements .
we are travelers , not tourists .
we do n't like dilemmas . we like solutions .
again , research shows that parents should spend less time worrying about what they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right , worry less about the bad times and build up the good times .
this family mission statement is a great way to identify what it is that you do right .
a few weeks later , we got a call from the school .
one of our daughters had gotten into a spat .
and suddenly we were worried , like , do we have a mean girl on our hands ?
and we did n't really know what to do , so we called her into my office .
the family mission statement was on the wall , and my wife said , " so , anything up there seem to apply ? "
and she kind of looked down the list , and she said , " bring people together ? "
suddenly we had a way into the conversation .
another great way to tell your story is to tell your children where they came from .
researchers at emory gave children a simple " what do you know " test .
do you know where your grandparents were born ?
do you know where your parents went to high school ?
do you know anybody in your family who had a difficult situation , an illness , and they overcame it ?
the children who scored highest on this " do you know " scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives .
the " do you know " test was the single biggest predictor of emotional health and happiness .
as the author of the study told me , children who have a sense of - they 're part of a larger narrative have greater self-confidence .
so my final plank is , tell your story .
spend time retelling the story of your family 's positive moments and how you overcame the negative ones .
if you give children this happy narrative , you give them the tools to make themselves happier .
i was a teenager when i first read " anna karenina " and its famous opening sentence , " all happy families are alike .
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way . "
when i first read that , i thought , " that sentence is inane .
of course all happy families are n't alike . "
but as i began working on this project , i began changing my mind .
recent scholarship has allowed us , for the first time , to identify the building blocks that successful families have .
i 've mentioned just three here today : adapt all the time , empower the children , tell your story .
is it possible , all these years later , to say tolstoy was right ?
the answer , i believe , is yes .
when leo tolstoy was five years old , his brother nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick , which he had hidden in a ravine on the family 's estate in russia .
if the stick were ever found , all humankind would be happy .
tolstoy became consumed with that stick , but he never found it .
in fact , he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden .
he still lies there today , covered in a layer of green grass .
that story perfectly captures for me the final lesson that i learned : happiness is not something we find , it 's something we make .
almost anybody who 's looked at well-run organizations has come to pretty much the same conclusion .
greatness is not a matter of circumstance .
it 's a matter of choice .
you do n't need some grand plan . you do n't need a waterfall .
you just need to take small steps , accumulate small wins , keep reaching for that green stick .
in the end , this may be the greatest lesson of all .
what 's the secret to a happy family ? try .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thirteen trillion dollars in wealth has evaporated over the course of the last two years .
we 've questioned the future of capitalism .
we 've questioned the financial industry .
we 've looked at our government oversight .
we 've questioned where we 're going .
and yet , at the same time , this very well may be a seminal moment in american history , an opportunity for the consumer to actually take control and guide us to a new trajectory in america .
i 'm calling this the great unwind .
and the idea is a simple , simple idea , which is the fact that the consumer has moved from a state of anxiety to action .
consumers who represent 72 percent of the gdp of america have actually started , just like banks and just like businesses , to de-leverage , to unwind their leverage , in daily life , to remove themselves from the liability and risk that presents itself as we move forward .
so , to understand this - and i 'm going to stress this - it 's not about the consumer being in retreat .
the consumer is empowered .
in order to understand this , we 're going to step back and look a little bit at what 's happened over the course of the last year and a half .
so , if you 've been gone , this is the easy cliffsnotes on what 's happened in the economy . okay ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unemployment up . housing values down . equity markets down .
commodity prices are like this .
if you 're a mom trying to manage a budget , and oil was 150 dollars a barrel last summer , and it 's somewhere between 50 and 70 , do you plan vacations ? how do you buy ?
what is your strategy in your household ?
will the bailout work ? we have national debt , detroit , currency valuations , healthcare , all these issues facing us .
you put them all together , you mix them up in a bouillabaisse , and you have consumer confidence that 's basically a ticking time-bomb .
in fact , let 's go back and look at what caused this crisis , because the consumer , all of us , in our daily lives , actually contributed a large part to the problem .
this is something i call the 50-20 paradox .
it took us 50 years to reach annual savings ratings of almost 10 percent . 50 years .
do you know what this was right here ?
this was world war ii . do you know why savings was so high ?
there was nothing to buy , unless you wanted to buy some rivets . right ?
so , what happened though , over the course of the last 20 years - we went from a 10 percent savings rate to a negative savings rate .
because we binged . we bought extra-large cars , supersized everything , we bought remedies for restless leg syndrome .
all these things together basically created a factor where the consumer sort of drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today .
the personal debt-to-income ratio basically went from 65 percent to 135 percent in the span of about 15 years .
so consumers got overleveraged .
and of course our banks did as well , as did our federal government .
this is an absolutely staggering chart .
it shows leverage , trended out from 1919 to 2009 .
and what you end up seeing is the whole phenomenon of the fact that we are actually stepping forth and basically leveraging future education , future children in our households .
so if you look at this in the context of visualizing the bailout , what you can see is if you stack up dollar bills , first of all , 360,000 dollars is about the size of a five-foot-four guy .
but if you stack it up , you just see this amazing , staggering amount of dollars that have been put into the system to fund and bail us out .
so this is the first 315 billion .
but i read this fact the other day , that one trillion seconds equals 32 thousand years , so if you think about that , the context , the casualness with which we talk about trillion-dollar bailout here , and trillion there , we are stacking ourselves up for long-term leverage .
however , consumers have moved .
they are taking responsibility .
what we 're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate .
in fact , 11 straight months of savings have happened since the beginning of the crisis .
we are working our way back up to that 10 percent .
also , remarkably , in the fourth quarter , spending dropped to its lowest level in 62 years , almost a 3.7 percent decline .
visa now reports that more people are using debit cards than they 're using credit cards .
so we 're starting to pay for things with money that we have .
and we 're starting to be much more careful about how we save and how we invest .
but that 's not really the whole story .
because this has also been a dramatic time of transformation .
and you 've got to admit , over the course of the last year and a half , consumers have been doing some pretty weird things .
it 's been pretty staggering , what we 've lived through .
if you take into account 80 percent of all americans were born after world war ii , this is essentially our depression .
and so , as a result , some crazy things have happened .
i 'll give you some examples . lets talk about dentists , vasectomies , guns and shark attacks . okay ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dentists report molars , you know , people grinding their teeth , coming in and reporting the fact that they 've had stress .
and so there is an increase in people having to have their fillings replaced .
guns , gun sales , according to the fbi , who does background checks , are up almost 25 percent since january .
vasectomies are up 48 percent , according to the cornell institute .
and lastly , but a very good point , hopefully not related to the former point i just made , which is that shark attacks are at their lowest level from 2003 .
does anybody know why ?
no one is at the beach . so there is a bright side to everything .
but seriously , what we see happening , and the reason i want to stress that the consumer is not in retreat , is that this is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer who drove us into this recession to lead us right back out .
and what i mean by that is that we can move from mindless consumption to mindful consumption . right ?
if you think about the last three decades , the consumer has moved from savvy about marketing in the ' 90s , to gathering all these amazing social and search tools in this decade , but the one thing that has been holding them back is the ability to discriminate .
by restricting their demand , consumers can actually align their values with their spending , and drive capitalism and business to not just be about more , but be about better .
we 're going to explain that right now .
based on y & r 's brandasset valuator , proprietary tool of vml and young & rubicam , we set out to understand what 's been happening in the crisis with the consumer marketplace .
we found a couple of really interesting things .
we 're going to go through four value-shifts that we see driving new consumer behaviors , that offer new management principles .
the first cultural value shift that we see is this tendency toward something we call liquid life .
this is the movement from americans defining their success on having things to having liquidity , because the less excess that you have around you , the more nimble and fleet of foot you are .
as a result , déclassé consumption is in .
déclassé consumption is the whole idea that spending money frivolously makes you look a little bit anti-fashion .
the management principle is dollars and cents .
so let 's look at some examples of this déclassé consumption that falls out of this value .
first things is we see something must be happening when p. diddy vows to tone down his bling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but seriously , we also have this phenomenon on madison avenue and in other places , where people are actually walking out of luxury boutiques with ordinary , sort of generic paper bags to hide the brand purchases .
we see high-end haggling in fashion today .
high-end haggling for luxury and real estate .
we also see just a relaxing of ego , and sort of a dismantling of artifice .
this is a story on the yacht club that 's all basically blue collar .
blue-collar yacht club , where you can join the yacht club , but you 've got to work in the boat yard , as sort of condition of membership .
we also see the trend toward tourism that 's a little bit more low key . right ?
agritourism , going to vineyards and going to farms .
and then we also see this movement forward from dollars and cents .
what businesses can do to connect with these new mindsets is really interesting .
a couple things that are kind of cool .
one is that frito-lay figured out this liquidity thing with their consumer .
they found their consumer had more money at the beginning of the month , less at the end of the month . so what they did is they started to change their packaging .
larger packs at the beginning of the month , smaller packaging at the end of the month .
really interestingly , too , was the san francisco giants .
they 've just instituted dynamic pricing .
so it takes into account everything from the pitcher match-ups , to the weather , to the team records , in setting prices for the consumer .
another quick example of these types of movements is the rise of zynga .
zynga has risen on the consumer 's desire to not want to be locked in to fixed-cost .
again , this theme is about variable cost , variable living .
so micropayments have become huge .
and lastly , some people are using hulu actually as a device to get rid of their cable bill .
so , really clever ideas there that are kind of being taken ahold and marketers are starting to understand .
the second of the four values is this movement toward ethics and fair play .
we see that play itself out with empathy and respect .
the consumer is demanding it .
and , as a result , businesses must provide not only value , but values .
increasingly , consumers are looking at the culture of the company , looking for their conduct in the marketplace .
so , what we see with empathy and respect , lots of really hopeful things that have come out of this recession .
and i 'll give you a few examples .
one is the rise toward communities and neighborhoods , and increased emphasis on your neighbors as your support system .
also a wonderful byproduct of sort of a really lousy thing , which has been unemployment , is a rise in volunteerism that 's been noted in our country .
we also see the phenomenon - some of you may have " boomerang kids " - these are " boomerang alumni , " where universities are actually reconnecting with alumni in helping them with jobs , sharing skills and retraining .
we also talked about character and professionalism .
we had this miracle on the hudson in new york city , you know , in january , and suddenly sully has become a key name on babycenter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , from a value and values standpoint , what companies can do is connect in lots of different ways .
microsoft is doing something wonderful .
they are actually vowing to retrain two million americans with i.t. training , using their existing infrastructure to do something good .
also a really interesting company is gore-tex .
gore-tex is all about personal accountability of their management and their employees , to the point where they really kind of shun the idea of bosses .
but they also talk about the fact that their executives , all of their expense reports are put onto their company intranet for everyone to see .
complete transparency .
think twice before you have that bottle of wine .
the third of the four laws of post-crisis consumerism is about durable living .
we 're seeing on our data that consumers are realizing this is a marathon , not a sprint .
they are digging in . and they 're looking for ways to extract value out of every purchase that they make .
witness the fact that americans are holding on to their cars longer than ever before , 9.4 years on average , in march . a record .
we also see the fact that libraries have become a huge resource for america .
did you know that 68 percent of americans now carry a library card ?
the highest percentage ever in our nation 's history .
so what you see in this trend is also the accumulation of knowledge .
continuing education is up .
everything is focused on betterment , and training , and development and moving forward .
we also see a big diy movement .
i was fascinated to learn that 30 percent of all homes in america are actually built by owners .
that includes cottages and the like . but 30 percent .
so , people are getting their hands dirty . they are rolling up their sleeves .
they want these skills .
we see that with the phenomenon of raising backyard hens and chickens and ducks . and when you work out the math , they say it does n't work , but the principle is there that it 's about being sustainable and taking care of yourself .
and then we look at the high line in new york city , an excellent use of reimagining existing infrastructure for something good , which is a brand new park in new york city .
so , what brands can do , and companies , is pay dividends to consumers , be a brand that lasts , offer transparency , promise you 're going to be there beyond today 's sale .
perfect example of that is patagonia .
patagonia 's footprint chronicles basically goes through and tracks every product that they make , and gives you social responsibility , and helps you understand the ethics that are behind the product that they make .
another great example is fidelity .
rather than instant cash-back rewards on your credit or debit purchases , this is about 529 rewards for your student education .
or the interesting company sunrun .
i love this company . they 've created a consumer collective where they put solar panels on households and create a consumer-based utility , where the electricity that they generate is basically pumped back out into the marketplace .
so , it 's a consumer driven co-op .
so , the fourth sort of post-crisis consumerism that we see is this movement about return to the fold .
it 's incredibly important right now .
trust is not parceled out , as we all know .
it 's now about connecting to your communities , connecting to your social networks .
in my book i talked about the fact that 72 percent of people trust what other people say about a brand or a company , versus 15 percent on advertising .
so , in that respect , cooperative consumerism has really taken off .
this is about consumers working together to get what they want out of the marketplace .
let 's look at a couple of quick examples .
the artisanal movement is huge .
everything about locally derived products and services , supporting your local neighborhoods , whether it 's cheeses , wines and other products .
also this rise of local currencies .
realizing that it 's difficult to get loans in this environment , you 're doing business with people you trust , in your local markets .
so , this rise of this sort of local currency is another really interesting phenomenon .
and then they did a recent report i thought was fascinating .
they actually started , in certain communities in the united states , start to publish people 's electricity usage .
and what they found out is when that was available for public record , the people 's electricity usage in those communities dropped .
then we also look at the idea of cow-pooling , which is the whole phenomenon of consumers organizing together to buy meat from organic farms that they know is safe and controlled in the way that they want it to be controlled .
and then there is this other really interesting movement that 's happened in california , which is about carrot mobs .
the traditional thing would be to boycott right ?
have a stick ? well why not have a carrot ?
so these are consumers organizing , pooling their resources to incentify companies to do good .
and then we look at what companies can do .
this is all the opportunity about being a community organizer .
you have to realize that you ca n't fight and control this .
you actually need to organize it .
you need to harness it . you need to give it meaning .
and there is lots of really interesting examples here that we see .
first is just the rise of the fact that zagat 's has actually moved out of and diversified from rating restaurants , into actually rating healthcare .
so what credentials does zagat 's have ?
well , they have a lot , because it 's their network of people . right ?
so that becomes a very powerful force for them to make their brand more elastic .
then you look at the phenomenon of kogi .
this kogi does n't exist . it 's a moving truck . right ?
it 's a moving truck through l.a. , and the only way you can find it is through twitter .
or you look at johnson & johnson 's momversations .
a phenomenal blog that 's been built up .
where j & j basically is tapping into the power of mommy bloggers , allowing them to basically create a forum where they can communicate and they can connect .
and it 's also become a very , very valuable sort of advertising revenue for j & j as well .
this plus the fact that you 've got phenomenal work from ceos from ford to zappos , connecting on twitter , creating an open environment , allowing their employees to be part of the process , rather than hidden behind walls .
you see this rising force in sort of total transparency and openness that companies are starting to adopt , all because the consumer is demanding it .
so , when we look at this and we step back , what i believe is that the crisis that exists today is definitely real .
it 's been tremendously powerful for consumers .
but , at the same time , this is also a tremendous opportunity .
and the chinese character for crisis is actually the same side of the same coin .
crisis equals opportunity .
what we 're seeing with consumers right now is the ability for them to actually lead us forward out of this recession .
so , we believe that values-driven spending will force capitalism to be better .
it will drive innovation .
it will make longer-lasting products . it will create better , more intuitive customer service .
it will give us the opportunity to connect with companies that share the values that we share .
so , when we look back and step out at this and see the beginning of these trends that we 're seeing in our data , we see a very hopeful picture for the future of america .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- of the five senses , vision is the one that i appreciate the most , and it 's the one that i can least take for granted .
i think this is partially due to my father , who was blind .
it was a fact that he did n't make much of a fuss about , usually .
one time in nova scotia , when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun - yeah , same one as in the carly simon song , which may or may not refer to james taylor , warren beatty or mick jagger ; we 're not really sure .
they handed out these dark plastic viewers that allowed us to look directly at the sun without damaging our eyes .
but dad got really scared : he did n't want us doing that .
he wanted us instead to use these cheap cardboard viewers so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would be damaged .
i thought this was a little strange at the time .
what i did n't know at the time was that my father had actually been born with perfect eyesight .
when he and his sister martha were just very little , their mom took them out to see a total eclipse - or actually , a solar eclipse - and not long after that , both of them started losing their eyesight .
decades later , it turned out that the source of their blindness was most likely some sort of bacterial infection .
as near as we can tell , it had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse , but by then my grandmother had already gone to her grave thinking it was her fault .
so , dad graduated harvard in 1946 , married my mom , and bought a house in lexington , massachusetts , where the first shots were fired against the british in 1775 , although we did n't actually hit any of them until concord .
he got a job working for raytheon , designing guidance systems , which was part of the route 128 high-tech axis in those days - so the equivalent of silicone valley in the ' 70s .
dad was n't a real militaristic kind of guy ; he just really felt bad that he was n't able to fight in world war ii on account of his handicap , although they did let him get through the several-hour-long army physical exam before they got to the very last test , which was for vision .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , dad started racking up all of these patents and gaining a reputation as a blind genius , rocket scientist , inventor .
but to us he was just dad , and our home life was pretty normal .
as a kid , i watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program and a little bit of politics .
i played a lot of chess .
but at the age of 14 , a friend of mine got me interested in comic books , and i decided that was what i wanted to do for a living .
so , here 's my dad : he 's a scientist , he 's an engineer and he 's a military contractor .
so , he has four kids , right ?
one grows up to become a computer scientist , one grows up to join the navy , one grows up to become an engineer , and then there 's me : the comic book artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which , incidentally , makes me the opposite of dean kamen , because i 'm a comic book artist , son of an inventor , and he 's an inventor , son of a comic book artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right , it 's true .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the funny thing is , dad had a lot of faith in me .
he had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist , even though he had no direct evidence that i was any good whatsoever : everything he saw was just a blur .
now , this gives a real meaning to the term " blind faith , " which does n't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people .
now , faith in things which can not be seen , which can not be proved , is not the sort of faith that i 've ever really related to all that much .
i tend to like science , where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation of what we know .
but there 's a middle ground , too .
a middle ground tread by people like poor old charles babbage , and his steam-driven computers that were never built .
nobody really understood what it was that he had in mind , except for ada lovelace , and he went to his grave trying to pursue that dream .
vannevar bush with his memex - this idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips - he had this vision .
and i think a lot of people in his day probably thought he was a bit of a kook .
and , yeah , we can look back in retrospect and say , yeah , ha-ha , you know - it 's all microfilm . but that 's - that 's not the point . he understood the shape of the future .
so did j.c.r. licklider and his notions for computer-human interaction .
same thing : he understood the shape of the future , even though it was something that would only be implemented by people much later .
or paul baran , and his vision for packet switching .
hardly anybody listened to him in his day .
or even the people who actually pulled it off , the people at bolt , beranek and newman in boston , who just would sketch out these structures of what would eventually become a worldwide network , and sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers and arguing over dinner at howard johnson 's - on route 128 in lexington , massachusetts , just two miles from where i was studying the queen 's gambit deferred and listening to gladys knight & the pips singing " midnight train to georgia , " while - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - in my dad 's big easy chair , you know ?
so , three types of vision , right ?
vision based on what one can not see : the vision of that unseen and unknowable .
the vision of that which has already been proven or can be ascertained .
and this third kind of vision , of something which can be , which may be , based on knowledge , but is as yet unproven .
now , we 've seen a lot of examples of people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science , but i think it 's also true in the arts , it 's true in politics , it 's even true in personal endeavors .
what it comes down to , really , is four basic principles : learn from everyone , follow no one , watch for patterns , and work like hell .
i think these are the four principles that go into this .
and it 's that third one , especially , where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves .
what 's interesting is that this particular way of looking at the world , is , i think , only one of four different ways that manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor .
in comics , i know that it results in sort of a formalist attitude towards trying to understand how it works .
then there 's another , more classical , attitude which embraces beauty and craft .
another one which believes in the pure transparency of content .
and then another which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience - and honesty , and rawness .
these are four very different ways of looking at the world . i even gave them names .
the classicist , the animist , and formalist and iconoclast .
interestingly , it seemed to correspond more or less to jung 's four subdivisions of human thought .
and they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight on left and the right ; tradition and revolution on the top and the bottom .
and if you go on the diagonal , you get content and form - and then beauty and truth .
and it probably applies just as much to music and to movies and to fine art , which has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all , or for that matter , nothing to do with our conference theme of " inspired by nature " - except to the extent of the fable of the frog who gives the ride to the scorpion on his back to get across the river because the scorpion promises not to sting him , but then the scorpion does sting him anyway and they both die , but not before the frog asks him why and the scorpion says , " because it 's my nature " -
in that sense , yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so - so this was my nature . the thing was , i saw that the route that i took to discovering this focus in my work and who i was , i saw it as just this road to discovery .
actually , it was just me embracing my nature , which means that i did n't actually fall that far from the tree after all .
so what does a " scientific mind " do in the arts ?
well , i started making comics , but i also started trying to understand them , almost immediately .
and one of the most important things about comics , i discovered , was that comics are a visual medium , but they try to embrace all of the senses within it .
so , the different elements of comics , like pictures and words , and the different symbols and everything in between that comics presents are all funneled through the single conduit of vision .
so you have things like resemblance , where something which resembles the physical world can be abstracted in a couple of different directions : abstracted from resemblance , but still retaining the complete meaning , or abstracted away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plan .
put all these three together , and you have a nice little map of the entire boundary of visual iconography which comics can embrace .
and if you move to the right you also get language , because that 's abstracting even further from resemblance , but still maintaining meaning .
vision is called upon to represent sound and to understand the common properties of those two and their common heritage , as well .
also , to try to represent the texture of sound to capture its essential character through visuals .
and there 's also a balance between the visible and the invisible in comics .
comics is a kind of call and response in which the artist gives you something to see within the panels , and then gives you something to imagine between the panels .
also , another sense which comics ' vision represents , and that 's time .
sequence is a very important aspect of comics .
comics presents a kind of temporal map .
and this temporal map was something that energizes modern comics , but i was wondering if perhaps it also energizes other sorts of forms , and i found some in history .
and you can see this same principle operating in these ancient versions of the same idea .
what 's happening is , the art form is colliding with the given technology , whether it 's paint on stone , like the tomb of the scribe in ancient egypt , or a bas-relief sculpture rising up a stone column , or a 200-foot-long embroidery , or painted deerskin and tree bark running across 88 accordion-folded pages .
what 's interesting is , once you hit print - and this is from 1450 , by the way - all of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves : rectilinear panel arrangements , simple line drawings without tone and a left-to-right reading sequence .
and within 100 years , you already start to see word balloons and captions , and it 's really just a hop , skip and a jump from here to here .
so i wrote a book about this in ' 93 , but as i was finishing the book , i had to do a little bit of typesetting , and i was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it , so i bought a computer .
and it was just a little thing - it was n't good for much except text entry - but my father had told me about moore 's law , about moore 's law back in the ' 70s , and i knew what was coming .
and so , i kept my eyes peeled to see if the sort of changes that happened when we went from pre-print comics to print comics would happen when we went beyond , to post-print comics .
so , one of the first things that were proposed was that we could mix the visuals of comics with the sound , motion and interactivity of the cd-roms that were being made in those days .
this was even before the web .
and one of the first things they did was , they tried to take the comics page as-is and transplant it to monitors , which was a classic mcluhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology .
and so , what they would do is , they 'd have these comic pages that resemble print comics pages , and they would introduce all this sound and motion .
the problem was , that if you go with this idea - this basic idea that space equals time in comics - what happens is that when you introduce sound and motion , which are temporal phenomena that can only be represented through time , then they break with that continuity of presentation .
interactivity was another thing .
there were hypertext comics .
but the thing about hypertext is that everything in hypertext is either here , not here or connected to here ; it 's profoundly non-spatial .
the distance from abraham lincoln to a lincoln penny , the penny marshall to the marshall plan to " plan 9 " to nine lives : it 's all the same .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and - but in comics , in comics , every aspect of the work , every element of the work has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times .
so the question was : was there any way to preserve that spatial relationship while still taking advantage of all of the things that digital had to offer us ?
and i found my personal answer for this in those ancient comics that i was showing you .
each of them has a single unbroken reading line , whether it 's going zigzag across the walls or spiraling up a column or just straight left to right , or even going in a backwards zigzag across those 88 accordion-folded pages .
the same thing is happening , and that is that the basic idea that as you move through space you move through time is being carried out without any compromise , but there were compromises when print hit .
adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments , so the basic idea of comics was being broken again and again and again and again .
and i thought , o.k. , well , if that 's true , is there any way , when we go beyond today 's print , to somehow bring that back ?
now , the monitor is just as limited as the page , technically , right ?
it 's a different shape , but other than that it 's the same basic limitation .
but that 's only if you look at the monitor as a page , but not if you look at the monitor as a window .
and that 's what i proposed : that perhaps we could create these comics on an infinite canvas : along the x axis and the y axis and staircases .
we could do circular narratives that were literally circular .
we could do a turn in a story that was literally a turn .
parallel narratives could be literally parallel .
x , y and also z.
so i had all these notions . this was back in the late ' 90s , and other people in my business thought i was pretty crazy , but a lot of people then went on and actually did it .
i 'm going to show you a couple now .
this was an early collage comic by a fellow named jason lex .
and notice what 's going on here .
what i 'm searching for is a durable mutation - that 's what all of us are searching for .
as media head into this new era , we are looking for mutations that are durable , that have some sort of staying power .
now , we 're taking this basic idea of presenting comics in a visual medium , and then we 're carrying it through all the way from beginning to end .
that 's that entire comic you just saw is up on the screen right now .
but even though we 're only experiencing it one piece at a time , that 's just where the technology is right now .
as the technology evolves , as you get full immersive displays and whatnot , this sort of thing will only grow .
it will adapt . it will adapt to its environment : it 's a durable mutation .
here 's another one i 'll show you . this is by drew weing ; this is called , " pup contemplates the heat death of the universe . "
see what 's going on here as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas is you 're creating a more pure expression of what this medium is all about .
we 'll go by this a little quickly - you get the idea .
i just want to get to the last panel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- just one more .
talk about your infinite canvas .
it 's by a guy named daniel merlin goodbrey in britain .
why is this important ?
i think this is important because media , all media , provide us a window back into our world .
now , it could be that motion pictures - and eventually , virtual reality , or something equivalent to it - some sort of immersive display , is going to provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we 're in .
that 's why most people turn to storytelling , is to escape .
but media provides us with a window back into the world that we live in .
and when media evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique .
because what you 're looking at is , you 're looking at comics cubed : you 're looking at comics that are more comics-like than they 've ever been before .
when that happens , you provide people with multiple ways of re-entering the world through different windows , and when you do that , it allows them to triangulate the world that they live in and see its shape .
and that 's why i think this is important .
one of many reasons , but i 've got to go now .
thank you for having me .
when i was growing up in montana , i had two dreams .
i wanted to be a paleontologist , a dinosaur paleontologist , and i wanted to have a pet dinosaur .
and so that 's what i 've been striving for all of my life .
i was very fortunate early in my career .
i was fortunate in finding things .
i was n't very good at reading things .
in fact , i do n't read much of anything .
i am extremely dyslexic , and so reading is the hardest thing i do .
but instead , i go out and i find things .
then i just pick things up .
i basically practice for finding money on the street .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i wander about the hills , and i have found a few things .
and i have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests , the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones .
and it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs were n't the big , stupid , green reptiles that people had thought for so many years .
people were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special .
and so , at that time , i was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues .
we were able to actually say that dinosaurs - based on the evidence we had - that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young , brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds .
so it was pretty interesting stuff .
i have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social .
we have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults .
the appearance of them would have been different - which it is in all social animals .
in social groups of animals , the juveniles always look different than the adults .
the adults can recognize the juveniles ; the juveniles can recognize the adults .
and so we 're making a better picture of what a dinosaur looks like .
and they did n't just all chase jeeps around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it is that social thing that i guess attracted michael crichton .
and in his book , he talked about the social animals .
and then steven spielberg , of course , depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures .
the theme of this story is building a dinosaur , and so we come to that part of " jurassic park . "
michael crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life .
you all know the story , right .
i mean , i assume everyone here has seen " jurassic park . "
if you want to make a dinosaur , you go out , you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap - otherwise known as amber - that has some blood-sucking insects in it , good ones , and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some dna , because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur dna out .
and you take your dna back to the laboratory and you clone it .
and i guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg , or something like that , and then you wait , and , lo and behold , out pops a little baby dinosaur .
and everybody 's happy about that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they 're happy over and over again .
they keep doing it ; they just keep making these things .
and then , then , then , and then ...
then the dinosaurs , being social , act out their socialness , and they get together , and they conspire .
and , of course , that 's what makes steven spielberg 's movie - conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around .
so i assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it , and you drilled into it , and you got something out of that insect , and you cloned it , and you did it over and over and over again , you 'd have a room full of mosquitos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and probably a whole bunch of trees as well .
now if you want dinosaur dna , i say go to the dinosaur .
so that 's what we 've done .
back in 1993 when the movie came out , we actually had a grant from the national science foundation to attempt to extract dna from a dinosaur , and we chose the dinosaur on the left , a tyrannosaurus rex , which was a very nice specimen .
and one of my former doctoral students , dr. mary schweitzer , actually had the background to do this sort of thing .
and so she looked into the bone of this t. rex , one of the thigh bones , and she actually found some very interesting structures in there .
they found these red circular-looking objects , and they looked , for all the world , like red blood cells .
and they 're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone .
and so she thought , well , what the heck .
so she sampled some material out of it .
now it was n't dna ; she did n't find dna .
but she did find heme , which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin .
and that was really cool .
that was interesting .
that was - here we have 65-million-year-old heme .
well we tried and tried and we could n't really get anything else out of it .
so a few years went by , and then we started the hell creek project .
and the hell creek project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find , and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them .
and out in eastern montana there 's a lot of space , a lot of badlands , and not very many people , and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff .
and we did find a lot of stuff .
we found a lot of tyrannosaurs , but we found one special tyrannosaur , and we called it b-rex .
and b-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock .
it was n't a very complete t. rex , and it was n't a very big t. rex , but it was a very special b-rex .
and i and my colleagues cut into it , and we were able to determine , by looking at lines of arrested growth , some lines in it , that b-rex had died at the age of 16 .
we do n't really know how long dinosaurs lived , because we have n't found the oldest one yet .
but this one died at the age of 16 .
we gave samples to mary schweitzer , and she was actually able to determine that b-rex was a female based on medullary tissue found on the inside of the bone .
medullary tissue is the calcium build-up , the calcium storage basically , when an animal is pregnant , when a bird is pregnant .
so here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs .
but mary went further .
she took the bone , and she dumped it into acid .
now we all know that bones are fossilized , and so if you dump it into acid , there should n't be anything left .
but there was something left .
there were blood vessels left .
there were flexible , clear blood vessels .
and so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur .
it was extraordinary .
but she also found osteocytes , which are the cells that laid down the bones .
and try and try , we could not find dna , but she did find evidence of proteins .
but we thought maybe - well , we thought maybe that the material was breaking down after it was coming out of the ground .
we thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast .
and so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer , and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples .
and we did . we got better material .
the cells looked better .
the vessels looked better .
found the protein collagen .
i mean , it was wonderful stuff .
but it 's not dinosaur dna .
so we have discovered that dinosaur dna , and all dna , just breaks down too fast .
we 're just not going to be able to do what they did in " jurassic park . "
we 're not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur .
but birds are dinosaurs .
birds are living dinosaurs .
we actually classify them as dinosaurs .
we now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs .
so the non-avian dinosaurs are the big clunky ones that went extinct .
avian dinosaurs are our modern birds .
so we do n't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i know , you 're as bad as the sixth-graders .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the sixth-graders look at it and they say , " no . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you can call it a dinosaur , but look at the velociraptor : the velociraptor is cool . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " the chicken is not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is our problem , as you can imagine .
the chicken is a dinosaur .
i mean it really is .
you ca n't argue with it because we 're the classifiers and we 've classified it that way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but the sixth-graders demand it .
" fix the chicken . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's what i 'm here to tell you about : how we are going to fix a chicken .
so we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken .
because evolution works , we actually have some evolutionary tools .
we 'll call them biological modification tools .
we have selection .
and we know selection works .
we started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a maltese .
i mean , that 's - that 's definitely genetic modification .
or any of the other funny-looking little dogs .
we also have transgenesis .
transgenesis is really cool too .
that 's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one .
that 's how people make glofish .
you take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish , and , puff , they glow .
and that 's pretty cool .
and they obviously make a lot of money off of them .
and now they 're making glow-rabbits and glow-all-sorts-of-things .
i guess we could make a glow chicken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i do n't think that 'll satisfy the sixth-graders either .
but there 's another thing .
there 's what we call atavism activation .
and atavism activation is basically - an atavism is an ancestral characteristic .
you heard that occasionally children are born with tails , and it 's because it 's an ancestral characteristic .
and so there are a number of atavisms that can happen .
snakes are occasionally born with legs .
and here 's an example .
this is a chicken with teeth .
a fellow by the name of matthew harris at the university of wisconsin in madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth , and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens .
now that 's a good characteristic .
we can save that one .
we know we can use that .
we can make a chicken with teeth .
that 's getting closer .
that 's better than a glowing chicken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a friend of mine , a colleague of mine , dr. hans larsson at mcgill university , is actually looking at atavisms .
and he 's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop , and he 's interested in how birds actually lost their tail .
he 's also interested in the transformation of the arm , the hand , to the wing .
he 's looking for those genes as well .
and i said , " well , if you can find those , i can just reverse them and make what i need to make for the sixth-graders . "
and so he agreed .
and so that 's what we 're looking into .
if you look at dinosaur hands , a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it .
archaeopteryx , which is a bird , a primitive bird , still has that very primitive hand .
but as you can see , the pigeon , or a chicken or anything else , another bird , has kind of a weird-looking hand , because the hand is a wing .
but the cool thing is that , if you look in the embryo , as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand .
it has the three fingers , the three digits .
but a gene turns on that actually fuses those together .
and so what we 're looking for is that gene .
we want to stop that gene from turning on , fusing those hands together , so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand , like the archaeopteryx .
and the same goes for the tails .
birds have basically rudimentary tails .
and so we know that in embryo , as the animal is developing , it actually has a relatively long tail .
but a gene turns on and resorbs the tail , gets rid of it .
so that 's the other gene we 're looking for .
we want to stop that tail from resorbing .
so what we 're trying to do really is take our chicken , modify it and make the chickenosaurus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a cooler-looking chicken .
but it 's just the very basics .
so that really is what we 're doing .
and people always say , " why do that ?
why make this thing ?
what good is it ? "
well , that 's a good question .
actually , i think it 's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things .
and quite frankly , i think if colonel sanders was to be careful how he worded it , he could actually advertise an extra piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway - when our dino-chicken hatches , it will be , obviously , the poster child , or what you might call a poster chick , for technology , entertainment and design .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- marco tempest : what i 'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment .
today 's its debut .
it 's a demonstration of augmented reality .
and the visuals you 're about to see are not prerecorded .
they are live and reacting to me in real time .
i like to think of it as a kind of technological magic .
so fingers crossed .
and keep your eyes on the big screen .
augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery .
it seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask , why , in a technological age , we continue to have this magical sense of wonder .
magic is deception , but it is a deception we enjoy .
to enjoy being deceived , an audience must first suspend its disbelief .
it was the poet samuel taylor coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind .
samuel taylor coleridge : i try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that , for a moment , constitutes poetic faith .
mt : this faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience .
without it , a script is just words .
augmented reality is just the latest technology .
is just an artful demonstration of dexterity .
we are all very good at suspending our disbelief .
we do it every day , while reading novels , watching television or going to the movies .
we willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had .
without this ability there is no magic .
it was jean robert-houdin , france 's greatest illusionist , who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller .
he said something that i 've posted on the wall of my studio .
jean robert-houdin : a conjurer is not a juggler .
he is an actor playing the part of a magician .
mt : which means magic is theater and every trick is a story .
follow the archetypes of narrative fiction .
there are tales of creation and loss , death and resurrection , and obstacles that must be overcome .
now many of them are intensely dramatic .
magicians play with fire and steel , defy the fury of the buzzsaw , dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape .
but audiences do n't come to see the magician die , they come to see him live .
because the best stories always have a happy ending .
the tricks of magic have one special element .
they are stories with a twist .
now edward de bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines .
he said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think .
edward de bono : stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error .
the audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable , but do not , in fact , match what is being done in front of them .
mt : in that respect , magic tricks are like jokes .
jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination .
but when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected , we laugh .
the same thing happens when people watch magic tricks .
the finale defies logic , gives new insight into the problem , and audiences express their amazement with laughter .
it 's fun to be fooled .
one of the key qualities of all stories is that they 're made to be shared .
we feel compelled to tell them .
when i do a trick at a party - -lrb- laughter -rrb- that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again .
they want to share the experience .
that makes my job more difficult , because , if i want to surprise them , i need to tell a story that starts the same , but ends differently - a trick with a twist on a twist .
it keeps me busy .
now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained .
we think in narrative structures .
we connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood .
it 's a uniquely human achievement .
we all want to share our stories , whether it is the trick we saw at the party , the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation .
today , thanks to technology , we can share those stories as never before , by email , facebook , blogs , tweets , on ted.com.
the tools of social networking , these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story .
we turn facts into similes and metaphors , and even fantasies .
we polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole .
our stories make us the people we are and , sometimes , the people we want to be .
they give us our identity and a sense of community .
and if the story is a good one , it might even make us smile .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- phyllis rodriguez : we are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship .
and it is .
and yet , it feels natural to us now .
i first learned that my son had been in the world trade center on the morning of september 11th , 2001 .
we did n't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later .
at the time , we knew that it was political .
we were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son - my husband , orlando , and i and our family .
and when i saw it - and yet , through the shock , the terrible shock , and the terrible explosion in our lives , literally , we were not vengeful .
and a couple of weeks later when zacarias moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism , and the u.s. government called for a death penalty for him , if convicted , my husband and i spoke out in opposition to that , publicly .
through that and through human rights groups , we were brought together with several other victims ' families .
when i saw aicha in the media , coming over when her son was indicted , and i thought , " what a brave woman .
someday i want to meet that woman when i 'm stronger . "
i was still in deep grief ; i knew i did n't have the strength .
i knew i would find her someday , or we would find each other .
because , when people heard that my son was a victim , i got immediate sympathy .
but when people learned what her son was accused of , she did n't get that sympathy .
but her suffering is equal to mine .
so we met in november 2002 , and aicha will now tell you how that came about .
-lrb- translator -rrb- aicha el-wafi : good afternoon , ladies and gentlemen .
i am the mother of zacarias moussaoui .
and i asked the organization of human rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims .
so they introduced me to five families .
and i saw phyllis , and i watched her .
she was the only mother in the group .
the others were brothers , sisters .
and i saw in her eyes that she was a mother , just like me .
i suffered a lot as a mother .
i was married when i was 14 .
i lost a child when i was 15 , a second child when i was 16 .
so the story with zacarias was too much really .
and i still suffer , because my son is like he 's buried alive .
i know she really cried for her son .
but she knows where he is .
my son , i do n't know where he is .
i do n't know if he 's alive . i do n't know if he 's tortured .
i do n't know what happened to him .
so that 's why i decided to tell my story , so that my suffering is something positive for other women .
for all the women , all the mothers that give life , you can give back , you can change .
it 's up to us women , because we are women , because we love our children .
we must be hand-in-hand and do something together .
it 's not against women , it 's for us , for us women , for our children .
i talk against violence , against terrorism .
i go to schools to talk to young , muslim girls so they do n't accept to be married against their will very young .
so if i can save one of the young girls , and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as i did , well this is something good .
this is why i 'm here in front of you .
pr : i would like to say that i have learned so much from aicha , starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members - which was a very private meeting with security , because it was november 2002 , and , frankly , we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country - those of us family members .
but we were all so nervous .
" why does she want to meet us ? "
and then she was nervous .
" why did we want to meet her ? "
what did we want from each other ?
before we knew each others ' names , or anything , we had embraced and wept .
then we sat in a circle with support , with help , from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation .
and aicha started , and she said , " i do n't know if my son is guilty or innocent , but i want to tell you how sorry i am for what happened to your families .
i know what it is to suffer , and i feel that if there is a crime , a person should be tried fairly and punished . "
but she reached out to us in that way , and it was , i 'd like to say , it was an ice-breaker .
and what happened then is we all told our stories , and we all connected as human beings .
by the end of the afternoon - it was about three hours after lunch - we 'd felt as if we 'd known each other forever .
now what i learned from her , is a woman , not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then , and what was being done to her son , but the life she 's had .
i never had met someone with such a hard life , from such a totally different culture and environment from my own .
and i feel that we have a special connection , which i value very much .
and i think it 's all about being afraid of the other , but making that step and then realizing , " hey , this was n't so hard .
who else can i meet that i do n't know , or that i 'm so different from ? "
so , aicha , do you have a couple of words for conclusion ?
because our time is up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- translator -rrb- aw : i wanted to say that we have to try to know other people , the other .
you have to be generous , and your hearts must be generous , your mind must be generous .
you must be tolerant .
you have to fight against violence .
and i hope that someday we 'll all live together in peace and respecting each other .
this is what i wanted to say .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to start with a little story .
so , i grew up in this neighborhood . when i was 15 years old , i went from being what i think was a strapping young athlete , over four months , slowly wasting away until i was basically a famine victim with an unquenchable thirst .
i had basically digested away my body .
and this all came to a head when i was on a backpacking trip , my first one ever actually , on old rag mountain in west virginia , and was putting my face into puddles of water and drinking like a dog .
that night , i was taken into the emergency room and diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in full-blown ketoacidosis .
and i recovered , thanks to the miracles of modern medicine , insulin and other things , and gained all my weight back and more .
and something festered inside me after this happened .
what i thought about was , what caused the diabetes ?
you see , diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your body fights itself , and at the time people thought that somehow maybe exposure to a pathogen had triggered my immune system to fight the pathogen and then kill the cells that make insulin .
and this is what i thought for a long period of time , and that 's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit , the microbes that do bad things .
and that 's where i need my assistant here now .
you may recognize her .
so , i went yesterday , i apologize , i skipped a few of the talks , and i went over to the national academy of sciences building , and they sell toys , giant microbes .
and here we go !
so you have caught flesh-eating disease if you caught that one .
i gotta get back out my baseball ability here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , unfortunately or not surprisingly , most of the microbes they sell at the national academy building are pathogens .
everybody focuses on the things that kill us , and that 's what i was focusing on .
and it turns out that we are covered in a cloud of microbes , and those microbes actually do us good much of the time , rather than killing us .
and so , we 've known about this for some period of time .
people have used microscopes to look at the microbes that cover us , i know you 're not paying attention to me , but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the microbes that cover us .
and if you look at them in the microscope , you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells .
there 's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain .
we are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms .
and unfortunately , if you want to learn about the microorganisms , just looking at them in a microscope is not sufficient .
and so we just heard about the dna sequencing .
it turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their dna .
and that 's what i 've been doing for 20 years , using dna sequencing , collecting samples from various places , including the human body , reading the dna sequence and then using that dna sequencing to tell us about the microbes that are in a particular place .
and what 's amazing , when you use this technology , for example , looking at humans , we 're not just covered in a sea of microbes .
there are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of microbes on us .
we have millions of genes of microbes in our human microbiome covering us .
and so this microbial diversity differs between people , and what people have been thinking about in the last 10 , maybe 15 years is , maybe these microbes , this microbial cloud in and on us , and the variation between us , may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us .
and that comes back to the diabetes story i was telling you .
it turns out that people now think that one of the triggers for type 1 diabetes is not fighting a pathogen , but is in fact trying to - miscommunicating with the microbes that live in and on you .
and somehow maybe the microbial community that 's in and on me got off , and then this triggered some sort of immune response and led to me killing the cells that make insulin in my body .
and so what i want to tell you about for a few minutes is , what people have learned using dna sequencing techniques in particular , to study the microbial cloud that lives in and on us .
and i want to tell you a story about a personal project .
my first personal experience with studying the microbes on the human body actually came from a talk that i gave , right around the corner from here at georgetown .
i gave a talk , and a family friend who happened to be the dean of georgetown medical school was at the talk , and came up to me afterwards saying , they were doing a study of ileal transplants in people .
and they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants .
and so i started a collaboration with this person , michael zasloff and thomas fishbein , to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient .
and i can tell you all the details about the microbial study that we did there , but the reason i want to tell you this story is something really striking that they did at the beginning of this project .
they take the donor ileum , which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community , say crohn 's disease , and they sterilized the donor ileum .
cleaned out all the microbes , and then put it in the recipient .
they did this because this was common practice in medicine , even though it was obvious that this was not a good idea .
and fortunately , in the course of this project , the transplant surgeons and the other people decided , forget common practice . we have to switch .
so they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum . they leave the microbes with the donor , and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant .
and so , people - this is a study that i did now .
in the last few years there 's been a great expansion in using dna technology to study the microbes in and on people .
there 's something called the human microbiome project that 's going on in the united states , and metahit going on in europe , and a lot of other projects .
and when people have done a variety of studies , they have learned things such as , when a baby is born , during vaginal delivery you get colonized by the microbes from your mother .
there are risk factors associated with cesarean sections , some of those risk factors may be due to mis-colonization when you carve a baby out of its mother rather than being delivered through the birth canal .
and a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system , helps in fighting off pathogens , helps in our metabolism , and determining our metabolic rate , probably determines our odor , and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways .
and so , these studies have documented or suggested out of a variety of important functions for the microbial community , this cloud , the non-pathogens that live in and on us .
and one area that i think is very interesting , which many of you may have now that we 've thrown microbes into the crowd , is something that i would call " germophobia . "
so people are really into cleanliness , right ?
we have antibiotics in our kitchen counters , people are washing every part of them all of the time , we pump antibiotics into our food , into our communities , we take antibiotics excessively .
and killing pathogens is a good thing if you 're sick , but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world , that we 're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us .
and excessive use of antibiotics , in particular in children , has been shown to be associated with , again , risk factors for obesity , for autoimmune diseases , for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community .
so the microbial community can go wrong whether we want it to or not , or we can kill it with antibiotics , but what can we do to restore it ?
i 'm sure many people here have heard about probiotics .
probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you .
and they definitely have been shown to be effective in some cases .
there 's a project going on at uc davis where people are using probiotics to try and treat , prevent , necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants .
premature infants have real problems with their microbial community .
and it may be that probiotics can help prevent the development of this horrible necrotizing enterocolitis in these premature infants .
but probiotics are sort of a very , very simple solution .
most of the pills that you can take or the yogurts that you can eat have one or two species in them , maybe five species in them , and the human community is thousands upon thousands of species .
so what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us ?
well , one thing that animals seem to do is , they eat poo - coprophagia .
and it turns out that many veterinarians , old school veterinarians in particular , have been doing something called " poo tea , " not booty , but poo tea , to treat colic and other ailments in horses and cows and things like that , where you make tea from the poo from a healthy individual animal and you feed it to a sick animal .
although , unless you have a fistulated cow with a big hole in its side , and you can put your hand into its rumen , it 's hard to imagine that the delivery of microbes directly into the mouth and through the entire top of the digestive tract is the best delivery system , so you may have heard in people they are now doing fecal transplants , where rather than delivering a couple of probiotic microbes through the mouth , they are delivering a community of probiotics , a community of microbes from a healthy donor , through the other end .
and this has turned out to be very effective in fighting certain intransigent infectious diseases like clostridium difficile infections that can stay with people for years and years and years .
transplants of the feces , of the microbes from the feces , from a healthy donor has actually been shown to cure systemic c. dif infections in some people .
now what these transplants , these fecal transplants , or the poo tea suggest to me , and many other people have come up with this same idea , is that the microbial community in and on us , it 's an organ .
we should view it as a functioning organ , part of ourselves .
we should treat it carefully and with respect , and we do not want to mess with it , say by c-sections or by antibiotics or excessive cleanliness , without some real good justification .
and what the dna sequencing technologies are allowing people to do now is do detailed studies of , say , 100 patients who have crohn 's disease and 100 people who do n't have crohn 's disease .
or 100 people who took antibiotics when they were little , and 100 people who did not take antibiotics .
and we can now start to compare the community of microbes and their genes and see if there are differences .
and eventually we may be able to understand if they 're not just correlative differences , but causative .
studies in model systems like mouse and other animals are also helping do this , but people are now using these technologies because they 've gotten very cheap , to study the microbes in and on a variety of people .
so , in wrapping up , what i want to tell you about is , i did n't tell you a part of the story of coming down with diabetes .
it turns out that my father was an m.d. , actually studied hormones . i told him many times that i was tired , thirsty , not feeling very good .
and he shrugged it off , i think he either thought i was just complaining a lot , or it was the typical m.d. " nothing can be wrong with my children . "
we even went to the international society of endocrinology meeting as family in quebec .
and i was getting up every five minutes to pee , and drinking everybody 's water at the table , and i think they all thought i was a druggie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the reason i 'm telling you this is that the medical community , my father as an example , sometimes does n't see what 's right in front of their eyes .
the microbial cloud , it is right in front of us .
we ca n't see it most of the time . it 's invisible .
they 're microbes . they 're tiny .
but we can see them through their dna , we can see them through the effects that they have on people .
and what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine .
it does n't mean that it affects every part of us , but it might .
what we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people , so that we can understand what they 're doing to our lives .
we are them . they are us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , so 90 percent of my photographic process is , in fact , not photographic .
it involves a campaign of letter writing , research and phone calls to access my subjects , which can range from hamas leaders in gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in west virginia .
and oddly , the most notable letter of rejection i ever received came from walt disney world , a seemingly innocuous site .
and it read - i 'm just going to read a key sentence : " especially during these violent times , i personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to . "
photography threatens fantasy .
they did n't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities , myths and beliefs , and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth .
but there are multiple truths attached to every image , depending on the creator 's intention , the viewer and the context in which it is presented .
over a five year period following september 11th , when the american media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders , most notably weapons of mass destruction , i chose to look inward at that which was integral to america 's foundation , mythology and daily functioning .
i wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen , self-imposed and real , and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge .
it was a critical moment in american history and global history where one felt they did n't have access to accurate information .
and i wanted to see the center with my own eyes , but what i came away with is a photograph .
and it 's just another place from which to observe , and the understanding that there are no absolute , all-knowing insiders .
and the outsider can never really reach the core .
i 'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series .
it 's titled , " an american index of the hidden and unfamiliar , " and it 's comprised of nearly 70 images .
in this context i 'll just show you a few .
this is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at hanford site in washington state , where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water .
a human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly .
and i found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the united states of america , which you can see here .
and a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text .
so i create these two poles .
every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text .
and what i 'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image , and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image .
so , at best , the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy .
and then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground .
but in this context i 'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts .
this is a cryopreservation unit , and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer robert ettinger , who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health , with advancements in science and technology , all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars , for forever .
this is a 21-year-old palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty .
hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state , allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage .
so it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen , allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse , to simulate the loss of virginity .
this is a jury simulation deliberation room , and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror .
and they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they 're hoping for .
this process costs 60,000 dollars .
this is a u.s. customs and border protection room , a contraband room , at john f. kennedy international airport .
on that table you can see 48 hours ' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the united states .
there is a pig 's head and african cane rats .
and part of my photographic work is i 'm not just documenting what 's there .
i do take certain liberties and intervene .
and in this i really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting , so i spent some time with the smells and items .
this is the exhibited art on the walls of the cia in langley , virginia , their original headquarters building .
and the cia has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts .
and it 's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-american thoughts and aesthetics .
and one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency , and had thus come under question , is abstract expressionism .
this is the forensic anthropology research facility , and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition .
and in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene .
this is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the united states .
it 's a research crop marijuana grow room .
and part of the work that i hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you ca n't find any discernible formula in how these things - they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security - and you ca n't completely understand how information is being distributed .
these are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the atlantic ocean , connecting north america to europe .
they carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations , and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability .
this one is almost humorous because it feels like i could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut .
but stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago , like it was locked in the cold war era and had n't necessarily progressed .
this is a braille edition of playboy magazine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is ... a division of the library of congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired , and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity .
and playboy is always in the top few .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you 'd be surprised , they do n't do the photographs . it 's just the text .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into america are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine , where they are tested for diseases including exotic newcastle disease and avian influenza .
this film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead .
and the air armament center at eglin air force base in florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the united states .
and the film was shot on 72 millimeter , government-issue film .
and that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film .
all living white tigers in north america are the result of selective inbreeding - that would be mother to son , father to daughter , sister to brother - to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger .
meaning white fur , ice blue eyes , a pink nose .
and the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth .
it 's a very violent process that is little known .
and the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment .
kenny was born . he actually made it to adulthood .
he has since passed away , but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities .
this , on a lighter note , is at george lucas ' personal archive .
this is the death star .
and it 's shown here in its true orientation .
in the context of " star wars : return of the jedi , " its mirror image is presented .
they flip the negative .
and you can see the photoetched brass detailing , and the painted acrylic facade .
in the context of the film , this is a deep-space battle station of the galactic empire , capable of annihilating planets and civilizations , and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is at fort campbell in kentucky .
it 's a military operations on urbanized terrain site .
essentially they 've simulated a city for urban combat , and this is one of the structures that exists in that city .
it 's called the world church of god .
it 's supposed to be a generic site of worship .
and after i took this photograph , they constructed a wall around the world church of god to mimic the set-up of mosques in afghanistan or iraq .
and i worked with mehta vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice .
and we put that wall around the world church of god , and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army .
and i put them into my photograph .
this is live hiv virus at harvard medical school , who is working with the u.s. government to develop sterilizing immunity .
and alhurra is a u.s. government- sponsored arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the arab world .
it runs 24 hours a day , commercial free .
however , it 's illegal to broadcast alhurra within the united states .
and in 2004 , they developed a channel called alhurra iraq , which specifically deals with events occurring in iraq and is broadcast to iraq .
now i 'm going to move on to another project i did .
it 's titled " the innocents . "
and for the men in these photographs , photography had been used to create a fantasy .
contradicting its function as evidence of a truth , in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie .
i traveled across the united states photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit , violent crimes .
i investigate photography 's ability to blur truth and fiction , and its influence on memory , which can lead to severe , even lethal consequences .
for the men in these photographs , the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification .
a victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement 's use of images .
but through exposure to composite sketches , polaroids , mug shots and line-ups , eyewitness testimony can change .
i 'll give you an example from a case .
a woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker .
she saw some similarities in one of the photographs , but could n't quite make a positive identification .
days later , she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs , except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array .
and a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory , if there ever was an actual memory .
photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals , and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications .
frederick daye , who is photographed at his alibi location , where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime .
he was convicted by an all-white jury of rape , kidnapping and vehicle theft .
and he served 10 years of a life sentence .
now dna exonerated frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison .
but the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of frederick 's photograph .
charles fain was convicted of kidnapping , rape and murder of a young girl walking to school .
he served 18 years of a death sentence .
i photographed him at the scene of the crime at the snake river in idaho .
and i photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction .
the scene of arrest , the scene of misidentification , the alibi location .
and here , the scene of the crime , it 's this place to which he 's never been , but changed his life forever .
so photographing there , i was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction , in both his life and in photography .
calvin washington was convicted of capital murder .
he served 13 years of a life sentence in waco , texas .
larry mayes , i photographed at the scene of arrest , where he hid between two mattresses in gary , indiana , in this very room to hide from the police .
he ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery .
the victim failed to identify larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification , days later , from a photo array .
larry youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival .
he is photographed at his alibi location .
ron williamson . ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club , and served 11 years of a death sentence .
i photographed ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the oakland a 's to play professional baseball just before his conviction .
and the state 's key witness in ron 's case was , in the end , the actual perpetrator .
ronald jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman .
i photographed him at the scene of arrest in chicago .
william gregory was convicted of rape and burglary .
he served seven years of a 70 year sentence in kentucky .
timothy durham , who i photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime , was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence , for several charges of rape and robbery .
he had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim .
troy webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in virginia .
he was convicted of rape , kidnapping and robbery , and served seven years of a 47 year sentence .
troy 's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward , but said he looked too old .
the police went and found a photograph of troy webb from four years earlier , which they entered into a photo array days later , and he was positively identified .
now i 'm going to leave you with a self portrait .
and it reiterates that distortion is a constant , and our eyes are easily deceived .
that 's it . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- think about your day for a second .
you woke up , felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door , encountered new colleagues and had great discussions , and felt in awe when you found something new .
but i bet there 's something you did n't think about today - something so close to home that you probably do n't think about it very often at all .
and that 's that all the sensations , feelings , decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain .
now the brain may not look like much from the outside - a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh , amorphous - but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain , and to see the intricacy of what lies within .
and they 've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons .
now unlike a human-designed computer , where there 's a fairly small number of different parts - we know how they work , because we humans designed them - the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells , maybe tens of thousands .
they come in different shapes ; they 're made out of different molecules .
and they project and connect to different brain regions , and they also change different ways in different disease states .
let 's make it concrete .
there 's a class of cells , a fairly small cell , an inhibitory cell , that quiets its neighbors .
it 's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia .
it 's called the basket cell .
and this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about .
new ones are being discovered everyday .
as just a second example : these pyramidal cells , large cells , they can span a significant fraction of the brain .
they 're excitatory .
and these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy .
every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device .
they receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs , which then , if they pass a certain threshold , will go to thousands of downstream partners .
and this process , which takes just a millisecond or so , happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells , as long as you live and think and feel .
so how are we going to figure out what this circuit does ?
ideally , we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies .
if we could activate cells , we could see what powers they can unleash , what they can initiate and sustain .
if we could turn them off , then we could try and figure out what they 're necessary for .
and that 's a story i 'm going to tell you about today .
and honestly , where we 've gone through over the last 11 years , through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off , both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans .
now before i tell you about the technology , the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room , if we live long enough , will encounter , perhaps , a brain disorder .
already , a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them , and the numbers do n't do it justice though .
these disorders - schizophrenia , alzheimer 's , depression , addiction - they not only steal our time to live , they change who we are .
they take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people .
now in the 20th century , there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders , and while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders , practically none of them can be considered to be cured .
and part of that 's because we 're bathing the brain in the chemical .
this elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance .
that 's also why , perhaps , most of the drugs , and not all , on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too .
now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain .
and for parkinson 's disease , cochlear implants , these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder .
but electricity also will go in all directions - the path of least resistance , which is where that phrase , in part , comes from .
and it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix .
so again , we 're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control .
could we dial-in information precisely where we want it to go ?
so when i started in neuroscience 11 years ago , i had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist , and the first thing i thought about was , if these neurons are electrical devices , all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance .
if we could turn on the electricity in one cell , but not its neighbors , that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells , figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they 're embedded .
and also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry .
now how are we going to do that ?
well there are many molecules that exist in nature , which are able to convert light into electricity .
you can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells .
if we can install these molecules in neurons somehow , then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light .
and their neighbors , which do n't have the molecule , would not .
there 's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen , and that 's the ability to get light into the brain .
and to do that - the brain does n't feel pain - you can put - taking advantage of all the effort that 's gone into the internet and communications and so on - optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate , in animal models for example , in pre-clinical studies , these neurons and to see what they do .
so how do we do this ?
around 2004 , in collaboration with gerhard nagel and karl deisseroth , this vision came to fruition .
there 's a certain alga that swims in the wild , and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally .
and it senses light with a little eye-spot , which works not unlike how our eye works .
in its membrane , or its boundary , it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity .
so these molecules are called channelrhodopsins .
and each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that i told you about .
when blue light hits it , it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot , and that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery .
so what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons .
and because it 's a protein , it 's encoded for in the dna of this organism .
so all we 've got to do is take that dna , put it into a gene therapy vector , like a virus , and put it into neurons .
so it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy , and lots of viruses were coming along .
so this turned out to be very simple to do .
and early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004 , we gave it a try , and it worked on the first try .
you take this dna and you put it into a neuron .
the neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell , like putting solar panels on a roof , and the next thing you know , you have a neuron which can be activated with light .
so this is very powerful .
one of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors .
and you can do that ; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others .
and there 's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells .
this field has now come to be known as optogenetics .
and just as one example of the kind of thing you can do , you can take a complex network , use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network .
and then when you shine light on the entire network , just that cell type will be activated .
so for example , lets sort of consider that basket cell i told you about earlier - the one that 's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory .
if we can deliver that gene to these cells - and they 're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene , of course - and then flash blue light over the entire brain network , just these cells are going to be driven .
and when the light turns off , these cells go back to normal , so they do n't seem to be averse against that .
not only can you use this to study what these cells do , what their power is in computing in the brain , but you can also use this to try to figure out - well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells , if indeed they 're atrophied .
now i want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we 're using this , both at the scientific , clinical and pre-clinical levels .
one of the questions we 've confronted is , what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward ?
because if you could find those , those would be some of the signals that could drive learning .
the brain will do more of whatever got that reward .
and also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction .
so if we could figure out what cells they are , we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against , or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability .
so to do that , we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the fiorella group , where one side of this little box , if the animal goes there , the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light .
so if these cells can mediate reward , the animal should go there more and more .
and so that 's what happens .
this animal 's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there , and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that .
and he 'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times .
these are the dopamine neurons , which some of you may have heard about , in some of the pleasure centers in the brain .
now we 've shown that a brief activation of these is enough , indeed , to drive learning .
now we can generalize the idea .
instead of one point in the brain , we can devise devices that span the brain , that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns - arrays of optical fibers , each coupled to its own independent miniature light source .
and then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish - like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen .
or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders .
and one story i want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder - a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear .
was to adopt a very classical model of fear .
this goes back to the pavlovian days .
it 's called pavlovian fear conditioning - where a tone ends with a brief shock .
the shock is n't painful , but it 's a little annoying .
and over time - in this case , a mouse , which is a good animal model , commonly used in such experiments - the animal learns to fear the tone .
the animal will react by freezing , sort of like a deer in the headlights .
now the question is , what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear ?
so what we do is we play that tone again after it 's been associated with fear .
but we activate targets in the brain , different ones , using that optical fiber array i told you about in the previous slide , in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear .
and so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we 're working on now .
this is an area in the prefrontal cortex , a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states .
and the animal 's going to hear a tone - and a flash of light occurred there .
there 's no audio on this , but you can see the animal 's freezing .
this tone used to mean bad news .
and there 's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner , so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this .
and now this next clip is just eight minutes later .
and the same tone is going to play , and the light is going to flash again .
okay , there it goes . right now .
and now you can see , just 10 minutes into the experiment , that we 've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory .
now over the last couple of years , we 've gone back to the tree of life because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off .
if we could do that , this could be extremely powerful .
if you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds , you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they 're embedded .
and we 've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life - every kingdom of life except for animals , we see slightly differently .
and we found all sorts of molecules , they 're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins , that respond to green and yellow light .
and they do the opposite thing of the molecule i told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin .
let 's give an example of where we think this is going to go .
consider , for example , a condition like epilepsy , where the brain is overactive .
now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment , one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain .
but that 's obviously irreversible , and there could be side effects .
what if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time , until the seizure dies away , and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state - sort of like a dynamical system that 's being coaxed down into a stable state .
so this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light , and we beam light in , and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure , we 're hoping to be able to turn it off .
and so we do n't have data to show you on this front , but we 're very excited about this .
now i want to close on one story , which we think is another possibility - which is that maybe these molecules , if you can do ultra-precise control , can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic , an optical prosthetic .
i already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon .
seventy-five thousand people have parkinson 's deep-brain stimulators implanted .
maybe 100,000 people have cochlear implants , which allow them to hear .
there 's another thing , which is you 've got to get these genes into cells .
and new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus , which probably most of us around this room have , and it does n't have any symptoms , which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body .
and so far , there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus .
there 's one last elephant in the room , the proteins themselves , which come from algae and bacteria and fungi , and all over the tree of life .
most of us do n't have fungi or algae in our brains , so what is our brain going to do if we put that in ?
are the cells going to tolerate it ? will the immune system react ?
in its early days - these have not been done on humans yet - but we 're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this , and so far we have n't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light .
so it 's early days , to be upfront , but we 're excited about it .
i wanted to close with one story , which we think could potentially be a clinical application .
now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors , our light sensors that are in the back of our eye , are gone .
and the retina , of course , is a complex structure .
now let 's zoom in on it here , so we can see it in more detail .
the photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top , and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations until finally that layer of cells at the bottom , the ganglion cells , relay the information to the brain , where we see that as perception .
in many forms of blindness , like retinitis pigmentosa , or macular degeneration , the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed .
now how could you repair this ?
it 's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored , because there 's nothing for the drug to bind to .
on the other hand , light can still get into the eye .
the eye is still transparent and you can get light in .
so what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras .
and because there 's so many of these cells in the eye , potentially , they could be very high-resolution cameras .
so this is some work that we 're doing .
it 's being led by one of our collaborators , alan horsager at usc , and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company eos neuroscience , which is funded by the nih .
and what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze .
it 's a six-arm maze . and there 's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move , or he 'll just sit there .
and the goal , of course , of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that 's under the lit top port .
now mice are smart , so this mouse solves the maze eventually , but he does a brute-force search .
he 's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform .
so he 's not using vision to do it .
these different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans .
and so we 're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach .
so how are we going to solve this ?
we 're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide .
we 're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera - just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive .
light is converted to electricity on them .
so this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus .
and now you can see , the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again .
and to point out the power of this : these animals are able to get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives .
so this pre-clinical study , i think , bodes hope for the kinds of things we 're hoping to do in the future .
to close , i want to point out that we 're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology .
we 're developing these tools , but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world , so people can study and try to treat different disorders .
and our hope is that , by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them , we can take some of these intractable disorders that i told you about earlier , practically none of which are cured , and in the 21st century make them history .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- juan enriquez : so some of the stuff is a little dense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs , and being able to target those specifically is a first step .
the second thing that i think i heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors , like an on / off switch .
ed boyden : that 's right .
je : which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code .
eb : right , yeah .
so with blue light , we can drive information , and it 's in the form of a one .
and by turning things off , it 's more or less a zero .
so our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities .
je : and in theory , that means that , as a mouse feels , smells , hears , touches , you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros .
eb : sure , yeah . we 're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings , and use that to understand more about the brain .
je : does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them ?
eb : well that 's something we 're starting to work on very hard .
we 're now working on some work where we 're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too .
so we can record information and then drive information back in - sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing .
je : well , that might change a couple things . thank you . -lrb- eb : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i started with paragliding .
paragliding is taking off from mountains with a paraglider , with the possibility to fly cross-country , distance , just with the use of thermals to soar .
also different aerobatic maneuvers are possible with a paraglider .
from there i started with skydiving .
in this picture you can see there is a four-way skydive , four people flying together , and on the left hand side it 's the camera flier with the camera mounted to his helmet so he can film the whole jump , for the film itself and also for the judging .
from regular , relative skydiving i went on to freeflying .
freeflying is more the three-dimensional skydiving .
you can see the skydiver with the red suit , he 's in a stand-up position .
the one with the yellow-green suit , he 's flying head-down .
and that 's me in the background , carving around the whole formation in freefall also , with the helmet cam to film this jump .
from freeflying i went on to skysurfing .
skysurfing is skydiving with a board on the feet .
you can imagine with this big surface of a skysurfing board , there is a lot of force , a lot of power .
of course i can use this power for example for nice spinning - we call it " helicopter moves . "
from there i went on to wingsuit flying .
wingsuit flying is a suit , that i can make fly , just only with my body .
if i put some tension on my body , tension on my suit , i can make it fly . and as you see the fall rate is much much slower because of the bigger surface .
with a proper body position i 'm able to really move forward to gain quite some distance .
this is a jump i did in rio de janeiro .
you can see the copacabana on the left-hand side .
from there with all the skills and knowledge from paragliding and all the different disciplines in skydiving , i went on to base jumping .
base jumping is skydiving from fixed objects , like buildings , antennae , bridges and earth - meaning mountains , cliffs .
it 's for sure - for me - it 's the ultimate feeling of being in free fall , with all the visual references .
so my goal soon was to discover new places that nobody had jumped before .
so in summer 2000 i was the first to base jump the eiger north face in switzerland .
two years after this , i was the first to base jump from matterhorn , a very famous mountain that probably everybody knows in here .
2005 i did a base jump from the eiger , from the monk and from the jungfrau , three very famous mountains in switzerland .
the special thing on these three jumps were , i hiked them all and climbed them all in only one day .
in 2008 i jumped the eiffel tower in paris .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so with all this knowledge , i also wanted to get into stunts .
so with some friends we started to do different tricks , like for example this jump here , i jumped from a paraglider .
or here - everybody was freezing , pretty much , except me , because it was very cold in austria where we did this filming .
everybody sitting in a basket , and i was on top of the balloon , ready to slide down with my skysurf board .
or this jump , from a moving truck on the highway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- extreme sports on top level like this is only possible if you practice step by step , if you really work hard on your skills and on your knowledge .
of course you need to be in physical , very good , condition , so i 'm training a lot .
you need to have the best possible equipment .
and probably the most important is you have to work on your mental skills , mental preparation .
and all this to come as close as possible to the human dream of being able to fly .
so for 2009 , i 'm training hard for my two new projects .
the first one , i want to set a world record in flying from a cliff with my wingsuit .
and i want to set a new record , with the longest distance ever flown .
for my second project , i have a sensational idea of a jump that never has been done before .
so now , on the following movie you will see that i 'm much better in flying a wingsuit than speaking in english .
enjoy , and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- june cohen : i have some questions .
i think we all might have some questions .
question one : so does that actually feel the way the flying dream does ?
because it looks like it might .
ueli gegenschatz : pretty much . i believe this is probably the closest possibility to come to the dream of being able to fly .
jc : i know the answer to this , but how do you land ?
ue : parachute . we have to open a parachute just seconds before , i would say , impact .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's not possible to land a wingsuit yet .
jc : yet . but people are trying . are you among those - you 're not going to commit - are you among those trying to do it ?
ue : it 's a dream . it 's a dream . yeah .
we 're still working on it and we 're developing the wingsuits to get better performance , to get more knowledge .
and i believe soon .
jc : all right . well we will watch this space . but i have two more questions .
what is the - there was exhaust coming out of the back of the wingsuit . was that a propelled wingsuit that you were wearing ?
ue : nope . it 's just smoke .
jc : coming off of you ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ue : hopefully not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jc : that seems dangerous .
ue : no , smoke is for two reasons , you can see the speed , you can see the way where i was flying .
that 's reason number one . and reason number two : it 's much easier for the camera guy to film if i 'm using smoke .
jc : ah , i see . so the wingsuit is set up to deliberately release smoke so that you can be tracked . one more question .
what do you do to to cover your face ?
because i just keep thinking of going that fast and having your whole face smushed backwards .
are you in a helmet ? are you in goggles ?
ue : the purest and the best feeling would be with only goggles .
jc : and is that how you usually fly ?
ue : usually i 'm wearing a helmet . in the mountains i 'm always wearing a helmet because of landings - usually it 's difficult - it 's not like regular skydiving where you have like the big landings .
so you have to be prepared .
jc : right . now is there anything you do n't do ?
do people come to you with projects and say , " we want you to do this ! "
and do you ever say , " no , no i 'm not going to . "
ue : oh of course , of course . some people have crazy ideas and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- jc : ... a round of applause ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- ue : thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what 's scheduled .
foreign policy , you can figure that out by watching , i do n't know , rachel maddow or somebody , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i want to talk about young people and structure , young people and structure .
this was last wednesday afternoon at a school in brooklyn , new york , at cristo rey high school , run by the jesuits .
and i was talking to this group of students , and take a look at them .
they were around me in three directions .
you 'll noticed that almost all of them are minority .
you 'll notice that the building is rather austere .
it 's an old new york school building , nothing fancy .
they still have old blackboards and whatnot .
and there are about 300 kids in this school , and the school 's been going now for four years , and they 're about to graduate their first class .
twenty-two people are graduating , and all 22 are going to college .
they all come from homes where there is , for the most part , just one person in the home , usually the mother or the grandmother , and that 's it , and they come here for their education and for their structure .
now i had this picture taken , and it was put up on my facebook page last week , and somebody wrote in , " huh , why does he have him standing at attention like that ? "
and then they said , " but he looks good . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- he does look good , because kids need structure , and the trick i play in all of my school appearances is that when i get through with my little homily to the kids , i then invite them to ask questions , and when they raise their hands , i say , " come up , " and i make them come up and stand in front of me .
i make them stand at attention like a soldier .
put your arms straight down at your side , look up , open your eyes , stare straight ahead , and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear .
no slouching , no pants hanging down , none of that stuff .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this young man , his name is - his last name cruz - he loved it . that 's all over his facebook page and it 's gone viral .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so people think i 'm being unkind to this kid .
no , we 're having a little fun .
and the thing about it , i 've done this for years , the younger they are , the more fun it is .
when i get six- and seven-year-olds in a group , i have to figure out how to keep them quiet .
you know that they 'll always start yakking .
and so i play a little game with them before i make them stand at attention .
i say , " now listen . in the army , when we want you to pay attention , we have a command . it 's called ' at ease . ' it means everybody be quiet and pay attention . listen up .
do you understand ? "
" uh-huh , uh-huh , uh-huh . " " let 's practice . everybody start chatting . "
and i let them go for about 10 seconds , then i go , " at ease ! "
" huh ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " yes , general . yes , general . "
try it with your kids . see if it works . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't think so .
but anyway , it 's a game i play , and it comes obviously from my military experience .
because for the majority of my adult life , i worked with young kids , teenagers with guns , i call them .
and we would bring them into the army , and the first thing we would do is to put them in an environment of structure , put them in ranks , make them all wear the same clothes , cut all their hair off so they look alike , make sure that they are standing in ranks .
we teach them how to go right face , left face , so they can obey instructions and know the consequences of not obeying instructions .
it gives them structure .
and then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately , the drill sergeant .
and they hate him .
and the drill sergeant starts screaming at them , and telling them to do all kinds of awful things .
but then the most amazing thing happens over time .
once that structure is developed , once they understand the reason for something , once they understand , " mama ai n't here , son .
i 'm your worst nightmare . i 'm your daddy and your mommy .
and that 's just the way it is . you got that , son ?
yeah , and then when i ask you a question , there are only three possible answers : yes , sir ; no , sir ; and no excuse , sir .
do n't start telling me why you did n't do something .
it 's yes , sir ; no , sir ; no excuse , sir . "
" you did n't shave . " " but sir - " " no , do n't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning .
i 'm telling you you did n't shave . "
" no excuse , sir . " " attaboy , you 're learning fast . "
but you 'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure .
in 18 weeks , they have a skill . they are mature .
and you know what , they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant .
they come to respect him .
and so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children .
i spend a lot of time with youth groups , and i say to people , " when does the education process begin ? "
we 're always talking about , " let 's fix the schools .
let 's do more for our teachers . let 's put more computers in our schools .
let 's get it all online . "
that is n't the whole answer . it 's part of the answer .
but the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child 's heart and soul to begin with .
when does the learning process begin ? does it begin in first grade ?
no , no , it begins the first time a child in a mother 's arms looks up at the mother and says , " oh , this must be my mother .
she 's the one who feeds me .
oh yeah , when i do n't feel so good down there , she takes care of me .
it 's her language i will learn . "
and at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age , but by three months , that 's her .
and if the person doing it , whether it 's the mother or grandmother , whoever 's doing it , that is when the education process begins .
that 's when language begins .
that 's when love begins . that 's when structure begins .
that 's when you start to imprint on the child that " you are special , you are different from every other child in the world .
and we 're going to read to you . "
a child who has not been read to is in danger when that child gets to school .
a child who does n't know his or her colors or does n't know how to tell time , does n't know how to tie shoes , does n't know how to do those things , and does n't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid : mind .
mind your manners ! mind your adults ! mind what you 're saying !
this is the way children are raised properly .
and i watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they 're , much to the distress of my children , they are acting just like we did . you know ? you imprint them .
and that 's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school .
and i 'm working at all the energy i have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool , we need head start , we need prenatal care .
the education process begins even before the child is born , and if you do n't do that , you 're going to have difficulty .
and we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing , they 've got their little knapsack on and they 're ready to go , and then they realize they 're not like the other first graders who know books , have been read to , can do their alphabet .
and by the third grade , the kids who did n't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they 're behind , and what do they do ?
they act it out . they act it out , and they 're on their way to jail or they 're on their way to being dropouts .
it 's predictable .
if you 're not at the right reading level at third grade , you are a candidate for jail at age 18 , and we have the highest incarceration rate because we 're not getting our kids the proper start in life .
the last chapter in my book is called " the gift of a good start . "
the gift of a good start . every child ought to have a good start in life .
i was privileged to have that kind of good start .
i was not a great student .
i was a public school kid in new york city , and i did n't do well at all .
i have my entire new york city board of education transcript from kindergarten through college .
i wanted it when i was writing my first book .
i wanted to see if my memory was correct , and , my god , it was . -lrb- laughter -rrb- straight c everywhere .
and i finally bounced through high school , got into the city college of new york with a 78.3 average , which i should n't have been allowed in with , and then i started out in engineering , and that only lasted six months . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i went into geology , " rocks for jocks . " this is easy .
and then i found rotc .
i found something that i did well and something that i loved doing , and i found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way .
and so my whole life then was dedicated to rotc and the military .
and i say to young kids everywhere , as you 're growing up and as this structure is being developed inside of you , always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing , and when you find those two things together , man , you got it .
that 's what 's going on . and that 's what i found .
now the authorities at ccny were getting tired of me being there .
i 'd been there four and a half going on five years , and my grades were not doing particularly well , and i was in occasional difficulties with the administration .
and so they said , " but he does so well in rotc .
look , he gets straight a 's in that but not in anything else . "
and so they said , " look , let 's take his rotc grades and roll them into his overall gpa and see what happens . "
and they did , and it brought me up to 2.0 . -lrb- laughter -rrb- yep . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- they said , " it 's good enough for government work .
give him to the army . we 'll never see him again . we 'll never see him again . "
so they shipped me off to the army , and lo and behold , many years later , i 'm considered one of the greatest sons the city college of new york has ever had . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i tell young people everywhere , it ai n't where you start in life , it 's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life , and you are blessed to be living in a country that , no matter where you start , you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself , you believe in the society and the country , and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along .
and that 's the key to success .
but it begins with the gift of a good start .
if we do n't give that gift to each and every one of our kids , if we do n't invest at the earliest age , we 're going to be running into difficulties .
it 's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas , because they 're not getting the gift of a good start .
my gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family , a good family , but having a family that said to me , " now listen , we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924 .
we worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day .
we 're not doing it so that you can stick something up your nose or get in trouble . and do n't even think about dropping out . "
if i had ever gone home and told those immigrant people that , " you know , i 'm tired of school and i 'm dropping out , " they 'd said , " we 're dropping you out . we 'll get another kid . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the south bronx , but they had more than just expectations for us .
they stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame : " do n't you shame this family . "
sometimes i would get in trouble , and my parents were coming home , and i was in my room waiting for what 's going to happen , and i would sit there saying to myself , " okay , look , take the belt and hit me , but , god , do n't give me that ' shame the family ' bit again . "
it devastated me when my mother did that to me .
and i also had this extended network .
children need a network . children need to be part of a tribe , a family , a community .
in my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings .
i do n't know how many of you are new yorkers , but there were these tenement buildings , and these women were always hanging out one of the windows , leaning on a pillow .
they never left . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i , so help me god , i grew up walking those streets , and they were always there .
they never went to the bathroom . they never cooked . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they never did anything .
but what they did was keep us in play .
they kept us in play .
and they did n't care whether you became a doctor or a lawyer or a general , and they never expected any generals in the family , as long as you got an education and then you got a job .
" do n't give us any of that self-actualization stuff .
you get a job and get out of the house .
we do n't have time to waste for that .
and then you can support us . that 's the role of you guys . "
and so , it 's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families , all families .
and it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people , and i 'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren , it 's not enough . you 've got to reach out and back and find kids like mr. cruz who can make it if you give them the structure , if you reach back and help , if you mentor , if you invest in boys and girls clubs , if you work with your school system , make sure it 's the best school system , and not just your kid 's school , but the school uptown in harlem , not just downtown montessori on the west side .
all of us have to have a commitment to do that .
and we 're not just investing in the kids .
we 're investing in our future .
we 're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation .
those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority .
and we have to make sure that they are ready to be the majority .
we have to make sure they 're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours , a country that is like no other , a country that amazes me every single day , a country that 's fractious . we 're always arguing with each other .
that 's how the system 's supposed to work .
it 's a country of such contrasts , but it 's a nation of nations .
we touch every nation . every nation touches us .
we are a nation of immigrants .
that 's why we need sound immigration policy .
it 's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation , or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty .
one of the great stories i love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of new york and walking up park avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world .
but what i always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler .
gotta have a dirty water dog . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and no matter where i am or what i 'm doing , i 've got to do that .
i even did it when i was secretary of state .
i 'd come out of my suite at the waldorf astoria - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - be walking up the street , and i would hit around 55th street looking for the immigrant pushcart peddler .
in those days , i had five bodyguards around me and three new york city police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while i was going up park avenue . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i would order the hot dog from the guy , and he 'd start to fix it , and then he 'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars - " i 've got a green card ! i 've got a green card ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " it 's okay , it 's okay . "
but now i 'm alone . i 'm alone .
i 've got no bodyguards , i 've got no police cars . i 've got nothing .
but i gotta have my hot dog .
i did it just last week . it was on a tuesday evening down by columbus circle .
and the scene repeats itself so often .
i 'll go up and ask for my hot dog , and the guy will fix it , and as he 's finishing , he 'll say , " i know you . i see you on television .
you 're , well , you 're general powell . "
" yes , yes . " " oh ... " i hand him the money .
" no , general . you ca n't pay me . i 've been paid .
america has paid me . i never forget where i came from .
but now i 'm an american . sir , thank you . "
i accept the generosity , continue up the street , and it washes over me , my god , it 's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago .
so we are still that magnificent country , but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world , and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the internet and the mobile phone .
they 've changed the world .
however , largely to our surprise , they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state .
it turned out that the capability to collect data , information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we 've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about western intelligence agencies , mostly u.s. intelligence agencies , watching over the rest of the world .
we 've heard about these starting with the revelations from june 6 .
edward snowden started leaking information , top secret classified information , from the u.s. intelligence agencies , and we started learning about things like prism and xkeyscore and others .
and these are examples of the kinds of programs u.s. intelligence agencies are running right now , against the whole rest of the world .
and if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by george orwell , well it turns out that george orwell was an optimist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined .
and this here is the infamous nsa data center in utah .
due to be opened very soon , it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center .
you could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting .
and it 's a pretty big building .
how big ? well , i can give you the numbers - 140,000 square meters - but that does n't really tell you very much .
maybe it 's better to imagine it as a comparison .
you think about the largest ikea store you 've ever been in .
this is five times larger .
how many hard drives can you fit in an ikea store ?
right ? it 's pretty big .
we estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year .
and this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever , keep it for extended periods of time , keep it for years , keep it for decades .
and this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all .
and what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone .
well , not exactly everyone , because the u.s. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners .
they can monitor foreigners when foreigners ' data connections end up in the united states or pass through the united states .
and monitoring foreigners does n't sound too bad until you realize that i 'm a foreigner and you 're a foreigner .
in fact , 96 percent of the planet are foreigners .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right ?
so it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us , all of us who use telecommunications and the internet .
but do n't get me wrong : there are actually types of surveillance that are okay .
i love freedom , but even i agree that some surveillance is fine .
if the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer , or they 're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting , and they have leads and they have suspects , then it 's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect 's phone , and to intercept his internet communications .
i 'm not arguing that at all , but that 's not what programs like prism are about .
they are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings .
they 're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent .
so the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this , well , the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations , there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations , saying that we knew all this already , we knew it was happening , there 's nothing new here .
and that 's not true . do n't let anybody tell you that we knew this already , because we did not know this already .
our worst fears might have been something like this , but we did n't know this was happening .
now we know for a fact it 's happening .
we did n't know about this . we did n't know about prism .
we did n't know about xkeyscore . we did n't know about cybertrans .
we did n't know about doublearrow .
we did not know about skywriter - all these different programs run by u.s. intelligence agencies .
but now we do .
and we did not know that u.s. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose .
and what that means is that you take something which is secure , an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file , nobody can decrypt that file .
even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file , it 's going to take millions of years .
so that 's basically perfectly safe , uncrackable .
you take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose , making all of us less secure as an end result .
a real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because , you know , bad people might have house alarms , but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result .
backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind .
but of course , these intelligence agencies are doing their job .
this is what they have been told to do : do signals intelligence , monitor telecommunications , monitor internet traffic .
that 's what they 're trying to do , and since most , a very big part of the internet traffic today is encrypted , they 're trying to find ways around the encryption .
one way is to sabotage encryption algorithms , which is a great example about how u.s. intelligence agencies are running loose .
they are completely out of control , and they should be brought back under control .
so what do we actually know about the leaks ?
everything is based on the files leaked by mr. snowden .
the very first prism slides from the beginning of june detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers , and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to .
they even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers .
so for example , they name the collection from microsoft started on september 11 , 2007 , for yahoo on the march 12 , 2008 , and then others : google , facebook , skype , apple and so on .
and every single one of these companies denies .
they all say that this simply is n't true , that they are not giving backdoor access to their data .
yet we have these files .
so is one of the parties lying , or is there some other alternative explanation ?
and one explanation would be that these parties , these service providers , are not cooperating .
instead , they 've been hacked .
that would explain it . they are n't cooperating . they 've been hacked .
in this case , they 've been hacked by their own government .
that might sound outlandish , but we already have cases where this has happened , for example , the case of the flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the u.s. government , and which , to spread , subverted the security of the windows update network , meaning here , the company was hacked by their own government .
and there 's more evidence supporting this theory as well .
der spiegel , from germany , leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies .
inside nsa , the unit is called tao , tailored access operations , and inside gchq , which is the u.k. equivalent , it 's called nac , network analysis centre .
and these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this gchq intelligence agency from the united kingdom targeting a telecom here in belgium .
and what this really means is that an e.u. country 's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow e.u. country on purpose , and they discuss it in their slides completely casually , business as usual .
here 's the primary target , here 's the secondary target , here 's the teaming .
they probably have a team building on thursday evening in a pub .
they even use cheesy powerpoint clip art like , you know , " success , " when they gain access to services like this .
what the hell ?
and then there 's the argument that okay , yes , this might be going on , but then again , other countries are doing it as well .
all countries spy .
and maybe that 's true .
many countries spy , not all of them , but let 's take an example .
let 's take , for example , sweden .
i 'm speaking of sweden because sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the united states .
when your data traffic goes through sweden , their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic .
all right , how many swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use , every day , u.s.-based services , like , you know , run windows or osx , or use facebook or linkedin , or store their data in clouds like icloud or skydrive or dropbox , or maybe use online services like amazon web services or sales support ?
and the answer is , every single swedish business leader does that every single day .
and then we turn it around .
how many american leaders use swedish webmails and cloud services ?
and the answer is zero .
so this is not balanced .
it 's not balanced by any means , not even close .
and when we do have the occasional european success story , even those , then , typically end up being sold to the united states .
like , skype used to be secure .
it used to be end-to-end encrypted .
then it was sold to the united states .
today , it no longer is secure .
so once again , we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose , making all of us less secure as an outcome .
and then the argument that the united states is only fighting terrorists .
it 's the war on terror .
you should n't worry about it .
well , it 's not the war on terror .
yes , part of it is war on terror , and yes , there are terrorists , and they do kill and maim , and we should fight them , but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of european leaders , to tap the email of residents of mexico and brazil , to read email traffic inside the united nations headquarters and e.u. parliament , and i do n't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the e.u. parliament , right ?
it 's not the war on terror .
part of it might be , and there are terrorists , but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them ?
are the americans ready to throw away the constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists ?
and the same thing with the bill of rights and all the amendments and the universal declaration of human rights and the e.u. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom ?
do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat , we are ready to do anything at all ?
but people are scared about terrorists , and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide .
feel free to survey me if that helps .
and whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply has n't thought about this long enough .
-lrb- applause -rrb- because we have this thing called privacy , and if you really think that you have nothing to hide , please make sure that 's the first thing you tell me , because then i know that i should not trust you with any secrets , because obviously you ca n't keep a secret .
but people are brutally honest with the internet , and when these leaks started , many people were asking me about this .
and i have nothing to hide .
i 'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal .
yet , i have nothing that i would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency , especially a foreign intelligence agency .
and if we indeed need a big brother , i would much rather have a domestic big brother than a foreign big brother .
and when the leaks started , the very first thing i tweeted about this was a comment about how , when you 've been using search engines , you 've been potentially leaking all that to u.s. intelligence .
and two minutes later , i got a reply by somebody called kimberly from the united states challenging me , like , why am i worried about this ?
what am i sending to worry about this ? am i sending naked pictures or something ?
and my answer to kimberly was that what i 'm sending is none of your business , and it should be none of your government 's business either .
because that 's what it 's about . it 's about privacy .
privacy is nonnegotiable .
it should be built in to all the systems we use .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines .
you show me your search history , and i 'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes .
we are more honest with search engines than we are with our families .
search engines know more about you than your family members know about you .
and this is all the kind of information we are giving away , we are giving away to the united states .
and surveillance changes history .
we know this through examples of corrupt presidents like nixon .
imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today .
and let me actually quote the president of brazil , ms. dilma rousseff .
she was one of the targets of nsa surveillance .
her email was read , and she spoke at the united nations headquarters , and she said , " if there is no right to privacy , there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion , and therefore , there can be no effective democracy . "
that 's what it 's about .
privacy is the building block of our democracies .
and to quote a fellow security researcher , marcus ranum , he said that the united states is right now treating the internet as it would be treating one of its colonies .
so we are back to the age of colonization , and we , the foreign users of the internet , we should think about americans as our masters .
so mr. snowden , he 's been blamed for many things .
some are blaming him for causing problems for the u.s. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations - and blaming snowden for causing problems for the u.s. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming al gore for causing global warming .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , what is there to be done ?
should we worry . no , we should n't worry .
we should be angry , because this is wrong , and it 's rude , and it should not be done .
but that 's not going to really change the situation .
what 's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the united states .
and that 's much easier said than done .
how do you do that ?
a single country , any single country in europe can not replace and build replacements for the u.s.-made operating systems and cloud services .
but maybe you do n't have to do it alone .
maybe you can do it together with other countries .
the solution is open source .
by building together open , free , secure systems , we can go around such surveillance , and then one country does n't have to solve the problem by itself .
it only has to solve one little problem .
and to quote a fellow security researcher , haroon meer , one country only has to make a small wave , but those small waves together become a tide , and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time , and the tide we will build with secure , free , open-source systems , will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the substance of things unseen .
cities , past and future .
in oxford , perhaps we can use lewis carroll and look in the looking glass that is new york city to try and see our true selves , or perhaps pass through to another world .
or , in the words of f. scott fitzgerald , " as the moon rose higher , the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually i became aware of the old island here that once flowered for dutch sailors ' eyes , a fresh green breast of the new world . "
my colleagues and i have been working for 10 years to rediscover this lost world in a project we call the mannahatta project .
we 're trying to discover what henry hudson would have seen on the afternoon of september 12th , 1609 , when he sailed into new york harbor .
and i 'd like to tell you the story in three acts , and if i have time still , an epilogue .
so , act i : a map found .
so , i did n't grow up in new york .
i grew up out west in the sierra nevada mountains , like you see here , in the red rock canyon .
and from these early experiences as a child i learned to love landscapes .
and so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies , i studied this emerging field of landscape ecology .
landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals .
this experience and this training lead me to get a wonderful job with the wildlife conservation society , which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world .
and over the last decade , i traveled to over 40 countries to see jaguars and bears and elephants and tigers and rhinos .
but every time i would return from my trips i 'd return back to new york city .
and on my weekends i would go up , just like all the other tourists , to the top of the empire state building , and i 'd look down on this landscape , on these ecosystems , and i 'd wonder , " how does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals ?
how does it work to make habitat for animals like me ? "
i 'd go to times square and i 'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall , and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them .
i 'd go to central park and see the rolling topography of central park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown manhattan .
i started reading about the history and the geography in new york city .
i read that new york city was the first mega-city , a city of 10 million people or more , in 1950 .
i started seeing paintings like this .
for those of you who are from new york , this is 125th street under the west side highway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was once a beach . and this painting has john james audubon , the painter , sitting on the rock .
and it 's looking up on the wooded heights of washington heights to jeffrey 's hook , where the george washington bridge goes across today .
or this painting , from the 1740s , from greenwich village .
those are two students at king 's college - later columbia university - sitting on a hill , overlooking a valley .
and so i 'd go down to greenwich village and i 'd look for this hill , and i could n't find it . and i could n't find that palm tree .
what 's that palm tree doing there ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it was in the course of these investigations that i ran into a map .
and it 's this map you see here .
it 's held in a geographic information system which allows me to zoom in .
this map is n't from hudson 's time , but from the american revolution , 170 years later , made by british military cartographers during the occupation of new york city .
and it 's a remarkable map . it 's in the national archives here in kew .
and it 's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide .
and if i zoom in to lower manhattan you can see the extent of new york city as it was , right at the end of the american revolution .
here 's bowling green . and here 's broadway .
and this is city hall park .
so the city basically extended to city hall park .
and just beyond it you can see features that have vanished , things that have disappeared .
this is the collect pond , which was the fresh water source for new york city for its first 200 years , and for the native americans for thousands of years before that .
you can see the lispenard meadows draining down through here , through what is tribeca now , and the beaches that come up from the battery , all the way to 42nd st.
this map was made for military reasons .
they 're mapping the roads , the buildings , these fortifications that they built .
but they 're also mapping things of ecological interest , also military interest : the hills , the marshes , the streams .
this is richmond hill , and minetta water , which used to run its way through greenwich village .
or the swamp at gramercy park , right here .
or murray hill . and this is the murrays ' house on murray hill , 200 years ago .
here is times square , the two streams that came together to make a wetland in times square , as it was at the end of the american revolution .
so i saw this remarkable map in a book .
and i thought to myself , " you know , if i could georeference this map , if i could place this map in the grid of the city today , i could find these lost features of the city , in the block-by-block geography that people know , the geography of where people go to work , and where they go to live , and where they like to eat . "
so , after some work we were able to georeference it , which allows us to put the modern streets on the city , and the buildings , and the open spaces , so that we can zoom in to where the collect pond is .
we can digitize the collect pond and the streams , and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today .
so this is fun for finding where things are relative to the old topography .
but i had another idea about this map .
if we take away the streets , and if we take away the buildings , and if we take away the open spaces , then we could take this map .
if we pull off the 18th century features we could drive it back in time .
we could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals : to the hills , to the streams , to the basic hydrology and shoreline , to the beaches , the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape .
then , if we added maps like the geology , the bedrock geology , and the surface geology , what the glaciers leave , if we make the soil map , with the 17 soil classes , that are defined by the national conservation service , if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were , then we can calculate the slopes .
we can calculate the aspect .
we can calculate the winter wind exposure - so , which way the winter winds blow across the landscape .
the white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds .
we compiled all the information about where the native americans were , the lenape .
and we built a probability map of where they might have been .
so , the red areas on this map indicate the places that are best for human sustainability on manhattan , places that are close to water , places that are near the harbor to fish , places protected from the winter winds .
we know that there was a lenape settlement down here by the collect pond .
and we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture , that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn , beans , and squash , the " three sisters " garden .
so , we built a model that explains where those fields might have been .
and the old fields , the successional fields that go .
and we might think of these as abandoned .
but , in fact , they 're grassland habitats for grassland birds and plants .
and they have become successional shrub lands , and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities .
and it turns out that manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types .
you can think of these as neighborhoods , as distinctive as tribeca and the upper east side and inwood - that these are the forest and the wetlands and the marine communities , the beaches .
and 55 is a lot . on a per-area basis , manhattan had more ecological communities per acre than yosemite does , than yellowstone , than amboseli .
it was really an extraordinary landscape that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity .
so , act ii : a home reconstructed .
so , we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees , the 85 different kinds of fish that were on manhattan , the heath hens , the species that are n't there anymore , the beavers on all the streams , the black bears , and the native americans , to study how they used and thought about their landscape .
we wanted to try and map these . and to do that what we did was we mapped their habitat needs .
where do they get their food ?
where do they get their water ? where do they get their shelter ?
where do they get their reproductive resources ?
to an ecologist , the intersection of these is habitat , but to most people , the intersection of these is their home .
so , we would read in field guides , the standard field guides that maybe you have on your shelves , you know , what beavers need is , " a slowly meandering stream with aspen trees and alders and willows , near the water . " that 's the best thing for a beaver .
so we just started making a list .
here is the beaver . and here is the stream , and the aspen and the alder and the willow .
as if these were the maps that we would need to predict where you would find the beaver .
or the bog turtle , needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places .
or the bobcat , needing rabbits and beavers and den sites .
and rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be something that a bobcat needs .
but a beaver also needs things . and that having it on either side means that we can link it together , that we can create the network of the habitat relationships for these species .
moreover , we realized that you can start out as being a beaver specialist , but you can look up what an aspen needs .
an aspen needs fire and dry soils .
and you can look at what a wet meadow needs .
and it need beavers to create the wetlands , and maybe some other things .
but you can also talk about sunny places .
so , what does a sunny place need ? not habitat per se .
but what are the conditions that make it possible ?
or fire . or dry soils .
and that you can put these on a grid that 's 1,000 columns long across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way .
and then we can visualize this data like a network , like a social network .
and this is the network of all the habitat relationships of all the plants and animals on manhattan , and everything they needed , going back to the geology , going back to time and space at the very core of the web .
we call this the muir web . and if you zoom in on it it looks like this .
each point is a different species or a different stream or a different soil type .
and those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together .
they are the connections that actually make nature resilient .
and the structure of this is what makes nature work , seen with all its parts .
we call these muir webs after the scottish-american naturalist john muir , who said , " when we try to pick out anything by itself , we find that it 's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that can not be broken , to everything in the universe . "
so then we took the muir webs and we took them back to the maps .
so if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th , and lex and third , maybe there was a stream in that block .
and these would be the kind of trees that might have been there , and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses , the butterflies , the fish in the stream , the birds in the trees .
maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there .
and perhaps a black bear walked by . and maybe native americans were there .
and then we took this data .
you can see this for yourself on our website .
you can zoom into any block on manhattan , and see what might have been there 400 years ago .
and we used it to try and reveal a landscape here in act iii .
we used the tools they use in hollywood to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies .
and we tried to use it to visualize third avenue .
so we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography .
we 'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters , and illuminate the landscape .
we would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities .
and feed into that the map of the species .
so that we would actually take a photograph , flying above times square , looking toward the hudson river , waiting for hudson to come .
using this technology , we can make these fantastic georeferenced views .
we can basically take a picture out of any window on manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago .
this is the view from the east river , looking up murray hill at where the united nations is today .
this is the view looking down the hudson river , with manhattan on the left , and new jersey out on the right , looking out toward the atlantic ocean .
this is the view over times square , with the beaver pond there , looking out toward the east .
so we can see the collect pond , and lispenard marshes back behind .
we can see the fields that the native americans made .
and we can see this in the geography of the city today .
so when you 're watching " law and order , " and the lawyers walk up the steps they could have walked back down those steps of the new york court house , right into the collect pond , 400 years ago .
so these images are the work of my friend and colleague , mark boyer , who is here in the audience today .
and i 'd just like , if you would give him a hand , to call out for his fine work .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there is such power in bringing science and visualization together , that we can create images like this , perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass .
and even though i 've only had a brief time to speak , i hope you appreciate that mannahatta was a very special place .
the place that you see here on the left side was interconnected . it was based on this diversity .
it had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world .
but i would n't have you think that i do n't like the place on the right , which i quite do . i 've come to love the city and its kind of diversity , and its resilience , and its dependence on density and how we 're connected together .
in fact , that i see them as reflections of each other , much as lewis carroll did in " through the looking glass . "
we can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time , that they really are the same place , that there is no way that cities can escape from nature .
and i think this is what we 're learning about building cities in the future .
so if you 'll allow me a brief epilogue , not about the past , but about 400 years from now , what we 're realizing is that cities are habitats for people , and need to supply what people need : a sense of home , food , water , shelter , reproductive resources , and a sense of meaning .
this is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity .
and so many of the talks here at ted are about meaning , about bringing meaning to our lives in all kinds of different ways , through technology , through art , through science , so much so that i think we focus so much on that side of our lives , that we have n't given enough attention to the food and the water and the shelter , and what we need to raise the kids .
so , how can we envision the city of the future ?
well , what if we go to madison square park , and we imagine it without all the cars , and bicycles instead and large forests , and streams instead of sewers and storm drains ?
what if we imagined the upper east side with green roofs , and streams winding through the city , and windmills supplying the power we need ?
or if we imagine the new york city metropolitan area , currently home to 12 million people , but 12 million people in the future , perhaps living at the density of manhattan , in only 36 percent of the area , with the areas in between covered by farmland , covered by wetlands , covered by the marshes we need .
this is the kind of future i think we need , is a future that has the same diversity and abundance and dynamism of manhattan , but that learns from the sustainability of the past , of the ecology , the original ecology , of nature with all its parts .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i started improv everywhere about 10 years ago when i moved to new york city with an interest in acting and comedy .
because i was new to the city , i did n't have access to a stage , so i decided to create my own in public places .
so the first project we 're going to take a look at is the very first no pants subway ride .
now this took place in january of 2002 .
and this woman is the star of the video .
she does n't know she 's being filmed .
she 's being filmed with a hidden camera .
this is on the 6 train in new york city .
and this is the first stop along the line .
these are two danish guys who come out and sit down next to the hidden camera .
and that 's me right there in a brown coat .
it 's about 30 degrees outside .
i 'm wearing a hat . i 'm wearing a scarf .
and the girl 's going to notice me right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as you 'll see now , i 'm not wearing pants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at this point - at this point she 's noticed me , but in new york there 's weirdos on any given train car .
one person 's not that unusual .
she goes back to reading her book , which is unfortunately titled " rape . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so she 's noticed the unusual thing , but she 's gone back to her normal life .
now in the meantime , i have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well .
they 're going to be entering this car one by one .
we 'll act as though we do n't know each other .
and we 'll act as if it 's just an unfortunate mistake we 've made , forgetting our pants on this cold january day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at this point , she decides to put the rape book away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings .
now in the meantime , the two danish guys to the left of the camera , they 're cracking up .
they think this is the funniest thing they 've ever seen before .
and watch her make eye contact with them right about now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i love that moment in this video , because before it became a shared experience , it was something that was maybe a little bit scary , or something that was at least confusing to her .
and then once it became a shared experience , it was funny and something that she could laugh at .
so the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the video wo n't show everything .
this goes on for another four stops .
a total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear .
at the eighth stop , a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar - like you might sell batteries or candy on the train .
we all very matter of factly bought a pair of pants , put them on and said , " thank you . that 's exactly what i needed today , " and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so that 's a still from the video there .
and i love that girl 's reaction so much .
and watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what i do .
and really one of the points of improv everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people .
it 's a prank , but it 's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell .
and her reaction inspired me to do a second annual no pants subway ride .
and we 've continued to do it every year .
this january , we did the 10th annual no pants subway ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in new york - almost every single train line in the city .
and also in 50 other cities around the world , people participated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as i started taking improv class at the upright citizens brigade theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians , i started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects .
so i could do more large-scale projects .
well one day i was walking through union square , and i saw this building , which had just been built in 2005 .
and there was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing .
and it was very peculiar , because it was dark out , but she was back-lit with florescent lighting , and she was very much onstage , and i could n't figure out why she was doing it .
after about 15 seconds , her friend appeared - she had been hiding behind a display - and they laughed and hugged each other and ran away .
so it seemed like maybe she had been dared to do this .
so i got inspired by that .
looking at the entire facade - there were 70 total windows - and i knew what i had to do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this project is called look up more . we had 70 actors dress in black .
this was completely unauthorized .
we did n't let the stores know we were coming .
and i stood in the park giving signals .
the first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out " look up more , " the name of the project .
the second signal was for everybody to do jumping jacks together .
you 'll see that start right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we had dancing . we had everyone dance .
and then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so then i gave a new hand signal , which signaled the next soloist down below in forever 21 , and he danced .
there were several other activities .
we had people jumping up and down , people dropping to the ground .
and i was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt , putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement .
and because it was in union square park , right by a subway station , there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing .
there 's a better photo of it .
so that particular event was inspired by a moment that i happened to stumble upon .
the next project i want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger .
a high school kid in texas wrote me in 2006 and said , " you should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a best buy and stand around . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i wrote this high school kid back immediately , and i said , " yes , you are correct .
i think i 'll try to do that this weekend . thank you . "
so here 's the video .
so again , this is 2005 .
this is the best buy in new york city .
we had about 80 people show up to participate , entering one-by-one .
there was an eight year-old girl , a 10 year-old girl .
there was also a 65 year-old man who participated .
so a very diverse group of people .
and i told people , " do n't work . do n't actually do work .
but also , do n't shop .
just stand around and do n't face products . "
now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt .
everybody else is one of our actors .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the lower level employees thought it was very funny .
and in fact , several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us .
a lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers .
the managers and the security guards , on the other hand , did not find it particularly funny .
you can see them in this footage .
they 're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt .
and we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming , watch out , the cops were coming .
and you can see the cops in this footage right here .
that 's a cop wearing black right there , being filmed with a hidden camera .
ultimately , the police had to inform best buy management that it was not , in fact , illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we had been there for 20 minutes ; we were happy to exit the store .
one thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras .
and they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags .
but the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the best buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop .
so i like that concept of using their own technology against them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think our best projects are ones that are site specific and happen at a particular place for a reason .
and one morning , i was riding the subway .
i had to make a transfer at the 53rd st. stop where there are these two giant escalators .
and it 's a very depressing place to be in the morning , it 's very crowded .
so i decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning .
so this was in the winter of 2009 - 8:30 in the morning .
it 's morning rush hour .
it 's very cold outside .
people are coming in from queens , transferring from the e train to the 6 train .
and they 're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so there 's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better .
he gave 2,000 high fives that day , and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick .
and that was done also without permission , although no one seemed to care .
so i 'd say over the years , one of the most common criticisms i see of improv everywhere left anonymously on youtube comments is : " these people have too much time on their hands . "
and you know , not everybody 's going to like everything you do , and i 've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to internet comments , but that one 's always bothered me , because we do n't have too much time on our hands .
the participants at improv everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other new yorkers , they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way .
you know , every saturday and sunday , hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games .
and i 've never seen anybody comment , looking at a football game , saying , " all those people in the stands , they have too much time on their hands . "
and of course they do n't .
it 's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon , watching a football game in a stadium .
but i think it 's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the grand central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the new york public library .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or listening to the same mp3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park , or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical , or diving into the ocean in coney island wearing formal attire .
you know , as kids , we 're taught to play .
and we 're never given a reason why we should play .
it 's just acceptable that play is a good thing .
and i think that 's sort of the point of improv everywhere .
it 's that there is no point and that there does n't have to be a point .
we do n't need a reason .
as long as it 's fun and it seems like it 's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time , then that 's enough for us .
and i think , as adults , we need to learn that there 's no right or wrong way to play .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in my previous life , i was an artist .
i still paint . i love art .
i love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities , and i try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics , and i see part of my job today , the reason for being here , not just to campaign for my party , but for politics , and the role it can play for the better in our lives .
for 11 years , i was mayor of tirana , our capital .
we faced many challenges .
art was part of the answer , and my name , in the very beginning , was linked with two things : demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back , and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city .
but this use of colors was not just an artistic act .
rather , it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget i had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something .
when we painted the first building , by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade , something unimaginable happened .
there was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident , or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star .
the french e.u. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting .
he screeched that he would block the financing .
" but why ? " i asked him .
" because the colors you have ordered do not meet european standards , " he replied .
" well , " i told him , " the surroundings do not meet european standards , even though this is not what we want , but we will choose the colors ourselves , because this is exactly what we want .
and if you do not let us continue with our work , i will hold a press conference here , right now , right in this road , and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era . "
then he was kind of troubled , and asked me for a compromise .
but i told him no , i 'm sorry , compromise in colors is gray , and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so it 's time for change .
the rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost .
the pride of people about their own place of living , and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal , barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space .
and when colors came out everywhere , a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people .
big noise raised up : " what is this ? what is happening ?
what are colors doing to us ? "
and we made a poll , the most fascinating poll i 've seen in my life .
we asked people , " do you want this action , and to have buildings painted like that ? "
and then the second question was , " do you want it to stop or do you want it to continue ? "
to the first question , 63 percent of people said yes , we like it .
thirty-seven said no , we do n't like it .
but to the second question , half of them that did n't like it , they wanted it to continue . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we noticed change .
people started to drop less litter in the streets , for example , started to pay taxes , started to feel something they had forgotten , and beauty was acting as a guardsman where municipal police , or the state itself , were missing .
one day i remember walking along a street that had just been colored , and where we were in the process of planting trees , when i saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop .
they had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place .
" why did you throw away the shutters ? " i asked him .
" well , because the street is safer now , " they answered .
" safer ? why ? they have posted more policemen here ? "
" come on , man ! what policemen ?
you can see it for yourself . there are colors , streetlights , new pavement with no potholes , trees . so it 's beautiful ; it 's safe . "
and indeed , it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected .
and this was not a misplaced feeling .
crime did fall .
the freedom that was won in 1990 brought about a state of anarchy in the city , while the barbarism of the ' 90s brought about a loss of hope for the city .
the paint on the walls did not feed children , nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant , but it gave hope and light , and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things , a different spirit , a different feel to our lives , and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics , we could build a better life for each other and for our country .
we removed 123,000 tons of concrete only from the riverbanks .
we demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city , up to eight stories high , the tallest of them .
we planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets .
we established a green tax , and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly .
by means of open competitions , we managed to recruit in our administration many young people , and we thus managed to build a de-politicized public institution where men and women were equally represented .
international organizations have invested a lot in albania during these 20 years , not all of it well spent .
when i told the world bank directors that i wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption , they did not understand me .
but people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks .
they were paying in order to skip the queue , the long queue .
the reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole , and , on the other hand , a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe .
we could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks , every week , but we could not change this corrupt practice .
" i 'm convinced , " i told a german official with the world bank , " that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in germany , in a german administration , just as i am convinced that if you put german officials from the german administration in those holes , they would be bribed just the same . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not about genes .
it 's not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience .
it 's about system , it 's about organization .
it 's also about environment and respect .
we removed the kiosks .
we built the bright new reception hall that made people , tirana citizens , think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests .
we created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes .
we put the citizen first , and not the clerks .
the corruption in the state administration of countries like albania - it 's not up to me to say also like greece - can be fought only by modernization .
reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer , and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us .
-lrb- applause -rrb- things have come to this point because politicians in general , but especially in our countries , let 's face it , think people are stupid .
they take it for granted that , come what may , people have to follow them , while politics , more and more , fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people .
politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians , while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation .
seen from those stairs , all politicians today seem the same , and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism .
barack obama won - -lrb- applause -rrb- - because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks .
he did not know each and every one of them , but with an admirable ingenuity , he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign .
i tweet . i love it .
i love it because it lets me get the message out , but it also lets people get their messages to me .
this is politics , not from top down , but from the bottom up , and sideways , and allowing everybody 's voice to be heard is exactly what we need .
politics is not just about leaders .
it 's not just about politicians and laws .
it is about how people think , how they view the world around them , how they use their time and their energy .
when people say all politicians are the same , ask yourself if obama was the same as bush , if françois hollande is the same as sarkozy .
they are not . they are human beings with different views and different visions for the world .
when people say nothing can change , just stop and think what the world was like 10 , 20 , 50 , 100 years ago .
our world is defined by the pace of change .
we can all change the world .
i gave you a very small example of how one thing , the use of color , can make change happen .
i want to make more change as prime minister of my country , but every single one of you can make change happen if you want to .
president roosevelt , he said , " believe you can , and you are halfway there . "
efharisto and kalinihta .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for emotions , we should not move quickly to the desert .
so , first , a small housekeeping announcement : please switch off your proper english check programs installed in your brain .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , welcome to the golden desert , indian desert .
it receives the least rainfall in the country , lowest rainfall .
if you are well-versed with inches , nine inches , centimeters , 16 -lsb- centimeters -rsb- .
the groundwater is 300 feet deep , 100 meters .
and in most parts it is saline , not fit for drinking .
so , you ca n't install hand pumps or dig wells , though there is no electricity in most of the villages .
but suppose you use the green technology , solar pumps - they are of no use in this area .
so , welcome to the golden desert .
clouds seldom visit this area .
but we find 40 different names of clouds in this dialect used here .
there are a number of techniques to harvest rain .
this is a new work , it 's a new program .
but for the desert society this is no program ; this is their life .
and they harvest rain in many ways .
so , this is the first device they use in harvesting rain .
it 's called kunds ; somewhere it is called -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment .
the desert is there , sand dunes , some small field .
and this is all big raised platform .
you can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment , and there is a slope .
sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms , but here they will care properly .
and the water will go where it should go .
and then it is 40 feet deep .
the waterproofing is done perfectly , better than our city contractors , because not a single drop should go waste in this .
they collect 100 thousand liters in one season .
and this is pure drinking water .
below the surface there is hard saline water .
but now you can have this for year round .
it 's two houses .
we often use a term called bylaws .
because we are used to get written things .
but here it is unwritten by law .
and people made their house , and the water storage tanks .
these raised up platforms just like this stage .
in fact they go 15 feet deep , and collect rain water from roof , there is a small pipe , and from their courtyard .
it can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon .
another big one , this is of course out of the hardcore desert area .
this is near jaipur . this is called the jaigarh fort .
and it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season .
the age is 400 years .
so , since 400 years it has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season .
you can calculate the price of that water .
it draws water from 15 kilometers of canals .
you can see a modern road , hardly 50 years old .
it can break sometimes .
but this 400 year old canal , which draws water , it is maintained for so many generations .
of course if you want to go inside , the two doors are locked .
but they can be opened for ted people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we request them .
you can see person coming up with two canisters of water .
and the water level - these are not empty canisters - water level is right up to this .
it can envy many municipalities , the color , the taste , the purity of this water .
and this is what they call zero b type of water , because it comes from the clouds , pure distilled water .
we stop for a quick commercial break , and then we come back to the traditional systems .
the government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from the himalayas .
that 's why i said that this is a commercial break .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we will come back , once again , to the traditional thing .
so , water from 300 , 400 kilometers away , soon it become like this .
in many portions , water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything .
of course there are some areas where water is reaching , i 'm not saying that it is not reaching at all .
but the tail end , the jaisalmer area , you will notice in bikaner things like this : where the water hyacinth could n't grow , the sand is flowing in these canals .
the bonus is that you can find wildlife around it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we had full-page advertisements , some 30 years , 25 years ago when this canal came .
they said that throw away your traditional systems , these new cement tanks will supply you piped water .
it 's a dream . and it became a dream also .
because soon the water was not able to reach these areas .
and people started renovating their own structures .
these are all traditional water structures , which we wo n't be able to explain in such a short time .
but you can see that no woman is standing on those .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they are plaiting hair .
-lrb- applause -rrb- jaisalmer . this is heart of desert .
this town was established 800 years ago .
i 'm not sure by that time bombay was there , or delhi was there , or chennai was there , or bangalore was there .
so , this was the terminal point for silk route .
well connected , 800 years ago , through europe .
none of us were able to go to europe , but jaisalmer was well connected to it .
and this is the 16 centimeter area .
such a limited rainfall , and highest colorful life flourished in these areas .
you wo n't find water in this slide .
but it is invisible .
somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here .
or , if you want to paint , you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms .
but apart from this system , they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town .
and what we call private public partnership you can add estate also .
so , estate , public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body .
and it 's a kind of water body for all seasons .
you will admire it . just behold the beauty throughout the year .
whether water level goes up or down , the beauty is there throughout .
another water body , dried up , of course , during the summer period , but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics , with the heart .
these statues , marvelous statues , gives you an idea of water table .
when this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank , it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in english today " mass communication . "
this was for mass communication .
everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned , so water will be there for seven months or nine months , or 12 months .
and then they will come and worship this pond , pay respect , their gratitude .
another small water body , called the -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
it is difficult to translate in english , especially in my english .
but the nearest would be " glory , " a reputation .
the reputation in desert of this small water body is that it never dries up .
in severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up .
and perhaps they knew the future also .
it was designed some 150 years ago .
but perhaps they knew that on sixth , november , 2009 , there will be a ted green and blue session , so they painted it like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dry water body . children are standing on a very difficult device to explain .
this is called kund . we have , in english , surface water and ground water .
but this is not ground water .
you can draw ground water from any well .
but this is no ordinary well .
it squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand .
and they have dubbed this water as the third one called -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and there is a gypsum belt running below it .
and it was deposited by the great mother earth , some three million years ago .
and where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water .
this is the same dry water body .
now , you do n't find any kund ; they are all submerged .
but when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year .
this year they have received only six centimeters .
six centimeter of rainfall , and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city , delhi , bombay , bangalore , mysore , please come to our area of six centimeters , we can give you water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how they maintain them ?
there are three things : concept , planning , making the actual thing , and also maintaining them .
it is a structure for maintain , for centuries , by generations , without any department , without any funding , so the secret is " -lsb- unclear -rsb- , " respect .
your own thing , not personal property , my property , every time .
so , these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area .
do n't spit , do n't do anything wrong , so that the clean water can be collected .
another pillar , stone pillar on your right side .
if you climb these three , six steps you will find something very nice .
this was done in 11th century .
and you have to go further down .
they say that a picture is worth a thousand words , so we can say a thousand words right now , an another thousand words .
if the water table goes down , you will find new stairs .
if it comes up , some of them will be submerged .
so , throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure .
three sides , such steps , on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such ted conferences anytime .
-lrb- applause -rrb- excuse me , who built these structures ?
they are in front of you .
the best civil engineers we had , the best planners , the best architects .
we can say that because of them , because of their forefathers , india could get the first engineering college in 1847 .
there were no english medium schools at that time , even no hindi schools , -lsb- unclear -rsb- schools .
but such people , compelled to the east india company , which came here for business , a very dirty kind of business ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but not to create the engineering colleges .
but because of them , first engineering college was created in a small village , not in the town .
the last point , we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert .
so , you can find through your jeep , a camel , and a cart .
this tire comes from the airplane .
so , look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater , and also create something through a tire from a jet plane , and used in a camel cart .
last picture , it 's a tattoo , 2,000-years-old tattoo .
they were using it on their body .
tattoo was , at one time , a kind of a blacklisted or con thing , but now it is in thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you can copy this tattoo . i have some posters of this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the center of life is water .
these are the beautiful waves .
these are the beautiful stairs which we just saw in one of the slides .
these are the trees .
and these are the flowers which add fragrance to our lives .
so , this is the message of desert .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so , first of all , i wish i had your eloquence , truly , in any language .
-lrb- applause -rrb- these artifacts and designs are inspiring .
do you believe that they can be used elsewhere , that the world can learn from this ?
or is this just right for this place ?
anupam mishra : no , the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area .
so , the ponds , the open bodies , are everywhere , right from sri lanka to kashmir , and in other parts also .
and these -lsb- unclear -rsb- , which stored water , there are two type of things .
one recharge , and one stores .
so , it depends on the terrain .
but kund , which uses the gypsum belt , for that you have to go back to your calendar , three million years ago .
if it is there it can be done right now .
otherwise , it ca n't be done .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- can i ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something - a movie , an album , a song or a book - and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked , and you anticipated that reaction , you waited for it , and it came back , and the person hated it ?
so , by way of introduction , that is the exact same state in which i spent every working day of the last six years . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i teach high school math .
i sell a product to a market that does n't want it , but is forced by law to buy it .
i mean , it 's just a losing proposition .
so there 's a useful stereotype about students that i see , a useful stereotype about you all .
i could give you guys an algebra-two final exam , and i would expect no higher than a 25 percent pass rate .
and both of these facts say less about you or my students than they do about what we call math education in the u.s. today .
to start with , i 'd like to break math down into two categories .
one is computation ; this is the stuff you 've forgotten .
for example , factoring quadratics with leading coefficients greater than one .
this stuff is also really easy to relearn , provided you have a really strong grounding in reasoning . math reasoning - we 'll call it the application of math processes to the world around us - this is hard to teach .
this is what we would love students to retain , even if they do n't go into mathematical fields .
this is also something that , the way we teach it in the u.s.
all but ensures they wo n't retain it .
so , i 'd like to talk about why that is , why that 's such a calamity for society , what we can do about it and , to close with , why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher .
so first , five symptoms that you 're doing math reasoning wrong in your classroom .
one is a lack of initiative ; your students do n't self-start .
you finish your lecture block and immediately you have five hands going up asking you to re-explain the entire thing at their desks .
students lack perseverance .
they lack retention ; you find yourself re-explaining concepts three months later , wholesale .
there 's an aversion to word problems , which describes 99 percent of my students .
and then the other one percent is eagerly looking for the formula to apply in that situation .
this is really destructive .
david milch , creator of " deadwood " and other amazing tv shows , has a really good description for this .
he swore off creating contemporary drama , shows set in the present day , because he saw that when people fill their mind with four hours a day of , for example , " two and a half men , " no disrespect , it shapes the neural pathways , he said , in such a way that they expect simple problems .
he called it , " an impatience with irresolution . "
you 're impatient with things that do n't resolve quickly .
you expect sitcom-sized problems that wrap up in 22 minutes , three commercial breaks and a laugh track .
and i 'll put it to all of you , what you already know , that no problem worth solving is that simple .
i am very concerned about this because i 'm going to retire in a world that my students will run .
i 'm doing bad things to my own future and well-being when i teach this way .
i 'm here to tell you that the way our textbooks - particularly mass-adopted textbooks - teach math reasoning and patient problem solving , it 's functionally equivalent to turning on " two and a half men " and calling it a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in all seriousness . here 's an example from a physics textbook .
it applies equally to math .
notice , first of all here , that you have exactly three pieces of information there , each of which will figure into a formula somewhere , eventually , which the student will then compute .
i believe in real life .
and ask yourself , what problem have you solved , ever , that was worth solving where you knew all of the given information in advance ; where you did n't have a surplus of information and you had to filter it out , or you did n't have sufficient information and had to go find some .
i 'm sure we all agree that no problem worth solving is like that .
and the textbook , i think , knows how it 's hamstringing students because , watch this , this is the practice problem set .
when it comes time to do the actual problem set , we have problems like this right here where we 're just swapping out numbers and tweaking the context a little bit .
and if the student still does n't recognize the stamp this was molded from , it helpfully explains to you what sample problem you can return to to find the formula .
you could literally , i mean this , pass this particular unit without knowing any physics , just knowing how to decode a textbook . that 's a shame .
so i can diagnose the problem a little more specifically in math .
here 's a really cool problem . i like this .
it 's about defining steepness and slope using a ski lift .
but what you have here is actually four separate layers , and i 'm curious which of you can see the four separate layers and , particularly , how when they 're compressed together and presented to the student all at once , how that creates this impatient problem solving .
i 'll define them here : you have the visual .
you also have the mathematical structure , talking about grids , measurements , labels , points , axes , that sort of thing .
you have substeps , which all lead to what we really want to talk about : which section is the steepest .
so i hope you can see .
i really hope you can see how what we 're doing here is taking a compelling question , a compelling answer , but we 're paving a smooth , straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way .
that 's all we 're doing here .
so i want to put to you that if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students , we can have everything we 're looking for in terms of patient problem solving .
so right here i start with the visual , and i immediately ask the question : which section is the steepest ?
and this starts conversation because the visual is created in such a way where you can defend two answers .
so you get people arguing against each other , friend versus friend , in pairs , journaling , whatever .
and then eventually we realize it 's getting annoying to talk about the skier in the lower left-hand side of the screen or the skier just above the mid line .
and we realize how great would it be if we just had some a , b , c and d labels to talk about them more easily .
and then as we start to define what does steepness mean , we realize it would be nice to have some measurements to really narrow it down , specifically what that means .
and then and only then , we throw down that mathematical structure .
the math serves the conversation , the conversation does n't serve the math .
and at that point , i 'll put it to you that nine out of 10 classes are good to go on the whole slope , steepness thing .
but if you need to , your students can then develop those substeps together .
do you guys see how this , right here , compared to that - which one creates that patient problem solving , that math reasoning ?
it 's been obvious in my practice , to me .
and i 'll yield the floor here for a second to einstein , who , i believe , has paid his dues .
he talked about the formulation of a problem being so incredibly important , and yet in my practice , in the u.s. here , we just give problems to students ; we do n't involve them in the formulation of the problem .
so 90 percent of what i do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving .
and here 's how it works .
i like this question . it 's about a water tank .
the question is : how long will it take you to fill it up ?
first things first , we eliminate all the substeps .
students have to develop those , they have to formulate those .
and then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you 'll need .
none of it 's a distractor , so we lose that .
students need to decide , " all right , well , does the height matter ? does the side of it matter ?
does the color of the valve matter ? what matters here ? "
such an underrepresented question in math curriculum .
so now we have a water tank .
how long will it take you to fill it up ? and that 's it .
and because this is the 21st century and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms , not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks , we go out and we take a picture of it .
so now we have the real deal .
how long will it take it to fill it up ?
and then even better is we take a video , a video of someone filling it up .
and it 's filling up slowly , agonizingly slowly .
it 's tedious .
students are looking at their watches , rolling their eyes , and they 're all wondering at some point or another , " man , how long is it going to take to fill up ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's how you know you 've baited the hook , right ?
and that question , off this right here , is really fun for me because , like the intro , i teach kids - because of my inexperience - i teach the kids that are the most remedial , all right ?
and i 've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula ; someone else knows how to work the formula better than me , so i wo n't talk about it .
but here , every student is on a level playing field of intuition .
everyone 's filled something up with water before , so i get kids answering the question , " how long will it take ? "
i 've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation .
we put names on the board , attach them to guesses , and kids have bought in here .
and then we follow the process i 've described .
and the best part here , or one of the better parts is that we do n't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher 's edition .
we , instead , just watch the end of the movie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's terrifying , because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher 's edition , that 's great , but it 's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical .
but those conversations have been so valuable , among the most valuable .
so i 'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class .
these are the kids who now , one semester in , i can put something on the board , totally new , totally foreign , and they 'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year , which is just so fun .
we 're no longer averse to word problems , because we 've redefined what a word problem is .
we 're no longer intimidated by math , because we 're slowly redefining what math is .
this has been a lot of fun .
i encourage math teachers i talk to to use multimedia , because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color ; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field ; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation ; to let students build the problem , because einstein said so ; and to finally , in total , just be less helpful , because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways : it 's buying you out of your obligation , for patient problem solving and math reasoning , to be less helpful .
and why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket .
it 's ubiquitous and fairly cheap , and the tools to distribute it freely under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous .
i put a video series on my blog not so long ago and it got 6,000 views in two weeks .
i get emails still from teachers in countries i 've never visited saying , " wow , yeah . we had a good conversation about that .
oh , and by the way , here 's how i made your stuff better , " which , wow .
i put this problem on my blog recently : in a grocery store , which line do you get into , the one that has one cart and 19 items or the line with four carts and three , five , two and one items .
and the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom , but it eventually got me on " good morning america " a few weeks later , which is just bizarre , right ?
and from all of this , i can only conclude that people , not just students , are really hungry for this .
math makes sense of the world .
math is the vocabulary for your own intuition .
so i just really encourage you , whatever your stake is in education - whether you 're a student , parent , teacher , policy maker , whatever - insist on better math curriculum .
we need more patient problem solvers . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ feminists do n't have a sense of humor . ♫ ♫ feminists just want to be alone - boo hoo , hoo , hoo . ♫ ♫ feminists spread vicious lies and rumors . ♫ ♫ they have a tumor on their funny bone . ♫ ♫ they say child molestation is n't funny - ha , ha , ha , ha . ♫ ♫ rape and degradation 's just a crime - lighten up , ladies . ♫ ♫ rampant prostitution 's sex for money - what 's wrong with that ? ♫ ♫ ca n't these chicks do anything but whine ? ♫ ♫ dance break ! da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . ♫
♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . ♫ ♫ woo-hoo ! ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da - ♫ ♫ yeah , take it off . ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , dum . ♫ ♫ they say cheap objectification is n't witty - it 's hot ! ♫ ♫ equal work and wages worth the fight - ♫ ♫ sing us a new one . ♫ ♫ on-demand abortion every city - ok , but no gun control . ♫ ♫ wo n't these women ever get a life ? ♫ ♫ feminists do n't have a sense of humor - poor hillary . ♫
♫ feminists and vegetarians - make mine a big mac . ♫ ♫ feminists spread vicious lies and rumors . ♫ ♫ they 're far too sensitive to ever be a ham , ♫ ♫ that 's why these feminists just need to find a man . ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . ♫ i 'm dennis kucinich and i approved this message .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i asked my mother , you know , should i say anything in support of anyone ?
and she said , " oh no ! just dis everybody , except ralph nader . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ♫ i could show the world how to smile , ♫ ♫ i could be glad all of the while . ♫ ♫ i could turn the gray skies to blue , if i had you . ♫ ♫ i could leave the old days behind , ♫ ♫ leave all my pals , i 'd never mind . ♫ ♫ i could start my life all anew , if i had you . ♫ ♫ i could climb the snow-capped mountains , ♫ ♫ sail the mighty ocean wide . ♫ ♫ i could cross the burning desert , if i had you by my side . ♫ ♫ i could be a king , dear , uncrowned , humble or poor , rich or renowned . ♫
♫ there is nothing i could n't do , if i had you . ♫ thank you . well , thank you so much .
there are more chinese restaurants in this country than mcdonald 's , burger king , kentucky fried chicken and wendy 's , combined - 40,000 , actually .
chinese restaurants have played an important role in american history , as a matter of fact .
the cuban missile crisis was resolved in a chinese restaurant called yenching palace in washington , d.c. , which unfortunately is closed now , and about to be turned into walgreen 's .
and the house that john wilkes booth planned the assassination of abraham lincoln is actually also now a chinese restaurant called wok ' n roll , on h street in washington .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's not completely gratuitous , because wok and roll - chinese food and japanese foods , so it kind of works out .
and americans love their chinese food so much they 've actually brought it into space .
nasa , for example , serves thermal-stabilized sweet-and-sour pork on its shuttle menu for its astronauts .
so , let me present the question to you : if our benchmark for americanness is apple pie , you should ask yourself , how often do you eat apple pie , versus how often do you eat chinese food . right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you think about it , a lot of the foods that you think of or we think of or americans think of as chinese food are barely recognizable to chinese , for example : beef with broccoli , egg rolls , general tso 's chicken , fortune cookies , chop suey , the take-out boxes .
for example , i took a whole bunch of fortune cookies back to china , gave them to chinese to see how they would react .
what is this ?
should i try it ?
try it !
what is it called ?
fortune cookie .
there 's a piece of paper inside !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is this ?
you 've won a prize !
what is this ?
it 's a fortune !
tasty !
so , where are they from ?
the short answer is , actually , they 're from japan .
and in kyoto , outside , there are still small family-run bakeries that make fortune cookies , as they did over 100 years ago , 30 years before fortune cookies were introduced in the united states .
if you see them side by side , there 's yellow and brown .
theirs are actually flavored with miso and sesame paste , so they 're not as sweet as our version .
so , how did they get to the united states ?
well , the short answer is , the japanese immigrants came over , and a bunch of the bakers introduced them - including at least one in los angeles , and one here in san francisco called benkyo-do , which is on the corner of sutter and buchanan .
they back then , actually , made fortune cookies using very much the similar kind of irons that we saw back in kyoto .
so , the interesting question is , how do you go from fortune cookies being something that is japanese to being something that is chinese ?
well , the short answer is , we locked up all the japanese during world war ii , including those that made fortune cookies , so that 's the time when the chinese moved in , kind of saw a market opportunity and took over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , fortune cookies : invented by the japanese , popularized by the chinese , but ultimately consumed by americans .
they are more american than anything else .
another one of my favorite dishes : general tso 's chicken - which , by the way , in the us naval academy is called admiral tso 's chicken .
i love this dish .
the original name in my book was actually called the long march of general tso , and he has marched very far indeed , because he is sweet , he is fried , and he is chicken - all things that americans love .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he has marched so far , actually , that the chef who originally invented the dish does n't recognize it ; he 's kind of horrified .
he 's in taiwan right now .
he 's retired , deaf and plays a lot of mahjong .
so , he - after this i showed him , he got up , and he 's like , " mominqimiao , " which means , " this is all nonsense , " and goes back to play his mahjong game during the afternoon .
so , another dish . one of my favorites . beef with broccoli .
broccoli is not a chinese vegetable ; in fact , it is originally an italian vegetable .
it was introduced into the united states in the 1800s , but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s .
in fact , the chinese had their own version of broccoli , which is called chinese broccoli , but right now , what - they 've now discovered american broccoli , and are importing it as a , sort of , exotic delicacy .
i guarantee you , general tso never saw a stalk of broccoli in his life - and indeed , that actually was a picture of general tso .
i went to his home town .
this is a billboard that says : " welcome to the birthplace of general tso . "
and i went looking for chicken .
finally found a cow - and did find chicken .
believe it or not , these guys were actually crossing the road .
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i actually found a whole bunch of general tso 's relatives who are still in the little town .
this guy is now five generations removed from the general ; this guy is about seven .
showed them all the pictures of general tso chicken that i showed you , and they 're like , we do n't know this dish .
and then they 're like , is this chinese food ?
because it does n't look like chinese food to them .
but they were n't kind of surprised i traveled around the world to visit them , because in their eyes he is , after all , a famous qing dynasty military hero .
he played an important role in the taiping rebellion , which was a war started by a guy who thought he was the son of god and the baby brother of jesus christ .
and caused the war that killed 20 million people - still the deadliest civil war in the world to this day .
so , you know , i realized when i was there , general tso is kind of a lot like colonel sanders in america , in that he 's known for chicken and not war .
but in china , this guy 's actually known for war and not chicken .
but the granddaddy of all the chinese-american dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey , which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century .
and according to new york times , in 1904 , there was an outbreak of chinese restaurants all over town , and " the city has gone ' chop suey ' mad . "
so it took about 30 years before the americans realized that , whoa , chop suey is actually not known in china .
and as this article points out , " the average native of any city in china knows nothing of chop suey . "
you know , back then it was a way to show that you were sophisticated and cosmopolitan : if you were a guy and you wanted to impress a girl , you could take her out on a chop suey date .
i like to say chop suey 's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another , because chop suey , if you translate into chinese , means tsap sui , which , if you translate back , means " odds and ends . "
so , these people are going around china asking for chop suey , which is sort of like a japanese guy coming here and saying , i understand you have a very popular dish in your country called " leftovers , " and it is particularly - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - right ?
and not only that : this dish is particularly popular after that holiday you call thanksgiving .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , why - why and where - did chop suey come from ?
let 's go back to mid-1800s when the chinese first came to america .
now back then , the americans were not clamoring to eat chinese food .
in fact , they saw this people who landed at their shores as alien .
these people were n't eating dogs - they were eating cats - and they were n't eating cats - they were eating rats .
in fact , the new york times , my esteemed employer , in 1883 ran an article that asked , " do chinese eat rats ? "
and not the most pc question to be asked today , but if you kind of look at the popular imagery of the time , not so outlandish .
this is actually a real advertisement for rat poison from the late 1800s , and if you see , under the word " clears " - very small - it says , " they must go , " which refers not only to the rats , but to the chinese in their midst , because the way that the food was perceived was that these people who ate foods different from us must be different from us .
and another way that you saw , sort of , this sort of , this antipathy towards the chinese is through documents like this .
this is actually in the library of congress ; it is a pamphlet published by samuel gompers , hero of our american labor movement , and it 's called , " some reason for chinese exclusion : meat versus rice : american manhood against asiatic coolieism : which shall survive ?
and it basically made the argument that chinese men who ate rice would necessarily bring down the standard of living for american men who ate meat .
and as a matter of fact , then , this is one of the reasons why we must exclude them from this country so , with sentiments like these , the chinese exclusion act was sort of passed between 1882 and 1902 , the only time in american history when a group was specifically excluded for its national origin or ethnicity .
so , in a way , because the chinese were attacked , chop suey was created as a defense mechanism .
now , who came up with the idea of chop suey ?
there 's a lot of different mysteries , a lot of different legends , but of the ones that i 've found that i thought was most interesting is this article from 1904 .
a chinese guy named lem sen shows up in chinatown , new york city , and says , i want you guys all to stop making chop suey , because i am the original creator and sole proprietor of the dish known as chop suey .
and the way that he tells it , there was a guy , there was a famous chinese diplomat that showed up , and he was told to make a dish that looked very popular and could , quote , " pass " as chinese .
and as he said - we would never print this today - but basically , the american man has become very rich .
lem sen , who 's this guy : i would have made this money , too , but i 've spent all this time looking for the american man who stole my recipe .
now i 've come and found him , and i want my recipe back and i want everyone to stop making chop suey , or pay me for the right to do the same .
so it was an early exercise of intellectual property rights .
so the thing is , this kind of idea of chinese-american food does n't exist only in america .
in fact , if you think about it , chinese food is the most pervasive food on the planet , served on all seven continents , even antarctica , because monday night is chinese food night at mcmurdo station , which is the main scientific station in antarctica .
so , you see different varieties of chinese food .
for example , there is french chinese food , where they serve salt and pepper frog legs .
there is italian chinese food , where they do n't have fortune cookies , so they serve fried gelato .
my downstairs neighbor , alessandra , was completely shocked when i told her , " dude , fried gelato is not chinese . "
she 's like , " it 's not ?
but they serve it in all the chinese restaurants in italy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and even the brits have their own version .
this is a dish called crispy shredded beef , which has a lot of crisp , a lot of shred , and not a lot of beef .
there is west indian chinese food , there 's jamaican chinese food , there is middle eastern chinese food , there 's mauritian chinese food .
this is a dish called magic bowl that i discovered .
there 's indian chinese food , korean chinese food , japanese chinese food , where they take the bao , the little buns , and they make them into pizza versions , and they take - and they - like , totally randomly they 'll take chinese noodle dishes , and they 'll just ramen-ize them .
this is , like , this is something that in the chinese version has no soup .
so , there 's peruvian chinese food , which should not be mixed with mexican chinese food , where they basically take things and make it look like fajitas .
and then - one thing : they have things like risotto chop suey .
my personal favorite of all the restaurants i 've encountered around the world was this one in brazil , called " kung food . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , let 's take a step back , and kind of , understand what is to be appreciated in america .
mcdonald 's has , sort of , garnered a lot of attention , a lot of respect , for basically standardizing the menu , décor and dining experience in post-world war ii america .
but you know what ?
they actually did so through a centralized headquarters out of illinois , right ?
chinese restaurants have done largely the same thing , i would argue , with the menu and the décor - even the restaurant name - but without a centralized headquarters .
so , this actually became very clear to me with the march 30 , 2005 powerball drawing , where , you know , they expected , based on the number of ticket sales they had , to have three or four second-place winners - those are the people who match five or six powerball numbers .
instead , they had 110 , and they were completely shocked .
they looked all across the country , and discovered it could n't necessarily be fraud , because it happened , you know , in different states , across different computer systems .
so whatever it was , it caused people to sort of behave in a mass synchronized way .
so , like , ok , maybe it had to do with the patterns on the little pieces of paper - you know , like , it was a diamond , or , you know , diagonal .
it was n't that .
it was n't that , so they 're like , ok , let 's look at television , so they looked at an episode of " lost . "
now , i do n't have a tv , which makes me a freak , but very productive , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and this episode of " lost , " i understand , where the overweight guy has a lucky number which was not a lucky number , which was how long they 'd been on the island , but they looked , and the numbers did not match .
so they looked at " the young and the restless , " and it was n't that , either .
so , it was n't until the first guy shows up the next day , and they ask him , " where did you get your number from ? "
he 's like , " oh , i got it from a fortune cookie . "
this actually is a slip that one of the winners had , because the tennessee lottery security officials were like , oh , no - like , this ca n't be true .
but it was true , and basically , of those 110 people , and 104 of them or so had gotten their number from the fortune cookie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . so , i went and started looking .
i went across the country , looking for these restaurants where these people had gotten their fortune cookies from .
you know , there are a bunch of them , including lee 's china in omaha - which is actually run by koreans , but that 's another point - and a bunch of them named china buffet .
so , what 's interesting is that their stories were similar , but they were different .
it was lunch , it was take-out , it was sit-down , it was buffet , it was three weeks ago , it was three months ago .
but at some point , all these people had a very similar experience that converged at a fortune cookie and at a chinese restaurant , and all these chinese restaurants were serving fortune cookies , which , of course we know are n't even chinese to begin with .
so it 's kind of part of the phenomenon i called spontaneous self-organization , right , where , like in ant colonies , where little decisions made by - on the micro-level actually have a big impact on the macro-level .
so , a good sort of contrast is chicken mcnuggets .
mcdonald 's actually spent 10 years coming out with a chicken-like product .
they did chicken pot pie , they did fried chicken , and then they finally introduced chicken mcnuggets .
and the great innovation of chicken mcnuggets was not nuggetfying them , because that 's kind of an easy concept , but the trick behind chicken mcnuggets was , they were able to remove the chicken from the bone in a cost-effective manner , which is why it took so long for other people to copy them .
it took 10 years , and then within a couple of months , it was such a hit they just introduced it and rolled it across the entire system of mcdonald 's in the country .
in contrast , we have general tso 's chicken , which actually started in new york city in the early 1970s , as i was also starting in the university in new york city in the early 1970s , so ...
and this logo !
so me , general tso 's chicken and this logo are all karmacally related .
but that dish also took about 10 years to spread across america from a random restaurant in new york city .
someone 's like , oh , god - it 's sweet , it 's fried , it 's chicken : americans will love this .
so , what i like to say , you know , this being sort of bay area , silicon valley - is that we think of mcdonald 's as sort of the microsoft of the dining experiences .
we can think of chinese restaurants perhaps as linux : sort of an open source thing , right , where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system , that there can be specialized versions of chinese food , you know , depending on the region .
for example , you know , in new orleans we have cajun chinese food , where they serve sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish , right ?
and in philadelphia , you have philadelphia cheesesteak roll , which looks like an egg roll on the outside , but a cheesesteak on the inside .
i was really surprised to discover that , not only in philadelphia , but also in atlanta , because what had happened was that a chinese family had moved from atlanta to - sorry , from philadelphia to atlanta , and brought that with them .
so , the thing is , our historical lore , because of the way we like narratives , are full of vast characters such as , you know , howard schultz of starbucks and ray kroc with mcdonald 's and asa chandler with coca-cola .
but , you know , it 's very easy to overlook the smaller characters - oops - for example , like lem sen , who introduced chop suey , chef peng , who introduced general tso chicken , and all the japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies .
so , the point of my presentation is to make you think twice , that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much , if not more , impact on what we eat today .
so . thank you very much .
daffodil hudson : hello ?
yeah , this is she .
what ?
oh , yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , of course i accept .
what are the dates again ?
pen . pen . pen .
march 17 through 21 .
okay , all right , great . thanks .
lab partner : who was that ?
dh : it was ted .
lp : who 's ted ?
dh : i 've got to prepare .
-lsb- " give your talk : a musical " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- " my talk " -rsb- ♪ procrastination . ♪ what do you think ?
-lrb- doorbell -rrb- can i help you ?
-lrb- music -rrb- speaker coach 1 : ♪ let 's prepare for main stage . ♪ ♪ it 's your time to shine . ♪ ♪ if you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed . ♪ speaker coach 2 : ♪ your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we 're through , ♪ ♪ speaker , we 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ speaker coach 3 : ♪ we know about climate change , ♪ ♪ but what can you say that 's new ? ♪ ♪ sc 1 : once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view . ♪
sc 2 : ♪ do n't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we wo n't post your talk online . ♪ all : ♪ somehow we 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ -lrb- music -rrb- sc 1 : ready to practice one more time ?
dh : right now ?
stagehand : break a leg .
dh : ♪ i 'll never remember all this . ♪ ♪ will the clicker work when i press it ? ♪ ♪ why must al gore go right before me ? ♪ ♪ oh man , i 'm scared to death . ♪ ♪ i hope i do n't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now i really wish i was n't wearing green . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ sc 1 : ♪ you must be be sweet like brené brown . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ sc 2 : ♪ you must be funny like ken robinson . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ sc 3 : ♪ you must be cool like reggie watts ♪
all : ♪ and bring out a prop like jill bolte taylor . ♪ dh : ♪ my time is running over . the clock now says nil . ♪ ♪ i 'm saying my words faster . understand me still . ♪ ♪ i 'm too nervous to give this ted talk . ♪ all : ♪ do n't give up . rehearse . you 're good . ♪ ♪ we 'll edit out the mistakes that you make . ♪ ♪ give your talk . ♪ dh : ♪ i will be big like amy cuddy . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ dh : ♪ i will inspire like liz gilbert . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪
dh : ♪ i will engage like hans rosling ♪ ♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like bill gates . ♪ sc 2 : ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- " brought to you by ted staff and friends " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- what is bioenergy ? bioenergy is not ethanol .
bioenergy is n't global warming . bioenergy is something which seems counterintuitive . bioenergy is oil . it 's gas . it 's coal . and part of building that bridge to the future , to the point where we can actually see the oceans in a rational way , or put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or do microwaves or stuff , is going to depend on how we understand bioenergy and manage it . and to do that , you really have to look first at agriculture .
so we 've been planting stuff for 11,000 years . and in the measure that we plant stuff , what we learn from agriculture is you 've got to deal with pests , you 've got to deal with all types of awful things , you 've got to cultivate stuff . in the measure that you learn how to use water to cultivate , then you 're going to be able to spread beyond the nile .
you 're going to be able to power stuff , so irrigation makes a difference .
irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant stuff where you want it , as opposed to where the rivers flood . you start getting this organic agriculture ; you start putting machinery onto this stuff . machinery , with a whole bunch of water , leads to very large-scale agriculture .
you put together machines and water , and you get landscapes that look like this . and then you get sales that look like this . it 's brute force . so what you 've been doing in agriculture is you start out with something that 's a reasonably natural system . you start taming that natural system . you put a lot of force behind that natural system . you put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - behind that natural system , and you end up with systems that look like this .
and it 's all brute force . and that 's the way we 've been approaching energy . so the lesson in agriculture is that you can actually change the system that 's based on brute force as you start merging that system and learning that system and actually applying biology . and you move from a discipline of engineering , you move from a discipline of chemistry , into a discipline of biology . and probably one of the most important human beings on the planet is this guy behind me .
this is a guy called norman borlaug . he won the nobel prize . he 's got the congressional medal of honor . he deserves all of this stuff . and he deserves this stuff because he probably has fed more people than any other human being alive because he researched how to put biology behind seeds . he did this in mexico . the reason why india and china no longer have these massive famines is because norman borlaug taught them how to grow grains in a more efficient way and launched the green revolution . that is something that a lot of people have criticized . but of course , those are
people who do n't realize that china and india , instead of having huge amounts of starving people , are exporting grains .
and the irony of this particular system is the place where he did the research , which was mexico , did n't adopt this technology , ignored this technology , talked about why this technology should be thought about , but not really applied .
and mexico remains one of the largest grain importers on the planet because it does n't apply technology that was discovered in mexico . and in fact , has n't recognized this man , to the point where there are n't statues of this man all over mexico . there are in china and india . and the institute that this guy ran has now moved to india . that is the difference between adopting technologies and discussing technologies .
now , it 's not just that this guy fed a huge amount of people in the world . it 's that this is the net effect in terms of what technology does , if you understand biology .
what happened in agriculture ? well , if you take agriculture over a century , agriculture in about 1900 would have been recognizable to somebody planting a thousand years earlier . yeah , the plows look different . the machines were tractors or stuff instead of mules , but the farmer would have understood : this is what the guy 's doing , this is why he 's doing it , this is where he 's going . what really started to change in agriculture is when you started moving from this brute force engineering and chemistry into biology , and that 's where you get your productivity increases . and as you do that stuff , here 's what happens to
productivity .
basically , you go from 250 hours to produce 100 bushels , to 40 , to 15 , to five . agricultural labor productivity increased seven times , 1950 to 2000 , whereas the rest of the economy increased about 2.5 times . this is an absolutely massive increase in how much is produced per person .
the effect of this , of course , is it 's not just amber waves of grain , it is mountains of stuff .
and 50 percent of the eu budget is going to subsidize agriculture from mountains of stuff that people have overproduced .
this would be a good outcome for energy . and of course , by now , you 're probably saying to yourself , " self , i thought i came to a talk about energy and here 's this guy talking about biology . "
so where 's the link between these two things ?
one of the ironies of this whole system is we 're discussing what to do about a system that we do n't understand . we do n't even know what oil is . we do n't know where oil comes from . i mean , literally , it 's still a source of debate what this black river of stuff is and where it comes from . the best assumption , and one of the best guesses in this stuff , is that this stuff comes out of this stuff , that these things absorb sunlight , rot under pressure for millions of years , and you get these black rivers .
now , the interesting thing about that thesis - if that thesis turns out to be true - is that oil , and all hydrocarbons , turned out to be concentrated sunlight . and if you think of bioenergy , bioenergy is n't ethanol . bioenergy is taking the sun , concentrating it in amoebas , concentrating it in plants , and maybe that 's why you get these rainbows .
and as you 're looking at this system , if hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight , then bioenergy works in a different way . and we 've got to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as part of these solar panels .
maybe that 's one of the reasons why if you fly over west texas , the types of wells that you 're beginning to see do n't look unlike those pictures of kansas and those irrigated plots .
this is how you farm oil . and as you think of farming oil and how oil has evolved , we started with this brute force approach . and then what did we learn ? then we learned we had to go bigger . and then what 'd we learn ? then we have to go even bigger . and we are getting really destructive as we 're going out and farming this bioenergy .
these are the athabasca tar sands , and there 's an enormous amount - first of mining , the largest trucks in the world are working here , and then you 've got to pull out this black sludge , which is basically oil that does n't flow . it 's tied to the sand . and then you 've got to use a lot of steam to separate it , which only works at today 's oil prices .
coal . coal turns out to be virtually the same stuff . it is probably plants , except that these have been burned and crushed under pressure .
so you take something like this , you burn it , you put it under pressure , and likely as not , you get this . although , again , i stress : we do n't know .
which is curious as we debate all this stuff . but as you think of coal , this is what burned wheat kernels look like . not entirely unlike coal .
and of course , coalmines are very dangerous places because in some of these coalmines , you get gas . when that gas blows up , people die . so you 're producing a biogas out of coal in some mines , but not in others .
any place you see a differential , there 're some interesting questions . there 's some questions as to what you should be doing with this stuff . but again , coal . maybe the same stuff , maybe the same system , maybe bioenergy , and you 're applying exactly the same technology .
here 's your brute force approach . once you get through your brute force approach , then you just rip off whole mountaintops . and you end up with the single largest source of carbon emissions , which are coal-fired gas plants . that is probably not the best use of bioenergy .
as you think of what are the alternatives to this system - it 's important to find alternatives because it turns out that the u.s. is dwindling in its coal reserves , nor is china . there are huge coal reserves that are sitting out there , and we 've got to start thinking of them as biological energy , because if we keep treating them as chemical energy , or engineering energy , we 're going to be in deep doo-doo .
gas is a similar issue . gas is also a biological product . and as you think of gas , well , you 're familiar with gas . and here 's a different way of mining coal .
this is called coal bed methane . why is this picture interesting ? because if coal turns out to be concentrated plant life , the reason why you may get a differential in gas output between one mine and another - the reason why one mine may blow up and another one may not blow up - may be because there 's stuff eating that stuff and producing gas .
this is a well-known phenomenon . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you eat certain things , you produce a lot of gas . it may turn out that biological processes in coalmines have the same process . if that is true , then one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal may not be to rip whole mountaintops off , and it may not be to burn coal . it may be to have stuff process that coal in a biological fashion as you did in agriculture .
that is what bioenergy is . it is not ethanol . it is not subsidies to a few companies . it is not importing corn into iowa because you 've built so many of these ethanol plants . it is beginning to understand the transition that occurred in agriculture , from brute force into biological force . and in the measure that you can do that , you can clean some stuff , and you can clean it pretty quickly .
we already have some indicators of productivity on this stuff . ok , if you put steam into coal fields or petroleum fields that have been running for decades , you can get a really substantial increase , like an eight-fold increase , in your output . this is just the beginning stages of this stuff .
and as you think of biomaterials , this guy - who did part of the sequencing of the human genome , who just doubled the databases of genes and proteins known on earth by sailing around the world - has been thinking about how you structure this . and there 's a series of smart people thinking about this . and they 've been putting together companies like synthetic genomics , like , a cambria , like codon , and what those companies are trying to do is to think of , how do you apply biological principles to avoid brute force ?
think of it in the following terms . think of it as beginning to program stuff for specific purposes .
think of the cell as a hardware . think of the genes as a software . and in the measure that you begin to think of life as code that is interchangeable , that can become energy , that can become food , that can become fiber , that can become human beings , that can become a whole series of things , then you 've got to shift your approach as to how you 're going to structure and deal and think about energy in a very different way .
what are the first principles of this stuff and where are we heading ? this is one of the gentle giants on the planet . he 's one of the nicest human beings you 've ever met . his name is hamilton smith . he won the nobel for figuring out how to cut genes - something called restriction enzymes .
he was at hopkins when he did this , and he 's such a modest guy that the day he won , his mother called him and said , " i did n't realize there was another ham smith at hopkins . do you know he just won the nobel ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , that was mom , but anyway , this guy is just a class act . you find him at the bench every single day , working on a pipette and building stuff . and one of the things this guy just built are these things .
what is this ? this is the first transplant of naked dna , where you take an entire dna operating system out of one cell , insert it into a different cell , and have that cell boot up as a separate species . that 's one month old . you will see stuff in the next month that will be just as important as this stuff .
and as you think about this stuff and what the implications of this are , we 're going to start not just converting ethanol from corn with very high subsidies . we 're going to start thinking about biology entering energy . it is very expensive to process this stuff , both in economic terms and in energy terms .
this is what accumulates in the tar sands of alberta . these are sulfur blocks . because as you separate that petroleum from the sand , and use an enormous amount of energy inside that vapor - steam to separate this stuff - you also have to separate out the sulfur . the difference between light crude and heavy crude - well , it 's about 14 bucks a barrel . that 's why you 're building these pyramids of sulfur blocks . and by the way , the scale on these things is pretty large .
now , if you can take part of the energy content out of doing this , you reduce the system , and you really do start applying biological principles to energy . this has to be a bridge to the point where nuclear - and hopefully you wo n't build the next nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an earthquake fault . -lrb- laughter -rrb- just a thought .
but in the meantime , for the next decade at least , the name of the game is hydrocarbons . and be that oil , be that gas , be that coal , this is what we 're dealing with . and before i make this talk too long , here 's what 's happening in the current energy system .
86 percent of the energy we consume are hydrocarbons . that means 86 percent of the stuff we 're consuming are probably processed plants and amoebas and the rest of the stuff . and there 's a role in here for conservation . there 's a role in here for alternative stuff , but we 've also got to get that other portion right .
how we deal with that other portion is our bridge to the future . and as we think of this bridge to the future , one of the things you should ponder is : we are leaving about two-thirds of the oil today inside those wells . so we 're spending an enormous amount of money and leaving most of the energy down there . which , of course , requires more energy to go out and get energy . the ratios become idiotic by the time you get to ethanol . it may even be a one-to-one ratio on the energy input and the energy output . that is a stupid way of
managing this system .
last point , last graph . one of the things that we 've got to do is to stabilize oil prices . this is what oil prices look like , ok ?
this is a very bad system because what happens is your hurdle rate gets set very low . people come up with really smart ideas for solar panels , or for wind , or for something else , and then guess what ?
the oil price goes through the floor . that company goes out of business , and then you can bring the oil price back up .
so if i had one closing and modest suggestion , let 's set a stable oil price in europe and the united states . how do you do that ? well , let 's put a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax , and it basically says for the next 20 years , the price of oil will be - whatever you want , 35 bucks , 40 bucks . if the opec price falls below that , we tax it . if the opec price goes above that , the tax goes away .
what does that do for entrepreneurs ? what does it do for companies ? it tells people , if you can produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel , or less than 40 bucks a barrel , or less than 50 bucks a barrel - let 's debate it - you will have a business . but let 's not put people through this cycle where it does n't pay to research because your company will go out of business as opec drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from happening . thank you .
who are we ?
that is the big question .
and essentially we are just an upright-walking , big-brained , super-intelligent ape .
this could be us .
we belong to the family called the hominidae .
we are the species called homo sapiens sapiens , and it 's important to remember that , in terms of our place in the world today and our future on planet earth .
we are one species of about five and a half thousand mammalian species that exist on planet earth today .
and that 's just a tiny fraction of all species that have ever lived on the planet in past times .
we 're one species out of approximately , or let 's say , at least 16 upright-walking apes that have existed over the past six to eight million years .
but as far as we know , we 're the only upright-walking ape that exists on planet earth today , except for the bonobos .
and it 's important to remember that , because the bonobos are so human , and they share 99 percent of their genes with us .
and we share our origins with a handful of the living great apes .
it 's important to remember that we evolved .
now , i know that 's a dirty word for some people , but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas , the chimpanzee and also the bonobos .
we have a common past , and we have a common future .
and it is important to remember that all of these great apes have come on as long and as interesting evolutionary journey as we ourselves have today .
and it 's this journey that is of such interest to humanity , and it 's this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family , as we 've been in east africa looking for the fossil remains of our ancestors to try and piece together our evolutionary past .
and this is how we look for them .
a group of dedicated young men and women walk very slowly out across vast areas of africa , looking for small fragments of bone , fossil bone , that may be on the surface .
and that 's an example of what we may do as we walk across the landscape in northern kenya , looking for fossils .
i doubt many of you in the audience can see the fossil that 's in this picture , but if you look very carefully , there is a jaw , a lower jaw , of a 4.1-million-year-old upright-walking ape as it was found at lake turkana on the west side .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's extremely time-consuming , labor-intensive and it is something that is going to involve a lot more people , to begin to piece together our past .
we still really have n't got a very complete picture of it .
when we find a fossil , we mark it .
today , we 've got great technology : we have gps .
we mark it with a gps fix , and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen , so we could essentially put it back on the surface , exactly where we found it .
and we can bring all this information into big gis packages , today .
when we then find something very important , like the bones of a human ancestor , we begin to excavate it extremely carefully and slowly , using dental picks and fine paintbrushes .
and all the sediment is then put through these screens , and where we go again through it very carefully , looking for small bone fragments , and it 's then washed .
and these things are so exciting . they are so often the only , or the very first time that anybody has ever seen the remains .
and here 's a very special moment , when my mother and myself were digging up some remains of human ancestors .
and it is one of the most special things to ever do with your mother .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not many people can say that .
but now , let me take you back to africa , two million years ago .
i 'd just like to point out , if you look at the map of africa , it does actually look like a hominid skull in its shape .
now we 're going to go to the east african and the rift valley .
it essentially runs up from the gulf of aden , or runs down to lake malawi .
and the rift valley is a depression .
it 's a basin , and rivers flow down from the highlands into the basin , carrying sediment , preserving the bones of animals that lived there .
if you want to become a fossil , you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried .
you then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface .
and then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok , so it is absolutely surprising that we know as much as we do know today about our ancestors , because it 's incredibly difficult , a , for these things to become - to be - preserved , and secondly , for them to have been brought back up to the surface .
and we really have only spent 50 years looking for these remains , and begin to actually piece together our evolutionary story .
so , let 's go to lake turkana , which is one such lake basin in the very north of our country , kenya .
and if you look north here , there 's a big river that flows into the lake that 's been carrying sediment and preserving the remains of the animals that lived there .
fossil sites run up and down both lengths of that lake basin , which represents some 20,000 square miles .
that 's a huge job that we 've got on our hands .
two million years ago at lake turkana , homo erectus , one of our human ancestors , actually lived in this region .
you can see some of the major fossil sites that we 've been working in the north . but , essentially , two million years ago , homo erectus , up in the far right corner , lived alongside three other species of human ancestor .
and here is a skull of a homo erectus , which i just pulled off the shelf there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it is not to say that being a single species on planet earth is the norm .
in fact , if you go back in time , it is the norm that there are multiple species of hominids or of human ancestors that coexist at any one time .
where did these things come from ?
that 's what we 're still trying to find answers to , and it is important to realize that there is diversity in all different species , and our ancestors are no exception .
here 's some reconstructions of some of the fossils that have been found from lake turkana .
but i was very lucky to have been brought up in kenya , essentially accompanying my parents to lake turkana in search of human remains .
and we were able to dig up , when we got old enough , fossils such as this , a slender-snouted crocodile .
and we dug up giant tortoises , and elephants and things like that .
but when i was 12 , as i was in this picture , a very exciting expedition was in place on the west side , when they found essentially the skeleton of this homo erectus .
i could relate to this homo erectus skeleton very well , because i was the same age that he was when he died .
and i imagined him to be tall , dark-skinned .
his brothers certainly were able to run long distances chasing prey , probably sweating heavily as they did so .
he was very able to use stones effectively as tools .
and this individual himself , this one that i 'm holding up here , actually had a bad back . he 'd probably had an injury as a child .
he had a scoliosis and therefore must have been looked after quite carefully by other female , and probably much smaller , members of his family group , to have got to where he did in life , age 12 .
unfortunately for him , he fell into a swamp and could n't get out .
essentially , his bones were rapidly buried and beautifully preserved .
and he remained there until 1.6 million years later , when this very famous fossil hunter , kamoya kimeu , walked along a small hillside and found that small piece of his skull lying on the surface amongst the pebbles , recognized it as being hominid .
it 's actually this little piece up here on the top .
well , an excavation was begun immediately , and more and more little bits of skull started to be extracted from the sediment .
and what was so fun about it was this : the skull pieces got closer and closer to the roots of the tree , and fairly recently the tree had grown up , but it had found that the skull had captured nice water in the hillside , and so it had decided to grow its roots in and around this , holding it in place and preventing it from washing away down the slope .
we began to find limb bones ; we found finger bones , the bones of the pelvis , vertebrae , ribs , the collar bones , things that had never , ever been seen before in homo erectus .
it was truly exciting .
he had a body very similar to our own , and he was on the threshold of becoming human .
well , shortly afterwards , members of his species started to move northwards out of africa , and you start to see fossils of homo erectus in georgia , china and also in parts of indonesia .
so , homo erectus was the first human ancestor to leave africa and begin its spread across the globe .
some exciting finds , again , as i mentioned , from dmanisi , in the republic of georgia .
but also , surprising finds recently announced from the island of flores in indonesia , where a group of these human ancestors have been isolated , and have become dwarfed , and they 're only about a meter in height .
but they lived only 18,000 years ago , and that is truly extraordinary to think about .
just to put this in terms of generations , because people do find it hard to think of time , homo erectus left africa 90,000 generations ago .
we evolved essentially from an african stock .
again , at about 200,000 years as a fully-fledged us .
and we only left africa about 70,000 years ago .
and until 30,000 years ago , at least three upright-walking apes shared the planet earth .
the question now is , well , who are we ?
we 're certainly a polluting , wasteful , aggressive species , with a few nice things thrown in , perhaps .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for the most part , we 're not particularly pleasant at all .
we have a much larger brain than our ape ancestors .
is this a good evolutionary adaptation , or is it going to lead us to being the shortest-lived hominid species on planet earth ?
and what is it that really makes us us ?
i think it 's our collective intelligence .
it 's our ability to write things down , our language and our consciousness .
from very primitive beginnings , with a very crude tool kit of stones , we now have a very advanced tool kit , and our tool use has really reached unprecedented levels : we 've got buggies to mars ; we 've mapped the human genome ; and recently even created synthetic life , thanks to craig venter .
and we 've also managed to communicate with people all over the world , from extraordinary places .
even from within an excavation in northern kenya , we can talk to people about what we 're doing .
as al gore so clearly has reminded us , we have reached extraordinary numbers of people on this planet .
human ancestors really only survive on planet earth , if you look at the fossil record , for about , on average , a million years at a time .
we 've only been around for the past 200,000 years as a species , yet we 've reached a population of more than six and a half billion people .
and last year , our population grew by 80 million .
i mean , these are extraordinary numbers .
you can see here , again , taken from al gore 's book .
but what 's happened is our technology has removed the checks and balances on our population growth .
we have to control our numbers , and i think this is as important as anything else that 's being done in the world today .
but we have to control our numbers , because we ca n't really hold it together as a species .
my father so appropriately put it , that " we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species . "
can we hold it together ?
it 's important to remember that we all evolved in africa .
we all have an african origin .
we have a common past and we share a common future .
evolutionarily speaking , we 're just a blip .
we 're sitting on the edge of a precipice , and we have the tools and the technology at our hands to communicate what needs to be done to hold it together today .
we could tell every single human being out there , if we really wanted to .
but will we do that , or will we just let nature take its course ?
well , to end on a very positive note , i think evolutionarily speaking , this is probably a fairly good thing , in the end .
i 'll leave it at that , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence , and i believe this is true , especially when i hear president obama often talk about the korean education system as a benchmark of success .
well , i can tell you that , in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the korean school system , also known as pressure cooker , not everyone can do well in that environment .
while many people responded in different ways about our education system , my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building .
why bows ?
i 'm not quite sure .
perhaps , in the face of constant pressure , my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows .
if you think about it , the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times .
the area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the joseon dynasty , where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves .
in order to raise the historical awareness of this fact , the government has planted mulberry trees .
the seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 olympics .
the area near these walls , which nobody bothers to pay attention to , had been left free from major intervention , and this is where i first found my treasures .
as i fell deeper into bow making , i began to search far and beyond my neighborhood .
family vacations , or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes , i wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that i sneaked inside my school bag .
and they would be somethings like saws , knives , sickles and axes that i covered up with a piece of towel .
i would bring the branches home , riding buses and subways , barely holding them in my hands .
and i did not bring the tools here to long beach .
airport security .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in the privacy of my room , covered in sawdust , i would saw , trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape .
one day , i was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire .
where ? the rooftop of my apartment building , a place where 96 families call home .
a customer from a department store across from my building called 911 , and i ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned .
i want to take this opportunity to tell my mom , in the audience today : mom , i was really sorry , and i will be more careful with open fire from now on .
my mother had to do a lot of explaining , telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson .
i also researched extensively on bows around the world .
in that process , i tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow .
i also worked with many different types of wood , such as maple , yew and mulberry , and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that i mentioned before .
the most effective bow for me would be like this .
one : curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow .
two : belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight , which means more power .
three : sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage .
and four : horn used to store energy in compression .
after fixing , breaking , redesigning , mending , bending and amending , my ideal bow began to take shape , and when it was finally done , it looked like this .
i was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own .
this is a picture of korean traditional bows taken from a museum , and see how my bow resembles them .
thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention . -lrb- laughter -rrb- through bowmaking , i came in contact with part of my heritage .
learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me .
you see , i searched far and wide , but never bothered to look close and near .
from this realization , i began to take interest in korean history , which had never inspired me before .
in the end , the grass is often greener on my side of the fence , although we do n't realize it .
now , i am going to show you how my bow works .
and let 's see how this one works .
this is a bamboo bow , with 45-pound draw weights .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a bow may function in a simple mechanism , but in order to make a good bow , a great amount of sensitivity is required .
you need to console and communicate each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being , and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow .
i may be an -lsb- odd -rsb- student with unconventional interests , but i hope i am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you .
my ideal world is a place where no one is left behind , where everyone is needed exactly where they are , like the fibers and the tendons in a bow , a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient .
the bow resembles me , and i resemble the bow .
now , i am shooting a part of myself to you .
no , better yet , a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind .
did it strike you ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , have any of y 'all ever looked up this word ?
you know , in a dictionary ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , that 's what i thought .
how about this word ?
here , i 'll show it to you .
lexicography : the practice of compiling dictionaries .
notice - we 're very specific - that word " compile . "
the dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite , out of a lump of rock . it 's made up of lots of little bits .
it 's little discrete - that 's spelled d-i-s-c-r-e-t-e - bits .
and those bits are words .
now one of the perks of being a lexicographer - besides getting to come to ted - is that you get to say really fun words , like lexicographical .
lexicographical has this great pattern : it 's called a double dactyl . and just by saying double dactyl , i 've sent the geek needle all the way into the red . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but " lexicographical " is the same pattern as " higgledy-piggledy . "
right ? it 's a fun word to say , and i get to say it a lot .
now , one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people do n't usually have a kind of warm , fuzzy , snuggly image of the dictionary .
right ? nobody hugs their dictionaries .
but what people really often think about the dictionary is , they think more like this .
just to let you know , i do not have a lexicographical whistle .
but people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary , and keep the bad words out .
but the thing is , i do n't want to be a traffic cop .
for one thing , i just do not do uniforms .
and for another , deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy .
and it 's not very fun . and when parts of your job are not easy or fun , you kind of look for an excuse not to do them .
so if i had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work , i would much rather be a fisherman .
i want to throw my big net into the deep , blue ocean of english and see what marvelous creatures i can drag up from the bottom .
but why do people want me to direct traffic , when i would much rather go fishing ?
well , i blame the queen .
why do i blame the queen ?
well , first of all , i blame the queen because it 's funny .
but secondly , i blame the queen because dictionaries have really not changed .
our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign .
the only thing that queen victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the f-word , which has happened in american dictionaries since 1965 .
so , there 's this guy , right ? victorian era .
james murray , first editor of the oxford english dictionary .
i do not have that hat . i wish i had that hat .
so he 's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today .
when a guy who looks like that , in that hat , is the face of modernity , you have a problem .
and so , james murray could get a job on any dictionary today .
there 'd be virtually no learning curve .
and of course , a few of us are saying : okay , computers !
computers ! what about computers ?
the thing about computers is , i love computers .
i mean , i 'm a huge geek , i love computers .
i would go on a hunger strike before i let them take away google book search from me .
but computers do n't do much else other than speed up the process of compiling dictionaries .
they do n't change the end result .
because what a dictionary is , is it 's victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion .
it 's steampunk . what we have is an electric velocipede .
you know , we have victorian design with an engine on it . that 's all !
the design has not changed .
and ok , what about online dictionaries , right ?
online dictionaries must be different .
this is the oxford english dictionary online , one of the best online dictionaries .
this is my favorite word , by the way .
erinaceous : pertaining to the hedgehog family ; of the nature of a hedgehog .
very useful word . so , look at that .
online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen .
this is flat . look how many links there are in the actual entry : two !
right ? those little buttons , i had them all expanded except for the date chart .
so there 's not very much going on here .
there 's not a lot of clickiness .
and in fact , online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print , except for searchability .
and when you improve searchability , you actually take away the one advantage of print , which is serendipity .
serendipity is when you find things you were n't looking for , because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult .
so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - now , when you think about this , what we have here is a ham butt problem .
does everyone know the ham butt problem ?
woman 's making a ham for a big , family dinner .
she goes to cut the butt off the ham and throw it away , and she looks at this piece of ham and she 's like , " this is a perfectly good piece of ham . why am i throwing this away ? "
she thought , " well , my mom always did this . "
so she calls up mom , and she says , " mom , why 'd you cut the butt off the ham , when you 're making a ham ? "
she says , " i do n't know , my mom always did it ! "
so they call grandma , and grandma says , " my pan was too small ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it 's not that we have good words and bad words .
we have a pan that 's too small !
you know , that ham butt is delicious ! there 's no reason to throw it away .
the bad words - see , when people think about a place and they do n't find a place on the map , they think , " this map sucks ! "
when they find a nightspot or a bar , and it 's not in the guidebook , they 're like , " ooh , this place must be cool ! it 's not in the guidebook . "
when they find a word that 's not in the dictionary , they think , " this must be a bad word . " why ? it 's more likely to be a bad dictionary .
why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan ?
so , you ca n't get a smaller ham .
the english language is as big as it is .
so , if you have a ham butt problem , and you 're thinking about the ham butt problem , the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive : paper is the enemy of words .
how can this be ? i mean , i love books . i really love books .
some of my best friends are books .
but the book is not the best shape for the dictionary .
now they 're going to think " oh , boy .
people are going to take away my beautiful , paper dictionaries ? "
no . there will still be paper dictionaries .
when we had cars - when cars became the dominant mode of transportation , we did n't round up all the horses and shoot them .
you know , there 're still going to be paper dictionaries , but it 's not going to be the dominant dictionary .
the book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in . and it 's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in .
so , think about it this way : if you 've got an artificial constraint , artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview .
what if biologists could only study animals that made people go , " aww . " right ?
what if we made aesthetic judgments about animals , and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study ?
we 'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna , and not very much about much else .
and i think this is a problem .
i think we should study all the words , because when you think about words , you can make beautiful expressions from very humble parts .
lexicography is really more about material science .
we are studying the tolerances of the materials that you use to build the structure of your expression : your speeches and your writing . and then , often people say to me , " well , ok , how do i know that this word is real ? "
they think , " ok , if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts , how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers ?
how can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer ? "
they 're just the right tools for the job .
and so people say to me , " how do i know if a word is real ? "
you know , anybody who 's read a children 's book knows that love makes things real .
if you love a word , use it . that makes it real .
being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction .
it does n't make a word any more real than any other way .
if you love a word , it becomes real .
so if we 're not worrying about directing traffic , if we 've transcended paper , if we are worrying less about control and more about description , then we can think of the english language as being this beautiful mobile .
and any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes , is touched , any time you touch a word , you use it in a new context , you give it a new connotation , you verb it , you make the mobile move .
you did n't break it . it 's just in a new position , and that new position can be just as beautiful .
now , if you 're no longer a traffic cop - the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection , or the cars get confused . right ?
but if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic , but maybe to count the cars that go by , then more eyeballs are better .
you can ask for help !
if you ask for help , you get more done . and we really need help .
library of congress : 17 million books , of which half are in english .
if only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that 's not in the dictionary in it , that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries .
and i find an un-dictionaried word - a word like " un-dictionaried , " for example - in almost every book i read . what about newspapers ?
newspaper archive goes back to 1759 , 58.1 million newspaper pages . if only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it , it would be an entire other oed .
that 's 500,000 more words . so that 's a lot .
and i 'm not even talking about magazines . i 'm not talking about blogs - and i find more new words on boingboing in a given week than i do newsweek or time .
there 's a lot going on there .
and i 'm not even talking about polysemy , which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves .
so if you think of the word " set , " a set can be a badger 's burrow , a set can be one of the pleats in an elizabethan ruff , and there 's one numbered definition in the oed .
the oed has 33 different numbered definitions for set .
tiny , little word , 33 numbered definitions .
one of them is just labeled " miscellaneous technical senses . "
do you know what that says to me ?
that says to me , it was friday afternoon and somebody wanted to go down the pub . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a lexicographical cop out , to say , " miscellaneous technical senses . "
so , we have all these words , and we really need help !
and the thing is , we could ask for help - asking for help 's not that hard .
i mean , lexicography is not rocket science .
see , i just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers , and this is more of a visual explanation .
if we think of the dictionary as being the map of the english language , these bright spots are what we know about , and the dark spots are where we are in the dark .
if that was the map of all the words in american english , we do n't know very much .
and we do n't even know the shape of the language .
if this was the dictionary - if this was the map of american english - look , we have a kind of lumpy idea of florida , but there 's no california !
we 're missing california from american english .
we just do n't know enough , and we do n't even know that we 're missing california .
we do n't even see that there 's a gap on the map .
so again , lexicography is not rocket science .
but even if it were , rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days . you know ?
it ca n't be that hard to find some words !
so , enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help , and they 're doing a good job of it .
for instance , there 's ebird , where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings .
and then , ornithologists can go and help track populations , migrations , etc .
and there 's this guy , mike oates . mike oates lives in the u.k.
he 's a director of an electroplating company .
he 's found more than 140 comets .
he 's found so many comets , they named a comet after him .
it 's kind of out past mars . it 's a hike .
i do n't think he 's getting his picture taken there anytime soon .
but he found 140 comets without a telescope .
he downloaded data from the nasa soho satellite , and that 's how he found them .
if we can find comets without a telescope , should n't we be able to find words ?
now , y 'all know where i 'm going with this .
because i 'm going to the internet , which is where everybody goes .
and the internet is great for collecting words , because the internet 's full of collectors .
and this is a little-known technological fact about the internet , but the internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm .
and words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography . is n't that great ?
so there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now , but the problem with some of them is that they 're not scientific enough .
they show the word , but they do n't show any context .
where did it come from ? who said it ?
what newspaper was it in ? what book ?
because a word is like an archaeological artifact .
if you do n't know the provenance or the source of the artifact , it 's not science , it 's a pretty thing to look at .
so a word without its source is like a cut flower .
you know , it 's pretty to look at for a while , but then it dies .
it dies too fast .
so , this whole time i 've been saying , " the dictionary , the dictionary , the dictionary , the dictionary . "
not " a dictionary , " or " dictionaries . " and that 's because , well , people use the dictionary to stand for the whole language .
they use it synecdochically .
and one of the problems of knowing a word like " synecdochically " is that you really want an excuse to say " synecdochically . "
this whole talk has just been an excuse to get me to the point where i could say " synecdochically " to all of you .
so i 'm really sorry . but when you use a part of something - like the dictionary is a part of the language , or a flag stands for the united states , it 's a symbol of the country - then you 're using it synecdochically .
but the thing is , we could make the dictionary the whole language .
if we get a bigger pan , then we can put all the words in .
we can put in all the meanings .
does n't everyone want more meaning in their lives ?
and we can make the dictionary not just be a symbol of the language - we can make it be the whole language .
you see , what i 'm really hoping for is that my son , who turns seven this month - i want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in .
this is what dictionaries used to look like .
i want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape .
it 's a format that died because it was n't useful enough .
it was n't really what people needed .
and the thing is , if we can put in all the words , no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad , we can really describe the language like scientists .
we can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers .
if we can do that , then i can spend all my time fishing , and i do n't have to be a traffic cop anymore .
thank you very much for your kind attention .
i thought i would talk a little bit about how nature makes materials .
i brought along with me an abalone shell .
this abalone shell is a biocomposite material that 's 98 percent by mass calcium carbonate and two percent by mass protein .
yet , it 's 3,000 times tougher than its geological counterpart .
and a lot of people might use structures like abalone shells , like chalk .
i 've been fascinated by how nature makes materials , and there 's a lot of sequence to how they do such an exquisite job .
part of it is that these materials are macroscopic in structure , but they 're formed at the nanoscale .
they 're formed at the nanoscale , and they use proteins that are coded by the genetic level that allow them to build these really exquisite structures .
so something i think is very fascinating is what if you could give life to non-living structures , like batteries and like solar cells ?
what if they had some of the same capabilities that an abalone shell did , in terms of being able to build really exquisite structures at room temperature and room pressure , using non-toxic chemicals and adding no toxic materials back into the environment ?
so that 's the vision that i 've been thinking about .
and so what if you could grow a battery in a petri dish ?
or , what if you could give genetic information to a battery so that it could actually become better as a function of time , and do so in an environmentally friendly way ?
and so , going back to this abalone shell , besides being nano-structured , one thing that 's fascinating , is when a male and a female abalone get together , they pass on the genetic information that says , " this is how to build an exquisite material .
here 's how to do it at room temperature and pressure , using non-toxic materials . "
same with diatoms , which are shown right here , which are glasseous structures .
every time the diatoms replicate , they give the genetic information that says , " here 's how to build glass in the ocean that 's perfectly nano-structured .
and you can do it the same , over and over again . "
so what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery ?
i like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year-old .
but anyone who 's ever had , or knows , small children knows they 're incredibly complex organisms .
and so if you wanted to convince them to do something they do n't want to do , it 's very difficult .
so when we think about future technologies , we actually think of using bacteria and virus , simple organisms .
can you convince them to work with a new toolbox , so that they can build a structure that will be important to me ?
also , when we think about future technologies , we start with the beginning of earth .
basically , it took a billion years to have life on earth .
and very rapidly , they became multi-cellular , they could replicate , they could use photosynthesis as a way of getting their energy source .
but it was n't until about 500 million years ago - during the cambrian geologic time period - that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials .
before that , they were all soft , fluffy structures .
and it was during this time that there was increased calcium and iron and silicon in the environment , and organisms learned how to make hard materials .
and so that 's what i would like be able to do - convince biology to work with the rest of the periodic table .
now if you look at biology , there 's many structures like dna and antibodies and proteins and ribosomes that you 've heard about that are already nano-structured .
so nature already gives us really exquisite structures on the nanoscale .
what if we could harness them and convince them to not be an antibody that does something like hiv ?
but what if we could convince them to build a solar cell for us ?
so here are some examples : these are some natural shells .
there are natural biological materials .
the abalone shell here - and if you fracture it , you can look at the fact that it 's nano-structured .
there 's diatoms made out of sio2 , and they 're magnetotactic bacteria that make small , single-domain magnets used for navigation .
what all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nanoscale , and they have a dna sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures .
now , going back to the abalone shell , the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins .
these proteins are very negatively charged .
and they can pull calcium out of the environment , put down a layer of calcium and then carbonate , calcium and carbonate .
it has the chemical sequences of amino acids , which says , " this is how to build the structure .
here 's the dna sequence , here 's the protein sequence in order to do it . "
and so an interesting idea is , what if you could take any material that you wanted , or any element on the periodic table , and find its corresponding dna sequence , then code it for a corresponding protein sequence to build a structure , but not build an abalone shell - build something that , through nature , it has never had the opportunity to work with yet .
and so here 's the periodic table .
and i absolutely love the periodic table .
every year for the incoming freshman class at mit , i have a periodic table made that says , " welcome to mit . now you 're in your element . "
and you flip it over , and it 's the amino acids with the ph at which they have different charges .
and so i give this out to thousands of people .
and i know it says mit , and this is caltech , but i have a couple extra if people want it .
and i was really fortunate to have president obama visit my lab this year on his visit to mit , and i really wanted to give him a periodic table .
so i stayed up at night , and i talked to my husband , " how do i give president obama a periodic table ?
what if he says , ' oh , i already have one , ' or , ' i 've already memorized it ' ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so he came to visit my lab and looked around - it was a great visit .
and then afterward , i said , " sir , i want to give you the periodic table in case you 're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight . "
and i thought molecular weight sounded much less nerdy than molar mass .
and so he looked at it , and he said , " thank you . i 'll look at it periodically . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and later in a lecture that he gave on clean energy , he pulled it out and said , " and people at mit , they give out periodic tables . "
so basically what i did n't tell you is that about 500 million years ago , organisms starter making materials , but it took them about 50 million years to get good at it .
it took them about 50 million years to learn how to perfect how to make that abalone shell .
and that 's a hard sell to a graduate student . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " i have this great project - 50 million years . "
and so we had to develop a way of trying to do this more rapidly .
and so we use a virus that 's a non-toxic virus called m13 bacteriophage that 's job is to infect bacteria .
well it has a simple dna structure that you can go in and cut and paste additional dna sequences into it .
and by doing that , it allows the virus to express random protein sequences .
and this is pretty easy biotechnology .
and you could basically do this a billion times .
and so you can go in and have a billion different viruses that are all genetically identical , but they differ from each other based on their tips , on one sequence that codes for one protein .
now if you take all billion viruses , and you can put them in one drop of liquid , you can force them to interact with anything you want on the periodic table .
and through a process of selection evolution , you can pull one out of a billion that does something that you 'd like it to do , like grow a battery or grow a solar cell .
so basically , viruses ca n't replicate themselves ; they need a host .
once you find that one out of a billion , you infect it into a bacteria , and you make millions and billions of copies of that particular sequence .
and so the other thing that 's beautiful about biology is that biology gives you really exquisite structures with nice link scales .
and these viruses are long and skinny , and we can get them to express the ability to grow something like semiconductors or materials for batteries .
now this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab .
we engineered a virus to pick up carbon nanotubes .
so one part of the virus grabs a carbon nanotube .
the other part of the virus has a sequence that can grow an electrode material for a battery .
and then it wires itself to the current collector .
and so through a process of selection evolution , we went from being able to have a virus that made a crummy battery to a virus that made a good battery to a virus that made a record-breaking , high-powered battery that 's all made at room temperature , basically at the bench top .
and that battery went to the white house for a press conference .
i brought it here .
you can see it in this case - that 's lighting this led .
now if we could scale this , you could actually use it to run your prius , which is my dream - to be able to drive a virus-powered car .
but it 's basically - you can pull one out of a billion .
you can make lots of amplifications to it .
basically , you make an amplification in the lab , and then you get it to self-assemble into a structure like a battery .
we 're able to do this also with catalysis .
this is the example of photocatalytic splitting of water .
and what we 've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna , and you get an energy transfer across the virus .
and then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen that can be used for clean fuels .
and i brought an example with me of that today .
my students promised me it would work .
these are virus-assembled nanowires .
when you shine light on them , you can see them bubbling .
in this case , you 're seeing oxygen bubbles come out .
and basically , by controlling the genes , you can control multiple materials to improve your device performance .
the last example are solar cells .
you can also do this with solar cells .
we 've been able to engineer viruses to pick up carbon nanotubes and then grow titanium dioxide around them - and use as a way of getting electrons through the device .
and what we 've found is through genetic engineering , we can actually increase the efficiencies of these solar cells to record numbers for these types of dye-sensitized systems .
and i brought one of those as well that you can play around with outside afterward .
so this is a virus-based solar cell .
through evolution and selection , we took it from an eight percent efficiency solar cell to an 11 percent efficiency solar cell .
so i hope that i 've convinced you that there 's a lot of great , interesting things to be learned about how nature makes materials - and taking it the next step to see if you can force , or whether you can take advantage of how nature makes materials , to make things that nature has n't yet dreamed of making .
thank you .
about 15 years ago , i went to visit a friend in hong kong .
and at the time i was very superstitious .
so , upon landing - this was still at the old hong kong airport that 's kai tak , when it was smack in the middle of the city - i thought , " if i see something good , i 'm going to have a great time here in my two weeks . and if i see something negative , i 'm going to be miserable , indeed . "
so the plane landed in between the buildings and got to a full stop in front of this little billboard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i actually went to see some of the design companies in hong kong in my stay there .
and it turned out that - i just went to see , you know , what they are doing in hong kong .
but i actually walked away with a great job offer .
and i flew back to austria , packed my bags , and , another week later , i was again on my way to hong kong still superstitions and thinking , " well , if that ' winner ' billboard is still up , i 'm going to have a good time working here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if it 's gone , it 's going to be really miserable and stressful . "
so it turned out that not only was the billboard still up but they had put this one right next to it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- on the other hand , it also taught me where superstition gets me because i really had a terrible time in hong kong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- however , i did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life - of , you know , i think what the conference brochure refers to as " moments that take your breath away . "
and since i 'm a big list maker , i actually listed them all .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you do n't have to go through the trouble of reading them and i wo n't read them for you .
i know that it 's incredibly boring to hear about other people 's happinesses .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i did do , though is , i actually looked at them from a design standpoint and just eliminated all the ones that had nothing to do with design .
and , very surprisingly , over half of them had , actually , something to do with design .
so there are , of course , two different possibilities .
there 's one from a consumer 's point of view - where i was happy while experiencing design .
and i 'll just give you one example . i had gotten my first walkman .
this is 1983 .
my brother had this great yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely .
and the police 's " synchronicity " cassette had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of bregenz .
so you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting the police on the new sony walkman .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i remember it as a true moment of happiness .
you know , of course , they are related to this combination of at least two of them being , you know , design objects .
and , you know , there 's a scale of happiness when you talk about in design but the motorcycle incident would definitely be , you know , situated somewhere here - right in there between delight and bliss .
now , there is the other part , from a designer 's standpoint - if you 're happy while actually doing it .
and one way to see how happy designers are when they 're designing could be to look at the authors ' photos on the back of their monographs ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , according to this , the australians and the japanese as well as the mexicans are very happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- while , somewhat , the spaniards ...
and , i think , particularly , the swiss -lrb- laughter -rrb- , do n't seem to be doing all that well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- last november , a museum opened in tokyo called the mori museum , in a skyscraper , up on the 56th floor .
and their inaugural exhibit was called " happiness . "
and i went , very eagerly , to see it , because - well , also , with an eye on this conference .
and they interestingly sectioned the exhibit off into four different areas .
under " arcadia , " they showed things like this , from the edo period - a hundred ways to write " happiness " in different forms .
or they had this apple by yoko ono - that , of course , later on was , you know , made into the label for the beatles .
under " nirvana " they showed this constable painting .
and there was a little - an interesting theory about abstraction .
this is a blue field - it 's actually an yves klein painting .
and the theory was that if you abstract an image , you really , you know open as much room for the un-representable - and , therefore , you know , are able to involve the viewer more .
then , under " desire , " they showed these shunsho paintings - also from the edo period - ink on silk .
and , lastly , under " harmony , " they had this 13th-century mandala from tibet .
now , what i took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the mandala most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness .
and i felt a little bit cheated , because the visualization - that 's a really easy thing to do .
and , you know , my studio - we 've done it all the time .
this is , you know , a book .
a happy dog - and you take it out , it 's an aggressive dog .
it 's a happy david byrne and an angry david byrne .
or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face .
you know , that 's not a big deal to accomplish .
it has gotten to the point where , you know , within advertising or within the movie industry , " happy " has gotten such a bad reputation that if you actually want to do something with the subject and still appear authentic , you almost would have to , you know , do it from a cynical point of view .
this is , you know , the movie poster .
or we , a couple of weeks ago , designed a box set for the talking heads where the happiness visualized on the cover definitely has , very much , a dark side to it .
much , much more difficult is this , where the designs actually can evoke happiness - and i 'm going to just show you three that actually did this for me .
this is a campaign done by a young artist in new york , who calls himself " true . "
everybody who has ridden the new york subway system will be familiar with these signs ?
true printed his own version of these signs .
met every wednesday at a subway stop with 20 of his friends .
they divided up the different subway lines and added their own version .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the way this works in the system is that nobody ever looks at these signs .
so you 're -lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're really bored in the subway , and you kind of stare at something .
and it takes you a while until it actually - you realize that this says something different than what it normally says .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , that 's , at least , how it made me happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , true is a real humanitarian .
he did n't want any of his friends to be arrested , so he supplied everybody with this fake volunteer card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and also gave this fake letter from the mta to everybody - sort of like pretending that it 's an art project financed by the metropolitan transit authority .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another new york project .
this is at p.s. 1 - a sculpture that 's basically a square room by james turrell , that has a retractable ceiling .
opens up at dusk and dawn every day .
you do n't see the horizon .
you 're just in there , watching the incredible , subtle changes of color in the sky .
and the room is truly something to be seen .
people 's demeanor changes when they go in there .
and , for sure , i have n't looked at the sky in the same way after spending an hour in there .
there are , of course , more than those three projects that i 'm showing here .
i would definitely say that observing vik muniz ' " cloud " a couple of years ago in manhattan for sure made me happy , as well .
but my last project is , again , from a young designer in new york .
he 's from korea originally .
and he took it upon himself to print 55,000 speech bubbles - empty speech bubbles stickers , large ones and small ones .
and he goes around new york and just puts them , empty as they are , on posters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and other people go and fill them in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this one says , " please let me die in peace . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think that was - the most surprising to myself was that the writing was actually so good .
this is on a musician poster , that says : " i am concerned that my cd will not sell more than 200,000 units and that , as a result , my recoupable advance from my label will be taken from me , after which , my contract will be cancelled , and i 'll be back doing journey covers on bleecker street . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think the reason this works so well is because everybody involved wins .
jee gets to have his project ; the public gets a sweeter environment ; and different public gets a place to express itself ; and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , there was a question , of course , that was on my mind for a while : you know , can i do more of the things that i like doing in design and less of the ones that i do n't like to be doing ?
which brought me back to my list making - you know , just to see what i actually like about my job .
you know , one is : just working without pressure .
then : working concentrated , without being frazzled .
or , as nancy said before , like really immerse oneself into it .
try not to get stuck doing the same thing - or try not get stuck behind the computer all day .
this is , you know , related to it : getting out of the studio .
then , of course , trying to , you know , work on things where the content is actually important for me .
and being able to enjoy the end results .
and then i found another list in one of my diaries that actually contained all the things that i thought i learned in my life so far .
and , just about at that time , an austrian magazine called and asked if we would want to do six spreads - design six spreads that work like dividing pages between the different chapters in the magazine ?
and the whole thing just fell together .
so i just picked one of the things that i thought i learned - in this case , " everything i do always comes back to me " - and we made these spreads right out of this .
so it was : " everything i do always comes back to me . "
a couple of weeks ago , a -lrb- laughter -rrb- french company asked us to design five billboards for them .
again , we could supply the content for it .
so i just picked another one .
and this was two weeks ago .
we flew to arizona - the designer who works with me , and myself - and photographed this one .
so it 's : " trying to look good limits my life . "
and then we did one more of these .
this is , again , for a magazine , dividing pages .
this is : " having " - this is the same thing ; it 's just , you know , photographed from the side .
this is from the front .
then it 's : " guts . "
again , it 's the same thing - " guts " is just the same room , reworked .
then it 's : " always works out . "
then it 's " for , " with the light on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's " me . "
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , people want a lot of things out of life , but i think , more than anything else , they want happiness .
aristotle called happiness " the chief good , " the end towards which all other things aim .
according to this view , the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job is n't that these things are intrinsically valuable .
it 's that we expect them to bring us happiness .
now in the last 50 years , we americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want . we 're richer .
we live longer . we have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago .
the paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically , we have n't actually gotten any happier .
maybe because these conventional notions of progress have n't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness , there 's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself .
people have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time , in fact for thousands of years , but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved .
well , as with many other domains in life , i think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question .
in fact , in the last few years , there 's been an explosion in research on happiness . for example , we 've learned a lot about its demographics , how things like income and education , gender and marriage relate to it .
but one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these do n't seem to have a particularly strong effect .
yes , it 's better to make more money rather than less , or to graduate from college instead of dropping out , but the differences in happiness tend to be small .
which leaves the question , what are the big causes of happiness ?
i think that 's a question we have n't really answered yet , but i think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences .
it certainly seems that we 're going about our lives , that what we 're doing , who we 're with , what we 're thinking about , have a big influence on our happiness , and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult , in fact almost impossible , for scientists to study .
a few years ago , i came up with a way to study people 's happiness moment to moment as they 're going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world , something we 'd never been able to do before . called trackyourhappiness.org , it uses the iphone to monitor people 's happiness in real time .
how does this work ? basically , i send people signals at random points throughout the day , and then i ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal .
the idea is that , if we can watch how people 's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day , minute to minute in some cases , and try to understand how what people are doing , who they 're with , what they 're thinking about , and all the other factors that describe our day , how those might relate to those changes in happiness , we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness .
we 've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data , a lot more data of this kind than i think has ever been collected before , over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people .
and it 's not just a lot of people , it 's a really diverse group , people from a wide range of ages , from 18 to late 80s , a wide range of incomes , education levels , people who are married , divorced , widowed , etc .
they collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries .
what i 'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we 've been investigating , and that 's mind-wandering .
as human beings , we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present .
this guy is sitting here working on his computer , and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month , wondering what he 's going to have for dinner .
maybe he 's worried that he 's going bald . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing . it allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can .
and yet it 's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness .
you 've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present . " be here now , " you 've probably heard a hundred times .
maybe , to really be happy , we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment .
maybe these people are right . maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing .
on the other hand , when our minds wander , they 're unconstrained . we ca n't change the physical reality in front of us , but we can go anywhere in our minds .
since we know people want to be happy , maybe when our minds wander , they 're going to someplace happier than the place that they 're leaving . it would make a lot of sense .
in other words , maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering .
well , since i 'm a scientist , i 'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data , and in particular i 'd like to present some data to you from three questions that i ask with track your happiness . remember , this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people 's real lives .
there are three questions . the first one is a happiness question : how do you feel , on a scale ranging from very bad to very good ? second , an activity question : what are you doing , on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching tv ?
and finally a mind-wandering question : are you thinking about something other than what you 're currently doing ?
people could say no - in other words , i 'm focused only on my task - or yes - i am thinking about something else - and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant , neutral or unpleasant .
any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering .
so what did we find ?
this graph shows happiness on the vertical axis , and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they 're focused on the present , when they 're not mind-wandering .
as it turns out , people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they 're not .
now you might look at this result and say , okay , sure , on average people are less happy when they 're mind-wandering , but surely when their minds are straying away from something that was n't very enjoyable to begin with , at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us .
people are less happy when they 're mind-wandering no matter what they 're doing . for example , people do n't really like commuting to work very much .
it 's one of their least enjoyable activities , and yet they are substantially happier when they 're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else .
it 's amazing .
so how could this be happening ? i think part of the reason , a big part of the reason , is that when our minds wander , we often think about unpleasant things , and they are enormously less happy when they do that , our worries , our anxieties , our regrets , and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral , they 're still considerably less happy than when they 're not mind-wandering at all .
even when they 're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant , they 're actually just slightly less happy than when they are n't mind-wandering .
if mind-wandering were a slot machine , it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars , 20 dollars or one dollar . right ? you 'd never want to play . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 've been talking about this , suggesting , perhaps , that mind-wandering causes unhappiness , but all i 've really shown you is that these two things are correlated .
it 's possible that 's the case , but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy , then they mind-wander .
maybe that 's what 's really going on . how could we ever disentangle these two possibilites ?
well , one fact that we can take advantage of , i think a fact you 'll all agree is true , is that time goes forward , not backward . right ? the cause has to come before the effect .
we 're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person , and so we can look and see , does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness , or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering , to get some insight into the causal direction .
as it turns out , there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later , consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy .
in contrast , there 's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later .
in other words , mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause , and not merely a consequence , of unhappiness .
a few minutes ago , i likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you 'd never want to play .
well , how often do people 's minds wander ?
forty-seven percent of the time , people are thinking about something other than what they 're currently doing .
how does that depend on what people are doing ?
this shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities ranging from a high of 65 percent - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - when people are taking a shower , brushing their teeth , to 50 percent when they 're working , to 40 percent when they 're exercising , all the way down to this one short bar on the right that i think some of you are probably laughing at .
ten percent of the time people 's minds are wandering when they 're having sex . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but there 's something i think that 's quite interesting in this graph , and that is , basically with one exception , no matter what people are doing , they 're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time , which suggests , i think , that mind-wandering is n't just frequent , it 's ubiquitous .
it pervades basically everything that we do .
in my talk today , i 've told you a little bit about mind-wandering , a variable that i think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness .
my hope is that over time , by tracking people 's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences and then in the end , a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that 's not only richer and healthier , but happier as well .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to tell you about one of the world 's largest problems and how it can be solved .
i 'd like to start with a little experiment .
could you put your hand up if you wear glasses or contact lenses , or you 've had laser refractive surgery ?
now , unfortunately , there are too many of you for me to do the statistics properly .
but it looks like - i 'm guessing - that it 'll be about 60 percent of the room because that 's roughly the fraction of developed world population that have some sort of vision correction .
the world health organization estimates - well , they make various estimates of the number of people who need glasses - the lowest estimate is 150 million people .
they also have an estimate of around a billion .
but in fact , i would argue that we 've just done an experiment here and now , which shows us that the global need for corrective eyewear is around half of any population .
and the problem of poor vision , is actually not just a health problem , it 's also an educational problem , and it 's an economic problem , and it 's a quality of life problem .
glasses are not very expensive . they 're quite plentiful .
the problem is , there are n't enough eye care professionals in the world to use the model of the delivery of corrective eyewear that we have in the developed world .
there are just way too few eye care professionals .
so this little slide here shows you an optometrist and the little blue person represents about 10,000 people and that 's the ratio in the u.k.
this is the ratio of optometrists to people in sub-saharan africa .
in fact , there are some countries in sub-saharan africa where there 's one optometrist for eight million of the population .
how do you do this ? how do you solve this problem ?
i came up with a solution to this problem , and i came up with a solution based on adaptive optics for this .
and the idea is you make eye glasses , and you adjust them yourself and that solves the problem .
what i want to do is to show you that one can make a pair of glasses .
i shall just show you how you make a pair of glasses . i shall pop this in my pocket .
i 'm short sighted . i look at the signs at the end , i can hardly see them .
so - okay , i can now see that man running out there , and i can see that guy running out there .
i 've now made prescription eyewear to my prescription .
next step in my process .
so , i 've now made eye glasses to my prescription .
okay , so i 've made these glasses and ...
okay , i 've made the glasses to my prescription and ...
... i 've just ...
and i 've now made some glasses . that 's it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , these are n't the only pair in the world .
in fact , this technology 's been evolving .
i started working on it in 1985 , and it 's been evolving very slowly .
there are about 30,000 in use now .
and they 're in fifteen countries . they 're spread around the world .
and i have a vision , which i 'll share with you .
i have a global vision for vision .
and that vision is to try to get a billion people wearing the glasses they need by the year 2020 .
to do that - this is an early example of the technology .
the technology is being further developed - the cost has to be brought down .
this pair , in fact , these currently cost about 19 dollars .
but the cost has to be brought right down .
it has to be brought down because we 're trying to serve populations who live on a dollar a day .
how do you solve this problem ?
you start to get into detail .
and on this slide , i 'm basically explaining all the problems you have .
how do you distribute ? how do you work out how to fit the thing ?
how do you have people realizing that they have a vision problem ?
how do you deal with the industry ?
and the answer to that is research .
what we 've done is to set up the center for vision in the developing world here in the university .
if you want to know more , just come have a look at our website . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a filmmaker .
for the last 8 years , i have dedicated my life to documenting the work of israelis and palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means .
when i travel with my work across europe and the united states , one question always comes up : where is the palestinian gandhi ?
why are n't palestinians using nonviolent resistance ?
the challenge i face when i hear this question is that often i have just returned from the middle east where i spent my time filming dozens of palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from israeli soldiers and settlers .
these leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region .
yet , most of you have probably never heard about them .
this divide between what 's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we do n't have yet a palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful .
so i 'm here today to talk about the power of attention , the power of your attention , and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the west bank , gaza and elsewhere - but today , my case study is going to be palestine .
i believe that what 's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for palestinians to start adopting nonviolence , but for us to start paying attention to those who already are .
allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called budrus .
about seven years ago , they faced extinction , because israel announced it would build a separation barrier , and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village .
they would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded , so they would lose free access to the rest of the west bank .
through inspired local leadership , they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening .
let me show you some brief clips , so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground .
-lrb- music -rrb- palestinian woman : we were told the wall would separate palestine from israel .
here in budrus , we realized the wall would steal our land .
israeli man : the fence has , in fact , created a solution to terror .
man : today you 're invited to a peaceful march .
you are joined by dozens of your israeli brothers and sisters .
israeli activist : nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition .
woman : we saw the men trying to push the soldiers , but none of them could do that .
but i think the girls could do it .
fatah party member : we must empty our minds of traditional thinking .
hamas party member : we were in complete harmony , and we wanted to spread it to all of palestine .
chanting : one united nation .
fatah , hamas and the popular front !
news anchor : the clashes over the fence continue .
reporter : israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd .
they were allowed to use any force necessary .
-lrb- gunshots -rrb- man : these are live bullets .
it 's like fallujah . shooting everywhere .
israeli activist : i was sure we were all going to die .
but there were others around me who were n't even cowering .
israeli soldier : a nonviolent protest is not going to stop the -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
protester : this is a peaceful march .
there is no need to use violence .
chanting : we can do it ! we can do it !
we can do it !
julia bacha : when i first heard about the story of budrus , i was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago , in 2003 .
what was even more surprising was the fact that budrus was successful .
the residents , after 10 months of peaceful resistance , convinced the israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line , which is the internationally recognized boundary between israel and the palestinian territories .
the resistance in budrus has since spread to villages across the west bank and to palestinian neighborhoods in jerusalem .
yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories .
this silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow , or even survive , in palestine .
violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common ; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause .
if violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the palestinian issue , it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight .
the power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room .
the surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit .
the tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior , since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it .
parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children .
but that 's true for adults too .
in fact , the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced , depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention .
i believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the middle east and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today .
in the course of taking my film to villages in the west bank , in gaza and in east jerusalem , i have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation .
in a village called wallajeh , which sits very close to jerusalem , the community was facing a very similar plight to budrus .
they were going to be surrounded , lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access , either to the west bank or jerusalem .
they had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention .
so we organized a screening .
a week later , they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date .
the organizers say that the villagers , upon seeing the story of budrus documented in a film , felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing , that people cared .
so they kept on going .
on the israeli side , there is a new peace movement called solidariot , which means solidarity in hebrew .
the leaders of this movement have been using budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools .
they report that israelis who had never been active before , upon seeing the film , understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities .
the examples of wallajeh and the solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior .
now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like bil 'in , ni 'lin , wallajeh , in jerusalem neighborhoods like sheikh jarrah and silwan - the nonviolent leaders would become more visible , valued and effective in their work .
i believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we do n't pay attention to these efforts , they are invisible , and it 's as if they never happened .
but i have seen first hand that if we do , they will multiply .
if they multiply , their influence will grow in the overall israeli-palestinian conflict .
and theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation .
these leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like budrus .
let 's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a culture , we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future , and where we might move forward from this point .
some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us .
other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling .
but i want to tell you a different story here today .
like all stories , it has a beginning .
my work , for a long time , has been involved in education , in teaching people practical skills for sustainability , teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food , how to build buildings using local materials , how to generate their own energy , and so on .
i lived in ireland , built the first straw-bale houses in ireland , and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing .
but all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model , and moderating what comes in at one end , and moderating the outputs at the other end .
and then i came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly .
and in order to introduce you to that , i 've got something here that i 'm going to unveil , which is one of the great marvels of the modern age .
and it 's something so astounding and so astonishing that i think maybe as i remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate .
if you could help me with that it would be fantastic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a liter of oil .
this bottle of oil , distilled over a hundred million years of geological time , ancient sunlight , contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor - equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you .
we can turn it into a dazzling array of materials , medicine , modern clothing , laptops , a whole range of different things .
it gives us an energy return that 's unimaginable , historically .
we 've based the design of our settlements , our business models , our transport plans , even the idea of economic growth , some would argue , on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity .
yet , when we take a step back , and look over the span of history , at what we might call the petroleum interval , it 's a short period in history where we 've discovered this extraordinary material , and then based a whole way of life around it .
but as we straddle the top of this energy mountain , at this stage , we move from a time where our economic success , our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume , to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability .
and it 's increasingly clear that we are n't going to be able to rely on the fact that we 're going to have this at our disposal forever .
for every four barrels of oil that we consume , we only discover one .
and that gap continues to widen .
there is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling .
in the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it .
completely unprecedented , historically .
already that 's fallen to about 11 .
and that 's why , now , the new breakthroughs , the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in alberta , or at the bottom of the oceans .
there are 98 oil-producing nations in the world .
but of those , 65 have already passed their peak .
the moment when the world on average passes this peak , people wonder when that 's going to happen .
and there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last july when the oil prices were so high .
but are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side ?
no . but the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are .
there is also the issue of climate change , is the other thing that underpins this transition approach .
but the thing that i notice , as i talk to climate scientists , is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes , as the data that 's coming in , which is far ahead of what the ipcc are talking about .
so the ipcc said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100 , in their worst case scenario .
actually , if current trends continue , it could all be gone in five or 10 years ' time .
if just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms , it would offset all the savings that we need to make , in carbon , over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change .
we have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization .
but i 'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us .
" the generation that lived at the top of the mountain , that partied so hard , and so abused its inheritance . "
and one of the ways i like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil , before we had fossil fuels , and people relied on their own muscle , animal muscle energy , or a little bit of wind , little bit of water energy .
we had stories like " the seven-league boots " : the giant who had these boots , where , once you put them on , with every stride you could cover seven leagues , or 21 miles , a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal .
stories like the magic porridge pot , where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words , this pot would just make as much food as you liked , without you having to do any work , provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge .
otherwise you 'd flood your entire town with warm porridge .
there is the story of " the elves and the shoemaker . "
the people who make shoes go to sleep , wake up in the morning , and all the shoes are magically made for them .
it 's something that was unimaginable to people then .
now we have the seven-league boots in the form of ryanair and easyjet .
we have the magic porridge pot in the form of walmart and tesco .
and we have the elves in the form of china .
but we do n't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been .
and what are the stories that we tell ourselves now , as we look forward about where we 're going to go .
and i would argue that there are four . there is the idea of business as usual , that the future will be like the present , just more of it .
but as we 've seen over the last year , i think that 's an idea that is increasingly coming into question .
and in terms of climate change , is something that is not actually feasible .
there is the idea of hitting the wall , that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse .
this is a popular story in some places .
the third story is the idea that technology can solve everything , that technology can somehow get us through this completely .
and it 's an idea that i think is very prevalent at these ted talks , the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis , that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints , the idea that we 'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side , the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world .
but the world is n't second life .
we ca n't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse .
and as we sit , exchanging free ideas with each other , there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers , extracting the minerals to make all of those things .
the breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances , usually at the expense of the local , more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past , which we 've so effectively devalued and dismantled .
we can be astonishingly inventive and creative .
but we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands .
energy and technology are not the same thing .
what i 'm involved with is the transition response .
and this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face , and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need .
it 's something which has spread incredibly fast .
and it is something which has several characteristics .
it 's viral . it seems to spread under the radar very , very quickly .
it 's open source . it 's something which everybody who 's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it .
it 's self-organizing . there is no great central organization that pushes this ; people just pick up an idea and they run with it , and they implement it where they are .
it 's solutions-focused . it 's very much looking at what people can do where they are , to respond to this .
it 's sensitive to place and to scale .
transitional is completely different .
transition groups in chile , transition groups in the u.s. , transition groups here , what they 're doing looks very different in every place that you go to .
it learns very much from its mistakes .
and it feels historic . it tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary .
and it 's a process which is really joyful .
people have a huge amount of fun doing this , reconnecting with other people as they do it .
one of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience .
and i think , in many ways , the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability .
the idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology .
and it 's really about how systems , settlements , withstand shock from the outside .
when they encounter shock from the outside that they do n't just unravel and fall to pieces .
and i think it 's a more useful concept than sustainability , as i said .
when our supermarkets have only two or three days ' worth of food in them at any one time , often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in .
looking through the lens of resilience , we really question how we 've let ourselves get into a situation that 's so vulnerable .
resilience runs much deeper : it 's about building modularity into what we do , building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us .
this is a photograph of the bristol and district market gardeners association , in 1897 .
this is at a time when the city of bristol , which is quite close to here , was surrounded by commercial market gardens , which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town , and created a lot of employment for people , as well .
there was a degree of resilience , if you like , at that time , which we can now only look back on with envy .
so how does this transition idea work ?
so basically , you have a group of people who are excited by the idea .
they pick up some of the tools that we 've developed .
they start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town .
they show films , they give talks , and so on .
it 's a process which is playful and creative and informative .
then they start to form working groups , looking at different aspects of this , and then from that , there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable .
so it started out with some work i was involved in in ireland , where i was teaching , and has since spread .
there are now over 200 formal transition projects .
and there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage .
they are mulling whether they 're going to take it further .
and actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff .
but what do they actually do ? you know , it 's a kind of nice idea , but what do they actually do on the ground ?
well , i think it 's really important to make the point that actually you know , this is n't something which is going to do everything on its own .
we need international legislation from copenhagen and so on .
we need national responses . we need local government responses .
but all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front , making unelectable policies electable , over the next 5 to 10 years .
some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects , like community-supported agriculture schemes , urban food production , creating local food directories , and so on .
a lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies , community-owned energy companies , where the community can invest money into itself , to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need .
a lot of places are working with their local schools .
newent in the forest of dean : big polytunnel they built for the school ; the kids are learning how to grow food .
promoting recycling , things like garden-share , that matches up people who do n't have a garden who would like to grow food , with people who have gardens they are n't using anymore .
planting productive trees throughout urban spaces .
and also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies .
this is lewes in sussex , who have recently launched the lewes pound , a currency that you can only spend within the town , as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy .
you take it anywhere else , it 's not worth anything .
but actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively .
another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan , which is basically to develop a plan b for the town .
most of our local authorities , when they sit down to plan for the next five , 10 , 15 , 20 years of a community , still start by assuming that there will be more energy , more cars , more housing , more jobs , more growth , and so on .
what does it look like if that 's not the case ? and how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody ?
as a friend of mine says , " life is a series of things you 're not quite ready for . "
and that 's certainly been my experience with transition .
from three years ago , it just being an idea , this has become something that has virally swept around the world .
we 're getting a lot of interest from government . ed miliband , the energy minister of this country , was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener .
which he did - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea .
there are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities , leicestershire and somerset . and in stroud , the transition group there , in effect , wrote the local government 's food plan .
and the head of the council said , " if we did n't have transition stroud , we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time . "
as we see the spread of it , we see national hubs emerging .
in scotland , the scottish government 's climate change fund has funded transition scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this .
and we see it all over the place as well now .
but the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now , but that things are already inevitably changing , and what we need to do is to work creatively with that , based on asking the right questions .
i think i 'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories .
because i think stories are vital here .
and actually the stories that we tell ourselves , we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here .
and one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing .
stories about the community that 's produced its own 21 pound note , for example , the school that 's turned its car park into a food garden , the community that 's founded its own energy company .
and for me , one of the great stories recently was the obamas digging up the south lawn of the white house to create a vegetable garden . because the last time that was done , when eleanor roosevelt did it , it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the united states .
so the question i 'd like to leave you with , really , is - for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive , how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions , while also building resilience ?
personally , i feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil .
i 've been astonishingly lucky , we 've been astonishingly lucky .
but let us honor what it has bought us , and move forward from this point .
because if we cling to it , and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices , the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable .
and by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us , and that the oil age has done for us , we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient , more nourishing , and in which , we find ourselves fitter , more skilled and more connected to each other .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " people do stupid things .
that 's what spreads hiv . "
this was a headline in a u.k. newspaper , the guardian , not that long ago .
i 'm curious , show of hands , who agrees with it ?
well , one or two brave souls .
this is actually a direct quote from an epidemiologist who 's been in field of hiv for 15 years , worked on four continents , and you 're looking at her .
and i am now going to argue that this is only half true .
people do get hiv because they do stupid things , but most of them are doing stupid things for perfectly rational reasons .
now , " rational " is the dominant paradigm in public health , and if you put your public health nerd glasses on , you 'll see that if we give people the information that they need about what 's good for them and what 's bad for them , if you give them the services that they can use to act on that information , and a little bit of motivation , people will make rational decisions and live long and healthy lives .
wonderful .
that 's slightly problematic for me because i work in hiv , and although i 'm sure you all know that hiv is about poverty and gender inequality , and if you were at ted ' 07 it 's about coffee prices ...
actually , hiv 's about sex and drugs , and if there are two things that make human beings a little bit irrational , they are erections and addiction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , let 's start with what 's rational for an addict .
now , i remember speaking to an indonesian friend of mine , frankie .
we were having lunch and he was telling me about when he was in jail in bali for a drug injection .
it was someone 's birthday , and they had very kindly smuggled some heroin into jail , and he was very generously sharing it out with all of his colleagues .
and so everyone lined up , all the smackheads in a row , and the guy whose birthday it was filled up the fit , and he went down and started injecting people .
so he injects the first guy , and then he 's wiping the needle on his shirt , and he injects the next guy .
and frankie says , " i 'm number 22 in line , and i can see the needle coming down towards me , and there is blood all over the place .
it 's getting blunter and blunter .
and a small part of my brain is thinking , ' that is so gross and really dangerous , ' but most of my brain is thinking , ' please let there be some smack left by the time it gets to me .
please let there be some left . " ' and then , telling me this story , frankie said , " you know ... god , drugs really make you stupid . "
and , you know , you ca n't fault him for accuracy .
but , actually , frankie , at that time , was a heroin addict and he was in jail .
so his choice was either to accept that dirty needle or not to get high .
and if there 's one place you really want to get high , it 's when you 're in jail .
but i 'm a scientist and i do n't like to make data out of anecdotes , so let 's look at some data .
we talked to 600 drug addicts in three cities in indonesia , and we said , " well , do you know how you get hiv ? "
" oh yeah , by sharing needles . "
i mean , nearly 100 percent . yeah , by sharing needles .
and , " do you know where you can get a clean needle at a price you can afford to avoid that ? "
" oh yeah . " hundred percent .
" we 're smackheads ; we know where to get clean needles . "
" so are you carrying a needle ? "
we 're actually interviewing people on the street , in the places where they 're hanging out and taking drugs .
" are you carrying clean needles ? "
one in four , maximum .
so no surprises then that the proportion that actually used clean needles every time they injected in the last week is just about one in 10 , and the other nine in 10 are sharing .
so you 've got this massive mismatch ; everyone knows that if they share they 're going to get hiv , but they 're all sharing anyway .
so what 's that about ? is it like you get a better high if you share or something ?
we asked that to a junkie and they 're like , " are you nuts ? "
you do n't want to share a needle anymore than you want to share a toothbrush even with someone you 're sleeping with .
there 's just kind of an ick factor there .
" no , no . we share needles because we do n't want to go to jail . "
so , in indonesia at this time , if you were carrying a needle and the cops rounded you up , they could put you into jail .
and that changes the equation slightly , does n't it ?
because your choice now is either i use my own needle now , or i could share a needle now and get a disease that 's going to possibly kill me 10 years from now , or i could use my own needle now and go to jail tomorrow .
and while junkies think that it 's a really bad idea to expose themselves to hiv , they think it 's a much worse idea to spend the next year in jail where they 'll probably end up in frankie 's situation and expose themselves to hiv anyway .
so , suddenly it becomes perfectly rational to share needles .
now , let 's look at it from a policy maker 's point of view .
this is a really easy problem .
for once , your incentives are aligned .
we 've got what 's rational for public health .
you want people to use clean needles - and junkies want to use clean needles .
so we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest .
now , the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known , bleeding heart liberal margaret thatcher .
and she put in the world 's first national needle exchange program , and other countries followed suit : australia , the netherlands and few others .
and in all of those countries , you can see , not more than four percent of injectors ever became infected with hiv .
now , places that did n't do this - new york city for example , moscow , jakarta - we 're talking , at its peak , one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease .
now , margaret thatcher did n't do this because she has any great love for junkies .
she did it because she ran a country that had a national health service .
so , if she did n't invest in effective prevention , she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on , and obviously those are much higher .
so she was making a politically rational decision .
now , if i take out my public health nerd glasses here and look at these data , it seems like a no-brainer , does n't it ?
but in this country , where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens , -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've taken a very different approach .
so what we 've been doing in the united states is reviewing the data - endlessly reviewing the data .
so , these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the united states , and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective - quite a lot of them .
now , the ones that show that needle programs are n't effective - you think that 's one of these annoying dynamic slides and i 'm going to press my dongle and the rest of it 's going to come up , but no - that 's the whole slide .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there is nothing on the other side .
so , completely irrational , you would think .
except that , wait a minute , politicians are rational , too , and they 're responding to what they think the voters want .
so what we see is that voters respond very well to things like this and not quite so well to things like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it becomes quite rational to deny services to injectors .
now let 's talk about sex .
are we any more rational about sex ?
well , i 'm not even going to address the clearly irrational positions of people like the catholic church , who think somehow that if you give out condoms , everyone 's going to run out and have sex .
i do n't know if pope benedict watches tedtalks online , but if you do , i 've got news for you benedict - i carry condoms all the time and i never get laid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not that easy !
here , maybe you 'll have better luck .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , seriously , hiv is actually not that easy to transmit sexually .
so , it depends on how much virus there is in your blood and in your body fluids .
and what we 've got is a very , very high level of virus right at the beginning when you 're first infected , then you start making antibodies , and then it bumps along at quite low levels for a long time - 10 or 12 years - you have spikes if you get another sexually transmitted infection .
but basically , nothing much is going on until you start to get symptomatic aids , and by that stage , you 're not looking great , you 're not feeling great , you 're not having that much sex .
so the sexual transmission of hiv is essentially determined by how many partners you have in these very short spaces of time when you have peak viremia .
now , this makes people crazy because it means that you have to talk about some groups having more sexual partners in shorter spaces of time than other groups , and that 's considered stigmatizing .
i 've always been a bit curious about that because i think stigma is a bad thing , whereas lots of sex is quite a good thing , but we 'll leave that be .
the truth is that 20 years of very good research have shown us that there are groups that are more likely to turnover large numbers of partners in a short space of time .
and those groups are , globally , people who sell sex and their more regular partners .
they are gay men on the party scene who have , on average , three times more partners than straight people on the party scene .
and they are heterosexuals who come from countries that have traditions of polygamy and relatively high levels of female autonomy , and almost all of those countries are in east or southern africa .
and that is reflected in the epidemic that we have today .
you can see these horrifying figures from africa .
these are all countries in southern africa where between one in seven , and one in three of all adults , are infected with hiv .
now , in the rest of the world , we 've got basically nothing going on in the general population - very , very low levels - but we have extraordinarily high levels of hiv in these other populations who are at highest risk : drug injectors , sex workers and gay men .
and you 'll note , that 's the local data from los angeles : 25 percent prevalence among gay men .
of course , you ca n't get hiv just by having unprotected sex .
you can only hiv by having unprotected sex with a positive person .
in most of the world , these few prevention failures notwithstanding , we are actually doing quite well these days in commercial sex : condom use rates are between 80 and 100 percent in commercial sex in most countries .
and , again , it 's because of an alignment of the incentives .
what 's rational for public health is also rational for individual sex workers because it 's really bad for business to have another sti .
no one wants it .
and , actually , clients do n't want to go home with a drip either .
so essentially , you 're able to achieve quite high rates of condom use in commercial sex .
but in " intimate " relations it 's much more difficult because , with your wife or your boyfriend or someone that you hope might turn into one of those things , we have this illusion of romance and trust and intimacy , and nothing is quite so unromantic as the , " my condom or yours , darling ? " question .
so in the face of that , you really need quite a strong incentive to use condoms .
this , for example , this gentleman is called joseph .
he 's from haiti and he has aids .
and he 's probably not having a lot of sex right now , but he is a reminder in the population , of why you might want to be using condoms .
this is also in haiti and is a reminder of why you might want to be having sex , perhaps .
now , funnily enough , this is also joseph after six months on antiretroviral treatment .
not for nothing do we call it the lazarus effect .
but it is changing the equation of what 's rational in sexual decision-making .
so , what we 've got - some people say , " oh , it does n't matter very much because , actually , treatment is effective prevention because it lowers your viral load and therefore makes it more difficult to transmit hiv . "
so , if you look at the viremia thing again , if you do start treatment when you 're sick , well , what happens ? your viral load comes down .
but compared to what ? what happens if you 're not on treatment ?
well , you die , so your viral load goes to zero .
and all of this green stuff here , including the spikes - which are because you could n't get to the pharmacy , or you ran out of drugs , or you went on a three day party binge and forgot to take your drugs , or because you 've started to get resistance , or whatever - all of that is virus that would n't be out there , except for treatment .
now , am i saying , " oh , well , great prevention strategy .
let 's just stop treating people . "
of course not , of course not .
we need to expand antiretroviral treatment as much as we can .
but what i am doing is calling into question those people who say that more treatment is all the prevention we need .
that 's simply not necessarily true , and i think we can learn a lot from the experience of gay men in rich countries where treatment has been widely available for going on 15 years now .
and what we 've seen is that , actually , condom use rates , which were very , very high - the gay community responded very rapidly to hiv , with extremely little help from public health nerds , i would say - that condom use rate has come down dramatically since treatment for two reasons really : one is the assumption of , " oh well , if he 's infected , he 's probably on meds , and his viral load 's going to be low , so i 'm pretty safe . "
and the other thing is that people are simply not as scared of hiv as they were of aids , and rightly so .
aids was a disfiguring disease that killed you , and hiv is an invisible virus that makes you take a pill every day .
and that 's boring , but is it as boring as having to use a condom every time you have sex , no matter how drunk you are , no matter how many poppers you 've taken , whatever ?
if we look at the data , we can see that the answer to that question is , mmm .
so these are data from scotland .
you see the peak in drug injectors before they started the national needle exchange program .
then it came way down .
and both in heterosexuals - mostly in commercial sex - and in drug users , you 've really got nothing much going on after treatment begins , and that 's because of that alignment of incentives that i talked about earlier .
but in gay men , you 've got quite a dramatic rise starting three or four years after treatment became widely available .
this is of new infections .
what does that mean ?
it means that the combined effect of being less worried and having more virus out there in the population - more people living longer , healthier lives , more likely to be getting laid with hiv - is outweighing the effects of lower viral load , and that 's a very worrisome thing .
what does it mean ?
it means we need to be doing more prevention the more treatment we have .
is that what 's happening ?
no , and i call it the " compassion conundrum . "
we 've talked a lot about compassion the last couple of days , and what 's happening really is that people are unable quite to bring themselves to put in good sexual and reproductive health services for sex workers , unable quite to be giving out needles to junkies .
but once they 've gone from being transgressive people whose behaviors we do n't want to condone to being aids victims , we come over all compassionate and buy them incredibly expensive drugs for the rest of their lives .
it does n't make any sense from a public health point of view .
i want to give what 's very nearly the last word to ines .
ines is a a transgender hooker on the streets of jakarta ; she 's a chick with a dick .
why does she do that job ?
well , of course , because she 's forced into it because she does n't have any better option , etc . , etc .
and if we could just teach her to sew and get her a nice job in a factory , all would be well .
this is what factory workers earn in an hour in indonesia : on average , 20 cents .
it varies a bit province to province .
i do speak to sex workers , 15,000 of them for this particular slide , and this is what sex workers say they earn in an hour .
so it 's not a great job , but for a lot of people it really is quite a rational choice .
okay , ines .
we 've got the tools , the knowledge and the cash , and commitment to preventing hiv too .
ines : so why is prevalence still rising ?
it 's all politics .
when you get to politics , nothing makes sense .
elizabeth pisani : " when you get to politics , nothing makes sense . "
so , from the point of view of a sex worker , politicians are making no sense .
from the point of view of a public health nerd , junkies are doing dumb things .
the truth is that everyone has a different rationale .
there are as many different ways of being rational as there are human beings on the planet , and that 's one of the glories of human existence .
but those ways of being rational are not independent of one another , so it 's rational for a drug injector to share needles because of a stupid decision that 's made by a politician , and it 's rational for a politician to make that stupid decision because they 're responding to what they think the voters want .
but here 's the thing : we are the voters .
we 're not all of them , of course , but ted is a community of opinion leaders .
and everyone who 's in this room , and everyone who 's watching this out there on the web , i think , has a duty to demand of their politicians that we make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense .
it 's going to be really hard for us to individually affect what 's rational for every frankie and every ines out there , but you can at least use your vote to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread hiv .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the last 50 years , we 've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences .
and i 'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that i think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia .
so whether it 's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots , i think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing , especially retail , sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places .
and in the process , what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost , and have the infrastructure in place , instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges .
so why is this important ?
i think there are any number of reasons , and i 'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few .
just from the perspective of climate change , the average urban dweller in the u.s.
has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller , mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more , and living in detached buildings , you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of .
so strictly from a climate change perspective , the cities are already relatively green .
the big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs .
all that driving that we 've been doing out in the suburbs , we have doubled the amount of miles we drive .
it 's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency .
we 're just driving so much more ; we have n't been able to keep up technologically .
public health is another reason to consider retrofitting .
researchers at the cdc and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles .
and those have been linked then with the rather alarming , growing rates of obesity , shown in these maps here , and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes .
and that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore , again , because of our development patterns .
and then there 's finally - there 's the affordability question .
i mean , how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices ?
suburban expansion to cheap land , for the last 50 years - you know the cheap land out on the edge - has helped generations of families enjoy the american dream .
but increasingly , the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability - which is basically our model - those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs .
for instance , here in atlanta , about half of households make between $ 20,000 and $ 50,000 a year , and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation .
i mean , that 's 2005 figures .
that 's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon .
you know , none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs , and they 're not going down any time soon .
whether you love suburbia 's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips , there are reasons why it 's important to retrofit .
but is it practical ?
i think it is .
june williamson and i have been researching this topic for over a decade , and we 've found over 80 varied projects .
but that they 're really all market driven , and what 's driving the market in particular - number one - is major demographic shifts .
we all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place , but that 's really not the case anymore .
since 2000 , already two-thirds of households in suburbia we just have n't caught up with the actual realities of this .
the reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now : the baby boomers retiring - and then there 's a gap , generation x , which is a small generation .
they 're still having kids - but generation y has n't even started hitting child-rearing age .
they 're the other big generation .
so as a result of that , demographers predict that through 2025 , 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them .
and the market research , consumer research , asking the boomers and gen y what it is they would like , what they would like to live in , tells us there is going to be a huge demand - and we 're already seeing it - for more urban lifestyles within suburbia .
that basically , the boomers want to be able to age in place , and gen y would like to live an urban lifestyle , but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia .
the other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt .
now i keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band , but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots - and suburbia is full of them .
when the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown , it made sense to just build surface parking lots .
but those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again , as we 've just continued to sprawl , and they now have a relatively central location .
it no longer just makes sense .
that land is more valuable than just surface parking lots .
it now makes sense to go back in , build a deck and build up on those sites .
so what do you do with a dead mall , dead office park ?
it turns out , all sorts of things .
in a slow economy like ours , re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies .
so this happens to be a dead mall in st. louis that 's been re-inhabited as art-space .
it 's now home to artist studios , theater groups , dance troupes .
it 's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was , but it 's serving its community .
it 's keeping the lights on .
it 's becoming , i think , a really great institution .
other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes , as universities , and as all variety of office space .
we also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well - lots of schools , lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one .
this was a little grocery store , a food lion grocery store , that is now a public library .
in addition to , i think , doing a beautiful adaptive reuse , they tore up some of the parking spaces , put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff , put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods .
and they 've made this , what was just a store along a commercial strip , into a community gathering space .
this one is a little l-shaped strip shopping center in phoenix , arizona .
really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint , a gourmet grocery , and they put up a restaurant in the old post office .
never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination .
it 's been so successful , they 've now taken over the strip across the street .
the real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim , " walking distance to le grande orange , " because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call " a third place . "
if home is the first place and work is the second place , the third place is where you go to hang out and build community .
and especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family , the family households , there 's a real hunger for more third places .
so the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category , the next strategy : redevelopment .
now , during the boom , there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density , a sort of compact , walkable urban neighborhoods .
but some of them have been much more incremental .
this is mashpee commons , the oldest retrofit that we 've found .
and it 's just incrementally , over the last 20 years , built urbanism on top of its parking lots .
so the black and white photo shows the simple 60 's strip shopping center .
and then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact , mixed-use new england village , and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side .
so , you know , sometimes it 's incremental .
sometimes , it 's all at once .
this is another infill project on the parking lots , this one of an office park outside of washington d.c.
when metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site , the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new main street , several apartments and condo buildings , while keeping the existing office buildings .
here is the site in 1940 : it was just a little farm in the village of hyattsville .
by 1980 , it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right .
today , the transit , the main street and the new housing have all been built .
eventually , i expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall .
plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped .
transit is a big driver of retrofits .
so here 's what it looks like .
you can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new main street .
this one is one of my favorites , belmar .
i think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction .
there 's massive p.v. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines .
this was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock .
it 's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets , two public parks , eight bus lines and a range of housing types , and so it 's really given lakewood , colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had .
here was the mall in its heyday .
they had their prom in the mall . they loved their mall .
so here 's the site in 1975 with the mall .
by 1995 , the mall has died .
the department store has been kept - and we found this was true in many cases .
the department stores are multistory ; they 're better built .
they 're easy to be re-adapted .
but the one story stuff ...
that 's really history .
so here it is at projected build-out .
this project , i think , has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods .
it 's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle .
it 's about two-thirds built out right now .
here 's what the new main street looks like .
it 's very successful , and it 's helped to prompt - eight of the 13 regional malls in denver have now , or have announced plans to be , retrofitted .
but it 's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring - just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city .
no , it 's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties .
and so it 's giving people more choices , but it 's not taking away choices .
but it 's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability .
you want to also try to get more systemic transformation .
we need to also retrofit the corridors themselves .
so this is one that has been retrofitted in california .
they took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below , and they built a boulevard that has become the main street for their town .
and it 's transformed from being an ugly , unsafe , undesirable address , to becoming a beautiful , attractive , dignified sort of good address .
i mean now we 're hoping we start to see it ; they 've already built city hall , attracted two hotels .
i could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree .
so there 's a lot of great things , but i 'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting .
but densification is not going to work everywhere .
sometimes re-greening is really the better answer .
there 's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like flint , michigan .
there 's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement - sort of victory gardens meets the internet .
but perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology , as in this example outside of minneapolis .
when the shopping center died , the city restored the site 's original wetlands , creating lakefront property , which then attracted private investment , the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years .
so they 've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time .
this is another re-greening example .
it also makes sense in very strong markets .
this one in seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop .
and the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit .
the creek had been culverted under the parking lot .
but daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat .
so i 've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits .
what 's next ?
i think we have three challenges for the future .
the first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale .
we need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened .
where should we be redeveloping ?
and where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation ?
these slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for atlanta .
i led a team that was asked to imagine atlanta 100 years from now .
and we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves - expensive , but simple .
one , in a hundred years , transit on all major rail and road corridors .
two , in a hundred years , thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors .
it 's a little extreme , but we 've got a little water problem .
in a hundred years , subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit wo n't be viable .
and so we 've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production .
so the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits .
and i close with this image of democracy in action : this is a protest that 's happening on a retrofit in silver spring , maryland on an astroturf town green .
now , retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism , and not without reason ; you do n't get much more phony than an astroturf town green .
i have to say , these are very hybrid places .
they are new but trying to look old .
they have urban streetscapes , but suburban parking ratios .
their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia , but they 're less diverse than cities .
and they are public places , but that are managed by private companies .
and just the surface appearance are often - like the astroturf here - they make me wince .
so , you know , i mean i 'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job .
the fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks , the streets and blocks , the putting in of public space , compromised as it may be , is still a really great thing .
but we 've got to get the architecture better .
the final challenge is for all of you .
i want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places - more sustainable places , period .
but culturally , we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic , and we expect that .
but we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to .
it 's time to let them grow up , so i want you to all support the zoning changes , the road diets , the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you .
thank you .
i want you to take a trip with me .
picture yourself driving down a small road in africa , and as you drive along , you look off to the side , and this is what you see : and you stop , and you get out of your car and you take a picture .
and you go into the town , and you inquire , " what 's going on here ? "
and people are initially reluctant to tell you .
and then someone says , " these are the recent aids deaths in our community . "
hiv is n't like other medical conditions ; it 's stigmatizing .
people are reluctant to talk about it - there 's a fear associated with it .
and i 'm going to talk about hiv today , about the deaths , about the stigma .
it 's a medical story , but more than that , it 's a social story .
this map depicts the global distribution of hiv .
and as you can see , africa has a disproportionate share of the infection .
there are 33 million people living with hiv in the world today .
of these , two-thirds , 22 million are living in sub-saharan africa .
there are 1.4 million pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries living with hiv and of these , 90 percent are in sub-saharan africa .
we talk about things in relative terms .
and i 'm going to talk about annual pregnancies and hiv-positive mothers .
the united states - a large country - each year , 7,000 mothers with hiv who give birth to a child .
but you go to rwanda - a very small country - 8,000 mothers with hiv who are pregnant .
and then you go to baragwanath hospital , outside of johannesburg in south africa , and 8,000 hiv-positive pregnant women giving birth - a hospital the same as a country .
and to realize that this is just the tip of an iceberg that when you compare everything here to south africa , it just pales , because in south africa , each year 300,000 mothers with hiv give birth to children .
so we talk about pmtct , and we refer to pmtct , prevention of mother to child transmission .
i think there 's an assumption amongst most people in the public that if a mother is hiv-positive , she 's going to infect her child .
the reality is really , very different .
in resource-rich countries , with all the tests and treatment we currently have , less than two percent of babies are born hiv-positive - 98 percent of babies are born hiv-negative .
and yet , the reality in resource-poor countries , in the absence of tests and treatment , 40 percent - 40 percent of children are infected - 40 percent versus two percent - an enormous difference .
so these programs - and i 'm going to refer to pmtct though my talk - these prevention programs , simply , they 're the tests and the drugs that we give to mothers to prevent them from infecting their babies , and also the medicines we give to mothers to keep them healthy and alive to raise their children .
so it 's the test a mother gets when she comes in .
it 's the drugs she receives to protect the baby that 's inside the uterus and during delivery .
it 's the guidance she gets around infant feeding and safer sex .
it 's an entire package of services , and it works .
so in the united states , since the advent of treatment in the middle of the 1990s , there 's been an 80-percent decline in the number of hiv-infected children .
less than 100 babies are born with hiv each year in the united states and yet , still , over 400,000 children are born every year in the world today with hiv .
what does that mean ?
it means 1,100 children infected each day - 1,100 children each day , infected with hiv .
and where do they come from ?
well , less than one comes from the united states .
one , on average , comes from europe .
100 come from asia and the pacific .
and each day , a thousand babies - a thousand babies are born each day with hiv in africa .
so again , i look at the globe here and the disproportionate share of hiv in africa .
and let 's look at another map .
and here , again , we see africa has a disproportionate share of the numbers of doctors .
that thin sliver you see here , that 's africa .
and it 's the same with nurses .
the truth is sub-saharan africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden and yet only three percent of the world 's health care workers .
that means doctors and nurses simply do n't have the time to take care of patients .
a nurse in a busy clinic will see 50 to 100 patients in a day , which leaves her just minutes per patient - minutes per patient .
and so when we look at these pmtct programs , what does it mean ?
well , back in 2001 , when there was just a simple test and a single dose of a drug , a nurse , in the course of her few minutes with a patient , would have to counsel for the hiv test , perform the hiv test , explain the results , dispense a single dose of the drug , nevirapine , explain how to take it , discuss infant feeding options , reinforce infant feeding , and test the baby - in minutes .
well , fortunately since 2001 , we 've got new treatments , new tests , and we 're far more successful , but we do n't have any more nurses .
and so these are the tests a nurse now has to do in those same few minutes .
it 's not possible - it does n't work .
and so we need to find better ways of providing care .
this is a picture of a maternal health clinic in africa - mothers coming , pregnant and with their babies .
these women are here for care , but we know that just doing a test , just giving someone a drug , it 's not enough .
meds do n't equal medical care .
doctors and nurses , frankly , do n't have the time or skills to tell people what to do in ways they understand .
i 'm a doctor - i tell people things to do , and i expect them to follow my guidance - because i 'm a doctor ; i went to harvard - but the reality is , if i tell a patient , " you should have safer sex .
you should always use a condom , " and yet , in her relationship , she 's not empowered - what 's going to happen ?
if i tell her to take her medicines every day and yet , no one in the household knows about her illness , so it 's just not going to work .
and so we need to do more , we need to do it differently , we need to do it in ways that are affordable and accessible and can be taken to scale , which means it can be done everywhere .
so , i want to tell you a story - i want to take you on a little trip .
imagine yourself , if you can , you 're a young woman in africa , you 're going to the hospital or clinic .
you go in for a test and you find out that you 're pregnant , and you 're delighted .
and then they give you another test and they tell you you 're hiv-positive , and you 're devastated .
and the nurse takes you into a room , and she tells you about the tests and hiv and the medicines you can take and how to take care of yourself and your baby , and you hear none of it .
all you 're hearing is , " i 'm going to die , and my baby is going to die . "
and then you 're out on the street , and you do n't know where to go .
and you do n't know who you can talk to , because the truth is , hiv is so stigmatizing that if you partner , your family , anyone in your home , you 're likely to be thrown out without any means of support .
and this - this is the face and story of hiv in africa today .
but we 're here to talk about possible solutions and some good news .
and i want to change the story a little bit .
take the same mother , and the nurse , after she gives her her test , takes her to a room .
the door opens and there 's a room full of mothers , mothers with babies , and they 're sitting , and they 're talking , they 're listening .
they 're drinking tea , they 're having sandwiches .
and she goes inside , and woman comes up to her and says , " welcome to mothers2mothers .
have a seat . you 're safe here .
we 're all hiv-positive .
you 're going to be okay . you 're going to live .
your baby is going to be hiv-negative . "
we view mothers as a community 's single greatest resource .
mothers take care of the children , take care of the home .
so often the men are gone .
they 're working , or they 're not part of the household .
our organization , mothers2mothers , enlists women with hiv as care providers .
we bring mothers who have hiv , who 've been through these pmtct programs in the very facilities , to come back and work side by side with doctors and nurses as part of the health care team .
these mothers , we call them mentor mothers , are able to engage women who , just like themselves , pregnant with babies , have found out about being hiv-positive , who need support and education .
and they support them around the diagnosis and educate them about how to take their medicines , how to take care of themselves , how to take care of their babies .
consider : if you needed surgery , you would want the best possible technical surgeon , right ?
but if you wanted to understand what that surgery would do to your life , you 'd like to engage someone , someone who 's had the procedure .
patients are experts on their own experience , and they can share that experience with others .
this is the medical care that goes beyond just medicines .
so the mothers who work for us , they come from the communities in which they work .
they 're hired - they 're paid as professional members of the health care teams , just like doctors and nurses .
and we open bank accounts for them and they 're paid directly into the accounts , because their money 's protected ; the men ca n't take it away from them .
they go through two to three weeks of rigorous curriculum-based education , training .
now , doctors and nurses - they too get trained .
but so often , they only get trained once , so they 're not aware of new medicines , new guidelines as they come out .
our mentor mothers get trained every single year and retrained .
and so doctors and nurses - they look up to them as experts .
imagine that : a woman , a former patient , being able to educate her doctor for the first time and educate the other patients that she 's taking care of .
our organization has three goals .
the first , to prevent mother-to-child transmission .
the second : keep mothers healthy , keep mothers alive , keep the children alive - no more orphans .
and the third , and maybe the most grand , is to find ways to empower women , enable them to fight the stigma and to live positive and productive lives with hiv .
so how do we do it ?
well , maybe the most important engagement is the one-to-one , seeing patients one-to-one , educating them , supporting them , explaining how they can take care of themselves .
we go beyond that ; we try to bring in the husbands , the partners .
in africa , it 's very , very hard to engage men .
men are not frequently part of pregnancy care .
but in rwanda , in one country , they 've got a policy that a woman ca n't come for care unless she brings the father of the baby with her - that 's the rule .
and so the father and the mother , together , go through the counseling and the testing .
the father and the mother , together , they get the results .
and this is so important in breaking through the stigma .
disclosure is so central to prevention .
how do you have safer sex , how do you use a condom regularly if there has n't been disclosure ?
disclosure is so important to treatment , because again , people need the support of family members and friends to take their medicines regularly .
we also work in groups .
now the groups , it 's not like me lecturing , but what happens is women , they come together - under the support and guidance of our mentor mothers - they come together , and they share their personal experiences .
and it 's through the sharing that people get tactics of how to take care of themselves , how to disclose how to take medicines .
and then there 's the community outreach , engaging women in their communities .
if we can change the way households believe and think , we can change the way communities believe and think .
and if we can change enough communities , we can change national attitudes .
we can change national attitudes to women and national attitudes to hiv .
the hardest barrier really is around stigma reduction .
we have the medicines , we have the tests , but how do you reduce the stigma ?
and it 's important about disclosure .
so , a couple years ago , one of the mentor mothers came back , and she told me a story .
she had been asked by one of the clients to go to the home of the client , because the client wanted to tell the mother and her brothers and sisters about her hiv status , and she was afraid to go by herself .
and so the mentor mother went along with .
and the patient walked into the house and said to her mother and siblings , " i have something to tell you . i 'm hiv-positive . "
and everybody was quiet .
and then her oldest brother stood up and said , " i too have something to tell you .
i 'm hiv-positive .
i 've been afraid to tell everybody . "
and then this older sister stood up and said , " i too am living with the virus , and i 've been ashamed . "
and then her younger brother stood up and said , " i 'm also positive .
i thought you were going to throw me out of the family . "
and you see where this is going .
the last sister stood up and said , " i 'm also positive .
i thought you were going to hate me . "
and there they were , all of them together for the first time being able to share this experience for the first time and to support each other for the first time .
-lrb- video -rrb- female narrator : women come to us , and they are crying and scared .
i tell them my story , that i am hiv-positive , but my child is hiv-negative .
i tell them , " you are going to make it , and you will raise a healthy baby . "
i am proof that there is hope .
mitchell besser : remember the images i showed you of how few doctors and nurses there are in africa .
and it is a crisis in health care systems .
even as we have more tests and more drugs , we ca n't reach people ; we do n't have enough providers .
so we talk in terms of what we call task-shifting .
task-shifting is traditionally when you take health care services from one provider and have another provider do it .
typically , it 's a doctor giving a job to a nurse .
and the issue in africa is that there are fewer nurses , really than doctors , and so we need to find new paradigm for health care .
how do you build a better health care system ?
we 've chosen to redefine the health care system as a doctor , a nurse and a mentor mother .
and so what nurses do is that they ask the mentor mothers to explain how to take the drugs , the side effects .
they delegate education about infant feeding , family planning , safer sex , actions that nurses simple just do n't have time for .
so we go back to the prevention of mother to child transmission .
the world is increasingly seeing these programs as the bridge to comprehensive maternal and child health .
and our organization helps women across that bridge .
the care does n't stop when the baby 's born - we deal with the ongoing health of the mother and baby , ensuring that they live healthy , successful lives .
our organization works on three levels .
the first , at the patient level - mothers and babies keeping babies from getting hiv , keeping mothers healthy to raise them .
the second , communities - empowering women .
they become leaders within their communities .
they change the way communities think - we need to change attitudes to hiv .
we need to change attitudes to women in africa .
we have to do that .
and then rework the level of the health care systems , building stronger health care systems .
our health care systems are broken .
they 're not going to work the way they 're currently designed .
and so doctors and nurses who need to try to change people 's behaviors do n't have the skills , do n't have the time - our mentor mothers do .
and so in redefining the health care teams by bringing the mentor mothers in , we can do that .
i started the program in capetown , south africa back in 2001 .
it was at that point , just the spark of an idea .
referencing steven johnson 's very lovely speech yesterday on where ideas come from , i was in the shower at the time - i was alone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the program is now working in nine countries , we have 670 program sites , we 're seeing about 230,000 women every month , we 're employing 1,600 mentor mothers , and last year , they enrolled 300,000 hiv-positive pregnant women and mothers .
that is 20 percent of the global hiv-positive pregnant women - 20 percent of the world .
what 's extraordinary is how simple the premise is .
mothers with hiv caring for mothers with hiv .
past patients taking care of present patients .
and empowerment through employment - reducing stigma .
-lrb- video -rrb- female narrator : there is hope , hope that one day we shall win this fight against hiv and aids .
each person must know their hiv status .
those who are hiv-negative must know how to stay negative .
those who are hiv-infected must know how to take care of themselves .
hiv-positive pregnant women must get pmtct services in order to have hiv-negative babies .
all of this is possible , if we each contribute to this fight .
mb : simple solutions to complex problems .
mothers caring for mothers .
it 's transformational .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when i was 15 years old .
i bought some pigs . i was living in sussex .
and i started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way .
i went to my school kitchen , and i said , " give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at . "
i went to the local baker and took their stale bread .
i went to the local greengrocer , and i went to a farmer who was throwing away potatoes because they were the wrong shape or size for supermarkets .
this was great . my pigs turned that food waste into delicious pork . i sold that pork to my school friends ' parents , and i made a good pocket money addition to my teenage allowance .
but i noticed that most of the food that i was giving my pigs was in fact fit for human consumption , and that i was only scratching the surface , and that right the way up the food supply chain , in supermarkets , greengrocers , bakers , in our homes , in factories and farms , we were hemorrhaging out food .
supermarkets did n't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting .
i 'd been round the back . i 'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites , and i thought , surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it .
one morning , when i was feeding my pigs , i noticed a particularly tasty-looking sun-dried tomato loaf that used to crop up from time to time .
i grabbed hold of it , sat down , and ate my breakfast with my pigs . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that was the first act of what i later learned to call freeganism , really an exhibition of the injustice of food waste , and the provision of the solution to food waste , which is simply to sit down and eat food , rather than throwing it away .
that became , as it were , a way of confronting large businesses in the business of wasting food , and exposing , most importantly , to the public , that when we 're talking about food being thrown away , stuff that 's beyond the pale .
we 're talking about good , fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale .
eventually , i set about writing my book , really to demonstrate the extent of this problem on a global scale . what this shows is a nation-by-nation breakdown of the likely level of food waste in each country in the world .
unfortunately , empirical data , good , hard stats , do n't exist , and therefore to prove my point , i first of all had to find some proxy way of uncovering how much food was being wasted .
so i took the food supply of every single country and i compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country .
that 's based on diet intake surveys , it 's based on levels of obesity , it 's based on a range of factors that gives you an approximate guess as to how much food is actually going into people 's mouths .
that black line in the middle of that table is the likely level of consumption with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste .
there will always be waste . i 'm not that unrealistic that i think we can live in a waste-free world .
but that black line shows what a food supply should be in a country if they allow for a good , stable , secure , nutritional diet for every person in that country .
any dot above that line , and you 'll quickly notice that that includes most countries in the world , represents unnecessary surplus , and is likely to reflect levels of waste in each country .
as a country gets richer , it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants , and as you can see , most european and north american countries fall between 150 and 200 percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations .
so a country like america has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the american people .
but the thing that really struck me , when i plotted all this data , and it was a lot of numbers , was that you can see how it levels off .
countries rapidly shoot towards that 150 mark , and then they level off , and they do n't really go on rising as you might expect .
so i decided to unpack that data a little bit further to see if that was true or false .
and that 's what i came up with .
if you include not just the food that ends up in shops and restaurants , but also the food that people feed to livestock , the maize , the soy , the wheat , that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products , what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself .
a country like america has four times the amount of food that it needs .
when people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by 2050 , i always think of these graphs .
the fact is , we have an enormous buffer in rich countries between ourselves and hunger .
we 've never had such gargantuan surpluses before .
in many ways , this is a great success story of human civilization , of the agricultural surpluses that we set out to achieve 12,000 years ago .
it is a success story . it has been a success story .
but what we have to recognize now is that we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear , and when we chop down forests , as we are every day , to grow more and more food , when we extract water from depleting water reserves , when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food , and then we throw away so much of it , we have to think about what we can start saving .
and yesterday , i went to one of the local supermarkets that i often visit to inspect , if you like , what they 're throwing away .
i found quite a few packets of biscuits amongst all the fruit and vegetables and everything else that was in there .
and i thought , well this could serve as a symbol for today .
so i want you to imagine that these nine biscuits that i found in the bin represent the global food supply , okay ? we start out with nine .
that 's what 's in fields around the world every single year .
the first biscuit we 're going to lose before we even leave the farm .
that 's a problem primarily associated with developing work agriculture , whether it 's a lack of infrastructure , refrigeration , pasteurization , grain stores , even basic fruit crates , which means that food goes to waste before it even leaves the fields .
the next three biscuits are the foods that we decide to feed to livestock , the maize , the wheat and the soya .
unfortunately , our beasts are inefficient animals , and they turn two-thirds of that into feces and heat , so we 've lost those two , and we 've only kept this one in meat and dairy products .
two more we 're going to throw away directly into bins .
this is what most of us think of when we think of food waste , what ends up in the garbage , what ends up in supermarket bins , what ends up in restaurant bins . we 've lost another two , and we 've left ourselves with just four biscuits to feed on .
that is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources , especially when you think of the billion hungry people that exist already in the world .
having gone through the data , i then needed to demonstrate where that food ends up .
where does it end up ? we 're used to seeing the stuff on our plates , but what about all the stuff that goes missing in between ?
supermarkets are an easy place to start .
this is the result of my hobby , which is unofficial bin inspections . -lrb- laughter -rrb- strange you might think , but if we could rely on corporations to tell us what they were doing in the back of their stores , we would n't need to go sneaking around the back , opening up bins and having a look at what 's inside .
but this is what you can see more or less on every street corner in britain , in europe , in north america .
it represents a colossal waste of food , but what i discovered whilst i was writing my book was that this very evident abundance of waste was actually the tip of the iceberg .
when you start going up the supply chain , you find where the real food waste is happening on a gargantuan scale .
can i have a show of hands if you have a loaf of sliced bread in your house ?
who lives in a household where that crust - that slice at the first and last end of each loaf - okay , most people , not everyone , but most people , and this is , i 'm glad to say , what i see across the world , and yet has anyone seen a supermarket or sandwich shop anywhere in the world that serves sandwiches with crusts on it ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- i certainly have n't .
so i kept on thinking , where do those crusts go ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the answer , unfortunately : 13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of this one single factory every single day , day-fresh bread .
in the same year that i visited this factory , i went to pakistan , where people in 2008 were going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies .
we contribute to that squeeze by depositing food in bins here in britain and elsewhere in the world . we take food off the market shelves that hungry people depend on .
go one step up , and you get to farmers , who throw away sometimes a third or even more of their harvest because of cosmetic standards .
this farmer , for example , has invested 16,000 pounds in growing spinach , not one leaf of which he harvested , potatoes that are cosmetically imperfect , all going for pigs .
parsnips that are too small for supermarket specifications , tomatoes in tenerife , oranges in florida , bananas in ecuador , where i visited last year , all being discarded . this is one day 's waste from one banana plantation in ecuador .
all being discarded , perfectly edible , because they 're the wrong shape or size .
if we do that to fruit and vegetables , you bet we can do it to animals too .
liver , lungs , heads , tails , kidneys , testicles , delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste . offal consumption has halved in britain and america in the last 30 years .
as a result , this stuff gets fed to dogs at best , or is incinerated .
this man , in kashgar , xinjiang province , in western china , is serving up his national dish .
it 's called sheep 's organs .
it 's delicious , it 's nutritious , and as i learned when i went to kashgar , it symbolizes their taboo against food waste .
i was sitting in a roadside cafe .
a chef came to talk to me , i finished my bowl , and halfway through the conversation , he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl .
i thought , " my goodness , what taboo have i broken ?
how have i insulted my host ? "
he pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl , and he said , " clean . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought , " my god , you know , i go around the world telling people to stop wasting food .
this guy has thrashed me at my own game . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it gave me faith . it gave me faith that we , the people , do have the power to stop this tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food on a colossal scale , if we make noise about it , tell corporations about it , tell governments we want to see an end to food waste , we do have the power to bring about that change .
fish , 40 to 60 percent of european fish are discarded at sea , they do n't even get landed .
in our homes , we 've lost touch with food .
this is an experiment i did on three lettuces .
who keeps lettuces in their fridge ?
most people . the one on the left was kept in a fridge for 10 days .
the one in the middle , on my kitchen table . not much difference .
the one on the right i treated like cut flowers .
it 's a living organism , cut the slice off , stuck it in a vase of water , it was all right for another two weeks after this .
some food waste , as i said at the beginning , will inevitably arise , so the question is , what is the best thing to do with it ?
i answered that question when i was 15 .
in fact , humans answered that question 6,000 years ago : we domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food .
and yet , in europe , that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak .
it 's unscientific . it 's unnecessary .
if you cook food for pigs , just as if you cook food for humans , it is rendered safe .
it 's also a massive saving of resources .
at the moment , europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from south america , where its production contributes to global warming , to deforestation , to biodiversity loss , to feed livestock here in europe .
at the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them .
if we did that , and fed it to pigs , we would save that amount of carbon .
if we feed our food waste which is the current government favorite way of getting rid of food waste , to anaerobic digestion , which turns food waste into gas to produce electricity , you save a paltry 448 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton of food waste . it 's much better to feed it to pigs .
we knew that during the war . -lrb- laughter -rrb- a silver lining : it has kicked off globally , the quest to tackle food waste .
feeding the 5,000 is an event i first organized in 2009 .
we fed 5,000 people all on food that otherwise would have been wasted .
since then , it 's happened again in london , it 's happening internationally , and across the country .
it 's a way of organizations coming together to celebrate food , to say the best thing to do with food is to eat and enjoy it , and to stop wasting it .
for the sake of the planet we live on , for the sake of our children , for the sake of all the other organisms that share our planet with us , we are a terrestrial animal , and we depend on our land for food . at the moment , we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats .
stop wasting food . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " even in purely non-religious terms , homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty .
it is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality - a pitiable flight from life .
as such , it deserves no compassion , it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom , and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness . "
that 's from time magazine in 1966 , when i was three years old .
and last year , the president of the united states came out in favor of gay marriage .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and my question is , how did we get from there to here ?
how did an illness become an identity ?
when i was perhaps six years old , i went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother .
and at the end of buying our shoes , the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home .
my brother wanted a red balloon , and i wanted a pink balloon .
my mother said that she thought i 'd really rather have a blue balloon .
but i said that i definitely wanted the pink one .
and she reminded me that my favorite color was blue .
the fact that my favorite color now is blue , but i 'm still gay - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - is evidence of both my mother 's influence and its limits .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- when i was little , my mother used to say , " the love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world .
and until you have children , you do n't know what it 's like . "
and when i was little , i took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me .
and when i was an adolescent , i thought that i 'm gay , and so i probably ca n't have a family .
and when she said it , it made me anxious .
and after i came out of the closet , when she continued to say it , it made me furious .
i said , " i 'm gay . that 's not the direction that i 'm headed in .
and i want you to stop saying that . "
about 20 years ago , i was asked by my editors at the new york times magazine to write a piece about deaf culture .
and i was rather taken aback .
i had thought of deafness entirely as an illness .
those poor people , they could n't hear .
they lacked hearing , and what could we do for them ?
and then i went out into the deaf world .
i went to deaf clubs .
i saw performances of deaf theater and of deaf poetry .
i even went to the miss deaf america contest in nashville , tennessee where people complained about that slurry southern signing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as i plunged deeper and deeper into the deaf world , i become convinced that deafness was a culture and that the people in the deaf world who said , " we do n't lack hearing , we have membership in a culture , " were saying something that was viable .
it was n't my culture , and i did n't particularly want to rush off and join it , but i appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it , it felt as valuable as latino culture or gay culture or jewish culture .
it felt as valid perhaps even as american culture .
then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf .
and when her daughter was born , she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me .
she was facing the question of what to do with this child .
should she say , " you 're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter ? "
or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity , get involved in the little people of america , become aware of what was happening for dwarfs ?
and i suddenly thought , most deaf children are born to hearing parents .
those hearing parents tend to try to cure them .
those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence .
most gay people are born to straight parents .
those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world , and those gay people have to discover identity later on .
and here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter .
and i thought , there it is again : a family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary .
and i hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity .
there are vertical identities , which are passed down generationally from parent to child .
those are things like ethnicity , frequently nationality , language , often religion .
those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children .
and while some of them can be difficult , there 's no attempt to cure them .
you can argue that it 's harder in the united states - our current presidency notwithstanding - to be a person of color .
and yet , we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to african-americans and asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair .
there are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group .
and i call them horizontal identities , because the peer group is the horizontal experience .
these are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers .
and those identities , those horizontal identities , people have almost always tried to cure .
and i wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them .
and it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place .
there 's self-acceptance , there 's family acceptance , and there 's social acceptance .
and they do n't always coincide .
and a lot of the time , people who have these conditions are very angry because they feel as though their parents do n't love them , when what actually has happened is that their parents do n't accept them .
love is something that ideally is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child .
but acceptance is something that takes time .
it always takes time .
one of the dwarfs i got to know was a guy named clinton brown .
when he was born , he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism , a very disabling condition , and his parents were told that he would never walk , he would never talk , he would have no intellectual capacity , and he would probably not even recognize them .
and it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly .
and his mother said she was n't going to do it .
and she took her son home .
and even though she did n't have a lot of educational or financial advantages , she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism , and she got clinton enrolled with him .
and in the course of his childhood , he had 30 major surgical procedures .
and he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures , as a result of which he now can walk .
and while he was there , they sent tutors around to help him with his school work .
and he worked very hard because there was nothing else to do .
and he ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family .
he was the first one in his family , in fact , to go to college , where he lived on campus and drove a specially-fitted car that accommodated his unusual body .
and his mother told me this story of coming home one day - and he went to college nearby - and she said , " i saw that car , which you can always recognize , in the parking lot of a bar , " she said . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and i thought to myself , they 're six feet tall , he 's three feet tall .
two beers for them is four beers for him . "
she said , " i knew i could n't go in there and interrupt him , but i went home , and i left him eight messages on his cell phone . "
she said , " and then i thought , if someone had said to me when he was born that my future worry would be that he 'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies - " -lrb- applause -rrb- and i said to her , " what do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming , accomplished , wonderful person ? "
and she said , " what did i do ? i loved him , that 's all .
clinton just always had that light in him .
and his father and i were lucky enough to be the first to see it there . "
i 'm going to quote from another magazine of the ' 60s .
this one is from 1968 - the atlantic monthly , voice of liberal america - written by an important bioethicist .
he said , " there is no reason to feel guilty about putting a down syndrome child away , whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible , lethal sense .
it is sad , yes - dreadful . but it carries no guilt .
true guilt arises only from an offense against a person , and a down 's is not a person . "
there 's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we 've made in the treatment of gay people .
the fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day .
but we forget how we used to see people who had other differences , how we used to see people who were disabled , how inhuman we held people to be .
and the change that 's been accomplished there , which is almost equally radical , is one that we pay not very much attention to .
one of the families i interviewed , tom and karen robards , were taken aback when , as young and successful new yorkers , their first child was diagnosed with down syndrome .
they thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be , and so they decided they would build a little center - two classrooms that they started with a few other parents - to educate kids with d.s.
and over the years , that center grew into something called the cooke center , where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught .
in the time since that atlantic monthly story ran , the life expectancy for people with down syndrome has tripled .
the experience of down syndrome people includes those who are actors , those who are writers , some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood .
the robards had a lot to do with that .
and i said , " do you regret it ?
do you wish your child did n't have down syndrome ?
do you wish you 'd never heard of it ? "
and interestingly his father said , " well , for david , our son , i regret it , because for david , it 's a difficult way to be in the world , and i 'd like to give david an easier life .
but i think if we lost everyone with down syndrome , it would be a catastrophic loss . "
and karen robards said to me , " i 'm with tom .
for david , i would cure it in an instant to give him an easier life .
but speaking for myself - well , i would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that i could come to such a point - speaking for myself , it 's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life , that speaking for myself , i would n't give it up for anything in the world . "
we live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up .
and yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before .
most deaf infants born in the united states now will receive cochlear implants , which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver , and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech .
a compound that has been tested in mice , bmn-111 , is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene .
achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism , and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene , grow to full size .
testing in humans is around the corner .
there are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before , making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies , or to terminate them .
and so we have both social progress and medical progress .
and i believe in both of them .
i believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful , and i think the same thing about the medical progress .
but i think it 's a tragedy when one of them does n't see the other .
and when i see the way they 're intersecting in conditions like the three i 've just described , i sometimes think it 's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have to think about how we feel about cures altogether .
and a lot of the time the question of parenthood is , what do we validate in our children , and what do we cure in them ?
jim sinclair , a prominent autism activist , said , " when parents say ' i wish my child did not have autism , ' what they 're really saying is ' i wish the child i have did not exist and i had a different , non-autistic child instead . ' read that again . this is what we hear when you mourn over our existence .
this is what we hear when you pray for a cure - that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces . "
it 's a very extreme point of view , but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they do n't want to be cured or changed or eliminated .
they want to be whoever it is that they 've come to be .
one of the families i interviewed for this project was the family of dylan klebold who was one of the perpetrators of the columbine massacre .
it took a long time to persuade them to talk to me , and once they agreed , they were so full of their story that they could n't stop telling it .
and the first weekend i spent with them - the first of many - i recorded more than 20 hours of conversation .
and on sunday night , we were all exhausted .
we were sitting in the kitchen . sue klebold was fixing dinner .
and i said , " if dylan were here now , do you have a sense of what you 'd want to ask him ? "
and his father said , " i sure do .
i 'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing . "
and sue looked at the floor , and she thought for a minute .
and then she looked back up and said , " i would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head . "
when i had dinner with her a couple of years later - one of many dinners that we had together - she said , " you know , when it first happened , i used to wish that i had never married , that i had never had children .
if i had n't gone to ohio state and crossed paths with tom , this child would n't have existed and this terrible thing would n't have happened .
but i 've come to feel that i love the children i had so much that i do n't want to imagine a life without them .
i recognize the pain they caused to others , for which there can be no forgiveness , but the pain they caused to me , there is , " she said .
" so while i recognize that it would have been better for the world if dylan had never been born , i 've decided that it would not have been better for me . "
i thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems , problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid , and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting .
and then i thought , all of us who have children love the children we have , with their flaws .
if some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children i have and give me other , better children - more polite , funnier , nicer , smarter - i would cling to the children i have and pray away that atrocious spectacle .
and ultimately i feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they wo n't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove , so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting , which is always that sometimes you look at your child and you think , where did you come from ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed - there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia , there are only so many families of children who are transgender , there are only so many families of prodigies - who also face similar challenges in many ways - there are only so many families in each of those categories - but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing , then you discover that it 's a nearly universal phenomenon .
ironically , it turns out , that it 's our differences , and our negotiation of difference , that unite us .
i decided to have children while i was working on this project .
and many people were astonished and said , " but how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong ? "
and i said , " i 'm not studying everything that can go wrong .
what i 'm studying is how much love there can be , even when everything appears to be going wrong . "
i thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child i had seen , a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect .
and when his ashes were interred , his mother said , " i pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed , once of the child i wanted and once of the son i loved . "
and i figured it was possible then for anyone to love any child if they had the effective will to do so .
so my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in minneapolis .
i had a close friend from college who 'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children .
and so she and i have a daughter , and mother and daughter live in texas .
and my husband and i have a son who lives with us all the time of whom i am the biological father , and our surrogate for the pregnancy was laura , the lesbian mother of oliver and lucy in minneapolis .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the shorthand is five parents of four children in three states .
and there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family .
and there are people who think that families like mine should n't be allowed to exist .
and i do n't accept subtractive models of love , only additive ones .
and i believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on , so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness .
the day after our son was born , the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned .
he was n't extending his legs appropriately .
she said that might mean that he had brain damage .
in so far as he was extending them , he was doing so asymmetrically , which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action .
and he had a very large head , which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus .
and as she told me all of these things , i felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor .
and i thought , here i had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who are disabled , and i did n't want to join their number .
because what i was encountering was an idea of illness .
and like all parents since the dawn of time , i wanted to protect my child from illness .
and i wanted also to protect myself from illness .
and yet , i knew from the work i had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for , that those would ultimately be his identity , and if they were his identity they would become my identity , that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded .
we took him to the mri machine , we took him to the cat scanner , we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw .
we felt helpless .
and at the end of five hours , they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly .
and when i asked the pediatrician what had been going on , she said she thought in the morning he had probably had a cramp .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i thought how my mother was right .
i thought , the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world , and until you have children , you do n't know what it feels like .
i think children had ensnared me the moment i connected fatherhood with loss .
but i 'm not sure i would have noticed that if i had n't been so in the thick of this research project of mine .
i 'd encountered so much strange love , and i fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns .
and i saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities .
during these 10 years , i had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility , and i had come to see how it conquers everything else .
and while i had sometimes thought the parents i was interviewing were fools , enslaving themselves to a lifetime 's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery , i realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that i was ready to join them on their ship .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- compassion : what does it look like ?
come with me to 915 south bloodworth street in raleigh , north carolina , where i grew up .
if you come in you will see us : evening time , at table - set for ten but not always all seats filled - at the point when dinner is ready to be served .
since mom had eight kids , sometimes she said she could n't tell who was who and where they were .
before we could eat , she would ask , " are all the children in ? "
and if someone happened to be missing , we would have to , we say , " fix a plate " for that person , put it in the oven , then we could say grace , and we could eat .
also , while we were at the table , there was a ritual in our family : when something significant had happened for any one of us - whether mom had just been elected as the president of the pta , or whether dad had gotten an assignment at the college of our denomination , or whether someone had won the jabberwocky contest for talent - the ritual at the family was , once the announcement is made , we must take five , ten minutes to do what we call " make over " that person - that is , to make a fuss over the one who had been honored in some way .
for when one is honored , all are honored .
also , we had to make a report on our extended " visited " members , that is , extended members of the family , sick and elderly , shut in .
my task was , at least once a week , to visit mother lassiter who lived on east street , mother williamson who lived on bledsoe avenue , and mother lathers who lived on oberlin road .
why ? because they were old and infirm , and we needed to go by to see if they needed anything .
for mom said , " to be family , is to care and share and to look out for one another .
they are our family . "
and , of course , sometimes there was a bonus for going .
they would offer sweets or money .
mom says , " if they ask you what it costs to either go shopping for them , you must always say , ' nothing . ' and if they insist , say , ' whatever you mind to give me . " ' this was the nature of being at that table .
in fact , she indicated that if we would do that , not only would we have the joy of receiving the gratitude from the members of the extended family , but she said , " even god will smile , and when god smiles , there is peace , and justice , and joy . "
so , at the table at 915 , i learned something about compassion .
of course , it was a minister 's family , so we had to add god into it .
and so , i came to think that mama eternal , mama eternal , is always wondering : are all the children in ?
and if we had been faithful in caring and sharing , we had the sense that justice and peace would have a chance in the world .
now , it was not always wonderful at that table .
let me explain a point at which we did not rise to the occasion .
it was christmas , and at our family , oh , what a morning .
christmas morning , where we open up our gifts , where we have special prayers , and where we get to the old upright piano and we would sing carols . it was a very intimate moment .
in fact , you could come down to the tree to get your gifts and get ready to sing , and then get ready for breakfast without even taking a bath or getting dressed , except that daddy messed it up .
there was a member of his staff who did not have any place on that particular christmas to celebrate .
and daddy brought elder revels to the christmas family celebration .
we thought he must be out of his mind .
this is our time . this is intimate time .
this is when we can just be who we are , and now we have this stuffy brother with his shirt and tie on , while we are still in our pjs .
why would daddy bring elder revels ?
any other time , but not to the christmas celebration .
and mom overheard us and said , " well , you know what ? if you really understand the nature of this celebration , it is that this is a time where you extend the circle of love .
that 's what the celebration is all about .
it 's time to make space , to share the enjoyment of life in a beloved community . "
so , we sucked up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but growing up at 915 , compassion was not a word to be debated ; it was a sensibility to how we are together .
we are sisters and brothers united together .
and , like chief seattle said , " we did not spin the web of life .
we 're all strands in it .
and whatever we do to the web , we do to ourselves . "
now that 's compassion .
so , let me tell you , i kind of look at the world this way .
i see pictures , and something says , " now , that 's compassion . "
a harvested field of grain , with some grain in the corners , reminding me of the hebrew tradition that you may indeed harvest , but you must always leave some on the edges , just in case there 's someone who has not had the share necessary for good nurture .
talk about a picture of compassion .
i see - always , it stirs my heart - a picture of dr. martin luther king , jr .
walking arm in arm with andy young and rabbi heschel and maybe thich nhat hanh and some of the other saints assembled , walking across the bridge and going into selma .
just a photograph .
arm in arm for struggle .
suffering together in a common hope that we can be brothers and sisters without the accidents of our birth or our ethnicity robbing us of a sense of unity of being .
so , there 's another picture . here , this one . i really do like this picture .
when dr. martin luther king , jr. was assassinated , that day , everybody in my community was upset .
you heard about riots all across the land .
bobby kennedy was scheduled to bring an inner city message in indianapolis .
this is the picture . they said , " it 's going to be too volatile for you to go . "
he insisted , " i must go . "
so , sitting on a flatbed truck , the elders of the community are there , and bobby stands up and says to the people , " i have bad news for you .
some of you may not have heard that dr. king has been assassinated .
i know that you are angry , and i know that you would almost wish to have the opportunity to enter now into activities of revenge . but , " he said , " what i really want you to know is that i know how you feel .
because i had someone dear to me snatched away .
i know how you feel . "
and he said , " i hope that you will have the strength to do what i did .
i allowed my anger , my bitterness , my grief to simmer a while , and then i made up my mind that i was going to make a different world , and we can do that together . "
that 's a picture . compassion ? i think i see it .
i saw it when the dalai lama came to the riverside church while i was a pastor , and he invited representatives of faith traditions from all around the world .
he asked them to give a message , and they each read in their own language a central affirmation , and that was some version of the golden rule : " as you would that others would do unto you , do also unto them . "
twelve in their ecclesiastical or cultural or tribal attire affirming one message .
we are so connected that we must treat each other as if an action toward you is an action toward myself .
one more picture while i 'm stinking and thinking about the riverside church : 9/11 . last night at chagrin fall , a newspaperman and a television guy said , " that evening , when a service was held at the riverside church , we carried it on our station in this city .
it was , " he said , " one of the most powerful moments of life together .
we were all suffering .
but you invited representatives of all of the traditions to come , and you invited them .
' find out what it is in your tradition that tells us what to do when we have been humiliated , when we have been despised and rejected . ' and they all spoke out of their own traditions , a word about the healing power of solidarity , one with the other . "
i developed a sense of compassion sort of as second nature , but i became a preacher .
now , as a preacher , i got a job . i got to preach the stuff , but i got to do it too .
or , as father divine in harlem used to say to folks , " some people preach the gospel .
i have to tangibilitate the gospel . "
so , the real issue is : how do you tangibilitate compassion ?
how do you make it real ?
my faith has constantly lifted up the ideal , and challenged me when i fell beneath it .
in my tradition , there is a gift that we have made to other traditions - to everybody around the world who knows the story of the " good samaritan . "
many people think of it primarily in terms of charity , random acts of kindness .
but for those who really study that text a little more thoroughly , you will discover that a question has been raised that leads to this parable .
the question was : " what is the greatest commandment ? "
and , according to jesus , the word comes forth , " you must love yourself , you must love the lord your god with all your heart , mind and soul , and your neighbor as yourself . "
and then the person asked , " well , what do you mean , ' neighbor ? " ' and he answered it by telling the story of the man who fell among thieves , and how religious authorities went the other way , and how their supporters in the congregation went the other way ; but an unsuspecting , despised person came along , saw the man in need , provided oil and wine for his wounds , put him on his own transportation , and took him to the inn and asked the innkeeper , " take care of him . "
and he said , " here , this is the initial investment , but if needs continue , make sure that you provide them .
and whatever else is needed , i will provide it and pay for it when i return . "
this always seemed to me to be a deepening of the sense of what it means to be a good samaritan .
a good samaritan is not simply one whose heart is touched in an immediate act of care and charity , but one who provides a system of sustained care - i like that , ' a system of sustained care ' - in the inn , take care .
i think maybe it 's one time when the bible talks about a healthcare system and a commitment to do whatever is necessary - that all god 's children would have their needs cared for , so that we could answer when mommy eternal asks , " in regards to health , are all the children in ? " and we could say yes .
oh , what a joy it has been to be a person seeking to tangibilitate compassion .
i recall that my work as a pastor has always involved caring for their spiritual needs ; being concerned for housing , for healthcare , for the prisoners , for the infirm , for children - even the foster care children for whom no one can even keep a record where they started off , where they are going .
to be a pastor is to care for these individual needs .
but now , to be a good samaritan - and i always say , and to be a good american - for me , is not simply to congratulate myself for the individual acts of care .
compassion takes on a corporate dynamic .
i believe that whatever we did around that table at bloodworth street must be done around tables and rituals of faith until we become that family , that family together that understands the nature of our unity .
we are one people together .
so , let me explain to you what i mean when i think about compassion , and why i think it is so important that right at this point in history .
we would decide to establish this charter of compassion .
the reason it 's important is because this is a very special time in history .
it is the time that , biblically , we would speak of as the day , or the year , of god 's favor .
this is a season of grace .
unusual things are beginning to happen .
please pardon me , as a black man , for celebrating that the election of obama was an unusual sign of the fact that it is a year of favor .
and yet , there is so much more that needs to be done .
we need to bring health and food and education and respect for all god 's citizens , all god 's children , remembering mama eternal .
now , let me close my comments by telling you that whenever i feel something very deeply , it usually takes the form of verse .
and so i want to close with a little song .
i close with this song - it 's a children 's song - because we are all children at the table of mama eternal .
and if mama eternal has taught us correctly , this song will make sense , not only to those of us who are a part of this gathering , but to all who sign the charter for compassion .
and this is why we do it .
the song says , ♫ " i made heaven so happy today , ♫ ♫ receiving god 's love and giving it away ♫ ♫ when i looked up , heaven smiled at me ♫ ♫ now , i 'm so happy . ca n't you see ? ♫ ♫ i 'm happy . look at me . i 'm happy . ca n't you see ? ♫ ♫ sharing makes me happy , makes heaven happy too ♫ ♫ i 'm happy . look at me . i 'm happy . ca n't you see ? ♫ ♫ let me share my happy loving smile with you . ♫ that 's compassion . -lrb- applause -rrb- every year in the united states alone ,
2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and not to have sex with anyone else , ever .
he buys a ring , she buys a dress .
they go shopping for all sorts of things .
she takes him to arthur murray for ballroom dancing lessons .
and the big day comes .
and they 'll stand before god and family and some guy her dad once did business with , and they 'll vow that nothing , not abject poverty , not life-threatening illness , not complete and utter misery will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and mid-life crises and a cumulative 50-lb. weight gain , until that far-off day when one of them is finally able to rest in peace .
you know , because they ca n't hear the snoring anymore .
and then they 'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each others ' faces and do the " macarena , " and we 'll be there showering them with towels and toasters and drinking their free booze and throwing birdseed at them every single time - even though we know , statistically , half of them will be divorced within a decade .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- of course , the other half wo n't , right ?
they 'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll .
and some of them will even still be enjoying each others ' company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore .
and researchers want to know why .
i mean , look , it does n't take a double-blind , placebo-controlled study to figure out what makes a marriage not work .
disrespect , boredom , too much time on facebook , having sex with other people .
but you can have the exact opposite of all of those things - respect , excitement , a broken internet connection , mind-numbing monogamy - and the thing still can go to hell in a hand basket .
so what 's going on when it does n't ?
what do the folks who make it all the way to side-by-side burial plots have in common ?
what are they doing right ?
what can we learn from them ?
and if you 're still happily sleeping solo , why should you stop what you 're doing and make it your life 's work to find that one special person that you can annoy for the rest of your life ?
well researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out .
they stalk blissful couples and they study their every move and mannerism .
and they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends .
and it turns out , the success stories share a few similarities , actually , beyond they do n't have sex with other people .
for instance , in the happiest marriages , the wife is thinner and better looking than the husband .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- obvious , right .
it 's obvious that this leads to marital bliss because , women , we care a great deal about being thin and good looking , whereas men mostly care about sex ...
ideally with women who are thinner and better looking than they are .
the beauty of this research though is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy ; we just have to be thinner than our partners .
so instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising , we just need to wait for them to get fat , maybe bake a few pies .
this is good information to have , and it 's not that complicated .
research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives .
for example , the happy wife .
instead of pointing out her husband 's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run , she might say , " wow , honey , thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner . "
these are couples who can find good in any situation .
" yeah , it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire , but it 's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars , and it 's a good thing you 've got all that body fat to keep us warm . "
one of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do house work , the more attractive his wife will find him .
because we needed a study to tell us this .
but here 's what 's going on here .
the more attractive she finds him , the more sex they have ; the more sex they have , the nicer he is to her ; the nicer he is to her , the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed - and ultimately , they live happily ever after .
in other words , men , you might want to pick it up a notch in the domestic department .
here 's an interesting one .
one study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce .
this is an actual study , and let me clarify .
the researchers were not looking at documented self-reports of childhood happiness or even studying old journals .
the data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures .
now i do n't know how old all of you are , but when i was a kid , your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called film , and , by god , film was expensive .
they did n't take 300 shots of you in that rapid-fire digital video mode and then pick out the nicest , smileyest one for the christmas card .
oh no .
they dressed you up , they lined you up , and you smiled for the fucking camera like they told you to or you could kiss your birthday party goodbye .
but still , i have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and i 'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce .
so what else can you do do not win an oscar for best actress .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm serious .
bettie davis , joan crawford , hallie berry , hillary swank , sandra bullock , reese witherspoon , all of them single soon after taking home that statue .
they actually call it the oscar curse .
it is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided .
and it 's not just successfully starring in films that 's dangerous .
it turns out , merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- apparently , the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us , but it obviously has n't and it probably never will , makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison .
and theoretically , i suppose if we opt for a film where someone gets brutally murdered or dies in a fiery car crash , we are more likely to walk out of that theater feeling like we 've got it pretty good .
drinking alcohol , it seems , is bad for your marriage .
yeah .
i ca n't tell you anymore about that one because i stopped reading it at the headline .
but here 's a scary one : divorce is contagious .
that 's right - when you have a close couple friend split up , it increases your chances of getting a divorce by 75 percent .
now i have to say , i do n't get this one at all .
my husband and i have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and viagra and eharmony .
and i 'm thinking they 've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could .
so now you may be wondering , why does anyone get married ever ?
well the u.s. federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone 's spouse - a list that includes visitation rights in jail , but hopefully you 'll never need that one .
but beyond the profound federal perks , married people make more money .
we 're healthier , physically and emotionally .
we produce happier , more stable and more successful kids .
we have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends - believe it or not .
we even live longer , which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place .
now if you 're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return , i ca n't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness who prefers horror movies and does n't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce , but i can only encourage you to try , because the benefits , as i 've pointed out , are significant .
the bottom line is , whether you 're in it or you 're searching for it , i believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting .
so i hope you 'll use the information i 've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors .
for instance , in my marriage , i 'd say i 'm doing okay .
one the one hand , and incredibly handsome .
so i 'm obviously going to need fatten him up .
and like i said , we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up .
so we have to keep an eye on that .
and we do like a cocktail or two .
on the other hand , i have the fake happy picture thing .
and also , my husband does a lot around the house , and would happily never see another romantic comedy as long as he lives .
so i 've got all those things going for me .
but just in case , i plan to work extra hard to not win an oscar anytime soon .
and for the good of your relationships , i would encourage you to do the same .
i 'll see you at the bar .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is emiliano salinas and i 'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in the violent atmosphere this country is living in right now .
i was born in 1976 .
i grew up in a traditional mexican family .
as a child , i had a pretty normal life : i would go to school , play with my friends and cousins .
but then my father became president of mexico and my life changed .
what i 'm about to say , at least some of what i 'm about to say , will cause controversy .
firstly , because i 'm the one who 's going to say it .
and secondly , because what i 'm going to say is true , and it will make a lot of people nervous because it 's something we do n't want to hear .
but it 's imperative that we listen because it 's undeniable and definitive .
it will also make members of criminal organizations nervous for the same reasons .
i 'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in this phenomenon , and about four different response levels we citizens have against violence .
i know many will find it difficult to separate the fact that i 'm carlos salinas de gortari 's son from the fact that i 'm a citizen concerned about the country 's current situation .
do n't worry .
it 's not necessary for understanding the importance of what i 'm going to say .
i think we have a problem in mexico .
we have a big problem .
i think there 's consensus on this .
no one argues - we all agree there 's a problem .
what we do n't agree on is what the problem actually is .
is it the zetas ? the drug traffickers ? the government ?
corruption ? poverty ? or is it something else ?
i think none of these is the problem .
i do n't mean they do n't deserve attention .
but we wo n't be able to take care of any of those things if we do n't solve the real problem we have in mexico first .
the real problem we have is most of us mexicans , we believe we are victims of our circumstances .
we are a country of victims .
historically , we 've always acted as victims of something or somebody .
we were victims of the spaniards .
then we were victims of the french .
then we were victims of don porfirio .
then we were victims of the pri .
even of salinas .
and of el peje .
and now of the zetas and the traffickers and the criminals and the kidnappers ...
hold on ! wait a minute !
what if none of these things is the problem ?
the problem is not the things we feel victims of .
the problem is that we play the role of victims .
we need to open our eyes and see that we are not victims .
if only we stopped feeling like victims , if we stopped acting as victims , our country would change so much !
i 'm going to talk about how to go from a society that acts as a victim of circumstances to a responsible , involved society that takes the future of its country in its own hands .
i 'm going to talk about four different levels of civil response against violence , from weakest to strongest .
the first level , the weakest level of civil response against violence , is denial and apathy .
today , much of mexican society is in denial of the situation we 're going through .
we want to go on with our daily life even though we are not living under normal circumstances .
daily life in our country is , to say the least , under extraordinary , exceptional circumstances .
it 's like someone who has a serious illness and pretends it 's the flu and it will just go away .
we want to pretend that mexico has the flu .
but it does n't .
mexico has cancer .
and if we do n't do something about it , the cancer will end up killing it .
we need to move mexican society from denial and apathy to the next level of citizen response , which is , effectively , recognition .
and that recognition will sow fear - recognizing the seriousness of the situation .
but , fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something .
many people in mexico are afraid today .
we 're very afraid .
and we 're acting out of that fear .
and let me tell you what the problem is with acting out of fear - and this is the second level of civil response : fear .
let 's think about mexican streets : they 're unsafe because of violence , so people stay at home .
does that make streets more or less safe ?
less safe !
so streets become more desolate and unsafe , so we stay home more - which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe , and we stay home even more .
this vicious circle ends up with the whole population stuck inside their houses , scared to death - even more afraid than when we were out on the streets .
we need to confront this fear .
we need to move mexican society , the members of society who are at this level , to the next level , which is action .
we need to face our fears and take back our streets , our cities , our neighborhoods .
for many people , acting involves courage .
we go from fear to courage .
they say , " i ca n't take it anymore .
let 's do something about it . "
recently - this is a sensitive figure - 35 public lynchings have been recorded so far in 2010 in mexico .
usually it 's one or two a year .
now we 're experiencing one every week .
this shows that society is desperate and it 's taking the law into its own hands .
unfortunately , violent action - though action is better than no action - but taking part in it only disguises violence .
if i 'm violent with you and you respond with violence , you become part of the violence and you just disguise my violence .
so civil action is vital , but it 's also vital to take people who are at the level of courage and violent action to the next level , which is non-violent action .
it 's pacific , coordinated civil action , which does n't mean passive action .
it means it 's determined and effective , but not violent .
there are examples of this kind of action in mexico .
two years ago , in galena city , chihuahua , a member of the community was kidnapped , eric le barón .
his brothers , benjamín and julián , got together with the rest of the community to think of the best course of action : to pay the ransom , to take up arms and go after the kidnappers or to ask the government for help .
in the end , benjamín and julián decided the best thing they could do was to organize the community and act together .
so what did they do ?
they mobilized the whole community of le barón to go to chihuahua , where they organized a sit-in in the central park of the city .
they sent a message to the kidnappers : " if you want your ransom come and get it .
we 'll be waiting for you right here . "
they stayed there .
seven days later , eric was set free and was able to return home .
this is an example of what an organized society can do , a society that acts .
of course , criminals can respond .
and in this case , they did .
on july 7th , 2009 , benjamín le barón was murdered .
but julián le barón keeps working and he has been mobilizing communities in chihuahua for over a year .
and for over a year he has known that a price has been put on his head .
but he keeps fighting .
he keeps organizing .
he keeps mobilizing .
these heroic acts are present all over the country .
with a thousand juliáns working together , mexico would be a very different country .
and they 're out there !
they just have to raise their hands .
i was born in mexico , i grew up in mexico and along the way , i learned to love mexico .
i think anyone who has stepped foot on this land - not to mention all mexican people - will agree that it 's not difficult to love mexico .
i 've traveled a lot and nowhere else have i found the passion mexicans have .
that devotion we feel for the national football team .
that devotion we show in helping victims of disasters , such as the earthquake in 1985 or this year 's floods .
the passion with which we 've been singing the national anthem since we were kids .
when we thought masiosare was the strange enemy , and we sang , with a childlike heart , " a soldier in each son . "
i think the biggest insult , the worst way you can offend a mexican is to insult their mother .
a mother is the most sacred thing in life .
mexico is our mother and today she cries out for her children .
we are going through the darkest moment in our recent history .
our mother , mexico , is being violated before our very eyes .
what are we going to do ?
masiosare , the strange enemy , is here .
where is the soldier in each son ?
mahatma gandhi , one of the greatest civil fighters of all time , said , " be the change you wish to see in the world . "
today in mexico we 're asking for gandhis .
we need gandhis .
we need men and women who love mexico and who are willing to take action .
this is a call for every true mexican to join this initiative .
this is a call so that every single thing we love about mexico - the festivals , the markets , the restaurants , the cantinas , the tequila , the mariachis , the serenades , the posadas , el grito , the day of the dead , san miguel , the joy , the passion for life , the fight and everything it means to be mexican - does n't disappear from this world .
we 're facing a very powerful opponent .
but we are many more .
they can take a man 's life .
anyone can kill me , or you , or you .
but no one can kill the spirit of true mexicans .
the battle is won , but we still have to fight it .
2000 years ago , the roman poet juvenal said something that today echoes in the heart of every true mexican .
he said , " count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor , and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries .
now i work in the solar technology industry .
and my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ...
... paying attention to crowd-sourcing .
it 's just a quick video of what we do .
huh . hang on a moment .
it might take a moment to load .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 'll just - we can just skip - i 'll just skip through the video instead ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- this is not ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- solar technology is ...
oh , that 's all my time ?
okay . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm not quite sure whether i really want to see a snare drum at nine o 'clock or so in the morning .
but anyway , it 's just great to see such a full theater , and really i must thank herbie hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation . -lrb- applause -rrb- one of the interesting things , of course , is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology , and of course what he said about listening to our young people .
of course , my job is all about listening , and my aim , really , is to teach the world to listen .
that 's my only real aim in life .
and it sounds quite simple , but actually it 's quite a big , big job .
because you know , when you look at a piece of music - for example , if i just open my little motorbike bag - we have here , hopefully , a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page .
and , you know , we open it up and i read the music .
so technically , i can actually read this .
i will follow the instructions , the tempo markings , the dynamics .
i will do exactly as i 'm told .
and so therefore , because time is short , if i just play you literally the first maybe two lines or so . it 's very straightforward .
there 's nothing too difficult about the piece .
but here i 'm being told that the piece of music is very quick .
i 'm being told where to play on the drum .
i 'm being told which part of the stick to use .
and i 'm being told the dynamic .
and i 'm also being told that the drum is without snares .
snares on , snares off .
so therefore , if i translate this piece of music , we have this idea . -lrb- music -rrb- and so on . my career would probably last about five years .
however , what i have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music .
everything that there is n't time to learn from a teacher , or to talk about , even , from a teacher .
but it 's the things that you notice when you 're not actually with your instrument that in fact become so interesting , and that you want to explore through this tiny , tiny surface of a drum .
so there , we experience the translation . now we 'll experience the interpretation . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now my career may last a little longer !
but in a way , you know , it 's the same if i look at you and i see a nice bright young lady with a pink top on .
i see that you 're clutching a teddy bear , etc . , etc .
so i get a basic idea as to what you might be about , what you might like , what you might do as a profession , etc . , etc .
however , that 's just , you know , the initial idea i may have that we all get when we actually look , and we try to interpret , but actually it 's so unbelievably shallow .
in the same way , i look at the music ; i get a basic idea ; i wonder what technically might be hard , or , you know , what i want to do .
just the basic feeling .
however , that is simply not enough .
and i think what herbie said - please listen , listen .
we have to listen to ourselves , first of all .
if i play , for example , holding the stick - where literally i do not let go of the stick - you 'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm .
and you feel really quite - believe it or not - detached from the instrument and from the stick , even though i 'm actually holding the stick quite tightly .
by holding it tightly , i feel strangely more detached .
if i just simply let go and allow my hand , my arm , to be more of a support system , suddenly i have more dynamic with less effort . much more .
and i just feel , at last , one with the stick and one with the drum .
and i 'm doing far , far less .
so in the same way that i need time with this instrument , i need time with people in order to interpret them .
not just translate them , but interpret them .
if , for example , i play just a few bars of a piece of music for which i think of myself as a technician - that is , someone who is basically a percussion player ... -lrb- music -rrb- and so on . if i think of myself as a musician ... -lrb- music -rrb- and so on . there is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thinking about .
and i remember when i was 12 years old , and i started playing tympani and percussion , and my teacher said , " well , how are we going to do this ? you know , music is about listening . "
and i said , " yes , i agree with that . so what 's the problem ? "
and he said , " well , how are you going to hear this ? how are you going to hear that ? "
and i said , " well , how do you hear it ? "
he said , " well , i think i hear it through here . "
and i said , " well , i think i do too - but i also hear it through my hands , through my arms , cheekbones , my scalp , my tummy , my chest , my legs and so on . "
and so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums - in particular , the kettle drums , or tympani - to such a narrow pitch interval , so something like ...
that of a difference . then gradually ... and gradually ...
and it 's amazing that when you do open your body up , and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through , that in fact the tiny , tiny difference ...
can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger , there .
and so what we would do is that i would put my hands on the wall of the music room , and together we would " listen " to the sounds of the instruments , and really try to connect with those sounds far , far more broadly than simply depending on the ear .
because of course , the ear is , i mean , subject to all sorts of things .
the room we happen to be in , the amplification , the quality of the instrument , the type of sticks ... etc . , etc .
they 're all different .
same amount of weight , but different sound colors .
and that 's basically what we are . we 're just human beings , but we all have our own little sound colors , as it were , that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things .
and as i grew older , i then auditioned for the royal academy of music in london , and they said , " well , no , we wo n't accept you , because we have n't a clue , you know , of the future of a so-called ' deaf ' musician . "
and i just could n't quite accept that .
and so therefore , i said to them , " well , look , if you refuse - if you refuse me through those reasons , as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound - then we have to think very , very hard about the people you do actually accept . "
and as a result - once we got over a little hurdle , and having to audition twice - they accepted me . and not only that - what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the united kingdom .
under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms , no legs - they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand .
no circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry .
and every single entry had to be listened to , experienced and then based on the musical ability - then that person could either enter or not .
so therefore , this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions .
and i have to say , many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world .
the interesting thing about this as well , though - -lrb- applause -rrb- - is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound - which is basically all of us , and we well know that music really is our daily medicine .
i say " music , " but actually i mean " sound . "
because you know , some of the extraordinary things i 've experienced as a musician , when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges , who may not be able to control his movements , who may be deaf , who may be blind , etc . , etc . - suddenly , if that young lad sits close to this instrument , and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba , and you play something that 's so incredibly organ-like , almost - i do n't really have the right sticks , perhaps - but something like this . let me change . -lrb- music -rrb- something that 's so unbelievably simple - but he would be experiencing something that i would n't be ,
because i 'm on top of the sound .
i have the sound coming this way .
he would have the sound coming through the resonators .
if there were no resonators on here , we would have ... -lrb- music -rrb- so he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows would n't experience , those of you in the back few rows would n't experience either .
every single one of us , depending on where we 're sitting , will experience this sound quite , quite differently .
and of course , being the participator of the sound , and that is starting from the idea of what type of sound i want to produce - for example , this sound .
can you hear anything ?
exactly . because i 'm not even touching it .
but yet , we get the sensation of something happening .
in the same way that when i see tree moves , then i imagine that tree making a rustling sound .
do you see what i mean ?
whatever the eye sees , then there 's always sound happening .
so there 's always , always that huge - i mean , just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from .
so all of my performances are based on entirely what i experience , and not by learning a piece of music , putting on someone else 's interpretation of it , buying all the cds possible of that particular piece of music , and so on and so forth .
because that is n't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic , and something that i can fully experience the journey of .
so it may be that , in certain halls , this dynamic may well work . -lrb- music -rrb- it may be that in other halls , they 're simply not going to experience that at all and so therefore , my level of soft , gentle playing may have to be ... -lrb- music -rrb- do you see what i mean ? so , because of this explosion in access to sound , especially through the deaf community , this has not only affected how music institutions , how schools for the deaf treat sound - and not just as a means of therapy - although of course , being a participator of music , that definitely is the case as well .
but it 's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together . there are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics , dare i say . but by that i mean where you can absolutely do anything you imagine .
the tiniest , softest , softest sound to something that is so broad , so huge , so incredible ! there 's always something - it may sound good up there , may not be so good there .
may be great there , but terrible up there .
maybe terrible over there , but not too bad there , etc . , etc .
so to find an actual hall is incredible - for which you can play exactly what you imagine , without it being cosmetically enhanced .
and so therefore , acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired , and who are participators of sound .
and this is quite interesting .
i can not , you know , give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls , but it 's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years we 've been saying , " well , how on earth can they experience music ? you know , they 're deaf . "
we just - we go like that , and we imagine that that 's what deafness is about .
or we go like that , and we imagine that 's what blindness is about .
if we see someone in a wheelchair , we assume they can not walk .
it may be that they can walk three , four , five steps . that , to them , means they can walk .
in a year 's time , it could be two extra steps .
in another year 's time , three extra steps .
those are hugely important aspects to think about .
so when we do listen to each other , it 's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills , to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber , to stop the judgment .
for me , as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music , it 's very easy for me to say , " oh yes , i like that piece .
oh no , i do n't like that piece . " and so on .
and you know , i just find that i have to give those pieces of music real time .
it may be that the chemistry is n't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music , but that does n't mean i have the right to say it 's a bad piece of music .
and you know , it 's just one of the great things about being a musician , is that it is so unbelievably fluid .
so there are no rules , no right , no wrong , this way , that way .
if i asked you to clap - maybe i can do this .
if i can just say , " please clap and create the sound of thunder . "
i 'm assuming we 've all experienced thunder .
now , i do n't mean just the sound ; i mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves .
and please try to create that through your clapping . try . just - please try .
-lrb- applause -rrb- very good ! snow . snow . have you ever heard snow ?
audience : no .
evelyn glennie : well then , stop clapping . -lrb- laughter -rrb- try again .
try again . snow .
see , you 're awake .
rain . not bad . not bad .
you know , the interesting thing here , though , is that i asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question .
now - great imagination , thank you very much .
however , not one of you got out of your seats to think , " right ! how can i clap ? ok , maybe ... -lrb- claps -rrb- maybe i can use my jewelry to create extra sounds .
maybe i can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds . "
not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands .
in the same way that when we listen to music , we assume that it 's all being fed through here .
this is how we experience music . of course it 's not .
we experience thunder - thunder , thunder . think , think , think .
listen , listen , listen . now - what can we do with thunder ?
i remember my teacher . when i first started , my very first lesson , i was all prepared with sticks , ready to go .
and instead of him saying , " ok , evelyn , please , feet slightly apart , arms at a more-or-less 90 degree angle , sticks in a more-or-less v shape , keep this amount of space here , etc .
please keep your back straight , etc . , etc . , etc . " - where i was probably just going to end up absolutely rigid , frozen , and i would not be able to strike the drum , because i was thinking of so many other things - he said , " evelyn , take this drum away for seven days , and i 'll see you next week . "
so , heavens ! what was i to do ? i no longer required the sticks ; i was n't allowed to have these sticks .
i had to basically look at this particular drum , see how it was made , what these little lugs did , what the snares did .
turned it upside down , experimented with the shell , experimented with the head .
experimented with my body , experimented with jewelry , experimented with all sorts of things .
and of course , i returned with all sorts of bruises and things like that - but nevertheless , it was such an unbelievable experience , because then , where on earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music ?
where on earth are you going to experience that in a study book ?
so we never , ever dealt with actual study books .
so for example , one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player , as opposed to a musician , is basically straightforward single stroke rolls .
like that . and then we get a little faster and a little faster and a little faster .
and so on and so forth . what does this piece require ?
single stroke rolls . so why ca n't i then do that whilst learning a piece of music ?
and that 's exactly what he did .
and interestingly , the older i became , and when i became a full-time student at a so called " music institution , " all of that went out of the window .
we had to study from study books .
and constantly , the question , " well , why ? why ? what is this relating to ?
i need to play a piece of music . " " oh , well , this will help your control ! "
" well , how ? why do i need to learn that ? i need to relate it to a piece of music .
you know . i need to say something .
" why am i practicing paradiddles ?
is it just literally for control , for hand-stick control ? why am i doing that ?
i need to have the reason , and the reason has to be by saying something through the music . "
and by saying something through music , which basically is sound , we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people .
but i do n't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage .
that 's up to you , when you walk through a hall .
because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things .
i may feel sorrowful , or happy , or exhilarated , or angry when i play certain pieces of music , but i 'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing .
so please , the next time you go to a concert , just allow your body to open up , allow your body to be this resonating chamber .
be aware that you 're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is .
the performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound , because they 're hearing the contact of the stick on the drum , or the mallet on the bit of wood , or the bow on the string , etc . , or the breath that 's creating the sound from wind and brass .
they 're experiencing that rawness there .
but yet they 're experiencing something so unbelievably pure , which is before the sound is actually happening .
please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike , or breath , is being pulled . just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that i wished i 'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference , rather than just arriving last night .
but i hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses .
but thank you very much for having me !
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi there .
i 'm going to be talking a little bit about music , machines and life .
or , more specifically , what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video .
some of you may recognize this image .
this is the opening frame of the video that we created .
we 'll be showing the video at the end , but before we do , i want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted .
now , when we first started talking to ok go - the name of the song is " this too shall pass " - we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with .
and we were very excited about this because , of course , they have a history of dancing with machines .
they 're responsible for this video , " here it goes again . "
50-million-plus views on youtube .
four guys dancing on treadmills , no cuts , just a static camera .
a fantastically viral and wonderful video .
so we were really excited about working with them .
and we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted .
and they explained that they wanted kind of a rube goldberg machine .
now , for those of you who do n't know , a rube goldberg machine is a complicated contraption , an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task .
so we were excited by this idea , and we started talking about exactly what it would look like .
and we came up with some parameters , because , you know , building a rube goldberg machine has limitations , but it also is pretty wide open .
and we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video .
so we came up with a list of requirements , the " 10 commandments , " and they were , in order of ascending difficulty : the first is " no magic . "
everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer .
the rule of thumb was that , if my mother could n't understand it , then we could n't use it in the video .
they wanted band integration , that is , the machine acting upon the band members , specifically not the other way around .
they wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling .
so as the song picks up emotion , so should the machine get grander in its process .
they wanted us to make use of the space .
so we have this 10,000-square-foot warehouse we were using , divided between two floors .
it included an exterior loading dock .
we used all of that , including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through .
they wanted it messy , and we were happy to oblige .
the machine itself would start the music .
so the machine would get started , it would travel some distance , reacting along the way , hit play on an ipod or a tape deck or something that would start playback .
and the machine would maintain synchronization throughout .
and speaking of synchronization , they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way .
okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they wanted it to end precisely on time .
okay , so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect .
and they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song .
and as if that was n't enough , all of these incredibly complicating things , right , they wanted it in one shot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- okay .
so , just some statistics about what we went through in the process .
the machine itself has 89 distinct interactions .
it took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction .
of those 85 takes , only three actually successfully completed their run .
we destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process .
we went to home depot well over a hundred times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers , heather knight , left her high-heeled shoe - after a nice dinner , and returned back to the build - and left it in a pile of stuff .
and another engineer thought , " well , that would be a really good thing to use " and ended up using it as a really nice trigger .
and it 's actually in the machine .
so what did we learn from all of this ?
well , having completed this , we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things .
and we learned that small stuff stinks .
little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust , and they fall out of the tracks , the exact angles makes it hard to get right .
and yet , a bowling ball will always follow the same path .
it does n't matter what temperature it is , does n't matter what 's in its way ; it will pretty much get where it needs to go .
but as much as the small stuff stinks , we needed somewhere to start , so that we would have somewhere to go .
and so you have to start with it . you have to focus on it .
small stuff stinks , but , of course , it 's essential , right ?
what else ? planning is incredibly important .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things .
it 's been said that , " no battle plan survives contact with the enemy . "
i think our enemy was physics - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and she 's a cruel mistress .
often , we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever .
and so while planning is important , so is flexibility .
these are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine .
so also , put reliable stuff last , the stuff that 's going to run every time .
again , small to large is relevant here .
the little lego car in the beginning of the video references the big , real car near the end of the video .
the big , real car works every time ; there 's no problem about it .
the little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that 's a problem .
but you do n't want to have to reset the whole machine because the lego car at the end does n't work , right .
so you put that up front so that , if it fails , at least you know you do n't have to reset the whole thing .
life can be messy .
there were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing .
months were spent in this tiny , cold warehouse .
and the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it .
so it 's important to remember that whether it 's good or it 's bad , " this too shall pass . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and now to introduce their music video , we have ok go .
ok go : an introduction . hello tedxusc .
we are ok go .
what are we doing ? oh , just hanging out with our grammy . what what !
it think we can do better than this . hello tedxusc .
we are ok go . have you read the " natural curiosity cabinet ? "
i mean , " curiosity " - excuse me .
let me start again .
we need some more ridiculous things besides " the cabinet of natural curiosities . "
tim 's sundial hat .
have you seen the new work they 've done to the waltz towers ?
sorry , start again .
-lrb- barking -rrb- dogs .
hello , tedxusc . we are ok go , and this our new video , " this too shall pass . "
-lsb- unclear -rsb- kay , we can still do one better i think , yeah .
that one 's pretty good . it 's getting better .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ you know you ca n't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ and you ca n't keep dragging that dead weight around ♫ ♫ if there ai n't all that much to lug around ♫ ♫ better run like hell when you hit the ground ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ you ca n't stop these kids from dancing ♫ ♫ why would you want to ? ♫ ♫ especially when you 're already getting yours ♫ ♫ cuz if your mind do n't move and your knees do n't bend ♫ ♫ well do n't go blaming the kids again ♫
♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ let it go ♫ ♫ this too shall pass ♫ ♫ let it go ♫ ♫ this too shall pass ♫ ♫ you know you ca n't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ no , you ca n't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ let it go ♫ ♫ this too shall pass ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫
♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ -lrb- cheering -rrb- what do i know that would cause me , a reticent , midwestern scientist , to get myself arrested in front of the white house protesting ?
and what would you do if you knew what i know ?
let 's start with how i got to this point .
i was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university .
and i was really lucky to go to the university of iowa where i could study under professor james van allen who built instruments for the first u.s. satellites .
professor van allen told me about observations of venus , that there was intense microwave radiation .
did it mean that venus had an ionosphere ?
or was venus extremely hot ?
the right answer , confirmed by the soviet venera spacecraft , was that venus was very hot - 900 degrees fahrenheit .
and it was kept hot by a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere .
i was fortunate to join nasa and successfully propose an experiment to fly to venus .
our instrument took this image of the veil of venus , which turned out to be a smog of sulfuric acid .
but while our instrument was being built , i became involved in calculations of the greenhouse effect here on earth , because we realized that our atmospheric composition was changing .
eventually , i resigned as principal investigator on our venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important .
its changes will affect all of humanity .
the greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century .
british physicist john tyndall , in the 1850 's , made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation , which is heat .
and he showed that gasses such as co2 absorb heat , thus acting like a blanket warming earth 's surface .
i worked with other scientists to analyze earth climate observations .
in 1981 , we published an article in science magazine concluding that observed warming of 0.4 degrees celsius in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing co2 .
that earth would likely warm in the 1980 's , and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century .
we also said that the 21st century would see shifting climate zones , creation of drought-prone regions in north america and asia , erosion of ice sheets , rising sea levels and opening of the fabled northwest passage .
all of these impacts have since either happened or are now well under way .
that paper was reported on the front page of the new york times and led to me testifying to congress in the 1980 's , testimony in which i emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the earth 's water cycle .
heatwaves and droughts on one hand , directly from the warming , but also , because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy , rainfall will become in more extreme events .
there will be stronger storms and greater flooding .
global warming hoopla became time-consuming and distracted me from doing science - partly because i had complained that the white house altered my testimony .
so i decided to go back to strictly doing science and leave the communication to others .
by 15 years later , evidence of global warming was much stronger .
most of the things mentioned in our 1981 paper were facts .
i had the privilege to speak twice to the president 's climate task force .
but energy policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels .
by then we had two grandchildren , sophie and connor .
i decided that i did not want them in the future to say , " opa understood what was happening , but he did n't make it clear . "
so i decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy .
i gave the talk at the university of iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the american geophysical union .
this led to calls from the white house to nasa headquarters and i was told that i could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by nasa headquarters .
after i informed the new york times about these restrictions , nasa was forced to end the censorship .
but there were consequences .
i had been using the first line of the nasa mission statement , " to understand and protect the home planet , " to justify my talks .
soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted , never to appear again .
over the next few years i was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies , while still researching the physics of climate change .
let me describe the most important conclusion from the physics - first , from earth 's energy balance and , second , from earth 's climate history .
adding co2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed .
it reduces earth 's heat radiation to space , so there 's a temporary energy imbalance .
more energy is coming in than going out , until earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the sun .
so the key quantity is earth 's energy imbalance .
is there more energy coming in than going out ?
if so , more warming is in the pipeline .
it will occur without adding any more greenhouse gasses .
now finally , we can measure earth 's energy imbalance precisely by measuring the heat content in earth 's heat reservoirs .
the biggest reservoir , the ocean , was the least well measured , until more than 3,000 argo floats were distributed around the world 's ocean .
these floats reveal that the upper half of the ocean is gaining heat at a substantial rate .
the deep ocean is also gaining heat at a smaller rate , and energy is going into the net melting of ice all around the planet .
and the land , to depths of tens of meters , is also warming .
the total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter .
that may not sound like much , but when added up over the whole world , it 's enormous .
it 's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity .
it 's equivalent to exploding 400,000 hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year .
that 's how much extra energy earth is gaining each day .
this imbalance , if we want to stabilize climate , means that we must reduce co2 from 391 ppm , parts per million , back to 350 ppm .
that is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming .
climate change deniers argue that the sun is the main cause of climate change .
but the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record , when the sun 's energy reaching earth was least .
yet , there was more energy coming in than going out .
this shows that the effect of the sun 's variations on climate is overwhelmed by the increasing greenhouse gasses , mainly from burning fossil fuels .
now consider earth 's climate history .
these curves for global temperature , atmospheric co2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and antarctic ice cores , from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two-mile thick ice sheet .
as you see , there 's a high correlation between temperature , co2 and sea level .
careful examination shows that the temperature changes slightly lead the co2 changes by a few centuries .
climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying , " look , the temperature causes co2 to change , not vice versa . "
but that lag is exactly what is expected .
small changes in earth 's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on earth .
when there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer , ice sheets melt .
shrinking ice sheets make the planet darker , so it absorbs more sunlight and becomes warmer .
a warmer ocean releases co2 , just as a warm coca-cola does .
and more co2 causes more warming .
so co2 , methane , and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge , even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing .
the important point is that these same amplifying feedbacks will occur today .
the physics does not change .
as earth warms , now because of extra co2 we put in the atmosphere , ice will melt , and co2 and methane will be released by warming ocean and melting permafrost .
while we ca n't say exactly how fast these amplifying feedbacks will occur , it is certain they will occur , unless we stop the warming .
there is evidence that feedbacks are already beginning .
precise measurements by grace , the gravity satellite , reveal that both greenland and antarctica are now losing mass , several hundred cubic kilometers per year .
and the rate has accelerated since the measurements began nine years ago .
methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost .
what sea level rise can we look forward to ?
the last time co2 was 390 ppm , today 's value , sea level was higher by at least 15 meters , 50 feet .
where you are sitting now would be under water .
most estimates are that , this century , we will get at least one meter .
i think it will be more if we keep burning fossil fuels , perhaps even five meters , which is 18 feet , this century or shortly thereafter .
the important point is that we will have started a process that is out of humanity 's control .
ice sheets would continue to disintegrate for centuries .
there would be no stable shoreline .
the economic consequences are almost unthinkable .
hundreds of new orleans-like devastations around the world .
what may be more reprehensible , if climate denial continues , is extermination of species .
the monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the intergovernmental panel on climate change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use .
global warming is already affecting people .
the texas , oklahoma , mexico heatwave and drought last year , moscow the year before and europe in 2003 , were all exceptional events , more than three standard deviations outside the norm .
fifty years ago , such anomalies covered only two- to three-tenths of one percent of the land area .
in recent years , because of global warming , they now cover about 10 percent - an increase by a factor of 25 to 50 .
so we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe texas and moscow heatwaves were not natural ; they were caused by global warming .
an important impact , if global warming continues , will be on the breadbasket of our nation and the world , the midwest and great plains , which are expected to become prone to extreme droughts , worse than the dust bowl , within just a few decades , if we let global warming continue .
how did i get dragged deeper and deeper into an attempt to communicate , giving talks in 10 countries , getting arrested , burning up the vacation time that i had accumulated over 30 years ?
more grandchildren helped me along .
jake is a super-positive , enthusiastic boy .
here at age two and a half years , he thinks he can protect his two and a half-day-old little sister .
it would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control .
now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple , honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis , with the government not keeping one dime .
most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they 'd pay in increased prices .
this fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations , creating millions of jobs .
it is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future .
several top economists are coauthors on this proposition .
jim dipeso of republicans for environmental protection describes it thusly : " transparent . market-based .
does not enlarge government .
leaves energy decisions to individual choices .
sounds like a conservative climate plan . "
but instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society , our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide , thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel - mountaintop removal , longwall mining , fracking , tar sands , tar shale , deep ocean arctic drilling .
this path , if continued , guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations .
a large fraction of species will be committed to extinction .
and increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world , causing massive famines and economic decline .
imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with earth .
that is the equivalent of what we face now .
yet , we dither , taking no action to divert the asteroid , even though the longer we wait , the more difficult and expensive it becomes .
if we had started in 2005 , it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century .
if we start next year , it is six percent per year .
if we wait 10 years , it is 15 percent per year - extremely difficult and expensive , perhaps impossible .
but we are n't even starting .
so now you know what i know that is moving me to sound this alarm .
clearly , i have n't gotten this message across .
the science is clear .
i need your help to communicate the gravity and the urgency of this situation and its solutions more effectively .
we owe it to our children and grandchildren .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century , specifically to june 24 , 1833 .
the british association for the advancement of science is holding its third meeting at the university of cambridge .
it 's the first night of the meeting , and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever .
an elderly , white-haired man stands up .
the members of the association are shocked to realize that it 's the poet samuel taylor coleridge , who had n't even left his house in years until that day .
they 're even more shocked by what he says .
" you must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers . "
coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs .
they were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the british association .
the crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly .
a young cambridge scholar named william whewell stood up and quieted the audience .
he politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist .
" if ' philosophers ' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term , " he said , " then , by analogy with ' artist , ' we may form ' scientist . " ' this was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public , only 179 years ago .
i first found out about this confrontation when i was in graduate school , and it kind of blew me away .
i mean , how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833 ?
what were scientists called before ?
what had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment ?
prior to this meeting , those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs .
think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils , like charles darwin , for example , or , the hired help of a nobleman , like joseph priestley , who was the literary companion to the marquis of lansdowne when he discovered oxygen .
after this , they were scientists , professionals with a particular scientific method , goals , societies and funding .
much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at cambridge university in 1812 : charles babbage , john herschel , richard jones and william whewell .
these were brilliant , driven men who accomplished amazing things .
charles babbage , i think known to most tedsters , invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer .
john herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere , and , in his spare time , co-invented photography .
i 'm sure we could all be that productive without facebook or twitter to take up our time .
richard jones became an important economist who later influenced karl marx .
and whewell not only coined the term scientist , as well as the words anode , cathode and ion , but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides .
in the cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813 , the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts .
they talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution .
they felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century .
it was time for a new revolution , which they pledged to bring about , and what 's so amazing about these guys is , not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams , but they actually carried them out , even beyond their wildest dreams .
and i 'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made .
about 200 years before , francis bacon and then , later , isaac newton , had proposed an inductive scientific method .
now that 's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws , which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise .
however , in 1809 , david ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different , deductive method .
the problem was that an influential group at oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics , this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too .
the members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed .
they wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers , university students and members of the public .
reading one of herschel 's books was such a watershed moment for charles darwin that he would later say , " scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me .
it made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge . "
it also shaped darwin 's scientific method , as well as that used by his peers .
-lsb- science for the public good -rsb- previously , it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen , or for one 's own personal gain .
for example , ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports .
harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains .
the philosophical breakfast club changed that , working together .
whewell 's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps that freely provided the harbormasters ' knowledge to all ship captains .
herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of south africa , and , as he complained to whewell , he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble .
the four men really helped each other in every way .
they also relentlessly lobbied the british government for the money to build babbage 's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society .
in the days before pocket calculators , the numbers that most professionals needed - bankers , insurance agents , ship captains , engineers - were to be found in lookup books like this , filled with tables of figures .
these tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as - and this is amazing - computers , but these calculations were really difficult .
i mean , this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year .
each month required 1,365 calculations , so these tables were filled with mistakes .
babbage 's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables .
two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the science museum of london using his own plans .
this is the one now at the computer history museum in california , and it calculates accurately . it actually works .
later , babbage 's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense .
it had a separate memory and central processor .
it was capable of iteration , conditional branching and parallel processing , and it was programmable using punched cards , an idea babbage took from jacquard 's loom .
tragically , babbage 's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public .
-lsb- new scientific institutions -rsb- founded in bacon 's time , the royal society of london was the foremost scientific society in england and even in the rest of the world .
by the 19th century , it had become a kind of gentleman 's club populated mainly by antiquarians , literary men and the nobility .
the members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies , including the british association .
these new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results .
they reinstated the tradition of the q & a after scientific papers were read , which had been discontinued by the royal society as being ungentlemanly .
and for the first time , they gave women a foot in the door of science .
members were encouraged to bring their wives , daughters and sisters to the meetings of the british association , and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one , they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well .
the british association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members .
-lsb- external funding for science -rsb- up to the 19th century , natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies .
occasionally , there were prizes , such as that given to john harrison in the 18th century , for solving the so-called longitude problem , but prizes were only given after the fact , when they were given at all .
on the advice of the philosophical breakfast club , the british association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy , the tides , fossil fish , shipbuilding , and many other areas .
these grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research , but they also encouraged thinking outside the box , rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question .
eventually , the royal society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit , and this has become - fortunately it 's become - a major part of the scientific landscape today .
so the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist .
that 's the heroic part of their story .
there 's a flip side as well .
they did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution .
they would have been deeply dismayed by today 's disjunction between science and the rest of culture .
it 's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of american adults have even a very basic level of science literacy , and this was tested by asking simple questions like , " did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the earth at the same time ? "
and " what proportion of the earth is covered in water ? "
once scientists became members of a professional group , they were slowly walled off from the rest of us .
this is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends .
charles darwin said , " i sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work . "
in fact , " origin of species " was written for a general and popular audience , and was widely read when it first appeared .
darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten , that science is not only for scientists .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- zach kaplan : keith and i lead a research team .
we investigate materials and technologies that have unexpected properties . over the last three years , we found over 200 of these things , and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for ted .
of these six , the first one that we 're going to talk about is in the black envelope you 're holding .
it comes from a company in japan called geltech . now go ahead and open it up .
keith schacht : now be sure and take the two pieces apart .
what 's unexpected about this is that it 's soft , but it 's also a strong magnet .
zach and i have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this .
we spent a long time thinking about why this is , and it 's just recently that we realized : it 's when we see something unexpected , it changes our understanding of the way things work .
as you 're seeing this gel magnet for the first time , if you assume that all magnets had to be hard , then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could work .
zk : now , it 's important to understand what the unexpected properties are .
but to really think about the implications of what this makes possible , we found that it helps to think about how it could be applied in the world .
so , a first idea is to use it on cabinet doors .
if you line the sides of the cabinets using the gel material - if a cabinet slams shut it would n't make a loud noise , and in addition the magnets would draw the cabinets closed .
imagine taking the same material , but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker .
you know , this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door , in your closet , and you could literally stick your shoes up instead of using a shelf .
for me , i really love this idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you come to my apartment and see my closet , i 'm sure you 'd figure out why : it 's a mess .
ks : seeing the unexpected properties and then seeing a couple of applications - it helps you see why this is significant , what the potential is .
but we 've found that the way we present our ideas it makes a big difference .
zk : it was like six months ago that keith and i were out in l.a. , and we were at starbucks having coffee with roman coppola .
he works on mostly music videos and commercials with his company , the directors bureau .
as we were talking , roman told us that he 's kind of an inventor on the side .
and we were showing him the same gel magnet that you 're holding in your hand - and you know , we shared the same ideas . and you could see it in his face : roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folder ; he opens it up and keith and i look in , and he starts showing us concepts that he 's been working on .
these things just get him really excited . and so we 're looking at these concepts , and we were just like , whoa , this guy 's good .
because the way that he presented the concept - his approach was totally different than ours . he sold it to you as if it was for sale right now .
when we were going in the car back to the airport , we were thinking : why was this so powerful ?
and as we thought about it more , we realized that it let you fill in all the details about the experience , just as if you saw it on tv . so , for ted we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with roman and his team at the directors bureau to create a commercial for a product from the future .
narrator : do you have a need for speed ?
inventables water adventures dares you to launch yourself on a magnetically-levitating board down a waterslide so fast , so tall , that when you hit the bottom , it uses brakes to stop .
aqua rocket : coming this summer .
ks : now , we showed the concept to a few people before this , and they asked us , when 's it coming out ?
so i just wanted to let you know , it 's not actually coming out , just the concept is .
zk : so now , when we dream up these concepts , it 's important for us to make sure that they work from a technical standpoint .
so i just want to quickly explain how this would work .
this is the magnetically-levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial .
the gel that you 're holding would be lining the bottom of the board .
now this is important for two reasons .
one : the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that , if it were to hit the rider in the head , it would n't injure him .
in addition , you can see from the diagram on the right , the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet .
so this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you 're going down .
the force of the water rushing down , in addition to that repulsion force , would make this slide go faster than any slide on the market .
it 's because of this that you need the magnetic braking system .
when you get to the very bottom of the slide - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the rider passes through an aluminum tube .
and i 'm going to kick it to keith to explain why that 's important from a technical standpoint .
ks : so i 'm sure all you engineers know that even though aluminum is a metal , it 's not a magnetic material . but something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube .
so we set up a quick experiment here to show that to you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you see the magnet fell really slowly .
now , i 'm not going to get into the physics of it , but all you need to know is that the faster the magnet 's falling , the greater the stopping force .
zk : now , our next technology is actually a 10-foot pole , and i have it right here in my pocket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 're a few different versions of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ks : some of them automatically unroll like this one .
they can be made to automatically roll up , or they can be made stable , like zach 's , to hold any position in between .
zk : as we were talking to the vendor - to try to learn about how you could apply these , or how they 're being applied currently - he was telling us that , in the military they use this one so soldiers can keep it on their chests - very concealed - and then , when they 're out on the field , erect it as an antenna to clearly send signals back to the base .
in our brainstorms , we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal : so at the end of the game , you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bag .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ks : now , the interesting thing about this is , you do n't have to be an engineer to appreciate why a 10-foot pole that can fit in your pocket is so interesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we decided to go out onto the streets of chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with this .
man : i clean my ceiling fans with that and i get the spider webs off my house - i do it that way .
woman : i 'd make my very own walking stick .
woman : i would create a ladder to use to get up on top of the tree .
woman : an olive server .
man : some type of extension pole - like what the painters use .
woman : i would make a spear that , when you went deep sea diving , you could catch the fish really fast , and then roll it back up , and you could swim easier ... yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zk : now , for our next technology we 're going to do a little demonstration , and so we need a volunteer from the audience .
you sir , come on up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- come on up . tell everybody your name .
steve jurvetson : steve .
zk : it 's steve . all right steve , now , follow me .
we need you to stand right in front of the ted sign .
right there . that 's great .
and hold onto this . good luck to you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ks : no , not yet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zk : i 'd just like to let you all know that this presentation has been brought to you by target .
ks : little bit - that 's perfect , just perfect .
now , zach , we 're going to demonstrate a water gun fight from the future .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here , come on up to the front . all right , so now if you 'll see here - no , no , it 's ok .
so , describe to the audience the temperature of your shirt . go ahead .
sj : it 's cold .
ks : now the reason it 's cold is that 's it 's not actually water loaded into these squirt guns - it 's a dry liquid developed by 3m .
it 's perfectly clear , it 's odorless , it 's colorless .
it 's so safe you could drink this stuff .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the reason it feels cold is because it evaporates 25 times faster than water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , well thanks for coming up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zk : wait , wait , steven - before you go we filled this with the dry liquid so during the break you can shoot your friends .
sj : excellent , thank you .
ks : thanks for coming up . let 's give him a big round of applause .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what 's the significance of this dry liquid ?
early versions of the fluid were actually used on a cray supercomputer .
now , the unexpected thing about this is that zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectly innocent member of the audience without any concern that we 'd damage the electronics , that we 'd get him wet , that we 'd hurt the books or the computers . it works because it 's non-conductive .
so you can see here , you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it would n't cause any damage .
you can circulate it to draw the heat away .
but today it 's most widely used in office buildings - in the sprinkler system - as a fire-suppression fluid .
again , it 's perfectly safe for people . it puts out the fires , does n't hurt anything .
but our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game . so during halftime , it could rain down on the players , cool everyone down , and in a matter of minutes it would dry . would n't hurt the court .
zk : our next technology comes to us from a company in japan called sekisui chemical . one of their r & d engineers was working on a way to make plastic stiffer .
while he was doing this , he noticed an unexpected thing .
we have a video to show you .
ks : so you see there , it did n't bounce back . now , this was an unintended side effect of some experiments they were doing .
it 's technically called , " shape-retaining property . "
now , think about your interactions with aluminum foil .
shape-retaining is common in metal : you bend a piece of aluminum foil , and it holds its place . contrast that with a plastic garbage can - and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back .
zk : for example , you could make a watch that wraps around your wrist , but does n't use a buckle .
taking it a little further , if you wove those strips together - kind of like a little basket - you could make a shape-retaining sheet , and then you could embed it in a cloth : so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table , so that way on a windy day it would n't blow away .
for our next technology , it 's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself , because it 's an ink .
so , we 've prepared a video to show it applied to paper .
ks : as this paper is bending , the resistance of the ink changes .
so with simple electronics , you can detect how much the page is being bent .
now , to think about the potential for this , think of all the places ink is supplied : on business cards , on the back of cereal boxes , board games . any place you use ink , you could change the way you interact with it .
zk : so my favorite idea for this is to apply the ink to a book .
this could totally change the way that you interface with paper .
you see the dark line on the side and the top . as you turn the pages of the book , the book can actually detect what page you 're on , based on the curvature of the pages .
in addition , if you were to fold in one of the corners , then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notes .
ks : for our last technology , we worked again with roman and his team at the directors bureau to develop a commercial from the future to explain how it works .
old milk carton : oh yeah , it smells good .
who are you ?
new milk carton : i 'm new milk .
omc : i used to smell like you .
narrator : fresh watch , from inventables dairy farms .
packaging that changes color when your milk 's gone off .
do n't let milk spoil your morning .
zk : now , this technology was developed by these two guys : professor ken suslick and neil rakow , of the university of illinois .
ks : now the way it works : there 's a matrix of color dyes .
and these dyes change color in response to odors .
so the smell of vanilla , that might change the four on the left to brown and the one on the right to yellow . this matrix can produce thousands of different color combinations to represent thousands of different smells .
but like in the milk commercial , if you know what odor you want to detect , then they can formulate a specific dye to detect just that odor .
zk : right . it was that that started a conversation with professor suslick and myself , and he was explaining to me the things that this is making possible , beyond just detecting spoiled food . it 's really where the significance of it lies .
his company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn , how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene ?
and he kind of comically explained that time after time , what the firemen would say is : they would rush to the scene of the crime ; they would look around ; if there were no dead policemen , it was ok to go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this is a true story . they 're using policemen as canaries .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but more seriously , they determined that you could develop a device that can smell better than the humans , and say if it 's safe for the firemen .
in addition , he 's spun off a company from the university called chemsensing , where they 're working on medical equipment .
so , a patient can come in and actually blow into their device .
by detecting the odor of particular bacteria , or viruses , or even lung cancer , the dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results .
this can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patients .
currently , they 're using a method of trial and error , but this could tell you precisely what disease you have .
ks : so that was the six we had for you today , but i hope you 're starting to see why we find these things so fascinating .
because every one of these six changed our understanding of what was possible in the world . prior to seeing this , we would have assumed : a 10-foot pole could n't fit in your pocket ; something as inexpensive as ink could n't sense the way paper is being bent ; every one of these things - and we 're constantly trying to find more .
zk : this is something that keith and i really enjoy doing .
i 'm sure it 's obvious to you now , but it was actually yesterday that i was reminded of why . i was having a conversation with steve jurvetson , over downstairs by the escalators , and he was telling me that when chris sent out that little box , one of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand - the sand that does n't get wet . he said that he was playing with it with his son .
and you know , his son was mesmerized , because he would dunk it in the water , he would take it out and it was bone dry . a few weeks later , he said that his son was playing with a lock of his mother 's hair , and he noticed that there were some drops of water on the hair .
and he took the thing and he looked up to steve and he said , " look , hydrophobic string . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , after hearing that story - that really summed it up for me .
thank you very much .
ks : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's talk dirty .
a few years ago , oddly enough , i needed the bathroom , and i found one , a public bathroom , and i went into the stall , and i prepared to do what i 'd done most of my life : use the toilet , flush the toilet , forget about the toilet .
and for some reason that day , instead , i asked myself a question , and it was , where does this stuff go ?
and with that question , i found myself plunged into the world of sanitation - there 's more coming - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sanitation , toilets and poop , and i have yet to emerge .
and that 's because it 's such an enraging , yet engaging place to be .
to go back to that toilet , it was n't a particularly fancy toilet , it was n't as nice as this one from the world toilet organization .
that 's the other wto . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it had a lockable door , it had privacy , it had water , it had soap so i could wash my hands , and i did because i 'm a woman , and we do that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but that day , when i asked that question , i learned something , and that was that i 'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right , when in fact it 's a privilege .
2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet .
they do n't have a bucket or a box .
forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet .
and they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the mumbai airport expressway , which is called open defecation , or poo-pooing in the open .
and he does that every day , and every day , probably , that guy in the picture walks on by , because he sees that little boy , but he does n't see him .
but he should , because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers .
fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit .
all those things , the eggs , the cysts , the bacteria , the viruses , all those can travel in one gram of human feces .
how ? well , that little boy will not have washed his hands .
he 's barefoot . he 'll run back into his house , and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet .
in what i call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in , the most common symptoms associated with those diseases , diarrhea , is now a bit of a joke .
it 's the runs , the hershey squirts , the squits .
where i come from , we call it delhi belly , as a legacy of empire .
but if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency , this is the picture that you come up with .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- still not sure about the bikini .
and here 's another image of diarrhea .
this is marie saylee , nine months old .
you ca n't see her , because she 's buried under that green grass in a little village in liberia , because she died in three days from diarrhea - the hershey squirts , the runs , a joke .
and that 's her dad .
but she was n't alone that day , because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea , and they do every day .
diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide , and you 've probably been asked to care about things like hiv / aids or t.b. or measles , but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together .
it 's a very potent weapon of mass destruction .
and the cost to the world is immense : 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation .
these are cholera beds in haiti .
you 'll have heard of cholera , but we do n't hear about diarrhea .
it gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases .
but we know how to fix this .
we know , because in the mid-19th century , wonderful victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet , and disease dropped dramatically .
child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history .
the flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the british medical journal , and they were choosing over the pill , anesthesia , and surgery .
it 's a wonderful waste disposal device .
but i think that it 's so good - it does n't smell , we can put it in our house , we can lock it behind a door - and i think we 've locked it out of conversation too .
we do n't have a neutral word for it .
poop 's not particularly adequate .
shit offends people . feces is too medical .
because i ca n't explain otherwise , when i look at the figures , what 's going on .
we know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation , but if you look at the budgets of countries , developing and developed , you 'll think there 's something wrong with the math , because you 'll expect absurdities like pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation , even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in pakistan every year .
but then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget , and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply , which is great ; we all need water .
no one 's going to refuse clean water .
but the humble latrine , or flush toilet , reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water .
think about it . that little boy who 's running back into his house , he may have a nice , clean fresh water supply , but he 's got dirty hands that he 's going to contaminate his water supply with .
and i think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development , because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us .
so a toilet can put a girl back in school .
twenty-five percent of girls in india drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation .
they 've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in .
we 've all done that , but they do it every day , and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating , it just gets too much .
and i understand that . who can blame them ?
so if you met an educationalist and said , " i can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing , " you 'd make a lot of friends in education .
that 's not the only thing it can do for you .
poop can cook your dinner .
it 's got nutrients in it .
we ingest nutrients . we excrete nutrients as well .
we do n't keep them all .
in rwanda , they are now getting 75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners ' bowels .
so these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in butare .
they 're genocidal inmates , most of them , and they 're stirring the contents of their own latrines , because if you put poop in a sealed environment , in a tank , pretty much like a stomach , then , pretty much like a stomach , it gives off gas , and you can cook with it .
and you might think it 's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit , but it 's also good economic sense , because they 're saving a million dollars a year .
they 're cutting down on deforestation , and they 've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible , infinite and free at the point of production .
it 's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives .
here 's a woman who 's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes , which is what you think it is , except not quite , because it 's actually donated .
there is now a new career path called stool donor .
it 's like the new sperm donor .
because she has been suffering from a superbug called c. diff , and it 's resistant to antibiotics in many cases .
she 's been suffering for years .
she gets a dose of healthy human feces , and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent .
it 's astonishing , but hardly anyone is still doing it .
maybe it 's the ick factor .
that 's okay , because there 's a team of research scientists in canada who have now created a stool sample , a fake stool sample which is called repoopulate .
so you 'd be thinking by now , okay , the solution 's simple , we give everyone a toilet .
and this is where it gets really interesting , because it 's not that simple , because we are not simple .
so the really interesting , exciting work - this is the engaging bit - in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology .
we need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware .
they 've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they 've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground .
so the idea is to manipulate human emotion .
it 's been done for decades . the soap companies did it in the early 20th century .
they tried selling soap as healthy . no one bought it .
they tried selling it as sexy . everyone bought it .
in india now there 's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that do n't have a toilet .
it 's called " no loo , no i do . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in case you think that poster 's just propaganda , here 's priyanka , 23 years old .
i met her last october in india , and she grew up in a conservative environment .
she grew up in a rural village in a poor area of india , and she was engaged at 14 , and then at 21 or so , she moved into her in-law 's house .
and she was horrified to get there and find that they did n't have a toilet .
she 'd grown up with a latrine .
it was no big deal , but it was a latrine .
and the first night she was there , she was told that at 4 o 'clock in the morning - her mother-in-law got her up , told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open .
and she was scared . she was scared of drunks hanging around .
she was scared of snakes . she was scared of rape .
after three days , she did an unthinkable thing .
she left .
and if you know anything about rural india , you 'll know that 's an unspeakably courageous thing to do .
but not just that .
she got her toilet , and now she goes around all the other villages in india persuading other women to do the same thing .
it 's what i call social contagion , and it 's really powerful and really exciting .
another version of this , another village in india near where priyanka lives is this village , called lakara , and about a year ago , it had no toilets whatsoever .
kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera .
some visitors came , using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other .
somehow , people who 'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought , " oops . "
not only that , but they were ingesting their neighbors ' shit .
that 's what really made them change their behavior .
so this woman , this boy 's mother installed this latrine in a few hours .
her entire life , she 'd been using the banana field behind , but she installed the latrine in a few hours .
it cost nothing . it 's going to save that boy 's life .
so when i get despondent about the state of sanitation , even though these are pretty exciting times because we 've got the bill and melinda gates foundation reinventing the toilet , which is great , we 've got matt damon going on bathroom strike , which is great for humanity , very bad for his colon .
but there are things to worry about .
it 's the most off-track millennium development goal .
it 's about 50 or so years off track .
we 're not going to meet targets , providing people with sanitation at this rate .
so when i get sad about sanitation , i think of japan , because japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks , and now it 's a nation of what are called woshurettos , washlet toilets .
they have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely , hands-free cleaning experience , and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the " marriage-saver . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but most importantly , what they have done in japan , which i find so inspirational , is they 've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door .
they 've made it conversational .
people go out and upgrade their toilet .
they talk about it . they 've sanitized it .
i hope that we can do that . it 's not a difficult thing to do .
all we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent , shameful issue that it is .
and do n't think that it 's just in the poor world that things are wrong .
our sewers are crumbling .
things are going wrong here too .
the solution to all of this is pretty easy .
i 'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing , and that 's to go out , protest , speak about the unspeakable , and talk shit .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to go right into the slides .
and all i 'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that i do just very straight stuff .
and my ideas are - in my head , anyway - they 're very logical and relate to what 's going on and problem solving for clients .
i either convince clients at the end that i solve their problems , or i really do solve their problems , because usually they seem to like it .
let me go right into the slides .
can you turn off the light ? down .
i like to be in the dark .
i do n't want you to see what i 'm doing up here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i did this house in santa monica , and it got a lot of notoriety .
in fact , it appeared in a porno comic book , which is the slide on the right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is in venice .
i just show it because i want you to know i 'm concerned about context .
on the left-hand side , i had the context of those little houses , and i tried to build a building that fit into that context .
when people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird , and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they 're photographed or seen in that space .
and then , once i deal with the context , i then try to make a place that 's comfortable and private and fairly serene , as i hope you 'll find that slide on the right .
and then i did a law school for loyola in downtown l.a.
i was concerned about making a place for the study of law .
and we continue to work with this client .
the building on the right at the top is now under construction .
the garage on the right - the gray structure - will be torn down , finally , and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we 've created , this campus .
and it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place .
they wanted a sense of place .
and so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown , in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into .
and it was my theory , or my point of view , that one did n't upstage the neighborhood - one made accommodations .
i tried to be inclusive , to include the buildings in the neighborhood , whether they were buildings i liked or not .
in the ' 60s i started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in bloomingdale 's .
we even made flooring , walls and everything , out of cardboard .
and the success of it threw me for a loop .
i could n't deal with the success of furniture - i was n't secure enough as an architect - and so i closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , nobody would like this .
and it was in this , preliminary to these pieces of furniture , that ricky and i worked on furniture by the slice .
and after we failed , i just kept failing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the piece on the left - and that ultimately led to the piece on the right - happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket .
and i put a piece of tape around it , as you see there , and realized you could sit on it , and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on .
so , it was an accidental discovery .
i got into fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , the story i tell is that i got mad at postmodernism - at po-mo - and said that fish were 500 million years earlier than man , and if you 're going to go back , we might as well go back to the beginning .
and so i started making these funny things .
and they started to have a life of their own and got bigger - as the one glass at the walker .
and then , i sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what i was learning about the form of the fish and the movement .
and a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it - accidental , again - it was an intuitive kind of thing , and i just kept going with it , and made this proposal for a building , which was only a proposal .
i did this building in japan .
i was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed .
and i love sake and kobe and all that stuff .
and after i got - i was really drunk - i was asked to do some sketches on napkins .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i made some sketches on napkins - little boxes and morandi-like things that i used to do .
and the client said , " why no fish ? "
and so i made a drawing with a fish , and i left japan .
three weeks later , i received a complete set of drawings saying we 'd won the competition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , it 's hard to do . it 's hard to translate a fish form , because they 're so beautiful - perfect - into a building or object like this .
and oldenburg , who i work with a little once in a while , told me i could n't do it , and so that made it even more exciting .
but he was right - i could n't do the tail .
i started to get the head ok , but the tail i could n't do .
it was pretty hard .
the thing on the right is a snake form , a ziggurat .
and i put them together , and you walk between them .
it was a dialog with the context again .
now , if you saw a picture of this as it was published in architectural record - they did n't show the context , so you would think , " god , what a pushy guy this is . "
but a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant .
could n't find it .
so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as for craft and technology and all those things that you 've all been talking about , i was thrown for a complete loop .
this was built in six months .
the way we sent drawings to japan : we used the magic computer in michigan that does carved models , and we used to make foam models , which that thing scanned .
we made the drawings of the fish and the scales .
and when i got there , everything was perfect - except the tail .
so , i decided to cut off the head and the tail .
and i made the object on the left for my show at the walker .
and it 's one of the nicest pieces i 've ever made , i think .
and then jay chiat , a friend and client , asked me to do his headquarters building in l.a.
for reasons we do n't want to talk about , it got delayed .
toxic waste , i guess , is the key clue to that one .
and so we built a temporary building - i 'm getting good at temporary - and we put a conference room in that 's a fish .
and , finally , jay dragged me to my hometown , toronto , canada .
and there is a story - it 's a real story - about my grandmother buying a carp on thursday , bringing it home , putting it in the bathtub when i was a kid .
i played with it in the evening .
when i went to sleep , the next day it was n't there .
and the next night , we had gefilte fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i set up this interior for jay 's offices and i made a pedestal for a sculpture .
and he did n't buy a sculpture , so i made one .
i went around toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother 's , and i put the fish in .
it was a joke .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i play with funny people like -lsb- claes -rsb- oldenburg .
we 've been friends for a long time .
and we 've started to work on things .
a few years ago , we did a performance piece in venice , italy , called " il corso del coltello " - the swiss army knife .
and most of the imagery is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- claes ' , but those two little boys are my sons , and they were claes ' assistants in the play .
he was the swiss army knife .
he was a souvenir salesman who always wanted to be a painter , and i was frankie p. toronto .
p for palladio .
dressed up like the at & t building by claes - -lrb- laughter -rrb- with a fish hat .
the highlight of the performance was at the end .
this beautiful object , the swiss army knife , which i get credit for participating in .
and i can tell you - it 's totally an oldenburg .
i had nothing to do with it .
the only thing i did was , i made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal , because i love sailing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we made it into a sailing craft .
i 've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing .
i do it because it 's a curious thing in the culture , when things are made in such great quantities , absorbed in such great quantities , and there 's so much denial about them .
people hate it .
and i 'm fascinated with that , which , like the paper furniture - it 's one of those materials .
and i 'm always drawn to that .
and so i did a lot of dirty things with chain link , which nobody will forgive me for .
but claes made homage to it in the loyola law school .
and that chain link is really expensive .
it 's in perspective and everything .
and then we did a camp together for children with cancer .
and you can see , we started making a building together .
of course , the milk can is his .
but we were trying to collide our ideas , to put objects next to each other .
like a morandi - like the little bottles - composing them like a still life .
and it seemed to work as a way to put he and i together .
then jay chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in venice , and i started with this three-piece thing , and you entered in the middle .
and jay asked me what i was going to do with the piece in the middle .
and he pushed that .
and one day i had a - oh , well , the other way .
i had the binoculars from claes , and i put them there , and i could never get rid of them after that .
oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal .
it made my building look sick .
and it was this interaction between that kind of , up-the-ante stuff that became pretty interesting .
it led to the building on the left .
and i still think the time magazine picture will be of the binoculars , you know , leaving out the - what the hell .
i use a lot of metal in my work , and i have a hard time connecting with the craft .
the whole thing about my house , the whole use of rough carpentry and everything , was the frustration with the crafts available .
i said , " if i ca n't get the craft that i want , i 'll use the craft i can get . "
there were plenty of models for that , in rauschenberg and jasper johns , and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials .
i went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture .
and it was all of one material , and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls .
the metalworkers , for the most part , do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff .
i was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the metalworkers ' unions of america and canada in washington , and i did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings , etc. etc .
and it 's working very well to have these people , these craftsmen , interested in it .
i just tell the stories .
it 's a way of connecting , at least , with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture .
the metal continued into a building - herman miller , in sacramento .
and it 's just a complex of factory buildings .
and herman miller has this philosophy of having a place - a people place .
i mean , it 's kind of a trite thing to say , but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be , where the people would come and where the people working would interact .
so it 's out in the middle of nowhere , and you approach it .
it 's copper and galvanize .
i used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge , so it would buckle .
i spent a lot of time undoing richard meier 's aesthetic .
everybody 's trying to get the panels perfect , and i always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy .
and they end up looking like stone .
this is the central area .
there 's a ramp .
and that little dome in there is a building by stanley tigerman .
stanley was instrumental in my getting this job .
and when i was awarded the contract i , at the very beginning , asked the client if they would let stanley do a cameo piece with me .
because these were ideas that we were talking about , building things next to each other , making - it 's all about -lsb- a -rsb- metaphor for a city , maybe .
and so stanley did the little dome thing .
and we did it over the phone and by fax .
he would send me a fax and show me something .
he 'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower .
i told him , " no , no , that 's too ongepotchket .
i do n't want the tower . "
so he came back with a simpler building , but he put some funny details on it , and he moved it closer to my building .
and so i decided to put him in a depression .
i put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in .
and so then he put two bridges - this all happened on the fax , going back and forth over a couple of weeks ' period .
and he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it .
and so then i put this big billboard behind it .
and i call it , " david and goliath . "
and that 's my cafeteria .
in boston , we had that old building on the left .
it was a very prominent building off the freeway , and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of - i thought - the language of the neighborhood , which had these cornices , projecting cornices .
mine got a little exuberant , but i used lead copper , which is a beautiful material , and it turns green in 100 years .
instead of , like , copper in 10 or 15 .
we redid the side of the building and re-proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space .
and it surprised both boston and myself that we got it approved , because they have very strict kind of design guideline , and they would n't normally think i would fit them .
the detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building .
in barcelona , on las ramblas for some film festival , i did the hollywood sign going and coming , made a building out of it , and they built it .
i flew in one night and took this picture .
but they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me .
and then more metal and some chain link in santa monica - a little shopping center .
and this is a laser laboratory at the university of iowa , in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back .
it 's the support labs , which , by some coincidence , required no windows .
and the shape fit perfectly .
i just joined the points .
in the curved part there 's all the mechanical equipment .
that solid wall behind it is a pipe chase - a pipe canyon - and so it was an opportunity that i seized , because i did n't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form .
it gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it .
this is a small house somewhere .
they 've been building it so long i do n't remember where it is .
it 's in the west valley .
and we started with the stream and built the house along the stream - dammed it up to make a lake .
these are the models .
the reality , with the lake - the workmanship is pretty bad .
and it reminded me why i play defensively in things like my house .
when you have to do something really cheaply , it 's hard to get perfect corners and stuff .
that big metal thing is a passage , and in it is - you go downstairs into the living room and then down into the bedroom , which is on the right .
it 's kind of like a whole built town .
i was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at yale .
i thought it was fitting for me to be doing that .
this is a house next to a philip johnson house in minnesota .
the owners had a dilemma - they asked philip to do it .
he was too busy .
he did n't recommend me , by the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we ended up having to make it a sculpture , because the dilemma was , how do you build a building that does n't look like the language ?
is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub-divided ?
etc. etc .
you 've got the idea .
and so we finally ended up making it .
these people are art collectors .
and we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side .
and the building is very sculptural as you walk around it .
it 's made of metal and the brown stuff is fin-ply - it 's that formed lumber from finland .
we used it at loyola on the chapel , and it did n't work .
i keep trying to make it work .
in this case we learned how to detail it .
in cleveland , there 's burnham mall , on the left .
it 's never been finished .
going out to the lake , you can see all those new buildings we built .
and we had the opportunity to build a building on this site .
there 's a railroad track .
this is the city hall over here somewhere , and the courthouse .
and the centerline of the mall goes out .
burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built , and so we followed .
sohio is on the axis here , and we followed the axis , and they 're two kind of goalposts .
and this is our building , which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company .
we collaborated with oldenburg and put the newspaper on top , folded .
the health club is fastened to the garage with a c-clamp , for cleveland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you drive down .
so it 's about a 10-story c-clamp .
and all this stuff at the bottom is a museum , and an idea for a very fancy automobile entry .
this owner has a pet peeve about bad automobile entries .
and this would be a hotel .
so , the centerline of this thing - we 'd preserve it , and it would start to work with the scale of the new buildings by pelli and kohn pederson fox , etc . , that are underway .
it 's hard to do high-rise .
i feel much more comfortable down here .
this is a piece of property in brentwood .
and a long time ago , about ' 82 or something , after my house - i designed a house for myself that would be a village of several pavilions around a courtyard - and the owner of this lot worked for me and built that actual model on the left .
and she came back , i guess wealthier or something - something happened - and asked me to design a house for her on this site .
and following that basic idea of the village , we changed it as we got into it .
i locked the house into the site by cutting the back end - here you see on the photographs of the site - slicing into it and putting all the bathrooms and dressing rooms like a retaining wall , creating a lower level zone for the master bedroom , which i designed like a kind of a barge , looking like a boat .
and that 's it , built .
the dome was a request from the client .
she wanted a dome somewhere in the house .
she did n't care where .
when you sleep in this bedroom , i hope - i mean , i have n't slept in it yet .
i 've offered to marry her so i could sleep there , but she said i did n't have to do that .
but when you 're in that room , you feel like you 're on a kind of barge on some kind of lake .
and it 's very private .
the landscape is being built around to create a private garden .
and then up above there 's a garden on this side of the living room , and one on the other side .
these are n't focused very well .
i do n't know how to do it from here .
focus the one on the right .
it 's up there .
left - it 's my right .
anyway , you enter into a garden with a beautiful grove of trees .
that 's the living room .
servants ' quarters .
a guest bedroom , which has this dome with marble on it .
and then you enter into the living room and then so on .
this is the bedroom .
you come down from this level along the stairway , and you enter the bedroom here , going into the lake .
and the bed is back in this space , with windows looking out onto the lake .
these stonehenge things were designed to give foreground and to create a greater depth in this shallow lot .
the material is lead copper , like in the building in boston .
and so it was an intent to make this small piece of land - it 's 100 by 250 - into a kind of an estate by separating these areas and making the living room and dining room into this pavilion with a high space in it .
and this happened by accident that i got this right on axis with the dining room table .
it looks like i got a baldessari painting for free .
but the idea is , the windows are all placed so you see pieces of the house outside .
eventually this will be screened - these trees will come up - and it will be very private .
and you feel like you 're in your own kind of village .
this is for michael eisner - disney .
we 're doing some work for him .
and this is in anaheim , california , and it 's a freeway building .
you go under this bridge at about 65 miles an hour , and there 's another bridge here .
and you 're through this room in a split second , and the building will sort of reflect that .
on the backside , it 's much more humane - entrance , dining hall , etc .
and then this thing here - i 'm hoping as you drive by you 'll hear the picket fence effect of the sound hitting it .
kind of a fun thing to do .
i 'm doing a building in switzerland , basel , which is an office building for a furniture company .
and we struggled with the image .
these are the early studies , but they have to sell furniture to normal people , so if i did the building and it was too fancy , then people might say , " well , the furniture looks ok in his thing , but no , it ai n't going to look good in my normal building . "
so we 've made a kind of pragmatic slab in the second phase here , and we 've taken the conference facilities and made a villa out of them so that the communal space is very sculptural and separate .
and you 're looking at it from the offices and you create a kind of interaction between these pieces .
this is in paris , along the seine .
palais des sports , the gare de lyon over here .
the minister of finance - the guy that moved from the louvre - goes in here .
there 's a new library across the river .
and back in here , in this already treed park , we 're doing a very dense building called the american center , which has a theater , apartments , dance school , an art museum , restaurants and all kinds of - it 's a very dense program - bookstores , etc .
in a very tight , small - this is the ground level .
and the french have this extraordinary way of screwing things up by taking a beautiful site and cutting the corner off .
they call it the plan coupe .
and i struggled with that thing - how to get around the corner .
these are the models for it .
i showed you the other model , the one - this is the way i organized myself so i could make the drawing - so i understood the problem .
i was trying to get around this plan coupe - how do you do it ?
apartments , etc .
and these are the kind of study models we did .
and the one on the left is pretty awful .
you can see why i was ready to commit suicide when this one was built .
but out of it came finally this resolution , where the elevator piece worked frontally to this , parallel to this street , and also parallel to here .
and then this kind of twist , with this balcony and the skirt , kind of like a ballerina lifting her skirt to let you into the foyer .
the restaurants here - the apartments and the theater , etc .
so it would all be built in stone , in french limestone , except for this metal piece .
and it faces into a park .
and the idea was to make this express the energy of this .
on the side facing the street it 's much more normal , except i slipped a few mansards down , so that coming on the point , these housing units made a gesture to the corner .
and this will be some kind of high-tech billboard .
if any of you guys have any ideas for it , please contact me .
i do n't know what to do .
jay chiat is a glutton for punishment , and he hired me to do a house for him in the hamptons .
and it 's got a fish .
and i keep thinking , " this is going to be the last fish . "
it 's like a drug addict .
i say , " i 'm not going to do it anymore - i do n't want to do it anymore - i 'm not going to do it . "
and then i do it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there it is .
but it 's the living room .
and this piece here is - i do n't know what it is .
i just added it so that we 'd have enough money in the budget so we could take something out .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is euro disney , and i 've worked with all of the guys that presented to you earlier .
we 've had a lot of fun working together .
i think i 'm from mars for them , and they are for me , but somehow we all manage to work together , and i think , productively .
so far .
this is a shopping thing .
you come into the magic kingdom and the hotel that tony baxter 's group is doing out here .
and then this is a kind of a shopping mall , with a rodeo and restaurants .
and another restaurant .
what i did - because of the paris skies being quite dull , i made a light grid that 's perpendicular to the train station , to the route of the train .
it looks like it 's kind of been there , and then crashed all these simpler forms into it .
the light grid will have a light , be lit up at night and give a kind of light ceiling .
in switzerland - germany , actually - on the rhine across from basel , we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum .
and i tried to - there 's a nick grimshaw building over here , there 's an oldenburg sculpture over here - i tried to make a relationship urbanistically .
and i do n't gave good slides to show - it 's just been completed - but this piece here is this building , and these pieces here and here .
and as you pass by it 's always part - you see it as all of these pieces accrue and become part of an overall neighborhood .
it 's plaster and just zinc .
and you wonder , if this is a museum , what it 's going to be like inside ?
if it 's going to be so busy and crazy that you would n't show anything , and just wait .
i 'm so cunning and clever - i made it quiet and wonderful .
but on the outside it does scream out at you a bit .
it 's actually basically three square rooms with a couple of skylights and stuff .
and from the building in the back , you see it as an iceberg floating by in the hills .
i know i 'm over time .
see , that skylight goes down and becomes that one .
so it 's pretty quiet inside .
this is the disney hall - the concert hall .
it 's a complicated project .
it has a chamber hall .
it 's related to an existing chandler pavilion that was built with a lot of love and tears and caring .
and it 's not a great building , but i approached it optimistically , that we would make a compositional relationship between us that would strengthen both of us .
and the plan of this - it 's a concert hall .
this is the foyer , which is kind of a garden structure .
there 's commercial at the ground floor .
these are offices , which , really , in the competition , we did n't have to design .
but finally , there 's a hotel there .
these were the kind of relationships made to the chandler , composing these elevations together and relating them to the buildings that existed - to moca , etc .
the acoustician in the competition gave us criteria , which led to this compartmentalized scheme , which we found out after the competition would not work at all .
but everybody liked these forms and liked the space , and so that 's one of the problems of a competition .
you have to then try and get that back in some way .
and we studied many models .
this was our original model .
these were the three buildings that were the ideal - the concertgebouw , boston and berlin .
everybody liked the surround .
actually , this is the smallest hall in size , and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies .
our client does n't want balconies , so - and when we met our new acoustician , he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape .
and we tried many shapes , trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical , acceptable format .
we finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the concertgebouw with the sloping outside walls , which the acoustician said were crucial to this and later decided they were n't , but now we have them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and our idea is to make the seating carriage very sculptural and out of wood and like a big boat sitting in this plaster room .
that 's the idea .
and the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural .
and the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of proscenium from wherever you sit , and create intimacy .
now , this is not a final design - these are just on the way to being - and so i would n't take it literally , except the feeling of the space .
we studied the acoustics with laser stuff , and they bounce them off this and see where it all works .
but you get the sense of the hall in section .
most halls come straight down into a proscenium .
in this case we 're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners .
and so it will be quite a different shape .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the original building , because it was frog-like , fit nicely on the site and cranked itself well .
when you get into a box , it 's harder to do it - and here we are , struggling with how to put the hotel in .
and this is a teapot i designed for alessi .
i just stuck it on there .
but this is how i do work . i do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away .
and of course it 's not going to look like that , but it is the crazy way i tend to work .
and then finally , in l.a. i was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of interstate bank tower , the highest building in l.a.
larry halprin is doing the stairs .
and i was asked to do a fish , and so i did a snake .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a public space , and i made it kind of a garden structure , and you can go in it .
it 's a kiva , and larry 's putting some water in there , and it works much better than a fish .
in barcelona i was asked to do a fish , and we 're working on that , at the foot of a ritz-carlton tower being done by skidmore , owings and merrill .
and the ritz-carlton tower is being designed with exposed steel , non-fire proof , much like those old gas tanks .
and so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it , perverted it , into the form of the fish , and created a kind of a 19th-century contraption that looks like , that will sit - this is the beach and the harbor out in front , and this is really a shopping center with department stores .
and we split these bridges .
originally , this was all solid with a hole in it .
we cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel .
we showed this to the hotel people the other day , and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the ritz-carlton anymore , because of this fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and finally , i just threw these in - lou danziger .
i did n't expect lou danziger to be here , but this is a building i did for him in 1964 , i think .
a little studio - and it 's sadly for sale .
time goes on .
and this is my son working with me on a small fast-food thing .
he designed the robot as the cashier , and the head moves , and i did the rest of it .
and the food was n't as good as the stuff , and so it failed .
it should have been the other way around - the food should have been good first .
it did n't work .
thank you very much .
i want to talk about the election .
for the first time in the united states , a predominantly white group of voters voted for an african-american candidate for president .
and in fact barack obama did quite well .
he won 375 electoral votes .
and he won about 70 million popular votes more than any other presidential candidate - of any race , of any party - in history .
if you compare how obama did against how john kerry had done four years earlier - democrats really like seeing this transition here , where almost every state becomes bluer , becomes more democratic - even states obama lost , like out west , those states became more blue .
in the south , in the northeast , almost everywhere but with a couple of exceptions here and there .
one exception is in massachusetts .
that was john kerry 's home state .
no big surprise , obama could n't do better than kerry there .
or in arizona , which is john mccain 's home , obama did n't have much improvement .
but there is also this part of the country , kind of in the middle region here .
this kind of arkansas , tennessee , oklahoma , west virginia region .
now if you look at ' 96 , bill clinton - the last democrat to actually win - how he did in ' 96 , you see real big differences in this part of the country right here , the kind of appalachians , ozarks , highlands region , as i call it : 20 or 30 point swings from how bill clinton did in ' 96 to how obama did in 2008 .
yes bill clinton was from arkansas , but these are very , very profound differences .
so , when we think about parts of the country like arkansas , you know .
there is a book written called , " what 's the matter with kansas ? "
but really the question here - obama did relatively well in kansas .
he lost badly but every democrat does .
he lost no worse than most people do .
but yeah , what 's the matter with arkansas ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when we think of arkansas we tend to have pretty negative connotations .
we think of a bunch of rednecks , quote , unquote , with guns .
and we think people like this probably do n't want to vote for people who look like this and are named barack obama .
we think it 's a matter of race . and is this fair ?
are we kind of stigmatizing people from arkansas , and this part of the country ?
and the answer is : it is at least partially fair .
we know that race was a factor , and the reason why we know that is because we asked those people .
actually we did n't ask them , but when they conducted exit polls in every state , in 37 states , out of the 50 , they asked a question , that was pretty direct , about race .
they asked this question .
in deciding your vote for president today , was the race we 're looking for people that said , " yes , race was a factor ; moreover it was an important factor , in my decision , " and people who voted for john mccain as a result of that factor , maybe in combination with other factors , and maybe alone .
we 're looking for this behavior among white voters or , really , non-black voters .
so you see big differences in different parts of the country on this question .
in louisiana , about one in five white voters said , " yes , one of the big reasons why i voted against barack obama is because he was an african-american . "
if those people had voted for obama , even half of them , obama would have won louisiana safely .
same is true with , i think , all of these states you see on the top of the list .
meanwhile , california , new york , we can say , " oh we 're enlightened " but you know , certainly a much lower incidence of this admitted , i suppose , manifestation of racially-based voting .
here is the same data on a map .
you kind of see the relationship between the redder states of where more people responded and said , " yes , barack obama 's race was a problem for me . "
you see , comparing the map to ' 96 , you see an overlap here .
this really seems to explain why barack obama did worse in this one part of the country .
so we have to ask why .
is racism predictable in some way ?
is there something driving this ?
is it just about some weird stuff that goes on in arkansas that we do n't understand , and kentucky ?
or are there more systematic factors at work ?
and so we can look at a bunch of different variables .
these are things that economists and political scientists look at all the time - things like income , and religion , education .
which of these seem to drive this manifestation of racism in this big national experiment we had on november 4th ?
and there are a couple of these that have strong predictive relationships , one of which is education , where you see the states with the fewest years of schooling per adult are in red , and you see this part of the country , the kind of appalachians region , is less educated . it 's just a fact .
and you see the relationship there with the racially-based voting patterns .
the other variable that 's important is the type of neighborhood that you live in .
states that are more rural - even to some extent of the states like new hampshire and maine - they exhibit a little bit of this racially-based voting against barack obama .
so it 's the combination of these two things : it 's education and the type of neighbors that you have , which we 'll talk about more in a moment .
and the thing about states like arkansas and tennessee is that they 're both very rural , and they are educationally impoverished .
so yes , racism is predictable .
these things , among maybe other variables , but these things seem to predict it .
we 're going to drill down a little bit more now , into something called the general social survey .
this is conducted by the university of chicago every other year .
and they ask a series of really interesting questions .
in 2000 they had particularly interesting questions about racial attitudes .
one simple question they asked is , " does anyone of the opposite race live in your neighborhood ? "
we can see in different types of communities that the results are quite different .
in cites , about 80 percent of people have someone whom they consider a neighbor of another race , but in rural communities , only about 30 percent .
probably because if you live on a farm , you might not have a lot of neighbors , period .
but nevertheless , you 're not having a lot of interaction with people who are unlike you .
so what we 're going to do now is take the white people in the survey and split them between those who have black neighbors - or , really , some neighbor of another race - and people who have only white neighbors .
and we see in some variables in terms of political attitudes , not a lot of difference .
this was eight years ago , some people were more republican back then .
but you see democrats versus republican , not a big difference based on who your neighbors are .
and even some questions about race - for example affirmative action , which is kind of a political question , a policy question about race , if you will - not much difference here .
affirmative action is not very popular frankly , with white voters , period .
but people with black neighbors and people with mono-racial neighborhoods feel no differently about it really .
but if you probe a bit deeper and get a bit more personal if you will , " do you favor a law banning interracial marriage ? "
there is a big difference .
people who do n't have neighbors of a different race are about twice as likely to oppose interracial marriage as people who do .
just based on who lives in your immediate neighborhood around you .
and likewise they asked , not in 2000 , but in the same survey in 1996 , " would you not vote for a qualified black president ? "
you see people without neighbors who are african-american who were much more likely to say , " that would give me a problem . "
so it 's really not even about urban versus rural .
it 's about who you live with .
racism is predictable . and it 's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you , people of other races .
so if you want to address it , the goal is to facilitate interaction with people of other races .
i have a couple of very obvious , i suppose , ideas for maybe how to do that .
i 'm a big fan of cities .
especially if we have cites that are diverse and sustainable , and can support people of different ethnicities and different income groups .
i think cities facilitate more of the kind of networking , the kind of casual interaction than you might have on a daily basis .
but also not everyone wants to live in a city , certainly not a city like new york .
so we can think more about things like street grids .
this is the neighborhood where i grew up in east lansing , michigan .
it 's a traditional midwestern community , which means you have real grid .
you have real neighborhoods and real trees , and real streets you can walk on .
and you interact a lot with your neighbors - people you like , people you might not know .
and as a result it 's a very tolerant community , which is different , i think , than something like this , which is in schaumburg , illinois , where every little set of houses has their own cul-de-sac and drive-through starbucks and stuff like that .
i think that actually this type of urban design , which became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s - i think there is a relationship between that and the country becoming more conservative under ronald reagan .
but also here is another idea we have - is an intercollegiate exchange program where you have students going from new york abroad .
but frankly there are enough differences within the country now where maybe you can take a bunch of kids from nyu , have them go study for a semester at the university of arkansas , and vice versa . do it at the high school level .
literally there are people who might be in school in arkansas or tennessee and might never interact in a positive affirmative way with someone from another part of the country , or of another racial group .
i think part of the education variable we talked about before is the networking experience you get when you go to college where you do get a mix of people that you might not interact with otherwise .
but the point is , this is all good news , because when something is predictable , it is what i call designable .
you can start thinking about solutions to solving that problem , even if the problem is pernicious and as intractable as racism .
if we understand the root causes of the behavior and where it manifests itself and where it does n't , we can start to design solutions to it .
so that 's all i have to say . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart , which is beauty .
i do the philosophy of art , aesthetics , actually , for a living .
i try to figure out intellectually , philosophically , psychologically , what the experience of beauty is , what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it .
now this is an extremely complicated subject , in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different .
i mean just think of the sheer variety - a baby 's face , berlioz 's " harold in italy , " movies like " the wizard of oz " or the plays of chekhov , a central california landscape , a hokusai view of mt . fuji , " der rosenkavalier , " a stunning match-winning goal in a world cup soccer match , van gogh 's " starry night , " a jane austen novel , fred astaire dancing across the screen .
this brief list includes human beings , natural landforms , works of art and skilled human actions .
an account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy .
i can , however , give you at least a taste of what i regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have .
and we get it not from a philosopher of art , not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic .
no , this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding , and you know who i mean : charles darwin .
of course , a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question , " what is beauty ? "
it 's in the eye of the beholder .
it 's whatever moves you personally .
or , as some people , especially academics prefer , beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder .
people agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste .
taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease .
beethoven is adored in japan .
peruvians love japanese woodblock prints .
inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in british museums , while shakespeare is translated into every major language of the earth .
or just think about american jazz or american movies - they go everywhere .
there are many differences among the arts , but there are also universal , cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values .
how can we explain this universality ?
the best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes .
we need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric , largely pleistocene environments , where we became fully human , but also by the social situations in which we evolved .
this reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory .
i mean fossils , cave paintings and so forth .
and it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries .
now , i personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty , with its emotional intensity and pleasure , belongs to our evolved human psychology .
the experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of darwinian adaptations .
beauty is an adaptive effect , which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment .
as many of you will know , evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms .
the first of these is natural selection - that 's random mutation and selective retention - along with our basic anatomy and physiology - the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails .
natural selection also explains many basic revulsions , such as the horrid smell of rotting meat , or fears , such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff .
natural selection also explains pleasures - sexual pleasure , our liking for sweet , fat and proteins , which in turn explains a lot of popular foods , from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs .
the other great principle of evolution is sexual selection , and it operates very differently .
the peacock 's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this .
it did not evolve for natural survival .
in fact , it goes against natural survival .
no , the peacock 's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens .
it 's quite a familiar story .
it 's women who actually push history forward .
darwin himself , by the way , had no doubts that the peacock 's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen .
he actually used that word .
now , keeping these ideas firmly in mind , we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination , even obsession , in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction .
beauty is nature 's way of acting at a distance , so to speak .
i mean , you ca n't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape .
it would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover .
so evolution 's trick is to make them beautiful , to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them .
consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure , the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes .
people in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape , a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved .
this landscape shows up today on calendars , on postcards , in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from new york to new zealand .
it 's a kind of hudson river school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees .
the trees , by the way , are often preferred if they fork near the ground , that is to say , if they 're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix .
the landscape shows the presence of water directly in view , or evidence of water in a bluish distance , indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally - get this - a path or a road , perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline , that extends into the distance , almost inviting you to follow it .
this landscape type is regarded as beautiful , even by people in countries that do n't have it .
the ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience .
but , someone might argue , that 's natural beauty .
how about artistic beauty ?
is n't that exhaustively cultural ?
no , i do n't think it is .
and once again , i 'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it .
it is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from lascaux and chauvet .
chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old , along with a few small , realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period .
but artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that .
beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you 'd see at an arts and crafts fair , as well as ochre body paint , have been found from around 100,000 years ago .
but the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this .
i have in mind the so-called acheulian hand axes .
the oldest stone tools are choppers from the olduvai gorge in east africa .
they go back about two-and-a-half-million years .
these crude tools were around for thousands of centuries , until around 1.4 million years ago when homo erectus started shaping single , thin stone blades , sometimes rounded ovals , but often in what are to our eyes an arresting , symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form .
these acheulian hand axes - they 're named after st. acheul in france , where finds were made in 19th century - have been unearthed in their thousands , scattered across asia , europe and africa , almost everywhere homo erectus and homo ergaster roamed .
now , the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they ca n't have been made for butchering animals .
and the plot really thickens when you realize that , unlike other pleistocene tools , the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges .
and some , in any event , are too big to use for butchery .
their symmetry , their attractive materials and , above all , their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes , even today .
so what were these ancient - i mean , they 're ancient , they 're foreign , but they 're at the same time somehow familiar .
what were these artifacts for ?
the best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art , practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects , contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship .
hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history - tools fashioned to function as what darwinians call " fitness signals " - that is to say , displays that are performances like the peacock 's tail , except that , unlike hair and feathers , the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted .
competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities - intelligence , fine motor control , planning ability , conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials .
over tens of thousands of generations , such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable .
you know , it 's an old line , but it has been shown to work - " why do n't you come up to my cave , so i can show you my hand axes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- except , of course , what 's interesting about this is that we ca n't be sure how that idea was conveyed , because the homo erectus that made these objects did not have language .
it 's hard to grasp , but it 's an incredible fact .
this object was made by a hominid ancestor , homo erectus or homo ergaster , between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language .
stretching over a million years , the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history .
by the end of the hand axe epic , homo sapiens - as they were then called , finally - were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by , who knows , telling jokes , storytelling , dancing , or hairstyling .
yes , hairstyling - i insist on that .
for us moderns , virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies , to express intense emotions with music , painting and dance .
but still , one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings : the beauty we find in skilled performances .
from lascaux to the louvre to carnegie hall , human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts .
we find beauty in something done well .
so the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone , do n't be so sure it 's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful .
your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it , even before they could put their love into words .
is beauty in the eye of the beholder ?
no , it 's deep in our minds .
it 's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors .
our powerful reaction to images , to the expression of emotion in art , to the beauty of music , to the night sky , will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- once upon a time , there was a place called lesterland .
now lesterland looks a lot like the united states .
like the united states , it has about 311 million people , and of that 311 million people , it turns out 144,000 are called lester .
if matt 's in the audience , i just borrowed that , i 'll return it in a second , this character from your series .
so 144,000 are called lester , which means about .05 percent is named lester .
now , lesters in lesterland have this extraordinary power .
there are two elections every election cycle in lesterland .
one is called the general election .
the other is called the lester election .
and in the general election , it 's the citizens who get to vote , but in the lester election , it 's the lesters who get to vote .
and here 's the trick .
in order to run in the general election , you must do extremely well in the lester election .
you do n't necessarily have to win , but you must do extremely well .
now , what can we say about democracy in lesterland ?
what we can say , number one , as the supreme court said in citizens united , that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials , because , after all , there is a general election , but only after the lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election .
and number two , obviously , this dependence upon the lesters is going to produce a subtle , understated , we could say camouflaged , bending to keep the lesters happy .
okay , so we have a democracy , no doubt , but it 's dependent upon the lesters and dependent upon the people .
it has competing dependencies , we could say conflicting dependencies , depending upon who the lesters are .
okay . that 's lesterland .
now there are three things i want you to see now that i 've described lesterland .
number one , the united states is lesterland .
the united states is lesterland .
the united states also looks like this , also has two elections , one we called the general election , the second we should call the money election .
in the general election , it 's the citizens who get to vote , if you 're over 18 , in some states if you have an id .
in the money election , it 's the funders who get to vote , the funders who get to vote , and just like in lesterland , the trick is , to run in the general election , you must do extremely well in the money election .
you do n't necessarily have to win . there is jerry brown .
but you must do extremely well .
and here 's the key : there are just as few relevant funders in usa-land as there are lesters in lesterland .
now you say , really ?
really .05 percent ?
well , here are the numbers from 2010 : .26 percent of america gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate , .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate , .01 percent - the one percent of the one percent - gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates , and in this election cycle , my favorite statistic is .000042 percent - for those of you doing the numbers , you know that 's 132 americans - gave 60 percent of the super pac money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending .
so i 'm just a lawyer , i look at this range of numbers , and i say it 's fair for me to say it 's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in america .
in this sense , the funders are our lesters .
now , what can we say about this democracy in usa-land ?
well , as the supreme court said in citizens united , we could say , of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials . we have a general election , but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election .
and number two , obviously , this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle , understated , camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy .
candidates for congress and members of congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to congress or to get their party back into power , and the question we need to ask is , what does it do to them , these humans , as they spend their time behind the telephone , calling people they 've never met , but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent ?
as anyone would , as they do this , they develop a sixth sense , a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money .
they become , in the words of " the x-files , " shape-shifters , as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money , not on issues one to 10 , but on issues 11 to 1,000 .
leslie byrne , a democrat from virginia , describes that when she went to congress , she was told by a colleague , " always lean to the green . "
then to clarify , she went on , " he was not an environmentalist . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so here too we have a democracy , a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people , competing dependencies , possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are .
okay , the united states is lesterland , point number one .
the united states is worse than lesterland , worse than lesterland because you can imagine in lesterland if we lesters got a letter from the government that said , " hey , you get to pick who gets to run in the general election , " we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of lesters .
you know , there are lesters from every part of social society .
there are rich lesters , poor lesters , black lesters , white lesters , not many women lesters , but put that to the side for one second .
we have lesters from everywhere . we could think , " what could we do to make lesterland better ? "
it 's at least possible the lesters would act for the good of lesterland .
but in our land , in this land , in usa-land , there are certainly some sweet lesters out there , many of them in this room here today , but the vast majority of lesters act for the lesters , because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest .
it 's for their private interest . in this sense , the usa is worse than lesterland .
and finally , point number three : whatever one wants to say about lesterland , against the background of its history , its traditions , in our land , in usa-land , lesterland is a corruption , a corruption .
now , by corruption i do n't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of congress .
i do n't mean rod blagojevich sense of corruption .
i do n't mean any criminal act .
the corruption i 'm talking about is perfectly legal .
it 's a corruption relative to the framers ' baseline for this republic .
the framers gave us what they called a republic , but by a republic they meant a representative democracy , and by a representative democracy , they meant a government , as madison put it in federalist 52 , that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone .
they have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency , but the problem here is that congress has evolved a different dependence , no longer a dependence upon the people alone , increasingly a dependence upon the funders .
now this is a dependence too , but it 's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people .
this is a corruption .
now , there 's good news and bad news about this corruption .
one bit of good news is that it 's bipartisan , equal-opportunity corruption .
it blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about .
it blocks the right too , as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible .
so the right wants smaller government .
when al gore was vice president , his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry .
the chief policy man took this idea to capitol hill , and as he reported back to me , the response was , " hell no !
if we deregulate these guys , how are we going to raise money from them ? "
this is a system that 's designed to save the status quo , including the status quo of big and invasive government .
it works against the left and the right , and that , you might say , is good news .
but here 's the bad news .
it 's a pathological , democracy-destroying corruption , because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election , that means the tiniest number of us , the tiniest , tiniest number of us , can block reform .
i know that should have been , like , a rock or something .
i can only find cheese . i 'm sorry . so there it is .
block reform .
because there is an economy here , an economy of influence , an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization .
it feeds on dysfunction .
the worse that it is for us , the better that it is for this fundraising .
henry david thoreau : " there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root . "
this is the root .
okay , now , every single one of you knows this .
you could n't be here if you did n't know this , yet you ignore it .
you ignore it . this is an impossible problem .
you focus on the possible problems , like eradicating polio from the world , or taking an image of every single street across the globe , or building the first real universal translator , or building a fusion factory in your garage .
these are the manageable problems , so you ignore - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - so you ignore this corruption .
but we can not ignore this corruption anymore .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we need a government that works .
and not works for the left or the right , but works for the left and the right , the citizens of the left and right , because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption .
so i want you to take hold , to grab the issue you care the most about .
climate change is mine , but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality .
grab that issue , sit it down in front of you , look straight in its eyes , and tell it there is no christmas this year .
there will never be a christmas .
we will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first .
so it 's not that mine is the most important issue . it 's not .
yours is the most important issue , but mine is the first issue , the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about .
no sensible reform , and we can not afford a world , a future , with no sensible reform .
okay . so how do we do it ?
turns out , the analytics here are easy , simple .
if the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of america , the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of americans , to spread it out , to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone .
and to do this does not require a constitutional amendment , changing the first amendment .
to do this would require a single statute , a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections , a statute of citizen-funded campaigns , and there 's any number of these proposals out there : fair elections now act , the american anti-corruption act , an idea in my book that i call the grant and franklin project to give vouchers to people to fund elections , an idea of john sarbanes called the grassroots democracy act .
each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us .
the analytics are easy here .
it 's the politics that 's hard , indeed impossibly hard , because this reform would shrink k street , and capitol hill , as congressman jim cooper , a democrat from tennessee , put it , has become a farm league for k street , a farm league for k street .
members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head , a business model focused on their life after government , their life as lobbyists .
fifty percent of the senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists , 42 percent of the house .
those numbers have only gone up , and as united republic calculated last april , the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent .
so it 's fair to ask , how is it possible for them to change this ?
now i get this skepticism .
i get this cynicism . i get this sense of impossibility .
but i do n't buy it .
this is a solvable issue .
if you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century , issues like racism , or sexism , or the issue that we 've been fighting in this century , homophobia , those are hard issues .
you do n't wake up one day no longer a racist .
it takes generations to tear that intuition , that dna , out of the soul of a people .
but this is a problem of just incentives , just incentives .
change the incentives , and the behavior changes , and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice .
when connecticut adopted this system , in the very first year , 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only .
it 's solvable , not by being a democrat , not by being a republican .
it 's solvable by being citizens , by being citizens , by being tedizens .
because if you want to kickstart reform , look , i could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy , i could give you back a republic .
okay . but even if you 're not yet with me , even if you believe this is impossible , what the five years since i spoke at ted has taught me as i 've spoken about this issue again and again is , even if you think it 's impossible , that is irrelevant .
irrelevant .
i spoke at dartmouth once , and a woman stood up after i spoke , i write in my book , and she said to me , " professor , you 've convinced me this is hopeless . hopeless .
there 's nothing we can do . "
when she said that , i scrambled .
i tried to think , " how do i respond to that hopelessness ?
what is that sense of hopelessness ? "
and what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son .
and i imagined a doctor coming to me and saying , " your son has terminal brain cancer , and there 's nothing you can do .
nothing you can do . "
so would i do nothing ?
would i just sit there ? accept it ? okay , nothing i can do ?
i 'm going off to build google glass .
of course not . i would do everything i could , and i would do everything i could because this is what love means , that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can , the odds be damned .
and then i saw the obvious link , because even we liberals love this country .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible , what this love of country says back is , " that 's just irrelevant . "
we lose something dear , something everyone in this room loves and cherishes , if we lose this republic , and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong .
so here 's my question : do you have that love ?
do you have that love ?
because if you do , then what the hell are you , what are the hell are we doing ?
when ben franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in september of 1787 , he was stopped in the street by a woman who said , " mr. franklin , what have you wrought ? "
franklin said , " a republic , madam , if you can keep it . "
a republic . a representative democracy .
a government dependent upon the people alone .
we have lost that republic .
all of us have to act to get it back .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- if you take 10,000 people at random , 9,999 have something in common : their interests in business lie on or near the earth 's surface .
the odd one out is an astronomer , and i am one of that strange breed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my talk will be in two parts . i 'll talk first as an astronomer , and then as a worried member of the human race .
but let 's start off by remembering that darwin showed how we 're the outcome of four billion years of evolution .
and what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before darwin 's simple beginning , to set our earth in a cosmic context .
and let me just run through a few slides .
this was the impact that happened last week on a comet .
if they 'd sent a nuke , it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last monday .
so that 's another project for nasa .
that 's mars from the european mars express , and at new year .
this artist 's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on titan , saturn 's giant moon .
it landed on the surface . this is pictures taken on the way down .
that looks like a coastline .
it is indeed , but the ocean is liquid methane - the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade .
if we go beyond our solar system , we 've learned that the stars are n't twinkly points of light .
each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it .
and we can see places where stars are forming , like the eagle nebula . we see stars dying .
in six billion years , the sun will look like that .
and some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion , leaving remnants like that .
on a still bigger scale , we see entire galaxies of stars .
we see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled .
and to the cosmologist , these galaxies are just the atoms , as it were , of the large-scale universe .
this picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky .
through a small telescope , this would look quite blank , but you see here hundreds of little , faint smudges .
each is a galaxy , fully like ours or andromeda , which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us .
the stars in those galaxies probably do n't have planets around them .
there 's scant chance of life there - that 's because there 's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron , the building blocks of planets and of life .
we believe that all of this emerged from a big bang - a hot , dense state . so how did that amorphous big bang turn into our complex cosmos ?
i 'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time , which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out .
but you see , as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom , you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small , dense irregularities , and structures develop .
and we 'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe .
and we compare simulated universes like that - i 'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk - with what we actually see in the sky .
well , we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the big bang , but we still do n't know what banged and why it banged .
that 's a challenge for 21st-century science .
if my research group had a logo , it would be this picture here : an ouroboros , where you see the micro-world on the left - the world of the quantum - and on the right the large-scale universe of planets , stars and galaxies .
we know our universes are united though - links between left and right .
the everyday world is determined by atoms , how they stick together to make molecules .
stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together .
and , as we 've learned in the last few years , galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter : particles in huge swarms , far smaller even than atomic nuclei .
but we 'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top .
the micro-world of the quantum is understood .
on the right hand side , gravity holds sway . einstein explained that .
but the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory - symbolized , as it were , gastronomically at the top of that picture . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and until we have that synthesis , we wo n't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom , quantum effects could shake everything .
and so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small , which we do n't yet have .
one idea , incidentally - and i had this hazard sign to say i 'm going to speculate from now on - is that our big bang was not the only one .
one idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space , just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper .
you can imagine ants on one of them thinking it 's a two-dimensional universe , not being aware of another population of ants on the other .
so there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours , but we 're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension , and we 're imprisoned in our three .
and so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we 've normally called our universe - the aftermath of our big bang . and here 's another picture .
bottom right depicts our universe , which on the horizon is not beyond that , but even that is just one bubble , as it were , in some vaster reality .
many people suspect that just as we 've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems , one galaxy to many galaxies , we have to go to many big bangs from one big bang , perhaps these many big bangs displaying an immense variety of properties .
well , let 's go back to this picture .
there 's one challenge symbolized at the top , but there 's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom .
you want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small , but we want to understand the very complex .
and the most complex things are ourselves , midway between atoms and stars .
we depend on stars to make the atoms we 're made of .
we depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure .
we clearly have to be large , compared to atoms , to have layer upon layer of complex structure .
we clearly have to be small , compared to stars and planets - otherwise we 'd be crushed by gravity . and in fact , we are midway .
it would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us .
the geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms , within a factor of two of the mass of each person here .
well , most of you anyway .
the science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all , greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right .
and it 's this science , which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world , but also transforming our world faster than ever .
and more than that , it 's engendering new kinds of change .
and i now move on to the second part of my talk , and the book " our final century " was mentioned .
if i was not a self-effacing brit , i would mention the book myself , and i would add that it 's available in paperback .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in america it was called " our final hour " because americans like instant gratification .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but my theme is that in this century , not only has science changed the world faster than ever , but in new and different ways .
targeted drugs , genetic modification , artificial intelligence , perhaps even implants into our brains , may change human beings themselves . and human beings , their physique and character , has not changed for thousands of years .
it may change this century .
it 's new in our history .
and the human impact on the global environment - greenhouse warming , mass extinctions and so forth - is unprecedented , too .
and so , this makes this coming century a challenge .
bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects , while , nonetheless , reducing pressure on energy and resources .
but they will have a dark side .
in our interconnected world , novel technology could empower just one fanatic , or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses , to trigger some kind on disaster .
indeed , catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror .
and even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence .
in fact , some years ago , bill joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over , etc .
i do n't go along with all that , but it 's interesting that he had a simple solution .
it was what he called " fine-grained relinquishment . "
he wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits . now , that 's absurdly naive for two reasons .
first , any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones .
and also , when a scientist makes a discovery , he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be .
and so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science .
we have to accept that there will be hazards .
and i think we have to go back to what happened in the post-war era , post-world war ii , when the nuclear scientists who 'd been involved in making the atomic bomb , in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers .
and they were inspired not by the young einstein , who did the great work in relativity , but by the old einstein , the icon of poster and t-shirt , who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws .
he was premature . but he was a moral compass - an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control .
and perhaps the greatest living person is someone i 'm privileged to know , joe rothblatt .
equally untidy office there , as you can see .
he 's 96 years old , and he founded the pugwash movement .
he persuaded einstein , as his last act , to sign the famous memorandum of bertrand russell .
and he sets an example of the concerned scientist .
and i think to harness science optimally , to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed , we need latter-day counterparts of people like joseph rothblatt .
we need not just campaigning physicists , but we need biologists , computer experts and environmentalists as well .
and i think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service , or company employees subject to commercial pressure .
i wrote my book , " our final century , " as a scientist , just a general scientist . but there 's one respect , i think , in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective , and that 's that it offers an awareness of the immense future .
the stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture - outside the american bible belt , anyway - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but most people , even those who are familiar with evolution , are n't mindful that even more time lies ahead .
the sun has been shining for four and a half billion years , but it 'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out .
on that schematic picture , a sort of time-lapse picture , we 're halfway .
and it 'll be another six billion before that happens , and any remaining life on earth is vaporized .
there 's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there , experiencing the sun 's demise , but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria .
the unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go , here on earth and probably far beyond .
so we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our earth and beyond .
if you represent the earth 's lifetime by a single year , say from january when it was made to december , the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in june - a tiny fraction of the year .
but even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective , our century is very , very special , the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet .
as i should have shown this earlier , it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun ; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria .
when einstein died in 1955 , one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by herblock in the washington post .
the plaque reads , " albert einstein lived here . "
and i 'd like to end with a vignette , as it were , inspired by this image .
we 've been familiar for 40 years with this image : the fragile beauty of land , ocean and clouds , contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints .
but let 's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar , not just for 40 years , but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our earth .
what would they have seen ?
over nearly all that immense time , earth 's appearance would have changed very gradually .
the only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions .
apart from those brief traumas , nothing happens suddenly .
the continental landmasses drifted around .
ice cover waxed and waned .
successions of new species emerged , evolved and became extinct .
but in just a tiny sliver of the earth 's history , the last one-millionth part , a few thousand years , the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before .
this signaled the start of agriculture .
change has accelerated as human populations rose .
then other things happened even more abruptly .
within just 50 years - that 's one hundredth of one millionth of the earth 's age - the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise , and ominously fast .
the planet became an intense emitter of radio waves - the total output from all tv and cell phones and radar transmissions . and something else happened .
metallic objects - albeit very small ones , a few tons at most - escaped into orbit around the earth .
some journeyed to the moons and planets .
a race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict earth 's final doom in another six billion years .
but could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the earth 's life ?
these human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed ?
if they continued their vigil , what might these hypothetical aliens witness will some spasm foreclose earth 's future ?
or will the biosphere stabilize ?
or will some of the metallic objects launched from the earth spawn new oases , a post-human life elsewhere ?
the science done by the young einstein will continue as long as our civilization , but for civilization to survive , we 'll need the wisdom of the old einstein - humane , global and farseeing .
and whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the earth , far beyond the earth as depicted here .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view , and this world i 'm going to talk about is the micro world .
i 've found , after doing this for many , many years , that there 's a magical world behind reality .
and that can be seen directly through a microscope , and i 'm going to show you some of this today .
so let 's start off looking at something rather not-so-small , something that we can see with our naked eye , and that 's a bee . so when you look at this bee , it 's about this size here , it 's about a centimeter .
but to really see the details of the bee , and really appreciate what it is , you have to look a little bit closer .
so that 's just the eye of the bee with a microscope , and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia , and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they 're right up close to something , because they ca n't see in stereo .
as we go smaller , here is a human hair .
a human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see .
it 's about a tenth of a millimeter .
and as we go smaller again , about ten times smaller than that , is a cell .
so you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair .
so when we would look at cells , this is how i really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope .
when i first saw living cells in a microscope , i was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like .
so if you look at the cell like that from the immune system , they 're actually moving all over the place .
this cell is looking for foreign objects , bacteria , things that it can find .
and it 's looking around , and when it finds something , and recognizes it being foreign , it will actually engulf it and eat it .
so if you look right there , it finds that little bacterium , and it engulfs it and eats it .
if you take some heart cells from an animal , and put it in a dish , they 'll just sit there and beat .
that 's their job . every cell has a mission in life , and these cells , the mission is to move blood around our body .
these next cells are nerve cells , and right now , as we see and understand what we 're looking at , our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now . they 're not just static . they 're moving around making new connections , and that 's what happens when we learn .
as you go farther down this scale here , that 's a micron , or a micrometer , and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom . now , an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom .
that 's how small that is .
and microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms . so these are some pictures of individual atoms . each bump here is an individual atom .
this is a ring of cobalt atoms .
so this whole world , the nano world , this area in here is called the nano world , and the nano world , the whole micro world that we see , there 's a nano world that is wrapped up within that , and the whole - and that is the world of molecules and atoms .
but i want to talk about this larger world , the world of the micro world .
so if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower , what would that flower look like , if the flower was this big ?
it would n't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower . so if you look at this flower here , and you 're a little bug , if you 're on that surface of that flower , that 's what the terrain would look like .
the petal of that flower looks like that , so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects , and if you look a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here , this is the style of that flower , and you notice that it 's got these little - these are like little jelly-like things that are what are called spurs . these are nectar spurs .
so this little ant that 's crawling here , it 's like it 's in a little willy wonka land .
it 's like a little disneyland for them . it 's not like what we see .
these are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there , and here is a - what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen , when you look in a microscope , it 's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen .
so this , for example , when you see bees flying around these little plants , and they 're collecting pollen , those pollen grains that they 're collecting , they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive , and that 's what makes the beehive , the wax in the beehive . and they 're also collecting nectar , and that 's what makes the honey that we eat .
here 's a close-up picture , or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth , and if you had really , really good vision , with your naked eye , you 'd see it about that well .
there 's the stamen and the pistil . but look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope . that 's the stamen .
so that 's thousands of little grains of pollen there , and there 's the pistil there , and these are the little things called trichomes . and that 's what makes the flower give a fragrance , and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances .
i want to talk about something really ordinary , just ordinary sand .
i became interested in sand about 10 years ago , when i first saw sand from maui , and in fact , this is a little bit of sand from maui .
so sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size .
each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size .
but when you look closer at this , look at what 's there .
it 's really quite amazing . you have microshells there .
you have things like coral .
you have fragments of other shells . you have olivine .
you have bits of a volcano . there 's a little bit of a volcano there . you have tube worms .
an amazing array of incredible things exist in sand .
and the reason that is , is because in a place like this island , a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow , and when they die , their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand , things like coral and so forth .
so here 's , for example , a picture of sand from maui .
this is from lahaina , and when we 're walking along a beach , we 're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history .
we do n't realize it , but it 's actually a record of that entire ecology .
so here we see , for example , a sponge spicule , two bits of coral here , that 's a sea urchin spine . really some amazing stuff .
so when i first looked at this , i was - i thought , gee , this is like a little treasure trove here .
i could n't believe it , and i 'd go around dissecting the little bits out and making photographs of them .
here 's what most of the sand in our world looks like .
these are quartz crystals and feldspar , so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar . it 's the erosion of granite rock .
so mountains are built up , and they erode away by water and rain and ice and so forth , and they become grains of sand .
there 's some sand that 's really much more colorful .
these are sand from near the great lakes , and you can see that it 's filled with minerals like pink garnet and green epidote , all kinds of amazing stuff , and if you look at different sands from different places , every single beach , every single place you look at sand , it 's different . here 's from big sur , like they 're little jewels .
there are places in africa where they do the mining of jewels , and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean , and it 's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope .
so every grain of sand is unique . every beach is different .
every single grain is different . there are no two grains of sand alike in the world .
every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere .
they 're like a snapshot in time .
now sand is not only on earth , but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe . in fact , outer space is filled with sand , and that sand comes together to make our planets and the moon .
and you can see those in micrometeorites .
this is some micrometeorites that the army gave me , and they get these out of the drinking wells in the south pole .
and they 're quite amazing-looking , and these are the tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in - the planets and the moon .
so nasa wanted me to take some pictures of moon sand , so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the apollo missions that happened 40 years ago .
and i started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes .
this was the first picture i took . it was kind of amazing .
i thought it looked kind of a little bit like the moon , which is sort of interesting .
now , the way my microscopes work is , normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time , so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope , keep taking pictures , and then i have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like , and i do that in 3d . so there , you can see , is a left-eye view . there 's a right-eye view .
so sort of left-eye view , right-eye view .
now something 's interesting here . this looks very different than any sand on earth that i 've ever seen , and i 've seen a lot of sand on earth , believe me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- look at this hole in the middle . that hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the moon .
now , the moon has no atmosphere , so micrometeorites come in continuously , and the whole surface of the moon is covered with powder now , because for four billion years it 's been bombarded by micrometeorites , and when micrometeorites come in at about 20 to 60,000 miles an hour , they vaporize on contact .
and you can see here that that is - that 's sort of vaporized , and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together .
this is a very small grain of sand , this whole thing .
and that 's called a ring agglutinate .
and many of the grains of sand on the moon look like that , and you 'd never find that on earth .
most of the sand on the moon , especially - and you know when you look at the moon , there 's the dark areas and the light areas . the dark areas are lava flows . they 're basaltic lava flows , and that 's what this sand looks like , very similar to the sand that you would see in haleakala .
other sands , when these micrometeorites come in , they vaporize and they make these fountains , these microscopic fountains that go up into the - i was going to say " up into the air , " but there is no air - goes sort of up , and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly , and they harden , and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the moon , they have these beautiful colored glass spherules .
and these are actually microscopic ; you need a microscope to see these .
now here 's a grain of sand that is from the moon , and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there .
this grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old , and it 's never eroded away like the way we have sand on earth erodes away because of water and tumbling , air , and so forth . all you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the sun , has these solar storms , and that 's erosion by solar radiation .
so what i 've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view .
i think that this was best put by william blake when he said , " to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower , hold infinity in the palm of your hand , and eternity in an hour . "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to take you on a trip to an alien world .
and it 's not a trip that requires light-years of travel , but it 's to a place where it 's defined by light .
so it 's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light .
i 've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence .
i study it because i think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs .
i also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution .
but mostly i 'm entranced by it .
since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible , when i went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays , i 've been a bioluminescence junky .
but i would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words , and they were totally inadequate to the task .
i needed some way to share the experience directly .
and the first time i figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called deep rover .
this next video clip , you 're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence .
and the first thing you 're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : in front of the sub , a mess screen will come into contact with the sub 's lights switched off , it is possible to see their bioluminescence - the light produced when they collide with the mesh .
this is the first time it has ever been recorded .
edith widder : so i recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye .
which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible .
but just to try to prove that fact to you , i 've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible , i have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it .
and you 'll note there 's no light coming from them right now , either because they 're dead - -lrb- laughter -rrb- or because i need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like .
-lrb- gasps -rrb- oops . sorry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i spend most of my time working in the dark ; i 'm used to that .
okay .
so that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate , a single-celled alga .
so why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light ?
well , it uses it to defend itself from its predators .
the flash is like a scream for help .
it 's what 's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm , and just like the alarm on your car or your house , it 's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder , thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away .
there 's a lot of animals that use this trick , for example this black dragonfish .
it 's got a light organ under its eye .
it 's got a chin barbel .
it 's got a lot of other light organs you ca n't see , but you 'll see in here in a minute .
so we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime , because the top speed of this fish is one knot , which was the top speed of the submersible .
but it was worth it , because we caught it in a special capture device , brought it up into the lab on the ship , and then everything on this fish lights up .
it 's unbelievable .
the light organs under the eyes are flashing .
that chin barbel is flashing .
it 's got light organs on its belly that are flashing , fin lights .
it 's a scream for help ; it 's meant to attract attention .
it 's phenomenal .
and you normally do n't get to see this because we 've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets .
there 's other ways you can defend yourself with light .
for example , this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud .
this blinds or distracts the predator .
this little squid is called the fire shooter now it may look like a tasty morsel , or a pig 's head with wings - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but if it 's attacked , it puts out a barrage of light - in fact , a barrage of photon torpedoes .
i just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing .
it 's phenomenal .
so there 's a lot of animals in the open ocean - most of them that make light .
and we have a pretty good idea , for most of them , why .
they use it for finding food , for attracting mates , for defending against predators .
but when you get down to the bottom of the ocean , that 's where things get really strange .
and some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in " avatar , " but you do n't have to travel to pandora to see them .
they 're things like this .
this is a golden coral , a bush .
it grows very slowly .
in fact , it 's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old , which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed .
the other reason is this amazing bush glows .
so if you brush up against it , any place you brushed against it , you get this twinkling blue-green light that 's just breathtaking .
and you see things like this .
this looks like something out of a dr. seuss book - just all manner of creatures all over this thing .
and these are flytrap anemones .
now if you poke it , it pulls in its tentacles .
but if you keep poking it , it starts to produce light .
and it actually ends up looking like a galaxy .
it produces these strings of light , presumably as some form of defense .
there are starfish that can make light .
and there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms .
this looks like a plant , but it 's actually an animal .
and it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock .
so it can actually hold itself in very strong currents , as you see here .
but if we collect it very gently , and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock , it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume , changing color as it goes , from green to blue .
colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we have no idea why it does that .
here 's another one . this is also a sea pen .
it 's got a brittle star hitching a ride .
it 's a green saber of light .
and like the one you just saw , it can produce these as bands of light .
so if i squeeze the base , the bands go from base to tip .
if i squeeze the tip , they go from tip to base .
so what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle ?
-lrb- gasps -rrb- i 'd be very interested in your theories about what that 's about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there 's a language of light in the deep ocean , and we 're just beginning to understand it , and one way we 're going about that is we 're imitating a lot of these displays .
this is an optical lure that i 've used .
we call it the electronic jellyfish .
it 's just 16 blue leds that we can program to do different types of displays .
and we view it with a camera system i developed called eye-in-the-sea that uses far red light that 's invisible to most animals , so it 's unobtrusive .
so i just want to show you some of the responses we 've elicited from animals in the deep sea .
so the camera 's black and white .
it 's not high-resolution .
and what you 're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of - like the cockroaches of the ocean - there are isopods all over it .
and right in the front is the electronic jellyfish .
and when it starts flashing , it 's just going to be one of the leds that 's flashing very fast .
but as soon as it starts to flash - and it 's going to look big , because it blooms on the camera - i want you to look right here .
there 's something small there that responds .
we 're talking to something .
it looks like a little of string pearls basically - in fact , three strings of pearls .
and this was very consistent .
this was in the bahamas at about 2,000 feet .
we basically have a chat room going on here , because once it gets started , everybody 's talking .
and i think this is actually a shrimp that 's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water .
but the cool thing is , we 're talking to it .
we do n't know what we 're saying .
personally , i think it 's something sexy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then finally , i want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world 's first deep-sea webcam , which we had installed in monterey canyon last year .
we 've only just begun to analyze all of this data .
this is going to be a glowing source first , which is like bioluminescent bacteria .
and it is an optical cue that there 's carrion on the bottom of the ocean .
so this scavenger comes in , which is a giant sixgill shark .
and i ca n't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in , because there 's bait right there .
but if it had been following the odor plume , it would have come in from the other direction .
and it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish .
that 's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark .
okay , so this next one is from the webcam , and it 's going to be this pinwheel display .
and this is a burglar alarm .
and that was a humboldt squid , a juvenile humboldt squid , about three feet long .
this is at 3,000 feet in monterey canyon .
but if it 's a burglar alarm , you would n't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly .
it 's supposed to be attacking what 's attacking the jellyfish .
but we did see a bunch of responses like this .
this guy is a little more contemplative .
" hey , wait a minute .
there 's supposed to be something else there . "
he 's thinking about it .
but he 's persistent .
he keeps coming back .
and then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more , and thinks , " maybe if i come in from a different angle . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nope .
so we are starting to get a handle on this , but only just the beginnings .
we need more eyes on the process .
so if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible , by all means , climb in and take the plunge .
this is something that should be on everybody 's bucket list , because we live on an ocean planet .
more than 90 percent , 99 percent , of the living space on our planet is ocean .
it 's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures , alien life forms that you do n't have to travel to another planet to see .
but if you do take the plunge , please remember to turn out the lights .
but i warn you , it 's addictive .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk today about - i 've been asked to take the long view , and i 'm going to tell you what i think are the three biggest problems for humanity from this long point of view .
some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers , which is encouraging .
it seems that there 's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important .
the first is - death is a big problem .
if you look at the statistics , the odds are not very favorable to us .
so far , most people who have lived have also died .
roughly 90 percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now .
so the annual death rate adds up to 150,000 - sorry , the daily death rate - 150,000 people per day , which is a huge number by any standard .
the annual death rate , then , becomes 56 million .
if we just look at the single , biggest cause of death - aging - it accounts for roughly two-thirds of all human people who die .
that adds up to an annual death toll of greater than the population of canada .
sometimes , we do n't see a problem because either it 's too familiar or it 's too big .
ca n't see it because it 's too big .
i think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem .
once you think about it , you see this is not statistical points ; these are - let 's see , how far have i talked ?
i 've talked for three minutes .
so that would be , roughly , 324 people have died since i 've begun speaking .
people like - it 's roughly the population in this room has just died .
now , the human cost of that is obvious , once you start to think about it - the suffering , the loss - it 's also , economically , enormously wasteful .
i just look at the information , and knowledge , and experience that is lost due to natural causes of death in general , and aging , in particular .
suppose we approximated one person with one book ?
now , of course , this is an underestimation .
a person 's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book .
but let 's suppose we did this .
52 million people die of natural causes each year corresponds , then , to 52 million volumes destroyed .
library of congress holds 18 million volumes .
we are upset about the burning of the library of alexandria .
it 's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember , even today .
but this is the equivalent of three libraries of congress - burnt down , forever lost - each year .
so that 's the first big problem .
and i wish godspeed to aubrey de grey , and other people like him , to try to do something about this as soon as possible .
existential risk - the second big problem .
existential risk is a threat to human survival , or to the long-term potential of our species .
now , why do i say that this is a big problem ?
well , let 's first look at the probability - and this is very , very difficult to estimate - but there have been only four studies on this in recent years , which is surprising .
you would think that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big , but it 's a very neglected area .
but there have been four studies - one by john lesley , wrote a book on this .
he estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century : 50 percent .
similarly , the astronomer royal , whom we heard speak yesterday , also has a 50 percent probability estimate .
another author does n't give any numerical estimate , but says the probability is significant that it will fail .
i wrote a long paper on this .
i said assigning a less than 20 percent probability would be a mistake in light of the current evidence we have .
now , the exact figures here , we should take with a big grain of salt , but there seems to be a consensus that the risk is substantial .
everybody who has looked at this and studied it agrees .
now , if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point - not very much - so that 's equivalent to 60 million lives saved , if we just count the currently living people , the current generation .
now one percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million .
so that 's a large number .
if we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up , then the figure becomes astronomical .
if we could eventually colonize a chunk of the universe - the virgo supercluster - maybe it will take us 100 million years to get there , but if we go extinct we never will .
then , even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number - 10 to the power of 32 .
so if you take into account future generations as much as our own , every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant .
the only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve .
and even if you just look at the current people , and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct , it should still have a high priority .
now , let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem , because it 's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp .
think about some time in your life - some people might never have experienced it - but some people , there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic .
it might have been at the moment of some great , creative inspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage .
or when you understood something you had never done before .
or perhaps in the ecstasy of romantic love .
or an aesthetic experience - a sunset or a great piece of art .
every once in a while we have these moments , and we realize just how good life can be when it 's at its best .
and you wonder , why ca n't it be like that all the time ?
you just want to cling onto this .
and then , of course , it drifts back into ordinary life and the memory fades .
and it 's really difficult to recall , in a normal frame of mind , just how good life can be at its best .
or how bad it can be at its worst .
the third big problem is that life is n't usually as wonderful as it could be .
i think that 's a big , big problem .
it 's easy to say what we do n't want .
here are a number of things that we do n't want - illness , involuntary death , unnecessary suffering , cruelty , stunted growth , memory loss , ignorance , absence of creativity .
suppose we fixed these things - we did something about all of these .
we were very successful .
we got rid of all of these things .
we might end up with something like this , which is - i mean , it 's a heck of a lot better than that .
but is this really the best we can dream of ?
is this the best we can do ?
or is it possible to find something a little bit more inspiring to work towards ?
and if we think about this , i think it 's very clear that there are ways in which we could change things , not just by eliminating negatives , but adding positives .
on my wish list , at least , would be : much longer , healthier lives , greater subjective well-being , enhanced cognitive capacities , more knowledge and understanding , unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits , better relationships , an unbounded potential for spiritual , moral and intellectual development .
if we want to achieve this , what , in the world , would have to change ?
and this is the answer - we would have to change .
not just the world around us , but we , ourselves .
not just the way we think about the world , but the way we are - our very biology .
human nature would have to change .
now , when we think about changing human nature , the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies - growth hormone therapy , cosmetic surgery , stimulants like ritalin , adderall , anti-depressants , anabolic steroids , artificial hearts .
it 's a pretty pathetic list .
they do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition , but for most people , they do n't really transform what it is to be human .
and they also all seem a little bit - most people have this instinct that , well , sure , there needs to be anti-depressants for the really depressed people .
but there 's a kind of queasiness that these are unnatural in some way .
it 's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use .
we have skin enhancements , clothing .
as far as i can see , all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room , so that 's a great thing .
mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial - caffeine , alcohol , nicotine , immune system enhancement , vision enhancement , anesthetics - we take that very much for granted , but just think about how great progress that is - like , having an operation before anesthetics was not fun .
contraceptives , cosmetics and brain reprogramming techniques - that sounds ominous , but the distinction between what is a technology - a gadget would be the archetype - and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle .
so if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read , you 're actually , literally rewriting your own brain .
you 're changing the microstructure of your brain as you go along .
so in a broad sense , we do n't need to think about technology as only little gadgets , like these things here , but even institutions and techniques , psychological methods and so forth .
forms of organization can have a profound impact on human nature .
looking ahead , there is a range of technologies that are almost certain to be developed sooner or later .
we are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are , but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws , laws of chemistry , etc .
it 's possible to assume , setting aside a possibility of catastrophe , that sooner or later we will develop all of these .
and even just a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition .
so let 's look at some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to leave room for improvement .
health span is a big and urgent thing , because if you 're not alive , then all the other things will be to little avail .
intellectual capacity - let 's take that box , which falls into a lot of different sub-categories : memory , concentration , mental energy , intelligence , empathy .
these are really great things .
part of the reason why we value these traits is that they make us better at competing with other people - they 're positional goods .
but part of the reason - and that 's the reason why we have ethical ground for pursuing these - is that they 're also intrinsically valuable .
it 's just better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with , and to remember what you have learned .
modalities and special faculties .
now , the human mind is not a single unitary information processor , but it has a lot of different , special , evolved modules that do specific things for us .
if you think about what we normally take as giving life a lot of its meaning - music , humor , eroticism , spirituality , aesthetics , nurturing and caring , gossip , chatting with people - all of these , very likely , are enabled by a special circuitry that we humans have , but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these .
we 're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and enjoy it .
all of these would enable , in principle - be amenable to enhancement .
some people have a better musical ability and ability to appreciate music than others have .
it 's also interesting to think about what other things are - so if these all enabled great values , why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be ?
imagine a species that just did n't have this neural machinery for processing music .
and they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance , like the one we just heard - because of people making stupid movements , and they would be really irritated and would n't see what we were up to .
but maybe they have another faculty , something else that would seem equally irrational to us , but they actually tap into some great possible value there .
but we are just literally deaf to that kind of value .
so we could think of adding on different , new sensory capacities and mental faculties .
bodily functionality and morphology and affective self-control .
greater subjective well-being .
be able to switch between relaxation and activity - being able to go slow when you need to do that , and to speed up .
able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do - easier to achieve the flow state , when you 're totally immersed in something you are doing .
conscientiousness and sympathy .
the ability to - it 's another interesting application that would have large social ramification , perhaps .
if you could actually choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person , undiminished through time , so that would n't have to - love would never have to fade if you did n't want it to .
that 's probably not all that difficult .
it might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this .
it 's been done in voles .
you can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it 's naturally polygamous .
it 's just a single gene .
might be more complicated in humans , but perhaps not that much .
this is the last picture that i want to - now we 've got to use the laser pointer .
a possible mode of being here would be a way of life - a way of being , experiencing , thinking , seeing , interacting with the world .
down here in this little corner , here , we have the little sub-space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings - beings with our biological capacities .
it 's a part of the space that 's accessible to animals ; since we are animals , we are a subset of that .
and then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities .
there would be different modes of being you could experience if you were able to stay alive for , say , 200 years .
then you could live sorts of lives and accumulate wisdoms that are just not possible for humans as we currently are .
so then , you move off to this larger sphere of " human + , " and you could continue that process and eventually explore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being .
now , why is that a good thing to do ?
well , we know already that in this little human circle there , there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being - human life at its best is wonderful .
we have no reason to believe that within this much , much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being , perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability even to imagine or dream about .
and so , to fix this third problem , i think we need - slowly , carefully , with ethical wisdom and constraint - develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it and find the great values that might hide there .
thanks .
i 'd like to dedicate this one to all the women in south africa - those women who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid .
and , of course , i 'm dedicating it also to my grandmother , whom i think really played quite a lot of important roles , especially for me when i was an activist , and being harassed by the police .
you will recall that in 1976 , june 16 , the students of south africa boycotted the language of afrikaans as the medium of the oppressor , as they were sort of like really told that they must do everything in afrikaans - biology , mathematics - and what about our languages ?
and the students wanted to speak to the government , and police answered with bullets .
so every year , june 16 , we will commemorate all those comrades or students who died .
and i was very young then . i think i was 11 years , and i started asking questions , and that 's when my political education started .
and i joined , later on , the youth organization under the african national congress .
so as part of organizing this and whatever , this commemoration , the police will round us up as they call us leaders .
and i used to run away from home , when i know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of june or so .
and my grandmother one time said , " no , look , you 're not going to run away .
this is your place , you stay here . "
and indeed , the police came - because they 'll just arrest us and put us in jail and release us whenever they feel like , after the 20th or so .
so it was on the 10th of june , and they came , and they surrounded the house , and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house , and opened the kitchen door .
and she said to them , " vusi 's here , and you 're not going to take him tonight .
i 'm tired of you having to come here , harassing us , while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes .
he is here , and you 're not going to take him .
i 've got a bowl full of boiling water - the first one who comes in here , gets it . "
and they left .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ thula mama , thula mama , thula mama , thula mama . ♫ ♫ through the mist of the tears in your eyes on my childhood memory , ♫ ♫ i know the truth in your smile , ♫ ♫ i know the truth in your smile , ♫ ♫ piercing through the gloom of my ignorance . ♫ ♫ oh , there is a mama lying down sleeping ♫ ♫ you 're very ill and your heart crying . ♫ ♫ wondering , wondering , wondering , wondering where is this world coming to . ♫ ♫ is it right the children have to fend for themselves ? no , no , no , no , no. no . ♫
♫ is it right heaping trouble on an old lady 's head ? ♫ ♫ so unlucky faceless people . ♫ ♫ thula mama mama , thula mama . thula mama mama . ♫ ♫ thula mama , thula mama , thula mama mama , thula mama ♫ ♫ tomorrow it 's going to be better . ♫ ♫ tomorrow it 's going to be better to climb , mama . ♫ ♫ thula mama , thula mama . ♫ ♫ am i to break into the song like the blues man or troubadour . ♫ ♫ and then from long distance in no blues club am i to sing , ♫ ♫ baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby . ♫
♫ should i now stop singing of love , ♫ ♫ now that my memory 's surrounded by blood ? ♫ ♫ sister , why oh why do we at times mistake a pimple for a cancer ? ♫ ♫ so who are they who says , no more love poems now ? ♫ ♫ i want to sing a song of love ♫ ♫ for that woman who jumped the fences pregnant ♫ ♫ and still gave birth to a healthy child . ♫ ♫ softly i walk into the sun rays of the smile ♫ ♫ that will ignite my love song , my song of life , ♫
♫ my song of love , my song of life , my song of love , ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love , my song of life . ♫ ♫ ooh , i 've not tried to run away from song , ♫ ♫ i hear a persistent voice , more powerful than the enemy bombs . ♫ ♫ the song that washed our lives and the rains of our blood . ♫ ♫ my song of love and my song of life , my song of love , ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love , ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love - i want everybody to sing with me - ♫
♫ my song of life , my song of love , my song of life - everybody sing with me - ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love - i ca n't hear you - ♫ ♫ my song of love , my song of life - you can do better - ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love - keep singing , keep singing - ♫ ♫ my song of love , my song of life , yes , my song of love - ♫ ♫ you can do better than that - ♫ ♫ my song of life , yes , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love - ♫
♫ keep singing , keep singing , keep singing - my song of love . ♫ ♫ oh yeah . my song of - a love song , my song of life . sing . a love song , my song of life . sing . ♫ ♫ love song , my song of life . sing . love song , my song of life . sing . ♫ ♫ love song , my song of life . sing . love song , my song of life . ♫ ♫ love song , my song of life . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee , as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything .
so the natural question you ask then at that point is , how do i get good at what i 'm trying to do ?
and it became a question of , how do we all get good at what we 're trying to do ?
it 's hard enough to learn to get the skills , try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you 're taking on .
i had to think about how i sew and how i cut , but then also how i pick the right person to come to an operating room .
and then in the midst of all this came this new context for thinking about what it meant to be good .
in the last few years we realized we were in the deepest crisis of medicine 's existence due to something you do n't normally think about when you 're a doctor concerned with how you do good for people , which is the cost of health care .
there 's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do .
the political fight that we 've developed has become one around whether it 's the government that 's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem .
and the answer is yes and no ; it 's deeper than all of that .
the cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us .
and in order to understand this , i 'm going to take you back a couple of generations .
i want to take you back to a time when lewis thomas was writing in his book , " the youngest science . "
lewis thomas was a physician-writer , one of my favorite writers .
and he wrote this book to explain , among other things , what it was like to be a medical intern at the boston city hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937 .
it was a time when medicine was cheap and very ineffective .
if you were in a hospital , he said , it was going to do you good only because it offered you some warmth , some food , shelter , and maybe the caring attention of a nurse .
doctors and medicine made no difference at all .
that did n't seem to prevent the doctors from being frantically busy in their days , as he explained .
what they were trying to do was figure out whether you might have one of the diagnoses for which they could do something .
and there were a few .
you might have a lobar pneumonia , for example , and they could give you an antiserum , an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus , if the intern sub-typed it correctly .
if you had an acute congestive heart failure , they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein , giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent .
if you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions , you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis , in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic - as long as you did n't overdose them and kill them .
beyond these sorts of things , a medical doctor did n't have a lot that they could do .
this was when the core structure of medicine was created - what it meant to be good at what we did and how we wanted to build medicine to be .
it was at a time when what was known you could know , you could hold it all in your head , and you could do it all .
if you had a prescription pad , if you had a nurse , if you had a hospital that would give you a place to convalesce , maybe some basic tools , you really could do it all .
you set the fracture , you drew the blood , you spun the blood , looked at it under the microscope , you plated the culture , you injected the antiserum .
this was a life as a craftsman .
as a result , we built it around a culture and set of values that said what you were good at was being daring , at being courageous , at being independent and self-sufficient .
autonomy was our highest value .
go a couple generations forward to where we are , though , and it looks like a completely different world .
we have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have .
we ca n't cure it all .
we ca n't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life .
but we can make it possible for most .
but what does it take ?
well , we 've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures .
we 've discovered 6,000 drugs that i 'm now licensed to prescribe .
and we 're trying to deploy this capability , town by town , to every person alive - in our own country , let alone around the world .
and we 've reached the point where we 've realized , as doctors , we ca n't know it all .
we ca n't do it all by ourselves .
there was a study where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you came into a hospital , as it changed over time .
and in the year 1970 , it took just over two full-time equivalents of clinicians .
that is to say , it took basically the nursing time and then just a little bit of time for a doctor who more or less checked in on you once a day .
by the end of the 20th century , it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient - specialists , physical therapists , the nurses .
we 're all specialists now , even the primary care physicians .
everyone just has a piece of the care .
but holding onto that structure we built around the daring , independence , self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster .
we have trained , hired and rewarded people to be cowboys .
but it 's pit crews that we need , pit crews for patients .
there 's evidence all around us : 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care .
60 percent of our asthma , stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care .
two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they did n't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene .
our experience as people who get sick , need help from other people , is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to - hardworking , incredibly well-trained and very smart - that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope , but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way .
there 's another sign that we need pit crews , and that 's the unmanageable cost of our care .
now we in medicine , i think , are baffled by this question of cost .
we want to say , " this is just the way it is .
this is just what medicine requires . "
when you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin , that mostly did n't do the job , to one where , if it gets bad enough , we can do a hip replacement , a knee replacement that gives you years , maybe decades , without disability , a dramatic change , well is it any surprise that that $ 40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive ?
it 's just the way it is .
but i think we 're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do .
as we 've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased , we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care .
and vice versa , the best care often turns out to be the least expensive - has fewer complications , the people get more efficient at what they do .
and what that means is there 's hope .
because -lsb- if -rsb- to have the best results , you really needed the most expensive care in the country , or in the world , well then we really would be talking about rationing who we 're going to cut off from medicare .
that would be really our only choice .
but when we look at the positive deviants - the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs - we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful .
that is to say , they found ways all of the different components , to come together into a whole .
having great components is not enough , and yet we 've been obsessed in medicine with components .
we want the best drugs , the best technologies , the best specialists , but we do n't think too much about how it all comes together .
it 's a terrible design strategy actually .
there 's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said , what if you built a car from the very best car parts ?
well it would lead you to put in porsche brakes , a ferrari engine , a volvo body , a bmw chassis .
and you put it all together and what do you get ?
a very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere .
and that is what medicine can feel like sometimes .
it 's not a system .
now a system , however , when things start to come together , you realize it has certain skills for acting and looking that way .
skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure .
when you are a specialist , you ca n't see the end result very well .
you have to become really interested in data , unsexy as that sounds .
one of my colleagues is a surgeon in cedar rapids , iowa , and he got interested in the question of , well how many ct scans did they do for their community in cedar rapids ?
he got interested in this because there had been government reports , newspaper reports , journal articles saying that there had been too many ct scans done .
he did n't see it in his own patients .
and so he asked the question , " how many did we do ? "
and he wanted to get the data .
it took him three months .
no one had asked this question in his community before .
and what he found was that , for the 300,000 people in their community , in the previous year they had done 52,000 ct scans .
they had found a problem .
which brings us to skill number two a system has .
skill one , find where your failures are .
skill two is devise solutions .
i got interested in this when the world health organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery .
the volume of surgery had spread around the world , but the safety of surgery had not .
now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training , give people more specialization or bring in more technology .
well in surgery , you could n't have people who are more specialized and you could n't have people who are better trained .
and yet we see unconscionable levels of death , disability that could be avoided .
and so we looked at what other high-risk industries do .
we looked at skyscraper construction , we looked at the aviation world , and we found that they have technology , they have training , and then they have one other thing : they have checklists .
i did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a harvard surgeon worrying about checklists .
and yet , what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better .
we got the lead safety engineer for boeing to help us .
could we design a checklist for surgery ?
not for the lowest people on the totem pole , but for the folks who were all the way around the chain , the entire team including the surgeons .
and what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than i had understood .
you have to think about things like pause points .
you need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it 's a danger and do something about it .
you have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist .
and then you need to focus on the killer items .
an aviation checklist , like this one for a single-engine plane , is n't a recipe for how to fly a plane , it 's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they 're not checked .
so we did this .
we created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams .
we had the pause points immediately before anesthesia is given , immediately before the knife hits the skin , immediately before the patient leaves the room .
and we had a mix of dumb stuff on there - making sure an antibiotic is given in the right time frame because that cuts the infection rate by half - and then interesting stuff , because you ca n't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery .
instead , you can make a recipe for how to have a team that 's prepared for the unexpected .
and we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day , because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you 're coming in .
we implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world , deliberately in places from rural tanzania to the university of washington in seattle .
we found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent .
it fell in every hospital it went into .
the death rates fell 47 percent .
this was bigger than a drug .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that brings us to skill number three , the ability to implement this , to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things .
and it 's been slow to spread .
this is not yet our norm in surgery - let alone making checklists to go onto childbirth and other areas .
there 's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we 're not a system , forces us to behave with a different set of values .
just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we 've had , like humility , discipline , teamwork .
this is the opposite of what we were built on : independence , self-sufficiency , autonomy .
i met an actual cowboy , by the way .
i asked him , what was it like to actually herd a thousand cattle across hundreds of miles ?
how did you do that ?
and he said , " we have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around . "
they communicate electronically constantly , and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle .
even the cowboys are pit crews now .
and it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves .
making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists .
but i would go further and say that making systems work , whether in health care , education , climate change , making a pathway out of poverty , is the great task of our generation as a whole .
in every field , knowledge has exploded , but it has brought complexity , it has brought specialization .
and we 've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize , as individualistic as we want to be , complexity requires group success .
we all need to be pit crews now .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , people argue vigorously about the definition of life .
they ask if it should have reproduction in it , or metabolism , or evolution .
and i do n't know the answer to that , so i 'm not going to tell you .
i will say that life involves computation .
so this is a computer program .
booted up in a cell , the program would execute , and it could result in this person ; or with a small change , it could result in this person ; or another small change , this person ; or with a larger change , this dog , or this tree , or this whale .
so now , if you take this metaphor -lsb- of -rsb- genome as program seriously , you have to consider that chris anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact , as is jim watson , craig venter , as are all of us .
and in convincing yourself that this metaphor is true , there are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs that could help to convince you .
but one , to me , that 's most compelling is the peculiar sensitivity to small changes that can make large changes in biological development - the output .
a small mutation can take a two-wing fly and make it a four-wing fly .
or it could take a fly and put legs where its antennae should be .
or if you 're familiar with " the princess bride , " it could create a six-fingered man .
now , a hallmark of computer programs is just this kind of sensitivity to small changes .
if your bank account 's one dollar , and you flip a single bit , you could end up with a thousand dollars .
so these small changes are things that i think that - they indicate to us that a complicated computation in development is underlying these amplified , large changes .
so now , all of this indicates that there are molecular programs underlying biology , and it shows the power of molecular programs - biology does .
and what i want to do is write molecular programs , potentially to build technology .
and there are a lot of people doing this , a lot of synthetic biologists doing this , like craig venter .
and they concentrate on using cells .
they 're cell-oriented .
so my friends , molecular programmers , and i have a sort of biomolecule-centric approach .
we 're interested in using dna , rna and protein , and building new languages for building things from the bottom up , using biomolecules , potentially having nothing to do with biology .
so , these are all the machines in a cell .
there 's a camera .
there 's the solar panels of the cell , some switches that turn your genes on and off , the girders of the cell , motors that move your muscles .
my little group of molecular programmers are trying to refashion all of these parts from dna .
we 're not dna zealots , but dna is the cheapest , easiest to understand and easy to program material to do this .
and as other things become easier to use - maybe protein - we 'll work with those .
if we succeed , what will molecular programming look like ?
you 're going to sit in front of your computer .
you 're going to design something like a cell phone , and in a high-level language , you 'll describe that cell phone .
then you 're going to have a compiler that 's going to take that description and it 's going to turn it into actual molecules that can be sent to a synthesizer and that synthesizer will pack those molecules into a seed .
and what happens if you water and feed that seed appropriately , is it will do a developmental computation , a molecular computation , and it 'll build an electronic computer .
and if i have n't revealed my prejudices already , i think that life has been about molecular computers building electrochemical computers , building electronic computers , which together with electrochemical computers will build new molecular computers , which will build new electronic computers , and so forth .
and if you buy all of this , and you think life is about computation , as i do , then you look at big questions through the eyes of a computer scientist .
so one big question is , how does a baby know when to stop growing ?
and for molecular programming , the question is how does your cell phone know when to stop growing ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or how does a computer program know when to stop running ?
or more to the point , how do you know if a program will ever stop ?
there are other questions like this , too .
one of them is craig venter 's question .
turns out i think he 's actually a computer scientist .
he asked , how big is the minimal genome that will give me a functioning microorganism ?
how few genes can i use ?
this is exactly analogous to the question , what 's the smallest program i can write that will act exactly like microsoft word ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and just as he 's writing , you know , bacteria that will be smaller , he 's writing genomes that will work , we could write smaller programs that would do what microsoft word does .
but for molecular programming , our question is , how many molecules do we need to put in that seed to get a cell phone ?
what 's the smallest number we can get away with ?
now , these are big questions in computer science .
these are all complexity questions , and computer science tells us that these are very hard questions .
almost - many of them are impossible .
but for some tasks , we can start to answer them .
so , i 'm going to start asking those questions for the dna structures i 'm going to talk about next .
so , this is normal dna , what you think of as normal dna .
it 's double-stranded , it 's a double helix , has the as , ts , cs and gs that pair to hold the strands together .
and i 'm going to draw it like this sometimes , just so i do n't scare you .
we want to look at individual strands and not think about the double helix .
when we synthesize it , it comes single-stranded , so we can take the blue strand in one tube and make an orange strand in the other tube , and they 're floppy when they 're single-stranded .
you mix them together and they make a rigid double helix .
now for the last 25 years , ned seeman and a bunch of his descendants have worked very hard and made beautiful three-dimensional structures using this kind of reaction of dna strands coming together .
but a lot of their approaches , though elegant , take a long time .
they can take a couple of years , or it can be difficult to design .
so i came up with a new method a couple of years ago i call dna origami that 's so easy you could do it at home in your kitchen and design the stuff on a laptop .
but to do it , you need a long , single strand of dna , which is technically very difficult to get .
so , you can go to a natural source .
you can look in this computer-fabricated artifact , and he 's got a double-stranded genome - that 's no good .
you look in his intestines . there are billions of bacteria .
they 're no good either .
double strand again , but inside them , they 're infected with a virus that has a nice , long , single-stranded genome that we can fold like a piece of paper .
and here 's how we do it .
this is part of that genome .
we add a bunch of short , synthetic dnas that i call staples .
each one has a left half that binds the long strand in one place , and a right half that binds it in a different place , and brings the long strand together like this .
the net action of many of these on that long strand is to fold it into something like a rectangle .
now , we ca n't actually take a movie of this process , but shawn douglas at harvard has made a nice visualization for us that begins with a long strand and has some short strands in it .
and what happens is that we mix these strands together .
we heat them up , we add a little bit of salt , we heat them up to almost boiling and cool them down , and as we cool them down , the short strands bind the long strands and start to form structure .
and you can see a little bit of double helix forming there .
when you look at dna origami , you can see that what it really is , even though you think it 's complicated , is a bunch of double helices that are parallel to each other , and they 're held together by places where short strands go along one helix and then jump to another one .
so there 's a strand that goes like this , goes along one helix and binds - it jumps to another helix and comes back .
that holds the long strand like this .
now , to show that we could make any shape or pattern that we wanted , i tried to make this shape .
i wanted to fold dna into something that goes up over the eye , down the nose , up the nose , around the forehead , back down and end in a little loop like this .
and so , i thought , if this could work , anything could work .
so i had the computer program design the short staples to do this .
i ordered them ; they came by fedex .
i mixed them up , heated them , cooled them down , and i got 50 billion little smiley faces floating around in a single drop of water .
and each one of these is just one-thousandth the width of a human hair , ok ?
so , they 're all floating around in solution , and to look at them , you have to get them on a surface where they stick .
so , you pour them out onto a surface and they start to stick to that surface , and we take a picture using an atomic-force microscope .
it 's got a needle , like a record needle , that goes back and forth over the surface , bumps up and down , and feels the height of the first surface .
it feels the dna origami .
there 's the atomic-force microscope working and you can see that the landing 's a little rough .
when you zoom in , they 've got , you know , weak jaws that flip over their heads and some of their noses get punched out , but it 's pretty good .
you can zoom in and even see the extra little loop , this little nano-goatee .
now , what 's great about this is anybody can do this .
and so , i got this in the mail about a year after i did this , unsolicited .
anyone know what this is ? what is it ?
it 's china , right ?
so , what happened is , a graduate student in china , lulu qian , did a great job .
she wrote all her own software to design and built this dna origami , a beautiful rendition of china , which even has taiwan , and you can see it 's sort of on the world 's shortest leash , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this works really well and you can make patterns as well as shapes , ok ?
and you can make a map of the americas and spell dna with dna .
and what 's really neat about it - well , actually , this all looks like nano-artwork , but it turns out that nano-artwork is just what you need to make nano-circuits .
so , you can put circuit components on the staples , like a light bulb and a light switch .
let the thing assemble , and you 'll get some kind of a circuit .
and then you can maybe wash the dna away and have the circuit left over .
so , this is what some colleagues of mine at caltech did .
they took a dna origami , organized some carbon nano-tubes , made a little switch , you see here , wired it up , tested it and showed that it is indeed a switch .
now , this is just a single switch and you need half a billion for a computer , so we have a long way to go .
but this is very promising because the origami can organize parts just one-tenth the size of those in a normal computer .
so it 's very promising for making small computers .
now , i want to get back to that compiler .
the dna origami is a proof that that compiler actually works .
so , you start with something in the computer .
you get a high-level description of the computer program , a high-level description of the origami .
you can compile it to molecules , send it to a synthesizer , and it actually works .
and it turns out that a company has made a nice program that 's much better than my code , which was kind of ugly , and will allow us to do this in a nice , visual , computer-aided design way .
so , now you can say , all right , why is n't dna origami the end of the story ?
you have your molecular compiler , you can do whatever you want .
the fact is that it does not scale .
so if you want to build a human from dna origami , the problem is , you need a long strand that 's 10 trillion trillion bases long .
that 's three light years ' worth of dna , so we 're not going to do this .
we 're going to turn to another technology , called algorithmic self-assembly of tiles .
it was started by erik winfree , and what it does , it has tiles that are a hundredth the size of a dna origami .
you zoom in , there are just four dna strands and they have little single-stranded bits on them that can bind to other tiles , if they match .
and we like to draw these tiles as little squares .
and if you look at their sticky ends , these little dna bits , you can see that they actually form a checkerboard pattern .
so , these tiles would make a complicated , self-assembling checkerboard .
and the point of this , if you did n't catch that , is that tiles are a kind of molecular program and they can output patterns .
and a really amazing part of this is that any computer program can be translated into one of these tile programs - specifically , counting .
so , you can come up with a set of tiles that when they come together , form a little binary counter rather than a checkerboard .
so you can read off binary numbers five , six and seven .
and in order to get these kinds of computations started right , you need some kind of input , a kind of seed .
you can use dna origami for that .
you can encode the number 32 in the right-hand side of a dna origami , and when you add those tiles that count , they will start to count - they will read that 32 and they 'll stop at 32 .
so , what we 've done is we 've figured out a way to have a molecular program know when to stop going .
it knows when to stop growing because it can count .
it knows how big it is .
so , that answers that sort of first question i was talking about .
it does n't tell us how babies do it , however .
so now , we can use this counting to try and get at much bigger things than dna origami could otherwise .
here 's the dna origami , and what we can do is we can write 32 on both edges of the dna origami , and we can now use our watering can and water with tiles , and we can start growing tiles off of that and create a square .
the counter serves as a template to fill in a square in the middle of this thing .
so , what we 've done is we 've succeeded in making something much bigger than a dna origami by combining dna origami with tiles .
and the neat thing about it is , is that it 's also reprogrammable .
you can just change a couple of the dna strands in this binary representation and you 'll get 96 rather than 32 .
and if you do that , the origami 's the same size , but the resulting square that you get is three times bigger .
so , this sort of recapitulates what i was telling you about development .
you have a very sensitive computer program where small changes - single , tiny , little mutations - can take something that made one size square and make something very much bigger .
now , this - using counting to compute and build these kinds of things by this kind of developmental process is something that also has bearing on craig venter 's question .
so , you can ask , how many dna strands are required to build a square of a given size ?
if we wanted to make a square of size 10 , 100 or 1,000 , if we used dna origami alone , we would require a number of dna strands that 's the square of the size of that square ; so we 'd need 100 , 10,000 or a million dna strands .
that 's really not affordable .
but if we use a little computation - we use origami , plus some tiles that count - then we can get away with using 100 , 200 or 300 dna strands .
and so we can exponentially reduce the number of dna strands we use , if we use counting , if we use a little bit of computation .
and so computation is some very powerful way to reduce the number of molecules you need to build something , to reduce the size of the genome that you 're building .
and finally , i 'm going to get back to that sort of crazy idea about computers building computers .
if you look at the square that you build with the origami and some counters growing off it , the pattern that it has is exactly the pattern that you need to make a memory .
so if you affix some wires and switches to those tiles - rather than to the staple strands , you affix them to the tiles - then they 'll self-assemble the somewhat complicated circuits , the demultiplexer circuits , that you need to address this memory .
so you can actually make a complicated circuit using a little bit of computation .
it 's a molecular computer building an electronic computer .
now , you ask me , how far have we gotten down this path ?
experimentally , this is what we 've done in the last year .
here is a dna origami rectangle , and here are some tiles growing from it .
and you can see how they count .
one , two , three , four , five , six , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 , 17 .
so it 's got some errors , but at least it counts up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it turns out we actually had this idea nine years ago , and that 's about the time constant for how long it takes to do these kinds of things , so i think we made a lot of progress .
we 've got ideas about how to fix these errors .
and i think in the next five or 10 years , we 'll make the kind of squares that i described and maybe even get to some of those self-assembled circuits .
so now , what do i want you to take away from this talk ?
i want you to remember that to create life 's very diverse and complex forms , life uses computation to do that .
and the computations that it uses , they 're molecular computations , and in order to understand this and get a better handle on it , as feynman said , you know , we need to build something to understand it .
and so we are going to use molecules and refashion this thing , rebuild everything from the bottom up , using dna in ways that nature never intended , using dna origami , and dna origami to seed this algorithmic self-assembly .
you know , so this is all very cool , but what i 'd like you to take from the talk , hopefully from some of those big questions , is that this molecular programming is n't just about making gadgets .
it 's not just making about - it 's making self-assembled cell phones and circuits .
what it 's really about is taking computer science and looking at big questions in a new light , asking new versions of those big questions and trying to understand how biology can make such amazing things . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i am always thinking about is what this session is about , which is called simplicity .
and almost , i would almost call it being simple-minded , but in the best sense of the word .
i 'm trying to figure out two very simple things : how to live and how to die , period .
that 's all i 'm trying to do , all day long .
and i 'm also trying to have some meals , and have some snacks , and , you know , and yell at my children , and do all the normal things that keep you grounded .
so , i was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child .
my older sister was busy torturing my parents , and they were busy torturing her .
i was lucky enough to be completely ignored , which is a fabulous thing , actually , i want to tell you .
so , i was able to completely daydream my way through my life .
and i finally daydreamed my way into nyu , at a very good time , in 1967 , where i met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of nyu .
and i was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him .
and feminists hated us , and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end .
but i kept writing bad poetry , and he did n't blow up the math building , but he went to cuba .
but i gave him the money , because i was from riverdale so i had more money than he did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that was a good thing to help , you know , the cause .
but , then he came back , and things happened , and i decided i really hated my writing , that it was awful , awful , purple prose .
and i decided that i wanted to tell - but i still wanted to tell a narrative story and i still wanted to tell my stories .
so i decided that i would start to draw . how hard could that be ?
and so what happened was that i started just becoming an editorial illustrator through , you know , sheer whatever , sheer ignorance .
and we started a studio .
well , tibor really started the studio , called m & co .
and the premise of m & co was , we do n't know anything , but that 's all right , we 're going to do it anyway .
and as a matter of fact , it 's better not to know anything , because if you know too much , you 're stymied .
so , the premise in the studio was , there are no boundaries , there is no fear .
and i - and my full-time job , i landed the best job on earth , was to daydream , and to actually come up with absurd ideas that - fortunately , there were enough people there , and it was a team , it was a collective , it was not just me coming up with crazy ideas .
but the point was that i was there as myself , as a dreamer .
and so some of the things - i mean , it was a long history of m & co , and clearly we also needed to make some money , so we decided we would create a series of products .
and some of the watches there , attempting to be beautiful and humorous - maybe not attempting , hopefully succeeding .
that to be able to talk about content , to break apart what you normally expect , to use humor and surprise , elegance and humanity in your work was really important to us .
it was a very high , it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say , the content is what 's important , not the package , not the wrapping .
you really have to be journalists , you have to be inventors , you have to use your imagination more importantly than anything .
so , the good news is that i have a dog and , though i do n't know if i believe in luck - i do n't know what i believe in , it 's a very complicated question , but i do know that before i go away , i crank his tail seven times .
so , whenever he sees a suitcase in the house , because everybody 's always , you know , leaving , they 're always cranking this wonderful dog 's tail , and he runs to the other room .
but i am able to make the transition from working for children and - from working for adults to children , and back and forth , because , you know , i can say that i 'm immature , and in a way , that 's true .
i do n't really - i mean , i could tell you that i did n't understand , i 'm not proud of it , but i did n't understand let 's say 95 percent of the talks at this conference .
but i have been taking beautiful notes of drawings and i have a gorgeous onion from murray gell-mann 's talk .
and i have a beautiful page of doodles from jonathan woodham 's talk .
so , good things come out of , you know , incomprehension - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - which i will do a painting of , and then it will end up in my work .
so , i 'm open to the possibilities of not knowing and finding out something new .
so , in writing for children , it seems simple , and it is .
you have to condense a story into 32 pages , usually .
and what you have to do is , you really have to edit down to what you want to say .
and hopefully , you 're not talking down to kids and you 're not talking in such a way that you , you know , could n't stand reading it after one time .
so , i hopefully am writing , you know , books that are good for children and for adults .
but the painting reflects - i do n't think differently for children than i do for adults .
i try to use the same kind of imagination , the same kind of whimsy , the same kind of love of language .
so , you know , and i have lots of wonderful-looking friends .
this is andrew gatz , and he walked in through the door and i said , " you ! sit down there . " you know , i take lots of photos .
and the bertoia chair in the background is my favorite chair .
so , i get to put in all of the things that i love .
hopefully , a dialog between adults and children will happen on many different levels , and hopefully different kinds of humor will evolve .
and the books are really journals of my life .
i never - i do n't like plots .
i do n't know what a plot means .
i ca n't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning , you know , beginning , middle and end . it really scares me , because my life is too random and too confused , and i enjoy it that way .
but anyway , so we were in venice , and this is our room . and i had this dream that i was wearing this fantastic green gown , and i was looking out the window , and it was really a beautiful thing .
and so , i was able to put that into this story , which is an alphabet , and hopefully go on to something else .
the letter c had other things in it .
i was fortunate also , to meet the man who 's sitting on the bed , though i gave him hair over here and he does n't have hair .
well , he has some hair but - well , he used to have hair .
and with him , i was able to do a project that was really fantastic .
i work for the new yorker , and i do covers , and 9/11 happened and it was , you know , a complete and utter end of the world as we knew it .
and rick and i were on our way to a party in the bronx , and somebody said bronxistan , and somebody said ferreristan , and we came up with this new yorker cover , which we were able to - we did n't know what we were doing .
we were n't trying to be funny , we were n't trying to be - well , we were trying to be funny actually , that 's not true .
we hoped we 'd be funny , but we did n't know it would be a cover , and we did n't know that that image , at the moment that it happened , would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people .
and it really became the - i do n't know , you know , it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on .
and from , you know , fattushis , to taxistan to , you know , for the fashtoonks , botoxia , pashmina , khlintunisia , you know , we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign , who are - what 's going on over here ?
who are these people ? what are these tribes ?
and david remnick , who was really wonderful about it , had one problem . he did n't like al zheimers , because he thought it would insult people with alzheimer 's .
but you know , we said , " david , who 's going to know ?
they 're not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it stayed in , and it was , and , you know , it was a good thing .
you know , in the course of my life , i never know what 's going to happen and that 's kind of the beauty part .
and we were on cape cod , a place , obviously , of great inspiration , and i picked up this book , " the elements of style , " at a yard sale .
and i did n't - and i 'd never used it in school , because i was too busy writing poems , and flunking out , and i do n't know what , sitting in cafes .
but i picked it up and i started reading it and i thought , this book is amazing .
i said , people should know about this book .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i decided it needed a few - it needed a lift , it needed a few illustrations .
and basically , i called the , you know , i convinced the white estate , and what an intersection of like , you know , polish jew , you know , main wasp family . here i am , saying , i 'd like to do something to this book .
and they said yes , and they left me completely alone , which was a gorgeous , wonderful thing .
and i took the examples that they gave , and just did 56 paintings , basically .
so , this is , i do n't know if you can read this .
" well , susan , this is a fine mess you are in . "
and when you 're dealing with grammar , which is , you know , incredibly dry , e.b. white wrote such wonderful , whimsical - and actually , strunk - and then you come to the rules and , you know , there are lots of grammar things . " do you mind me asking a question ?
do you mind my asking a question ? "
" would , could , should , or would , should , could . "
and " would " is coco chanel 's lover , " should " is edith sitwell , and " could " is an august sander subject .
and , " he noticed a large stain in the center of the rug . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , there 's a kind of british understatement , murder-mystery theme that i really love very much .
and then , " be obscure clearly ! be wild of tongue in a way we can understand . "
e.b. white wrote us a number of rules , which can either paralyze you and make you loathe him for the rest of time , or you can ignore them , which i do , or you can , i do n't know what , you know , eat a sandwich .
so , what i did when i was painting was i started singing , because i really adore singing , and i think that music is the highest form of all art .
so , i commissioned a wonderful composer , nico muhly , who wrote nine songs using the text , and we performed this fantastic evening of - he wrote music for both amateurs and professionals .
i played the clattering teacup and the slinky in the main reading room of the new york public library , where you 're supposed to be very , very quiet , and it was a phenomenally wonderful event , which we hopefully will do some more .
who knows ? the new york timesselect , the op-ed page , asked me to do a column , and they said , you can do whatever you want .
so , once a month for the last year , i 've been doing a column called " the principles of uncertainty , " which , you know , i do n't know who heisenberg is , but i know i can throw that around now . you know , it 's the principles of uncertainty , so , you know .
i 'm going to read quickly - and probably i 'm going to edit some , because i do n't have that much time left - a few of the columns .
and basically , i was so , you know , it was so amusing , because i said , " well , how much space do i have ? "
and they said , " well , you know , it 's the internet . "
and i said , " yes , but how much space do i have ? "
and they said , " it 's unlimited , it 's unlimited . "
ok . so , the first one i was very timid , and i 'll begin .
" how can i tell you everything that is in my heart ?
impossible to begin . enough . no . begin with the hapless dodo . "
and i talk about the dodo , and how the dodo became extinct , and then i talk about spinoza .
" as the last dodo was dying , spinoza was looking for a rational explanation for everything , called eudaemonia .
and then he breathed his last , with loved ones around him , and i know that he had chicken soup also , as his last meal . "
i happen to know it for a fact .
and then he died , and there was no more spinoza . extinct .
and then , we do n't have a stuffed spinoza , but we do have a stuffed pavlov 's dog , and i visited him in the museum of hygiene in st. petersburg , in russia .
and there he is , with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic , decrepit palace .
" and i think it must have been a very , very dark day when the bolsheviks arrived .
maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs , but stalin was a paranoid man , even more than my father . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you do n't even know .
" and decided his top people had to be extinctified . "
which i think i made up , which is a good thing .
and so , this is a chart of , you know , just a small chart , because the chart would go on forever of all the people that he killed .
so , shot dead , smacked over the head , you know , thrown away .
" nabokov 's family fled russia . how could the young nabokov , sitting innocently and elegantly in a red chair , leafing through a book and butterflies , imagine such displacement , such loss ? "
and then i want to tell you that this is a map .
so , " my beautiful mother 's family fled russia as well .
too many pogroms .
leaving the shack , the wild blueberry woods , the geese , the river sluch , they went to palestine and then america . "
and my mother drew this map for me of the united states of america , and that is my dna over here , because that person who i grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever .
facts were actually banished from our home .
and so , if you see that texas - you know , texas and california are under canada , and that south carolina is on top of north carolina , this is the home that i grew up in , ok ?
so , it 's a miracle that i 'm here today .
but actually , it 's not . it 's actually a wonderful thing .
but then she says tel aviv and lenin , which is the town they came from , and , " sorry , the rest unknown , thank you . "
but in her lexicon , " sorry , the rest unknown , thank you " is " sorry , the rest unknown , go to hell , " because she could n't care less .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " the impossibility of february " is that february 's a really wretched month in new york and the images for me conjure up these really awful things .
well , not so awful .
i received a box in the mail and it was wrapped with newspaper and there was the picture of the man on the newspaper and he was dead .
and i say , " i hope he 's not really dead , just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow , but the caption says he is dead . "
and actually , he was . i think he 's dead , though i do n't know , maybe he 's not dead .
" and this woman leans over in anguish , not about that man , but about all sad things . it happens quite often in february . "
there 's consoling .
this man is angry because somebody threw onions all over the staircase , and basically - you know , i guess onions are a theme here .
and he says , " it is impossible not to lie .
it is february and not lying is impossible . "
and i really spend a lot of time wondering , how much truth do we tell ?
what is it that we 're actually - what story are we actually telling ?
how do we know when we are ourselves ?
how do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories , you know , are real sentences ?
or are they fake sentences that we think we ought to be saying ?
i 'm going to quickly go through this .
a quote by bertrand russell , " all the labor of all the ages , all the devotion , all the inspiration , all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction .
so now , my friends , if that is true , and it is true , what is the point ? "
a complicated question .
and so , you know , i talk to my friends and i go to plays where they 're singing russian songs .
oh my god , you know what ?
could we have - no , we do n't have time .
i taped my aunt . i taped my aunt singing a song in russian from the - you know , could we have it for a second ?
do you have that ?
-lrb- music -rrb- ok . i taped my - my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about 85 .
so - and that 's a song about how everybody 's miserable because , you know , we 're from russia .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i went to visit kitty carlisle hart , and she is 96 , and when i brought her a copy of " the elements of style , " she said she would treasure it .
and then i said - oh , and she was talking about moss hart , and i said , " when you met him , you knew it was him . "
and she said , " i knew it was he . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i was the one who should have kept the book , but it was a really wonderful moment .
and she dated george gershwin , so , you know , get out .
gershwin died at the age of 38 .
he 's buried in the same cemetery as my husband .
i do n't want to talk about that now .
i do want to talk - the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the barricini family mausoleum nearby .
i think the barricini family should open a store there and sell chocolate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i would like to run it for them .
and i went to visit louise bourgeoise , who 's also still working , and i looked at her sink , which is really amazing , and left .
and then i photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street .
and a woman who lives on our street , lolita .
and then i go and have some tea .
and then my aunt frances dies , and before she died , she tried to pay with sweet 'n low packets for her bagel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i wonder what the point is and then i know , and i see that hy meyerowitz , rick meyerowitz 's father , a dry-cleaning supply salesman from the bronx , won the charlie chaplin look-alike contest in 1931 .
that 's actually hy .
and i look at a beautiful bowl of fruit , and i look at a dress that i sewed for friends of mine .
and it says , " ich habe genug , " which is a bach cantata , which i once thought meant " i 've had it , i ca n't take it anymore , give me a break , " but i was wrong .
it means " i have enough . " and that is utterly true .
i happen to be alive , end of discussion . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to speak about a problem that i have and that 's that i 'm a philosopher .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i go to a party and people ask me what do i do and i say , " i 'm a professor , " their eyes glaze over .
when i go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around , they ask me what field i 'm in and i say , " philosophy " - their eyes glaze over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i go to a philosopher 's party -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they ask me what i work on and i say , " consciousness , " their eyes do n't glaze over - their lips curl into a snarl .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think , " that 's impossible ! you ca n't explain consciousness . "
the very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question .
my late , lamented friend bob nozick , a fine philosopher , in one of his books , " philosophical explanations , " is commenting on the ethos of philosophy - the way philosophers go about their business .
and he says , you know , " philosophers love rational argument . "
and he says , " it seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion , and if they do n't accept the conclusion , they die .
their heads explode . " the idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents .
but in fact that does n't change people 's minds at all .
it 's very hard to change people 's minds about something like consciousness , and i finally figured out the reason for that .
the reason for that is that everybody 's an expert on consciousness .
we heard the other day that everybody 's got a strong opinion about video games .
they all have an idea for a video game , even if they 're not experts .
but they do n't consider themselves experts on video games ; they 've just got strong opinions .
i 'm sure that people here who work on , say , climate change and global warming , or on the future of the internet , encounter people who have very strong opinions about what 's going to happen next .
but they probably do n't think of these opinions as expertise .
they 're just strongly held opinions .
but with regard to consciousness , people seem to think , each of us seems to think , " i am an expert .
simply by being conscious , i know all about this . "
and so , you tell them your theory and they say , " no , no , that 's not the way consciousness is !
no , you 've got it all wrong . "
and they say this with an amazing confidence .
and so what i 'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence . because i know the feeling - i can feel it myself .
i want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds - that you are , yourselves , authoritative about your own consciousness .
that 's the order of the day here .
now , this nice picture shows a thought-balloon , a thought-bubble .
i think everybody understands what that means .
that 's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness .
this is my favorite picture of consciousness that 's ever been done .
it 's a saul steinberg of course - it was a new yorker cover .
and this fellow here is looking at the painting by braque .
that reminds him of the word baroque , barrack , bark , poodle , suzanne r. - he 's off to the races .
there 's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along , you learn a lot about this man .
what i particularly like about this picture , too , is that steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style .
which reminds us , as rod brooks was saying yesterday : what we are , what each of us is - what you are , what i am - is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots .
that 's what we 're made of .
no other ingredients at all . we 're just made of cells , about 100 trillion of them .
not a single one of those cells is conscious ; not a single one of those cells knows who you are , or cares .
somehow , we have to explain how when you put together teams , armies , battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells - not so different really from a bacterium , each one of them - the result is this . i mean , just look at it .
the content - there 's color , there 's ideas , there 's memories , there 's history . and somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons .
how is that possible ? many people just think it is n't possible at all .
they think , " no , there ca n't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness . "
this is a lovely book by a friend of mine named lee siegel , who 's a professor of religion , actually , at the university of hawaii , and he 's an expert magician , and an expert on the street magic of india , which is what this book is about , " net of magic . "
and there 's a passage in it which i would love to share with you .
it speaks so eloquently to the problem .
" ' i 'm writing a book on magic , ' i explain , and i 'm asked , ' real magic ? ' by ' real magic , ' people mean miracles , thaumaturgical acts , and supernatural powers .
' no , ' i answer . ' conjuring tricks , not real magic . ' ' real magic , ' in other words , refers to the magic that is not real ; while the magic that is real , that can actually be done , is not real magic . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , that 's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- real consciousness is not a bag of tricks .
if you 're going to explain this as a bag of tricks , then it 's not real consciousness , whatever it is .
and , as marvin said , and as other people have said , " consciousness is a bag of tricks . "
this means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when i attempt to explain consciousness .
so this is the problem . so i have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you wo n't like , for the same reason that you do n't like to see a magic trick explained to you .
how many of you here , if somebody - some smart aleck - starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done , you sort of want to block your ears and say , " no , no , i do n't want to know !
do n't take the thrill of it away . i 'd rather be mystified .
do n't tell me the answer . "
a lot of people feel that way about consciousness , i 've discovered .
and i 'm sorry if i impose some clarity , some understanding on you .
you 'd better leave now if you do n't want to know some of these tricks .
but i 'm not going to explain it all to you .
i 'm going to do what philosophers do .
here 's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick .
you know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick ?
the philosopher says , " i 'm going to explain to you how that 's done .
you see , the magician does n't really saw the lady in half . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " he merely makes you think that he does . "
and you say , " yes , and how does he do that ? "
he says , " oh , that 's not my department , i 'm sorry . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i 'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness .
but i 'm going to try to also show you that consciousness is n't quite as marvelous - your own consciousness is n't quite as wonderful - as you may have thought it is .
this is something , by the way , that lee siegel talks about in his book .
he marvels at how he 'll do a magic show , and afterwards people will swear they saw him do x , y , and z. he never did those things .
he did n't even try to do those things .
people 's memories inflate what they think they saw .
and the same is true of consciousness .
now , let 's see if this will work . all right . let 's just watch this .
watch it carefully .
i 'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named nick deamer , and this is a little demo that he 's done for me , part of a larger project some of you may be interested in .
we 're looking for a backer .
it 's a feature-length documentary on consciousness .
ok , now , you all saw what changed , right ?
how many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color ?
every one . i 'll just show you by running it again .
even when you know that they 're all going to change color , it 's very hard to notice . you have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all .
now , this is an example - one of many - of a phenomenon that 's now being studied quite a bit .
it 's one that i predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book , " consciousness explained , " where i said if you did experiments of this sort , you 'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes .
if there 's time at the end , i 'll show you the much more dramatic case .
now , how can it be that there are all those changes going on , and that we 're not aware of them ?
well , earlier today , jeff hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades , the way your eye moves around three or four times a second .
he did n't mention the speed . your eye is constantly in motion , moving around , looking at eyes , noses , elbows , looking at interesting things in the world .
and where your eye is n't looking , you 're remarkably impoverished in your vision .
that 's because the foveal part of your eye , which is the high-resolution part , is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length .
that 's the detail part .
it does n't seem that way , does it ?
it does n't seem that way , but that 's the way it is .
you 're getting in a lot less information than you think .
here 's a completely different effect . this is a painting by bellotto .
it 's in the museum in north carolina .
bellotto was a student of canaletto 's .
and i love paintings like that - the painting is actually about as big as it is right here .
and i love canalettos , because canaletto has this fantastic detail , and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting .
and i started across the hall in north carolina , because i thought it was probably a canaletto , and would have all that in detail .
and i noticed that on the bridge there , there 's a lot of people - you can just barely see them walking across the bridge .
and i thought as i got closer i would be able to see all the detail of most people , see their clothes , and so forth .
and as i got closer and closer , i actually screamed .
i yelled out because when i got closer , i found the detail was n't there at all .
there were just little artfully placed blobs of paint .
and as i walked towards the picture , i was expecting detail that was n't there .
the artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things , and my brain had taken the suggestion .
you 're familiar with a more recent technology , which is - there , you can get a better view of the blobs .
see , when you get close they 're really just blobs of paint .
you will have seen something like this - this is the reverse effect .
i 'll just give that to you one more time .
now , what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion ?
when an artful blob of paint or two , by an artist , suggests a person - say , one of marvin minsky 's little society of mind - do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere ?
i do n't think so . not a chance . but then , how on earth is it done ?
well , remember the philosopher 's explanation of the lady ?
it 's the same thing .
the brain just makes you think that it 's got the detail there .
you think the detail 's there , but it is n't there .
the brain is n't actually putting the detail in your head at all .
it 's just making you expect the detail .
let 's just do this experiment very quickly .
is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right , rotated ?
yes .
how many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind 's eye , to see if it matched up with the one on the right ?
how many of you rotated the one on the right ? ok .
how do you know that 's what you did ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science - various experiments started by roger shepherd , who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images .
yes , it 's possible to do that .
but the details of the process are still in significant controversy .
and if you read that literature , one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you 're the subject in the experiment , you do n't know .
you do n't know how you do it .
you just know that you have certain beliefs .
and they come in a certain order , at a certain time .
and what explains the fact that that 's what you think ?
well , that 's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician .
this is a figure that i love : bradley , petrie , and dumais .
you may think that i 've cheated , that i 've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there .
how many of you see that sort of boundary , with the necker cube floating in front of the circles ?
can you see it ?
well , you know , in effect , the boundary 's really there , in a certain sense .
your brain is actually computing that boundary , the boundary that goes right there .
but now , notice there are two ways of seeing the cube , right ?
it 's a necker cube .
everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube ? ok .
can you see the four ways of seeing the cube ?
because there 's another way of seeing it .
if you 're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles , some black circles , there 's another way of seeing it .
as a cube , on a black background , as seen through a piece of swiss cheese .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- can you get it ? how many of you ca n't get it ? that 'll help .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now you can get it . these are two very different phenomena .
when you see the cube one way , behind the screen , those boundaries go away .
but there 's still a sort of filling in , as we can tell if we look at this .
we do n't have any trouble seeing the cube , but where does the color change ?
does your brain have to send little painters in there ?
the purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who 's going to paint that bit behind the curtain ? no .
your brain just lets it go . the brain does n't need to fill that in .
when i first started talking about the bradley , petrie , dumais example that you just saw - i 'll go back to it , this one - i said that there was no filling-in behind there .
and i supposed that that was just a flat truth , always true .
but rob van lier has recently shown that it is n't .
now , if you think you see some pale yellow - i 'll run this a few more times .
look in the gray areas , and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there - yeah , it 's amazing . there 's nothing there . it 's no trick .
-lsb- " failure to detect changes in scenes " slide -rsb- this is ron rensink 's work , which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book .
let me just pause this for a second if i can .
this is change-blindness .
what you 're going to see is two pictures , one of which is slightly different from the other .
you see here the red roof and the gray roof , and in between them there will be a mask , which is just a blank screen , for about a quarter of a second .
so you 'll see the first picture , then a mask , then the second picture , then a mask .
and this will just continue , and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change .
so , show the original picture for 240 milliseconds . blank .
show the next picture for 240 milliseconds . blank .
and keep going , until the subject presses the button , saying , " i see the change . "
so now we 're going to be subjects in the experiment .
we 're going to start easy . some examples .
no trouble there .
can everybody see ? all right .
indeed , rensink 's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button .
can you see that one ?
2.9 seconds .
how many do n't see it still ?
what 's on the roof of that barn ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's easy .
is it a bridge or a dock ?
there are a few more really dramatic ones , and then i 'll close .
i want you to see a few that are particularly striking .
this one because it 's so large and yet it 's pretty hard to see .
can you see it ?
audience : yes .
dan dennett : see the shadows going back and forth ? pretty big .
so 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there .
i love this one . i 'll end with this one , just because it 's such an obvious and important thing .
how many still do n't see it ? how many still do n't see it ?
how many engines on the wing of that boeing ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right in the middle of the picture !
thanks very much for your attention .
what i wanted to show you is that scientists , using their from-the-outside , third-person methods , can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of , and that , in fact , you 're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are .
and we 're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind .
jeff hawkins , this morning , was describing his attempt to get theory , and a good , big theory , into the neuroscience .
and he 's right . this is a problem .
harvard medical school once - i was at a talk - director of the lab said , " in our lab , we have a saying .
if you work on one neuron , that 's neuroscience .
if you work on two neurons , that 's psychology . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have to have more theory , and it can come as much from the top down .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this book that i have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982 . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , it 's deceptively large .
there 's actually only about 20 people on each page , because we have the name , address and telephone number of every single person .
and , in fact , everybody 's listed twice , because it 's sorted once by name and once by email address .
obviously a very small community .
there were only two other dannys on the internet then .
i knew them both .
we did n't all know each other , but we all kind of trusted each other , and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network , and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things .
so just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community , let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days .
now , it just so happened that i got to register the third domain name on the internet .
so i could have anything i wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com.
so i picked think.com , but then i thought , you know , there 's a lot of really interesting names out there .
maybe i should register a few extras just in case .
and then i thought , " nah , that would n't be very nice . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days , and in fact , it was n't just the people on the network , but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the internet itself .
so the basic idea of i.p. , or internet protocol , and the way that the - the routing algorithm that used it , were fundamentally " from each according to their ability , to each according to their need . "
and so , if you had some extra bandwidth , you 'd deliver a message for someone .
if they had some extra bandwidth , they would deliver a message for you .
you 'd kind of depend on people to do that , and that was the building block .
it was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the cold war by the defense department , but it obviously worked really well , and we all saw what happened with the internet .
it was incredibly successful .
in fact , it was so successful that there 's no way that these days you could make a book like this .
my rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick .
but , of course , you could n't do it , because we do n't know the names of all the people with internet or email addresses , and even if we did know their names , i 'm pretty sure that they would not want their name , address and telephone number published to everyone .
so the fact is that there 's a lot of bad guys on the internet these days , and so we dealt with that by making walled communities , secure subnetworks , vpns , little things that are n't really the internet but are made out of the same building blocks , but we 're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust .
and that means that it 's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen , or certain kinds of deliberate attacks , but even the mistakes can be bad .
so , for instance , in all of asia recently , it was impossible to get youtube for a little while because pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring youtube in its internal network .
they did n't intend to screw up asia , but they did because of the way that the protocols work .
another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is , you may remember a couple of years ago , all the planes west of the mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in salt lake city had a bug in it .
now , you do n't really think that our airplane system depends on the internet , and in some sense it does n't .
i 'll come back to that later .
but the fact is that people could n't take off because something was going wrong on the internet , and the router card was down .
and so , there are many of those things that start to happen .
now , there was an interesting thing that happened last april .
all of a sudden , a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole internet , including a lot of the traffic between u.s. military installations , started getting re-routed through china .
so for a few hours , it all passed through china .
now , china telecom says it was just an honest mistake , and it is actually possible that it was , the way things work , but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to , and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes .
imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks .
so if somebody really wanted to attack the united states or western civilization these days , they 're not going to do it with tanks .
that will not succeed .
what they 'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the iranian nuclear facility .
nobody has claimed credit for that .
there was basically a factory of industrial machines .
it did n't think of itself as being on the internet .
it thought of itself as being disconnected from the internet , but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a usb drive in there , or something like that , and software got in there that causes the centrifuges , in that case , to actually destroy themselves .
now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant .
and so there 's a lot of - i 'm sure you 've read a lot in papers , about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those .
but the fact is , people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the internet , and there 's been surprisingly little attention to defending the internet itself as a communications medium .
and i think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that , because it 's actually kind of fragile .
back when it was the arpanet , there were actually times - there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it .
and the way the internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places , and this one processor , because of a broken card , decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time .
so , in other words , it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it .
so of course , the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy , who would send it back in time and get it there super early , so every message in the internet started getting switched through this one node , and of course that clogged everything up .
everything started breaking .
the interesting thing was , though , that the sysadmins were able to fix it , but they had to basically turn every single thing on the internet off .
now , of course you could n't do that today .
i mean , everything off , it 's like the service call you get from the cable company , except for the whole world .
now , in fact , they could n't do it for a lot of reasons today .
one of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use ip protocol and use things like skype and so on that go through the internet right now , and so in fact we 're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things , like when you take off from lax , you 're really not thinking you 're using the internet .
when you pump gas , you really do n't think you 're using the internet .
what 's happening increasingly , though , is these systems are beginning to use the internet .
most of them are n't based on the internet yet , but they 're starting to use the internet for service functions , for administrative functions , and so if you take something like the cell phone system , which is still relatively independent of the internet for the most part , internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions , and it 's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well , they 're cheap , they 're repeated , and so on .
so all of our systems , more and more , and starting to depend on this technology .
and so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other .
that 's crazy . it was never designed to do things like that .
so we 've built this system where we understand all the parts of it , but we 're using it in a very , very different way than we expected to use it , and it 's gotten a very , very different scale than it was designed for .
and in fact , nobody really exactly understands all the things it 's being used for right now .
it 's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system , where we 've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have .
and so if you hear an expert talking about the internet and saying it can do this , or it does do this , or it will do that , you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather , or something like that .
they have an informed opinion , but it 's changing so quickly that even the experts do n't know exactly what 's going on .
so if you see one of these maps of the internet , it 's just somebody 's guess .
nobody really knows what the internet is right now because it 's different than it was an hour ago .
it 's constantly changing . it 's constantly reconfiguring .
and the problem with it is , i think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system , where we take a system that 's basically built on trust , was basically built for a smaller-scale system , and we 've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate .
and so right now , i think it 's literally true that we do n't know what the consequences on the internet would be , and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year , and worse next year , and so on .
but so what we need is a plan b.
there is no plan b right now .
there 's no clear backup system that we 've very carefully kept to be independent of the internet , made out of completely different sets of building blocks .
so what we need is something that does n't necessarily have to have the performance of the internet , but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the internet , or the hospitals have to order fuel oil .
this does n't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project .
it 's actually relatively simple to do , technically , because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground , existing wireless infrastructure .
it 's basically a matter of deciding to do it .
but people wo n't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it , and that 's the problem that we have right now .
so there 's been plenty of people , plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years , but it 's very hard to get people focused on plan b when plan a seems to be working so well .
so i think that , if people understand how much we 're starting to depend on the internet , and how vulnerable it is , we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist , and i think if enough people say , " yeah , i would like to use it , i 'd like to have such a system , " then it will get built .
it 's not that hard a problem .
it could definitely be done by people in this room .
and so i think that this is actually , of all the problems you 're going to hear about at the conference , this is probably one of the very easiest to fix .
so i 'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- here 's a question we need to rethink together : what should be the role of money and markets in our societies ?
today , there are very few things that money ca n't buy .
if you 're sentenced to a jail term in santa barbara , california , you should know that if you do n't like the standard accommodations , you can buy a prison cell upgrade .
it 's true . for how much , do you think ?
what would you guess ?
five hundred dollars ?
it 's not the ritz-carlton . it 's a jail !
eighty-two dollars a night .
eighty-two dollars a night .
if you go to an amusement park and do n't want to stand in the long lines for the popular rides , there is now a solution .
in many theme parks , you can pay extra to jump to the head of the line .
they call them fast track or vip tickets .
and this is n't only happening in amusement parks .
in washington , d.c. , long lines , queues sometimes form for important congressional hearings .
now some people do n't like to wait in long queues , maybe overnight , even in the rain .
so now , for lobbyists and others who are very keen to attend these hearings but do n't like to wait , there are companies , line-standing companies , and you can go to them .
you can pay them a certain amount of money , they hire homeless people and others who need a job to stand waiting in the line for as long as it takes , and the lobbyist , just before the hearing begins , can take his or her place at the head of the line and a seat in the front of the room .
paid line standing .
it 's happening , the recourse to market mechanisms and market thinking and market solutions , in bigger arenas .
take the way we fight our wars .
did you know that , in iraq and afghanistan , there were more private military contractors on the ground than there were u.s. military troops ?
now this is n't because we had a public debate about whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies , but this is what has happened .
over the past three decades , we have lived through a quiet revolution .
we 've drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to becoming market societies .
the difference is this : a market economy is a tool , a valuable and effective tool , for organizing productive activity , but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale .
it 's a way of life , in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life : personal relations , family life , health , education , politics , law , civic life .
now , why worry ? why worry about our becoming market societies ?
for two reasons , i think .
one of them has to do with inequality .
the more things money can buy , the more affluence , or the lack of it , matters .
if the only thing that money determined was access to yachts or fancy vacations or bmws , then inequality would n't matter very much .
but when money comes increasingly to govern access to the essentials of the good life - decent health care , access to the best education , political voice and influence in campaigns - when money comes to govern all of those things , inequality matters a great deal .
and so the marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality and its social and civic consequence .
that 's one reason to worry .
there 's a second reason apart from the worry about inequality , and it 's this : with some social goods and practices , when market thinking and market values enter , they may change the meaning of those practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about .
i 'd like to take an example of a controversial use of a market mechanism , a cash incentive , and see what you think about it .
many schools struggle with the challenge of motivating kids , especially kids from disadvantaged backgrounds , to study hard , to do well in school , to apply themselves .
some economists have proposed a market solution : offer cash incentives to kids for getting good grades or high test scores or for reading books .
they 've tried this , actually .
they 've done some experiments in some major american cities .
in new york , in chicago , in washington , d.c. , they 've tried this , offering 50 dollars for an a , 35 dollars for a b.
in dallas , texas , they have a program that offers eight-year-olds two dollars for each book they read .
so let 's see what - some people are in favor , some people are opposed to this cash incentive to motivate achievement .
let 's see what people here think about it .
imagine that you are the head of a major school system , and someone comes to you with this proposal .
and let 's say it 's a foundation . they will provide the funds .
you do n't have to take it out of your budget .
how many would be in favor and how many would be opposed to giving it a try ?
let 's see by a show of hands .
first , how many think it might at least be worth a try to see if it would work ? raise your hand .
and how many would be opposed ? how many would - so the majority here are opposed , but a sizable minority are in favor .
let 's have a discussion .
let 's start with those of you who object , who would rule it out even before trying .
what would be your reason ?
who will get our discussion started ? yes ?
heike moses : hello everyone , i 'm heike , and i think it just kills the intrinsic motivation , so in the respect that children , if they would like to read , you just take this incentive away in just paying them , so it just changes behavior .
michael sandel : takes the intrinsic incentive away .
what is , or should be , the intrinsic motivation ?
hm : well , the intrinsic motivation should be to learn .
ms : to learn . hm : to get to know the world .
and then , if you stop paying them , what happens then ?
then they stop reading ?
ms : now , let 's see if there 's someone who favors , who thinks it 's worth trying this .
elizabeth loftus : i 'm elizabeth loftus , and you said worth a try , so why not try it and do the experiment and measure things ?
ms : and measure . and what would you measure ?
you 'd measure how many - el : how many books they read and how many books they continued to read after you stopped paying them .
ms : oh , after you stopped paying .
all right , what about that ?
hm : to be frank , i just think this is , not to offend anyone , a very american way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ms : all right . what 's emerged from this discussion is the following question : will the cash incentive drive out or corrupt or crowd out the higher motivation , the intrinsic lesson that we hope to convey , which is to learn to love to learn and to read for their own sakes ?
and people disagree about what the effect will be , but that seems to be the question , that somehow a market mechanism or a cash incentive teaches the wrong lesson , and if it does , what will become of these children later ?
i should tell you what 's happened with these experiments .
the cash for good grades has had very mixed results , for the most part has not resulted in higher grades .
the two dollars for each book did lead those kids to read more books .
it also led them to read shorter books .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the real question is , what will become of these kids later ?
will they have learned that reading is a chore , a form of piecework to be done for pay , that 's the worry , or may it lead them to read maybe for the wrong reason initially but then lead them to fall in love with reading for its own sake ?
now , what this , even this brief debate , brings out is something that many economists overlook .
economists often assume that markets are inert , that they do not touch or taint the goods they exchange .
market exchange , they assume , does n't change the meaning or value of the goods being exchanged .
this may be true enough if we 're talking about material goods .
if you sell me a flat screen television or give me one as a gift , it will be the same good .
it will work the same either way .
but the same may not be true if we 're talking about nonmaterial goods and social practices such as teaching and learning or engaging together in civic life .
in those domains , bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out nonmarket values and attitudes worth caring about .
once we see that markets and commerce , when extended beyond the material domain , can change the character of the goods themselves , can change the meaning of the social practices , as in the example of teaching and learning , we have to ask where markets belong and where they do n't , where they may actually undermine values and attitudes worth caring about .
but to have this debate , we have to do something we 're not very good at , and that is to reason together in public about the value and the meaning of the social practices we prize , from our bodies to family life to personal relations to health to teaching and learning to civic life .
now these are controversial questions , and so we tend to shrink from them .
in fact , during the past three decades , when market reasoning and market thinking have gathered force and gained prestige , our public discourse during this time empty of larger moral meaning .
for fear of disagreement , we shrink from these questions .
but once we see that markets change the character of goods , we have to debate among ourselves these bigger questions about how to value goods .
one of the most corrosive effects of putting a price on everything is on commonality , the sense that we are all in it together .
against the background of rising inequality , marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who are of modest means increasingly live separate lives .
we live and work and shop and play in different places .
our children go to different schools .
this is n't good for democracy , nor is it a satisfying way to live , even for those of us who can afford to buy our way to the head of the line .
here 's why .
democracy does not require perfect equality , but what it does require is that citizens share in a common life .
what matters is that people of different social backgrounds and different walks of life encounter one another , bump up against one another in the ordinary course of life , because this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences .
and this is how we come to care for the common good .
and so , in the end , the question of markets is not mainly an economic question .
it 's really a question of how we want to live together .
do we want a society where everything is up for sale , or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money can not buy ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me tell you , it has been a fantastic month for deception .
and i 'm not even talking about the american presidential race . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism , a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they 've pulled it from the shelves ; a new york times exposé on fake book reviews .
it 's been fantastic .
now , of course , not all deception hits the news .
much of the deception is everyday . in fact , a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day , as dave suggested .
so it 's about 6:30 now , suggests that most of us should have lied .
let 's take a look at winnipeg . how many of you , in the last 24 hours - think back - have told a little fib , or a big one ? how many have told a little lie out there ?
all right , good . these are all the liars .
make sure you pay attention to them . -lrb- laughter -rrb- no , that looked good , it was about two thirds of you .
the other third did n't lie , or perhaps forgot , or you 're lying to me about your lying , which is very , very devious . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this fits with a lot of the research , which suggests that lying is very pervasive .
it 's this pervasiveness , combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human , the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up , that has fascinated people throughout history .
here we have diogenes with his lantern .
does anybody know what he was looking for ?
a single honest man , and he died without finding one back in greece . and we have confucius in the east who was really concerned with sincerity , not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk , but that you believed in what you were doing .
you believed in your principles .
now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys , a couple thousand years .
i was a customs officer for canada back in the mid- ' 90s .
yeah . i was defending canada 's borders .
you may think that 's a weapon right there . in fact , that 's a stamp . i used a stamp to defend canada 's borders . -lrb- laughter -rrb- very canadian of me . i learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs , one of which was that most of what i thought i knew about deception was wrong , and i 'll tell you about some of that tonight .
but even since just 1995 , ' 96 , the way we communicate has been completely transformed . we email , we text , we skype , we facebook . it 's insane .
almost every aspect of human communication 's been changed , and of course that 's had an impact on deception .
let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions we 've been tracking and documenting .
they 're called the butler , the sock puppet and the chinese water army .
it sounds a little bit like a weird book , but actually they 're all new types of lies .
let 's start with the butlers . here 's an example of one : " on my way . " anybody ever written , " on my way ? "
then you 've also lied . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're never on our way . we 're thinking about going on our way .
here 's another one : " sorry i did n't respond to you earlier .
my battery was dead . " your battery was n't dead .
you were n't in a dead zone .
you just did n't want to respond to that person that time .
here 's the last one : you 're talking to somebody , and you say , " sorry , got work , gotta go . "
but really , you 're just bored . you want to talk to somebody else .
each of these is about a relationship , and this is a 24/7 connected world . once you get my cell phone number , you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day .
and so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer , like the butler used to do , between us and the connections to everybody else .
but they 're very special . they use ambiguity that comes from using technology . you do n't know where i am or what i 'm doing or who i 'm with .
and they 're aimed at protecting the relationships .
these are n't just people being jerks . these are people that are saying , look , i do n't want to talk to you now , or i did n't want to talk to you then , but i still care about you .
our relationship is still important .
now , the sock puppet , on the other hand , is a totally different animal . the sock puppet is n't about ambiguity , per se . it 's about identity .
let me give you a very recent example , as in , like , last week .
here 's r.j. ellory , best-seller author in britain .
here 's one of his bestselling books .
here 's a reviewer online , on amazon .
my favorite , by nicodemus jones , is , " whatever else it might do , it will touch your soul . "
and of course , you might suspect that nicodemus jones is r.j. ellory .
he wrote very , very positive reviews about himself . surprise , surprise .
now this sock puppet stuff is n't actually that new .
walt whitman also did this back in the day , before there was internet technology . sock puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale , which is the domain of the chinese water army .
chinese water army refers to thousands of people in china that are paid small amounts of money to produce content . it could be reviews . it could be propaganda . the government hires these people , companies hire them , all over the place .
in north america , we call this astroturfing , and astroturfing is very common now . there 's a lot of concerns about it .
we see this especially with product reviews , book reviews , everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not .
now , looking at these three reviews , or these three types of deception , you might think , wow , the internet is really making us a deceptive species , especially when you think about the astroturfing , where we can see deception brought up to scale .
but actually , what i 've been finding is very different from that .
now , let 's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms , which i 'm sure none of you have been in .
i can assure you there 's deception there .
and let 's put aside the nigerian prince who 's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's forget about that guy , too .
let 's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones .
those are the conversations that really matter .
what does technology do to deception with those folks ?
here 's a couple of studies . one of the studies we do are called diary studies , in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days , and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium , and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media .
and it really throws people for a loop because we think , well , there 's no nonverbal cues , so why do n't you lie more ?
the phone , in contrast , the most lies .
again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most , and perhaps because of the butler lie ambiguities i was telling you about .
this tends to be very different from what people expect .
what about résumés ? we did a study in which we had people apply for a job , and they could apply for a job either with a traditional paper résumé , or on linkedin , which is a social networking site like facebook , but for professionals - involves the same information as a résumé .
and what we found , to many people 's surprise , was that those linkedin résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers , like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job .
how about facebook itself ?
you know , we always think that hey , there are these idealized versions , people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives . i 've thought that many times .
my friends , no way they can be that cool and have good of a life .
well , one study tested this by examining people 's personalities .
they had four good friends of a person judge their personality .
then they had strangers , many strangers , judge the person 's personality just from facebook , and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical , highly correlated , meaning that facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality .
all right , well , what about online dating ?
i mean , that 's a pretty deceptive space .
i 'm sure you all have " friends " that have used online dating . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came , or the woman that did n't look at all like her photo .
well , we were really interested in it , and so what we did is we brought people , online daters , into the lab , and then we measured them . we got their height up against the wall , we put them on a scale , got their weight - ladies loved that - and then we actually got their driver 's license to get their age .
and what we found was very , very interesting .
here 's an example of the men and the height .
along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile .
along the y-axis , the vertical axis , is how tall they actually were .
that diagonal line is the truth line . if their dot 's on it , they were telling exactly the truth .
now , as you see , most of the little dots are below the line .
what it means is all the guys were lying about their height .
in fact , they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch , what we say in the lab as " strong rounding up . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- you get to 5 ' 8 " and one tenth , and boom ! 5 ' 9 . "
but what 's really important here is , look at all those dots .
they are clustering pretty close to the truth . what we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions , but they always lied by a little bit .
one of the reasons is pretty simple . if you go to a date , a coffee date , and you 're completely different than what you said , game over . right ? so people lied frequently , but they lied subtly , not too much . they were constrained .
well , what explains all these studies ? what explains the fact that despite our intuitions , mine included , a lot of online communication , technologically-mediated communication , is more honest than face to face ?
that really is strange . how do we explain this ?
well , to do that , one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature .
it 's a very old literature by now , it 's coming up on 50 years .
it 's been reviewed many times . there 's been thousands of trials , hundreds of studies , and there 's some really compelling findings .
the first is , we 're really bad at detecting deception , really bad . fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not .
that 's really bad . why is it so bad ?
well it has to do with pinocchio 's nose .
if i were to ask you guys , what do you rely on when you 're looking at somebody and you want to find out if they 're lying ? what cue do you pay attention to ?
most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes . the eyes are the window to the soul .
and you 're not alone . around the world , almost every culture , one of the top cues is eyes . but the research over the last 50 years says there 's actually no reliable cue to deception , which blew me away , and it 's one of the hard lessons that i learned when i was customs officer .
the eyes do not tell us whether somebody 's lying or not .
some situations , yes - high stakes , maybe their pupils dilate , their pitch goes up , their body movements change a little bit , but not all the time , not for everybody , it 's not reliable .
strange . the other thing is that just because you ca n't see me does n't mean i 'm going to lie . it 's common sense , but one important finding is that we lie for a reason .
we lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else 's gain .
so there are some pathological liars , but they make up a tiny portion of the population . we lie for a reason .
just because people ca n't see us does n't mean we 're going to necessarily lie .
but i think there 's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here . the next big thing for me , the next big idea , we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language .
most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago . that 's a long time ago .
a lot of humans have lived since then .
we 've been talking , i guess , about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers . i do n't know what they talked about , but they were doing a lot of talking , and like i said , there 's a lot of humans evolving speaking , about 100 billion people in fact .
what 's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago . so what that means is that all the people before there was any writing , every word that they ever said , every utterance disappeared . no trace . evanescent . gone .
so we 've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record . in fact , even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now , with the printing press , which is very recent in our past , and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until world war ii , so even the people of the last two millennia , most of the words they ever said - poof ! - disappeared .
let 's turn to now , the networked age .
how many of you have recorded something today ?
anybody do any writing today ? did anybody write a word ?
it looks like almost every single person here recorded something .
in this room , right now , we 've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history .
that is crazy . we 're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we 've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear , but we 're in an environment where we 're recording everything .
in fact , i think in the very near future , it 's not just what we write that will be recorded , everything we do will be recorded .
what does that mean ? what 's the next big idea from that ?
well , as a social scientist , this is the most amazing thing i have ever even dreamed of . now , i can look at all those words that used to , for millennia , disappear .
i can look at lies that before were said and then gone .
you remember those astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before ? well , when they write a fake review , they have to post it somewhere , and it 's left behind for us .
so one thing that we did , and i 'll give you an example of looking at the language , is we paid people to write some fake reviews . one of these reviews is fake .
the person never was at the james hotel .
the other review is real . the person stayed there .
now , your task now is to decide which review is fake ?
i 'll give you a moment to read through them .
but i want everybody to raise their hand at some point .
remember , i study deception . i can tell if you do n't raise your hand .
all right , how many of you believe that a is the fake ?
all right . very good . about half .
and how many of you think that b is ?
all right . slightly more for b.
excellent . here 's the answer .
b is a fake . well done second group . you dominated the first group . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're actually a little bit unusual . every time we demonstrate this , it 's usually about a 50-50 split , which fits with the research , 54 percent . maybe people here in winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out .
those cold , hard winters , i love it .
all right , so why do i care about this ?
well , what i can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception .
let me highlight a couple of things here in the fake review . the first is that liars tend to think about narrative . they make up a story : who ? and what happened ? and that 's what happened here .
our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing . they also used the first person singular , i , way more than the people that actually stayed there .
they were inserting themselves into the hotel review , kind of trying to convince you they were there .
in contrast , the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there , their bodies actually entered the physical space , they talked a lot more about spatial information .
they said how big the bathroom was , or they said , you know , here 's how far shopping is from the hotel .
now , you guys did pretty well . most people perform at chance at this task .
our computer algorithm is very accurate , much more accurate than humans can be , and it 's not going to be accurate all the time .
this is n't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend 's lying to you on text messaging .
we believe that every lie now , every type of lie - fake hotel reviews , fake shoe reviews , your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging - those are all different lies . they 're going to have different patterns of language . but because everything 's recorded now , we can look at all of those kinds of lies .
now , as i said , as a social scientist , this is wonderful .
it 's transformational . we 're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression , about everything from love to attitudes , because everything is being recorded now , but what does it mean for the average citizen ?
what does it mean for us in our lives ?
well , let 's forget deception for a bit . one of the big ideas , i believe , is that we 're leaving these huge traces behind .
my outbox for email is massive , and i never look at it . i write all the time , but i never look at my record , at my trace .
and i think we 're going to see a lot more of that , where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote , what we said , what we did .
now , if we bring it back to deception , there 's a couple of take-away things here .
first , lying online can be very dangerous , right ?
not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine , but you 're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to , and you 're also leaving them around for me to analyze with some computer algorithms .
so by all means , go ahead and do that , that 's good .
but when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives , i think we can go back to diogenes and confucius . and they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie , and more concerned about being true to the self , and i think this is really important .
now , when you are about to say or do something , we can think , do i want this to be part of my legacy , part of my personal record ?
because in the digital age we live in now , in the networked age , we are all leaving a record .
thank you so much for your time , and good luck with your record . -lrb- applause -rrb- we live in difficult and challenging economic times , of course .
and one of the first victims of difficult economic times , i think , is public spending of any kind , but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science , and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration .
so i want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that 's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do .
but i think to set the scene , i want to show - the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst ted slide in the history of ted , but it is a bit of a mess .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually , it 's not my fault ; it 's from the guardian newspaper .
and it 's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs .
because , if i 'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration , i should tell you how much it costs .
so this is a game called " spot the science budgets . "
this is the u.k. government spend .
you see there , it 's about 620 billion a year .
the science budget is actually - if you look to your left , there 's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs .
and it 's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob .
it 's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion .
that funds everything in the u.k.
from medical research , space exploration , where i work , at cern in geneva , particle physics , engineering , even arts and humanities , funded from the science budget , which is that 3.3 billion , that little , tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen .
so that 's what we 're arguing about .
that percentage , by the way , is about the same in the u.s. and germany and france .
r & d in total in the economy , publicly funded , is about 0.6 percent of gdp .
so that 's what we 're arguing about .
the first thing i want to say , and this is straight from " wonders of the solar system , " is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful .
this is a picture that actually was sent back by the cassini space probe around saturn , after we 'd finished filming " wonders of the solar system . "
so it is n't in the series .
it 's of the moon enceladus .
so that big sweeping , white sphere in the corner is saturn , which is actually in the background of the picture .
and that crescent there is the moon enceladus , which is about as big as the british isles .
it 's about 500 kilometers in diameter .
so , tiny moon .
what 's fascinating and beautiful ...
this an unprocessed picture , by the way , i should say , it 's black and white , straight from saturnian orbit .
what 's beautiful is , you can probably see on the limb there some faint , sort of , wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb .
this is how we visualize that in " wonders of the solar system . "
it 's a beautiful graphic .
what we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon .
that 's fascinating and beautiful in itself , but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon .
and what 's important about that is that , on our planet , on earth , wherever we find liquid water , we find life .
so , to find strong evidence of liquid , pools of liquid , beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the earth is really quite astounding .
so what we 're saying , essentially , is maybe that 's a habitat for life in the solar system .
well , let me just say , that was a graphic . i just want to show this picture .
that 's one more picture of enceladus .
this is when cassini flew beneath enceladus .
so it made a very low pass , just a few hundred kilometers above the surface .
and so this , again , a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space , absolutely beautiful .
but that 's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system .
that 's probably this place , which is a moon of jupiter , europa .
and again , we had to fly to the jovian system to get any sense that this moon , as most moons , was anything other than a dead ball of rock .
it 's actually an ice moon .
so what you 're looking at is the surface of the moon europa , which is a thick sheet of ice , probably a hundred kilometers thick .
but by measuring the way that europa interacts with the magnetic field of jupiter , and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around , we 've inferred very strongly that there 's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of europa .
so below the ice , there 's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon .
it could be hundreds of kilometers deep , we think .
we think it 's saltwater , and that would mean that there 's more water on that moon of jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the earth combined .
so that place , a little moon around jupiter , is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the earth , that we know of .
tremendous and beautiful discovery .
our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful .
it may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask , which is : " are we alone in the universe ? "
is there any other use to exploration and science , other than just a sense of wonder ?
well , there is .
this is a very famous picture taken , actually , on my first christmas eve , december 24th , 1968 , when i was about eight months old .
it was taken by apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon .
earthrise from apollo 8 .
a famous picture ; many people have said that it 's the picture that saved 1968 , which was a turbulent year - the student riots in paris , the height of the vietnam war .
the reason many people think that about this picture , and al gore has said it many times , actually , on the stage at ted , is that this picture , arguably , was the beginning of the environmental movement .
because , for the first time , we saw our world , not as a solid , immovable , kind of indestructible place , but as a very small , fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space .
what 's also not often said about the space exploration , about the apollo program , is the economic contribution it made .
i mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this , it cost a lot , did n't it ?
well , actually , many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness , the economic impact of apollo .
the biggest one was in 1975 by chase econometrics .
and it showed that for every $ 1 spent on apollo , 14 came back into the u.s. economy .
so the apollo program paid for itself in inspiration , in engineering , achievement and , i think , in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over .
so exploration can pay for itself .
what about scientific discovery ?
what about driving innovation ?
well , this looks like a picture of virtually nothing .
what it is , is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen .
see , back in the 1880s , 1890s , many scientists , many observers , looked at the light given off from atoms .
and they saw strange pictures like this .
what you 're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it does n't just glow like a white light , it just emits light at particular colors , a red one , a light blue one , some dark blue ones .
now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that 's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them .
and the electrons can only be in particular places .
and when they jump up to the next place they can be , and fall back down again , they emit light at particular colors .
and so the fact that atoms , when you heat them up , only emit light at very specific colors , was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory , the theory of the structure of atoms .
i just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable .
this is actually a picture of the spectrum of the sun .
and now , this is a picture of atoms in the sun 's atmosphere absorbing light .
and again , they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down , jump up and fall down .
but look at the number of black lines in that spectrum .
and the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element .
and that 's why helium 's called helium .
it 's called " helios " - helios from the sun .
now , that sounds esoteric , and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit , but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon , for example .
the way that silicon behaves , the fact that you can build transistors , is a purely quantum phenomenon .
so without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms , which led to this rather esoteric theory , quantum mechanics , then we would n't have transistors , we would n't have silicon chips , we would n't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy .
there 's one more , i think , wonderful twist to that tale .
in " wonders of the solar system , " we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal .
it 's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on earth , is you can transport it , not only to the planets , but to the most distant stars and galaxies .
and one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics , just by looking at the structure of atoms - the same theory that describes transistors - is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than , quite specifically , 1.4 times the mass of the sun .
that 's a limit imposed on the mass of stars .
you can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory , get a telescope , swing it to the sky , and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the sun .
that 's quite an incredible prediction .
what happens when you have a star that 's right on the edge of that mass ?
well , this is a picture of it .
this is the picture of a galaxy , a common " our garden " galaxy with , what , 100 billion stars like our sun in it .
it 's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe .
there are a billion stars in the galactic core , which is why it 's shining out so brightly .
this is about 50 million light years away , so one of our neighboring galaxies .
but that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy .
so that star is also 50 million light years away .
it 's part of that galaxy , and it 's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it .
that 's a type ia supernova explosion .
now that 's an incredible phenomena , because it 's a star that sits there .
it 's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf .
it sits there about , say , 1.3 times the mass of the sun .
and it has a binary companion that goes around it , so a big star , a big ball of gas .
and what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star , until it gets to this limit called the chandrasekhar limit , and then it explodes .
and it explodes , and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks , and releases , not only energy , but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe .
in fact , that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf .
now , there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the big bang .
and there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars .
it was made in stars like that , locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets , stars , new solar systems and , indeed , people like us .
i think that 's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics , because we understand that process , because we understand the structure of atoms here on earth .
this is a beautiful quote that i found - we 're talking about serendipity there - from alexander fleming : " when i woke up just after dawn on september 28 , 1928 , i certainly did n't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world 's first antibiotic . "
now , the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor .
and they certainly did n't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions , which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe .
so , i think science can be - serendipity is important .
it can be beautiful . it can reveal quite astonishing things .
it can also , i think , finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet .
this is a spectacular picture of our home planet .
now , it does n't look like our home planet .
it looks like saturn because , of course , it is .
it was taken by the cassini space probe .
but it 's a famous picture , not because of the beauty and majesty of saturn 's rings , but actually because of a tiny , faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings .
and if i blow it up there , you see it .
it looks like a moon , but in fact , it 's a picture of earth .
it was a picture of earth captured in that frame of saturn .
that 's our planet from 750 million miles away .
i think the earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it , the more beautiful it seems .
but that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet .
it was taken by this thing , which is called the voyager spacecraft .
and that 's a picture of me in front of it for scale .
the voyager is a tiny machine .
it 's currently 10 billion miles away from earth , transmitting with that dish , with the power of 20 watts , and we 're still in contact with it .
but it visited jupiter , saturn , uranus and neptune .
and after it visited all four of those planets , carl sagan , who 's one of my great heroes , had the wonderful idea of turning voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited .
and it took this picture of earth .
now it 's very hard to see the earth there , it 's called the " pale blue dot " picture , but earth is suspended in that red shaft of light .
that 's earth from four billion miles away .
and i 'd like to read you what sagan wrote about it , just to finish , because i can not say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken .
he said , " consider again that dot .
that 's here . that 's home . that 's us .
on it , everyone you love , everyone you know , everyone you 've ever heard of , every human being who ever was lived out their lives .
the aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions , ideologies and economic doctrines , every hunter and forager , every hero and coward , every creator and destroyer of civilization , every king and peasant , every young couple in love , every mother and father , hopeful child , inventor and explorer , every teacher of morals , every corrupt politician , every superstar , every supreme leader , every saint and sinner in the history of our species , lived there , on a mote of dust , suspended in a sunbeam .
it 's been said that astronomy 's a humbling and character-building experience .
there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world .
to me , it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot , the only home we 've ever known . "
beautiful words about the power of science and exploration .
the argument has always been made , and it will always be made , that we know enough about the universe .
you could have made it in the 1920s ; you would n't have had penicillin .
you could have made it in the 1890s ; you would n't have the transistor .
and it 's made today in these difficult economic times .
surely , we know enough .
we do n't need to discover anything else about our universe .
let me leave the last words to someone who 's rapidly becoming a hero of mine , humphrey davy , who did his science at the turn of the 19th century .
he was clearly under assault all the time .
" we know enough at the turn of the 19th century .
just exploit it ; just build things . "
he said this , he said , " nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate , that our triumphs are complete , that there are no mysteries in nature , and that there are no new worlds to conquer . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as an artist , connection is very important to me .
through my work i 'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected .
i first went to antarctica almost 10 years ago , where i saw my first icebergs .
i was in awe .
my heart beat fast , my head was dizzy , trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me .
the icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water , and i could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake , year after year .
icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves .
each iceberg has its own individual personality .
they have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences .
some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end , while others ca n't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion .
it 's easy to think , when you look at an iceberg , that they 're isolated , that they 're separate and alone , much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves .
but the reality is far from it .
as an iceberg melts , i am breathing in its ancient atmosphere .
as the iceberg melts , it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life .
i approach photographing these icebergs as if i 'm making portraits of my ancestors , knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again .
it is not a death when they melt ; it is not an end , but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life .
some of the ice in the icebergs that i photograph is very young - a couple thousand years old .
and some of the ice is over 100,000 years old .
the last pictures i 'd like to show you are of an iceberg that i photographed in qeqetarsuaq , greenland .
it 's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling .
so here it is .
you can see on the left side a small boat .
that 's about a 15-foot boat .
and i 'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline .
you can see here , it begins to roll , and the boat has moved to the other side , and the man is standing there .
this is an average-size greenlandic iceberg .
it 's about 120 feet above the water , or 40 meters .
and this video is real time .
-lrb- music -rrb- and just like that , the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to give you your recommended dietary allowance of poetry .
and the way i 'm going to do that is present to you five animations of five of my poems .
and let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about .
because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act .
but when i was united states poet laureate - and i love saying that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a great way to start sentences .
when i was him back then , i was approached by j. walter thompson , the ad company , and they were hired sort of by the sundance channel .
and the idea was to have me record some of my poems and then they would find animators to animate them .
and i was initially resistant , because i always think poetry can stand alone by itself .
attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results , in all cases .
and the poem , if it 's written with the ear , already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed .
and surely , if you 're reading a poem that mentions a cow , you do n't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow .
i mean , let 's let the reader do a little work .
but i relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility , and also i 'm like a total cartoon junkie since childhood .
i think more influential than emily dickinson or coleridge or wordsworth on my imagination were warner brothers , merrie melodies and loony tunes cartoons .
bugs bunny is my muse .
and this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places .
and i 'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses , poetry on subways , on billboards , on cereal boxes .
when i was poet laureate , there i go again - i ca n't help it , it 's true - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i created a poetry channel on delta airlines that lasted for a couple of years .
so you could tune into poetry as you were flying .
and my sense is , it 's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life .
start a meeting with a poem . that would be an idea you might take with you .
when you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio or on a cereal box or whatever , it happens to you so suddenly that you do n't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school .
so let us start with the first one .
it 's a little poem called " budapest , " and in it i reveal , or pretend to reveal , the secrets of the creative process .
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " budapest . "
my pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater .
i watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly , intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that will allow it to live another day .
it wants only to be here tomorrow , dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt , nose pressed against the page , writing a few more dutiful lines while i gaze out the window and imagine budapest or some other city where i have never been .
bc : so that makes it seem a little easier .
-lrb- applause -rrb- writing is not actually as easy as that for me .
but i like to pretend that it comes with ease .
one of my students came up after class , an introductory class , and she said , " you know , poetry is harder than writing , " which i found both erroneous and profound .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i like to at least pretend it just flows out .
a friend of mine has a slogan ; he 's another poet .
he says that , " if at first you do n't succeed , hide all evidence you ever tried . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next poem is also rather short .
poetry just says a few things in different ways .
and i think you could boil this poem down to saying , " some days you eat the bear , other days the bear eats you . "
and it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture .
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " some days . "
some days i put the people in their places at the table , bend their legs at the knees , if they come with that feature , and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs .
all afternoon they face one another , the man in the brown suit , the woman in the blue dress - perfectly motionless , perfectly behaved .
but other days i am the one who is lifted up by the ribs then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table .
very funny .
but how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next striding around like a vivid god , your shoulders in the clouds , or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper staring straight ahead with your little plastic face ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : there 's a horror movie in there somewhere .
the next poem is called forgetfulness , and it 's really just a kind of poetic essay on the subject of mental slippage .
and the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia , in other words , forgetting the things that you have read .
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " forgetfulness . "
the name of the author is the first to go , followed obediently by the title , the plot , the heartbreaking conclusion , the entire novel , which suddenly becomes one you have never read , never even heard of .
it is as if , one by one , the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones .
long ago , you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag .
and even now , as you memorize the order of the planets , something else is slipping away , a state flower perhaps , the address of an uncle , the capital of paraguay .
whatever it is you are struggling to remember , it is not poised on the tip of your tongue , not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen .
it has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an l as far as you can recall , well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle .
no wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war .
no wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : the next poem is called " the country " and it 's based on , when i was in college i met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine .
he lived , and still does , in rural vermont .
i lived in new york city .
and we would visit each other .
and when i would go up to the country , he would teach me things like deer hunting , which meant getting lost with a gun basically - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and trout fishing and stuff like that .
and then he 'd come down to new york city and i 'd teach him what i knew , which was largely smoking and drinking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in that way we traded lore with each other .
the poem that 's coming up is based on him trying to tell me a little something about a domestic point of etiquette in country living that i had a very hard time , at first , processing .
it 's called " the country . "
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " the country . "
i wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house , because the mice might get into them and start a fire .
but your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches , you said , are always stowed .
who could sleep that night ?
who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper , gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth ?
who could not see him rounding a corner , the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam , the sudden flare and the creature , for one bright , shining moment , suddenly thrust ahead of his time - now a fire-starter , now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual , little brown druid illuminating some ancient night ?
and who could fail to notice , lit up in the blazing insulation , the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice - one-time inhabitants of what once was your house in the country ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . and the last poem is called " the dead . "
i wrote this after a friend 's funeral , but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying , as all eulogists tend to do , which is how happy the deceased would be to look down and see all of us assembled .
and that to me was a bad start to the afterlife , having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified .
so the little poem is called " the dead . "
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " the dead . "
the dead are always looking down on us , they say .
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich , they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity .
they watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth .
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch , drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon , they think we are looking back at them , which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : i 'm not sure if other poems will be animated .
it took a long time - i mean , it 's rather uncommon to have this marriage - a long time to put those two together .
but then again , it took us a long time to put the wheel and the suitcase together .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , we had the wheel for some time .
and schlepping is an ancient and honorable art .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just have time to read a more recent poem to you .
if it has a subject , the subject is adolescence .
and it 's addressed to a certain person .
it 's called " to my favorite 17-year-old high school girl . "
" do you realize that if you had started building the parthenon on the day you were born , you would be all done in only one more year ?
of course , you could n't have done that all alone .
so never mind ; you 're fine just being yourself .
you 're loved for just being you .
but did you know that at your age judy garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture , joan of arc was leading the french army to victory and blaise pascal had cleaned up his room - no wait , i mean he had invented the calculator ?
of course , there will be time for all that later in your life , after you come out of your room and begin to blossom , or at least pick up all your socks .
for some reason i keep remembering that lady jane grey was queen of england when she was only 15 .
but then she was beheaded , so never mind her as a role model .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a few centuries later , when he was your age , franz schubert was doing the dishes for his family , but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies , four operas and two complete masses as a youngster .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but of course , that was in austria at the height of romantic lyricism , not here in the suburbs of cleveland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- frankly , who cares if annie oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if maria callas debuted as tosca at 17 ?
we think you 're special just being you - playing with your food and staring into space .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- by the way , i lied about schubert doing the dishes , but that does n't mean he never helped out around the house . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that , by far , most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light .
we can stand on the earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes .
the sun burns our peripheral vision .
we see light reflected off the moon .
and in the time since galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies , the known universe has come to us through light , across vast eras in cosmic history .
and with all of our modern telescopes , we 've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe - these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the big bang .
and yet , the universe is not a silent movie because the universe is n't silent .
i 'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself , because space can wobble like a drum .
it can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold .
now we 'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe - a sonic composition .
and while we 've never heard the sounds from space , we really should , in the next few years , start to turn up the volume on what 's going on out there .
so in this ambition to capture songs from the universe , we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have , because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song , which i 'd like to play for you - some of our predictions for what that song will be like .
now black holes are dark against a dark sky .
we ca n't see them directly .
they 're not brought to us with light , at least not directly .
we can see them indirectly , because black holes wreak havoc on their environment .
they destroy stars around them .
they churn up debris in their surroundings .
but they wo n't come to us directly through light .
we might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background , but we have n't yet .
and yet black holes may be heard even if they 're not seen , and that 's because they bang on space-time like a drum .
now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to albert einstein - to whom we owe so much .
einstein realized that if space were empty , if the universe were empty , it would be like this picture , except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it .
but if we were freely falling through the space , even without this helpful grid , we might be able to paint it ourselves , because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines , undeflected straight paths through the universe .
einstein also realized - and this is the real meat of the matter - that if you put energy or mass in the universe , it would curve space , and a freely falling object would pass by , let 's say , the sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space .
it was einstein 's great general theory of relativity .
now even light will be bent by those paths .
and you can be bent so much that you 're caught in orbit around the sun , as the earth is , or the moon around the earth .
these are the natural curves in space .
what einstein did not realize was that , if you took our sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers - so you took a million times the mass of the earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across , you would make a black hole , an object so dense that if light veered too close , it would never escape - a dark shadow against the universe .
it was n't einstein who realized this , it was karl schwarzschild who was a german jew in world war i - joined the german army already an accomplished scientist , working on the russian front .
i like to imagine schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire , and then , in between , calculating einstein 's equations - as you do in the trenches .
and he was reading einstein 's recently published general theory of relativity , and he was thrilled by this theory .
and he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary : curves so strong that space would rain down into them , space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole .
and even light could not escape this current .
light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be , and all that would be left would be a shadow .
now he wrote to einstein , and he said , " as you will see , the war has been kind to me enough .
despite the heavy gunfire , i 've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas . "
and einstein was very impressed with his exact solution , and i should hope also the dedication of the scientist .
this is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions .
and he took schwarzschild 's idea to the prussian academy of sciences the next week .
but einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity .
he did not believe they existed in nature .
he thought nature would protect us from their formation .
it was decades before the term " black hole " was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects - in fact they 're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime .
now our sun will not collapse to a black hole .
it 's actually not massive enough .
but if we did a little thought experiment - as einstein was very fond of doing - we could imagine putting the sun crushed down to six kilometers , and putting a tiny little earth around it in orbit , maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun .
and it would be self-illuminated , because now the sun 's gone , we have no other source of light - so let 's make our little earth self-illuminated .
and you would realize you could put the earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole .
this crushed black hole actually would fit inside manhattan , more or less .
it might spill off into the hudson a little bit before it destroyed the earth .
but basically that 's what we 're talking about .
we 're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of manhattan .
so we move this earth very close - 30 kilometers outside - and we notice it 's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole .
there 's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe , but you actually have to get very close to fall in .
but what 's very impressive is that , from our vantage point , we can always see the earth .
it can not hide behind the black hole .
the light from the earth , some of it falls in , but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us .
so you ca n't hide anything behind a black hole .
if this were battlestar galactica and you 're fighting the cylons , do n't hide behind the black hole .
they can see you .
now , our sun will not collapse to a black hole - it 's not massive enough - but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy .
and if one were to eclipse the milky way , this is what it would look like .
we would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the milky way galaxy and its luminous dust lanes .
and if we were to fall towards this black hole , we would see all of that light lensed around it , and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened .
it would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we could n't , anymore than light can escape .
but even though the black hole is dark from the outside , it 's not dark on the inside , because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us .
and even though , due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation , our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time , it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us , right before we were crushed to death by the black hole .
it would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel , but it 's a total death experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel .
now we 've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole , but black holes can be heard , even if they 're not seen .
imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation - imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together .
maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes - each one 10 times the mass of the sun .
so now we 're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across .
they can be spinning hundreds of times a second .
at the end of their lives , they 're going around each other very near the speed of light .
so they 're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second , and as they do so , they not only curve space , but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space , an actual wave on space-time .
space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe .
and they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light .
this computer simulation is due to a relativity group at nasa goddard .
it took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem .
this was one of the groups .
it shows two black holes in orbit around each other , again , with these helpfully painted curves .
and if you can see - it 's kind of faint - but if you can see the red waves emanating out , those are the gravitational waves .
they 're literally the sounds of space ringing , and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning , quiet black hole at the end of the day .
if you were standing near enough , your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space .
you would literally hear the sound .
now of course , your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully , so you might have trouble understanding what 's going on .
but i 'd like to play for you the sound that we predict .
this is from my group - a slightly less glamorous computer modeling .
imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole .
the sound you 're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close .
if it gets far away , it 's a little too quiet .
but it comes in like a mallet , and it literally cracks space , wobbling it like a drum .
and we can predict what the sound will be .
we know that , as it falls in , it gets faster and it gets louder .
and eventually , we 're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy .
-lrb- thumping -rrb- then it 's gone .
now i 've never heard it that loud - it 's actually more dramatic .
at home it sounds kind of anticlimactic .
it 's sort of like ding , ding , ding .
this is another sound from my group .
no , i 'm not showing you any images , because black holes do n't leave behind helpful trails of ink , and space is not painted , showing you the curves .
but if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this , you want to get moving .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- want to get away from the sound .
both black holes are moving .
both black holes are getting closer together .
in this case , they 're both wobbling quite a lot .
and then they 're going to merge .
-lrb- thumping -rrb- now it 's gone .
now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging - that it chirps up at the end .
now that 's our prediction for what we 'll see .
luckily we 're at this safe distance in long beach , california .
and surely , somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged .
and surely , the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years , or a million years , at the speed of light to get to us .
but the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear .
there are very industrious experiments being built on earth - one called ligo - which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers .
it 's a remarkably ambitious experiment , and it 's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years - to pick this up .
there 's also a mission proposed for space , which hopefully will launch in the next ten years , called lisa .
and lisa will be able to see super-massive black holes - black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the sun .
in this hubble image , we see two galaxies .
they look like they 're frozen in some embrace .
and each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core .
but they 're not frozen ; they 're actually merging .
these two black holes are colliding , and they will merge over a billion-year time scale .
it 's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration .
but lisa could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe 's history , the last 15 minutes before they fall together .
and it 's not just black holes , but it 's also any big disturbance in the universe - and the biggest of them all is the big bang .
when that expression was coined , it was derisive - like , " oh , who would believe in a big bang ? "
but now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang .
it might make a sound .
this animation from my friends at proton studios shows looking at the big bang from the outside .
we do n't ever want to do that actually . we want to be inside the universe because there 's no such thing as standing outside the universe .
so imagine you 're inside the big bang .
it 's everywhere , it 's all around you , and the space is wobbling chaotically .
fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us .
galaxies form , and generations of stars form in those galaxies , and around one star , at least one star , is a habitable planet .
and here we are frantically building these experiments , doing these calculations , writing these computer codes .
imagine a billion years ago , two black holes collided .
that song has been ringing through space for all that time .
we were n't even here .
it gets closer and closer - 40,000 years ago , we 're still doing cave paintings .
it 's like hurry , build your instruments .
it 's getting closer and closer , and in 20 ...
whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity - we 'll build them , we 'll turn on the machines and , bang , we 'll catch it - the first song from space .
if it was the big bang we were going to pick up , it would sound like this .
-lrb- static -rrb- it 's a terrible sound .
it 's literally the definition of noise .
it 's white noise ; it 's such a chaotic ringing .
but it 's around us everywhere , presumably , if it has n't been wiped out by some other process in the universe .
and if we pick it up , it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation , of our observable universe .
so within the next few years , we 'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit , render the universe in audio .
but if we detect those earliest moments , it 'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the big bang , which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest , most elusive , questions .
if we run the movie of our universe backwards , we know that there was a big bang in our past , and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it , but was our big bang the only big bang ?
i mean we have to ask , has it happened before ?
will it happen again ?
i mean , in the spirit of rising to ted 's challenge to reignite wonder , we can ask questions , at least for this last minute , that honestly might evade us forever .
but we have to ask : is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history ?
or , is it possible that we 're just a branch off of a multiverse - each branch with its own big bang in its past - maybe some of them with black holes playing drums , maybe some without - maybe some with sentient life , and maybe some without - not in our past , not in our future , but somehow fundamentally connected to us ?
so we have to wonder , if there is a multiverse , in some other patch of that multiverse , are there creatures ?
here 's my multiverse creatures .
are there other creatures in the multiverse , wondering about us and wondering about their own origins ?
and if they are , i can imagine them as we are , calculating , writing computer code , building instruments , trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there .
thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : you guys were amazing .
that 's amazing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you just do n't hear that every day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- usman , the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching jimmy page on youtube .
usman riaz : yes , that was the first one . and then i - that was the first thing i learned , and then i started progressing to other things .
and i started watching kaki king a lot , and she would always cite preston reed as a big influence , so then i started watching his videos , and it 's very surreal right now to be - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : was that piece just now , that was one of his songs that you learned , or how did that happen ?
ur : i 'd never learned it before , but he told me that we would be playing that on stage , so i was familiar with it , so that 's why i had so much more fun learning it .
and it finally happened , so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : preston , from your point of view , i mean , you invented this like 20 years ago , right ?
how does it feel to see someone like this come along taking your art and doing so much with it ?
preston reed : it 's mind-blowing , and i feel really proud , really honored .
and he 's a wonderful musician , so it 's cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : i guess , i do n't think there is like a one-minute other piece you guys can do ?
can you ? do you jam ? do you have anything else ?
pr : we have n't prepared anything .
ca : there is n't . i 'll tell you what .
if you have another 30 or 40 seconds , and you have another 30 or 40 seconds , and we just see that , i just think - i can feel it . we want to hear a little more .
and if it goes horribly wrong , no worries .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- good evening .
we are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight , but when qatar will host the football world cup 10 years from now , 2022 , we already heard it will be in the hot , very hot and sunny summer months of june and july .
and when qatar has been assigned to the world cup all , many people around the world have been wondering , how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football , run around in this desert climate ? how would it be possible that spectators sit , enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment ?
together with the architects of albert speer & partner , our engineers from transsolar have been supporting , have been developing open-air stadia based on 100 percent solar power , on 100 percent solar cooling .
let me tell you about that , but let me start with comfort .
let me start with the aspect of comfort , because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort .
we are used to looking at charts like that , and you see this red line showing the air temperature in june and july , and yes , that 's right , it 's picking up to 45 degrees c.
it 's actually very hot .
but air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort .
let me show you analysis a colleague of mine did looking on different football , world cups , olympic games around the world , looking on the comfort and analyzing the comfort people have perceived at these different sport activities , and let me start with mexico .
mexico temperature has been , air temperature has been something between 15 , up to 30 degrees c , and people enjoyed themselves .
it was a very comfortable game in mexico city . have a look .
orlando , same kind of stadium , open-air stadium . people have been sitting in the strong sun , in the very high humidity in the afternoon , and they did not enjoy . it was not comfortable .
the air temperature was not too high , but it was not comfortable during these games .
what about seoul ? seoul , because of broadcast rights , all the games have been in the late afternoon . sun has already been set , so the games have been perceived as comfortable .
what about athens ? mediterranean climate , but in the sun it was not comfortable . they did n't perceive comfort .
and we know that from spain , we know that " sol y sombra . "
if you have a ticket , and you get a ticket for the shade , you pay more , because you 're in a more comfortable environment .
what about beijing ?
it 's again , sun in the day and high humidity , and it was not comfortable .
so if i overlay , and if you overlay all these comfort envelopes , what we see is , in all these places , air temperature has been ranging something from 25 to 35 , and if you go on the line , 30 , of 30 degrees c go along that line you see there has been all kind of comfort , all kinds of perceived outdoor comfort , ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable .
so why is that ?
this is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort , which is the sun , the direct sun , the diffuse sun , which is wind , strong wind , mild wind , which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in .
and this is air temperature .
all these parameters go into the comfort feeling of our have developed a parameter , which is the perceived temperature , where all these parameters go in and help designers to understand which is the driving parameter that i feel comfort or that i do n't feel comfort .
which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature ? and these parameters , these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism .
because of our metabolism , we as human beings , we produce heat .
i 'm excited , i 'm talking to you , i 'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment . you are sitting , you are relaxed , you 're looking at me . it 's probably 100 watts each person is producing , and we need to get rid of that energy . i need , with my body , to get rid of the energy , and the harder it is for myself , for my body , to get rid of the energy , the less comfort i feel .
that 's it . and if i do n't get rid of the energy , i will die .
if we overlay what happens during the football world cup , what will happen in june , july , we will see , yes , air temperature will be much higher , but because the games and the plays will be in the afternoon , it 's probably the same comfort rating we 've found in other places which has perceived as non-comfortable .
so we sat together with a team which prepared the bid book , or goal , that we said , let 's aim for perceived temperature , for outdoor comfort in this range , which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees celsius perceived temperature , which is extremely comfortable .
people would feel really fine in an open outdoor environment .
but what does it mean ?
if we just look on what happens , we see , temperature 's too high .
if we apply the best architectural design , climate engineering design , we wo n't get much better .
so we need to do something active .
we need , for instance , to bring in radiant cooling technology , and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning .
and how does it look like in a stadium ?
so the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort . first of all , it 's shading . it needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind .
but that 's not all what we need to do . we need to use active systems .
instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium , we can use radiant cooling technologies , like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor .
and just by using cold water going through the water pipes , you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium , so you can create that comfort , and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air , the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs , to their individual energy balance .
they can adjust and find their comfort they need to find .
there are 12 stadia probably to come , but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train .
we applied the same concept : shading of the training pitch , using a shelter against wind , then using the grass .
natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature , and using dehumidified air to create comfort .
but even the best passive design would n't help .
we need active system .
and how do we do that ?
our idea for the bid was 100 percent solar cooling , based on the idea that we use the roof of the stadia , we cover the roofs of the stadia with pv systems .
we do n't borrow any energy from history .
we are not using fossil energies .
we are not borrowing energy from our neighbors .
we 're using energy we can harvest on our roofs , and also on the training pitches , which will be covered with large , flexible membranes , and we will see in the next years an industry coming up with flexible photovoltaics , giving the possibilities of shading against strong sun and producing electric energy in the same time .
and this energy now is harvested throughout the year , sent into the grid , is replacing fossils in the grid , and when i need it for the cooling , i take it back from the grid and i use the solar energy which i have brought to the grid back when i need it for the solar cooling .
and i can do that in the first year and i can balance that in the next 10 , and the next 20 years , this energy , which is necessary to condition a world cup in qatar , the next 20 years , this energy goes into the grid of qatar .
so this - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- this is not only useful for stadia . we can use that also in open-air places and streets , and we 've been working on the city of the future in masdar , which is in the united emirates , abu dhabi .
and i had the pleasure to work on the central plaza .
and the same idea to use there , to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable . people enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall , which is chilled down and which is cooled . we wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon , even in these sunny and hot summer months , and they can enjoy and meet there with their families . -lrb- applause -rrb- and the same concept : shade against the sun , shade against the wind , and use , use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint .
and these beautiful umbrellas .
so i 'd like to encourage you to pay attention to your thermal comfort , to your thermal environment , tonight and tomorrow , and if you 'd like to learn more about that , i invite you to go to our website .
we uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort .
and i also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters , it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions , to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment , and we can do that with the best passive design , but also using the energy source of the site in qatar which is the sun .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- shukran . -lrb- applause -rrb- a great way to start , i think , with my view of simplicity is to take a look at ted . here you are , understanding why we 're here , what 's going on with no difficulty at all .
the best a.i. in the planet would find it complex and confusing , and my little dog watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he would have a great time .
and of course , if you 're a speaker here , like hans rosling , a speaker finds this complex , tricky . but in hans rosling 's case , he had a secret weapon yesterday , literally , in his sword swallowing act .
and i must say , i thought of quite a few objects that i might try to swallow today and finally gave up on , but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing .
so puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense , but that we 're easily fooled . in fact , what shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled , so we 're actually looking forward to it .
we go to magic shows in order to be fooled .
and this makes many things fun , but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves .
and our friend , betty edwards , the " drawing on the right side of the brain " lady , shows these two tables to her drawing class and says , " the problem you have with learning to draw is not that you ca n't move your hand , but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty .
it 's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what 's there . "
and to prove it , she says , " the exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same , and i 'm going to prove it to you . "
she does this with cardboard , but since i have an expensive computer here i 'll just rotate this little guy around and ...
now having seen that - and i 've seen it hundreds of times , because i use this in every talk i give - i still ca n't see that they 're the same size and shape , and i doubt that you can either .
so what do artists do ? well , what artists do is to measure .
they measure very , very carefully .
and if you measure very , very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge , you 'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size .
and the talmud saw this a long time ago , saying , " we see things not as they are , but as we are . "
i certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then , if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion .
so if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are , then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here . it 's a waking dream , and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history .
and what that means : " simple and understandable " might not be actually simple or understandable , and things we think are " complex " might be made simple and understandable .
somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws .
we can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel .
the way i think of it is , we ca n't learn to see until we admit we 're blind .
once you start down at this very humble level , then you can start finding ways to see things .
and what 's happened , over the last 400 years in particular , is that human beings have invented " brainlets " - little additional parts for our brain - made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways .
and these are in the form of sensory apparatus - telescopes , microscopes - reasoning apparatus - various ways of thinking - and , most importantly , in the ability to change perspective on things .
i 'll talk about that a little bit .
it 's this change in perspective on what it is we think we 're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history .
and yet , it is not taught in any k through 12 curriculum in america that i 'm aware of .
so one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more . we like more .
if we do more in a kind of a stupid way , the simplicity gets complex and , in fact , we can keep on doing it for a very long time .
but murray gell-mann yesterday talked about emergent properties ; another name for them could be " architecture " as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious , non-simple ways of combining it .
and in fact , what murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature - of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar - all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish , and they 're in violent motion .
those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world .
but how simple ?
so , when i saw roslings ' gapminder stuff a few years ago , i just thought it was the greatest thing i 'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply .
but then i had a thought of , " boy , maybe it 's too simple . "
and i put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side , and i found that they matched up very well .
so the roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what 's important about the data .
whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell , as a former molecular biologist , i did n't like that at all .
not because it was n't beautiful or anything , but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology , and that is : why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed ?
and what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous ; they just swooped in the air and bound , and something happened .
but in fact , those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second ; they 're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds ; they 're completely crowded together , they 're jammed , they 're bashing up against each other .
and if you do n't understand that in your mental model of this stuff , what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous , and i think that 's exactly the wrong image for when you 're trying to teach science .
so , another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle .
so a kid who 's 14 in high school gets this version of the pythagorean theorem , which is a truly subtle and interesting proof , but in fact it 's not a good way to start learning about mathematics .
so a more direct one , one that gives you more of the feeling of math , is something closer to pythagoras ' own proof , which goes like this : so here we have this triangle , and if we surround that c square with three more triangles and we copy that , notice that we can move those triangles down like this .
and that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious ...
and bingo . that is all you have to do .
and this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you 're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the , literally , 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of pythagoras ' theorem that have been discovered .
now let 's go to young children .
this is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher , but was a natural mathematician .
so she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician ; she just had a feeling for math .
and here are her six-year-olds , and she 's got them making shapes out of a shape .
so they pick a shape they like - like a diamond , or a square , or a triangle , or a trapezoid - and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape , and the next larger shape .
you can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there .
and what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project , and then something like science .
so they had created these artifacts .
now she had them look at them and do this ... laborious , which i thought for a long time , until she explained to me was to slow them down so they 'll think .
so they 're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up .
but the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out .
" what have you noticed about what you did ? "
and so six-year-old lauren there noticed that the first one took one , and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one , the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one , and then the next one .
she saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two , so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there .
and she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six , where she was n't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was , but then she was confident again .
so that 's what lauren did .
and then the teacher , gillian ishijima , had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor , and everybody went batshit : " holy shit ! they 're the same ! "
no matter what the shapes were , the growth law is the same .
and the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation , derived by six-year-olds .
well , that 's pretty amazing .
that is n't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds .
so , let 's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this .
and so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do .
i 'm using the software that we 're putting on the $ 100 laptop .
so i 'd like to draw a little car here - i 'll just do this very quickly - and put a big tire on him .
and i get a little object here and i can look inside this object , i 'll call it a car . and here 's a little behavior : car forward .
each time i click it , car turn .
if i want to make a little script to do this over and over again , i just drag these guys out and set them going .
and i can try steering the car here by ...
see the car turn by five here ?
so what if i click this down to zero ?
it goes straight . that 's a big revelation for nine-year-olds .
make it go in the other direction .
but of course , that 's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car , so the kids want to do a steering wheel ; so they draw a steering wheel .
and we 'll call this a wheel .
see this wheel 's heading here ?
if i turn this wheel , you can see that number over there going minus and positive .
that 's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here , and now i can steer the car with the steering wheel .
and it 's interesting .
you know how much trouble the children have with variables , but by learning it this way , in a situated fashion , they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it .
and we can reflect here the way gillian ishijima did .
so if you look at the little script here , the speed is always going to be 30 .
we 're going to move the car according to that over and over again .
and i 'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things ; they 're evenly spaced because they 're 30 apart .
and what if i do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying , " ok , i 'm going to increase the speed by two each time , and then i 'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time ?
what do i get there ? "
we get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration .
so how do the children do science ?
-lrb- video -rrb- teacher : -lsb- choose -rsb- objects that you think will fall to the earth at the same time .
student 1 : ooh , this is nice .
teacher : do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing .
who 's got the apple ?
alan kay : they 've got little stopwatches .
student 2 : what did you get ? what did you get ?
ak : stopwatches are n't accurate enough .
student 3:0.99 seconds .
teacher : so put " sponge ball " ...
student 4l : -lsb- i decided to -rsb- do the shot put and the sponge ball because they 're two totally different weights , and if you drop them at the same time , maybe they 'll drop at the same speed .
teacher : drop . class : whoa !
ak : so obviously , aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because , of course , he did n't bother doing the experiment , and neither did st. thomas aquinas .
and it was not until galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child , only 400 years ago .
we get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase .
now , what if we want to look at this more closely ?
we can take a movie of what 's going on , but even if we single stepped this movie , it 's tricky to see what 's going on .
and so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up .
so when the children see this , they say , " ah ! acceleration , " remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways , and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is .
so what i 'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image , about a fifth of a second later , like that . and they 're getting faster and faster each time , and if i stack these guys up , then we see the differences ; the increase in the speed is constant .
and they say , " oh , yeah . constant acceleration .
we 've done that already . "
and how shall we look and verify that we actually have it ?
so you ca n't tell much from just making the ball drop there , but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time , we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model .
galileo , by the way , did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute .
i pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a newton and the apple type story , but it 's a great story .
and i thought i would do just one thing on the $ 100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here .
so once you have gravity , here 's this - increase the speed by something , increase the ship 's speed .
if i start the little game here that the kids have done , it 'll crash the space ship .
but if i oppose gravity , here we go ... oops !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one more .
yeah , there we go . yeah , ok ?
i guess the best way to end this is with two quotes : marshall mcluhan said , " children are the messages that we send to the future , " but in fact , if you think of it , children are the future we send to the future .
forget about messages ; children are the future , and children in the first and second world and , most especially , in the third world need mentors .
and this summer , we 're going to build five million of these $ 100 laptops , and maybe 50 million next year .
but we could n't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life .
that means that we , once again , have a thing where we can put technology out , but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new ichat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing .
i believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface , and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars .
it sounds like a lot , but it is literally 18 minutes of what we 're spending in iraq - we 're spending 8 billion dollars a month ; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars - so this is actually cheap .
and einstein said , " things should be as simple as possible , but not simpler . "
thank you .
what i want you all to do right now is to think of this mammal that i 'm going to describe to you .
the first thing i 'm going to tell you about this mammal is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly .
if we remove this mammal from our ecosystems , they simply will not work .
that 's the first thing .
the second thing is that due to the unique sensory abilities of this mammal , if we study this mammal , we 're going to get great insight into our diseases of the senses , such as blindness and deafness .
and the third really intriguing aspect of this mammal is that i fully believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies deep within its dna .
so are you all thinking ?
so , magnificent creature , is n't it ?
who here thought of a bat ?
ah , i can see half the audience agrees with me , and i have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of you .
so i have had the good fortune for the past 20 years to study these fascinating and beautiful mammals .
one fifth of all living mammals is a bat , and they have very unique attributes .
bats as we know them have been around on this planet for about 64 million years .
one of the most unique things that bats do as a mammal is that they fly .
now flight is an inherently difficult thing .
flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times : once in the bats , once in the birds , and once in the pterodactyls .
and so with flight , it 's very metabolically costly .
bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this .
but one other extremely unique thing about bats is that they are able to use sound to perceive their environment . they use echolocation .
now , what i mean by echolocation - they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth or through their nose . this sound wave comes out and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment , and the bats then hear these echoes and they turn this information into an acoustic image .
and this enables them to orient in complete darkness .
indeed , they do look very strange . we 're humans .
we 're a visual species . when scientists first realized that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly and orient and move at night , we did n't believe it .
for a hundred years , despite evidence to show that this is what they were doing , we did n't believe it .
now , if you look at this bat , it looks a little bit alien .
indeed , the very famous philosopher thomas nagel once said , " to truly experience an alien life form on this planet , you should lock yourself inside a room with a flying , echolocating bat in complete darkness . "
and if you look at the actual physical characteristics on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat , you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated to be able to make sound and perceive it .
very big ears , strange nose leaves , but teeny-tiny eyes .
so again , if you just look at this bat , you realize sound is very important for its survival .
most bats look like the previous one .
however , there are a group that do not use echolocation .
they do not perceive their environment using sound , and these are the flying foxes .
if anybody has ever been lucky enough to be in australia , you 've seen them coming out of the botanic gardens in sydney , and if you just look at their face , you can see they have much , much larger eyes and much smaller ears .
so among and within bats is a huge variation in their ability to use sensory perception .
now this is going to be important for what i 'm going to tell you later during the talk .
now , if the idea of bats in your belfry terrifies you , and i know some people probably are feeling a little sick looking at very large images of bats , that 's probably not that surprising , because here in western culture , bats have been demonized .
really , of course the famous book " dracula , " written by a fellow northside dubliner bram stoker , probably is mainly responsible for this .
however , i also think it 's got to do with the fact that bats come out at night , and we do n't really understand them . we 're a little frightened by things that can perceive the world slightly differently than us .
bats are usually synonymous with some type of evil events .
they are the perpetrators in horror movies , such as this famous " nightwing . "
also , if you think about it , demons always have bat wings , whereas birds , they typically - or angels have bird wings .
now , this is western society , and what i hope to do tonight is to convince you of the chinese traditional culture , that they perceive bats as creatures that bring good luck , and indeed , if you walk into a chinese home , you may see an image such as this .
this is considered the five blessings .
the chinese word for " bat " sounds like the chinese word for " happiness , " and they believe that bats bring wealth , health , longevity , virtue and serenity .
and indeed , in this image , you have a picture of longevity surrounded by five bats .
and what i want to do tonight is to talk to you and to show you that at least three of these blessings are definitely represented by a bat , and that if we study bats we will get nearer to getting each of these blessings .
so , wealth - how can a bat possibly bring us wealth ?
now as i said before , bats are essential for our ecosystems to function correctly . and why is this ?
bats in the tropics are major pollinators of many plants .
they also feed on fruit , and they disperse the seeds of these fruits . bats are responsible for pollinating the tequila plant , and this is a multi-million dollar industry in mexico . so indeed , we need them for our ecosystems to function properly .
without them , it 's going to be a problem .
but most bats are voracious insect predators .
it 's been estimated in the u.s. , in a tiny colony of big brown bats , that they will feed on over a million insects a year , and in the united states of america , right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome .
it 's working its way slowly across the u.s. and wiping out populations of bats , and scientists have estimated that 1,300 metric tons of insects a year are now remaining in the ecosystems due to the loss of bats .
bats are also threatened in the u.s.
by their attraction to wind farms . again , right now bats are looking at a little bit of a problem .
they 're going to - they are very threatened in the united states of america alone .
now how can this help us ?
well , it has been calculated that if we were to remove bats from the equation , we 're going to have to then use insecticides to remove all those pest insects that feed on our agricultural crops .
and for one year in the u.s. alone , it 's estimated that it 's going to cost 22 billion u.s. dollars , if we remove bats . so indeed , bats then do bring us wealth .
they maintain the health of our ecosystems , and also they save us money .
so again , that 's the first blessing . bats are important for our ecosystems .
and what about the second ? what about health ?
inside every cell in your body lies your genome .
your genome is made up of your dna , your dna codes for proteins that enable you to function and interact and be as you are .
now since the new advancements in modern molecular technologies , it is now possible for us to sequence our own genome in a very rapid time and at a very , very reduced cost .
now when we 've been doing this , we 've realized that there 's variations within our genome .
so i want you to look at the person beside you .
just have a quick look . and what we need to realize is that every 300 base pairs in your dna , you 're a little bit different .
and one of the grand challenges right now in modern molecular medicine is to work out whether this variation makes you more susceptible to diseases , or does this variation just make you different ?
again , what does it mean here ? what does this variation actually mean ? so if we are to capitalize on all of this new molecular data and personalized genomic information that is coming online that we will be able to have in the next few years , we have to be able to differentiate between the two . so how do we do this ?
well , i believe we just look at nature 's experiments .
so through natural selection , over time , mutations , variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time .
evolution acts as a sieve . it sieves out the bad variation .
and so therefore , if you look at the same region of a genome in many mammals that have been evolutionarily distant from each other and are also ecologically divergent , you will get a better understanding of what the evolutionary prior of that site is , i.e. , if it is important for the mammal to function , for its survival , it will be the same in all of those different lineages , species , taxa .
so therefore , if we were to do this , what we 'd need to do is sequence that region in all these different mammals and ascertain if it 's the same or if it 's different . so if it is the same , this indicates that that site is important for a function , so a disease mutation should fall within that site .
so in this case here , if all the mammals that we look at have a yellow-type genome at that site , it probably suggests that purple is bad .
this could be even more powerful if you look at mammals that are doing things slightly differently .
so say , for example , the region of the genome that i was looking at was a region that 's important for vision .
if we look at that region in mammals that do n't see so well , such as bats , and we find that bats that do n't see so well have the purple type , we know that this is probably what 's causing this disease .
so in my lab , we 've been using bats to look at two different types of diseases of the senses .
we 're looking at blindness . now why would you do this ?
three hundred and fourteen million people are visually impaired , and 45 million of these are blind . so blindness is a big problem , and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases , so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease .
also we look at deafness . one in every 1,000 newborn babies are deaf , and when we reach 80 , over half of us will also have a hearing problem .
again , there 's many underlying genetic causes for this .
so what we 've been doing in my lab is looking at these unique sensory specialists , the bats , and we have looked at genes that cause blindness genes that cause deafness when there 's a defect in them , and now we can predict which sites are most likely to cause disease .
so bats are also important for our health , to enable us to better understand how our genome functions .
so this is where we are right now , but what about the future ?
what about longevity ?
this is where we 're going to go , and as i said before , i really believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies within the bat genome .
so why should we be interested in aging at all ?
well , really , this is a picture drawn from the 1500s of the fountain of youth . aging is considered one of the most familiar , yet the least well-understood , aspects of all of biology , and really , since the dawn of civilization , mankind has sought to avoid it .
but we are going to have to understand it a bit better .
in europe alone , by 2050 , there is going to be a 70 percent increase of individuals over 65 , and 170 percent increase in individuals over 80 .
as we age , we deteriorate , and this deterioration causes problems for our society , so we have to address it .
so how could the secret of everlasting youth actually lie within the bat genome ? does anybody want to hazard a guess over how long this bat could live for ?
who - put up your hands - who says two years ?
nobody ? one ? how about 10 years ?
some ? how about 30 ?
how about 40 ? okay , it 's a whole varied response .
this bat is myotis brandtii . it 's the longest-living bat .
it lived for up to 42 years , and this bat 's still alive in the wild today .
but what would be so amazing about this ?
well , typically , in mammals there is a relationship between body size , metabolic rate , and how long you can live for , and you can predict how long a mammal can live for given its body size .
so typically , small mammals live fast , die young .
think of a mouse . but bats are very different .
as you can see here on this graph , in blue , these are all other mammals , but bats can live up to nine times longer than expected despite having a really , really high metabolic rate , and the question is , how can they do that ?
there are 19 species of mammal that live longer than expected , given their body size , than man , and 18 of those are bats .
so therefore , they must have something within their dna that ables them to deal with the metabolic stresses , particularly of flight . they expend three times more energy than a mammal of the same size , but do n't seem to suffer the consequences or the effects .
so right now , in my lab , we 're combining state-of-the-art bat field biology , going out and catching the long-lived bats , with the most up-to-date , modern molecular technology to understand better what it is that they do to stop aging as we do .
and hopefully in the next five years , i 'll be giving you a tedtalk on that .
aging is a big problem for humanity , and i believe that by studying bats , we can uncover the molecular mechanisms that enable mammals to achieve extraordinary longevity . if we find out what they 're doing , perhaps through gene therapy , we can enable us to do the same thing .
potentially , this means that we could halt aging or maybe even reverse it .
just imagine what that would be like .
so really , i do n't think we should be thinking of them as flying demons of the night , but more as our superheroes .
and the reality is that bats can bring us so much benefit if we just look in the right place . they 're good for our ecosystem , they allow us to understand how our genome functions , and they potentially hold the secret to everlasting youth .
so tonight , when you walk out of here and you look up in the night skies , and you see this beautiful flying mammal , i want you to smile . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- when my brother called me in december of 1998 , he said , " the news does not look good . "
this is him on the screen .
he 'd just been diagnosed with als , which is a disease that the average lifespan is three years .
it paralyzes you . it starts by killing the motor neurons in your spinal cord .
and you go from being a healthy , robust 29-year-old male to someone that can not breathe , can not move , can not speak .
this has actually been , to me , a gift , because we began a journey to learn a new way of thinking about life .
and even though steven passed away three years ago we had an amazing journey as a family .
we did not even - i think adversity is not even the right word .
we looked at this and we said , " we 're going to do something with this in an incredibly positive way . "
and i want to talk today about one of the things that we decided to do , which was to think about a new way of approaching healthcare .
because , as we all know here today , it does n't work very well .
i want to talk about it in the context of a story .
this is the story of my brother .
but it 's just a story . and i want to go beyond the story , and go to something more .
" given my status , what is the best outcome i can hope to achieve , and how do i get there ? "
is what we are here to do in medicine , is what everyone should do .
and those questions all have variables to them .
all of our statuses are different .
all of our hopes and dreams , what we want to accomplish , is different , and our paths will be different , they are all stories .
but it 's a story until we convert it to data and so what we do , this concept we had , was to take steven 's status , " what is my status ? "
and go from this concept of walking , breathing , and then his hands , speak , and ultimately happiness and function .
so , the first set of pathologies , they end up in the stick man on his icon , but the rest of them are really what 's important here .
because steven , despite the fact that he was paralyzed , as he was in that pool , he could not walk , he could not use his arms - that 's why he had the little floaty things on them , did you see those ? - he was happy . we were at the beach , he was raising his son , and he was productive .
and we took this , and we converted it into data .
but it 's not a data point at that one moment in time .
it is a data point of steven in a context .
here he is in the pool . but here he is healthy , as a builder : taller , stronger , got all the women , amazing guy .
here he is walking down the aisle , but he can barely walk now , so it 's impaired .
and he could still hold his wife 's hand , but he could n't do buttons on his clothes , ca n't feed himself .
and here he is , paralyzed completely , unable to breathe and move , over this time journey .
these stories of his life , converted to data .
he renovated my carriage house when he was completely paralyzed , and unable to speak , and unable to breathe , and he won an award for a historic restoration .
so , here 's steven alone , sharing this story in the world .
and this is the insight , the thing that we are excited about , because we have gone away from the community that we are , the fact that we really do love each other and want to care for each other .
we need to give to others to be successful .
so , steven is sharing this story , but he is not alone .
there are so many other people sharing their stories .
not stories in words , but stories in data and words .
and we convert that information into this structure , this understanding , this ability to convert those stories into something that is computable , to which we can begin to change the way medicine is done and delivered .
we did this for als . we can do this for depression , parkinson 's disease , hiv .
these are not simple , they are not internet scalable ; they require thought and processes to find the meaningful information about the disease .
so , this is what it looks like when you go to the website .
and i 'm going to show you what patients like me , the company that myself , my youngest brother and a good friend from mit started .
here are the actual patients , there are 45,000 of them now , sharing their stories as data .
here is an m.s. patient .
his name is mike , and he is uniformly impaired on cognition , vision , walking , sensation .
those are things that are different for each m.s. patient .
each of them can have a different characteristic .
you can see fibromyalgia , hiv , als , depression .
look at this hiv patient down here , zinny .
it 's two years of this disease . all of the symptoms are not there .
but he is working to keep his cd4 count high and his viral level low so he can make his life better .
but you can aggregate this and you can discover things about treatments .
look at this , 2,000 people almost , on copaxone .
these are patients currently on drugs , sharing data .
i love some of these , physical exercise , prayer .
anyone want to run a comparative effectiveness study on prayer against something ? let 's look at prayer .
what i love about this , just sort of interesting design problems .
these are why people pray .
here is the schedule of how frequently they - it 's a dose .
so , anyone want to see the 32 patients that pray for 60 minutes a day , and see if they 're doing better , they probably are .
here they are . it 's an open network , everybody is sharing . we can see it all .
or , i want to look at anxiety , because people are praying for anxiety .
and here is data on 15,000 people 's current anxiety , right now .
how they treat it , the drugs , the components of it , their side effects , all of it in a rich environment , and you can drill down and see the individuals .
this amazing data allows us to drill down and see what this drug is for - 1,500 people on this drug , i think . yes .
i want to talk to the 58 patients down here who are taking four milligrams a day .
and i want to talk to the ones of those that have been doing it for more than two years .
so , you can see the duration .
all open , all available .
i 'm going to log in .
and this is my brother 's profile .
and this is a new version of our platform we 're launching right now .
this is the second generation . it 's going to be in flash .
and you can see here , as this animates over , steven 's actual data against the background of all other patients , against this information .
the blue band is the 50th percentile . steven is the 75th percentile , that he has non-genetic als .
you scroll down in this profile and you can see all of his prescription drugs , but more than that , in the new version , i can look at this interactively .
wait , poor spinal capacity .
does n't this remind you of a great stock program ?
would n't it be great if the technology we used to take care of ourselves was as good as the technology we use to make money ?
detrol . in the side effects for his drug , integrated into that , the stem cell transplant that he had , the first in the world , shared openly for anyone who wants to see it .
i love here - the cyberkinetics implant , which was , again , the only patient 's data that was online and available .
you can adjust the time scale . you can adjust the symptoms .
you can look at the interaction between how i treat my als .
so , you click down on the als tab there .
i 'm taking three drugs to manage it . some of them are experimental .
i can look at my constipation , how to manage it .
i can see magnesium citrate , and the side effects from that drug all integrated in the time in which they 're meaningful .
but i want more .
i do n't want to just look at this cool device , i want to take this data and make something even better .
i want my brother 's center of the universe and his symptoms and his drugs , and all of the things that interact among those , the side effects , to be in this beautiful data galaxy that we can look at in any way we want to understand it , so that we can take this information and go beyond just this simple model i do n't even know what a medical record is .
i want to solve a problem . i want an application .
so , can i take this data - rearrange yourself , put the symptoms in the left , the drugs across the top , tell me everything we know about steven and everyone else , and what interacts .
years after he 's had these drugs , i learned that everything he did to manage his excess saliva , including some positive side effects that came from other drugs , were making his constipation worse .
and if anyone 's ever had severe constipation , and you do n't understand how much of an impact that has on your life - yes , that was a pun .
you 're trying to manage these , and this grid is available here , and we want to understand it .
no one 's ever had this kind of information .
so , patients have this . we 're for patients .
this is all about patient health care , there was no doctors on our network .
this is about the patients .
so , how can we take this and bring them a tool that they can go back and they can engage the medical system ?
and we worked hard , and we thought about it and we said , " what 's something we can use all the time , that we can use in the medical care system , that everyone will understand ? "
so , the patients print it out , because hospitals usually block us because they believe we are a social network .
it 's actually the most used feature on the website .
doctors actually love this sheet , and they 're actually really engaged .
so , we went from this story of steven and his history to data , and then back to paper , where we went back and engaged the medical care system .
and here 's another paper .
this is a journal , pnas - i think it 's the proceedings of the national academy of science of the united states of america .
you 've seen multiple of these today , when everyone 's bragging about the amazing things they 've done .
this is a report about a drug called lithium .
lithium , that is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder , that a group in italy found slowed als down in 16 patients , and published it .
now , we 'll skip the critiques of the paper .
but the short story is : if you 're a patient , you want to be on the blue line .
you do n't want to be on the red line , you want to be on the blue line .
because the blue line is a better line . the red line is way downhill , the blue line is a good line .
so , you know we said - we looked at this , and what i love also is that people always accuse these internet sites of promoting bad medicine and having people do things irresponsibly .
so , this is what happened when pnas published this .
ten percent of the people in our system took lithium .
ten percent of the patients started taking lithium based on 16 patients of data in a bad publication .
and they call the internet irresponsible .
here 's the implication of what happens .
there 's this one guy , named humberto , from brazil , who unfortunately passed away nine months ago , who said , " hey , listen . can you help us answer this question ?
because i do n't want to wait for the next trial , it 's going to be years .
i want to know now . can you help us ? "
so , we launched some tools , we let them track their blood levels .
we let them share the data and exchange it .
you know , a data network .
and they said , you know , " jamie , plm , can you guys tell us whether this works or not ? "
and we went around and we talked to people , and they said , " you ca n't run a clinical trial like this . you know ?
you do n't have the blinding , you do n't have data , it does n't follow the scientific method .
it 's never going to work . you ca n't do it . "
so , i said , " okay well we ca n't do that . then we can do something harder . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i ca n't say whether lithium works in all als patients , but i can say whether it works in humberto .
i bought a mac about two years ago , i converted over , and i was so excited about this new feature of the time machine that came in leopard . and we said - because it 's really cool , you can go back and you can look at the entire history of your computer , and find everything you 've lost , and i loved it .
and i said , " what if we built a time machine for patients , except instead of going backwards , we go forwards .
can we find out what 's going to happen to you , so that you can maybe change it ? "
so , we did . we took all the patients like humberto , that 's the apple background , we stole that because we did n't have time to build our own . this is a real app by the way .
this is not just graphics .
and you take those data , and we find the patients like him , and we bring their data together . and we bring their histories into it .
and then we say , " well how do we line them all up ? "
so , we line them all up so they go together around the meaningful points , integrated across everything we know about the patient .
full information , the entire course of their disease .
and that 's what is going to happen to humberto , unless he does something .
and he took lithium , and he went down the line .
and it works almost every time .
now , the ones that it does n't work are interesting .
but almost all the time it works .
it 's actually scary . it 's beautiful .
so , we could n't run a clinical trial , we could n't figure it out .
but we could see whether it was going to work for humberto .
and yeah , all the clinicians in the audience will talk about power and all the standard deviation . we 'll do that later .
but here is the answer of the mean of the patients that actually decided to take lithium .
these are all the patients that started lithium .
it 's the intent to treat curve .
you can see here , the blue dots on the top , the light ones , those are the people in the study in pnas that you wanted to be on . and the red ones are the ones , the pink ones on the bottom are the ones you did n't want to be .
and the ones in the middle are all of our patients from the start of lithium at time zero , going forward , and then going backward .
so , you can see we matched them perfectly , perfectly .
terrifyingly accurate matching .
and going forward , you actually do n't want to be a lithium patient this time .
you 're actually doing slightly worse - not significantly , but slightly worse . you do n't want to be a lithium patient this time .
but you know , a lot of people dropped out , the trial , there is too much drop out .
can we do the even harder thing ? can we go to the patients that actually decided to stay on lithium , because they were so convinced they were getting better ?
we asked our control algorithm , are those 69 patients - by the way , you 'll notice that 's four times the number of patients in the clinical trial - can we look at those patients and say , " can we match them with our time machine to the other patients that are just like them , and what happens ? "
even the ones that believed they were getting better matched the controls exactly . exactly .
those little lines ? that 's the power .
so , we - i ca n't tell you lithium does n't work . i ca n't tell you that if you did it at a higher dose or if you run the study proper - i can tell you that for those 69 people that took lithium , they did n't do any better than the people that were just like them , just like me , and that we had the power to detect that at about a quarter of the strengths reported in the initial study .
we did that one year ahead of the time when the first clinical trial funded by the nih for millions of dollars failed for futility last week , and announced it .
so , remember i told you about my brother 's stem cell transplant .
i never really knew whether it worked .
and i put 100 million cells in his cisterna magna , in his lumbar cord , and filled out the irbs and did all this work , and i never really knew .
how did i not know ?
i mean , i did n't know what was going to happen to him .
i actually asked tim , who is the quant in our group - we actually searched for about a year to find someone who could do the sort of math and statistics and modeling in healthcare , could n't find anybody . so , we went to the finance industry .
and there are these guys who used to model the future of interest rates , and all that kind of stuff .
and some of them were available . so , we hired one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we hired them , set them up , assisting at lab .
i i.m. him things . that 's the way i communicate with him , is like a little guy in a box . i i.m.ed tim . i said , " tim can you tell me whether my brother 's stem cell transplant worked or not ? "
and he sent me this two days ago .
it was that little outliers there . you see that guy that lived a long time ?
we have to go talk to him . because i 'd like to know what happened .
because something went different .
but my brother did n't . my brother went straight down the line .
it only works about 12 months .
it 's the first version of the time machine .
first time we ever tried it . we 'll try to get it better later but 12 months so far .
and , you know , i look at this , and i get really emotional .
you look at the patients , you can drill in all the controls , you can look at them , you can ask them .
and i found a woman that had - we found her , she was odd because she had data after she died .
and her husband had come in and entered her last functional scores , because he knew how much she cared .
and i am thankful .
i ca n't believe that these people , years after my brother had died , helped me answer the question about whether an operation i did , and spent millions of dollars on years ago , worked or not .
i wished it had been there when i 'd done it the first time , and i 'm really excited that it 's here now , because the lab that i founded has some data on a drug that might work , and i 'd like to show it .
i 'd like to show it in real time , now , and i want to do that for all of the diseases that we can do that for .
i 've got to thank the 45,000 people that are doing this social experiment with us .
there is an amazing journey we are going on to become human again , to be part of community again , to share of ourselves , to be vulnerable , and it 's very exciting . so , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 're going to begin in 1964 .
bob dylan is 23 years old , and his career is just reaching its pinnacle .
he 's been christened the voice of a generation , and he 's churning out classic songs at a seemingly impossible rate , but there 's a small minority of dissenters , and they claim that bob dylan is stealing other people 's songs .
2004 . brian burton , aka danger mouse , takes the beatles ' " white album , " combines it with jay-z 's " the black album " to create " the grey album . "
" the grey album " becomes an immediate sensation online , and the beatles ' record company sends out countless cease-and-desist letters for " unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property . "
now , " the grey album " is a remix .
it is new media created from old media .
it was made using these three techniques : copy , transform and combine .
it 's how you remix . you take existing songs , you chop them up , you transform the pieces , you combine them back together again , and you 've got a new song , but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs .
but i think these are n't just the components of remixing .
i think these are the basic elements of all creativity .
i think everything is a remix , and i think this is a better way to conceive of creativity .
all right , let 's head back to 1964 , and let 's hear where some of dylan 's early songs came from .
we 'll do some side-by-side comparisons here .
all right , this first song you 're going to hear is " nottamun town . " it 's a traditional folk tune .
after that , you 'll hear dylan 's " masters of war . "
jean ritchie : ♫ in nottamun town , not a soul would look out , ♫ ♫ not a soul would look up , not a soul would look down . ♫ bob dylan : ♫ come you masters of war , ♫ ♫ you that build the big guns , you that build the death planes , ♫ ♫ you that build all the bombs . ♫ kirby ferguson : okay , so that 's the same basic melody and overall structure . this next one is " the patriot game , " by dominic behan . alongside that , you 're going to hear " with god on our side , " by dylan .
dominic behan : ♫ come all ye young rebels , ♫ ♫ and list while i sing , ♫ ♫ for the love of one 's land is a terrible thing . ♫ bd : ♫ oh my name it is nothin ' , ♫ ♫ my age it means less , ♫ ♫ the country i come from is called the midwest . ♫ kf : okay , so in this case , dylan admits he must have heard " the patriot game , " he forgot about it , then when the song kind of bubbled back up in his brain , he just thought it was his song .
last one , this is " who 's going to buy you ribbons , " another traditional folk tune .
alongside that is " do n't think twice , it 's all right . "
this one 's more about the lyric .
paul clayton : ♫ it ai n't no use to sit and sigh now , ♫ ♫ darlin ' , and it ai n't no use to sit and cry now . ♫ bd : ♫ it ai n't no use to sit and wonder why , babe , ♫ ♫ if you do n't know by now , ♫ ♫ and it ai n't no use to sit and wonder why , babe , ♫ ♫ it 'll never do somehow . ♫ kf : okay , now , there 's a lot of these .
it 's been estimated that two thirds of the melodies dylan used in his early songs were borrowed .
this is pretty typical among folk singers .
here 's the advice of dylan 's idol , woody guthrie .
" the worlds are the important thing .
do n't worry about tunes . take a tune , sing high when they sing low , sing fast when they sing slow , and you 've got a new tune . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's , that 's what guthrie did right here , and i 'm sure you all recognize the results .
-lrb- music -rrb- we know this tune , right ? we know it ?
actually you do n't .
that is " when the world 's on fire , " a very old melody , in this case performed by the carter family .
guthrie adapted it into " this land is your land . "
so , bob dylan , like all folk singers , he copied melodies , he transformed them , he combined them with new lyrics which were frequently their own concoction of previous stuff .
now , american copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others .
instead , these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property .
now , creative works may indeed be kind of like property , but it 's property that we 're all building on , and creations can only take root and grow once that ground has been prepared .
henry ford once said , " i invented nothing new .
i simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work .
progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable . "
2007 . the iphone makes it debut .
apple undoubtedly brings this innovation to us early , but its time was approaching because its core technology had been evolving for decades .
that 's multi-touch , controlling a device by touching its display .
here is steve jobs introducing multi-touch and making a rather foreboding joke .
steve jobs : and we have invented a new technology called multi-touch .
you can do multi-fingered gestures on it , and boy have we patented it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- kf : yes . and yet , here is multi-touch in action .
this is at ted , actually , about a year earlier .
this is jeff han , and , i mean , that 's multi-touch .
it 's the same animal , at least .
let 's hear what jeff han has to say about this newfangled technology .
jeff han : multi-touch sensing is n't anything - is n't completely new . i mean , people like bill buxton have been playing around with it in the ' 80s .
the technology , you know , is n't the most exciting thing here right now other than probably its newfound accessibility .
kf : so he 's pretty frank about it not being new .
so it 's not multi-touch as a whole that 's patented .
it 's the small parts of it that are , and it 's in these small details where we can clearly see patent law contradicting its intent : to promote the progress of useful arts .
here is the first ever slide-to-unlock .
that is all there is to it . apple has patented this .
it 's a 28-page software patent , but i will summarize what it covers . spoiler alert : unlocking your phone by sliding an icon with your finger . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm only exaggerating a little bit . it 's a broad patent .
now , can someone own this idea ?
now , back in the ' 80s , there were no software patents , and it was xerox that pioneered the graphical user interface .
what if they had patented pop-up menus , scrollbars , the desktop with icons that look like folders and sheets of paper ?
would a young and inexperienced apple have survived the legal assault from a much larger and more mature company like xerox ?
now , this idea that everything is a remix might sound like common sense until you 're the one getting remixed .
for example ...
sj : i mean , picasso had a saying .
he said , " good artists copy . great artists steal . "
and we have , you know , always been shameless about stealing great ideas .
kf : okay , so that 's in ' 96 . here 's in 2010 .
" i 'm going to destroy android because it 's a stolen product . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so in other words , great artists steal , but not from me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , behavioral economists might refer to this sort of thing as loss aversion we have a strong predisposition towards protecting what we feel is ours .
we have no such aversion towards copying what other people have , because we do that nonstop .
so here 's the sort of equation we 're looking at .
we 've got laws that fundamentally treat creative works as property , plus massive rewards or settlements in infringement cases , plus huge legal fees to protect yourself in court , plus cognitive biases against perceived loss .
and the sum looks like this .
that is the last four years of lawsuits in the realm of smartphones .
is this promoting the progress of useful arts ?
1983 . bob dylan is 42 years old , and his time in the cultural spotlight is long since past .
he records a song called " blind willie mctell , " named after the blues singer , and the song is a voyage through the past , through a much darker time , but a simpler one , a time when musicians like willie mctell had few illusions about what they did .
" i jump ' em from other writers but i arrange ' em my own way . "
i think this is mostly what we do .
our creativity comes from without , not from within .
we are not self-made . we are dependent on one another , and admitting this to ourselves is n't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness .
it 's a liberation from our misconceptions , and it 's an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin .
thank you so much . it was an honor to be here .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i got up this morning at 6:10 a.m.
after going to sleep at 12:45 a.m.
i was awakened once during the night .
my heart rate was 61 beats per minute - my blood pressure , 127 over 74 .
i had zero minutes of exercise yesterday , so my maximum heart rate during exercise was n't calculated .
i had about 600 milligrams of caffeine , zero of alcohol .
and my score on the narcissism personality index , or the npi-16 , is a reassuring 0.31 .
we know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise , manage , govern , search .
i 'm going to talk about how they 're useful when we reflect , learn , remember and want to improve .
a few years ago , kevin kelly , my partner , and i noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary , familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day .
people were tracking their food via twitter , their kids ' diapers on their iphone .
they were making detailed journals of their spending , their mood , their symptoms , their treatments .
now , we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle - the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices , the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing , and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors .
this little black dot there is a 3d accelerometer .
it tracks your movement through space .
it is , as you can see , very small and also very cheap .
they 're now down to well under a dollar a piece , and they 're going into all kinds of devices .
but what 's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this .
this kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device - among early adopters at the moment - the fitbit .
this tracks your activity and also your sleep .
it has just that sensor in it .
you 're probably familiar with the nike + system .
i just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor .
it 's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that 's in a doorbell .
and nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor .
this is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their nike + system .
this is a beautiful , new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data , not just whether you 're asleep or awake , but also your phase of sleep - deep sleep , light sleep , rem sleep .
the sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there .
the rest of it is the bedside console ; just for reference , this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago - i mean , really until now .
and this is the sleep tracking system of today .
this just was presented at a health care conference in d.c.
most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler , but the top is a very small gps transceiver , which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident , giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors .
now , we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world - these tiny sensors that gather data in nature , the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used , and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute .
but we think of these tools as pointing outward , as windows and i 'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors .
so that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement , we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement , for self-discovery , self-awareness , self-knowledge .
here 's a biometric device : a pair of apple earbuds .
last year , apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation , heart rate and body temperature via the earbuds .
what is this for ?
what should it be for ?
some people will say it 's for biometric security .
some people will say it 's for public health research .
some people will say it 's for avant-garde marketing research .
i 'd like to tell you that it 's also for self-knowledge .
and the self is n't the only thing ; it 's not even most things .
the self is just our operation center , our consciousness , our moral compass .
so , if we want to act more effectively in the world , we have to get to know ourselves better .
thank you .
two weeks ago i was in my studio in paris , and the phone rang and i heard , " hey , jr , you won the ted prize 2011 .
you have to make a wish to save the world . "
i was lost .
i mean , i ca n't save the world . nobody can .
the world is fucked up .
come on , you have dictators ruling the world , population is growing by millions , there 's no more fish in the sea , the north pole is melting and as the last ted prize winner said , we 're all becoming fat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- except maybe french people .
whatever .
so i called back and i told her , " look , amy , tell the ted guys i just wo n't show up .
i ca n't do anything to save the world . "
she said , " hey , jr , your wish is not to save the world , but to change the world . "
" oh , all right . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " that 's cool . "
i mean , technology , politics , business do change the world - not always in a good way , but they do .
what about art ?
could art change the world ?
i started when i was 15 years old .
and at that time , i was not thinking about changing the world .
i was doing graffiti - writing my name everywhere , using the city as a canvas .
i was going in the tunnels of paris , on the rooftops with my friends .
each trip was an excursion , was an adventure .
it was like leaving our mark on society , to say , " i was here , " on the top of a building .
so when i found a cheap camera on the subway , i started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies - really small photos just that size .
that 's how , at 17 years old , i started pasting them .
and i did my first " expo de rue , " which means sidewalk gallery .
and i framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising .
i mean , the city 's the best gallery i could imagine .
i would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people .
i would control it directly with the public in the streets .
so that 's paris .
i would change - depending on the places i would go - the title of the exhibition .
that 's on the champs-elysees .
i was quite proud of that one .
because i was just 18 and i was just up there on the top of the champs-elysees .
then when the photo left , the frame was still there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- november 2005 : the streets are burning .
a large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of paris .
everyone was glued to the tv , watching disturbing , frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood .
i mean , these kids , without control , throwing molotov cocktails , attacking the cops and the firemen , looting everything they could in the shops .
these were criminals , thugs , dangerous , destroying their own environment .
and then i saw it - could it be possible ? - my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car - a pasting i 'd done a year earlier - an illegal one - still there .
i mean , these were the faces of my friends .
i know those guys .
all of them are not angels , but they 're not monsters either .
so it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television .
so i went back there with a 28 mm lens .
it was the only one i had at that time .
but with that lens , you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person .
so you can do it only with their trust .
so i took full portraits of people from le bosquet .
they were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves .
and then i pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of paris with the name , age , even building number of these guys .
a year later , the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of paris .
and we go from thug images , who 've been stolen and distorted by the media , who 's now proudly taking over his own image .
that 's where i realized the power of paper and glue .
so could art change the world ?
a year later , i was listening to all the noise about the middle east conflict .
i mean , at that time , trust me , they were only referring to the israeli and palestinian conflict .
so with my friend marco , we decided to go there and see who are the real palestinians and who are the real israelis .
are they so different ?
when we got there , we just went in the street , started talking with people everywhere , and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media .
so we decided to take portraits of palestinians and israelis doing the same jobs - taxi-driver , lawyer , cooks .
asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment .
not a smile - that really does n't tell about who you are and what you feel .
they all accepted to be pasted next to the other .
i decided to paste in eight israeli and palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall .
we launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever .
we called the project face 2 face .
the experts said , " no way .
the people will not accept .
the army will shoot you , and hamas will kidnap you . "
we said , " okay , let 's try and push as far as we can . "
i love the way that people will ask me , " how big will my photo be ? "
" it will be as big as your house . "
when we did the wall , we did the palestinian side .
so we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough .
and so palestinians guys say , " calm down . no wait . i 'm going to find you a solution . "
so he went to the church of nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen jesus being born .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we did face 2 face with only six friends , two ladders , two brushes , a rented car , a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper .
we had all sorts of help from all walks of life .
okay , for example , that 's palestine .
we 're in ramallah right now .
we 're pasting portraits - so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market .
people come around us and start asking , " what are you doing here ? "
" oh , we 're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an israeli and a palestinian doing the same job .
and those ones are actually two taxi-drivers . "
and then there was always a silence .
" you mean you 're pasting an israeli face - doing a face - right here ? "
" well , yeah , yeah , that 's part of the project . "
and i would always leave that moment , and we would ask them , " so can you tell me who is who ? "
and most of them could n't say .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we even pasted on israeli military towers , and nothing happened .
when you paste an image , it 's just paper and glue .
people can tear it , tag on it , or even pee on it - some are a bit high for that , i agree - but the people in the street , they are the curator .
the rain and the wind will take them off anyway .
they are not meant to stay .
but exactly four years after , the photos , most of them are still there .
face 2 face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible - and , you know what , even easy .
we did n't push the limit ; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought .
in the middle east , i experienced my work in places without -lsb- many -rsb- museums .
so the reactions in the street were kind of interesting .
so i decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums .
when you go in these developing societies , women are the pillars of their community , but the men are still the ones holding the streets .
so we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos .
i called that project women are heroes .
when i listened to all the stories everywhere i went on the continents , i could n't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict .
i just observed .
sometimes there was no words , no sentence , just tears .
i just took their pictures and pasted them .
women are heroes took me around the world .
most of the places i went to , i decided to go there because i 've heard about it through the media .
so for example , in june 2008 , i was watching tv in paris , and then i heard about this terrible thing that happened in rio de janeiro - the first favela of brazil named providencia .
three kids - that was three students - were -lsb- detained -rsb- by the army because they were not carrying their papers .
and the army took them , and instead of bringing them to the police station , they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces .
i was shocked .
all brazil was shocked .
i heard it was one of the most violent favelas , because the largest drug cartel controls it .
so i decided to go there .
when i arrived - i mean , i did n't have any contact with any ngo .
there was none in place - no association , no ngos , nothing - no eyewitnesses .
so we just walked around , and we met a woman , and i showed her my book .
and she said , " you know what ?
we 're hungry for culture .
we need culture out there . "
so i went out and i started with the kids .
i just took a few photos of the kids , and the next day i came with the posters and we pasted them .
the day after , i came back and they were already scratched .
but that 's okay .
i wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them .
then the next day , i held a meeting on the main square and some women came .
they were all linked to the three kids that got killed .
there was the mother , the grandmother , the best friend - they all wanted to shout the story .
after that day , everyone in the favela gave me the green light .
i took more photos , and we started the project .
the drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place , so i told them , " you know what ?
i 'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons .
you see that enough in the media .
what i want to show is the incredible life and energy .
i 've been seeing it around me the last few days . "
so that 's a really symbolic pasting , because that 's the first one we did that you could n't see from the city .
and that 's where the three kids got arrested , and that 's the grandmother of one of them .
and on that stairs , that 's where the traffickers always stand and there 's a lot of exchange of fire .
everyone there understood the project .
and then we pasted everywhere - the whole hill .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what was interesting is that the media could n't get in .
i mean , you should see that .
they would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens , and we would see ourselves , on tv , pasting .
and they would put a number : " please call this number if you know what 's going on in providencia . "
we just did a project and then left so the media would n't know .
so how can we know about the project ?
so they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them .
so you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women .
we kept traveling .
we went to africa , sudan , sierra leone , liberia , kenya .
in war-torn places like monrovia , people come straight to you .
i mean , they want to know what you 're up to .
they kept asking me , " what is the purpose of your project ?
are you an ngo ? are you the media ? "
art . just doing art .
some people question , " why is it in black and white ?
do n't you have color in france ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or they tell you , " are these people all dead ? "
some who understood the project would explain it to others .
and to a man who did not understand , i heard someone say , " you know , you 've been here for a few hours trying to understand , discussing with your fellows .
during that time , you have n't thought about what you 're going to eat tomorrow .
this is art . "
i think it 's people 's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects .
and then it becomes more .
it becomes a desire , a need , an armor .
on this bridge that 's in monrovia , ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war .
women are always the first ones targeted during conflict .
this is kibera , kenya , one of the largest slums of africa .
you might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008 .
this time we covered the roofs of the houses , but we did n't use paper , because paper does n't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house - vinyl does .
then art becomes useful .
so the people kept it .
you know what i love is , for example , when you see the biggest eye there , there are so -lsb- many -rsb- houses inside .
and i went there a few months ago - photos are still there - and it was missing a piece of the eye .
so i asked the people what happened .
" oh , that guy just moved . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when the roofs were covered , a woman said as a joke , " now god can see me . "
when you look at kibera now , they look back .
okay , india .
before i start that , just so you know , each time we go to a place , we do n't have authorization , so we set up like commandos - we 're a group of friends who arrive there , and we try to paste on the walls .
but there are places where you just ca n't paste on a wall .
in india it was just impossible to paste .
i heard culturally and because of the law , they would just arrest us at the first pasting .
so we decided to paste white , white on the walls .
so imagine white guys pasting white papers .
so people would come to us and ask us , " hey , what are you up to ? "
" oh , you know , we 're just doing art . " " art ? "
of course , they were confused .
but you know how india has a lot of dust in the streets , and the more dust you would have going up in the air , on the white paper you can almost see , but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker .
so the more dust you have , the more it will reveal the photo .
so we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so we did n't get caught this time .
each project - that 's a film from women are heroes .
-lrb- music -rrb- okay .
for each project we do a film .
and most of what you see - that 's a trailer from " women are heroes " - its images , photography , taken one after the other .
and the photos kept traveling even without us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- hopefully , you 'll see the film , and you 'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos .
because that 's a big part of it . there 's layers behind each photo .
behind each image is a story .
women are heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities , and the women kept that dynamic after we left .
for example , we did books - not for sale - that all the community would get .
but to get it , they would have to -lsb- get -rsb- it signed by one of the women .
we did that in most of the places .
we go back regularly .
and so in providencia , for example , in the favela , we have a cultural center running there .
in kibera , each year we cover more roofs .
because of course , when we left , the people who were just at the edge of the project said , " hey , what about my roof ? "
so we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project .
a really important point for me is that i do n't use any brand or corporate sponsors .
so i have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that is for me one of the more important things in the work .
i think , today , as important as the result is the way you do things .
and that has always been a central part of the work .
and what 's interesting is that fine line that i have with images and advertising .
we just did some pasting in los angeles on another project in the last weeks .
and i was even invited to cover the moca museum .
but yesterday the city called them and said , " look , you 're going to have to tear it down .
because this can be taken for advertising , and because of the law , it has to be taken down . "
but tell me , advertising for what ?
the people i photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community .
but they asked me for a promise basically .
they asked me , " please , make our story travel with you . "
so i did . that 's paris .
that 's rio .
in each place , we built exhibitions with a story , and the story traveled .
you understand the full scope of the project .
that 's london .
new york .
and today , they are with you in long beach .
all right , recently i started a public art project where i do n't use my artwork anymore .
i use man ray , helen levitt , giacomelli , other people 's artwork .
it does n't matter today if it 's your photo or not .
the importance is what you do with the images , the statement it makes where it 's pasted .
so for example , i pasted the photo of the minaret in switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in chernobyl originally , and i pasted it in southern italy , where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground .
in some ways , art can change the world .
art is not supposed to change the world , to change practical things , but to change perceptions .
art can change the way we see the world .
art can create an analogy .
actually the fact that art can not change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions , and then enables you to change the world .
when i do my work , i have two kinds of reactions .
people say , " oh , why do n't you go in iraq or afghanistan .
they would be really useful . "
or , " how can we help ? "
i presume that you belong to the second category , and that 's good , because for that project , i 'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them .
so now my wish is : -lrb- mock drum roll -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project , and together we 'll turn the world inside out .
and this starts right now .
yes , everyone in the room .
everyone watching .
i wanted that wish to actually start now .
so a subject you 're passionate about , a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos - tell me what you stand for .
take the photos , the portraits , upload it - i 'll give you all the details - and i 'll send you back your poster . join by groups and reveal things to the world .
the full data is on the website - insideoutproject.net - that is launching today .
what we see changes who we are .
when we act together , the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts .
so i hope that , together , we 'll create something that the world will remember .
and this starts right now and depends on you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so as a fashion designer , i 've always tended to think of materials something like this , or this , or maybe this .
but then i met a biologist , and now i think of materials like this - green tea , sugar , a few microbes and a little time .
i 'm essentially using a kombucha recipe , which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria , yeasts and other micro-organisms , which spin cellulose in a fermentation process .
over time , these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface .
so we start by brewing the tea .
i brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time , and then while it 's still hot , add a couple of kilos of sugar .
we stir this in until it 's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath .
we need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees c.
and then we 're ready to add the living organism .
and along with that , some acetic acid .
and once you get this process going , you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid .
we need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth .
and i use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it .
and actually , in hot weather , i can just grow it outside .
so this is my mini fabric farm .
after about three days , the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid .
so this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing .
and the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid .
so they 're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose .
and they 're sticking together , forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface .
after about two to three weeks , we 're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness .
so the bath on the left is after five days , and on the right , after 10 .
and this is a static culture .
you do n't have to do anything to it ; you just literally watch it grow .
it does n't need light .
and when it 's ready to harvest , you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold , soapy water .
at this point , it 's really heavy .
it 's over 90 percent water , so we need to let that evaporate .
so i spread it out onto a wooden sheet .
again , you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air .
and as it 's drying , it 's compressing , so what you 're left with , depending on the recipe , is something that 's either like a really light-weight , transparent paper , or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather .
and then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally , or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape .
and as it evaporates , it will knit itself together , forming seams .
so the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea .
i guess it also looks a little bit like human skin , which intrigues me .
since it 's organic , i 'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals .
i can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation .
using fruit and vegetable staining , create organic patterning .
and using indigo , make it anti-microbial .
and in fact , cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark .
and because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose , it just takes one , and a really short one at that .
what i ca n't yet do is make it water-resistant .
so if i was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today , i would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water .
the dress would get really heavy , and eventually the seams would probably fall apart - leaving me feeling rather naked .
possibly a good performance piece , but definitely not ideal for everyday wear .
what i 'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that i need .
so what i want to do is say to a future bug , " spin me a thread .
align it in this direction .
make it hydrophobic .
and while you 're at it , just form it around this 3d shape . "
bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing , and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels , possibly even replacement bone tissue .
but with synthetic biology , we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality , quantity and shape of material that we desire .
obviously , as a designer , that 's really exciting because then i start to think , wow , we could actually imagine growing consumable products .
what excites me about using microbes is their efficiency .
so we only grow what we need .
there 's no waste .
and in fact , we could make it from a waste stream - so for example , a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant .
finally , at the end of use , we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings .
what i 'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton , leather or other textile materials .
but i do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources .
ultimately , maybe it wo n't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact .
we could , for example , imagine growing a lamp , a chair , a car or maybe even a house .
so i guess what my question to you is : in the future , what would you choose to grow ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : suzanne , just a curiosity , what you 're wearing is not random . -lrb- suzanne lee : no . -rrb- this is one of the jackets you grew ?
sl : yes , it is .
it 's probably - part of the project 's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's absorbing my sweat , and it 's feeding on it .
bg : okay , so we 'll let you go and save it , and rescue it .
suzanne lee . -lrb- sl : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a simple idea about nature .
i want to say a word for nature because we have n't talked that much about it the last couple days .
i want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals , and tell you about a tool , a very simple tool that i have found .
although it 's really nothing more than a literary conceit ; it 's not a technology .
it 's very powerful for , i think , changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend .
and that tool is very simply , as chris suggested , looking at us and the world from the plants ' or the animals ' point of view .
it 's not my idea , other people have hit on it , but i 've tried to take it to some new places .
let me tell you where i got it .
like a lot of my ideas , like a lot of the tools i use , i found it in the garden ; i 'm a very devoted gardener .
and there was a day about seven years ago : i was planting potatoes , it was the first week of may - this is new england , when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom ; they 're just white clouds above .
i was here , planting my chunks , cutting up potatoes and planting it , and the bees were working on this tree ; bumblebees , just making this thing vibrate .
and one of the things i really like about gardening is that it does n't take all your concentration , you really ca n't get hurt - it 's not like woodworking - and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation .
and the question i asked myself that afternoon in the garden , working alongside that bumblebee , was : what did i and that bumblebee have in common ?
how was our role in this garden similar and different ?
and i realized we actually had quite a bit in common : both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another , and both of us - probably , if i can imagine the bee 's point of view - thought we were calling the shots .
i had decided what kind of potato i wanted to plant - i had picked my yukon gold or yellow finn , or whatever it was - and i had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country , brought it , and i was planting it .
and that bee , no doubt , assumed that it had decided , " i 'm going for that apple tree , i 'm going for that blossom , i 'm going to get the nectar and i 'm going to leave . "
we have a grammar that suggests that 's who we are ; that we are sovereign subjects in nature , the bee as well as me .
i plant the potatoes , i weed the garden , i domesticate the species .
but that day , it occurred to me : what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit ?
because , of course , the bee thinks he 's in charge or she 's in charge , but we know better .
we know that what 's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower .
and when i say manipulated , i 'm talking about in a darwinian sense , right ?
i mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits - color , scent , flavor , pattern - that has lured that bee in .
and the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar , and also picking up some powder on its leg , and going off to the next blossom .
the bee is not calling the shots .
and i realized then , i was n't either .
i had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its - into spreading its genes , giving it a little bit more habitat .
and that 's when i got the idea , which was , " well , what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us ? "
and agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention , not as a human technology , but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species , mostly edible grasses , had exploited us , figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world .
the competition of grasses , right ?
and suddenly everything looked different .
and suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience .
i had thought always - and in fact , had written this in my first book ; this was a book about gardening - that lawns were nature under culture 's boot , that they were totalitarian landscapes , and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex .
and that 's what the lawn was .
but then i realized , " no , this is exactly what the grasses want us to do .
i 'm a dupe . i 'm a dupe of the lawns , whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees , who they compete with for sunlight . "
and so by getting us to mow the lawn , we keep the trees from coming back , which in new england happens very , very quickly .
so i started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called " the botany of desire . "
and i realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees - that they like sweetness , that they like this color and not that color , that they like symmetry - what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing ?
that a certain kind of potato , a certain kind of drug , a sativa-indica cannabis cross has something to say about us .
and that , would n't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world ?
now , the test of any idea - i said it was a literary conceit - is what does it get us ?
and when you 're talking about nature , which is really my subject as a writer , how does it meet the aldo leopold test ?
which is , does it make us better citizens of the biotic community ?
get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota , rather than its destruction ?
and i would submit that this idea does this .
so , let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way , besides some entertaining insights about human desire .
as an intellectual matter , looking at the world from other species ' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly , which is - and this is in the realm of intellectual history - which is that we have this darwinian revolution 150 years ago ...
ugh . mini-me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we have this intellectual , this darwinian revolution in which , thanks to darwin , we figured out we are just one species among many ; evolution is working on us the same way it 's working on all the others ; we are acted upon as well as acting ; we are really in the fiber , the fabric of life .
but the weird thing is , we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later ; none of us really believes this .
we are still cartesians - the children of descartes - who believe that subjectivity , consciousness , sets us apart ; that the world is divided into subjects and objects ; that there is nature on one side , culture on another .
as soon as you start seeing things from the plant 's point of view or the animal 's point of view , you realize that the real literary conceit is that - is the idea that nature is opposed to culture , the idea that consciousness is everything - and that 's another very important thing it does .
looking at the world from other species ' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance .
you suddenly realize that consciousness - which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature , human consciousness - is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world .
and it 's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool .
but , you know , there 's a comedian who said , " well , who 's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important ?
well , consciousness . "
so when you look at the plants , you realize that there are other tools and they 're just as interesting .
i 'll give you two examples , also from the garden : lima beans . you know what a lima bean does when it 's attacked by spider mites ?
it releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite , defending the lima bean .
so what plants have - while we have consciousness , tool making , language , they have biochemistry .
and they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine .
their complexity , their sophistication , is something to really marvel at , and i think it 's really the scandal of the human genome project .
you know , we went into it thinking , 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000 .
just to give you grounds for comparison , rice : 35,000 genes .
so who 's the more sophisticated species ?
well , we 're all equally sophisticated .
we 've been evolving just as long , just along different paths .
so , cure for self-importance , way to sort of make us feel the darwinian idea .
and that 's really what i do as a writer , as a storyteller , is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically .
now , the other use of this is practical .
and i 'm going to take you to a farm right now , because i used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what i learned , in fact , is that we are all , now , being manipulated by corn .
and the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today , to me , is the final triumph of corn over good sense . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it is part of corn 's scheme for world domination .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you will see , the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we 've decided ethanol is going to help us .
so it helped me understand industrial agriculture , which of course is a cartesian system .
it 's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge , and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want .
let me take you to a very different kind of farm .
this is a farm in the shenandoah valley of virginia .
i went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species ' point of view are actually implemented , and i found it in a man . the farmer 's name is joel salatin .
and i spent a week as an apprentice on his farm , and i took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that i 've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature .
and that is this : the farm is called polyface , which means ...
the idea is he 's got six different species of animals , as well as some plants , growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement .
it 's permaculture , those of you who know a little bit about this , such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the ...
what else does he have ?
all the six different species - rabbits , actually - are all performing ecological services for one another , such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another .
it 's a very elaborate and beautiful dance , but i 'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it , and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens , his laying hens .
and i 'll show you , if you take this approach , what you get , ok ?
and this is a lot more than growing food , as you 'll see ; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion , the cartesian idea that either nature 's winning or we 're winning , and that for us to get what we want , nature is diminished .
so , one day , cattle in a pen .
the only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing : relatively new , hooked to a car battery ; even i could carry a quarter-acre paddock , set it up in 15 minutes .
cows graze one day . they move , ok ?
they graze everything down , intensive grazing .
he waits three days , and then we towed in something called the eggmobile .
the eggmobile is a very rickety contraption - it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards - but it houses 350 chickens .
he tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank , turns them down , and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank - clucking , gossiping as chickens will - and they make a beeline for the cow patties .
and what they 're doing is very interesting : they 're digging through the cow patties for the maggots , the grubs , the larvae of flies .
and the reason he 's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day , those larvae will hatch and he 'll have a huge fly problem .
but he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens ' favorite form of protein .
so the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they 're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs , and in the process they 're spreading the manure out .
very useful second ecosystem service .
and third , while they 're in this paddock they are , of course , defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field .
they then move out to the next one , and in the course of just a few weeks , the grass just enters this blaze of growth .
and within four or five weeks , he can do it again .
he can graze again , he can cut , he can bring in another species , like the lambs , or he can make hay for the winter .
now , i want you to just look really close up onto what 's happened there .
so , it 's a very productive system .
and what i need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef ; 30,000 pounds of pork ; 25,000 dozen eggs ; 20,000 broilers ; 1,000 turkeys ; 1,000 rabbits - an immense amount of food .
you know , you hear , " can organic feed the world ? "
well , look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of ...
again , give each species what it wants , let it realize its desires , its physiological distinctiveness .
put that in play .
but look at it from the point of view of the grass , now .
what happens to the grass when you do this ?
when a ruminant grazes grass , the grass is cut from this height to this height , and it immediately does something very interesting .
any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio , and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy .
so when they lose a lot of leaf mass , they shed roots ; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die .
and the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots , decomposing them - the earthworms , the fungi , the bacteria - and the result is new soil .
this is how soil is created .
it 's created from the bottom up .
this is how the prairies were built , the relationship between bison and grasses .
and what i realized when i understood this - and if you ask joel salatin what he is , he 'll tell you he 's not a chicken farmer , he 's not a sheep farmer , he 's not a cattle rancher ; he 's a grass farmer , because grass is really the keystone species of such a system - is that , if you think about it , this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads , which is that for us to get what we want , nature is diminished .
more for us , less for nature .
here , all this food comes off this farm , and at the end of the season there is actually more soil , more fertility and more biodiversity .
it 's a remarkably hopeful thing to do .
there are a lot of farmers doing this today .
this is well beyond organic agriculture , which is still a cartesian system , more or less .
and what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species , take account of the soil , that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea - because there is no technology involved here except for those fences , which are so cheap they could be all over africa in no time - that we can take the food we need from the earth and actually heal the earth in the process .
this is a way to reanimate the world , and that 's what 's so exciting about this perspective .
when we really begin to feel darwin 's insights in our bones , the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about .
thank you very much .
i 've spent my life working on sustainability .
i set up a climate change ngo called the climate group .
i worked on forestry issues in wwf .
i worked on development and agriculture issues in the u.n. system .
about 25 years in total , and then three years ago , i found myself talking to ikea 's ceo about joining his team .
like many people here , well , i want to maximize my personal impact in the world , so i 'm going to explain why i joined the team there .
but first , let 's just take three numbers .
the first number is three : three billion people .
this is the number of people joining the global middle class by 2030 , coming out of poverty .
it 's fantastic for them and their families , but we 've got two billion people in the global middle class today , and this swells that number to five , a big challenge when we already have resource scarcity .
the second number is six : this is six degrees centigrade , what we 're heading towards in terms of global warming .
we 're not heading towards one degree or three degrees or four degrees , we 're heading toward six degrees .
and if you think about it , all of the weird weather we 've been having the last few years , much of that is due to just one degree warming , and we need co2 emissions to peak by the end of this decade globally and then come down .
it 's not inevitable , but we need to act decisively .
the third number is 12 : that 's the number of cities in the world that had a million or more people when my grandmother was born .
you can see my grandmother there .
that was in the beginning of the last century .
so just 12 cities . she was born in manchester , england , the ninth largest city in the world .
now there are 500 cities , nearly , with a million people or more in them .
and if you look at the century from 1950 to 2050 , that 's the century when we build all the world 's cities , the century that we 're in the middle of right now .
every other century was kind of practice , and this lays down a blueprint for how we live .
so think about it .
we 're building cities like never before , bringing people out of poverty like never before , and changing the climate like never before .
sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a must-do .
it 's about what we do right here , right now , and for the rest of our working lives .
so i 'm going to talk a little bit about what business can do and what a business like ikea can do , and we have a sustainability strategy called " people and planet positive " to help guide our business to have a positive impact on the world .
why would we not want to have a positive impact on the world as a business ?
other companies have sustainability strategies .
i 'm going to refer to some of those as well , and i 'm just going to mention a few of the commitments as illustrations that we 've got .
but first , let 's think of customers .
we know from asking people from china to the u.s.
that the vast majority of people care about sustainability after the day-to-day issues , the day-to-day issues of , how do i get my kids to school ?
can i pay the bills at the end of the month ?
then they care about big issues like climate change .
but they want it to be easy , affordable and attractive , and they expect business to help , and they 're a little bit disappointed today .
so take your mind back and think of the first sustainable products .
we had detergents that could wash your whites grayer .
we had the early energy-efficient light bulbs that took five minutes to warm up and then you were left looking a kind of sickly color .
and we had the rough , recycled toilet paper .
so every time you pulled on a t-shirt , or switched the light on , or went to the bathroom , or sometimes all three together , you were reminded sustainability was about compromise .
it was n't a great start .
today we have choices .
we can make products that are beautiful or ugly , sustainable or unsustainable , affordable or expensive , functional or useless .
so let 's make beautiful , functional , affordable , sustainable products .
let 's take the led .
the led is the next best thing to daylight .
the old-fashioned lightbulbs , the incandescent bulbs - i 'm not going to ask for a show of hands of how many of you still have them in your homes , wasting energy every time you switch them on - change them after this - or whether we have them on the stage here at ted or not - but those old incandescent light bulbs really should have been sold as heaters .
they were mis-sold for more than a hundred years .
they produced heat and a little bit of light on the side .
now we have lights that produce light and a little bit of heat on the side .
you save 85 percent of the electricity with an led that you would have done in an old incandescent .
and the best thing is , they 'll also last for more than 20 years .
so think about that .
you 'll change your smartphone seven or eight times , probably more if you 're in this audience .
you 'll change your car , if you have one , three or four times .
your kids could go to school , go to college , go away and have kids of their own , come back , bring the grandkids , you 'll have the same lightbulb saving you energy .
so leds are fantastic .
what we decided to do was not to sell leds on the side marked up high and continue to push all the old bulbs , the halogens and the cfls .
we decided , over the next two years , we will ban the halogens and the cfls ourselves .
we will go all in .
and this is what business needs to do : go all-in , go 100 percent , because then you stop investing in the old stuff , you invest in the new stuff , you lower costs , you use your supply chain and your creativity and you get the prices down so everybody can afford the best lights so they can save energy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not just about products in people 's homes .
we 've got to think about the raw materials that produce our products .
obviously there 's fantastic opportunities with recycled materials , and we can and will go zero waste .
and there 's opportunities in a circular economy .
but we 're still dependent on natural , raw materials .
let 's take cotton .
cotton 's brilliant . probably many people are wearing cotton right now .
it 's a brilliant textile in use .
it 's really dirty in production .
it uses lots of pesticides , lots of fertilizer , lots of water .
so we 've worked with others , with other businesses and ngos , on the better cotton initiative , working right back down to the farm , and there you can halve the amount of water and halve the chemical inputs , the yields increase , and 60 percent of the costs of running many of these farms with farmers with low incomes can be chemical imports .
yields increase , and you halve the input costs .
farmers are coming out of poverty . they love it .
already hundreds of thousands of farmers have been reached , and now we 've got 60 percent better cotton in our business .
again , we 're going all-in .
by 2015 , we 'll be 100 percent better cotton .
take the topic of 100 percent targets , actually .
people sometimes think that 100 percent 's going to be hard , and we 've had the conversation in the business .
actually , we found 100 percent is easier to do than 90 percent or 50 percent .
if you have a 90 percent target , everyone in the business finds a reason to be in the 10 percent .
when it 's 100 percent , it 's kind of clear , and businesspeople like clarity , because then you just get the job done .
so , wood . we know with forestry , it 's a choice .
you 've got illegal logging and deforestation still on a very large scale , or you can have fantastic , responsible forestry that we can be proud of .
it 's a simple choice , so we 've worked for many years with the forest stewardship council , with literally hundreds of other organizations , and there 's a point here about collaboration .
so hundreds of others , of ngos , of forest workers ' unions , and of businesses , have helped create the forest stewardship council , which sets standards for forestry and then checks the forestry 's good on the ground .
now together , through our supply chain , with partners , we 've managed to certify 35 million hectares of forestry .
that 's about the size of germany .
and we 've decided in the next three years , we will double the volume of certified material we put through our business .
so be decisive on these issues .
use your supply chain to drive good .
but then it comes to your operations .
some things are certain , i think .
we know we 'll use electricity in 20 or 30 years ' time .
we know the sun will be shining somewhere , and the wind will still be blowing in 20 or 30 years ' time .
so why not make our energy out of the sun and the wind ?
and why not take control of it ourselves ?
so we 're going 100 percent renewable .
by 2020 , we 'll produce more renewable energy than the energy we consume as a business .
for all of our stores , our own factories , our distribution centers , we 've installed 300,000 solar panels so far , and we 've got 14 wind farms we own and operate in six countries , and we 're not done yet .
but think of a solar panel .
a solar panel pays for itself in seven or eight years .
the electricity is free .
every time the sun comes out after that , the electricity is free .
so this is a good thing for the cfo , not just the sustainability guy .
every business can do things like this .
but then we 've got to look beyond our operations , and i think everybody would agree that now business has to take full responsibility for the impacts of your supply chain .
many businesses now , fortunately , have codes of conduct and audit their supply chains , but not every business . far from it .
and this came in ikea actually in the ' 90s .
we found there was a risk of child labor in the supply chain , and people in the business were shocked .
and it was clearly totally unacceptable , so then you have to act .
so a code of conduct was developed , and now we have 80 auditors out in the world every day making sure all our factories secure good working conditions and protect human rights and make sure there is no child labor .
but it 's not just as simple as making sure there 's no child labor .
you 've got to say that 's not enough today .
i think we 'd all agree that children are the most important people in the world and the most vulnerable .
so what can a business do today to actually use your total value chain to support a better quality of life and protect child rights ?
we 've worked with unicef and save the children on developing some new business principles with children 's rights .
increasing numbers of businesses are signing up to these , but actually in a survey , many business leaders said they thought their business had nothing to do with children .
so what we decided to do was , we will look and ask ourselves the tough questions with partners who know more than us , what can we do to go beyond our business to help improve the lives of children ?
we also have a foundation that 's committed to work through partners and help improve the lives and protect the rights of 100 million children by 2015 .
you know the phrase , you can manage what you measure ?
well , you should measure what you care about .
if you 're not measuring things , you do n't care and you do n't know .
so let 's take an example , measure the things that are important in your business .
is n't it about time that businesses were led equally by men and women ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we know for our 17,000 managers across ikea that 47 percent are women today , but it 's not enough , and we want to close the gap and follow it all the way through to senior management .
and we do not want to wait another hundred years .
so we 've launched a women 's open network this week in ikea , and we 'll do whatever it takes to lead the change .
so the message here is , measure what you care about and lead the change , and do n't wait a hundred years .
so we 've gone from sustainability being a nice-to-do to a must-do . it 's a must-do .
it 's still nice to do , but it 's a must-do .
and everybody can do something on this as an individual .
be a discerning consumer .
vote with your wallets .
search out the companies that are acting on this .
but also , there are other businesses already acting .
i mentioned renewable energy .
you go to google or lego , they 're going 100 percent renewable too , in the same way that we are .
on having really good sustainability strategies , there are companies like nike , patagonia , timberland , marks & spencer .
but i do n't think any of those businesses would say they 're perfect . we certainly would n't .
we 'll make mistakes going forward , but it 's about setting a clear direction , being transparent , having a dialogue with the right partners , and choosing to lead on the issues that really count .
so if you 're a business leader , if you 're not already weaving sustainability right into the heart of your business model , i 'd urge you to do so .
and together , we can help create a sustainable world , and , if we get it right , we can make sustainability affordable for the many people , not a luxury for the few .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a kid , i was fascinated with all things air and space .
i would watch nova on pbs .
our school would show bill nye the science guy .
when i was in elementary school , my next door neighbor , he gave me a book for my birthday .
it was an astronomy book , and i poured over that thing for hours on end , and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream , and part of that dream was , i always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft .
well , a number of years later , i graduated from ucla and i found myself at nasa , working for the jet propulsion laboratory , and there our team was challenged to create a 3d visualization of the solar system , and today i want to show you what we 've done so far .
now , the kicker is , everything i 'm about to do here you can do at home , because we built this for the public for you guys to use .
so what you 're looking at right now is the earth .
you can see the united states and california and san diego , and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around .
now , this is n't new . anyone who 's used google earth has seen this before , but one thing we like to say in our group is , we do the opposite of google earth .
google earth goes from this view down to your backyard .
we go from this view out to the stars .
so the earth is cool , but what we really want to show are the spacecraft , so i 'm going to bring the interface back up , and now you 're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the earth .
these are a number of our science space earth orbiters .
we have n't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites .
if we did , it would be a complete mess , because there 's a lot of stuff out there .
and the cool thing is , we actually created 3d models for a number of these spacecraft , so if you want to visit any of these , all you need to do is double-click on them .
so i 'm going to find the international space station , double-click , and it will take us all the way down to the iss .
and now you 're riding along with the iss where it is right now .
and the other cool thing is , not only can we move the camera around , we can also control time , so i can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward , and now we can see what a sunset on the iss would look like , and they get one every 90 minutes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , so what about the rest of it ?
well , i can click on this home button over here , and that will take us up to the inner solar system , and now we 're looking at the rest of the solar system .
you can see , there 's saturn , there 's jupiter , and while we 're here , i want to point out something .
it 's actually pretty busy .
here we have the mars science laboratory on its way to mars , just launched last weekend .
here we have juno on its cruise to jupiter , there .
we have dawn orbiting vesta , and we have over here new horizons on a straight shot to pluto .
and i mention this because there 's this strange public perception that nasa 's dead , that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there 's no more spacecraft out there .
well , a lot of what nasa does is robotic exploration , and we have a lot of spacecraft out there .
granted , we 're not sending humans up at the moment , well at least with our own launch vehicles , but nasa is far from dead , and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there 's so many other things that we 're doing .
anyway , while we 're here , again , if you want to visit anything , all you need to do is double-click .
so i 'm just going to double-click on vesta , and here we have dawn orbiting vesta , and this is happening right now .
i 'm going to double-click on uranus , and we can see uranus rotating on its side along with its moons .
you can see how it 's tilted at about 89 degrees .
and just being able to visit different places and go through different times , we have data from 1950 to 2050 .
granted , we do n't have everything in between , because some of the data is hard to get .
just being able to visit places in different times , you can explore this for hours , literally hours on end , but i want to show you one thing in particular , so i 'm going to open up the destination tab , spacecraft outer planet missions , voyager 1 , and i 'm going to bring up the titan flyby .
so now we 've gone back in time .
we 're now riding along with voyager 1 .
the date here is november 11 , 1980 .
now , there 's a funny thing going on here .
it does n't look like anything 's going on .
it looks like i 've paused the program .
it 's actually running at real rate right now , one second per second , and in fact , voyager 1 here is flying by titan at i think it 's 38,000 miles per hour .
it only looks like nothing 's moving because , well , saturn here is 700,000 miles away , and titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away .
it 's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing 's happening .
but to make it more interesting , i 'm going to speed up time , and we can watch as voyager 1 flies by titan , which is a hazy moon of saturn .
it actually has a very thick atmosphere .
and i 'm going to recenter the camera on saturn , here .
i 'm going to pull out , and i want to show you voyager 1 as it flies by saturn .
there 's a point to be made here .
with a 3d visualization like this , we can not only just say voyager 1 flew by saturn .
there 's a whole story to tell here .
and even better , because it 's an interactive application , you can tell the story for yourself .
if you want to pause it , you can pause it .
if you want to keep going , if you want to change the camera angle , you can do that , and because of that , i can show you that voyager 1 does n't just fly by saturn .
it actually flies underneath saturn .
now , what happens is , as it flies underneath saturn , saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system , so if i just keep letting this go , you can see voyager 1 fly up like that .
and , in fact , i 'm going to go back to the solar system .
i 'm going to go back to today , now , and i want to show you where voyager 1 is .
right there , above , way above the solar system , way beyond our solar system .
and here 's the thing . now you know how it got there .
now you know why , and to me , that 's the point of this program .
you can manipulate it yourself .
you can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself .
you know , the theme today is " the world in your grasp . "
well , we 're trying to give you the solar system in your grasp - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and we hope once it 's there , you 'll be able to learn for yourself what we 've done out there , and what we 're about to do .
and my personal dream is for kids to take this and explore and see the wonders out there and be inspired , as i was as a kid , to pursue stem education and to pursue a dream in space exploration .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- we live in in a remarkable time , the age of genomics .
your genome is the entire sequence of your dna .
your sequence and mine are slightly different .
that 's why we look different .
i 've got brown eyes ; you might have blue or gray .
but it 's not just skin-deep .
the headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases , maybe even shape our personality , or give us mental disorders .
our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies .
and yet , i would like to think that i am more than my genes .
what do you guys think ?
are you more than your genes ?
-lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- yes ?
i think some people agree with me .
i think we should make a statement .
i think we should say it all together .
all right : " i 'm more than my genes " - all together .
everybody : i am more than my genes .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- sebastian seung : what am i ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i am my connectome .
now , since you guys are really great , maybe you can humor me and say this all together too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right . all together now .
everybody : i am my connectome .
ss : that sounded great .
you know , you guys are so great , you do n't even know what a connectome is , and you 're willing to play along with me .
i could just go home now .
well , so far only one connectome is known , that of this tiny worm .
its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons .
and in the 1970s and ' 80s , a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons .
in this diagram , every node is a neuron , and every line is a connection .
this is the connectome of the worm c. elegans .
your connectome is far more complex than this because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections .
there 's a diagram like this for your brain , but there 's no way it would fit on this slide .
your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters .
that 's a lot of information .
what 's in that information ?
we do n't know for sure , but there are theories .
since the 19th century , neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories - the information that makes you , you - maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain 's neurons .
and perhaps other aspects of your personal identity - maybe your personality and your intellect - maybe they 're also encoded in the connections between your neurons .
and so now you can see why i proposed this hypothesis : i am my connectome .
i did n't ask you to chant it because it 's true ; i just want you to remember it .
and in fact , we do n't know if this hypothesis is correct , because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it .
finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor .
and to find the connectomes of brains more like our own , we need more sophisticated technologies , that are automated , that will speed up the process of finding connectomes .
and in the next few minutes , i 'll tell you about some of these technologies , which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators .
now you 've probably seen pictures of neurons before .
you can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes .
they extend long and delicate branches , and in short , they look like trees .
but this is just a single neuron .
in order to find connectomes , we have to see all the neurons at the same time .
so let 's meet bobby kasthuri , who works in the laboratory of jeff lichtman at harvard university .
bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain .
and we 're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution , so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time .
except , you still may not really recognize them , and that 's because we have to work in three dimensions .
if we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up , we get a three-dimensional image .
and still , you may not see the branches .
so we start at the top , and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red , and we do that for the next slice and for the next slice .
and we keep on doing that , slice after slice .
if we continue through the entire stack , we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron .
and we can do that for another neuron in green .
and you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations , and these are what are called synapses .
let 's zoom in on one synapse , and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron .
you should see small circles - these are called vesicles .
they contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter .
and so when the green neuron wants to communicate , it wants to send a message to the red neuron , it spits out neurotransmitter .
at the synapse , the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone .
so you see how to find a synapse .
how can we find an entire connectome ?
well , we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book .
we color every neuron in , in a different color , and then we look through all of the images , find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse .
if we can do that throughout all the images , we could find a connectome .
now , at this point , you 've learned the basics of neurons and synapses .
and so i think we 're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience : how are the brains of men and women different ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- according to this self-help book , guys brains are like waffles ; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes .
girls ' brains are like spaghetti ; everything in their life is connected to everything else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you guys are laughing , but you know , this book changed my life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but seriously , what 's wrong with this ?
you already know enough to tell me - what 's wrong with this statement ?
it does n't matter whether you 're a guy or girl , everyone 's brains are like spaghetti .
or maybe really , really fine capellini with branches .
just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate , one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches .
one neuron can be connected to so many other neurons , because there can be synapses at these points of contact .
by now , you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is .
and so let 's do a series of comparisons to show you .
i assure you , this is very tiny . it 's just six microns on a side .
so , here 's how it stacks up against an entire neuron .
and you can tell that , really , only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube .
and a neuron , well , that 's smaller than brain .
and that 's just a mouse brain - it 's a lot smaller than a human brain .
so when show my friends this , sometimes they 've told me , " you know , sebastian , you should just give up .
neuroscience is hopeless . "
because if you look at a brain with your naked eye , you do n't really see how complex it is , but when you use a microscope , finally the hidden complexity is revealed .
in the 17th century , the mathematician and philosopher , blaise pascal , wrote of his dread of the infinite , his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space .
and , as a scientist , i 'm not supposed to talk about my feelings - too much information , professor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but may i ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i feel curiosity , and i feel wonder , but at times i have also felt despair .
why did i choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite ?
it 's absurd .
how could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this ?
and yet , i persist in this quixotic endeavor .
and indeed , these days i harbor new hopes .
someday , a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images .
and some day , artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome .
i do not know , but i hope that i will live to see that day , because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time .
it will take the work of generations to succeed .
at the present time , my collaborators and i , what we 're aiming for is much more modest - just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain .
but even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that i am my connectome .
for now , let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis , that it 's actually worth taking seriously .
as you grow during childhood and age during adulthood , your personal identity changes slowly .
likewise , every connectome changes over time .
what kinds of changes happen ?
well , neurons , like trees , can grow new branches , and they can lose old ones .
synapses can be created , and they can be eliminated .
and synapses can grow larger , and they can grow smaller .
second question : what causes these changes ?
well , it 's true .
to some extent , they are programmed by your genes .
but that 's not the whole story , because there are signals , electrical signals , that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch .
these signals are called neural activity .
and there 's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts , feelings and perceptions , our mental experiences .
and there 's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change .
and if you put those two facts together , it means that your experiences can change your connectome .
and that 's why every connectome is unique , even those of genetically identical twins .
the connectome is where nature meets nurture .
and it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome - an idea that you may find empowering .
what 's in this picture ?
a cool and refreshing stream of water , you say .
what else is in this picture ?
do not forget that groove in the earth called the stream bed .
without it , the water would not know in which direction to flow .
and with the stream , i would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity .
neural activity is constantly changing .
it 's like the water of the stream ; it never sits still .
the connections of the brain 's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows .
and so the connectome is like bed of the stream ; but the metaphor is richer than that , because it 's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water , but over long timescales , the water also reshapes the bed of the stream .
and as i told you just now , neural activity can change the connectome .
and if you 'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights , i will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis - or so neuroscientists think - of thoughts , feelings and perceptions .
and so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness .
neural activity is its water , and the connectome is its bed .
so let 's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science .
suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work .
how will we go about testing the hypothesis " i am my connectome ? "
well , i propose a direct test .
let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes .
consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements , like a pianist playing a beethoven sonata .
according to a theory that dates back to the 19th century , such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain .
because , if the first neurons in the chain are activated , through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons , which are activated , and so on down the line , like a chain of falling dominoes .
and this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements .
so one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes .
but it wo n't be easy , because they 're not going to look like this .
they 're going to be scrambled up .
so we 'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain .
and if we can do that , the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall .
and if that were successful , that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what a mess - have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this ?
i hope not .
but if you have , you know it 's very easy to make a mistake .
the branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain .
can anyone guess : what 's the total length of wires in your brain ?
i 'll give you a hint . it 's a big number .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i estimate , millions of miles , all packed in your skull .
and if you appreciate that number , you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain .
and indeed , the popular press loves headlines like , " anorexic brains are wired differently , " or " autistic brains are wired differently . "
these are plausible claims , but in truth , we ca n't see the brain 's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true .
and so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain , to see mental disorders in connectomes .
sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication .
philosophers know this game very well .
if you believe that i am my connectome , i think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome .
i mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species .
one of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics .
if you pay 100,000 dollars , you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an arizona warehouse , awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you .
should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality , calling them fools ?
or will they someday chuckle over our graves ?
i do n't know - i prefer to test their beliefs , scientifically .
i propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain .
we know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing .
the question is : has that damage erased the connectome ?
if it has , there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains .
resurrection might succeed for the body , but not for the mind .
on the other hand , if the connectome is still intact , we can not ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily .
i 've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small , and propels us to the world of the far future .
connectomes will mark a turning point in human history .
as we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the african savanna , what distinguished us was our larger brains .
we have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies .
eventually , these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains .
i believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists , but for all of us .
and i 'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- clearly , we 're living in a moment of crisis .
arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us , and yet i stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive .
because of some of technologies we 've been talking about .
because of the resources , the skills , and certainly the surge of talent we 're seeing all around the world , with the mindset to create change .
and we 've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen , who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower , but that we 've got to engage in a different way with the world .
and by definition , every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul , a global citizen .
you work on the front lines . and you 've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another .
and no matter what country you live or work in , you 've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of , even in their most ordinariness .
today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty , how best we release their energies .
on the one hand , we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out .
and on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid .
and what i want to talk about is something that compliments both systems .
we call it patient capital .
the critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in africa since 1970 and say , and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty , rampant corruption ?
they use mobutu as metaphor .
and their policy prescription is to make government more accountable , focus on the capital markets , invest , do n't give anything away .
on the other side , as i said , there are those who say the problem is that we need more money .
that when it comes to the rich , we 'll bail out and we 'll hand a lot of aid , but when it comes to our poor brethren , we want little to do with it .
they point to the successes of aid : the eradication of smallpox , and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals .
both sides are right .
and the problem is that neither side is listening to the other .
even more problematic , they 're not listening to poor people themselves .
after 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation , it 's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet than low-income people .
they must navigate markets daily , making micro-decisions , dozens and dozens , to move their way through society , and yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family , they could be put back into poverty , sometimes for generations .
and so we need both the market and we need aid .
patient capital works between , and tries to take the best of both .
it 's money that 's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare , water , housing , alternative energy , thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity , but as individual customers , consumers , clients , people who want to make decisions in their own lives .
patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk , a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment , to use the market as the best listening device that we have , and the expectation of below-market returns , but outsized social impact .
it recognizes that the market has its limitation , and so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy to include all people .
now , entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons .
first , they tend to work in markets where people make one , two , three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level .
second , the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure - no roads to speak of , sporadic electricity and high levels of corruption .
third , they are often creating markets .
even if you 're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages , it is something new .
and so many low-income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time , takes a lot of patience .
it also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance .
not only to build the systems , the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way , but to connect those business to other markets , to governments , to corporations - real partnerships if we want to get to scale .
i want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation .
in 2002 i met this incredible entrepreneur named amitabha sadangi from india , who 'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet .
and he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether , despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in india make under a dollar a day .
they were creating subsidies either for large farms , or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use , rather than that the farmers wanted to use .
at the same time amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in israel .
it was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant .
and it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green .
but the market also had bypassed low income farmers , because these systems were both too expensive , and they were constructed for fields that were too large .
the average small village farmer works on two acres or less .
and so , amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves , because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he thought that they should have .
and he used three fundamental principles .
the first one was miniaturization .
the drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre , even if he had two , because it was too frightening , given all that he had at stake .
second , it had to be extremely affordable .
in other words , that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest , or else they would n't take the risk .
and third , it had to be what amitabha calls infinitely expandable .
what i mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre , the farmers could buy a second and a third and a fourth .
as of today , ide india , amitabha 's organization , has sold over 300,000 farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple on average , but this did n't happen overnight .
in fact , when you go back to the beginning , there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day , that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors , agriculture .
and so we needed grants . and he used significant grants to research , to experiment , to fail , to innovate and try again .
and when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers , that 's when patient capital could come in .
and we helped him build a company , for profit , that would build on ide 's knowledge , and start looking at sales and exports , and be able to tap into other kinds of capital .
secondarily , we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries .
and so we met dr. sono khangharani in pakistan .
and while , again , you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in india into pakistan , just to get the permits , over time we were able to start a company with dr. sono , who runs a large community development organization in the thar desert , which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country .
and though that company has just started , our assumption is that there too we 'll see the impact on millions .
but drip irrigation is n't the only innovation .
we 're starting to see these happening all around the world .
in arusha , tanzania , a to z textile manufacturing has worked in partnership with us , with unicef , with the global fund , to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people , mostly women .
and they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for africans around the world .
lifespring hospital is a joint venture between acumen and the government of india to bring quality , affordable maternal health care to low-income women , and it 's been so successful that it 's currently building a new hospital every 35 days .
and 1298 ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry , building an ambulance service in bombay that would use the technology of google earth , a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access , and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption .
so that in the terrorist attacks of november they were the first responder , and are now beginning to scale , because of partnership .
they 've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances , and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in india .
this idea of scale is critical .
because we 're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people . all of the ones i discussed have reached at least a quarter million people .
but that 's obviously not enough .
and it 's where the idea of partnership becomes so important .
whether it 's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets , government itself , or partner with major corporations , there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation .
president obama understands that .
he recently authorized the creation of a social innovation fund to focus on what works in this country , and look at how we can scale it .
and i would submit that it 's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations , not only for their country , but ones that we can use in the developed world as well .
invest financial assistance , but also management assistance .
and then measure the returns , both from a financial perspective and from a social impact perspective .
when we think about new approaches to aid , it 's impossible not to talk about pakistan .
we 've had a rocky relationship with that country and , in all fairness , the united states has not always been a very reliable partner .
but again i would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen .
and if we take that notion of a global innovation fund , we could use this time to invest not directly in government , though we would have government 's blessing , nor in international experts , but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country .
people like rashani zafar , who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country , and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country .
and tasneem siddiqui , who developed a way called incremental housing , where he has moved 40,000 slum dwellers into safe , affordable community housing .
educational initiatives like dil and the citizen foundation that are building schools across the country .
it 's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the taliban .
i 've invested in pakistan for over seven years now , and those of you who 've also worked there can attest that pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population , and there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature .
president kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable .
i would say that the converse is true .
that these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day , provide real pathways to hope .
and as we think about how we construct aid for pakistan , while we need to strengthen the judiciary , build greater stability , we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world .
on one of my last visits to pakistan , i asked dr. sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the thar desert .
and we left karachi one morning before dawn .
it was about 115 degrees .
and we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color , lots of heat , very little discussion , because we were exhausted .
and finally , at the end of the journey , i could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon .
and as we got closer , its significance became apparent .
that there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall .
because one of the poorest farmers on earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life .
his name was raja , and he had kind , twinkly hazel eyes and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father .
and he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he had n't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day .
because he was building these crops .
and with the money he earned he could stay this year .
and for the first time ever in three generations , his children would go to school .
we asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons .
and he said , " of course i will .
because i do n't want them discriminated against anymore . "
when we think about solutions to poverty , we can not deny individuals their fundamental dignity .
because at the end of the day , dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth .
and what 's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity .
because that is where dignity really starts .
martin luther king said that love without power is anemic and sentimental , and that power without love is reckless and abusive .
our generation has seen both approaches tried , and often fail .
but i think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power .
for that is what we 'll need , as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us , and to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal to every human being on the planet .
the time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions , a cross sector , is now .
i can only talk from my own experience , but in eight years of running acumen fund , i 've seen the power of patient capital .
not only to inspire innovation and risk taking , but to truly build systems that have created more than 25,000 jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet .
i know it works .
but i know that many other kinds of innovation also work .
and so i urge you , in whatever sector you work , in whatever job you do , to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we 're trying to help .
rather than what we think that they might need .
it will take embracing the world with both arms .
and it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability , with a sense of integrity and perseverance .
and yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations .
and there is so much good that we can do .
just think of all those sunflowers in the desert .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- many of you could ask the question , you know , why is a flying car , or maybe more accurately , a roadable aircraft , possible at this time ?
a number of years ago , mr. ford predicted that flying cars of some form would be available .
now , 60 years later , i 'm here to tell you why it 's possible .
when i was about five years old , not very much - about a year after mr. ford made his predictions , i was living in a rural part of canada , on the side of a mountain in a very isolated area .
getting to school , for a kid that was actually pretty short for his age , through the canadian winter , was not a pleasant experience .
it was a trying and scary thing for a young kid to be going through .
at the end of my first year in school , in the summer of that year , i discovered a couple hummingbirds that were caught in a shed near my home .
they 'd worn themselves out , beating themselves against the window , i took them outside and as i let them go , that split second , even though they were very tired , that second i let them go they hovered for a second , then zipped off into the distance .
i thought , what a great way to get to school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for a kid at that age , this was like infinite speed , disappearing , and i was very inspired by that .
and so the next - over the next six decades , believe it or not , i 've built a number of aircraft , with the goal of creating something that could do for you , or me , what the hummingbird does , and give you that flexibility .
i 've called this vehicle , generically , a volantor , after the latin word " volant , " meaning , to fly in a light , nimble manner .
volantor-like helicopter , perhaps .
the faa , the controlling body above all , calls it a " powered lift aircraft . "
and they 've actually issued a pilot 's license - a powerlift pilot 's license - for this type of aircraft .
it 's closer than you think . it 's kind of remarkable when you consider that there are no operational powered lift aircraft .
so for once , perhaps , the government is ahead of itself .
the press calls my particular volantor a " skycar . "
this is a little bit earlier version of it , that 's why it 's given the x designation , but it 's a four-passenger aircraft that could take off vertically , like a helicopter - therefore it does n't need an airfield .
on the ground , it 's powered electrically .
it 's actually classified as a motorcycle because of the three wheels , which is a great asset because it allows you , theoretically , to use this on the highways in most states , and actually in all cities .
so that 's an asset because if you 've got to deal with the crash protection issues of the automobile , forget it - you 're never going to fly it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one could say that a helicopter does pretty much what the hummingbird does , and gets around in much the same way , and it 's true , but a helicopter is a very complex device .
it 's expensive - so expensive that very few people could own or use it .
it 's often been described because of its fragile nature and its complexity , as a series of parts - a large number of parts - flying in formation .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another difference , and i have to describe this , because it 's very personal , another great difference between the helicopter and the volantor - in my case the skycar volantor - is the experience that i 've had in flying both of those .
in a helicopter you feel - and it 's still a remarkable sensation - you feel like you 're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane .
when you get in the skycar - and i can tell you , there 's only one other person that 's flown it , but he had the same sensation - you really feel like you 're being lifted up by a magic carpet , without any vibration whatsoever . the sensation is unbelievable .
and it 's been a great motivator .
i only get to fly this vehicle occasionally , and only when i can persuade my stockholders to let me do so , but it 's still one of those wonderful experiences that reward you for all that time .
what we really need is something to replace the automobile for those 50-plus mile trips .
very few people realize that 50 mile-plus trips make up 85 percent of the miles traveled in america .
if we can get rid of that , then the highways will now be useful to you , as contrasted by what 's happening in many parts of the world today .
on this next slide , is an interesting history of what we really have seen in infrastructure , because whether i give you a perfect skycar , the perfect vehicle for use , it 's going to have very little value to you unless you 've got a system to use it in .
i 'm sure any of you have asked the question , yeah , are there great things up there - what am i going to do , get up there ?
it 's bad enough on a highway , what 's it going to be like to be in the air ?
this world that you 're going to be talking about tomorrow is going to be completely integrated . you 're not going to be a pilot , you 're going to be a passenger .
and it 's the infrastructure that really determines whether this process goes forward .
i can tell you , technically we can build skycars - my god , we went to the moon !
the technology there was much more difficult than what i 'm dealing with here .
but we have to have these priority changes , we have to have infrastructure to go with this .
historically you see that we got around 200 years ago by canals , and as that system disappeared , were replaced by railroads .
as that disappeared we came in with highways .
but if you look at that top corner - the highway system - you see where we are today . highways are no longer being built , and that 's a fact . you wo n't see any additional highways in the next 10 years .
however , the next 10 years , if like the last 10 years , we 're going to see 30 percent more traffic .
and where is that going to lead you to ?
so the issue then , i 've often asked , is when is it going to happen ?
when are we going to be able to have these vehicles ?
and of course , if you ask me , i 'm going to give you a really optimistic view .
after all , i 've been spending 60 years here believing it 's going to happen tomorrow .
so , i 'm not going to quote myself on this .
i 'd prefer to quote someone else , who testified with me before congress , and in his position as head of nasa put forward this particular vision of the future of this type of aircraft .
now i would argue , actually , if you look at the fact that on the highways today , you 're only averaging about 30 miles per hour - on average , according to the dot - the skycar travels at over 300 miles an hour , up to 25,000 feet .
and so , in effect , you could see perhaps a tenfold increase in the ability to get around as far as speed is concerned .
unbeknownst to many of you , the highway in the sky that i 'm talking about here has been under construction for 10 years .
it makes use of the gps - you 're familiar with gps in your automobile , but you may not be familiar with the fact that there 's a gps u.s. , there 's a russian gps , and there 's a new gps system going to europe , called galileo .
with those three systems , you have what is always necessary - a level of redundancy that says , if one system fails , you 'll still have a way because if you 're in this world , where computers are controlling what you 're doing , it 's going to be very critical that something ca n't fail on you .
how would a trip in a skycar work ?
well , you ca n't right now take off from your home because it 's too noisy .
i mean to be able to take off from your home , you 'd have to be extremely quiet .
but it 's still fairly quiet .
you 'd motor , electrically , to a vertiport , which may be a few blocks , maybe even a few miles away .
this is clearly , as i said earlier , a roadable aircraft , and you 're not going to spend that much time on the road .
after all , if you can fly like that , why are you going to drive around on a highway ?
go to a local vertiport , plug in your destination , delivered almost like a passenger .
you can play computer games , you can sleep , you can read on the way .
this is the world - there wo n't be you as a pilot . and i know the pilots in the audience are n't going to like that - and i 've had a lot of bad feedback from people who want to be up there , flying around and experiencing that .
and of course , i suppose like recreational parks you can still do that .
but the vehicle itself is going to be a very , very controlled environment .
or it 's going to have no use to you as a person who might use such a system .
we flew the first vehicle for the international press in 1965 , when i really got it started .
i was a professor at the u.c. davis system , and i got a lot of excitement around this , and i was able to fund the initiation of the program back in that time .
and then through the various years we invented various vehicles .
actually the critical point was in 1989 , when we demonstrated the stability of this vehicle - how completely stable it was in all circumstances , which is of course very critical .
still not a practical vehicle during all of this , but moving in the right direction , we believe .
finally , in the early part of - or actually the middle of 2002 , we flew the 400 - m400 , which was the four-passenger vehicle .
in this case here , we 're flying it remotely , as we always did at the beginning .
and we had very small power plants in it at this time .
we are now installing larger powerplants , which will make it possible for me to get back on board .
a vertical-takeoff aircraft is not the safest vehicle during the test flight program .
there 's an old adage that applied for the years between 1950s and 1970s , when every aeronautical company was working on vertical-takeoff aircraft .
a vertical-takeoff aircraft needs an artificial stabilization system - that 's essential .
at least for the hover , and the low-speed flight .
if that single-stability system , that brain that flies that aircraft , fails , or if the engine fails , that vehicle crashes . there is no option to that .
and the adage that i 'm referring to , that applied at that time , was that nothing comes down faster than a vtol aircraft upside down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a macabre comment because we lost a lot of pilots .
in fact , the aircraft companies gave up on vertical-takeoff aircraft more or less for a number of years .
and there 's really only one operational aircraft in the world today that 's a vertical-takeoff aircraft - as distinct from a helicopter - and that 's the hawker harrier jump jet .
a vertical-takeoff aircraft , like the hummingbird , has a very high metabolism , which means it requires a lot of energy .
getting that energy is very , very difficult . it all comes down to that power plant - how to get a large amount of power in a small package .
fortunately , dr. felix wankel invented the rotary engine .
a very unique engine - it 's round , it 's small , it 's vibration-free .
it fits exactly where we need to fit it , right in the center of the hubs of the ducts in the system - very critical . in fact that engine - for those who are into the automobile - know that it recently is applied to the rx8 - the mazda .
and that sportscar won sports car of the year .
wonderful engine .
in that application , it generates one horsepower per pound , which is twice as good as your car engine today , but only half of what we need .
my company has spent 35 years and many millions of dollars taking that rotary engine , which was invented in the late ' 50s , and getting it to the point that we get over two horsepower per pound , reliably , and critical .
we actually get 175 horsepower into one cubic foot .
we have eight engines in this vehicle .
we have four computers . we have two parachutes .
redundancy is the critical issue here .
if you want to stay alive you 've got to have backups .
and we have actually flown this vehicle and lost an engine , and continued to hover .
the computers back up each other . there 's a voting system - if one computer is not agreeing with the other three , it 's kicked out of the system .
and then you have three - you still have the triple redundancy .
if one of those fails , you still have a second chance .
if you stick around , then good luck .
there wo n't be a third chance .
the parachutes are there - hopefully , more for psychological than real reasons , but they will be an ultimate backup if it comes to that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd like to show you an animation in this next one , which is one element of the skycar 's use , but it 's one that demonstrates how it could be used .
you could think of it personally in your own terms , video : skycar dispatched , launch rescue vehicle for san francisco .
paul moller : i believe that personal transportation in something like the skycar , probably in another volantor form as well , will be a significant part of our lives , as dr. goldin says , within the next 10 years .
and it 's going to change the demographics in a very significant way .
if you can live 75 miles from san francisco and get there in 15 minutes , you 're going to sell your 700,000-dollar apartment , buy an upscale home on the side of a mountain , buy a skycar , which i think would be priced at that time perhaps in the area of 100,000 dollars , put money in the bank ...
that 's a very significant incentive for getting out of san francisco .
but you better be the first one out of town as the real estate values go to hell .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- developing the skycar has been a real challenge .
obviously i 'm dependent on a lot of other people believing in what i 'm doing - both financially and in technical help .
and that has - you run into situations where you have this great acceptance of what you 're doing , i characterized this emerging technology in an aphorism , which really talks about what i 've experienced , and i 'm sure what other people may have experienced in emerging technologies .
there 's an interesting poll that came out recently under nas - i think it 's msnbc - in which they asked the question , " are you in the market for a volantor ? "
twenty-three percent said , " yes , as soon as possible . "
forty-seven percent - yes , as soon as they could - price could come down .
twenty-three percent said , " as soon as it 's proven safe . "
only seven percent said that they would n't consider buying a skycar .
i 'm encouraged by that . at least it makes me feel like , to some extent , it is becoming self-evident .
that we need an alternative to the automobile , at least for those 50-mile trips and more , so that the highways become usable in today 's world .
thank you .
so , last month , the encyclopaedia britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years , which made me nostalgic , because i remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when i was a kid , maybe 12 years old .
and i wondered if i could update that game , not just for modern methods , but for the modern me .
so i tried .
i went to an online encyclopedia , wikipedia , and i entered the term " earth . "
you can start anywhere , this time i chose earth .
and the first rule of the game is pretty simple .
you just have to read the article until you find something you do n't know , and preferably something your dad does n't even know .
and in this case , i quickly found this : the furthest point from the center of the earth is not the tip of mount everest , like i might have thought , it 's the tip of this mountain : mount chimborazo in ecuador .
the earth spins , of course , as it travels around the sun , so the earth bulges a little bit around the middle , like some earthlings .
and even though mount chimborazo is n't the tallest mountain in the andes , it 's one degree away from the equator , it 's riding that bulge , and so the summit of chimborazo is the farthest point on earth from the center of the earth .
and it is really fun to say .
so i immediately decided , this is going to be the name of the game , or my new exclamation .
you can use it at ted .
chimborazo , right ?
it 's like " eureka " and " bingo " had a baby .
i did n't know that ; that 's pretty cool .
chimborazo !
so the next rule of the game is also pretty simple .
you just have to find another term and look that up .
now in the old days , that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically , maybe getting sidetracked , that was fun .
nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from .
i can go literally anywhere in the world , i think since i was already in ecuador , i just decided to click on the word " tropical . "
that took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the earth .
now that 's the tropic of cancer in the north and the tropic of capricorn in the south , that much i knew , but i was surprised to learn this little fact : those are not cartographers ' lines , like latitude or the borders between nations , they are astronomical phenomena caused by the earth 's tilt , and they change .
they move ; they go up , they go down .
in fact , for years , the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year , and nobody told me that .
i did n't know it .
chimborazo !
so to keep the game going , i just have to find another term and look that one up .
since i 'm already in the tropics , i chose " tropical rainforest . "
famous for its diversity , human diversity .
there are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet .
they 're all over the globe , but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests .
this is the only place you can go nowadays and not get " friended . "
the link that i clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end .
it mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera , which turn out to be beetles .
now i clicked on this on purpose , but if i 'd somehow gotten here by mistake , it does remind me , for the band , see " the beatles , " for the car see " volkswagon beetle , " but i am here for beetle beetles .
this is the most successful order on the planet by far .
something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet , including plants , are beetles .
that means the next time you are in the grocery store , take a look at the four people ahead of you in line .
statistically , one of you is a beetle .
and if it is you , you are astonishingly well adapted .
there are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums .
there are predator beetles , that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us .
there are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings .
this reminded the ancient egyptians of their god khepri , who renews the ball of the sun every morning , which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the pharaoh tutankhamun .
beetles , i was reminded , have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom .
fireflies are not flies , fireflies are beetles .
fireflies are coleoptera , and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well .
like my next link : the chemical language of pheromones .
now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex .
yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the link to aphrodisiac .
now that 's something that increases sexual desire , possibly chocolate .
there is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac .
but as the article mentions , because of enzyme breakdown , it 's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally .
so those of you who only eat your chocolate , you might have to experiment .
the link i clicked on here , " sympathetic magic , " mostly because i understand what both of those words mean .
but not when they 're together like that .
i do like sympathy . i do like magic .
so when i click on " sympathetic magic , " i get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls .
this is the boy in me getting lucky again .
sympathetic magic is imitation .
if you imitate something , maybe you can have an effect on it .
that 's the idea behind voodoo dolls , and possibly also cave paintings .
the link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind .
i would love to see google maps inside some of these caves .
we 've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork .
common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands , usually the left hand .
we have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia , so even though i do n't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube , i can easily picture how he did it .
and i really do n't think it 's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that i 'm going to use now to click on the term for " hand , " go to the page for " hand , " where i found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia i 've found in a long time . it 's simply this : the back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar .
now that 's embarrassing , because up until now , every time i 've said , " i know it like the back of my hand , " i 've really been saying , " i 'm totally familiar with that , i just do n't know it 's freaking name , right ? "
and the link i clicked on here , well , lemurs , monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar .
i click on chimpanzee , and i get our closest genetic relative .
pan troglodytes , the name we give him , means " cave dweller . "
he does n't .
he lives in rainforests and savannas .
it 's just that we 're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us , evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us , and in some cases , he gets places before us .
like my next link , the almost irresistible link , ham the astrochimp .
i click on him , and i really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice , in fact .
he 's born in cameroon , which is smack in the middle of my tropics map , and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles .
in between those two landmarks in ham 's life , he flew into space .
he experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it , soviet cosmonaut yuri gagarin .
when i click on yuri gagarin 's page , i get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature , huge in heroism .
top estimates , soviet estimates , put this guy at 1.65 meters , that is less than five and a half feet tall max , possibly because he was malnourished as a child .
germans occupied russia .
a nazi officer took over the gagarin household , and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut .
years later , the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space , the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet .
and he did n't just leave it , he circled it once .
fifty years later , as a tribute , the international space station , which is still up there tonight , synced its orbit with gagarin 's orbit , at the exact same time of day , and filmed it , so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride , possibly a lonely one , the first person to ever see such a thing .
and then when you 've had your fill of that , you can click on one more link .
you can come back to earth .
you return to where you started .
you can finish your game .
you just need to find one more fact that you did n't know .
and for me , i quickly landed on this one : the earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid , which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls .
this is the kind of fact i would have loved as a boy .
i found it myself .
it 's got some math that i can do .
i 'm pretty sure my dad does n't know it .
what this means is that if you could shrink the earth to the size of a billiard ball , if you could take planet earth , with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests , astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees , voodoo dolls , fireflies , chocolate , sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea , you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball , it would be as smooth as a billiard ball , presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle .
that 's pretty cool .
i did n't know that .
chimborazo !
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid , playing with blocks .
as you figured out how to reach out and grasp , pick them up and move them around , you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships .
spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us .
so , as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects - along with my adviser pattie , and my collaborator jeevan kalanithi - i started to wonder - what if when we used a computer , instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop , what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically , arranging it the way we wanted ?
this question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer , by building siftables .
in a nutshell , a siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie .
they 're able to be moved around by hand , they can sense each other , they can sense their motion , and they have a screen and a wireless radio .
most importantly , they 're physical , so like the blocks , you can move them just by reaching out and grasping .
and siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information .
and as these tools become more physical , more aware of their motion , aware of each other , and aware of the nuance of how we move them , we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles .
so , i 'm going to start with some simple examples .
this siftable is configured to show video , and if i tilt it in one direction , it 'll roll the video this way ; if i tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards .
and these interactive portraits are aware of each other .
so if i put them next to each other , they get interested .
if they get surrounded , they notice that too , they might get a little flustered .
and they can also sense their motion and tilt .
one of the interesting implications on interaction , we started to realize , was that we could use everyday gestures on data , like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid .
so in this case , we 've got three siftables configured to be paint buckets and i can use them to pour color into that central one , where they get mixed .
if we overshoot , we can pour a little bit back .
there are also some neat possibilities for education , like language , math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly , and view the results immediately .
so here i 'm - -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a fibonacci sequence that i 'm making with a simple equation program .
here we have a word game that 's kind of like a mash-up between scrabble and boggle .
basically , in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each siftable , and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary .
then , after about 30 seconds , it reshuffles , and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so these are some kids that came on a field trip to the media lab , and i managed to get them to try it out , and shoot a video .
they really loved it .
and , one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you do n't have to give people many instructions .
all you have to say is , " make words , " and they know exactly what to do .
so here 's another few people trying it out .
that 's our youngest beta tester , down there on the right .
turns out , all he wanted to do was to stack the siftables up .
so to him , they were just blocks .
now , this is an interactive cartoon application .
and we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners .
and this is felix , actually .
and he can bring new characters into the scene , just by lifting the siftables off the table that have that character shown on them .
here , he 's bringing the sun out .
video : the sun is rising .
david merrill : now he 's brought a tractor into the scene .
video : the orange tractor .
good job ! yeah !
dm : so by shaking the siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact - video : woof !
dm : inventing his own narrative .
video : hello !
dm : it 's an open-ended story , and he gets to decide how it unfolds .
video : fly away , cat .
dm : so , the last example i have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we 've built recently , in which siftables act as sounds like lead , bass and drums .
each of these has four different variations , you get to choose which one you want to use .
and you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want .
and you inject it by just bumping up the sound siftable against a sequence siftable .
there are effects that you can control live , like reverb and filter .
you attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it .
and then , overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence .
so let 's have a look .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : we 'll start by putting a lead into two sequence siftables , arrange them into a series , extend it , add a little more lead .
now i put a bass line in .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : now i 'll put some percussion in .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : and now i 'll attach the filter to the drums , so i can control the effect live .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : i can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : and now i 'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : i can rearrange the sequence while it plays .
so i do n't have to plan it out in advance , but i can improvise , making it longer or shorter as i go .
and now , finally , i can fade the whole sequence out using the volume siftable , tilted to the left .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , as you can see , my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work .
and today , i had time to show you one point in this new design space , and a few of the possibilities that we 're working to bring out of the laboratory .
so the thought i want to leave you with is that we 're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms .
thank you very much .
i look forward to talking with all of you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- having spent 18 years as a child of the state in children 's homes and foster care , you could say that i 'm an expert on the subject , and in being an expert , i want to let you know that being an expert does in no way make you right in light of the truth .
if you 're in care , legally the government is your parent , loco parentis .
margaret thatcher was my mother . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's not talk about breastfeeding . -lrb- laughter -rrb- harry potter was a foster child .
pip from " great expectations " was adopted ; superman was a foster child ; cinderella was a foster child ; lisbeth salander , the girl with the dragon tattoo , was fostered and institutionalized ; batman was orphaned ; lyra belacqua from philip pullman 's " northern lights " was fostered ; jane eyre , adopted ; roald dahl 's james from " james and the giant peach ; " matilda ; moses - moses ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- moses ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the boys in michael morpurgo 's " friend or foe ; " alem in benjamin zephaniah 's " refugee boy ; " luke skywalker - luke skywalker ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- - oliver twist ; cassia in " the concubine of shanghai " by hong ying ; celie in alice walker 's " the color purple . "
all of these great fictional characters , all of them who were hurt by their condition , all of them who spawned thousands of other books and other films , all of them were fostered , adopted or orphaned .
it seems that writers know that the child outside of family reflects on what family truly is more than what it promotes itself to be .
that is , they also use extraordinary skills to deal with extraordinary situations on a daily basis .
how have we not made the connection ?
and why have we not made the connection , between - how has that happened ? - between these incredible characters of popular culture and religions , and the fostered , adopted or orphaned child in our midst ? it 's not our pity that they need .
it 's our respect .
i know famous musicians , i know actors and film stars and millionaires and novelists and top lawyers and television executives and magazine editors and national journalists and dustbinmen and hairdressers , all who were looked after children , fostered , adopted or orphaned , and many of them grow into their adult lives in fear of speaking of their background , as if it may somehow weaken their standing in the foreground , as if it were somehow kryptonite , as if it were a time bomb strapped on the inside . children in care , who 've had a life in care , deserve the right to own and live the memory of their own childhood .
it is that simple .
my own mother - and i should say this here - she same to this country in the late ' 60s , and she was , you know , she found herself pregnant , as women did in the late ' 60s . you know what i mean ?
they found themselves pregnant .
and she sort of , she had no idea of the context in which she 'd landed .
in the 1960s - i should give you some context - in the 1960s , if you were pregnant and you were single , you were seen as a threat to the community .
you were separated from your family by the state .
you were separated from your family and placed into mother and baby homes .
you were appointed a social worker .
the adoptive parents were lined up .
it was the primary purpose of the social worker , the aim , to get the woman at her most vulnerable time in her entire life , to sign the adoption papers .
so the adoption papers were signed .
the mother and baby 's homes were often run by nuns .
the adoption papers were signed , the child was given to the adoptive parents , and the mother shipped back to her community to say that she 'd been on a little break .
a little break .
a little break .
the first secret of shame for a woman for being a woman , " a little break . "
the adoption process took , like , a matter of months , so it was a closed shop , you know , sealed deal , an industrious , utilitarian solution : the government , the farmer , the adopting parents , the consumer , the mother , the earth , and the child , the crop .
it 's kind of easy to patronize the past , to forego our responsibilities in the present .
what happened then is a direct reflection of what is happening now . everybody believed themselves to be doing the right thing by god and by the state for the big society , fast-tracking adoption .
so anyway , she comes here , 1967 , she 's pregnant , and she comes from ethiopia that was celebrating its own jubilee at the time under the emperor haile selassie , and she lands months before the enoch powell speech , the " rivers of blood " speech .
she lands months before the beatles release " the white album , " months before martin luther king was killed .
it was a summer of love if you were white .
if you were black , it was a summer of hate .
so she goes from oxford , she 's sent to the north of england to a mother and baby home , and appointed a social worker .
it 's her plan . you know , i have to say this in the houses - it 's her plan to have me fostered for a short period of time while she studies . but the social worker , he had a different agenda .
he found the foster parents , and he said to them , " treat this as an adoption . he 's yours forever .
his name is norman . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- norman ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- norman !
so they took me . i was a message , they said .
i was a sign from god , they said .
i was norman mark greenwood .
now , for the next 11 years , all i know is that this woman , this birth woman , should have her eyes scratched out for not signing the adoption papers . she was an evil woman too selfish to sign , so i spent those 11 years kneeling and praying .
i tried praying . i swear i tried praying .
" god , can i have a bike for christmas ? "
but i would always answer myself , " yes , of course you can . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i was supposed to determine whether that was the voice of god or it was the voice of the devil .
and it turns out i 've got the devil inside of me .
who knew ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so anyway , two years sort of passed , and they had a child of their own , and then another two years passed , and they had another child of their own , and then another time passed and they had another child that they called an accident , which i thought was an unusual name . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was on the cusp of , sort of , adolescence , so i was starting to take biscuits from the tin without asking .
i was starting to stay out a little bit late , etc . , etc .
now , in their religiosity , in their naivete , my mom and dad , which i believed them to be forever , as they said they were , my mom and dad conceived that i had the devil inside of me .
and what - i should say this here , because this is how they engineered my leaving .
they sat me at a table , my foster mom , and she said to me , " you do n't love us , do you ? " at 11 years old .
they 've had three other children . i 'm the fourth . the third was an accident .
and i said , " yeah , of course i do . " because you do .
my foster mother asked me to go away to think about love and what it is and to read the scriptures and to come back tomorrow and give my most honest and truthful answer .
so this was an opportunity . if they were asking me whether i loved them or not , then i must n't love them , which led me to the miracle of thought that i thought they wanted me to get to .
" i will ask god for forgiveness and his light will shine through me to them . how fantastic . " this was an opportunity .
the theology was perfect , the timing unquestionable , and the answer as honest as a sinner could get .
" i must n't love you , " i said to them . " but i will ask god for forgiveness . "
" because you do n't love us , norman , clearly you 've chosen your path . "
twenty-four hours later , my social worker , this strange man who used to visit me every couple of months , he 's waiting for me in the car as i say goodbye to my parents .
i did n't say goodbye to anybody , not my mother , my father , my sisters , my brothers , my aunts , my uncles , my cousins , my grandparents , nobody .
on the way to the children 's home , i started to ask myself , " what 's happened to me ? "
it 's not that i 'd had the rug pulled from beneath me as much as the entire floor had been taken away .
when i got to the - for the next four , five years , i was held in four different children 's homes .
on the third children 's home , at 15 , i started to rebel , and what i did was , i got three tins of paint , airfix paint that you use for models , and i was - it was a big children 's home , big victorian children 's home - and i was in a little turret at the top of it , and i poured them , red , yellow and green , the colors of africa , down the tiles .
you could n't see it from the street , because the home was surrounded by beech trees .
for doing this , i was incarcerated for a year in an assessment center which was actually a remand center . it was a virtual prison for young people .
by the way , years later , my social worker said that i should never have been put in there .
i was n't charged for anything . i had n't done anything wrong .
but because i had no family to inquire about me , they could do anything to me .
i 'm 17 years old , and they had a padded cell .
they would march me down corridors in last-size order .
they - i was put in a dormitory with a confirmed nazi sympathizer .
all of the staff were ex-police - interesting - and ex-probation officers .
the man who ran it was an ex-army officer .
every time i had a visit by a person who i did not know who would feed me grapes , once every three months , i was strip-searched .
that home was full of young boys who were on remand for things like murder .
and this was the preparation that i was being given after 17 years as a child of the state .
i have to tell this story .
i have to tell it , because there was no one to put two and two together .
i slowly became aware that i knew nobody that knew me for longer than a year .
see , that 's what family does .
it gives you reference points .
i 'm not defining a good family from a bad family .
i 'm just saying that you know when your birthday is by virtue of the fact that somebody tells you when your birthday is , a mother , a father , a sister , a brother , an aunt , an uncle , a cousin , a grandparent . it matters to someone , and therefore it matters to you . understand , i was 14 years old , tucked away in myself , into myself , and i was n't touched either , physically touched .
i 'm reporting back . i 'm reporting back simply to say that when i left the children 's home i had two things that i wanted to do . one was to find my family , and the other was to write poetry .
in creativity i saw light .
in the imagination i saw the endless possibility of life , the endless truth , the permanent creation of reality , the place where anger was an expression in the search for love , a place where dysfunction is a true reaction to untruth .
i 've just got to say it to you all : i found all of my family in my adult life . i spent all of my adult life finding them , and i 've now got a fully dysfunctional family just like everybody else .
but i 'm reporting back to you to say quite simply that you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats its child .
i do n't mean children . i mean the child of the state .
thanks very much . it 's been an honor . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i 'm thrilled to be here .
i 'm going to talk about a new , old material that still continues to amaze us , and that might impact the way we think about material science , high technology - and maybe , along the way , also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation .
so that 's kind of a bold statement .
i 'll tell you a little bit more .
this material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true .
it 's sustainable ; it 's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature - and is biodegradable with a clock , so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years .
it 's edible ; it 's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response .
it actually gets reintegrated in the body .
and it 's technological , so it can do things like microelectronics , and maybe photonics do .
and the material looks something like this .
in fact , this material you see is clear and transparent .
the components of this material are just water and protein .
so this material is silk .
so it 's kind of different from what we 're used to thinking about silk .
so the question is , how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia ?
the process of discovery , generally , is inspired by nature .
and so we marvel at silk worms - the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber .
the silk worm does a remarkable thing : it uses these two ingredients , protein and water , that are in its gland , to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection - so comparable to technical fibers like kevlar .
and so in the reverse engineering process that we know about , and that we 're familiar with , for the textile industry , the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things .
we want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid kevlar , to this natural kevlar .
so the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material .
and this is an insight that came , about two decades ago , from a person that i 'm very fortunate to work with , david kaplan .
and so we get this starting material .
and so this starting material is back to the basic building block .
and then we use this to do a variety of things - like , for example , this film .
and we take advantage of something that is very simple .
the recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do .
they find their way to self-assemble .
so the recipe is simple : you take the silk solution , you pour it , and you wait for the protein to self-assemble .
and then you detach the protein and you get this film , as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates .
but i mentioned that the film is also technological .
and so what does that mean ?
it means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology , like microelectronics and nanoscale technology .
and the image of the dvd here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface , which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale .
so it would be able to replicate the information that is on the dvd .
and we can store information that 's film with water and protein .
so we tried something out , and we wrote a message in a piece of silk , which is right here , and the message is over there .
and much like in the dvd , you can read it out optically .
and this requires a stable hand , so this is why i decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people .
so let me see .
so as you see the film go in transparently through there , and then ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- and the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that .
so once you have these attributes of this material , then you can do a lot of things .
it 's actually not limited to films .
and so the material can assume a lot of formats .
and then you go a little crazy , and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays , like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes .
or you can do beautiful things that , if the camera can capture , you can make .
you can add a third dimensionality to the film .
and if the angle is right , you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk .
but you can do other things .
you can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light , and so we 've made optical fibers .
but silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics .
and you can think of different formats .
so for instance , if you 're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle , we do microneedle arrays .
what you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that 's made of silk - just to give you a sense of size .
you can do bigger things .
you can do gears and nuts and bolts - that you can buy at whole foods .
and the gears work in water as well .
so you think of alternative mechanical parts .
and maybe you can use that liquid kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins , for example , or maybe an entire bone .
and so you have here a little example of a small skull - what we call mini yorick .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you can do things like cups , for example , and so , if you add a little bit of gold , if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods .
you can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap .
or if you 're fashion forward , some silk led tattoos .
so there 's versatility , as you see , in the material formats , that you can do with silk .
but there are still some unique traits .
i mean , why would you want to do all these things for real ?
i mentioned it briefly at the beginning ; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible .
and you see here a picture of a tissue section .
and so what does that mean , that it 's biodegradable and biocompatible ?
you can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted .
which means that all the devices that you 've seen before and all the formats , in principle , can be implanted and disappear .
and what you see there in that tissue section , in fact , is you see that reflector tape .
so , much like you 're seen at night by a car , then the idea is that you can see , if you illuminate tissue , you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk .
and you see there , it gets reintegrated in tissue .
and reintegration in the human body is not the only thing , but reintegration in the environment is important .
so you have a clock , you have protein , and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt - -lrb- applause -rrb- unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday .
it 's edible , so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food .
it does n't taste good , so i 'm going to need some help with that .
but probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle .
silk , during its self-assembly process , acts like a cocoon for biological matter .
and so if you change the recipe , and you add things when you pour - so you add things to your liquid silk solution - where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines , the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants .
so it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive .
so that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together - a fractured bone together - and deliver drugs at the same , while your bone is healing , for example .
or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge .
so we 've made a silk card with penicillin in it .
and we stored penicillin at 60 degrees c , so 140 degrees fahrenheit , for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin .
and so that could be - -lrb- applause -rrb- that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course , there 's no use in storage if you ca n't use -lsb- it -rsb- .
and so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have , that they 're programmably degradable .
and so what you see there is the difference .
in the top , you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade , and in the bottom , a film that has been programmed to degrade in water .
and what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it .
so it allows for the recovery of what we 've stored before .
and so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you 've seen .
so the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread .
we 're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do , whether you want to replace a vein or a bone , or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics , perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt , maybe carry your drugs in your pocket , deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert , the answer may be in a thread of silk .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if you 've been following the news , you 've heard that there 's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the united states , all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years .
now i do n't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal .
that actually would n't be such a problem , because if we were really all going to die , we would put aside our differences , we 'd spend whatever it took , and we 'd find a way to deflect them .
i 'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way , but they 're wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us , and therefore paralyzes us .
last march , i went to the ted conference , and i saw jim hansen speak , the nasa scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s , and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true .
this is where we 're headed in terms of global temperature rises , and if we keep on going the way we 're going , we get a four- or five-degree-centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century .
hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels .
this is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like .
low-lying cities all around the world will disappear within the lifetime of children born today .
hansen closed his talk by saying , " imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with earth .
that is the equivalent of what we face now .
yet we dither , taking no action to deflect the asteroid , even though the longer we wait , the more difficult and expensive it becomes . "
of course , the left wants to take action , but the right denies that there 's any problem .
all right , so i go back from ted , and then the following week , i 'm invited to a dinner party in washington , d.c. , where i know that i 'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals , including yuval levin , and to prepare for the meeting , i read this article by levin in national affairs called " beyond the welfare state . "
levin writes that all over the world , nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable , dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era .
all right , now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid , but look at these graphs that levin showed .
this graph shows the national debt as a percentage of america 's gdp , and as you see , if you go all the way back to the founding , we borrowed a lot of money to fight the revolutionary war .
wars are expensive . but then we 'd pay it off , pay it off , pay it off , and then , oh , what 's this ? the civil war . even more expensive .
borrow a lot of money , pay it off , pay it off , pay it off , get down to near zero , and bang ! - world war i.
once again , the same process repeats .
now then we get the great depression and world war ii .
we rise to an astronomical level , around 118 percent of gdp , really unsustainable , really dangerous .
but we pay it off , pay it off , pay it off , and then , what 's this ?
why has it been rising since the ' 70s ?
it 's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded , but it 's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending , especially medicare .
we 're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at world war ii , and the baby boomers have n't even retired yet , and when they do , this is what will happen .
this is data from the congressional budget office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended .
all right , now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical , not in terms of the x- and y-axes , or in terms of the data they present , but in terms of their moral and political implications , they say the same thing .
let me translate for you .
" we are doomed unless we start acting now .
what 's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party ?
ca n't you see reality ? if you wo n't help , then get the hell out of the way . "
we can deflect both of these asteroids .
these problems are both technically solvable .
our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times , the mere fact that one side says , " look , there 's an asteroid , " means that the other side 's going to say , " huh ? what ?
no , i 'm not even going to look up . no . "
to understand why this is happening to us , and what we can do about it , we need to learn more about moral psychology .
so i 'm a social psychologist , and i study morality , and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds .
it binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality .
think of it like this .
large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet .
there are only a few species that can do it .
that 's a beehive . that 's a termite mound , a giant termite mound .
and when you find this in other animals , it 's always the same story .
they 're always all siblings who are children of a single queen , so they 're all in the same boat .
they rise or fall , they live or die , as one .
there 's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship , and that , of course , is us .
this is a reconstruction of ancient babylon , and this is tenochtitlan .
now how did we do this ? how did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years ?
it 's miraculous , and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values .
as you see , temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations .
this is an image of muslims circling the kaaba in mecca .
it 's a sacred rock , and when people circle something together , they unite , they can trust each other , they become one .
it 's as though you 're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current .
when people circle together , they generate a current .
we love to circle around things .
we circle around flags , and then we can trust each other .
we can fight as a team , as a unit .
but even as morality binds people together into a unit , into a team , the circling blinds them .
it causes them to distort reality .
we begin separating everything into good versus evil .
now that process feels great . it feels really satisfying .
but it is a gross distortion of reality .
you can see the moral electromagnet operating in the u.s. congress .
this is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in congress falls strictly along the left-right axis , so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is , you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues .
and what you can see is that , in the decades after the civil war , congress was extraordinarily polarized , as you would expect , about as high as can be .
but then , after world war i , things dropped , and we get this historically low level of polarization .
this was a golden age of bipartisanship , at least in terms of the parties ' ability to work together and solve grand national problems .
but in the 1980s and ' 90s , the electromagnet turns back on .
polarization rises .
it used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in congress .
they could rearrange themselves , form bipartisan committees , but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up , the force field increased , democrats and republicans were pulled apart .
it became much harder for them to socialize , much harder for them to cooperate .
retiring members nowadays say that it 's become like gang warfare .
did anybody notice that in two of the three debates , obama wore a blue tie and romney wore a red tie ?
do you know why they do this ?
it 's so that the bloods and the crips will know which side to vote for . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the polarization is strongest among our political elites .
nobody doubts that this is happening in washington .
but for a while , there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people .
well , in the last 12 years it 's become much more apparent that it is .
so look at this data . this is from the american national elections survey .
and what they do on that survey is they ask what 's called a feeling thermometer rating .
so , how warm or cold do you feel about , you know , native americans , or the military , the republican party , the democratic party , all sorts of groups in american life .
the blue line shows how warmly democrats feel about democrats , and they like them .
you know , ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale .
republicans like republicans . that 's not a surprise .
but when you look at cross-party ratings , you find , well , that it 's lower , but actually , when i first saw this data , i was surprised .
that 's actually not so bad . if you go back to the carter and even reagan administrations , they were rating the other party 43 , 45 . it 's not terrible .
it drifts downwards very slightly , but now look what happens under george w. bush and obama .
it plummets . something is going on here .
the moral electromagnet is turning back on , and nowadays , just very recently , democrats really dislike republicans .
republicans really dislike the democrats . we 're changing .
it 's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too .
it 's like put out in the two oceans and it 's pulling the whole country apart , pulling left and right into their own territories like the bloods and the crips .
now , there are many reasons why this is happening to us , and many of them we can not reverse .
we will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in world war ii against a common enemy .
we will never again have just three television networks , all of which are relatively centrist .
and we will never again have a large group of conservative southern democrats and liberal northern republicans making it easy , making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation .
so for a lot of reasons , those decades after the second world war were an historically anomalous time .
we will never get back to those low levels of polarization , i believe .
but there 's a lot that we can do . there are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better , because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution .
these changes are detailed in many books .
these are two that i strongly recommend , and they list a whole bunch of reforms .
i 'm just going to group them into three broad classes here .
so if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional , hyper-polarized institution , well , the first step is , do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place , and when you have closed party primaries , and only the most committed republicans and democrats are voting , you 're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans .
so open primaries would make that problem much , much less severe .
but the problem is n't primarily that we 're electing bad people to congress .
from my experience , and from what i 've heard from congressional insiders , most of the people going to congress are good , hard-working , intelligent people who really want to solve problems , but once they get there , they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking .
you step out of line , you get punished .
so there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this .
for example , this " citizens united " ruling is a disaster , because it means there 's like a money gun aimed at your head , and if you step out of line , if you try to reach across the aisle , there 's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising .
but the third class of reforms is that we 've got to change the nature of social relationships in congress .
the politicians i 've met are generally very extroverted , friendly , very socially skillful people , and that 's the nature of politics . you 've got to make relationships , make deals , you 've got to cajole , please , flatter , you 've got to use your personal skills , and that 's the way politics has always worked .
but beginning in the 1990s , first the house of representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week .
nowadays , congressmen fly in on tuesday morning , they do battle for two days , then they fly home thursday afternoon .
they do n't move their families to the district .
they do n't meet each other 's spouses or children .
there 's no more relationship there .
and trying to run congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil .
should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization ?
a simple change to the legislative calendar , such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home , that would change the fundamental relationships in congress .
so there 's a lot we can do , but who 's going to push them to do it ?
there are a number of groups that are working on this .
no labels and common cause , i think , have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our congress more effective .
but i 'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick , and the trick is this .
nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack , especially an attack from a foreign enemy , unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology , in which case , as i said before , it can actually pull us apart .
sometimes a single threat can polarize us , as we saw .
but what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this , where there 's just so much stuff coming in , it 's just , " start shooting , come on , everybody , we 've got to just work together , just start shooting . "
because actually , we do face this situation .
this is where we are as a country .
so here 's another asteroid .
we 've all seen versions of this graph , right , which shows the changes in wealth since 1979 , and as you can see , almost all the gains in wealth have gone to the top 20 percent , and especially the top one percent .
rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy .
especially , it destroys our ability to trust each other , to feel that we 're all in the same boat , because it 's obvious we 're not .
some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts .
other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood .
we 're not all in the same boat , and that means nobody 's willing to sacrifice for the common good .
the left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now , and the right says , " huh , what ? hmm ? no problem . no problem . "
now , why is that happening to us ? why is the inequality rising ?
well , one of the largest causes , after globalization , is actually this fourth asteroid , rising non-marital births .
this graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s .
most hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers .
whites are headed that way too .
within a decade or two , most american children will be born into homes with no father .
this means that there 's much less money coming into the house .
but it 's not just money . it 's also stability versus chaos .
as i know from working with street children in brazil , mom 's boyfriend is often a really , really dangerous person for kids .
now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s , and the left has been saying , " it 's not a problem . it 's not a problem . "
the left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children .
now let me be clear . i 'm not blaming the women here .
i 'm actually more critical of the men who wo n't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children .
but even if you blame nobody , it still is a national problem , and one side has been more concerned about it than the other .
the new york times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last july showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality .
we are becoming a nation of just two classes .
when americans go to college and marry each other , they have very low divorce rates .
they earn a lot of money , they invest that money in their kids , some of them become tiger mothers , the kids rise to their full potential , and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph .
and then there 's everybody else : the children who do n't benefit from a stable marriage , who do n't have as much invested in them , who do n't grow up in a stable environment , and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph .
so once again , we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing .
as before , we 've got a problem , we 've got to start working on this , we 've got to do something , and what 's wrong with you people that you do n't see my threat ?
but if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders , we 'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together .
because if you really care about income inequality , you might want to talk to some evangelical christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage .
but then you 're going to run smack into the problem that women do n't generally want to marry someone who does n't have a job .
so if you really care about strengthening families , you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality , who are working on raising the minimum wage , who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives .
so to conclude , there are at least four asteroids headed our way .
how many of you can see all four ?
please raise your hand right now if you 're willing to admit that all four of these are national problems .
please raise your hands .
okay , almost all of you .
well , congratulations , you guys are the inaugural members of the asteroids club , which is a club for all americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point .
in the asteroids club , we do n't start by looking for common ground .
common ground is often very hard to find .
no , we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground .
now , am i being naive ? is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords , and left and right could actually work together ?
i do n't think so , because it happens , not all that often , but there are a variety of examples that point the way .
this is something we can do .
because americans on both sides care about the decline in civility , and they 've formed dozens of organizations , at the national level , such as this one , down to many local organizations , such as to the village square in tallahassee , florida , which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate that sort of working together human relationship that 's necessary to solve florida 's problems .
americans on both sides care about global poverty and aids , and on so many humanitarian issues , liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies , and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems .
and most surprisingly to me , they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice .
for example , the incarceration rate , the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980 .
now this is a social disaster , and liberals are very concerned about this .
the southern poverty law center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex , fighting to prevent a system that 's just sucking in more and more poor young men .
but are conservatives happy about this ?
well , grover norquist is n't , because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money .
and so , because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls , groups of fiscal conservatives and christian conservatives have come together to form a group called right on crime .
and at times they have worked with the southern poverty law center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane .
so this is possible . we can do it .
let us therefore go to battle stations , not to fight each other , but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids .
and let our first mission be to press congress to reform itself , before it 's too late for our nation .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- organic chemists make molecules , very complicated molecules , by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering .
and as a chemist , one of the things i wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is , could we make a really cool universal chemistry set ?
in essence , could we " app " chemistry ?
now what would this mean , and how would we do it ?
well to start to do this , we took a 3d printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware .
and so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time , we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry .
now what could this mean ?
well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine , so if you have a cell that 's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill , if you have this embedded in your device at the same time , and you do the chemistry , you may be able to make drugs in a new way .
so how are we doing this in the lab ?
well it requires software , it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks .
and so the really cool bit is , the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer , and you download the blueprint , the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device .
and so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software .
so what could this mean ?
well , ultimately , it could mean that you could print your own medicine .
and this is what we 're doing in the lab at the moment .
but to take baby steps to get there , first of all we want to look at drug design and production , or drug discovery and manufacturing .
because if we can manufacture it after we 've discovered it , we could deploy it anywhere .
you do n't need to go to the chemist anymore .
we can print drugs at point of need .
we can download new diagnostics .
say a new super bug has emerged .
you put it in your search engine , and you create the drug to treat the threat .
so this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly .
but perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells , with your genes and your environment , and you print your own personal medicine .
and if that does n't seem fanciful enough , where do you think we 're going to go ?
well , you 're going to have your own personal matter fabricator .
beam me up , scotty .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mark zuckerberg , a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed .
and the journalist was asking him , " why is this so important ? "
and zuckerberg said , " a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in africa . "
and i want to talk about what a web based on that idea of relevance might look like .
so when i was growing up in a really rural area in maine , the internet meant something very different to me .
it meant a connection to the world .
it meant something that would connect us all together .
and i was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society .
but there 's this shift in how information is flowing online , and it 's invisible .
and if we do n't pay attention to it , it could be a real problem .
so i first noticed this in a place i spend a lot of time - my facebook page .
i 'm progressive , politically - big surprise - but i 've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives .
i like hearing what they 're thinking about ; i like seeing what they link to ; i like learning a thing or two .
and so i was surprised when i noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my facebook feed .
and what it turned out was going on was that facebook was looking at which links i clicked on , and it was noticing that , actually , i was clicking more on my liberal friends ' links than on my conservative friends ' links .
and without consulting me about it , it had edited them out .
they disappeared .
so facebook is n't the only place that 's doing this kind of invisible , algorithmic editing of the web .
google 's doing it too .
if i search for something , and you search for something , even right now at the very same time , we may get very different search results .
even if you 're logged out , one engineer told me , there are 57 signals that google looks at - everything from what kind of computer you 're on to what kind of browser you 're using to where you 're located - that it uses to personally tailor your query results .
think about it for a second : there is no standard google anymore .
and you know , the funny thing about this is that it 's hard to see .
you ca n't see how different your search results are from anyone else 's .
but a couple of weeks ago , i asked a bunch of friends to google " egypt " and to send me screen shots of what they got .
so here 's my friend scott 's screen shot .
and here 's my friend daniel 's screen shot .
when you put them side-by-side , you do n't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are .
but when you do read the links , it 's really quite remarkable .
daniel did n't get anything about the protests in egypt at all in his first page of google results .
scott 's results were full of them .
and this was the big story of the day at that time .
that 's how different these results are becoming .
so it 's not just google and facebook either .
this is something that 's sweeping the web .
there are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization .
yahoo news , the biggest news site on the internet , is now personalized - different people get different things .
huffington post , the washington post , the new york times - all flirting with personalization in various ways .
and this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see , but not necessarily what we need to see .
as eric schmidt said , " it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them . "
so i do think this is a problem .
and i think , if you take all of these filters together , you take all these algorithms , you get what i call a filter bubble .
and your filter bubble is your own personal , unique universe of information that you live in online .
and what 's in your filter bubble depends on who you are , and it depends on what you do .
but the thing is that you do n't decide what gets in .
and more importantly , you do n't actually see what gets edited out .
so one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at netflix .
and they were looking at the netflix queues , and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed , which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses .
they enter the queue , they just zip right out .
so " iron man " zips right out , and " waiting for superman " can wait for a really long time .
what they discovered was that in our netflix queues there 's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves .
you know we all want to be someone who has watched " rashomon , " but right now we want to watch " ace ventura " for the fourth time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the best editing gives us a bit of both .
it gives us a little bit of justin bieber and a little bit of afghanistan .
it gives us some information vegetables ; it gives us some information dessert .
and the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters , these personalized filters , is that , because they 're mainly looking at what you click on first , it can throw off that balance .
and instead of a balanced information diet , you can end up surrounded by information junk food .
what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the internet wrong .
in a broadcast society - this is how the founding mythology goes - in a broadcast society , there were these gatekeepers , the editors , and they controlled the flows of information .
and along came the internet and it swept them out of the way , and it allowed all of us to connect together , and it was awesome .
but that 's not actually what 's happening right now .
what we 're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones .
and the thing is that the algorithms do n't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did .
so if algorithms are going to curate the world for us , if they 're going to decide what we get to see and what we do n't get to see , then we need to make sure that they 're not just keyed to relevance .
we need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important - this is what ted does - other points of view .
and the thing is , we 've actually been here before as a society .
in 1915 , it 's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities .
then people noticed that they were doing something really important .
that , in fact , you could n't have a functioning democracy if citizens did n't get a good flow of information , that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter , and then journalistic ethics developed .
it was n't perfect , but it got us through the last century .
and so now , we 're kind of back in 1915 on the web .
and we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they 're writing .
i know that there are a lot of people here from facebook and from google - larry and sergey - people who have helped build the web as it is , and i 'm grateful for that .
but we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life , a sense of civic responsibility .
we need you to make sure that they 're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters .
and we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what does n't .
because i think we really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being .
we need it to connect us all together .
we need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives .
and it 's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to open by quoting einstein 's wonderful statement , just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us , and also calls us to this action .
he said , " a human being is a part of the whole , called by us , the ' universe , ' - a part limited in time and space .
he experiences himself , his thoughts and feelings , as something separated from the rest , a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness .
this delusion is a kind of prison for us , restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us .
our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion , to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty . "
this insight of einstein 's is uncannily close to that of buddhist psychology , wherein compassion - " karuna , " it is called - is defined as , " the sensitivity to another 's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering . "
it pairs closely with love , which is the will for the other to be happy , which requires , of course , that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it .
this is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion , the concern for others , and , further , it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly , while the compassionate are more free and , implicitly , more happy .
the dalai lama often states that compassion is his best friend .
it helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair .
compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute , most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others , even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings .
in fact , suffering is so huge and enormous , his own becomes less and less monumental .
and he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others .
and this immediately cheers him up , as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion .
thus , he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion .
he is a very good colleague of einstein 's , we must say .
now , i want to tell a story , which is a very famous story in the indian and buddhist tradition , of the great saint asanga who was a contemporary of augustine in the west and was sort of like the buddhist augustine .
and asanga lived 800 years after the buddha 's time .
and he was discontented with the state of people 's practice of the buddhist religion in india at that time .
and so he said , " i 'm sick of all this . nobody 's really living the doctrine .
they 're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment , but they are acting selfish and pathetic .
so , buddha 's teaching has lost its momentum .
i know the next buddha will come a few thousand years from now , but exists currently in a certain heaven " - that 's maitreya - " so , i 'm going to go on a retreat and i 'm going to meditate and pray until the buddha maitreya reveals himself to me , and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today . "
so he went on this retreat . and he meditated for three years and he did not see the future buddha maitreya .
and he left in disgust .
and as he was leaving , he saw a man - a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain .
and he had a lump of iron .
and he was rubbing it with a cloth .
and he became interested in that .
he said , " well what are you doing ? "
and the man said , " i 'm making a needle . "
and he said , " that 's ridiculous . you ca n't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth . "
and the man said , " really ? " and he showed him a dish full of needles .
so he said , " okay , i get the point . "
he went back to his cave . he meditated again .
another three years , no vision . he leaves again .
this time , he comes down .
and as he 's leaving , he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge .
and where it 's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff , its feathers brushes the rock - and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in . there was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds .
so he said , " all right . i get the point . " he went back .
another three years .
again , no vision of maitreya after nine years .
and he again leaves , and this time : water dripping , making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream .
and so , again , he goes back . and after 12 years there is still no vision .
and he 's freaked out . and he wo n't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision .
and he comes to the town . he 's a broken person .
and there , in the town , he 's approached by a dog who comes like this - one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries , even in america , i think , in some areas - and he 's looking just terrible .
and he becomes interested in this dog because it 's so pathetic , and it 's trying to attract his attention . and he sits down looking at the dog .
and the dog 's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore .
some of it is like gangrenous , and there are maggots in the flesh . and it 's terrible .
he thinks , " what can i do to fix up this dog ?
well , at least i can clean this wound and wash it . "
so , he takes it to some water . he 's about to clean , but then his awareness focuses on the maggots .
and he sees the maggots , and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute .
and they 're maggoting happily in the dog 's hindquarters there .
" well , if i clean the dog , i 'll kill the maggots . so how can that be ?
that 's it . i 'm a useless person and there 's no buddha , no maitreya , and everything is all hopeless .
and now i 'm going to kill the maggots ? "
so , he had a brilliant idea .
and he took a shard of something , and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh , and he placed it on ground .
he was not really thinking too carefully about the aspca .
he was just immediately caught with the situation .
so he thought , " i will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh , then clean the dog 's wounds , and then i 'll figure out what to do with the maggots . "
so he starts to do that . he ca n't grab the maggots .
apparently they wriggle around . they 're kind of hard to grab , these maggots .
so he says , " well , i 'll put my tongue on the dog 's flesh .
and then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue " - the dog is kind of used up - " and then i 'll spit them one by one down on the thing . "
so he goes down , and he 's sticking his tongue out like this .
and he had to close his eyes , it 's so disgusting , and the smell and everything .
and then , suddenly , there 's a pfft , a noise like that .
he jumps back and there , of course , is the future buddha maitreya in a beautiful vision - rainbow lights , golden , jeweled , a plasma body , an exquisite mystic vision - that he sees .
and he says , " oh . " he bows .
but , being human , he 's immediately thinking of his next complaint .
so as he comes up from his first bow he says , " my lord , i 'm so happy to see you , but where have you been for 12 years ?
what is this ? "
and maitreya says , " i was with you . who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you , mister dense ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " looking for the buddha in person , " he said .
and he said , " you did n't have , until this moment , real compassion .
and , until you have real compassion , you can not recognize love . "
" maitreya " means love , " the loving one , " in sanskrit .
and so he looked very dubious , asanga did .
and he said , " if you do n't believe me , just take me with you . "
and so he took the maitreya - it shrunk into a globe , a ball - took him on his shoulder .
and he ran into town in the marketplace , and he said , " rejoice ! rejoice !
the future buddha has come ahead of all predictions . here he is . "
and then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him - it was n't chautauqua , it was some other town - because they saw a demented looking , scrawny looking yogi man , like some kind of hippie , with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder , shouting that the future buddha had come .
so , naturally , they chased him out of town .
but on the edge of town , one elderly lady , a charwoman in the charnel ground , saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog , but she saw the jewel foot of the maitreya , and she offered a flower .
so that encouraged him , and he went with maitreya .
maitreya then took him to a certain heaven , which is the typical way a buddhist myth unfolds .
and maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years , dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion .
and then i thought i would share with you what that method is , or one of them .
a famous one , it 's called the " sevenfold causal method of developing compassion . "
and it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one - even animals too , but everyone is in human form .
the animals are in one of their human lives . the humans are human .
and then , among them , you think of your friends and loved ones , the circle at the table .
and you think of your enemies , and you think of the neutral ones .
and then you try to say , " well , the loved ones i love .
but , you know , after all , they 're nice to me .
i had fights with them . sometimes they were unfriendly .
i got mad . brothers can fight . parents and children can fight .
so , in a way , i like them so much because they 're nice to me .
while the neutral ones i do n't know . they could all be just fine .
and then the enemies i do n't like because they 're mean to me .
but they are nice to somebody . i could be them . "
and then the buddhists , of course , think that , because we 've all had infinite previous lives , we 've all been each other 's relatives , actually .
therefore all of you , in the buddhist view , in some previous life , although you do n't remember it and neither do i , have been my mother - for which i do apologize for the trouble i caused you .
and also , actually , i 've been your mother .
i 've been female , and i 've been every single one of yours ' mother in a previous life , the way the buddhists reflect .
so , my mother in this life is really great . but all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother .
you gave me that expression ; " the eternal mama , " you said . that 's wonderful .
so , that 's the way the buddhists do it .
a theist christian can think that all beings , even my enemies , are god 's children .
so , in that sense , we 're related .
so , they first create this foundation of equality .
so , we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love - just in the meditation - and we open our mind to those we do n't know .
and we definitely reduce the hostility and the " i do n't want to be compassionate to them " to the ones we think of as the bad guys , the ones we hate and we do n't like .
and we do n't hate anyone , therefore . so we equalize . that 's very important .
and then the next thing we do is what is called " mother recognition . "
and that is , we think of every being as familiar , as family .
we expand . we take the feeling about remembering a mama , and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation .
and we see the mother in every being .
we see that look that the mother has on her face , looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body , being a mammal , where she has true compassion , truly is the other , and identifies completely .
often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life .
and that 's why it 's the most powerful form of altruism .
the mother is the model of all altruism for human beings , in spiritual traditions .
and so , we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings .
people laugh at me because , you know , i used to say that i used to meditate on mama cheney as my mom , when , of course , i was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in iraq .
i used to meditate on george bush . he 's quite a cute mom in a female form .
he has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms .
and you think of him as nursing you .
and then saddam hussein 's serious mustache is a problem , but you think of him as a mom .
and this is the way you do it . you take any being who looks weird to you , and you see how they could be familiar to you .
and you do that for a while , until you really feel that .
you can feel the familiarity of all beings .
nobody seems alien . they 're not " other . "
you reduce the feeling of otherness about beings .
then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general , if you can remember the kindness of your own mother , if you can remember the kindness of your spouse , or , if you are a mother yourself , how you were with your children .
and you begin to get very sentimental ; you cultivate sentimentality intensely .
you will even weep , perhaps , with gratitude and kindness .
and then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility .
every being , even the most mean looking ones , can be motherly .
and then , third , you step from there to what is called " a feeling of gratitude . "
you want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you .
and then the fourth step , you go to what is called " lovely love . "
in each one of these you can take some weeks , or months , or days depending on how you do it , or you can do them in a run , this meditation .
and then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy , when they are satisfied .
and every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness .
their face does n't look like this . when they 're angry , they look ugly , every being , but when they 're happy they look beautiful .
and so you see beings in their potential happiness .
and you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy , even the enemy .
we think jesus is being unrealistic when he says , " love thine enemy . "
he does say that , and we think he 's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin . " nice for him to say it , but i ca n't do that . "
but , actually , that 's practical .
if you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy .
if your enemy was really happy , why would they bother to be your enemy ?
how boring to run around chasing you .
they would be relaxing somewhere having a good time .
so it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy , because they 'll stop being your enemy because that 's too much trouble .
but anyway , that 's the " lovely love . " and then finally , the fifth step is compassion , " universal compassion . "
and that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of .
and you look at them , and you see how they are .
and you realize how unhappy they are actually , mostly , most of the time .
you see that furrowed brow in people .
and then you realize they do n't even have compassion on themselves .
they 're driven by this duty and this obligation .
" i have to get that . i need more . i 'm not worthy . and i should do something . "
and they 're rushing around all stressed out .
and they think of it as somehow macho , hard discipline on themselves .
but actually they are cruel to themselves .
and , of course , they are cruel and ruthless toward others .
and they , then , never get any positive feedback .
and the more they succeed and the more power they have , the more unhappy they are .
and this is where you feel real compassion for them .
and you then feel you must act .
and the choice of the action , of course , hopefully will be more practical than poor asanga , who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation , and whoever was in front of him , he wanted to help .
but , of course , that is impractical . he should have founded the aspca in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots .
and i 'm sure he did that later . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but that just indicates the state of mind , you know .
and so the next step - the sixth step beyond " universal compassion " - is this thing where you 're linked with the needs of others in a true way , and you have compassion for yourself also , and it is n't sentimental only . you might be in fear of something .
some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways .
and in buddhism , they catch it in the future life .
of course in theistic religion they 're punished by god or whatever .
and materialism , they think they get out of it just by not existing , by dying , but they do n't .
and so they get reborn as whatever , you know .
never mind . i wo n't get into that .
but the next step is called " universal responsibility . "
and that is very important - the charter of compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion , what is called " universal responsibility . "
in the great teaching of his holiness the dalai lama that he always teaches everywhere , he says that that is the common religion of humanity : kindness .
but " kindness " means " universal responsibility . "
and that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us : we are responsible for that , and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it .
we absolutely must do that . there is no way not to do it .
and then , finally , that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy .
one thing we must n't think is that compassion makes you miserable .
compassion makes you happy .
the first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself , even if you have n't done anything yet for anybody else .
although , the change in your mind already does something for other beings : they can sense this new quality in yourself , and it helps them already , and gives them an example .
and that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it 's all over .
so , practice compassion , read the charter , disseminate it and develop it within yourself .
do n't just think , " well , i 'm compassionate , " or " i 'm not compassionate , " and sort of think you 're stuck there .
you can develop this . you can diminish the non-compassion , the cruelty , the callousness , the neglect of others , and take universal responsibility for them .
and then , not only will god smile and the eternal mama will smile , but karen armstrong will smile .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope .
when we go to the physician today - when we go to the doctor 's office and we walk in , there are words that we just do n't want to hear .
there are words that we 're truly afraid of .
diabetes , cancer , parkinson 's , alzheimer 's , heart failure , lung failure - things that we know are debilitating diseases , for which there 's relatively little that can be done .
and what i want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease , why it 's important , why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already has n't , and where we are clinically today , and where we might go tomorrow , and what some of the hurdles are .
and we 're going to do all of that in 18 minutes , i promise .
i want to start with this slide , because this slide sort of tells the story the way science magazine thinks of it .
this was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human .
it was basically a regenerative medicine issue .
regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand .
it 's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale .
so we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there .
we know that if we have a damaged hip , you can put an artificial hip in .
and this is the idea that science magazine used on their front cover .
this is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine .
this is not regenerative medicine .
regenerative medicine is what business week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago .
the idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like - and i 'll come back to that theme a few times - instead of doing that , we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue .
so that at the end of the treatment , you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment .
very few good ideas - if you agree that this is a good idea - very few good ideas are truly novel .
and this is just the same .
if you look back in history , charles lindbergh , who was better known for flying airplanes , was actually one of the first people along with alexis carrel , one of the nobel laureates from rockefeller , to begin to think about , could you culture organs ?
and they published this book in 1937 , where they actually began to think about , what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs ?
we 've come a long way since then .
i 'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that 's going on .
but before doing that , what i 'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you .
many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life , and reducing poverty , and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe .
one of the challenges is that the richer we are , the longer we live .
and the longer we live , the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older .
this is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65 .
and you can basically see that the richer a country is , the older the people are within it .
why is this important ?
and why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now ?
if the average age of your population is 30 , then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again , maybe a little bit of asthma .
if the average age in your country is 45 to 55 , now the average person is looking at diabetes , early-onset diabetes , heart failure , coronary artery disease - things that are inherently more difficult to treat , and much more expensive to treat .
just have a look at the demographics in the u.s. here .
this is from " the untied states of america . "
in 1930 , there were 41 workers per retiree .
41 people who were basically outside of being really sick , paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease .
in 2010 , two workers per retiree in the u.s.
and this is matched in every industrialized , wealthy country in the world .
how can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this ?
this is age versus cost of health care .
and you can see that right around age 45 , 40 to 45 , there 's a sudden spike in the cost of health care .
it 's actually quite interesting . if you do the right studies , you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care , plotted over your lifetime .
and about seven years before you 're about to die , there 's a spike .
and you can actually - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we wo n't get into that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are very few things , very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what i would call healthy aging .
i 'd suggest there are four things , and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system .
all those things do is change who pays .
they do n't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is .
one thing you can do is not treat . you can ration health care .
we wo n't talk about that anymore . it 's too depressing .
you can prevent .
obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention .
but perhaps most interesting , to me anyway , and most important , is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression , and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom .
think of it in terms of diabetes , for instance .
today , with diabetes , what do we do ?
we diagnose the disease eventually , once it becomes symptomatic , and then we treat the symptom for 10 , 20 , 30 , 40 years .
and we do ok . insulin 's a pretty good therapy .
but eventually it stops working , and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease .
why could n't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease , perhaps even before it was symptomatic ?
and it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it , but if it worked , we would truly be able to do something different .
this video , i think , gets across the concept that i 'm talking about quite dramatically .
this is a newt re-growing its limb .
if a newt can do this kind of thing , why ca n't we ?
i 'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment .
but what we 're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body , for tissues and for organs themselves .
so today 's reality is that if we get sick , the message is we will treat your symptoms , and you need to adjust to a new way of life .
i would pose to you that tomorrow - and when tomorrow is we could debate , but it 's within the foreseeable future - we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation .
there 's a limb prosthetic up here , similar actually one on the soldier that 's come back from iraq .
there are 370 soldiers that have come back from iraq that have lost limbs .
imagine if instead of facing that , they could actually face the regeneration of that limb .
it 's a wild concept .
i 'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept .
but it 's applicable , again , to every organ system .
how can we do that ?
the way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body .
we need to learn to speak the body 's language .
and to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus .
a mammalian fetus , if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy , will re-grow that limb .
so our dna has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms .
it 's a natural process , but it is lost as we age .
in a child , before the age of about six months , if they lose their fingertip in an accident , they 'll re-grow their fingertip .
by the time they 're five , they wo n't be able to do that anymore .
so to engage in that conversation with the body , we need to speak the body 's language .
and there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today .
i 'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body .
the first is cellular therapies .
clearly , we heal ourselves in a natural process , using cells to do most of the work .
therefore , if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body , they may do the healing .
secondly , we can use materials .
we heard yesterday about the importance of new materials .
if we can invent materials , design materials , or extract materials from a natural environment , then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself .
and finally , we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal .
i 'm going to show you an example of each of these , and i 'm going to start with materials .
steve badylak - who 's at the university of pittsburgh - about a decade ago had a remarkable idea .
and that idea was that the small intestine of a pig , if you threw away all the cells , and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active , may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself .
and he asked a very important question .
he asked the question , if i take that material , which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine , and i place it somewhere else on a person 's body , would it give a tissue-specific response , or would it make small intestine if i tried to make a new ear ?
i would n't be telling you this story if it were n't compelling .
the picture i 'm about to show you -lrb- laughter -rrb- however , for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish - even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends - the lights are down . this is a good time to look at your feet , check your blackberry , do anything other than look at the screen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer .
and although - it 's good to laugh before we look at this .
this is the reality of diabetes .
i think a lot of times we hear about diabetics , diabetic ulcers , we just do n't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment , which is amputation , if you ca n't heal it .
so i 'm going to put the slide up now . it wo n't be up for long .
this is a diabetic ulcer . it 's tragic .
the treatment for this is amputation .
this is an older lady . she has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes , and has decided to die with what 's left of her body intact .
and this lady decided , after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer , that she would try this new therapy that steve invented .
that 's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later .
that material contained only natural signals .
and that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it did n't have before .
there 's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you - i 'll let you know when you can look again .
this is a horse . the horse is not in pain .
if the horse was in pain , i would n't show you this slide .
the horse just has another nostril that 's developed because of a riding accident .
just a few weeks after treatment - in this case , taking that material , turning it into a gel , and packing that area , and then repeating the treatment a few times - and the horse heals up .
and if you took an ultrasound of that area , it would look great .
here 's a dolphin where the fin 's been re-attached .
there are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds .
could you regenerate a limb ?
darpa just gave steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question .
and i 'll show you the 15 million dollar picture .
this is a 78 year-old man who 's lost the end of his fingertip .
remember that i mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips .
after treatment that 's what it looks like .
this is happening today .
this is clinically relevant today .
there are materials that do this . here are the heart patches .
but could you go a little further ?
could you , say , instead of using material , can i take some cells along with the material , and remove a damaged piece of tissue , put a bio-degradable material on there ?
you can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish .
this was done by teruo okano at tokyo women 's hospital .
he can actually grow beating tissue in a dish .
he chills the dish , it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish .
it 's the coolest stuff .
now i 'm going to show you cell-based regeneration .
and what i 'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient .
again , if you 're squeamish , you do n't want to watch .
but this one 's kind of cool .
so this is a bypass operation , just like what al gore had , with a difference .
in this case , at the end of the bypass operation , you 're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient .
and i 'm standing up here because at one point i 'm going to show you just how early this technology is .
here go the stem cells , right into the beating heart of the patient .
and if you look really carefully , it 's going to be right around this point you 'll actually see a back-flush .
you see the cells coming back out .
we need all sorts of new technology , new devices , to get the cells to the right place at the right time .
just a little bit of data , a tiny bit of data .
this was a randomized trial .
at this time this was an n of 20 . now there 's an n of about 100 .
basically , if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass , they get a little bit better .
if you give them stem cells as well as their bypass , for these particular patients , they became asymptomatic .
these are now two years out .
the coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early , and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state .
this is the same procedure , but now done minimally invasively , with only three holes in the body where they 're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure .
there go the cells .
we do n't have time to go into all of those details , but basically , that works too .
you can take patients who are less sick , and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy .
here 's another example of stem-cell therapy that is n't quite clinical yet , but i think very soon will be .
this is the work of kacey marra from pittsburgh , along with a number of colleagues around the world .
they 've decided that liposuction fluid , which - in the united states , we have a lot of liposuction fluid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a great source of stem cells .
stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid .
so you could go in , you could get your tummy-tuck .
out comes the liposuction fluid , and in this case , the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons .
all done in the lab .
and i think fairly soon , you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived , or adipose-derived , stem cells .
i talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease .
here 's just one example before i close up .
this is equally tragic .
we have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the institute for surgical research in the us army , who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from iraq .
many of those patients are very severely burned .
and if there 's anything that 's been learned about burn , it 's that we do n't know how to treat it .
everything that is done to treat burn - basically we do a sodding approach .
we make something over here , and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound , and we try and get the two to take .
in this case here , a new , wearable bio-reactor has been designed - it should be tested clinically later this year at isr - by joerg gerlach in pittsburgh .
and that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed .
the gun that you see there sprays cells .
that 's going to spray cells over that area .
the reactor will serve to fertilize the environment , deliver other things as well at the same time , and therefore we will seed that lawn , as opposed to try the sodding approach .
it 's a completely different way of doing it .
so my 18 minutes is up .
so let me finish up with some good news , and maybe a little bit of bad news .
the good news is that this is happening today .
it 's very powerful work .
clearly the images kind of get that across .
it 's incredibly difficult because it 's highly inter-disciplinary .
almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen .
a number of governments , and a number of regions , have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease .
the japanese government were perhaps the first , when they decided to invest first 3 billion , later another 2 billion in this field .
it 's no coincidence .
japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age .
they need this to work or their health system dies .
so they 're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area .
the european union , same thing .
china , the same thing .
china just launched a national tissue-engineering center .
the first year budget was 250 million us dollars .
in the united states we 've had a somewhat different approach .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , for al gore to come and be in the real world as president .
we 've had a different approach .
and the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along .
but there 's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way .
and i 'm going to finish up with a quote , maybe a little cheap shot , at the director of the nih , who 's a very charming man .
myself and jay vacanti from harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago , to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he 's going to get next year and focus it , in a strategic way , to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients .
and at the end of a very testy meeting , what the nih director said was , " your vision is larger than our appetite . "
i 'd like to close by saying that no one 's going to change our vision , but together we can change his appetite .
thank you .
do you know how many choices you make in a typical day ?
do you know how many choices you make in typical week ?
i recently did a survey with over 2,000 americans , and the average number of choices that the typical american reports making is about 70 in a typical day .
there was also recently a study done with ceos in which they followed ceos around for a whole week .
and these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these ceos engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks .
and they found that the average ceo engaged in about 139 tasks in a week .
each task was made up of many , many , many sub-choices of course .
50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less .
only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time .
think about your own choices .
do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category ?
how well do you think you 're doing at managing those choices ?
today i want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have , which is the choice overload problem .
i want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions .
now as i talk about this problem , i 'm going to have some questions for you and i 'm going to want to know your answers .
so when i ask you a question , since i 'm blind , only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- otherwise , when i ask you a question , and if your answer is yes , so for my first question for you today : are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so when i was a graduate student at stanford university , i used to go to this very , very upscale grocery store ; at least at that time it was truly upscale .
it was a store called draeger 's .
now this store , it was almost like going to an amusement park .
they had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water - and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water .
i used to love going to this store , but on one occasion i asked myself , well how come you never buy anything ?
here 's their olive oil aisle .
they had over 75 different kinds of olive oil , including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees .
so i one day decided to pay a visit to the manager , and i asked the manager , " is this model of offering people all this choice really working ? "
and he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday , with cameras ready usually .
we decided to do a little experiment , and we picked jam for our experiment .
here 's their jam aisle .
they had 348 different kinds of jam .
we set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store .
we there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam , and we looked at two things : first , in which case were people more likely to stop , sample some jam ?
more people stopped when there were 24 , about 60 percent , than when there were six , about 40 percent .
the next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam .
now we see the opposite effect .
of the people who stopped when there were 24 , only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam .
of the people who stopped when there were six , well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam .
now if you do the math , people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24 .
now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us - at least it 's good for our waistlines - but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions .
we choose not to choose , even when it goes against our best self-interests .
so now for the topic of today : financial savings .
now i 'm going to describe to you a study i did with gur huberman , emir kamenica , wei jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million americans from about 650 plans all in the u.s.
and what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan , the 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan , does that affect people 's likelihood to save more for tomorrow .
and what we found was that indeed there was a correlation .
so in these plans , we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings .
and what we found was that , the more funds offered , indeed , there was less participation rate .
so if you look at the extremes , those plans that offered you two funds , participation rates were around in the mid-70s - still not as high as we want it to be .
in those plans that offered nearly 60 funds , participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile .
now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present , even then , it has negative consequences .
so for those people who did choose to participate , the more choices available , the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds .
the more choices available , the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts .
now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you 're considering their future financial well-being .
well , over the past decade , we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices .
they 're more likely to delay choosing - procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest .
they 're more likely to make worse choices - worse financial choices , medical choices .
they 're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied , even when they do objectively better .
the main reason for this is because , we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises , mustards , vinegars , jams , but we ca n't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display .
so what i want to propose to you today are four simple techniques - techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues - that you can easily apply in your businesses .
the first : cut .
you 've heard it said before , but it 's never been more true than today , that less is more .
people are always upset when i say , " cut . "
they 're always worried they 're going to lose shelf space .
but in fact , what we 're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut , get rid of those extraneous redundant options , well there 's an increase in sales , there 's a lowering of costs , there is an improvement of the choosing experience .
when proctor & gamble went from 26 different kinds of head & shoulders to 15 , they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent .
when the golden cat corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products , they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent - a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs .
you know , the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products .
the typical walmart today offers you 100,000 products .
but the ninth largest retailer , the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is aldi , and it offers you only 1,400 products - one kind of canned tomato sauce .
now in the financial savings world , i think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that david laibson was heavily involved in designing , which was the program that they have at harvard .
every single harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund .
for those people who actually want to choose , they 're given 20 funds , not 300 or more funds .
you know , often , people say , " i do n't know how to cut .
they 're all important choices . "
and the first thing i do is i ask the employees , " tell me how these choices are different from one another .
and if your employees ca n't tell them apart , neither can your consumers . "
now before we started our session this afternoon , i had a chat with gary .
and gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world .
here 's a description of the road .
and i 'd like you to read it .
and now i 'll give you a few seconds to read it and then i want you to clap your hands if you 're ready to take gary up on his offer .
-lrb- light clapping -rrb- okay . anybody who 's ready to take him up on his offer .
is that all ?
all right , let me show you some more about this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you guys knew there was a trick , did n't you .
-lrb- honk -rrb- now who 's ready to go on this trip .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think i might have actually heard more hands .
all right .
now in fact , you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around , but i would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around .
because the pictures made it feel more real to you .
which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem , which is concretization .
that in order for people to understand the differences between the choices , they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice , and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way , in a very concrete way .
why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an atm card or a credit card as opposed to cash ?
because it does n't feel like real money .
and it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more .
so a study that i did with shlomo benartzi and alessandro previtero , we did a study with people at ing - employees that are all working at ing - and now these people were all in a session where they 're doing enrollment for their 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan .
and during that session , we kept the session exactly the way it used to be , but we added one little thing .
the one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more .
by doing that simple thing , there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent .
the third technique : categorization .
we can handle more categories than we can handle choices .
so for example , here 's a study we did in a magazine aisle .
it turns out that in wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor , the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664 .
but you know what ?
if i show you 600 magazines and i divide them up into 10 categories , versus i show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories , you believe that i have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if i gave you the 400 than if i gave you the 600 .
because the categories tell me how to tell them apart .
here are two different jewelry displays .
one is called " jazz " and the other one is called " swing . "
if you think the display on the left is swing and the display on the right is jazz , clap your hands .
-lrb- light clapping -rrb- okay , there 's some .
if you think the one on the left is jazz and the one on the right is swing , clap your hands .
okay , a bit more .
now it turns out you 're right .
the one on the left is jazz and the one on the right is swing , but you know what ?
this is a highly useless categorization scheme .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the categories need to say something to the chooser , not the choice-maker .
and you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds .
who are they actually supposed to be informing ?
my fourth technique : condition for complexity .
it turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can , we 've just got to take it a little easier .
we have to gradually increase the complexity .
i 'm going to show you one example of what i 'm talking about .
let 's take a very , very complicated decision : buying a car .
here 's a german car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car .
you 've got to make 60 different decisions , completely make up your car .
now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision .
car colors , exterior car colors - i 've got 56 choices .
engines , gearshift - four choices .
so now what i 'm going to do is i 'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear .
so half of the customers are going to go from high choice , 56 car colors , to low choice , four gearshifts .
the other half of the customers are going to go from low choice , four gearshifts , to 56 car colors , high choice .
what am i going to look at ?
how engaged you are .
if you keep hitting the default button per decision , that means you 're getting overwhelmed , that means i 'm losing you .
what you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice , they 're hitting that default button over and over and over again .
we 're losing them .
they go from low choice to high choice , they 're hanging in there .
it 's the same information . it 's the same number of choices .
the only thing that i have done is i have varied the order in which that information is presented .
if i start you off easy , i learn how to choose .
even though choosing gearshift does n't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor , it still prepares me for how to choose .
it also gets me excited about this big product that i 'm putting together , so i 'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged .
so let me recap .
i have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload - cut - get rid of the extraneous alternatives ; concretize - make it real ; categorize - we can handle more categories , less choices ; condition for complexity .
all of these techniques that i 'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices - better for you , you can use them on yourself , better for the people that you are serving .
because i believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing .
and the more we 're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have the answer to a question that we 've all asked .
the question is , why is it that the letter x represents the unknown ?
now i know we learned that in math class , but now it 's everywhere in the culture - the x prize , the x-files , project x , tedx .
where 'd that come from ?
about six years ago i decided that i would learn arabic , which turns out to be a supremely logical language .
to write a word or a phrase or a sentence in arabic is like crafting an equation , because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information .
that 's one of the reasons so much of what we 've come to think of as western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the common era by the persians and the arabs and the turks .
this includes the little system in arabic called al-jebra .
and al-jebr roughly translates to " the system for reconciling disparate parts . "
al-jebr finally came into english as algebra .
one example among many .
the arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to europe - which is to say spain - in the 11th and 12th centuries .
and when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a european language .
but there were problems .
one problem is there are some sounds in arabic that just do n't make it through a european voice box without lots of practice .
trust me on that one .
also , those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in european languages .
here 's one of the culprits .
this is the letter sheen , and it makes the sound we think of as sh - " sh . "
it 's also the very first letter of the word shalan , which means " something " just like the the english word " something " - some undefined , unknown thing .
now in arabic , we can make this definite by adding the definite article " al . "
so this is al-shalan - the unknown thing .
and this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics , such as this 10th century derivation of proofs .
the problem for the medieval spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter sheen and the word shalan ca n't be rendered into spanish because spanish does n't have that sh , that " sh " sound .
so by convention , they created a rule in which they borrowed the ck sound , " ck " sound , from the classical greek in the form of the letter kai .
later when this material was translated into a common european language , which is to say latin , they simply replaced the greek kai with the latin x.
and once that happened , once this material was in latin , it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years .
but now we have the answer to our question .
why is it that x is the unknown ?
x is the unknown because you ca n't say " sh " in spanish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i thought that was worth sharing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a garbage man .
and you might find it interesting that i became a garbage man , because i absolutely hate waste .
i hope , within the next 10 minutes , to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life .
and i 'd like to start at the very beginning .
think back when you were just a kid .
how did look at the stuff in your life ?
perhaps it was like these toddler rules : it 's my stuff if i saw it first .
the entire pile is my stuff if i 'm building something .
the more stuff that 's mine , the better .
and of course , it 's your stuff if it 's broken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry , it 's become pretty clear to me that we do n't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults .
and let me tell you why i have that perspective .
because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people 's discarded stuff .
now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff , but it 's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world - well less than one percent .
in fact , the united nations estimates that there 's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year - and that 's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream .
and if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth , that number well more than doubles .
and of course , the more developed the country , the bigger these mountains .
now when you see these mountains , most people think of garbage .
we see above-ground mines .
and the reason we see mines is because there 's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place .
and it 's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams .
because as we 've heard all week at ted , the world 's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff .
and of course , they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted .
and what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day ?
it 's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals .
and the metals , we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world .
and the plastics , we get from oil , which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract .
and these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we 're already starting to see today .
the good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff , particularly in regions of the world like here in europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner .
most of what 's extracted from our end-of-life stuff , if it makes it to a recycler , are the metals .
to put that in perspective - and i 'm using steel as a proxy here for metals , because it 's the most common metal - if your stuff makes it to a recycler , probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose .
plastics are a whole other story : well less than 10 percent are recovered .
in fact , it 's more like five percent .
most of it 's incinerated or landfilled .
now most people think that 's because plastics are a throw-away material , have very little value .
but actually , plastics are several times more valuable than steel .
and there 's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel .
so why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material ?
well it 's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another .
they have very different densities .
they have different electrical and magnetic properties .
and they even have different colors .
so it 's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials .
plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range .
they have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties .
and any plastic can be any color , as you probably well know .
so the traditional ways of separating materials just simply do n't work for plastics .
another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world - and sadly to say , particularly from the united states , where we do n't have any recycling policies in place like here in europe - finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling .
people , for as little as a dollar a day , pick through our stuff .
they extract what they can , which is mostly the metals - circuit boards and so forth - and they leave behind mostly what they ca n't recover , which is , again , mostly the plastics .
or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here .
and they extract the metals by hand .
now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution , this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution .
i call this environmental arbitrage .
and it 's not fair , it 's not safe and it 's not sustainable .
now because the plastics are so plentiful - and by the way , those other methods do n't lead to the recovery of plastics , obviously - but people do try to recover the plastics .
this is just one example .
this is a photo i took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in mumbai , india .
they store the plastics on the roofs .
they bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these , and people try very hard to separate the plastics , by color , by shape , by feel , by any technique they can .
and sometimes they 'll resort to what 's known as the " burn and sniff " technique where they 'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic .
none of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way .
and by the way , please do n't try this technique at home .
so what are we to do about this space-age material , at least what we used to call a space-aged material , these plastics ?
well i certainly believe that it 's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke .
so about 20 years ago , i literally started in my garage tinkering around , trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other , and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends , in the mining world actually , and in the plastics world , and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world .
because after all , we 're doing above-ground mining .
and we eventually broke the code .
this is the last frontier of recycling .
it 's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the earth .
and we finally figured out how to do it .
and in the process , we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics .
the traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals .
you breakdown the molecules , you recombine them in very specific ways , to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day .
we said , there 's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics .
and not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint , sustainable from an economic standpoint as well .
well a good place to start is with waste .
it certainly does n't cost as much as oil , and it 's plentiful , as i hope that you 've been able to see from the photographs .
and because we 're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them , we 're using a mining approach to extract the materials .
we have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment .
we have enormous energy savings .
i do n't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way .
and instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life , our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them .
and we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that 's made from petrochemicals .
our customers get to enjoy huge co2 savings .
they get to close the loop with their products .
and they get to make more sustainable products .
in the short time period i have , i want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this .
it starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits .
they recover the metals and leave behind what 's called shredder residue - it 's their waste - a very complex mixture of materials , but predominantly plastics .
we take out the things that are n't plastics , such as the metals they missed , carpeting , foam , rubber , wood , glass , paper , you name it .
even an occasional dead animal , unfortunately .
and it goes in the first part of our process here , which is more like traditional recycling .
we 're sieving the material , we 're using magnets , we 're using air classification .
it looks like the willy wonka factory at this point .
at the end of this process , we have a mixed plastic composite : many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics .
this goes into the more sophisticated part of our process , and the really hard work , multi-step separation process begins .
we grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail .
we use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics , not only by type , but by grade .
and out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic : one type , one grade .
we then use optical sorting to color sort this material .
we blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos .
we push that material to extruders where we melt it , push it through small die holes , make spaghetti-like plastic strands .
and we chop those strands into what are called pellets .
and this becomes the currency of the plastics industry .
this is the same material that you would get from oil .
and today , we 're producing it from your old stuff , and it 's going right back into your new stuff .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so now , instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke , you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products , in your office , or back at work in your home .
and these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic , replacing virgin plastic , to make their new products .
so i hope i 've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life .
we took our clues from mother nature .
mother nature wastes very little , reuses practically everything .
and i hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer - that 's a label i 've always hated my entire life - and think of yourself as just using resources in one form , until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time .
and finally , i hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to : " if it 's broken , it 's my stuff . "
thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food .
i 've been interested in food for a long time .
i taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this .
i went to chef school in france .
and there is a way the world both envisions food , the way the world writes about food and learns about food .
and it 's largely what you would find in these books .
and it 's a wonderful thing .
but there 's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established .
in the last 20 years , people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food .
in fact , understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking - some of the chemistry , some of the physics and so forth .
but that 's not in any of those books .
there 's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed , some about new aesthetics , new approaches to food .
there 's a chef in spain named ferran adria .
he 's developed a very avant-garde cuisine .
a guy in england called heston blumenthal , he 's developed his avant-garde cuisine .
none of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books .
none of them are taught in cooking schools .
in order to learn them , you have to go work in those restaurants .
and finally , there 's the old way of viewing food is the old way .
and so a few years ago - fours years ago , actually - i set out to say , is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder ?
is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before ?
so we tried , and i 'll show you what we came up with .
this is a picture called a cutaway .
this is actually the first picture i took in the book .
the idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli .
and this magic view allows you to see all of what 's happening while the broccoli steams .
then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact .
and the hope was two-fold .
one is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli .
but the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical , maybe a little bit more scientific , maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have .
because with that beautiful photo , maybe i can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time .
steaming ought to be faster .
it turns out it is n't because of something called film condensation , and this explains that .
well , that first cutaway picture worked , so we said , " okay , let 's do some more . "
so here 's another one .
we discovered why woks are the shape they are .
this shaped wok does n't work very well ; this caught fire three times .
but we had a philosophy , which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one of our canning cutaways .
once you start cutting things in half , you kind of get carried away , so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan .
and each of these text blocks explains a key thing that 's going on .
in this case , boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic .
you do n't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores ca n't grow in the acid .
so this is great for pickled vegetables , which is what we 're canning here .
here 's our hamburger cutaway .
one of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish .
so you can lavish all the same care , all the same technique , on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish .
and if you do lavish as much technique as possible , and you try to make the highest quality hamburger , it gets to be a little bit involved .
the new york times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called " the wait for the 30-hour hamburger just got longer . "
because our hamburger recipe , our ultimate hamburger recipe , if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff , it does take about 30 hours .
of course , you 're not actually working the whole time .
most of the time is kind of sitting there .
the point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they have n't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers , because , believe it or not , there is something to the physics and chemistry - in particular , those flames underneath the burger .
most of the characteristic char-grilled taste does n't come from the wood or the charcoal .
buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference .
mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing , or burning .
so it 's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste .
now you might wonder , how do we make these cutaways ?
most people assume we use photoshop .
and the answer is : no , not really ; we use a machine shop .
and it turns out , the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half .
so we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we cut a $ 5,000 restaurant oven in half .
the manufacturer said , " what would it take for you to cut one in half ? "
i said , " it would have to show up free . "
and so it showed up , we used it a little while , we cut it in half .
now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots .
we would glue a piece of pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front .
we used a red , very high-temperature silicon to do that .
the great thing is , when you cut something in half , you have another half .
so you photograph that in exactly the same position , and then you can substitute in - and that part does use photoshop - just the edges .
so it 's very much like in a hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air , supported by wires , and then they take the wires away digitally so you 're flying through the air .
in most cases , though , there was no glass .
like for the hamburger , we just cut the damn barbecue .
and so those coals that kept falling off the edge , we kept having to put them back up .
but again , it only has to work for a thousandth of a second .
the wok shot caught fire three times .
what happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh !
one of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way .
but hey , they grow back .
in addition to cutaways , we also explain physics .
this is fourier 's law of heat conduction .
it 's a partial differential equation .
we have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it .
but to make them palatable , we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this .
we 've got lots of little tidbits in the book .
everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage , right ?
but you probably do n't know that much about james watt .
but now you will ; we put a biography of james watt in .
it 's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt , and where he got his inspiration .
it turned out he was hired by a scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey .
we also did a lot of calculation .
i personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook .
here 's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue , or other radiant heat source , goes as you move away from it .
so as you move vertically away from this surface , the heat falls off .
as you move side to side , it moves off .
that horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot .
that 's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent .
so that 's the place where you really want to cook .
and it 's got this funny horn-shaped thing , which as far as i know , again , the first cookbook to ever do this .
now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it .
you know , there 's two ways you can make a product .
you can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want , or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it .
here 's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger .
if you really want great hamburger , it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain .
and it 's really simple , as you can see here .
as it comes out of the grinder , you just have a little tray , and you just take it off in little passes , build it up , slice it vertically .
here 's the final hamburger .
this is the 30-hour hamburger .
we make every aspect of this burger .
the lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it .
we also have things about how to make the bun .
there 's a mushroom , ketchup - it goes on and on .
now watch closely . this is popcorn . i 'll explain it here .
the popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics .
is n't that beautiful ?
we have a very high-speed camera , which we had lots of fun with on the book .
the key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600 .
that 's what 's happening to the water inside that popcorn .
so it 's a great illustration of that .
now i 'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual .
we have a chapter on gels .
and because people watch mythbusters and csi , i thought , well , let 's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin .
well , if you have a high-speed camera , and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around , pretty soon somebody does this .
-lrb- gasps -rrb- now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot - that 's why you should n't get shot .
the other amazing thing is , when this ballistics gelatin comes down , it falls back down as a nice block .
anyway , here 's the book .
here it is .
2,438 pages .
and they 're nice big pages too .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen , so there 's a sixth volume that has washable , waterproof paper .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a few months ago the nobel prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever .
and today , after briefly describing what they found , i 'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery , namely the possibility that way beyond the earth , the milky way and other distant galaxies , we may find that our universe is not the only universe , but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse .
now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one .
i mean , most of us were raised to believe that the word " universe " means everything .
and i say most of us with forethought , as my four-year-old daughter has heard me speak of these ideas since she was born .
and last year i was holding her and i said , " sophia , i love you more than anything in the universe . "
and she turned to me and said , " daddy , universe or multiverse ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but barring such an anomalous upbringing , it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours , most with fundamentally different features , that would rightly be called universes of their own .
and yet , speculative though the idea surely is , i aim to convince you that there 's reason for taking it seriously , as it just might be right .
i 'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts .
in part one , i 'm going to describe those nobel prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed .
in part two , i 'll offer a solution to that mystery .
it 's based on an approach called string theory , and that 's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story .
finally , in part three , i 'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation , which will pull all the pieces of the story together .
okay , part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer edwin hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us , establishing that space itself is stretching , it 's expanding .
now this was revolutionary .
the prevailing wisdom was that on the largest of scales the universe was static .
but even so , there was one thing that everyone was certain of : the expansion must be slowing down .
that , much as the gravitational pull of the earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward , the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing now let 's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers i mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing .
and they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies , allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time .
here 's the surprise : they found that the expansion is not slowing down .
instead they found that it 's speeding up , going faster and faster .
that 's like tossing an apple upward and it goes up faster and faster .
now if you saw an apple do that , you 'd want to know why .
what 's pushing on it ?
similarly , the astronomers ' results are surely well-deserving of the nobel prize , but they raised an analogous question .
what force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed ?
well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of einstein 's .
you see , we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing , pulls objects together .
but in einstein 's theory of gravity , his general theory of relativity , gravity can also push things apart .
how ? well according to einstein 's math , if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy , sort of like a uniform , invisible mist , then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive , repulsive gravity , which is just what we need to explain the observations .
because the repulsive gravity of an invisible energy in space - we now call it dark energy , but i 've made it smokey white here so you can see it - its repulsive gravity would cause each galaxy to push against every other , driving expansion to speed up , not slow down .
and this explanation represents great progress .
but i promised you a mystery here in part one .
here it is .
when the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up , look at what they found .
this number is small .
expressed in the relevant unit , it is spectacularly small .
and the mystery is to explain this peculiar number .
we want this number to emerge from the laws of physics , but so far no one has found a way to do that .
now you might wonder , should you care ?
maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue , a technical detail of interest to experts , but of no relevance to anybody else .
well it surely is a technical detail , but some details really matter .
some details provide windows into uncharted realms of reality , and this peculiar number may be doing just that , as the only approach that 's so far made headway to explain it invokes the possibility of other universes - an idea that naturally emerges from string theory , which takes me to part two : string theory .
so hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as i now go on to tell you three key things about string theory .
first off , what is it ?
well it 's an approach to realize einstein 's dream of a unified theory of physics , a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe .
and the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward .
it says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely , at first you 'll find molecules and then you 'll find atoms and subatomic particles .
but the theory says that if you could probe smaller , much smaller than we can with existing technology , you 'd find something else inside these particles - a little tiny vibrating filament of energy , a little tiny vibrating string .
and just like the strings on a violin , they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes .
these little fundamental strings , when they vibrate in different patterns , they produce different kinds of particles - so electrons , quarks , neutrinos , photons , all other particles would be united into a single framework , as they would all arise from vibrating strings .
it 's a compelling picture , a kind of cosmic symphony , where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little , tiny strings can play .
but there 's a cost to this elegant unification , because years of research have shown that the math of string theory does n't quite work .
it has internal inconsistencies , unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar - extra dimensions of space .
that is , we all know about the usual three dimensions of space .
and you can think about those as height , width and depth .
but string theory says that , on fantastically small scales , there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them .
but even though the dimensions are hidden , they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate .
and in string theory , vibration determines everything .
so particle masses , the strengths of forces , and most importantly , the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions .
so if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions , we should be able to calculate these features , calculate the amount of dark energy .
the challenge is we do n't know the shape of the extra dimensions .
all we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math .
now when these ideas were first developed , there were only about five different candidate shapes , so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe .
but over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes .
from five , the number grew into the hundreds and then the thousands - a large , but still manageable , collection to analyze , since after all , graduate students need something to do .
but then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions , until today .
the list of candidate shapes has soared to about 10 to the 500 .
so , what to do ?
well some researchers lost heart , concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions , each giving rise to different physical features , string theory would never make definitive , testable predictions .
but others turned this issue on its head , taking us to the possibility of a multiverse .
here 's the idea .
maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other .
each is as real as every other , in the sense that there are many universes , each with a different shape , for the extra dimensions .
and this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery : the amount of dark energy revealed by the nobel prize-winning results .
because you see , if there are other universes , and if those universes each have , say , a different shape for the extra dimensions , then the physical features of each universe will be different , and in particular , the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different .
which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we 've now measured would take on a wholly different character .
in this context , the laws of physics ca n't explain one number for the dark energy because there is n't just one number , there are many numbers .
which means we have been asking the wrong question .
it 's that the right question to ask is , why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we 've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there ?
and that 's a question on which we can make headway .
because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours , whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies , the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies do n't form .
and in those universes that have much less dark energy , well they collapse back on themselves so quickly that , again , galaxies do n't form .
and without galaxies , there are no stars , no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes .
so we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we 've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life .
and that would be that .
mystery solved , multiverse found .
now some find this explanation unsatisfying .
we 're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe .
but the point is , if the feature you 're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality , then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided .
an early example comes from the great astronomer johannes kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number - why the sun is 93 million miles away from the earth .
and he worked for decades trying to explain this number , but he never succeeded , and we know why .
kepler was asking the wrong question .
we now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars .
so hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number , 93 million miles , well that is simply wrongheaded .
instead the right question to ask is , why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance , instead of any of the other possibilities ?
and again , that 's a question we can answer .
those planets which are much closer to a star like the sun would be so hot that our form of life would n't exist .
and those planets that are much farther away from the star , well they 're so cold that , again , our form of life would not take hold .
so we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life .
and when it comes to planets and their distances , this clearly is the right kind of reasoning .
the point is , when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain , it may also be the right kind of reasoning .
one key difference , of course , is we know that there are other planets out there , but so far i 've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes .
so to pull it all together , we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes .
and that takes me to my final part , part three .
because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the big bang .
you see , when we speak of the big bang , we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward .
but there 's a little secret .
the big bang leaves out something pretty important , the bang .
it tells us how the universe evolved after the bang , but gives us no insight into what would have powered the bang itself .
and this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the big bang theory .
it 's called inflationary cosmology , which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space .
the fuel is based on something called a quantum field , but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it 's virtually impossible to use it all up , which means in the inflationary theory , the big bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event .
instead the fuel not only generated our big bang , but it would also generate countless other big bangs , each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes .
and now , when we meld this with string theory , here 's the picture we 're led to .
each of these universes has extra dimensions .
the extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes .
the different shapes yield different physical features .
and we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it 's only in our universe that the physical features , like the amount of dark energy , are right for our form of life to take hold .
and this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider .
one big remaining question , of course , is , could we ever confirm the existence of other universes ?
well let me describe one way that might one day happen .
the inflationary theory already has strong observational support .
because the theory predicts that the big bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded , tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world , yielding a distinctive fingerprint , a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots , across space , which powerful telescopes have now observed .
going further , if there are other universes , the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide .
and if our universe got hit by another , that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect .
and so exotic as this picture is , it may one day be grounded in observations , establishing the existence of other universes .
i 'll conclude with a striking implication of all these ideas for the very far future .
you see , we learned that our universe is not static , that space is expanding , that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies .
but because the expansion is speeding up , in the very far future , those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we wo n't be able to see them - not because of technological limitations , but because of the laws of physics .
the light those galaxies emit , even traveling at the fastest speed , the speed of light , will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us .
so astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static , inky , black stillness .
and they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit - a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong .
now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era , like ours , attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies .
but would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge ?
or would they believe in the black , static empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal ?
i suspect the latter .
which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration .
it appears that it may not always be that way .
because today 's astronomers , by turning powerful telescopes to the sky , have captured a handful of starkly informative photons - a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit .
and the message echoing across the ages is clear .
sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law .
sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : brian , thank you .
the range of ideas you 've just spoken about are dizzying , exhilarating , incredible .
how do you think of where cosmology is now , in a sort of historical side ?
are we in the middle of something unusual historically in your opinion ?
bg : well it 's hard to say .
when we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out , the natural question is , maybe we 're already in that position and certain deep , critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves .
so from that perspective , maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them .
on the other hand , we now can understand how old the universe is .
we can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago - and yet , we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches .
holy cow ! that 's just amazing .
so on the one hand , it 's just incredible where we 've gotten , but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future .
ca : you 're going to be around for the next few days .
maybe some of these conversations can continue .
thank you . thank you , brian . -lrb- bg : my pleasure . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well when i was asked to do this tedtalk , i was really chuckled , because , you see , my father 's name was ted , and much of my life , especially my musical life , is really a talk that i 'm still having with him , or the part of me that he continues to be .
now ted was a new yorker , an all-around theater guy , and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician .
he did n't read a note , and he was profoundly hearing impaired .
yet , he was my greatest teacher .
because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids , his understanding of music was profound .
and for him , it was n't so much the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you .
and he did a painting of this experience , which he called " in the realm of music . "
now ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of tin pan alley style like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- but he was tough when it came to music .
he said , " there are only two things that matter in music : what and how .
and the thing about classical music , that what and how , it 's inexhaustible . "
that was his passion for the music .
both my parents really loved it .
they did n't know all that much about it , but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them .
and i think inspired by that memory , it 's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as i can , sort of pass it on through whatever means .
and how people get this music , how it comes into their lives , really fascinates me .
one day in new york , i was on the street and i saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants .
and a tough , slouchy kid got up to bat , and he took a swing and really connected .
and he watched the ball fly for a second , and then he went , " dah dadaratatatah .
brah dada dadadadah . "
and he ran around the bases .
and i thought , go figure .
how did this piece of 18th century austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this new york kid ?
how was that passed on ? how did he get to hear mozart ?
well when it comes to classical music , there 's an awful lot to pass on , much more than mozart , beethoven or tchiakovsky .
because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years .
and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it 's like to be alive .
now the raw material of it , of course , is just the music of everyday life .
it 's all the anthems and dance crazes and ballads and marches .
but what classical music does is to distill all of these musics down , to condense them to their absolute essence , and from that essence create a new language , a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are .
it 's a language that 's still evolving .
now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of , like concertos and symphonies , but even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment - like this one from the beethoven violin concerto .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's so simple , so evocative .
so many emotions seem to be inside of it .
yet , of course , like all music , it 's essentially not about anything .
it 's just a design of pitches and silence and time .
and the pitches , the notes , as you know , are just vibrations .
they 're locations in the spectrum of sound .
and whether we call them 440 per second , a , or 3,729 , b flat - trust me , that 's right - they 're just phenomena .
but the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood .
and the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries , as have our preferences for them .
so for example , in the 11th century , people liked pieces that ended like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- and in the 17th century , it was more like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- and in the 21st century ...
-lrb- music -rrb- now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord , even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room .
and the reason you like it is because you 've inherited , whether you knew it or not , centuries-worth of changes in musical theory , practice and fashion .
and in classical music we can follow these changes very , very accurately because of the music 's powerful silent partner , the way it 's been passed on : notation .
now the impulse to notate , or , more exactly i should say , encode music has been with us for a very long time .
in 200 b.c. , a man named sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the greeks .
-lrb- music -rrb- and a thousand years later , this impulse to notate took an entirely different form .
and you can see how this happened in these excerpts from the christmas mass " puer natus est nobis , " " for us is born . "
-lrb- music -rrb- in the 10th century , little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune .
and in the 12th century , a line was drawn , like a musical horizon line , to better pinpoint the pitch 's location .
and then in the 13th century , more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly , and that led to the kind of notation we have today .
well notation not only passed the music on , notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely , because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale .
now inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded , saved , considered , prioritized , made into intricate designs .
and from this moment , classical music became what it most essentially is , a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature : instinct and intelligence .
and there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition .
now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move , but a composer is considering all possible moves , testing them out , prioritizing them out , until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness .
now some of the greatest composers , like bach , were combinations of these two things .
bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master .
mozart was the same way .
but every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason , instinct and intelligence .
and every musical era had different priorities of these things , different things to pass on , different ' whats ' and ' hows ' .
so in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition the big ' what ' was to praise god .
and by the 1400s , music was being written that tried to mirror god 's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky .
the ' how ' was a style called polyphony , music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in ptolemy 's geocentric universe .
this was truly the music of the spheres .
-lrb- music -rrb- this is the kind of music that leonardo davinci would have known .
and perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity meant that something new had to happen - a radical new move , which in 1600 is what did happen .
-lrb- music -rrb- singer : ah , bitter blow !
ah , wicked , cruel fate !
ah , baleful stars !
ah , avaricious heaven !
mtt : this , of course , was the birth of opera , and its development put music on a radical new course .
the what now was not to mirror the mind of god , but to follow the emotion turbulence of man .
and the how was harmony , stacking up the pitches to form chords .
and the chords , it turned out , were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions .
and the basic chords were the ones we still have with us , the triads , either the major one , which we think is happy , or the minor one , which we perceive as sad .
but what 's the actual difference between these two chords ?
it 's just these two notes in the middle .
it 's either e natural , and 659 vibrations per second , or e flat , at 622 .
so the big difference between human happiness and sadness ?
37 freakin ' vibrations .
so you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions .
and in fact , as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature , harmony grew more complex to reflect it .
turns out it was capable of expressing emotions beyond the ability of words .
now with all this possibility , classical music really took off .
it 's the time in which the big forms began to arise .
and the effects of technology began to be felt also , because printing put music , the scores , the codebooks of music , into the hands of performers everywhere .
and new and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible .
this is when those big forms arose - the symphonies , the sonatas , the concertos .
and in these big architectures of time , composers like beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime .
a piece like beethoven 's fifth basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger , over the course of a half an hour , step by exacting step of his route , to the moment when he could make it across to joy .
-lrb- music -rrb- and it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues , like gripping ones of culture , such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality .
but whatever direction the music took , one thing until recently was always the same , and that was when the musicians stopped playing , the music stopped .
now this moment so fascinates me .
i find it such a profound one .
what happens when the music stops ?
where does it go ? what 's left ?
what sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance ?
is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude ?
and how might that change their lives ?
to me this is the intimate , personal side of music .
it 's the passing on part . it 's the ' why ' part of it .
and to me that 's the most essential of all .
mostly it 's been a person-to-person thing , a teacher-student , performer-audience thing , and then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of passing things on , albeit an impersonal one .
people could now hear music all the time , even though it was n't necessary for them to play an instrument , read music or even go to concerts .
and technology democratized music by making everything available .
it spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like caruso and bessie smith were on the same footing .
and technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes , using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences .
at the same time technology , by taking over the role that notation had always played , shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side .
the culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that 's been sliced , diced , layered and , god knows , distributed and sold .
what 's the long-term effect of this on us or on music ?
nobody knows .
the question remains : what happens when the music stops ?
what sticks with people ?
now that we have unlimited access to music , what does stick with us ?
well let me show you a story of what i mean by " really sticking with us . "
i was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home , and i spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker .
he came over to a piano that was there , and he balanced himself and began playing something like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- and he said something like , " me ... boy ... symphony ... beethoven . "
and i suddenly got it , and i said , " friend , by any chance are you trying to play this ? "
-lrb- music -rrb- and he said , " yes , yes . i was a little boy .
the symphony : isaac stern , the concerto , i heard it . "
and i thought , my god , how much must this music mean to this man that he would get himself out of his bed , across the room to recover the memory of this music that , after everything else in his life is sloughing away , still means so much to him ?
well , that 's why i take every performance so seriously , why it matters to me so much .
i never know who might be there , who might be absorbing it and what will happen to it in their life .
but now i 'm excited that there 's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music .
that 's what drives my interest in projects like the tv series " keeping score " with the san francisco symphony that looks at the backstories of music , and working with the young musicians at the new world symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education .
and of course , the new world symphony led to the youtube symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world .
and the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype .
there 's just a role here for so many people - teachers , parents , performers - to be explorers together .
sure , the big events attract a lot of attention , but what really matters is what goes on every single day .
we need your perspectives , your curiosity , your voices .
and it excites me now to meet people who are hikers , chefs , code writers , taxi drivers , people i never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on .
you do n't need to worry about knowing anything .
if you 're curious , if you have a capacity for wonder , if you 're alive , you know all that you need to know .
you can start anywhere . ramble a bit .
follow traces . get lost . be surprised , amused inspired .
all that ' what ' , all that ' how ' is out there waiting for you to discover its ' why ' , to dive in and pass it on .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to share with you the story of one of my patients called celine .
celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district of cameroon in west central africa .
six years ago , at the time of her hiv diagnosis , she was recruited to participate in the clinical trial which was running in her health district at the time .
when i first met celine , a little over a year ago , she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy , and she was very ill .
she told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance .
now during the clinical trial , she 'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs free of charge , and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds .
all of these ended once the trial was completed , leaving celine with no alternatives .
she was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she 'd received during the trial , or even what the trial had been about .
i did n't bother to ask her what the results of the trial were because it seemed obvious to me that she would have no clue .
yet what puzzled me most was celine had given her informed consent to be a part of this trial , yet she clearly did not understand the implications of being a participant or what would happen to her once the trial had been completed .
now , i have shared this story with you as an example of what can happen to participants in the clinical trial when it is poorly conducted .
maybe this particular trial yielded exciting results .
maybe it even got published in a high-profile scientific journal .
maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of hiv patients .
but it would have done so at a price to hundreds of patients who , like celine , were left to their own devices once the research had been completed .
i do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting hiv clinical trials in developing countries is bad .
on the contrary , clinical trials are extremely useful tools , and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries .
however , the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation , especially in the context of externally-funded research .
sadly enough , the fact remains that a lot of the studies that are conducted in developing countries could never be authorized in the richer countries which fund the research .
i 'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries , especially those in sub-saharan africa , so attractive for these hiv clinical trials ?
well , in order for a clinical trial to generate valid and widely applicable results , they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high incidence of new hiv infections .
sub-saharan africa largely fits this description , with 22 million people living with hiv , an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide .
also , research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty , endemic diseases and inadequate health care systems .
a clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized , and in the absence of good health care systems , almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing .
even more problematic reasons include lower risk of litigation , less rigorous ethical reviews , and populations that are willing to participate in almost any study that hints at a cure .
as funding for hiv research increases in developing countries and ethical review in richer countries become more strict , you can see why this context becomes very , very attractive .
the high prevalence of hiv drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable .
how then can we ensure that , in our search for the cure , we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic ?
i invite you to consider four areas i think we can focus on in order to improve the way in which things are done .
the first of these is informed consent .
now , in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable , participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand , and must freely consent to participate in the trial .
this is especially important in developing countries , where a lot of participants consent to research because they believe it is the only way in which they can receive medical care or other benefits .
consent procedures that are used in richer countries are often inappropriate or ineffective in a lot of developing countries .
for example , it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant , like celine , sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read , let alone understand .
local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials , as well as the incentives for participation .
the information in these trials needs to be given to the potential participants in linguistically and culturally acceptable formats .
the second point i would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial .
now , this is subject to a lot of debate and controversy .
should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world ?
or should they be given an alternative standard of care , such as the best current treatment available in the country in which the research is being conducted ?
is it fair to evaluate a treatment regimen which may not be affordable or accessible to the study participants once the research has been completed ?
now , in a situation where the best current treatment is inexpensive and simple to deliver , the answer is straightforward .
however , the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries .
it is important to assess the potential risks and benefits of the standard of care which is to be provided to participants in any clinical trial , and establish one which is relevant for the context of the study and most beneficial for the participants within the study .
that brings us to the third point i want you think about : the ethical review of research .
an effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of clinical trials is primordial to safeguard participants within any clinical trial .
unfortunately , this is often lacking or inefficient in a lot of developing countries .
local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries , ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors .
public accountability needs to be promoted through transparency and independent review by nongovernmental and international organizations as appropriate .
the final point i would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed .
i think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended .
now , researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed .
in addition , they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends .
if , for any reason , they feel that this might not be possible , then i think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place .
now , fortunately for celine , our meeting did not end in my office .
i was able to get her enrolled into a free hiv treatment program closer to her home , and with a support group to help her cope .
her story has a positive ending , but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate .
although she may not know this , my encounter with celine has completely changed the way in which i view hiv clinical trials in developing countries , and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done .
i believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change .
if you are a researcher , i hold you to a higher standard of moral conscience , to remain ethical in your research , and not compromise human welfare in your search for answers .
if you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company , i challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound .
if you come from a developing country like myself , i urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country .
yes , there is a need for us to find a cure for hiv , to find an effective vaccine for malaria , to find a diagnostic tool that works for t.b. , but i believe that we owe it to those who willingly and selflessly consent to participate in these clinical trials to do this in a humane way .
thank you .
to give me an idea of how many of you here may find what i 'm about to tell you of practical value , let me ask you please to raise your hands : who here is either over 65 years old or hopes to live past age 65 or has parents or grandparents who did live or have lived past 65 , raise your hands please . -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . you are the people to whom my talk will be of practical value . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the rest of you but i think that you will still find the subject fascinating .
i 'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies .
this subject constitutes just one chapter of my latest book , which compares traditional , small , tribal societies with our large , modern societies , with respect to many topics such as bringing up children , growing older , health , dealing with danger , settling disputes , religion and speaking more than one language .
those tribal societies , which constituted all human societies for most of human history , are far more diverse than are our modern , recent , big societies .
all big societies that have governments , and where most people are strangers to each other , are inevitably similar to each other and different from tribal societies .
tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society .
they constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn .
tribal societies should n't be scorned as primitive and miserable , but also they should n't be romanticized as happy and peaceful .
when we learn of tribal practices , some of them will horrify us , but there are other tribal practices which , when we hear about them , we may admire and envy and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves .
most old people in the u.s. end up living separately from their children and from most of their friends of their earlier years , and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly , whereas in traditional societies , older people instead live out their lives among their children , their other relatives , and their lifelong friends .
nevertheless , the treatment of the elderly varies enormously among traditional societies , from much worse to much better than in our modern societies .
at the worst extreme , many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in one of four increasingly direct ways : by neglecting their elderly and not feeding or cleaning them until they die , or by abandoning them when the group moves , or by encouraging older people to commit suicide , or by killing older people .
in which tribal societies do children abandon or kill their parents ?
it happens mainly under two conditions .
one is in nomadic , hunter-gather societies that often shift camp and that are physically incapable of transporting old people who ca n't walk when the able-bodied younger people already have to carry their young children and all their physical possessions .
the other condition is in societies living in marginal or fluctuating environments , such as the arctic or deserts , where there are periodic food shortages , and occasionally there just is n't enough food to keep everyone alive .
whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied adults and for children .
to us americans , it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick wife or husband or elderly mother or father , but what could those traditional societies do differently ?
they face a cruel situation of no choice .
their old people had to do it to their own parents , and the old people know what now is going to happen to them .
at the opposite extreme in treatment of the elderly , the happy extreme , are the new guinea farming societies where i 've been doing my fieldwork for the past 50 years , and most other sedentary traditional societies around the world .
in those societies , older people are cared for .
they are fed . they remain valuable .
and they continue to live in the same hut or else in a nearby hut near their children , relatives and lifelong friends .
there are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies in their treatment of old people .
the variation depends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the society 's values .
first , as regards usefulness , older people continue to perform useful services .
one use of older people in traditional societies is that they often are still effective at producing food .
another traditional usefulness of older people is that they are capable of babysitting their grandchildren , thereby freeing up their own adult children , the parents of those grandchildren , to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren .
still another traditional value of older people is in making tools , weapons , baskets , pots and textiles .
in fact , they 're usually the people who are best at it .
older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies , and the people most knowledgeable about politics , medicine , religion , songs and dances .
finally , older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern , literate societies , where our sources of information are books and the internet .
in contrast , in traditional societies without writing , older people are the repositories of information .
it 's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience .
those , then , are the ways in which older people are useful in traditional societies .
their usefulness varies and contributes to variation in the society 's treatment of the elderly .
the other set of reasons for variation in the treatment of the elderly is the society 's cultural values .
for example , there 's particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in east asia , associated with confucius ' doctrine of filial piety , which means obedience , respect and support for elderly parents .
cultural values that emphasize respect for older people contrast with the low status of the elderly in the u.s.
older americans are at a big disadvantage in job applications .
they 're at a big disadvantage in hospitals .
our hospitals have an explicit policy called age-based allocation of healthcare resources .
that sinister expression means that if hospital resources are limited , for example if only one donor heart becomes available for transplant , or if a surgeon has time to operate on only a certain number of patients , american hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that younger patients are considered more valuable to society because they have more years of life ahead of them , even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them .
there are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the u.s.
one is our protestant work ethic which places high value on work , so older people who are no longer working are n't respected .
another reason is our american emphasis on the virtues of self-reliance and independence , so we instinctively look down on older people who are no longer self-reliant and independent .
still a third reason is our american cult of youth , which shows up even in our advertisements .
ads for coca-cola and beer always depict smiling young people , even though old as well as young people buy and drink coca-cola and beer .
just think , what 's the last time you saw a coke or beer ad depicting smiling people 85 years old ? never .
instead , the only american ads featuring white-haired old people are ads for retirement homes and pension planning .
well , what has changed in the status of the elderly today compared to their status in traditional societies ?
there have been a few changes for the better and more changes for the worse .
big changes for the better include the fact that today we enjoy much longer lives , much better health in our old age , and much better recreational opportunities .
another change for the better is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of old people .
changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality that we now have more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past .
that means that all those old people are more of a burden on the few young people , and that each old person has less individual value .
another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age , because older people , their children , and their friends , all move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives .
we americans move on the average every five years .
hence our older people are likely to end up living distant from their children and the friends of their youth .
yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce , carrying with it a loss of work friendships and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work .
perhaps the biggest change for the worse is that our elderly are objectively less useful than in traditional societies .
widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as repositories of knowledge .
when we want some information , we look it up in a book or we google it instead of finding some old person to ask .
the slow pace of technological change in traditional societies means that what someone learns there as a child is still useful when that person is old , but the rapid pace of technological change today means that what we learn as children is no longer useful 60 years later .
and conversely , we older people are not fluent in the technologies essential for surviving in modern society .
for example , as a 15-year-old , i was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers because i had memorized the multiplication tables and i know how to use logarithms and i 'm quick at manipulating a slide rule .
today , though , those skills are utterly useless because any idiot can now multiply eight-digit numbers accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator .
conversely , i at age 75 am incompetent at skills essential for everyday life .
my family 's first tv set in 1948 had only three knobs that i quickly mastered : an on-off switch , a volume knob , and a channel selector knob .
today , just to watch a program on the tv set in my own house , i have to operate a 41-button tv remote that utterly defeats me .
i have to telephone my 25-year-old sons and ask them to talk me through it while i try to push those wretched 41 buttons .
what can we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the u.s. , and to make better use of their value ?
that 's a huge problem .
in my remaining four minutes today , i can offer just a few suggestions .
one value of older people is that they are increasingly useful as grandparents for offering high-quality childcare to their grandchildren , if they choose to do it , as more young women enter the workforce and as fewer young parents of either gender stay home as full-time caretakers of their children .
compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters and day care centers , grandparents offer superior , motivated , experienced child care .
they 've already gained experience from raising their own children .
they usually love their grandchildren , and are eager to spend time with them .
unlike other caregivers , grandparents do n't quit their job because they found another job with higher pay looking after another baby .
a second value of older people is paradoxically related to their loss of value as a result of changing world conditions and technology .
at the same time , older people have gained in value today precisely because of their unique experience of living conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change , but that could come back .
for example , only americans now in their 70s or older today can remember the experience of living through a great depression , the experience of living through a world war , and agonizing whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs .
most of our current voters and politicians have no personal experience of any of those things , but millions of older americans do .
unfortunately , all of those terrible situations could come back .
even if they do n't come back , we have to be able to plan for them on the basis of the experience of what they were like .
older people have that experience .
younger people do n't .
the remaining value of older people that i 'll mention involves recognizing that while there are many things that older people can no longer do , there are other things that they can do better than younger people .
a challenge for society is to make use of those things that older people are better at doing .
some abilities , of course , decrease with age .
those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina , ambition , and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation , such as figuring out the structure of dna , best left to scientists under the age of 30 .
conversely , valuable attributes that increase with age include experience , understanding of people and human relationships , ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way , and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases , such as economics and comparative history , best left to scholars over the age of 60 .
hence older people are much better than younger people at supervising , administering , advising , strategizing , teaching , synthesizing , and devising long-term plans .
i 've seen this value of older people with so many of my friends in their 60s , 70s , 80s and 90s , who are still active as investment managers , farmers , lawyers and doctors .
in short , many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give their elderly more satisfying lives than we do in modern , big societies .
paradoxically nowadays , when we have more elderly people than ever before , living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before , old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before .
the lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern american society .
we can surely do better by learning from the lives of the elderly in traditional societies .
but what 's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional societies is true of many other features of traditional societies as well .
of course , i 'm not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle .
there are many obvious respects in which our lives today are far happier than those in small , traditional societies .
to mention just a few examples , our lives are longer , materially much richer , and less plagued by violence than are the lives of people in traditional societies .
but there are also things to be admired about people in traditional societies , and perhaps to be learned from them .
their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives , although materially poorer .
their children are more self-confident , more independent , and more socially skilled than are our children .
they think more realistically about dangers than we do .
they almost never die of diabetes , heart disease , stroke , and the other noncommunicable diseases that will be the causes of death of almost all of us in this room today .
features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases , and features of the traditional lifestyle protect us against them .
those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies .
i hope that you will find it as fascinating to read about traditional societies as i found it to live in those societies .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm here to explain why i 'm wearing these ninja pajamas .
and to do that , i 'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies .
so some of you may know about the chemical bisphenol a , bpa .
it 's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that 's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics .
so bpa mimics the body 's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems .
and it 's everywhere .
a recent study found bpa in 93 percent of people six and older .
but it 's just one chemical .
the center for disease control in the u.s.
says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies , and this includes preservatives , pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury .
to me , this says three things .
first , do n't become a cannibal .
second , we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution .
and third , our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins .
so what happens to all these toxins when we die ?
the short answer is : they return to the environment in one way or another , continuing the cycle of toxicity .
but our current funeral practices make the situation much worse .
if you 're cremated , all those toxins i mentioned are released into the atmosphere .
and this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year .
and in a traditional american funeral , a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive .
it 's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition - a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel .
so by trying to preserve our dead bodies , we deny death , poison the living and further harm the environment .
green or natural burials , which do n't use embalming , are a step in the right direction , but they do n't address the existing toxins in our bodies .
i think there 's a better solution .
i 'm an artist , so i 'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art , science and culture .
the infinity burial project , an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies .
the infinity burial project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the infinity mushroom - a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies , clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots , leaving clean compost .
but i learned it 's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom .
i also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil .
so i thought maybe i could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body .
so today , i 'm collecting what i shed or slough off - my hair , skin and nails - and i 'm feeding these to edible mushrooms .
as the mushrooms grow , i pick the best feeders to become infinity mushrooms .
it 's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife .
so when i die , the infinity mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it .
all right , so for some of you , this may be really , really out there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just a little .
i realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food .
we want to eat , not be eaten by , our food .
but as i watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body , i imagine the infinity mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment .
see for me , cultivating the infinity mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet , it 's a step towards accepting the fact that someday i will die and decay .
it 's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet .
growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture , a concept that was developed by an entomologist , timothy myles .
the infinity mushroom is a subset of decompiculture i 'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation - the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies .
and now about these ninja pajamas .
once it 's completed , i plan to integrate the infinity mushrooms into a number of objects .
first , a burial suit infused with mushroom spores , the mushroom death suit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit .
it 's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores .
the dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia , which are the equivalent of plant roots .
i 'm also making a decompiculture kit , a cocktail of capsules that contain infinity mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation .
these capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly , a kind of second skin , which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms .
so i plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two , and then i 'd like to begin testing them , first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects .
and believe it or not , a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment .
i wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms , so i formed the decompiculture society , a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options , seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the infinity mushroom .
the decompiculture society shares a vision of a cultural shift , from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture , a radical acceptance of death and decomposition .
accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment , as the research on environmental toxins confirms .
and the saying goes , we came from dust and will return to dust .
and once we understand that we 're connected to the environment , we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet .
i believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , indeed , i have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive .
waking up with abraham lincoln in the morning , thinking of franklin roosevelt when i went to bed at night .
but when i try and think about what i 've learned about the meaning in life , my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that i took when i was a graduate student at harvard with the great psychologist erik erikson .
he taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms : work , love and play .
and that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the other , is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age .
whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication , is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement , but with serenity .
so since i tell stories , let me look back on the lives of two of the presidents i 've studied to illustrate this point - abraham lincoln and lyndon johnson .
as for that first sphere of work , i think what abraham lincoln 's life suggests is that fierce ambition is a good thing .
he had a huge ambition .
but it was n't simply for office or power or celebrity or fame - what it was for was to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it .
even as a child , it seemed , lincoln dreamed heroic dreams .
he somehow had to escape that hard-scrabble farm from which he was born .
no schooling was possible for him , except a few weeks here , a few weeks there .
but he read books in every spare moment he could find .
it was said when he got a copy of the king james bible or " aesop 's fables , " he was so excited he could n't sleep .
he could n't eat .
the great poet emily dickinson once said , " there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away . "
how true for lincoln .
though he never would travel to europe , he went with shakespeare 's kings to merry england , he went with lord byron 's poetry to spain and portugal .
literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings .
but there were so many losses in his early life that he was haunted by death .
his mother died when he was only nine years old ; his only sister , sarah , in childbirth a few years later ; and his first love , ann rutledge , at the age of 22 .
moreover , when his mother lay dying , she did not hold out for him the hope that they would meet in an afterworld .
she simply said to him , " abraham , i 'm going away from you now , and i shall never return . "
as a result he became obsessed with the thought that when we die our life is swept away - dust to dust .
but only as he grew older did he develop a certain consolation from an ancient greek notion - but followed by other cultures as well - that if you could accomplish something worthy in your life , you could live on in the memory of others .
your honor and your reputation would outlive your earthly existence .
and that worthy ambition became his lodestar .
it carried him through the one significant depression that he suffered when he was in his early 30s .
three things had combined to lay him low .
he had broken his engagement with mary todd , not certain he was ready to marry her , but knowing how devastating it was to her that he did that .
his one intimate friend , joshua speed , was leaving illinois to go back to kentucky because speed 's father had died .
and his political career in the state legislature was on a downward slide .
he was so depressed that friends worried he was suicidal .
they took all knives and razors and scissors from his room .
and his great friend speed went to his side and said , " lincoln , you must rally or you will die . "
he said that , " i would just as soon die right now , but i 've not yet done anything to make any human being remember that i have lived . "
so fueled by that ambition , he returned to the state legislature .
he eventually won a seat in congress .
he then ran twice for the senate , lost twice .
" everyone is broken by life , " ernest hemingway once said , " but some people are stronger in the broken places . "
so then he surprised the nation with an upset victory for the presidency over three far more experienced , far more educated , far more celebrated rivals .
and then when he won the general election , he stunned the nation even more by appointing each of these three rivals into his cabinet .
it was an unprecedented act at the time because everybody thought , " he 'll look like a figurehead compared to these people . "
they said , " why are you doing this , lincoln ? "
he said , " look , these are the strongest and most able men in the country .
the country is in peril . i need them by my side . "
but perhaps my old friend lyndon johnson might have put it in less noble fashion : " better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out , than outside the tent pissing in . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it soon became clear that abraham lincoln would emerge as the undisputed captain of this unruly team .
for each of them soon came to understand that he possessed an unparalleled array of emotional strengths and political skills that proved far more important than the thinness of his external résumé .
for one thing , he possessed an uncanny ability to empathize with and to think about other peoples ' point of view .
he repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into permanent hostility .
he shared credit with ease , assumed responsibility for the failure of his subordinates , constantly acknowledged his errors and learned from his mistakes .
these are the qualities we should be looking for in our candidates in 2008 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- he refused to be provoked by petty grievances .
he never submitted to jealousy or brooded over perceived slights .
and he expressed his unshakeable convictions in everyday language , in metaphors , in stories .
and with a beauty of language - almost as if the shakespeare and the poetry he had so loved as a child had worked their way into his very soul .
in 1863 , when the emancipation proclamation was signed , he brought his old friend , joshua speed , back to the white house , and remembered that conversation of decades before , when he was so sad .
and he , pointing to the proclamation , said , " i believe , in this measure , my fondest hopes will be realized . "
but as he was about to put his signature on the proclamation his own hand was numb and shaking because he had shaken a thousand hands that morning at a new year 's reception .
so he put the pen down .
he said , " if ever my soul were in an act , it is in this act .
but if i sign with a shaking hand , posterity will say , ' he hesitated . " ' so he waited until he could take up the pen and sign with a bold and clear hand .
but even in his wildest dreams , lincoln could never have imagined how far his reputation would reach .
i was so thrilled to find an interview with the great russian writer , leo tolstoy , in a new york newspaper in the early 1900s .
and in it , tolstoy told of a trip that he 'd recently made to a very remote area of the caucasus , where there were only wild barbarians , who had never left this part of russia .
knowing that tolstoy was in their midst , they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history .
so he said , " i told them about napoleon and alexander the great and frederick the great and julius caesar , and they loved it .
but before i finished , the chief of the barbarians stood up and said , ' but wait , you have n't told us about the greatest ruler of them all .
we want to hear about that man who spoke with a voice of thunder , who laughed like the sunrise , who came from that place called america , which is so far from here , that if a young man should travel there , he would be an old man when he arrived .
tell us of that man . tell us of abraham lincoln . " ' he was stunned .
he told them everything he could about lincoln .
and then in the interview he said , " what made lincoln so great ?
not as great a general as napoleon , not as great a statesman as frederick the great . "
but his greatness consisted , and historians would roundly agree , in the integrity of his character and the moral fiber of his being .
so in the end that powerful ambition that had carried lincoln through his bleak childhood had been realized .
that ambition that had allowed him to laboriously educate himself by himself , to go through that string of political failures and the darkest days of the war .
his story would be told .
so as for that second sphere , not of work , but of love - encompassing family , friends and colleagues - it , too , takes work and commitment .
the lyndon johnson that i saw in the last years of his life , when i helped him on his memoirs , was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work , power and individual success , that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone .
my relationship with him began on a rather curious level .
i was selected as a white house fellow when i was 24 years old .
we had a big dance at the white house .
president johnson did dance with me that night .
not that peculiar - there were only three women out of the 16 white house fellows .
but he did whisper in my ear that he wanted me to work directly for him in the white house .
but it was not to be that simple .
for in the months leading up to my selection , like many young people , i 'd been active in the anti-vietnam war movement , and had written an article against lyndon johnson , which unfortunately came out in the new republic two days after the dance in the white house .
-lrb- laugher -rrb- and the theme of the article was how to remove lyndon johnson from power .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was certain he would kick me out of the program .
but instead , surprisingly , he said , " oh , bring her down here for a year , and if i ca n't win her over , no one can . "
so i did end up working for him in the white house .
eventually accompanied him to his ranch to help him on those memoirs , never fully understanding why he 'd chosen me to spend so many hours with .
i like to believe it was because i was a good listener .
he was a great storyteller .
fabulous , colorful , anecdotal stories .
there was a problem with these stories , however , which i later discovered , which is that half of them were n't true .
but they were great , nonetheless .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i think that part of his attraction for me was that i loved listening to his tall tales .
but i also worried that part of it was that i was then a young woman .
and he had somewhat of a minor league womanizing reputation .
so i constantly chatted to him about boyfriends , even when i did n't have any at all .
everything was working perfectly , until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship .
sounded very ominous when he took me nearby to the lake , conveniently called lake lyndon baines johnson .
and there was wine and cheese and a red-checked tablecloth - all the romantic trappings .
and he started out , " doris , more than any other woman i have ever known ... " and my heart sank .
and then he said , " you remind me of my mother . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was pretty embarrassing , given what was going on in my mind .
but i must say , the older i 've gotten , the more i realize what an incredible privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man .
a victor in a thousand contests , three great civil rights laws , medicare , aid to education .
and yet , roundly defeated in the end by the war in vietnam .
and because he was so sad and so vulnerable , he opened up to me in ways he never would have had i known him at the height of his power - sharing his fears , his sorrows and his worries .
and i 'd like to believe that the privilege fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public figure , that i 've tried to bring to each of my books since then .
but it also brought home to me the lessons which erik erikson had tried to instill in all of us about the importance of finding balance in life .
for on the surface , lyndon johnson should have had everything in the world to feel good about in those last years , in the sense that he had been elected to the presidency ; he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity he wanted ; he owned a spacious ranch in the countryside , a penthouse in the city , sailboats , speedboats .
he had servants to answer any whim , and he had a family who loved him deeply .
and yet , years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement he could find no solace in family , in recreation , in sports or in hobbies .
it was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family , without work , could not fill it .
as his spirits sagged , his body deteriorated until , i believe , he slowly brought about his own death .
in those last years , he said he was so sad watching the american people look toward a new president and forgetting him .
he spoke with immense sadness in his voice , saying maybe he should have spent more time with his children , and their children in turn .
but it was too late .
despite all that power , all that wealth , he was alone when he finally died - his ultimate terror realized .
so as for that third sphere of play , which he never had learned to enjoy , i 've learned over the years that even this sphere requires a commitment of time and energy - enough so that a hobby , a sport , a love of music , or art , or literature , or any form of recreation , can provide true pleasure , relaxation and replenishment .
so deep , for instance , was abraham lincoln 's love of shakespeare , that he made time to spend more than a hundred nights in the theater , even during those dark days of the war .
he said , when the lights went down and a shakespeare play came on , for a few precious hours he could imagine himself back in prince hal 's time .
but an even more important form of relaxation for him , that lyndon johnson never could enjoy , was a love of - somehow - humor , and feeling out what hilarious parts of life can produce as a sidelight to the sadness .
he once said that he laughed so he did not cry , that a good story , for him , was better than a drop of whiskey .
his storytelling powers had first been recognized when he was on the circuit in illinois .
the lawyers and the judges would travel from one county courthouse to the other , and when anyone was knowing lincoln was in town , they would come from miles around to listen to him tell stories .
he would stand with his back against a fire and entertain the crowd for hours with his winding tales .
and all these stories became part of his memory bank , so he could call on them whenever he needed to .
and they 're not quite what you might expect from our marble monument .
one of his favorite stories , for example , had to do with the revolutionary war hero , ethan allen .
and as lincoln told the story , mr. allen went to britain after the war .
and the british people were still upset about losing the revolution , so they decided to embarrass him a little bit by putting a huge picture of general washington in the only outhouse , where he 'd have to encounter it .
they figured he 'd be upset about the indignity of george washington being in an outhouse .
but he came out of the outhouse not upset at all .
and so they said , " well , did you see george washington in there ? "
" oh , yes , " he said , " perfectly appropriate place for him . "
" what do you mean ? " they said .
" well , " he said , " there 's nothing to make an englishman shit faster than the sight of general george washington . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so you can imagine , if you are in the middle of a tense cabinet meeting - and he had hundreds of these stories - you would have to relax .
so between his nightly treks to the theater , his story telling , and his extraordinary sense of humor and his love of quoting shakespeare and poetry , he found that form of play which carried him through his days .
in my own life , i shall always be grateful for having found a form of play in my irrational love of baseball .
which allows me , from the beginning of spring training to the end of the fall , to have something to occupy my mind and heart other than my work .
it all began when i was only six years old , and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games - so that when he went to work in new york during the day , i could record for him the history of that afternoon 's brooklyn dodgers game .
now , when you 're only six years old , and your father comes home every single night and listens to you - as i now realize that i , in excruciating detail , recounted every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place that afternoon .
but he made me feel i was telling him a fabulous story .
it makes you think there 's something magic about history to keep your father 's attention .
in fact , i 'm convinced i learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father .
because at first , i 'd be so excited i would blurt out , " the dodgers won ! " or , " the dodgers lost ! "
which took much of the drama of this two-hour telling away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end .
i must say , so fervent was my love of the old brooklyn dodgers in those days that i had to confess in my first confession two sins that related to baseball .
the first occurred because the dodgers ' catcher , roy campanella , came to my hometown of rockville centre , long island , just as i was in preparation for my first holy communion .
and i was so excited - first person i 'd ever see outside of ebbets field .
but it so happened he was speaking in a protestant church .
when you are brought up as a catholic , you think that if you ever set foot in a protestant church , you 'll be struck dead at the threshold .
so i went to my father in tears , " what are we going to do ? "
he said , " do n't worry . he 's speaking in a parish hall .
we 're sitting in folding chairs . he 's talking about sportsmanship .
it 's not a sin . "
but as i left that night , i was certain that somehow i 'd traded the life of my everlasting soul for this one night with roy campanella .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there were no indulgences around that i could buy .
so i had this sin on my soul when i went to my first confession .
i told the priest right away .
he said , " no problem . it was n't a religious service . "
but then , unfortunately , he said , " and what else , my child ? "
and then came my second sin .
i tried to sandwich it in between talking too much in church , wishing harm to others , being mean to my sisters .
and he said , " to whom did you wish harm ? "
and i had to say that i wished that various new york yankees players would break arms , legs and ankles - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so that the brooklyn dodgers could win their first world series .
he said , " how often do you make these horrible wishes ? "
and i had to say , every night when i said my prayers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he said , " look , i 'll tell you something .
i love the brooklyn dodgers , as you do , but i promise you some day they will win fairly and squarely .
you do not need to wish harm on others to make it happen . "
" oh yes , " i said .
but luckily , my first confession - to a baseball-loving priest !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , though my father died of a sudden heart attack when i was still in my 20s , before i had gotten married and had my three sons , i have passed his memory - as well as his love of baseball - on to my boys .
though when the dodgers abandoned us to come to l.a. , i lost faith in baseball until i moved to boston and became an irrational red socks fan .
and i must say , even now , when i sit with my sons with our season tickets , i can sometimes close my eyes against the sun and imagine myself , a young girl once more , in the presence of my father , watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below : jackie robinson , roy campanella , pee wee reese , and duke snider .
i must say there is magic in these moments .
when i open my eyes and i see my sons in the place where my father once sat , i feel an invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see , but whose heart and soul they have come to know through all the stories i have told .
which is why , in the end , i shall always be grateful for this curious love of history , allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past .
allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life .
allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families , and the public figures we have respected in our history , just as abraham lincoln wanted to believe , really can live on , so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives .
thank you for letting me be that storyteller today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i 'm very fortunate to be here .
i feel so fortunate .
i 've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me .
i called my wife leslie , and i said , " you know , there 's so many good people trying to do so much good .
it feels like i 've landed in a colony of angels . "
it 's a true feeling .
but let me get to the talk - i see the clock is running .
i 'm a public school teacher , and i just want to share a story of my superintendent .
her name is pam moran in albemarle county , virginia , the foothills of the blue ridge mountains .
and she 's a very high-tech superintendent .
she uses smart boards , she blogs , she tweets , she does facebook , she does all this sort of high-tech stuff .
she 's a technology leader and instructional leader .
but in her office , there 's this old wooden , weather-worn table , kitchen table - peeling green paint , it 's kind of rickety .
and i said , " pam , you 're such a modern , cutting-edge person .
why is this old table in your office ? "
and she told me , she said , " you know , i grew up in southwestern virginia , in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural virginia , and this table was in my grandfather 's kitchen .
and we 'd come in from playing , he 'd come in from plowing and working , and we 'd sit around that table every night .
and as i grew up , i heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table , i began to call it the wisdom table .
and when he passed on , i took this table with me and brought it to my office , and it reminds me of him .
it reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes . "
the project i 'm going to tell you about is called the world peace game , and essentially it is also an empty space .
and i 'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table , really .
it all started back in 1977 .
i was a young man , and i had been dropping in and out of college .
and my parents were very patient , but i had been doing intermittent sojourns to india on a mystical quest .
and i remember the last time i came back from india - in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my john lennon glasses - and i said to my father , " dad , i think i 've just about found spiritual enlightenment . "
he said , " well there 's one more thing you need to find . "
i said , " what is that , dad ? " " a job . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something .
so i got a degree and it turned out to be education .
it was an experimental education program .
it could have been dentistry , but the word " experimental " was in it , and so that 's what i had to go for .
and i went in for a job interview in the richmond public schools in virginia , the capital city , bought a three-piece suit - my concession to convention - kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes - at the time it was the ' 70s - and i walked in , and i sat down and had an interview .
and i guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor , her name was anna aro , said i had the job teaching gifted children .
and i was so shocked , so stunned , i got up and said , " well , thank you , but what do i do ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- gifted education had n't really taken hold too much .
there were n't really many materials or things to use .
and i said , " what do i do ? "
and her answer shocked me . it stunned me .
her answer set the template for the entire career i was to have after that .
she said , " what do you want to do ? "
and that question cleared the space .
there was no program directive , no manual to follow , no standards in gifted education in that way .
and she cleared such a space that i endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students , an empty space , whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding .
so this happened in 1978 , and i was teaching many years later , and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker .
his name is chris farina .
chris farina is here today at his own cost .
chris , could you stand up and let them see you - a young , visionary filmmaker who 's made a film .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this film is called " world peace and other 4th grade achievements . "
he proposed the film to me - it 's a great title .
he proposed the film to me , and i said , " yeah , maybe it 'll be on local tv , and we can say hi to our friends . "
but the film has really gone places .
now it 's still in debt , but chris has managed , through his own sacrifice , to get this film out .
so we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me , more than a story about one teacher .
it 's a story that 's a testament to teaching and teachers .
and it 's a beautiful thing .
and the strange thing is , when i watch the film - i have the eerie sensation of seeing it - i saw myself literally disappear .
what i saw was my teachers coming through me .
i saw my geometry teacher in high school , mr. rucell 's wry smile under his handlebar mustache .
that 's the smile i use - that 's his smile .
i saw jan polo 's flashing eyes .
and they were n't flashing in anger , they were flashing in love , intense love for her students .
and i have that kind of flash sometimes .
and i saw miss ethel j. banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day .
and you know , she had that old-school teacher stare .
you know the one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and i 'm not even talking about you behind me , because i 've got eyes in the back of my head . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know that teacher ?
i did n't use that stare very often , but i do have it in my repertoire .
and miss banks was there as a great mentor for me .
and then i saw my own parents , my first teachers .
my father , very inventive , spatial thinker .
that 's my brother malcolm there on the right .
and my mother , who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in virginia , who was my inspiration .
and really , i feel as though , when i see the film - i have a gesture she does , like this - i feel like i am a continuation of her gesture .
i am one of her teaching gestures .
and the beautiful thing was , i got to teach my daughter in elementary school , madeline .
and so that gesture of my mother 's continues through many generations .
it 's an amazing feeling to have that lineage .
and so i 'm here standing on the shoulders of many people .
i 'm not here alone .
there are many people on this stage right now .
and so this world peace game i 'd like to tell you about .
it started out like this : it 's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school , 1978 .
i was creating a lesson for students on africa .
we put all the problems of the world there , and i thought , let 's let them solve it .
i did n't want to lecture or have just book reading .
i wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies .
so i thought , well they like to play games .
i 'll make something - i did n't say interactive ; we did n't have that term in 1978 - but something interactive .
and so we made the game , and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot plexiglass structure .
and it has four plexiglass layers .
there 's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining .
there 's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces , a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it - even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining .
there are four countries around the board .
the kids make up the names of the countries - some are rich ; some are poor .
they have different assets , commercial and military .
and each country has a cabinet .
there 's a prime minister , secretary of state , minister of defense and a cfo , or comptroller .
i choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them .
i offer them the job , they can turn it down , and then they choose their own cabinet .
there 's a world bank , arms dealers and a united nations .
there 's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's not all .
and then there 's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems .
so that , if one thing changes , everything else changes .
i throw them into this complex matrix , and they trust me because we have a deep , rich relationship together .
and so with all these crises , we have - let 's see - ethnic and minority tensions ; we have chemical and nuclear spills , nuclear proliferation .
there 's oil spills , environmental disasters , water rights disputes , breakaway republics , famine , endangered species and global warming .
if al gore is here , i 'm going to send my fourth-graders from agnor-hurt and venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and they 've done it several times too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i also have in the game a saboteur - some child - it 's basically a troublemaker - and i have my troublemaker put to use because they , on the surface , are trying to save the world and their position in the game .
but they 're also trying to undermine everything in the game .
and they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies , trying to cause everyone to think more deeply .
the saboteur is there , and we also read from sun tzu 's " the art of war . "
fourth-graders understand it - nine years old - and they handle that and use that to understand how to , not follow - at first they do - the paths to power and destruction , the path to war .
they learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking , to think in a long-term , more consequential way .
stewart brand is here , and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a coevolution quarterly article on a peace force .
and in the game , sometimes students actually form a peace force .
i 'm just a clock watcher .
i 'm just a clarifier . i 'm just a facilitator .
the students run the game .
i have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing .
so i 'll just share with you ...
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : the world peace game is serious .
you 're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world .
see , mr. hunter is doing that because he says his time has messed up a lot , and he 's trying to tell us how to fix that problem .
john hunter : i offered them a - -lrb- applause -rrb- actually , i ca n't tell them anything because i do n't know the answer .
and i admit the truth to them right up front : i do n't know .
and because i do n't know , they 've got to dig up the answer .
and so i apologize to them as well .
i say , " i 'm so sorry , boys and girls , but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape , and we hope you can fix it for us , and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it . "
it 's a sincere apology , and they take it very seriously .
now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like .
well when we have the game start , here 's what you see .
-lrb- video -rrb- jh : all right , we 're going into negotiations as of now . go .
-lrb- chatter -rrb- jh : my question to you is , who 's in charge of that classroom ?
it 's a serious question : who is really in charge ?
i 've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time .
there 's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that i simply do n't have to do what i thought i had to do as a beginning teacher : control every conversation and response in the classroom .
it 's impossible . their collective wisdom is much greater than mine , and i admit it to them openly .
so i 'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that have happened .
in this game we had a little girl , and she was the defense minister of the poorest nation .
and the defense minister - she had the tank corps and air force and so forth .
and she was next door to a very wealthy , oil-rich neighbor .
without provocation , suddenly she attacked , against her prime minister 's orders , the next-door neighbor 's oil fields .
she marched into the oil field reserves , surrounded it , without firing a shot , and secured it and held it .
and that neighbor was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up .
we were all upset with her , " why are you doing this ?
this is the world peace game . what is wrong with you ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was a little girl and , at nine years old , she held her pieces and said , " i know what i 'm doing . "
to her girlfriends she said that .
that 's a breach there .
and we learned in this , you do n't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they are the toughest opponents .
and we were very upset .
i thought i was failing as a teacher . why would she do this ?
but come to find out , a few game days later - and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team - actually there 's a negotiation period with all teams , and each team takes a turn , then we go back in negotiation , around and around , so each turn around is one game day .
so a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world .
had they had their fuel supplies , they would have done it .
she was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game .
now she used a small war to avert a larger war , so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right , conditional good , or not right .
that 's the kind of thinking that we put them in , the situations .
i could not have designed that in teaching it .
it came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom .
-lrb- applause -rrb- another example , a beautiful thing happened .
we have a letter in the game .
if you 're a military commander and you wage troops - the little plastic toys on the board - and you lose them , i put in a letter .
you have to write a letter to their parents - the fictional parents of your fictional troops - explaining what happened and offering your condolences .
so you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat .
and so we had this situation come up - last summer actually , at agnor-hurt school in albemarle county - and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said , " mr. hunter , let 's ask - there 's a parent over there . "
there was a parent visiting that day , just sitting in the back of the room .
" let 's ask that mom to read the letter .
it 'll be more realer if she reads it . "
so we did , we asked her , and she gamely picked up the letter .
" sure . " she started reading . she read one sentence .
she read two sentences .
by the third sentence , she was in tears .
i was in tears .
everybody understood that when we lose somebody , the winners are not gloating .
we all lose .
and it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding .
i 'll show you what my friend david says about this .
he 's been in many battles .
-lrb- video -rrb- david : we 've really had enough of people attacking .
i mean , we 've been lucky -lsb- most of -rsb- the time .
but now i 'm feeling really weird because i 'm living what sun tzu said one week .
one week he said , " those who go into battle and win will want to go back , and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win . "
and so i 've been winning battles , so i 'm going into battles , more battles .
and i think it 's sort of weird to be living what sun tzu said .
jh : i get chills every time i see that .
that 's the kind of engagement you want to have happen .
and i ca n't design that , i ca n't plan that , and i ca n't even test that .
but it 's self-evident assessment .
we know that 's an authentic assessment of learning .
we have a lot of data , but i think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what 's going on .
so i 'll just share a third story .
this is about my friend brennan .
we had played the game one session after school for many weeks , about seven weeks , and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises .
the way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and every country 's asset value has to be increased above its starting point .
some are poor , some are wealthy . there are billions .
the world bank president was a third-grader one time .
he says , " how many zeros in a trillion ? i 've got to calculate that right away . "
but he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him .
so the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer .
there was no way they could win .
and we were approaching four o 'clock , our cut-off time - there was about a minute left - and despair just settled over the room .
i thought , i 'm failing as a teacher .
i should have gotten it so they could have won .
they should n't be failing like this .
i 've failed them .
and i was just feeling so sad and dejected .
and suddenly , brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell , the bell i ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets , and he ran back to his seat , rang the bell .
everybody ran to his chair : there was screaming ; there was yelling , waving of their dossiers .
they get these dossiers full of secret documents .
they were gesticulating ; they were running around .
i did n't know what they were doing . i 'd lost control of my classroom .
principal walks in , i 'm out of a job .
the parents were looking in the window .
and brennan runs back to his seat . everybody runs back to their seat .
he rings the bell again . he says , " we have " - and there 's 12 seconds left on the clock - " we have , all nations , pooled all our funds together .
and we 've got 600 billion dollars .
we 're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country .
and if they accept it , it 'll raise their asset value and we can win the game .
will you accept it ? "
and there are three seconds left on the clock .
everybody looks at this prime minister of that country , and he says , " yes . "
and the game is won .
spontaneous compassion that could not be planned for , that was unexpected and unpredictable .
every game we play is different .
some games are more about social issues , some are more about economic issues .
some games are more about warfare .
but i do n't try to deny them that reality of being human .
i allow them to go there and , through their own experience , learn , in a bloodless way , how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing .
and they find out what is right their own way , their own selves .
and so in this game , i 've learned so much from it , but i would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world , they may save us all .
if only .
and on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders i 'm standing , thank you . thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how do groups get anything done ? right ?
how do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value , instead of just being chaos ?
and the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs .
and a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output .
and we 've had a classic answer for coordination costs , which is , if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people , you start an institution , right ? you raise some resources .
you found something . it can be private or public .
it can be for profit or not profit . it can be large or small .
but you get these resources together .
you found an institution , and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group .
more recently , because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor - and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination - there has been a second answer , which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure , to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system , without regard to institutional models .
so , that 's what i want to talk about today .
i 'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples , but always pointing to the broader themes .
so , i 'm going to start by trying to answer a question that i know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other , and which the internet is purpose-built to answer , which is , where can i get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid ?
so , in new york city , on the first saturday of every summer , coney island , our local , charmingly run-down amusement park , hosts the mermaid parade . it 's an amateur parade ; people come from all over the city ; people get all dressed up .
some people get less dressed up .
young and old , dancing in the streets .
colorful characters , and a good time is had by all .
and what i want to call your attention to is not the mermaid parade itself , charming though it is , but rather to these photos .
i did n't take them . how did i get them ?
and the answer is : i got them from flickr .
flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos , upload them , share them over the web and so forth .
recently , flickr has added an additional function called tagging .
tagging was pioneered by delicious and joshua schachter .
delicious is a social bookmarking service .
tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification .
right ? if i had given this talk last year , i could n't do what i just did , because i could n't have found those photos .
but instead of saying , we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they 're uploaded , flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos .
so , i was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged " mermaid parade . " there were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers , all aggregated and then put under this nice , neat name , shown in reverse chronological order .
and i was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow .
now , what hard problem is being solved here ?
and it 's - in the most schematic possible view , it 's a coordination problem , right ?
there are a large number of people on the internet , a very small fraction of them have photos of the mermaid parade .
how do we get those people together to contribute that work ?
the classic answer is to form an institution , right ?
to draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals .
and i want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route .
first of all , when you form an institution , you take on a management problem , right ?
no good just hiring employees , you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth .
secondly , you have to bring structure into place .
right ? you have to have economic structure .
you have to have legal structure .
you have to have physical structure .
and that creates additional costs .
third , forming an institution is inherently exclusionary .
you notice we have n't got everybody who has a photo .
you ca n't hire everyone in a company , right ?
you ca n't recruit everyone into a governmental organization .
you have to exclude some people .
and fourth , as a result of that exclusion , you end up with a professional class . look at the change here .
we 've gone from people with photos to photographers .
right ? we 've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the mermaid parade , or whatever else they 're sent out to photograph .
when you build cooperation into the infrastructure , which is the flickr answer , you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals , rather than moving the individuals to the problem .
you arrange the coordination in the group , and by doing that you get the same outcome , without the institutional difficulties .
you lose the institutional imperative .
you lose the right to shape people 's work when it 's volunteer effort , but you also shed the institutional cost , which gives you greater flexibility .
what flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination .
and this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems .
right . you 'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone , and you stopped making plans .
you just said , " i 'll call you when i get there . "
" call me when you get off work . " right ?
that is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning .
right . we 're now able to do that kind of thing with groups .
to say instead of , we must make an advance plan , we must have a five-year projection of where the wikipedia is going to be , or whatever , you can just say , let 's coordinate the group effort , and let 's deal with it as we go , because we 're now well-enough coordinated that we do n't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do .
so here 's another example . this one 's somewhat more somber .
these are photos on flickr tagged " iraq . "
and everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the mermaid parade is even harder here .
there are more pictures . there are more photographers .
it 's taken over a wider geographic area .
the photos are spread out over a longer period of time .
and worst of all , that figure at the bottom , approximately ten photos per photographer , is a lie .
it 's mathematically true , but it does n't really talk about anything important - because in these systems , the average is n't really what matters .
what matters is this .
this is a graph of photographs tagged iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos .
and it 's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer .
you can see here , over at the end , our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos , and you can see there 's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos .
then there 's dozens of people who 've taken dozens of photos .
and by the time we get around here , we get ten or fewer photos , and then there 's this long , flat tail .
and by the time you get to the middle , you 've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each .
this is called a power-law distribution .
it appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like - this is often what you get . right ?
the math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever 's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever 's being measured , relative to the person in the first position .
so , we 'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos , and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did .
so , the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter .
but that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long , flat tail .
and curiously , in these systems , as they grow larger , the systems do n't converge ; they diverge more .
in bigger systems , the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer , so the imbalance increases .
you can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted . here 's how heavily : if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system , they account for three quarters of the photos taken - just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers .
if you go down to five percent , you 're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos .
if you go down to one percent , exclude 99 percent of the group effort , you 're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos .
and because of this left weighting , the average is actually here , way to the left .
and that sounds strange to our ears , but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount .
that sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same , but they 're not at all .
this is the math underlying the 80/20 rule . right ?
whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule , this is what 's going on . right ?
20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue , 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources - this is the shape people are talking about when that happens .
institutions only have two tools : carrots and sticks .
and the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone .
the costs of running the institution mean that you can not take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame .
the institutional model always pushes leftwards , treating these people as employees .
the institutional response is , i can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires - great , that 's what i 'll do .
the cooperative infrastructure model says , why do you want to give up a quarter of the value ?
if your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value , re-engineer the system .
do n't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people .
build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount .
so the coordination response asks not , how are these people as employees , but rather , what is their contribution like ? right ?
we have over here psycho milt , a flickr user , who has contributed one , and only one , photo titled " iraq . "
and here 's the photo . right . labeled , " bad day at work . "
right ? so the question is , do you want that photo ? yes or no .
the question is not , is psycho milt a good employee ?
and the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle .
when you 're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions , when you 're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want , that 's an institution-as-enabler world .
you can hire those people as employees , you can coordinate their work and you can get some output .
but when you 're down here , where the psycho milts of the world are adding one photo at a time , that 's institution as obstacle .
institutions hate being told they 're obstacles .
one of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation .
and the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n .
right ? so , when institutions are told they are obstacles , and that there are other ways of coordinating the value , they go through something a little bit like the kubler-ross stages - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - of reaction , being told you have a fatal illness : denial , anger , bargaining , acceptance .
most of the cooperative systems we 've seen have n't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase .
many , many institutions are still in denial , but we 're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining .
there 's a wonderful , small example going on right now .
in france , a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool , right , because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue .
you can follow this in the guardian .
it 's actually quite entertaining .
the bigger question is , what do you do about the value down here ?
right ? how do you capture that ?
and institutions , as i 've said , are prevented from capturing that .
steve ballmer , now ceo of microsoft , was criticizing linux a couple of years ago , and he said , " oh , this business of thousands of programmers contributing to linux , this is a myth .
we 've looked at who 's contributed to linux , and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who 've only done one thing . " right ?
you can hear this distribution under that complaint .
and you can see why , from ballmer 's point of view , that 's a bad idea , right ?
we hired this programmer , he came in , he drank our cokes and played foosball for three years and he had one idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right ? bad hire . right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the psycho milt question is , was it a good idea ?
what if it was a security patch ?
what if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit , of which windows has not some , -lsb- but -rsb- several ?
do you want that patch , right ?
the fact that a single programmer can , without having to move into a professional relation to an institution , improve linux once and never be seen from again , should terrify ballmer .
because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks , but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software , of file sharing , of the wikipedia . i 've used a lot of examples from flickr , but there are actually stories about this from all over .
meetup , a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you .
when scott heiferman founded meetup , he thought it would be used for , you know , train spotters and cat fanciers - classic affinity groups .
the inventors do n't know what the invention is .
number one group on meetup right now , most chapters in most cities with most members , most active ?
stay-at-home moms . right ?
in the suburbanized , dual-income united states , stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local , small-scale neighborhoods .
so they 're reinventing it , using these tools .
meetup is the platform , but the value here is in social infrastructure .
if you want to know what technology is going to change the world , do n't pay attention to 13-year-old boys - pay attention to young mothers , because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that does n't materially make their lives better .
this is so much more important than xbox , but it 's a lot less glitzy .
i think this is a revolution .
i think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged .
and i use that word advisedly .
it 's a revolution in that it 's a change in equilibrium .
it 's a whole new way of doing things , which includes new downsides .
in the united states right now , a woman named judith miller is in jail for not having given to a federal grand jury her sources - she 's a reporter for the new york times - her sources , in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case .
and journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws .
the shield laws are our laws - pretty much a patchwork of state laws - that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source .
this is happening , however , against the background of the rise of web logging .
web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization .
it has de-professionalized publishing .
want to publish globally anything you think today ?
it is a one-button operation that you can do for free .
that has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization .
and so the shield law , as much as we want it - we want a professional class of truth-tellers - it is becoming increasingly incoherent , because the institution is becoming incoherent .
there are people in the states right now tying themselves into knots , trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists .
and the answer to that question is , it does n't matter , because that 's not the right question .
journalism was an answer to an even more important question , which is , how will society be informed ?
how will they share ideas and opinions ?
and if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism , it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class .
so as much as we want the shield laws , the background - the institution to which they were attached - is becoming incoherent .
here 's another example .
pro-ana , the pro-ana groups .
these are groups of teenage girls who have taken on web logs , bulletin boards , other kinds of cooperative infrastructure , and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice .
they post pictures of thin models , which they call " thinspiration . "
they have little slogans , like " salvation through starvation . "
they even have lance armstrong-style bracelets , these red bracelets , which signify , in the small group , i am trying to maintain my eating disorder .
they trade tips , like , if you feel like eating something , clean a toilet or the litter box . the feeling will pass .
we 're used to support groups being beneficial .
we have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial .
but it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral .
a support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group .
now , when the larger group is a bunch of drunks , and the small group wants to stay sober , then we think , that 's a great support group .
but when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice , then we 're horrified .
what 's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we 're used to , came from the institutions that were framing them , and not from the infrastructure .
once the infrastructure becomes generically available , the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone , including people pursuing these kinds of goals .
so , there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides . and of course , in the current environment , one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs , and taking advantage of these .
this is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack .
it was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools . and doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week .
now , this is the part of the talk where i tell you what 's going to come as a result of all of this , but i 'm running out of time , which is good , because i do n't know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right . as with the printing press , if it 's really a revolution , it does n't take us from point a to point b.
it takes us from point a to chaos .
the printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos , moving from a world where the catholic church was the sort of organizing political force to the treaty of westphalia , when we finally knew what the new unit was : the nation state .
now , i 'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this . 50 .
50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage , and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives - like deciding in advance what 's going to happen , or the profit motive - the more leverage they 'll get .
and institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure , and the more rigidly managed , and the more they rely on information monopolies , the greater the pressure is going to be .
and that 's going to happen one arena at a time , one institution at a time . the forces are general , but the results are going to be specific .
and so the point here is not , " this is wonderful , " or " we 're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework . "
it 's going to be much more complicated than that .
but the point is that it 's going to be a massive readjustment .
and since we can see it in advance and know it 's coming , my argument is essentially : we might as well get good at it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- martin luther king did not say , " i have a nightmare , " when he inspired the civil rights movements .
he said , " i have a dream . "
and i have a dream .
i have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare , and this is going to be a challenge , because , if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times , nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic .
i think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times , " the road . "
it 's a beautiful piece of filmmaking , but everything is desolate , everything is dead .
and just a father and son trying to survive , walking along the road .
and i think the environmental movement of which i am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future .
for too long , we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what 's going to happen .
we have focused on the worst-case scenario .
we have focused on the problems .
and we have not thought enough about the solutions .
we 've used fear , if you like , to grab people 's attention .
and any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism .
it 's part of the fight and flight mechanism , that when an animal is frightened - think of a deer .
a deer freezes very , very still , poised to run away .
and i think that 's what we 're doing when we 're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change .
people are freezing and running away because we 're using fear .
and i think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is .
what would it be like to be improving the human lot ?
and one of the problems that we face , i think , is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is , an economic definition of what progress is - that somehow , if we get the right numbers to go up , we 're going to be better off , whether that 's on the stock market , whether that 's with gdp and economic growth , that somehow life is going to get better .
this is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear - that more is better .
come on . in the western world , we have enough .
maybe some parts of the world do n't , but we have enough .
and we 've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations .
in fact , the architect of our national accounting system , simon kuznets , in the 1930s , said that , " a nation 's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income . "
but we 've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff .
and indeed , this is probably historical , and it had its time .
in the second world war , we needed to produce a lot of stuff .
and indeed , we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of europe , and we had to rebuild it afterwards .
and so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce .
but as early as 1968 , this visionary man , robert kennedy , at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign , gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product and he finished his talk with the phrase , that , " the gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile . "
how crazy is that ? that our measure of progress , our dominant measure of progress in society , is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile ?
i believe , if kennedy was alive today , he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile .
he 'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice , sustainability and people 's well-being .
and actually , social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world .
this is from a global survey .
it 's asking people , what do they want .
and unsurprisingly , people all around the world say that what they want is happiness , for themselves , for their families , their children , their communities .
okay , they think money is slightly important .
it 's there , but it 's not nearly as important as happiness , and it 's not nearly as important as love .
we all need to love and be loved in life .
it 's not nearly as important as health .
we want to be healthy and live a full life .
these seem to be natural human aspirations .
why are statisticians not measuring these ?
why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms , instead of just how much stuff we have ?
and really , this is what i 've done with my adult life - is think about how do we measure happiness , how do we measure well-being , how can we do that within environmental limits .
and we created , at the organization that i work for , the new economics foundation , something we call the happy planet index , because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy .
why do n't we create a measure of progress that shows that ?
and what we do , is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens .
that should be the goal of every nation on the planet .
but we have to remember that there 's a fundamental input to that , and that is how many of the planet 's resources we use .
we all have one planet . we all have to share it .
it is the ultimate scarce resource , the one planet that we share .
and economics is very interested in scarcity .
when it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome , it thinks in terms of efficiency .
it thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck .
and this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use .
it is an efficiency measure .
and probably the easiest way to show you that , is to show you this graph .
running horizontally along the graph , is " ecological footprint , " which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet .
more is bad .
running vertically upwards , is a measure called " happy life years . "
it 's about the well-being of nations .
it 's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy .
it 's like quality and quantity of life in nations .
and the yellow dot there you see , is the global average .
now , there 's a huge array of nations around that global average .
to the top right of the graph , are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being , but they 're using a lot of planet to get there .
they are the u.s.a. , other western countries going across in those triangles and a few gulf states in there actually .
conversely , at the bottom left of the graph , are countries that are not producing much well-being - typically , sub-saharan africa .
in hobbesian terms , life is short and brutish there .
the average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years .
malaria , hiv / aids are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world .
but now for the good news !
there are some countries up there , yellow triangles , that are doing better than global average , that are heading up towards the top left of the graph .
this is an aspirational graph .
we want to be top left , where good lives do n't cost the earth .
they 're latin american .
the country on its own up at the top is a place i have n't been to .
maybe some of you have .
costa rica .
costa rica - average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years .
that is longer than in the usa .
they are , according to the latest gallup world poll , the happiest nation on the planet - than anybody ; more than switzerland and denmark .
they are the happiest place .
they are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in -lsb- the -rsb- western world - a quarter of the resources .
what 's going on there ?
what 's happening in costa rica ?
we can look at some of the data .
99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources .
their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021 .
they abolished the army in 1949 - 1949 .
and they invested in social programs - health and education .
they have one of the highest literacy rates in latin america and in the world .
and they have that latin vibe , do n't they .
they have the social connectedness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the challenge is , that possibly - and the thing we might have to think about - is that the future might not be north american , might not be western european .
it might be latin american .
and the challenge , really , is to pull the global average up here .
that 's what we need to do .
and if we 're going to do that , we need to pull countries from the bottom , and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph .
and then we 're starting to create a happy planet .
that 's one way of looking at it .
another way of looking at it is looking at time trends .
we do n't have good data going back for every country in the world , but for some of the richest countries , the oecd group , we do .
and this is the trend in well-being over that time , a small increase , but this is the trend in ecological footprint .
and so in strict happy-planet methodology , we 've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to .
and the point really is , is that i think , probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening .
it 's actually not very long away .
it 's half a human lifetime away .
a child entering school today will be my age in 2050 .
this is not the very distant future .
this is what the u.k. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like .
and i put it to you , that is not business as usual .
that is changing our business .
that is changing the way we create our organizations , we do our government policy and we live our lives .
and the point is , we need to carry on increasing well-being .
no one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce .
none of us , i think , want human progress to stop .
i think we want it to carry on .
i think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing .
and i think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in .
i think this is what they want . they want quality of life to keep increasing .
they want to hold on to what they 've got .
and if we 're going to engage them , i think that 's what we 've got to do .
and that means we have to really increase efficiency even more .
now that 's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that , but the point is we need to turn those curves .
and this is where i think we can take a leaf out of systems theory , systems engineers , where they create feedback loops , put the right information at the right point of time .
human beings are very motivated by the " now . "
you put a smart meter in your home , and you see how much electricity you 're using right now , how much it 's costing you , your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly .
what would that look like for society ?
why is it , on the radio news every evening , i hear the ftse 100 , the dow jones , the dollar pound ratio - i do n't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news .
and why do i hear that ?
why do n't i hear how much energy britain used yesterday , or american used yesterday ?
did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions ?
that 's how you create a collective goal .
you put it out there into the media and start thinking about it .
and we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being at a government level , they might create national accounts of well-being .
at a business level , you might look at the well-being of your employees , which we know is really linked to creativity , which is linked to innovation , and we 're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues .
at a personal level , we need these nudges too .
maybe we do n't quite need the data , but we need reminders .
in the u.k. , we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do - never my best thing .
what are these for happiness ?
what are the five things that you should do every day to be happier ?
we did a project for the government office of science a couple of years ago , a big program called the foresight program - lots and lots of people - involved lots of experts - everything evidence based - a huge tome .
but a piece of work we did was on : what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life ?
and the point of these is they are , not quite , the secrets of happiness , but they are things that i think happiness will flow out the side from .
and the first of these is to connect , is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life .
do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do , and energy ?
keep building them .
the second one is be active .
the fastest way out of a bad mood : step outside , go for a walk , turn the radio on and dance .
being active is great for our positive mood .
the third one is take notice .
how aware are you of things going on around the world , the seasons changing , people around you ?
do you notice what 's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge ?
based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness , cognitive behavioral therapy , -lsb- very -rsb- strong for our well being .
the fourth is keep learning and keep is important - learning throughout the whole life course .
older people who keep learning and are curious , they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down .
but it does n't have to be formal learning ; it 's not knowledge based .
it 's more curiosity .
it can be learning to cook a new dish , picking up an instrument you forgot as a child .
keep learning .
and the final one is that most anti-economic of activities , but give .
our generosity , our altruism , our compassion , are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain .
we feel good if we give .
you can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning .
you tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people .
you measure their happiness at the end of the day , those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves .
and these five ways , which we put onto these handy postcards , i would say , do n't have to cost the earth .
they do n't have any carbon content .
they do n't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied .
and so i think it 's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth .
now , martin luther king , on the eve of his death , gave an incredible speech .
he said , " i know there are challenges ahead , there may be trouble ahead , but i fear no one . i do n't care .
i have been to the mountain top , and i have seen the promised land . "
now , he was a preacher , but i believe the environmental movement and , in fact , the business community , government , needs to go to the top of the mountain top , and it needs to look out , and it needs to see the promised land , or the land of promise , and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want .
and not only that , we need to create a great transition to get there , and we need to pave that great transition with good things .
human beings want to be happy .
pave them with the five ways .
and we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them - something like the happy planet index .
and then i believe that we can all create a world we all want , where happiness does not cost the earth .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the story i wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an iranian artist , as an iranian woman artist , as an iranian woman artist living in exile .
well , it has its pluses and minuses .
on the dark side , politics does n't seem to escape people like me .
every iranian artist , in one form or another , is political .
politics have defined our lives .
if you 're living in iran , you 're facing censorship , harassment , arrest , torture - at times , execution .
if you 're living outside like me , you 're faced with life in exile - the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family .
therefore , we do n't find the moral , emotional , psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility .
oddly enough , an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice , the speaker of my people , even if i have , indeed , no access to my own country .
also , people like myself , we 're fighting two battles on different grounds .
we 're being critical of the west , the perception of the west about our identity - about the image that is constructed about us , about our women , about our politics , about our religion .
we are there to take pride and insist on respect .
and at the same time , we 're fighting another battle .
that is our regime , our government - our atrocious government , -lsb- that -rsb- has done every crime in order to stay in power .
our artists are at risk .
we are in a position of danger .
we pose a threat to the order of the government .
but ironically , this situation has empowered all of us , because we are considered , as artists , central to the cultural , political , social discourse in iran .
we are there to inspire , to provoke , to mobilize , to bring hope to our people .
we are the reporters of our people , and are communicators to the outside world .
art is our weapon .
culture is a form of resistance .
i envy sometimes the artists of the west for their freedom of expression .
for the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics .
from the fact that they are only serving one audience , mainly the western culture .
but also , i worry about the west , because often in this country , in this western world that we have , culture risks being a form of entertainment .
our people depend on our artists , and culture is beyond communication .
my journey as an artist started from a very , very personal place .
i did not start to make social commentary about my country .
the first one that you see in front of you is actually when i first returned to iran after being separated for a good 12 years .
it was after the islamic revolution of 1979 .
while i was absent from iran , the islamic revolution had descended on iran and had entirely transformed the country from persian to the islamic culture .
i came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that i found my place in the society .
but instead , i found a country that was totally ideological and that i did n't recognize anymore .
more so , i became very interested , as i was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions , i became immersed in the study of the islamic revolution - how , indeed , it had incredibly transformed the lives of iranian women .
i found the subject of iranian women immensely interesting , in the way the women of iran , historically , seemed to embody the political transformation .
so in a way , by studying a woman , you can read the structure and the ideology of the country .
so i made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life , and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse - the subject of martyrdom , the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of god , faith , but violence and crime and cruelty .
for me , this became incredibly important .
and yet , i had an unusual position toward this .
i was an outsider who had come back to iran to find my place , but i was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the islamic revolution .
this changed slowly as i found my voice and i discovered things that i did n't know i would discover .
so my art became slightly more critical .
my knife became a little sharper .
and i fell into a life in exile .
i am a nomadic artist .
i work in morocco , in turkey , in mexico .
i go everywhere to make believe it 's iran .
now i am making films .
last year , i finished a film called " women without men . "
" women without men " returns to history , but another part of our iranian history .
it goes to 1953 when american cia exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader , dr. mossadegh .
the book is written by an iranian woman , shahrnush parsipur .
it 's a magical realist novel .
this book is banned , and she spent five years in prison .
my obsession with this book , and the reason i made this into a film , is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female - traditionally , historically in iran - and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change , freedom and democracy - while the country of iran , equally , as if another character , also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions .
i made this film because i felt it 's important for it to speak to the westerners about our history as a country .
that all of you seem to remember iran after the islamic revolution .
that iran was once a secular society , and we had democracy , and this democracy was stolen from us by the american government , by the british government .
this film also speaks to the iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so islamicized - in the way we looked , in the way we played music , in the way we had intellectual life .
and most of all , in the way that we fought for democracy .
these are some of the shots actually from my film .
these are some of the images of the coup .
and we made this film in casablanca , recreating all the shots .
this film tried to find a balance between telling a political story , but also a feminine story .
being a visual artist , indeed , i am foremost interested to make art - to make art that transcends politics , religion , the question of feminism , and become an important , timeless , universal work of art .
the challenge i have is how to do that .
how to tell a political story but an allegorical story .
how to move you with your emotions , but also make your mind work .
these are some of the images and the characters of the film .
now comes the green movement - the summer of 2009 , as my film is released - the uprising begins in the streets of tehran .
what is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film , the cry for democracy and social justice , repeats itself now again in tehran .
the green movement significantly inspired the world .
it brought a lot of attention to all those iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy .
what was most significant for me was , once again , the presence of the women .
they 're absolutely inspirational for me .
if in the islamic revolution , the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and did n't have a voice , now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of tehran - women who were educated , forward thinking , non-traditional , sexually open , fearless and seriously feminist .
these women and those young men united iranians across the world , inside and outside .
i then discovered why i take so much inspiration from iranian women .
that , under all circumstances , they have pushed the boundary .
they have confronted the authority .
they have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way .
and once again , they proved themselves .
i stand here to say that iranian women have found a new voice , and their voice is giving me my voice .
and it 's a great honor to be an iranian woman and an iranian artist , even if i have to operate in the west only for now .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is about a hidden corner of the labor market .
it 's the world of people who need to work ultra-flexibly , if they 're to work at all .
so think , for instance , of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition , or somebody who 's caring for a dependent adult , or a parent with complex child care needs .
their availability for work can be such that it 's , " a few hours today .
maybe i can work tomorrow , but i do n't know if and when yet . "
and it 's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly .
which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible local people booked completely ad hoc around when that person wants to work .
imagine that you run a cafe .
it 's mid-morning , the place is filling up .
you 're going to have a busy lunchtime rush .
if you could get two extra workers for 90 minutes to start in an hour 's time , you 'd do it , but they 'd have to be reliable , inducted in how your cafe works .
they 'd have to be available at very competitive rates .
they 'd have to be bookable in about the next minute .
in reality , no recruitment agency wants to handle that sort of business , so you are going to muddle by , understaffed .
and it 's not just caterers , it 's hoteliers , it 's retailers , it 's anyone who provides services to the public or businesses .
there 's all sorts of organizations that can use these pools of very flexible people , possibly already once they 've been inducted .
at this level of the labor market , what you need is a marketplace for spare hours .
they do exist . here 's how they work .
so in this example , a distribution company has said , we 've got a rush order that we 've got to get out of the warehouse tomorrow morning .
show us everyone who 's available .
it 's found 31 workers .
everybody on this screen is genuinely available at those specific hours tomorrow .
they 're all contactable in time for this booking .
they 've all defined the terms on which they will accept bookings .
and this booking is within all the parameters for each individual .
and they would all be legally compliant by doing this booking .
of course , they 're all trained to work in warehouses .
you can select as many of them as you want .
they 're from multiple agencies .
it 's calculated the charge rate for each person for this specific booking .
and it 's monitoring their reliability .
the people on the top row are the provenly reliable ones .
they 're likely to be more expensive .
in an alternative view of this pool of local , very flexible people , here 's a market research company , and it 's inducted maybe 25 local people in how to do street interviewing .
and they 've got a new campaign . they want to run it next week .
and they 're looking at how many of the people they 've inducted are available each hour next week .
and they 'll then decide when to do their street interviews .
but is there more that could be done for this corner of the labor market ?
because right now there are so many people who need whatever economic opportunity they can get .
let 's make it personal .
imagine that a young woman - base of the economic pyramid , very little prospect of getting a job - what economic activity could she theoretically engage in ?
well , she might be willing to work odd hours in a call center , in a reception area , in a mail room .
she may be interested in providing local services to her community : babysitting , local deliveries , pet care .
she may have possessions that she would like to trade at times she does n't need them .
so she might have a sofa bed in her front room that she would like to let out .
she might have a bike , a video games console she only uses occasionally .
and you 're probably thinking - because you 're all very web-aware - yes , and we 're in the era of collaborative consumption , so she can go online and do all this .
she can go to airbnb to list her sofa bed , she can go to taskrabbit.com and say , " i want to do local deliveries , " and so on .
these are good sites , but i believe we can go a step further .
and the key to that is a philosophy that we call modern markets for all .
markets have changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years , but only for organizations at the top of the economy .
if you 're a wall street trader , you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time , executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you 've set .
it analyzes supply and demand and pricing and tells you where your next wave of opportunities are coming from .
it manages counterparty risk in incredibly sophisticated ways .
it 's all extremely low overhead .
what have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last 20 years ?
basically classified adverts with a search facility .
so why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading , and what the rest of us have ?
a modern market is more than a website ; it 's a web of interoperable marketplaces , back office mechanisms , regulatory regimes , settlement mechanisms , liquidity sources and so on .
and when a wall street trader comes into work in the morning , she does not write a listing for every financial derivative she wants to sell today and then post that listing on multiple websites and wait for potential buyers to get in touch and start negotiating the terms on which she might trade .
in the early days of this modern markets technology , the financial institutions worked out how they could leverage their buying power , their back office processes , their relationships , their networks to shape these new markets that would create all this new activity .
they asked governments for supporting regulatory regimes , and in a lot of cases they got it .
but throughout the economy , there are facilities that could likewise leverage a new generation of markets for the benefit of all of us .
and those facilities - i 'm talking about things like the mechanisms that prove our identity , the licensing authorities that know what each of us is allowed to do legally at any given time , the processes by which we resolve disputes through official channels .
these mechanisms , these facilities are not in the gift of craigslist or gumtree or yahoo , they 're controlled by the state .
and the policymakers who sit on top of them are , i suggest , simply not thinking about how those facilities could be used to underpin a whole new era of markets .
like everyone else , those policymakers are taking it for granted that modern markets are the preserve of organizations powerful enough to create them for themselves .
suppose we stopped taking that for granted .
suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of britain or the president of the u.s. , or the leader of any other developed nation , woke up and said , " i 'm never going to be able to create all the jobs i need in the current climate .
i have got to focus on whatever economic opportunity i can get to my citizens .
and for that they have to be able to access state-of-the-art markets .
how do i make that happen ? "
and i think i can see a few eyes rolling .
politicians in a big , complex , sophisticated i.t. project ?
oh , that 's going to be a disaster waiting to happen .
not necessarily .
there is a precedent for technology-enabled service that has been initiated by politicians in multiple countries and has been hugely successful : national lotteries .
let 's take britain as an example .
our government did n't design the national lottery , it did n't fund the national lottery , it does n't operate the national lottery .
it simply passed the national lottery act and this is what followed .
this act defines what a national lottery will look like .
it specifies certain benefits that the state can uniquely bestow on the operators .
and it puts some obligations on those operators .
in terms of spreading gambling activity to the masses , this was an unqualified success .
but let 's suppose that our aim is to bring new economic activity to the base of the pyramid .
could we use the same model ?
i believe we could .
so imagine that policymakers outlined a facility .
let 's call it national e-markets , nems for short .
think of it as a regulated public utility .
so it 's on a par with the water supply or the road network .
and it 's a series of markets for low-level trade that can be fulfilled by a person or a small company .
and government has certain benefits it can uniquely bestow on these markets .
it 's about public spending going through these markets to buy public services at the local level .
it 's about interfacing these markets direct into the highest official channels in the land .
it 's about enshrining government 's role as a publicist for these markets .
it 's about deregulating some sectors so that local people can enter them .
so , taxi journeys might be one example .
and there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators , and the key one is , of course , that the operators pay for everything , including all the interfacing into the public sector .
so imagine that the operators make their return by building a percentage markup into each transaction .
imagine that there 's a concession period defined of maybe 15 years in which they can take all these benefits and run with them .
and imagine that the consortia who bid to run it are told , whoever comes in at the lowest percentage markup on each transaction to fund the whole thing will get the deal .
so government then exits the frame .
this is now in the hands of the consortium .
either they are going to unlock an awful lot of economic opportunity and make a percentage on all of it or it 's all going to crash and burn , which is tough on their shareholders .
it does n't bother the taxpayer necessarily .
and there would be no constraints on alternative markets .
so this would just be one more choice among millions of internet forums .
but it could be very different , because having access to those state-backed facilities could incentivize this consortium to seriously invest in the service .
because they would have to get a lot of these small transactions going to start making their return .
so we 're talking about sectors like home hair care , the hire of toys , farm work , hire of clothes even , meals delivered to your door , services for tourists , home care .
this would be a world of very small trades , but very well-informed , because national e-markets will deliver data .
so this is a local person potentially deciding whether to enter the babysitting market .
and they might be aware that they would have to fund vetting and training if they wanted to go into that market .
they 'd have to do assessment interviews with local parents who wanted a pool of babysitters .
is it worth their while ?
should they be looking at other sectors ?
should they be moving to another part of the country where there 's a shortage of babysitters ?
this kind of data can become routine .
and this data can be used by investors .
so if there 's a problem with a shortage of babysitters in some parts of the country and the problem is nobody can afford the vetting and training , an investor can pay for it and the system will tithe back the enhanced earnings of the individuals for maybe the next two years .
this is a world of atomized capitalism .
so it 's small trades by small people , but it 's very informed , safe , convenient , low-overhead and immediate .
some rough research suggests this could unlock around 100 million pounds ' worth a day of new economic activity in a country the size of the u.k.
does that sound improbable to you ?
that 's what a lot of people said about turbo trading in financial exchanges 20 years ago .
do not underestimate the transformative power of truly modern markets .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to share my photography .
or is it photography ?
because , of course , this is a photograph that you ca n't take with your camera .
yet , my interest in photography started as i got my first digital camera at the age of 15 .
it mixed with my earlier passion for drawing , but it was a bit different , because using the camera , the process was in the planning instead .
and when you take a photograph with a camera , the process ends when you press the trigger .
so to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time .
i felt like anyone could do that .
so i wanted to create something different , something where the process starts when you press the trigger .
photos like this : construction going on along a busy road .
but it has an unexpected twist .
and despite that , it retains a level of realism .
or photos like these - both dark and colorful , but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism .
when i say realism , i mean photo-realism .
because , of course , it 's not something you can capture really , but i always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph .
photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick .
so it 's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really .
but what 's the trick that makes it look realistic ?
is it something about the details or the colors ?
is it something about the light ?
what creates the illusion ?
sometimes the perspective is the illusion .
but in the end , it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface .
it 's not really what is realistic , it 's what we think looks realistic really .
so i think the basics are quite simple .
i just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality .
and let me show you a simple example .
here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects , something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world .
but combined in a certain way , they can create something that still looks three-dimensional , like it could exist .
but at the same time , we know it ca n't .
so we trick our brains , because our brain simply does n't accept the fact that it does n't really make sense .
and i see the same process with combining photographs .
it 's just really about combining different realities .
so the things that make a photograph look realistic , i think it 's the things that we do n't even think about , the things all around us in our daily lives .
but when combining photographs , this is really important to consider , because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow .
so i would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result .
as you can see , these images are n't really special .
but combined , they can create something like this .
so the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective .
secondly , photos combined should have the same type of light .
and these two images both fulfill these two requirements - shot at the same height and in the same type of light .
the third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless .
make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed .
so by matching color , contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images , adding photographic defects like depth of field , desaturated colors and noise , we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image , despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically .
so here 's another example .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what 's manipulated .
but this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations .
i personally think that it 's easier to actually create a place than to find a place , because then you do n't need to compromise with the ideas in your head .
but it does require a lot of planning .
and getting this idea during winter , i knew that i had several months to plan it , to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically .
so for example , the fish was captured on a fishing trip .
the shores are from a different location .
the underwater part was captured in a stone pit .
and yeah , i even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more swedish .
so to achieve a realistic result , i think it comes down to planning .
it always starts with a sketch , an idea .
then it 's about combining the different photographs .
and here every piece is very well planned .
and if you do a good job capturing the photos , the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic .
so all the tools are out there , and the only thing that limits us is our imagination .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , the history of music and television on the internet in three minutes .
a ted medley - a tedley .
♫ it 's nine o ' clock on a saturday ♫ ♫ the record store 's closed for the night ♫ ♫ so i fire up the old itunes music store ♫ ♫ and soon i am feelin ' all right ♫ ♫ i know steve jobs can find me a melody ♫ ♫ with one dollar pricing that rocks ♫ ♫ i can type in the track and get album names back ♫ ♫ while still in my pjs and socks ♫ ♫ sell us a song , you 're the music man ♫ ♫ my ipod 's still got 10 gigs to go ♫ ♫ yes , we might prefer more compatibility ♫
♫ but steve likes to run the whole show ♫ ♫ i heard " desperate housewives " was great last night ♫ ♫ but i had a bad piece of cod ♫ ♫ as i threw up my meal , i thought , " it 's no big deal " ♫ ♫ i 'll watch it tonight on my ' pod ♫ ♫ and now all of the networks are joining in ♫ ♫ two bucks a show without ads ♫ ♫ it 's a business those guys always wanted to try ♫ ♫ but only steve jobs had the ' nads ♫ ♫ they say we 're young , do n't watch tv ♫
♫ they say the internet is all we see ♫ ♫ but that 's not true ; they 've got it wrong ♫ ♫ see , all our shows are just two minutes long ♫ ♫ hey ♫ ♫ i got youtube ♫ ♫ i got youtube ♫ and now , ladies and gentlemen , a tribute to the recording industry association of america - the riaa !
♫ young man , you were surfin ' along ♫ ♫ and then , young man , you downloaded a song ♫ ♫ and then , dumb man , copied it to your ' pod ♫ ♫ then a phone call came to tell you ... ♫ ♫ you 've just been sued by the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ you 've just been screwed by the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ their attorneys say you committed a crime ♫ ♫ and there 'd better not be a next time ♫ ♫ they 've lost their minds at the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ justice is blind at the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ you 're depriving the bands ♫ ♫ you are learning to steal ♫
♫ you ca n't do whatever you feel ♫ ♫ cd sales have dropped every year ♫ ♫ they 're not greedy , they 're just quaking with fear ♫ ♫ yes indeedy , what if their end is near ♫ ♫ and we download all our music ♫ ♫ yeah , that would piss off the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ no plastic discs from the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ what a way to make friends ♫ ♫ it 's a plan that ca n't fail ♫ ♫ all your customers off to jail ♫ ♫ who 'll be next for the r-i-a-a ? ♫ ♫ what else is vexing the r-i-a-a ? ♫
♫ maybe whistling a tune ♫ ♫ maybe humming along ♫ ♫ maybe mocking ' em in a song ♫ i 'm a huge believer in hands-on education .
but you have to have the right tools .
if i 'm going to teach my daughter about electronics , i 'm not going to give her a soldering iron .
and similarly , she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands .
so my wonderful student sam and i decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of : play-doh .
and so we spent a summer looking at different play-doh recipes .
and these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough - pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen .
we have two favorite recipes - one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt .
and they 're great . we can make great little sculptures with these .
but the really cool thing about them is when we put them together .
you see that really salty play-doh ?
well , it conducts electricity .
and this is nothing new .
it turns out that regular play-doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity , and high school physics teachers have used that for years .
but our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial play-doh .
and that sugar dough ?
well it 's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough .
so what does that mean ?
well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits - circuits that the most creative , tiny , little hands can build on their own .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so i want to do a little demo for you .
so if i take this salt dough , again , it 's like the play-dough you probably made as kids , and i plug it in - it 's a two-lead battery pack , simple battery pack , you can buy them at radio shack and pretty much anywhere else - we can actually then light things up .
but if any of you have studied electrical engineering , we can also create a short circuit .
if i push these together , the light turns off .
right , the current wants to run through the play-dough , not through that led .
if i separate them again , i have some light .
well now if i take that sugar dough , the sugar dough does n't want to conduct electricity .
it 's like a wall to the electricity .
if i place that between , now all the dough is touching , but if i stick that light back in , i have light .
in fact , i could even add some movement to my sculptures .
if i want a spinning tail , let 's grab a motor , put some play-dough on it , stick it on and we have spinning .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and once you have the basics , we can make a slightly more complicated circuit .
we call this our sushi circuit . it 's very popular with kids .
i plug in again the power to it .
and now i can start talking about parallel and series circuits .
i can start plugging in lots of lights .
and we can start talking about things like electrical load .
what happens if i put in lots of lights and then add a motor ?
it 'll dim .
we can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we 've done .
you could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this .
so this is all in your home kitchen .
we 've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab .
we have a website , it 's all there . these are the home recipes .
we 've got some videos . you can make them yourselves .
and it 's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone .
we 've had a mom in utah who used them with her kids , to a science researcher in the u.k. , and curriculum developers in hawaii .
so i would encourage you all to grab some play-doh , grab some salt , grab some sugar and start playing .
we do n't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers , but maybe we should .
have fun . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a clergyman , you can imagine how out of place i feel .
i feel like a fish out of water , or maybe an owl out of the air .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was preaching in san jose some time ago , and my friend mark kvamme , who helped introduce me to this conference , brought several ceos and leaders of some of the companies here in the silicon valley to have breakfast with me , or i with them .
and i was so stimulated .
and had such - it was an eye-opening experience to hear them talk about the world that is yet to come through technology and science .
i know that we 're near the end of this conference , and some of you may be wondering why they have a speaker from the field of religion .
richard can answer that , because he made that decision .
but some years ago i was on an elevator in philadelphia , coming down .
i was to address a conference at a hotel .
and on that elevator a man said , " i hear billy graham is staying in this hotel . "
and another man looked in my direction and said , " yes , there he is . he 's on this elevator with us . "
and this man looked me up and down for about 10 seconds , and he said , " my , what an anticlimax ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i hope that you wo n't feel that these few moments with me is not a - is an anticlimax , after all these tremendous talks that you 've heard , and addresses , which i intend to listen to every one of them .
but i was on an airplane in the east some years ago , and the man sitting across the aisle from me was the mayor of charlotte , north carolina .
his name was john belk . some of you will probably know him .
and there was a drunk man on there , and he got up out of his seat two or three times , and he was making everybody upset by what he was trying to do .
and he was slapping the stewardess and pinching her as she went by , and everybody was upset with him .
and finally , john belk said , " do you know who 's sitting here ? "
and the man said , " no , who ? "
he said , " it 's billy graham , the preacher . "
he said , " you do n't say ! "
and he turned to me , and he said , " put her there ! "
he said , " your sermons have certainly helped me . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i suppose that that 's true with thousands of people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i know that as you have been peering into the future , and as we 've heard some of it here tonight , i would like to live in that age and see what is going to be .
but i wo n't , because i 'm 80 years old . this is my eightieth year , and i know that my time is brief .
i have phlebitis at the moment , in both legs , and that 's the reason that i had to have a little help in getting up here , because i have parkinson 's disease in addition to that , and some other problems that i wo n't talk about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this is not the first time that we 've had a technological revolution .
we 've had others .
and there 's one that i want to talk about .
in one generation , the nation of the people of israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the near east .
a man by the name of david came to the throne , and king david became one of the great leaders of his generation .
he was a man of tremendous leadership .
he had the favor of god with him .
he was a brilliant poet , philosopher , writer , soldier - with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today .
but about two centuries before david , the hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron , and , slowly , that skill spread .
but they would n't allow the israelis to look into it , or to have any .
but david changed all of that , and he introduced the iron age to israel .
and the bible says that david laid up great stores of iron , and which archaeologists have found , that in present-day palestine , there are evidences of that generation .
now , instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones , israel now had iron plows , and sickles , and hoes and military weapons .
and in the course of one generation , israel was completely changed .
the introduction of iron , in some ways , had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation .
and david found that there were many problems that technology could not solve .
there were many problems still left .
and they 're still with us , and you have n't solved them , and i have n't heard anybody here speak to that .
how do we solve these three problems that i 'd like to mention ?
the first one that david saw was human evil .
where does it come from ?
how do we solve it ?
over again and again in the psalms , which gladstone said was the greatest book in the world , david describes the evils of the human race .
and yet he says , " he restores my soul . "
have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are ?
on one hand , we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology , as this conference vividly demonstrates .
we 've seen under the sea , three miles down , or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future .
but on the other hand , something is wrong .
our battleships , our soldiers , are on a frontier now , almost ready to go to war with iraq .
now , what causes this ?
why do we have these wars in every generation , and in every part of the world ?
and revolutions ?
we ca n't get along with other people , even in our own families .
we find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we ca n't break .
racism and injustice and violence sweep our world , bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death .
even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle .
i would like to see oracle take up that , or some other technological geniuses work on this .
how do we change man , so that he does n't lie and cheat , and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever ?
the bible says the problem is within us , within our hearts and our souls .
our problem is that we are separated from our creator , which we call god , and we need to have our souls restored , something only god can do .
jesus said , " for out of the heart come evil thoughts : murders , sexual immorality , theft , false testimonies , slander . "
the british philosopher bertrand russell was not a religious man , but he said , " it 's in our hearts that the evil lies , and it 's from our hearts that it must be plucked out . "
albert einstein - i was just talking to someone , when i was speaking at princeton , and i met mr. einstein .
he did n't have a doctor 's degree , because he said nobody was qualified to give him one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he made this statement .
he said , " it 's easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man . "
and many of you , i 'm sure , have thought about that and puzzled over it .
you 've seen people take beneficial technological advances , such as the internet we 've heard about tonight , and twist them into something corrupting .
you 've seen brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down whole systems .
the oklahoma city bombing was simple technology , horribly used .
the problem is not technology .
the problem is the person or persons using it .
king david said that he knew the depths of his own soul .
he could n't free himself from personal problems and personal evils that included murder and adultery .
yet king david sought god 's forgiveness , and said , " you can restore my soul . "
you see , the bible teaches that we 're more than a body and a mind .
we are a soul .
and there 's something inside of us that is beyond our understanding .
that 's the part of us that yearns for god , or something more than we find in technology .
your soul is that part of you that yearns for meaning in life , and which seeks for something beyond this life .
it 's the part of you that yearns , really , for god .
i find -lsb- that -rsb- young people all over the world are searching for something .
they do n't know what it is . i speak at many universities , and i have many questions and answer periods , and whether it 's cambridge , or harvard , or oxford - i 've spoken at all of those universities .
i 'm going to harvard in about three or four - no , it 's about two months from now - to give a lecture .
and i 'll be asked the same questions that i was asked the last few times i 've been there .
and it 'll be on these questions : where did i come from ? why am i here ? where am i going ?
what 's life all about ? why am i here ?
even if you have no religious belief , there are times when you wonder that there 's something else .
thomas edison also said , " when you see everything that happens in the world of science , and in the working of the universe , you can not deny that there 's a captain on the bridge . "
i remember once , i sat beside mrs. gorbachev at a white house dinner .
i went to ambassador dobrynin , whom i knew very well .
and i 'd been to russia several times under the communists , and they 'd given me marvelous freedom that i did n't expect .
and i knew mr. dobrynin very well , and i said , " i 'm going to sit beside mrs. gorbachev tonight .
what shall i talk to her about ? "
and he surprised me with the answer .
he said , " talk to her about religion and philosophy .
that 's what she 's really interested in . "
i was a little bit surprised , but that evening that 's what we talked about , and it was a stimulating conversation .
and afterward , she said , " you know , i 'm an atheist , but i know that there 's something up there higher than we are . "
the second problem that king david realized he could not solve was the problem of human suffering .
writing the oldest book in the world was job , and he said , " man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward . "
yes , to be sure , science has done much to push back certain types of human suffering .
but i 'm - in a few months , i 'll be 80 years of age .
i admit that i 'm very grateful for all the medical advances that have kept me in relatively good health all these years .
my doctors at the mayo clinic urged me not to take this trip out here to this - to be here .
i have n't given a talk in nearly four months .
and when you speak as much as i do , three or four times a day , you get rusty .
that 's the reason i 'm using this podium and using these notes .
every time you ever hear me on the television or somewhere , i 'm ad-libbing .
i 'm not reading . i never read an address .
i never read a speech or a talk or a lecture .
i talk ad lib .
but tonight , i 've got some notes here so that if i begin to forget , which i do sometimes , i 've got something i can turn to .
but even here among us , most - in the most advanced society in the world , we have poverty .
we have families that self-destruct , friends that betray us .
unbearable psychological pressures bear down on us .
i 've never met a person in the world that did n't have a problem or a worry .
why do we suffer ? it 's an age-old question that we have n't answered .
yet david again and again said that he would turn to god .
he said , " the lord is my shepherd . "
the final problem that david knew he could not solve was death .
many commentators have said that death is the forbidden subject of our generation .
most people live as if they 're never going to die .
technology projects the myth of control over our mortality .
we see people on our screens .
marilyn monroe is just as beautiful on the screen as she was in person , and our - many young people think she 's still alive .
they do n't know that she 's dead .
or clark gable , or whoever it is .
the old stars , they come to life .
and they 're - they 're just as great on that screen as they were in person .
but death is inevitable .
i spoke some time ago to a joint session of congress , last year .
and we were meeting in that room , the statue room .
about 300 of them were there .
and i said , " there 's one thing that we have in common in this room , all of us together , whether republican or democrat , or whoever . "
i said , " we 're all going to die .
and we have that in common with all these great men of the past that are staring down at us . "
and it 's often difficult for young people to understand that .
it 's difficult for them to understand that they 're going to die .
as the ancient writer of ecclesiastes wrote , he said , there 's every activity under heaven .
there 's a time to be born , and there 's a time to die .
i 've stood at the deathbed of several famous people , whom you would know .
i 've talked to them .
i 've seen them in those agonizing moments when they were scared to death .
and yet , a few years earlier , death never crossed their mind .
i talked to a woman this past week whose father was a famous doctor .
she said he never thought of god , never talked about god , did n't believe in god . he was an atheist .
but she said , as he came to die , he sat up on the side of the bed one day , and he asked the nurse if he could see the chaplain .
and he said , for the first time in his life he 'd thought about the inevitable , and about god .
was there a god ?
a few years ago , a university student asked me , " what is the greatest surprise in your life ? "
and i said , " the greatest surprise in my life is the brevity of life .
it passes so fast . "
but it does not need to have to be that way .
wernher von braun , in the aftermath of world war ii concluded , quote : " science and religion are not antagonists .
on the contrary , they 're sisters . "
he put it on a personal basis .
i knew dr. von braun very well .
and he said , " speaking for myself , i can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm a belief in the certainty of a creator . "
he also said , " in our search to know god , i 've come to believe that the life of jesus christ should be the focus of our efforts and inspiration .
the reality of this life and his resurrection is the hope of mankind . "
i 've done a lot of speaking in germany and in france , and in different parts of the world - 105 countries it 's been my privilege to speak in .
and i was invited one day to visit chancellor adenauer , who was looked upon as sort of the founder of modern germany , since the war .
and he once - and he said to me , he said , " young man . " he said , " do you believe in the resurrection of jesus christ ? "
and i said , " sir , i do . "
he said , " so do i. "
he said , " when i leave office , i 'm going to spend my time writing a book on why jesus christ rose again , and why it 's so important to believe that . "
in one of his plays , alexander solzhenitsyn depicts a man dying , who says to those gathered around his bed , " the moment when it 's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying . "
how should one live in order not to feel regret when one is dying ?
blaise pascal asked exactly that question in seventeenth-century france .
pascal has been called the architect of modern civilization .
he was a brilliant scientist at the frontiers of mathematics , even as a teenager .
he is viewed by many as the founder of the probability theory , and a creator of the first model of a computer .
and of course , you are all familiar with the computer language named for him .
pascal explored in depth our human dilemmas of evil , suffering and death .
he was astounded at the phenomenon we 've been considering : that people can achieve extraordinary heights in science , the arts and human enterprise , yet they also are full of anger , hypocrisy and have - and self-hatreds .
pascal saw us as a remarkable mixture of genius and self-delusion .
on november 23 , 1654 , pascal had a profound religious experience .
he wrote in his journal these words : " i submit myself , absolutely , to jesus christ , my redeemer . "
a french historian said , two centuries later , " seldom has so mighty an intellect submitted with such humility to the authority of jesus christ . "
pascal came to believe not only the love and the grace of god could bring us back into harmony , but he believed that his own sins and failures could be forgiven , and that when he died he would go to a place called heaven .
he experienced it in a way that went beyond scientific observation and reason .
it was he who penned the well-known words , " the heart has its reasons , which reason knows not of . "
equally well known is pascal 's wager .
essentially , he said this : " if you bet on god , and open yourself to his love , you lose nothing , even if you 're wrong .
but if instead you bet that there is no god , then you can lose it all , in this life and the life to come . "
for pascal , scientific knowledge paled beside the knowledge of god .
the knowledge of god was far beyond anything that ever crossed his mind .
he was ready to face him when he died at the age of 39 .
king david lived to be 70 , a long time in his era .
yet he too had to face death , and he wrote these words : " even though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death , i will fear no evil , for you are with me . "
this was david 's answer to three dilemmas of evil , suffering and death .
it can be yours , as well , as you seek the living god and allow him to fill your life and give you hope for the future .
when i was 17 years of age , i was born and reared on a farm in north carolina .
i milked cows every morning , and i had to milk the same cows every evening when i came home from school .
and there were 20 of them that i had - that i was responsible for , and i worked on the farm and tried to keep up with my studies .
i did n't make good grades in high school .
i did n't make them in college , until something happened in my heart .
one day , i was faced face-to-face with christ .
he said , " i am the way , the truth and the life . "
can you imagine that ? " i am the truth .
i 'm the embodiment of all truth . "
he was a liar .
or he was insane .
or he was what he claimed to be .
which was he ?
i had to make that decision .
i could n't prove it .
i could n't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it .
but by faith i said , i believe him , and he came into my heart and changed my life .
and now i 'm ready , when i hear that call , to go into the presence of god .
thank you , and god bless all of you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you for the privilege . it was great .
richard wurman : you did it .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i know what you 're thinking .
you think i 've lost my way , and somebody 's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i get that all the time in dubai .
" here on holiday are you , dear ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " come to visit the children ?
how long are you staying ? "
well actually , i hope for a while longer yet .
i have been living and teaching in the gulf for over 30 years .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and in that time , i have seen a lot of changes .
now that statistic is quite shocking .
and i want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of english .
i want to tell you about my friend who was teaching english to adults in abu dhabi .
and one fine day , she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary .
but it was she who ended up learning all the arabic words for the local plants , as well as their uses - medicinal uses , cosmetics , cooking , herbal .
how did those students get all that knowledge ?
of course , from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents .
it 's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations .
but sadly , today , languages are dying at an unprecedented rate .
a language dies every 14 days .
now , at the same time , english is the undisputed global language .
could there be a connection ?
well i do n't know .
but i do know that i 've seen a lot of changes .
when i first came out to the gulf , i came to kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post .
actually , not that long ago .
that is a little bit too early .
but nevertheless , i was recruited by the british council , along with about 25 other teachers .
and we were the first non-muslims to teach in the state schools there in kuwait .
we were brought to teach english because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education .
and of course , the u.k. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth .
okay .
now this is the major change that i 've seen - how teaching english has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today .
no longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum , and no longer the sole domain of mother england , it has become a bandwagon for every english-speaking nation on earth .
and why not ?
after all , the best education - according to the latest world university rankings - is to be found in the universities of the u.k. and the u.s.
so everybody wants to have an english education , naturally .
but if you 're not a native speaker , you have to pass a test .
now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone ?
perhaps you have a computer scientist who 's a genius .
would he need the same language as a lawyer , for example ?
well , i do n't think so .
we english teachers reject them all the time .
we put a stop sign , and we stop them in their tracks .
they ca n't pursue their dream any longer , ' til they get english .
now let me put it this way : if i met a monolingual dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer , would i stop him from entering my british university ?
i do n't think so .
but indeed , that is exactly what we do .
we english teachers are the gatekeepers .
and you have to satisfy us first that your english is good enough .
now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society .
maybe the barrier would be too universal .
okay .
" but , " i hear you say , " what about the research ?
it 's all in english . "
so the books are in english , the journals are done in english , but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy .
it feeds the english requirement .
and so it goes on .
i ask you , what happened to translation ?
if you think about the islamic golden age , there was lots of translation then .
they translated from latin and greek into arabic , into persian , and then it was translated on into the germanic languages of europe and the romance languages .
and so light shone upon the dark ages of europe .
now do n't get me wrong ; i am not against teaching english , all you english teachers out there .
i love it that we have a global language .
we need one today more than ever .
but i am against using it as a barrier .
do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being english , or chinese ?
we need more than that . where do we draw the line ?
this system equates intelligence with a knowledge of english , which is quite arbitrary .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today 's intelligentsia stand did not have to have english , they did n't have to pass an english test .
case in point , einstein .
he , by the way , was considered remedial at school because he was , in fact , dyslexic .
but fortunately for the world , he did not have to pass an english test .
because they did n't start until 1964 with toefl , the american test of english .
now it 's exploded .
there are lots and lots of tests of english .
and millions and millions of students take these tests every year .
now you might think , you and me , " those fees are n't bad , they 're okay , " but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people .
so immediately , we 're rejecting them .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it brings to mind a headline i saw recently : " education : the great divide . "
now i get it , i understand why people would want to focus on english .
they want to give their children the best chance in life .
and to do that , they need a western education .
because , of course , the best jobs go to people out of the western universities , that i put on earlier .
it 's a circular thing .
okay .
let me tell you a story about two scientists , two english scientists .
they were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals .
but they could n't get the results they wanted .
they really did n't know what to do , until along came a german scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb , whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does german .
so bingo , problem solved .
if you ca n't think a thought , you are stuck .
but if another language can think that thought , then , by cooperating , we can achieve and learn so much more .
my daughter came to england from kuwait .
she had studied science and mathematics in arabic .
it 's an arabic-medium school .
she had to translate it into english at her grammar school .
and she was the best in the class at those subjects .
which tells us that when students come to us from abroad , we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know , and they know it in their own language .
when a language dies , we do n't know what we lose with that language .
this is - i do n't know if you saw it on cnn recently - they gave the heroes award to a young kenyan shepherd boy who could n't study at night in his village , like all the village children , because the kerosene lamp , it had smoke and it damaged his eyes .
and anyway , there was never enough kerosene , because what does a dollar a day buy for you ?
so he invented a cost-free solar lamp .
and now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when he received his award , he said these lovely words : " the children can lead africa from what it is today , a dark continent , to a light continent . "
a simple idea , but it could have such far-reaching consequences .
people who have no light , whether it 's physical or metaphorical , can not pass our exams , and we can never know what they know .
let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark .
let us celebrate diversity .
mind your language .
use it to spread great ideas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- climate change is already a heavy topic , and it 's getting heavier because we 're understanding that we need to do more than we are .
we 're understanding , in fact , that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions .
that 's , to put it mildly , not what 's on the table now .
and it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face .
and when we have overwhelming problems in front of us , we tend to seek simple answers .
and i think this is what we 've done with climate change .
we look at where the emissions are coming from - they 're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth , and we say , okay , well the problem is that they 're coming out of fossil fuels that we 're burning , so therefore , the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy .
and while , of course , we do need clean energy , i would put to you that it 's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem , we 're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it .
and the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing .
that should n't be news to any of us .
however , it 's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization .
by mid-century , we 're going to have about eight billion - perhaps more - people living in cities or within a day 's travel of one .
we will be an overwhelmingly urban species .
in order to provide the kind of energy that it would take that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global north live in today , we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy .
that we are not even able to build that much clean energy .
so if we 're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet , we need to look somewhere else for the solution .
the solution , in fact , may be closer to hand than we think , because all of those cities we 're building are opportunities .
every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants .
we tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing - i choose to turn this light switch on - but really , enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in .
i wo n't show you very many graphs today , but if i can just focus on this one for a moment , it really tells us a lot of what we need to know - which is , quite simply , that if you look , for example , at transportation , a major category of climate emissions , there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air .
and the correlation , of course , is that denser places tend to have lower emissions - which is n't really all that difficult to figure out , if you think about it .
basically , we substitute , in our lives , access to the things we want .
we go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place .
and we 're basically using mobility to get the access we need .
but when we live in a denser community , suddenly what we find , of course , is that the things we need are close by .
and since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place , suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable .
and it is possible , of course , to increase the density of the communities around us .
some places are doing this with new eco districts , developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods , which is nice work if you can get it , but most of the time , what we 're talking about is , in fact , reweaving the urban fabric that we already have .
so we 're talking about things like infill development : really sharp little changes to where we have buildings , where we 're developing .
urban retrofitting : creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there .
increasingly , we 're realizing that we do n't even need to densify an entire city .
what we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we do n't drive as much and so on .
and that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot .
so you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city .
and we find that when we do that , we can , in fact , have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results .
now we may find that there are places that are really , really dense and still hold onto their cars , but the reality is that , by and large , what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect , where people simply stop driving as much , and increasingly , more and more people , if they 're surrounded by places that make them feel at home , give up their cars altogether .
and this is a huge , huge energy savings , because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars .
we have the manufacture of the car , the disposal of the car , all of the parking and freeways and so on .
when you can get rid of all of those because somebody does n't use any of them really , you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent .
and people are embracing this .
all around the world , we 're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life .
people are saying that it 's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood .
and when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we 're starting to see , what you find is , in fact , even more access suffused into spaces .
some of it 's transportation access .
this is a mapnificent map that shows me , in this case , how far i can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation .
some of it is about walking . it 's not all perfect yet .
this is google walking maps .
i asked how to do the greater ridgeway , and it told me to go via guernsey .
it did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths , though .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the technologies are getting better , and we 're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation .
and as we just heard earlier , of course , we 're also learning how to put information on dumb objects .
things that do n't have any wiring in them at all , we 're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation .
part of what we 're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption , which is to get a bunch of stuff , is not , in fact , how we really live best in dense environments .
what we 're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things .
my favorite example is a drill . who here owns a drill , a home power drill ?
okay . i do too .
the average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime , depending on who you ask .
and so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time , use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit .
our cities , i would put to you , are stockpiles of these surplus capacities .
and while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities - such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit - what we probably will find is that , in fact , turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them , is a far smarter way to go .
and in fact , even space itself is turning into a service .
we 're finding that people can share the same spaces , do stuff with vacant space .
buildings are becoming bundles of services .
so we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on - like heating , cooling etc . - and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on .
so we light our buildings with daylight .
we cool them with breezes . we heat them with sunshine .
in fact , when we use all these things , what we 've found is that , in some cases , energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent .
which brings on another threshold effect i like to call furnace dumping , which is , quite simply , if you have a building that does n't need to be heated with a furnace , you save a whole bunch of money up front .
these things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives .
now when we look at being able to slash our product use , slash our transportation use , slash our building energy use , all of that is great , but it still leaves something behind .
and if we 're going to really , truly become sustainable cities , we need to think a little differently .
this is one way to do it .
this is vancouver 's propaganda about how green a city they are .
and certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery .
so we have visions like this .
we have visions like this . we have visions like this .
now all of these are fine projects , but they really have missed an essential point , which is it 's not about the leaves above , it 's about the systems below .
do they , for instance , capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use ?
water is energy intensive .
do they , perhaps , include green infrastructure , so that we can take runoff and water that 's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees ?
do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by , for example , connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration ?
do they allow for pollination , pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities ?
do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth , and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon - take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities ?
i would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible , they 're being done right now , and that it 's a darn good thing .
because right now , our economy by and large operates as paul hawken said , " by stealing the future , selling it in the present and calling it gdp . "
and if we have another eight billion or seven billion , or six billion , even , people , living on a planet where their cities also steal the future , we 're going to run out of future really fast .
but if we think differently , i think that , in fact , we can have cities that are not only zero emissions , but have unlimited possibilities as well .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was sitting with my girls , and joy said , " dang , i wish he 'd get off my back .
my daddy , he calls me all the time . "
" lucky for you he calls at all , " said jasmine .
" i have n't heard from my dad in years . "
at this moment , i knew the girls needed a way to connect with their fathers .
at camp diva , my non-profit organization , we have these types of conversations all the time as a way to help girls of african descent prepare for their passage into womanhood .
these girls just needed a way to invite their fathers into their lives on their own terms .
so i asked the girls , " how can we help other girls develop healthy relationships with their fathers ? "
" let 's have a dance , " one girl shouted , and all the girls quickly backed her up .
they started dreaming about the decorations , invitations , the dresses they were going to wear , and what their fathers could and could not wear . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was off and running before i could even blink my eyes , but even if i could have slowed down those girls , i would n't have , because one thing that i have learned from over a decade of working with girls is that they already know what they need .
the wisdom lives inside of them .
as long as they have infrastructure , mentorship and resources , they can build what they need , not only to survive , but to thrive .
so we had a dance , and girls and their fathers came in multitudes .
they were dressed to the nines .
they acted sweet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they acted silly .
they really enjoyed each other 's company .
it was a huge success .
and the girls decided to make it an annual event .
so as the seasons changed , and it was time to plan the dance again , one girl named brianna spoke up , and she said , " my dad ca n't come to the dance , and this whole thing is making me sad . "
" why not ? " the girls asked .
" because he 's in jail , " she bravely admitted .
" well , can he just get out for a day ? " one of the girls asked . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and come in shackles ?
that 's worse than not having him here at all . "
at this moment , i saw an opportunity for the girls to rise to the occasion and to become their own heroes .
so i asked , " what do you think we should do about this ?
we want every girl to experience the dance , right ? "
so the girls thought for a moment , and one girl suggested , " why do n't we just take the dance in the jail ? "
most of the girls doubted the possibility of that , and said , " are you crazy ?
who is going to allow a bunch of little girls , dressed up - " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " - to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies in spongebob suits ? "
because that 's what they called them .
i said , " girls , well , well , you never know unless you ask . "
so a letter was written to the richmond city sheriff , signed collectively by each girl , and i would have to say , he is a very special sheriff .
he contacted me immediately and said , whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside , his doors are always open .
because one thing he did know , that when fathers are connected to their children , it is less likely that they will return .
so , 16 inmates and 18 girls were invited .
the girls were dressed in their sunday best , and the fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirts and ties .
they hugged .
they shared a full catered meal of chicken and fish .
they laughed together .
it was beautiful .
the fathers and daughters even experienced an opportunity to have a physical connection , something that a lot of them did n't even have for a while .
fathers were in a space where they were able to make their daughters play , and pull out her chair and extend his hand for a dance .
even the guards cried .
but after the dance , we all realized that dad still would be in jail .
so we needed to create something that they could take with them .
so we brought in flip cams , and we had them look at the flip cams and just interview each other - their messages , their thoughts .
this was going to be used as a touchstone so when they started to miss each other and feel disconnected , they could reconnect through this image .
i 'll never forget that one girl looked in her father 's eyes with that camera and said , " daddy , when you look at me , what do you see ? "
because our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve , and how they see us for the rest of our lives .
i know that very well , because i was one of the lucky girls .
i have had my father in my life always .
he 's even here today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers , especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors .
we have just created a form for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions and given the fathers the freedom to answer .
because we know that the fathers are even leaving with this one thought : what type of woman am i preparing to put in the world ?
because a father is locked in does not mean he should be locked out of his daughter 's life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a man who 's trying to live from his heart , and so just before i get going , i wanted to tell you as a south african that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago .
nelson mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom .
and so this talk is going to be for him .
i grew up in wonder .
i grew up amongst those animals .
i grew up in the wild eastern part of south africa at a place called londolozi game reserve .
it 's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations .
now for as long as i can remember , my job has been to take people out into nature , and so i think it 's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering .
africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories , and so what i have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories , stories about heroes of heart .
when i was nine years old , president mandela came to stay with my family .
he had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration , and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status .
members of the african national congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye , and it 's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it was a defining time for me as a young boy .
i would take him breakfast in bed , and then , in an old track suit and slippers , he would go for a walk around the garden .
at night , i would sit with my family around the snowy , bunny-eared tv , and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly .
he was bringing peace to a divided and violent south africa , one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity .
mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think , to create in himself the things he most wanted for south africa : peace , reconciliation , harmony .
through this act of immense open-heartedness , he was to become the embodiment of what in south africa we call " ubuntu . "
ubuntu : i am because of you .
or , people are not people without other people .
it 's not a new idea or value but it 's one that i certainly think at these times is worth building on .
in fact , it is said that in the collective consciousness of africa , we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others .
ubuntu is at play right now .
you are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who i am .
without you , i 'm just a guy talking to an empty room , and i spent a lot of time last week doing that , and it 's not the same as this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if mandela was the national and international embodiment , then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man , solly mhlongo .
solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where i grew up in mozambique .
he would never have a lot of money , but he was to be one of the richest men i would ever meet .
solly grew up tending to his father 's cattle .
now , i can tell you , i do n't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle , but it makes for über-resourcefulness .
the first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks .
where he had learned to do that out in the bush i have no idea , but he could do it .
he then moved across into what we called the habitat team .
these were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being .
he fixed roads , he mended wetlands , he did some anti-poaching .
and then one day we were out together , and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked .
and it was an old track , but for fun he turned and he began to follow it , and i tell you , i could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a ph.d.-level tracker .
if you drove past solly somewhere out on the reserve , you look up in your rearview mirror , you 'd see he 'd stopped the car 20 , 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something .
the only accusation i ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said , " solly , you are pathologically helpful . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i started professionally guiding people out into this environment , solly was my tracker .
we worked together as a team .
and the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your east coast , and they said to solly , on the side , they said , " before we even go out to see lions and leopards , we want to see where you live . "
so we took them up to his house , and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when solly 's wife , who was learning english , was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying , " hello , i love you .
welcome , i love you . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and there was something so beautifully african about it to me , this small house with a huge heart in it .
now on the day that solly saved my life , he was already my hero .
it was a hot day , and we found ourselves down by the river .
because of the heat , i took my shoes off , and i rolled up my pants , and i walked into the water .
solly remained on the bank .
the water was clear running over sand , and we turned and we began to make our way upstream .
and a few meters ahead of us , there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank , and its branches were touching the water , and it was shadowy .
and if had been a horror movie , people in the audience would have started saying , " do n't go in there . do n't go in there . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course , the crocodile was in the shadows .
now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite .
wham ! it hits me by my right leg .
it pulls me . it turns . i throw my hand up . i 'm able to grab a branch .
it 's shaking me violently .
it 's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you , and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- solly on the bank sees that i 'm in trouble .
he turns . he begins to make his way to me .
the croc again continues to shake me .
it goes to bite me a second time .
i notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream .
as it bites the second time , i kick .
my foot goes down its throat . it spits me out .
i pull myself up into the branches , and as i come out of the water , i look over my shoulder .
my leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description .
the bone is cracked .
the meat is torn up .
i make an instant decision that i 'll never look at that again .
as i come out of the water , solly arrives at a deep section , a channel between us .
he knows , he sees the state of my leg , he knows that between him and i there is a crocodile , and i can tell you this man does n't slow down for one second .
he comes straight into the channel .
he wades in to above his waist .
he gets to me . he grabs me .
i 'm still in a vulnerable position .
he picks me and puts me on his shoulder .
this is the other thing about solly , he 's freakishly strong .
he turns . he walks me up the bank .
he lays me down . he pulls his shirt off .
he wraps it around my leg , picks me up a second time , walks me to a vehicle , and he 's able to get me to medical attention .
and i survive .
now - -lrb- applause -rrb- now i do n't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you , but for solly , it was as natural as breathing .
and he is one amazing example of what i have experienced all over africa .
in a more collective society , we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others .
danger is shared . pain is shared .
joy is shared . achievement is shared .
houses are shared . food is shared .
ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share , and what solly taught me that day is the essence of this value , his animated , empathetic action in every moment .
now although the root word is about people , i thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people .
and then i met this young lady .
her name was elvis .
in fact , solly gave her the name elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the elvis the pelvis dance .
she was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis .
she arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route .
when i first saw her , i thought she would be dead in a matter of days .
and yet , for the next five years she returned in the winter months .
and we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track .
it looked like an inverted bracket , and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow , and then we would come around the corner , and there she would be with her herd .
and that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her , it was this sense of kinship .
and it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals .
and yet still i remained amazed that she was surviving .
and then one day we came across them at this small water hole .
it was sort of a hollow in the ground .
and i watched as the matriarch drank , and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants , looks like the arm in motion , and she began to make her way up the steep bank .
the rest of the herd turned and began to follow .
and i watched young elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill .
she got visibly - ears came forward , she had a full go of it and halfway up , her legs gave way , and she fell backwards .
she attempted it a second time , and again , halfway up , she fell backwards .
and on the third attempt , an amazing thing happened .
halfway up the bank , a young teenage elephant came in behind her , and he propped his trunk underneath her , and he began to shovel her up the bank .
and it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant .
the next day i watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth , and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground .
and a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant .
what elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu , and i believe that in the cathedral of the wild , we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us .
and it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet .
if africa has a gift to share , it 's a gift of a more collective society .
and while it 's true that ubuntu is an african idea , what i see is the essence of that value being invented here .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pat mitchell : so boyd , we know that you knew president mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today , and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world .
but i just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts , because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session .
boyd varty : well thanks , pat .
i 'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on .
he was suffering .
and so of course there 's the mixed emotions .
but i just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the oprah show and asked her what the show would be about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she was like , " well , it 'll be about you . "
i mean , that 's just incredible humility .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was the father of our nation and we 've got a road to walk in south africa .
and everything , they used to call it madiba magic .
you know , he used to go to a rugby match and we would win .
anywhere he went , things went well .
but i think that magic will be with us , and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for .
and so that 's what i 'm going to try and do , and that 's what people all over south africa are trying to do .
pm : and that 's what you 've done today . bv : oh , thank you .
pm : thank you . bv : thank you . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'd like you to do is , just really quickly , is just , sort of , nod to the person on your right , and then nod to the person on your left .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , chances are that over the last winter , if you had been a beehive , either you or one of the two people you just nodded at would have died .
now , that 's an awful lot of bees .
and this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies , or we estimate we 've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter .
now , that 's a lot , a lot of bees , and that 's really important .
and most of those losses are because of things we know .
we know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses , and we also have this new phenomenon , which i talked about last year , colony collapse disorder .
and here we see a picture on top of a hill in central valley last december .
and below , you can see all these out yards , or temporary yards , where the colonies are brought in until february , and then they 're shipped out to the almonds .
and one documentary writer , who was here and looked at this two months after i was here , described this not as beehives but as a graveyard , with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them .
now , i 'm going to sum up a year 's worth of work in two sentences to say that we have been trying to figure out what the cause of this is .
and what we know is that it 's as if the bees have caught a flu .
and this flu has wiped through the population of bees .
in some cases , and in fact in most cases in one year , this flu was caused by a new virus to us , or newly identified by us , called israeli acute paralysis virus .
it was called that because a guy in israel first found it , and he now regrets profoundly calling it that disease , because , of course , there 's the implication .
but we think this virus is pretty ubiquitous .
it 's also pretty clear that the bees sometimes catch other viruses or other flus , and so the question we 're still struggling with , and the question that keeps us up at night , is why have the bees suddenly become so susceptible to this flu , and why are they so susceptible to these other diseases ?
and we do n't have the answer to that yet , and we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out .
we think perhaps it 's a combination of factors .
we know from the work of a very large and dynamic working team that , you know , we 're finding a lot of different pesticides in the hive , and surprisingly , sometimes the healthiest hives have the most pesticides . and so we discover all these very strange things that we ca n't begin to understand .
and so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health .
now of course , if you lose a lot of colonies , beekeepers can replace them very quickly .
and that 's why we 've been able to recover from a lot of loss .
if we lost one in every three cows in the winter , you know , the national guard would be out .
but what beekeepers can do is , if they have one surviving colony , they can split that colony in two .
and then the one half that does n't have a queen , they can buy a queen .
it comes in the mail ; it can come from australia or hawaii or florida , and you can introduce that queen .
and in fact , america was the first country that ever did mail-delivery queens and in fact , it 's part of the postal code that you have to deliver queens by mail in order to make sure that we have enough bees in this country .
if you do n't just want a queen , you can buy , actually , a three-pound package of bees , which comes in the mail , and of course , the postal office is always very concerned when they get , you know , your three-pound packages of bees .
and you can install this in your hive and replace that dead-out .
so it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead-outs , and so they 've been able to cover those losses .
so even though we 've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year , the same number of colonies have existed in the country , at about 2.4 million colonies .
now , those losses are tragic on many fronts , and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper .
and it 's really important to talk about beekeepers first , because beekeepers are among the most fascinating people you 'll ever meet .
if this was a group of beekeepers , you would have everyone from the card-carrying nra member who 's , you know , live free or die , to the , you know , the self-expressed quirky san francisco backyard pig farmer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you get all of these people in the same room , and they 're all engaged and they 're getting along , and they 're all there because of the passion for bees .
now , there 's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers , the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone .
and these tend to be some of the most independent , tenacious , intuitive , you know , inventive people you will ever meet .
they 're just fascinating . and they 're like that all over the world .
i had the privilege of working in haiti just for two weeks earlier this year .
and haiti , if you 've ever been there , is just a tragedy .
i mean , there may be 100 explanations for why haiti is the impoverished nation it is , but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor .
but you meet this beekeeper , and i met this beekeeper here , and he is one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers i 've ever met .
no formal education , but very knowledgeable .
we needed beeswax for a project we were working on ; he was so capable , he was able to render the nicest block of beeswax i have ever seen from cow dung , tin cans and his veil , which he used as a screening , right in this meadow . and so that ingenuity is inspiring .
we also have dave hackenberg , who is the poster child of ccd .
he 's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells .
and he has a history of these trucks , and he 's moved these bees up and down the coast .
and a lot of people talk about trucks and moving bees , and that being bad , but we 've done that for thousands of years .
the ancient egyptians used to move bees up and down the nile on rafts , so this idea of a movable bee force is not new at all .
and one of our real worries with colony collapse disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead-out colonies .
and you can do that one year in a row , you may be able to do it two years in a row .
but if you 're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies , you ca n't survive three years in a row . and we 're really worried about losing this segment of our industry .
and that 's important for many fronts , and one of them is because of that culture that 's in agriculture .
and these migratory beekeepers are the last nomads of america .
you know , they pick up their hives ; they move their families once or twice in a year .
and if you look at florida , in dade city , florida , that 's where all the pennsylvania beekeepers go .
and then 20 miles down the road is groveland , and that 's where all the wisconsin beekeepers go .
and if you 're ever in central valley in february , you go to this café at 10 o 'clock in the morning , kathy and kate 's .
and that 's where all the beekeepers come after a night of moving bees into the almond groves .
they all have their breakfast and complain about everyone right there . and it 's a great experience , and i really encourage you to drop in at that diner during that time , because that 's quite essential american experience .
and we see these families , these nomadic families , you know , father to son , father to son , and these guys are hurting .
and they 're not people who like to ask for help , although they are the most helpful people ever .
if there 's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul , everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies .
and so , it 's a very dynamic , and i think , historic and exciting community to be involved with .
of course , the real importance for bees is not the honey .
and although i highly encourage you , all use honey .
i mean , it 's the most ethical sweetener , and you know , it 's a dynamic and fun sweetener .
but we estimate that about one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees .
now , i want to just illustrate that in the fact that if we look at the breakfast i had yesterday morning - a little cranberry juice , some fruits , some granola , i should have had whole wheat bread , i realized , but you know , jam on my wonderbread , and some coffee - and had we taken out all those ingredients , - except for the almonds i was n't going to pick out from the granola - if we had taken out all those ingredients the bees had indirectly or directly pollinated , we would n't have much on our plate .
so if we did not have bees , it 's not like we would starve , but clearly our diet would be diminished .
it 's said that for bees , the flower is the fountain of life , and for flowers bees are the messengers of love .
and that 's a really great expression , because really , bees are the sex workers for flowers . they are , you know - they get paid for their services .
they get paid by pollen and nectar , to move that male sperm , the pollen , from flower to flower .
and there are flowers that are self-infertile . that means they ca n't - the pollen in their bloom ca n't fertilize themselves .
so in an apple orchard , for instance , you 'll have rows of 10 apples of one variety , and then you have another apple tree that 's a different type of pollen .
and bees are very faithful .
when they 're out pollinating or gathering pollen from one flower , they stay to that crop exclusively , in order to help generate .
and of course , they 're made to carry this pollen .
they build up a static electric charge and the pollen jumps on them and helps spread that pollen from bloom to bloom .
however , honeybees are a minority .
honeybees are not native to america ; they were introduced with the colonialists .
and there are actually more species of bees than there are mammals and birds combined .
in pennsylvania alone , we have been surveying bees for 150 years , and very intensely in the last three years .
we have identified over 400 species of bees in pennsylvania .
thirty-two species have not been identified or found in the state since 1950 .
now , that could be because we have n't been sampling right , but it does , i think , suggest that something 's wrong with the pollinator force . and these bees are fascinating .
we have bumblebees on the top .
and bumblebees are what we call eusocial : they 're not truly social , because only the queen is , over winter .
we also have the sweat bees , and these are little gems flying around .
they 're like tiny little flies and they fly around .
and then you have another type of bee , which we call kleptoparasites , which is a very fancy way of saying , bad-minded , murdering - what 's the word i 'm looking for ? murdering - audience : bee ?
dennis vanengelsdorp : bee . okay , thanks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what these bees do is , they sit there . these solitary bees , they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch , and they collect pollen and make it into a ball , and they lay an egg on it .
well , these bees hang out at that hole , and they wait for that mother to fly away , they go in , eat the egg , and lay their own egg there . so they do n't do any work .
and so , in fact , if you know you have these kleptoparasitic bees , you know that your environment is healthy , because they 're top-of-the-food-chain bees .
and in fact , there is now a red list of pollinators that we 're worried have disappeared , and on top of that list are a lot of these kleptoparasites , but also these bumblebees .
and in fact , if you guys live on the west coast , go to these websites here , and they 're really looking for people to look for some of these bumblebees , because we think some have gone extinct . or some , the population has declined .
and so it 's not just honeybees that are in trouble , but we do n't understand these native pollinators or all those other parts of our community .
and of course , bees are not the only important factor here .
there are other animals that pollinate , like bats , and bats are in trouble too .
and i 'm glad i 'm a bee man and not a bat man , because there 's no money to research the bat problems .
and bats are dying at an extraordinary rate .
white-nose syndrome has wiped out populations of bats .
if there 's a cave in new york that had 15,000 bats in it , and there are 1,000 left . that 's like san francisco becoming the population of half of this county in three years .
and so that 's incredible . and there 's no money to do that .
but i 'm glad to say that i think we know the cause of all these conditions , and that cause is ndd : nature deficit disorder .
and that is that i think that what we have in our society is , we forgot our connection with nature .
and i think if we reconnect to nature , we 'll be able to have the resources and that interest to solve these problems .
and i think that there is an easy cure for ndd .
and that is , make meadows and not lawns .
and i think we have lost our connection , and this is a wonderful way of reconnecting to our environment .
i 've had the privilege of living by a meadow for the last little while , and it is terribly engaging .
and if we look at the history of lawns , it 's actually rather tragic .
it used to be , two , three hundred years ago , that a lawn was a symbol of prestige , and so it was only the very rich that could keep these green actually , deserts : they 're totally sterile .
americans spent , in 2001 - 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns .
five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns .
and so it 's incredible the amount of resources we 've spent keeping our lawns , which are these useless biosystems .
and so we need to rethink this idea .
in fact , you know , the white house used to have sheep in front in order to help fund the war effort in world war i , which probably is not a bad idea ; it would n't be a bad idea .
i want to say this not because i 'm opposed completely to mowing lawns .
i think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale , and i think we 're encouraged to do that .
but i also want to reinforce some of the ideas we 've heard here , because having a meadow or living by a meadow is transformational .
that it is amazing that connection we can have with what 's there .
these milkweed plants have grown up in my meadow over the last four years . add to watch the different plants , or insects , that come to these flowers , to watch that - and we 've heard about , you know , this relationship you can have with wine , this companion you can have as it matures and as it has these different fragrances .
and this is a companion , and this is a relationship that never dries up .
you never run out of that companion as you drink this wine , too .
and i encourage you to look at that .
now , not all of us have meadows , or lawns that we can convert , and so you can always , of course , grow a meadow in a pot .
bees apparently , can be the gateway to , you know , other things .
so i 'm not saying that you should plant a meadow of pot , but a pot in a meadow .
but you can also have this great community of city or building-top beekeepers , these beekeepers that live - this is in paris where these beekeepers live .
and everyone should open a beehive , because it is the most amazing , incredible thing .
and if we want to cure ourselves of ndd , or nature deficit disorder , i think this is a great way of doing it .
get a beehive and grow a meadow , and watch that life come back into your life .
and so with that , i think that what we can do , if we do this , we can make sure that our future - our more perfect future - includes beekeepers and it includes bees and it includes those meadows .
and that journey - that journey of transformation that occurs as you grow your meadow and as you keep your bees or you watch those native bees there - is an extremely exciting one .
and i hope that you experience it and i hope you tell me about it one day .
so thank you very much for being here . thank you very much .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ i do n't understand myself , ♫ ♫ why they keep talking of love , ♫ ♫ if they come near me , ♫ ♫ if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand . ♫ ♫ i do n't understand myself , ♫ ♫ why they talk of magic , ♫ ♫ that no one withstands , ♫ ♫ if he sees me , if he passes by . ♫ ♫ but if the red light is on ♫ ♫ in the middle of the night ♫ ♫ and everybody listens to my song , ♫ ♫ then it is plain to see . ♫ ♫ my lips , they give so fiery a kiss , ♫
♫ my limbs , they are supple and soft . ♫ ♫ it is written for me in the stars , ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss , thou shalt love . ♫ ♫ my feet , they glide and float , ♫ ♫ my eyes , they lure and glow . ♫ ♫ and i dance as if entranced , ' cause i know , ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss . ♫ ♫ in my veins , ♫ ♫ runs a dancer 's blood , ♫ ♫ because my beautiful mother ♫ ♫ was the queen of dance ♫ ♫ in the gilded alcazar . ♫ ♫ she was so very beautiful , ♫ ♫ i often saw her in my dreams . ♫
♫ if she beat the tambourine ♫ ♫ to her beguiling dance , all eyes were glowing admiringly . ♫ ♫ she reawakened in me , ♫ ♫ mine is the same lot . ♫ ♫ i dance like her at midnight ♫ ♫ and from deep within i feel : ♫ ♫ my lips , they give so fiery a kiss , ♫ ♫ my limbs , they are supple and soft . ♫ ♫ it is written for me in the stars , ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss , thou shalt love . ♫ ♫ and i dance as if entranced , ' cause i know , ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss . ♫
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to take you back basically to my hometown , and to a picture of my hometown of the week that " emergence " came out .
and it 's a picture we 've seen several times .
basically , " emergence " was published on 9/11 .
i live right there in the west village , so the plume was luckily blowing west , away from us .
we had a two-and-a-half-day-old baby in the house that was ours - we had n't taken it from somebody else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one of the thoughts that i had dealing with these two separate emergences of a book and a baby , and having this event happen so close - that my first thought , when i was still kind of in the apartment looking out at it all or walking out on the street and looking out on it just in front of our building , was that i 'd made a terrible miscalculation in the book that i 'd just written .
because so much of that book was a celebration of the power and creative potential of density , of largely urban density , of connecting people and putting them together in one place , and putting them on sidewalks together and having them share ideas and share physical space together .
and it seemed to me looking at that - that tower burning and then falling , those towers burning and falling - that in fact , one of the lessons here was that density kills .
and that of all the technologies that were exploited to make that carnage come into being , probably the single group of technologies that cost the most lives were those that enable 50,000 people to live in two buildings 110 stories above the ground .
if they had n't been crowded - you compare the loss of life at the pentagon to the twin towers , and you can see that very powerfully .
and so i started to think , well , you know , density , density - i 'm not sure if , you know , this was the right call .
and i kind of ruminated on that for a couple of days .
and then about two days later , the wind started to change a little bit , and you could sense that the air was not healthy .
and so even though there were no cars still in the west village where we lived , my wife sent me out to buy a , you know , a large air filter at the bed bath and beyond , which was located about 20 blocks away , north .
and so i went out .
and obviously i 'm physically a very strong person , as you can tell - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so i was n't worried about carrying this thing 20 blocks .
and i walked out , and this really miraculous thing happened to me as i was walking north to buy this air filter , which was that the streets were completely alive with people .
there was an incredible - it was , you know , a beautiful day , as it was for about a week after , and the west village had never seemed more lively .
i walked up along hudson street - where jane jacobs had lived and written her great book that so influenced what i was writing in " emergence " - past the white horse tavern , that great old bar where dylan thomas drank himself to death , and the bleecker street playground was filled with kids .
and all the people who lived in the neighborhood , who owned restaurants and bars in the neighborhood , were all out there - had them all open .
people were out .
there were no cars , so it seemed even better , in some ways .
and it was a beautiful urban day , and the incredible thing about it was that the city was working .
the city was there .
all the things that make a great city successful and all the things that make a great city stimulating - they were all on display there on those streets .
and i thought , well , this is the power of a city .
i mean , the power of the city - we talked about cities as being centralized in space , but what makes them so strong most of the time is they 're decentralized in function .
they do n't have a center executive branch that you can take out and cause the whole thing to fail .
if they did , it probably was right there at ground zero .
i mean , you know , the emergency bunker was right there , was destroyed by the attacks , and obviously the damage done to the building and the lives .
but nonetheless , just 20 blocks north , two days later , the city had never looked more alive .
if you 'd gone into the minds of the people , well , you would have seen a lot of trauma , and you would have seen a lot of heartache , and you would have seen a lot of things that would take a long time to recover .
but the system itself of this city was thriving .
so i took heart in seeing that .
so i wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why that works so well , and how some of those reasons kind of map on to where the web is going right now .
the question that i found myself asking to people when i was talking about the book afterwards is - when you 've talked about emergent behavior , when you 've talked about collective intelligence , the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask , who builds a neighborhood ?
who decides that soho should have this personality and that the latin quarter should have this personality ?
well , there are some kind of executive decisions , but mostly the answer is - everybody and nobody .
everybody contributes a little bit .
no single person is really the ultimate actor behind the personality of a neighborhood .
same thing to the question of , who was keeping the streets alive post-9/11 in my neighborhood ?
well , it was the whole city .
the whole system kind of working on it , and everybody contributing a small little part .
and this is increasingly what we 're starting to see on the web in a bunch of interesting ways - most of which were n't around , actually , except in very experimental things , when i was writing " emergence " and when the book came out .
so it 's been a very optimistic time , i think , and i want to just talk about a few of those things .
i think that there is effectively a new kind of model of interactivity that 's starting to emerge online right now .
and the old one looked like this .
this is not the future king of england , although it looks like it .
it 's some guy , it 's a geocities homepage of some guy that i found online who 's interested , if you look at the bottom , in soccer and jesus and garth brooks and clint beckham and " my hometown " - those are his links .
but nothing really says this model of interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real , the web zeitgeist of 1995 - than " click here for a picture of my dog . "
that is - you know , there 's no sentence that kind of conjures up that period better than that , i think , which is that you suddenly have the power to put up a picture of your dog and link to it , and somebody reading the page has the power to click on that link or not click on that link .
and , you know , i do n't want to belittle that . that , in a sense - to reference what jeff was talking about yesterday - that was , in a sense , the kind of interface electricity that powered a lot of the explosion of interest in the web : that you could put up a link , and somebody could click on it , and it could take you anywhere you wanted to go .
but it 's still a very one-to-one kind of relationship .
there 's one person putting up the link , and there 's another person on the other end trying to decide whether to click on it or not .
the new model is much more like this , and we 've already seen a couple of references to this .
this is what happens when you search " steven johnson " on google .
about two months ago , i had the great breakthrough - one of my great , kind of shining achievements - which is that my website finally became a top result for " steven johnson . "
there 's some theoretical physicist at mit named steven johnson who has dropped two spots , i 'm happy to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , i mean , i 'll look at a couple of things like this , but google is obviously the greatest technology ever invented for navel gazing .
it 's just that there are so many other people in your navel when you gaze .
because effectively , what 's happening here , what 's creating this page , obviously - and we all know this , but it 's worth just thinking about it - is not some person deciding that i am the number one answer for steven johnson , but rather somehow the entire web of people putting up pages and deciding to link to my page or not link to it , and google just sitting there and running the numbers .
so there 's this collective decision-making that 's going on .
this page is effectively , collectively authored by the web , and google is just helping us kind of to put the authorship in one kind of coherent place .
now , they 're more innovative - well , google 's pretty innovative - but there are some new twists on this .
there 's this incredibly interesting new site - technorati - that 's filled with lots of little widgets that are expanding on these .
and these are looking in the blog world and the world of weblogs .
he 's analyzed basically all the weblogs out there that he 's tracking .
and he 's tracking how many other weblogs linked to those weblogs , and so you have kind of an authority - a weblog that has a lot of links to it is more authoritative than a weblog that has few links to it .
and so at any given time , on any given page on the web , actually , you can say , what does the weblog community think about this page ?
and you can get a list .
this is what they think about my site ; it 's ranked by blog authority .
you can also rank it by the latest posts .
so when i was talking in " emergence , " i talked about the limitations of the one-way linking architecture that , basically , you could link to somebody else but they would n't necessarily know that you were pointing to them .
and that was one of the reasons why the web was n't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two-way linking , you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things .
well , something like technorati is supplying that .
now what 's interesting here is that this is a quote from dave weinberger , where he talks about everything being purposive in the web - there 's nothing artificial .
he has this line where he says , you know , you 're going to put up a link there , if you see a link , somebody decided to put it there .
and he says , the link to one site did n't just grow on the other page " like a tree fungus . "
and in fact , i think that 's not entirely true anymore .
i could put up a feed of all those links generated by technorati on the right-hand side of my page , and they would change as the overall ecology of the web changes .
that little list there would change .
i would n't really be directly in control of it .
so it 's much closer , in a way , to a data fungus , in a sense , wrapped around that page , than it is to a deliberate link that i 've placed there .
now , what you 're having here is basically a global brain that you 're able to do lots of kind of experiments on to see what it 's thinking .
and there are all these interesting tools .
google does the google zeitgeist , which looks at search requests to test what 's going on , what people are interested in , and they publish it with lots of fun graphs .
and i 'm saying a lot of nice things about google , so i 'll be i 'll be saying one little critical thing .
there 's a problem with the google zeitgeist , which is it often comes back with news that a lot of people are searching for britney spears pictures , which is not necessarily news .
the columbia blows up , suddenly there are a lot of searches on columbia .
well , you know , we should expect to see that .
that 's not necessarily something we did n't know already .
so the key thing in terms of these new tools that are kind of plumbing the depths of the global brain , that are sending kind of trace dyes through that whole bloodstream - the question is , are you finding out something new ?
and one of the things that i experimented with is this thing called google share which is basically , you take an abstract term , and you search google for that term , and then you search the results that you get back for somebody 's name .
so basically , the number of pages that mention this term , that also mention this page , the percentage of those pages is that person 's google share of that term .
so you can do kind of interesting contests .
like for instance , this is a google share of the ted conference .
so richard saul wurman has about a 15 percent google share of the ted conference .
our good friend chris has about a six percent - but with a bullet , i might add .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the interesting thing is , you can broaden the search a little bit .
and it turns out , actually , that 42 percent is the mola mola fish .
i had no idea .
no , that 's not true .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i made that up because i just wanted to put up a slide of the mola mola fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i also did - and i do n't want to start a little fight in the next panel - but i did a google share analysis of evolution and natural selection .
so right here - now this is a big category , you have smaller percentages , so this is 0.7 percent - dan dennett , who 'll be speaking shortly .
right below him , 0.5 percent , steven pinker .
so dennett 's in the lead a little bit there .
but what 's interesting is you can then broaden the search and actually see interesting things and get a sense of what else is out there .
so gary bauer is not too far behind - has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection .
and right behind him is l. ron hubbard . so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- you can see we 're in the ascot , which is always good .
and by the way , chris , that would 've been a really good panel , i think , right there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hubbard apparently started to reach , but besides that , i think it would be good next year .
another quick thing - this is a slightly different thing , but this analysis some of you may have seen .
it just came out . this is bursty words , looking at the historical record of state of the union addresses .
so these are words that suddenly start to appear out of nowhere , so they 're kind of , you know , memes that start taking off , that did n't have a lot of historical precedent before .
so the first one is - these are the bursty words around 1860s - slaves , emancipation , slavery , rebellion , kansas .
that 's britney spears . i mean , you know , ok , interesting .
they 're talking about slavery in 1860 .
1935 - relief , depression , recovery banks .
and ok , i did n't learn anything new there as well - that 's pretty obvious .
1985 , right at the center of the reagan years - that 's , we 're , there 's , we 've , it 's .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there 's one way to interpret this , which is to say that " emancipation " and " depression " and " recovery " all have a lot of syllables .
so you know , you can actually download - it 's hard to remember those .
but seriously , actually , what you can see there , in a way that would be very hard to detect otherwise , is reagan reinventing the political language of the country and shifting to a much more intimate , much more folksy , much more telegenic - contracting all those verbs .
you know , 20 years before it was still , " ask not what you can do , " but with reagan , it 's , " that 's where , there 's nancy and i , " that kind of language .
and so something we kind of knew , but you did n't actually notice syntactically what he was doing .
i 'll go very quickly .
the question now - and this is the really interesting question - is , what kind of higher-level shape is emerging right now in the overall web ecosystem - and particularly in the ecosystem of the blogs because they are really kind of at the cutting edge .
and i think what happens there will also happen in the wider system .
now there was a very interesting article by clay shirky that got a lot of attention about a month ago , and this is basically the distribution of links on the web to all these various different blogs .
it follows a power law , so that there are a few extremely well-linked to , popular blogs , and a long tail of blogs with very few links .
so 20 percent of the blogs get 80 percent of the links .
now this is a very interesting thing .
it 's caused a lot of controversy because people thought that this was the ultimate kind of one man , one modem democracy , where anybody can get out there and get their voice heard .
and so the question is , " why is this happening ? "
it 's not being imposed by fiat from above .
it 's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now .
now , what 's great about it is that people are working on - within seconds of clay publishing this piece , people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing .
and basically , the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage .
if you 're the first site there , everybody links to you .
if you 're the second site there , most people link to you .
and so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links , and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future , and then you get this kind of shape .
and so what dave sifry at technorati started working on , literally as shirky started - after he published his piece - was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers .
and he started looking at interesting newcomers that do n't have a lot of links , that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours .
so in a sense , bursty weblogs coming from new voices .
so he 's working on a tool right there that can actually change the overall system .
and it creates a kind of planned emergence .
you 're not totally in control , but you 're changing the underlying rules in interesting ways because you have an end result which is maybe a more democratic spread of voices .
so the most amazing thing about this - and i 'll end on this note - is , most emergent systems , most self-organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not .
so the most wonderful thing , i think , about this whole debate about power laws and software that could change it is the fact that we 're having the conversation .
i hope it continues here .
thanks a lot .
right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she 's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life , which is be an educator , change lives , and spark magic .
right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible .
right now there 's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards , who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately , while at the same time saying to herself over and over again , " do n't smile till november , " because that 's what she was taught in her teacher education program .
right now there 's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he 's very , very sick and ca n't make it to school tomorrow .
on the other hand , right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information , information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge .
right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention , a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before , but if they close their eyes tightly enough , they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling .
right now there 's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says , " put them down . "
right now .
so people will then say , " well , chris , you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you 're also describing these powerful educators .
if you 're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular , these guys will probably cancel each other out , and then we 'll be okay . "
the reality is , the folks i described as the master teachers , the master narrative builders , the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms .
the folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience do n't even know what teacher certification means .
they may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education .
and that to me is sad .
it 's sad because the people who i described , they were very disinterested in the learning process , want to be effective teachers , but they have no models .
i 'm going to paraphrase mark twain .
mark twain says that proper preparation , or teaching , is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good , it can turn awful practices into powerful ones , it can change men and transform them into angels .
the folks who i described earlier got proper preparation in teaching , not in any college or university , but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage .
guess where those places are ?
barber shops , rap concerts , and most importantly , in the black church .
and i 've been framing this idea called pentecostal pedagogy .
who here has been to a black church ?
we got a couple of hands .
you go to a black church , their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience , so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes , and then he takes a pause , and he says , " oh my gosh , they 're not quite paying attention . "
so he says , " can i get an amen ? "
audience : amen .
chris emdin : so i can i get an amen ? audience : amen .
ce : and all of a sudden , everybody 's reawoken .
that preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention .
he drops his voice at a very , very low volume when he wants people to key into him , and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers .
so why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills , that magic that you need to engage an audience , to engage a student ?
so i make the argument that we reframe teacher education , that we could focus on content , and that 's fine , and we could focus on theories , and that 's fine , but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing .
now people oftentimes say , " well , magic is just magic . "
there are teachers who , despite all their challenges , who have those skills , get into those schools and are able to engage an audience , and the administrator walks by and says , " wow , he 's so good , i wish all my teachers could be that good . "
and when they try to describe what that is , they just say , " he has that magic . "
but i 'm here to tell you that magic can be taught .
magic can be taught .
magic can be taught .
now , how do you teach it ?
you teach it by allowing people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening .
if you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education , you 've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood .
you 've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop , you 've got to attend that black church , and you 've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do .
at our teacher education classes at my university , i 've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts .
they watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands .
they study the way that he walks proudly across that stage .
they listen to his metaphors and analogies , and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic .
they learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch , you do n't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more .
and if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof ! we could make dead classes come alive , we could reignite imaginations , and we can change education .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- namaste . good morning .
i 'm very happy to be here in india .
and i 've been thinking a lot about what i have learned over these last particularly 11 years with v-day and " the vagina monologues , " traveling the world , essentially meeting with women and girls across the planet to stop violence against women .
what i want to talk about today is this particular cell , or grouping of cells , that is in each and every one of us .
and i want to call it the girl cell .
and it 's in men as well as in women .
i want you to imagine that this particular grouping of cells is central to the evolution of our species and the continuation of the human race .
and i want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell , the oppression of these cells , the reinterpretation of these cells , the undermining of these cells , getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing , eradicating , destroying , reducing these cells , basically began the process of killing off the girl cell , which was , by the way , patriarchy .
i want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective consciousness .
and it is essential to balance , to wisdom and to actually the future of all of us .
and then i want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion , and it 's empathy , and it 's passion itself , and it 's vulnerability , and it 's openness , and it 's intensity , and it 's association , and it 's relationship , and it is intuitive .
and then let 's think how compassion informs wisdom , and that vulnerability is our greatest strength , and that emotions have inherent logic , which lead to radical , appropriate , saving action .
and then let 's remember that we 've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be , that compassion clouds your thinking , that it gets in the way , that vulnerability is weakness , that emotions are not to be trusted , and you 're not supposed to take things personally , which is one of my favorites .
i think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl .
how do we bring up boys ? what does it mean to be a boy ?
to be a boy really means not to be a girl .
to be a man means not to be a girl .
to be a woman means not to be a girl .
to be strong means not to be a girl .
to be a leader means not to be a girl .
i actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we 've had to train everyone not to be that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'd also like to say that the irony of course , is that denying girl , suppressing girl , suppressing emotion , refusing feeling has lead thus here .
where we have now come to live in a world where the most extreme forms of violence , the most horrific poverty , genocide , mass rapes , the destruction of the earth , is completely out of control .
and because we have suppressed our girl cells and suppressed our girl-ship , we do not feel what is going on .
so , we are not being charged with the adequate response to what is happening .
i want to talk a little bit about the democratic republic of congo .
for me , it was the turning point of my life .
i have spent a lot of time there in the last three years .
i feel up to that point i had seen a lot in the world , a lot of violence .
i essentially lived in the rape mines of the world for the last 12 years .
but the democratic republic of congo really was the turning point in my soul .
i went and i spent time in a place called bukavu in a hospital called the panzi hospital , with a doctor who was as close to a saint as any person i 've ever met .
his name is dr. denis mukwege .
in the congo , for those of you who do n't know , there has been a war raging for the last 12 years , a war that has killed nearly six million people .
it is estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 women have been raped there .
when i spent my first weeks at panzi hospital i sat with women who sat and lined up every day to tell me their stories .
their stories were so horrific , and so mind-blowing and so on the other side of human existence , that to be perfectly honest with you , i was shattered .
and i will tell you that what happened is through that shattering , listening to the stories of eight-year-old girls who had their insides eviscerated , who had guns and bayonets and things shoved inside them so they had holes , literally , inside them where their pee and poop came out of them .
listening to the story of 80-year-old women who were tied to chains and circled , and where groups of men would come and rape them periodically , all in the name of economic exploitation to steal the minerals so the west can have it and profit from them .
my mind was so shattered .
but what happened for me is that that shattering actually emboldened me in a way i have never been emboldened .
that shattering , that opening of my girl cell , that kind of massive breakthrough of my heart allowed me to become more courageous , and braver , and actually more clever than i had been in the past in my life .
i want to say that i think the powers that be know that empire-building is actually - that feelings get in the way of empire-building .
feelings get in the way of the mass acquisition of the earth , and excavating the earth , and destroying things .
i remember , for example , when my father , who was very , very violent , used to beat me .
and he would actually say , while he was beating me , " do n't you cry . do n't you dare cry . "
because my crying somehow exposed his brutality to him .
and even in the moment he did n't want to be reminded of what he was doing .
i know that we have systematically annihilated the girl cell .
and i want to say we 've annihilated it in men as well as in women .
and i think in some ways we 've been much harsher to men in the annihilation of their girl cell .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i see how boys have been brought up , and i see this across the planet : to be tough , to be hardened , to distance themselves from their tenderness , to not cry .
i actually realized once in kosovo , when i watched a man break down , that bullets are actually hardened tears , that when we do n't allow men to have their girl self and have their vulnerability , and have their compassion , and have their hearts , that they become hardened and hurtful and violent .
and i think we have taught men to be secure when they are insecure , to pretend they know things when they do n't know things , or why would we be where we are ?
to pretend they 're not a mess when they are a mess .
and i will tell you a very funny story .
on my way here on the airplane , i was walking up and down the aisle of the plane .
and all these men , literally at least 10 men , were in their little seats watching chick flicks .
and they were all alone , and i thought , " this is the secret life of men . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've traveled , as i said , to many , many countries , and i 've seen , if we do what we do to the girl inside us then obviously it 's horrific to think what we do to girls in the world .
and we heard from sunitha yesterday , and kavita about what we do to girls .
but i just want to say that i 've met girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns , who are literally being treated like ashtrays .
i 've seen girls be treated like garbage cans .
i 've seen girls who were beaten by their mothers and brothers and fathers and uncles .
i 've seen girls starving themselves to death in america in institutions to look like some idealized version of themselves .
i 've seen that we cut girls and we control them and we keep them illiterate , or we make them feel bad about being too smart .
we silence them . we make them feel guilty for being smart . we get them to behave , to tone it down , not to be too intense .
we sell them , we kill them as embryos , we enslave them , we rape them .
we are so accustomed to robbing girls of the subject of being the subjects of their lives that we have now actually objectified them and turned them into commodities .
the selling of girls is rampant across the planet .
and in many places they are worth less than goats and cows .
but i also want to talk about the fact that if one in eight people on the planet are girls between the ages of 10 to 24 , they are they key , really , in the developing world , as well as in the whole world , to the future of humanity .
and if girls are in trouble because they face systematic disadvantages that keep them where society wants them to be , including lack of access to healthcare , education , healthy foods , labor force participation .
the burden of all the household tasks usually falls on girls and younger siblings , which ensures that they will never overcome these barriers .
the state of girls , the condition of girls , will , in my belief - and that 's the girl inside us and the girl in the world - determine whether the species survives .
and what i want to suggest is that , having talked to girls , because i just finished a new book called " i am an emotional creature : the secret life of girls around the world , " i 've been talking to girls for five years , and one of the things that i 've seen is true everywhere is that the verb that 's been enforced on girl is the verb " to please . "
girls are trained to please .
i want to change the verb .
i want us all to change the verb .
i want the verb to be " educate , " or " activate , " or " engage , " or " confront , " or " defy , " or " create . "
if we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them .
and i have to now share a few stories of girls i 've seen across the planet who have engaged their girl , who have taken on their girl in spite of all the circumstances around them .
i know a 14-year-old girl in the netherlands , for example , who is demanding that she take a boat and go around the entire world by herself .
there is a teenage girl who just recently went out and knew that she needed 56 stars tattooed on the right side of her face .
there is a girl , julia butterfly hill , who lived for a year in a tree because she wanted to protect the wild oaks .
there is a girl who i met 14 years ago in afghanistan who i have adopted as my daughter because her mother was killed . her mother was a revolutionary .
and this girl , when she was 17 years old , wore a burqa in afghanistan , and went into the stadiums and documented the atrocities that were going on towards women , underneath her burqa , with a video .
and that video became the video that went out all over the world after 9/11 to show what was going on in afghanistan .
i want to talk about rachel corrie who was in her teens when she stood in front of an israeli tank to say , " end the occupation . "
and she knew she risked death and she was literally gunned down and rolled over by that tank .
and i want to talk about a girl that i just met recently in bukavu , who was impregnated by her rapist .
and she was holding her baby .
and i asked her if she loved her baby .
and she looked into her baby 's eyes and she said , " of course i love my baby . how could i not love my baby ?
it 's my baby and it 's full of love . "
the capacity for girls to overcome situations and to move on levels , to me , is mind-blowing .
there is a girl named dorcas , and i just met her in kenya .
dorcas is 15 years old , and she was trained in self-defense .
a few months ago she was picked up on the street by three older men .
they kidnapped her , they put her in a car .
and through her self-defense , she grabbed their adam 's apples , she punched them in the eyes and she got herself free and out of the car .
in kenya , in august , i went to visit one of the v-day safe houses for girls , a house we opened seven years ago with an amazing woman named agnes pareyio .
agnes was a woman who was cut when she was a little girl , she was female genitally mutilated .
and she made a decision as many women do across this planet , that what was done to her would not be enforced and done to other women and girls .
so , for years agnes walked through the rift valley .
she taught girls what a healthy vagina looked like , and what a mutilated vagina looked like .
and in that time she saved many girls . and when we met her we asked her what we could do for her , and she said , " well , if you got me a jeep i could get around a lot faster . "
so , we got her a jeep . and then she saved 4,500 girls .
and then we asked her , " okay , what else do you need ? "
and she said , " well , now , i need a house . "
so , seven years ago agnes built the first v-day safe house in narok , kenya , in the masai land .
and it was a house where girls could run away , they could save their clitoris , they would n't be cut , they could go to school .
and in the years that agnes has had the house , she has changed the situation there .
she has literally become deputy mayor .
she 's changed the rules .
the whole community has bought in to what she 's doing .
when we were there she was doing a ritual where she reconciles girls , who have run away , with their families .
and there was a young girl named jaclyn .
jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her masai family and there 's a drought in kenya .
so cows are dying , and cows are the most valued possession .
and jaclyn overheard her father talking to an old man about how he was about to sell her for the cows .
and she knew that meant she would be cut .
she knew that meant she would n't go to school .
she knew that meant she would n't have a future .
she knew she would have to marry that old man , and she was 14 .
so , one afternoon , she 'd heard about the safe house , jaclyn left her father 's house and she walked for two days , two days through masai land .
she slept with the hyenas . she hid at night .
she imagined her father killing her on one hand , and mama agnes greeting her , with the hope that she would greet her when she got to the house .
and when she got to the house she was greeted .
agnes took her in , and agnes loved her , and agnes supported her for the year .
she went to school and she found her voice , and she found her identity , and she found her heart .
then , her time was ready when she had to go back to talk to her father about the reconciliation , after a year .
i had the privilege of being in the hut when she was reunited with her father and reconciled .
in that hut , we walked in , and her father and his four wives were sitting there , and her sisters who had just returned because they had all fled when she had fled , and her primary mother , who had been beaten in standing up for her with the elders .
when her father saw her and saw who she had become , in her full girl self , he threw his arms around her and broke down crying .
he said , " you are beautiful . you have grown into a gorgeous woman .
we will not cut you .
and i give you my word , here and now , that we will not cut your sisters either . "
and what she said to him was , " you were willing to sell me for four cows , and a calf and some blankets .
but i promise you , now that i will be educated i will always take care of you , and i will come back and i will build you a house .
and i will be in your corner for the rest of your life . "
for me , that is the power of girls .
and that is the power of transformation .
i want to close today with a new piece from my book .
and i want to do it tonight for the girl in everybody here .
and i want to do it for sunitha .
and i want to do it for the girls that sunitha talked about yesterday , the girls who survive , the girls who can become somebody else .
but i really want to do it for each and every person here , to value the girl in us , to value the part that cries , to value the part that 's emotional , to value the part that 's vulnerable , to understand that 's where the future lies .
this is called " i 'm an emotional creature . "
and it happened because i met a girl in watts , l.a.
i was asking girls if they like being a girl , and all the girls were like , " no , i hate it . i ca n't stand it .
it 's all bad . my brothers get everything . "
and this girl just sat up and went , " i love being a girl .
i 'm an emotional creature ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is for her : i love being a girl .
i can feel what you 're feeling as you 're feeling inside the feeling before .
i am an emotional creature .
things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas .
they pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears .
oh , i know when your girlfriend 's really pissed off , even though she appears to give you what you want .
i know when a storm is coming .
i can feel the invisible stirrings in the air .
i can tell you he wo n't call back . it 's a vibe i share .
i am an emotional creature .
i love that i do not take things lightly .
everything is intense to me , the way i walk in the street , the way my momma wakes me up , the way it 's unbearable when i lose , the way i hear bad news .
i am an emotional creature .
i am connected to everything and everyone . i was born like that .
do n't you say all negative that it 's only only a teenage thing , or it 's only because i 'm a girl .
these feelings make me better .
they make me present . they make me ready . they make me strong .
i am an emotional creature .
there is a particular way of knowing .
it 's like the older women somehow forgot .
i rejoice that it 's still in my body .
oh , i know when the coconut 's about to fall .
i know we have pushed the earth too far .
i know my father is n't coming back , and that no one 's prepared for the fire .
i know that lipstick means more than show , and boys are super insecure , and so-called terrorists are made , not born .
i know that one kiss could take away all my decision-making ability .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you know what ? sometimes it should .
this is not extreme . it 's a girl thing , what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open .
do n't tell me not to cry , to calm it down , not to be so extreme , to be reasonable .
i am an emotional creature .
it 's how the earth got made , how the wind continues to pollinate .
you do n't tell the atlantic ocean to behave .
i am an emotional creature .
why would you want to shut me down or turn me off ?
i am your remaining memory .
i can take you back .
nothing 's been diluted .
nothing 's leaked out .
i love , hear me , i love that i can feel the feelings inside you , even if they stop my life , even if they break my heart , even if they take me off track , they make me responsible .
i am an emotional , i am an emotional , incondotional , devotional creature .
and i love , hear me , i love , love , love being a girl .
can you say it with me ?
i love , i love , love , love being a girl !
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a recent comic strip from the los angeles times .
the punch line ?
" on the other hand , i do n't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my labrador . "
this is a recent cover of new york magazine .
best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment , births , strokes , heart disease , hip replacements , 4 a.m. emergencies .
and this is a song medley i put together - -lrb- music -rrb- did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand ?
it means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a time for inconveniences , mishaps , yearnings .
a time for plotting to whack the chief of police , like in this classic scene from " the godfather . "
coppola 's script describes these guys as , " exhausted in shirt sleeves .
it is four in the morning . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a time for even grimmer stuff than that , like autopsies and embalmings in isabel allende 's " the house of the spirits . "
after the breathtaking green-haired rosa is murdered , the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians ' paste .
they worked until four o 'clock in the morning .
a time for even grimmer stuff than that , like in last april 's new yorker magazine .
this short fiction piece by martin amis starts out , " on september 11 , 2001 , he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in portland , maine , and mohamed atta 's last day began . "
for a time that i find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day , four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press - -lrb- laughter -rrb- across a lot of different media from a lot of big names .
and it made me suspicious .
i figured , surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world , really , are n't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it , right ?
could it be there is something more going on here ?
something deliberate , something secret , and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway ?
i say this guy - alberto giacometti , shown here with some of his sculptures on the swiss 100 franc note .
he did it with this famous piece from the new york museum of modern art .
its title - " the palace at four in the morning - -lrb- laughter -rrb- 1932 .
not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning i can find .
i believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it .
i call this the giacometti code , a ted exclusive .
no , feel free to follow along on your blackberries or your iphones if you 've got them .
it works a little something like - this is a recent google search for four in the morning .
results vary , of course . this is pretty typical .
the top 10 results yield you four hits for faron young 's song , " it 's four in the morning , " three hits for judi dench 's film , " four in the morning , " one hit for wislawa szymborska 's poem , " four in the morning . "
but what , you may ask , do a polish poet , a british dame , a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent google ranking ?
well , let 's start with faron young - who was born incidentally in 1932 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in 1996 , he shot himself in the head on december ninth - which incidentally is judi dench 's birthday .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he did n't die on dench 's birthday .
he languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 - which incidentally is how old alberto giacometti was when he died .
where was wislawa szymborska during all this ?
she has the world 's most absolutely watertight alibi .
on that very day , december 10 , 1996 while mr. four in the morning , faron young , was giving up the ghost in nashville , tennessee , ms. four in the morning - or one of them anyway - wislawa szymborska was in stockholm , sweden , accepting the nobel prize for literature .
100 years to the day after the death of alfred nobel himself .
coincidence ? no , it 's creepy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- coincidence to me has a much simpler metric .
that 's like me telling you , " hey , you know the nobel prize was established in 1901 , which coincidentally is the same year alberto giacometti was born ? "
no , not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm , but that does not mean there 's not something going on at the highest possible levels .
in fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we 're about to see .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- video : homer simpson : we have a tennis court , a swimming pool , a screening room - you mean if i want pork chops , even in the middle of the night , your guy will fry them up ?
herbert powell : sure , that 's what he 's paid for .
now do you need towels , laundry , maids ?
hs : wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait - let me see if i got this straight .
it is christmas day , 4 a.m.
there 's a rumble in my stomach .
marge simpson : homer , please .
rives : wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait .
let me see if i got this straight , matt .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when homer simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock , but the whole freaking calendar , he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the baby jesus .
and no , i do n't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things , but obviously i know a coded message when i see one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , i know a coded message when i see one .
and folks , you can buy a copy of bill clinton 's " my life " from the bookstore here at ted .
parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want .
or you can go to the random house website where there is this excerpt .
and how far down into it you figure we 'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket ?
would you believe about a dozen paragraphs ?
this is page 474 on your paperbacks if you 're following along : " though it was getting better , i still was n't satisfied with the inaugural address .
my speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on inauguration day , i was still changing it . "
sure you were , because you 've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you .
and then - -lrb- laughter -rrb- three paragraphs later we get this little beauty : " we went back to blair house to look at the speech for the last time .
it had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m. "
well , how could it have ?
by his own writing , this man was either asleep , at a prayer meeting with al and tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase .
what happens to american presidents at 0400 on inauguration day ?
what happened to william jefferson clinton ?
we might not ever know .
and i noticed , he 's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it could get awkward , right ?
i mean after all , this whole business happened on his watch .
but if he were here - -lrb- laughter -rrb- he might remind us , as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography , that on this day bill clinton began a journey - a journey that saw him go on to become the first democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades .
in generations .
the first since this man , franklin delano roosevelt , who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election , way back in a simpler time , way back in 1932 - -lrb- laughter -rrb- the year alberto giacometti -lrb- laughter -rrb- made " the palace at four in the morning . "
the year , let 's remember , that this voice , now departed , first came a-cryin ' into this big old crazy world of ours .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- last year , i told you the story , in seven minutes , of project orion , which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked , but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened .
so it did n't happen . it was a dream that did not happen .
this year i 'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing .
this was a perfect introduction .
and it 's a story that did work . it did happen , and the machines are all around us .
and it was a technology that was inevitable .
if the people i 'm going to tell you the story about , if they had n't done it , somebody else would have .
so , it was sort of the right idea at the right time .
this is barricelli 's universe . this is the universe we live in now .
it 's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things , including changing biology .
i 'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at trinity , which was the manhattan project . it was a little bit like ted : it brought a whole lot of very smart people together .
and three of the smartest people were stan ulam , richard feynman and john von neumann .
and it was von neumann who said , after the bomb , he was working on something much more important than bombs : he 's thinking about computers .
so , he was n't only thinking about them ; he built one . this is the machine he built .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he built this machine , and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works , with these little bits . and it 's an idea that goes way back .
the first person to really explain that was thomas hobbes , who , in 1651 , explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing , and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic , you can do it all with arithmetic .
he said you needed addition and subtraction .
leibniz , who came a little bit later - this is 1679 - showed that you did n't even need subtraction .
you could do the whole thing with addition .
here , we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution .
and leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine .
he talked about doing it with marbles , having gates and what we now call shift registers , where you shift the gates , drop the marbles down the tracks .
and that 's what all these machines are doing , except , instead of doing it with marbles , they 're doing it with electrons .
and then we jump to von neumann , 1945 , when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing .
and 1945 , after the war , the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine .
so june 1945 - actually , the bomb has n't even been dropped yet - and von neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing , which also goes back to turing , who , before that , gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless , little , finite state machine , just reading a tape in and reading a tape out .
the other sort of genesis of what von neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather .
lewis richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people , giving them each a little chunk , and putting it together .
here , we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will , but capable of only two ideas .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's really the simplest computer .
it 's basically why you need the qubit , because it only has two ideas .
and you put lots of those together , you get the essentials of the modern computer : the arithmetic unit , the central control , the memory , the recording medium , the input and the output .
but , there 's one catch . this is the fatal - you know , we saw it in starting these programs up .
the instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail .
so , the programming has to be perfect , or it wo n't work .
if you look at the origins of this , the classic history sort of takes it all back to the eniac here .
but actually , the machine i 'm going to tell you about , the institute for advanced study machine , which is way up there , really should be down there . so , i 'm trying to revise history , and give some of these guys more credit than they 've had .
such a computer would open up universes , which are , at the present , outside the range of any instruments .
so it opens up a whole new world , and these people saw it .
the guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle , vladimir zworykin , from rca .
rca , in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time , decided not to go into computers .
but the first meetings , november 1945 , were at rca 's offices .
rca started this whole thing off , and said , you know , televisions are the future , not computers .
the essentials were all there - all the things that make these machines run .
von neumann , and a logician , and a mathematician from the army put this together . then , they needed a place to build it .
when rca said no , that 's when they decided to build it in princeton , where freeman works at the institute .
that 's where i grew up as a kid .
that 's me , that 's my sister esther , who 's talked to you before , so we both go back to the birth of this thing .
that 's freeman , a long time ago , and that was me .
and this is von neumann and morgenstern , who wrote the " theory of games . "
all these forces came together there , in princeton .
oppenheimer , who had built the bomb .
the machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations .
and julian bigelow , who took zworkykin 's place as the engineer , to actually figure out , using electronics , how you would build this thing . the whole gang of people who came to work on this , and women in front , who actually did most of the coding , were the first programmers .
these were the prototype geeks , the nerds .
they did n't fit in at the institute .
this is a letter from the director , concerned about - " especially unfair on the matter of sugar . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can read the text .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is hackers getting in trouble for the first time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
these were not theoretical physicists .
they were real soldering-gun type guys , and they actually built this thing .
and we take it for granted now , that each of these machines has billions of transistors , doing billions of cycles per second without failing .
they were using vacuum tubes , very narrow , sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes .
they actually used 6j6 , the common radio tube , because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes .
and what they did at the institute was publish every step of the way .
reports were issued , so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world .
and it really was . it was the original microprocessor .
all the computers now are copies of that machine .
the memory was in cathode ray tubes - a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube - very , very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances .
so , there 's 40 of these tubes , like a v-40 engine running the memory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the input and the output was by teletype tape at first .
this is a wire drive , using bicycle wheels .
this is the archetype of the hard disk that 's in your machine now .
then they switched to a magnetic drum .
this is modifying ibm equipment , which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry , later at ibm .
and this is the beginning of computer graphics .
the " graph 'g-beam turn on . " this next slide , that 's the - as far as i know - the first digital bitmap display , 1954 .
so , von neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud , doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components .
those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks , trying to get this thing to work , with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time .
and that 's what i 've been doing , this last six months , is going through the logs .
" running time : two minutes . input , output : 90 minutes . "
this includes a large amount of human error .
so they are always trying to figure out , what 's machine error ? what 's human error ?
what 's code , what 's hardware ?
that 's an engineer gazing at tube number 36 , trying to figure out why the memory 's not in focus .
he had to focus the memory - seems ok .
so , he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running , let alone having , you know , software problems .
" no use , went home . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " impossible to follow the damn thing , where 's a directory ? "
so , already , they 're complaining about the manuals : " before closing down in disgust ... " " the general arithmetic : operating logs . "
burning lots of midnight oil .
" maniac , " which became the acronym for the machine , mathematical and numerical integrator and calculator , " lost its memory . "
" maniac regained its memory , when the power went off . " " machine or human ? "
" aha ! " so , they figured out it 's a code problem .
" found trouble in code , i hope . "
" code error , machine not guilty . "
" damn it , i can be just as stubborn as this thing . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and the dawn came . " so they ran all night .
twenty-four hours a day , this thing was running , mainly running bomb calculations .
" everything up to this point is wasted time . " " what 's the use ? good night . "
" master control off . the hell with it . way off . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " something 's wrong with the air conditioner - smell of burning v-belts in the air . "
" a short - do not turn the machine on . "
" ibm machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards . the tar is from the roof . "
so they really were working under tough conditions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here , " a mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack , set blower to vibrating . result : no more mouse . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " here lies mouse . born : ? . died : 4:50 a.m. , may 1953 . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's an inside joke someone has penciled in : " here lies marston mouse . "
if you 're a mathematician , you get that , because marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there .
" picked a lightning bug off the drum . " " running at two kilocycles . "
that 's two thousand cycles per second - " yes , i 'm chicken " - so two kilocycles was slow speed .
the high speed was 16 kilocycles .
i do n't know if you remember a mac that was 16 megahertz , that 's slow speed .
" i have now duplicated both results .
how will i know which is right , assuming one result is correct ?
this now is the third different output .
i know when i 'm licked . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we 've duplicated errors before . "
" machine run , fine . code is n't . "
" only happens when the machine is running . "
and sometimes things are okay .
" machine a thing of beauty , and a joy forever . " " perfect running . "
" parting thought : when there 's bigger and better errors , we 'll have them . "
so , nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs .
they 're designing hydrogen bombs . but someone in the logbook , late one night , finally drew a bomb .
so , that was the result . it was mike , the first thermonuclear bomb , in 1952 .
that was designed on that machine , in the woods behind the institute .
so von neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems .
barricelli , he came to do what we now call , really , artificial life , trying to see if , in this artificial universe - he was a viral-geneticist , way , way , way ahead of his time .
he 's still ahead of some of the stuff that 's being done now .
trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer .
began - his universe started march 3 , ' 53 .
so it 's almost exactly - it 's 50 years ago next tuesday , i guess .
and he saw everything in terms of - he could read the binary code straight off the machine .
he had a wonderful rapport .
other people could n't get the machine running . it always worked for him .
even errors were duplicated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " dr. barricelli claims machine is wrong , code is right . "
so he designed this universe , and ran it .
when the bomb people went home , he was allowed in there .
he would run that thing all night long , running these things , if anybody remembers stephen wolfram , who reinvented this stuff .
and he published it . it was n't locked up and disappeared .
it was published in the literature .
" if it 's that easy to create living organisms , why not create a few yourself ? "
so , he decided to give it a try , to start this artificial biology going in the machines .
and he found all these , sort of - it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny , 5,000-byte universe , and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world , in biology .
this is some of the generations of his universe .
but they 're just going to stay numbers ; they 're not going to become organisms .
they have to have something .
you have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype .
they have to go out and do something . and he started doing that , started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with - playing chess with other machines and so on .
and they did start to evolve .
and he went around the country after that .
every time there was a new , fast machine , he started using it , and saw exactly what 's happening now .
that the programs , instead of being turned off - when you quit the program , you 'd keep running and , basically , all the sorts of things like windows is doing , running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines , he envisioned all that happening .
and he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process .
it was n't any sort of creator intelligence , but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence .
and he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike , or a new kind of life .
it just was another version of the same thing happening .
and there 's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago .
and could you do it again now ?
so , when i went into these archives looking at this stuff , lo and behold , the archivist came up one day , saying , " i think we found another box that had been thrown out . "
and it was his universe on punch cards .
so there it is , 50 years later , sitting there - sort of suspended animation .
that 's the instructions for running - this is actually the source code for one of those universes , with a note from the engineers saying they 're having some problems .
" there must be something about this code that you have n't explained yet . "
and i think that 's really the truth . we still do n't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity .
what 's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive ?
these cards , now , thanks to me showing up , are being saved .
and the question is , should we run them or not ?
you know , could we get them running ?
do you want to let it loose on the internet ?
these machines would think they - these organisms , if they came back to life now - whether they 've died and gone to heaven , there 's a universe .
my laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when barricelli quit the project .
he was thinking far ahead , to how this would really grow into a new kind of life .
and that 's what 's happening !
when juan enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth , of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab , that 's what barricelli imagined : that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code - it already is coding from nucleic acids .
we 've been doing that since , you know , since we started pcr and synthesizing small strings of dna .
and real soon , we 're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins , and , like steve showed us , that just opens an entirely new world .
it 's a world that von neumann himself envisioned .
this was published after he died : his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines , what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce .
it took really three people : barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing ; von neumann saw how you could build the machines - that now , last count , four million of these von neumann machines is built every 24 hours ; and julian bigelow , who died 10 days ago - this is john markoff 's obituary for him - he was the important missing link , the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work .
and all our computers have , inside them , the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day , sort of on pencil and paper .
and we owe a tremendous credit to that .
and he explained , in a very generous way , the spirit that brought all these different people to the institute for advanced study in the ' 40s to do this project , and make it freely available with no patents , no restrictions , no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world .
that 's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down , july 1958 .
and it 's julian bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off .
and that 's the end .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that 's actually one of the oldest questions in economics , dating back to at least before adam smith .
and that is , why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior ?
now , many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question , and as a field we 've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this .
what i 'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that i 've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save .
let me tell you a little bit about savings rates , a little bit about language , and then i 'll draw that connection .
let 's start by thinking about the member countries of the oecd , or the organization of economic cooperation and development .
oecd countries , by and large , you should think about these as the richest , most industrialized countries in the world .
and by joining the oecd , they were affirming a common commitment to democracy , open markets and free trade .
despite all of these similarities , we see huge differences in savings behavior .
so all the way over on the left of this graph , what you see is many oecd countries saving over a quarter of their gdp every year , and some oecd countries saving over a third of their gdp per year .
holding down the right flank of the oecd , all the way on the other side , is greece .
and what you can see is that over the last 25 years , greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their gdp .
it should be noted , of course , that the united states and the u.k. are the next in line .
now that we see these huge differences in savings rates , how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences ?
let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ .
linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now .
and then i 'll draw the connection between these two behaviors .
many of you have probably already noticed that i 'm chinese .
i grew up in the midwest of the united states .
and something i realized quite early on was that the chinese language forced me to speak about and - in fact , more fundamentally than that - ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways .
now , how might that be ? let me give you an example .
suppose i were talking with you and i was introducing you to my uncle .
you understood exactly what i just said in english .
if we were speaking mandarin chinese with each other , though , i would n't have that luxury .
i would n't have been able to convey so little information .
what my language would have forced me to do , instead of just telling you , " this is my uncle , " is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information .
my language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother 's side or my father 's side , whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth , and if this man was my father 's brother , whether he was older than or younger than my father .
all of this information is obligatory . chinese does n't let me ignore it .
and in fact , if i want to speak correctly , chinese forces me to constantly think about it .
now , that fascinated me endlessly as a child , but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time .
so for example , if i 'm speaking in english , i have to speak grammatically differently if i 'm talking about past rain , " it rained yesterday , " current rain , " it is raining now , " or future rain , " it will rain tomorrow . "
notice that english requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events .
why ? because i have to consider that and i have to modify what i 'm saying to say , " it will rain , " or " it 's going to rain . "
it 's simply not permissible in english to say , " it rain tomorrow . "
in contrast to that , that 's almost exactly what you would say in chinese .
a chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an english speaker 's ears .
they can say , " yesterday it rain , " " now it rain , " " tomorrow it rain . "
in some deep sense , chinese does n't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that english forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly .
is this difference in languages only between very , very distantly related languages , like english and chinese ?
actually , no .
so many of you know , in this room , that english is a germanic language .
what you may not have realized is that english is actually an outlier .
it is the only germanic language that requires this .
for example , most other germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying , " morgen regnet es , " quite literally to an english ear , " it rain tomorrow . "
this led me , as a behavioral economist , to an intriguing hypothesis .
could how you speak about time , could how your language forces you to think about time , affect your propensity to behave across time ?
you speak english , a futured language .
and what that means is that every time you discuss the future , or any kind of a future event , grammatically you 're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it 's something viscerally different .
now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak .
if that 's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present , that 's going to make it harder to save .
if , on the other hand , you speak a futureless language , the present and the future , you speak about them identically .
if that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically , that 's going to make it easier to save .
now this is a fanciful theory .
i 'm a professor , i get paid to have fanciful theories .
but how would you actually go about testing such a theory ?
well , what i did with that was to access the linguistics literature .
and interestingly enough , there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world .
this is a pocket of futureless language speakers in northern europe .
interestingly enough , when you start to crank the data , these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be , by and large , some of the world 's best savers .
just to give you a hint of that , let 's look back at that oecd graph that we were talking about .
what you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the oecd that speak futured languages .
what is the average difference here ?
five percentage points of your gdp saved per year .
over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation .
now while these findings are suggestive , countries can be different in so many different ways that it 's very , very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences .
what i 'm going to show you , though , is something that i 've been engaging in for a year , which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists , and i 'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences , hoping to get this relationship to break .
and just in summary , no matter how far i push this , i ca n't get it to break .
let me show you how far you can do that .
one way to imagine that is i gather large datasets from around the world .
so for example , there is the survey of health , -lsb- aging -rsb- and retirement in europe .
from this dataset you actually learn that retired european families are extremely patient with survey takers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so imagine that you 're a retired household in belgium and someone comes to your front door .
" excuse me , would you mind if i peruse your stock portfolio ?
do you happen to know how much your house is worth ? do you mind telling me ?
would you happen to have a hallway that 's more than 10 meters long ?
if you do , would you mind if i timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway ?
would you mind squeezing as hard as you can , in your dominant hand , this device so i can measure your grip strength ?
how about blowing into this tube so i can measure your lung capacity ? "
the survey takes over a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- combine that with a demographic and health survey collected by usaid in developing countries in africa , for example , which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the hiv status of families living in , for example , rural nigeria .
combine that with a world value survey , which measures the political opinions and , fortunately for me , the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world .
take all of that data , combine it , and this map is what you get .
what you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages .
and what i 'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that i can measure , and then i 'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels .
what are the characteristics we can control for ?
well i 'm going to match families on country of birth and residence , the demographics - what sex , their age - their income level within their own country , their educational achievement , a lot about their family structure .
it turns out there are six different ways to be married in europe .
and most granularly , i break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world - so an extreme level of granularity .
there are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself .
now effectively everything i 'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families .
it 's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions , but one of whom speaks flemish and one of whom speaks french ; or two families that live in a rural district in nigeria , one of whom speaks hausa and one of whom speaks igbo .
now even after all of this granular level of control , do futureless language speakers seem to save more ?
yes , futureless language speakers , even after this level of control , are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year .
does this have cumulative effects ?
yes , by the time they retire , futureless language speakers , holding constant their income , are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings .
can we push this data even further ?
yes , because i just told you , we actually collect a lot of health data as economists .
now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings ?
well , think about smoking , for example .
smoking is in some deep sense negative savings .
if savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure , smoking is just the opposite .
it 's current pleasure in exchange for future pain .
what we should expect then is the opposite effect .
and that 's exactly what we find .
futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely and they 're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire , and they 're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter .
i could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find .
it 's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect is n't present .
my linguistics and economics colleagues at yale and i are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak .
ultimately , the goal , once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making , we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everyone 's familiar with cancer , but we do n't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease .
the tasmanian devil has shown us that , not only can cancer be a contagious disease , but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction .
so first of all , what is a tasmanian devil ?
many of you might be familiar with taz , the cartoon character , the one that spins around and around and around .
but not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the tasmanian devil , and it 's the world 's largest carnivorous marsupial .
a marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo .
the tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes .
-lrb- screaming -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- the tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger , and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals .
-lsb- the -rsb- tasmanian devil is found only on the island of tasmania , which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of australia .
and despite their ferocious appearance , tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals .
in fact , growing up in tasmania , it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a tasmanian devil in the wild .
but the tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline .
and in fact , there 's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years .
and the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease , a contagious cancer .
the story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face .
at the time , this was thought to be a one-off .
animals , just like humans , sometimes get strange tumors .
however , we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease , which is now an epidemic spreading through tasmania .
the disease was first sighted in the northeast of tasmania in 1996 and has spread across tasmania like a huge wave .
now there 's only a small part of the population , which remains unaffected .
this disease appears first as tumors , usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected tasmanian devils .
these tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors , such as these ones here .
and the next image i 'm going to show is quite gruesome .
but inevitably , these tumors progress towards being enormous , ulcerating tumors like this one here .
this one in particular sticks in my mind , because this is the first case of this disease that i saw myself .
and i remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating , foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw .
she had n't eaten for days .
her guts were swimming with parasitic worms .
her body was riddled with secondary tumors .
and yet , she was feeding three little baby tasmanian devils in her pouch .
of course , they died along with the mother .
they were too young to survive without their mother .
in fact , in the area where she comes from , more than 90 percent of the tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease .
scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer , this infectious cancer , that was spreading through the tasmanian devil population .
and our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women , which is spread by a virus , and to the aids epidemic , which is associated with a number of different types of cancer .
all the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus .
however , we now know - and i 'll tell you right now - that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus .
in fact , the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister , and something that we had n't really thought of before .
but in order for me to explain what that is , i need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself .
cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year .
one in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives .
i myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when i was only 14 .
cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself .
paradoxically , once established , natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer .
natural selection is survival of the fittest .
and when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells , if one of them acquires new mutations , which allow them to grow more quickly , acquire nutrients more successfully , invade the body , they 'll be selected for by evolution .
that 's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat .
it evolves .
throw a drug at it , and resistant cells will grow back .
an amazing fact is that , given the right environment and the right nutrients , a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever .
however cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies , and its continued growth , its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues , leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself .
so cancer could be thought of as a strange , short-lived , self-destructive life form - an evolutionary dead end .
but that is where the tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation .
and the answer came from studying the tasmanian devil cancer 's dna .
this was work from many people , but i 'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that i did a few years ago .
the next slide is going to be gruesome .
this is jonas .
he 's a tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face .
and being a geneticist , i 'm always interested to look at dna and mutations .
so i took this opportunity to collect some samples from jonas ' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body .
i took these back to the lab .
i extracted dna from them .
and when i looked at the sequence of the dna , and compared the sequence of jonas ' tumor to that of the rest of his body , i discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile .
in fact , jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you .
what this told us was that jonas ' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body .
in fact , more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female tasmanian devil - and jonas was clearly a male .
so how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on jonas ' face ?
well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of tasmanian devil cancers from all around tasmania .
we found that all of these cancers shared the same dna .
think about that for a minute .
that means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil , that have broken free of that first devil 's body and spread through the entire tasmanian devil population .
but how can a cancer spread in a population ?
well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild .
they tend to bite each other , often quite ferociously and usually on the face .
we think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor , get into the saliva .
when the devil bites another devil , it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil , so the tumor continues to grow .
so this tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer .
it 's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it .
it spreads through the population , has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system , and it 's the only cancer that we know of that 's threatening an entire species with extinction .
but if this can happen in tasmanian devils , why has n't it happened in other animals or even humans ?
well the answer is , it has .
this is kimbo .
he 's a dog that belongs to a family in mombasa in kenya .
last year , his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region .
she took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting .
and if you 're squeamish , please look away now .
he discovered this , a huge bleeding tumor at the base of kimbo 's penis .
the vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor , a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs .
and just as the tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells , so is this dog cancer .
but this dog cancer is quite remarkable , because it spread all around the world .
and in fact , these same cells that are affecting kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in new york city , in mountain villages in the himalayas and in outback australia .
we also believe this cancer might be very old .
in fact , genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old , which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the neanderthals .
this cancer is remarkable .
it 's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of .
it 's a living relic of the distant past .
so we 've seen that this can happen in animals .
could cancers be contagious between people ?
well this is a question which fascinated chester southam , a cancer doctor in the 1950s .
ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else .
and this is a photograph of dr. southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer , who in this case was an inmate in ohio state penitentiary .
most of the people that dr. southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells .
but a small number of them did , and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill - whose immune systems were probably compromised .
what this tells us , ethical issues aside , is that ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people .
however , under some circumstances , it can happen .
and i think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future .
so just finally , cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments .
but that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer .
in fact , i believe , given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer 's growth , we can defeat cancer .
my personal aim is to defeat the tasmanian devil cancer .
let 's prevent the tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- adam ockelford : i promise there wo n't be too much of me talking , and a lot of derek playing , but i thought it would just be nice to recap on how derek got to where he is today .
it 's amazing now , because he 's so much bigger than me , but when derek was born , he could have fitted on the palm of your hand .
he was born three and a half months premature , and really it was a fantastic fight for him to survive .
he had to have a lot of oxygen , and that affected your eyes , derek , and also the way you understand language and the way you understand the world .
but that was the end of the bad news , because when derek came home from the hospital , his family decided to employ the redoubtable nanny who was going to look after you , derek , really for the rest of your childhood .
and nanny 's great insight , really , was to think , here 's a child who ca n't see .
music must be the thing for derek .
and sure enough , she sang , or as derek called it , warbled , to him for his first few years of life .
and i think it was that excitement with hearing her voice hour after hour every day that made him think maybe , you know , in his brain something was stirring , some sort of musical gift .
here 's a little picture of derek going up now , when you were with your nanny .
now nanny 's great other insight was to think , perhaps we should get derek something to play , and sure enough , she dragged this little keyboard out of the loft , never thinking really that anything much would come of it .
but derek , your tiny hand must have gone out to that thing and actually bashed it , bashed it so hard they thought it was going to break .
but out of all the bashing , after a few months , emerged the most fantastic music , and i think there was just a miracle moment , really , derek , when you realized that all the sounds you hear in the world out there is something that you can copy on the keyboard .
that was the great eureka moment .
now , not being able to see meant , of course , that you taught yourself .
derek paravicini : i taught myself to play .
ao : you did teach yourself to play , and as a consequence , playing the piano for you , derek , was a lot of knuckles and karate chops , and even a bit of nose going on in there .
and now , here 's what nanny did also do was to press the record button on one of those little early tape recorders that they had , and this is a wonderful tape , now , of derek playing when you were four years old .
dp : " molly malone -lrb- cockles and mussels -rrb- . "
ao : it was n't actually " cockles and mussels . "
this one is " english country garden . "
dp : " english country garden . "
-lrb- music : " english country garden " -rrb- ao : there you are .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think that 's just fantastic .
you know , there 's this little child who ca n't see , ca n't really understand much about the world , has no one in the family who plays an instrument , and yet he taught himself to play that .
and as you can see from the picture , there was quite a lot of body action going on while you were playing , derek .
now , along - derek and i met when he was four and a half years old , and at first , derek , i thought you were mad , to be honest , because when you played the piano , you seemed to want to play every single note on the keyboard , and also you had this little habit of hitting me out of the way .
so as soon as i tried to get near the piano , i was firmly shoved off .
and having said to your dad , nic , that i would try to teach you , i was then slightly confused as to how i might go about that if i was n't allowed near the piano .
but after a while , i thought , well , the only way is to just pick you up , shove derek over to the other side of the room , and in the 10 seconds that i got before derek came back , i could just play something very quickly for him to learn .
and in the end , derek , i think you agreed that we could actually have some fun playing the piano together .
as you can see , there 's me in my early , pre-marriage days with a brown beard , and little derek concentrating there .
i just realized this is going to be recorded , is n't it ? right . okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now then , by the age of 10 , derek really had taken the world by storm .
this is a photo of you , derek , playing at the barbican with the royal philharmonic pops .
basically it was just an exciting journey , really .
and in those days , derek , you did n't speak very much , and so there was always a moment of tension as to whether you 'd actually understood what it was we were going to play and whether you 'd play the right piece in the right key , and all that kind of thing .
but the orchestra were wowed as well , and the press of the world were fascinated by your ability to play these fantastic pieces .
now the question is , how do you do it , derek ?
and hopefully we can show the audience now how it is you do what you do .
i think that one of the first things that happened when you were very little , derek , was that by the time you were two , your musical ear had already outstripped that of most adults .
and so whenever you heard any note at all - if i just play a random note - -lrb- piano notes -rrb- - you knew instantly what it was , and you 'd got the ability as well to find that note on the piano .
now that 's called perfect pitch , and some people have perfect pitch for a few white notes in the middle of the piano .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- you can see how - you get a sense of playing with derek .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but derek , your ear is so much more than that .
if i just put the microphone down for a bit , i 'm going to play a cluster of notes .
those of you who can see will know how many notes , but derek , of course , ca n't .
not only can you say how many notes , it 's being able to play them all at the same time . here we are .
-lrb- chords -rrb- well , forget the terminology , derek . fantastic .
and it 's that ability , that ability to hear simultaneous sounds , not only just single sounds , but when a whole orchestra is playing , derek , you can hear every note , and instantly , through all those hours and hours of practice , reproduce those on the keyboard , that makes you , i think , is the basis of all your ability .
now then .
it 's no use having that kind of raw ability without the technique , and luckily , derek , you decided that , once we did start learning , you 'd let me help you learn all the scale fingerings .
so for example using your thumb under with c major .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- etc .
and in the end , you got so quick , that things like " flight of the bumblebee " were no problem , were they ?
dp : no .
ao : right . so here , by the age of 11 , derek was playing things like this .
dp : this .
-lrb- music : " flight of the bumblebee " -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ao : derek , let 's have a bow .
well done .
now the truly amazing thing was , with all those scales , derek , you could not only play " flight of the bumblebee " in the usual key , but any note i play , derek can play it on .
so if i just choose a note at random , like that one .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- can you play " flight of the bumblebee " on that note ?
dp : " flight of the bumblebee " on that note .
-lrb- music : " flight of the bumblebee " -rrb- ao : or another one ? how about in g minor ?
dp : g minor .
-lrb- music : " flight of the bumblebee " -rrb- ao : fantastic . well done , derek .
so you see , in your brain , derek , is this amazing musical computer that can instantly recalibrate , recalculate , all the pieces in the world that are out there .
most pianists would have a heart attack if you said , " sorry , do you mind playing ' flight of the bumblebee ' in b minor instead of a minor ? " as we went on .
in fact , the first time , derek , you played that with an orchestra , you 'd learned the version that you 'd learned , and then the orchestra , in fact , did have a different version , so while we were waiting in the two hours before the rehearsal and the concert , derek listened to the different version and learned it quickly and then was able to play it with the orchestra .
fantastic chap .
the other wonderful thing about you is memory .
dp : memory . ao : your memory is truly amazing , and every concert we do , we ask the audience to participate , of course , by suggesting a piece derek might like to play .
and people say , " well , that 's terribly brave because what happens if derek does n't know it ? "
and i say , " no , it 's not brave at all , because if you ask for something that derek does n't know , you 're invited to come and sing it first , and then he 'll pick it up . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish .
but seriously , would anyone like to choose a piece ?
dp : choose a piece . choose , choose , would you like to choose ? ao : because it 's quite dark . you 'll just have to shout out .
would you like to hear me play ?
-lrb- audience : " theme of paganini . " -rrb- ao : paganini . dp : " the theme of paganini . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music : " theme of paganini " -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ao : well done .
derek 's going to l.a. soon , and it 's a milestone , because it means that derek and i will have spent over 100 hours on long-haul flights together , which is quite interesting , is n't it derek ?
dp : very interesting , adam , yes . long-haul flights . yes .
ao : you may think 13 hours is a long time to keep talking , but derek does it effortlessly . now then .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in america , they 've coined this term , " the human ipod " for derek , which i think is just missing the point , really , because derek , you 're so much more than an ipod .
you 're a fantastic , creative musician , and i think that was nowhere clearer to see , really , than when we went to slovenia , and someone - in a longer concert we tend to get people joining in , and this person , very , very nervously came onto the stage .
dp : he played " chopsticks . " ao : and played " chopsticks . "
dp : " chopsticks . "
ao : a bit like this . dp : like this . yes .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- ao : i should really get derek 's manager to come and play it .
he 's sitting there .
dp : somebody played " chopsticks " like this . ao : just teasing , right ? here we go .
-lrb- music : " chopsticks " -rrb- dp : let derek play it .
ao : what did you do with it , derek ?
dp : i got to improvise with it , adam .
ao : this is derek the musician .
-lrb- music : " chopsticks " improvisation -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- clapping -rrb- keep up with derek .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the ted people will kill me , but perhaps there 's time for one encore .
dp : for one encore . ao : one encore , yes .
so this is one of derek 's heroes .
it 's the great art tatum - dp : art tatum .
ao : - who also was a pianist who could n't see , and also , i think , like derek , thought that all the world was a piano , so whenever art tatum plays something , it sounds like there 's three pianos in the room .
and here is derek 's take on art tatum 's take on " tiger rag . "
dp : " tiger rag . "
-lrb- music : " tiger rag " -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world .
i 'm not going to talk about " the skeptical environmentalist " - probably that 's also a good choice .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i am going talk about : what are the big problems in the world ?
and i must say , before i go on , i should ask every one of you to try and get out pen and paper because i 'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that .
so get out your pen and paper .
bottom line is , there is a lot of problems out there in the world .
i 'm just going to list some of them .
there are 800 million people starving .
there 's a billion people without clean drinking water .
two billion people without sanitation .
there are several million people dying of hiv and aids .
the lists go on and on .
there 's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change - so on .
there are many , many problems out there .
in an ideal world , we would solve them all , but we do n't .
we do n't actually solve all problems .
and if we do not , the question i think we need to ask ourselves - and that 's why it 's on the economy session - is to say , if we do n't do all things , we really have to start asking ourselves , which ones should we solve first ?
and that 's the question i 'd like to ask you .
if we had say , 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world , where should we spend it ?
we identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world , and i will just briefly read them : climate change , communicable diseases , conflicts , education , financial instability , governance and corruption , malnutrition and hunger , population migration , sanitation and water , and subsidies and trade barriers .
we believe that these in many ways encompass the biggest problems in the world .
the obvious question would be to ask , what do you think are the biggest things ?
where should we start on solving these problems ?
but that 's a wrong problem to ask .
that was actually the problem that was asked in davos in january .
but of course , there 's a problem in asking people to focus on problems .
because we ca n't solve problems .
surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die .
but we do n't have a technology to solve that , right ?
so the point is not to prioritize problems , but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems .
and that would be - of course that gets a little more complicated .
to climate change that would be like kyoto .
to communicable diseases , it might be health clinics or mosquito nets .
to conflicts , it would be u.n. 's peacekeeping forces , and so on .
the point that i would like to ask you to try to do , is just in 30 seconds - and i know this is in a sense an impossible task - write down what you think is probably some of the top priorities .
and also - and that 's , of course , where economics gets evil - to put down what are the things we should not do , first .
what should be at the bottom of the list ?
please , just take 30 seconds , perhaps talk to your neighbor , and just figure out what should be the top priorities and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have to the world 's biggest issues .
the amazing part of this process - and of course , i mean , i would love to - i only have 18 minutes , i 've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time , right ?
i 'd love to go into , and get you to think about this process , and that 's actually what we did .
and i also strongly encourage you , and i 'm sure we 'll also have these discussions afterwards , to think about , how do we actually prioritize ?
of course , you have to ask yourself , why on earth was such a list never done before ?
and one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable .
nobody wants to do this .
of course , every organization would love to be on the top of such a list .
but every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list .
and since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list than there is number ones , it makes perfect sense not to want to do such a list .
we 've had the u.n. for almost 60 years , yet we 've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world , and said , which of them should we do first ?
so it does n't mean that we are not prioritizing - any decision is a prioritization , so of course we are still prioritizing , if only implicitly - and that 's unlikely to be as good as if we actually did the prioritization , and went in and talked about it .
so what i 'm proposing is really to say that we have , for a very long time , had a situation when we 've had a menu of choices .
there are many , many things we can do out there , but we 've not had the prices , nor the sizes .
we have not had an idea .
imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card , but you have no idea what the price is .
you know , you have a pizza ; you 've no idea what the price is .
it could be at one dollar ; it could be 1,000 dollars .
it could be a family-size pizza ; it could be a very individual-size pizza , right ?
we 'd like to know these things .
and that is what the copenhagen consensus is really trying to do - to try to put prices on these issues .
and so basically , this has been the copenhagen consensus ' process .
we got 30 of the world 's best economists , three in each area .
so we have three of world 's top economists write about climate change .
what can we do ? what will be the cost and what will be the benefit of that ?
likewise in communicable diseases .
three of the world 's top experts saying , what can we do ?
what would be the price ?
what should we do about it , and what will be the outcome ?
and so on .
then we had some of the world 's top economists , eight of the world 's top economists , including three nobel laureates , meet in copenhagen in may 2004 .
we called them the " dream team . "
the cambridge university prefects decided to call them the real madrid of economics .
that works very well in europe , but it does n't really work over here .
and what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list .
and then you ask , why economists ?
and of course , i 'm very happy you asked that question - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because that 's a very good question .
the point is , of course , if you want to know about malaria , you ask a malaria expert .
if you want to know about climate , you ask a climatologist .
but if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first , you ca n't ask either of them , because that 's not what they do .
that is what economists do .
they prioritize .
they make that in some ways disgusting task of saying , which one should we do first , and which one should we do afterwards ?
so this is the list , and this is the one i 'd like to share with you .
of course , you can also see it on the website , and we 'll also talk about it more , i 'm sure , as the day goes on .
they basically came up with a list where they said there were bad projects - basically , projects where if you invest a dollar , you get less than a dollar back .
then there 's fair projects , good projects and very good projects .
and of course , it 's the very good projects we should start doing .
i 'm going to go from backwards so that we end up with the best projects .
these were the bad projects .
as you might see the bottom of the list was climate change .
this offends a lot of people , and that 's probably one of the things where people will say i should n't come back , either .
and i 'd like to talk about that , because that 's really curious .
why is it it came up ?
and i 'll actually also try to get back to this because it 's probably one of the things that we 'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down .
the reason why they came up with saying that kyoto - or doing something more than kyoto - is a bad deal is simply because it 's very inefficient .
it 's not saying that global warming is not happening .
it 's not saying that it 's not a big problem .
but it 's saying that what we can do about it is very little , at a very high cost .
what they basically show us , the average of all macroeconomic models , is that kyoto , if everyone agreed , would cost about 150 billion dollars a year .
that 's a substantial amount of money .
that 's two to three times the global development aid that we give the third world every year .
yet it would do very little good .
all models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100 .
so the guy in bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106 .
which is a little good , but not very much good .
so the idea here really is to say , well , we 've spent a lot of money doing a little good .
and just to give you a sense of reference , the u.n. actually estimate that for half that amount , for about 75 billion dollars a year , we could solve all major basic problems in the world .
we could give clean drinking water , sanitation , basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet .
so we have to ask ourselves , do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good ?
or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good ?
and that is really why it becomes a bad project .
it 's not to say that if we had all the money in the world , we would n't want to do it .
but it 's to say , when we do n't , it 's just simply not our first priority .
the fair projects - notice i 'm not going to comment on all these - but communicable diseases , scale of basic health services - just made it , simply because , yes , scale of basic health services is a great thing .
it would do a lot of good , but it 's also very , very costly .
again , what it tells us is suddenly we start thinking about both sides of the equation .
if you look at the good projects , a lot of sanitation and water projects came in .
again , sanitation and water is incredibly important , but it also costs a lot of infrastructure .
so i 'd like to show you the top four priorities which should be at least the first ones that we deal with when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world .
the fourth best problem is malaria - dealing with malaria .
the incidence of malaria is about a couple of -lsb- million -rsb- people get infected every year .
it might even cost up towards a percentage point of gdp every year for affected nations .
if we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years , we could bring that incidence down to half .
we could avoid about 500,000 people dying , but perhaps more importantly , we could avoid about a -lsb- million -rsb- people getting infected every year .
we would significantly increase their ability to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with - of course , in the long run , also to deal with global warming .
this third best one was free trade .
basically , the model showed that if we could get free trade , and especially cut subsidies in the u.s. and europe , we could basically enliven the global economy to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year , half of which would accrue to the third world .
again , the point is to say that we could actually pull two to three hundred million people out of poverty , very radically fast , in about two to five years .
that would be the third best thing we could do .
the second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition .
not just malnutrition in general , but there 's a very cheap way of dealing with malnutrition , namely , the lack of micronutrients .
basically , about half of the world 's population is lacking in iron , zinc , iodine and vitamin a.
if we invest about 12 billion dollars , we could make a severe inroad into that problem .
that would be the second best investment that we could do .
and the very best project would be to focus on hiv / aids .
basically , if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years , we could avoid 28 new million cases of hiv / aids .
again , what this does and what it focuses on is saying there are two very different ways that we can deal with hiv / aids .
one is treatment ; the other one is prevention .
and again , in an ideal world , we would do both .
but in a world where we do n't do either , or do n't do it very well , we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first .
and treatment is much , much more expensive than prevention .
so basically , what this focuses on is saying , we can do a lot more by investing in prevention .
basically for the amount of money that we spend , we can do x amount of good in treatment , and 10 times as much good in prevention .
so again , what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment , at first rate .
what this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities .
i 'd like to have you look at your priority list and say , did you get it right ?
or did you get close to what we came up with here ?
well , of course , one of the things is climate change again .
i find a lot of people find it very , very unlikely that we should do that .
we should also do climate change , if for no other reason , simply because it 's such a big problem .
but of course , we do n't do all problems .
there are many problems out there in the world .
and what i want to make sure of is , if we actually focus on problems , that we focus on the right ones .
the ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good .
and i think , actually - thomas schelling , one of the participants in the dream team , he put it very , very well .
one of things that people forget , is that in 100 years , when we 're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be , people will be much , much richer .
even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the u.n.
estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100 will be about as rich as we are today .
much more likely , they will be two to four times richer than we are .
and of course , we 'll be even richer than that .
but the point is to say , when we talk about saving people , or helping people in bangladesh in 2100 , we 're not talking about a poor bangladeshi .
we 're actually talking about a fairly rich dutch guy .
and so the real point , of course , is to say , do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little , 100 years from now , a fairly rich dutch guy ?
or do we want to help real poor people , right now , in bangladesh , who really need the help , and whom we can help very , very cheaply ?
or as schelling put it , imagine if you were a rich - as you will be - a rich chinese , a rich bolivian , a rich congolese , in 2100 , thinking back on 2005 , and saying , " how odd that they cared so much about helping me a little bit through climate change , and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather and my great grandfather , whom they could have helped so much more , and who needed the help so much more ? "
so i think that really does tell us why it is we need to get our priorities straight .
even if it does n't accord to the typical way we see this problem .
of course , that 's mainly because climate change has good pictures .
we have , you know , " the day after tomorrow " - it looks great , right ?
it 's a good film in the sense that i certainly want to see it , right , but do n't expect emmerich to cast brad pitt in his next movie digging latrines in tanzania or something . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it just does n't make for as much of a movie .
so in many ways , i think of the copenhagen consensus and the whole discussion of priorities as a defense for boring problems .
to make sure that we realize it 's not about making us feel good .
it 's not about making things that have the most media attention , but it 's about making places where we can actually do the most good .
the other objections , i think , that are important to say , is that i 'm somehow - or we are somehow - positing a false choice .
of course , we should do all things , in an ideal world - i would certainly agree .
i think we should do all things , but we do n't .
in 1970 , the developed world decided we were going to spend twice as much as we did , right now , than in 1970 , on the developing world .
since then our aid has halved .
so it does n't look like we 're actually on the path of suddenly solving all big problems .
likewise , people are also saying , but what about the iraq war ?
you know , we spend 100 billion dollars - why do n't we spend that on doing good in the world ?
i 'm all for that .
if any one of you guys can talk bush into doing that , that 's fine .
but the point , of course , is still to say , if you get another 100 billion dollars , we still want to spend that in the best possible way , do n't we ?
so the real issue here is to get ourselves back and think about what are the right priorities .
i should just mention briefly , is this really the right list that we got out ?
you know , when you ask the world 's best economists , you inevitably end up asking old , white american men .
and they 're not necessarily , you know , great ways of looking at the entire world .
so we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world to come and solve the same problem .
the only two requirements were that they were studying at the university , and they spoke english .
the majority of them were , first , from developing countries .
they had all the same material but they could go vastly outside the scope of discussion , and they certainly did , to come up with their own lists .
and the surprising thing was that the list was very similar - with malnutrition and diseases at the top and climate change at the bottom .
we 've done this many other times .
there 's been many other seminars and university students , and different things .
they all come out with very much the same list .
and that gives me great hope , really , in saying that i do believe that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities , and saying , what is the important thing in the world ?
of course , in an ideal world , again we 'd love to do everything .
but if we do n't do it , then we can start thinking about where should we start ?
i see the copenhagen consensus as a process .
we did it in 2004 , and we hope to assemble many more people , getting much better information for 2008 , 2012 .
map out the right path for the world - but also to start thinking about political triage .
to start thinking about saying , " let 's do not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost , not the things that we do n't know how to do , but let 's do the great things where we can do an enormous amount of good , at very low cost , right now . "
at the end of the day , you can disagree with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these , but we have to be honest and frank about saying , if there 's some things we do , there are other things we do n't do .
if we worry too much about some things , we end by not worrying about other things .
so i hope this will help us make better priorities , and think about how we better work for the world .
thank you .
i wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation , sharing some of the problems .
and warren buffet had recommended i do that - being honest about what was going well , what was n't , and making it kind of an annual thing .
a goal i had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems , because i think there are some very important problems that do n't get worked on naturally .
that is , the market does not drive the scientists , the communicators , the thinkers , the governments to do the right things .
and only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to .
so this morning i 'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand .
but before i dive into those i want to admit that i am an optimist .
any tough problem , i think it can be solved .
and part of the reason i feel that way is looking at the past .
over the past century , average lifespan has more than doubled .
another statistic , perhaps my favorite , is to look at childhood deaths .
as recently as 1960 , 110 million children were born , and 20 million of those died before the age of five .
five years ago , 135 million children were born - so , more - and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five .
so that 's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate .
it 's a phenomenal thing .
each one of those lives matters a lot .
and the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs : vaccines that were used more widely .
for example , measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000 .
so we really can make changes .
the next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again .
and i think that 's doable in well under 20 years .
why ? well there 's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths : diarrhea , pneumonia and malaria .
so that brings us to the first problem that i 'll raise this morning , which is how do we stop a deadly disease that 's spread by mosquitos ?
well , what 's the history of this disease ?
it 's been a severe disease for thousands of years .
in fact , if we look at the genetic code , it 's the only disease we can see that people who lived in africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths .
deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s .
so it was absolutely gigantic .
and the disease was all over the world .
a terrible disease . it was in the united states . it was in europe .
people did n't know what caused it until the early 1900s , when a british military man figured out that it was mosquitos .
so it was everywhere .
and two tools helped bring the death rate down .
one was killing the mosquitos with ddt .
the other was treating the patients with quinine , or quinine derivatives .
and so that 's why the death rate did come down .
now , ironically , what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones , which is where the rich countries are .
so we can see : 1900 , it 's everywhere .
1945 , it 's still most places .
1970 , the u.s. and most of europe have gotten rid of it .
1990 , you 've gotten most of the northern areas .
and more recently you can see it 's just around the equator .
and so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries , it does n't get much investment .
for example , there 's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria .
now , baldness , it 's a terrible thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and rich men are afflicted .
and so that 's why that priority has been set .
but , malaria - even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact .
over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it .
it means that you ca n't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much .
now , malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos .
i brought some here , just so you could experience this .
we 'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's no reason only poor people should have the experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- those mosquitos are not infected .
so we 've come up with a few new things . we 've got bed nets .
and bed nets are a great tool .
what it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night , so the mosquitos that bite late at night ca n't get at them .
and when you use indoor spraying with ddt and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent .
and that 's happened now in a number of countries .
it 's great to see .
but we have to be careful because malaria - the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves .
so every tool that we 've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective .
and so you end up with two choices .
if you go into a country with the right tools and the right way , you do it vigorously , you can actually get a local eradication .
and that 's where we saw the malaria map shrinking .
or , if you go in kind of half-heartedly , for a period of time you 'll reduce the disease burden , but eventually those tools will become ineffective , and the death rate will soar back up again .
and the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then did n't pay attention .
now we 're on the upswing .
bed net funding is up .
there 's new drug discovery going on .
our foundation has backed a vaccine that 's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months .
and that should save over two thirds of the lives if it 's effective .
so we 're going to have these new tools .
but that alone does n't give us the road map .
because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things .
it involves communicators to keep the funding high , to keep the visibility high , to tell the success stories .
it involves social scientists , so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets , but 90 percent .
we need mathematicians to come in and simulate this , to do monte carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together .
of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise .
we need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things .
and so as these elements come together , i 'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria .
now let me turn to a second question , a fairly different question , but i 'd say equally important .
and this is : how do you make a teacher great ?
it seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on , and we 'd understand very well .
and the answer is , really , that we do n't .
let 's start with why this is important .
well , all of us here , i 'll bet , had some great teachers .
we all had a wonderful education .
that 's part of the reason we 're here today , part of the reason we 're successful .
i can say that , even though i 'm a college drop-out .
i had great teachers .
in fact , in the united states , the teaching system has worked fairly well .
there are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places .
so the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education .
and those top 20 percent have been the best in the world , if you measure them against the other top 20 percent .
and they 've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the u.s. at the forefront .
now , the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis , but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting .
not only has that been weak. it 's getting weaker .
and if you look at the economy , it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education .
and we have to change this .
we have to change it so that people have equal opportunity .
we have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education , like science and mathematics .
when i first learned the statistics , i was pretty stunned at how bad things are .
over 30 percent of kids never finish high school .
and that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year .
because they were n't tracking where the kids were before that .
but most of the dropouts had taken place before that .
they had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent .
for minority kids , it 's over 50 percent .
and even if you graduate from high school , if you 're low-income , you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree .
if you 're low-income in the united states , you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree .
and that does n't seem entirely fair .
so , how do you make education better ?
now , our foundation , for the last nine years , has invested in this .
there 's many people working on it .
we 've worked on small schools , we 've funded scholarships , we 've done things in libraries .
a lot of these things had a good effect .
but the more we looked at it , the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing .
and we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers , between , say , the top quartile - the very best - and the bottom quartile .
how much variation is there within a school or between schools ?
and the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable .
a top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year .
what does that mean ?
that means that if the entire u.s. , for two years , had top quartile teachers , the entire difference between us and asia would go away .
within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away .
so , it 's simple . all you need are those top quartile teachers .
and so you 'd say , " wow , we should reward those people .
we should retain those people .
we should find out what they 're doing and transfer that skill to other people . "
but i can tell you that absolutely is not happening today .
what are the characteristics of this top quartile ?
what do they look like ?
you might think these must be very senior teachers .
and the answer is no .
once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter .
the variation is very , very small .
you might think these are people with master 's degrees .
they 've gone back and they 've gotten their master 's of education .
this chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality .
that bottom thing , which says there 's no effect at all , is a master 's degree .
now , the way the pay system works is there 's two things that are rewarded .
one is seniority .
because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension .
the second is giving extra money to people who get their master 's degree .
but it in no way is associated with being a better teacher .
teach for america : slight effect .
for math teachers majoring in math there 's a measurable effect .
but , overwhelmingly , it 's your past performance .
there are some people who are very good at this .
and we 've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it , to raise the average capability - or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system .
you might say , " do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher 's leave ? "
the answer is , on average , the slightly better teachers leave the system .
and it 's a system with very high turnover .
now , there are a few places - very few - where great teachers are being made .
a good example of one is a set of charter schools called kipp .
kipp means knowledge is power .
it 's an unbelievable thing .
they have 66 schools - mostly middle schools , some high schools - and what goes on is great teaching .
they take the poorest kids , and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges .
and the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools .
they 're team teaching . they 're constantly improving their teachers .
they 're taking data , the test scores , and saying to a teacher , " hey , you caused this amount of increase . "
they 're deeply engaged in making teaching better .
when you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms , at first it 's very bizarre .
i sat down and i thought , " what is going on ? "
the teacher was running around , and the energy level was high .
i thought , " i 'm in the sports rally or something .
what 's going on ? "
and the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids were n't paying attention , which kids were bored , and calling kids rapidly , putting things up on the board .
it was a very dynamic environment , because particularly in those middle school years - fifth through eighth grade - keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention , nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who does n't want to be there .
everybody needs to be involved .
and so kipp is doing it .
how does that compare to a normal school ?
well , in a normal school , teachers are n't told how good they are .
the data is n't gathered .
in the teacher 's contract , it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom - sometimes to once per year .
and they need advanced notice to do that .
so imagine running a factory where you 've got these workers , some of them just making crap and the management is told , " hey , you can only come down here once a year , but you need to let us know , because we might actually fool you , and try and do a good job in that one brief moment . "
even a teacher who wants to improve does n't have the tools to do it .
they do n't have the test scores , and there 's a whole thing of trying to block the data .
for example , new york passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers .
and so that 's sort of working in the opposite direction .
but i 'm optimistic about this , i think there are some clear things we can do .
first of all , there 's a lot more testing going on , and that 's given us the picture of where we are .
and that allows us to understand who 's doing it well , and call them out , and find out what those techniques are .
of course , digital video is cheap now .
putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools .
and so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say , " ok , here 's a little clip of something i thought i did well .
here 's a little clip of something i think i did poorly .
advise me - when this kid acted up , how should i have dealt with that ? "
and they could all sit and work together on those problems .
you can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it , have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff .
you can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course , learn from that .
if you have a kid who 's behind , you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept .
and in fact , these free courses could not only be available just on the internet , but you could make it so that dvds were always available , and so anybody who has access to a dvd player can have the very best teachers .
and so by thinking of this as a personnel system , we can do it much better .
now there 's a book actually , about kipp - the place that this is going on - that jay matthews , a news reporter , wrote - called , " work hard , be nice . "
and i thought it was so fantastic .
it gave you a sense of what a good teacher does .
i 'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , we put a lot of money into education , and i really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have .
in fact we have in the stimulus bill - it 's interesting - the house version actually had money in it for these data systems , and it was taken out in the senate because there are people who are threatened by these things .
but i - i 'm optimistic .
i think people are beginning to recognize how important this is , and it really can make a difference for millions of lives , if we get it right .
i only had time to frame those two problems .
there 's a lot more problems like that - aids , pneumonia - i can just see you 're getting excited , just at the very name of these things .
and the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad .
you know , the system does n't naturally make it happen .
governments do n't naturally pick these things in the right way .
the private sector does n't naturally put its resources into these things .
so it 's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things , get other people involved - and you 're helping to come up with solutions .
and with that , i think there 's some great things that will come out of it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " what i will " i will not dance to your war drum .
i will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum .
i will not dance to that beating .
i know that beat .
it is lifeless .
i know intimately that skin you are hitting .
it was alive once , hunted , stolen , stretched .
i will not dance to your drummed-up war .
i will not pop , spin , break for you .
i will not hate for you or even hate you .
i will not kill for you .
especially i will not die for you .
i will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide .
i will not side with you or dance to bombs because everyone is dancing .
everyone can be wrong .
life is a right , not collateral or casual .
i will not forget where i come from .
i will craft my own drum .
gather my beloved near , and our chanting will be dancing .
our humming will be drumming .
i will not be played .
i will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat .
i will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance .
this heartbeat is louder than death .
your war drum ai n't louder than this breath . haaa .
what 's up ted people ? let me hear you make some noise .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a bunch of pacifists .
confused , aspiring pacifists .
i understand .
i 've been wrong a lot lately .
like a lot .
so i could n't figure out what to read today .
i mean , i 've been saying i 've been prepping .
what that means is prepping my outfit , -lrb- laughter -rrb- prepping options , trying to figure out what i 'm coming behind and going in front of .
poetry does that .
it preps you . it aims you .
so i am going to read a poem that was chosen just now .
but i 'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here .
hold her now with you .
you do n't need to say her name out loud , you can just hold her .
are you holding her ?
this is " break clustered . "
all holy history banned .
unwritten books predicted the future , projected the past .
but my head unwraps around what appears limitless , man 's creative violence .
whose son shall it be ?
which male child will perish a new day ?
our boys ' deaths galvanize .
we cherish corpses .
we mourn women , complicated .
bitches get beat daily .
profits made , prophets ignored .
war and tooth , enameled salted lemon childhoods .
all colors run , none of us solid .
do n't look for shadow behind me . i carry it within .
i live cycles of light and darkness .
rhythm is half silence .
i see now , i never was one and not the other .
sickness , health , tender violence .
i think now i never was pure .
before form i was storm , blind , ign 'ant - still am .
human contracted itself blind , malignant .
i never was pure .
girl spoiled before ripened .
language ca n't math me .
i experience exponentially .
everything is everything .
one woman loses 15 , maybe 20 , members of her family .
one woman loses six .
one woman loses her head .
one woman searches rubble . one woman feeds on trash .
one woman shoots her face . one woman shoots her husband .
one woman straps herself .
one woman gives birth to a baby .
one woman gives birth to borders .
one woman no longer believes love will ever find her .
one woman never did .
where do refugee hearts go ?
broken , dissed , placed where they 're not from , do n't want to be missed .
faced with absence .
we mourn each one or we mean nothing at all .
my spine curves spiral .
precipice running to and running from human beings .
cluster bombs left behind .
de facto landmines .
a smoldering grief .
harvest contaminated tobacco .
harvest bombs .
harvest baby teeth .
harvest palms , smoke .
harvest witness , smoke .
resolutions , smoke .
salvation , smoke .
redemption , smoke .
breathe .
do not fear what has blown up .
if you must , fear the unexploded .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love theater .
i love the idea that you can transform , become somebody else and look at life with a completely new perspective .
i love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen .
the idea that in that room at that moment , everyone , regardless of their age , their gender , their race , their color , their religion , comes together .
at that moment , we transcend space and time together .
theater awakens our senses and opens the door to our imagination .
and our ability to imagine is what makes us explorers .
our ability to imagine makes us inventors and creators and unique .
i was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show , and began developing " upwake . "
" upwake " tells the story of zero , a modern-day business man , going to work with his life in a suitcase , stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two .
i wanted " upwake " to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would .
and i wanted to let my imagination run wild .
so i began drawing the story that was moving in my head .
if antoine de saint-exupery , the author of " the little prince , " were here , he would have drawn three holes inside that box and told you your sheep was inside .
because , if you look closely enough , things will begin to appear .
this is not a box ; these are the renderings of my imagination from head to paper to screen to life .
in " upwake " buildings wear suits , zero tap dances on a giant keyboard , clones himself with a scanner , tames and whips the computer mice , sails away into dreamscape from a single piece of paper and launches into space .
i wanted to create environments that moved and morphed like an illusionist .
go from one world to another in a second .
i wanted to have humor , beauty , simplicity and complexity and use metaphors to suggest ideas .
at the beginning of the show , for example , zero deejays dream and reality .
technology is an instrument that allowed me to manifest my visions in high definition , live , on stage .
so today , i would like to talk to you about the relationship between theater and technology .
let 's start with technology .
-lrb- fuse blowing -rrb- all right . let 's start with theater .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- buzzing -rrb- -lrb- click , click , bang -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
" upwake " lasts 52 minutes and 54 seconds .
i project 3d animation on all the four surfaces of the stage which i interact with .
the use of animation and projection was a process of discovery .
i did n't use it as a special effect , but as a partner on stage .
there are no special effects in " upwake , " no artifice .
it 's as lavish and intricate as it is simple and minimal .
three hundred and forty-four frames , four and a half years and commissions later , what started as a one person show became a collaborative work of nineteen most talented artists .
and here are some excerpts .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so this is , relatively , a new show that we 're now beginning to tour .
and in austin , texas , i was asked to give small demonstrations in schools during the afternoon .
when i arrived at one of the schools , i certainly did not expect this : six hundred kids , packed in a gymnasium , waiting .
i was a little nervous performing without animation , costume - really - and make-up .
but the teachers came to me afterward and told me they had n't seen the kids that attentive .
and i think the reason why is that i was able to use their language and their reality in order to transport them into another .
something happened along the way .
zero became a person and not just a character in a play .
zero does not speak , is neither man nor woman .
zero is zero , a little hero of the 21st century , and zero can touch so many more people than i possibly could .
it 's as much about bringing new disciplines inside this box as it is about taking theater out of its box .
as a street performer , i have learned that everybody wants to connect .
and that usually , if you 're a bit extraordinary , if you 're not exactly of human appearance , then people will feel inclined to participate and to feel out loud .
it 's as though you made something resonate within them .
it 's as though the mystery of the person they 're interacting with and connecting allows them to be themselves just a bit more .
because through your mask , they let theirs go .
being human is an art form .
i know theater can improve the quality of people 's lives , and i know theater can heal .
i 've worked as a doctor clown in a hospital for two years .
i have seen sick kids and sad parents and doctors be lifted and transported in moments of pure joy .
i know theater unites us .
zero wants to engage the generation of today and tomorrow , tell various stories through different mediums .
comic books . quantum physics video games .
and zero wants to go to the moon .
in 2007 , zero launched a green campaign , suggesting his friends and fans to turn off their electricity the idea is simple , basic . it 's not original , but it 's important , and it 's important to participate .
there is a revolution .
it 's a human and technological revolution .
it 's motion and emotion .
it 's information .
it 's visual . it 's musical . it 's sensorial .
it 's conceptual . it 's universal . it 's beyond words and numbers .
it 's happening .
the natural progression of science and art finding each other to better touch and define the human experience .
there is a revolution in the way that we think , in the way that we share , and the way that we express our stories , our evolution .
this is a time of communication , connection and creative collaboration .
charlie chaplin innovated motion pictures and told stories through music , silence , humor and poetry .
he was social , and his character , the tramp , spoke to millions .
he gave entertainment , pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most .
we are not here to question the possible ; we are here to challenge the impossible .
in the science of today , we become artists .
in the art of today , we become scientists .
we design our world . we invent possibilities .
we teach , touch and move .
it is now that we can use the diversity of our talents to create intelligent , meaningful and extraordinary work . it 's now .
-lrb- ringing -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- twelve years ago , i founded zipcar .
zipcar buys cars and parks them throughout dense metropolitan areas for people to use , by the hour and by the day , instead of owning their own cars .
each zipcar replaces 15 personal cars , and each driver drives about 80 percent less because they 're now paying the full cost , all at once , in real time .
but what zipcar really did was make sharing the norm .
now , a decade later , it 's really time to push the envelope a little bit , and so a couple years ago i moved to paris with my husband and youngest child , and we launched buzzcar a year ago .
buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars to their friends and neighbors .
instead of investing in a car , we invest in a community .
we bring the power of a corporation to individuals who add their cars to the network .
some people call this peer-to-peer .
this does express the humanity of what 's going on , and the personal relationships , but that is also like saying that it 's the same thing as a yard sale or a bake sale or babysitting .
that 's peer-to-peer .
it 's like saying yard sales are the same thing as ebay , or craft fairs are the same thing as etsy .
but what 's really happening is that we 've got the power of a free and open internet , and on top of that we 're putting a platform for participation , and the peers are now in partnership with the company , creating shared value on shared values , and each strengthening the other , and doing what the other ca n't do .
i call this peers , inc .
the incorporated side , the company , is doing things that it does really well .
what does it do really well ? it creates economies of scale , significant and long-term resource investment , the expertise of many different kinds of people and different kinds of minds , and for individuals , consumers , it 's bringing the standards , rules and recourse that we really want as consumers , and this is kind of bound up in a brand promise , and the companies are providing this on a platform for participation .
peers are giving and doing things that are incredibly expensive for companies to do .
what do they bring ? they bring this fabulous diversity , expensive for companies . and what does that deliver ?
it delivers localization and customization , specialization , and all of this aspect about social networks and how companies are yearning and eager to get inside there ?
it 's natural for me . me and my friends , i can connect to them easily .
and it also delivers really fabulous innovation , and i 'll talk about that later .
so we have the peers that are providing the services and the product , and the company that 's doing the stuff that companies do .
the two of these are delivering the best of both worlds .
some of my favorite examples : in transportation , carpooling.com. ten years old , three and a half million people have joined up , and a million rides are shared every day .
it 's a phenomenal thing . it 's the equivalent of 2,500 tgv trains , and just think , they did n't have to lay a track or buy a car .
this is all happening with excess capacity .
and it 's not just with transportation , my love , but of course in other realms . here 's fiverr.com.
i met these founders just weeks after they had launched , and now , in two years , what would you do for five dollars ?
seven hundred and fifty thousand gigs are now posted after two years , what people would do for five dollars .
and not just easy things that anyone can do .
this peers , inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm .
topcoder has 400,000 engineers who are delivering complex design and engineering services .
when i talked to their ceo , he had this great line .
he said , " we have a community that owns its own company . "
and then my all-time favorite , etsy .
etsy is providing goods that people make themselves and they 're selling it in a marketplace .
it just celebrated its seventh anniversary , and after seven years , last year it delivered 530 million dollars ' worth of sales to all those individuals who have been making those objects .
i know you guys out there who are businesspeople , are thinking , " oh my god , i want to build one of those .
i see this incredible speed and scale .
you mean all i have to do is build a platform and all these people are going to put their stuff on top and i sit back and roll it in ? "
building these platforms for participation are so nontrivial to do .
i think of the difference of google video versus youtube .
who would have thought that two young guys and a start-up would beat out google video ? why ?
i actually have no idea why . i did n't talk to them .
but i 'm thinking , you know , they probably had the " share " button a little bit brighter and to the right , and so it was easier and more convenient for the two sides that are always participating on these networks .
so i actually know a lot about building a peer platform now , and a peers , inc. company , because i 've spent the last two years doing that in paris .
so let me take you back how it 's so incredibly different building buzzcar than it was building zipcar , because now every single thing we do has these two different bodies that i have to be thinking about : the owners who are going to provide the cars and the drivers who are going to rent them .
every single decision , i have to think about what is right for both sides .
there are many , many examples and i 'll give you one that is not my favorite example : insurance .
it took me a year and a half to get the insurance just right .
hours and hours of sitting with insurers and many companies and their thoughts about risk and how this is totally innovative , they 'd never thought of it before .
way too much money , i just ca n't even go there , with lawyers , trying to figure out how this is different , who 's responsible to whom , and the result was that we were able to provide owners protection for their own driving records and their own history .
the cars are completely insured during the rental , and it gives drivers what they need , and what do they need ?
they need a low deductible , and 24-hour roadside assistance .
so this was a trick to get these two sides .
so now i want to take you to the moment of - when you 're an entrepreneur , and you 've started a new company , there 's the , here 's all the stuff we do beforehand , and then the service launches . what happens ?
so all those months of work , they come into play .
last june 1 , we launched . it was an exciting moment .
and all the owners are adding their cars . it 's really exciting .
all the drivers are becoming members . it 's excellent .
the reservations start coming in , and here , owners who were getting text messages and emails that said , " hey , joe wants to rent your car for the weekend .
you can earn 60 euros . is n't that great ? yes or no ? "
no reply . like , a huge proportion of them could n't be bothered after they had just started , they just signed up , to reply .
so i thought , " duh , robin , this is the difference between industrial production and peer production . "
industrial production , the whole point of industrial production is to provide a standardized , exact service model that is consistent every single time , and i 'm really thankful that my smartphone is made using industrial production .
and zipcar provides a very nice , consistent service that works fabulously .
but what does peer production do ? peer production is this completely different way of doing things , and you have a big quality range , and so ebay , cleverly , the first peer production , peer , inc. company , i 'd say , they figured out early on , we need to have ratings and commentaries and all that yucky side stuff .
we can flag that and we can put it to the side , and people who are buyers and consumers do n't have to deal with it .
so going back , this is my look of excitement and joy , because all this stuff that i 'd also been hoping for actually really did happen , and what 's that ?
that is the diversity of what 's going on .
you have these different fabulous owners and their different cars , different prices , different locations . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they dress differently , and they look different , and , really , i love these photos every time i look at them .
cool guys , excited guys , and here is selma , who - i love this driver .
and after a year , we have 1,000 cars that are parked across france and 6,000 people who are members and eager to drive them .
this would not be possible to do that in economic fashion for a traditional company .
back to this spectrum .
so what 's happening is , we had the yuck side , but we actually had this real wow side .
and i can tell you two great stories .
a driver was telling me that they went to rent a car to go up the coast of france and the owner gave it to them , and said , " you know what , here 's where the cliffs are , and here 's all the beaches , and this is my best beach , and this is where the best fish restaurant is . "
and the peers also become , peers and owners create relationships , and so at the last minute people can - a driver can say , " hey , you know what , i really need the car , is it available ? " and that person will say , " sure , my wife 's at home . go pick up the keys . go do it . "
so you can have these really nice things that ca n't happen , and it 's a kind of " wow ! " and i want to say " wow ! "
type of thing that 's happening here , because individuals , if you 're a company , what happens is you might have 10 people who are in charge of innovation , or 100 people who are in charge of innovation .
what happens in peer , inc. companies is that you have tens and hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are creating experiments on this model , and so out of all that influence and that effort , you are having this exceptional amount of innovation that is coming out .
so one of the reasons , if we come back to why did i call it buzzcar ? i wanted to remind all of us about the power of the hive , and its incredible facility to create this platform that individuals want to participate and innovate on .
and for me , when i think about our future , and all of those problems that seem incredibly large , the scale is impossible , the urgency is there , peers , inc. provides the speed and scale and the innovation and the creativity that is going to answer these problems .
all we have to do is create a fabulous platform for participation - nontrivial .
so i continue to think that transportation is the center of the hard universe .
all problems come back to transportation for me .
but there are all these other areas that are these profound , big problems that i know that we can work on , and people are working on them in many different sectors , but there 's this really fabulous group of things with the power of this peers , inc. model .
so over the last decade , we 've been reveling in the power of the internet and how it 's empowered individuals , and for me , what peers , inc. does is it takes it up a notch . we 're now bringing the power of the company and the corporation and supercharging individuals .
so for me , it 's a collaboration .
together , we can . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the maxim , " know thyself " has been around since the ancient greeks .
some attribute this golden world knowledge to plato , others to pythagoras .
but the truth is it does n't really matter which sage said it first , because it 's still sage advice , even today .
" know thyself . "
it 's pithy almost to the point of being meaningless , but it rings familiar and true , does n't it ?
" know thyself . "
i understand this timeless dictum as a statement about the problems , or more exactly the confusions , of consciousness .
i 've always been fascinated with knowing the self .
this fascination led me to submerge myself in art , study neuroscience and later to become a psychotherapist .
today i combine all my passions as the ceo of interaxon , a thought-controlled computing company .
my goal , quite simply , is to help people become more in tune with themselves .
i take it from this little dictum , " know thyself . "
if you think about it , this imperative is kind of the defining characteristic of our species , is n't it ?
i mean , it 's self-awareness that separates homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind .
today we 're often too busy tending to our iphones and ipods to really stop and get to know ourselves .
under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations , emails , relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags , we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place : ourselves .
much of the time we 're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world .
and we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves .
we 've cluttered ourselves up with all this .
and we feel like we have to get far , far away to a secluded retreat , leaving it all behind .
so we go far away to the top of a mountain , assuming that perching ourselves on a piece is bound to give us the respite we need to sort the clutter , the chaotic everyday , and find ourselves again .
but on that mountain where we gain that beautiful peace of mind , what are we really achieving ?
it 's really only a successful escape .
think of the term we use , " retreat . "
this is the term that armies use when they 've lost a battle .
it means we 've got to get out of here .
is this how we feel about the pressures of our world , that in order to get inside ourselves , you have to run for the hills ?
and the problem with escaping your day-to-day life is that you have to come home eventually .
so when you think about it , we 're almost like a tourist visiting ourselves over there .
and eventually that vacation 's got to come to an end .
so my question to you is , can we find ways to know ourselves without the escape ?
can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek ?
can we live here and now in our wired web and still follow those ancient instructions , " know thyself ? "
i say the answer is yes .
and i 'm here today to share a new way that we 're working with technology to this end to get familiar with our inner self like never before - humanizing technology and furthering that age-old quest of ours to more fully know the self .
it 's called thought-controlled computing .
you may or may not have noticed that i 'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead .
this is actually a brainwave sensor that 's reading the electrical activity of my brain as i give this talk .
these brainwaves are being analyzed and we can see them as a graph .
let me show you what it looks like .
that blue line there is my brainwave .
it 's the direct signal being recorded from my head , rendered in real time .
the green and red bars show that same signal displayed by frequency , with lower frequencies here and higher frequencies up here .
you 're actually looking inside my head as i speak .
these graphs are compelling , they 're undulating , but from a human 's perspective , they 're actually not very useful .
that 's why we 've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this data meaningful to the people who use it .
for instance , what if i could use this data to find out how relaxed i am at any moment ?
or what if i can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen ?
the shape on the right over here has become an indicator of what 's going on in my head .
the more relaxed i am , the more the energy 's going to fall through it .
i may also be interested in knowing how focused i am , so i can put my level of attention into the circuit board on the other side .
and the more focused my brain is , the more the circuit board is going to surge with energy .
ordinarily , i would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed i was in any tangible way .
as we know , our feelings about how we 're feeling are notoriously unreliable .
we 've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who did n't deserve it , and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier .
this new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves .
we 're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient , our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever .
i 'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit , but first i want to take a look at how we got here .
by the way , feel free to check in on my head at any time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my team at interaxon and i have been developing throught-controlled application for almost a decade now .
in the first phase of development we were really enthused by all the things we could control with our mind .
we were making things activate , light up and work just by thinking .
we were transcending the space between the mind and the device .
we brought to life a vast array of prototypes and products that you could control with your mind , like thought-controlled home appliances or a levitating chair .
we created technology and applications that engaged people 's imaginations , and it was really exciting .
and then we were asked to do something really big for the olympics .
we were invited to create a massive installation at the vancouver 2010 winter olympics , were used in vancouver , got to control the lighting on the c.n. tower , the canadian parliament buildings and niagara falls from all the way across the country using their minds .
over 17 days at the olympics 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the c.n. tower , parliament and niagara in real time with their minds from across the country , 3,000 km away .
so controlling stuff with your mind is pretty cool .
but we 're always interested in multi-tiered levels of human interaction .
and so we began looking into inventing thought-controlled applications in a more complex frame than just control .
and that was responsiveness .
we realized that we had a system that allowed technology to know something about you .
and it could join into the relationship with you .
we created the responsive room where the lights music and blinds adjusted to your state .
they followed these little shifts in your mental activity .
so as you settled into relaxation at the end of a hard day , on the couch in our office , the music would mellow with you .
when you read , the desk lamp would get brighter .
if you nod off , the system would know , dimming to darkness as you do .
we then realized that if technology could know something about you and use it to help you , there 's an even more valuable application than that .
that you could know something about yourself .
we could know sides of ourselves that were all but invisible and come to see things that were previously hidden .
let me show you an example of what i 'm talking about here .
here 's an application that i created for the ipad .
so the goal of the original game zen bound is to wrap a rope around a wooden form .
so you use it with your headset .
the headset connects wirelessly to an ipad or a smartphone .
in that headset you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear .
in the original zen bound game , you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad .
in the game that we created , of course , you control the wooden form that 's on the screen there with your mind .
as you focus on the wooden form , it rotates .
the more you focus , the faster the rotation .
this is for real .
this is not a fake .
what 's really interesting to me though is at the end of the game you get stats and feedback about how you did .
you have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing - not just how much rope you used or what your high score is , but what was going on inside of your mind .
and this is valuable feedback that we can use to understand what 's going on inside of ourselves .
i like to call this " intra-active . "
normally we think about technology as interactive .
this technology is intra-active .
it understands what 's inside of you and builds a sort of responsive relationship between you and your technology so that you can use this information to move you forward .
so you can use this information to understand you in a responsive loop .
at interaxon , intra-active technology is one of our really defining mandates .
it 's how we understand the world inside and reflect it outside into this tight loop .
for example , thought-controlled computing can teach children with add how to improve their focus .
with add , children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states .
so you can create applications that reward focused brain states .
so you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their add symptoms as they do it .
this can be as effective as ritalin .
perhaps even more importantly , thought-controlled computing can give children with add insights into their own fluctuating mental states , so they can better understand themselves and their learning needs .
the way these children will be able to use their new awareness to improve themselves will upend many of the damaging and widespread social stigmas that people who are diagnosed as different are challenged with .
we can peer inside our heads and interact with what was once locked away from us , what once mystified and separated us .
brainwave technology can understand us , anticipate our emotions and find the best solutions for our needs .
imagine this collected awareness of the individual computed and reflected across an entire lifespan .
imagine the insights that you can gain from this kind of second sight .
it would be like plugging into your own personal google .
on the subject of google , today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them .
you can tag pictures of baby animals as happy , or whatever baby animals are to you , and then you can search that database , navigating with your feelings , rather than the keywords that just hint at them .
or you could tag facebook photos with the emotions that you had associated with those memories and then instantly prioritize the streams that catch your attention , just like this .
humanizing technology is about taking what 's already natural about the human-tech experience and building technology seamlessly in tandem with it .
as it aligns with our human behaviors , it can allow us to make better sense of what we do and , more importantly , why , creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are .
with humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles .
when our productivity starts to slacken , we can go back to that data and see how we can make more effective balance between work and play .
do you know what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self , what triggers cause you to be depressed or what fun things are going to bring you out of that funk ?
imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest , or what activities brought you joy .
would you make more time for those people ? would you prioritize ?
would you get a divorce ?
what thought-controlled computing can allow you to do is build colorful layered pictures of our lives .
and with this , we can get the skinny on our psychological happenings and build a story of our behaviors over time .
we can begin to see the underlying narratives that propel us forward and tell us about what 's going on .
and from this , we can learn how to change the plot , the outcome and the character of our personal stories .
two millennia ago , those greeks had some powerful insights .
they knew that a fundamental piece falls into place when you start to live out their little phrase , when you come into contact with yourself .
they understood the power of human narrative and the value that we place on humans as changing , evolving and growing .
but they understood something more fundamental - the sheer joy in discovery , the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it , the richness that we get from seeing , feeling and knowing the lives that we are .
my mom 's an artist , and as a child i 'd often see her bring things to life with the stroke of a brush .
one moment it was all white space , pure possibility .
the next , it was alive with her colorful ideas and expressions .
as i sat easel-side , watching her transform canvas after canvas , i learned that you could create your own world .
i learned that our own inner worlds - our ideas , emotions and imaginations - were , in fact , not bound by our brains and bodies .
if you could think it , if you could discover it , you could bring it to life .
to me , thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush - one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us .
i look forward to the day that i can sit beside you , easel-side , watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- other people . everyone is interested in other people .
everyone has relationships with other people , and they 're interested in these relationships for a variety of reasons .
good relationships , bad relationships , annoying relationships , agnostic relationships , and what i 'm going to do is focus on the central piece of an interaction that goes on in a relationship .
so i 'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we 're all interested in interacting with other people , i 'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features , and i 'm going to turn that object , that simplified object , into a scientific probe , and provide the early stages , embryonic stages of new insights into what happens in two brains while they simultaneously interact .
but before i do that , let me tell you a couple of things that made this possible .
the first is we can now eavesdrop safely on healthy brain activity .
without needles and radioactivity , without any kind of clinical reason , we can go down the street and record from your friends ' and neighbors ' brains while they do a variety of cognitive tasks , and we use a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging .
you 've probably all read about it or heard about in some incarnation . let me give you a two-sentence version of it .
so we 've all heard of mris . mris use magnetic fields and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain or your knee or your stomach , grayscale images that are frozen in time .
in the 1990s , it was discovered you could use the same machines in a different mode , and in that mode , you could make microscopic blood flow movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain .
okay , so what ? in fact , the so what is , in the brain , changes in neural activity , the things that make your brain work , the things that make your software work in your brain , are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow .
you make a blood flow movie , you have an independent proxy of brain activity .
this has literally revolutionized cognitive science .
take any cognitive domain you want , memory , motor planning , thinking about your mother-in-law , getting angry at people , emotional response , it goes on and on , put people into functional mri devices , and image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity .
it 's in its early stages , and it 's crude by some measures , but in fact , 20 years ago , we were at nothing .
you could n't do people like this . you could n't do healthy people .
that 's caused a literal revolution , and it 's opened us up to a new experimental preparation . neurobiologists , as you well know , have lots of experimental preps , worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this .
and now , we have a new experimental prep : human beings .
we can now use human beings to study and model the software in human beings , and we have a few burgeoning biological measures .
okay , let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do , and it 's in the area of what you 'd call valuation .
valuation is just what you think it is , you know ?
if you went and you were valuing two companies against one another , you 'd want to know which was more valuable .
cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago .
if you want to compare oranges to windshields , what do you do ?
well , you ca n't compare oranges to windshields .
they 're immiscible . they do n't mix with one another .
so instead , you convert them to a common currency scale , put them on that scale , and value them accordingly .
well , your brain has to do something just like that as well , and we 're now beginning to understand and identify brain systems involved in valuation , and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system whose cells are located in your brainstem and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain .
i wo n't go through the details of it , but that 's an important discovery , and we know a good bit about that now , and it 's just a small piece of it , but it 's important because those are the neurons that you would lose if you had parkinson 's disease , and they 're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally every drug of abuse , and that makes sense .
drugs of abuse would come in , and they would change the way you value the world . they change the way you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice , and they make you value that over everything else .
here 's the key feature though . these neurons are also involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas , and i put some symbols up here that we assign value to for various reasons .
we have a behavioral superpower in our brain , and it at least in part involves dopamine .
we can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea , for a mere idea . no other species can do that .
in 1997 , the cult heaven 's gate committed mass suicide predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet hale-bopp waiting to take them to the next level . it was an incredibly tragic event .
more than two thirds of them had college degrees .
but the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival using exactly the same systems that were put there to make them survive . that 's a lot of control , okay ?
one thing that i 've left out of this narrative is the obvious thing , which is the focus of the rest of my little talk , and that is other people .
these same valuation systems are redeployed when we 're valuing interactions with other people .
so this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs , that makes you freeze when you get parkinson 's disease , that contributes to various forms of psychosis , is also redeployed to value interactions with other people and to assign value to gestures that you do when you 're interacting with somebody else .
let me give you an example of this .
you bring to the table such enormous processing power in this domain that you hardly even notice it .
let me just give you a few examples . so here 's a baby .
she 's three months old . she still poops in her diapers and she ca n't do calculus .
she 's related to me . somebody will be very glad that she 's up here on the screen .
you can cover up one of her eyes , and you can still read something in the other eye , and i see sort of curiosity in one eye , i see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other .
here 's a couple . they 're sharing a moment together , and we 've even done an experiment where you can cut out different pieces of this frame and you can still see that they 're sharing it . they 're sharing it sort of in parallel .
now , the elements of the scene also communicate this to us , but you can read it straight off their faces , and if you compare their faces to normal faces , it would be a very subtle cue .
here 's another couple . he 's projecting out at us , and she 's clearly projecting , you know , love and admiration at him .
here 's another couple . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm thinking i 'm not seeing love and admiration on the left . -lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , i know this is his sister , and you can just see him saying , " okay , we 're doing this for the camera , and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- he 'll kill me for showing that .
all right , so what does this mean ?
it means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem .
it engages deep systems in our brain , in dopaminergic systems that are there to make you chase sex , food and salt .
they keep you alive . it gives them the pie , it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we 've called a superpower .
so how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe ?
and the short answer is games .
economic games . so what we do is we go into two areas .
one area is called experimental economics . the other area is called behavioral economics .
and we steal their games . and we contrive them to our own purposes .
so this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game .
red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer a split to blue . let 's say red wants to keep 70 , and offers blue 30 . so he offers a 70-30 split with blue .
control passes to blue , and blue says , " i accept it , " in which case he 'd get the money , or blue says , " i reject it , " in which case no one gets anything . okay ?
so a rational choice economist would say , well , you should take all non-zero offers .
what do people do ? people are indifferent at an 80-20 split .
at 80-20 , it 's a coin flip whether you accept that or not .
why is that ? you know , because you 're pissed off .
you 're mad . that 's an unfair offer , and you know what an unfair offer is .
this is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world .
that just gives you an example of the kind of thing that these games probe . the interesting thing is , these games require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line .
you have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person .
you have to be able to remember what you 've done .
you have to stand up in the moment to do that .
then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back , and you have to do something that is interesting , which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay .
that is , you have to decide what that other person expects of you .
you have to send signals to manage your image in their mind .
like a job interview . you sit across the desk from somebody , they have some prior image of you , you send signals across the desk to move their image of you from one place to a place where you want it to be .
we 're so good at this we do n't really even notice it .
these kinds of probes exploit it . okay ?
in doing this , what we 've discovered is that humans are literal canaries in social exchanges .
canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines .
when methane built up , or carbon dioxide built up , or oxygen was diminished , the birds would swoon before people would - so it acted as an early warning system : hey , get out of the mine . things are n't going so well .
people come to the table , and even these very blunt , staged social interactions , and they , and there 's just numbers going back and forth between the people , and they bring enormous sensitivities to it .
so we realized we could exploit this , and in fact , as we 've done that , and we 've done this now in many thousands of people , i think on the order of five or six thousand . we actually , to make this a biological probe , need bigger numbers than that , remarkably so . but anyway , patterns have emerged , and we 've been able to take those patterns , convert them into mathematical models , and use those mathematical models to gain new insights into these exchanges . okay , so what ?
well , the so what is , that 's a really nice behavioral measure , the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play .
we can compute that during the game .
and we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior .
here 's the cool thing . six or seven years ago , we developed a team . it was at the time in houston , texas .
it 's now in virginia and london . and we built software that 'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices up over the internet . i guess we 've done up to six machines at a time , but let 's just focus on two .
so it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world .
we synchronize the machines , set them into these staged social interactions , and we eavesdrop on both of the interacting brains . so for the first time , we do n't have to look at just averages over single individuals , or have individuals playing computers , or try to make inferences that way . we can study individual dyads .
we can study the way that one person interacts with another person , turn the numbers up , and start to gain new insights into the boundaries of normal cognition , but more importantly , we can put people with classically defined mental illnesses , or brain damage , into these social interactions , and use these as probes of that .
so we 've started this effort . we 've made a few hits , a few , i think , embryonic discoveries .
we think there 's a future to this . but it 's our way of going in and redefining , with a new lexicon , a mathematical one actually , as opposed to the standard ways that we think about mental illness , characterizing these diseases , by using the people as birds in the exchanges . that is , we exploit the fact that the healthy partner , playing somebody with major depression , or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder , or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder , we use that as a kind of biosensor , and then we use computer programs to model that person , and it gives us a kind of assay of this .
early days , and we 're just beginning , we 're setting up sites around the world . here are a few of our collaborating sites .
the hub , ironically enough , is centered in little roanoke , virginia .
there 's another hub in london , now , and the rest are getting set up . we hope to give the data away at some stage . that 's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world .
but we 're also studying just a small part of what makes us interesting as human beings , and so i would invite other people who are interested in this to ask us for the software , or even for guidance on how to move forward with that .
let me leave you with one thought in closing .
the interesting thing about studying cognition has been that we 've been limited , in a way .
we just have n't had the tools to look at interacting brains simultaneously .
the fact is , though , that even when we 're alone , we 're a profoundly social creature . we 're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people . in fact , our minds depend on other people . they depend on other people , and they 're expressed in other people , so the notion of who you are , you often do n't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you , people that are enemies of you , people that are agnostic to you .
so this is the first sort of step into using that insight into what makes us human beings , turning it into a tool , and trying to gain new insights into mental illness .
thanks for having me . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what 's in the box ?
whatever it is must be pretty important , because i 've traveled with it , moved it , from apartment to apartment to apartment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- sound familiar ?
did you know that we americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago ?
three times .
so you 'd think , with all this extra space , we 'd have plenty of room for all our stuff .
nope .
there 's a new industry in town , a 22 billion-dollar , 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry : that of personal storage .
so we 've got triple the space , but we 've become such good shoppers that we need even more space .
so where does this lead ?
lots of credit card debt , huge environmental footprints , and perhaps not coincidentally , our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years .
well i 'm here to suggest there 's a better way , that less might actually equal more .
i bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less : college - in your dorm , traveling - in a hotel room , camping - rig up basically nothing , maybe a boat .
whatever it was for you , i bet that , among other things , this gave you a little more freedom , a little more time .
so i 'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint .
it 's actually a great way to save you some money .
and it 's going to give you a little more ease in your life .
so i started a project called life edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area .
first up : crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in manhattan with partners mutopo and jovoto.com.
i wanted it all - home office , sit down dinner for 10 , room for guests , and all my kite surfing gear .
with over 300 entries from around the world , i got it , my own little jewel box .
by buying a space that was 420 sq. ft .
instead of 600 , immediately i 'm saving 200 grand .
smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities - save some more money there , but also a smaller footprint .
and because it 's really designed around an edited set of possessions - my favorite stuff - and really designed for me , i 'm really excited to be there .
so how can you live little ?
three main approaches .
first of all , you have to edit ruthlessly .
we 've got to clear the arteries of our lives .
and that shirt that i had n't worn in years ?
it 's time for me to let it go .
we 've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives , and we 've got to learn to stem the inflow .
we need to think before we buy .
ask ourselves , " is that really going to make me happier ? truly ? "
by all means , we should buy and own some great stuff .
but we want stuff that we 're going to love for years , not just stuff .
secondly , our new mantra : small is sexy .
we want space efficiency .
we want things that are designed for how they 're used the vast majority of the time , not that rare event .
why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three ?
so we want things that nest , we want things that stack , and we want it digitized .
you can take paperwork , books , movies , and you can make it disappear - it 's magic .
finally , we want multifunctional spaces and housewares - a sink combined with a toilet , a dining table becomes a bed - same space , a little side table stretches out to seat 10 .
in the winning life edited scheme in a render here , we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space .
look at the coffee table - it grows in height and width to seat 10 .
my office folds away , easily hidden .
my bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers .
guests ? move the moving wall , have some fold-down guest beds .
and of course , my own movie theater .
so i 'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft .
but consider the benefits of an edited life .
go from 3,000 to 2,000 , from 1,500 to 1,000 .
most of us , maybe all of us , are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags , maybe a small space , a hotel room .
so when you go home and you walk through your front door , take a second and ask yourselves , " could i do with a little life editing ?
would that give me a little more freedom ?
maybe a little more time ? "
what 's in the box ?
it does n't really matter .
i know i do n't need it .
what 's in yours ?
maybe , just maybe , less might equal more .
so let 's make room for the good stuff .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- those of us who believe in heaven have some sort of idea of what heaven would be .
and in my idea , heaven is satisfied curiosity .
i think of heaven as a really comfortable cloud where i can just lie down with my belly down , like i was watching tv when i was a child , and my elbows up .
and i can basically look everywhere i want , see every movie i 've always wanted to see .
and in the same kind of trance that you can feel sometimes in the subway in new york when you 're reading , there 's something really soothing and easy .
well , the funny thing is that i already have that kind of life , in a way , because i discovered ...
it took me a while to understand it , but when i discovered around 24 years of age that i was much more comfortable with objects than with people , i finally decided to really embrace this passion .
and i basically live my life in sort of a trance , and i look around and everything i see is just the beginning of a long story .
just to give you an example : this is the exhibition , humble masterpieces , as it was at moma in 2004 .
we were in queens , we were building the big , big , big , big building in midtown , so we were in the small , small , small boondocks .
that was one of the funnest moments of my career .
but it 's not only that .
the typeface - the typeface is helvetica ; it 's its 50th anniversary this year .
and so i start thinking - max miedinger and all those swiss designers together , trying to outdo akzidenz-grotesk , and come up with a new sans-serif typeface - and the movie starts playing in my head already .
and of course , you can imagine , with humble masterpieces it was the same thing multiplied by a hundred .
and i do hope , by the way , that the real goal of the exhibition is going to have the same effect on you .
the exhibition was meant to be a way to have children think of doing ...
you know when they do homeworks at home ?
instead of having a tray with two peas , i was hoping that they would go into the kitchen cabinet or the mother 's handbag and do their museum-quality design collection on a tray .
so , everybody 's always suggesting new humble masterpieces , and at moma we put out some books just for people to suggest their own humble masterpieces .
and when you do that , usually you get 80 percent porn and 20 percent real suggestions , and instead it was all - almost - all good suggestions .
and a lot of nationalism came in .
for instance , i did n't know that the spaniards invented the mop , but they were very proud so every spaniard said " la frego . " and italians did the pizza .
and i wanted to show you , also , the suggestions from kentucky are pretty good - they had moonshine , laundry detergents and liquid nails .
and i keep it going , and i just got , -lrb- laughter -rrb- also , this suggestion from milan : it 's our traffic divider , which we call " panettone , " and it 's painted ; it 's these beautiful concrete things that you use around milan to define all the lanes of traffic .
so , think of your own , send them on if you want to - they 're always welcome .
but an exhibition like that made me understand even more what i 've been thinking of for 13 years ever since i got to moma .
i 'm italian . in italy , design is normal .
different parts of the world have a knack for different things .
i was just recently in argentina and in uruguay , and the default way of building homes in the country is a beautiful modernism that you do n't see elsewhere , but the contemporary art was terrible .
in italy , in milan especially , contemporary art really does n't have that much of a place .
but design - oh , my god .
what you find at the store at the corner , without going to any kind of fancy store , is the kind of refined design that makes everybody think that we are all so sophisticated .
it 's just what you find at the store .
and new york has another kind of knack for contemporary art .
i 'm always amazed - three-year-olds know who richard serra is and take you to the galleries .
but design , for some reason , is still misunderstood for decoration .
it 's really interesting : what many people think when i say the word " design " is they think of this kind of overdesigned - in this case , it 's overdesigned on purpose , but - decoration , interior decoration .
they think of somebody choosing fabrics .
design can be that , of course , but it can also be this .
it can be a school of design in jerusalem that tries to find a better way to design gas masks for people , because , as you know , israel deploys one gas mask per person including babies .
so , what these designers do is they find a way to lower the neckline , so that instead of being completely strangled , a teenager can also sip a coke .
they tried to make a toddler 's gas mask in such a way that the toddler can be held by the parent because proximity of the body is so important .
and then they make a little tent for the baby .
however cruel , however ruthless you can think this is it 's a great design , and it is miles away from the fancy furniture , but still , it 's part of my same field of passion .
what i 've been doing at moma since the beginning is to try to harness the power of moma because it 's great to work there . you really have power in that people usually tend to know about your exhibition or see the exhibitions , and that is power because in a design museum i would n't have as many visitors .
i 'm very well aware that 80 percent of my public is there to see picasso and matisse , and then they stumble upon my show and i keep them there .
but what i 've been trying to do is something that the curators at moma in my department have been doing ever since the museum was founded in 1929 , which is to try and see what 's going on in the world and try to use that authority in order to make things better .
there have been many episodes , and actually eames demetrius may be here in the audience , but in two instances , his great-grandfather , grandfather - i 'm always a little perplexed about the relation , exactly - charles eames the first time and then charles and ray eames the second time were involved in two competitions : one in 1940 , it was about organic furniture , and the second one in 1948 was low-cost furniture for the gis coming back from the war that then sparked a whole line of furniture .
and then there was good design for very low price .
there were a lot of programs in architecture and design that were about pointing people in the direction of a better design for a better life .
so , i started out in ' 95 with this exhibition that was called mutant materials in contemporary design .
it was about a new phase , in my opinion , in the world of design in that materials could be customized by the designers themselves .
and that put me in touch with such diverse design examples as the aerogels from the lawrence livermore lab in california ; at that time , they were beginning to be brought into the civilian market .
and at the same time , the gorgeous work of takeshi ishiguro , who did these beautiful salt-and-pepper containers that are made of rice dough .
so you see , the range is really quite diverse .
and then , for instance , this other exhibition that was entitled workspheres in 2001 , where i asked different designers to come up with ideas for the new type of work styles that were happening in the world at that time .
and you see ideo there .
it was beautiful - it was called personal skies .
the idea was that if you had a cubicle , you could project a sky on top of your head and have your own " cielo in una stanza " - a sky in a room - it 's a very famous italian song .
and other examples : this was marti guixe about working on the go , and hella jongerius , my favorite , about how to work at home .
and this lets me introduce a very important idea about design : designers are the biggest synthesizers in the world .
what they do best is make a synthesis of human needs , current conditions in economy , in materials , in sustainability issues , and then what they do at the end - if they are good - is much more than the sum of its parts .
hella jongerius is a person that is able to make a synthesis that is really quite amazing and also quite hilarious .
the idea behind her work was that at that time , everybody was saying you have to really divide your life .
instead , she said , " no , no . work and leisure can be together . "
yeah , that 's particularly gorgeous - it 's the tv dinner of 2001 .
there have been many other exhibitions in the meantime , but i do n't want to focus on my shows .
i would like , instead , to talk about how great some designers are .
i 've always had a hard time with the word " maverick . "
i came to the united states 13 years ago , and to this day i have to ask , " what does that mean ? "
so , this morning i went to see on the dictionary and it said that there was this gentleman that was not branding its cattle .
therefore , he was not following everybody 's lead , and therefore , he was a maverick .
so , designers do need to be mavericks , because the best way to design a successful object - and also an object that we were missing before - is to pretend that either it never existed or that people will be able to have a new behavior with it .
so , safe is the last exhibition that i did at moma and it ended at the beginning of last year .
it was about design that deals with safety and deals with protection .
it 's a long story because it started before 2001 and it was called emergency .
and then when 9/11 happened , i had a shock and i canceled the exhibition until , slowly but surely , it came back - as a half-full glass instead of half-empty - and it was about protection and safety .
but it ranged from such items as a complete de-mining equipment to these kind of water-sterilizing straws , so it was really wide-ranging .
it also had ... you know , cameron and i worked a little bit together , and some of the entries that you see in his website were actually in the exhibition .
but what is interesting is that we do n't need to talk about design and art anymore ; design uses whatever tools it has at its disposal in order to make a point .
it 's a sense of economy and a sense , also , of humor .
this is a beautiful project by ralph borland , who 's south african .
it 's a suit for civil disobedience .
the idea is that when you have a riot or a protest and the police comes towards you , you 're wearing this thing - it 's like a big heart and it has a loudspeaker over your heart so your heartbeat is amplified - and the police is reminded ; it 's like having a flower in front of the rifle .
and also , you can imagine , a whole group of people with the same suit will have this mounting collective heartbeat that will be scary to the police .
so , designers sometimes do n't do things that are immediately functional , but they 're functional to our understanding of issues .
tony dunne and fiona raby did this series of objects that are about our anguish and our paranoia , like this hideaway furniture that 's made in the same wood as your floor so it disappears completely and you can hide away ; or even better , the huggable atomic mushroom , which got me an article on the bulletin of atomic scientists of the united states - i do n't think it ever happened before at moma ; or this faraday chair that is supposed to protect you from radiations .
but the interesting thing in the exhibition is the discovery that the ultimate shelter is your sense of self , and there are quite a few designers that are working on this particular topic .
this is cindy van den bremen , who is a dutch designer that 's done this series of capsters .
they are athletic gear for muslim women that enable them to ski , play tennis , do whatever they want to do without having to uncap themselves .
and sometimes by doing this kind of research , you encounter such beautiful ideas of design .
twan verdonck is really young , i think he 's 27 , and working together with some psychologist he did a series of toys that are for sensorial stimulation for children that have psychological impairments .
they 're quite beautiful .
they range from this fluffy toy that is about hugging you - because autistic children like to be hugged tight , so it has a spring inside - all the way to this doll with a mirror so the child can see him or herself in the mirror and regain a sense of self .
design really looks upon the whole world and it considers the world in all of its different ranges .
i was recently at a conference on luxury organized by the herald tribune in istanbul .
and it was really interesting because i was the last speaker and before me there were people that were really talking about luxury , and i did n't want to be a party pooper but at the same time i felt that i had to kind of bring back the discourse to reality .
and the truth is that there are very different kinds of luxury , and there 's luxury that is relative for people that do n't have that much .
i want to make this point by showing you two examples of design coming from a sense of economy - very , very clear limits .
this is cuba , and this is the recycling of a squeaky toy as a bicycle bell , and this is a raincoat that is made out of rice sacks .
so they 're quite beautiful , but they 're beautiful because they 're so smart and economical .
and here is the work of two brothers from sao paulo , fernando and humberto campana , who got inspired by the poverty and smartness that they saw around them to do pieces of furniture that now are selling for an enormous amount of money .
but that 's because of the kind of strangeness of the market itself .
so really , design takes everything into account , and the interesting thing is that as the technology advances , as we become more and more wireless and impalpable , designers , instead , want us to be hands-on .
sometimes hammer-on .
this is a whole series of furniture that wants to engage you physically .
even this chair that you have to open up and then sit on so that it takes your imprint , all the way to this beautiful series of objects that are considered design by ana mir in barcelona .
from this kind of bijou made with human hair to these chocolate nipples to these intra-toe candies that your lover is supposed to suck from your toes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's quite beautiful because somehow , this is a gorgeous moment for design .
many years ago i heard a mathematician from vienna , whose name was marchetti , explain how the innovation in the military industry - therefore , secret innovation - and the innovation in the civilian society are two sinusoids that are kind of opposed .
and that makes sense .
in moments of war there 's great technological innovation , and in the world you have to do without - well , during the second world war , you had to do without steel , you had to do without aluminum .
and then as peace comes , all of these technologies get all of a sudden available for the civilian market .
many of you might know that the potato chip chair by charles and ray eames comes exactly from that kind of instance : fiberglass was available for civilian use all of a sudden .
i think that this is a strange moment .
the rhythm of the sinusoids has changed tremendously , just like the rhythm of our life in the past 25 years , so i 'm not sure anymore what the wavelength is .
but it surely is a very important moment for design , because not only is the technology proceeding , not only is computing technology making open-source possible also in the world of design , but also the idea of sustainability - which is not only sustainability from the viewpoint of co2 emissions and footprint , but also sustainability of human interrelationships - is very much part of the work of so many designers .
and that 's why designers , more and more , are working on behaviors rather than on objects .
especially the good ones , not all of them .
i wanted to show you , for instance , the work of mathieu lehanneur , which is quite fantastic .
he 's another young designer from france who 's working - and at this point he 's working , also , with pharmaceutical companies - on new ways to engage patients , especially children , in taking their medicines with constancy and with certainty .
for instance , this is a beautiful container for asthma medicine that kind of inflates itself when it 's time for you to take the medicine , so the child has to go - pffff ! - to release and relieve the container itself .
and this other medicine is something that you can draw on your skin , so intradermal delivery enables you to joyfully be involved in this particular kind of delivery .
similarly , there 's the work of people like marti guixe that tries to involve you in a way that is really about making everything pass through your mouth so that you learn from your mistakes or from your taste , orally .
the next show that i 'm going to work on - and i 've been bugging a lot of you about this here - is about the relationship between design and science .
i 'm trying to find not the metaphors , but , rather , the points in common - the common gripes , the common issues , the common preoccupations - and i think that it will enable us to go a little further in this idea of design as an instruction , as a direction rather than a prescription of form .
and i am hoping that many of you will respond to this .
i 've sent an email already to quite a few of you .
but design and science and the possibility of visualizing different scales , and therefore , really work at the scale of the very small to make it very big and very meaningful .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain .
it 's a diagram of the visual system .
and some things look very familiar today .
two eyes at the bottom , optic nerve flowing out from the back .
there 's a very large nose that does n't seem to be connected to anything in particular .
and if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system , you 'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years .
and that 's because today we can see what 's inside of the brain , rather than just looking at its overall shape .
imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard , a mouse , a screen .
you really would be kind of out of luck .
you want to be able to open it up , crack it open , look at the wiring inside .
and up until a little more than a century ago , nobody was able to do that with the brain .
nobody had had a glimpse of the brain 's wiring .
and that 's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it , put it under even a very powerful microscope , there 's nothing there .
it 's gray , formless .
there 's no structure . it wo n't tell you anything .
and this all changed in the late 19th century .
suddenly , new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring .
the computer was cracked open .
so what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the golgi stain .
and it works in a very particular way .
instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue , it somehow only stains about one percent of them .
it clears the forest , reveals the trees inside .
if everything had been labeled , nothing would have been visible .
so somehow it shows what 's there .
spanish neuroanatomist santiago ramon y cajal , who 's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience , applied this golgi stain , which yields data which looks like this , and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell , the neuron .
and if you 're thinking of the brain as a computer , this is the transistor .
and very quickly cajal realized that neurons do n't operate alone , but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer .
today , a century later , when researchers want to visualize neurons , they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them .
and there 's several ways of doing this .
but one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein .
now green fluorescent protein , which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish , is very useful .
because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell , that cell will glow green - or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein , you get a cell to glow many different colors .
and so coming back to the brain , this is from a genetically engineered mouse called " brainbow . "
and it 's so called , of course , because all of these neurons are glowing different colors .
now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons , molecules , rather than the entire cell .
and there 's several ways of doing this , but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies .
and you 're familiar , of course , with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system .
but it turns out that they 're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules , like , for example , the coat protein of a virus that 's invading the body .
and researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain , recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually .
and a lot of the images i 've been showing you here are very beautiful , but they 're also very powerful .
they have great explanatory power .
this , for example , is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain .
and you 've heard of serotonin , of course , in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety .
you 've heard of ssris , which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases .
and in order to understand how serotonin works , it 's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is .
and antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question .
i 'd like to leave you with the following thought : green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go .
they were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason , or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus , for example .
and only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say , " hey , these are tools , these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette . "
and instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch , there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there 's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs .
the fact is that we 're living longer .
medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer , and the problem is , as we age , our organs tend to fail more , and so currently there are not enough organs to go around .
in fact , in the last 10 years , the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled , while in the same time , the actual number of transplants has barely gone up .
so this is now a public health crisis .
so that 's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine .
it really involves many different areas .
you can use , actually , scaffolds , biomaterials - they 're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt - but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate .
or we can use cells alone , either your very own cells or different stem cell populations .
or we can use both .
we can use , actually , biomaterials and the cells together .
and that 's where the field is today .
but it 's actually not a new field .
interestingly , this is a book that was published back in 1938 .
it 's titled " the culture of organs . "
the first author , alexis carrel , a nobel prize winner .
he actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels , and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by alexis .
but i want you to note his co-author : charles lindbergh .
that 's the same charles lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with alexis at the rockefeller institute in new york so if the field 's been around for so long , why so few clinical advances ?
and that really has to do to many different challenges .
but if i were to point to three challenges , the first one is actually the design of materials that could go in your body and do well over time .
and many advances now , we can do that fairly readily .
the second challenge was cells .
we could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body .
over the last 20 years , we 've basically tackled that .
many scientists can now grow many different types of cells .
plus we have stem cells .
but even now , 2011 , there 's still certain cells that we just ca n't grow from the patient .
liver cells , nerve cells , pancreatic cells - we still ca n't grow them even today .
and the third challenge is vascularity , the actual supply of blood to allow those organs or tissues to survive once we regenerate them .
so we can actually use biomaterials now .
this is actually a biomaterial .
we can weave them , knit them , or we can make them like you see here .
this is actually like a cotton candy machine .
you saw the spray going in .
that was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure , this tubularized structure , which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so .
and that 's exactly what we did here .
this is actually a patient who -lsb- was -rsb- presented with a deceased organ , and we then created one of these smart biomaterials , and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient 's structure .
what we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge , if you will , and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue .
and you see that patient now six months after with an x-ray showing you the regenerated tissue , which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope .
we can also use cells alone .
these are actually cells that we obtained .
these are stem cells that we create from specific sources , and we can drive them to become heart cells , and they start beating in culture .
so they know what to do .
the cells genetically know what to do , and they start beating together .
now today , many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease .
so that 's actually now in patients .
or if we 're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures , we can then use the patient 's own cells , or some cell population , and the biomaterials , the scaffolds , together .
so the concept here : so if you do have a deceased or injured organ , we take a very small piece of that tissue , less than half the size of a postage stamp .
we then tease the cells apart , we grow the cells outside the body .
we then take a scaffold , a biomaterial - again , looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt - we then shape that material , and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time - very much like baking a layer cake , if you will .
we then place it in an oven-like device , and we 're able to create that structure and bring it out .
this is actually a heart valve that we 've engineered , and you can see here , we have the structure of the heart valve and we 've seeded that with cells , and then we exercise it .
so you see the leaflets opening and closing - of this heart valve that 's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies .
another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders .
we actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient - less than half the size of a postage stamp .
we then grow the cells outside the body , take the scaffold , coat the scaffold with the cells - the patient 's own cells , two different cell types .
we then put it in this oven-like device .
it has the same conditions as the human body - 37 degrees centigrade , 95 percent oxygen .
a few weeks later , you have your engineered organ that we 're able to implant back into the patient .
for these specific patients , we actually just suture these materials .
we use three-dimensional imagining analysis , but we actually created these biomaterials by hand .
but we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells .
we use now some type of technologies , where for solid organs , for example , like the liver , what we do is we take discard livers .
as you know , a lot of organs are actually discarded , not used .
so we can take these liver structures , which are not going to be used , and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away .
two weeks later , you have something that looks like a liver .
you can hold it like a liver , but it has no cells ; it 's just a skeleton of the liver .
and we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells , preserving the blood vessel tree .
so we actually perfuse first the blood vessel tree with the patient 's own blood vessel cells , and we then infiltrate the parenchyma with the liver cells .
and we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology .
another technology that we 've used is actually that of printing .
this is actually a desktop inkjet printer , but instead of using ink , we 're using cells .
and you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure , and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure .
and there 's a 3d elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through .
and then finally you 're able to get that structure out .
you can pop that structure out of the printer and implant it .
and this is actually a piece of bone that i 'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here .
that was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques .
another more advanced technology we 're looking at right now , our next generation of technologies , are more sophisticated printers .
this particular printer we 're designing now is actually one where we print right on the patient .
so what you see here - i know it sounds funny , but that 's the way it works .
because in reality , what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound , and you have a scanner , basically like a flatbed scanner .
that 's what you see here on the right side .
you see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves .
this is how it actually works .
here 's the scanner going through , scanning the wound .
once it 's scanned , it sends information in the correct layers of cells where they need to be .
and now you 're going to see here a demo of this actually being done in a representative wound .
and we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material .
so once those cells are on the patient they will stick where they need to be .
and this is actually new technology still under development .
we 're also working on more sophisticated printers .
because in reality , our biggest challenge are the solid organs .
i do n't know if you realize this , but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney .
patients are dying every day because we do n't have enough of those organs to go around .
so this is more challenging - large organ , vascular , a lot of blood vessel supply , a lot of cells present .
so the strategy here is - this is actually a ct scan , an x-ray - and we go layer by layer , using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3d reconstruction to get right down to those patient 's own kidneys .
we then are able to actually image those , do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics , and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form .
so we go layer by layer through the organ , analyzing each layer as we go through the organ , and we then are able to send that information , as you see here , through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient .
this actually shows the actual printer .
and this actually shows that printing .
in fact , we actually have the printer right here .
so while we 've been talking today , you can actually see the printer back here in the back stage .
that 's actually the actual printer right now , and that 's been printing this kidney structure that you see here .
it takes about seven hours to print a kidney , so this is about three hours into it now .
and dr. kang 's going to walk onstage right now , and we 're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today .
put a pair of gloves here .
thank you .
go backwards .
so , these gloves are a little bit small on me , but here it is .
you can actually see that kidney as it was printed earlier today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- has a little bit of consistency to it .
this is dr. kang who 's been working with us on this project , and part of our team .
thank you , dr. kang . i appreciate it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so this is actually a new generation .
this is actually the printer that you see here onstage .
and this is actually a new technology we 're working on now .
in reality , we now have a long history of doing this .
i 'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while .
and this is actually a very brief clip - only about 30 seconds - of a patient who actually received an organ .
-lrb- video -rrb- luke massella : i was really sick . i could barely get out of bed .
i was missing school . it was pretty much miserable .
i could n't go out and play basketball at recess without feeling like i was going to pass out when i got back inside .
i felt so sick .
i was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis , and i do n't even like to think about what my life would be like if i was on that .
so after the surgery , life got a lot better for me .
i was able to do more things .
i was able to wrestle in high school .
i became the captain of the team , and that was great .
i was able to be a normal kid with my friends .
and because they used my own cells to build this bladder , it 's going to be with me .
i 've got it for life , so i 'm all set .
-lrb- applause -rrb- juan enriquez : these experiments sometimes work , and it 's very cool when they do .
luke , come up please .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so luke , before last night , when 's the last time you saw tony ?
lm : ten years ago , when i had my surgery - and it 's really great to see him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- je : and tell us a little bit about what you 're doing .
lm : well right now i 'm in college at the university of connecticut .
i 'm a sophomore and studying communications , tv and mass media , and basically trying to live life like a normal kid , which i always wanted growing up .
but it was hard to do that when i was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder were n't working .
i went through about 16 surgeries , and it seemed impossible to do that when i was in kidney failure when i was 10 .
and this surgery came along and basically made me who i am today and saved my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- je : and tony 's done hundreds of these ?
lm : what i know from , he 's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff .
i know i was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery .
and when i was 10 , i did n't realize how amazing it was .
i was a little kid , and i was like , " yeah . i 'll have that . i 'll have that surgery . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all i wanted to do was to get better , and i did n't realize how amazing it really was until now that i 'm older and i see the amazing things that he 's doing .
je : when you got this call out of the blue - tony 's really shy , and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as tony to allow us to bring luke .
so luke , you go to your communications professors - you 're majoring in communications - and you ask them for permission to come to ted , which might have a little bit to do with communications , and what was their reaction ?
lm : most of my professors were all for it , and they said , " bring pictures and show me the clips online , " and " i 'm happy for you . "
there were a couple that were a little stubborn , but i had to talk to them .
i pulled them aside .
je : well , it 's an honor and a privilege to meet you .
thank you so much . -lrb- lm : thank you so much . -rrb- je : thank you , tony .
-lrb- applause -rrb- john hockenberry : it 's great to be here with you , tom .
and i want to start with a question that has just been consuming me since i first became familiar with your work .
in you work there 's always this kind of hybrid quality of a natural force in some sort of interplay with creative force .
are they ever in equilibrium in the way that you see your work ?
tom shannon : yeah , the subject matter that i 'm looking for , it 's usually to solve a question .
i had the question popped into my head : what does the cone that connects the sun and the earth look like if you could connect the two spheres ?
and in proportion , what would the size of the sphere and the length , and what would the taper be to the earth ?
and so i went about and made that sculpture , turning it out of solid bronze .
and i did one that was about 35 feet long .
the sun end was about four inches in diameter , and then it tapered over about 35 feet to about a millimeter at the earth end .
and so for me , it was really exciting just to see what it looks like if you could step outside and into a larger context , as though you were an astronaut , and see these two things as an object , because they are so intimately bound , and one is meaningless without the other .
jh : is there a relief in playing with these forces ?
and i 'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is in playing with these forces .
ts : well , like the magnetically levitated objects - like that silver one there , that was the result of hundreds of experiments with magnets , trying to find a way to make something float with the least possible connection to the ground .
so i got it down to just one tether to be able to support that .
jh : now is this electromagnetic here , or are these static ?
ts : those are permanent magnets , yeah .
jh : because if the power went out , there would just be a big noise .
ts : yeah .
it 's really unsatisfactory having plug-in art .
jh : i agree .
ts : the magnetic works are a combination of gravity and magnetism , so it 's a kind of mixture of these ambient forces that influence everything .
the sun has a tremendous field that extends way beyond the planets and the earth 's magnetic field protects us from the sun .
so there 's this huge invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe .
but with the pendulum , it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up .
my sculptures are normally very simplified .
i try to refine them down to very simple forms .
but the paintings become very complex , because i think the fields that are supporting them , they 're billowing , and they 're interpenetrating , and they 're interference patterns .
jh : and they 're non-deterministic .
i mean , you do n't know necessarily where you 're headed when you begin , even though the forces can be calculated .
so the evolution of this - i gather this is n't your first pendulum .
ts : no . -lrb- jh : no . -rrb- ts : the first one i did was in the late 70 's , and i just had a simple cone with a spigot at the bottom of it .
i threw it into an orbit , and it only had one color , and when it got to the center , the paint kept running out , so i had to run in there , did n't have any control over the spigot remotely .
so that told me right away : i need a remote control device .
but then i started dreaming of having six colors .
i sort of think about it as the dna - these colors , the red , blue , yellow , the primary colors and white and black .
and if you put them together in different combinations - just like printing in a sense , like how a magazine color is printed - and put them under certain forces , which is orbiting them or passing them back and forth or drawing with them , these amazing things started appearing .
jh : it looks like we 're loaded for bear here .
ts : yeah , well let 's put a couple of canvases .
i 'll ask a couple of my sons to set up the canvases here .
i want to just say - so this is jack , nick and louie .
jh : thanks guys .
ts : so here are the - jh : all right , i 'll get out of the way here .
ts : i 'm just going to throw this into an orbit and see if i can paint everybody 's shoes in the front .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jh : whoa . that is ...
ooh , nice .
ts : so something like this .
i 'm doing this as a demo , and it 's more playful , but inevitably , all of this can be used .
i can redeem this painting , just continuing on , doing layers upon layers .
and i keep it around for a couple of weeks , and i 'm contemplating it , and i 'll do another session with it and bring it up to another level , where all of this becomes the background , the depth of it .
jh : that 's fantastic .
so the valves at the bottom of those tubes there are like radio-controlled airplane valves .
ts : yes , they 're servos with cams that pinch these rubber tubes .
and they can pinch them very tight and stop it , or you can have them wide open .
and all of the colors come out one central port at the bottom .
you can always be changing colors , put aluminum paint , or i could put anything into this .
it could be tomato sauce , or anything could be dispensed - sand , powders or anything like that .
jh : so many forces there .
you 've got gravity , you 've got the centrifugal force , you 've got the fluid dynamics .
each of these beautiful paintings , are they images in and of themselves , or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas ?
ts : well , this painting here , i wanted to do something very simple , a simple , iconic image of two ripples interfering .
so the one on the right was done first , and then the one on the left was done over it .
and then i left gaps so you could see the one that was done before .
and then when i did the second one , it really disturbed the piece - these big blue lines crashing through the center of it - and so it created a kind of tension and an overlap .
there are lines in front of the one on the right , and there are lines behind the one on the left , and so it takes it into different planes .
what it 's also about , just the little events , the events of the interpenetration of - jh : two stars , or - ts : two things that happened - there 's an interference pattern , and then a third thing happens .
there are shapes that come about just by the marriage of two events that are happening , and i 'm very interested in that .
like the occurrence of moire patterns .
like this green one , this is a painting i did about 10 years ago , but it has some - see , in the upper third - there are these moires and interference patterns that are radio kind of imagery .
and that 's something that in painting i 've never seen done .
i 've never seen a representation of a kind of radio interference patterns , which are so ubiquitous and such an important part of our lives .
jh : is that a literal part of the image , or is my eye making that interference pattern - is my eye completing that interference pattern ?
ts : it is the paint actually , makes it real .
it 's really manifested there .
if i throw a very concentric circle , or concentric ellipse , it just dutifully makes these evenly spaced lines , which get closer and closer together , which describes how gravity works .
there 's something very appealing about the exactitude of science that i really enjoy .
and i love the shapes that i see in scientific observations and apparatus , especially astronomical forms and the idea of the vastness of it , the scale , is very interesting to me .
my focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology .
some of these paintings , when you look at them very close , odd things appear that really look like horses or birds or crocodiles , elephants .
there are lots of things that appear .
when you look into it , it 's sort of like looking at cloud patterns , but sometimes they 're very modeled and highly rendered .
and then there are all these forms that we do n't know what they are , but they 're equally well-resolved and complex .
so i think , conceivably , those could be predictive .
because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we 're familiar with in biology , it 's also making other forms that we 're not familiar with .
and maybe it 's the kind of forms we 'll discover underneath the surface of mars , where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface .
jh : oh , let 's hope so . oh , my god , let 's .
oh , please , yes . oh , i 'm so there .
you know , it seems at this stage in your life , you also very personally are in this state of confrontation with a sort of dissonant - i suppose it 's an electromagnetic force that somehow governs your parkinson 's and this creative force that is both the artist who is in the here and now and this sort of arc of your whole life .
is that relevant to your work ?
ts : as it turns out , this device kind of comes in handy , because i do n't have to have the fine motor skills to do , that i can operate slides , which is more of a mental process .
i 'm looking at it and making decisions : it needs more red , it needs more blue , it needs a different shape .
and so i make these creative decisions and can execute them in a much , much simpler way .
i mean , i 've got the symptoms .
i guess parkinson 's kind of creeps up over the years , but at a certain point you start seeing the symptoms .
in my case , my left hand has a significant tremor and my left leg also .
i 'm left-handed , and so i draw .
all my creations really start on small drawings , which i have thousands of , and it 's my way of just thinking .
i draw with a simple pencil , and at first , the parkinson 's was really upsetting , because i could n't get the pencil to stand still .
jh : so you 're not a gatekeeper for these forces .
you do n't think of yourself as the master of these forces .
you think of yourself as the servant .
ts : nature is - well , it 's a godsend .
it just has so much in it .
and i think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature , humans are of the universe .
the universe is in our mind , and our minds are in the universe .
and we are expressions of the universe , basically .
as humans , ultimately being part of the universe , we 're kind of the spokespeople or the observer part of the constituency of the universe .
and to interface with it , with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere act and show what they can do , giving them pigment and paint just like an artist , it 's a good ally .
it 's a terrific studio assistant .
jh : well , i love the idea that somewhere within this idea of fine motion and control with the traditional skills that you have with your hand , some sort of more elemental force gets revealed , and that 's the beauty here .
tom , thank you so much . it 's been really , really great .
ts : thank you , john .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start with a story , a la seth godin , from when i was 12 years old .
my uncle ed gave me a beautiful blue sweater - at least i thought it was beautiful .
and it had fuzzy zebras walking across the stomach , and mount kilimanjaro and mount meru were kind of right across the chest , that were also fuzzy .
and i wore it whenever i could , thinking it was the most fabulous thing i owned .
until one day in ninth grade , when i was standing with a number of the football players .
and my body had clearly changed , and matt , who was undeniably my nemesis in high school , said in a booming voice that we no longer had to go far away to go on ski trips , but we could all ski on mount novogratz .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was so humiliated and mortified that i immediately ran home to my mother and chastised her for ever letting me wear the hideous sweater .
we drove to the goodwill and we threw the sweater away somewhat ceremoniously , my idea being that i would never have to think about the sweater nor see it ever again .
fast forward - 11 years later , i 'm a 25-year-old kid .
i 'm working in kigali , rwanda , jogging through the steep slopes , when i see , 10 feet in front of me , a little boy - 11 years old - running toward me , wearing my sweater .
and i 'm thinking , no , this is not possible .
but so , curious , i run up to the child - of course scaring the living bejesus out of him - grab him by the collar , turn it over , and there is my name written on the collar of this sweater .
i tell that story , because it has served and continues to serve as a metaphor to me about the level of connectedness that we all have on this earth .
we so often do n't realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know .
i also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be .
that this traveled into the goodwill in virginia , and moved its way into the larger industry , which at that point was giving millions of tons of secondhand clothing to africa and asia .
which was a very good thing , providing low cost clothing .
and at the same time , certainly in rwanda , it destroyed the local retailing industry .
not to say that it should n't have , but that we have to get better at answering the questions that need to be considered when we think about consequences and responses .
so , i 'm going to stick in rwanda , circa 1985 , 1986 , where i was doing two things .
i had started a bakery with 20 unwed mothers .
we were called the " bad news bears , " and our notion was we were going to corner the snack food business in kigali , which was not hard because there were no snacks before us .
and because we had a good business model , we actually did it , and i watched these women transform on a micro-level .
but at the same time , i started a micro-finance bank , and tomorrow iqbal quadir is going to talk about grameen , which is the grandfather of all micro-finance banks , which now is a worldwide movement - you talk about a meme - but then it was quite new , especially in an economy that was moving from barter into trade .
we got a lot of things right .
we focused on a business model ; we insisted on skin in the game .
the women made their own decisions at the end of the day as to how they would use this access to credit to build their little businesses , earn more income so they could take care of their families better .
what we did n't understand , what was happening all around us , with the confluence of fear , ethnic strife and certainly an aid game , if you will , that was playing into this invisible but certainly palpable movement inside rwanda , that at that time , 30 percent of the budget was all foreign aid .
the genocide happened in 1994 , seven years after these women all worked together to build this dream .
and the good news was that the institution , the banking institution , lasted .
in fact , it became the largest rehabilitation lender in the country .
the bakery was completely wiped out , but the lessons for me were that accountability counts - got to build things with people on the ground , using business models where , as steven levitt would say , the incentives matter .
understand , however complex we may be , incentives matter .
so when chris raised to me how wonderful everything that was happening in the world , that we were seeing a shift in zeitgeist , on the one hand i absolutely agree with him , and i was so thrilled to see what happened with the g8 - that the world , because of people like tony blair and bono and bob geldof - the world is talking about global poverty ; the world is talking about africa in ways i have never seen in my life .
it 's thrilling .
and at the same time , what keeps me up at night is a fear that we 'll look at the victories of the g8 - 50 billion dollars in increased aid to africa , 40 billion in reduced debt - as the victory , as more than chapter one , as our moral absolution .
and in fact , what we need to do is see that as chapter one , celebrate it , close it , and recognize that we need a chapter two that is all about execution , all about the how-to .
and if you remember one thing from what i want to talk about today , it 's that the only way to end poverty , to make it history , is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor , in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable .
if we do that , we really can make poverty history .
and it was that - that whole philosophy - that encouraged me to start my current endeavor called " acumen fund , " which is trying to build some mini-blueprints for how we might do that in water , health and housing in pakistan , india , kenya , tanzania and egypt .
and i want to talk a little bit about that , and some of the examples , so you can see what it is that we 're doing .
but before i do this - and this is another one of my pet peeves - i want to talk a little bit about who the poor are .
because we too often talk about them as these strong , huge masses of people yearning to be free , when in fact , it 's quite an amazing story .
on a macro level , four billion people on earth make less than four dollars a day .
that 's who we talk about when we think about " the poor . "
if you aggregate it , it 's the third largest economy on earth , and yet most of these people go invisible .
where we typically work , there 's people making between one and three dollars a day .
who are these people ?
they are farmers and factory workers .
they work in government offices . they 're drivers .
they are domestics .
they typically pay for critical goods and services like water , like healthcare , like housing , and they pay 30 to 40 times what their middleclass counterparts pay - certainly where we work in karachi and nairobi .
the poor also are willing to make , and do make , smart decisions , if you give them that opportunity .
so , two examples .
one is in india , where there are 240 million farmers , most of whom make less than two dollars a day .
where we work in aurangabad , the land is extraordinarily parched .
you see people on average making 60 cents to a dollar .
this guy in pink is a social entrepreneur named ami tabar .
what he did was see what was happening in israel , larger approaches , and figure out how to do a drip irrigation , which is a way of bringing water directly to the plant stock .
but previously it 's only been created for large-scale farms , so ami tabar took this and modularized it down to an eighth of an acre .
a couple of principles : build small .
make it infinitely expandable and affordable to the poor .
this family , sarita and her husband , bought a 15-dollar unit when they were living in a - literally a three-walled lean-to with a corrugated iron roof .
after one harvest , they had increased their income enough to buy a second system to do their full quarter-acre .
a couple of years later , i meet them .
they now make four dollars a day , which is pretty much middle class for india , and they showed me the concrete foundation they had just laid to build their house .
and i swear , you could see the future in that woman 's eyes .
something i truly believe .
you ca n't talk about poverty today without talking about malaria bed nets , and i again give jeffrey sachs of harvard huge kudos for bringing to the world this notion of his rage - for five dollars you can save a life .
malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year .
300 to 500 million cases are reported .
it 's estimated that africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease .
five dollars can save a life .
we can send people to the moon ; we can see if there 's life on mars - why ca n't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people ?
the question , though , is not " why ca n't we ? "
the question is how can we help africans do this for themselves ?
a lot of hurdles .
one : production is too low . two : price is too high .
three : this is a good road in - right near where our factory is located .
distribution is a nightmare , but not impossible .
we started by making a 350,000-dollar loan to the largest traditional bed net manufacturer in africa so that they could transfer technology from japan and build these long-lasting , five-year nets .
here are just some pictures of the factory .
today , three years later , the company has employed another thousand women .
it contributes about 600,000 dollars in wages to the economy of tanzania .
it 's the largest company in tanzania .
the throughput rate right now is 1.5 million nets , three million by the end of the year .
we hope to have seven million at the end of next year .
so the production side is working .
on the distribution side , though , as a world , we have a lot of work to do .
right now , 95 percent of these nets are being bought by the u.n. , and then given primarily to people around africa .
we 're looking at building on some of the most precious resources of africa : people .
their women .
and so i want you to meet jacqueline , my namesake , 21 years old .
if she were born anywhere else but tanzania , i 'm telling you , she could run wall street .
she runs two of the lines , and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house .
she makes about two dollars a day , is creating an education fund , and told me she is not marrying nor having children until these things are completed .
and so , when i told her about our idea - that maybe we could take a tupperware model from the united states , and find a way for the women themselves to go out and sell these nets to others - she quickly started calculating what she herself could make and signed up .
we took a lesson from ideo , one of our favorite companies , and quickly did a prototyping on this , and took jacqueline into the area where she lives .
she brought 10 of the women with whom she interacts together to see if she could sell these nets , five dollars apiece , despite the fact that people say nobody will buy one , and we learned a lot about how you sell things .
not coming in with our own notions , because she did n't even talk about malaria until the very end .
first , she talked about comfort , status , beauty .
these nets , she said , you put them on the floor , bugs leave your house .
children can sleep through the night ; the house looks beautiful ; you hang them in the window .
and we 've started making curtains , and not only is it beautiful , but people can see status - that you care about your children .
only then did she talk about saving your children 's lives .
a lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how we sell goods and services to the poor .
i want to end just by saying that there 's enormous opportunity to make poverty history .
to do it right , we have to build business models that matter , that are scaleable and that work with africans , indians , people all over the developing world who fit in this category , to do it themselves .
because at the end of the day , it 's about engagement .
it 's about understanding that people really do n't want handouts , that they want to make their own decisions ; they want to solve their own problems ; and that by engaging with them , not only do we create much more dignity for them , but for us as well .
and so i urge all of you to think next time as to how to engage with this notion and this opportunity that we all have - to make poverty history - by really becoming part of the process and moving away from an us-and-them world , and realizing that it 's about all of us , and the kind of world that we , together , want to live in and share .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . ooh , i 'm like , " phew , phew , calm down . get back into my body now . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- usually when i play out , the first thing that happens is people scream out , " what 's she doing ? ! "
i 'll play at these rock shows , be on stage standing completely still , and they 're like , " what 's she doing ? ! what 's she doing ? ! "
and then i 'll kind of be like - -lrb- vvvwow ! -rrb- - and then they 're like , " whoa ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm sure you 're trying to figure out , " well , how does this thing work ? "
well , what i 'm doing is controlling the pitch with my left hand .
see , the closer i get to this antenna , the higher the note gets - -lrb- portamento -rrb- - and you can get it really low .
and with this hand i 'm controlling the volume , so the further away my right hand gets , the louder it gets .
-lrb- tones -rrb- so basically , with both of your hands you 're controlling pitch and volume and kind of trying to create the illusion that you 're doing separate notes , when really it 's continuously going ...
-lrb- flourish ... beep -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- sometimes i startle myself : i 'll forget that i have it on , and i 'll lean over to pick up something , and then it goes like - -lrb- blip -rrb- - " oh ! "
and it 's like a funny sound effect that follows you around if you do n't turn the thing off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- maybe we 'll go into the next tune , because i totally lost where this is going .
we 're going to do a song by david mash called " listen : the words are gone , " and maybe i 'll have words come back into me afterwards if i can relax .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'm trying to think of some of the questions that are commonly asked ; there are so many .
and ... well , i guess i could tell you a little of the history of the theremin .
it was invented around the 1920s , and the inventor , léon theremin - he also was a musician besides an inventor - he came up with the idea for making the theremin , i think , when he was working on some shortwave radios .
and there 'd be that sound in the signal - it 's like -lrb- screeching -rrb- - and he thought , " oh , what if i could control that sound and turn it into an instrument , because there are pitches in it . "
and so somehow through developing that , he eventually came to make the theremin the way it is now .
and a lot of times , even kids nowadays , they 'll make reference to a theremin by going , " whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo , " because in the ' 50s it was used in the sci-fi horror movies , that sound that 's like ... -lrb- woo-hoo-hoo-hoo -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's kind of a funny , goofy sound to do .
and sometimes if i have too much coffee , then my vibrato gets out of hand .
you 're really sensitive to your body and its functions when you 're behind this thing .
you have to stay so still if you want to have the most control .
it reminds me of the balancing act earlier on - what michael was doing - because you 're fighting so hard to keep the balance with what you 're playing with and stay in tune , and at the same time you do n't want to focus so much on being in tune all the time ; you want to be feeling the music .
and then also , you 're trying to stay very , very , very still because little movements with other parts of your body will affect the pitch , or sometimes if you 're holding a low note - -lrb- tone rising out of key -rrb- - and breathing will make it ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if i pass out on the next song ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think of it almost like like a yoga instrument because it makes you so aware of every little crazy thing your body is doing , or just aware of what you do n't want it to be doing while you 're playing ; you do n't want to have any sudden movements .
and if i go to a club and play a gig , people are like , " here , have some drinks on us ! "
and it 's like , " well , i 'm about to go on soon ; i do n't want to be like - -lrb- teetering tones -rrb- - you know ? "
it really does reflect the mood that you 're in also , if you 're ...
it 's similar to being a vocalist , except instead of it coming out of your throat , you 're controlling it just in the air and you do n't really have a point of reference ; you 're always relying on your ears and adjusting constantly .
you just have to always adjust to what 's happening and realize you 'll have bummer notes come here and there and listen to it , adjust it , and just move on , or else you 'll get too tied up and go crazy . like me .
i think we will play another tune now .
i 'm going to do " lush life . " it 's one of my favorite tunes to play .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species .
the first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious , and that 's that our species , homo sapiens , is actually really , really smart - like , ridiculously smart - like you 're all doing things that no other species on the planet does right now .
and this is , of course , not the first time you 've probably recognized this .
of course , in addition to being smart , we 're also an extremely vain species .
so we like pointing out the fact that we 're smart .
you know , so i could turn to pretty much any sage from shakespeare to stephen colbert to point out things like the fact that we 're noble in reason and infinite in faculties and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral .
but of course , there 's a second observation about the human species that i want to focus on a little bit more , and that 's the fact that even though we 're actually really smart , sometimes uniquely smart , we can also be incredibly , incredibly dumb when it comes to some aspects of our decision making .
now i 'm seeing lots of smirks out there .
do n't worry , i 'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes .
but of course , just in the last two years we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude .
and we 've watched as the tools we uniquely make to pull the resources out of our environment kind of just blow up in our face .
we 've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create - these markets that were supposed to be foolproof - we 've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes .
but both of these two embarrassing examples , i think , do n't highlight what i think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make , which is that we 'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of fail blog-worthy decisions .
but it turns out , what social scientists are actually learning is that most of us , when put in certain contexts , will actually make very specific mistakes .
the errors we make are actually predictable .
we make them again and again .
and they 're actually immune to lots of evidence .
when we get negative feedback , we still , the next time we 're face with a certain context , tend to make the same errors .
and so this has been a real puzzle to me as a sort of scholar of human nature .
what i 'm most curious about is , how is a species that 's as smart as we are capable of such bad and such consistent errors all the time ?
you know , we 're the smartest thing out there , why ca n't we figure this out ?
in some sense , where do our mistakes really come from ?
and having thought about this a little bit , i see a couple different possibilities .
one possibility is , in some sense , it 's not really our fault .
because we 're a smart species , we can actually create all kinds of environments that are super , super complicated , sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand , even though we 've actually created them .
we create financial markets that are super complex .
we create mortgage terms that we ca n't actually deal with .
and of course , if we are put in environments where we ca n't deal with it , in some sense makes sense that we actually might mess certain things up .
if this was the case , we 'd have a really easy solution to the problem of human error .
we 'd actually just say , okay , let 's figure out the kinds of technologies we ca n't deal with , the kinds of environments that are bad - get rid of those , design things better , and we should be the noble species that we expect ourselves to be .
but there 's another possibility that i find a little bit more worrying , which is , maybe it 's not our environments that are messed up .
maybe it 's actually us that 's designed badly .
this is a hint that i 've gotten from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors .
and what we see is that people tend to keep making errors exactly the same way , over and over again .
it feels like we might almost just be built to make errors in certain ways .
this is a possibility that i worry a little bit more about , because , if it 's us that 's messed up , it 's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it .
we might just have to accept the fact that we 're error prone and try to design things around it .
so this is the question my students and i wanted to get at .
how can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two ?
what we need is a population that 's basically smart , can make lots of decisions , but does n't have access to any of the systems we have , any of the things that might mess us up - no human technology , human culture , maybe even not human language .
and so this is why we turned to these guys here .
these are one of the guys i work with . this is a brown capuchin monkey .
these guys are new world primates , which means they broke off from the human branch about 35 million years ago .
this means that your great , great , great great , great , great - with about five million " greats " in there - grandmother was probably the same great , great , great , great grandmother with five million " greats " in there as holly up here .
you know , so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant , but albeit evolutionary , relative .
the good news about holly though is that she does n't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do .
you know , she 's a smart , very cut creature , a primate as well , but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up .
so she 's the perfect test case .
what if we put holly into the same context as humans ?
does she make the same mistakes as us ?
does she not learn from them ? and so on .
and so this is the kind of thing we decided to do .
my students and i got very excited about this a few years ago .
we said , all right , let 's , you know , throw so problems at holly , see if she messes these things up .
first problem is just , well , where should we start ?
because , you know , it 's great for us , but bad for humans .
we make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts .
you know , where are we actually going to start with this ?
and because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse , around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news , we said , hhmm , maybe we should actually start in the financial domain .
maybe we should look at monkey 's economic decisions and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do .
of course , that 's when we hit a sort second problem - a little bit more methodological - which is that , maybe you guys do n't know , but monkeys do n't actually use money . i know , you have n't met them .
but this is why , you know , they 're not in the queue behind you at the grocery store or the atm - you know , they do n't do this stuff .
so now we faced , you know , a little bit of a problem here .
how are we actually going to ask monkeys about money if they do n't actually use it ?
so we said , well , maybe we should just , actually just suck it up and teach monkeys how to use money .
so that 's just what we did .
what you 're looking at over here is actually the first unit that i know of of non-human currency .
we were n't very creative at the time we started these studies , so we just called it a token .
but this is the unit of currency that we 've taught our monkeys at yale to actually use with humans , to actually buy different pieces of food .
it does n't look like much - in fact , it is n't like much .
like most of our money , it 's just a piece of metal .
as those of you who 've taken currencies home from your trip know , once you get home , it 's actually pretty useless .
it was useless to the monkeys at first before they realized what they could do with it .
when we first gave it to them in their enclosures , they actually kind of picked them up , looked at them .
they were these kind of weird things .
but very quickly , the monkeys realized that they could actually hand these tokens over to different humans in the lab for some food .
and so you see one of our monkeys , mayday , up here doing this .
this is a and b are kind of the points where she 's sort of a little bit curious about these things - does n't know .
there 's this waiting hand from a human experimenter , and mayday quickly figures out , apparently the human wants this .
hands it over , and then gets some food .
it turns out not just mayday , all of our monkeys get good at trading tokens with human salesman .
so here 's just a quick video of what this looks like .
here 's mayday . she 's going to be trading a token for some food and waiting happily and getting her food .
here 's felix , i think . he 's our alpha male ; he 's a kind of big guy .
but he too waits patiently , gets his food and goes on .
so the monkeys get really good at this .
they 're surprisingly good at this with very little training .
we just allowed them to pick this up on their own .
the question is : is this anything like human money ?
is this a market at all , or did we just do a weird psychologist 's trick by getting monkeys to do something , looking smart , but not really being smart .
and so we said , well , what would the monkeys spontaneously do if this was really their currency , if they were really using it like money ?
well , you might actually imagine them to do all the kinds of smart things that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other .
you might have them start paying attention to price , paying attention to how much they buy - sort of keeping track of their monkey token , as it were .
do the monkeys do anything like this ?
and so our monkey marketplace was born .
the way this works is that our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure .
when they get a hankering for some treats , we actually allowed them a way out into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market .
upon entering the market - it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets because , as the monkeys entered the door of the market , a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens so they could actually trade the tokens with one of these two guys here - two different possible human salesmen that they could actually buy stuff from .
the salesmen were students from my lab .
they dressed differently ; they were different people .
and over time , they did basically the same thing so the monkeys could learn , you know , who sold what at what price - you know , who was reliable , who was n't , and so on .
and you can see that each of the experimenters is actually holding up a little , yellow food dish .
and that 's what the monkey can for a single token .
so everything costs one token , but as you can see , sometimes tokens buy more than others , sometimes more grapes than others .
so i 'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like .
here 's a monkey-eye-view . monkeys are shorter , so it 's a little short .
but here 's honey .
she 's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently .
all of a sudden the market opens . here 's her choice : one grapes or two grapes .
you can see honey , very good market economist , goes with the guy who gives more .
she could teach our financial advisers a few things or two .
so not just honey , most of the monkeys went with guys who had more .
most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food .
when we introduced sales , we saw the monkeys paid attention to that .
they really cared about their monkey token dollar .
the more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists to actually look at the monkeys ' data using economic tools , they basically matched , not just qualitatively , but quantitatively with what we saw humans doing in a real market .
so much so that , if you saw the monkeys ' numbers , you could n't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market .
and what we 'd really thought we 'd done is like we 'd actually introduced something that , at least for the monkeys and us , works like a real financial currency .
question is : do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do ?
well , we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might .
one thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace was any evidence of saving - you know , just like our own species .
the monkeys entered the market , spent their entire budget and then went back to everyone else .
the other thing we also spontaneously saw , embarrassingly enough , is spontaneous evidence of larceny .
the monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity - from each other , often from us - you know , things we did n't necessarily think we were introducing , but things we spontaneously saw .
so we said , this looks bad .
can we actually see if the monkeys are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do ?
one possibility is just kind of let the monkey financial system play out , you know , see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years .
we were a little impatient so we wanted to sort of speed things up a bit .
so we said , let 's actually give the monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong in certain kinds of economic challenges , or certain kinds of economic experiments .
and so , since the best way to see how people go wrong is to actually do it yourself , i 'm going to give you guys a quick experiment to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action .
so imagine that right now i handed each and every one of you a thousand u.s. dollars - so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills .
take these , put it in your wallet and spend a second thinking about what you 're going to do with it .
because it 's yours now ; you can buy whatever you want .
donate it , take it , and so on .
sounds great , but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money .
and here 's your choice : you can either be risky , in which case i 'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens .
if it comes up heads , you 're going to get a thousand dollars more .
if it comes up tails , you get nothing .
so it 's a chance to get more , but it 's pretty risky .
your other option is a bit safe . your just going to get some money for sure .
i 'm just going to give you 500 bucks .
you can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately .
so see what your intuition is here .
most people actually go with the play-it-safe option .
most people say , why should i be risky when i can get 1,500 dollars for sure ?
this seems like a good bet . i 'm going to go with that .
you might say , eh , that 's not really irrational .
people are a little risk-averse . so what ?
well , the " so what ? " comes when start thinking about the same problem set up just a little bit differently .
so now imagine that i give each and every one of you 2,000 dollars - 20 crisp hundred dollar bills .
now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before .
think about how you 'd feel sticking it in your wallet .
and now imagine that i have you make another choice but this time , it 's a little bit worse .
now , you 're going to be deciding how you 're going to lose money , but you 're going to get the same choice .
you can either take a risky loss - so i 'll flip a coin . if it comes up heads , you 're going to actually lose a lot .
if it comes up tails , you lose nothing , you 're fine , get to keep the whole thing - or you could play it safe , which means you have to reach back into your wallet and give me five of those $ 100 bills , for certain .
and i 'm seeing a lot of furrowed brows out there .
so maybe you 're having the same intuitions as the subjects that were actually tested in this , which is when presented with these options , people do n't choose to play it safe .
they actually tend to go a little risky .
the reason this is irrational is that we 've given people in both situations the same choice .
it 's a 50/50 shot of a thousand or 2,000 , or just 1,500 dollars with certainty .
but people 's intuitions about how much risk to take varies depending on where they started with .
so what 's going on ?
well , it turns out that this seems to be the result of at least two biases that we have at the psychological level .
one is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms .
you really have to do work to figure out , well , one option 's a thousand , 2,000 ; one is 1,500 .
instead , we find it very easy to think in very relative terms as options change from one time to another .
so we think of things as , " oh , i 'm going to get more , " or " oh , i 'm going to get less . "
this is all well and good , except that changes in different directions actually effect whether or not we think options are good or not .
and this leads to the second bias , which economists have called loss aversion .
the idea is that we really hate it when things go into the red .
we really hate it when we have to lose out on some money .
and this means that sometimes we 'll actually switch our preferences to avoid this .
what you saw in that last scenario is that subjects get risky because they want the small shot that there wo n't be any loss .
that means when we 're in a risk mindset - excuse me , when we 're in a loss mindset , we actually become more risky , which can actually be really worrying .
these kinds of things play out in lots of bad ways in humans .
they 're why stock investors hold onto losing stocks longer - because they 're evaluating them in relative terms .
they 're why people in the housing market refused to sell their house - because they do n't want to sell at a loss .
the question we were interested in is whether the monkeys show the same biases .
if we set up those same scenarios in our little monkey market , would they do the same thing as people ?
and so this is what we did , we gave the monkeys choices between guys who were safe - they did the same thing every time - or guys who were risky - they did things differently half the time .
and then we gave them options that were bonuses - like you guys did in the first scenario - so they actually have a chance more , or pieces where they were experiencing losses - they actually thought they were going to get more than they really got .
and so this is what this looks like .
we introduced the monkeys to two new monkey salesmen .
the guy on the left and right both start with one piece of grape , so it looks pretty good .
but they 're going to give the monkeys bonuses .
the guy on the left is a safe bonus .
all the time , he adds one , to give the monkeys two .
the guy on the right is actually a risky bonus .
sometimes the monkeys get no bonus - so this is a bonus of zero .
sometimes the monkeys get two extra .
for a big bonus , now they get three .
but this is the same choice you guys just faced .
do the monkeys actually want to play it safe and then go with the guy who 's going to do the same thing on every trial , or do they want to be risky and try to get a risky , but big , bonus , but risk the possibility of getting no bonus .
people here played it safe .
turns out , the monkeys play it safe too .
qualitatively and quantitatively , they choose exactly the same way as people , when tested in the same thing .
you might say , well , maybe the monkeys just do n't like risk .
maybe we should see how they do with losses .
and so we ran a second version of this .
now , the monkeys meet two guys who are n't giving them bonuses ; they 're actually giving them less than they expect .
so they look like they 're starting out with a big amount .
these are three grapes ; the monkey 's really psyched for this .
but now they learn these guys are going to give them less than they expect .
they guy on the left is a safe loss .
every single time , he 's going to take one of these away and give the monkeys just two .
the guy on the right is the risky loss .
sometimes he gives no loss , so the monkeys are really psyched , but sometimes he actually gives a big loss , taking away two to give the monkeys only one .
and so what do the monkeys do ?
again , same choice ; they can play it safe for always getting two grapes every single time , or they can take a risky bet and choose between one and three .
the remarkable thing to us is that , when you give monkeys this choice , they do the same irrational thing that people do .
they actually become more risky depending on how the experimenters started .
this is crazy because it suggests that the monkeys too are evaluating things in relative terms and actually treating losses differently than they treat gains .
so what does all of this mean ?
well , what we 've shown is that , first of all , we can actually give the monkeys a financial currency , and they do very similar things with it .
they do some of the smart things we do , some of the kind of not so nice things we do , like steal it and so on .
but they also do some of the irrational things we do .
they systematically get things wrong and in the same ways that we do .
this is the first take-home message of the talk , which is that if you saw the beginning of this and you thought , oh , i 'm totally going to go home and hire a capuchin monkey financial adviser .
they 're way cuter than the one at ... you know - do n't do that ; they 're probably going to be just as dumb as the human one you already have .
so , you know , a little bad - sorry , sorry , sorry .
a little bad for monkey investors .
but of course , you know , the reason you 're laughing is bad for humans too .
because we 've answered the question we started out with .
we wanted to know where these kinds of errors came from .
and we started with the hope that maybe we can sort of tweak our financial institutions , tweak our technologies to make ourselves better .
but what we 've learn is that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that .
in fact , they might be due to the very nature of our evolutionary history .
you know , maybe it 's not just humans at the right side of this chain that 's duncey .
maybe it 's sort of duncey all the way back .
and this , if we believe the capuchin monkey results , means that these duncey strategies might be 35 million years old .
that 's a long time for a strategy to potentially get changed around - really , really old .
what do we know about other old strategies like this ?
well , one thing we know is that they tend to be really hard to overcome .
you know , think of our evolutionary predilection for eating sweet things , fatty things like cheesecake .
you ca n't just shut that off .
you ca n't just look at the dessert cart as say , " no , no , no . that looks disgusting to me . "
we 're just built differently .
we 're going to perceive it as a good thing to go after .
my guess is that the same thing is going to be true when humans are perceiving different financial decisions .
when you 're watching your stocks plummet into the red , when you 're watching your house price go down , you 're not going to be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms .
this means that the biases that lead investors to do badly , that lead to the foreclosure crisis are going to be really hard to overcome .
so that 's the bad news . the question is : is there any good news ?
i 'm supposed to be up here telling you the good news .
well , the good news , i think , is what i started with at the beginning of the talk , which is that humans are not only smart ; we 're really inspirationally smart to the rest of the animals in the biological kingdom .
we 're so good at overcoming our biological limitations - you know , i flew over here in an airplane .
i did n't have to try to flap my wings .
i 'm wearing contact lenses now so that i can see all of you .
i do n't have to rely on my own near-sightedness .
we actually have all of these cases where we overcome our biological limitations through technology and other means , seemingly pretty easily .
but we have to recognize that we have those limitations .
and here 's the rub .
it was camus who once said that , " man is the only species who refuses to be what he really is . "
but the irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them .
the hope is that you all will think about your limitations , not necessarily as unovercomable , but to recognize them , accept them and then use the world of design to actually figure them out .
that might be the only way that we will really be able to achieve our own human potential and really be the noble species we hope to all be .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to share some personal friends and stories with you that i 've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world .
twenty-four years ago , i had - a sophomore in college , i had a series of fainting spells . no alcohol was involved .
and i ended up in student health , and they ran some labwork and came back right away , and said , " kidney problems . "
and before i knew it , i was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me .
and i 'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound , and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once , and i 'm like , " uh oh , this is bad news . "
and their diagnosis was this : they said , " you have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually , you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away , and you 'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant , and you 're not likely to live more than two or three years . "
now , with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis , it just sucked me in immediately , as if i began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me , until i met a patient named verna in a waiting room , who became a dear friend , and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases , and said , " eric , these people who get this are normally in their ' 70s and ' 80s .
they do n't know anything about you . wake up .
take control of your health and get on with your life . "
and i did .
now , these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people .
in fact , these professionals were miracle workers , but they 're working in a flawed , expensive system that 's set up the wrong way .
it 's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need .
it 's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us .
it 's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails , and so something either works or you die .
and it 's dependent on passive patients who just take it and do n't ask any questions .
now the problem with this model is that it 's unsustainable globally .
it 's unaffordable globally .
we need to invent what i call a personal health system .
so what does this personal health system look like , and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail ?
now , i 'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine , libby , somebody i 've become quite attached to over the last six months .
this is libby , or actually , this is an ultrasound image of libby .
this is the kidney transplant i was never supposed to have .
now , this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today , and you 'll notice , on the edge of this image , there 's some dark spots there , which was really concerning to me .
so we 're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how libby 's doing .
this is not a wardrobe malfunction . i have to take my belt off here .
do n't you in the front row worry or anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm going to use a device from a company called mobisante .
this is a portable ultrasound .
it can plug into a smartphone . it can plug into a tablet .
mobisante is up in redmond , washington , and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself .
they 're not approved to do this . patients are not approved to do this .
this is a concept demo , so i want to make that clear .
all right , i gotta gel up .
now the people in the front row are very nervous . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i want to actually introduce you to dr. batiuk , who 's another friend of mine .
he 's up in legacy good samaritan hospital in portland , oregon .
so let me just make sure . hey , dr. batiuk . can you hear me okay ?
and actually , can you see libby ?
thomas batuik : hi there , eric .
you look busy . how are you ?
eric dishman : i 'm good . i 'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people . it 's wonderful .
so i just wanted to see , is this the image you need to get ?
and i know you want to look and see if those spots are still there .
tb : okay . well let 's scan around a little bit here , give me a lay of the land .
ed : all right.tb : okay . turn it a little bit inside , a little bit toward the middle for me .
okay , that 's good . how about up a little bit ?
okay , freeze that image . that 's a good one for me .
ed : all right . now last week , when i did this , you had me measure that spot to the right .
should i do that again ?
tb : yeah , let 's do that .
ed : all right . this is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring , but i 've got it , i think , and i 'll save that image and send it to you .
so tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means .
it 's not something i was very happy about .
tb : many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney .
most of the time it does n't create any kind of mischief , but it does warrant looking at , so i 'm happy we 've got an opportunity to look at it today , make sure that it 's not growing , it 's not creating any problems .
based on the other images we have , i 'm really happy how it looks today .
ed : all right . well , i guess we 'll double check it when i come in .
i 've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks , and i 'm going to let you do that in the clinic , because i do n't think i can do that one on myself .
tb : good choice.ed : all right , thanks , dr. batiuk .
all right . so what you 're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies , of mobile , social and analytic technologies .
these are the foundations of what 's going to make personal health possible .
now there 's really three pillars of this personal health i want to talk to you about now , and it 's care anywhere , care networking and care customization .
and you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with dr. batiuk .
so let 's start with care anywhere .
humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s . it is time to update our thinking .
we have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care , because these places are often the wrong tool , and the most expensive tool , for the job .
and these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients , especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections .
and many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they 're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built .
now i personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age .
this was me in third grade .
i broke my elbow very seriously , had to have surgery , worried that they were going to actually lose the arm .
recovering from the surgery in the hospital , i get bedsores .
those bedsores become infected , and they give me an antibiotic which i end up being allergic to , and now my whole body breaks out , and now all of those become infected .
the longer i stayed in the hospital , the sicker i became , and the more expensive it became , and this happens to millions of people around the world every year .
the future of personal health that i 'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model , not in a hospital or clinic .
you have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job .
now the smartphones that we 're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them , and a whole array of others , today , and as sensing is built into these , we 'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we 've never had before .
many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what 's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now .
now the software is also getting smarter , right ?
think about a coach , an agent online , that 's going to help me do safe self-care .
that same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing , and the device will say , " up , down , left , right , ah , eric , that 's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor . "
now , if we 've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere , it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff , and that leads to the second pillar i want to talk about , care networking .
we have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care .
uncoordinated care today is expensive at best , and it is deadly at worst .
eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members .
i had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school , when we 're under treatment for the kidney , and suddenly , they 're like , " oh , we think you have a heart problem . "
and i have these palpitations that are showing up .
they put me through five weeks of tests - very expensive , very scary - before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper , my meds list that i 've been carrying to every single appointment , and says , " oh my gosh . "
three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me .
i did not have a heart problem . i had an overdose problem .
i had a care coordination problem .
and this happens to millions of people every year .
i want to use technology that we 're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport .
now this is the most frightening thing to me .
out of all the care i 've had in hospitals and clinics around the world , the first time i 've ever had a true team-based care experience was at legacy good sam these last six months for me to go get this .
and this is a picture of my graduation team from legacy .
there 's a couple of the folks here . you 'll recognize dr. batiuk .
we just talked to him . here 's jenny , one of the nurses , allison , who helped manage the transplant list , and a dozen other people who are n't pictured , a pharmacist , a psychologist , a nutritionist , even a financial counselor , lisa , who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles .
i wept the day i graduated .
i should have been happy , because i was so well that i could go back to my normal doctors , but i wept because i was so actually connected to this team .
and here 's the most important part .
the other people in this picture are me and my wife , ashley .
legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics .
that 's the only way that the model works .
my team is actually working in china on one of these self-care models for a project we called age-friendly cities .
we 're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers , as well as have an exchange network online , where , for example , i can donate three hours of care a day to your mom , if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals , and we exchange all of that online .
the most important point i want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past .
the future of health care is smart teams , and you 'd better be on that team for yourself .
now , the last thing that i want to talk to you about is care customization , because if you 've got care anywhere and you 've got care networking , those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system , but there 's still too much guesswork .
randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis , and those are important things , do n't get me wrong .
these population studies that we 've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives , but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages , not unique individuals , because at the end of the day , the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied . that 's what 's leading to the guesswork .
the technologies that are coming , high-performance computing , analytics , big data that everyone 's talking about , will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients .
and the magic here is , experiment on my avatar in software , not my body in suffering .
now , i 've had two examples i want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey .
the first was quite simple . i finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity .
it 's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live .
i was optimizing my life for quality of life , and quality of life for me means time in snow .
so on my chart , i forced them to put , " patient goal : low doses of drugs over longer periods of time , side effects friendly to skiing . "
and i think that 's why i achieved longevity .
i think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that i had .
now the second example of customization - and by the way , you ca n't customize care if you do n't know your own goals , so health care ca n't know those until you know your own health care goals .
but the second example i want to give you is , i happened to be an early guinea pig , and i got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced .
now it took about two weeks of processing on intel 's highest-end servers to make this happen , and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data .
and at the end of all of that , they said , " yes , those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong , and we have a better path forward . "
the future that intel 's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours , and make this kind of tool available , not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world , but in the mainstream - every patient , every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing .
and i tell you , this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime .
so these three pillars of personal health , care anywhere , care networking , care customization , are happening in pieces now , but this vision will completely fail if we do n't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles .
it 's what my friend verna said : wake up and take control of your health .
because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways .
and it 's in that spirit that i want to introduce you to one last friend , very quickly .
tracey gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that i was never supposed to have .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so tracey , just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you .
tracey gamley : for me , it was really easy .
i only had one night in the hospital .
the surgery was done laparoscopically , so i have just five very small scars on my abdomen , and i had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything i 'd done before without any changes .
ed : well , i probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again .
so " thank you " feel likes a really trite word , but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this ted stage and all of the ted stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies , and i 've done that here today , and i 've seen amazing things coming from ted speakers , i mean , my gosh , artificial kidneys , even printable kidneys , that are coming .
but until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us , and even when they are , it 's up to us to care for , and even save , one another .
i hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone . thanks so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , the first robot to talk about is called strider .
it stands for self-excited tripedal dynamic experimental robot .
it 's a robot that has three legs , which is inspired by nature .
but have you seen anything in nature , an animal that has three legs ?
probably not . so , why do i call this a biologically inspired robot ? how would it work ?
but before that , let 's look at pop culture .
so , you know h.g. wells ' " war of the worlds , " novel and movie .
and what you see over here is a very popular video game , and in this fiction they describe these alien creatures that are robots that have three legs that terrorize earth .
but my robot , strider , does not move like this .
so , this is an actual dynamic simulation animation .
i 'm just going to show you how the robot works .
it flips its body 180 degrees and it swings its leg between the two legs and catches the fall .
so , that 's how it walks . but when you look at us human being , bipedal walking , what you 're doing is you 're not really using a muscle to lift your leg and walk like a robot . right ?
what you 're doing is you really swing your leg and catch the fall , stand up again , swing your leg and catch the fall .
you 're using your built-in dynamics , the physics of your body , just like a pendulum .
we call that the concept of passive dynamic locomotion .
what you 're doing is , when you stand up , potential energy to kinetic energy , potential energy to kinetic energy .
it 's a constantly falling process .
so , even though there is nothing in nature that looks like this , really , we were inspired by biology and applying the principles of walking to this robot . thus it 's a biologically inspired robot .
what you see over here , this is what we want to do next .
we want to fold up the legs and shoot it up for long-range motion .
and it deploys legs - it looks almost like " star wars " - when it lands , it absorbs the shock and starts walking .
what you see over here , this yellow thing , this is not a death ray . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is just to show you that if you have cameras or different types of sensors - because it is tall , it 's 1.8 meters tall - you can see over obstacles like bushes and those kinds of things .
so we have two prototypes .
the first version , in the back , that 's strider i.
the one in front , the smaller , is strider ii .
the problem that we had with strider i is it was just too heavy in the body . we had so many motors , you know , aligning the joints , and those kinds of things .
so , we decided to synthesize a mechanical mechanism so we could get rid of all the motors , and with a single motor we can coordinate all the motions .
it 's a mechanical solution to a problem , instead of using mechatronics .
so , with this now the top body is light enough . so , it 's walking in our lab ; this was the very first successful step .
it 's still not perfected - its coffee falls down - so we still have a lot of work to do .
the second robot i want to talk about is called impass .
it stands for intelligent mobility platform with actuated spoke system .
so , it 's a wheel-leg hybrid robot .
so , think of a rimless wheel or a spoke wheel , but the spokes individually move in and out of the hub ; so , it 's a wheel-leg hybrid .
we are literally re-inventing the wheel here .
let me demonstrate how it works .
so , in this video we 're using an approach called the reactive approach .
just simply using the tactile sensors on the feet , it 's trying to walk over a changing terrain , a soft terrain where it pushes down and changes .
and just by the tactile information , it successfully crosses over these type of terrain .
but , when it encounters a very extreme terrain , in this case , this obstacle is more than three times the height of the robot , then it switches to a deliberate mode , where it uses a laser range finder , and camera systems , to identify the obstacle and the size , and it plans , carefully plans the motion of the spokes and coordinates it so that it can show this kind of very very impressive mobility .
you probably have n't seen anything like this out there .
this is a very high mobility robot that we developed called impass .
ah , is n't that cool ?
when you drive your car , when you steer your car , you use a method called ackermann steering .
the front wheels rotate like this .
for most small wheeled robots , they use a method called differential steering where the left and right wheel turns the opposite direction .
for impass , we can do many , many different types of motion .
for example , in this case , even though the left and right wheel is connected with a single axle rotating at the same angle of velocity .
we just simply change the length of the spoke .
it affects the diameter and then can turn to the left , turn to the right .
so , these are just some examples of the neat things that we can do with impass .
this robot is called climber : cable-suspended limbed intelligent matching behavior robot .
so , i 've been talking to a lot of nasa jpl scientists - at jpl they are famous for the mars rovers - and the scientists , geologists always tell me that the real interesting science , the science-rich sites , are always at the cliffs .
but the current rovers can not get there .
so , inspired by that we wanted to build a robot that can climb a structured cliff environment .
so , this is climber .
so , what it does , it has three legs . it 's probably difficult to see , but it has a winch and a cable at the top - and it tries to figure out the best place to put its foot .
and then once it figures that out in real time , it calculates the force distribution : how much force it needs to exert to the surface so it does n't tip and does n't slip .
once it stabilizes that , it lifts a foot , and then with the winch it can climb up these kinds of thing .
also for search and rescue applications as well .
five years ago i actually worked at nasa jpl during the summer as a faculty fellow .
and they already had a six legged robot called lemur .
so , this is actually based on that . this robot is called mars : multi-appendage robotic system . so , it 's a hexapod robot .
we developed our adaptive gait planner .
we actually have a very interesting payload on there .
the students like to have fun . and here you can see that it 's walking over unstructured terrain .
it 's trying to walk on the coarse terrain , sandy area , but depending on the moisture content or the grain size of the sand the foot 's soil sinkage model changes .
so , it tries to adapt its gait to successfully cross over these kind of things .
and also , it does some fun stuff , as can imagine .
we get so many visitors visiting our lab .
so , when the visitors come , mars walks up to the computer , starts typing " hello , my name is mars . "
welcome to romela , the robotics mechanisms laboratory at virginia tech .
this robot is an amoeba robot .
now , we do n't have enough time to go into technical details , i 'll just show you some of the experiments .
so , this is some of the early feasibility experiments .
we store potential energy to the elastic skin to make it move .
or use an active tension cords to make it move forward and backward . it 's called chimera .
we also have been working with some scientists and engineers from upenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot .
we do something to something and just like magic , it moves . the blob .
this robot is a very recent project . it 's called raphael .
robotic air powered hand with elastic ligaments .
there are a lot of really neat , very good robotic hands out there in the market .
the problem is they 're just too expensive , tens of thousands of dollars .
so , for prosthesis applications it 's probably not too practical , because it 's not affordable .
we wanted to go tackle this problem in a very different direction .
instead of using electrical motors , electromechanical actuators , we 're using compressed air .
we developed these novel actuators for joints .
it is compliant . you can actually change the force , simply just changing the air pressure .
and it can actually crush an empty soda can .
it can pick up very delicate objects like a raw egg , or in this case , a lightbulb .
the best part , it took only $ 200 dollars to make the first prototype .
this robot is actually a family of snake robots that we call hydras , hyper degrees-of-freedom robotic articulated serpentine .
this is a robot that can climb structures .
this is a hydras 's arm .
it 's a 12 degrees of freedom robotic arm .
but the cool part is the user interface .
the cable over there , that 's an optical fiber .
and this student , probably the first time using it , but she can articulate it many different ways .
so , for example in iraq , you know , the war zone , there is roadside bombs . currently you send these remotely controlled vehicles that are armed .
it takes really a lot of time and it 's expensive to train the operator to operate this complex arm .
in this case it 's very intuitive ; this student , probably his first time using it , doing very complex manipulation tasks , picking up objects and doing manipulation , just like that . very intuitive .
now , this robot is currently our star robot .
we actually have a fan club for the robot , darwin : dynamic anthropomorphic robot with intelligence .
as you know , we are very interested in humanoid robot , human walking , so we decided to build a small humanoid robot .
this was in 2004 ; at that time , this was something really , really revolutionary .
this was more of a feasibility study : what kind of motors should we use ?
is it even possible ? what kinds of controls should we do ?
so , this does not have any sensors .
so , it 's an open loop control .
for those who probably know , if you do n't have any sensors and there are any disturbances , you know what happens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , based on that success , the following year we did the proper mechanical design starting from kinematics .
and thus , darwin i was born in 2005 .
it stands up , it walks - very impressive .
however , still , as you can see , it has a cord , umbilical cord . so , we 're still using an external power source and external computation .
so , in 2006 , now it 's really time to have fun .
let 's give it intelligence . we give it all the computing power it needs : a 1.5 gigahertz pentium m chip , two firewire cameras , rate gyros , accelerometers , four force sensors on the foot , lithium polymer batteries .
and now darwin ii is completely autonomous .
it is not remote controlled .
there are no tethers . it looks around , searches for the ball , looks around , searches for the ball , and it tries to play a game of soccer , autonomously : artificial intelligence .
let 's see how it does . this was our very first trial , and ... spectators -lrb- video -rrb- : goal !
dennis hong : so , there is actually a competition called robocup .
i do n't know how many of you have heard about robocup .
it 's an international autonomous robot soccer competition .
and the goal of robocup , the actual goal is , by the year 2050 we want to have full size , autonomous humanoid robots play soccer against the human world cup champions and win .
it 's a true actual goal . it 's a very ambitious goal , but we truly believe that we can do it .
so , this is last year in china .
we were the very first team in the united states that qualified in the humanoid robocup competition .
this is this year in austria .
you 're going to see the action , three against three , completely autonomous .
there you go . yes !
the robots track and they team play amongst themselves .
it 's very impressive . it 's really a research event packaged in a more exciting competition event .
what you see over here , this is the beautiful louis vuitton cup trophy .
so , this is for the best humanoid , and we would like to bring this for the very first time , to the united states next year , so wish us luck .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
darwin also has a lot of other talents .
last year it actually conducted the roanoke symphony orchestra for the holiday concert .
this is the next generation robot , darwin iv , but smarter , faster , stronger .
and it 's trying to show off its ability : " i 'm macho , i 'm strong .
i can also do some jackie chan-motion , martial art movements . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it walks away . so , this is darwin iv .
and again , you 'll be able to see it in the lobby .
we truly believe this is going to be the very first running humanoid robot in the united states . so , stay tuned .
all right . so i showed you some of our exciting robots at work .
so , what is the secret of our success ?
where do we come up with these ideas ?
how do we develop these kinds of ideas ?
we have a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive into urban environments . we won a half a million dollars in the darpa urban challenge .
we also have the world 's very first vehicle that can be driven by the blind .
we call it the blind driver challenge , very exciting .
and many , many other robotics projects i want to talk about .
these are just the awards that we won in 2007 fall from robotics competitions and those kinds of things .
so , really , we have five secrets .
first is : where do we get inspiration ?
where do we get this spark of imagination ?
this is a true story , my personal story .
at night when i go to bed , 3 - 4 a.m. in the morning , i lie down , close my eyes , and i see these lines and circles and different shapes floating around .
and they assemble , and they form these kinds of mechanisms .
and then i think , " ah this is cool . "
so , right next to my bed i keep a notebook , a journal , with a special pen that has a light on it , led light , because i do n't want to turn on the light and wake up my wife .
so , i see this , scribble everything down , draw things , and i go to bed .
every day in the morning , the first thing i do before my first cup of coffee , before i brush my teeth , i open my notebook .
many times it 's empty , sometimes i have something there - if something 's there , sometimes it 's junk - but most of the time i ca n't even read my handwriting .
and so , 4 am in the morning , what do you expect , right ?
so , i need to decipher what i wrote .
but sometimes i see this ingenious idea in there , and i have this eureka moment .
i directly run to my home office , sit at my computer , i type in the ideas , i sketch things out and i keep a database of ideas .
so , when we have these calls for proposals , i try to find a match between my potential ideas and the problem . if there is a match we write a research proposal , get the research funding in , and that 's how we start our research programs .
but just a spark of imagination is not good enough .
how do we develop these kinds of ideas ?
at our lab romela , the robotics and mechanisms laboratory , we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions .
so , we gather around , we discuss about problems and social problems and talk about it .
but before we start we set this golden rule .
the rule is : nobody criticizes anybody 's ideas .
nobody criticizes any opinion .
this is important , because many times students , they fear or they feel uncomfortable how others might think about their opinions and thoughts .
so , once you do this , it is amazing how the students open up .
they have these wacky , cool , crazy , brilliant ideas , and the whole room is just electrified with creative energy .
and this is how we develop our ideas .
well , we 're running out of time . one more thing i want to talk about is , you know , just a spark of idea and development is not good enough .
there was a great ted moment , i think it was sir ken robinson , was it ?
he gave a talk about how education and school kills creativity .
well , actually , there are two sides to the story .
so , there is only so much one can do with just ingenious ideas and creativity and good engineering intuition .
if you want to go beyond a tinkering , if you want to go beyond a hobby of robotics and really tackle the grand challenges of robotics through rigorous research we need more than that . this is where school comes in .
batman , fighting against bad guys , he has his utility belt , he has his grappling hook , he has all different kinds of gadgets .
for us roboticists , engineers and scientists , these tools , these are the courses and classes you take in class .
math , differential equations .
i have linear algebra , science , physics , even nowadays , chemistry and biology , as you 've seen .
these are all the tools that we need .
so , the more tools you have , for batman , more effective at fighting the bad guys , for us , more tools to attack these kinds of big problems .
so , education is very important .
also , it 's not about that , only about that . you also have to work really , really hard .
so , i always tell my students , " work smart , then work hard . "
this picture in the back this is 3 a.m. in the morning .
i guarantee if you come to your lab at 3 - 4 am we have students working there , not because i tell them to , but because we are having too much fun .
which leads to the last topic : do not forget to have fun .
that 's really the secret of our success , we 're having too much fun .
i truly believe that highest productivity comes when you 're having fun , and that 's what we 're doing .
there you go . thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love the internet .
it 's true .
think about everything it has brought us .
think about all the services we use , all the connectivity , all the entertainment , all the business , all the commerce .
and it 's happening during our lifetimes .
i 'm pretty sure that one day we 'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now . this time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online , the generation that built something really and truly global .
but yes , it 's also true that the internet has problems , very serious problems , problems with security and problems with privacy .
i 've spent my career fighting these problems .
so let me show you something .
this here is brain .
this is a floppy disk - five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by brain.a.
it 's the first virus we ever found for pc computers .
and we actually know where brain came from .
we know because it says so inside the code .
let 's take a look .
all right .
that 's the boot sector of an infected floppy , and if we take a closer look inside , we 'll see that right there , it says , " welcome to the dungeon . "
and then it continues , saying , 1986 , basit and amjad .
and basit and amjad are first names , pakistani first names .
in fact , there 's a phone number and an address in pakistan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , 1986 .
now it 's 2011 .
that 's 25 years ago .
the pc virus problem is 25 years old now .
so half a year ago , i decided to go to pakistan myself .
so let 's see , here 's a couple of photos i took while i was in pakistan .
this is from the city of lahore , which is around 300 kilometers south from abbottabad , where bin laden was caught .
here 's a typical street view .
and here 's the street or road leading to this building , which is 730 nizam block at allama iqbal town .
and i knocked on the door .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you want to guess who opened the door ?
basit and amjad ; they are still there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so here standing up is basit .
sitting down is his brother amjad .
these are the guys who wrote the first pc virus .
now of course , we had a very interesting discussion .
i asked them why .
i asked them how they feel about what they started .
and i got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both basit and amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years .
so there is some sort of justice in the world after all .
now , the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more .
so let me just show you a couple of examples of what they used to look like .
what i 'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer .
so let me just mount some drives . go over there .
what we have here is a list of old viruses .
so let me just run some viruses on my computer .
for example , let 's go with the centipede virus first .
and you can see at the top of the screen , there 's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one .
you know that you 're infected because it actually shows up .
here 's another one . this is the virus called crash , invented in russia in 1992 .
let me show you one which actually makes some sound .
-lrb- siren noise -rrb- and the last example , guess what the walker virus does ?
yes , there 's a guy walking across your screen once you get infected .
so it used to be fairly easy to know that you 're infected by a virus , when the viruses were written by hobbyists and teenagers .
today , they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers .
today , viruses are a global problem .
what we have here in the background is an example of our systems that we run in our labs , where we track virus infections worldwide .
so we can actually see in real time that we 've just blocked viruses in sweden and taiwan and russia and elsewhere .
in fact , if i just connect back to our lab systems through the web , we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses , how many new examples of malware we find every single day .
here 's the latest virus we 've found , in a file called server.exe.
and we found it right over here three seconds ago - the previous one , six seconds ago .
and if we just scroll around , it 's just massive .
we find tens of thousands , even hundreds of thousands .
and that 's the last 20 minutes of malware every single day .
so where are all these coming from then ?
well today , it 's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses .
it 's gangs like - let 's go to gangstabucks.com.
this is a website operating in moscow where these guys are buying infected computers .
so if you are a virus writer and you 're capable of infecting windows computers , but you do n't know what to do with them , you can sell those infected computers - somebody else 's computers - to these guys .
and they 'll actually pay you money for those computers .
so how do these guys then monetize those infected computers ?
well there 's multiple different ways , such as banking trojans , which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking , or keyloggers .
keyloggers silently sit on your computer , hidden from view , and they record everything you type .
so you 're sitting on your computer and you 're doing google searches .
every single google search you type is saved and sent to the criminals .
every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals .
same thing with every single password and so on .
but the thing that they 're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store .
because when you do purchases in online stores , you will be typing in your name , the delivery address , your credit card number and the credit card security codes .
and here 's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago .
that 's the credit card number , that 's the expiration date , that 's the security code , and that 's the name of the owner of the card .
once you gain access to other people 's credit card information , you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information .
and that , obviously , is a problem .
we now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime .
one example of how these guys actually are capable of monetizing their operations : we go and have a look at the pages of interpol and search for wanted persons .
we find guys like bjorn sundin , originally from sweden , and his partner in crime , also listed on the interpol wanted pages , mr. shaileshkumar jain , a u.s. citizen .
these guys were running an operation called i.m.u. , a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions .
they are both right now on the run .
nobody knows where they are .
u.s. officials , just a couple of weeks ago , froze a swiss bank account belonging to mr. jain , and that bank account had 14.9 million u.s. dollars on it .
so the amount of money online crime generates is significant .
and that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks .
we know that online criminals are hiring programmers , hiring testing people , testing their code , having back-end systems with sql databases .
and they can afford to watch how we work - like how security people work - and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build .
they also use the global nature of internet to their advantage .
i mean , the internet is international .
that 's why we call it the internet .
and if you just go and take a look at what 's happening in the online world , here 's a video built by clarified networks , which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world .
this operation , believed to be originally from estonia , moves around from one country to another as soon as the website is tried to shut down .
so you just ca n't shut these guys down .
they will switch from one country to another , from one jurisdiction to another - moving around the world , using the fact that we do n't have the capability to globally police operations like this .
so the internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world .
now , criminals who were n't capable of reaching us before can reach us .
so how do you actually go around finding online criminals ?
how do you actually track them down ?
let me give you an example .
what we have here is one exploit file .
here , i 'm looking at the hex dump of an image file , which contains an exploit .
and that basically means , if you 're trying to view this image file on your windows computer , it actually takes over your computer and runs code .
now , if you 'll take a look at this image file - well there 's the image header , and there the actual code of the attack starts .
and that code has been encrypted , so let 's decrypt it .
it has been encrypted with xor function 97 .
you just have to believe me , it is , it is .
and we can go here and actually start decrypting it .
well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted .
and i know , it does n't really look much different from the original .
but just keep staring at it .
you 'll actually see that down here you can see a web address : unionseek.com / d / ioo.exe and when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program .
and that 's a backdoor which will take over your computer .
but even more interestingly , if we continue decrypting , we 'll find this mysterious string , which says o600ko78rus .
that code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature .
it 's not used for anything .
and i was looking at that , trying to figure out what it means .
so obviously i googled for it .
i got zero hits ; was n't there .
so i spoke with the guys at the lab .
and we have a couple of russian guys in our labs , and one of them mentioned , well , it ends in rus like russia .
and 78 is the city code for the city of st. petersburg .
for example , you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that .
so i went looking for contacts in st. petersburg , and through a long road , we eventually found this one particular website .
here 's this russian guy who 's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website , and he runs a blog under the popular live journal .
and on this blog , he blogs about his life , about his life in st. petersburg - he 's in his early 20s - about his cat , about his girlfriend .
and he drives a very nice car .
in fact , this guy drives a mercedes-benz s600 v12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower .
now that 's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in st. petersburg .
how do i know about this car ?
because he blogged about the car .
he actually had a car accident .
in downtown st. petersburg , he actually crashed his car into another car .
and he put blogged images about the car accident - that 's his mercedes - right here is the lada samara he crashed into .
and you can actually see that the license plate of the samara ends in 78rus .
and if you actually take a look at the scene picture , you can see that the plate of the mercedes is o600ko78rus .
now i 'm not a lawyer , but if i would be , this is where i would say , " i rest my case . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what happens when online criminals are caught ?
well in most cases it never gets this far .
the vast majority of the online crime cases , we do n't even know which continent the attacks are coming from .
and even if we are able to find online criminals , quite often there is no outcome .
the local police do n't act , or if they do , there 's not enough evidence , or for some reason we ca n't take them down .
i wish it would be easier ; unfortunately it is n't .
but things are also changing at a very rapid pace .
you 've all heard about things like stuxnet .
so if you look at what stuxnet did is that it infected these .
that 's a siemens s7-400 plc , programmable logic -lsb- controller -rsb- .
and this is what runs our infrastructure .
this is what runs everything around us .
plc 's , these small boxes which have no display , no keyboard , which are programmed , are put in place , and they do their job .
for example , the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these .
and when stuxnet infects one of these , that 's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about .
because everything around us is being run by these .
i mean , we have critical infrastructure .
you go to any factory , any power plant , any chemical plant , any food processing plant , you look around - everything is being run by computers .
everything is being run by computers .
everything is reliant on these computers working .
we have become very reliant on internet , on basic things like electricity , obviously , on computers working .
and this really is something which creates completely new problems for us .
we must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted are n't there .
it 's actually very basic stuff - thinking about continuity , thinking about backups , thinking about the things that actually matter .
now i told you - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i love the internet . i do .
think about all the services we have online .
think about if they are taken away from you , if one day you do n't actually have them for some reason or another .
i see beauty in the future of the internet , but i 'm worried that we might not see that .
i 'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime .
online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've spent my life defending the net , and i do feel that if we do n't fight online crime , we are running a risk of losing it all .
we have to do this globally , and we have to do it right now .
what we need is more global , international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs - these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks .
that 's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls .
what actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks , and even more importantly , we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime , but have n't yet done it .
we have to find the people with the skills , but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm extremely excited to be given the opportunity to come and speak to you today about what i consider to be the biggest stunt on earth .
or perhaps not quite on earth .
a parachute jump from the very edge of space .
more about that a bit later on .
what i 'd like to do first is take you through a very brief helicopter ride of stunts and the stunts industry in the movies and in television , and show you how technology has started to interface with the physical skills of the stunt performer in a way that makes the stunts bigger and actually makes them safer than they 've ever been before .
i 've been a professional stunt man for 13 years .
i 'm a stunt coordinator . and as well as perform stunts i often design them .
during that time , health and safety has become everything about my job .
it 's critical now that when a car crash happens it is n't just the stunt person we make safe , it 's the crew .
we ca n't be killing camera men . we ca n't be killing stunt men .
we ca n't be killing anybody or hurting anybody on set , or any passerby . so , safety is everything .
but it was n't always that way .
in the old days of the silent movies - harold lloyd here , hanging famously from the clock hands - a lot of these guys did their own stunts . they were quite remarkable .
they had no safety , no real technology .
what safety they had was very scant .
this is the first stunt woman , rosie venger , an amazing woman .
you can see from the slide , very very strong .
she really paved the way at a time when nobody was doing stunts , let alone women .
my favorite and a real hero of mine is yakima canutt .
yakima canutt really formed the stunt fight .
he worked with john wayne and most of those old punch-ups you see in the westerns . yakima was either there or he stunt coordinated .
this is a screen capture from " stagecoach , " where yakima canutt is doing one of the most dangerous stunts i 've ever seen .
there is no safety , no back support , no pads , no crash mats , no sand pits in the ground .
that 's one of the most dangerous horse stunts , certainly .
talking of dangerous stunts and bringing things slightly up to date , some of the most dangerous stunts we do as stunt people are fire stunts .
we could n't do them without technology .
these are particularly dangerous because there is no mask on my face .
they were done for a photo shoot . one for the sun newspaper , one for fhm magazine .
highly dangerous , but also you 'll notice it does n't look as though i 'm wearing anything underneath the suit .
the fire suits of old , the bulky suits , the thick woolen suits , have been replaced with modern materials like nomex or , more recently , carbonex - fantastic materials that enable us as stunt professionals to burn for longer , look more spectacular , and in pure safety .
here 's a bit more .
there 's a guy with a flame thrower there , giving me what for .
one of the things that a stuntman often does , and you 'll see it every time in the big movies , is be blown through the air .
well , we used to use trampettes . in the old days , that 's all they had .
and that 's a ramp . spring off the thing and fly through the air , and hopefully you make it look good .
now we 've got technology . this thing is called an air ram .
it 's a frightening piece of equipment for the novice stunt performer , because it will break your legs very , very quickly if you land on it wrong .
having said that , it works with compressed nitrogen .
and that 's in the up position . when you step on it , either by remote control or with the pressure of your foot , it will fire you , depending on the gas pressure , anything from five feet to 30 feet .
i could , quite literally , fire myself into the gallery .
which i 'm sure you would n't want .
not today .
car stunts are another area where technology and engineering advances have made life easier for us , and safer .
we can do bigger car stunts than ever before now .
being run over is never easy .
that 's an old-fashioned , hard , gritty , physical stunt .
but we have padding , and fantastic shock-absorbing things like sorbothane - the materials that help us , when we 're hit like this , not to hurt ourselves too much .
the picture in the bottom right-hand corner there is of some crash test dummy work that i was doing .
showing how stunts work in different areas , really .
and testing breakaway signpost pillars .
a company makes a lattix pillar , which is a network , a lattice-type pillar that collapses when it 's hit .
the car on the left drove into the steel pillar .
and you ca n't see it from there , but the engine was in the driver 's lap .
they did it by remote control .
i drove the other one at 60 miles an hour , exactly the same speed , and clearly walked away from it .
rolling a car over is another area where we use technology .
we used to have to drive up a ramp , and we still do sometimes .
but now we have a compressed nitrogen cannon .
you can just see , underneath the car , there is a black rod on the floor by the wheel of the other car .
that 's the piston that was fired out of the floor .
we can flip lorries , coaches , buses , anything over with a nitrogen cannon with enough power . -lrb- laughs -rrb- it 's a great job , really . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's such fun !
you should hear some of the phone conversations that i have with people on my bluetooth in the shop .
" well , we can flip the bus over , we can have it burst into flames , and how about someone , you know , big explosion . "
and people are looking like this ...
-lrb- laughs -rrb- i sort of forget how bizarre some of those conversations are .
the next thing that i 'd like to show you is something that dunlop asked me to do earlier this year with our channel five 's " fifth gear show . "
a loop-the-loop , biggest in the world .
only one person had ever done it before .
now , the stuntman solution to this in the old days would be , " let 's hit this as fast as possible . 60 miles an hour .
let 's just go for it . foot flat to the floor . "
well , you 'd die if you did that .
we went to cambridge university , the other university , and spoke to a doctor of mechanical engineering there , a physicist who taught us that it had to be 37 miles an hour .
even then , i caught seven g and lost a bit of consciousness on the way in .
that 's a long way to fall , if you get it wrong . that was just about right .
so again , science helps us , and with the engineering too - the modifications to the car and the wheel .
high falls , they 're old fashioned stunts .
what 's interesting about high falls is that although we use airbags , and some airbags are quite advanced , they 're designed so you do n't slip off the side like you used to , if you land a bit wrong . so , they 're a much safer proposition .
just basically though , it is a basic piece of equipment .
it 's a bouncy castle with slats in the side to allow the air to escape .
that 's all it is , a bouncy castle .
that 's the only reason we do it . see , it 's all fun , this job .
what 's interesting is we still use cardboard boxes .
they used to use cardboard boxes years ago and we still use them .
and that 's interesting because they are almost retrospective .
they 're great for catching you , up to certain heights .
and on the other side of the fence , that physical art , the physical performance of the stuntman , has interfaced with the very highest technology in i.t. and in software .
not the cardboard box , but the green screen .
this is a shot of " terminator , " the movie .
two stunt guys doing what i consider to be a rather benign stunt .
it 's 30 feet . it 's water . it 's very simple .
with the green screen we can put any background in the world on it , moving or still , and i can assure you , nowadays you ca n't see the joint .
this is a parachutist with another parachutist doing exactly the same thing .
completely in the safety of a studio , and yet with the green screen we can have some moving image that a skydiver took , and put in the sky moving and the clouds whizzing by .
decelerator rigs and wires , we use them a lot .
we fly people on wires , like this .
this guy is not skydiving . he 's being flown like a kite , or moved around like a kite .
and this is a guinness world record attempt .
they asked me to open their 50th anniversary show in 2004 .
and again , technology meant that i could do the fastest abseil over 100 meters , and stop within a couple of feet of the ground without melting the rope with the friction , because of the alloys i used in the descender device .
and that 's centre point in london .
we brought oxford street and tottenham court road to a standstill .
helicopter stunts are always fun , hanging out of them , whatever .
and aerial stunts . no aerial stunt would be the same without skydiving .
which brings us quite nicely to why i 'm really here today : project space jump .
in 1960 , joseph kittenger of the united states air force did the most spectacular thing .
he did a jump from 100,000 feet , 102,000 to be precise , and he did it to test high altitude systems for military pilots in the new range of aircraft that were going up to 80,000 feet or so .
and i 'd just like to show you a little footage of what he did back then .
and just how brave he was in 1960 , bear in mind .
project excelsior , it was called .
there were three jumps .
they first dropped some dummies .
so that 's the balloon , big gas balloon .
it 's that shape because the helium has to expand .
my balloon will expand to 500 times and look like a big pumpkin when it 's at the top .
these are the dummies being dropped from 100,000 feet , and there is the camera that 's strapped to them .
you can clearly see the curvature of the earth at that kind of altitude .
and i 'm planning to go from 120,000 feet , which is about 22 miles .
you 're in a near vacuum in that environment , which is in minus 50 degrees .
so it 's an extremely hostile place to be .
this is joe kittenger himself .
bear in mind , ladies and gents , this was 1960 .
he did n't know if he would live or die . this is an extremely brave man .
i spoke with him on the phone a few months ago .
he 's a very humble and wonderful human being .
he sent me an email , saying , " if you get this thing off the ground i wish you all the best . " and he signed it , " happy landings , " which i thought was quite lovely .
he 's in his 80s and he lives in florida . he 's a tremendous guy .
this is him in a pressure suit .
now one of the challenges of going up to altitude is when you get to 30,000 feet - it 's great , is n't it ? - when you get to 30,000 feet you can really only use oxygen .
above 30,000 feet up to nearly 50,000 feet , you need pressure breathing , which is where you 're wearing a g suit .
this is him in his old rock-and-roll jeans there , pushing him in , those turned up jeans .
you need a pressure suit .
you need a pressure breathing system with a g suit that squeezes you , that helps you to breathe in and helps you to exhale .
above 50,000 feet you need a space suit , a pressure suit .
certainly at 100,000 feet no aircraft will fly .
not even a jet engine .
it needs to be rocket-powered or one of these things , a great big gas balloon .
it took me a while ; it took me years to find the right balloon team to build the balloon that would do this job .
i 've found that team in america now .
and it 's made of polyethylene , so it 's very thin .
we will have two balloons for each of my test jumps , and two balloons for the main jump , because they notoriously tear on takeoff .
they 're just so , so delicate .
this is the step off . he 's written on that thing , " the highest step in the world . "
and what must that feel like ?
i 'm excited and i 'm scared , both at the same time in equal measures .
and this is the camera that he had on him as he tumbled before his drogue chute opened to stabilize him .
a drogue chute is just a smaller chute which helps to keep your face down .
you can just see them there , popping open .
those are the drogue chutes . he had three of them .
i did quite a lot of research .
and you 'll see in a second there , he comes back down to the floor .
now just to give you some perspective of this balloon , the little black dots are people .
it 's hundreds of feet high . it 's enormous .
that 's in new mexico .
that 's the u.s. air force museum .
and they 've made a dummy of him . that 's exactly what it looked like .
my gondola will be more simple than that .
it 's a three sided box , basically .
so i 've had to do quite a lot of training .
this is morocco last year in the atlas mountains , training in preparation for some high altitude jumps .
this is what the view is going to be like at 90,000 feet for me .
now you may think this is just a thrill-seeking trip , a pleasure ride , just the world 's biggest stunt .
well there 's a little bit more to it than that .
trying to find a space suit to do this has led me to an area of technology that i never really expected when i set about doing this .
i contacted a company in the states who make suits for nasa .
that 's a current suit . this was me last year with their chief engineer .
that suit would cost me about a million and a half dollars .
and it weighs 300 pounds and you ca n't skydive in it .
so i 've been stuck . for the past 15 years i 've been trying to find a space suit that would do this job , or someone that will make one .
something revolutionary happened a little while ago , at the same facility .
that 's the prototype of the parachute . i 've now had them custom make one , the only one of its kind in the world . and that 's the only suit of its kind in the world .
it was made by a russian that 's designed most of the suits of the past 18 years for the soviets .
he left the company because he saw , as some other people in the space suit industry , an emerging market for space suits for space tourists .
you know if you are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet and the cabin depressurizes , you can have oxygen .
if you 're at 100,000 feet you die .
in six seconds you 've lost consciousness . in 10 seconds you 're dead .
your blood tries to boil . it 's called vaporization .
the body swells up . it 's awful .
and so we expect - it 's not much fun .
we expect , and others expect , that perhaps the faa , the caa might say , " you need to put someone in a suit that 's not inflated , that 's connected to the aircraft . "
then they 're comfortable , they have good vision , like this great big visor .
and then if the cabin depressurizes while the aircraft is coming back down , in whatever emergency measures , everyone is okay .
i would like to bring costa on , if he 's here , to show you the only one of its kind in the world .
i was going to wear it , but i thought i 'd get costa to do it , my lovely assistant .
thank you . he 's very hot . thank you , costa .
this is the communication headset you 'll see on lots of space suits .
it 's a two-layer suit . nasa suits have got 13 layers .
this is a very lightweight suit . it weighs about 15 pounds .
it 's next to nothing . especially designed for me .
it 's a working prototype . i will use it for all the jumps .
would you just give us a little twirl , please , costa ?
thank you very much .
and it does n't look far different when it 's inflated , as you can see from the picture down there .
i 've even skydived in it in a wind tunnel , which means that i can practice everything i need to practice , in safety , before i ever jump out of anything . thanks very much , costa .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , that 's just about it from me .
the status of my mission at the moment is it still needs a major sponsor .
i 'm confident that we 'll find one .
i think it 's a great challenge .
and i hope that you will agree with me , it is the greatest stunt on earth .
thank you very much for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective .
i 'm going to try to give you a little bit of a natural history of compassion and the golden rule .
so , i 'm going to be sometimes using kind of clinical language , and so it 's not going to sound as warm and fuzzy as your average compassion talk .
i want to warn you about that .
so , i do want to say , at the outset , that i think compassion 's great .
the golden rule is great . i 'm a big supporter of both .
and i think it 's great that the leaders of the religions of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths .
at the same time , i think religions do n't deserve all the credit .
i think nature gave them a helping hand here .
i 'm going to argue tonight that compassion and the golden rule are , in a certain sense , built into human nature .
but i 'm also going to argue that once you understand the sense in which they are built into human nature , you realize that just affirming compassion , and affirming the golden rule , is really not enough .
there 's a lot of work to be done after that .
ok so , a quick natural history , first of compassion .
in the beginning , there was compassion , and i mean not just when human beings first showed up , but actually even before that .
i think it 's probably the case that , in the human evolutionary lineage , even before there were homo sapiens , feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool , and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened .
it happened through a principle known as kin selection .
and the basic idea of kin selection is that , if an animal feels compassion for a close relative , and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative , then , in the end , the compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself .
so , from a biologist 's point of view , compassion is actually a gene 's way of helping itself . ok .
i warned you this was not going to be very warm and fuzzy .
i 'll get there - i hope to get a little fuzzier .
this does n't bother me so much , that the underlying darwinian rationale of compassion is kind of self-serving at the genetic level .
actually , i think the bad news about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion is naturally deployed only within the family .
that 's the bad news . the good news is compassion is natural .
the bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family .
now , there 's more good news that came along later in evolution , a second kind of evolutionary logic .
biologists call that " reciprocal altruism . " ok .
and there , the basic idea is that compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor .
again , i know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past , but from a biologist 's point of view , this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion is ultimately self-serving too .
it 's not that people think that , when they feel the compassion .
it 's not consciously self-serving , but to a biologist , that 's the logic .
and so , you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies .
i 'm sure a lot of you , if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them , you feel really bad .
but if you read in the newspaper that something really horrible happened to somebody you 've never heard of , you can probably live with that .
that 's just human nature .
so , it 's another good news / bad news story .
it 's good that compassion was extended beyond the family by this kind of evolutionary logic .
the bad news is this does n't bring us universal compassion by itself .
so , there 's still work to be done .
now , there 's one other result of this dynamic called reciprocal altruism , which i think is kind of good news , which is that the way that this is played out in the human species , it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule .
i do n't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes , but you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions , no exposure to ethical philosophy , and you 'll find , if you spend time with these people , that , basically , they believe that one good turn deserves another , and that bad deeds should be punished .
and evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes .
so , they do understand that if you want to be treated well , you treat other people well .
and it 's good to treat other people well .
that 's close to being a kind of built-in intuition .
so , that 's good news . now , if you 've been paying attention , you 're probably anticipating that there 's bad news here ; we still are n't to universal love , and it 's true because , although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural , it 's also natural to carve out exceptions to the golden rule .
i mean , for example , none of us , probably , want to go to prison , but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison . right ?
so , we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated .
now , we have a rationale for that .
we say they did these bad things that make it just that they should go to prison .
none of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion .
we have the capacity to carve out exceptions , put people in a special category .
and the problem is that - although in the case of sending people to prison , you have this impartial judiciary determining who gets excluded from the golden rule - that in everyday life , the way we all make these decisions about who we 're not going to extend the golden rule to , is we use a much rougher and readier formula .
basically it 's just like , if you 're my enemy , if you 're my rival - if you 're not my friend , if you 're not in my family - i 'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you .
we all do that , and you see it all over the world .
you see it in the middle east : people who , from gaza , are firing missiles at israel .
they would n't want to have missiles fired at them , but they say , " well , but the israelis , or some of them have done things that put them in a special category . "
the israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them , but they impose one on gaza , and they say , " well , the palestinians , or some of them , have brought this on themselves . "
so , it 's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world 's trouble .
and it 's natural to do that .
so , the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not , by itself , going to bring us universal love .
it 's not going to save the world .
now , there 's one piece of good news i have that may save the world . okay .
are you on the edges of your seats here ?
good , because before i tell you about that good news , i 'm going to have to take a little excursion through some academic terrain .
so , i hope i 've got your attention with this promise of good news that may save the world .
it 's this non-zero-sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about .
it 's just a quick introduction to game theory .
this wo n't hurt . okay .
it 's about zero-sum and non-zero-sum games .
if you ask what kind of a situation is conducive to people becoming friends and allies , the technical answer is a non-zero-sum situation .
and if you ask what kind of situation is conducive to people defining people as enemies , it 's a zero-sum situation .
so , what do those terms mean ?
basically , a zero-sum game is the kind you 're used to in sports , where there 's a winner and a loser .
so , their fortunes add up to zero .
so , in tennis , every point is either good for you and bad for the other person , or good for them , bad for you .
either way , your fortunes add up to zero . that 's a zero-sum game .
now , if you 're playing doubles , then the person on your side of the net is in a non-zero-sum relationship with you , because every point is either good for both of you - positive , win-win - or bad for both of you , it 's lose-lose .
that 's a non-zero-sum game .
and in real life , there are lots of non-zero-sum games .
in the realm of economics , say , if you buy something : that means you 'd rather have the merchandise than the money , but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise .
you both feel you 've won .
in a war , two allies are playing a non-zero-sum game .
it 's going to either be win-win or lose-lose for them .
so , there are lots of non-zero-sum games in real life .
and you could basically reformulate what i said earlier , about how compassion is deployed and the golden rule is deployed , by just saying , well , compassion most naturally flows along non-zero-sum channels where people perceive themselves as being in a potentially win-win situation with some of their friends or allies .
the deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non-zero-sum channels .
so , kind of webs of non-zero-sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic .
with zero-sum channels you would expect something else .
okay . so , now you 're ready for the good news that i said might save the world .
and now i can admit that it might not too , now that i 've held your attention for three minutes of technical stuff .
but it may . and the good news is that history has naturally expanded these webs of non-zero-sumness , these webs that can be these channels for compassion .
you can go back all the way to the stone age : technological evolution - roads , the wheel , writing , a lot of transportation and communication technologies - has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances .
that 's the story of civilization .
it 's why social organization has grown from the hunter-gatherer village to the ancient state , the empire , and now here we are in a globalized world .
and the story of globalization is largely a story of non-zero-sumness .
you 've probably heard the term " interdependence " applied to the modern world . well , that 's just another term for non-zero-sum .
if your fortunes are interdependent with somebody , then you live in a non-zero-sum relationship with them .
and you see this all the time in the modern world .
you saw it with the recent economic crash , where bad things happen in the economy - bad for everybody , for much of the world .
good things happen , and it 's good for much of the world .
and , you know , i 'm happy to say , i think there 's really evidence that this non-zero-sum kind of connection can expand the moral compass .
i mean , if you look at the american attitudes toward japanese during world war ii - look at the depictions of japanese in the american media as just about subhuman , and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs , really without giving it much of a thought - and you compare that to the attitude now , i think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence .
any form of interdependence , or non-zero-sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people .
so , i think that 's good .
and the world is full of non-zero-sum dynamics .
environmental problems , in many ways , put us all in the same boat .
and there are non-zero-sum relationships that maybe people are n't aware of .
for example , probably a lot of american christians do n't think of themselves as being in a non-zero-sum relationship with muslims halfway around the world , but they really are , because if these muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it , that 's good for americans , because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten american security .
if they get less and less happy , that will be bad for americans .
so , there 's plenty of non-zero-sumness .
and so , the question is : if there 's so much non-zero-sumness , why has the world not yet been suffused in love , peace , and understanding ?
the answer 's complicated . it 's the occasion for a whole other talk .
certainly , a couple of things are that , first of all , there are a lot of zero-sum situations in the world .
and also , sometimes people do n't recognize the non-zero-sum dynamics in the world .
in both of these areas , i think politicians can play a role .
this is n't only about religion .
i think politicians can help foster non-zero-sum relationships , economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on , in this regard .
and politicians can be aware , and should be aware that , when people around the world are looking at them , are looking at their nation and picking up their cues for whether they are in a zero-sum or a non-zero-sum relationship with a nation - like , say , america , or any other nation - human psychology is such that they use cues like : do we feel we 're being respected ?
because , you know , historically , if you 're not being respected , you 're probably not going to wind up in a non-zero-sum , mutually profitable relationship with people .
so , we need to be aware of what kind of signals we 're sending out .
and some of this , again , is in the realm of political work .
if there 's one thing i can encourage everyone to do , politicians , religious leaders , and us , it would be what i call " expanding the moral imagination " - that is to say , your ability to put yourself in the shoes of people in very different circumstances .
this is not the same as compassion , but it 's conducive to compassion . it opens the channels for compassion .
and i 'm afraid we have another good news / bad news story , which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature .
that 's good , but again we tend to deploy it selectively .
once we define somebody as an enemy , we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes , just naturally .
so , if you want to take a particularly hard case for an american : somebody in iran who is burning an american flag , and you see them on tv .
well , the average american is going to resist the moral exercise of putting themselves in that person 's head and is going to resist the idea that they have much in common with that person .
and if you tell them , " well , they think america disrespects them and even wants to dominate them , and they hate america .
has there ever been somebody who disrespected you so much that you kind of hated them briefly " ?
you know , they 'll resist that comparison and that 's natural , that 's human .
and , similarly , the person in iran : when you try to humanize somebody in america who said that islam is evil , they 'll have trouble with that .
so , it 's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it does n't naturally go .
i think it 's worth the trouble because , again , it just helps us to understand .
if you want to reduce the number of people who are burning flags , it helps to understand what makes them do it .
and i think it 's good moral exercise .
i would say here is where religious leaders come in , because religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people , at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think .
i mean , religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business .
it 's their great calling right now , to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations , appreciating that in so many ways they 're in the same boat .
i would just sum up the way things look , at least from this secular perspective , as far as compassion and the golden rule go , by saying that it 's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature .
it 's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed .
and it 's going to take real work to change that .
but , nobody ever said that doing god 's work was going to be easy . thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i understand that this meeting was planned , and the slogan was from was to still .
and i am illustrating still .
which , of course , i am not agreeing with because , although i am 94 , i am not still working .
and anybody who asks me , " are you still doing this or that ? "
i do n't answer because i 'm not doing things still , i 'm doing it like i always did .
i still have - or did i use the word still ? i did n't mean that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have my file which is called to do . i have my plans .
i have my clients . i am doing my work like i always did .
so this takes care of my age .
i want to show you my work so you know what i am doing and why i am here .
this was about 1925 .
all of these things were made during the last 75 years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but , of course , i 'm working since 25 , doing more or less what you see here . this is castleton china .
this was an exhibition at the museum of modern art .
this is now for sale at the metropolitan museum .
this is still at the metropolitan museum now for sale .
this is a portrait of my daughter and myself .
-lrb- applause -rrb- these were just some of the things i 've made .
i made hundreds of them for the last 75 years .
i call myself a maker of things .
i do n't call myself an industrial designer because i 'm other things .
industrial designers want to make novel things .
novelty is a concept of commerce , not an aesthetic concept .
the industrial design magazine , i believe , is called " innovation . "
innovation is not part of the aim of my work .
well , makers of things : they make things more beautiful , more elegant , more comfortable than just the craftsmen do .
i have so much to say . i have to think what i am going to say .
well , to describe our profession otherwise , we are actually concerned with the playful search for beauty .
that means the playful search for beauty was called the first activity of man .
sarah smith , who was a mathematics professor at mit , wrote , " the playful search for beauty was man 's first activity - that all useful qualities and all material qualities were developed from the playful search for beauty . "
these are tiles . the word , " playful " is a necessary aspect of our work because , actually , one of our problems is that we have to make , produce , lovely things throughout all of life , and this for me is now 75 years .
so how can you , without drying up , make things with the same pleasure , as a gift to others , for so long ?
the playful is therefore an important part of our quality as designer .
let me tell you some about my life .
as i said , i started to do these things 75 years ago .
my first exhibition in the united states was at the sesquicentennial exhibition in 1926 - that the hungarian government sent one of my hand-drawn pieces as part of the exhibit .
my work actually took me through many countries , and showed me a great part of the world .
this is not that they took me - the work did n't take me - i made the things particularly because i wanted to use them to see the world .
i was incredibly curious to see the world , and i made all these things , which then finally did take me to see many countries and many cultures .
i started as an apprentice to a hungarian craftsman , and this taught me what the guild system was in middle ages .
the guild system : that means when i was an apprentice , i had to apprentice myself in order to become a pottery master .
in my shop where i studied , or learned , there was a traditional hierarchy of master , journeyman and learned worker , and apprentice , and i worked as the apprentice .
the work as an apprentice was very primitive .
that means i had to actually learn every aspect of making pottery by hand .
we mashed the clay with our feet when it came from the hillside .
after that , it had to be kneaded . it had to then go in , kind of , a mangle .
and then finally it was prepared for the throwing .
and there i really worked as an apprentice .
my master took me to set ovens because this was part of oven-making , oven-setting , in the time .
and finally , i had received a document that i had accomplished my apprenticeship successfully , that i had behaved morally , and this document was given to me by the guild of roof-coverers , rail-diggers , oven-setters , chimney sweeps and potters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i also got at the time a workbook which explained my rights and my working conditions , and i still have that workbook .
first i set up a shop in my own garden , and made pottery which i sold on the marketplace in budapest .
and there i was sitting , and my then-boyfriend - i did n't mean it was a boyfriend like it is meant today - but my boyfriend and i sat at the market and sold the pots .
my mother thought that this was not very proper , so she sat with us to add propriety to this activity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- however , after a while there was a new factory being built in budapest , a pottery factory , a large one .
and i visited it with several ladies , and asked all sorts of questions of the director .
then the director asked me , why do you ask all these questions ?
i said , i also have a pottery .
so he asked me , could he please visit me , and then finally he did , and explained to me that what i did now in my shop was an anachronism , that the industrial revolution had broken out , and that i rather should join the factory .
there he made an art department for me where i worked for several months .
however , everybody in the factory spent his time at the art department .
the director there said there were several women casting and producing my designs now in molds , and this was sold also to america .
i remember that it was quite successful .
however , the director , the chemist , model maker - everybody - concerned himself much more with the art department - that means , with my work - than making toilets , so finally they got a letter from the center , from the bank who owned the factory , saying , make toilet-setting behind the art department , and that was my end .
so this gave me the possibility because now i was a journeyman , and journeymen also take their satchel and go to see the world .
so as a journeyman , i put an ad into the paper that i had studied , that i was a down-to-earth potter 's journeyman and i was looking for a job as a journeyman .
and i got several answers , and i accepted the one which was farthest from home and practically , i thought , halfway to america .
and that was in hamburg .
then i first took this job in hamburg , at an art pottery where everything was done on the wheel , and so i worked in a shop where there were several potters .
and the first day , i was coming to take my place at the turntable - there were three or four turntables - and one of them , behind where i was sitting , was a hunchback , a deaf-mute hunchback , who smelled very bad .
so i doused him in cologne every day , which he thought was very nice , and therefore he brought bread and butter every day , which i had to eat out of courtesy .
the first day i came to work in this shop there was on my wheel a surprise for me .
my colleagues had thoughtfully put on the wheel where i was supposed to work a very nicely modeled natural man 's organs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after i brushed them off with a hand motion , they were very - i finally was now accepted , and worked there for some six months .
this was my first job .
if i go on like this , you will be here till midnight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i will try speed it up a little -lrb- laughter -rrb- moderator : eva , we have about five minutes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- eva zeisel : are you sure ?
moderator : yes , i am sure .
ez : well , if you are sure , i have to tell you that within five minutes i will talk very fast .
and actually , my work took me to many countries because i used my work to fill my curiosity .
and among other things , other countries i worked , was in the soviet union , where i worked from ' 32 to ' 37 - actually , to ' 36 .
i was finally there , although i had nothing to do - i was a foreign expert .
i became art director of the china and glass industry , and eventually under stalin 's purges - at the beginning of stalin 's purges , i did n't know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were arrested .
so i was arrested quite early in stalin 's purges , and spent 16 months in a russian prison .
the accusation was that i had successfully prepared an attentat on stalin 's life .
this was a very dangerous accusation .
and if this is the end of my five minutes , i want to tell you that i actually did survive , which was a surprise .
but since i survived and i 'm here , and since this is the end of the five minutes , i will - moderator : tell me when your last trip to russia was .
were n't you there recently ?
ez : oh , this summer , in fact , the lomonosov factory was bought by an american company , invited me .
they found out that i had worked in ' 33 at this factory , and they came to my studio in rockland county , and brought the 15 of their artists to visit me here .
and they invited myself to come to the russian factory last summer , in july , to make some dishes , design some dishes .
and since i do n't like to travel alone , they also invited my daughter , son-in-law and granddaughter , so we had a lovely trip to see russia today , which is not a very pleasant and happy view .
here i am now , if this is the end ? thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , i have no idea what we 're going to play .
i wo n't be able to tell you what it is until it happens .
i did n't realize there was going to be a little music before .
so i think i 'm going to start with what i just heard .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- okay , so first of all , let 's welcome mr. jamire williams on the drums , -lrb- applause -rrb- burniss travis on the bass , -lrb- applause -rrb- and mr. christian sands on the piano .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the bandstand , as we call it , this is an incredible space .
it is really a sacred space .
and one of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future , or the past .
you really are alive right here in this moment .
there are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand .
we had no idea what key we were going to play in .
in the middle , we sort of made our way into a song called " titi boom . "
but that could have happened - maybe , maybe not .
everyone 's listening . we 're responding .
you have no time for projected ideas .
so the idea of a mistake : from the perspective of a jazz musician , it 's easier to talk about someone else 's mistake .
so the way i perceive a mistake when i 'm on the bandstand - first of all , we do n't really see it as a mistake .
the only mistake lies in that i 'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did .
every " mistake " is an opportunity in jazz .
so it 's hard to even describe what a funny note would be .
so for example , if i played a color , like we were playing on a palette , that sounded like this ...
-lrb- music -rrb- so if christian played a note - like play an f.
-lrb- music -rrb- see , these are all right inside of the color palette .
if you played an e.
see , these all lie right inside of this general emotional palette that we were painting .
if you played an f # though , -lrb- dissonance -rrb- to most people 's ears , they would perceive that as a mistake .
so i 'm going to show you , we 're going to play just for a second .
and we 're going to play on this palette .
and at some point , christian will introduce this note .
and we wo n't react to it .
he 'll introduce it for a second and then i 'll stop , i 'll talk for a second .
we 'll see what happens when we play with this palette .
-lrb- music -rrb- so someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake .
the only way that i would say it was a mistake is in that we did n't react to it .
it was an opportunity that was missed .
so it 's unpredictable . we 'll paint this palette again .
he 'll play it . i do n't know how we 'll react to it , but something will change .
we 'll all accept his ideas , or not .
-lrb- music -rrb- so you see , he played this note .
i ended up creating a melody out of it .
the texture changed in the drums this time .
it got a little bit more rhythmic , a little bit more intense in response to how i responded to it .
so there is no mistake .
the only mistake is if i 'm not aware , if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we do n't allow for creativity .
so jazz , this bandstand is absolutely amazing .
it 's a very purifying experience .
and i know that i speak for all of us when i tell you that we do n't take it for granted .
we know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing .
so how does this all relate to behavioral finance ?
well we 're jazz musicians , so stereotypically we do n't have a great relationship to finance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it .
and the other dynamic of it is that we do n't micromanage in jazz .
you have some people who do .
but what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities .
if i come up and i dictate to the band that i want to play like this and i want the music to go this way , and i just jump right in ...
ready , just play some time .
one , two , one , two , three , four .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's kind of chaotic because i 'm bullying my ideas .
i 'm telling them , " you come with me over this way . "
if i really want the music to go there , the best way for me to do it is to listen .
this is a science of listening .
it has far more to do with what i can perceive than what it is that i can do .
so if i want the music to get to a certain level of intensity , the first step for me is to be patient , to listen to what 's going on and pull from something that 's going on around me .
when you do that , you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more , and gradually it builds .
watch . one , two , a one , two , three , four .
-lrb- music -rrb- totally different experience when i 'm pulling ideas .
it 's much more organic . it 's much more nuanced .
it 's not about bullying my vision or anything like that .
it 's about being here in the moment , accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is shivdutt yadav , and he 's from uttar pradesh , india .
now shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in uttar pradesh , and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead .
his land was no longer registered in his name .
his brothers , chandrabhan and phoolchand , were also listed as dead .
family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead , allowing them to inherit their father 's share of the ancestral farmland .
because of this , all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home .
according to the yadav family , the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001 , but a judge has never appeared .
there are several instances in uttar pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review .
shivdutt 's father 's death and a want for his property led to this corruption .
he was laid to rest in the ganges river , where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water .
photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they do n't exist , and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life .
yet , these men remain dead .
this quandary led to the title of the project , which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future .
so this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled " a living man declared dead and other chapters . "
and for this work , i traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories .
i was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood , chance or circumstance .
the subjects i documented ranged from feuding families in brazil to victims of genocide in bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in india .
in each chapter , you can see the external forces of governance , power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance .
each work that i make is comprised of three segments .
on the left are one or more portrait panels in which i systematically order the members of a given bloodline .
this is followed by a text panel , it 's designed in scroll form , in which i construct the narrative at stake .
and then on the right is what i refer to as a footnote panel .
it 's a space that 's more intuitive in which i present fragments of the story , beginnings of other stories , photographic evidence .
and it 's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the internet , in a less linear form .
so it 's more disordered .
and this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline .
in my past projects i 've often worked in serial form , documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation , but in fact , are fairly abstract .
in this project i wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog , something that i could n't interrupt , curate or edit by choice .
this led me to blood .
a bloodline is determined and ordered .
but the project centers on the collision of order and disorder - the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters .
in chapter two , i photograph the descendants of arthur ruppin .
he was sent in 1907 to palestine by the zionist organization to look at areas for jewish settlement and acquire land for jewish settlement .
he oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the palestine land development company whose work led to the establishment of a jewish state .
through my research at the zionist archives in jerusalem , i wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the jewish state .
and i found these maps which you see here .
and these are studies commissioned by the zionist organization for alternative areas for jewish settlement .
in this , i was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if israel were in uganda , which is what these maps demonstrate .
these archives in jerusalem , they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to palestine , and later israel , from 1919 to 1965 .
chapter three : joseph nyamwanda jura ondijo treated patients outside of kisumu , kenya for aids , tuberculosis , infertility , mental illness , evil spirits .
he 's most often paid for his services in cash , cows or goats .
but sometimes when his female patients ca n't afford his services , their families give the women to jura in exchange for medical treatment .
as a result of these transactions , jura has nine wives , 32 children and 63 grandchildren .
in his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here .
two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them , three for evil spirits , one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives ondijo claims he took for love , paying their families a total of 16 cows .
one wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits .
polygamy is widely practiced in kenya .
it 's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes .
instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth , status and power .
you may notice in several of the chapters that i photographed there are empty portraits .
these empty portraits represent individuals , living individuals , who could n't be present .
and the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel .
they include dengue fever , imprisonment , army service , women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons .
and in this particular chapter , it 's children whose mothers would n't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it .
twenty-four european rabbits were brought to australia in 1859 by a british settler for sporting purposes , for hunting .
and within a hundred years , that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion .
the european rabbit has no natural predators in australia , and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land .
since the 1950s , australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth .
these rabbits were bred at a government facility , biosecurity queensland , where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them .
so they 're testing its virulence .
during the course of this trial , all of the rabbits died , except for a few , which were euthanized .
haigh 's chocolate , in collaboration with the foundation for rabbit-free australia , stopped all production of the easter bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the easter bilby .
now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that 's native to australia , and actually an animal that is threatened by the european rabbit .
in chapter seven , i focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline .
so over a two-day period , six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the srebrenica massacre .
this is the only work in which i visually represent the dead .
but i only represent those that were killed in the srebrenica massacre , which is recorded as the largest mass murder in europe since the second world war .
and during this massacre , 8,000 bosnian muslim men and boys were systematically executed .
so when you look at a detail of this work , you can see , the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him .
her name is zumra .
she is followed by her four children , all of whom were killed in the srebrenica massacre .
following those four children is zumra 's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well .
during the time i was in bosnia , the mortal remains of zumra 's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave .
and i was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains .
however , the other individuals are represented by these blue slides , which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to dna evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals .
they 've all been given a proper burial , so what remains are these blue slides at the international commission for missing persons .
these are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the potochari battery factory , which was where the dutch u.n. soldiers were staying , and also the serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions .
this is video footage used at the milosevic trial , which from top to bottom shows a serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them .
chapter 15 is more of a performance piece .
i solicited china 's state council information office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent china for this project .
they chose a large family from beijing for its size , and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice .
this is one of the rare situations where i have no empty portraits .
everyone showed up .
you can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline .
previously known as the department of foreign propaganda , the state council information office is responsible for all of china 's external publicity operations .
it controls all foreign media and image production outside of china from foreign media working within china .
it also monitors the internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues , including tibet , ethnic minorities , human rights , religion , democracy movements and terrorism .
for the footnote panel in this work , this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in beijing .
and i also photographed the gift bag they gave me when i left .
these are the descendants of hans frank who was hitler 's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied poland .
now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits , highlighting a complex relationship to one 's family history .
the reasons for these absences include people who declined participation .
there 's also parents who participated who would n't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves .
another section of the family presented their clothing , as opposed to their physical presence , because they did n't want to be identified with the past that i was highlighting .
and finally , another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation , so i had to pixelate him out so he 's unrecognizable .
in the footnote panel that accompanies this work i photographed an official adolph hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by british intelligence with hans frank 's image on it .
it was released in poland to create friction between frank and hitler , so that hitler would imagine frank was trying to usurp his power .
again , talking about fate , i was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art .
these paintings were taken by hans frank during the time of the third reich .
and i 'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time .
they are leonardo da vinci 's " lady with an ermine , " rembrandt 's " landscape with good samaritan " and raphael 's " portrait of a youth , " which has never been found .
chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making , but becomes their own .
so this is the ferraz family and the novaes family .
and they are in an active blood feud .
this feud has been going on since 1991 in northeast brazil in pernambuco , and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud , including hired hit men , innocent bystanders and friends .
tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power .
but it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors .
installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of louis novaes , who 's the head of the novaes family , are these turret holes , which were used for shooting and looking .
brazil 's northeast state of pernambuco is one of the nation 's most violent regions .
it 's rooted in a principle of retributive justice , or an eye for an eye , so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area .
this story , like many of the stories in my chapters , reads almost as an archetypal episode , like something out of shakespeare , that 's happening now and will happen again in the future .
i 'm interested in these ideas of repetition .
so after i returned home , i received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face .
chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history .
children at this ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16 .
this piece is ordered by age because it ca n't be ordered by blood .
in a 12-month period when i was at the orphanage , only one child had been adopted .
children have to leave the orphanage at age 16 , despite the fact that there 's often nowhere for them to go .
it 's commonly reported in ukraine that children , when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking , child pornography and prostitution .
many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival , and high rates of suicide are recorded .
this is a boys ' bedroom .
there 's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing .
children bathe infrequently because the hot water is n't turned on until october .
this is a girls ' bedroom .
and the director listed the orphanage 's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer , four vacuum cleaners , two computers , a video projector , a copy machine , winter shoes and a dentist 's drill .
this photograph , which i took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms , shows a sign which i had translated when i got home .
and it reads : " those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future . "
there are many more chapters in this project .
this is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images .
and this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive .
and within this accumulation of images and texts , i 'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself .
but archives exist because there 's something that ca n't necessarily be articulated .
something is said in the gaps between all the information that 's collected .
and there 's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between .
it 's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die , and the stories keep coming and coming .
and in this , i 'm considering , is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution , or are we on repeat over and over again ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to start by asking you a question : is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem ?
okay , so most of you are .
i think we can all agree it 's a serious issue .
nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water , or swim in a blue algae-infested lake .
right ?
i hope you wo n't be disappointed , but today , i wo n't be talking about blue algae .
instead , i 'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue , which i will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis .
why have i chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today ?
for the simple reason that nobody else is talking about it .
and by the end of my presentation , i hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue .
now , the problem is that if i ask , why do we find ourselves in this situation with blue algae ?
the answer is that it comes from how we farm .
we use fertilizers in our farming , chemical fertilizers .
why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture ?
basically , to help plants grow and to produce a better yield .
the issue is that this is set to engender an environmental problem that is without precedent .
before going further , let me give you a crash course in plant biology .
so , what does a plant need in order to grow ?
a plant , quite simply , needs light , it needs co2 , but even more importantly , it needs nutrients , which it draws from the soil .
several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements : phosphorus , nitrogen and calcium .
so , the plant 's roots will extract these resources .
today i 'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus .
why phosphorus in particular ?
because it is the most problematic chemical element .
by the end of my presentation , you will have seen what these problems are , and where we are today .
phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life . this is a very important point .
i 'd like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is .
phosphorus is a key component in several molecules , in many of our molecules of life .
experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based - phosphorylation , dephosphorylation .
cell membranes are phosphorus-based : these are called phospholipids .
the energy in all living things , atp , is phosphorus-based .
and more importantly still , phosphorus is a key component of dna , something everyone is familiar with , and which is shown in this image .
dna is our genetic heritage .
it is extremely important , and once again , phosphorus is a key player .
now , where do we find this phosphorus ?
as humans , where do we find it ?
as i explained earlier , plants extract phosphorus from the soil , through water .
so , we humans get it from the things we eat : plants , vegetables , fruits , and also from eggs , meat and milk .
it 's true that some humans eat better than others .
some are happier than others .
and now , looking at this picture , which speaks for itself , we see modern agriculture , which i also refer to as intensive agriculture .
intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers .
without them , we would not manage to produce enough to feed the world 's population .
speaking of humans , there are currently 7 billion of us on earth .
in less than 40 years , there will be 9 billion of us .
and the question is a simple one : do we have enough phosphorus to feed our future generations ?
so , in order to understand these issues , where do we find our phosphorus ?
let me explain .
but first , let 's just suppose that we are using 100 percent of a given dose of phosphorus .
only 15 percent of this 100 percent goes to the plant . eighty-five percent is lost .
it goes into the soil , ending its journey in the lakes , resulting in lakes with extra phosphorus , which leads to the blue algae problem .
so , you 'll see there 's a problem here , something that is illogical .
a hundred percent of the phosphorus is used , but only 15 percent goes to the plant .
you 're going to tell me it 's wasteful .
yes , it is . what is worse is that it is very expensive .
nobody wants to throw their money out the window , but unfortunately that 's what is happening here .
eighty percent of each dose of phosphorus is lost .
modern agriculture depends on phosphorus .
and because in order to get 15 percent of it to the plant , all the rest is lost , we have to add more and more .
now , where will we get this phosphorus from ?
basically , we get it out of mines .
this is the cover of an extraordinary article published in nature in 2009 , which really launched the discussion about the phosphorus crisis .
phosphorus , a nutrient essential to life , which is becoming increasingly scarce , yet nobody is talking about it .
and everyone agrees : politicians and scientists are in agreement that we are headed for a phosphorus crisis .
what you are seeing here is an open-pit mine in the u.s. , and to give you an idea of the dimensions of this mine , if you look in the top right-hand corner , the little crane you can see , that is a giant crane .
so that really puts it into perspective .
so , we get phosphorus from mines .
and if i make a comparison with oil , there 's an oil crisis , we talk about it , we talk about global warming , yet we never mention the phosphorus crisis .
to come back to the oil problem , oil is something we can replace .
we can use biofuels , or solar power , or hydropower , but phosphorus is an essential element , indispensable to life , and we ca n't replace it .
what is the current state of the world 's phosphorus reserves ?
this graph gives you a rough idea of where we are today .
the black line represents predictions for phosphorus reserves .
in 2030 , we 'll reach the peak .
by the end of this century , it will all be gone .
the dotted line shows where we are today .
as you can see , they meet in 2030 , i 'll be retired by then .
but we are indeed heading for a major crisis , and i 'd like people to become aware of this problem .
do we have a solution ?
what are we to do ? we are faced with a paradox .
less and less phosphorus will be available .
by 2050 there will be 9 billion of us , and according to the u.n. food and agriculture organization , we will need to produce twice as much food in 2050 than we do today .
so , we will have less phosphorus , but we 'll need to produce more food .
what should we do ?
it truly is a paradoxical situation .
do we have a solution , or an alternative which will allow us to optimize phosphorus use ?
remember that 80 percent is destined to be lost .
the solution i 'm offering today is one that has existed for a very long time , even before plants existed on earth , and it 's a microscopic mushroom that is very mysterious , very simple , and yet also extremely complex .
i 've been fascinated by this little mushroom for over 16 years now .
it has led me to further my research and to use it as a model for my laboratory research .
this mushroom exists in symbiosis with the roots .
by symbiosis , i mean a bidirectional and mutually beneficial association which is also called mycorrhiza .
this slide illustrates the elements of a mycorrhiza .
you 're looking at the root of wheat , one of the world 's most important plants .
normally , a root will find phosphorus all by itself .
it will go in search of phosphorus , but only within the one millimeter which surrounds it .
beyond one millimeter , the root is ineffective .
it can not go further in its search for phosphorus .
now , imagine this tiny , microscopic mushroom .
it grows much faster , and is much better designed to seek out phosphorus .
it can go beyond the root 's one-millimeter scope to seek out phosphorus .
i have n't invented anything at all ; it 's a biotechnology that has existed for 450 million years .
and over time , this mushroom has evolved and adapted to seek out even the tiniest trace of phosphorus , and to put it to use , to make it available to the plant .
what you 're seeing here , in the real world , is a carrot root , and the mushroom with its very fine filaments .
looking closer , we can see that this mushroom is very gentle in its penetration .
it will proliferate between the root 's cells , eventually penetrating a cell and starting to form a typical arbuscular structure , which will considerably increase the exchange interface between the plant and the mushroom .
and it is through this structure that mutual exchanges will occur .
it 's a win-win trade : i give you phosphorus , and you feed me .
true symbiosis .
now let 's add a mycorrhiza plant into the diagram i used earlier .
and instead of using a 100 percent dose , i 'm going to reduce it to 25 percent .
you 'll see that of this 25 percent , most will benefit the plant , more than 90 percent .
a very small amount of phosphorus will remain in the soil .
that 's completely natural .
what 's more is that in certain cases , we do n't even need to add phosphorus .
if you recall the graphs i showed you earlier , 85 percent of phosphorus is lost in the soil , and the plants are unable to access it .
even though it is present in the soil , it is in insoluble form .
the plant is only able to seek out soluble forms .
the mushroom is capable of dissolving this insoluble form and making it available for the plant to use .
to further support my argument , here is a picture that speaks for itself .
these are trials in a field of sorghum .
on the left side , you see the yield produced using conventional agriculture , with a 100 percent phosphorus dose .
on the other side , the dose was reduced to 50 percent , and just look at the yield .
with only a half-dose , we achieved a better yield .
this is to show you that this method works .
and in some cases , in cuba , mexico and india , the dose can be reduced to 25 percent , and in several other cases , there 's no need to add any phosphorus at all , because the mushrooms are so well adapted to finding phosphorus and drawing it from the soil .
this is an example of soy production in canada .
mycorrhiza was used in one field but not in the other .
and here , where blue indicates a better yield , and yellow a weaker yield .
the black rectangle is the plot from which the mycorrhiza was added .
in other words , as i already said , i have invented nothing .
mycorrhiza has existed for 450 million years , and it has even helped modern-day plant species to diversify .
so , this it is n't something that is still undergoing lab tests .
mycorrhiza exists , it works , it 's produced at an industrial scale and commercialized worldwide .
the problem is that people are not aware of it .
people like food producers and farmers are still not aware of this problem .
we have a technology that works , and one that , if used correctly , will alleviate some of the pressure we are putting on the world 's phosphorus reserves .
in conclusion , i am a scientist and a dreamer .
i 'm passionate about this topic .
so if you were to ask me what my retirement dream is , which will be at the moment we reach that phosphorus peak , it would be that we use one label , " made with mycorrhiza , " and that my children and grandchildren buy products bearing that label too .
thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm an ecologist , mostly a coral reef ecologist .
i started out in chesapeake bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight .
and it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years .
i mean , somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet .
and that was what i did .
and i ended up in jamaica , in the west indies , where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary , structurally , that i ever saw in my life .
and this picture here , it 's really interesting , it shows two things : first of all , it 's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far , and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s , you took pictures in black and white .
the other thing it shows you is that , although there 's this beautiful forest of coral , there are no fish in that picture .
those reefs at discovery bay , jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years .
we were the best and the brightest .
people came to study our reefs from australia , which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs .
and the view of scientists about how coral reefs work , how they ought to be , was based on these reefs without any fish .
then , in 1980 , there was a hurricane , hurricane allen .
i put half the lab up in my house .
the wind blew very strong .
the waves were 25 to 50 feet high .
and the reefs disappeared , and new islands formed , and we thought , " well , we 're real smart .
we know that hurricanes have always happened in the past . "
and we published a paper in science , the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane .
and we predicted what would happen , and we got it all wrong .
and the reason was because of overfishing , and the fact that a last common grazer , a sea urchin , died .
and within a few months after that sea urchin dying , the seaweed started to grow .
and that is the same reef ; that 's the same reef 15 years ago ; that 's the same reef today .
the coral reefs of the north coast of jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime .
and that 's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the caribbean , and increasingly , tragically , the coral reefs worldwide .
now , that 's my little , depressing story .
all of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories .
there are tens of thousands of those stories out there , and it 's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being , because it just keeps getting worse .
and the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe , like a hurricane , it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery , but what 's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that .
and so i 'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things .
we hear a lot about the collapse of cod .
it 's difficult to imagine that two , or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod .
cod fed most of the people of western europe .
it fed the slaves brought to the antilles , the song " jamaica farewell " - " ackee rice salt fish are nice " - is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern canada .
it all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s : 35,000 people lost their jobs .
and that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species , from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world , and what have you .
it 's a little hard to understand that , because you can go to a costco in the united states and buy cheap fish .
you ought to read the label to find out where it came from , but it 's still cheap , and everybody thinks it 's okay .
it 's hard to communicate this , and one way that i think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish , because people like to go out and catch fish .
it 's one of those things .
this picture here shows the trophy fish , the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat , go to a place off of key west in florida , drink a lot of beer , throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water , come back with the biggest and the best fish , and the champion trophy fish are put on this board , where people take a picture , and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish .
well , that 's what it 's like now , but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock .
the trophy fish were so big that you could n't put any of those small fish up on it .
and the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds , goliath grouper , and if you wanted to go out and kill something , you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish .
and they tasted really good .
and people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little , tiny fish .
and that 's everywhere .
it 's not just the fish , though , that are disappearing .
industrial fishing uses big stuff , big machinery .
we use nets that are 20 miles long .
we use longlines that have one million or two million hooks .
and we trawl , which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds , put it on a big chain , and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish .
think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest , because it clears it away .
and the habitat destruction is unbelievable .
this is a photograph , a typical photograph , of what the continental shelves of the world look like .
you can see the rows in the bottom , the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn .
what that was , was a forest of sponges and coral , which is a critical habitat for the development of fish .
what it is now is mud , and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud , to parking lot , is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity .
we 've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years .
we tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days .
and all of that stuff is really disgusting , but what 's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems .
and i 'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution : one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients .
so this is the infamous caulerpa taxifolia , the so-called killer algae .
a book was written about it .
it 's a bit of an embarrassment .
it was accidentally released from the aquarium in monaco , it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria .
it 's very pretty , and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern mediterranean .
i do n't know how many of you remember the movie " the little shop of horrors , " but this is the plant of " the little shop of horrors . "
but , instead of devouring the people in the shop , and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern mediterranean sea .
we do n't know anything that eats it , we 're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done , but , as it stands , it 's the monster from hell , about which nobody knows what to do .
now another form of pollution that 's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients .
the green revolution , all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer , we use too much of it .
it 's subsidized , which is one of the reasons we used too much of it .
it runs down the rivers , and it feeds the plankton , the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water .
but since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton , there 's nothing to eat the plankton and there 's more and more of it , so it dies of old age , which is unheard of for plankton .
and when it dies , it falls to the bottom and then it rots , which means that bacteria break it down .
and in the process they use up all the oxygen , and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that ca n't swim away .
so , what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish , as you see on the left in front of you .
and the only fishery left - and it is a commercial fishery - is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right , where there used to be prawns .
even in newfoundland where we used to catch cod , we now have a jellyfish fishery .
and another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms .
that picture on the left is just staggering to me .
i have talked about it a million times , but it 's unbelievable .
in the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the mississippi delta , and the lower left of that picture is the texas-mexico border .
you 're looking at the entire northwestern gulf of mexico ; you 're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish , made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right .
and in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore .
that 's the same species .
and as it comes to shore and the wind blows , and little droplets of the water get into the air , the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress .
and that 's retirement homes on the west coast of florida .
a friend and i did this thing in hollywood we called hollywood ocean night , and i was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what 's going on .
and i said , " so , imagine you 're in a movie called ' escape from malibu ' because all the beautiful people have moved to north dakota , where it 's clean and safe .
and the only people who are left there are the people who ca n't afford to move away from the coast , because the coast , instead of being paradise , is harmful to your health . "
and then this is amazing .
it was when i was on holiday last early autumn in france .
this is from the coast of brittany , which is being enveloped in this green , algal slime .
the reason that it attracted so much attention , besides the fact that it 's disgusting , is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die , and a farmer died of it , and you can imagine the scandal that happened .
and so there 's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all , and the net result is that the beaches of brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis .
and then , of course , there 's climate change , and we all know about climate change .
i guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the arctic sea .
think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the northwest passage .
well , the northwest passage is already there .
i think it 's sort of funny ; it 's on the siberian coast , maybe the russians will charge tolls .
the governments of the world are taking this really seriously .
the military of the arctic nations is taking it really seriously .
for all the denial of climate change by government leaders , the cia and the navies of norway and the u.s. and canada , whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view .
and , of course , arctic communities are toast .
the other kinds of effects of climate change - this is coral bleaching . it 's a beautiful picture , right ?
all that white coral .
except it 's supposed to be brown .
what happens is that the corals are a symbiosis , and they have these little algal cells that live inside them .
and the algae give the corals sugar , and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection .
but when it gets too hot , the algae ca n't make the sugar .
the corals say , " you cheated . you did n't pay your rent . "
they kick them out , and then they die .
not all of them die ; some of them survive , some more are surviving , but it 's really bad news .
to try and give you a sense of this , imagine you go camping in july somewhere in europe or in north america , and you wake up the next morning , and you look around you , and you see that 80 percent of the trees , as far as you can see , have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked .
and you come home , and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in north america and in europe have dropped their leaves .
and then you read in the paper a few weeks later , " oh , by the way , a quarter of those died . "
well , that 's what happened in the indian ocean during the 1998 el nino , an area vastly greater than the size of north america and europe , when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died .
and then the really scary thing about all of this - the overfishing , the pollution and the climate change - is that each thing does n't happen in a vacuum .
but there are these , what we call , positive feedbacks , the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts .
and the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this , is do we know how to put humpty dumpty back together again ?
i mean , because we , at this point , we can protect it .
but what does that mean ?
we really do n't know .
so what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years ?
well , there wo n't be any fish except for minnows , and the water will be pretty dirty , and all those kinds of things and full of mercury , etc . , etc .
and dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they 'll start to merge , and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global , coastal ocean .
then you sure wo n't want to eat fish that were raised in it , because it would be a kind of gastronomic russian roulette .
sometimes you have a toxic bloom ; sometimes you do n't .
that does n't sell .
the really scary things though are the physical , chemical , oceanographic things that are happening .
as the surface of the ocean gets warmer , the water is lighter when it 's warmer , it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over .
we say it becomes more strongly stratified .
the consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries , of the sardines of california or in peru or whatever , those slow down and those fisheries collapse .
and , at the same time , water from the surface , which is rich in oxygen , does n't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert .
so the question is : how are we all going to respond to this ?
and we can do all sorts of things to fix it , but in the final analysis , the thing we really need to fix is ourselves .
it 's not about the fish ; it 's not about the pollution ; it 's not about the climate change .
it 's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today .
so the question is : will we respond to this or not ?
i would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a believer .
i 'm a believer in global warming , and my record is good on the subject .
but my subject is national security .
we have to get off of oil purchased from the enemy .
i 'm talking about opec oil .
and let me take you back 100 years to 1912 .
you 're probably thinking that was my birth year .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was n't . it was 1928 .
but go back to 1912 , 100 years ago , and look at that point what we , our country , was faced with .
it 's the same energy question that you 're looking at today , but it 's different sources of fuel .
a hundred years ago we were looking at coal , of course , and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil .
at that point , we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner , it was cheaper , and it was n't ours though , it was theirs .
so at that point , 1912 , we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal .
but as we moved on to the period now , 100 years later , we 're back really at another decision point .
what is the decision point ?
it 's what we 're going to use in the future .
so from here , it 's pretty clear to me , we would prefer to have cleaner , cheaper , domestic , ours - and we have that , we have that - which is natural gas .
so here you are , that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil , and the cost annually is three trillion dollars .
and one trillion of that goes to opec .
that has got to be stopped .
now if you look at the cost of opec , it cost seven trillion dollars - on the milken institute study last year - seven trillion dollars since 1976 , is what we paid for oil from opec .
now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both .
but it 's the greatest transfer of wealth , from one group to another in the history of mankind .
and it continues .
now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth , you can see here that we have the arrows going into the mid-east and away from us .
and with that , we have found ourselves to be the world 's policemen .
we are policing the world , and how are we doing that ?
i know the response to this .
i would bet there are n't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world .
raise your hand if you think you know .
there are 12 .
one is under construction by the chinese and the other 11 belong to us .
why do we have 11 aircraft carriers ?
do we have a corner on the market ?
are we smarter than anybody else ? i 'm not sure .
if you look at where they 're located - and on this slide it 's the red blobs on there - there are five that are operating in the mid-east , and the rest of them are in the united states .
they just move back to the mid-east and those come back .
so actually most of the 11 we have are tied up in the mid-east .
why ? why are they in the mid-east ?
they 're there to control , keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available .
and the united states uses about 20 million barrels a day , which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world .
and we 're doing it with four percent of the population .
somehow that does n't seem right .
that 's not sustainable .
so where do we go from here ?
does that continue ?
yes , it 's going to continue .
the slide you 're looking at here is 1990 to 2040 .
over that period you are going to double your demand .
and when you look at what we 're using the oil for , 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel .
so when somebody says , " let 's go more nuclear , let 's go wind , let 's go solar , " fine ; i 'm for anything american , anything american .
but if you 're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil , you have to address transportation .
so here we are using 20 million barrels a day - producing eight , importing 12 , and from the 12 , five comes from opec .
when you look at the biggest user and the second largest user , we use 20 million barrels and the chinese use 10 .
the chinese have a little bit better plan - or they have a plan ; we have no plan .
in the history of america , we 've never had an energy plan .
we do n't even realize the resources that we have available to us .
if you take the last 10 years and bring forward , you 've transferred to opec a trillion dollars .
if you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel , you will pay 2.2 trillion .
that 's not sustainable either .
but the days of cheap oil are over .
they 're over .
the saudis do , they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments .
now i had people in washington last week told me , he said , " the saudis can produce the oil for five dollars a barrel .
that has nothing to do with it .
it 's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil . "
there is no free market for oil .
the oil is priced off the margin .
and the opec nations are the ones that price the oil .
so where are we headed from here ?
we 're headed to natural gas .
natural gas will do everything we want it to do .
it 's 130 octane fuel .
it 's 25 percent cleaner than oil .
it 's ours , we have an abundance of it .
and it does not require a refinery .
it comes out of the ground at 130 octane .
run it through the separator and you 're ready to use it .
it 's going to be very simple for us to use .
it 's going to be simple to accomplish this .
you 're going to find , and i 'll tell you in just a minute , what you 're looking for to make it happen .
but here you can look at the list .
natural gas will fit all of those .
it will replace or be able to be used for that .
it 's for power generation , transportation , it 's peaking fuel , it 's all those .
do we have enough natural gas ?
look at the bar on the left . it 's 24 trillion .
it 's what we use a year .
go forward and the estimates that you have from the eia and onto the industry estimates - the industry knows what they 're talking about - we 've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that 's available to us .
how does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent ?
it would be three times what the saudis claim they have .
and they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil , which i do not believe .
i think it 's probably 175 billion barrels .
but anyway , whether they say they 're right or whatever , we have plenty of natural gas .
so i have tried to target on where we use the natural gas .
and where i 've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks .
there are eight million of them .
you take eight million trucks - these are 18-wheelers - and take them to natural gas , reduce carbon by 30 percent , it is cheaper and it will cut our imports three million barrels .
so you will cut 60 percent off of opec with eight million trucks .
there are 250 million vehicles in america .
so what you have is the way i see it .
i do n't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's your concern .
but when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas , because you have plenty of natural gas .
but as i said , i 'm for anything american .
now let me take you - i 've been a realist - i went from theorist early to realist .
i 'm back to theorist again .
if you look at the world , you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent .
and here you can see methane , if that 's the way you 're going to go , that there 's plenty of methane - natural gas is methane , methane and natural gas are interchangeable - but if you decide that you 're going to use some methane - and i 'm gone , so it 's up to you - but we do have so i think i 've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in america .
if we do - it 's costing us a billion dollars a day for oil .
and yet , we have no energy plan .
so there 's nothing going on that impresses me in washington on that plan , other than i 'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers .
if we could do that , i think we would take our first step to an energy plan .
if we did , we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thanks for that .
so from your point of view , you had this great pickens plan that was based on wind energy , and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed .
what happened ?
tbp : i lost 150 million dollars .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 'll make you abandon something .
no , what happened to us , chris , is that power , it 's priced off the margin .
and so the margin is natural gas .
and at the time i went into the wind business , natural gas was nine dollars .
today it 's two dollars and forty cents .
you can not do a wind deal under six dollars an mcf .
ca : so what happened was that , through increased ability to use fracking technology , the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted , which made wind uncompetitive .
in a nutshell that 's what happened ?
tbp : that 's what happened .
we found out that we could go to the source rock , which were the carboniferous shales in the basins .
the first one was barnett shale in texas and then the marcellus up in the northeast across new york , pennsylvania , west virginia ; and haynesville in louisiana .
this stuff is everywhere .
we are overwhelmed with natural gas .
ca : and now you 're a big investor in that and bringing that to market ?
tbp : well you say a big investor .
it 's my life .
i 'm a geologist , got out of school in ' 51 , and i 've been in the industry my entire life .
now i do own stocks .
i 'm not a big natural gas producer .
somebody the other day said i was the second largest natural gas producer in the united states .
do n't i wish .
but no , i 'm not . i own stocks .
but i also am in the fueling business .
ca : but natural gas is a fossil fuel .
you burn it , you release co2 .
so you believe in the threat of climate change .
why does n't that prospect concern you ?
tbp : well you 're going to have to use something .
what do you have to replace it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : no , no . the argument that it 's a bridge fuel makes sense , because the amount of co2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal , correct ?
and so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas .
but if that 's it and that becomes the reason that renewables do n't get invested in , then , long-term , we 're screwed anyway , right ?
tbp : well i 'm not ready to give up , but jim and i talked there as he left , and i said , " how do you feel about natural gas ? "
and he said , " well it 's a bridge fuel , is what it is . "
and i said , " bridge to what ?
where are we headed ? "
see but again , i told you , i do n't have to worry with that .
you all do .
ca : but i do n't think that 's right , boone .
i think you 're a person who believes in your legacy .
you 've made the money you need .
you 're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate .
do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon ?
does that make sense ?
tbp : i do n't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program .
i can tell you it will be a failure .
the government is not successful on these things .
they just are n't , it 's a bad deal .
look at solyndra , or whatever it was .
i mean , that was told to be a bad idea 10 times , they went ahead and did it anyway .
but that only blew out 500 million .
i think it 's closer to a billion .
but chris , i think where we 're headed , the long-term , i do n't mind going back to nuclear .
and i can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be .
one , do n't build a reformer on a fault .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and number two , do not build a reformer on the ocean .
and now i think reformers are safe .
move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers .
there is n't anything wrong with nuke .
you 're going to have to have energy . there is no question .
you ca n't - okay .
ca : one of the questions from the audience is , with fracking and the natural gas process , what about the problem of methane leaking from that , methane being a worse global warming gas than co2 ?
is that a concern ?
tbp : fracking ? what is fracking ?
ca : fracking .
tbp : i 'm teasing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : we 've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here , you know .
tbp : no , let me tell you , i 've told you what my age was .
i got out of school in ' 51 .
i witnessed my first frack job at border texas in 1953 .
fracking came out in ' 47 , and do n't believe for a minute when our president gets up there and says the department of energy 30 years ago developed fracking .
i do n't know what in the hell he 's talking about .
i mean seriously , the department of energy did not have anything to do with fracking .
the first frack job was in ' 47 .
i saw my first one in ' 53 .
i 've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life .
never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else .
now the largest aquifer in north america is from midland , texas to the south dakota border , across eight states - big aquifer : ogallala , triassic age .
there had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in oklahoma , texas , kansas in that aquifer .
there 's no problems .
i do n't understand why the media is focused on eastern pennsylvania .
ca : all right , so you do n't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon .
your picture then i guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately , that we 'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive ?
tbp : solar and wind , jim and i agreed on that in 13 seconds .
that is , it 's going to be a small part , because you ca n't rely on it .
ca : so how does the world get off fossil fuels ?
tbp : how do we get there ?
we have so much natural gas , a day will not come where you say , " well let 's do n't use that anymore . "
you 'll keep using it . it is the cleanest of all .
and if you look at california , they use 2,500 buses .
lamta have been on natural gas for 25 years .
the ft . worth t has been on it for 25 years .
why ? air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel .
why are all the trash trucks today in southern california on natural gas ?
it 's because of air quality .
i know what you 're telling me , and i 'm not disagreeing with you .
how in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point ?
and i say , that is your problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : all right , so it 's the bridge fuel .
what is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out .
if someone comes to you with a plan that really looks like it might be part of this solution , are you ready to invest in those technologies , even if they are n't maximized for profits , they might be maximized for the future health of the planet ?
tbp : i lost 150 million on the wind , okay .
yeah , sure , i 'm game for it .
because , again , i 'm trying to get energy solved for america .
and anything american will work for me .
ca : boone , i really , really appreciate you coming here , engaging in this conversation .
i think there 's a lot of people who will want to engage with you .
and that was a real gift you gave this audience .
thank you so much . -lrb- tbp : you bet , chris . thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other - is that person dangerous ? are they attractive ?
are they a potential mate ? are they a potential networking opportunity ?
we do this little interrogation when we meet people to make a mental resume for them .
what 's your name ? where are you from ?
how old are you ? what do you do ?
then we get more personal with it .
have you ever had any diseases ?
have you ever been divorced ?
does your breath smell bad while you 're answering my interrogation right now ?
what are you into ? who are you into ?
what gender do you like to sleep with ?
i get it .
we are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves .
we start forming cliques as soon as we 're old enough to know what acceptance feels like .
we bond together based on anything that we can - music preference , race , gender , the block that we grew up on .
we seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices .
sometimes , though , just the question " what do you do ? "
can feel like somebody 's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it .
because the categories , i 've found , are too limiting .
the boxes are too narrow .
and this can get really dangerous .
so here 's a disclaimer about me , though , before we get too deep into this .
i grew up in a very sheltered environment .
i was raised in downtown manhattan in the early 1980s , two blocks from the epicenter of punk music .
i was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing .
where i come from , if you were n't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind , you were the weirdo .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was an unorthodox upbringing , but as a kid on the streets of new york , you learn how to trust your own instincts , you learn how to go with your own ideas .
so when i was six , i decided that i wanted to be a boy .
i went to school one day and the kids would n't let me play basketball with them .
they said they would n't let girls play .
so i went home , and i shaved my head , and i came back the next day and i said , " i 'm a boy . "
i mean , who knows , right ?
when you 're six , maybe you can do that .
i did n't want anyone to know that i was a girl , and they did n't .
i kept up the charade for eight years .
so this is me when i was 11 .
i was playing a kid named walter in a movie called " julian po . "
i was a little street tough that followed christian slater around and badgered him .
see , i was also a child actor , which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity , because no one knew that i was actually a girl really playing a boy .
in fact , no one in my life knew that i was a girl - not my teachers at school , not my friends , not the directors that i worked with .
kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an adam 's apple or grab my crotch to check what i was working with .
when i would go to the bathroom , i would turn my shoes around in the stalls so that it looked like i was peeing standing up .
at sleepovers i would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they did n't want to kiss me without outing myself .
it 's worth mentioning though that i did n't hate my body or my genitalia .
i did n't feel like i was in the wrong body .
i felt like i was performing this elaborate act .
i would n't have qualified as transgender .
if my family , though , had been the kind of people to believe in therapy , they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty .
but in my particular case , i just woke up one day when i was 14 , and i decided that i wanted to be a girl again .
puberty had hit , and i had no idea what being a girl meant , and i was ready to figure out who i actually was .
when a kid behaves like i did , they do n't exactly have to come out , right ?
no one is exactly shocked .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i was n't asked to define myself by my parents .
when i was 15 , and i called my father to tell him that i had fallen in love , it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl .
three years later , when i fell in love with a man , neither of my parents batted an eyelash either .
see , it 's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that i was n't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point .
i was just allowed to be me , growing and changing in every moment .
so four , almost five years ago , proposition 8 , the great marriage equality debate , was raising a lot of dust around this country .
and at the time , getting married was n't really something i spent a lot of time thinking about .
but i was struck by the fact that america , a country with such a tarnished civil rights record , could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly .
and i remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country , between places where people believed in it and places where people did n't .
and then , that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me .
if this was a war with two disparate sides , i , by default , fell on team gay , because i certainly was n't 100 percent straight .
at the time i was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl 's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy , over-compensating , boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what i actually was , a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person .
i had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls , much like myself , who fell kind of between-the-lines - girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear , girls who had boys ' haircuts but wore girly nail polish , girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees , girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls who all hated being boxed in to anything .
i loved these people , and i admired their freedom , but i watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television .
and this powerful awareness rolled in over me that i was a minority , and in my own home country , based on one facet of my character .
i was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen .
i was not an activist .
i wave no flags in my own life .
but i was plagued by this question : how could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that i knew based on one element of their character ?
how could they say that we as a group were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else ?
were we even a group ? what group ?
and had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination ?
did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was ?
and then it occurred to me , perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do .
it might give them pause .
obviously i could n't get 20 million people to the same dinner party , so i figured out a way where i could introduce them to each other photographically without any artifice , without any lighting , or without any manipulation of any kind on my part .
because in a photograph you can examine a lion 's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off .
for me , photography is not just about exposing film , it 's about exposing the viewer to something new , a place they have n't gone before , but most importantly , to people that they might be afraid of .
life magazine introduced generations of people to distant , far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures .
so i decided to make a series of very simple portraits , mugshots if you will .
and i basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that was not 100 percent straight , which , if you do n't know , is a limitless number of people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was a very large undertaking , and to do it we needed some help .
so i ran out in the freezing cold , and i photographed every single person that i knew that i could get to in february of about two years ago .
and i took those photographs , and i went to the hrc and i asked them for some help .
and they funded two weeks of shooting in new york .
and then we made this .
-lrb- music -rrb- video : i 'm io tillett wright , and i 'm an artist born and raised in new york city .
-lrb- music -rrb- self evident truths is a photographic record of lgbtq america today .
my aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who 's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the lgbtq spectrum in any way .
my goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face .
-lrb- music -rrb- " we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal . "
it 's written in the declaration of independence .
we are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded .
there is no equality in the united states .
-lsb- " what does equality mean to you ? " -rsb- -lsb- " marriage " -rsb- -lsb- " freedom " -rsb- -lsb- " civil rights " -rsb- -lsb- " treat every person as you 'd treat yourself " -rsb- it 's when you do n't have to think about it , simple as that .
the fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage .
today in 29 states , more than half of this country , you can legally be fired just for your sexuality .
-lsb- " who is responsible for equality ? " -rsb- i 've heard hundreds of people give the same answer : " we are all responsible for equality . "
so far we 've shot 300 faces in new york city .
and we would n't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the human rights campaign .
i want to take the project across the country .
i want to visit 25 american cities , and i want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people .
this is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation .
i challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- " self evident truths " -rsb- -lsb- " 4,000 faces across america " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- io tillett wright : absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that .
almost 85,000 people watched that video , and then they started emailing us from all over the country , asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces .
and a lot more people wanted to show their faces than i had anticipated .
so i changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces .
that video was made in the spring of 2011 , and as of today i have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people .
i know that this is a talk , but i 'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that i can say that will add to them .
because if a picture is worth a thousand words , then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary .
so after traveling and talking to people in places like oklahoma or small-town texas , we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on .
visibility really is key .
familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy .
once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family , you 're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it .
of course , in my travels i met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight , but i also met people who were southern baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian .
sparking empathy had become the backbone of self evident truths .
but here 's what i was starting to learn that was really interesting : self evident truths does n't erase the differences between us .
in fact , on the contrary , it highlights them .
it presents , not just the complexities found in a procession of different human beings , but the complexities found within each individual person .
it was n't that we had too many boxes , it was that we had too few .
at some point i realized that my mission to photograph " gays " was inherently flawed , because there were a million different shades of gay .
here i was trying to help , and i had perpetuated the very thing i had spent my life trying to avoid - yet another box .
at some point i added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay .
and i watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people did n't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before .
can you quantify your openness ?
once they got over the shock , though , by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks .
of course , there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other , but i found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced .
i found that most people fall on a spectrum of what i have come to refer to as " grey . "
let me be clear though - and this is very important - in no way am i saying that preference does n't exist .
and i am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative , because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice , i invite you to go out and try to be grey .
i 'll take your picture just for trying .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional .
the most important thing to take from the percentage system is this : if you have gay people over here and you have straight people over here , and while we recognize that most people identify as somewhere closer to one binary or another , there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between .
and the reality that this presents is a complicated one .
because , for example , if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior , where exactly do you draw the line ?
is it over here , by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far ?
or is it over here by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far ?
where exactly does one become a second-class citizen ?
another interesting thing that i learned from my project and my travels is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is .
after traveling so much and meeting so many people , let me tell you , there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and democrats and republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the lgbt community as there are within the human race .
aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs , and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle , just being other than straight does n't necessarily mean that we have anything in common .
so in the endless proliferation of faces that self evident truths is always becoming , as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms , bus shelters , billboards , facebook pages , screen savers , perhaps in watching this procession of humanity , something interesting and useful will begin to happen .
hopefully these categories , these binaries , these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they 'll begin to fall away .
because really , they describe nothing that we see and no one that we know and nothing that we are .
what we see are human beings in all their multiplicity .
and seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity .
at the very least i hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights .
so is it me particularly that you would choose to deny the right to housing , the right to adopt children , the right to marriage , the freedom to shop here , live here , buy here ?
am i the one that you choose to disown as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father , your neighbor , your cousin , your uncle , the president , your police woman or the fireman ?
it 's too late .
because i already am all of those things .
we already are all of those things , and we always have been .
so please do n't greet us as strangers , greet us as your fellow human beings , period .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the things i want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots .
i just wanted you to know that .
so i am indeed a neurosurgeon , and i follow a long tradition of neurosurgery , and what i 'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain , being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients .
so as i said , neurosurgery comes from a long tradition .
it 's been around for about 7,000 years .
in mesoamerica , there used to be neurosurgery , and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients .
and they were trying to - they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease .
they did n't know exactly what they were doing .
not much has changed , by the way . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but they thought that , if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease , it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit .
so if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems , then the way to treat this is , of course , to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape .
so this was the thinking back then , and these individuals made these holes .
sometimes the patients were a little bit reluctant to go through this because , you can tell that the holes are made partially and then , i think , there was some trepanation , and then they left very quickly and it was only a partial hole , and we know they survived these procedures .
but this was common .
there were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes , and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common , and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago .
now , in the course of time , we 've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things .
so there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite , and so on .
and when things work well , then the nervous system works well , and everything functions .
but once in a while , things do n't go so well , and there 's trouble in these circuits , and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble , or sometimes they 're underactive and they 're not quite working as they should .
now , the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are .
so when these neurons are in the motor circuit , you get dysfunction in the movement system , and you get things like parkinson 's disease .
when the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood , you get things like depression , and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function , then you get things like alzheimer 's disease .
so what we 've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain , and we 've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down .
so this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial .
once you choose the right station , whether it be jazz or opera , in our case whether it be movement or mood , we can put the dial there , and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume , to turn it up or turn it down .
so what i 'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients .
and this is accomplished using this kind of device , and this is called deep brain stimulation .
so what we 're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain .
again , we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime , putting an electrode in , and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest , and with a remote control very much like a television remote control , we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain .
we can turn it up or down , on or off .
now , about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation , and i 'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement , disorders of mood and disorders of cognition .
so this looks something like this when it 's in the brain .
you see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there , and we can place this really anywhere in the brain .
i tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon , because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now .
with parkinson 's disease , and this lady has parkinson 's disease , and she has these electrodes in her brain , and i 'm going to show you what she 's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her parkinson 's symptoms , and then we 're going to turn it on .
so this looks something like this .
the electrodes are turned off now , and you can see that she has tremor .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : okay . woman : i ca n't . man : can you try to touch my finger ?
-lrb- video -rrb- man : that 's a little better . woman : that side is better .
we 're now going to turn it on .
it 's on . just turned it on .
and this works like that , instantly .
and the difference between shaking in this way and not - -lrb- applause -rrb- the difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus .
so we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them , " gentlemen , that 's enough .
we want you to stop doing that . "
and we do that with electricity .
so we use electricity to dictate how they fire , and we try to block their misbehavior using electricity .
so in this case , we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons .
we started using this technique in other problems , and i 'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered , a case of dystonia .
so dystonia is a disorder affecting children .
it 's a genetic disorder , and it involves a twisting motion , and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they ca n't breathe , until they get sores , urinary infections , and then they die .
so back in 1997 , i was asked to see this young boy , perfectly normal . he has this genetic form of dystonia .
there are eight children in the family .
five of them have dystonia .
so here he is .
this boy is nine years old , perfectly normal until the age six , and then he started twisting his body , first the right foot , then the left foot , then the right arm , then the left arm , then the trunk , and then by the time he arrived , within the course of one or two years of the disease onset , he could no longer walk , he could no longer stand .
he was crippled , and indeed the natural progression as this gets worse is for them to become progressively twisted , progressively disabled , and many of these children do not survive .
so he is one of five kids .
the only way he could get around was crawling on his belly like this .
he did not respond to any drugs .
we did not know what to do with this boy .
we did not know what operation to do , where to go in the brain , but on the basis of our results in parkinson 's disease , we reasoned , why do n't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in parkinson 's disease , and let 's see what happens ?
so here he was . we operated on him hoping that he would get better . we did not know .
so here he is now , back in israel where he lives , three months after the procedure , and here he is .
-lrb- applause -rrb- on the basis of this result , this is now a procedure that 's done throughout the world , and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery .
this boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life .
this has been one of the most satisfying cases that i have ever done in my entire career , to restore movement and walking to this kind of child .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things , and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood .
and we decided to take on depression , and the reason we took on depression is because it 's so prevalent , and as you know , there are many treatments for depression , with medication and psychotherapy , even electroconvulsive therapy , but there are millions of people , and there are still 10 or 20 percent of patients with depression that do not respond , and it is these patients that we want to help .
and let 's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression .
so the first thing we did was , we compared , what 's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal , and what we did was pet scans to look at the blood flow of the brain , and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals , areas of the brain are shut down , and those are the areas in blue .
so here you really have the blues , and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation , in drive and decision-making , and indeed , if you 're severely depressed as these patients were , those are impaired . you lack motivation and drive .
the other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive , area 25 , seen there in red , and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain .
if i make any of you sad , for example , i make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died , this area of the brain lights up .
it is the sadness center of the brain .
and so patients with depression have hyperactivity .
the area of the brain for sadness is on red hot .
the thermostat is set at 100 degrees , and the other areas of the brain , involved in drive and motivation , are shut down .
so we wondered , can we place electrodes in this area of sadness and see if we can turn down the thermostat , can we turn down the activity , and what will be the consequence of that ?
so we went ahead and implanted electrodes in patients with depression .
this is work done with my colleague helen mayberg from emory .
and we placed electrodes in area 25 , and in the top scan you see before the operation , area 25 , the sadness area is red hot , and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue , and then , after three months of continuous stimulation , 24 hours a day , or six months of continuous stimulation , we have a complete reversal of this .
we 're able to drive down area 25 , down to a more normal level , and we 're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain , and indeed we 're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression .
so now we are in clinical trials , and are in phase iii clinical trials , and this may become a new procedure , if it 's safe and we find that it 's effective , to treat patients with severe depression .
i 've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of parkinson 's disease and dystonia .
i 've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression .
can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anybody interested in that ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- of course we can , right ?
so what we 've decided to do is we 're going to try to turbocharge we 're going to place electrodes within the circuits that regulate your memory and cognitive function to see if we can turn up their activity .
now we 're not going to do this in normal people .
we 're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits , and we 've chosen to treat patients with alzheimer 's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits .
as you know , this is the main symptom of early onset alzheimer 's disease .
so we 've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix , which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit , with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit , and whether that can , in turn , help these patients with alzheimer 's disease .
now it turns out that in alzheimer 's disease , there 's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain .
the brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose .
it uses 20 percent of all your - even though it only weighs two percent - it uses 10 times more glucose than it should based on its weight .
twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain , and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment , which is a precursor for alzheimer 's , all the way to alzheimer 's disease , then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose .
they shut down . they turn off .
and indeed , what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely .
this is analogous to having a power failure in an area of the brain , a regional power failure .
so the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with alzheimer 's disease , and the question is , are the lights out forever , or can we turn the lights back on ?
can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again ?
so this is what we did . we implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with alzheimer 's disease , we turned it on , and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain .
and indeed , at the top , you 'll see before the surgery , the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal , predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes .
these areas of the brain are shut down .
the lights are out in these areas of the brain .
we then put in the dbs electrodes and we wait for a month or a year , and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization .
and indeed , we are able to get these areas of the brain that were not using glucose to use glucose once again .
so the message here is that , in alzheimer 's disease , the lights are out , but there is someone home , and we 're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain , and as we do so , we expect that their functions will return .
so this is now in clinical trials .
we are going to operate on 50 patients with early alzheimer 's disease to see whether this is safe and effective , whether we can improve their neurologic function .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the message i want to leave you with today is that , indeed , there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states , whether we 're talking about parkinson 's disease , depression , schizophrenia , alzheimer 's .
we are now learning to understand what are the circuits , what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases .
we can now reach those circuits .
we can introduce electrodes within those circuits .
we can graduate the activity of those circuits .
we can turn them down if they are overactive , if they 're causing trouble , trouble that is felt throughout the brain , or we can turn them up if they are underperforming , and in so doing , we think that we may be able to help the overall function of the brain .
the implications of this , of course , is that we may be able to modify the symptoms of the disease , but i have n't told you but there 's also some evidence that we might be able to help the repair of damaged areas of the brain using electricity , and this is something for the future , to see if , indeed , we not only change the activity but also some of the reparative functions of the brain can be harvested .
so i envision that we 're going to see a great expansion of indications of this technique .
we 're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain .
one of the most exciting things about this is that , indeed , it involves multidisciplinary work .
it involves the work of engineers , of imaging scientists , of basic scientists , of neurologists , psychiatrists , neurosurgeons , and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there 's the excitement .
and i think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on , and the consequence of that , of course , will be that we will be able to help many more patients .
thank you very much .
so , i kind of believe that we 're in like the " cave-painting " era of computer interfaces .
like , they 're very kind of - they do n't go as deep or as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be and i 'd like to change all that .
hit me .
ok . so i mean , this is the kind of status quo interface , right ?
it 's very flat , kind of rigid .
and ok , so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable mac , you know , but really it 's the kind of same old crap we 've had for the last , you know , 30 years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- like i think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers .
i mean it 's point and click , it 's like the menus , icons , it 's all the kind of same thing .
and so one kind of information space that i take inspiration from is my real desk .
it 's so much more subtle , so much more visceral - you know , what 's visible , what 's not .
and i 'd like to bring that experience to the desktop .
so i kind of have a - this is bumptop .
it 's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing .
so you can bump things - they 're all physically , you know , manipulable and stuff .
and instead of that point and click , it 's like a push and pull , things collide as you 'd expect them . just like on my real desk , i can - let me just grab these guys - i can turn things into piles instead of just the folders that we have .
and once things are in a pile i can browse them by throwing them into a grid , or you know , flip through them like a book or i can lay them out like a deck of cards .
when they 're laid out , i can pull things to new locations or delete things or just quickly sort a whole pile , you know , just immediately , right ?
and then , it 's all smoothly animated , instead of these jarring changes you see in today 's interfaces .
also , if i want to add something to a pile , well , how do i do that ?
i just toss it to the pile , and it 's added right to the top . it 's a kind of nice way .
also some of the stuff we can do is , for these individual icons we thought - i mean , how can we play with the idea of an icon , and push that further ?
and one of the things i can do is make it bigger if i want to emphasize it and make it more important .
but what 's really cool is that since there 's a physics simulation running under this , it 's actually heavier . so the lighter stuff does n't really move but if i throw it at the lighter guys , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's cute , but it 's also like a subtle channel of conveying information , right ?
this is heavy so it feels more important . so it 's kind of cool .
despite computers everywhere paper really has n't disappeared , because it has a lot of , i think , valuable properties .
and some of those we wanted to transfer to the icons in our system .
so one of the things you can do to our icons , just like paper , is crease them and fold them , just like paper . remember , you know , something for later .
or if you want to be destructive , you can just crumple it up and , you know , toss it to the corner .
also just like paper , around our workspace we 'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later , and i can do the same thing here , and you know , you 'll see post-it notes and things like that around people 's offices .
and i can pull them off when i want to work with them .
so , one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that , you know , " okay , well my real desk is really messy . i do n't want that mess on my computer . "
so one thing we have for that is like a grid align , kind of - so you get that more traditional desktop . things are kind of grid aligned .
more boring , but you still have that kind of colliding and bumping .
and you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop .
let 's just break this shelf . okay , that shelf broke .
i think beyond the icons , i think another really cool domain for this software - i think it applies to more than just icons and your desktop - but browsing photographs .
i think you can really enrich the way we browse our photographs and bring it to that kind of shoebox of , you know , photos with your family on the kitchen table kind of thing .
i can toss these things around . they 're so much more tangible and touchable - and you know i can double-click on something to take a look at it .
and i can do all that kind of same stuff i showed you before .
so i can pile things up , i can flip through it , i can , you know - okay , let 's move this photo to the back , let 's delete this guy here , and i think it 's just a much more rich kind of way of interacting with your information .
and that 's bumptop . thanks !
meet tony . he 's my student .
he 's about my age , and he 's in san quentin state prison .
when tony was 16 years old , one day , one moment , " it was mom 's gun .
just flash it , scare the guy . he 's a punk .
he took some money ; we 'll take his money . that 'll teach him .
then last minute , i 'm thinking , ' ca n't do this . this is wrong . ' my buddy says , ' c 'mon , let 's do this . ' i say , ' let 's do this . " ' and those three words , tony 's going to remember , because the next thing he knows , he hears the pop .
there 's the punk on the ground , puddle of blood .
and that 's felony murder - 25 to life , parole at 50 if you 're lucky , and tony 's not feeling very lucky .
so when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and i say , " in this class , we will discuss the foundations of ethics , " tony interrupts me .
" what are you going to teach me about right and wrong ?
i know what is wrong . i have done wrong .
i am told every day , by every face i see , every wall i face , that i am wrong .
if i ever get out of here , there will always be a mark by my name .
i 'm a convict ; i am branded ' wrong . ' what are you going to tell me about right and wrong ? "
so i say to tony , " sorry , but it 's worse than you think .
you think you know right and wrong ?
then can you tell me what wrong is ?
no , do n't just give me an example .
i want to know about wrongness itself , the idea of wrong .
what is that idea ?
what makes something wrong ?
how do we know that it 's wrong ? maybe you and i disagree .
maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong .
maybe it 's you , maybe it 's me - but we 're not here to trade opinions ; everyone 's got an opinion .
we are here for knowledge .
our enemy is thoughtlessness . this is philosophy . "
and something changes for tony .
" could be i 'm wrong . i 'm tired of being wrong .
i want to know what is wrong .
i want to know what i know . "
what tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy , the project that begins in wonder - what kant called " admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within . "
what can creatures like us know of such things ?
it is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence - what heidegger called " the always already there . "
it is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it - what socrates called " the examined life . "
socrates , a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing .
socrates died in prison , his philosophy intact .
so tony starts doing his homework .
he learns his whys and wherefores , his causes and correlations , his logic , his fallacies .
turns out , tony 's got the philosophy muscle .
his body is in prison , but his mind is free .
tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous , the epistemologically anxious , the ethically dubious , the metaphysically ridiculous .
that 's plato , descartes , nietzsche and bill clinton .
so when he gives me his final paper , in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure , i say , " i do n't know .
let us think about that . "
because in that moment , there 's no mark by tony 's name ; it 's just the two of us standing there .
it is not professor and convict , it is just two minds ready to do philosophy .
and i say to tony , " let 's do this . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it sure used to be a lot easier to be from iceland , because until a couple of years ago , people knew hardly anything about us , and i could basically come out here and say only good things about us .
but in the last couple of years we 've become infamous for a couple of things .
first , of course , the economic meltdown .
it actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on ebay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve .
then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends , including president obama .
by the way , the pronunciation is " eyjafjallajokull . "
none of your media got it right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly .
i 'm here to tell you the story of audur capital , which is a financial firm founded by me and kristin - who you see in the picture - in the spring of 2007 , just over a year before the economic collapse hit .
why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm ?
well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone .
and i 'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country .
but i can surely tell you that in my country , much like on wall street and the city of london and elsewhere , men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector , and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we decided , a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this was n't sustainable , to found a financial services firm based on our values , and we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance .
raised quite a few eyebrows in iceland .
we were n't known as the typical " women " women in iceland up until then .
so it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then .
and we got a great group of people to join us - principled people with great skills , and investors with a vision and values to match ours .
and together we got through the eye of the financial storm in iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients .
and although i want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that - and also there 's a factor of luck and timing - we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values .
so let me share with you our values .
we believe in risk awareness .
what does that mean ?
we believe that you should always understand the risks that you 're taking , and we will not invest in things we do n't understand .
not a complicated thing .
but in 2007 , at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures , it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market .
we also believe in straight-talking , telling it as it is , using simple language that people understand , telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides , and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter , like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the icelandic financial sector that already we had months before the collapse hit us .
and , although we do work in the financial sector , where excel is king , we believe in emotional capital .
and we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence .
it is actually people that make money and lose money , not excel spreadsheets .
-lrb- applause -rrb- last , but not least , we believe in profit with principles .
we care how we make our profit .
so while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers , we are willing to do it with a long-term view , and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter .
so we like to see profits , plus positive social and environmental benefits , when we invest .
but it was n't just about the values , although we are convinced that they matter .
it was also about a business opportunity .
it 's the female trend , and it 's the sustainability trend , that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come .
the whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men ; it is actually about women being different from men , bringing different values and different ways to the table .
so what do you get ? you get better decision-making , and you get less herd behavior , and both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results .
but one has to wonder , now that we 've had this financial sector collapse upon us in iceland - and by the way , europe looks pretty bad right now , and many would say that you in america are heading for some more trouble as well .
now that we 've had all that happen , and we have all this data out there telling us that it 's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables , will we see business and finance change ?
will government change ?
well i 'll give you my straight talk about this .
i have days that i believe , but i have days that i 'm full of doubt .
have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- einstein said that this was the definition of insanity - to do the same things over and over again , hoping for a different outcome .
so i guess the world is insane , because i see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again , hoping that this time it 's not going to collapse upon us .
i want to see more revolutionary thinking , and i remain hopeful .
like ted , i believe in people .
and i know that consumers are becoming more conscious , and they are going to start voting with their wallets , and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside , if they do n't do it from the inside .
but i 'm more of the revolutionary , and i should be ; i 'm from iceland .
we have a long history of strong , courageous , independent women , ever since the viking age .
and i want to tell you when i first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society , i was seven - it happened to be my mother 's birthday - october 24 , 1975 .
women in iceland took the day off .
from work or from home , they took the day off , and nothing worked in iceland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they marched into the center of reykjavik , and they put women 's issues onto the agenda .
and some say this was the start of a global movement .
for me it was the start of a long journey , but i decided that day to matter .
five years later , iceland elected vigdis finnbogadottir as their president - first female to become head of state , single mom , a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed .
and at one of the campaign sessions , she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she could n't become president - she was a woman , and even half a woman .
that night she won the election , because she came back - not just because of his crappy behavior - but she came back and said , " well , i 'm actually not going to breastfeed the icelandic nation ; i 'm going to lead it . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who i am and where i am today .
but in spite of that , i went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman .
started in corporate america , and i was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual , that women and men would have just the same opportunities .
but i 've come to conclude lately that it is n't like that .
we are not the same , and it 's great . because of our differences , we create and sustain life .
so we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge .
the final thought i want to leave with you is that i 'm fed up with this tyranny of either / or choices in life - either it 's men or it 's women .
we need to start embracing the beauty of balance .
so let 's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there , and let 's start thinking about doing good business .
that 's how we change the world . that 's the only sustainable future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is kate hartman .
and i like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate .
so i 'm specifically interested in how we , as humans , relate to ourselves , each other and the world around us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so just to give you a bit of context , as june said , i 'm an artist , a technologist and an educator .
i teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics .
and much of what i do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form .
and so anytime i talk about what i do , i like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter .
and it 's pretty simple .
everybody 's got one - all of you .
i can guarantee , everyone in this room , all of you over there , the people in the cushy seats , the people up top with the laptops - we all have bodies .
do n't be ashamed .
it 's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world .
and so when working as an interaction designer , or as an artist who deals with participation - creating things that live on , in or around the human form - it 's really a powerful space to work within .
so within my own work , i use a broad range of materials and tools .
so i communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing .
and to tell you a bit about the things that i make , the easiest place to start the story is with a hat .
and so it all started several years ago , late one night when i was sitting on the subway , riding home , and i was thinking .
and i tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little .
and so i was thinking about how it might be great if i could just take all these noises - like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head - if i could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that i could share them with somebody else .
and so i went home , and i made a prototype of this hat .
and i called it the muttering hat , because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you , but you could detach them and share them with somebody else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i make other hats as well .
this one is called the talk to yourself hat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's fairly self-explanatory .
it physically carves out conversation space for one .
and when you speak out loud , the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so when i make these things , it 's really not so much about the object itself , but rather the negative space around the object .
so what happens when a person puts this thing on ?
what kind of an experience do they have ?
and how are they transformed by wearing it ?
so many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves .
so this particular device is called the gut listener .
and it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication .
and so the inflatable heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves .
so they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions .
so they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences .
so the discommunicator is a tool for arguments .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange , but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in the end , some of these things just act as invitations .
so the ear bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say .
so even though i 'm really interested in the relationship between people , i also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us .
and so when i was first living in new york city a few years back , i was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how i would like to better relate to them .
and i thought , " well , hey !
maybe if i want to better relate to walls , maybe i need to be more wall-like myself . "
so i made a wearable wall that i could wear as a backpack .
and so i would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that i could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so jumping off of that , thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world , i have this ongoing project called botanicalls - which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols .
so when a plant is thirsty , it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like twitter .
and so this really shifts the human / plant dynamic , because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time .
and so kind of thinking about scale , my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers - of course .
and so glaciers are these magnificent beings , and there 's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them , but what i 'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because there seems to be an issue .
the glaciers are actually leaving us .
they 're both shrinking and retreating - and some of them have disappeared altogether .
and so i actually live in canada now , so i 've been visiting one of my local glaciers .
and this one 's particularly interesting , because , of all the glaciers in north america , it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year .
they actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier .
and this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter .
when i meet a glacier for the very first time , what do i do ?
there 's no kind of social protocol for this .
i really just do n't even know how to say hello .
do i carve a message in the snow ?
or perhaps i can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes - ice cube morse code .
or perhaps i need to make myself a speaking tool , like an icy megaphone that i can use to amplify my voice when i direct it at the ice .
but really the most satisfying experience i 've had is the act of listening , which is what we need in any good relationship .
and i was really struck by how much it affected me .
this very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier .
and so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days , i actually made a device called the glacier embracing suit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice .
and once again , it 's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug .
so , yea , this is actually just the beginning .
these are initial musings for this project .
and just as with the wall , how i wanted to be more wall-like , with this project , i 'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace .
and so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where i work with people from different disciplines - artists , technologists , scientists - to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations .
so beyond that , in closing , i 'd just like to say that we 're in this era of communications and device proliferation , and it 's really tremendous and exciting and sexy , but i think what 's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start off by saying , houston , we have a problem .
we 're entering a second generation of no progress in terms of human flight in space . in fact , we 've regressed .
we stand a very big chance of losing our ability to inspire our youth to go out and continue this very important thing that we as a species have always done .
and that is , instinctively we 've gone out and climbed over difficult places , went to more hostile places , and found out later , maybe to our surprise , that that 's the reason we survived .
and i feel very strongly that it 's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that think that it 's ok to look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it .
they need to look forward to exploration ; they need to look forward to colonization ; they need to look forward to breakthroughs .
we need to inspire them , because they need to lead us and help us survive in the future .
i 'm particularly troubled that what nasa 's doing right now with this new bush doctrine to - for this next decade and a half - oh shoot , i screwed up .
we have real specific instructions here not to talk about politics .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what we 're looking forward to is - -lrb- applause -rrb- what we 're looking forward to is not only the inspiration of our children , but the current plan right now is not really even allowing the most creative people in this country - the boeing 's and lockheed 's space engineers - to go out and take risks and try new stuff .
we 're going to go back to the moon ... 50 years later ?
and we 're going to do it very specifically planned to not learn anything new .
i 'm really troubled by that . but anyway that 's - the basis of the thing that i want to share with you today , though , is that right back to where we inspire people who will be our great leaders later .
that 's the theme of my next 15 minutes here .
and i think that the inspiration begins when you 're very young : three-year-olds , up to 12- , 14-year-olds .
what they look at is the most important thing .
let 's take a snapshot at aviation .
and there was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened .
it started in 1908 , when the wright brothers flew in paris , and everybody said , " ooh , hey , i can do that . " there 's only a few people that have flown in early 1908 . in four years , 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes , thousand of pilots . airplanes were invented by natural selection .
now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today , but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes .
there were probably at least 30,000 different things tried , and when they crash and kill the pilot , do n't try that again .
the ones that flew and landed ok because there were no trained pilots who had good flying qualities by definition .
so we , by making a whole bunch of attempts , thousands of attempts , in that four-year time period , we invented the concepts of the airplanes that we fly today . and that 's why they 're so safe , as we gave it a lot of chance to find what 's good .
that has not happened at all in space flying .
there 's only been two concepts tried - two by the u.s. and one by the russians .
well , who was inspired during that time period ?
aviation week asked me to make a list of who i thought were the movers and shakers of the first 100 years of aviation .
and i wrote them down and i found out later that every one of them was a little kid in that wonderful renaissance of aviation .
well , what happened when i was a little kid was - some pretty heavy stuff too .
the jet age started : the missile age started . von braun was on there showing how to go to mars - and this was before sputnik .
and this was at a time when mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than it is now . we thought there 'd be animals there ; we knew there were plants there ; the colors change , right ?
but , you know , nasa screwed that up because they 've sent these robots and they 've landed it only in the deserts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you look at what happened - this little black line is as fast as man ever flew , and the red line is top-of-the-line military fighters and the blue line is commercial air transport .
you notice here 's a big jump when i was a little kid - and i think that had something to do with giving me the courage to go out and try something that other people were n't having the courage to try .
well , what did i do when i was a kid ?
i did n't do the hotrods and the girls and the dancing and , well , we did n't have drugs in those days . but i did competition model airplanes .
i spent about seven years during the vietnam war flight-testing airplanes for the air force .
and then i went in and i had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages .
and some 3,000 of those are flying . of course , one of them is around the world voyager . i founded another company in ' 82 , which is my company now .
and we have developed more than one new type of airplane every year since 1982 .
and there 's a lot of them that i actually ca n't show you on this chart .
the most impressive airplane ever , i believe , was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet .
stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly , taken out of service .
we retreated in ' 98 back to something that was developed in ' 56 . what ?
the most impressive spaceship ever , i believe , was a grumman lunar lander . it was a - you know , it landed on the moon , take off of the moon , did n't need any maintenance guys - that 's kind of cool .
we 've lost that capability . we abandoned it in ' 72 .
this thing was designed three years after gagarin first flew in space in 1961 .
three years , and we ca n't do that now . crazy .
talk very briefly about innovation cycles , things that grow , have a lot of activity ; they die out when they 're replaced by something else .
these things tend to happen every 25 years .
40 years long , with an overlap . you can put that statement on all kinds of different technologies . the interesting thing - by the way , the speed here , excuse me , higher-speed travel is the title of these innovation cycles . there is none here .
these two new airplanes are the same speed as the dc8 that was done in 1958 .
here 's the biggie , and that is , you do n't have innovation cycles if the government develops and the government uses it .
you know , a good example , of course , is the darpa net .
computers were used for artillery first , then irs .
but when we got it , now you have all the level of activity , all the benefit from it . private sector has to do it .
keep that in mind . i put down innovation - i 've looked for innovation cycles in space ; i found none .
the very first year , starting when gagarin went in space , and a few weeks later alan shepherd , there were five manned space flights in the world - the very first year .
in 2003 , everyone that the united states sent to space was killed .
there were only three or four flights in 2003 .
in 2004 , there were only two flights : two russian soyuz flights to the international manned station . and i had to fly three in mojave with my little group of a couple dozen people in order to get to a total of five , which was the number the same year back in 1961 .
there is no growth . there 's no activity . there 's no nothing .
this is a picture here taken from spaceshipone .
this is a picture here taken from orbit .
our goal is to make it so that you can see this picture and really enjoy that .
we know how to do it for sub-orbital flying now , do it safe enough - at least as safe as the early airlines - so that can be done .
and i think i want to talk a little bit about why we had the courage to go out and try that as a small company .
well , first of all , what 's going to happen next ?
the first industry will be a high volume , a lot of players .
there 's another one announced just last week .
and it will be sub-orbital . and the reason it has to be sub-orbital is , there is not solutions for adequate safety to fly the public to orbit . the governments have been doing this - three governments have been doing this for 45 years , and still four percent of the people that have left the atmosphere have died .
that 's - you do n't want to run a business with that kind of a safety record .
it 'll be very high volume ; we think 100,000 people will fly by 2020 .
i ca n't tell you when this will start , because i do n't want my competition to know my schedule .
but i think once it does , we will find solutions , and very quickly , you 'll see those resort hotels in orbit .
and that real easy thing to do , which is a swing around the moon so you have this cool view . and that will be really cool .
because the moon does n't have an atmosphere - you can do an elliptical orbit and miss it by 10 feet if you want .
oh , it 's going to be so much fun .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . my critics say , " hey , rutan 's just spending a lot of these billionaires ' money for joyrides for billionaires .
what 's this ? this is not a transportation system ; it 's just for fun . "
and i used to be bothered by that , and then i got to thinking , well , wait a minute . i bought my first apple computer in 1978 and i bought it because i could say , " i got a computer at my house and you do n't .
' what do you use it for ? ' come over . it does frogger . " ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not the bank 's computer or lockheed 's computer , but the home computer was for games .
for a whole decade it was for fun - we did n't even know what it was for .
but what happened , the fact that we had this big industry , big development , big improvement and capability and so on , and they get out there in enough homes - we were ripe for a new invention .
and the inventor is in this audience .
al gore invented the internet and because of that , something that we used for a whole year - excuse me - a whole decade for fun , became everything - our commerce , our research , our communication and , if we let the google guys think for another couple weekends , we can add a dozen more things to the list . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it wo n't be very long before you wo n't be able to convince kids that we did n't always have computers in our homes .
so fun is defendable .
ok , i want to show you kind of a busy chart , but in it is my prediction with what 's going to happen .
and in it also brings up another point , right here .
there 's a group of people that have come forward - and you do n't know all of them - but the ones that have come forward were inspired as young children , this little three- to 15-year-old age , by us going to orbit and going to the moon here , right in this time period .
paul allen , elan musk , richard branson , jeff bezos , the ansari family , which is now funding the russians ' sub-orbital thing , bob bigelow , a private space station , and carmack .
these people are taking money and putting it in an interesting area , and i think it 's a lot better than they put it in an area of a better cell phone or something - but they 're putting it in very - areas and this will lead us into this kind of capability , and it will lead us into the next really big thing and it will allow us to explore . and i think eventually it will allow us to colonize and to keep us from going extinct .
they were inspired by big progress . but look at the progress that 's going on after that .
there were a couple of examples here .
the military fighters had a - highest-performance military airplane was the sr71 . it went a whole life cycle , got too rusty to fly , and was taken out of service . the concorde doubled the speed for airline travel .
it went a whole life cycle without competition , took out of service . and we 're stuck back here with the same kind of capability for military fighters and commercial airline travel that we had back in the late ' 50s .
but something is out there to inspire our kids now .
and i 'm talking about if you 've got a baby now , or if you 've got a 10-year-old now .
what 's out there is there 's something really interesting going to happen here .
relatively soon , you 'll be able to buy a ticket and fly higher and faster than the highest-performance military operational airplane . it 's never happened before .
the fact that they have stuck here with this kind of performance has been , well , you know , you win the war in 12 minutes ; why do you need something better ?
but i think when you guys start buying tickets and flying sub-orbital flights to space , very soon - wait a minute , what 's happening here , we 'll have military fighters with sub-orbital capability , and i think very soon this .
but the interesting thing about it is the commercial guys are going to go first .
ok , i look forward to a new " capitalist 's space race , " let 's call it .
you remember the space race in the ' 60s was for national prestige , because we lost the first two milestones .
we did n't lose them technically . the fact that we had the hardware to put something in orbit when we let von braun fly it - you can argue that 's not a technical loss .
sputnik was n't a technical loss , but it was a prestige loss .
america - the world saw america as not being the leader in technology , and that was a very strong thing .
and then we flew alan shepherd weeks after gagarin , not months or decades , or whatever . so we had the capability .
but america lost . we lost . and because of that , we made a big jump to recover it .
well , again , what 's interesting here is we 've lost to the russians on the first couple of milestones already .
you can not buy a ticket commercially to fly into space in america - ca n't do it . you can buy it in russia .
you can fly with russian hardware . this is available because a russian space program is starving , and it 's nice for them to get 20 million here and there to take one of the seats .
it 's commercial . it can be defined as space tourism . they are also offering a trip to go on this whip around the moon , like apollo 8 was done .
100 million bucks - hey , i can go to the moon .
but , you know , would you have thought back in the ' 60s , when the space race was going on , that the first commercial capitalist-like thing to do to buy a ticket to go to the moon would be in russian hardware ?
and would you have thought , would the russians have thought , that when they first go to the moon in their developed hardware , the guys inside wo n't be russians ? maybe it 'll probably be a japanese or an american billionaire ? well , that 's weird : you know , it really is .
but anyway , i think we need to beat them again .
i think what we 'll do is we 'll see a successful , very successful , private space flight industry . whether we 're first or not really does n't matter .
the russians actually flew a supersonic transport before the concorde .
and then they flew a few cargo flights , and took it out of service .
i think you kind of see the same kind of parallel when the commercial stuff is offered .
ok , we 'll talk just a little bit about commercial development for human space flight .
this little thing says here : five times what nasa 's doing by 2020 . i want to tell you , already there 's about 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion investment in private space flight that is not government at all - already , worldwide . if you read - if you google it , you 'll find about half of that money , but there 's twice of that being committed out there - not spent yet , but being committed and planned for the next few years . hey , that 's pretty big .
i 'm predicting , though , as profitable as this industry is going to be - and it certainly is profitable when you fly people at 200,000 dollars on something that you can actually operate at a tenth of that cost , or less - this is going to be very profitable .
i predict , also , that the investment that will flow into this will be somewhere around half of what the u.s. taxpayer spends for nasa 's manned spacecraft work .
and every dollar that flows into that will be spent more efficiently by a factor of 10 to 15 . and what that means is before we know it , the progress in human space flight , with no taxpayer dollars , will be at a level of about five times as much as the current nasa budgets for human space flight .
and that is because it 's us . it 's private industry .
you should never depend on the government to do this sort of stuff - and we 've done it for a long time . the naca , before nasa , never developed an airliner and never ran an airline .
but nasa is developing the space liner , always has , and runs the only space line , ok . and we 've shied away from it because we 're afraid of it . but starting back in june of 2004 , when i showed that a little group out there actually can do it , can get a start with it , everything changed after that time .
ok , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a particle physicist , i study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level .
for most of my research career , i 've been using accelerators , such as the electron accelerator at stanford university , just up the road , to study things on the smallest scale .
but more recently , i 've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale .
because , as i 'll explain to you , the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected .
so i 'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe , what it 's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are - at least some of the big questions .
so , recently , we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe - and by ordinary matter , i mean you , me , the planets , the stars , the galaxies - the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe .
almost a quarter , or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe , is stuff that 's invisible .
by invisible , i mean it does n't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum .
it does n't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum . it does n't reflect .
it does n't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum , which is what we use to detect things .
it does n't interact at all . so how do we know it 's there ?
we know it 's there by its gravitational effects .
in fact , this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale , and i 'll be telling you about the evidence for that .
what about the rest of the pie ?
the rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy .
more about that later , ok .
so for now , let 's turn to the evidence for dark matter .
in these galaxies , especially in a spiral galaxy like this , most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy .
this huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy .
so we have these stars going around in circles like this .
as you can imagine , even if you know physics , this should be intuitive , ok - that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here , ok .
so what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars , that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside .
in other words , if we measured speed as a function of distance - this is the only time i 'm going to show a graph , ok - we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy .
when those measurements are made , instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant , as a function of distance .
if it 's constant , that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see .
in fact , this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter .
and this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves , and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy .
so we see the galaxy and fixate on that , but it 's actually a cloud of dark matter that 's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy .
galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space ; they tend to cluster .
and this is an example of a very , actually , famous cluster , the coma cluster .
and there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster .
they 're the white , fuzzy , elliptical things here .
so these galaxy clusters - we take a snapshot now , we take a snapshot in a decade , it 'll look identical .
but these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds .
they 're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster , ok .
so all of these galaxies are moving .
we can measure the speeds of these galaxies , their orbital velocities , and figure out how much mass is in this cluster .
and again , what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see .
or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum , we see that there 's a lot of gas in this cluster , as well .
but that can not account for the mass either .
in fact , there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter , ok .
it would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly .
i 'm just putting this big , blue blob on there , ok , to try to remind you that it 's there .
can we see it more visually ? yes , we can .
and so let me lead you through how we can do this .
so here 's an observer : it could be an eye ; it could be a telescope .
and suppose there 's a galaxy out here in the universe .
how do we see that galaxy ?
a ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye .
now , how do we deduce where the galaxy is ?
well , we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye , right ?
we say , the ray of light came this way ; the galaxy must be there , ok .
now , suppose i put in the middle a cluster of galaxies - and do n't forget the dark matter , ok .
now , if we consider a different ray of light , one going off like this , we now need to take into account what einstein predicted when he developed general relativity .
and that was that the gravitational field , due to mass , will deflect not only the trajectory of particles , but will deflect light itself .
so this light ray will not continue in a straight line , but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye .
where will this observer see the galaxy ?
you can respond . up , right ?
we extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here .
is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer 's eye from that galaxy ?
yes , great . i see people going down like this .
so a ray of light could go down , be bent up into the observer 's eye , and the observer sees a ray of light here .
now , take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe , ok , a three-dimensional space .
are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye ?
yes ! the rays would lie on a - i 'd like to see - yeah , on a cone .
so there 's a whole ray of light - rays of light on a cone - that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer 's eye .
if there is a cone of light coming into my eye , what do i see ?
a circle , a ring . it 's called an einstein ring . einstein predicted that , ok .
now , it will only be a perfect ring if the source , the deflector and the eyeball , in this case , are all in a perfectly straight line .
if they 're slightly skewed , we 'll see a different image .
now , you can do an experiment tonight over the reception , ok , to figure out what that image will look like .
because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise , that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect .
we call this gravitational lensing .
and so , this is your instrument , ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
but ignore the top part .
it 's the base that i want you to concentrate , ok .
so , actually , at home , whenever we break a wineglass , i save the bottom , take it over to the machine shop .
we shave it off , and i have a little gravitational lens , ok .
so it 's got the right shape to produce the lensing .
and so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin . i grabbed a piece of graph paper - i 'm a physicist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , a napkin . draw a little model galaxy in the middle .
and now put the lens over the galaxy , and what you 'll find is that you 'll see a ring , an einstein ring .
now , move the base off to the side , and the ring will split up into arcs , ok .
and you can put it on top of any image .
on the graph paper , you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted .
and again , this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing .
ok , so the question is : do we see this in the sky ?
do we see arcs in the sky when we look at , say , a cluster of galaxies ?
and the answer is yes .
and so , here 's an image from the hubble space telescope .
many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the hubble space telescope .
well , first of all , for the golden shape galaxies - those are the galaxies in the cluster .
they 're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions , or mirages , practically , of the background galaxies .
so the streaks that you see , all these streaks , are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away .
so what we can do , then , is based on how much distortion we see in those images , we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster .
and it 's an enormous amount of mass .
and also , you can tell by eye , by looking at this , that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies .
they are centered on some more spread out structure , and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded , ok .
so this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye .
ok , so , a quick review then , to see that you 're following .
so the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter - this gravitationally attracting stuff - is that galaxies , the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large ; it must be embedded in dark matter .
the speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large ; it must be embedded in dark matter .
and we see these gravitational lensing effects , these distortions that say that , again , clusters are embedded in dark matter .
ok . so now , let 's turn to dark energy .
so to understand the evidence for dark energy , we need to discuss something that stephen hawking referred to in the previous session .
and that is the fact that space itself is expanding .
so if we imagine a section of our infinite universe - and so i 've put down four spiral galaxies , ok - and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures , so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure , horizontal or vertical , for measuring where things are .
if you could do this , what you would find that with each passing day , each passing year , each passing billions of years , ok , the distance between galaxies is getting greater .
and it 's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space .
they 're not necessarily moving through space .
they 're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger , ok .
that 's what the expansion of the universe or space means .
so they 're moving further apart .
now , what stephen hawking mentioned , as well , is that after the big bang , space expanded at a very rapid rate .
but because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space , it tends to slow down the expansion of the space , ok .
so the expansion slows down with time .
so , in the last century , ok , people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever ; whether it would slow down , you know , will be slowing down , but continue forever ; slow down and stop , asymptotically stop ; or slow down , stop , and then reverse , so it starts to contract again .
so a little over a decade ago , two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down , ok .
by how much less is it expanding today , compared to , say , a couple of billion years ago ?
the startling answer to this question , ok , from these experiments , was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago , ok .
so the expansion of space is actually speeding up .
this was a completely surprising result .
there is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen , ok .
no one was predicting ahead of time this is what 's going to be found .
it was the opposite of what was expected .
so we need something to be able to explain that .
now it turns out , in the mathematics , you can put it in as a term that 's an energy , but it 's a completely different type of energy from anything we 've ever seen before .
we call it dark energy , and it has this effect of causing space to expand .
but we do n't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point , ok .
so it 's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in .
now , so at this point , then , what i want to really emphasize to you , is that , first of all , dark matter and dark energy are completely different things , ok .
there are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe , and they have very different effects .
dark matter , because it gravitationally attracts , it tends to encourage the growth of structure , ok .
so clusters of galaxies will tend to form , because of all this gravitational attraction .
dark energy , on the other hand , is putting more and more space between the galaxies , makes it , the gravitational attraction between them decrease , and so it impedes the growth of structure .
so by looking at things like clusters of galaxies , and how they - their number density , how many there are as a function of time - we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming .
in terms of dark matter , i said that we do n't have any , you know , really persuasive argument for dark energy .
do we have anything for dark matter ? and the answer is yes .
we have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter .
now , what do i mean by well motivated ?
i mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon , ok , things that i have n't even talked about , that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting , new particle .
so , this is exactly what you want in physics : where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else .
but we do n't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate , ok .
one or both , who knows ? or it could be something completely different .
now , we look for these dark matter particles because , after all , they are here in the room , ok , and they did n't come in the door .
they just pass through anything .
they can come through the building , through the earth - they 're so non-interacting .
so one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it .
so a crystal that will ring if that happens .
so one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector .
and they 've put it deep down in an iron mine in minnesota , ok , deep under the ground , and in fact , in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far .
they have n't seen anything , ok , but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are .
there 's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy , to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this .
the large hadron collider , a particle physics accelerator , that we 'll be turning on later this year .
it is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the large hadron collider .
now , because they are so non-interactive , they will actually escape the detector , so their signature will be missing energy , ok .
now , unfortunately , there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy , so it will be hard to tell the difference .
and finally , for future endeavors , there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy - ground-based telescopes , and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy .
so in terms of the big questions : what is dark matter ? what is dark energy ?
the big questions facing physics .
and i 'm sure you have lots of questions , which i very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours , while i 'm here . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the kind of neuroscience that i do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman .
we are always chasing storms .
we want to see and measure storms - brainstorms , that is .
and we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives , but we rarely see or listen to one .
so i always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them .
actually , the first time we recorded more than one neuron - a hundred brain cells simultaneously - we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal , this is the first image we got , the first 10 seconds of this recording .
so we got a little snippet of a thought , and we could see it in front of us .
i always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer , because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe .
and here we are , out of billions of neurons , just recording , 10 years ago , a hundred .
we are doing a thousand now .
and we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature .
because , if you do n't know yet , everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms , comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories , our beliefs , our feelings , our plans for the future .
everything that we ever do , everything that every human has ever done , do or will do , requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms .
and the sound of a brainstorm , if you 've never heard one , is somewhat like this .
you can put it louder if you can .
my son calls this " making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned a.m. station . "
this is a brain .
this is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing , your brain will sound like this - my brain , any brain .
and what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies , these brain symphonies , and try to extract from them the messages they carry .
in particular , about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces .
and you have a scheme here that describes how it works .
the idea is , let 's have some sensors that listen to these storms , this electrical firing , and see if you can , in the same time that it takes for this storm to leave the brain and reach the legs or the arms of an animal - about half a second - let 's see if we can read these signals , extract the motor messages that are embedded in it , translate it into digital commands and send it to an artificial device that will reproduce the voluntary motor wheel of that brain in real time .
and see if we can measure how well we can translate that message when we compare to the way the body does that .
and if we can actually provide feedback , sensory signals that go back from this robotic , mechanical , computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain , back to the brain , how the brain deals with that , of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery .
and that 's exactly what we did 10 years ago .
we started with a superstar monkey called aurora that became one of the superstars of this field .
and aurora liked to play video games .
as you can see here , she likes to use a joystick , like any one of us , any of our kids , to play this game .
and as a good primate , she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer .
so even before a target appears that she 's supposed to cross with the cursor that she 's controlling with this joystick , aurora is trying to find the target , no matter where it is .
and if she 's doing that , because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor , she gets a drop of brazilian orange juice .
and i can tell you , any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of brazilian orange juice .
actually any primate will do that .
think about that .
well , while aurora was playing this game , as you saw , and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice , we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that aurora was making .
because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have aurora play the game just by thinking , without interference of her body .
her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target .
and to our shock , that 's exactly what aurora did .
she played the game without moving her body .
so every trajectory that you see of the cursor now , this is the exact first moment she got that .
that 's the exact first moment a brain intention was liberated from the physical domains of a body of a primate and could act outside , in that outside world , just by controlling an artificial device .
and aurora kept playing the game , kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get , that she craved for .
well , she did that because she , at that time , had acquired a new arm .
the robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later , after the first video that i showed to you , is under the control of aurora 's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target .
and aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm , but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases .
she can scratch her back , she can scratch one of us , she can play another game .
by all purposes and means , aurora 's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body .
the model of the self that aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm .
well , we did that 10 years ago .
just fast forward 10 years .
just last year we realized that you do n't even need to have a robotic device .
you can just build a computational body , an avatar , a monkey avatar .
and you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them , or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar 's arms or legs .
and what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world .
and these objects are visually identical , but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects , they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey 's brain , informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching .
and in just four weeks , the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway - like a new sense .
and you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar .
and the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin .
so what you see here is this is the design of the task .
you 're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets .
and he has to select one because only one carries the reward , the orange juice that they want to get .
and he has to select it by touch using a virtual arm , an arm that does n't exist .
and that 's exactly what they do .
this is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task .
the animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets .
and he 's sensing the texture by receiving an electrical message directly in the brain .
and the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward .
the legends that you see in the movie do n't appear for the monkey .
and by the way , they do n't read english anyway , so they are here just for you to know that the correct target is shifting position .
and yet , they can find them by tactile discrimination , and they can press it and select it .
so when we look at the brains of these animals , on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity , the electrical storms , of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick .
and that 's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows .
the basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions .
the bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar .
as fast as we can reset our computers , the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool , as if this too was a part of that primate 's body .
the brain is assimilating that too , as fast as we can measure .
so that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies , but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we 're commanding with our brains .
our violins , our cars , our bicycles , our soccer balls , our clothing - they all become assimilated by this voracious , amazing , dynamic system called the brain .
how far can we take it ?
well , in an experiment that we ran a few years ago , we took this to the limit .
we had an animal running on a treadmill at duke university on the east coast of the united states , producing the brainstorms necessary to move .
and we had a robotic device , a humanoid robot , in kyoto , japan at atr laboratories that was dreaming its entire life to be controlled by a brain , a human brain , or a primate brain .
what happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to duke , so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her .
so she could be rewarded , not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity .
funny thing , that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head , the head of the monkey , and reach its own muscle .
the monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger , across the planet .
this is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously .
this is cb1 fulfilling its dream in japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate .
so where are we taking all this ?
what are we going to do with all this research , besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears ?
well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world .
millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action , into movement .
although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements , they can not cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord .
so our idea is to create a bypass , is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals , larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again , bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body , a whole body called an exoskeleton , a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients .
and you can see an image produced by this consortium .
this is a nonprofit consortium called the walk again project that is putting together scientists from europe , from here in the united states , and in brazil together to work to actually get this new body built - a body that we believe , through the same plastic mechanisms that allow aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life .
this same mechanism , we hope , will allow these patients , not only to imagine again the movements that they want to make and translate them into movements of this new body , but for this body to be assimilated as the new body that the brain controls .
so i was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen , that this was close to impossible .
and i can only tell you that as a scientist , i grew up in southern brazil in the mid- ' 60s watching a few crazy guys telling -lsb- us -rsb- that they would go to the moon .
and i was five years old , and i never understood why nasa did n't hire captain kirk and spock to do the job ; after all , they were very proficient - but just seeing that as a kid made me believe , as my grandmother used to tell me , that " impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true . "
so they told me that it 's impossible to make someone walk .
i think i 'm going to follow my grandmother 's advice .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important , long , oily , hot summer , and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted .
but before i talk about the political chemistry , i actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil .
this is a photograph from when i visited prudhoe bay in alaska in 2002 to watch the minerals management service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice .
and what you see here is , you see a little bit of crude oil , you see some ice cubes , and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm .
the napalm is burning there quite nicely .
and the thing is , is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the american consumer .
we 're four percent of the world 's population ; we use 25 percent of the world 's oil production .
and we do n't really understand what oil is , until you check out its molecules , and you do n't really understand that until you see this stuff burn .
so this is what happens as that burn gets going .
it takes off . it 's a big woosh .
i highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday , because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again .
it 'll just bake your retinas .
so there it is ; the retinas are baking .
let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil .
oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules .
it starts of with the very small ones , which are one carbon , four hydrogen - that 's methane - it just floats off .
then there 's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon .
you 've probably heard of benzene rings ; they 're very carcinogenic .
and it goes all the way over to these big , thick , galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons , and they have thousands of hydrogens , and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them .
those are called the asphaltenes ; they 're an ingredient in asphalt .
they 're very important in oil spills .
let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water .
it is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous .
oil does n't sink , it floats .
if it sank , it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill .
and the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water .
it spreads out to be really thin , so you have a hard time corralling it .
the next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate , and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that , and shrimp .
and then the asphaltenes - and this is the crucial thing - the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion , something like mayonnaise .
it triples the amount of oily , messy goo that you have in the water , and it makes it very hard to handle .
it also makes it very viscous .
when the prestige sank off the coast of spain , there were big , floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil , with the consistency , or the viscosity , of chewing gum .
it 's incredibly hard to clean up .
and every single oil is different when it hits water .
when the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics , it 's absolutely explosive .
for the first time , american consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves .
they have a " eureka ! " moment , when we suddenly understand oil in a different context .
so i 'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics , because it 's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important , why we need to stay focused .
nobody gets up in the morning and thinks , " wow ! i 'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work . "
no , they think , " ugh . i have to go buy gas .
i 'm so angry about it . the oil companies are ripping me off .
they set the prices , and i do n't even know .
i am helpless over this . "
and this is what happens to us at the gas pump - and actually , gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger .
you might notice that many gas pumps , including this one , are designed to look like atms .
i 've talked to engineers . that 's specifically to diffuse our anger , because supposedly we feel good about atms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that shows you how bad it is .
but actually , i mean , this feeling of helplessness comes in because most americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy , not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market .
and the thing is , too , is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume , which is somewhat reasonable , because in fact , we have designed this system where , if you want to get a job , it 's much more important to have a car that runs , to have a job and keep a job , than to have a ged .
and that 's actually very perverse .
now there 's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas , which is that we 'd rather be doing anything else .
this is bp 's gas station in downtown los angeles .
it is green . it is a shrine to greenishness .
" now , " you think , " why would something so lame work on people so smart ? "
well , the reason is , is because , when we 're buying gas , we 're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance .
i mean , we 're angry at the one hand and we want to be somewhere else .
we do n't want to be buying oil ; we want to be doing something green .
and we get kind of in on our own con .
i mean - and this is funny , it looks funny here .
but in fact , that 's why the slogan " beyond petroleum " worked .
but it 's an inherent part of our energy policy , which is we do n't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use .
we talk about energy independence . we talk about hydrogen cars .
we talk about biofuels that have n't been invented yet .
and so , cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil , and it 's really important to dealing with this oil spill .
okay , so the politics of oil are very moral in the united states .
the oil industry is like a huge , gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else , but we actually see it in very moral terms .
this is an early-on photograph - you can see , we had these gushers .
early journalists looked at these spills , and they said , " this is a filthy industry . "
but they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing .
they were n't farmers , they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground .
it 's the " beverly hillbillies , " basically .
but in the beginning , this was seen as a very morally problematic thing , long before it became funny .
and then , of course , there was john d. rockefeller .
and the thing about john d. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry , and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company , a multinational .
it was terrifying ; you think walmart is a terrifying business model now , imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s .
and it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy .
but what 's really amazing is that ida tarbell , the journalist , went in and did a big exposé of rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place .
but in many ways , that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us .
and here 's one of the things that ida tarbell said - she said , " he has a thin nose like a thorn .
there were no lips .
there were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so that guy is actually still with us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this is a very pervasive - this is part of our dna .
and then there 's this guy , okay .
so , you might be wondering why it is that , every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill , we call these ceos down to washington , and we sort of pepper them with questions in public and we try to shame them .
and this is something that we 've been doing since 1974 , when we first asked them , " why are there these obscene profits ? "
and we 've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these ceos .
and we take it as , you know - we look at it on a moral level , rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level .
and so i 'm not saying these guys are n't liable to answer questions - i 'm just saying that , when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards , you do n't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate , or you 're going to get around to really reducing the amount of oil and reducing our dependence on oil .
so i 'm saying this is kind of a distraction .
but it makes for good theater , and it 's powerfully cathartic as you probably saw last week .
so the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing .
i mean , these pictures - this is from the santa barbara spill .
you have these pictures of birds .
they really influence people .
when the santa barbara spill happened in 1969 , it formed the environmental movement in its modern form .
it started earth day .
it also put in place the national environmental policy act , the clean air act , the clean water act .
everything that we are really stemmed from this period .
i think it 's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us .
here we are normally ; we 're standing at the gas pump , and we 're feeling kind of helpless .
we look at these pictures and we understand , for the first time , our role in this supply chain .
we connect the dots in the supply chain .
and we have this kind of - as voters , we have kind of a " eureka ! " moment .
this is why these moments of these oil spills are so important .
but it 's also really important that we do n't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it .
we actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem .
one of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms .
we were very reactive , as opposed to being proactive about what happened .
and so what we did was , actually , we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling .
we stopped drilling in anwr , but we did n't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed .
in fact , it 's continued to increase .
the only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices .
as you can see , our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out .
we only have two percent of the world 's oil reserves ; 65 percent of them are in the persian gulf .
one of the things that 's happened because of this is that , since 1969 , the country of nigeria , or the part of nigeria that pumps oil , which is the delta - which is two times the size of maryland - has had thousands of oil spills a year .
i mean , we 've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations .
that has been the equivalent of an exxon valdez spill every year since 1969 .
and we can wrap our heads around the spills , because that 's what we see here , but in fact , these guys actually live in a war zone .
there 's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of maryland , and it 's all related to the oil .
and these guys , i mean , if they were in the u.s. , they might be actually here in this room .
they have degrees in political science , degrees in business - they 're entrepreneurs . they do n't actually want to be doing what they 're doing .
and it 's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us .
the other thing that we 've done , as we 've continued to increase demand , is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs .
one of the places we put in a big oil project in chad , with exxon .
so the u.s. taxpayer paid for it ; the world bank , exxon paid for it .
we put it in . there was a tremendous banditry problem .
i was there in 2003 .
we were driving along this dark , dark road , and the guy in the green stepped out , and i was just like , " ahhh ! this is it . "
and then the guy in the exxon uniform stepped out , and we realized it was okay .
they have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields .
but at the same time , chad has become much more unstable , and we are not paying for that price at the pump .
we pay for it in our taxes on april 15th .
we do the same thing with the price of policing the persian gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open .
this is 1988 - we actually bombed two iranian oil platforms that year .
that was the beginning of an escalating u.s. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump .
we pay for it on april 15th , and we ca n't even calculate the cost of this involvement .
the other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the gulf of mexico , which was not part of the moratoriums .
now what 's happened in the gulf of mexico - as you can see , this is the minerals management diagram of wells for gas and oil .
it 's become this intense industrialized zone .
it does n't have the same resonance for us that the arctic national wildlife refuge has , but it should , i mean , it 's a bird sanctuary .
also , every time you buy gasoline in the united states , half of it is actually being refined along the coast , because the gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well .
so the people of the gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment .
and finally , american families also pay a price for oil .
now on the one hand , the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil , but on the other hand , the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work , generally in a fairly crummy car .
if you look at people who make $ 50,000 a year , they have two kids , they might have three jobs or more , and then they have to really commute .
they 're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care .
and the same thing happens at the 50th percentile , around 80,000 .
gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the american economy , but they 're also a drain on individual families and it 's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher .
so , what i 'm going to talk to you about now is : what do we have to do this time ?
what are the laws ? what do we have to do to keep ourselves focused ?
one thing is - we need to stay away from the theater .
we need to stay away from the moratoriums .
we need to focus really back again on the molecules .
the moratoriums are fine , but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil .
one of the things that we also need to do , is we need to try to not kind of fool ourselves into thinking that you can have a green world , before you reduce the amount of oil that we use .
we need to focus on reducing the oil .
what you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the u.s. economy .
it comes in on the side - the useful stuff is the dark gray , and the un-useful stuff , which is called the rejected energy - the waste , goes up to the top .
now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount .
and one of the things that we need to do is , not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient , but we also need to fix the economy in general .
we need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel .
for example , we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000 .
we actually encourage people to drive more .
we have policies that reward sprawl - we have all kinds of policies .
we need to have more mobility choices .
we need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil .
and we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry , which is at least 10 billion dollars a year , into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute .
whether that 's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road , this is where we need to be .
we need to kind of rationalize this whole thing , and you can find more about this policy .
it 's called strong , which is " secure transportation reducing oil needs gradually , " and the idea is instead of being helpless , we need to be more strong .
they 're up at newamerica.net.
what 's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump , to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are , having kind of that special moment , where we connect the dots actually at the pump .
now supposedly , oil taxes are the third rail of american politics - the no-fly zone .
i actually - i agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much , but i think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline , and upped it to six cents next year , nine cents the following year , all the way up to 30 cents by 2020 , that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption , and at the same time we would give people time to prepare , time to respond , and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time .
let me give you a little sense of how this would work .
this is a gas receipt , hypothetically , for a year from now .
the first thing that you have on the tax is - you have a tax for a stronger america - 33 cents .
so you 're not helpless at the pump .
and the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign , very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack .
and what it says is , " the national academy of sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs . "
that 's a lot .
and so this - you can see that you 're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax .
and also , the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system .
and at the same time , you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting , or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car , or whatever it is you 're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence .
with this whole sort of suite of policies , we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption - or our oil consumption - by 20 percent by 2020 .
so , three million barrels a day .
but in order to do this , one of the things we really need to do , is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon .
we need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater , not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there .
we need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- time flies .
it 's actually almost 20 years ago when i wanted to reframe the way we use information , the way we work together : i invented the world wide web .
now , 20 years on , at ted , i want to ask your help in a new reframing .
so going back to 1989 , i wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system .
nobody really did anything with it , pretty much .
but 18 months later - this is how innovation happens - 18 months later , my boss said i could do it on the side , as a sort of a play project , kick the tires of a new computer we 'd got .
and so he gave me the time to code it up .
so i basically roughed out what html should look like : hypertext protocol , http ; the idea of urls , these names for things which started with http .
i wrote the code and put it out there .
why did i do it ?
well , it was basically frustration .
i was frustrated - i was working as a software engineer in this huge , very exciting lab , lots of people coming from all over the world .
they brought all sorts of different computers with them .
they had all sorts of different data formats , all sorts , all kinds of documentation systems .
so that , in all that diversity , if i wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this , everything i looked into , i had to connect to some new machine , i had to learn to run some new program , i would find the information i wanted in some new data format .
and these were all incompatible .
it was just very frustrating .
the frustration was all this unlocked potential .
in fact , on all these discs there were documents .
so if you just imagined them all being part of some big , virtual documentation system in the sky , say on the internet , then life would be so much easier .
well , once you 've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people do n't read your memo - actually he did , it was found after he died , his copy .
he had written , " vague , but exciting , " in pencil , in the corner .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in general it was difficult - it was really difficult to explain what the web was like .
it 's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then .
but then - ok , when ted started , there was no web so things like " click " did n't have the same meaning .
i can show somebody a piece of hypertext , a page which has got links , and we click on the link and bing - there 'll be another hypertext page .
not impressive .
you know , we 've seen that - we 've got things on hypertext on cd-roms .
what was difficult was to get them to imagine : so , imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine .
alright , that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make .
well , some people did .
so yeah , it was difficult to explain , but there was a grassroots movement .
and that is what has made it most fun .
that has been the most exciting thing , not the technology , not the things people have done with it , but actually the community , the spirit of all these people getting together , sending the emails .
that 's what it was like then .
do you know what ? it 's funny , but right now it 's kind of like that again .
i asked everybody , more or less , to put their documents - i said , " could you put your documents on this web thing ? "
and you did .
thanks .
it 's been a blast , has n't it ?
i mean , it has been quite interesting because we 've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away .
they 're much more than we 'd originally imagined when we put together the little , initial website that we started off with .
now , i want you to put your data on the web .
turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential .
there is still a huge frustration that people have because we have n't got data on the web as data .
what do you mean , " data " ? what 's the difference - documents , data ?
well , documents you read , ok ?
more or less , you read them , you can follow links from them , and that 's it .
data - you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer .
who was here or has otherwise seen hans rosling 's talk ?
one of the great - yes a lot of people have seen it - one of the great ted talks .
hans put up this presentation in which he showed , for various different countries , in various different colors - he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality , and he shot this thing animated through time .
so , he 'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world .
he put up a slide a little bit like this .
it had underground all the data ok , data is brown and boxy and boring , and that 's how we think of it , is n't it ?
because data you ca n't naturally use by itself but in fact , data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it .
in this case , hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of united nations websites and things .
he had put it together , combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he 'd put it into this software , which i think his son developed , originally , and produces this wonderful presentation .
and hans made a point of saying , " look , it 's really important to have a lot of data . "
and i was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying , very forcibly , " it 's really important to have a lot of data . "
so i want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected , or six like he did , but i want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data .
the technology is linked data , and it 's extremely simple .
if you want to put something on the web there are three rules : first thing is that those http names - those things that start with " http : " - we 're using them not just for documents now , we 're using them for things that the documents are about .
we 're using them for people , we 're using them for places , we 're using them for your products , we 're using them for events .
all kinds of conceptual things , they have names now that start with http .
second rule , if i take one of these http names and i look it up and i do the web thing with it and i fetch the data using the http protocol from the web , i will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing , about that event .
who 's at the event ? whatever it is about that person , where they were born , things like that .
so the second rule is i get important information back .
third rule is that when i get back that information it 's not just got somebody 's height and weight and when they were born , it 's got relationships .
data is relationships .
interestingly , data is relationships .
this person was born in berlin ; berlin is in germany .
and when it has relationships , whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it 's related to is given one of those names that starts http .
so , i can go ahead and look that thing up .
so i look up a person - i can look up then the city where they were born ; then i can look up the region it 's in , and the town it 's in , and the population of it , and so on .
so i can browse this stuff .
so that 's it , really .
that is linked data .
i wrote an article entitled " linked data " a couple of years ago and soon after that , things started to happen .
the idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that hans had , and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting .
it 's not just a whole lot of other plants .
it 's not just a root supplying a plant , but for each of those plants , whatever it is - a presentation , an analysis , somebody 's looking for patterns in the data - they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together , and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together , the more powerful it is .
so , linked data .
the meme went out there .
and , pretty soon chris bizer at the freie universitat in berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up , he noticed that wikipedia - you know wikipedia , the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it .
well , in those documents , there are little squares , little boxes .
and in most information boxes , there 's data .
so he wrote a program to take the data , extract it from wikipedia , and put it into a blob of linked data on the web , which he called dbpedia .
dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up berlin , you 'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about berlin , and they 're linked together .
so if you pull the data from dbpedia about berlin , you 'll end up pulling up these other things as well .
and the exciting thing is it 's starting to grow .
this is just the grassroots stuff again , ok ?
let 's think about data for a bit .
data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms .
think of the diversity of the web . it 's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there .
so it is with data . i could talk about all kinds of data .
we could talk about government data , enterprise data is really important , there 's scientific data , there 's personal data , there 's weather data , there 's data about events , there 's data about talks , and there 's news and there 's all kinds of stuff .
i 'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it , so that you also see how much unlocked potential .
let 's start with government data .
barack obama said in a speech , that he - american government data would be available on the internet in accessible formats .
and i hope that they will put it up as linked data .
that 's important . why is it important ?
not just for transparency , yeah transparency in government is important , but that data - this is the data from all the government departments think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in america .
it 's actual useful . it 's got value .
i can use it in my company .
i could use it as a kid to do my homework .
so we 're talking about making the place , making the world run better by making this data available .
in fact if you 're responsible - if you know about some data in a government department , often you find that these people , they 're very tempted to keep it - hans calls it database hugging .
you hug your database , you do n't want to let it go until you 've made a beautiful website for it .
well , i 'd like to suggest that rather - yes , make a beautiful website , who am i to say do n't make a beautiful website ?
make a beautiful website , but first give us the unadulterated data , we want the data .
we want unadulterated data .
ok , we have to ask for raw data now .
and i 'm going to ask you to practice that , ok ?
can you say " raw " ?
audience : raw .
tim berners-lee : can you say " data " ?
audience : data .
tbl : can you say " now " ?
audience : now !
tbl : alright , " raw data now " !
audience : raw data now !
practice that . it 's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you , even though you 've paid for it as a taxpayer .
and it 's not just america . it 's all over the world .
and it 's not just governments , of course - it 's enterprises as well .
so i 'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data .
here we are at ted , and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now - curing cancer , understanding the brain for alzheimer 's , understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable , understanding how the world works .
the people who are going to solve those - the scientists - they have half-formed ideas in their head , they try to communicate those over the web .
but a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases , often sitting in their computers , and actually , currently not shared .
in fact , i 'll just go into one area - if you 're looking at alzheimer 's , for example , drug discovery - there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos , because they had their genomics data in one database in one building , and they had their protein data in another .
now , they are sticking it onto - linked data - and now they can ask the sort of question , that you probably would n't ask , i would n't ask - they would .
what proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons ?
well , you take that mouthful and you put it into google .
of course , there 's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before .
you get 223,000 hits - no results you can use .
you ask the linked data - which they 've now put together - 32 hits , each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at .
the power of being able to ask those questions , as a scientist - questions which actually bridge across different disciplines - is really a complete sea change .
it 's very very important .
scientists are totally stymied at the moment - the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems .
now if i go on like this , you 'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you .
but , that 's not true .
in fact , data is about our lives .
you just - you log on to your social networking site , your favorite one , you say , " this is my friend . "
bing ! relationship . data .
you say , " this photograph , it 's about - it depicts this person . " bing ! that 's data . data , data , data .
every time you do things on the social networking site , the social networking site is taking data and using it - re-purposing it - and using it to make other people 's lives more interesting on the site .
but , when you go to another linked data site - and let 's say this is one about travel , and you say , " i want to send this photo to all the people in that group , " you ca n't get over the walls .
the economist wrote an article about it , and lots of people have blogged about it - tremendous frustration .
the way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites .
we need to do that with linked data .
one last type of data i 'll talk about , maybe it 's the most exciting .
before i came down here , i looked it up on openstreetmap the openstreetmap 's a map , but it 's also a wiki .
zoom in and that square thing is a theater - which we 're in right now - the terrace theater . it did n't have a name on it .
so i could go into edit mode , i could select the theater , i could add down at the bottom the name , and i could save it back .
and now if you go back to the openstreetmap. org , and you find this place , you will find that the terrace theater has got a name .
i did that . me !
i did that to the map . i just did that !
i put that up on there . hey , you know what ?
if i - that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs .
and that is what linked data is all about .
it 's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit , and it all connecting .
that 's how linked data works .
you do your bit . everybody else does theirs .
you may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it .
and we 've practiced that .
so , linked data - it 's huge .
i 've only told you a very small number of things there are data in every aspect of our lives , every aspect of work and pleasure , and it 's not just about the number of places where data comes , it 's about connecting it together .
and when you connect data together , you get power in a way that does n't happen just with the web , with documents .
you get this really huge power out of it .
so , we 're at the stage now where we have to do this - the people who think it 's a great idea .
and all the people - and i think there 's a lot of people at ted who do things because - even though there 's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it - they 'll do it because they 're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them .
ok , so it 's called linked data .
i want you to make it .
i want you to demand it .
and i think it 's an idea worth spreading .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how can i speak in 10 minutes about the bonds of women over three generations , about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl huddled with her young sister , her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the china sea more than 30 years ago , bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go - that small girl now living in san francisco and speaking to you today ?
this is not a finished story .
it is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together .
let me tell you about some of the pieces .
imagine the first piece : a man burning his life 's work .
he is a poet , a playwright , a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country 's unity and freedom .
imagine him as the communists enter saigon , confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste .
words , for so long his friends , now mocked him .
he retreated into silence .
he died broken by history .
he is my grandfather .
i never knew him in real life .
but our lives are much more than our memories .
my grandmother never let me forget his life .
my duty was not to allow it to have been in vain , and my lesson was to learn that , yes , history tried to crush us , but we endured .
the next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea .
my mother , mai , was 18 when her father died - already in an arranged marriage , already with two small girls .
for her , life had distilled itself into one task : the escape of her family and a new life in australia .
it was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed .
so after a four-year saga that defies fiction , a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel .
all the adults knew the risks .
the greatest fear was of pirates , rape and death .
like most adults on the boat , my mother carried a small bottle of poison .
if we were captured , first my sister and i , then she and my grandmother would drink .
my first memories are from the boat - the steady beat of the engine , the bow dipping into each wave , the vast and empty horizon .
i do n't remember the pirates who came many times , but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat , or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours .
but i do remember the lights on the oil rig off the malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died , the journey 's end too much for him , and the first apple i tasted , given to me by the men on the rig .
no apple has ever tasted the same .
after three months in a refugee camp , we landed in melbourne .
and the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together .
we settled in footscray , a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants .
unlike the settled middle-class suburbs , whose existence i was oblivious of , there was no sense of entitlement in footscray .
the smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world .
and the snippets of halting english were exchanged between people who had one thing in common , they were starting again .
my mother worked on farms , then on a car assembly line , working six days , double shifts .
somehow she found time to study english and gain it qualifications .
we were poor .
all the dollars were allocated and extra tuition in english and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out , which was usually new clothes ; they were always secondhand .
two pairs of stockings for school , each to hide the holes in the other .
a school uniform down to the ankles , because it had to last for six years .
and there were rare but searing chants of " slit-eye " and the occasional graffiti : " asian , go home . "
go home to where ?
something stiffened inside me .
there was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying , " i will bypass you . "
my mother , my sister and i slept in the same bed .
my mother was exhausted each night , but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house .
my mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat .
and my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so i could wake her .
she opened a computer store then studied to be a beautician and opened another business .
and the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition , angry and inflexible , and troubled children caught between two worlds .
grants and sponsors were sought .
centers were established .
i lived in parallel worlds .
in one , i was the classic asian student , relentless in the demands that i made on myself .
in the other , i was enmeshed in lives that were precarious , tragically scarred by violence , drug abuse and isolation .
but so many over the years were helped .
and for that work , when i was a final year law student , i was chosen as the young australian of the year .
and i was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another , and their edges did n't fit .
tan le , anonymous footscray resident , was now tan le , refugee and social activist , invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined .
i did n't know the protocols .
i did n't know how to use the cutlery .
i did n't know how to talk about wine .
i did n't know how to talk about anything .
i wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb - a grandmother , a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years , telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep , the three of us still in the same bed .
i told my mother i could n't do it .
she reminded me that i was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat .
no had never been an option .
" just do it , " she said , " and do n't be what you 're not . "
so i spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and the disenfranchised .
and the more candidly i spoke , the more i was asked to speak .
i met people from all walks of life , so many of them doing the thing they loved , living on the frontiers of possibility .
and even though i finished my degree , i realized i could not settle into a career in law .
there had to be another piece of the jigsaw .
and i realized at the same time that it is okay to be an outsider , a recent arrival , new on the scene - and not just okay , but something to be thankful for , perhaps a gift from the boat .
because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons , can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province .
i have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that , yes , the world does fall apart , but not in the way that you fear .
possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged .
there was an energy there , an implacable optimism , a strange mixture of humility and daring .
so i followed my hunches .
i gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label " it ca n't be done " was an irresistible challenge .
for a year we were penniless .
at the end of each day , i made a huge pot of soup which we all shared .
we worked well into each night .
most of our ideas were crazy , but a few were brilliant , and we broke through .
i made the decision to move to the u.s.
after only one trip .
my hunches again .
three months later i had relocated , and the adventure has continued .
before i close though , let me tell you about my grandmother .
she grew up at a time when confucianism was the social norm and the local mandarin was the person who mattered .
life had n't changed for centuries .
her father died soon after she was born .
her mother raised her alone .
at 17 she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her .
with no support from her husband , she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case , and a far greater sensation when she won .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " it ca n't be done " was shown to be wrong .
i was taking a shower in a hotel room in sydney the moment she died 600 miles away in melbourne .
i looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side .
i knew she had come to say goodbye .
my mother phoned minutes later .
a few days later , we went to a buddhist temple in footscray and sat around her casket .
we told her stories and assured her that we were still with her .
at midnight the monk came and told us he had to close the casket .
my mother asked us to feel her hand .
she asked the monk , " why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold ? "
" because you have been holding it since this morning , " he said .
" you have not let it go . "
if there is a sinew in our family , it runs through the women .
given who we were and how life had shaped us , we can now see that the men who might have come into our lives would have thwarted us .
defeat would have come too easily .
now i would like to have my own children , and i wonder about the boat .
who could ever wish it on their own ?
yet i am afraid of privilege , of ease , of entitlement .
can i give them a bow in their lives , dipping bravely into each wave , the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine , the vast horizon that guarantees nothing ?
i do n't know .
but if i could give it and still see them safely through , i would .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trevor neilson : and also , tan 's mother is here today in the fourth or fifth row .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i grew up in limpopo , on the border of limpopo and mpumalanga , a little town called motetema .
water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather , and growing up in these tough situations , at the age of 17 , i was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter , and we were sunbathing .
the limpopo sun gets really hot in winter .
so as we were sunbathing , my best friend next to me says , " man , why does n't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you do n't have to bathe ? "
and i sat , and i was like , " man , i would buy that , eh ? "
so i went home , and i did a little research , and i found some very shocking statistics .
over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation .
four hundred and fifty million of them are in africa , and five million of them are in south africa .
various diseases thrive in this environment , the most drastic of which is called trachoma .
trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt can leave you permanently blind .
the disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year . the shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma , all you have to do is wash your face : no medicine , no pills , no injections .
so after seeing these shocking statistics , i thought to myself , " okay , even if i 'm not just doing it for myself and the fact that i do n't want to bathe , i at least need to do it to try to save the world . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so with my trusty little steed , my nokia 6234 cell phone - i did n't have a laptop , i did n't have internet much , except for the 20-rand-an-hour internet cafe - i did research on wikipedia , on google , about lotions , creams , the compositions , the melting points , the toxicities - i did high school science - and i wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper ,
and it looked like the kfc special spice , you know ?
so i was like , okay , so we 've got the formula ready .
now we need to get this thing into practice .
fast forward four years later , after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone , having written my patent on the cell phone , i 'm the youngest patent-holder in the country , and - -lrb- " no more bathing ! " -rrb- - i ca n't say any more than that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i had invented drybath , the world 's first bath-substituting lotion .
you literally put it on your skin , and you do n't have to bathe .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources i had , i went to university , met a few people , got it into practice , and we have a fully functioning product that 's ready to go to the market . it 's actually available on the market .
so we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making drybath available .
one of the things we learned was that poor communities do n't buy products in bulk .
they buy products on demand . a person in alex does n't buy a box of cigarettes . they buy one cigarette each day , even though it 's more expensive .
so we packaged drybath in these innovative little sachets .
you just snap them in half , and you squeeze it out .
and the cool part is , one sachet substitutes one bath for five rand .
after creating that model , we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product .
we realized that even rich kids from the suburbs really want drybath . -lrb- laughter -rrb- at least once a week .
anyway , we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath , and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas , two hours more for school , two hours more for homework , two hours more to just be a kid .
after seeing that global impact , we narrowed it down to our key value proposition , which was cleanliness and convenience .
drybath is a rich man 's convenience and a poor man 's lifesaver .
having put the product into practice , we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market , and one question i have for the audience today is , on the gravel roads of limpopo , with an allowance of 50 rand a week , i came up with a way for the world not to bathe .
what 's stopping you ? -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm not done yet . i 'm not done yet .
and another key thing that i learned a lot throughout this whole process , last year google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world .
i 'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world , the first african to get that accolade , and one thing that really puzzles me is , i did all of this just because i did n't want to bathe . thank you .
-lrb- applause . -rrb- the hindus say , " nada brahma , " one translation of which is , " the world is sound . "
and in a way , that 's true , because everything is vibrating .
in fact , all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating .
every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies .
so you are , in fact , a chord - each of you an individual chord .
one definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony .
your ears ca n't hear that chord ; they can actually hear amazing things . your ears can hear 10 octaves .
incidentally , we see just one octave .
your ears are always on - you have no ear lids .
they work even when you sleep .
the smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters .
the loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that .
ears are made not for hearing , but for listening .
listening is an active skill , whereas hearing is passive , listening is something that we have to work at - it 's a relationship with sound .
and yet it 's a skill that none of us are taught .
for example , have you ever considered that there are listening positions , places you can listen from ?
here are two of them .
reductive listening is listening " for . "
it reduces everything down to what 's relevant and it discards everything that 's not relevant .
men typically listen reductively .
so he 's saying , " i 've got this problem . "
he 's saying , " here 's your solution . thanks very much . next . "
that 's the way we talk , right guys ?
expansive listening , on the other hand , is listening " with , " not listening " for . "
it 's got no destination in mind - it 's just enjoying the journey .
women typically listen expansively .
if you look at these two , eye contact , facing each other , possibly both talking at the same time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- men , if you get nothing else out of this talk , practice expansive listening , and you can transform your relationships .
the trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise , surrounding us all the time .
noise like this , according to the european union , is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of europe .
two percent of the population of europe - that 's 16 million people - are having their sleep devastated by noise like that .
noise kills 200,000 people a year in europe .
it 's a really big problem .
now , when you were little , if you had noise and you did n't want to hear it , you 'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum .
these days , you can do a similar thing , it just looks a bit cooler .
it looks a bit like this .
the trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues .
the first really big health issue is a word that murray schafer coined : " schizophonia . "
it 's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear .
so , we 're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us .
i think there 's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia .
the second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression .
we squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this .
listen to this - this is an uncompressed piece of music .
-lrb- music -rrb- and now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed .
-lrb- music -rrb- i do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two .
there is a cost of compression .
it makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data .
you 're having to imagine it .
it 's not good for you in the long run .
the third problem with headphones is this : deafness - noise-induced hearing disorder .
ten million americans already have this for one reason or another , but really worryingly , 16 percent - roughly one in six - of american teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse .
one study at an american university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse .
we may be raising an entire generation of deaf people .
now that 's a really serious problem .
i 'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children , please .
professional hearing protectors are great ; i use some all the time .
if you 're going to use headphones , buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you do n't have to have it so loud .
if you ca n't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice , it 's too loud .
and thirdly , if you 're in bad sound , it 's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it .
protect your ears in that way .
let 's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that i urge you to seek out .
wwb : wind , water , birds - stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events , all of it very healthy , all of it sound that we evolved to over the years .
seek those sounds out ; they 're good for you and so it this .
silence is beautiful .
the elizabethans described language as decorated silence .
i urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art .
have a foreground , a background , all in beautiful proportion .
it 's fun to get into designing with sound .
if you ca n't do it yourself , get a professional to do it for you .
sound design is the future , and i think it 's the way we 're going to change the way the world sounds .
i 'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities , eight ways sound can improve health .
first , ultrasound : we 're very familiar with it from physical therapy ; it 's also now being used to treat cancer .
lithotripsy - saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound .
sound healing is a wonderful modality .
it 's been around for thousands of years .
i do urge you to explore this .
there are great things being done there , treating now autism , dementia and other conditions .
and music , of course . just listening to music is good for you , if it 's music that 's made with good intention , made with love , generally .
devotional music , good - mozart , good .
there are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy .
and four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved .
first of all , listen consciously .
i hope that that after this talk you 'll be doing that .
it 's a whole new dimension to your life and it 's wonderful to have that dimension .
secondly , get in touch with making some sound - create sound .
the voice is the instrument we all play , and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice ? get trained ; learn to sing , learn to play an instrument .
musicians have bigger brains - it 's true .
you can do this in groups as well .
it 's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia ; to make music and sound in a group of people , whichever style you enjoy particularly .
and let 's take a stewarding role for the sound around us .
protect your ears ? yes , absolutely .
design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work .
and let 's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that i played you early on .
so i 'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound .
my vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things , we will take a very big step in that direction .
so i urge you to take that path .
i 'm leaving you with a little more birdsong , which is very good for you .
i wish you sound health .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'd like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years .
but before i do that , i need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics , which require huge amounts of energy to create and , because of their disposal issues , are slowly poisoning our planet .
i also want to tell you and share with you how my team and i have been using mushrooms over the last three years .
not like that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials , which perform a lot like plastics during their use , but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- but first , i need to talk to you about what i consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category .
this is a material you all know is styrofoam , but i like to think of it as toxic white stuff .
in a single cubic foot of this material - about what would come around your computer or large television - you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol .
yet , after just a few weeks of use , you 'll throw this material in the trash .
and this is n't just found in packaging .
20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year , in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops .
and that 's not the only place it 's found .
the epa estimates , in the united states , by volume , this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills .
even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment - on the side of the road or next to a river .
if it 's not picked up by a human , like me and you , it 'll stay there for thousands and thousands of years .
perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans , like in the great plastic gyre , where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits , but they 're not really going away .
they 're not biologically compatible .
they 're basically fouling up earth 's respiratory and circulatory systems .
and because these materials are so prolific , because they 're found in so many places , there 's one other place you 'll find this material , styrene , which is made from benzene , a known carcinogen .
you 'll find it inside of you .
so , for all these reasons , i think we need better materials , and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials .
the first is feedstocks .
today , we use a single feedstock , petroleum , to heat our homes , power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you .
we recognize this is a finite resource , and it 's simply crazy to do this , to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package .
second of all , we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials .
i say far less , because 10 percent is n't going to cut it .
we should be talking about half , a quarter , one-tenth the energy content .
and lastly , and i think perhaps most importantly , we should be creating materials that fit into what i call nature 's recycling system .
this recycling system has been in place for the last billion years .
i fit into it , you fit into it , and a hundred years tops , my body can return to the earth with no preprocessing .
yet that packaging i got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years .
this is crazy .
but nature provides us with a really good model here .
when a tree 's done using its leaves - its solar collectors , these amazing molecular photon capturing devices - at the end of a season , it does n't pack them up , take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves .
it just drops them , the shortest distance possible , to the forest floor , where they 're actually upcycled into next year 's topsoil .
and this gets us back to the mushrooms .
because in nature , mushrooms are the recycling system .
and what we 've discovered is , by using a part of the mushroom you 've probably never seen - analogous to its root structure ; it 's called mycelium - we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics .
now , mycelium is an amazing material , because it 's a self-assembling material .
it actually takes things we would consider waste - things like seed husks or woody biomass - and can transform them into a chitinous polymer , which you can form into almost any shape .
in our process , we basically use it as a glue .
and by using mycelium as a glue , you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry , and you can create materials with many different properties , materials that are insulating , fire-resistant , moisture-resistant , vapor-resistant - materials that can absorb impacts , that can absorb acoustical impacts .
but these materials are grown from agricultural byproducts , not petroleum .
and because they 're made of natural materials , they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard .
so i 'd like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials .
the first is selecting a feedstock , preferably something that 's regional , that 's in your area , right - local manufacturing .
the next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool , physically filling an enclosure , a mold , in whatever shape you want to get .
then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles , and that 's where the magic happens , because the organism is doing the work in this process , not the equipment .
the final step is , of course , the product , whether it 's a packaging material , a table top , or building block .
our vision is local manufacturing , like the local food movement , for production .
so we 've created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts .
if you 're in china , you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull .
if you 're in northern europe or north america , you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls .
we then process these husks with some basic equipment .
and i want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale .
so what you 're seeing here is actually cotton hulls from texas , in this case .
it 's a waste product .
and what they 're doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system , which cleans , cooks , cools and pasteurizes these materials , while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium .
this gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape , though today we 're making corner blocks .
and it 's when this lid goes on the part , that the magic really starts .
because the manufacturing process is our organism .
it 'll actually begin to digest these wastes and , over the next five days , assemble them into biocomposites .
our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark , quietly self-assembling materials - and everything from building materials to , in this case , a packaging corner block .
so i 've said a number of times that we grow materials .
and it 's kind of hard to picture how that happens .
so my team has taken five days-worth of growth , a typical growth cycle for us , and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse .
and i want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen , because , over the five-day period , what they do is extend out and through this material , using the energy that 's contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix .
this matrix self-assembles , growing through and around the particles , making millions and millions of tiny fibers .
and what parts of the seed husk we do n't digest , actually become part of the final , physical composite .
so in front of your eyes , this part just self-assembled .
it actually takes a little longer . it takes five days .
but it 's much faster than conventional farming .
the last step , of course , is application .
in this case , we 've grown a corner block .
a major fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment .
they used to use a plastic packaging buffer , but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material .
best of all , when it gets to the customer , it 's not trash .
they can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing , and it 's going to improve the local soil .
so , why mycelium ?
the first reason is local open feedstocks .
you want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls , because you have multiple choices .
the next is self-assembly , because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process .
you do n't need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility .
so you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world .
biological yield is really important .
and because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product , even the parts that are n't digested become part of the structure , we 're getting incredible yield rates .
natural polymers , well ... i think that 's what 's most important , because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years , in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans .
they 're not going to clog up earth 's ecosystems . they work great .
and while , today , we can practically guarantee that yesterday 's packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years , what i want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years , our descendants , our children 's children , will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy earth .
and i think that can be some really good news .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over the last two decades , india has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services , as we call it , and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in india , offshoring software development and back office services , there 's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to india .
when this is combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs to china , it has , you know , led to considerable angst amongst the western populations .
in fact , if you look at polls , they show a declining trend for support for free trade in the west .
now , the western elites , however , have said this fear is misplaced .
for example , if you have read - i suspect many of you have done so - read the book by thomas friedman called " the world is flat , " he said , basically , in his book that , you know , this fear for free trade is wrong because it assumes , it 's based on a mistaken assumption that everything that can be invented has been invented .
in fact , he says , it 's innovation that will keep the west ahead of the developing world , with the more sophisticated , innovative tasks being done in the developed world , and the less sophisticated , shall we say , drudge work being done in the developing world .
now , what we were trying to understand was , is this true ?
could india become a source , or a global hub , of innovation , just like it 's become a global hub for back office services and software development ?
and for the last four years , my coauthor phanish puranam and i spent investigating this topic .
initially , or , you know , as people would say , you know , in fact the more aggressive people who are supporting the western innovative model , say , " where are the indian googles , ipods and viagras , if the indians are so bloody smart ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so initially , when we started our research , we went and met several executives , and we asked them , " what do you think ? will india go from being a favored destination for software services and back office services to a destination for innovation ? "
they laughed . they dismissed us .
they said , " you know what ? indians do n't do innovation . "
the more polite ones said , " well , you know , indians make good software programmers and accountants , but they ca n't do the creative stuff . "
sometimes , it took a more , took a veneer of sophistication , and people said , " you know , it 's nothing to do with indians .
it 's really the rule-based , regimented education system in india that is responsible for killing all creativity . "
they said , instead , if you want to see real creativity , go to silicon valley , and look at companies like google , microsoft , intel .
so we started examining the r & amp ; d and innovation labs of silicon valley .
well , interestingly , what you find there is , usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the r & amp ; d center as they may call it , and more often than not , it 's an indian . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i immediately said , " well , but you could not have been educated in india , right ?
you must have gotten your education here . "
it turned out , in every single case , they came out of the indian educational system .
so we realized that maybe we had the wrong question , and the right question is , really , can indians based out of india do innovative work ?
so off we went to india . we made , i think , about a dozen trips to bangalore , mumbai , gurgaon , delhi , hyderabad , you name it , to examine what is the level of corporate innovation in these cities .
and what we found was , as we progressed in our research , was , that we were asking really the wrong question .
when you ask , " where are the indian googles , ipods and viagras ? " you are taking a particular perspective on innovation , which is innovation for end users , visible innovation .
instead , innovation , if you remember , some of you may have read the famous economist schumpeter , he said , " innovation is novelty in how value is created and distributed . "
it could be new products and services , but it could also be new ways of producing products .
it could also be novel ways of organizing firms and industries .
once you take this , there 's no reason to restrict innovation , the beneficiaries of innovation , just to end users .
when you take this broader conceptualization of innovation , what we found was , india is well represented in innovation , but the innovation that is being done in india is of a form we did not anticipate , and what we did was we called it " invisible innovation . "
and specifically , there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of india .
the first type of invisible innovation out of india is what we call innovation for business customers , which is led by the multinational corporations , which have - in the last two decades , there have been 750 r & amp ; d centers set up in india by multinational companies employing more than 400,000 professionals .
now , when you consider the fact that , historically , the r & amp ; d center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters , or in the country of origin of that multinational company , to have 750 r & amp ; d centers of multinational corporations in india is truly a remarkable figure .
when we went and talked to the people in those innovation centers and asked them what are they working on , they said , " we are working on global products . "
they were not working on localizing global products for india , which is the usual role of a local r & amp ; d.
they were working on truly global products , and companies like microsoft , google , astrazeneca , general electric , philips , have already answered in the affirmative the question that from their bangalore and hyderabad r & amp ; d centers they are able to produce products and services for the world .
but of course , as an end user , you do n't see that , because you only see the name of the company , not where it was developed .
the other thing we were told then was , " yes , but , you know , the kind of work that is coming out of the indian r & amp ; d center can not be compared to the kind of work that is coming out of the u.s. r & amp ; d centers . "
so my coauthor phanish puranam , who happens to be one of the smartest people i know , said he 's going to do a study .
what he did was he looked at those companies that had an r & amp ; d center in usa and in india , and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the u.s. and a similar patent filed out of the same company 's subsidiary in india , so he 's now comparing the patents of r & amp ; d centers in the u.s. with r & amp ; d centers in india of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the u.s. centers ?
interestingly , what he finds is - and by the way , the way we look at the quality of a patent is what we call forward citations : how many times does a future patent reference the older patent ? - he finds something very interesting .
what we find is that the data says that the number of forward citations of a patent filed out of a u.s. r & amp ; d subsidiary is identical to the number of forward citations of a patent filed by an indian subsidiary of the same company within that company .
so within the company , there 's no difference in the forward citation rates of their indian subsidiaries versus their u.s. subsidiaries .
so that 's the first kind of invisible innovation coming out of india .
the second kind of invisible innovation coming out of india is what we call outsourcing innovation to indian companies , where many companies today are contracting indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world .
for example , in the pharma industry , a lot of the molecules are being developed , but you see a major part of that work is being sent to india .
for example , xcl technologies , they developed two of the mission critical systems for the new boeing 787 dreamliner , one to avoid collisions in the sky , and another to allow landing in zero visibility .
but of course , when you climb onto the boeing 787 , you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of india .
the third kind of invisible innovation coming out of india is what we call process innovations , because of an injection of intelligence by indian firms .
process innovation is different from product innovation .
it 's about how do you create a new product or develop a new product or manufacture a new product , but not a new product itself ?
only in india do millions of young people dream of working in a call center .
what happens - you know , it 's a dead end job in the west , what high school dropouts do .
what happens when you put hundreds of thousands of smart , young , ambitious kids on a call center job ?
very quickly , they get bored , and they start innovating , and they start telling the boss how to do this job better , and out of this process innovation comes product innovations , which are then marketed around the world .
for example , 24/7 customer , traditional call center company , used to be a traditional call center company . today they 're developing analytical tools to do predictive modeling so that before you pick up the phone , you can guess or predict what this phone call is about .
it 's because of an injection of intelligence into a process which was considered dead for a long time in the west .
and the last kind of innovation , invisible innovation coming out of india is what we call management innovation .
it 's not a new product or a new process but a new way to organize work , and the most significant management innovation to come out of india , invented by the indian offshoring industry is what we call the global delivery model .
what the global delivery model allows is , it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks , break them up into parts , send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists , and then specify the means for reintegrating them .
without that , you could not have any of the other invisible innovations today .
so , what i 'm trying to say is , what we are finding in our research is , that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg , india is well represented in the invisible , large , submerged portion of the innovation iceberg .
now , this has , of course , some implications , and so we developed three implications of this research .
the first is what we called sinking skill ladder , and now i 'm going to go back to where i started my conversation with you , which was about the flight of jobs .
now , of course , when we first , as a multinational company , decide to outsource jobs to india in the r & amp ; d , what we are going to do is we are going to outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to india , the least sophisticated jobs , just like tom friedman would predict .
now , what happens is , when you outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to india for innovation and for r & amp ; d work , at some stage in the very near future you are going to have to confront a problem , which is where does the next step of the ladder people come from within your company ?
so you have two choices then : either you bring the people from india into the developed world to take positions in the next step of the ladder - immigration - or you say , there 's so many people in the bottom step of the ladder waiting to take the next position in india , why do n't we move the next step to india ?
what we are trying to say is that once you outsource the bottom end of the ladder , you - it 's a self-perpetuating act , because of the sinking skill ladder , and the sinking skill ladder is simply the point that you ca n't be an investment banker without having been an analyst once .
you ca n't be a professor without having been a student .
you ca n't be a consultant without having been a research associate .
so , if you outsource the least sophisticated jobs , at some stage , the next step of the ladder has to follow .
the second thing we bring up is what we call the browning of the tmt , the top management teams .
if the r & amp ; d talent is going to be based out of india and china , and the largest growth markets are going to be based out of india and china , you have to confront the problem that your top management of the future is going to have to come out of india and china , because that 's where the product leadership is , that 's where the important market leadership is .
right ? and the last thing we point out in this slide , which is , you know , that to this story , there 's one caveat .
india has the youngest growing population in the world .
this demographic dividend is incredible , but paradoxically , there 's also the mirage of mighty labor pools .
indian institutes and educational system , with a few exceptions , are incapable of producing students in the quantity and quality needed to keep this innovation engine going , so companies are finding innovative ways to overcome this , but in the end it does not absolve the government of the responsibility for creating this educational structure .
so finally , i want to conclude by showing you the profile of one company , ibm .
as many of you know , ibm has always been considered for the last hundred years to be one of the most innovative companies .
in fact , if you look at the number of patents filed over history , i think they are in the top or the top two or three companies in the world of all patents filed in the usa as a private company .
here is the profile of employees of ibm over the last decade .
in 2003 , they had 300,000 employees , or 330,000 employees , out of which , 135,000 were in america , 9,000 were in india .
in 2009 , they had 400,000 employees , by which time the u.s. employees had moved to 105,000 , whereas the indian employees had gone to 100,000 .
well , in 2010 , they decided they 're not going to reveal this data anymore , so i had to make some estimates based on various sources .
here are my best guesses . okay ? i 'm not saying this is the exact number , it 's my best guess .
it gives you a sense of the trend .
there are 433,000 people now at ibm , out of which 98,000 are remaining in the u.s. , and 150,000 are in india .
so you tell me , is ibm an american company , or an indian company ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm actually here to make a challenge to people .
i know there have been many challenges made to people .
the one i 'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means .
peace is not " kumbaya , my lord . "
peace is not the dove and the rainbow - as lovely as they are .
when i see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove , i think of personal serenity .
i think of meditation .
i do not think about what i consider to be peace , which is sustainable peace with justice and equality .
it is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives , where these people have enough access to education and health care , so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear .
this is called human security .
and i am not a complete pacifist like some of my really , really heavy-duty , non-violent friends , like mairead mcguire .
i understand that humans to use a nice word , because i promised my mom i 'd stop using the f-bomb in public .
and i 'm trying harder and harder .
mom , i 'm really trying .
we need a little bit of police ; we need a little bit of military , but for defense .
we need to redefine what makes us secure in this world .
it is not arming our country to the teeth .
it is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them .
it is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure , to make the people of the world secure .
i was thinking about the recent ongoings in congress , where the president is offering to try to get the start vote .
i certainly support the start vote .
but he 's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons .
do you know the figure that the u.n. talks about for fulfilling the millennium development goals is 80 billion dollars ?
just that little bit of money , which to me , i wish it was in my bank account - it 's not , but ...
in global terms , it 's a little bit of money .
but it 's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime , unless we get up off our ...
and take action to make it happen , unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we 've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security .
it is saving the tigers .
it is stopping the tar sands .
it is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer .
it is all of those things .
it is using our money for all of those things .
it is about action .
i was in hiroshima a couple of weeks ago , and his holiness - we 're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city , and there were about eight of us nobel laureates .
and he 's a bad guy . he 's like a bad kid in church .
we 're staring at everybody , waiting our turn to speak , and he leans over to me , and he says , " jody , i 'm a buddhist monk . "
i said , " yes , your holiness .
your robe gives it away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " you know that i kind of like meditation , and i pray . "
i said , " that 's good . that 's good .
we need that in the world .
i do n't follow that , but that 's cool . "
and he says , " but i have become skeptical .
i do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world .
i think what we need is action . "
his holiness , in his robes , is my new action hero .
i spoke with aung sun suu kyi a couple of days ago .
as most of you know , she 's a hero for democracy in her country , burma .
you probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy .
she was just released a couple of weeks ago , and we 're very concerned to see how long she will be free , because she is already out in the streets in rangoon , agitating for change .
she is already out in the streets , working with the party to try to rebuild it .
but i talked to her for a range of issues .
but one thing that i want to say , because it 's similar to what his holiness said .
she said , " you know , we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country .
but i do n't believe in hope without endeavor .
i do n't believe in the hope of change , unless we take action to make it so . "
here 's another woman hero of mine .
she 's my friend , dr. shirin ebadi , the first muslim woman to receive the nobel peace prize .
she has been in exile you ask her where she lives - where does she live in exile ?
she says the airports of the world .
she is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections .
and instead of going home , she conferred with all the other women that she works with , who said to her , " stay out . we need you out .
we need to be able to talk to you out there , so that you can give the message of what 's happening here . "
a year and a half - she 's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country .
wangari maathai - 2004 peace laureate .
they call her the " tree lady , " but she 's more than the tree lady .
working for peace is very creative .
it 's hard work every day .
when she was planting those trees , i do n't think most people understand that , at the same time , she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country .
people could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail .
but if they were together planting trees for the environment , it was okay - creativity .
but it 's not just iconic women like shirin , like aung sun suu kyi , like wangari maathai - it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world .
the women 's league of burma , 11 individual organizations of burmese women came together because there 's strength in numbers .
working together is what changes our world .
the million signatures campaign of women inside burma working together to change human rights , to bring democracy to that country .
when one is arrested and taken to prison , another one comes out and joins the movement , recognizing that if they work together , they will ultimately bring change in their own country .
mairead mcguire in the middle , betty williams on the right-hand side - bringing peace to northern ireland .
i 'll tell you the quick story .
an ira driver was shot , and his car plowed into people on the side of the street .
there was a mother and three children .
the children were killed on the spot .
it was mairead 's sister .
instead of giving in to grief , depression , defeat in the face of that violence , mairead hooked up with betty - a staunch protestant and a staunch catholic - and they took to the streets to say , " no more violence . "
and they were able to get tens of thousands of , primarily , women , some men , in the streets to bring about change .
and they have been part of what brought peace to northern ireland , and they 're still working on it , because there 's still a lot more to do .
this is rigoberta menchu tum .
she also received the peace prize .
she is now running for president .
she is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy , about how you bring democracy to the country , about educating , about how to vote - but that democracy is not just about voting ; it 's about being an active citizen .
that 's what i got stuck doing - the landmine campaign .
one of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two ngos to thousands in 90 countries around the world , working together in common cause to ban landmines .
some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month .
they could maybe volunteer that much .
there were others , like myself , who were full-time .
but it was the actions , together , of all of us that brought about that change .
in my view , what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace .
it 's not a dirty word .
it 's hard work every single day .
and if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could , we would change this world , we would save this world .
and we ca n't wait for the other guy . we have to do it ourselves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- by 2010 , detroit had become the poster child for an american city in crisis .
there was a housing collapse , an auto industry collapse , and the population had plummeted by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010 , and many people were beginning to write it off , as it had topped the list of american shrinking cities .
by 2010 , i had also been asked by the kresge foundation and the city of detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future .
i come to this work as an architect and an urban planner , and i 've spent my career working in other contested cities , like chicago , my hometown ; harlem , which is my current home ; washington , d.c. ; and newark , new jersey .
all of these cities , to me , still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice , issues of equity , inclusion and access .
now by 2010 , as well , popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like detroit , and devoting whole issues to " fixing the city . "
i was asked by a good friend , fred bernstein , to do an interview for the october issue of architect magazine , and he and i kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title , " can this planner save detroit ? "
so i 'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now , because obviously , it 's completely absurd that a single person , let alone a planner , could save a city .
but i 'm also smiling because i thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis .
so i 'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city , a little bit about detroit , and i want to do that through the voices of detroiters .
so we began our process in september of 2010 .
it 's just after a special mayoral election , and word has gotten out that there is going to be this citywide planning process , which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among detroiters .
we had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process , and people came out from all over the city , including areas that were stable neighborhoods , as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy .
and most of our audience was representative of the 82 percent african-american population in the city at that time .
so obviously , we have a q & a portion of our program , and people line up to mics to ask questions .
many of them step very firmly to the mic , put their hands across their chest , and go , " i know you people are trying to move me out of my house , right ? "
so that question is really powerful , and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment , when you connect it to the stories that some detroiters had , and actually a lot of african-americans ' families have had that are living in midwestern cities like detroit .
many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents , who were one of 1.6 million people who migrated from the rural south to the industrial north , as depicted in this painting by jacob lawrence , " the great migration . "
they came to detroit for a better way of life .
many found work in the automobile industry , the ford motor company , as depicted in this mural by diego rivera in the detroit institute of art .
the fruits of their labors would afford them a home , for many the first piece of property that they would ever know , and a community with other first-time african-american home buyers .
the first couple of decades of their life in the north is quite well , up until about 1950 , which coincides with the city 's peak population at 1.8 million people .
now it 's at this time that detroit begins to see a second kind of migration , a migration to the suburbs .
between 1950 and 2000 , the region grows by 30 percent .
but this time , the migration leaves african-americans in place , as families and businesses flee the city , leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs .
during that same period , between 1950 and 2000 , 2010 , the city loses 60 percent of its population , and today it hovers at above 700,000 .
the audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it 's like to live in a city with such depleted population .
many tell us that they 're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied , and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches .
citywide , there are 80,000 vacant homes .
they can also see vacant property .
they 're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties , like illegal dumping , and they know that because the city has lost so much population , their costs for water , electricity , gas are rising , because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need .
citywide , there are about 100,000 vacant parcels .
now , to quickly give you all a sense of a scale , because i know that sounds like a big number , but i do n't think you quite understand until you look at the city map .
so the city is 139 square miles .
you can fit boston , san francisco , and the island of manhattan within its footprint .
so if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together , it looks like about 20 square miles , and that 's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we 're sitting on today , manhattan , at 22 square miles .
so it 's a lot of vacancy .
now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities , and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots , and they 're starting community gardens , which are creating a great sense of community stewardship , but they 're very , very clear to tell us that this is not enough , that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them .
now there 's been a lot of speculation since 2010 about what to do with the vacant property , and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening , or what we call urban agriculture .
so many people would say to us , " what if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland ?
it can provide fresh foods , and it can put detroiters back to work too . "
when i hear that story , i always imagine the folks from the great migration rolling over in their graves , because you can imagine that they did n't sacrifice moving from the south to the north to create a better life for their families , only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle , especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the american dream : steady work and a home that they owned .
now , there 's a third wave of migration happening in detroit : a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs .
these folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new , entrepreneurial ideas and profit , so much so that former models can move to detroit , buy property , start successful businesses and restaurants , and become successful community activists in their neighborhood , bringing about very positive change .
similarly , we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city .
this company , shinola , which is a luxury watch and bicycle company , deliberately chose to relocate to detroit , and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand of detroit 's innovation .
and they also knew that they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things .
now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods , we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises , and we have businesses relocating , and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all , a city that 's under the control of an emergency manager , and just this july filed for chapter 9 bankruptcy .
so 2010 , we started this process , and by 2013 , we released detroit future city , which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence - not what it was , but what it could be , looking at new ways of economic growth , new forms of land use , more sustainable and denser neighborhoods , a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system , and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change .
three key imperatives were really important to our work .
one was that the city itself was n't necessarily too large , but the economy was too small .
there are only 27 jobs per 100 people in detroit , very different from a denver or an atlanta or a philadelphia that are anywhere between 35 to 70 jobs per 100 people .
secondly , there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come .
it was n't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before , and urban agriculture , while a very productive and successful intervention happening in detroit , was not the only answer , that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new , productive , innovative , and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities , where still nearly 300,000 residents lived .
so we came up with one neighborhood typology - there are several - called a live-make neighborhood , where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises , with a specific emphasis on looking at the , again , majority 82 percent african-american population .
so they , too , could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided .
then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses , so that it could be used for storm water management , for example , by using surface lakes and retention ponds , that created neighborhood amenities , places of recreation , and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels .
or we could use it as research plots , where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils , or we could use it to generate energy .
so the descendants of the great migration could either become precision watchmakers at shinola , like willie h. , who was featured in one of their ads last year , or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like shinola .
the good news is , there is a future for the next generation of detroiters , both those there now and those that want to come .
so no thank you , mayor menino , who recently was quoted as saying , " i 'd blow up the place and start over . "
there are very important people , business and land assets in detroit , and there are real opportunities there .
so while detroit might not be what it was , detroit will not die .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to talk today about what i think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon , which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it .
my own interest in this subject , and my passion for it , began rather accidentally .
i had bought a copy of this book , " the universe and dr. einstein " - a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in seattle .
a few years after that , in bangalore , i was finding it hard to fall asleep one night , and i picked up this book , thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes .
and as it happened , i read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot .
and i was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do .
and that feeling has n't left me yet .
that feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career - from being a software engineer to become a science writer - so that i could partake in the joy of science , and also the joy of communicating it to others .
and that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts , to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes , detectors , instruments that people are building , or have built , in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail .
so it took me from places like chile - the atacama desert in chile - to siberia , to underground mines in the japanese alps , in northern america , all the way to antarctica and even to the south pole .
and today i would like to share with you some images , some stories of these trips .
i have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting , literally at times , their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe .
and i first begin with a pie chart - and i promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation - but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos .
all the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter - the stuff that we 're all made of - and that 's four percent of the universe .
astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe , which makes up 23 percent of the universe , and something called dark energy , which permeates the fabric of space-time , that makes up another 73 percent .
so if you look at this pie chart , 96 percent of the universe , at this point in our exploration of it , is unknown or not well understood .
and most of the experiments , telescopes that i went to see are in some way addressing this question , these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy .
i will take you first to an underground mine in northern minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter .
and the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors .
and the reason why they have to go underground is that , if you did this experiment on the surface of the earth , the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays , ambient radio activity , even our own bodies . you might not believe it , but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment .
so they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector .
and i went to see one of these experiments , and this is actually - you can barely see it , and the reason for that is it 's entirely dark in there - this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960 .
and physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s .
and the miners in the early part of the last century worked , literally , in candlelight .
and today , you would see this inside the mine , half a mile underground .
this is one of the largest underground labs in the world .
and , among other things , they 're looking for dark matter .
there is another way to search for dark matter , which is indirectly .
if dark matter exists in our universe , in our galaxy , then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about - one of them being neutrinos .
and neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules .
when a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light , a flash of blue light , and by looking for this blue light , you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then , indirectly , something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino .
but you need very , very large volumes of water in order to do this .
you need something like tens of megatons of water - almost a gigaton of water - in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino .
and where in the world would you find such water ?
well the russians have a tank in their own backyard .
this is lake baikal .
it is the largest lake in the world . it 's 800 km long .
it 's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places , and one to two kilometers deep .
and what the russians are doing is they 're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light .
and this is the scene that greeted me when i landed there .
this is lake baikal in the peak of the siberian winter .
the lake is entirely frozen .
and the line of black dots that you see in the background , that 's the ice camp where the physicists are working .
the reason why they have to work in winter is because they do n't have the money to work in summer and spring , which , if they did that , they would need ships and submersibles to do their work .
so they wait until winter - the lake is completely frozen over - and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work .
so this is the russians working on the ice in the peak of the siberian winter .
they have to drill holes in the ice , dive down into the water - cold , cold water - to get hold of the instrument , bring it up , do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do , put it back and get out before the ice melts .
because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it 's full of cracks .
and you have to imagine , there 's an entire sea-like lake underneath , moving .
i still do n't understand this one russian man working in his bare chest , but that tells you how hard he was working .
and these people , a handful of people , have been working for 20 years , looking for particles that may or may not exist .
and they have dedicated their lives to it .
and just to give you an idea , they have spent 20 million over 20 years .
it 's very harsh conditions .
they work on a shoestring budget .
the toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack .
and it 's that basic , but they do this every year .
from siberia to the atacama desert in chile , to see something called the very large telescope .
the very large telescope is one of these things that astronomers do - they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively .
i can tell you for a fact , that the next one that they 're planning is called the extremely large telescope .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you would n't believe it , but the one after that is going to be called the overwhelmingly large telescope .
but nonetheless , it 's an extraordinary piece of engineering .
these are four 8.2 meter telescopes .
and these telescopes , among other things , they 're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time .
and the more you understand that , the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about .
and one piece of engineering that i want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror .
each mirror , there are four of them , is made of a single piece of glass , a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic , that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is -lsb- to -rsb- imagine a city like paris , with all its buildings and the eiffel tower , if you grind down paris to that kind of accuracy , you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high .
and that 's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured .
an extraordinary set of telescopes .
here 's another view of the same .
the reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the atacama desert is because of the high altitude desert .
the dry air is really good for telescopes , and also , the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies .
finally , i want to take you to antarctica .
i want to spend most of my time on this part of the world .
this is cosmology 's final frontier .
some of the most amazing experiments , some of the most extreme experiments , are being done in antarctica .
i was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight , which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere , the upper stratosphere , 40 km up .
and that 's where they do their experiments , and then the balloon , the payload , is brought down .
so this is us landing on the ross ice shelf in antarctica .
that 's an american c-17 cargo plane that flew us from new zealand to mcmurdo in antarctica .
and here we are about to board our bus .
and i do n't know if you can read the lettering , but it says , " ivan the terribus . "
and that 's taking us to mcmurdo .
and this is the scene that greets you in mcmurdo .
and you barely might be able to make out this hut here .
this hut was built by robert falcon scott and his men when they first came to antarctica on their first expedition to go to the south pole .
because it 's so cold , the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it , with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there .
it 's an extraordinary place .
this is mcmurdo itself . about a thousand people work here in summer , and about 200 in winter when it 's completely dark for six months .
i was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument .
this is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km .
what i want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight .
so you 're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km .
and the engineers , the technicians , the physicists have all got to assemble on the ross ice shelf , because antarctica - i wo n't go into the reasons why - but it 's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches , except for the weather .
the weather , as you can imagine , this is summer , and you 're standing on 200 ft of ice .
and there 's a volcano behind , which has glaciers at the very top .
and what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon - the fabric , parachute and everything - on the ice and then fill it up with helium .
and that process takes about two hours .
and the weather can change as they 're putting together this whole assembly .
for instance , here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind , which is eventually going to be filled up with helium .
those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium .
now , in case the weather changes before the launch , they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to mcmurdo station .
and this particular balloon , because it has to launch two tons of weight , is an extremely huge balloon .
the fabric alone weighs two tons .
in order to minimize the weight , it 's very thin , it 's as thin as a sandwich wrapper .
and if they have to pack it back , they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again - except , when they did it first , it would have been done in texas .
here , they ca n't do it with the kind shoes they 're wearing , so they have to take their shoes off , get barefoot into the boxes , in this cold , and do that kind of work .
that 's the kind of dedication these people have .
here 's the balloon being filled up with helium , and you can see it 's a gorgeous sight .
here 's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end .
so the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side , and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there 's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute , and then the parachute is then connected to the payload .
and remember , all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold , in sub-zero temperatures .
they 're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff , but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that .
and i would like to share with you a launch .
-lrb- video -rrb- radio : okay , release the balloon , release the balloon , release the balloon .
anil ananthaswamy : and i 'll finally like to leave you with two images .
this is an observatory in the himalayas , in ladakh in india .
and the thing i want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side .
and on the far left there is a 400 year-old buddhist monastery .
this is a close-up of the buddhist monastery .
and i was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has .
one is exploring the cosmos on the outside , and the other one is exploring our interior being .
and both require silence of some sort .
and what struck me was every place that i went to to see these telescopes , the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence , whether it 's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever .
and it was very obvious that , if we destroy these silent places on earth , we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards , because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mountain biking in israel is something that i do with great passion and commitment .
and when i 'm on my bike , i feel that i connect with the profound beauty of israel , and i feel that i 'm united with this country 's history and biblical law .
and also , for me , biking is a matter of empowerment .
when i reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere , i feel young , invincible , eternal .
it 's as if i 'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself .
you can see my fellow riders at the end of the picture , looking at me with some concern .
and here is another picture of them .
unfortunately , i can not show their faces , neither can i disclose their true names , and that 's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates , offenders spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes ' ride from here - well , like everything in israel .
and i 've been riding with these kids once a week , every tuesday , rain or shine , for the last four years and by now , they 've become a very big part of my life .
this story began four years ago .
the correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips , and it 's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards .
so on one of these rides , i talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden .
i told the warden that i wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically i wanted to take the kids from here to there .
and i told him , " let 's find a way in which i 'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country . "
and the warden was quite amused , and he told me he thought that i was a nut and he told me , " this place is a correction facility . these guys are serious offenders .
they are supposed to be locked up .
they are n't supposed to be out at large . "
and yet , we began to talk about it , and one thing led to another .
and i ca n't see myself going into a state prison in new jersey and making such a proposition , but this being israel , the warden somehow made it happen .
and so two months later , we found ourselves " at large " - myself , 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named russ , who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project .
and in the next few weeks , i had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom , a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these - everything you see here is obviously in israel - as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes , colors , shapes , forms and so on .
in spite of all this splendor , the beginning was extremely frustrating .
every small obstacle , every slight uphill , would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up .
so we had a lot of this going on .
i found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties - not because they were physically unfit .
but that 's one reason why they ended up where they were .
and i became increasingly more and more agitated , because i was there not only to be with them , but also to ride and create a team and i did n't know what to do .
now , let me give you an example .
we 're going downhill in some rocky terrain , and the front tire of alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here .
so he crashes down , and he gets slightly injured , but this does not prevent him from jumping up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently .
then he throws his helmet in the air .
his backpack goes ballistic in some other direction .
and then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like i 've never heard .
and i 'm just standing there , watching this scene with a complete disbelief , not knowing what to do .
i 'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students , and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging , violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere .
and you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations .
they happened in places like this , in the judean desert , 20 kilometers away from the nearest road .
and what you do n't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there , there 's a teenager sitting on a rock , saying , " i 'm not moving from here . forget it .
i 've had it . "
well , that 's a problem because one way or another , you have to get this guy moving because it 's getting dark soon and dangerous .
it took me several such incidents to figure out what i was supposed to do .
at the beginning , it was a disaster .
i tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere .
that 's what they had all their lives .
and at some point i found out , when a kid like this gets into a fit , the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid , which is difficult , because what you really want to do is go away .
but that 's what he had all his life , people walking away from him .
so what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate .
so i would say , " alex , i know that it 's terribly difficult .
why do n't you rest for a few minutes and then we 'll go on . "
" go away you maniac-psychopath .
why would you bring us to this goddamn place ? "
and i would say , " relax , alex .
here 's a piece of chocolate . "
and alex would go , " arrrrggg ! "
because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry - and after the rides also .
and who is this guy , alex , to begin with ?
he 's a 17-year-old .
when he was eight , someone put him on a boat in odessa and sent him , shipped him to israel on his own .
and he ended up in south tel aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a -lsb- unclear -rsb- and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member .
and he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only , the slums and the state prison , where he spent the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there .
and so this kid was probably abused , abandoned , ignored , betrayed by almost every adult along the way .
so , for such a kid , when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and does n't walk away from him in any situation , irrespective of how he behaves , it 's a tremendous healing experience .
it 's an act of unconditional acceptance , something that he never had .
i want to say a few words about vision .
when i started this program four years ago , i had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs .
i had an image of lance armstrong in my mind .
and it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced , and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available .
it all of a sudden dawned on me , in this project , that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only : love .
love to the country , to the uphill and the downhill , to all the incredible creatures that surround us - the animals , the plants , the insects - love and respect to other fellow members in your team , in your biking team , and most importantly , love and respect to yourself , which is something that they badly miss .
together with the kids , i also went through a remarkable transformation .
now , i come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology .
i used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen .
and before i worked with the kids , anything that i did with them , or anything that i did with myself , was supposed to be perfect , ideal , optimal , but after working with them for some time , i discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision , and if the vision does n't work , well nothing happened .
all you have to do is play with it , change it a little bit , and come up with something that does help , that does work .
so right now , i feel more like these are my principles , and if you do n't like them , i have others .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and one of these principles is focus .
before each ride we sit together with the kids , and we give them one word to think about during the ride .
you have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen .
so these are words like " teamwork " or " endurance " or even complicated concepts like " resource allocation " or " perspective , " a word that they do n't understand .
you know , perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you .
i tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they can not take it anymore , it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows .
it literally propels you upwards .
that 's what perspective is all about .
or you can also look back in time and realize that you 've already conquered steeper mountains before .
and that 's how they develop self-esteem .
now , let me give you an example of how it works .
you stand with your bike at the beginning of february .
it 's very cold , and you 're standing in one of these rainy days , and it 's drizzling and cold and chilly , and you 're standing in , let 's say , yokneam .
and you look up at the sky through a hole in the clouds you see the monastery at the top of the muhraka - that 's where you 're supposed to climb now - and you say , " there 's no way that i could possibly get there . "
and yet , two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery , smeared with mud , blood and sweat .
and you look down at yokneam ; everything is so small and tiny .
and you say , " hey , alex . look at this parking lot where we started .
it 's that big .
i ca n't believe that i did it . "
and that 's the point when you start loving yourself .
and so we talked about these special words that we teach them .
and at the end of each ride , we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference , and these discussions can be extremely inspiring .
in one of them , one of the kids once said , " when we were riding on this ridge overlooking the dead sea - and he 's talking about this spot here - " i was reminded of the day when i left my village in ethiopia and went away together with my brother .
we walked 120 kilometers until we reached sudan .
this was the first place where we got some water and supplies . "
and he goes on saying , and everyone looks at him like a hero , probably for the first time in his life .
and he says - because i also have volunteers riding with me , adults , who are sitting there listening to him - and he says , " and this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in israel .
and only now , " he says , " i 'm beginning to understand where i am , and i actually like it . "
now i remember , when he said it , i felt goosebumps on my body , because he said it overlooking the moab mountains here in the background .
that 's where joshua descended and crossed the jordan and led the people of israel into the land of canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from africa .
and so , perspective and context and history play key roles in the way i plan my rides with the kids .
we visit kibbutzim that were established by holocaust survivors .
we explore ruins of palestinian villages , and we discuss how they became ruins .
and we go through numerous remnants of jewish settlements , nabatic settlements , canaanite settlements - three- , four , five-thousand years old .
and through this tapestry , which is the history of this country , the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education , and that is the understanding that life is complex , and there 's no black and white .
and by appreciating complexity , they become more tolerant , and tolerance leads to hope .
i ride with these kids once a week , every tuesday .
here 's a picture i took last tuesday - less than a week ago - and i ride with them tomorrow also .
in every one of these rides i always end up standing in one of these incredible locations , taking in this incredible landscape around me , and i feel blessed and fortunate that i 'm alive , and that i sense every fiber in my aching body .
and i feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago i had the courage to resign my tenured position at nyu and return to my home country where i can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from ethiopia and morocco and russia .
and i feel blessed and fortunate that every week , every tuesday - and actually every friday also - i can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in israel on the edge .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid .
i do n't know his name , but i do know his story .
he lives in a small village in southern somalia .
his village is near mogadishu .
drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation .
with nothing left for him there , he leaves for the big city , in this case , mogadishu , the capital of somalia .
when he arrives , there are no opportunities , no jobs , no way forward .
he ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of mogadishu .
maybe a year passes , nothing .
one day , he 's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch , then to dinner , to breakfast .
he meets this dynamic group of people , and they give him a break .
he 's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes , money to send back home to his family .
he is introduced to this young woman .
he eventually gets married .
he starts this new life .
he has a purpose in life .
one beautiful day in mogadishu , under an azure blue sky , a car bomb goes off .
that small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber , and that dynamic group of people were al shabaab , a terrorist organization linked to al qaeda .
so how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up ?
he was waiting .
he was waiting for an opportunity , waiting to begin his future , waiting for a way forward , and this was the first thing that came along .
this was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood .
and his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world .
it is the story of the disenfranchised , unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in johannesburg , sparks riots in london , who reaches out for something other than waithood .
for young people , the promise of the city , the big city dream is that of opportunity , of jobs , of wealth , but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities .
often it 's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates .
by 2030 , three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 18 .
if we do not include young people in the growth of our cities , if we do not provide them opportunities , the story of waithood , the gateway to terrorism , to violence , to gangs , will be the story of cities 2.0 .
and in my city of birth , mogadishu , 70 percent of young people suffer from unemployment .
70 percent do n't work , do n't go to school .
they pretty much do nothing .
i went back to mogadishu last month , and i went to visit madina hospital , the hospital i was born in .
i remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking , what if i had never left ?
what if i had been forced into that same state of waithood ?
would i have become a terrorist ?
i 'm not really sure about the answer .
my reason for being in mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit .
i brought together about 90 young somali leaders .
we sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city .
one of the young men in the room was aden .
he went to university in mogadishu , graduated .
there were no jobs , no opportunities .
i remember him telling me , because he was a college graduate , unemployed , frustrated , that he was the perfect target for al shabaab and other terrorist organizations , to be recruited .
they sought people like him out .
but his story takes a different route .
in mogadishu , the biggest barrier to getting from point a to point b are the roads .
twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system , and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around .
aden saw an opportunity and seized it .
he started a motorbike company .
he began renting out motorbikes to local residents who could n't normally afford them .
he bought 10 bikes , with the help of family and friends , and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years .
how is this story different ?
what makes his story different ?
i believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity .
it 's entrepreneurship , and i believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood .
it empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking .
and you can train young people to be entrepreneurs .
i want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings , mohamed mohamoud , a florist .
he was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship .
he 's actually the first florist mogadishu has seen in over 22 years , and until recently , until mohamed came along , if you wanted flowers at your wedding , you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad .
if you asked someone , " when was the last time you saw fresh flowers ? "
for many who grew up under civil war , the answer would be , " never . "
so mohamed saw an opportunity .
he started a landscaping and design floral company .
he created a farm right outside of mogadishu , and started growing tulips and lilies , which he said could survive the harsh mogadishu climate .
and he began delivering flowers to weddings , creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city , and he 's now working on creating mogadishu 's first public park in 22 years .
there 's no public park in mogadishu .
he wants to create a space where families , young people , can come together , and , as he says , smell the proverbial roses .
and he does n't grow roses because they use too much water , by the way .
so the first step is to inspire young people , and in that room , mohamed 's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room .
they had never really thought about starting up a business .
they 've thought about working for an ngo , working for the government , but his story , his innovation , really had a strong impact on them .
he forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity .
he empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs , that they could be change makers .
by the end of the day , they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city .
they came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems .
so inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step , but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality .
they need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses .
connect young people with the resources they need , provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation , and you will create catalysts for urban growth .
for me , entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business .
it 's about creating a social impact .
mohamed is not simply selling flowers .
i believe he is selling hope .
his peace park , and that 's what he calls it , when it 's created , will actually transform the way people see their city .
aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him .
he gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood .
these young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities .
so my suggestion is , turn youth into entrepreneurs , incubate and nurture their inherent innovation , and you will have more stories of flowers and peace parks than of car bombs and waithood .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- just a few minutes ago , i took this picture about 10 blocks from here .
this is the grand cafe here in oxford .
i took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in england in 1650 .
that 's its great claim to fame , and i wanted to show it to you , not because i want to give you the kind of starbucks tour of historic england , but rather because the english coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years , what we now call the enlightenment .
and the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the enlightenment , in part , because of what people were drinking there .
because , before the spread of coffee and tea through british culture , what people drank - both elite and mass folks drank - day-in and day-out , from dawn until dusk was alcohol .
alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice .
you would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch , a little gin - particularly around 1650 - and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day .
that was the healthy choice - right - because the water was n't safe to drink .
and so , effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse , you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day .
and you can imagine what that would be like , right , in your own life - and i know this is true of some of you - if you were drinking all day , and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life , you would have better ideas .
you would be sharper and more alert .
and so it 's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as england switched to tea and coffee .
but the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space .
it was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds , different fields of expertise , and share .
it was a space , as matt ridley talked about , where ideas could have sex .
this was their conjugal bed , in a sense - ideas would get together there .
and an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story .
i 've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years , because i 've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from .
what are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation , unusual levels of creativity ?
what 's the kind of environmental - what is the space of creativity ?
and what i 've done is i 've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse ; i 've looked at media environments , like the world wide web , that have been extraordinarily innovative ; i 've gone back to the history of the first cities ; i 've even gone to biological environments , like coral reefs and rainforests , that involve unusual levels of biological innovation ; and what i 've been looking for is shared patterns , kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments .
are there recurring patterns that we can learn from , that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives , or our own organizations , or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative ?
and i think i 've found a few .
but what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation .
we have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration .
we have the kind of the flash of insight , the stroke of insight , we have epiphanies , we have " eureka ! " moments , we have the lightbulb moments , right ?
all of these concepts , as kind of rhetorically florid as they are , share this basic assumption , which is that an idea is a single thing , it 's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment .
but in fact , what i would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level .
i mean , this is what is happening inside your brain .
an idea - a new idea - is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain .
it 's a new configuration that has never formed before .
and the question is : how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form ?
and it turns out that , in fact , the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain .
so the metaphor i 'd like the use i can take from a story of a great idea that 's quite recent - a lot more recent than the 1650s .
a wonderful guy named timothy prestero , who has a company called ... an organization called design that matters .
they decided to tackle this really pressing problem of , you know , the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world .
one of the things that 's very frustrating about this is that we know , by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context , if we can keep premature babies warm , basically - it 's very simple - we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments .
so , the technology is there .
these are standard in all the industrialized worlds .
the problem is , if you buy a $ 40,000 incubator , and you send it off to a mid-sized village in africa , it will work great for a year or two years , and then something will go wrong and it will break , and it will remain broken forever , because you do n't have a whole system of spare parts , and you do n't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $ 40,000 piece of equipment .
and so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries , and then it ends up being useless .
so what prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see : what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts ?
and what they noticed was they do n't have a lot of dvrs , they do n't have a lot of microwaves , but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road .
there 's a toyota forerunner on the street in all these places .
they seem to have the expertise to keep cars working .
so they started to think , " could we build a neonatal incubator that 's built entirely out of automobile parts ? "
and this is what they ended up coming with .
it 's called a " neonurture device . "
from the outside , it looks like a normal little thing you 'd find in a modern , western hospital .
in the inside , it 's all car parts .
it 's got a fan , it 's got headlights for warmth , it 's got door chimes for alarm - it runs off a car battery .
and so all you need is the spare parts from your toyota and the ability to fix a headlight , and you can repair this thing .
now , that 's a great idea , but what i 'd like to say is that , in fact , this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen .
we like to think our breakthrough ideas , you know , are like that $ 40,000 , brand new incubator , state-of-the-art technology , but more often than not , they 're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby .
we take ideas from other people , from people we 've learned from , from people we run into in the coffee shop , and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new .
that 's really where innovation happens .
and that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like , right .
i mean , this is one vision of it .
another is newton and the apple , when newton was at cambridge .
this is a statue from oxford .
you know , you 're sitting there thinking a deep thought , and the apple falls from the tree , and you have the theory of gravity .
in fact , the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this , right .
this is hogarth 's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern , but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then .
this is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together , where people were likely to have new , interesting , unpredictable collisions - people from different backgrounds .
so , if we 're trying to build organizations that are more innovative , we have to build spaces that - strangely enough - look a little bit more like this .
this is what your office should look like , is part of my message here .
and one of the problems with this is that people are actually - when you research this field - people are notoriously unreliable , when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas , or their history of their best ideas .
and a few years ago , a wonderful researcher named kevin dunbar decided to go around and basically do the big brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from .
he went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job .
so when they were sitting in front of the microscope , when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler , and all these things .
and he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas , where they happened .
and when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab , we have this image - you know , they 're pouring over the microscope , and they see something in the tissue sample .
and " oh , eureka , " they 've got the idea .
what happened actually when dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that , in fact , almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab , in front of the microscope .
they happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting , when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings , oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having , the error , the noise in the signal they were discovering .
and something about that environment - and i 've started calling it the " liquid network , " where you have lots of different ideas that are together , different backgrounds , different interests , jostling with each other , bouncing off each other - that environment is , in fact , the environment that leads to innovation .
the other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames .
so they want to tell the story of the " eureka ! " moment .
they want to say , " there i was , i was standing there and i had it all suddenly clear in my head . "
but in fact , if you go back and look at the historical record , it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods - i call this the " slow hunch . "
we 've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity , but in fact , a lot of great ideas linger on , sometimes for decades , in the back of people 's minds .
they have a feeling that there 's an interesting problem , but they do n't quite have the tools yet to discover them .
they spend all this time working on certain problems , but there 's another thing lingering there that they 're interested in , but they ca n't quite solve .
darwin is a great example of this .
darwin himself , in his autobiography , tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic " eureka ! " moment .
he 's in his study , it 's october of 1838 , and he 's reading malthus , actually , on population .
and all of a sudden , the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says , " ah , at last , i had a theory with which to work . "
that 's in his autobiography .
about a decade or two ago , a wonderful scholar named howard gruber went back and looked at darwin 's notebooks from this period .
and darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had , every little hunch .
and what gruber found was that darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany , reading malthus in october of 1838 .
there are passages where you can read it , and you think you 're reading from a darwin textbook , from the period before he has this epiphany .
and so what you realize is that darwin , in a sense , had the idea , he had the concept , but was unable of fully thinking it yet .
and that is actually how great ideas often happen ; they fade into view over long periods of time .
now the challenge for all of us is : how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life , right ?
it 's hard to go to your boss and say , " i have an excellent idea for our organization .
it will be useful in 2020 .
could you just give me some time to do that ? "
now a couple of companies - like google - they have innovation time off , 20 percent time , where , in a sense , those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization .
but that 's a key thing .
and the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people 's hunches ; that 's what often happens .
you have half of an idea , somebody else has the other half , and if you 're in the right environment , they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts .
so , in a sense , we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property , you know , building barricades , having secretive r & d labs , patenting everything that we have , so that those ideas will remain valuable , and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas , and the culture will be more innovative .
but i think there 's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time , if not more , valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them .
and i 'll leave you with this story , which i think captures a lot of these values , and it 's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways .
it 's october of 1957 , and sputnik has just launched , and we 're in laurel maryland , at the applied physics lab associated with johns hopkins university .
and it 's monday morning , and the news has just broken about this satellite that 's now orbiting the planet .
and of course , this is nerd heaven , right ?
there are all these physics geeks who are there thinking , " oh my gosh ! this is incredible . i ca n't believe this has happened . "
and two of them , two 20-something researchers at the apl are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues .
and these two guys are named guier and weiffenbach .
and they start talking , and one of them says , " hey , has anybody tried to listen for this thing ?
there 's this , you know , man-made satellite up there in outer space that 's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal .
we could probably hear it , if we tune in . "
and so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues , and everybody 's like , " no , i had n't thought of doing that .
that 's an interesting idea . "
and it turns out weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception , and he 's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office .
and so guier and weiffenbach go back to weiffenbach 's office , and they start kind of noodling around - hacking , as we might call it now .
and after a couple of hours , they actually start picking up the signal , because the soviets made sputnik very easy to track .
it was right at 20 mhz , so you could pick it up really easily , because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax , basically .
so they made it really easy to find it .
so these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal , and people start kind of coming into the office and saying , " wow , that 's pretty cool . can i hear ? wow , that 's great . "
and before long , they think , " well jeez , this is kind of historic .
we may be the first people in the united states to be listening to this .
we should record it . "
and so they bring in this big , clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep , bleeps .
and they start writing the kind of date stamp , time stamps for each little bleep that they record .
and they they start thinking , " well gosh , you know , we 're noticing small little frequency variations here .
we could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling , if we do a little basic math here using the doppler effect . "
and then they played around with it a little bit more , and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties .
and they said , " jeez , you know , we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it 's farthest away .
that 's pretty cool . "
and eventually , they get permission - this is all a little side project that had n't been officially part of their job description .
they get permission to use the new , you know , univac computer that takes up an entire room that they 'd just gotten at the apl .
they run some more of the numbers , and at the end of about three or four weeks , turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the earth , just from listening to this one little signal , over lunch one morning .
a couple weeks later their boss , frank mcclure , pulls them into the room and says , " hey , you guys , i have to ask you something about that project you were working on .
you 've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground .
could you go the other way ?
could you figure out an unknown location on the ground , if you knew the location of the satellite ? "
and they thought about it and they said , " well , i guess maybe you could . let 's run the numbers here . "
so they went back , and they thought about it .
and they came back and said , " actually , it 'll be easier . "
and he said , " oh , that 's great .
because see , i have these new nuclear submarines that i 'm building .
and it 's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of moscow , if you do n't know where the submarine is in the middle of the pacific ocean .
so we 're thinking , we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean .
could you work on that problem ? "
and that 's how gps was born .
30 years later , ronald reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform , left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it .
and now , i guarantee you certainly half of this room , if not more , has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space .
and i bet you one of you , if not more , has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last - -lrb- laughter -rrb- in the last day or last week , right ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that , i think , is a great case study , a great lesson in the power , the marvelous , kind of unplanned emergent , unpredictable power of open innovative systems .
when you build them right , they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of .
i mean , here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch , this little passion that had developed , then they thought they were fighting the cold war , and then it turns out they 're just helping somebody find a soy latte .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that is how innovation happens .
chance favors the connected mind .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide ?
and these are base stations .
and we also have more than five billion of these devices here .
these are cellular mobile phones .
and with these mobile phones , we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month .
this is a 6 with 14 zeroes - a very large number .
and wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water .
we use it everyday . we use it in our everyday lives now - in our private lives , in our business lives .
and we even have to be asked sometimes , very kindly , to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons .
and it 's this importance why i decided to look into the issues that this technology has , because it 's so fundamental to our lives .
and one of the issues is capacity .
the way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves - in particular , radio waves .
and radio waves are limited .
they are scarce ; they are expensive ; and we only have a certain range of it .
and it 's this limitation that does n't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month .
and we are simply running out of spectrum .
there 's another problem .
that is efficiency .
these 1.4 million cellular radio masts , or base stations , consume a lot of energy .
and mind you , most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves , it is used to cool the base stations .
then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent .
and that creates a big problem .
then there 's another issue that you 're all aware of .
you have to switch off your mobile phone during flights .
in hospitals , they are security issues .
and security is another issue .
these radio waves penetrate through walls .
they can be intercepted , and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions .
so these are the main four issues .
but on the other hand , we have 14 billion of these : light bulbs , light .
and light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum .
so let 's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum , where we have gamma rays .
you do n't want to get close to gamma rays , it could be dangerous .
x-rays , useful when you go to hospitals .
then there 's ultraviolet light .
it 's good for a nice suntan , but otherwise dangerous for the human body .
infrared - due to eye safety regulations , can be only used with low power .
and then we have the radio waves , they have the issues i 've just mentioned .
and in the middle there , we have this visible light spectrum .
it 's light , and light has been around for many millions of years .
and in fact , it has created us , has created life , has created all the stuff of life .
so it 's inherently safe to use .
and would n't it be great to use that for wireless communications ?
not only that , i compared -lsb- it to -rsb- the entire spectrum .
i compared the radio waves spectrum - the size of it - with the size of the visible light spectrum .
and guess what ?
we have 10,000 times more of that spectrum , which is there for us to use .
so not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum , let 's compare that with a number i 've just mentioned .
we have 1.4 million expensively deployed , and multiply that by 10,000 , then you end up at 14 billion .
14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already .
so we have the infrastructure there .
look at the ceiling , you see all these light bulbs .
go to the main floor , you see these light bulbs .
can we use them for communications ?
yes .
what do we need to do ?
the one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs , florescent lights , with this new technology of led , led light bulbs .
an led is a semiconductor . it 's an electronic device .
and it has a very nice acute property .
its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds , and it can be switched off at very high speeds .
and this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology .
so let 's show how we do that .
let 's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum - go to remote controls .
you all know remote controls have an infrared led - basically you switch on the led , and if it 's off , you switch it off .
and it creates a simple , low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second , 20,000 bits per second .
not usable for a youtube video .
what we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb .
we transmit with our technology , not only a single data stream , we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel , at even higher speeds .
and the technology we have developed - it 's called sim ofdm .
and it 's spacial modulation - these are the only technical terms , i 'm not going into details - but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data .
you will say , " okay , this is nice - a slide created in 10 minutes . "
but not only that .
what we 've done and i 'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator .
and what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp .
we fit in an led light bulb , worth three u.s. dollars , put in our signal processing technology .
and then what we have here is a little hole .
and the light goes through that hole .
there 's a receiver .
the receiver will convert these little , subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal .
and that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream .
in the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones .
and not only integrate a photo detector here , but maybe use the camera inside .
so what happens when i switch on that light ?
as you would expect , it 's a light , a desk lamp .
put your book beneath it and you can read .
it 's illuminating the space .
but at the same time , you see this video coming up here .
and that 's a video , a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam .
you 're critical .
you think , " ha , ha , ha .
this is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here . "
but let me do this .
-lrb- applause -rrb- once again .
still do n't believe ?
it is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream .
and if you look at the light , it is illuminating as you would expect .
you do n't notice with your human eye .
you do n't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude it 's serving the purpose of illumination , but at the same time , we are able to transmit this data .
and you see , even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver .
it can ignore that constant light , because all the receiver 's interested in are subtle changes .
you also have a critical question now , and you say , " okay , do i have to have the light on all the time to have this working ? "
and the answer is yes .
but , you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off .
and you are still able to transmit data - that 's possible .
so i 've mentioned to you the four challenges .
capacity : we have 10,000 times more spectrum , 10,000 times more leds installed already in the infrastructure there .
you would agree with me , hopefully , there 's no issue of capacity anymore .
efficiency : this is data through illumination - it 's first of all an illumination device .
and if you do the energy budget , the data transmission comes for free - highly energy efficient .
i do n't mention the high energy efficiency of these led light bulbs .
if the whole world would deploy them , you would save hundreds of power plants .
that 's aside .
and then i 've mentioned the availability .
you will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital .
you need to see what to do .
you have lights in an aircraft .
so it 's everywhere in a day there is light .
look around . everywhere . look at your smart phone .
it has a flashlight , an led flashlight .
these are potential sources for high-speed data transmission .
and then there 's security .
you would agree with me that light does n't penetrate through walls .
so no one , if i have a light here , if i have secure data , no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data .
and there 's only data where there is light .
so if i do n't want that receiver to receive the data , then what i could do , turn it away .
so the data goes in that direction , not there anymore .
now we can in fact see where the data is going to .
so for me , the applications of it , to me , are beyond imagination at the moment .
we have had a century of very nice , smart application developers .
and you only have to notice , where we have light , there is a potential way to transmit data .
but i can give you a few examples .
well you may see the impact already now .
this is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean .
and they use light to illuminate space down there .
and this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things -lsb- use -rsb- to communicate with each other .
intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant - you ca n't use rf , it may generate antenna sparks , but you can use light - you see plenty of light there .
in hospitals , for new medical instruments ; in streets for traffic control .
cars have led-based headlights , led-based back lights , and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on .
and then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world .
and every street lamp could be a free access point .
we call it , in fact , a li-fi , light-fidelity .
and then we have these aircraft cabins .
there are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin , and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data .
so you could enjoy your most favorite ted video on your long flight back home .
online life . so that is a vision , i think , that is possible .
so , all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device .
and this would then combine two basic functionalities : illumination and wireless data transmission .
and it 's this symbiosis that i personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days .
and in the future , you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs , you may have 14 billion li-fis deployed worldwide - for a cleaner , a greener , and even a brighter future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good morning everyone . first of all , it 's been fantastic being here over these past few days .
and secondly , i feel it 's a great honor to kind of wind up this extraordinary gathering of people , these amazing talks that we 've had .
i feel that i 've fitted in , in many ways , to some of the things that i 've heard .
i came directly here from the deep , deep tropical rainforest in ecuador , where i was out - you could only get there by a plane - with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses , where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies , and keep the roads , out of their forests .
they 're fighting to develop their own way of living within the forest in a world that 's clean , a world that is n't contaminated , a world that is n't polluted .
and what was so amazing to me , and what fits right in with what we 're all talking about here at ted , is that there , right in the middle of this rainforest , was some solar panels - the first in that part of ecuador - and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women would n't have to go down .
the water was cleaned , but because they got a lot of batteries , they were able to store a lot of electricity .
so every house - and there were , i think , eight houses in this little community - could have light for , i think it was about half an hour each evening .
and there is the chief , in all his regal finery , with a laptop computer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this man , he has been outside , but he 's gone back , and he was saying , " you know , we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era , and we did n't even know about the white man 50 years ago , and now here we are with laptop computers , and there are some things we want to learn from the modern world .
we want to know about health care .
we want to know about what other people do - we 're interested in it .
and we want to learn other languages .
we want to know english and french and perhaps chinese , and we 're good at languages . "
so there he is with his little laptop computer , but fighting against the might of the pressures - because of the debt , the foreign debt of ecuador - fighting the pressure of world bank , imf , and of course the people who want to exploit the forests and take out the oil .
and so , coming directly from there to here .
but , of course , my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization - i ca n't really call it a civilization .
a different way of life , a different being .
we 've talked earlier - this wonderful talk by wade davis about the different cultures of the humans around the world - but the world is not composed only of human beings ; there are also other animal beings .
and i propose to bring into this ted conference , as i always do around the world , the voice of the animal kingdom .
too often we just see a few slides , or a bit of film , but these beings have voices that mean something .
and so , i want to give you a greeting , as from a chimpanzee in the forests of tanzania - ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been studying chimpanzees in tanzania since 1960 .
during that time , there have been modern technologies that have really transformed the way that field biologists do their work .
for example , for the first time , a few years ago , by simply collecting little fecal samples we were able to have them analyzed - to have dna profiling done - so for the first time , we actually know which male chimps are the fathers of each individual infant .
because the chimps have a very promiscuous mating society .
so this opens up a whole new avenue of research .
and we use gsi - geographic whatever it is , gsi - to determine the range of the chimps .
and we 're using - you can see that i 'm not really into this kind of stuff - but we 're using satellite imagery to look at the deforestation in the area .
and of course , there 's developments in infrared , so you can watch animals at night , and equipment for recording by video , and tape recording is getting lighter and better .
so in many , many ways , we can do things today that we could n't do when i began in 1960 .
especially when chimpanzees , and other animals with large brains , are studied in captivity , modern technology is helping us to search for the upper levels of cognition in some of these non-human animals .
so that we know today , they 're capable of performances that would have been thought absolutely impossible by science when i began .
i think the chimpanzee in captivity who is the most skilled in intellectual performance is one called ai in japan - her name means love - and she has a wonderfully sensitive partner working with her .
she loves her computer - she 'll leave her big group , and her running water , and her trees and everything .
and she 'll come in to sit at this computer - it 's like a video game for a kid ; she 's hooked .
she 's 28 , by the way , and she does things with her computer screen and a touch pad that she can do faster than most humans .
she does very complex tasks , and i have n't got time to go into them , but the amazing thing about this female is she does n't like making mistakes .
if she has a bad run , and her score is n't good , she 'll come and reach up and tap on the glass - because she ca n't see the experimenter - which is asking to have another go .
and her concentration - she 's already concentrated hard for 20 minutes or so , and now she wants to do it all over again , just for the satisfaction of having done it better .
and the food is not important - she does get a tiny reward , like one raisin for a correct response - but she will do it for nothing , if you tell her beforehand .
so here we are , a chimpanzee using a computer .
chimpanzees , gorillas , orangutans also learn human sign language .
but the point is that when i was first in gombe in 1960 - i remember so well , so vividly , as though it was yesterday - the first time , when i was going through the vegetation , the chimpanzees were still running away from me , for the most part , although some were a little bit acclimatized - and i saw this dark shape , hunched over a termite mound , and i peered with my binoculars .
it was , fortunately , one adult male whom i 'd named david greybeard - and by the way , science at that time was telling me that i should n't name the chimps ; they should all have numbers ; that was more scientific .
anyway , david greybeard - and i saw that he was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest .
and not only that - he would sometimes pick a leafy twig and strip the leaves - modifying an object to make it suitable for a specific purpose - the beginning of tool-making .
the reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time , it was thought that humans , and only humans , used and made tools .
when i was at school , we were defined as man , the toolmaker .
so that when louis leakey , my mentor , heard this news , he said , " ah , we must now redefine ' man , ' redefine ' tool , ' or accept chimpanzees as humans . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we now know that at gombe alone , there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes .
moreover , we know that in different parts of africa , wherever chimps have been studied , there are completely different tool-using behaviors .
and because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next , through observation , imitation and practice - that is a definition of human culture .
what we find is that over these 40-odd years that i and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes , and , as i say , other mammals with complex brains and social systems , we have found that after all , there is n't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom .
it 's a very wuzzy line .
it 's getting wuzzier all the time as we find animals doing things that we , in our arrogance , used to think was just human .
the chimps - there 's no time to discuss their fascinating lives - but they have this long childhood , five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother , and then another three , four or five years of emotional dependence on her , even when the next child is born .
the importance of learning in that time , when behavior is flexible - and there 's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society .
the long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother , with the brothers and sisters , and which can last through a lifetime , which may be up to 60 years .
they can actually live longer than 60 in captivity , so we 've only done 40 years in the wild so far .
and we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism .
we find in their non-verbal communication - this is very rich - they have a lot of sounds , which they use in different circumstances , but they also use touch , posture , gesture , and what do they do ?
they kiss ; they embrace ; they hold hands .
they pat one another on the back ; they swagger ; they shake their fist - the kind of things that we do , and they do them in the same kind of context .
they have very sophisticated cooperation .
sometimes they hunt - not that often , but when they hunt , they show sophisticated cooperation , and they share the prey .
we find that they show emotions , similar to - maybe sometimes the same - as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness , sadness , fear , despair .
they know mental as well as physical suffering .
and i do n't have time to go into the information that will prove some of these things to you , save to say that there are very bright students , in the best universities , studying emotions in animals , studying personalities in animals .
we know that chimpanzees and some other creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors - " self " as opposed to " other . "
they have a sense of humor , and these are the kind of things which traditionally have been thought of as human prerogatives .
but this teaches us a new respect - and it 's a new respect not only for the chimpanzees , i suggest , but some of the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet .
once we 're prepared to admit that after all , we 're not the only beings with personalities , minds and above all feelings , and then we start to think about ways we use and abuse so many other sentient , sapient creatures on this planet , it really gives cause for deep shame , at least for me .
so , the sad thing is that these chimpanzees - who 've perhaps taught us , more than any other creature , a little humility - are in the wild , disappearing very fast .
they 're disappearing for the reasons that all of you in this room know only too well .
the deforestation , the growth of human populations , needing more land .
they 're disappearing because some timber companies go in with clear-cutting .
they 're disappearing in the heart of their range in africa because the big multinational logging companies have come in and made roads - as they want to do in ecuador and other parts where the forests remain untouched - to take out oil or timber .
and this has led in congo basin , and other parts of the world , to what is known as the bush-meat trade .
this means that although for hundreds , perhaps thousands of years , people have lived in those forests , or whatever habitat it is , in harmony with their world , just killing the animals they need for themselves and their families - now , suddenly , because of the roads , the hunters can go in from the towns .
they shoot everything , every single thing that moves that 's bigger than a small rat ; they sun-dry it or smoke it .
and now they 've got transport ; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it .
and people will pay more for bush-meat , as it 's called , than for domestic meat - it 's culturally preferred .
and it 's not sustainable , and the huge logging camps in the forest are now demanding meat , so the pygmy hunters in the congo basin who 've lived there with their wonderful way of living for so many hundreds of years are now corrupted .
they 're given weapons ; they shoot for the logging camps ; they get money .
their culture is being destroyed , along with the animals upon whom they depend .
so , when the logging camp moves , there 's nothing left .
we talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity , and i 've seen it happening with my own eyes .
and the grim picture in africa - i love africa , and what do we see in africa ?
we see deforestation ; we see the desert spreading ; we see massive hunger ; we see disease and we see population growth in areas where there are more people living on a certain piece of land than the land can possibly support , and they 're too poor to buy food from elsewhere .
were the people that we heard about yesterday , on the easter island , who cut down their last tree - were they stupid ?
did n't they know what was happening ?
of course , but if you 've seen the crippling poverty in some of these parts of the world it is n't a question of " let 's leave the tree for tomorrow . "
" how am i going to feed my family today ?
maybe i can get just a few dollars from this last tree which will keep us going a little bit longer , and then we 'll pray that something will happen to save us from the inevitable end . "
so , this is a pretty grim picture .
the one thing we have , which makes us so different from chimpanzees or other living creatures , is this sophisticated spoken language - a language with which we can tell children about things that are n't here .
we can talk about the distant past , plan for the distant future , discuss ideas with each other , so that the ideas can grow from the accumulated wisdom of a group .
we can do it by talking to each other ; we can do it through video ; we can do it through the written word .
and we are abusing this great power we have to be wise stewards , and we 're destroying the world .
in the developed world , in a way , it 's worse , because we have so much access to knowledge of the stupidity of what we 're doing .
do you know , we 're bringing little babies into a world where , in many places , the water is poisoning them ?
and the air is harming them , and the food that 's grown from the contaminated land is poisoning them .
and that 's not just in the far-away developing world ; that 's everywhere .
do you know we all have about 50 chemicals in our bodies we did n't have about 50 years ago ?
and so many of these diseases , like asthma and certain kinds of cancers , are on the increase around places where our filthy toxic waste is dumped .
we 're harming ourselves around the world , as well as harming the animals , as well as harming nature herself - mother nature , that brought us into being ; mother nature , where i believe we need to spend time , where there 's trees and flowers and birds for our good psychological development .
and yet , there are hundreds and hundreds of children in the developed world who never see nature , because they 're growing up in concrete and all they know is virtual reality , with no opportunity to go and lie in the sun , or in the forest , with the dappled sun-specks coming down from the canopy above .
as i was traveling around the world , you know , i had to leave the forest - that 's where i love to be .
i had to leave these fascinating chimpanzees for my students and field staff to continue studying because , finding they dwindled from about two million 100 years ago to about 150,000 now , i knew i had to leave the forest to do what i could to raise awareness around the world .
and the more i talked about the chimpanzees ' plight , the more i realized the fact that everything 's interconnected , and the problems of the developing world so often stem from the greed of the developed world , and everything was joining together , and making - not sense , hope lies in sense , you said - it 's making a nonsense .
how can we do it ?
somebody said that yesterday .
and as i was traveling around , i kept meeting young people who 'd lost hope .
they were feeling despair , they were feeling , " well , it does n't matter what we do ; eat , drink and be merry , for tomorrow we die .
everything is hopeless - we 're always being told so by the media . "
and then i met some who were angry , and anger that can turn to violence , and we 're all familiar with that .
and i have three little grandchildren , and when some of these students would say to me at high school or university , they 'd say , " we 're angry , " or " we 're filled with despair , because we feel you 've compromised our future , and there 's nothing we can do about it . "
and i looked in the eyes of my little grandchildren , and think how much we 've harmed this planet since i was their age .
i feel this deep shame , and that 's why in 1991 in tanzania , i started a program that 's called roots and shoots .
there 's little brochures all around outside , and if any of you have anything to do with children and care about their future , i beg that you pick up that brochure .
and roots and shoots is a program for hope .
roots make a firm foundation .
shoots seem tiny , but to reach the sun they can break through brick walls .
see the brick walls as all the problems that we 've inflicted on this planet .
then , you see , it is a message of hope .
hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through , and can make this a better world .
and the most important message of roots and shoots is that every single individual makes a difference .
every individual has a role to play .
every one of us impacts the world around us everyday , and you scientists know that you ca n't actually - even if you stay in bed all day , you 're breathing oxygen and giving out co2 , and probably going to the loo , and things like that - you 're making a difference in the world .
so , the roots and shoots program involves youth in three kinds of projects .
and these are projects to make the world around them a better place .
one project to show care and concern for your own human community .
one for animals , including domestic animals - and i have to say , i learned everything i know about animal behavior even before i got to gombe and the chimps from my dog , rusty , who was my childhood companion .
and the third kind of project : something for the local environment .
so what the kids do depends first of all , how old are they - and we go now from pre-school right through university .
it 's going to depend whether they 're inner-city or rural .
it 's going to depend if they 're wealthy or impoverished .
it 's going to depend which part , say , of america they 're in .
we 're in every state now , and the problems in florida are different from the problems in new york .
it 's going to depend on which country they 're in - and we 're already in 60-plus countries , with about 5,000 active groups - and there are groups all over the place that i keep hearing about that i 've never even heard of , because the kids are taking the program and spreading it themselves .
why ?
because they 're buying into it , and they 're the ones who get to decide what they 're going to do .
it is n't something that their parents tell them , or their teachers tell them .
that 's effective , but if they decide themselves , " we want to clean this river and put the fish back that used to be there .
we want to clear away the toxic soil from this area and have an organic garden .
we want to go and spend time with the old people and hear their stories and record their oral histories .
we want to go and work in a dog shelter .
we want to learn about animals . we want ... " you know , it goes on and on , and this is very hopeful for me .
as i travel around the world 300 days a year , everywhere there 's a group of roots and shoots of different ages .
everywhere there are children with shining eyes saying , " look at the difference we 've made . "
and now comes the technology into it , because with this new way of communicating electronically these kids can communicate with each other around the world .
and if anyone is interested to help us , we 've got so many ideas but we need help - we need help to create the right kind of system that will help these young people to communicate their excitement .
but also - and this is so important - to communicate their despair , to say , " we 've tried this and it does n't work , and what shall we do ? "
and then , lo and behold , there 's another group answering these kids who may be in america , or maybe this is a group in israel , saying , " yeah , you did it a little bit wrong . this is how you should do it . "
the philosophy is very simple .
we do not believe in violence .
no violence , no bombs , no guns .
that 's not the way to solve problems .
violence leads to violence , at least in my view .
so how do we solve ?
the tools for solving the problems are knowledge and understanding .
know the facts , but see how they fit in the big picture .
hard work and persistence - do n't give up - and love and compassion leading to respect for all life .
how many more minutes ? two , one ?
chris anderson : one - one to two .
jane goodall : two , two , i 'm going to take two .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- are you going to come and drag me off ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway - so basically , roots and shoots is beginning to change young people 's lives .
it 's what i 'm devoting most of my energy to .
and i believe that a group like this can have a very major impact , not just because you can share technology with us , but because so many of you have children .
and if you take this program out , and give it to your children , they have such a good opportunity to go out and do good , because they 've got parents like you .
and it 's been so clear how much you all care about trying to make this world a better place .
it 's very encouraging .
but the kids do ask me - and this wo n't take more than two minutes , i promise - the kids say , " dr. jane , do you really have hope for the future ?
you travel , you see all these horrible things happening . "
firstly , the human brain - i do n't need to say anything about that .
now that we know what the problems are around the world , human brains like yours are rising to solve those problems .
and we 've talked a lot about that .
secondly , the resilience of nature .
we can destroy a river , and we can bring it back to life .
we can see a whole area desolated , and it can be brought back to bloom again , with time or a little help .
and thirdly , the last speaker talked about - or the speaker before last , talked about the indomitable human spirit .
we are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible .
nelson mandela - i take a little piece of limestone from robben island prison , where he labored for 27 years , and came out with so little bitterness , he could lead his people from the horror of apartheid without a bloodbath .
even after the 11th of september - and i was in new york and i felt the fear - nevertheless , there was so much human courage , so much love and so much compassion .
and then as i went around the country after that and felt the fear - the fear that was leading to people feeling they could n't worry about the environment any more , in case they seemed not to be patriotic - and i was trying to encourage them , somebody came up with a little quotation from mahatma gandhi , " if you look back through human history , you see that every evil regime has been overcome by good . "
and just after that a woman brought me this little bell , and i want to end on this note .
she said , " if you 're talking about hope and peace , ring this .
this bell is made from metal from a defused landmine , from the killing fields of pol pot - one of the most evil regimes in human history - where people are now beginning to put their lives back together after the regime has crumbled .
so , yes , there is hope , and where is the hope ?
is it out there with the politicians ?
it 's in our hands .
it 's in your hands and my hands and those of our children .
it 's really up to us .
we 're the ones who can make a difference .
if we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints , if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and do n't buy the things that are not , we can change the world overnight .
thank you .
so i am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at stanford university where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation .
now , inspired by jill bolte taylor last year , i did n't bring a human brain , but i did bring a liter of bone marrow .
and bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients , most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases .
so , a few years ago , i 'm doing my transplant fellowship at stanford .
i 'm in the operating room . we have bob here , who is a volunteer donor .
we 're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia .
so actually how do we harvest this bone marrow ?
well we have a whole o.r. team , general anesthesia , nurses , and another doctor across from me .
bob 's on the table , and we take this sort of small needle , you know , not too big .
and the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue , and kind of punch it into the hard bone , into the tuchus - that 's a technical term - and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out , each time , with a syringe .
and hand it off to the nurse . she squirts it into a tin .
hands it back to me . and we do that again and again .
about 200 times usually .
and by the end of this my arm is sore , i 've got a callus on my hand , let alone bob , whose rear end looks something more like this , like swiss cheese .
so i 'm thinking , you know , this procedure has n't changed in about 40 years .
and there is probably a better way to do this .
so i thought of a minimally invasive approach , and a new device that we call the marrow miner .
this is it .
and the marrow miner , the way it works is shown here .
our standard see-through patient .
instead of entering the bone dozens of times , we enter just once , into the front of the hip or the back of the hip .
and we have a flexible , powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip , as it moves around .
so it enables you to very rapidly aspirate , or suck out , rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole .
we can do multiple passes through that same entry .
no robots required .
and , so , very quickly , bob can just get one puncture , local anesthesia , and do this harvest as an outpatient .
so i did a few prototypes . i got a small little grant at stanford .
and played around with this a little bit .
and our team members developed this technology .
and eventually we got two large animals , and pig studies .
and we found , to our surprise , that we not only got bone marrow out , but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the marrow miner , compared to the normal device .
this device was just fda approved in the last year .
here is a live patient . you can see it following the flexible curves around .
there will be two passes here , in the same patient , from the same hole .
this was done under local anesthesia , as an outpatient .
and we got , again , about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient .
so why should you care ? bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells .
you all know about embryonic stem cells .
they 've got great potential but have n't yet entered clinical trials .
adult stem cells are throughout our body , including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow , which we 've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years .
in the last decade there 's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient 's other diseases such as heart disease , vascular disease , orthopedics , tissue engineering , even in neurology to treat parkinson 's and diabetes .
we 've just come out , we 're commercializing , this year , generation 2.0 of the marrow miner .
the hope is that this gets more stem cells out , which translates to better outcomes .
it may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live-saving bone marrow donors .
it may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells , when you 're younger and healthier , to use in the future should you need it .
and ultimately - and here 's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors , who come together for a reunion each year at stanford .
hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good morning . so magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve , to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow .
as a cyber-magician , i combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced .
you 've probably all heard of google 's project glass .
it 's new technology . you look through them and the world you see is augmented with data : names of places , monuments , buildings , maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street .
so these are my illusion glasses .
they 're a little bigger . they 're a prototype .
and when you look through them , you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist .
let me show you what i mean .
all we need is a playing card . any card will do .
like this . and let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again .
all right . very significant mark .
and let 's put it back into the deck , somewhere in the middle , and let 's get started .
-lrb- music -rrb- voice : system ready . acquiring image .
marco tempest : for those of you who do n't play cards , a deck of cards is made up of four different suits : hearts , clubs , diamonds and spades .
the cards are amongst the oldest of symbols , and have been interpreted in many different ways .
now , some say that the four suits represent the four seasons .
winter is like magic . it 's a time of change , when warmth turns to cold , water turns to snow , and then it all disappears .
there are 13 cards in each suit . -lrb- music -rrb- voice : each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles .
mt : so over here is low tide , and over here is high tide , and in the middle is the moon .
voice : the moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic .
mt : there are two colors in a deck of cards .
there is the color red and the color black , representing the constant change from day to night .
voice : marco , i did not know you could do that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- mt : and is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards , just as there are 52 weeks in a year ?
-lrb- music -rrb- voice : if you total all the spots on a deck of cards , the result is 365 .
mt : oh , 365 , the number of days in a year , the number of days between each birthday .
make a wish . -lrb- blowing noise -rrb- voice : do n't tell , or it wo n't come true .
mt : well , as a matter of fact , it was on my sixth birthday that i received my first deck of cards , and ever since that day , i have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls , men and women , husbands and wives , even kings and queens . -lrb- applause -rrb- voice : and who are these ? mt : ah , mischief-makers . watch .
wake up .
joker : whoa.mt : are you ready for your party piece ?
joker : ready ! mt : let me see what you 've got .
joker : presenting my pogo stick.mt : ah . watch out .
joker : whoa , whoa , whoa , oh ! -lrb- music -rrb- mt : but today , i am performing for a different kind of audience .
i 'm performing for you .
voice : signed card detected.mt : well , sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician ? is it a 9-to-5 job ?
of course not ! you 've got to practice 24/7 .
i do n't literally mean 24 hours , seven days a week .
24/7 is a little bit of an exaggeration , but it does take practice . now , some people will say , well , magic , that must be the work of some evil supernatural force . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- whoa .
well , to this , i just say , no no .
actually , in german , it 's nein nein . -lrb- laughter -rrb- magic is n't that intense . i have to warn you , though , if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this , do n't play for money .
-lrb- music -rrb- voice : why not ? that 's a very good hand .
the odds of getting it are 4,165 to one .
mt : yeah , but i guess my hand is better . we beat the odds .
voice : i think you got your birthday wish.mt : and that actually leaves me with the last , and most important card of all : the one with this very significant mark on it .
and unlike anything else we 've just seen , virtual or not.voice : signed card detected .
digital mt : this is without a question the real thing .
mt : bye bye . -lrb- music -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- to most of you , this is a device to buy , sell , play games , watch videos .
i think it might be a lifeline .
i think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin .
texting : i know i say texting and a lot of you think sexting , a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see - hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else - or trying to translate the abbreviations lol , lmao , hmu .
i can help you with those later .
but the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids .
it might be the only way to communicate with your kids .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month , unless she 's a girl , then it 's closer to 4,000 .
and the secret is she opens every single one .
texting has a 100 percent open rate .
now the parents are really alarmed .
it 's a 100 percent open rate even if she does n't respond to you when you ask her when she 's coming home for dinner .
i promise she read that text .
and this is n't some suburban iphone-using teen phenomenon .
texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth .
i know this because at dosomething.org , which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in america , about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging .
we 're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that .
we 're finding it 11 times more powerful than email .
we 've also found an unintended consequence .
we 've been getting text messages back like these .
" i do n't want to go to school today .
the boys call me faggot . "
" i was cutting , my parents found out , and so i stopped .
but i just started again an hour ago . "
or , " he wo n't stop raping me .
he told me not to tell anyone .
it 's my dad . are you there ? "
that last one 's an actual text message that we received .
and yeah , we 're there .
i will not forget the day we got that text message .
and so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline .
because this is n't what we do .
we do social change .
kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there 's nowhere else to turn that they 're sending them to us .
so think about it , a text hotline ; it 's pretty powerful .
it 's fast , it 's pretty private .
no one hears you in a stall , you 're just texting quietly .
it 's real time .
we can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals .
that 's great .
but the thing that really makes this awesome is the data .
because i 'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals .
i want to prevent this shit from happening .
so think about a cop .
there 's something in new york city .
the police did it . it used to be just guess work , police work .
and then they started crime mapping .
and so they started following and watching petty thefts , summonses , all kinds of things - charting the future essentially .
and they found things like , when you see crystal meth on the street , if you add police presence , you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen .
in fact , the year after the nypd put compstat in place , the murder rate fell 60 percent .
so think about the data from a crisis text line .
there is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape - no census .
maybe there 's some studies , some longitudinal studies , that cost lots of money and took lots of time .
or maybe there 's some anecdotal evidence .
imagine having real time data on every one of those issues .
you could inform legislation .
you could inform school policy .
you could say to a principal , " you 're having a problem every thursday at three o 'clock .
what 's going on in your school ? "
you could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result .
this is really , to me , the power of texting and the power of data .
because while people are talking about data , making it possible for facebook to mine my friend from the third grade , or target to know when it 's time for me to buy more diapers , or some dude to build a better baseball team , i 'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school , to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father 's raping her .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , when i was in art school , i developed a shake in my hand , and this was the straightest line i could draw .
now in hindsight , it was actually good for some things , like mixing a can of paint or shaking a polaroid , but at the time this was really doomsday .
this was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist .
the shake developed out of , really , a single-minded pursuit of pointillism , just years of making tiny , tiny dots .
and eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles , because of the shake .
so to compensate , i 'd hold the pen tighter , and this progressively made the shake worse , so i 'd hold the pen tighter still .
and this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues , i had trouble holding anything .
and after spending all my life wanting to do art , i left art school , and then i left art completely .
but after a few years , i just could n't stay away from art , and i decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered i had permanent nerve damage .
and he actually took one look at my squiggly line , and said , " well , why do n't you just embrace the shake ? "
so i did . i went home , i grabbed a pencil , and i just started letting my hand shake and shake .
i was making all these scribble pictures .
and even though it was n't the kind of art that i was ultimately passionate about , it felt great .
and more importantly , once i embraced the shake , i realized i could still make art .
i just had to find a different approach to making the art that i wanted .
now , i still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism , seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole .
so i began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake would n't affect the work , like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas , or , in a 3d structure consisting of two-by-fours , creating a 2d image by burning it with a blowtorch .
i discovered that , if i worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials , my hand really would n't hurt , and after having gone from a single approach to art , i ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons .
this was the first time i 'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity .
at the time , i was finishing up school , and i was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies .
i had this horrible little set of tools , and i felt like i could do so much more with the supplies i thought an artist was supposed to have .
i actually did n't even have a regular pair of scissors .
i was using these metal shears until i stole a pair from the office that i worked at .
so i got out of school , i got a job , i got a paycheck , i got myself to the art store , and i just went nuts buying supplies .
and then when i got home , i sat down and i set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box .
but i sat there for hours , and nothing came to mind .
the same thing the next day , and then the next , quickly slipping into a creative slump .
and i was in a dark place for a long time , unable to create .
and it did n't make any sense , because i was finally able to support my art , and yet i was creatively blank .
but as i searched around in the darkness , i realized i was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that i never had before .
and it was then that i thought back to my jittery hands .
embrace the shake .
and i realized , if i ever wanted my creativity back , i had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it .
i wondered , could you become more creative , then , by looking for limitations ?
what if i could only create with a dollar 's worth of supplies ?
at this point , i was spending a lot of my evenings in - well , i guess i still spend a lot of my evenings in starbucks - but i know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one , so i decided to ask for 50 .
surprisingly , they just handed them right over , and then with some pencils i already had , i made this project for only 80 cents .
it really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless .
i took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas , and wondered what if , instead of painting on a canvas , i could only paint on my chest ?
so i painted 30 images , one layer at a time , one on top of another , with each picture representing an influence in my life .
or what if , instead of painting with a brush , i could only paint with karate chops ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'd dip my hands in paint , and i just attacked the canvas , and i actually hit so hard that i bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- or , what if instead of relying on myself , i had to rely on other people to create the content for the art ?
so for six days , i lived in front of a webcam .
i slept on the floor and i ate takeout , and i asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment .
their stories became the art as i wrote them onto the revolving canvas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- or what if instead of making art to display , i had to destroy it ?
this seemed like the ultimate limitation , being an artist without art .
this destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that i called goodbye art , where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation .
in the beginning of goodbye art , i focused on forced destruction , like this image of jimi hendrix , made with over 7,000 matches .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then i opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally .
i looked for temporary materials , like spitting out food - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine .
the last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that did n't actually exist in the first place .
so i organized candles on a table , i lit them , and then blew them out , then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles , then assembled the videos into the larger image .
so the end image was never visible as a physical whole .
it was destroyed before it ever existed .
in the course of this goodbye art series , i created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display .
what i thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation , as each time i created , the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where i felt refreshed and ready to start the next project .
it did not happen overnight .
there were times when my projects failed to get off the ground , or , even worse , after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing .
but having committed to the process , i continued on , and something really surprising came out of this .
as i destroyed each project , i was learning to let go , let go of outcomes , let go of failures , and let go of imperfections .
and in return , i found a process of creating art that 's perpetual and unencumbered by results .
i found myself in a state of constant creation , thinking only of what 's next and coming up with more ideas than ever .
when i think back to my three years away from art , away from my dream , just going through the motions , instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream , i just quit , i gave up .
and what if i did n't embrace the shake ?
because embracing the shake for me was n't just about art and having art skills .
it turned out to be about life , and having life skills .
because ultimately , most of what we do takes place here , inside the box , with limited resources .
learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and , collectively , transform our world .
looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life .
now , when i run into a barrier or i find myself creatively stumped , i sometimes still struggle , but i continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities , like using hundreds of real , live worms to make an image , using a pushpin to tattoo a banana , or painting a picture with hamburger grease .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that i 've learned into something others can replicate .
limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity , but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts , rethink categories and challenge accepted norms .
and instead of telling each other to seize the day , maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a sculpture i made , which is a way of , kind of , freeing a form into an object that has different degrees of freedom .
so , it can balance on a point .
this is a bronze ball , an aluminum arm here , and then this wooden disk .
and the wooden disk was really thought about as something that you 'd want to hold on to , and that would glide easily through your hands .
the aluminum is because it 's very light .
the bronze is nice hard , durable material that could roll on the ground .
inside of the bronze ball there 's a lead weight that is free-swinging on an axle that 's on two bearings that pass in between , across it , like this , that counterbalance this weight .
so it allows it to roll .
and the sphere has that balance property that it always sort of stays still and looks the same from every direction .
but if you put something on top of it , it disbalances it . and so it would tip over .
but in this case because the interior is free-swinging in relation to the sphere , it can stand up on one point .
and then there was a second level to this object , which is that it - i wanted it to convey some proportions that i was interested in , which is the diameter of the moon and the diameter of the earth in proportion to each other .
i was exploring , really early on , wanting to make things float in the air .
and i thought up a lot of ideas .
this is sculpture that i made that - it 's magnetically levitated .
the thing is , is that it 's slightly dangerous .
normally it 's sort of cordoned off when it 's in a museum .
but it 's uh - let 's see if i can manipulate it a little bit without , um - oops .
so this is just floating , floating on a permanent magnetic field , which stabilizes it in all directions .
except there is a slight tether here , which keeps it from going over the top of its field .
it 's sort of surfing on a magnetic field at the crest of a wave .
and that 's what supports the object and keeps it stable .
i think we could roll the tape , admin .
i have a sort of a collection of videos that i took of different installations , which i could narrate .
this is a sculpture of the sun and the earth , in proportion .
representing that eight and a half minutes that it takes light and gravity to connect the two .
so here is the earth . it 's a little less than a millimeter that was turned of solid bronze .
and here is a similar sculpture .
that 's the sun at that end .
and then in a series of 55 balls , it reduces , proportionately - each ball and the spaces between them reduce proportionately , until they get down to this little earth .
this is in a sculpture park in taejon .
this one is about the moon and then the distance to the earth , in proportion also .
this is a little stone ball , floating .
as you can see the little tether , that it 's also magnetically levitated .
and then this is the first part of - this is 109 spheres , since the sun is 109 times the diameter of the earth .
and so this is the size of the sun .
and then each of these little spheres is the size of the earth in proportion to the sun .
it 's made up of 16 concentric shells . each one has 92 spheres .
this is in the courtyard of a twelfth-century alchemist .
i was thinking that the sun is kind of the ultimate alchemist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so this , again , is on the subject - a slice from the equator of the earth .
and then the moon in the center , and it 's floating . and this is in france .
this is in sapporo .
it 's balancing on a shaft and a ball , right at the center of gravity , or just slightly above the center of gravity , which means that the lower half of the object is just a little bit more weighty .
so you can see it rotating here .
it weighs about a ton or over a ton .
it 's made of stainless steel , quite thick .
but it 's being balanced like that in equilibrium .
it 's susceptible to motion by the air currents .
this is another species of work that i do .
these are these arrays . these spheres are all suspended , but they have magnets horizontally in them that make them all like compasses .
so all the red sides , for example , face one direction : south .
and the blue side , the compliment , faces the other way .
so as you turn around you 're seeing different colors .
this is based on the structure of a diamond .
it was a diamond cell structure was the point of departure .
and then there were kind of large spaces in the hollows between the atoms .
and so i placed one more element of each one of them .
these were white spheres .
then i had video projectors that were projecting intermittently onto the spheres .
so they would catch parts of the images , and make sort of three-dimensional color volumes , as you walk through it , through the object .
this is something i did of a tactile communication system .
it was the idea of isolating the tactile component of sculpture , and then putting it into a communication system .
this is an idea of moving a sculpture , a ball , that would be directed around the room by a computer .
this is a clock i designed .
it has buckminster fuller 's dymaxion map edited here .
it turns once per day in synchrony with the earth .
and then , this is like projects that are harder to build .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this has a diamond-bottomed lake .
so it 's a floating island with water , fresh water , that can fly from place to place .
this would be grown , i suppose , with nanotechnology in the future sometime .
in the course of doing my work i sort of have a broad range of interests .
and some of it is just the idea of creating media - media as a sculpture , something that would keep the sculpture fresh and ever-changing , by just creating the media that the sculpture is made of .
and i had a lot of - always interested in the concept of a crystal ball .
and the idea that you could see things inside of a crystal ball and predict the future - or a television set , where it 's sort of like a magic box where anything can appear .
i had thought about , a long time ago , in the late ' 60s - when i was just starting out , i was under the influence of thinking about buckminster fuller 's grand project for an electric globe across from the united nations - and other things that were happening , the space program at that time , and whole earth catalog , things like that .
i was thinking about mass produced spherical television sets that could be linked to orbiting camera satellites .
so if we could roll the next film here .
this has evolved over the years in a lot of different iterations .
but this the current version of it , is a flying airship that is about 35 meters in diameter , about 110 feet in diameter .
the whole surface of it is covered with 60 million diodes , red , blue , and green , that allow you to have a high-resolution picture , visible in daylight .
i came with a plan .
i brought it to paul maccready 's company aerovironment to do a feasibility study , and they analyzed it , and came up with a lot of innovative ideas about how to propel it .
so we have a physical plan of how to make this actually happen .
this is the control room inside of the ship .
the idea of this air genie is , it 's something that can just transform and become anything .
it 's like a traveling show .
it has speakers on it . and it has cameras over the surface of it .
so it can see its environment , and then it can mimic its environment and disappear .
here the legs are retracting .
the cabin is open or closed , as you like .
it weighs about 20 tons .
it has on-board generators .
it can generate about a million kilowatts , in order to be bright enough to be visible in daylight .
the idea of it is to make a kind of a traveling show .
it really would be dedicated to the arts and to interacting .
there would be on board a crew of artists , musicians , that would allow the thing to become actually kind of a conscious object that would respond to the moment , and to interact as an entity that was aware , that could communicate .
it 's completely silent and nonpolluting .
it has electric motors with a novel propulsion system .
it could be interacted with large crowds in different ways .
primarily i would be interested in how it would interact with , say , going to a college campus , and then being used as a way of talking about the earth sciences , the world , the situation of the globe .
the default image on the object would probably be a high-resolution earth image .
but then one could interact with that and show plate tectonics or global warming issues , or migrations - all of the things that we 're concerned with today .
and then at night the idea is that it would be used as kind of a rave situation , where the people could cut loose , and the music and the lights , and everything .
so it could land in a park , for example .
or this could represent a college green .
and then it would have a corresponding website that would show the itinerary of this .
and so interacting with the same kind of imagery .
it would also be able to be an open code , so people could interact with it .
it would be forum for people 's ideas about what they would like to see on a giant screen of this type .
so that 's pretty much it .
okay . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i go to parties , it does n't usually take very long for people to find out that i 'm a scientist and i study sex .
and then i get asked questions .
and the questions usually have a very particular format .
they start with the phrase , " a friend told me , " and then they end with the phrase , " is this true ? "
and most of the time i 'm glad to say that i can answer them , but sometimes i have to say , " i 'm really sorry , but i do n't know because i 'm not that kind of a doctor . "
that is , i 'm not a clinician , i 'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy .
and my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything 's going right , rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong , like so many of you .
and what i do is i look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they 've evolved for fundamental biological problems .
so today i 'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric ivory tower activity that we find at our universities , but that broad study across species , tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health .
and this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain , and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises .
and now you know why i 'm fun at parties .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so today i 'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one .
now i 'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows - i did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week - penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another .
and the slide behind me barely scratches the surface of how widespread they are in animals .
there 's an enormous amount of anatomical variation .
you find muscular tubes , modified legs , modified fins , as well as the mammalian fleshy , inflatable cylinder that we 're all familiar with - or at least half of you are .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think we see this tremendous variation because it 's a really effective solution to a very basic biological problem , and that is getting sperm in a position to meet up with eggs and form zygotes .
now the penis is n't actually required for internal fertiliztion , but when internal fertilization evolves , penises often follow .
and the question i get when i start talking about this most often is , " what made you interested in this subject ? "
and the answer is skeletons .
you would n't think that skeletons and penises have very much to do with one another .
and that 's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power .
and my first forays into biological research , doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate , were really squarely in that realm .
but when i went to graduate school to study biomechanics , i really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function .
i tried a bunch of different stuff .
a lot of it did n't pan out .
but then one day i started thinking about the mammalian penis .
and it 's really an odd sort of structure .
before it can be used for internal fertilization , its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion .
most of the time it 's a flexible organ .
it 's easy to bend .
but before it 's brought into use during copulation it has to become rigid , it has to become difficult to bend .
and moreover , it has to work .
a reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring , and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool .
and so i thought , " here 's a problem that just cries out for a skeletal system - not one like this one , but one like this one - because , functionally , a skeleton is any system that supports tissue and transmits forces .
and i already knew that animals like this earthworm , indeed most animals , do n't support their tissues by draping them over bones .
instead they 're more like reinforced water balloons .
they use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton .
and a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements .
the skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that 's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins .
and the interaction is crucial .
without both elements you have no support .
if you have fluid with no wall to surround it and keep pressure up , you have a puddle .
and if you have just the wall with no fluid inside of it to put the wall in tension , you 've got a little wet rag .
when you look at a penis in cross section , it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton .
it has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid - in this case blood - surrounded by a wall of tissue that 's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen .
but at the time when i started this project , the best explanation i could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues , and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila ! it became erect .
and that explained to me expansion - made sense : more fluid , you get tissues that expand - but it did n't actually explain erection .
because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend .
and no one had systematically looked at the wall tissue .
so i thought , wall tissue 's important in skeletons .
it has to be part of the explanation .
and this was the point at which my graduate adviser said , " whoa ! hold on . slow down . "
because after about six months of me talking about this , i think he finally figured out that i was really serious about the penis thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he sat me down , and he warned me .
he was like , " be careful going down this path .
i 'm not sure this project 's going to pan out . "
because he was afraid i was walking into a trap .
i was taking on a socially embarrassing question with an answer that he thought might not be particularly interesting .
and that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements .
it had the central fluid , it had the surrounding wall , and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton .
so the image behind me shows a piece of tissue in one of these cross helical skeletons cut so that you 're looking at the surface of the wall .
the arrow shows you the long axis .
and you can see two layers of fibers , one in blue and one in yellow , arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles .
and if you were n't just looking at a little section of the fibers , those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton - something like a chinese finger trap , where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck .
and these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors , which i 'm going to demonstrate in a film .
it 's a model skeleton that i made out of a piece of cloth that i wrapped around an inflated balloon .
the cloth 's cut on the bias .
so you can see that the fibers wrap in helices , and those fibers can reorient as the skeleton moves , which means the skeleton 's flexible .
it lengthens , shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces .
now my adviser 's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton .
what are you going to contribute ?
what new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology ?
and i thought , " yeah , he does have a really good point here . "
so i spent a long , long time thinking about it .
and one thing kept bothering me , and that 's , when they 're functioning , penises do n't wiggle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so something interesting had to be going on .
so i went ahead , collected wall tissue , prepared it so it was erect , sectioned it , put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look , fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety .
but instead i saw this .
there 's an outer layer and an inner layer .
the arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton .
i was really surprised at this .
everyone i showed it was really surprised at this .
why was everyone surprised at this ?
that 's because we knew theoretically that there was another way of arranging fibers in a hydrostatic skeleton , and that was with fibers at zero degrees and 90 degrees to the long axis of the structure .
the thing is , no one had ever seen it before in nature .
and now i was looking at one .
those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very , very different behavior .
i 'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials .
so it 'll be made of the same cotton cloth , same balloon , same internal pressure .
but the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently .
and you 'll see that , unlike the cross helical model , this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending .
now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues .
they 're an integral part of the penile skeleton .
if the wall around the erectile tissue was n't there , if it was n't reinforced in this way , the shape would change , but the inflated penis would not resist bending , and erection simply would n't work .
it 's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well , but it 's also relevant in a broad sense , i think , to the design of prosthetics , soft robots , basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important .
so to sum up : twenty years ago , i had a college adviser tell me , when i went to the college and said , " i 'm kind of interested in anatomy , " they said , " anatomy 's a dead science . "
he could n't have been more wrong .
i really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies .
not just about its genetics and molecular biology , but up here in the meat end of the scale .
we 've got limits on our time .
we often focus on one disease , one model , one problem , but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us .
after all , if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems , there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what you have here is an electronic cigarette .
it 's something that 's , since it was invented a year or two ago , has given me untold happiness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a little bit of it , i think , is the nicotine , but there 's something much bigger than that .
which is ever since , in the u.k. , they banned smoking in public places , i 've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the reason , i only worked out just the other day , which is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people , you do n't actually want to spend all the time talking .
it 's really , really tiring .
sometimes you just want to stand there silently , alone with your thoughts .
sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window .
now the problem is , when you ca n't smoke , if you stand and stare out of the window on your own , you 're an antisocial , friendless idiot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette , you 're a fucking philosopher .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so the power of reframing things can not be overstated .
what we have is exactly the same thing , the same activity , but one of them makes you feel great and the other one , with just a small change of posture , makes you feel terrible .
and i think one of the problems with classical economics is it 's absolutely preoccupied with reality .
and reality is n't a particularly good guide to human happiness .
why , for example , are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed ?
both of them , after all , are in exactly the same stage of life .
you both have too much time on your hands and not much money .
but pensioners are reportedly very , very happy , whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed .
the reason , i think , is that the pensioners believe they 've chosen to be pensioners , whereas the young unemployed feel it 's been thrust upon them .
in england the upper middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly , because they 've re-branded unemployment .
if you 're an upper-middle-class english person , you call unemployment " a year off . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's because having a son who 's unemployed in manchester is really quite embarrassing , but having a son who 's unemployed in thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually the power to re-brand things - to understand that actually our experiences , costs , things do n't actually much depend on what they really are , but on how we view them - i genuinely think ca n't be overstated .
there 's an experiment i think daniel pink refers to where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor .
every now and then an electric shock is applied to the floor , which pains the dogs .
the only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box .
and when it nuzzles the button , the electric shock stops .
the other dog does n't have the button .
it 's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box , but it has no control over the circumstances .
generally the first dog can be relatively content .
the second dog lapses into complete depression .
the circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives .
it 's an interesting question .
we ask the question - the whole debate in the western world is about the level of taxation .
but i think there 's another debate to be asked , which is the level of control we have over our tax money .
that what costs us 10 pounds in one context can be a curse .
what costs us 10 pounds in a different context we may actually welcome .
you know , pay 20,000 pounds in tax toward health and you 're merely feeling a mug .
pay 20,000 pounds to endow a hospital ward and you 're called a philanthropist .
i 'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'll give you one in return . how you frame things really matters .
do you call it the bailout of greece or the bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to greece ?
because they are actually the same thing .
what you call them actually affects how you react to them , viscerally and morally .
i think psychological value is great to be absolutely honest .
one of my great friends , a professor called nick chater , who 's the professor of decision sciences in london , believes that we should spend far less time looking into humanity 's hidden depths and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows .
i think that 's true actually .
i think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do .
but what we do n't have is a really good model of human psychology .
at least pre-kahneman perhaps , we did n't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering , of neoclassical economics .
so people who believed in psychological solutions did n't have a model .
we did n't have a framework .
this is what warren buffett 's business partner charlie munger calls " a latticework on which to hang your ideas . "
engineers , economists , classical economists all had a very , very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung .
we merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model .
and what that means is that in looking at solutions , we 've probably given too much priority to what i call technical engineering solutions , newtonian solutions , and not nearly enough to the psychological ones .
you know my example of the eurostar .
six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between paris and london by about 40 minutes .
for 0.01 percent of this money you could have put wifi on the trains , which would n't have reduced the duration of the journey , but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefullness far more .
for maybe 10 percent of the money , you could have paid all of the world 's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free chateau petrus to all the passengers .
you 'd still have five -lsb- million -rsb- pounds in change , and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically ?
i think it 's because there 's an imbalance , an asymmetry , in the way we treat creative , emotionally-driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational , numerical , spreadsheet-driven ideas .
if you 're a creative person , i think quite rightly , you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you .
you have to go in and you have to have a cost-benefit analysis , a feasibility study , an roi study and so forth .
and i think that 's probably right .
but this does not apply the other way around .
people who have an existing framework , an economic framework , an engineering framework , feel that actually logic is its own answer .
what they do n't say is , " well the numbers all seem to add up , but before i present this idea , i 'll go and show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better . "
and so we , artificially i think , prioritize what i 'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas .
an example of a great psychological idea : the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the london underground per pound spent came when they did n't add any extra trains nor change the frequency of the trains , they put dot matrix display board on the platforms .
because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality , its duration , but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait .
waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes , knuckle-biting going , " when 's this train going to damn well arrive ? "
here 's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in korea .
red traffic lights have a countdown delay .
it 's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments .
why ? because road rage , impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait .
in china , not really understanding the principle behind this , they applied the same principle to green traffic lights .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is n't a great idea .
you 're 200 yards away , you realize you 've got five seconds to go , you floor it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the koreans , very assiduously , did test both .
the accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights ; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights .
this is all i 'm asking for really in human decision making , is the consideration of these three things .
i 'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other .
i 'm merely saying that when you solve problems , you should look at all three of these equally and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle .
if you actually look at a great business , you 'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play .
really , really successful businesses - google is great , great technological success , but it 's also based on a very good psychological insight : people believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else .
it 's an innate thing called goal dilution .
ayelet fishbach has written a paper about this .
everybody else at the time of google , more or less , was trying to be a portal .
yes , there 's a search function , but you also have weather , sports scores , bits of news .
google understood that if you 're just a search engine , people assume you 're a very , very good search engine .
all of you know this actually from when you go in to buy a television .
and in the shabbier end of the row of flat screen tvs you can see are these rather despised things called combined tv and dvd players .
and we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things , but we look at a combined tv and dvd player and we go , " uck .
it 's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a dvd player . "
so we walk out of the shops with one of each .
google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one .
i propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we did n't even realize were problems at all .
this is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics .
do n't give them 24 white pills .
give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first and then take the blue ones .
it 's called chunking .
the likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle .
one of the great mistakes , i think , of economics is it fails to understand that what something is , whether it 's retirement , unemployment , cost , is a function , not only of its amount , but also its meaning .
this is a toll crossing in britain .
quite often queues happen at the tolls .
sometimes you get very , very severe queues .
you could apply the same principle actually , if you like , to the security lanes in airports .
what would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge , but go through a lane that 's an express lane ?
it 's not an unreasonable thing to do . it 's an economically efficient thing to do .
time means more to some people than others .
if you 're waiting trying to get to a job interview , you 'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane .
if you 're on the way to visit your mother in-law , you 'd probably prefer to stay on the left .
the only problem is if you introduce this economically efficient solution , people hate it .
because they think you 're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue , and " why on earth should i pay to subsidize your imcompetence ? "
on the other hand , change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management , so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company , it goes to charity , and the mental willingness to pay completely changes .
you have a relatively economically efficient solution , but one that actually meets with public approval and even a small degree of affection , rather than being seen as bastardy .
so where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money .
actually my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount , but where i think that money is going .
and i think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy .
it could revolutionize the public services .
it could really change things quite significantly .
here 's a guy you all need to study .
he 's an austrian school economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in vienna .
what was interesting about the austrian school is they actually grew up alongside freud .
and so they 're predominantly interested in psychology .
they believed that there was a discipline called praxeology , which is a prior discipline to the study of economics .
praxeology is the study of human choice , action and decision making .
i think they 're right .
i think the danger we have in today 's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology .
but as charlie munger says , " if economics is n't behavioral , i do n't know what the hell is . "
von mises , interestingly , believes economics is just a subset of psychology .
i think he just refers to economics as " the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity . "
but von mises , among many other things , i think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing , the value of perceived value and the fact that we should actually treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value .
we tend to , all of us - even those of us who work in marketing - to think of value in two ways .
there 's the real value , which is when you make something in a factory and provide a service , and then there 's a kind of dubious value , which you create by changing the way people look at things .
von mises completely rejected this distinction .
and he used this following analogy .
he referred actually to strange economists called the french physiocrats , who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land .
so if you 're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer , you created true value .
if however , you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat , you were n't actually creating value , you were exploiting the shepherd .
now von mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing .
he says , if you run a restaurant , there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor .
one of them creates , perhaps , the primary product - the thing we think we 're paying for - the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product .
and the idea that one of them should actually have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong .
try this quick thought experiment .
imagine a restaurant that serves michelin-starred food , but actually where the restaurant smells of sewage and there 's human feces on the floor .
the best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further , it 's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor .
and it 's vital we understand this .
if that seems like some strange , abstruse thing , in the u.k. , the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day .
they decided this was n't good enough and they wanted to get it up to 99 .
the effort to do that almost broke the organization .
if at the same time you 'd gone and asked people , " what percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day ? "
the average answer , or the modal answer would have been 50 to 60 percent .
now if your perception is much worse than your reality , what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality ?
that 's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks .
what you need to do is first of all tell people that 98 percent of mail gets there the next day , first-class mail .
that 's pretty good .
i would argue , in britain there 's a much better frame of reference , which is to tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the u.k. than in germany .
because generally in britain if you want to make us happy about something , just tell us we do it better than the germans .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- choose your frame of reference and the perceived value and therefore the actual value is completely tranformed .
it has to be said of the germans that the germans and the french are doing a brilliant job of creating a united europe .
the only thing they do n't expect is they 're uniting europe through a shared mild hatred of the french and germans .
but i 'm british , that 's the way we like it .
what you also notice is that in any case our perception is leaky .
we ca n't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it .
all of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted .
when you drive away , your car feels as if it drives better .
and the reason for this , unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which i 'm not paying him for and i 'm unaware of , is because perception is in any case leaky .
analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded .
i do n't just mean through reported pain reduction , actual measured pain reduction .
and so perception actually is leaky in any case .
so if you do something that 's perceptually bad in one respect , you can damage the other .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a storyteller .
that 's what i do in life - telling stories , writing novels - and today i would like to tell you a few stories about the art of storytelling and also some supernatural creatures called the djinni .
but before i go there , please allow me to share with you glimpses of my personal story .
i will do so with the help of words , of course , but also a geometrical shape , the circle , so throughout my talk , you will come across several circles .
i was born in strasbourg , france to turkish parents .
shortly after , my parents got separated , and i came to turkey with my mom .
from then on , i was raised as a single child by a single mother .
now in the early 1970s , in ankara , that was a bit unusual .
our neighborhood was full of large families , where fathers were the heads of households , so i grew up seeing my mother as a divorcee in a patriarchal environment .
in fact , i grew up observing two different kinds of womanhood .
on the one hand was my mother , a well-educated , secular , modern , westernized , turkish woman .
on the other hand was my grandmother , who also took care of me and was more spiritual , less educated and definitely less rational .
this was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye .
many people visited my grandmother , people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands .
each time , my grandmother would utter some words in arabic , take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove .
then one by one , she would encircle these thorns with dark ink .
a week later , the patient would come back for a follow-up examination .
now , i 'm aware that i should not be saying such things in front of an audience of scholars and scientists , but the truth is , of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions , i did not see anyone go back unhappy or unhealed .
i asked her how she did this . was it the power of praying ?
in response she said , " yes , praying is effective , but also beware of the power of circles . "
from her , i learned , amongst many other things , one very precious lesson - that if you want to destroy something in this life , be it an acne , a blemish or the human soul , all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls .
it will dry up inside .
now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle .
we all do .
we 're born into a certain family , nation , class .
but if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted , then we too run the risk of drying up inside .
our imagination might shrink ; our hearts might dwindle , and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons .
our friends , neighbors , colleagues , family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us , it means we are surrounded with our mirror image .
now one other thing women like my grandma do in turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out .
it 's an old eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it 's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection .
ironically , -lsb- living in -rsb- communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today 's globalized world .
and it 's happening everywhere , among liberals and conservatives , agnostics and believers , the rich and the poor , east and west alike .
we tend to form clusters based on similarity , and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people .
in my opinion , one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling .
stories can not demolish frontiers , but they can punch holes in our mental walls .
and through those holes , we can get a glimpse of the other , and sometimes even like what we see .
i started writing fiction at the age of eight .
my mother came home one day with a turquoise notebook and asked me if i 'd be interested in keeping a personal journal .
in retrospect , i think she was slightly worried about my sanity .
i was constantly telling stories at home , which was good , except i told this to imaginary friends around me , which was not so good .
i was an introverted child , to the point of communicating with colored crayons and apologizing to objects when i bumped into them , so my mother thought it might do me good to write down my day-to-day experiences and emotions .
what she did n't know was that i thought my life was terribly boring , and the last thing i wanted to do was to write about myself .
instead , i began to write about people other than me and things that never really happened .
and thus began my life-long passion for writing fiction .
so from the very beginning , fiction for me was less of an autobiographical manifestation than a transcendental journey into other lives , other possibilities .
and please bear with me : i 'll draw a circle and come back to this point .
now one other thing happened around this same time .
my mother became a diplomat .
so from this small , superstitious , middle-class neighborhood of my grandmother , i was zoomed into this posh , international school -lsb- in madrid -rsb- , where i was the only turk .
it was here that i had my first encounter with what i call the " representative foreigner . "
in our classroom , there were children from all nationalities , yet this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan , egalitarian classroom democracy .
instead , it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen - not as an individual on his own , but as the representative of something larger .
we were like a miniature united nations , which was fun , except whenever something negative , with regards to a nation or a religion , took place .
the child who represented it was mocked , ridiculed and bullied endlessly .
and i should know , because during the time i attended that school , a military takeover happened in my country , a gunman of my nationality nearly killed the pope , and turkey got zero points in -lsb- the -rsb- eurovision song contest .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i skipped school often and dreamed of becoming a sailor during those days .
i also had my first taste of cultural stereotypes there .
the other children asked me about the movie " midnight express , " which i had not seen ; they inquired how many cigarettes a day i smoked , because they thought all turks were heavy smokers , and they wondered at what age i would start covering my hair .
i came to learn that these were the three main stereotypes about my country : politics , cigarettes and the veil .
after spain , we went to jordan , germany and ankara again .
everywhere i went , i felt like my imagination was the only suitcase i could take with me .
stories gave me a sense of center , continuity and coherence , the three big cs that i otherwise lacked .
in my mid-twenties , i moved to istanbul , the city i adore .
i lived in a very vibrant , diverse neighborhood where i wrote several of my novels .
i was in istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999 .
when i ran out of the building at three in the morning , i saw something that stopped me in my tracks .
there was the local grocer there - a grumpy , old man who did n't sell alcohol and did n't speak to marginals .
he was sitting next to a transvestite with a long black wig and mascara running down her cheeks .
i watched the man open a pack of cigarettes with trembling hands and offer one to her , and that is the image of the night of the earthquake in my mind today - a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk .
in the face of death and destruction , our mundane differences evaporated , and we all became one even if for a few hours .
but i 've always believed that stories , too , have a similar effect on us .
i 'm not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake , but when we are reading a good novel , we leave our small , cozy apartments behind , go out into the night alone and start getting to know people we had never met before and perhaps had even been biased against .
shortly after , i went to a women 's college in boston , then michigan .
i experienced this , not so much as a geographical shift , as a linguistic one .
i started writing fiction in english .
i 'm not an immigrant , refugee or exile - they ask me why i do this - but the commute between languages gives me the chance to recreate myself .
i love writing in turkish , which to me is very poetic and very emotional , and i love writing in english , which to me is very mathematical and cerebral .
so i feel connected to each language in a different way .
for me , like millions of other people around the world today , english is an acquired language .
when you 're a latecomer to a language , what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration .
as latecomers , we always want to say more , you know , crack better jokes , say better things , but we end up saying less because there 's a gap between the mind and the tongue .
and that gap is very intimidating .
but if we manage not to be frightened by it , it 's also stimulating .
and this is what i discovered in boston - that frustration was very stimulating .
at this stage , my grandmother , who had been watching the course of my life with increasing anxiety , started to include in her daily prayers that i urgently get married so that i could settle down once and for all .
and because god loves her , i did get married .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but instead of settling down , i went to arizona .
and since my husband is in istanbul , i started commuting between arizona and istanbul - the two places on the surface of earth that could n't be more different .
i guess one part of me has always been a nomad , physically and spiritually .
stories accompany me , keeping my pieces and memories together , like an existential glue .
yet as much as i love stories , recently , i 've also begun to think that they lose their magic if and when a story is seen as more than a story .
and this is a subject that i would love to think about together .
when my first novel written in english came out in america , i heard an interesting remark from a literary critic .
" i liked your book , " he said , " but i wish you had written it differently . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i asked him what he meant by that .
he said , " well , look at it . there 's so many spanish , american , hispanic characters in it , but there 's only one turkish character and it 's a man . "
now the novel took place on a university campus in boston , so to me , it was normal that there be more international characters in it than turkish characters , but i understood what my critic was looking for .
and i also understood that i would keep disappointing him .
he wanted to see the manifestation of my identity .
he was looking for a turkish woman in the book because i happened to be one .
we often talk about how stories change the world , but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated , read and reviewed .
many authors feel this pressure , but non-western authors feel it more heavily .
if you 're a woman writer from the muslim world , like me , then you are expected to write the stories of muslim women and , preferably , the unhappy stories of unhappy muslim women .
you 're expected to write informative , poignant and characteristic stories and leave the experimental and avant-garde to your western colleagues .
what i experienced as a child in that school in madrid is happening in the literary world today .
writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own , but as the representatives of their respective cultures : a few authors from china , a few from turkey , a few from nigeria .
we 're all thought to have something very distinctive , if not peculiar .
the writer and commuter james baldwin gave an interview in 1984 in which he was repeatedly asked about his homosexuality .
when the interviewer tried to pigeonhole him as a gay writer , baldwin stopped and said , " but do n't you see ? there 's nothing in me that is not in everybody else , and nothing in everybody else that is not in me . "
when identity politics tries to put labels on us , it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger .
there 's a fuzzy category called multicultural literature in which all authors from outside the western world are lumped together .
i never forget my first multicultural reading , in harvard square about 10 years ago .
we were three writers , one from the philippines , one turkish and one indonesian - like a joke , you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the reason why we were brought together was not because we shared an artistic style or a literary taste .
it was only because of our passports .
multicultural writers are expected to tell real stories , not so much the imaginary .
a function is attributed to fiction .
in this way , not only the writers themselves , but also their fictional characters become the representatives of something larger .
but i must quickly add that this tendency to see a story as more than a story does not solely come from the west .
it comes from everywhere .
and i experienced this firsthand when i was put on trial in 2005 for the words my fictional characters uttered in a novel .
i had intended to write a constructive , multi-layered novel about an armenian and a turkish family through the eyes of women .
my micro story became a macro issue when i was prosecuted .
some people criticized , others praised me for writing about the turkish-armenian conflict .
but there were times when i wanted to remind both sides that this was fiction .
it was just a story .
and when i say , " just a story , " i 'm not trying to belittle my work .
i want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is , not as a means to an end .
writers are entitled to their political opinions , and there are good political novels out there , but the language of fiction is not the language of daily politics .
chekhov said , " the solution to a problem and the correct way of posing the question are two completely separate things .
and only the latter is an artist 's responsibility . "
identity politics divides us . fiction connects .
one is interested in sweeping generalizations .
the other , in nuances .
one draws boundaries .
the other recognizes no frontiers .
identity politics is made of solid bricks .
fiction is flowing water .
in the ottoman times , there were itinerant storytellers called " meddah . "
they would go to coffee houses , where they would tell a story in front of an audience , often improvising .
with each new person in the story , the meddah would change his voice , impersonating that character .
everybody could go and listen , you know - ordinary people , even the sultan , muslims and non-muslims .
stories cut across all boundaries , like " the tales of nasreddin hodja , " which were very popular throughout the middle east , north africa , the balkans and asia .
today , stories continue to transcend borders .
when palestinian and israeli politicians talk , they usually do n't listen to each other , but a palestinian reader still reads a novel by a jewish author , and vice versa , connecting and empathizing with the narrator .
literature has to take us beyond .
if it can not take us there , it is not good literature .
books have saved the introverted , timid child that i was - that i once was .
but i 'm also aware of the danger of fetishizing them .
when the poet and mystic , rumi , met his spiritual companion , shams of tabriz , one of the first things the latter did was to toss rumi 's books into water and watch the letters dissolve .
the sufis say , " knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance . "
the problem with today 's cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge - we know a lot about each other , or so we think - but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves : it makes us elitist , distant and disconnected .
there 's a metaphor which i love : living like a drawing compass .
as you know , one leg of the compass is static , rooted in a place .
meanwhile , the other leg draws a wide circle , constantly moving .
like that , my fiction as well .
one part of it is rooted in istanbul , with strong turkish roots , but the other part travels the world , connecting to different cultures .
in that sense , i like to think of my fiction as both local and universal , both from here and everywhere .
now those of you who have been to istanbul have probably seen topkapi palace , which was the residence of ottoman sultans for more than 400 years .
in the palace , just outside the quarters of the favorite concubines , there 's an area called the gathering place of the djinn .
it 's between buildings .
i 'm intrigued by this concept .
we usually distrust those areas that fall in between things .
we see them as the domain of supernatural creatures like the djinn , who are made of smokeless fire and are the symbol of elusiveness .
but my point is perhaps that elusive space is what writers and artists need most .
when i write fiction i cherish elusiveness and changeability .
i like not knowing what will happen 10 pages later .
i like it when my characters surprise me .
i might write about a muslim woman in one novel , and perhaps it will be a very happy story , and in my next book , i might write about a handsome , gay professor in norway .
as long as it comes from our hearts , we can write about anything and everything .
audre lorde once said , " the white fathers taught us to say , ' i think , therefore i am . " ' she suggested , " i feel , therefore i am free . "
i think it was a wonderful paradigm shift .
and yet , why is it that , in creative writing courses today , the very first thing we teach students is " write what you know " ?
perhaps that 's not the right way to start at all .
imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about .
we should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel .
we should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next .
in the end , stories move like whirling dervishes , drawing circles beyond circles .
they connect all humanity , regardless of identity politics , and that is the good news .
and i would like to finish with an old sufi poem : " come , let us be friends for once ; let us make life easy on us ; let us be lovers and loved ones ; the earth shall be left to no one . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to tell you about an affliction i suffer from .
and i have a funny feeling that quite a few of you suffer from it as well .
when i 'm walking around an art gallery , rooms and rooms full of paintings , after about 15 or 20 minutes , i realize i 'm not thinking about the paintings .
i 'm not connecting to them .
instead , i 'm thinking about that cup of coffee i desperately need to wake me up .
i 'm suffering from gallery fatigue .
how many of you out there suffer from - yes . ha ha , ha ha !
now , sometimes you might last longer than 20 minutes , or even shorter , but i think we all suffer from it . and do you have the accompanying guilt ?
for me , i look at the paintings on the wall and i think , somebody has decided to put them there , thinks they 're good enough to be on that wall , but i do n't always see it .
in fact , most of the time i do n't see it .
and i leave feeling actually unhappy .
i feel guilty and unhappy with myself , rather than thinking there 's something wrong with the painting , i think there 's something wrong with me .
and that 's not a good experience , to leave a gallery like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the thing is , i think we should give ourselves a break .
if you think about going into a restaurant , when you look at the menu , are you expected to order every single thing on the menu ?
no ! you select .
if you go into a department store to buy a shirt , are you going to try on every single shirt and want every single shirt ?
of course not , you can be selective . it 's expected .
how come , then , it 's not so expected to be selective when we go to an art gallery ?
why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting ?
well i 'm trying to take a different approach .
and there 's two things i do : when i go into a gallery , first of all , i go quite fast , and i look at everything , and i pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other .
i do n't even know why they make me slow down , but something pulls me like a magnet and then i ignore all the others , and i just go to that painting .
so it 's the first thing i do is , i do my own curation .
i choose a painting . it might just be one painting in 50 .
and then the second thing i do is i stand in front of that painting , and i tell myself a story about it .
why a story ? well , i think that we are wired , our dna tells us to tell stories .
we tell stories all the time about everything , and i think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy , chaotic place , and sometimes stories , we 're trying to make sense of the world a little bit , trying to bring some order to it .
why not apply that to our looking at paintings ?
so i now have this sort of restaurant menu visiting of art galleries .
there are three paintings i 'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them .
the first one needs little introduction - " girl with a pearl earring " by johannes vermeer , 17th-century dutch painter .
this is the most glorious painting .
i first saw it when i was 19 , and i immediately went out and got a poster of it , and in fact i still have that poster . 30 years later it 's hanging in my house .
it 's accompanied me everywhere i 've gone , i never tire of looking at her .
what made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with was just the gorgeous colors he uses and the light falling on her face .
but i think what 's kept me still coming back year after year is another thing , and that is the look on her face , the conflicted look on her face .
i ca n't tell if she 's happy or sad , and i change my mind all the time .
so that keeps me coming back .
one day , 16 years after i had this poster on my wall , i lay in bed and looked at her , and i suddenly thought , i wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that .
and it was the first time i 'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him .
always before i 'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl .
now i began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship .
and i thought , well , what is that relationship ?
so i went to find out . i did some research and discovered , we have no idea who she is .
in fact , we do n't know who any of the models in any of vermeer 's paintings are , and we know very little about vermeer himself .
which made me go , " yippee ! "
i can do whatever i want , i can come up with whatever story i want to .
so here 's how i came up with the story .
first of all , i thought , i 've got to get her into the house .
how does vermeer know her ?
well , there 've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter .
the daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting .
and i thought , no , it 's a very intimate look , but it 's not a look a daughter gives her father .
for one thing , in dutch painting of the time , if a woman 's mouth was open , it was indicating sexual availability .
it would have been inappropriate for vermeer to paint his daughter like that .
so it 's not his daughter , but it 's somebody close to him , physically close to him .
well , who else would be in the house ?
a servant , a lovely servant .
so , she 's in the house .
how do we get her into the studio ?
we do n't know very much about vermeer , but the little bits that we do know , one thing we know is that he married a catholic woman , they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he - his studio . he also had 11 children .
it would have been a chaotic , noisy household .
and if you 've seen vermeer 's paintings before , you know that they 're incredibly calm and quiet .
how does a painter paint such calm , quiet paintings with 11 kids around ?
well , he compartmentalizes his life .
he gets to his studio , and he says , " nobody comes in here .
not the wife , not the kids . okay , the maid can come in and clean . "
she 's in the studio . he 's got her in the studio , they 're together .
and he decides to paint her .
he has her wear very plain clothes .
now , all of the women , or most of the women in vermeer 's other paintings wore velvet , silk , fur , very sumptuous materials .
this is very plain ; the only thing that is n't plain is her pearl earring .
now , if she 's a servant , there is no way she could afford a pair of pearl earrings .
so those are not her pearl earrings . whose are they ?
we happen to know , there 's a list of catharina , the wife 's clothes .
amongst them a yellow coat with white fur , a yellow and black bodice , and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings , different women in the paintings , vermeer 's paintings .
so clearly , her clothes were lent to various different women .
it 's not such a leap of faith to take that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife .
so we 've got all the elements for our story .
she 's in the studio with him for a long time .
these paintings took a long time to make .
they would have spent the time alone , all that time .
she 's wearing his wife 's pearl earring .
she 's gorgeous . she obviously loves him . she 's conflicted .
and does the wife know ? maybe not .
and if she does n't , well - that 's the story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next painting i 'm going to talk about is called " boy building a house of cards " by chardin .
he 's an 18th-century french painter best known for his still lifes , but he did occasionally paint people .
and in fact , he painted four versions of this painting , different boys building houses of cards , all concentrated .
i like this version the best , because some of the boys are older and some are younger , and to me , this one , like goldilocks 's porridge , is just right .
he 's not quite a child , and he 's not quite a man .
he 's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience , and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting .
and i looked at his face . it 's like a vermeer painting a bit .
the light comes in from the left , his face is bathed in this glowing light . it 's right in the center of the painting , and you look at it , and i found that when i was looking at it , i was standing there going , " look at me . please look at me . "
and he did n't look at me . he was still looking at his cards , and that 's one of the seductive elements of this painting is , he 's so focused on what he 's doing that he does n't look at us .
and that is , to me , the sign of a masterpiece , of a painting when there 's a lack of resolution .
he 's never going to look at me .
so i was thinking of a story where , if i 'm in this position , who could be there looking at him ?
not the painter , i do n't want to think about the painter .
i 'm thinking of an older version of himself .
he 's a man , a servant , an older servant looking at this younger servant , saying , " look at me . i want to warn you about what you 're about to go through . please look at me . "
and he never does .
and that lack of resolution , the lack of resolution in " girl with a pearl earring " - we do n't know if she 's happy or sad .
i 've written an entire novel about her , and i still do n't know if she 's happy or sad .
again and again , back to the painting , looking for the answer , looking for the story to fill in that gap .
and we may make a story , and it satisfies us momentarily , but not really , and we come back again and again .
the last painting i 'm going to talk about is called " anonymous " by anonymous . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a tudor portrait bought by the national portrait gallery .
they thought it was a man named sir thomas overbury , and then they discovered that it was n't him , and they have no idea who it is .
now , in the national portrait gallery , if you do n't know the biography of the painting , it 's kind of useless to you .
they ca n't hang it on the wall , because they do n't know who he is .
so unfortunately , this orphan spends most of his time in storage , along with quite a number of other orphans , some of them some beautiful paintings .
this painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons : one is the disconnection between his mouth that 's smiling and his eyes that are wistful .
he 's not happy , and why is n't he happy ?
the second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks .
he is blushing . he 's blushing for his portrait being made !
this must be a guy who blushes all the time .
what is he thinking about that 's making him blush ?
the third thing that made me stop in my tracks is his absolutely gorgeous doublet .
silk , gray , those beautiful buttons .
and you know what it makes me think of , is it 's sort of snug and puffy ; it 's like a duvet spread over a bed .
i kept thinking of beds and red cheeks , and of course i kept thinking of sex when i looked at him , and i thought , is that what he 's thinking about ?
and i thought , if i 'm going to make a story , what 's the last thing i 'm going to put in there ?
well , what would a tudor gentleman be preoccupied with ?
and i thought , well , henry viii , okay .
he 'd be preoccupied with his inheritance , with his heir .
who is going to inherit his name and his fortune ?
you put all those together , and you 've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back .
now , here 's the story .
it 's short .
" rosy " i am still wearing the white brocade doublet caroline gave me .
it has a plain high collar , detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread , set close together so that the fit is snug .
the doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed .
perhaps that was the intention .
i first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor .
i knew even before i stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed .
i have always flushed easily , from physical exertion , from wine , from high emotion .
as a boy , i was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys , but not by george .
only george could call me rosy .
i would not allow anyone else .
he managed to make the word tender .
when i made the announcement , george did not turn rosy , but went pale as my doublet .
he should not have been surprised .
it has been a common assumption that i would one day marry his cousin .
but it is difficult to hear the words aloud .
i know , i could barely utter them .
afterwards , i found george on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden .
despite drinking steadily all afternoon , he was still pale .
we stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces .
" what do you think of my doublet ? " i asked .
he glanced at me . " that collar looks to be strangling you . "
" we will still see each other , " i insisted .
" we can still hunt and play cards and attend court .
nothing need change . "
george did not speak .
" i am 23 years old . it is time for me to marry and produce an heir . it is expected of me . "
george drained another glass of claret and turned to me .
" congratulations on your upcoming nuptials , james .
i 'm sure you 'll be content together . "
he never used my nickname again .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ i think i 'm ready to do my thing ♫ ♫ i think i 'm ready to take my chances ♫ ♫ i 've been dining out and all stressed out ♫ ♫ due to the circumstances . see ? ♫ ♫ i gotta get up , get up , get up , get up ♫ ♫ wake up , wake up , wake up , wake up ♫ ♫ i see what you 're saying ♫ ♫ we sent a demo to the world , they said it sounds like take 6 ♫ ♫ i said " hold on , wait a minute , i 'll be back with the remix " ♫ ♫ they looking at us funny , we ca n't make any money ♫
♫ it took us years to figure out that we was dealing with dummies ♫ ♫ they did n't understand the sound from the bronx , that 's the boogie down ♫ ♫ to huntsville , alabama , there 's no circles in my planner , so ♫ ♫ it was time to make the product , so we hooked up with townsend ♫ ♫ made a deal with john neal , on the road sold ten thousand ♫ ♫ wba , that means a trip to nashville ♫ ♫ festplatte showed up and said them boys are naturals ♫ ♫ can you hear what they were hearing ? see what they were seeing ? ♫
♫ from bronx to berlin , we took the tour european ♫ ♫ all vocal yeah , we widit , call the album " what is it ? " ♫ ♫ with sarah connor , set the goal for number one and we hit it ♫ ♫ but now it 's kev , sim , drew , stew , time for a new day ♫ ♫ ring the alarm , hit ' em on skype or a two-way ♫ ♫ sung by the words , we ready to fly ! ♫ ♫ fly baby ! time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! this ai n't no time to rest ♫
♫ come on fly baby , we got work to do ♫ ♫ here we go , spread my wings and ... ♫ ♫ fly baby ! time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! this ai n't no time to rest . come on ♫ ♫ fly baby ! we got work to do ♫ ♫ here we go . spread my wings and fly . one more time ♫ ♫ fly baby ! time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! this ai n't no time to rest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! we got work to do ♫ ♫ here we go , spread my wings and ... ♫
♫ fly baby ! fly baby fly ♫ ♫ fly baby ! fly baby high ♫ ♫ fly baby ! up to the sky ♫ ♫ spread my wings and fly ♫ instrumental !
♫ we 're ready to fly ! ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- gabriel garcía márquez is one of my favorite writers , for his storytelling , but even more , i think , for the beauty and precision of his prose .
and whether it 's the opening line from " one hundred years of solitude " or the fantastical stream of consciousness in " autumn of the patriarch , " where the words rush by , page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal south american jungle , reading márquez is a visceral experience .
which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when i realized that i was being swept along on this remarkable , vivid journey in translation .
now i was a comparative literature major in college , which is like an english major , only instead of being stuck studying chaucer for three months , we got to read great literature in translation from around the world .
and as great as these books were , you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect .
but not so with márquez who once praised his translator 's versions as being better than his own , which is an astonishing compliment .
so when i heard that the translator , gregory rabassa , had written his own book on the subject , i could n't wait to read it .
it 's called apropos of the italian adage that i lifted from his forward , " if this be treason . "
and it 's a charming read .
it 's highly recommended for anyone who 's interested in the translator 's art .
but the reason that i mention it is that early on , rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight : " every act of communication is an act of translation . "
now maybe that 's been obvious to all of you for a long time , but for me , as often as i 'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis , i had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light .
ever since i can remember thinking consciously about such things , communication has been my central passion .
even as a child , i remember thinking that what i really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else .
so no ego problems .
it 's funny , my wife , daisy , whose family is littered with schizophrenics - and i mean littered with them - once said to me , " chris , i already have a brother who thinks he 's god .
i do n't need a husband who wants to be . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , as i plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was , it was that second part , being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge i was gaining , where the futility of my quest really set in .
time after time , whenever i set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient , it had the opposite effect .
interestingly , when your opening line of communication is , " hey , listen up , because i 'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you , " it 's amazing how quickly you 'll discover both ice and the firing squad .
finally , after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike , i finally got it , a new personal truth all my own , that if i was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that i was gaining , i 'd better find a different way of going about it .
and that 's when i discovered comedy .
now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language .
if i had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum , i 'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies .
and i 'm not talking about all comedy here , because , clearly , there 's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel .
what i want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives - comedy as the philosopher 's stone .
it takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world .
because that 's what i take from the theme of this conference : gained in translation .
that it 's about communication that does n't just produce greater understanding within the individual , but leads to real change .
which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest .
now i 'm big on speaking to people 's self-interest because we 're all wired for that .
it 's part of our survival package , and that 's why it 's become so important for us , and that 's why we 're always listening at that level .
and also because that 's where , in terms of our own self-interest , we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond , our responsibility now as to what i mean by the best comedy and satire , i mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity .
now if you think back on tina fey 's impersonations on saturday night live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate sarah palin , they were devastating .
fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate 's fundamental lack of seriousness , cementing an impression that the majority of the american public still holds today .
and the key detail of this is that fey 's scripts were n't written by her and they were n't written by the snl writers .
they were lifted verbatim from palin 's own remarks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here was a palin impersonator quoting palin word for word .
now that 's honesty and integrity , and it 's also why fey 's performances left such a lasting impression .
on the other side of the political spectrum , the first time that i heard rush limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful john edwards as the breck girl i knew that he 'd made a direct hit .
now it 's not often that i 'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with limbaugh , but it 's really hard to argue with that punchline .
the description perfectly captured edwards ' personal vanity .
and guess what ?
that ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career .
now the daily show with john stewart is by far the most - -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy .
survey after survey , from pew research to the annenberg center for public policy , has found that daily show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of stewart 's viewers , the larger point remains that stewart 's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts - not because his intent is to inform . it 's not .
his intent is to be funny .
it just so happens that stewart 's brand of funny does n't work unless the facts are true .
and the result is great comedy that 's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media .
now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people 's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection .
a great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick , where you think it 's going over here and then all of a sudden you 're transported over here .
and there 's this mental delight that 's followed by the physical response of laughter , which , not coincidentally , releases endorphins in the brain .
and just like that , you 've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses .
this is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic , all of the flight-or-fight responses , operate .
flight-or-fight releases adrenalin , which throws our walls up sky-high .
and the comedy comes along , dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest - race , religion , politics , sexuality - only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin , we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows , revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view .
now let me give you an example from my act .
i have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda , which starts off by asking , how radical is the gay agenda ?
because from what i can tell , the three things gay americans seem to want most are to join the military , get married and start a family .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- three things i 've tried to avoid my entire life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- have at it you radical bastards . the field is yours .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's followed by these lines about gay adoption : what is the problem with gay adoption ?
why is this remotely controversial ?
if you have a baby and you think that baby 's gay , you should be allowed to put it up for adoption .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you have given birth to an abomination .
remove it from your household .
now by taking the biblical epithet " abomination " and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence , a baby , this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity , through their laughter , to question its validity .
misdirection is n't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve .
economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy .
there are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline .
bill hicks - and if you do n't know his work , you should really google him - hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground , where finally the other kid says to him , " huh ? well my dad can beat up your dad , " to which hicks replies , " really ? how soon ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's an entire childhood in three words .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not to mention what it reveals about the adult who 's speaking them .
and one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it 's inherently viral .
people ca n't wait to pass along that new great joke .
and this is n't some new phenomenon of our wired world .
comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the internet , social media , even cable tv .
back in 1980 when comedian richard pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident , i was in los angeles the day after it happened and then i was in washington d.c. two days after that .
and i heard the exact same punchline on both coasts - something about the ignited negro college fund .
clearly , it did n't come out of a tonight show monologue .
and my guess here - and i have no research on this - is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it , you 'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession .
first there were drums and then knock-knock jokes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's when you put all of these elements together - when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that 's crafted from honesty and integrity , it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation .
now i have a close friend , joel pett , who 's the editorial cartoonist for the lexington herald-leader .
and he used to be the usa today monday morning guy .
i was visiting with joel the weekend before the copenhagen conference on climate change opened in december of 2009 .
and joel was explaining to me that , because usa today was one of america 's four papers of record , it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference , which meant that , if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on monday , the opening day of the conference , it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers .
so we started talking about climate change .
and it turned out that joel and i were both bothered by the same thing , which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or was n't , which , to both of us , seems somewhat intentionally off point .
because first of all , there 's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists .
now governor perry of my newly-adopted state of texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the republican presidential nomination , proclaiming over and over that the science was n't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of texas were on fire .
and perry 's policy solution was to ask the people of texas to pray for rain .
personally , i was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but back in 2009 , the question joel and i kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science .
so we tossed it back and forth until joel came up with this .
cartoon : " what if it 's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 've got to love that idea .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how about that ? how about we create a better world for nothing ?
not for god , not for country , not for profit - just as a basic metric for global decision-making .
and this cartoon hit the bull 's eye .
shortly after the conference was over , joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the epa in washington whose wall it now hangs on .
and not long after that , he got another request for a copy from the head of the epa in california who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in sacramento last year .
and it did n't stop there .
to date , joel 's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups , in the united states , canada and europe .
and earlier this year , he got a request from the green party in australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that is a lot of punch for 14 words .
so my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny , because you might just find the question that you 've been looking for .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic , which pat said makes 70 percent , but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region 's population .
qatar is no exception to the region .
it 's a very young nation led by young people .
we have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the ipods , and for me the abaya , my traditional dress that i 'm wearing today .
now this is not a religious garment , nor is it a religious statement .
instead , it 's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear .
now i remember a few years ago , a journalist asked dr. sheikha , who 's sitting here , president of qatar university - who , by the way , is a woman - he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way .
her answer was quite the contrary .
instead , she felt more free , more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya .
she could come to work in her pajamas and nobody would care .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not that you do ; i 'm just saying .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my point is here , people have a choice - just like the indian lady could wear her sari or the japanese woman could wear her kimono .
we are changing our culture from within , but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions .
we know that modernization is happening .
and yes , qatar wants to be a modern nation .
but at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our arab heritage .
it 's important for us to grow organically .
and we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance .
in fact , research has shown that the more the world is flat , if i use tom friedman 's analogy , or global , the more and more people are wanting to be different .
and for us young people , they 're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves .
which is why i prefer the richard wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global .
we do n't want to be all the same , but we want to respect each other and understand each other .
and therefore tradition becomes more important , not less important .
life necessitates a universal world , however , we believe in the security of having a local identity .
and this is what the leaders of this region we 're trying to be part of this global village , but at the same time we 're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development .
i 'm a representation of that phenomenon .
and i think a lot of people in this room , i can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself .
and i 'm sure , although we ca n't see the people in washington , they are in the same position .
we 're continuously trying to straddle different worlds , different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others .
so i want to ask a question : what should culture in the 21st century look like ?
in a time where the world is becoming personalized , when the mobile phone , the burger , the telephone , everything has its own personal identity , how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others ?
how does that impact our desert culture ?
i 'm not sure of how many of you in washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and , the more recent , museum of islamic art opened in qatar in 2008 .
i myself am personalizing these cultural developments , but i also understand that this has to be done organically .
yes , we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions , but what i think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this ca n't happen from outside , it has to come from within .
and guess what ?
you might be surprised to know that most people in the gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women .
i want to ask you , why do you think this is ?
is it because it 's a soft option ; we have nothing else to do ?
no , i do n't think so .
i think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally .
it 's a natural component for bringing people together , discussing ideas - in the same way we 're doing here at ted .
we 're here , we 're part of a community , sharing out ideas and discussing them .
art becomes a very important part of our national identity .
the existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation 's development of cultural identity is very important .
you know , art and culture is big business .
ask me .
ask the chairpersons and ceos of sotheby 's and christie 's .
ask charles saatchi about great art .
they make a lot of money .
so i think women in our society are becoming leaders , because they realize that for their future generations , it 's very important to maintain our cultural identities .
why else do greeks demand the return of the elgin marbles ?
and why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum ?
why does it take me months on end to get an export license from london or new york in order to get pieces into my country ?
in few hours , shirin neshat , my friend from iran who 's a very important artist for us will be talking to you .
she lives in new york city , but she does n't try to be a western artist .
instead , she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture , nation and heritage .
she does that through important visual forms of photography and film .
in the same way , qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within .
our mission is of cultural integration and independence .
we do n't want to have what there is in the west .
we do n't want their collections .
we want to build our own identities , our own fabric , create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us .
in a few days , we will be opening the arab museum of modern art .
we have done extensive research to ensure that arab and muslim artists , and arabs who are not muslims - not all arabs are muslims , by the way - but we make sure that they are represented in this new institution .
this institution is government-backed and it has been the case for the past three decades .
we will open the museum in a few days , and i welcome all of you to get on qatar airways and come and join us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this museum is just as important to us as the west .
some of you might have heard of the algerian artist baya mahieddine , but i doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in picasso 's studio in paris in the 1930s .
for me it was a new discovery .
and i think with time , in the years to come we 'll be learning a lot about our picassos , our legers and our cezannes .
we do have artists , but unfortunately we have not discovered them yet .
now visual expression is just one form of culture integration .
we have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of youtube and social networking to express their stories , share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices .
in a similar way , we have created the doha film institute .
now the doha film institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking .
last year we did n't have one qatari woman filmmaker .
today i am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 qatari women filmmakers to edit , tell their own stories in their own voices .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now if you 'll allow me , i would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture .
and this is one of our filmmakers ' products .
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : hey listen ! did you know that the stocks are up ?
who are you playing ?
girl : uncle khaled . here , put on the headscarf .
khaled : why would i want to put it on ?
girl : do as you 're told , young girl .
boy : no , you play mom and i play dad . -lrb- girl : but it 's my game . -rrb- play by yourself then .
girl : women ! one word and they get upset .
useless .
thank you . thank you !
-lrb- applause -rrb- sm : going back to straddling between east and west , last month we had our second doha tribeca film festival here in doha .
the doha tribeca film festival was held at our new cultural hub , katara .
it attracted 42,000 people , and we showcased 51 films .
now the doha tribeca film festival is not an imported festival , but rather an important festival between the cities of new york and doha .
it 's important for two things .
first , it allows us to showcase our arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world , new york city .
at the same time , we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world .
they 're learning our culture , our language , our heritage and realizing we 're just as different and just the same as each other .
now over and over again , people have said , " let 's build bridges , " and frankly , i want to do more than that .
i would like break the walls of ignorance between east and west - no , not the soft option that we have discussed before , but rather the soft power that joseph nye has spoken about before .
culture 's a very important tool to bring people together .
we should not underestimate it .
" know thyself , " that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling .
now i do n't pretend to have all the answers , but i know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading .
this is a very interesting journey .
i welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions .
familiarity destroys and trumps fear . try it .
ladies and gentlemen , thank you very much . shokran .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tom green : that 's a 4chan thing .
these kids on the internet , they have this group of kids and they like to say funny words like " barrel roll . "
it 's a video game move from " star fox . "
" star fox 20 " ? -lrb- assistant : " star fox 64 . " -rrb- tom green : yeah . and they 've been dogging me for a year .
i got to tell you , it 's driving me nuts , actually .
sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night and i scream , " 4chan ! "
christopher poole : when i was 15 , i found this website called futaba channel .
and it was a japanese forum and imageboard .
that format of forum , at that time , was not well-known outside of japan .
and so what i did is i took it , i translated it into english , and i stuck it up for my friends to use .
now , six and a half years later , over seven million people are using it , contributing over 700,000 posts per day .
and we 've gone from one board to 48 boards .
this is what it looks like .
so , what 's unique about the site is that it 's anonymous , and it has no memory .
there 's no archive , there are no barriers , there 's no registration .
these things that we 're used to with forums do n't exist on 4chan .
and that 's led to this discussion that 's completely raw , completely unfiltered .
what the site 's known for , because it has this environment , is it 's fostered the creation of a lot of internet phenomena , viral videos and whatnot , known as " memes . "
two of the largest memes that have come out of this site some of you might be familiar with are these lolcats - just silly pictures of cats with text .
and this resonates with millions of people , apparently , because there are tens of thousands of these , and there is a whole blogging empire now dedicated to pictures like these .
and rick astley 's kind of rebirth these past two years ...
rickroll was this bait and switch , really simple , classic bait and switch .
somebody says they 're linking to something interesting , and you get an ' 80s pop song . that 's all it was .
and it got big enough to the point where there was a float last year at the macy 's thanksgiving day parade , and rick astley pops out , and rickrolls millions of people on television .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are thousands of memes that come out of the site .
there are a handful that have escaped into the mainstream , the ones i 've just shown you , but every day , every month , people are producing thousands of these .
so does a site like this have rules ?
we do ; they 're the codified rules that i 've come up with , which are more-or-less ignored by the community .
and so they 've come up with their own set of rules , the " rules of the internet . "
and so there are three that i want to show you specifically .
rule one is you do n't talk about / b / .
two is you do not talk about / b / .
and this one 's kind of interesting : " if it exists , there is porn of it . no exceptions . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i will spare you that slide .
i assure you , it is very true .
/ b / is the first board we started with , and it is , in many ways , the beating heart of the website .
it is where a third of all the traffic is going .
and / b / is known for , more than anything , not just the memes they 've created , but the exploits .
and chris just touched on one of those a second ago , and that was the time 100 poll .
so somebody at time , at the magazine , thought it would be fun to nominate me for this thing they did last year .
and so they placed me on it , and the internet got wind of it . my community decided they wanted me to win it .
i did n't instruct them to do it ; they just decided that that 's what they wanted .
and so , you know , 390 percent approval rating ai n't so bad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they broke that poll .
and i ended up on top .
i ended up at this really fancy party .
but that 's not what 's interesting about this .
it 's that they were n't putting me at the top of this list ; they were actually - it got so sophisticated to the point where they gamed all of the top 21 places to spell " marblecake . also , the game . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the amount of time and effort that went into that is absolutely incredible .
and " marble cake " is significant because it is the channel that this group called anonymous organized .
anonymous is this group of people that protested , very famously , scientology .
the story is , scientology had this embarrassing video of tom cruise . it went up online .
they got it taken offline and managed to piss off part of the internet .
and so these people , over 7,000 people , less than one month later , organized in a hundred cities around the globe and - this is l.a. - protested the church of scientology , and they have continued to do so , now , two full years after the fact .
they are still protesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 've got this activist group that 's this grassroots group that 's come out of the site .
and last , i 'm going to show you the example , the story of dusty the cat .
dusty is the name that we 've given to this cat .
this young man posted a video of him abusing his cat on youtube .
and , you know , this did n't sit well with people , and so there was this outpouring of support for people to do something about this .
so what they did is they - i mean , they put csi to shame here - the internet detectives came out .
they matched , they found his myspace .
they took the youtube video and they mashed everything in the video .
within 24 hours , they had his name , and within 48 hours , he was arrested .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so , what i think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it 's this open place .
as i said , it 's raw , it 's unfiltered .
and sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now .
they 're endangered because we 're moving towards social networking .
we 're moving towards persistent identity .
we 're moving towards , you know , a lack of privacy , really .
we 're sacrificing a lot of that , and i think in doing so , moving towards those things , we 're losing something valuable .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
got a couple questions for you .
but if i ask them , is the ted website going to go down ?
cp : you 're lucky that this is not being streamed to them live right now .
ca : well , you never know . some of them - we 've got people in 75 countries out there watching .
do n't tell .
but seriously , this issue on anonymity is - i mean , you made the case there .
but anonymity basically allows people to say anything , all the rules gone .
you 've had to wrestle with issues like child pornography .
and i 'm just curious whether you sometimes lie awake in the night worrying that you 've opened pandora 's box .
cp : yes and no .
i mean , for as much good that kind of comes out of this environment , there is plenty of bad .
there are plenty of downsides .
but i think that the greater good is being served here by just allowing people - there are very few places , now , where you can go and not have identity , to be completely anonymous and say whatever you 'd like .
and saying whatever you like , i think , is powerful .
doing whatever you like is now crossing a line .
but i think it 's important to have these places .
when i get emails , people say , " thank you for giving me this place , this outlet , where i can come after work and be myself . "
ca : but words , saying things , you know , can be constructive ; it can be really damaging .
and if you cut the link between what is said and any attribution back to you , i mean , surely there are huge risks with that .
cp : there are , certainly .
but - ca : tell me about what - i mean , i think you asked the board what you might say at ted , right ?
cp : yeah , i posted a thread on sunday .
and within 24 hours , it had over 12,000 responses .
and the thing is , i did n't make it into that presentation because i ca n't read to you anything that they said , more or less .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 99 percent of it is just , would have been , you know , bleeped out .
but there were some good things that came out of that too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- love and peace were mentioned .
ca : love and peace were mentioned , kind of with quote marks around them , right ?
cp : cats and dogs were mentioned too .
ca : and that content is all off the board now .
right , it 's gone ? or is it still up there ?
cp : i stuck that thread so it lasted a few days .
it went up to about 16,000 posts , and now it has been taken off .
ca : okay , well .
now , i 'm not sure i would have necessarily recommended everyone at ted to go and check it out anyway .
chris , you yourself ? i mean , you 're a figure of some intrigue .
you 've got this surprising semi-underground influence , but it 's not making you a lot of money , yet .
what 's the commercial picture here ?
cp : the commercial picture is that there really is n't much of one , i guess .
the site has adult content on it .
i mean , obviously , it 's got some very offensive , obscene content on it , just in terms of language alone .
and when you 've got that , you 've pretty much sacrificed any hope of making lots of money .
ca : but you still live at home , right ?
cp : i actually moved out recently .
ca : that 's very cool .
-lrb- applause -rrb- cp : i got out of mom 's , and i 'm back in school right now .
ca : but what conversations did you or do you have with your mother about 4chan ?
cp : at first , very kind of pained , awkward conversations .
the content is not dinner table conversation in the least .
but my parents - i think part of why they kind of are able to appreciate it is because they do n't understand it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : and they were probably pleased to see you on top of the time poll .
cp : yeah . they still did n't know what to think of that though .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : and so , in 10 years ' time , what do you picture yourself doing ?
cp : that 's a good question .
as i said , i just went back to school , and i am considering majoring in urban studies and then going on to urban planning , kind of taking whatever i 've learned from online communities and trying to adapt that to a physical community .
ca : chris , thank you . absolutely fascinating . thank you for coming to ted .
when i was a student here in oxford in the 1970s , the future of the world was bleak .
the population explosion was unstoppable .
global famine was inevitable .
a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives .
the acid rain was falling on the forests .
the desert was advancing by a mile or two a year .
the oil was running out , and a nuclear winter would finish us off .
none of those things happened , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and astonishingly , if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime , the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet , in real terms , adjusted for inflation , has tripled .
lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime .
child mortality is down by two-thirds .
per-capita food production is up by a third .
and all this at a time when the population has doubled .
how did we achieve that , whether you think it 's a good thing or not ?
how did we achieve that ?
how did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous ?
the size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population , and the level of the graph represents gdp per capita .
i think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine , to meet and , indeed , to mate .
in other words , you need to understand how ideas have sex .
i want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this .
these are both real objects .
one is an acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by homo erectus .
the other is obviously a computer mouse .
they 're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree .
i 've tried to work out which is bigger , and it 's almost impossible .
and that 's because they 're both designed to fit the human hand .
they 're both technologies . in the end , their similarity is not that interesting .
it just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand .
the differences are what interest me , because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years - from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago .
homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations .
of course there were a few changes , but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days .
there was no progress , no innovation .
it 's an extraordinary phenomenon , but it 's true .
whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years .
and there 's another difference too , which is the object on the left is made from one substance .
the object on the right is made from a confection of different substances , from silicon and metal and plastic and so on .
and more than that , it 's a confection of different ideas , the idea of plastic , the idea of a laser , the idea of transistors .
they 've all been combined together in this technology .
and it 's this combination , this cumulative technology , that intrigues me , because i think it 's the secret to understanding what 's happening in the world .
my body 's an accumulation of ideas too : the idea of skin cells , the idea of brain cells , the idea of liver cells .
they 've come together .
how does evolution do cumulative , combinatorial things ?
well , it uses sexual reproduction .
in an asexual species , if you get two different mutations in different creatures , a green one and a red one , then one has to be better than the other .
one goes extinct for the other to survive .
but if you have a sexual species , then it 's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages .
so what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species .
it 's not confined to its own lineage .
what 's the process that 's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution ?
and i think the answer is exchange , the habit of exchanging one thing for another .
it 's a unique human feature .
no other animal does it .
you can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange - and indeed there 's reciprocity in other animals - but the exchange of one object for another never happens .
as adam smith said , " no man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can have culture without exchange .
you can have , as it were , asexual culture .
chimpanzees , killer whales , these kinds of creatures , they have culture .
they teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring .
in this case , chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks .
but the difference is that these cultures never expand , never grow , never accumulate , never become combinatorial , and the reason is because there is no sex , as it were , there is no exchange of ideas .
chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops .
there 's no exchange of ideas between them .
and why does exchange raise living standards ?
well , the answer came from david ricardo in 1817 .
and here is a stone age version of his story , although he told it in terms of trade between countries .
adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe .
oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe .
so oz is better at both spears and axes than adam .
he does n't need adam .
he can make his own spears and axes .
well no , because if you think about it , if oz makes two spears and adam make two axes , and then they trade , then they will each have saved an hour of work .
and the more they do this , the more true it 's going to be , because the more they do this , the better adam is going to get at making axes and the better oz is going to get at making spears .
so the gains from trade are only going to grow .
and this is one of the beauties of exchange , is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization , which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on .
adam and oz both saved an hour of time .
that is prosperity , the saving of time in satisfying your needs .
ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by .
if you had to start from scratch , let 's say you go out into the countryside .
you find a sheep . you kill it . you get the fat out of it .
you render it down . you make a candle , etc. etc .
how long is it going to take you ? quite a long time .
how long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you 're on the average wage in britain today ?
and the answer is about half a second .
back in 1950 , you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light .
and that 's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you 've gained since 1950 , as it were , because that 's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else , or you can acquire another good or service .
and back in 1880 , it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light on the average wage .
back in 1800 , you 'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour .
in other words , the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800 .
go back to this image of the axe and the mouse , and ask yourself : " who made them and for who ? "
the stone axe was made by someone for himself .
it was self-sufficiency .
we call that poverty these days .
but the object on the right was made for me by other people .
how many other people ?
tens ? hundreds ? thousands ?
you know , i think it 's probably millions .
because you 've got to include the man who grew the coffee , which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig , who was drilling for oil , which was going to be made into the plastic , etc .
they were all working for me , to make a mouse for me .
and that 's the way society works .
that 's what we 've achieved as a species .
in the old days , if you were rich , you literally had people working for you .
that 's how you got to be rich ; you employed them .
louis xiv had a lot of people working for him .
they made his silly outfits , like this , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they did his silly hairstyles , or whatever .
he had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night .
but a modern tourist going around the palace of versailles and looking at louis xiv 's pictures , he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too .
they 're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over paris , and they 're all ready to serve you at an hour 's notice with an excellent meal that 's probably got higher quality than louis xiv even had .
and that 's what we 've done , because we 're all working for each other .
we 're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other 's living standards .
now , you do get other animals working for each other too .
ants are a classic example ; workers work for queens and queens work for workers .
but there 's a big difference , which is that it only happens within the colony .
there 's no working for each other across the colonies .
and the reason for that is because there 's a reproductive division of labor .
that is to say , they specialize with respect to reproduction .
the queen does it all .
in our species , we do n't like doing that .
it 's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves , is reproduction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even in england , we do n't leave reproduction to the queen .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so when did this habit start ?
and how long has it been going on ? and what does it mean ?
well , i think , probably , the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor .
but i 've got no evidence for that .
it just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male .
in all hunter-gatherer societies today , there 's a foraging division of labor between , on the whole , hunting males and gathering females .
it is n't always quite that simple , but there 's a distinction between specialized roles for males and females .
and the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides .
the woman knows that , in the hadzas ' case here - digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat - she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat .
and she does n't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog .
and the man knows that he does n't have to do any digging to get roots .
all he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it 's big enough to share some .
and so both sides raise each other 's standards of living through the sexual division of labor .
when did this happen ? we do n't know , but it 's possible that neanderthals did n't do this .
they were a highly cooperative species .
they were a highly intelligent species .
their brains on average , by the end , were bigger than yours and mine in this room today .
they were imaginative . they buried their dead .
they had language , probably , because we know they had the foxp2 gene of the same kind as us , which was discovered here in oxford .
and so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills .
they were brilliant people . i 'm not dissing the neanderthals .
but there 's no evidence of a sexual division of labor .
there 's no evidence of gathering behavior by females .
it looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men .
and the other thing there 's no evidence for is exchange between groups , because the objects that you find in neanderthal remains , the tools they made , are always made from local materials .
for example , in the caucasus there 's a site where you find local neanderthal tools .
they 're always made from local chert .
in the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date , 30,000 years ago , and some of those are from local chert , but more - but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away .
and when human beings began moving objects around like this , it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups .
trade is 10 times as old as farming .
people forget that . people think of trade as a modern thing .
exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years .
and the earliest evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in africa , when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in ethiopia .
you also see seashells - as discovered by a team here in oxford - moving 125 miles inland from the mediterranean in algeria .
and that 's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups .
and that will have led to specialization .
how do you know that long-distance movement means trade rather than migration ?
well , you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals , who quarried for stone axes at a place called mount isa , which was a quarry owned by the kalkadoon tribe .
they traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs , and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of australia .
so long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade , not migration .
what happens when you cut people off from exchange , from the ability to exchange and specialize ?
and the answer is that not only do you slow down technological progress , you can actually throw it into reverse .
an example is tasmania .
when the sea level rose and tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago , the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland , they actually experienced regress .
they gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had .
it 's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island .
how many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years ?
it did n't happen in tierra del fuego - similar island , similar people .
the reason : because tierra del fuego is separated from south america by a much narrower straight , and there was trading contact across that straight throughout 10,000 years .
the tasmanians were isolated .
go back to this image again and ask yourself , not only who made it and for who , but who knew how to make it .
in the case of the stone axe , the man who made it knew how to make it .
but who knows how to make a computer mouse ?
nobody , literally nobody .
there is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse .
i mean this quite seriously .
the president of the computer mouse company does n't know .
he just knows how to run a company .
the person on the assembly line does n't know because he does n't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic , and so on .
we all know little bits , but none of us knows the whole .
i am of course quoting from a famous essay by leonard read , the economist in the 1950s , called " i , pencil " in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made , and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil , because the people who assemble it do n't know how to mine graphite , and they do n't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing .
and what we 've done in human society , through exchange and specialization , is we 've created the ability to do things that we do n't even understand .
it 's not the same with language .
with language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other .
but with technology , we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities .
we 've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree .
and by the way , that 's one of the reasons that i 'm not interested in the debate about i.q. , about whether some groups have higher i.q.s than other groups .
it 's completely irrelevant .
what 's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas , and how well they 're cooperating , not how clever the individuals are .
so we 've created something called the collective brain .
we 're just the nodes in the network .
we 're the neurons in this brain .
it 's the interchange of ideas , the meeting and mating of ideas between them , that is causing technological progress , incrementally , bit by bit .
however , bad things happen .
and in the future , as we go forward , we will , of course , experience terrible things .
there will be wars ; there will be depressions ; there will be natural disasters .
awful things will happen in this century , i 'm absolutely sure .
but i 'm also sure that , because of the connections people are making , and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before , i 'm also sure that technology will advance , and therefore living standards will advance .
because through the cloud , through crowd sourcing , through the bottom-up world that we 've created , where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate , we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- space , we all know what it looks like .
we 've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives , from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies .
but whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space , we have no sense of what space sounds like .
and indeed , most people associate space with silence .
but the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking .
and yet despite this , hardly any of us have ever heard space .
how many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star ?
well in case you 've ever wondered , this is what the sun sounds like .
-lrb- static -rrb- -lrb- crackling -rrb- -lrb- static -rrb- -lrb- crackling -rrb- this is the planet jupiter .
-lrb- soft crackling -rrb- and this is the space probe cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of saturn .
-lrb- crackling -rrb- this is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter , spinning in the distant universe .
-lrb- tapping -rrb- so my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe .
and you may wonder , how do we know what these sounds are ?
how can we tell the difference between the sound of the sun and the sound of a pulsar ?
well the answer is the science of radio astronomy .
radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers , which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky .
and just like the signals that we send and receive here on earth , we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques .
and therefore , it 's through listening that we 've come to uncover some of the universe 's most important secrets - its scale , what it 's made of and even how old it is .
so today , i 'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening .
it 's punctuated by three quick anecdotes , which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space .
now this story does n't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft , but a rather more humble technology - and in fact , the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we 're all part of today : the telephone .
it 's 1876 , it 's in boston , and this is alexander graham bell who was working with thomas watson on the invention of the telephone .
a key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire , which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in boston .
the line carried the telephone signals that would later make bell a household name .
but like any long length of charged wire , it also inadvertently became an antenna .
thomas watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected .
now you have to remember , this is 10 years before heinrich hertz proved the existence of radio waves - 15 years before nikola tesla 's four-tuned circuit - nearly 20 years before marconi 's first broadcast .
so thomas watson was n't listening to us .
we did n't have the technology to transmit .
so what were these strange noises ?
watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature .
some of the crackles and pops were lightning , but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin .
using the very first telephone , watson was in fact dialed into the heavens .
as he correctly guessed , some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the sun .
it was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to - a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora .
so whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution , watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves .
he had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them .
fast-forward 50 years , and bell and watson 's technology has completely transformed global communications .
but going from slinging some wire across rooftops in boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the atlantic ocean seabed is no easy matter .
and so before long , bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution .
radio could carry sound without wires .
but the medium is lossy - it 's subject to a lot of noise and interference .
so bell employed an engineer to study those noises , to try and find out where they came from , with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec , which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony .
most of the noises that the engineer , karl jansky , investigated were fairly prosaic in origin .
they turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power .
but there was one persistent noise that jansky could n't identify , and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day .
now any astronomer will tell you , this is the telltale sign of something that does n't originate from earth .
jansky had made a historic discovery , that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves .
fifty years on from watson 's accidental encounter with the sun , jansky 's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration : the radio astronomy age .
over the next few years , astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky , about jupiter and the sun , by listening .
let 's jump ahead again .
it 's 1964 , and we 're back at bell labs .
and once again , two scientists have got a problem with noise .
arno penzias and robert wilson were using the horn antenna at bell 's holmdel laboratory to study the milky way with extraordinary precision .
they were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity .
there was a glitch in their soundtrack .
a mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research .
it was in the microwave range , and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously .
now this did n't make any sense , and like any reasonable engineer or scientist , they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself , it must be the dish .
there were pigeons roosting in the dish .
and so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings , get the disk kind of operational again , normal operations would resume .
but the noise did n't disappear .
the mysterious noise that penzias and wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard .
it was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe .
this was the first experimental evidence that the big bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago .
so our story ends at the beginning - the beginning of all things , the big bang .
this is the noise that penzias and wilson heard - the oldest sound that you 're ever going to hear , the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the big bang .
-lrb- fuzz -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , extinction is a different kind of death .
it 's bigger .
we did n't really realize that until 1914 , when the last passenger pigeon , a female named martha , died at the cincinnati zoo .
this had been the most abundant bird in the world that 'd been in north america for six million years .
suddenly it was n't here at all .
flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun .
aldo leopold said this was a biological storm , a feathered tempest .
and indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest , from the mississippi to the atlantic , from canada down to the gulf .
but it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades .
what happened ?
well , commercial hunting happened .
these birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton , and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground , they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands .
it was the cheapest source of protein in america .
by the end of the century , there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers .
there 's an upside to the story .
this made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the american bison , and so these birds saved the buffalos .
but a lot of other animals were n't saved .
the carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere .
it was hunted to death for its feathers .
there was a bird that people liked on the east coast called the heath hen .
it was loved . they tried to protect it . it died anyway .
a local newspaper spelled out , " there is no survivor , there is no future , there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again . "
there 's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things , and it happened to lots of birds that people loved .
it happened to lots of mammals .
another keystone species is a famous animal called the european aurochs .
there was sort of a movie made about it recently .
and the aurochs was like the bison .
this was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire europe and asian continent , from spain to korea .
the documentation of this animal goes back to the lascaux cave paintings .
the extinctions still go on .
there 's an ibex in spain called the bucardo .
it went extinct in 2000 .
there was a marvelous animal , a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in tasmania , south of australia , called the tasmanian tiger .
it was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos .
a little bit of film was shot .
sorrow , anger , mourning .
do n't mourn . organize .
what if you could find out that , using the dna in museum specimens , fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back , what would you do ? where would you start ?
well , you 'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there .
i started with my wife , ryan phelan , who ran a biotech business called dna direct , and through her , one of her colleagues , george church , one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed .
so he and ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the wyss institute in harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons , conservation ornithologists , bioethicists , and fortunately passenger pigeon dna had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named beth shapiro .
all she needed from those specimens at the smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue , because down in there is what is called ancient dna .
it 's dna which is pretty badly fragmented , but with good techniques now , you can basically reassemble the whole genome .
then the question is , can you reassemble , with that genome , the whole bird ?
george church thinks you can .
so in his book , " regenesis , " which i recommend , he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species , and he has a machine called the multiplex automated genome engineering machine .
it 's kind of like an evolution machine .
you try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip , and the ones that win , that you can then put into a living organism . it 'll work .
the precision of this , one of george 's famous unreadable slides , nevertheless points out that there 's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair .
the passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome .
so what you 're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene .
it 's called an allele .
well that 's what happens in normal hybridization anyway .
so this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative .
now along the way , george points out that his technology , the technology of synthetic biology , is currently accelerating at four times the rate of moore 's law .
it 's been doing that since 2005 , and it 's likely to continue .
okay , the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon . they 're abundant . there 's some around here .
genetically , the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon .
there 's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon .
if you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits , you 've got the extinct bird back , cooing at you .
now , there 's work to do .
you have to figure out exactly what genes matter .
so there 's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon , genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon , and so on with the red eye , peach-colored breast , flocking , and so on .
add them all up and the result wo n't be perfect .
but it should be be perfect enough , because nature does n't do perfect either .
so this meeting in boston led to three things .
first off , ryan and i decided to create a nonprofit called revive and restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way , and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon .
another direct result was a young grad student named ben novak , who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient dna , himself sequenced the passenger pigeon , using money from his family and friends .
we hired him full-time .
now , this photograph i took of him last year at the smithsonian , he 's looking down at martha , the last passenger pigeon alive .
so if he 's successful , she wo n't be the last .
the third result of the boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction , but they 'd never met each other .
and national geographic got interested because national geographic has the theory that the last century , discovery was basically finding things , and in this century , discovery is basically making things .
de-extinction falls in that category .
so they hosted and funded this meeting . and 35 scientists , they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists , basically meeting to see if they had work to do together .
some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical .
there 's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species , they 're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern siberia , in the netherlands , and in hawaii .
henri , from the netherlands , with a dutch last name i wo n't try to pronounce , is working on the aurochs .
the aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle , and so basically its genome is alive , it 's just unevenly distributed .
so what they 're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive , hardy-looking cattle like that maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild , over time , with selective back-breeding , the aurochs .
now , re-wilding is moving faster in korea than it is in america , and so the plan is , with these re-wilded areas all over europe , they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job , its old ecological role , of clearing the somewhat barren , closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it .
another amazing story came from alberto fernández-arias .
alberto worked with the bucardo in spain .
the last bucardo was a female named celia who was still alive , but then they captured her , they got a little bit of tissue from her ear , they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen , released her back into the wild , but a few months later , she was found dead under a fallen tree .
they took the dna from that ear , they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat , the pregnancy came to term , and a live baby bucardo was born .
it was the first de-extinction in history .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it was short-lived .
sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems .
this one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes , but alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then , and this will move ahead , and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern spain .
cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is oliver ryder .
at the san diego zoo , his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years .
now , when it 's frozen that deep , minus 196 degrees celsius , the cells are intact and the dna is intact .
they 're basically viable cells , so someone like bob lanza at advanced cell technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the javan banteng , put it in a cow , the cow went to term , and what was born was a live , healthy baby javan banteng , who thrived and is still alive .
the most exciting thing for bob lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells , like sperm and eggs .
so now we go to mike mcgrew who is a scientist at roslin institute in scotland , and mike 's doing miracles with birds .
so he 'll take , say , falcon skin cells , fibroblast , turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells .
since it 's so pluripotent , it can become germ plasm .
he then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have , basically , the gonads of a falcon .
you get a male and a female each of those , and out of them comes falcons .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens .
ben novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting .
he showed how all of this can be put together .
the sequence of events : he 'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon , he 'll take the techniques of george church and get passenger pigeon dna , the techniques of robert lanza and michael mcgrew , get that dna into chicken gonads , and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs , squabs , and now you 're getting a population of passenger pigeons .
it does raise the question of , they 're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon .
so what do you do about that ?
well birds are pretty hard-wired , as it happens , so most of that is already in their dna , but to supplement it , part of ben 's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds .
there were some conservationists , really famous conservationists like stanley temple , who is one of the founders of conservation biology , and kate jones from the iucn , which does the red list .
they 're excited about all this , but they 're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive , that have n't gone extinct yet .
you see , you want to work on protecting the animals out there .
you want to work on getting the market for ivory in asia down so you 're not using 25,000 elephants a year .
but at the same time , conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out .
and so the red list is really important , keep track of what 's endangered and critically endangered , and so on .
but they 're about to create what they call a green list , and the green list will have species that are doing fine , thank you , species that were endangered , like the bald eagle , but they 're much better off now , thanks to everybody 's good work , and protected areas around the world that are very , very well managed .
so basically , they 're learning how to build on good news .
and they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on .
here 's a couple related examples .
captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species .
the california condor was down to 22 birds in 1987 .
everybody thought is was finished .
thanks to captive breeding at the san diego zoo , there 's 405 of them now , 226 are out in the wild .
that technology will be used on de-extincted animals .
another success story is the mountain gorilla in central africa .
in 1981 , dian fossey was sure they were going extinct .
there were just 254 left .
now there are 880 . they 're increasing in population by three percent a year .
the secret is , they have an eco-tourism program , which is absolutely brilliant .
so this photograph was taken last month by ryan with an iphone .
that 's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors .
another interesting project , though it 's going to need some help , is the northern white rhinoceros .
there 's no breeding pairs left .
but this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of dna for this animal is available in the frozen zoo .
a bit of cloning , you can get them back .
these have been private meetings so far .
i think it 's time for the subject to go public .
what do people think about it ?
you know , do you want extinct species back ?
do you want extinct species back ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- tinker bell is going to come fluttering down .
it is a tinker bell moment , because what are people excited about with this ?
what are they concerned about ?
we 're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon .
so ben novak , even as we speak , is joining the group that beth shapiro has at uc santa cruz .
they 're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon .
as that data matures , they 'll send it to george church , who will work his magic , get passenger pigeon dna out of that .
we 'll get help from bob lanza and mike mcgrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents , and then from then on , it 's passenger pigeons all the way , maybe for the next six million years .
you can do the same thing , as the costs come down , for the carolina parakeet , for the great auk , for the heath hen , for the ivory-billed woodpecker , for the eskimo curlew , for the caribbean monk seal , for the woolly mammoth .
because the fact is , humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years .
we have the ability now , and maybe the moral obligation , to repair some of the damage .
most of that we 'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands , by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species .
but some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
i 've got a question .
so , this is an emotional topic . some people stand .
i suspect there are some people out there sitting , kind of asking tormented questions , almost , about , well , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait a minute , there 's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way .
there 's going to be unintended consequences .
you 're going to uncork some sort of pandora 's box of who-knows-what . do they have a point ?
stewart brand : well , the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct , and many of them were keystone species , and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go .
now , there 's the shifting baseline problem , which is , so when these things come back , they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love .
i think that 's , you know , part of how it 'll work .
this is a long , slow process - one of the things i like about it , it 's multi-generation .
we will get woolly mammoths back .
ca : well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling .
thank you so much for presenting . sb : thank you .
ca : thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- in the ocean , what is the common point between oil , plastic and radioactivity ?
on the top line , this is the bp oil spill : billions of barrels of oil gushing in the gulf of mexico .
the middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean , and the third line is radioactive material leaking from fukushima nuclear power plant in the pacific ocean .
well , the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces .
this should make us feel very , terribly awful as much as it should make us feel hopeful , because if we have the power to create these problems , we may as well have the power to remediate these problems .
but what about natural forces ?
well , that 's exactly what i want to talk about today , is how we can use these natural forces to remediate these man-made problems .
when the bp oil spill happened , i was working at mit , and i was in charge of developing an oil spill-cleaning technology .
and i had a chance to go in the gulf of mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working .
more than 700 of these boats , which are fishermen boats repurposed with oil absorbent in white and oil containment in orange , were used , but they only collected three percent of the oil on the surface , and the health of the cleaners were very deeply affected .
i was working on a very interesting technology at mit , but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology , and it was going to be a very expensive technology , and also it would be patented .
so i wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast , that would be cheap , and that would be open-source , so , because oil spills are not only happening in the gulf of mexico , and that would be using renewable energy .
so i quit my dream job , and i moved to new orleans , and i kept on studying how the oil spill was happening .
currently , what they were doing is that they were using these small fishing boats , and they were cleaning clean lines in an ocean of dirt .
if you 're using the exact same amount of surface of oil absorbent , but you 're just paying attention to natural patterns , and if you 're going up the winds , you can collect a lot more material .
if you 're multiplying the rig , so you multiply how many layers of absorbent you 're using , you can collect a lot more .
but it 's extremely difficult to move oil absorbent against the winds , the surface currents and the waves .
these are enormous forces .
so the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind .
so this did n't require any invention .
we just took a simple sailing boat and we tried to pull something long and heavy , but as we tacked back and forth , what we lost was two things : we were losing pulling power and direction .
and so , i thought , what about if we just take the rudder from the back of the boat to the front , would we have better control ?
so i built this small sailing robot with the rudder at the front , and i was trying to pull something very long and heavy , so that 's a four-meter-long object just to pull , and i was surprised with just a 14-centimeter rudder , i could control four meters of absorbent .
then i was so happy that i kept playing with the robot , and so you see the robot has a front rudder here .
normally it 's at the back .
and , playing , i realized that the maneuverability of this was really amazing , and i could avoid an obstacle at the very last second , more maneuverable than a normal boat .
then i started publishing online , and some friends from korea , they started being interested in this , and we made a boat which has a front rudder and a back rudder , so we started interacting with this , and it was slightly better , although it was very small and a bit off balance , but then we thought , what if we have more than two points of control ?
what if the entire boat becomes a point of control ?
what if the entire boat changes shape ?
so - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- and so that 's the beginning of protei , and that 's the first boat in history that completely changed the shape of the hull in order to control it , and the properties of sailing that we get are very superior compared to a normal boat .
when we 're turning , we have the feeling of surfing , and the way it 's going up-wind , it 's very efficient .
this is low speed , low wind speed , and the maneuverability is very increased , and here i 'm going to do a small jibe , and look at the position of the sail .
what 's happening is that , because the boat changes shape , the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind .
we 're catching wind from both sides .
and this is exactly what we 're looking -lsb- for -rsb- if we want to pull something long and heavy .
we do n't want to lose pulling power , nor direction .
so , i wanted to know if this was possible to put this at an industrial level , so we made a large boat with a large sail , and with a very light hull , inflatable , very small footprint , so we have a very big size and power ratio .
after this , we wanted to see if we could implement this and automate the system , so we used the same system but we added a structure to it so we could activate the machine .
so , we used the same bladder-inflated system , and we took it for testing .
so this is happening in the netherlands .
we tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works .
and then we mounted a camera for controlling it , but quickly we saw that we would need a lot more weight at the bottom , so we had to take it back to the lab , and then we built a skin around it , we put batteries , remote controllers , and then we put it in the water and then we let it go in the water and see how well it would work , so let some rope out , and hope it 's going to work , and it worked okay , but we still have a long way .
our small prototype has given us good insight that it 's working very well , but we still need to work a lot more on this .
so what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology .
we went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two rudders to multiple rudders to the whole boat changing shape , and the more we are moving forward , and the more the design looks simple and cute . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but i wanted to show you a fish because - in fact , it 's very different from a fish .
a fish will move because - by changing like this , but our boat is propelled by the wind still , and the hull controls the trajectory .
so i brought to you for the first time on the ted stage protei number eight . it 's not the last one , but it 's a good one for making demos .
so the first thing as i show you in the video is that we may be able to control the trajectory of a sailing boat better , or we may be able to never be in irons , so never facing the wind , we always can catch the wind from both sides .
but new properties of a sailing boat .
so if you 're looking at the boat from this side , this might remind you of an airplane profile .
an airplane , when you 're moving in this direction , starts to lift , and that 's how it takes off .
now , if you 're taking the same system , and you 're putting vertical , you 're bending , and if you 're moving this way forward , your instinct will tell you that you might go this way , but if you 're moving fast enough , you might create what we call lateral lift , so we could get further or closer to the wind .
other property is this : a normal sailing boat has a centerboard here and a rudder at the back , and these two things are what creates most resistance and turbulence behind the boat , but because this does n't have either a centerboard or a rudder , we hope that if we keep working on this hull design we can improve and have less resistance .
the other thing is , most boats , when they reach a certain speed , and they are going on waves , they start to hit and slap on the surface of the water , and a lot of the energy moving forward is lost .
but if we 're going with the flow , if we pay attention to natural patterns instead of trying to be strong , but if you 're going with the flow , we may absorb a lot of environmental noises , so the wave energy , to actually save some energy to move forward .
so we may have developed the technology which is very efficient for pulling something long and heavy , but the idea is , what is the purpose of technology if it does n't reach the right hands ?
normal technology or innovation happens like this : somebody has an interesting idea , some other scientist or engineer , they take it to the next level , they make a theory about it and maybe they patent it , and then some industry will make a contract of exclusivity to manufacture and sell it , and then , eventually , a buyer will buy it , and we hope that they are going to use -lsb- it -rsb- for a good purpose .
what we really want is that this innovation happens continuously . the inventor and engineers and also the manufacturers and everybody works at the same time , but this would be sterile if this was happening in a parallel and uncrossed process .
what you really want is not a sequential , not parallel development .
you want to have a network of innovation .
you want everybody , like we 're doing now , to work at the same time , and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information , and that 's exactly what open hardware is about .
it 's to replace competition by collaboration .
it 's to transform any new product into a new market .
so what is open hardware ?
essentially , open hardware is a license .
it 's just an intellectual property setup .
it means that everybody is free to use , modify and distribute , and in exchange we only ask for two things : the name is credited - the name of the project - and also the people who make improvement , they share back with the community .
so it 's a very simple condition .
and i started this project alone in a garage in new orleans , but quickly after i wanted to publish and share this information , so i made a kickstarter , which is a crowd-fundraising platform , and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars .
with this money , i hired a team of young engineers from all over the world , and we rented a factory in rotterdam in the netherlands .
we were peer-learning , we were engineering , we were making things , prototyping , but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible , to fail as quickly as possible , to learn from .
this is a proud member of protei from korea , and on the right side , this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in mexico .
this idea really appealed to gabriella levine in new york , and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw , and she documented every step of the process , and she published it on instructables , which is a website for sharing inventions .
less than one week after , this is a team in eindhoven , it 's a school of engineering .
they made it , but they eventually published a simplified design .
they also made it into an instructable , and in less than one week , they had almost 10,000 views , and they got many new friends .
we 're working on also simpler technology , not that complex , with younger people and also older people , like this dinosaur is from mexico . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so protei is now an international network of innovation for selling technology using this shape-shifting hull .
and what puts us together is that we have a common , at least , global understanding of what the word " business " is , or what it should be .
this is how most work today .
business as usual is saying , what 's most important is to make lots of profit , and you 'll be using technology for that , and people will be your work force , instrumentalized , and environment is usually the last priority .
it will be just a way to , say , greenwash your audience and , say , increase your price tag .
what we 're trying to do , or what we believe , because this is how we believe the world really works , is that without the environment you have nothing .
we have the people so we need to protect each other , yes , and we 're a technology company , and profit is necessary to make this happen . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- if we have the courage to understand or accept that this actually how the world really works , and this is the order of priority that we need to choose , then it makes obvious why we need to choose open hardware for developing environmental technology , because we need to share information .
what 's next for us ?
so , this small machine that you 've seen , we 're hoping to make small toys like one-meter remote control protei that you can upgrade - so replace the remote control parts by androids , so the mobile phone , and arduino micro-controller , so you could be controlling this from your mobile phone , your tablet .
then what we want to do is create six-meter versions so we can test the maximum performance of these machines , so we can go at very , very high speed .
so imagine yourself .
you are laying down in a flexible torpedo , sailing at high speed , controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms .
so that 's what we 're looking for developing . -lrb- applause -rrb- and we replace the human being - to go , for example , for measuring radioactivity , you do n't want a human to be sailing those robots - with batteries , motors , micro-controllers and sensors .
this is what our teammates , we dream of at night .
we hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills , or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean , or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines , to monitor coral reefs or to monitor fisheries .
our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- up until now , our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms .
whether it 's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch , or even as complex as programming robotics , we have always had to give a command to a machine , or even a series of commands , in order for it to do something for us .
communication between people , on the other hand , is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed .
we observe facial expressions , body language , and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another .
this actually forms a large part of our decision-making process .
our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do , but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences .
and what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain , our center for control and experience .
well , it sounds like a pretty good idea , but this task , as bruno mentioned , is n't an easy one for two main reasons : first , the detection algorithms .
our brain is made up of billions of active neurons , around 170,000 km of combined axon length .
when these neurons interact , the chemical reaction emits an electrical impulse , which can be measured .
the majority of our functional brain is distributed over the outer surface layer of the brain , and to increase the area that 's available for mental capacity , the brain surface is highly folded .
now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses .
each individual 's cortex is folded differently , very much like a fingerprint .
so even though a signal may come from the same functional part of the brain , by the time the structure has been folded , its physical location is very different between individuals , even identical twins .
there is no longer any consistency in the surface signals .
our breakthrough was to create an algorithm that unfolds the cortex , so that we can map the signals closer to its source , and therefore making it capable of working across a mass population .
the second challenge is the actual device for observing brainwaves .
eeg measurements typically involve a hairnet with an array of sensors , like the one that you can see here in the photo .
a technician will put the electrodes onto the scalp using a conductive gel or paste and usually after a procedure of preparing the scalp by light abrasion .
now this is quite time consuming and is n't the most comfortable process .
and on top of that , these systems actually cost in the tens of thousands of dollars .
so with that , i 'd like to invite onstage evan grant , who is one of last year 's speakers , who 's kindly agreed to help me to demonstrate what we 've been able to develop .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the device that you see is a 14-channel , high-fidelity eeg acquisition system .
it does n't require any scalp preparation , no conductive gel or paste .
it only takes a few minutes to put on and for the signals to settle .
it 's also wireless , so it gives you the freedom to move around .
and compared to the tens of thousands of dollars for a traditional eeg system , this headset only costs a few hundred dollars .
now on to the detection algorithms .
so facial expressions - as i mentioned before in emotional experiences - are actually designed to work out of the box with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization .
but with the limited time we have available , i 'd like to show you the cognitive suite , which is the ability for you to basically move virtual objects with your mind .
now , evan is new to this system , so what we have to do first is create a new profile for him .
he 's obviously not joanne - so we 'll " add user . "
evan . okay .
so the first thing we need to do with the cognitive suite is to start with training a neutral signal .
with neutral , there 's nothing in particular that evan needs to do .
he just hangs out . he 's relaxed .
and the idea is to establish a baseline or normal state for his brain , because every brain is different .
it takes eight seconds to do this , and now that that 's done , we can choose a movement-based action .
so evan , choose something that you can visualize clearly in your mind .
evan grant : let 's do " pull . "
tan le : okay , so let 's choose " pull . "
so the idea here now is that evan needs to imagine the object coming forward into the screen , and there 's a progress bar that will scroll across the screen while he 's doing that .
the first time , nothing will happen , because the system has no idea how he thinks about " pull . "
but maintain that thought for the entire duration of the eight seconds .
so : one , two , three , go .
okay .
so once we accept this , the cube is live .
so let 's see if evan can actually try and imagine pulling .
ah , good job !
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's really amazing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we have a little bit of time available , so i 'm going to ask evan to do a really difficult task .
and this one is difficult because it 's all about being able to visualize something that does n't exist in our physical world .
this is " disappear . "
so what you want to do - at least with movement-based actions , we do that all the time , so you can visualize it .
but with " disappear , " there 's really no analogies - so evan , what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out , okay .
same sort of drill . so : one , two , three , go .
okay . let 's try that .
oh , my goodness . he 's just too good .
eg : losing concentration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tl : but we can see that it actually works , even though you can only hold it for a little bit of time .
as i said , it 's a very difficult process to imagine this .
and the great thing about it is that we 've only given the software one instance of how he thinks about " disappear . "
as there is a machine learning algorithm in this - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
good job . good job .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you , evan , you 're a wonderful , wonderful example of the technology .
so , as you can see , before , there is a leveling system built into this software so that as evan , or any user , becomes more familiar with the system , they can continue to add more and more detections , so that the system begins to differentiate between different distinct thoughts .
and once you 've trained up the detections , these thoughts can be assigned or mapped to any computing platform , application or device .
so i 'd like to show you a few examples , because there are many possible applications for this new interface .
in games and virtual worlds , for example , your facial expressions can naturally and intuitively be used to control an avatar or virtual character .
obviously , you can experience the fantasy of magic and control the world with your mind .
and also , colors , lighting , sound and effects can dynamically respond to your emotional state to heighten the experience that you 're having , in real time .
and moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world , with robots and simple machines , for example - in this case , flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking " lift " with your mind .
the technology can also be applied to real world applications - in this example , a smart home .
you know , from the user interface of the control system to opening curtains or closing curtains .
and of course , also to the lighting - turning them on or off .
and finally , to real life-changing applications , such as being able to control an electric wheelchair .
in this example , facial expressions are mapped to the movement commands .
man : now blink right to go right .
now blink left to turn back left .
now smile to go straight .
tl : we really - thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are really only scratching the surface of what is possible today , and with the community 's input , and also with the involvement of developers and researchers from around the world , we hope that you can help us to shape where the technology goes from here . thank you so much .
one year ago , i rented a car in jerusalem to go find a man i 'd never met but who had changed my life .
i did n't have a phone number to call to say i was coming .
i did n't have an exact address , but i knew his name , abed , i knew that he lived in a town of 15,000 , kfar kara , and i knew that , 21 years before , just outside this holy city , he broke my neck .
and so , on an overcast morning in january , i headed north off in a silver chevy to find a man and some peace .
the road dropped and i exited jerusalem .
i then rounded the very bend where his blue truck , heavy with four tons of floor tiles , had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where i sat .
i was then 19 years old .
i 'd grown five inches and done some 20,000 pushups in eight months , and the night before the crash , i delighted in my new body , playing basketball with friends into the wee hours of a may morning .
i palmed the ball in my large right hand , and when that hand reached the rim , i felt invincible .
i was off in the bus to get the pizza i 'd won on the court .
i did n't see abed coming .
from my seat , i was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop , bright in the noontime sun , when from behind there was a great bang , as loud and violent as a bomb .
my head snapped back over my red seat .
my eardrum blew . my shoes flew off .
i flew too , my head bobbing on broken bones , and when i landed , i was a quadriplegic .
over the coming months , i learned to breathe on my own , then to sit and to stand and to walk , but my body was now divided vertically .
i was a hemiplegic , and back home in new york , i used a wheelchair for four years , all through college .
college ended and i returned to jerusalem for a year .
there i rose from my chair for good , i leaned on my cane , and i looked back , finding all from my fellow passengers in the bus to photographs of the crash , and when i saw this photograph , i did n't see a bloody and unmoving body .
i saw the healthy bulk of a left deltoid , and i mourned that it was lost , mourned all i had not yet done , but was now impossible .
it was then i read the testimony that abed gave the morning after the crash , of driving down the right lane of a highway toward jerusalem .
reading his words , i welled with anger .
it was the first time i 'd felt anger toward this man , and it came from magical thinking .
on this xeroxed piece of paper , the crash had not yet happened .
abed could still turn his wheel left so that i would see him whoosh by out my window and i would remain whole .
" be careful , abed , look out . slow down . "
but abed did not slow , and on that xeroxed piece of paper , my neck again broke , and again , i was left without anger .
i decided to find abed , and when i finally did , he responded to my hebrew hello which such nonchalance , it seemed he 'd been awaiting my phone call .
and maybe he had .
i did n't mention to abed his prior driving record - 27 violations by the age of 25 , the last , his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that may day - and i did n't mention my prior record - the quadriplegia and the catheters , the insecurity and the loss - and when abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash , i did n't say that i knew from the police report that he 'd escaped serious injury .
i said i wanted to meet .
abed said that i should call back in a few weeks , and when i did , and a recording told me that his number was disconnected , i let abed and the crash go .
many years passed .
i walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents .
i pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that i started in central park , and home in new york , i became a journalist and an author , typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger .
a friend pointed out to me that all of my big stories mirrored my own , each centering on a life that had changed in an instant , owing , if not to a crash , then to an inheritance , a swing of the bat , a click of the shutter , an arrest .
each of us had a before and an after .
i 'd been working through my lot after all .
still , abed was far from my mind , when last year , i returned to israel to write of the crash , and the book i then wrote , " half-life , " was nearly complete when i recognized that i still wanted to meet abed , and finally i understood why : to hear this man say two words : " i 'm sorry . "
people apologize for less .
and so i got a cop to confirm that abed still lived somewhere in his same town , and i was now driving to it with a potted yellow rose in the back seat , when suddenly flowers seemed a ridiculous offering .
but what to get the man who broke your fucking neck ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i pulled into the town of abu ghosh , and bought a brick of turkish delight : pistachios glued in rosewater . better .
back on highway 1 , i envisioned what awaited .
abed would hug me . abed would spit at me .
abed would say , " i 'm sorry . "
i then began to wonder , as i had many times before , how my life would have been different had this man not injured me , had my genes been fed a different helping of experience .
who was i ?
was i who i had been before the crash , before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book ?
was i what had been done to me ?
were all of us the results of things done to us , done for us , the infidelity of a parent or spouse , money inherited ?
were we instead our bodies , their inborn endowments and deficits ?
it seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience , but how to tease out the one from the other ?
as yeats put that same universal question , " o body swayed to music , o brightening glance , how can we know the dancer from the dance ? "
i 'd been driving for an hour when i looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance .
the light my eyes had carried for as long as they had been blue .
the predispositions and impulses that had propelled me as a toddler to try and slip over a boat into a chicago lake , that had propelled me as a teen to jump into wild cape cod bay after a hurricane .
but i also saw in my reflection that , had abed not injured me , i would now , in all likelihood , be a doctor and a husband and a father .
i would be less mindful of time and of death , and , oh , i would not be disabled , would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune .
the frequent furl of five fingers , the chips in my teeth come from biting at all the many things a solitary hand can not open .
the dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined .
it was approaching 11 when i exited right toward afula , and passed a large quarry and was soon in kfar kara .
i felt a pang of nerves .
but chopin was on the radio , seven beautiful mazurkas , and i pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm .
i 'd been told that in an arab town , one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized .
and i was mentioning abed and myself , noting deliberately that i was here in peace , to the people in this town , when i met mohamed outside a post office at noon .
he listened to me .
you know , it was most often when speaking to people that i wondered where i ended and my disability began , for many people told me what they told no one else .
many cried .
and one day , after a woman i met on the street did the same and i later asked her why , she told me that , best she could tell , her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong , but vulnerable too .
i listened to her words . i suppose they were true .
i was me , but i was now me despite a limp , and that , i suppose , was what now made me , me .
anyway , mohamed told me what perhaps he would not have told another stranger .
he led me to a house of cream stucco , then drove off .
and as i sat contemplating what to say , a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe .
i stepped from my car and said " shalom , " and identified myself , and she told me that her husband abed would be home from work in four hours .
her hebrew was not good , and she later confessed that she thought that i had come to install the internet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i drove off and returned at 4:30 , thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back .
and as i approached the front door , abed saw me , my jeans and flannel and cane , and i saw abed , an average-looking man of average size .
he wore black and white : slippers over socks , pilling sweatpants , a piebald sweater , a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead .
he 'd been expecting me . mohamed had phoned .
and so at once , we shook hands , and smiled , and i gave him my gift , and he told me i was a guest in his home , and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch .
it was then that abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before .
he 'd just had surgery on his eyes , he said .
he had problems with his side and his legs too , and , oh , he 'd lost his teeth in the crash .
did i wish to see him remove them ?
abed then rose and turned on the tv so that i would n't be alone when he left the room , and returned with polaroids of the crash and his old driver 's license .
" i was handsome , " he said .
we looked down at his laminated mug .
abed had been less handsome than substantial , with thick black hair and a full face and a wide neck .
it was this youth who on may 16 , 1990 , had broken two necks including mine , and bruised one brain and taken one life .
twenty-one years later , he was now thinner than his wife , his skin slack on his face , and looking at abed looking at his young self , i remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash , and recognized his longing .
" the crash changed both of our lives , " i said .
abed then showed me a picture of his mashed truck , and said that the crash was the fault of a bus driver in the left lane who did not let him pass .
i did not want to recap the crash with abed .
i 'd hoped for something simpler : to exchange a turkish dessert for two words and be on my way .
and so i did n't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash , abed did not even mention the bus driver .
no , i was quiet . i was quiet because i had not come for truth .
i had come for remorse .
and so i now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus .
" i understand , " i said , " that the crash was not your fault , but does it make you sad that others suffered ? "
abed spoke three quick words .
" yes , i suffered . "
abed then told me why he 'd suffered .
he 'd lived an unholy life before the crash , and so god had ordained the crash , but now , he said , he was religious , and god was pleased .
it was then that god intervened : news on the tv of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north .
we looked up at the wreckage .
" strange , " i said .
" strange , " he agreed .
i had the thought that there , on route 804 , there were perpetrators and victims , dyads bound by a crash .
some , as had abed , would forget the date .
some , as had i , would remember .
the report finished and abed spoke .
" it is a pity , " he said , " that the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers . "
i was baffled .
abed had said something remarkable .
did it point up the degree to which he 'd absolved himself of the crash ?
was it evidence of guilt , an assertion that he should have been put away longer ?
he 'd served six months in prison , lost his truck license for a decade .
i forgot my discretion .
" um , abed , " i said , " i thought you had a few driving issues before the crash . "
" well , " he said , " i once went 60 in a 40 . "
and so 27 violations - driving through a red light , driving at excessive speed , driving on the wrong side of a barrier , and finally , riding his brakes down that hill - reduced to one .
and it was then i understood that no matter how stark the reality , the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable .
the goat becomes the hero . the perpetrator becomes the victim .
it was then i understood that abed would never apologize .
abed and i sat with our coffee .
we 'd spent 90 minutes together , and he was now known to me .
he was not a particularly bad man or a particularly good man .
he was a limited man who 'd found it within himself to be kind to me .
with a nod to jewish custom , he told me that i should live to be 120 years old .
but it was hard for me to relate to one who had so completely washed his hands of his own calamitous doing , to one whose life was so unexamined that he said he thought two people had died in the crash .
there was much i wished to say to abed .
i wished to tell him that , were he to acknowledge my disability , it would be okay , for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp .
people do n't know that they have lived through worse , that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck , that problems of the mind are greater still , more injurious , than a hundred broken necks .
i wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us , but how we respond to what happens to us .
" this , " wrote the psychiatrist viktor frankl , " is the last of the human freedoms : to choose one 's attitude in any given set of circumstances . "
i wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve , reconcile to reality , but we all must - the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone .
i wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good , that a crash is from god and so a crash is good , a broken neck is good .
one can say that a bad thing sucks , but that this natural world still has many glories .
i wished to tell him that , in the end , our mandate is clear : we have to rise above bad fortune .
we have to be in the good and enjoy the good , study and work and adventure and friendship - oh , friendship - and community and love .
but most of all , i wished to tell him what herman melville wrote , that " truly to enjoy bodily warmth , some small part of you must be cold , for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast . "
yes , contrast .
if you are mindful of what you do not have , you may be truly mindful of what you do have , and if the gods are kind , you may truly enjoy what you have .
that is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way .
you know death , and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life .
some part of you is cold , and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm , or even to be cold .
when one morning , years after the crash , i stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold , nerves at last awake , it was exhilarating , a gust of snow .
but i did n't say these things to abed .
i told him only that he had killed one man , not two .
i told him the name of that man .
and then i said , " goodbye . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my story is a little bit about war .
it 's about disillusionment .
it 's about death .
and it 's about rediscovering idealism in all of that wreckage .
and perhaps also , there 's a lesson about how to deal with our screwed-up , fragmenting and dangerous world of the 21st century .
i do n't believe in straightforward narratives .
i do n't believe in a life or history written as decision " a " led to consequence " b " led to consequence " c " - these neat narratives that we 're presented with , and that perhaps we encourage in each other .
i believe in randomness , and one of the reasons i believe that is because me becoming a diplomat was random .
i 'm colorblind .
i was born unable to see most colors .
this is why i wear gray and black most of the time , and i have to take my wife with me to chose clothes .
and i 'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot when i was a boy .
i loved watching planes barrel over our holiday home in the countryside .
and it was my boyhood dream to be a fighter pilot .
and i did the tests in the royal air force to become a pilot , and sure enough , i failed .
i could n't see all the blinking different lights , so i had to choose another career , and this was in fact relatively easy for me , because i had an abiding passion all the way through my childhood , which was international relations .
as a child , i read the newspaper thoroughly .
i was fascinated by the cold war , by the inf negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear missiles , the proxy war between the soviet union and the u.s.
in angola or afghanistan .
these things really interested me .
and so i decided quite at an early age i wanted to be a diplomat .
and i , one day , i announced this to my parents - and my father denies this story to this day - i said , " daddy , i want to be a diplomat . "
and he turned to me , and he said , " carne , you have to be very clever to be a diplomat . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and my ambition was sealed .
in 1989 , i entered the british foreign service .
that year , 5,000 people applied to become a diplomat , and 20 of us succeeded .
and as those numbers suggest , i was inducted into an elite and fascinating and exhilarating world .
being a diplomat , then and now , is an incredible job , and i loved every minute of it - i enjoyed the status of it .
i bought myself a nice suit and wore leather-soled shoes and reveled in this amazing access i had to world events .
i traveled to the gaza strip .
i headed the middle east peace process section in the british foreign ministry .
i became a speechwriter for the british foreign secretary .
i met yasser arafat .
i negotiated with saddam 's diplomats at the u.n.
later , i traveled to kabul and served in afghanistan after the fall of the taliban .
and i would travel in a c-130 transport and go and visit warlords in mountain hideaways and negotiate with them about how we were going to eradicate al qaeda from afghanistan , surrounded by my special forces escort , who , themselves , had to have an escort of a platoon of royal marines , because it was so dangerous .
and that was exciting - that was fun .
it was really interesting .
and it 's a great cadre of people , incredibly close-knit community of people .
and the pinnacle of my career , as it turned out , was when i was posted to new york .
i 'd already served in germany , norway , various other places , but i was posted to new york to serve on the u.n. security council for the british delegation .
and my responsibility was the middle east , which was my specialty .
and there , i dealt with things like the middle east peace process , the lockerbie issue - we can talk about that later , if you wish - but above all , my responsibility was iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and the sanctions we placed on iraq to oblige it to disarm itself of these weapons .
i was the chief british negotiator on the subject , and i was steeped in the issue .
and anyway , my tour - it was kind of a very exciting time .
i mean it was very dramatic diplomacy .
we went through several wars during my time in new york .
i negotiated for my country the resolution in the security council of the 12th of september 2001 condemning the attacks of the day before , which were , of course , deeply present to us actually living in new york at the time .
so it was kind of the best of time , worst of times kind of experience .
i lived the high-life .
although i worked very long hours , i lived in a penthouse in union square .
i was a single british diplomat in new york city ; you can imagine what that might have meant .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i had a good time .
but in 2002 , when my tour came to an end , i decided i was n't going to go back to the job that was waiting for me in london .
i decided to take a sabbatical , in fact , at the new school , bruce .
in some inchoate , inarticulate way i realized that there was something wrong with my work , with me .
i was exhausted , and i was also disillusioned in a way i could n't quite put my finger on .
and i decided to take some time out from work .
the foreign office was very generous .
you could take these special unpaid leave , as they called them , and yet remain part of the diplomatic service , but not actually do any work .
it was nice .
and eventually , i decided to take a secondment to join the u.n. in kosovo , which was then under u.n. administration .
and two things happened in kosovo , which kind of , again , shows the randomness of life , because these things turned out to be two of the pivots of my life and helped to deliver me to the next stage .
but they were random things .
one was that , in the summer of 2004 , the british government , somewhat reluctantly , decided to have an official inquiry into the use of intelligence on wmd in the run up to the iraq war , a very limited subject .
and i testified to that inquiry in secret .
i had been steeped in the intelligence on iraq and its wmd , and my testimony to the inquiry said three things : that the government exaggerated the intelligence , which was very clear in all the years i 'd read it .
and indeed , our own internal assessment was very clear that iraq 's wmd did not pose a threat to its neighbors , let alone to us .
secondly , the government had ignored all available alternatives to war , which in some ways was a more discreditable thing still .
the third reason , i wo n't go into .
but anyway , i gave that testimony , and that presented me with a crisis .
what was i going to do ?
this testimony was deeply critical of my colleagues , of my ministers , who had , in my view had perpetrated a war on a falsehood .
and so i was in crisis .
and this was n't a pretty thing .
i moaned about it , i hesitated , i went on and on and on to my long-suffering wife , and eventually i decided to resign from the british foreign service .
i felt - there 's a scene in the al pacino movie " the insider , " which you may know , where he goes back to cbs after they 've let him down over the tobacco guy , and he goes , " you know , i just ca n't do this anymore . something 's broken . "
and it was like that for me . i love that movie .
i felt just something 's broken .
i ca n't actually sit with my foreign minister or my prime minister again with a smile on my face and do what i used to do gladly for them .
so took a running leap and jumped over the edge of a cliff .
and it was a very , very uncomfortable , unpleasant feeling .
and i started to fall .
and today , that fall has n't stopped ; i 'm still falling .
but , in a way , i 've got used to the sensation of it .
and in a way , i kind of like the sensation of it a lot better than i like actually standing on top of the cliff , wondering what to do .
a second thing happened in kosovo , which kind of - i need a quick gulp of water , forgive me .
a second thing happened in kosovo , which kind of delivered the answer , which i could n't really answer , which is , " what do i do with my life ? "
i love diplomacy - i have no career - i expected my entire life to be a diplomat , to be serving my country .
i wanted to be an ambassador , and my mentors , my heroes , people who got to the top of my profession , and here i was throwing it all away .
a lot of my friends were still in it .
my pension was in it .
and i gave it up .
and what was i going to do ?
and that year , in kosovo , this terrible , terrible thing happened , which i saw .
in march 2004 , there were terrible riots all over the province - as it then was - of kosovo .
18 people were killed .
it was anarchy .
and it 's a very horrible thing to see anarchy , to know that the police and the military - there were lots of military troops there - actually ca n't stop that rampaging mob who 's coming down the street .
and the only way that rampaging mob coming down the street will stop is when they decide to stop and when they 've had enough burning and killing .
and that is not a very nice feeling to see , and i saw it .
and i went through it . i went through those mobs .
and with my albanian friends , we tried to stop it , but we failed .
and that riot taught me something , which is n't immediately obvious and it 's kind of a complicated story .
but one of the reasons that riot took place - those riots , which went on for several days , took place - was because the kosovo people were disenfranchised from their own future .
there were diplomatic negotiations about the future of kosovo going on then , and the kosovo government , let alone the kosovo people , were not actually participating in those talks .
there was this whole fancy diplomatic system , this negotiation process about the future of kosovo , and the kosovars were n't part of it .
and funnily enough , they were frustrated about that .
those riots were part of the manifestation of that frustration .
it was n't the only reason , and life is not simple , one reason narratives .
it was a complicated thing , and i 'm not pretending it was more simple than it was .
but that was one of the reasons .
and that kind of gave me the inspiration - or rather to be precise , it gave my wife the inspiration .
she said , " why do n't you advise the kosovars ?
why do n't you advise their government on their diplomacy ? "
and the kosovars were not allowed a diplomatic service .
they were not allowed diplomats .
they were not allowed a foreign office to help them deal with this immensely complicated process , which became known as the final status process of kosovo .
and so that was the idea .
that was the origin of the thing that became independent diplomat , the world 's first diplomatic advisory group and a non-profit to boot .
and it began when i flew back from london after my time at the u.n. in kosovo .
i flew back and had dinner with the kosovo prime minister and said to him , " look , i 'm proposing that i come and advise you on the diplomacy .
i know this stuff . it 's what i do . why do n't i come and help you ? "
and he raised his glass of raki to me and said , " yes , carne . come . "
and i came to kosovo and advised the kosovo government .
independent diplomat ended up advising three successive kosovo prime ministers and the multi-party negotiation team of kosovo .
and kosovo became independent .
independent diplomat is now established in five diplomatic centers around the world , and we 're advising seven or eight different countries , or political groups , depending on how you wish to define them - and i 'm not big on definitions .
we 're advising the northern cypriots on how to reunify their island .
we 're advising the burmese opposition , the government of southern sudan , which - you heard it here first - is going to be a new country within the next few years .
we 're advising the polisario front of the western sahara , who are fighting to get their country back from moroccan occupation after 34 years of dispossession .
we 're advising various island states in the climate change negotiations , which is suppose to culminate in copenhagen .
there 's a bit of randomness here too because , when i was beginning independent diplomat , i went to a party in the house of lords , which is a ridiculous place , but i was holding my drink like this , and i bumped into this guy who was standing behind me .
and we started talking , and he said - i told him what i was doing , and i told him rather grandly i was going to establish independent diplomat in new york .
at that time there was just me - and me and my wife were moving back to new york .
and he said , " why do n't you see my colleagues in new york ? "
and it turned out he worked for an innovation company called ? what if ! , which some of you have probably heard of .
and one thing led to another , and i ended up having a desk in ? what if ! in new york , when i started independent diplomat .
and watching ? what if !
develop new flavors of chewing gum for wrigley or new flavors for coke actually helped me innovate new strategies for the kosovars and for the saharawis of the western sahara .
and i began to realize that there are different ways of doing diplomacy - that diplomacy , like business , is a business of solving problems , and yet the word innovation does n't exist in diplomacy ; it 's all zero sum games and realpolitik and ancient institutions that have been there for generations and do things the same way they 've always done things .
and independent diplomat , today , tries to incorporate some of the things i learned at ? what if ! .
we all sit in one office and shout at each other across the office .
we all work on little laptops and try to move desks to change the way we think .
and we use naive experts who may know nothing about the countries we 're dealing with , but may know something about something else to try to inject new thinking into the problems that we try to address for our clients .
it 's not easy , because our clients , by definition , are having a difficult time , diplomatically .
there are , i do n't know , some lessons from all of this , personal and political - and in a way , they 're the same thing .
the personal one is falling off a cliff is actually a good thing , and i recommend it .
and it 's a good thing to do at least once in your life just to tear everything up and jump .
the second thing is a bigger lesson about the world today .
independent diplomat is part of a trend which is emerging and evident across the world , which is that the world is fragmenting .
states mean less than they used to , and the power of the state is declining .
that means the power of others things is rising .
those other things are called non-state actors .
they may be corporations , they may be mafiosi , they may be nice ngos , they may anything , any number of things .
we are living in a more complicated and fragmented world .
if governments are less able to affect the problems that affect us in the world , then that means , who is left to deal with them , who has to take greater responsibility to deal with them ?
us .
if they ca n't do it , who 's left to deal with it ?
we have no choice but to embrace that reality .
what this means is it 's no longer good enough to say that international relations , or global affairs , or chaos in somalia , or what 's going on in burma is none of your business , and that you can leave it to governments to get on with .
i can connect any one of you by six degrees of separation to the al-shabaab militia in somalia .
ask me how later , particularly if you eat fish , interestingly enough , but that connection is there .
we are all intimately connected .
and this is n't just tom friedman , it 's actually provable in case after case after case .
what that means is , instead of asking your politicians to do things , you have to look to yourself to do things .
and independent diplomat is a kind of example of this in a sort of loose way .
there are n't neat examples , but one example is this : the way the world is changing is embodied in what 's going on at the place i used to work - the u.n. security council .
the u.n. was established in 1945 .
its charter is basically designed to stop conflicts between states - interstate conflict .
today , 80 percent of the agenda of the u.n. security council is about conflicts within states , involving non-state parties - guerillas , separatists , terrorists , if you want to call them that , people who are not normal governments , who are not normal states .
that is the state of the world today .
when i realized this , and when i look back on my time at the security council and what happened with the kosovars , and i realize that often the people who were most directly affected by what we were doing in the security council were n't actually there , were n't actually invited to give their views to the security council , i thought , this is wrong .
something 's got to be done about this .
so i started off in a traditional mode .
me and my colleagues at independent diplomat went around the u.n. security council .
we went around 70 u.n. member states - the kazaks , the ethiopians , the israelis - you name them , we went to see them - the secretary general , all of them , and said , " this is all wrong .
this is terrible that you do n't consult these people who are actually affected .
you 've got to institutionalize a system where you actually invite the kosovars to come and tell you what they think .
this will allow you to tell me - you can tell them what you think .
it 'll be great . you can have an exchange .
you can actually incorporate these people 's views into your decisions , which means your decisions will be more effective and durable . "
super-logical , you would think .
i mean , incredibly logical . so obvious , anybody could get it .
and of course , everybody got it . everybody went , " yes , of course , you 're absolutely right .
come back to us in maybe six months . "
and of course , nothing happened - nobody did anything .
the security council does its business in exactly the same way today that it did x number of years ago , when i was there 10 years ago .
so we looked at that observation of basically failure and thought , what can we do about it .
and i thought , i 'm buggered if i 'm going to spend the rest of my life lobbying for these crummy governments to do what needs to be done .
so what we 're going to do is we 're actually going to set up these meetings ourselves .
so now , independent diplomat is in the process of setting up meetings between the u.n. security council and the parties to the disputes that are on the agenda of the security council .
so we will be bringing darfuri rebel groups , the northern cypriots and the southern cypriots , rebels from aceh , and awful long laundry list of chaotic conflicts around the world .
and we will be trying to bring the parties to new york to sit down in a quiet room in a private setting with no press and actually explain what they want to the members of the u. n. security council , and for the members of the u.n. security council to explain to them what they want .
so there 's actually a conversation , which has never before happened .
and of course , describing all this , any of you who know politics will think this is incredibly difficult , and i entirely agree with you .
the chances of failure are very high , but it certainly wo n't happen if we do n't try to make it happen .
and my politics has changed fundamentally from when i was a diplomat to what i am today , and i think that outputs is what matters , not process , not technology , frankly , so much either .
preach technology to all the twittering members of all the iranian demonstrations who are now in political prison in tehran , where ahmadinejad remains in power .
technology has not delivered political change in iran .
you 've got to look at the outputs , and you got to say to yourself , " what can i do to produce that particular output ? "
that is the politics of the 21st century , and in a way , independent diplomat embodies that fragmentation , that change , that is happening to all of us .
that 's my story . thanks .
pat mitchell : what is the story of this pin ?
madeleine albright : this is " breaking the glass ceiling . "
pm : oh .
that was well chosen , i would say , for tedwomen .
ma : most of the time i spend when i get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen .
and none of this pin stuff would have happened if it had n't been for saddam hussein .
i 'll tell you what happened .
i went to the united nations as an ambassador , and it was after the gulf war , and i was an instructed ambassador .
and the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions , and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about saddam hussein constantly , which he deserved - he had invaded another country .
and so all of a sudden , a poem appeared in the papers in baghdad comparing me to many things , but among them an " unparalleled serpent . "
and so i happened to have a snake pin .
so i wore it when we talked about iraq .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when i went out to meet the press , they zeroed in , said , " why are you wearing that snake pin ? "
i said , " because saddam hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent . "
and then i thought , well this is fun .
so i went out and i bought a lot of pins that would , in fact , reflect what i thought we were going to do on any given day .
so that 's how it all started .
pm : so how large is the collection ?
ma : pretty big .
it 's now traveling .
at the moment it 's in indianapolis , but it was at the smithsonian .
and it goes with a book that says , " read my pins . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pm : so is this a good idea .
i remember when you were the first woman as secretary of state , and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing , how you looked - the thing that happens to a lot of women , especially if they 're the first in a position .
so how do you feel about that - the whole - ma : well , it 's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing .
but people did pay attention to what clothes i had .
what was interesting was that , before i went up to new york as u.n. ambassador , i talked to jeane kirkpatrick , who 'd been ambassador before me , and she said , " you 've got to get rid of your professor clothes .
go out and look like a diplomat . "
so that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping .
but still , there were all kinds of questions about - " did you wear a hat ? " " how short was your skirt ? "
and one of the things - if you remember condoleezza rice was at some event and she wore boots , and she got criticized over that .
and no guy ever gets criticized . but that 's the least of it .
pm : it is , for all of us , men and women , finding our ways of defining our roles , and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future .
how did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother , a grandmother , nurturing ...
and so how did you handle that ?
ma : well the interesting part was i was asked what it was like to be the first woman secretary of state a few minutes after i 'd been named .
and i said , " well i 've been a woman for 60 years , but i 've only been secretary of state for a few minutes . "
so it evolved .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but basically i love being a woman .
and so what happened - and i think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this - i went to my first meeting , first at the u.n. , and that 's when this all started , because that is a very male organization .
and i 'm sitting there - there are 15 members of the security council - so 14 men sat there staring at me , and i thought - well you know how we all are .
you want to get the feeling of the room , and " do people like me ? "
and " will i really say something intelligent ? "
and all of a sudden i thought , " well , wait a minute .
i am sitting behind a sign that says ' the united states , ' and if i do n't speak today then the voice of the united states will not be heard , " and it was the first time that i had that feeling that i had to step out of myself in my normal , reluctant female mode and decide that i had to speak on behalf of our country .
and so that happened more at various times , but i really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman .
i think we are a lot better at personal relationships , and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it 's necessary .
but i have to tell you , i have my youngest granddaughter , when she turned seven last year , said to her mother , my daughter , " so what 's the big deal about grandma maddie being secretary of state ?
only girls are secretary of state . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- pm : because in her lifetime - ma : that would be so .
pm : what a change that is .
as you travel now all over the world , which you do frequently , how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls ?
where are we ?
ma : i think we 're slowly changing , but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different .
and therefore it means that we have to remember that , while many of us have had huge opportunities - and pat , you have been a real leader in your field - is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women .
and so what i have felt - and i have looked at this from a national security issue - when i was secretary of state , i decided that women 's issues had to be central to american foreign policy , not just because i 'm a feminist , but because i believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered , that values are passed down , the health situation is better , education is better , there is greater economic prosperity .
so i think that it behooves us - those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice - that we need to help other women .
and i really dedicated myself to that , both at the u.n. and then as secretary of state .
pm : and did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy ?
ma : from some people .
i think that they thought that it was a soft issue .
the bottom line that i decided was actually women 's issues are the hardest issues , because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects , and because , as i said , it is really central to the way that we think about things .
now for instance , some of the wars that took place when i was in office , a lot of them , the women were the main victims of it .
for instance , when i started , there were wars in the balkans .
the women in bosnia were being raped .
we then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues .
and by the way , one of the things that i did at that stage was , i had just arrived at the u.n. , and when i was there , there were 183 countries in the u.n.
now there are 192 .
but it was one of the first times that i did n't have to cook lunch myself .
so i said to my assistant , " invite the other women permanent representatives . "
and i thought when i 'd get to my apartment i get there , and there are six other women , out of 183 .
so the countries that had women representatives were canada , kazakhstan , philippines , trinidad tobago , jamaica , lichtenstein and me .
so being an american , i decided to set up a caucus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so we set it up , and we called ourselves the g7 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pm : is that " girl 7 ? " ma : girl 7 .
and we lobbied on behalf of women 's issues .
so we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal .
and then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war , that it was against humanity .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : so when you look around the world and you see that , in many cases - certainly in the western world - women are evolving into more leadership positions , and even other places some barriers are being brought down , but there 's still so much violence , still so many problems , and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables .
now you were at those negotiating tables when they were n't , when there was maybe you - one voice , maybe one or two others .
do you believe , and can you tell us why , there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis ?
ma : well i do think , when there are more women , that the tone of the conversation changes , and also the goals of the conversation change .
but it does n't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women .
if you think that , you 've forgotten high school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the bottom line is that there is a way , when there are more women at the table , that there 's an attempt to develop some understanding .
so for instance , what i did when i went to burundi , we 'd got tutsi and hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in rwanda .
and so i think the capability of women to put themselves - i think we 're better about putting ourselves into the other guy 's shoes and having more empathy .
i think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room .
when i was secretary of state , there were only 13 other women foreign ministers .
and so it was nice when one of them would show up .
for instance , she is now the president of finland , but tarja halonen was the foreign minister of finland and , at a certain stage , head of the european union .
and it was really terrific .
because one of the things i think you 'll understand .
we went to a meeting , and the men in my delegation , when i would say , " well i feel we should do something about this , " and they 'd say , " what do you mean , you feel ? "
and so then tarja was sitting across the table from me .
and all of a sudden we were talking about arms control , and she said , " well i feel we should do this . "
and my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden .
but i think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions .
the other thing that i think is really important : a lot of national security policy is n't just about foreign policy , but it 's about budgets , military budgets , and how the debts of countries work out .
so if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts , they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries .
pm : so how do we get this balance we 're looking for , then , in the world ?
more women 's voices at the table ?
more men who believe that the balance is best ?
ma : well i think one of the things - i 'm chairman of the board of an organization called the national democratic institute that works to support women candidates .
i think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office , to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices .
i think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other .
now i have a saying that i feel very strongly about , because i am of a certain age where , when i started in my career , believe it or not , there were other women who criticized me : " why are n't you in the carpool line ? "
or " are n't your children suffering because you 're not there all the time ? "
and i think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty .
in fact , i think " guilt " is every woman 's middle name .
and so i think what needs to happen is we need to help each other .
and my motto is that there 's a special place in hell for women who do n't help each other .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : well secretary albright , i guess you 'll be going to heaven .
thank you for joining us today .
ma : thank you all . thanks pat .
-lrb- applause -rrb- early visions of wireless power actually were thought of by nikola tesla basically about 100 years ago .
the thought that you would n't want to transfer electric power wirelessly , no one ever thought of that .
they thought , " who would use it if you did n't ? "
and so , in fact , he actually set about doing a variety of things .
built the tesla coil . this tower was built on long island back at the beginning of the 1900s .
and the idea was , it was supposed to be able to transfer power anywhere on earth .
we 'll never know if this stuff worked . actually , i think the federal bureau of investigation took it down for security purposes , sometime in the early 1900s .
but the one thing that did come out of electricity is that we love this stuff so much .
i mean , think about how much we love this .
if you just walk outside , there are trillions of dollars that have been invested in infrastructure around the world , putting up wires to get power from where it 's created to where it 's used .
the other thing is , we love batteries .
and for those of us that have an environmental element to us , there is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that , generally speaking , is used within a few inches or a few feet of where there is very inexpensive power .
so , before i got here , i thought , " you know , i am from north america .
we do have a little bit of a reputation in the united states . "
so i thought i 'd better look it up first .
so definition number six is the north american definition of the word " suck . "
wires suck , they really do .
think about it . whether that 's you in that picture or something under your desk .
the other thing is , batteries suck too .
and they really , really do .
do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff ?
40 billion of these things built .
this is what happens .
they fall apart , they disintegrate , and they end up here .
so when you talk about expensive power , the cost per kilowatt-hour to supply battery power to something is on the order of two to three hundred pounds .
think about that .
the most expensive grid power in the world is thousandths of that .
so fortunately , one of the other definitions of " suck " that was in there , it does create a vacuum .
and nature really does abhor a vacuum .
what happened back a few years ago was a group of theoretical physicists at mit actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance .
basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb at a distance of about two meters .
it got about 50 percent of the efficiency - by the way , that 's still a couple thousand times more efficient than a battery would be , to do the same thing .
but were able to light that , and do it very successfully .
this was actually the experiment . so you can see the coils were somewhat larger .
the light bulb was a fairly simple task , from their standpoint .
this all came from a professor waking up at night to the third night in a row that his wife 's cellphone was beeping because it was running out of battery power .
and he was thinking , " with all the electricity that 's out there in the walls , why could n't some of that just come into the phone so i could get some sleep ? "
and he actually came up with this concept of resonant energy transfer .
but inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire .
and those two coils of wire are really , really close to each other , and actually do transfer power magnetically and wirelessly , only over a very short distance .
what dr. soljacic figured out how to do was separate the coils in a transformer to a greater distance than the size of those transformers using this technology , which is not dissimilar from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room .
it 's a resonant phenomenon for which he actually received a macarthur fellowship award , which is nicknamed the genius award , last september , for his discovery .
so how does it work ?
imagine a coil . for those of you that are engineers , there 's a capacitor attached to it too .
and if you can cause that coil to resonate , what will happen is it will pulse at alternating current frequencies - at a fairly high frequency , by the way .
and if you can bring another device close enough to the source , that will only work at exactly that frequency , you can actually get them to do what 's called strongly couple , and transfer magnetic energy between them .
and then what you do is , you start out with electricity , turn it into magnetic field , take that magnetic field , turn it back into electricity , and then you can use it .
number one question i get asked .
i mean , people are worried about cellphones being safe .
you know . what about safety ?
the first thing is this is not a " radiative " technology .
it does n't radiate .
there are n't electric fields here . it 's a magnetic field .
it stays within either what we call the source , or within the device .
and actually , the magnetic fields we 're using are basically about the same as the earth 's magnetic field .
we live in a magnetic field .
and the other thing that 's pretty cool about the technology is that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency .
and it 's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen .
then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere that will regulate everything we do .
they 've pretty much set field exposure limits , which all of the things in the stuff i 'll show you today sort of sit underneath those guidelines .
mobile electronics .
home electronics .
those cords under your desk , i bet everybody here has something that looks like that or those batteries .
there are industrial applications .
and then finally , electric vehicles .
these electric cars are beautiful .
but who is going to want to plug them in ?
imagine driving into your garage - we 've built a system to do this - you drive into your garage , and the car charges itself , because there is a mat on the floor that 's plugged into the wall .
and it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently .
then there 's all kinds of other applications . implanted medical devices , where people do n't have to die of infections anymore if you can seal the thing up .
credit cards , robot vacuum cleaners .
so what i 'd like to do is take a couple minutes and show you , actually , how it works .
and what i 'm going to do is to show you pretty much what 's here .
you 've got a coil .
that coil is connected to an r.f. amplifier that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field .
we put one on the back of the television set .
by the way , i do make it look a little bit easier than it is .
there 's lots of electronics and secret sauce and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it .
but then what 's going to happen is , it will create a field .
it will cause one to get created on the other side .
and if the demo gods are willing , in about 10 seconds or so we should see it .
the 10 seconds actually are because we - i do n't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a t.v. in when you use just a cord .
generally , you have to go over and hit the button . so i thought we put a little computer in it that has to wake up to tell it to do that .
so , i 'll plug that in .
it creates a magnetic field here .
it causes one to be created out here .
and as i said , in sort of about 10 seconds we should start to see ...
this is a commercially - -lrb- applause -rrb- available color television set .
imagine , you get one of these things . you want to hang them on the wall .
how many people want to hang them on the wall ?
think about it . you do n't want those ugly cords coming down .
imagine if you can get rid of it .
the other thing i wanted to talk about was safety .
so , there is nothing going on . i 'm okay .
and i 'll do it again , just for safety 's sake .
almost immediately , though , people ask , " how small can you make this ? can you make this small enough ? "
because remember dr. soljacic 's original idea was his wife 's cellphone beeping .
so , i wanted to show you something .
we 're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing .
this a google g1 .
you know , it 's the latest thing that 's come out .
it runs the android operating system .
i think i heard somebody talk about that before .
it 's odd . it has a battery .
it also has coiled electronics that witricity has put into the back of it .
and if i can get the camera - okay , great - you 'll see , as i get sort of close ...
you 're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i know some of you are apple aficionados .
so , you know they do n't make it easy at apple to get inside their phones .
so we put a little sleeve on the back , but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too .
and those of you that have an iphone recognize the green center .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and nokia as well .
you 'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back , to do that , and it probably beeps , actually , as it goes on as well .
but they typically use it to light up the screen .
so , imagine these things could go ... they could go in your ceiling .
they could go in the floor . they could go , actually , underneath your desktop .
so that when you walk in or you come in from home , if you carry a purse , it works in your purse .
you never have to worry about plugging these things in again .
and think of what that would do for you .
so i think in closing , sort of in the immortal visions of the new yorker magazine , i thought i 'd put up one more slide .
and for those of you who ca n't read it , it says , " it does appear to be some kind of wireless technology . "
so , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a very difficult task .
i 'm a spectroscopist .
i have to talk about astronomy without showing you any single image of nebulae or galaxies , etc .
because my job is spectroscopy .
i never deal with images .
but i 'll try to convince you that spectroscopy is actually something which can change this world .
spectroscopy can probably answer the question , " is there anybody out there ? "
are we alone ? seti .
it 's not very fun to do spectroscopy .
one of my colleagues in bulgaria , nevena markova , spent about 20 years studying these profiles .
and she published 42 articles just dedicated to the subject .
can you imagine ? day and night , thinking , observing , the same star for 20 years is incredible .
but we are crazy . we do these things .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm not that far .
i spent about eight months working on these profiles .
because i 've noticed a very small symmetry in the profile of one of the planet host stars .
and i thought , well maybe there is lithium-6 in this star , which is an indication that this star has swallowed a planet .
because apparently you ca n't have this fragile isotope of lithium-6 in the atmospheres of sun-like stars .
but you have it in planets and asteroids .
so if you engulf planet or large number of asteroids , you will have this lithium-6 isotope in the spectrum of the star .
so i invested more than eight months just studying the profile of this star .
and actually it 's amazing , because i got phone calls from many reporters asking , " have you actually seen the planet going into a star ? "
because they thought that if you are having a telescope , you are an astronomer so what you are doing is actually looking in a telescope .
and you might have seen the planet going into a star .
and i was saying , " no , excuse me .
what i see is this one . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's just incredible . because nobody understood really .
i bet that there were very few people who really understood what i 'm talking about .
because this is the indication that the planet went into the star .
it 's amazing .
the power of spectroscopy was actually realized by pink floyd already in 1973 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because they actually said that you can get any color you like in a spectrum .
and all you need is time and money to make your spectrograph .
this is the number one high resolution , most precise spectrograph on this planet , called harps , which is actually used to detect extrasolar planets and sound waves in the atmospheres of stars .
how we get spectra ?
i 'm sure most of you know from school physics that it 's basically splitting a white light into colors .
and if you have a liquid hot mass , it will produce something which we call a continuous spectrum .
a hot gas is producing emission lines only , no continuum .
and if you place a cool gas in front of a hot source , you will see certain patterns which we call absorption lines .
which is used actually to identify chemical elements in a cool matter , which is absorbing exactly at those frequencies .
now , what we can do with the spectra ?
we can actually study line-of-sight velocities of cosmic objects .
and we can also study chemical composition and physical parameters of stars , galaxies , nebulae .
a star is the most simple object .
in the core , we have thermonuclear reactions going on , creating chemical elements .
and we have a cool atmosphere .
it 's cool for me .
cool in my terms is three or four or five thousand degrees .
my colleagues in infra-red astronomy call minus 200 kelvin is cool for them .
but you know , everything is relative .
so for me 5,000 degrees is pretty cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the spectrum of the sun - 24,000 spectral lines , and about 15 percent of these lines is not yet identified .
it is amazing . so we are in the 21st century , and we still can not properly understand the spectrum of the sun .
sometimes we have to deal with just one tiny , weak spectral line to measure the composition of that chemical element in the atmosphere .
for instance , you see the spectral line of the gold is the only spectral line in the spectrum of the sun .
and we use this weak feature to measure the composition of gold in the atmosphere of the sun .
and now this is a work in progress .
we have been dealing with a similarly very weak feature , which belongs to osmium .
it 's a heavy element produced in thermonuclear explosions of supernovae .
it 's the only place where you can produce , actually , osmium .
just comparing the composition of osmium in one of the planet host stars , we want to understand why there is so much of this element .
perhaps we even think that maybe supernova explosions trigger formations of planets and stars .
it can be an indication .
the other day , my colleague from berkeley , gibor basri , emailed me a very interesting spectrum , asking me , " can you have a look at this ? "
and i could n't sleep , next two weeks , when i saw the huge amount of oxygen and other elements in the spectrum of the stars .
i knew that there is nothing like that observed in the galaxy .
it was incredible . the only conclusion we could make from this is clear evidence that there was a supernova explosion in this system , which polluted the atmosphere of this star .
and later a black hole was formed in a binary system , which is still there with a mass of about five solar masses .
this was considered as first evidence that actually black holes come from supernovae explosions .
my colleagues , comparing composition of chemical elements in different galactic stars , actually discovered alien stars in our galaxy .
it 's amazing that you can go so far simply studying the chemical composition of stars .
they actually said that one of the stars you see in the spectra is an alien . it comes from a different galaxy .
there is interaction of galaxies . we know this .
and sometimes they just capture stars .
you 've heard about solar flares .
we were very surprised to discover a super flare , a flare which is thousands of millions of times more powerful than those we see in the sun .
in one of the binary stars in our galaxy called fh leo , we discovered the super flare .
and later we went to study the spectral stars to see is there anything strange with these objects .
and we found that everything is normal .
these stars are normal like the sun . age , everything was normal .
so this is a mystery .
it 's one of the mysteries we still have , super flares .
and there are six or seven similar cases reported in the literature .
now to go ahead with this , we really need to understand chemical evolution of the universe .
it 's very complicated . i do n't really want you to try to understand what is here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's to show you how complicated is the whole story of the production of chemical elements .
you have two channels - the massive stars and low-mass stars - producing and recycling matter and chemical elements in the universe .
and doing this for 14 billion years , we end up with this picture , which is a very important graph , showing relative abundances of chemical elements in sun-like stars and in the interstellar medium .
so which means that it 's really impossible to find an object where you find about 10 times more sulfur than silicon , five times more calcium than oxygen . it 's just impossible .
and if you find one , i will say that this is something related to seti , because naturally you ca n't do it .
doppler effect is something very important from fundamental physics .
and this is related to the change of the frequency of a moving source .
the doppler effect is used to discover extrasolar planets .
the precision which we need to discover a jupiter-like planet around a sun-like star is something like 28.4 meters per second .
and we need nine centimeters per second to detect an earth-like planet .
this can be done with the future spectrographs .
i , myself , i 'm actually involved in the team which is developing a codex , high resolution , future generation spectrograph for the 42 meter e-elt telescope .
and this is going to be an instrument to detect earth-like planets around sun-like stars .
it is an amazing tool called astroseismology where we can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of stars .
this is the sound of an alpha cen .
we can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of sun-like stars .
those waves have frequencies in infrasound domain , the sound actually nobody knows , domain .
coming back to the most important question , " is there anybody out there ? "
this is closely related to tectonic and volcanic activity of planets .
connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward .
no life without tectonic activity , without volcanic activity .
and we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium , thorium , and potassium .
how to measure , if we have planets where the amount of those elements is small , so those planets are tectonically dead , there can not be life .
if there is too much uranium or potassium or thorium , probably , again , there would be no life .
because can you imagine everything boiling ?
it 's too much energy on a planet .
now , we have been measuring abundance of thorium in one of the stars with extrasolar planets .
it 's exactly the same game . a very tiny feature .
we are actually trying to measure this profile and to detect thorium .
it 's very tough . it 's very tough .
and you have to , first you have to convince yourself .
then you have to convince your colleagues .
and then you have to convince the whole world that you have actually detected something like this in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet host star somewhere in 100 parsec away from here .
it 's really difficult .
but if you want to know about a life on extrasolar planets , you have to do this job .
because you have to know how much of radioactive element you have in those systems .
the one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals .
if you receive something interesting , well that 's what seti does actually , what seti has been doing for many years .
i think the most promising way is to go for biomarkers .
you can see the spectrum of the earth , this earthshine spectrum , and that is a very clear signal .
the slope which is coming , which we call a red edge , is a detection of vegetated area .
it 's amazing that we can detect vegetation from a spectrum .
now imagine doing this test for other planets .
now very recently , very recently , i 'm talking about last six , seven , eight months , water , methane , carbon dioxide have been detected in the spectrum of a planet outside the solar system .
it 's amazing . so this is the power of spectroscopy .
you can actually go and detect and study a chemical composition of planets far , far , far from solar system .
we have to detect oxygen or ozone to make sure that we have all necessary conditions to have life .
cosmic miracles are something which can be related to seti .
now imagine an object , amazing object , or something which we can not explain when we just stand up and say , " look , we give up . physics does n't work . "
so it 's something which you can always refer to seti and say , " well , somebody must be doing this , somehow . "
and with the known physics etc , it 's something actually which has been pointed out by frank drake , many years ago , and shklovsky .
if you see , in the spectrum of a planet host star , if you see strange chemical elements , it can be a signal from a civilization which is there and they want to signal about it .
they want to actually signal their presence through these spectral lines , in the spectrum of a star , in different ways .
there can be different ways doing this .
one is , for instance , technetium is a radioactive element with a decay time of 4.2 million years .
if you suddenly observe technetium in a sun-like star , you can be sure that somebody has put this element in the atmosphere , because in a natural way it is impossible to do this .
now we are reviewing the spectra of about 300 stars with extrasolar planets .
and we are doing this job since 2000 and it 's a very heavy project .
we have been working very hard .
and we have some interesting cases , candidates , so on , things which we ca n't really explain .
and i hope in the near future we can confirm this .
so the main question : " are we alone ? "
i think it will not come from ufos .
it will not come from radio signals .
i think it will come from a spectrum like this .
it is the spectrum of a planet like earth , showing a presence of nitrogen dioxide , as a clear signal of life , and oxygen and ozone .
if , one day , and i think it will be within 15 years from now , or 20 years .
if we discover a spectrum like this we can be sure that there is life on that planet .
in about five years we will discover planets like earth , around sun-like stars , the same distance as the earth from the sun .
it will take about five years .
and then we will need another 10 , 15 years with space projects to get the spectra of earth-like planets like the one i showed you .
and if we see the nitrogen dioxide and oxygen , i think we have the perfect e.t.
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my story actually began when i was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of savannah , georgia .
and this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after confederate war generals .
we lived on robert e. lee boulevard .
and when i was five , my parents gave me an orange schwinn sting-ray bicycle .
it had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan .
that 's why they were called ape hangers .
they were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s , which i 'm sure my mom did n't know .
and one day i was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away .
and i came back , and i wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly , so i decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood , and wham ! i was hit by a passing sedan .
my mangled body flew in one direction , my mangled bike flew in the other .
and i lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line , and one of my neighbors came running over .
" andy , andy , how are you doing ? " she said , using the name of my older brother .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm bruce , " i said , and promptly passed out .
i broke my left femur that day - it 's the largest bone in your body - and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee , and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle .
and for the next 38 years , that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me .
in fact , i made a living by walking .
i traveled around the world , entered different cultures , wrote a series of books about my travels , including " walking the bible . "
i hosted a television show by that name on pbs .
i was , for all the world , the " walking guy . "
until , in may 2008 , a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones .
and my doctor , on a whim , sent me to get a full-body bone scan , which showed that there was some growth in my left leg .
that sent me to an x-ray , then to an mri .
and one afternoon , i got a call from my doctor .
" the tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor . "
i stopped walking , and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying negative .
i have cancer .
and to think that the tumor was in the same bone , in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier - it seemed like too much of a coincidence .
so that afternoon , i went back to my house , and my three year-old identical twin daughters , eden and tybee feiler , came running to meet me .
they 'd just turned three , and they were into all things pink and purple .
in fact , we called them pinkalicious and purplicious - although i must say , our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday , april 15th .
when they were born at 6:14 and 6:46 on april 15 , 2005 , our otherwise grim , humorless doctor looked at his watch , and was like , " hmm , april 15th - tax day .
early filer and late filer . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next day i came to see him . i was like , " doctor , that was a really good joke . "
and he was like , " you 're the writer , kid . "
anyway - so they had just turned three , and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground , laughing with all the glee in the world .
i crumbled .
i kept imagining all the walks i might not take with them , the art projects i might not mess up , the boyfriends i might not scowl at , the aisles i might not walk down .
would they wonder who i was , i thought .
would they yearn for my approval , my love , my voice ?
a few days later , i woke with an idea of how i might give them that voice .
i would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters ' lives .
" i believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives , " i wrote these men .
" they 'll have loving families and welcoming homes , but they may not have me .
they may not have their dad .
will you help be their dad ? "
and i said to myself i would call this group of men " the council of dads . "
now as soon as i had this idea , i decided i would n't tell my wife . okay .
she 's a very upbeat , naturally excited person .
there 's this idea in this culture - i do n't have to tell you - that you sort of " happy " your way through a problem .
we should focus on the positive .
my wife , as i said , she grew up outside of boston .
she 's got a big smile . she 's got a big personality .
she 's got big hair - although , she told me recently , i ca n't say she has big hair , because if i say she has big hair , people will think she 's from texas .
and it 's apparently okay to marry a boy from georgia , but not to have hair from texas .
and actually , in her defense , if she were here right now , she would point out that , when we got married in georgia , there were three questions on the marriage certificate license , the third of which was , " are you related ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " look , in georgia at least we want to know .
in arkansas they do n't even ask . "
what i did n't tell her is , if she said , " yes , " you could jump .
you do n't need the 30-day waiting period .
because you do n't need the get-to-know-you session at that point .
so i was n't going to tell her about this idea , but the next day i could n't control myself , i told her .
and she loved the idea , but she quickly started rejecting my nominees .
she was like , " well , i love him , but i would never ask him for advice . "
so it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we decided that we needed a set of rules , and we came up with a number .
and the first one was no family , only friends .
we thought our family would already be there .
second , men only .
we were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls ' lives .
and then third , sort of a dad for every side .
we kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing .
so what happened was i wrote a letter to each of these men .
and rather than send it , i decided to read it to them in person .
linda , my wife , joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals .
i sort of friend-married each of these guys .
and the first of these guys was jeff schumlin .
now jeff led this trip i took to europe when i graduated from high school in the early 1980s .
and on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle .
and i snuck out behind , and there was a moat , a fence and a field of cows .
and jeff came up beside me and said , " so , have you ever been cow tipping ? "
i was like , " cow tipping ?
he was like , " yeah . cows sleep standing up .
so if you approach them from behind , down wind , you can push them over and they go thud in the mud . "
so before i had a chance to determine whether this was right or not , we had jumped the moat , we had climbed the fence , we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor , dozing cow .
so a few weeks after my diagnosis , we went up to vermont , and i decided to put jeff as the first person in the council of dads .
and we went to this apple orchard , and i read him this letter .
" will you help be their dad ? "
and i got to the end - he was crying and i was crying - and then he looked at me , and he said , " yes . "
i was like , " yes ? "
i kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter .
and frankly , although i keep getting asked this , it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances .
and then i asked him a question , which i ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book .
and that was , " what 's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls ? "
and jeff 's advice was , " be a traveller , not a tourist .
get off the bus . seek out what 's different .
approach the cow . "
" so it 's 10 years from now , " i said , " and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad , and i 'm not here .
what would you tell them ? "
he said , " i would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle .
you can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple , or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like , what it smells like . "
and as he talked he had that glint in his eye that i first saw back in holland - the glint that says , " let 's go cow tipping , " even though we never did tip the cow , even though no one tips the cow , even though cows do n't sleep standing up .
he said , " i want to see you back here girls , at the end of this experience , covered in mud . "
two weeks after my diagnosis , a biopsy confirmed i had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur .
six hundred americans a year get an osteosarcoma .
eighty-five percent are under 21 .
only a hundred adults a year get one of these diseases .
twenty years ago , doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped , and there was a 15 percent survival rate .
and then in the 1980 's , they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective , and within weeks i had started that regimen .
and since we are in a medical room , i went through four and a half months of chemo .
actually i had cisplatin , doxorubicin and very high-dose methotrexate .
and then i had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon , dr. john healey at memorial sloan-kettering hospital in new york , took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium .
and if you did see the sanjay special , you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis .
then he took my fibula from my calf , cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh , where it now lives .
and what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf and re-vascularized it in my thigh and then connected it to the good parts of my knee and my hip .
and then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle .
this is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me .
and my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo .
it was , as we said in my house , a lost year .
because in those opening weeks , we all had nightmares .
and one night i had a nightmare that i was walking through my house , sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else 's children sitting on my desk .
and i remember a particular one night that , when you told that story of - i do n't know where you are dr. nuland - of william sloane coffin - it made me think of it .
because i was in the hospital after , i think it was my fourth round of chemo when my numbers went to zero , and i had basically no immune system .
and they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital .
and anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body .
and one night i got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters , at that time three and a half , were missing me and feeling my absence .
and i hung up the phone , and i put my face in my hands , and i screamed this silent scream .
and what you said , dr. nuland - i do n't know where you are - made me think of this today .
because the thought that came to my mind was that the feeling that i had was like a primal scream .
and what was so striking - and one of the messages i want to leave you here with today - is the experience .
as i became less and less human - and at this moment in my life , i was probably 30 pounds less than i am right now .
of course , i had no hair and no immune system .
they were actually putting blood inside my body .
at that moment i was less and less human , i was also , at the same time , maybe the most human i 've ever been .
and what was so striking about that time was , instead of repulsing people , i was actually proving to be a magnet for people .
people were incredibly drawn .
when my wife and i had kids , we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck .
instead , it was everybody running the other way .
and when i had cancer , we thought it 'd be everybody running the other way .
instead , it was all-hands-on-deck .
and when people came to me , rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw - i was like a living ghost - they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives .
cancer , i found , is a passport to intimacy .
it is an invitation , maybe even a mandate , to enter the most vital arenas of human life , the most sensitive and the most frightening , the ones that we never want to go to , but when we do go there , we feel incredibly transformed when we do .
and this also happened to my girls as they began to see , and , we thought , maybe became an ounce more compassionate .
one day , my daughter tybee , tybee came to me , and she said , " i have so much love for you in my body , daddy , i ca n't stop giving you hugs and kisses .
and when i have no more love left , i just drink milk , because that 's where love comes from . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one night my daughter eden came to me .
and as i lifted my leg out of bed , she reached for my crutches and handed them to me .
in fact , if i cling to one memory of this year , it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand .
i did n't need the crutch anymore , i was walking on air .
and one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people .
and it made me think - and i 'll just note for the record - one word that i 've only heard once actually was when we were all doing tony robbins yoga yesterday - the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word " friend . "
and yet from everything we 've been talking about - compliance , or addiction , or weight loss - we now know that community is important , and yet it 's one thing we do n't actually bring in .
and there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me .
and one of the things that i learned is that over time , particularly men , who used to be non-communicative , are becoming more and more communicative .
and that particularly happened - there was one in my life - is this council of dads that linda said , what we were talking about , it 's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off .
and no one captures this modern manhood to me more than david black .
now david is my literary agent .
he 's about five-foot three and a half on a good day , standing fully upright in cowboy boots .
and on kind of the manly-male front , he answers the phone - i can say this i guess because you 've done it here - he answers the phone , " yo , motherfucker . "
he gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine , and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car - although , like a lot of men , he 's impatient ; he bought it on his 49th .
but like a lot of modern men , he hugs , he bakes , he leaves work early to coach little league .
someone asked me if he cried when i asked him to be in the council of dads .
i was like , " david cries when you invite him to take a walk . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he 's a literary agent , which means he 's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams do n't come true .
and this is what we wanted him to capture - what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations .
and i said , " what 's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer ? "
and he said , " a belief in themselves . "
" but when i came to see you , " i said , " i did n't believe in myself .
i was at a wall . "
he said , " i do n't see the wall , " and i 'm telling you the same , do n't see the wall .
you may encounter one from time to time , but you 've got to find a way to get over it , around it , or through it .
but whatever you do , do n't succumb to it .
do n't give in to the wall .
my home is not far from the brooklyn bridge , and during the year and a half i was on crutches , it became a sort of symbol to me .
so one day near the end of my journey , i said , " come on girls , let 's take a walk across the brooklyn bridge . "
we set out on crutches .
i was on crutches , my wife was next to me , my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead .
and because walking was one of the first things i lost , i spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts .
walking upright , we are told , is the threshold of what made us human .
and yet , for the four million years humans have been walking upright , the act is essentially unchanged .
as my physical therapist likes to say , " every step is a tragedy waiting to happen . "
you nearly fall with one leg , then you catch yourself with the other .
and the biggest consequence of walking on crutches - as i did for a year and a half - is that you walk slower .
you hurry , you get where you 're going , but you get there alone .
you go slow , you get where you 're going , but you get there with this community you built along the way .
at the risk of admission , i was never nicer than the year i was on crutches .
200 years ago , a new type of pedestrian appeared in paris .
he was called a " flaneur , " one who wanders the arcades .
and it was the custom of those flaneurs to show they were men of leisure by taking turtles for walks and letting the reptile set the pace .
and i just love this ode to slow moving .
and it 's become my own motto for my girls .
take a walk with a turtle .
behold the world in pause .
and this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson i took from my journey .
there 's a quote from moses on the side of the liberty bell , and it comes from a passage in the book of leviticus , that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow .
and every seven sets of seven years , the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love .
that 50th year is called the jubilee year , and it 's the origin of that term .
and though i 'm shy of 50 , it captures my own experience .
my lost year was my jubilee year .
by laying fallow , i planted the seeds for a healthier future and was reunited with the ones i love .
come the one year anniversary of my journey , i went to see my surgeon , dr. john healey - and by the way , healey , great name for a doctor .
he 's the president of the international society of limb salvage , which is the least euphemistic term i 've ever heard .
and i said , " dr. healey , if my daughters come to you one day and say , ' what should i learn from my daddy 's story ? ' what would you tell them ? "
he said , " i would tell them what i know , and that is everybody dies , but not everybody lives .
i want you to live . "
i wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book , " the council of dads , " and i listed these lessons , a few of which you 've heard here today : approach the cow , pack your flipflops , do n't see the wall , live the questions , harvest miracles .
as i looked at this list - to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living - i realized , we may have done it for our girls , but it really changed us .
and that is , the secret of the council of dads , is that my wife and i did this in an attempt to help our daughters , but it really changed us .
so i stand here today as you see now , walking without crutches or a cane .
and last week i had my 18-month scans .
and as you all know , anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans .
in my case it 's quarterly .
and all the collective minds in this room , i dare say , can never find a solution for scan-xiety .
as i was going there , i was wondering , what would i say depending on what happened here .
i got good news that day , and i stand here today cancer-free , walking without aid and hobbling forward .
and i just want to mention briefly in passing - i 'm past my time limit - but i just want to briefly mention in passing that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this is , at a similar meeting , back in the spring , anne wojcicki heard about our story and very quickly - in a span of three weeks - put the full resources of 23andme , and we announced an initiative in july to get to decode the genome of anybody , a living person with a heart tissue , bone sarcoma .
and she told me last night , in the three months since we 've done it , we 've gotten 300 people who 've contributed to this program .
and the epidemiologists here will tell you , that 's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the united states .
so if you go to 23andme , or if you go to councilofdads.com , you can click on a link .
and we encourage anybody to join this effort .
but i 'll just close what i 've been talking about by leaving you with this message : may you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal , or to that college roommate , or to some person you may have turned away from .
may you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace , or find a way to get over , around , or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams .
and every now and then , find a friend , find a turtle , and take a long , slow walk .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you really want to understand the problem that we 're facing with the oceans , you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics .
we ca n't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way .
so i 'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean .
we 'll look at sea level rise .
we 'll look at ocean warming .
and then the last thing on the list there , ocean acidification - if you were to ask me , you know , " what do you worry about the most ?
what frightens you ? "
for me , it 's ocean acidification .
and this has come onto the stage pretty recently .
so i will spend a little time at the end .
i was in copenhagen in december like a number of you in this room .
and i think we all found it , simultaneously , an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience .
i sat in this large negotiation hall , at one point , for three or four hours , without hearing the word " oceans " one time .
it really was n't on the radar screen .
the nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders - it tended to be the leaders of the small island states , the low-lying island states .
and by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations , a lot of the low-lying states , like kiribati and nauru , they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows .
you know , they were marginalized in the negotiation room .
one of the problems is coming up with the right target .
it 's not clear what the target should be .
and how can you figure out how to fix something if you do n't have a clear target ?
now , you 've heard about " two degrees " : that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees .
but there 's not a lot of science behind that number .
we 've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere .
should it be 450 ? should it be 400 ?
there 's not a lot of science behind that one either .
most of the science that is behind these numbers , these potential targets , is based on studies on land .
and i would say , for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be , we would argue that they must be much lower .
you know , from an oceanic perspective , 450 is way too high .
now there 's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350 .
we are , right now , at 390 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere .
we 're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450 , so we 've got to accept we 're going to do an overshoot , and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what 's the pathway back to 350 .
now , why is this so complicated ?
why do n't we know some of these things a little bit better ?
well , the problem is that we 've got very complicated forces in the climate system .
there 's all kinds of natural causes of climate change .
there 's air-sea interactions .
here in galapagos , we 're affected by el ninos and la nina .
but the entire planet warms up when there 's a big el nino .
volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere .
that changes our climate .
the ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet .
so anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet .
and we know the solar output 's not constant through time .
so those are all natural causes of climate change .
and then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well .
we 're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land , the reflectivity .
we inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere , and we have trace gases , and not just carbon dioxide - it 's methane , ozone , oxides of sulfur and nitrogen .
so here 's the thing . it sounds like a simple question .
is co2 produced by man 's activities causing the planet to warm up ?
but to answer that question , to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide , you have to know something about all of these other agents of change .
but the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things .
you know , thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes .
and we 've got it worked out , and we can say , " yes , co2 is causing the planet to warm up now . "
now , we have many ways to study natural variability .
i 'll show you a few examples of this now .
this is the ship that i spent the last three months on in the antarctic .
it 's a scientific drilling vessel .
we go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change , right .
like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had co2 double what it is today .
and so that 's what we 've done with this ship .
this was - this is south of the antarctic circle .
it looks downright tropical there .
one day where we had calm seas and sun , which was the reason i could get off the ship .
most of the time it looked like this .
we had a waves up to 50 ft .
and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots .
so that trip just ended , and i ca n't show you too many results from that right now , but we 'll go back one more year , to another drilling expedition i 've been involved in .
this was led by ross powell and tim naish .
it 's the andrill project .
and we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet .
this is a crazy thing , this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm , drilling at temperatures of minus 40 .
and we drilled in the ross sea .
that 's the ross sea ice shelf on the right there .
so , this huge floating ice shelf the size of alaska comes from west antarctica .
now , west antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep .
so that ice sheet is partly floating , and it 's exposed to the ocean , to the ocean heat .
this is the part of antarctica that we worry about .
because it 's partly floating , you can imagine , is sea level rises a little bit , the ice lifts off the bed , and then it can break off and float north .
when that ice melts , sea level rises by six meters .
so we drill back in time to see how often that 's happened , and exactly how fast that ice can melt .
here 's the cartoon on the left there .
we drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor .
so it 's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled .
it took about 10 years to put this project together .
and here 's what we found .
now , there 's 40 scientists working on this project , and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses .
but it turns out , you know , the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description .
you know , we saw this in the core samples as they came up .
we saw these alternations between sediments that look like this - there 's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand .
that 's the kind of material in the deep sea .
it can only get there if it 's carried out by ice .
so we know there 's an ice shelf overhead .
and that alternates with a sediment that looks like this .
this is absolutely beautiful stuff .
this sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants .
and these plants need sunlight , so we know when we find that sediment there 's no ice overhead .
and we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water , between gravels and these plant sediments .
so what that means is , what it tells us is that the ross sea region , this ice shelf , melted back and formed anew about 35 times .
and this is in the past four million years .
this was completely unexpected .
nobody imagined that the west antarctic ice sheet was this dynamic .
in fact , the lore for many years has been , " the ice formed many tens of millions of years ago , and it 's been there ever since . "
and now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again , and sea level went up and down , six meters at a time .
what caused it ?
well , we 're pretty sure that it 's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching antarctica , just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the earth .
but here 's the key thing : you know , the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold , that the planet warmed up enough - and the number 's about one degree to one and a half degrees centigrade - the planet warmed up enough that it became ...
that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted .
and you know what ?
we 've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount .
so many of us are convinced now that west antarctica , the west antarctic ice sheet , is starting to melt .
we do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century .
and it could be larger than that .
this is a serious consequence for nations like kiribati , you know , where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level .
okay , the second story takes place here in galapagos .
this is a bleached coral , coral that died during the 1982- ' 83 el nino .
this is from champion island .
it 's about a meter tall pavona clavus colony .
and it 's covered with algae . that 's what happens .
when these things die , immediately , organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface .
and so , when a coral colony is killed by an el nino event , it leaves this indelible record .
you can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this .
so one of the things thought of in the ' 80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event .
and just so you know , 1982- ' 83 , that el nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in galapagos .
then there was similar mortality in ' 97- ' 98 .
and what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events .
we saw no other mass mortality events .
so these events in our recent past really are unique .
so they 're either just truly monster el ninos , or they 're just very strong el ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming .
either case , it 's bad news for the corals of the galapagos islands .
here 's how we sample the corals .
this is actually easter island . look at this monster .
this coral is eight meters tall , right .
and it been growing for about 600 years .
now , sylvia earle turned me on to this exact same coral .
and she was diving here with john lauret - i think it was 1994 - and collected a little nugget and sent it to me .
and we started working on it , and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this .
so we have a diamond drill .
we 're not killing the colony ; we 're taking a small core sample out of the top .
the core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone .
and that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it .
you can see some of the coral cores there on the right .
so we 've done that all over the eastern pacific .
we 're starting to do it in the western pacific as well .
i 'll take you back here to the galapagos islands .
and we 've been working at this fascinating uplift here in urbina bay .
that the place where , during an earthquake in 1954 , this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly , and it was lifted up about six to seven meters .
and so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet .
if you go on the ground there , it looks like this , and this is the grandaddy coral .
it 's 11 meters in diameter , and we know that it started growing in the year 1584 .
imagine that .
and that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters , until 1954 , when the earthquake happened .
now the reason we know it 's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands .
when you cut them , slice those cores in half and x-ray them , you see these light and dark bands .
each one of those is a year .
we know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year .
and we just count on down to the bottom .
then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry .
we can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral , and there 's a whole bunch of things we can do .
but in this case , we measured the different isotopes of oxygen .
their ratio tells us the water temperature .
in this example here , we had monitored this reef in galapagos with temperature recorders , so we know the temperature of the water the coral 's growing in .
then after we harvest a coral , we measure this ratio , and now you can see , those curves match perfectly .
in this case , at these islands , you know , corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water .
and of course , our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here .
the coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years .
so , what we do : it 's not just my group ; there 's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this .
but we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years , here 's a synthetic diagram .
there 's a whole family of curves here .
but what 's happening : we 're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet .
and there 's five or six different compilations there , but each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals .
we do similar things with ice cores .
we work with tree rings .
and that 's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century , right ?
and i chose this one because it 's complicated and messy looking , right .
this is as messy as it gets .
you can see there 's some signals there .
some of the records show lower temperatures than others .
some of them show greater variability .
but they all tell us what the natural variability is .
some of them are from the northern hemisphere ; some are from the entire globe .
but here 's what we can say : what 's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down .
it was cooling down until about 1900 or so .
and there is natural variability caused by the sun , caused by el ninos .
a century-scale , decadal-scale variability , and we know the magnitude ; it 's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree centigrade .
but then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black .
and there 's the temperature up there in 2009 .
you know , we 've warmed the globe about a degree centigrade in the last century , and there 's nothing that resembles what we 've seen in the last century .
you know , that 's the strength of our argument , that we are doing something that 's truly different .
so i 'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification .
i like it as a component of global change to talk about , because , even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic , and i talk to that community fairly often , you can not deny the simple physics of co2 dissolving in the ocean .
you know , we 're pumping out lots of co2 into the atmosphere , from fossil fuels , from cement production .
right now , about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea , right ?
and as it does so , it makes the ocean more acidic .
so , you can not argue with that .
that is what 's happening right now , and it 's a very different issue than the global warming issue .
it has many consequences .
there 's consequences for carbonate organisms .
there are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate - plants and animals both .
the main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate .
that material is more soluble in acidic fluid .
so one of the things we 're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells .
at some point , as this transience , as this co2 uptake in the ocean continues , that material 's actually going to start to dissolve .
and on coral reefs , where some of the main framework organisms disappear , we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity .
but it 's not just the carbonate producers that are affected .
there 's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean .
so many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean .
so , all of these things - greater metabolic demands , reduced reproductive success , changes in respiration and metabolism .
you know , these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience .
so we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track co2 levels in the atmosphere , we used to do it just with ice cores , but in this case , we 're going back 20 million years .
and we take samples of the sediment , and it tells us the co2 level of the ocean , and therefore the co2 level of the atmosphere .
and here 's the thing : you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when co2 levels were about what they are today .
you have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when co2 levels were double what they are today .
now , what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean , that 's the reason that they 're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that 's going on right now .
so , charlie veron came up with this statement last year : " the prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic co2 release . "
and i think that may very well be true , so i 'll close with this .
you know , we do need the protected areas , absolutely , but for the sake of the oceans , we have to cap or limit co2 emissions as soon as possible .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- has anyone ever been to aspen , colorado ?
it 's not a joke yet ; those are n't the jokes .
is this thing off ?
i went to aspen recently and stumbled into this song .
♫ black men go to aspen ♫ ♫ and rent colorful chalets . ♫ ♫ giggle at the questions ♫ ♫ their mere presence seems to raise . ♫ ♫ get taken for men ♫ ♫ we do n't resemble in the least . ♫ " are you ... ? "
" no . "
♫ it 's a winter wonderland ♫ ♫ in the belly of the beast . ♫ ♫ and black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men send back sushi ♫ ♫ with a scorned yakuza 's flair . ♫ ♫ we make postmodern art ♫ ♫ with bacon grease ♫ ♫ and hot combed hair . ♫ ♫ we secretly play beethoven ♫ ♫ inside our bassmobiles . ♫ ♫ we can tell you how cool looks ♫ ♫ but can not show you how it feels ♫ ♫ when black men ski . ♫ ♫ when black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men now are students ♫
♫ of gay sensibility . ♫ ♫ we wear ironic t-shirts ♫ ♫ drenched in code unknown to thee . ♫ ♫ we get baptized in walden pond ♫ ♫ amongst a searing mob ♫ ♫ because the cleansing blood of jesus ♫ ♫ could not do a thorough job . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ chinese guys can jump real high ♫ ♫ and germans cook soul food . ♫ ♫ white boys rap and hippies nap ♫ ♫ their dreads up to look rude . ♫ ♫ jazz is now suburban ♫ ♫ it 's marsalisly clean . ♫
♫ and now we 've got viagra ♫ ♫ everyone 's a sex machine . ♫ ♫ so black men ski . ♫ what else can we do ?
♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ some kids i 'll describe as friends ♫ ♫ say i am race-obsessed . ♫ ♫ the luxury of your opinion ♫ ♫ shows that you are blessed . ♫ ♫ see , i have poems about sunsets ♫ ♫ flowers and the rain . ♫ ♫ i 've read them to policemen ♫ ♫ but it was all in vain . ♫ ♫ so black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski ... ♫ elegantly .
♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ we 're 25 , 26 years after the advent of the macintosh , which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general .
it fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation , thought about computers , how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them .
it was such a radical change , in fact , that the early macintosh development team in ' 82 , ' 83 , ' 84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up .
now , this is an interesting little message , and it 's a lesson that has since , i think , been forgotten or lost or something , and that is , namely , that the os is the interface .
the interface is the os .
it 's like the land and the king -lrb- i.e. arthur -rrb- they 're inseparable , they are one .
and to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter .
it was n't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines .
there were no graphics routines . there were no mouse drivers .
so it was a necessity .
but in the quarter-century since then , we 've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk .
so memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million .
same thing for processor speeds .
networks , we did n't have networks at all at the time of the macintosh 's introduction , and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers .
and , of course , graphics : today 84 dollars and 97 cents at best buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from sgi only a decade ago .
so we 've got that incredible ramp-up .
then , on the side , we 've got the web and , increasingly , the cloud , which is fantastic , but also - in the regard in which an interface is fundamental - kind of a distraction .
so we 've forgotten to invent new interfaces .
certainly we 've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard , and people are starting to wake up about that .
so what happens next ? where do we go from there ?
the problem , as we see it , has to do with a single , simple word : " space , " or a single , simple phrase : " real world geometry . "
computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in , that we teach them in , are hideously insensate when it comes to space .
they do n't understand real world space .
it 's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well .
they also do n't understand time , but that 's a matter for a separate talk .
so what happens if you start to explain space to them ?
one thing you might get is something like the luminous room .
the luminous room is a system in which it 's considered that input and output spaces are co-located .
that 's a strangely simple , and yet unexplored idea , right ?
when you use a mouse , your hand is down here on the mouse pad .
it 's not even on the same plane as what you 're talking about : the pixels are up on the display .
so here was a room in which all the walls , floors , ceilings , pets , potted plants , whatever was in there , were capable , not only of display but of sensing as well .
and that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this .
that 's a digital storage in a physical container .
the contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers .
has to come back out , whatever you put in .
this little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well .
if you presented it with a chess board , it tried to figure out what you might mean by that .
and if there was nothing for them to do , the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away .
the academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous , so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser .
the beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects , and the system projects down the laser beam path .
so you 've got an interface that has no interface .
you operate the world as you operate the real world , which is to say , with your hands .
similarly , a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left - not that remarkable in a sense ; we did n't invent the mathematics .
but if you displayed that on a crt or flat panel display , it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object , a real world object in that .
here , the real world merges with the simulation .
and finally , to pull out all the stops , this is a system called urp , for urban planners , in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use cad systems .
and we make the machine meet them half way .
it projects down digital shadows , as you see here .
and if you introduce tools like this inverse clock , then you can control the sun 's position in the sky .
that 's 8 a.m. shadows .
they get a little shorter at 9 a.m.
there you are , swinging the sun around .
short shadows at noon and so forth .
and we built up a series of tools like this .
there are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate , even though they do n't know anything about urban planning : to move a building , you simply reach out your hand and you move the building .
a material wand makes the building into a sort of frank gehry thing that reflects light in all directions .
are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways ?
a zoning tool connects distant structures , a building and a roadway .
are you going to get sued by the zoning commission ? and so forth .
now , if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated , that 's great ; they should seem familiar .
this work is 15 years old .
this stuff was undertaken at mit and the media lab under the incredible direction of professor hiroshi ishii , director of the tangible media group .
but it was that work that was seen by alex mcdowell , one of the world 's legendary production designers .
but alex was preparing a little , sort of obscure , indie , arthouse film called " minority report " for steven spielberg , and invited us to come out from mit and design the interfaces that would appear in that film .
and the great thing about it was that alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude , the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable , that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an r & d effort .
and the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual .
people still reference those sequences in " minority report " when they talk about new ui design .
so this led full circle , in a strange way , to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface : the spatial operating environment , we call it .
so here we have a bunch of stuff , some images .
and , using a hand , we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom , six degrees of navigational control .
and it 's fun to fly through mr. beckett 's eye .
and you can come back out through the scary orangutan .
and that 's all well and good .
let 's do something a little more difficult .
here , we have a whole bunch of disparate images .
we can fly around them .
so navigation is a fundamental issue .
you have to be able to navigate in 3d .
much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial .
and the part that is n't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it .
now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways .
so we can throw it out like that . let 's reset it .
we can organize it this way .
and , of course , it 's not just about navigation , but about manipulation as well .
so if we do n't like stuff , or we 're intensely curious about ernst haeckel 's scientific falsifications , we can pull them out like that .
and then if it 's time for analysis , we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution .
let 's just come down a bit and fly around .
so that 's a different way to look at stuff .
if you 're of a more analytical nature then you might want , actually , to look at this as a color histogram .
so now we 've got the stuff color-sorted , angle maps onto color .
and now , if we want to select stuff , 3d , space , the idea that we 're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in , not in 2d , not in fake 2d , but in actual 3d .
here are some selection planes .
and we 'll perform this boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass .
so , from there to the world of real work .
here 's a logistics system , a small piece of one that we 're currently building .
there 're a lot of elements .
and one thing that 's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information .
so here 's a familiar place .
and we 'll bring this back here for a second .
maybe select a little bit of that .
and bring out this graph .
and we should , now , be able to fly in here and have a closer look .
these are logistics elements that are scattered across the united states .
one thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers .
that 's the old way , that 's the old mantra : one machine , one human , one mouse , one screen .
well , that does n't really cut it anymore .
in the real world , we have people who collaborate ; we have people who have to work together , and we have many different displays .
and we might want to look at these various images .
we might want to ask for some help .
the author of this new pointing device is sitting over there , so i can pull this from there to there .
these are unrelated machines , right ?
so the computation is space soluble and network soluble .
so i 'm going to leave that over there because i have a question for paul .
paul is the designer of this wand , and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what 's going on .
so let me get some of these out of the way .
let 's pull this apart : i 'll go ahead and explode it .
kevin , can you help ?
let me see if i can help us find the circuit board .
mind you , it 's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise , but we do it in the lab all the time .
all right .
so collaborative work , whether it 's immediately co-located or distant and distinct , is always important .
and again , that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space .
and finally , i 'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery .
this is a system called tamper , which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be .
we at oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form .
so we have a large number of movies stuck inside here .
and let 's just pick out a few elements .
we can zip through them as a possibility .
we can grab elements off the front , where upon they reanimate , come to life , and drag them down onto the table here .
we 'll go over to jacques tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well .
we may need more than one .
and we probably need , well , we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , let 's take that one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you see , cowboys and french farce people do n't go well together , and the system knows that .
let me leave with one final thought , and that is that one of the greatest english language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift .
and he was n't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 -lsb- dollars -rsb- , or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen vermeer ; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence .
and i think that it 's time that we asked for the same from technology .
technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity , and we need to demand that , in fact .
for some of this kind of technology , ground center is a combination of design , which is crucially important .
we ca n't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start .
and , as well , as of efficacy , agency .
we 're , as human beings , the creatures that create , and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image .
so i will leave you with that . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so to ask the obvious question - actually this is from bill gates - when ? -lrb- john underkoffler : when ? -rrb- ca : when real ? when for us , not just in a lab and on a stage ?
can it be for every man , or is this just for corporations and movie producers ?
ju : no , it has to be for every human being .
that 's our goal entirely .
we wo n't have succeeded unless we take that next big step .
i mean it 's been 25 years .
can there really be only one interface ? there ca n't .
ca : but does that mean that , at your desk or in your home , you need projectors , cameras ?
you know , how can it work ?
ju : no , this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display .
it 'll be built into architecture .
the gloves go away in a matter of months or years .
so this is the inevitability about it .
ca : so , in your mind , five years time , someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface ?
ju : i think in five years time when you buy a computer , you 'll get this .
ca : well that 's cool .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used .
what do you think , what in your mind is the first killer app for this ?
ju : that 's a good question , and we ask ourselves that every day .
at the moment , our early-adopter customers - and these systems are deployed out in the real world - do all the big data intensive , data heavy problems with it .
so , whether it 's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction , financial services , pharmaceuticals , bioinformatics , those are the topics right now , but that 's not a killer app .
and i understand what you 're asking .
ca : c 'mon , c 'mon . martial arts , games . c 'mon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- john , thank you for making science-fiction real .
ju : it 's been a great pleasure .
thank you to you all .
-lrb- applause -rrb- can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17 ?
do you know what i wanted to be ?
i wanted to be a biker chick .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i wanted to race cars , and i wanted to be a cowgirl , and i wanted to be mowgli from " the jungle book . "
because they were all about being free , the wind in your hair - just to be free .
and on my seventeenth birthday , my parents , knowing how much i loved speed , gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday .
not that we could have afforded i drive , but to give me the dream of driving .
and on my seventeenth birthday , i accompanied my little sister in complete innocence , as i always had all my life - my visually impaired sister - to go to see an eye specialist .
because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters .
and my little sister wanted to be a pilot - god help her .
so i used to get my eyes tested just for fun .
and on my seventeenth birthday , after my fake eye exam , the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday .
and he said , " so what are you going to do to celebrate ? "
and i took that driving lesson , and i said , " i 'm going to learn how to drive . "
and then there was a silence - one of those awful silences when you know something 's wrong .
and he turned to my mother , and he said , " you have n't told her yet ? "
on my seventeenth birthday , as janis ian would best say , i learned the truth at 17 .
i am , and have been since birth , legally blind .
and you know , how on earth did i get to 17 and not know that ?
well , if anybody says country music is n't powerful , let me tell you this : i got there because my father 's passion for johnny cash and a song , " a boy named sue . "
i 'm the eldest of three . i was born in 1971 .
and very shortly after my birth , my parents found out i had a condition called ocular albinism .
and what the hell does that mean to you ?
so let me just tell you , the great part of all of this ?
i ca n't see this clock and i ca n't see the timing , so holy god , woohoo ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- i might buy some more time .
but more importantly , let me tell you - i 'm going to come up really close here . do n't freak out , pat .
hey .
see this hand ?
beyond this hand is a world of vaseline .
every man in this room , even you , steve , is george clooney .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and every woman , you are so beautiful .
and when i want to look beautiful , i step three feet away from the mirror , and i do n't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting i 've done all my life from all the dark lights .
the really strange part is that , at three and a half , just before i was going to school , my parents made a bizarre , unusual and incredibly brave decision .
no special needs schools .
no labels .
no limitations .
my ability and my potential .
and they decided to tell me that i could see .
so just like johnny cash 's sue , a boy given a girl 's name , i would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive , when they were no longer there to protect me , or just take it all away .
but more significantly , they gave me the ability to believe , totally , to believe that i could .
and so when i heard that eye specialist tell me all the things , a big fat " no , " everybody imagines i was devastated .
and do n't get me wrong , because when i first heard it - aside from the fact that i thought he was insane - i got that thump in my chest , just that " huh ? "
but very quickly i recovered . it was like that .
the first thing i thought about was my mom , who was crying over beside me .
and i swear to god , i walked out of his office , " i will drive . i will drive .
you 're mad . i 'll drive . i know i can drive . "
and with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since i was such a child - he taught me how to sail , knowing i could never see where i was going , i could never see the shore , and i could n't see the sails , and i could n't see the destination .
but he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face .
and that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and i would drive .
and for the next 11 years , i swore nobody would ever find out that i could n't see , because i did n't want to be a failure , and i did n't want to be weak .
and i believed i could do it .
so i rammed through life as only a casey can do .
and i was an archeologist , and then i broke things .
and then i managed a restaurant , and then i slipped on things .
and then i was a masseuse . and then i was a landscape gardener .
and then i went to business school .
and you know , disabled people are hugely educated .
and then i went in and i got a global consulting job with accenture .
and they did n't even know .
and it 's extraordinary how far belief can take you .
in 1999 , two and a half years into that job , something happened .
wonderfully , my eyes decided , enough .
and temporarily , very unexpectedly , they dropped .
and i 'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world , where you work hard , play hard , you gotta be the best , you gotta be the best .
and two years in , i really could see very little .
and i found myself in front of an hr manager in 1999 , saying something i never imagined that i would say .
i was 28 years old .
i had built a persona all around what i could and could n't do .
and i simply said , " i 'm sorry .
i ca n't see , and i need help . "
asking for help can be incredibly difficult .
and you all know what it is . you do n't need to have a disability to know that .
we all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure .
and it 's frightening , is n't it ?
but all that belief had fueled me so long .
and can i tell you , operating in the sighted world when you ca n't see , it 's kind of difficult - it really is .
can i tell you , airports are a disaster .
oh , for the love of god .
and please , any designers out there ?
ok , designers , please put up your hands , even though i ca n't even see you .
i always end up in the gents ' toilets .
and there 's nothing wrong with my sense of smell .
but can i just tell you , the little sign for a gents ' toilet or a ladies ' toilet is determined by a triangle .
have you ever tried to see that if you have vaseline in front of your eyes ?
it 's such a small thing , right ?
and you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you 're not , or to be somebody that you are n't ?
and so after admitting i could n't see to hr , they sent me off to an eye specialist .
and i had no idea that this man was going to change my life .
but before i got to him , i was so lost .
i had no idea who i was anymore .
and that eye specialist , he did n't bother testing my eyes .
god no , it was therapy .
and he asked me several questions , of which many were , " why ?
why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself ?
and do you love what you do , caroline ? "
and you know , when you go to a global consulting firm , they put a chip in your head , and you 're like , " i love accenture . i love accenture . i love my job . i love accenture .
i love accenture . i love accenture . i love my job . i love accenture . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- to leave would be failure .
and he said , " do you love it ? "
i could n't even speak i was so choked up .
i just was so - how do i tell him ?
and then he said to me , " what did you want to be when you were little ? "
now listen , i was n't going to say to him , " well , i wanted to race cars and motorbikes . "
hardly appropriate at this moment in time .
he thought i was mad enough anyway .
and as i left his office , he called me back and he said , " i think it 's time .
i think it 's time to stop fighting and do something different . "
and that door closed .
and that silence just outside a doctor 's office , that many of us know .
and my chest ached .
and i had no idea where i was going . i had no idea .
but i did know the game was up .
and i went home , and , because the pain in my chest ached so much , i thought , " i 'll go out for a run . "
really not a very sensible thing to do .
and i went on a run that i know so well .
i know this run so well , by the back of my hand .
i always run it perfectly fine .
i count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with .
and there was a rock that i always missed .
and i 'd never fallen on it , never .
and there i was crying away , and smash , bash on my rock .
broken , fallen over on this rock in the middle of march in 2000 , typical irish weather on a wednesday - gray , snot , tears everywhere , ridiculously self-pitying .
and i was floored , and i was broken , and i was angry .
and i did n't know what to do .
and i sat there for quite some time going , " how am i going to get off this rock and go home ?
because who am i going to be ?
what am i going to be ? "
and i thought about my dad , and i thought , " good god , i 'm so not sue now . "
and i kept thinking over and over in my mind , what had happened ? where did it go wrong ? why did n't i understand ?
and you know , the extraordinary part of it is i just simply had no answers .
i had lost my belief .
look where my belief had brought me to .
and now i had lost it . and now i really could n't see .
i was crumpled .
and then i remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me , " what do you want to be ? what do you want to be ?
what did you want to be when you were little ? do you love what you do ?
do something different . what do you want to be ?
do something different . what do you want to be ? "
and really slowly , slowly , slowly , it happened .
and it did happen this way .
and then the minute it came , it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart - something different .
" well , how about mowgli from ' the jungle book ' ?
you do n't get more different than that . "
and the moment , and i mean the moment , the moment that hit me , i swear to god , it was like woo hoo ! you know - something to believe in .
and nobody can tell me no .
yes , you can say i ca n't be an archeologist .
but you ca n't tell me , no , i ca n't be mowgli , because guess what ?
nobody 's ever done it before , so i 'm going to go do it .
and it does n't matter whether i 'm a boy or a girl , i 'm just going to scoot .
and so i got off that rock , and , oh my god , did i run home .
and i sprinted home , and i did n't fall , and i did n't crash .
and i ran up the stairs , and there was one of my favorite books of all time , " travels on my elephant " by mark shand - i do n't know if any of you know it .
and i grabbed this book off , and i 'm sitting on the couch going , " i know what i 'm going to do .
i know how to be mowgli .
i 'm going to go across india on the back of an elephant .
i 'm going to be an elephant handler . "
and i had no idea how i was going to be an elephant handler .
from global management consultant to elephant handler .
i had no idea how . i had no idea how you hire an elephant , get an elephant .
i did n't speak hindi . i 'd never been to india . had n't a clue .
but i knew i would .
because , when you make a decision at the right time and the right place , god , that universe makes it happen for you .
nine months later , after that day on snot rock , i had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called kanchi .
and together we would trek a thousand kilometers across india .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the most powerful thing of all , it 's not that i did n't achieve before then . oh my god , i did .
but you know , i was believing in the wrong thing .
because i was n't believing in me , really me , all the bits of me - all the bits of all of us .
do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we 're not ?
and you know what , when you really believe in yourself and everything about you , it 's extraordinary what happens .
and you know what , that trip , that thousand kilometers , it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations .
six thousand people got to see because of that .
when i came home off that elephant , do you know what the most amazing part was ?
i chucked in my job at accenture .
i left , and i became a social entrepreneur , and i set up an organization with mark shand called elephant family , which deals with asian elephant conservation .
and i set up kanchi , because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant , because disability is like the elephant in the room .
and i wanted to make you see it in a positive way - no charity , no pity .
but i wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible .
it was extraordinary .
that 's what i wanted to do .
and i never thought about noes anymore , or not seeing , or any of that kind of nothing .
it just seemed that it was possible .
and you know , the oddest part is , when i was on my way traveling here to ted , i 'll be honest , i was petrified .
and i speak , but this is an amazing audience , and what am i doing here ?
but as i was traveling here , you 'll be very happy to know , i did use my white symbol stick cane , because it 's really good to skip queues in the airport .
and i got my way here being happily proud that i could n't see .
and the one thing is that a really good friend of mine , he texted me on the way over , knowing i was scared .
even though i present confident , i was scared .
he said , " be you . "
and so here i am .
this is me , all of me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i have learned , you know what , cars and motorbikes and elephants , that 's not freedom .
being absolutely true to yourself is freedom .
and i never needed eyes to see - never .
i simply needed vision and belief .
and if you truly believe - and i mean believe from the bottom of your heart - you can make change happen .
and we need to make it happen , because every single one of us - woman , man , gay , straight , disabled , perfect , normal , whatever - everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves .
i no longer want anybody to be invisible .
we all have to be included .
and stop with the labels , the limiting .
losing of labels , because we are not jam jars .
we are extraordinary , different , wonderful people .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my students often ask me , " what is sociology ? "
and i tell them , " it 's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they do n't see . "
and they say , " so how can i be a sociologist ?
how can i understand those invisible forces ? "
and i say , " empathy .
start with empathy .
it all begins with empathy .
take yourself out of your shoes , put yourself into the shoes of another person . "
here , i 'll give you an example .
so i imagine my life : if a hundred years ago china had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the united states in search of coal , and they found it , and , in fact , they found lots of it right here .
and pretty soon , they began shipping that coal , ton by ton , rail car by rail car , boatload by boatload , back to china and elsewhere around the world .
and they got fabulously wealthy in doing so .
and they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal .
and back here in the united states , we saw economic despair , deprivation .
this is what i saw .
i saw people struggling to get by , not knowing what was what and what was next .
and then i asked myself the question .
i say , " how 's it possible that we could be so poor here in the united states , because the coal is such a wealthy resource , it 's so much money ? "
and i realized , because the chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the united states who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves .
and the rest of us , the vast majority of us , struggle to get by .
and the chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship .
does this sound familiar ?
and they did things like train americans to help protect the coal .
and everywhere , were symbols of the chinese - everywhere , a constant reminder .
and back in china , what do they say in china ?
nothing . they do n't talk about us . they do n't talk about the coal .
if you ask them , they 'll say , " well , you know the coal , we need the coal .
i mean , come on , i 'm not going to turn down my thermostat .
you ca n't expect that . "
and so i get angry , and i get pissed , as do lots of average people .
and we fight back , and it gets really ugly .
and the chinese respond in a very ugly way .
and before we know it , they send in the tanks and then send in the troops , and lots of people are dying , and it 's a very , very difficult situation .
can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes ?
can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers ?
and just imagine what you would feel .
because you know why they 're here , and you know what they 're doing here .
and you just feel the anger and you feel the fear .
if you can , that 's empathy - that 's empathy .
you 've left your shoes , and you 've stood in mine .
and you 've got to feel that .
okay , so that 's the warm up .
that 's the warm up .
now we 're going to have the real radical experiment .
and so for the remainder of my talk , what i want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary arab muslim living in the middle east - in particular , in iraq .
and so to help you , perhaps you 're a member of this middle class family in baghdad - and what you want is the best for your kids .
you want your kids to have a better life .
and you watch the news , you pay attention , you read the newspaper , you go down to the coffee shop with your friends , and you read the newspapers from around the world .
and sometimes you even watch satellite , cnn , from the united states .
so you have a sense of what the americans are thinking .
but really , you just want a better life for yourself .
that 's what you want .
you 're arab muslim living in iraq .
you want a better life for yourself .
so here , let me help you .
let me help you with some things that you might be thinking .
number one : this incursion into your land these past 20 years , and before , the reason anyone is interested in your land , and particularly the united states , it 's oil .
it 's all about oil ; you know that , everybody knows that .
people here back in the united states know it 's about oil .
it 's because somebody else has a design for your resource .
it 's your resource ; it 's not somebody else 's .
it 's your land ; it 's your resource .
somebody else has a design for it .
and you know why they have a design ?
you know why they have their eyes set on it ?
because they have an entire economic system that 's dependent on that oil - foreign oil , oil from other parts of the world that they do n't own .
and what else do you think about these people ?
the americans , they 're rich .
come on , they live in big houses , they have big cars , they all have blond hair , blue eyes , they 're happy .
you think that . it 's not true , of course , but that 's the media impression , and that 's like what you get .
and they have big cities , and the cities are all dependent on oil .
and back home , what do you see ?
poverty , despair , struggle .
look , you do n't live in a wealthy country .
this is iraq .
this is what you see .
you see people struggling to get by .
i mean , it 's not easy ; you see a lot of poverty .
and you feel something about this .
these people have designs for your resource , and this is what you see ?
something else you see that you talk about - americans do n't talk about this , but you do .
there 's this thing , this militarization of the world , and it 's centered right in the united states .
and the united states is responsible for almost one half of the world 's military spending - and you feel it ; you see it every day .
it 's part of your life .
and you talk about it with your friends .
you read about it .
and back when saddam hussein was in power , the americans did n't care about his crimes .
when he was gassing the kurds and gassing iran , they did n't care about it .
when oil was at stake , somehow , suddenly , things mattered .
and what you see , something else , the united states , the hub of democracy around the world , they do n't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world .
there are a lot of countries , oil-producing countries , that are n't very democratic , but supported by the united states .
that 's odd .
oh , these incursions , these two wars , the 10 years of sanctions , the eight years of occupation , the insurgency that 's been unleashed on your people , of civilian deaths , all because of oil .
you ca n't help but think that .
you talk about it .
it 's in the forefront of your mind always .
you say , " how is that possible ? "
and this man , he 's every man - your grandfather , your uncle , your father , your son , your neighbor , your professor , your student .
once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly , pain and sorrow .
everyone in your country has been touched by the violence , the bloodshed , the pain , the horror , everybody .
not a single person in your country has not been touched .
but there 's something else .
there 's something else about these people , these americans who are there .
there 's something else about them that you see - they do n't see themselves .
and what do you see ? they 're christians .
they 're christians .
they worship the christian god , they have crosses , they carry bibles .
their bibles have a little insignia that says " u.s. army " on them .
and their leaders , their leaders : before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country - and you know the reason - before they send them off , they go to a christian church , and they pray to their christian god , and they ask for protection and guidance from that god .
why ?
well , obviously , when people die in the war , they are muslims , they are iraqis - they 're not americans .
you do n't want americans to die . protect our troops .
and you feel something about that - of course you do .
and they do wonderful things .
you read about it , you hear about it .
they 're there to build schools and help people , and that 's what they want to do .
they do wonderful things , but they also do the bad things , and you ca n't tell the difference .
and this guy , you get a guy like lt. gen. william boykin .
i mean , here 's a guy who says that your god is a false god .
your god 's an idol ; his god is the true god .
the solution to the problem in the middle east , according to him , is to convert you all to christianity - just get rid of your religion .
and you know that . americans do n't read about this guy .
they do n't know anything about him , but you do .
you pass it around . you pass his words around .
i mean this is serious . you 're afraid .
he was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of iraq .
and you 're thinking , " god , if this guy is saying that , then all the soldiers must be saying that . "
and this word here , george bush called this war a crusade .
man , the americans , they 're just like , " ah , crusade .
whatever . i do n't know . "
you know what it means .
it 's a holy war against muslims .
look , invade , subdue them , take their resources .
if they wo n't submit , kill them .
that 's what this is about .
and you 're thinking , " my god , these christians are coming to kill us . "
this is frightening .
you feel frightened . of course you feel frightened .
and this man , terry jones : i mean here 's a guy who wants to burn korans , right ?
and the americans : " ah , he 's a knucklehead .
he 's a former hotel manager ; he 's got three-dozen members of his church . "
they laugh him off . you do n't laugh him off .
because in the context of everything else , all the pieces fit .
i mean , of course , this is how americans take it , so people all over the middle east , not just in your country , are protesting .
" he wants to burn korans , our holy book .
these christians , who are these christians ?
they 're so evil , they 're so mean - this is what they 're about . "
this is what you 're thinking as an arab muslim , as an iraqi .
of course you 're going to think this .
and then your cousin says , " hey cuz , check out this website .
you 've got to see this - bible boot camp .
these christians are nuts .
they 're training their little kids to be soldiers for jesus .
and they take these little kids and they run them through these things till they teach them how to say , " sir , yes , sir , " and things like grenade toss and weapons care and maintenance .
and go to the website .
it says " u.s. army " right on it .
i mean , these christians , they 're nuts . how would they do this to their little kids ? "
and you 're reading this website .
and of course , christians back in the united states , or anybody , says , " ah , this is some little , tiny church in the middle of nowhere . "
you do n't know that .
for you , this is like all christians .
it 's all over the web , bible boot camp .
and look at this : they even teach their kids - they train them in the same way the u.s. marines train .
is n't that interesting .
and it scares you , and it frightens you .
so these guys , you see them .
you see , i , sam richards , i know who these guys are .
they 're my students , my friends .
i know what they 're thinking : " you do n't know . "
when you see them , they 're something else , they 're something else .
that 's what they are to you .
we do n't see it that way in the united states , but you see it that way .
so here .
of course , you got it wrong .
you 're generalizing . it 's wrong .
you do n't understand the americans .
it 's not a christian invasion .
we 're not just there for oil ; we 're there for lots of reasons .
you have it wrong . you 've missed it .
and of course , most of you do n't support the insurgency ; you do n't support killing americans ; you do n't support the terrorists .
of course you do n't . very few people do .
but some of you do .
and this is a perspective .
okay , so now , here 's what we 're going to do .
step outside of your shoes that you 're in right now and step back into your normal shoes .
so everyone 's back in the room , okay .
now here comes the radical experiment .
so we 're all back home .
this photo : this woman , man , i feel her .
i feel her .
she 's my sister , my wife , my cousin , my neighbor .
she 's anybody to me .
these guys standing there , everybody in the photo , i feel this photo , man .
so here 's what i want you to do .
let 's go back to my first example of the chinese .
so i want you to go there .
so it 's all about coal , and the chinese are here in the united states .
and what i want you to do is picture her as a chinese woman receiving a chinese flag because her loved one has died in america in the coal uprising .
and the soldiers are chinese , and everybody else is chinese .
as an american , how do you feel about this picture ?
what do you think about that scene ?
okay , try this . bring it back .
this is the scene here .
it 's an american , american soldiers , american woman who lost her loved one in the middle east - in iraq or afghanistan .
now , put yourself in the shoes , go back to the shoes of an arab muslim living in iraq .
what are you feeling and thinking about this photo , about this woman ?
okay , now follow me on this , because i 'm taking a big risk here .
and so i 'm going to invite you to take a risk with me .
these gentlemen here , they 're insurgents .
they were caught by the american soldiers , trying to kill americans .
and maybe they succeeded . maybe they succeeded .
put yourself in the shoes of the americans who caught them .
can you feel the rage ?
can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks ?
can you go there ?
it should n't be that difficult .
you just - oh , man .
now , put yourself in their shoes .
are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders ?
which one ?
can you feel their anger , their fear , their rage at what has happened in their country ?
can you imagine that maybe one of them in the morning bent down to their child and hugged their child and said , " dear , i 'll be back later .
i 'm going out to defend your freedom , your lives .
i 'm going out to look out for us , the future of our country . "
can you imagine that ?
can you imagine saying that ?
can you go there ?
what do you think they 're feeling ?
you see , that 's empathy .
it 's also understanding .
now , you might ask , " okay , sam , so why do you do this sort of thing ?
why would you use this example of all examples ? "
and i say , because ... because .
you 're allowed to hate these people .
you 're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being .
and if i can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch , one tiny inch , then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life .
you can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person 's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane , or your teenage son , or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on sunday mornings .
whatever it is , you can go so far .
and this is what i tell my students : step outside of your tiny , little world .
step inside of the tiny , little world of somebody else .
and then do it again and do it again and do it again .
and suddenly all these tiny , little worlds , they come together in this complex web .
and they build a big , complex world .
and suddenly , without realizing it , you 're seeing the world differently .
everything has changed .
everything in your life has changed .
and that 's , of course , what this is about .
attend to other lives , other visions .
listen to other people , enlighten ourselves .
i 'm not saying that i support the terrorists in iraq , but as a sociologist , what i am saying is i understand .
and now perhaps - perhaps - you do too .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- about 75 years ago , my grandfather , a young man , walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that , and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen : none other than mae west , the heartthrob of the ' 30s , and he could never forget her .
in fact , when he had his daughter many years later , he wanted to name her after mae west , but can you imagine an indian child name mae west ?
the indian family said , no way !
so when my twin brother kaesava was born , he decided to tinker with the spelling of keshava 's name .
he said , if mae west can be m-a-e , why ca n't keshava be k-a-e ?
so he changed kaesava 's spelling .
now kaesava had a baby boy called rehan a couple of weeks ago .
he decided to spell , or , rather , misspell raehan with an a-e .
you know , my grandfather died many years ago when i was little , but his love for mae west lives on as a misspelling in the dna of his progeny .
that for me is successful legacy . -lrb- laughs -rrb- you know , as for me , my wife and i have our own crazy legacy project .
we actually sit every few years , argue , disagree , fight , and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan .
our friends think we 're mad .
our parents think we 're cuckoo .
because , you know , we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom , but we both like to live larger than life .
i believe in the concept of a raja yogi : be a dude before you can become an ascetic .
this is me being a rock star , even if it 's in my own house .
you know ?
so when netra and i sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago , we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves .
what do we mean by beyond ourselves ?
well 200 years , we calculated , is at the end of our direct contact with the world .
there 's nobody i 'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years , so we thought that 's a perfect place where we should situate our plan and let our imagination take flight .
you know , i never really believed in legacy . what am i going to leave behind ? i 'm an artist .
until i made a cartoon about 9/11 .
it caused so much trouble for me .
i was so upset .
you know , a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer .
now i 'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me , and i think about what i want to leave behind through those paintings .
you know , the 9/11 cartoon upset me so much that i decided i 'll never cartoon again .
i said , i 'm never going to make any honest public commentary again .
but of course i continued creating artwork that was honest and raw , because i forgot about how people reacted to my work .
you know , sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic .
perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings .
one of the most important things in my 200-year plan that netra and i write is what to forget about ourselves .
you know , we carry so much baggage , from our parents , from our society , from so many people - fears , insecurities - and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire .
we actually put an expiry date on all our childhood problems .
the latest date i put was , i said , i am going to expire my fear of my leftist , feminist mother-in-law , and this today is the date ! -lrb- laughs -rrb- she 's watching . -lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , you know , i really make decisions all the time about how i want to remember myself , and that 's the most important kind of decisions i make .
and this directly translates into my paintings .
but like my friends , i can do that really well on facebook , pinterest , twitter , flickr , youtube .
name it , i 'm on it .
i 've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world , you know ? but that comes with a problem .
it 's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory , but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology .
we only remember what we want to . at least i do .
and i rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory , you know ? and if technology is not a metaphor for memory , what is it ?
netra and i use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy .
that is a picture of my mother , and she recently got a facebook account .
you know where this is going .
and i 've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my facebook page . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i actually untagged myself first , then i picked up the phone . i said , " mom , you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again . "
and she said , " why ? you look so cute , darling . " i said , " you just do n't understand . "
maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves .
maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives .
you know , whether you agree with , you know , legacy or not , we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time .
so netra and i really wanted to use our 200-year plan to curate this digital legacy , and not only digital legacy but we believe in curating the legacy of my past and future .
how , you may ask ?
well , when i think of the future , i never see myself moving forward in time . i actually see time moving backward towards me .
i can actually visualize my future approaching .
i can dodge what i do n't want and pull in what i want .
it 's like a video game obstacle course . and i 've gotten better and better at doing this . even when i make a painting , i actually imagine i 'm behind the painting , it already exists , and someone 's looking at it , and i see whether they 're feeling it from their gut .
are they feeling it from their heart , or is it just a cerebral thing ?
and it really informs my painting .
even when i do an art show , i really think about , what should people walk away with ?
i remember when i was 19 , i did , i wanted to do my first art exhibition , and i wanted the whole world to know about it .
i did n't know ted then , but what i did was i closed my eyes tight , and i started dreaming . i could imagine people coming in , dressed up , looking beautiful , my paintings with all the light , and in my visualization i actually saw a very famous actress launching my show , giving credibility to me .
and i woke up from my visualization and i said , who was that ? i could n't tell if it was shabana azmi or rekha , two very famous indian actresses , like the meryl streeps of india .
as it turned out , next morning i wrote a letter to both of them , and shabana azmi replied , and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago .
and what a bang it started my career with ! you know , when we think of time in this way , we can curate not only the future but also the past .
this is a picture of my family , and that is netra , my wife .
she 's the co-creator of my 200-year plan .
netra 's a high school history teacher . i love netra , but i hate history .
i keep saying , " nets , you live in the past while i 'll create the future , and when i 'm done , you can study about it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she gave me an indulgent smile , and as punishment , she said , " tomorrow i 'm teaching a class on indian history , and you are sitting in it , and i 'm grading you . "
i 'm like , " oh , god . " i went .
i actually went and sat in on her class . she started by giving students primary source documents from india , pakistan , from britain , and i said , " wow . " then she asked them to separate fact from bias .
i said , " wow , " again .
then she said , " choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity . "
history as an imaging tool ?
i was so inspired .
i went and created my own version of indian history .
i actually included stories from my grandmother .
she used to work for the telephone exchange , and she used to actually overhear conversations between nehru and edwina mountbatten .
and she used to hear all kinds of things she should n't have heard . but , you know , i include things like that .
this is my version of indian history .
you know , if this is so , it occurred to me that maybe , just maybe , the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity .
go tell facebook to figure that out !
netra and i do n't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years . imagine receiving a parcel saying , from the past , okay now you 're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this . no .
we actually write it only to set our attitudes right .
you know , i used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy .
education is great .
it really teaches us who we are , and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world , but it 's really my creativity that 's taught me that i can be much more than what my education told me i am .
i 'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have .
it lets us create who we are , and curate what is to come .
i like to think - thank you .
i like to think of myself as a storyteller , where my past and my future are only stories , my stories , waiting to be told and retold . i hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story .
thank you so much .
shukran ! -lrb- applause -rrb- good morning .
i 've come here to share with you an experiment of how to get rid of one form of human suffering .
it really is a story of dr. venkataswamy .
his mission and his message is about the aravind eye care system .
i think first it 's important for us to recognize what it is to be blind .
-lrb- music -rrb- woman : everywhere i went looking for work , they said no , what use do we have for a blind woman ?
i could n't thread a needle or see the lice in my hair .
if an ant fell into my rice , i could n't see that either .
thulasiraj ravilla : becoming blind is a big part of it , but i think it also deprives the person of their livelihood , their dignity , their independence , and their status in the family .
so she is just one amongst the millions who are blind .
and the irony is that they do n't need to be .
a simple , well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions , and something even simpler , a pair of glasses , can make millions more see .
if we add to that the many of us here now who are more productive because they have a pair of glasses , then almost one in five indians will require eye care , a staggering 200 million people .
today , we 're reaching not even 10 percent of them .
so this is the context in which aravind came into existence about 30 years back as a post-retirement project of dr. v.
he started this with no money .
he had to mortgage all his life savings to make a bank loan .
and over time , we have grown into a network of five hospitals , predominately in the state of tamil nadu and puducherry , and then we added several , what we call vision centers as a hub-and-spoke model .
and then more recently we started managing hospitals in other parts of the country and also setting up hospitals in other parts of the world as well .
the last three decades , we have done about three-and-a-half million surgeries , a vast majority of them for the poor people .
now , each year we perform about 300,000 surgeries .
a typical day at aravind , we would do about a thousand surgeries , maybe see about 6,000 patients , send out teams into the villages to examine , bring back patients , lots of telemedicine consultations , and , on top of that , do a lot of training , both for doctors and technicians who will become the future staff of aravind .
and then doing this day-in and day-out , and doing it well , requires a lot of inspiration and a lot of hard work .
and i think this was possible thanks to the building blocks put in place by dr. v. , a value system , an efficient delivery process , and fostering the culture of innovation .
-lrb- music -rrb- dr. v : i used to sit with the ordinary village man because i am from a village , and suddenly you turn around and seem to be in contact with his inner being , you seem to be one with him .
here is a soul which has got all the simplicity of confidence .
doctor , whatever you say , i accept it .
an implicit faith in you and then you respond to it .
here is an old lady who has got so much faith in me , i must do my best for her .
when we grow in spiritual consciousness , we identify ourselves with all that is in the world , so there is no exploitation .
it is ourselves we are helping .
it is ourselves we are healing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this helped us build a very ethical and very highly patient-centric organization and systems that support it .
but on a practical level , you also have to deliver services efficiently , and , odd as it may seem , the inspiration came from mcdonald 's .
dr. v : see , mcdonald 's ' concept is simple .
they feel they can train people all over the world , irrespective of different religions , cultures , all those things , to produce a product in the same way and deliver it in the same manner in hundreds of places .
larry brilliant : he kept talking about mcdonalds and hamburgers , and none of it made any sense to us .
he wanted to create a franchise , a mechanism of delivery of eye care with the efficiency of mcdonald 's .
dr. v : supposing i 'm able to produce eye care , techniques , methods , all in the same way , and make it available in every corner of the world .
the problem of blindness is gone .
tr : if you think about it , i think the eyeball is the same , as american or african , the problem is the same , the treatment is the same .
and yet , why should there be so much variation in quality and in service , and that was the fundamental principle that we followed when we designed the delivery systems .
and , of course , the challenge was that it 's a huge problem , we are talking of millions of people , very little resource to deal with it , and then lots of logistics and affordability issues .
and then so , one had to constantly innovate .
and one of the early innovations , which still continues , is to create ownership in the community to the problem , and then engage with them as a partner , and here is one such event .
here a community camp just organized by the community themselves , where they find a place , organize volunteers , and then we 'll do our part . you know , check their vision , and then you have doctors who you find out what the problem is and then determine what further testing should be done , and then those tests are done by technicians who check for glasses , or check for glaucoma .
and then , with all these results , the doctor makes a final diagnosis , and then prescribes a line of treatment , and if they need a pair of glasses , they are available right there at the camp site , usually under a tree .
but they get glasses in the frames of their choice , and that 's very important because i think glasses , in addition to helping people see , is also a fashion statement , and they 're willing to pay for it .
so they get it in about 20 minutes and those who require surgery , are counseled , and then there are buses waiting , which will transport them to the base hospital .
and if it was not for this kind of logistics and support , many people like this would probably never get services , and certainly not when they most need it .
they receive surgery the following day , and then they will stay for a day or two , and then they are put back on the buses to be taken back to where they came from , and where their families will be waiting to take them back home .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and this happens several thousand times each year .
it may sound impressive that we 're seeing lots of patients , very efficient process , but we looked at , are we solving the problem ?
we did a study , a scientifically designed process , and then , to our dismay , we found this was only reaching seven percent of those in need , and we 're not adequately addressing more , bigger problems .
so we had to do something different , so we set up what we call primary eye care centers , vision centers .
these are truly paperless offices with completely electronic medical records and so on .
they receive comprehensive eye exams .
we kind of changed the simple digital camera into a retinal camera , and then every patient gets their teleconsultation with a doctor .
the effect of this has been that , within the first year , we really had a 40 percent penetration in the market that it served , which is over 50,000 people .
and the second year went up to 75 percent .
so i think we have a process by which we can really penetrate into the market and reach everyone who needs it , and in this process of using technology , make sure that most do n't need to come to the base hospital .
and how much will they pay for this ?
we fixed the pricing , taking into account what they would save in bus fare in coming to a city , so they pay about 20 rupees , and that 's good for three consultations .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the other challenge was , how do you give high-tech or more advanced treatment and care ?
we designed a van with a vsat , which sends out images of patients to the base hospital where it is diagnosed , and then as the patient is waiting , the report goes back to the patient , it gets printed out , the patient gets it , and then gets a consultation about what they should be doing - i mean , go see a doctor or come back after six months , and then this happens as a way of bridging the technology competence .
so the impact of all this has been essentially one of growing the market , because it focused on the non-customer , and then by reaching the unreached , we 're able to significantly grow the market .
the other aspect is how do you deal with this efficiently when you have very few ophthalmologists ?
so what is in this video is a surgeon operating , and then you see on the other side , another patient is getting ready .
so , as they finish the surgery , they just swing the microscope over , the tables are placed so that their distance is just right , we 're able to more than quadruple the productivity of the surgeon .
and then to support the surgeon , we require a certain workforce .
and then we focused on village girls that we recruited , and then they really are the backbone of the organization .
they do almost all of the skill-based routine tasks .
they do one thing at a time . they do it extremely well .
with the result we have very high productivity , very high quality at very , very low cost .
so , putting all this together , what really happened was the productivity of our staff was significantly higher than anyone else .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a very busy table , but what this really is conveying is that , when it comes to quality , we have put in very good quality-assurance systems .
as a result , our complications are significantly lower than what has been reported in the united kingdom , and you do n't see those kind of numbers very often .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the final part of the puzzle is , how do you make all this work financially , especially when the people ca n't pay for it ?
so what we did was , we gave away a lot of it for free , and then those who pay , i mean , they paid local market rates , nothing more , and often much less .
and we were helped by the market inefficiency .
i think that has been a big savior , even now .
and , of course , one needs the mindset to be wanting to give away what you have as a surplus .
the result has been , over the years , the expenditure has increased with volumes .
the revenues increase at a higher level , giving us a healthy margin while you 're treating a large number of people for free .
i think in absolute terms , last year we earned about 20-odd million dollars , spent about 13 million , with over a 40 percent ebita .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but this really requires going beyond what we do , or what we have done , if you really want to achieve solving this problem of blindness .
and what we did was a couple of very counter-intuitive things .
we created competition for ourselves , and then we made eye care affordable by making low-cost consumables .
we proactively and systematically promoted these practices to many hospitals in india , many in our own backyards and then in other parts of the world as well .
the impact of this has been that these hospitals , in the second year after our consultation , are double their output and then achieve financial recovery as well .
the other part was how do you address this increase in cost of technology ?
there was a time when we failed to negotiate the -lsb- intra-ocular lens -rsb- prices to be at affordable levels , so we set up a manufacturing unit .
and then , over time , we were able to bring down the cost significantly to about two percent of what it used to be when we started out .
today , we believe we have about seven percent of the global market , and they 're used in about 120-odd countries .
to conclude , i mean , what we do , does it have a broader relevance , or is it just india or developing countries ?
so to address this , we studied uk versus aravind .
what it shows is that we do roughly about 60 percent of the volume of what the uk does , near a half-million surgeries as a whole country .
and we do about 300,000 .
and then we train about 50 ophthalmologists against the 70 trained by them , comparable quality , both in training and in patient care .
so we 're really comparing apples to apples .
we looked at cost .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i think it is simple to say just because the u.k. is n't india the difference is happening .
i think there is more to it .
i mean , i think one has to look at other aspects as well .
maybe there is - the solution to the cost could be in productivity , maybe in efficiency , in the clinical process , or in how much they pay for the lenses or consumables , or regulations , their defensive practice .
so , i think decoding this can probably bring answers to most developed countries including the u.s. , and maybe obama 's ratings can go up again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another insight , which , again , i want to leave with you , in conditions where the problem is very large , which cuts across all economic strata , where we have a good solution , i think the process i described , you know , productivity , quality , patient-centered care , can give an answer , and there are many which fit this paradigm .
you take dentistry , hearing aid , maternity and so on .
there are many where this paradigm can now play , but i think probably one of the most challenging things is on the softer side .
now , how do you create compassion ?
now , how do you make people own the problem , want to do something about it ?
there are a bit harder issues .
and i 'm sure people in this crowd can probably find the solutions to these .
so i want to end my talk leaving this thought and challenge to you .
dr. v : when you grow in spiritual consciousness , we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation .
it is ourselves we are helping .
it is ourselves we are healing .
tr : thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to apologize , first of all , to all of you because i have no form of powerpoint presentation .
so what i 'm going to do is , every now and again , i will make this gesture , and in a moment of powerpoint democracy , you can imagine what you 'd like to see .
i do a radio show .
the radio show is called " the infinite monkey cage . "
it 's about science , it 's about rationalism .
so therefore , we get a lot of complaints every single week - complaints including one we get very often , which is to say the very title , " infinite monkey cage , " celebrates the idea of vivisection .
we have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we also had someone else who said , " ' the infinite monkey cage ' idea is ridiculous .
an infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of shakespeare .
we know this because they did an experiment . "
yes , they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week , and after a week , they only used it as a bathroom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the main element though , the main complaint we get - and one that i find most worrying - is that people say , " oh , why do you insist on ruining the magic ?
you bring in science , and it ruins the magic . "
now i 'm an arts graduate ; i love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing .
that 's what i do .
but i also do n't understand how it does ruin the magic .
all of the magic , i think , that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful .
astrology , for instance : like many rationalists , i 'm a pisces .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now astrology - we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted ; that you 'll , perhaps today , meet a lucky man who 's wearing a hat .
that is gone .
but if we want to look at the sky and see predictions , we still can .
we can see predictions of galaxies forming , of galaxies colliding into each other , of new solar systems .
this is a wonderful thing .
if the sun could one day - and indeed the earth , in fact - if the earth could read its own astrological , astronomical chart , one day it would say , " not a good day for making plans .
you 'll been engulfed by a red giant . "
and that to me as well , that if you think i 'm worried about losing worlds , well many worlds theory - one of the most beautiful , fascinating , sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation - is a wonderful thing .
that every person here , every decision that you 've made today , every decision you 've made in your life , you 've not really made that decision , but in fact , every single permutation of those decisions is made , each one going off into a new universe .
that is a wonderful idea .
if you ever think that your life is rubbish , always remember there 's another you that 's made much worse decisions than that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you ever think , " ah , i want to end it all , " do n't end it all .
remember that in the majority of universes , you do n't even exist in the first place .
this to me , in its own strange way , is very , very comforting .
now reincarnation , that 's another thing gone - the afterlife .
but it 's not gone .
science actually says we will live forever .
well , there is one proviso .
we wo n't actually live forever . you wo n't live forever .
your consciousness , the you-ness of you , the me-ness of me - that gets this one go .
but every single thing that makes us , every atom in us , has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things .
we have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people 's knees .
who knows , maybe one of your atoms was once napoleon 's knee .
that is a good thing .
unlike the occupants of the universe , the universe itself is not wasteful .
we are all totally recyclable .
and when we die , we do n't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs .
this is a wonderful thing .
understanding , to me , does not remove the wonder and the joy .
for instance , my wife could turn to me and she may say , " why do you love me ? "
and i can with all honesty look her in the eye and say , " because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- though i 'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well .
and that is a wonderful thing there .
love does not die because of that thing .
pain does n't go away either .
this is a terrible thing , even though i understand pain .
if someone punches me - and because of my personality , this is recently a regular occurrence - i understand where the pain comes from .
it is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant - that 's what it is .
but at no point can i react and go , " ha ! is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you 've got ? "
no , i just spit out a tooth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that is all of these different things - the love for my child .
i have a son . his name is archie .
i 'm very lucky , because he 's better than all the other children .
now i know you do n't think that .
you may well have your own children and think , " oh no , my child 's best . "
that 's the wonderful thing about evolution - the predilection to believe that our child is best .
now in many ways , that 's just a survival thing .
the fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes , and therefore we love it .
but we do n't notice that bit ; we just unconditionally love .
that is a wonderful thing .
though i should say that my son is best and is better than your children .
i 've done some tests .
and all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder .
even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework , for instance .
perhaps you 've been at home for a week on your own .
you house is in a terrible state .
your partner is about to return .
you think , what should i do ?
do nothing .
all you have to do is , when she walks in , using a quantum interpretation , say , " i 'm so sorry .
i stopped observing the house for a moment , and when i started observing again , everything had happened . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming .
for me , it 's a very , very important thing .
even on my journey up here - the joy that i have on my journey up here every single time .
if you actually think , you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful .
i 'm sitting on a train .
every time i breathe in , i 'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen .
i 'm sitting on a chair .
even though i know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space , i find it comfortable .
i look out the window , and i realize that every single time we stop and i look out that window , framed in that window , wherever we are , i am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet earth .
if you go to the safari parks on saturn or jupiter , you will be disappointed .
and i realize i 'm observing this with the brain , the human brain , the most complex thing in the known universe .
that , to me , is an incredible thing .
and do you know what , that might be enough .
steven weinberg , the nobel laureate , once said , " the more the universe seems comprehensible , the more it seems pointless . "
now for some people , that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism .
but for me , it does n't . that is a wonderful thing .
i 'm glad the universe is pointless .
it means if i get to the end of my life , the universe ca n't turn to me and go , " what have you been doing , you idiot ?
that 's not the point . "
i can make my own purpose .
you can make your own purpose .
we have the individual power to go , " this is what i want to do . "
and in a pointless universe , that , to me , is a wonderful thing .
i have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the copenhagen interpretation .
you , i imagine , can do much better things with your time .
thank you very much . goodbye .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities , or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again .
we at berkeley bionics call these robots exoskeletons .
these are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning , and it will give you extra strength , and it will further enhance your speed , and it will help you , for instance , to manage your balance .
it is actually the true integration of the man and the machine .
but not only that - it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there .
this is just not some blue sky thinking .
to show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the american soldier , that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs , and they are being asked to carry more equipment .
obviously , this is resulting in some major complications - back injuries , 30 percent of them - chronic back injuries .
so we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue .
so let me now introduce to you hulc - or the human universal load carrier .
soldier : with the hulc exoskeleton , i can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours .
its flexible design allows for deep squats , crawls and high-agility movements .
it senses what i want to do , where i want to go , and then augments my strength and endurance .
eythor bender : we are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device , this new exoskeleton this year .
so this is for real .
now let 's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users , something that i 'm particularly passionate about .
there are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide .
this is about one percent of the total population .
and that 's actually a conservative estimate .
we are talking here about , oftentimes , very young individuals with spinal cord injuries , that in the prime of their life - 20s , 30s , 40s - hit a wall and the wheelchair 's the only option .
but it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers .
and the only option , pretty much - when it 's stroke or other complications - is the wheelchair .
and that is actually for the last 500 years , since its very successful introduction , i must say .
so we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility .
let me now introduce you to elegs that is worn by amanda boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured , and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- amanda boxtel : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- eb : amanda is wearing our elegs set .
it has sensors .
it 's completely non-invasive , sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back .
there are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips , as well as her knee joints , that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait .
ab : i was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me .
in a split second , i lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis .
not long afterwards , a doctor strode into my hospital room , and he said , " amanda , you 'll never walk again . "
and that was 19 yeas ago .
he robbed every ounce of hope from my being .
adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again , to rock climb and even handcycle .
but nothing has been invented that enables me to walk , until now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- eb : as you can see , we have the technology , we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you .
it 's in our hands , and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations - not only for the soldiers , or for amanda here and all the wheelchair users , but for everyone .
ab : thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what i want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it .
but to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is .
the 404 page is that .
it 's that broken experience on the web .
it 's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it ca n't find it .
and it serves you the 404 page .
it 's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it .
and i just want you to think a little bit about , remember for yourself , it 's annoying when you hit this thing .
because it 's the feeling of a broken relationship .
and that 's where it 's actually also interesting to think about , where does 404 come from ?
it 's from a family of errors actually - a whole set of relationship errors , which , when i started digging into them , it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples couselor .
you sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes .
but these things are everywhere .
they 're on sites big , they 're on sites small .
this is a global experience .
what a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks .
and that 's not a good experience when you 're used to experiences like this .
you can get on your kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone .
a 404 page is not what you 're looking for .
you get that , and it 's like a slap in the face .
trying to think about how a 404 felt , and it would be like if you went to starbucks and there 's the guy behind the counter and you 're over there and there 's no skim milk .
and you say , " hey , could you bring the skim milk ? "
and they walk out from behind the counter and they 've got no pants on .
and you 're like , " oh , i did n't want to see that . "
that 's the 404 feeling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , i 've heard about that .
so where this comes into play and why this is important is i head up a technology incubator , and we had eight startups sitting around there .
and those startups are focused on what they are , not what they 're not , until one day athletepath , which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes , found this video .
-lrb- video -rrb- guy : joey !
crowd : whoa !
renny gleeson : you just ... no , he 's not okay .
they took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place .
because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this turned into a contest .
dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page .
stayhound , which helps you find pet sitters through your social network , commiserated with your pet .
each one of them found this .
it turned into a 24-hour contest .
at 4:04 the next day , we gave out $ 404 in cash .
and what they learned was that those little things , done right , actually matter , and that well-designed moments can build brands .
so you take a look out in the real world , and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself .
you can type in an url and put in a 404 and these will pop .
this is one that commiserates with you .
this is one that blames you .
this is one that i loved .
this is an error page , but what if this error page was also an opportunity ?
so it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be .
because back to the whole relationship issue , what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you 're not , or it can remind me of why i should love you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- images like this , from the auschwitz concentration camp , have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are , where we 've come from and the times we live in .
during the twentieth century , we witnessed the atrocities of stalin , hitler , mao , pol pot , rwanda and other genocides , and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old , we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in darfur and the daily horrors of iraq .
this has led to a common understanding of our situation , namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence , and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from , to our peril .
here is an example from an op-ed on thanksgiving , in the boston globe a couple of years ago , where the writer wrote , " the indian life was a difficult one , but there were no employment problems , community harmony was strong , substance abuse unknown , crime nearly non-existent , what warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter . " now , you 're all familiar with this treacle .
we teach it to our children . we hear it on television and in storybooks . now , the original title of this session was , " everything you know is wrong , " and i 'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong , that , in fact , our ancestors were far more violent than we are , that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time , and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species ' existence .
now , in the decade of darfur and iraq , a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene . but i 'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture . the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon . you can see it over millennia , over centuries , over decades and over years , although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the age of reason in the sixteenth century . one sees it all over the world , although not homogeneously .
it 's especially evident in the west , beginning with england and holland around the time of the enlightenment .
let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 - from the millennium scale to the year scale - to try to persuade you of this . until 10,000 years ago , all humans lived as hunter-gatherers , without permanent settlements or government . and this is the state that 's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony . but the archaeologist lawrence keeley , looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers , which is our best source of evidence about this way of life , has shown a rather different conclusion .
here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging , or hunting and gathering societies .
the red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man , as opposed to passing away of natural causes , in a variety of foraging societies in the new guinea highlands and the amazon rainforest .
and they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to , in the case of the gebusi , only a 15 percent chance . the tiny , little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from united states and europe in the twentieth century , and includes all the deaths of both world wars . if the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century , there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million .
also at the millennium scale , we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the bible . and in this supposed source of our moral values , one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare , such as the following from numbers 31 : " and they warred against the midianites as the lord commanded moses , and they slew all the males . and moses said unto them , ' have you saved all the women alive ? now , therefore , kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him , but all the women children that have not know a man
by lying with him keep alive for yourselves . " ' in other words , kill the men ; kill the children ; if you see any virgins , then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them .
you can find four or five passages in the bible of this ilk .
also in the bible , one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality , adultery , blasphemy , idolatry , talking back to your parents - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and picking up sticks on the sabbath .
well , let 's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude , and look at the century scale .
although we do n't have statistics for warfare throughout the middle ages to modern times , we know just from conventional history - the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence .
for example , any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment . the kind of infraction today that would give you a fine , in those days would result in your tongue being cut out , your ears being cut off , you being blinded , a hand being chopped off and so on .
there were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment : burning at the stake , disemboweling , breaking on the wheel , being pulled apart by horses and so on .
the death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes : criticizing the king , stealing a loaf of bread . slavery , of course , was the preferred labor-saving device , and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment . perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning , in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire , and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat , howling in pain , was burned to death .
what about one-on-one murder ? well , there , there are good statistics , because many municipalities recorded the cause of death .
the criminologist manuel eisner scoured all of the historical records across europe for homicide rates in any village , hamlet , town , county that he could find , and he supplemented them with national data , when nations started keeping statistics .
he plotted on a logarithmic scale , going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year , which was approximately the rate of homicide in the middle ages . and the figure plummets down to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year in seven or eight european countries . then , there is a slight uptick in the 1960s . the people who said that rock ' n ' roll would lead to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that .
but there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude in homicide from the middle ages to the present , and the elbow occurred in the early sixteenth century .
let 's click down now to the decade scale .
according to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics , since 1945 , in europe and the americas , there has been a steep decline in interstate wars , in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms , and in military coups , even in south america . worldwide , there 's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars . the yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present .
and , as you can see , the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade , as horrific as it is .
even in the year scale , one can see a decline of violence .
since the end of the cold war , there have been fewer civil wars , fewer genocides - indeed , a 90 percent reduction since post-world war ii highs - and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime .
this is from the fbi uniform crime statistics . you can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the ' 50s and the ' 60s , then it soared upward for several decades , and began a precipitous decline , starting in the 1990s , so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960 .
president clinton , if you 're here , thank you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the question is , why are so many people so wrong about something so important ? i think there are a number of reasons .
one of them is we have better reporting . the associated press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the earth than sixteenth-century monks were .
there 's a cognitive illusion . we cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something , the higher the probability that you assign to it .
things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age . there are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets : no one ever attracted observers , advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life , and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about western culture .
and of course , our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior . one of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time .
that 's a process that seems to be continuing , but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day , things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards . so today , we get exercised - and rightly so - if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in texas after a 15-year appeal process . we do n't consider that a couple of hundred years ago , they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes , and indeed , that that would have been repeated over and over again . today , we look at capital punishment
as evidence of how low our behavior can sink , rather than how high our standards have risen .
well , why has violence declined ? no one really knows , but i have read four explanations , all of which , i think , have some grain of plausibility . the first is , maybe thomas hobbes got it right . he was the one who said that life in a state of nature was " solitary , poor , nasty , brutish and short . " not because , he argued , humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative , but because of the logic of anarchy . in a state of anarchy , there 's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively , before they invade you . more recently , thomas schelling
gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement . being a good american , he has a pistol in the nightstand , pulls out his gun , and walks down the stairs .
and what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand .
now , each one of them is thinking , " i do n't really want to kill that guy , but he 's about to kill me .
maybe i had better shoot him , before he shoots me , especially since , even if he does n't want to kill me , he 's probably worrying right now that i might kill him before he kills me . " and so on .
hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought , and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first .
now , one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence .
you do n't strike first , but you have a publicly announced policy that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded .
the only thing is that it 's liable to having its bluff called , and therefore can only work if it 's credible . to make it credible , you must avenge all insults and settle all scores , which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta .
life becomes an episode of " the sopranos . " hobbes ' solution , the " leviathan , " was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency - a leviathan - then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack , because any kind of aggression will be punished , leaving its profitability as zero . that would remove the temptation to invade preemptively , out of fear of them attacking you first .
it removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation to make your deterrent threat credible . and therefore , it would lead to a state of peace . eisner - the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide - argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in europe coincided with the rise of centralized states .
so that 's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory .
also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy , in failed states , collapsed empires , frontier regions , mafias , street gangs and so on .
the second explanation is that in many times and places , there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap .
in earlier times , when suffering and early death were common in one 's own life , one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others . and as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant , one puts a higher value on life in general .
this was an argument from the political scientist james payne .
a third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game , and was worked out in the book " nonzero " by the journalist robert wright . wright points out that in certain circumstances , cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction , such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead , or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time .
wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in , by allowing the trade of goods , services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people .
the result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead , and violence declines for selfish reasons . as wright put it , " among the many reasons that i think that we should not bomb the japanese is that they built my mini-van . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called " the expanding circle , " by the philosopher peter singer , who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy , an ability to treat other peoples ' interests as comparable to one 's own . unfortunately , by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family .
people outside that circle are treated as sub-human , and can be exploited with impunity . but , over history , the circle has expanded . one can see , in historical record , it expanding from the village , to the clan , to the tribe , to the nation , to other races , to both sexes , and , in singer 's own arguments , something that we should extend to other sentient species . the question is , if this has happened , what has powered that expansion ?
and there are a number of possibilities , such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that robert wright argues for .
the logic of the golden rule - the more you think about and interact with other people , the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs , at least not if you want them to listen to you . you ca n't say that my interests are special compared to yours , anymore than you can say that the particular spot that i 'm standing on is a unique part of the universe because i happen to be standing on it that very minute .
it may also be powered by cosmopolitanism , by histories , and journalism , and memoirs , and realistic fiction , and travel , and literacy , which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human , and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life , the sense that " there but for fortune go i. "
whatever its causes , the decline of violence , i think , has profound implications . it should force us to ask not just , why is there war ? but also , why is there peace ? not just , what are we doing wrong ? but also , what have we been doing right ?
because we have been doing something right , and it sure would be good to find out what it is .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
chris anderson : i loved that talk . i think a lot of people here in the room would say that that expansion of - that you were talking about , that peter singer talks about , is also driven by , just by technology , by greater visibility of the other , and the sense that the world is therefore getting smaller . i mean , is that also a grain of truth ?
steven pinker : very much . it would fit both in wright 's theory , that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation over larger and larger circles . but also , i think it helps us imagine what it 's like to be someone else . i think when you read these horrific tortures that were common in the middle ages , you think , how could they possibly have done it , how could they have not have empathized with the person that they 're disemboweling ? but clearly , as far as they 're concerned , this is just an alien being that does not have feelings akin to their own . anything , i think ,
that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person .
ca : well , steve , i would love every news media owner to hear that talk at some point in the next year . i think it 's really important . thank you so much .
sp : my pleasure .
i would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs , but not the cyborgs that you think .
you 're not robocop , and you 're not terminator , but you 're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices .
so what 's a good definition for cyborg ?
well , traditional definition is " an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments . "
that came from a 1960 paper on space travel , because , if you think about it , space is pretty awkward .
people are n't supposed to be there .
but humans are curious , and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next .
so let 's look at the concept of traditional anthropology .
somebody goes to another country , says , " how fascinating these people are , how interesting their tools are , how curious their culture is . "
and then they write a paper , and maybe a few other anthropologists read it , and we think it 's very exotic .
well , what 's happening is that we 've suddenly found a new species .
i , as a cyborg anthropologist , have suddenly said , " oh , wow . now suddenly we 're a new form of homo sapiens , and look at these fascinating cultures , and look at these curious rituals that everybody 's doing around this technology .
they 're clicking on things and staring at screens . "
now there 's a reason why i study this , versus traditional anthropology .
and the reason is that tool use , in the beginning - for thousands and thousands of years , everything has been a physical modification of self .
it has helped us to extend our physical selves , go faster , hit things harder , and there 's been a limit on that .
but now what we 're looking at is not an extension of the physical self , but an extension of the mental self , and because of that , we 're able to travel faster , communicate differently .
and the other thing that happens is that we 're all carrying around little mary poppins technology .
we can put anything we want into it , and it does n't get heavier , and then we can take anything out .
what does the inside of your computer actually look like ?
well , if you print it out , it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you 're carrying around all the time .
and if you actually lose that information , it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind , that you suddenly feel like something 's missing , except you are n't able to see it , so it feels like a very strange emotion .
the other thing that happens is that you have a second self .
whether you like it or not , you 're starting to show up online , and people are interacting with your second self when you 're not there .
and so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open , which is basically your facebook wall , so that people do n't write on it in the middle of the night - because it 's very much the equivalent .
and suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self .
you have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life .
so , in the same way that you wake up , take a shower and get dressed , you have to learn to do that for your digital self .
and the problem is that a lot of people now , especially adolescents , have to go through two adolescences .
they have to go through their primary one , that 's already awkward , and then they go through their second self 's adolescence , and that 's even more awkward because there 's an actual history of what they 've gone through online .
and anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now , and so it 's very awkward , and it 's very difficult for them to do those things .
so when i was little , my dad would sit me down at night and he would say , " i 'm going to teach you about time and space in the future . "
and i said , " great . "
and he said one day , " what 's the shortest distance between two points ? "
and i said , " well , that 's a straight line . you told me that yesterday . "
i thought i was very clever .
he said , " no , no , no . here 's a better way . "
he took a piece of paper , drew a and b on one side and the other and folded them together so where a and b touched .
and he said , " that is the shortest distance between two points . "
and i said , " dad , dad , dad , how do you do that ? "
he said , " well , you just bend time and space , it takes an awful lot of energy , and that 's just how you do it . "
and i said , " i want to do that . "
and he said , " well , okay . "
and so , when i went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years , i was thinking at night , " i want to be the first person to create a wormhole , to make things accelerate faster .
and i want to make a time machine . "
i was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders .
but then what i realized when i went to college is that technology does n't just get adopted because it works .
it gets adopted because people use it and it 's made for humans .
so i started studying anthropology .
and when i was writing my thesis on cell phones , i realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets .
they were n't physically transporting themselves ; they were mentally transporting themselves .
they would click on a button , and they would be connected as a to b immediately .
and i thought , " oh , wow . i found it . this is great . "
so over time , time and space have compressed because of this .
you can stand on one side of the world , whisper something and be heard on the other .
one of the other ideas that comes around is that you have a different type of time on every single device that you use .
every single browser tab gives you a different type of time .
and because of that , you start to dig around for your external memories - where did you leave them ?
so now we 're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we 've lost on our external brains that we 're carrying around in our pockets .
and that incites a sort of panic architecture - " oh no , where 's this thing ? "
we 're all " i love lucy " on a great assembly line of information , and we ca n't keep up .
and so what happens is , when we bring all that into the social space , we end up checking our phones all the time .
so we have this thing called ambient intimacy .
it 's not that we 're always connected to everybody , but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want .
and if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone , the room would be very crowded .
these are the people that you have access to right now , in general - all of these people , all of your friends and family that you can connect to .
and so there are some psychological effects that happen with this .
one i 'm really worried about is that people are n't taking time for mental reflection anymore , and that they are n't slowing down and stopping , being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces , paleontology and panic architecture .
they 're not just sitting there .
and really , when you have no external input , that is a time when there is a creation of self , when you can do long-term planning , when you can try and figure out who you really are .
and then , once you do that , you can figure out how to present your second self in a legitimate way , instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in - and oh , i have to do this , and i have to do this , and i have to do this .
and so this is very important .
i 'm really worried that , especially kids today , they 're not going to be dealing with this down-time , that they have an instantaneous button-clicking culture , and that everything comes to them , and that they become very excited about it and very addicted to it .
so if you think about it , the world has n't stopped either .
it has its own external prosthetic devices , and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other .
but when you actually visualize it , all the connections that we 're doing right now - this is an image of the mapping of the internet - it does n't look technological .
it actually looks very organic .
this is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we 've connected in this way .
and it 's not that machines are taking over .
it 's that they 're helping us to be more human , helping us to connect with each other .
the most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives .
and really , it ends up being more human than technology , because we 're co-creating each other all the time .
and so this is the important point that i like to study : that things are beautiful , that it 's still a human connection - it 's just done in a different way .
we 're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other , regardless of geography .
so that 's why i study cyborg anthropology .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , so a couple of years ago i was turning 60 , and i do n't like being 60 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i started grappling with this existential angst of what little i had done with my life .
it was n't the resume of breaking this record here , it was more like , who had i become ?
how had i spent my valuable time ?
how could this have gone by like lightning ?
and i could n't forgive myself for the countless , countless hours i had lost in negative thought - all the time i had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when i was a kid and career moves and this and this and this .
just why , why did n't i do it better ? why ? why ? why ?
and then my mother died at 82 .
and so i starting thinking , not only am i not happy with the past , now i 'm getting choked with , " i 've only got 22 years left . "
what am i going to do with this short amount of time that 's just fleeting ?
and i 'm not in the present whatsoever .
and i decided the remedy to all this malaise was going to be for me to chase an elevated dream , an extreme dream , something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion , something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life , every minute of every day , because the dream was so big that i could n't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction .
and i decided , it was an old dream that was lingering , that was from so many years ago , three decades ago - the only sort of world class swim i had tried and failed at back in my 20s - was going from cuba to florida .
it was deep in my imagination .
no one 's ever done it without a shark cage .
it 's daunting .
it 's more than a hundred miles across a difficult passage of ocean .
it 's probably , at my speed , at my age - for anybody 's speed at anybody 's age - going to take 60 , maybe 70 , hours of continuous swimming , never getting out on the boat .
and i started to train .
i had n't swum for 31 years , not a stroke .
and i had kept in good shape , but swimming 's a whole different animal .
this picture is supposed to be me during training .
it 's a smiling face .
and when you 're training for this sport , you are not smiling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's an arduous , difficult sport , and i do n't remember smiling at any time during this sport .
as i said , i respect other sports , and i compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events , but this is a sensory deprivation , a physical duress .
and when i started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24-hour swims , i knew i had it , because i was making it through these .
and when i said i 'm going to go out and do a 15-hour swim , and we 're coming into the dock after a long day and it 's now night , and we come in and it 's 14 hours and 58 minutes and i can touch the dock and we 're done , the trainer says , " that 's great .
it 's 14 hours 58 minutes . who cares the last two minutes ? "
i say , " no , it 's got to be 15 hours , " and i swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours .
and i put together an expedition .
it 's not that i did n't have help , but honestly , i sort of led , i was the team leader .
and to get the government permissions , you read in the paper , you think it 's easy to get into cuba everyday ?
try going in with an armada like we had of 50 people and five boats and cnn 's crew , etc .
the navigation is difficult .
there 's a big river called the gulf stream that runs across and it 's not going in the direction you are .
it 's going to the east and you 'd like to go north .
it 's tricky .
and there 's dehydration .
and there 's hypothermia .
and there are sharks .
and there are all kinds of problems .
and i gathered together , honestly , the world 's leading experts in every possible way .
and a month ago , the 23rd of september , i stood on that shore and i looked across to that long , long faraway horizon and i asked myself , do you have it ?
are your shoulders ready ?
and they were . they were prepared .
no stone left unturned .
was the mind ready ?
you know , you 're swimming with the fogged goggles , you 're swimming at 60 strokes a minute , so you 're never really focused on anything , you do n't see well .
you 've got tight bathing caps over your ears trying to keep the heat of the head , because it 's where the hypothermia starts , and so you do n't hear very well .
you 're really left alone with your own thoughts .
and i had all kinds of counting systems ready there in english , followed by german , followed by spanish , followed by french .
you save the french for last .
and i had songs , i had a playlist in my head - not through headphones , in my own head - of 65 songs .
and i could n't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night , because that 's when neil young comes out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's odd , is n't it ?
you 'd think you 'd be singing leonard cohen 's " hallelujah " out in the majesty of the ocean , not songs about heroin addiction in new york city .
but no , for some reason i could n't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing , ♫ " a heard you knocking at my cellar door ♫ ♫ i love you baby and i want some more ♫ ♫ ooh , ooh , the damage done " ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- the night before i started , i finished stephen hawking 's " the grand design . "
and i could n't wait to trip the mind fantastic .
about the 50th hour , i was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe .
is there an edge ?
is this an envelope we 're living inside of , or no , does it go onto infinity in both time and space ?
and there 's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this .
i could n't wait to prove the athlete i am , that nobody else in the world can do this swim .
and i knew i could do it .
and when i jumped into that water , i yelled in my mother 's french , " courage ! "
and i started swimming , and , oh my god , it was glassy .
and we knew it , all 50 people on the boat , we all knew this was it , this was our time .
and i reminded myself a couple hours in , you know , the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself .
first of all , you 're going to hit obstacles .
and even though you 're feeling great at any one moment , do n't take it for granted , be ready , because there 's going to be pain , there 's going to be suffering .
it 's not going to feel this good all the way across .
and i was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things - the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater .
you 're immersed in the liquid .
your body does n't like the saltwater .
after a couple of days , three days , you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways .
but no , two hours in , wham ! never in my life ...
i knew there were portuguese men o ' war , all kinds of moon jellies , all kinds of things , but the box jellyfish from the southern oceans is not supposed to be in these waters .
and i was on fire - excruciating , excruciating pain .
i do n't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm .
evidently , a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred-thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin , it 's sending a venom .
the most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish .
and every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system .
so first i feel like boiling hot oil , i 've been dipped in .
and i 'm yelling out , " fire ! fire ! fire ! fire !
help me ! somebody help me ! "
and the next thing is paralysis .
i feel it in the back and then i feel it in the chest up here , and i ca n't breathe .
and now i 'm not swimming with a nice long stroke , i 'm sort of crabbing it this way .
then come convulsions .
a young man on our boat is an emt . he dives in to try to help me .
he 's stung .
they drag him out on the boat , and he 's - evidently , i did n't see any of this - but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out .
he 's 29 years old , very well-built , lean , he 's six-foot , five , weighs 265 lbs . , and he is down .
and he is crying and he 's yelling to my trainer who 's trying to help me .
and he 's saying , " bonnie , i think i 'm going to die .
my breath is down to three breaths a minute .
i need help , and i ca n't help diana . "
so that was at eight o 'clock at night .
the doctor , medical team from university of miami arrived at five in the morning .
so i swam through the night , and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots .
i did n't get out , but was in the water taking prednisone shots , taking xanax , oxygen to the face .
it was like an icu unit in the water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i guess the story is that even navy seals who are stung by the box jelly , they 're done .
they either die or they quickly get to a hospital .
and i swam through the night and i swam through the next day .
and the next night at dusk , again , wham !
the box jelly again - all across the neck , all across here .
and this time , i do n't like it , i did n't want to give into it , but there 's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim .
and i gave in to the staged swim .
and they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board .
and i got back in .
and i swam through that night and into the next day .
and at 41 hours , this body could n't make it .
the devastation of those stings had taken the respiratory system down so that i could n't make the progress i wanted .
and the dream was crushed .
and how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together .
and i knew about the jellyfish , but i was sort of cavalier .
a lot of athletes have this , you know , sort of invincibility .
they should worry about me . i do n't worry about them .
i 'll just swim right through them .
we 've got benadryl on board . if i get stung , i 'll just grin and bear it .
well there was no grin and bearing this .
as a matter of fact , the best advice i got was from an elementary school class in the caribbean .
and i was telling these kids , 120 of them - they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor - and i was telling them about the jellyfish and how they 're gelatinous and you ca n't see them at night especially .
and they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles .
and they do this wrapping .
and they can send the poison into the system .
and a little kid from the back was like this .
and i said , " what 's your name ? " " henry . "
" henry , what 's your question ? "
he said , " well , i did n't have a question so much as i had a suggestion . "
he said , " you know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs ? "
and i said , " well it 's odd that you 've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit , but yeah , i know those guys . "
he said , " that 's what you need .
you need like a school of fish that would swim in front of you like this . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and when the jellyfish come and they wrap their tentacles around the fish , they 're going to be busy with them , and you 'll just scoot around . "
i said , " oh , it 's like a suicide army . "
he said , " that 's what i 'm talking about . that 's what you need . "
and little did i know , that you should listen to eight year-olds .
and so i started that swim in a bathing suit like normal , and , no joke , this is it ; it came from the shark divers .
i finished the swim like this .
i was swimming with this thing on .
that 's how scared of the jellyfish i was .
so now what do i do ?
i would n't mind if every one of you came up on this stage tonight and told us how you 've gotten over the big disappointments of your lives .
because we 've all had them , have n't we ?
we 've all had a heartache .
and so my journey now in the face of this defeat .
and i can look at the journey , not just the destination .
i can feel proud . i can stand here in front of you tonight and say i was courageous .
yeah .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and with all sincerity , i can say , i am glad i lived those two years of my life that way , because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore , i got there with that goal .
when you live that way , when you live with that kind of passion , there 's no time , there 's no time for regrets , you 're just moving forward .
and i want to live every day of the rest of my life that way , swim or no swim .
but the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes , if cancer has won , if there 's death and we have no choice , then grace and acceptance are necessary .
but that ocean 's still there .
this hope is still alive .
and i do n't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years , and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails , but i can swim from cuba to florida , and i will swim from cuba to florida .
thank you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so , what after that ?
are you going to swim the atlantic ?
no , that 's the last swim .
it 's the only swim i 'm interested in .
but i 'm ready .
and by the way , a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was august 22nd 1949 , and for some odd reason in wikipedia , they had my death date too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " did you know you 're going to die the same place you were born , new york city , and it 's going to be in january of ' 35 ? "
i said , " nope . i did n't know . "
and now i 'm going to live to 85 .
i have three more years than i thought .
and so i ask myself , i 'm starting to ask myself now , even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me , i 'm asking myself , and maybe i can ask you tonight too , to paraphrase the poet mary oliver , she says , " so what is it , what is it you 're doing , with this one wild and precious life of yours ? "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- live it large . live it large .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was afraid of womanhood .
not that i 'm not afraid now , but i 've learned to pretend .
i 've learned to be flexible .
in fact , i 've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear .
let me explain .
back in the ' 50s and ' 60s , when i was growing up , little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft , and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy - really not quite clear what we were supposed to be .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there were plenty of role models all around us .
we had our mothers , our aunts , our cousins , our sisters , and of course , the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words , telling us how to be .
now my mother was different .
she was a homemaker , but she and i did n't go out and do girlie things together , and she did n't buy me pink outfits .
instead , she knew what i needed , and she bought me a book of cartoons .
and i just ate it up .
i drew , and i drew , and since i knew that humor was acceptable in my family , i could draw , do what i wanted to do , and not have to perform , not have to speak - i was very shy - and i could still get approval .
i was launched as a cartoonist .
now when we 're young , we do n't always know . we know there are rules out there , but we do n't always know - we do n't perform them right , even though we are imprinted at birth with these things , and we 're told what the most important color in the world is .
we 're told what shape we 're supposed to be in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're told what to wear - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and how to do our hair - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and how to behave .
now the rules that i 'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture .
we 're being corrected , and the primary policemen are women , because we are the carriers of the tradition .
we pass it down from generation to generation .
not only that - we always have this vague notion that something 's expected of us .
and on top of all off these rules , they keep changing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we do n't know what 's going on half the time , so it puts us in a very tenuous position .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now if you do n't like these rules , and many of us do n't - i know i did n't , and i still do n't , even though i follow them half the time , not quite aware that i 'm following them - what better way than to change them -lsb- than -rsb- with humor ?
humor relies on the traditions of a society .
it takes what we know , and it twists it .
it takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress , and it makes it unexpected , and that 's what elicits a laugh .
now what if you put together women and humor ?
i think you can get change .
because women are on the ground floor , and we know the traditions so well , we can bring a different voice to the table .
now i started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos .
i grew up not far from here in washington d.c.
during the civil rights movement , the assassinations , the watergate hearings and then the feminist movement , and i think i was drawing , trying to figure out what was going on .
and then also my family was in chaos , and i drew to try to bring my family together - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - try to bring my family together with laughter .
it did n't work .
my parents got divorced , and my sister was arrested .
but i found my place .
i found that i did n't have to wear high heels , i did n't have to wear pink , and i could feel like i fit in .
now when i was a little older , in my 20s , i realized there are not many women in cartooning .
and i thought , " well , maybe i can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning , " and so i did . i became a cartoonist .
and then i thought - in my 40s i started thinking , " well , why do n't i do something ?
i always loved political cartoons , so why do n't i do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we 're following as well as laugh ? "
now my perspective is a particularly - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - my perspective is a particularly american perspective .
i ca n't help it . i live here .
even though i 've traveled a lot , i still think like an american woman .
but i believe that the rules that i 'm talking about are universal , of course - that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions , and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the u.s.
consequently , we have .
women , because we 're on the ground , we know the tradition .
we have amazing antennae .
now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists , which i so enjoy , and it 's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth , to get at the issues quickly and succinctly .
and not only that , it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect , but through the heart .
my work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world - countries such as saudi arabia , iran , turkey , argentina , france - and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties .
and these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances .
but i feel blessed to be able to work with them .
and we talk about how women have such strong perceptions , because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers , that we can have the great potential to be change-agents .
and i think , i truly believe , that we can change this thing one laugh at a time .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've actually been waiting by the phone and in fact , in 2000 , i was ready to talk about ebay , but no call .
in 2003 , i was ready to do a talk about the skoll foundation and social entrepreneurship . no call .
in 2004 , i started participant productions and we had a really good first year , and no call .
and finally , i get a call last year , and then i have to go up after j.j. abrams .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 've got a cruel sense of humor , ted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i first moved to hollywood from silicon valley , i had some misgivings .
but i found that there were some advantages to being in hollywood .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , in fact , some advantages to owning your own media company .
and i also found that hollywood and silicon valley have a lot more in common than i would have dreamed .
hollywood has its sex symbols , and the valley has its sex symbols .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hollywood has its rivalries , and the valley has its rivalries .
hollywood gathers around power tables , and the valley gathers around power tables .
so it turned out there was a lot more in common than i would have dreamed .
but i 'm actually here today to tell a story .
and part of it is a personal story . when chris invited me to speak , he said , people think of you as a bit of an enigma , and they want to know what drives you a bit .
and what really drives me is a vision of the future that i think we all share .
it 's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability .
and when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days , ed wilson and the pictures of james nachtwey , i think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that i like to call " humanity 2.0 . "
and it 's also something that resides in each of us , to close what i think are the two big calamities in the world today .
one is the gap in opportunity - this gap that president clinton last night called uneven , unfair and unsustainable - and , out of that , comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us .
but perhaps the other , bigger gap is what we call the hope gap .
and someone , at some point , came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual could n't make a difference in the world .
and i think that 's just a horrible thing .
and so chapter one really begins today , with all of us , because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps .
and if the men and women of ted ca n't make a difference in the world , i do n't know who can .
and for me , a lot of this started when i was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate new york .
and there really was n't much to do there for the summer , except get beaten up by my sister or read books .
and so i used to read authors like james michener and james clavell and ayn rand .
and their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place .
and it struck me that if i could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected , that maybe i could get people interested in the issues that affected us all , and maybe engage them to make a difference .
i did n't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living , so i decided to go on a path to become financially independent , so i could write these stories as quickly as i could .
i then had a bit of a wake-up call when i was 14 .
and my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer , and it looked pretty bad .
and what he said was , he was n't so much afraid that he might die , but that he had n't done the things that he wanted to with his life .
and knock on wood , he 's still alive today , many years later .
but for a young man that made a real impression on me , that one never knows how much time one really has .
so i set out in a hurry . i studied engineering .
i started a couple of businesses that i thought would be the ticket to financial freedom .
one of those businesses was a computer rental business called micros on the move , which is very well named , because people kept stealing the computers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i figured i needed to learn a little bit more about business , so i went to stanford business school and studied there .
and while i was there , i made friends with a fellow named pierre omidyar , who is here today . and pierre , i apologize for this . this is a photo from the old days .
and just after i 'd graduated , pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other .
and with the wisdom of my stanford degree , i said , " pierre , what a stupid idea . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and needless to say , i was right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but right after that , pierre - in ' 96 , pierre and i left our full-time jobs to build ebay as a company . and the rest of that story , you know .
the company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world .
hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries , and so on .
but for me , personally , it was a real change .
i went from living in a house with five guys in palo alto and living off their leftovers , to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources .
and i wanted to figure out how i could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world .
and around that time , i met john gardner , who is a remarkable man .
he was the architect of the great society programs under lyndon johnson in the 1960s .
and i asked him what he felt was the best thing i could do , or anyone could do , to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity .
and john said , " bet on good people doing good things .
bet on good people doing good things . "
and that really resonated with me .
i started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things .
these leading , innovative , nonprofit folks , who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems .
people today we call social entrepreneurs .
and to put a face on it , people like muhammad yunus , who started the grameen bank , has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world , won the nobel peace prize .
but there 's also a lot of people that you do n't know .
folks like ann cotton , who started a group called camfed in africa , because she felt girls ' education was lagging .
and she started it about 10 years ago , and today , she educates over a quarter million african girls .
and somebody like dr. victoria hale , who started the world 's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company , and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis , also known as black fever .
and by 2010 , she hopes to eliminate this disease , which is really a scourge in the developing world .
and so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things .
and a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that i find really is powerful .
it 's what we call , " invest , connect and celebrate . "
and invest : if you see good people doing good things , invest in them . invest in their organizations , or in business . invest in these folks .
connecting them together through conferences - like a ted - brings so many powerful connections , or through the world forum on social entrepreneurship that my foundation does at oxford every year .
and celebrate them : tell their stories , because not only are there good people doing good work , but their stories can help close these gaps of hope .
and it was this last part of the mission , the celebrate part , that really got me back to thinking when i was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all .
and a light bulb went off , which was , first , that i did n't actually have to do the writing myself , i could find writers .
and then the next light bulb was , better than just writing , what about film and tv , to get out to people in a big way ?
and i thought about the films that inspired me , films like " gandhi " and " schindler 's list . "
and i wondered who was doing these kinds of films today .
and there really was n't a specific company that was focused on the public interest .
so , in 2003 , i started to make my way around los angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and i was met with a lot of encouragement .
one of the lines of encouragement that i heard over and over was , " the streets of hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you , who think you 're going to come to this town and make movies . "
and then of course , there was the other adage .
" the surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- undeterred , in january of 2004 , i started participant productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest .
and our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change .
and we do n't just want people to see our movies and say , that was fun , and forget about it .
we want them to actually get involved in the issues .
in 2005 , we launched our first slate of films , " murder ball , " " north country , " " syriana " and " good night and good luck . "
and much to my surprise , they were noticed .
we ended up with 11 oscar nominations for these films .
and it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy .
perhaps more importantly , tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies .
and we had an online component of that , our community sect called participate.net.
but with our social sector partners , like the aclu and pbs and the sierra club and the nrdc , once people saw the film , there was actually something they could do to make a difference .
one of these films in particular , called " north country , " was actually kind of a box office disaster .
but it was a film that starred charlize theron and it was about women 's rights , women 's empowerment , domestic violence and so on .
and we released the film at the same time that the congress was debating the renewal of the violence against women act .
and with screenings on the hill , and discussions , and with our social sector partners , like the national organization of women , the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act .
and that to me , spoke volumes , because it 's - the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed , sued her employer , led to a landmark case that led to the equal opportunity act , and the violence against women act and others .
and then the movie about this person doing these things , then led to this greater renewal .
and so again , it goes back to betting on good people doing good things .
speaking of which , our fellow tedster , al - i first saw al do his slide show presentation on global warming in may of 2005 .
at that point , i thought i knew something about global warming .
i thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem .
and after we saw his slide show , it became clear that it was much more urgent .
and so right afterwards , i met backstage with al , and with lawrence bender , who was there , and laurie david , and davis guggenheim , who was running documentaries for participant at the time .
and with al 's blessing , we decided on the spot to turn it into a film , because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having al go around the world , speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time .
and you know , there 's another adage in hollywood , that nobody knows nothing about anything .
and i really thought this was going to be a straight-to-pbs charitable initiative .
and so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest , and today is mandatory viewing in schools in england and scotland , and most of scandinavia .
we 've sent 50,000 dvds to high school teachers in the u.s.
and it 's really changed the debate on global warming .
it was also a pretty good year for this guy .
we now call al the george clooney of global warming .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and for participant , this is just the start .
everything we do looks at the major issues in the world .
and we have 10 films in production right now , and dozens others in development .
i 'll quickly talk about a few coming up .
one is " charlie wilson 's war , " with tom hanks and julia roberts .
and it 's the true story of congressman charlie wilson , and how he funded the taliban to fight the russians in afghanistan .
and we 're also doing a movie called " the kite runner , " based on the book " the kite runner , " also about afghanistan .
and we think once people see these films , they 'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the middle east in general .
we premiered a film called " the chicago 10 " at sundance this year .
it 's based on the protesters at the democratic convention in 1968 , abby hoffman and crew , and , again , a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world .
and a documentary that we 're doing on jimmy carter and his mid-east peace efforts over the years .
and in particular , we 've been following him on his recent book tour , which , as many of you know , has been very non-controversial - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie .
in closing , i 'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way .
and all the people in this room have done so through their business lives , or their philanthropic work , or their other interests .
and one thing that i 've learned is that there 's never one right way to make change .
one can do it as a tech person , or as a finance person , or a nonprofit person , or as an entertainment person , but every one of us is all of those things and more .
and i believe if we do these things , we can close the opportunity gaps , we can close the hope gaps .
and i can imagine , if we do this , the headlines in 10 years might read something like these : " new aids cases in africa fall to zero , " " u.s. imports its last barrel of oil " - -lrb- applause -rrb- - " israelis and palestinians celebrate 10 years of peaceful coexistence . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i like this one , " snow has returned to kilimanjaro . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and finally , an ebay listing for one well-traveled slide show , now obsolete , museum piece . please contact al gore .
and i believe that , working together , we can make all of these things happen .
and i want to thank you all for having me here today .
it 's been a real honor . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , thank you .
there 's currently over a thousand tedtalks on the ted website .
and i guess many of you here think that this is quite fantastic - except for me . i do n't agree with this .
i think we have a situation here .
because if you think about it , 1,000 tedtalks , that 's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading .
how on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas ?
even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand ted videos , it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so .
and i did a little calculation of this .
the damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $ 15,000 .
so having seen this danger to the economy , i thought , we need to find a solution to this problem .
here 's my approach to it all .
if you look at the current situation , you have a thousand tedtalks .
each of those tedtalks has an average length of about 2,300 words .
now take this together and you end up with 2.3 million words of tedtalks , which is about three bibles-worth of content .
the obvious question here is , does a tedtalk really need 2,300 words ?
is n't there something shorter ?
i mean , if you have an idea worth spreading , surely you can put it into something shorter than 2,300 words .
the only question is , how short can you get ?
what 's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a tedtalk ?
while i was pondering this question , i came across this urban legend about ernest hemingway , who allegedly said that these six words here : " for sale : baby shoes , never worn , " were the best novel he had ever written .
and i also encountered a project called six-word memoirs where people were asked , take your whole life and please sum this up into six words , such as these here : " found true love , married someone else . "
or " living in existential vacuum ; it sucks . "
i actually like that one .
so if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words , you do n't need more than six words for a tedtalk .
we could have been done by lunch here .
i mean ...
and if you did this for all thousand tedtalks , you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000 .
so i thought this was quite worthwhile .
so i started asking all my friends , please take your favorite tedtalk and put that into six words .
so here are some of the results that i received . i think they 're quite nice .
for example , dan pink 's talk on motivation , which was pretty good if you have n't seen it : " drop carrot . drop stick . bring meaning . "
it 's what he 's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes .
or some even included references to the speakers , such as nathan myhrvold 's speaking style , or the one of tim ferriss , which might be considered a bit strenuous at times .
the challenge here is , if i try to systematically do this , i would probably end up with a lot of summaries , but not with many friends in the end .
so i had to find a different method , preferably involving total strangers .
and luckily there 's a website for that called mechanical turk , which is a website where you can post tasks that you do n't want to do yourself , such as " please summarize this text for me in six words . "
and i did n't allow any low-cost countries to work on this , but i found out i could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents , which i think is a pretty good price .
even then , unfortunately , it 's not possible to summarize each tedtalk individually .
because if you do the math , you have a thousand tedtalks , the pay 10 cents each ; you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks , because some of them will probably be , or are , really bad .
so i would end up paying hundreds of dollars .
so i thought of a different way by thinking , well , the talks revolve around certain themes .
so what if i do n't let people summarize individual tedtalks to six words , but give them 10 tedtalks at the same time and say , " please do a six-word summary for that one . "
i would cut my costs by 90 percent .
so for $ 60 , i could summarize a thousand tedtalks into just 600 summaries , which would actually be quite nice .
now some of you might actually right now be thinking , it 's downright crazy to have 10 tedtalks summarized into just six words .
but it 's actually not , because there 's an example by statistics professor , hans rosling .
i guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks .
he 's got eight talks online , and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words , because that 's all he 's basically showing us , our intuition is really bad .
he always proves us wrong .
so people on the internet , some did n't do so well .
i mean , when i asked them to summarize the 10 tedtalks at the same time , some took the easy route out .
they just had some general comment .
there were others , and i found this quite cheeky .
they used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if i 'd been too much on google lately .
and finally also , i never understood this , some people really came up with their own version of the truth .
i do n't know any tedtalk that contains this .
but , oh well . in the end , however , and this is really amazing , for each of those 10 tedtalk clusters that i submitted , i actually received meaningful summaries .
here are some of my favorites .
for example , for all the tedtalks around food , someone summed this up into : " food shaping body , brains and environment , " which i think is pretty good .
or happiness : " striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness . "
so here i was .
i had started out with a thousand tedtalks and i had 600 six-word summaries for those .
actually it sounded nice in the beginning , but when you look at 600 summaries , it 's quite a lot .
it 's a huge list .
so i thought , i probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries - and this is exactly what i did .
so i took the 600 summaries that i had , put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on ted.com and asked people to do summaries of those .
again , there were some misunderstandings .
for example , when i had a cluster of all the beautiful talks , someone thought i was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line .
but in the end , amazingly , again , people were able to do it .
for example , all the courageous tedtalks : " people dying , " or " people suffering , " was also one , " with easy solutions around . "
or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping tedtalk : " flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer . "
i mean that 's the essence of it all .
now i had my nine groups , but , i mean , it 's already quite a reduction .
but of course , once you are that far , you 're not really satisfied .
i wanted to go all the way , all the way down the distillery , starting out with a thousand tedtalks .
i wanted to have a thousand tedtalks summarized into just six words - which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content .
and i would only pay $ 99.50 - so stay even below a hundred dollars for it .
so i had 50 overall summaries done .
this time i paid 25 cents because i thought the task was a bit harder .
and unfortunately when i first received the answers - and here you 'll see six of the answers - i was a bit disappointed .
because i think you 'll agree , they all summarize some aspect of ted , but to me they felt a bit bland , or they just had a certain aspect of ted in them .
so i was almost ready to give up when one night i played around with these sentences and found out that there 's actually a beautiful solution in here .
so here it is , a crowd-sourced , six-word summary of a thousand tedtalks at the value of $ 99.50 : " why the worry ? i 'd rather wonder . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have all my life wondered what " mind-boggling " meant .
after two days here , i declare myself boggled , and enormously impressed , and feel that you are one of the great hopes - not just for american achievement in science and technology , but for the whole world .
i 've come , however , on a special mission on behalf of my constituency , which are the 10-to-the-18th-power - that 's a million trillion - insects and other small creatures , and to make a plea for them .
if we were to wipe out insects alone , just that group alone , on this planet - which we are trying hard to do - the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land .
and within a few months .
now , how did i come to this particular position of advocacy ?
as a little boy , and through my teenage years , i became increasingly fascinated by the diversity of life .
i had a butterfly period , a snake period , a bird period , a fish period , a cave period and finally and definitively , an ant period .
by my college years , i was a devoted myrmecologist , but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on earth in general - including all that it means to us as a species , how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it .
out of that broader study has emerged a concern and an ambition , crystallized in the wish that i 'm about to make to you .
my choice is the culmination of a lifetime commitment that began with growing up on the gulf coast of alabama , on the florida peninsula .
as far back as i can remember , i was enchanted by the natural beauty of that region and the almost tropical exuberance of the plants and animals that grow there .
one day when i was only seven years old and fishing , i pulled a " pinfish , " they 're called , with sharp dorsal spines , up too hard and fast , and i blinded myself in one eye .
i later discovered i was also hard of hearing , possibly congenitally , in the upper registers .
so in planning to be a professional naturalist - i never considered anything else in my entire life - i found that i was lousy at bird watching and could n't track frog calls either .
so i turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger : the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems , the little things , as i like to say , who run the world .
in so doing , i reached a frontier of biology so strange , so rich , that it seemed as though it exists on another planet .
in fact , we live on a mostly unexplored planet .
the great majority of organisms on earth remain unknown to science .
in the last 30 years , thanks to explorations in remote parts of the world and advances in technology , biologists have , for example , added a full one-third of the known frog and other amphibian species , to bring the current total to 5,400 , and more continue to pour in .
two new kinds of whales have been discovered , along with two new antelopes , dozens of monkey species and a new kind of elephant - and even a distinct kind of gorilla .
at the extreme opposite end of the size scale , the class of marine bacteria , the prochlorococci - that will be on the final exam - although discovered only in 1988 , are now recognized as likely the most abundant organisms on earth , and moreover , responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean .
these bacteria were not uncovered sooner because they are also among the smallest of all earth 's organisms - so minute that they can not be seen with conventional optical microscopy .
yet life in the sea may depend on these tiny creatures .
these examples are just the first glimpse of our ignorance of life on this planet .
consider the fungi - including mushrooms , rusts , molds and many disease-causing organisms .
60,000 species are known to science , but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist .
consider the nematode roundworm , the most abundant of all animals .
four out of five animals on earth are nematode worms - if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated , you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms .
about 16,000 species of nematode worms have been discovered and diagnosed by scientists ; there could be hundreds of thousands of them , even millions , still unknown .
this vast domain of hidden biodiversity is increased still further by the dark matter of the biological world of bacteria , which within just the last several years still were known from only about 6,000 species of bacteria worldwide .
but that number of bacteria species can be found in one gram of soil , just a little handful of soil , in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there .
it 's been estimated that a single ton of soil - fertile soil - contains approximately four million species of bacteria , all unknown .
so the question is : what are they all doing ?
the fact is , we do n't know .
we are living on a planet with a lot of activities , with reference to our living environment , done by faith and guess alone .
our lives depend upon these creatures .
to take an example close to home : there are over 500 species of bacteria now known - friendly bacteria - living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria .
at this point i think we have a little impressionistic film that was made especially for this occasion .
and i 'd like to show it .
assisted in this by billie holiday .
-lrb- video -rrb- and that may be just the beginning !
the viruses , those quasi-organisms among which are the prophages , the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria , are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology , a world unto themselves .
what constitutes a viral species is still unresolved , although they 're obviously of enormous importance to us .
but this much we can say : the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds , or is likely to exceed , that in all of the rest of life combined .
nowadays , in addressing microbial biodiversity , scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the pacific ocean .
but that is changing rapidly with the aid of new genomic technology .
already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours .
soon we will be in a position to go forth in the field with sequencers on our backs - to hunt bacteria in tiny crevices of the habitat 's surface in the way you go watching for birds with binoculars .
what will we find as we map the living world , as , finally , we get this underway seriously ?
as we move past the relatively gigantic mammals , birds , frogs and plants to the more elusive insects and other small invertebrates and then beyond to the countless millions of organisms in the invisible living world enveloped and living within humanity ?
already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose , instead , two great domains of microorganisms : true bacteria and one-celled organisms the archaea , which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota , the group that we belong to .
some serious biologists , and i count myself among them , have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms , one might - just might - find aliens among them .
true aliens , stocks that arrived from outer space .
they 've had billions of years to do it , but especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet .
we do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment , including hard radiation strong enough and maintained long enough to crack the pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria .
there may be a temptation to treat the biosphere holistically and the species that compose it as a great flux of entities hardly worth distinguishing one from the other .
but each of these species , even the tiniest prochlorococci , are masterpieces of evolution .
each has persisted for thousands to millions of years .
each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives , interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine .
we will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence - and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy .
my own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953 , while a harvard graduate student , searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of cuba , ants that shine in the sunlight - metallic green or metallic blue , according to species , and one species , i discovered , metallic gold .
i found my magical ants , but only after a tough climb into the mountains where the last of the native cuban forests hung on , and were then - and still are - being cut back .
i realized then that these species and a large part of the other unique , marvelous animals and plants on that island - and this is true of practically every part of the world - which took millions of years to evolve , are in the process of disappearing forever .
and so it is everywhere one looks .
the human juggernaut is permanently eroding earth 's ancient biosphere by a combination of forces that can be summarized by the acronym " hippo , " the animal hippo .
h is for habitat destruction , including climate change forced by greenhouse gases .
i is for the invasive species like the fire ants , the zebra mussels , broom grasses and pathogenic bacteria and viruses that are flooding every country , and at an exponential rate - that 's the i.
the p , the first one in " hippo , " is for pollution .
the second is for continued population , human population expansion .
and the final letter is o , for over-harvesting - driving species into extinction by excessive hunting and fishing .
the hippo juggernaut we have created , if unabated , is destined - according to the best estimates of ongoing biodiversity research - to reduce half of earth 's still surviving animal and plant species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century .
human-forced climate change alone - again , if unabated - could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades .
what will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded ?
huge potential sources of scientific information yet to be gathered , much of our environmental stability and new kinds of pharmaceuticals and new products of unimaginable strength and value - all thrown away .
the loss will inflict a heavy price in wealth , security and yes , spirituality for all time to come , because previous cataclysms of this kind - the last one , that ended the age of dinosaurs - took , normally , five to 10 million years to repair .
sadly , our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered .
for example , even in the united states , the 200,000 species known currently actually has been found to be only partial in coverage ; it is mostly unknown to us in basic biology .
only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status .
of the 15 percent evaluated , 20 percent are classified as " in peril , " that is , in danger of extinction .
that 's in the united states .
we are , in short , flying blind into our environmental future .
we urgently need to change this .
we need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it .
we need to settle down before we wreck the planet .
and we need that knowledge .
this should be a big science project equivalent to the human genome project .
it should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable .
so this brings me to my wish for tedsters , and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk .
i wish we will work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of earth 's biodiversity .
and let us call it the " encyclopedia of life . "
what is the " encyclopedia of life ? " a concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be looked at seriously ?
it is an encyclopedia that lives on the internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world .
amateurs can do it also .
it has an indefinitely expandable page for each species .
it makes all key information about life on earth accessible to anyone , on demand , anywhere in the world .
i 've written about this idea before , and i know there are people in this room who have expended significant effort on it in the past .
but what excites me is that since i first put forward this particular idea in that form , science has advanced .
technology has moved forward .
today , the practicalities of making such an encyclopedia , regardless of the magnitude of the information put into it , are within reach .
indeed , in the past year , a group of influential scientific institutions have begun mobilizing to realize this dream .
i wish you would help them .
working together , we can make this real .
the encyclopedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications .
it will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness , and sense of human need .
it will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity .
and most of all , it can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started , for me personally , 60 years ago : to search for life , to understand it and finally , above all , to preserve it .
that is my wish . thank you .
from all outward appearances , john had everything going for him .
he had just signed the contract to sell his new york apartment at a six-figure profit , and he 'd only owned it for five years .
the school where he graduated from with his master 's had just offered him a teaching appointment , which meant not only a salary , but benefits for the first time in ages .
and yet , despite everything going really well for john , he was struggling , fighting addiction and a gripping depression .
on the night of june 11th , 2003 , he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the manhattan bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below .
remarkably - no , miraculously - he lived .
the fall shattered his right arm , broke every rib that he had , punctured his lung , and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the east river , under the brooklyn bridge and out into the pathway of the staten island ferry , where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain , contacted the boat 's captain who contacted the coast guard who fished him out of the east river and took him to bellevue hospital .
and that 's actually where our story begins .
because once john committed himself to putting his life back together - first physically , then emotionally , and then spiritually - he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did .
research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail .
but the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time .
this truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them .
and what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life , because of our taboos around suicide , we 're not sure what to say , and so quite often we say nothing .
and that furthers the isolation that people like john found themselves in .
i know john 's story very well because i 'm john .
and this is , today , the first time in any sort of public setting i 've ever acknowledged the journey that i have been on .
but after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide , and sitting last year at tedactive , i knew that i needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading - and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help .
as the trevor project says , it gets better .
it gets way better .
and i 'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you , to urge you , that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide , or you know somebody who has , talk about it ; get help .
it 's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are , how globalized we are n't , and why it 's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments .
and the leading point of view on this , whether measured by number of books sold , mentions in media , or surveys that i 've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the world trade organization , is this view that national borders really do n't matter very much anymore , cross-border integration is close to complete , and we live in one world .
and what 's interesting about this view is , again , it 's a view that 's held by pro-globalizers like tom friedman , from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted , but it 's also held by anti-globalizers , who see this giant globalization tsunami that 's about to wreck all our lives if it has n't already done so .
the other thing i would add is that this is not a new view .
i 'm a little bit of an amateur historian , so i 've spent some time going back , trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing . and the best , earliest quote that i could find was one from david livingstone , writing in the 1850s about how the railroad , the steam ship , and the telegraph were integrating east africa perfectly with the rest of the world .
now clearly , david livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time , but it does seem useful to ask ourselves , " just how global are we ? "
before we think about where we go from here .
so the best way i 've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat , may not even be close to flat , is with some data .
so one of the things i 've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders , and i 've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total .
i 'm not going to present all the data that i have here today , but let me just give you a few data points .
i 'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow , one kind of flow of people , one kind of flow of capital , and , of course , trade in products and services .
so let 's start off with plain old telephone service .
of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year , what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls ?
pick a percentage in your own mind .
the answer turns out to be two percent .
if you include internet telephony , you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent , but it 's nowhere near what people tend to estimate .
or let 's turn to people moving across borders .
one particular thing we might look at , in terms of long-term flows of people , is what percentage of the world 's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants ?
again , please pick a percentage .
turns out to be a little bit higher .
it 's actually about three percent .
or think of investment . take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010 .
what percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment ?
not quite ten percent .
and then finally , the one statistic that i suspect many of the people in this room have seen : the export-to-gdp ratio .
if you look at the official statistics , they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent .
however , there 's a big problem with the official statistics , in that if , for instance , a japanese component supplier ships something to china to be put into an ipod , and then the ipod gets shipped to the u.s. , that component ends up getting counted multiple times .
so nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is , so i thought i would ask the person who 's spearheading the effort to generate data on this , pascal lamy , the director of the world trade organization , what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of gdp , without the double- and triple-counting , and it 's actually probably a bit under 20 percent , rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we 're talking about .
so it 's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that i talk about in my book , " world 3.0 , " that we 're very , very far from the no-border effect benchmark , which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85 , 90 , 95 percent .
so clearly , apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case .
but it 's not just the apocalyptics , as i think of them , who are prone to this kind of overstatement .
i 've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be .
let me share with you the results of a survey that harvard business review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people 's guesses along these dimensions actually were .
so a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide .
first of all , there is a suggestion of some error .
okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- second , these are pretty large errors . for four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent , you have people guessing three , four times that level .
even though i 'm an economist , i find that a pretty large error .
and third , this is not just confined to the readers of the harvard business review .
i 've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world , and in all cases except one , where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-gdp ratio , people have this tendency towards overestimation , and so i thought it important to give a name to this , and that 's what i refer to as globaloney , the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars .
especially because , i suspect , some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims , i think it 's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney .
a couple of different reasons come to mind .
first of all , there 's a real dearth of data in the debate .
let me give you an example . when i first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called foreign policy , one of the people who wrote in , not entirely in agreement , was tom friedman . and since my article was titled " why the world is n't flat , " that was n't too surprising . -lrb- laughter -rrb- what was very surprising to me was tom 's critique , which was , " ghemawat 's data are narrow . "
and this caused me to scratch my head , because as i went back through his several-hundred-page book , i could n't find a single figure , chart , table , reference or footnote .
so my point is , i have n't presented a lot of data here to convince you that i 'm right , but i would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we 've been bombarded with actually are correct .
so dearth of data in the debate is one reason .
a second reason has to do with peer pressure .
i remember , i decided to write my " why the world is n't flat " article , because i was being interviewed on tv in mumbai , and the interviewer 's first question to me was , " professor ghemawat , why do you still believe that the world is round ? " and i started laughing , because i had n't come across that formulation before . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and as i was laughing , i was thinking , i really need a more coherent response , especially on national tv . i 'd better write something about this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i ca n't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question .
the perspective was , here is this poor professor .
he 's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years .
he really has no idea as to what 's actually going on in the world .
so try this out with your friends and acquaintances , if you like . you 'll find that it 's very cool to talk about the world being one , etc .
if you raise questions about that formulation , you really are considered a bit of an antique .
and then the final reason , which i mention , especially to a ted audience , with some trepidation , has to do with what i call " techno-trances . "
if you listen to techno music for long periods of time , it does things to your brainwave activity . -lrb- laughter -rrb- something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers , all political barriers , all geographic barriers , because at this point i know you are n't allowed to ask me questions , but when i get to this point in my lecture with my students , hands go up , and people ask me , " yeah , but what about facebook ? "
and i got this question often enough that i thought i 'd better do some research on facebook .
because , in some sense , it 's the ideal kind of technology to think about . theoretically , it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door .
what percentage of people 's friends on facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we 're analyzing are based ?
the answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent .
non-negligible , so we do n't live in an entirely local or national world , but very , very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect , and the reason 's very simple .
we do n't , or i hope we do n't , form friendships at random on facebook . the technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have , and those relationships are what the technology does n't quite displace . those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are .
so does all this matter ? or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues ?
i want to suggest that actually , globaloney can be very harmful to your health .
first of all , recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration , whereas if we thought we were already there , there would be no particular point to pushing harder .
it 's a little bit like , we would n't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference .
so being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more , something that would contribute further to global welfare .
which brings me to my second point .
avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization .
so i actually spend most of my " world 3.0 " book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate .
i 'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today , so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what i have in mind .
think of france and the current debate about immigration .
when you ask people in france what percentage of the french population is immigrants , the answer is about 24 percent . that 's their guess .
maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue .
or to take an even more striking example , when the chicago council on foreign relations did a survey of americans , asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid , the guess was 30 percent , which is slightly in excess of the actual level - -lrb- " actually about ... 1 % " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- - of u.s. governmental commitments to federal aid .
the reassuring thing about this particular survey was , when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data , some of them - not all of them - seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid .
so foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here , because if you think about it , what i 've been talking about today is this notion - very uncontroversial amongst economists - that most things are very home-biased .
" foreign aid is the most aid to poor people , " is about the most home-biased thing you can find .
if you look at the oecd countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person , and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries , the ratio - branko milanovic at the world bank did the calculations - turns out to be about 30,000 to one .
now of course , some of us , if we truly are cosmopolitan , would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one .
i 'd like to make the suggestion that we do n't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are .
if we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one , we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the rio summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on .
so in summary , while radical openness is great , given how closed we are , even incremental openness could make things dramatically better . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- my favorite topic is shortcuts .
the master of shortcuts - it 's , of course , nature .
but i will demonstrate different ways to get rid of difficulties and go to the point , to find an answer probably much quicker than arthur did . so , first , we violate the common sense , the logic . all of you , if you hold your hand like this , 90 degrees - all of you . not you .
all of you , right ? palm up .
if you do this , the common , the logic says you must turn the wrist .
do you agree ?
good .
but i will first teach you a method , how you can do it without moving the wrist , and then the shortcut .
you can do it immediately , right ?
hold the hand like this , palm up .
do n't move the wrist . the wrist is - i does n't speak very many , but i do the best , what i are .
right-molded you say , with iron ?
that was a joke , actually , and i - ok .
hold the hand palm up . do this , do n't move the wrist .
over the heart , do n't move the wrist .
forward , do n't move the wrist .
up , do n't move the wrist . over the heart , do n't move the wrist .
and forward . yeah .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - logic , logically , you have got to this position from this , without moving the wrist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the shortcut .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it was six moves . now with one move .
i start here , palm down , you can follow .
and then look at me .
yeah ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- one move . ok .
so , that was the warming up .
now , i need an assistant .
i talked to a nice girl before , zoe .
she has left . no ! a big hand .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good . nice . and you can sit over there .
one item here was water , right ?
and i will give my tribute to water .
i think it 's enough with water for me . the other guys can talk about - cheers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- beer has about - there 's a lot of water in beer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , now i will demonstrate different ways of memorizing , control cards and so on .
and i think i 'll take off this one .
i work with a special i work with precision - oh , sorry - control and a very powerful ...
memory system , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , if - i have studied the poker . i like to gamble .
officially , i do n't gamble but ...
so , if we are - if we have five person , and i will do a five-handed poker game .
now i will interact . so a different person all the time , so not the same person can answer .
so we have an agreement .
which one shall have a good poker hand ?
which number ? one , two , three , four or five ? -lrb- audience : three . -rrb- lennart green : three - good .
and here , i had a mat here to make it a little - the critical moment is - sorry .
if a card shark gathers the cards together , immediately when he - before he deals the card . now , so i think , number three , i have arranged them in a full house .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- with queens and - it 's ok - queens and tens .
that 's a challenge . i like this .
i will explain later . one , two , three , four , five .
i start with three queens .
so here you see the contrast when i treat the cards .
and two tens .
yeah . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but also the other hand is good , if all the other guys have good hands too .
so these guys have actually a stronger hand - three aces and two kings .
this guy beats them with four of a kind , or deuce - deuce .
no reaction ? that with even - ok , and this .
these look in order , i 'm probably - hopefully - yeah . three , four , five , six , seven and ...
but , of course , i will have the winning hand .
ten , jack , queen , king , ace .
yeah . so , good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the hand that looks so good from the beginning , number three , at the end was actually the lowest hand .
such life . right ?
so , please mix them .
now , if you are interested , i will demonstrate some underground techniques .
yes ?
i work with kind of estimation , shuffle tracking - ah , good .
impressive . thank you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , first , the first term is estimation .
here , i can estimate exactly how many cards are put between my royal flush .
of course , i can count the cards , but this is much quicker .
right ? you agree .
so here i have , actually - i know exactly where the cards are .
so here , i can make a bet , and this is actually one of the points where i get my money .
so here : 10 , jack , queen , king , ace .
ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- next is a term - i do it quick . i call this stealing .
so here , i think i know about where the cards are .
i will spread the cards and you 'll say stop , when i point to them , right . point , say stop .
zoe : stop .
lg : here - you see some are missing ?
and that 's the stealing cards , which i did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
now , another term called shuffle tracking .
shuffle tracking means i keep track of the cards , even if another person shuffles .
this is a little risky .
so - because if you look , now , i can still see it .
you agree ? but if you square - square , and shuffle , and then a cut .
so here , to follow my cards , i must look at the shuffle from the begin - ah , we are started together . it 's ok , it 's ok .
come to - no , no , no , no .
i 'm joking , yeah ?
any style - yeah , good .
here i have to calculate , but actually , i do n't like to calculate .
i work direct with the right brain .
if you pass the left brain , you have to take care of logic and common sense .
direct in the right brain , that 's much better . and so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - arthur benjamin did a little of the same thing .
and if you work with , in the right atmosphere , with humor , you have - that 's the password to the cosmic bank of knowledge , where you can find any solution of any problem .
ok . now , i drop the cards , and you say stop anyway , right ?
not at the last card .
zoe : stop . lg : yeah .
when i 'm sober , i do this much quicker , but we will check .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ah , not in order , it - that was a mistake .
no , i 'm kidding .
-lrb- applause -rrb- no , now and then i put in a mistake , just to emphasize how difficult it is .
right ?
yeah , last night i forgot that . that was a mistake .
but now i 'm glad i remember it .
so , this deck is bought here . sorry .
i have a little pad to make it a little softer .
this deck is bought here in america .
it 's called " bicycle . " and this deck is very flexible , but not so many people know , if you check , if you press at the right spots , you see how thin and flexible this deck is , right ?
now , you can carry this in your wallet , so ...
you do n't see it , make no reaction ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , but here , and - is the camera getting too much ? no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah ? -lrb- audience : it 's getting too much . -rrb- lg : pardon ? but then , when we will have it back , you do this .
but not too much .
then you have to push it down again .
here , please . if you push these heaps - everyone see - push them together so they are really interlaced , right ? yeah , good .
perfect .
just push them through , good . thank you .
and then , i will demonstrate a thing from russian satellite , stealen - stolen , probably copied from america but we will see .
here - shortcuts . i talk about shortcuts .
now i go very quick through the deck and try to find some pattern .
the new chaos theory is already old , right ?
but you know , i think you are familiar with fractals - the mandelbrot spirals and all these things .
and it 's much easier to memorize cards in a pattern way , and not concentrate . if you concentrate and calculate , then you go to - then it 's the left brain . but if you just look and talk in another language ...
yeah , great .
i think i have it .
so now , different persons , older , tap .
please name any card , anyone .
-lrb- audience : jack of spades . -rrb- lg : jack of spades .
jack of spades .
i think jack of spades is number 12 from the top .
one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 . yes , right .
so - oh , jack of spades .
you said spades ? -lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- lg : ah .
my fault . do n't applaud , this was clubs .
so , jack of spades .
i think ...
23 - 24 , sorry , 24 .
one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 - ah , 25 , yes .
it 's the last .
now , i do it quicker , better .
ok . another person . oh , i forgot , i should n't shuffle but i think - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - actually , my technique is to peek , all the time .
when i lift the heap , i peek .
you see , yeah , perfect .
three , four , five , six . then i calculate - yeah , good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another person , another card . -lrb- audience : seven of diamonds . -rrb- lg : seven of diamonds . perfect , my favorite , yeah , seven .
so i will do it quick , very quick , but in slow motion , so you can follow .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- seven of ? -lrb- audience : diamonds . -rrb- lg : diamonds , good . i start here .
good , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the thing i did - i peeked .
i know where the card were , then i chose it . so another person , another card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another person .
-lrb- audience : ten of diamonds . -rrb- lg : pardon ?
-lrb- audience : ten of diamonds . -rrb- lg : ten of diamonds , yeah .
i think i do it the same way . i like to , so i know where it is .
ten of diamonds .
but now i do it the regular speed , right ?
ten of diamonds .
good .
maybe you will cut ? lift .
excellent .
so , thank you . another person , another card .
-lrb- audience : five of clubs . -rrb- lg : pardon ? -lrb- audience : five of clubs . -rrb- lg : five of clubs . it 's not the same person , even if it 's the same spot .
we can take some over there later . so now , i will drop the cards .
and you 'll say stop , anywhere . got it ?
five of clubs .
not the last . yes , that 's difficult to find a card here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we do it again .
the person who said five of clubs say stop , when the cards are in the air , right ?
-lrb- audience : stop . -rrb- lg : very good .
ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ok , i had to use a little force there .
i think we save five of clubs .
and now a card with a contrast of five of clubs .
-lrb- audience : queen of hearts . -rrb- lg : queen of hearts , yeah .
excellent . i love that card .
here , i will do the most difficult thing .
for example , you are sitting in las vegas , and you 're betting , and you let the other guys peek this card by mistake . feel , it 's just the regular , one card .
and now , when i lift this card , it shall be your card . what was your card ?
-lrb- audience : queen of hearts . -rrb- lg : queen of ? queen of hearts .
so that 's a tough challenge , right ?
so here , i grab - you know this ? five of clubs ...
and queen of hearts . yes !
this is a tough one , because here i must take advantage of - i switch it with the five of clubs .
so , now a false count .
which card shall i use ? queen or five ?
zoe : the queen . lg : queen , yes .
so , i use the queen , and here 's five of clubs .
the false count - and the number one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight - you say the same card all the time .
eight , nine , 10 .
this is a kind of optical deal , right ?
when i put one card at a table - look , it 's not one card . it 's - look , it 's a bunch of cards that gives this impression .
yeah .
now some hard stuff .
i think we keep the queen here , yes .
now , to the satellites things .
this - oh sorry , do n't look at the beam . my fault .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is high-frequency laser , and it 's enough with a fraction of a second to destroy the retina completely .
right , sorry , my - i should have mentioned that , yeah .
but you can relax , because it takes half an hour before it works , so you have plenty of time to see my whole performance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i put the laser here , and - now , when i deal the cards in the laser , i know where they are but - yes ?
did the camera got it ?
no ?
they did n't ?
what happened ?
-lrb- audience : it disappeared . -rrb- lg : ok , i 'll take another group .
do the cameras see the cards now ?
no ? -lrb- audience : no , they 're all gone . -rrb- lg : but you see the hand .
ah , good , good , good . but now .
so now , that was the reason , right ?
you see the cards ? yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , good .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - one guy laughed . so now , to find the queen , do it this way : take back the other one , take back the queen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , interesting , but a little dangerous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i liked it . now , a little more difficult .
name - anyone , name , please , any suit .
-lrb- audience : spades . -rrb- lg : spades ? spades , good .
so here , here i have to peek , lots of cards .
i think there are lots of - i do n't know how many - but 10 , 15 spades in a deck , at least , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so every time i lift the heap , i peek , right .
then i arrange them so i can get them quick .
perfect , excellent .
so i start with the ace - yeah , ace . ah , yeah - spades ?
same mistake as before , right ?
so - i arrange the spades - the clubs .
i try to do this right here . first , i take the spades .
you see , i do n't work with prestige , so always do mistakes .
it does n't matter to me .
and now and then , i get some extra sympathy points , right ?
one , two , three , four - yes , the camera got it ? five , six , seven , eight - ah - nine , 10 , the jack , jack of spades , queen of - i like that laugh , yeah ! good . queen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- wait , wait , wait - please take any card .
grab any one . quick , quick , good .
and we switch this to the king .
ace of diamonds .
and now , look , ace of diamonds will guide .
so i find ...
king of spades .
there was the place . and here is king of spades , correct ?
yeah ? ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , a little more difficult thing .
maybe you think i have the cards in order already , so you help me to shuffle again .
another suit , please .
-lrb- audience : armani . -rrb- lg : pardon ? -lrb- audience : armani . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- lg : it was after the blindfold .
i like this guy , yeah .
ok . that should be my end effect , but ok .
armani - who said armani ? you ?
i drop the cards and you - which size ?
which size ? it 's a piece of cake . i like challenges .
which size ?
-lrb- audience : extra large . -rrb- lg : extra large , ok .
say stop . -lrb- audience : stop . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- lg : yeah , armani . ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ah , this is tough .
ok , a suit . i had clubs before , spades .
another suit . -lrb- audience : diamonds . -rrb- lg : diamonds , perfect .
so , in this case , i try to locate diamonds . i look at the cards , and ok .
we try . yeah . you help me .
if i drop the card face up , like this , you reverse it . zoe : ok .
lg : ok , now .
do with both hands , and quick . yes , good , good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think we have it now . yeah , good , good .
so here , diamonds , hearts - no , diamonds . good , good .
stop . do you see the pattern ?
no ? now ?
yes , yes , ok .
i work with pattern .
oh sorry , i dropped one .
maybe it 's important - yeah - nine of diamonds , ok .
so now - i always ask , why do i put myself in this position ?
i have to figure out so many outs , when i miss some cards , but i love it . so now , i will do it . i will try to find the diamonds , but i will do it the hard way .
it 's too easy to do it right away , right ?
i think i will do it ...
blindfolded .
at this distance , it works immediately .
aargh !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- duct tape .
i look - shake the cards , so i do n't .
go ahead . yeah , good . i like the empathy .
empathy .
but it was - did you hear ?
it was women 's voice . hear the guy - yeah , more , more , more .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , good . yeah .
you can take the nostril too , because some guys think - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - some guys think i can peek through the nostril , so do more . go , go .
right ? good .
satisfied ?
looks good , like batman . ow !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , with dignity and elegance , right ?
but i like her , yeah . i said , be a little tough .
and it was ok . one more ?
the last .
ok .
all right .
now you must agree that i 'm - i must rely on other senses , right ?
i work with vibration .
so , what was the card ?
diamonds . ah , i memorized hearts .
so now i have to improvise again .
maybe i 'll stand up . half .
diamonds - i 'll start with ace of diamonds .
just kidding , warming up - king of hearts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i give you a diamonds , so they - so you put them here , in a nice row , right . and you can see , yeah ? good .
ace of diamonds , yes ? zoe : yeah .
lg : good . good . two - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you .
i never ever miss two . this is interesting .
always i 've found two , but the wrong color . spades , sorry .
and the deck is a gift to you after , so let the skepticals here , in this , examine them , right ? remind me . it 's a gift .
two - and it was two of spades , right ?
sorry , two of diamonds . i 'll do it quick now .
three - three of diamonds . yes !
four - i like challenges , yes .
yeah , good .
chris anderson : you 're peeking .
lg : pardon ?
ca : you 're peeking . you just got to - this is a request from the lady in the back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
try that .
lg : yeah . also listen .
ok , now .
this is maybe a little tough .
we will try .
yes ? good ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . so , how many cards ? five ? zoe : four .
lg : four . is five the next card ?
zoe : five of diamonds , yeah .
lg : it 's not here ? zoe : it 's not there .
lg : oh .
so here , all the cards are face down - you agree ? -lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- lg : yes ? you see that in the screen ?
and this is face up , and it 's not at the bottom here .
so next card will be - was it five ?
zoe : five . lg : yeah - i will reverse it face up here .
yes ? zoe : yeah .
lg : six - six with the thumb .
seven .
yeah , i do this . i know where it is , because i peeked before and then i do this .
right ?
eight .
if - and then nine , right ?
yeah .
yesterday - the day before yesterday , i was in vegas , and i used this actually .
nine ? yeah ? correct ?
no ? yes ! ah , good , good .
ten - once again , i love this jonny wayne move .
yeah . jack - you -lsb- unclear -rsb- with jack ?
jack of diamonds , correct ? -lrb- audience : no . -rrb- lg : yes ?
and queen ! queen , with misdirection .
misdirection . -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah ?
and then , king , after exactly five seconds .
yeah . five . five seconds .
one , two , three , four - mmm !
check it .
yes ?
ca : king of diamonds . lg : ah !
good . oh .
touch me , feel - ah , ah , you know !
ca : ladies and gentlemen , lennart green ! lg : okay , thank you .
i worked on a film called " apollo 13 , " and when i worked on this film , i discovered something about how our brains work , and how our brains work is that , when we 're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever , it changes and alters our perception of things .
it changes what we see . it changes what we remember .
and as an experiment , because i dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a saturn v launch for this particular movie , because i put it out there , i felt a little nervous about it , so i need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage , and when i played this stock footage , i simply wanted to find out what people remembered , what was memorable about it ?
what should i actually try to replicate ?
what should i try to emulate to some degree ?
so this is the footage that i was showing everybody .
and what i discovered is , because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we 're doing this film , there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things .
when i showed it , and i asked , immediately after the screening was over , what they thought of it , what was your memorable shots , they changed them .
they were - had camera moves on them .
they had all kinds of things . shots were combined , and i was just really curious , i mean , what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come , how 'd you come up with this sort of description ?
and what i discovered is , what i should do is not actually replicate what they saw , is replicate what they remembered .
so this is our footage of the launch , based on , basically , taking notes , asking people what they thought , and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like , but not what it really looked like .
so this is what we created for " apollo 13 . "
-lrb- launch noises -rrb- so literally what you 're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people , a bunch of different memories , including my own , of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter .
i basically shot everything with short lenses , which means that you 're very close to the action , but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance , so i was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you have n't really quite seen before . -lrb- music -rrb- and then i 'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it .
-lrb- music -rrb- tom hanks : hello , houston , this is odyssey .
it 's good to see you again . -lrb- cheers -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- rob legato : i pretend they 're clapping for me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i 'm in a parking lot . basically it 's a tin can , and i 'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers , fire , i have wax that i threw in front of the lens to look like ice , and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that i just showed you , what you were reacting to , what you 're emoting to , is something that 's a total falsehood , and i found that really kind of fascinating .
and in this particular case , this is the climax of the movie , and , you know , the weight of achieving it was simply take a model , throw it out of a helicopter , and shoot it .
and that 's simply what i did .
that 's me shooting , and i 'm a fairly mediocre operator , so i got that nice sense of verisimilitude , of a kind of , you know , following the rocket all the way down , and giving that little sort of edge , i was desperately trying to keep it in frame . so then i come up to the next thing .
we had a nasa consultant who was actually an astronaut , who was actually on some of the missions , of apollo 15 , and he was there to basically double check my science .
and , i guess somebody thought they needed to do that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know why , but they thought they did .
so we were , he 's a hero , he 's an astronaut , and we 're all sort of excited , and , you know , i gave myself the liberty of saying , you know , some of the shots i did did n't really suck that bad .
and so maybe , you know , we were feeling kind of a little good about it , so i brought him in here , and he needed to really check and see what we were doing , and basically give us our a plus report card , and so i showed him some shots we were working on , and waiting for the reaction that you hope for , which is what i got . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- launch noises -rrb- so i showed him these two shots , and then he basically told me what he thought .
-lrb- " that 's wrong " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's what you dream about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what i got from him is , he turned to me and said , " you would never , ever design a rocket like that .
you would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out . can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that ?
you would never , ever design a rocket like that . "
and he was looking at me . it 's like , yeah , i do n't know if you noticed , but i 'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of america 's finest moments with fire extinguishers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm not going to argue with you . you 're an astronaut , a hero , and i 'm from new jersey , so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm just going to show you some footage .
i 'm just going to show you some footage , and tell me what you think .
and then i did kind of get the reaction i was hoping for .
so i showed him this , and this is actual footage that he was on . this is apollo 15 . this was his mission .
so i showed him this , and the reaction i got was interesting .
-lrb- " that 's wrong too . " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , and what happened was , i mean , what i sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently .
he remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system , perfectly safe rocket launch , because he 's sitting in a rocket that has , like , a hundred thousand pounds of thrust , built by the lowest bidder .
he was hoping it was going to work out okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so he twisted his memory around .
now , ron howard ran into buzz aldrin , who was not on the movie , so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage , and he just responded as he would respond , and i 'll run this .
ron howard : buzz aldrin came up to me and said , " hey , that launch footage , i saw some shots i 'd never seen before . did you guys , what vault did you find that stuff in ? " and i said , " well , no vault , buzz , we generated all that from scratch . "
and he said , " huh , that 's pretty good . can we use it ? "
-lrb- explosion -rrb- -lrb- " sure " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- rl : i think he 's a great american .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , " titanic " was , if you do n't know the story , does n't end well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jim cameron actually photographed the real titanic .
so he basically set up , or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief , because what he photographed was the real thing , a mir sub going down , or actually two mir subs going down to the real wreck , and he created this very haunting footage .
it 's really beautiful , and it conjures up all these various different emotions , but he could n't photograph everything , and to tell the story , i had to fill in the gaps , which is now rather daunting , because now i have to recreate back to back what really happened and i had , i 'm the only one who could really blow it at that point .
so this is the footage he photographed , and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring .
so i 'm going to just let it run , so you kind of absorb this sort of thing , and i 'll describe my sort of reactions when i was looking at it for the very first time .
i got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life .
i automatically wanted to see this ship , this magnificent ship , basically in all its glory , and conversely , i wanted to see it not in all its glory , basically go back to what it looks like .
so i conjured up an effect that i 'm later going to show you what i tried to do , which is kind of the heart of the movie , for me , and so that 's why i wanted to do the movie , that 's why i wanted to create the sort of things i created .
and i 'll show you , you know , another thing that i found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a look at it .
so here 's the behind the scenes , a couple of little shots here .
so , when you saw my footage , you were seeing this : basically , a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down , and the little mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs , and shot in smoke .
jim went three miles went down , and i went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage .
and so , but what you 're emoting to , or what you 're looking at , had the same feeling , the same haunting quality , that jim 's footage had , so i found it so fascinating that our brains sort of , once you believe something 's real , you transfer everything that you feel about it , this quality you have , and it 's totally artificial .
it 's totally make-believe , yet it 's not to you , and i found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use , and it caused me to create the next effect that i 'll show you , which is this sort of magic transition , and all i was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect , so it became a seamless experience for them , that i was n't showing you my sort of interpretation , i was showing you what you wanted to see .
and the very next shot , right after this - so you can see what i was doing .
so basically , if there 's two subs in the same shot , i shot it , because where 's the camera coming from ?
and when jim shot it , it was only one sub , because he was photographing from the other , and i do n't remember if i did this or jim did this .
i 'll give it to jim , because he could use the pat on the back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . so now the titanic transition .
so this is what i was referring to where i wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the titanic to the other . so i 'll just play the shot once . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- and what i was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you .
gloria stuart : that was the last time titanic ever saw daylight .
rl : so , what i did is basically i had another screening room experience where i was basically tracking where i was looking , or where we were looking , and of course you 're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship , and then at some point , i 'm changing the periphery of the shot , i 'm changing , it 's becoming the rusted wreck , and then i would run it every day , and then i would find exactly the moment that i stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it , and the moment my eye shifted , we just marked it to the frame .
the moment my eye shifted , i immediately started to change them , so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped .
and so i 'll just show it one more time .
-lrb- music -rrb- and it 's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us , which is , as soon as you shift your attention , something changes , and then i left the little scarf going , because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot , really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck , essentially . that 's where they were buried forever .
or something like that . i just made that up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was , incidentally , the last time i ever saw daylight .
it was a long film to work on . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , " hugo " was another interesting movie , because the movie itself is about film illusions .
it 's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture , and one of the things i had to do is , we - sasha baron cohen is a very clever , very smart guy , comedian , wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the buster keaton sort of slapstick things , and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train .
very dangerous , very impossible to do , and particularly on our stage , because there literally is no way to actually move this train , because it fits so snugly into our set .
so let me show you the scene , and then i basically used the trick that was identified by sergei eisenstein , which is , if you have a camera that 's moving with a moving object , what is not moving appears to be moving , and what is moving appears to be stopped , so what you 're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all , and what is actually moving is the floor .
so this is the shot . that 's a little video of what you 're looking at there , which is our little test , so that 's actually what you 're seeing , and i thought it was sort of an interesting thing , because it was , part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which i ca n't take credit for .
i 'd love to but i ca n't , because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that , is i told marty , and it 's kind of one of those mind things that it 's really hard to really get until you actually see it work , and i said , you know , what i was going to do , and he said , " so , let me see if i can get this straight . the thing with the wheels ?
that does n't move . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " and the thing without the wheels , that moves . "
precisely . -lrb- laughter -rrb- brings me to the next , and final - marty 's not going to see this , is he ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is n't viewed outside of - -lrb- laughter -rrb- the next illustration is something that , there 's like all one shot theory . it 's a very elegant way of telling a story , especially if you 're following somebody on a journey , and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way , and what we wanted to do based on the shot in " goodfellas , " which is one of the great shots ever , a martin scorsese film , of basically following henry hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk
going through the copacabana and being treated in a special way .
he was the master of his universe , and we wanted hugo to feel the same way , so we created this shot .
-lrb- music -rrb- that 's hugo . -lrb- music -rrb- and we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him , we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe , and his universe is , you know , behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way , and we had to make it feel that this is his normal , everyday sort of life , so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important , and of course , in shooting in 3d , which is basically
it 's a huge camera that 's hanging off of a giant stick , so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task , and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the " goodfellas " shot .
so what you 're now going to see is how we actually did it .
it 's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys .
the one on the left is where the shot ends , and the shot on the right is where it takes over , and now we switch boys , so it went from asa butterfield , who 's the star of the show , to his stand-in . -lrb- music -rrb- i would n't say his stunt double . there 's a crazy rig that we built for this . -lrb- music -rrb- and so this is , and now this is set number three we 're into , and then we 're going to go into , basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot . everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that , and it literally was done
over five different sets , two different boys , different times , and it all had to feel like it was all one shot , and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot i 've ever worked on , and , you know , i was kind of proud of it when i was done , which is , you should never really be proud of stuff , i guess .
so i was kind of proud of it , and i went to a friend of mine , and said , " you know , this is , you know , kind of the best-reviewed shot i 've ever worked on .
what do you think was the reason ? "
and he said , " because no one knows you had anything to do with it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , all i can say is , thank you , and that 's my presentation for you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson asked me if i could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for ted .
that 's an englishman asking an irishman to be succinct .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " chris , that would take a miracle . "
he said , " bono , would n't that be a good use of your messianic complex ? "
so , yeah .
then i thought , let 's go even further than 25 years .
let 's go back before christ , three millennia , to a time when , at least in my head , the journey for justice , the march against inequality and poverty really began .
three thousand years ago , civilization just getting started on the banks of the nile , some slaves , jewish shepherds in this instance , smelling of sheep shit , i guess , proclaimed to the pharaoh , sitting high on his throne , " we , your majesty-ness , are equal to you . "
and the pharaoh replies , " oh , no .
you , your miserableness , have got to be kidding . "
and they say , " no , no , that 's what it says here in our holy book . "
cut to our century , same country , same pyramids , another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book .
this time it 's called the facebook .
crowds are gathered in tahrir square .
they turn a social network from virtual to actual , and kind of rebooted the 21st century .
not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the arab spring has been , neither to oversell the role of technology , but these things have given a sense of what 's possible when the age-old model of power , the pyramid , gets turned upside down , putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom , as it were .
it 's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality , because facts , like people , want to be free , and when they 're free , liberty is usually around the corner , even for the poorest of the poor - facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia , facts that tell us what 's working and , more importantly , what 's not , so we can fix it , facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that nelson mandela made back in 2005 , when he asked us to be that great generation
that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity , extreme poverty , facts that build a powerful momentum .
so i thought , forget the rock opera , forget the bombast , my usual tricks .
the only thing singing today would be the facts , for i have truly embraced by inner nerd .
so exit the rock star .
enter the evidence-based activist , the factivist .
because what the facts are telling us is that the long , slow journey , humanity 's long , slow journey of equality , is actually speeding up .
look at what 's been achieved .
look at the pictures these data sets print .
since the year 2000 , since the turn of the millennium , there are eight million more aids patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs .
malaria : there are eight countries in sub-saharan africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent .
for kids under five , child mortality , kids under five , it 's down by 2.65 million a year .
that 's a rate of 7,256 children 's lives saved each day .
wow . wow . -lrb- applause -rrb- let 's just stop for a second , actually , and think about that .
have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number ? wow .
great news . it drives me nuts that most people do n't seem to know this news .
seven thousand kids a day . here 's two of them .
this is michael and benedicta , and they 're alive thanks in large part to dr. patricia asamoah - she 's amazing - and the global fund , which all of you financially support , whether you know it or not .
and the global fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing hiv to their kids .
this fantastic news did n't happen by itself .
it was fought for , it was campaigned for , it was innovated for .
and this great news gives birth to even more great news , because the historic trend is this .
the number of people living in back-breaking , soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world 's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010 .
give it up for that . -lrb- applause -rrb- halved . halved .
now , the rate is still too high - still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives .
there 's still work to do .
but it 's heart-stopping . it 's mind-blowing stuff .
and if you live on less than $ 1.25 a day , if you live in that kind of poverty , this is not just data .
this is everything .
if you 're a parent who wants the best for your kids - and i am - this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope .
and guess what ? if the trajectory continues , look where the amount of people living on $ 1.25 a day gets to by 2030 .
ca n't be true , can it ?
that 's what the data is telling us . if the trajectory continues , we get to , wow , the zero zone .
for number-crunchers like us , that is the erogenous zone , and it 's fair to say that i am , by now , sexually aroused by the collating of data .
so virtual elimination of extreme poverty , as defined by people living on less than $ 1.25 a day , adjusted , of course , for inflation from a 1990 baseline .
we do love a good baseline .
that 's amazing .
now i know that some of you think this progress is all in asia or latin america or model countries like brazil - and who does n't love a brazilian model ? - but look at sub-saharan africa .
there 's a collection of 10 countries , some call them the lions , who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation , a tripling of aid , a tenfold increase in fdi - that 's foreign direct investment - which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources - that 's local money - which , when spent wisely - that 's good governance - cut childhood mortality by a third , doubled education completion rates , and they , too , halved extreme poverty , and at this rate , these 10 get to zero too .
so the pride of lions is the proof of concept .
there are all kinds of benefits to this .
for a start , you wo n't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up jesus like myself .
how about that ? -lrb- applause -rrb- and 2028 , 2030 ? it 's just around the corner .
i mean , it 's about three rolling stones farewell concerts away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i hope . i 'm hoping .
makes us look really young .
so why are n't we jumping up and down about this ?
well , the opportunity is real , but so is the jeopardy .
we ca n't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done .
look at this graph .
it 's called inertia . it 's how we screw it up .
and the next one is really beautiful .
it 's called momentum .
and it 's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero , just doing the things that we know work .
so inertia versus momentum .
there is jeopardy , and of course , the closer you get , it gets harder .
we know the obstacles that are in our way right now , in difficult times .
in fact , today in your capital , in difficult times , some who mind the nation 's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the global fund .
but you can do something about that .
you can tell politicians that these cuts -lsb- can cost -rsb- lives .
right now today , in oslo as it happens , oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries .
you can do something about that too .
you can join the one campaign , and leaders like mo ibrahim , the telecom entrepreneur .
we 're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it .
and right now , we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease . it 's corruption .
but there 's a vaccine for that too .
it 's called transparency , open data sets , something the ted community is really on it .
daylight , you could call it , transparency .
and technology is really turbocharging this .
it 's getting harder to hide if you 're doing bad stuff .
so let me tell you about the u-report , which i 'm really excited about . it 's 150,000 millennials all across uganda , young people armed with 2g phones , an sms social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what 's in the budget and how their money is being spent .
this is exciting stuff .
look , once you have these tools , you ca n't not use them .
once you have this knowledge , you ca n't un-know it .
you ca n't delete this data from your brain , but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant , impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives .
you can erase that , you really can , because it 's not true anymore . -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's transformational .
2030 ? by 2030 , robots , not just serving us guinness , but drinking it .
by the time we get there , every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way .
so i 'm here to - i guess we 're here to try and infect you with this virtuous , data-based virus , the one we call factivism .
it 's not going to kill you .
in fact , it could save countless lives .
i guess we in the one campaign would love you to be contagious , spread it , share it , pass it on .
by doing so , you will join us and countless others in what i truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken , the ever-demanding journey of equality .
could we really be the great generation that mandela asked us to be ?
might we answer that clarion call with science , with reason , with facts , and , dare i say it , emotions ?
because as is obvious , factivists have feelings too .
i 'm thinking of wael ghonim , though .
some of you know him . he set up one of the facebook groups behind the tahrir square in cairo .
he got thrown in jail for it , but i have his words tattooed on my brain .
" we are going to win because we do n't understand politics .
we are going to win because we do n't play their dirty games .
we are going to win because we do n't have a party political agenda .
we are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts .
we are going to win because we have dreams , and we 're willing to stand up for those dreams . "
wael is right .
we 're going to win if we work together as one , because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i study ants , and that 's because i like to think about how organizations work .
and in particular , how the simple parts of organizations interact to create the behavior of the whole organization .
so , ant colonies are a good example of an organization like that , and there are many others . the web is one .
there are many biological systems like that - brains , cells , developing embryos .
there are about 10,000 species of ants .
they all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens , and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers .
and all ant colonies have in common that there 's no central control .
nobody tells anybody what to do .
the queen just lays the eggs . there 's no management .
no ant directs the behavior of any other ant .
and i try to figure out how that works .
and i 've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern arizona .
here 's my study site . this is really a picture of ants , and the rabbit just happens to be there .
and these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds .
this is the nest of the mature colony , and there 's the nest entrance .
and they forage maybe for about 20 meters away , gather up the seeds and bring them back to the nest , and store them .
and every year i go there and make a map of my study site .
this is just a road . and it 's not very big : it 's about 250 meters on one side , 400 on the other .
and every colony has a name , which is a number , which is painted on a rock . and i go there every year and look for all the colonies that were alive the year before , and figure out which ones have died , and put all the new ones on the map .
and by doing this i know how old they all are .
and because of that , i 've been able to study how their behavior changes as the colony gets older and larger .
so i want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony .
ants never make more ants ; colonies make more colonies .
and they do that by each year sending out the reproductives - those are the ones with wings - on a mating flight .
so every year , on the same day - and it 's a mystery exactly how that happens - each colony sends out its virgin , unmated queens with wings , and the males , and they all fly to a common place . and they mate .
and this shows a recently virgin queen . here 's her wings .
and she 's in the process of mating with this male , and there 's another male on top waiting his turn .
often the queens mate more than once .
and after that , the males all die . that 's it for them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then the newly mated queens fly off somewhere , drop their wings , dig a hole and go into that hole and start laying eggs .
and they will live for 15 or 20 years , continuing to lay eggs using the sperm from that original mating .
so the queen goes down in there .
she lays eggs , she feeds the larvae - so an ant starts as an egg , then it 's a larva .
she feeds the larvae by regurgitating from her fat reserves .
then , as soon as the ants - the first group of ants - emerge , they 're larvae . then they 're pupae . then they come out as adult ants .
they go out , they get the food , they dig the nest , and the queen never comes out again .
so this is a one-year-old colony - this happens to be 536 .
there 's the nest entrance , there 's a pencil for scale .
so this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer .
this is a three-year-old colony .
there 's the nest entrance , there 's a pencil for scale .
they make a midden , a pile of refuse - mostly the husks of the seeds that they eat .
this is a five-year-old colony . this is the nest entrance , here 's a pencil for scale .
this is about as big as they get , about a meter across .
and then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes - so this is about 10,000 worker ants - changes as a function of colony age , in years .
so it starts out with zero ants , just the founding queen , and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five .
and it stays that size until the queen dies and there 's nobody to make more ants , when she 's about 15 or 20 years old .
and it 's when they reach this stable size , in numbers of ants , that they start to reproduce .
that is , to send more winged queens and males to that year 's mating flight .
and i know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because i 've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's not the most fun part of this research , although it 's interesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- really the question that i think about with these ants is what i call task allocation .
that 's not just how is the colony organized , but how does it change what it 's doing ?
how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change ?
so , things happen to an ant colony .
when it rains in the summer , it floods in the desert .
there 's a lot of damage to the nest , and extra ants are needed to clean up that mess .
when extra food becomes available - and this is what everybody knows about picnics - then extra ants are allocated to collect the food .
so , with nobody telling anybody what to do , how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task ?
and that 's the process that i call task allocation .
and in harvester ants , i divide the tasks of the ants i see just outside the nest into these four categories : where an ant is foraging , when it 's out along the foraging trail , searching for food or bringing food back .
the patrollers - that 's supposed to be a magnifying glass - are an interesting group that go out early in the morning before the foragers are active .
they somehow choose the direction that the foragers will go , and by coming back - just by making it back - they tell the foragers that it 's safe to go out .
then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest , and i wanted to say that the nests look a lot like bill lishman 's house .
that is , that there are chambers inside , they line the walls of the chambers with moist soil and it dries to a kind of an adobe-like surface in it .
it also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the hopi people that are in that area .
and the nest maintenance workers do that inside the nest , and then they come out of the nest carrying bits of dry soil in their mandibles .
so you see the nest maintenance workers come out with a bit of sand , put it down , turn around , and go back in .
and finally , the midden workers put some kind of territorial chemical in the garbage .
so what you see the midden workers doing is making a pile of refuse .
on one day , it 'll all be here , and then the next day they 'll move it over there , and then they 'll move it back .
so that 's what the midden workers do .
and these four groups are just the ants outside the nest .
so that 's only about 25 percent of the colony , and they 're the oldest ants .
so , an ant starts out somewhere near the queen .
and when we dig up nests we find they 're about as deep as the colony is wide , so about a meter deep for the big old nests .
and then there 's another long tunnel and a chamber , where we often find the queen , after eight hours of hacking away at the rock with pickaxes .
i do n't think that chamber has evolved because of me and my backhoe and my crew of students with pickaxes , but instead because when there 's flooding , occasionally the colony has to go down deep .
so there 's this whole network of chambers .
the queen 's in there somewhere ; she just lays eggs .
there 's the larvae , and they consume most of the food .
and this is true of most ants - that the ants you see walking around do n't do much eating .
they bring it back and feed it to the larvae .
when the foragers come in with food , they just drop it into the upper chamber , and other ants come up from below , get the food , bring it back , husk the seeds , and pile them up .
there are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest .
and curiously , and interestingly , it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing .
so , despite what it says in the bible , about , you know , " look to the ant , thou sluggard , " in fact , you could think of those ants as reserves .
that is to say , if something happened - and i 've never seen anything like this happen , but i 've only been looking for 20 years - if something happened , they might all come out if they were needed .
but in fact , mostly they 're just hanging around in there .
and i think it 's a very interesting question - what is there about the way the colony is organized that might give some function to a reserve of ants who are doing nothing ?
and they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside .
and if you mark ants that are working outside , and dig up a colony , you never see them deep down .
so what 's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they 're younger .
they somehow get into this reserve .
and then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce .
and once they belong to the ants that work outside , they never go back down .
now ants - most ants , including these , do n't see very well .
they have eyes , they can distinguish between light and dark , but they mostly work by smell .
so just to reinforce that what you might have thought about ant queens is n't true - you know , even if the queen did have the intelligence to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to tell the ants outside what to do , there is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers that we actually see outside the nest .
so that 's one way that we know the queen is n't directing the behavior of the colony .
so when i first set out to work on task allocation , my first question was , " what 's the relationship between the ants doing different tasks ?
does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing ?
does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing ? "
and i was working in the context of a view of ant colonies in which each ant was somehow dedicated to its task from birth and sort of performed independently of the others , knowing its place on the assembly line .
and instead i wanted to ask , " how are the different task groups interdependent ? "
so i did experiments where i changed one thing .
so for example , i created more work for the nest maintenance workers by putting out a pile of toothpicks near the nest entrance , early in the morning when the nest maintenance workers are first active .
this is what it looks like about 20 minutes later .
here it is about 40 minutes later .
and the nest maintenance workers just take all the toothpicks to the outer edge of the nest mound and leave them there .
and what i wanted to know was , " ok , here 's a situation where extra nest maintenance workers were recruited - is this going to have any effect on the workers performing other tasks ? "
then we repeated all those experiments with the ants marked .
so here 's some blue nest maintenance workers .
and lately we 've gotten more sophisticated and we have this three-color system .
and we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which .
we started out with model airplane paint and then we found these wonderful little japanese markers , and they work really well .
well it turns out that yes , the different tasks are interdependent .
so , if i change the numbers performing one task , it changes the numbers performing another .
so for example , if i make a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up , then i see fewer ants out foraging .
and this was true for all the pair-wise combinations of tasks .
and the second result , which was surprising to a lot of people , was that ants actually switch tasks .
the same ant does n't do the same task over and over its whole life .
so for example , if i put out extra food , everybody else - the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food , they become foragers .
the nest maintenance workers become foragers .
the patrollers become foragers .
but not every transition is possible . and this shows how it works .
like i just said , if there is more food to collect , the patrollers , the midden workers , the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage .
if there 's more patrolling to do - so i created a disturbance , so extra patrollers were needed - the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol .
but if more nest maintenance work is needed - for example , if i put out a bunch of toothpicks - then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance , they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest .
so foraging acts as a sink , and the ants inside the nest act as a source .
and finally , it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not .
so , for example , when there 's extra nest maintenance work to do , it 's not that the foragers switch over . i know that they do n't do that .
but the foragers somehow decide not to come out .
and here was the most intriguing result : the task allocation .
this process changes with colony age , and it changes like this .
when i do these experiments with older colonies - so ones that are five years or older - they 're much more consistent from one time to another and much more homeostatic . the worse things get , the more i hassle them , the more they act like undisturbed colonies .
whereas the young , small colonies - the two-year-old colonies of just 2,000 ants - are much more variable .
and the amazing thing about this is that an ant lives only a year .
it could be this year , or this year .
so , the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony .
it 's not due to the experience of older , wiser ants .
instead , something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older .
and the obvious thing that 's changing is its size .
so since i 've had this result , i 've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kinds of decision rules - very simple , local , probably olfactory , chemical rules could an ant could be using , since no ant can assess the global situation - that would have the outcome that i see , these predictable dynamics , in who does what task .
and it would change as the colony gets larger .
and what i 've found out is that ants are using a network of antennal contact .
so anybody who 's ever looked at ants has seen them touch antennae .
they smell with their antennae .
when one ant touches another , it 's smelling it , and it can tell , for example , whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other , through grooming , with a layer of grease , which carries a colony-specific odor .
and what we 're learning is that an ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts , the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks , in deciding what to do .
and so what the message is , is not any message the pattern itself is the message .
and i 'll tell you a little bit more about that .
but first you might be wondering : how is it that an ant can tell , for example , i 'm a forager .
i expect to meet another forager every so often .
but if instead i start to meet a higher number of nest maintenance workers , i 'm less likely to forage .
so it has to know the difference between a forager and a nest maintenance worker .
and we 've learned that , in this species - and i suspect in others as well - these hydrocarbons , this layer of grease on the outside of ants , is different as ants perform different tasks .
and we 've done experiments that show that that 's because the longer an ant stays outside , the more these simple hydrocarbons on its surface change , and so they come to smell different by doing different tasks .
and they can use that task-specific odor in cuticular hydrocarbons - they can use that in their brief antennal contacts to somehow keep track of the rate at which they 're meeting ants of certain tasks .
and we 've just recently demonstrated this by putting extract of hydrocarbons on little glass beads , and dropping the beads gently down into the nest entrance at the right rate .
and it turns out that ants will respond to the right rate of contact with a glass bead with hydrocarbon extract on it , as they would to contact with real ants .
so i want now to show you a bit of film - and this will start out , first of all , showing you the nest entrance .
so the idea is that ants are coming in and out of the nest entrance .
they 've gone out to do different tasks , and the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance determines , or influences , each ant 's decision about whether to go out , and which task to perform .
this is taken through a fiber optics microscope . it 's down inside the nest .
in the beginning you see the ants just kind of engaging with the fiber optics microscope .
but the idea is that the ants are in there , and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it - a stream of contacts with other ants .
and the pattern of these interactions determines whether the ant comes back out , and what it does when it comes back out .
you can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these .
each ant , then , as it comes back in , is contacting other ants .
and the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip , are contacting the ants coming in .
so , what 's interesting about this system is that it 's messy .
it 's variable . it 's noisy . and , in particular , in two ways .
the first is that the experience of the ant - of each ant - ca n't be very predictable .
because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside .
and the second thing is that an ant 's ability to assess this pattern must be very crude because no ant can do any sophisticated counting .
so , we do a lot of simulation and modeling , and also experimental work , to try to figure out how those two kinds of noise combine to , in the aggregate , produce the predictable behavior of ant colonies .
again , i do n't want to say that this kind of haphazard pattern of interactions produces a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork .
in fact , if you watch ants at all , you end up trying to help them because they never seem to be doing anything exactly the way that you think that they ought to be doing it .
so it 's not really that out of these haphazard contacts , perfection arises .
but it works pretty well .
ants have been around for several hundred million years .
they cover the earth , except for antarctica .
something that they 're doing is clearly successful enough that this pattern of haphazard contacts , in the aggregate , produces something that allows ants to make a lot more ants .
and one of the things that we 're studying is how natural selection might be acting now to shape this use of interaction patterns - this network of interaction patterns - to perhaps increase the foraging efficiency of ant colonies .
so the one thing , though , that i want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you 'd expect to be closely connected to colony size .
the simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony - and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule , like " i expect to meet another forager every three seconds . "
but in a small colony , it 's likely to meet fewer foragers , just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet .
so this is the kind of rule that , as the colony develops and gets older and larger , will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a visual artist , and i 'm also one of the co-founders of the plastic pollution coalition .
i 've been working with plastic bags , which i cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years .
i turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations .
upon working with the plastic , after about the first eight years , some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic .
and i thought , " great .
it 's ephemeral just like us . "
upon educating myself a little further about plastics , i actually realized this was a bad thing .
it 's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits , because it 's always still plastic .
and what we 're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment .
i then , in the last few years , learned about the pacific garbage patch and the gyre .
and my initial reaction - and i think this is a lot of people 's first reaction to learning about it - is , " oh my god !
we 've got to go out there and clean this thing up . "
so i actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers , a crane , a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine .
and my intention was to go out to the gyre , raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic , chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities .
i began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so , i realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world , and that actually i needed to back up and look at the bigger picture .
and the bigger picture is : we need to find a way to turn off the faucet .
we need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics , which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale .
so in looking at that , i also realized that i was really angry .
i was n't just concerned about plastic that you 're trying to imagine out in the middle of the pacific ocean - of which i have learned there are now 11 gyres , potentially , of plastic in five major oceans in the world .
it 's not just that gyre of plastic that i 'm concerned about - it 's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket .
i 'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic .
all of my beverages are packaged in plastic , even at the health food market .
i 'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator , and i 'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies .
so i came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue , and we created the plastic pollution coalition .
we have many initiatives that we 're working on , but some of them are very basic .
one is : if 80 to 90 percent of what we 're finding in the ocean - of the marine debris that we 're finding in the ocean - is plastic , then why do n't we call it what it is .
it 's plastic pollution .
recycling - everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling .
you put something in a bin and you do n't have to think about it again .
what is the reality of that ?
in the united states , less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled .
and if you really look into it , particularly when it comes to plastic bottles , most of it is only down-cycled , or incinerated , or shipped to china .
it is down-cycled and turned into lesser things , while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again - a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again .
so this is a big issue for us .
another thing that we 're looking at and asking people to think about is we 've added a fourth r onto the front of the " reduce , reuse , recycle , " three r 's , and that is refuse .
whenever possible , refuse single-use and disposable plastics .
alternatives exist ; some of them are very old-school .
i myself am now collecting these cool pyrex containers and using those instead of glad and tupperware containers to store food in .
and i know that i am doing a service to myself and my family .
it 's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle , if you 're traveling and you 've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water , versus purchasing plastic bottled water .
i guess what i want to say to everybody here - and i know that you guys know a lot about this issue - is that this is a huge problem in the oceans , but this is a problem that we 've created as consumers and we can solve .
we can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives .
so whenever possible , to choose alternatives to single-use plastics .
we can cut the stem - tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so , save our oceans , save our planet , save ourselves .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'm in chile , in the atacama desert , sitting in a hotel lobby , because that 's the only place that i can get a wi-fi connection , and i have this picture up on my screen , and a woman comes up behind me .
she says , " oh , that 's beautiful .
what is it ? is that jackson pollock ? "
and unfortunately , i can be a little too honest .
i said , " no , it 's - it 's penguin shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , " excuse me ! "
and i could sense that she thought i was speaking synecdochically .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i said , " no , no , really - it 's penguin shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i had just been in the falkland islands taking pictures of penguins .
this is a gentoo penguin . and she was still skeptical .
so , literally , a few minutes before that , i downloaded this scientific paper about calculations on avian defecation , which is really quite interesting , because it turns out you can model this as something called " poiseuille flow , " and you can learn an awful lot about the physics of the avian rectum .
actually , technically , it 's not a rectum . it 's called a cloaca .
at this point , she stops me , and she says , " who are you ?
wha - what do you do ? "
and i was stuck , because i did n't have any way to describe what i do .
and so , in some sense , this talk today is my answer to that .
it 's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that i do .
and it 's very hard for me to make sense of it , so i 'm not sure that you can .
it 's the kind of thing that i sit up late at night thinking about sometimes - often at four in the morning .
so , some people are afraid of what i do .
some people think i am the nerd tony soprano , and in response , i have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector .
i 'm not sure what these people think , because i do n't speak norsk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'm not thinking " monsteret " is a good thing .
i do n't know , you know ?
so , one of the things that i love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites .
because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations , and see where they succeeded and where they failed .
use science to , you know , work backwards and say , " well , really , what were they thinking ? "
and recently , i was in easter island , which is an incredibly beautiful place , and an incredibly mysterious place , because no matter where you go in easter island , you 're struck by these statues , called the moai .
the place is 64 square miles .
they made , so far as we can tell , 900 of them .
why on earth ? and if you have n't read jared diamond 's book , " collapse , " i totally recommend that you do .
he 's got a great chapter about it .
basically , these people committed ecological suicide in order to make more of these .
and somewhere along the line , somebody said , " i know ! let 's cut down the last tree and commit suicide , because we need more identical statues . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , one thing that is n't a mystery , actually , was when i grew up - because when i was a little kid , i 'd seen these pictures - and i thought , " well , why that look on the face ?
why that brow ? " i mean , it 's such a powerful thing .
where did they get that inspiration ?
and then i met yoyo , who is the native rapa nui-an guide , and if you look at yoyo 's face , you kind of figure out where they got it .
there 's many mysteries , these statues .
everyone wants to know , how did they make them , how did they transport them ?
this woman in the foreground is jo anne van tilberg .
she 's the leading archaeologist working easter island today .
and she has studied the statues for 20-some years , and she has detailed records of every single statue .
the one on the page here is the same that 's up there .
one interesting problem is the stone is n't very hard .
so , this used to be completely smooth .
in fact , in many of the statues , when you excavate them , the backs are totally smooth - almost glass smooth .
but after 1,000 years out in the weather , they look like this .
jo anne and i have just embarked on a project to digitize them all , and we 're going to do a very high-res digitization , first because it 's a way of preserving them .
second , we have these ideas about how you can algorithmically , then , learn a few of the mysteries about them .
how long have they been standing in what positions ?
and maybe , indirectly , get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are .
while i was in easter island , comet mcnaught was there also , so you get a gratuitous picture of a moai with a comet .
i also have an archaeological project going on in egypt .
" going on " is perhaps a little bit strong .
we 're trying to get all of the permissions to get everything all set , to get it going .
so , i 'll talk about it at a future ted .
but there 's some amazing opportunities in egypt as well .
another thing i do is i invent stuff .
in fact , i design nuclear reactors .
not a joke .
this is the conventional nuclear fuel cycle .
the red line is what is done in most nuclear reactors . it 's called the open fuel cycle .
the white lines are what 's called an advance fuel cycle , where you reprocess .
now , this is the normal way it 's done .
it 's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution .
it has a lot of disadvantages : each one of these steps is extremely expensive , it 's potentially dangerous and they have the interesting property that the step can not be performed in anyone 's backyard , which is a problem .
so , our reactor eliminates these steps , which , if we can actually make it work , is a really cool thing .
now , it 's kind of nuts to work on a new nuclear reactor .
there 's - no reactor 's been even built to an old design , much less a new one , in the united states for 25 years .
it 's the kind of very high-risk , but potentially very high-return thing that we do .
changing into a totally different field , we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics , particularly in an area called metamaterials .
a metamaterial is an artificial material , which manipulates , in this case , electromagnetic radiation , in a way that you could n't otherwise .
so , this device here is an invisibility cloak .
it may not seem that , but if you were a microwave , this is how you would view it .
rays of light - in this case , microwave light - come in , and they just squish around the cell , and they come back the other side .
now , you could do that with mirrors from one angle .
the cool thing is , this does it from all angles .
metamaterials , unfortunately - a , it only works on microwave , and b , it does n't work all that well yet .
but metamaterials are an incredibly exciting field .
it 's - you know , today i 'd like to say it 's a zero billion dollar business , but , in fact , it 's negative .
but some day , some day , maybe it 's going to work .
we do a lot of work in biomedical fields .
in this case , we 're working with a major medical foundation to develop inexpensive ways of diagnosing diseases in developing countries .
so , they say the eyes are the windows of the soul - turns out they 're a window to a whole lot more stuff .
and these happen to be my eyes , by the way .
now , i 'm also very interested in cooking .
while i was at microsoft , i took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in france .
i used to work , also while at microsoft , at a leading restaurant in seattle , so i do a lot of cooking .
i 've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue .
but barbecue 's interesting , because it 's one of these cult foods like chili , or bouillabaisse .
various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to - there 's tremendous traditions , there 's secrecy .
and i 'm trying to use a very scientific approach .
so , this is my latest cooker , and if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor , that 's because it is .
but if you get to play with all those knobs and dials - and of course , really the controller over there does it all on software - you can make some terrific ribs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a high-speed centrifuge .
you should all have one in your kitchen , beside your turbochef .
this subjects food to a force about 50,000 times that of normal gravity , and oh boy , does it clarify chicken stock .
you would not believe it !
i perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food - in this case , trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are .
it turns out , a , it 's useful , and for a geek like me , it 's fun .
theory is red , black is experiment .
so , i 'm either really good at faking it , or this particular model seems to work .
so , another random thing i do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence , or seti .
and you may be familiar with the movie " contact , " which sort of popularized that .
it turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way .
in fact , almost everybody in the movie is based on a real character , a real person .
so , the jodie foster character here is actually this woman , jill tarter , and jill has dedicated her life to this .
you know , a lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism , which is kind of cool , but jill has what i call slow heroism .
she is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years - may not ever .
so , i like to support people that are risking their lives .
after the movie came out , of course , there was a lot of interest in seti .
my kids saw the movie , and afterwards they came to me and they said , " so , dad , so - so - that character - that 's jill , right ? "
i said , " oh , yeah , yeah - absolutely . "
" and that other person , that 's someone - " i said , " yes . "
they said , " well , you know that creepy rich guy in the movie ?
is that you ? "
i said , " well , you know , it 's just a movie ! come on . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the seti institute , with a little bit of help from me , and a lot of help from paul allen and a variety of other people , is building a dedicated radio telescope in hat creek , california , so they can do this seti work .
now , i travel a lot , and i change cell phones a lot , and the one person who always gets updated on all my cell phones and pagers and everything else is jill , because i really do n't want to miss " the call . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , can you imagine ? e.t. 's phoning home , and i 'm not , like , there ? you know , horrible !
so , i do a lot of work on dinosaurs .
i 'm known to tedsters as the guy that has sex with dinosaurs .
and i resemble that remark .
i 'm going to talk about a different aspect of dinosaurs , which is the finding of them .
now , to find dinosaurs , you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur .
it sounds really dumb , but that 's what it is .
it 's horrible conditions , because wherever you have nice weather , plants grow , and you do n't get any erosion , and you do n't see any dinosaurs .
so , you always find dinosaurs in deserts or badlands , areas that have very little plant growth and have flash floods in the spring .
you know , skiers pray for snow ?
paleontologists pray for erosion .
so , you hike around and - this is after you dig them up , they look like this .
you hike around , you see something like this .
now , this is something i found , so look at it very closely here .
you 've got this bentonite clay , which is - sort of swells up and expands .
and there 's some stuff poking out . so , you look at that , and you look up close , and you say , " well , gee , that 's kind of interesting . what are all of these pieces ? "
well , if you look closely , you can recognize , actually , from the shape , that these are skull fragments .
and then when you look at this , you say , " that 's a tooth .
it 's a big tooth . "
it 's about the size of a banana .
it has a big serration on the edge .
this is what tyrannosaurus rex looks like in the ground .
and this is what it 's like to find a tyrannosaurus rex , which i was lucky enough to do a few years ago .
now , this is what tyrannosaurus rex looks like in my living room .
not the same one , actually . this is a cast , which i had bought , and then , after buying the cast , i found my own , and i do n't have room for two .
you know .
so , the thing that 's wonderful for me about finding dinosaurs is that it is both an intellectual thing , because you 're trying to reconstruct the environment of millions of years ago .
it 's something that can inform all sorts of science in unexpected ways .
the study of dinosaurs led to the realization that there 's a problem with asteroid impact , for example .
the study of dinosaurs may , literally , one day save the planet .
study of the ancient climate is very important .
in fact , the mesozoic , when dinosaurs lived , had much higher co2 than today , was much warmer than today , and is one of the interesting proof points for the effects of co2 on climate .
but , besides being intellectually and scientifically interesting , it 's also very different than the other things i do , because you get to hike around in the badlands .
this is actually what most dinosaur research looks like .
this is one of my papers : " a pygostyle from a non-avian theropod . "
it 's not as gripping as dinosaur sex , so we 're not going to go into it further .
now , i 'm also really big on photography .
i travel all over the world taking pictures - some of them good , most of them not .
these days , bits are cheap . unfortunately , that means you 've got to spend more time sorting through them .
here 's a picture i took in the falkland islands of king penguins on a beach .
here 's a picture i took in alaska , a few years ago , of orcas .
i 'd gone up to photograph orcas , and we had looked for a week , and we had n't seen a damn orca .
and the last day , the sun comes out , the orcas come , they 're right by the boat . it 's fantastic .
and i get lots of pictures like this .
then , a little bit later , i start getting some pictures like this .
now , to a human audience , i need to explain that if penthouse magazine had a marine mammal edition , this would be the centerfold .
it 's true .
so , there 's more and more activity near the boat , and all of a sudden somebody shouts , " what 's that in the water ? "
i said , " well , i think that 's what you call a free willy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a variety of things you can learn from watching whales have sex .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the first thing you learn is the overwhelming importance of hands .
they do n't have them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think paul simon is in the audience , and he has - he may not realize it , but he wrote a song all about whale sex , " slip-slidin ' away . "
that 's kind of what it 's like .
the other interesting thing that i learned about whale sex : they curl their toes too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so - where do you go putting all of these disparate pieces together ?
you know , there 's a tremendous amount of wisdom in finding a great thing , passion in life , and focusing all your energy on it , and i 've never been able to do that .
i just - you know , because , yes , i 'll focus passion on something , but then there will be something else , and then there 's something else again .
and for a long time i fought this , and i thought , " well , gee , i really ought to buckle down . "
and you know , when i was at microsoft , that was so engrossing , and the whole industry was expanding so much , that it did tend to crowd out most of the other things in my life .
but ultimately , i decided that what i really ought to do is not fight being who i am , but embrace it .
and say , " yeah , you know , i - this whole talk has been a mile wide and an inch deep , but that 's really what works for me . "
and regardless of whether it 's nuclear reactors or metamaterials or whale sex , the common - or lowest common denominator - is me .
that 's it , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- adrian kohler : well , we 're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse .
basil jones : but actually we 're going to start this evolution with a hyena .
ak : the ancestor of the horse .
okay , we 'll do something with it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hahahaha .
the hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called " faustus in africa , " a handspring production from 1995 , where it had to play draughts with helen of troy .
this production was directed by south african artist and theater director , william kentridge .
so it needed a very articulate front paw .
but , like all puppets , it has other attributes .
bj : one of them is breath , and it kind of breathes .
ak : haa haa haaa .
bj : breath is really important for us .
it 's the kind of original movement for any puppet for us onstage .
it 's the thing that distinguishes the puppet - ak : oops .
bj : from an actor .
puppets always have to try to be alive .
it 's their kind of ur-story onstage , that desperation to live .
ak : yeah , it 's basically a dead object , as you can see , and it only lives because you make it .
an actor struggles to die onstage , but a puppet has to struggle to live .
and in a way that 's a metaphor for life .
bj : so every moment it 's on the stage , it 's making the struggle .
so we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology - -lrb- laughter -rrb- to turn nouns into verbs .
ak : well actually i prefer to say that it 's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life .
bj : okay so .
ak : it has ears that move passively when the head goes .
bj : and it has these bulkheads made out of plywood , covered with fabric - curiously similar , in fact , to the plywood canoes that adrian 's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop .
ak : in port elizabeth , the village outside port elizabeth in south africa .
bj : his mother was a puppeteer .
and when we met at art school and fell in love in 1971 , i hated puppets .
i really thought they were so beneath me .
i wanted to become an avant-garde artist - and punch and judy was certainly not where i wanted to go .
and , in fact , it took about 10 years to discover the bambara bamana puppets of mali in west africa , where there 's a fabulous tradition of puppetry , to learn a renewed , or a new , respect for this art form .
ak : so in 1981 , i persuaded basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company .
and 20 years later , miraculously , we collaborated with a company from mali , the sogolon marionette troupe of bamako , where we made a piece about a tall giraffe .
it was just called " tall horse , " which was a life-sized giraffe .
bj : and here again , you see the same structure .
the bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane , but it 's ultimately the same structure .
it 's got two people inside it on stilts , which give them the height , and somebody in the front who 's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head .
ak : the person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail , a bit like the hyena - same mechanism , just a bit bigger .
and he 's controlling the ear movement .
bj : so this production was seen by tom morris of the national theatre in london .
and just around that time , his mother had said , " have you seen this book by michael morpurgo called ' war horse ' ? "
ak : it 's about a boy who falls in love with a horse .
the horse is sold to the first world war , and he joins up to find his horse .
bj : so tom gave us a call and said , " do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the national theatre ? "
ak : it seemed a lovely idea .
bj : but it had to ride . it had to have a rider .
ak : it had to have a rider , and it had to participate in cavalry charges .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the national theatre in london .
but they agreed to go along with it for a while .
so we began with a test .
bj : this is adrian and thys stander , who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse , and our next-door neighbor katherine , riding on a ladder .
the weight is really difficult when it 's up above your head .
ak : and once we put katherine through that particular brand of hell , we knew that we might be able to make a horse , which could be ridden .
so we made a model .
this is a cardboard model , a little bit smaller than the hyena .
you 'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there .
bj : and the two manipulators are inside .
but we did n't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator , because we could n't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time .
ak : we started work on the prototype after the model was approved , and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated .
we had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones .
and we had a crate built for it .
it had to be shipped to london .
we were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in cape town , and it got to midnight and we had n't done that yet .
bj : so we got a camera , and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances .
and we sent it off to the national theatre , hoping that they believed that we created something that worked .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ak : a month later , we were there in london with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us .
bj : about 40 people .
ak : we were terrified .
we opened the lid , we took the horse out , and it did work ; it walked and it was able to be ridden .
here i have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype .
this is in the national theatre studio , the place where they cook new ideas .
it had by no means got the green light yet .
the choreographer , toby sedgwick , invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse , which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs , grew up into the big horse .
and nick starr , the director of the national theatre , saw that particular moment , he was standing next to me - he nearly wet himself .
and so the show was given the green light .
and we went back to cape town and redesigned the horse completely .
here is the plan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and here is our factory in cape town where we make horses .
you can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there .
the horses are completely handmade .
there is very little 20th century technology in them .
we used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces .
but because they have to be light and flexible , and each one of them is different , they ca n't be mass-produced , unfortunately .
so here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in london .
and now we would like to introduce you to joey .
joey boy , you there ?
joey .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- joey .
joey , come here .
no , no , i have n't got it .
he 's got it ; it 's in his pocket .
bj : joey .
ak : joey , joey , joey , joey .
come here . stand here where people can see you .
move around . come on .
i 'd just like to describe - i wo n't talk too loud . he might get irritated .
here , craig is working the head .
he has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand .
each one of them operates either an ear , separately , or the head , up and down .
but he also controls the head directly by using his hand .
the ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse .
when they point right back , the horse is fearful or angry , depending upon what 's going on in front of him , around him .
or , when he 's more relaxed , the head comes down and the ears listen , either side .
horses ' hearing is very important .
it 's almost more important than their eyesight .
over here , tommy 's got what you call the heart position .
he 's working the leg .
you see the string tendon from the hyena , the hyena 's front leg , automatically pulls the hoop up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- horses are so unpredictable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the way a hoof comes up with a horse immediately gives you the feeling that it 's a convincing horse action .
the hind legs have got the same action .
bj : and mikey also has , in his fingers , the ability to move the tail from left to right , and up and down with the other hand .
and together , there 's quite a complex possibility of tail expression .
ak : you want to say something about the breathing ?
bj : we had a big challenge with breathing .
adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that - because that 's how a horse would breathe , with an expanded chest .
but we realized that , if that were to be happening , you would n't , as an audience , see the breath .
so he made a channel in here , and the chest moves up and down in that channel .
so it 's anti-naturalistic really , the up and down movement , but it feels like breath .
and it 's very , very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees .
ak : other emotional stuff .
if i were to touch the horse here on his skin , the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver .
you 'll notice , of course , that the puppet is made out of cane lines .
and i would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice , that i was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space .
but of course , it was the cane is light , and the cane is moldable .
and so it was a very practical reason why it was made of cane .
the skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh , which , if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear , she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike .
you see the skeletal structure of it .
or if you light it from above , it becomes more solid .
again , that was a practical consideration .
the guys inside the horse have to be able to see out .
they have to be able to act and it 's very much an in-the-moment activity that they 're engaged in .
it 's three heads making one character .
but now we would like you to put joey through some paces .
and plant .
-lrb- whinny -rrb- thank you .
and now just - -lrb- applause -rrb- all the way from sunny california we have zem joaquin who 's going to ride the horse for us .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- so we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly .
bj : not being able to talk to one another while they 're onstage because they 're mic 'd .
the sound that that very large chest makes , of the horse - the whinnying and the nickering and everything - that starts usually with one performer , carries on with a second person and ends with a third .
ak : mikey brett from leicestershire .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mikey brett , craig , leo , zem joaquin and basil and me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , this is such an honor . and it 's wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world .
and i 'm intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today .
and i 'm also rather surprised , because when i look back on my life the last thing i ever wanted to do was write , or be in any way involved in religion .
after i left my convent , i 'd finished with religion , frankly .
i thought that was it .
and for 13 years i kept clear of it . i wanted to be an english literature professor .
and i certainly did n't even want to be a writer , particularly .
but then i suffered a series of career catastrophes , one after the other , and finally found myself in television . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i said that to bill moyers , and he said , " oh , we take anybody . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was doing some rather controversial religious programs .
this went down very well in the u.k. , where religion is extremely unpopular .
and so , for once , for the only time in my life , i was finally in the mainstream .
but i got sent to jerusalem to make a film about early christianity .
and there , for the first time , i encountered the other religious traditions : judaism and islam , the sister religions of christianity .
and while i found i knew nothing about these faiths at all - despite my own intensely religious background , i 'd seen judaism only as a kind of prelude to christianity , and i knew nothing about islam at all .
but in that city , that tortured city , where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together , you also become aware of the profound connection between them .
and it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be , and actually enabled me to look at my own faith in a different light .
and i found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me . frankly , in the days when i thought i 'd had it with religion , i just found the whole thing absolutely incredible .
these doctrines seemed unproven , abstract .
and to my astonishment , when i began seriously studying other traditions , i began to realize that belief - which we make such a fuss about today - is only a very recent religious enthusiasm that surfaced only in the west , in about the 17th century .
the word " belief " itself originally meant to love , to prize , to hold dear .
in the 17th century , it narrowed its focus , for reasons that i 'm exploring in a book i 'm writing at the moment , to include - to mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions , a credo .
" i believe : " it did not mean , " i accept certain creedal articles of faith . "
it meant : " i commit myself . i engage myself . "
indeed , some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy .
in the quran , religious opinion - religious orthodoxy - is dismissed as " zanna : " self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other , but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so if religion is not about believing things , what is it about ?
what i 've found , across the board , is that religion is about behaving differently .
instead of deciding whether or not you believe in god , first you do something .
you behave in a committed way , and then you begin to understand the truths of religion .
and religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action ; you only understand them when you put them into practice .
now , pride of place in this practice is given to compassion .
and it is an arresting fact that right across the board , in every single one of the major world faiths , compassion - the ability to feel with the other in the way we 've been thinking about this evening - is not only the test of any true religiosity , it is also what will bring us into the presence of what jews , christians and muslims call " god " or the " divine . "
it is compassion , says the buddha , which brings you to nirvana .
why ? because in compassion , when we feel with the other , we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there . and once we get rid of ego , then we 're ready to see the divine .
and in particular , every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted - has said - and put at the core of their tradition what 's become known as the golden rule .
first propounded by confucius five centuries before christ : " do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you . "
that , he said , was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day .
and it was - the golden rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called " ren , " human-heartedness , which was a transcendent experience in itself .
and this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms , too .
there 's a famous story about the great rabbi , hillel , the older contemporary of jesus .
a pagan came to him and offered to convert to judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of jewish teaching while he stood on one leg .
hillel stood on one leg and said , " that which is hateful to you , do not do to your neighbor . that is the torah . the rest is commentary .
go and study it . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and " go and study it " was what he meant .
he said , " in your exegesis , you must make it clear that every single verse of the torah is a commentary , a gloss upon the golden rule . "
the great rabbi meir said that any interpretation of scripture which led to hatred and disdain , or contempt of other people - any people whatsoever - was illegitimate .
saint augustine made exactly the same point .
scripture , he says , " teaches nothing but charity , and we must not leave an interpretation of scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it . "
and this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life . -lrb- applause -rrb- but now look at our world . and we are living in a world that is - where religion has been hijacked . where terrorists cite quranic verses to justify their atrocities .
where instead of taking jesus ' words , " love your enemies .
do n't judge others , " we have the spectacle of christians endlessly judging other people , endlessly using scripture as a way of arguing with other people , putting other people down . throughout the ages , religion has been used to oppress others , and this is because of human ego , human greed .
we have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things .
so the traditions also insisted - and this is an important point , i think - that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group : your own nation , your own co-religionists , your own fellow countrymen . you must have what one of the chinese sages called " jian ai " : concern for everybody . love your enemies . honor the stranger .
we formed you , says the quran , into tribes and nations so that you may know one another .
and this , again - this universal outreach - is getting subdued in the strident use of religion - abuse of religion - for nefarious gains .
now , i 've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who , when i say to them what i do for a living , inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history . wrong .
the causes of our present woes are political .
but , make no mistake about it , religion is a kind of fault line , and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region , religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem . our modernity has been exceedingly violent .
between 1914 and 1945 , 70 million people died in europe alone as a result of armed conflict .
and so many of our institutions , even football , which used to be a pleasant pastime , now causes riots where people even die .
and it 's not surprising that religion , too , has been affected by this violent ethos .
there 's also a great deal , i think , of religious illiteracy around .
people seem to think , now equate religious faith with believing things .
as though that - we call religious people often believers , as though that were the main thing that they do . and very often , secondary goals get pushed into the first place , in place of compassion and the golden rule .
because the golden rule is difficult . i sometimes - when i 'm speaking to congregations about compassion , i sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be right , rather than compassionate . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now - but that 's not the whole story .
since september the 11th , when my work on islam suddenly propelled me into public life , in a way that i 'd never imagined , i 've been able to sort of go all over the world , and finding , everywhere i go , a yearning for change .
i 've just come back from pakistan , where literally thousands of people came to my lectures , because they were yearning , first of all , to hear a friendly western voice .
and especially the young people were coming . and were asking me - the young people were saying , " what can we do ? what can we do to change things ? "
and my hosts in pakistan said , " look , do n't be too polite to us .
tell us where we 're going wrong . let 's talk together about where religion is failing . "
because it seems to me that with - our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that does n't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time .
and religion , with its wide following ... here in the united states , people may be being religious in a different way , as a report has just shown - but they still want to be religious . it 's only western europe that has retained its secularism , which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned .
but people want to be religious , and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world , which it can and should be - because of the golden rule .
" do not do to others what you would not have them do to you " : an ethos that should now be applied globally .
we should not treat other nations as we would not wish to be treated ourselves .
and these - whatever our wretched beliefs - is a religious matter , it 's a spiritual matter .
it 's a profound moral matter that engages and should engage us all .
and as i say , there is a hunger for change out there .
here in the united states , i think you see it in this election campaign : a longing for change .
and people in churches all over and mosques all over this continent after september the 11th , coming together locally to create networks of understanding .
with the mosque , with the synagogue , saying , " we must start to speak to one another . "
i think it 's time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other .
i 'd - there 's one story i 'd just like to mention .
this comes from " the iliad . " but it tells you what this spirituality should be .
you know the story of " the iliad , " the 10-year war between greece and troy .
in one incident , achilles , the famous warrior of greece , takes his troops out of the war , and the whole war effort suffers . and in the course of the ensuing muddle , his beloved friend , patroclus , is killed - and killed in single combat by one of the trojan princes , hector . and achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge , and he mutilates the body . he kills hector , he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family , which means that , in greek ethos , hector 's soul will wander eternally , lost .
and then one night , priam , king of troy , an old man , comes into the greek camp incognito , makes his way to achilles ' tent to ask for the body of his son .
and everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering and shows himself .
and achilles looks at him and thinks of his father . and he starts to weep .
and priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons , and he , too , starts to weep . and the sound of their weeping filled the house .
the greeks believed that weeping together created a bond between people .
and then achilles takes the body of hector , he hands it very tenderly to the father , and the two men look at each other , and see each other as divine .
that is the ethos found , too , in all the religions .
it 's what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies , and beginning to appreciate the other .
it 's of great importance that the word for " holy " in hebrew , applied to god , is " kadosh " : separate , other .
and it is often , perhaps , the very otherness of our enemies which can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is god .
and now , here 's my wish : i wish that you would help with the creation , launch and propagation of a charter for compassion , crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three abrahamic traditions of judaism , christianity and islam , and based on the fundamental principle of the golden rule .
we need to create a movement among all these people that i meet in my travels - you probably meet , too - who want to join up , in some way , and reclaim their faith , which they feel , as i say , has been hijacked .
we need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos , and to give guidelines . this charter would not be a massive document .
i 'd like to see it - to give guidelines as to how to interpret the scriptures , these texts that are being abused . remember what the rabbis and what augustine said about how scripture should be governed by the principle of charity .
let 's get back to that . and the idea , too , of jews , christians and muslims - these traditions now so often at loggerheads - working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand , at least , of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world .
and you are the people . i 'm just a solitary scholar .
despite the idea that i love a good time , which i was rather amazed to see coming up on me - i actually spend a great deal of time alone , studying , and i 'm not very - you 're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody , everybody on the planet . i 've had some preliminary talks , and archbishop desmond tutu , for example , is very happy to give his name to this , as is imam feisal rauf , the imam in new york city .
also , i would be working with the alliance of civilizations at the united nations .
i was part of that united nations initiative called the alliance of civilizations , which was asked by kofi annan to diagnose the causes of extremism , and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism .
and the alliance has told me that they are very happy to work with it .
the importance of this is that this is - i can see some of you starting to look worried , because you think it 's a slow and cumbersome body - but what the united nations can do is give us some neutrality , so that this is n't seen as a western or a christian initiative , but that it 's coming , as it were , from the united nations , from the world - who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this .
and so i do urge you to join me in making - in this charter - to building this charter , launching it and propagating it so that it becomes - i 'd like to see it in every college , every church , every mosque , every synagogue in the world , so that people can look at their tradition , reclaim it , and make religion a source of peace in the world , which it can and should be . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- when i was little - and by the way , i was little once - my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker .
and what this guy had done : he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches .
and one day , one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he 'd bought .
and the guy took it apart , and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels .
and as he did so , his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving , were words .
and he said to the guy , " why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see ? "
and the watchmaker turned around and said , " god can see it . "
now i 'm not in the least bit religious , neither was my father , but at that point , i noticed something happening here .
i felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves , and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere , i guess .
but i felt something .
and it was a physiological response .
and from that point on , from my age at the time , i began to think of things in a different way .
and as i took on my career as a designer , i began to ask myself the simple question : do we actually think beauty , or do we feel it ?
now you probably know the answer to this already .
you probably think , well , i do n't know which one you think it is , but i think it 's about feeling beauty .
and so i then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things .
one of the most early work was done in automotive design - some very exciting work was done there .
and during a lot of this work , we found something , or i found something , that really fascinated me , and maybe you can remember it .
do you remember when lights used to just go on and off , click click , when you closed the door in a car ?
and then somebody , i think it was bmw , introduced a light that went out slowly .
remember that ?
i remember it clearly .
do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that ?
i remember sitting there thinking , this is fantastic .
in fact , i 've never found anybody that does n't like the light that goes out slowly .
i thought , well what the hell 's that about ?
so i started to ask myself questions about it .
and the first was , i 'd ask other people : " do you like it ? " " yes . "
" why ? " and they 'd say , " oh , it feels so natural , " or , " it 's nice . "
i thought , well that 's not good enough .
can we cut down a little bit further , because , as a designer , i need the vocabulary , i need the keyboard , of how this actually works .
and so i did some experiments .
and i suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that - light to dark in six seconds - exactly that .
do you know what it is ? anyone ?
you see , using this bit , the thinky bit , the slow bit of the brain - using that .
and this is n't a think , it 's a feel .
and would you do me a favor ?
for the next 14 minutes or whatever it is , will you feel stuff ?
i do n't need you to think so much as i want you to feel it .
i felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation .
and that thing that i found was the cinema or the theater .
it 's actually just happened here - light to dark in six seconds .
and when that happens , are you sitting there going , " no , the movie 's about to start , " or are you going , " that 's fantastic . i 'm looking forward to it .
i get a sense of anticipation " ?
now i 'm not a neuroscientist .
i do n't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex .
but it might be .
because the people i speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this .
and some of the people i speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater do n't get it in the same way .
everybody likes it , but some like it more than others .
so this leads me to think of this in a different way .
we 're not feeling it . we 're thinking beauty is in the limbic system - if that 's not an outmoded idea .
these are the bits , the pleasure centers , and maybe what i 'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking .
the wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit , the cortex .
they arrive first .
so how do we make that actually work ?
and how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know , or what we 're going to learn , about something ?
this is one of the most beautiful things i know .
it 's a plastic bag .
and when i looked at it first , i thought , no , there 's no beauty in that .
then i found out , post exposure , that this plastic bag if i put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff , that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure , potable drinking water .
and all of a sudden , this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me .
now i 'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit .
would you mind taking the brain out , and i just want you to feel something .
look at that . what are you feeling about it ?
is it beautiful ? is it exciting ?
i 'm watching your faces very carefully .
there 's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that .
maybe there 's an innocence to it .
now i 'm going to tell you what it is . are you ready ?
this is the last act on this earth of a little girl called heidi , five years old , before she died of cancer to the spine .
it 's the last thing she did , the last physical act .
look at that picture .
look at the innocence . look at the beauty in it .
is it beautiful now ?
stop . stop . how do you feel ?
where are you feeling this ?
i 'm feeling it here . i feel it here .
and i 'm watching your faces , because your faces are telling me something .
the lady over there is actually crying , by the way .
but what are you doing ?
i watch what people do .
i watch faces .
i watch reactions .
because i have to know how people react to things .
and one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty , something stupefyingly delicious , is what i call the omg .
and by the way , there 's no pleasure in that face .
it 's not a " this is wonderful ! "
the eyebrows are doing this , the eyes are defocused , and the mouth is hanging open .
that 's not the expression of joy .
there 's something else in that .
there 's something weird happening .
so pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in .
poignancy is a word i love as a designer .
it means something triggering a big emotional response , often quite a sad emotional response , but it 's part of what we do .
it is n't just about nice .
and this is the dilemma , this is the paradox , of beauty .
sensorily , we 're taking in all sorts of things - mixtures of things that are good , bad , exciting , frightening - to come up with that sensorial exposure , that sensation of what 's going on .
pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl 's drawing .
and also triumph , this sense of transcendence , this " i never knew that . ah , this is something new . "
and that 's packed in there as well .
and as we assemble these tools , from a design point of view , i get terribly excited about it , because these are things , as we 've already said , they 're arriving at the brain , it would seem , before cognition , before we can manipulate them - electrochemical party tricks .
now what i 'm also interested in is : is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty ?
by that , i mean intrinsically beautiful things , just something that 's exquisitely beautiful , that 's universally beautiful .
very hard to find . maybe you 've got some examples of it .
very hard to find something that , to everybody , is a very beautiful thing , without a certain amount of information packed in there before .
so a lot of it tends to be extrinsic .
it 's mediated by information before the comprehension .
or the information 's added on at the back , like that little girl 's drawing that i showed you .
now when talking about beauty you ca n't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you .
and one of the most tedious ones , i think , was saying that beauty was about symmetry .
well it obviously is n't .
this is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people , and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face .
and they found that it was almost exact coincidence .
so it was n't about symmetry .
in fact , this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face , of which both sides are beautiful .
but they 're both different .
and as a designer , i ca n't help meddling with this , so i pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this , and tried to understand what the individual elements were , but feeling it as i go .
now i can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if i look at that eye .
i 'm not getting it off the eyebrow .
and the earhole is n't doing it to me at all .
so i do n't know how much this is helping me , but it 's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off .
and as i say , i 'm not a neuroscientist , but to understand how i can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements .
anais nin and the talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are , but as we are .
so i 'm going to shamelessly expose something to you , which is beautiful to me .
and this is the f1 mv agusta .
ahhhh .
it is really - i mean , i ca n't express to you how exquisite this object is .
but i also know why it 's exquisite to me , because it 's a palimpsest of things .
it 's masses and masses of layers .
this is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension .
it 's something much bigger .
layer after layer of legend , sport , details that resonate .
i mean , if i just go through some of them now - i know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects , and that does it consummately well , you can see it can .
so that 's getting me excited .
and i feel that here .
this bit , the big secret of automotive design - reflection management .
it 's not about the shapes , it 's how the shapes reflect light .
now that thing , light flickers across it as you move , so it becomes a kinetic object , even though it 's standing still - managed by how brilliantly that 's done on the reflection .
this little relief on the footplate , by the way , to a rider means there 's something going on underneath it - in this case , a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably , taking the power from the engine .
i 'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things .
titanium lacquer on this .
i ca n't tell you how wonderful this is .
that 's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel .
i 'm really getting into this now .
and of course , a racing bike does n't have a prop stand , but this one , because it 's a road bike , it all goes away and it folds into this little gap .
so it disappears .
and then i ca n't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator , which is curved .
why would you do that ?
because i know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics .
so it 's more expensive , but it 's wonderful .
and to cap it all , brand royalty - agusta , count agusta , from the great histories of this stuff .
the bit that you ca n't see is the genius that created this .
massimo tamburini .
they call him " the plumber " in italy , as well as " maestro , " because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time .
there 's so little compromise on this , you ca n't see it .
but unfortunately , the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty .
we have to deal with it .
so i have to work with a supply chain , and i 've got to work with the technologies , and i 've got to work with everything else all the time , and so compromises start to fit into it .
and so look at her .
i 've had to make a bit of a compromise there .
i 've had to move that part across , but only a millimeter .
no one 's noticed , have they yet ?
did you see what i did ?
i moved three things by a millimeter .
pretty ? yes .
beautiful ? maybe lesser .
but then , of course , the consumer says that does n't really matter .
so that 's okay , is n't it ?
another millimeter ?
no one 's going to notice those split lines and changes .
it 's that easy to lose beauty , because beauty 's incredibly difficult to do .
and only a few people can do it .
and a focus group can not do it .
and a team rarely can do it .
it takes a central cortex , if you like , to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time .
this is a beautiful water bottle - some of you know of it - done by ross lovegrove , the designer .
this is pretty close to intrinsic beauty . this one , as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this .
it 's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious .
i might like it more than you like it , because i know how bloody hard it is to do it .
it 's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that , that comes out of the tool correctly , that goes down the line without falling over .
underneath this , like the story of the swan , is a million things very difficult to do .
so all hail to that .
it 's a fantastic example , a simple object .
and the one i showed you before was , of course , a massively complex one .
and they 're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it .
you all , i guess , like me , enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance .
and part of the joy of it is , you know the difficulty .
you also may be taking into account the fact that it 's incredibly painful .
anybody seen a ballet dancer 's toes when they come out of the points ?
while she 's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you , something horrible 's going on down here .
the comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what 's actually going on .
now i 'm using microseconds wrongly here , so please ignore me .
but what i have to do now , feeling again , what i 've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes , of these triggers into something early on in the process , that you pick it up , not through your thinking , but through your feeling .
so we 're going to have a little experiment .
right , are you ready ? i 'm going to show you something for a very , very brief moment .
are you ready ? okay .
did you think that was a bicycle when i showed it to you at the first flash ?
it 's not .
tell me something , did you think it was quick when you first saw it ? yes you did .
did you think it was modern ? yes you did .
that blip , that information , shot into you before that .
and because your brain starter motor began there , now it 's got to deal with it .
and the great thing is , this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it 's green technology and it 's good for you and it 's light and it 's all part of the future .
so is that wrong ?
well in this case it is n't , because it 's a very , very ecologically-sound piece of technology .
but you 're a slave of that first flash .
we are slaves to the first few fractions of a second - and that 's where much of my work has to win or lose , on a shelf in a shop .
it wins or loses at that point .
you may see 50 , 100 , 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it , but i have to work within that domain , to ensure that it gets you there first .
and finally , the layer that i love , of knowledge .
some of you , i 'm sure , will be familiar with this .
what 's incredible about this , and the way i love to come back to it , is this is taking something that you hate or bores you , folding clothes , and if you can actually do this - who can actually do this ? anybody try to do this ?
yeah ?
it 's fantastic , is n't it ?
look at that . do you want to see it again ?
no time . it says i have two minutes left , so we ca n't do this .
but just go to the web , youtube , pull it down , " folding t-shirt . "
that 's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your t-shirt .
you did n't maybe know it .
but how do you feel about it ?
it feels fantastic when you do it , you look forward to doing it , and when you tell somebody else about it - like you probably have - you look really smart .
the knowledge bubble that sits around the outside , the stuff that costs nothing , because that knowledge is free - bundle that together and where do we come out ?
form follows function ?
only sometimes . only sometimes .
form is function . form is function .
it informs , it tells us , it supplies us answers before we 've even thought about it .
and so i 've stopped using words like " form , " and i 've stopped using words like " function " as a designer .
what i try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things .
because if i can get that right , i can make them wonderful , and i can make them repeatedly wonderful .
and you know what those products and services are , because you own some of them .
they 're the things that you 'd snatch if the house was on fire .
forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you may have heard about the koran 's idea of paradise being 72 virgins , and i promise i will come back to those virgins .
but in fact , here in the northwest , we 're living very close to the real koranic idea of paradise , defined 36 times as " gardens watered by running streams . "
since i live on a houseboat on the running stream of lake union , this makes perfect sense to me .
but the thing is , how come it 's news to most people ?
i know many well-intentioned non-muslims who 've begun reading the koran , but given up , disconcerted by its " otherness . "
the historian thomas carlyle considered muhammad one of the world 's greatest heroes , yet even he called the koran " as toilsome reading as i ever undertook , a wearisome , confused jumble . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- part of the problem , i think , is that we imagine that the koran can be read as we usually read a book - as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach , as though god - and the koran is entirely in the voice of god speaking to muhammad - were just another author on the bestseller list .
yet the fact that so few people do actually read the koran is precisely why it 's so easy to quote - that is , to misquote .
phrases and snippets taken out of context in what i call the " highlighter version , " which is the one favored by both muslim fundamentalists and anti-muslim islamophobes .
so this past spring , as i was gearing up to begin writing a biography of muhammad , i realized i needed to read the koran properly - as properly as i could , that is .
my arabic 's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary , so i took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side , verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century arabic .
now i did have an advantage .
my last book was about the story behind the shi 'a-sunni split , and for that i 'd worked closely with the earliest islamic histories , so i knew the events to which the koran constantly refers , its frame of reference .
i knew enough , that is , to know that i 'd be a tourist in the koran - an informed one , an experienced one even , but still an outsider , an agnostic jew reading some else 's holy book .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i read slowly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd set aside three weeks for this project , and that , i think , is what is meant by " hubris " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because it turned out to be three months .
i did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are .
but every time i thought i was beginning to get a handle on the koran - that feeling of " i get it now " - it would slip away overnight , and i 'd come back in the morning wondering if i was n't lost in a strange land , and yet the terrain was very familiar .
the koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the torah and the gospels .
so one-third of it reprises the stories of biblical figures like abraham , moses , joseph , mary , jesus .
god himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as yahweh - jealously insisting on no other gods .
the presence of camels , mountains , desert wells and springs took me back to the year i spent wandering the sinai desert .
and then there was the language , the rhythmic cadence of it , reminding me of evenings spent listening to bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory .
and i began to grasp why it 's said that the koran is really the koran only in arabic .
take the fatihah , the seven-verse opening chapter that is the lord 's prayer and the shema yisrael of islam combined .
it 's just 29 words in arabic , but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation .
and yet the more you add , the more seems to go missing .
the arabic has an incantatory , almost hypnotic , quality that begs to be heard rather than read , felt more than analyzed .
it wants to be chanted out loud , to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue .
so the koran in english is a kind of shadow of itself , or as arthur arberry called his version , " an interpretation . "
but all is not lost in translation .
as the koran promises , patience is rewarded , and there are many surprises - a degree of environmental awareness , for instance , and of humans as mere stewards of god 's creation , unmatched in the bible .
and where the bible is addressed exclusively to men , using the second and third person masculine , the koran includes women - talking , for instance , of believing men and believing women , honorable men and honorable women .
or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers .
yes , it does say that , but in a very specific context : the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of mecca where fighting was usually forbidden , and the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers .
not " you must kill unbelievers in mecca , " but you can , you are allowed to , but only after a grace period is over and only if there 's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the kaaba , and only if they attack you first .
and even then - god is merciful ; forgiveness is supreme - and so , essentially , better if you do n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was perhaps the biggest surprise - how flexible the koran is , at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible .
" some of these verses are definite in meaning , " it says , " and others are ambiguous . "
the perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities , trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own .
only god knows the true meaning .
the phrase " god is subtle " appears again and again , and indeed , the whole of the koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe .
as in , for instance , that little matter of virgins and paradise .
old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here .
the word used four times is houris , rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts , or as fair , high-bosomed virgins .
yet all there is in the original arabic is that one word : houris .
not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this may be a way of saying " pure beings " - like in angels - or it may be like the greek kouros or kórē , an eternal youth .
but the truth is nobody really knows , and that 's the point .
because the koran is quite clear when it says that you 'll be " a new creation in paradise " and that you will be " recreated in a form unknown to you , " which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that number 72 never appears .
there are no 72 virgins in the koran .
that idea only came into being 300 years later , and most islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps .
paradise is quite the opposite .
it 's not virginity ; it 's fecundity .
it 's plenty .
it 's gardens watered by running streams .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this song is one of thomas ' favorites , called " what you do with what you 've got . "
♫ you must know someone like him ♫ ♫ he was tall and strong and lean ♫ ♫ with a body like a greyhound ♫ ♫ and a mind so sharp and keen ♫ ♫ but his heart , just like laurel ♫ ♫ grew twisted around itself ♫ ♫ till almost everything he did ♫ ♫ brought pain to someone else ♫ ♫ it 's not just what you 're born with ♫ ♫ it 's what you choose to bear ♫ ♫ it 's not how big your share is ♫ ♫ it 's how much you can share ♫
♫ it 's not the fights you dreamed of ♫ ♫ it 's those you really fought ♫ ♫ it 's not what you 've been given ♫ ♫ it 's what you do with what you 've got ♫ ♫ what 's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you 've nothing good to say ? ♫ ♫ what 's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you ca n't hear those you love ? ♫
♫ what 's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you 've nothing good to say ? ♫ ♫ what 's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you ca n't hear those you love ? ♫ ♫ between those who use their neighbors ♫ ♫ and those who use the cane ♫ ♫ between those in constant power ♫ ♫ and those in constant pain ♫
♫ between those who run to glory ♫ ♫ and those who can not run ♫ ♫ tell me which ones are the cripples ♫ ♫ and which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ which ones touch the sun ♫ in 1994 , i walked into a prison in cambodia , and i met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel .
and as i looked into his eyes , i realized that for the hundreds of letters i had written for political prisoners , that i would never have written a letter for him , because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody .
he was not a political prisoner .
he was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle .
what i also realized at that point was that it was not only cambodia , but of the 113 developing countries that torture , 93 of these countries have all passed laws that say you have a right to a lawyer and you have a right not to be tortured .
and what i recognized was that there was an incredible window of opportunity for us as a world community to come together and end torture as an investigative tool .
we often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst , but , in fact , 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners .
it is for people who are in broken-down legal systems , and unfortunately because torture is the cheapest form of investigation - it 's cheaper than having a legal system , cheaper than having a lawyer and early access to counsel - it is what happens most of the time .
i believe today that it is possible for us as a world community , if we make a decision , to come together and end torture as an investigative tool in our lifetime , but it will require three things .
first is the training , empowerment , and connection of defenders worldwide .
the second is insuring that there is systematic early access to counsel .
and the third is commitment .
so in the year 2000 , i began to wonder , what if we came together ?
could we do something for these 93 countries ?
and i founded international bridges to justice which has a specific mission of ending torture as an investigative tool and implementing due process rights in the 93 countries by placing trained lawyers at an early stage in police stations and in courtrooms .
my first experiences , though , did come from cambodia , and at the time i remember first coming to cambodia and there were , in 1994 , still less than 10 attorneys in the country because the khmer rouge had killed them all .
and even 20 years later , there was only 10 lawyers in the country , so consequently you 'd walk into a prison and not only would you meet 12-year-old boys , you 'd meet women and you 'd say , " why are you here ? " women would say , " well i 've been here for 10 years because my husband committed a crime , but they ca n't find him . "
so it 's just a place where there was no rule of law .
the first group of defenders came together and i still remember , as i was training , i said , " okay , what do you do for an investigation ? "
and there was silence in the class , and finally one woman stood up , -lsb- inaudible name -rsb- , and she said " khrew , " which means " teacher . "
she said , " i have defended more than a hundred people , and i 've never had to do any investigation , because they all come with confessions . "
and we talked about , as a class , the fact that number one , the confessions might not be reliable , but number two , we did not want to encourage the police to keep doing this , especially as it was now against the law .
and it took a lot of courage for these defenders to decide that they would begin to stand up and support each other in implementing these laws .
and i still remember the first cases where they came , all 25 together , she would stand up , and they were in the back , and they would support her , and the judges kept saying , " no , no , no , no , we 're going to do things the exact same way we 've been doing them . "
but one day the perfect case came , and it was a woman who was a vegetable seller , she was sitting outside of a house .
she said she actually saw the person run out who she thinks stole whatever the jewelry was , but the police came , they got her , there was nothing on her .
she was pregnant at the time . she had cigarette burns on her . she 'd miscarried .
and when they brought her case to the judge , for the first time he stood up and he said , " yes , there 's no evidence except for your torture confession and you will be released . "
and the defenders began to take cases over and over again and you will see , they have step by step began to change the course of history in cambodia .
but cambodia is not alone .
i used to think , well is it cambodia ?
or is it other countries ?
but it is in so many countries .
in burundi i walked into a prison and it was n't a 12-year-old boy , it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone .
or a woman , i picked up her baby , really cute baby , i said " your baby is so cute . "
it was n't a baby , she was three .
and she said " yeah , but she 's why i 'm here , " because she was accused of stealing two diapers and an iron for her baby and still had been in prison .
and when i walked up to the prison director , i said , " you 've got to let her out .
a judge would let her out . "
and he said , " okay , we can talk about it , but look at my prison . eighty percent of the two thousand people here are without a lawyer . what can we do ? "
so lawyers began to courageously stand up together to organize a system where they can take cases .
but we realized that it 's not only the training of the lawyers , but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference .
for example , in cambodia , it was that -lsb- inaudible name -rsb- did not go alone but she had 24 lawyers with her who stood up together . and in the same way , in china , they always tell me , " it 's like a fresh wind in the desert when we can come together . "
or in zimbabwe , where i remember innocent , after coming out of a prison where everybody stood up and said , " i 've been here for one year , eight years , 12 years without a lawyer , " he came and we had a training together and he said , " i have heard it said " - because he had heard people mumbling and grumbling - " i have heard it said that we can not help to create justice because we do not have the resources . "
and then he said , " but i want you to know that the lack of resources is never an excuse for injustice . "
and with that , he successfully organized 68 lawyers who have been systematically taking the cases .
the key that we see , though , is training and then early access .
i was recently in egypt , and was inspired to meet with another group of lawyers , and what they told me is that they said , " hey , look , we do n't have police on the streets now . the police are one of the main reasons why we had the revolution . they were torturing everybody all the time . "
and i said , " but there 's been tens of millions of dollars that have recently gone in to the development of the legal system here .
what 's going on ? "
i met with one of the development agencies , and they were training prosecutors and judges , which is the normal bias , as opposed to defenders .
and they showed me a manual which actually was an excellent manual .
i said , " i 'm gonna copy this . "
it had everything in it . lawyers can come at the police station . it was perfect .
prosecutors were perfectly trained .
but i said to them , " i just have one question , which is , by the time that everybody got to the prosecutor 's office , what had happened to them ? "
and after a pause , they said , " they had been tortured . "
so the pieces are , not only the training of the lawyers , but us finding a way to systematically implement early access to counsel , because they are the safeguard in the system for people who are being tortured .
and as i tell you this , i 'm also aware of the fact that it sounds like , " oh , okay , it sounds like we could do it , but can we really do it ? "
because it sounds big .
and there are many reasons why i believe it 's possible .
the first reason is the people on the ground who find ways of creating miracles because of their commitment .
it 's not only innocent , who i told you about in zimbabwe , but defenders all over the world who are looking for these pieces .
we have a program called justicemakers , and we realized there are people that are courageous and want to do things , but how can we support them ?
so it 's an online contest where it 's only five thousand dollars if you come up with and innovative way of implementing justice .
and there are 30 justicemakers throughout the world , from sri lanka to swaziland to the drc , who with five thousand dollars do amazing things , through sms programs , through paralegal programs , through whatever they can do .
and it 's not only these justicemakers , but people we courageously see figure out who their networks are and how they can move it forward .
so in china , for instance , great laws came out where it says police can not torture people or they will be punished .
and i was sitting side by side with one of our very courageous lawyers , and said , " how can we get this out ? how can we make sure that this is implemented ?
this is fantastic . " and he said to me , " well , do you have money ? " and i said , " no . " and he said , " that 's okay , we can still figure it out . "
and on december 4 , he organized three thousand members of the youth communist league , from 14 of the top law schools , who organized themselves , developed posters with the new laws , and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights .
so i talked about the fact that we need to train and support defenders .
we need to systematically implement early access to counsel .
but the third and most important thing is that we make a commitment to this .
and people often say to me , " you know , this is great , but it 's wildly idealistic .
never going to happen . "
and the reason that i think that those words are interesting is because those were the same kinds of words that were used for people who decided they would end slavery , or end apartheid .
it began with a small group of people who decided they would commit .
now , there 's one of our favorite poems from the defenders , which they share from each other , is : " take courage friends , the road is often long , the path is never clear , and the stakes are very high , but deep down , you are not alone . "
and i believe that if we can come together as a world community to support not only defenders , but also everyone in the system who is looking towards it , we can end torture as an investigative tool .
i end always , because i 'm sure the questions are - and i 'd be happy to talk to you at any point - " but what can i really do ? "
well , i would say this . first of all , you know what you can do . but second of all , i would leave you with the story of vishna , who actually was my inspiration for starting international bridges to justice .
vishna was a 4-year-old boy when i met him who was born in a cambodian prison in kandal province . but because he was born in the prison , everybody loved him , including the guards , so he was the only one who was allowed to come in and out of the bars .
so , you know , there 's bars . and by the time that vishna was getting bigger , which means what gets bigger ? your head gets bigger .
so he would come to the first bar , the second bar and then the third bar , and then really slowly move his head so he could fit through , and come back , third , second , first . and he would grab my pinkie , because what he wanted to do every day is he wanted to go visit .
you know , he never quite made it to all of them every day , but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners . and i would lift him , and he would put his fingers through .
or if they were dark cells , it was like iron corrugated , and he would put his fingers through .
and most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine , and they looked forward to him . and i was like , here 's vishna . he 's a 4-year-old boy .
he was born in a prison with almost nothing , no material goods , but he had a sense of his own heroic journey , which i believe we are all born into . he said , " probably i ca n't do everything .
but i 'm one . i can do something .
and i will do the one thing that i can do . "
so i thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together , and invite you into this journey with us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1962 , with rachel carson 's " silent spring , " i think for people like me in the world of the making of things , the canary in the mine was n't singing .
and so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared .
and the question was , were the birds singing ?
now , i 'm not a scientist , that 'll be really clear .
but , you know , we 've just come from this discussion of what a bird might be .
what is a bird ?
well , in my world , this is a rubber duck .
it comes in california with a warning - " this product contains chemicals known by the state of california to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm . "
this is a bird .
what kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children ?
i think we have a design problem .
someone heard the six hours of talk that i gave called " the monticello dialogues " on npr , and sent me this as a thank you note - " we realize that design is a signal of intention , but it also has to occur within a world , and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence , and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design , we , in a way , need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet , and i think the exciting part of that is the good news that 's there ,
because the news is the news of abundance , and not the news of limits , and i think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear , we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent , driven by the sun , and start to imagine what that would be like to share . "
that was a nice thing to get .
that was one sentence .
henry james would be proud .
this is - i put it down at the bottom , but that was extemporaneous , obviously .
the fundamental issue is that , for me , design is the first signal of human intentions .
so what are our intentions , and what would our intentions be - if we wake up in the morning , we have designs on the world - well , what would our intention be as a species now that we 're the dominant species ?
and it 's not just stewardship and dominion debate , because really , dominion is implicit in stewardship - because how could you dominate something you had killed ?
and stewardship 's implicit in dominion , because you ca n't be steward of something if you ca n't dominate it .
so the question is , what is the first question for designers ?
now , as guardians - let 's say the state , for example , which reserves the right to kill , the right to be duplicitous and so on - the question we 're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant , how are we meant , to secure local societies , create world peace and save the environment ?
but i do n't know that that 's the common debate .
commerce , on the other hand , is relatively quick , essentially creative , highly effective and efficient , and fundamentally honest , because we ca n't exchange value for very long if we do n't trust each other .
so we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work , but the question we bring to it is , how do we love all the children of all species for all time ?
and so we start our designs with that question .
because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy .
if we come here and say , " well , i did n't intend to cause global warming on the way here , " and we say , " that 's not part of my plan , " then we realize it 's part of our de facto plan .
because it 's the thing that 's happening because we have no other plan .
and i was at the white house for president bush , meeting with every federal department and agency , and i pointed out that they appear to have no plan .
if the end game is global warming , they 're doing great .
if the end game is mercury toxification of our children downwind of coal fire plants as they scuttled the clean air act , then i see that our education programs should be explicitly defined as , " brain death for all children . no child left behind . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , the question is , how many federal officials are ready to move to ohio and pennsylvania with their families ?
so if you do n't have an endgame of something delightful , then you 're just moving chess pieces around , if you do n't know you 're taking the king .
so perhaps we could develop a strategy of change , which requires humility . and in my business as an architect , it 's unfortunate the word " humility " and the word " architect " have not appeared in the same paragraph since " the fountainhead . "
so if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility , reflect on this - it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage .
so , as kevin kelly pointed out , there is no endgame .
there is an infinite game , and we 're playing in that infinite game .
and so we call it " cradle to cradle , " and our goal is very simple .
this is what i presented to the white house .
our goal is a delightfully diverse , safe , healthy and just world , with clean air , clean water , soil and power - economically , equitably , ecologically and elegantly enjoyed , period .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what do n't you like about this ?
which part of this do n't you like ?
so we realized we want full diversity , even though it can be difficult to remember what de gaulle said when asked what it was like to be president of france .
he said , " what do you think it 's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese ? "
but at the same time , we realize that our products are not safe and healthy .
so we 've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million .
this is a baby blanket by pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of alzheimer 's later in life .
we can ask ourselves , what is justice , and is justice blind , or is justice blindness ?
and at what point did that uniform turn from white to black ?
water has been declared a human right by the united nations .
air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes .
is there anybody here who does n't breathe ?
clean soil is a critical problem - the nitrification , the dead zones in the gulf of mexico .
a fundamental issue that 's not being addressed .
we 've seen the first form of solar energy that 's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the great plains , and so that hegemony is leaving .
and if we remember sheikh yamani when he formed opec , they asked him , " when will we see the end of the age of oil ? "
i do n't know if you remember his answer , but it was , " the stone age did n't end because we ran out of stones . "
we see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that do n't .
we see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect .
this is a hospital monitor from los angeles , sent to china .
this woman will expose herself to toxic phosphorous , release four pounds of toxic lead into her childrens ' environment , which is from copper .
on the other hand , we see great signs of hope .
here 's dr. venkataswamy in india , who 's figured out how to do mass-produced health .
he has given eyesight to two million people for free .
we see in our material flows that car steels do n't become car steel again because of the contaminants of the coatings - bismuth , antimony , copper and so on .
they become building steel .
on the other hand , we 're working with berkshire hathaway , warren buffett and shaw carpet , the largest carpet company in the world .
we 've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable , down to the parts per million .
the upper is nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam , the bottom , a polyolephine - infinitely recyclable thermoplastic .
now if i was a bird , the building on my left is a liability .
the building on my right , which is our corporate campus for the gap with an ancient meadow , is an asset - its nesting grounds .
here 's where i come from . i grew up in hong kong , with six million people in 40 square miles .
during the dry season , we had four hours of water every fourth day .
and the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries .
you ca n't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow .
my childhood summers were in the puget sound of washington , among the first growth and big growth .
my grandfather had been a lumberjack in the olympics , so i have a lot of tree karma i am working off .
i went to yale for graduate school , studied in a building of this style by le corbusier , affectionately known in our business as brutalism .
if we look at the world of architecture , we see with mies ' 1928 tower for berlin , the question might be , " well , where 's the sun ? "
and this might have worked in berlin , but we built it in houston , and the windows are all closed . and with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use , this is actually a vertical gas chamber .
when i went to yale , we had the first energy crisis , and i was designing the first solar-heated house in ireland as a student , which i then built - which would give you a sense of my ambition .
and richard meier , who was one of my teachers , kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism , and he would say , " bill , you 've got to understand- - solar energy has nothing to do with architecture . "
i guess he did n't read vitruvius .
in 1984 , we did the first so-called " green office " in america for environmental defense .
we started asking manufacturers what were in their materials .
they said , " they 're proprietary , they 're legal , go away . "
the only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by r.j. reynolds tobacco company , and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace .
so , all of a sudden , here i am , graduating from high school in 1969 , and this happens , and we realize that " away " went away .
remember we used to throw things away , and we 'd point to away ?
and yet , noaa has now shown us , for example - you see that little blue thing above hawaii ?
that 's the pacific gyre .
it was recently dragged for plankton by scientists , and they found six times as much plastic as plankton .
when asked , they said , " it 's kind of like a giant toilet that does n't flush . "
perhaps that 's away .
so we 're looking for the design rules of this - this is the highest biodiversity of trees in the world , irian jaya , 259 species of tree , and we described this in the book , " cradle to cradle . "
the book itself is a polymer . it is not a tree .
that 's the name of the first chapter - " this book is not a tree . "
because in poetics , as margaret atwood pointed out , " we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears . "
and with so much polymer , what we really need is technical nutrition , and to use something as elegant as a tree - imagine this design assignment : design something that makes oxygen , sequesters carbon , fixes nitrogen , distills water , accrues solar energy as fuel , makes complex sugars and food , creates microclimates , changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates .
well , why do n't we knock that down and write on it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , we 're looking at the same criteria as most people - you know , can i afford it ?
does it work ? do i like it ?
we 're adding the jeffersonian agenda , and i come from charlottesville , where i 've had the privilege of living in a house designed by thomas jefferson .
we 're adding life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness .
now if we look at the word " competition , " i 'm sure most of you 've used it .
you know , most people do n't realize it comes from the latin competere , which means strive together .
it means the way olympic athletes train with each other .
they get fit together , and then they compete .
the williams sisters compete - one wins wimbledon .
so we 've been looking at the idea of competition as a way of cooperating in order to get fit together .
and the chinese government has now - i work with the chinese government now - has taken this up .
we 're also looking at survival of the fittest , not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground , but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good .
now most environmentalists do n't say growth is good , because , in our lexicon , asphalt is two words : assigning blame .
but if we look at asphalt as our growth , then we realize that all we 're doing is destroying the planetary 's fundamental underlying operating system .
so when we see e equals mc squared come along , from a poet 's perspective , we see energy as physics , chemistry as mass , and all of a sudden , you get this biology .
and we have plenty of energy , so we 'll solve that problem , but the biology problem 's tricky , because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge , we will never be able to recover that .
and as francis crick pointed out , nine years after discovering dna with mr. watson , that life itself has to have growth as a precondition - it has to have free energy , sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals .
so we 're asking for human artifice to become a living thing , and we want growth , we want free energy from sunlight and we want an open metabolism for chemicals .
then , the question becomes not growth or no growth , but what do you want to grow ?
so instead of just growing destruction , we want to grow the things that we might enjoy , and someday the fda will allow us to make french cheese .
so therefore , we have these two metabolisms , and i worked with a german chemist , michael braungart , and we 've identified the two fundamental metabolisms .
the biological one i 'm sure you understand , but also the technical one , where we take materials and put them into closed cycles .
we call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition .
technical nutrition will be in an order of magnitude of biological nutrition .
biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans , which means that if we all wore birkenstocks and cotton , the world would run out of cork and dry up .
so we need materials in closed cycles , but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer , birth defects , mutagenic effects , disruption of our immune systems , biodegradation , persistence , heavy metal content , knowledge of how we 're making them and their production and so on .
our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry .
using those intellectual filters , we eliminated -lsb- 7,962 . -rsb- we were left with 38 chemicals .
we have since databased the 4000 most commonly used chemicals in human manufacturing , and we 're releasing this database into the public in six weeks .
so designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains , because when we asked most companies we work with - about a trillion dollars - and say , " where does your stuff come from ? " they say , " suppliers . "
" and where does it go ? "
" customers . "
so we need some help there .
so the biological nutrients , the first fabrics - the water coming out was clean enough to drink .
technical nutrients - this is for shaw carpet , infinitely reusable carpet .
here 's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet .
biotechnical nutrients - the model u for ford motor , a cradle to cradle car - concept car .
shoes for nike , where the uppers are polyesters , infinitely recyclable , the bottoms are biodegradable soles .
wear your old shoes in , your new shoes out .
there is no finish line .
the idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever , some of the materials go back to soil - it 's all solar-powered .
here 's a building at oberlin college we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water .
here 's a building for the gap , where the ancient grasses of san bruno , california , are on the roof .
and this is our project for ford motor company .
it 's the revitalization of the river rouge in dearborn .
this is obviously a color photograph .
these are our tools . these are how we sold it to ford .
we saved ford 35 million dollars doing it this way , day one , which is the equivalent of the ford taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars .
here it is . it 's the world 's largest green roof , 10 and a half acres .
this is the roof , saving money , and this is the first species to arrive here . these are killdeer .
they showed up in five days .
and we now have 350-pound auto workers learning bird songs on the internet .
we 're developing now protocols for cities - that 's the home of technical nutrients .
the country - the home of biological . and putting them together .
and so i will finish by showing you a new city we 're designing for the chinese government .
we 're doing 12 cities for china right now , based on cradle to cradle as templates .
our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years .
we did a mass energy balance - if they use brick , they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal .
they 'll have cities with no energy and no food .
we signed a memorandum of understanding - here 's madam deng nan , deng xiaoping 's daughter - for china to adopt cradle to cradle .
because if they toxify themselves , being the lowest-cost producer , send it to the lowest-cost distribution - wal-mart - and then we send them all our money , what we 'll discover is that we have what , effectively , when i was a student , was called mutually assured destruction .
now we do it by molecule . these are our cities .
we 're building a new city next to this city ; look at that landscape .
this is the site .
we do n't normally do green fields , but this one is about to be built , so they brought us in to intercede .
this is their plan .
it 's a rubber stamp grid that they laid right on that landscape .
and they brought us in and said , " what would you do ? "
this is what they would end up with , which is another color photograph .
so this is the existing site , so this is what it looks like now , and here 's our proposal .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully .
we studied the biota , the ancient biota , the current farming and the protocols .
we studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air , fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day .
we then take the parks and lay them out as ecological infrastructure .
we lay out the building areas .
we start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be .
the transportation is all very simple , everybody 's within a five-minute walk of mobility .
we have a 24-hour street , so that there 's always a place that 's alive .
the waste systems all connect .
if you flush a toilet , your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants , which are sold as assets , not liabilities .
because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas ?
the waters are all taken in to construct the wetlands for habitat restorations .
and then it makes natural gas , which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city .
so this is - these are fertilizer gas plants .
and then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city , where we 've got farming , because what we 've done is lifted up the city , the landscape , into the air to - to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings .
the solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city .
and this is the concept for the top of the city .
we 've lifted the earth up onto the roofs .
the farmers have little bridges to get from one roof to the next .
we inhabit the city with work / live space on all the ground floors .
and so this is the existing city , and this is the new city .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " give me liberty or give me death . "
when patrick henry , the governor of virginia , said these words in 1775 , he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with american generations to come .
at the time , these words were earmarked and targeted against the british , but over the last 200 years , they 've come to embody what many westerners believe , that freedom is the most cherished value , and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them .
who could blame them ?
over the past hundred years , the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the united states and western countries to new levels of economic development .
in the united states over the past hundred years , incomes have increased 30 times , and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty .
meanwhile , american ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions , motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets .
it 's no surprise , then , that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis , president obama said , " the question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill .
its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched . "
thus , there 's understandably a deep-seated presumption among westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth , liberal democracy , and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights .
however , to many who live in the emerging markets , this is an illusion , and even though the universal declaration of human rights , which was signed in 1948 , was unanimously adopted , what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries , and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights .
this schism has only grown wider .
today , many people who live in the emerging markets , where 90 percent of the world 's population lives , believe that the western obsession with political rights is beside the point , and what is actually important is delivering on food , shelter , education and healthcare .
" give me liberty or give me death " is all well and good if you can afford it , but if you 're living on less than one dollar a day , you 're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy .
now , i know many people in this room and around the world will think , " well actually , this is hard to grasp , " because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct .
but i ask you today , what would you do if you had to choose ?
what if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote ?
over the last 10 years , i 've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries , many of them in the emerging markets , in latin america , asia , and my own continent of africa .
i 've met with presidents , dissidents , policymakers , lawyers , teachers , doctors and the man on the street , and through these conversations , it 's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there 's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the west and that which people believe in the rest of the world .
now , do n't get me wrong .
i 'm not saying people in the emerging markets do n't understand democracy , nor am i saying that they would n't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders .
of course they would .
however , i am saying that on balance , they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from , and how it is their governments can deliver for them , than whether or not the government was elected by democracy .
the fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the western ideological systems of politics and economics , and this is a system that is embodied by china .
and rather than have private capitalism , they have state capitalism .
instead of liberal democracy , they have de-prioritized the democratic system .
and they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights .
i put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by china that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow , because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time .
explaining to you first why economically they 've come to this belief .
first of all , it 's china 's economic performance over the past 30 years .
she 's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty , specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 300 million people out of indigence .
it 's not just in economics , but it 's also in terms of living standards .
we see that in china , 28 percent of people had secondary school access .
today , it 's closer to 82 percent .
so in its totality , economic improvement has been quite significant .
second , china has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct .
today , the united states and china are the two leading economies in the world .
they have vastly different political systems and different economic systems , one with private capitalism , another one broadly with state capitalism .
however , these two countries have the identical gini coefficient , which is a measure of income equality .
perhaps what is more disturbing is that china 's income equality has been improving in recent times , whereas that of the united states has been declining .
thirdly , people in the emerging markets look at china 's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout .
this is not just about china building roads and ports and railways in her own country - she 's been able to build 85,000 kilometers of road network in china and surpass that of the united states - but even if you look to places like africa , china has been able to help tar the distance of cape town to cairo , which is 9,000 miles , or three times the distance of new york to california .
now this is something that people can see and point to .
perhaps it 's no surprise that in a 2007 pew survey , when surveyed , africans in 10 countries said they thought that the chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins , by as much as 98 percent .
finally , china is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces .
if you travel to mogadishu , mexico city or mumbai , you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas .
however , through a network of state-owned enterprises , the chinese have been able to go into these rural areas , using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions .
ladies and gentlemen , it 's no surprise that around the world , people are pointing at what china is doing and saying , " i like that . i want that .
i want to be able to do what china 's doing .
that is the system that seems to work . "
i 'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what china is doing in the democratic stance .
in particular , there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets , when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth .
in fact , countries like taiwan , singapore , chile , not just china , have shown that actually , it 's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy .
in a recent study , the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last .
the study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year , your democracy will last about eight and a half years .
if your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year , then you 're likely to only get 33 years of democracy .
and only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water .
what this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable .
but perhaps it 's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy , because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies , democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments that they seek to replace .
the evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing .
freedom house finds that although 50 percent of the world 's countries today are democratic , 70 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people do n't have free speech or freedom of movement .
but also , we 're finding from freedom house in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years .
what this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy , is we 've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way , and that has its roots in economics .
but it also says that as china moves toward being the largest economy in the world , something that is expected to happen by experts in 2016 , that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the west and the rest is likely to widen .
what might that world look like ?
well , the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism ; greater protectionisms of nation-states ; but also , as i just pointed out a moment ago , ever-declining political rights and individual rights .
the question that is left for us in general is , what then should the west be doing ?
and i suggest that they have two options .
the west can either compete or cooperate .
if the west chooses to compete with the chinese model , and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy , this is basically going against headwinds , but it also would be a natural stance for the west to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy , and state capitalism .
now the fact of the matter is , if the west decides to compete , it will create a wider schism .
the other option is for the west to cooperate , and by cooperating i mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility what political and economic system works best for them .
now i 'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking , well , this is like ceding to china , and this is a way , in other words , for the west to take a back seat .
but i put it to you that if the united states and european countries want to remain globally influential , they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete , and by that , they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want .
instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with china , the west should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions .
instead of criticizing china for bad behavior , the west should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one .
and instead of shoehorning democracy around the world , perhaps the west should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today .
indeed , the supreme court justice stephen breyer reminds us that it took the united states nearly 170 years from the time that the constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the united states .
some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights .
in fact , there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law .
at its very best , the western model speaks for itself .
it 's the model that put food on the table .
it 's the refrigerators .
it put a man on the moon .
but the fact of the matter is , although people back in the day used to point at the western countries and say , " i want that , i like that , " there 's now a new person in town in the form of a country , china .
today , generations are looking at china and saying , " china can produce infrastructure , china can produce economic growth , and we like that . "
because ultimately , the question before us , and the question before seven billion people on the planet is , how can we create prosperity ?
people who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way , to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time .
as you leave here today , i would like to leave you with a very personal message , which is what it is that i believe we should be doing as individuals , and this is really about being open-minded , open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world , creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people , has to be based in being open-minded , because these systems have good things and they have bad things .
just to illustrate , i went into my annals of myself .
that 's a picture of me .
awww . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i was born and raised in zambia in 1969 .
at the time of my birth , blacks were not issued birth certificates , and that law only changed in 1973 .
this is an affidavit from the zambian government .
i bring this to you to tell you that in 40 years , i 've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious ted crowd today to talk to you about my views .
in this vein , we can increase economic growth .
we can meaningfully put a dent in poverty .
but also , it 's going to require that we look at our assumptions , assumptions and strictures that we 've grown up with around democracy , around private capitalism , around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms .
we might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth .
ultimately , it 's about transforming the world and making it a better place .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant , world-class neuropsychologist : i had a baby .
and that 's not to say i ever went on to become a brilliant , world-class neuropsychologist .
sorry , ted .
but i did go on to be a reasonably astute , arguably world-class worrier .
one of my girlfriends in graduate school , marie , said , " kim , i figured it out .
it 's not that you 're more neurotic than everyone else ; it 's just that you 're more honest about how neurotic you are . "
so in the spirit of full disclosure , i brought some pictures to share .
awwww .
i 'll just say , july .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zzzzzzip for safety .
water wings - an inch of water .
and then , finally , all suited up for the 90-minute drive to copper mountain .
so you can get kind of a feel for this .
so my baby , vander , is eight years old now .
and , despite being cursed with my athletic inability , he plays soccer .
he 's interested in playing football .
he wants to learn how to ride a unicycle .
so why would i worry ?
because this is what i do . this is what i teach .
it 's what i study . it 's what i treat .
and i know that kids get concussed every year .
in fact , more than four million people sustain a concussion every year , and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms .
and so when kids sustain a concussion , we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung , but what is it that we 're really talking about ?
let 's take a look .
all right . " starsky and hutch , " arguably , yes .
so a car accident .
forty miles an hour into a fixed barrier - 35 gs .
a heavy weight boxer punches you straight in the face - 58 gs .
in case you missed it , we 'll look again .
so look to the right-hand side of the screen .
what would you say ?
how many gs ?
close .
seventy-two .
would it be crazy to know , 103 gs .
the average concussive impact is 95 gs .
now , when the kid on the right does n't get up , we know they 've had a concussion .
but how about the kid on the left , or the athlete that leaves the field of play ?
how do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion ?
how do we know that legislation that would require that they be pulled from play , cleared for return to play , applies to them ?
the definition of concussion does n't actually require a loss of consciousness .
it requires only a change in consciousness , and that can be any one of a number of symptoms , including feeling foggy , feeling dizzy , hearing a ringing in your ear , being more impulsive or hostile than usual .
so given all of that and given how darn neurotic i am , how do i get any sleep at all ?
because i know our brains are resilient .
they 're designed to recover from an injury .
if , god forbid , any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion , most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks .
but kids are more vulnerable to brain injury .
in fact , high school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers , and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline .
after that first injury , their risk for second injury is exponentially greater .
from there , their risk for a third injury , greater still , and so on .
and here 's the really alarming part : we do n't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries .
you guys may be familiar with this research that 's coming out of the nfl .
in a nutshell , this research suggests that among retired nfl players with three or more career concussions , the incidents of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population .
so you 've all seen that - new york times , you 've seen it .
what you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by nfl wives who said , " is n't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys ?
is n't it weird that my 47-year-old husband is forever losing the car ?
is n't it weird that my 48-year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car , from the driveway ? "
so i may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child .
so it 's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around some day .
so how do we guarantee the safety of our kids ?
how can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids ?
let me tell you what i 've come up with .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if only .
my little boy 's right there , and he 's like , " she 's not kidding .
she 's totally not kidding . "
so in all seriousness , should my kid play football ?
should your kid play football ? i do n't know .
but i do know there are three things you can do .
the first : study up .
you have to be familiar with the issues we 're talking about today .
there are some great resources out there .
the cdc has a program , heads up .
it 's at cdc.gov.
heads up is specific to concussion in kids .
the second is a resource i 'm personally really proud of .
we 've just rolled this out in the last couple months - co kids with brain injury .
this is a great resource for student athletes , teachers , parents , professionals , athletic and coaching staff .
it 's a great place to start if you have questions .
the second thing is : speak up .
just two weeks ago , a bill introduced by senator kefalas that would have required athletes , kids under 18 , to wear a helmet when they 're riding their bike died in committee .
it died in large part because it lacked constituent buy-in ; it lacked stakeholder traction .
now i 'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should or should n't support , but i am going to tell you that , if it matters to you , your legislators need to know that .
speak up also with coaching staff .
ask about what kind of protective equipment is available .
what 's the budget for protective equipment ?
how old it is ?
maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear - which brings us to suit up .
wear a helmet .
the only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening .
recently , one of my graduate students , tom said , " kim , i 've decided to wear a bike helmet on my way to class . "
and tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the g-force of impact by half .
now i thought that it was because i have this totally compelling helmet crusade , right , this epiphany of tom 's .
as it turns out , it occurred to tom that a $ 20 helmet is a good way to protect a $ 100,000 graduate education .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , should vander play football ?
i ca n't say no , but i can guarantee that every time he leaves the house that kid 's wearing a helmet - like to the car , or at school .
so whether athlete , scholar , over-protected kid , neurotic mom , or otherwise , here 's my baby , vander , reminding you to mind your matter .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so anyway , who am i ?
i usually say to people , when they say , " what do you do ? "
i say , " i do hardware , " because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything i do .
and i recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some valley event , to which he replied , " how quaint . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i sort of really was dumbstruck .
and i really should have said something smart .
and now i 've had a little bit of time to think about it , i would have said , " well , you know , if we look at the next 100 years and we 've seen all these problems in the last few days , most of the big issues - clean water , clean energy - and they 're interchangeable in some respects - and cleaner , more functional materials - they all look to me to be hardware problems .
this does n't mean we should ignore software , or information , or computation . "
and that 's in fact probably what i 'm going to try and tell you about .
so , this talk is going to be about how do we make things and what are the new ways that we 're going to make things in the future .
now , ted sends you a lot of spam if you 're a speaker about " do this , do that " and you fill out all these forms , and you do n't actually know how they 're going to describe you , and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist .
and i 've always been nervous about the term " futurist , " because you seem doomed to failure because you ca n't really predict it .
and i was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues i have , and said , " you know , well , if i have to talk about the future , what is it ? "
and george homsey , a great guy , said , " oh , the future is amazing .
it is so much stranger than you think .
we 're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut , and we 're going to make your poo smell like peppermint . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , you may think that 's sort of really crazy , but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening that make this possible .
so , this is n't my work , but it 's work of good friends of mine at mit .
this is called the registry of standard biological parts .
this is headed by drew endy and tom knight and a few other very , very bright individuals .
basically , what they 're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system .
literally , think of proteins as subroutines that you can string together to execute a program .
now , this is actually becoming such an interesting idea .
this is a state diagram . that 's an extremely simple computer .
this one is a two-bit counter .
so that 's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches .
and this is being built by a group of students at zurich for a design competition in biology .
and from the results of the same competition last year , a university of texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off .
so this is interesting in the sense that you can now do " if-then-for " statements in materials , in structure .
this is a pretty interesting trend , because we used to live in a world where everyone 's said glibly , " form follows function , " but i think i 've sort of grown up in a world - you listened to neil gershenfeld yesterday ; i was in a lab associated with his - where it 's really a world where information defines form and function .
i spent six years thinking about that , but to show you the power of art over science - this is actually one of the cartoons i write . these are called " howtoons . "
i work with a fabulous illustrator called nick dragotta .
took me six years at mit , and about that many pages to describe what i was doing , and it took him one page . and so this is our muse tucker .
he 's an interesting little kid - and his sister , celine - and what he 's doing here is observing the self-assembly of his cheerios in his cereal bowl .
and in fact you can program the self-assembly of things , so he starts chocolate-dipping edges , changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity .
in theory , if you program those sufficiently , you should be able to do something pretty interesting and make a very complex structure .
in this case , he 's done self-replication of a complex 3d structure .
and that 's what i thought about for a long time , because this is how we currently make things .
this is a silicon wafer , and essentially that 's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff , sort of layered up .
the feature side is - you know , people will say , -lsb- unclear -rsb- down around about 65 nanometers now .
on the right , that 's a radiolara .
that 's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans .
and that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers , and it 's a complex 3d structure .
we could do a lot more with computers and things generally if we knew how to build things this way .
the secret to biology is , it builds computation into the way it makes things . so this little thing here , polymerase , is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating dna .
and the ribosome here is another little computer that helps in the translation of the proteins .
i thought about this in the sense that it 's great to build in biological materials , but can we do similar things ?
can we get self-replicating-type behavior ?
can we get complex 3d structure automatically assembling in inorganic systems ?
because there are some advantages to inorganic systems , like higher speed semiconductors , etc .
so , this is some of my work on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system .
and this is sort of babbage 's revenge .
these are little mechanical computers .
these are five-state state machines .
so , that 's about three light switches lined up .
in a neutral state , they wo n't bind at all .
now , if i make a string of these , a bit string , they will be able to replicate .
so we start with white , blue , blue , white .
that encodes ; that will now copy . from one comes two , and then from two comes three .
and so you 've got this sort of replicating system .
it was work actually by lionel penrose , father of roger penrose , the tiles guy .
he did a lot of this work in the ' 60s , and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow as we went down the digital computer revolution , but it 's now coming back .
so now i 'm going to show you the hands-free , autonomous self-replication .
so we 've tracked in the video the input string , which was green , green , yellow , yellow , green .
we set them off on this air hockey table .
you know , high science uses air hockey tables - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy , but what you 're actually seeing is copies of that original string emerging from the parts bin that you have here .
so we 've got autonomous replication of bit strings .
so , why would you want to replicate bit strings ?
well , it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme , that you can take a linear string , which is a convenient thing to copy , and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3d structure .
so i was trying to , you know , take the engineer 's version : can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing ?
so what i 'm showing you here is that we can make a 2d shape - the b - assemble from a string of components that follow extremely simple rules .
and the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here , and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design , was that you do n't need digital logic to do computation .
and that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips .
so you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process .
so , neil gershenfeld showed you this video on wednesday , i believe , but i 'll show you again .
this is literally the colored sequence of those tiles .
each different color has a different magnetic polarity , and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out .
now , hopefully , those of you who know anything about graph theory can look at that , and that will satisfy you that that can also do arbitrary 3d structure , and in fact , you know , i can now take a dog , carve it up and then reassemble it so it 's a linear string that will fold from a sequence . and now i can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits .
so , you know , it 's a pretty interesting world when you start looking at the world a little bit differently .
and the universe is now a compiler .
and so i 'm thinking about , you know , what are the programs for programming the physical universe ?
and how do we think about materials and structure , sort of as an information and computation problem ?
not just where you attach a micro-controller to the end point , but that the structure and the mechanisms are the logic , are the computers .
having totally absorbed this philosophy , i started looking at a lot of problems a little differently .
with the universe as a computer , you can look at this droplet of water as having performed the computations .
you set a couple of boundary conditions , like gravity , the surface tension , density , etc . , and then you press " execute , " and magically , the universe produces you a perfect ball lens .
so , this actually applied to the problem of - so there 's a half a billion to a billion people in the world do n't have access to cheap eyeglasses .
so can you make a machine that could make any prescription lens very quickly on site ?
this is a machine where you literally define a boundary condition .
if it 's circular , you make a spherical lens .
if it 's elliptical , you can make an astigmatic lens .
you then put a membrane on that and you apply pressure - so that 's part of the extra program .
and literally with only those two inputs - so , the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure - you can define an infinite number of lenses that cover the range of human refractive error , from minus 12 to plus eight diopters , up to four diopters of cylinder .
and then literally , you now pour on a monomer .
you know , i 'll do a julia childs here .
this is three minutes of uv light .
and you reverse the pressure on your membrane once you 've cooked it . pop it out .
i 've seen this video , but i still do n't know if it 's going to end right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so you reverse this . this is a very old movie , so with the new prototypes , actually both surfaces are flexible , but this will show you the point .
now you 've finished the lens , you literally pop it out .
that 's next year 's yves klein , you know , eyeglasses shape .
and you can see that that has a mild prescription of about minus two diopters .
and as i rotate it against this side shot , you 'll see that that has cylinder , and that was programmed in - literally into the physics of the system .
so , this sort of thinking about structure as computation and structure as information leads to other things , like this .
this is something that my people at squid labs are working on at the moment , called " electronic rope . "
so literally , you think about a rope . it has very complex structure in the weave .
and under no load , it 's one structure .
under a different load , it 's a different structure . and you can actually exploit that by putting in a very small number of conducting fibers to actually make it a sensor .
so this is now a rope that knows the load on the rope at any particular point in the rope .
just by thinking about the physics of the world , materials as the computer , you can start to do things like this .
i 'm going to segue a little here .
i guess i 'm just going to casually tell you the types of things that i think about with this .
one thing i 'm really interested about this right now is , how , if you 're really taking this view of the universe as a computer , how do we make things in a very general sense , and how might we share the way we make things in a general sense the same way you share open source hardware ?
and a lot of talks here have espoused the benefits of having lots of people look at problems , share the information and work on those things together .
so , a convenient thing about being a human is you move in linear time , and unless lisa randall changes that , we 'll continue to move in linear time .
so that means anything you do , or anything you make , you produce a sequence of steps - and i think lego in the ' 70s nailed this , and they did it most elegantly .
but they can show you how to build things in sequence .
so , i 'm thinking about , how can we generalize the way we make all sorts of things , so you end up with this sort of guy , right ?
and i think this applies across a very broad - sort of , a lot of concepts .
you know , cameron sinclair yesterday said , " how do i get everyone to collaborate on design globally to do housing for humanity ? "
and if you 've seen amy smith , she talks about how you get students at mit to work with communities in haiti .
and i think we have to sort of redefine and rethink how we define structure and materials and assembly things , so that we can really share the information on how you do those things in a more profound way and build on each other 's source code for structure .
i do n't know exactly how to do this yet , but , you know , it 's something being actively thought about .
so , you know , that leads to questions like , is this a compiler ? is this a sub-routine ?
interesting things like that .
maybe i 'm getting a little too abstract , but you know , this is the sort of - returning to our comic characters - this is sort of the universe , or a different universe view , that i think is going to be very prevalent in the future - from biotech to materials assembly . it was great to hear bill joy .
they 're starting to invest in materials science , but these are the new things in materials science .
how do we put real information and real structure into new ideas , and see the world in a different way ? and it 's not going to be binary code that defines the computers of the universe - it 's sort of an analog computer .
but it 's definitely an interesting new worldview .
i 've gone too far . so that sounds like it 's it .
i 've probably got a couple of minutes of questions , or i can show - i think they also said that i do extreme stuff in the introduction , so i may have to explain that .
so maybe i 'll do that with this short video .
so this is actually a 3,000-square-foot kite , which also happens to be a minimal energy surface .
so returning to the droplet , again , thinking about the universe in a new way .
this is a kite designed by a guy called dave kulp .
and why do you want a 3,000-square-foot kite ?
so that 's a kite the size of your house .
and so you want that to tow boats very fast .
so i 've been working on this a little , also , with a couple of other guys .
but , you know , this is another way to look at the - if you abstract again , this is a structure that is defined by the physics of the universe .
you could just hang it as a bed sheet , but again , the computation of all the physics gives you the aerodynamic shape .
and so you can actually sort of almost double your boat speed with systems like that . so that 's sort of another interesting aspect of the future .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the problem that i want to talk with you about is really the problem of : how does one supply healthcare in a world in which cost is everything ?
how do you do that ?
and the basic paradigm we want to suggest to you , i want to suggest to you , is one in which you say that in order to treat disease you have to first know what you 're treating - that 's diagnostics - and then you have to do something .
so , the program that we 're involved in is something which we call diagnostics for all , or zero-cost diagnostics .
how do you provide medically relevant information at as close as possible to zero cost ? how do you do it ?
let me just give you two examples .
the rigors of military medicine are not so dissimilar from the third world - poor resources , a rigorous environment , a series of problems in lightweight , and things of this kind - and also not so different from the home healthcare and diagnostic system world .
so , the technology that i want to talk about is for the third world , for the developing world , but it has , i think , much broader application , because information is so important in the healthcare system .
so , you see two examples here .
one is a lab that is actually a fairly high-end laboratory in africa .
the second is basically an entrepreneur who is set up and doing who-knows-what in a table in a market .
i do n't know what kind of healthcare is delivered there .
but it 's not really what is probably most efficient .
what is our approach ?
and the way in which one typically approaches a problem of lowering cost , starting from the perspective of the united states , is to take our solution , and then to try to cut cost out of it .
no matter how you do that , you 're not going to start with a 100,000-dollar instrument and bring it down to no-cost . it is n't going to work .
so , the approach that we took was the other way around .
to ask , " what is the cheapest possible stuff that you could make a diagnostic system out of , and get useful information , add function ? " and what we 've chosen is paper .
what you see here is a prototypic device .
it 's about a centimeter on the side .
it 's about the size of a fingernail .
the lines around the edges are a polymer .
it 's made of paper and paper , of course , wicks fluid , as you know , paper , cloth - drop wine on the tablecloth , and the wine wicks all over everything .
put it on your shirt , it ruins the shirt .
that 's what a hydrophilic surface does .
so , in this device the idea is that you drip the bottom end of it in a drop of , in this case , urine .
the fluid wicks its way into those chambers at the top .
the brown color indicates the amount of glucose in the urine , the blue color indicates the amount of protein in the urine .
and the combination of those two is a first order shot at a number of useful things that you want .
so , this is an example of a device made from a simple piece of paper .
now , how simple can you make the production ?
why do we choose paper ?
there 's an example of the same thing on a finger , showing you basically what it looks like .
one reason for using paper is that it 's everywhere .
we have made these kinds of devices using napkins and toilet paper and wraps , and all kinds of stuff .
so , the production capability is there .
the second is , you can put lots and lots of tests in a very small place .
i 'll show you in a moment that the stack of paper there would probably hold something like 100,000 tests , something of that kind .
and then finally , a point that you do n't think of so much in developed world medicine : it eliminates sharps .
and what sharps means is needles , things that stick .
if you 've taken a sample of someone 's blood and the someone might have hepatitis c , you do n't want to make a mistake and stick it in you .
it just - you do n't want to do that .
so , how do you dispose of that ? it 's a problem everywhere .
and here you simply burn it .
so , it 's a sort of a practical approach to starting on things .
now , you say , " if paper is a good idea , other people have surely thought of it . "
and the answer is , of course , yes .
those half of you , roughly , who are women , at some point may have had a pregnancy test .
and the most common of these is in a device that looks like the thing on the left .
it 's something called a lateral flow immunoassay .
in that particular test , urine either , containing a hormone called hcg , does or does not flow across a piece of paper .
and there are two bars . one bar indicates that the test is working , and if the second bar shows up , you 're pregnant .
this is a terrific kind of test in a binary world , and the nice thing about pregnancy is either you are pregnant or you 're not pregnant .
you 're not partially pregnant or thinking about being pregnant or something of that sort .
so , it works very well there , but it does n't work very well when you need more quantitative information .
there are also dipsticks , but if you look at the dipsticks , they 're for another kind of urine analysis .
there are an awful lot of colors and things like that .
what do you actually do about that in a difficult circumstance ?
so , the approach that we started with is to ask : is it really practical to make things of this sort ?
and that problem is now , in a purely engineering way , solved .
and the procedure that we have is simply to start with paper .
you run it through a new kind of printer called a wax printer .
the wax printer does what looks like printing .
it is printing . you put that on , you warm it a little bit , the wax prints through so it absorbs into the paper , and you end up with the device that you want .
the printers cost 800 bucks now .
they 'll make , we estimate that if you were to run them 24 hours a day they 'd make about 10 million tests a year .
so , it 's a solved problem , that particular problem is solved .
and there is an example of the kind of thing that you see .
that 's on a piece of 8 by 12 paper .
that takes about two seconds to make .
and so i regard that as done .
there is a very important issue here , which is that because it 's a printer , a color printer , it prints colors . that 's what color printers do .
i 'll show you in a moment , that 's actually quite useful .
now , the next question that you would like to ask is : what would you like to measure ? what would you like to analyze ?
and the thing which you 'd most like to analyze , we 're a fair distance from .
it 's what 's called " fever of undiagnosed origin . "
someone comes into the clinic , they have a fever , they feel bad . what do they have ?
do they have t.b. ? do they have aids ?
do they have a common cold ?
the triage problem . that 's a hard problem for reasons that i wo n't go through .
there are an awful lot of things that you 'd like to distinguish among .
but then there are a series of things : aids , hepatitis , malaria , tb , others and simpler ones , such as guidance of treatment .
now even that 's more complicated than you think .
a friend of mine works in transcultural psychiatry , and he is interested in the question of why people do and do n't take their meds .
so , dapsone , or something like that , you have to take it for a while .
he has a wonderful story of talking to a villager in india and saying , " have you taken your dapsone ? " " yes . "
" have you taken it every day ? " " yes . "
" have you taken if for a month ? " " yes . "
what the guy actually meant was that he 'd fed a 30-day dose of dapsone to his dog , that morning .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was telling the truth . because in a different culture , the dog is a surrogate for you , you know , " today , " " this month , " " since the rainy season " - there are lots of opportunities for misunderstanding , and so an issue here is to , in some cases , to figure out how to deal with matters that seem uninteresting , like compliance .
now , take a look at what a typical test looks like .
prick a finger , you get some blood , about 50 microliters .
that 's about all you 're going to get , because you ca n't use the usual sort of systems .
you ca n't manipulate it very well , although i 'll show something about that in a moment .
so , you take the drop of blood , no further manipulations , you put it on a little device , the device filters out the blood cells , lets the serum go through , and you get a series of colors down in the bottom there .
and the colors indicate " disease " or " normal . "
but even that 's complicated , because to you , to me , colors might indicate " normal , " but , after all , we 're all suffering from probably an excess of education .
what you do about something which requires quantitative analysis ?
and so the solution that we and many other people are thinking about there , and at this point there is a dramatic flourish , and out comes the universal solution to everything these days , which is a cell phone . in this particular case , a camera phone .
they 're everywhere , six billion a month in india .
and the idea is that what one does , is to take the device , you dip it , you develop the color , you take a picture , the picture goes to a central laboratory .
you do n't have to send out a doctor , you send out somebody who can just take the sample , and in the clinic either a doctor , or ideally a computer in this case , does the analysis .
turns out to work actually quite well , particularly when your color printer has printed the color bars that indicate how things work .
so , my view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor , but is an 18-year-old , otherwise unemployed , who has two things : he has a backpack full of these tests , and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample , and an ak-47 .
and these are the things that get him through his day .
there 's another very interesting connection here , and that is that what one wants to do is to pass through useful information over what is generally a pretty awful telephone system .
it turns out there 's an enormous amount of information already available on that subject , which is the mars rover problem .
how do you get back an accurate view of the color on mars if you have a really terrible bandwidth to do it with ?
and the answer is not complicated but it 's one which i do n't want to go through here , other than to say that the communication systems for doing this are really pretty well understood .
also , a fact which you may not know is that the compute capability of this thing is not so different from the compute capability of your desktop computer .
this is a fantastic device which is only beginning to be tapped .
i do n't know whether the idea of one computer , one child makes any sense . here 's the computer of the future , because this screen is already there and they 're ubiquitous .
all right now let me show you just a little bit about advanced devices .
and we 'll start by posing a little problem .
what you see here is another centimeter-sized device , and the different colors are different colors of dye .
and you notice something which might strike you as a little bit interesting , which is the yellow seems to disappear , get through the blue , and then get through the red .
how does that happen ? how do you make something flow through something ?
and , of course the answer is , " you do n't . "
you make it flow under and over .
but now the question is : how do you make it flow under and over in a piece of paper ?
the answer is that what you do , and the details are not terribly important here , is to make something more elaborate : you take several different layers of paper , each one containing its own little fluid system , and you separate them by pieces of , literally , double-sided carpet tape , the stuff you use to stick the carpets onto the floor .
and the fluid will flow from one layer into the next .
it distributes itself , flows through further holes , distributes itself .
and what you see , at the lower right-hand side there , is a sample in which a single sample of blood has been put on the top , and it has gone through and distributed itself into these 16 holes on the bottom , in a piece of paper - basically it looks like a chip , two pieces of paper thick .
and in this particular case we were just interested in the replicability of that .
but that is , in principle , the way you solve the " fever of unexplained origin " problem , because each one of those spots then becomes a test for a particular set of markers of disease , and this will work in due course .
here is an example of a slightly more complicated device .
there 's the chip .
you dip in a corner . the fluid goes into the center .
it distributes itself out into these various wells or holes , and turns color , and all done with paper and carpet tape .
so , i think it 's as low-cost as we 're likely to be able to come up and make things .
now , i have one last , two last little stories to tell you , in finishing off this business .
this is one : one of the things that one does occasionally need to do is to separate blood cells from serum .
and the question was , here we do it by taking a sample , we put it in a centrifuge , we spin it , and you get blood cells out . terrific .
what happens if you do n't have an electricity , and a centrifuge , and whatever ?
and we thought for a while of how you might do this and the way , in fact , you do it is what 's shown here .
you get an eggbeater , which is everywhere , and you saw off a blade , and then you take tubing , and you stick it on that . you put the blood in , you spin it - somebody sits there and spins it .
it works really , really well .
and we sat down , we did the physics of eggbeaters and self-aligning tubes and all the rest of that kind of thing , sent it off to a journal .
we were very proud of this , particularly the title , which was " eggbeater as centrifuge . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we sent it off , and by return mail it came back .
i called up the editor and i said , " what 's going on ? how is this possible ? "
the editor said , with enormous disdain , " i read this .
and we 're not going to publish it , because we only publish science . "
and it 's an important issue because it means that we have to , as a society , think about what we value .
and if it 's just papers and phys. rev. letters , we 've got a problem .
here is another example of something which is - this is a little spectrophotometer .
it measures the absorption of light in a sample the neat thing about this is , you have light source that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz , another light source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz , and so you can run this system in broad daylight .
it performs about equivalently to a system that 's in the order of 100,000 dollars .
it costs 50 dollars . we can probably make it for 50 cents , if we put our mind to it .
why does n't somebody do it ? and the answer is , " how do you make a profit in a capitalist system , doing that ? "
interesting problem .
so , let me finish by saying that we 've thought about this as a kind of engineering problem .
and we 've asked : what is the scientific unifying idea here ?
and we 've decided that we should think about this not so much in terms of cost , but in terms of simplicity .
simplicity is a neat word . and you 've got to think about what simplicity means .
i know what it is but i do n't actually know what it means .
so , i actually was interested enough in this to put together several groups of people .
and the most recent involved a couple of people at mit , one of them being an exceptionally bright kid who is one of the very few people i would think of who 's an authentic genius .
we all struggled for an entire day to think about simplicity .
and i want to give you the answer of this deep scientific thought .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , in a sense , you get what you pay for .
thank you very much .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in 2002 , a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane .
the wright brothers , in the beginning of the last century , had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly .
they also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane .
they were not the only ones .
that was common practice in the industry , and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right .
this actually was n't so great for the development of the aviation industry , and this was at a time that in particular the u.s. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes .
so there was a bit of a conflict there .
the u.s. government decided to take action , and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes .
so what has this got to do with this ?
in 2002 , nelson otwoma , a kenyan social scientist , discovered he had hiv and needed access to treatment .
he was told that a cure did not exist .
aids , he heard , was lethal , and treatment was not offered . this was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries .
aids had become a chronic disease .
people in our countries here in europe , in north america , were living with hiv , healthy lives .
not so for nelson . he was n't rich enough , and not so for his three-year-old son , who he discovered a year later also had hiv .
nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups .
in 2002 , they were facing a different battle .
prices for arvs , the drugs needed to treat hiv , cost about 12,000 -lsb- dollars -rsb- per patient per year .
the patents on those drugs were held by a number of western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available .
when you have a patent , you can exclude anyone else from making , from producing or making low-cost versions , for example , available of those medications .
clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe .
luckily , those patents did not exist everywhere .
there were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents , such as india , and indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions , low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines , and make them available in the developing world , and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year , and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year , and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines .
treatment programs became possible , funding became available , and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly .
today , eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs .
thirty-four million are infected with hiv .
never has this number been so high , but actually this is good news , because what it means is people stop dying .
people who have access to these drugs stop dying .
and there 's something else .
they also stop passing on the virus .
this is fairly recent science that has shown that .
what that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic .
so what 's the problem ?
well , things have changed .
first of all , the rules have changed .
today , all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years .
this is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the world trade organization .
so what india did is no longer possible .
second , the practice of patent-holding companies have changed .
here you see the patent practices before the world trade organization 's rules , before ' 95 , before antiretroviral drugs .
this is what you see today , and this is in developing countries , so what that means is , unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now , we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis , because new drugs are developed , new drugs go to market , but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries .
so unless we act , unless we do something today , we will soon be faced -lsb- with -rsb- what some have termed the treatment time bomb .
it is n't only the number of drugs that are patented .
there 's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away .
this shows you a patent landscape .
this is the landscape of one medicine .
so you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product , unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available , you will probably choose to do something else .
again , deliberate action is needed .
so surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes , we should be able to do something similar to tackle the hiv / aids epidemic .
and we did .
in 2010 , unitaid established the medicines patent pool for hiv .
and this is how it works : patent holders , inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions , but make those patents available to the medicines patent pool . the medicines patent pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents .
that can be generic manufacturers .
it can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies , for example .
those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them , to treatment programs that need access to them .
they pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders , so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property .
there is one key difference with the airplane patent pool .
the medicines patent pool is a voluntary mechanism .
the airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they 'd license their patents or not .
they were forced to do so .
that is something that the medicines patent pool can not do .
it relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use .
today , nelson otwoma is healthy .
he has access to antiretroviral drugs .
his son will soon be 14 years old .
nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the medicines patent pool , and he told me not so long ago , " ellen , we rely in kenya and in many other countries on the medicines patent pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us , that new medicines , without delay , become available to us . "
and this is no longer fantasy .
already , i 'll give you an example .
in august of this year , the united states drug agency approved a new four-in-one aids medication .
the company , gilead , that holds the patents , has licensed the intellectual property to the medicines patent pool .
the pool is already working today , two months later , with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed . this is unprecedented .
this has never been done before .
the rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries , if at all .
this has never been seen before .
nelson 's expectations are very high , and quite rightly so . he and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next , throughout their lifetime , so that he and many others in kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy , active lives .
now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen . we count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest , not only in the interest of the global good , but also in their own interest , to move from conflict to collaboration , and through the medicines patent pool they can make that happen .
they can also choose not to do that , but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the wright brothers ended up with early last century , facing forcible measures by government . so they 'd better jump now .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about my investigations into what technology means in our lives - not just our immediate life , but in the cosmic sense , in the kind of long history of the world and our place in the world : what is this stuff ?
what is the significance ?
and so , i want to kind of go through my little story of what i found out .
and one of the first things that i started to investigate was the history of the name of technology .
and in the united states there is a state of the union address given by every president since 1790 .
and each one of those is really kind of summing up the most important things for the united states at that time .
if you search for the word " technology , " it was not used until 1952 .
so , technology was sort of absent from everybody 's thinking until 1952 , which happened to be the year of my birth .
and obviously , technology had existed before then , but we were n't aware of it , and so it was sort of an awakening of this force in our life .
i actually did research to find out the first use of the word " technology . "
it was in 1829 , and it was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum - a course , bringing together all the kinds of arts and crafts , and industry - and he called it " technology . "
and that 's the very first use of the word .
so , what is this stuff that we 're all consumed by , and bothered by ?
alan kay calls it , " technology is anything that was invented after you were born . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is sort of the idea that we normally have about what technology is : it 's all that new stuff .
it 's not roads , or penicillin , or factory tires ; it 's the new stuff .
my friend danny hillis says kind of a similar one , he says , " technology is anything that does n't work yet . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is , again , a sense that it 's all new .
but we know that it 's just not new .
it actually goes way back , and what i want to suggest is it goes a long way back .
so , another way to think about technology , what it means , is to imagine a world without technology .
if we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today - and i mean everything , from blades to scrapers to cloth - we as a species would not live very long .
we would die by the billions , and very quickly : the wolves would get us , we would be defenseless , we would be unable to grow enough food , or find enough food .
even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools .
and so , they had minimal technology , but they had some technology .
and if we study those hunter-gatherer tribes and the neanderthal , which are very similar to early man , we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology , and this is a kind of a curve of their average age .
there are no neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we 've ever found , and the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30 .
there are very few young infants because they die - high mortality rate - and there 's very few old people .
and so the profile is sort of for your average san francisco neighborhood : a lot of young people .
and if you go there , you say , " hey , everybody 's really healthy . "
well , that 's because they 're all young .
and the same thing with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man is that you did n't live beyond the age of 30 .
so , it was a world without grandparents .
and grandparents are very important , because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information .
imagine a world and basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old .
how much learning can you do ?
you ca n't do very much learning in your own life , it 's so short , and there 's nobody to pass on what you do learn .
so , that 's one aspect .
it was a very short life . but at the same time anthropologists know that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world , with that very little technology , actually did not spend a very long time gathering the food that they needed : three to six hours a day .
some anthropologists call that the original affluent society .
because they had banker hours basically .
so , it was possible to get enough food .
but when the scarcity came when the highs and lows and the droughts came , then people went into starvation .
and that 's why they did n't live very long .
so , what technology brought , through the very simple tools like these stone tools here - even something as small as this - the early bands of humans were actually able to eliminate to extinction about 250 megafauna animals in north america when they first arrived 10,000 years ago .
so , long before the industrial age we 've been affecting the planet on a global scale , with just a small amount of technology .
the other thing that the early man invented was fire .
and fire was used to clear out , and again , affected the ecology of grass and whole continents , and was used in cooking .
it enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things .
it was sort of , in a certain sense , in a mcluhan sense , an external stomach , in the sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise .
and if we do n't have fire , we actually could not live .
our bodies have adapted to these new diets .
our bodies have changed in the last 10,000 years .
so , with that little bit of technology , humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so - the same number as neanderthals everywhere - and we suddenly exploded . with the invention of language around 50,000 years ago , the number of humans exploded , and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet .
and they migrated into the rest of the world at two kilometers per year until , within several tens of thousands of years , we occupied every single watershed on the planet and became the most dominant species , with a very small amount of technology .
and even at that time , with the introduction of agriculture , 8,000 , 10,000 years ago we started to see climate change .
so , climate change is not a new thing .
what 's new is just the degree of it . even during the agricultural age there was climate change .
and so , already small amounts of technology were transforming the world .
and what this means , and where i 'm going , is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world .
all the things that we see today that are changing our lives , we can always trace back to the introduction of some new technology .
so , it 's a force that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet , and in such a degree that i think that it 's become our - who we are .
in fact , our humanity , and everything that we think about ourselves is something that we 've invented .
so , we 've invented ourselves . of all the animals that we have domesticated , the most important animal that we 've domesticated has been us . okay ?
so , humanity is our greatest invention .
but of course we 're not done yet .
we 're still inventing , and this is what technology is allowing us to do - it 's continually to reinvent ourselves .
it 's a very , very strong force .
i call this entire thing - us humans as our technology , everything that we 've made , gadgets in our lives - we call that the technium . that 's this world .
my working definition of technology is " anything useful that a human mind makes . "
it 's not just hammers and gadgets , like laptops .
but it 's also law . and of course cities are ways to make things more useful to us .
while this is something that comes from our mind , it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos .
it goes back . the origins and roots of technology go back to the big bang , in this way , in that they are part of this self-organizing thread that starts at the big bang and goes through galaxies and stars , into life , into us .
and the three major phases of the early universe was energy , when the dominant force was energy ; then it became , the dominant force , as it cooled , became matter ; and then , with the invention of life , four billion years ago , the dominant force in our neighborhood became information .
that 's what life is : it 's an information process that was restructuring and making new order .
so , those energy , matter einstein show were equivalent , and now new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information and matter and energy are all interrelated , so it 's one long continuum .
you put energy into the right kind of system and out comes wasted heat , entropy and extropy , which is order .
it 's the increased order .
where does this order come from ? its roots go way back .
we actually do n't know .
but we do know that the self-organization trend throughout the universe is long , and it began with things like galaxies ; they maintained their order for billions of years .
stars are basically nuclear fusion machines that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years , this order against the entropy of the world .
and flowers and plants are the same thing , extended , and technology is basically an extension of life .
one trend that we notice in all those things is that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through this , is actually increasing .
the amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence .
and that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life is actually greater than a star - because of the star 's long lifespan , the energy density in life is actually higher than a star .
and the energy density that we see in the greatest of anywhere in the universe is actually in a pc chip .
there is more energy flowing through , per gram per second , than anything that we have any other experience with .
what i would suggest is that if you want to see where technology is going , we continue that trajectory , and we say " well what 's going to become more energy-dense , that 's where it 's going . " and so what i 've done is , i 've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say , " what are the general trends in evolutionary life ? "
and there are things moving towards greater complexity , moving towards greater diversity , moving towards greater specialization , sentience , ubiquity and most important , evolvability : those very same things are also present in technology .
that 's where technology is going .
in fact , technology is accelerating all the aspects of life , and we can see that happening ; just as there 's diversity in life , there 's more diversity in things we make .
things in life start out being general cell , and they become specialized : you have tissue cells , you have muscle , brain cells . and same things happens with say , a hammer , which is general at first and becomes more specific .
so , i would like to say that while there is six kingdoms of life , we can think of technology basically as a seventh kingdom of life .
it 's a branching off from the human form .
but technology has its own agenda , like anything , like life itself .
for instance , right now , three-quarters of the energy that we use is actually used to feed the technium itself .
in transportation , it 's not to move us , it 's to move the stuff that we make or buy .
i use the word " want . " technology wants .
this is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power .
your cat wants more food .
a bacterium , which has no consciousness at all , wants to move towards light .
it has an urge , and technology has an urge .
at the same time , it wants to give us things , and what it gives us is basically progress .
you can take all kinds of curves , and they 're all pointing up .
there 's really no dispute about progress , if we discount the cost of that .
and that 's the thing that bothers most people , is that progress is really real , but we wonder and question : what are the environmental costs of it ?
i did a survey of a number of species of artifacts in my house , and there 's 6,000 . other people have come up with 10,000 .
when king henry of england died , he had 18,000 things in his house , but that was the entire wealth of england .
and with that entire wealth of england , king henry could not buy any antibiotics , he could not buy refrigeration , he could not buy a trip of a thousand miles .
whereas this rickshaw wale in india could save up and buy antibiotics and he could buy refrigeration .
he could buy things that king henry , in all his wealth , could never buy .
that 's what progress is about .
so , technology is selfish ; technology is generous .
that conflict , that tension , will be with us forever , that sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do , and sometimes it 's going to do things for us .
we have confusion about what we should think about a new technology .
right now the default position about when a new technology comes along , is we - people talk about the precautionary principle , which is very common in europe , which says , basically , " do n't do anything . when you meet a new technology , stop , until it can be proven that there 's no harm . "
i think that really leads nowhere .
but a better way is to , what i call proactionary principle , which is : you engage with technology .
you try it out .
you obviously do what the precautionary principle suggests , you try to anticipate it , but after anticipating it , you constantly asses it , not just once , but eternally .
and when it diverts from what you want , we prioritize risk , we evaluate not just the new stuff , but the old stuff .
we fix it , but most importantly , we relocate it .
and what i mean by that is that we find a new job for it .
nuclear energy , fission , is really bad idea for bombs .
but it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy for electricity , instead of burning coal .
when we have a bad idea , the response to a bad idea is not no ideas , it 's not to stop thinking .
the response to a bad idea - like , say , a tungsten light bulb - is a better idea . ok ?
so , better ideas is really - always the response to technology that we do n't like is basically , better technology .
and actually , in a certain sense , technology is a kind of a method for generating better ideas , if you can think about it that way .
so , maybe spraying ddt on crops is a really bad idea .
but ddt sprayed on local homes , there 's nothing better to eliminate malaria , besides insect ddt-impregnated mosquito nets .
but that 's a really good idea ; that 's a good job for technology .
so , our job as humans is to parent our mind children , to find them good friends , to find them a good job .
and so , every technology is sort of a creative force looking for the right job .
that 's actually my son , right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are no bad technologies , just as there are no bad children .
we do n't say children are neutral , children are positive .
we just have to find them the right place .
and so , what technology gives us , over the long term , over the sort of extended evolution - from the beginning of time , through the invention of the plants and animals , and the evolution of life , the evolution of brains - what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences : it 's increasing diversity , it 's increasing options , it 's increasing choices , opportunities , possibilities and freedoms .
that 's what we get from technology all the time . that 's why people leave villages and go into cities , is because they are always gravitating towards increased choices and possibilities .
and we are aware of the price .
we pay a price for that , but we are aware of it , and generally we will pay the price for increased freedoms , choices and opportunities .
even technology wants clean water .
is technology diametrically opposed to nature ?
because technology is an extension of life , it 's in parallel and aligned with the same things that life wants .
so that i think technology loves biology , if we allow it to .
great movement that is starting billions of years ago is moving through us and it continues to go , and our choice , so to speak , in technology , is really to align ourselves with this force much greater than ourselves .
so , technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket .
it 's more than just gadgets ; it 's more than just things that people invent .
it 's actually part of a very long story , a great story , that began billions of years ago .
and it 's moving through us , this self-organization , and we 're extending and accelerating it , and we can be part of it by aligning the technology that we make with it .
i really appreciate your attention today . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- bass guitar -rrb- -lrb- bass guitar and accordion -rrb- ♫ you 're older than you 've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older . ♫ ♫ you 're older than you 've even been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're older still . ♫ ♫ time ♫ ♫ is marching on ♫ ♫ and time ♫ ♫ is still marching on . ♫ ♫ this day will soon be at an end ♫ ♫ and now it 's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it 's even sooner ♫
♫ and now it 's even sooner . ♫ ♫ this day will soon be at an end ♫ ♫ and now it 's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it 's sooner still . ♫ ♫ you 're older than you 've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older . ♫ ♫ you 're older than you 've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're older still . ♫ thank you very much .
good morning everybody .
we are they might be giants .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am wearing the al gore in-ear monitors he wore on the larry king show and i 'm hearing that transmission and not mine .
but i guess that 's in keeping , so now we 'll just move to the powerpoint presentation , ladies and gentlemen .
this is a brand new song .
in the spirit of ted , we 're bringing you something that has not been released .
john , do you want to introduce the song ?
this is a song about a creature called a hummingbird moth which imitates another creature which imitates yet another creature .
it 's completely fucked up and can only be explained in song .
♫ everyone is crying at the dread hypnotic flying ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ you ca n't walk , you ca n't ramble ♫ ♫ ' cause you 're gonna have to scramble ♫ ♫ from the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ catbird is a cat ♫ ♫ but he 's got bugness in his veins . ♫ ♫ manhouse lives within himself ♫ ♫ with thoughtful human brains . ♫ ♫ neither one is equal ♫ ♫ to the challenge of the freak we 'll call ♫ ♫ the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫
♫ now the moth ♫ ♫ defeats the mouse and man . ♫ ♫ it 's messing with the plan . ♫ ♫ it ca n't be believed ♫ ♫ ' cause it 's just a hummingbird moth ♫ ♫ who 's acting like the bird ♫ ♫ that thinks it 's a bee . ♫ ♫ got a brand new shipment ♫ ♫ of electrical equipment ♫ ♫ it 's addressed to the bottom of the sea . ♫ ♫ send a tangerine-colored ♫ ♫ nuclear submarine ♫ ♫ with a sticker that says stp . ♫ ♫ windshield wiper washer fluid ♫ ♫ spraying in the air ... ♫ ♫ headlights under head lice ♫
♫ under hats lie everywhere . ♫ ♫ subatomic waves ♫ ♫ to the underwater caves ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ now the moth defeats the mouse and man . ♫ ♫ it 's messing with the plan . ♫ ♫ it ca n't be believed ♫ ♫ ' cause it 's just a hummingbird moth ♫ ♫ who 's acting like a bird ♫ ♫ that thinks it 's a bee . ♫ ♫ is it us or is this messed up ? ♫ ♫ everyone 's deforming ♫ ♫ in the presence of the swarming ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫
♫ protozoa , snakes and horses ♫ ♫ have enlisted in the forces ♫ ♫ of the bee of bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ catbug is a cat ♫ ♫ but he 's got bugness in his veins . ♫ ♫ manhouse lives within himself ♫ ♫ with thoughtful human brains . ♫ ♫ neither one is equal ♫ ♫ to the challenge of the freak we 'll call ♫ ♫ the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks a lot .
thank you very much .
so we are past our 1,000th show .
probably somewhere around 1,500 .
it 's hard to know .
we 've only done two shows in 2007 so far , but our first show was actually the coldest performance we 've ever had .
it was 19 degrees in st. louis about a month ago and i 'm happy to report that this performance you are seeing today is the earliest we have ever performed .
so thank you .
we are cultural test pilots , ladies and gentlemen .
how early can a rock performance begin ?
not all the facts are in about performing at 8.30 in the morning .
i can tell you the 19 degree thing was fantastic .
all right .
so we do n't know that much about the history of violinists but we do know that when we entered the state of new jersey there is an uptick in violence .
this song is called " asbury park . "
it 's based on a real life experience .
♫ i ♫ ♫ i got ♫ ♫ i got kicked ♫ ♫ i got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the stone . ♫ ♫ stone pone . ♫ ♫ stone pony . ♫ ♫ i got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the stone pony ♫ ♫ where i swore to the guy ♫ ♫ that the guy who took his beer was n't me . ♫ ♫ me got ♫ ♫ me got kicked ♫ ♫ me got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the stone . ♫ ♫ stone pone . ♫ ♫ stone pony . ♫ ♫ me got kicked in the head ♫
♫ backstage at the stone pony ♫ ♫ where i swore to the guy ♫ ♫ that the guy who took his beer ♫ ♫ was a guy dressed like me . ♫ ♫ not me ! ♫ ♫ not me ! ♫ ♫ not me ! ♫ thank you .
marty beller on the drums over there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we want to get in as many songs as possible during our brief time here so this is the one to play .
this song is called " fingertips . "
♫ everything is catching on fire ♫ ♫ yes , everything is catching on fire ♫ ♫ yes , everything is catching on fire . ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ i hear the wind blow ♫ ♫ i hear the wind blow ♫ ♫ it seems to say ♫ ♫ hello ♫ ♫ hello ♫ ♫ i 'm the one who loves you so . ♫ ♫ hey , now everybody , now . ♫ ♫ hey , now everybody ♫ ♫ hey , now everybody , now ♫ ♫ who 's that standing ♫ ♫ at the window ? ♫ ♫ i found a new friend ♫ ♫ underneath my pillow . ♫
♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ are n't you the guy who hit me in the eye ? ♫ ♫ are n't you the guy who hit me in the eye ? ♫ ♫ please pass the milk , please . ♫ ♫ please pass the milk , please . ♫ ♫ please pass the milk , please . ♫ ♫ leave me alone , leave me alone . ♫ ♫ who 's knocking on the wall ? ♫ ♫ all alone , all alone . ♫
♫ all by myself . ♫ ♫ what 's that blue thing doing here ? ♫ ♫ something grabbed ahold of my hand ♫ ♫ i did n't know what had my hand ♫ ♫ but that 's when all my troubles began . ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i can not understand you ♫ ♫ i can not understand you ♫ ♫ i do n't understand the things you say ♫ ♫ i ca n't understand a single word ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i just do n't understand you ♫
♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i do not understand you ♫ ♫ do n't understand you ♫ ♫ do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i turn around ♫ ♫ see the sound ♫ ♫ turn around and see the thing ♫ ♫ that made the sound . ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ the day that love came to play . ♫ ♫ i 'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ i 'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ i 'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ i 'm having a ... ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫
♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ i walk along darkened corridors ♫ ♫ and i walk along darkened corridors ♫ thank you very much - " fingertips . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ we 're taking calls - from the dead . ♫ ♫ we 're taking calls - from the dead . ♫ ♫ we 're taking phone calls from the dead . ♫ ♫ they 're calling from beyond the grave . ♫ ♫ beyond the grave . ♫ ♫ they have some questions ♫ ♫ and things to share ♫ ♫ from underneath the cold , cold ground . ♫ we 're soliciting phone calls from dead people as a special ted presentation .
we 're taking calls live on stage here at ted in monterey .
and i think we have a caller coming in here .
hello there .
you 're live .
hello . who 's there , please ?
am i on the air ?
hi there .
you 're on with they might be giants .
this is eleanor roosevelt .
hello , eleanor , please ...
i want to talk to ...
please turn off your radio , eleanor .
i wanna talk to randi .
i 've got a question for randi .
what 's your question , please ?
i want to talk to the amazing randi .
do you have a laminated badge , eleanor ?
i want my million dollars .
eleanor , i 'm sorry , do you have a laminated badge ?
no , i do n't have a badge .
well , i think we 're going to stop that part of the show .
here 's a song we like to think of as the future anthem of ted .
it 's actually a children 's song but like so many projects for children it 's really just a trojan horse for adult work .
this song is called " the alphabet ...
of nations ! "
♫ algeria , bulgaria , cambodia , dominica , ♫ ♫ egypt , france , the gambia ♫ ♫ hungary , iran , japan , kazakhstan , ♫ ♫ libya and mongolia . ♫ ♫ norway , oman , pakistan , ♫ ♫ qatar , russia , suriname , ♫ ♫ turkey , uruguay , vietnam , ♫ ♫ west xylophone , yemen , zimbabwe . ♫ ♫ algeria , bulgaria , cambodia , dominica , ♫ ♫ egypt , france , the gambia , ♫ ♫ hungary , iran , japan , kazakhstan , ♫ ♫ libya and mongolia . ♫ ♫ norway , oman , pakistan , ♫ ♫ qatar , russia , suriname , ♫ ♫ turkey , uruguay , vietnam , ♫ ♫ west xylophone , yemen , zimbabwe . ♫ ♫ azerbaijan , bolivia , canada , ♫ ♫ australia , belgium , chad , ♫ ♫ afghanistan , brunei , china , denmark , ♫
♫ ecuador , fiji , guatemala , ♫ ♫ algeria , bulgaria , cambodia , dominica , ♫ ♫ egypt , france , the gambia , ♫ ♫ hungary , iran , japan , kazakhstan , ♫ ♫ libya and mongolia . ♫ ♫ norway , oman , pakistan , ♫ ♫ qatar , russia , suriname , ♫ ♫ turkey , uruguay , vietnam , ♫ ♫ west xylophone , yemen , zimbabwe . ♫ thank you so much .
you 've been a wonderful 8:30 audience .
have a great session .
thank you all .
i think the beautiful malin -lsb- akerman -rsb- put it perfectly .
every man deserves the opportunity to grow a little bit of luxury .
ladies and gentlemen , and more importantly , mo bros and mo sistas - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - for the next 17 minutes , i 'm going to share with you my movember journey , and how , through that journey , we 've redefined charity , we 're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world , and i hope , through that process , that i inspire you to create something significant in your life , something significant that will go on and make this world a better place .
so the most common question i get asked , and i 'm going to answer it now so i do n't have to do it over drinks tonight , is how did this come about ?
how did movember start ?
well , normally , a charity starts with the cause , and someone that is directly affected by a cause .
they then go on to create an event , and beyond that , a foundation to support that .
pretty much in every case , that 's how a charity starts .
not so with movember . movember started in a very traditional australian way . it was on a sunday afternoon .
i was with my brother and a mate having a few beers , and i was watching the world go by , had a few more beers , and the conversation turned to ' 70s fashion - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and how everything manages to come back into style .
and a few more beers , i said , " there has to be some stuff that has n't come back . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- then one more beer and it was , whatever happened to the mustache ?
why has n't that made a comeback ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so then there was a lot more beers , and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so in australia , " mo " is slang for mustache , so we renamed the month of november " movember " and created some pretty basic rules , which still stand today .
and they are : start the month clean-shaven , rock a mustache - not a beard , not a goatee , a mustache - for the 30 days of november , and then we agreed that we would come together at the end of the month , have a mustache-themed party , and award a prize for the best , and of course , the worst mustache . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now trust me , when you 're growing a mustache back in 2003 , and there were 30 of us back then , and this was before the ironic hipster mustache movement - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it created a lot of controversy . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so my boss would n't let me go and see clients .
my girlfriend at the time , who 's no longer my girlfriend - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - hated it .
parents would shuffle kids away from us . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but we came together at the end of the month and we celebrated our journey , and it was a real journey .
and we had a lot of fun , and in 2004 , i said to the guys , " that was so much fun . we need to legitimize this so we can get away with it year on year . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we started thinking about that , and we were inspired by the women around us and all they were doing for breast cancer .
and we thought , you know what , there 's nothing for men 's health .
why is that ? why ca n't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men 's health ?
and i started to research that topic , and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it .
but there was nothing for this cause , so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer , and then we created our tagline , which is , " changing the face of men 's health . "
and that eloquently describes the challenge , changing your appearance for the 30 days , and also the outcome that we 're trying to achieve : getting men engaged in their health , having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face .
so with that model , i then cold-called the ceo of the prostate cancer foundation .
i said to him , " i 've got the most amazing idea that 's going to transform your organization . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i did n't want to share with him the idea over the phone , so i convinced him to meet with me for coffee in melbourne in 2004 .
and we sat down , and i shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across australia , raising awareness for this cause , and funds for his organization . and i needed a partnership to legitimately do that .
and i said , " we 're going to come together at the end , we 're going to have a mustache-themed party , we 're going to have djs , we 're going to celebrate life , and we 're going to change the face of men 's health . "
and he just looked at me and laughed , and he said , he said , " adam , that 's a really novel idea , but we 're an ultraconservative organization .
we ca n't have anything to do with you . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i paid for coffee that day - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and his parting comment as we shook hands was , " listen , if you happen to raise any money out of this , we 'll gladly take it . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so my lesson that year was persistence .
and we persisted , and we got 450 guys growing mustaches , and together we raised 54,000 dollars , and we donated every cent of that to the prostate cancer foundation of australia , and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they 'd ever received .
so from that day forward , my life has become about a mustache .
every day - this morning , i wake up and go , my life is about a mustache . -lrb- laughter -rrb- essentially , i 'm a mustache farmer . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and my season is november . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so in 2005 , the campaign got more momentum , was more successful in australia and then new zealand , and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point .
it was consuming so much of our time after hours on weekends that we thought , we either need to close this down or figure a way to fund movember so that i could quit my job and go and spend more time in the organization and take it to the next level .
it 's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let me tell you that there 's not too many people interested in investing in that , not even the prostate cancer foundation , who we 'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage .
so again we persisted , and foster 's brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship , and that was enough for me to quit my job , i did consulting on the side .
and leading into movember 2006 , we 'd run through all the money from foster 's , we 'd run through all the money i had , and essentially we had no money left , and we 'd convinced all our suppliers - creative agencies , web development agencies , hosting companies , whatnot - to delay their billing until december .
so we 'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt . so if movember 2006 did n't happen , the four founders , well , we would 've been broke , we would 've been homeless , sitting on the street with mustaches . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but we thought , you know what , if that 's the worst thing that happens , so what ?
we 're going to have a lot of fun doing it , and it taught us the importance of taking risks and really smart risks .
then in early 2007 , a really interesting thing happened .
we had mo bros from canada , from the u.s. , and from the u.k. emailing us and calling us and saying , hey , there 's nothing for prostate cancer .
bring this campaign to these countries .
so we thought , why not ? let 's do it .
so i cold-called the ceo of prostate cancer canada , and i said to him , " i have this most amazing concept . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it 's going to transform your organization . i do n't want to tell you about it now , but will you meet with me if i fly all the way to toronto ? " so i flew here , met down on front street east , and we sat in the boardroom , and i said , " right , here 's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across canada raising awareness and funds for your organization . "
and he looked at me and laughed and said , " adam , sounds like a really novel idea , but we 're an ultraconservative organization . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've heard this before . i know how it goes .
but he said , " we will partner with you , but we 're not going to invest in it . you need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work . "
so what we did was , we took some of the money that we raised in australia to bring the campaign across to this country , the u.s , and the u.k. , and we did that because we knew , if this was successful , we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in australia . and that money fuels research , and that research will get us to a cure .
and we 're not about finding an australian cure or a canadian cure , we 're about finding the cure .
so in 2007 , we brought the campaign across here , and it was , it set the stage for the campaign .
it was n't as successful as we thought it would be .
we were sort of very gung ho with our success in australia and new zealand at that stage .
so that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets .
but what i 'm really pleased to say is , in 2010 , movember became a truly global movement .
canada was just pipped to the post in terms of the number one fundraising campaign in the world .
last year we had 450,000 mo bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that makes movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world .
and that is an amazing achievement when you think about us growing mustaches . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and for us , we have redefined charity .
our ribbon is a hairy ribbon . -lrb- laughter -rrb- our ambassadors are the mo bros and the mo sistas , and i think that 's been fundamental to our success .
we hand across our brand and our campaign to those people .
we let them embrace it and interpret it in their own way .
so now i live in los angeles , because the prostate cancer foundation of the u.s. is based there , and i always get asked by the media down there , because it 's so celebrity-driven , " who are your celebrity ambassadors ? "
and i say to them , " last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors . "
and they go , " what , what do you mean ? "
and it 's like , everything single person , every single mo bro and mo sista that participates in movember is our celebrity ambassador , and that is so , so important and fundamental to our success .
now what i want to share with you is one of my most touching movember moments , and it happened here in toronto last year , at the end of the campaign .
i was out with a team . it was the end of movember .
we 'd had a great campaign , and to be honest , we 'd had our fair share of beer that night , but i said , " you know what , i think we 've got one more bar left in us . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we piled into a taxi , and this is our taxi driver , and i was sitting in the back seat , and he turned around and said , " where are you going ? "
and i said , " hang on , that is an amazing mustache . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he said , " i 'm doing it for movember . " and i said , " so am i. " and i said , " tell me your movember story . "
and he goes , " listen , i know it 's about men 's health , i know it 's about prostate cancer , but this is for breast cancer . "
and i said , " okay , that 's interesting . "
and he goes , " last year , my mom passed away from breast cancer in sri lanka , because we could n't afford proper treatment for her , " and he said , " this mustache is my tribute to my mom . "
and we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi , and i did n't tell him who i was , because i did n't think it was appropriate , and i just shook his hand and i said , " thank you so much .
your mom would be so proud . "
and from that moment i realized that movember is so much more than a mustache , having a joke .
it 's about each person coming to this platform , embracing it in their own way , and being significant in their own life .
for us now at movember , we really focus on three program areas , and having a true impact : awareness and education , survivor support programs , and research .
now we always focus , naturally , on how much we raise , because it 's a very tangible outcome , but for me , awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise , because i know that is changing and saving lives today , and it 's probably best exampled by a young guy that i met at south by southwest in austin , texas , at the start of the year .
he came up to me and said , " thank you for starting movember . "
and i said , " thank you for doing movember . "
and i looked at him , and i was like , " i 'm pretty sure you ca n't grow a mustache . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , " what 's your movember story ? "
and he said , " i grew the worst mustache ever . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " but i went home for thanksgiving dinner , and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and we talked - i talked to them about movember , and then after that , my dad came up to me , and at the age of 26 , for the first time ever , i had a conversation with my dad one on one about men 's health . i had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer , and i learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and i was able to share with my dad that he was
twice as likely to get that disease , and he did n't know that , and he had n't been getting screened for it . "
so now , that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer .
so those conversations , getting men engaged in this , at whatever age , is so critically important , and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise .
now to the funds we raise , and research , and how we 're redefining research .
we fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries .
we literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world , and when we looked at this more recently , we realized there 's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions , let alone nationally , let alone globally , and this is not unique to prostate cancer . this is cancer research the world over .
and so we said , right , we 'd redefined charity . we need to redefine the way these guys operate . how do we do that ?
so what we did was , we created a global action plan , and we 're taking 10 percent of what 's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund , and we 've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund , and they come together each year and identify the number one priority , and that , last year , was getting a better screening test .
so they identified that as a priority , and then they 've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic , essentially the same topic .
so now we 're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together , and that 's a unique thing in the cancer world , and we know , through that collaboration , it will accelerate outcomes .
and that 's how we 're redefining the research world .
so , what i know about my movember journey is that , with a really creative idea , with passion , with persistence , and a lot of patience , four mates , four mustaches , can inspire a room full of people , and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city , and that city is melbourne , my home .
and that city can go on and inspire a state , and that state can go on and inspire a nation , and beyond that , you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men 's health .
my name is adam garone , and that 's my story .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to tell you a story - an encouraging story - about addressing desperation , depression and despair in afghanistan , and what we have learned from it , and how to help people to overcome traumatic experiences and how to help them to regain some confidence in the time ahead - in the future - and how to participate again in everyday life .
so , i am a jungian psychoanalyst , and i went to afghanistan in january 2004 , by chance , on an assignment for medica mondiale .
jung in afghanistan - you get the picture .
afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world , and 70 percent of the people are illiterate .
war and malnutrition kills people together with hope .
you may know this from the media , but what you may not know is that the average age of the afghan people is 17 years old , which means they grow up in such an environment and - i repeat myself - in 30 years of war .
so this translates into ongoing violence , foreign interests , bribery , drugs , ethnic conflicts , bad health , shame , fear and cumulative traumatic experiences .
local and foreign military are supposed to build peace together with the donors and the governmental and non-governmental organizations .
and people had hope , yes , but until they realized their situation worsens every day - either because they are being killed or because , somehow , they are poorer than eight years ago .
one figure for that : 54 percent of the children under the age of five years suffer from malnutrition .
yet , there is hope .
one day a man told me , " my future does not look brilliant , but i want to have a brilliant future for my son . "
this is a picture i took in 2005 , walking on fridays over the hills in kabul , and for me it 's a symbolic picture of an open future for a young generation .
so , doctors prescribe medication .
and donors are supposed to bring peace by building schools and roads .
military collect weapons , and depression stays intact .
why ?
because people do n't have tools to cope with it , to get over it .
so , soon after my arrival , i had confirmed something which i had already known ; that my instruments come from the heart of modern europe , yes .
however , what can wound us and our reaction to those wounds - they are universal .
and the big challenge was how to understand the meaning of the symptom in this specific cultural context .
after a counseling session , a woman said to me , " because you have felt me , i can feel myself again , and i want to participate again in my family life . "
this was very important , because the family is central in afghans ' social system .
no one can survive alone .
and if people feel used , worthless and ashamed , because something horrible has happened to them , then they retreat , and they fall into social isolation , and they do not dare to tell this evil to other people or to their loved ones , because they do not want to burden them .
and very often violence is a way to cope with it .
traumatized people also easily lose control - symptoms are hyper-arousal and memory flashbacks - so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly , suddenly , and they can not control it .
to compensate this loss of inner control , they try to control the outside , very understandably - mostly the family - and unfortunately , this fits very well into the traditional side , regressive side , repressive side , restrictive side of the cultural context .
so , husbands start beating wives , mothers and fathers beat their children , and afterward , they feel awful .
they did not want to do this , it just happened - they lost control .
the desperate try to restore order and normality , and if we are not able to cut this circle of violence , it will be transferred to the next generation without a doubt .
and partly this is already happening .
so everybody needs a sense for the future , and the afghan sense of the future is shattered .
but let me repeat the words of the woman .
" because you have felt me , i can feel myself again . "
so the key here is empathy .
somebody has to be a witness to what has happened to you .
somebody has to feel how you felt .
and somebody has to see you and listen to you .
everybody must be able to know what he or she has experienced is true , and this only goes with another person .
so everybody must be able to say , " this happened to me , and it did this with me , but i 'm able to live with it , to cope with it , and to learn from it .
and i want to engage myself in the bright future for my children and the children of my children , and i will not marry-off my 13 year-old daughter , " - what happens too often in afghanistan .
so something can be done , even in such extreme environments as afghanistan .
and i started thinking about a counseling program .
but , of course , i needed help and funds .
and one evening , i was sitting next to a very nice gentleman in kabul , and he asked what i thought would be good in afghanistan .
and i explained to him quickly , i would train psycho-social counselors , i would open centers , and i explained to him why .
this man gave me his contact details at the end of the evening and said , " if you want to do this , call me . "
at that time , it was the head of caritas germany .
so , i was able to launch a three-year project with caritas germany , and we trained 30 afghan women and men , and we opened 15 counseling centers in kabul .
this was our sign - it 's hand-painted , and we had 45 all over kabul .
eleven thousand people came - more than that .
and 70 percent regained their lives .
this was a very exciting time , developing this with my wonderful afghan team .
and they are working with me up to today .
we developed a culturally-sensitive psycho-social counseling approach .
so , from 2008 up until today , a substantial change and step forward has been taking place .
the european union delegation in kabul came into this and hired me to work inside the ministry of public health , to lobby this approach - we succeeded .
we revised the mental health component of the primary health care services by adding psycho-social care and psycho-social counselors to the system .
this means , certainly , to retrain all health staff .
but for that , we already have the training manuals , which are approved by the ministry and moreover , this approach is now part of the mental health strategy in afghanistan .
so we also have implemented it already in some selected clinics in three provinces , and you are the first to see the results .
we wanted to know if what is being done is effective .
and here you can see the patients all had symptoms of depression , moderate and severe .
and the red line is the treatment as usual - medication with a medical doctor .
and all the symptoms stayed the same or even got worse .
and the green line is treatment with psycho-social counseling only , without medication .
and you can see the symptoms almost completely go away , and the psycho-social stress has dropped significantly , which is explicable , because you can not take away the psycho-social stresses , but you can learn how to cope with them .
so this makes us very happy , because now we also have some evidence that this is working .
so here you see , this is a health facility in northern afghanistan , and every morning it looks like this all over .
and doctors usually have three to six minutes for the patients , but now this will change .
they go to the clinics , because they want to cure their immediate symptoms , and they will find somebody to talk to and discuss these issues and talk about what is burdening them and find solutions , develop their resources , learn tools to solve their family conflicts and gain some confidence in the future .
and i would like to share one short vignette .
one hazara said to his pashtun counselor , " if we were to have met some years ago , then we would have killed each other .
and now you are helping me to regain some confidence in the future . "
and another counselor said to me after the training , " you know , i never knew why i survived the killings in my village , but now i know , because i am part of a nucleus of a new peaceful society in afghanistan . "
so i believe this kept me running .
and this is a really emancipatory and political contribution to peace and reconciliation .
and also - i think - without psycho-social therapy , and without considering this in all humanitarian projects , we can not build-up civil societies .
i thought it was an idea worth spreading , and i think it must be , can be , could be replicated elsewhere .
i thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when we think of games , there 's all kinds of things .
maybe you 're ticked off , or maybe you 're looking forward to a new game . you 've been up too late playing a game .
all these things happen to me .
but when we think about games , a lot of times we think about stuff like this : first-person shooters , or the big , what we would call aaa games , or maybe you 're a facebook game player .
this is one my partner and i worked on .
maybe you play facebook games , and that 's what we 're making right now . this is a lighter form of game .
maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in thanksgiving situations .
this would be one of those tragically boring board games that you can figure out .
or maybe you 're in your living room , you know , playing with the wii with the kids , or something like that , and , you know , there 's this whole range of games , and that 's very much what i think about .
i make my living from games . i 've been lucky enough to do this since i was 15 , which also qualifies as i 've never really had a real job .
but we think about games as fun , and that 's completely reasonable , but let 's just think about this .
so this one here , this is the 1980 olympics .
now i do n't know where you guys were , but i was in my living room . it was practically a religious event .
and this is when the americans beat the russians , and this was - yes , it was technically a game .
hockey is a game . but really , was this a game ?
i mean , people cried . i 've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of monopoly .
and so this was just an amazing experience .
or , you know , if anybody here is from boston - so when the boston red sox won the world series after , i believe , 351 years , when they won the world series , it was amazing .
i happened to be living in springfield at the time , and the best part of it was - is that - you would close the women 's door in the bathroom , and i remember seeing " go sox , " and i thought , really ?
or the houses , you 'd come out , because every game , well , i think almost every game , went into overtime , right ?
so we 'd be outside , and all the other lights are on in school , and kids were n't going to school .
but it 's okay , it 's the red sox , right ?
i mean , there 's education , and then there 's the red sox , and we know where they 're stacked .
so this was an amazing experience , and again , yes , it was a game , but they did n't write newspaper articles , people did n't say - you know , really , " i can die now because the red sox won . " and many people did .
so games , it means something more to us .
it absolutely means something more .
so now , just , this is an abrupt transition here .
there was three years where i actually did have a real job , sort of .
i was the head of a college department teaching games , so , again , it was sort of a real job , and now i just got to talk about making as opposed to making them .
and i was at a dinner . part of the job of it , when you 're a chair of a department , is to eat , and i did that very well , and so i 'm out at a dinner with this guy called zig jackson .
so this is zig in this photograph . this is also one of zig 's photographs . he 's a photographer .
and he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself , and you can see here he 's got zig 's indian reservation . and this particular shot , this is one of the more traditional shots . this is a rain dancer .
and this is one of my favorite shots here .
so you can look at this , and maybe you 've even seen things like this . this is an expression of culture , right ?
and this is actually from his degradation series .
and what was most fascinating to me about this series is just , look at that little boy there .
can you imagine ? now let 's , we can see that 's a traditional native american . now i just want to change that guy 's race .
just imagine if that 's a black guy .
so , " honey , come here , let 's get your picture with the black guy . "
right ? like , seriously , nobody would do this .
it baffles the mind . and so zig , being indian , likewise it baffles his mind . his favorite photograph - my favorite photograph of his , which i do n't have in here is indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of indians . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i happen to be at dinner with this photographer , and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred , and it was on an indian reservation . he 'd taken his camera up there to photograph it , but when he got there , he discovered he could n't do it . he just could n't capture the picture . and so they were talking back and forth
about this question . do you take the picture or not ?
and that was fascinating to me as a game designer , because it never occurs to me , like , should i make the game about this difficult topic or not ?
because we just make things that are fun or , you know , will make you feel fear , you know , that visceral excitement .
but every other medium does it .
so this is my kid . this is maezza , and when she was seven years old , she came home from school one day , and like i do every single day , i asked her , " what 'd you do today ? "
so she said , " we talked about the middle passage . "
now , this was a big moment . maezza 's dad is black , and i knew this day was coming . i was n't expecting it at seven . i do n't know why , but i was n't .
anyways , so i asked her , " how do you feel about that ? "
so she proceeded to tell me , and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here .
so the ships start in england , they come down from england , they go to africa , they go across the ocean - that 's the middle passage part - they come to america where the slaves are sold , she 's telling me .
but abraham lincoln was elected president , and then he passed the emancipation proclamation , and now they 're free .
pause for about 10 seconds .
" can i play a game , mommy ? "
and i thought , that 's it ? and so , you know , this is the middle passage , this is an incredibly significant event , and she 's treating it like , basically some black people went on a cruise , is more or less how it sounds to her . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , to me , i wanted more value in this , so when she asked if she could play a game , i said , " yes . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i happened to have all of these little pieces .
i 'm a game designer , so i have this stuff sitting around my house .
so i said , " yeah , you can play a game , " and i give her a bunch of these , and i tell her to paint them in different families . these are pictures of maezza when she was - god , it still chokes me up seeing these .
so she 's painting her little families .
so then i grab a bunch of them and i put them on a boat .
this was the boat . it was made quickly obviously . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so the basic gist of it is , i grabbed a bunch of families , and she 's like , " mommy , but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things . "
and she says , " they want to go . " and i said , " honey , no they do n't want to go . this is the middle passage .
nobody wants to go on the middle passage . "
so she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother , and as we 're going across the ocean , following these rules , she realizes that she 's rolling pretty high , and she says to me , " we 're not going to make it . "
and she realizes , you know , we do n't have enough food , and so she asks what to do , and i say , " well , we can either " - remember , she 's seven - " we can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they do n't get sick and we make it to the other side . "
and she - just the look on her face came over and she said - now mind you this is after a month of - this is black history month , right ?
after a month she says to me , " did this really happen ? "
and i said , " yes . " and so she said , " so , if i came out of the woods " - this is her brother and sister - " if i came out of the woods , avalon and donovan might be gone . " " yes . "
" but i 'd get to see them in america . " " no . "
" but what if i saw them ? you know , could n't we stay together ? " " no . "
" so daddy could be gone . " " yes . "
and she was fascinated by this , and she started to cry , and i started to cry , and her father started to cry , and now we 're all crying . he did n't expect to come home from work to the middle passage , but there it goes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , we made this game , and she got it .
she got it because she spent time with these people .
it was n't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie .
and so it was just an incredibly powerful experience .
this is the game , which i 've ended up calling the new world , because i like the phrase .
i do n't think the new world felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships .
but when this happened , i saw the whole planet .
i was so excited . it was like , i 'd been making games for 20-some years , and then i decided to do it again .
my history is irish .
so this is a game called síochán leat . it 's " peace be with you . "
it 's the entire history of my family in a single game .
i made another game called train .
i was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics , and if you 're going to cover a difficult topic , this is one you need to cover , and i 'll let you figure out what that 's about on your own .
and i also made a game about the trail of tears .
this is a game with 50,000 individual pieces .
i was crazy when i decided to start it , but i 'm in the middle of it now .
it 's the same thing .
i 'm hoping that i 'll teach culture through these games .
and the one i 'm working on right now , which is - because i 'm right in the middle of it , and these for some reason choke me up like crazy - is a game called mexican kitchen workers .
and originally it was a math problem more or less .
like , here 's the economics of illegal immigration .
and the more i learned about the mexican culture - my partner is mexican - the more i learned that , you know , for all of us , food is a basic need , but , and it is obviously with mexicans too , but it 's much more than that .
it 's an expression of love . it 's an expression of - god , i 'm totally choking up way more than i thought .
i 'll look away from the picture .
it 's an expression of beauty . it 's how they say they love you .
it 's how they say they care , and you ca n't hear somebody talk about their mexican grandmother without saying " food " in the first sentence .
and so to me , this beautiful culture , this beautiful expression is something that i want to capture through games .
and so games , for a change , it changes how we see topics , it changes how our perceptions about those people in topics , and it changes ourselves .
we change as people through games , because we 're involved , and we 're playing , and we 're learning as we do so . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- my thing with school lunch is , it 's a social justice issue .
i 'm the director of nutrition services for the berkeley unified school district . i have 90 employees and 17 locations , 9,600 kids .
i 'm doing 7,100 meals a day and i 've been doing it for two years , trying to change how we feed kids in america .
and that 's what i want to talk to you a little bit about today .
these are some of my kids with a salad bar .
i put salad bars in all of our schools when i got there .
everyone says it could n't be done .
little kids could n't eat off the salad bar , big kids would spit in it - neither happened .
when i took over this , i tried to really figure out , like , what my vision would be .
how do we really change children 's relationship to food ?
and i 'll tell you why we need to change it , but we absolutely have to change it .
and what i came to understand is , we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet , healthy food and healthy kids .
and that if we do n't do that , the antithesis , although we 've heard otherwise , is we 're really going to become extinct , because we 're feeding our children to death .
that 's my premise .
we 're seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker .
and the reason this is happening , by and large , is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food , the way the government oversees our food , the way the usda puts food on kids ' plates that 's unhealthy , and allows unhealthy food into schools .
and by - tacitly , all of us send our kids , or grandchildren , or nieces , or nephews , to school and tell them to learn , you know , learn what 's in those schools .
and when you feed these kids bad food , that 's what they 're learning . so that 's really what this is all about .
the way we got here is because of big agribusiness .
we now live in a country where most of us do n't decide , by and large , what we eat . we see big businesses , monsanto and dupont , who brought out agent orange and stain-resistant carpet .
they control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country .
these are - 10 companies control much of what 's in our grocery stores , much of what people eat . and that 's really , really a problem .
so when i started thinking about these issues and how i was going to change what kids ate , i really started focusing on what we would teach them .
and the very first thing was about regional food - trying to eat food from within our region .
and clearly , with what 's going on with fossil fuel usage , or when - as the fossil fuel is going away , as oil hits its peak oil , you know , we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should , or could , be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it .
so we talked to kids about that , and we really start to feed kids regional food .
and then we talk about organic food .
now , most school districts ca n't really afford organic food , but we , as a nation , have to start thinking about consuming , growing and feeding our children food that 's not chock-full of chemicals .
we ca n't keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones .
we ca n't keep doing that .
you know , it does n't work .
and the results of that are kids getting sick .
one of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics .
seventy percent of all antibiotics consumed in america is consumed in animal husbandry .
we are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day .
seventy percent - it 's unbelievable .
and the result of it is , we have diseases .
we have things like e. coli that we ca n't fix , that we ca n't make kids better when they get sick .
and , you know , certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed , but it 's an issue in the food supply .
one of my favorite facts is that u.s. agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year .
that means every one of us , and our children , consumes what would equal a five-pound bag - those bags you have at home . if i had one here and ripped it open , and that pile i would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply , because of the way we consume produce in america .
the usda allows these antibiotics , these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply , and the usda paid for this ad in time magazine .
okay , we could talk about rachel carson and ddt , but we know it was n't good for you and me .
and that is what the usda allows in our food supply .
and that has to change , you know .
the usda can not be seen as the be-all and end-all of what we feed our kids and what 's allowed .
we can not believe that they have our best interests at heart .
the antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food .
that 's what i really try and get people to understand .
i really try and teach it to kids . i think it 's the most important .
it 's consuming food in a way in which we 'll still have a planet , in which kids will grow up to be healthy , and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we 're seeing .
it really is just a new idea .
i mean , people toss around sustainability , but we have to figure out what sustainability is .
in less than 200 years , you know , just in a few generations , we 've gone from being 200 - being 100 percent , 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers .
we now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers - 2.1 million prisoners , 1.9 million farmers .
and we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison , and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child .
it 's no wonder , you know , we have criminals .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what 's happening is , we 're getting sick .
we 're getting sick and our kids are getting sick .
it is about what we feed them .
what goes in is what we are .
we really are what we eat .
and if we continue down this path , if we continue to feed kids bad food , if we continue not to teach them what good food is , what 's going to happen ? you know , what is going to happen ?
what 's going to happen to our whole medical system ?
what 's going to happen is , we 're going to have kids that have a life less long than our own .
the cdc , the center for disease control , has said , of the children born in the year 2000 - those seven- and eight-year-olds today - one out of every three caucasians , one out of every two african-americans and hispanics are going to have diabetes in their lifetime .
and if that 's not enough , they 've gone on to say , most before they graduate high school .
this means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade . within a decade .
what 's going to happen ?
well , the cdc has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country 's history to die at a younger age than their parents .
and it 's because of what we feed them .
because eight-year-olds do n't get to decide - and if they do , you should be in therapy .
you know , we are responsible for what kids eat .
but oops , maybe they 're responsible for what kids eat .
big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids .
20 billion dollars a year . 10,000 ads most kids see .
they spend 500 dollars for every one dollar - 500 dollars marketing foods that kids should n't eat for every one dollar marketing healthy , nutritious food .
the result of which is kids think they 're going to die if they do n't have chicken nuggets .
you know that everybody thinks they should be eating more , and more , and more .
this is the usda portion size , that little , tiny thing .
and the one over there , that 's bigger than my head , is what mcdonald 's and burger king and those big companies think we should eat .
and why can they serve that much ?
why can we have 29-cent big gulps and 99-cent double burgers ?
it 's because of the way the government commodifies food , and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really , really cheap .
which is why i say it 's a social justice issue .
now , i said i 'm doing this in berkeley , and you might think , " oh , berkeley . of course you can do it in berkeley . "
well , this is the food i found 24 months ago .
this is not even food .
this is the stuff we were feeding our kids : extremo burritos , corn dogs , pizza pockets , grilled cheese sandwiches .
everything came in plastic , in cardboard .
the only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter .
the only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher , because if it did n't come in a can , it came frozen in a box .
the usda allows this .
the usda allows all of this stuff .
in case you ca n't tell , that 's , like , pink danish and some kind of cupcakes .
chicken nuggets , tater tots , chocolate milk with high fructose , canned fruit cocktail - a reimbursable meal .
that 's what the government says is okay to feed our kids .
it ai n't okay . you know what ? it is not okay .
and we , all of us , have to understand that this is about us , that we can make a difference here .
now i do n't know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets , but i 'm sure you 're rich if you did .
but whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart , a giraffe , a star ?
well , tyson did , because there 's no chicken in the chicken .
and that they could figure it out , that we could sell this stuff to kids .
you know , what 's wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken ?
but this is what most schools serve .
in fact , this may be what a lot of parents serve , as opposed to - this is what we try and serve .
we really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food .
we really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe .
you know , that vegetables are actually colorful , that they have flavor , that carrots grow in the ground , that strawberries grow in the ground .
there 's not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush .
you know , we have to change the way we teach kids about these things .
there 's a lot of stuff we can do . there 's a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs . there 's a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools .
now , in berkeley , we 've gone totally fresh .
we have no high-fructose corn syrup , no trans fats , no processed foods .
we 're cooking from scratch every day .
we have 25 percent of our - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you - 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local . we cook .
those are my hands . i get up at 4 a.m.
every day and go cook the food for the kids , because this is what we need to do .
we ca n't keep serving kids processed crap , full of chemicals , and expect these are going to be healthy citizens .
you 're not going to get the next generation , or the generation after , to be able to think like this if they 're not nourished .
if they 're eating chemicals all the time , they 're not going to be able to think .
they 're not going to be smart .
you know what ? they 're just going to be sick .
now one of the things that - what happened when i went into berkeley is i realized that , you know , this was all pretty amazing to people , very , very different , and i needed to market it .
i came up with these calendars that i sent home to every parent .
and these calendars really started to lay out my program .
now i 'm in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district .
so this is a typical menu .
this is what we 're serving this week at the schools .
and you see these recipes on the side ?
those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes .
they do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes .
they also may be growing them . and we serve them in the cafeterias .
if we 're going to change children 's relationship to food , it 's delicious , nutritious food in the cafeterias , hands-on experience - you 're looking in cooking and gardening classes - and academic curriculum to tie it all together .
now you 've probably garnered that i do n't love the usda , and i do n't have any idea what to do with their pyramid , this upside-down pyramid with a rainbow over the top , i do n't know .
you know , run up into the end of the rainbow , i do n't know what you do with it . so , i came up with my own .
this is available on my website in english and spanish , and it 's a visual way to talk to kids about food .
the really tiny hamburger , the really big vegetables .
we have to start changing this .
we have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference .
we have cooking classes - we have cooking classrooms in our schools .
and why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation , maybe two , of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food , one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a tv or computer .
what are kids learning ? where is the family time ?
where is socialization ? where is discussion ?
where is learning to talk ?
you know , we have to change it .
i work with kids a lot . these are kids i work with in harlem .
eatwise - enlightened and aware teens who inspire smart eating .
we have to teach kids that coke and pop tarts are n't breakfast .
we have to teach kids that if they 're on a diet of refined sugar , they go up and down , just like if they 're on a diet of crack .
and we have to pull it all together . we have composting in all of our schools .
we have recycling in all of our schools .
you know , the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important , we have to teach kids about in school .
it has to be so much a part of them that they really get it .
because , you know what , many of us are sort of at the end of our careers , and we need to be giving these kids - these young kids , the next generation - the tools to save themselves and save the planet .
one of the things i do a lot is public-private partnerships .
i work with private companies who are willing to do r & d with me , who are willing to do distribution for me , who are really willing to work to go into schools .
schools are underfunded .
most schools in america spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child .
that comes down to under five dollars an hour .
most of you spend 10 , 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them .
so we 're spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system .
and if we 're going to change it , and change how we feed kids , we really have to rethink that .
so , public and private partnerships , advocacy groups , working with foundations .
in our school district , the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services . and i think if every school district allocated a half to one percent , we could start to really fix this program .
we really need to change it .
it 's going to take more money .
of course , it 's not all about food ; it 's also about kids getting exercise .
and one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch .
it 's sort of this " duh " thing .
you know , if you have kids coming into lunch and all they 're going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess , you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside .
and then , at one in the afternoon , they 're totally crashing .
these are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up , because they have n't had lunch .
so if the only thing they 'd have to do after lunch is go to class , believe me , they 're going to sit there and eat their lunch .
we need to - we need to educate .
we need to educate the kids .
we need to educate the staff .
i had 90 employees .
two were supposed to be cooks - none could .
and , you know , i 'm not that better off now .
but we really have to educate .
we have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again , because , of course , they do n't - because we 've had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long .
we need 40-minute lunches - most schools have 20-minute lunches - and lunches that are time-appropriate .
there was just a big study done , and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning .
that is not lunchtime .
you know , it 's crazy . it 's crazy what we 're doing .
and just remember , at very least tacitly , this is what we 're teaching children as what they should be doing .
i think if we 're going to fix this , one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the national school lunch program .
instead of the national school lunch program being under the usda , i think it should be under cdc .
if we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative , and we started thinking about food as health , then i think we would n't have corn dogs as lunch .
okay , finance 101 on this , and this - i 'm sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece , because i think this is something we all have to understand .
the national school lunch program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year .
that number probably needs to double .
people say , " oh my god , where are we going to get 8 billion ? "
in this country , we 're spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food .
we spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids .
we spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables , which is why we need all the diet aids .
we spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today , with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes .
200 billion .
so you know what , when we talk about needing 8 billion more , it 's not a lot .
that 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents - that 's what the government allocates for lunch .
most school districts spend two thirds of that on payroll and overhead .
that means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools - most schools , 80 to 90 cents . in l.a. , it 's 56 cents .
so we 're spending less than a dollar , ok , on lunch .
now i do n't know about you , but i go to starbucks and pete 's and places like that , and venti latte in san francisco is five dollars .
one gourmet coffee , one , is more - we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools .
you know what ? we should be ashamed .
we , as a country , should be ashamed at that .
the richest country .
in our country , it 's the kids that need it the most , who get this really , really lousy food .
it 's the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that ca n't even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food .
and those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick .
those are the same kids who we should be taking care of .
we can all make a difference .
that every single one of us , whether we have children , whether we care about children , whether we have nieces or nephews , or anything - that we can make a difference .
whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids , whether you take your kids , or grandchildren , or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers ' market . just do tastings with them .
sit down and care .
and on the macro level , we 're in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign , and of all the things we 're asking all of these potential leaders , what about asking for the health of our children ?
thank you .
an image is worth more than a thousand words , so i 'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that i recently captured .
so by now , my talk is already 6,000 words long , and i feel like i should stop here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- at the same time , i probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw .
what i am trying to do as a photographer , as an artist , is to bring the world of art and science together .
whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it 's bursting , as you can see in this image , whether it 's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint , strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways , or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces , i 'm always trying to link those two fields together .
what i find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing : they are a response to their surroundings .
and yet , they do it in a very different way .
if you look at science on one hand , science is a very rational approach to its surroundings , whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings .
what i am trying to do is i 'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer 's heart but also to the viewer 's brain .
let me demonstrate this based on three projects .
the first one has to do with making sound visible .
now as you may know , sound travels in waves , so if you have a speaker , a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal , transform it into a vibration , which is then transported through the air , is captured by our ear , and transformed into an audio signal again .
now i was thinking , how can i make those sound waves visible ?
so i came up with the following setup .
i took a speaker , i placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker , and then i added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker .
and now , if i would play a sound through that speaker , it would cause the crystals to move up and down .
now this happens very fast , in the blink of an eye , so , together with lg , we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second .
let me show you what this looks like .
-lrb- music : " teardrop " by massive attack -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
i agree , it looks pretty amazing .
but i have to tell you a funny story .
i got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in los angeles .
now in los angeles , you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches , but i got mine indoors , and what happened is that , if you 're shooting at 3,000 frames per second , you need to have a silly amount of light , lots of lights .
so we had this speaker set up , and we had the camera facing it , and lots of lights pointing at the speaker , and i would set up the speaker , put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker , and we would do this over and over again , and it was until midday that i realized that i had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker .
what was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side , so the right side of my face was completely red and i looked like the phantom of the opera for the rest of the week .
let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances .
has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid ?
ah , some of you have . excellent .
should i skip that part ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ferrofluid has a very strange behavior .
it 's a liquid that is completely black .
it 's got an oily consistency .
and it 's got tiny little particles of metal in it , which makes it magnetic .
so if i now put this liquid into a magnetic field , it would change its appearance .
now i 've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you .
so i 've got a camera pointing down at this plate , and underneath that plate , there is a magnet .
now i 'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet .
let 's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more . excellent .
so what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes .
this is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid .
now this looks already quite interesting , but let me now add some watercolors to it .
those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with .
you would n't paint with syringes , but it works just the same .
so what happened now is , when the watercolor was flowing into the structure , the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid .
that 's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic .
that means it does n't mix with the water .
and at the same time , it tries to maintain its position above the magnet , and therefore , it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint .
so that was the second project .
let me now turn to the last project , which involves the national beverage of scotland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this image , and also this one , were made using whiskey .
now you might ask yourself , how did he do that ?
did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper ?
i can assure you i was fully conscious while i was taking those pictures .
now , whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol , and alcohol has got some very interesting properties .
maybe you have experienced some of those properties before , but i am talking about the physical properties , not the other ones .
so when i open the bottle , the alcohol molecules would spread in the air , and that 's because alcohol is a very volatile substance .
and at the same time , alcohol is highly flammable .
and it was with those two properties that i was able to create the images that you 're seeing right now .
let me demonstrate this over here .
and what i have here is an empty glass vessel .
it 's got nothing in it .
and now i 'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey .
add some more .
now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle .
and now , let 's set that on fire .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's all that happens .
it goes really fast , and it 's not that impressive .
i could do it again to show it one more time , but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey , and that i should rather drink it .
but let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what i just showed you in this live demonstration .
so what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom , burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol .
so the images that you saw at the beginning , they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle , and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees .
so that 's how those images were made .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , i have now showed you three projects , and you might ask yourself , what is it good for ?
what 's the idea behind it ?
is it just a waste of whiskey ?
is it just some strange materials ?
those three projects , they 're based on very simple scientific phenomena , such as magnetism , the sound waves , or over here , the physical properties of a substance , and what i 'm trying to do is i 'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way , and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century , because during that century , our minds have altered dramatically .
as you all know , the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology .
and our minds have altered , too .
we 've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world , and it 's a world where we 've had to develop new mental habits , new habits of mind .
and these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification , introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent , and also taking the hypothetical seriously , that is , wondering about what might have been rather than what is .
now , this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive i.q. gains over time , and these have been truly massive .
that is , we do n't just get a few more questions right on i.q. tests .
we get far more questions right on i.q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented .
indeed , if you score the people a century ago against modern norms , they would have an average i.q. of 70 .
if you score us against their norms , we would have an average i.q. of 130 .
now this has raised all sorts of questions .
were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation ?
because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation .
or are we on the verge of all being gifted ?
because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness .
now i 'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that 's much more illuminating than either of those , and to put this into perspective , let 's imagine that a martian came down to earth and found a ruined civilization .
and this martian was an archaeologist , and they found scores , target scores , that people had used for shooting .
and first they looked at 1865 , and they found that in a minute , people had only put one bullet in the bullseye .
and then they found , in 1898 , that they 'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute .
and then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye .
and initially , that archaeologist would be baffled .
they would say , look , these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand , how keen their eyesight was , whether they had control of their weapon .
how could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree ?
well we now know , of course , the answer .
if that martian looked at battlefields , they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the civil war and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the spanish-american war , and then they had machine guns by the time of world war i.
and , in other words , it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible , not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand .
now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years , and i think again that another thinker will help us here , and that 's luria .
luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age , and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world .
they wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use .
he found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical , to speculating about what might be , and he found finally that they did n't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions .
now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews .
he talked to the head man of a person in rural russia .
they 'd only had , as people had in 1900 , about four years of schooling .
and he asked that particular person , what do crows and fish have in common ?
and the fellow said , " absolutely nothing .
you know , i can eat a fish . i ca n't eat a crow .
a crow can peck at a fish .
a fish ca n't do anything to a crow . "
and luria said , " but are n't they both animals ? "
and he said , " of course not .
one 's a fish .
the other is a bird . "
and he was interested , effectively , in what he could do with those concrete objects .
and then luria went to another person , and he said to them , " there are no camels in germany .
hamburg is a city in germany .
are there camels in hamburg ? "
and the fellow said , " well , if it 's large enough , there ought to be camels there . "
and luria said , " but what do my words imply ? "
and he said , " well , maybe it 's a small village , and there 's no room for camels . "
in other words , he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem , and he was used to camels being in villages , and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical , to ask himself what if there were no camels in germany .
a third interview was conducted with someone about the north pole .
and luria said , " at the north pole , there is always snow .
wherever there is always snow , the bears are white .
what color are the bears at the north pole ? "
and the response was , " such a thing is to be settled by testimony .
if a wise person came from the north pole and told me the bears were white , i might believe him , but every bear that i have seen is a brown bear . "
now you see again , this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience , and it was important to that person what color bears were - that is , they had to hunt bears .
they were n't willing to engage in this .
one of them said to luria , " how can we solve things that are n't real problems ?
none of these problems are real .
how can we address them ? "
now , these three categories - classification , using logic on abstractions , taking the hypothetical seriously - how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room ?
and let me give you a few illustrations .
first , almost all of us today get a high school diploma .
that is , we 've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education , and 52 percent of americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education .
now , not only do we have much more education , and much of that education is scientific , and you ca n't do science without classifying the world .
you ca n't do science without proposing hypotheses .
you ca n't do science without making it logically consistent .
and even down in grade school , things have changed .
in 1910 , they looked at the examinations that the state of ohio gave to 14-year-olds , and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information .
they were things like , what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time ?
when they looked at the exams that the state of ohio gave in 1990 , they were all about abstractions .
they were things like , why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital ?
and you were supposed to think , well , the state legislature was rural-controlled , and they hated the big city , so rather than putting the capital in a big city , they put it in a county seat .
they put it in albany rather than new york .
they put it in harrisburg rather than philadelphia .
and so forth .
so the tenor of education has changed .
we are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously , to use abstractions , and to link them logically .
what about employment ?
well , in 1900 , three percent of americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding .
only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers .
today , 35 percent of americans practice cognitively demanding professions , not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer , but many , many sub-professions having to do with being a technician , a computer programmer .
a whole range of professions now make cognitive demands .
and we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible .
and it 's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions .
the professions have been upgraded .
compare the doctor in 1900 , who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve , with the modern general practitioner or specialist , with years of scientific training .
compare the banker in 1900 , who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage .
well , the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss , but they were cognitively very agile .
they went far beyond that 1900 banker .
they had to look at computer projections for the housing market .
they had to get complicated cdo-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset .
they had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a aaa , though in many cases , they had virtually bribed the rating agencies .
and they also , of course , had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable .
or take a farmer today .
i take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900 .
so it has n't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions .
it 's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties .
but i 've talked about education and employment .
some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas .
i 'm primarily a moral philosopher .
i merely have a holiday in psychology , and what interests me in general is moral debate .
now over the last century , in developed nations like america , moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously , and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections .
when i came home in 1955 from university at the time of martin luther king , a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents .
my father was born in 1885 , and he was mildly racially biased .
as an irishman , he hated the english so much he did n't have much emotion for anyone else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he did have a sense that black people were inferior .
and when we said to our parents and grandparents , " how would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black ? "
they said that is the dumbest thing you 've ever said .
who have you ever known who woke up in the morning - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that turned black ?
in other words , they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited .
they would not take the hypothetical seriously , and without the hypothetical , it 's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground .
you have to say , imagine you were in iran , and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong .
how would you feel about that ?
and if someone of the older generation says , well , our government takes care of us , and it 's up to their government to take care of them , they 're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously .
or take an islamic father whose daughter has been raped , and he feels he 's honor-bound to kill her .
well , he 's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited , and they 're unmovable in any way by logic .
they 're just inherited mores .
today we would say something like , well , imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized .
would you deserve to be killed ?
and he would say , well that 's not in the koran .
that 's not one of the principles i 've got .
well you , today , universalize your principles .
you state them as abstractions and you use logic on them .
if you have a principle such as , people should n't suffer unless they 're guilty of something , then to exclude black people you 've got to make exceptions , do n't you ?
you have to say , well , blackness of skin , you could n't suffer just for that .
it must be that blacks are somehow tainted .
and then we can bring empirical evidence to bear , ca n't we , and say , well how can you consider all blacks tainted when st. augustine was black and thomas sowell is black .
and you can get moral argument off the ground , then , because you 're not treating moral principles as concrete entities .
you 're treating them as universals , to be rendered consistent by logic .
now how did all of this arise out of i.q. tests ?
that 's what initially got me going on cognitive history .
if you look at the i.q. test , you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas .
the similarities subtest of the wechsler is about classification , and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest .
there are other parts of the i.q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions .
some of you may have taken raven 's progressive matrices , and it 's all about analogies .
and in 1900 , people could do simple analogies .
that is , if you said to them , cats are like wildcats .
what are dogs like ?
they would say wolves .
but by 1960 , people could attack raven 's on a much more sophisticated level .
if you said , we 've got two squares followed by a triangle , what follows two circles ?
they could say a semicircle .
just as a triangle is half of a square , a semicircle is half of a circle .
by 2010 , college graduates , if you said two circles followed by a semicircle , two sixteens followed by what , they would say eight , because eight is half of 16 .
that is , they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question .
now , i should say one thing that 's very disheartening .
we have n't made progress on all fronts .
one of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics , and sadly you can have humane moral principles , you can classify , you can use logic on abstractions , and if you 're ignorant of history and of other countries , you ca n't do politics .
we 've noticed , in a trend among young americans , that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands , and they 're essentially ahistorical .
they live in the bubble of the present .
they do n't know the korean war from the war in vietnam .
they do n't know who was an ally of america in world war ii .
think how different america would be if every american knew that this is the fifth time western armies have gone to afghanistan to put its house in order , and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that is , they had barely left , and there was n't a trace in the sand .
or imagine how different things would be if most americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars .
you know , the spanish did n't sink the battleship maine , the lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions , the north vietnamese did not attack the seventh fleet , and , of course , saddam hussein hated al qaeda and had nothing to do with it , and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms , when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost .
but i do n't want to end on a pessimistic note .
the 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized , and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person could n't make it , that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities .
lord curzon once said he saw people bathing in the north sea , and he said , " why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have ? "
as if they were a reptile .
well , dickens was right and he was wrong . -lsb- correction : rudyard kipling -rsb- -lsb- kipling -rsb- said , " the colonel 's lady and judy o 'grady are sisters underneath the skin . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- we all make decisions every day ; we want to know what the right thing is to do - in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic .
and surely , if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times , that would be a tremendous gift .
it turns out that , in fact , the world was given this gift in 1738 by a dutch polymath named daniel bernoulli .
and what i want to talk to you about today is what that gift is , and i also want to explain to you why it is that it has n't made a damn bit of difference .
now , this is bernoulli 's gift . this is a direct quote .
and if it looks like greek to you , it 's because , well , it 's greek .
but the simple english translation - much less precise , but it captures the gist of what bernoulli had to say - was this : the expected value of any of our actions - that is , the goodness that we can count on getting - is the product of two simple things : the odds that this action will allow us to gain something , and the value of that gain to us .
in a sense , what bernoulli was saying is , if we can estimate and multiply these two things , we will always know precisely how we should behave .
now , this simple equation , even for those of you who do n't like equations , is something that you 're quite used to .
here 's an example : if i were to tell you , let 's play a little coin toss game , and i 'm going to flip a coin , and if it comes up heads , i 'm going to pay you 10 dollars , but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me , most of you would say , sure , i 'll take that bet . because you know that the odds of you winning are one half , the gain if you do is 10 dollars , that multiplies to five , and that 's more than i 'm charging you to play . so , the answer is , yes .
this is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet .
now , the idea is simple when we 're applying it to coin tosses , but in fact , it 's not very simple in everyday life .
people are horrible at estimating both of these things , and that 's what i want to talk to you about today .
there are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do , and those are errors in estimating the odds that they 're going to succeed , and errors in estimating the value of their own success .
now , let me talk about the first one first .
calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy : there are six sides to a die , two sides to a coin , 52 cards in a deck .
you all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads .
but as it turns out , this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life . that 's why americans spend more - i should say , lose more - gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined .
the reason is , this is n't how people do odds .
the way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs .
now , the question i 'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in oxford .
and of course , you all know that the answer is dogs .
and the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you 've seen dogs and pigs on leashes .
it was very easy to remember seeing dogs , not so easy to remember pigs . and each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind , then dogs on leashes are more probable .
that 's not a bad rule of thumb , except when it is .
so , for example , here 's a word puzzle .
are there more four-letter english words with r in the third place or r in the first place ?
well , you check memory very briefly , make a quick scan , and it 's awfully easy to say to yourself , ring , rang , rung , and very hard to say to yourself , pare , park : they come more slowly .
but in fact , there are many more words in the english language with r in the third than the first place .
the reason words with r in the third place come slowly to your mind is n't because they 're improbable , unlikely or infrequent .
it 's because the mind recalls words by their first letter .
you kind of shout out the sound , s - and the word comes .
it 's like the dictionary ; it 's hard to look things up by the third letter .
so , this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability - how this idea could lead you astray . it 's not just puzzles , though .
for example , when americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways - these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million u.s. citizens .
and these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado , fireworks , asthma , drowning , etc .
compare these to the actual numbers .
now , you see a very interesting pattern here , which is first of all , two things are vastly over-estimated , namely tornadoes and fireworks .
two things are vastly underestimated : dying by drowning and dying by asthma . why ?
when was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was , " boy dies of asthma ? "
it 's not interesting because it 's so common .
it 's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we 've seen tornadoes devastating cities , or some poor schmuck who 's blown his hands off with a firework on the fourth of july .
drownings and asthma deaths do n't get much coverage .
they do n't come quickly to mind , and as a result , we vastly underestimate them .
indeed , this is kind of like the sesame street game of " which thing does n't belong ? " and you 're right to say it 's the swimming pool that does n't belong , because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that 's actually very dangerous .
the way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide .
the lottery is an excellent example , of course - an excellent test-case of people 's ability to compute probabilities .
and economists - forgive me , for those of you who play the lottery - but economists , at least among themselves , refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax , because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet - which , by the way , does n't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything .
why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery ?
well , there are many answers , but one answer surely is , we see a lot of winners . right ? when this couple wins the lottery , or ed mcmahon shows up at your door with this giant check - how the hell do you cash things that size , i do n't know .
we see this on tv ; we read about it in the paper .
when was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost ?
indeed , if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner , the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say , " me ? i lost . " " me ? i lost . "
now , if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television - no sleep , no potty breaks - and you saw loss after loss after loss , and then at the end there 's 30 seconds of , " and i won , " the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small .
look , i can prove this to you : here 's a little lottery .
there 's 10 tickets in this lottery .
nine of them have been sold to these individuals .
it costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and , if you win , you get 20 bucks . is this a good bet ?
well , bernoulli tells us it is .
the expected value of this lottery is two dollars ; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money .
and most people say , " ok , i 'll play . "
now , a slightly different version of this lottery : imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named leroy .
leroy has nine tickets ; there 's one left .
do you want it ? most people wo n't play this lottery .
now , you can see the odds of winning have n't changed , but it 's now fantastically easy to imagine who 's going to win .
it 's easy to see leroy getting the check , right ?
you ca n't say to yourself , " i 'm as likely to win as anybody , " because you 're not as likely to win as leroy .
the fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play , even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds .
now , estimating odds , as difficult as it may seem , is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value : trying to say what something is worth , how much we 'll enjoy it , how much pleasure it will give us .
i want to talk now about errors in value .
how much is this big mac worth ? is it worth 25 dollars ?
most of you have the intuition that it 's not - you would n't pay that for it .
but in fact , to decide whether a big mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one , and only one question , which is : what else can i do with 25 dollars ?
if you 've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to australia and realized that they 're not going to serve you any food , but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the mcdonald 's bag , and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat , you think , i ca n't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours .
i ca n't even set it on fire - they took my cigarette lighter !
suddenly , 25 dollars for a big mac might be a good deal .
on the other hand , if you 're visiting an underdeveloped country , and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal , it 's exorbitant for a big mac .
why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no , before i 'd even told you anything about the context ?
because most of you compared the price of this big mac to the price you 're used to paying . rather than asking , " what else can i do with my money , " comparing this investment to other possible investments , you compared to the past .
and this is a systematic error people make .
what you knew is , you paid three dollars in the past ; 25 is outrageous .
this is an error , and i can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads .
for example , this is , of course , one of the most delicious tricks in marketing , is to say something used to be higher , and suddenly it seems like a very good deal .
when people are asked about these two different jobs : a job where you make 60k , then 50k , then 40k , a job where you 're getting a salary cut each year , and one in which you 're getting a salary increase , people like the second job better than the first , despite the fact they 're all told they make much less money . why ?
because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages , even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period . here 's another nice example .
here 's a $ 2,000 hawaiian vacation package ; it 's now on sale for 1,600 .
assuming you wanted to go to hawaii , would you buy this package ?
most people say they would . here 's a slightly different story : $ 2,000 hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars , so you decide to mull it over for a week .
by the time you get to the ticket agency , the best fares are gone - the package now costs 1,500 . would you buy it ? most people say , no .
why ? because it used to cost 700 , and there 's no way i 'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week .
this tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal . in other words , a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal .
here 's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions .
imagine that you 're going to the theater .
you 're on your way to the theater .
in your wallet you have a ticket , for which you paid 20 dollars .
you also have a 20-dollar bill .
when you arrive at the theater , you discover that somewhere along the way you 've lost the ticket .
would you spend your remaining money on replacing it ?
most people answer , no .
now , let 's just change one thing in this scenario .
you 're on your way to the theater , and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills .
when you arrive you discover you 've lost one of them .
would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket ?
well , of course , i went to the theater to see the play .
what does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do ?
now , just in case you 're not getting it , here 's a schematic of what happened , ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- along the way , you lost something .
in both cases , it was a piece of paper .
in one case , it had a u.s. president on it ; in the other case it did n't .
what the hell difference should it make ?
the difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself , i 'm not paying twice for the same thing .
you compare the cost of the play now - 40 dollars - to the cost that it used to have - 20 dollars - and you say it 's a bad deal .
comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people 's attempts to assign value .
but even when we compare with the possible , instead of the past , we still make certain kinds of mistakes .
and i 'm going to show you one or two of them .
one of the things we know about comparison : that when we compare one thing to the other , it changes its value .
so in 1992 , this fellow , george bush , for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum , did n't seem like such a great guy .
suddenly , we 're almost longing for him to return .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the comparison changes how we evaluate him .
now , retailers knew this long before anybody else did , of course , and they use this wisdom to help you - spare you the undue burden of money .
and so a retailer , if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine , and you see them here for eight , 27 and 33 dollars , what would you do ?
most people do n't want the most expensive , they do n't want the least expensive .
so , they will opt for the item in the middle .
if you 're a smart retailer , then , you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf , because suddenly the $ 33 wine does n't look as expensive in comparison .
so i 'm telling you something you already knew : namely , that comparison changes the value of things .
here 's why that 's a problem : the problem is that when you get that $ 33 bottle of wine home , it wo n't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to .
the comparisons we make when we are appraising value , where we 're trying to estimate how much we 'll like things , are not the same comparisons we 'll be making when we consume them .
this problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions .
let me just give you an example .
i have to show you something from my own lab , so let me sneak this in .
these are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions : how much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now ?
they 're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them .
for some of the subjects , sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of godiva chocolates , and for others is a can of spam .
in fact , these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they 're going to enjoy the potato chips .
namely , those who are looking at spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty ; those who are looking at godiva chocolate think they wo n't be nearly so tasty .
of course , what happens when they eat the potato chips ?
well , look , you did n't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy , salty , crispy , delicious snacks , what 's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience .
nonetheless , their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience .
you 've all experienced this yourself , even if you 've never come into our lab to eat potato chips . so here 's a question : you want to buy a car stereo .
the dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars , but if you drive across town , you can get it for 100 bucks .
so would you drive to get 50 percent off , saving 100 dollars ?
most people say they would .
they ca n't imagine buying it for twice the price when , with one trip across town , they can get it for half off .
now , let 's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo , and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000 .
but if you drove across town , you could get it for 30,900 .
would you drive to get it ? at this point , 0.003 savings - the 100 dollars .
most people say , no , i 'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car ?
this kind of thinking drives economists crazy , and it should .
because this 100 dollars that you save - hello ! - does n't know where it came from .
it does n't know what you saved it on .
when you go to buy groceries with it , it does n't go , i 'm the money saved on the car stereo , or , i 'm the dumb money saved on the car . it 's money .
and if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks , it 's worth 100 bucks no matter what you 're saving it on . people do n't think that way .
that 's why they do n't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment , but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste .
now , you can see , this is the problem of shifting comparisons , because what you 're doing is , you 're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you 're making , but when you go to spend that money you wo n't be making that comparison .
you 've all had this experience .
if you 're an american , for example , you 've probably traveled in france .
and at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown , and you thought , " oh , my god , these people are so warm . they 're so nice to me .
i mean , compared to all these people who hate me when i try to speak their language and hate me more when i do n't , these people are just wonderful . " and so you tour france with them , and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner , and what do you find ?
compared to your regular friends , they are boring and dull , right ? because in this new context , the comparison is very , very different . in fact , you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for french citizenship .
now , you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo .
you go to the stereo store , you see two sets of speakers - these big , boxy , monoliths , and these little , sleek speakers , and you play them , and you go , you know , i do hear a difference : the big ones sound a little better .
and so you buy them , and you bring them home , and you entirely violate the décor of your house .
and the problem , of course , is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you 'll never make again .
what are the odds that years later you 'll turn on the stereo and go , " sounds so much better than those little ones , " which you ca n't even remember hearing .
the problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time .
people have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time .
and what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules .
so let me give you one very easy problem , a second very easy problem and then a third , hard , problem .
here 's the first easy problem : you can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now . which would you prefer ?
this is what we call a one-item iq test , ok ?
all of us , i hope , prefer more money , and the reason is , we believe more is better than less .
here 's the second problem : you can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month . which would you prefer ?
again , an easy decision , because we all know that now is better than later .
what 's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict .
for example , when you 're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month .
this typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting , but you have to be patient .
what do we know ? what do people do in these kinds of situations ?
well , by and large people are enormously impatient .
that is , they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars .
maybe that is n't so remarkable , but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year - that 's 12 months - or 60 dollars in 13 months .
what do we find now ?
people are gladly willing to wait : as long as they 're waiting 12 , they might as well wait 13 .
what makes this dynamic inconsistency happen ?
comparison . troubling comparison . let me show you .
this is just a graph showing the results that i just suggested you would show if i gave you time to respond , which is , people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they 'll be delivered in now or one month , respectively - a 30-day delay - but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year .
now , why in the world do you get this pattern of results ?
these guys can tell us .
what you see here are two lads , one of them larger than the other : the fireman and the fiddler .
they are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon , and i want you to notice two things .
at no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler . no point .
however , the difference between them seems to be getting smaller .
first it 's an inch in your view , then it 's a quarter-inch , then a half-inch , and then finally they go off the edge of the earth .
here are the results of what i just showed you .
this is the subjective height - the height you saw of these guys at various points .
and i want you to see that two things are true .
one , the farther away they are , the smaller they look ; and two , the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler .
but watch what happens when we make some of them disappear . right .
at a very close distance , the fiddler looks taller than the fireman , but at a far distance their normal , their true , relations are preserved .
as plato said , what space is to size , time is to value .
these are the results of the hard problem i gave you : 60 now or 50 in a month ?
and these are subjective values , and what you can see is , our two rules are preserved .
people always think more is better than less : 60 is always better than 50 , and they always think now is better than later : the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side .
watch what happens when we drop some out .
suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us .
we have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month , but not if that decision is far in the future .
notice something interesting that this implies - namely , that when people get to the future , they will change their minds .
that is , as that month 12 approaches , you will say , what was i thinking , waiting an extra month for 60 dollars ?
i 'll take the 50 dollars now .
well , the question with which i 'd like to end is this : if we 're so damn stupid , how did we get to the moon ?
because i could go on for about two hours with evidence of people 's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value .
the answer to this question , i think , is an answer you 've already heard in some of the talks , and i dare say you will hear again : namely , that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living .
they were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups , rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves , had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today .
bernoulli 's gift , bernoulli 's little formula , allows us , it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us .
that explains why we are so bad at using it , but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good , fast .
we are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands .
we have no significant predators , we 're the masters of our physical environment ; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us .
the only thing - the only thing - that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions .
if we 're not here in 10,000 years , it 's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young dutch fellow in 1738 , because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that was remarkable .
we have time for some questions for dan gilbert . one and two .
bill lyell : would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us , and is there some way that we could counteract that ?
dan gilbert : i actually was consulting recently with the department of homeland security , which generally believes that american security dollars should go to making borders safer .
i tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people 's psychological reaction to a set of events , and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified , rather than - not rather than , but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we 're all concerned about .
surely the kinds of play that at least american media give to - and forgive me , but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents .
we already know , for example , in the united states , more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes - because they were scared - and driving on highways , than were killed in 9/11 . ok ?
if i told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 americans next year , you might be alarmed if you did n't find out it was the flu .
these are small-scale accidents , and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play , the kind of coverage , that they do .
surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they 'll be hurt in these various ways , and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us .
ca : dan , i 'd like to hear more on this . so , you 're saying that our response to terror is , i mean , it 's a form of mental bug ?
talk more about it .
dg : it 's out-sized . i mean , look .
if australia disappears tomorrow , terror is probably the right response .
that 's an awful large lot of very nice people . on the other hand , when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed , more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country .
is terror the right response ?
ca : what causes the bug ? is it the drama of the event - that it 's so spectacular ?
is it the fact that it 's an intentional attack by , quote , outsiders ?
what is it ?
dg : yes . it 's a number of things , and you hit on several of them .
first , it 's a human agent trying to kill us - it 's not a tree falling on us by accident .
second , these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again .
people are being killed for no reason instead of good reason - as if there 's good reason , but sometimes people think there are .
so there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event , but let 's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read . so there 's a large role here played by the media , who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can .
ca : i mean , what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it ?
dg : well , go to israel . you know , go to israel . and a mall blows up , and then everybody 's unhappy about it , and an hour-and-a-half later - at least when i was there , and i was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up - i went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on .
and as the israeli mother said , she said , " we never let them win by stopping weddings . "
i mean , this is a society that has learned - and there are others too - that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it , shall i say , as those of us who have not had many terror attacks .
ca : but is there a rational fear that actually , the reason we 're frightened about this is because we think that the big one is to come ?
dg : yes , of course . so , if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be , there might be more and more buses of 30 people - we would probably not be nearly so frightened .
i do n't want to say - please , i 'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying , " terrorism is fine and we should n't be so distressed . "
that 's not my point at all .
what i 'm saying is that , surely , rationally , our distress about things that happen , about threats , should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come .
i think in the case of terrorism , it is n't .
and many of the things we 've heard about from our speakers today - how many people do you know got up and said , poverty ! i ca n't believe what poverty is doing to us .
people get up in the morning ; they do n't care about poverty .
it 's not making headlines , it 's not making news , it 's not flashy .
there are no guns going off .
i mean , if you had to solve one of these problems , chris , which would you solve ? terrorism or poverty ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- that 's a tough one .
ca : there 's no question .
poverty , by an order of magnitude , a huge order of magnitude , unless someone can show that there 's , you know , terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come .
the latest i 've read , seen , thought is that it 's incredibly hard for them to do that .
if that turns out to be wrong , we all look silly , but with poverty it 's a bit - dg : even if that were true , still more people die from poverty .
ca : we 've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks . is that because in the past , in the ancient past , we just did n't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth , and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things ?
people died ; so be it .
but if you got attacked , that was something you could do something about .
and so we evolved these responses .
is that what happened ?
dg : well , you know , the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves .
my guess is that there 's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past . but rather , if you 're looking for an evolutionary explanation , you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic - that is , they 're a little scared of stuff that 's new and different .
and there 's a good reason to be , because old stuff did n't eat you . right ?
any animal you see that you 've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you 've never seen before .
so , you know , when a school bus is blown up and we 've never seen this before , our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated .
i do n't think it 's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to , but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it .
jay walker : you know , economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets . but i suspect you 're making the exact same error you 're accusing those people of , which is the error of value .
i know , because i 've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years .
it turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning .
that 's what you think it is . all right ?
the average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year , so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose , and yet she buys 150 tickets a year . why is that ?
it 's not because she is stupid or he is stupid .
it 's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain , and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you 've lost .
or , to put it another way , for the dollar investment , you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet , which you can not have a good feeling from .
now , economists tend to - -lrb- applause -rrb- - economists tend to view the world through their own lenses , which is : this is just a bunch of stupid people .
and as a result , many people look at economists as stupid people .
and so fundamentally , the reason we got to the moon is , we did n't listen to the economists . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dg : well , no , it 's a great point . it remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery . because remember , people who did n't buy tickets do n't feel awful the next day either , even though they do n't feel great during the drawing .
i would disagree that people know they 're not going to win .
i think they think it 's unlikely , but it could happen , which is why they prefer that to the flushing .
but certainly i see your point : that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning .
now , i think there 's many good reasons not to listen to economists .
that is n't one of them , for me , but there 's many others .
ca : last question .
aubrey de grey : my name 's aubrey de grey , from cambridge .
i work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills - i work on aging - and i 'm interested in doing something about it , as we 'll all hear tomorrow .
i very much resonate with what you 're saying , because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever . do you have any advice ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dg : for you or for them ?
adg : in persuading them .
dg : ah , for you in persuading them .
well , it 's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted .
but one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly .
one of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future .
to the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future , people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way .
so , would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you 're 65 is a question that 's very different than , imagine who you 'll be when you 're 65 : will you be living , what will you look like , how much hair will you have , who will you be living with .
once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario , suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money .
but these are tricks around the margins .
i think in general you 're battling a very fundamental human tendency , which is to say , " i 'm here today , and so now is more important than later . "
ca : dan , thank you . members of the audience , that was a fantastic session . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i decided when i was asked to do this that what i really wanted to talk about was my friend richard feynman .
i was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence .
and i 'm going to tell you the richard feynman that i knew .
i 'm sure there are other people here who could tell you about the richard feynman they knew , and it would probably be a different richard feynman .
richard feynman was a very complex man .
he was a man of many , many parts .
he was , of course , foremost , a very , very , very great scientist .
he was an actor . you saw him act .
i also had the good fortune to be in those lectures , up in the balcony .
they were fantastic .
he was a philosopher ; he was a drum player ; he was a teacher par excellence .
richard feynman was also a showman , an enormous showman .
he was brash , irreverent - he was full of macho , a kind of macho one-upmanship .
he loved intellectual battle .
he had a gargantuan ego .
but the man had somehow a lot of room at the bottom .
and what i mean by that is a lot of room , in my case - i ca n't speak for anybody else - but in my case , a lot of room for another big ego .
well , not as big as his , but fairly big .
i always felt good with dick feynman .
it was always fun to be with him .
he always made me feel smart .
how can somebody like that make you feel smart ?
somehow he did .
he made me feel smart . he made me feel he was smart .
he made me feel we were both smart , and the two of us could solve any problem whatever .
and in fact , we did sometimes do physics together .
we never published a paper together , but we did have a lot of fun .
he loved to win .
with these little macho games we would sometimes play - and he did n't only play them with me , he played them with all sorts of people - he would almost always win .
but when he did n't win , when he lost , he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won .
i remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him .
they took him - i think it was for his birthday - they took him for lunch .
they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in pasadena .
it may still exist ; i do n't know .
celebrity sandwiches was their thing .
you could get a marilyn monroe sandwich .
you could get a humphrey bogart sandwich .
the students went there in advance , and they arranged that they would all order feynman sandwiches .
one after another , they came in and ordered feynman sandwiches .
feynman loved this story .
he told me this story , and he was really happy and laughing .
when he finished the story , i said to him , " dick , i wonder what would be the difference between a feynman sandwich and a susskind sandwich . "
and without skipping a beat at all , he said , " well , they 'd be about the same .
the only difference is a susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham , " ham , as in bad actor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , i happened to have been very quick that day , and i said , " yeah , but a lot less baloney . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the truth of the matter is that a feynman sandwich had a load of ham , but absolutely no baloney .
what feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense - phoniness , false sophistication , jargon .
i remember sometime during the ' 80s , the mid- ' 80s , dick and i and sidney coleman would meet a couple of times up in san francisco at some very rich guy 's house - up in san francisco for dinner .
and the last time the rich guy invited us , he also invited a couple of philosophers .
these guys were philosophers of mind .
their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness .
and they were full of all kinds of jargon .
i 'm trying to remember the words - " monism , " " dualism , " categories all over the place .
i did n't know what those things meant , neither did dick - neither did sydney for that matter .
and what did we talk about ?
well , what do you talk about when you talk about minds ?
one thing , there 's one obvious thing to talk about - can a machine become a mind ?
can you build a machine that thinks like a human being , that is conscious ?
we sat around and we talked about this - we of course never resolved it .
but the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-iphizing .
it 's a scientific question after all .
and this was a very , very dangerous thing to do around dick feynman .
feynman let them have it - both barrels , right between the eyes .
it was brutal ; it was funny - ooh , it was funny .
but it was really brutal .
he really popped their balloon .
but the amazing thing was - feynman had to leave a little early .
he was n't feeling too well , so he left a little bit early .
and sidney and i were left there with the two philosophers .
and the amazing thing is these guys were flying .
they were so happy .
they had met the great man ; they had been instructed by the great man ; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud , and it was something special .
i realized there was something just extraordinary about feynman , even when he did what he did .
dick , he was my friend . i did call him dick .
dick and i had a certain , a little bit of a rapport .
i think it may have been a special rapport that he and i had .
we liked each other ; we liked the same kind of things .
i also liked the kind of intellectual macho games .
sometimes i would win , mostly he would win , but we both enjoyed them .
and dick became convinced at some point that he and i had some kind of similarity of personality .
i do n't think he was right .
i think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves .
but he was convinced of this .
and he was curious .
the man was incredibly curious .
and he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection .
and one day we were walking . we were in france .
we were in les houches .
we were up in the mountains , 1976 .
we were up in the mountains , and feynman said to me , he said , " leonardo . "
the reason he called me leonardo is because we were in europe and he was practicing his french .
and he said , " leonardo , were you closer to your mother or to you father when you were a kid ? "
and i said , " well , my real hero was my father .
he was a working man , had a fifth grade education .
he was a master mechanic , and he taught me how to use tools .
he taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things .
he even taught me the pythagorean theorem .
he did n't call it the hypotenuse , he called it the shortcut distance . "
and feynman 's eyes just opened up .
he went off like a light bulb .
and he said he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father .
in fact , he had been convinced at one time that , to be a good physicist , that it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father .
i apologize for the sexist conversation here , but this is the way it really happened .
he said that he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary - the necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist .
being dick , he , of course , wanted to check this .
he wanted to go out and do an experiment .
so , well he did .
he went out and did an experiment .
he asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists , " was it your mom or your pop that influenced you ? "
and to a man - they were all men - to a man , every single one of them said , " my mother . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there went that theory down the trashcan of history .
but he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with my father as he had with his father .
and for some time , he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well .
i do n't know . maybe . who knows ?
but let me tell you a little bit about feynman the physicist .
feynman 's style - no , style is not the right word .
style makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn or the suit he was wearing .
there 's something much deeper than that , but i ca n't think of another word for it .
feynman 's scientific style was always to look for the simplest , most elementary solution to a problem that was possible .
if it was n't possible , you had to use something fancier .
but no doubt part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could .
but he also deeply believed , he truly believed , that if you could n't explain something simply you did n't understand it .
in the 1950s , people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked .
there was a theory .
it was due to a russian mathematical physicist , and it was a complicated theory .
i 'll tell you what that theory was soon enough .
it was a terribly complicated theory full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth .
and it sort of worked , but it did n't work very well .
the only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very , very far apart .
the helium atoms had to be very far apart .
and unfortunately , the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other .
feynman decided , as a sort of amateur helium physicist , that he would try to figure it out .
he had an idea , a very clear idea .
he would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like .
he would try to visualize it , guided by a small number of simple principles .
the small number of simple principles were very , very simple .
the first one was that when helium atoms touch each other , they repel .
the implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero , it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other .
the other fact is that the ground state , the lowest energy state of a quantum system , the wave function is always very smooth - has the minimum number of wiggles .
so he sat down - and i imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil - and he tried to write down , and did write down , the simplest function that he could think of which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between .
he wrote down a simple thing .
it was so simple , in fact , that i suspect a really smart high school student , who did n't even have calculus , could understand what he wrote down .
the thing was that that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium and then some .
i 've always wondered whether the professionals , the real professional helium physicists , were just a little bit embarrassed by this .
they had their super-powerful technique , and they could n't do as well .
incidentally , i 'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was .
it was the technique of feynman diagrams .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he did it again in 1968 .
in 1968 , in my own university - i was n't there at the time - but in 1968 , they were exploring the structure of the proton .
the proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles .
this was more or less known .
and the way to analyze it was , of course , feynman diagrams .
that 's what feynman diagrams were constructed for - to understand particles .
the experiments that were going on were very simple .
you simply take the proton , and you hit it really sharply with an electron .
this was the thing the feynman diagrams were for .
the only problem was that feynman diagrams are complicated .
they 're difficult integrals .
if you could do all of them , you would have a very precise theory .
but you could n't ; they were just too complicated .
people were trying to do them .
you could do a one loop diagram . do n't worry about one loop .
one loop , two loops - maybe you could do a three loop diagram , but beyond that , you could n't do anything .
feynman said , " forget all of that .
just think of the proton as an assemblage of little particles - a swarm of little particles . "
he called them partons . he called them partons .
he said , " just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast . "
because they 're moving real fast , relativity says the internal motions go very slow .
the electron hits it suddenly .
it 's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton .
what do you see ?
you see a frozen bunch of partons .
they do n't move , and because they do n't move during the course of the experiment , you do n't have to worry about how they 're moving .
you do n't have to worry about the forces between them .
you just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons .
this was the key to analyzing these experiments .
extremely effective , it really did - somebody said the word revolution is a bad word .
i suppose it is , so i wo n't say revolution - but it certainly evolved very , very deeply our understanding of the proton , and of particles beyond that .
well , i had some more that i was going to tell you about my connection with feynman , what he was like , but i see i have exactly half a minute .
so i think i 'll just finish up by saying i actually do n't think feynman would have liked this event .
i think he would have said , " i do n't need this . "
but how should we honor feynman ?
how should we really honor feynman ?
i think the answer is we should honor feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you all know the truth of what i 'm going to say .
i think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the french revolution .
what 's changed is we now can look at the evidence , we can compare societies , more and less equal societies , and see what inequality does .
i 'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links i 'm going to be showing you exist .
but first , see what a miserable lot we are .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to start though with a paradox .
this shows you life expectancy against gross national income - how rich countries are on average .
and you see the countries on the right , like norway and the usa , are twice as rich as israel , greece , portugal on the left .
and it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all .
there 's no suggestion of a relationship there .
but if we look within our societies , there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society .
this , again , is life expectancy .
these are small areas of england and wales - the poorest on the right , the richest on the left .
a lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us .
even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top .
so income means something very important within our societies , and nothing between them .
the explanation of that paradox is that , within our societies , we 're looking at relative income or social position , social status - where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us .
and as soon as you 've got that idea , you should immediately wonder : what happens if we widen the differences , or compress them , make the income differences bigger or smaller ?
and that 's what i 'm going to show you .
i 'm not using any hypothetical data .
i 'm taking data from the u.n. - it 's the same as the world bank has - on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies .
the measure we 've used , because it 's easy to understand and you can download it , is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country .
and you see in the more equal countries on the left - japan , finland , norway , sweden - the top 20 percent are about three and a half , four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent .
but on the more unequal end - u.k. , portugal , usa , singapore - the differences are twice as big .
on that measure , we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies .
now i 'm going to show you what that does to our societies .
we collected data on problems with social gradients , the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder .
internationally comparable data on life expectancy , on kids ' maths and literacy scores , on infant mortality rates , homicide rates , proportion of the population in prison , teenage birthrates , levels of trust , obesity , mental illness - which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction - and social mobility .
we put them all in one index .
they 're all weighted equally .
where a country is is a sort of average score on these things .
and there , you see it in relation to the measure of inequality i 've just shown you , which i shall use over and over again in the data .
the more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems .
it 's an extraordinarily close correlation .
but if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to gnp per capita , gross national income , there 's nothing there , no correlation anymore .
we were a little bit worried that people might think we 'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence , so we also did a paper in the british medical journal on the unicef index of child well-being .
it has 40 different components put together by other people .
it contains whether kids can talk to their parents , whether they have books at home , what immunization rates are like , whether there 's bullying at school .
everything goes into it .
here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality .
kids do worse in the more unequal societies .
highly significant relationship .
but once again , if you look at that measure of child well-being , in relation to national income per person , there 's no relationship , no suggestion of a relationship .
what all the data i 've shown you so far says is the same thing .
the average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth .
that 's very important in poorer countries , but not in the rich developed world .
but the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much .
i 'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index .
here , for instance , is trust .
it 's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted .
it comes from the world values survey .
you see , at the more unequal end , it 's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others .
but in the more equal societies , it rises to 60 or 65 percent .
and if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital , very similar relationships closely related to inequality .
i may say , we did all this work twice .
we did it first on these rich , developed countries , and then as a separate test bed , we repeated it all on the 50 american states - asking just the same question : do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures ?
so here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality .
very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust .
same thing is going on .
basically we found that almost anything that 's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed .
we 're not just talking about a fluke .
this is mental illness .
who put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society .
this is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year .
and it goes from about eight percent up to three times that - whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others .
and again , closely related to inequality .
this is violence .
these red dots are american states , and the blue triangles are canadian provinces .
but look at the scale of the differences .
it goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150 .
this is the proportion of the population in prison .
there 's a about a tenfold difference there , log scale up the side .
but it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison .
that relationship is not mainly driven by more crime .
in some places , that 's part of it .
but most of it is about more punitive sentencing , harsher sentencing .
and the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty .
here we have children dropping out of high school .
again , quite big differences .
extraordinarily damaging , if you 're talking about using the talents of the population .
this is social mobility .
it 's actually a measure of mobility based on income .
basically , it 's asking : do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons , or is there no relationship between the two ?
and at the more unequal end , fathers ' income is much more important - in the u.k. , usa .
and in scandinavian countries , fathers ' income is much less important .
there 's more social mobility .
and as we like to say - and i know there are a lot of americans in the audience here - if americans want to live the american dream , they should go to denmark .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've shown you just a few things in italics here .
i could have shown a number of other problems .
they 're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient .
but there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries - not just a little bit worse , but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common .
think of the expense , the human cost of that .
i want to go back though to this graph that i showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points .
one is that , in graph after graph , we find the countries that do worse , whatever the outcome , seem to be the more unequal ones , and the ones that do well seem to be the nordic countries and japan .
so what we 're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality .
it 's not just one or two things that go wrong , it 's most things .
the other really important point i want to make on this graph is that , if you look at the bottom , sweden and japan , they 're very different countries in all sorts of ways .
the position of women , how closely they keep to the nuclear family , are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world .
but another really important difference is how they get their greater equality .
sweden has huge differences in earnings , and it narrows the gap through taxation , general welfare state , generous benefits and so on .
japan is rather different though .
it starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax .
it has lower taxes .
it has a smaller welfare state .
and in our analysis of the american states , we find rather the same contrast .
there are some states that do well through redistribution , some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax .
so we conclude that it does n't much matter how you get your greater equality , as long as you get there somehow .
i am not talking about perfect equality , i 'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies .
another really surprising part of this picture is that it 's not just the poor who are affected by inequality .
there seems to be some truth in john donne 's " no man is an island . "
and in a number of studies , it 's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy .
this is just one example .
some swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the british register of general socioeconomic classification .
and so it 's anachronistically a classification by fathers ' occupations , so single parents go on their own .
but then where it says " low social class , " that 's unskilled manual occupations .
it goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle , then the junior non-manual , going up high to the professional occupations - doctors , lawyers , directors of larger companies .
you see there that sweden does better than britain all the way across the social hierarchy .
the biggest differences are at the bottom of society .
but even at the top , there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society .
we show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the united states and internationally .
and that seems to be the general picture - that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom , but has some benefits even at the top .
but i should say a few words about what 's going on .
i think i 'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality .
more to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority , of being valued and devalued , respected and disrespected .
and of course , those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society .
it also leads to status insecurity .
we worry more about how we 're judged and seen by others , whether we 're regarded as attractive , clever , all that kind of thing .
the social-evaluative judgments increase , the fear of those social-evaluative judgments .
interestingly , some parallel work going on in social psychology : some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones , their responses to doing stressful tasks , measured .
and in the review , what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol , the central stress hormone .
and the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat - threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance .
those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress .
now we have been criticized .
of course , there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising .
i should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data , we never pick and choose data .
we have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we 're looking at , it goes into the analysis .
our data source decides whether it 's reliable data , we do n't .
otherwise that would introduce bias .
what about other countries ?
there are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals .
this is n't confined to these countries here , hiding a very simple demonstration .
the same countries , the same measure of inequality , one problem after another .
why do n't we control for other factors ?
well we 've shown you that gnp per capita does n't make any difference .
and of course , others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on .
what about causality ?
correlation in itself does n't prove causality .
we spend a good bit of time .
and indeed , people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes .
the big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system , the cardiovascular system .
or for instance , the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on .
i should say that to deal with this , we 've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things .
we 've got to constrain income , the bonus culture incomes at the top .
i think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can .
i think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us .
suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies , and that 's exciting .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when my father and i started a company to 3d print human tissues and organs , some people initially thought we were a little crazy .
but since then , much progress has been made , both in our lab and other labs around the world .
and given this , we started getting questions like , " if you can grow human body parts , can you also grow animal products like meat and leather ? "
when someone first suggested this to me , quite frankly i thought they were a little crazy , but what i soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all .
what 's crazy is what we do today .
i 'm convinced that in 30 years , when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags , we 'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy .
did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat , dairy , eggs and leather goods ?
and over the next few decades , as the world 's population expands to 10 billion , this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals .
but maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet .
animals are not just raw materials .
they 're living beings , and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land , fresh water , and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change .
on top of this , when you get so many animals so close together , it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse .
clearly , we can not continue on this path which puts the environment , public health , and food security at risk .
there is another way , because essentially , animal products are just collections of tissues , and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues .
what if , instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal , we started with what the tissues are made of , the basic unit of life , the cell ?
this is biofabrication , where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs .
already in medicine , biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts , like ears , windpipes , skin , blood vessels and bone , that have been successfully implanted into patients .
and beyond medicine , biofabrication can be a humane , sustainable and scalable new industry .
and we should begin by reimagining leather .
i emphasize leather because it is so widely used .
it is beautiful , and it has long been a part of our history .
growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat .
it mainly uses one cell type , and it is largely two-dimensional .
it is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators .
until biofabrication is better understood , it is clear that , initially at least , more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods , no matter how delicious .
in this sense , leather is a gateway material , a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry .
if we can succeed here , it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon .
now how do we do it ?
to grow leather , we begin by taking cells from an animal , through a simple biopsy .
the animal could be a cow , lamb , or even something more exotic .
this process does no harm , and daisy the cow can live a happy life .
we then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium .
this takes millions of cells and expands them into billions .
and we then coax these cells to produce collagen , as they would naturally .
this collagen is the stuff between cells .
it 's natural connective tissue .
it 's the extracellular matrix , but in leather , it 's the main building block .
and what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets , and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another , like phyllo pastry , to form thicker sheets , which we then let mature .
and finally , we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process , we create leather .
and so i 'm very excited to show you , for the first time , the first batch of our cultured leather , fresh from the lab .
this is real , genuine leather , without the animal sacrifice .
it can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells , and better yet , there is no hair to remove , no scars or insect 's bites , and no waste .
this leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet , a handbag or a car seat .
it is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator .
and because we make this material , we grow this leather from the ground up , we can control its properties in very interesting ways .
this piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick , and as you can see , it is nearly transparent .
and this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque .
you do n't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather .
and we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities , like softness , breathability , durability , elasticity and even things like pattern .
we can mimic nature , but in some ways also improve upon it .
this type of leather can do what today 's leather does , but with imagination , probably much more .
what could the future of animal products look like ?
it need not look like this , which is actually the state of the art today .
rather , it could be much more like this .
already , we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years , beginning with products like wine , beer and yogurt .
and speaking of food , our cultured food has evolved , and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful , sterile facilities like this .
a brewery is essentially a bioreactor .
it is where cell culture takes place .
imagine that in this facility , instead of brewing beer , we were brewing leather or meat .
imagine touring this facility , learning about how the leather or meat is cultured , seeing the process from beginning to end , and even trying some .
it 's clean , open and educational , and this is in contrast to the hidden , guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today .
perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind .
it 's environmentally responsible , efficient and humane .
it allows us to be creative .
we can design new materials , new products , and new facilities .
we need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved .
perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1962 , buckminster fuller presented the particularly audacious proposal for the geoscope .
it was a 200-foot diameter geodesic sphere to be suspended over the east river in new york city , in full view of the united nations .
it was a big idea , for sure , and it was one that he felt could truly inform and deeply affect the decision making of this body through animations of global data , trends and other information regarding the globe , on this sphere .
and today , 45 years later , we clearly have no less need for this kind of clarity and perspective , but what we do have is improved technology .
today we do n't need one million light bulbs to create a spherical display .
we can use leds .
leds are smaller , they 're cheaper , they 're longer lasting , they 're more efficient .
most importantly for this , they 're faster .
and this speed , combined with today 's high-performance micro-controllers , allows us to actually simulate , in this piece , over 17,000 leds - using just 64 .
and the way this happens is through the phenomenon of persistence of vision .
but as this ring rotates at about 1,700 rpm - that 's 28 times per second .
the equator 's speed is actually about 60 miles per hour .
there are four on-board micro-controllers that , each time this ring rotates it , as it passes the rear of the display , it picks up a position signal .
and from that , the on-board micro-controllers can extrapolate the position of the ring at all points around the revolution and display arbitrary bitmap images and animations .
but this is really just the beginning .
in addition to higher resolution versions of this display , my father and i are working on a new patent-pending design for a fully volumetric display using the same phenomenon .
it achieves this by rotating leds about two axes .
so as you can see here , this is a , eleven-inch diameter circuit board .
these blocks represent leds .
and so you could see that as this disc rotates about this axis , it will create a disc of light that we can control .
that 's nothing new : that 's a propeller clock ; that 's the rims that you can buy for your car .
but what is new is that , when we rotate this disc about this axis , this disc of light actually becomes a sphere of light .
and so we can control that with micro-controllers and create a fully volumetric , three-dimensional display with just 256 leds .
now this piece is currently in process - due out in may - but what we 've done is we 've put together a small demo , just to show the geometric translation of points into a sphere .
i 've got a little video to show you , but keep in mind that this is with no electronic control , and this is also with only four leds .
this is actually only about 1.5 percent of what the final display will be in may .
so , take a look .
and here you can see it 's rotating about the vertical axis only , creating circles .
and then , as the other axis kicks in , those actually blur into a volume .
and the shutter speed of the camera actually makes it slightly less effective in this case .
but this piece is due out in may .
it 'll be on display at the interactive telecommunications spring show in greenwich village in new york city - that 's open to the public , definitely invite you all to come and attend - it 's a fantastic show .
there are hundreds of student innovators with fantastic projects .
this piece , actually , will be on display down in the sierra simulcast lounge in the breaks between now and the end of the show .
so i 'd love to talk to you all , and invite you to come down and take a closer look .
it 's an honor to be here . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a researcher , every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting .
and this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you , and teaches you that you 're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in .
and these are unfortunate moments , because you go to sleep that night dumber than when you woke up .
so , that 's really the goal of my talk , is to a , communicate that moment to you and b , have you leave this session a little dumber than when you entered .
so , i hope i can really accomplish that .
so , this incident that i 'm going to describe really began with some diarrhea .
now , we 've known for a long time the cause of diarrhea .
that 's why there 's a glass of water up there .
for us , it 's a problem , the people in this room .
for babies , it 's deadly .
they lack nutrients , and diarrhea dehydrates them .
and so , as a result , there is a lot of death , a lot of death .
in india in 1960 , there was a 24 percent child mortality rate , lots of people did n't make it . this is incredibly unfortunate .
one of the big reasons this happened was because of diarrhea .
now , there was a big effort to solve this problem , and there was actually a big solution .
this solution has been called , by some , " potentially the most important medical advance this century . "
now , the solution turned out to be simple .
and what it was was oral rehydration salts .
many of you have probably used this .
it 's brilliant . it 's a way to get sodium and glucose together so that when you add it to water the child is able to absorb it even during situations of diarrhea .
remarkable impact on mortality .
massive solution to the problem .
flash forward : 1960 , 24 percent child mortality has dropped to 6.5 percent today .
still a big number , but a big drop .
it looks like the technological problem is solved .
but if you look , even today there are about 400,000 diarrhea-related deaths in india alone .
what 's going on here ?
well the easy answer is , we just have n't gotten those salts to those people .
that 's actually not true .
if you look in areas where these salts are completely available , the price is low or zero , these deaths still continue abated .
maybe there 's a biological answer .
maybe these are the deaths that simple rehydration alone does n't solve . that 's not true either .
many of these deaths were completely preventable , and this what i want to think of as the disconcerting thing , what i want to call " the last mile " problem .
see , we spent a lot of energy , in many domains - technological , scientific , hard work , creativity , human ingenuity - to crack important social problems with technology solutions .
that 's been the discoveries of the last 2,000 years , that 's mankind moving forward .
but in this case we cracked it , but a big part of the problem still remains .
nine hundred and ninety-nine miles went well , the last mile 's proving incredibly stubborn .
now , that 's for oral rehydration therapy .
maybe this is something unique about diarrhea .
well , it turns out - and this is where things get really disconcerting - it 's not unique to diarrhea .
it 's not even unique to poor people in india .
here 's an example from a variety of contexts .
i 've put a bunch of examples up here .
i 'll start with insulin , diabetes medication in the u.s.
ok , the american population .
on medicaid - if you 're fairly poor you get medicaid , or if you have health insurance - insulin is pretty straightforward .
you get it , either in pill form or you get it as an injection ; you have to take it every day to maintain your blood sugar levels .
massive technological advance : took an incredibly deadly disease , made it solvable .
adherence rates . how many people are taking their insulin every day ?
about on average , a typical person is taking it 75 percent of the time .
as a result , 25,000 people a year go blind , hundreds of thousands lose limbs , every year , for something that 's solvable .
here i have a bunch of other examples , all suffer from the last mile problem .
it 's not just medicine .
here 's another example from technology : agriculture . we think there 's a food problem , so we create new seeds .
we think there 's an income problem , so we create new ways of farming that increase income .
well , look at some old ways , some ways that we 'd already cracked .
intercropping . intercropping really increases income .
sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side .
some people are doing that , many are not . what 's going on ?
this is the last mile .
the last mile is , everywhere , problematic .
alright , what 's the problem ?
the problem is this little three-pound machine that 's behind your eyes and between your ears .
this machine is really strange , and one of the consequences is that people are weird .
they do lots of inconsistent things .
-lrb- applause -rrb- they do lots of inconsistent things .
and the inconsistencies create , fundamentally , this last mile problem .
see , when we were dealing with our biology , bacteria , the genes , the things inside here , the blood ?
that 's complex , but it 's manageable .
when we 're dealing with people like this ?
the mind is more complex .
that 's not as manageable , and that 's what we 're struggling with .
let me go back to diarrhea for a second .
here 's a question that was asked in the national sample survey , which is a survey asked of many indian women : " your child has diarrhea .
should you increase , maintain or decrease the number of fluids ? "
just so you do n't embarrass yourselves , i 'll give you the right answer : it 's increase .
now , diarrhea 's interesting because it 's been around for thousands of years , ever since humankind really lived side by side enough to have really polluted water .
one roman strategy that was very interesting was that - and it really gave them a comparative advantage - they made sure their soldiers did n't drink even remotely muddied waters .
because if some of your troops get diarrhea they 're not that effective on the battlefield .
so , if you think of roman comparative advantage part of it was the breast shields , the breastplates , but part of it was drinking the right water .
so , here are these women . they 've seen their parents have struggled with diarrhea , they 've struggled with diarrhea , they 've seen lots of deaths . how do they answer this question ?
in india , 35 to 50 percent say " reduce . "
think about what that means for a second .
thirty-five to 50 percent of women forget oral rehydration therapy , they are increasing - they are actually making their child more likely to die through their actions .
how is that possible ?
well , one possibility - i think that 's how most people respond to this - is to say , " that 's just stupid . "
i do n't think that 's stupid .
i think there is something very profoundly right in what these women are doing .
and that is , you do n't put water into a leaky bucket .
so , think of the mental model that goes behind reducing the intake .
just does n't make sense .
now , the model is intuitively right .
it just does n't happen to be right about the world .
but it makes a whole lot of sense at some deep level .
and that , to me , is the fundamental challenge of the last mile .
this first challenge is what i refer to as the persuasion challenge .
convincing people to do something - take oral rehydration therapy , intercrop , whatever it might be - is not an act of information : " let 's give them the data , and when they have data they 'll do the right thing . "
it 's more complex than that .
and if you want to understand how it 's more complex let me start with something kind of interesting .
i 'm going to give you a little math problem , and i want you to just yell out the answer as fast as possible .
a bat and a ball together cost $ 1.10 .
the bat costs a dollar more than the ball .
how much does the ball cost ? quick .
so , somebody out there says , " five . "
a lot of you said , " ten . "
let 's think about 10 for a second .
if the ball costs 10 , the bat costs ...
this is easy , $ 1.10 .
yeah . so , together they would cost $ 1.20 .
so , here you all are , ostensibly educated people .
most of you look smart .
the combination of that produces something that is actually , you got this thing wrong .
how is that possible ? let 's go to something else .
i know algebra can be complicated .
so , let 's dial this back . that 's what ? fifth grade ? fourth grade ?
let 's go back to kindergarten . ok ?
there 's a great show on american television that you have to watch .
it 's called " are you smarter than a fifth grader ? "
i think we 've learned the answer to that here .
let 's move to kindergarten . let 's see if we can beat five-year-olds .
here 's what i 'm going to do : i 'm going to put objects on the screen .
i just want you to name the color of the object .
that 's all it is . ok ?
i want you to do it fast , and say it out loud with me , and do it quickly . i 'll make the first one easy for you .
ready ? black .
now the next ones i want you to do quickly and say it out loud .
ready ? go .
audience : red . green .
yellow . blue . red .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sendhil mullainathan : that 's pretty good .
almost out of kindergarten .
what is all this telling us ?
you see , what 's going on here , and in the bat and ball problem is that you have some intuitive ways of interacting with the world , some models that you use to understand the world .
these models , like the leaky bucket , work well in most situations .
i suspect most of you - i hope that 's true for the rest of you - actually do pretty well with addition and subtraction in the real world .
i found a problem , a specific problem that actually found an error with that .
diarrhea , and many last mile problems , are like that .
they are situations where the mental model does n't match the reality .
same thing here : you had an intuitive response to this that was very quick .
you read " blue " and you wanted to say " blue , " even though you knew your task was red .
now , i do this stuff because it 's fun .
but it 's more profound than fun .
i 'll give you a good example of how it actually effects persuasion .
bmw is a pretty safe car .
and they are trying to figure out , " safety is good .
i want to advertise safety . how am i going to advertise safety ? "
" i could give people numbers . we do well on crash tests . "
but the truth of the matter is , you look at that car , it does n't look like a volvo , and it does n't look like a hummer .
so , what i want you to think about for a few minutes is : how would you convey safety of the bmw ? okay ?
so now , while you 're thinking about that let 's move to a second task .
the second task is fuel efficiency . okay ?
here 's another puzzle for all of you .
one person walks into a car lot , and they 're thinking about buying this toyota yaris .
they are saying , " this is 35 miles per gallon . i 'm going to do the environmentally right thing , i 'm going to buy the prius , 50 miles per gallon . "
another person walks into the lot , and they 're about to buy a hummer , nine miles per gallon , fully loaded , luxury .
and they say , " you know what ? do i need turbo ? do i need this heavyweight car ? "
i 'm going to do something good for the environment .
i 'm going to take off some of that weight , and i 'm going to buy a hummer that 's 11 miles per gallon . "
which one of these people has done more for the environment ?
see , you have a mental model .
fifty versus 35 , that 's a big move . eleven versus nine ? come on .
turns out , go home and do the math , the nine to 11 is a bigger change . that person has saved more gallons .
why ? because we do n't care about miles per gallon , we care about gallons per mile .
think about how powerful that is if you 're trying to encourage fuel efficiency .
miles per gallon is the way we present things .
if we want to encourage change of behavior , gallons per mile would have far more effectiveness .
researchers have found these type of anomalies .
okay , back to bmw . what should they do ?
the problem bmw faces is this car looks safe .
this car , which is my mini , does n't look that safe .
here was bmw 's brilliant insight , which they embodied into an ad campaign .
they showed a bmw driving down the street .
there 's a truck on the right . boxes fall out of the truck .
the car swerves to avoid it , and therefore does n't get into an accident .
bwm realizes safety , in people 's minds , has two components .
you can be safe because when you 're hit , you survive , or you can be safe because you avoid accidents .
remarkably successful campaign , but notice the power of it .
it harnesses something you already believe .
now , even if i persuaded you to do something , it 's hard sometimes to actually get action as a result .
you all probably intended to wake up , i do n't know , 6:30 , 7 a.m.
this is a battle we all fight every day , along with trying to get to the gym .
now , this is an example of that battle , and makes us realize intentions do n't always translate into action , and so one of the fundamental challenges is how we would actually do that . ok ?
so , let me now talk about the last mile problem .
so far , i 've been pretty negative .
i 've been trying to show you the oddities of human behavior .
and i think maybe i 'm being too negative .
maybe it 's the diarrhea .
maybe the last mile problem really should be thought of as the last mile opportunity .
let 's go back to diabetes .
this is a typical insulin injection .
now , carrying this thing around is complicated .
you gotta carry the bottle , you gotta carry the syringe .
it 's also painful .
now , you may think to yourself , " well , if my eyes depended on it , you know , i would obviously use it every day . "
but the pain , the discomfort , you know , paying attention , remembering to put it in your purse these are the day-to-day of life , and they do pose problems .
here is an innovation , a design innovation .
this is a pen , it 's called an insulin pen , preloaded .
the needle is particularly sharp .
you just gotta carry this thing around .
it 's much easier to use , much less painful .
anywhere between five and 10 percent increase in adherence , just as a result of this .
that 's what i 'm talking about as a last mile opportunity .
you see , we tend to think the problem is solved when we solve the technology problem .
but the human innovation , the human problem still remains , and that 's a great frontier that we have left .
this is n't about the biology of people ; this is now about the brains , the psychology of people , and innovation needs to continue all the way through the last mile .
here 's another example of this .
this is from a company called positive energy .
this is about energy efficiency .
we 're spending a lot of time on fuel cells right now .
what this company does is they send a letter to households that say , " here 's your energy use , here 's your neighbor 's energy use : you 're doing well . " smiley face .
" you 're doing worse . " frown .
and what they find is just this letter , nothing else , has a two to three percent reduction in electricity use .
in terms of carbon offsets , reduced electricity , 900 million dollars per year .
why ? because for free , this is n't a new technology , this is a letter - we 're getting a big bang in behavior .
so , how do we tackle the last mile ?
i think this tells us there is an opportunity .
and i think to tackle it , we need to combine psychology , marketing , art , we 've seen that .
but you know what we need to combine it with ?
we need to combine this with the scientific method .
see what 's really puzzling and frustrating about the last mile , to me , is that the first 999 miles are all about science .
no one would say , " hey , i think this medicine works , go ahead and use it . "
we have testing , we go to the lab , we try it again , we have refinement .
but you know what we do on the last mile ?
" oh , this is a good idea . people will like this . let 's put it out there . "
the amount of resources we put in are disparate .
we put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies .
how much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible , systematic , testing way ?
now , i think that we 're on the verge of something big .
we 're on the verge of a whole new social science .
it 's a social science that recognizes - much like science recognizes the complexity of the body , biology recognizes the complexity of the body - we 'll recognize the complexity of the human mind .
the careful testing , retesting , design , are going to open up vistas of understanding , complexities , difficult things .
and those vistas will both create new science , and fundamental change in the world as we see it , in the next hundred years .
all right . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : sendhil , thank you so much .
so , this whole area is so fascinating .
i mean , it sometimes feels , listening to behavioral economists that they are kind of putting into place academically , what great marketers have sort of intuitively known for a long time .
how much is your field talking to great marketers about their insights into human psychology ?
because they 've seen it on the ground .
sendhil mullainathan : yeah , we spend a lot of time talking to marketers , and i think 60 percent of it is exactly what you say , there are insights to be gleaned there .
forty percent of it is about what marketing is .
marketing is selling an ad to a firm .
so , in some sense , a lot of marketing is about convincing a ceo , " this is a good ad campaign . "
so , there is a little bit of slippage there .
that 's just a caveat . that 's different from actually having an effective ad campaign .
and one of the new movements in marketing is : how do we actually measure effectiveness ? are we effective ?
ca : how you take your insights here and actually get them integrated into working business models on the ground , in indian villages , for example ?
sm : so , the scientific method i alluded to is pretty important .
we work closely with companies that have operational capacity , or nonprofits that have operational capacity .
and then we say , " well , you want to get this behavior change .
let 's come up with a few ideas , test them , see which is working , go back , synthesize , and try to come up with a thing that works , " and then we 're able to scale with partners .
it 's kind of the model that has worked in other contexts .
if you have biological problems we try and fix it , see if it works , and then work the scale .
ca : alright sendhil , thanks so much for coming to ted . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- by the end of this year , there 'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites .
the one thing that all of them have in common is that they 're going to die .
while that might be a somewhat morbid thought , i think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring .
what first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by derek k. miller , who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer .
and what miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died .
here 's what he wrote in starting that out .
he said , " here it is . i 'm dead , and this is my last post to my blog .
in advance , i asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer , then my family and friends publish this prepared message i wrote - the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive . "
now , while as a journalist , miller 's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most , the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that 's something completely different than anything that 's been created by any previous generation .
consider a few stats for a moment .
right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to youtube every single minute .
there are 200 million tweets being posted every day .
and the average facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month .
so when you think about your parents or your grandparents , at best they may have created some photos or home videos , or a diary that lives in a box somewhere .
but today we 're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that 's going to live in the cloud indefinitely , years after we 're gone .
and i think that 's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists .
now to be clear , i 'm a journalist and not a technologist , so what i 'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like .
now we 're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die .
one of them actually , fittingly enough , found me when i checked into a deli at a restaurant in new york on foursquare .
-lrb- recording -rrb- adam ostrow : hello .
death : adam ?
ao : yeah .
death : death can catch you anywhere , anytime , even at the organic .
ao : who is this ?
death : go to ifidie.net before it 's too late .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- adam ostrow : kind of creepy , right ?
so what that service does , quite simply , is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to facebook after you die .
another service right now is called 1,000 memories .
and what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones , complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die .
but what i think comes next is far more interesting .
now a lot of you are probably familiar with deb roy who , back in march , demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video .
i think as machines ' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve , it 's going to become possible to analyze an entire life 's worth of content - the tweets , the photos , the videos , the blog posts - that we 're producing in such massive numbers .
and i think as that happens , it 's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we 're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we 're creating and technology 's ability to make sense of it all .
now we 're already starting to see some experiments here .
one service called my next tweet analyzes your entire twitter stream , everything you 've posted onto twitter , to make some predictions as to what you might say next .
well right now , as you can see , the results can be somewhat comical .
you can imagine what something like this might look like five , 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve .
taking it a step further , mit 's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans .
but what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime ?
finally , think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the united states , where cnn beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with anderson cooper .
what if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms - interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive ?
i think that 's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we 're producing and technology 's ability to understand it both expand exponentially .
now in closing , i think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality - and if so , what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so how would you run a whole country without oil ?
that 's the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a davos afternoon about four years ago .
it never left my brain .
and i started playing with it more like a puzzle .
the original thought i had : this must be ethanol .
so i went out and researched ethanol , and found out you need the amazon in your backyard in every country .
about six months later i figured out it must be hydrogen , until some scientist told me the unfortunate truth , which is , you actually use more clean electrons than the ones you get inside a car , if you use hydrogen .
so that is not going to be the path to go .
and then sort of through a process of wandering around , i got to the thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars , in a way that is convenient and affordable , you could get to a solution .
now i started this from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse .
not how do you build one car , but how do you scale this so that it can become something that is used by 99 percent of the population ?
the thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today .
so one , it has to be more convenient than a car .
and two , it has be more affordable than today 's cars .
affordable is not a 40,000 dollar sedan , right ?
alright ? that 's not something that we can finance or buy today .
and convenient is not something that you drive for an hour and charge for eight .
so we 're bound with the laws of physics and the laws of economics .
and so the thought that i started with was how do you do this , still within the boundary of the science we know today - no time for science fair , no time for playing around with things or waiting for the magic battery to show up .
how do you do it within the economics that we have today ?
how do you do it from the power of the consumer up ?
and not from the power of an edict down .
on a random visit to tesla on some afternoon , i actually found out that the answer comes from separating between the car ownership and the battery ownership .
in a sense if you want to think about it this is the classic " batteries not included . "
now if you separate between the two , you could actually answer the need for a convenient car by creating a network , by creating a network before the cars show up .
the network has two components in them .
first component is you charge the car whenever you stop - ends up that cars are these strange beasts that drive for about two hours and park for about 22 hours .
if you drive a car in the morning and drive it back in the afternoon the ratio of charge to drive is about a minute for a minute .
and so the first thought that came to mind is , everywhere we park we have electric power .
now it sounds crazy . but in some places around the world , like scandinavia , you already have that .
if you park your car and did n't plug in the heater , when you come back you do n't have a car . it just does n't work .
now that last mile , last foot , in a sense , is the first step of the infrastructure .
the second step of the infrastructure needs to take care of the range extension .
see we 're bound by today 's technology on batteries , which is about 120 miles if you want to stay within reasonable space and weight limitations .
120 miles is a good enough range for a lot of people .
but you never want to get stuck .
so what we added is a second element to our network , which is a battery swap system .
you drive . you take your depleted battery out .
a full battery comes on . and you drive on .
you do n't do it as a human being . you do it as a machine .
it looks like a car wash . you come into your car wash .
and a plate comes up , holds your battery , takes it out , puts it back in , and within two minutes you 're back on the road and you can go again .
if you had charge spots everywhere , and you had battery swap stations everywhere , how often would you do it ? and it ends up that you 'd do swapping less times than you stop at a gas station .
as a matter of fact , we added to the contract .
we said that if you stop to swap your battery more than 50 times a year we start paying you money because it 's an inconvenience .
then we looked at the question of the affordability .
we looked at the question , what happens when the battery is disconnected from the car .
what is the cost of that battery ?
everybody tells us batteries are so expensive .
what we found out , when you move from molecules to electrons , something interesting happens .
we can go back to the original economics of the car and look at it again .
the battery is not the gas tank , in a sense .
remember in your car you have a gas tank .
you have the crude oil .
and you have refining and delivery of that crude oil as what we call petrol or gasoline .
the battery in this sense , is the crude oil .
we have a battery bay . it costs the same hundred dollars as the gas tank .
but the crude oil is replaced with a battery .
just it does n't burn . it consumes itself step after step after step .
it has 2,000 life cycles these days .
and so it 's sort of a mini well .
we were asked in the past when we bought an electric car to pay for the entire well , for the life of the car .
nobody wants to buy a mini well when they buy a car .
in a sense what we 've done is we 've created a new consumable .
you , today , buy gasoline miles .
and we created electric miles .
and the price of electric miles ends up being a very interesting number .
today 2010 , in volume , when we come to market , it is eight cents a mile .
those of you who have a hard time calculating what that means - in the average consumer environment we 're in in the u.s.
20 miles per gallon that 's a buck 50 , a buck 60 a gallon .
that 's cheaper than today 's gasoline , even in the u.s.
in europe where taxes are in place , that 's the equivalent to a minus 60 dollar barrel .
but e-miles follow moore 's law .
they go from eight cents a mile in 2010 , to four cents a mile in 2015 , to two cents a mile by 2020 .
why ? because batteries life cycle improve - a bit of improvement on energy density , which reduces the price .
and these prices are actually with clean electrons .
we do not use any electrons that come from coal .
so in a sense this is an absolute zero-carbon , zero-fossil fuel electric mile at two cents a mile by 2020 .
now even if we get to 40 miles per gallon by 2020 , which is our desire .
imagine only 40 miles per gallon cars would be on the road .
that is an 80 cent gallon .
an 80 cent gallon means , if the entire pacific would convert to crude oil , and we 'd let any oil company bring it out and refine it , they still ca n't compete with two cents a mile .
that 's a new economic factor , which is fascinating to most people .
now this would have been a wonderful paper .
that 's how i solved it in my head . it was a white paper i handed out to governments .
and some governments told me that it 's fascinating that the younger generation actually thinks about these things .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- until i got to the true young global leader , shimon peres , president of israel , and he ran a beautiful manipulation on me .
first he let me go to the prime minister of the country , who told me , if you can find the money you need for this network , 200 million dollars , and if you can find a car company that will build that car in mass volume , in two million cars - that 's what we needed in israel - i 'll give you country to invest the 200 million into .
peres thought that was a great idea .
so we went out , and we looked at all the car companies .
we sent letters to all the car companies .
three of them never showed up . one of them asked us if we would stay with hybrids and they would give us a discount .
but one of them carlos ghosn , ceo of renault and nissan , when asked about hybrids said something very fascinating .
he said hybrids are like mermaids .
when you want a fish you get a woman and when you need a woman you get a fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and ghosn came up and said , " i have the car , mr. peres ; i will build you the cars . "
and actually true to form , renault has put a billion and a half dollars in building nine different types of cars that fit this kind of model that will come into the market in mass volume - mass volume being the first year , 100 thousand cars .
it 's the first mass-volume electric car , zero-emission electric car in the market .
i was running , as chris said , to be the ceo of a large software company called sap and then peres said , " well wo n't you run this project ? "
and i said , " i 'm ready for ceo " and he said , " oh no no no no no . you 've got to explain to me , what is more important than saving your country and saving the world , that you would go and do ? "
and i had to quit and come and do this thing called a better place .
we then decided to scale it up .
we went to other countries . as i said we went to denmark .
and denmark set this beautiful policy ; it 's called the iq test .
it 's inversely proportional to taxes .
they put 180 percent tax on gasoline cars and zero tax on zero-emission cars .
so if you want to buy a gasoline car in denmark , it costs you about 60,000 euros .
if you buy our car it 's about 20,000 euros .
if you fail the iq test they ask you to leave the country .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we then were sort of coined as the guys who run only in small islands .
i know most people do n't think of israel as a small island , but israel is an island - it 's a transportation island .
if your car is driving outside israel it 's been stolen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you 're thinking about it in terms of islands , we decided to go to the biggest island that we could find , and that was australia . the third country we announced was australia .
it 's got three centers - in brisbane , in melbourne , in sydney - and one freeway , one electric freeway that connects them .
the next island was not too hard to find , and that was hawaii .
we decided to come into the u.s.
and pick the two best places - the one where you did n't need any range extension .
hawaii you can drive around the island on one battery .
and if you really have a long day you can switch , and keep on driving around the island .
the second one was the san francisco bay area where gavin newsom created a beautiful policy across all the mayors .
he decided that he 's going to take over the state , unofficially , and then officially , and then created this beautiful region one policy .
in the san francisco bay area not only do you have the highest concentration of priuses , but you also have the perfect range extender .
it 's called the other car .
as we stared scaling it up we looked at what is the problem to come up to the u.s. ?
why is this a big issue ?
and the most fascinating thing we 've learned is that , when you have small problems on the individual level , like the price of gasoline to drive every morning .
you do n't notice it , but when the aggregate comes up you 're dead . alright ?
so the price of oil , much like lots of other curves that we 've seen , goes along a depletion curve .
the foundation of this curve is that we keep losing the wells that are close to the ground .
and we keep getting wells that are farther away from the ground .
it becomes more and more and more expensive to dig them out .
you think , well it 's been up , it 's been down , its been up , it 's going to keep on going up and down .
here is the problem : at 147 dollars a barrel , which we were in six months ago , the u.s. spent a ton of money to get oil .
then we lost our economy and we went back down to 47 - sometimes it 's 40 , sometimes it 's 50 .
now we 're running a stimulus package .
it 's called the trillion-dollar stimulus package .
we 're going to revive the economy . hopefully it happens between now and 2015 , somewhere in that space .
what happens when the economy recovers ?
by 2015 we would have had at least 250 million new cars even at the pace we 're going at right now .
that 's another 30 percent demand on oil .
that is another 25 million barrels a day .
that 's all the u.s. usage today .
in other words at some point when we 've recovered we go up to the peak .
and then we do the opec stimulus package also known as 200 dollars a barrel .
we take our money and we give it away .
you know what happens at that point ?
we go back down . it 's going to go up and down .
and the downs are going to be much longer and the ups are going to be much shorter .
and that 's the difference between problems that are additive , like co2 , which we go slowly up and then we tip , and problems that are depletive , in which we lose what we have , which oscillate , and they oscillate until we lose everything we 've got .
now we actually looked at what the answer would be .
right ? remember in the campaign : one million hybrid cars by 2015 .
that is 0.5 percent of the u.s. oil consumption .
that is oh point oh well percent of the rest of the world .
that wo n't do much difference .
we looked at an mit study : ten million electric cars on the global roads .
ten million out of 500 million we will add between now and then .
that is the most pessimistic number you can have .
it 's also the most optimistic number because it means we will scale this industry from 100 thousand cars is 2011 , to 10 million cars by 2016 - 100 x growth in less than five years .
you have to remember that the world today is bringing in so many cars .
we have 10 million cars by region .
that 's an enormous amount of cars .
china is adding those cars - india , russia , brazil .
we have all these regions .
europe has solved it . they just put a tax on gasoline .
they 'll be the first in line to get off because their prices are high .
china solves it by an edict . at some point they 'll just declare that no gasoline car will come into a city , and that will be it .
the indians do n't even understand why we think of it as a problem because most people in india fill two or three gallons every time .
for them to get a battery that goes 120 miles is an extension on range , not a reduction in range .
we 're the only ones who do n't have the price set right .
we do n't have the industry set right .
we do n't have any incentive to go and resolve it across the u.s.
now where is the car industry on that ?
very interesting . the car industry has been focused just on themselves .
they basically looked at it and said , " car 1.0 we 'll solve everything within the car itself . "
no infrastructure , no problem .
we forgot about the entire chain around us .
all this stuff that happens around .
we are looking at the emergence of a car 2.0 - a whole new market , a whole new business model .
the business model in which the money that is actually coming in , to drive the car - the minutes , the miles if you want , that you are all familiar with - subsidize the price of the car , just like cellphones . you 'll pay for the miles .
and some of it will go back to the car maker .
some of it will go back to your own pocket .
but our cars are actually going to be cheaper than gasoline cars .
you 're looking at a world where cars are matched with windmills .
in denmark , we will drive all the cars in denmark from windmills , not from oil .
in israel , we 've asked to put a solar farm in the south of israel .
and people said , " oh that 's a very very large space that you 're asking for . "
and we said , " what if we had proven that in the same space we found oil for the country for the next hundred years ? "
and they said , " we tried . there is n't any . "
we said , " no no , but what if we prove it ? "
and they said , " well you can dig . " and we decided to dig up , instead of digging down .
these are perfect matches to one another .
now all you need is about 10 percent of the electricity generated .
think of it as a project that spans over about 10 years .
that 's one percent a year .
now when we 're looking at solving big problems , we need to start thinking in two numbers .
and those are not 20 percent by 2020 .
the two numbers are zero - as in zero footprint or zero oil - and scale it infinity .
and when we go to cop15 at the end of this year we ca n't stop thinking of padding co2 .
we have to start thinking about giving kickers to countries that are willing to go to this kind of scale .
one car emits four tons .
and actually 700 and change million cars today emit 2.8 billion tons of co2 .
that 's , in the additive , about 25 percent of our problem .
cars and trucks add up to about 25 percent of the world 's co2 emissions .
we have to come and attack this problem with a focus , with an effort that actually says , we 're going to go to zero before the world ends .
i actually shared that with some legislators here in the u.s.
i shared it with a gentleman called bobby kennedy jr . , who is one of my idols .
i told him one of the reasons that his uncle was remembered is because he said we 're going to send a man to the moon , and we 'll do it by the end of the decade .
we did n't say we 're going to send a man 20 percent to the moon .
and there will be about a 20 percent chance we 'll recover him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he actually shared with me another story , which is from about 200 years ago .
200 years ago , in parliament , in great britain , there was a long argument over economy versus morality .
25 percent - just like 25 percent emissions today comes from cars - 25 percent of their energy for the entire industrial world in the u.k.
came from a source of energy that was immoral : human slaves .
and there was an argument . should we stop using slaves ?
and what would it do to our economy ?
and people said , " well we need to take time to do it .
let 's not do it immediately . maybe we free the kids and keep the slaves .
and after a month of arguments they decided to stop slavery , and the industrial revolution started within less than one year .
and the u.k. had 100 years of economic growth .
we have to make the right moral decision .
we have to make it immediately .
we need to have presidential leadership just like we had in israel that said we will end oil .
and we need to do it not within 20 years or 50 years , but within this presidential term because if we do n't , we will lose our economy , right after we 'd lost our morality .
thank you all very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation , what would you say ?
how would people describe your judgment , your knowledge , your behaviors , in different situations ?
today i 'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset .
i 'd like to start by introducing you to someone whose life has been changed by a marketplace fueled by reputation .
sebastian sandys has been a bed and breakfast host on airbnb since 2008 .
i caught up with him recently , where , over the course of several cups of tea , he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life .
more than 50 people have come to stay in the 18th-century watchhouse he lives in with his cat , squeak .
now , i mention squeak because sebastian 's first guest happened to see a rather large mouse run across the kitchen , and she promised that she would refrain from leaving a bad review on one condition : he got a cat .
and so sebastian bought squeak to protect his reputation .
now , as many of you know , airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries .
the places being rented out are things that you might expect , like spare rooms and holiday homes , but part of the magic is the unique places that you can now access : treehouses , teepees , airplane hangars , igloos .
if you do n't like the hotel , there 's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night .
it 's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before .
now let me show you these heat maps of paris to see how insanely fast it 's growing .
this image here is from 2008 .
the pink dots represent host properties .
even four years ago , letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea .
now the same view in 2010 .
and now , 2012 .
there is an airbnb host on almost every main street in paris .
now , what 's happening here is people are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets , from skills to spaces to material possessions , in ways and on a scale never possible before .
it 's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption , and , through it , people like sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs .
they 're empowered to make money and save money from their existing assets .
but the real magic and the secret source behind collaborative consumption marketplaces like airbnb is n't the inventory or the money .
it 's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers .
this side of airbnb really hit home to sebastian last summer during the london riots .
he woke up around 9 , and he checked his email and he saw a bunch of messages all asking him if he was okay .
former guests from around the world had seen that the riots were happening just down the street , and wanted to check if he needed anything .
sebastian actually said to me , he said , " thirteen former guests contacted me before my own mother rang . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this little anecdote gets to the heart of why i 'm really passionate about collaborative consumption , and why , after i finished my book , i decided i 'm going to try and spread this into a global movement .
because at its core , it 's about empowerment .
it 's about empowering people to make meaningful connections , connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we 've lost somewhere along the way , by engaging in marketplaces like airbnb , like kickstarter , like etsy , that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions .
now the irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us .
they 're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the facebook age .
we 're literally beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share , swap , rent , barter or trade just about anything . we 're sharing our cars on whipcar , our bikes on spinlister , our offices on loosecubes , our gardens on landshare . we 're lending and borrowing money from strangers on zopa and lending club .
we are trading lessons on everything from sushi-making to coding on skillshare , and we 're even sharing our pets on dogvacay .
now welcome to the wonderful world of collaborative consumption that 's enabling us to match wants with haves in more democratic ways .
now , collaborative consumption is creating the start of a transformation in the way we think about supply and demand , but it 's also a part of a massive value shift underway , where instead of consuming to keep up with the joneses , people are consuming to get to know the joneses .
but the key reason why it 's taking off now so fast is because every new advancement of technology increases the efficiency and the social glue of trust to make sharing easier and easier .
now , i 've looked at thousands of these marketplaces , and trust and efficiency are always the critical ingredients .
let me give you an example .
meet 46-year-old chris mok , who has , i bet , the best job title here of superrabbit .
now , four years ago , chris lost his job , unfortunately , as an art buyer at macy 's , and like so many people , he struggled to find a new one during the recession .
and then he happened to stumble across a post about taskrabbit .
now , the story behind taskrabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of kobe .
now what happened was , in february 2008 , leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner , when kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva .
they realized they 'd run out of dog food .
kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow .
now , later that evening , the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of ebay for errands existed .
six months later , leah quit her job , and taskrabbit was born .
at the time , she did n't realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking .
it 's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world .
now the way taskrabbit works is , people outsource the tasks that they want doing , name the price they 're willing to pay , and then vetted rabbits yes , there 's actually a four-stage , rigorous interview process that 's designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy rabbits .
now , there 's over 4,000 rabbits across the united states and 5,000 more on the waiting list .
now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect , like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs .
i actually learned the other day that 12 and a half thousand loads of laundry have been cleaned and folded through taskrabbit .
but i love that the number one task posted , over a hundred times a day , is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing : yes , assembling ikea furniture . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's brilliant . now , we may laugh , but chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life .
and 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed .
i think taskrabbit and other examples of collaborative consumption are like lemonade stands on steroids . they 're just brilliant .
now , when you think about it , it 's amazing , right , that over the past 20 years , we 've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information , and now we 're entering the third trust wave : connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces .
i actually came across this fascinating study by the pew center this week that revealed that an active facebook user is three times as likely as a non-internet user to believe that most people are trustworthy .
virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face .
now , with all of my optimism , and i am an optimist , comes a healthy dose of caution , or rather , an urgent need to address some pressing , complex questions .
how to ensure our digital identities reflect our real world identities ? do we want them to be the same ?
how do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online ?
how do we stop people who 've behaved badly in one community doing so under a different guise ?
in a similar way that companies often use some kind of credit rating to decide whether to give you a mobile plan , or the rate of a mortgage , marketplaces that depend on transactions between relative strangers need some kind of device to let you know that sebastian and chris are good eggs , and that device is reputation .
reputation is the measurement of how much a community trusts you .
let 's just take a look at chris .
you can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5 .
there are over 20 pages of reviews of his work describing him as super-friendly and fast , and he 's reached level 25 , the highest level , making him a superrabbit .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i love that word , superrabbit .
and interestingly , what chris has noted is that as his reputation has gone up , so has his chances of winning a bid and how much he can charge .
in other words , for superrabbits , reputation has a real world value .
now , i know what you might be thinking .
well , this is n't anything new . just think of power sellers on ebay or star ratings on amazon .
the difference today is that , with every trade we make , comment we leave , person we flag , badge we earn , we leave a reputation trail of how well we can and ca n't be trusted .
and it 's not just the breadth but the volume of reputation data out there that is staggering .
just consider this : five million nights have been booked on airbnb in the past six months alone .
30 million rides have been shared on carpooling.com.
this year , two billion dollars worth of loans will go through peer-to-peer lending platforms .
this adds up to millions of pieces of reputation data on how well we behave or misbehave .
now , capturing and correlating the trails of information that we leave in different places is a massive challenge , but one we 're being asked to figure out .
what the likes of sebastian are starting to rightfully ask is , should n't they own their reputation data ?
should n't the reputation that he 's personally invested on building on airbnb mean that it should travel with him from one community to another ?
what i mean by this is , say he started selling second-hand books on amazon . why should he have to start from scratch ?
it 's a bit like when i moved from new york to sydney .
it was ridiculous . i could n't get a mobile phone plan because my credit history did n't travel with me .
i was essentially a ghost in the system .
now i 'm not suggesting that the next stage of the reputation economy is about adding up multiple ratings into some kind of empty score .
people 's lives are too complex , and who wants to do that ?
i also want to be clear that this is n't about adding up tweets and likes and friends in a clout-like fashion .
those guys are measuring influence , not behaviors that indicate our trustworthiness .
but the most important thing that we have to keep in mind is that reputation is largely contextual .
just because sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble ikea furniture .
the big challenge is figuring out what data makes sense to pull , because the future 's going to be driven by a smart aggregation of reputation , not a single algorithm .
it 's only a matter of time before we 'll be able to perform a facebook- or google-like search and see a complete picture of someone 's behaviors in different contexts over time .
i envision a realtime stream of who has trusted you , when , where and why , your reliability on taskrabbit , your cleanliness as a guest on airbnb , the knowledge that you display on quora or -lsb- unclear -rsb- , they 'll all live together in one place , and this will live in some kind of reputation dashboard that will paint a picture of your reputation capital .
now this is a concept that i 'm currently researching and writing my next book on , and currently define as the worth of your reputation , your intentions , capabilities and values across communities and marketplaces .
this is n't some far-off frontier .
there are actually a wave of startups like connect.me and legit and trustcloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate , monitor and use your online reputation .
now , i realize that this concept may sound a little big brother to some of you , and yes , there are some enormous transparency and privacy issues to solve , but ultimately , if we can collect our personal reputation , we can actually control it more , and extract the immense value that will flow from it .
also , more so than our credit history , we can actually shape our reputation .
just think of sebastian and how he bought the cat to influence his .
now privacy issues aside , the other really interesting issue i 'm looking at is how do we empower digital ghosts , people -lsb- who -rsb- for whatever reason , are not active online , but are some of the most trustworthy people in the world ?
how do we take their contributions to their jobs , their communities and their families , and convert that value into reputation capital ?
ultimately , when we get it right , reputation capital could create a massive positive disruption in who has power , trust and influence .
a three-digit score , your traditional credit history , that only 30 percent of us actually know what it is , will no longer be the determining factor in how much things cost , what we can access , and , in many instances , limit what we can do in the world .
indeed , reputation is a currency that i believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century .
reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me .
now the interesting thing is , reputation is the socioeconomic lubricant that makes collaborative consumption work and scale , but the sources it will be generated from , and its applications , are far bigger than this space alone .
let me give you one example from the world of recruiting , where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past .
four years ago , tech bloggers and entrepreneurs joel spolsky and jeff atwood , decided to start something called stack overflow .
now , stack overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions .
this site receives five and a half thousand questions a day , and 80 percent of these receive accurate answers .
now users earn reputation in a whole range of ways , but it 's basically by convincing their peers they know what they 're talking about .
now a few months after this site launched , the founders heard about something interesting , and it actually did n't surprise them .
what they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their résumés , and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents .
now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way , because stack overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves , and what their peers think of them .
but the bigger principle of what 's happening behind stack overflow , i think , is incredibly exciting .
people are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built .
you know , it 's very interesting .
when you talk to super-users , whether that 's superrabbits or super-people on stack overflow , or uberhosts , they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power .
on stack overflow , it creates a level playing field , enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top .
on airbnb , the people often become more important than the spaces . on taskrabbit , it gives people control of their economic activity .
now at the end of my tea with sebastian , he told me how , on a bad , rainy day , when he has n't had a customer in his bookstore , he thinks of all the people around the world who 've said something wonderful about him , and what that says about him as a person .
he 's turning 50 this year , and he 's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he 's built on airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life .
you know , there are only a few windows in history where the opportunity exists to reinvent part of how our socioeconomic system works .
we 're living through one of those moments .
i believe that we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the industrial revolution .
in the 20th century , the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system , and in many ways controlled who had access to what .
in the 21st century , new trust networks , and the reputation capital they generate , will reinvent the way we think about wealth , markets , power and personal identity , in ways we ca n't yet even imagine .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you know , i 've talked about some of these projects before - about the human genome and what that might mean , and discovering new sets of genes .
we 're actually starting at a new point : we 've been digitizing biology , and now we 're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life .
so , we 've always been trying to ask big questions .
" what is life ? " is something that i think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels .
we 've tried various approaches , paring it down to minimal components .
we 've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years ; when we sequenced the human genome , it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer .
now we 're trying to ask , " can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe ? "
this is the map of a small organism , mycoplasma genitalium , that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory , and we 've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome .
we 're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here .
when we look at its metabolic map , it 's relatively simple compared to ours - trust me , this is simple - but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time , it 's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell .
so we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions .
and so we started down the road of : can we synthesize a chromosome ?
can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we 've never been before ?
and if we do , can we boot up a chromosome ?
a chromosome , by the way , is just a piece of inert chemical material .
so , our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace .
our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing , and our latest point would put it on , now , an exponential curve .
we started this over 15 years ago .
it took several stages , in fact , starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments .
but it turns out synthesizing dna is very difficult .
there are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of dna - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it 's a degenerate process , so the longer you make the piece , the more errors there are .
so we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors .
and this was our first attempt , starting with the digital information of the genome of phi x174 .
it 's a small virus that kills bacteria .
we designed the pieces , went through our error correction and had a dna molecule of about 5,000 letters .
the exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria , and the bacteria started to read this genetic code , made the viral particles .
the viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the e. coli .
i was talking to the oil industry recently and i said they clearly understood that model .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they laughed more than you guys are . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system .
but we wanted to go much larger : we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome - it 's over 580,000 letters of genetic code - so we thought we 'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are .
design is critical , and if you 're starting with digital information in the computer , that digital information has to be really accurate .
when we first sequenced this genome in 1995 , the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs .
we actually found , on resequencing it , 30 errors ; had we used that original sequence , it never would have been able to be booted up .
part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together .
we design unique elements into this .
you may have read that we put watermarks in .
think of this : we have a four-letter genetic code - a , c , g and t.
triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids , such that there 's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids .
so we can use the genetic code to write out words , sentences , thoughts .
initially , all we did was autograph it .
some people were disappointed there was not poetry .
we designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes ; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together .
and we started making pieces , starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters , put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces , then put sets of those going up to 72,000 .
at each stage , we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we 're trying to create a process that 's extremely robust that you can see in a minute .
we 're trying to get to the point of automation .
so , this looks like a basketball playoff .
when we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs , they wo n't any longer grow readily in e. coli - it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology - and so we turned to other mechanisms .
we knew there 's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair dna that can put pieces together .
here 's an example of it : there 's an organism called deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation .
you can see in the top panel , its chromosome just gets blown apart .
twelve to 24 hours later , it put it back together exactly as it was before .
we have thousands of organisms that can do this .
these organisms can be totally desiccated ; they can live in a vacuum .
i am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space , move around , find a new aqueous environment .
in fact , nasa has shown a lot of this is out there .
here 's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes , actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in ; yeast puts them together automatically .
this is not an electron micrograph ; this is just a regular photomicrograph .
it 's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope .
these are pictures over about a six-second period .
so , this is the publication we had just a short while ago .
this is over 580,000 letters of genetic code ; it 's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure .
it 's over 300 million molecular weight .
if we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing , it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code .
well , how do we boot up a chromosome ? how do we activate this ?
obviously , with a virus it 's pretty simple ; it 's much more complicated dealing with bacteria .
it 's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves : you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one , and that 's what you 've all heard about with cloning .
with bacteria and archaea , the chromosome is integrated into the cell , but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it .
we purified a chromosome from one microbial species - roughly , these two are as distant as human and mice - we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome , we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins , and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell - and you 'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here .
the new chromosome went into the cell .
in fact , we thought this might be as far as it went , but we tried to design the process a little bit further .
this is a major mechanism of evolution right here .
we find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere , adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species .
so , people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology .
there are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest dna .
the chromosome that was in the cell does n't have one ; the chromosome we put in does .
it got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material , chewed it up , and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome .
it turned blue because of the genes we put in it .
and with a very short period of time , all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell .
all the proteins changed , the membranes changed ; when we read the genetic code , it 's exactly what we had transferred in .
so , this may sound like genomic alchemy , but we can , by moving the software of dna around , change things quite dramatically .
now i 've argued , this is not genesis ; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution .
and i 've argued that we 're about to perhaps create a new version of the cambrian explosion , where there 's massive new speciation based on this digital design .
why do this ?
i think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs .
we 're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years .
to put it in context for myself : i was born in 1946 .
there are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946 ; within 40 years , there 'll be four .
we have trouble feeding , providing fresh , clean water , medicines , fuel for the six and a half billion .
it 's going to be a stretch to do it for nine .
we use over five billion tons of coal , 30 billion-plus barrels of oil - that 's a hundred million barrels a day .
when we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that , it 's going to be a huge challenge .
then of course , there 's all that co2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere .
we now , from our discovery around the world , have a database with about 20 million genes , and i like to think of these as the design components of the future .
the electronics industry only had a dozen or so components , and look at the diversity that came out of that .
we 're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination .
we now have techniques , because of these rapid methods of synthesis , to do what we 're calling combinatorial genomics .
we have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day .
when you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals , new vaccines , we can just with a small team , do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science .
and it 's just standard selection : we can select for viability , chemical or fuel production , vaccine production , etc .
this is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we 're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer .
you know , we do n't know necessarily what it 'll look like : we know exactly what their genetic code looks like .
we 're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels .
you 've seen recently , corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment .
we have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar , to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol .
but the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with co2 as its feedstock , and so we 're working with designing cells to go down this road .
and we think we 'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months .
sunlight and co2 is one method ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- but in our discovery around the world , we have all kinds of other methods .
this is an organism we described in 1996 .
it lives in the deep ocean , about a mile and a half deep , almost at boiling-water temperatures .
it takes co2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source .
we 're looking to see if we can take captured co2 , which can easily be piped to sites , convert that co2 back into fuel to drive this process .
so , in a short period of time , we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of " what is life ? "
we truly , you know , have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah . if you ca n't do that at ted , where can you ? - -lrb- laughter -rrb- become a major source of energy ...
but also , we 're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines .
you 've seen this year with flu ; we 're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine .
i think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance .
here 's what the future may begin to look like with changing , now , the evolutionary tree , speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria , archaea and , eventually , eukaryotes .
we 're a ways away from improving people : our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'll start with my favorite muse , emily dickinson , who said that wonder is not knowledge , neither is it ignorance .
it 's something which is suspended between what we believe we can be , and a tradition we may have forgotten .
and i think , when i listen to these incredible people here , i 've been so inspired - so many incredible ideas , so many visions .
and yet , when i look at the environment outside , you see how resistant architecture is to change .
you see how resistant it is to those very ideas .
we can think them out . we can create incredible things .
and yet , at the end , it 's so hard to change a wall .
we applaud the well-mannered box .
but to create a space that never existed is what interests me ; to create something that has never been , a space that we have never entered except in our minds and our spirits .
and i think that 's really what architecture is based on .
architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil .
it 's based on wonder .
and that wonder is really what has created the greatest cities , the greatest spaces that we have had .
and i think that is indeed what architecture is . it is a story .
by the way , it is a story that is told through its hard materials .
but it is a story of effort and struggle against improbabilities .
if you think of the great buildings , of the cathedrals , of the temples , of the pyramids , of pagodas , of cities in india and beyond , you think of how incredible this is that that was realized not by some abstract idea , but by people .
so , anything that has been made can be unmade .
anything that has been made can be made better .
there it is : the things that i really believe are of important architecture .
these are the dimensions that i like to work with .
it 's something very personal .
it 's not , perhaps , the dimensions appreciated by art critics or architecture critics or city planners .
but i think these are the necessary oxygen for us to live in buildings , to live in cities , to connect ourselves in a social space .
and i therefore believe that optimism is what drives architecture forward .
it 's the only profession where you have to believe in the future .
you can be a general , a politician , an economist who is depressed , a musician in a minor key , a painter in dark colors .
but architecture is that complete ecstasy that the future can be better .
and it is that belief that i think drives society .
and today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us .
and yet it is in times like this that i think architecture can thrive with big ideas , ideas that are not small . think of the great cities .
think of the empire state building , the rockefeller center .
they were built in times that were not really the best of times in a certain way .
and yet that energy and power of architecture has driven an entire social and political space that these buildings occupy .
so again , i am a believer in the expressive .
i have never been a fan of the neutral .
i do n't like neutrality in life , in anything .
i think expression .
and it 's like espresso coffee , you know , you take the essence of the coffee .
that 's what expression is .
it 's been missing in much of the architecture , because we think architecture is the realm of the neutered , the realm of the kind of a state that has no opinion , that has no value .
and yet , i believe it is the expression - expression of the city , expression of our own space - that gives meaning to architecture .
and , of course , expressive spaces are not mute .
expressive spaces are not spaces that simply confirm what we already know .
expressive spaces may disturb us .
and i think that 's also part of life .
life is not just an anesthetic to make us smile , but to reach out across the abyss of history , to places we have never been , and would have perhaps been , had we not been so lucky .
so again , radical versus conservative .
radical , what does it mean ? it 's something which is rooted , and something which is rooted deep in a tradition .
and i think that is what architecture is , it 's radical .
it 's not just a conservation in formaldehyde of dead forms .
it is actually a living connection to the cosmic event that we are part of , and a story that is certainly ongoing .
it 's not something that has a good ending or a bad ending .
it 's actually a story in which our acts themselves are pushing the story in a particular way .
so again i am a believer in the radical architecture .
you know the soviet architecture of that building is the conservation .
it 's like the old las vegas used to be .
it 's about conserving emotions , conserving the traditions that have obstructed the mind in moving forward and of course what is radical is to confront them .
and i think our architecture is a confrontation with our own senses .
therefore i believe it should not be cool .
there is a lot of appreciation for the kind of cool architecture .
i 've always been an opponent of it . i think emotion is needed .
life without emotion would really not be life .
even the mind is emotional .
there is no reason which does not take a position in the ethical sphere , in the philosophical mystery of what we are .
so i think emotion is a dimension that is important to introduce into city space , into city life .
and of course , we are all about the struggle of emotions .
and i think that is what makes the world a wondrous place .
and of course , the confrontation of the cool , the unemotional with emotion , is a conversation that i think cities themselves have fostered .
i think that is the progress of cities .
it 's not only the forms of cities , but the fact that they incarnate emotions , not just of those who build them , but of those who live there as well .
inexplicable versus understood . you know , too often we want to understand everything .
but architecture is not the language of words .
it 's a language . but it is not a language that can be reduced to a series of programmatic notes that we can verbally write .
too many buildings that you see outside that are so banal tell you a story , but the story is very short , which says , " we have no story to tell you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the important thing actually , is to introduce the actual architectural dimensions , which might be totally inexplicable in words , because they operate in proportions , in materials , in light .
they connect themselves into various sources , into a kind of complex vector matrix that is n't really frontal but is really embedded in the lives , and in the history of a city , and of a people .
so again , the notion that a building should just be explicit i think is a false notion , which has reduced architecture into banality .
hand versus the computer .
of course , what would we be without computers ?
our whole practice depends on computing .
but the computer should not just be the glove of the hand ; the hand should really be the driver of the computing power .
because i believe that the hand in all its primitive , in all its physiological obscurity , has a source , though the source is unknown , though we do n't have to be mystical about it .
we realize that the hand has been given us by forces that are beyond our own autonomy .
and i think when i draw drawings which may imitate the computer , but are not computer drawings - drawings that can come from sources that are completely not known , not normal , not seen , yet the hand - and that 's what i really , to all of you who are working - how can we make the computer respond to our hand rather than the hand responding to the computer .
i think that 's part of what the complexity of architecture is .
because certainly we have gotten used to the propaganda that the simple is the good . but i do n't believe it .
listening to all of you , the complexity of thought , the complexity of layers of meaning is overwhelming .
and i think we should n't shy away in architecture , you know , brain surgery , atomic theory , genetics , economics are complex complex fields .
there is no reason that architecture should shy away and present this illusory world of the simple .
it is complex . space is complex .
space is something that folds out of itself into completely new worlds .
and as wondrous as it is , it can not be reduced to a kind of simplification that we have often come to be admired .
and yet , our lives are complex .
our emotions are complex .
our intellectual desires are complex .
so i do believe that architecture as i see it needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have , in every intimacy that we possess .
of course that means that architecture is political .
the political is not an enemy of architecture .
the politeama is the city . it 's all of us together .
and i 've always believed that the act of architecture , even a private house , when somebody else will see it , is a political act , because it will be visible to others .
and we live in a world which is connecting us more and more .
so again , the evasion of that sphere , which has been so endemic to that sort of pure architecture , the autonomous architecture that is just an abstract object has never appealed to me .
and i do believe that this interaction with the history , with history that is often very difficult , to grapple with it , to create a position that is beyond our normal expectations and to create a critique .
because architecture is also the asking of questions .
it 's not only the giving of answers .
it 's also , just like life , the asking of questions .
therefore it is important that it be real .
you know we can simulate almost anything .
but the one thing that can be ever simulated is the human heart , the human soul .
and architecture is so closely intertwined with it because we are born somewhere and we die somewhere .
so the reality of architecture is visceral . it 's not intellectual .
it 's not something that comes to us from books and theories .
it 's the real that we touch - the door , the window , the threshold , the bed - such prosaic objects . and yet , i try , in every building , to take that virtual world , which is so enigmatic and so rich , and create something in the real world .
create a space for an office , a space of sustainability that really works between that virtuality and yet can be realized as something real .
unexpected versus habitual .
what is a habit ? it 's just a shackle for ourselves .
it 's a self-induced poison .
so the unexpected is always unexpected .
you know , it 's true , the cathedrals , as unexpected , will always be unexpected .
you know frank gehry 's buildings , they will continue to be unexpected in the future .
so not the habitual architecture that instills in us the false sort of stability , but an architecture that is full of tension , an architecture that goes beyond itself to reach a human soul and a human heart , and that breaks out of the shackles of habits .
and of course habits are enforced by architecture .
when we see the same kind of architecture we become immured in that world of those angles , of those lights , of those materials .
we think the world really looks like our buildings .
and yet our buildings are pretty much limited by the techniques and wonders that have been part of them .
so again , the unexpected which is also the raw .
and i often think of the raw and the refined .
what is raw ? the raw , i would say is the naked experience , untouched by luxury , untouched by expensive materials , untouched by the kind of refinement that we associate with high culture .
so the rawness , i think , in space , the fact that sustainability can actually , in the future translate into a raw space , a space that is n't decorated , a space that is not mannered in any source , but a space that might be cool in terms of its temperature , might be refractive to our desires .
a space that does n't always follow us like a dog that has been trained to follow us , but moves ahead into directions of demonstrating other possibilities , other experiences , that have never been part of the vocabulary of architecture .
and of course that juxtaposition is of great interest to me because it creates a kind of a spark of new energy .
and so i do like something which is pointed , not blunt , something which is focused on reality , something that has the power , through its leverage , to transform even a very small space .
so architecture maybe is not so big , like science , but through its focal point it can leverage in an archimedian way what we think the world is really about .
and often it takes just a building to change our experience of what could be done , what has been done , how the world has remained both in between stability and instability .
and of course buildings have their shapes .
those shapes are difficult to change .
and yet , i do believe that in every social space , in every public space , there is a desire to communicate more than just that blunt thought , that blunt technique , but something that pinpoints , and can point in various directions forward , backward , sideways and around .
so that is indeed what is memory .
so i believe that my main interest is to memory .
without memory we would be amnesiacs .
we would not know which way we were going , and why we are going where we 're going .
so i 've been never interested in the forgettable reuse , rehashing of the same things over and over again , which , of course , get accolades of critics .
critics like the performance to be repeated again and again the same way .
but i rather play something completely unheard of , and even with flaws , than repeat the same thing over and over which has been hollowed by its meaninglessness .
so again , memory is the city , memory is the world .
without the memory there would be no story to tell .
there would be nowhere to turn .
the memorable , i think , is really our world , what we think the world is .
and it 's not only our memory , but those who remember us , which means that architecture is not mute .
it 's an art of communication .
it tells a story . the story can reach into obscure desires .
it can reach into sources that are not explicitly available .
it can reach into millennia that have been buried , and return them in a just and unexpected equity .
so again , i think the notion that the best architecture is silent has never appealed to me .
silence maybe is good for a cemetery but not for a city .
cities should be full of vibrations , full of sound , full of music .
and that indeed is the architectural mission that i believe is important , is to create spaces that are vibrant , that are pluralistic , that can transform the most prosaic activities , and raise them to a completely different expectation .
create a shopping center , a swimming place that is more like a museum than like entertainment .
and these are our dreams .
and of course risk . i think architecture should be risky .
you know it costs a lot of money and so on , but yes , it should not play it safe .
it should not play it safe , because if it plays it safe it 's not moving us in a direction that we want to be .
and i think , of course , risk is what underlies the world .
world without risk would not be worth living .
so yes , i do believe that the risk we take in every building .
risks to create spaces that have never been cantilevered to that extent .
risks of spaces that have never been so dizzying , as they should be , for a pioneering city .
risks that really move architecture even with all its flaws , into a space which is much better that the ever again repeated hollowness of a ready-made thing .
and of course that is finally what i believe architecture to be .
it 's about space . it 's not about fashion .
it 's not about decoration .
it 's about creating with minimal means something which can not be repeated , can not be simulated in any other sphere .
and there of course is the space that we need to breathe , is the space we need to dream .
these are the spaces that are not just luxurious spaces for some of us , but are important for everybody in this world .
so again , it 's not about the changing fashions , changing theories .
it 's about carving out a space for trees .
it 's carving out a space where nature can enter the domestic world of a city .
a space where something which has never seen a light of day can enter into the inner workings of a density .
and i think that is really the nature of architecture .
now i am a believer in democracy .
i do n't like beautiful buildings built for totalitarian regimes .
where people can not speak , can not vote , can not do anything .
we too often admire those buildings . we think they are beautiful .
and yet when i think of the poverty of society which does n't give freedom to its people , i do n't admire those buildings .
so democracy , as difficult as it is , i believe in it .
and of course , at ground zero what else ?
it 's such a complex project .
it 's emotional . there is so many interests .
it 's political . there is so many parties to this project .
there is so many interests . there 's money . there 's political power .
there are emotions of the victims .
and yet , in all its messiness , in all its difficulties , i would not have liked somebody to say , " this is the tabula rasa , mister architect - do whatever you want . "
i think nothing good will come out of that .
i think architecture is about consensus .
and it is about the dirty word " compromise . " compromise is not bad .
compromise , if it 's artistic , if it is able to cope with its strategies - and there is my first sketch and the last rendering - it 's not that far away .
and yet , compromise , consensus , that is what i believe in .
and ground zero , despite all its difficulties , it 's moving forward .
it 's difficult . 2011 , 2013 . freedom tower , the memorial .
and that is where i end .
i was inspired when i came here as an immigrant on a ship like millions of others , looking at america from that point of view .
this is america . this is liberty .
this is what we dream about . its individuality , demonstrated in the skyline . it 's resilience .
and finally , it 's the freedom that america represents , not just to me , as an immigrant , but to everyone in the world . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i 've got a question .
so have you come to peace with the process that happened at ground zero and the loss of the original , incredible design that you came up with ?
daniel libeskind : look . we have to cure ourselves of the notion that we are authoritarian , that we can determine everything that happens .
we have to rely on others , and shape the process in the best way possible .
i came from the bronx . i was taught not to be a loser , not to be somebody who just gives up in a fight .
you have to fight for what you believe . you do n't always win everything you want to win . but you can steer the process .
and i believe that what will be built at ground zero will be meaningful , will be inspiring , will tell other generations of the sacrifices , of the meaning of this event .
not just for new york , but for the world .
chris anderson : thank you so much , daniel libeskind .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am a cultural omnivore , one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an ipod - an ipod that contains wagner and mozart , pop diva christina aguilera , country singer josh turner , gangsta rap artist kirk franklin , concerti , symphonies and more and more .
i 'm a voracious reader , a reader who deals with ian mcewan down to stephanie meyer .
i have read the " twilight " tetralogy .
and one who lives for my home theater , a home theater where i devour dvds , video-on-demand and a lot of television .
for me , " law and order : svu , " tine fey and " 30 rock " and " judge judy " - " the people are real , the cases are real , the rulings are final . "
now , i 'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions , especially my passion for judge judy , and you 'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us , but i 'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life , a passion for the live professional performing arts , performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire , yes , but jazz as well , modern dance , opera , theater and more and more and more .
you know , frankly it 's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology .
while we initially heralded the internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems , we now realize that the internet is , if anything , too effective in that regard .
depending on who you read , an arts organization or an artist , who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer , now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen sees every single day .
we now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time .
five years ago , gen-x 'ers spent 20.7 hours online and tv , the majority on tv .
gen-y 'ers spent even more - 23.8 hours , the majority online .
and now , a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games - a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined .
moreover , we 're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption .
thanks to the internet , we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it , delivered to our own doorstep .
we can shop at three in the morning or eight at night , ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types .
expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts - which have set curtain times , set venues , attendant inconveniences of travel , parking and the like - simply can not meet .
and we 're all acutely aware : what 's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony , opera or ballet ticket , when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free ?
these are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain .
but as particular as they feel to us , we know we 're not alone .
all of us are engaged in a seismic , fundamental realignment of culture and communications , a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry , the magazine industry , the book and publishing industry and more .
saddled in the performing arts as we are , by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming , locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues , where we charge exorbitant prices .
many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of tower records and ask ourselves , " are we next ? "
everyone i talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of adrienne rich , who , in " dreams of a common language , " wrote , " we are out in a country that has no language , no laws .
whatever we do together is pure invention .
the maps they gave us are out of date by years . "
and for those of you who love the arts , are n't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , rather than saying that we 're on the brink of our own annihilation , i prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation , a reformation like the religious reformation of the 16th century .
the arts reformation , like the religious reformation , is spurred in part by technology , with indeed , the printing press really leading the charge on the religious reformation .
both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion , internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models .
and at heart , both reformations , i think were asking the questions : who 's entitled to practice ?
how are they entitled to practice ?
and indeed , do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine ?
chris anderson , someone i trust you all know , editor-in-chief of wired magazine and author of " the long tail , " really was the first - for me - to nail a lot of this .
he wrote a long time ago , you know , thanks to the invention of the internet , web technology , mini-cams and more , the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history .
in the 1930s , if any of you wanted to make a movie , you had to work for warner brothers or rko because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more ?
and now who in this room does n't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second , third , or fourth movie ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- similarly , the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history .
again , in the ' 30s , warner brothers , rko did that for you .
now , go to youtube , facebook ; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom .
this double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market , a time when anyone is a potential author .
frankly , what we 're seeing now in this environment is a massive time , when the entire world is changing as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting .
but the number of arts participants , people who write poetry , who sing songs , who perform in church choirs , is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations .
this group , others have called the " pro ams , " amateur artists doing work at a professional level .
you see them on youtube , in dance competitions , film festivals and more .
they are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary , while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions .
ultimately , we now live in a world defined not by consumption , but by participation .
but i want to be clear , just as the religious reformation did not spell the end to the formal church or to the priesthood ; i believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance .
they currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity - not opulence - of dignity .
and they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home .
but to view them as synonymous is , by far , too short-sighted .
and indeed , while we 've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional , the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist , the professional artist who works , not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage ; but most frequently around women 's rights , or human rights , or on global warming issues or aids relief for more - not out of economic necessity , but out of a deep , organic conviction that the work that she or he , is called to do can not be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment .
today 's dance world is not defined solely by the royal winnipeg ballet or the national ballet of canada , but by liz lerman 's dance exchange - a multi-generational , professional dance company , whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82 , and who work with genomic scientists to embody the dna strand and with nuclear physicists at cern .
today 's professional theater community is defined , not only the shaw and stratford festivals , but by the cornerstone theater of los angeles - a collective of artists that after 9/11 , brought together 10 different religious communities - the bahia , the catholic , the muslim , the jewish , even the native american and the gay and lesbian communities of faith , helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play , where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing .
today 's performers , like rhodessa jones , work in women 's prisons , helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration , while today 's playwrights and directors work with youth gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more .
and indeed , i think , rather than being annihilated , the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been .
you know , we 've said for a long time , we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town .
and absolutely - i hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy , dollars spent in restaurants or on parking , at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes , the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more .
but the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward , especially in industries we ca n't even imagine yet , just as they have been central to the ipod and the computer game industries , which few , if any of us come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago .
business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence , the ability to listen deeply , to have empathy , to articulate change , to motivate others - the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter .
especially now , as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation , uninformed by social conscience ; we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters , and especially characters of the young people , who all too often , are subjected to bombardment of sensation , rather than digested experience .
ultimately , especially now in this world , where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws , in reality tv that thrives on humiliation , and in a context of analysis , where the thing we hear most repeatedly , day-in , day-out in the united states , in every train station , every bus station , every plane station is , " ladies and gentlemen , please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you , " when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion .
the arts , whatever they do , whenever they call us together , invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity .
god knows , if we ever needed that capacity in human history , we need it now .
you know , we 're bound together , not , i think by technology , entertainment and design , but by common cause .
we work to promote healthy vibrant societies , to ameliorate human suffering , to promote a more thoughtful , substantive , empathic world order .
i salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work , whatever your purpose may be .
i promise you the hand of the doris duke charitable foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come .
and i thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon .
thank you , and godspeed .
the first half of the 20th century was an absolute disaster in human affairs , a cataclysm .
we had the first world war , the great depression , the second world war and the rise of the communist nations .
and each one of these forces split the world , tore the world apart , divided the world .
and they threw up walls - political walls , trade walls , transportation walls , communication walls , iron curtains - which divided peoples and nations .
it was only in the second half of the 20th century out of this abyss .
trade walls began to come tumbling down .
here are some data on tariffs : starting at 40 percent , coming down to less than 5 percent .
we globalized the world . and what does that mean ?
it means that we extended cooperation across national boundaries ; we made the world more cooperative .
transportation walls came tumbling down .
you know in 1950 the typical ship carried 5,000 to 10,000 tons worth of goods .
today a container ship can carry 150,000 tons ; it can be manned with a smaller crew ; and unloaded faster than ever before .
communication walls , i do n't have to tell you - the internet - have come tumbling down .
and of course the iron curtains , political walls have come tumbling down .
now all of this has been tremendous for the world .
trade has increased .
here is just a little bit of data .
in 1990 , exports from china to the united states : 15 billion dollars .
by 2007 : over 300 billion dollars .
and perhaps most remarkably , at the beginning of the 21st century , really for the first time in modern history , growth extended to almost all parts of the world .
so china , i 've already mentioned , beginning around 1978 , around the time of the death of mao , growth - ten percent a year .
year after year after year , absolutely incredible .
never before in human history have so many people been raised out of such great poverty as happened in china .
china is the world 's greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades .
india , starting a little bit later , but in 1990 , begetting tremendous growth .
incomes at that time less than $ 1,000 per year .
and over the next 18 years have almost tripled .
growth of six percent a year . absolutely incredible .
now africa , sub-saharan africa - sub-saharan africa most resistant to growth .
and we can see the tragedy of africa in the first few bars here .
growth was negative .
people were actually getting poorer than their parents , and sometimes even poorer than their grandparents had been .
but at the end of the 20th century , the beginning of the 21st century , we saw growth in africa .
and i think , as you 'll see , there 's reasons for optimism , because i believe that the best is yet to come .
now why .
on the cutting edge today it 's new ideas which are driving growth .
and by that i mean it 's products for which the research and development costs are really high , and the manufacturing costs are low .
more than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge .
now ideas have this amazing property .
thomas jefferson , i think , really expressed this quite well .
he said , " he who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself , without lessening mine .
as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me . "
or to put it slightly differently : one apple feeds one man , but an idea can feed the world .
now this is not new . this is practically not new to tedsters .
this is practically the model of ted .
but what is new is that the greater function of ideas is going to drive growth even more than ever before .
this provides a reason why trade and globalization are even more important , more powerful than ever before , and are going to increase growth more than ever before .
and to explain why this is so , i have a question .
suppose that there are two diseases : one of them is rare , the other one is common , but if they are not treated they are equally severe .
if you had to choose , which would you rather have : the common disease or the rare disease ?
common , the common - i think that 's absolutely right , and why ? because there are more drugs to treat common diseases than there are to treat rare diseases .
the reason for this is incentives .
it costs about the same to produce a new drug whether that drug treats 1,000 people , 100,000 people , or a million people .
but the revenues are much greater if the drug treats a million people .
so the incentives are much larger to produce drugs which treat more people .
to put this differently : larger markets save lives .
in this case misery truly does love company .
now think about the following : if china and india were as rich as the united states is today , the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now .
now we are not there yet , but it is happening .
as other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously .
and that means an increase incentive to do research and development , which benefits everyone in the world .
larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas , whether it 's software , whether it 's a computer chip , whether it 's a new design .
for the hollywood people in the audience , this even explains why action movies have larger budgets than comedies : it 's because action movies translate easier into other languages and other cultures , so the market for those movies is larger .
people are willing to invest more , and the budgets are larger .
alright . well if larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas , how do we maximize that incentive ?
it 's by having one world market , by globalizing the world .
the way i like to put this is : one idea . ideas are meant to be shared , so one idea can serve one world , one market .
one idea , one world , one market .
well how else can we create new ideas ?
that 's one reason .
globalize trade .
how else can we create new ideas ?
well , more idea creators .
now idea creators , they come from all walks of life .
artists and innovators - many of the people you 've seen on this stage .
i 'm going to focus on scientists and engineers because i have some data on that , and i 'm a data person .
now , today , less than one-tenth of one percent of the world 's population are scientists and engineers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the united states has been an idea leader .
a large fraction of those people are in the united states .
but the u.s. is losing its idea leadership .
and for that i am very grateful .
that is a good thing .
it is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the united states , and a handful of other developed countries , have shouldered the entire burden of research and development .
but consider the following : if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the united states is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone , which are shared by everyone .
i think of the great indian mathematician , ramanujan .
how many ramanujans are there in india today toiling in the fields , barely able to feed themselves , when they could be feeding the world ?
now we 're not there yet .
but it is going to happen in this century .
the real tragedy of the last century is this : if you think about the world 's population as a giant computer , a massively parallel processor , then the great tragedy has been that billions of our processors have been off line .
but in this century china is coming on line .
india is coming on line .
africa is coming on line .
we will see an einstein in africa in this century .
here is just some data . this is china .
1996 : less than one million new university students in china per year ; 2006 : over five million .
now think what this means .
this means we all benefit when another country gets rich .
we should not fear other countries becoming wealthy .
that is something that we should embrace - a wealthy china , a wealthy india , a wealthy africa .
we need a greater demand for ideas - those larger markets i was talking about earlier - and a greater supply of ideas for the world .
now you can see some of the reasons why i 'm optimistic .
globalization is increasing the demand for ideas , the incentive to create new ideas .
investments in education are increasing the supply of new ideas .
in fact if you look at world history you can see some reasons for optimism .
from about the beginnings of humanity to 1500 : zero economic growth , nothing .
1500 to 1800 : maybe a little bit of economic growth , but less in a century than you expect to see in a year today .
1900s : maybe one percent .
twentieth century : a little bit over two percent .
twenty-first century could easily be 3.3 , even higher percent .
even at that rate , by 2100 average gdp per capita in the world will be $ 200,000 .
that 's not u.s. gdp per capita , which will be over a million , but world gdp per capita - $ 200,000 .
that 's not that far .
we wo n't make it .
but some of our grandchildren probably will .
and i should say , i think this is a rather modest prediction .
in kurzweilian terms this is gloomy .
in kurzweilian terms i 'm like the eeyore of economic growth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- alright what about problems ?
what about a great depression ?
well let 's take a look . let 's take a look at the great depression .
here is gdp per capita from 1900 to 1929 .
now let 's imagine that you were an economist in 1929 , trying to forecast future growth for the united states , not knowing that the economy was about to go off a cliff , not knowing that we were about to enter the greatest economic disaster certainly in the 20th century .
what would you have predicted , not knowing this ?
if you had based your prediction , your forecast on 1900 to 1929 you 'd have predicted something like this .
if you 'd been a little more optimistic - say , based upon the roaring twenties - you 'd have said this .
so what actually happened ?
we went off a cliff but we recovered .
in fact in the second half of the 20th century growth was even higher than anything you would have predicted based upon the first half of the 20th century .
so growth can wash away even what appears to be a great depression .
alright . what else ?
oil . oil . this was a big topic .
when i was writing up my notes oil was $ 140 per barrel .
so people were asking a question . they were saying , " is china drinking our milkshake ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there is some truth to this , in the sense that we have something of a finite resource , and increased growth is going to push up demand for that .
but i think i do n't have to tell this audience that a higher price of oil is not necessarily a bad thing .
moreover , as everyone knows , look - it 's energy , not oil , which counts .
and higher oil prices mean a greater incentive to invest in energy r & d.
you can see this in the data .
as oil prices go up , energy patents go up .
the world is much better equipped to overcome an increase in the price of oil today , than ever in the past , because of what i 'm talking about .
one idea , one world , one market .
so i 'm optimistic so long as we hew to these two ideas : to keep globalizing world markets , keep extending cooperation across national boundaries , and keep investing in education .
now the united states has a particularly important role to play in this : to keep our education system globalized , to keep our education system open to students from all over the world , because our education system is the candle that other students come to light their own candles .
now remember here what jefferson said .
jefferson said , " when they come and light their candles at ours , they gain light , and we are not darkened . "
but jefferson was n't quite right , was he ?
because the truth is , when they light their candles at ours , there is twice as much light available for everyone .
so my view is : be optimistic .
spread the ideas . spread the light .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i was five years old i fell in love with airplanes .
now i 'm talking about the ' 30s .
in the ' 30s an airplane had two wings and a round motor , and was always flown by a guy who looked like cary grant .
he had high leather boots , jodhpurs , an old leather jacket , a wonderful helmet and those marvelous goggles - and , inevitably , a white scarf , to flow in the wind .
he 'd always walk up to his airplane in a kind of saunter , devil-may-care saunter , flick the cigarette away , grab the girl waiting here , give her a kiss .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then mount his airplane , maybe for the last time .
of course i always wondered what would happen if he 'd kissed the airplane first .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this was real romance to me .
everything about flying in those years , which was - you have to stop and think for a moment - was probably the most advanced technological thing going on at the time .
so as a youngster , i tried to get close to this by drawing airplanes , constantly drawing airplanes .
it 's the way i got a part of this romance .
and of course , in a way , when i say romance , i mean in part the aesthetics of that whole situation .
i think the word is the holistic experience revolving around a product .
the product was that airplane .
but it built a romance .
even the parts of the airplane had french names .
ze fuselage , ze empanage , ze nessal .
you know , from a romance language .
so that it was something that just got into your spirit .
it did mine .
and i decided i had to get closer than just drawing fantasy airplanes .
i wanted to build airplanes .
so i built model airplanes .
and i found that in doing the model airplanes the appearance drawings were not enough .
you could n't transfer those to the model itself .
if you wanted it to fly you had to learn the discipline of flying .
you had to learn about aeronautics .
you had to learn what made an airplane stay in the air .
and of course , as a model in those years , you could n't control it .
so it had to be self-righting , and stay up without crashing .
so i had to give up the approach of drawing the fantasy shapes and convert it to technical drawings - the shape of the wing , the shape of the fuselage and so on - and build an airplane over these drawings that i knew followed some of the principles of flying .
and in so doing , i could produce a model that would fly , stay in the air .
and it had , once it was in the air , some of this romance that i was in love with .
well the act of drawing airplanes led me to , when i had the opportunity to choose a course in school , led me to sign up for aeronautical engineering .
and when i was sitting in classes - in which no one asked me to draw an airplane - to my surprise .
i had to learn mathematics and mechanics and all this sort of thing .
i 'd wile away my time drawing airplanes in the class .
one day a young man looked over my shoulder , he said , " you draw very well .
you should be in the art department . "
and i said , " why ? "
and he said , " well for one thing , there are more girls there . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so my romance was temporarily shifted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i went into art because they appreciated drawing .
studied painting ; did n't do very well at that .
went through design , some architecture .
eventually hired myself out as a designer .
and for the following 25 years , living in italy , living in america , i doled out a piece of this romance to anybody who 'd pay for it - this sense , this aesthetic feeling , for the experience revolving around a designed object .
and it exists .
any of you who rode the automobiles - was it yesterday ? - at the track , you know the romance revolving around those high performance cars .
well in 25 years i was mostly putting out pieces of this romance and not getting a lot back in because design on call does n't always connect you with a circumstance in which you can produce things of this nature .
so after 25 years i began to feel as though i was running dry .
and i quit .
and i started up a very small operation - went from 40 people to one , in an effort to rediscover my innocence .
i wanted to get back where the romance was .
and i could n't choose airplanes because they had gotten sort of unromantic at that point , even though i 'd done a lot of airplane work , on the interiors .
so i chose furniture .
and i chose chairs specifically because i knew something about them .
i 'd designed a lot of chairs , over the years for tractors and trucks and submarines - all kinds of things .
but not office chairs .
so i started doing that .
and i found that there were ways to duplicate the same approach that i used to use on the airplane .
only this time , instead of the product being shaped by the wind , it was shaped by the human body .
so the discipline was - as in the airplane you learn a lot about how to deal with the air , for a chair you have to learn a lot about how to deal with the body , and what the body needs , wants , indicates it needs .
and that 's the way , ultimately after some ups and downs , i ended up designing the chair i 'm going to show you .
i should say one more thing . when i was doing those model airplanes , i did everything .
i conceived the kind of airplane .
i basically engineered it .
i built it .
and i flew it .
and that 's the way i work now .
when i started this chair it was not a preconceived notion .
design nowadays , if you mean it , you do n't start with styling sketches .
i started with a lot of loose ideas , roughly eight or nine years ago .
and the loose ideas had something to do with what i knew happened with people in the office , at the work place - people who worked , and used task seating , a great many of them sitting in front of a computer all day long .
and i felt , the one thing they do n't need , is a chair that interferes with their main reason for sitting there .
so i took the approach that the chair should do as much for them as humanly possible or as mechanistically possible so that they did n't have to fuss with it .
so my idea was that , instead of sitting down and reaching for a lot of controls , that you would sit on the chair , and it would automatically balance your weight against the force required to recline .
now that may not mean a lot to some of you .
but you know most good chairs do recline because it 's beneficial to open up this joint between your legs and your upper body for better breathing and better flow .
so that if you sit down on my chair , whether you 're five feet tall or six foot six , it always deals with your weight and transfers the amount of force required to recline in a way that you do n't have to look for something to adjust .
i 'll tell you right up front , this is a trade off .
there are drawbacks to this .
one is : you ca n't accommodate everybody .
there are some very light people , some extremely heavy people , maybe people with a lot of bulk up top .
they begin to fall off the end of your chart .
but the compromise , i felt , was in my favor because most people do n't adjust their chairs .
they will sit in them forever .
i had somebody on the bus out to the racetrack tell me about his sister calling him .
he said she had one of the new , better chairs .
she said , " oh i love it . "
she said , " but it 's too high . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he said , " well i 'll come over and look at it . "
he came over and looked at it .
he reached down . he pulled a lever . and the chair sank down .
she said , " oh it 's wonderful . how did you do that ? "
and he showed her the lever .
well , that 's typical of a lot of us working in chairs .
and why should you get a 20-page manual about how to run a chair ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i had one for a wristwatch once . 20 pages .
anyway , i felt that it was important that you did n't have to make an adjustment in order to get this kind of action .
the other thing i felt was that armrests had never really been properly approached from the standpoint of how much of an aid they could be to your work life .
but i felt it was too much to ask to have to adjust each individual armrest in order to get it where you wanted .
so i spent a long time .
i said i worked eight or nine years on it .
and each of these things went along sort of in parallel but incrementally were a problem of their own .
i worked a long time on figuring out how to move the arms over a much greater arc - that is up and down - and make them a lot easier , so that you did n't have to use a button .
and so after many trials , many failures , we came up with a very simple arrangement in which we could just move one arm or the other .
and they go up easily .
and stop where you want .
you can put them down , essentially out of the way .
no arms at all .
or you can pull them up where you want them .
and this was another thing that i felt , while not nearly as romantic as cary grant , nevertheless begins to grab a little bit of aesthetic operation , aesthetic performance into a product .
the next area that was of interest to me was the fact that reclining was a very important factor .
and the more you can recline , in a way , the better it is .
the more the angle between here and here opens up - and nowadays , with a screen in front of you , you do n't want to have your eye drop too far in the recline , so we keep it at more or less the same level - but you transfer weight off your tailbones .
would everybody put their hand under their bottom and feel their tailbone ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you feel that bone under there ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just your own .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's two of them , one on either side .
all the weight of your upper torso - your arms , your head - goes right down through your back , your spine , into those bones when you sit .
and that 's a lot of load .
just relieving your arms with armrests takes 20 percent of that load off .
now that , if your spine is not held in a good position , will help bend your spine the wrong way , and so on .
so to unload that great weight - if that indeed exists - you can recline .
when you recline you take away a lot of that load off your bottom end , and transfer it to your back .
at the same time , as i say , you open up this joint .
and breathability is good .
but to do that , if you have any amount of recline , it gets to the point where you need a headrest because nearly always , automatically hold your head in a vertical position , see ?
as i recline , my head says more or less vertical .
well if you 're reclined a great deal , you have to use muscle force to hold your head there .
so that 's where a headrest comes in .
now headrest is a challenge because you want it to adjust enough so that it 'll fit , you know , a tall guy and a short girl .
so here we are .
i 've got five inches of adjustment here in order to get the headrest in the right place .
but then i knew from experience and looking around in offices where there were chairs with headrests that nobody would ever bother to reach back and turn a knob and adjust the headrest to put it in position .
and you need it in a different position when you 're upright , then when you 're reclined .
so i knew that had to be solved , and had to be automatic .
so if you watch this chair as i recline , the headrest comes up to meet my neck .
ideally you want to put the head support in the cranial area , right there .
so that part of it took a long time to work out .
and there is a variety of other things : the shape of the cushions , the gel we put .
we stole the idea from bicycle seats , and put gel in the cushions and in the armrests to absorb point load - distributes the loading so you do n't get hard spots .
you cant hit your elbow on bottom .
and i did want to demonstrate the fact that the chair can accommodate people .
while you 're sitting in it you can adjust it down for the five-footer , or you can adjust it for the six-foot-six guy - all within the scope of a few simple adjustments .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love video games .
i 'm also slightly in awe of them .
i 'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination , in terms of technology , in terms of concept .
but i think , above all , i 'm in awe at their power to motivate , to compel us , to transfix us , like really nothing else we 've ever invented has quite done before .
and i think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this .
and in particular , i think we can learn things about learning .
now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media .
from about 10 billion in 1990 , it 's worth 50 billion dollars globally today , and it shows no sign of slowing down .
in four years ' time , it 's estimated it 'll be worth over 80 billion dollars .
that 's about three times the recorded music industry .
this is pretty stunning , but i do n't think it 's the most telling statistic of all .
the thing that really amazes me is that , today , people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games .
this is a screenshot from the virtual game world , entropia universe .
earlier this year , a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars .
and this is a titan class ship in the space game , eve online .
and this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build , plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that .
and yet , many of these get built .
at the other end of the scale , the game farmville that you may well have heard of , has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day .
this may all sound really quite alarming to some people , an index of something worrying or wrong in society .
but we 're here for the good news , and the good news is that i think we can explore why this very real human effort , this very intense generation of value , is occurring .
and by answering that question , i think we can take something extremely powerful away .
and i think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards .
and specifically , it 's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively .
now if we look at what 's going on in someone 's head when they are being engaged , two quite different processes are occurring .
on the one hand , there 's the wanting processes .
this is a bit like ambition and drive - i 'm going to do that . i 'm going to work hard .
on the other hand , there 's the liking processes , fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back .
it 's a really great image . it 's pretty cool .
it 's from the game world of warcraft with more than 10 million players globally , one of whom is me , another of whom is my wife .
and this kind of a world , this vast flying beast you can ride around , shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking .
because it 's very powerful . it 's pretty awesome .
it gives you great powers .
your ambition is satisfied , but it 's very beautiful .
it 's a very great pleasure to fly around .
and so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement .
but this is n't the really interesting stuff .
the really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it .
because what you can measure in virtuality is everything .
every single thing that every single person who 's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured .
the biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players , about what everybody does - far more detail than you 'd ever get from any website .
and this allows something very special to happen in games .
it 's something called the reward schedule .
and by this , i mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate , the nature , the type , the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort .
now , to try and explain this in sort of real terms , i want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games .
go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item .
let 's say , for the sake of argument , my mission is to get 15 pies and i can get 15 pies by killing these cute , little monsters .
simple game quest .
now you can think about this , if you like , as a problem about boxes .
i 've got to keep opening boxes .
i do n't know what 's inside them until i open them .
and i go around opening box after box until i 've got 15 pies .
now , if you take a game like warcraft , you can think about it , if you like , as a great box-opening effort .
the game 's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes , getting better and better stuff in them .
this sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling .
and the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data .
let 's think about probability .
if we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies , we want to make sure it 's neither too easy , nor too difficult , to find a pie .
so what do you do ? well , you look at a million people - no , 100 million people , 100 million box openers - and you work out , if you make the pie rate about 25 percent - that 's neither too frustrating , nor too easy .
it keeps people engaged .
but of course , that 's not all you do - there 's 15 pies .
now , i could make a game called piecraft , where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies .
that would be very boring .
fifteen is a pretty optimal number .
you find that - you know , between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going .
but we do n't just have pies in the boxes .
there 's 100 percent up here .
and what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened , there 's something in it , some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged .
in most adventure games , it 's a little bit in-game currency , a little bit experience .
but we do n't just do that either .
we also say there 's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement .
there 's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item .
there 's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item .
and each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item .
and also , we say , " well , how many monsters ? should i have the entire world full of a billion monsters ? "
no , we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time .
so i 'm drawn on . it 's not too easy , not too difficult .
so all this is very powerful .
but we 're in virtuality . these are n't real boxes .
so we can do some rather amazing things .
we notice , looking at all these people opening boxes , that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies , their perception shifts , they start to get a bit bored , a bit testy .
they 're not rational about probability .
they think this game is unfair .
it 's not giving me my last two pies . i 'm going to give up .
if they 're real boxes , there 's not much we can do , but in a game we can just say , " right , well .
when you get to 13 pies , you 've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now . "
keep you engaged . look at what people do - adjust the world to match their expectation .
our games do n't always do this .
and one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item , they make very sure another one does n't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value , to keep it special .
and the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways .
over tens and hundreds of thousands of years , we evolved to find certain things stimulating , and as very intelligent , civilized beings , we 're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning .
but now , we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes .
so what does all this mean in practice ?
well , i 've come up with seven things that , i think , show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games .
the first one is very simple : experience bars measuring progress - something that 's been talked about brilliantly by people like jesse schell earlier this year .
it 's already been done at the university of indiana in the states , among other places .
it 's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces , you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny , tiny , tiny little increments which they feel are their own .
and everything comes towards that , and they watch it creeping up , and they own that as it goes along .
second , multiple long and short-term aims - 5,000 pies , boring , 15 pies , interesting .
so , you give people lots and lots of different tasks .
you say , it 's about doing 10 of these questions , but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time , but another task is collaborating with other people , another task is showing you 're working five times , another task is hitting this particular target .
you break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities .
third , you reward effort .
it 's your 100 percent factor . games are brilliant at this .
every time you do something , you get credit ; you get a credit for trying .
you do n't punish failure . you reward every little bit of effort - a little bit of gold , a little bit of credit . you 've done 20 questions - tick .
it all feeds in as minute reinforcement .
fourth , feedback .
this is absolutely crucial , and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this .
if you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we 've been hearing amazing things about , it 's very , very hard for people to learn if they can not link consequences to actions .
pollution , global warming , these things - the consequences are distant in time and space .
it 's very hard to learn , to feel a lesson .
but if you can model things for people , if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes , then they can learn a lesson , they can see , they can move on , they can understand .
and fifth , the element of uncertainty .
now this is the neurological goldmine , if you like , because a known reward excites people , but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward , the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty , that they did n't quite know whether they were going to get it or not .
the 25 percent . this lights the brain up .
and if you think about using this in testing , in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training , you can transform the levels of people 's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism .
when we do n't quite predict something perfectly , we get really excited about it .
we just want to go back and find out more .
as you probably know , the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine .
it 's associated with reward-seeking behavior .
and something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the university of bristol in the u.k. , where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain .
and what this means is we can predict learning , we can predict enhanced engagement , these windows , these windows of time , in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level .
and two things really flow from this .
the first has to do with memory , that we can find these moments .
when someone is more likely to remember , we can give them a nugget in a window .
and the second thing is confidence , that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver , make them more willing to take risks , more willing to take on difficulty , harder to discourage .
this can all seem very sinister .
but you know , sort of " our brains have been manipulated ; we 're all addicts . "
the word " addiction " is thrown around .
there are real concerns there .
but the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people .
this is what really excites us .
in reward terms , it 's not money ; it 's not being given cash - that 's nice - it 's doing stuff with our peers , watching us , collaborating with us .
and i want to tell you a quick story about 1999 - a video game called everquest .
and in this video game , there were two really big dragons , and you had to team up to kill them - 42 people , up to 42 to kill these big dragons .
that 's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items .
so players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other , fairly and transparently .
what happened was , they paid each other a virtual currency they called " dragon kill points . "
and every time you turned up to go on a mission , you got paid in dragon kill points .
they tracked these on a separate website .
so they tracked their own private currency , and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted - all organized by the players themselves .
now the staggering system , not just that this worked in everquest , but that today , a decade on , every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system - tens of millions of people .
and the success rate is at close to 100 percent .
this is a player-developed , self-enforcing , voluntary currency , and it 's incredibly sophisticated player behavior .
and i just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world .
let 's start with business .
i mean , we 're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation .
we 're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters .
and i just look at this , and i think , yes , we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets , by using elements of uncertainty , by using these multiple targets , by using a grand , underlying reward and incentive system , by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups , in terms of streets to collaborate and compete , to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see .
in terms of education , perhaps most obviously of all , we can transform how we engage people .
we can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment .
we can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks .
we can use calculated randomness .
we can reward effort consistently as everything fields together .
and we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together , these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms .
government , well , one thing that comes to mind is the u.s. government , among others , is literally starting to pay people to lose weight .
so we 're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity .
but again , those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal , to take the data , to take the observations , of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement .
and in the end , it 's this word , " engagement , " that i want to leave you with .
it 's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games .
but it 's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games .
and if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards , then i really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i knew i was going to come to speak to you , i thought , " i gotta call my mother . "
i have a little cuban mother - she 's about that big .
four feet . nothing larger than the sum of her figurative parts .
you still with me ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- i called her up .
" hello , how 're you doing , baby ? "
" hey , ma , i got to talk to you . "
" you 're talking to me already . what 's the matter ? "
i said , " i 've got to talk to a bunch of nice people . "
" you 're always talking to nice people , except when you went to the white house . "
" ma , do n't start ! "
and i told her i was coming to ted , and she said , " what 's the problem ? "
and i said , " well , i 'm not sure . "
i said , " i have to talk to them about stories .
it 's ' technology , entertainment and design . " ' and she said , " well , you design a story when you make it up , it 's entertainment when you tell it , and you 're going to use a microphone . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " you 're a peach , ma . pop there ? "
" what 's the matter ? the pearls of wisdom leaping from my lips like lemmings is no good for you ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then my pop got on there .
my pop , he 's one of the old souls , you know - old cuban man from camaguey .
camaguey is a province in cuba .
he 's from florida .
he was born there in 1924 .
he grew up in a bohio of dirt floors , and the structure was the kind used by the tainos , our old arawak ancestors .
my father is at once quick-witted , wickedly funny , and then poignancy turns on a dime and leaves you breathless .
" papi , help . "
" i already heard your mother . i think she 's right . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " after what i just told you ? "
my whole life , my father 's been there .
so we talked for a few minutes , and he said , " why do n't you tell them what you believe ? "
i love that , but we do n't have the time .
good storytelling is crafting a story that someone wants to listen to .
great story is the art of letting go .
so i 'm going to tell you a little story .
remember , this tradition comes to us not from the mists of avalon , back in time , but further still , before we were scratching out these stories on papyrus , or we were doing the pictographs on walls in moist , damp caves .
back then , we had an urge , a need , to tell the story .
when lexus wants to sell you a car , they 're telling you a story .
have you been watching the commercials ?
because every one of us has this desire , for once - just once - to tell our story and have it heard .
there are stories you tell from stages .
there 's stories that you may tell in a small group of people with some good wine .
and there 's stories you tell late at night to a friend , maybe once in your life .
and then there are stories that we whisper into a stygian darkness .
i 'm not telling you that story .
i 'm telling you this one .
it 's called , " you 're going to miss me . "
it 's about human connection .
my cuban mother , which i just briefly introduced you to in that short character sketch , came to the united states one thousand years ago .
i was born in 19 - i forget , and i came to this country with them in the aftermath of the cuban revolution .
we went from havana , cuba to decatur , georgia .
and decatur , georgia 's a small southern town .
and in that little southern town , i grew up , and grew up hearing these stories .
but this story only happened a few years ago .
i called my mom .
it was a saturday morning .
and i was calling about how to make ajiaco . it 's a cuban meal .
it 's delicious . it 's savory .
it makes spit froth in the little corners of your mouth - is that enough ? it makes your armpits juicy , you know ?
that kind of food , yeah .
this is the sensory part of the program , people .
i called my mother , and she said , " carmen , i need you to come , please .
i need to go to the mall , and you know your father now , he takes a nap in the afternoon , and i got to go .
i got an errand to run . "
let me parenthetically pause here and tell you - esther , my mother , had stopped driving several years ago , to the collective relief of the entire city of atlanta .
any vehicular outing with that woman from the time i was a young child , guys , naturally included flashing , blue lights .
but she 'd become adept at dodging the boys in blue , and when she did meet them , oh , she had wonderful , well , rapport .
" ma 'am , did you know that was a light you just ran ? "
-lrb- spanish -rrb- " you do n't speak english ? "
" no . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but eventually , every dog has its day , and she ended up in traffic court , where she bartered with the judge for a discount .
there 's a historical marker .
but now she was a septuagenarian , she 'd stopped driving .
and that meant that everyone in the family had to sign up to take her to have her hair dyed , you know , that peculiar color of blue that matches her polyester pants suit , you know , same color as the buick .
anybody ? all right .
little picks on the legs , where she does her needlepoint , and leaves little loops .
rockports - they 're for this .
that 's why they call them that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is her ensemble .
and this is the woman that wants me to come on a saturday morning when i have a lot to do , but it does n't take long because cuban guilt is a weighty thing .
i 'm not going political on you but ... and so , i go to my mother 's .
i show up . she 's in the carport .
of course , they have a carport .
the kind with the corrugated roof , you know .
the buick 's parked outside , and she 's jingling , jangling a pair of keys .
" i got a surprise for you , baby ! "
" we taking your car ? "
" not we , i. "
and she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a catastrophe .
somebody 's storytelling . interactive art . you can talk to me .
oh , a driver 's license , a perfectly valid driver 's license .
issued , evidently , by the dmv in her own county of gwinnett .
blithering fucking idiots .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " is that thing real ? "
" i think so . "
" can you even see ? "
" i guess i must . "
" oh , jesus . "
she gets into the car - she 's sitting on two phone books .
i ca n't even make this part up because she 's that tiny .
she 's engineered an umbrella so she can - bam ! - slam the door .
her daughter , me , the village idiot with the ice cream cone in the middle of her forehead , is still standing there , slack-jawed .
" you coming ? you no coming ? "
" oh , my god . " i said , " ok , fine . does pop know you 're driving ? "
" are you kidding me ? "
" how are you doing it ? "
" he 's got to sleep sometime . "
and so we left my father fast asleep , because i knew he 'd kill me if i let her go by herself , and we get in the car .
puts it in reverse . fifty-five out of the driveway , in reverse .
i am buckling in seatbelts from the front .
i 'm yanking them in from the back . i 'm doing double knots .
i mean , i 've got a mouth as dry as the kalahari desert .
i 've got a white-knuckle grip on the door . you know what i 'm talking about ?
and she 's whistling , and finally i do the kind of birth breathing - you know , that one ?
only a couple of women are going uh-huh , uh-huh , uh-huh . right .
and i said , " ma , would you slow down ? "
because now she 's picked up the highway 285 , the perimeter around atlanta , which encompasses now - there 's seven lanes , she 's on all of them , y 'all .
i said , " ma , pick a lane ! "
" they give you seven lanes , they expect you to use them . "
and there she goes , right .
i do n't believe for a minute she has been out and not been stopped .
so , i think , hey , we can talk . it 'll be a diversion .
it 'll help my breathing . it 'll do something for my pulse , maybe .
" mommy , i know you have been stopped . "
" no , no , what you talking about ? "
" you have a license . how long have you been driving ? "
" four or five days . "
" yeah . and you have n't been stopped ? "
" i did not get a ticket . "
i said , " yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , but come on , come on , come on . "
" ok , so i stopped at a light and there 's a guy , you know , in the back . "
" would this guy have , like , a blue uniform and a terrified look on his face ? "
" you were n't there , do n't start . "
" come on . you got a ticket ? "
" no . " she explained , " the man " - i have to tell you as she did , because it loses something if i do n't , you know - " he come to the window , and he does a thing like this , which tells me he 's pretty old , you know .
so i look up and i 'm thinking , maybe he 's still going to think i 'm kind of cute . "
" ma , are you still doing that ? "
" if it works , it works , baby .
so , i say , ' perdon , yo no hablo ingles . ' well , would n't you know , he had been in honduras for the peace corps . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he 's talking to her , and at some point she says , " then , you know , it was it . that was it . it was done . "
" yeah ? what ?
he gave you a ticket ? he did n't give you a ticket ? what ? "
" no , i look up , and the light , she change . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you should be terrified .
now , i do n't know if she 's toying with me , kind of like a cat batting back a mouse , batting back a mouse - left paw , right paw , left paw , right paw - but by now , we 've reached the mall .
now , you have all been at a mall during the holidays , yes ?
talk to me . yes . yes . you can say yes .
audience : yes .
carmen agra deedy : all right , then you know that you have now entered parking lot purgatory , praying to that saint of perpetual availability that as you join that serpentine line of cars crawling along , some guy 's going to turn on the brake lights just as you pull up behind him .
but that does n't happen most of the time , right ?
so , first i say , " ma , why are we here ? "
" you mean , like , in the car ? "
" no , do n't - why are we here today ?
it 's saturday . it 's the holidays . "
" because i have to exchange your father 's underwear . "
now , see , this is the kind of machiavellian thinking , that you really have to - you know , in my mind , it 's a rabbit 's warren , this woman 's mind .
do i want to walk in , because unless i have ariadne 's thread to anchor - enough metaphors for you ? - somewhere , i may not get out .
but you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " why do we have to take pop 's underwear back now ?
and why ? what is wrong with his underwear ? "
" it will upset you . "
" it wo n't upset me . why ? what ? is something wrong with him ? "
" no , no , no . the only thing with him is , he 's an idiot .
i sent him to the store , which was my first mistake , and he went to buy underwear , and he bought the grippers , and he 's supposed to buy the boxers . "
" why ? "
" i read it on the intersnet . you can not have children . "
" oh , my god ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- olivia ? huh ? huh ?
by now , we have now crawled another four feet , and my mother finally says to me , " i knew it , i knew it .
i 'm an immigrant . we make a space . what i tell you ? right there . "
and she points out the passenger window , and i look out , and three - three - aisles down , " look , the chevy . "
you want to laugh , but you do n't know - you 're that politically corrected , have you noticed ?
correct the other direction now , it 's ok .
" look , the chevy - he 's coming this way . "
" mama , mama , mama , wait , wait , wait . the chevy is three aisles away . "
she looks at me like i 'm her , you know , her moron child , the cretin , the one she 's got to speak to very slowly and distinctly .
" i know that , honey . get out of the car and go stand in the parking space till i get there . "
ok , i want a vote . come on , come on . no , no .
how many of you once in your - you were a kid , you were an adult - you stood in a parking space to hold it for someone ?
see , we 're a secret club with a secret handshake .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and years of therapy later , we 're doing great .
we 're doing great . we 're doing fine .
well , i stood up to her .
this is - you know , you 'd think by now i 'm - and still holding ?
i said , " no way , ma , you have embarrassed me my entire life . "
of course , her comeback is , " when have i embarrassed you ? "
-lrb- spanish -rrb- and she 's still talking while she puts the car in park , hits the emergency brake , opens the door , and with a spryness astounding in a woman her age , she jumps out of the car , knocks out the phone books , and then she walks around - she 's carrying her cheap kmart purse with her - around the front of the car .
she has amazing land speed for a woman her age , too .
before i know it , she has skiddled across the parking lot and in between the cars , and people behind me , with that kind of usual religious charity that the holidays bring us , wah-wah wah-wah .
" i 'm coming . " italian hand signals follow .
i scoot over . i close the door . i leave the phone books .
this is new and fast , just so you - are you still with us ?
we 'll wait for the slow ones . ok .
i start , and this is where a child says to me - and the story does n't work if i tell you about her before , because this is my laconic child .
a brevity , brevity of everything with this child .
you know , she eats small portions .
language is something to be meted out in small phonemes , you know - just little hmm , hmm-hmm .
she carries a mean spiral notebook and a pen .
she wields great power .
she listens , because that 's what people who tell stories do first .
but she pauses occasionally and says , " how do you spell that ? what year ? ok . "
when she writes the expose in about 20 years , do n't believe a word of it .
but this is my daughter , lauren , my remarkable daughter , my borderline asperger 's kid .
bless you , dr. watson .
she says , " ma , you got to look ! "
now , when this kid says i got to look , you know .
but it is n't like i have n't seen this crime scene before .
i grew up with this woman .
i said , " lauren , you know what , give me a play-by-play . i ca n't . "
" no , mama , you got to look . "
i got to look . you got to look .
do n't you want to look ?
there she is .
i look in bewildered awe : she 's standing , those rockports slightly apart , but grounded .
she 's holding out that cheap kmart purse , and she is wielding it .
she 's holding back tons of steel with the sheer force of her little personality , in that crone-ish voice , saying things like , " back it up , buddy ! no , it 's reserved ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ready ? brace yourselves . here it comes .
" no , my daughter , she 's coming in the buick .
honey , sit up so they can see you . "
oh , jesus . oh , jesus .
i finally come - and now , it 's the south .
i do n't know what part of the country you live in .
i think we all secretly love stories .
we all secretly want our blankie and our boo bear .
we want to curl up and say , " tell it to me , tell it to me .
come on , honey , tell it to me . "
but in the south , we love a good story .
people have pulled aside , i mean , they 've come out of that queue line , they have popped their trunks , pulled out lawn chairs and cool drinks .
bets are placed .
" i 'm with the little lady . damn ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she 's bringing me in with a slight salsa movement .
she is , after all , cuban .
i 'm thinking , " accelerator , break . accelerator , break . "
like you 've never thought that in your life ? right ? yeah .
i pull in . i put the car in park .
engine 's still running - mine , not the car .
i jump out next to her going , " do n't you move ! "
" i 'm not going anywhere . "
she 's got front seat in a greek tragedy .
i come out , and there 's esther .
she 's hugging the purse .
" que ? " which means " what , " and so much more .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " ma , have you no shame ?
people are watching us all around , " right ?
now , some of them you 've got to make up , people .
secret of the trade .
guess what ? some of these stories i sculpt a little , here and there .
some , they 're just right there , right there . put them right there .
she says this to me .
after i say - let me refresh you - " have you no shame ? "
" no . i gave it up with pantyhose - they 're both too binding . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , you can clap , but then you 're about 30 seconds from the end .
i 'm about to snap like a brittle twig , when suddenly someone taps me on the shoulder .
intrepid soul .
i 'm thinking , " this is my kid . how dare she ?
she jumped out of that car . "
that 's ok , because my mother yells at me , i yell at her .
it 's a beautiful hierarchy , and it works .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i turn around , but it 's not a child . it 's a young woman , a little taller than i , pale green , amused eyes .
with her is a young man - husband , brother , lover , it 's not my job .
and she says , " pardon me , ma 'am " - that 's how we talk down there - " is that your mother ? "
i said , " no , i follow little old women around parking lots to see if they 'll stop . yes , it 's my mother ! "
the boy , now , he says . " well , what my sister meant " - they look at each other , it 's a knowing glance - " god , she 's crazy ! "
i said , -lrb- spanish -rrb- , and the young girl and the young boy say , " no , no , honey , we just want to know one more thing . "
i said , " look , please , let me take care of her , ok , because i know her , and believe me , she 's like a small atomic weapon , you know , you just want to handle her really gingerly . "
and the girl goes , " i know , but , i mean , i swear to god , she reminds us of our mother . "
i almost miss it .
he turns to her on the heel of his shoe .
it 's a half-whisper , " god , i miss her . "
they turn then , shoulder to shoulder , and walk away , lost in their own reverie .
memories of some maddening woman who was the luck of their dna draw .
and i turn to esther , who 's rocking on those ' ports , and says , " you know what , honey ? "
" what , ma ? "
" i 'm going to drive you crazy probably for about 14 , 15 more years , if you 're lucky , but after that , honey , you 're going to miss me . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's how we traveled in the year 1900 .
that 's an open buggy . it does n't have heating .
it does n't have air conditioning .
that horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound , and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains .
that 's a boeing 707 .
only 60 years later , it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound , and we do n't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust .
so i started wondering and pondering , could it be that the best years of american economic growth are behind us ?
and that leads to the suggestion , maybe economic growth is almost over .
some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial .
there are four headwinds that are just hitting the american economy in the face .
they 're demographics , education , debt and inequality .
they 're powerful enough to cut growth in half .
so we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline .
and here 's my theme : because of the headwinds , if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years , growth is cut in half .
if innovation is less powerful , invents less great , wonderful things , then growth is going to be even lower than half of history .
now here 's eight centuries of economic growth .
the vertical axis is just percent per year of growth , zero percent a year , one percent a year , two percent a year .
the white line is for the u.k. , and then the u.s.
takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900 , when the line switches to red .
you 'll notice that , for the first four centuries , there 's hardly any growth at all , just 0.2 percent .
then growth gets better and better .
it maxes out in the 1930s , ' 40s and ' 50s , and then it starts slowing down , and here 's a cautionary note .
that last downward notch in the red line is not actual data .
that is a forecast that i made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent .
but you know what the actual facts are ?
you know what the growth in per-person income has been in the united states in the last six years ?
negative .
this led to a fantasy .
what if i try to fit a curved line to this historical record ?
i can make the curved line end anywhere i wanted , but i decided i would end it at 0.2 , just like the u.k. growth for the first four centuries .
now the history that we 've achieved is that we 've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period , 1891 to 2007 , and remember it 's been a little bit negative since 2007 .
but if growth slows down , instead of doubling our standard of living every generation , americans in the future ca n't expect to be twice as well off as their parents , or even a quarter -lsb- more well off than -rsb- their parents .
now we 're going to change and look at the level of per capita income .
the vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today 's prices .
you 'll notice that in 1891 , over on the left , we were at about 5,000 dollars .
today we 're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population .
now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years ?
well , it 's a matter of arithmetic .
two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years .
that means we 'd go from 44,000 to 180,000 .
well , we 're not going to do that , and the reason is the headwinds .
the first headwind is demographics .
it 's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity , rises faster than output per hour , if hours per person increased .
and we got that gift back in the ' 70s and ' 80s when women entered the labor force .
but now it 's turned around .
now hours per person are shrinking , first because of the retirement of the baby boomers , and second because there 's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution .
the next headwind is education .
we 've got problems all over our educational system despite race to the top .
in college , we 've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care .
we have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt , and our college completion rate is 15 points , 15 percentage points below canada .
we have a lot of debt .
our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing .
consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today .
and everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of gdp at a very rapid rate , and the only way that 's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements , also called transfer payments .
and that gets us down from the 1.5 , where we 've reached for education , down to 1.3 .
and then we have inequality .
over the 15 years before the financial crisis , the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we 've been talking about before .
all the rest went to the top one percent .
so that brings us down to 0.8 .
and that 0.8 is the big challenge .
are we going to grow at 0.8 ?
if so , that 's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years .
so let 's see what some of those inventions were .
if you wanted to read in 1875 at night , you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp .
they created pollution , they created odors , they were hard to control , the light was dim , and they were a fire hazard .
by 1929 , electric light was everywhere .
we had the vertical city , the invention of the elevator .
central manhattan became possible .
and then , in addition to that , at the same time , hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools , all achieved by electricity .
electricity was also very helpful in liberating women .
women , back in the late 19th century , spent two days a week doing the laundry .
they did it on a scrub board .
then they had to hang the clothes out to dry .
then they had to bring them in .
the whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week .
and then we had the electric washing machine .
and by 1950 , they were everywhere .
but the women still had to shop every day , but no they did n't , because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator .
back in the late 19th century , the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating .
the bedrooms were cold . they were unheated .
but by 1929 , certainly by 1950 , we had central heating everywhere .
what about the internal combustion engine , which was invented in 1879 ?
in america , before the motor vehicle , transportation depended entirely on the urban horse , which dropped , without restraint , 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine .
that comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities .
those horses also ate up fully one quarter of american agricultural land .
that 's the percentage of american agricultural land it took to feed the horses .
of course , when the motor vehicle was invented , and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929 , that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export .
and here 's an interesting ratio : starting from zero in 1900 , only 30 years later , the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the united states reached 90 percent in just 30 years .
back before the turn of the century , women had another problem .
all the water for cooking , cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside .
it 's a historical fact that in 1885 , the average north carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water .
but by 1929 , cities around the country had put in underground water pipes .
they had put in underground sewer pipes , and as a result , one of the great scourges of the late 19th century , waterborne diseases like cholera , began to disappear .
and an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century , the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century .
so it 's a truism that things ca n't be more than 100 percent of themselves .
and i 'll just give you a few examples .
we went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound .
electrification , central heat , ownership of motor cars , they all went from zero to 100 percent .
urban environments make people more productive than on the farm .
we went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years .
what about the electronic revolution ?
here 's an early computer .
it 's amazing . the mainframe computer was invented in 1942 .
by 1960 we had telephone bills , bank statements were being produced by computers .
the earliest cell phones , the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s .
the 1980s brought us bill gates , dos , atm machines to replace bank tellers , bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector .
fast forward through the ' 90s , we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth .
but i 'm now going to give you an experiment .
you have to choose either option a or option b.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- option a is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago .
so you get google , you get amazon , you get wikipedia , and you get running water and indoor toilets .
or you get everything invented to yesterday , including facebook and your iphone , but you have to give up , go out to the outhouse , and carry in the water .
hurricane sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century , maybe for a couple of days , in some cases for more than a week , electricity , running water , heating , gasoline for their cars , and a charge for their iphones .
the problem we face is that all these great inventions , we have to match them in the future , and my prediction that we 're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2 , the fanciful curve that i drew you at the beginning .
so here we are back to the horse and buggy .
i 'd like to award an oscar to the inventors of the 20th century , the people from alexander graham bell to thomas edison to the wright brothers , i 'd like to call them all up here , and they 're going to call back to you .
your challenge is , can you match what we achieved ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- each of you possesses the most powerful , dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised .
it 's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people 's minds .
i 'm talking about your language , of course , because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else 's mind , and they can attempt to do the same to you , without either of you having to perform surgery .
instead , when you speak , you 're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television .
it 's just that , whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light , your language relies on pulses , discrete pulses , of sound .
and just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood , you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else 's brain to suit your interests .
languages are genes talking , getting things that they want .
and just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that , merely by uttering a sound , it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic , and maybe even into its mouth .
now language 's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship , in books you ca n't read , phrases you ca n't use and words you ca n't say .
in fact , the tower of babel story in the bible is a fable and warning about the power of language .
according to that story , early humans developed the conceit that , by using their language to work together , they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven .
now god , angered at this attempt to usurp his power , destroyed the tower , and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt , he scattered the people by giving them different languages - confused them by giving them different languages .
and this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating .
even today , we know that there are words we can not use , phrases we can not say , because if we do so , we might be accosted , jailed , or even killed .
and all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths .
now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there 's something worth explaining .
and that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve , and why did it evolve only in our species ?
now it 's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question , in the chimpanzees .
now these chimpanzees are using tools , and we take that as a sign of their intelligence .
but if they really were intelligent , why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel ?
and if they really were intelligent , why would they crack open nuts with a rock ?
why would n't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them ?
why not ? i mean , that 's what we do .
now the reason the chimpanzees do n't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning .
they seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching .
as a result , they ca n't improve on others ' ideas or learn from others ' mistakes - benefit from others ' wisdom .
and so they just do the same thing over and over and over again .
in fact , we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts .
now this may sound arrogant , or even full of hubris .
how do we know this ?
because this is exactly what our ancestors , the homo erectus , did .
these upright apes evolved on the african savanna about two million years ago , and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands .
but if we look at the fossil record , we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years .
you can follow it through the fossil record .
now if we make some guesses about how long homo erectus lived , what their generation time was , that 's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring , and other individuals watching , in which that hand axe did n't change .
it 's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives , the neanderthals , had social learning .
sure enough , their tools were more complicated than those of homo erectus , but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species , the neanderthals , lived in eurasia .
okay , so what this tells us is that , contrary to the old adage , " monkey see , monkey do , " the surprise really is that all of the other animals really can not do that - at least not very much .
and even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it - something from a barnum & bailey circus .
but by comparison , we can learn .
we can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do .
we can then choose , from among a range of options , the best one .
we can benefit from others ' ideas .
we can build on their wisdom .
and as a result , our ideas do accumulate , and our technology progresses .
and this cumulative cultural adaptation , as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas , is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives .
i mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago .
and all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation .
the chairs you 're sitting in , the lights in this auditorium , my microphone , the ipads and ipods that you carry around with you - all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation .
now to many commentators , cumulative cultural adaptation , or social learning , is job done , end of story .
our species can make stuff , therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has .
in fact , we can even make the " stuff of life " - as i just said , all the stuff around us .
but in fact , it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago , when our species first arose and acquired social learning , that this was really the beginning of our story , not the end of our story .
because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma , the resolution of which , it 's fair to say , would determine not only the future course of our psychology , but the future course of the entire world .
and most importantly for this , it 'll tell us why we have language .
and the reason that dilemma arose is , it turns out , that social learning is visual theft .
if i can learn by watching you , i can steal your best ideas , and i can benefit from your efforts , without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them .
if i can watch which lure you use to catch a fish , or i can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better , or if i follow you secretly to your mushroom patch , i can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills , and maybe even catch that fish before you do .
social learning really is visual theft .
and in any species that acquired it , it would behoove you to hide your best ideas , lest somebody steal them from you .
and so some time around 200,000 years ago , our species confronted this crisis .
and we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring .
one of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups .
because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives .
had we chosen this option , sometime around 200,000 years ago , we would probably still be living like the neanderthals were when we first entered europe 40,000 years ago .
and this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas , there are fewer innovations .
and small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck .
so if we 'd chosen that path , our evolutionary path would have led into the forest - and been a short one indeed .
the other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others .
choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own .
well , we chose the second option , and language is the result .
language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft .
language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation - for reaching agreements , for striking deals and for coordinating our activities .
and you can see that , in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language , not having language would be a like a bird without wings .
just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit , language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit .
and we take this utterly for granted , because we 're a species that is so at home with language , but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language .
and to see why , consider two scenarios from early in our evolution .
let 's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads , but you 're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached .
two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts , but they 're hopeless at making the arrowheads .
so what you do is - one of those people has not really acquired language yet .
and let 's pretend the other one is good at language skills .
so what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads , and you walk up to the one that ca n't speak very well , and you put the arrowheads down in front of him , hoping that he 'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows .
but he looks at the pile of arrowheads , thinks they 're a gift , picks them up , smiles and walks off .
now you pursue this guy , gesticulating .
a scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads .
okay , now replay this scene now , and you 're approaching the one who has language .
you put down your arrowheads and say , " i 'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows . i 'll split you 50/50 . "
the other one says , " fine . looks good to me .
we 'll do that . "
now the job is done .
once we have language , we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we could n't have before we acquired it .
and this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos , languishing .
that 's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites .
all right , if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true , any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity .
and this is exactly what the archeological record shows .
if you look at our ancestors , the neanderthals and the homo erectus , our immediate ancestors , they 're confined to small regions of the world .
but when our species arose about 200,000 years ago , sometime after that we quickly walked out of africa and spread around the entire world , occupying nearly every habitat on earth .
now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to , with social learning and language , we could transform the environment to suit our needs .
and so we prospered in a way that no other animal has .
language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved .
it is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised .
language really is the voice of our genes .
now having evolved language , though , we did something peculiar , even bizarre .
as we spread out around the world , we developed thousands of different languages .
currently , there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on earth .
now you might say , well , this is just natural .
as we diverge , our languages are naturally going to diverge .
but the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on earth is found where people are most tightly packed together .
if we go to the island of papua new guinea , we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages , different human languages , spoken on that island alone .
there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles .
now , incredible as this sounds , i once met a papuan man , and i asked him if this could possibly be true .
and he said to me , " oh no .
they 're far closer together than that . "
and it 's true ; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile .
and this is also true of some remote oceanic islands .
and so it seems that we use our language , not just to cooperate , but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities , and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside .
and we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures , we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups .
they slow the flow of technologies .
and they even slow the flow of genes .
now i ca n't speak for you , but it seems to be the case that we do n't have sex with people we ca n't talk to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now we have to counter that , though , against the evidence we 've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the neanderthals and the denisovans .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , this tendency we have , this seemingly natural tendency we have , towards isolation , towards keeping to ourselves , crashes head first into our modern world .
this remarkable image is not a map of the world .
in fact , it 's a map of facebook friendship links .
and when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude , it literally draws a map of the world .
our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past .
and that communication , that connectivity around the world , that globalization now raises a burden .
because these different languages impose a barrier , as we 've just seen , to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom .
and they impose a barrier to cooperation .
and nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the european union , whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages .
the european union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages .
that 's something on the order of 1.45 billion u.s. dollars on translation costs alone .
now think of the absurdity of this situation .
if 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table , speaking their 23 languages , some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities .
the european union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators .
and in 2007 alone - and i 'm sure there are more recent figures - something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into english alone .
and so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft , if language really is the conduit of our cooperation , the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas , in our modern world , we confront a question .
and that question is whether in this modern , globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages .
to put it this way , nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist .
one of them always drives the other extinct .
and we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization .
there are lots and lots of ways of measuring things - weighing them and measuring their length - but the metric system is winning .
there are lots and lots of ways of measuring time , but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world .
there are many , many ways of imprinting cds or dvds , but those are all being standardized as well .
and you can probably think of many , many more in your own everyday lives .
and so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma .
and it 's the dilemma that this chinese man faces , who 's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language , and yet he is sitting at his blackboard , converting chinese phrases into english language phrases .
and what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange , and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity , his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- matt ridley : mark , one question .
svante found that the foxp2 gene , which seems to be associated with language , was also shared in the same form in neanderthals as us .
do we have any idea how we could have defeated neanderthals if they also had language ?
mark pagel : this is a very good question .
so many of you will be familiar with the idea that there 's this gene called foxp2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that 's associated with language .
the reason why i do n't believe that tells us that the neanderthals had language is - here 's a simple analogy : ferraris are cars that have engines .
my car has an engine , but it 's not a ferrari .
now the simple answer then is that genes alone do n't , all by themselves , determine the outcome of very complicated things like language .
what we know about this foxp2 and neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths - who knows .
but that does n't tell us they necessarily had language .
mr : thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously , on a collective level .
and what i mean by that , it 's the behaviors that we 're in denial about , and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness .
and as individuals , we all do these things , all the time , everyday .
it 's like when you 're mean to your wife because you 're mad at somebody else .
or when you drink a little too much at a party , just out of anxiety .
or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt , or whatever .
and when we do these kind of things , when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors , then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants , and no one intended .
and that 's what i look at with my photographic work .
this is an image i just recently completed , that is - when you stand back at a distance , it looks like some kind of neo-gothic , cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution .
and as you get a little bit closer , it starts looking like lots of pipes , like maybe a chemical plant , or a refinery , or maybe a hellish freeway interchange .
and as you get all the way up close , you realize that it 's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups .
and in fact , this is one million plastic cups , which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the united states every six hours .
we use four million cups a day on airline flights , and virtually none of them are reused or recycled .
they just do n't do that in that industry .
now , that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day , and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages , most of which is coffee .
i could n't fit 40 million cups on a canvas , but i was able to put 410,000 . that 's what 410,000 cups looks like .
that 's 15 minutes of our cup consumption .
and if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life , that 's the size it would be .
and there 's an hour 's worth of our cups .
and there 's a day 's worth of our cups .
you can still see the little people way down there .
that 's as high as a 42-story building , and i put the statue of liberty in there as a scale reference .
speaking of justice , there 's another phenomenon going on in our culture that i find deeply troubling , and that is that america , right now , has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on earth .
one out of four people , one out of four humans in prison are americans , imprisoned in our country .
and i wanted to show the number .
the number is 2.3 million americans were incarcerated in 2005 .
and that 's gone up since then , but we do n't have the numbers yet .
so , i wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms , and in the actual print of this piece , each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge .
they 're tiny . they 're barely visible as a piece of material , and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print .
and so i had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide .
this is that piece installed in a gallery in new york - those are my parents looking at the piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- every time i look at this piece , i always wonder if my mom 's whispering to my dad , " he finally folded his laundry . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction .
and this particular one is about cigarette addiction .
i wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of americans who die from cigarette smoking .
more than 400,000 people die in the united states every year from smoking cigarettes .
and so , this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes .
and , as you slowly step back , you see that it 's a painting by van gogh , called " skull with cigarette . "
it 's a strange thing to think about , that on 9/11 , when that tragedy happened , 3,000 americans died .
and do you remember the response ?
it reverberated around the world , and will continue to reverberate through time .
it will be something that we talk about in 100 years .
and yet on that same day , 1,100 americans died from smoking .
and the day after that , another 1,100 americans died from smoking .
and every single day since then , 1,100 americans have died .
and today , 1,100 americans are dying from cigarette smoking .
and we are n't talking about it - we dismiss it .
the tobacco lobby , it 's too strong .
we just dismiss it out of our consciousness .
and knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes , we continue to allow our children , our sons and daughters , to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking .
and this is what the next piece is about .
this is just lots and lots of cigarettes : 65,000 cigarettes , which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month , and every month in the u.s.
more than 700,000 children in the united states aged 18 and under begin smoking every year .
one more strange epidemic in the united states that i want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs .
this is an image i 've made out of lots and lots of vicodin .
well , actually , i only had one vicodin that i scanned lots and lots of times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , as you stand back , you see 213,000 vicodin pills , which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the united states , and anti-anxiety medications .
one-third of all drug overdoses in the u.s. - and that includes cocaine , heroin , alcohol , everything - one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications .
a strange phenomenon .
this is a piece that i just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon . and that is the phenomenon , this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery .
384,000 women , american women , last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery .
it 's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift , given to young girls who are about to go off to college .
so , i made this image out of barbie dolls , and so , as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern , and as you get all the way back , you see 32,000 barbie dolls , which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the u.s. each month .
the vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21 .
and strangely enough , the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction , and most of that is being done by men .
now , i want to emphasize that these are just examples .
i 'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues .
they 're just examples .
and the reason that i do this , it 's because i have this fear that we are n't feeling enough as a culture right now .
there 's this kind of anesthesia in america at the moment .
we 've lost our sense of outrage , our anger and our grief about what 's going on in our culture right now , what 's going on in our country , the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world .
they 've gone missing ; these feelings have gone missing .
our cultural joy , our national joy is nowhere to be seen .
and one of the causes of this , i think , is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview , this holoptical worldview , this holographic image that we 're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things : the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy ; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers .
as we try to build this view , and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture , the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers : numbers in the millions , in the hundreds of millions , in the billions and now in the trillions .
bush 's new budget is in the trillions , and these are numbers that our brain just does n't have the ability to comprehend .
we ca n't make meaning out of these enormous statistics .
and so that 's what i 'm trying to do with my work , is to take these numbers , these statistics from the raw language of data , and to translate them into a more universal visual language , that can be felt .
because my belief is , if we can feel these issues , if we can feel these things more deeply , then they 'll matter to us more than they do now .
and if we can find that , then we 'll be able to find , within each one of us , what it is that we need to find to face the big question , which is : how do we change ?
that , to me , is the big question that we face as a people right now : how do we change ? how do we change as a culture , and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of , and that is our own behavior ?
my belief is that you do n't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues .
i 'm not pointing the finger at america in a blaming way .
i 'm simply saying , this is who we are right now .
and if there are things that we see that we do n't like about our culture , then we have a choice .
the degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface , to bring to this question , the depth of character that we can summon , as we show up for the question of how do we change - it 's already defining us as individuals and as a nation , and it will continue to do that , on into the future .
and it will profoundly affect the well-being , the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions .
i 'm not speaking abstractly about this , i 'm speaking - this is who we are in this room , right now , in this moment .
thank you and good afternoon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you worry about what is going to kill you ?
heart disease , cancer , a car accident ?
most of us worry about things we ca n't control , like war , terrorism , the tragic earthquake that just occurred in haiti .
but what really threatens humanity ?
a few years ago , professor vaclav smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history .
he called these , " massively fatal discontinuities , " meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years .
he looked at the odds of another world war , of a massive volcanic eruption , even of an asteroid hitting the earth .
but he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent , and that is a severe flu pandemic .
now , you might think of flu as just a really bad cold , but it can be a death sentence .
every year , 36,000 people in the united states die of seasonal flu .
in the developing world , the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher .
you know , the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically , it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic .
in 1918 , a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people .
it spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms .
are we safer today ?
well , we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared , but this threat could reappear at any time .
the good news is that we 're at a moment in time when science , technology , globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility : the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on earth .
we can do this .
we 're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines , and if we get these to more people , we can certainly save more lives .
but with new or better vaccines for malaria , tb , hiv , pneumonia , diarrhea , flu , we could end suffering that has been on the earth since the beginning of time .
so , i 'm here to trumpet vaccines for you .
but first , i have to explain why they 're important because vaccines , the power of them , is really like a whisper .
when they work , they can make history , but after a while you can barely hear them .
now , some of us are old enough to have a small , circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children .
but when was the last time you worried about smallpox , a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us ?
or polio ? how many of you remember the iron lung ?
we do n't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines .
now , it 's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now , but we 're still threatened by things like hiv and flu .
why is that ?
well , here 's the dirty little secret .
until recently , we have n't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked .
we knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error .
you took a pathogen , you modified it , you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened .
this worked well for most pathogens , somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu , but not at all for hiv , for which humans have no natural immunity .
so let 's explore how vaccines work .
they basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed .
now , when you get a viral infection , what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength , and that might be too late .
when you 're pre-immunized , what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes .
so that 's really how vaccines work .
now , let 's take a look at a video that we 're debuting at ted , for the first time , on how an effective hiv vaccine might work .
-lrb- music -rrb- narrator : a vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader .
after hiv penetrates the body 's mucosal barriers , it infects immune cells to replicate .
the invader draws the attention of the immune system 's front-line troops .
dendritic cells , or macrophages , capture the virus and display pieces of it .
memory cells generated by the hiv vaccine are activated when they learn hiv is present from the front-line troops .
these memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed .
memory b cells turn into plasma cells , which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto hiv to prevent it from infecting cells , while squadrons of killer t cells seek out and destroy cells that are already hiv infected .
the virus is defeated .
without a vaccine , these responses would have taken more than a week .
by that time , the battle against hiv would already have been lost .
seth berkley : really cool video , is n't it ?
the antibodies you just saw in this video , in action , are the ones that make most vaccines work .
so the real question then is : how do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and hiv ?
the principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they 're always changing .
so let 's take a look at the flu virus .
in this rendering of the flu virus , these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you .
and also , what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus .
when these mutate , they change their shape , and the antibodies do n't know what they 're looking at anymore .
so that 's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu .
it 's also why in the spring , we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year , put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall .
even worse , the most common influenza - influenza a - also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans , and they can recombine in those particular animals .
in addition , wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza .
so , you 've got this situation : in 2003 , we had an h5n1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent .
now luckily , that particular virus , although very scary at the time , did not transmit from person to person very easily .
this year 's h1n1 threat was actually a human , avian , swine mixture that arose in mexico .
it was easily transmitted , but , luckily , was pretty mild .
and so , in a sense , our luck is holding out , but you know , another wild bird could fly over at anytime .
now let 's take a look at hiv .
as variable as flu is , hiv makes flu look like the rock of gibraltar .
the virus that causes aids is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted .
it mutates furiously , it has decoys to evade the immune system , it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome .
here 's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to hiv , a much wilder target .
in the video a moment ago , you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells .
now realize that in a recently infected person , there are millions of these ships ; each one is just slightly different .
finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder .
now , in the 27 years since hiv was identified as the cause of aids , we 've developed more drugs to treat hiv than all other viruses put together .
these drugs are n't cures , but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence at least for those who can access them .
the vaccine effort though is really quite different .
large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business .
many thought that it was just impossible to make an aids vaccine , but today , evidence tells us otherwise .
in september , we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in thailand .
for the first time , we saw an aids vaccine work in humans - albeit , quite modestly - and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago .
newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models .
but in the past few months , researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an hiv infected individual .
now , what does this mean ?
we saw earlier that hiv is highly variable , that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus .
if you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models , they provide full protection from infection .
in addition , these researchers found a new site on hiv where the antibodies can grab onto , and what 's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates .
it 's like , as many times as the virus changes its clothes , it 's still wearing the same socks , and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks .
so what we 've got is a situation .
the thai results tell us we can make an aids vaccine , and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that .
this strategy , working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate , has never been done before in vaccine research .
it 's called retro-vaccinology , and its implications extend way beyond that of just hiv .
so think of it this way .
we 've got these new antibodies we 've identified , and we know that they latch onto many , many variations of the virus .
we know that they have to latch onto a specific part , so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part , present that through a vaccine , what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies .
and that would create a universal hiv vaccine .
now , it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site , and as you can imagine , these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on .
and if you guys have ideas to help us solve this , we 'd love to hear about it .
but , you know , the research that has occurred from hiv now has really helped with innovation with other diseases .
so for instance , a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza , as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus .
they 're currently making a cocktail - an antibody cocktail - that can be used to treat severe , overwhelming cases of flu .
in the longer term , what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine .
now , retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design .
let me give you another example .
we talked about before the h and n spikes on the surface of the flu virus .
notice these other , smaller protuberances .
these are largely hidden from the immune system .
now it turns out that these spots also do n't change much when the virus mutates .
if you can cripple these with specific antibodies , you could cripple all versions of the flu .
so far , animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease , although you might get a mild case .
so if this works in humans , what we 're talking about is a universal flu vaccine , one that does n't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death .
we really could think of flu , then , as just a bad cold .
of course , the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it .
so to do that , we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and , of course , smart delivery methods .
so i want you to think back a few months ago .
in june , the world health organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years .
the u.s. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by october 15th for the flu peak .
vaccines were promised to developing countries .
hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing .
so what happened ?
well , we first figured out how to make flu vaccines , how to produce them , in the early 1940s .
it was a slow , cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs , millions of living chicken eggs .
viruses only grow in living things , and so it turned out that , for flu , chicken eggs worked really well .
for most strains , you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg .
luckily for us , we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances .
so today , we get our flu vaccines from ...
chicken eggs , -lrb- laughter -rrb- hundreds of millions of chicken eggs .
almost nothing has changed .
the system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow .
this year 's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production : basically .6 doses per egg .
so , here 's an alarming thought .
what if that wild bird flies by again ?
you could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks , and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines .
so , dan -lsb- barber -rsb- , if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm , i know where to get them .
so right now , the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains , and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu .
but this assumes that our factories are humming because , in 2004 , the u.s. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant .
and the process still takes more than half a year .
so are we better prepared than we were in 1918 ?
well , with the new technologies emerging now , i hope we can say definitively , " yes . "
imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we 're currently spending now in the united states .
with a range of new technologies , we could .
here 's an example : a company i 'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the h spike of flu that sparks the immune system .
if you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium , which creates a vigorous immune response , they 've created a very powerful flu fighter .
this vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria , e. coli .
now , as you know , bacteria reproduce quickly - it 's like making yogurt - and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories , in a few weeks , with no eggs , for a fraction of the cost of current methods .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so here 's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies .
and , aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings - for example , the e. coli method i just talked about - look at the time saved : this would be lives saved .
the developing world , mostly left out of the current response , sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they 're leapfrogging the west .
india , mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines , and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use .
because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap , billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them .
now think of where this leads us .
new infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years .
some day , perhaps soon , we 'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us .
will we be quick enough to react before millions die ?
luckily , this year 's flu was relatively mild .
i say , " luckily " in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated .
so if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments , we will master these and new tools of vaccinology , and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives .
no longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year .
no longer does aids need to kill two million a year .
no longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases , or indeed , anybody .
instead of having vaclav smil 's " massively fatal discontinuity " of life , we can ensure the continuity of life .
what the world needs now are these new vaccines , and we can make it happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , the science is changing .
in your mind , seth - i mean , you must dream about this - what is the kind of time scale on , let 's start with hiv , for a game-changing vaccine that 's actually out there and usable ?
sb : the game change can come at any time , because the problem we have now is we 've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans ; we just need a better one .
and with these types of antibodies , we know humans can make them .
so , if we can figure out how to do that , then we have the vaccine , and what 's interesting is there already is some evidence that we 're beginning to crack that problem .
so , the challenge is full speed ahead .
ca : in your gut , do you think it 's probably going to be at least another five years ?
sb : you know , everybody says it 's 10 years , but it 's been 10 years every 10 years .
so i hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation , but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends .
ca : and that 's the same with universal flu vaccine , the same kind of thing ?
sb : i think flu is different . i think what happened with flu is we 've got a bunch - i just showed some of this - a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now .
they look good . the problem has been that , what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that 's what we were comfortable with .
you also can use adjuvants , which are chemicals you mix .
that 's what europe is doing , so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available , but , going back to what michael specter said , the anti-vaccine crowd did n't really want that to happen .
ca : and malaria 's even further behind ?
sb : no , malaria , there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now .
it probably is n't the perfect vaccine , but it 's moving along .
ca : seth , most of us do work where every month , we produce something ; we get that kind of gratification .
you 've been slaving away at this for more than a decade , and i salute you and your colleagues for what you do .
the world needs people like you . thank you .
sb : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think the future of this planet depends on humans , not technology , and we already have the knowledge - we 're kind of at the endgame with knowledge .
but we 're nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception .
we still have one foot in the dark ages .
and when you listen to some of the presentations here - and the extraordinary range of human capability , our understandings - and then you contrast it with the fact we still call this planet , " earth : " it 's pretty extraordinary - we have one foot in the dark ages .
just quickly : aristotle , his thing was , " it 's not flat , stupid , it 's round . "
galileo - he had the inquisition , so he had to be a little bit more polite - his was , " it 's not in the middle , you know . "
and hawkes : " it 's not earth , stupid , it 's ocean . "
this is an ocean planet .
t.s. eliot really said it for me - and this should give you goose bumps : " we shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time . "
and the next lines are , " through the unknown remembered gate , where the last of earth discovered is that which is the beginning . "
so i have one message .
it seems to me that we 're all pointed in the wrong direction .
for the rocketeers in the audience : i love what you 're doing , i admire the guts , i admire the courage - but your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's all a question of perspective .
let me try and tell you - i do n't mean to insult you , but look , if i - and i 'm not doing this for real because it would be an insult , so i 'm going to pretend , and it softens the blow - i 'm going to tell you what you 're thinking .
if i held up a square that was one foot square and the color of earth , and i held up another square that was the root two square - so it 's 1.5 times bigger - and was the color of the oceans ; and i said , what is the relative value of these two things ?
well , it 's the relative importance .
you would say - yeah , yeah , yeah , we all know this ; water covers twice the area of the planet than dry land .
but it 's a question of perception , and if that 's what you 're thinking , if that 's what you think i mean when i say , " this is an ocean planet stupidly called ' earth . " ' if you think that that 's the relative importance , two to one , you 're wrong by a factor of ten .
now , you 're not as thick as two short planks , but you sound like it when you say " earth , " because that demonstration , if i turned around this way - that earth plane would be as thin as paper .
it 's a thin film , two-dimensional existence .
the ocean representation would have a depth to it .
and if you hefted those two things you might find that the relative scale of those is 20 to 1 .
it turns out that something more than 94 percent of life on earth is aquatic .
that means that us terrestrials occupy a minority .
the problem we have in believing that is - you just have to give up this notion that this earth was created for us .
because it 's a problem we have .
if this is an ocean planet and we only have a small minority of this planet , it just interferes with a lot of what humanity thinks .
okay . let me criticize this thing .
i 'm not talking about james cameron - although i could , but i wo n't .
you really do have to go and see his latest film , " aliens of the deep . " it 's incredible .
it features two of these deep rovers , and i can criticize them because these sweet things are mine .
this , i think , represents one of the most beautiful classic submersibles built .
if you look at that sub , you 'll see a sphere .
this is an acryclic sphere .
it generates all of the buoyancy , all of the payload for the craft , and the batteries are down here hanging underneath , exactly like a balloon .
this is the envelope , and this is the gondola , the payload .
also coming up later for criticism are these massive lights .
and this one actually carries two great manipulators .
it actually is a very good working sub - that 's what it was designed for .
the problem with it is - and the reason i will never build another one like it - is that this is a product of two-dimensional thinking .
it 's what we humans do when we go in the ocean as engineers ; we take all our terrestrial hang-ups , all our constraints - importantly , these two-dimensional constraints that we have , and they 're so constrained we do n't even understand it - and we take them underwater .
you notice that jim cameron is sitting in a seat .
a seat works in a two-dimensional world , where gravity blasts down on that seat , ok ?
and in a two-dimensional world , we do know about the third dimension but we do n't use it because to go up requires an awful lot of energy against gravity .
and then our mothers tell us , " careful you do n't fall down " - because you 'll fall over .
now , go into the real atmosphere of this planet .
this planet has an inner atmosphere of water ; it 's its inner atmosphere . it has two atmospheres - a lesser , outer gaseous atmosphere , a lighter one .
most of life on earth is in that inner atmosphere .
and that life enjoys a three-dimensional existence , which is alien to us .
fish do not sit in seats .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they do n't . their mothers do n't say to little baby fish , " careful you do n't fall over . "
they do n't fall over . they do n't fall .
they live in a three-dimensional world where there is no difference in energy between going this way , that way , that way or that way .
it 's truly a three-dimensional space .
and we 're only just beginning to grasp it .
i do n't know of any other submersible , or even remote , that just takes advantage that this is a three-dimensional space .
this is the way we should be going into the oceans .
this is a three-dimensional machine .
what we need to do is go down into the ocean with the freedom of the animals , and move in this three-dimensional space .
ok , this is good stuff .
this is man 's first attempt at flying underwater .
right now , i 'm just coming down on this gorgeous , big , giant manta ray .
she has twice the wingspan that i do .
there i 'm coming ; she sees me .
and just notice how she rolls under and turns ; she does n't sit there and try and blow air into a tank and kind of flow up or sink down - she just rolls .
and the craft that i 'm in - this has n't been shown before .
chris asked us to show stuff that has n't been shown before .
i wanted you to notice that she actually turned to come back up .
there i am ; i see her coming back , coming up underneath me .
i put reverse thrust and i try and pull gently down .
i 'm trying to do everything very gently .
we spent about three hours together and she 's beginning to trust me .
and this ballet is controlled by this lady here .
she gets about that close and then she pulls away .
so now i try and go after her , but i 'm practicing flying .
this is the first flying machine . this was the first prototype .
this was a fly by wire . it has wings .
there 're no silly buoyancy tanks - it 's permanently , positively buoyant .
and then by moving through the water it 's able to take that control .
now , look at that ; look , it 's - she just blew me away .
she just rolled right away from underneath .
really that 's the only real dive i 've ever made in this machine .
it took 10 years to build .
but this lady here taught me , hah , taught me so much .
we just learned so much in three hours in the water there .
i just had to go and build another machine .
but look here . instead of blowing tanks and coming up slowly without thinking about it , it 's a little bit of back pressure , and that sub just comes straight back up out of the water .
this is an internal sony camera . thank you , sony .
i do n't really look that ugly , but the camera is so close that it 's just distorted .
now , there she goes , right overhead .
this is a wide-angle camera .
she 's just a few inches off the top of my head .
" aah , ha , oh , he just crossed over the top of my head about , oh , i do n't know , just so close . "
i come back up , not for air .
" this is an incredible encounter with a manta . i 'm speechless .
we 've been just feet apart . i 'm going back down now . "
okay , can we cut that ? lights back up please .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trying to fly and keep up with that animal - it was n't the lack of maneuverability that we had .
it was the fact she was going so slow .
i actually designed that to move faster through the water because i thought that was the thing that we needed to do : to move fast and get range .
but after that encounter i really did want to go back with that animal and dance .
she wanted to dance .
and so what we needed to do was increase the wing area so that we just had more grip , develop higher forces .
so the sub that was outside last year - this is the one .
you see the larger wing area here .
also , clearly , it was such a powerful thing , we wanted to try and bring other people but we could n't figure out how to do it .
so we opened the world 's first flight school .
the rational for the world 's first flight school goes something like : when the coastguards come up to me and say - they used to leave us alone when we were diving these goofy little spherical things , but when we started flying around in underwater jet fighters they got a little nervous - they would come up and say , " do you have a license for that ? "
and then i 'd put my sunglasses on , the beard that would all sprout out , and i would say , " i do n't need no stinking license . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i write these stinking license , " which i do .
so bob gelfond 's around here - but somebody in the audience here has license number 20 .
they 're one of the first subsea aviators .
so we 've run two flight schools .
where the hell that goes , i do n't know , but it 's a lot of fun .
what comes next in 30 seconds ? i ca n't tell you .
but the patent for underwater flight - karen and i , we were looking at it , some business partners wanted us to patent it - we were n't sure about that .
we 've decided we 're just going to let that go .
it just seems wrong to try and patent - -lrb- applause -rrb- - the freedom for underwater flight .
so anybody who wants to copy us and come and join us , go for it .
the other thing is that we 've got much lower costs .
we developed some other technology called spider optics , and craig ventner asked me to make an announcement here this morning : we 're going to be building a beautiful , little , small version of this - unmanned , super deep - for his boat to go and get back some deep sea dna stuff .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i 'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation , the third-largest organized crime , a $ 10 billion industry .
i 'm talking to you about modern-day slavery .
i 'd like to tell you the story of these three children , pranitha , shaheen and anjali .
pranitha 's mother was a woman in prostitution , a prostituted person .
she got infected with hiv , and towards the end of her life , when she was in the final stages of aids , she could not prostitute , so she sold four-year-old pranitha to a broker .
by the time we got the information , we reached there , pranitha was already raped by three men .
shaheen 's background i do n't even know .
we found her in a railway track , raped by many , many men , i do n't know many .
but the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body .
and when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body .
we still do n't know who her parents are , who she is .
all that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally .
anjali 's father , a drunkard , sold his child for pornography .
you 're seeing here images of three years , four-year-olds , and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation .
in this country , and across the globe , hundreds and thousands of children , as young as three , as young as four , are sold into sexual slavery .
but that 's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for .
they are sold in the name of adoption .
they are sold in the name of organ trade .
camel jockeying , anything , everything .
i work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation .
and i tell you stories from there .
my own journey to work with these children started as a teenager .
i was 15 when i was gang-raped by eight men .
i do n't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it .
yes , there were eight men who defiled me , raped me , but that did n't go into my consciousness .
i never felt like a victim , then or now .
but what lingered from then till now - i am 40 today - is this huge outrageous anger .
two years , i was ostracized , i was stigmatized , i was isolated , because i was a victim .
and that 's what we do to all traffic survivors .
we , as a society , we have phds in victimizing a victim .
right from the age of 15 , when i started looking around me , i started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices , but have absolutely no respite , because we do n't allow them to come in .
where does their journey begin ?
most of them come from very optionless families , not just poor .
you have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked .
i had this i.s. officer 's daughter , who is 14 years old , studying in ninth standard , who was raped chatting with one individual , and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine , who was trafficked .
i have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families , and children from well-to-do families , who are getting trafficked .
these people are deceived , forced .
99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution .
some pay the price for it .
they 're killed ; we do n't even hear about them .
they are voiceless , -lsb- unclear -rsb- , nameless people .
but the rest , who succumb into it , go through everyday torture .
because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends , or who want to have a family with you .
these are men who buy you for an hour , for a day , and use you , throw you .
each of the girls that i have rescued - i have rescued more than 3,200 girls - each of them tell me one story in common ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- one story about one man , at least , putting chili powder in her vagina , one man taking a cigarette and burning her , one man whipping her .
we are living among those men : they 're our brothers , fathers , uncles , cousins , all around us .
and we are silent about them .
we think it is easy money .
we think it is shortcut .
we think the person likes to do what she 's doing .
but the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections , sexually transmitted infections , hiv , aids , syphilis , gonorrhea , you name it , substance abuse , drugs , everything under the sun .
and one day she gives up on you and me , because we have no options for her .
and therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation .
she believes , " yes , this is it , this is what my destiny is about . "
and this is normal , to get raped by 100 men a day .
and it 's abnormal to live in a shelter .
it 's abnormal to get rehabilitated .
it 's in that context that i work .
it 's in that context that i rescue children .
i 've rescued children as young as three years , and i 've rescued women as old as 40 years .
when i rescued them , one of the biggest challenges i had was where do i begin .
because i had lots of them who were already hiv infected .
one third of the people i rescue are hiv positive .
and therefore my challenge was to understand how can i get out the power from this pain .
and for me , i was my greatest experience .
understanding my own self , understanding my own pain , my own isolation , was my greatest teacher .
because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential .
you see a girl here who is trained as a welder .
she works for a very big company , a workshop in hyderabad , making furnitures .
she earns around 12,000 rupees .
she is an illiterate girl , trained , skilled as a welder .
why welding and why not computers ?
we felt , one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage .
they did not have any pardas inside their body , hijabs inside themselves ; they 've crossed the barrier of it .
and therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world , very easily , and not feel very shy about it .
we have trained girls as carpenters , as masons , as security guards , as cab drivers .
and each one of them are excelling in their chosen field , gaining confidence , restoring dignity , and building hopes in their own lives .
these girls are also working in big construction companies like ram-ki construction , as masons , full-time masons .
what has been my challenge ?
my challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up .
i 've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life .
i ca n't hear from my right ear .
i 've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue .
my biggest challenge is society .
it 's you and me .
my biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own .
a very supportive friend of mine , a well-wisher of mine , used to give me every month , 2,000 rupees for vegetables .
when her mother fell sick she said , " sunitha , you have so much of contacts .
can you get somebody in my house to work , so that she can look after my mother ? "
and there is a long pause .
and then she says , " not one of our girls . "
it 's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking , in this fantastic a-c hall .
it 's very nice for discussion , discourse , making films and everything .
but it is not nice to bring them to our homes .
it 's not nice to give them employment in our factories , our companies .
it 's not nice for our children to study with their children .
there it ends .
that 's my biggest challenge .
if i 'm here today , i 'm here not only as sunitha krishnan .
i 'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking .
they need your compassion .
they need your empathy .
they need , much more than anything else , your acceptance .
many times when i talk to people , i keep telling them one thing : do n't tell me hundred ways how you can not respond to this problem .
can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem ?
and that 's what i 'm here for , asking for your support , demanding for your support , requesting for your support .
can you break your culture of silence ?
can you speak to at least two persons about this story ?
tell them this story . convince them to tell the story to another two persons .
i 'm not asking you all to become mahatma gandhis or martin luther kings , or medha patkars , or something like that .
i 'm asking you , in your limited world , can you open your minds ? can you open your hearts ?
can you just encompass these people too ?
because they are also a part of us .
they are also part of this world .
i 'm asking you , for these children , whose faces you see , they 're no more .
they died of aids last year .
i 'm asking you to help them , accept as human beings - not as philanthropy , not as charity , but as human beings who deserve all our support .
i 'm asking you this because no child , no human being , deserves what these children have gone through .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my topic is economic growth in china and india .
and the question i want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth .
you may say this is not fair , because i 'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy .
actually , exactly the opposite is what i 'm going to do .
i 'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy , rather than against democracy .
the first question there is why china has grown so much faster than india .
over the last 30 years , in terms of the gdp growth rates , china has grown at twice the rate of india .
in the last five years , the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth .
but over the last 30 years , china undoubtedly has done much better than india .
one simple answer is china has shanghai and india has mumbai .
look at the skyline of shanghai .
this is the pudong area .
the picture on india is the dharavi slum of mumbai in india .
the idea there behind these two pictures is that the chinese government can act above rule of law .
it can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process , evict millions of people - that 's just a small technical issue .
whereas in india , you can not do that , because you have to listen to the public .
you 're being constrained by the public 's opinion .
even prime minister manmohan singh agrees with that view .
in an interview printed in the financial press of india , he said that he wants to make mumbai another shanghai .
this is an oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values , and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of shanghai .
so let me call it the shanghai model of economic growth , that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development : infrastructures , airports , highways , bridges , things like that .
and you need a strong government to do that , because you can not respect private property rights .
you can not be constrained by the public 's opinion .
you need also state ownership , especially of land assets , in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly .
the implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth , rather than a facilitator of economic growth .
here 's the key question .
just how important are infrastructures for economic growth ?
this is a key issue .
if you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth , then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth .
if you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe , then you will put less emphasis on strong government .
so to illustrate that question , let me give you two countries .
and for the sake of brevity , i 'll call one country country 1 and the other country country 2 .
country 1 has a systematic advantage over country 2 in infrastructures .
country 1 has more telephones , and country 1 has a longer system of railways .
so if i were to ask you , " which is china and which is india , and which country has grown faster ? "
if you believe in the infrastructure view , then you will say , " country 1 must be china .
they must have done better , in terms of economic growth .
and country 2 is possibly india . "
actually the country with more telephones is the soviet union , and the data referred to 1989 .
after the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones , the country collapsed .
that 's not too good .
the picture there is khrushchev .
i know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the soviet union , but that 's the best picture that i can find .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- telephones , infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth .
country 2 , that has fewer telephones , is china .
since 1989 , the country has performed at a double-digit rate if you know nothing about china and the soviet union other than the fact about their telephones , you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades .
country 1 , that has a longer system of railways , is actually india .
and country 2 is china .
this is a very little known fact about the two countries .
yes , today china has a huge infrastructure advantage over india .
but for many years , until the late 1990s , china had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis india .
in developing countries , the most common mode of transportation is the railways , and the british built a lot of railways in india .
india is the smaller of the two countries , and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s .
so clearly , infrastructure does n't explain why china did better before the late 1990s , as compared with india .
in fact , if you look at the evidence worldwide , the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth .
the economy grows , government accumulates more resources , and the government can invest in infrastructure - rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth .
and this is clearly the story of the chinese economic growth .
let me look at this question more directly .
is democracy bad for economic growth ?
now let 's turn to two countries , country a and country b.
country a , in 1990 , had about $ 300 per capita gdp as compared with country b , which had $ 460 in per capita gdp .
by 2008 , country a has surpassed country b with $ 700 per capita gdp as compared with $ 650 per capita gdp .
both countries are in asia .
if i were to ask you , " which are the two asian countries ?
and which one is a democracy ? "
you may argue , " well , maybe country a is china and country b is india . "
in fact , country a is democratic india , and country b is pakistan - the country that has a long period of military rule .
and it 's very common that we compare india with china .
that 's because the two countries have about the same population size .
but the more natural comparison is actually between india and pakistan .
those two countries are geographically similar .
they have a complicated , but shared common history .
by that comparison , democracy looks very , very good in terms of economic growth .
so why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments ?
one reason is the east asian model .
in east asia , we have had successful economic growth stories such as korea , taiwan , hong kong and singapore .
some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s .
the problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries , " have you won the lottery ? "
and they all tell you , " yes , we have won the lottery . "
and then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent .
the reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and did n't end up winning the prize .
for each of these successful authoritarian governments in east asia , there 's a matched failure .
korea succeeded , north korea did n't .
taiwan succeeded , china under mao zedong did n't .
burma did n't succeed .
the philippines did n't succeed .
if you look at the statistical evidence worldwide , there 's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth .
so the east asian model has this massive selection bias - it is known as selecting on a dependent variable , something we always tell our students to avoid .
so exactly why did china grow so much faster ?
i will take you to the cultural revolution , when china went mad , and compare that country 's performance with india under indira gandhi .
the question there is : which country did better , china or india ?
china was during the cultural revolution .
it turns out even during the cultural revolution , china out-perfomed india in terms of gdp growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita gdp .
so that 's when china was mad .
the whole country went mad .
it must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the cultural revolution .
the advantage the country had was human capital - nothing else but human capital .
this is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s .
and this is the earliest data that i can find .
the adult literacy rate in china is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in india .
the contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between chinese women and indian women .
i have n't told you about the definition of literacy .
in china , the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 chinese characters .
in india , the definition of literacy , operating definition of literacy , is the ability , the grand ability , to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak .
the gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated .
if you go to other sources of data such as human development index , that data series , go back to the early 1970s , you see exactly the same contrast .
china held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis india .
life expectancies : as early as 1965 , china had a huge advantage in life expectancy .
on average , as a chinese in 1965 , you lived 10 years more than an average indian .
so if you have a choice between being a chinese and being an indian , you would want to become a chinese in order to live 10 years longer .
if you made that decision in 1965 , the down side of that is the next year we have the cultural revolution .
so you have to always think carefully about these decisions .
if you can not chose your nationality , then you will want to become an indian man .
because , as an indian man , you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis indian women .
this is an extremely strange fact .
it 's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern .
it shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the indian society against women .
the good news is , by 2006 , india has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy .
today , indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over indian men .
so india is reverting to the normal .
but india still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality .
these are the two pictures taken of garment factories in guangdong province and garment factories in india .
in china , it 's all women .
60 to 80 percent of the workforce in china is women in the coastal part of the country , whereas in india , it 's all men .
financial times printed this picture of an indian textile factory with the title , " india poised to overtake china in textile . "
by looking at these two pictures , i say no , it wo n't overtake china for a while .
if you look at other east asian countries , women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off - in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with east asia .
india still has a long way to go to catch up with china .
then the issue is , what about the chinese political system ?
you talk about human capital , you talk about education and public health .
what about the political system ?
is n't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in china ?
actually , the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that .
it depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system .
statically , china is a one-party system , authoritarian - there 's no question about it .
dynamically , it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic .
when you explain change - for example , economic growth ; economic growth is about change - when you explain change , you use other things that have changed to explain change , rather than using the constant to explain change .
sometimes a fixed effect can explain change , but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change .
in terms of the political changes , they have introduced village elections .
they have increased the security of proprietors .
and they have increased the security with long-term land leases .
there are also financial reforms in rural china .
there is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in china .
to me , the pace of political changes is too slow , too gradual .
and my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges , because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms .
but nevertheless , the system has moved in a more liberal direction , moved in a more democratic direction .
you can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on india .
in fact , when india was growing at a hindu rate of growth - about one percent , two percent a year - that was when india was least democratic .
indira gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975 .
the indian government owned and operated all the tv stations .
a little-known fact about india in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms , the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule , privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts .
so the dynamic perspective fits both with china and in india in terms of the direction .
why do many people believe that india is still a growth disaster ?
one reason is they are always comparing india with china .
but china is a superstar in terms of economic growth .
if you are a nba player and you are always being compared to michael jordan , you 're going to look not so impressive .
but that does n't mean that you 're a bad basketball player .
comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark .
in fact , if you compare india with the average developing country , even before the more recent period of acceleration of indian growth - now india is growing between eight and nine percent - even before this period , india was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies .
this is a very impressive record indeed .
let 's think about the future : the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant .
which country has the growth momentum ?
china , i believe , still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals - mostly the social capital , the public health , the sense of egalitarianism that you do n't find in india .
but i believe that india has the momentum .
it has the improving fundamentals .
the government has invested in basic education , has invested in basic health .
i believe the government should do more , but nevertheless , the direction it is moving in is the right direction .
india has the right institutional conditions for economic growth , whereas china is still struggling with political reforms .
i believe that the political reforms are a must for china to maintain its growth .
and it 's very important to have political reforms , to have widely shared benefits of economic growth .
i do n't know whether that 's going to happen or not , but i 'm an optimist .
hopefully , five years from now , i 'm going to report to tedglobal that political reforms will happen in china .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over the last 13 years - one , three , 13 years - i 've been part of an exceptional team at insightec in israel and partners around the world for taking this idea , this concept , noninvasive surgery , from the research lab to routine clinical use .
and this is what i 'll tell you about .
13 years - for some of you , you can empathize with that number .
for me , today , on this date , it 's like a second bar mitzvah experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies .
one is the focused ultrasound , and the other one is the vision-enabled magnetic resonance imaging .
so let 's first talk about focused ultrasound .
and i hold in my hand a tissue-mimicking phantom .
it is made out of silicon .
it is transparent , made just for you .
so you see , it 's all intact , completely transparent .
i 'll take you now to the acoustic lab .
you see the phantom within the aquarium .
this is a setup i put in a physics lab .
on the right-hand side , you see an ultrasonic transducer .
so the ultrasonic transducer emits basically an ultrasonic beam that focuses inside the phantom .
okay , when you hear the click , this is when the energy starts to emit and you see a little lesion form inside the phantom .
okay , so everything around it is whole and intact .
it 's just a lesion formed inside .
so think about , this is in your brain .
we need to reach a target inside the brain .
we can do it without harming any tissue .
so this is , i think , the first kosher hippocratic surgical system .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so let 's talk a little bit about ultrasound , the force of ultrasound .
you know all about imaging , right , ultrasound imaging .
and you know also about lithotripsy - breaking kidney stones .
but ultrasound can be shaped to be anything in between , because it 's a mechanical force .
basically , it 's a force acting on a tissue that it transverses .
so you can change the intensity , the frequency , the duration , the pulse shape of the ultrasound to create anything from an airbrush to a hammer .
and i am going to show you multiple applications in the medical field that can be enabled just by focusing , physically focusing .
so this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all .
when i was born , this idea was already conceived by pioneers such as the fry brothers and lars leksell , who is know actually as the inventor of the gammaknife .
but you may not know that he tried to perform lobotomies in the brain , noninvasively , with focused ultrasound in the ' 50s .
he failed , so he then invented the gammaknife .
and it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed .
and there was something fundamental that they were missing .
they were missing the vision .
it was n't until the invention of the mr and really the integration of mr with focused ultrasound that we could get the feedback - both the anatomical and the physiological in order to have a completely noninvasive , closed-loop surgical procedure .
so this is how it looks , you know , the operating room of the future today .
this is an mr suite with a focused ultrasound system .
and i will give you several examples .
so the first one is in the brain .
one of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders , like parkinson 's or essential tremor .
what is typical to those conditions , to essential tremor for example , is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you , or write legibly so people can understand it , and be really independent in your life without the help of others .
so i 'd like you to meet john .
john is a retired professor of history from virginia .
so he suffered from essential tremor for many years .
and medication did n't help him anymore .
and many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain .
and about four or five months ago , he underwent an experimental procedure .
it is approved under an fdaide at the university of virginia in charlottesville using focused ultrasound to ablate a point in his thalamus .
and this is his handwriting .
" on june 20th , " if you can read it , " 2011 . "
this is his handwriting on the morning of the treatment before going into the mr so now i 'll take you through -lsb- what -rsb- a typical procedure like that looks like , -lsb- what -rsb- noninvasive surgery looks like .
so we put the patient on the mr table .
we attach a transducer , in this case , to the brain , but if it will be a different organ , it will be a different transducer attached to the patient .
and the physician will then take a regular mr scan .
and the objective of that ?
i do n't have a pointer here , but you see the green , sort of rectangle or trapezoid ?
this is the sort of general area of the treatment .
it 's a safety boundary around the target .
it 's a target in the thalamus .
so once those pictures are acquired and the physician has drawn all the necessary safety limits and so on , he selects basically a point - you see the round point in the middle where the cursor is - and he presses this blue button called " sonicate . "
we call this instance of injecting the energy , we call it sonication .
the only handwork the physician does here is moving a mouse .
this is the only device he needs in this treatment .
so he presses " sonicate , " and this is what happens .
you see the transducer , the light blue .
there 's water in between the skull and the transducer .
and it does this burst of energy .
it elevates the temperature .
we first need to verify that we are on target .
so the first sonication is at lower energy .
it does n't do any damage , but it elevates the temperature by a few degrees .
and one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the mr is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively .
this is really a unique capability of the mr.
it is not being used in regular diagnostic imaging .
but here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time .
and you can see the points there on the graph .
the temperature was raised to 43 degrees c temporarily .
this does n't cause any damage .
but the point is we are right on target .
so once the physician verifies that the focus spot is on the target he has chosen , then we move to perform a full-energy ablation like you see here .
and you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees c.
if you do it for more than a second , it 's enough to basically destroy the proteins of the cells .
this is the outcome from a patient perspective - same day after the treatment .
this is an immediate relief .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
john is one of -lsb- about -rsb- a dozen very heroic , courageous people who volunteered for the study .
and you have to understand what is in people 's mind when they are willing to take the risk .
and this is a quote from john after he wrote it .
he said , " miraculous . "
and his wife said , " this is the happiest moment of my life . "
and you wonder why .
i mean , one of the messages i like to carry over is , what about defending quality of life ?
i mean , those people lose their independence .
they are dependent on others .
and john today is fully independent .
he returned to a normal life routine .
and he also plays golf , like you do in virginia when you are retired .
okay , so you can see here the spot .
it 's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain .
there 's no damage outside .
he suffers from no neurodeficit .
there 's no recovery needed , no nothing .
he 's back to his normal life .
let 's move now to a more painful subject .
pain is something that can make your life miserable .
and people are suffering from all kinds of pain like neuropathic pain , lower-back pain and cancer pain from bone metastases , when the metastases get to your bones , sometimes they are very painful .
all those i 've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain , again , very fast .
and i would like to tell you about pj .
he 's a 78 year-old farmer who suffered from - how should i say it ? - it 's called pain in the butt .
he had metastases in his right buttock , and he could n't sit even with medication .
he had to forgo all the farm activities .
he was treated with radiation therapy , state-of-the-art radiation therapy , but it did n't help .
many patients like that favor radiation therapy .
and again , he volunteered to a pivotal study that we ran worldwide , also in the u.s.
and his wife actually took him .
they drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital .
he had to sit on a cushion , stand still , not move , because it was very painful .
he took the treatment , and on the way back , he drove the truck by himself .
so again , this is an immediate relief .
and you have to understand what those people feel and what their family experiences when it happens .
he returned again to his daily routine on the farm .
he rides his tractor .
he rides his horse to their mountain cabin regularly .
and he has been very happy .
but now , you ask me , but what about war , the war on cancer ?
show us some primary cancer .
what can be done there ?
so i have good news and bad news .
the good news : there 's a lot that can be done .
and it has been shown actually outside of the u.s.
and doing that in the u.s.
is very painful .
i do n't see , without this nation taking it as some collective will or something that is a national goal to make that happen , it will not happen .
and it 's not just because of regulation ; it 's because of the amount of money needed under the current evidence-based medicine and the size of trials and so on to make it happen .
so the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer .
they were the first to be treated by focused ultrasound .
and we have better-than-surgery results in breasts .
but i have a message for the men here .
we heard here yesterday quyen talking about the adverse event trait in prostate cancer .
there is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by mr , because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy - treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland , and by that , avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence .
well , there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen - quite lethal , very lethal actually - pancreas , liver , kidney .
the challenge there with a breathing and awake patient - and in all our treatments , the patient is awake and conscious and speaks with the physician - is you have to teach the mr some tricks how to do it in real time .
and this will take time .
this will take two years .
but i have now a message to the ladies .
and this is , in 2004 , the fda has approved mr-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids .
women suffer from that disease .
all those tumors have heavy bleeding during periods , abdominal pressure , back pain , frequent urination .
and sometimes , they can not even conceive and become pregnant because of the fibroid .
this is frances .
she was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized fibroid .
this is a big fibroid .
she was offered a hysterectomy , but this is an inconceivable proposition for someone who wants to keep her pregnancy option .
so she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008 .
and in 2010 , she became a first-time mother to a healthy baby .
so new life was born .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in conclusion , i 'd like to leave you with actually four messages .
one is , think about the amount of suffering that is saved from patients undergoing noninvasive surgery , and also the economical and emotional burden removed from their families and communities and the society at large - and i think also from their physicians , by the way .
and the other thing i would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table -lsb- who -rsb- is awake and can even monitor the treatment .
in all our treatments , the patient holds a stop sonication button .
he can stop the surgery at any moment .
and with that note , i would like to thank you for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you today about prosperity , about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity .
and not just us , but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished .
and hope actually is at the heart of this .
in fact , the latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity .
" pro-speras , " " speras , " hope - in accordance with our hopes and expectations .
the irony is , though , that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth .
and we 've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope - running down resources , cutting down rainforests , spilling oil into the gulf of mexico , changing the climate - and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession .
and recession , of course , is n't exactly a recipe for hope either , as we 're busy finding out .
so we 're caught in a kind of trap .
it 's a dilemma , a dilemma of growth .
we ca n't live with it ; we ca n't live without it .
trash the system or crash the planet - it 's a tough choice ; it is n't much of a choice .
and our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently .
now i have n't got anything against efficiency .
and i think we are a clever species sometimes .
but i think we should also just check the numbers , take a reality check here .
so i want you to imagine a world , in 2050 , of around nine billion people , all aspiring to western incomes , western lifestyles .
and i want to ask the question - and we 'll give them that two percent hike in income , in salary each year as well , because we believe in growth .
and i want to ask the question : how far and how fast would be have to move ?
how clever would we have to be ?
how much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets ?
and here in my chart - on the left-hand side is where we are now .
this is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment .
it 's around about 770 grams of carbon .
in the world i describe to you , we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon .
it 's a 130-fold improvement , and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we 've ever achieved in industrial history .
maybe we can do it , maybe it 's possible - who knows ?
maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere , which is what we 're going to need to be doing by the end of the century .
but should n't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement ?
so i want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics .
it 's a bit complex , and i apologize for that .
what i 'll try and do , is i 'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms .
so it looks a little bit like this .
firms produce goods for households - that 's us - and provide us with incomes , and that 's even better , because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services .
that 's called the circular flow of the economy .
it looks harmless enough .
i just want to highlight one key feature of this system , which is the role of investment .
now investment constitutes only about a fifth of the national income in most modern economies , but it plays an absolutely vital role .
and what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth .
it does this in a couple of ways - chasing productivity , which drives down prices and encourages us to buy more stuff .
but i want to concentrate in seeking out novelty , the production and consumption of novelty .
joseph schumpeter called this " the process of creative destruction . "
it 's a process of the production and reproduction of novelty , continually chasing expanding consumer markets , consumer goods , new consumer goods .
and this , this is where it gets interesting , because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty .
we love new stuff - new material stuff for sure - but also new ideas , new adventures , new experiences .
but the materiality matters too , because in every society that anthropologists have looked at , material stuff operates as a kind of language - a language of goods , a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories - stories , for example , about how important we are .
status-driven , conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty .
and here , all of a sudden , we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic - the economic institutions , and who we are as people , locked together to drive an engine of growth .
and this engine is not just economic value ; it is pulling material resources relentlessly through the system , driven by our own insatiable appetites , driven in fact by a sense of anxiety .
adam smith , 200 years ago , spoke about our desire for a life without shame .
a life without shame : in his day , what that meant was a linen shirt , and today , well , you still need the shirt , but you need the hybrid car , the hdtv , two holidays a year in the sun , the netbook and ipad , the list goes on - an almost inexhaustible supply of goods , driven by this anxiety .
and even if we do n't want them , we need to buy them , because , if we do n't buy them , the system crashes .
and to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades , we 've expanded the money supply , expanded credit and debt , so that people can keep buying stuff .
and of course , that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis .
but this - i just want to show you some data here .
this is what it looks like , essentially , this credit and debt system , just for the u.k.
this was the last 15 years before the crash , and you can see there , consumer debt rose dramatically .
it was above the gdp for three years in a row just before the crisis .
and in the mean time , personal savings absolutely plummeted .
the savings ratio , net savings , were below zero in the middle of 2008 , just before the crash .
this is people expanding debt , drawing down their savings , just to stay in the game .
this is a strange , rather perverse , story , just to put it in very simple terms .
it 's a story about us , people , being persuaded to spend money we do n't have on things we do n't need to create impressions that wo n't last on people we do n't care about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but before we consign ourselves to despair , maybe we should just go back and say , " did we get this right ?
is this really how people are ?
is this really how economies behave ? "
and almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies .
the first one is in the crisis itself .
in the crisis , in the recession , what do people want to do ?
they want to hunker down , they want to look to the future .
they want to spend less and save more .
but saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view .
keynes called this the " paradox of thrift " - saving slows down recovery .
and politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt , to draw down our own savings even further , just so that we can get the show back on the road , so we can keep this growth-based economy going .
it 's an anomaly , it 's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people .
here 's another one - completely different one : why is it that we do n't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change , very , very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances , putting in efficient lights , turning the lights off occasionally , insulating our homes ?
these things save carbon , they save energy , they save us money .
so is it that , though they make perfect economic sense , we do n't do them ?
well , i had my own personal insight into this a few years ago .
it was a sunday evening , sunday afternoon , and it was just after - actually , to be honest , too long after - we had moved into a new house .
and i had finally got around to doing some draft stripping , installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts .
and my , then , five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do .
and we 'd been doing this for a while , when she turned to me very solemnly and said , " will this really keep out the giraffes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " here they are , the giraffes . "
you can hear the five-year-old mind working .
these ones , interestingly , are 400 miles north of here outside barrow-in-furness in cumbria .
goodness knows what they make of the lake district weather .
but actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me , because it suddenly became clear to me why we do n't do the blindingly obvious things .
we 're too busy keeping out the giraffes - putting the kids on the bus in the morning , getting ourselves to work on time , surviving email overload and shop floor politics , foraging for groceries , throwing together meals , escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time tv or ted online , getting from one end of the day to the other , keeping out the giraffes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is the objective ?
" what is the objective of the consumer ? "
mary douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago .
" it is , " she said , " to help create the social world and find a credible place in it . "
that is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives , and it 's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model .
so who are we ?
who are these people ?
are we these novelty-seeking , hedonistic , selfish individuals ?
or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist depicted in rembrandt 's lovely , lovely sketch here ?
well psychology actually says there is a tension - a tension between self-regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors .
and these tensions have deep evolutionary roots , so selfish behavior is adaptive in certain circumstances - fight or flight .
but other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings .
and perhaps even more interesting from our point of view , another tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and tradition or conservation .
novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself .
tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups .
so here , all of a sudden , we 're looking at a map of the human heart .
and it reveals to us , suddenly , the crux of the matter .
what we 've done is we 've created economies .
we 've created systems , which systematically privilege , encourage , one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded .
and in the same token , the solution becomes clear , because this is n't , therefore , about changing human nature .
it is n't , in fact , about curtailing possibilities .
it is about opening up .
it is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human , recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect rembrandt 's fragile altruist within .
what does all this mean for economics ?
what would economies look like if we took that vision of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche ?
well , it might look a little bit like the 4,000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the u.k. over the last five years and a similar rise in b corporations in the united states , enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their heart - companies , in fact , like this one , ecosia .
and i just want to , very quickly , show you this .
ecosia is an internet search engine .
internet search engines work by drawing revenues from sponsored links that appear when you do a search .
and ecosia works in pretty much the same way .
so we can do that here - we can just put in a little search term .
there you go , oxford , that 's where we are . see what comes up .
the difference with ecosia though is that , in ecosia 's case , it draws the revenues in the same way , but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the amazon .
and we 're going to do it .
we 're just going to click on naturejobs.uk.
in case anyone out there is looking for a job in a recession , that 's the page to go to .
and what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to ecosia , and ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project .
it 's taking profits from one place and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources .
it 's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy .
it 's a form , if you like , of ecological altruism - perhaps something along those lines . maybe it 's that .
whatever it is , whatever this new economy is , what we need the economy to do , in fact , is to put investment back into the heart of the model , to re-conceive investment .
only now , investment is n't going to be about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth .
investment has to be a different beast .
investment has to be , in the new economy , protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends .
it has to be about transition .
it has to be investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures .
we have to invest , in fact , in the idea of a meaningful prosperity , providing capabilities for people to flourish .
and of course , this task has material dimensions .
it would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they did n't have food , clothing and shelter .
but it 's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this .
it has social and psychological aims - family , friendship , commitments , society , participating in the life of that society .
and this too requires investment , investment - for example , in places - places where we can connect , places where we can participate , shared spaces , concert halls , gardens , public parks , libraries , museums , quiet centers , places of joy and celebration , places of tranquility and contemplation , sites for the " cultivation of a common citizenship , " in michael sandel 's lovely phrase .
an investment - investment , after all , is just such a basic economic concept - is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future , a shared present and a common future .
and we need that relationship to reflect , to reclaim hope .
so let me come back , with this sense of hope , to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door .
what can we offer those people ?
it 's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty .
it 's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations .
and it 's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we 're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations , a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model .
so this is not just a western post-materialist fantasy .
in fact , an african philosopher wrote to me , when " prosperity without growth " was published , pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional african concept of ubuntu .
ubuntu says , " i am because we are . "
prosperity is a shared endeavor .
its roots are long and deep - its foundations , i 've tried to show , exist already , inside each of us .
so this is not about standing in the way of development .
it 's not about overthrowing capitalism .
it 's not about trying to change human nature .
what we 're doing here is we 're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose .
and at the heart of that economics , we 're placing a more credible , more robust , and more realistic vision of what it means to be human .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : while they 're taking the podium away , just a quick question .
first of all , economists are n't supposed to be inspiring , so you may need to work on the tone a little .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- can you picture the politicians ever buying into this ?
i mean , can you picture a politician standing up in britain and saying , " gdp fell two percent this year . good news !
we 're actually all happier , and a country 's more beautiful , and our lives are better . "
tim jackson : well that 's clearly not what you 're doing .
you 're not making news out of things falling down .
you 're making news out of the things that tell you that we 're flourishing .
can i picture politicians doing it ?
actually , i already am seeing a little bit of it .
when we first started this kind of work , politicians would stand up , treasury spokesmen would stand up , and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves .
and actually in the period through which we 've been working over the last 18 years - partly because of the financial crisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economics - actually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world .
ca : but is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together , or is it going to be more just civil society and companies ?
tj : it has to be companies . it has to be civil society .
but it has to have political leadership .
this is a kind of agenda , which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma , because they 're hooked on the growth model themselves .
but actually opening up the space to think about different ways of governing , different kinds of politics , and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operate differently - absolutely vital .
ca : and if someone could convince you that we actually can make the - what was it ? - the 130-fold improvement in efficiency , of reduction of carbon footprint , would you then actually like that picture of economic growth into more knowledge-based goods ?
tj : i would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century , in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere , and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water .
if you can convince me we can do all that , then , yes , i would take the two percent .
ca : tim , thank you for a very important talk . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now i 'm going to give you a story .
it 's an indian story about an indian woman and her journey .
let me begin with my parents .
i 'm a product of this visionary mother and father .
many years ago , when i was born in the ' 50s - ' 50s and ' 60s did n't belong to girls in india .
they belonged to boys .
they belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents , and girls would be dolled up to get married .
my family , in my city , and almost in the country , was unique .
we were four of us , not one , and fortunately no boys .
we were four girls and no boys .
and my parents were part of a landed property family .
my father defied his own grandfather , almost to the point of disinheritance , because he decided to educate all four of us .
he sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education .
as i 've said , when we 're born , we do n't choose our parents , and when we go to school , we do n't choose our school .
children do n't choose a school .
they just get the school which parents choose for them .
so this is the foundation time which i got .
i grew up like this , and so did my other three sisters .
and my father used to say at that time , " i 'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world . "
i do n't know if he really meant -lsb- that -rsb- , but it happened .
i 'm the only one who 's left in india .
one is a british , another is an american and the third is a canadian .
so we are four of us in four corners of the world .
and since i said they 're my role models , i followed two things which my father and mother gave me .
one , they said , " life is on an incline .
you either go up , or you come down . "
and the second thing , which has stayed with me , which became my philosophy of life , which made all the difference , is : 100 things happen in your life , good or bad .
out of 100 , 90 are your creation .
they 're good . they 're your creation . enjoy it .
if they 're bad , they 're your creation . learn from it .
ten are nature-sent over which you ca n't do a thing .
it 's like a death of a relative , or a cyclone , or a hurricane , or an earthquake .
you ca n't do a thing about it .
you 've got to just respond to the situation .
but that response comes out of those 90 points .
since i 'm a product of this philosophy , of 90/10 , and secondly , " life on an incline , " that 's the way i grew up to be valuing what i got .
i 'm a product of opportunities , rare opportunities in the ' 50s and the ' 60s , which girls did n't get , and i was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique .
because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry , and here i was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities .
i thought i must tell you this .
why i said this , is the background .
this is what comes next .
i joined the indian police service as a tough woman , a woman with indefatigable stamina , because i used to run for my tennis titles , etc .
but i joined the indian police service , and then it was a new pattern of policing .
for me the policing stood for power to correct , power to prevent and power to detect .
this is something like a new definition ever given in policing in india - the power to prevent .
because normally it was always said , power to detect , and that 's it , or power to punish .
but i decided no , it 's a power to prevent , because that 's what i learned when i was growing up .
how do i prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10 ?
so this was how it came into my service , and it was different from the men .
i did n't want to make it different from the men , but it was different , because this was the way i was different .
and i redefined policing concepts in india .
i 'm going to take you on two journeys , my policing journey and my prison journey .
what you see , if you see the title called " pm 's car held . "
this was the first time a prime minister of india was given a parking ticket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the first time in india , and i can tell you , that 's the last time you 're hearing about it .
it 'll never happen again in india , because now it was once and forever .
and the rule was , because i was sensitive , i was compassionate , i was very sensitive to injustice , and i was very pro-justice .
that 's the reason , as a woman , i joined the indian police service .
i had other options , but i did n't choose them .
so i 'm going to move on .
this is about tough policing , equal policing .
now i was known as " here 's a woman that 's not going to listen . "
so i was sent to all indiscriminate postings , postings which others would say no .
i now went to a prison assignment as a police officer .
normally police officers do n't want to do prison .
they sent me to prison to lock me up , thinking , " now there will be no cars and no vips to be given tickets to .
let 's lock her up . "
here i got a prison assignment .
this was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals .
obviously , it was .
but 10,000 men , of which only 400 were women - 10,000 - 9,000 plus about 600 were men .
terrorists , rapists , burglars , gangsters - some of them i 'd sent to jail as a police officer outside .
and then how did i deal with them ?
the first day when i went in , i did n't know how to look at them .
and i said , " do you pray ? " when i looked at the group , i said , " do you pray ? "
they saw me as a young , short woman wearing a pathan suit .
i said , " do you pray ? "
and they did n't say anything .
i said , " do you pray ? do you want to pray ? "
they said , " yes . " i said , " all right , let 's pray . "
i prayed for them , and things started to change .
this is a visual of education inside the prison .
friends , this has never happened , where everybody in the prison studies .
i started this with community support .
government had no budget .
it was one of the finest , largest volunteerism in any prison in the world .
this was initiated in delhi prison .
you see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class .
these are hundreds of classes .
nine to eleven , every prisoner went into the education program - the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten .
we converted this into an ashram - from a prison to an ashram through education .
i think that 's the bigger change .
it was the beginning of a change .
teachers were prisoners . teachers were volunteers .
books came from donated schoolbooks .
stationery was donated .
everything was donated , because there was no budget of education for the prison .
now if i 'd not done that , it would have been a hellhole .
that 's the second landmark .
i want to show you some moments of history in my journey , which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world .
one , the numbers you 'll never get to see .
secondly , this concept .
this was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners .
one thousand prisoners who sat in meditation .
this was one of the most courageous steps i took as a prison governor .
and this is what transformed .
you want to know more about this , go and see this film , " doing time , doing vipassana . "
you will hear about it , and you will love it .
and write to me on kiranbedi.com , and i 'll respond to you .
let me show you the next slide .
i took the same concept of mindfulness , because , why did i bring meditation into the indian prison ?
because crime is a product of a distorted mind .
it was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control .
not by preaching , not by telling , not by reading , but by addressing your mind .
i took the same thing to the police , because police , equally , were prisoners of their minds , and they felt as if it was " we " and " they , " and that the people do n't cooperate .
this worked .
this is a feedback box called a petition box .
this is a concept which i introduced to listen to complaints , listen to grievances .
this was a magic box .
this was a sensitive box .
this is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison .
if you see somebody in the blue - yeah , this guy - he was a prisoner , and he was a teacher .
and you see , everybody 's busy . there was no time to waste .
let me wrap it up .
i 'm currently into movements , movements of education of the under-served children , which is thousands - india is all about thousands .
secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in india .
that 's a big way we , as a small group of activists , have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of india .
friends , you will hear a lot about it .
that 's the movement at the moment i 'm driving , and that 's the movement and ambition of my life .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you very much . thank you .
thank you . thank you . thank you .
the humanitarian model has barely changed since the early 20th century .
its origins are firmly rooted in the analog age .
and there is a major shift coming on the horizon .
the catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck haiti on the 12th of january in 2010 .
haiti was a game changer .
the earthquake destroyed the capital of port-au-prince , claiming the lives of some 320,000 people , rendering homeless about 1.2 million people .
government institutions were completely decapitated , including the presidential palace .
i remember standing on the roof of the ministry of justice in downtown port-au-prince .
it was about two meters high , completely squashed by the violence of the earthquake .
for those of us on the ground in those early days , it was clear for even the most disaster-hardened veterans that haiti was something different .
haiti was something we had n't seen before .
but haiti provided us with something else unprecedented .
haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices .
because out of the urban devastation in port-au-prince came a torrent of sms texts - people crying for help , beseeching us for assistance , sharing data , offering support , looking for their loved ones .
this was a situation that traditional aid agencies had never before encountered .
we were in one of the poorest countries on the planet , but 80 percent of the people had mobile devices in their hands .
and we were unprepared for this , and they were shaping the aid effort .
outside haiti also , things were looking different .
tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the internet , converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps , layering them with all sorts of important information - people like crisis mappers and open street map - and putting these on the web for everybody - the media , the aid organizations and the communities themselves - to participate in and to use .
back in haiti , people were increasingly turning to the medium of sms .
people that were hungry and hurting were signaling their distress , were signaling their need for help .
on street sides all over port-au-prince , entrepreneurs sprung up offering mobile phone charging stations .
they understood more than we did people 's innate need to be connected .
never having been confronted with this type of situation before , we wanted to try and understand how we could tap into this incredible resource , how we could really leverage this incredible use of mobile technology and sms technology .
we started talking with a local telecom provider called voilà , which is a subsidiary of trilogy international .
we had basically three requirements .
we wanted to communicate in a two-way form of communication .
we did n't want to shout ; we needed to listen as well .
we wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities .
we did n't need to talk to the whole country at the same time .
and we wanted it to be easy to use .
out of this rubble of haiti and from this devastation came something that we call tera - the trilogy emergency response application - which has been used to support the aid effort ever since .
it has been used to help communities prepare for disasters .
it has been used to signal early warning in advance of weather-related disasters .
it 's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera .
and it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence .
but does it work ?
we have just published an evaluation of this program , and the evidence that is there for all to see is quite remarkable .
some 74 percent of people received the data .
those who were intended to receive the data , 74 percent of them received it .
96 percent of them found it useful .
83 percent of them took action - evidence that it is indeed empowering .
and 73 percent of them shared it .
the tera system was developed from haiti with support of engineers in the region .
it is a user-appropriate technology that has been used for humanitarian good to great effect .
technology is transformational .
right across the developing world , citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change , positive change , the grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models , the old analog models of control and command .
one illustration of the transformational power of technology is in kibera .
kibera is one of africa 's largest slums .
it 's on the outskirts of nairobi , the capital city of kenya .
it 's home to an unknown number of people - some say between 250,000 and 1.2 million .
if you were to arrive in nairobi today and pick up a tourist map , kibera is represented as a lush , green national park devoid of human settlement .
young people living in kibera in their community , with simple handheld devices , gps handheld devices and sms-enabled mobile phones , have literally put themselves on the map .
they have collated crowd-sourced data and rendered the invisible visible .
people like josh and steve are continuing to layer information upon information , real-time information , tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use .
you can find out about the latest impromptu music session .
you can find out about the latest security incident .
you can find out about places of worship .
you can find out about the health centers .
you can feel the dynamism of this living , breathing community .
they also have their own news network on youtube with 36,000 viewers at the moment .
they 're showing us what can be done with mobile , digital technologies .
they 're showing that the magic of technology can bring the invisible visible .
and they are giving a voice to themselves .
they are telling their own story , bypassing the official narrative .
and we 're seeing from all points on the globe similar stories .
in mongolia for instance , where 30 percent of the people are nomadic , sms information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns .
sms is even used to hold herder summits from remote participation .
and if people are migrating into urban , unfamiliar , concrete environments , they can also be helped in anticipation with social supporters ready and waiting for them based on sms knowledge .
in nigeria , open-source sms tools are being used by the red cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria .
my colleague , jason peat , who runs this program , tells me it 's 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the traditional way of doing things .
and not only is it empowering to the communities , but really importantly , this information stays in the community where it is needed to formulate long-term health polices .
we are on a planet of seven billion people , five billion mobile subscriptions .
by 2015 , there will be three billion smartphones in the world .
the u.n. broadband commission has recently set targets to help broadband access in 50 percent of the developing world , compared to 20 percent today .
we are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart , fast mobile devices .
people are understanding , from cairo to oakland , that there are new ways to come together , there are new ways to mobilize , there are new ways to influence .
a transformation is coming which needs to be understood by the humanitarian structures and humanitarian models .
the collective voices of people needs to be more integrated through new technologies into the organizational strategies and plans of actions and not just recycled for fundraising or marketing .
we need to , for example , embrace the big data , the knowledge that is there from market leaders who understand what it means to use and leverage big data .
one idea that i 'd like you to consider , for instance , is to take a look at our it departments .
they 're normally backroom or basement hardware service providers , but they need to be elevated to software strategists .
we need people in our organizations who know what it 's like to work with big data .
we need technology as a core organizational principle .
we need technological strategists in the boardroom who can ask and answer the question , " what would amazon or google do with all of this data ? "
and convert it to humanitarian good .
the possibilities that new digital technologies are bringing can help humanitarian organizations , not only ensure that people 's right to information is met , or that they have their right to communicate , but i think in the future , humanitarian organizations will also have to anticipate the right for people to access critical communication technologies in order to ensure that their voices are heard , that they 're truly participating , that they 're truly empowered in the humanitarian world .
it has always been the elusive ideal to ensure full participation of people affected by disasters in the humanitarian effort .
we now have the tools . we now have the possibilities .
there are no more reasons not to do it .
i believe we need to bring the humanitarian world from analog to digital .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- eric berlow : i 'm an ecologist , and sean 's a physicist , and we both study complex networks .
and we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short ted talk about the ecology of war , and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met .
and then we thought , you know , there are thousands of other talks out there , especially tedx talks , that are popping up all over the world .
how are they connected , and what does that global conversation look like ?
so sean 's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that .
sean gourley : exactly . so we took 24,000 tedx talks from around the world , 147 different countries , and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them .
and we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other .
and so , of course , if you 're going to do this kind of stuff , you need a lot of data .
so the data that you 've got is a great thing called youtube , and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from youtube , all the comments , all the views , who 's watching it , where are they watching it , what are they saying in the comments .
but we can also pull up , using speech-to-text translation , we can pull the entire transcript , and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself .
so we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things .
we can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer , line by line , extracting key concepts from this .
and we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea .
and we call that the meme-ome .
and the meme-ome , you know , quite simply , is the mathematics that underlies an idea , and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it , which i want to share with you now .
so each idea has its own meme-ome , and each idea is unique with that , but of course , ideas , they borrow from each other , they kind of steal sometimes , and they certainly build on each other , and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk , and if there 's a similarity between the two of them , we can create a link and represent that as a graph , just like eric and i are connected .
so that 's theory , that 's great .
let 's see how it works in actual practice .
so what we 've got here now is the global footprint of all the tedx talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from new york all the way down to little old new zealand in the corner .
and what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these , and we started to see where the connections occurred , where they connected with each other .
cameron russell talking about image and beauty connected over into europe .
we 've got a bigger conversation about israel and palestine radiating outwards from the middle east .
and we 've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere .
so from this , we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection , but luckily , computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space .
so we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this , and the similar talks kind of smash together , and the different ones fly apart , and what we 're left with is something quite beautiful .
eb : so i want to just point out here that every node is a talk , they 're linked if they share similar ideas , and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts , and then all these topics that pop out , they 're not from tags and keywords .
they come from the network structure of interconnected ideas . keep going .
sg : absolutely . so i got a little quick on that , but he 's going to slow me down .
we 've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media .
you 've got , of course , the human brain right next to healthcare , which you might expect , but also you 've got video games , which is sort of adjacent , as those two spaces interface with each other .
but i want to take you into one cluster that 's particularly important to me , and that 's the environment .
and i want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution .
so as we go in here , what we start to see , apply the physics engine again , we see what 's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones .
the structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world .
so you 've got food economy and local food at the top , you 've got greenhouse gases , solar and nuclear waste .
what you 're getting is a range of smaller conversations , each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share , creating a broader concept of the environment .
and of course , from here , we can go and zoom in and see , well , what are young people looking at ?
and they 're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion .
this is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment .
if we split along gender lines , we can see females resonating heavily with food economy , but also out there in hope and optimism .
and so there 's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here , and i 'll throw to eric for the next part .
eb : yeah , i mean , just to point out here , you can not get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on youtube .
let 's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment , and look at all the talks together .
now often , when we 're faced with this amount of content , we do a couple of things to simplify it .
we might just say , well , what are the most popular talks out there ?
and a few rise to the surface .
there 's a talk about gratitude .
there 's another one about personal health and nutrition .
and of course , there 's got to be one about porn , right ?
and so then we might say , well , gratitude , that was last year .
what 's trending now ? what 's the popular talk now ?
and we can see that the new , emerging , top trending topic is about digital privacy .
so this is great . it simplifies things .
but there 's so much creative content that 's just buried at the bottom .
and i hate that . how do we bubble stuff up to the surface that 's maybe really creative and interesting ?
well , we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that .
remember , it 's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics , and let 's say we could take two of them , like cities and genetics , and say , well , are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines .
and that 's - essentially , this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation .
well here 's one by jessica green about the microbial ecology of buildings .
it 's literally defining a new field .
and we could go back to those topics and say , well , what talks are central to those conversations ?
in the cities cluster , one of the most central was one by mitch joachim about ecological cities , and in the genetics cluster , we have a talk about synthetic biology by craig venter .
these are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline .
we could go the other direction and say , well , what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields .
we used a measure of ecological diversity to get this .
like , a talk by steven pinker on the history of violence , very synthetic .
and then , of course , there are talks that are so unique they 're kind of out in the stratosphere , in their own special place , and we call that the colleen flanagan index .
and if you do n't know colleen , she 's an artist , and i asked her , " well , what 's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space ? "
and apparently it smells like bacon .
i would n't know .
so we 're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique , ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields , ones that are central to their topic , and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields .
okay ? we never would have found those with our obsession with what 's trending now .
and all of this comes from the architecture of complexity , or the patterns of how things are connected .
sg : so that 's exactly right .
we 've got ourselves in a world that 's massively complex , and we 've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it .
and those algorithms , whilst being kind of useful , are also very , very narrow , and we can do better than that , because we can realize that their complexity is not random .
it has mathematical structure , and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what 's being said , to see what 's not being said , and to be a little bit more human and , hopefully , a little smarter .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a contemporary artist and i show in art galleries and museums .
i show a number of photographs and films , but i also make television programs , books and some advertising , all with the same concept .
and it 's about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture , and the importance of the image : celebrity is born of photography .
i 'm going to start with how i started with this concept seven years ago , when princess diana died .
there was a sort of a standstill in britain the moment of her death , and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way .
i was fascinated by this phenomenon , so i wondered : could one erase the image of diana , actually quite crudely and physically ?
so , i got a gun and started to shoot at the image of diana , but i could n't erase this from my memory and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche .
momentum was being built .
the press wrote about her death in rather , i felt , pornographic ways - like , " which bit of artery left which bit of body ? "
and " how did she die in the back of the car ? " - and i was intrigued by this sort of mass voyeurism , so i made these rather gory images .
i then went on wondering whether i could actually replace her image , so i got a look-alike of diana and posed her in the right positions and angles and created something that was in , or existed in , the public imagination .
so people were wondering : was she going to marry dodi ?
was she in love with him ?
was she pregnant ? did she want his baby ?
was she pregnant when she died ?
so i created this image of diana , dodi and their imaginary mixed-race child and this image came out , which caused a huge public outcry at the time .
i then went on to make more comments on the media and press imagery , so i started making reference to media imagery - made it grainy , shot through doorways and so on and so forth - to titillate the public or the viewer further in terms of trying to make the viewer more aware of their own voyeurism .
so , this is an image of diana looking at camilla kissing her husband , and this was a sequence of images .
and this gets shown in art galleries like this , as a sequence .
and similarly with the di-dodian baby imagery - this is another art gallery installation .
i 'm particularly interested in how you ca n't rely on your own perception .
this is jane smith and jo bloggs , for instance , but you think it 's camilla and the queen , and i 'm fascinated how what you think is real is n't necessarily real .
and the camera can lie , and it makes it very , very easy with the mass bombardment of imagery to tell untruths .
so , i continued to work on this project of how photography seduces us and is more interesting to look at than the actual real subject matter .
and at the same time , it removes us from the real subject matter , and this acts as a sort of titillating thing .
so , the photograph becomes this teaser and incites desire and voyeurism ; what you ca n't have , you want more .
in the photograph , the real subject does n't exist so it makes you want that person more .
and that is the way , i think , that celebrity magazines work now : the more pictures you see of these celebrities , the more you feel you know them , but you do n't know them and you want to know them further .
of course , the queen goes to her stud often to watch her horses ...
watch her horses . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
and then i was sort of making imagery .
in england there 's an expression : " you ca n't imagine the queen on the loo . "
so i 'm trying to penetrate that .
well , here is the image .
all this imagery was creating a lot of fuss and i was cited as a disgusting artist . the press were writing about this , giving full pages about how terrible this was .
which i found very interesting that it was going full cycle : i was making comments about the press and about how we know facts and information only by media - because we do n't know the real people ; very few of us know the real people - but it was going back into the press and they were publicizing , effectively , my filthy work .
so , these are broadsheets , tabloids , debates were being had all about this work , films were being banned before people had actually had the look at the work , politicians were getting involved - all sorts of things - great headlines .
then suddenly , it started to get on front pages .
i was being asked and paid to do front covers .
suddenly i was becoming sort of acceptable , which i found also fascinating .
how one moment - it was disgusting - journalists would lie to me to get a story or a photograph of me , saying my work was wonderful , and the next minute there were terrible headlines about me .
but then this changed suddenly .
i then started to work for magazines and newspapers .
this was , for example , an image that went into tatler .
this was another newspaper image .
it was an april fool actually , and to this day some people think it 's real .
i was sitting next to someone at dinner the other day , and they were saying there 's this great image of the queen sitting outside william hill .
they thought it was real .
i was exploring , at the time , the hyperbole of icons - and diana and marilyn - and the importance of celebrity in our lives .
how they wheedle their way into the collective psyche without us even knowing , and how that should happen .
i explored with actually dressing up as the celebrities myself .
there 's me as diana - i look like the mass murderer myra hindley , i think , in this one . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
and me as the queen .
i then continued on to make a whole body of work about marilyn - the biggest icon of all - and trying to titillate by shooting through doorways and shutters and so on and so forth , and only showing certain angles to create a reality that , obviously , is completely constructed .
this is the look-alike , so the crafting elements of this is completely enormous .
she looks nothing like marilyn , but by the time we 've made her up and put wigs and makeup on , she looks exactly like marilyn , to the extent that her husband could n't recognize her - or recognize this look-alike - in these photographs , which i find quite interesting .
so , all this work is getting shown in art galleries .
then i made a book .
i was also making a tv series for the bbc at the time .
stills from the tv series went into this book .
but there was a real legal problem because it looks real , but how do you get over that ?
because obviously it 's making a comment about our culture right now : that we ca n't tell what 's real .
how do we know when we 're looking at something whether it 's real or not ?
so , from my point of view , it 's important to publish it , but at the same time it does cause a confusion - intentional on my behalf , but problematic for any outlet that i 'm working with .
so a big disclaimer is put on everything that i do , and i made narratives about all the european or brit celebrities and comments about our public figures .
you know , what does tony blair get up to in private with his fashion guru ?
and also dealing with the perceptions that are put about bin laden , saddam hussein , the links that were put about pre-iraq war .
and what is going to happen to the monarchy ?
because obviously the british public , i think , would prefer william to charles on the throne .
and it 's that wish , or that desire , that i suppose i 'm dealing with in my work .
i 'm not really interested in the celebrity themselves .
i 'm interested in the perception of the celebrity .
and with some look-alikes , they are so good you do n't know whether they 're real or not .
i did an advertising campaign for schweppes , which is coca-cola , and so that was very interesting in terms of the legalities .
it 's highly commercial .
but it was a difficulty for me - because this is my artwork ; should i do advertising ? - at the time .
so i made sure the work was not compromised in any way and that the integrity of the work remained the same .
but the meanings changed in the sense that with the logo on , you 're closing all the lines of interpretation down to selling a product and that 's all you 're doing .
when you take the logo off , you 're opening up the interpretations and making the work inconclusive , opposed to conclusive when you are advertising .
this image is quite interesting , actually , because i think we made it three years ago .
and it 's camilla in her wedding dress , which , again , nearly got re-used now , recently prior to her wedding .
tony blair and cherie . and again , the legalities - we had to be very careful .
it 's obviously a very big commercial company , and so this little , " shh - it 's not really them , " was put on the side of the imagery .
and margaret thatcher visiting jeffery archer in jail .
i then was asked by selfridges to do a series of windows for them , so i built a sauna bath in one of their windows and created little scenes - live scenes with look-alikes inside the windows , and the windows were all steamed up .
so , it 's tony blair reading and practicing his speech ; i 've got them doing yoga inside there with carole caplin ; sven making out with ulrika jonsson , who he was having an affair with at that time .
this was a huge success for them because the imagery got shown in the press the day after in every single newspaper , broadsheets and tabloids .
it was a bit of a road stopper , which was problematic because the police kept on trying to clear away the crowds , but huge fun - it was great for me to do a performance .
also , people were taking photographs of this , so it was being texted around the world extremely quickly , all this imagery .
and the press were interviewing , and i was signing my book . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
further imagery . i 'm making a new book now with taschen that i 'm working on really for a sort of global market - my previous book was only for the u.k. market - that i suppose it could be called humorous .
i suppose i come from a sort of non-humorous background with serious intent , and then suddenly my work is funny .
and i think it does n't really matter that my work is considered humorous , in a way ; i think it 's a way in for me to deal with the importance of imagery and how we read all our information through imagery .
it 's an extremely fast way of getting information .
it 's extremely difficult if it 's constructed correctly , and there are techniques of constructing iconic imagery .
this image , for example , is sort of spot-on because it exactly sums up what elton may be doing in private , and also what might be happening with saddam hussein , and george bush reading the koran upside-down .
for example , george bush target practice - shooting at bin laden and michael moore .
and then you change the photograph he 's shooting at , and it suddenly becomes rather grim and maybe less accessible . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
tony blair being used as a mounting block , and rumsfeld and bush laughing with some abu ghraib photos behind , and the seriousness , or the intellect , of bush .
and also , commenting on the behind the scenes - well , as we know now - what goes on in prisons .
and in fact , george bush and tony blair are having great fun during all of this .
and really commenting , you know , based on the perception we have of the celebrities .
what jack nicholson might be up to in his celebrity life , and the fact that he tried to ... he had a bit of road rage and golf-clubbed a driver the other day .
i mean , it 's extremely difficult to find these look-alikes , so i 'm constantly going up to people in the street and trying to ask people to come and be in one of my photographs or films .
and sometimes asking the real celebrity , mistaking them for someone who just looks like the real person , which is highly embarrassing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
i 've also been working with the guardian on a topical basis - a page a week in their newspaper - which has been very interesting , working topically .
so , jamie oliver and school dinners ; bush and blair having difficulty getting alongside muslim culture ; the whole of the hunting issue , and the royal family refusing to stop hunting ; and the tsunami issues ; and obviously harry ; blair 's views on gordon brown , which i find very interesting ; condi and bush .
this image i 've decided to show having a reservation about it .
i made it a year ago . and just how meanings change , and there were a terrible thing that has happened , but the fear is lurking around in our minds prior to that .
that 's why this image was made one year ago , and what it means today .
so , i 'll leave you with these clips to have a look . -lrb- music -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
my work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions .
today i brought two recent projects as an example of this .
both projects are in emerging countries , one in ethiopia and another one in tunisia .
and also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture .
the first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in ethiopia 's capital city addis ababa .
and this is the type of building we were shown as an example , to my team and myself , of what we had to design .
at first , the first thing i thought was , i want to run away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after seeing a few of these buildings - there are many in the city - we realized that they have three very big points .
first , these buildings , they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people can not afford to buy things .
second , they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside , and then you need a lot of cooling .
in a city where this should n't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year .
and third is that their image has nothing to do with africa and with ethiopia .
it is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions .
also during our first visit to ethiopia , i was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people , they go and buy things every day from small vendors .
and also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity .
so i thought , this is what i really want to design , not a shopping mall .
but the question was how we could do a multistory , contemporary building with these principles .
the next challenge was when we looked at the site , that is , in a really growing area of the city , where most of these buildings that you see in the image , they were not there .
and it 's also between two parallel streets that do n't have any connection for hundreds of meters .
so the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets , putting all the entrances of the building .
and this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain .
and around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops , that change in each floor because of the shape of the void .
i also thought , how to close the building ?
and i really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions .
and i started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in , and also the light , but in a filtered way .
and then the inspiration came from these beautiful patterns of the ethiopian women 's dresses .
that they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade .
and we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building .
and this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night .
with these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like , " this is not a shopping mall . we did n't ask for that . "
but then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell .
and also that the idea of the facade was much , much cheaper , not only because of the material compared with the glass , but also because we did n't need to have air conditioning anymore .
so we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project .
and the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day .
so we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof .
and then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis .
and these porches on the roof , all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside .
hopefully by the beginning of next year , because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction .
the second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of tunis .
and for doing such a big project , the biggest project i 've ever designed , i really needed to understand the city of tunis , but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture .
during that analysis i paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall , opened by twelve different gates , connected by almost straight lines .
when i went to the site , the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets , creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in barcelona and other cities in europe with these courtyards .
on top of that , we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines , and this modified this initial pattern .
and the last operation was to think about the cell , the small cell of the project , like the apartment , as an essential part of the master plan .
and for that i thought , what would be the best orientation in the mediterranean climate for an apartment ?
and it 's north-south , because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation .
so we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction .
and this is the result that is almost like a combination of the european block and the arab city .
it has these blocks with courtyards , and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians .
and also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor .
and it also reinforces this idea of the gates .
the volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood and in the courtyards there are the different facilities , such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by , a series of commercial -lsb- spaces -rsb- that bring activity to the ground floor .
the roof , which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction .
and it 's where all the neighbors , they can go up and socialize , and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning , jumping from one building to another .
these two examples , they have a common approach in the design process .
and also , they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing .
in these cities , the impact of architecture in people 's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow .
for this reason , i see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , i thought there would be a podium , so i 'm a bit scared .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- chris asked me to tell again how we found the structure of dna .
and since , you know , i follow his orders , i 'll do it .
but it slightly bores me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , i wrote a book . so i 'll say something - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i 'll say a little about , you know , how the discovery was made , and why francis and i found it .
and then , i hope maybe i have at least five minutes to say what makes me tick now .
in back of me is a picture of me when i was 17 .
i was at the university of chicago , in my third year , and i was in my third year because the university of chicago let you in after two years of high school .
so you - it was fun to get away from high school - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because i was very small , and i was no good in sports , or anything like that .
but i should say that my background - my father was , you know , raised to be an episcopalian and republican , but after one year of college , he became an atheist and a democrat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and my mother was irish catholic , and - but she did n't take religion too seriously .
and by the age of 11 , i was no longer going to sunday mass , and going on birdwatching walks with my father .
so early on , i heard of charles darwin .
i guess , you know , he was the big hero .
and , you know , you understand life as it now exists through evolution .
and at the university of chicago i was a zoology major , and thought i would end up , you know , if i was bright enough , maybe getting a ph.d. from cornell in ornithology .
then , in the chicago paper , there was a review of a book called " what is life ? " by the great physicist , schrodinger .
and that , of course , had been a question i wanted to know .
you know , darwin explained life after it got started , but what was the essence of life ?
and schrodinger said the essence was information present in our chromosomes , and it had to be present on a molecule . i 'd never really thought of molecules before .
you know chromosomes , but this was a molecule , and somehow all the information was probably present in some digital form . and there was the big question of , how did you copy the information ?
so that was the book . and so , from that moment on , i wanted to be a geneticist - understand the gene and , through that , understand life .
so i had , you know , a hero at a distance .
it was n't a baseball player ; it was linus pauling .
and so i applied to caltech and they turned me down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i went to indiana , which was actually as good as caltech in genetics , and besides , they had a really good basketball team . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i had a really quite happy life at indiana .
and it was at indiana i got the impression that , you know , the gene was likely to be dna .
and so when i got my ph.d. , i should go and search for dna .
so i first went to copenhagen because i thought , well , maybe i could become a biochemist , but i discovered biochemistry was very boring .
it was n't going anywhere toward , you know , saying what the gene was ; it was just nuclear science . and oh , that 's the book , little book .
you can read it in about two hours .
and - but then i went to a meeting in italy .
and there was an unexpected speaker who was n't on the program , and he talked about dna .
and this was maurice wilkins . he was trained as a physicist , and after the war he wanted to do biophysics , and he picked dna because dna had been determined at the rockefeller institute to possibly be the genetic molecules on the chromosomes .
most people believed it was proteins .
but wilkins , you know , thought dna was the best bet , and he showed this x-ray photograph .
sort of crystalline . so dna had a structure , even though it owed it to probably different molecules carrying different sets of instructions .
so there was something universal about the dna molecule .
so i wanted to work with him , but he did n't want a former birdwatcher , and i ended up in cambridge , england .
so i went to cambridge , because it was really the best place in the world then for x-ray crystallography . and x-ray crystallography is now a subject in , you know , chemistry departments .
i mean , in those days it was the domain of the physicists .
so the best place for x-ray crystallography was at the cavendish laboratory at cambridge .
and there i met francis crick .
i went there without knowing him . he was 35 . i was 23 .
and within a day , we had decided that maybe we could take a shortcut to finding the structure of dna .
not solve it like , you know , in rigorous fashion , but build a model , an electro-model , using some coordinates of , you know , length , all that sort of stuff from x-ray photographs .
but just ask what the molecule - how should it fold up ?
and the reason for doing so , at the center of this photograph , is linus pauling . about six months before , he proposed the alpha helical structure for proteins . and in doing so , he banished the man out on the right , sir lawrence bragg , who was the cavendish professor .
this is a photograph several years later , when bragg had cause to smile .
he certainly was n't smiling when i got there , because he was somewhat humiliated by pauling getting the alpha helix , and the cambridge people failing because they were n't chemists .
and certainly , neither crick or i were chemists , so we tried to build a model . and he knew , francis knew wilkins .
so wilkins said he thought it was the helix .
x-ray diagram , he thought was comparable with the helix .
so we built a three-stranded model .
the people from london came up .
wilkins and this collaborator , or possible collaborator , rosalind franklin , came up and sort of laughed at our model .
they said it was lousy , and it was .
so we were told to build no more models ; we were incompetent .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so we did n't build any models , and francis sort of continued to work on proteins .
and basically , i did nothing . and - except read .
you know , basically , reading is a good thing ; you get facts .
and we kept telling the people in london that linus pauling 's going to move on to dna .
if dna is that important , linus will know it .
he 'll build a model , and then we 're going to be scooped .
and , in fact , he 'd written the people in london : could he see their x-ray photograph ?
and they had the wisdom to say " no . " so he did n't have it .
but there was ones in the literature .
actually , linus did n't look at them that carefully .
but about , oh , 15 months after i got to cambridge , a rumor began to appear from linus pauling 's son , who was in cambridge , that his father was now working on dna .
and so , one day peter came in and he said he was peter pauling , and he gave me a copy of his father 's manuscripts .
and boy , i was scared because i thought , you know , we may be scooped .
i have nothing to do , no qualifications for anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so there was the paper , and he proposed a three-stranded structure .
and i read it , and it was just - it was crap .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was , you know , unexpected from the world 's - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and so , it was held together by hydrogen bonds between phosphate groups .
well , if the peak ph that cells have is around seven , those hydrogen bonds could n't exist .
we rushed over to the chemistry department and said , " could pauling be right ? " and alex hust said , " no . " so we were happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , we were still in the game , but we were frightened that somebody at caltech would tell linus that he was wrong .
and so bragg said , " build models . "
and a month after we got the pauling manuscript - i should say i took the manuscript to london , and showed the people .
well , i said , linus was wrong and that we 're still in the game and that they should immediately start building models .
but wilkins said " no . " rosalind franklin was leaving in about two months , and after she left he would start building models .
and so i came back with that news to cambridge , and bragg said , " build models . "
well , of course , i wanted to build models .
and there 's a picture of rosalind . she really , you know , in one sense she was a chemist , but really she would have been trained - she did n't know any organic chemistry or quantum chemistry .
she was a crystallographer .
and i think part of the reason she did n't want to build models was , she was n't a chemist , whereas pauling was a chemist .
and so crick and i , you know , started building models , and i 'd learned a little chemistry , but not enough .
well , we got the answer on the 28th february ' 53 .
and it was because of a rule , which , to me , is a very good rule : never be the brightest person in a room , and we were n't .
we were n't the best chemists in the room .
i went in and showed them a pairing i 'd done , and jerry donohue - he was a chemist - he said , it 's wrong .
you 've got - the hydrogen atoms are in the wrong place .
i just put them down like they were in the books .
he said they were wrong .
so the next day , you know , after i thought , " well , he might be right . "
so i changed the locations , and then we found the base pairing , and francis immediately said the chains run in absolute directions .
and we knew we were right .
so it was a pretty , you know , it all happened in about two hours .
from nothing to thing .
and we knew it was big because , you know , if you just put a next to t and g next to c , you have a copying mechanism .
so we saw how genetic information is carried .
it 's the order of the four bases .
so in a sense , it is a sort of digital-type information .
and you copy it by going from strand-separating .
so , you know , if it did n't work this way , you might as well believe it , because you did n't have any other scheme .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that 's not the way most scientists think .
most scientists are really rather dull .
they said , we wo n't think about it until we know it 's right .
but , you know , we thought , well , it 's at least 95 percent right or 99 percent right .
so think about it . the next five years , there were essentially something like five references to our work in " nature " - none .
and so we were left by ourselves , and trying to do the last part of the trio : how do you - what does this genetic information do ?
it was pretty obvious that it provided the information to an rna molecule , and then how do you go from rna to protein ?
for about three years we just - i tried to solve the structure of rna .
it did n't yield . it did n't give good x-ray photographs .
i was decidedly unhappy ; a girl did n't marry me .
it was really , you know , sort of a shitty time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there 's a picture of francis and i before i met the girl , so i 'm still looking happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but there is what we did when we did n't know where to go forward : we formed a club and called it the rna tie club .
george gamow , also a great physicist , he designed the tie .
he was one of the members . the question was : how do you go from a four-letter code to the 20-letter code of proteins ?
feynman was a member , and teller , and friends of gamow .
but that 's the only - no , we were only photographed twice .
and on both occasions , you know , one of us was missing the tie .
there 's francis up on the upper right , and alex rich - the m.d.-turned-crystallographer - is next to me .
this was taken in cambridge in september of 1955 .
and i 'm smiling , sort of forced , i think , because the girl i had , boy , she was gone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i did n't really get happy until 1960 , because then we found out , basically , you know , that there are three forms of rna .
and we knew , basically , dna provides the information for rna .
rna provides the information for protein .
and that let marshall nirenberg , you know , take rna - synthetic rna - put it in a system making protein . he made polyphenylalanine , polyphenylalanine . so that 's the first cracking of the genetic code , and it was all over by 1966 .
so there , that 's what chris wanted me to do , it was - so what happened since then ?
well , at that time - i should go back .
when we found the structure of dna , i gave my first talk at cold spring harbor . the physicist , leo szilard , he looked at me and said , " are you going to patent this ? "
and - but he knew patent law , and that we could n't patent it , because you could n't . no use for it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so dna did n't become a useful molecule , and the lawyers did n't enter into the equation until 1973 , 20 years later , when boyer and cohen in san francisco and stanford came up with their method of recombinant dna , and stanford patented it and made a lot of money .
at least they patented something which , you know , could do useful things .
and then , they learned how to read the letters for the code .
and , boom , we 've , you know , had a biotech industry . and , but we were still a long ways from , you know , answering a question which sort of dominated my childhood , which is : how do you nature-nurture ?
and so i 'll go on . i 'm already out of time , but this is michael wigler , a very , very clever mathematician turned physicist . and he developed a technique which essentially will let us look at sample dna and , eventually , a million spots along it .
there 's a chip there , a conventional one . then there 's one made by a photolithography by a company in madison called nimblegen , which is way ahead of affymetrix .
and we use their technique .
and what you can do is sort of compare dna of normal segs versus cancer .
and you can see on the top that cancers which are bad show insertions or deletions .
so the dna is really badly mucked up , whereas if you have a chance of surviving , the dna is n't so mucked up .
so we think that this will eventually lead to what we call " dna biopsies . " before you get treated for cancer , you should really look at this technique , and get a feeling of the face of the enemy .
it 's not a - it 's only a partial look , but it 's a - i think it 's going to be very , very useful .
so , we started with breast cancer because there 's lots of money for it , no government money .
and now i have a sort of vested interest : i want to do it for prostate cancer . so , you know , you are n't treated if it 's not dangerous .
but wigler , besides looking at cancer cells , looked at normal cells , and made a really sort of surprising observation .
which is , all of us have about 10 places in our genome where we 've lost a gene or gained another one .
so we 're sort of all imperfect . and the question is well , if we 're around here , you know , these little losses or gains might not be too bad .
but if these deletions or amplifications occurred in the wrong gene , maybe we 'll feel sick .
so the first disease he looked at is autism .
and the reason we looked at autism is we had the money to do it .
looking at an individual is about 3,000 dollars . and the parent of a child with asperger 's disease , the high-intelligence autism , had sent his thing to a conventional company ; they did n't do it .
could n't do it by conventional genetics , but just scanning it we began to find genes for autism .
and you can see here , there are a lot of them .
so a lot of autistic kids are autistic because they just lost a big piece of dna .
i mean , big piece at the molecular level .
we saw one autistic kid , about five million bases just missing from one of his chromosomes .
we have n't yet looked at the parents , but the parents probably do n't have that loss , or they would n't be parents .
now , so , our autism study is just beginning . we got three million dollars .
i think it will cost at least 10 to 20 before you 'd be in a position to help parents who 've had an autistic child , or think they may have an autistic child , and can we spot the difference ?
so this same technique should probably look at all .
it 's a wonderful way to find genes .
and so , i 'll conclude by saying we 've looked at 20 people with schizophrenia .
and we thought we 'd probably have to look at several hundred before we got the picture . but as you can see , there 's seven out of 20 had a change which was very high .
and yet , in the controls there were three .
so what 's the meaning of the controls ?
were they crazy also , and we did n't know it ?
or , you know , were they normal ? i would guess they 're normal .
and what we think in schizophrenia is there are genes of predisposure , and whether this is one that predisposes - and then there 's only a sub-segment of the population that 's capable of being schizophrenic .
now , we do n't have really any evidence of it , but i think , to give you a hypothesis , the best guess is that if you 're left-handed , you 're prone to schizophrenia .
30 percent of schizophrenic people are left-handed , and schizophrenia has a very funny genetics , which means 60 percent of the people are genetically left-handed , but only half of it showed . i do n't have the time to say .
now , some people who think they 're right-handed are genetically left-handed . ok . i 'm just saying that , if you think , oh , i do n't carry a left-handed gene so therefore my , you know , children wo n't be at risk of schizophrenia . you might . ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's , to me , an extraordinarily exciting time .
we ought to be able to find the gene for bipolar ; there 's a relationship .
and if i had enough money , we 'd find them all this year .
i thank you .
we 've got a real problem with math education right now .
basically , no one 's very happy .
those learning it think it 's disconnected , uninteresting and hard .
those trying to employ them think they do n't know enough .
governments realize that it 's a big deal for our economies , but do n't know how to fix it .
and teachers are also frustrated .
yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history .
so at one end we 've got falling interest in education in math , and at the other end we 've got a more mathematical world , a more quantitative world than we ever have had .
so what 's the problem , why has this chasm opened up , and what can we do to fix it ?
well actually , i think the answer is staring us right in the face : use computers .
i believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work .
so to explain that , let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education .
see , in the real world math is n't necessarily done by mathematicians .
it 's done by geologists , engineers , biologists , all sorts of different people - modeling and simulation .
it 's actually very popular .
but in education it looks very different - dumbed-down problems , lots of calculating , mostly by hand .
lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world , except if you 're learning it .
and another thing about math : math sometimes looks like math - like in this example here - and sometimes it does n't - like " am i drunk ? "
and then you get an answer that 's quantitative in the modern world .
you would n't have expected that a few years back .
but now you can find out all about - unfortunately , my weight is a little higher than that , but - all about what happens .
so let 's zoom out a bit and ask , why are we teaching people math ?
what 's the point of teaching people math ?
and in particular , why are we teaching them math in general ?
why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject ?
well , i think there are about three reasons : technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies , what i call " everyday living " - to function in the world today , you 've got to be pretty quantitative , much more so than a few years ago : figure out your mortgages , being skeptical of government statistics , those kinds of things - and thirdly , what i would call something like logical mind training , logical thinking .
over the years we 've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically . it 's part of human society .
it 's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that .
so let 's ask another question .
what is math ?
what do we mean when we say we 're doing math , or educating people to do math ?
well , i think it 's about four steps , roughly speaking , starting with posing the right question .
what is it that we want to ask ? what is it we 're trying to find out here ?
and this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world , beyond virtually any other part of doing math .
people ask the wrong question , and surprisingly enough , they get the wrong answer , for that reason , if not for others .
so the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem .
that 's stage two .
once you 've done that , then there 's the computation step .
turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form .
and of course , math is very powerful at doing that .
and then finally , turn it back to the real world .
did it answer the question ?
and also verify it - crucial step .
now here 's the crazy thing right now .
in math education , we 're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand .
yet , that 's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice .
instead , we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one , two and four - conceptualizing problems , applying them , getting the teacher to run them through how to do that .
see , crucial point here : math is not equal to calculating .
math is a much broader subject than calculating .
now it 's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years .
there was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand .
but in the last few decades that has totally changed .
we 've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that i could ever imagine with computers .
calculating was typically the limiting step , and now often it is n't .
so i think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating .
but that math liberation did n't get into education yet .
see , i think of calculating , in a sense , as the machinery of math .
it 's the chore .
it 's the thing you 'd like to avoid if you can , like to get a machine to do .
it 's a means to an end , not an end in itself , and automation allows us to have that machinery .
computers allow us to do that - and this is not a small problem by any means .
i estimated that , just today , across the world , we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand .
that 's an amazing amount of human endeavor .
so we better be damn sure - and by the way , they did n't even have fun doing it , most of them - so we better be damn sure that we know why we 're doing that and it has a real purpose .
i think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that .
and i think there are some cases .
for example : mental arithmetic .
i still do a lot of that , mainly for estimating .
people say , " is such and such true ? "
and i 'll say , " hmm , not sure . " i 'll think about it roughly .
it 's still quicker to do that and more practical .
so i think practicality is one case where it 's worth teaching people by hand .
and then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating , but i think they 're relatively small in number .
one thing i often ask about is ancient greek and how this relates .
see , the thing we 're doing right now is we 're forcing people to learn mathematics .
it 's a major subject .
i 'm not for one minute suggesting that , if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre - they should do that .
that 's absolutely the right thing , for people to follow their self-interest .
i was somewhat interested in ancient greek , but i do n't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient greek .
i do n't think it 's warranted .
so i have this distinction between what we 're making people do and the subject that 's sort of mainstream and the subject that , in a sense , people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that .
so what are the issues people bring up with this ?
well one of them is , they say , you need to get the basics first .
you should n't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject .
so my usual question is , what do you mean by " basics ? "
basics of what ?
are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it , or design it for that matter ?
are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill ?
i do n't think so .
i think you need to separate the basics of what you 're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation .
a hundred years ago , it 's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things .
but automation in cars allowed that to separate , so driving is now a quite separate subject , so to speak , from engineering of the car or learning how to service it .
so automation allows this separation and also allows - in the case of driving , and i believe also in the future case of maths - a democratized way of doing that .
it can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that .
so there 's another thing that comes up with basics .
people confuse , in my view , the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching .
so just because paper was invented before computers , it does n't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics .
my daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this .
she enjoys making what she calls " paper laptops . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i asked her one day , " you know , when i was your age , i did n't make these .
why do you think that was ? "
and after a second or two , carefully reflecting , she said , " no paper ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you were born after computers and paper , it does n't really matter which order you 're taught with them in , you just want to have the best tool .
so another one that comes up is " computers dumb math down . "
that somehow , if you use a computer , it 's all mindless button-pushing , but if you do it by hand , it 's all intellectual .
this one kind of annoys me , i must say .
do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they do n't really understand , for reasons they do n't get ?
i do n't think so .
and what 's worse , what they 're learning there is n't even practically useful anymore .
might have been 50 years ago , but it is n't anymore .
when they 're out of education , they do it on a computer .
just to be clear , i think computers can really help with this problem , actually make it more conceptual .
now , of course , like any great tool , they can be used completely mindlessly , like turning everything into a multimedia show , like the example i was shown of solving an equation by hand , where the computer was the teacher - show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand .
this is just nuts .
why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway ?
all backwards .
let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate .
see , normally in school , you do things like solve quadratic equations .
but you see , when you 're using a computer , you can just substitute .
you can make it a quartic equation . make it kind of harder , calculating-wise .
same principles applied - calculations , harder .
and problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this .
they 've got hair all over them .
they 're not just simple , dumbed-down things that we see in school math .
and think of the outside world .
do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers ?
i do n't think so - quite the opposite .
so the problem we 've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down , but that we have dumbed-down problems right now .
well , another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding .
so if you go through lots of examples , you can get the answer , you can understand how the basics of the system work better .
i think there is one thing that i think very valid here , which is that i think understanding procedures and processes is important .
but there 's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world .
it 's called programming .
programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days , and it 's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand .
if you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it .
so programming is the way i think we should be doing that .
so to be clear , what i really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual , simultaneously .
i ca n't think of any other subject where that 's recently been possible .
it 's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual .
but i think we can do both at the same time here .
and we open up so many more possibilities .
you can do so many more problems .
what i really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they 've ever got before .
and experience of harder problems - being able to play with the math , interact with it , feel it .
we want people who can feel the math instinctively .
that 's what computers allow us to do .
another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum .
traditionally it 's been by how difficult it is to calculate , but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts , however hard the calculating .
so calculus has traditionally been taught very late .
why is this ?
well , it 's damn hard doing the calculations , that 's the problem .
but actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group .
this was an example i built for my daughter .
and very , very simple .
we were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number .
and of course , it turns into a circle .
and by the way , she was also very insistent on being able to change the color , an important feature for this demonstration .
you can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme - and very small sides and a very large number of sides .
very simple example .
that 's a view of the world that we do n't usually give people for many , many years after this .
and yet , that 's a really important practical view of the world .
so one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams .
in the end , if we test everyone by hand in exams , it 's kind of hard to get the curricula changed during the semesters .
and one of the reasons it 's so important - so it 's very important to get computers in exams .
and then we can ask questions , real questions , questions like , what 's the best life insurance policy to get ? - real questions that people have in their everyday lives .
and you see , this is n't some dumbed-down model here .
this is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens .
how many years of protection do i need ?
what does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth ?
now i 'm not for one minute suggesting it 's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams , but i think it 's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people 's real understanding .
so i believe -lsb- there is -rsb- critical reform we have to do in computer-based math .
we have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward , and also our societies , based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics .
this is n't some optional extra .
and the country that does this first will , in my view , leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even , an improved economy , an improved outlook .
in fact , i even talk about us moving from what we often call now the " knowledge economy " to what we might call a " computational knowledge economy , " where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is .
we can engage so many more students with this , and they can have a better time doing it .
and let 's understand : this is not an incremental sort of change .
we 're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math .
and you know if you walk across a chasm , you end up making it worse than if you did n't start at all - bigger disaster .
no , what i 'm suggesting is that we should leap off , we should increase our velocity so it 's high , and we should leap off one side and go the other - of course , having calculated our differential equation very carefully .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i want to see a completely renewed , changed math curriculum built from the ground up , based on computers being there , computers that are now ubiquitous almost .
calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years .
now i 'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math , but what i am sure is it 's the mainstream subject of the future .
let 's go for it , and while we 're about it , let 's have a bit of fun , for us , for the students and for ted here .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i moved to boston 10 years ago , from chicago , with an interest in cancer and in chemistry .
you might know that chemistry is the science of making molecules - or to my taste , new drugs for cancer .
and you might also know that , for science and medicine , boston is a bit of a candy store .
you ca n't roll a stop sign in cambridge without hitting a graduate student .
the bar is called the miracle of science .
the billboards say " lab space available . "
and it 's fair to say that in these 10 years , we 've witnessed absolutely the start of a scientific revolution - that of genome medicine .
we know more about the patients that enter our clinic now than ever before .
and we 're able , finally , to answer the question that 's been so pressing for so many years : why do i have cancer ?
this information is also pretty staggering .
you might know that , so far in just the dawn of this revolution , we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes , and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers , causes of cancer .
yet comparatively , we have about a dozen targeted medications .
and this inadequacy of cancer medicine really hit home when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer .
we did n't fly him to boston .
we did n't sequence his genome .
it 's been known for decades what causes this malignancy .
it 's three proteins - ras , myc and p53 .
this is old information we 've known since about the 80s , yet there 's no medicine i can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three horsemen of the apocalypse that is cancer .
there 's no ras , no myc , no p53 drug .
and you might fairly ask : why is that ?
and the very unsatisfying , yet scientific , answer is it 's too hard .
that for whatever reason , these three proteins have entered a space in the language of our field that 's called the undruggable genome - which is like calling a computer unsurfable or the moon unwalkable .
it 's a horrible term of trade .
but what it means is that we fail to identify a greasy pocket in these proteins , into which we , like molecular locksmiths , can fashion an active , small , organic molecule or drug substance .
now as i was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem cell transplantation , what we had instead , cascading through the regulatory network at the fda , were these substances - arsenic , thalidomide and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas .
and this is the 21st century .
and so , i guess you 'd say , dissatisfied with the performance and quality of these medicines , i went back to school in chemistry with the idea that perhaps by learning the trade of discovery chemistry and approaching it in the context of this brave new world of the open-source , the crowd-source , the collaborative network that we have access to within academia , that we might more quickly bring powerful and targeted therapies to our patients .
and so please consider this a work in progress , but i 'd like to tell you today a story about a very rare cancer called midline carcinoma , about the protein target , the undruggable protein target that causes this cancer , called brd4 , and about a molecule developed at my lab at dana farber cancer institute called jq1 , which we affectionately named for jun qi , the chemist that made this molecule .
now brd4 is an interesting protein .
you might ask yourself , with all the things cancer 's trying to do to kill our patient , how does it remember it 's cancer ?
when it winds up its genome , why does it not turn into an eye , into a liver , as it has all the genes necessary to do this ?
it remembers that it 's cancer .
and the reason is that cancer , like every cell in the body , places little molecular bookmarks , little post-it notes , that remind the cell " i 'm cancer ; i should keep growing . "
and those post-it notes involve this and other proteins of its class - so-called bromodomains .
so we developed an idea , a rationale , that perhaps , if we made a molecule that prevented the post-it note from sticking by entering into the little pocket at the base of this spinning protein , then maybe we could convince cancer cells , certainly those addicted to this brd4 protein , that they 're not cancer .
and so we started to work on this problem .
we developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called jq1 .
now not being a drug company , we could do certain things , we had certain flexibilities , that i respect that a pharmaceutical industry does n't have .
we just started mailing it to our friends .
i have a small lab .
we thought we 'd just send it to people and see how the molecule behaves .
and we sent it to oxford , england where a group of talented crystallographers provided this picture , which helped us understand exactly how this molecule is so potent for this protein target .
it 's what we call a perfect fit of shape complimentarity , or hand in glove .
now this is a very rare cancer , this brd4-addicted cancer .
and so we worked with samples of material that were collected by young pathologists at brigham women 's hospital .
and as we treated these cells with this molecule , we observed something really striking .
the cancer cells , small , round and rapidly dividing , grew these arms and extensions .
they were changing shape .
in effect , the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell .
this got us very excited .
the next step would be to put this molecule into mice .
the only problem was there 's no mouse model of this rare cancer .
and so at the time that we were doing this research , i was caring for a 29 year-old firefighter from connecticut who was very much at the end of life with this incurable cancer .
this brd4-addicted cancer was growing throughout his left lung , and he had a chest tube in that was draining little bits of debris .
and every nursing shift we would throw this material out .
and so we approached this patient and asked if he would collaborate with us .
could we take this precious and rare cancerous material from this chest tube and drive it across town and put it into mice and try to do a clinical trial and stage it with a prototype drug ?
well that would be impossible and , rightly , illegal to do in humans .
and he obliged us .
at the lurie family center for animal imaging , my colleague , andrew kung , grew this cancer successfully in mice without ever touching plastic .
and you can see this pet scan of a mouse - what we call a pet pet .
the cancer is growing as this red , huge mass in the hind limb of this animal .
and as we treat it with our compound , this addiction to sugar , this rapid growth , faded .
and on the animal on the right , you see that the cancer was responding .
we 've completed now clinical trials in four mouse models of this disease .
and every time , we see the same thing .
the mice with this cancer that get the drug live , and the ones that do n't rapidly perish .
so we started to wonder , what would a drug company do at this point ?
well they probably would keep this a secret until they turn a prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance .
and so we did just the opposite .
we published a paper that described this finding at the earliest prototype stage .
we gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule , typically a secret in our discipline .
we told people exactly how to make it .
we gave them our email address , suggesting that , if they write us , we 'll send them a free molecule .
we basically tried to create the most competitive environment for our lab as possible .
and this was , unfortunately , successful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because now when we 've shared this molecule , just since december of last year , with 40 laboratories in the united states and 30 more in europe - many of them pharmaceutical companies seeking now to enter this space , to target this rare cancer that , thankfully right now , is quite desirable to study in that industry .
but the science that 's coming back from all of these laboratories about the use of this molecule has provided us insights that we might not have had on our own .
leukemia cells treated with this compound turn into normal white blood cells .
mice with multiple myeloma , an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow , respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug .
you might know that fat has memory .
nice to be able to demonstrate that for you .
and in fact , this molecule prevents this adipocyte , this fat stem cell , from remembering how to make fat such that mice on a high fat diet , like the folks in my hometown of chicago , fail to develop fatty liver , which is a major medical problem .
what this research taught us - not just my lab , but our institute , and harvard medical school more generally - is that we have unique resources in academia for drug discovery - that our center that has tested perhaps more cancer molecules in a scientific way than any other , never made one of its own .
for all the reasons you see listed here , we think there 's a great opportunity for academic centers to participate in this earliest , conceptually-tricky and creative discipline of prototype drug discovery .
so what next ?
we have this molecule , but it 's not a pill yet .
it 's not orally available .
we need to fix it , so that we can deliver it to our patients .
and everyone in the lab , especially following the interaction with these patients , feels quite compelled to deliver a drug substance based on this molecule .
it 's here where i have to say that we could use your help and your insights , your collaborative participation .
unlike a drug company , we do n't have a pipeline that we can deposit these molecules into .
we do n't have a team of salespeople and marketeers that can tell us how to position this drug against the other .
what we do have is the flexibility of an academic center to work with competent , motivated , enthusiastic , hopefully well-funded people to carry these molecules forward into the clinic while preserving our ability to share the prototype drug worldwide .
this molecule will soon leave our benches and go into a small startup company called tensha therapeutics .
and really this is the fourth of these molecules to kind of graduate from our little pipeline of drug discovery , two of which - a topical drug for lymphoma of the skin , an oral substance for the treatment of multiple myeloma - will actually come to the bedside for first clinical trial in july of this year .
for us , a major and exciting milestone .
i want to leave you with just two ideas .
the first is if anything is unique about this research , it 's less the science than the strategy - that this for us was a social experiment , an experiment in what would happen if we were as open and honest at the earliest phase of discovery chemistry research as we could be .
this string of letters and numbers and symbols and parentheses that can be texted , i suppose , or twittered worldwide , is the chemical identity of our pro compound .
it 's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies , the information on how these early prototype drugs might work .
yet this information is largely a secret .
and so we seek really to download from the amazing successes of the computer science industry two principles : that of opensource and that of crowdsourcing to quickly , responsibly accelerate the delivery of targeted therapeutics to patients with cancer .
now the business model involves all of you .
this research is funded by the public .
it 's funded by foundations .
and one thing i 've learned in boston is that you people will do anything for cancer - and i love that .
you bike across the state . you walk up and down the river .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've never seen really anywhere this unique support for cancer research .
and so i want to thank you for your participation , your collaboration and most of all for your confidence in our ideas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everybody talks about happiness these days .
i had somebody count the number of books with " happiness " in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40 , and there were many more .
there is a huge wave of interest in happiness , among researchers .
there is a lot of happiness coaching .
everybody would like to make people happier .
but in spite of all this flood of work , there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness .
and my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps .
this applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness , and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness , because it turns out we 're just as messed up as anybody else is .
the first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity .
it turns out that the word " happiness " is just not a useful word anymore , because we apply it to too many different things .
i think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it , but by and large , this is something that we 'll have to give up and we 'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is .
the second trap is a confusion between experience and memory ; basically , it 's between being happy in your life , and being happy about your life or happy with your life .
and those are two very different concepts , and they 're both lumped in the notion of happiness .
and the third is the focusing illusion , and it 's the unfortunate fact that we ca n't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance .
i mean , this is a real cognitive trap .
there 's just no way of getting it right .
now , i 'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story , he said he 'd been listening to a symphony , and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording , there was a dreadful screeching sound .
and then he added , really quite emotionally , it ruined the whole experience .
but it had n't .
what it had ruined were the memories of the experience .
he had had the experience .
he had had 20 minutes of glorious music .
they counted for nothing because he was left with a memory ; the memory was ruined , and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep .
what this is telling us , really , is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves .
there is an experiencing self , who lives in the present and knows the present , is capable of re-living the past , but basically it has only the present .
it 's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches - you know , when the doctor asks , " does it hurt now when i touch you here ? "
and then there is a remembering self , and the remembering self is the one that keeps score , and maintains the story of our life , and it 's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question , " how have you been feeling lately ? "
or " how was your trip to albania ? " or something like that .
those are two very different entities , the experiencing self and the remembering self , and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness .
now , the remembering self is a storyteller .
and that really starts with a basic response of our memories - it starts immediately .
we do n't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories .
our memory tells us stories , that is , what we get to keep from our experiences is a story .
and let me begin with one example .
this is an old study .
those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure .
i wo n't go into detail . it 's no longer painful these days , but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s .
they were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds .
here are two patients , those are their recordings .
and you are asked , " who of them suffered more ? "
and it 's a very easy question .
clearly , patient b suffered more - his colonoscopy was longer , and every minute of pain that patient a had , patient b had , and more .
but now there is another question : " how much did these patients think they suffered ? "
and here is a surprise .
the surprise is that patient a had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than patient b.
the stories of the colonoscopies were different , and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends .
and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great - but one of them is this distinct ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- but one of them is distinctly worse than the other .
and the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end ; it 's a bad story .
how do we know that ?
because we asked these people after their colonoscopy , and much later , too , " how bad was the whole thing , in total ? "
and it was much worse for a than for b , in memory .
now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self .
from the point of view of the experiencing self , clearly , b had a worse time .
now , what you could do with patient a , and we actually ran clinical experiments , and it has been done , and it does work - you could actually extend the colonoscopy of patient a by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much .
that will cause the patient to suffer , but just a little and much less than before .
and if you do that for a couple of minutes , you have made the experiencing self of patient a worse off , and you have the remembering self of patient a a lot better off , because now you have endowed patient a with a better story about his experience .
what defines a story ?
and that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us , and it 's also true of the stories that we make up .
what defines a story are changes , significant moments and endings .
endings are very , very important and , in this case , the ending dominated .
now , the experiencing self lives its life continuously .
it has moments of experience , one after the other .
and you can ask : what happens to these moments ?
and the answer is really straightforward : they are lost forever .
i mean , most of the moments of our life - and i calculated , you know , the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long ; that means that , you know , in a life there are about 600 million of them ; in a month , there are about 600,000 - most of them do n't leave a trace .
most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self .
and yet , somehow you get the sense that they should count , that what happens during these moments of experience is our life .
it 's the finite resource that we 're spending while we 're on this earth .
and how to spend it would seem to be relevant , but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us .
so we have the remembering self and the experiencing self , and they 're really quite distinct .
the biggest difference between them is in the handling of time .
from the point of view of the experiencing self , if you have a vacation , and the second week is just as good as the first , then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation .
that 's not the way it works at all for the remembering self .
for the remembering self , a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added .
you have not changed the story .
and in this way , time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self ; time has very little impact on the story .
now , the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories .
it is actually the one that makes decisions because , if you have a patient who has had , say , two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose , then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad , and that 's the surgeon that will be chosen .
the experiencing self has no voice in this choice .
we actually do n't choose between experiences , we choose between memories of experiences .
and even when we think about the future , we do n't think of our future normally as experiences .
we think of our future as anticipated memories .
and basically you can look at this , you know , as a tyranny of the remembering self , and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self does n't need .
i have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case ; that is , we go on vacations , in the service of our remembering self .
and this is a bit hard to justify i think .
i mean , how much do we consume our memories ?
that is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self .
and when i think about that , i think about a vacation we had in antarctica a few years ago , which was clearly the best vacation i 've ever had , and i think of it relatively often , relative to how much i think of other vacations .
and i probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip , i would say , for about 25 minutes in the last four years .
now , if i had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it , i would have spent another hour .
now , that is three weeks , and that is at most an hour and a half .
there seems to be a discrepancy .
now , i may be a bit extreme , you know , in how little appetite i have for consuming memories , but even if you do more of this , there is a genuine question : why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences ?
so i want you to think about a thought experiment .
imagine that for your next vacation , you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed , and you 'll get an amnesic drug so that you wo n't remember anything .
now , would you choose the same vacation ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you would choose a different vacation , there is a conflict between your two selves , and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict , and it 's actually not at all obvious , because if you think in terms of time , then you get one answer , and if you think in terms of memories , you might get another answer .
why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves .
now , the two selves bring up two notions of happiness .
there are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply , one per self .
so you can ask : how happy is the experiencing self ?
and then you would ask : how happy are the moments in the experiencing self 's life ?
and they 're all - happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process .
what are the emotions that can be measured ?
and , by the way , now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time .
if you ask for the happiness of the remembering self , it 's a completely different thing .
this is not about how happily a person lives .
it is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life .
very different notion .
anyone who does n't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness , and i belong to a crowd of students of well-being , who 've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way .
the distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years , and there are now efforts to measure the two separately .
the gallup organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences , and there have been other efforts along those lines .
so in recent years , we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves .
and the main lesson i think that we have learned is they are really different .
you can know how satisfied somebody is with their life , and that really does n't teach you much about how happily they 're living their life , and vice versa .
just to give you a sense of the correlation , the correlation is about .5 .
what that means is if you met somebody , and you were told , " oh his father is six feet tall , " how much would you know about his height ?
well , you would know something about his height , but there 's a lot of uncertainty .
you have that much uncertainty .
if i tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten , you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self .
so the correlation is low .
we know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self .
we know that money is very important , goals are very important .
we know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like , spending time with people that we like .
there are other pleasures , but this is dominant .
so if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves , you are going to end up doing very different things .
the bottom line of what i 've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being .
it is a completely different notion .
now , very quickly , another reason we can not think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life , and we actually live .
so , if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in california , you are not going to get to the correct answer .
when you ask that question , you think people must be happier in california if , say , you live in ohio .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what happens is when you think about living in california , you are thinking of the contrast between california and other places , and that contrast , say , is in climate .
well , it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it 's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are .
but now , because the reflective self is in charge , you may end up - some people may end up moving to california .
and it 's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to california in the hope of getting happier .
well , their experiencing self is not going to get happier .
we know that .
but one thing will happen : they will think they are happier , because , when they think about it , they 'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in ohio , and they will feel they made the right decision .
it is very difficult to think straight about well-being , and i hope i have given you a sense of how difficult it is .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you . i 've got a question for you .
thank you so much .
now , when we were on the phone a few weeks ago , you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that gallup survey .
is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now ?
daniel kahneman : sure .
i think the most interesting result that we found in the gallup survey is a number , which we absolutely did not expect to find .
we found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self .
when we looked at how feelings , vary with income .
and it turns out that , below an income of 60,000 dollars a year , for americans - and that 's a very large sample of americans , like 600,000 , so it 's a large representative sample - below an income of 600,000 dollars a year ...
ca : 60,000 .
dk : 60,000 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 60,000 dollars a year , people are unhappy , and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get .
above that , we get an absolutely flat line .
i mean i 've rarely seen lines so flat .
clearly , what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness , but lack of money certainly buys you misery , and we can measure that misery very , very clearly .
in terms of the other self , the remembering self , you get a different story .
the more money you earn , the more satisfied you are .
that does not hold for emotions .
ca : but danny , the whole american endeavor is about life , liberty , the pursuit of happiness .
if people took seriously that finding , i mean , it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about , like for example , taxation policy and so forth .
is there any chance that politicians , that the country generally , would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it ?
dk : you know i think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy .
the recognition is going to be slow in the united states , no question about that , but in the u.k. , it is happening , and in other countries it is happening .
people are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy .
it 's going to take a while , and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness , or whether they want to study life evaluation , so we need to have that debate fairly soon .
how to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think , and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self .
this is going to influence policy , i think , in years to come .
in the united states , efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population .
this is going to be , i think , within the next decade or two , part of national statistics .
ca : well , it seems to me that this issue will - or at least should be - the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years .
thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics .
thank you , danny kahneman .
what is going on in this baby 's mind ?
if you 'd asked people this 30 years ago , most people , including psychologists , would have said that this baby was irrational , illogical , egocentric - that he could n't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect .
in the last 20 years , developmental science has completely overturned that picture .
so in some ways , we think that this baby 's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists .
let me give you just one example of this .
one thing that this baby could be thinking about , that could be going on in his mind , is trying to figure out what 's going on in the mind of that other baby .
after all , one of the things that 's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling .
and maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel is n't actually exactly like what we think and feel .
anyone who 's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get .
we wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people .
now the question is : how could we ask them ?
babies , after all , ca n't talk , and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks , what you 'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that .
so how do we actually ask them the question ?
well it turns out that the secret was broccoli .
what we did - betty rapacholi , who was one of my students , and i - was actually to give the babies two bowls of food : one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers .
now all of the babies , even in berkley , like the crackers and do n't like the raw broccoli .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then what betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl .
and she would act as if she liked it or she did n't .
so half the time , she acted as if she liked the crackers and did n't like the broccoli - just like a baby and any other sane person .
but half the time , what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go , " mmmmm , broccoli .
i tasted the broccoli . mmmmm . "
and then she would take a little bit of the crackers , and she 'd go , " eww , yuck , crackers .
i tasted the crackers . eww , yuck . "
so she 'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted .
we did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies .
and then she would simply put her hand out and say , " can you give me some ? "
so the question is : what would the baby give her , what they liked or what she liked ?
and the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies , just barely walking and talking , would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers , but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli .
15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli , like they could n't figure this out .
but then after they stared for a long time , they would just give her the crackers , what they thought everybody must like .
so there are two really remarkable things about this .
the first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature , that we do n't always want the same thing .
and what 's more , they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted .
even more remarkably though , the fact that 15 month-olds did n't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep , profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old .
so children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought .
and this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that 's actually demonstrated it .
the question you might ask though is : why do children learn so much ?
and how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time ?
i mean , after all , if you look at babies superficially , they seem pretty useless .
and actually in many ways , they 're worse than useless , because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive .
but if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies , it turns out that there 's actually an answer .
if we look across many , many different species of animals , not just us primates , but also including other mammals , birds , even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats , it turns out that there 's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are .
and sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there .
on one side is a new caledonian crow .
and crows and other corvidae , ravens , rooks and so forth , are incredibly smart birds .
they 're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects .
and this is a bird on the cover of science who 's learned how to use a tool to get food .
we have our friend the domestic chicken .
and chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps .
so they 're very , very good at pecking for grain , and they 're not much good at doing anything else .
well it turns out that the babies , the new caledonian crow babies , are fledglings .
they depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years , which is a really long time in the life of a bird .
whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months .
so childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of science and the chickens end up in the soup pot .
there 's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning .
well what kind of explanation could we have for this ?
well some animals , like the chicken , seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well .
so they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment .
other creatures , like the crows , are n't very good at doing anything in particular , but they 're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments .
and of course , we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows .
we have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal .
we 're smarter , we 're more flexible , we can learn more , we survive in more different environments , we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space .
and our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species .
my son is 23 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and at least until they 're 23 , we 're still popping those worms into those little open mouths .
all right , why would we see this correlation ?
well an idea is that that strategy , that learning strategy , is an extremely powerful , great strategy for getting on in the world , but it has one big disadvantage .
and that one big disadvantage is that , until you actually do all that learning , you 're going to be helpless .
so you do n't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself , " a slingshot or maybe a spear might work . which would actually be better ? "
you want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up .
and the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor .
so the idea is that we have this early period when we 're completely protected .
we do n't have to do anything . all we have to do is learn .
and then as adults , we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world .
so one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species .
so they 're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas , and we 're production and marketing .
we have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use .
another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups , we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species - kind of like caterpillars and butterflies - except that they 're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring , and we 're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow , grownup , adult path .
if this is true , if these babies are designed to learn - and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning , that 's what they 're for - we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms .
and in fact , the baby 's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet .
but real computers are actually getting to be a lot better .
and there 's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently .
and it all depends on the ideas of this guy , the reverend thomas bayes , who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century .
and essentially what bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize , describe , the way that scientists find out about the world .
so what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with .
they go out and test it against the evidence .
the evidence makes them change that hypothesis .
then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth .
and what bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that .
and that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now .
and some 10 years ago , i suggested that babies might be doing the same thing .
so if you want to know what 's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes , i think it actually looks something like this .
this is reverend bayes 's notebook .
so i think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they 're revising to figure out how the world works .
all right , now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate .
because after all , if you ask even grownups about statistics , they look extremely stupid .
how could it be that children are doing statistics ?
so to test this we used a machine that we have called the blicket detector .
this is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others .
and using this very simple machine , my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world .
let me mention just one that we did with tumar kushner , my student .
if i showed you this detector , you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector .
but actually , this detector works in a bit of a strange way .
because if you wave a block over the top of the detector , something you would n't ever think of to begin with , the detector will actually activate two out of three times .
whereas , if you do the likely thing , put the block on the detector , it will only activate two out of six times .
so the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence .
it looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy .
so we did just this ; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence , and we just asked them to make it go .
and sure enough , the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector .
now there are two things that are really interesting about this .
the first one is , again , remember , these are four year-olds .
they 're just learning how to count .
but unconsciously , they 're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure .
and the other interesting thing is that they 're using that evidence to get to an idea , get to a hypothesis about the world , that seems very unlikely to begin with .
and in studies we 've just been doing in my lab , similar studies , we 've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task .
so in these circumstances , the children are using statistics to find out about the world , but after all , scientists also do experiments , and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments .
when children do experiments we call it " getting into everything " or else " playing . "
and there 's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program .
here 's one from cristine legare 's lab .
what cristine did was use our blicket detectors .
and what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones did n't , and then she showed them an anomaly .
and what you 'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes .
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : how about this ?
same as the other side .
alison gopnik : okay , so his first hypothesis has just been falsified .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- boy : this one lighted up , and this one nothing .
ag : okay , he 's got his experimental notebook out .
boy : what 's making this light up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know .
ag : every scientist will recognize that expression of despair .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- boy : oh , it 's because this needs to be like this , and this needs to be like this .
ag : okay , hypothesis two .
boy : that 's why .
oh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ag : now this is his next idea .
he told the experimenter to do this , to try putting it out onto the other location .
not working either .
boy : oh , because the light goes only to here , not here .
oh , the bottom of this box has electricity in here , but this does n't have electricity .
ag : okay , that 's a fourth hypothesis .
boy : it 's lighting up .
so when you put four .
so you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up .
ag : okay , there 's his fifth hypothesis .
now that is a particularly - that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy , but what cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical .
if you look at the way children play , when you ask them to explain something , what they really do is do a series of experiments .
this is actually pretty typical of four year-olds .
well , what 's it like to be this kind of creature ?
what 's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes ?
well , if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers , a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all .
and i think just the opposite is true .
i think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults .
now here 's what we know about how adult consciousness works .
and adults ' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight .
so what happens for adults is we decide that something 's relevant or important , we should pay attention to it .
our consciousness of that thing that we 're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid , and everything else sort of goes dark .
and we even know something about the way the brain does this .
so what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex , the sort of executive part of our brains , sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible , more plastic , better at learning , and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains .
so we have a very focused , purpose-driven kind of attention .
if we look at babies and young children , we see something very different .
i think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness .
so babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing .
but they 're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once .
and if you actually look in their brains , you see that they 're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity , and the inhibitory parts have n't come on yet .
so when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention , what we really mean is that they 're bad at not paying attention .
so they 're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that 's important .
that 's the kind of attention , the kind of consciousness , that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn .
well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults , i think the best thing is think about cases where we 're put in a new situation that we 've never been in before - when we fall in love with someone new , or when we 're in a new city for the first time .
and what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts , it expands , so that those three days in paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking , talking , faculty meeting-attending zombie back home .
and by the way , that coffee , that wonderful coffee you 've been drinking downstairs , actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters .
so what 's it like to be a baby ?
it 's like being in love in paris for the first time after you 've had three double-espressos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a fantastic way to be , but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o 'clock in the morning .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now it 's good to be a grownup .
i do n't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are .
it 's good to be a grownup .
we can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves .
and it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do .
but if what we want is to be like those butterflies , to have open-mindedness , open learning , imagination , creativity , innovation , maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children .
-lrb- applause -rrb- charles and ray were a team . they were husband and wife .
despite the new york times ' and vanity fair 's best efforts recently , they 're not brothers . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they were a lot of fun .
you know , ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we are going to focus on charles today , because it is charles ' 100th birthday .
but when i speak of him , i 'm really speaking of both of them as a team .
here 's charles when he was three . so he would be 100 this june .
we have a lot of cool celebrations that we 're going to do .
the thing about their work is that most people come to the door of furniture - i suspect you probably recognize this chair and some of the others i 'm going to show you .
but we 're going to first enter through the door of the big top .
the whole thing about this , though , is that , you know , why am i showing it ?
is it because charles and ray made this film ?
this is actually a training film for a clown college that they had .
they also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be .
there is a picture of charles . so let 's watch the next clip .
the film that we 're about to see is a film they made for the moscow world 's fair .
video : this is the land .
it has many contrasts .
it is rough and it is flat .
in places it is cold .
in some it is hot .
too much rain falls on some areas , and not enough on others .
but people live on this land .
and , as in russia , they are drawn together into towns and cities .
here is something of the way they live .
eames demetrios : now , this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the united states .
it was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across .
and it was at the height of the cold war .
the nixon-khrushchev kitchen debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown .
and yet , how did it start ?
you know , commonality , the first line in charles ' narration was , " the same stars that shine down on russia shine down on the united states . from the sky , our cities look much the same . "
it was that human connection that charles and ray always found in everything .
and you can imagine , and the thing about it is , that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images because the important thing was to get the gestalt of what the images were about .
so that was just a little snip .
but the thing about charles and ray is that they were always modeling stuff .
they were always trying things out .
i think one of the things i am passionate about , my grandparents work , i 'm passionate about my work , but on top of all that i 'm passionate about a holistic vision of design , where design is a life skill , not a professional skill .
and you know , those of us with kids often want our kids to take music .
i 'm no exception .
but it 's not about them becoming bono or tracy chapman .
it 's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking .
design is the same way . design has to become that same way .
and this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation .
and charles just checking it out there .
so now we 're going to go through that door of furniture .
this is an unusual installation of airport seating .
so what we 're going to see is some of the icons of eames furniture .
and the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host , anticipating the needs of the guest .
so those are cool images . but these are ones i think are really cool .
these are all the prototypes . these are the mistakes , although i do n't think mistakes is the right word in design .
it 's just the things you try out to kind of make it work better .
and you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs .
some of them are kind of cool looking . it 's like " hey , why did n't they try that ? "
it was that hands-on iterative process which is so much like vernacular design and folk design in traditional cultures .
and i think that 's one of the commonalities between modernism and traditional design . i think it may be a real common ground as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years .
the other thing that 's kind of cool is that you look at this and in the media when people say design , they actually mean style .
and i 'm really here to talk about design .
but you know the object is just a pivot .
it 's a pivot between a process and a system .
and this is a little film i made about the making of the eames lounge chair .
the design process for charles and ray never ended in manufacturing .
it continued . they were always trying to make thing better and better .
because it 's like as bill clinton was saying about rwandan health clinics .
it 's not enough to create one .
you 've got to create a system that will work better and better .
so i 've always liked this prototype picture .
because it just kind of , you know , does n't get any more basic than that .
you try things out .
this is a relatively famous chair .
its early version had an " x " base . that 's what the collectors like .
charles and ray liked this one because it was better .
it worked better : " h " base , much more practical .
this is something called a splint .
and i was very touched by dean kamen 's work for the military , or for the soldiers , because charles and ray designed a molded plywood splint . this is it .
and they 'd been working on furniture before .
but doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process , which was incredibly important to them .
i 'm trying to show you too much , because i want you to really get a broth of ideas and images .
this is a house that charles and ray designed .
my sister is chasing someone else . it 's not me .
although i endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary , it 's not me .
and then this is a film , on the lower left , that charles and ray made .
now look at that plastic chair .
the house is 1949 .
the chair is done in 1949 .
charles and ray , they did n't obsess about style for it 's own sake .
they did n't say , " our style is curves . let 's make the house curvy . "
they did n't say , " our style is grids . let 's make the chair griddy . "
they focused on the need .
they tried to solve the design problem .
charles used to say , " the extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem . "
it 's kind of a brutal quote .
this is the earlier design of that house .
and again , they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype of a house - architecture , very expensive medium .
here 's a film we 've been hearing things about .
the " powers of ten " is a film they made .
if we watch the next clip , you 're going to see the first version of " powers of ten , " upper left .
the familiar one on the lower right .
the eames ' film tops , lower left .
and a lamp that charles designed for a church .
video : which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies .
these form part of a grouping system much as the stars do .
they are so many and so varied that from this distance they appear like the stars from earth .
ed : you 've seen that film , and what 's so great about this whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale .
everybody here is coming at it from a different way .
i want to give you one example .
e.o. wilson once told me that when he looked at ants - he loved them , of course , and he wanted to learn more about them - he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale .
so here is the tiny creature .
and yet simply by changing the frame of reference it reveals so much , including what ended up being the ted prize .
modeling , they tried modeling all the time . they were always modeling things .
and i think part of that is that they never delegated understanding .
and i think in our family we were very lucky , because we learned about design backwards .
design was not something other .
it was part of the business of life in general .
it was part of the quality of life .
and here is some family pictures .
and you can see why i 'm down on style , with a haircut like that .
but anyway , -lrb- laughter -rrb- i remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the eames house when i was a kid .
so we 're going to watch another film .
this is a film , the one called toys .
you can see me , i have the same haircut , in the upper right corner .
upper left is a film they did on toy trains .
lower right is a solar do-nothing toy .
lower left is day-of-the-dead toys .
charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear .
they are often the precursor to bigger things .
and these ideas - that train up there , being about the honest use of materials , is totally the same as the honest use of materials in the plywood .
and now i 'm going to test you .
this is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old .
so can you read it ?
lucia angel , okay , eye .
audience : saw many trains .
ed : awl , also , good that the leather crafter 's guild is here .
also , what is he doing ? row , rowed .
sun ? no . well is there another name for a sunrise ?
dawn , very good .
also rode on one . i ...
audience : you had , i hope you had - ed : now you 've been to the website dogs of saint louis in the late , in the mid-1930 's , then you 'd know that was a great dane .
so , i hope you had a audience : nice time , time - ed : time at .
citizen kane , rose - audience : rosebud .
ed : no , bud . " d "'s right . at buddy 's - audience : party . love .
ed : okay , good .
so , " i saw many trains and also rode on one .
i hope you had a nice time at buddy 's party . "
so you guys did pretty good , cool .
so my mom and charles had this great relationship where they 'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another .
and it 's all part of the , you know , they used to say , " take your pleasure seriously . "
these are some images from a project of mine that 's called kymaerica .
it 's sort of an alternative universe .
it 's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape .
those plaques are plaques we 've been installing around north america .
we 're about to do six in the u.k. next week .
and they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world .
so , of course , since it 's bronze it has to be true .
video : kymaerica with waterfalls , tumbling through our - ed : this is one of the traditional kymaerican songs .
and so we had spelling bees in paris , illinois .
video : your word is n. carolina .
girl : y-i-n-d-i-a-n-a .
ed : and then embassy row is actually a historical site , because in the kymaerican story this is where the parisian diaspora started , where there embassy was .
so you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional fictional experience there .
and the town has really embraced it .
we had the spelling bee in conjunction with the gwomeus club .
but what is really cool is that we take our visual environment as inevitable . and it 's not .
other things could have happened . the japanese could have discovered monterey .
and we could have been born 100,000 years ago .
and there are a lot of fun things . this is the museum of the bench .
they have trading cards and all sorts of cool things .
and you 're kind of trapped in the texture of kymaerica .
the tahatchabe , the great road building culture .
a guy named nobu naga , the so-called japanese columbus .
but now i 'm going to return you to the real world .
and this is cranbrook . i 've got a real treat for you , which is the first film that charles ever made .
so let 's watch that . nobody 's ever seen it .
cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here .
it 's a film about maya gretel , a famous ceramicist , and a teacher at cranbrook .
and he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition .
silent . we do n't have a track for it yet .
very simple . it 's just a start . but it 's that learn-by-doing thing .
you want to learn how to make films ? go make a movie .
and you try something out .
but here is what 's really great .
see that chair there ? the orange one ? that 's the organic chair . 1940 .
at the same time that charles was doing that chair , he was doing this film .
so my point is that this scope of vision , this holistic vision of design , was with them from the beginning .
it was n't like " oh , we made some chairs and got successful .
now we 're going to do some movies . "
it was always part of how they looked at the world . and that 's what 's really powerful .
and i think that all of us in this room , as you move design forward , it 's not about just doing one thing .
it 's about how you approach problems . and there is this huge , beautiful commonality between design , business and the world .
so we 're going to do the last clip .
and i 've shown you some of the images . i just want to focus on sound now .
so this is charles ' voice .
charles eames : in india , those without , and the lowest in caste , eat very often , particularly in southern india , and those a little bit up the scale eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish .
and a little bit higher , why they have a glaze on a thing they call a thali .
if you 're up the scale a little bit more , why , a brass thali .
and then things get to be a little questionable .
there are things like silver-plated thalis .
and there is solid silver thalis .
and i suppose some nut has had a gold thali that he 's eaten off of .
but you can go beyond that .
and the guys that have not only means , but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding , go to the next step , and they eat off a banana leaf .
and i think that in these times when we fall back and regroup , that somehow or other , the banana leaf parable because i 'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of .
but it is that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf .
ed : i 've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you .
because that 's part of where we 've got to get to .
and i also want to share this one .
" beyond the age of information is the age of choices . "
and i really think that 's where we are .
and it 's kind of cool for me to be part of a family and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978 .
and part of why this stuff is important and all the things that we do are important , is that these are the ideas we need .
and i think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey .
that 's what we all need to do .
design is not just for designers anymore . it 's a process . it 's not style .
all that great thinking needs to really get about solving pretty key problems .
i really thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everybody in our society 's life is touched by cancer - if not personally , then through a loved one , a family member , colleague , friend .
and once our lives are touched by cancer , we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons , or three tools , that are available to fight the disease : surgery , radiation and chemotherapy .
and once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions , again either personally or with our loved ones and family members , we also very quickly learn the benefits , the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools .
i 'm very thankful to jay and to mark and the tedmed team for inviting me today to describe a fourth tool , a new tool , that we call tumor treating fields .
tumor treating fields were invented by dr. yoram palti , professor emeritus at the technion in israel .
and they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer .
to understand how tumor treating fields work , we first need to understand what are electric fields .
let me first address a few popular misconceptions .
first of all , electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue .
electric fields are not ionizing radiation , like x-rays or proton beams , that bombard tissue to disrupt dna .
and electric fields are not magnetism .
what electric fields are are a field of forces .
and these forces act on , attract , bodies that have an electrical charge .
the best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity .
gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses .
we can all picture astronauts in space .
they float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them .
but as that space shuttle returns to earth , and as the astronauts enter the earth 's gravitational field , they begin to see the effects of gravity .
they begin to be attracted towards earth .
and as they land , they 're fully aligned in the gravitational field .
we 're , of course , all stuck in the earth 's gravitational field right now .
that 's why you 're all in your chairs .
and that 's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up , to walk around and to lift things .
in cancer , cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth .
we can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it 's a mini space station .
and in that space station we have the genetic material , the chromosomes , within a nucleus .
and out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions .
importantly , those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body .
as cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates , the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains .
these chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells .
and this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells , two cancer cells become four cancer cells , and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth .
tumor treating fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station .
and when that cellular space station is within the electric field , it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them .
and it prevents them from forming those chains , those mitotic spindles , that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells .
what we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours .
and they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide , programmed cell death , or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided .
and we can observe this .
what i 'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments .
this is cultures , identical cultures , of cervical cancer cells .
and we 've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains .
the first clip shows a normal cell division without the tumor treating fields .
what we see are , first of all , a very active culture , a lot of divisions , and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated .
and we can see them dividing throughout .
when we apply the fields - again , in the identical time-scale to the identical culture - you 're going to see something different .
the cells round up for division , but they 're very static in that position .
we 'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide .
the one within the circle manages .
but see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus , even in the dividing cell .
the one up there ca n't divide at all .
and then this bubbling , this membrane bubbling , is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell .
formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types .
we 've applied tumor treating fields to over 20 different cancers in the lab , and we see this effect in all of them .
now importantly , these tumor treating fields have no effect on normal undividing cells .
10 years ago , dr. palti founded a company called novocure to develop his discovery into a practical therapy for patients .
in that time , novocure 's developed two systems - one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body .
the first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer , gbm .
gbm affects about 10,000 people in the u.s. each year .
it 's a death sentence .
the expected five year survival is less than five percent .
and the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year , and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again .
novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent gbm .
so these are patients who had received surgery , high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy , and that had failed and their tumors had grown back .
we divided the patients into two groups .
the first group received second-line chemotherapy , which is expected to double the life expectancy , versus no treatment at all .
and then the second group received only tumor treating field therapy .
what we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups - so the chemotherapy treated group and the tumor treating field group - was the same .
but importantly , the tumor treating field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients .
they had no pain , suffered none of the infections .
they had no nausea , diarrhea , constipation , fatigue that would be expected .
based on this trial , in april of this year , the fda approved tumor treating fields for the treatment of patients with recurrent gbm .
importantly , it was the first time ever that the fda included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim .
so i 'm going to show you now one of the patients from this trial .
robert dill-bundi is a famous swiss cycling champion .
he won the gold medal in moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit .
and five years ago , robert was diagnosed with gbm .
he received the standard treatments .
he received surgery .
he received high dose radiation to the head .
and he received first-line chemotherapy .
a year after this treatment - in fact , this is his baseline mri .
you can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery .
and a year after that treatment , his tumor grew back with a vengeance .
that cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor .
at this point , he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live .
he entered our trial .
and here we can see him getting the therapy .
first of all , these electrodes are noninvasive .
they 're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor .
here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages .
the patients learn to do this themselves and then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life .
there 's none of the tiredness .
there 's none of what is called the " chemo head . "
there 's no sensation .
it does n't interfere with computers or electrical equipment .
and the therapy is delivered continuously at home , without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually .
these are robert 's mris , again , under only ttfield treatment .
this is a therapy that takes time to work .
it 's a medical device ; it works when it 's on .
but what we can see is , by month six , the tumor has responded and it 's begun to melt away .
it 's still there .
by month 12 , we could argue whether there 's a little bit of material around the edges , but it 's essentially completely gone .
it 's now five years since robert 's diagnosis , and he 's alive , but importantly , he 's healthy and he 's at work .
i 'm going to let him , in this very short clip , describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words .
-lrb- video -rrb- robert dill-bundi : my quality of life , i rate what i have today a bit different than what most people would assume .
i am the happiest , the happiest person in the world .
and every single morning i appreciate life .
every night i fall asleep very well , and i am , i repeat , the happiest man in the world , and i 'm thankful i am alive .
bd : novocure 's also working on lung cancer as the second target .
we 've run a phase two trial in switzerland on , again , recurrent patients - patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back .
i 'm going to show you another clip of a woman named lydia .
lydia 's a 66 year-old farmer in switzerland .
she was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago .
she underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years , none of which had an effect .
her cancer continued to grow .
three years ago , she entered the novocure lung cancer trial .
you can see , in her case , she 's wearing her transducer arrays , one of the front of her chest , one on the back , and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver .
you can see the tumor treating field field generator , but importantly you can also see that she is living her life .
she is managing her farm .
she 's interacting with her kids and her grand kids .
and when we talked to her , she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy , she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions .
her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went .
now she can run all of the activities of her farm .
it 's only the beginning .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the lab , we 've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and tumor treating fields .
there 's research underway now at harvard medical school to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit .
we also believe that tumor treating fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have .
there 's now a new research project underway at the karolinska in sweden to prove that hypothesis .
we have more trials planned for lung cancer , pancreatic cancer , ovarian cancer and breast cancer .
and i firmly believe that in the next 10 years tumor treating fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors .
i 'm also very hopeful that in the next decades , we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " when the crisis came , the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent . "
" there is also a strong belief , which i share , that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis . "
now , you 've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism .
but this is different .
this is coming from the heart of finance .
the first quote is from jean-claude trichet when he was governor of the european central bank .
the second quote is from the head of the u.k. financial services authority .
are these people implying that we do n't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies ?
it gets worse .
" we spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe while we still do n't understand the conditions for a stable society , a functioning economy , or peace . "
what 's happening here ? how can this be possible ?
do we really understand more about the fabric of reality than we do about the fabric which emerges from our human interactions ?
unfortunately , the answer is yes .
but there 's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity .
to explain what this means and what this thing is , please let me quickly take a couple of steps back .
i ended up in physics by accident .
it was a random encounter when i was young , and since then , i 've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day .
in a nutshell , you can think of physics as follows .
so you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics .
you encode it into equations .
then predictions can be made and tested .
we 're actually really lucky that this works , because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe .
despite the success , physics has its limits .
as dirk helbing pointed out in the last quote , we do n't really understand the complexity that relates to us , that surrounds us .
this paradox is what got me interested in complex systems .
so these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts : swarms of birds or fish , ant colonies , ecosystems , brains , financial markets .
these are just a few examples .
interestingly , complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations , so the usual physics approach does n't really work here .
so what do we know about complex systems ?
well , it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction .
this means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions , so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions .
and it gets even better , because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence .
so this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which can not be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system .
so the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts .
and all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system , how complex they are .
so if it 's a cell or a termite or a bird , you just focus on the rules of interaction .
as a result , networks are ideal representations of complex systems .
the nodes in the network are the system 's components and the links are given by the interactions .
so what equations are for physics , complex networks are for the study of complex systems .
this approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics , biology , computer science , the social sciences , but what about economics ?
where are economic networks ?
this is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature .
the study we published last year called " the network of global corporate control " was the first extensive analysis of economic networks .
the study went viral on the internet and it attracted a lot of attention from the international media .
this is quite remarkable , because , again , why did no one look at this before ?
similar data has been around for quite some time .
what we looked at in detail was ownership networks .
so here the nodes are companies , people , governments , foundations , etc .
and the links represent the shareholding relations , so shareholder a has x percent of the shares in company b.
and we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue .
so ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations .
in this little example , you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted .
now you may think that no one 's looked at this before because ownership networks are really , really boring to study .
well , as ownership is related to control , as i shall explain later , looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like , who are the key players ?
how are they organized ? are they isolated ?
are they interconnected ?
and what is the overall distribution of control ?
in other words , who controls the world ?
i think this is an interesting question .
and it has implications for systemic risk .
this is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall .
a high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability , because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic .
scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data , because a foundational guideline in science is : let the data speak . okay . let 's do that .
so we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007 .
this is a lot of data , and because we wanted to find out who rules the world , we decided to focus on transnational corporations , or tncs for short .
these are companies that operate in more than one country , and we found 43,000 .
in the next step , we built the network around these companies , so we took all the tncs ' shareholders , and the shareholders ' shareholders , etc . , all the way upstream , and we did the same downstream , and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links .
this is the tnc network which we analyzed .
and it turns out to be structured as follows .
so you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players , and in the center there 's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies .
to give you a better picture , think about a metropolitan area .
so you have the suburbs and the periphery , you have a center like a financial district , then the core will be something like the tallest high rise building in the center .
and we already see signs of organization going on here .
thirty-six percent of the tncs are in the core only , but they make up 95 percent of the total operating revenue of all tncs .
okay , so now we analyzed the structure , so how does this relate to the control ?
well , ownership gives voting rights to shareholders .
this is the normal notion of control .
and there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership .
if you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company , you get control , but usually it depends on the relative distribution of shares .
and the network really matters .
about 10 years ago , mr. tronchetti provera had ownership and control in a small company , which had ownership and control in a bigger company .
you get the idea .
this ended up giving him control in telecom italia with a leverage of 26 .
so this means that , with each euro he invested , he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations .
now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the tncs ' value .
this allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder .
this is very much in the sense of max weber 's idea of potential power , which is the probability of imposing one 's own will despite the opposition of others .
if you want to compute the flow in an ownership network , this is what you have to do .
it 's actually not that hard to understand .
let me explain by giving you this analogy .
so think about water flowing in pipes where the pipes have different thickness .
so similarly , the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes .
so what did we find after computing all this network control ?
well , it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to collectively control 80 percent of the tncs ' value .
now remember , we started out with 600,000 nodes , so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent .
they 're mostly financial institutions in the u.s. and the u.k.
and it gets even more extreme .
there are 146 top players in the core , and they together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the tncs ' value .
what should you take home from all of this ?
well , the high degree of control you saw is very extreme by any standard .
the high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy and we could easily reproduce the tnc network with a few simple rules .
this means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization .
it 's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system , so it 's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy .
our study " is an impression of the moon 's surface .
it 's not a street map . "
so you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt , yet it " gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance . "
we hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction , so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future .
and this is slowly starting .
we 're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view .
but this journey has only just begun , so we will have to wait before we see the first results .
now there is still a big problem , in my opinion .
ideas relating to finance , economics , politics , society , are very often tainted by people 's personal ideologies .
i really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found .
it would be really great if it has the power to help end the gridlock created by conflicting ideas , which appears to be paralyzing our globalized world .
reality is so complex , we need to move away from dogma .
but this is just my own personal ideology .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion .
it was deep at night .
i do not remember what time it was .
i just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking .
everything in my room was shaking - my heart , my windows , my bed , everything .
i looked out the windows and i saw a full half-circle of explosion .
i thought it was just like the movies , but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that i was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray , and a full circle of explosion .
and i kept on staring at it until it disappeared .
i went back to my bed , and i prayed , and i secretly thanked god that that missile did not land on my family 's home , that it did not kill my family that night .
thirty years have passed , and i still feel guilty about that prayer , for the next day , i learned that that missile landed on my brother 's friend 's home and killed him and his father , but did not kill his mother or his sister .
his mother showed up the next week at my brother 's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son , for she had lost everything .
this is not a story of a nameless survivor of war , and nameless refugees , whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our tv with tattered clothes , dirty face , scared eyes .
this is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war , who we do not know their hopes , their dreams , their accomplishments , their families , their beliefs , their values .
this is my story .
i was that girl .
i am another image and vision of another survivor of war .
i am that refugee , and i am that girl .
you see , i grew up in war-torn iraq , and i believe that there are two sides of wars and we 've only seen one side of it .
we only talk about one side of it .
but there 's another side that i have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it .
i grew up with the colors of war - the red colors of fire and blood , the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile , so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it .
i grew up with the sounds of war - the staccato sounds of gunfire , the wrenching booms of explosions , ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens .
these are the sounds you would expect , but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night , the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous , unbearable silence .
" war , " a friend of mine said , " is not about sound at all .
it is actually about silence , the silence of humanity . "
i have since left iraq and founded a group called women for women international that ends up working with women survivors of wars .
in my travels and in my work , from congo to afghanistan , from sudan to rwanda , i have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same , but the fears of war are the same .
you know , there is a fear of dying , and do not believe any movie character where the hero is not afraid .
it is very scary to go through that feeling of " i am about to die " or " i could die in this explosion . "
but there 's also the fear of losing loved ones , and i think that 's even worse .
it 's too painful . you do n't want to think about it .
but i think the worst kind of fear is the fear - as samia , a bosnian woman , once told me , who survived the four-years besiege of sarajevo ; she said , " the fear of losing the ' i ' in me , the fear of losing the ' i ' in me . "
that 's what my mother in iraq used to tell me .
it 's like dying from inside-out .
a palestinian woman once told me , " it is not about the fear of one death , " she said , " sometimes i feel i die 10 times in one day , " as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets .
she said , " but it 's not fair , because there is only one life , and there should only be one death . "
we have been only seeing one side of war .
we have only been discussing and consumed with high-level preoccupations over troop levels , drawdown timelines , surges and sting operations , when we should be examining the details of where the social fabric has been most torn , where the community has improvised and survived and shown acts of resilience and amazing courage just to keep life going .
we have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics , tactics , weapons , dollars and casualties .
this is the language of sterility .
how casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic .
this is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities .
eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children . oh .
ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians .
seventy-five percent of them are women and children .
how interesting .
oh , half a million women in rwanda get raped in 100 days .
or , as we speak now , hundreds of thousands of congolese women are getting raped and mutilated .
how interesting .
these just become numbers that we refer to .
the front of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space , guiding missiles toward unseen targets , while the human conduct of the orchestra of media relations in the event that this particular drone attack hits a villager instead of an extremist .
it is a chess game .
you learn to play an international relations school on your way out and up to national and international leadership .
checkmate .
we are missing a completely other side of wars .
we are missing my mother 's story , who made sure with every siren , with every raid , with every cut off-of electricity , she played puppet shows for my brothers and i , so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions .
we are missing the story of fareeda , a music teacher , a piano teacher , in sarajevo , who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in sarajevo and walked to that school , despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her , and kept the piano , the violin , the cello playing the whole duration of the war , with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats .
that was her fight .
that was her resistance .
we are missing the story of nehia , a palestinian woman in gaza who , the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year 's war , she left out of home , collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have , in case there is no cease-fire the day after .
we are missing the stories of violet , who , despite surviving genocide in the church massacre , she kept on going on , burying bodies , cleaning homes , cleaning the streets .
we are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars .
do you know - do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going ?
and the ones who are keeping that life are women .
there are two sides of war .
there is a side that fights , and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open .
there is a side that is focused on winning battles , and there is a side that is focused on winning life .
there is a side that leads the front-line discussion , and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion .
there is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting , and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs .
there is a side that is led by men , and there is a side that is led by women .
and in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace , we must understand war and peace from both sides .
we must have a full picture of what that means .
in order for us to understand what actually peace means , we need to understand , as one sudanese woman once told me , " peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again . "
she grew up in sudan , in southern sudan , for 20 years of war , where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees .
many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers , as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers .
so that woman walked for 20 years , so she would not be kidnapped again .
and only when there was some sort of peace , her toenails grew back again .
we need to understand peace from a toenail 's perspective .
we need to understand that we can not actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table .
i find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping , and the group of people who are mostly - though not exclusively - who are keeping life going in the midst of war , are not included in the negotiating table .
and i do argue that women lead the back-line discussion , but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion .
the doctors who are not fighting , the artists , the students , the men who refuse to pick up the guns , they are , too , excluded from the negotiating tables .
there is no way we can talk about a lasting peace , building of democracy , sustainable economies , any kind of stabilities , if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table .
not one , but 50 percent .
there is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we do n't start investing in women and girls .
did you know that one year of the world 's military spending equals 700 years of the u.n. budget and equals 2,928 years of the u.n. budget allocated for women ?
if we just reverse that distribution of funds , perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world .
and last , but not least , we need to invest in peace and women , not only because it is the right thing to do , not only because it is the right thing to do , for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today , but it is for the future .
a congolese woman , who was telling me about how her children saw their father killed in front of them and saw her raped in front of them and mutilated in front of them , and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling killed in front of them , how they 're doing okay right now .
she got into women for women international 's program .
she got a support network .
she learned about her rights .
we taught her vocational and business skills . we helped her get a job .
she was earning 450 dollars . she was doing okay .
she was sending them to school . have a new home .
she said , " but what i worry about the most is not any of that .
i worry that my children have hate in their hearts , and when they want to grow up , they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother . "
we need to invest in women , because that 's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future .
that mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do .
are there good news ? of course , there are good news . there are lots of good news .
to start with , these women that i told you about are dancing and singing every single day , and if they can , who are we not to dance ?
that girl that i told you about ended up starting women for women international group that impacted one million people , sent 80 million dollars , and i started this from zero , nothing , nada , -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances , not because of it .
think of how the world can be a much better place if , for a change , we have a better equality , we have equality , we have a representation and we understand war , both from the front-line and the back-line discussion .
rumi , a 13th-century sufi poet , says , " out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings , there is a field .
i will meet you there .
when the soul lies down in that grass , the world is too full to talk about .
ideas , language , even the phrase ' each other ' no longer makes any sense . "
i humbly add - humbly add - that out beyond the worlds of war and peace , there is a field , and there are many women and men -lsb- who -rsb- are meeting there .
let us make this field a much bigger place .
let us all meet in that field .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors , where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye : microorganisms .
buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us , and some that are bad for us .
what determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors ?
buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems .
and they are brought inside by humans and other creatures .
the fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans , and with the human-built environment .
and today , architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us .
we spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments , like this building here - environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering , heating and air conditioning .
given the amount of time that we spend indoors , it 's important to understand how this affects our health .
at the biology and the built environment center , we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the dna out of microbes in the air .
and we looked at three different types of rooms .
we looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated , which are the data points in the blue .
we looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated , where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable , but they made them operable for our study .
and we also sampled the outdoor air .
if you look at the x-axis of this graph , you 'll see that what we commonly want to do - which is keeping the outdoors out - we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation .
so if you look at the green data points , which is air that 's outside , you 'll see that there 's a large amount of microbial diversity , or variety of microbial types .
but if you look at the blue data points , which is mechanically ventilated air , it 's not as diverse .
but being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health .
if you look at the y-axis of this graph , you 'll see that , in the mechanically ventilated air , you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen , or germ , than if you 're outdoors .
so to understand why this was the case , we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram , which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples .
the data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart .
and the first things that you can see from this graph is , if you look at the blue data points , which are the mechanically ventilated air , they 're not simply a subset of the green data points , which are the outdoor air .
what we 've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans .
it has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth , our spit .
and this is because we 're all constantly shedding microbes .
so all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another .
and when you 're outdoors , that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt .
why does this matter ?
it matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the united states .
hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings .
and the model that we 're working with in hospitals , and also with many , many different buildings , is to keep the outdoors out .
and this model may not necessarily be the best for our health .
and given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections , or hospital-acquired infections , this is a clue that it 's a good time to reconsider our current practices .
so just as we manage national parks , where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others , we 're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors .
i 've heard somebody say that you 're as healthy as your gut .
and for this reason , many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora .
and what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everyone needs a coach .
it does n't matter whether you 're a basketball player , a tennis player , a gymnast or a bridge player .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my bridge coach , sharon osberg , says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else 's in the world . -lrb- laughter -rrb- sorry , sharon . here you go .
we all need people who will give us feedback .
that 's how we improve .
unfortunately , there 's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better , and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world .
i 'm talking about teachers .
when melinda and i learned how little useful feedback most teachers get , we were blown away .
until recently , over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback : satisfactory .
if all my bridge coach ever told me was that i was " satisfactory , " i would have no hope of ever getting better .
how would i know who was the best ?
how would i know what i was doing differently ?
today , districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers , but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice .
our teachers deserve better .
the system we have today is n't fair to them .
it 's not fair to students , and it 's putting america 's global leadership at risk .
so today i want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve .
let 's start by asking who 's doing well .
well , unfortunately there 's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems .
so i looked at the countries whose students perform well academically , and looked at what they 're doing to help their teachers improve .
consider the rankings for reading proficiency .
the u.s. is n't number one .
we 're not even in the top 10 .
we 're tied for 15th with iceland and poland .
now , out of all the places that do better than the u.s. in reading , how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve ?
eleven out of 14 .
the u.s. is tied for 15th in reading , but we 're 23rd in science and 31st in math .
so there 's really only one area where we 're near the top , and that 's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills .
let 's look at the best academic performer : the province of shanghai , china .
now , they rank number one across the board , in reading , math and science , and one of the keys to shanghai 's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving .
they made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work .
they have weekly study groups , where teachers get together and talk about what 's working .
they even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues .
you might ask , why is a system like this so important ?
it 's because there 's so much variation in the teaching profession .
some teachers are far more effective than others .
in fact , there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains .
if today 's average teacher could become as good as those teachers , our students would be blowing away the rest of the world .
so we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best .
what would that system look like ?
well , to find out , our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called measures of effective teaching .
we had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices .
for example , did they ask their students challenging questions ?
did they find multiple ways to explain an idea ?
we also had students fill out surveys with questions like , " does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson ? "
" do you learn to correct your mistakes ? "
and what we found is very exciting .
first , the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes .
so it tells us we 're asking the right questions .
and second , teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools , because they pointed to specific places where they can improve .
i want to show you what this video component of met looks like in action .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- sarah brown wessling : good morning everybody .
let 's talk about what 's going on today .
to get started , we 're doing a peer review day , okay ?
a peer review day , and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays .
my name is sarah brown wessling .
i am a high school english teacher at johnston high school in johnston , iowa .
turn to somebody next to you .
tell them what you think i mean when i talk about moves to prove . i 've talk about - i think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it .
okay , so i would like you to please bring up your papers .
i think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality .
you ca n't really dispute what you see on the video , and there is a lot to be learned from that , and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this .
i just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens .
at the beginning of class , i just perch it in the back of the classroom . it 's not a perfect shot .
it does n't catch every little thing that 's going on .
but i can hear the sound . i can see a lot .
and i 'm able to learn a lot from it .
so it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection .
all right , let 's take a look at the long one first , okay ?
once i 'm finished taping , then i put it in my computer , and then i 'll scan it and take a peek at it .
if i do n't write things down , i do n't remember them .
so having the notes is a part of my thinking process , and i discover what i 'm seeing as i 'm writing .
i really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management , and just all of those different facets of the classroom .
i 'm glad that we 've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works , what does n't .
i think that video exposes so much of what 's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand , and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about .
i think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we can not convey in a lesson plan , things you can not convey in a standard , things that you can not even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy .
alrighty , everybody , have a great weekend .
i 'll see you later .
-lsb- every classroom could look like that -rsb- -lrb- applause -rrb- bill gates : one day , we 'd like every classroom in america to look something like that .
but we still have more work to do .
diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle .
we also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis .
if you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions , you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions .
so building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system wo n't be easy .
for example , i know some teachers are n't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom .
that 's understandable , but our experience with met suggests that if teachers manage the process , if they collect video in their own classrooms , and they pick the lessons they want to submit , a lot of them will be eager to participate .
building this system will also require a considerable investment .
our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars .
now that 's a big number , but to put it in perspective , it 's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries .
the impact for teachers would be phenomenal .
we would finally have a way to give them feedback , as well as the means to act on it .
but this system would have an even more important benefit for our country .
it would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education , find a career that 's fulfilling and rewarding , and have a chance to live out their dreams .
this would n't just make us a more successful country .
it would also make us a more fair and just one , too .
i 'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve .
i hope you are too .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the next 18 minutes , i 'm going to take you on a journey .
and it 's a journey that you and i have been on for many years now , and it began some 50 years ago , when humans first stepped off our planet .
and in those 50 years , not only did we literally , physically set foot on the moon , but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets - all eight of them - and we have landed on asteroids , we have rendezvoused with comets , and , at this point in time , we have a spacecraft on its way to pluto , the body formerly known as a planet .
and all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey : a voyage to understand something , to get a sense of our cosmic place , to understand something of our origins , and how earth , our planet , and we , living on it , came to be .
and of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this , there 's saturn . and we have been to saturn before - we visited saturn in the early 1980s - but our investigations of saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the cassini spacecraft , traveling across interplanetary space for seven years , glided into orbit around saturn in the summer of 2004 , and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the sun .
now , the saturn system is a rich planetary system .
it offers mystery , scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare , and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach .
in fact , just studying the rings alone , we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies .
and here 's a beautiful picture of the andromeda nebula , which is our closest , largest spiral galaxy to the milky way .
and then , here 's a beautiful composite of the whirlpool galaxy , taken by the hubble space telescope .
so the journey back to saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us , and also how humans fit into that picture .
and it pains me that i ca n't tell you all that we have learned with cassini .
i ca n't show you all the beautiful pictures that we 've taken in the last two and a half years , because i simply do n't have the time .
so i 'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around saturn , and have been for the past two and a half years .
saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons .
they range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the u.s.
most of the beautiful pictures we 've taken of saturn , in fact , show saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons . here 's saturn with dione , and then , here 's saturn showing the rings edge-on , showing you just how vertically thin they are , with the moon enceladus .
now , two of the 47 moons that saturn has are standouts .
and those are titan and enceladus . titan is saturn 's largest moon , and , until cassini had arrived there , was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system .
and it is a body that has long intrigued people who 've watched the planets .
it has a very large , thick atmosphere , and in fact , its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the earth , or at least had in the past , than any other body in the solar system .
its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen , like you are breathing here in this room , except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane .
and these molecules high up in the atmosphere of titan get broken down , and their products join together to make haze particles .
this haze is ubiquitous . it 's completely global and enveloping titan .
and that 's why you can not see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum .
but these haze particles , it was surmised , before we got there with cassini , over billions and billions of years , gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge .
so like the equivalent , the titan equivalent , of tar , or oil , or what - we did n't know what .
but this is what we suspected . and these molecules , especially methane and ethane , can be liquids at the surface temperatures of titan .
and so it turns out that methane is to titan what water is to the earth .
it 's a condensable in the atmosphere , and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities . you can have methane clouds , ok , and above those clouds , you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze , which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface .
the temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero fahrenheit .
but despite that cold , you could have rain falling down on the surface of titan .
and doing on titan what rain does on the earth : it carves gullies ; it forms rivers and cataracts ; it can create canyons ; it can pool in large basins and craters .
it can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills , down into the lowlands . so stop and think for a minute .
try to imagine what the surface of titan might look like .
it 's dark . high noon on titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the earth .
it 's cold , it 's eerie , it 's misty , it might be raining , and you might be standing on the shores of lake michigan brimming with paint thinner . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that is the view that we had of the surface of titan before we got there with cassini , and i can tell you that what we have found on titan , though it is not the same in detail , is every bit as fascinating as that story is .
and for us , it has been like - the cassini people - it has been like a jules verne adventure come true .
as i said , it has a thick , extensive atmosphere .
this is a picture of titan , backlit by the sun , with the rings as a beautiful backdrop .
and yet another moon there - i do n't even know which one it is . it 's a very extensive atmosphere .
we have instruments on cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere , and my camera system is one of them .
and we have taken pictures like this .
and what you see is bright and dark regions , and that 's about as far as it got for us .
it was so mystifying : we could n't make out what we were seeing on titan .
when you look closer at this region , you start to see things like sinuous channels - we did n't know . you see a few round things .
this , we later found out , is , in fact , a crater , but there are very few craters on the surface of titan , meaning it 's a very young surface .
and there are features that look tectonic .
they look like they 've been pulled apart .
whenever you see anything linear on a planet , it means there 's been a fracture , like a fault .
and so it 's been tectonically altered .
but we could n't make sense of our images , until , six months after we got into orbit , an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of cassini 's investigation of titan .
and that was the deployment of the huygens probe , the european-built huygens probe that cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system . we deployed it to the atmosphere of titan , it took two and a half hours to descend , and it landed on the surface .
and i just want to emphasize how significant an event this is .
this is a device of human making , and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history .
it is so significant that , in my mind , this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the u.s. and europe , and sadly , that was n't the case .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
it was significant for another reason . this is an international mission , and this event was celebrated in europe , in germany , and the celebratory presentations were given in english accents , and american accents , and german accents , and french and italian and dutch accents .
it was a moving demonstration of what the words " united nations " are supposed to mean : a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good .
and , in this case , it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet , and to come to understand a planetary system that , for all of human history , had been unreachable , and now humans had actually touched it .
so it was - i mean , i 'm getting goose bumps just talking about it .
it was a tremendously emotional event , and it 's something that i will personally never forget , and you should n't either .
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
but anyway , the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down , and it also took panoramic pictures .
and i ca n't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of titan 's surface from the probe . and this is what we saw .
and it was a shocker , because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be .
it was an unambiguous pattern , a geological pattern .
it 's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids .
and you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge .
and they converge into this channel here , which drains into this region .
you are looking at a shoreline .
was this a shoreline of fluids ? we did n't know .
but this is somewhat of a shoreline .
this picture is taken at 16 kilometers .
this is the picture taken at eight kilometers , ok ? again , the shoreline .
okay , now , 16 kilometers , eight kilometers - this is roughly an airline altitude .
if you were going to take an airplane trip across the u.s. , you would be flying at these altitudes .
so , this is the picture you would have at the window of titanian airlines as you fly across the surface of titan . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then finally , the probe came to rest on the surface , and i 'm going to show you , ladies and gentlemen , the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system .
and here is the horizon , ok ?
these are probably water ice pebbles , yes ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
and obviously , it landed in one of these flat , dark regions and it did n't sink out of sight . so it was n't fluid that we landed in .
what the probe came down in was basically the titan equivalent of a mud flat .
this is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane .
and it 's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of titan through these channels that we saw , and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins .
and that is what the huygens probe landed in .
but still , there was no sign in our images , or even in the huygens ' images , of any large , open bodies of fluids .
where were they ? it got even more puzzling when we found dunes .
ok , so this is our movie of the equatorial region of titan , showing these dunes . these are dunes that are 100 meters tall , separated by a few kilometers , and they go on for miles and miles and miles .
there 's hundreds , up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes .
this is the saharan desert of titan .
it 's obviously a place which is very dry , or you would n't get dunes .
so again , it got puzzling that there were no bodies of fluid , until finally , we saw lakes in the polar regions .
and there is a lake scene in the south polar region of titan .
it 's about the size of lake ontario .
and then , only a week and a half ago , we flew over the north pole of titan and found , again , we found a feature here the size of the caspian sea .
so it seems that the liquids , for some reason we do n't understand , or during at least this season , are apparently at the poles of titan .
and i think you would agree that we have found titan is a remarkable , mystical place . it 's exotic , it 's alien , but yet strangely earth-like , and having earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity , and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the earth itself .
and so now we go onto enceladus . enceladus is a small moon , it 's about a tenth the size of titan . and you can see it here next to england , just to show you the size . this is not meant to be a threat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
and enceladus is very white , it 's very bright , and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures .
it is a very geologically active body .
but the mother lode of discoveries on enceladus was found at the south pole - and we 're looking at the south pole here - where we found this system of fractures .
and they 're a different color because they 're a different composition .
they are coated . these fractures are coated with organic materials .
moreover , this whole , entire region , the south polar region , has elevated temperatures . it 's the hottest place on the planet , on the body .
that 's as bizarre as finding that the antarctic on the earth is hotter than the tropics .
and then , when we took additional pictures , we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine , icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space .
and when we color-code this image , to bring out the faint light levels , we see that these jets feed a plume that , in fact , we see , in other images , goes thousands of miles into the space above enceladus .
my team and i have examined images like this , and like this one , and have thought about the other results from cassini .
and we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of enceladus .
so we have , possibly , liquid water , organic materials and excess heat .
in other words , we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration , or in other words , an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms .
and i do n't think i need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system , whether it be on enceladus or elsewhere , would have enormous cultural and scientific implications .
because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred not once , but twice , independently , in our solar system , then that means , by inference , it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the universe and its 13.7 billion year history .
right now , earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life .
it is precious , it is unique , it is still , so far , the only home we 've ever known .
and if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s - and we 'd forgive you , if you were n't , ok - you would remember this very famous picture taken by the apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 .
it was the first time that earth was imaged from space , and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe , and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet .
well , we on cassini have taken an equivalent first , a picture that no human eye has ever seen before .
it is a total eclipse of the sun , seen from the other side of saturn .
and in this impossibly beautiful picture , you see the main rings backlit by the sun , you see the refracted image of the sun and you see this ring created , in fact , by the exhalations of enceladus .
but as if that were n't brilliant enough , we can spot , in this beautiful image , sight of our own planet , cradled in the arms of saturn 's rings .
now , there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar , and capturing the sight of our little , blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds .
and that , and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that , may be , in the end , the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago .
and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- metaphor lives a secret life all around us .
we utter about six metaphors a minute .
metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others , how we communicate , learn , discover and invent .
but metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words .
now , to assist me in explaining this , i 've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers , the reigning king of the metaphorians , a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor .
i am , of course , referring to none other than elvis presley .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , " all shook up " is a great love song .
it 's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract - ideas , emotions , feelings , concepts , thoughts - we inevitably resort to metaphor .
in " all shook up , " a touch is not a touch , but a chill .
lips are not lips , but volcanoes .
she is not she , but a buttercup .
and love is not love , but being all shook up .
in this , elvis is following aristotle 's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else .
this is the mathematics of metaphor .
and fortunately it 's very simple .
x equals y.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this formula works wherever metaphor is present .
elvis uses it , but so does shakespeare in this famous line from " romeo and juliet : " juliet is the sun .
now , here , shakespeare gives the thing , juliet , a name that belongs to something else , the sun .
but whenever we give a thing a name that belongs to something else , we give it a whole network of analogies too .
we mix and match what we know about the metaphor 's source , in this case the sun , with what we know about its target , juliet .
and metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of juliet than if shakespeare had literally described what she looks like .
so , how do we make and understand metaphors ?
this might look familiar .
the first step is pattern recognition .
look at this image . what do you see ?
three wayward pac-men , and three pointy brackets are actually present .
what we see , however , are two overlapping triangles .
metaphor is not just the detection of patterns ; it is the creation of patterns .
second step , conceptual synesthesia .
now , synesthesia is the experience of a stimulus in once sense organ in another sense organ as well , such as colored hearing .
people with colored hearing actually see colors when they hear the sounds of words or letters .
we all have synesthetic abilities .
this is the bouba / kiki test .
what you have to do is identify which of these shapes is called bouba , and which is called kiki .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you are like 98 percent of other people , you will identify the round , amoeboid shape as bouba , and the sharp , spiky one as kiki .
can we do a quick show of hands ?
does that correspond ?
okay , i think 99.9 would about cover it .
why do we do that ?
because we instinctively find , or create , a pattern between the round shape and the round sound of bouba , and the spiky shape and the spiky sound of kiki .
and many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic .
silence is sweet .
neckties are loud .
sexually attractive people are hot .
sexually unattractive people leave us cold .
metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia , in which we understand one concept in the context of another .
third step is cognitive dissonance .
this is the stroop test .
what you need to do here is identify as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which these words are printed .
you can take the test now .
if you 're like most people , you will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when the name of the color is printed in a differently colored ink .
the test shows that we can not ignore the literal meaning of words even when the literal meaning gives the wrong answer .
stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well .
the participants had to identify , as quickly as possible , the literally false sentences .
they took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences .
why ? because we can not ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either .
one of the sentences was , " some jobs are jails . "
now , unless you 're a prison guard , the sentence " some jobs are jails " is literally false .
sadly , it 's metaphorically true .
and the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false .
metaphor matters because it 's around us every day , all the time .
metaphor matters because it creates expectations .
pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news .
agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing , as in , " the nasdaq climbed higher . "
object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things , as in , " the dow fell like a brick . "
researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries , and then predict the next day 's price trend .
those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue .
and they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal .
if , for example , house prices are routinely described as climbing and climbing , higher and higher , people might naturally assume that that rise is unstoppable .
they may feel confident , say , in taking out mortgages they really ca n't afford .
that 's a hypothetical example of course .
but this is how metaphor misleads .
metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies .
a group of students was told that a small democratic country had been invaded and had asked the u.s. for help .
and they had to make a decision .
what should they do ?
intervene , appeal to the u.n. , or do nothing ?
they were each then given one of three descriptions of this hypothetical crisis .
each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy : world war ii , vietnam , and the third was historically neutral .
those exposed to the world war ii scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others .
just as we can not ignore the literal meaning of words , we can not ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor .
metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery .
whenever we solve a problem , or make a discovery , we compare what we know with what we do n't know .
and the only way to find out about the latter is to investigate the ways it might be like the former .
einstein described his scientific method as combinatory play .
he famously used thought experiments , which are essentially elaborate analogies , to come up with some of his greatest discoveries .
by bringing together what we know and what we do n't know through analogy , metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery .
now metaphor is ubiquitous , yet it 's hidden .
but you just have to look at the words around you and you 'll find it .
ralph waldo emerson described language as " fossil poetry . "
but before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor .
and these fossils still breathe .
take the three most famous words in all of western philosophy : " cogito ergo sum . "
that 's routinely translated as , " i think , therefore i am . "
but there is a better translation .
the latin word " cogito " is derived from the prefix " co , " meaning " together , " and the verb " agitare , " meaning " to shake . "
so , the original meaning of " cogito " is to shake together .
and the proper translation of " cogito ergo sum " is " i shake things up , therefore i am . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- metaphor shakes things up , giving us everything from shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process .
the mind is a plastic snow dome , the most beautiful , most interesting , and most itself , when , as elvis put it , it 's all shook up .
and metaphor keeps the mind shaking , rattling and rolling , long after elvis has left the building .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am going to be talking about secrets .
obviously the best way to divulge a secret is to tell someone to not say anything about it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- secrets . i 'm using powerpoint this year just because , you know , i 'm into the ted thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when you use these things you do n't have to go like that .
you just press it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , man . um , yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes . i 'm sure ! just change it !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is bill gates here ?
change it ! come on ! what ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ah ! okay .
that 's not my slides , but it 's okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as you can see , these are all maps .
and maps are important devices for transferring information , especially if you have human cognitive ability .
we can see that all formulas are really maps .
now , as humans , we make maps of places that we seldom even go , which seems a little wasteful of time .
this , of course , is a map of the moon .
there 're some very delightful names .
tranquilacalitis , -lsb- unclear -rsb- . my favorite is frigoris .
what are these people thinking ? frigoris ?
what the frigoris you doing ? names are important .
frigoris ? this is the moon . people could live there one day .
i 'll meet you at frigoris . no . i do n't think so .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there we see mars , again with various names .
and this is all done , by the way , by the international astronomical union .
this is an actual group of people that sit around naming planetary objects .
this is from their actual book .
these are some of the names that they have chosen , ladies and gentlemen .
i 'll go through a little of them . bolotnitsa .
that , of course , is the slavic swamp mermaid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i think the whole concept of a mermaid does n't really blend into the swamp feel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " oh look ! mermaid come out of swamp . oh boy !
it 's time for bolotnitsa ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- djabran fluctus .
if that do n't flow off the tongue , what does ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean kids are studying this stuff and they 've got the word " fluctus " up there . that 's wrong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one dyslexic kid and he could be ruining his life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it fluctus up , mama . "
hikuleo fluctus .
that 's a little more flowing . hikuleo sounds like a kind of a leonardo dicaprio 17 syllable thing .
and that 's the tonga underworld .
and one of my favorites is the itoki fluctus , who is the nicaraguan goddess of insects , stars , and planets .
now , if you 're a goddess of stars and planets would n't you relegate insects to somebody else ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " no , no , really , i 'm so busy with the stars .
would you mind taking the insects ? thank you darling .
oh take the spiders too . i know they 're not insects , but i do n't care .
monkeys , chimps , just get rid of the hairy creatures . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , we 're going to be going to mars one day . and when we do , it 's going to be unfair for the people that are living there to have to live with these ridiculous names .
so , you 'll be on mars , and you 're at hellespointica depressio which has got to be a really " up " place .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i 'm at the depressio , and i want to get over to amazonis so i plug it into the mars map , and click the button and there 's my directions .
i go to chrysokeras .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- left to the thymiamata .
then to niliacus lacus , which is not a bad name .
niliacus lacus , try to get the practice , slick-a-tick-a-bacus .
that 's a cool name . i will say that .
so , i hold back a little of my venom for these astronomical misnomers .
and then of course arnon to thoth .
and of course there will be advertisements .
this is from their rule book , the international astronomical union .
and you know they 're international because they put it " en francais " as well .
l 'union astronomique internationale , for those of you who do n't speak french .
i thought i 'd translate for you .
from the rulebook : nomenclature is a tool .
the first consideration , make it clear , simple and unambiguous .
and i think that djabran fluctus , that fits that mode .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's simple , the goddess of goats , very simple .
djabran fluctus .
" now , frank is this clear to you , djabran fluctus ? "
" yeah , that 's the goat goddess right ? the abacazanian ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's clear to me . "
" listen , i 'm going back to the swamp mermaid . can you call me in a little while ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- also , from the actual document i highlighted a part i thought may be of interest .
anyone can suggest changing a name .
so , i look to you , fellow member of the earth community .
we 've got to change this stuff up fast .
so , these are actual names of people that work there .
i did some more investigation .
these are more people working for this group .
and , as you can see , they do n't use their first names .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are people naming planets , and they wo n't use their first names .
something is askew here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is it because his name is really jupiter blunck ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is that ganymede andromeda burba ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is that mars ya marov ?
i do n't know . but it 's investigative material , no doubt .
there are some mapping people who do use their names .
witness please , eugene shoemaker , who , diligently , from a young boy decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies .
must have been a very interesting day in the shoemaker house .
" mom , i want to make maps . "
" that 's wonderful eugene . you could make maps of toronto . "
" no , i want to make maps of planets . "
" yeah , go to your room . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- martians , venusians , jovians .
we have names for places where people do n't exist .
that seems a little silly to me .
there are no jovians .
getting back to my premise , i used stamps , by the way , because you do n't have to pay anybody for the rights .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there is obviously einstein , niels bohr , de fermat 's last theorem , and i 'm not sure whether that 's james coburn or richard harris .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's definitely one of the two . i 'm not really clear which one .
but obviously the point is that numbers are maps .
and within numbers , is there an underlying secret to the universe ?
that is the premise of this particular presentation .
by the way , that 's a natural picture of saturn , no adjustments . i mean that 's just beautiful .
so beautiful that i will even give up a laugh to explain my love of this particular planet , and the day saturday , named after it , wonderfully .
so , formulas relate number to form .
that 's euler , his formula was one of the inspirations that lead to the beginning of string theory which is kind of cool , not that funny , but it is cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was also famous for having no body .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which a lot of you are like , " how did he figure that out ? "
he 's got no body , no man , just a head floating high .
here comes euler .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's an icosahedron , which is one of the five sacred solids , very important shapes .
you see the icosahedron again .
the dodecahedron , it 's dual .
there is a dodecahedron which i had to do in my room last night .
the five sacred solids , as you can see there .
which is not to be confused with the five sacred salads .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- blue cheese , ranch , oil and vinegar , thousand islands and house .
i suggest the house .
the reality , now here is something important .
what 's important about this is these shapes are duals of each other .
and you can see how the icosahedron withdraws into the dodecahedron and then they just merge into each other .
so , the whole concept of branes in the universe , if the universe is shaped like a dodecahedron this is a very good map of what could possibly be .
and that is , of course , what we are here to talk about .
what a coincidence !
october 9th , in france , jean-pierre luminet said that the universe is probably shaped like a dodecahedron , based on information that they got from this probe .
this would be a normal wave pattern .
but what they 're seeing , way out there in the far reaches of the microwave background , is this kind of odd undulation .
it does n't plug in to what they suspected a flat universe would be .
so , you can kind of get an idea from this extrapolating that back under this huge picture , so we get this idea of what the primal universe looked like .
and judging from this , it looks a little like a cheeseburger .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'm thinking the universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger .
and for me , that 's a win-win .
everybody goes , i 'm happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- better really hurry up .
i just threw this in because as important as all of our intellectual abilities are , without heart and without love it 's just - it 's all meaningless .
and that , to me , is really beautiful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- except for that creepy guy in the background .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- getting back to the point of my particular presentation , kepler , one of my great heroes , who realized that these five solids , which i spoke of earlier , were related somehow to the planets , but he could n't prove it . it freaked him out .
but it did lead to newton discovering gravity .
so , maps of things leading to organized understandings of the universe in which we emerge .
now this is isaac from a vietnamese stamp .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i am not suggesting at all that my vietnamese brothers and sisters could maybe use a little art class here and there . but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's not a good picture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not a good picture . now , my friends in the island of nevis are a little better . look at that ! that 's isaac newton .
that guy is rockin ' .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what a handsome cat .
once again , nicaragua let me down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and copernicus looks like johnny carson , which is really weird .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't get that at all .
once again , these guys rock it out .
isaac is kickin ' ass . man , he looks like a rock star .
this is freaky is a major way .
this is sierra leone .
they got little babies in there , floating in there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- man . i do n't really need to comment on this .
but i did n't know that isaac newton was in the moody blues . did you ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when did this happen ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a different kind of course . and they 've got five apples ?
i mean these guys are extrapolating in realms that are not necessarily valid .
although five is a good number , of course .
ecuador , my friend kepler , as you can see , they call him juan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- juan ? no ! johannes , not juan .
it was n't carlos chaplain . it 's wrong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rené descartes , of course . once again these grenada people , this is like way too sick for anybody 's imagination .
he 's all murky . there is little kids leaning on his leg , little ghosts flying around . we gotta clean this stuff up fast , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is , of course , the cartesian coordinates .
once again , that 's sierra leone .
this is again , indicating how numbers relate to space relate to form , maps of the universe .
because that 's why we 're here , really , i think to figure stuff out and to love each other .
descartes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- before the horse . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , monaco took descartes , and just flipped him around .
now , monaco is problematic for me , and i 'll show you why .
here is a map . all they have is a casino on it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and why franklin delano roosevelt is on their map i do n't even want to hazard a guess .
but i 'd say he 'd been to hellespointica depressio recently .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the flag of monaco . ladies and gentlemen , the flag of indonesia . please examine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- not sure how this came to be , but it 's not right .
in monaco , " no , what are you talking about ?
they are so different .
look , ours is more red , it 's longer .
they stole our flag ! they stole our flag ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bode 's law was n't even his law . it was a guy named titus .
and the reason i just bring this up because it is a law that does n't really work .
that 's jude law and some of his films recently did n't work .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just a correlation that indicates how things are misinterpreted .
and i wonder if the photographer said , " okay , jude , could you touch your tooth ? that 's good . "
just a tip , if you 're being photographed for press pictures , do n't touch your teeth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- prime numbers , gauss , one of my favorites .
golden section , i 've been obsessed with this thing since before i was born .
i know that scares a lot of you , but that was my purpose entirely .
there we can see fibonacci numbers related to the golden section , because fibonacci and golden section relate to the unfolding of the measured meter of matter , as i refer to it .
if fibonacci had been on paxil , -lrb- laughter -rrb- that would be the fibonacci series .
" ten milligram , 20 milligram . "
" leonardo , dinner 's ready , put down those books and take your pills . "
" yes , mama . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- alright where is this going ? that 's a good question .
here is the premise that i began 27 years ago .
if numbers can express the laws of this incredible universe that we live , i reason , through some sort of reverse engineering , we could extrapolate from them some basic structural element of this universe .
and that 's what i did . twenty-seven years ago i started working on this .
and i tried to build a particle accelerator .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that did n't work out well .
so , then i thought a calculator is a metaphor .
i can just divide numbers , that 's like atom smashing .
that 's what i did . that 's how i found moleeds .
moleeds are what i believe the thing that will allow string theory to be proved .
they are the nodes on the string , patterns and relationships , 27 , 37 .
that was the first chart i came up with .
you can see , even if you do n't go for the numbers , the beauty of the symmetry .
the numbers from one to 36 , divided into six groups .
symmetry , pairs .
every top adds up to 37 .
bottom , all 74 .
there is so many intricate relationships that i 'm not going to go there now , because you would say , " hey , go back to the fluctus part . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- circle of fifths , acoustic harmony , geometric symmetry .
i knew those two were related .
once again , the cartesian kind of cross-over .
so , i said if i 'm going to put a circle , see what kind of patterns i get , boom , the red system .
look at that . you ca n't just make this stuff up , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you ca n't just go around going , " oh , i 'm going to put some triangles in a circle and they 're going to be symmetrical . and they 're all going to add up , and it 's going to be , oh yeah , i figured that out . "
this is beyond anything anybody could just make up .
there is the orange system .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you 'll see over here , these are multiples of the number 27 .
and they recapitulate that shape , even though that 's a circle of nine and that 's a circle of 36 . it 's nuts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the green system . it all folds in half on the green system , right between 18 and 19 .
the blue system . the violet . it 's all there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- look at that ! i mean you can not make that stuff up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that just does n't fall out of a tree , ladies and gentlemen .
twenty-seven years of my life !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm presenting it here at ted . why ?
because this is the place if aliens land , i hope they come here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we are going to destroy the earth . hmmm ... maybe not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in this last year i have found these subsequent systems which allow for the mathematic possibilities of the calabi-yau manifolds in a way that does n't necessitate these little hidden dimensions .
which works mathematically , but it just does n't seem god-like to me .
it just seems like it 's not sexy and elegant , it 's hidden .
i do n't want hidden , i want to see it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i found other pairs all have symmetry , even though , unlike the master one , their symmetry is split .
unbelievable . this is like crazy .
am i the only one that sees this ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , i did n't just draw this in a day , by the way .
you know , try making some charts like this at home .
you gotta be accurate ! there 's measurement involved , increments .
these are maps , by the way .
not stamps , but one day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , i 'm getting to the punch . golden ratio , it 's crazy .
and look at this , built within it is the golden ratio .
i start looking at that , and look at them again .
they start looking like planets .
i go to jpl .
i look at the orbits of the planets .
i find 18 examples of it in our solar system .
i never told anybody . this is the first thing . this could be history .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- kepler was right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- eighteen and 19 , the middle of the moleeds , 0.618 is the golden section .
multiply them together , 18.618 x 19.618 is 365.247 .
which is .005 different from the number of days in a year .
hey , you ca n't make this up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so let me start by taking you back , back into the mists of your memory to perhaps the most anticipated year in your life , but certainly the most anticipated year in all human history : the year 2000 . remember that ?
y2k , the dotcom bubble , stressing about whose party you 're going to go to as the clock strikes midnight , before the champagne goes flat , and then there 's that inchoate yearning that was felt , i think , by many , that the millennium , that the year 2000 , should mean more , more than just a two and some zeroes .
well , amazingly , for once , our world leaders actually lived up to that millennium moment and back in 2000 agreed to some pretty extraordinary stuff : visionary , measurable , long-term targets called the millennium development goals .
now , i 'm sure you all keep a copy of the goals under your pillow , or by the bedside table , but just in case you do n't , and your memory needs some jogging , the deal agreed then goes like this : developing countries promised to at least halve extreme poverty , hunger and deaths from disease , alongside some other targets , by 2015 , and developed nations promised to help them get that done by dropping debts , increasing smart aid , and trade reform .
well , we 're approaching 2015 , so we 'd better assess , how are we doing on these goals ?
but we 've also got to decide , do we like such global goals ?
some people do n't . and if we like them , we 've got to decide what we want to do on these goals going forward .
what does the world want to do together ?
we 've got to decide a process by which we decide .
well , i definitely think these goals are worth building on and seeing through , and here 's just a few reasons why .
incredible partnerships between the private sector , political leaders , philanthropists and amazing grassroots activists across the developing world , but also 250,000 people marched in the streets of edinburgh outside this very building for make poverty history .
all together , they achieved these results : increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals , life-saving anti-aids drugs ; nearly halved deaths from malaria ; vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved .
and combined , this is going to result in two million fewer children dying every year , last year , than in the year 2000 .
that 's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day , ten times you lot not dead every day , because of all of these partnerships .
so i think this is amazing living proof of progress that more people should know about , but the challenge of communicating this kind of good news is probably the subject of a different tedtalk .
anyway , for now , anyone involved in getting these results , thank you . i think this proved these goals are worth it .
but there 's still a lot of unfinished business .
still , 7.6 million children die every year of preventable , treatable diseases , and 178 million kids are malnourished to the point of stunting , a horrible term which means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment .
so there 's plainly a lot more to do on the goals we 've got .
but then , a lot of people think there are things that should have been in the original package that were n't agreed back then that should now be included , like sustainable development targets , natural resource governance targets , access to opportunity , to knowledge , equity , fighting corruption .
all of this is measurable and could be in the new goals .
but the key thing here is , what do you think should be in the new goals ?
what do you want ?
are you annoyed that i did n't talk about gender equality or education ?
should those be in the new package of goals ?
and quite frankly , that 's a good question , but there 's going to be some tough tradeoffs and choices here , so you want to hope that the process by which the world decides these new goals is going to be legitimate , right ?
well , as we gather here in edinburgh , technocrats appointed by the u.n. and certain governments , with the best intentions , are busying themselves designing a new package of goals , and currently they 're doing that through pretty much the same old late-20th-century , top-down , elite , closed process .
but , of course , since then , the web and mobile telephony , along with ubiquitous reality tv formats have spread all around the world .
so what we 'd like to propose is that we use them to involve people from all around the world in an historic first : the world 's first truly global poll and consultation , where everyone everywhere has an equal voice for the very first time .
i mean , would n't it be a huge historic missed opportunity not to do this , given that we can ?
there 's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake , tens of millions of lives , or deaths , at stake , and , i 'd argue , the security and future of you and your family is also at stake .
so , if you 're with me , i 'd say there 's three essential steps in this crowdsourcing campaign : collecting , connecting and committing .
so first of all , we 've got to ground this campaign in core polling data .
let 's go into every country that will let us in , ask 1,001 people what they want the new goals to be , making special efforts to reach the poorest , those without access to modern technology , and let 's make sure that their views are at the center of the goals going forward .
then , we 've got to commission a baseline survey to make sure we can monitor and progress the goals going forward . the original goals did n't really have good baseline survey data , and we 're going to need the help of big data through all of this process to make sure we can really monitor the progress .
and then we 've got to connect with the big crowd .
now here , we see the role for an unprecedented coalition of social media giants and upstarts , telecoms companies , reality tv show formats , gaming companies , telecoms , all of them together in kind of their " we are the world " moment .
could they come together and help the millennium development goals get rebranded into the millennial generation 's goals ?
and if just five percent of the five billion plus who are currently connected made a comment , and that comment turned into a commitment , we could crowdsource a force of 300 million people around the world to help see these goals through .
if we have this collected data , and this connected crowd , based upon our experience of campaigning and getting world leaders to commit , i think world leaders will commit to most of the crowdsourced recommendations .
but the question really is , through this process will we all have become committed ?
and if we are , are we ready to iterate , monitor and provide feedback , make sure these promises are really delivering results ?
well , there 's some fantastic examples here to scale up , mostly piloted within africa , actually .
there 's open data kenya , which geocodes and crowdsources information about where projects are , are they delivering results .
often , they 're not in the right place .
and ushahidi , which means " witness " in swahili , which geocodes and crowdsources information in complex emergencies to help target responses .
this is some of the most exciting stuff in development and democracy , where citizens on the edge of a network are helping to force open the process to make sure that the big global aid promises and vague stuff up at the top really delivers for people at a grassroots level and inverts that pyramid .
this openness , this forcing openness , is key , and if it was n't entirely transparent already , i should be open : i 've got a completely transparent agenda .
long-term trends suggest that this century is going to be a tough place to live , with population increases , consumption patterns increasing , and conflict over scarce natural resources .
and look at the state of global politics today .
look at the rio earth summit that happened just last week , or the mexican g20 , also last week .
both , if we 're honest , a bust .
our world leaders , our global politics , currently ca n't get it done .
they need our help . they need the cavalry , and the cavalry 's not going to come from mars .
it 's got to come from us , and i see this process of deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashion what the world wants to work on together as one vital means by which we can crowdsource the force to really build that constituency that 's going to reinvigorate global governance in the 21st century .
i started in 2000 . let me finish in 2030 .
many people made fun of a big campaign a few years ago we had called make poverty history .
it was a naive thought in many people 's minds , and it 's true , it was just a t-shirt slogan that worked for the moment . but look .
the empirical condition of living under a dollar and 25 is trending down , and look where it gets to by 2030 .
it 's getting near zero .
now sure , progress in china and india and poverty reduction there was key to that , but recently also in africa , poverty rates are being reduced .
it will get harder as we get towards zero , as the poor will be increasingly located in post-conflict , fragile states , or maybe in middle income states where they do n't really care about the marginalized .
but i 'm confident , with the right kind of political campaigning and creative and technological innovation combined working together more and more as one , i think we can get this and other goals done .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : jamie , here 's the puzzle to me .
if there was an incident today where a hundred kids died in some tragedy or where , say , a hundred kids were kidnapped and then rescued by special forces , i mean , it would be all over the news for a week , right ?
you just put up , just as one of your numbers there , that 5,000 - is that the number ?
jamie drummond : fewer children every day .
ca : five thousand fewer children dying every day .
i mean , it dwarfs , dwarfs everything that is actually on our news agenda , and it 's invisible .
this must drive you crazy .
jd : it does , and we 're having a huge debate in this country about aid levels , for example , and aid alone is not the whole solution . nobody thinks it is .
but , you know , if people saw the results of this smart aid , i mean , they 'd be going crazy for it .
i wish the 250,000 people who really did march outside this very building knew these results .
right now they do n't , and it would be great to find a way to better communicate it , because we have not .
creatively , we 've failed to communicate this success so far .
if those kinds of efforts just could multiply their voice and amplify it at the key moments , i know for a fact we 'd get better policy .
the mexican g20 need not have been a bust .
rio , if anyone cares about the environment , need not have been a bust , okay ?
but these conferences are going on , and i know people get skeptical and cynical about the big global summits and the promises and their never being kept , but actually , the bits that are , are making a difference , and what the politicians need is more permission from the public .
ca : but you have n't fully worked out the web mechanisms , etc .
by which this might happen .
i mean , if the people here who 've had experience using open platforms , you 're interested to talk with them this week and try to take this forward .
jd : absolutely . ca : all right , well i must say , if this conference led in some way to advancing that idea , that 's a huge idea , and if you carry that forward , that is really awesome , so thank you . jd : i 'd love your help .
ca : thank you , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my search is always to find ways to chronicle , to share and to document stories about people , just everyday people .
stories that offer transformation , that lean into transcendence , but that are never sentimental , that never look away from the darkest things about us .
because i really believe that we 're never more beautiful than when we 're most ugly .
because that 's really the moment we really know what we 're made of .
as chris said , i grew up in nigeria with a whole generation - in the ' 80s - of students who were protesting a military dictatorship , which has finally ended .
so it was n't just me , there was a whole generation of us .
but what i 've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures , but in the simple accumulation of gentle , soft , almost invisible acts of compassion , everyday acts of compassion .
in south africa , they have a phrase called ubuntu .
ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says , the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me .
but if you 're like me , my humanity is more like a window .
i do n't really see it , i do n't pay attention to it until there 's , you know , like a bug that 's dead on the window .
then suddenly i see it , and usually , it 's never good .
it 's usually when i 'm cussing in traffic at someone who is trying to drive their car and drink coffee and send emails and make notes .
so what ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people .
it 's really very simple , but really very complicated .
so , i thought i should start with some stories .
i should tell you some stories about remarkable people , so i thought i 'd start with my mother .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she was dark , too .
my mother was english .
my parents met in oxford in the ' 50s , and my mother moved to nigeria and lived there .
she was five foot two , very feisty and very english .
this is how english my mother is - or was , she just passed .
she came out to california , to los angeles , to visit me , and we went to malibu , which she thought was very disappointing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we went to a fish restaurant , and we had chad , the surfer dude , serving us , and he came up and my mother said , " do you have any specials , young man ? "
and chad says , " sure , like , we have this , like , salmon , that 's , like , rolled in this , like , wasabi , like , crust .
it 's totally rad . "
and my mother turned to me and said , " what language is he speaking ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " english , mum . "
and she shook her head and said , " oh , these americans . we gave them a language , why do n't they use it ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this woman , who converted from the church of england to catholicism when she married my father - and there 's no one more rabid than a catholic convert - decided to teach in the rural areas in nigeria , particularly among igbo women , the billings ovulation method , which was the only approved birth control by the catholic church .
but her igbo was n't too good .
so she took me along to translate .
i was seven .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , here are these women , who never discuss their period with their husbands , and here i am telling them , " well , how often do you get your period ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , " do you notice any discharges ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , " how swollen is your vulva ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she never would have thought of herself as a feminist , my mother , but she always used to say , " anything a man can do , i can fix . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- and when my father complained about this situation , where she 's taking a seven-year-old boy to teach this birth control , you know , he used to say , " oh , you 're turning him into - you 're teaching him how to be a woman . "
my mother said , " someone has to . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this woman - during the biafran war , we were caught in the war .
it was my mother with five little children .
it takes her one year , through refugee camp after refugee camp , to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country .
at every single refugee camp , she has to face off soldiers who want to take my elder brother mark , who was nine , and make him a boy soldier .
can you imagine this five-foot-two woman , standing up to men with guns who want to kill us ?
all through that one year , my mother never cried one time , not once .
but when we were in lisbon , in the airport , about to fly to england , this woman saw my mother wearing this dress , which had been washed so many times it was basically see through , with five really hungry-looking kids , came over and asked her what had happened .
and she told this woman .
and so this woman emptied out her suitcase and gave all of her clothes to my mother , and to us , and the toys of her kids , who did n't like that very much , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that was the only time she cried .
and i remember years later , i was writing about my mother , and i asked her , " why did you cry then ? "
and she said , " you know , you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble , any kind of horror .
but the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you . "
the old women in my father 's village , after this war had happened , memorized the names of every dead person , and they would sing these dirges , made up of these names .
dirges so melancholic that they would scorch you .
and they would sing them only when they planted the rice , as though they were seeding the hearts of the dead into the rice .
but when it came for harvest time , they would sing these joyful songs , that were made up of the names of every child who had been born that year .
and then the next planting season , when they sang the dirge , they would remove as many names of the dead that equaled as many people that were born .
and in this way , these women enacted a lot of transformation , beautiful transformation .
did you know , that before the genocide in rwanda , the word for rape and the word for marriage was the same one ?
but today , women are rebuilding rwanda .
did you also know that after apartheid , when the new government went into the parliament houses , there were no female toilets in the building ?
which would seem to suggest that apartheid was entirely the business of men .
all of this to say , that despite the horror , and despite the death , women are never really counted .
their humanity never seems to matter very much to us .
when i was growing up in nigeria - and i should n't say nigeria , because that 's too general , but in afikpo , the igbo part of the country where i 'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men .
men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women , that 's essentially what it is .
and a lot of rituals involved killing , killing little animals , progressing along , so when i turned 13 - and , i mean , it made sense , it was an agrarian community , somebody had to kill the animals , there was no whole foods you could go and get kangaroo steak at - so when i turned 13 , it was my turn now to kill a goat .
and i was this weird , sensitive kid , who could n't really do it , but i had to do it .
and i was supposed to do this alone .
but a friend of mine , called emmanuel , who was significantly older than me , who 'd been a boy soldier during the biafran war , decided to come with me .
which sort of made me feel good , because he 'd seen a lot of things .
now , when i was growing up , he used to tell me stories about how he used to bayonet people , and their intestines would fall out , but they would keep running .
so , this guy comes with me .
and i do n't know if you 've ever heard a goat , or seen one - they sound like human beings , that 's why we call tragedies " a song of a goat . "
my friend brad kessler says that we did n't become human until we started keeping goats .
anyway , a goat 's eyes are like a child 's eyes .
so when i tried to kill this goat and i could n't , emmanuel bent down , he puts his hand over the mouth of the goat , covers its eyes , so i do n't have to look into them , while i kill the goat .
it did n't seem like a lot , for this guy who 'd seen so much , and to whom the killing of a goat must have seemed such a quotidian experience , still found it in himself to try to protect me .
i was a wimp .
i cried for a very long time .
and afterwards , he did n't say a word .
he just sat there watching me cry for an hour .
and then afterwards he said to me , " it will always be difficult , but if you cry like this every time , you will die of heartbreak .
just know that it is enough sometimes to know that it is difficult . "
of course , talking about goats makes me think of sheep , and not in good ways .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i was born two days after christmas .
so growing up , you know , i had a cake and everything , but i never got any presents , because , born two days after christmas .
so , i was about nine , and my uncle had just come back from germany , and we had the catholic priest over , my mother was entertaining him with tea .
and my uncle suddenly says , " where are chris ' presents ? "
and my mother said , " do n't talk about that in front of guests . "
but he was desperate to show that he 'd just come back , so he summoned me up , and he said , " go into the bedroom , my bedroom .
take anything you want out of the suitcase .
it 's your birthday present . "
i 'm sure he thought i 'd take a book or a shirt , but i found an inflatable sheep .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i blew it up and ran into the living room , my finger where it should n't have been , i was waving this buzzing sheep around , and my mother looked like she was going to die of shock .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and father mcgetrick was completely unflustered , just stirred his tea and looked at my mother and said , " it 's all right daphne , i 'm scottish . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- my last days in prison , the last 18 months , my cellmate - for the last year , the first year of the last 18 months - my cellmate was 14 years old .
the name was john james , and in those days , if a family member committed a crime , the military would hold you as ransom till your family turned themselves in .
so , here was this 14-year-old kid on death row .
and not everybody on death row was a political prisoner .
there were some really bad people there .
and he had smuggled in two comics , two comic books - " spiderman " and " x-men . "
he was obsessed .
and when he got tired of reading them , he started to teach the men in death row how to read , with these comic books .
and so , i remember night after night , you 'd hear all these men , these really hardened criminals , huddled around john james , reciting , " take that , spidey ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's incredible .
i was really worried .
he did n't know what death row meant .
i 'd been there twice , and i was terribly afraid that i was going to die .
and he would always laugh , and say , " come on , man , we 'll make it out . "
then i 'd say , " how do you know ? "
and he said , " oh , i heard it on the grapevine . "
they killed him .
they handcuffed him to a chair , and they tacked his penis to a table with a six-inch nail , then left him there to bleed to death .
that 's how i ended up in solitary , because i let my feelings be known .
all around us , everywhere , there are people like this .
the igbo used to say that they built their own gods .
they would come together as a community , and they would express a wish .
and their wish would then be brought to a priest , who would find a ritual object , and the appropriate sacrifices would be made , and the shrine would be built for the god .
but if the god became unruly and began to ask for human sacrifice , the igbos would destroy the god .
they would knock down the shrine , and they would stop saying the god 's name .
this is how they came to reclaim their humanity .
every day , all of us here , we 're building gods that have gone rampant , and it 's time we started knocking them down and forgetting their names .
it does n't require a tremendous thing .
all it requires is to recognize among us , every day - the few of us that can see - are surrounded by people like the ones i 've told you .
there are some of you in this room , amazing people , who offer all of us the mirror to our own humanity .
i want to end with a poem by an american poet called lucille clifton .
the poem is called " libation , " and it 's for my friend vusi who is in the audience here somewhere .
" libation , north carolina , 1999 .
i offer to this ground , this gin .
i imagine an old man crying here , out of the sight of the overseer .
he pushes his tongue through a hole where his tooth would be , if he were whole .
it aches in that space where his tooth would be , where his land would be , his house , his wife , his son , his beautiful daughter .
he wipes sorrow from his face , and puts his thirsty finger to his thirsty tongue , and tastes the salt .
i call a name that could be his .
this is for you , old man .
this gin , this salty earth . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think i 'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is .
autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe - the child remains non-verbal - all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers .
and i actually feel at home here , because there 's a lot of autism genetics here .
you would n't have any ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a continuum of traits .
when does a nerd turn into asperger , which is just mild autism ?
i mean , einstein and mozart and tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today .
and one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things , you know , that bill gates talked about this morning .
ok . now , if you want to understand autism , animals .
and i want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking .
you have to get away from verbal language .
i think in pictures , i do n't think in language .
now , the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details .
ok , this is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters , or pick out the little letters , and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly .
and the thing is , the normal brain ignores the details .
well , if you 're building a bridge , details are pretty important because it will fall down if you ignore the details .
and one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract .
people are getting away from doing hands-on stuff .
i 'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes , because art , and classes like that , those are the classes where i excelled .
in my work with cattle , i noticed a lot of little things that most people do n't notice would make the cattle balk . like , for example , this flag waving , right in front of the veterinary facility .
this feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility ; all they needed to do was move the flag .
rapid movement , contrast .
in the early ' 70s when i started , i got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing .
people thought that was crazy . a coat on a fence would make them balk , shadows would make them balk , a hose on the floor ...
people were n't noticing these things - a chain hanging down - and that 's shown very , very nicely in the movie .
in fact , i loved the movie , how they duplicated all my projects . that 's the geek side .
my drawings got to star in the movie too .
and actually it 's called " temple grandin , " not " thinking in pictures . "
so , what is thinking in pictures ? it 's literally movies in your head .
my mind works like google for images .
now , when i was a young kid i did n't know my thinking was different .
i thought everybody thought in pictures .
and then when i did my book , " thinking in pictures , " i start interviewing people about how they think .
and i was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different . like if i say , " think about a church steeple " most people get this sort of generalized generic one .
now , maybe that 's not true in this room , but it 's going to be true in a lot of different places .
i see only specific pictures .
they flash up into my memory , just like google for pictures .
and in the movie , they 've got a great scene in there where the word " shoe " is said , and a whole bunch of ' 50s and ' 60s shoes pop into my imagination .
ok , there is my childhood church , that 's specific . there 's some more , fort collins .
ok , how about famous ones ?
and they just kind of come up , kind of like this .
just really quickly , like google for pictures .
and they come up one at a time , and then i think , " ok , well maybe we can have it snow , or we can have a thunderstorm , " and i can hold it there and turn them into videos .
now , visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities .
and i 've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant .
i 'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides .
i 've got that stuff up on youtube if you want to look at it .
but , one of the things that i was able to do in my design work is i could actually test run a piece of equipment in my mind , just like a virtual reality computer system .
and this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie .
that was like just so super cool .
and there were a lot of kind of asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but one of the things that really worries me is : where 's the younger version of those kids going today ?
they 're not ending up in silicon valley , where they belong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , one of the things i learned very early on because i was n't that social , is i had to sell my work , and not myself .
and the way i sold livestock jobs is i showed off my drawings , i showed off pictures of things .
another thing that helped me as a little kid is , boy , in the ' 50s , you were taught manners .
you were taught you ca n't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around .
now , when kids get to be in third or fourth grade , you might see that this kid 's going to be a visual thinker , drawing in perspective . now , i want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker .
now , i had this brain scan done several years ago , and i used to joke around about having a gigantic internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex .
this is tensor imaging .
and my great big internet trunk line is twice as big as the control 's .
the red lines there are me , and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control .
and there i got a gigantic one , and the control over there , the blue one , has got a really small one .
and some of the research now is showing is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex .
now , the thing is , the visual thinker 's just one kind of mind .
you see , the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind - good at one thing , bad at something else .
and where i was bad was algebra . and i was never allowed to take geometry or trig .
gigantic mistake : i 'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra , go right to geometry and trig .
now , another kind of mind is the pattern thinker .
more abstract . these are your engineers , your computer programmers .
now , this is pattern thinking . that praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper - no scotch tape , no cuts .
and there in the background is the pattern for folding it .
here are the types of thinking : photo-realistic visual thinkers , like me ; pattern thinkers , music and math minds .
some of these oftentimes have problems with reading .
you also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic .
you 'll see these different kinds of minds .
and then there 's a verbal mind , they know every fact about everything .
now , another thing is the sensory issues .
i was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face .
and i came in half an hour beforehand so i could have it put on and kind of get used to it , and they got it bent so it 's not hitting my chin .
but sensory is an issue . some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights ; others have problems with sound sensitivity .
you know , it 's going to be variable .
now , visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind .
because think about it : an animal is a sensory-based thinker , not verbal - thinks in pictures , thinks in sounds , thinks in smells .
think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant .
he knows who 's been there , when they were there .
are they friend or foe ? is there anybody he can go mate with ?
there 's a ton of information on that fire hydrant .
it 's all very detailed information , and , looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals .
now , the animal mind , and also my mind , puts sensory-based information into categories .
man on a horse and a man on the ground - that is viewed as two totally different things .
you could have a horse that 's been abused by a rider .
they 'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer , but you ca n't ride him .
you have another horse , where maybe the horseshoer beat him up and he 'll be terrible for anything on the ground , with the veterinarian , but a person can ride him .
cattle are the same way .
man on a horse , a man on foot - they 're two different things .
you see , it 's a different picture .
see , i want you to think about just how specific this is .
now , this ability to put information into categories , i find a lot of people are not very good at this .
when i 'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant , they do n't seem to be able to figure out , " do i have a training people issue ?
or do i have something wrong with the equipment ? "
in other words , categorize equipment problem from a people problem .
i find a lot of people have difficulty doing that .
now , let 's say i figure out it 's an equipment problem .
is it a minor problem , with something simple i can fix ?
or is the whole design of the system wrong ?
people have a hard time figuring that out .
let 's just look at something like , you know , solving problems with making airlines safer .
yeah , i 'm a million-mile flier .
i do lots and lots of flying , and if i was at the faa , what would i be doing a lot of direct observation of ?
it would be their airplane tails .
you know , five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years , the tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way .
it 's tails , pure and simple .
and when the pilots walk around the plane , guess what ? they ca n't see that stuff inside the tail .
you know , now as i think about that , i 'm pulling up all of that specific information .
it 's specific . see , my thinking 's bottom-up .
i take all the little pieces and i put the pieces together like a puzzle .
now , here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats .
he 'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat .
white cowboy hats , that was absolutely fine .
now , the thing is , the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together .
we 've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds .
and one of the things that is driving me really crazy , as i travel around and i do autism meetings , is i 'm seeing a lot of smart , geeky , nerdy kids , and they just are n't very social , and nobody 's working on developing their interest in something like science .
and this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher .
my science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie .
i was a goofball student . when i was in high school i just did n't care at all about studying , until i had mr. carlock 's science class .
he was now dr. carlock in the movie .
and he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room .
this brings up the whole thing of you 've got to show kids interesting stuff .
you know , one of the things that i think maybe ted ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on ted , and there 's all kinds of great stuff on the internet to get these kids turned on .
because i 'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids , and the teachers out in the midwest , and the other parts of the country , when you get away from these tech areas , they do n't know what to do with these kids .
and they 're not going down the right path .
the thing is , you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind , or your mind can be wired to be more social .
and what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here , in the really brilliant mind , and we lose a few social circuits here .
it 's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social .
and then you can get into the point where it 's so severe you 're going to have a person that 's going to be non-verbal .
in the normal human mind language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals .
this is the work of dr. bruce miller .
and he studied alzheimer 's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia .
and the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain , and then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars .
now , van gogh does n't know anything about physics , but i think it 's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence , which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head .
and the wolfram stuff - i was taking notes and i was writing down all the search words i could use , because i think that 's going to go on in my autism lectures .
we 've got to show these kids interesting stuff .
and they 've taken out the autoshop class and the drafting class and the art class .
i mean art was my best subject in school .
we 've got to think about all these different kinds of minds , and we 've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds , because we absolutely are going to need these kind of people in the future .
and let 's talk about jobs .
ok , my science teacher got me studying because i was a goofball that did n't want to study .
but you know what ? i was getting work experience .
i 'm seeing too many of these smart kids who have n't learned basic things , like how to be on time .
i was taught that when i was eight years old .
you know , how to have table manners at granny 's sunday party .
i was taught that when i was very , very young .
and when i was 13 , i had a job at a dressmaker 's shop sewing clothes .
i did internships in college , i was building things , and i also had to learn how to do assignments .
you know , all i wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when i was little .
my mother said , " well let 's do a picture of something else . "
they 've got to learn how to do something else .
let 's say the kid is fixated on legos .
let 's get him working on building different things .
the thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated .
like if a kid loves racecars , let 's use racecars for math .
let 's figure out how long it takes a racecar to go a certain distance .
in other words , use that fixation in order to motivate that kid , that 's one of the things we need to do .
i really get fed up when they , you know , the teachers , especially when you get away from this part of the country , they do n't know what to do with these smart kids .
it just drives me crazy .
what can visual thinkers do when they grow up ?
they can do graphic design , all kinds of stuff with computers , photography , industrial design .
the pattern thinkers , they 're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians , your software engineers , your computer programmers , all of those kinds of jobs .
and then you 've got the word minds . they make great journalists , and they also make really , really good stage actors .
because the thing about being autistic is , i had to learn social skills like being in a play .
it 's just kind of - you just have to learn it .
and we need to be working with these students .
and this brings up mentors .
you know , my science teacher was not an accredited teacher .
he was a nasa space scientist .
now , some states now are getting it to where if you have a degree in biology , or a degree in chemistry , you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry .
we need to be doing that .
because what i 'm observing is the good teachers , for a lot of these kids , are out in the community colleges , but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools .
another thing that can be very , very , very successful is there is a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry , and they can teach your kid .
and it does n't matter if what they teach them is old , because what you 're doing is you 're lighting the spark .
you 're getting that kid turned on .
and you get him turned on , then he 'll learn all the new stuff .
mentors are just essential .
i can not emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me .
and we 've got to mentor them , hire them .
and if you bring them in for internships in your companies , the thing about the autism , asperger-y kind of mind , you 've got to give them a specific task . do n't just say , " design new software . "
you 've got to tell them something a lot more specific : " well , we 're designing a software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing .
and it can only use so much memory . "
that 's the kind of specificity you need .
well , that 's the end of my talk .
and i just want to thank everybody for coming .
it was great to be here .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , you 've got a question for me ? ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you so much for that .
you know , you once wrote , i like this quote , " if by some magic , autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth , then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave . "
temple grandin : because who do you think made the first stone spears ?
the asperger guy . and if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics there would be no more silicon valley , and the energy crisis would not be solved .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : so , i want to ask you a couple other questions , and if any of these feel inappropriate , it 's okay just to say , " next question . "
but if there is someone here who has an autistic child , or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them , what advice would you give them ?
tg : well , first of all , you 've got to look at age .
if you have a two , three or four year old you know , no speech , no social interaction , i ca n't emphasize enough : do n't wait , you need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching .
you know , the thing is , autism comes in different degrees .
there 's going to be about half the people on the spectrum that are not going to learn to talk , and they 're not going to be working silicon valley , that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do .
but then you get the smart , geeky kids that have a touch of autism , and that 's where you 've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things .
i got social interaction through shared interest .
i rode horses with other kids , i made model rockets with other kids , did electronics lab with other kids , and in the ' 60s , it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show .
that was like , we considered that super cool .
ca : is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them , as some might , as most , wish ?
tg : well let me tell you , that child will be loyal , and if your house is burning down , they 're going to get you out of it .
ca : wow . so , most people , if you ask them what are they most passionate about , they 'd say things like , " my kids " or " my lover . "
what are you most passionate about ?
tg : i 'm passionate about that the things i do are going to make the world a better place .
when i have a mother of an autistic child say , " my kid went to college because of your book , or one of your lectures , " that makes me happy .
you know , the slaughter plants , i 've worked with them in the ' 80s ; they were absolutely awful .
i developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes : how many cattle fell down ?
how many cattle got poked with the prodder ?
how many cattle are mooing their heads off ?
and it 's very , very simple .
you directly observe a few simple things .
it 's worked really well . i get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world . we need a lot more of that , and a lot less abstract stuff .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : when we were talking on the phone , one of the things you said that really astonished me was you said one thing you were passionate about was server farms . tell me about that .
tg : well the reason why i got really excited when i read about that , it contains knowledge .
it 's libraries .
and to me , knowledge is something that is extremely valuable . so , maybe , over 10 years ago now our library got flooded .
and this is before the internet got really big .
and i was really upset about all the books being wrecked , because it was knowledge being destroyed .
and server farms , or data centers are great libraries of knowledge .
ca : temple , can i just say it 's an absolute delight to have you at ted .
tg : well thank you so much . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it feels like we 're all suffering from information overload or data glut .
and the good news is there might be an easy solution to that , and that 's using our eyes more .
so , visualizing information , so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense , or it tells a story , or allows us to focus only on the information that 's important .
failing that , visualized information can just look really cool .
so , let 's see .
this is the $ billion dollar o-gram , and this image arose out of frustration i had with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press .
that is , they 're meaningless without context : 500 billion for this pipeline , 20 billion for this war .
it does n't make any sense , so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively .
so i scraped a load of reported figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts .
and the colors here represent the motivation behind the money .
so purple is " fighting , " and red is " giving money away , " and green is " profiteering . "
and what you can see straight away is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers .
you can literally see them .
but more importantly , you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports .
let me point out some that i really like .
this is opec 's revenue , this green box here - 780 billion a year .
and this little pixel in the corner - three billion - that 's their climate change fund .
americans , incredibly generous people - over 300 billion a year , donated to charity every year , compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top 17 industrialized nations at 120 billion .
then of course , the iraq war , predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003 .
and it mushroomed slightly . afghanistan and iraq mushroomed now to 3,000 billion .
so now it 's great because now we have this texture , and we can add numbers to it as well .
so we could say , well , a new figure comes out ... let 's see african debt .
how much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that africa owes to the west ?
let 's take a look .
so there it is : 227 billion is what africa owes .
and the recent financial crisis , how much of this diagram might that figure take up ?
what has that cost the world ? let 's take a look at that .
dooosh - which i think is the appropriate sound effect for that much money : 11,900 billion .
so , by visualizing this information , we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes , a kind of map really , a sort of information map .
and when you 're lost in information , an information map is kind of useful .
so i want to show you another landscape now .
we need to imagine what a landscape of the world 's fears might look like .
let 's take a look .
this is mountains out of molehills , a timeline of global media panic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'll label this for you in a second .
but the height here , i want to point out , is the intensity of certain fears as reported in the media .
let me point them out .
so this , swine flu - pink .
bird flu .
sars - brownish here . remember that one ?
the millennium bug , terrible disaster .
these little green peaks are asteroid collisions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in summer , here , killer wasps .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so these are what our fears look like over time in our media .
but what i love - and i 'm a journalist - and what i love is finding hidden patterns ; i love being a data detective .
and there 's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only see when you visualize it .
let me highlight it for you .
see this line , this is a landscape for violent video games .
as you can see , there 's a kind of odd , regular pattern in the data , twin peaks every year .
if we look closer , we see those peaks occur at the same month every year .
why ?
well , november , christmas video games come out , and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content .
but april is n't a particularly massive month for video games .
why april ?
well , in april 1999 was the columbine shooting , and since then , that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year .
you have retrospectives , anniversaries , court cases , even copy-cat shootings , all pushing that fear into the agenda .
and there 's another pattern here as well . can you spot it ?
see that gap there ? there 's a gap , and it affects all the other stories .
why is there a gap there ?
you see where it starts ? september 2001 , when we had something very real to be scared about .
so , i 've been working as a data journalist for about a year , and i keep hearing a phrase all the time , which is this : " data is the new oil . "
data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights , and it 's all around us , and it can be mined very easily .
it 's not a particularly great metaphor in these times , especially if you live around the gulf of mexico , but i would , perhaps , adapt this metaphor slightly , and i would say that data is the new soil .
because for me , it feels like a fertile , creative medium .
over the years , online , we 've laid down a huge amount of information and data , and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity , and it 's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments .
and , all right , i 'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit .
but it 's a really fertile medium , and it feels like visualizations , infographics , data visualizations , they feel like flowers blooming from this medium .
but if you look at it directly , it 's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts .
but if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way , interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed .
let me show you this .
can you guess what this data set is ?
what rises twice a year , once in easter and then two weeks before christmas , has a mini peak every monday , and then flattens out over the summer ?
i 'll take answers .
-lrb- audience : chocolate . -rrb- david mccandless : chocolate .
you might want to get some chocolate in .
any other guesses ?
-lrb- audience : shopping . -rrb- dm : shopping .
yeah , retail therapy might help .
-lrb- audience : sick leave . -rrb- dm : sick leave . yeah , you 'll definitely want to take some time off .
shall we see ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , the information guru lee byron and myself , we scraped 10,000 status facebook updates for the phrase " break-up " and " broken-up " and this is the pattern we found - people clearing out for spring break , -lrb- laughter -rrb- coming out of very bad weekends on a monday , being single over the summer , and then the lowest day of the year , of course : christmas day .
who would do that ?
so there 's a titanic amount of data out there now , unprecedented .
but if you ask the right kind of question , or you work it in the right kind of way , interesting things can emerge .
so information is beautiful . data is beautiful .
i wonder if i could make my life beautiful .
and here 's my visual c.v.
i 'm not quite sure i 've succeeded .
pretty blocky , the colors are n't that great .
but i wanted to convey something to you .
i started as a programmer , and then i worked as a writer for many years , about 20 years , in print , online and then in advertising , and only recently have i started designing .
and i 've never been to design school .
i 've never studied art or anything .
i just kind of learned through doing .
and when i started designing , i discovered an odd thing about myself .
i already knew how to design , but it was n't like i was amazingly brilliant at it , but more like i was sensitive to the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography .
it 's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me .
and i do n't feel like i 'm unique .
i feel that everyday , all of us now are being blasted by information design .
it 's being poured into our eyes through the web , and we 're all visualizers now ; we 're all demanding a visual aspect to our information .
there 's something almost quite magical about visual information .
it 's effortless , it literally pours in .
and if you 're navigating a dense information jungle , coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization , it 's a relief , it 's like coming across a clearing in the jungle .
i was curious about this , so it led me to the work of a danish physicist called tor norretranders , and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms .
so here we go . this is your senses , pouring into your senses every second .
your sense of sight is the fastest .
it has the same bandwidth as a computer network .
then you have touch , which is about the speed of a usb key .
and then you have hearing and smell , which has the throughput of a hard disk .
and then you have poor old taste , which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator .
and that little square in the corner , a naught .7 percent , that 's the amount we 're actually aware of .
so a lot of your vision - the bulk of it is visual , and it 's pouring in .
it 's unconscious .
the eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color , shape and pattern .
it loves them , and it calls them beautiful .
it 's the language of the eye .
if you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind , which is about words and numbers and concepts , you start speaking two languages simultaneously , each enhancing the other .
so , you have the eye , and then you drop in the concepts .
and that whole thing - it 's two languages both working at the same time .
so we can use this new kind of language , if you like , to alter our perspective or change our views .
let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer : who has the biggest military budget ?
it 's got to be america , right ?
massive . 609 billion in 2008 - 607 , rather .
so massive , in fact , that it can contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself .
gobble , gobble , gobble , gobble , gobble .
now , you can see africa 's total debt there and the u.k. budget deficit for reference .
so that might well chime with your view that america is a sort of warmongering military machine , out to overpower the world with its huge industrial-military complex .
but is it true that america has the biggest military budget ?
because america is an incredibly rich country .
in fact , it 's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations ' economies inside itself , it 's so vastly rich .
so its military budget is bound to be enormous .
so , to be fair and to alter our perspective , we have to bring in another data set , and that data set is gdp , or the country 's earnings .
who has the biggest budget as a proportion of gdp ?
let 's have a look .
that changes the picture considerably .
other countries pop into view that you , perhaps , were n't considering , and american drops into eighth .
now you can also do this with soldiers .
who has the most soldiers ? it 's got to be china .
of course , 2.1 million .
again , chiming with your view that china has a militarized regime ready to , you know , mobilize its enormous forces .
but of course , china has an enormous population .
so if we do the same , we see a radically different picture .
china drops to 124th .
it actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration .
so , absolute figures , like the military budget , in a connected world , do n't give you the whole picture .
they 're not as true as they could be .
we need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture , and then that can lead to us changing our perspective .
as hans rosling , the master , my master , said , " let the dataset change your mindset . "
and if it can do that , maybe it can also change your behavior .
take a look at this one .
i 'm a bit of a health nut .
i love taking supplements and being fit , but i can never understand what 's going on in terms of evidence .
there 's always conflicting evidence .
should i take vitamin c ? should i be taking wheatgrass ?
this is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements .
this kind of diagram is called a balloon race .
so the higher up the image , the more evidence there is for each supplement .
and the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to google hits .
so you can immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity , but you can also , if you grade the evidence , do a " worth it " line .
so supplements above this line are worth investigating , but only for the conditions listed below , and then the supplements below the line are perhaps not worth investigating .
now this image constitutes a huge amount of work .
we scraped like 1,000 studies from pubmed , the biomedical database , and we compiled them and graded them all .
and it was incredibly frustrating for me because i had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book , and i spent a month doing this , and i only filled two pages .
but what it points to is that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression .
it 's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space .
and once you 've curated that data , and once you 've cleaned that data , and once it 's there , you can do cool stuff like this .
so i converted this into an interactive app , so i can now generate this application online - this is the visualization online - and i can say , " yeah , brilliant . "
so it spawns itself .
and then i can say , " well , just show me the stuff that affects heart health . "
so let 's filter that out .
so heart is filtered out , so i can see if i 'm curious about that .
i think , " no , no . i do n't want to take any synthetics , i just want to see plants and - just show me herbs and plants . i 've got all the natural ingredients . "
now this app is spawning itself from the data .
the data is all stored in a google doc , and it 's literally generating itself from that data .
so the data is now alive ; this is a living image , and i can update it in a second .
new evidence comes out . i just change a row on a spreadsheet .
doosh ! again , the image recreates itself .
so it 's cool .
it 's kind of living .
but it can go beyond data , and it can go beyond numbers .
i like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts .
this is a visualization of the political spectrum , an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture , into families , into individuals , into their beliefs and back around again in a cycle .
what i love about this image is it 's made up of concepts , it explores our worldviews and it helps us - it helps me anyway - to see what others think , to see where they 're coming from .
and it feels just incredibly cool to do that .
what was most exciting for me designing this was that , when i was designing this image , i desperately wanted this side , the left side , to be better than the right side - being a journalist , a left-leaning person - but i could n't , because i would have created a lopsided , biased diagram .
so , in order to really create a full image , i had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side and at the same time , uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me , which was very , very annoying and uncomfortable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but not too uncomfortable , because there 's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective , versus being told or forced to listen to one .
you 're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them .
it 's even fun to engage with them because it 's visual .
so that 's what 's exciting to me , seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream - beautiful , lovely data .
so , just to wrap up , i wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions , and information design is about solving information problems .
it feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment , from the overload and the saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency , or even just interestingness .
i mean , i find information just too interesting .
it has a magnetic quality that draws me in .
so , visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems .
even when the information is terrible , the visual can be quite beautiful .
often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly , like this one , the recent icelandic volcano .
which was emitting the most co2 ?
was it the planes or the volcano , the grounded planes or the volcano ?
so we can have a look .
we look at the data and we see : yep , the volcano emitted 150,000 tons ; the grounded planes would have emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky .
so essentially , we had our first carbon-neutral volcano .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that is beautiful . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is revolution 2.0 .
no one was a hero . no one was a hero .
because everyone was a hero .
everyone has done something .
we all use wikipedia .
if you think of the concept of wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content , and at the end of the day you 've built the largest encyclopedia in the world .
from just an idea that sounded crazy , you have the largest encyclopedia in the world .
and in the egyptian revolution , the revolution 2.0 , everyone has contributed something , small or big . they contributed something - to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions .
it was actually really inspiring to see all these egyptians completely changing .
if you look at the scene , egypt , for 30 years , had been in a downhill - going into a downhill .
everything was going bad .
everything was going wrong .
we only ranked high when it comes to poverty , corruption , lack of freedom of speech , lack of political activism .
those were the achievements of our great regime .
yet , nothing was happening .
and it 's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated .
in fact , people were extremely frustrated .
but the reason why everyone was silent is what i call the psychological barrier of fear .
everyone was scared .
not everyone . there were actually a few brave egyptians that i have to thank for being so brave - going into protests as a couple of hundred , getting beaten up and arrested .
but in fact , the majority were scared .
everyone did not want really to get in trouble .
a dictator can not live without the force .
they want to make people live in fear .
and that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years , and here comes the internet , technology , blackberry , sms .
it 's helping all of us to connect .
platforms like youtube , twitter , facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that , " wow , i 'm not alone .
there are a lot of people who are frustrated . "
there are lots of people who are frustrated .
there are lots of people who actually share the same dream .
there are lots of people who care about their freedom .
they probably have the best life in the world .
they are living in happiness . they are living in their villas .
they are happy . they do n't have problems .
but they are still feeling the pain of the egyptian .
a lot of us , we 're not really happy when we see a video of an egyptian man who 's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country .
the internet has played a great role , helping these people to speak up their minds , to collaborate together , to start thinking together .
it was an educational campaign .
khaled saeed was killed in june 2010 .
i still remember the photo .
i still remember every single detail of that photo .
the photo was horrible .
he was tortured , brutally tortured to death .
but then what was the answer of the regime ?
" he choked on a pile of hash " - that was their answer : " he 's a criminal .
he 's someone who escaped from all these bad things . "
but people did not relate to this .
people did not believe this .
because of the internet , the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth .
and everyone started to think that " this guy could be my brother . "
he was a middle-class guy .
his photo was remembered by all of us .
a page was created .
an anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page , and there was no plan .
" what are we going to do ? " " i do n't know . "
in a few days , tens of thousands of people there - angry egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs , " enough .
get those who killed this guy .
to just bring them to justice . "
but of course , they do n't listen .
it was an amazing story - how everyone started feeling the ownership .
everyone was an owner in this page .
people started contributing ideas .
in fact , one of the most ridiculous ideas was , " hey , let 's have a silent stand .
let 's get people to go in the street , face the sea , their back to the street , dressed in black , standing up silently for one hour , doing nothing and then just leaving , going back home . "
for some people , that was like , " wow , silent stand .
and next time it 's going to be vibration . "
people were making fun of the idea .
but actually when people went to the street - the first time it was thousands of people in alexandria - it felt like - it was amazing . it was great because it connected people from the virtual world , bringing them to the real world , sharing the same dream , the same frustration , the same anger , the same desire for freedom .
and they were doing this thing .
but did the regime learn anything ? not really .
they were actually attacking them .
they were actually abusing them , despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were - they were not even protesting .
and things had developed until the tunisian revolution .
this whole page was , again , managed by the people .
in fact , the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas , help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing .
people were taking shots and photos ; people were reporting violations of human rights in egypt ; people were suggesting ideas , they were actually voting on ideas , and then they were executing the ideas ; people were creating videos .
everything was done by the people to the people , and that 's the power of the internet .
there was no leader .
the leader was everyone on that page .
the tunisian experiment , as amir was saying , inspired all of us , showed us that there is a way .
yes we can . we can do it .
we have the same problems ; we can just go in the streets .
and when i saw the street on the 25th , i went back and said , " egypt before the 25th is never going to be egypt after the 25th .
the revolution is happening .
this is not the end , this is the beginning of the end . "
i was detained on the 27th night .
thank god i announced the locations and everything .
but they detained me .
and i 'm not going to talk about my experience , because this is not about me .
i was detained for 12 days , blindfolded , handcuffed .
and i did not really hear anything . i did not know anything .
i was not allowed to speak with anyone .
and i went out .
the next day i was in tahrir .
seriously , with the amount of change i had noticed in this square , i thought it was 12 years .
i never had in my mind to see this egyptian , the amazing egyptian .
the fear is no longer fear .
it 's actually strength - it 's power .
people were so empowered .
it was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights .
completely opposite .
extremism became tolerance .
who would -lsb- have -rsb- imagined before the 25th , if i tell you that hundreds of thousands of christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of muslims are going to protect them , and then hundreds of thousands of muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of christians are going to protect them - this is amazing .
all the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda , or mainstream media , are proven wrong .
this whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the egyptian man , the egyptian woman , how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream .
when i saw that , i went back and i wrote on facebook .
and that was a personal belief , regardless of what 's going on , regardless of the details .
i said that , " we are going to win .
we are going to win because we do n't understand politics .
we 're going to win because we do n't play their dirty games .
we 're going to win because we do n't have an agenda .
we 're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts .
we 're going to win because we have dreams .
we 're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams . "
and that 's actually what happened . we won .
and that 's not because of anything , but because we believed in our dream .
the winning here is not the whole details of what 's going to happen in the political scene .
the winning is the winning of the dignity of every single egyptian .
actually , i had this taxi driver telling me , " listen , i am breathing freedom .
i feel that i have dignity that i have lost for so many years . "
for me that 's winning , regardless of all the details .
my last word to you is a statement i believe in , which egyptians have proven to be true , that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power .
thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this session is on natural wonders , and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness .
i want to try to combine them all , because to me , healing is really the ultimate natural wonder .
your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself , and much more quickly than people had once realized , if you simply stop doing what 's causing the problem .
and so , really , so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet .
i love doing this work , because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they did n't have before , and it allows us to talk about things that - not just diet , but that happiness is not - we 're talking about the pursuit of happiness , but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions , what aldous huxley called the " perennial wisdom , " when you get past the named and forms and rituals that really divide people , it 's really about - our nature is to be happy ; our nature is to be peaceful , our nature is to be healthy .
and so it 's not something - happiness is not something you get , health is generally not something that you get .
but rather all of these different practices - you know , the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns did n't develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure , unclog your arteries , even though it can do all those things .
they 're powerful tools for transformation , for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy , to be peaceful , to be joyful and to realize that it 's not something that you pursue and get , but rather it 's something that you have already until you disturb it .
i studied yoga for many years with a teacher named swami satchidananda and people would say , " what are you , a hindu ? " he 'd say , " no , i 'm an undo . "
and it 's really about identifying what 's causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness , and then to allow that natural healing to occur .
to me , that 's the real natural wonder .
so , within that larger context , we can talk about diet , stress management - which are really these spiritual practices - moderate exercise , smoking cessation , support groups and community - which i 'll talk more about - and some vitamins and supplements .
and it 's not a diet .
you know , when most people think about the diet i recommend , they think it 's a really strict diet .
for reversing disease , that 's what it takes , but if you 're just trying to be healthy , you have a spectrum of choices .
and to the degree that you can move in a healthy direction , you 're going to live longer , you 're going to feel better , you 're going to lose weight , and so on .
and in our studies , what we 've been able to do is to use very expensive , high-tech , state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost - and in many ways , ancient - interventions , can be .
we first began by looking at heart disease , and when i began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago , it was thought that once you have heart disease it can only get worse .
and what we found was that , instead of getting worse and worse , in many cases it could get better and better , and much more quickly than people had once realized .
this is a representative patient who at the time was 73 - totally needed to have a bypass , decided to do this instead .
we used quantitative arteriography , showing the narrowing .
this is one of the arteries that feed the heart , one of the main arteries , and you can see the narrowing here .
a year later , it 's not as clogged ; normally , it goes the other direction .
these minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent improvement in blood flow , and using cardiac positron emission tomography , or " pet , " scans , blue and black is no blood flow , orange and white is maximal .
huge differences can occur without drugs , without surgery .
clinically , he literally could n't walk across the street without getting severe chest pain ; within a month , like most people , was pain-free , and within a year , climbing more than 100 floors a day on a stairmaster .
this is not unusual , and it 's part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes , because it makes such a big difference in their quality of life .
overall , if you looked at all the arteries in all the patients , they got worse and worse , from one year to five years , in the comparison group .
this is the natural history of heart disease , but it 's really not natural because we found it could get better and better , and much more quickly than people had once thought .
we also found that the more people change , the better they got .
it was n't a function of how old or how sick they were - it was mainly how much they changed , and the oldest patients improved as much as the young ones .
i got this as a christmas card a few years ago from two of the patients in one of our programs .
the younger brother is 86 , the older one 's 95 ; they wanted to show me how much more flexible they were .
and the following year they sent me this one , which i thought was kind of funny .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you just never know .
and what we found was that 99 percent of the patients start to reverse the progression of their heart disease .
now i thought , you know , if we just did good science , that would change medical practice . but , that was a little naive .
it 's important , but not enough .
because we doctors do what we get paid to do , and we get trained to do what we get paid to do , so if we change insurance , then we change medical practice and medical education .
insurance will cover the bypass , it 'll cover the angioplasty ; it wo n't , until recently , cover diet and lifestyle .
so , we began through our nonprofit institute 's training hospitals around the country , and we found that most people could avoid surgery , and not only was it medically effective , it was also cost effective .
and the insurance companies found that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars per patient , and medicare is now in the middle of doing a demonstration project where they 're paying for 1,800 people to go through the program on the sites that we train .
the fortuneteller says , " i give smokers a discount because there 's not as much to tell . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i like this slide , because it 's a chance to talk about what really motivates people to change , and what does n't .
and what does n't work is fear of dying , and that 's what 's normally used .
everybody who smokes knows it 's not good for you , and still 30 percent of americans smoke - 80 percent in some parts of the world . why do people do it ?
well , because it helps them get through the day .
and i 'll talk more about this , but the real epidemic is n't just heart disease or obesity or smoking - it 's loneliness and depression .
as one woman said , " i 've got 20 friends in this package of cigarettes , and they 're always there for me and nobody else is .
you 're going to take away my 20 friends ? what are you going to give me ? "
or they eat when they get depressed , or they use alcohol to numb the pain , or they work too hard , or watch too much tv .
there are lots of ways we have of avoiding and numbing and bypassing pain , but the point of all of this is to deal with the cause of the problem .
and the pain is not the problem : it 's the symptom .
and telling people they 're going to die is too scary to think about , or , they 're going to get emphysema or heart attack is too scary , and so they do n't want to think about it , so they do n't .
the most effective anti-smoking ad was this one .
you 'll notice the limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth , and " impotence " - the headline is , " impotent " - it 's not emphysema .
what was the biggest selling drug of all time when it was introduced a few years ago ?
viagra , right ? why ? because a lot of guys need it .
it 's not like you say , " hey joe , i 'm having erectile dysfunction , how about you ? "
and yet , look at the number of prescriptions that are being sold .
it 's not so much psychological , it 's vascular , and nicotine makes your arteries constrict .
so does cocaine , so does a high fat diet , so does emotional stress .
so the very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired , lethargic , depressed and impotent , and that 's not much fun .
but when you change those behaviors , your brain gets more blood , you think more clearly , you have more energy , your heart gets more blood in ways i 've shown you .
your sexual function improves .
and these things occur within hours . this is a study : a high fat meal , and within one or two hours blood-flow is measurably less - and you 've all experienced this at thanksgiving .
when you eat a big fatty meal , how do you feel ?
you feel kind of sleepy afterwards .
on a low-fat meal , the blood flow does n't go down - it even goes up .
many of you have kids , and you know that 's a big change in your lifestyle , and so people are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they 're worth it .
and the paradox is that when you make big changes , you get big benefits , and you feel so much better so quickly .
for many people , those are choices worth making - not to live longer , but to live better .
i want to talk a little bit about the obesity epidemic , because it really is a problem .
two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese , and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent in the last 10 years . it 's no joke : it 's real .
and just to show you this , this is from the cdc .
these are not election returns ; these are the percentage of people who are overweight .
and if you see from ' 85 to ' 86 to ' 87 , ' 88 , ' 89 , ' 90 , ' 91 - you get a new category , 15 to 20 percent ; ' 92 , ' 93 , ' 94 , ' 95 , ' 96 , ' 97 - you get a new category ; ' 98 , ' 99 , 2000 , and 2001 .
mississippi , more than 25 percent of people are overweight .
why is this ? well , this is one way to lose weight that works very well ...
but it does n't last , which is the problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there 's no mystery in how you lose weight ; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories .
now , one way to eat fewer calories is to eat less food , which is why you can lose weight on any diet if you eat less food , or if you restrict entire categories of foods .
but the problem is , you get hungry , so it 's hard to keep it off .
the other way is to change the type of food .
and fat has nine calories per gram , whereas protein and carbs only have four .
so , when you eat less fat , you eat fewer calories without having to eat less food .
so you can eat the same amount of food , but you 'll be getting fewer calories because the food is less dense in calories .
and it 's the volume of food that affects satiety , rather than the type of food .
you know , i do n't like talking about the atkins diet , but i get asked about it every day , and so i just thought i 'd spend a few minutes on that .
the myth that you hear about is , americans have been told to eat less fat , the percent of calories from fat is down , americans are fatter than ever , therefore fat does n't make you fat .
it 's a half-truth . actually , americans are eating more fat than ever , and even more carbs . and so the percentage is lower , the actual amount is higher , and so the goal is to reduce both .
dr. atkins and i debated each other many times before he died , and we agreed that americans eat too many simple carbs , the " bad carbs , " and these are things like - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sugar , white flour , white rice , alcohol . and you get a double whammy : you get all these calories that do n't fill you up because you 've removed the fiber , and they get absorbed quickly so your blood sugar zooms up .
your pancreas makes insulin to bring it back down , which is good .
but insulin accelerates the conversion of calories into fat .
so , the goal is not to go to pork rinds and bacon and sausages - these are not health foods - but to go from " bad carbs " to what are called " good carbs . "
and these are things like whole foods , or unrefined carbs : fruits , vegetables , whole wheat flour , brown rice , in their natural forms , are rich in fiber .
and the fiber fills you up before you get too many calories , and it slows the absorption so you do n't get that rapid rise in blood sugar .
so , and you get all the disease-protective substances .
it 's not just what you exclude from your diet , but also what you include that 's protective .
just as all carbs are not bad for you , all fats are not bad for you . there are good fats .
and these are predominantly what are called the omega-3 fatty acids .
you find these , for example , in fish oil .
and the bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids and processed food and saturated fats , which we find in meat .
if you do n't remember anything else from this talk , three grams a day of fish oil can reduce your risk of a heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent .
three grams a day . they come in one-gram capsules ; more than that just gives you extra fat you do n't need .
it also helps reduce the risk of the most common cancers like breast , prostate and colon cancer .
now , the problem with the atkins diet , everybody knows people who have lost weight on it , but you can lose weight on amphetamines , you know , and fen-phen .
i mean , there are lots of ways of losing weight that are n't good for you .
you want to lose weight in a way that enhances your health rather than the one that harms it .
and the problem is that it 's based on this half-truth , which is that americans eat too many simple carbs , so if you eat fewer simple carbs you 're going to lose weight .
you 'll lose even more weight if you go to whole foods and less fat , and you 'll enhance your health rather than harming it .
he says , " i 've got some good news .
while your cholesterol level has remained the same , the research findings have changed . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , what happens to your heart when you go on an atkins diet ?
the red is good at the beginning , and a year later - this is from a study done in a peer-reviewed journal called angiology - there 's more red after a year on a diet like i would recommend , there 's less red , less blood flow after a year on an atkins-type diet .
so , yes , you can lose weight , but your heart is n't happy .
now , one of the studies funded by the atkins center found that 70 percent of the people were constipated , 65 percent had bad breath , 54 percent had headaches - this is not a healthy way to eat .
and so , you might start to lose weight and start to attract people towards you , but when they get too close it 's going to be a problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and more seriously , there are case reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks on the atkins diet - of bone disease , kidney disease , and so on .
and that 's how your body excretes waste , is through your breath , your bowels and your perspiration .
so when you go on these kinds of diet , they begin to smell bad .
so , an optimal diet is low in fat , low in the bad carbs , high in the good carbs and enough of the good fats .
and then , again , it 's a spectrum : when you move in this direction , you 're going to lose weight , you 're going to feel better and you 're going to gain health .
now , there are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too , whether it 's the deforestation of the amazon , or making more protein available , to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day - not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have .
so , there are lots of reasons for eating this way that go beyond just your health .
now , we 're about to publish the first study looking at the effects of this program on prostate cancer , and , in collaboration with sloane-kettering and with ucsf .
we took 90 men who had biopsy-proven prostate cancer and who had elected , for reasons unrelated to the study , not to have surgery .
we could randomly divide them into two groups , and then we could have one group that is a non-intervention control group to compare to , which we ca n't do with , say , breast cancer , because everyone gets treated .
what we found was that , after a year , none of the experimental group patients who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment , whereas six of the control-group patients needed surgery or radiation .
when we looked at their psa levels - which is a marker for prostate cancer - they got worse in the control group , but they actually got better in the experimental group , and these differences were highly significant .
and then i wondered : was there any relationship between how much people changed their diet and lifestyle - whichever group they were in - and the changes in psa ?
and sure enough , we found a dose-response relationship , just like we found in the arterial blockages in our cardiac studies .
and in order for the psa to go down , they had to make pretty big changes .
i then wondered , well , maybe they 're just changing their psa , but it 's not really affecting the tumor growth .
so we took some of their blood serum and sent it down to ucla ; they added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture , and it inhibited the growth seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group - 70 versus 9 percent .
and finally , i said , i wonder if there 's any relationship between how much people change and how it inhibited their tumor growth , whichever group they happened to be in .
and this really got me excited because again , we found the same pattern : the more people change , the more it affected the growth of their tumors .
and finally , we did mri and mr spectroscopy scans on some of these patients , and the tumor activity is shown in red in this patient , and you can see clearly it 's better a year later , along with the psa going down .
so , if it 's true for prostate cancer , it 'll almost certainly be true for breast cancer as well .
and whether or not you have conventional treatment , in addition , if you make these changes , it may help reduce the risk of recurrence .
the last thing i want to talk about , apropos of the issue of the pursuit of happiness , is that study after study have shown that people who are lonely and depressed - and depression is the other real epidemic in our culture - are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely , in part because , as we talked about , they 're more likely to smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard and so on .
but also , through mechanisms that we do n't fully understand , people who are lonely and depressed are many times - three to five to ten times , in some studies - more likely to get sick and die prematurely .
and depression is treatable . we need to do something about that .
now , on the other hand , anything that promotes intimacy is healing .
it can be sexual intimacy - i happen to think that healing energy and erotic energy are just different forms of the same thing .
friendship , altruism , compassion , service - all the perennial truths that we talked about that are part of all religion and all cultures - once you stop trying to see the differences , these are the things in our own self-interest , because they free us from our suffering and from disease .
and it 's in a sense the most selfish thing that we can do .
just take a look at one study . this was done by david spiegel at stanford .
he took women with metastatic breast cancer , randomly divided them into two groups .
one group of people just met for an hour-and-a-half once a week in a support group .
it was a nurturing , loving environment , where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood , because they were going through it too .
they just met once a week for a year .
five years later , those women lived twice as long , and you can see that the people - and that was the only difference between the groups .
it was a randomized control study published in the lancet .
other studies have shown this as well .
so , these simple things that create intimacy are really healing , and even the word healing , it comes from the root " to make whole . "
the word yoga comes from the sanskrit , meaning " union , to yoke , to bring together . "
and the last slide i want to show you is from - i was - again , this swami that i studied with for so many years , and i did a combined oncology and cardiology grand rounds at the university of virginia medical school a couple of years ago .
and at the end of it , somebody said , " hey , swami , what 's the difference between wellness and illness ? "
and so he went up on the board and he wrote the word " illness , " and circled the first letter , and then wrote the word " wellness , " and circled the first two letters ...
to me , it 's just shorthand for what we 're talking about : that anything that creates a sense of connection and community and love is really healing .
and then we can enjoy our lives more fully without getting sick in the process .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the big residual is always value for money .
all the time we are trying to get value for money .
what we do n't look for is value for many , while we are generating value for money .
do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day , the so-called bottom of the pyramid ?
what are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many ?
we have described here in terms of the performance and the price .
if you have money , of course , you can get the value .
you can get a mercedes for a very high price , very high performance .
but if you do n't have money , what happens ?
well , you are to ride a bicycle , carrying your own weight and also some other weight , so that you can earn the bread for the day .
well , poor do not remain poor ; they become lower-middle-class .
and if they do so , then , of course , the conditions improve , and they start riding on scooters .
but the challenge is , again , they do n't get much value , because they ca n't afford anything more than the scooter .
the issue is , at that price , can you give them some extra value ?
a super value , in terms of their ability to ride in a car , to get that dignity , to get that safety , looks practically impossible , is n't it .
now , this is something that we see on indian streets all the time .
but many people see the same thing and think things differently , and one of them is here , ratan tata .
the great thing about our leaders is that , should they not only have passion in their belly , which practically all of them have , they 're also very innovative .
an innovator is one who does not know it can not be done .
they believe that things can be done .
but great leaders like ratan have compassion .
and what you said , lakshmi , is absolutely true : it 's not just ratan tata , it 's the house of tatas over time .
let me confirm what she said .
yes , i went barefoot until i was 12 .
i struggled to -lsb- unclear -rsb- day was a huge issue .
and when i finished my ssc , the eleventh standard , i stood eleventh among 125,000 students .
but i was about to leave the school , because my poor mother could n't afford schooling .
and it was -lsb- unclear -rsb- tata trust , which gave me six rupees per month , almost a dollar per month for six years .
that 's how i 'm standing before you .
so that is the house of tata .
-lrb- applause -rrb- innovation , compassion and passion .
they combine all that .
and it was that compassion which bothered them , because when he saw - in fact , he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car - he drives his own car by the way - and he saw in the rain , a family like the one that i showed to you getting drenched with an infant .
and then he said , " well , i must give them a car that they can afford , one lakh car , $ 2,000 car . "
of course , as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible , and that 's what was said by suzuki .
he said , oh , probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney .
and you can see the cartoon here .
well they did n't build that . they built a proper car . nano .
and mind you , i 'm six feet half an inch , ratan is taller than me , and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car .
and incredible car .
and of course , nothing succeeds like success ; the cynics then turned around , and one after the other they also started saying , " yes , we also want to make a car in the nano segment .
we 'll manufacture a car in the nano segment . "
how did this great story unfold , the making of nano ?
let me tell you a bit about it .
for example , how we started : ratan just began with a five-engineer team , young people in their mid-twenties .
and he said , " well , i wo n't define the vehicle for you , but i will define the cost for you .
it is one lakh , 100,000 rupees , and you are to make it within that . "
and he told them , " question the unquestionable .
stretch the envelope . "
and at a point in time , he got so engrossed in the whole challenge , that he himself became a member of the team .
can you believe it ?
i still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated .
until midnight , he 'd be thinking .
early morning he 'll be coming back with sort of solutions .
but who was the team leader ?
the team leader was girish wagh , a 34 year-old boy in -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and the nano team average age was just 27 years .
and they did innovation in design and beyond .
broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time .
for example , that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft .
adhesives were replacing the rivets .
there was a co-creation , a huge co-creation , with vendors and suppliers .
all ideas on board were welcome .
100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plant , and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed .
imagine that a fellow who sells cloth , for example , will be selling nano .
i mean , it was incredible innovation .
seeking solutions for non-auto sectors .
it was an open innovation , ideas from all over were welcome .
the mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used , by the way , as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers .
the fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers .
and the crux of the matter was , however , getting more from less .
all the time , you have been given an envelope .
you ca n't cross that envelope , which is 100,000 rupees , 2,000 dollars .
and therefore , each component had to have a dual functionality .
and the seat riser , for example , serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity .
half the number of parts are contained in nano in comparison to a typical passenger car .
the length is smaller by eight percent by the way .
but the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less , but 21 percent more inside space .
and what happened was that - more from less - you can see how much more for how much less .
when the model t was launched - and this is , by the way , all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices - model t was 19,700 by ford .
volkswagon was 11,333 .
and british motor was around 11,000 .
and nano was , bang , 2,000 dollars .
this is why you started actually a new paradigm shift , where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car , who were carrying their entire family in a scooter , started dreaming of being in a car .
and those dreams are getting fulfilled .
this is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home .
the driver 's name is naran .
he has bought his own nano .
and you can see , there is a physical space that has been created for him , parking that car , along with the owner 's car , but more importantly , they 've created a space in their mind that " yes , my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it . "
and that 's why i call it a transformational innovation .
it is not just technological , it is social innovation that we talk about .
and that is where , ladies and gentlemen , this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important .
i remember talking about this for the first time in australia , about one and a half years ago , when their academy honored me with a fellowship .
and unbelievably , in 40 years , i was the first indian to be honored .
and the title of my talk was therefore " indian innovation from gandhi to gandhian engineering . "
and i titled this more from less for more and more people as gandhian engineering .
and gandhian engineering , in my judgment , is the one which is going to take the world forward , is going to make a difference , not just for a few , but for everyone .
let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs .
here is an american citizen and his son having an artificial foot .
what is its price ? 20,000 dollars .
and of course , these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads .
unfortunately , that 's not the case in india .
you can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land , sometimes in a marshy land , and so on and so forth .
more importantly , they not only walk far to work , and not only do they cycle to work , but they cycle for work , as you can see here .
and they climb up for their work .
you have to design an artificial foot for such conditions .
a challenge , of course .
four billion people , their incomes are less then two dollars a day .
and if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe , you 're talking about 10,000 days of income .
you just do n't have it .
and therefore , you ought to look at alternatives .
and that is how jaipur foot was created in india .
it had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system , a quick molding and modular components , enabling custom-made , on-the-spot limb fitments .
you could feel it actually in an hour , by the way , whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day , as so on .
outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes , rather than using heated sheets .
and unique high-ankle design and human-like looks , -lsb- unclear -rsb- and functions .
and i like to show how it looks and how it works .
-lrb- music -rrb- see , he jumps . you can see what stress it must have .
-lrb- text : ... any person with a below the knee limb could do this .
... above the limb , yes , it would be difficult ...
" did it hurt ? "
" no ... not at all . "
... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds ... -rrb- one kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so that 's what it is all about .
and therefore time took notice of this 28-dollar foot , basically .
-lrb- applause -rrb- an incredible story .
let 's move on to something else .
i 've been talking about getting more from less for more .
let 's move to health .
we 've talked about mobility and the rest of it , let 's talk about health .
what 's happening in the area of health ?
you know , you have new diseases that require new drugs .
and if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now , what has happened ?
10 years ago , it used to cost about a quarter billion .
today it costs 1.5 billion dollars .
time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace , after all the human and animal testing , was 10 years , now it is 15 years .
are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money ?
no , i 'm sorry .
we used to have 40 , now they have come down to 30 .
so actually we are getting less from more for less and less people .
why less and less people ? because it is so expensive , so very few will be able to basically afford that .
let us just take an example .
psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin .
the cost of treatment , 20,000 dollars .
1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin , by the way , and 20 of them .
time for development - it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars .
let 's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets .
for example , we do n't want 20,000 dollars ; we do n't have it .
can we do it -lsb- for -rsb- 100 dollars ?
time for development , not 10 years .
we are in a hurry . five years .
cost of development - 300 million dollars .
sorry . i ca n't spend more than 10 million dollars .
looks absolutely audacious .
looks absolutely ridiculous .
you know something ? this has been achieved in india .
these targets have been achieved in india .
and how they have been achieved ...
sir francis bacon once said , " when you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before , it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before . "
and therefore , the standard process , where you develop a molecule , put it into mice , into men , are not yielding those results - the billions of dollars that have been spent .
the indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge , however , scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men , not molecule to mice to men , you know .
and that is how this difference has come .
and you can see this blending of traditional medicine , modern medicine , modern science .
i launched a big program -lsb- unclear -rsb- csir about nine years ago .
he is giving us not just for psoriasis , for cancer and a whole range of things , changing the whole paradigm .
and you can see this indian psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of -lsb- unclear -rsb- by doing things differently .
you can see before treatment and after treatment .
this is really getting more from less for more and more people , because these are all affordable treatments now .
let me just remind you of what mahatma gandhi had said .
he had said , " earth provides enough to satisfy every man 's need , but not every man 's greed . "
so the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people , not only the current generation , but the future generations .
and he also said , " i would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all . "
so he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people , not just a few people .
and therefore , ladies and gentlemen , this is the theme , getting more from less for more .
and mind you , it is not getting just a little more for just a little less .
it 's not about low cost .
it 's about ultra-low cost .
you can not say it 's a mere treatment 10,000 dollars , but because you are poor i 'll give it for 9,000 .
sorry , it does n't work . you have to give it for 100 dollars , 200 dollars .
is it possible ? it has been made possible , by the way , for certain other different reasons .
so you are not talking about low cost , you are talking about ultra-low cost .
you are not talking about affordability , you are talking about extreme affordability .
because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day .
you 're not talking exclusive innovation .
you 're talking about inclusive innovation .
and therefore , you 're not talking about incremental innovation , you 're talking about disruptive innovation .
the ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms .
and i would also add , it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people , the whole world working for it .
i was very touched when i saw a breakthrough the other day .
you know , incubators for infants , for example .
they 're not available in africa .
they 're not available in indian villages .
and infants die .
and incubator costs 2,000 dollars .
and there 's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created .
and by whom ?
by young students from standford university on an extreme affordability project that they had , basically .
their heart is in the right place , like ratan tata .
it 's not just innovation , compassion and passion - compassion in the heart and passion in the belly .
that 's the new world that we want to create .
and that is why the message is that of gandhian engineering .
ladies and gentlemen , i 'd like to end before time .
i was also afraid of those 18 minutes .
i 've still one and a half to go .
the message , the final message , is this : india gave a great gift to the world .
what was that ?
-lsb- in the -rsb- 20th century , we gave gandhi to the world .
the 21st century gift , which is very , very important for the whole world , whether it is global economic meltdown , whether it is climate change - any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more - not only the current generations , for the future generations .
and that can come only from gandhian engineering .
so ladies and gentlemen , i 'm very happy to announce , this gift of the 21st century to the world from india , gandhian engineering .
-lrb- applause -rrb- lakshmi pratury : thank you , dr. mashelkar . -lrb- r.a. mashelkar : thank you very much . -rrb- lp : a quick question for you .
now , when you were a young boy in this school , what were your thoughts , like what did you think you could become ?
what do you think that drove you ?
was there a vision you had ? what is it that drove you ?
ram : i 'll tell you a story that drove me , that transformed my life .
i remember , i went to a poor school , because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees , that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time .
it was -lsb- unclear -rsb- high school .
but it was a poor school with rich teachers , honestly .
and one of them was -lsb- unclear -rsb- who taught us physics .
one day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens .
the lens was here . the piece of paper was there . he moved it up and down .
and there was a bright spot up there .
and then he said , " this is the focal length . "
but then he held it for a little while , lakshmi .
and then the paper burned .
when the paper burned , for some reason he turned to me , and he said , " mashelkar , like this , if you do not diffuse your energies , if you focus your energies , you can achieve anything in the world . "
that gave me a great message : focus and you can achieve .
i said , " whoa , science is so wonderful , i have to become a scientist . "
but more importantly , focus and you can achieve .
and that message , very frankly , is valuable for society today .
what does that focal length do ?
it has parallel lines , which are sun rays .
and the property of parallel lines is that they never meet .
what does that convex lens do ?
it makes them meet .
this is convex lens leadership .
you know what today 's leadership is doing ? concave length .
they divide them farther .
so i learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that .
and when i was at national chemical laboratory -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
when i was at council of scientific industry research - 40 laboratories - when two laboratories were not talking to each other , i would -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and currently i 'm president of global research alliance , 60,000 scientists in nine counties , right from india to the u.s.
i 'm trying to build a global team , which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing .
that was the lesson . that was the inspirational moment .
lp : thank you very much . -lrb- ram : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a picture of maurice druon , the honorary perpetual secretary of l 'academie francaise , the french academy .
he is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform , befitting the role of the french academy as legislating the correct usage in french and perpetuating the language .
the french academy has two main tasks : it compiles a dictionary of official french .
they 're now working on their ninth edition , which they began in 1930 , and they 've reached the letter p.
they also legislate on correct usage , such as the proper term for what the french call " email , " which ought to be " courriel . "
the world wide web , the french are told , ought to be referred to as " la toile d 'araignee mondiale " - the global spider web - recommendations that the french gaily ignore .
now , this is one model of how language comes to be : namely , it 's legislated by an academy .
but anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit , that language , rather , emerges from human minds interacting from one another .
and this is visible in the unstoppable change in language - the fact that by the time the academy finishes their dictionary , it will already be well out of date .
we see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon , of the historical change in languages , in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages .
so language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature , so much as a window onto human nature .
in a book that i 'm currently working on , i hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature , including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction .
and i 'm going to say a few words about each one this morning .
let me start off with a technical problem in language that i 've worried about for quite some time - and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they 're used .
the problem is , which verbs go in which constructions ?
the verb is the chassis of the sentence .
it 's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted .
let me give you a quick reminder of something that you 've long forgotten .
an intransitive verb , such as " dine , " for example , ca n't take a direct object .
you have to say , " sam dined , " not , " sam dined the pizza . "
a transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there : " sam devoured the pizza . " you ca n't just say , " sam devoured . "
there are dozens or scores of verbs of this type , each of which shapes its sentence .
so , a problem in explaining how children learn language , a problem in teaching language to adults so that they do n't make grammatical errors , and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions .
for example , the dative construction in english .
you can say , " give a muffin to a mouse , " the prepositional dative .
or , " give a mouse a muffin , " the double-object dative .
" promise anything to her , " " promise her anything , " and so on .
hundreds of verbs can go both ways .
so a tempting generalization for a child , for an adult , for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction , " subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient " can also be expressed as " subject-verb-recipient-thing . "
a handy thing to have , because language is infinite , and you ca n't just parrot back the sentences that you 've heard .
you 've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences .
this would be an example of how to do that .
unfortunately , there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions .
you can say , " biff drove the car to chicago , " but not , " biff drove chicago the car . "
you can say , " sal gave jason a headache , " but it 's a bit odd to say , " sal gave a headache to jason . "
the solution is that these constructions , despite initial appearance , are not synonymous , that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition , you see that there 's a subtle difference in meaning between them .
so , " give the x to the y , " that construction corresponds to the thought " cause x to go to y. " whereas " give the y the x " corresponds to the thought " cause y to have x. "
now , many events can be subject to either construal , kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions , in which you can either pay attention to the particular object , in which case the space around it recedes from attention , or you can see the faces in the empty space , in which case the object recedes out of consciousness .
how are these construals reflected in language ?
well , in both cases , the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object , the noun after the verb .
so , when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere - where you 're doing something to the muffin - you say , " give the muffin to the mouse . "
when you construe it as " cause the mouse to have something , " you 're doing something to the mouse , and therefore you express it as , " give the mouse the muffin . "
so which verbs go in which construction - the problem with which i began - depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change .
to give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have .
to drive the car only causes something to go , because chicago 's not the kind of thing that can possess something .
only humans can possess things .
and to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache , but it 's not as if you 're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person , and implanting it in them .
you may just be loud or obnoxious , or some other way causing them to have the headache .
so , that 's an example of the kind of thing that i do in my day job .
so why should anyone care ?
well , there are a number of interesting conclusions , i think , from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of english verbs .
first , there 's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure , which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence , that governs our use of language .
you can think of this as the language of thought , or " mentalese . "
it seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts , which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs - not only in english , but in all other languages - fundamental concepts such as space , time , causation and human intention , such as , what is the means and what is the ends ?
these are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that immanuel kant argued are the basic framework for human thought , and it 's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these kantian categories .
does n't care about perceptual qualities , such as color , texture , weight and speed , which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions .
an additional twist is that all of the constructions in english are used not only literally , but in a quasi-metaphorical way .
for example , this construction , the dative , is used not only to transfer things , but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas , as when we say , " she told a story to me " or " told me a story , " " max taught spanish to the students " or " taught the students spanish . "
it 's exactly the same construction , but no muffins , no mice , nothing moving at all .
it evokes the container metaphor of communication , in which we conceive of ideas as objects , sentences as containers , and communication as a kind of sending .
as when we say we " gather " our ideas , to " put " them " into " words , and if our words are n't " empty " or " hollow , " we might get these ideas " across " to a listener , who can " unpack " our words to " extract " their " content . "
and indeed , this kind of verbiage is not the exception , but the rule .
it 's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor .
for example , you can use the verb " go " and the prepositions " to " and " from " in a literal , spatial sense .
" the messenger went from paris to istanbul . "
you can also say , " biff went from sick to well . "
he need n't go anywhere . he could have been in bed the whole time , but it 's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving .
or , " the meeting went from three to four , " in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line .
likewise , we use " force " to indicate not only physical force , as in , " rose forced the door to open , " but also interpersonal force , as in , " rose forced sadie to go , " not necessarily by manhandling her , but by issuing a threat .
or , " rose forced herself to go , " as if there were two entities inside rose 's head , engaged in a tug of a war .
second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways , such as " cause something to go to someone " and " causing someone to have something , " i think is a fundamental feature of human thought , and it 's the basis for much human argumentation , in which people do n't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed .
just to give you a few examples : " ending a pregnancy " versus " killing a fetus ; " " a ball of cells " versus " an unborn child ; " " invading iraq " versus " liberating iraq ; " " redistributing wealth " versus " confiscating earnings . "
and i think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts - such as objects , space , time , causation and intention - which are useful in a social , knowledge-intensive species , whose evolution you can well imagine , and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content - space , time and force - and apply them to new abstract domains , therefore allowing a species that evolved
to deal with rocks and tools and animals , to conceptualize mathematics , physics , law and other abstract domains .
well , i said i 'd talk about two windows on human nature - the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world , and now i 'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction , again , as reflected in language .
and i 'll start out with a puzzle , the puzzle of indirect speech acts .
now , i 'm sure most of you have seen the movie " fargo . "
and you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer , is asked to show his driver 's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet .
and he says , " i was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in fargo , " which everyone , including the audience , interprets as a veiled bribe .
this kind of indirect speech is rampant in language .
for example , in polite requests , if someone says , " if you could pass the guacamole , that would be awesome , " we know exactly what he means , even though that 's a rather bizarre concept being expressed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " would you like to come up and see my etchings ? "
i think most people understand the intent behind that .
and likewise , if someone says , " nice store you 've got there . it would be a real shame if something happened to it " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we understand that as a veiled threat , rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities .
so the puzzle is , why are bribes , polite requests , solicitations and threats so often veiled ?
no one 's fooled .
both parties know exactly what the speaker means , and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows , etc . , etc .
so what 's going on ?
i think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships , and human relationships fall into a number of types .
there 's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist alan fiske , in which relationships can be categorized , more or less , into communality , which works on the principle " what 's mine is thine , what 's thine is mine , " the kind of mindset that operates within a family , for example ; dominance , whose principle is " do n't mess with me ; " reciprocity , " you scratch my back , i 'll scratch yours ; " and sexuality , in the immortal words of cole porter , " let 's do it . "
now , relationship types can be negotiated .
even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied , they can be stretched and extended .
for example , communality applies most naturally within family or friends , but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it .
for example , in brotherhoods , fraternal organizations , sororities , locutions like " the family of man , " you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin .
now , mismatches - when one person assumes one relationship type , and another assumes a different one - can be awkward .
if you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss ' plate , for example , that would be an awkward situation .
or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal , that would be rather awkward as well .
in less blatant cases , there 's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on .
in the workplace , for example , there 's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss , or refer to him or her on a first-name basis .
if two friends have a reciprocal transaction , like selling a car , it 's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness .
in dating , the transition from friendship to sex can lead to , notoriously , various forms of awkwardness , and as can sex in the workplace , in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship " sexual harassment . "
well , what does this have to do with language ?
well , language , as a social interaction , has to satisfy two conditions .
you have to convey the actual content - here we get back to the container metaphor .
you want to express the bribe , the command , the promise , the solicitation and so on , but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person .
the solution , i think , is that we use language at two levels : the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener , whereas the implicated content - the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform - allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context , which possibly initiates a changed relationship .
the simplest example of this is in the polite request .
if you express your request as a conditional - " if you could open the window , that would be great " - even though the content is an imperative , the fact that you 're not using the imperative voice means that you 're not acting as if you 're in a relationship of dominance , where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person .
on the other hand , you want the damn guacamole .
by expressing it as an if-then statement , you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around .
and in a more subtle way , i think , this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability : the bribes , threats , propositions , solicitations and so on .
one way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language - where it could only be used literally .
and you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix .
put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer .
there 's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer .
if you do n't bribe the officer , then you will get a traffic ticket - or , as is the case of " fargo , " worse - whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest .
nothing ventured , nothing gained .
in that case , the consequences are rather severe .
on the other hand , if you extend the bribe , if the officer is dishonest , you get a huge payoff of going free .
if the officer is honest , you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery .
so this is a rather fraught situation .
on the other hand , with indirect language , if you issue a veiled bribe , then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe , in which case you get the payoff of going free .
the honest officer ca n't hold you to it as being a bribe , and therefore , you get the nuisance of the traffic ticket .
so you get the best of both worlds .
and a similar analysis , i think , can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation , and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset .
i think this affirms something that 's long been known by diplomats - namely , that the vagueness of language , far from being a bug or an imperfection , actually might be a feature of language , one that we use to our advantage in social interactions .
so to sum up : language is a collective human creation , reflecting human nature , how we conceptualize reality , how we relate to one another .
and then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language , i think we can get a window onto what makes us tick .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been fascinated for a lifetime by the beauty , form and function of giant bluefin tuna .
bluefin are warmblooded like us .
they 're the largest of the tunas , the second-largest fish in the sea - bony fish .
they actually are a fish that is endothermic - powers through the ocean with warm muscles like a mammal .
that 's one of our bluefin at the monterey bay aquarium .
you can see in its shape and its streamlined design it 's powered for ocean swimming .
it flies through the ocean on its pectoral fins , gets lift , powers its movements with a lunate tail .
it 's actually got a naked skin for most of its body , so it reduces friction with the water .
this is what one of nature 's finest machines .
now , bluefin were revered by man for all of human history .
for 4,000 years , we fished sustainably for this animal , and it 's evidenced in the art that we see from thousands of years ago .
bluefin are in cave paintings in france .
they 're on coins that date back 3,000 years .
this fish was revered by humankind .
it was fished sustainably till all of time , except for our generation .
bluefin are pursued wherever they go - there is a gold rush on earth , and this is a gold rush for bluefin .
there are traps that fish sustainably up until recently .
and yet , the type of fishing going on today , with pens , with enormous stakes , is really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet .
now bluefin , in general , goes to one place : japan .
some of you may be guilty of having contributed to the demise of bluefin .
they 're delectable muscle , rich in fat - absolutely taste delicious .
and that 's their problem ; we 're eating them to death .
now in the atlantic , the story is pretty simple .
bluefin have two populations : one large , one small .
the north american population is fished at about 2,000 ton .
the european population and north african - the eastern bluefin tuna - is fished at tremendous levels : 50,000 tons over the last decade almost every year .
the result is whether you 're looking at the west or the eastern bluefin population , there 's been tremendous decline on both sides , as much as 90 percent if you go back with your baseline to 1950 .
for that , bluefin have been given a status equivalent to tigers , to lions , to certain african elephants and to pandas .
these fish have been proposed for an endangered species listing in the past two months .
they were voted on and rejected just two weeks ago , despite outstanding science that shows from two committees this fish meets the criteria of cites i.
and if it 's tunas you do n't care about , perhaps you might be interested that international long lines and pursing chase down tunas and bycatch animals such as leatherbacks , sharks , marlin , albatross .
these animals and their demise occurs in the tuna fisheries .
the challenge we face is that we know very little about tuna , and everyone in the room knows what it looks like when an african lion takes down its prey .
i doubt anyone has seen a giant bluefin feed .
this tuna symbolizes what 's the problem for all of us in the room .
it 's the 21st century , but we really have only just begun to really study our oceans in a deep way .
technology has come of age that 's allowing us to see the earth from space and go deep into the seas remotely .
and we 've got to use these technologies immediately to get a better understanding of how our ocean realm works .
most of us from the ship - even i - look out at the ocean and see this homogeneous sea .
we do n't know where the structure is .
we ca n't tell where are the watering holes like we can on an african plain .
we ca n't see the corridors , and we ca n't see what it is that brings together a tuna , a leatherback and an albatross .
we 're only just beginning to understand how the physical oceanography and the biological oceanography come together to create a seasonal force that actually causes the upwelling that might make a hot spot a hope spot .
the reasons these challenges are great is that technically it 's difficult to go to sea .
it 's hard to study a bluefin on its turf , the entire pacific realm .
it 's really tough to get up close and personal with a mako shark and try to put a tag on it .
and then imagine being bruce mate 's team from osu , getting up close to a blue whale and fixing a tag on the blue whale that stays , an engineering challenge we 've yet to really overcome .
so the story of our team , a dedicated team , is fish and chips .
we basically are taking the same satellite phone parts , or the same parts that are in your computer , chips .
we 're putting them together in unusual ways , and this is taking us into the ocean realm like never before .
and for the first time , we 're able to watch the journey of a tuna beneath the ocean using light and photons to measure sunrise and sunset .
now , i 've been working with tunas for over 15 years .
i have the privilege of being a partner with the monterey bay aquarium .
we 've actually taken a sliver of the ocean , put it behind glass , and we together have put bluefin tuna and yellowfin tuna on display .
when the veil of bubbles lifts every morning , we can actually see a community from the pelagic ocean , one of the only places on earth you can see giant bluefin swim by .
we can see in their beauty of form and function , their ceaseless activity .
they 're flying through their space , ocean space .
and we can bring two million people a year into contact with this fish and show them its beauty .
behind the scenes is a working lab at stanford university partnered with the monterey bay aquarium .
here , for over 14 or 15 years , we 've actually brought in both bluefin and yellowfin in captivity .
we 'd been studying these fish , but first we had to learn how to husbandry them .
what do they like to eat ?
what is it that they 're happy with ?
we go in the tanks with the tuna - we touch their naked skin - it 's pretty amazing . it feels wonderful .
and then , better yet , we 've got our own version of tuna whisperers , our own chuck farwell , alex norton , who can take a big tuna and in one motion , put it into an envelope of water , so that we can actually work with the tuna and learn the techniques it takes to not injure this fish who never sees a boundary in the open sea .
jeff and jason there , are scientists who are going to take a tuna and put it in the equivalent of a treadmill , a flume .
and that tuna thinks it 's going to japan , but it 's staying in place .
we 're actually measuring its oxygen consumption , its energy consumption .
we 're taking this data and building better models .
and when i see that tuna - this is my favorite view - i begin to wonder : how did this fish solve the longitude problem before we did ?
so take a look at that animal .
that 's the closest you 'll probably ever get .
now , the activities from the lab have taught us now how to go out in the open ocean .
so in a program called tag-a-giant we 've actually gone from ireland to canada , from corsica to spain .
we 've fished with many nations around the world in an effort to basically put electronic computers inside giant tunas .
we 've actually tagged 1,100 tunas .
and i 'm going to show you three clips , because i tagged 1,100 tunas .
it 's a very hard process , but it 's a ballet .
we bring the tuna out , we measure it .
a team of fishers , captains , scientists and technicians work together to keep this animal out of the ocean for about four to five minutes .
we put water over its gills , give it oxygen .
and then with a lot of effort , after tagging , putting in the computer , making sure the stalk is sticking out so it senses the environment , we send this fish back into the sea .
and when it goes , we 're always happy .
we see a flick of the tail .
and from our data that gets collected , when that tag comes back , because a fisher returns it for a thousand-dollar reward , we can get tracks beneath the sea for up to five years now , on a backboned animal .
now sometimes the tunas are really large , such as this fish off nantucket .
but that 's about half the size of the biggest tuna we 've ever tagged .
it takes a human effort , a team effort , to bring the fish in .
in this case , what we 're going to do is put a pop-up satellite archival tag on the tuna .
this tag rides on the tuna , senses the environment around the tuna and actually will come off the fish , detach , float to the surface and send back to earth-orbiting satellites position data estimated by math on the tag , pressure data and temperature data .
and so what we get then from the pop-up satellite tag is we get away from having to have a human interaction to recapture the tag .
both the electronic tags i 'm talking about are expensive .
these tags have been engineered by a variety of teams in north america .
they are some of our finest instruments , our new technology in the ocean today .
one community in general has given more to help us than any other community .
and that 's the fisheries off the state of north carolina .
there are two villages , harris and morehead city , every winter for over a decade , held a party called tag-a-giant , and together , fishers worked with us to tag 800 to 900 fish .
in this case , we 're actually going to measure the fish .
we 're going to do something that in recent years we 've started : take a mucus sample .
watch how shiny the skin is ; you can see my reflection there .
and from that mucus , we can get gene profiles , we can get information on gender , checking the pop-up tag one more time , and then it 's out in the ocean .
and this is my favorite .
with the help of my former postdoc , gareth lawson , this is a gorgeous picture of a single tuna .
this tuna is actually moving on a numerical ocean .
the warm is the gulf stream , the cold up there in the gulf of maine .
that 's where the tuna wants to go - it wants to forage on schools of herring - but it ca n't get there . it 's too cold .
but then it warms up , and the tuna pops in , gets some fish , maybe comes back to home base , goes in again and then comes back to winter down there in north carolina and then on to the bahamas .
and my favorite scene , three tunas going into the gulf of mexico .
three tunas tagged .
astronomically , we 're calculating positions .
they 're coming together . that could be tuna sex - and there it is .
that is where the tuna spawn .
so from data like this , we 're able now to put the map up , and in this map you see thousands of positions generated by this decade and a half of tagging .
and now we 're showing that tunas on the western side go to the eastern side .
so two populations of tunas - that is , we have a gulf population , one that we can tag - they go to the gulf of mexico , i showed you that - and a second population .
living amongst our tunas - our north american tunas - are european tunas that go back to the med .
on the hot spots - the hope spots - they 're mixed populations .
and so what we 've done with the science is we 're showing the international commission , building new models , showing them that a two-stock no-mixing model - to this day , used to reject the cites treaty - that model is n't the right model .
this model , a model of overlap , is the way to move forward .
so we can then predict where management places should be .
places like the gulf of mexico and the mediterranean are places where the single species , the single population , can be captured .
these become forthright in places we need to protect .
the center of the atlantic where the mixing is , i could imagine a policy that lets canada and america fish , because they manage their fisheries well , they 're doing a good job .
but in the international realm , where fishing and overfishing has really gone wild , these are the places that we have to make hope spots in .
that 's the size they have to be to protect the bluefin tuna .
now in a second project called tagging of pacific pelagics , we took on the planet as a team , those of us in the census of marine life .
and , funded primarily through sloan foundation and others , we were able to actually go in , in our project - we 're one of 17 field programs and begin to take on tagging large numbers of predators , not just tunas .
so what we 've done is actually gone up to tag salmon shark in alaska , met salmon shark on their home territory , followed them catching salmon and then went in and figured out that , if we take a salmon and put it on a line , we can actually take up a salmon shark - this is the cousin of the white shark - and very carefully - note , i say " very carefully , " - we can actually keep it calm , put a hose in its mouth , keep it off the deck and then tag it with a satellite tag .
that satellite tag will now have your shark phone home and send in a message .
and that shark leaping there , if you look carefully , has an antenna .
it 's a free swimming shark with a satellite tag jumping after salmon , sending home its data .
salmon sharks are n't the only sharks we tag .
but there goes salmon sharks with this meter-level resolution on an ocean of temperature - warm colors are warmer .
salmon sharks go down to the tropics to pup and come into monterey .
now right next door in monterey and up at the farallones are a white shark team led by scott anderson - there - and sal jorgensen .
they can throw out a target - it 's a carpet shaped like a seal - and in will come a white shark , a curious critter that will come right up to our 16-ft. boat .
it 's a several thousand-pound animal .
and we 'll wind in the target .
and we 'll place an acoustic tag that says , " omshark 10165 , " or something like that , acoustically with a ping .
and then we 'll put on a satellite tag that will give us the long-distance journeys with the light-based geolocation algorithms solved on the computer that 's on the fish .
so in this case , sal 's looking at two tags there , and there they are : the white sharks of california going off to the white shark cafe and coming back .
we also tag makos with our noaa colleagues , blue sharks .
and now , together , what we can see on this ocean of color that 's temperature , we can see ten-day worms of makos and salmon sharks .
we have white sharks and blue sharks .
for the first time , an ecoscape as large as ocean-scale , showing where the sharks go .
the tuna team from topp has done the unthinkable : three teams tagged 1,700 tunas , bluefin , yellowfin and albacore all at the same time - carefully rehearsed tagging programs in which we go out , pick up juvenile tunas , put in the tags that actually have the sensors , stick out the tuna and then let them go .
they get returned , and when they get returned , here on a nasa numerical ocean you can see bluefin in blue go across their corridor , returning to the western pacific .
our team from ucsc has tagged elephant seals with tags that are glued on their heads , that come off when they slough .
these elephant seals cover half an ocean , take data down to 1,800 feet - amazing data .
and then there 's scott shaffer and our shearwaters wearing tuna tags , light-based tags , that now are going to take you from new zealand to monterey and back , journeys of 35,000 nautical miles we had never seen before .
but now with light-based geolocation tags that are very small , we can actually see these journeys .
same thing with laysan albatross who travel an entire ocean on a trip sometimes , up to the same zone the tunas use .
you can see why they might be caught .
then there 's george schillinger and our leatherback team out of playa grande tagging leatherbacks that go right past where we are .
and scott benson 's team that showed that leatherbacks go from indonesia all the way to monterey .
so what we can see on this moving ocean is we can finally see where the predators are .
we can actually see how they 're using ecospaces as large as an ocean .
and from this information , we can begin to map the hope spots .
so this is just three years of data right here - and there 's a decade of this data .
we see the pulse and the seasonal activities that these animals are going on .
so what we 're able to do with this information is boil it down to hot spots , 4,000 deployments , a huge herculean task , 2,000 tags in an area , shown here for the first time , off the california coast , that appears to be a gathering place .
and then for sort of an encore from these animals , they 're helping us .
they 're carrying instruments that are actually taking data down to 2,000 meters .
they 're taking information from our planet at very critical places like antarctica and the poles .
those are seals from many countries being released who are sampling underneath the ice sheets and giving us temperature data of oceanographic quality on both poles .
this data , when visualized , is captivating to watch .
we still have n't figured out best how to visualize the data .
and then , as these animals swim and give us the information that 's important to climate issues , we also think it 's critical to get this information to the public , to engage the public with this kind of data .
we did this with the great turtle race - tagged turtles , brought in four million hits .
and now with google 's oceans , we can actually put a white shark in that ocean .
and when we do and it swims , we see this magnificent bathymetry that the shark knows is there on its path as it goes from california to hawaii .
but maybe mission blue can fill in that ocean that we ca n't see .
we 've got the capacity , nasa has the ocean .
we just need to put it together .
so in conclusion , we know where yellowstone is for north america ; it 's off our coast .
we have the technology that 's shown us where it is .
what we need to think about perhaps for mission blue is increasing the biologging capacity .
how is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere ?
and then finally - to basically get the message home - maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks .
make killer apps , if you will .
a lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the golden gate bridge .
let 's connect the public to this activity right on their iphone .
that way we do away with a few internet myths .
so we can save the bluefin tuna .
we can save the white shark .
we have the science and technology .
hope is here . yes we can .
we need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm going to do , in the spirit of collaborative creativity , is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made , but do them - this is called " creative collaboration ; " it 's actually called " borrowing " - but do it through a particular perspective , and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that jimmy and others have talked about .
let me just ask you , to start with , this simple question : who invented the mountain bike ?
because traditional economic theory would say , well , the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big r & d lab where they were thinking up new projects , and it came out of there . it did n't come from there .
another answer might be , well , it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage , who , working away on different kinds of bikes , comes up with a bike out of thin air .
it did n't come from there . the mountain bike came from users , came from young users , particularly a group in northern california , who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes , which were those sort of bikes that eddy merckx rode , or your big brother , and they 're very glamorous .
but also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode , which sort of had big handlebars like that , and they were too heavy .
so , they got the frames from these big bikes , put them together with the gears from the racing bikes , got the brakes from motorcycles , and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients .
and for the first , i do n't know , three to five years of their life , mountain bikes were known as " clunkers . "
and they were just made in a community of bikers , mainly in northern california .
and then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business , start selling them to other people , and gradually another company emerged out of that , marin , and it probably was , i do n't know , 10 , maybe even 15 , years , before the big bike companies realized there was a market .
thirty years later , mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in america .
that 's 58 billion dollars .
this is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they could n't see the need , the opportunity ; they did n't have the incentive to innovate .
the one thing i think i disagree with about yochai 's presentation is when he said the internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive .
it 's when the internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers - who are knowledgeable ; they 've got the incentive to innovate ; they 've got the tools ; they want to - that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration .
and out of that , you get the need for the kind of things that jimmy was talking about , which is our new kinds of organization , or a better way to put it : how do we organize ourselves without organizations ?
that 's now possible ; you do n't need an organization to be organized , to achieve large and complex tasks , like innovating new software programs .
so this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about .
the traditional view , still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity - in organizations , in government - is that creativity is about special people : wear baseball caps the wrong way round , come to conferences like this , in special places , elite universities , r & d labs in the forests , water , maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors , you know , bean bags , maybe the odd table-football table .
special people , special places , think up special ideas , then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers , who are passive .
they can say " yes " or " no " to the invention .
that 's the idea of creativity .
what 's the policy recommendation out of that if you 're in government , or you 're running a large company ?
more special people , more special places .
build creative clusters in cities ; create more r & d parks , so on and so forth .
expand the pipeline down to the consumers .
well this view , i think , is increasingly wrong .
i think it 's always been wrong , because i think always creativity has been highly collaborative , and it 's probably been largely interactive .
but it 's increasingly wrong , and one of the reasons it 's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline .
the ideas are coming back from the consumers , and they 're often ahead of the producers .
why is that ?
well , one issue is that radical innovation , when you 've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people , have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them .
the payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest .
and when you get a radical innovation , it 's often very uncertain how it can be applied .
the whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty .
the very first landline telephones , the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from west end theaters .
when the mobile telephone companies invented sms , they had no idea what it was for ; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use .
so the more radical the innovation , the more the uncertainty , the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for .
all of our patents , our entire approach to patents and invention , is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for ; we can say what it 's for .
more and more , the inventors of things it will be worked out in use , in collaboration with users .
we like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation : there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea .
the truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative ; like wikipedia , it develops over a long period of time .
the second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big , disruptive innovations .
if you want to find the big new ideas , it 's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets , in big organizations .
and just look inside large organizations and you 'll see why that is so .
so , you 're in a big corporation .
you 're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder .
do you go into your board and say , " look , i 've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market , with consumers we 've never dealt with before , and i 'm not sure it 's going to have a big payoff , but it could be really , really big in the future ? "
no , what you do , is you go in and you say , " i 've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users , and i can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years . "
big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success .
they 've got so much sunk in it that it 's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets . emerging new markets , then , are the breeding grounds for passionate users .
best example : who in the music industry , 30 years ago , would have said , " yes , let 's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to .
that sounds like a winner ; we 'll go with it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
so what happens ? rap music is created by the users .
they do it on their own tapes , with their own recording equipment ; they distribute it themselves .
30 years later , rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture - would never have come from the big companies .
had to start - this is the third point - with these pro-ams .
this is the phrase that i 've used in some stuff which i 've done with a think tank in london called demos , where we 've been looking at these people who are amateurs - i.e. , they do it for the love of it - but they want to do it to very high standards .
and across a whole range of fields - from software , astronomy , natural sciences , vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing , so on and so forth - you find people who want to do things because they love it , but they want to do these things to very high standards .
they work at their leisure , if you like .
they take their leisure very seriously : they acquire skills ; they invest time ; they use technology that 's getting cheaper - it 's not just the internet : cameras , design technology , leisure technology , surfboards , so on and so forth .
largely through globalization , a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper .
more knowledgeable consumers , more educated , more able to connect with one another , more able to do things together .
consumption , in that sense , is an expression of their productive potential .
why , we found , people were interested in this , is that at work they do n't feel very expressed .
they do n't feel as if they 're doing something that really matters to them , so they pick up these kinds of activities .
this has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life .
take astronomy as an example , which yochai has already mentioned .
twenty years ago , 30 years ago , only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space .
and there 's a big telescope in northern england called jodrell bank , and when i was a kid , it was amazing , because the moon shots would take off , and this thing would move on rails .
and it was huge - it was absolutely enormous .
now , six amateur astronomers , working with the internet , with dobsonian digital telescopes - which are pretty much open source - with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years , the internet - they can do what jodrell bank could only do 30 years ago .
so here in astronomy , you have this vast explosion of new productive resources .
the users can be producers .
what does this mean , then , for our organizational landscape ?
well , just imagine a world , for the moment , divided into two camps .
over here , you 've got the old , traditional corporate model : special people , special places ; patent it , push it down the pipeline to largely waiting , passive consumers .
over here , let 's imagine we 've got wikipedia , linux , and beyond - open source .
this is open ; this is closed .
this is new ; this is traditional .
well , the first thing you can say , i think with certainty , is what yochai has said already - is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms .
these people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding , because they 're threatened by them .
and so the debates about copyright , digital rights , so on and so forth - these are all about trying to stifle , in my view , these kinds of organizations .
what we 're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright .
meant to be a way to incentivize invention , meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge , they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place .
let me just give you two examples .
the first is : imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying , " i 've got a fantastic idea .
i 've invented this brilliant new program that is much , much better than microsoft outlook . "
which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with microsoft , with microsoft outlook ? no one .
that is why the competition with microsoft is bound to come - will only come - from an open-source kind of project .
so , there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation , because it 's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly .
there 'll be huge professional arguments as well .
because the professionals , over here in these closed organizations - they might be academics ; they might be programmers ; they might be doctors ; they might be journalists - my former profession - say , " no , no - you ca n't trust these people over here . "
when i started in journalism - financial times , 20 years ago - it was very , very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper .
and you 'd kind of look over their shoulder on the tube to see if they were reading your article .
usually they were reading the share prices , and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor , or something like that , and you know , " for heaven 's sake , what are they doing !
they 're not reading my brilliant article ! "
and we allowed users , readers , two places where they could contribute to the paper : the letters page , where they could write a letter in , and we would condescend to them , cut it in half , and print it three days later .
or the op-ed page , where if they knew the editor - had been to school with him , slept with his wife - they could write an article for the op-ed page .
those were the two places .
shock , horror : now , the readers want to be writers and publishers .
that 's not their role ; they 're supposed to read what we write .
but they do n't want to be journalists . the journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists ; they do n't want to be journalists ; they just want to have a voice .
they want to , as jimmy said , they want to have a dialogue , a conversation .
they want to be part of that flow of information .
what 's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding .
so , there 's going to be a tremendous struggle .
but , also , there 's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed .
what you 'll see , i think , is two things that are critical , and these , i think , are two challenges for the open movement .
the first is : can we really survive on volunteers ?
if this is so critical , do we not need it funded , organized , supported in much more structured ways ?
i think the idea of creating the red cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea , but can we really organize that , just on volunteers ?
what kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible ?
what 's the role of the bbc , for instance , in that world ?
what should be the role of public policy ?
and finally , what i think you will see is the intelligent , closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction .
so it 's not going to be a contest between two camps , but , in between them , you 'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy .
new organizational models coming about , mixing closed and open in tricky ways .
it wo n't be so clear-cut ; it wo n't be microsoft versus linux - there 'll be all sorts of things in between .
and those organizational models , it turns out , are incredibly powerful , and the people who can understand them will be very , very successful .
let me just give you one final example of what that means .
i was in shanghai , in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago - one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they 've built in shanghai in the last 10 years .
and i was having dinner with this guy called timothy chan .
timothy chan set up an internet business in 2000 .
did n't go into the internet , kept his money , decided to go into computer games .
he runs a company called shanda , which is the largest computer games company in china .
nine thousand servers all over china , has 250 million subscribers .
at any one time , there are four million people playing one of his games .
how many people does he employ to service that population ?
500 people .
well , how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees ?
because basically , he does n't service them .
he gives them a platform ; he gives them some rules ; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation ; he orchestrates the action .
but actually , a lot of the content is created by the users themselves .
and it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really , really powerful .
the best measure of that : so you go into one of his games , you create a character that you develop in the course of the game .
if , for some reason , your credit card bounces , or there 's some other problem , you lose your character .
you 've got two options .
one option : you can create a new character , right from scratch , but with none of the history of your player .
that costs about 100 dollars .
or you can get on a plane , fly to shanghai , queue up outside shanda 's offices - cost probably 600 , 700 dollars - and reclaim your character , get your history back .
every morning , there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is about companies built on communities , that provide communities with tools , resources , platforms in which they can share .
he 's not open source , but it 's very , very powerful .
so here is one of the challenges , i think , for people like me , who do a lot of work with government .
if you 're a games company , and you 've got a million players in your game , you only need one percent of them to be co-developers , contributing ideas , and you 've got a development workforce of 10,000 people .
imagine you could take all the children in education in britain , and one percent of them were co-developers of education .
what would that do to the resources available to the education system ?
or if you got one percent of the patients in the nhs to , in some sense , be co-producers of health .
the reason why - despite all the efforts to cut it down , why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force , is that they multiply our productive resources .
and one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers , consumers into designers .
thank you very much .
you hear that this is the era of environment - or biology , or information technology ...
well , it 's the era of a lot of different things that we 're in right now . but one thing for sure : it 's the era of change . there 's more change going on than ever has occurred in the history of human life on earth .
and you all sort of know it , but it 's hard to get it so that you really understand it .
and i 've tried to put together something that 's a good start for this .
i 've tried to show in this - though the color does n't come out - that what i 'm concerned with is the little 50-year time bubble that you are in . you tend to be interested in a generation past , a generation future - your parents , your kids , things you can change over the next few decades - and this 50-year time bubble you kind of move along in . and in that 50 years , if you look at the population curve , you find the population of humans on the earth more than doubles and we 're up three-and-a-half times since i was born . when you have a new baby ,
by the time that kid gets out of high school more people will be added than existed on earth when i was born .
this is unprecedented , and it 's big .
where it goes in the future is questioned . so that 's the human part .
now , the human part related to animals : look at the left side of that .
what i call the human portion - humans and their livestock and pets - versus the natural portion - all the other wild animals and just - these are vertebrates and all the birds , etc . , in the land and air , not in the water . how does it balance ?
certainly , 10,000 years ago , the civilization 's beginning , the human portion was less than one tenth of one percent . let 's look at it now .
you follow this curve and you see the whiter spot in the middle - that 's your 50-year time bubble . humans , livestock and pets are now 97 percent of that integrated total mass on earth and all wild nature is three percent . we have won . the next generation does n't even have to worry about this game - it is over .
and the biggest problem came in the last 25 years : it went from 25 percent up to that 97 percent .
and this really is a sobering picture upon realizing that we , humans , are in charge of life on earth ; we 're like the capricious gods of old greek myths , kind of playing with life - and not a great deal of wisdom injected into it .
now , the third curve is information technology .
this is moore 's law plotted here , which relates to density of information , but it has been pretty good for showing a lot of other things about information technology - computers , their use , internet , etc . and what 's important is it just goes straight up through the top of the curve , and has no real limits to it . now try and contrast these .
this is the size of the earth going through that same - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - frame . and to make it really clear , i 've put all four on one graph .
there 's no need to see the little detailed words on it .
that first one is humans-versus-nature ; we 've won , there 's no more gain . human population .
and so if you 're looking for growth industries to get into , that 's not a good one - protecting natural creatures . human population is going up ; it 's going to continue for quite a while .
good business in obstetricians , morticians , and farming , housing , etc . - they all deal with human bodies , which require being fed , transported , housed and so on . and the information technology , which connects to our brains , has no limit - now , that is a wonderful field to be in . you 're looking for growth opportunity ?
it 's just going up through the roof .
and then , the size of the earth . somehow making these all compatible with the earth looks like a pretty bad industry to be involved with .
so , that 's the stage out of all this . i find , for reasons i do n't understand , i really do have a goal .
and the goal is that the world be desirable and sustainable when my kids reach my age - and i think that 's - in other words , the next generation . i think that 's a goal that we probably all share .
i think it 's a hopeless goal . technologically , it 's achievable ; economically , it 's achievable ; politically , it means sort of the habits , institutions of people - it 's impossible .
the institutions of the past with all their inertia are just irrelevant for the future , except they 're there and we have to deal with them . i spend about 15 percent of my time trying to save the world , the other 85 percent , the usual - and whatever else we devote ourselves to .
and in that 15 percent , the main focus is on human mind , thinking skills , somehow trying to unleash kids from the straightjacket of school , which is putting information and dogma into them , get them so they really think , ask tough questions , argue about serious subjects , do n't believe everything that 's in the book , think broadly or creative . they can be .
our school systems are very flawed and do not reward you for the things that are important in life or for the survival of civilization ; they reward you for a lot of learning and sopping up stuff .
we ca n't go into that today because there is n't time - it 's a broad subject . one thing for sure , in the future there is an essential feature - necessary , but not sufficient - which is doing more with less . we 've got to be doing things with more efficiency using less energy , less material .
your great-great grandparents got by on muscle power , and yet we all think there 's this huge power that 's essential for our lifestyle . and with all the wonderful technology we have we can do things that are much more efficient : conserve , recycle , etc .
let me just rush very quickly through things that we 've done .
human-powered airplane - gossamer condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77 , winning the kremer prize in aviation history , followed by the albatross . and we began making various odd planes and creatures .
here 's a giant flying replica of a pterosaur that has no tail .
trying to have it fly straight is like trying to shoot an arrow with the feathered end forward . it was a tough job , and boy it made me have a lot of respect for nature .
this was the full size of the original creature .
we did things on land , in the air , on water - vehicles of all different kinds , usually with some electronics or electric power systems in them . i find they 're all the same , whether its land , air or water .
i 'll be focusing on the air here . this is a solar-powered airplane - 165 miles carrying a person from france to england as a symbol that solar power is going to be an important part of our future . then we did the solar car for general motors - the sunracer - that won the race in australia .
we got a lot of people thinking about electric cars , what you could do with them . a few years later , when we suggested to gm that now is the time and we could do a thing called the impact , they sponsored it , and here 's the impact that we developed with them on their programs . this is the demonstrator . and they put huge effort into turning it into a commercial product .
with that preamble , let 's show the first two-minute videotape , which shows a little airplane for surveillance and moving to a giant airplane .
narrator : a tiny airplane , the av pointer serves for surveillance - in effect , a pair of roving eyeglasses . a cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle . it is convenient to carry , assemble and launch by hand . battery-powered , it is silent and rarely noticed .
it sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator .
with onboard gps , it can navigate autonomously , and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage .
the modern sailplane is superbly efficient .
some can glide as flat as 60 feet forward for every foot of descent .
they are powered only by the energy they can extract from the atmosphere - an atmosphere nature stirs up by solar energy .
humans and soaring birds have found nature to be generous in providing replenishable energy . sailplanes have flown over 1,000 miles , and the altitude record is over 50,000 feet .
-lrb- music -rrb- the solar challenger was made to serve as a symbol that photovoltaic cells can produce real power and will be part of the world 's energy future .
in 1981 , it flew 163 miles from paris to england , solely on the power of sunbeams , and established a basis for the pathfinder .
-lrb- music -rrb- the message from all these vehicles is that ideas and technology can be harnessed to produce remarkable gains in doing more with less - gains that can help us attain a desirable balance between technology and nature . the stakes are high as we speed toward a challenging future .
buckminster fuller said it clearly : " there are no passengers on spaceship earth , only crew . we , the crew , can and must do more with less - much less . "
paul maccready : if we could have the second video , the one-minute , put in as quickly as you can , which - this will show the pathfinder airplane in some flights this past year in hawaii , and will show a sequence of some of the beauty behind it after it had just flown to 71,530 feet - higher than any propeller airplane has ever flown .
it 's amazing : just on the puny power of the sun - by having a super lightweight plane , you 're able to get it up there .
it 's part of a long-term program nasa sponsored .
and we worked very closely with the whole thing being a team effort , and with wonderful results like that flight .
and we 're working on a bigger plane - 220-foot span - and an intermediate-size , one with a regenerative fuel cell that can store excess energy during the day , feed it back at night , and stay up 65,000 feet for months at a time .
-lrb- music -rrb- ray morgan 's voice will come in here .
there he 's the project manager . anything they do is certainly a team effort . he ran this program . here 's ...
some things he showed as a celebration at the very end .
ray morgan : we 'd just ended a seven-month deployment of hawaii .
for those who live on the mainland , it was tough being away from home .
the friendly support , the quiet confidence , congenial hospitality shown by our hawaiian and military hosts - -lrb- music -rrb- this is starting - made the experience enjoyable and unforgettable .
pm : we have real-time ir scans going out through the internet while the plane is flying . and it 's exploring without polluting the stratosphere . that 's its goal : the stratosphere , the blanket that really controls the radiation of the earth and permits life on earth to be the success that it is - probing that is very important . and also we consider it as a sort of poor man 's stationary satellite , because it can stay right overhead for months at a time , 2,000 times closer than the real gfc synchronous satellite .
we could n't bring one here to fly it and show you .
but now let 's look at the other end .
in the video you saw that nine-pound or eight-pound pointer airplane surveillance drone that keenan has developed and just done a remarkable job . where some have servos that have gotten down to , oh , 18 or 25 grams , his weigh one-third of a gram . and what he 's going to bring out here is a surveillance drone that weighs about 2 ounces - that includes the video camera , the batteries that run it , the telemetry , the receiver and so on . and we 'll fly it , we hope , with the same success that we had last night when we did the practice .
so matt keenan , just any time you 're - all right - ready to let her go . but first , we 're going to make sure that it 's appearing on the screen , so you see what it sees .
you can imagine yourself being a mouse or fly inside of it , looking out of its camera .
matt keenan : it 's switched on .
pm : but now we 're trying to get the video . there we go .
mk : can you bring up the house lights ?
pm : yeah , the house lights and we 'll see you all better and be able to fly the plane better .
mk : all right , we 'll try to do a few laps around and bring it back in .
here we go .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : the video worked right for the first few and i do n't know why it - there it goes .
oh , that was only a minute , but i think you 'd be safe to have that near the end of the flight , perhaps .
all right .
if this hits you , it will not hurt you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but now , as they say in infomercials , we have something much better for you , which we 're working on : planes that are only six inches - 15 centimeters - in size .
and matt 's plane was on the cover of popular science last month , showing what this can lead to . and in a while , something this size will have gps and a video camera in it . we 've had one of these fly nine miles through the air at 35 miles an hour with just a little battery in it .
but there 's a lot of technology going .
there are just milestones along the way of some remarkable things .
this one does n't have the video in it , but you get a little feel from what it can do .
ok , here we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- mk : sorry .
ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : if you can pass it down when you 're done . yeah , i think - i lost a little orientation ; i looked up into this light .
it hit the building . and the building was poorly placed , actually .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you 're beginning to see what can be done .
we 're working on projects now - even wing-flapping things the size of hawk moths - darpa contracts , working with caltech , ucla .
where all this leads , i do n't know . is it practical ? i do n't know .
but like any basic research , when you 're really forced to do things that are way beyond existing technology , you can get there with micro-technology , nanotechnology .
you can do amazing things when you realize what nature has been doing all along . as you get to these small scales , you realize we have a lot to learn from nature - not with 747s - but when you get down to the nature 's realm , nature has 200 million years of experience .
it never makes a mistake . because if you make a mistake , you do n't leave any progeny .
we should have nothing but success stories from nature , for you or for birds , and we 're learning a lot from its fascinating subjects .
in concluding , i want to get back to the big picture and i have just two final slides to try and put it in perspective .
the first i 'll just read . at last , i put in three sentences and had it say what i wanted .
over billions of years on a unique sphere , chance has painted a thin covering of life - complex , improbable , wonderful and fragile . suddenly , we humans - a recently arrived species , no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature - have grown in population , technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power . we now wield the paintbrush .
and that 's serious : we 're not very bright . we 're short on wisdom ; we 're high on technology . where 's it going to lead ?
well , inspired by the sentences , i decided to wield the paintbrush .
every 25 years i do a picture . here 's the one - tries to show that the world is n't getting any bigger .
sort of a timeline , very non-linear scale , nature rates and trilobites and dinosaurs , and eventually we saw some humans with caves ... birds were flying overhead , after pterosaurs .
and then we get to the civilization above the little tv set with a gun on it . then traffic jams , and power systems , and some dots for digital . where it 's going to lead - i have no idea .
and so i just put robotic and natural cockroaches out there , but you can fill in whatever you want . this is not a forecast .
this is a warning , and we have to think seriously about it .
and that time when this is happening is not 100 years or 500 years .
things are going on this decade , next decade ; it 's a very short time that we have to decide what we are going to do .
and if we can get some agreement on where we want the world to be - desirable , sustainable when your kids reach your age - i think we actually can reach it . now , i said this was a warning , not a forecast . that was before - i painted this before we started in on making robotic versions of hawk moths and cockroaches , and now i 'm beginning to wonder seriously - was this more of a forecast than i wanted ?
i personally think the surviving intelligent life form on earth is not going to be carbon-based ; it 's going to be silicon-based .
and so where it all goes , i do n't know .
the one final bit of sparkle we 'll put in at the very end here is an utterly impractical flight vehicle , which is a little ornithopter wing-flapping device that - rubber-band powered - that we 'll show you .
mk : 32 gram . sorry , one gram .
pm : last night we gave it a few too many turns and it tried to bash the roof out also . it 's about a gram .
the tube there 's hollow , about paper-thin .
and if this lands on you , i assure you it will not hurt you .
but if you reach out to grab it or hold it , you will destroy it .
so , be gentle , just act like a wooden indian or something .
and when it comes down - and we 'll see how it goes .
we consider this to be sort of the spirit of ted .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and you wonder , is it practical ? and it turns out if i had not been - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- unfortunately , we have some light bulb changes .
we can probably get it down , but it 's possible it 's gone up to a greater destiny up there - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - than it ever had . and i wanted to make - -lrb- applause -rrb- just - -lrb- applause -rrb- but i want to make just two points . one is , you think it 's frivolous ; there 's nothing to it . and yet if i had not been making ornithopters like that , a little bit cruder , in 1939 - a long , long time ago - there would n't have been a gossamer condor , there would n't have been an albatross , a solar challenger , there would n't be an impact car , there would n't be a mandate
on zero-emission vehicles in california .
a lot of these things - or similar - would have happened some time , probably a decade later . i did n't realize at the time i was doing inquiry-based , hands-on things with teams , like they 're trying to get in education systems .
so i think that , as a symbol , it 's important .
and i believe that also is important . you can think of it as a sort of a symbol for learning and ted that somehow gets you thinking of technology and nature , and puts it all together in things that are - that make this conference , i think , more important than any that 's taken place in this country in this decade .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- people are living longer and societies are getting grayer .
you hear about it all the time .
you read about it in your newspapers .
you hear about it on your television sets .
sometimes i 'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we 've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency , even ease .
but make no mistake , longer lives can and , i believe , will improve quality of life at all ages .
now to put this in perspective , let me just zoom out for a minute .
more years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined .
in the blink of an eye , we nearly doubled the length of time that we 're living .
so if you ever feel like you do n't have this aging thing quite pegged , do n't kick yourself .
it 's brand new .
and because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up , that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population , with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age is being reshaped into a rectangle .
and now , if you 're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics , these are the ones that should do it .
because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species , the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old .
how did this happen ?
well we 're no genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago .
this increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture - the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being .
through cultural changes , our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives .
now there are problems associated with aging - diseases , poverty , loss of social status .
it 's hardly time to rest on our laurels .
but the more we learn about aging , the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate .
aging brings some rather remarkable improvements - increased knowledge , expertise - and emotional aspects of life improve .
that 's right , older people are happy .
they 're happier than middle-aged people , and younger people certainly .
study after study is coming to the same conclusion .
the cdc recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week .
and fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people , and younger people as well .
and a recent gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day .
and stress , worry , anger all decrease with age .
now social scientists call this the paradox of aging .
after all , aging is not a piece of cake .
so we 've asked all sorts of questions to see if we could undo this finding .
we 've asked whether it may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations .
that is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older .
we 've asked , well maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the more we 've tried to disavow this finding , the more evidence we find to support it .
years ago , my colleagues and i embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period .
originally the sample was aged 18 to 94 .
and we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older .
our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time , and we 'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times .
and every time we paged them we 'd ask them to answer several questions - on a one to seven scale , how happy are you right now ?
how sad are you right now ?
how frustrated are you right now ? - so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives .
and using this intense study of individuals , we find that it 's not one particular generation that 's doing better than the others , but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience .
now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages .
and there is a slight downturn .
but at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood .
now it 's really too simplistic to say that older people are " happy . "
in our study , they are more positive , but they 're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions - sadness at the same time you experience happiness ; you know , that tear in the eye when you 're smiling at a friend .
and other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably .
they 're more accepting of sadness than younger people are .
and we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly-charged emotional conflicts and debates .
older people can view injustice with compassion , but not despair .
and all things being equal , older people direct their cognitive resources , like attention and memory , to positive information more than negative .
if we show older , middle-aged , younger people images , like the ones you see on the screen , and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can , older people , but not younger people , remember more positive images than negative images .
we 've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies , some frowning , some smiling .
older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning , angry faces .
in day-to-day life , this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction .
but as social scientists , we continue to ask about possible alternatives .
we 've said , well maybe older people report more positive emotions because they 're cognitively impaired .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've said , could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions , and so you switch to the positive emotions ?
maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we 're unable to process negative emotions anymore .
but that 's not the case .
the most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect the most .
and under conditions where it really matters , older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information .
so how can this be ?
well in our research , we 've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time - not just clock time and calendar time , but lifetime .
and if there 's a paradox of aging , it 's that recognizing that we wo n't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways .
when time horizons are long and nebulous , as they typically are in youth , people are constantly preparing , trying to soak up all the information they possibly can , taking risks , exploring .
we might spend time with people we do n't even like because it 's somehow interesting .
we might learn something unexpected .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we go on blind dates .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , after all , if it does n't work out , there 's always tomorrow .
people over 50 do n't go on blind dates .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as we age , our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change .
when we recognize that we do n't have all the time in the world , we see our priorities most clearly .
we take less notice of trivial matters .
we savor life .
we 're more appreciative , more open to reconciliation .
we invest in more emotionally important parts of life , and life gets better , so we 're happier day-to-day .
but that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice .
by 2015 , there will be more people in the united states over the age of 60 than under 15 .
what will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people ?
the numbers wo n't determine the outcome .
culture will .
if we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people , then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages .
societies with millions of talented , emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them , armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known .
my father , who is 92 , likes to say , " let 's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm a city planner , an urban designer , former arts advocate , trained in architecture and art history , and i want to talk to you today not about design but about america and how america can be more economically resilient , how america can be healthier , and how america can be more environmentally sustainable .
and i realize this is a global forum , but i think i need to talk about america because there is a history , in some places , not all , of american ideas being appropriated , being emulated , for better or for worse , around the world .
and the worst idea we 've ever had is suburban sprawl .
it 's being emulated in many places as we speak .
by suburban sprawl , i refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use , and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching , time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to , most americans , in fact , need , just to live their daily lives .
and there 's an alternative .
you know , we say , half the world is living in cities .
well , in america , that living in cities , for many of them , they 're living in cities still where they 're dependent on that automobile .
and what i work for , and to do , is to make our cities more walkable .
but i ca n't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that i 've learned from the economists , the epidemiologists and the environmentalists .
so these are the three arguments that i 'm going to give you quickly today .
when i was growing up in the ' 70s , the typical american spent one tenth of their income , american family , on transportation .
since then , we 've doubled the number of roads in america , and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation .
working families , which are defined as earning between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars a year in america are spending more now on transportation than on housing , slightly more , because of this phenomenon called " drive till you qualify , " finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs , so that they 're locked in this , two , three hours , four hours a day of commuting .
and these are the neighborhoods , for example , in the central valley of california that were n't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up ; they were decimated .
and in fact , these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today .
imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage , it goes underwater , and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you 're doing .
so we know what it 's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars .
what happens when a city decides it 's going to set other priorities ?
and probably the best example we have here in america is portland , oregon .
portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other american city .
while most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl , they instituted an urban growth boundary .
while most cities were reaming out their roads , removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic , they instituted a skinny streets program .
and while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways , they actually invested in bicycling and in walking .
and they spent 60 million dollars on bike facilities , which seems like a lot of money , but it was spent over about 30 years , so two million dollars a year - not that much - and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city .
these changes and others like them changed the way that portlanders live , and their vehicle-miles traveled per day , the amount that each person drives , actually peaked in 1996 , has been dropping ever since , and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country .
the typical portland citizen drives four miles less , and 11 minutes less per day than they did before .
the economist joe cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 11 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region .
so if they 're not spending that money on driving - and by the way , 85 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy - if they 're not spending that money on driving , what are they spending it on ?
well , portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita , the most independent bookstores per capita , the most strip clubs per capita .
these are all exaggerations , slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth , which is portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of america .
actually , oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states , which may be a good thing or a bad thing , but it makes you glad they 're driving less .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually , they 're spending most of it in their homes , and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get .
but there 's a whole other portland story , which is n't part of this calculus , which is that young , educated people have been moving to portland in droves , so that between the last two censuses , they had a 50-percent increase in college-educated millennials , which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country , or , i should say , of the national average .
so on the one hand , a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable , but on the other hand , it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days .
so the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster , or an aerospace cluster , but to become a place where people want to be .
and millennials , certainly , these engines of entrepreneurship , 64 percent of whom decide first where they want to live , then they move there , then they look for a job , they will come to your city .
the health argument is a scary one , and you 've probably heard part of this argument before .
again , back in the ' 70s , a lot 's changed since then , back in the ' 70s , one in 10 americans was obese .
now one out of three americans is obese , and a second third of the population is overweight .
twenty-five percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces .
according to the center for disease control , fully one third of all children born after 2000 will get diabetes .
we have the first generation of children in america who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents .
i believe that this american healthcare crisis that we 've all heard about is an urban design crisis , and that the design of our cities lies at the cure .
because we 've talked a long time about diet , and we know that diet impacts weight , and weight of course impacts health .
but we 've only started talking about inactivity , and how inactivity born of our landscape , inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk , is driving our weight up .
and we finally have the studies , one in britain called " gluttony versus sloth " that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity , and found a much higher , stronger correlation between the latter two .
dr. james levine at , in this case , the aptly-named mayo clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear , held their diet steady , and then started pumping the calories in .
some people gained weight , some people did n't gain weight .
expecting some metabolic or dna factor at work , they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving , and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting , on average , two hours more per day than those who did n't .
so we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity , but even more , we now have studies that tie weight to where you live .
do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city , or where in your city do you live ?
in san diego , they used walk score - walk score rates every address in america and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is - they used walk score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods .
well guess what ? if you lived in a more walkable neighborhood , you were 35 percent likely to be overweight .
if you lived in a less walkable neighborhood , you were 60 percent likely to be overweight .
so we have study after study now that 's tying where you live to your health , particularly as in america , the biggest health crisis we have is this one that 's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity .
and i learned a new word last week .
they call these neighborhoods " obesageneric . "
i may have that wrong , but you get the idea .
now that 's one thing , of course .
briefly mentioning , we have an asthma epidemic in this country .
you probably have n't thought that much about it .
fourteen americans die each day from asthma , three times what it was in the ' 90s , and it 's almost all coming from car exhaust .
american pollution does not come from factories anymore , it comes from tailpipes , and the amount that people are driving in your city , your urban vmt , is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city .
and then finally , in terms of driving , there 's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults , and one of the largest killers of all people , is car crashes .
and we take car crashes for granted .
we figure it 's a natural risk of being on the road .
but in fact , here in america , 12 people out of every 100,000 die every year from car crashes .
we 're pretty safe here .
well , guess what ? in england , it 's seven per 100,000 .
it 's japan , it 's four per 100,000 .
do you know where it 's three per 100,000 ?
new york city .
san francisco , the same thing . portland , the same thing .
oh , so cities make us safer because we 're driving less ?
tulsa : 14 per 100,000 .
orlando : 20 per 100,000 .
it 's not whether you 're in the city or not , it 's how is your city designed ?
was it designed around cars or around people ?
because if your city is designed around cars , it 's really good at smashing them into each other .
that 's part of a much larger health argument .
finally , the environmental argument is fascinating , because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 10 years ago .
the environmental movement in america has historically been an anti-city movement from jefferson on .
" cities are pestilential to the health , to the liberties , to the morals of man .
if we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities , as they do in europe , we shall become as corrupt as they are in europe and take to eating one another as they do there . "
he apparently had a sense of humor .
and then the american environmental movement has been a classically arcadian movement .
to become more environmental , we move into the country , we commune with nature , we build suburbs .
but , of course , we 've seen what that does .
the carbon mapping of america , where is the co2 being emitted , for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly .
if you look at any carbon map , because we map it per square mile , any carbon map of the u.s. , it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the u.s. , hottest in the cities , cooler in the suburbs , dark , peaceful in the countryside .
until some economists said , you know , is that the right way to measure co2 ?
there are only so many people in this country at any given time , and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact .
and they said , let 's measure co2 per household , and when they did that , the maps just flipped , coolest in the center city , warmer in the suburbs , and red hot in these exurban " drive till you qualify " neighborhoods .
so a fundamental shift , and now you have environmentalists and economists like ed glaeser saying we are a destructive species .
if you love nature , the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it , move to a city , and the denser the better , and the denser cities like manhattan are the cities that perform the best .
so the average manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation has n't seen since the ' 20s , consuming half of the electricity of dallas .
but of course , we can do better .
canadian cities , they consume half the gasoline of american cities .
european cities consume half as much again .
so obviously , we can do better , and we want to do better , and we 're all trying to be green .
my final argument in this topic is that i think we 're trying to be green the wrong way , and i 'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets , on accessorizing - what can i add to my house , what can i add to what i 've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable ? - has kind of dominated the discussion .
so i 'm not immune to this .
my wife and i built a new house on an abandoned lot in washington , d.c. , and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store .
we 've got the solar photovoltaic system , solar hot water heater , dual-flush toilets , bamboo floors .
a log burning in my german high-tech stove apparently , supposedly , contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest .
yet all of these innovations - that 's what they said in the brochure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city .
we 've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers , and you should do the same thing , but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week .
and we do n't want to have this argument .
politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a " lifestyle choice . "
you do n't want to tell americans , god forbid , that they have to change their lifestyle .
but what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more , something that would be better than what we have right now ?
well , the gold standard of quality of life rankings , it 's called the mercer survey .
you may have heard of it .
they rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 10 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life : health , economics , education , housing , you name it .
there 's six more . short talk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking american city , honolulu , number 28 , is followed by kind of the usual suspects of seattle and boston and all walkable cities .
the driving cities in the sun belt , the dallases and the phoenixes and , sorry , atlanta , these cities are not appearing on the list .
but who 's doing even better ?
the canadian cities like vancouver , where again , they 're burning half the fuel .
and then it 's usually won by cities where they speak german , like dusseldorf or vienna , where they 're burning , again , half as much fuel .
and you see this alignment , this strange alignment .
is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life ?
i would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life , and that 's living in a walkable neighborhood .
so sustainability , which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability .
but particularly here in america , we are polluting so much because we 're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway , then these two problems would seem to share the same solution , which is to make our cities more walkable .
doing so is n't easy , but it can be done , it has been done , and it 's being done now in more than a few cities , around the globe and in our country .
i take some solace from winston churchill , who put it this way : " the americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for the next few minutes we 're going to talk about energy , and it 's going to be a bit of a varied talk .
i 'll try to spin a story about energy , and oil 's a convenient starting place .
the talk will be broadly about energy , but oil 's a good place to start .
and one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff .
you take about eight or so carbon atoms , about 20 hydrogen atoms , you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid : very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels .
it 's great stuff .
now , as far as it goes , there 's a lot of oil out there in the world .
here 's my little pocket map of where it 's all located .
a bigger one for you to look at .
but this is it , this is the oil in the world .
geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is .
this is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today .
now , that 's just one story about oil , and we could end it there and say , " well , oil 's going to last forever because , well , there 's just a lot of it . "
but there 's actually more to the story than that .
oh , by the way , if you think you 're very far from some of this oil , 1000 meters below where you 're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world .
come talk to me about it , i 'll fill in some of the details if you want .
so , that 's one of the stories of oil ; there 's just a lot of it .
but what about oil ? where is it in the energy system ?
here 's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil , and it 's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years .
now , here 's another little secret i 'm going to tell you about : for the last 25 years , oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems .
there was one kind of peak oil in 1985 , when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply .
now , it 's about 35 percent .
it 's been declining and i believe it will continue to decline .
gasoline consumption in the u.s. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining .
so oil is playing a less significant role every year .
and so , 25 years ago , there was a peak oil ; just like , in the 1920s , there was a peak coal ; and a hundred years before that , there was a peak wood .
this is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems .
and what 's been taking up the slack in the last few decades ?
well , a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear , for starters .
and what goes on in the future ?
well , i think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas , and beyond that , peak renewables .
now , i 'll tell you another little , very important story about this picture .
now , i 'm not pretending that energy use in total is n't increasing , it is - that 's another part of the story . come talk to me about it , we 'll fill in some of the details - but there 's a very important message here : this is 200 years of history , and for 200 years we 've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system .
energy systems of the world becoming progressively - year on year , decade on decade , century on century - becoming less carbon intense .
and that continues into the future with the renewables that we 're developing today , reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century .
now that might be the end of the story - okay , we just replace it all with conventional renewables - but i think , actually , there 's more to the story than that .
and to tell the next part of the story - and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond .
what is the future of truly sustainable , carbon-free energy ?
well , we have to take a little excursion , and we 'll start in central texas .
here 's a piece of limestone .
i picked it up outside of marble falls , texas .
it 's about 400 million years old .
and it 's just limestone , nothing really special about it .
now , here 's a piece of chalk .
i picked this up at mit . it 's a little younger .
and it 's different than this limestone , you can see that .
you would n't build a building out of this stuff , and you would n't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this .
yeah , it 's very different - no , it 's not different .
it 's not different , it 's the same stuff : calcium carbonate , calcium carbonate .
what 's different is how the molecules are put together .
now , if you think that 's kind of neat , the story gets really neat right now .
off the coast of california comes this : it 's an abalone shell .
now , millions of abalone every year make this shell .
oh , by the way , just in case you were n't already guessing , it 's calcium carbonate .
it 's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this .
but it 's not the same stuff ; it 's different .
it 's thousands of times , maybe 3,000 times tougher than this .
and why ? because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers , making this beautiful , iridescent mother of pearl .
very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles , millions of abalone , all the time , every day , every year .
this is pretty incredible stuff .
all the same , what 's different ?
how the molecules are put together .
now , what does this have to do with energy ?
here 's a piece of coal .
and i 'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk .
now , whether we 're talking about fuels or energy carriers , or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells , nature has n't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature did n't need to .
nature did n't need to because , unlike the abalone shell , the survival of a species did n't depend on building those materials , until maybe now when it might just matter .
so , when we think about the future of energy , imagine what would it be like if instead of this , we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently .
and so that is my story .
the oil will never run out .
it 's not because we have a lot of it .
it 's not because we 're going to build a bajillion windmills .
it 's because , well , thousands of years ago , people invented ideas - they had ideas , innovations , technology - and the stone age ended , not because we ran out of stones .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's ideas , it 's innovation , it 's technology that will end the age of oil , long before we run out of oil .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was one of the founding members of the axis of evil comedy tour .
the other founding members included ahmed ahmed , who is an egyptian-american , who actually had the idea to go to the middle east and try it out .
before we went out as a tour , he went out solo and did it first .
then there was aron kader , who was the palestinian-american .
and then there was me , the iranian-american of the group .
now , being iranian-american presents its own set of problems , as you know .
those two countries are n't getting along these days .
so it causes a lot of inner conflict , you know , like part of me likes me , part of me hates me .
part of me thinks i should have a nuclear program , the other part thinks i ca n't be trusted with one .
these are dilemmas i have every day .
but i was born in iran ; i 'm now an american citizen , which means i have the american passport , which means i can travel .
because if you only have the iranian passport , you 're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms , you know - syria , venezuela , north korea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so anyone who 's gotten their passport in america will tell you , when you get your passport , it still says what country you were born in .
so i remember getting my american passport .
i was like , " woohoo ! i 'm going to travel . "
and i opened it up , it said , " born in iran . " i 'm like , " oh , come on , man . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm trying to go places . "
but what 's interesting is , i 've never had trouble traveling in any other western countries with my american passport , even though it says , " born in iran . " no problems .
where i 've had some problems is some of the arab countries , because i guess some of the arab countries are n't getting along with iran either .
and so i was in kuwait recently , doing a comedy show with some other american comedians .
they all went through , and then the border patrol saw my american passport .
" ah ha ! american , great . "
then he opened it up . " born in iran ? wait . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he started asking me questions .
he said , " what is your father 's name ? "
i said , " well , he 's passed away , but his name was khosro . "
he goes , " what is your grandfather 's name ? "
i said , " he passed away a long time ago .
his name was jabbar . "
he says , " you wait . i 'll be back , " and he walked away .
and i started freaking out , because i do n't know what kind of crap my grandfather was into .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thought the guy was going to come back and be like , " we 've been looking for you for 200 years . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " your grandfather has a parking violation . it 's way overdue .
you owe us two billion dollars . "
but as you can see , when i talk , i speak with an american accent , which you would think as an iranian-american actor , i should be able to play any part , good , bad , what have you .
but a lot of times in hollywood , when casting directors find out you 're of middle eastern descent , they go , " oh , you 're iranian . great .
can you say ' i will kill you in the name of allah ? " ' " i could say that , but what if i were to say , ' hello . i 'm your doctor ? " ' they go , " great . and then you hijack the hospital . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like i think you 're missing the point here .
do n't get me wrong , i do n't mind playing bad guys .
i want to play a bad guy . i want to rob a bank .
i want to rob a bank in a film . i want to rob a bank in a film , but do it with a gun , with a gun , not with a bomb strapped around me , right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i imagine the director : " maz , i think your character would rob the bank with a bomb around him . "
" why would i do that ?
if i want the money , why would i kill myself ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " gimme all your money , or i 'll blow myself up . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " well , then blow yourself up .
just do it outside , please . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the fact is , there 's good people everywhere .
that 's what i try and show in my stand-up . there 's good people everywhere .
all it takes in one person to mess it up .
like a couple months ago in times square in new york , there was this pakistani muslim guy who tried to blow up a car bomb .
now , i happened to be in times square that night doing a comedy show .
and a few months before that , there was a white american guy in austin , texas who flew his airplane into the irs building , and i happened to be in austin that day doing a stand-up comedy show .
now i 'll tell you , as a middle eastern male , when you show up around a lot of these activities , you start feeling guilty at one point .
i was watching the news . i 'm like , " am i involved in this crap ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i did n't get the memo . what 's going on ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what was interesting was , the pakistani muslim guy - see he gives a bad name to muslims and middle easterners and pakistanis from all over the world .
and one thing that happened there was also the pakistani taliban took credit for that failed car bombing .
my question is : why would you take credit for a failed car bombing ?
" we just wanted to say we tried . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and furthermore , it is the thought that counts . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " and in conclusion , win some , lose some . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what happened was , when the white guy flew his plane into the building , i know all my middle eastern and muslim friends in the states were watching tv , going , " please , do n't be middle eastern .
do n't be hassan . do n't be hussein . "
and the name came out jack . i 'm like , " woooo !
that 's not one of us . "
but i kept watching the news in case they came back , they were like , " before he did it , he converted to islam . "
" damn it ! why jack ? why ? "
but the fact is , i 've been lucky to get a chance to perform all over the world , and i did a lot of shows in the middle east .
i just did a seven-country solo tour .
i was in oman , and i was in saudi arabia .
i was in dubai .
and it 's great , there 's good people everywhere .
and you learn great things about these places .
i encourage people always to go visit these places .
for example , dubai - cool place .
they 're obsessed with having the biggest , tallest , longest , as we all know .
they have a mall there , the dubai mall .
it is so big , they have taxis in the mall .
i was walking . i heard " beep , beep . "
i 'm like , " what are you doing here ? "
he goes , " i 'm going to the zara store . it 's three miles away .
out of my way . out of my way . out of my way . "
and what 's crazy - there 's a recession going on , even in dubai , but you would n't know by the prices .
like in the dubai mall , they sell frozen yogurt by the gram .
it 's like a drug deal .
i was walking by . the guy goes , " psst . habibi , my friend . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you want some frozen yogurt ?
come here . come here . come here .
i have one gram , five gram , 10 gram . how many gram do you want ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i bought five grams . 10 dollars . 10 dollars ! i said , " what 's in this ? "
he 's like , " good stuff , man . columbian . top of the line . top of the line . "
the other thing you learn sometimes when you travel to these countries in the middle east , sometimes in latin american countries , south american countries - a lot of times when they build stuff , there 's no rules and regulations .
for example , i took my two year-old son to the playground at the dubai mall .
and i 've taken my two year-old son to playgrounds all over the united states .
and when you put your two year-old on a slide in the united states , they put something on the slide to slow the kid down as he comes down the slide .
not in the middle east .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i put my two year-old on the slide ; he went frrmrmm ! he took off .
i went down . i go , " where 's my son ? "
" on the third floor , sir . on the third floor . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you take a taxi . you go to zara . make a left . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " try the yogurt . it 's very good . little expensive . "
but one of the things i try to do with my stand-up is to break stereotypes .
and i 've been guilty of stereotyping as well .
i was in dubai . and there 's a lot of indians who work in dubai .
and they do n't get paid that well .
and i got it in my head that all the indians there must be workers .
and i forgot there 's obviously successful indians in dubai as well .
i was doing a show , and they said , " we 're going to send a driver to pick you up . "
so i went down to the lobby , and i saw this indian guy .
i go , " he 's got to be my driver . "
because he was standing there in like a cheap suit , thin mustache , staring at me .
so i went over , " excuse me , sir , are you my driver ? "
he goes , " no , sir . i own the hotel . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i go , " i 'm sorry . then why were you staring at me ? "
he goes , " i thought you were my driver . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll leave you guys with this : i try , with my stand-up , to break stereotypes , present middle easterners in a positive light - muslims in a positive light - and i hope that in the coming years , more film and television programs come out of hollywood presenting us in a positive light .
who knows , maybe one day we 'll even have our own james bond , right .
" my name is bond , jamal bond . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- til then , i 'll keep telling jokes . i hope you keep laughing .
have a good day . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i believe that there are new , hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions - institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life : schools , hospitals , workplaces , factories , offices , etc .
and something that i see happening is something that i would like to call a sort of " democratization of intimacy . "
and what do i mean by that ?
i mean that what people are doing is , in fact , they are sort of , with their communication channels , they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them .
how are they doing this ? they 're doing it in a very simple way , by calling their mom from work , by iming from their office to their friends , by texting under the desk .
the pictures that you 're seeing behind me are people that i visited in the last few months .
and i asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most .
and somebody brought a boyfriend , somebody a father .
one young woman brought her grandfather .
for 20 years , i 've been looking at how people use channels such as email , the mobile phone , texting , etc .
what we 're actually going to see is that , fundamentally , people are communicating on a regular basis with five , six , seven of their most intimate sphere .
now , lets take some data . facebook .
recently some sociologists from facebook - facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels .
and an average user , said cameron marlow , from facebook , has about 120 friends .
but he actually talks to , has two-way exchanges with , about four to six people on a regular base , depending on his gender .
academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists , but fundamentally people chat with two , three , four - anyway , less than five .
my own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people . 80 percent .
and when you go to skype , it 's down to two people .
a lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed .
i mean , i 've been a bit disappointed sometimes when i saw this data and all this deployment , just for five people .
and some sociologists actually feel that it 's a closure , it 's a cocooning , that we 're disengaging from the public .
and i would actually , i would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it , and from where they 're doing it , actually there is an incredible social transformation .
there are three stories that i think are quite good examples .
the first gentleman , he 's a baker .
and so he starts working every morning at four o 'clock in the morning .
and around eight o 'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven , cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife .
he just wants to wish her a good day , because that 's the start of her day .
and i 've heard this story a number of times .
a young factory worker who works night shifts , who manages to sneak away from the factory floor , where there is cctv by the way , and find a corner , where at 11 o 'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight .
or a mother who , at four o 'clock , suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home .
then there is another couple , there is a brazilian couple .
they 've lived in italy for a number of years .
they skype with their families a few times a week .
but once a fortnight , they actually put the computer on their dining table , pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in sao paulo . and they have a big event of it .
and i heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from kosovo in switzerland .
they had set up a big screen in their living room , and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother .
but danny miller , who is a very good anthropologist who is working on filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the philippines , was telling me about how much parenting is going on through skype , and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through skype .
and then there is the third couple . they are two friends .
they chat to each other every day , a few times a day actually .
and finally , finally , they 've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work .
and now , obviously , they have it open .
whenever they have a moment they chat to each other .
and this is exactly what we 've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school , under the table , and texting under the table to their friends .
so , none of these cases are unique .
i mean , i could tell you hundreds of them .
but what is really exceptional is the setting .
so , think of the three settings i 've talked to you about : factory , migration , office .
but it could be in a school , it could be an administration , it could be a hospital .
three settings that , if we just step back 15 years , if you just think back 15 years , when you clocked in , when you clocked in to an office , when you clocked in to a factory , there was no contact for the whole duration of the time , there was no contact with your private sphere .
if you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere .
if you were in management , oh , that was a different story .
maybe you had a direct line .
if you were not , you maybe had to go through an operator .
but basically , when you walked into those buildings , the private sphere was left behind you .
and this has become such a norm of our professional lives , such a norm and such an expectation .
and it had nothing to do with technical capability .
the phones were there . but the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand , fully to the people around you .
that was where the focus had to be .
and this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage .
if you think nursery , kindergarten , first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children , to make them used to staying long hours away from their family .
and then the school enacts perfectly well .
it mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices : rituals of entry , rituals of exit , the schedules , the uniforms in this country , things that identify you , team-building activities , team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids , or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time .
and of course , the major thing : learn to pay attention , to concentrate and focus your attention .
this only started about 150 years ago .
it only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy , and of industrial revolution .
when people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work .
and when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach , where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere .
so , until then , basically people were living on top of their trades .
they were living on top of the land they were laboring .
they were living on top of the workshops where they were working .
and if you think , it 's permeated our whole culture , even our cities .
if you think of medieval cities , medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there .
now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas .
and actually , over these 150 years , there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged .
so the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out , the more removed he would be from his personal sphere .
people have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations .
and they are doing it massively .
the pew institute , which produces good data on a regular basis on , for instance , in the states , says that - and i think that this number is conservative - 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office .
i really think that the number is conservative .
in my own research , we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o 'clock in the morning , whatever the country .
75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones .
100 percent are using text .
the point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions .
i 'm always surprised the u.s. army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance , of soldiers in iraq having daily contact with their families .
but there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access .
and every day , every single day , i read news that makes me cringe , like a $ 15 fine to kids in texas , for using , every time they take out their mobile phone in school .
immediate dismissal to bus drivers in new york , if seen with a mobile phone in a hand .
companies blocking access to im or to facebook .
behind issues of security and safety , which have always been the arguments for social control , in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who , in fact , has a right to self determine their attention , to decide , whether they should , or not , be isolated .
and they are actually trying to block , in a certain sense , this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy .
roger ebert : these are my words , but this is not my voice .
this is alex , the best computer voice i 've been able to find , which comes as standard equipment on every macintosh .
for most of my life , i never gave a second thought to my ability to speak .
it was like breathing .
in those days , i was living in a fool 's paradise .
after surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak , eat or drink , i was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me .
for several days now , we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at ted .
i used to be able to talk like that .
maybe i was n't as smart , but i was at least as talkative .
i want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself , and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one 's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away .
however , i 've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous .
so i 've decided to recruit some of my ted friends to read my words aloud for me .
i will start with my wife , chaz .
chaz ebert : it was chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak .
going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006 , i expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show , ' ebert and roeper at the movies . ' i had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation .
the doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw .
my tongue , larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- ce : i was optimistic , and all was right with the world .
the first surgery was a great success .
i saw myself in the mirror and i looked pretty good .
two weeks later , i was ready to return home .
i was using my ipod to play the leonard cohen song ' i 'm your man ' for my doctors and nurses .
suddenly , i had an episode of catastrophic bleeding .
my carotid artery had ruptured .
thank god i was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there .
chaz told me that if that song had n't played for so long , i might have already been in the car , on the way home , and would have died right there and then .
so thank you , leonard cohen , for saving my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there was a second surgery - which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart .
and then a third attempt , which also patched me back together pretty well , until it failed .
a doctor from brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture .
and before i left the hospital , after a year of being hospitalized , i had seven ruptures of my carotid artery .
there was no particular day when anyone told me i would never speak again ; it just sort of became obvious .
human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system .
we need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds .
therefore , the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air .
because i had lost my jaw , i could no longer form a seal , and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless .
dean ornish : at first for a long time , i wrote messages in notebooks .
then i tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice .
this was faster , and nobody had to try to read my handwriting .
i tried out various computer voices that were available online , and for several months i had a british accent , which chaz called sir lawrence . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it was the clearest i could find .
then apple released the alex voice , which was the best i 'd heard .
it knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark .
when it saw a period , it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air .
there are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices , and i 've experimented with them .
for me , they share a fundamental problem : they 're too slow .
when i find myself in a conversational situation , i need to type fast and to jump right in .
people do n't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase .
but what value do we place on the sound of our own voice ?
how does that affect who you are as a person ?
when people hear alex speaking my words , do they experience a disconnect ?
does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next ?
how did i feel not being able to speak ?
i felt , and i still feel , a lot of distance from the human mainstream .
i 've become uncomfortable when i 'm separated from my laptop .
even then , i 'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties .
so chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my tv show voice from a period of 30 years .
at first i was against it .
i thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer .
there was something comforting about a voice that was not my own .
but i decided then to just give it a try .
so we contacted a company in scotland that created personalized computer voices .
they 'd never made one from previously-recorded materials .
all of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth .
but they were willing to give it a try .
so i sent them many hours of recordings of my voice , including several audio commentary tracks that i 'd made for movies on dvds .
and it sounded like me , it really did .
there was a reason for that ; it was me .
but it was n't that simple .
the tapes from my tv show were n't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved - movie soundtracks , for example , or gene siskel arguing with me - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and my words often had a particular emphasis that did n't fit into a sentence well enough .
i 'll let you hear a sample of that voice .
these are a few of the comments i recorded for use when chaz and i appeared on the oprah winfrey program .
and here 's the voice we call roger jr .
or roger 2.0 .
roger 2.0 : oprah , i ca n't tell you how great it is to be back on your show .
we have been talking for a long time , and now here we are again .
this is the first version of my computer voice .
it still needs improvement , but at least it sounds like me and not like hal 9000 .
when i heard it the first time , it sent chills down my spine .
when i type anything , this voice will speak whatever i type .
when i read something , it will read in my voice .
i have typed these words in advance , as i did n't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing .
the voice was created by a company in scotland named cereproc .
it makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while i was commenting on " casablanca " and " citizen kane . "
this is the first voice they 've created for an individual .
there are several very good voices available for computers , but they all sound like somebody else , while this voice sounds like me .
i plan to use it on television , radio and the internet .
people who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems .
many blind people use them to read pages on the web to themselves .
but i 've got to say , in first grade , they said i talked too much , and now i still can .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- roger ebert : as you can hear , it sounds like me , but the words jump up and down .
the flow is n't natural .
the good people in scotland are still improving my voice , and i 'm optimistic about it .
but so far , the apple alex voice is the best one i 've heard .
i wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played alex .
he said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice .
a very large sample is needed .
john hunter : all my life i was a motormouth .
now i have spoken my last words , and i do n't even remember for sure what they were .
i feel like the hero of that harlan ellison story titled " i have no mouth and i must scream . "
on wednesday , david christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe .
for almost all of its millions and billions of years , there was no life on earth at all .
for almost all the years of life on earth , there was no intelligent life .
only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next , did civilization become possible .
in cosmological terms , that was about 10 minutes ago .
finally came mankind 's most advanced and mysterious tool , the computer .
that has mostly happened in my lifetime .
some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of urbana , the birthplace of hal 9000 .
when i heard the amazing talk by salman khan on wednesday , about the khan academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world , i had a flashback .
it was about 1960 .
as a local newspaper reporter still in high school , i was sent over to the computer lab of the university of illinois to interview the creators of something called plato .
the initials stood for programmed logic for automated teaching operations .
this was a computer-assisted instruction system , which in those days ran on a computer named illiac .
the programmers said it could assist students in their learning .
i doubt , on that day 50 years ago , they even dreamed of what salman khan has accomplished .
but that 's not the point .
the point is plato was only 50 years ago , an instant in time .
it continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers , until only five years ago .
i have learned from wikipedia that , starting with that humble beginning , plato established forums , message boards , online testing , email , chat rooms , picture languages , instant messaging , remote screen sharing and multiple-player games .
since the first web browser was also developed in urbana , it appears that my hometown in downstate illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual , online universe we occupy today .
but i 'm not here from the chamber of commerce .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm here as a man who wants to communicate .
all of this has happened in my lifetime .
i started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first atech systems was installed at the chicago sun-times .
i was in line at radio shack to buy one of the first model 100 's .
and when i told the people in the press room at the academy awards that they 'd better install some phone lines for internet connections , they did n't know what i was talking about .
when i bought my first desktop , it was a dec rainbow .
does anybody remember that ? "
-lrb- applause -rrb- " the sun times sent me to the cannes film festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the porteram telebubble .
i joined compuserve when it had fewer numbers than i currently have followers on twitter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ce : all of this has happened in the blink of an eye .
it is unimaginable what will happen next .
it makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history .
indeed , i am lucky to live in history at all , because without intelligence and memory there is no history .
for billions of years , the universe evolved completely without notice .
now we live in the age of the internet , which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness .
and because of it , i can communicate as well as i ever could .
we are born into a box of time and space .
we use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others .
for me , the internet began as a useful tool and now has become something i rely on for my actual daily existence .
i can not speak ; i can only type so fast .
computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated , but with my computer , i can communicate more widely than ever before .
i feel as if my blog , my email , twitter and facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation .
they are n't an improvement , but they 're the best i can do .
they give me a way to speak .
not everybody has the patience of my wife , chaz .
but online , everybody speaks at the same speed .
this whole adventure has been a learning experience .
every time there was a surgery that failed , i was left with a little less flesh and bone .
now i have no jaw left at all .
while harvesting tissue from both my shoulders , the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily .
ironic that my legs are fine , and it 's my shoulders that slow up my walk .
when you see me today , i look like the phantom of the opera .
but no you do n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it is human nature to look at someone like me and assume i have lost some of my marbles .
people - -lrb- applause -rrb- people talk loudly - i 'm so sorry .
excuse me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- people talk loudly and slowly to me .
sometimes they assume i am deaf .
there are people who do n't want to make eye contact .
believe me , he did n't mean this as - anyway , let me just read it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you should never let your wife read something like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is human nature to look away from illness .
we do n't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality .
that 's why writing on the internet has become a lifesaver for me .
my ability to think and write have not been affected .
and on the web , my real voice finds expression .
i have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way .
one of my twitter friends can type only with his toes .
one of the funniest blogs on the web is written by a friend of mine named smartass cripple .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- google him and he will make you laugh .
all of these people are saying , in one way or another , that what you see is not all you get .
so i have not come here to complain .
i have much to make me happy and relieved .
i seem , for the time being , to be cancer-free .
i am writing as well as ever .
i am productive .
if i were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago , i would be as isolated as a hermit .
i would be trapped inside my head .
because of the rush of human knowledge , because of the digital revolution , i have a voice , and i do not need to scream .
re : wait . i have one more thing to add .
a guy goes into a psychiatrist .
the psychiatrist says , " you 're crazy . "
the guy says , " i want a second opinion . "
the psychiatrist says , " all right , you 're ugly . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you all know the test for artificial intelligence - the turing test .
a human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer .
if the judge ca n't tell the machine apart from the human , the machine has passed the test .
i now propose a test for computer voices - the ebert test .
if a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as henny youngman , then that 's the voice i want .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's just get started here .
okay , just a moment .
-lrb- whirring -rrb- all right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , sorry .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- beatboxing -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the key question is , " when are we going to get fusion ? "
it 's really been a long time since we 've known about fusion .
we 've known about fusion since 1920 , when sir arthur stanley eddington and the british association for the advancement of science conjectured that that 's why the sun shines .
i 've always been very worried about resource .
i do n't know about you , but when my mother gave me food , i always sorted the ones i disliked from the ones i liked .
and i ate the disliked ones first , because the ones you like , you want to save .
and as a child you 're always worried about resource .
and once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world 's resources , i got very upset , about as upset as i did when i realized that the earth will only last about five billion years before it 's swallowed by the sun .
big events in my life , a strange child .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- energy , at the moment , is dominated by resource .
the countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them .
coal-powered industrial revolution in this country - oil , gas , sorry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- gas , i 'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when mister putin turns off the gas tap , because my budget goes up .
we 're really dominated now by those things that we 're using up faster and faster and faster .
and as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the third world , in the developing world , we 're using energy faster and faster .
and those resources are going away .
and the way we 'll make energy in the future is not from resource , it 's really from knowledge .
if you look 50 years into the future , the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three , with some wind , with some other things , but these are going to be the base load energy drivers .
solar can do it , and we certainly have to develop solar .
but we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world .
fission .
our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations .
they 're going to put in six new nuclear power stations , and probably more after that .
china is building nuclear power stations . everybody is .
because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy .
but if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is , the perfect energy source is one that does n't take up much space , has a virtually inexhaustible supply , is safe , does n't put any carbon into the atmosphere , does n't leave any long-lived radioactive waste : it 's fusion .
but there is a catch . of course there is always a catch in these cases .
fusion is very hard to do .
we 've been trying for 50 years .
okay . what is fusion ? here comes the nuclear physics .
and sorry about that , but this is what turns me on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was a strange child .
nuclear energy comes for a simple reason .
the most stable nucleus is iron , right in the middle of the periodic table .
it 's a medium-sized nucleus .
and you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy .
so , uranium , which is very big , wants to split .
but small atoms want to join together , small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron .
and you can get energy out this way .
and indeed that 's exactly what stars do .
in the middle of stars , you 're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon , to make oxygen , all the things that you 're made of are made in the middle of stars .
but it 's a hard process to do because , as you know , the middle of a star is quite hot , almost by definition .
and there is one reaction that 's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do .
it 's between two isotopes of hydrogen , two kinds of hydrogen : deuterium , which is heavy hydrogen , which you can get from seawater , and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen .
these two nuclei , when they 're far apart , are charged .
and you push them together and they repel .
but when you get them close enough , something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together .
so , most of the time they repel .
you get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together .
for a moment they become helium 5 , because they 've got five particles inside them .
so , that 's that process there . deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5 .
helium splits out , and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out .
if you can get something to about 150 million degrees , things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration , this will happen , and it will release energy .
and that energy is what powers fusion .
and it 's this reaction that we want to do .
there is one trickiness about this reaction .
well , there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees , but there is a trickiness about the reaction yet .
it 's pretty hot .
the trickiness about the reaction is that tritium does n't exist in nature .
you have to make it from something else .
and you make if from lithium . that reaction at the bottom , that 's lithium 6 , plus a neutron , will give you more helium , plus tritium .
and that 's the way you make your tritium .
but fortunately , if you can do this fusion reaction , you 've got a neutron , so you can make that happen .
now , why the hell would we bother to do this ?
this is basically why we would bother to do it .
if you just plot how much fuel we 've got left , in units of present world consumption .
and as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil - the blue line , by the way , is the lowest estimate of existing resources .
and the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate .
and as you go across there you will see that we 've got a few tens of years , and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left .
and god knows we do n't really want to burn all of it , because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air .
and then we get to uranium .
and with current reactor technology we really do n't have very much uranium .
and we will have to extract uranium from sea water , which is the yellow line , to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us .
this is a bit shocking , because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet kyoto , and do all those kind of things .
to go any further you would have to have breeder technology .
and breeder technology is fast breeders . and that 's pretty dangerous .
the big thing , on the right , is the lithium we have in the world .
and lithium is in sea water . that 's the yellow line .
and we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water .
everybody can get it . that 's why we want to do fusion .
is it cost-competitive ?
we make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant .
and we get within about the same price as current electricity .
so , how would we make it ?
we have to hold something at 150 million degrees .
and , in fact , we 've done this .
we hold it with a magnetic field .
and inside it , right in the middle of this toroidal shape , doughnut shape , right in the middle is 150 million degrees .
it boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees .
and in fact we can make fusion happen .
and just down the road , this is jet .
it 's the only machine in the world that 's actually done fusion .
when people say fusion is 30 years away , and always will be , i say , " yeah , but we 've actually done it . " right ?
we can do fusion . in the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997 .
and in 2013 we 're going to fire it up again and break all those records .
but that 's not really fusion power . that 's just making some fusion happen .
we 've got to take that , we 've got to make that into a fusion reactor .
because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the earth .
this is the device we 're building now .
it gets very expensive to do this research .
it turns out you ca n't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense . right ?
you ca n't . you have to do it in a very big device .
more than half the world 's population is involved in building this device in southern france , which is a nice place to put an experiment .
seven nations are involved in building this .
it 's going to cost us 10 billion . and we 'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power .
but that 's not electricity yet .
we have to get to this .
we have to get to a power plant .
we have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology .
and i 'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is .
but at the moment , all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s .
i wish this were different . we really need it now .
we 're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country .
so 2030 looks like an infinity away .
but we ca n't abandon it now ; we have to push forward , get fusion to happen .
i wish we had more money , i wish we had more resources .
but this is what we 're aiming at , sometime in the 2030s - real electric power from fusion . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's begin with a story .
once upon a time - well actually less than two years ago - in a kingdom not so very far away , there was a man who traveled many miles to come to work at the jewel in the kingdom 's crown - an internationally famous company .
let 's call it island networks .
now this kingdom had many resources and mighty ambitions , but the one thing it lacked was people .
and so it invited workers from around the world to come and help it build the nation .
but in order to enter and to stay these migrants had to pass a few tests .
and so it was , our man presented himself to authorities in the kingdom , looking forward to settling into his new life .
but then something unexpected happened .
the medical personnel who took blood samples from the man never actually told him what they were testing for .
he was n't offered counseling before or after the test , which is best medical practice .
he was never informed of the results of the test .
and yet , a couple of weeks later , he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam , including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell .
he was released , but then a day or two later , he was taken to the airport and he was deported .
what on earth did this man do to merit this treatment ?
what was his terrible crime ?
he was infected with hiv .
now the kingdom is one of about 50 countries that imposes restrictions on the entry or stay of people living with hiv .
the kingdom argues that its laws allow it to detain or deport foreigners who pose a risk to the economy or the security or the public health or the morals of the state .
but these laws , when applied to people living with hiv , to which these countries are signatories .
but you know what ?
matters of principle aside , practically speaking , these laws drive hiv underground .
people are less likely to come forth to be tested or treated or to disclose their condition , none of which helps these individuals or the communities these laws purport to protect .
today we can prevent the transmission of hiv .
and with treatment , it is a manageable condition .
we are very far from the days when the only practical response to dread disease was to have banished the afflicted - like this , " the exile of the leper . "
so you tell me why , in our age of science , we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition .
time for a quick show of hands .
who here has been touched by hiv - either because you yourself have the virus or you have a family member or a friend or a colleague who is living with hiv ?
hands up .
wow . wow .
that 's a significant number of us .
you know better than anyone that hiv brings out the best and the worst in humanity .
and the laws reflect these attitudes .
i 'm not just talking about laws on the books , but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts .
and i 'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with hiv , but people who are at greatest risk of infection - people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners .
and in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable .
now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature .
these laws treat people touched by hiv with compassion and acceptance .
these laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence .
these laws ensure that people living with hiv and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment .
unfortunately , these good laws of really bad law - law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation , laws which specifically punish people living with hiv or those at greatest risk .
these laws fly in the face of science , and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion .
but you know what ? you do n't have to take my word for it .
we 're going to hear from two people who are on the sharp end of the law .
the first is nick rhoades . he 's an american .
and he was convicted under the u.s. state of iowa 's law on hiv transmission and exposure - neither of which offense he actually committed .
-lrb- video -rrb- nick rhoades : if something is against the law then that is telling society that is unacceptable , that 's bad behavior .
and i think the severity of that punishment tells you how bad you are as a person .
you 're a class b felon , lifetime sex offender .
you are a very , very , very bad person .
and you did a very , very , very bad thing .
and so that 's just programmed into you .
and you go through the correctional system and everyone 's telling you the same thing .
and you 're just like , i 'm a very bad person .
shereen el-feki : it 's not just a question of unfair or ineffective laws .
some countries have good laws , laws which could stem the tide of hiv .
the problem is that these laws are flouted .
because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with hiv or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens .
and this is exactly what happened to helma and dongo from namibia .
-lrb- video -rrb- hilma : i found out when i went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up .
the nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for hiv that day .
i took the test and the result showed i was positive .
that 's the day i found out .
the nurse said to me , " why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are hiv positive ?
why are you pregnant when you are living positive ? "
i am sure now that is the reason they sterilized me .
because i am hiv positive .
they did n't give the forms to me or explain what was in the form .
the nurse just came with it already marked where i had to sign .
and with the labor pain , i did n't have the strength to ask them to read it to me .
i just signed .
se : hilma and nick and our man in the kingdom are among the 34 million people living with hiv according to recent estimates .
they 're the lucky ones because they 're still alive .
according to those same estimates , in 2010 1.8 million people died of aids related causes .
these are terrible and tragic figures .
but if we look a little more broadly into the statistics , we actually see some reason for hope .
looking globally , the number of new infections of hiv is declining .
and looking globally as well , deaths are also starting to fall .
there are many reasons for these positive developments , but one of the most remarkable is in the increase in the number of people around the world on anti-retroviral therapy , the medicines they need to keep their hiv in check .
now there are still many problems .
only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it .
in some parts of the world - like here in the middle east and north africa - new infections are rising and so are deaths .
and the money , the money we need for the global response to hiv , that is shrinking .
but for the first time in three decades into this epidemic we have a real chance to come to grips with hiv .
but in order to do that we need to tackle an epidemic of really bad law .
it 's for this reason that the global commission on hiv and the law , of which i 'm a member , was established by the agencies of the united nations - to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with hiv and those at greatest risk , and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally , not an enemy , of the global response to hiv .
let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference .
people who inject drugs are one of those groups i mentioned .
they 're at high risk of hiv through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors .
in fact , one in every 10 new infections of hiv is among people who inject drugs .
now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country .
but some countries take a harder line on this than others .
in thailand people who use drugs , or are merely suspected of using drugs , are placed in detention centers , like the one you see here , where they are supposed to clean up .
there is absolutely no evidence cures their drug dependence .
there is , however , ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of hiv and other infections .
we know how to reduce hiv transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs .
it 's called harm reduction , and it involves , among other things , providing clean needles and syringes , offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence .
it involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce hiv transmission , and also providing hiv testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected .
where the legal environment allows for harm reduction the results are striking .
australia and switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their hiv epidemics , and they have a very low rate of hiv among injecting drug users .
the u.s. and malaysia came to harm reduction a little later , and they have higher rates of hiv in these populations .
thailand and russia , however , have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use .
and hey , surprise , very high rates of hiv among people who are injecting drugs .
at the global commission we have studied the evidence , and we 've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries .
and the trend ? well the trend is clear .
where you criminalize people living with hiv or those at greatest risk , you fuel the epidemic .
now coming up with a vaccine for hiv or a cure for aids - now that 's rocket science .
but changing the law is n't .
and in fact , a number of countries are starting to make progress on a number of points .
to begin , countries need to review their legislation as it touches hiv and vulnerable groups .
on the back of those reviews , governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with hiv or those at greatest risk .
repealing a law is n't easy , and it 's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex .
but there 's plenty you can do while that process is underway .
one of the key points is to reform the police so that they have better practices on the ground .
so for example , outreach workers who are distributing condoms to vulnerable populations are not themselves subject to police harassment or abuse or arbitrary arrest .
we can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice .
we can retool prisons so that hiv prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners .
the key to all this is reinforcing civil society .
because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights .
but awareness needs action .
and so we need to ensure that these people who are living with hiv or at greatest risk of hiv have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts .
and also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law , which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma .
for many of us here hiv is not an abstract threat .
it hits very close to home .
the law , on the other hand , can seem remote , arcane , the stuff of specialists , but it is n't .
because for those of us who live in democracies , or in aspiring democracies , the law begins with us .
laws that treat people living with hiv or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves : as equals .
if we are going to stop the spread of hiv in our lifetime , then that is the change we need to spread .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everything is interconnected .
as a shinnecock indian , i was raised to know this .
we are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of long island near the town of southampton in new york .
when i was a little girl , my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day .
there were no clouds in the sky .
and after a while i began to perspire .
and he pointed up to the sky , and he said , " look , do you see that ?
that 's part of you up there .
that 's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals . "
in my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life , i started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said , " mom , you should do that . "
and so three days later , driving very fast , i found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell , capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes , although only two percent actually do .
these clouds can grow so big , up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere .
they can grow so big , blocking all daylight , making it very dark and ominous standing under them .
storm chasing is a very tactile experience .
there 's a warm , moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth , the wheat , the grass , the charged particles .
and then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming , the greens and the turquoise blues .
i 've learned to respect the lightning .
my hair used to be straight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm just kidding .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what really excites me about these storms is their movement , the way they swirl and spin and undulate , with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds .
they become lovely monsters .
when i 'm photographing them , i can not help but remember my grandfather 's lesson .
as i stand under them , i see not just a cloud , but understand that what i have the privilege to witness is the same forces , the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy , our solar system , our sun and even this very planet .
all my relations . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was listed on the online biography that said i was a design missionary .
that 's a bit lofty ; i 'm really more of something like a street walker .
i spend a lot of time in urban areas looking for design , and studying design in the public sector .
i take about 5,000 photographs a year , and i thought that i would edit from these , and try to come up with some images that might be appropriate and interesting to you .
and i used three criteria : the first was , i thought i 'd talk about real design within reach , design that 's free , not design not quite within reach , as we 're fondly known by our competition and competitors , but stuff that you can find on the streets , stuff that was free , stuff that was available to all people , and stuff that probably contains some other important messages .
i 'll use these sidewalks in rio as an example .
a very common public design done in the ' 50s .
it 's got a nice kind of flowing , organic form , very consistent with the brazilian culture - i think good design adds to culture .
wholly inconsistent with san francisco or new york .
but i think these are my sort of information highways : i live in much more of an analog world , where pedestrian traffic and interaction and diversity exchange , and where i think the simple things under our feet have a great amount of meaning to us .
how did i get started in this business ?
i was a ceramic designer for about 10 years , and just loved utilitarian form - simple things that we use every day , little compositions of color and surface on form .
this led me to starting a company called design within reach , a company dealing with simple forms , making good designers available to us , and also selling the personalities and character of the designers as well , and it seems to have worked .
a couple of years into the process , i spent a lot of time in europe traveling around , looking for design .
and i had a bit of a wake-up call in amsterdam : i was there going into the design stores , and mixing with our crowd of designers , and i recognized that a whole lot of stuff pretty much looked the same , and the effect of globalization has had that in our community also .
we know a lot about what 's going on with design around the world , and it 's getting increasingly more difficult to find design that reflects a unique culture .
i was walking around on the streets of amsterdam and i recognized , you know , the big story from amsterdam is n't what 's in the design stores , it 's what 's out on the streets , and maybe it 's self-explanatory , but a city that has n't been taken over by modernism , that 's preserved its kind of architecture and character , and where the bicycle plays an important part of the way in which people get around and where pedestrian rights are protected .
and i write a newsletter that goes out every week , and i wrote an article about this , and it got such enormous response that i realized that design , that common design , that 's in the public area means a lot to people , and establishes kind of a groundwork and a dialog .
i then kind of thought about the other cities in europe where i spend a lot of time looking for design , like basel , where vitra is located , or in northern italy - all cities where there are a whole lot of bicycles , and where pedestrian areas - and i came to the conclusion that perhaps there was something about these important design centers that dealt with bicycles and foot traffic , and i 'm sure the skeptic eye would say , no , the correlation there is that there are universities and schools where people ca n't afford cars , but it did seem that in many of these areas
pedestrian traffic was protected .
you would n't look at this and call this a designer bike : a designer bike is made of titanium or molybdenum .
but i began looking at design in a place like amsterdam and recognized , you know , the first job of design is to serve a social purpose .
and so i look at this bike as not being a designer bike , but being a very good example of design .
and since that time in amsterdam , i spent an increasing amount of time in the cities , looking at design for common evidence of design that really is n't under so much of a designer 's signature .
i was in buenos aires very recently , and i went to see this bridge by santiago calatrava .
he 's a spanish architect and designer .
and the tourist brochures pointed me in the direction of this bridge - i love bridges , metaphorically and symbolically and structurally - and it was a bit of a disappointment , because of the sludge from the river was encrusted on it ; it really was n't in use .
and i recognized that oftentimes design , when you 're set up to see design , but there were lots of other things going on in this area : it was a kind of construction zone ; a lot of buildings were going up .
and , approaching a building from a distance , you do n't see too much ; you get a little closer , and you arrive at a nice little composition that might remind you of a mondrian or a diebenkorn or something .
but to me it was an example of industrial materials with a little bit of colors and animation and a nice little still life - kind of unintended piece of design .
and going a little closer , you get a different perspective .
i find these little vignettes , these little accidental pieces of design , to be refreshing .
they give me , i do n't know , a sense of correctness in the world and some visual delight in the knowledge that the building will probably never look as good as this simple industrial scaffolding that is there to serve .
down the road , there was another building , a nice visual structure : horizontal , vertical elements , little decorative lines going across , these magenta squiggles , the workmen being reduced to decorative elements , just a nice , kind of , breakup of the urban place .
and , you know , that no longer exists .
you 've captured it for a moment , and finding this little still life 's like listening to little songs or something : it gives me an enormous amount of pleasure .
antoine predock designed a wonderful ball stadium in san diego called petco park .
a terrific use of local materials , but inside you could find some interior compositions .
some people go to baseball stadiums to look at games ; i go and see design relationships .
just a wonderful kind of breakup of architecture , and the way that the trees form vertical elements .
red is a color in the landscape that is often on stop signs .
it takes your attention ; it has a great amount of emotion ; it stares back at you the way that a figure might .
just a piece of barrier tape construction stuff in italy .
construction site in new york : red having this kind of emotional power that 's almost an equivalent with the way in which - cuteness of puppies and such .
side street in italy .
red drew me into this little composition , optimistic to me in the sense that maybe the public service 's mailbox , door service , plumbing .
it looks as if these different public services work together to create some nice little compositions .
in italy , you know , almost everything , kind of , looks good .
simple menus put on a board , achieving , kind of , the sort of balance .
but i 'm convinced that it 's because you 're walking around the streets and seeing things .
red can be comical : it can draw your attention to the poor little personality of the little fire hydrant suffering from bad civic planning in havana .
color can animate simple blocks , simple materials : walking in new york , i 'll stop .
i do n't always know why i take photographs of things .
a nice visual composition of symmetry .
curves against sharp things .
it 's a comment on the way in which we deal with public seating in the city of new york .
i 've come across some other just , kind of , curious relationships of bollards on the street that have different interpretations , but - these things amuse me .
sometimes a trash can - this is just in the street in san francisco - a trash can that 's been left there for 18 months creates a nice 45-degree angle against these other relationships , and turns a common parking spot into a nice little piece of sculpture .
so , there 's this sort of silent hand of design at work that i see in places that i go .
havana is a wonderful area .
it 's quite free of commercial clutter : you do n't see our logos and brands and names , and therefore you 're alert to things physically .
and this is a great protection of a pedestrian zone , and the repurposing of some colonial cannons to do that .
and cuba needs to be far more resourceful , because of the blockades and things , but a really wonderful playground .
i 've often wondered why italy is really a leader in modern design .
in our area , in furnishings , they 're sort of way at the top .
the dutch are good also , but the italians are good .
and i came across this little street in venice , where the communist headquarters were sharing a wall with this catholic shrine .
and i realized that , you know , italy is a place where they can accept these different ideologies and deal with diversity and not have the problem , or they can choose to ignore them , but these - you do n't have warring factions , and i think that maybe the tolerance of the absurdity which has made italy so innovative and so tolerant .
the past and the present work quite well together in italy also , and i think that it 's recognizable there , and has an important effect on culture , because their public spaces are protected , their sidewalks are protected , and you 're actually able to confront these things physically , and i think this helps people get over their fear of modernism and other such things .
a change might be a typical street corner in san francisco .
and i use this - this is , sort of , what i consider to be urban spam .
i notice this stuff because i walk a lot , but here , private industry is really kind of making a mess of the public sector .
and as i look at it , i sort of say , you know , the publications that report on problems in the urban area also contribute to it , and it 's just my call to say to all of us , public policy wo n't change this at all ; private industry has to work to take things like this seriously .
the extreme might be in italy where , again , there 's kind of some type of control over what 's happening in the environment is very evident , even in the way that they sell and distribute periodicals .
i walk to work every day or ride my scooter , and i come down and park in this little spot .
and i came down one day , and all the bikes were red .
now , this is not going to impress you guys who photoshop , and can do stuff , but this was an actual moment when i got off my bike , and i looked and i thought , it 's as if all of my biker brethren had kind of gotten together and conspired to make a little statement .
and it reminded me that - to keep in the present , to look out for these kinds of things .
it gave me possibilities for wonder - if maybe it 's a yellow day in san francisco , and we could all agree , and create some installations .
but it also reminded me of the power of pattern and repetition to make an effect in our mind .
and i do n't know if there 's a stronger kind of effect than pattern and the way it unites kind of disparate elements .
i was at the art show in miami in december , and spent a couple of hours looking at fine art , and amazed at the prices of art and how expensive it is , but having a great time looking at it .
and i came outside , and the valets for this car service had created , you know , quite a nice little collage of these car keys , and my closest equivalent were a group of prayer tags that i had seen in tokyo .
and i thought that if pattern can unite these disparate elements , it can do just about anything .
i do n't have very many shots of people , because they kind of get in the way of studying pure form .
i was in a small restaurant in spain , having lunch - one of those nice days where you had the place kind of to yourself , and you have a glass of wine , and enjoying the local area and the culture and the food and the quiet , and feeling very lucky , and a bus load of tourists arrived , emptied out , filled up the restaurant .
in a very short period of time , completely changed the atmosphere and character with loud voices and large bodies and such , and we had to get up and leave ; it was just that uncomfortable .
and at that moment , the sun came out , and through this perforated screen , a pattern was cast over these bodies and they kind of faded into the rear , and we left the restaurant kind of feeling o.k. about stuff .
and i do think pattern has the capability of eradicating some of the most evil forces of society , such as bad form in restaurants , but quite seriously , it was a statement to me that one thing that you do , sort of , see is the aggressive nature of the industrial world has produced - kind of , large masses of things , and when you - in monoculture , and i think the preservation of diversity in culture is something that 's important to us .
the last shots that i have deal with - coming back to this theme of sidewalks , and i wanted to say something here about - i 'm , kind of , optimistic , you know .
post-second world war , the influence of the automobile has really been devastating in a lot of our cities .
a lot of urban areas have been converted into parking lots in a sort of indiscriminate use .
a lot of the planning departments became subordinated to the transportation department . it 's as easy to rag on cars as it is on wal-mart ; i 'm not going to do that .
but they 're real examples in urbanization and the change that 's occurred in the last number of years , and the heightened sensitivity to the importance of our urban environments as cultural centers .
i think that they are , that the statements that we make in this public sector are our contributions to a larger whole .
cities are the place where we 're most likely to encounter diversity and to mix with other people .
we go there for stimulation in art and all those other things .
but i think people have recognized the sanctity of our urban areas .
a place like chicago has really reached kind of a level of international stature .
the u.s. is actually becoming a bit of a leader in kind of enlightened urban planning and renewal , and i want to single out a place like chicago , where i look at some guy like mayor daley as a bit of a design hero for being able to work through the political processes and all that to improve an area .
you would expect a city like this to have upgraded flower boxes on michigan avenue where wealthy people shop , but if you actually go along the street you find the flower boxes change from street to street : there 's actual diversity in the plants .
and the idea that a city group can maintain different types of foliage is really quite exceptional .
there are common elements of this that you 'll see throughout chicago , and then there are your big-d design statements : the pritzker pavilion done by frank gehry .
my measure of this as being an important bit of design is not so much the way that it looks , but the fact that it performs a very important social function .
there are a lot of free concerts , for example , that go on in this area ; it has a phenomenal acoustic system .
but the commitment that the city has made to the public area is significant , and almost an international model .
i work on the mayor 's council in san francisco , on the international design council for mayors , and chicago is looked at as the pinnacle , and i really would like to salute mayor daley and the folks there .
i thought that i should include at least one shot of technology for you guys .
this is also in millennium park in chicago , where the spanish artist-designer plensa has created , kind of , a digital readout in this park that reflects back the characters and personalities of the people in this area .
and it 's a welcoming area , i think , inclusive of diversity , reflective of diversity , and i think this marriage of both technology and art in the public sector is an area where the u.s.
can really take a leadership role , and chicago is one example .
thank you very much .
at the break , i was asked by several people about my comments about the aging debate .
and this will be my only comment on it .
and that is , i understand that optimists greatly outlive pessimists .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm going to tell you about in my 18 minutes is how we 're about to switch from reading the genetic code to the first stages of beginning to write the code ourselves .
it 's only 10 years ago this month when we published the first sequence of a free-living organism , that of haemophilus influenzae .
that took a genome project from 13 years down to four months .
we can now do that same genome project in the order of two to eight hours .
so in the last decade , a large number of genomes have been added : most human pathogens , a couple of plants , several insects and several mammals , including the human genome .
genomics at this stage of the thinking from a little over 10 years ago was , by the end of this year , we might have between three and five genomes sequenced ; it 's on the order of several hundred .
we just got a grant from the gordon and betty moore foundation to sequence 130 genomes this year , as a side project from environmental organisms .
so the rate of reading the genetic code has changed .
but as we look , what 's out there , we 've barely scratched the surface on what is available on this planet .
most people do n't realize it , because they 're invisible , but microbes make up about a half of the earth 's biomass , whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass .
and maybe it 's something that people in oxford do n't do very often , but if you ever make it to the sea , and you swallow a mouthful of seawater , keep in mind that each milliliter has about a million bacteria and on the order of 10 million viruses .
less than 5,000 microbial species and so we decided to do something about it .
and we started the sorcerer ii expedition , where we were , as with great oceanographic expeditions , trying to sample the ocean every 200 miles .
we started in bermuda for our test project , then moved up to halifax , working down the u.s. east coast , the caribbean sea , the panama canal , through to the galapagos , then across the pacific , and we 're in the process now of working our way across the indian ocean .
it 's very tough duty ; we 're doing this on a sailing vessel , in part to help excite young people about going into science .
the experiments are incredibly simple .
we just take seawater and we filter it , and we collect different size organisms on different filters , and then take their dna back to our lab in rockville , where we can sequence a hundred million letters of the genetic code every 24 hours .
and with doing this , we 've made some amazing discoveries .
for example , it was thought that the visual pigments that are in our eyes - there was only one or two organisms in the environment that had these same pigments .
it turns out , almost every species in the upper parts of the ocean in warm parts of the world have these same photoreceptors , and use sunlight as the source of their energy and communication .
from one site , from one barrel of seawater , we discovered 1.3 million new genes and as many as 50,000 new species .
we 've extended this to the air now with a grant from the sloan foundation .
we 're measuring how many viruses and bacteria all of us are breathing in and out every day , particularly on airplanes or closed auditoriums .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we filter through some simple apparatuses ; we collect on the order of a billion microbes from just a day filtering on top of a building in new york city .
and we 're in the process of sequencing all that at the present time .
just on the data collection side , just where we are through the galapagos , we 're finding that almost every 200 miles , we see tremendous diversity in the samples in the ocean .
some of these make logical sense , in terms of different temperature gradients .
so this is a satellite photograph based on temperatures - red being warm , blue being cold - and we found there 's a tremendous difference between the warm water samples and the cold water samples , in terms of abundant species .
the other thing that surprised us quite a bit is these photoreceptors detect different wavelengths of light , and we can predict that based on their amino acid sequence .
and these vary tremendously from region to region .
maybe not surprisingly , in the deep ocean , where it 's mostly blue , the photoreceptors tend to see blue light .
when there 's a lot of chlorophyll around , they see a lot of green light .
but they vary even more , possibly moving towards infrared and ultraviolet in the extremes .
just to try and get an assessment of what our gene repertoire was , we assembled all the data - including all of ours thus far from the expedition , which represents more than half of all the gene data on the planet - and it totaled around 29 million genes .
and we tried to put these into gene families to see what these discoveries are : are we just discovering new members of known families , or are we discovering new families ?
and it turns out we have about 50,000 major gene families , but every new sample we take in the environment adds in a linear fashion to these new families .
so we 're at the earliest stages of discovery about basic genes , components and life on this planet .
when we look at the so-called evolutionary tree , we 're up on the upper right-hand corner with the animals .
of those roughly 29 million genes , we only have around 24,000 in our genome .
and if you take all animals together , we probably share less than 30,000 and probably maybe a dozen or more thousand different gene families .
i view that these genes are now not only the design components of evolution .
and we think in a gene-centric view - maybe going back to richard dawkins ' ideas - than in a genome-centric view , which are different constructs of these gene components .
synthetic dna , the ability to synthesize dna , has changed at sort of the same pace that dna sequencing has over the last decade or two , and is getting very rapid and very cheap .
our first thought about synthetic genomics came when we sequenced the second genome back in 1995 , and that from mycoplasma genitalium .
and we have really nice t-shirts that say , you know , " i heart my genitalium . "
this is actually just a microorganism .
but it has roughly 500 genes .
haemophilus had 1,800 genes .
and we simply asked the question , if one species needs 800 , another 500 , is there a smaller set of genes that might comprise a minimal operating system ?
so we started doing transposon mutagenesis .
transposons are just small pieces of dna that randomly insert in the genetic code .
and if they insert in the middle of the gene , they disrupt its function .
so we made a map of all the genes that could take transposon insertions and we called those " non-essential genes . "
but it turns out the environment is very critical for this , and you can only define an essential or non-essential gene based on exactly what 's in the environment .
we also tried to take a more directly intellectual approach with the genomes of 13 related organisms , and we tried to compare all of those , to see what they had in common .
and we got these overlapping circles . and we found only 173 genes common to all 13 organisms .
the pool expanded a little bit if we ignored one intracellular parasite ; it expanded even more when we looked at core sets of genes of around 310 or so .
so we think that we can expand or contract genomes , depending on your point of view here , to maybe 300 to 400 genes from the minimal of 500 .
the only way to prove these ideas was to construct an artificial chromosome with those genes in them , and we had to do this in a cassette-based fashion .
we found that synthesizing accurate dna in large pieces was extremely difficult .
ham smith and clyde hutchison , my colleagues on this , developed an exciting new method that allowed us to synthesize a 5,000-base pair virus in only a two-week period that was 100 percent accurate , in terms of its sequence and its biology .
it was a quite exciting experiment - when we just took the synthetic piece of dna , injected it in the bacteria and all of a sudden , that dna started driving the production of the virus particles that turned around and then killed the bacteria .
this was not the first synthetic virus - a polio virus had been made a year before - but it was only one ten-thousandth as active and it took three years to do .
this is a cartoon of the structure of phi x 174 .
this is a case where the software now builds its own hardware , and that 's the notions that we have with biology .
people immediately jump to concerns about biological warfare , and i had recent testimony before a senate committee , and a special committee the u.s. government has set up to review this area .
and i think it 's important to keep reality in mind , versus what happens with people 's imaginations .
basically , any virus that 's been sequenced today - that genome can be made .
and people immediately freak out about things about ebola or smallpox , but the dna from this organism is not infective .
so even if somebody made the smallpox genome , that dna itself would not cause infections .
the real concern that security departments have is designer viruses .
and there 's only two countries , the u.s. and the former soviet union , that had major efforts on trying to create biological warfare agents .
if that research is truly discontinued , there should be very little activity on the know-how to make designer viruses in the future .
i think single-cell organisms are possible within two years .
and possibly eukaryotic cells , those that we have , are possible within a decade .
so we 're now making several dozen different constructs , because we can vary the cassettes and the genes that go into this artificial chromosome .
the key is , how do you put all of the others ?
we start with these fragments , and then we have a homologous recombination system that reassembles those into a chromosome .
this is derived from an organism , deinococcus radiodurans , that can take three million rads of radiation and not be killed .
it reassembles its genome after this radiation burst in about 12 to 24 hours , after its chromosomes are literally blown apart .
this organism is ubiquitous on the planet , and exists perhaps now in outer space due to all our travel there .
this is a glass beaker after about half a million rads of radiation .
the glass started to burn and crack , while the microbes sitting in the bottom just got happier and happier .
here 's an actual picture of what happens : the top of this shows the genome after 1.7 million rads of radiation .
the chromosome is literally blown apart .
and here 's that same dna automatically reassembled 24 hours later .
it 's truly stunning that these organisms can do that , and we probably have thousands , if not tens of thousands , of different species on this planet that are capable of doing that .
after these genomes are synthesized , the first step is just transplanting them into a cell without a genome .
so we think synthetic cells are going to have tremendous potential , not only for understanding the basis of biology but for hopefully environmental and society issues .
for example , from the third organism we sequenced , methanococcus jannaschii - it lives in boiling water temperatures ; its energy source is hydrogen and all its carbon comes from co2 it captures back from the environment .
so we know lots of different pathways , thousands of different organisms now that live off of co2 , and can capture that back .
so instead of using carbon from oil for synthetic processes , we have the chance of using carbon and capturing it back from the atmosphere , converting that into biopolymers or other products .
we have one organism that lives off of carbon monoxide , and we use as a reducing power to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen .
also , there 's numerous pathways that can be engineered metabolizing methane .
and dupont has a major program with statoil in norway to capture and convert the methane from the gas fields there into useful products .
within a short while , i think there 's going to be a new field called " combinatorial genomics , " because with these new synthesis capabilities , these vast gene array repertoires and the homologous recombination , we think we can design a robot to make maybe a million different chromosomes a day .
and therefore , as with all biology , you get selection through screening , whether you 're screening for hydrogen production , or chemical production , or just viability .
to understand the role of these genes is going to be well within reach .
we 're trying to modify photosynthesis to produce hydrogen directly from sunlight .
photosynthesis is modulated by oxygen , and we have an oxygen-insensitive hydrogenase that we think will totally change this process .
we 're also combining cellulases , the enzymes that break down complex sugars into simple sugars and fermentation in the same cell for producing ethanol .
pharmaceutical production is already under way in major laboratories using microbes .
the chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce .
i think future engineered species could be the source of food , hopefully a source of energy , environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry .
let me just close with ethical and policy studies .
we delayed the start of our experiments in 1999 until we completed a year-and-a-half bioethical review as to whether we should try and make an artificial species .
every major religion participated in this .
it was actually a very strange study , because the various religious leaders were using their scriptures as law books , and they could n't find anything in them prohibiting making life , so it must be ok . the only ultimate concerns were biological warfare aspects of this , but gave us the go ahead to start these experiments right now the sloan foundation has just funded a multi-institutional study on this , to work out what the risk and benefits to society are , and the rules that scientific teams such as my own should be using in this area , and we 're trying to set good examples as we go forward .
these are complex issues .
except for the threat of bio-terrorism , they 're very simple issues in terms of , can we design things to produce clean energy , perhaps revolutionizing what developing countries can do and provide through various simple processes .
thank you very much .
imagine spending seven years at mit and research laboratories , only to find out that you 're a performance artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm also a software engineer , and i make lots of different kinds of art with the computer .
and i think the main thing that i 'm interested in is trying to find a way of making the computer into a personal mode of expression .
and many of you out there are the heads of macromedia and microsoft , and in a way those are my bane : i think there 's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think of course , it 's also a great liberating force that makes possible , you know , publishing and so forth , and standards , and so on .
but , in a way , the computer makes possible much more than what most people think , and my art has just been about trying to find a personal way of using the computer , and so i end up writing software to do that .
chris has asked me to do a short performance , and so i 'm going to take just this time - maybe 10 minutes - to do that , and hopefully at the end have just a moment to show you a couple of my other projects in video form .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 've got about a minute left .
i 'd just like to show a clip from a most recent project .
i did a performance with two singers who specialize in making strange noises with their mouths .
and this just came off last september at ars electronica ; we repeated it in england .
and the idea is to visualize their speech and song behind them with a large screen .
we used a computer vision tracking system in order to know where they were .
and since we know where their heads are , and we have a wireless mic on them that we 're processing the sound from , we 're able to create visualizations which are linked very tightly to what they 're doing with their speech .
this will take about 30 seconds or so .
he 's making a , kind of , cheek-flapping sound .
well , suffice it to say it 's not all like that , but that 's part of it .
thanks very much . there 's always lots more .
i 'm overtime , so i just wanted to say you can , if you 're in new york , you can check out my work at the whitney biennial next week , and also at bitforms gallery in chelsea .
and with that , i think i should give up the stage , so , thank you so much .
i do n't know your name . audience member : howard . howard .
thom mayne : howard ? i 'm sitting next to howard . i do n't know howard , obviously , and he 's going , i hope you 're not next .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- amazing . amazing performance .
i kind of erased everything in my brain to follow that .
let me start some place . i 'm interested - i kind of do the same thing , but i do n't move my body . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and instead of using human figures to develop ideas of time and space , i work in the mineral world . i work with more or less inert matter .
and i organize it . and , well , it 's also a bit different because an architect versus , let 's say , a dance company finally is a negotiation between one 's private world , one 's conceptual world , the world of ideas , the world of aspirations , of inventions , with the relationship of the exterior world and all the limitations , the naysayers .
because i have to say , for my whole career , if there 's anything that 's been consistent , it 's been that you ca n't do it .
no matter what i 've done , what i 've tried to do , everybody says it ca n't be done .
and it 's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas .
and to be an architect , somehow you have to negotiate between left and right , and you have to negotiate between this very private place where ideas take place and the outside world , and then make it understood .
i can start any number of places , because this process is also - i think - very different from some of the morning sessions , which you had such a kind of very clear , such a lineal idea , like the last one , say , with howard , that i think the creative process in architecture , the design process , is extremely circuitous . it 's labyrinthine .
it 's calvino 's idea of the quickest way between two points is the circuitous line , not the straight line .
and definitely my life has been part of that .
i 'm going to start with some simple kind of notions of how we organize things .
but basically , what we do is , we try to give coherence to the world .
we make physical things , buildings that become a part in an accretional process ; they make cities .
and those things are the reflection of the processes , and the time that they are made .
and what i 'm doing is attempting to synthesize the way one sees the world and the territories which are useful as generative material .
because , really , all i 'm interested in , always , as an architect , is the way things are produced because that 's what i do . right ?
and it 's not based on an a priori notion .
i have no interest at all in conceiving something in my brain and saying , " this is what it looks like . " in fact , somebody mentioned - ewan , maybe it was you in your introduction - about this is what architects - did somebody say it 's what business people come to , it 's what the corporate world comes to when they want to make it look like something at the end of the line ? huh . wow .
it does n't work that way for me at all .
i have no interest in that whatsoever .
architecture is the beginning of something , because it 's - if you 're not involved in first principles , if you 're not involved in the absolute , the beginning of that generative process , it 's cake decoration .
and i 've nothing wrong with cake decoration and cake decorators , if anybody 's involved in cake decorations - it 's not what i 'm interested in doing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , in the formation of things , in giving it form , in concretizing these things , it starts with some notion of how one organizes .
and i 've had for 30 years an interest in a series of complexities where a series of forces are brought to bear , and to understand the nature of the final result of that , representing the building itself .
there 's been a continual relationship between inventions , which are private , and reality , which has been important to me .
a project which is part of an exhibition in copenhagen 10 years ago , which was the modeling of a hippocampus - the territory of the brain that records short-term memory - and the documentation of that , the imaginative and documentation of that through a series of drawings which literally attempt to organize that experience .
and it had to do with the notion of walking a kilometer , observing every kilometer a particular object of desire , and then placing that within this .
and the notion was that i could make an organization not built on normal coherencies , but built on non-sequiturs , built on randomness .
and i 'd been extremely interested in this notion of randomness as it produces architectural work and as it definitely connects to the notion of the city , an accretional notion of the city , and that led to various ideas of organization .
and then this led to broader ideas of buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems .
and it 's not any single system that makes the work .
it 's the relationship - it 's the dynamics between the systems - which have the power to transform and invent and produce an architecture that is - that would otherwise not exist .
and those systems could be identified , and they could be grouped together .
and of course , today , with the technology of the computer and with the rapid prototyping , etc . , we have the mechanisms to understand and to respond to these systems , and to allow them to adjust to the various accommodations of functionalities because that 's all we do .
we 're producing spaces that accommodate human activity .
and what i 'm interested in is not the styling of that , but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity .
and that directly connects to ideas of city-making .
this is a project that we just finished in penang for a very , very large city project that came directly out of this process , which is the result of the multiplicity of forces that produce it .
and the project - again , enormous , enormous competition - on the hudson river and in new york that we were asked to do three years ago , which uses these processes .
and what you 're looking at are possibilities that have to do with the generation of the city as one applies a methodology that uses notions of these multiple forces , that deals with the enormity of the problem , the complexity of the problem , when we 're designing cities at larger and larger aggregates .
because one of the issues today is that the economic aggregate is driving the development aggregate , and as the aggregates get larger we require more and more complex investigation processes to solve these problems .
and that led us directly to the olympic village .
i was in new york on monday presenting it to the ioc .
we won the competition - what was it , nine months ago ?
again , a direct reflection from using these processes to develop extremely complicated , very large-scale organisms .
and then , also , was working with broad strategies .
in this case , we only used 15 of the 60 acres of land , and the 45 acres was a park and would become the legacy of the olympic village .
and it would become the second largest park in the boroughs , etc .
its position , of course , in the middle of manhattan - it 's on hunter 's point .
and then the broader ideas of city-making start having direct influences on architecture , on the elements that make up the broader scheme , the buildings themselves , and start guiding us .
architecture for me has been an investigation of a multiplicity of forces that could come from literally any place .
and so i can start this discussion in any number of places , and i 've chosen three or four to talk about .
and it has also to do with an interest in the vast kind of territory that architecture touches .
it literally is connected to anything in terms of knowledge base .
there 's just no place that it does n't somehow have a connective tissue to .
this is jim dine , and it 's the absence of presence , etc .
it 's the clothing , the skin , without the presence of the character .
it became kind of an idea for the notion of the surface of a work , and it was used in a project where we could unravel that surface , and it was a figurative idea that was going to be folded and made into a very , kind of complex space .
and the idea was the relationship of the space , which was made up of the fold of the image , and the dialectic or the conflict between the figuration , and the clarity of the image and the complexity of the space , which were in dialog .
and it made us rethink the whole notion of how we work and how we make things , and it led us to ideas that were closer to fashion design as we flattened out surfaces , and then brought them back together as they could make spatial combinations .
and this was the first prototype in korea , as we 're dealing with a dynamic envelope , and then the same characteristic of the fabric .
it has a material identity and it 's translucent and it 's porous , and it allows us for a very different notion of what a skin of a building is .
and that turned right away into another project .
this is the caltrans building in los angeles .
and now we 're seeing as the skin and the body is differentiated .
again , it 's a very , very simple notion .
if you look at most buildings , what you look at is the building , the facade , and it is the building .
and all of a sudden we 're kind of moving away , and we 're separating the skin from the body , and that 's going to lead to broader performance criteria , which i 'm going to talk about in a minute .
and you 're looking at how it drapes over and differentiates from the body .
and then , again , the building itself , middle of los angeles , right across from city hall .
and as it moves , it takes pieces of the earth with it . it bends up .
it 's part of a sign system , which was part of the kind of legacy of los angeles - the two-dimension , three-dimension signing , etc .
and then it allows one to penetrate the work itself .
it 's transparent , and it allows you to understand , i think , what is always the most interesting thing in any building , which is the actual constructional processes that make it .
and it 's probably the most intense kind of territory of the work , which is not occupied , because architecture is always the most interesting in some mechanism when it 's separated from function , and this is an area that allows for that .
and then the skin starts transforming into other materials .
we 're using light as a building material in this case .
we 're working with keith sonnier in new york , and we 're making this large outside room , which is possible in los angeles , and which is very much reflective of the urban , the contemporary urban environments that you would find in shibuya or you 'd find in mexico city or sao paulo , etc . , that have to do with activating the city over a longer span of time .
and that was very much part of the notion of the urban objective of this project in los angeles .
and , again , all of it promoting transparency .
and an image which may be closest talks about the use of light as a medium , that light becomes literally a building material .
well , that immediately turned into something much broader , and as a scope .
and again , we 're looking at an early sketch where i 'm understanding now that the skin can be a transition between the ground and the tower .
this is a building in san francisco which is under construction .
and now it turned into something much , much broader as a problem , and it has to do with performance .
this will be the first building in the united states that took - well , i ca n't say it took the air conditioning out . it 's a hybrid .
i wanted a pure thing , and i ca n't get it .
it 's a wrong attitude , actually , because the hybrid is probably more interesting .
but we took the air conditioning out of the tower .
there 's some air conditioning left in the base , but the skin now moves on hydraulics .
it forces air through a venturi force if there 's no wind .
it adjusts continually . and we removed the air conditioning .
huge , huge thing . half a million dollars a year delta .
10 of these - it 's just under a million square feet - 800 and some thousand square feet - 10 of these would power sausalito - the delta on this .
and so now what we 're looking at , as the projects get larger in scale , as they interface with broader problems , that they expand the capabilities in terms of their performance .
well , i could also start here .
we could talk about the relationship at a more biological sense of the relationship of building and ground .
well , our research - my generation for sure , people who were going to school in the late ' 60s - made very much a shift out of the internal focus of architecture , looking at architecture within its own territory , and we were much more affected by film , by what was going on in the art world , etc .
this is , of course , michael heizer .
and when i saw this , first an image and then visited , it completely changed the way i thought after that point .
and i understood that building really could be the augmentation of the earth 's surface , and it completely shifted the notion of building ground in the most basic sense .
and then - well , he was probably looking at this - this is nazca ; this is 700 years ago - the most amazing four-kilometer land sculptures .
they 're just totally incredible .
and that led us to then completely rethinking how we draw , how we work .
this is the first sketch of a high school in pomona - well , whatever it is , a model , a conceptual , kind of idea .
and it 's the reshaping of the earth to make it occupiable .
so it puts 200,000 square feet of stuff that make a high school work in the surface of that earth .
there it is modeled as it was developing into a piece of work .
and there it is , again , as it 's starting to get resolved tectonically , and then there 's the school .
and , of course , we 're interested in participating with education .
i have absolutely no interest in producing a building that just accommodates x , y and z function .
what i 'm interested in are how these ideas participate in the educational process of young people .
it demands some sort of notion of inquiry because it 's a system that 's developed not sculpturally .
it 's an idea that started from my first discussion .
it has to do with a broad , consistent logic , and that logic could be understood as one occupies the building .
and there 's an overt - at least , there 's an attempt to make a very overt notion of a building that connects to the land in a very different way because i was interested in a very didactic approach to the problem , as one would understand that .
and the second project that was just finished in los angeles that uses some of the same ideas . it uses landscape as a major idea .
then , again , we 're doing the headquarters for noaa - national oceanographic and atmospheric agency - outside of washington in maryland .
and this is how they see the world .
they have 22 satellites zipping around at plus or minus 100 miles , and the site 's in red .
and what we really want to do - well , the architects , if there are architects out there , this is the laugier hut ; this is the primitive hut that 's been around for so long - and what we wanted to do is really build this , because they see themselves as the caretakers of the world , and we wanted them to look down at their satellite , how they see their own site , that eight-acre site , and we wanted nothing left . we wanted it to stay green .
there 's actually three baseball fields on it right now , and they 're going to stay there .
we put one piece directly north-south , and it holds the dishes at the ears , right ?
and then right below that the processing , and the mission lift , and the mission control room , and all the other spaces are underground .
and what you look at is an aircraft carrier that 's performance-driven by the cone vision of these satellite dishes .
and that the building itself is occupied in the lower portion , broken up by a series of courts , and it 's five acres of uninterrupted , horizontal space for their administrative offices .
and then that , in turn , propelled us to look at larger-scale projects where this notion of landscape building interface becomes a connective tissue .
the new capital competition for berlin , four years ago .
and again we just finished the ecb - actually coop himmelblau in vienna just won this project , where the building was separated into a series of landscape elements that became part of a connective tissue of a park , which is parallel to the river , and develops ideas of the buildings themselves and becomes part of the connective fabric - the social , cultural and the landscape , recreational fabric of the city .
and the building is no longer seen as an autonomous thing , but something that 's only inextricably connected to this city and this place at this time .
and a project that was realized in austria , the hooper bank , which again used this idea of connecting typology , the traditional buildings , and morphology , or the relationship of the development of land as an idea , into a complex , which is a piece of a city where we can see part of it is literally just this augmenting , this movement of the land that 's a very simple idea of just lifting it up and occupying it , and other parts are much more energetic and intense .
and talk about that intensity in terms of the collisions of the kind of events they make that have to do with putting a series of systems together , and then where part of it is in the ground , part of it is oppositional lifts .
one enters the building as it lifts off the ground , and it becomes part of the idea .
and then the skin - the edges of this - all promote the dynamic , the movement of the building as a series of seismic shifts , geologic shifts . right ?
and it makes for event space and then it breaks in places that allow you to peer into the interior , and those interiors , again , are promoting transparency for the workplace , which has been a continual interest of ours .
and then , again , in a more , kind of traditional setting , this is a graduate student housing in toronto , and it 's very much about the relationship of a building as it makes a connective tissue to the city .
the main idea was the gateway , where it breaks the site , and the building occupies both the public space and the private space .
and it 's that territory of - it 's this thing .
i visited the site many times , and everybody , kind of - you can see this from two kilometers away ; it 's an exact center of the street , and the whole notion is to engage the public , to engage buildings as part of the public tissue of the city .
and finally , one of the most interesting projects - it 's a courthouse .
and what i want to talk about - this is the supreme court , of course - and , well , i 'm dealing with michael hogan , the chief justice of oregon .
you could not proceed without making this negotiation between one 's own values and the relationship of the character you 're working with and how he understands the court , because i 'm showing him , of course , corbusier at savoy , which is 1928 , which is the beginning of modern architecture .
well , then we get to this image .
and this is where the project started . because i 'm going , i 'm interested in the phenomenon that 's taking place in here .
and really what we 're talking about is constructing reality .
and i 'm a character that 's extremely interested in understanding the nature of that constructed reality because there 's no such thing as nature any more . nature is gone .
nature in the 19th-century sense , alright ?
nature is only a cultural edifice today , right ?
we construct it and we construct those ideas .
and then of course , this one , our governor at the moment .
and we spent some time with conan , believe it or not , and then that led us to , kind of , the very differences of our worlds from a legal and an artistic , architectural .
and it forced us to talk about notions of how we work , and the dynamics of that , and what other sources of the work is .
and it led us to the project , the courthouse , which is absolutely a part of a negotiation between tradition and pieces of the traditional courthouse .
you 'll find a stair that 's the same length as the supreme court .
here 's a piano nobile , which is a device used in the renaissance .
the courts were made of that . the skin is this series of layers that reflect even rusticated stonework , but which were embedded with fragments of the constitution , which were part of the little process , all set on a plinth that defined it from the community .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i thought i would talk about today is the transition from one mode of thinking about nature to another that 's tracked by architecture .
what 's interesting about architects is , we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature , and arguably , beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature .
so , for roughly 300 years , the hot debate in architecture was whether the number five or the number seven was a better proportion to think about architecture , because the nose was one-fifth of your head , or because your head was one-seventh of your body .
and the reason that that was the model of beauty and of nature was because the decimal point had not been invented yet - it was n't the 16th century - and everybody had to dimension a building in terms of fractions , so a room would be dimensioned as one-fourth of a facade ; the structural dais of that might be dimensioned as 10 units , and you would get down to the small elements by fractional subdivision : finer and finer and finer .
in the 15th century , the decimal point was invented ; architects stopped using fractions , and they had a new model of nature .
so , what 's going on today which is calculus-based and which is using digital tools , and that has a lot of implications to the way we think about beauty and form , and it has a lot of implications in the way we think about nature .
the best example of this would probably be the gothic , and the gothic was invented after the invention of calculus , although the gothic architects were n't really using calculus to define their forms .
but what was important is , the gothic moment in architecture was the first time that force and motion was thought of in terms of form .
so , examples like christopher wren 's king 's cross : you can see that the structural forces of the vaulting get articulated as lines , so you 're really actually seeing the expression of structural force and form .
much later , robert maillart 's bridges , which optimize structural form with a calculus curvature almost like a parabola .
the hanging chain models of antonio gaudi , the catalan architect .
the end of the 19th century , beginning of the 20th century , and how that hanging chain model translates into archways and vaulting .
so , in all of these examples , structure is the determining force .
frei otto was starting to use foam bubble diagrams and foam bubble models to generate his mannheim concert hall .
interestingly , in the last 10 years norman foster used a similar heat thermal transfer model to generate the roof of the national gallery , with the structural engineer chris williams .
in all these examples , there 's one ideal form , because these are thought in terms of structure .
and as an architect , i 've always found these kinds of systems very limiting , because i 'm not interested in ideal forms and i 'm not interested in optimizing to some perfect moment .
so , what i thought i would bring up is another component that needs to be thought of , whenever you think about nature , and that 's basically the invention of generic form in genetic evolution .
my hero is actually not darwin ; it 's a guy named william bateson , father of greg bateson , who was here for a long time in monterey .
and he was what you 'd call a teratologist : he looked at all of the monstrosities and mutations to find rules and laws , rather than looking at the norms .
so , instead of trying to find the ideal type or the ideal average , he 'd always look for the exception . so , in this example , which is an example of what 's called bateson 's rule , he has two kinds of mutations of a human thumb .
when i first saw this image , 10 years ago , i actually found it very strange and beautiful at the same time .
beautiful , because it has symmetry .
so , what he found is that in all cases of thumb mutations , instead of having a thumb , you would either get another opposable thumb , or you would get four fingers .
so , the mutations reverted to symmetry .
and bateson invented the concept of symmetry breaking , which is that wherever you lose information in a system , you revert back to symmetry .
so , symmetry was n't the sign of order and organization - which is what i was always understanding , and as is an architect - symmetry was the absence of information .
so , whenever you lost information , you 'd move to symmetry ; whenever you added information to a system , you would break symmetry .
so , this whole idea of natural form shifted at that moment from looking for ideal shapes to looking for a combination of information and generic form .
you know , literally after seeing that image , and finding out what bateson was working with , we started to use these rules for symmetry breaking and branching to start to think about architectural form .
to just talk for a minute about the digital mediums that we 're using now and how they integrate calculus : the fact that they 're calculus-based means that we do n't have to think about dimension in terms of ideal units or discreet elements .
so , in architecture we deal with big assemblies of components , so there might be up to , say , 50,000 pieces of material in this room you 're sitting in right now that all need to get organized .
now , typically you 'd think that they would all be the same : like , the chairs you 're sitting in would all be the same dimension .
you know , i have n't verified this , but it 's the norm that every chair would be a slightly different dimension , because you 'd want to space them all out for everybody 's sight lines .
the elements that make up the ceiling grid and the lighting , they 're all losing their modular quality , and moving more and more to these infinitesimal dimensions .
that 's because we 're all using calculus tools for manufacturing and for design .
calculus is also a mathematics of curves .
so , even a straight line , defined with calculus , is a curve .
it 's just a curve without inflection .
so , a new vocabulary of form is now pervading all design fields : whether it 's automobiles , architecture , products , etc . , it 's really being affected by this digital medium of curvature .
the intricacies of scale that come out of that - you know , in the example of the nose to the face , there 's a fractional part-to-whole idea .
with calculus , the whole idea of subdivision is more complex , because the whole and the parts are one continuous series .
it 's too early in the morning for a lecture on calculus , so i brought some images to just describe how that works .
this is a korean church that we did in queens .
and in this example , you can see that the components of this stair are repetitive , but they 're repetitive without being modular .
each one of the elements in this structure is a unique distance and dimension , and all of the connections are unique angles .
now , the only way we could design that , or possibly construct it , is by using a calculus-based definition of the form .
it also is much more dynamic , so that you can see that the same form opens and closes in a very dynamic way as you move across it , because it has this quality of vector in motion built into it .
so the same space that appears to be a kind of closed volume , when seen from the other side becomes a kind of open vista .
and you also get a sense of visual movement in the space , because every one of the elements is changing in a pattern , so that pattern leads your eye towards the altar .
i think that 's one of the main changes , also , in architecture : that we 're starting to look now not for some ideal form , like a latin cross for a church , but actually all the traits of a church : so , light that comes from behind from an invisible source , directionality that focuses you towards an altar .
it turns out it 's not rocket science to design a sacred space .
you just need to incorporate a certain number of traits in a very kind of genetic way .
so , these are the different perspectives of that interior , which has a very complex set of orientations all in a simple form .
in terms of construction and manufacturing , this is a kilometer-long housing block that was built in the ' 70s in amsterdam .
and here we 've broken the 500 apartments up into small neighborhoods , and differentiated those neighborhoods .
i wo n't go into too much description of any of these projects , but what you can see is that the escalators and elevators that circulate people along the face of the building are all held up by 122 structural trusses .
because we 're using escalators to move people , all of these trusses are picking up diagonal loads .
so , every one of them is a little bit different-shaped as you move down the length of the building .
so , working with bentley and microstation , we 've written a custom piece of software that networks all of the components together into these chunks of information , so that if we change any element along the length of the building , not only does that change distribute through each one of the trusses , but each one of the trusses then distributes that information down the length of the entire facade of the building .
so it 's a single calculation for every single component of the building that we 're adding onto .
so , it 's tens of millions of calculations just to design one connection between a piece of structural steel and another piece of structural steel .
but what it gives us is a harmonic and synthesized relationship of all these components , one to another .
this idea has , kind of , brought me into doing some product design , and it 's because design firms that have connections to architects , like , i 'm working with vitra , which is a furniture company , and alessi , which is a houseware company .
they saw this actually solving a problem : this ability to differentiate components but keep them synthetic .
so , not to pick on bmw , or to celebrate them , but take bmw as an example .
they have to , in 2005 , have a distinct identity for all their models of cars .
so , the 300 series , or whatever their newest car is , the 100 series that 's coming out , has to look like the 700 series , at the other end of their product line , so they need a distinct , coherent identity , which is bmw .
at the same time , there 's a person paying 30,000 dollars for a 300-series car , and a person paying 70,000 dollars for a 700 series , and that person paying more than double does n't want their car to look too much like the bottom-of-the-market car .
so they have to also discriminate between these products .
so , as manufacturing starts to allow more design options , this problem gets exacerbated , of the whole and the parts .
now , as an architect , part-to-whole relationships is all i think about , but in terms of product design it 's becoming more and more of an issue for companies .
so , the first kind of test product we did was with alessi , which was for a coffee and tea set .
it 's an incredibly expensive coffee and tea set ; we knew that at the beginning . so , i actually went to some people i knew down south in san diego , and we used an exploded titanium forming method that 's used in the aerospace industry .
basically what we can do , is just cut a graphite mold , put it in an oven , heat it to 1,000 degrees , gently inflate titanium that 's soft , and then explode it at the last minute into this form .
but what 's great about it is , the forms are only a few hundred dollars .
the titanium 's several thousand dollars , but the forms are very cheap .
so , we designed a system here of eight curves that could be swapped , very similar to that housing project i showed you , and we could recombine those together , so that we always had ergonomic shapes that always had the same volume and could always be produced in the same way .
that way , each one of these tools we could pay for with a few hundred dollars , and get incredible variation in the components .
and this is one of those examples of the sets .
so , for me , what was important is that this coffee set - which is just a coffee pot , a teapot , and those are the pots sitting on a tray - that they would have a coherence - so , they would be greg lynn alessi coffee pots - but that everyone who bought one would have a one-of-a-kind object that was unique in some way .
to go back to architecture , what 's organic about architecture as a field , unlike product design , is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm .
like , we have to design things which are coherent as a single object , but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale .
architects tend to work with signature , so that an architect needs a signature and that signature has to work across the scale of houses up to , say , skyscrapers , and that problem of signatures is a thing we 're very good at maintaining and working with ; and intricacy , which is the relationship of , say , the shape of a building , its structure , its windows , its color , its pattern . these are real architectural problems .
so , my kind of hero for this in the natural world are these tropical frogs .
i got interested in them because they 're the most extreme example of a surface where the texture and the - let 's call it the decoration - i know the frog does n't think of it as decoration , but that 's how it works - are all intricately connected to one another .
so a change in the form indicates a change in the color pattern .
so , the pattern and the form are n't the same thing , but they really work together and are fused in some way .
so , when doing a center for the national parks in costa rica , we tried to use that idea of a gradient color and a change in texture as the structure moves across the surface of the building .
we also used a continuity of change from a main exhibition hall to a natural history museum , so it 's all one continuous change in the massing , but within that massing are very different kinds of spaces and forms .
in a housing project in valencia , spain , we 're doing , the different towers of housing fused together in shared curves so you get a single mass , like a kind of monolith , but it breaks down into individual elements .
and you can see that that change in massing also gives all 48 of the apartments a unique shape and size , but always within a , kind of , controlled limit , an envelope of change .
i work with a group of other architects .
we have a company called united architects .
we were one of the finalists for the world trade center site design .
and i think this just shows how we were approaching the problem of incredibly large-scale construction .
we wanted to make a kind of gothic cathedral around the footprints of the world trade center site .
and to do that , we tried to connect up the five towers into a single system .
and we looked at , from the 1950s on , there were numerous examples of other architects trying to do the same thing .
we really approached it at the level of the typology of the building , where we could build these five separate towers , but they would all join at the 60th floor and make a kind of single monolithic mass .
with united architects , also , we made a proposal for the european central bank headquarters that used the same system , but this time in a much more monolithic mass , like a sphere .
but again , you can see this , kind of , organic fusion of multiple building elements to make a thing which is whole , but breaks down into smaller parts , but in an incredibly organic way .
finally , i 'd like to just show you some of the effects of using digital fabrication .
about six years ago , i bought one of these cnc mills , to just replace , kind of , young people cutting their fingers off all the time building models .
and i also bought a laser cutter and started to fabricate within my own shop , kind of , large-scale building elements and models , where we could go directly to the tooling .
what i found out is that the tooling , if you intervened in the software , actually produced decorative effects .
so , for these interiors , like this shop in stockholm , sweden , or this installation wall in the netherlands at the netherlands architecture institute , we could use the texture that the tool would leave to produce a lot of the spatial effects , and we could integrate the texture of the wall with the form of the wall with the material .
so , in vacuum-formed plastic , in fiberglass , and then even at the level of structural steel , which you think of as being linear and modular .
the steel industry is so far ahead of the design industry that if you take advantage of it you can even start to think of beams and columns all rolled together into a single system which is highly efficient , but also produces decorative effects and formal effects that are very beautiful and organic .
thanks very much .
i was asked to come here and speak about creation .
and i only have 15 minutes , and i see they 're counting already .
and i can - in 15 minutes , i think i can touch only a very rather janitorial branch of creation , which i call " creativity . "
creativity is how we cope with creation .
while creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable , or even pointless , creativity is always meaningful .
see , for instance , in this picture .
you know , creation is what put that dog in that picture , and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his hindquarters .
when you think about - you know , creativity has a lot to do with causality too .
you know , when i was a teenager , i was a creator .
i just did things .
then i became an adult and started knowing who i was , and tried to maintain that persona - i became creative .
it was n't until i actually did a book and a retrospective exhibition , that i could track exactly - looks like all the craziest things that i had done , all my drinking , all my parties - they followed a straight line that brings me to the point that actually i 'm talking to you at this moment .
though it 's actually true , you know , the reason i 'm talking to you right now is because i was born in brazil .
if i was born in monterey , probably would be in brazil .
you know , i was born in brazil and grew up in the ' 70s under a climate of political distress , and i was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market .
you could n't really say what you wanted to say ; you had to invent ways of doing it .
you did n't trust information very much .
that led me to another step of why i 'm here today , is because i really liked media of all kinds .
i was a media junkie , and eventually got involved with advertising .
my first job in brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards , and based on speed , angle of approach and actually blocks of text .
it was very - actually , it was a very good study , and got me a job in an ad agency .
and they also decided that i had to - to give me a very ugly plexiglas trophy for it .
and another point - why i 'm here - is that the day i went to pick up the plexiglas trophy , i rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life , picked the thing - did n't have any friends .
on my way out , i had to break a fight apart .
somebody was hitting somebody else with brass knuckles .
they were in tuxedos , and fighting . it was very ugly .
and also - advertising people do that all the time - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and i - well , what happened is when i went back , it was on the way back to my car , the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun - i do n't know why he had a gun - and shoot the first person he decided to be his aggressor .
the first person was wearing a black tie , a tuxedo . it was me .
luckily , it was n't fatal , as you can all see .
and , even more luckily , the guy said that he was sorry and i bribed him for compensation money , otherwise i press charges .
and that 's how - with this money i paid for a ticket to come to the united states in 1983 , and that 's very - the basic reason i 'm talking to you here today : because i got shot . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well , when i started working with my own work , i decided that i should n't do images .
you know , i became - i took this very iconoclastic approach .
because when i decided to go into advertising , i wanted to do - i wanted to airbrush naked people on ice , for whiskey commercials , that 's what i really wanted to do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but i - they did n't let me do it , so i just - you know , they would only let me do other things .
but i was n't into selling whiskey ; i was into selling ice .
the first works were actually objects .
it was kind of a mixture of found object , product design and advertising .
and i called them relics .
they were displayed first at stux gallery in 1983 .
this is the clown skull .
is a remnant of a race of - a very evolved race of entertainers .
they lived in brazil , long time ago . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the ashanti joystick .
unfortunately , it has become obsolete because it was designed for atari platform .
a playstation ii is in the works , maybe for the next ted i 'll bring it .
the rocking podium . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the pre-columbian coffeemaker . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , the idea came out of an argument that i had at starbucks , that i insisted that i was n't having colombian coffee ; the coffee was actually pre-columbian .
the bonsai table .
the entire encyclopedia britannica bound in a single volume , for travel purposes .
and the half tombstone , for people who are not dead yet .
i wanted to take that into the realm of images , and i decided to make things that had the same identity conflicts .
so i decided to do work with clouds .
because clouds can mean anything you want .
but now i wanted to work in a very low-tech way , so something that would mean at the same time a lump of cotton , a cloud and durer 's praying hands - although this looks a lot more like mickey mouse 's praying hands .
but i was still , you know - this is a kitty cloud .
they 're called " equivalents , " after alfred stieglitz 's work .
" the snail . "
but i was still working with sculpture , and i was really trying to go flatter and flatter .
" the teapot . "
i had a chance to go to florence , in - i think it was ' 94 , and i saw ghiberti 's " door of paradise . "
and he did something that was very tricky .
he put together two different media from different periods of time .
first , he got an age-old way of making it , which was relief , and he worked this with three-point perspective , which was brand-new technology at the time .
and it 's totally overkill .
and your eye does n't know which level to read .
and you become trapped into this kind of representation .
so i decided to make these very simple renderings , that at first they are taken as a line drawing - you know , something that 's very - and then i did it with wire .
the idea was to - because everybody overlooks white - like pencil drawings , you know ?
and they would look at it - " ah , it 's a pencil drawing . "
then you have this double take and see that it 's actually something that existed in time .
it had a physicality , and you start going deeper and deeper into sort of narrative that goes this way , towards the image . so this is " monkey with leica . "
" relaxation . "
" fiat lux . "
and the same way the history of representation evolved from line drawings to shaded drawings .
and i wanted to deal with other subjects .
i started taking that into the realm of landscape , which is something that 's almost a picture of nothing .
i made these pictures called " pictures of thread , " and i named them after the amount of yards that i used to represent each picture .
these always end up being a photograph at the end , or more like an etching in this case .
so this is a lighthouse .
this is " 6,500 yards , " after corot . " 9,000 yards , " after gerhard richter .
and i do n't know how many yards , after john constable .
departing from the lines , i decided to tackle the idea of points , like which is more similar to the type of representation that we find in photographs themselves .
i had met a group of children in the caribbean island of saint kitts , and i did work and play with them .
i got some photographs from them .
upon my arrival in new york , i decided - they were children of sugar plantation workers .
and by manipulating sugar over a black paper , i made portraits of them .
these are - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you . this is " valentina , the fastest . "
it was just the name of the child , with the little thing you get to know of somebody that you meet very briefly .
" valicia . "
" jacynthe . "
but another layer of representation was still introduced .
because i was doing this while i was making these pictures , i realized that i could add still another thing i was trying to make a subject - something that would interfere with the themes , so chocolate is very good , because it has - it brings to mind ideas that go from scatology to romance .
and so i decided to make these pictures , and they were very large , so you had to walk away from it to be able to see them .
so they 're called " pictures of chocolate . "
freud probably could explain chocolate better than i. he was the first subject .
and jackson pollock also .
pictures of crowds are particularly interesting , because , you know , you go to that - you try to figure out the threshold with something you can define very easily , like a face , goes into becoming just a texture .
" paparazzi . "
i used the dust at the whitney museum to render some pieces of their collection .
and i picked minimalist pieces because they 're about specificity .
and you render this with the most non-specific material , which is dust itself .
like , you know , you have the skin particles of every single museum visitor .
they do a dna scan of this , they will come up with a great mailing list .
this is richard serra .
i bought a computer , and -lsb- they -rsb- told me it had millions of colors in it .
you know an artist 's first response to this is , who counted it ? you know ?
and i realized that i never worked with color , because i had a hard time controlling the idea of single colors .
but once they 're applied to numeric structure , then you can feel more comfortable .
so the first time i worked with colors was by making these mosaics of pantone swatches .
they end up being very large pictures , and i photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera .
so you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of chuck close .
and you have to walk very far to be able to see it .
also , the reference to gerhard richter 's use of color charts - and the idea also entering another realm of representation that 's very common to us today , which is the bit map .
i ended up narrowing the subject to monet 's " haystacks . "
this is something i used to do as a joke - you know , make - the same like - robert smithson 's " spiral jetty " - and then leaving traces , as if it was done on a tabletop .
i tried to prove that he did n't do that thing in the salt lake .
but then , just doing the models , i was trying to explore the relationship between the model and the original .
and i felt that i would have to actually go there and make some earthworks myself .
i opt for very simple line drawings - kind of stupid looking .
and at the same time , i was doing these very large constructions , being 150 meters away .
now i would do very small ones , which would be like - but under the same light , and i would show them together , so the viewer would have to really figure it out what one he was looking .
i was n't interested in the very large things , or in the small things .
i was more interested in the things in between , you know , because you can leave an enormous range for ambiguity there .
this is like you see - the size of a person over there .
this is a pipe .
a hanger .
and this is another thing that i did - you know working - everybody loves to watch somebody draw , but not many people have a chance to watch somebody draw in - a lot of people at the same time , to evidence a single drawing .
and i love this work , because i did these cartoonish clouds over manhattan for a period of two months .
and it was quite wonderful , because i had an interest - an early interest - in theater , that 's justified on this thing .
in theater , you have the character and the actor in the same place , trying to negotiate each other in front of an audience .
and in this , you 'd have like a - something that looks like a cloud , and it is a cloud at the same time .
so they 're like perfect actors .
my interest in acting , especially bad acting , goes a long way .
actually , i once paid like 60 dollars to see a very great actor to do a version of " king lear , " and i felt really robbed , because by the time the actor started being king lear , he stopped being the great actor that i had paid money to see .
on the other hand , you know , i paid like three dollars , i think - and i went to a warehouse in queens to see a version of " othello " by an amateur group .
and it was quite fascinating , because you know the guy - his name was joey grimaldi - he impersonated the moorish general - you know , for the first three minutes he was really that general , and then he went back into plumber , he worked as a plumber , so - plumber , general , plumber , general - so for three dollars , i saw two tragedies for the price of one .
see , i think it 's not really about impression , making people fall for a really perfect illusion , as much as it is to make - i usually work at the lowest threshold of visual illusion .
because it 's not about fooling somebody , it 's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief : how much you want to be fooled .
that 's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that .
well , i think that 's it .
my time is nearly up .
thank you very much .
i guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s , when i was seven or eight years old , watching jacques cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on .
then after every episode , i had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain , because that 's all there was to look at .
and by the time i turned 16 , i pursued a career in marine science , in exploration and diving , and lived in underwater habitats , like this one off the florida keys , for 30 days total .
brian skerry took this shot . thanks , brian .
and i 've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world .
and this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world , operated by the japanese government .
and sylvia earle and i were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in japan .
and on my dive , i went down 18,000 feet , to an area that i thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor .
but when i got there , i found lots of plastic garbage and other debris .
and it was really a turning point in my life , where i started to realize that i could n't just go have fun doing science and exploration .
i needed to put it into a context .
i needed to head towards conservation goals .
so i began to work with national geographic society and others and led expeditions to antarctica .
i led three diving expeditions to antarctica .
ten years ago was a seminal trip , where we explored that big iceberg , b-15 , the largest iceberg in history , that broke off the ross ice shelf .
and we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg , such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around , so that , as the blood flowed through our kidneys , it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies .
but after three trips to antarctica , i decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water .
and that same year , 10 years ago , i headed north to the phoenix islands .
and i 'm going to tell you that story here in a moment .
but before i do , i just want you to ponder this graph for a moment .
you may have seen this in other forms , but the top line is the amount of protected area on land , globally , and it 's about 12 percent .
and you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and ' 70s , and it 's on kind of a nice trajectory right now .
and that 's probably because that 's when everybody got aware of the environment and earth day and all the stuff that happened in the ' 60s with the hippies and everything really did , i think , have an affect on global awareness .
but the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now - it appears to be ticking up .
and i do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean .
i think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land .
but unfortunately , the ocean is opaque , and we ca n't see what 's going on .
and therefore we 're way behind on protection .
but scuba diving , submersibles and all the work that we 're setting about to do here will help rectify that .
so where are the phoenix islands ?
they were the world 's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the chagos archipelago was declared .
it 's in the mid-pacific . it 's about five days from anywhere .
if you want to get to the phoenix islands , it 's five days from fiji , it 's five days from hawaii , it 's five days from samoa .
it 's out in the middle of the pacific , right around the equator .
i had never heard of the islands 10 years ago , nor the country , kiribati , that owns them , till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in fiji said , " greg , would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands ?
they 've never been dived . "
and i said , " yeah .
but tell me where they are and the country that owns them . "
so that 's when i first learned of the islands and had no idea what i was getting into .
but i was in for the adventure .
let me give you a little peek here of the phoenix islands-protected area .
it 's a very deep-water part of our planet .
the average depths are about 12,000 ft .
there 's lots of seamounts in the phoenix islands , which are specifically part of the protected area .
seamounts are important for biodiversity .
there 's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land .
it 's an interesting fact .
and the phoenix islands is very rich in those seamounts .
so it 's a deep - think about it in a big three-dimensional space , very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna , whales , all kinds of deep sea marine life like we 've seen here before .
that 's the vessel that we took up there for these studies , early on , and that 's what the islands look like - you can see in the background .
they 're very low to the water , and they 're all uninhabited , except one island has about 35 caretakers on it .
and they 've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days , these islands were too far away from the bright lights of fiji and hawaii and tahiti for those ancient polynesian mariners that were traversing the pacific so widely .
but we got up there , and i had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go , " okay , where are we going to dive ?
let 's try there , " and then falling into the water .
both my personal and my professional life changed .
suddenly , i saw a world that i had never seen before in the ocean - schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface , coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful , large fish everywhere , manta rays .
it was an ecosystem . parrotfish spawning - this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the phoenix islands .
you can see the fish are balled up and then there 's a little cloudy area there where they 're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction - events that the ocean is supposed to do , but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity .
the phoenix islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries , especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here .
phoenix islands is a major tuna location .
and sharks - we had sharks on our early dives , up to 150 sharks at once , which is an indication of a very , very healthy , very strong , system .
so i thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever , but they did finally come to an end .
and we explored the surface of the islands as well - very important bird nesting site , some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the pacific , in the world .
and we finished our trip .
and that 's the area again .
you can see the islands - there are eight islands - that pop out of the water .
the peaks that do n't come out of the water are the seamounts .
remember , a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface .
and what 's the context of the phoenix islands ?
where do these exist ?
well they exist in the republic of kiribati , and kiribati is located in the central pacific in three island groups .
in the west we have the gilbert islands .
in the center we have the phoenix islands , which is the subject that i 'm talking about .
and then over to the east we have the line islands .
it 's the largest atoll nation in the world .
and they have about 110,000 people they control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean , and that 's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet .
and when i was first going up there , i barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago , and people would ask me , " why are you going to this place called kiribati ? "
and it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed , and the reporter yells , " hey , willy . why do you rob banks ? "
and he says , " cause that 's where all the money is . "
and i would tell people , " why do i go to kiribati ?
because that 's where all the ocean is . "
they basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the central pacific ocean .
they 're also a country that is in dire danger .
sea levels are rising , and kiribati , along with 42 other nations in the world , will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean .
the islands rise only one to two meters above the surface .
some of the islands have already gone under water .
and these nations are faced with a real problem .
we as a world are faced with a problem .
what do we do with displaced fellow earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet ?
the president of the maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries .
so it 's something we need to focus on .
but back to the phoenix islands , which is the subject of this talk .
after i got back , i said , okay , this is amazing , what we found .
i 'd like to go back and share it with the government of kiribati , who are over in tarawa , the westernmost group .
so i started contacting them - because they had actually given me a permit to do this - and i said , " i want to come up and tell you what we found . "
and for some reason they did n't want me to come , or it was hard to find a time and a place , and it took a while , but finally they said , " okay , you can come .
but if you come , you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar . "
so i said , " okay , i 'm happy to buy lunch .
just get whatever anybody wants . "
so david obura , a coral reef biologist , and i went to tarawa , and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the phoenix islands .
and the country never knew this . they never had any data from this area .
they 'd never had any information from the phoenix islands .
after the talk , the minister of fisheries walked up to me and he said , " greg , do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did ? "
he said , " we often issue these permits to do research in our waters , but usually we get a note two or three years later , or a reprint .
but you 're the first one who 's ever come back and told us what you did .
and we really appreciate that . and we 're buying you lunch today .
and are you free for dinner ? "
and i was free for dinner , and i went out to dinner with the minister of fisheries in kiribati .
and over the course of dinner , i learned that kiribati gains most of its revenue - it 's a very poor country - but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters , because kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself .
and the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives kiribati five percent of the landed value .
so if the united states removes a million dollars ' worth of lobsters from a reef , kiribati gets 50,000 dollars .
and , you know , it did n't seem like a very good deal to me .
so i asked the minister over dinner , i said , " would you consider a situation where you would still get paid - we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is - but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water ? "
he stopped , and he said , " yes , we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem , and i think we would call it a reverse fishing license . "
he coined the term " reverse fishing license . "
so i said , " yes , a ' reverse fishing license . " ' so we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point .
i went back to the states and started looking around to see if i could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued , and it turned out there were none .
there were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing .
it had occurred on land , in rainforests of south america and africa , where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down .
and conservation international had struck some of those deals .
so i went to conservation international and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource , deciding how much kiribati should be compensated , what the range of the fishes were , brought in a whole bunch of other partners - the government of australia , the government of new zealand , the world bank .
the oak foundation and national geographic have been big funders of this as well .
and we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact .
halfway through this process , i met the president of kiribati , president anote tong .
he 's a really important leader , a real visionary , forward-thinking man , and he told me two things when i approached him .
he said , " greg , there 's two things i 'd like you to do .
one is , remember i 'm a politician , so you 've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of kiribati that this is a good idea .
secondly , i 'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency .
i do n't want to do something like this if it 's going to go away after i 'm voted out of office . "
so we had very strong leadership , very good vision and a lot of science , a lot of lawyers involved .
many , many steps were taken to pull this off .
and it was primarily because kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this .
they realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community .
then in 2002 , when this was all going full-swing , a coral-bleaching event happened in the phoenix islands .
here 's this resource that we 're looking to save , and it turns out it 's the hottest heating event that we can find on record .
the ocean heated up as it does sometimes , and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the phoenix islands for six months .
it was over 32 degrees celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral .
so suddenly we had this area that we were protecting , but now it appeared to be dead , at least in the coral areas .
of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine , but the coral , which everybody likes to look at , was in trouble .
well , the good news is it 's recovered and recovering fast , faster than any reef we 've seen .
this picture was just taken by brian skerry a few months ago when we returned to the phoenix islands and discovered that , because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy , the coral is booming , is just booming back .
it 's almost like if a person has multiple diseases , it 's hard to get well , you might die , but if you only have one disease to deal with , you can get better .
and that 's the story with climate-change heating .
it 's the only threat , the only influence that the reef had to deal with .
there was no fishing , there was no pollution , there was no coastal development , and the reef is on a full-bore recovery .
now i remember that dinner i had with the minister of fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and i got quite animated during the dinner and said , " well , i think that the conservation community might embrace this idea , minister . "
he paused and put his hands together and said , " yes , greg , but the devil will be in the details , " he said .
and it certainly was .
the last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans , as i said , teams of lawyers , mous , creating the phoenix islands trust board .
and we are now in the process of raising the full endowment .
kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment .
we just had our first pipa trust board meeting three weeks ago .
so it 's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country .
and the pipa trust board holds that license and pays the country for this .
so it 's a very solid , very well thought-out , very well grounded system , and it was a bottom-up system , and that was very important with this work , from the bottom up to secure this .
so the conditions for success here are listed .
you can read them yourselves .
but i would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation .
and that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world .
and i 'll leave you with one final slide , that is : how do we scale this up ?
how do we realize sylvia 's dream ?
where eventually do we take this ?
here 's the pacific with large mpas and large conservation zones on it .
and as you can see , we have a patchwork across this ocean .
i 've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle , the phoenix islands , but every other green patch on that has its own story .
and what we need to do now is look at the whole pacific ocean in its entirety and make a network of mpas across the pacific so that we have our world 's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- imagine , if you will - a gift .
i 'd like for you to picture it in your mind .
it 's not too big - about the size of a golf ball .
so envision what it looks like all wrapped up .
but before i show you what 's inside , i will tell you , it 's going to do incredible things for you .
it will bring all of your family together .
you will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you have n't heard from in years .
adoration and admiration will overwhelm you .
it will recalibrate what 's most important in your life .
it will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith .
you 'll have a new understanding and trust in your body .
you 'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy .
you 'll expand your vocabulary , meet new people , and you 'll have a healthier lifestyle .
and get this - you 'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing .
you 'll eat countless gourmet meals .
flowers will arrive by the truckload .
people will say to you , " you look great . have you had any work done ? "
and you 'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs .
you 'll be challenged , inspired , motivated and humbled .
your life will have new meaning .
peace , health , serenity , happiness , nirvana .
the price ?
$ 55,000 , and that 's an incredible deal .
by now i know you 're dying to know what it is and where you can get one .
does amazon carry it ?
does it have the apple logo on it ?
is there a waiting list ?
not likely .
this gift came to me about five months ago .
it looked more like this when it was all wrapped up - not quite so pretty .
and this , and then this .
it was a rare gem - a brain tumor , hemangioblastoma - the gift that keeps on giving .
and while i 'm okay now , i would n't wish this gift for you .
i 'm not sure you 'd want it .
but i would n't change my experience .
it profoundly altered my life in ways i did n't expect in all the ways i just shared with you .
so the next time you 're faced with something that 's unexpected , unwanted and uncertain , consider that it just may be a gift .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the question today is not : why did we invade afghanistan ?
the question is : why are we still in afghanistan one decade later ?
why are we spending $ 135 billion ?
why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground ?
why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict ?
how has this happened ?
the last 20 years has been the age of intervention , and afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy .
we came out of the end of the cold war in despair .
we faced rwanda ; we faced bosnia , and then we rediscovered our confidence .
in the third act , we went into bosnia and kosovo and we seemed to succeed .
in the fourth act , with our hubris , our overconfidence developing , we invaded iraq and afghanistan , and in the fifth act , we plunged into a humiliating mess .
so the question is : what are we doing ?
why are we still stuck in afghanistan ?
and the answer , of course , that we keep being given is as follows : we 're told that we went into afghanistan because of 9/11 , and that we remain there because the taliban poses an existential threat to global security .
in the words of president obama , " if the taliban take over again , they will invite back al-qaeda , who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can . "
the story that we 're told is that there was a " light footprint " initially - in other words , that we ended up in a situation where we did n't have enough troops , we did n't have enough resources , that afghans were frustrated - they felt there was n't enough progress and economic development and security , and therefore the taliban came back - that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments , but we still did n't put enough troops on the ground .
and that it was n't until 2009 , when president obama signed off on a surge , that we finally had , in the words of secretary clinton , " the strategy , the leadership and the resources . "
so , as the president now reassures us , we are on track to achieve our goals .
all of this is wrong .
every one of those statements is wrong .
afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security .
it is extremely unlikely the taliban would ever be able to take over the country - extremely unlikely they 'd be able to seize kabul .
they simply do n't have a conventional military option .
and even if they were able to do so , even if i 'm wrong , it 's extremely unlikely the taliban would invite back al-qaeda .
from the taliban 's point of view , that was their number one mistake last time .
if they had n't invited back al-qaeda , they would still be in power today .
and even if i 'm wrong about those two things , even if they were able to take back the country , even if they were to invite back al-qaeda , it 's extremely unlikely that al-qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the united states or harm europe .
because this is n't the 1990s anymore .
if the al-qaeda base was to be established near ghazni , we would hit them very hard , and it would be very , very difficult for the taliban to protect them .
furthermore , it 's simply not true that what went wrong in afghanistan is the light footprint .
in my experience , in fact , the light footprint was extremely helpful .
and these troops that we brought in - it 's a great picture of david beckham there on the sub-machine gun - made the situation worse , not better .
when i walked across afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002 , what i saw was scenes like this .
a girl , if you 're lucky , in the corner of a dark room - lucky to be able to look at the koran .
but in those early days when we 're told we did n't have enough troops and enough resources , we made a lot of progress in afghanistan .
within a few months , there were two and a half million more girls in school .
in sangin where i was sick in 2002 , the nearest health clinic was within three days walk .
today , there are 14 health clinics in that area alone .
there was amazing improvements .
we went from almost no afghans having mobile telephones during the taliban to a situation where , almost overnight , three million afghans had mobile telephones .
and we had progress in the free media .
we had progress in elections - all of this with the so-called light footprint .
but when we began to bring more money , when we began to invest more resources , things got worse , not better . how ?
well first see , if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like afghanistan where the entire revenue of the afghan state is one billion dollars a year , you drown everything .
it 's not simply corruption and waste that you create ; you essentially replace the priorities of the afghan government , the elected afghan government , with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities .
and the same is true for the troops .
when i walked across afghanistan , i stayed with people like this .
this is commandant haji malem mohsin khan of kamenj .
commandant haji malem mohsin khan of kamenj was a great host .
he was very generous , like many of the afghans i stayed with .
but he was also considerably more conservative , considerably more anti-foreign , considerably more islamist than we 'd like to acknowledge .
this man , for example , mullah mustafa , tried to shoot me .
and the reason i 'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is i was somewhat frightened , and i was too afraid on this occasion to ask him , having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house , why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me .
but 18 months later , i asked him why he had tried to shoot me .
and mullah mustafa - he 's the man with the pen and paper - explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph , nadir shah had bet him that he could n't hit me .
now this is not to say afghanistan is a place full of people like mullah mustafa .
it 's not ; it 's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence .
but it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it .
2005 , anthony fitzherbert , an agricultural engineer , could travel through helmand , could stay in nad ali , sangin and ghoresh , which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place .
today , he could never do that .
so the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the taliban insurgency is mistaken .
rather than preceding the insurgency , the taliban followed the troop deployment , and as far as i 'm concerned , the troop deployment caused their return .
now is this a new idea ?
no , there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years .
i ran a center at harvard from 2008 to 2010 , and there were people like michael semple there who speak afghan languages fluently , who 've traveled to almost every district in the country .
andrew wilder , for example , born on the pakistan-iranian border , served his whole life in pakistan and afghanistan .
paul fishstein who began working there in 1978 - worked for save the children , ran the afghan research and evaluation unit .
these are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making afghanistan less secure , not more secure - that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work .
and yet , nobody listened to them .
instead , there was a litany of astonishing optimism .
beginning in 2004 , every general came in saying , " i 've inherited a dismal situation , but finally i have the right resources and the correct strategy , which will deliver , " in general barno 's word in 2004 , the " decisive year . "
well guess what ? it did n't .
but it was n't sufficient to prevent general abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver , in 2005 , the " decisive year . "
or general david richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the " crunch year . "
or in 2007 , the norwegian deputy foreign minister , espen eide , to say that that would deliver the " decisive year . "
or in 2008 , major general champoux to come in and say he would deliver the " decisive year . "
or in 2009 , my great friend , general stanley mcchrystal , who said that he was " knee-deep in the decisive year . "
or in 2010 , the u.k. foreign secretary , david miliband , who said that at last we would deliver the " decisive year . "
and you 'll be delighted to hear in 2011 , today , that guido westerwelle , the german foreign minister , assures us that we are in the " decisive year . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- how do we allow any of this to happen ?
well the answer , of course , is , if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country , you co-opt almost everybody .
even the aid agencies , who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the u.s. and the european governments to build schools and clinics , are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that afghanistan is an existential threat to global security .
they 're worried , in other words , that if anybody believes that it was n't such a threat - oxfam , save the children would n't get the money to build their hospitals and schools .
it 's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest .
it 's very difficult for a politician , because you 're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain .
you feel deep , deep guilt .
you exaggerate your fears , and you 're terrified about the humiliation of defeat .
what is the solution to this ?
well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like michael semple , or those other people , who are telling the truth , who know the country , who 've spent 30 years on the ground - and most importantly of all , the missing component of this - afghans themselves , who understand what is going on .
we need to somehow get their message to the policymakers .
and this is very difficult to do because of our structures .
the first thing we need to change is the structures of our government .
very , very sadly , our foreign services , the united nations , the military in these countries have very little idea of what 's going on .
the average british soldier is on a tour of only six months ; italian soldiers , on tours of four months ; the american military , on tours of 12 months .
diplomats are locked in embassy compounds .
when they go out , they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour .
in the british embassy in afghanistan in 2008 , an embassy of 350 people , there were only three people who could speak dari , the main language of afghanistan , at a decent level .
and there was not a single pashto speaker .
in the afghan section in london responsible for governing afghan policy on the ground , i was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in afghanistan .
so we need to change that institutional culture .
and i could make the same points about the united states and the united nations .
secondly , we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals .
we need to make sure that we 're a little bit suspicious , that we understand that optimism is in the dna of the military , that we do n't respond to it with quite as much alacrity .
and thirdly , we need to have some humility .
we need to begin from the position that our knowledge , our power , our legitimacy is limited .
this does n't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster .
it is n't .
bosnia and kosovo were signal successes , great successes .
today when you go to bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened .
it 's almost impossible to believe the progress we 've made since 1994 .
refugee return , which the united nations high commission for refugees thought would be extremely unlikely , has largely happened .
a million properties have been returned .
borders between the bosniak territory and the bosnian-serb territory have calmed down .
the national army has shrunk .
the crime rates in bosnia today are lower than they are in sweden .
this has been done by an incredible , principled effort by the international community , and , of course , above all , by bosnians themselves .
but you need to look at context .
and this is what we 've lost in afghanistan and iraq .
you need to understand that in those places what really mattered was , firstly , the role of tudman and milosevic in coming to the agreement , and then the fact those men went , that the regional situation improved , that the european union could offer bosnia something extraordinary : the chance to be part of a new thing , a new club , a chance to join something bigger .
and finally , we need to understand that in bosnia and kosovo , a lot of the secret of what we did , a lot of the secret of our success , was our humility - was the tentative nature of our engagement .
we criticized people a lot in bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals .
we criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees .
but that slowness , that caution , the fact that president clinton initially said that american troops would only be deployed for a year , turned out to be a strength , and it helped us to put our priorities right .
one of the saddest things about our involvement in afghanistan is that we 've got our priorities out of sync .
we 're not matching our resources to our priorities .
because if what we 're interested in is terrorism , pakistan is far more important than afghanistan .
if what we 're interested in is regional stability , egypt is far more important .
if what we 're worried about is poverty and development , sub-saharan africa is far more important .
this does n't mean that afghanistan does n't matter , but that it 's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage .
so if i can finish with a metaphor for intervention , what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue .
why mountain rescue ?
because when people talk about intervention , they imagine that some scientific theory - the rand corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population .
this is the wrong way of looking at it .
you need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue .
when you 're doing mountain rescue , you do n't take a doctorate in mountain rescue , you look for somebody who knows the terrain .
it 's about context .
you understand that you can prepare , but the amount of preparation you can do is limited - you can take some water , you can have a map , you can have a pack .
but what really matters is two kinds of problems - problems that occur on the mountain which you could n't anticipate , such as , for example , ice on a slope , but which you can get around , and problems which you could n't anticipate and which you ca n't get around , like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather .
and the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain , in every temperature , at every period - a guide who , above all , knows when to turn back , who does n't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them .
what we look for in firemen , in climbers , in policemen , and what we should look for in intervention , is intelligent risk takers - not people who plunge blind off a cliff , not people who jump into a burning room , but who weigh their risks , weigh their responsibilities .
because the worst thing we have done in afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option .
it makes failure invisible , inconceivable and inevitable .
and if we can resist this crazy slogan , we shall discover - in egypt , in syria , in libya , and anywhere else we go in the world - that if we can often do much less than we pretend , we can do much more than we fear .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you very much .
thank you . thank you very much .
thank you . thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
thank you . thank you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : rory , you mentioned libya at the end .
just briefly , what 's your take on the current events there and the intervention ?
rory stewart : okay , i think libya poses the classic problem .
the problem in libya is that we are always pushing for the black or white .
we imagine there are only two choices : either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation .
and we are always being tempted up to our neck .
we put our toes in and we go up to our neck .
what we should have done in libya is we should have stuck to the u.n. resolution .
we should have limited ourselves very , very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in benghazi .
we could have done that .
we set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours .
instead of which , we 've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change .
in doing so , we 've destroyed our credibility with the security council , which means it 's very difficult to get a resolution on syria , and we 're setting ourselves up again for failure .
once more , humility , limits , honesty , realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of .
bg : rory , thank you very much .
rs : thank you . -lrb- bg : thank you . -rrb- what i want to talk about today is one idea .
it 's an idea for a new kind of school , which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work .
and it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon .
where it comes from is an organization called the young foundation , which , over many decades , has come up with many innovations in education , like the open university and things like extended schools , schools for social entrepreneurs , summer universities and the school of everything .
and about five years ago , we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the u.k.
and we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems .
one was large numbers of bored teenagers who just did n't like school , could n't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs .
and employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school were n't actually ready for real work , did n't have the right attitudes and experience .
and so we try to ask : what kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in , not fighting to stay out ?
and after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from paraguay to australia , and looking at some of the academic research , which showed the importance of what 's now called non-cognitive skills - the skills of motivation , resilience - and that these are as important as the cognitive skills - formal academic skills - we came up with an answer , a very simple answer in a way , which we called the studio school .
and we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the renaissance where work and learning are integrated .
you work by learning , and you learn by working .
and the design we came up with had the following characteristics .
first of all , we wanted small schools - about 300 , 400 pupils - 14 to 19 year-olds , and critically , about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms , but through real-life , practical projects , working on commission to businesses , ngo 's and others .
that every pupil would have a coach , as well as teachers , who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business .
and all of this will be done within the public system , funded by public money , but independently run .
and all at no extra cost , no selection , and allowing the pupils the route into university , even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well .
underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things , they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real - all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does .
now that was a nice idea , so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase .
we tried it out , first in luton - famous for its airport and not much else , i fear - and in blackpool - famous for its beaches and leisure .
and what we found - and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them - but we found that the young people loved it .
they found it much more motivational , much more exciting than traditional education .
and perhaps most important of all , two years later when the exam results came through , the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top - in fact , pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of gcse 's , which is the british marking system .
now not surprisingly , that influenced some people to think we were onto something .
the minister of education down south in london described himself as a " big fan . "
and the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today .
and indeed , the head of the chambers of commerce is now the chairman of the studio schools trust and helping it , not just with big businesses , but small businesses all over the country .
we started with two schools .
that 's grown this year to about 10 .
and next year , we 're expecting about 35 schools open across england , and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening - a pretty rapid spread of this idea .
interestingly , it 's happened almost entirely without media coverage .
it 's happened almost entirely without big money behind it .
it spread almost entirely through word of mouth , virally , across teachers , parents , people involved in education .
and it spread because of the power of an idea - so the very , very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal , things like working in teams , doing practical projects , and putting them right at the heart of learning , rather than on the edges .
now there 's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn .
this is one from yorkshire where , in fact , my nephew , i hope , will be able to attend it .
and this one is focused on creative and media industries .
other ones have a focus on health care , tourism , engineering and other fields .
we think we 're onto something .
it 's not perfect yet , but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands , possibly millions , of teenagers who are really bored by schooling .
it does n't animate them .
they 're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour .
they want to do things , they want to get their hands dirty , they want education to be for real .
and my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us .
we feel we 're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the studio school idea into something which is present , not as a universal answer for every child , but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world .
and i hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- shall i ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations ?
i 'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- none , huh ?
all right .
i 'm going to talk about dinosaurs .
do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- dinosaurs are kind of funny , you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're going to kind of go in a different direction right now .
i hope you all realize that .
so i 'll just give you my message up front : try not to go extinct .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people ask me a lot - in fact , one of the most asked questions i get is , why do children like dinosaurs so much ?
what 's the fascination ?
and i usually just say , " well dinosaurs were big , different and gone . "
they 're all gone .
well that 's not true , but we 'll get to the goose in a minute .
so that 's sort of the theme : big , different and gone .
the title of my talk : shape-shifting dinosaurs : the cause of a premature extinction .
now i assume that we remember dinosaurs .
and there 's lots of different shapes .
lots of different kinds .
a long time ago , back in the early 1900s , museums were out looking for dinosaurs .
they went out and gathered them up .
and this is an interesting story .
every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had .
so if the museum in toronto went out and collected a tyrannosaur , a big one , then the museum in ottawa wanted a bigger one and a better one .
and that happened for all museums .
so everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs .
and this was in the early 1900s .
by about 1970 , some scientists were sitting around and they thought , " what in the world ?
look at these dinosaurs .
they 're all big .
where are all the little ones ? "
and they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it : " where are the little dinosaurs ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , go to a museum , you 'll see , see how many baby dinosaurs there are .
people assumed - and this was actually a problem - people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs , if they had juvenile dinosaurs , they 'd be easy to identify .
you 'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur .
but all they had were big dinosaurs .
and it comes down to a couple of things .
first off , scientists have egos , and scientists like to name dinosaurs .
they like to name anything .
everybody likes to have their own animal that they named .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so every time they found something that looked a little different , they named it something different .
and what happened , of course , is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs .
in 1975 , a light went on in somebody 's head .
dr. peter dodson at the university of pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do , which is different than the way reptiles grow .
and in fact , he used the cassowary as an example .
and it 's kind of cool - if you look at the cassowary , or any of the birds that have crests on their heads , they actually grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow .
now think about that .
they 're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny .
so allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth .
so you can see that if you actually found one that was 80 percent grown and you did n't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary , you would think they were two different animals .
so this was a problem , and peter dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called hypacrosaurus .
and he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like , if it grew in sort of a linear fashion , it would have a crest about half the size of the adult .
but the actual sub-adult at 65 percent had no crest at all .
so this was interesting .
so this is where people went astray again .
i mean , if they 'd have just taken that , taken peter dodson 's work , and gone on with that , then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have .
but scientists have egos ; they like to name things .
and so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different .
now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur , or any animal , is a young one or an older one .
and that 's by actually cutting into their bones .
but cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do , as you can imagine , because in museums bones are precious .
you go into a museum and they take really good care of them .
they put them in foam , little containers .
they 're very well taken care of .
they do n't like it if you come in and want to saw them open and look inside .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they do n't normally let you do that .
but i have a museum and i collect dinosaurs and i can saw mine open .
so that 's what i do .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if you cut open a little dinosaur , it 's very spongy inside like a.
and if you cut into an older dinosaur , it 's very massive .
you can tell it 's mature bone .
so it 's real easy to tell them apart .
so what i want to do is show you these .
in north america in the northern plains of the united states and the southern plains of alberta and saskatchewan , there 's this unit of rock called the hell creek formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on earth .
and there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes - i mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct .
and so we will evaluate them .
and that 's sort of what i 've been doing .
so my students , my staff , we 've been cutting them open .
now as you can imagine , cutting open a leg bone is one thing , but when you go to a museum and say , " you do n't mind if i cut open your dinosaur 's skull do you ? "
they say , " go away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here are 12 dinosaurs .
and we want to look at these three first .
so these are dinosaurs that are called pachycephalosaurs .
and everybody knows that these three animals are related .
and the assumption is is that they 're related like cousins or whatever .
but no one ever considered that they might be more closely related .
in other words , people looked at them and they saw the differences .
and you all know that if you are going to determine whether you 're related to your brother or your sister , you ca n't do it by looking at differences .
you can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities .
so people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are .
pachycephalosaurus has a big , thick dome on its head , and it 's got some little bumps on the back of its head , and it 's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose .
and then stygimoloch , another dinosaur from the same age , lived at the same time , has spikes sticking out the back of its head .
it 's got a little , tiny dome , and it 's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose .
and then there 's this thing called dracorex , hogwart 's eye .
guess where that came from ? dragon .
so here 's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head , no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose .
nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike .
but they did look at these three and they said , " these are three different dinosaurs , and dracorex is probably the most primitive of them .
and the other one is more primitive than the other .
it 's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out .
but if you line them up , if you just take those three skulls and just line them up , they line up like this .
dracorex is the littlest one , stygimoloch is the middle size one , pachycephalosaurus is the largest one .
and one would think , that should give me a clue .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it did n't give them a clue .
because , well we know why .
scientists like to name things .
so if we cut open dracorex - i cut open our dracorex - and look , it was spongy inside , really spongy inside .
i mean , it is a juvenile and it 's growing really fast .
so it is going to get bigger .
if you cut open stygimoloch , it is doing the same thing .
the dome , that little dome , is growing really fast .
it 's inflating very fast .
what 's interesting is the spike on the back of the dracorex was growing very fast as well .
the spikes on the back of the stygimoloch are actually resorbing , which means they 're getting smaller as that dome is getting bigger .
and if we look at pachycephalosaurus , pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing .
so just with these three dinosaurs , you can easily - as a scientist - we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal .
which of course means that stygimoloch and dracorex are extinct .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with .
so a colleague of mine at berkley , he and i were looking at triceratops .
and before the year 2000 - now remember , triceratops was first found in the 1800s - before 2000 , no one had ever seen a juvenile triceratops .
there 's a triceratops in every museum in the world , but no one had ever collected a juvenile .
and we know why , right ?
because everybody wants to have a big one .
so everyone had a big one .
so we went out and collected a whole bunch of stuff and we found a whole bunch of little ones .
they 're everywhere . they 're all over the place .
so we have a whole bunch of them at our museum .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and everybody says it 's because i have a little museum .
when you have a little museum , you have little dinosaurs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you look at the triceratops , you can see it 's changing , it 's shape-shifting .
as the juveniles are growing up , their horns actually curve backwards .
and then as they grow older , the horns grow forward .
and that 's pretty cool .
if you look along the edge of the frill , they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the pachycephalosaurs .
and then , because the juveniles are in my collection , i cut them open and look inside .
and the little one is really spongy .
and the middle size one is really spongy .
but what was interesting was the adult triceratops was also spongy .
and this is a skull that is two meters long .
it 's a big skull .
but there 's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a triceratops , except it 's bigger , and it 's called torosaurus .
and torosaurus , when we cut into it , has mature bone .
but it 's got these big holes in its shield .
and everybody says , " a triceratops and a torosaurus ca n't possibly be the same animal because one of them 's bigger than the other one . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and it has holes in its frill . "
and i said , " well do we have any juvenile torosauruses ? "
and they said , " well no , but it has holes in its frill . "
so one of my graduate students , john scannella , looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in triceratops and , of course it 's open , in torosaurus - so he found the transitional ones between triceratops and torosaurus , which was pretty cool .
so now we know that torosaurus is actually a grownup triceratops .
now when we name dinosaurs , when we name anything , the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out .
so torosaurus is extinct .
triceratops , if you 've heard the news , a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong .
they thought torosaurus should be kept and triceratops thrown out , but that 's not going to happen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs .
i mean , here 's edmontosaurus and anatotitan .
anatotitan : giant duck .
it 's a giant duck-bill dinosaur .
here 's another one .
so we look at the bone histology .
the bone histology tells us that edmontosaurus is a juvenile , or at least a sub-adult , and the other one is an adult and we have an ontogeny .
and we get rid of anatotitan .
so we can just keep doing this .
and the last one is t. rex .
so there 's these two dinosaurs , t. rex and nanotyrannus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- again , makes you wonder .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but they had a good question .
they were looking at them and they said , " one 's got 17 teeth , and the biggest one 's got 12 teeth .
and that does n't make any sense at all , because we do n't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older .
so it must be true - they must be different . "
so we cut into them .
and sure enough , nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone .
it looks like it could still get bigger .
and at the museum of the rockies where we work , i have four t. rexes , so i can cut a whole bunch of them .
but i did n't have to cut any of them really , because i just lined up their jaws and it turned out the biggest one had 12 teeth and the next smallest one had 13 and the next smallest had 14 .
and of course , nano has 17 .
and we just went out and looked at other people 's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth .
so again , real easy to say that tyrannosaurus ontogeny included nanotyrannus , and therefore we can take out another dinosaur .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so when it comes down to our end cretaceous , we have seven left .
and that 's a good number .
that 's a good number to go extinct , i think .
now as you can imagine , this is not very popular with fourth-graders .
fourth-graders love their dinosaurs , they memorize them .
and they 're not happy with this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today , i 'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics .
i 'm , among several other things , an electrical engineer , and that means that i spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology , and what i 've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways .
so it 's a really slow process , it 's really expensive , and the outcome of that process , namely electronic circuit boards , are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways .
so they 're really small , generally , they 're square and flat and hard , and frankly , most of them just are n't very attractive , and so my team and i have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics .
and so what if you could design and build electronics like this ? so what if you could do it extremely quickly , extremely inexpensively , and maybe more interestingly , really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally ?
would n't that be so cool , and that would n't that open up all sorts of new possibilities ?
i 'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines , and we 'll start with this one .
-lrb- video -rrb- magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper .
a conductive pen from the lewis lab at uiuc .
sticker templates .
speed x 4 .
making a switch .
music : dj shadow .
adding some intelligence with a microcontroller .
sketching an interface .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- pretty cool , huh ? we think so .
so now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things , we started to realize that , essentially , anything that we can do with paper , anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics .
so the next project that i want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility .
and i 'll kind of let it speak for itself .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this , and so the way that we 're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools , and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways .
and so sometime soon , you 'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way .
so thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- this man is wearing what we call a bee beard . -lrb- laughter -rrb- a beard full of bees .
now , this is what many of you might picture when you think about honeybees , maybe insects , or maybe anything that has more legs than two .
and let me start by telling you , i gotcha .
i understand that . but , there are many things to know , and i want you to open your minds here , keep them open , and change your perspective about honeybees .
notice that this man is not getting stung .
he probably has a queen bee tied to his chin , and the other bees are attracted to it .
so this really demonstrates our relationship with honeybees , and that goes deep back for thousands of years .
we 're very co-evolved , because we depend on bees for pollination and , even more recently , as an economic commodity .
many of you may have heard that honeybees are disappearing , not just dying , but they 're gone .
we do n't even find dead bodies .
this is called colony collapse disorder , and it 's bizarre . researchers around the globe still do not know what 's causing it , but what we do know is that , with the declining numbers of bees , the costs of over 130 fruit and vegetable crops so honeybees are important for their role in the economy as well as in agriculture .
here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs , or urban agriculture .
we 're familiar with the image on the left that shows a local neighborhood garden in the south end .
that 's where i call home . i have a beehive in the backyard .
and perhaps a green roof in the future , when we 're further utilizing urban areas , where there are stacks of garden spaces .
check out this image above the orange line in boston .
try to spot the beehive . it 's there .
it 's on the rooftop , right on the corner there , and it 's been there for a couple of years now .
the way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden , and it 's not because they need to be .
it 's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea , and that 's why i want you today to try to think about this , think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing .
let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works .
so we know flowers , we know fruits and vegetables , even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat , rely on pollinators , but you 've got male and female parts to a plant here , and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar , and in the process , a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen , or that male kind of sperm counterpart , along the way , and then travel to different flowers , and eventually an apple , in this case , will be produced .
you can see the orientation . the stem is down .
the blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it , but that 's a basic overview of how pollination works .
and let 's think about urban living , not today , and not in the past , but what about in a hundred years ?
what 's it gonna look like ? we have huge grand challenges these days of habitat loss . we have more and more people , billions of people , in 100 years , god knows how many people , and how little space there will be to fit all of them , so we need to change the way that we see cities , and looking at this picture on the left of new york city today , you can see how gray and brown it is .
we have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere , contributing to global climate change , no doubt .
what about in 100 years , if we have green rooftops everywhere , and gardening , and we create our own crops right in the cities ? we save on the costs of transportation , we save on a healthier diet , and we also educate and create new jobs locally .
we need bees for the future of our cities and urban living .
here 's some data that we collected through our company with best bees , where we deliver , install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them , in the city , in the countryside , and we introduce honeybees , and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape , for even that matter , and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is .
there 's a counterintuitive trend that we noticed in these numbers . so let 's look at the first metric here , overwintering survival .
now this has been a huge problem for many years , basically since the late 1980s , when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses , bacteria and fungal diseases with it .
overwintering success is hard , and that 's when most of the colonies are lost , and we found that in the cities , bees are surviving better than they are in the country .
a bit counterintuitive , right ?
we think , oh , bees , countryside , agriculture , but that 's not what the bees are showing .
the bees like it in the city . -lrb- laughter -rrb- furthermore , they also produce more honey .
the urban honey is delicious .
the bees in boston on the rooftop of the seaport hotel , where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that i 'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by , are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicious , healthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city .
so the yield for urban hives , in terms of honey production , is higher as well as the overwintering survival , compared to rural areas .
again , a bit counterintuitive .
and looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health , we can go back to the year 950 and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in ireland .
so the problems of bees today is n't necessarily something new . it has been happening since over a thousand years ago , but what we do n't really notice are these problems in cities .
so one thing i want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is .
you think in the city maybe the temperature 's warmer .
why are bees doing better in the city ?
this is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city .
perhaps there 's more pollen in the city .
with the trains coming in to urban hubs , they can carry pollen with them , very light pollen , and it 's just a big supermarket in the city .
a lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks .
perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in -lsb- rural -rsb- areas .
perhaps there are other things that we 're just not thinking about yet , but that 's one idea to think about , urban islands .
and colony collapse disorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees . honeybees are dying , and it 's a huge , huge grand challenge of our time .
what you can see up here is a map of the world , and we 're tracking the spread of this varroa mite .
now , the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping , and you can see , at the top right , the years are changing , we 're coming up to modern times , and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early 1900s through now .
it 's 1968 , and we 're pretty much covering asia .
1971 , we saw it spread to europe and south america , and then , when we get to the 1980s , and specifically to 1987 , the varroa mite finally came to north america and to the united states , and that is when the game changed for honeybees in the united states .
many of us will remember our childhood growing up , maybe you got stung by a bee , you saw bees on flowers .
think of the kids today . their childhood 's a bit different .
they do n't experience this .
the bees just are n't around anymore .
so we need bees and they 're disappearing and it 's a big problem .
what can we do here ?
so , what i do is honeybee research .
i got my ph.d. studying honeybee health .
i started in 2005 studying honeybees .
in 2006 , honeybees started disappearing , so suddenly , like , this little nerd kid going to school working with bugs - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - became very relevant in the world .
and it worked out that way .
so my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier .
i do n't research what 's killing the bees , per se .
i 'm not one of the many researchers around the world who 's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees .
we 're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines , through yogurt , like probiotics , and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees , and this process is so easy , even a 7-year-old can do it .
you just mix up some pollen , sugar and water , and whatever active ingredient you want to put in , and you just give it right to the bees . no chemicals involved , just immune boosters .
humans think about our own health in a prospective way .
we exercise , we eat healthy , we take vitamins .
why do n't we think about honeybees in that same type of way ?
bring them to areas where they 're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick .
i spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles . -lrb- laughter -rrb- like , years , years at the bench , " oh my gosh , it 's 3 a.m.
and i 'm still pricking bees . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then one day i said , " why do n't we just do an oral vaccine ? "
it 's like , " ugh , " so that 's what we do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd love to share with you some images of urban beehives , because they can be anything .
i mean , really open your mind with this .
you can paint a hive to match your home .
you can hide a hive inside your home .
these are three hives on the rooftop of the fairmont copley plaza hotel , and they 're beautiful here . i mean , we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets , and these bees are terrific , and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden .
that 's what the chefs go to to use for their cooking , and the honey - they do live events - they 'll use that honey at their bars .
honey is a great nutritional substitute for regular sugar because there are different types of sugars in there .
we also have a classroom hives project , where - this is a nonprofit venture - we 're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting , behind glass , and used as an educational tool .
this hive that you see here has been in fenway high school for many years now .
the bees fly right into the outfield of fenway park .
nobody notices it . if you 're not a flower , these bees do not care about you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they do n't . they do n't . they 'll say , " s 'cuse me , flying around . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- some other images here in telling a part of the story that really made urban beekeeping terrific is in new york city , beekeeping was illegal until 2010 .
that 's a big problem , because what 's going to pollinate all of the gardens and the produce locally ? hands ?
i mean , locally in boston , there is a terrific company called green city growers , and they are going and pollinating their squash crops by hand with q-tips , and if they miss that three day window , there 's no fruit .
their clients are n't happy , and people go hungry .
so this is important .
we have also some images of honey from brooklyn .
now , this was a mystery in the new york times where the honey was very red , and the new york state forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers .
paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping .
they 've had hives on the rooftop of their opera house for many years now , and that 's what really got people started , thinking , " wow , we can do this , and we should do this . "
also in london , and in europe across the board , they 're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives , and i 'll show you an ending note here .
i would like to encourage you to open your mind .
what can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future ?
well , really , just change your perspective .
try to understand that bees are very important .
a bee is n't going to sting you if you see it .
the bee dies . honeybees die when they sting , so they do n't want to do it either . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's nothing to panic about . they 're all over the city .
you could even get your own hive if you want .
there are great resources available , and there are even companies that will help get you set up and mentor you and it 's important for our educational system in the world for students to learn about agriculture worldwide such as this little girl , who , again , is not even getting stung .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the great texts of the ancient world do n't survive to us in their original form .
they survive because medieval scribes copied them and copied them and copied them .
and so it is with archimedes , the great greek mathematician .
everything we know about archimedes as a mathematician we know about because of just three books , and they 're called a , b and c.
and a was lost by an italian humanist in 1564 .
and b was last heard of in the pope 's library about a hundred miles north of rome in viterbo in 1311 .
now codex c was only discovered in 1906 , and it landed on my desk in baltimore on the 19th of january , 1999 .
and this is codex c here .
now codex c is actually buried in this book .
it 's buried treasure .
because this book is actually a prayer book .
it was finished by a guy called johannes myrones on the 14th of april , 1229 .
and to make his prayer book he used parchment .
but he did n't use new parchment , he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts , and there were seven of them .
and archimedes codex c was just one of those seven .
he took apart the archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts .
he erased all of their texts , and then he cut the sheets down in the middle , he shuffled them up , and he rotated them 90 degrees , and he wrote prayers on top of these books .
and essentially these seven manuscripts disappeared for 700 years , and we have a prayer book .
the prayer book was discovered by this guy , johan ludvig heiberg , in 1906 .
and with just a magnifying glass , he transcribed as much of the text as he could .
and the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript that were unique texts .
they were n't in a and b at all ; they were completely new texts by archimedes , and they were called " the method " and " the stomachion . "
and it became a world famous manuscript .
now it should be clear by now that this book is in bad condition .
it got in worse condition in the 20th century after heiberg saw it .
forgeries were painted over it , and it suffered very badly from mold .
this book is the definition of a write-off .
it 's the sort of book that you thought would be in an institution .
but it 's not in an institution , it was bought by a private owner in 1998 .
why did he buy this book ?
because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe .
he wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous .
he wanted to make that which was expensive free .
and he wanted to do this as a matter of principle .
because not many people are really going to read archimedes in ancient greek , but they should have the chance to do it .
so he gathered around himself the friends of archimedes , and he promised to pay for all the work .
and it was an expensive job , but actually it would n't be as much as you think because these people , they did n't come from money , they came from archimedes .
and they came from all sorts of different backgrounds .
they came from particle physics , they came from classical philology , they came from book conservation , they came from ancient mathematics , they came from data management , they came from scientific imaging and program management .
and they got together to work on this manuscript .
the first problem was a conservation problem .
and this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with : there was glue on the spine of the book .
and if you look at this photograph carefully , the bottom half of this is rather brown .
and that glue is hide glue .
now if you 're a conservator , you can take off this glue reasonably easily .
the top half is elmer 's wood glue .
it 's polyvinyl acetate emulsion that does n't dissolve in water once it 's dry .
and it 's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on .
and so before we could start imaging archimedes , we had to take this book apart .
so it took four years to take apart .
and this is a rare action shot , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax , because this was used in the liturgical services of the greek orthodox church and they 'd used candle wax .
and the candle wax was dirty , and we could n't image through the wax .
so very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax .
it 's hard to tell you exactly how bad this condition of this book is , but it came out in little bits very often .
and normally in a book , you would n't worry about the little bits , but these little bits might contain unique archimedes text .
so , tiny fragments we actually managed to put back in the right place .
then , having done that , we started to image the manuscript .
and we imaged the manuscript in 14 different wavebands of light .
because if you look at something in different wavebands of light , you see different things .
and here is an image of a page imaged in 14 different wavebands of light .
but none of them worked .
so what we did was we processed the images together , and we put two images into one blank screen .
and here are two different images of the archimedes manuscript .
and the image on the left is the normal red image .
and the image on the right is an ultraviolet image .
and in the image on the right you might be able to see some of the archimedes writing .
if you merge them together into one digital canvas , the parchment is bright in both images and it comes out bright .
the prayer book is dark in both images and it comes out dark .
the archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another .
and it 'll come out dark but red , and then you can start to read it rather clearly .
and that 's what it looks like .
now that 's a before and after image , but you do n't read the image on the screen like that .
you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in , and you can just read it now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you process the same two images in a different way , you can actually get rid of the prayer book text .
and this is terribly important , because the diagrams in the manuscript are the unique source for the diagrams that archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century b.c.
and there we are , i can give them to you .
with this kind of imaging - this kind of infrared , ultraviolet , invisible light imaging - we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries .
how were we going to do that ?
well we took the manuscript , and we decided to image it in x-ray fluorescence imaging .
so an x-ray comes in in the diagram on the left and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom .
and that electron disappears .
and as it disappears , an electron from a shell farther out jumps in and takes its place .
and when it takes its place , it sheds electromagnetic radiation .
it sheds an x-ray .
and this x-ray is specific in its wavelength to the atom that it hits .
and what we wanted to get was the iron .
because the ink was written in iron .
and if we can map where this x-ray that comes out , where it comes from , we can map all the iron on the page , then theoretically we can read the image .
the thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this .
so we took it to the stanford synchrotron radiation laboratory in california , which is a particle accelerator .
electrons go around one way , positrons go around the other .
they meet in the middle , and they create subatomic particles like the charm quark and the tau lepton .
now we were n't actually going to put archimedes in that beam .
but as the electrons go round at the speed of light , they shed x-rays .
and this is the most powerful light source in the solar system .
this is called synchrotron radiation , and it 's normally used to look at things like proteins and that sort of thing .
but we wanted it to look at atoms , at iron atoms , so that we could read the page from before and after .
and lo and behold , we found that we could do it .
it took about 17 minutes to do a single page .
so what did we discover ?
well one of the unique texts in archimedes is called " the stomachion . "
and this did n't exist in codices a and b.
and we knew that it involved this square .
and this is a perfect square , and it 's divided into 14 bits .
but no one knew what archimedes was doing with these 14 bits .
and now we think we know .
he was trying to work out how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits and still make a perfect square .
anyone want to guess the answer ?
it 's 17,152 divided into 536 families .
and the important point about this is that it 's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics .
and combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics .
the really astonishing thing though about this manuscript is that we looked at the other manuscripts that the palimpsester had made , the scribe had made his book out of , and one of them was a manuscript containing text by hyperides .
now hyperides was an athenian orator from the fourth century b.c.
he was an exact contemporary of demosthenes .
and in 338 b.c. he and demosthenes together decided that they wanted to stand up to the military might of philip of macedon .
so athens and thebes went out to fight philip of macedon .
this was a bad idea , because philip of macedon had a son called alexander the great , and they lost the battle of chaeronea .
alexander the great went on to conquer the known world ; hyperides found himself on trial for treason .
and this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial - and it 's a great speech : " best of all , " he says , " is to win .
but if you ca n't win , then you should fight for a noble cause , because then you 'll be remembered .
consider the spartans .
they won enumerable victories , but no one remembers what they are because they were all fought for selfish ends .
the one battle that the spartans fought that everybody remembers is the the battle of thermopylae where they were butchered to a man , but fought for the freedom of greece . "
it was such a great speech that the athenian law courts let him off .
he lived for another 10 years , then the macedonian faction caught up with him .
they cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory , and no one knows what they did with his body .
so this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity , speaking to us , not from the grave , because his grave does n't exist , but from the athenian law courts .
now i should say at this point that normally when you 're looking at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off , you do n't find unique texts .
and to find two in one manuscript is really something .
to find three is completely weird .
and we found three .
aristotle 's " categories " is one of the foundational texts of western philosophy .
and we found a third century a.d. commentary on it , possibly by galen and probably by porphyry .
now all this data that we collected , all the images , all the raw images , all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing have been put online under a creative commons license for anyone to use for any commercial purpose .
-lrb- applause -rrb- why did the owner of the manuscript do this ?
he did this because he understands data as well as books .
now the thing to do with books , if you want to ensure their long-term utility , is to hide them away in closets and let very few people look at them .
the thing to do with data , if you want it to survive , is to let it out and have everybody have it with as little control on that data as possible .
and that 's what he did .
and institutions can learn from this .
because institutions at the moment confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing .
and if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the web , at the moment you have to go to the national library of y 's site or the university library of x 's site , which is about the most boring way in which you can deal with digital data .
what you want to do is to aggregate it all together .
because the web of the ancient manuscripts of the future is n't going to be built by institutions .
it 's going to be built by users , by people who get this data together , by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps from wherever they come from , all sorts of medieval romances from wherever they come from , people who just want to curate their own glorious selection of beautiful things .
and that is the future of the web .
and it 's an attractive and beautiful future , if only we can make it happen .
now we at the walters art museum have followed this example , and we have put up all our manuscripts on the web for people to enjoy - all the raw data , all the descriptions , all the metadata .
under a creative commons license .
now the walters art museum is a small museum and it has beautiful manuscripts , but the data is fantastic .
and the result of this is that if you do a google search on images right now and you type in " illuminated manuscript koran " for example , 24 of the 28 images you 'll find come from my institution .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , let 's think about this for a minute .
what 's in it for the institution ?
there are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution .
you can talk about the humanities and that sort of thing , but let 's talk about selfish things .
because what 's really in it for the institution is this : now why do people go to the louvre ?
they go to see the mona lisa .
why do they go to see the mona lisa ?
because they already know what she looks like .
and they know what she looks like because they 've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere .
now , there is no need for these restrictions at all .
and i think that institutions should stand up and release all their data under unrestricted licenses , and it would be a great benefit to everybody .
why do n't we just let everybody have access to this data and curate their own collection of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things and increase the beauty and the cultural significance of the internet .
thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think all of us have been interested , at one time or another , in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed , such as the classic maya in the yucatan , the easter islanders , the anasazi , fertile crescent society , angor wat , great zimbabwe and so on . and within the last decade or two , archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses .
but there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse , such as japan , java , tonga and tikopea . so evidently , societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas .
how can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies ? the problem is obviously relevant to our situation today , because today as well , there are some societies that have already collapsed , such as somalia and rwanda and the former yugoslavia . there are also societies today that may be close to collapse , such as nepal , indonesia and columbia .
what about ourselves ?
what is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have ?
obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor . if anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses , you know right away that they 're an idiot . this is a complex subject .
but how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject ?
in analyzing societal collapses , i 've arrived at a five-point framework - a checklist of things that i go through to try and understand collapses . and i 'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the greenland norse society .
this is a european society with literate records , so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation .
in ad 984 vikings went out to greenland , settled greenland , and around 1450 they died out - the society collapsed , and every one of them ended up dead .
why did they all end up dead ? well , in my five-point framework , the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment : people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend . and in the case of the viking norse , the vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation , which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal , to make iron .
so they ended up an iron age european society , virtually unable to make their own iron . a second item on my checklist is climate change . climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter .
in the case of the vikings - in greenland , the climate got colder in the late 1300s , and especially in the 1400s . but a cold climate is n't necessarily fatal , because the inuit - the eskimos inhabiting greenland at the same time - did better , rather than worse , with cold climates . so why did n't the greenland norse as well ?
the third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society . and if that friendly support is pulled away , that may make a society more likely to collapse . in the case of the greenland norse , they had trade with the mother country - norway - and that trade dwindled : partly because norway got weaker , partly because of sea ice between greenland and norway .
the fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies .
in the case of norse greenland , the hostiles were the inuit - the eskimos sharing greenland - with whom the norse got off to bad relationships . and we know that the inuit killed the norse and , probably of greater importance , may have blocked access to the outer fjords , on which the norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year .
and then finally , the fifth item on my checklist is the political , economic , social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems . in the case of the greenland norse , cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were : their commitments to a christian society investing heavily in cathedrals ; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society ; and their scorn for the inuit , from whom they refused to learn . so that 's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the greenland norse .
what about a society today ?
for the past five years , i 've been taking my wife and kids to southwestern montana , where i worked as a teenager on the hay harvest . and montana , at first sight , seems like the most pristine environment in the united states .
but scratch the surface , and montana suffers from serious problems .
going through the same checklist : human environmental impacts ?
yes , acute in montana . toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars .
problems from weeds , weed control , cost montana nearly 200 million dollars a year . montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization , problems of forest management , problems of forest fires . second item on my checklist : climate change . yes - the climate in montana is getting warmer and drier , but montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack , and as the snow is melting - for example , as the glaciers in glacier national park are disappearing - that 's bad news for montana irrigation agriculture .
third thing on my checklist : relations with friendlies that can sustain the society . in montana today , more than half of the income of montana is not earned within montana , but is derived from out of state : transfer payments from social security , investments and so on - which makes montana vulnerable to the rest of the united states .
fourth : relations with hostiles . montanans have the same problems as do all americans , in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies , and terrorist attacks . and finally , last item on my checklist : question of how political , economic , social , cultural attitudes play into this . montanans have long-held values , which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems .
long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture , and to no government regulation ; values that worked well in the past , but they do n't seem to be working well today .
so , i 'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies .
are there any general conclusions that arise ?
in a way , just like tolstoy 's statement about every unhappy marriage being different , every collapsed or endangered society is different - they all have different details . but nevertheless , there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today . one interesting common thread has to do with , in many cases , the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak . there are many societies that do n't wind down gradually , but they build up - get richer and more powerful - and then within a short time , within a few decades
after their peak , they collapse . for example , the classic lowland maya of the yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s - literally a few decades after the maya were building their biggest monuments , and maya population was greatest .
or again , the collapse of the soviet union took place within a couple of decades , maybe within a decade , of the time when the soviet union was at its greatest power .
an analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish .
these rapid collapses are especially likely where there 's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption , or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential .
in a petri dish , bacteria grow . say they double every generation , and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15/16ths empty , and then the next generation 's 3/4ths empty , and the next generation half empty . within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty , it is full . there 's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed .
so , this is a frequent theme : societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power .
what it means to put it mathematically is that , if you 're concerned about a society today , you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function - the wealth itself - but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function . that 's one general theme . a second general theme is that there are many , often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others . many of those factors are not well understood . for example , why is it that in the pacific , of those hundreds of pacific islands , why did easter island end up as
the most devastating case of complete deforestation ?
it turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors - some , rather subtle ones - that were working against the easter islanders , and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra , latitude , rainfall . perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central asia .
easter , of all pacific islands , has the least input of dust from asia restoring the fertility of its soils . but that 's a factor that we did n't even appreciate until 1999 .
so , some societies , for subtle environmental reasons , are more fragile than others . and then finally , another generalization . i 'm now teaching a course at ucla , to ucla undergraduates , on these collapses of societies . what really bugs my ucla undergraduate students is , how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing ?
how could the easter islanders have deforested their environment ?
what did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree ?
did n't they see what they were doing ? how could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time ?
and i would expect that , if our human civilization carries on , then maybe in the next century people will be asking , why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action ?
it seems incredible in the past . in the future , it 'll seem incredible what we are doing today . and so i 've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems - why they fail to perceive the problems or , if they perceive them , why they fail to tackle them . or , if they tackle them , why do they fail to succeed in solving them ?
i 'll just mention two generalizations in this area .
one blueprint for trouble , making collapse likely , is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole , especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions . where what 's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole , there 's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run .
for example , among the greenland norse - a competitive rank society - what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs . and that led the chiefs to do what 's called flogging the land : overstocking the land , forcing tenant farmers into dependency . and that made the chiefs powerful in the short run , but led to the society 's collapse in the long run .
those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the united states today . especially because the decision makers in the united states are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds , by drinking bottled water and so on . and within the last couple of years , it 's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole , such as draining a few billion dollars out of enron and other businesses . they are quite correct
that these things are good for them in the short term , although bad for society in the long term .
so , that 's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions : conflicts of interest .
and the other generalization that i want to mention is that it 's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances . for example , the greenland norse , in this difficult environment , were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion , and by their strong social cohesion . but those two things - commitment to religion and strong social cohesion - also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the inuit . or today - australia .
one of the things that enabled australia to survive in this remote outpost of european civilization for 250 years has been their british identity .
but today , their commitment to a british identity is serving australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in asia . so it 's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength .
what 's going to be the outcome today ?
well , all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world , time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to - all of them , not more than 50 years , and any one of which can do us in ; the time bombs of water , of soil , of climate change , invasive species , the photosynthetic ceiling , population problems , toxics , etc . , etc . - listing about 12 of them . and while these time bombs - none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years , and most of them have fuses of a few decades - some of them , in some places ,
have much shorter fuses . at the rate at which we 're going now , the philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years . and the solomon islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest , which is their major export . and that 's going to be spectacular for the economy of the solomons . people often ask me , jared , what 's the most important thing that we need to do about the world 's environmental problems ?
and my answer is , the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do .
instead , there are a dozen things , any one of which could do us in .
and we 've got to get them all right , because if we solve 11 , we fail to solve the 12th - we 're in trouble . for example , if we solve our problems of water and soil and population , but do n't solve our problems of toxics , then we are in trouble .
the fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course , which means , by definition , that it can not be maintained .
and the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades .
that means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved , and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution , but our children and grandchildren certainly will .
the resolution is going to achieve either of two forms : either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action , or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice - namely , by war , disease or starvation . but what 's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades . in other words , since the theme of this session is choices , we have a choice . does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed ? i draw the reverse conclusion .
the big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control . our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us , something we can do nothing about .
instead , all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making . and since we made the problems , we can also solve the problems . that then means that it 's entirely in our power to deal with these problems .
in particular , what can all of us do ? for those of you who are interested in these choices , there are lots of things you can do . there 's a lot that we do n't understand , and that we need to understand . and there 's a lot that we already do understand , but are n't doing , and that we need to be doing . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : elon , what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car ?
elon musk : well , it goes back to when i was in university .
i thought about , what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity ?
i think it 's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production .
that sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century , independent of environmental concerns .
in fact , even if producing co2 was good for the environment , given that we 're going to run out of hydrocarbons , we need to find some sustainable means of operating .
ca : most of american electricity comes from burning fossil fuels .
how can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help ?
em : right . there 's two elements to that answer .
one is that , even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars , you 're still better off .
so if you take , say , natural gas , which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel , if you burn that in a modern general electric natural gas turbine , you 'll get about 60 percent efficiency .
if you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car , you get about 20 percent efficiency .
and the reason is , in the stationary power plant , you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more , is voluminous , and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source .
so in effect , even after you 've taken transmission loss into account and everything , even using the same source fuel , you 're at least twice as better off charging an electric car , then burning it at the power plant .
ca : that scale delivers efficiency .
em : yes , it does .
and then the other point is , we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway , electricity generation .
so given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation , then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport .
ca : so we 've got some video here of the tesla being assembled , which , if we could play that first video - so what is innovative about this process in this vehicle ?
em : sure . so , in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport , and i should say that i think , actually , all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets .
there 's just no way around newton 's third law .
the question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport ?
and in order to do that for cars , you have to come up with a really energy efficient car , so that means making it incredibly light , and so what you 're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in north america .
in fact , we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack .
and then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size .
so as a result , the energy usage is very low , and it has the most advanced battery pack , and that 's what gives it the range that 's competitive , so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range .
ca : i mean , those battery packs are incredibly heavy , but you think the math can still work out intelligently - by combining light body , heavy battery , you can still gain spectacular efficiency .
em : exactly . the rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack , and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range .
and in fact , customers of the model s are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range .
i think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge .
ca : bruno bowden , who 's here , did that , broke the world record.em : congratulations .
ca : that was the good news . the bad news was that to do it , he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops . -lrb- laughter -rrb- em : i mean , you can certainly drive - if you drive it 65 miles an hour , under normal conditions , 250 miles is a reasonable number .
ca : let 's show that second video showing the tesla in action on ice .
not at all a dig at the new york times , this , by the way .
what is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car ?
em : in creating an electric car , the responsiveness of the car is really incredible .
so we wanted really to have people feel as though they 've almost got to mind meld with the car , so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one , and as you corner and accelerate , it just happens , like the car has esp .
you can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness .
you ca n't do that with a gasoline car .
i think that 's really a profound difference , and people only experience that when they have a test drive .
ca : i mean , this is a beautiful but expensive car .
is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle ?
em : yeah . the goal of tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process , where version one was an expensive car at low volume , version two is medium priced and medium volume , and then version three would be low price , high volume .
so we 're at step two at this point .
so we had a $ 100,000 sports car , which was the roadster .
then we 've got the model s , which starts at around 50,000 dollars .
and our third generation car , which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $ 30,000 car .
but whenever you 've got really new technology , it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product .
and so i think we 're making progress in that direction , and i feel confident that we 'll get there .
ca : i mean , right now , if you 've got a short commute , you can drive , you can get back , you can charge it at home .
there is n't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast .
do you see that coming , really , truly , or just on a few key routes ?
em : there actually are far more charging stations than people realize , and at tesla we developed something called a supercharging technology , and we 're offering that if you buy a model s for free , forever .
and so this is something that maybe a lot of people do n't realize .
we actually have california and nevada covered , and we 've got the eastern seaboard from boston to d.c. covered .
by the end of this year , you 'll be able to drive from l.a. to new york just using the supercharger network , which charges at five times the rate of anything else .
and the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop , to stop time , of about six or seven .
so if you drive for three hours , you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes , because that 's normally what people will stop for .
so if you start a trip at 9 a.m. , by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat , hit the restroom , coffee , and keep going .
ca : so your proposition to consumers is , for the full charge , it could take an hour .
so it 's common - do n't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes .
wait for an hour , but the good news is , you 're helping save the planet , and by the way , the electricity is free . you do n't pay anything .
em : actually , what we 're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes , not for an hour .
it 's actually better to drive for about maybe 160 , 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going .
that 's the natural cadence of a trip .
ca : all right . so this is only one string to your energy bow .
you 've been working on this solar company solarcity .
what 's unusual about that ?
em : well , as i mentioned earlier , we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption , so i 'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar .
i mean , it 's really indirect fusion , is what it is .
we 've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun , and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization .
what most people know but do n't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already .
if the sun was n't there , we 'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees kelvin , and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation .
the whole ecosystem is solar-powered .
ca : but in a gallon of gasoline , you have , effectively , thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space , so it 's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar , and to remotely compete with , for example , natural gas , fracked natural gas . how are you going to build a business here ?
em : well actually , i 'm confident that solar will beat everything , hands down , including natural gas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : how ?
em : it must , actually . if it does n't , we 're in deep trouble .
ca : but you 're not selling solar panels to consumers .
what are you doing ?
em : no , we actually are . you can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system .
most people choose to lease .
and the thing about solar power is that it does n't have any feed stock or operational costs , so once it 's installed , it 's just there .
it works for decades . it 'll work for probably a century .
so therefore , the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low , and then get the cost of the financing low , because that interest - those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar .
and we 've made huge progress in that direction , and that 's why i 'm confident we 'll actually beat natural gas .
ca : so your current proposition to consumers is , do n't pay so much up front .
em : zero.ca : pay zero up front .
we will install panels on your roof .
you will then pay , how long is a typical lease ?
em : typical leases are 20 years , but the value proposition is , as you 're sort of alluding to , quite straightforward .
it 's no money down , and your utility bill decreases .
pretty good deal .
ca : so that seems like a win for the consumer .
no risk , you 'll pay less than you 're paying now .
for you , the dream here then is that - i mean , who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term ?
i mean , how do you , the company , benefit ?
em : well , essentially , solarcity raises a chunk of capital from say , a company or a bank .
google is one of our big partners here .
and they have an expected return on that capital .
with that capital , solarcity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment , which is less than the utility bill .
ca : but you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power .
you 're kind of building a new type of distributed utility .
em : exactly . what it amounts to is a giant distributed utility .
i think it 's a good thing , because utilities have been this monopoly , and people have n't had any choice .
so effectively it 's the first time there 's been competition for this monopoly , because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines , but now it 's on your roof .
so i think it 's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses .
ca : and you really picture a future where a majority of power in america , within a decade or two , or within your lifetime , it goes solar ?
em : i 'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power , and most likely a majority , and i predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years .
i made that bet with someone - ca : definition of plurality is ?
em : more from solar than any other source .
ca : ah . who did you make the bet with ?
em : with a friend who will remain nameless .
ca : just between us . -lrb- laughter -rrb- em : i made that bet , i think , two or three years ago , so in roughly 18 years , i think we 'll see more power from solar than any other source .
ca : all right , so let 's go back to another bet that you made with yourself , i guess , a kind of crazy bet .
you 'd made some money from the sale of paypal .
you decided to build a space company .
why on earth would someone do that ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- em : i got that question a lot , that 's true .
people would say , " did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry ? "
obviously , " he started with a large one , " is the punchline .
and so i tell people , well , i was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one .
and they 'd look at me , like , " is he serious ? "
ca : and strangely , you were . so what happened ?
em : it was a close call . things almost did n't work out .
we came very close to failure , but we managed to get through that point in 2008 .
the goal of spacex is to try to advance rocket technology , and in particular to try to crack a problem that i think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization , which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket .
ca : would humanity become a space-faring civilization ?
so that was a dream of yours , in a way , from a young age ?
you 've dreamed of mars and beyond ?
em : i did build rockets when i was a kid , but i did n't think i 'd be involved in this .
it was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one ?
and i really think there 's a fundamental difference , if you sort of look into the future , between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization , that 's out there exploring the stars , on multiple planets , and i think that 's really exciting , compared with one where we are forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event .
ca : so you 've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent , depending on how you calculate it .
how on earth have you done that ?
nasa has been doing this for years . how have you done this ?
em : well , we 've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe , the engines , the electronics and the launch operation .
there 's a long list of innovations that we 've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk , but - ca : not least because you could still get copied , right ?
you have n't patented this stuff . it 's really interesting to me .
em : no , we do n't patent.ca : you did n't patent because you think it 's more dangerous to patent than not to patent .
em : since our primary competitors are national governments , the enforceability of patents is questionable . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : that 's really , really interesting .
but the big innovation is still ahead , and you 're working on it now . tell us about this .
em : right , so the big innovation - ca : in fact , let 's roll that video and you can talk us through it , what 's happening here .
em : absolutely . so the thing about rockets is that they 're all expendable .
all rockets that fly today are fully expendable .
the space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket , but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time , and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight .
so the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight .
obviously that does n't work very well for - ca : what just happened there ? we just saw something land ?
em : that 's right . so it 's important that the rocket stages be able to come back , to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours .
ca : wow . reusable rockets.em : yes . -lrb- applause -rrb- and so what a lot of people do n't realize is , the cost of the fuel , of the propellant , is very small .
it 's much like on a jet .
so the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket .
so it 's possible to achieve , let 's say , roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket .
that 's why it 's so important .
every mode of transport that we use , whether it 's planes , trains , automobiles , bikes , horses , is reusable , but not rockets .
so we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization .
ca : you asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.em : certain cruises are apparently highly problematic .
ca : definitely more expensive .
so that 's potentially absolutely disruptive technology , and , i guess , paves the way for your dream to actually take , at some point , to take humanity to mars at scale .
you 'd like to see a colony on mars .
em : yeah , exactly . spacex , or some combination of companies and governments , needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary , of establishing a base on another planet , on mars - being the only realistic option - and then building that base up until we 're a true multi-planet species .
ca : so progress on this " let 's make it reusable , " how is that going ? that was just a simulation video we saw .
how 's it going ?
em : we 're actually , we 've been making some good progress recently with something we call the grasshopper test project , where we 're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight , the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky .
and we 've had some good tests .
ca : can we see that ? em : yeah .
so that 's just to give a sense of scale .
we dressed a cowboy as johnny cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : all right , let 's see that video then , because this is actually amazing when you think about it .
you 've never seen this before . a rocket blasting off and then - em : yeah , so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building .
-lrb- rocket launch -rrb- so now it 's hovering at about 40 meters , and it 's constantly adjusting the angle , the pitch and yaw of the main engine , and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters .
ca : how cool is that ? -lrb- applause -rrb- elon , how have you done this ?
these projects are so - paypal , solarcity , tesla , spacex , they 're so spectacularly different , they 're such ambitious projects at scale .
how on earth has one person been able to innovate in this way ?
what is it about you ?
em : i do n't know , actually .
i do n't have a good answer for you .
i work a lot . i mean , a lot .
ca : well , i have a theory.em : okay . all right .
ca : my theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design , technology and business , so if ted was tbd , design , technology and business , into one package , synthesize it in a way that very few people can and - and this is the critical thing - feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks .
you bet your fortune on it , and you seem to have done that multiple times .
i mean , almost no one can do that .
is that - could we have some of that secret sauce ?
can we put it into our education system ? can someone learn from you ?
it is truly amazing what you 've done .
em : well , thanks . thank you .
well , i do think there 's a good framework for thinking .
it is physics . you know , the sort of first principles reasoning .
generally i think there are - what i mean by that is , boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there , as opposed to reasoning by analogy .
through most of our life , we get through life by reasoning by analogy , which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations .
and you have to do that .
otherwise , mentally , you would n't be able to get through the day .
but when you want to do something new , you have to apply the physics approach .
physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive , like quantum mechanics .
it 's really counterintuitive .
so i think that 's an important thing to do , and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback , and solicit it , particularly from friends .
this may sound like simple advice , but hardly anyone does that , and it 's incredibly helpful .
ca : boys and girls watching , study physics .
learn from this man .
elon musk , i wish we had all day , but thank you so much for coming to ted .
em : thank you . ca : that was awesome . that was really , really cool .
look at that . -lrb- applause -rrb- just take a bow . that was fantastic .
thank you so much .
cartoons are basically short stories .
i tried to find one that did n't have a whole lot of words .
not all of them have happy endings .
so how did i get started cartooning ?
i doodled a lot as a kid , and if you spend enough time doodling , sooner or later , something happens : all your career options run out .
so you have to make a living cartooning .
actually , i fell in love with the ocean when i was a little boy , when i was about eight or nine .
and i was particularly fascinated with sharks .
this is some of my early work .
eventually , my mom took the red crayon away , so it was -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
but i 'd like to relay to you a childhood experience of mine that really made me see the ocean differently , and it 's become the foundation of my work because , i feel like , if in a day , i can see the ocean differently , then i can evoke that same kind of change in others , especially kids .
before that day , this is how i saw the ocean .
it 's just a big blue surface .
and this is how we 've seen the ocean since the beginning of time .
it 's a mystery .
there 's been a lot of folklore developed around the ocean , mostly negative .
and that prompted people to make maps like this , with all kinds of wonderful detail on the land , but when you get to the waters edge , the ocean looks like one giant puddle of blue paint .
and this is the way i saw the ocean at school - as if to say , " all geography and science lessons stop at water 's edge .
this part 's not going to be on the test . "
but that day i flew low over the islands - it was a family trip to the caribbean , and i flew in a small plane low over the islands .
this is what i saw . i saw hills and valleys .
i saw forests and meadows .
i saw grottoes and secret gardens and places i 'd love to hide as a kid , if i could only breathe underwater .
and best of all , i saw the animals .
i saw a manta ray that looked as big as the plane i was flying in .
and i flew over a lagoon with a shark in it , and that was the day that my comic strip about a shark was born .
so from that day on , i was an ordinary kid walking around on dry land , but my head was down there , underwater .
up until that day , these were the animals that were most common in my life .
these were the ones i 'd like to draw - all variations of four legs and fur .
but when you got to the ocean , my imagination was no competition for nature .
every time i 'd come up with a crazy cartoon character on the drawing board , i 'd find a critter in the ocean that was even crazier .
and the differences in scale between this tiny sea dragon and this enormous humpback whale was like something out of a science-fiction movie .
whenever i talk to kids , i always like to tell them , the biggest animal that ever lived is still alive .
it 's not a dinosaur ; it 's a whale , animals as big as office buildings still swimming around out there in our ocean .
speaking of dinosaurs , sharks are basically the same fish they were 300 million years ago .
so if you ever fantasize about going back in time and seeing what a dinosaur looked like , that 's what a dinosaur looks like .
so you have living dinosaurs and space aliens , animals that evolved in zero gravity in harsh conditions .
it 's just incredible ; no hollywood designer could come up with something more interesting than that .
or this fangtooth . the particles in the water make it look like it 's floating in outer space .
could you image if we looked through the hubble telescope and we saw that ?
it would start a whole new space race .
but instead , we stick a camera in the deep ocean , and we see a fish , and it does n't capture our imagination as a society .
we say to ourselves , " maybe we can make fish sticks with it or something . "
so , what i 'd like to do now is try a little drawing .
so , i 'm going to try to draw this fangtooth here .
i love to draw the deep sea fish , because they are so ugly , but beautiful in their own way .
maybe we can give him a little bioluminescence here - give him a headlight , maybe a brake light , turn signals .
but it 's easy to see why these animals make such great cartoon characters , their shapes and sizes .
so some of them actually seem to have powers like superheroes in a comic book .
for instance , take these sea turtles .
they kind of have a sixth sense like superman 's x-ray vision .
they can sense the magnetic fields of the earth .
and they can use that sense to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean .
i kind of give my turtle hands just to make them an easier cartoon character to work with .
or take this sea cucumber .
it 's not an animal we draw cartoons of or draw at all .
he 's like an underwater spiderman .
he shoots out these sticky webs to entangle his enemy .
of course , sea cucumbers shoot them out their rears , which , in my opinion , makes them much more interesting a superhero .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he ca n't spin a web anytime ; he 's got to pull his pants down first .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or the blowfish .
the blowfish is like the incredible hulk .
it can change its body into a big , intimidating fish in a matter of seconds .
i 'm going to draw this blowfish uninflated .
and then i 'm going to attempt onscreen animation here .
let 's see .
try and inflate it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you talkin ' to me ? " see , he can inflate himself when he wants to be intimidating .
or take this swordfish .
could you imagine being born with a tool for a nose ?
do you think he wakes up in the morning , looks in the mirror and says , " somebody 's getting stabbed today . "
or this lionfish for instance .
imagine trying to make friends covered with razor-sharp poisonous barbs .
it 's not something you want to put on your facebook page , right ?
my characters are - my lead character 's a shark named sherman .
he 's a great white shark .
and i kind of broke the mold with sherman .
i did n't want to go with this ruthless predator image .
he 's kind of just out there making a living .
he 's sort of a homer simpson with fins .
and then his sidekick is a sea turtle , as i mentioned before , named filmore .
he uses his wonderful skills at navigation to wander the oceans , looking for a mate .
and he does manage to find them , but great navigation skills , lousy pick-up lines .
he never seems to settle on any particular girl .
i have a hermit crab named hawthorne , who does n't get a lot of respect as a hermit crab , so he kind of wishes he were a great white shark .
and then i 'll introduce you to one more character , this guy , ernest , who is basically a juvenile delinquent in a fish body .
so with characters , you can make stories .
sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens .
so , imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or , sometimes i take them to places that people have never heard of because they 're underwater .
for instance , i took them skiing in the mid-atlantic range , which is this range of mountains in the middle of the atlantic .
i 've taken them to the sea of japan , where they met giant jellyfish .
i 've taken them camping in the kelp forests of california .
this next one here , i did a story on the census of marine life .
and that was a lot of fun because , as most of you know , it 's a real project we 've heard about .
but it was a chance for me to introduce readers to a lot of crazy undersea characters .
so we start off the story with ernest , who volunteers as a census taker .
he goes down and he meets this famous anglerfish .
then he meets the yeti crab , the famous vampire squid - elusive , hard to find - and the dumbo octopus , which looks so much like a cartoon in real life that really did n't have to change a thing when i drew it .
i did another story on marine debris .
i was speaking to a lot of my friends in the conservation business , and they - i asked them , " so what 's one issue you would like everyone to know more about ? "
and they said - this one friend of mine said , " i 've got one word for you : plastic . "
and i told him , " well , i need something a little sexier than that .
plastic just is not going to do it . "
we sort of worked things out .
he wanted me to use words like polyvinyl chloride , which does n't really work in voice balloons very well .
i could n't fit them in .
so what i did was i made an adventure strip .
basically , this bottle travels a long way .
what i 'm trying to tell readers is that plastic does n't really go away ; it just continues to wash downstream .
and a lot of it ends up washing into the ocean , which is a great story if you attach a couple characters to it , especially if they ca n't stand each other , like these two .
so , i sent them to boise , idaho , where they dropped a plastic bottle into the boise sewer system .
and it ended up in the boise river and then on to the columbia river and then to the mouth of the columbia and to the pacific ocean and then on to this place called the great pacific garbage patch - which is this giant pacific gyre in the north pacific , where a lot of this plastic ends up floating around - and then back onto the lagoon .
so that was basically a buddy story with a plastic bottle following along .
so a lot of people remember the plastic bottle anyway , but we really talked about marine debris and plastic in the course of that one .
the third storyline i did about a year and a half ago was probably my most difficult .
it was on shark finning , and i felt really strongly about this issue .
and i felt like , since my main character was a shark , the comic strip was a perfect vehicle for telling the public about this .
now , finning is the act of taking a shark , cutting the valuable fins off and throwing the live animal back in the water .
it 's cruel , it 's wasteful .
there 's nothing funny or entertaining about it , but i really wanted to take this issue on .
i had to kill my main character , who is a shark .
we start with sherman in a chinese restaurant , who gets a fortune that he 's about to get caught by a trawler , which he does .
and then he dies .
he gets finned , and then he gets thrown overboard .
ostensibly , he 's dead now .
and so i killed a character that 's been in the newspaper for 15 years .
so i got a lot of reader feedback on that one .
meanwhile , the other characters are talking about shark fin soup .
i do three or four strips after that where we explore the finning issue and the shark fin soup issue .
sherman 's up in shark heaven .
this is what i love about comic strips , you know .
you really do n't have to worry about the audience suspending its sense of disbelief because , if you start with a talking shark , readers pretty much check their disbelief at the door .
you can kind of do anything .
it becomes a near-death experience for sherman .
meanwhile , ernest finds his fins on the internet .
there was a real website based in china that actually sold shark fins , so i kind of exposed that .
and he clicks the " buy now " button .
and voila , next-day air , they show up , and they surgically reattach them .
i ended that series with a kind of a mail-in petition that encouraged our national marine fishery service , to force other countries to have a stronger stance with shark management .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
i 'd like to end with a little metaphor here .
i 've been trying to think of a metaphor to represent mission blue , and this is what i came up with .
imagine you 're in an enormous room , and it 's as dark as a cave .
and you can have anything in that room , anything you want , but you ca n't see anything .
you 've been given one tool , a hammer .
so you wander around in the darkness , and you bump into something , and it feels like it 's made of stone .
it 's big , it 's heavy . you ca n't carry it away , so you bang it with your hammer , and you break off a piece .
and you take the piece out into the daylight .
and you see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster .
so you say to yourself , " well , that 's worth something . "
so you go back into the room , and you break this thing to pieces , and you haul it away .
and you find other things , and you break that up , and you haul those away .
and you 're getting all kinds of cool stuff .
and you hear other people doing the same thing .
so you get this sense of urgency , like you need to find as much stuff as possible as soon as possible .
and then some yells , " stop ! "
and they turn up the lights .
and you realize where you are ; you 're in the louvre .
and you 've taken all this complexity and beauty , and you 've turned it into a cheap commodity .
and that 's what we 're doing with the ocean .
and part of what mission blue is about is yelling , " stop ! "
so that each of us - explorer , scientist , cartoonist , singer , chef - can turn up the lights in their own way .
and that 's what i hope my comic strip does in a small way .
that 's why i like what i do .
thanks for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ they stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on tv ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ we will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ we will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ women of hope ♫ ♫ women of change ♫ ♫ women of war and pain ♫ ♫ i believe ♫
♫ i believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ women of hope ♫ ♫ women of change ♫ ♫ women of love , joy , no shame ♫ ♫ you 've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ oh lord , wo n't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ oh lord , wo n't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫
♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said , " you will grow free on this land " ♫ ♫ women of hope ♫ ♫ women of change ♫ ♫ women of war and pain ♫ ♫ i can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ nobody really knows ♫
♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ aung san suu kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ when her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫
♫ help someone ♫ now we know the words , let 's sing .
♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ if you 're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ people of hope ♫ ♫ people of change ♫ ♫ people of love , joy , no shame ♫ ♫ i believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when i was writing my new book , and it 's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago , when the kingdom of israel was in its infancy .
and it takes place in an area called the shephelah in what is now israel .
and the reason the story obsessed me is that i thought i understood it , and then i went back over it and i realized that i did n't understand it at all .
ancient palestine had a - along its eastern border , there 's a mountain range .
still same is true of israel today .
and in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region , so jerusalem , bethlehem , hebron .
and then there 's a coastal plain along the mediterranean , where tel aviv is now .
and connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the shephelah , which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west , and you can follow the shephelah , go through the shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains .
and the shephelah , if you 've been to israel , you 'll know it 's just about the most beautiful part of israel .
it 's gorgeous , with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards .
but more importantly , though , in the history of that region , it 's served , it 's had a real strategic function , and that is , it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way , get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains .
and 3,000 years ago , that 's exactly what happens .
the philistines , who are the biggest of enemies of the kingdom of israel , are living in the coastal plain .
they 're originally from crete . they 're a seafaring people .
and they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the shephelah up into the mountains , because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by bethlehem and split the kingdom of israel in two .
and the kingdom of israel , which is headed by king saul , obviously catches wind of this , and saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the philistines in the valley of elah , one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the shephelah .
and the israelites dig in along the northern ridge , and the philistines dig in along the southern ridge , and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other , because they 're deadlocked .
neither can attack the other , because to attack the other side you 've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side , and you 're completely exposed .
so finally , to break the deadlock , the philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor , and he calls out and he says to the israelites , " send your mightiest warrior down , and we 'll have this out , just the two of us . "
this was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat .
it was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle .
and the philistine who is sent down , their mighty warrior , is a giant .
he 's 6 foot 9 .
he 's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor , and he 's got a sword and he 's got a javelin and he 's got his spear . he is absolutely terrifying .
and he 's so terrifying that none of the israelite soldiers want to fight him .
it 's a death wish , right ? there 's no way they think they can take him .
and finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy , and he goes up to saul and he says , " i 'll fight him . "
and saul says , " you ca n't fight him . that 's ridiculous .
you 're this kid . this is this mighty warrior . "
but the shepherd is adamant . he says , " no , no , no , you do n't understand , i have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years . i think i can do it . "
and saul has no choice . he 's got no one else who 's come forward .
so he says , " all right . "
and then he turns to the kid , and he says , " but you 've got to wear this armor . you ca n't go as you are . "
so he tries to give the shepherd his armor , and the shepherd says , " no . "
he says , " i ca n't wear this stuff . "
the biblical verse is , " i can not wear this for i have not proved it , " meaning , " i 've never worn armor before . you 've got to be crazy . "
so he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd 's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant .
and the giant sees this figure approaching , and calls out , " come to me so i can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field . "
he issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him .
and the shepherd draws closer and closer , and the giant sees that he 's carrying a staff .
that 's all he 's carrying .
instead of a weapon , just this shepherd 's staff , and he says - he 's insulted - " am i a dog that you would come to me with sticks ? "
and the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket , puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes - right here , in his most vulnerable spot - and he falls down either dead or unconscious , and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head , and the philistines see this and they turn and they just run .
and of course , the name of the giant is goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is david , and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything i thought i knew about that story turned out to be wrong .
so david , in that story , is supposed to be the underdog , right ?
in fact , that term , david and goliath , has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger .
now why do we call david an underdog ?
well , we call him an underdog because he 's a kid , a little kid , and goliath is this big , strong giant .
we also call him an underdog because goliath is an experienced warrior , and david is just a shepherd .
but most importantly , we call him an underdog because all he has is - it 's that goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry , this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear , and all david has is this sling .
well , let 's start there with the phrase " all david has is this sling , " because that 's the first mistake that we make .
in ancient warfare , there are three kinds of warriors .
there 's cavalry , men on horseback and with chariots .
there 's heavy infantry , which are foot soldiers , armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor .
and there 's artillery , and artillery are archers , but , more importantly , slingers .
and a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it , and they put a projectile , either a rock or a lead ball , inside the pouch , and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go , and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target .
that 's what david has , and it 's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot .
it 's not this , right ? it 's not a child 's toy .
it 's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon .
when david rolls it around like this , he 's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second , and that means that when the rock is released , it 's going forward really fast , probably 35 meters per second .
that 's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers .
more than that , the stones in the valley of elah were not normal rocks . they were barium sulphate , which are rocks twice the density of normal stones .
if you do the calculations on the ballistics , on the stopping power of the rock fired from david 's sling , it 's roughly equal to the stopping power of a -lsb- .45 caliber -rsb- handgun .
this is an incredibly devastating weapon .
accuracy , we know from historical records that slingers - experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards .
from medieval tapestries , we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight .
they were incredibly accurate .
when david lines up - and he 's not 200 yards away from goliath , he 's quite close to goliath - when he lines up and fires that thing at goliath , he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes .
if you go back over the history of ancient warfare , you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another .
so what 's goliath ? he 's heavy infantry , and his expectation when he challenges the israelites to a duel is that he 's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman .
when he says , " come to me that i might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field , " the key phrase is " come to me . "
come up to me because we 're going to fight , hand to hand , like this .
saul has the same expectation .
david says , " i want to fight goliath , " and saul tries to give him his armor , because saul is thinking , " oh , when you say ' fight goliath , ' you mean ' fight him in hand-to-hand combat , ' infantry on infantry . "
but david has absolutely no expectation .
he 's not going to fight him that way . why would he ?
he 's a shepherd . he 's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves .
that 's where his strength lies .
so here he is , this shepherd , experienced in the use of a devastating weapon , up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat .
goliath is a sitting duck . he does n't have a chance .
so why do we keep calling david an underdog , and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable ?
there 's a second piece of this that 's important .
it 's not just that we misunderstand david and his choice of weaponry .
it 's also that we profoundly misunderstand goliath .
goliath is not what he seems to be .
there 's all kinds of hints of this in the biblical text , things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and do n't square with his image as this mighty warrior .
so to begin with , the bible says that goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant .
now that is weird , right ?
here is this mighty warrior challenging the israelites to one-on-one combat .
why is he being led by the hand by some young boy , presumably , to the point of combat ?
secondly , the bible story makes special note of how slowly goliath moves , another odd thing to say when you 're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point .
and then there 's this whole weird thing about how long it takes goliath to react to the sight of david .
so david 's coming down the mountain , and he 's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat .
there is nothing about him that says , " i am about to fight you like this . "
he 's not even carrying a sword .
why does goliath not react to that ?
it 's as if he 's oblivious to what 's going on that day .
and then there 's that strange comment he makes to david : " am i a dog that you should come to me with sticks ? "
sticks ? david only has one stick .
well , it turns out that there 's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with goliath , an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies .
there have been many articles written .
the first one was in 1960 in the indiana medical journal , and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for goliath 's height .
so goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era , and usually when someone is that far out of the norm , there 's an explanation for it .
so the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly , and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone .
and throughout history , many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly .
so the tallest person of all time was a guy named robert wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11 .
he had acromegaly .
do you remember the wrestler andré the giant ?
famous . he had acromegaly .
there 's even speculation that abraham lincoln had acromegaly .
anyone who 's unusually tall , that 's the first explanation we come up with .
and acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it , principally having to do with vision .
the pituitary tumor , as it grows , often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain , with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted .
so when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with goliath , they 've said , " wait a minute , he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly . "
and that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day .
why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant ?
because he ca n't make his way on his own .
why is he so strangely oblivious to david that he does n't understand that david 's not going to fight him until the very last moment ?
because he ca n't see him .
when he says , " come to me that i might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field , " the phrase " come to me " is a hint also of his vulnerability .
come to me because i ca n't see you .
and then there 's , " am i a dog that you should come to me with sticks ? "
he sees two sticks when david has only one .
so the israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe .
what they did n't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness .
and there is , i think , in that , a very important lesson for all of us .
giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem .
and sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm going to do is to just give a few notes , and this is from a book i 'm preparing called " letters to a young scientist . "
i 'd thought it 'd be appropriate to present it , on the basis that i have had extensive experience in teaching , counseling scientists across a broad array of fields .
and you might like to hear some of the principles that i 've developed in doing that teaching and counseling .
so let me begin by urging you , particularly you on the youngsters ' side , on this path you 've chosen , to go as far as you can .
the world needs you , badly .
humanity is now fully into the techno-scientific age .
there is going to be no turning back .
although varying among disciplines - say , astrophysics , molecular genetics , the immunology , the microbiology , the public health , to the new area of the human body as a symbiont , to public health , environmental science .
knowledge in medical science and science overall is doubling every 15 to 20 years .
technology is increasing at a comparable rate .
between them , the two already pervade , as most of you here seated realize , every dimension of human life .
so swift is the velocity of the techno-scientific revolution , so startling in its countless twists and turns , that no one can predict its outcome even a decade from the present moment .
there will come a time , of course , when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge , which actually began in the 1600s , has to peak and level off , the revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades .
it 'll render the human condition radically different from what it is today .
traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing , inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines .
in time , all of science will come to be a continuum of description , an explanation of networks , of principles and laws .
that 's why you need not just be training in one specialty , but also acquire breadth in other fields , related to and even distant from your own initial choice .
keep your eyes lifted and your head turning .
the search for knowledge is in our genes .
it was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world , and it 's never going to be quenched .
to understand and use it sanely , as a part of the civilization yet to evolve requires a vastly larger population of scientifically trained people like you .
in education , medicine , law , diplomacy , government , business and the media that exist today .
our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy , which most badly lack today - no applause , please .
it will be better for all if they prepare before entering office rather than learning on the job .
therefore you will do well to act on the side , no matter how far into the laboratory you may go , to serve as teachers during the span of your career .
i 'll now proceed quickly , and before else , to a subject that is both a vital asset and a potential barrier to a scientific career .
if you are a bit short in mathematical skills , do n't worry .
many of the most successful scientists at work today are mathematically semi-literate .
a metaphor will serve here : where elite mathematicians and statisticians and theorists often serve as architects in the expanding realm of science , the remaining large majority of basic applied scientists , including a large portion of those who could be said to be of the first rank , are the ones who map the terrain , they scout the frontiers , they cut the pathways , some may have considered me foolhardy , but it 's been my habit to brush aside the fear of mathematics when talking to candidate scientists .
during 41 years of teaching biology at harvard , i watched sadly as bright students turned away from the possibility of a scientific career or even from taking non-required courses in science because they were afraid of failure .
these math-phobes deprive science and medicine of immeasurable amounts of badly needed talent .
here 's how to relax your anxieties , if you have them : understand that mathematics is a language ruled like other verbal languages , or like verbal language generally , by its own grammar and system of logic .
any person with average quantitative intelligence who learns to read and write mathematics at an elementary level will , as in verbal language , have little difficulty picking up most of the fundamentals if they choose to master the mathspeak of most disciplines of science .
the longer you wait to become at least semi-literate the harder the language of mathematics will be to master , just as again in any verbal language , but it can be done at any age .
i speak as an authority on that subject , because i 'm an extreme case .
i did n't take algebra until my freshman year at the university of alabama .
they did n't teach it before then .
i finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at harvard , where i sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students , little more than half my age .
a couple of them were students in a course i was giving on evolutionary biology .
i swallowed my pride , and i learned calculus .
i found out that in science and all its applications , what is crucial is not that technical ability , but it is imagination in all of its applications .
the ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition .
i found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations .
they are instead the products of downstream imagination leading to hard work , during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant .
ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied of foremost importance is a thorough , well-organized knowledge of all that is known of the relevant entities and processes that might be involved in that domain you propose to enter .
when something new is discovered , it 's logical then that one of the follow-up steps is to find the mathematical and statistical methods to move its analysis forward .
if that step proves too difficult for the person or team that made the discovery , a mathematician can then be added by them as a collaborator .
consider the following principle , which i will modestly call wilson 's principle number one : it is far easier for scientists including medical researchers , to require needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations .
it is important in choosing the direction to take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply , and focus on that .
keep in mind , then , wilson 's second principle : for every scientist , whether researcher , technician , teacher , manager or businessman , working at any level of mathematical competence , there exists a discipline in science or medicine for which that level is enough to achieve excellence .
now i 'm going to offer quickly several more principles that will be useful in organizing your education and career , or if you 're teaching , how you might enhance your own teaching and counseling of young scientists .
in selecting a subject in which to conduct original research , or to develop world-class expertise , take a part of the chosen discipline that is sparsely inhabited .
judge opportunity by how few other students and researchers are on hand .
this is not to de-emphasize the essential requirement of broad training , or the value of apprenticing yourself in ongoing research to programs of high quality .
it is important also to acquire older mentors within these successful programs , and to make friends and colleagues of your age for mutual support .
but through it all , look for a way to break out , to find a field and subject not yet popular .
we have seen this demonstrated already in the talks preceding mine .
there is the quickest way advances are likely to occur , as measured in discoveries per investigator per year .
you may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies : march to the sound of the guns .
in science , the exact opposite is the case : march away from the sound of the guns .
so wilson 's principle number three : march away from the sound of the guns .
observe from a distance , but do not join the fray .
make a fray of your own .
once you have settled on a specialty , and the profession you can love , and you 've secured opportunity , your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become an expert .
there are thousands of professionally delimited subjects sprinkled through physics and chemistry to biology and medicine .
and on then into the social sciences , where it is possible in short time to acquire the status of an authority .
when the subject is still very thinly populated , you can with diligence and hard work become the world authority .
the world needs this kind of expertise , and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it .
the existing information and what you self-discover may at first seem skimpy and difficult to connect to other bodies of knowledge .
well , if that 's the case , good . why hard instead of easy ?
the answer deserves to be stated as principle number four .
in the attempt to make scientific discoveries , every problem is an opportunity , and the more difficult the problem , the greater will be the importance of its solution .
now this brings me to a basic categorization in the way scientific discoveries are made .
scientists , pure mathematicians among them , follow one or the other of two pathways : first through early discoveries , a problem is identified and a solution is sought .
the problem may be relatively small ; for example , where exactly in a cruise ship does the norovirus begin to spread ?
or larger , what 's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe ?
as the answer is sought , other phenomena are typically discovered and other questions are asked .
this first of the two strategies is like a hunter , exploring a forest in search of a particular quarry , who finds other quarries along the way .
the second strategy of research is to study a subject broadly searching for unknown phenomena or patterns of known phenomena like a hunter in what we call " the naturalist 's trance , " the researcher of mind is open to anything interesting , any quarry worth taking .
the search is not for the solution of the problem , but for problems themselves worth solving .
the two strategies of research , original research , can be stated as follows , in the final principle i 'm going to offer you : for every problem in a given discipline of science , there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution .
and conversely , for every species or other entity or phenomenon , there exist important problems for the solution of which , those particular objects of research are ideally suited .
find out what they are .
you 'll find your own way to discover , to learn , to teach .
the decades ahead will see dramatic advances in disease prevention , general health , the quality of life .
all of humanity depends on the knowledge and practice of the medicine and the science behind it you will master .
you have chosen a calling that will come in steps to give you satisfaction , at its conclusion , of a life well lived .
and i thank you for having me here tonight .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , thank you .
thank you very much .
i salute you .
hi . today , i 'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects , done in collaboration with danish artist soren pors .
we call ourselves pors and rao , and we live and work in india .
i 'd like to begin with my very first object , which i call " the uncle phone . "
and it was inspired by my uncle 's peculiar habit of constantly asking me to do things for him , almost like i were an extension of his body - to turn on the lights or to bring him a glass of water , a pack of cigarettes .
and as i grew up , it became worse and worse , and i started to think of it as a form of control .
but of course , i could never say anything , because the uncle is a respected figure in the indian family .
and the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone .
he would hold on to the receiver and expect me to dial a number for him .
and so as a response and as a gift to my uncle , i made him " the uncle phone . "
it 's so long that it requires two people to use it .
it 's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that 's designed for one person .
but the problem is that , when i left home and went to college , i started missing his commands .
and so i made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email .
so what he had to do was take a piece of paper , roll it into the carriage , type his email or command and pull the paper out .
this device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email .
so here you can see , we embedded a lot of electronics that understands all of the mechanical actions and converts it to digital .
so my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface .
and of course , the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism , the way my uncle likes it .
the next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call " the pygmies . "
and we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy , sensitive and sweet creatures .
so how it works is we have these panels , which we have on the wall , and behind them , we have these little creatures which hide .
and as soon as it 's silent , they sort of creep out .
and if it 's even more silent , they stretch their necks out .
and at the slightest sound , they hide back again .
so we had these panels on three walls of a room .
and we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them .
so this is how it works .
this is a video prototype .
so when it 's quiet , it 's sort of coming out from behind the panels .
and they hear like humans do , or real creatures do .
so they get immune to sounds that scare them after awhile .
and they do n't react to background sounds .
you 'll hear a train in moment that they do n't react to .
-lrb- noise -rrb- but they react to foreground sounds . you 'll hear that in a second .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- so we worked very hard to make them as lifelike as possible .
so each pygmy has its own behavior , psyche , mood swings , personalities and so on .
so this is a very early prototype .
of course , it got much better after that .
and we made them react to people , but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them .
this is a video installation called " the missing person . "
and we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility .
how would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility ?
so we worked with a company that specializes in camera surveillance , and we asked them to develop a piece of software with us , using a camera that could look at people in the room , track them and replace one person with the background , rendering them invisible .
so i 'm just going to show you a very early prototype .
on the right side you can see my colleague soren , who 's actually in the space .
and on the left side , you 'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible .
soren enters the room . pop ! he goes invisible .
and you can see that the camera is tracking him and erasing .
it 's a very early video , so we have n't yet dealt with the overlap and all of that , but that got refined pretty soon , later .
so how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space , and we had one monitor , one on each wall .
and as people walked into the room , they would see themselves in the monitor , except with one difference : one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room .
so this is a work called " the sun shadow . "
and it was almost like a sheet of paper , like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun .
and from the front , this object appeared to be very strong and robust , and from the side , it almost seemed very weak .
so people would walking into the room and they 'd almost ignore it , thinking it was some crap laying around .
but as soon as they passed by , it would start to climb up the wall in jerky fashion .
and it would get exhausted , and it would collapse every time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this work is a caricature of an upside-down man .
his head is so heavy , full of heavy thoughts , that it 's sort of fallen into his hat , and his body 's grown out of him almost like a plant .
well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement .
and it 's kind of constrained by that circle .
because if that circle were n't there , and the floor was very even , it would start to wander about in the space .
and there 's no wires .
so i 'll just show you an instance - so when people enter the room , it activates this object .
and it very slowly , over a few minutes , sort of painfully goes up , and then it gains momentum and it looks like it 's almost about to fall .
and this is an important moment , because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help , or save the subject .
but it does n't really need it , because it , again , sort of manages to pull itself up .
so this work was a real technical challenge for us , and we worked very hard , like most of our works , over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics .
and it was very important for us to establish the exact moment that it would fall , because if we made it in a way that it would topple over , then it would damage itself , and if it did n't fall enough , it would n't instill that fatalism , or that sense of wanting to go and help it .
so i 'm going to show you a very quick video where we are doing a test scenario - it 's much faster .
that 's my colleague . he 's let it go .
now he 's getting nervous , so he 's going to go catch it .
but he does n't need to , because it manages to lift itself up on its own .
so this is a work that we were very intrigued with , working with the aesthetic of fur embedded with thousands of tiny different sizes of fiber optics , which twinkle like the night sky .
and it 's at the scale of the night sky .
so we wrapped this around a blob-like form , which is in the shape of a teddy bear , which was hanging from the ceiling .
and the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear , which is very comforting and intimate .
and the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space , and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky .
so this is the last work , and a work in progress , and it 's called " space filler . "
well imagine a small cube that 's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room , and as you approached it , it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that 's twice its height and -lsb- eight -rsb- times its volume .
and so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it - almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something .
so we work with a lot of technology , but we do n't really love technology , because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years .
but we use it because we 're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create .
and once a creature pops into our minds , it 's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is amit .
and 18 months ago , i had another job at google , and i pitched this idea of doing something with museums and art to my boss who 's actually here , and she allowed me to do it .
and it took 18 months .
a lot of fun , negotiations and stories , i can tell you , with 17 very interesting museums from nine countries .
but i 'm going to focus on the demo .
there are a lot of stories about why we did this .
i think my personal story is explained very simply on the slide , and it 's access .
and i grew up in india .
i had a great education - i 'm not complaining - but i did n't have access to a lot of these museums and these artworks .
and so when i started traveling and going to these museums , i started learning a lot .
and while working at google , i tried to put this desire to make it more accessible with technology together .
so we formed a team , a great team of people , and we started doing this .
i 'm going to probably get into the demo and then tell you a couple of the interesting things we 've had since launch .
so , simple : you come to googleartproject.com.
you look around at all these museums here .
you 've got the uffizi , you 've got the moma , the hermitage , the rijks , the van gogh .
i 'm going to actually get to one of my favorites , the metropolitan museum of art in new york .
two ways of going in - very simple .
click and , bang , you 're in this museum .
it does n't matter where you are - bombay , mexico , it does n't really matter .
you move around , you have fun .
you want to navigate around the museum ?
open the plan up , and , in one click , jump .
you 're in there , you want to go to the end of the corridor .
keep going . have fun .
explore .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . i have n't come to the best part .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i 'm in front of one of my favorite paintings , " the harvesters " by pieter bruegel at the met .
i see this plus sign .
if the museum has given us the image , you click on it .
now this is one of the images .
so this is all of the meta-data information .
for those of you who are truly interested in art , you can click this - but i 'm going to click this off right now .
and this is one of these images that we captured in what we call gigapixel technology .
so this image , for example , has close to , i think , around 10 billion pixels .
and i get a lot of people asking me : " what do you get for 10 billion pixels ? "
so i 'm going to try and show you what you really get for 10 billion pixels .
you can zoom around very simply .
you see some fun stuff happening here .
i love this guy ; his expression is priceless .
but then you really want to go deep .
and so i started playing around , and i found something going on over here .
and i was like , " hold on . that sounds interesting . "
went in , and i started noticing that these kids were actually beating something .
i did a little research , spoke to a couple of my contacts at the met , and actually found out that this is a game called squall , which involves beating a goose with a stick on shrove tuesday .
and apparently it was quite popular .
i do n't know why they did it , but i learned something about it .
now just to get really deep in , you can really get to the cracks .
now just to give you some perspective , i 'm going to zoom out so you really see what you get .
here is where we were , and this is the painting .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the best is yet to come - so in a second .
so now let 's just quickly jump into the moma , again in new york .
so another one of my favorites , " the starry night . "
now the example i showed you was all about finding details .
but what if you want to see brush strokes ?
and what if you want to see how van gogh actually created this masterpiece ?
you zoom in . you really go in .
i 'm going to go to one of my favorite parts in this painting , and i 'm really going to get to the cracks .
this is " the starry night , " i think , never seen like this before .
i 'm going to show you my other favorite feature .
there 's a lot of other stuff here , but i do n't have time .
this is the real cool part . it 's called collections .
any one of you , anybody - does n't matter if you 're rich , if you 're poor , if you have a fancy house - does n't matter .
you can go and create your own museum online - create your own collection across all these images .
very simply , you go in - and i 've created this , called the power of zoom - you can just zoom around .
this is " the ambassadors , " based in the national gallery .
you can annotate the stuff , send it to your friends and really get a conversation going about what you 're feeling when you go through these masterpieces .
so i think , in conclusion , for me , the main thing is that all the amazing stuff here does not really come from google .
it does n't , in my opinion , even come from the museums .
i probably should n't say that .
it really comes from these artists .
and that 's been my humbling experience in this .
i mean , i hope in this digital medium that we do justice to their artwork and represent it properly online .
and the biggest question i get asked nowadays is , " did you do this to replicate the experience of going to a museum ? "
and the answer is no .
it 's to supplement the experience .
and that 's it . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- africa is booming .
per capita incomes since the year 2000 have doubled , and this boom is impacting on everyone .
life expectancy has increased by one year every three years for the last decade .
that means if an african child is born today , rather than three days ago , they will get an extra day of life at the end of their lifespan .
it 's that quick .
and hiv infection rates are down 27 percent : 600,000 less people a year are getting hiv in sub-saharan africa .
the battle against malaria is being won , with deaths from malaria down 27 percent , according to the latest world bank data .
and malaria nets actually are playing a role in that .
this should n't surprise us , because actually , everybody grows .
if you go back to imperial rome in the year 1 a.d. , there was admittedly about 1,800 years where there was n't an awful lot of growth .
but then the people that the romans would have called scottish barbarians , my ancestors , were actually part of the industrial revolution , and in the 19th century , growth began to accelerate , and you saw that get quicker and quicker , and it 's been impacting everyone .
it does n't matter if this is the jungles of singapore or the tundra of northern finland .
everybody gets involved . it 's just a matter of when the inevitable happens .
among the reasons i think it 's happening right now is the quality of the leadership across africa .
i think most of us would agree that in the 1990s , the greatest politician in the world was african , but i 'm meeting brilliant people across the continent the entire time , and they 're doing the reforms which have transformed the economic situation for their countries .
and the west is engaging with that .
which have halved sub-saharan debt from about 70 percent of gdp down to about 40 .
at the same time , our debt level 's gone up to 120 and we 're all feeling slightly miserable as a result .
politics gets weaker when debt is high .
when public sector debt is low , governments do n't have to choose between investing in education and health and paying interest on that debt you owe .
and it 's not just the public sector which is looking so good .
the private sector as well .
again , in the west , we have private sector debt of 200 percent of gdp in spain , the u.k. , and the u.s.
that 's an awful lot of debt .
africa , many african countries , are sitting at 10 to 30 percent of gdp .
if there 's any continent that can do what china has done - china 's at about 130 percent of gdp on that chart - if anyone can do what china has done in the last 30 years , it 'll be africa in the next 30 .
so they 've got great government finances , great private sector debt .
does anyone recognize this ? in fact , they do .
foreign direct investment has poured into africa in the last 15 years .
back in the ' 70s , no one touched the continent with a barge pole .
and this investment is actually western-led .
we hear a lot about china , and they do lend a lot of money , but 60 percent of the fdi in the last couple of years has come from europe , america , australia , canada .
ten percent 's come from india .
and they 're investing in energy .
africa produces 10 million barrels a day of oil now .
it 's the same as saudi arabia or russia .
and they 're investing in telecoms , shopping malls .
and this very encouraging story , i think , is partly demographic-led .
and it 's not just about african demographics .
i 'm showing you the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in various parts of the world , and the blue line is the one i want you to focus on for a second .
ten years ago , say you 're foxconn setting up an iphone factory , by chance .
you might choose china , which is the bulk of that east asian blue line , where there 's 200 million young people , and every year until 2010 that 's getting bigger .
which means you 're going to have new guys knocking on the door saying , " give us a job , " and , " i do n't need a big pay rise , just please give me a job . "
now , that 's completely changed now .
this decade , we 're going to see a 20- to 30-percent fall in the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in china .
so where do you set up your new factory ?
you look at south asia , and people are .
they 're looking at pakistan and bangladesh , and they 're also looking at africa .
and they 're looking at africa because that yellow line is showing you that the number of young africans is going to continue to get bigger decade after decade after decade out to 2050 .
now , there 's a problem with lots of young people coming into any market , particularly when they 're young men .
a bit dangerous , sometimes .
i think one of the crucial factors is how educated is that demographic ?
if you look at the red line here , what you 're going to see is that in 1975 , just nine percent of kids were in secondary school education in sub-saharan africa .
would you set up a factory in sub-sahara in the mid-1970s ?
nobody else did .
they chose instead turkey and mexico to set up the textiles factories , because their education levels were 25 to 30 percent .
today , sub-sahara is at the levels that turkey and mexico were at in 1975 .
they will get the textiles jobs that will take people out of rural poverty and put them on the road to industrialization and wealth .
so what 's africa looking like today ?
this is how i look at africa .
it 's a bit odd , because i 'm an economist .
each little box is about a billion dollars , and you see that i pay an awful lot of attention to nigeria sitting there in the middle .
south africa is playing a role .
but when i 'm thinking about the future , i 'm actually most interested in central , western and southern africa .
if i look at africa by population , east africa stands out as so much potential .
and i 'm showing you something else with these maps .
i 'm showing you democracy versus autocracy .
fragile democracies is the beige color .
strong democracies are the orange color .
and what you 'll see here is that most africans are now living in democracies .
why does that matter ?
because what people want is what politicians try , they do n't always succeed , but they try and deliver .
and what you 've got is a reinforcing positive circle going on .
in ghana in the elections , in december 2012 , the battle between the two candidates was over education .
one guy offered free secondary school education to all , not just 30 percent .
the other guy had to say , i 'm going to build 50 new schools .
he won by a margin .
so democracy is encouraging governments to invest in education .
education is helping growth and investment , and that 's giving budget revenues , which is giving governments more money , which is helping growth through education .
it 's a positive , virtuous circle .
but i get asked this question , and this particular question makes me quite sad : it 's , " but what about corruption ?
how can you invest in africa when there 's corruption ? "
and what makes me sad about it is that this graph here is showing you that the biggest correlation with corruption is wealth .
when you 're poor , corruption is not your biggest priority .
and the countries on the right hand side , you 'll see the per capita gdp , basically every country with a per capita gdp of , say , less than 5,000 dollars , has got a corruption score of roughly , what 's that , about three ?
three out of 10 . that 's not good .
every poor country is corrupt .
every rich country is relatively uncorrupt .
how do you get from poverty and corruption to wealth and less corruption ?
you see the middle class grow .
and the way to do that is to invest , not to say i 'm not investing in that continent because there 's too much corruption .
now , i do n't want to be an apologist for corruption .
i 've been arrested because i refused to pay a bribe - not in africa , actually .
but what i 'm saying here is that we can make a difference and we can do that by investing .
now i 'm going to let you in on a little not-so-secret .
economists are n't great at forecasting .
because the question really is , what happens next ?
and if you go back to the year 2000 , what you 'll find is the economist had a very famous cover , " the hopeless continent , " and what they 'd done is they 'd looked at growth in africa over the previous 10 years - two percent - and they said , what 's going to happen in the next 10 years ?
they assumed two percent , and that made it a pretty hopeless story , because population growth was two and a half .
people got poorer in africa in the 1990s .
now 2012 , the economist has a new cover , and what does that new cover show ?
that new cover shows , well , africa rising , because the growth over the last 10 years has been about five and a half percent .
i would like to see if you can all now become economists , because if growth for the last 10 years has been five and a half percent , what do you think the imf is forecasting for the next five years of growth in africa ?
very good . i think you 're secretly saying to your head , probably five and a half percent .
you 're all economists , and i think , like most economists , wrong .
no offense .
what i like to do is try and find the countries that are doing exactly what africa has already done , and it means that jump from 1,800 years of nothing to whoof , suddenly shooting through the roof .
india is one of those examples .
this is indian growth from 1960 to 2010 .
ignore the scale on the bottom for a second .
actually , for the first 20 years , the ' 60s and ' 70s , india did n't really grow .
it grew at two percent when population growth was about two and a half .
if that 's familiar , that 's exactly what happened in sub-sahara in the ' 80s and the ' 90s .
and then something happened in 1980 .
boom ! india began to explode .
it was n't a " hindu rate of growth , " " democracies ca n't grow . " actually india could .
and if i lay sub-saharan growth on top of the indian growth story , it 's remarkably similar .
twenty years of not much growth and a trend line which is actually telling you that sub-saharan african growth is slightly better than india .
and if i then lay developing asia on top of this , i 'm saying india is 20 years ahead of africa , i 'm saying developing asia is 10 years ahead of india , i can draw out some forecasts for the next 30 to 40 years which i think are better than the ones where you 're looking backwards .
and that tells me this : that africa is going to go from a $ 2 trillion economy today to a $ 29 trillion economy by 2050 .
now that 's bigger than europe and america put together in today 's money .
life expectancy is going to go up by 13 years .
the population 's going to double from one billion to two billion , so household incomes are going to go up sevenfold in the next 35 years .
and when i present this in africa - nairobi , lagos , accra - i get one question .
" charlie , why are you so pessimistic ? "
and you know what ?
actually , i think they 've got a point .
am i really saying that there can be nothing learned , yes from the positives in asia and india , but also the negatives ?
perhaps africa can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made .
surely , the technologies that we 're talking about here this last week , surely some of these can perhaps help africa grow even faster ?
and i think here we can play a role .
because technology does let you help .
you can go and download some of the great african literature from the internet now .
no , not right now , just 30 seconds .
you can go and buy some of the great tunes .
my ipod 's full of them .
buy african products .
go on holiday and see for yourself the change that 's happening .
invest .
perhaps hire people , give them the skills that they can take back to africa , and their companies will grow an awful lot faster than most of ours here in the west .
and then you and i can help make sure that for africa , the 21st century is their century .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the writer george eliot cautioned us that , among all forms of mistake , prophesy is the most gratuitous .
the person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart , yogi berra , agreed .
he said , " it 's tough to make predictions , especially about the future . "
i 'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast .
in the world that we are creating very quickly , we 're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction , and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs .
our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves , which means we 're going to need fewer truck drivers .
we 're going to hook siri up to watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that 's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers , and we 're already taking r2d2 , painting him orange , and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses , which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles .
now , for about 200 years , people have been saying exactly what i 'm telling you - the age of technological unemployment is at hand - starting with the luddites smashing looms in britain just about two centuries ago , and they have been wrong .
our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment .
which brings up a critical question : why is this time different , if it really is ?
the reason it 's different is that , just in the past few years , our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never , ever had before : understanding , speaking , hearing , seeing , answering , writing , and they 're still acquiring new skills .
for example , mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive , but the research arm of the defense department just launched a competition to have them do things like this , and if the track record is any guide , this competition is going to be successful .
so when i look around , i think the day is not too far off at all when we 're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now .
and we 're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs .
it 's a world that erik brynjolfsson and i are calling " the new machine age . "
the thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news .
this is the best economic news on the planet these days .
not that there 's a lot of competition , right ?
this is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons .
the first is , technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we 're on where output goes up over time , while at the same time , prices go down , and volume and quality just continue to explode .
now , some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism , but that 's absolutely the wrong way to look at it .
this is abundance , which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide .
the second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that , once the androids start doing jobs , we do n't have to do them anymore , and we get freed up from drudgery and toil .
now , when i talk about this with my friends in cambridge and silicon valley , they say , " fantastic . no more drudgery , no more toil .
this gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society , a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues , entertain , enlighten , provoke each other . "
it 's a society really , that looks a lot like the ted conference .
and there 's actually a huge amount of truth here .
we are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place .
in a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document , we have amazing new possibilities .
the people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers , and they 're responsible for massive amounts of innovation .
and artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never , ever possible for them before .
so this is a time of great flourishing , and the more i look around , the more convinced i become that this quote , from the physicist freeman dyson , is not hyperbole at all .
this is just a plain statement of the facts .
we are in the middle of an astonishing period .
which brings up another great question : what could possibly go wrong in this new machine age ?
right ? great , hang up , flourish , go home .
we 're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we 're creating .
the first are economic , and they 're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between henry ford ii and walter reuther , who was the head of the auto workers union .
they were touring one of the new modern factories , and ford playfully turns to reuther and says , " hey walter , how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues ? "
and reuther shoots back , " hey henry , how are you going to get them to buy cars ? "
reuther 's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that 's full of machines , and we see this very clearly in the statistics .
if you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital - in other words , corporate profits - we see them going up , and we see that they 're now at an all-time high .
if we look at the returns to labor , in other words total wages paid out in the economy , we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction .
so this is clearly bad news for reuther .
it looks like it might be great news for ford , but it 's actually not . if you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people , you really want a large , stable , prosperous middle class .
we have had one of those in america for just about the entire postwar period .
but the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now .
we all know a lot of the statistics , but just to repeat one of them , median income in america has actually gone down over the past 15 years , and we 're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time .
the societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention .
there are a set of societal challenges that i 'm actually not that worried about , and they 're captured by images like this .
this is not the kind of societal problem that i am concerned about .
there is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware , and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us .
i 'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about .
to tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age , i want to tell a story about two stereotypical american workers .
and to make them really stereotypical , let 's make them both white guys .
and the first one is a college-educated professional , creative type , manager , engineer , doctor , lawyer , that kind of worker .
we 're going to call him " ted . "
he 's at the top of the american middle class .
his counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer , works as a clerk , does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy .
we 're going to call that guy " bill . "
and if you go back about 50 years , bill and ted were leading remarkably similar lives .
for example , in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs , working at least 40 hours a week .
but as the social researcher charles murray has documented , as we started to automate the economy , and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses , as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy , the fortunes of bill and ted diverged a lot .
over this time frame , ted has continued to hold a full-time job . bill has n't .
in many cases , bill has left the economy entirely , and ted very rarely has .
over time , ted 's marriage has stayed quite happy .
bill 's has n't .
and ted 's kids have grown up in a two-parent home , while bill 's absolutely have not over time .
other ways that bill is dropping out of society ?
he 's decreased his voting in presidential elections , and he 's started to go to prison a lot more often .
so i can not tell a happy story about these social trends , and they do n't show any signs of reversing themselves .
they 're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at , and they 're actually getting so severe that they 're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the civil rights movement .
and what my friends in silicon valley and cambridge are overlooking is that they 're ted .
they 're living these amazingly busy , productive lives , and they 've got all the benefits to show from that , while bill is leading a very different life .
they 're actually both proof of how right voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work , and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils .
so with these challenges , what do we do about them ?
the economic playbook is surprisingly clear , surprisingly straightforward , in the short term especially .
the robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two , so the classic econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine : encourage entrepreneurship , double down on infrastructure , and make sure we 're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills .
but over the longer term , if we are moving into an economy that 's heavy on technology and light on labor , and we are , then we have to consider some more radical interventions , for example , something like a guaranteed minimum income .
now , that 's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable , because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth .
i did a little bit of research on this notion , and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists friedrich hayek , richard nixon and milton friedman .
and if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent , you might be interested to know that social mobility , one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the united states , is now lower than it is in the northern european countries that have these very generous social safety nets .
so the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward .
the societal one is a lot more challenging .
i do n't know what the playbook is for getting bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life .
i do know that education is a huge part of it .
i witnessed this firsthand .
i was a montessori kid for the first few years of my education , and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it .
the school stopped in third grade , so then i entered the public school system , and it felt like i had been sent to the gulag .
with the benefit of hindsight , i now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer , but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me .
we have to do better than this .
we can not keep turning out bills .
so we see some green shoots that things are getting better .
we see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people , from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones .
we see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we 've been holding dear for a while .
and we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have .
so the green shoots are out there .
i do n't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough .
we 're facing very tough challenges .
to give just one example , there are about five million americans who have been unemployed for at least six months .
we 're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to montessori .
and my biggest worry is that we 're creating a world where we 're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity .
but i actually do n't think that 's what we 're going to do .
i think we 're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason : the facts are getting out there .
the realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known .
if we wanted to accelerate that process , we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play " jeopardy ! " against watson .
we could send congress on an autonomous car road trip .
and if we do enough of these kinds of things , the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different .
and then we 're off to the races , because i do n't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try .
i started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century .
let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant .
winston churchill came to my home of mit in 1949 , and he said , " if we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance , it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production . "
abraham lincoln realized there was one other ingredient .
he said , " i am a firm believer in the people .
if given the truth , they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis .
the great point is to give them the plain facts . "
so the optimistic note , great point that i want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear , and i have every confidence that we 're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging , abundant economy that we 're creating .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i got my current job , i was given a good piece of advice , which was to interview three politicians every day .
and from that much contact with politicians , i can tell you they 're all emotional freaks of one sort or another .
they have what i called " logorrhea dementia , " which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what they do have is incredible social skills .
when you meet them , they lock into you , they look you in the eye , they invade your personal space , they massage the back of your head .
i had dinner with a republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal - squeezing it .
i once - this was years ago - i saw ted kennedy and dan quayle meet in the well of the senate .
and they were friends , and they hugged each other and they were laughing , and their faces were like this far apart .
and they were moving and grinding and moving their arms up and down each other .
and i was like , " get a room . i do n't want to see this . "
but they have those social skills .
another case : last election cycle , i was following mitt romney around new hampshire , and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons : bip , chip , rip , zip , lip and dip .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he 's going into a diner .
and he goes into the diner , introduces himself to a family and says , " what village are you from in new hampshire ? "
and then he describes the home he owned in their village .
and so he goes around the room , and then as he 's leaving the diner , he first-names almost everybody he 's just met .
i was like , " okay , that 's social skill . "
but the paradox is , when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode , that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants .
so in the course of my career , i have covered a series of failures .
we sent economists in the soviet union with privatization plans when it broke up , and what they really lacked was social trust .
we invaded iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities .
we had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who would n't do anything stupid .
for 30 years , i 've been covering school reform and we 've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes - charters , private schools , vouchers - but we 've had disappointing results year after year .
and the fact is , people learn from people they love .
and if you 're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student , you 're not talking about that reality .
but that reality is expunged from our policy-making process .
and so that 's led to a question for me : why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy ?
and i came to the conclusion , this is a symptom of a larger problem .
that , for centuries , we 've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we 're divided selves , that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions .
and it 's led to a view of human nature that we 're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives , and it 's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is .
and it 's produced a great amputation , a shallow view of human nature .
we 're really good at talking about material things , but we 're really bad at talking about emotions .
we 're really good at talking about skills and safety and health ; we 're really bad at talking about character .
alasdair macintyre , the famous philosopher , said that , " we have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue , honor , goodness , but we no longer have a system by which to connect them . "
and so this has led to a shallow path in politics , but also in a whole range of human endeavors .
you can see it in the way we raise our young kids .
you go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out , and they 're wearing these 80-pound backpacks .
if the wind blows them over , they 're like beetles stuck there on the ground .
you see these cars that drive up - usually it 's saabs and audis and volvos , because in certain neighborhoods it 's socially acceptable to have a luxury car , so long as it comes from a country hostile to u.s. foreign policy - that 's fine .
they get picked up by these creatures i 've called uber-moms , who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into harvard .
and you can usually tell the uber-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at the moment of conception , they 're doing little butt exercises .
babies flop out , they 're flashing mandarin flashcards at the things .
driving them home , and they want them to be enlightened , so they take them to ben & jerry 's ice cream company with its own foreign policy .
in one of my books , i joke that ben & jerry 's should make a pacifist toothpaste - does n't kill germs , just asks them to leave .
it would be a big seller .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they go to whole foods to get their baby formula , and whole foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they 're on loan from amnesty international .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they buy these seaweed-based snacks there called veggie booty with kale , which is for kids who come home and say , " mom , mom , i want a snack that 'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so the kids are raised in a certain way , jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure - sat prep , oboe , soccer practice .
they get into competitive colleges , they get good jobs , and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner , and they make a ton of money .
and sometimes you can see them at vacation places like jackson hole or aspen .
and they 've become elegant and slender - they do n't really have thighs ; they just have one elegant calve on top of another .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they have kids of their own , and they 've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people , so their grandmoms look like gertrude stein , their daughters looks like halle berry - i do n't know how they 've done that .
they get there and they realize it 's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights .
so they 've got these furry 160-pound dogs - all look like velociraptors , all named after jane austen characters .
and then when they get old , they have n't really developed a philosophy of life , but they 've decided , " i 've been successful at everything ; i 'm just not going to die . "
and so they hire personal trainers ; they 're popping cialis like breath mints .
you see them on the mountains up there .
they 're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make dick cheney look like jerry lewis .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as they whiz by you , it 's like being passed by a little iron raisinet going up the hill .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this is part of what life is , but it 's not all of what life is .
and over the past few years , i think we 've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are .
and it 's not based on theology or philosophy , it 's in the study of the mind , across all these spheres of research , from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists , behavioral economists , psychologists , sociology , we 're developing a revolution in consciousness .
and when you synthesize it all , it 's giving us a new view of human nature .
and far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature , it 's a new humanism , it 's a new enchantment .
and i think when you synthesize this research , you start with three key insights .
the first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species , the unconscious mind does most of the work .
and so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute , of which it can be consciously aware of about 40 .
and this leads to oddities .
one of my favorite is that people named dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists , people named lawrence become lawyers , because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar , which is why i named my daughter president of the united states brooks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another finding is that the unconscious , far from being dumb and sexualized , is actually quite smart .
so one of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture .
it 's really hard to imagine a sofa , how it 's going to look in your house .
and the way you should do that is study the furniture , let it marinate in your mind , distract yourself , and then a few days later , go with your gut , because unconsciously you 've figured it out .
the second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking .
people with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart , they 're actually sometimes quite helpless .
and the " giant " in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning - antonio damasio .
and one of the things he 's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason , but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value .
and so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom .
now i 'm a middle-aged guy .
i 'm not exactly comfortable with emotions .
one of my favorite brain stories described these middle-aged guys .
they put them into a brain scan machine - this is apocryphal by the way , but i do n't care - and they had them watch a horror movie , and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives .
and the brain scans were identical in both activities .
it was just sheer terror .
so me talking about emotion is like gandhi talking about gluttony , but it is the central organizing process of the way we think .
it tells us what to imprint .
the brain is the record of the feelings of a life .
and the third insight is that we 're not primarily self-contained individuals .
we 're social animals , not rational animals .
we emerge out of relationships , and we are deeply interpenetrated , one with another .
and so when we see another person , we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds .
when we watch a car chase in a movie , it 's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase .
when we watch pornography , it 's a little like having sex , though probably not as good .
and we see this when lovers walk down the street , when a crowd in egypt or tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion , the deep interpenetration .
and this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing , i think , politics , a different way , most importantly , of seeing human capital .
we are now children of the french enlightenment .
we believe that reason is the highest of the faculties .
but i think this research shows that the british enlightenment , or the scottish enlightenment , with david hume , adam smith , actually had a better handle on who we are - that reason is often weak , our sentiments are strong , and our sentiments are often trustworthy .
and this work corrects that bias in our culture , that dehumanizing bias .
it gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life .
when we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily - things like grades , sat 's , degrees , the number of years in schooling .
what it really takes to do well , to lead a meaningful life , are things that are deeper , things we do n't really even have words for .
and so let me list just a couple of the things i think this research points us toward trying to understand .
the first gift , or talent , is mindsight - the ability to enter into other people 's minds and learn what they have to offer .
babies come with this ability .
meltzoff , who 's at the university of washington , leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old .
he wagged his tongue at the baby .
the baby wagged her tongue back .
babies are born to interpenetrate into mom 's mind and to download what they find - their models of how to understand reality .
in the united states , 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people .
and those people who have models of how to relate have a huge head start in life .
scientists at the university of minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy , at age 18 months , who was going to graduate from high school , based on who had good attachment with mom .
twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships .
they are what we call avoidantly attached .
they have trouble relating to other people .
they go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind - wanting to get close to people , but not really having the models of how to do that .
and so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge , one from another .
a second skill is equipoise , the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind .
so for example , we are overconfidence machines .
ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers .
ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills .
time magazine asked americans , " are you in the top one percent of earners ? "
nineteen percent of americans are in the top one percent of earners .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a gender-linked trait , by the way .
men drown at twice the rate of women , because men think they can swim across that lake .
but some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases , their own overconfidence .
they have epistemological modesty .
they are open-minded in the face of ambiguity .
they are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence .
they are curious .
and these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with iq .
the third trait is metis , what we might call street smarts - it 's a greek word .
it 's a sensitivity to the physical environment , the ability to pick out patterns in an environment - derive a gist .
one of my colleagues at the times did a great story about soldiers in iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an ied , a landmine , in the street .
they could n't tell you how they did it , but they could feel cold , they felt a coldness , and they were more often right than wrong .
the third is what you might call sympathy , the ability to work within groups .
and that comes in tremendously handy , because groups are smarter than individuals .
and face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically , because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal .
and the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the iq of the group ; it 's determined by how well they communicate , how often they take turns in conversation .
then you could talk about a trait like blending .
any child can say , " i 'm a tiger , " pretend to be a tiger .
it seems so elementary .
but in fact , it 's phenomenally complicated to take a concept " i " and a concept " tiger " and blend them together .
but this is the source of innovation .
what picasso did , for example , was take the concept " western art " and the concept " african masks " and blend them together - not only the geometry , but the moral systems entailed in them .
and these are skills , again , we ca n't count and measure .
and then the final thing i 'll mention is something you might call limerence .
and this is not an ability ; it 's a drive and a motivation .
the conscious mind hungers for success and prestige .
the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence , when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task - when a craftsman feels lost in his craft , when a naturalist feels at one with nature , when a believer feels at one with god 's love .
that is what the unconscious mind hungers for .
and many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused .
and one of the most beautiful descriptions i 've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named douglas hofstadter at the university of indiana .
he was married to a woman named carol , and they had a wonderful relationship .
when their kids were five and two , carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly .
and hofstadter wrote a book called " i am a strange loop . "
in the course of that book , he describes a moment - just months after carol has died - he comes across her picture on the mantel , or on a bureau in his bedroom .
and here 's what he wrote : " i looked at her face , and i looked so deeply that i felt i was behind her eyes .
and all at once i found myself saying as tears flowed , ' that 's me . that 's me . ' and those simple words brought back many thoughts that i had had before , about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity , about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children , about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes , but were just one hope , one clear thing that defined us both , that welded us into a unit - the kind of unit i had but dimly imagined
before being married and having children .
i realized that , though carol had died , that core piece of her had not died at all , but had lived on very determinedly in my brain . "
the greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom .
through his suffering , hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are .
through the policy failures of the last 30 years , we have come to acknowledge , i think , how shallow our view of human nature has been .
and now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are , comes this revolution in consciousness - these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted , this new humanism .
and when freud discovered his sense of the unconscious , it had a vast effect on the climate of the times .
now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious , of who we are deep inside , and it 's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , a big question that we 're facing now and have been for quite a number of years now : are we at risk of a nuclear attack ?
now , there 's a bigger question that 's probably actually more important than that , is the notion of permanently eliminating the possibility of a nuclear attack , eliminating the threat altogether .
and i would like to make a case to you that over the years since we first developed atomic weaponry , until this very moment , we 've actually lived in a dangerous nuclear world that 's characterized by two phases , which i 'm going to go through with you right now .
first of all , we started off the nuclear age in 1945 .
the united states had developed a couple of atomic weapons through the manhattan project , and the idea was very straightforward : we would use the power of the atom to end the atrocities and the horror of this unending world war ii that we 'd been involved in in europe and in the pacific .
and in 1945 , we were the only nuclear power .
we had a few nuclear weapons , two of which we dropped on japan , in hiroshima , a few days later in nagasaki , in august 1945 , killing about 250,000 people between those two .
and for a few years , we were the only nuclear power on earth .
but by 1949 , the soviet union had decided it was unacceptable to have us as the only nuclear power , and they began to match what the united states had developed .
and from 1949 to 1985 was an extraordinary time of a buildup of a nuclear arsenal that no one could possibly have imagined back in the 1940s .
so by 1985 - each of those red bombs up here is equivalent of a thousands warheads - the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads , and seven members of something that came to be known as the " nuclear club . "
and it was an extraordinary time , and i am going to go through some of the mentality that we - that americans and the rest of the world were experiencing .
but i want to just point out to you that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons at any particular time since 1985 - going forward , of course - were part of the arsenals of the united states and the soviet union .
after 1985 , and before the break up of the soviet union , we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view .
we began to counter-proliferate , and we dropped the number of nuclear warheads in the world to about a total of 21,000 .
it 's a very difficult number to deal with , because what we 've done is we 've quote unquote " decommissioned " some of the warheads .
they 're still probably usable . they could be " re-commissioned , " but the way they count things , which is very complicated , we think we have about a third of the nuclear weapons we had before .
but we also , in that period of time , added two more members to the nuclear club : pakistan and north korea .
so we stand today with a still fully armed nuclear arsenal among many countries around the world , but a very different set of circumstances .
so i 'm going to talk about a nuclear threat story in two chapters .
chapter one is 1949 to 1991 , when the soviet union broke up , and what we were dealing with , at that point and through those years , was a superpowers ' nuclear arms race .
it was characterized by a nation-versus-nation , very fragile standoff .
and basically , we lived for all those years , and some might argue that we still do , in a situation of being on the brink , literally , of an apocalyptic , planetary calamity .
it 's incredible that we actually lived through all that .
we were totally dependent during those years on this amazing acronym , which is mad .
it stands for mutually assured destruction .
so it meant if you attacked us , we would attack you virtually simultaneously , and the end result would be a destruction of your country and mine .
so the threat of my own destruction kept me from launching a nuclear attack on you . that 's the way we lived .
and the danger of that , of course , is that a misreading of a radar screen could actually cause a counter-launch , even though the first country had not actually launched anything .
during this chapter one , there was a high level of public awareness about the potential of nuclear catastrophe , and an indelible image was implanted in our collective minds that , in fact , a nuclear holocaust would be absolutely globally destructive and could , in some ways , mean the end of civilization as we know it .
so this was chapter one .
now the odd thing is that even though we knew that there would be that kind of civilization obliteration , we engaged in america in a series - and in fact , in the soviet union - in a series of response planning .
it was absolutely incredible .
so premise one is we 'd be destroying the world , and then premise two is , why do n't we get prepared for it ?
so what we offered ourselves was a collection of things . i 'm just going to go skim through a few things , just to jog your memories .
if you 're born after 1950 , this is just - consider this entertainment , otherwise it 's memory lane .
this was bert the turtle . -lrb- video -rrb- this was basically an attempt to teach our schoolchildren that if we did get engaged in a nuclear confrontation and atomic war , then we wanted our school children to kind of basically duck and cover .
that was the principle . you - there would be a nuclear conflagration about to hit us , and if you get under your desk , things would be ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't do all that well in psychiatry in medical school , but i was interested , and i think this was seriously delusional .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- secondly , we told people to go down in their basements and build a fallout shelter .
maybe it would be a study when we were n't having an atomic war , or you could use it as a tv room , or , as many teenagers found out , a very , very safe place for a little privacy with your girlfriend .
and actually - so there are multiple uses of the bomb shelters .
or you could buy a prefabricated bomb shelter that you could simply bury in the ground .
now , the bomb shelters at that point - let 's say you bought a prefab one - it would be a few hundred dollars , maybe up to 500 , if you got a fancy one .
yet , what percentage of americans do you think ever had a bomb shelter in their house ?
what percentage lived in a house with a bomb shelter ?
less than two percent . about 1.4 percent of the population , as far as anyone knows , did anything , either making a space in their basement or actually building a bomb shelter .
many buildings , public buildings , around the country - this is new york city - had these little civil defense signs , and the idea was that you would run into one of these shelters and be safe from the nuclear weaponry .
and one of the greatest governmental delusions of all time was something that happened in the early days of the federal emergency management agency , fema , as we now know , and are well aware of their behaviors from katrina .
here is their first big public announcement .
they would propose - actually there were about six volumes written on this - a crisis relocation plan that was dependent upon the united states having three to four days warning that the soviets were going to attack us .
so the goal was to evacuate the target cities .
we would move people out of the target cities into the countryside .
and i 'm telling you , i actually testified at the senate about the absolute ludicrous idea that we would actually evacuate , and actually have three or four days ' warning .
it was just completely off the wall .
turns out that they had another idea behind it , even though this was - they were telling the public it was to save us .
the idea was that we would force the soviets to re-target their nuclear weapons - very expensive - and potentially double their arsenal , to not only take out the original site , but take out sites where people were going .
this was what apparently , as it turns out , was behind all this .
it was just really , really frightening .
the main point here is we were dealing with a complete disconnect from reality .
the civil defense programs were disconnected from the reality of what we 'd see in all-out nuclear war .
so organizations like physicians for social responsibility , around 1979 , started saying this a lot publicly .
they would do a bombing run . they 'd go to your city , and they 'd say , " here 's a map of your city .
here 's what 's going to happen if we get a nuclear hit . "
so no possibility of medical response to , or meaningful preparedness for all-out nuclear war .
so we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive .
this disconnect was never actually resolved .
and what happened was - when we get in to chapter two of the nuclear threat era , which started back in 1945 .
chapter two starts in 1991 .
when the soviet union broke up , we effectively lost that adversary as a potential attacker of the united states , for the most part .
it 's not completely gone . i 'm going to come back to that .
but from 1991 through the present time , emphasized by the attacks of 2001 , the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and the idea of a single event , act of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead .
although the scenario has changed very considerably , the fact is that we have n't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war means .
so i 'm going to tell you what the implications of that are in just a second .
so , what is a nuclear terror threat ?
and there 's four key ingredients to describing that .
first thing is that the global nuclear weapons , in the stockpiles that i showed you in those original maps , happen to be not uniformly secure .
and it 's particularly not secure in the former soviet union , now in russia .
there are many , many sites where warheads are stored and , in fact , lots of sites where fissionable materials , like highly enriched uranium and plutonium , are absolutely not safe .
they 're available to be bought , stolen , whatever .
they 're acquirable , let me put it that way .
from 1993 through 2006 , the international atomic energy agency documented 175 cases of nuclear theft , 18 of which involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium , the key ingredients to make a nuclear weapon .
the global stockpile of highly enriched uranium is about 1,300 , at the low end , to about 2,100 metric tons .
more than 100 megatons of this is stored in particularly insecure russian facilities .
how much of that do you think it would take to actually build a 10-kiloton bomb ?
well , you need about 75 pounds of it .
so , what i 'd like to show you is what it would take to hold 75 pounds of highly enriched uranium .
this is not a product placement . it 's just - in fact , if i was coca cola , i 'd be pretty distressed about this - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but basically , this is it .
this is what you would need to steal or buy out of that 100-metric-ton stockpile that 's relatively insecure to create the type of bomb that was used in hiroshima .
now you might want to look at plutonium as another fissionable material that you might use in a bomb .
that - you 'd need 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium .
now , plutonium , 10 to 13 pounds : this . this is enough plutonium to create a nagasaki-size atomic weapon .
now this situation , already i - you know , i do n't really like thinking about this , although somehow i got myself a job where i have to think about it . so the point is that we 're very , very insecure in terms of developing this material .
the second thing is , what about the know-how ?
and there 's a lot of controversy about whether terror organizations have the know-how to actually make a nuclear weapon .
well , there 's a lot of know-how out there .
there 's an unbelievable amount of know-how out there .
there 's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts .
there 's books about how to build a nuclear bomb .
there are plans for how to create a terror farm where you could actually manufacture and develop all the components and assemble it .
all of this information is relatively available .
if you have an undergraduate degree in physics , i would suggest - although i do n't , so maybe it 's not even true - but something close to that would allow you , with the information that 's currently available , to actually build a nuclear weapon .
the third element of the nuclear terror threat is that , who would actually do such a thing ?
well , what we 're seeing now is a level of terrorism that involves individuals who are highly organized .
they are very dedicated and committed .
they are stateless .
somebody once said , al qaeda does not have a return address , so if they attack us with a nuclear weapon , what 's the response , and to whom is the response ?
and they 're retaliation-proof .
since there is no real retribution possible that would make any difference , since there are people willing to actually give up their lives in order to do a lot of damage to us , it becomes apparent that the whole notion of this mutually assured destruction would not work .
here is sulaiman abu ghaith , and sulaiman was a key lieutenant of osama bin laden .
he wrote many , many times statements to this effect : " we have the right to kill four million americans , two million of whom should be children . "
and we do n't have to go overseas to find people willing to do harm , for whatever their reasons .
mcveigh and nichols , and the oklahoma city attack in the 1990s was a good example of homegrown terrorists .
what if they had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon ?
the fourth element is that the high-value u.s. targets are accessible , soft and plentiful .
this would be a talk for another day , but the level of the preparedness that the united states has achieved since 9/11 of ' 01 is unbelievably inadequate .
what you saw after katrina is a very good indicator of how little prepared the united states is for any kind of major attack .
seven million ship cargo containers come into the united states every year .
five to seven percent only are inspected - five to seven percent .
this is alexander lebed , who was a general that worked with yeltsin , who talked about , and presented to congress , this idea that the russians had developed - these suitcase bombs . they were very low yield - 0.1 to one kiloton , hiroshima was around 13 kilotons - but enough to do an unbelievable amount of damage .
and lebed came to the united states and told us that many , many - more than 80 of the suitcase bombs were actually not accountable .
and they look like this . they 're basically very simple arrangements .
you put the elements into a suitcase .
it becomes very portable .
the suitcase can be conveniently dropped in your trunk of your car .
you take it wherever you want to take it , and you can detonate it .
you do n't want to build a suitcase bomb , and you happen to get one of those insecure nuclear warheads that exist .
this is the size of the " little boy " bomb that was dropped at hiroshima .
it was 9.8 feet long , weighed 8,800 pounds . you go down to your local rent-a-truck and for 50 bucks or so , you rent a truck that 's got the right capacity , and you take your bomb , you put it in the truck and you 're ready to go .
it could happen . but what it would mean and who would survive ?
you ca n't get an exact number for that kind of probability , but what i 'm trying to say is that we have all the elements of that happening .
anybody who dismisses the thought of a nuclear weapon being used by a terrorist is kidding themselves .
i think there 's a lot of people in the intelligence community - a lot of people who deal with this work in general think it 's almost inevitable , unless we do certain things to really try to defuse the risk , like better interdiction , better prevention , better fixing , you know , better screening of cargo containers that are coming into the country and so forth .
there 's a lot that can be done to make us a lot safer .
at this particular moment , we actually could end up seeing a nuclear detonation in one of our cities .
i do n't think we would see an all-out nuclear war any time soon , although even that is not completely off the table .
there 's still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the superpowers to destroy the earth many , many times over .
there are flash points in india and pakistan , in the middle east , in north korea , other places where the use of nuclear weapons , while initially locally , could very rapidly go into a situation where we 'd be facing all-out nuclear war .
it 's very unsettling .
here we go . ok .
i 'm back in my truck , and we drove over the brooklyn bridge .
we 're coming down , and we bring that truck that you just saw somewhere in here , in the financial district .
this is a 10-kiloton bomb , slightly smaller than was used in hiroshima . and i want to just conclude this by just giving you some information . i think - " news you could use " kind of concept here .
so , first of all , this would be horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine .
this is the ultimate .
and if you 're in the half-mile radius of where this bomb went off , you have a 90 percent chance of not making it .
if you 're right where the bomb went off , you will be vaporized . and that 's - i 'm just telling you , this is not good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you assume that .
two-mile radius , you have a 50 percent chance of being killed , and up to about eight miles away - now i 'm talking about killed instantly - somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance of getting killed .
the thing about this is that the experience of the nuclear detonation is - first of all , tens of millions of degrees fahrenheit at the core here , where it goes off , and an extraordinary amount of energy in the form of heat , acute radiation and blast effects .
an enormous hurricane-like wind , and destruction of buildings almost totally , within this yellow circle here .
and what i 'm going to focus on , as i come to conclusion here , is that , what happens to you if you 're in here ?
well , if we 're talking about the old days of an all-out nuclear attack , you , up here , are as dead as the people here . so it was a moot point .
my point now , though , is that there is a lot that we could do for you who are in here , if you 've survived the initial blast .
you have , when the blast goes off - and by the way , if it ever comes up , do n't look at it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you look at it , you 're going to be blind , either temporarily or permanently .
so if there 's any way that you can avoid , like , avert your eyes , that would be a good thing .
if you find yourself alive , but you 're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon , you have - that 's gone off - you have 10 to 20 minutes , depending on the size and exactly where it went off , to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up .
in that 10 to 15 minutes , all you have to do - and i mean this seriously - is go about a mile away from the blast .
and what happens is - this is - i 'm going to show you now some fallout plumes . within 20 minutes , it comes straight down . within 24 hours , lethal radiation is going out with prevailing winds , and it 's mostly in this particular direction - it 's going northeast .
and if you 're in this vicinity , you 've got to get away .
so you 're feeling the wind - and there 's tremendous wind now that you 're going to be feeling - and you want to go perpendicular to the wind -lsb- not upwind or downwind -rsb- .
if you are in fact able to see where the blast was in front of you .
you 've got to get out of there .
if you do n't get out of there , you 're going to be exposed to lethal radiation in very short order .
if you ca n't get out of there , we want you to go into a shelter and stay there .
now , in a shelter in an urban area means you have to be either in a basement as deep as possible , or you have to be on a floor - on a high floor - if it 's a ground burst explosion , which it would be , higher than the ninth floor . so you have to be tenth floor or higher , or in the basement .
but basically , you 've got to get out of town as quickly as possible .
and if you do that , you actually can survive a nuclear blast .
over the next few days to a week , there will be a radiation cloud , again , going with the wind , and settling down for another 15 or 20 miles out - in this case , over long island .
and if you 're in the direct fallout zone here , you really have to either be sheltered or you have to get out of there , and that 's clear . but if you are sheltered , you can actually survive .
the difference between knowing information of what you 're going to do personally , and not knowing information , can save your life , and it could mean the difference between 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities and half a million to 700,000 fatalities .
so , response planning in the twenty-first century is both possible and is essential .
but in 2008 , there is n't one single american city that has done effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster .
part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves , personally , are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe .
they are paralyzed .
you say " nuclear " to them , and they 're thinking , " oh my god , we 're all gone . what 's the point ? it 's futile . "
and we 're trying to tell them , " it 's not futile .
we can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things . "
so the goal here is to minimize fatalities .
and i just want to leave you with the personal points that i think you might be interested in .
the key to surviving a nuclear blast is getting out , and not going into harm 's way .
that 's basically all we 're going to be talking about here .
and the farther you are away in distance , the longer it is in time from the initial blast ; and the more separation between you and the outside atmosphere , the better .
so separation - hopefully with dirt or concrete , or being in a basement - distance and time is what will save you .
so here 's what you do . first of all , as i said , do n't stare at the light flash , if you can . i do n't know you could possibly resist doing that .
but let 's assume , theoretically , you want to do that .
you want to keep your mouth open , so your eardrums do n't burst from the pressures .
if you 're very close to what happened , you actually do have to duck and cover , like bert told you , bert the turtle .
and you want to get under something so that you 're not injured or killed by objects , if that 's at all possible .
you want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud , i said , in just a few minutes .
and shelter and place . you want to move -lsb- only -rsb- crosswind for 1.2 miles .
you know , if you 're out there and you see buildings horribly destroyed and down in that direction , less destroyed here , then you know that it was over there , the blast , and you 're going this way , as long as you 're going crosswise to the wind .
once you 're out and evacuating , you want to keep as much of your skin , your mouth and nose covered , as long as that covering does n't impede you moving and getting out of there .
and finally , you want to get decontaminated as soon as possible .
and if you 're wearing clothing , you 've taken off your clothing , and remove the radiation that would be - the radioactive material that might be on you .
and then you want to stay in shelter for 48 to 72 hours minimum , but you 're going to wait hopefully - you 'll have your little wind-up , battery-less radio , and you 'll be waiting for people to tell you when it 's safe to go outside . that 's what you need to do .
in conclusion , nuclear war is less likely than before , but by no means out of the question , and it 's not survivable .
nuclear terrorism is possible - it may be probable - but is survivable .
and this is jack geiger , who 's one of the heroes of the u.s. public health community .
and jack said the only way to deal with nuclear anything , whether it 's war or terrorism , is abolition of nuclear weapons .
and you want something to work on once you 've fixed global warming , i urge you to think about the fact that we have to do something about this unacceptable , inhumane reality of nuclear weapons in our world .
now , this is my favorite civil defense slide , and i - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i do n't want to be indelicate , but this - he 's no longer in office . we do n't really care , ok .
this was sent to me by somebody who is an aficionado of civil defense procedures , but the fact of the matter is that america 's gone through a very hard time .
we 've not been focused , we 've not done what we had to do , and now we 're facing the potential of bad , hell on earth .
thank you .
let me share with you today an original discovery .
but i want to tell it to you the way it really happened - not the way i present it in a scientific meeting , or the way you 'd read it in a scientific paper .
it 's a story about beyond biomimetics , to something i 'm calling biomutualism .
i define that as an association between biology and another discipline , where each discipline reciprocally advances the other , but where the collective discoveries that emerge are beyond any single field .
now , in terms of biomimetics , as human technologies take on more of the characteristics of nature , nature becomes a much more useful teacher .
engineering can be inspired by biology by using its principles and analogies when they 're advantageous , but then integrating that with the best human engineering , ultimately to make something actually better than nature .
now , being a biologist , i was very curious about this .
these are gecko toes .
and we wondered how they use these bizarre toes to climb up a wall so quickly .
we discovered it . and what we found was that they have leaf-like structures on their toes , with millions of tiny hairs that look like a rug , and each of those hairs has the worst case of split-ends possible : about 100 to 1000 split ends that are nano-size .
and the individual has 2 billion of these nano-size split ends .
they do n't stick by velcro or suction or glue .
they actually stick by intermolecular forces alone , van der waals forces .
and i 'm really pleased to report to you today that the first synthetic self-cleaning , dry adhesive has been made .
from the simplest version in nature , one branch , my engineering collaborator , ron fearing , at berkeley , had made the first synthetic version .
and so has my other incredible collaborator , mark cutkosky , at stanford - he made much larger hairs than the gecko , but used the same general principles .
and here is its first test .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's kellar autumn , my former ph.d. student , professor now at lewis and clark , literally giving his first-born child up for this test .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- more recently , this happened .
man : this the first time someone has actually climbed with it .
narrator : lynn verinsky , a professional climber , who appeared to be brimming with confidence .
lynn verinsky : honestly , it 's going to be perfectly safe . it will be perfectly safe .
man : how do you know ?
lynn verinsky : because of liability insurance . -lrb- laughter -rrb- narrator : with a mattress below and attached to a safety rope , lynn began her 60-foot ascent .
lynn made it to the top in a perfect pairing of hollywood and science .
man : so you 're the first human being to officially emulate a gecko .
lynn verinsky : ha ! wow . and what a privilege that has been .
robert full : that 's what she did on rough surfaces .
but she actually used these on smooth surfaces - two of them - to climb up , and pull herself up .
and you can try this in the lobby , and look at the gecko-inspired material .
now the problem with the robots doing this is that they ca n't get unstuck , with the material .
this is the gecko 's solution . they actually peel their toes away from the surface , at high rates , as they run up the wall .
well i 'm really excited today to show you the newest version of a robot , stickybot , using a new hierarchical dry adhesive .
here is the actual robot .
and here is what it does .
and if you look , you can see that it uses the toe peeling , just like the gecko does .
if we can show some of the video , you can see it climbing up the wall .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there it is .
and now it can go on other surfaces because of the new adhesive that the stanford group was able to do in designing this incredible robot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh . one thing i want to point out is , look at stickybot .
you see something on it . it 's not just to look like a gecko .
it has a tail . and just when you think you 've figured out nature , this kind of thing happens .
the engineers told us , for the climbing robots , that , if they do n't have a tail , they fall off the wall .
so what they did was they asked us an important question .
they said , " well , it kind of looks like a tail . "
even though we put a passive bar there .
" do animals use their tails when they climb up walls ? "
what they were doing was returning the favor , by giving us a hypothesis to test , in biology , that we would n't have thought of .
so of course , in reality , we were then panicked , being the biologists , and we should know this already .
we said , " well , what do tails do ? "
well we know that tails store fat , for example .
we know that you can grab onto things with them .
and perhaps it is most well known that they provide static balance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it can also act as a counterbalance .
so watch this kangaroo .
see that tail ? that 's incredible !
marc raibert built a uniroo hopping robot .
and it was unstable without its tail .
now mostly tails limit maneuverability , like this human inside this dinosaur suit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my colleagues actually went on to test this limitation , by increasing the moment of inertia of a student , so they had a tail , and running them through and obstacle course , and found a decrement in performance , like you 'd predict .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but of course , this is a passive tail .
and you can also have active tails .
and when i went back to research this , i realized that one of the great ted moments in the past , from nathan , we 've talked about an active tail .
video : myhrvold thinks tail-cracking dinosaurs were interested in love , not war .
robert full : he talked about the tail being a whip for communication .
it can also be used in defense .
pretty powerful .
so we then went back and looked at the animal .
and we ran it up a surface .
but this time what we did is we put a slippery patch that you see in yellow there .
and watch on the right what the animal is doing with its tail when it slips . this is slowed down 10 times .
so here is normal speed .
and watch it now slip , and see what it does with its tail .
it has an active tail that functions as a fifth leg , and it contributes to stability .
if you make it slip a huge amount , this is what we discovered .
this is incredible .
the engineers had a really good idea .
and then of course we wondered , okay , they have an active tail , but let 's picture them .
they 're climbing up a wall , or a tree .
and they get to the top and let 's say there 's some leaves there .
and what would happen if they climbed on the underside of that leaf , and there was some wind , or we shook it ?
and we did that experiment , that you see here .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and this is what we discovered .
now that 's real time . you ca n't see anything .
but there it is slowed down .
what we discovered was the world 's fastest air-righting response .
for those of you who remember your physics , that 's a zero-angular-momentum righting response . but it 's like a cat .
you know , cats falling . cats do this . they twist their bodies .
but geckos do it better .
and they do it with their tail .
so they do it with this active tail as they swing around .
and then they always land in the sort of superman skydiving posture .
okay , now we wondered , if we were right , we should be able to test this in a physical model , in a robot .
so for ted we actually built a robot , over there , a prototype , with the tail .
and we 're going to attempt the first air-righting response in a tail , with a robot .
if we could have the lights on it .
okay , there it goes .
and show the video .
there it is .
and it works just like it does in the animal .
so all you need is a swing of the tail to right yourself .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , of course , we were normally frightened because the animal has no gliding adaptations , so we thought , " oh that 's okay . we 'll put it in a vertical wind tunnel .
we 'll blow the air up , we 'll give it a landing target , a tree trunk , just outside the plexi-glass enclosure , and see what it does .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we did . and here is what it does .
so the wind is coming from the bottom . this is slowed down 10 times .
it does an equilibrium glide . highly controlled .
this is sort of incredible . but actually it 's quite beautiful , when you take a picture of it .
and it 's better than that , it - just in the slide - maneuvers in mid-air .
and the way it does it , is it takes its tail and it swings it one way to yaw left , and it swings its other way to yaw right .
so we can maneuver this way .
and then - we had to film this several times to believe this - it also does this . watch this .
it oscillates its tail up and down like a dolphin .
it can actually swim through the air .
but watch its front legs . can you see what they are doing ?
what does that mean for the origin of flapping flight ?
maybe it 's evolved from coming down from trees , and trying to control a glide .
stay tuned for that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so then we wondered , " can they actually maneuver with this ? "
so there is the landing target . could they steer towards it with these capabilities ? here it is in the wind tunnel .
and it certainly looks like it .
you can see it even better from down on top .
watch the animal .
definitely moving towards the landing target .
watch the whip of its tail as it does it . look at that .
it 's unbelievable .
so now we were really confused , because there are no reports of it gliding .
so we went , " oh my god , we have to go to the field , and see if it actually does this . "
completely opposite of the way you 'd see it on a nature film , of course .
we wondered , " do they actually glide in nature ? "
well we went to the forests of singapore and southeast asia .
and the next video you see is the first time we 've showed this .
this is the actual video - not staged , a real research video - of animal gliding down . there is a red trajectory line .
look at the end to see the animal .
but then as it gets closer to the tree , look at the close-up . and see if you can see it land .
so there it comes down . there is a gecko at the end of that trajectory line .
you see it there ? there ? watch it come down .
now watch up there and you can see the landing . did you see it hit ?
it actually uses its tail too , just like we saw in the lab .
so now we can continue this mutualism by suggesting that they can make an active tail .
and here is the first active tail , in the robot , made by boston dynamics .
so to conclude , i think we need to build biomutualisms , like i showed , that will increase the pace of basic discovery in their application .
to do this though , we need to redesign education in a major way , to balance depth with interdisciplinary communication , and explicitly train people how to contribute to , and benefit from other disciplines .
and of course you need the organisms and the environment to do it .
that is , whether you care about security , search and rescue or health , we must preserve nature 's designs , otherwise these secrets will be lost forever .
and from what i heard from our new president , i 'm very optimistic . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i just did something i 've never done before .
i spent a week at sea on a research vessel .
now i 'm not a scientist , but i was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the university of south florida who have been tracking the travels of bp 's oil this is the boat we were on , by the way .
the scientists i was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff - the birds , the turtles , the dolphins , the glamorous stuff .
they 're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff .
and what they 're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton , which is very bad news , because so much life depends on it .
so contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we did n't have to worry about it , this disaster is still unfolding .
it 's still working its way up the food chain .
now this should n't come as a surprise to us .
rachel carson - the godmother of modern environmentalism - warned us about this very thing back in 1962 .
she pointed out that the " control men " - as she called them - who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like ddt , were only trying to kill the little stuff , the insects , not the birds .
but they forgot this : the fact that birds dine on grubs , that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with ddt .
and so , robin eggs failed to hatch , songbirds died en masse , towns fell silent .
thus the title " silent spring . "
i 've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the gulf of mexico , because i 'm canadian , and i can draw no ancestral ties .
and i think what it is is i do n't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster , with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world , with what it meant to watch the contents of the earth gush forth on live tv , 24 hours a day , for months .
after telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature , suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness , with our lack of control , as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it - " top hats , " " top kills " and , most memorably , the " junk shot " - the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world .
but even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed - the carelessness , the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up .
if there is one thing bp 's watery improv act made clear , it is that , as a culture , we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable , and to do so without a back-up plan , without an exit strategy .
and bp was hardly our first experience of this in recent years .
our leaders barrel into wars , telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades .
then , it is years of deadly damage control , frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies , and once again , no exit strategy .
our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence , convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market - the kind that never goes down .
and when it inevitably does , the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot - in this case , throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole .
as with bp , the hole does get plugged , at least temporarily , but not before exacting a tremendous price .
we have to figure out why we keep letting this happen , because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all - deciding what to do , or not to do , about climate change .
now as you know , a great deal of time is spent , inside the climate debate , on the question of , " what if the ipc scientists are all wrong ? "
now a far more relevant question - as mit physicist evelyn fox keller puts it - is , " what if those scientists are right ? "
given the stakes , the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle - the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible , we can not afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty .
better to err on the side of caution .
more overt , the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed , but rather on the industry that stands to profit .
but climate policy in the wealthy world - to the extent that such a thing exists - is not based on precaution , but rather on cost-benefit analysis - finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our gdp .
so rather than asking , as precaution would demand , what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe , we ask bizarre questions like this : " what is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions ?
can we put this off till 2020 , 2030 , 2050 ? "
or we ask , " how much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive ?
can we go with two degrees , three degrees , or - where we 're currently going - four degrees celsius ? "
and by the way , the assumption that we can safely control the earth 's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat , making the planet not too hot , not too cold , but just right - sort of goldilocks style - this is pure fantasy , and it 's not coming from the climate scientists .
it 's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science .
the fact is that we simply do n't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops .
so once again , why do we take these crazy risks with the precious ?
a range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now , like " greed . "
this is a popular explanation , and there 's lots of truth to it , because taking big risks , as we all know , pays a lot of money .
another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris .
and greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness .
for instance , if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon , then you need a narrative , you need a story that makes that disparity okay .
and you actually do n't have a lot of options .
you 're either an incredibly good scammer , and you 're getting away with it - you gamed the system - or you 're some kind of boy genius , the likes of which the world has never seen .
now both of these options - the boy genius and the scammer - and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future .
by the way , tony hayward , the former ceo of bp , had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan : " what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail ? "
now this is actually a popular plaque , and this is a crowd of overachievers , so i 'm betting that some of you have this plaque .
do n't feel ashamed .
putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you 're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a tedtalk , but personally , i think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of icarus hanging from the wall , because - maybe not that one in particular - but i want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time .
so we have greed , we 've got overconfidence / hubris , but since we 're here at tedwomen , let 's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness .
now i 'm not going to belabor this point , but studies do show that , as investors , women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men , precisely because , as we 've already heard , women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do .
so it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides - for society at least .
the flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted , chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides .
and this problem - call it the " perils of privilege " - brings us closer , i think , to the root of our collective recklessness .
because none of us - at least in the global north - neither men nor women , are fully exempt from this message .
here 's what i 'm talking about .
whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them , our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature - the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer , the narrative of manifest destiny , the narrative of apocalypse and salvation .
and just when you think these stories are fading into history , and that we 've gotten over them , they pop up in the strangest places .
for instance , i stumbled across this advertisement outside the women 's washroom in the kansas city airport .
it 's for motorola 's new rugged cell phone , and yes , it really does say , " slap mother nature in the face . "
and i 'm not just showing it to pick on motorola - that 's just a bonus .
i 'm showing it because - they 're not a sponsor , are they ? - because , in its own way , this is a crass version of our founding story .
we slapped mother nature around and won , and we always win , because dominating nature is our destiny .
but this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature .
there 's another one , equally important , about how that very same mother nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance .
let 's hear from tony hayward again .
" the gulf of mexico is a very big ocean .
the amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume . "
in other words , the ocean is big ; she can take it .
it is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do .
because this is our real master-narrative : however much we mess up , there will always be more - more water , more land , more untapped resources .
a new bubble will replace the old one .
a new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one .
in a way , that is the story of the settling of the americas , the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which europeans escaped .
and it 's also the story of modern capitalism , because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system , one that can not survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers .
now the problem is that the story was always a lie .
the earth always did have limits .
they were just beyond our sights .
and now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts .
i believe that we know this , yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop .
not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories , but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that , frankly , verges on camp .
how else to explain the cultural space occupied by sarah palin ?
now on the one hand , exhorting us to " drill , baby , drill , " because god put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them , and on the other , glorying in the wilderness of alaska 's untouched beauty on her hit reality tv show .
the twin message is as comforting as it is mad .
ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall .
there are still no limits .
there will always be another frontier .
so stop worrying and keep shopping .
now , would that this were just about sarah palin and her reality tv show .
in environmental circles , we often hear that , rather than shifting to renewables , we are continuing with business as usual .
this assessment , unfortunately , is far too optimistic .
the truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era , the era of extreme energy .
so that means drilling for oil in the deepest water , including the icy arctic seas , where a clean-up may simply be impossible .
it means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal , the likes of which we have n't yet seen .
and most controversially , it means the tar sands .
i 'm always surprised by how little people outside of canada know about the alberta tar sands , which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the united states .
it 's worth taking a moment to understand this practice , because i believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we 're on like little else .
so this is where the tar sands live , under one of the last magnificent boreal forests .
the oil is not liquid .
you ca n't just drill a hole and pump it out .
tar sand 's oil is solid , mixed in with the soil .
so to get at it , you first have to get rid of the trees .
then , you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand .
the process requires a huge amount of water , which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds .
that 's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates .
now looking at these images , it 's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation , which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of england .
i find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth , the largest ever built .
that 's a person down there by the wheel .
my point is that this is not oil drilling .
it 's not even mining .
it is terrestrial skinning .
vast , vivid landscapes are being gutted , left monochromatic gray .
now i should confess that as -lsb- far as -rsb- i 'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon .
but the truth is that , on average , turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in canada .
how else to describe this , but as a form of mass insanity ?
just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet , off the power of sun , wind and waves , we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest , highest-emitting stuff imaginable .
this is where our story of endless growth has taken us , to this black hole at the center of my country - a place of such planetary pain that , like the bp gusher , one can only stand to look at it for so long .
as jared diamond and others have shown us , this is how civilizations commit suicide , by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes .
the problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too .
at the very last minute , we are going to get saved just like in every hollywood movie , just like in the rapture .
but , of course , our secular religion is technology .
now , you may have noticed more and more headlines like these .
the idea behind this form of " geoengineering " as it 's called , is that , as the planet heats up , we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun 's rays back to space , thereby cooling the planet .
the wackiest plan - and i 'm not making this up - would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky , suspended by balloons , to spew sulfur dioxide .
so , solving the problem of pollution with more pollution .
think of it as the ultimate junk shot .
the serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested .
they do n't know if they 'll work , and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash .
nevertheless , the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles , particularly media circles , with a relief tinged with euphoria .
an escape hatch has been reached .
a new frontier has been found .
most importantly , we do n't have to change our lifestyles after all .
you see , for some people , their savior is a guy in a flowing robe .
for other people , it 's a guy with a garden hose .
we badly need some new stories .
we need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks - risks that confront recklessness head on , that put the precautionary principle into practice , even if that means through direct action - like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested , blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining .
we need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around .
that this is our only home .
there is no escape hatch .
call it karma , call it physics , action and reaction , call it precaution - the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm going to try to do is explain to you quickly how to predict , and illustrate it with some predictions about what iran is going to do in the next couple of years .
in order to predict effectively , we need to use science .
and the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we 're doing ; it 's not just wisdom or guesswork .
and if we can predict , then we can engineer the future .
so if you are concerned to influence energy policy , or you are concerned to influence national security policy , or health policy , or education , science - and a particular branch of science - is a way to do it , not the way we 've been doing it , which is seat-of-the-pants wisdom .
now before i get into how to do it let me give you a little truth in advertising , because i 'm not engaged in the business of magic .
there are lots of thing that the approach i take can predict , and there are some that it ca n't .
it can predict complex negotiations or situations involving coercion - that is in essence everything that has to do with politics , much of what has to do with business , but sorry , if you 're looking to speculate in the stock market , i do n't predict stock markets - ok , it 's not going up any time really soon .
but i 'm not engaged in doing that .
i 'm not engaged in predicting random number generators .
i actually get phone calls from people who want to know what lottery numbers are going to win .
i do n't have a clue .
i engage in the use of game theory , game theory is a branch of mathematics and that means , sorry , that even in the study of politics , math has come into the picture .
we can no longer pretend that we just speculate about politics , we need to look at this in a rigorous way .
now , what is game theory about ?
it assumes that people are looking out for what 's good for them .
that does n't seem terribly shocking - although it 's controversial for a lot of people - that we are self-interested .
in order to look out for what 's best for them or what they think is best for them , people have values - they identify what they want , and what they do n't want .
and they have beliefs about what other people want , and what other people do n't want , how much power other people have , how much those people could get in the way of whatever it is that you want .
and they face limitations , constraints , they may be weak , they may be located in the wrong part of the world , they may be einstein , stuck away farming someplace in a rural village in india not being noticed , as was the case for ramanujan for a long time , a great mathematician but nobody noticed .
now who is rational ?
a lot of people are worried about what is rationality about ?
you know , what if people are rational ?
mother theresa , she was rational .
terrorists , they 're rational .
pretty much everybody is rational .
i think there are only two exceptions that i 'm aware of - two-year-olds , they are not rational , they have very fickle preferences , they switch what they think all the time , and schizophrenics are probably not rational , but pretty much everybody else is rational .
that is , they are just trying to do what they think is in their own best interest .
now in order to work out what people are going to do to pursue their interests , we have to think about who has influence in the world .
if you 're trying to influence corporations to change their behavior , with regard to producing pollutants , one approach , the common approach , is to exhort them to be better , to explain to them what damage they 're doing to the planet .
and many of you may have noticed that does n't have as big an effect , as perhaps you would like it to have .
but if you show them that it 's in their interest , then they 're responsive .
so , we have to work out who influences problems .
if we 're looking at iran , the president of the united states we would like to think , may have some influence - certainly the president in iran has some influence - but we make a mistake if we just pay attention to the person at the top of the power ladder because that person does n't know much about iran , or about energy policy , or about health care , or about any particular policy .
that person surrounds himself or herself with advisers .
if we 're talking about national security problems , maybe it 's the secretary of state , maybe it 's the secretary of defense , the director of national intelligence , maybe the ambassador to the united nations , or somebody else who they think is going to know more about the particular problem .
but let 's face it , the secretary of state does n't know much about iran .
the secretary of defense does n't know much about iran .
each of those people in turn has advisers who advise them , so they can advise the president .
there are lots of people shaping decisions and so if we want to predict correctly we have to pay attention to everybody who is trying to shape the outcome , not just the people at the pinnacle of the decision-making pyramid .
unfortunately , a lot of times we do n't do that .
there 's a good reason that we do n't do that , and there 's a good reason that using game theory and computers , we can overcome the limitation imagine a problem with just five decision-makers .
imagine for example that sally over here , wants to know what harry , and jane , and george and frank are thinking , and sends messages to those people .
sally 's giving her opinion to them , and they 're giving their opinion to sally .
but sally also wants to know what harry is saying to these three , and what they 're saying to harry .
and harry wants to know what each of those people are saying to each other , and so on , and sally would like to know what harry thinks those people are saying .
that 's a complicated problem ; that 's a lot to know .
with five decision-makers there are a lot of linkages - 120 , as a matter of fact , if you remember your factorials .
five factorial is 120 .
now you may be surprised to know that smart people can keep 120 things straight in their head .
suppose we double the number of influencers from five to 10 .
does that mean we 've doubled the number of pieces of information we need to know , from 120 to 240 ?
no . how about 10 times ?
to 1,200 ? no .
we 've increased it to 3.6 million .
nobody can keep that straight in their head .
but computers , they can . they do n't need coffee breaks , they do n't need vacations , they do n't need to go to sleep at night , they do n't ask for raises either .
they can keep this information straight and that means that we can process the information .
so i 'm going to talk to you about how to process it , and i 'm going to give you some examples out of iran , and you 're going to be wondering , " why should we listen to this guy ?
why should we believe what he 's saying ? "
so i 'm going to show you a factoid .
this is an assessment by the central intelligence agency of the percentage of time that the model i 'm talking about is right in predicting things whose outcome is not yet known , when the experts who provided the data inputs got it wrong .
that 's not my claim , that 's a cia claim - you can read it , it was declassified a while ago . you can read it in a volume edited by h. bradford westerfield , yale university press .
so , what do we need to know in order to predict ?
you may be surprised to find out we do n't need to know very much .
we do need to know who has a stake in trying to shape the outcome of a decision .
we need to know what they say they want , not what they want in their heart of hearts , not what they think they can get , but what they say they want , because that is a strategically chosen position , and we can work backwards from that to draw inferences about important features of their decision-making .
we need to know how focused they are on the problem at hand .
that is , how willing are they to drop what they 're doing when the issue comes up , and attend to it instead of something else that 's on their plate - how big a deal is it to them ?
and how much clout could they bring to bear if they chose to engage on the issue ?
if we know those things we can predict their behavior by assuming that everybody cares about two things on any decision .
they care about the outcome . they 'd like an outcome as close to what they are interested in as possible .
they 're careerists , they also care about getting credit - there 's ego involvement , they want to be seen as important in shaping the outcome , or as important , if it 's their druthers , to block an outcome .
and so we have to figure out how they balance those two things .
different people trade off between standing by their outcome , faithfully holding to it , going down in a blaze of glory , or giving it up , putting their finger in the wind , and doing whatever they think is going to be a winning position .
most people fall in between , and if we can work out where they fall we can work out how to negotiate with them to change their behavior .
so with just that little bit of input we can work out what the choices are that people have , what the chances are that they 're willing to take , what they 're after , what they value , what they want , and what they believe about other people .
you might notice what we do n't need to know : there 's no history in here .
how they got to where they are may be important in shaping the input information , but once we know where they are we 're worried about where they 're going to be headed in the future .
how they got there turns out not to be terribly critical in predicting .
i remind you of that 90 percent accuracy rate .
so where are we going to get this information ?
we can get this information from the internet , from the economist , the financial times , the new york times , u.s. news and world report , lots of sources like that , or we can get it from asking experts who spend their lives studying places and problems , because those experts know this information .
if they do n't know , who are the people trying to influence the decision , how much clout do they have , how much they care about this issue , and what do they say they want , are they experts ? that 's what it means to be an expert , that 's the basic stuff an expert needs to know .
alright , lets turn to iran .
let me make three important predictions - you can check this out , time will tell .
what is iran going to do about its nuclear weapons program ?
how secure is the theocratic regime in iran ?
what 's its future ?
and everybody 's best friend , ahmadinejad . how are things going for him ?
how are things going to be working out for him in the next year or two ?
you take a look at this , this is not based on statistics .
i want to be very clear here . i 'm not projecting some past data into the future .
i 've taken inputs on positions and so forth , run it through a computer model that had simulated the dynamics of interaction , and these are the simulated dynamics , the predictions about the path of policy .
so you can see here on the vertical axis , i have n't shown it all the way down to zero , there are lots of other options , but here i 'm just showing you the prediction , so i 've narrowed the scale .
up at the top of the axis , " build the bomb . "
at 130 , we start somewhere above 130 , between building a bomb , and making enough weapons-grade fuel so that you could build a bomb .
that 's where , according to my analyses , the iranians were at the beginning of this year .
and then the model makes predictions down the road .
at 115 they would only produce enough weapons grade fuel to show that they know how , but they would n't build a weapon : they would build a research quantity .
it would achieve some national pride , but not go ahead and build a weapon .
and down at 100 they would build civilian nuclear energy , which is what they say is their objective .
the yellow line shows us the most likely path .
the yellow line includes an analysis of 87 decision makers in iran , and a vast number of outside influencers trying to pressure iran into changing its behavior , various players in the united states , and egypt , and saudi arabia , and russia , european union , japan , so on and so forth .
the white line reproduces the analysis if the international environment just left iran to make its own internal decisions , under its own domestic political pressures .
that 's not going to be happening , but you can see that the line comes down faster if they 're not put under international pressure , if they 're allowed to pursue their own devices .
but in any event , by the end of this year , beginning of next year , we get to a stable equilibrium outcome .
and that equilibrium is not what the united states would like , but it 's probably an equilibrium that the united states can live with , and that a lot of others can live with .
and that is that iran will achieve that nationalist pride by making enough weapons-grade fuel , through research , so that they could show that they know how to make weapons-grade fuel , but not enough to actually build a bomb .
how is this happening ?
over here you can see this is the distribution of power in favor of civilian nuclear energy today , this is what that power block is predicted to be like by the late parts of 2010 , early parts of 2011 .
just about nobody supports research on weapons-grade fuel today , but by 2011 that gets to be a big block , and you put these two together , that 's the controlling influence in iran .
out here today , there are a bunch of people - ahmadinejad for example - who would like not only to build a bomb , but test a bomb .
that power disappears completely ; nobody supports that by 2011 .
these guys are all shrinking , the power is all drifting out here , so the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel .
who are the winners and who are the losers in iran ?
take a look at these guys , they 're growing in power , and by the way , this was done a while ago before the current economic crisis , and that 's probably going to get steeper .
these folks are the moneyed interests in iran , the bankers , the oil people , the bazaaries .
they are growing in political clout , as the mullahs are isolating themselves - with the exception of one group of mullahs , who are not well known to americans .
that 's this line here , growing in power , these are what the iranians call the quietists .
these are the ayatollahs , mostly based in qom , who have great clout in the religious community , have been quiet on politics and are going to be getting louder , because they see iran going in an unhealthy direction , a direction contrary to what khomeini had in mind .
here is mr. ahmadinejad .
two things to notice : he 's getting weaker , and while he gets a lot of attention in the united states , he is not a major player in iran .
he is on the way down .
ok , so i 'd like you to take a little away from this .
everything is not predictable : the stock market is , at least for me , not predictable , but most complicated negotiations are predictable .
again , whether we 're talking health policy , education , environment , energy , litigation , mergers , all of these are complicated problems that are predictable , that this sort of technology can be applied to .
and the reason that being able to predict those things is important , is not just because you might run a hedge fund and make money off of it , but because if you can predict what people will do , you can engineer what they will do .
and if you engineer what they do you can change the world , you can get a better result .
i would like to leave you with one thought , which is for me , the dominant theme of this gathering , and is the dominant theme of this way of thinking about the world .
when people say to you , " that 's impossible , " you say back to them , " when you say ' that 's impossible , ' you 're confused with , ' i do n't know how to do it . " ' thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : one question for you .
that was fascinating .
i love that you put it out there .
i got very nervous halfway through the talk though , just panicking whether you 'd included in your model , the possibility that putting this prediction out there might change the result .
we 've got 800 people in tehran who watch tedtalks .
bruce bueno de mesquita : i 've thought about that , and since i 've done a lot of work for the intelligence community , they 've also pondered that .
it would be a good thing if people paid more attention , took seriously , and engaged in the same sorts of calculations , because it would change things . but it would change things in two beneficial ways .
it would hasten how quickly people arrive at an agreement , and so it would save everybody a lot of grief and time .
and , it would arrive at an agreement that everybody was happy with , without having to manipulate them so much - which is basically what i do , i manipulate them .
so it would be a good thing .
ca : so you 're kind of trying to say , " people of iran , this is your destiny , lets go there . "
bbm : well , people of iran , this is what many of you are going to evolve to want , and we could get there a lot sooner , and you would suffer a lot less trouble from economic sanctions , and we would suffer a lot less fear of the use of military force on our end , and the world would be a better place .
ca : here 's hoping they hear it that way . thank you very much bruce .
bbm : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i have a strange career .
i know it because people come up to me , like colleagues , and say , " chris , you have a strange career . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i can see their point , because i started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist .
and i was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions , and i was only 14 years old .
no , no , i was n't 14 years old .
but after that , i actually had my own lab in the computational neuroscience department , and i was n't doing any neuroscience .
later , i would work on evolutionary genetics , and i would work on systems biology .
but i 'm going to tell you about something else today .
i 'm going to tell you about how i learned something about life .
and i was actually a rocket scientist .
i was n't really a rocket scientist , but i was working at the jet propulsion laboratory in sunny california where it 's warm ; whereas now i 'm in the mid-west , and it 's cold .
but it was an exciting experience .
one day a nasa manager comes into my office , sits down and says , " can you please tell us , how do we look for life outside earth ? "
and that came as a surprise to me , because i was actually hired to work on quantum computation .
yet , i had a very good answer .
i said , " i have no idea . "
and he told me , " biosignatures , we need to look for a biosignature . "
and i said , " what is that ? "
and he said , " it 's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate and i said , " really ?
because is n't that easy ?
i mean , we have life .
ca n't you apply a definition , like for example , a supreme court-like definition of life ? "
and then i thought about it a little bit , and i said , " well , is it really that easy ?
because , yes , if you see something like this , then all right , fine , i 'm going to call it life - no doubt about it .
but here 's something . "
and he goes , " right , that 's life too . i know that . "
except , if you think life is also defined by things that die , you 're not in luck with this thing , because that 's actually a very strange organism .
it grows up into the adult stage like that and then goes through a benjamin button phase , and actually goes backwards and backwards until it 's like a little embryo again , and then actually grows back up , and back down and back up - sort of yo-yo - and it never dies .
so it 's actually life , but it 's actually not as we thought life would be .
and then you see something like that .
and he was like , " my god , what kind of a life form is that ? "
anyone know ?
it 's actually not life , it 's a crystal .
so once you start looking and looking at smaller and smaller things - so this particular person wrote a whole article and said , " hey , these are bacteria . "
except , if you look a little bit closer , you see , in fact , that this thing is way too small to be anything like that .
so he was convinced , but , in fact , most people are n't .
and then , of course , nasa also had a big announcement , and president clinton gave a press conference , about this amazing discovery of life in a martian meteorite .
except that nowadays , it 's heavily disputed .
if you take the lesson of all these pictures , then you realize , well actually maybe it 's not that easy .
maybe i do need a definition of life in order to make that kind of distinction .
so can life be defined ?
well how would you go about it ?
well of course , you 'd go to encyclopedia britannica and open at l.
no , of course you do n't do that ; you put it somewhere in google .
and then you might get something .
and what you might get - and anything that actually refers to things that we are used to , you throw away .
and then you might come up with something like this .
and it says something complicated with lots and lots of concepts .
who on earth would write something as convoluted and complex and inane ?
oh , it 's actually a really , really , important set of concepts .
so i 'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to , but in fact on processes only .
and if you take a look at that , this was actually in a book that i wrote that deals with artificial life .
and that explains why that nasa manager was actually in my office to begin with .
because the idea was that , with concepts like that , maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life .
and so if you go and ask yourself , " what on earth is artificial life ? , " let me give you a whirlwind tour of how all this stuff came about .
and it started out quite a while ago when someone wrote one of the first successful computer viruses .
and for those of you who are n't old enough , you have no idea how this infection was working - namely , through these floppy disks .
but the interesting thing about these computer virus infections was that , if you look at the rate at which the infection worked , they show this spiky behavior that you 're used to from a flu virus .
and it is in fact due to this arms race between hackers and operating system designers that things go back and forth .
and the result is kind of a tree of life of these viruses , a phylogeny that looks very much like the type of life that we 're used to , at least on the viral level .
so is that life ? not as far as i 'm concerned .
why ? because these things do n't evolve by themselves .
in fact , they have hackers writing them .
but the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further when a scientist working at the scientific institute decided , " why do n't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve ? "
and this was steen rasmussen .
and he designed this system , but it really did n't work , because his viruses were constantly destroying each other .
but there was another scientist who had been watching this , an ecologist .
and he went home and says , " i know how to fix this . "
and he wrote the tierra system , and , in my book , is in fact one of the first truly artificial living systems - except for the fact that these programs did n't really grow in complexity .
so having seen this work , worked a little bit on this , this is where i came in .
and i decided to create a system that has all the properties that are necessary to see the evolution of complexity , more and more complex problems constantly evolving .
and of course , since i really do n't know how to write code , i had help in this .
i had two undergraduate students at california institute of technology that worked with me .
that 's charles offria on the left , titus brown on the right .
they are now actually respectable professors at michigan state university , but i can assure you , back in the day , we were not a respectable team .
and i 'm really happy that no photo survives of the three of us anywhere close together .
but what is this system like ?
well i ca n't really go into the details , but what you see here is some of the entrails .
but what i wanted to focus on is this type of population structure .
there 's about 10,000 programs sitting here .
and all different strains are colored in different colors .
and as you see here , there are groups that are growing on top of each other , because they are spreading .
any time there is a program that 's better at surviving in this world , due to whatever mutation it has acquired , it is going to spread over the others and drive the others to extinction .
so i 'm going to show you a movie where you 're going to see that kind of dynamic .
and these kinds of experiments are started with programs that we wrote ourselves .
we write our own stuff , replicate it , and are very proud of ourselves .
and we put them in , and what you see immediately is that there are waves and waves of innovation .
by the way , this is highly accelerated , so it 's like a thousand generations a second .
but immediately the system goes like , " what kind of dumb piece of code was this ?
this can be improved upon in so many ways so quickly . "
so you see waves of new types taking over the other types .
and this type of activity goes on for quite awhile , until the main easy things have been acquired by these programs .
and then you see sort of like a stasis coming on where the system essentially waits for a new type of innovation , like this one , which is going to spread over all the other innovations that were before and is erasing the genes that it had before , until a new type of higher level of complexity has been achieved .
and this process goes on and on and on .
so what we see here is a system that lives in very much the way we 're used to life -lsb- going . -rsb- but what the nasa people had asked me really was , " do these guys have a biosignature ?
can we measure this type of life ?
because if we can , maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids . "
so i said , " well , perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process .
in fact , it should perhaps make use of the concepts that i developed just in order to sort of capture what a simple living system might be . "
and the thing i came up with - i have to first give you an introduction about the idea , and maybe that would be a meaning detector , rather than a life detector .
and the way we would do that - i would like to find out how i can distinguish text that was written by a million monkeys , as opposed to text that -lsb- is -rsb- in our books .
and i would like to do it in such a way that i do n't actually have to be able to read the language , because i 'm sure i wo n't be able to .
as long as i know that there 's some sort of alphabet .
so here would be a frequency plot of how often you find each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in a text written by random monkeys .
and obviously each of these letters comes off about roughly equally frequent .
but if you now look at the same distribution in english texts , it looks like that .
and i 'm telling you , this is very robust across english texts .
and if i look at french texts , it looks a little bit different , or italian or german .
they all have their own type of frequency distribution , but it 's robust .
it does n't matter whether it writes about politics or about science .
it does n't matter whether it 's a poem or whether it 's a mathematical text .
it 's a robust signature , and it 's very stable .
as long as our books are written in english - because people are rewriting them and recopying them - it 's going to be there .
so that inspired me to think about , well , what if i try to use this idea in order , not to detect random texts from texts with meaning , but rather detect the fact that there is meaning in the biomolecules that make up life .
but first i have to ask : what are these building blocks , like the alphabet , elements that i showed you ?
well it turns out , we have many different alternatives for such a set of building blocks .
we could use amino acids , we could use nucleic acids , carboxylic acids , fatty acids .
in fact , chemistry 's extremely rich , and our body uses a lot of them .
so that we actually , to test this idea , first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids .
and here 's the result .
here is , in fact , what you get if you , for example , look at the distribution of amino acids on a comet or in interstellar space or , in fact , in a laboratory , where you made very sure that in your primordial soup that there is not living stuff in there .
what you find is mostly glycine and then alanine and there 's some trace elements of the other ones .
that is also very robust - what you find in systems like earth where there are amino acids , but there is no life .
but suppose you take some dirt and dig through it and then put it into these spectrometers , because there 's bacteria all over the place ; or you take water anywhere on earth , because it 's teaming with life , and you make the same analysis ; the spectrum looks completely different .
of course , there is still glycine and alanine , but in fact , there are these heavy elements , these heavy amino acids , that are being produced because these are valuable to the organism .
and some other ones that are not used in the set of 20 , they will not appear at all in any type of concentration .
so this also turns out to be extremely robust .
it does n't matter what kind of sediment you 're using to grind up , whether it 's bacteria or any other plants or animals .
anywhere there 's life , you 're going to have this distribution , as opposed to that distribution .
and it is detectable not just in amino acids .
now you could ask : well , what about these avidians ?
the avidians being the denizens of this computer world where they are perfectly happy replicating and growing in complexity .
so this is the distribution that you get if , in fact , there is no life .
they have about 28 of these instructions .
and if you have a system where they 're being replaced one by the other , it 's like the monkeys writing on a typewriter .
each of these instructions appears with roughly the equal frequency .
but if you now take a set of replicating guys like in the video that you saw , it looks like this .
so there are some instructions that are extremely valuable to these organisms , and their frequency is going to be high .
and there 's actually some instructions that you only use once , if ever .
so they are either poisonous or really should be used at less of a level than random .
in this case , the frequency is lower .
and so now we can see , is that really a robust signature ?
i can tell you indeed it is , because this type of spectrum , just like what you 've seen in books , and just like what you 've seen in amino acids , it does n't really matter how you change the environment , it 's very robust ; it 's going to reflect the environment .
so i 'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did .
and i have to explain to you , the top of this graph shows you that frequency distribution that i talked about .
here , in fact , that 's the lifeless environment where each instruction occurs at an equal frequency .
and below there , i show , in fact , the mutation rate in the environment .
and i 'm starting this at a mutation rate that is so high that , even if you would drop a replicating program that would otherwise happily grow up to fill the entire world , if you drop it in , it gets mutated to death immediately .
so there is no life possible at that type of mutation rate .
but then i 'm going to slowly turn down the heat , so to speak , and then there 's this viability threshold where now it would be possible for a replicator to actually live .
and indeed , we 're going to be dropping these guys into that soup all the time .
so let 's see what that looks like .
so first , nothing , nothing , nothing .
too hot , too hot .
now the viability threshold is reached , and the frequency distribution has dramatically changed and , in fact , stabilizes .
and now what i did there is , i was being nasty , i just turned up the heat again and again .
and of course , it reaches the viability threshold .
and i 'm just showing this to you again because it 's so nice .
you hit the viability threshold .
the distribution changes to " alive ! "
and then , once you hit the threshold where the mutation rate is so high that you can not self-reproduce , you can not copy the information forward to your offspring without making so many mistakes that your ability to replicate vanishes .
and then that signature is lost .
what do we learn from that ?
well , i think we learn a number of things from that .
one of them is , if we are able to think about life in abstract terms - and we 're not talking about things like plants , and we 're not talking about amino acids , and we 're not talking about bacteria , but we think in terms of processes - then we could start to think about life , not as something that is so special to earth , but that , in fact , could exist anywhere .
because it really only has to do with these concepts of information , of storing information within physical substrates - anything : bits , nucleic acids , anything that 's an alphabet - and make sure that there 's some process so that this information can be stored for much longer than you would expect the time scales for the deterioration of information .
and if you can do that , then you have life .
so the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone , without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear , as far as the type of life on earth is .
and that in a sense removes us again , like all of our scientific discoveries , or many of them - it 's this continuous dethroning of man - of how we think we 're special because we 're alive .
well we can make life . we can make life in the computer .
granted , it 's limited , but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it .
and once we have that , then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say , if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate , then we can go out and try other worlds , figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be , figure enough about the normal chemistry , the geochemistry of the planet , so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life , and then look for large deviations from this - this thing sticking out , which says , " this chemical really should n't be there . "
now we do n't know that there 's life then , but we could say , " well at least i 'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from . "
and that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we can not visibly see it .
and so that 's really the only take-home message that i have for you .
life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets .
and if we remove the mystery of life , then i think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live , and how perhaps we 're not as special as we always think we are .
and i 'm going to leave you with that .
and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- amongst all the troubling deficits we struggle with today - we think of financial and economic primarily - the ones that concern me most is the deficit of political dialogue - our ability to address modern conflicts as they are , to go to the source of what they 're all about and to understand the key players and to deal with them .
we who are diplomats , we are trained to deal with conflicts between states and issues between states .
and i can tell you , our agenda is full .
there is trade , there is disarmament , there is cross-border relations .
but the picture is changing , coming onto the scene .
we loosely call them " groups . "
they may represent social , religious , political , economic , military realities .
and we struggle with how to deal with them .
the rules of engagement : how to talk , when to talk , and how to deal with them .
let me show you a slide here which illustrates the character of conflicts since 1946 until today .
you see the green is a traditional interstate conflict , the ones we used to read about .
the red is modern conflict , conflicts within states .
these are quite different , and they are outside the grasp of modern diplomacy .
and the core of these key actors are groups who represent different interests inside countries .
and the way they deal with their conflicts rapidly spreads to other countries .
so in a way , it is everybody 's business .
another acknowledgment we 've seen during these years , recent years , is that very few of these domestic interstate , intrastate conflicts can be solved militarily .
they may have to be dealt with with military means , but they can not be solved by military means .
they need political solutions .
and we , therefore , have a problem , because they escape traditional diplomacy .
and we have among states a reluctance in dealing with them .
plus , during the last decade , we 've been in the mode where dealing with groups was conceptually and politically dangerous .
after 9/11 , either you were with us or against us .
it was black or white .
and groups are very often immediately label terrorists .
and who would talk to terrorists ?
the west , as i would see it , comes out of that decade weakened , because we did n't understand the group .
so we 've spent more time on focusing on why we should not talk to others than finding out how we talk to others .
now i 'm not naive .
you can not talk to everybody all the time .
and there are times you should walk .
and sometimes military intervention is necessary .
i happen to believe that libya was necessary and that military intervention in afghanistan was also necessary .
and my country relies on its security through military alliance , that 's clear .
but still we have a large deficit in dealing with and understanding modern conflict .
let us turn to afghanistan .
10 years after that military intervention , that country is far from secure .
the situation , to be honest , is very serious .
now again , the military is necessary , but the military is no problem-solver .
when i first came to afghanistan in 2005 as a foreign minister , i met the commander of isaf , the international troops .
and he told me that , " this can be won militarily , minister .
we just have to persevere . "
now four com isaf 's later , we hear a different message : " this can not be won militarily .
we need military presence , but we need to move to politics .
we can only solve this through a political solution .
and it is not us who will solve it ; afghans have to solve it . "
but then they need a different political process than the one they were given in 2001 , 2002 .
they need an inclusive process where the real fabric of this very complicated society can deal with their issues .
everybody seems to agree with that .
it was very controversial to say three , four , five years ago .
now everybody agrees .
but now , as we prepare to talk , we understand how little we know .
because we did n't talk .
we did n't grasp what was going on .
the international committee of the red cross , the icrc , is talking to everyone , and it is doing so because it is neutral .
and that 's one reason why that organization probably is the best informed key player to understand modern conflict - because they talk .
my point is that you do n't have to be neutral to talk .
and you do n't have to agree when you sit down with the other side .
and you can always walk .
but if you do n't talk , you ca n't engage the other side .
and the other side which you 're going to engage is the one with whom you profoundly disagree .
prime minister rabin said when he engaged the oslo process , " you do n't make peace with your friends , you make peace with your enemies . "
it 's hard , but it is necessary .
let me go one step further .
this is tahrir square .
there 's a revolution going on .
the arab spring is heading into fall and is moving into winter .
it will last for a long , long time .
and who knows what it will be called in the end .
that 's not the point .
the point is that we are probably seeing , for the first time in the history of the arab world , a revolution bottom-up - people 's revolution .
social groups are taking to the streets .
and we find out in the west that we know very little about what 's happening .
because we never talk to the people in these countries .
most governments followed the dictate of the authoritarian leaders to stay away from these different groups , because they were terrorists .
so now that they are emerging in the street and we salute the democratic revolution , we find out how little we know .
right now , the discussion goes , " should we talk to the muslim brotherhood ?
should we talk to hamas ?
if we talk to them , we may legitimize them . "
i think that is wrong .
if you talk in the right way , you make it very clear that talking is not agreeing .
and how can we tell the muslim brotherhood , as we should , that they must respect minority rights , if we do n't accept majority rights ?
because they may turn out to be a majority .
how can we escape -lsb- having -rsb- a double-standard , if we at the same time preach democracy and at the same time how will we ever be interlocutors ?
now my diplomats are instructed to talk to all these groups .
but talking can be done in different ways .
we make a distinction between talking from a diplomatic level and talking at the political level .
now talking can be accompanied with aid or not with aid .
talking can be accompanied with inclusion or not inclusion .
there 's a big array of the ways of dealing with this .
so if we refuse to talk to these new groups that are going to be dominating the news in years to come , we will further radicalization , i believe .
we will make the road from violent activities into politics harder to travel .
and if we can not demonstrate to these groups that if you move towards democracy , if you move towards taking part in civilized and normal standards among states , there are some rewards on the other side .
the paradox here is that the last decade probably was a lost decade for making progress on this .
and the paradox is that the decade before the last decade was so promising - and for one reason primarily .
and the reason is what happened in south africa : nelson mandela .
when mandela came out of prison after 27 years of captivity , if he had told his people , " it 's time to take up the arms , it 's time to fight , " he would have been followed .
and i think the international community would have said , " fair enough .
it 's their right to fight . "
now as you know , mandela did n't do that .
in his memoirs , " long road to freedom , " he wrote that he survived during those years of captivity because he always decided to look upon his oppressor as also being a human being , also being a human being .
so he engaged a political process of dialogue , not as a strategy of the weak , but as a strategy of the strong .
and he engaged talking profoundly by settling some of the most tricky issues through a truth and reconciliation process where people came and talked .
now south african friends will know that was very painful .
so what can we learn from all of this ?
dialogue is not easy - not between individuals , not between groups , not between governments - but it is very necessary .
if we 're going to deal with political conflict-solving of conflicts , if we 're going to understand these new groups which are coming from bottom-up , supported by technology , which is available to all , we diplomats can not be sitting back in the banquets believing that we are doing interstate relations .
we have to connect with these profound changes .
and what is dialogue really about ?
when i enter into dialogue , i really hope that the other side would pick up my points of view , that i would impress upon them my opinions and my values .
i can not do that unless i send the signals that i will be open to listen to the other side 's signals .
we need a lot more training on how to do that and a lot more practice on how that can take problem-solving forward .
we know from our personal experiences that it 's easy sometimes just to walk , and sometimes you may need to fight .
and i would n't say that is the wrong thing in all circumstances .
sometimes you have to .
but that strategy seldom takes you very far .
the alternative is a strategy of engagement and principled dialogue .
and i believe we need to strengthen this approach in modern diplomacy , not only between states , but also within states .
we are seeing some new signs .
we could never have done the convention against anti-personnel landmines and the convention that is banning cluster munitions unless we had done diplomacy differently , by engaging with civil society .
all of a sudden , ngos were not only standing in the streets , crying their slogans , but they were taking -lsb- them -rsb- into the negotiations , partly because they represented the victims of these weapons .
and they brought their knowledge .
and there was an interaction between diplomacy and the power coming bottom-up .
this is perhaps a first element of a change .
we should draw examples from these different illustrations , not to have diplomacy which is disconnected from people and civil society .
and we have to go also beyond traditional diplomacy to the survival issue of our times , climate change .
how are we going to solve climate change through negotiations , unless we are able to make civil society and people , not part of the problem , but part of the solution ?
it is going to demand an inclusive process of diplomacy very different from the one we are practicing today as we are heading to new rounds of difficult climate negotiations , but when we move toward something which has to be much more along a broad mobilization .
it 's crucial to understand , i believe , because of technology and because of globalization , societies from bottom-up .
we as diplomats need to know the social capital of communities .
what is it that makes people trust each other , not only between states , but also within states ?
what is the legitimacy of diplomacy , of the the solution we devise as diplomats if they can not be reflected and understood by also these broader forces of societies that we now very loosely call groups ?
the good thing is that we are not powerless .
we have never had as many means of communication , means of being connected , means of reaching out , means of including .
the diplomatic toolbox is actually full of different tools we can use to strengthen our communication .
but the problem is that we are coming out of a decade where we had a fear of touching it .
now , i hope , in the coming years , that we are able to demonstrate through some concrete examples that fear is receding and that we can take courage from that alliance with civil society in different countries to support their problem-solving , among the afghans , inside the palestinian population , between the peoples of palestine and israel .
and as we try to understand this broad movement across the arab world , we are not powerless .
we need to improve the necessary skills , and we need the courage to use them .
in my country , i have seen how the council of islamist groups and christian groups came together , not as a government initiative , but they came together on their own initiative to establish contact and dialogue in times where things were pretty low-key tension .
and when tension increased , they already had that dialogue , and that was a strength to deal with different issues .
our modern western societies are more complex than before , in this time of migration .
how are we going to settle and build a bigger " we " to deal with our issues if we do n't improve our skills of communication ?
and for all of these reasons , this is time and this is why we must talk .
thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am honored to be here , and i 'm honored to talk about this topic , which i think is of grave importance .
we 've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species , but plastic hurts people too , especially poor people .
and both in the production of plastic , the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic , are poor people .
people got very upset when the bp oil spill happened people thought about , " oh , my god .
this is terrible , this oil - it 's in the water .
it 's going to destroy the living systems there .
people are going to be hurt .
this is a terrible thing , that the oil is going to hurt the people in the gulf . "
what people do n't think about is : what if the oil had made it safely to shore ?
what if the oil actually got where it was trying to go ?
not only would it have been burned in engines and added to global warming , but there 's a place called " cancer alley , " and the reason it 's called " cancer alley " is because the petrochemical industry takes that oil and turns it into plastic and , in the process , kills people .
it shortens the lives of the people who live there in the gulf .
so oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem where there 's a spill ; they 're a problem where there 's not .
and what we do n't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products .
the other thing that we do n't often appreciate is it 's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer .
poor people also suffer at the point of use .
those of us who earn a certain income level , we have something called choice .
the reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices , economic choices .
we actually get a chance to choose not to use products that have dangerous , poisonous plastic in them .
other people who are poor do n't have those choices .
so low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using .
those are the people who wind up actually ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic and using it .
and people say , " well , they should just buy a different product . "
well , the problem with being poor is you do n't have those choices .
you often have to buy the cheapest products .
the cheapest products are often the most dangerous .
and if that were n't bad enough , if it was n't just the production of plastic that 's giving people cancer in places like " cancer alley " and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use , at the point of disposal , once again , it 's poor people who bear the burden .
often , we think we 're doing a good thing .
you 're in your office , and you 're drinking your bottled water , or whatever it is , and you think to yourself , " hey , i 'm going to throw this away .
no , i 'm going to be virtuous .
i 'm going to put it in the blue bin . "
you think , " i put mine in the blue bin , " and then you look at your colleague and say , " why , you cretin .
you put yours in the white bin . "
and we use that as a moral tickle .
we feel so good about ourselves .
maybe i 'll feel good myself .
not you , but i feel this way .
and so we kind of have this kind of moral feel-good moment .
but if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey , we would be shocked to discover that , all too often , that bottle is going to be put on a boat , it 's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense , and it 's going to wind up in a developing country - often china .
say , " oh , little bottle .
we 're so happy to see you , little bottle . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you 've served so well . "
he 's given a little bottle massage , a little bottle medal .
but that 's not actually what happens .
that bottle winds up getting burned .
recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic , the burning of the plastic , which releases incredible toxic chemicals and , once again , kills people .
and so poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like " cancer alley , " poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately , and then poor people , who even at the tail end of the recycling are having their lives shortened , are all being harmed greatly by this addiction that we have to disposability .
now you think to yourself - because i know how you are - you say , " that sure is terrible for those poor people .
it 's just awful , those poor people .
i hope someone does something to help them . "
but what we do n't understand is - is , here we are in los angeles .
we worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in los angeles .
but guess what ?
because the environmental laws do n't protect the people in asia now , and the toxic air gains that we 've achieved here in california so , we all are being hit . we all are being impacted .
it 's just the poor people get hit first and worst .
but the dirty production , the burning of toxins , the lack of environmental standards in asia is actually creating so much dirty air pollution it 's coming across the ocean and has erased our gains here in california .
we 're back where we were in the 1970s .
and so we 're on one planet , and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems .
well the root of this problem , in my view , is the idea of disposability itself .
you see , if you understand the link between what we 're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we 're doing to poor people , you arrive at a very troubling , but also very helpful , insight : in order to trash the planet , you have to trash people .
but if you create a world where you do n't trash people , you ca n't trash the planet .
so now we are at a moment and ecology as an idea , we finally can now see that they are really , at the end of the day , one idea .
and it 's the idea that we do n't have disposable anything .
we do n't have disposable resources .
we do n't have disposable species .
and we do n't have disposable people either .
we do n't have a throwaway planet , and we do n't have throwaway children - it 's all precious .
and as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding , new opportunities for action begin to emerge .
biomimicry , which is something that is an emerging science , winds up being a very important social justice idea .
people who are just learning about this stuff , biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species .
democracy , by the way , means respecting the wisdom of all people - and we 'll get to that .
but biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species .
it turns out we 're a pretty clever species .
this big cortex , or whatever , we 're pretty proud of ourselves .
but if we want to make something hard , and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute , but i got this hard thing .
i 'm so clever , " and you look behind you , and there 's destruction all around you .
but guess what ? you 're so clever , but you 're not as clever as a clam .
a clamshell 's hard .
there 's no vacuums . there 's no big furnaces .
there 's no poison . there 's no pollution .
it turns out that our other species has figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things that we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well .
well that insight of biomimicry , of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species .
i do n't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff .
i do n't mean looking at it from that way - abusing the little species .
i mean actually respecting them , respecting what they 've achieved .
that 's called biomimicry , and that opens the door to zero waste production , zero pollution production - that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life , a high standard of living without trashing the planet .
well that idea of biomimicry , respecting the wisdom of all species , combined with the idea of democracy and social justice , respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people , would give us a different society .
we would have a different economy .
we would have a green society that dr. king would be proud of .
that should be the goal .
and the way that we get there is to first of all recognize that the idea of disposability not only hurts the species we 've talked about , but it even corrupts our own society .
we 're so proud to live here in california .
we just had this vote , and everybody 's like , " well , not in our state .
i do n't know what those other states were doing . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just so proud .
and , yeah , i 'm proud , too .
but california , though we lead the world in some of the green stuff , we also , unfortunately , lead the world in some of the gulag stuff .
california has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states .
we have a moral challenge in this moment .
we are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill , but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings , living people .
and i would say that we live in a country - five percent of the world 's population , 25 percent of the greenhouse gases , but also 25 percent of the world 's prisoners .
one out of every four people locked up anywhere in the world is locked up right here in the united states .
so that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in .
and yet , as a movement that has to broaden its constituency , that has to grow , that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone , one of the challenges to the success of this movement , of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift , is people look at our movement with some suspicion .
and they ask a question , and the question is : how can these people be so passionate ?
a poor person , a low-income person , somebody in " cancer alley , " somebody in watts , somebody in harlem , somebody on an indian reservation , might say to themselves , and rightfully so , " how can these people be so passionate about making sure that a plastic bottle has a second chance in life , and yet , when my child gets in trouble and goes to prison , he does n't get a second chance ? "
how can this movement be so passionate about saying we do n't have throwaway stuff , no throwaway dead materials , and yet accept throwaway lives and throwaway communities like " cancer alley ? "
and so we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement .
when we take on topics like this , it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow , and we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we 've been in .
most of you are good , softhearted people .
when you were younger , you cared about the whole world , and at some point somebody said you had to pick an issue , you had to boil your love down to an issue .
ca n't love the whole world - you 've got to work on trees , or you 've got to work on immigration .
you 've got to shrink it down and be about one issue .
and really , they fundamentally told you , " are you going to hug a tree , or are you going to hug a child ? pick .
are you going to hug a tree , or are you going to hug a child ? pick . "
well , when you start working on issues like plastic , you realize that the whole thing is connected , and luckily most of us are blessed to have two arms .
we can hug both .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my big idea is a very , very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us .
and my little idea that will do that is sleep .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a room of type-a women .
this is a room of sleep-deprived women .
and i learned the hard way , the value of sleep .
two-and-a-half years ago , i fainted from exhaustion .
i hit my head on my desk . i broke my cheekbone , i got five stitches on my right eye .
and i began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep .
and in the course of that , i studied , i met with medical doctors , scientists , and i 'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive , more inspired , more joyful life is getting enough sleep .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution , this new feminist issue .
we are literally going to sleep our way to the top , literally .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- because unfortunately for men , sleep deprivation has become a virility symbol .
i was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before .
and i felt like saying to him - but i did n't say it - i felt like saying , " you know what ?
if you had gotten five , this dinner would have been a lot more interesting . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship .
especially here in washington , if you try to make a breakfast date , and you say , " how about eight o 'clock ? "
they 're likely to tell you , " eight o 'clock is too late for me , but that 's okay , i can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight . "
and they think that means that they are so incredibly busy and productive , but the truth is they 're not , because we , at the moment , have had brilliant leaders in business , in finance , in politics , making terrible decisions .
so a high i.q.
does not mean that you 're a good leader , because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the titanic .
and we 've had far too many icebergs hitting our titanics .
in fact , i have a feeling that if lehman brothers was lehman brothers and sisters , they might still be around .
-lrb- applause -rrb- while all the brothers were busy just being hyper-connected 24/7 , maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg , because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep and have been able to see the big picture .
so as we are facing all the multiple crises in our world at the moment , what is good for us on a personal level , what 's going to bring more joy , gratitude , effectiveness in our lives and be the best for our own careers is also what is best for the world .
so i urge you to shut your eyes and discover the great ideas that lie inside us , to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- angella ahn : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much .
we are so honored to be here at tedwomen , sharing our music with you .
what an exciting and inspiring event .
what you just heard is " skylife " by david balakrishnan .
we want to play you one more selection .
it 's by astor piazzolla , an argentine composer .
and we talk about different ideas - he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart .
this was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart , beautiful music , was n't the most popular thing in the classical music world .
it was more atonal and twelve-tone .
and he insisted on beautiful music .
so this is " oblivion " by astor piazzolla .
thank you .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- openness . it 's a word that denotes opportunity and possibilities .
open-ended , open hearth , open source , open door policy , open bar . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and everywhere the world is opening up , and it 's a good thing .
why is this happening ?
the technology revolution is opening the world .
yesterday 's internet was a platform for the presentation of content .
the internet of today is a platform for computation .
the internet is becoming a giant global computer , and every time you go on it , you upload a video , you do a google search , you remix something , you 're programming this big global computer that we all share .
humanity is building a machine , and this enables us to collaborate in new ways .
collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis .
now a new generation is opening up the world as well .
i started studying kids about 15 years ago , - so actually 20 years ago now - and i noticed how my own children were effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology , and at first i thought , " my children are prodigies ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- but then i noticed all their friends were like them , so that was a bad theory .
so i 've started working with a few hundred kids , and i came to the conclusion that this is the first generation to come of age in the digital age , to be bathed in bits .
i call them the net generation .
i said , these kids are different .
they have no fear of technology , because it 's not there .
it 's like the air .
it 's sort of like , i have no fear of a refrigerator .
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's no more powerful force to change every institution than the first generation of digital natives .
i 'm a digital immigrant .
i had to learn the language .
the global economic crisis is opening up the world as well .
our opaque institutions from the industrial age , everything from old models of the corporation , government , media , wall street , are in various stages of being stalled or frozen or in atrophy or even failing , and this is now creating a burning platform in the world .
i mean , think about wall street .
the core modus operandi of wall street almost brought down global capitalism .
now , you know the idea of a burning platform , that you 're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are become greater than the costs of moving to something different , perhaps something radically different .
and we need to change and open up all of our institutions .
so this technology push , a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up .
now , i think , in fact , we 're at a turning point in human history , where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the industrial age around a new set of principles .
now , what is openness ?
well , as it turns out , openness has a number of different meanings , and for each there 's a corresponding principle for the transformation of civilization .
the first is collaboration .
now , this is openness in the sense of the boundaries of organizations becoming more porous and fluid and open .
the guy in the picture here , i 'll tell you his story .
his name is rob mcewen .
i 'd like to say , " i have this think tank , we scour the world for amazing case studies . "
the reason i know this story is because he 's my neighbor . -lrb- laughter -rrb- he actually moved across the street from us , and he held a cocktail party to meet the neighbors , and he says , " you 're don tapscott .
i 've read some of your books . "
i said , " great . what do you do ? "
and he says , " well i used to be a banker and now i 'm a gold miner . "
and he tells me this amazing story .
he takes over this gold mine , and his geologists ca n't tell him where the gold is .
he gives them more money for geological data , they come back , they ca n't tell him where to go into production .
after a few years , he 's so frustrated he 's ready to give up , but he has an epiphany one day .
he wonders , " if my geologists do n't know where the gold is , maybe somebody else does . "
so he does a " radical " thing .
he takes his geological data , he publishes it and he holds a contest on the internet called the goldcorp challenge .
it 's basically half a million dollars in prize money for anybody who can tell me , do i have any gold , and if so , where is it ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- he gets submissions from all around the world .
they use techniques that he 's never heard of , and for his half a million dollars in prize money , rob mcewen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold .
the market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars , and i can tell you , because he 's my neighbor , he 's a happy camper . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , conventional wisdom says talent is inside , right ?
your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night .
he viewed talent differently .
he wondered , who are their peers ?
he should have fired his geology department , but he did n't .
you know , some of the best submissions did n't come from geologists .
they came from computer scientists , engineers .
the winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is .
he helped us understand that social media 's becoming social production .
it 's not about hooking up online .
this is a new means of production in the making .
and this ideagora that he created , an open market , agora , for uniquely qualified minds , was part of a change , a profound change in the deep structure and architecture of our organizations , and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate , to create goods and services , to engage with the rest of the world , in terms of government , how we create public value .
openness is about collaboration .
now secondly , openness is about transparency .
this is different . here , we 're talking about the communication of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations : employees , customers , business partners , shareholders , and so on .
and everywhere , our institutions are becoming naked .
people are all bent out of shape about wikileaks , but that 's just the tip of the iceberg .
you see , people at their fingertips now , everybody , not just julian assange , have these powerful tools for finding out what 's going on , scrutinizing , informing others , and even organizing collective responses .
institutions are becoming naked , and if you 're going to be naked , well , there 's some corollaries that flow from that .
i mean , one is , fitness is no longer optional . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know ? or if you 're going to be naked , you 'd better get buff .
now , by buff i mean , you need to have good value , because value is evidenced like never before .
you say you have good products .
they 'd better be good .
but you also need to have values .
you need to have integrity as part of your bones and your dna as an organization , because if you do n't , you 'll be unable to build trust , and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world .
so this is good . it 's not bad .
sunlight is the best disinfectant .
and we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world .
now , the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing .
now this is different than transparency .
transparency is about the communication of information .
sharing is about giving up assets , intellectual property .
and there are all kinds of famous stories about this .
ibm gave away 400 million dollars of software to the linux movement , and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff .
now , conventional wisdom says , " well , hey , our intellectual property belongs to us , and if someone tries to infringe it , we 're going to get out our lawyers and we 're going to sue them . "
well , it did n't work so well for the record labels , did it ?
i mean , they took - they had a technology disruption , and rather than taking a business model innovation to correspond to that , they took and sought a legal solution and the industry that brought you elvis and the beatles is now suing children and is in danger of collapse .
so we need to think differently about intellectual property .
i 'll give you an example .
the pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble .
first of all , there are n't a lot of big inventions in the pipeline , and this is a big problem for human health , and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem , that they 're about to fall off something called the patent cliff .
do you know about this ?
they 're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue in the next 12 months .
and what are you going to do , like , cut back on paper clips or something ? no .
we need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research .
the pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets in a commons . they need to start sharing precompetitive research .
they need to start sharing clinical trial data , and in doing so , create a rising tide that could lift all boats , not just for the industry but for humanity .
now , the fourth meaning of openness , and corresponding principle , is about empowerment .
and i 'm not talking about the motherhood sense here .
knowledge and intelligence is power , and as it becomes more distributed , there 's a concomitant distribution and decentralization and disaggregation of power that 's underway in the world today .
the open world is bringing freedom .
now , take the arab spring .
the debate about the role of social media and social change has been settled .
you know , one word : tunisia .
and then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too .
but in the tunisian revolution , the new media did n't cause the revolution ; it was caused by injustice .
social media did n't create the revolution ; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who did n't want to be treated as subjects anymore .
but just as the internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government , it also drops the cost of dissent , of rebellion , and even insurrection in ways that people did n't understand .
you know , during the tunisian revolution , snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street .
so the students would take their mobile devices , take a picture , triangulate the location , send that picture to friendly military units , who 'd come in and take out the snipers .
you think that social media is about hooking up online ?
for these kids , it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers .
it was a tool of self-defense .
you know , as we speak today , young people are being killed in syria , and up until three months ago , if you were injured on the street , an ambulance would pick you up , take you to the hospital , you 'd go in , say , with a broken leg , and you 'd come out with a bullet in your head .
so these 20-somethings created an alternative health care system , where what they did is they used twitter and basic publicly available tools that when someone 's injured , a car would show up , it would pick them up , take them to a makeshift medical clinic , where you 'd get medical treatment , as opposed to being executed .
so this is a time of great change .
now , it 's not without its problems .
up until two years ago , all revolutions in human history had a leadership , and when the old regime fell , the leadership and the organization would take power .
well , these wiki revolutions happen so fast they create a vacuum , and politics abhors a vacuum , and unsavory forces can fill that , typically the old regime , or extremists , or fundamentalist forces .
you can see this playing out today in egypt .
but that does n't matter , because this is moving forward .
the train has left the station . the cat is out of the bag .
the horse is out of the barn . help me out here , okay ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the toothpaste is out of the tube .
i mean , we 're not putting this one back .
the open world is bringing empowerment and freedom .
i think , at the end of these four days , that you 'll come to conclude that the arc of history is a positive one , and it 's towards openness .
if you go back a few hundred years , all around the world it was a very closed society .
it was agrarian , and the means of production and political system was called feudalism , and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility .
people did n't know about things .
there was no concept of progress .
you were born , you lived your life and you died .
but then johannes gutenberg came along with his great invention , and , over time , the society opened up .
people started to learn about things , and when they did , the institutions of feudal society appeared to be stalled , or frozen , or failing .
it did n't make sense for the church to be responsible for medicine when people had knowledge .
so we saw the protestant reformation .
martin luther called the printing press " god 's highest act of grace . "
the creation of a corporation , science , the university , eventually the industrial revolution , and it was all good .
but it came with a cost .
and now , once again , the technology genie is out of the bottle , but this time it 's different .
the printing press gave us access to the written word .
the internet enables each of us to be a producer .
the printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge .
the internet gives us access , not just to information and knowledge , but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis .
to me , this is not an information age , it 's an age of networked intelligence .
it 's an age of vast promise , an age of collaboration , where the boundaries of our organizations are changing , of transparency , where sunlight is disinfecting civilization , an age of sharing and understanding the new power of the commons , and it 's an age of empowerment and of freedom .
now , what i 'd like to do is , to close , to share with you some research that i 've been doing .
i 've tried to study all kinds of organizations to understand what the future might look like , but i 've been studying nature recently .
you know , bees come in swarms and fish come in schools .
starlings , in the area around edinburgh , in the moors of england , come in something called a murmuration , and the murmuration refers to the murmuring of the wings of the birds , and throughout the day the starlings are out over a 20-mile radius sort of doing their starling thing .
and at night they come together and they create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature , and it 's called a murmuration .
and scientists that have studied this have said they 've never seen an accident .
now , this thing has a function .
it protects the birds .
you can see on the right here , there 's a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds , and apparently this is a frightening thing if you 're a predator of starlings .
and there 's leadership , but there 's no one leader .
now , is this some kind of fanciful analogy , or could we actually learn something from this ?
well , the murmuration functions to record a number of principles , and they 're basically the principles that i have described to you today .
this is a huge collaboration .
it 's an openness , it 's a sharing of all kinds of information , not just about location and trajectory and danger and so on , but about food sources .
and there 's a real sense of interdependence , that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective .
perhaps like we should understand that business ca n't succeed in a world that 's failing .
well , i look at this thing , and i get a lot of hope .
think about the kids today in the arab spring , and you see something like this that 's underway .
and imagine , just consider this idea , if you would : what if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass ?
could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge ?
could we start to share our intelligence ?
could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create , perhaps , some kind of consciousness on a global basis ?
well , if we could do this , we could attack some big problems in the world .
and i look at this thing , and , i do n't know , i get a lot of hope that maybe this smaller , networked , open world that our kids inherit might be a better one , and that this new age of networked intelligence could be an age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited .
let 's do this . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so why do we learn mathematics ?
essentially , for three reasons : calculation , application , and last , and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it , inspiration .
mathematics is the science of patterns , and we study it to learn how to think logically , critically and creatively , but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated , and when our students ask , " why are we learning this ? "
then they often hear that they 'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test .
but would n't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind ?
now , i know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen , so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers , the fibonacci numbers . -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah ! i already have fibonacci fans here .
that 's great .
now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways .
from the standpoint of calculation , they 're as easy to understand as one plus one , which is two .
then one plus two is three , two plus three is five , three plus five is eight , and so on .
indeed , the person we call fibonacci was actually named leonardo of pisa , and these numbers appear in his book " liber abaci , " which taught the western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today .
in terms of applications , fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often .
the number of petals on a flower is typically a fibonacci number , or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a fibonacci number as well .
in fact , there are many more applications of fibonacci numbers , but what i find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display .
let me show you one of my favorites .
suppose you like to square numbers , and frankly , who does n't ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's look at the squares of the first few fibonacci numbers .
so one squared is one , two squared is four , three squared is nine , five squared is 25 , and so on .
now , it 's no surprise that when you add consecutive fibonacci numbers , you get the next fibonacci number . right ?
that 's how they 're created .
but you would n't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together .
but check this out .
one plus one gives us two , and one plus four gives us five .
and four plus nine is 13 , nine plus 25 is 34 , and yes , the pattern continues .
in fact , here 's another one .
suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few fibonacci numbers .
let 's see what we get there .
so one plus one plus four is six .
add nine to that , we get 15 .
add 25 , we get 40 .
add 64 , we get 104 .
now look at those numbers .
those are not fibonacci numbers , but if you look at them closely , you 'll see the fibonacci numbers buried inside of them .
do you see it ? i 'll show it to you .
six is two times three , 15 is three times five , 40 is five times eight , two , three , five , eight , who do we appreciate ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- fibonacci ! of course .
now , as much fun as it is to discover these patterns , it 's even more satisfying to understand why they are true .
let 's look at that last equation .
why should the squares of one , one , two , three , five and eight add up to eight times 13 ?
i 'll show you by drawing a simple picture .
we 'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square .
together , they form a one-by-two rectangle .
beneath that , i 'll put a two-by-two square , and next to that , a three-by-three square , beneath that , a five-by-five square , and then an eight-by-eight square , creating one giant rectangle , right ?
now let me ask you a simple question : what is the area of the rectangle ?
it 's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it , right ?
just as we created it .
it 's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared . right ?
that 's the area .
on the other hand , because it 's a rectangle , the area is equal to its height times its base , and the height is clearly eight , and the base is five plus eight , which is the next fibonacci number , 13 . right ?
so the area is also eight times 13 .
since we 've correctly calculated the area two different ways , they have to be the same number , and that 's why the squares of one , one , two , three , five and eight add up to eight times 13 .
now , if we continue this process , we 'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21 , 21 by 34 , and so on .
now check this out .
if you divide 13 by eight , you get 1.625 .
and if you divide the larger number by the smaller number , then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618 , known to many people as the golden ratio , a number which has fascinated mathematicians , scientists and artists for centuries .
now , i show all this to you because , like so much of mathematics , there 's a beautiful side to it that i fear does not get enough attention in our schools .
we spend lots of time learning about calculation , but let 's not forget about application , including , perhaps , the most important application of all , learning how to think .
if i could summarize this in one sentence , it would be this : mathematics is not just solving for x , it 's also figuring out why .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- running - it 's basically just right , left , right , left - yeah ?
i mean , we 've been doing it for two million years , so it 's kind of arrogant to assume that i 've got something to say that has n't been said and performed better a long time ago .
but the cool thing about running , as i 've discovered , is that something bizarre happens in this activity all the time .
case in point : a couple months ago , if you saw the new york city marathon , i guarantee you , you saw something that no one has ever seen before .
an ethiopian woman named derartu tulu turns up at the starting line .
she 's 37 years old , she has n't won a marathon of any kind in eight years , and a few months previously she almost died in childbirth .
derartu tulu was ready to hang it up and retire from the sport , but she decided she 'd go for broke and try for one last big payday in the marquee event , the new york city marathon .
except - bad news for derartu tulu - some other people had the same idea , including the olympic gold medalist and paula radcliffe , who is a monster , the fastest woman marathoner in history by far .
only 10 minutes off the men 's world record , paula radcliffe is essentially unbeatable .
that 's her competition .
the gun goes off , and she 's not even an underdog .
she 's under the underdogs .
but the under-underdog hangs tough , and 22 miles into a 26-mile race , there is derartu tulu up there with the lead pack .
now this is when something really bizarre happens .
paula radcliffe , the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck out of derartu tulu 's under-underdog hands , suddenly grabs her leg and starts to fall back .
so we all know what to do in this situation , right ?
you give her a quick crack in the teeth with your elbow and blaze for the finish line .
derartu tulu ruins the script .
instead of taking off , she falls back , and she grabs paula radcliffe , says , " come on . come with us . you can do it . "
so paula radcliffe , unfortunately , does it .
she catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line .
but then she falls back again .
and the second time derartu tulu grabs her and tries to pull her .
and paula radcliffe at that point says , " i 'm done . go . "
so that 's a fantastic story , and we all know how it ends .
she loses the check , but she goes home with something bigger and more important .
except derartu tulu ruins the script again - instead of losing , she blazes past the lead pack and wins , wins the new york city marathon , goes home with a big fat check .
it 's a heartwarming story , but if you drill a little bit deeper , you 've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there .
when you have two outliers in one organism , it 's not a coincidence .
when you have someone who is more competitive and more compassionate than anybody else in the race , again , it 's not a coincidence .
you show me a creature with webbed feet and gills ; somehow water 's involved .
someone with that kind of heart , there 's some kind of connection there .
and the answer to it , i think , can be found down in the copper canyons of mexico , where there 's a tribe , a reclusive tribe , called the tarahumara indians .
now the tarahumara are remarkable for three things .
number one is , they have been living essentially unchanged for the past 400 years .
when the conquistadors arrived in north america you had two choices : you either fight back and engage or you could take off .
the mayans and aztecs engaged , which is why there are very few mayans and aztecs .
the tarahumara had a different strategy .
they took off and hid in this labyrinthine , networking , spiderwebbing system of canyons called the copper canyons , and there they remained since the 1600s - essentially the same way they 've always been .
the second thing remarkable about the tarahumara is , deep into old age - 70 to 80 years old - these guys are n't running marathons ; they 're running mega-marathons .
they 're not doing 26 miles ; they 're doing 100 , 150 miles at a time , and apparently without injury , without problems .
the last thing that 's remarkable about the tarahumara is that all the things that we 're going to be talking about today , all the things that we 're trying to come up with using all of our technology and brain power to solve - things like heart disease and cholesterol and cancer and crime and warfare and violence and clinical depression - all this stuff , the tarahumara do n't know what you 're talking about .
they are free from all of these modern ailments .
so what 's the connection ?
again , we 're talking about outliers - there 's got to be some kind of cause and effect there .
well , there are teams of scientists at harvard and the university of utah that are bending their brains to try to figure out what the tarahumara have known forever .
they 're trying to solve those same kinds of mysteries .
and once again , a mystery wrapped inside of a mystery - perhaps the key to derartu tulu and the tarahumara is wrapped in three other mysteries , which go like this : three things - if you have the answer , come up and take the microphone , because nobody else knows the answer .
and if you know it , then you are smarter than anybody else on planet earth .
mystery number one is this : two million years ago the human brain exploded in size .
australopithecus had a tiny little pea brain .
suddenly humans show up - homo erectus - big , old melon-head .
to have a brain of that size , you need to have a source of condensed caloric energy .
in other words , early humans are eating dead animals - no argument , that 's a fact .
the only problem is , the first edged weapons only appeared about 200,000 years ago .
so , somehow , for nearly two million years , we are killing animals without any weapons .
now we 're not using our strength because we are the biggest sissies in the jungle .
every other animal is stronger than we are - they have fangs , they have claws , they have nimbleness , they have speed .
we think usain bolt is fast . usain bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel .
we 're not fast .
that would be an olympic event : turn a squirrel loose - whoever catches the squirrel , you get a gold medal .
so no weapons , no speed , no strength , no fangs , no claws - how were we killing these animals ? mystery number one .
mystery number two : women have been in the olympics for quite some time now , but one thing that 's remarkable about all women sprinters - they all suck ; they 're terrible .
there 's not a fast woman on the planet and there never has been .
the fastest woman to ever run a mile did it in 4:15 .
i could throw a rock and hit a high school boy who can run faster than 4:15 .
for some reason you guys are just really slow .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you get to the marathon we were just talking about - you guys have only been allowed to run the marathon for 20 years .
because , prior to the 1980s , medical science said that if a woman tried to run 26 miles - does anyone know what would happen if you tried to run 26 miles , why you were banned from the marathon before the 1980s ?
-lrb- audience member : her uterus would be torn . -rrb- her uterus would be torn .
yes . you would have torn reproductive organs .
the uterus would fall out , literally fall out of the body .
now i 've been to a lot of marathons , and i 've yet to see any ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's only been 20 years that women have been allowed to run the marathon .
in that very short learning curve , you guys have gone from broken organs up to the fact that you 're only 10 minutes off the male world record .
then you go beyond 26 miles , into the distance that medical science also told us would be fatal to humans - remember pheidippides died when he ran 26 miles - you get to 50 and 100 miles , and suddenly it 's a different game .
you can take a runner like ann trason , or nikki kimball , or jenn shelton , you put them in a race of 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world and it 's a coin toss who 's going to win .
i 'll give you an example .
a couple years ago , emily baer signed up for a race called the hardrock 100 , which tells you all you need to know about the race .
they give you 48 hours to finish this race .
well emily baer - 500 runners - she finishes in eighth place , in the top 10 , even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race - and yet , beat 492 other people .
so why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer ?
the third mystery is this : at the university of utah , they started tracking finishing times for people running the marathon .
and what they found is that , if you start running the marathon at age 19 , you will get progressively faster , year by year , until you reach your peak at age 27 .
and then after that , you succumb to the rigors of time .
and you 'll get slower and slower , until eventually you 're back to running the same speed you were at age 19 .
so about seven years , eight years to reach your peak , and then gradually you fall off your peak , until you go back to the starting point .
you would think it might take eight years to go back to the same speed , maybe 10 years - no , it 's 45 years .
64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19 .
now i defy you to come up with any other physical activity - and please do n't say golf - something that actually is hard - where geriatrics are performing as well as they did as teenagers .
so you have these three mysteries .
is there one piece in the puzzle which might wrap all these things up ?
you 've got to be really careful any time someone looks back in prehistory and tries to give you some sort of global answer , because , it being prehistory , you can say whatever the hell you want and get away with it .
but i 'll submit this to you : if you put one piece in the middle of this jigsaw puzzle , suddenly it all starts to form a coherent picture .
if you wonder , why it is the tarahumara do n't fight and do n't die of heart disease , why a poor ethiopian woman named derartu tulu can be the most compassionate and yet the most competitive , and why we somehow were able to find food without weapons , perhaps it 's because humans , as much as we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe , actually evolved as nothing more than a pack of hunting dogs .
maybe we evolved as a hunting pack animal .
because the one advantage we have in the wilderness - again , it 's not our fangs and our claws and our speed - the only thing we do really , really well is sweat .
we 're really good at being sweaty and smelly .
better than any other mammal on earth , we can sweat really well .
but the advantage of that little bit of social discomfort is the fact that , when it comes to running under hot heat for long distances , we 're superb , we 're the best on the planet .
you take a horse on a hot day , and after about five or six miles , that horse has a choice .
it 's either going to breathe or it 's going to cool off , but it ai n't doing both - we can .
so what if we evolved as hunting pack animals ?
what if the only natural advantage we had in the world was the fact that we could get together as a group , go out there on that african savannah , pick out an antelope and go out as a pack and run that thing to death ?
that 's all we could do .
we could run really far on a hot day .
well if that 's true , a couple other things had to be true as well .
the key to being part of a hunting pack is the word " pack . "
if you go out by yourself , and you try to chase an antelope , i guarantee you there 's going to be two cadavers out there in the savannah .
you need a pack to pull together .
you need to have those 64- , 65-year-olds who have been doing this for a long time to understand which antelope you 're actually trying to catch .
the herd explodes and it gathers back again .
those expert trackers have got to be part of the pack .
they ca n't be 10 miles behind .
you need to have the women and the adolescents there because the two times in your life you most benefit from animal protein is when you are a nursing mother and a developing adolescent .
it makes no sense to have the antelope over there dead and the people who want to eat it 50 miles away .
they need to be part of the pack .
you need to have those 27-year-old studs at the peak of their powers ready to drop the kill , and you need to have those teenagers there who are learning the whole thing all involved .
the pack stays together .
another thing that has to be true about this pack : this pack can not be really materialistic .
you ca n't be hauling all your crap around , trying to chase the antelope .
you ca n't be a pissed-off pack . you ca n't be bearing grudges , like , " i 'm not chasing that guy 's antelope .
he pissed me off . let him go chase his own antelope . "
the pack has got to be able to swallow its ego , be cooperative and pull together .
what you end up with , in other words , is a culture remarkably similar to the tarahumara - a tribe that has remained unchanged since the stone age .
it 's a really compelling argument that maybe the tarahumara are doing exactly what all of us had done for two million years , that it 's us in modern times who have sort of gone off the path .
you know , we look at running as this kind of alien , foreign thing , this punishment you 've got to do because you ate pizza the night before .
but maybe it 's something different .
maybe we 're the ones who have taken this natural advantage we had and we spoiled it .
how do we spoil it ? well how do we spoil anything ?
we try to cash in on it .
we try to can it and package it and make it " better " and sell it to people .
and what happened was we started creating these fancy cushioned things , which can make running " better , " called running shoes .
the reason i get personally pissed-off about running shoes is because i bought a million of them and i kept getting hurt .
and i think that , if anybody in here runs - and i just had a conversation with carol ; we talked for two minutes backstage , and she 's talking about plantar fasciitis .
you talk to a runner , i guarantee , within 30 seconds , the conversation turns to injury .
so if humans evolved as runners , if that 's our one natural advantage , why are we so bad at it ? why do we keep getting hurt ?
curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time .
if you read folklore and mythology , any kind of myths , any kind of tall tales , running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor .
it 's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain .
geronimo used to say that , " my only friends are my legs . i only trust my legs . "
that 's because an apache triathlon used to be you 'd run 50 miles across the desert , engage in hand-to-hand combat , steal a bunch of horses and slap leather for home .
geronimo was never saying , " ah , you know something , my achilles - i 'm tapering . i got to take this week off , " or " i need to cross-train .
i did n't do yoga . i 'm not ready . "
humans ran and ran all the time .
we are here today . we have our digital technology .
all of our science comes from the fact that our ancestors were able to do something extraordinary every day , which was just rely on their naked feet and legs to run long distances .
so how do we get back to that again ?
well , i would submit to you the first thing is get rid of all packaging , all the sales , all the marketing .
get rid of all the stinking running shoes .
stop focusing on urban marathons , which , if you do four hours , you suck .
if you do 3:59:59 , you 're awesome , because you qualified for another race .
we need to get back to that sense of playfulness and joyfulness and , i would say , nakedness , that has made the tarahumara one of the healthiest and serene cultures in our time .
so what 's the benefit ? so what ?
so you burn off the haagen-dazs from the night before ?
but maybe there 's another benefit there as well .
without getting a little too extreme about this , imagine a world where everybody could go out their door and engage in the kind of exercise that 's going to make them more relaxed , more serene , more healthy , burn off stress - where you do n't come back into your office a raging maniac anymore , where you do n't go back home with a lot of stress on top of you again .
maybe there 's something between what we are today and what the tarahumara have always been .
i do n't say let 's go back to the copper canyons and live on corn and maize , which is the tarahumara 's preferred diet , but maybe there 's somewhere in between .
and if we find that thing , maybe there is a big fat nobel prize out there .
because if somebody could find a way to restore that natural ability that we all enjoyed for most of our existence , up until the 1970s or so , the benefits , social and physical and political and mental , could be astounding .
so what i 've been seeing today is there is a growing subculture of barefoot runners , people who got rid of their shoes .
and what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes , you get rid of the stress , you get rid of the injuries and the ailments .
and what you find is something the tarahumara have known for a very long time , that this can be a whole lot of fun .
i 've experienced it personally myself .
i was injured all my life , and then in my early 40s i got rid of my shoes and my running ailments have gone away too .
so hopefully it 's something we can all benefit from .
and i appreciate you guys listening to this story . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's start with day and night .
life evolved under conditions of light and darkness , light and then darkness .
and so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light .
these are chemical clocks , and they 're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell .
i 'll give you an example - if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach , and you fly it all the way across the continent , and you drop it into a sloped cage , it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores , and it 'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away .
it 'll do this for weeks , until it kind of gradually loses the plot .
and it 's incredible to watch , but there 's nothing psychic or paranormal going on ; it 's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond , usually , with what 's going on around it .
so , we have this ability as well .
and in humans , we call it the " body clock . "
you can see this most clearly when you take away someone 's watch and you shut them into a bunker , deep underground , for a couple of months . -lrb- laughter -rrb- people actually volunteer for this , and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole .
so , no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be , they all show the same thing .
they get up just a little bit later every day - say 15 minutes or so - and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks .
and so , in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks , rather than somehow sensing the day outside .
so fine , we have a body clock , and it turns out that it 's incredibly important in our lives .
it 's a huge driver for culture and i think that it 's the most underrated force on our behavior .
we evolved as a species near the equator , and so we 're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness .
but of course , we 've spread to every corner of the globe and in arctic canada , where i live , we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter .
so the culture , the northern aboriginal culture , traditionally has been highly seasonal .
in winter , there 's a lot of sleeping going on ; you enjoy your family life inside .
and in summer , it 's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours , very active .
so , what would our natural rhythm look like ?
what would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense ?
well , it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all , they sleep twice every night .
they go to bed around 8:00 p.m.
until midnight and then again , they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise .
and in-between , they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed .
and during this time , there 's a surge of prolactin , the likes of which a modern day never sees .
the people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime , that they realize they 're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives .
so , cut to the modern day .
we 're living in a culture of jet lag , global travel , 24-hour business , shift work .
and you know , our modern ways of doing things have their advantages , but i believe we should understand the costs .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade ?
have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around ?
have you ever looked at the arab uprisings and thought , " how could we have predicted that ? "
or " how could we have better prepared for that ? "
well my personal story , my personal journey , what brings me to the ted stage here today , is a demonstration of exactly what 's been happening in muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades , at least , and beyond .
i want to share some of that story with you , but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in muslim-majority societies .
so let me begin by first of all giving a very , very brief history of time , if i may indulge .
in medieval societies there were defined allegiances .
an identity was defined primarily by religion .
and then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a european nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity .
so identity was primarily defined by ethnicity , and the nation-state reflected that .
in the age of globalization , we moved on .
i call it the era of citizenship - where people could be from multi-racial , multi-ethnic backgrounds , but all be equal as citizens in a state .
you could be american-italian ; you could be american-irish ; you could be british-pakistani .
but i believe now that we 're moving into a new age , and that age the new york times dubbed recently as " the age of behavior . "
how i define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances , where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives .
and these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave .
now this is not all necessarily good news , because it 's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love .
but actually it 's my belief that the people who 've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior , up until now , up until recent times , up until the last six months , the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances , using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies , those who 've been benefiting from this have been extremists .
and that 's something which i 'd like to elaborate on .
if we look at islamists , if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists , one thing they 've been very good at , one thing that they 've actually been exceeding in , is communicating across borders , using technologies to organize themselves , to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena .
now i should know , because for 13 years of my life , i was involved in an extreme islamist organization .
and i was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders , and i witnessed the rise of islamist extremism as distinct from islam the faith , and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world .
and my story , my personal story , is truly evidence for the age of behavior that i 'm attempting to elaborate upon here .
i was , by the way - i 'm an essex lad , born and raised in essex in the u.k.
anyone who 's from england knows the reputation we have from essex .
but having been born in essex , at the age of 16 , i joined an organization .
at the age of 17 , i was recruiting people from cambridge university to this organization .
at the age of 19 , i was on the national leadership of this organization in the u.k.
at the age of 21 , i was co-founding this organization in pakistan .
at the age of 22 , i was co-founding this organization in denmark .
by the age of 24 , i found myself convicted in prison in egypt , being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments , being subjected to torture in egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience .
now that journey , and what took me from essex all the way across the world - by the way , we were laughing at democratic activists .
we felt they were from the age of yesteryear .
we felt that they were out of date .
i learned how to use email from the extremist organization that i used .
i learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected .
eventually i was detected , of course , in egypt .
but the way in which i learned to use technology to my advantage was because i was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state .
the age of behavior : where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances .
so as i said , we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it .
and it 's not just islamist extremists that did this .
but even if you look across the mood music in europe of late , far-right fascism is also on the rise .
a form of anti-islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it 's transnational .
and the consequences that this is having is that it 's affecting the political climate across europe .
what 's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms , individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another , have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become , or are becoming , mainstream .
because the internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world .
if you look at the rise of far-right fascism across europe of late , you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics , yet the phenomenon is transnational .
in certain countries , mosque minarets are being banned .
in others , headscarves are being banned .
in others , kosher and halal meat are being banned , as we speak .
and on the flip side , we have transnational islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies .
and so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream .
now that never would have been possible before .
they would have felt isolated , until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon .
where does that leave democracy aspirants ?
well i believe they 're getting left far behind .
and i 'll give you an example here at this stage .
if any of you remembers the christmas day bomb plot : there 's a man called anwar al-awlaki .
as an american citizen , ethnically a yemeni , in hiding currently in yemen , who inspired a nigerian , son of the head of nigeria 's national bank .
this nigerian student studied in london , trained in yemen , boarded a flight in amsterdam to attack america .
in the meanwhile , the old mentality with a capital o , was represented by his father , the head of the nigerian bank , warning the cia that his own son was about to attack , and this warning fell on deaf ears .
the old mentality with a capital o , as represented by the nation-state , not yet fully into the age of behavior , not recognizing the power of transnational social movements , got left behind .
and the christmas day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the united states of america .
again with the example of the far right : that we find , ironically , xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization .
so why are they succeeding ?
and why are democracy aspirants falling behind ?
well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this .
and a social movement is comprised , in my view , it 's comprised of four main characteristics .
it 's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders .
i 'll talk you through one example , and that 's the example that everyone here will be aware of , and that 's the example of al-qaeda .
if i asked you to think of the ideas of al-qaeda , that 's something that comes to your mind immediately .
if i ask you to think of their narratives - the west being at war with islam , the need to defend islam against the west - these narratives , they come to your mind immediately .
incidentally , the difference between ideas and narratives : the idea is the cause that one believes in ; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause - the propaganda , if you like , of the cause .
so the ideas and the narratives of al-qaeda come to your mind immediately .
if i ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders , they come to your mind immediately .
one of their leaders was killed in pakistan recently .
so these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately .
and that 's the power of social movements .
they 're transnational , and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders .
however , if i ask your minds to focus currently on pakistan , and i ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in pakistan today , you 'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of benazir bhutto .
which means , by definition , that particular leader no longer exists .
one of the problems we 're facing is , in my view , that there are no globalized , youth-led , grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across muslim-majority societies .
there is no equivalent of the al-qaeda , without the terrorism , for democracy across muslim-majority societies .
there are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground .
so that begs the next question .
why is it that extremist organizations , whether of the far-right or of the islamist extremism - islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of islam over the rest of society - why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way , whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind ?
and i believe that 's for four reasons .
i believe , number one , it 's complacency .
because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power , or have societies that are leading globalized , powerful societies , powerful countries .
and that level of complacency means they do n't feel the need to advocate for that culture .
the second , i believe , is political correctness .
that we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that - we associate believing in the universality of our values - with extremists .
yet actually , whenever we talk about human rights , we do say that human rights are universal .
but actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with islamist extremism .
to go around saying that i believe democratic culture is the best that we 've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism .
and the third , democratic choice in muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice , meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party , but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party - wanting to rule by military dictatorship .
and then you have a third party saying , " vote for us ; we 'll establish a theocracy . "
so democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies .
and what happens as a result of this is , when those parties are elected , and inevitably they fail , or inevitably they make political mistakes , democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes .
and then people say , " we 've tried democracy . it does n't really work .
let 's bring the military back again . "
and the fourth reason , i believe , is what i 've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance .
what i mean by that is , if the world superpower today was a communist , it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism , than it is today with the world superpower being america , occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals .
so roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice , not merely as a political choice .
when talking about those reasons , let 's break down certain preconceptions .
is it just about grievances ?
is it just about a lack of education ?
well statistically , the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated .
statistically , they are educated , on average , above the education levels of western society .
anecdotally , we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor , well bin laden is from one of the richest families in saudi arabia .
his deputy , ayman al-zawahiri , was a pediatrician - not an ill-educated man .
international aid and development has been going on for years , but extremism in those societies , in many of those societies , has been on the rise .
and what i believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground , in addition to international aid , in addition to education , in addition to health .
not exclusive to these things , but in addition to them , is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground .
and this is where i believe neoconservatism had it upside-down .
neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down .
whereas islamists and far-right organizations , for decades , have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots .
they 've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots , and we 've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of islamism .
mass movements in pakistan have been represented after the arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy , rather than for a democratic uprising .
because since pre-partition , they 've been building demand for their ideology on the ground .
and what 's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture - which is necessarily more than just elections .
but without freedom of speech , you ca n't have free and fair elections .
without human rights , you do n't have the protection granted to you to campaign .
without freedom of belief , you do n't have the right to join organizations .
so what 's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture .
what that will do is avoid the problem i was talking about earlier , where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy .
whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level , rather than merely on a political level , a level above politics - movements that are not political parties , but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture .
what we 'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here - the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy , not for a democracy .
but to get to that stage , where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric , but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship - i.e. you 're voting in a democracy , in an existing democracy , and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box .
to get to that stage , we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground .
now to conclude , how does that happen ?
well , egypt is a good starting point .
the arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning .
but what happened in the arab uprisings and what happened in egypt was particularly cathartic for me .
what happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal , and that was to remove the leader .
we need to move one step beyond that now .
we need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions , loosely based political coalitions , to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground .
because it 's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator .
that does n't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values .
but generally , the trends that start in egypt have historically spread across the mena region , the middle east and north africa region .
so when arab socialism started in egypt , it spread across the region .
in the ' 80s and ' 90s when islamism started in the region , it spread across the mena region as a whole .
and the aspiration that we have at the moment - as young arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism - is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that .
but that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture .
and we 've made a start for that in pakistan with a movement called khudi , where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture .
and it 's with that thought that i 'll end .
and my time is up , and thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers : thomas starzl , who performed the world 's first successful liver transplant in 1967 , and sir roy calne , who performed the first liver transplant in the u.k.
in the following year .
i returned to singapore and , in 1990 , performed asia 's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure , but against all odds .
now when i look back , the transplant was actually the easiest part .
next , raising the money to fund the procedure .
but perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators - a matter which was debated in the parliament - that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country .
but 20 years on , my patient , surinder , is asia 's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and perhaps more important , i am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate .
the truth is , there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around .
as the demand for donor organs continues to rise , in large part due to the aging population , the supply has remained relatively constant .
in the united states alone , 100,000 men , women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs , and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs .
the transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation .
and the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living , related donors - relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ , like a split liver graft , to a relative or loved one .
but as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs , the gift of life was then extended from living , related donors to now living , unrelated donors .
and this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy .
how can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from , for example , a submissive spouse , an in-law , a servant , a slave , an employee ?
where and how can we draw the line ?
in my part of the world , too many people live below the poverty line .
and in some areas , the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living , unrelated donors .
shortly after i performed the first liver transplant , i received my next assignment , and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners .
i was also pregnant at the time .
pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman 's life .
but my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts - thoughts of walking through the prison 's high-security death row , as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room .
and at each time , i would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners ' eyes follow me .
and for two years , i struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4:30 am on a friday morning , driving to the prison , getting down , gloved and scrubbed , ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner , remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon .
no doubt , i was informed , the consent had been obtained .
but , in my life , the one fulfilling skill that i had was now invoking feelings of conflict - conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk .
in my team , the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience .
some of us may have been sublimated , but really none of us remained the same .
i was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos .
and in my mind , i realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence .
it made me wonder if there could be a better way - a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide .
now just about that time , the practice of surgery evolved from big to small , from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures , tiny incisions .
and in transplantation , concepts shifted from whole organs to cells .
in 1988 , at the university of minnesota , i participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants .
i witnessed the technical difficulty .
and this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells .
i thought to myself , why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas - the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes - and transplant these cells ? - technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ .
and at that time , stem cell research had gained momentum , following the isolation of the world 's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s .
the observation that stem cells , as master cells , could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types - heart cells , liver cells , pancreatic islet cells - captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public .
i too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology , and this inspired a shift in my mindset , from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells .
and i focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants .
today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells .
embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage , chiefly because of their pluripotency - that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types .
but the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells - the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos - has encouraged research into other types of stem cells .
now to the ridicule of my colleagues , i inspired my lab to focus on what i thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells , adipose tissue , or fat , yes fat - nowadays available in abundant supply - you and i , i think , would be very happy to get rid of anyway .
fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells .
and adult stem cells are found in you and me - in our blood , in our bone marrow , in our fat , our skin and other organs .
and as it turns out , fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells .
but adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells .
and here is the limitation : adult stem cells are mature cells , and , like mature human beings , these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types , as embryonic stem cells -lsb- can -rsb- .
but in 2007 , two remarkable individuals , shinya yamanaka of japan and jamie thomson of the united states , made an astounding discovery .
they discovered that adult cells , taken from you and me , could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells , which they termed ips cells , or induced pluripotent stem cells .
and so guess what , scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells - aging adult cells from you and me - they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful ips cells .
and in our lab , we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells - cells that we may use to then form other , more specialized , cells , which one day may be used as cell transplants .
if this research is successful , it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos .
indeed , there is a lot of hype , but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions .
heart disease , stroke , diabetes , spinal cord injury , muscular dystrophy , retinal eye diseases - are any of these conditions relevant , personally , to you ?
in may 2006 , something horrible happened to me .
i was about to start a robotic operation , but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room , i realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness .
earlier that week , i had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing - yes , i fell .
and i started to see floaters and stars , which i casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure .
what happened to me might have been catastrophic , if not for the fact that i was in reach of good surgical access .
and i had my vision restored , but not before a prolonged period of convalescence - three months - in a head down position .
this experience taught me to empathize more with my patients , and especially those with retinal diseases .
37 million people worldwide are blind , and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision .
stem cell-derived retinal transplants , now in a research phase , may one day restore vision , or part vision , to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide .
indeed , we live in both challenging as well as exciting times .
as the world population ages , scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells .
it is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured , our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation .
and these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue .
stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body , or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver .
as we speak , there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases .
what lies ahead ?
heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide .
1.1 million americans suffer heart attacks yearly .
4.8 million suffer cardiac failure .
stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function .
there are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease .
while still in a research phase , stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology .
stem cells provide hope for new beginnings - small , incremental steps , cells rather than organs , repair rather than replacement .
stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs .
powerful new technologies always present enigmas .
as we speak , the world 's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the usfda approval .
and in the u.k. , neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial .
the research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers .
each one has his story .
my story has been about my journey from organs to cells - a journey through controversy , inspired by hope - hope that , as we age , you and i may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life .
thank you .
my name is arvind gupta , and i 'm a toymaker .
i 've been making toys for the last 30 years .
the early ' 70s , i was in college .
it was a very revolutionary time .
it was a political ferment , so to say - students out in the streets of paris , revolting against authority .
america was jolted by the anti-vietnam movement , the civil rights movement .
in india , we had the naxalite movement , the -lsb- unclear -rsb- movement .
but you know , when there is a political churning of society , it unleashes a lot of energy .
the national movement of india was testimony to that .
lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the national movement .
now in the early ' 70s , one of the great programs in india was to revitalize primary science in village schools .
there was a person , anil sadgopal , did a ph.d. from caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in india 's cutting-edge research institute , the tifr .
at 31 , he was not able to relate the kind of -lsb- unclear -rsb- research , which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people .
so he designed and went and started a village science program .
many people were inspired by this .
the slogan of the early ' 70s was " go to the people .
live with them ; love them .
start from what they know . build on what they have . "
this was kind of the defining slogan .
well i took one year .
i joined telco , made tata trucks , pretty close to pune .
i worked there for two years , and i realized that i was not born to make trucks .
often one does n't know what one wants to do , but it 's good enough to know what you do n't want to do .
so i took one year off , and i went to this village science program .
and it was a turning point .
it was a very small village - a weekly bazaar where people , just once in a week , they put in all the vats .
so i said , " i 'm going to spend a year over here . "
so i just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside .
and one thing which i found was this black rubber .
this is called a cycle valve tube .
when you pump in air in a bicycle , you use a bit of this .
and some of these models - so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube , you can put two matchsticks inside this , and you make a flexible joint .
it 's a joint of tubes . you start by teaching angles - an acute angle , a right angle , an obtuse angle , a straight angle .
it 's like its own little coupling .
if you have three of them , and you loop them together , well you make a triangle .
with four , you make a square , you make a pentagon , you make a hexagon , you make all these kind of polygons .
and they have some wonderful properties .
if you look at the hexagon , for instance , it 's like an amoeba , which is constantly changing its own profile .
you can just pull this out , this becomes a rectangle .
you give it a push , this becomes a parallelogram .
but this is very shaky .
look at the pentagon , for instance , pull this out - it becomes a boat shape trapezium .
push it and it becomes house shaped .
this becomes an isosceles triangle - again , very shaky .
this square might look very square and prim .
give it a little push - this becomes a rhombus .
it becomes kite-shaped .
but give a child a triangle , he ca n't do a thing to it .
why use triangles ?
because triangles are the only rigid structures .
we ca n't make a bridge with squares because the train would come , it would start doing a jig .
ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in india , they might not have gone to engineering college , but no one makes a roof placed like this .
because if they put tiles on top , it 's just going to crash .
they always make a triangular roof .
now this is people science .
and if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick , you 'll get a t joint .
and if i were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle , i would make a tetrahedron .
so you make all these 3d shapes .
you make a tetrahedron like this .
and once you make these , you make a little house .
put this on top .
you can make a joint of four . you can make a joint of six .
you just need a ton .
now this was - you make a joint of six , you make an icosahedron .
you can play around with it .
this makes an igloo .
now this is in 1978 .
i was a 24-year-old young engineer .
and i thought this was so much better than making trucks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you , as a matter of fact , put four marbles inside , you simulate the molecular structure of methane , ch4 .
four atoms of hydrogen , the four points of the tetrahedron , which means the little carbon atom .
well since then , i just thought that i 've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country - village schools , government schools , municipal schools , ivy league schools - i 've been invited by most of them .
and every time i go to a school , i see a gleam in the eyes of the children .
i see hope . i see happiness in their faces .
children want to make things . children want to do things .
now this , we make lots and lots of pumps .
now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon .
it 's a real pump . you could actually pop the balloon .
and we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it .
so all you do is - it 's a very kind of provocative statement - this old bicycle tube and this old plastic -lsb- unclear -rsb- this filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube .
and this is how you make a valve .
you put a little sticky tape .
this is one-way traffic .
well we make lots and lots of pumps .
and this is the other one - that you just take a straw , and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts .
now this is what you do , is you bend both these legs into a triangle , and you just wrap some tape around .
and this is the pump .
and now , if you have this pump , it 's like a great , great sprinkler .
it 's like a centrifuge .
if you spin something , it tends to fly out .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well in terms of - if you were in andhra pradesh , you would make this with the palmyra leaf .
many of our folk toys have great science principles .
if you spin-top something , it tends to fly out .
if i do it with both hands , you can see this fun mr. flying man .
right .
this is a toy which is made from paper . it 's amazing .
there are four pictures .
you see insects , you see frogs , snakes , eagles , butterflies , frogs , snakes , eagles .
here 's a paper which you could -lsb- unclear -rsb- - designed by a mathematician at harvard in 1928 , arthur stone , documented by martin gardner in many of his many books .
but this is great fun for children .
they all study about the food chain .
the insects are eaten by the frogs ; the frogs are eaten by the snakes ; the snakes are eaten by the eagles .
and this can be , if you had a whole photocopy paper - a4 size paper - you could be in a municipal school , you could be in a government school - a paper , a scale and a pencil - no glue , no scissors .
in three minutes , you just fold this up .
and what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination .
if you take a smaller paper , you make a smaller flexagon .
with a bigger one , you make a bigger one .
now this is a pencil with a few slots over here .
and you put a little fan here .
and this is a hundred-year-old toy .
there have been six major research papers on this .
there 's some grooves over here , you can see .
and if i take a reed - if i rub this , something very amazing happens .
six major research papers on this .
as a matter of fact , feynman , as a child , was very fascinated by this .
he wrote a paper on this .
and you do n't need the three billion-dollar hadron collider for doing this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is there for every child , and every child can enjoy this .
if you want to put a colored disk , well all these seven colors coalesce .
and this is what newton talked about 400 years back , that white light 's made of seven colors , just by spinning this around .
this is a straw .
what we 've done , we 've just sealed both the ends with tape , nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner , so there 's holes in the opposite corners , there 's a little hole over here .
this is a kind of a blowing straw .
i just put this inside this .
there 's a hole here , and i shut this .
and this costs very little money to make - great fun for children to do .
what we do is make a very simple electric motor .
now this is the simplest motor on earth .
the most expensive thing is the battery inside this .
if you have a battery , it costs five cents to make it .
this is an old bicycle tube , which gives you a broad rubber band , two safety pins .
this is a permanent magnet .
whenever current flows through the coil , this becomes an electromagnet .
it 's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin .
we made 30,000 .
teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years , they just muck up the definition and they spit it out .
when teachers make it , children make it .
you can see a gleam in their eye .
they get a thrill of what science is all about .
and this science is not a rich man 's game .
in a democratic country , science must reach to our most oppressed , to the most marginalized children .
this program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools .
over 100,000 children learn science this way .
and we 're just trying to see possibilities .
look , this is the tetrapak - awful materials from the point of view of the environment .
there are six layers - three layers of plastic , aluminum - which are are sealed together .
they are fused together , so you ca n't separate them .
now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron .
so something which is trash , which is choking all the seabirds , you could just recycle this into a very , very joyous - all the platonic solids can be made with things like this .
this is a little straw , and what you do is you just nip two corners here , and this becomes like a baby crocodile 's mouth .
you put this in your mouth , and you blow .
-lrb- honk -rrb- it 's children 's delight , a teacher 's envy , as they say .
you 're not able to see how the sound is produced , because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth .
i 'm going to keep this outside , to blow out . i 'm going to suck in air .
-lrb- honk -rrb- so no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations .
the other is that you keep blowing at it , keep making the sound , and you keep cutting it .
and something very , very nice happens .
-lrb- honk -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and when you get a very small one - -lrb- honk -rrb- this is what the kids teach you . you can also do this .
well before i go any further , this is something worth sharing .
this is a touching slate meant for blind children .
this is strips of velcro , this is my drawing slate , and this is my drawing pen , which is basically a film box .
it 's basically like a fisherman 's line , a fishing line .
and this is wool over here .
if i crank the handle , all the wool goes inside .
and what a blind child can do is to just draw this .
wool sticks on velcro .
there are 12 million blind children in our country - -lrb- applause -rrb- who live in a world of darkness .
and this has come as a great boon to them .
there 's a factory out there making our children blind , not able to provide them with food , not able to provide them with vitamin a.
but this has come as a great boon for them .
there are no patents . anyone can make it .
this is very , very simple .
you can see , this is the generator . it 's a crank generator .
these are two magnets .
this is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old cds .
small pulley and two strong magnets .
and this fiber turns a wire attached to an led .
if i spin this pulley , the small one 's going to spin much faster .
there will be a spinning magnetic field .
lines , of course , would be cut , the force will be generated .
and you can see , this led is going to glow .
so this is a small crank generator .
well , this is , again , it 's just a ring , a steel ring with steel nuts .
and what you can do is just , if you give it a twirl , well they just keep going on .
and imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on .
and they 'd be absolutely joyous playing with this .
well in the end , what we can also do : we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps .
this is worthy of sachin tendulkar .
it 's a great cricket cap . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- when first you see nehru and gandhi , this is the nehru cap - just half a newspaper .
we make lots of toys with newspapers , and this is one of them .
and this is - you can see - this is a flapping bird .
all of our old newspapers , we cut them into little squares .
and if you have one of these birds - children in japan have been making this bird for many , many years .
and you can see , this is a little fantail bird .
well in the end , i 'll just end with a story .
this is called " the captain 's hat story . "
the captain was a captain of a sea-going ship .
it goes very slowly .
and there were lots of passengers on the ship , and they were getting bored , so the captain invited them on the deck .
" wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance , and i 'll provide you with good food and drinks . "
and the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia .
the first day , it was a huge umbrella cap , like a captain 's cap .
that night , when the passengers would be sleeping , he would give it one more fold , and the second day , he would be wearing a fireman 's cap - with a little shoot just like a designer cap , because it protects the spinal cord .
and the second night , he would take the same cap and give it another fold .
and the third day , it would be a shikari cap - just like an adventurer 's cap .
and the third night , he would give it two more folds - and this is a very , very famous cap .
if you 've seen any of our bollywood films , this is what the policeman wears , it 's called a zapalu cap .
it 's been catapulted to international glory .
and we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship .
so that 's a ship .
and now the end : everyone was enjoying the journey very much .
they were singing and dancing .
suddenly there was a storm and huge waves .
and all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves .
a huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down .
and another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down .
and there 's a third one over here .
this swallows the bridge and knocks it down .
and the ship sinks , and the captain has lost everything , but for a life jacket .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up watching star trek . i love star trek .
star trek made me want to see alien creatures , creatures from a far-distant world .
but basically , i figured out that i could find those alien creatures right on earth .
and what i do is i study insects .
i 'm obsessed with insects , particularly insect flight .
i think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life .
without insects , there 'd be no flowering plants .
without flowering plants , there would be no clever , fruit-eating primates giving ted talks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , david and hidehiko and ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans , and there are many similarities , and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies , the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this , for example - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but in my talk , i do n't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies , but rather the differences , and focus on the behaviors that i think fruit flies excel at doing .
and so i want to show you a high-speed video sequence of a fly shot at 7,000 frames per second in infrared lighting , and to the right , off-screen , is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly .
the fly is going to sense this predator .
it is going to extend its legs out .
it 's going to sashay away to live to fly another day .
now i have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink , so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye , the fly has seen this looming predator , estimated its position , initiated a motor pattern to fly it away , beating its wings at 220 times a second as it does so .
i think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly 's brain can process information .
now , flight - what does it take to fly ?
well , in order to fly , just as in a human aircraft , you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces , you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight , and you need a controller , and in the first human aircraft , the controller was basically the brain of orville and wilbur sitting in the cockpit .
now , how does this compare to a fly ?
well , i spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air .
and you might have heard how engineers proved that bumblebees could n't fly .
well , the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work . but they do n't .
and we tackle this problem by building giant , dynamically scaled model robot insects that would flap in giant pools of mineral oil where we could study the aerodynamic forces .
and it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way , at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing , a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex , and it 's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air .
is not so much that the wing has some interesting morphology .
what 's clever is the way the fly flaps it , which of course ultimately is controlled by the nervous system , and this is what enables flies to perform these remarkable aerial maneuvers .
now , what about the engine ?
the engine of the fly is absolutely fascinating .
they have two types of flight muscle : so-called power muscle , which is stretch-activated , which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction-by-contraction basis by the nervous system .
it 's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight , and it fills the middle portion of the fly , so when a fly hits your windshield , it 's basically the power muscle that you 're looking at .
but attached to the base of the wing is a set of little , tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all , but they 're very fast , and they 're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke-by-stroke basis , and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory .
and of course , the role of the nervous system is to control all this .
so let 's look at the controller .
now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem .
they have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection .
they have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet .
they have another set of eyes on the top of their head .
we have no idea what they do .
they have sensors on their wing .
their wing is covered with sensors , including sensors that sense deformation of the wing .
they can even taste with their wings .
one of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the halteres .
the halteres are actually gyroscopes .
these devices beat back and forth about 200 hertz during flight , and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very , very fast corrective maneuvers .
but all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain , and yes , indeed , flies have a brain , a brain of about 100,000 neurons .
now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they 're a simple model of brain function .
and the basic punchline of my talk is , i 'd like to turn that over on its head .
i do n't think they 're a simple model of anything .
and i think that flies are a great model .
they 're a great model for flies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and let 's explore this notion of simplicity .
so i think , unfortunately , a lot of neuroscientists , we 're all somewhat narcissistic .
when we think of brain , we of course imagine our own brain .
but remember that this kind of brain , which is much , much smaller - instead of 100 billion neurons , it has 100,000 neurons - but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for 400 million years .
and is it fair to say that it 's simple ?
well , it 's simple in the sense that it has fewer neurons , but is that a fair metric ?
and i would propose it 's not a fair metric .
so let 's sort of think about this . i think we have to compare - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do .
so i propose we have a trump number , and the trump number is the ratio of this man 's behavioral repertoire to the number of neurons in his brain .
we 'll calculate the trump number for the fruit fly .
now , how many people here think the trump number is higher for the fruit fly ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a very smart , smart audience .
yes , the inequality goes in this direction , or i would posit it .
now i realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly .
but let 's take another animal just as an example . here 's a mouse .
a mouse has about 1,000 times as many neurons as a fly .
i used to study mice . when i studied mice , i used to talk really slowly .
and then something happened when i started to work on flies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think if you compare the natural history of flies and mice , it 's really comparable . they have to forage for food .
they have to engage in courtship .
they have sex . they hide from predators .
they do a lot of the similar things .
but i would argue that flies do more .
so for example , i 'm going to show you a sequence , and i have to say , some of my funding comes from the military , so i 'm showing this classified sequence and you can not discuss it outside of this room . okay ?
so i want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly .
watch it very closely , and you 'll see why my six-year-old son now wants to be a neuroscientist .
wait for it .
pshhew .
so at least you 'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice , they 're at least as clever as pigeons . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i want to get across that it 's not just a matter of numbers but also the challenge for a fly to compute everything its brain has to compute with such tiny neurons .
so this is a beautiful image of a visual interneuron from a mouse that came from jeff lichtman 's lab , and you can see the wonderful images of brains that he showed in his talk .
but up in the corner , in the right corner , you 'll see , at the same scale , a visual interneuron from a fly .
and i 'll expand this up .
and it 's a beautifully complex neuron .
it 's just very , very tiny , and there 's lots of biophysical challenges with trying to compute information with tiny , tiny neurons .
how small can neurons get ? well , look at this interesting insect .
it looks sort of like a fly . it has wings , it has eyes , it has antennae , its legs , complicated life history , it 's a parasite , it has to fly around and find caterpillars to parasatize , but not only is its brain the size of a salt grain , which is comparable for a fruit fly , it is the size of a salt grain .
so here 's some other organisms at the similar scale .
this animal is the size of a paramecium and an amoeba , and it has a brain of 7,000 neurons that 's so small - you know these things called cell bodies you 've been hearing about , where the nucleus of the neuron is ?
this animal gets rid of them because they take up too much space .
so this is a session on frontiers in neuroscience .
i would posit that one frontier in neuroscience is to figure out how the brain of that thing works .
but let 's think about this . how can you make a small number of neurons do a lot ?
and i think , from an engineering perspective , you think of multiplexing .
you can take a hardware and have that hardware do different things at different times , or have different parts of the hardware doing different things .
and these are the two concepts i 'd like to explore .
and they 're not concepts that i 've come up with , but concepts that have been proposed by others in the past .
and one idea comes from lessons from chewing crabs .
and i do n't mean chewing the crabs .
i grew up in baltimore , and i chew crabs very , very well .
but i 'm talking about the crabs actually doing the chewing .
crab chewing is actually really fascinating .
crabs have this complicated structure under their carapace called the gastric mill that grinds their food in a variety of different ways .
and here 's an endoscopic movie of this structure .
the amazing thing about this is that it 's controlled by a really tiny set of neurons , about two dozen neurons that can produce a vast variety of different motor patterns , and the reason it can do this is that this little tiny ganglion in the crab is actually inundated by many , many neuromodulators .
you heard about neuromodulators earlier .
there are more neuromodulators that alter , that innervate this structure than actually neurons in the structure , and they 're able to generate a complicated set of patterns .
and this is the work by eve marder and her many colleagues who 've been studying this fascinating system that show how a smaller cluster of neurons can do many , many , many things because of neuromodulation that can take place on a moment-by-moment basis .
so this is basically multiplexing in time .
imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator .
you select one set of cells to perform one sort of behavior , another neuromodulator , another set of cells , a different pattern , and you can imagine you could extrapolate to a very , very complicated system .
is there any evidence that flies do this ?
well , for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world , we 've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators .
you can tether a fly to a little stick .
you can measure the aerodynamic forces it 's creating .
you can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display .
so let me show you a little tiny sequence of this .
here 's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator , and this is a game the flies love to play .
you allow them to steer towards the little stripe , and they 'll just steer towards that stripe forever .
it 's part of their visual guidance system .
but very , very recently , it 's been possible to modify these sorts of behavioral arenas for physiologies .
so this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs , gaby maimon , who 's now at rockefeller , developed , and it 's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly 's brain .
and this is what one of these experiments looks like .
it was a sequence taken from another post-doc in the lab , bettina schnell .
the green trace at the bottom is the membrane potential of a neuron in the fly 's brain , and you 'll see the fly start to fly , and the fly is actually controlling the rotation of that visual pattern itself by its own wing motion , and you can see this visual interneuron respond to the pattern of wing motion as the fly flies .
so for the first time we 've actually been able to record from neurons in the fly 's brain while the fly is performing sophisticated behaviors such as flight .
and one of the lessons we 've been learning is that the physiology of cells that we 've been studying for many years in quiescent flies is not the same as the physiology of those cells when the flies actually engage in active behaviors like flying and walking and so forth .
and why is the physiology different ?
well it turns out it 's these neuromodulators , just like the neuromodulators in that little tiny ganglion in the crabs .
so here 's a picture of the octopamine system .
octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors .
but this is just one of many neuromodulators that 's in the fly 's brain .
so i really think that , as we learn more , it 's going to turn out that the whole fly brain is just like a large version of this stomatogastric ganglion , and that 's one of the reasons why it can do so much with so few neurons .
now , another idea , another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space , having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time .
so here 's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate , a human pyramidal neuron from ramon y cajal , and another cell to the right , a non-spiking interneuron , and this is the work of alan watson and malcolm burrows many years ago , and malcolm burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials .
it 's a non-spiking cell .
so a typical cell , like the neurons in our brain , has a region called the dendrites that receives input , and that input sums together and will produce action potentials that run down the axon and then activate all the output regions of the neuron .
but non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated , and there 's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time .
so there 's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time .
so these basic concepts of multitasking in time and multitasking in space , i think these are things that are true in our brains as well , but i think the insects are the true masters of this .
so i hope you think of insects a little bit differently next time , and as i say up here , please think before you swat .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now this is a very un-ted-like thing to do , but let 's kick off the afternoon with a message from a mystery sponsor .
anonymous : dear fox news , it has come to our unfortunate attention that both the name and nature of anonymous has been ravaged .
we are everyone . we are no one .
we are anonymous . we are legion .
we do not forgive . we do not forget .
we are but the base of chaos .
misha glenny : anonymous , ladies and gentlemen - a sophisticated group of politically motivated hackers who have emerged in 2011 .
and they 're pretty scary .
you never know when they 're going to attack next , who or what the consequences will be .
but interestingly , they have a sense of humor .
these guys hacked into fox news ' twitter account to announce president obama 's assassination .
now you can imagine the panic that would have generated in the newsroom at fox .
" what do we do now ?
put on a black armband , or crack open the champagne ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course , who could escape the irony of a member of rupert murdoch 's news corp.
being a victim of hacking for a change .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- sometimes you turn on the news and you say , " is there anyone left to hack ? "
sony playstation network - done , the government of turkey - tick , britain 's serious organized crime agency - a breeze , the cia - falling off a log .
in fact , a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world : those that know they 've been hacked , and those that do n't .
i mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the fbi have been hacked .
is nothing sacred anymore , for heaven 's sake ?
anyway , this mysterious group anonymous - and they would say this themselves - they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data .
but there is also a very serious aspect to anonymous - they are ideologically driven .
they claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy .
they say that governments are trying to take over the internet and control it , and that they , anonymous , are the authentic voice of resistance - be it against middle eastern dictatorships , against global media corporations , or against intelligence agencies , or whoever it is .
and their politics are not entirely unattractive .
okay , they 're a little inchoate .
there 's a strong whiff of half-baked anarchism about them .
but one thing is true : we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the internet .
the web links everything , and very soon it will mediate most human activity .
because the internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an old-age dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom .
now this is a very complicated struggle .
and unfortunately , for mortals like you and me , we probably ca n't understand it very well .
nonetheless , in an unexpected attack of hubris a couple of years ago , i decided i would try and do that .
and i sort of get it .
these were the various things that i was looking at as i was trying to understand it .
but in order to try and explain the whole thing , i would need another 18 minutes or so to do it , so you 're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion , and let me assure you that all of these issues are involved in cybersecurity and control of the internet one way or the other , but in a configuration that even stephen hawking would probably have difficulty trying to get his head around .
so there you are .
and as you see , in the middle , there is our old friend , the hacker .
the hacker is absolutely central to many of the political , social and economic issues affecting the net .
and so i thought to myself , " well , these are the guys who i want to talk to . "
and what do you know , nobody else does talk to the hackers .
they 're completely anonymous , as it were .
so despite the fact that we are beginning to pour billions , hundreds of billions of dollars , into cybersecurity - for the most extraordinary technical solutions - no one wants to talk to these guys , the hackers , who are doing everything .
instead , we prefer these really dazzling technological solutions , which cost a huge amount of money .
and so nothing is going into the hackers .
well , i say nothing , but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit in turin , italy called the hackers profiling project .
and they are doing some fantastic research into the characteristics , into the abilities and the socialization of hackers .
but because they 're a u.n. operation , maybe that 's why governments and corporations are not that interested in them .
because it 's a u.n. operation , of course , it lacks funding .
but i think they 're doing very important work .
because where we have a surplus of technology in the cybersecurity industry , we have a definite lack of - call me old-fashioned - human intelligence .
now , so far i 've mentioned the hackers anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group .
of course , the criminal justice system treats them as common old garden criminals .
but interestingly , anonymous does not make use of its hacked information for financial gain .
but what about the real cybercriminals ?
well real organized crime on the internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted ukrainian hackers developed a website , which led to the industrialization of cybercrime .
welcome to the now forgotten realm of carderplanet .
this is how they were advertising themselves a decade ago on the net .
now carderplanet was very interesting .
cybercriminals would go there to buy and sell stolen credit card details , to exchange information about new malware that was out there .
and remember , this is a time when we 're seeing for the first time so-called off-the-shelf malware .
this is ready for use , out-of-the-box stuff , which you can deploy even if you 're not a terribly sophisticated hacker .
and so carderplanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals .
and its creators were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial , because they were faced with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals .
and that challenge is : how do you do business , how do you trust somebody on the web who you want to do business with when you know that they 're a criminal ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's axiomatic that they 're dodgy , and they 're going to want to try and rip you off .
so the family , as the inner core of carderplanet was known , came up with this brilliant idea called the escrow system .
they appointed an officer who would mediate between the vendor and the purchaser .
the vendor , say , had stolen credit card details ; the purchaser wanted to get a hold of them .
the purchaser would send the administrative officer some dollars digitally , and the vendor would sell the stolen credit card details .
and the officer would then verify if the stolen credit card worked .
and if they did , he then passed on the money to the vendor and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser .
and it was this which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the web .
and after that , it just went wild .
we had a champagne decade for people who we know as carders .
now i spoke to one of these carders who we 'll call redbrigade - although that was n't even his proper nickname - but i promised i would n't reveal who he was .
and he explained to me how in 2003 and 2004 he would go on sprees in new york , taking out $ 10,000 from an atm here , $ 30,000 from an atm there , using cloned credit cards .
he was making , on average a week , $ 150,000 - tax free of course .
and he said that he had so much money stashed in his upper-east side apartment at one point that he just did n't know what to do with it and actually fell into a depression .
but that 's a slightly different story , which i wo n't go into now .
now the interesting thing about redbrigade is that he was n't an advanced hacker .
he sort of understood the technology , and he realized that security was very important if you were going to be a carder , but he did n't spend his days and nights bent over a computer , eating pizza , drinking coke and that sort of thing .
he was out there on the town having a fab time enjoying the high life .
and this is because hackers are only one element in a cybercriminal enterprise .
and often they 're the most vulnerable element of all .
and i want to explain this to you by introducing you to six characters who i met while i was doing this research .
dimitry golubov , aka script - born in odessa , ukraine in 1982 .
now he developed his social and moral compass on the black sea port during the 1990s .
this was a sink-or-swim environment where involvement in criminal or corrupt activities was entirely necessary if you wanted to survive .
as an accomplished computer user , what dimitry did was to transfer the gangster capitalism of his hometown onto the worldwide web .
and he did a great job in it .
you have to understand though that from his ninth birthday , the only environment he knew was gangsterism .
he knew no other way of making a living and making money .
then we have renukanth subramaniam , aka jilsi - founder of darkmarket , born in colombo , sri lanka .
as an eight year-old , he and his parents fled the sri lankan capital because singhalese mobs were roaming the city , looking for tamils like renu to murder .
at 11 , he was interrogated by the sri lankan military , accused of being a terrorist , and his parents sent him on his own to britain as a refugee seeking political asylum .
at 13 , with only little english and being bullied at school , he escaped into a world of computers where he showed great technical ability , but he was soon being seduced by people on the internet .
he was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud , and he will be released from wormwood scrubs jail in london in 2012 .
matrix001 , who was an administrator at darkmarket .
born in southern germany to a stable and well-respected middle class family , his obsession with gaming as a teenager led him to hacking .
and he was soon controlling huge servers around the world where he stored his games that he had cracked and pirated .
his slide into criminality was incremental .
and when he finally woke up to his situation and understood the implications , he was already in too deep .
max vision , aka iceman - mastermind of cardersmarket .
born in meridian , idaho .
max vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of santa clara , california in the late 90s for private companies and voluntarily for the fbi .
now in the late 1990s , he discovered a vulnerability on all u.s. government networks , and he went in and patched it up - because this included nuclear research facilities - sparing the american government a huge security embarrassment .
but also , because he was an inveterate hacker , he left a tiny digital wormhole through which he alone could crawl .
but this was spotted by an eagle-eye investigator , and he was convicted .
at his open prison , he came under the influence of financial fraudsters , and those financial fraudsters persuaded him to work for them on his release .
and this man with a planetary-sized brain is now serving a 13-year sentence in california .
adewale taiwo , aka freddybb - master bank account cracker from abuja in nigeria .
he set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup , bankfrauds @ yahoo.co.uk before arriving in britain in 2005 to take a masters in chemical engineering at manchester university .
he impressed in the private sector , developing chemical applications for the oil industry while simultaneously running a worldwide bank and credit card fraud operation that was worth millions until his arrest in 2008 .
and then finally , cagatay evyapan , aka cha0 - one of the most remarkable hackers ever , from ankara in turkey .
he combined the tremendous skills of a geek with the suave social engineering skills of the master criminal .
one of the smartest people i 've ever met .
he also had the most effective virtual private network security arrangement the police have ever encountered amongst global cybercriminals .
now the important thing about all of these people is they share certain characteristics despite the fact that they come from very different environments .
they are all people who learned their hacking skills in their early to mid-teens .
they are all people who demonstrate advanced ability in maths and the sciences .
remember that , when they developed those hacking skills , their moral compass had not yet developed .
and most of them , with the exception of script and cha0 , they did not demonstrate any real social skills in the outside world - only on the web .
and the other thing is the high incidence of hackers like these who have characteristics which are consistent with asperger 's syndrome .
now i discussed this with professor simon baron-cohen who 's the professor of developmental psychopathology at cambridge .
and he has done path-breaking work on autism and confirmed , also for the authorities here , that gary mckinnon - who is wanted by the united states for hacking into the pentagon - suffers from asperger 's and a secondary condition of depression .
and baron-cohen explained that certain disabilities can manifest themselves in the hacking and computing world as tremendous skills , and that we should not be throwing in jail people who have such disabilities and skills because they have lost their way socially or been duped .
now i think we 're missing a trick here , because i do n't think people like max vision should be in jail .
and let me be blunt about this .
in china , in russia and in loads of other countries that are developing cyber-offensive capabilities , this is exactly what they are doing .
they are recruiting hackers both before and after they become involved in criminal and industrial espionage activities - are mobilizing them on behalf of the state .
we need to engage and find ways of offering guidance to these young people , because they are a remarkable breed .
and if we rely , as we do at the moment , solely on the criminal justice system and the threat of punitive sentences , we will be nurturing a monster we can not tame .
thank you very much for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so your idea worth spreading is hire hackers .
how would someone get over that kind of fear that the hacker they hire might preserve that little teensy wormhole ?
mg : i think to an extent , you have to understand that it 's axiomatic among hackers that they do that .
they 're just relentless and obsessive about what they do .
but all of the people who i 've spoken to who have fallen foul of the law , they have all said , " please , please give us a chance to work in the legitimate industry .
we just never knew how to get there , what we were doing .
we want to work with you . "
chris anderson : okay , well that makes sense . thanks a lot misha .
-lrb- applause -rrb- someone once said that politics is , of course , " showbiz for ugly people . "
so , on that basis , i feel like i 've really arrived .
the other thing to think of is what an honor it is , as a politician , to give a ted talk , particularly here in the u.k. , where the reputation of politics , with the expenses scandal , has sunk so low .
there was even a story recently that scientists had thought about actually replacing rats in their experiments with politicians .
and someone asked , " why ? "
and they said , " well , there 's no shortage of politicians , no one really minds what happens to them and , after all , there are some things that rats just wo n't do . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i know you all love data , so i 'm starting with a data-rich slide .
this , i think , is the most important fact to bear in mind in british politics or american politics , and that is : we have run out of money .
we have vast budget deficits .
this is my global public debt clock , and , as you can see , it 's 32 trillion and counting .
and i think what this leads to is a very simple recognition , that there 's one question in politics at the moment above all other , and it 's this one : how do we make things better without spending more money ?
because there is n't going to be a lot of money to improve public services , or to improve government , or to improve so many of the things that politicians talk about .
so what follows from that is that if you think it 's all about money - you can only measure success in public services in health care and education and policing by spending more money , you can only measure progress by spending money - you 're going to have a pretty miserable time .
but if you think a whole lot of other things matter that lead up to well being - things like your family relationships , friendship , community , values - then , actually , this is an incredibly exciting time to be in politics .
and the really simple argument i want to make tonight , the really straightforward argument is this : that if we combine the right political philosophy , the right political thinking , with the incredible information revolution that has taken place , and that all of you know so much more about than i do , i think there 's an incredible opportunity to actually remake politics , remake government , remake public services , and achieve what 's up on that slide , which is a big increase in our well-being .
that 's the argument i want to make tonight .
so , starting with the political philosophy .
now i 'm not saying for a minute that british conservatives have all the answers .
of course we do n't .
but there are two things at heart that i think drive a conservative philosophy that are really relevant to this whole debate .
the first is this : we believe that if you give people more power and control over their lives , if you give people more choice , if you put them in the driving seat , then actually , you can create a stronger and better society .
and if you marry this fact with the incredible abundance of information that we have in our world today , i think you can completely , as i 've said , remake politics , remake government , remake your public services .
the second thing we believe is we believe in going with the grain of human nature .
politics and politicians will only succeed if they actually try and treat with people as they are , rather than as they would like them to be .
now , if you combine this very simple , very conservative thought - go with the grain of human nature - with all the advances in behavioral economics , some of which we were just hearing about , again , i think we can achieve a real increase in well-being , in happiness , in a stronger society without necessarily having to spend a whole lot more money .
now , why do i think now is the moment to make this argument ?
well , i 'm afraid you 're going to suffer a short , condensed history lesson about what i would say are the three passages of history : the pre-bureaucratic age , the bureaucratic age and what we now live in , which i think is a post-bureaucratic age .
is that we have gone from a world of local control , then we went to a world of central control , and now we 're in a world of people control .
local power , central power , now , people power .
now , here is king cnut , king a thousand years ago .
thought he could turn back the waves ; could n't turn back the waves .
could n't actually turn back very much , because if you were king a thousand years ago , while it still took hours and hours and weeks and weeks to traverse your own country , there was n't much you were in charge of .
you were n't in charge of policing , justice , education , health , welfare .
you could just about go to war and that was about it .
this was the pre-bureaucratic age , an age in which everything had to be local .
you had to have local control because there was no nationally-available information because travel was so restricted .
so this was the pre-bureaucratic age .
next part of the cold history lesson , the lovely picture of the british industrial revolution .
suddenly , all sorts of transport , travel information were possible , and this gave birth to , what i like to call , the bureaucratic age .
and hopefully this slide is going to morph beautifully . there we are .
suddenly , you have the big , strong , central state .
it was able - but only it was able - to organize health care , education , policing , justice .
and it was a world of , as i say , not local power , but now central power .
it had sucked all that power up from the localities .
it was able to do that itself .
the next great stage , which all of you are so familiar with : the massive information revolution .
just consider this one fact : one hundred years ago , sending these 10 words cost 50 dollars .
right now , here we are linked up to long beach and everywhere else , and all these secret locations for a fraction of that cost , and we can send and receive huge quantities of information without it costing anything .
so we 're now living in a post-bureaucratic age , where genuine people power is possible .
now , what does this mean for our politics , for our public services , for our government ?
well i ca n't , in the time i 've got , give huge numbers of examples , but let me just give a few of the ways that life can change .
and this is so obvious , in a way , because you think about how all of you have changed the way we shop , the way we travel , the way that business is done .
that is already happened ; the information and internet revolution has actually gone all the way through our societies in so many different ways , but it has n't , in every way , yet touched our government .
so , how could this happen ?
well , i think there are three chief ways that it should make an enormous difference : in transparency , in greater choice and in accountability , in giving us that genuine people power .
if we take transparency , here is one of my favorite websites , the missouri accountability portal .
in the old days , only the government could hold the information , and only a few elected people could try and grab that information and question it and challenge it .
now here , on one website , one state in america , every single dollar spent by that government is searchable , is analyzable , is checkable .
think of the huge change that means : any business that wants to bid for a government contract can see what currently is being spent .
anyone thinking , " i could do that service better , i could deliver it cheaper , " it 's all available there .
we have only , in government and in politics , started to scratch the surface of what people are doing in the commercial world with the information revolution .
so , complete transparency will make a huge difference .
in this country , if we win the election , we are going to make all government spending over 25,000 pounds transparent and available online , searchable for anyone to see .
we 're going to make every contract - we 're announcing this today - available on the internet so anyone can see what the terms are , what the conditions are , driving huge value for money , but also huge increases , i believe , in well-being as well .
choice . now you all shop online , compare online , do everything online , and yet this revolution has hardly touched the surface of public services like education , or health care or policing , and you 're going to see this change massively .
we should be making this change with the information revolution in our country , with searchable health sites , so you can see what operations work out properly , what records doctors have , the cleanliness of hospitals , who does best at infection control - all of the information that would once be locked in the department of health is now available for all of us to see .
and the third of these big changes : accountability .
this , i think , is a huge change .
it is a crime map . this is a crime map from chicago .
so , instead of having a situation where only the police have the information about which crimes are committed where , and we have to employ people in government to try and hold the police to account , suddenly , we 've got this vast opportunity for people power , where we , as citizens , can see what crimes are being committed - where , when and by whom - and we can hold the police to account .
and you can see this looks a bit like a chef 's hat , but actually that 's an assault , the one in blue .
you can see what crime is committed where , and you have the opportunity to hold your police force to account .
so those three ways - transparency , accountability and choice - will make a huge difference .
now i also said the other principle that i think we should work on is understanding of people , is recognizing that going with the grain of human nature you can achieve so much more .
now , we 're got a huge revolution in understanding of why people behave in the way that they do , and a great opportunity to put that knowledge and information to greater use .
we 're working with some of these people .
we 're being advised by some of these people , as was said , to try and bring all the experience to book .
let me just give you one example that i think is incredibly simple , and i love .
we want to get people to be more energy efficient .
why ? it cuts fuel poverty , it cuts their bills , and it cuts carbon emissions at the same time .
how do you do it ?
well , we 've had government information campaigns over the years when they tell you to switch off the lights when you leave the home .
we even had - one government minister once told us to brush our teeth in the dark .
i do n't think they lasted very long .
look at what this does . this is a simple piece of behavioral economics .
the best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill is to show them their own spending , to show them what their neighbors are spending , and then show what an energy conscious neighbor is spending .
that sort of behavioral economics can transform people 's behavior in a way that all the bullying and all the information and all the badgering from a government can not possibly achieve .
other examples are recycling .
we all know we need to recycle more .
how do we make it happen ?
all the proof from america is that actually , if you pay people to recycle , if you give them a carrot rather than a stick , you can transform their behavior .
so what does all this add up to ?
here are my two favorite u.s. speeches of the last 50 years .
obviously , here we have jfk with that incredibly simple and powerful formulation , " ask not what your country can do for you ; ask what you can do for your country , " an incredibly noble sentiment .
but when he made that speech , what could you do to build the stronger , better society ?
you could fight for your country , you could die for your country , you could serve in your country 's civil service , but you did n't really have the information and the knowledge and the ability to help build the stronger society in the way that you do now .
and i think an even more wonderful speech , which i 'm going to read a big chunk of , which sums up what i said at the beginning about believing there is more to life than money , and more that we should try and measure than money .
and it is robert kennedy 's beautiful description of why gross national product captures so little : it " does not allow for the health of our children , the quality of their education , or the joy of their play .
it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages , the intelligence of our public debate .
it measures neither our wit nor our courage , neither our wisdom nor our learning , neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country .
it measures everything , in short , except that which makes life worthwhile . "
again , a sentiment that was so noble and beautifully put 40 years ago , and a beautiful dream 40 years ago , but now with the huge advances in information technology , with the massive changes in behavioral economics , with all that we know about how you advance well-being , that if we combine those insights of giving power to people , and using information to make that possible , and using the insight of going with the grain of human nature , while at the same time , understanding why people behave in the way they do , it is a dream more easy to realize today than it was when it was made in that beautiful speech 40 years ago .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am a conductor , and i 'm here today to talk to you about trust .
my job depends upon it .
there has to be , between me and the orchestra , an unshakable bond of trust , born out of mutual respect , through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in .
now in the old days , conducting , music making , was less about trust and more , frankly , about coercion .
up to and around about the second world war , conductors were invariably dictators - these tyrannical figures who would rehearse , not just the orchestra as a whole , but individuals within it , within an inch of their lives .
but i 'm happy to say now that the world has moved on , music has moved on with it .
we now have a more democratic view and way of making music - a two-way street .
i , as the conductor , have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music , within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine .
for myself , of course , i have to completely trust my body language .
that 's all i have at the point of sale .
it 's silent gesture .
i can hardly bark out instructions while we 're playing .
-lrb- music -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , the scottish ensemble .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in order for all this to work , obviously i have got to be in a position of trust .
i have to trust the orchestra , and , even more crucially , i have to trust myself .
think about it : when you 're in a position of not trusting , what do you do ?
you overcompensate .
and in my game , that means you overgesticulate .
you end up like some kind of rabid windmill .
and the bigger your gesture gets , the more ill-defined , blurry and , frankly , useless it is to the orchestra .
you become a figure of fun . there 's no trust anymore , only ridicule .
and i remember at the beginning of my career , again and again , on these dismal outings with orchestras , i would be going completely insane on the podium , trying to engender a small scale crescendo really , just a little upsurge in volume .
bugger me , they would n't give it to me .
i spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms .
and how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great british veteran conductor sir colin davis who said , " conducting , charles , is like holding a small bird in your hand .
if you hold it too tightly , you crush it .
if you hold it too loosely , it flies away . "
i have to say , in those days , i could n't really even find the bird .
now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me , in terms of music , has been my adventures in south africa , the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view , but a country which , through its musical culture , has taught me one fundamental lesson : that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust .
back in 2000 , i had the opportunity to go to south africa to form a new opera company .
so i went out there , and i auditioned , mainly in rural township locations , right around the country .
i heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers , the majority of whom were black , but there were a handful of white performers .
now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had , in his previous incarnation , been a member of the south african police force .
and in the last years of the old regime , he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community .
now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room , the general atmosphere .
let 's be under no illusions .
in south africa , the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community .
so how do we recover from that , ladies and gentlemen ?
simply through singing .
we sang , we sang , we sang , and amazingly new trust grew , and indeed friendship blossomed .
and that showed me such a fundamental truth , that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words can not .
so we got some shows off the ground . we started touring them internationally .
one of them was " carmen . "
we then thought we 'd make a movie of " carmen , " which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside cape town called khayelitsha .
the piece was sung entirely in xhosa , which is a beautifully musical language , if you do n't know it .
it 's called " u-carmen e-khayelitsha " - literally " carmen of khayelitsha . "
i want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about south african music making .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- something which i find utterly enchanting about south african music making is that it 's so free .
south africans just make music really freely .
and i think , in no small way , that 's due to one fundamental fact : they 're not bound to a system of notation .
they do n't read music .
they trust their ears .
you can teach a bunch of south africans a tune in about five seconds flat .
and then , as if by magic , they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can .
now those of us that live in the west , if i can use that term , i think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music - that somehow it 's all about skill and systems .
therefore it 's the exclusive preserve of an elite , talented body .
and yet , ladies and gentlemen , every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis .
and if i can broaden this out for a second , i 'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity , with total confidence , about movies , probably about literature .
but how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music ?
why is this ?
and what i 'm going to say to you now is i 'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence , to take the plunge , to believe that you can trust your ears , you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue , fiber , dna , what makes a great piece of music great .
i 've got a little experiment i want to try with you .
did you know that ted is a tune ?
a very simple tune based on three notes - t , e , d.
now hang on a minute .
i know you 're going to say to me , " t does n't exist in music . "
well ladies and gentlemen , there 's a time-honored system , which composers have been using for hundreds of years , which proves actually that it does .
if i sing you a musical scale : a , b , c , d , e , f , g - and i just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet , same scale : h , i , j , k , l , m , n , o , p , q , r , s , t - there you go .
t , see it 's the same as f in music .
so t is f.
so t , e , d is the same as f , e , d.
now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme , which is ted .
have a listen .
-lrb- music -rrb- do you hear it ?
or do i smell some doubt in the room ?
okay , we 'll play it for you again now , and we 're going to highlight , we 're going to poke out the t , e , d.
if you 'll pardon the expression .
-lrb- music -rrb- oh my goodness me , there it was loud and clear , surely .
i think we should make this even more explicit .
ladies and gentlemen , it 's nearly time for tea .
would you reckon you need to sing for your tea , i think ?
i think we need to sing for our tea .
we 're going to sing those three wonderful notes : t , e , d.
will you have a go for me ?
audience : t , e , d.
charles hazlewood : yeah , you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings .
shall we try that one again ?
and look , if you 're adventurous , you go up the octave .
t , e , d.
audience : t , e , d.
ch : once more with vim . -lrb- audience : t , e , d. -rrb- there i am like a bloody windmill again , you see .
now we 're going to put that in the context of the music .
the music will start , and then at a signal from me , you will sing that .
-lrb- music -rrb- one more time , with feeling , ladies and gentlemen .
you wo n't make the key otherwise .
well done , ladies and gentlemen .
it was n't a bad debut for the ted choir , not a bad debut at all .
now there 's a project that i 'm initiating at the moment that i 'm very excited about and wanted to share with you , because it is all about changing perceptions , and , indeed , building a new level of trust .
the youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy , which as you can imagine , if you do n't have an experience of it yourself , is quite a big thing to take on board .
but the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me , aside from her very existence , is that it 's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden , the community of disabled people .
and i found myself looking at the paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology 's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement .
of course there 's a grimmer side to that truth , which is that it 's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust , to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion .
so i find myself asking : where is music in all of this ?
you ca n't tell me that there are n't millions of disabled people , in the u.k. alone , with massive musical potential .
so i decided to create a platform for that potential .
it 's going to be britain 's first ever national disabled orchestra .
it 's called paraorchestra .
i 'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had .
it was a really extraordinary moment .
just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians .
normally when you improvise - and i do it all the time around the world - there 's this initial period of horror , like everyone 's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring , an awful pregnant silence .
then suddenly , as if by magic , bang ! we 're all in there and it 's complete bedlam . you ca n't hear anything .
no one 's listening . no one 's trusting .
no one 's responding to each other .
now in this room with these four disabled musicians , within five minutes a rapt listening , a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- nicholas : : my name 's nicholas mccarthy .
i 'm 22 , and i 'm a left-handed pianist .
and i was born without my left hand - right hand .
can i do that one again ?
-lrb- music -rrb- lyn : when i 'm making music , i feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane .
i become alive .
-lrb- music -rrb- clarence : i would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk .
there 's so much joy and things i could get from playing an instrument and performing .
it 's removed some of my paralysis .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ch : i only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today , so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are .
paraorchestra is the name of that project .
if any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point , please let me know .
now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great joseph haydn , wonderful austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century - spent the bulk of his life in the employ of prince nikolaus esterhazy , along with his orchestra .
now this prince loved his music , but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time , which is just on the austro-hungarian border , a place called esterhazy - a long way from the big city of vienna .
now one day in 1772 , the prince decreed that the musicians ' families , the orchestral musicians ' families , were no longer welcome in the castle .
they were n't allowed to stay there anymore ; they had to be returned to vienna - as i say , an unfeasibly long way away in those days .
you can imagine , the musicians were disconsolate .
haydn remonstrated with the prince , but to no avail .
so given the prince loved his music , haydn thought he 'd write a symphony to make the point .
and we 're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now .
and you 'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt .
i 'm pleased to say , the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance , and the musicians were reunited with their families .
but i think it sums up my talk rather well , this , that where there is trust , there is music - by extension life .
where there is no trust , the music quite simply withers away .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i was born on the last day of the last year of the ' 70s .
i was raised on " free to be you and me " - -lrb- cheering -rrb- hip-hop - not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house .
thank you . thank you for hip-hop - and anita hill .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- my parents were radicals - -lrb- laughter -rrb- who became , well , grown-ups .
my dad facetiously says , " we wanted to save the world , and instead we just got rich . "
we actually just got " middle class " in colorado springs , colorado , but you get the picture .
i was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy .
at this ripe old age of 30 , i 've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible , beautiful time , and i 've decided , for me , it 's been a real journey and paradox .
the first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it .
feminism was the water i grew up in .
when i was just a little girl , my mom started what is now the longest-running women 's film festival in the world .
so while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons , i was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women .
you can see how this had an influence .
but she was not the only feminist in the house .
my dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son , but not his daughter .
-lrb- applause -rrb- he 's actually here today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet , not a businessman , but the intention was really good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in any case , i did n't readily claim the feminist label , even though it was all around me , because i associated it with my mom 's women 's groups , her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads - none of which had much cachet in the hallways of palmer high school where i was trying to be cool at the time .
but i suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing , so i started covertly tiptoeing into my mom 's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them - never , of course , admitting that i was doing so .
i did n't actually claim the feminist label until i went to barnard college and i heard amy richards and jennifer baumgardner speak for the first time .
they were the co-authors of a book called " manifesta . "
so what very profound epiphany , you might ask , was responsible for my feminist click moment ?
fishnet stockings .
jennifer baumgardner was wearing them .
i thought they were really hot .
i decided , okay , i can claim the feminist label .
now i tell you this - i tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself , because i think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics , that beauty , that fun do matter .
there are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness .
anyone heard of these two guys as an example ?
so my feminism is very indebted to my mom 's , but it looks very different .
my mom says , " patriarchy . "
i say , " intersectionality . "
so race , class , gender , ability , all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman .
pay equity ? yes . absolutely a feminist issue .
but for me , so is immigration . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
my mom says , " protest march . "
i say , " online organizing . "
i co-edit , along with a collective of other super-smart , amazing women , a site called feministing.com.
we are the most widely read feminist publication ever , and i tell you this because i think it 's really important to see that there 's a continuum .
feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising .
but we also have a straightforward political impact .
feministing has been able to get merchandise pulled off the shelves of walmart .
we got a misogynist administrator sending us hate-mail fired from a big ten school .
and one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of iowa who say , " i googled jessica simpson and stumbled on your site .
i realized feminism was n't about man-hating and birkenstocks . "
so we 're able to pull in the next generation in a totally new way .
my mom says , " gloria steinem . "
i say , " samhita mukhopadhyay , miriam perez , ann friedman , jessica valenti , vanessa valenti , and on and on and on and on . "
we do n't want one hero .
we do n't want one icon .
we do n't want one face .
we are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing , community organizing , changing institutions from the inside out - all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- which brings me to the second paradox : sobering up about our smallness and maintaining faith in our greatness all at once .
many in my generation - because of well-intentioned parenting and self-esteem education - were socialized to believe that we were special little snowflakes - -lrb- laughter -rrb- who were going to go out and save the world .
these are three words many of us were raised with .
we walk across graduation stages , high on our overblown expectations , and when we float back down to earth , we realize we do n't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway .
the mainstream media often paints my generation as apathetic , and i think it 's much more accurate to say we are deeply overwhelmed .
and there 's a lot to be overwhelmed about , to be fair - an environmental crisis , wealth disparity in this country unlike we 've seen since 1928 , and globally , a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity .
xenophobia 's on the rise . the trafficking of women and girls .
it 's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed .
i experienced this firsthand myself when i graduated from barnard college in 2002 .
i was fired up ; i was ready to make a difference .
i went out and i worked at a non-profit , i went to grad school , i phone-banked , i protested , i volunteered , and none of it seemed to matter .
and on a particularly dark night of december of 2004 , i sat down with my family , and i said that i had become very disillusioned .
i admitted that i 'd actually had a fantasy - kind of a dark fantasy - of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the white house steps .
my mom took a drink of her signature sea breeze , her eyes really welled with tears , and she looked right at me and she said , " i will not stand for your desperation . "
she said , " you are smarter , more creative and more resilient than that . "
which brings me to my third paradox .
growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there 's a writer i 've been deeply influenced by , parker palmer , and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed " between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves . "
you may have guessed by now , i did not light myself on fire .
i did what i know to do in desperation , which is write .
i wrote the book i needed to read .
i wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work .
i wrote about nia martin-robinson , the daughter of detroit and two civil rights activists , who 's dedicating her life to environmental justice .
i wrote about emily apt who initially became a caseworker in the welfare system because she decided that was the most noble thing she could do , but quickly learned , not only did she not like it , but she was n't really good at it .
instead , what she really wanted to do was make films .
so she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact .
i wrote about maricela guzman , the daughter of mexican immigrants , who joined the military so she could afford college .
she was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the service women 's action network .
what i learned from these people and others was that i could n't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals .
many of them are working in deeply intractable systems - the military , congress , the education system , etc .
but what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force .
and at the end of the day , what could possibly be more important than that ?
cornel west says , " of course it 's a failure .
but how good a failure is it ? "
this is n't to say we give up our wildest , biggest dreams .
it 's to say we operate on two levels .
on one , we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part .
but on the other , we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person 's day more kind , more just , etc .
so when i was a little girl , i had a couple of very strange habits .
one of them was i used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home , and i would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom 's cold toes with my right hand .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was listening to her talk on the phone , which she did a lot .
she was talking about board meetings , she was founding peace organizations , she was coordinating carpools , she was consoling friends - all these daily acts of care and creativity .
and surely , at three and four years old , i was listening to the soothing sound of her voice , but i think i was also getting my first lesson in activist work .
the activists i interviewed had nothing in common , literally , except for one thing , which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences .
so often , particularly at a young age , we look far afield for our models of the meaningful life , and sometimes they 're in our own kitchens , talking on the phone , making us dinner , doing all that keeps the world going around and around .
my mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory , or certainty , or security even .
it 's about embracing the paradox .
it 's about acting in the face of overwhelm .
and it 's about loving people really well .
and at the end of the day , these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , i was introduced as the former governor of michigan , but actually i 'm a scientist .
all right , a political scientist , it does n't really count , but my laboratory was the laboratory of democracy that is michigan , and , like any good scientist , i was experimenting with policy about what would achieve the greatest good for the greatest number .
but there were three problems , three enigmas that i could not solve , and i want to share with you those problems , but most importantly , i think i figured out a proposal for a solution .
the first problem that not just michigan , but every state , faces is , how do you create good jobs in america in a global economy ?
so let me share with you some empirical data from my lab .
i was elected in 2002 and , at the end of my first year in office in 2003 , i got a call from one of my staff members , who said , " gov , we have a big problem .
we have a little tiny community called greenville , michigan , population 8,000 , and they are about to lose their major employer , which is a refrigerator factory that 's operated by electrolux . "
and i said , " well , how many people work at electrolux ? "
and he said , " 3,000 of the 8,000 people in greenville . "
so it is a one-company town .
and electrolux was going to go to mexico .
so i said , " forget that . i 'm the new governor .
we can fix this . we 're going to go to greenville with my whole cabinet and we will just make electrolux an offer they ca n't refuse . "
so i brought my whole cabinet , and we met with all of the pooh-bahs of little greenville - the mayor , the city manager , the head of the community college - and we basically emptied our pockets and put all of our chips on the table , incentives , you name it , to convince electrolux to stay , and as we made our pile of chips , we slid them across the table to the management of electrolux .
and in the pile were things like zero taxes for 20 years , or that we 'd help to build a new factory for the company , said they would offer unprecedented concessions , sacrifices to just keep those jobs in greenville .
so the management of electrolux took our pile , our list of incentives , and they went outside the room for 17 minutes , and they came back in and they said , " wow , this is the most generous any community has ever been to try to keep jobs here .
but there 's nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $ 1.57 an hour in juarez , mexico . so we 're leaving . "
and they did . and when they did , it was like a nuclear bomb went off in little greenville .
in fact , they did implode the factory .
that 's a guy that is walking on his last day of work .
and on the month that the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line , the employees of electrolux in greenville , michigan , had a gathering for themselves that they called the last supper .
it was in a big pavilion in greenville , an indoor pavilion , and i went to it because i was so frustrated as governor that i could n't stop the outflow of these jobs , and i wanted to grieve with them , and as i went into the room - there 's thousands of people there .
it was a just big thing . people were eating boxed lunches on roundtop tables , and there was a sad band playing music , or a band playing sad music , probably both . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this guy comes up to me , and he 's got tattoos and his ponytail and his baseball cap on , and he had his two daughters with him , and he said , " gov , these are my two daughters . "
he said , " i 'm 48 years old , and i have worked at this factory for 30 years .
i went from high school to factory .
my father worked at this factory , " he said .
" my grandfather worked at this factory .
all i know is how to make refrigerators . "
and he looked at his daughters , and he puts his hand on his chest , and he says , " so , gov , tell me , who is ever going to hire me ?
who is ever going to hire me ? "
and that was asked not just by that guy but by everyone in the pavilion , and frankly , by every worker at one of the 50,000 factories that closed in the first decade of this century .
enigma number one : how do you create jobs in america in a global economy ?
number two , very quickly : how do you solve global climate change when we do n't even have a national energy policy in this country and when gridlock in congress seems to be the norm ?
in fact , there was a poll that was done recently and the pollster compared congress 's approval ratings to a number of other unpleasant things , and it was found , in fact , that congress 's approval rating is worse than cockroaches , lice , nickelback the band , root canals and donald trump . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but wait , the good news is it 's at least better than meth labs and gonorrhea . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we got a problem , folks .
so it got me thinking , what is it ?
what in the laboratory that i see out there , the laboratories of democracy , what has happened ?
what policy prescriptions have happened that actually cause changes to occur and that have been accepted in a bipartisan way ?
so if i asked you , for example , what was the obama administration policy that caused massive changes across the country , what would you say ?
you might say obamacare , except for those were not voluntary changes .
as we know , only half the states have opted in .
we might say the recovery act , but those did n't require policy changes .
the thing that caused massive policy changes to occur was race to the top for education .
why ? the government put a $ 4.5 billion pot and said to the governors across the country , compete for it .
forty-eight governors competed , convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum .
forty-eight states opted in , creating a national -lsb- education -rsb- policy from the bottom up .
so i thought , well , why ca n't we do something like that and create a clean energy jobs race to the top ?
because after all , if you look at the context , 1.6 trillion dollars has been invested in the past eight years from the private sector globally , and every dollar represents a job , and where are those jobs going ?
well , they 're going to places that have policy , like china .
in fact , i was in china to see what they were doing , and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that i was with , and i was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the chinese officials , and we were watching , and he says , " so , gov , when do you think the u.s. is going to get national energy policy ? "
and i said , " oh my god - congress , gridlock , who knows ? "
and this is what he did , he goes , he says , " take your time . "
because they see our passivity as their opportunity .
so what if we decided to create a challenge to the governors of the country , and the price to entry into this competition used the same amount that the bipartisan group approved in congress for the race to the top for education , 4.5 billion , which sounds like a lot , but actually it 's less than one tenth of one percent of federal spending .
it 's a rounding error on the federal side .
but price to entry into that competition would be , you could just , say , use the president 's goal .
he wants congress to adopt a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2030 , in other words , that you 'd have to get 80 percent of your energy from clean sources by the year 2030 .
why not ask all of the states to do that instead ?
and imagine what might happen , because every region has something to offer .
you might take states like iowa and ohio - two very important political states , by the way - those two governors , and they would say , we 're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy .
you might say the solar states , the sun belt , we 're going to be the states that produce solar energy for the country , and maybe jerry brown says , " well , i 'm going to create an industry cluster in california to be able to produce the solar panels so that we 're not buying them from china but we 're buying them from the u.s. "
in fact , every region of the country could do this .
you see , you 've got solar and wind opportunity all across the nation .
in fact , if you look just at the upper and northern states in the west , they could do geothermal , or you could look at texas and say , we could lead the nation in the solutions to smart grid .
in the middle eastern states which have access to forests and to agricultural waste , they might say , we 're going to lead the nation in biofuels .
in the upper northeast , we 're going to lead the nation in energy efficiency solutions .
along the eastern seaboard , we 're going to lead the nation in offshore wind .
you might look at michigan and say , we 're going to lead the nation in producing the guts for the electric vehicle , like the lithium ion battery .
every region has something to offer , and if you created a competition , it respects the states and it respects federalism .
it 's opt-in . you might even get texas and south carolina , who did n't opt into the education race to the top , you might even get them to opt in . why ?
because republican and democratic governors love to cut ribbons .
we want to bring jobs . i 'm just saying .
and it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy .
now , any of you who are watching anything about politics lately might say , " okay , great idea , but really ?
congress putting four and a half billion dollars on the table ?
they ca n't agree to anything . "
so you could wait and go through congress , although you should be very impatient .
or , you renegades , we could go around congress .
go around congress .
what if we created a private sector challenge to the governors ?
what if several of the high-net worth companies and individuals who are here at ted decided that they would create , band together , just a couple of them , and create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top and see how the governors respond ?
what if it all started here at ted ?
what if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs in america - -lrb- applause -rrb- - and get national energy policy and we created a national energy strategy from the bottom up ?
because , dear tedsters , if you are impatient like i am , you know that our economic competitors , our other nations , are in the game and are eating us for lunch .
and we can get in the game or not .
we can be at the table or we can be on the table .
and i do n't know about you , but i prefer to dine .
thank you all so much . -lrb- applause -rrb- when i 'm starting talks like this , i usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there do n't know what that is .
this is a crowd that does know what it is , so i 'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version . right ?
so just bear with me . we 'll go real fast , you know ?
fill in the blanks .
so , you know , sustainability , small planet .
right ? picture a little earth , circling around the sun .
you know , about a million years ago , a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees , got a little clever , harnessed fire , invented the printing press , made , you know , luggage with wheels on it .
and , you know , built the society that we now live in .
unfortunately , while this society is , without a doubt , the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created , it 's got some major , major flaws .
one of them is that every society has an ecological footprint .
it has an amount of impact on the planet that 's measurable .
how much stuff goes through your life , how much waste is left behind you .
and we , at the moment , in our society , have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this .
we 're using up about five planets .
if everybody on the planet lived the way we did , we 'd need between five , six , seven , some people even say 10 planets to make it .
clearly we do n't have 10 planets .
again , you know , mental , visual , 10 planets , one planet , 10 planets , one planet . right ?
we do n't have that . so that 's one problem .
the second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways . right ?
north americans , such as myself , you know , we 're basically sort of wallowing , gluttonous hogs , and we 're eating all sorts of stuff .
and , you know , then you get all the way down to people who live in the asia-pacific region , or even more , africa .
and people simply do not have enough to survive .
this is producing all sorts of tensions , all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing .
and there 's more and more people on the way . right ?
so , this is what the planet 's going to look like in 20 years .
it 's going to be a pretty crowded place , at least eight billion people .
so to make matters even more difficult , it 's a very young planet .
a third of the people on this planet are kids .
and those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did , no matter where they live .
they 've been exposed to this idea of our society , of our prosperity .
and they may not want to live exactly like us .
they may not want to be americans , or brits , or germans , or south africans , but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous , and more dynamic , and more , you know , enjoyable .
and all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet .
and if we can not figure out a way to deal with that torque , we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable .
everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios .
i do n't need to go into that .
but i will ask the question , what 's the alternative ?
and i would say that , at the moment , the alternative is unimaginable .
you know , so on the one hand we have the unthinkable ; on the other hand we have the unimaginable .
we do n't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable , which is shareable with everybody on the planet , which promotes stability and democracy and human rights , and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face .
we do n't know how to do this yet .
so what 's worldchanging ?
well , worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future .
you know , what we 're out there doing is looking for examples of tools , models and ideas , which , if widely adopted , would change the game .
a lot of times , when i do a talk like this , i talk about things that everybody in this room i 'm sure has already heard of , but most people have n't .
so i thought today i 'd do something a little different , and talk about what we 're looking for , rather than saying , you know , rather than giving you tried-and-true examples .
talk about the kinds of things we 're scoping out .
give you a little peek into our editorial notebook .
and given that i have 13 minutes to do this , this is going to go kind of quick .
so , i do n't know , just stick with me . right ?
so , first of all , what are we looking for ? bright green city .
one of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities .
we 're already an urban planet ; that 's especially true in the developed world .
and people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous , and thus use a lot of stuff .
if we can change the dynamic , by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ...
here , for example , is vancouver , which if you have n't been there , you ought to go for a visit . it 's a fabulous city .
and they are doing density , new density , better than probably anybody else on the planet right now .
they 're actually managing to talk north americans out of driving cars , which is a pretty great thing .
so you have density . you also have growth management .
you leave aside what is natural to be natural .
this is in portland . that is an actual development .
that land there will remain pasture in perpetuity .
they 've bounded the city with a line .
nature , city . nothing changes .
once you do those things , you can start making all sorts of investments .
you can start doing things like , you know , transit systems that actually work to transport people , in effective and reasonably comfortable manners .
you can also start to change what you build .
this is the beddington zero energy development in london , which is one of the greenest buildings in the world . it 's a fabulous place .
we 're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity , that recycle much of their water , that are much more comfortable than standard buildings , use all-natural light , etc . , and , over time , cost less .
green roofs . bill mcdonough covered that last night , so i wo n't dwell on that too much .
but once you also have people living in close proximity to each other , one of the things you can do is - as information technologies develop - you can start to have smart places .
you can start to know where things are .
when you know where things are , it becomes easier to share them .
when you share them , you end up using less .
so one great example is car-share clubs , which are really starting to take off in the u.s. , have already taken off in many places in europe , and are a great example .
if you 're somebody who drives , you know , one day a week , do you really need your own car ?
another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing , and by monitoring , the amount we 're actually using .
so , here 's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use , which i think is a pretty cool concept , although i think it ought to work the other way around , that it gets brighter the more you do n't use .
but , you know , there may even be a simpler approach .
we could just re-label things .
this light switch that reads , on the one hand , flashfloods , and on the other hand , off .
how we build things can change as well .
this is a bio-morphic building .
it takes its inspiration in form from life .
many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful , and also much more effective .
this is an example of bio-mimicry , which is something we 're really starting to look a lot more for .
in this case , you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan , which is greatly more effective .
there 's a lot of this stuff happening ; it 's really pretty remarkable .
i encourage you to look on worldchanging if you 're into it .
we 're starting to cover this more and more .
there 's also neo-biological design , where more and more we 're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry .
so this , for example , is hydrogen-generating algae .
so we have a model in potential , an emerging model that we 're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in , and turn them into bright green cities .
but unfortunately , most of the people on the planet do n't live in the cites we live in .
they live in the emerging megacities of the developing world .
and there 's a statistic i often like to use , which is that we 're adding a city of seattle every four days , a city the size of seattle to the planet every four days .
i was giving a talk about two months ago , and this guy , who 'd done some work with the u.n. , came up to me and was really flustered , and he said , look , you 've got that totally wrong ; it 's totally wrong .
it 's every seven days .
so , we 're adding a city the size of seattle every seven days , and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or i live in .
most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly .
they do n't have existing infrastructure ; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty , and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways .
so what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into bright green megacities ?
well , the first thing we need is , we need leapfrogging .
and this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere .
the idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person , or a country , who is stuck in a situation where you do n't have the tools and technologies that you need , there 's no reason for you to invest in last generation 's technologies . right ?
that you 're much better off , almost universally , looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology .
one place we 're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones . right ?
all throughout the developing world , people are going directly to cell phones , skipping the whole landline stage .
if there are landlines in many developing world cities , they 're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money .
so i rather like this picture here .
i particularly like the ganesh in the background , talking on the cell phone .
so what we have , increasingly , is cell phones just permeating out through society .
we 've heard all about this here this week , so i wo n't say too much more than that , other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies .
the second thing is tools for collaboration , be they systems of collaboration , or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration . right ?
when you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate , you get different kinds of solutions .
and those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who do n't have capital . right ?
so , you know , we have open source software , we have creative commons and other kinds of copyleft solutions .
and those things lead to things like this .
this is a telecentro in sao paulo .
this is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software , cheap , sort of hacked-together machines , and basically sort of abandoned buildings - has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in , get high-speed internet access , learn computer programming skills for free .
and a quarter-million people every year use these now in sao paulo .
and those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in sao paolo .
i particularly like the little linux penguin in the back . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so one of the things that that 's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion .
and one of the things we 're really , really interested in at worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself , and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room .
so it 's not , you know , bollywood is n't just answering hollywood . right ?
you know , brazilian music scene is n't just answering the major labels .
it 's doing something new . there 's new things happening .
there 's interplay between them . and , you know , you get amazing things .
like , i do n't know if any of you have seen the movie " city of god ? "
yeah , it 's a fabulous movie if you have n't seen it .
and it 's all about this question , in a very artistic and indirect kind of way .
you have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out .
these are people who have just been visited by the internet bookmobile in uganda .
and who are waving their first books in the air , which , i just think that 's a pretty cool picture . you know ?
so you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways , in ways that have n't happened before .
and as we heard last night , as we 've heard earlier this week , are absolutely , fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions , is we 've got to craft new political realities .
and i would personally say that we have to craft new political realities , not only in places like india , afghanistan , kenya , pakistan , what have you , but here at home as well .
another world is possible .
and sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement . right ?
we tweak that a lot .
we talk about how another world is n't just possible ; another world 's here .
that it 's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different , vague possibility out there , but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility .
we need to start doing things like lula , president of brazil .
how many people knew of lula before today ?
ok , so , much , much better than the average crowd , i can tell you that .
so lula , he 's full of problems , full of contradictions , but one of the things that he 's doing is , he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration .
i would keep your eye on this fellow .
another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call " serious play . "
we 're looking a lot at this . this is spreading everywhere .
this is from " a force more powerful . " it 's a little screenshot .
" a force more powerful " is a video game that , while you 're playing it , it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change . -lrb- laughter -rrb- here 's another one . this is from a game called " food force , " which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp .
these things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in , especially in the developing world , in people 's interest in and passion for democracy .
we get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer , freer , more democratic , less corrupt .
and , you know , we do n't hear those stories enough .
but it 's happening all over the place , and these tools are part of what 's making it possible .
now when you add all those things together , when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools , you know , second superpower stuff , etc . , what do you get ?
well , very quickly , you get a bright green future for the developing world .
you get , for example , green power spread throughout the world .
you get - this is a building in hyderabad , india .
it 's the greenest building in the world .
you get grassroots solutions , things that work for people who have no capital or limited access .
you get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains .
you get access to distance medicine .
these are indian nurses learning how to use pdas to access databases that have information that they do n't have access to at home in a distant manner .
you get new tools for people in the developing world .
these are led lights that help the roughly billion people out there , for whom nightfall means darkness , to have a new means of operating .
these are refrigerators that require no electricity ; they 're pot within a pot design .
and you get water solutions . water 's one of the most pressing problems .
here 's a design for harvesting rainwater that 's super cheap and available to people in the developing world .
here 's a design for distilling water using sunlight .
here 's a fog-catcher , which , if you live in a moist , jungle-like area , will distill water from the air that 's clean and drinkable .
here 's a way of transporting water .
i just love this , you know - i mean carrying water is such a drag , and somebody just came up with the idea of well , what if you rolled it . right ?
i mean , that 's a great design .
this is a fabulous invention , lifestraw .
basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips .
so , you know , people who are in desperate straits can get this .
this is one of my favorite worldchanging kinds of things ever .
this is a merry-go-round invented by the company roundabout , which pumps water as kids play . you know ?
seriously - give that one a hand , it 's pretty great .
and the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis . right ?
we 're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability .
how do we help people like that ?
well , there 's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet .
some of those designs include models for acting , such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps .
new models for pedagogy for the displaced .
and we have new tools .
this is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere .
does anyone know what this is ?
audience : it detects landmines .
alex steffen : exactly , this is a landmine-detecting flower .
if you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered , you can fling these seeds out into the field .
and as they grow up , they will grow up around the mines , their roots will detect the chemicals in them , and where the flowers turn red you do n't step .
yeah , so seeds that could save your life . you know ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- i also love it because it seems to me that the example , the tools we use to change the world , ought to be beautiful in themselves .
you know , that it 's not just enough to survive .
we 've got to make something better than what we 've got .
and i think that we will .
just to wrap up , in the immortal words of h.g. wells , i think that better things are on the way .
i think that , in fact , that " all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning .
all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening . "
i hope that that turns out to be true .
the people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it can be a very complicated thing , the ocean .
and it can be a very complicated thing , what human health is .
and bringing those two together might seem a very daunting task , but what i 'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity , there 's some simple themes that i think , if we understand , we can really move forward .
and those simple themes are n't really themes about the complex science of what 's going on , but things that we all pretty well know .
and i 'm going to start with this one : if momma ai n't happy , ai n't nobody happy .
we know that , right ? we 've experienced that .
and if we just take that and we build from there , then we can go to the next step , which is that if the ocean ai n't happy , ai n't nobody happy .
that 's the theme of my talk .
and we 're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways .
this is a shot of cannery row in 1932 .
cannery row , at the time , had the biggest industrial canning operation on the west coast .
we piled enormous amounts of pollution into the air and into the water .
rolf bolin , who was a professor at the hopkin 's marine station where i work , wrote in the 1940s that " the fumes from the scum floating on the inlets of the bay were so bad they turned lead-based paints black . "
people working in these canneries could barely stay there all day because of the smell , but you know what they came out saying ?
they say , " you know what you smell ?
you smell money . "
that pollution was money to that community , and those people dealt with the pollution and absorbed it into their skin and into their bodies because they needed the money .
we made the ocean unhappy ; we made people very unhappy , and we made them unhealthy .
the connection between ocean health and human health is actually based upon another couple simple adages , and i want to call that " pinch a minnow , hurt a whale . "
the pyramid of ocean life ...
now , when an ecologist looks at the ocean - i have to tell you - we look at the ocean in a very different way , and we see different things than when a regular person looks at the ocean because when an ecologist looks at the ocean , we see all those interconnections .
we see the base of the food chain , the plankton , the small things , and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid , and on so up this diagram .
and that flow , that flow of life , from the very base up to the very top , is the flow that ecologists see .
and that 's what we 're trying to preserve when we say , " save the ocean . heal the ocean . "
it 's that pyramid .
now why does that matter for human health ?
because when we jam things in the bottom of that pyramid that should n't be there , some very frightening things happen .
pollutants , some pollutants have been created by us : molecules like pcbs that ca n't be broken down by our bodies .
and they go in the base of that pyramid , and they drift up ; they 're passed up that way , on to predators and on to the top predators , and in so doing , they accumulate .
now , to bring that home , i thought i 'd invent a little game .
we do n't really have to play it ; we can just think about it here .
it 's the styrofoam and chocolate game .
imagine that when we got on this boat , we were all given two styrofoam peanuts .
ca n't do much with them : put them in your pocket .
suppose the rules are : every time you offer somebody a drink , you give them the drink , and you give them your styrofoam peanuts too .
what 'll happen is that the styrofoam peanuts will start moving through our society here , and they will accumulate in the drunkest , stingiest people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible styrofoam peanuts .
and that 's exactly what happens with pdbs in this food pyramid : they accumulate into the top of it .
now suppose , instead of styrofoam peanuts , we take these lovely little chocolates that we get and we had those instead .
well , some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around , and instead of accumulating , they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group because they 're absorbed by us .
and that 's the difference between a pcb and , say , something natural like an omega-3 , something we want out of the marine food chain .
pcbs accumulate .
we have great examples of that , unfortunately .
pcbs accumulate in dolphins in sarasota bay , in texas , in north carolina .
they get into the food chain .
the dolphins eat the fish that have pcbs from the plankton , and those pcbs , being fat-soluble , accumulate in these dolphins .
now , a dolphin , mother dolphin , any dolphin - there 's only one way that a pcb can get out of a dolphin .
and what 's that ?
in mother 's milk .
here 's a diagram of the pcb load of dolphins in sarasota bay .
adult males : a huge load .
juveniles : a huge load .
females after their first calf is already weaned : a lower load .
those females , they 're not trying to .
those females are passing the pcbs in the fat of their own mother 's milk into their offspring , and their offspring do n't survive .
the death rate in these dolphins , for the first calf born of every female dolphin , is 60 to 80 percent .
these mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant , and most of them die .
now , the mother then can go and reproduce , but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals - the death of the first-born calf .
there 's another top predator in the ocean , it turns out .
that top predator , of course , is us .
and we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places .
this is whale meat that i photographed in a grocery store in tokyo - or is it ?
in fact , what we did a few years ago was learn how to smuggle a molecular biology lab into tokyo and use it to genetically test the dna out of whale meat samples and identify what they really were .
and some of those whale meat samples were whale meat .
some of them were illegal whale meat , by the way .
that 's another story .
but some of them were not whale meat at all .
even though they were labeled whale meat , they were dolphin meat .
some of them were dolphin liver . some of them were dolphin blubber .
and those dolphin parts had a huge load of pcbs , dioxins and heavy metals .
and that huge load was passing into the people that ate this meat .
it turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world .
that 's a tragedy for those populations , but it 's also a tragedy for the people eating them because they do n't know that that 's toxic meat .
we had these data a few years ago .
i remember sitting at my desk being about the only person in the world who knew that whale meat being sold in these markets was really dolphin meat , and it was toxic .
it had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the epa .
and i remember there sitting at my desk thinking , " well , i know this . this is a great scientific discovery , " but it was so awful .
and for the very first time in my scientific career , i broke scientific protocol , which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals and then begin to talk about them .
we sent a very polite letter to the minister of health in japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation , not for us , but for the people of japan because mothers who may be breastfeeding , who may have young children , would be buying something that they thought was healthy , but it was really toxic .
that led to a whole series of other campaigns in japan , and i 'm really proud to say that at this point , it 's very difficult to buy anything in japan that 's labeled incorrectly , even though they 're still selling whale meat , which i believe they should n't .
but at least it 's labeled correctly , and you 're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead .
it is n't just there that this happens , but in a natural diet of some communities in the canadian arctic and in the united states and in the european arctic , a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of pcbs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women .
these women have toxic breast milk .
they can not feed their offspring , their children , their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain , in their part of the world 's ocean pyramid .
that means their immune systems are compromised .
it means that their children 's development can be compromised .
and the world 's attention on this over the last decade has reduced the problem for these women , not by changing the pyramid , but by changing what they particularly eat out of it .
we 've taken them out of their natural pyramid in order to solve this problem .
that 's a good thing for this particular acute problem , but it does nothing to solve the pyramid problem .
there 's other ways of breaking the pyramid .
the pyramid , if we jam things in the bottom , can get backed up like a sewer line that 's clogged .
and if we jam nutrients , sewage , fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid , it can back up all through it .
we end up with things we 've heard about before : red tides , for example , which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage .
we can also see blooms of bacteria , blooms of viruses in the ocean .
these are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio , which includes the genus that has cholera in it .
how many people have seen a " beach closed " sign ?
why does that happen ?
it happens because we have jammed so much into the base of the natural ocean pyramid that these bacteria clog it up and overfill onto our beaches .
often what jams us up is sewage .
now how many of you have ever gone to a state park or a national park where you had a big sign at the front saying , " closed because human sewage is so far over this park that you ca n't use it " ?
not very often . we would n't tolerate that .
we would n't tolerate our parks being swamped by human sewage , but beaches are closed a lot in our country .
they 're closed more and more and more all around the world for the same reason , and i believe we should n't tolerate that either .
it 's not just a question of cleanliness ; it 's also a question of how those organisms then turn into human disease .
these vibrios , these bacteria , can actually infect people .
they can go into your skin and create skin infections .
this is a graph from noaa 's ocean and human health initiative , showing the rise of the infections by vibrio in people over the last few years .
surfers , for example , know this incredibly .
and if you can see on some surfing sites , in fact , not only do you see what the waves are like or what the weather 's like , but on some surf rider sites , you see a little flashing poo alert .
that means that the beach might have great waves , but it 's a dangerous place for surfers to be because they can carry with them , even after a great day of surfing , this legacy of an infection that might take a very long time to solve .
some of these infections are actually carrying antibiotic resistance genes now , and that makes them even more difficult .
these same infections create harmful algal blooms .
those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals .
this is just a simple list of some of the types of poisons that come out of these harmful algal blooms : shellfish poisoning , fish ciguatera , diarrheic shellfish poisoning - you do n't want to know about that - neurotoxic shellfish poisoning , paralytic shellfish poisoning .
these are things that are getting into our food chain because of these blooms .
rita calwell very famously traced a very interesting story of cholera into human communities , brought there , not by a normal human vector , but by a marine vector , this copepod .
copepods are small crustaceans .
they 're a tiny fraction of an inch long , and they can carry on their little legs some of the cholera bacteria that then leads to human disease .
that has sparked cholera epidemics in ports along the world and has led to increased concentration on trying to make sure shipping does n't move these vectors of cholera around the world .
so what do you do ?
we have major problems in disrupted ecosystem flow that the pyramid may not be working so well , that the flow from the base up into it is being blocked and clogged .
what do you do when you have this sort of disrupted flow ?
well , there 's a bunch of things you could do .
you could call joe the plumber , for example .
and he could come in and fix the flow .
but in fact , if you look around the world , not only are there hope spots for where we may be able to fix problems , there have been places where problems have been fixed , where people have come to grips with these issues and begun to turn them around .
monterey is one of those .
i started out showing how much we had distressed the monterey bay ecosystem with pollution and the canning industry and all of the attendant problems .
in 1932 , that 's the picture .
in 2009 , the picture is dramatically different .
the canneries are gone . the pollution has abated .
but there 's a greater sense here that what the individual communities need is working ecosystems .
they need a functioning pyramid from the base all the way to the top .
and that pyramid in monterey , right now , because of the efforts of a lot of different people , is functioning better than it 's ever functioned for the last 150 years .
it did n't happen accidentally .
it happened because many people put their time and effort and their pioneering spirit into this .
on the left there , julia platt , the mayor of my little hometown in pacific grove .
at 74 years old , became mayor because something had to be done to protect the ocean .
in 1931 , she produced california 's first community-based marine protected area , right next to the biggest polluting cannery , because julia knew that when the canneries eventually were gone , the ocean needed a place to grow from , that the ocean needed a place to spark a seed , and she wanted to provide that seed .
other people , like david packard and julie packard , who were instrumental in producing the monterey bay aquarium to lock into people 's notion that the ocean and the health of the ocean ecosystem were just as important to the economy of this area as eating the ecosystem would be .
that change in thinking has led to a dramatic shift , not only in the fortunes of monterey bay , but other places around the world .
well , i want to leave you with the thought that what we 're really trying to do here is protect this ocean pyramid , and that ocean pyramid connects to our own pyramid of life .
it 's an ocean planet , and we think of ourselves as a terrestrial species , but the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected .
and it 's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ' theme and variations ' is one of those forms that require a certain kind of intellectual activity , because you are always comparing the variation with the theme that you hold in your mind .
you might say that the theme is nature and everything that follows is a variation on the subject .
i was asked , i guess about six years ago , to do a series of paintings that in some way would celebrate the birth of piero della francesca .
and it was very difficult for me to imagine how to paint pictures that were based on piero until i realized that i could look at piero as nature - that i would have the same attitude towards looking at piero della francesca as i would if i were looking out a window at a tree .
and that was enormously liberating to me .
perhaps it 's not a very insightful observation , but that really started me on a path to be able to do a kind of theme and variations based on a work by piero , in this case that remarkable painting that 's in the uffizi , " the duke of montefeltro , " who faces his consort , battista .
once i realized that i could take some liberties with the subject , i did the following series of drawings .
that 's the real piero della francesca - one of the greatest portraits in human history .
and these , i 'll just show these without comment .
it 's just a series of variations on the head of the duke of montefeltro , who 's a great , great figure in the renaissance , and probably the basis for machiavelli 's " the prince . "
he apparently lost an eye in battle , which is why he is always shown in profile .
and this is battista .
and then i decided i could move them around a little bit - so that for the first time in history , they 're facing the same direction .
whoops ! passed each other .
and then a visitor from another painting by piero , this is from " the resurrection of christ " - as though the cast had just gotten of the set to have a chat .
and now , four large panels : this is upper left ; upper right ; lower left ; lower right .
incidentally , i 've never understood the conflict between abstraction and naturalism .
since all paintings are inherently abstract to begin with there does n't seem to be an argument there .
on another subject - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i was driving in the country one day with my wife , and i saw this sign , and i said , " that is a fabulous piece of design . "
and she said , " what are you talking about ? "
i said , " well , it 's so persuasive , because the purpose of that sign is to get you into the garage , and since most people are so suspicious of garages , and know that they 're going to be ripped off , they use the word ' reliable . ' but everybody says they 're reliable .
but , reliable dutchman " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - " fantastic ! "
because as soon as you hear the word dutchman - which is an archaic word , nobody calls dutch people " dutchmen " anymore - but as soon as you hear dutchman , you get this picture of the kid with his finger in the dike , preventing the thing from falling and flooding holland , and so on .
and so the entire issue is detoxified by the use of " dutchman . "
now , if you think i 'm exaggerating at all in this , all you have to do is substitute something else , like " indonesian . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or even " french . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , " swiss " works , but you know it 's going to cost a lot of money .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm going to take you quickly through the actual process of doing a poster .
i do a lot of work for the school of visual arts , where i teach , and the director of this school - a remarkable man named silas rhodes - often gives you a piece of text and he says , " do something with this . "
and so he did .
and this was the text - " in words as fashion the same rule will hold / alike fantastic if too new or old / be not the first by whom the new are tried / nor yet the last to lay the old aside . "
i could make nothing of that .
and i really struggled with this one .
and the first thing i did , which was sort of in the absence of another idea , was say i 'll sort of write it out and make some words big , and i 'll have some kind of design on the back somehow , and i was hoping - as one often does - to stumble into something .
so i took another crack at it - you 've got to keep it moving - and i xeroxed some words on pieces of colored paper and i pasted them down on an ugly board .
i thought that something would come out of it , like " words rule fantastic new old first last pope " because it 's by alexander pope , but i sort of made a mess out of it , and then i thought i 'd repeat it in some way so it was legible .
so , it was going nowhere .
sometimes , in the middle of a resistant problem , i write down things that i know about it .
but you can see the beginning of an idea there , because you can see the word " new " emerging from the " old . "
that 's what happens .
there 's a relationship between the old and the new ; the new emerges from the context of the old .
and then i did some variations of it , but it still was n't coalescing graphically at all .
i had this other version which had something interesting about it in terms of being able to put it together in your mind from clues .
the w was clearly a w , the n was clearly an n , even though they were very fragmentary and there was n't a lot of information in it .
then i got the words " new " and " old " and now i had regressed back to a point where there seemed to be no return .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was really desperate at this point .
and so , i do something i 'm truthfully ashamed of , which is that i took two drawings i had made for another purpose and i put them together .
it says " dreams " at the top .
and i was going to do a thing , i say , " well , change the copy .
let it say something about dreams , and come to sva and you 'll sort of fulfill your dreams . "
but , to my credit , i was so embarrassed about doing that that i never submitted this sketch .
and , finally , i arrived at the following solution .
now , it does n't look terribly interesting , but it does have something that distinguishes it from a lot of other posters .
for one thing , it transgresses the idea of what a poster 's supposed to be , which is to be understood and seen immediately , and not explained .
i remember hearing all of you in the graphic arts - " if you have to explain it , it ai n't working . "
and one day i woke up and i said , " well , suppose that 's not true ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here 's what it says in my explanation at the bottom left .
it says , " thoughts : this poem is impossible .
silas usually has a better touch with his choice of quotations .
this one generates no imagery at all . "
i am now exposing myself to my audience , right ?
which is something you never want to do professionally .
" maybe the words can make the image without anything else happening .
what 's the heart of this poem ?
do n't be trendy if you want to be serious .
is doing the poster this way trendy in itself ?
i guess one could reduce the idea further by suggesting that the new emerges behind and through the old , like this . "
and then i show you a little drawing - you see , you remember that old thing i discarded ?
well , i found a way to use it .
so , there 's that little alternative over there , and i say , " not bad , " - criticizing myself - " but more didactic than visual .
maybe what wants to be said is that old and the new are locked in a dialectical embrace , a kind of dance where each defines the other . "
and then more self-questioning - " am i being simple-minded ?
is this the kind of simple that looks obvious , or the kind that looks profound ?
there 's a significant difference .
this could be embarrassing .
actually , i realize fear of embarrassment drives me as much as any ambition .
do you think this sort of thing could really attract a student to the school ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , i think there are two fresh things here - two fresh things .
one is the sort of willingness to expose myself to a critical audience , and not to suggest that i am confident about what i 'm doing .
and as you know , you have to have a front .
i mean - you 've got to be confident ; if you do n't believe in your work , who else is going to believe in it ?
so that 's one thing , to introduce the idea of doubt into graphics .
that can be a big contribution .
the other thing is to actually give you two solutions for the price of one ; you get the big one and if you do n't like that , how about the little one ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that too is a relatively new idea .
and here 's just a series of experiments where i ask the question of - does a poster have to be square ?
now , this is a little illusion .
that poster is not folded .
it 's not folded , that 's a photograph same cheap trick in the upper left-hand corner .
and here , a very peculiar poster because , simply because of using the isometric perspective in the computer , it wo n't sit still in the space .
at times , it seems to be wider at the back than the front , and then it shifts .
and if you sit here long enough , it 'll float off the page into the audience .
but , we do n't have time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then an experiment - a little bit about the nature of perspective , where the outside shape is determined by the peculiarity of perspective , but the shape of the bottle - which is identical to the outside shape - is seen frontally .
and another piece for the art directors ' club is " anna rees " casting long shadows .
this is another poster from the school of visual arts .
there were 10 artists invited to participate in it , and it was one of those things where it was extremely competitive and i did n't want to be embarrassed , so i worked very hard on this .
the idea was - and it was a brilliant idea - was to have 10 posters distributed throughout the city 's subway system so every time you got on the subway you 'd be passing a different poster , all of which had a different idea of what art is .
but i was absolutely stuck on the idea of " art is " and trying to determine what art was .
but then i gave up and i said , " well , art is whatever . "
and as soon as i said that , i discovered that the word " hat " was hidden in the word " whatever , " and that led me to the inevitable conclusion .
but then again , it 's on my list of didactic posters .
my intent is to have a literary accompaniment that explains the poster , in case you do n't get it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this says , " note to the viewer : i thought i might use a visual cliche of our time - magritte 's everyman - to express the idea that art is mystery , continuity and history .
i 'm also convinced that , in an age of computer manipulation , surrealism has become banal , a shadow of its former self .
the phrase ' art is whatever ' expresses the current inclusiveness that surrounds art-making - a sort of ' it ai n't what you do , it 's the way that you do it ' notion .
the shadow of magritte falls across the central part of the poster a poetic event that occurs as the shadow man isolates the word ' hat , ' hidden in the word ' whatever . ' the four hats shown in the poster suggests how art might be defined : as a thing itself , the worth of the thing , the shadow of the thing , and the shape of the thing .
whatever . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and the one that i did not submit , which i still like , i wanted to use the same phrase .
there were wonderful experiments by bruno munari on letterforms some years ago - sort of , see how far you could go and still be able to read them .
and that idea stuck in my head .
but then i took the pieces that i had taken off and put them at the bottom .
and , of course those are the remains , and they 're so labeled .
but what really happens is that you read it as : " art is whatever remains . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you remember the story of odysseus and the sirens from high school or junior high school ?
there was this hero , odysseus , who 's heading back home after the trojan war .
and he 's standing on the deck of his ship , he 's talking to his first mate , and he 's saying , " tomorrow , we will sail past those rocks , and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called sirens .
and these women sing an enchanting song , a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die . "
now you would expect , given that , that they would choose an alternate route around the sirens , but instead odysseus says , " i want to hear that song .
and so what i 'm going to do is i 'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men - stay with me - so that you ca n't hear the song , and then i 'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that i can listen and we can all sail by unaffected . "
so this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song .
and i 'd like to think if this was the case , they probably would have rehearsed it a few times .
odysseus would have said , " okay , let 's do a dry run .
you tie me to the mast , and i 'm going to beg and plead .
and no matter what i say , you can not untie me from the mast .
all right , so tie me to the mast . "
and the first mate takes a rope and ties odysseus to the mast in a nice knot .
and odysseus does his best job playacting and says , " untie me . untie me .
i want to hear that song . untie me . "
and the first mate wisely resists and does n't untie odysseus .
and then odysseus says , " i see that you can get it .
all right , untie me now and we 'll get some dinner . "
and the first mate hesitates .
he 's like , " is this still the rehearsal , or should i untie him ? "
and the first mate thinks , " well , i guess at some point the rehearsal has to end . "
so he unties odysseus , and odysseus flips out .
he 's like , " you idiot . you moron .
if you do that tomorrow , i 'll be dead , you 'll be dead , every single one of the men will be dead .
now just do n't untie me no matter what . "
he throws the first mate to the ground .
this repeats itself through the night - rehearsal , tying to the mast , conning his way out of it , beating the poor first mate up mercilessly .
hilarity ensues .
tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device .
a commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you do n't do something regrettable when you have a hot head .
because there 's two heads inside one person when you think about it .
scholars have long invoked this metaphor of two selves when it comes to questions of temptation .
there is first , the present self .
this is like odysseus when he 's hearing the song .
he just wants to get to the front row .
he just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification .
but then there 's this other self , the future self .
this is odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife penelope outside of ithaca - the other one .
so why do we need commitment devices ?
well resisting temptation is hard , as the 19th century english economist nassau william senior said , " to abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power , or to seek distant rather than immediate results , are among the most painful exertions of the human will . "
if you set goals for yourself and you 're like a lot of other people , you probably realize it 's not that your goals are physically impossible that 's keeping you from achieving them , it 's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them .
it 's physically possible to lose weight .
it 's physically possible to exercise more .
but resisting temptation is hard .
the other reason that it 's difficult to resist temptation is because it 's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self .
i mean , let 's face it , the present self is present .
it 's in control . it 's in power right now .
it has these strong , heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth .
and the future self is not even around .
it 's off in the future . it 's weak .
it does n't even have a lawyer present .
there 's nobody to stick up for the future self .
and so the present self can trounce all over its dreams .
so there 's this battle between the two selves that 's being fought , and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two .
now i 'm a big fan of commitment devices actually .
tying yourself to the mast is the oldest one , but there are other ones such as locking a credit card away with a key or not bringing junk food into the house so you wo n't eat it or unplugging your internet connection so you can use your computer .
i was creating commitment devices of my own long before i knew what they were .
so when i was a starving post-doc at columbia university , i was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career .
i had to write five pages a day towards papers or i would have to give up five dollars .
and when you try to execute these commitment devices , you realize the devil is really in the details .
because it 's not that easy to get rid of five dollars .
i mean , you ca n't burn it ; that 's illegal .
and i thought , well i could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that .
but then i thought , oh , i 'm sending myself mixed messages .
because not writing is bad , but giving to charity is good .
so then i would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift .
and then i kind of flipped that around and thought , well i could give it to the neo-nazis .
but then i was like , that 's more bad than writing is good , and so that would n't work .
so ultimately , i just decided i would leave it in an envelope on the subway .
sometimes a good person would find it , sometimes a bad person would find it .
on average , it was just a completely pointless exchange of money that i would regret .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- such it is with commitment devices .
but despite my like for them , there 's two nagging concerns that i 've always had about commitment devices , and you might feel this if you use them yourself .
so the first is , when you 've got one of these devices going , such as this contract to write everyday or pay , it 's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control .
you 're just telling yourself , " without you , commitment device , i am nothing , i have no self-discipline . "
and then when you 're ever in a situation where you do n't have a commitment device in place - like , " oh my god , that person 's offering me a doughnut , and i have no defense mechanism , " - you just eat it .
so i do n't like the way that they take the power away from you .
i think self-discipline is something , it 's like a muscle .
the more you exercise it , the stronger it gets .
the other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them .
you say , " well , of course i ca n't write today , because i 'm giving a tedtalk and i have five media interviews , and then i 'm going to a cocktail party and then i 'll be drunk after that .
and so there 's no way that this is going to work . "
so in effect , you are like odysseus and the first mate in one person .
you 're putting yourself , you 're binding yourself , and you 're weaseling your way out of it , and then you 're beating yourself up afterwards .
so i 've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people 's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices .
in particular , i 'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self .
and this is a timely issue .
i 'm talking about the topic of saving .
now saving is a classic two selves problem .
the present self does not want to save at all .
it wants to consume .
whereas the future self wants the present self to save .
so this is a timely problem .
we look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s .
at the same time , the retirement risk index , the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement , has been increasing .
and we 're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers , the mckinsey global institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they 're in retirement .
so what can we do about this ?
there 's a philosopher , derek parfit , who said some words that were inspiring to my coauthors and i.
he said that , " we might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination . "
that is to say , we somehow might not believe that we 're going to get old , or we might not be able to imagine that we 're going to get old some day .
on the one hand , it sounds ridiculous .
of course , we know that we 're going to get old .
but are n't there things that we believe and do n't believe at the same time ?
so my coauthors and i have used computers , the greatest tool of our time , to assist people 's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future .
and i 'll show you some of these tools right here .
the first is called the distribution builder .
it shows people what the future might be like by showing them a hundred equally probable outcomes that might be obtained in the future .
each outcome is shown by one of these markers , and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement .
being up at the top means that you 're enjoying a high income in retirement .
being down at the bottom means that you 're struggling to make ends meet .
when you make an investment , what you 're really saying is , " i accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth . "
now you can try to move your outcomes around .
you can try to manipulate your fate , like this person is doing , but it costs you something to do it .
it means that you have to save more today .
once you find an investment that you 're happy with , what people do is they click " done " and the markers begin to disappear , slowly , one by one .
it simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out .
at the end , there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement .
yes , this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement .
they 're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working .
if you 're like most people , just seeing that gave you a small sense of elation and joy - just to think about making 50 percent more money in retirement than before .
however , had you ended up on the very bottom , it might have given you a slight sense of dread and / or nausea thinking about struggling to get by in retirement .
by using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome , people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future .
now people are motivated through emotions , but different people find different things motivating .
this is a simulation that uses graphics , but other people find motivating what money can buy , not just numbers .
so here i made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes , i show people what those outcomes will get you , in particular apartments that you can afford if you 're retiring on 3,000 , 2,500 , 2,000 dollars per month and so on .
as you move down the ladder of apartments , you see that they get worse and worse .
some of them look like places i lived in as a graduate student .
and as you get to the very bottom , you 're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you do n't save anything for retirement , you wo n't be able to afford any housing at all .
those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the internet .
the last thing i 'll show you , the last behavioral time machine , is something that i created with hal hershfield , who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project , bill sharpe .
and what it is is an exploration into virtual reality .
so what we do is we take pictures of people - in this case , college-age people - and we use software to age them and show these people what they 'll look like when they 're 60 , 70 , 80 years old .
and we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior .
so this is one of our experiments .
here we see the face of the young subject on the left .
he 's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate .
as he moves his savings rate down , it means that he 's saving zero when it 's all the way here at the left .
you can see his current annual income - this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today - is quite high , 91 percent , but his retirement income is quite low .
he 's going to retire on 44 percent of what he earned while he was working .
if he saves the maximum legal amount , his retirement income goes up , but he 's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today .
other conditions show people the future self .
and from the future self 's point of view , everything is in reverse .
if you save very little , the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income .
whereas if the present self saves a lot , the future self is delighted , where the income is close up near 100 percent .
to bring this to a wider audience , i 've been working with hal and allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine , in which you not only get to see yourself in the future , but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth .
so for instance , here is somebody using the tool .
and just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider .
the younger face gets happier and happier , saving nothing .
the older face is miserable .
and slowly , slowly we 're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate .
and then it 's a high savings rate .
the younger face is getting unhappy .
the older face is quite pleased with the decision .
we 're going to see if this has an effect on what people do .
and what 's nice about it is it 's not something that biasing people actually , because as one face smiles , the other face frowns .
it 's not telling you which way to put the slider , it 's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self .
your decisions today are going to determine its well-being .
and that 's something that 's easy to forget .
this use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older .
there are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke , if they get too much exposure to the sun , if they gain weight and so on .
and what 's good is , unlike in the experiments that hal and myself ran with russ smith , you do n't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality .
there are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing .
this is actually a picture of hal , my coauthor .
you might recognize him from the previous demos .
and just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding , aging and weight gain software to see how he would look .
hal is here , so i think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image .
and i 'll close it there .
on behalf of hal and myself , i wish all the best to your present and future selves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly , and in many of the places where it counts the most , women are , in fact , taking control of everything .
in my mother 's day , she did n't go to college .
not a lot of women did .
and now , for every two men who get a college degree , three women will do the same .
women , for the first time this year , became the majority of the american workforce .
and they 're starting to dominate lots of professions - doctors , lawyers , bankers , accountants .
over 50 percent of managers are women these days , and in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade , all but two of them are dominated by women .
so the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men , believe it or not , and these economic changes are starting to rapidly affect our culture - what our romantic comedies look like , what our marriages look like , what our dating lives look like , and our new set of superheroes .
for a long time , this is the image of american manhood that dominated - tough , rugged , in control of his own environment .
a few years ago , the marlboro man was retired and replaced by this much less impressive specimen , who is a parody of american manhood , and that 's what we have in our commercials today .
the phrase " first-born son " is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that this statistic alone shocked me .
in american fertility clinics , 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys .
and in places where you would n't think , such as south korea , india and china , the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little , and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons .
if you think about this , if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots , you can see the evidence everywhere .
you can see it in college graduation patterns , in job projections , in our marriage statistics , you can see it in the icelandic elections , which you 'll hear about later , and you can see it on south korean surveys on son preference , that something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women .
certainly this is not the first time that we 've had great progress with women .
the ' 20s and the ' 60s also come to mind .
but the difference is that , back then , it was driven by a very passionate feminist movement that was trying to project its own desires , whereas this time , it 's not about passion , and it 's not about any kind of movement .
this is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in .
the 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end , believe it or not , and that 's why i talk about the " end of men . "
now all you men out there , this is not the moment where you tune out or throw some tomatoes , because the point is that this is happening to all of us .
i myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom i dearly love .
and this is why i like to talk about this , because if we do n't acknowledge it , then the transition will be pretty painful .
but if we do take account of it , then i think it will go much more smoothly .
i first started thinking about this about a year and a half ago .
i was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else , and i started to notice a distinct pattern - that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women .
and i remembered back to about 10 years ago when i read a book by susan faludi called " stiffed : the betrayal of the american man , " in which she described how hard the recession had hit men , and i started to think about whether it had gotten worse this time around in this recession .
and i realized that two things were different this time around .
the first was that these were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was giving men - that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shift in our global economy .
and second , that the story was no longer just about the crisis of men , but it was also about what was happening to women .
and now look at this second set of slides .
these are headlines about what 's been going on with women in the next few years .
these are things we never could have imagined a few years ago .
women , a majority of the workplace .
and labor statistics : women take up most managerial jobs .
this second set of headlines - you can see that families and marriages are starting to shift .
and look at that last headline - young women earning more than young men .
that particular headline comes to me from a market research firm .
they were basically asked by one of their clients who was going to buy houses in that neighborhood in the future .
and they expected that it would be young families , or young men , just like it had always been .
but in fact , they found something very surprising .
it was young , single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood .
and so they decided , because they were intrigued by this finding , to do a nationwide survey .
so they spread out all the census data , and what they found , the guy described to me as a shocker , which is that in 1,997 out of 2,000 communities , women , young women , were making more money than young men .
so here you have a generation of young women who grow up thinking of themselves as being more powerful earners than the young men around them .
now , i 've just laid out the picture for you , but i still have n't explained to you why this is happening .
and in a moment , i 'm going to show you a graph , and what you 'll see on this graph - it begins in 1973 , just before women start flooding the workforce , and it brings us up to our current day .
and basically what you 'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy .
now what does that mean ?
it means that the economy is dividing into high-skill , high-wage jobs and low-skill , low-wage jobs - and that the middle , the middle-skill jobs , and the middle-earning jobs , are starting to drop out of the economy .
this has been going on for 40 years now .
but this process is affecting men very differently than it 's affecting women .
you 'll see the women in red , and you 'll see the men in blue .
you 'll watch them both drop out of the middle class , but see what happens to women and see what happens to men .
there we go .
so watch that . you see them both drop out of the middle class .
watch what happens to the women . watch what happens to the men .
the men sort of stagnate there , while the women zoom up in those high-skill jobs .
so what 's that about ?
it looks like women got some power boost on a video game , or like they snuck in some secret serum into their birth-control pills that lets them shoot up high .
but of course , it 's not about that .
what it 's about is that the economy has changed a lot .
we used to have a manufacturing economy , which was about building goods and products , and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy .
those two economies require very different skills , and as it happens , women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been .
it used to be that you were a guy who went to high school but you had a specific set of skills , and with the help of a union , you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life .
but that really is n't true anymore .
this new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength , which is what 's helped men along all these years .
what the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills .
you basically need intelligence , you need an ability to sit still and focus , to communicate openly , and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be , and those are things that women do extremely well , as we 're seeing .
if you look at management theory these days , it used to be that our ideal leader sounded something like general patton , right ?
you would be issuing orders from above .
you would be very hierarchical .
you would tell everyone below you what to do .
but that 's not what an ideal leader is like now .
if you read management books now , a leader is somebody who can foster creativity , who can get his - get the employees - see , i still say " his " - who can get the employees to talk to each other , who can basically build teams and get them to be creative .
and those are all things that women do very well .
and then on top of that , that 's created a kind of cascading effect .
women enter the workplace at the top , and then at the working class , all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home .
so that 's childcare , elder care and food preparation .
so those are all the jobs that are growing , and those are jobs that women tend to do .
now one day it might be that mothers will hire an out-of-work , middle-aged , former steelworker guy to watch their children at home , and that would be good for the men , but that has n't quite happened yet .
to see what 's going to happen , you ca n't just look at the workforce that is now , you have to look at our future workforce .
and here the story is fairly simple .
women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men .
why ? this is a real mystery .
people have asked men , why do n't they just go back to college , to community college , say , and retool themselves , learn a new set of skills ?
well it turns out that they 're just very uncomfortable doing that .
they 're used to thinking of themselves as providers , and they ca n't seem to build the social networks that allow them to get through college .
so for some reason men just do n't end up going back to college .
and what 's even more disturbing is what 's happening with younger boys .
there 's been about a decade of research about what people are calling the " boy crisis . "
now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys , for whatever reason , are doing worse in school than very young girls , and people have theories about that .
is it because we have an excessively verbal curriculum , and little girls are better at that than little boys ?
or that we require kids to sit still too much , and so boys initially feel like failures ?
and some people say it 's because , in 9th grade , boys start dropping out of school .
because i 'm writing a book about all this , i 'm still looking into it , so i do n't have the answer .
but in the mean time , i 'm going to call on the worldwide education expert , who 's my 10-year-old daughter , noa , to talk to you about why the boys in her class do worse .
-lrb- video -rrb- noa : the girls are obviously smarter .
i mean they have much larger vocabulary .
they learn much faster .
they are more controlled .
on the board today for losing recess tomorrow , only boys .
hanna rosin : and why is that ?
noa : why ? they were just not listening to the class while the girls sat there very nicely .
hr : so there you go .
this whole thesis really came home to me when i went to visit a college in kansas city - working-class college .
certainly , when i was in college , i had certain expectations about my life - that my husband and i would both work , and that we would equally raise the children .
but these college girls had a completely different view of their future .
basically , the way they said it to me is that they would be working 18 hours a day , that their husband would maybe have a job , but that mostly he would be at home taking care of the kiddies .
and this was kind of a shocker to me .
and then here 's my favorite quote from one of the girls : " men are the new ball and chain . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now you laugh , but that quote has kind of a sting to it , right ?
and i think the reason it has a sting is because thousands of years of history do n't reverse themselves without a lot of pain , and that 's why i talk about us all going through this together .
the night after i talked to these college girls , i also went to a men 's group in kansas , and these were exactly the kind of victims of the manufacturing economy which i spoke to you about earlier .
they were men who had been contractors , or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom , and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support .
and the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age .
he was telling them they no longer had any moral authority , that nobody needed them for emotional support anymore , and they were not really the providers .
so who were they ?
and this was very disheartening for them .
and what he did was he wrote down on the board " $ 85,000 , " and he said , " that 's her salary , " and then he wrote down " $ 12,000 . "
" that 's your salary .
so who 's the man now ? " he asked them .
" who 's the damn man ?
she 's the man now . "
and that really sent a shudder through the room .
and that 's part of the reason i like to talk about this , because i think it can be pretty painful , and we really have to work through it .
and the other reason it 's kind of urgent is because it 's not just happening in the u.s.
it 's happening all over the world .
in india , poor women are learning english faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in india .
in china , a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses , small businesses , faster than men .
and here 's my favorite example , which is in south korea .
over several decades , south korea built one of the most patriarchal societies we know about .
they basically enshrined the second-class status of women in the civil code .
and if women failed to birth male children , they were basically treated like domestic servants .
and sometimes family would pray to the spirits to kill off a girl child so they could have a male child .
but over the ' 70s and ' 80s , the south korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize , and so what they did was , they started to push women into the workforce .
now they 've been asking a question since 1985 : " how strongly do you prefer a first-born son ? "
and now look at the chart .
that 's from 1985 to 2003 .
how much do you prefer a first-born son ?
so you can see that these economic changes really do have a strong effect on our culture .
now because we have n't fully processed this information , it 's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways , where you can see that the stereotypes are changing .
and so we have on the male side what one of my colleagues likes to call the " omega males " popping up , who are the males who are romantically challenged losers who ca n't find a job .
and they come up in lots of different forms .
so we have the perpetual adolescent .
we have the charmless misanthrope .
then we have our bud light guy who 's the happy couch potato .
and then here 's a shocker : even america 's most sexiest man alive , the sexiest man alive gets romantically played these days in a movie .
and then on the female side , you have the opposite , in which you have these crazy superhero women .
you 've got lady gaga .
you 've got our new james bond , who 's angelina jolie .
and it 's not just for the young , right ?
even helen mirren can hold a gun these days .
and so it feels like we have to move from this place where we 've got these uber-exaggerated images into something that feels a little more normal .
so for a long time in the economic sphere , we 've lived with the term " glass ceiling . "
now i 've never really liked this term .
for one thing , it puts men and women in a really antagonistic relationship with one another , because the men are these devious tricksters up there who 've put up this glass ceiling .
and we 're always below the glass ceiling , the women .
and we have a lot of skill and experience , but it 's a trick , so how are you supposed to prepare to get through that glass ceiling ?
and also , " shattering the glass ceiling " is a terrible phrase .
what crazy person would pop their head through a glass ceiling ?
so the image that i like to think of , instead of glass ceiling , is the high bridge .
it 's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge , but it 's also pretty exhilarating , because it 's beautiful up there , and you 're looking out on a beautiful view .
and the great thing is there 's no trick like with the glass ceiling .
there 's no man or woman standing in the middle about to cut the cables .
there 's no hole in the middle that you 're going to fall through .
and the great thing is that you can take anyone along with you .
you can bring your husband along .
you can bring your friends , or your colleagues , or your babysitter to walk along with you .
and husbands can drag their wives across , if their wives do n't feel ready .
but the point about the high bridge is that you have to have the confidence to know that you deserve to be on that bridge , that you have all the skills and experience you need in order to walk across the high bridge , but you just have to make the decision to take the first step and do it .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a guy named bob mckim .
he was a creativity researcher in the ' 60s and ' 70s , and also led the stanford design program .
and in fact , my friend and ideo founder , david kelley , who 's out there somewhere , studied under him at stanford .
and he liked to do an exercise with his students where he got them to take a piece of paper and draw the person who sat next to them , their neighbor , very quickly , just as quickly as they could .
and in fact , we 're going to do that exercise right now .
you all have a piece of cardboard and a piece of paper .
it 's actually got a bunch of circles on it .
i need you to turn that piece of paper over ; you should find that it 's blank on the other side .
and there should be a pencil .
and i want you to pick somebody that 's seated next to you , and when i say , go , you 've got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor , ok ?
so , everybody ready ? ok . off you go .
you 've got 30 seconds , you 'd better be fast .
come on : those masterpieces ...
ok ? stop . all right , now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes , lot 's of laughter . yeah , exactly .
lots of laughter , quite a bit of embarrassment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- am i hearing a few " sorry 's " ? i think i 'm hearing a few sorry 's .
yup , yup , i think i probably am .
and that 's exactly what happens every time , every time you do this with adults .
mckim found this every time he did it with his students .
he got exactly the same response : lots and lots of sorry 's .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers , and that we 're embarrassed about showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers , to those around us .
and this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking .
so we might have a wild idea , but we 're afraid to share it with anybody else .
ok , so if you try the same exercise with kids , they have no embarrassment at all .
they just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it .
but as they learn to become adults , they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others , and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed .
and in studies of kids playing , it 's been shown time after time that kids who feel secure , who are in a kind of trusted environment - they 're the ones that feel most free to play .
and if you 're starting a design firm , let 's say , then you probably also want to create a place where people have the same kind of security .
where they have the same kind of security to take risks .
maybe have the same kind of security to play .
before founding ideo , david said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends .
now , that was n't just self-indulgence .
he knew that friendship is a short cut to play .
and he knew that it gives us a sense of trust , and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as designers .
and so , that decision to work with his friends - now he has 550 of them - was what got ideo started .
and our studios , like , i think , many creative workplaces today , are designed to help people feel relaxed : familiar with their surroundings , comfortable with the people that they 're working with .
it takes more than decor , but i think we 've all seen that creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful , and that it 's a permissive environment .
so , whether it 's this microbus meeting room that we have in one our buildings at ideo ; or at pixar , where the animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves ; or at the googleplex , where it 's famous for its -lsb- beach -rsb- volleyball courts , and even this massive dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos on it .
do n't know the reason for the pink flamingos , but anyway , they 're there in the garden .
or even in the swiss office of google , which perhaps has the most wacky ideas of all .
and my theory is , that 's so the swiss can prove to their californian colleagues that they 're not boring .
so they have the slide , and they even have a fireman 's pole .
do n't know what they do with that , but they have one .
so all of these places have these symbols .
now , our big symbol at ideo is actually not so much the place , it 's a thing .
and it 's actually something that we invented a few years ago , or created a few years ago .
it 's a toy ; it 's called a " finger blaster . "
and i forgot to bring one up with me .
so if somebody can reach under the chair that 's next to them , you 'll find something taped underneath it .
that 's great . if you could pass it up . thanks , david , i appreciate it .
so this is a finger blaster , and you will find that every one of you has got one taped under your chair .
and i 'm going to run a little experiment . another little experiment .
but before we start , i need just to put these on .
thank you . all right .
now , what i 'm going to do is , i 'm going to see how - i ca n't see out of these , ok .
i 'm going to see how many of you at the back of the room can actually get those things onto the stage .
so the way they work is , you know , you just put your finger in the thing , pull them back , and off you go .
so , do n't look backwards . that 's my only recommendation here .
i want to see how many of you can get these things on the stage .
so come on ! there we go , there we go . thank you . thank you . oh .
i have another idea . i wanted to - there we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you , thank you , thank you .
not bad , not bad . no serious injuries so far .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , they 're still coming in from the back there ; they 're still coming in .
some of you have n't fired them yet .
can you not figure out how to do it , or something ?
it 's not that hard . most of your kids figure out how to do this in the first 10 seconds , when they pick it up .
all right . this is pretty good ; this is pretty good .
okay , all right . let 's - i suppose we 'd better ...
i 'd better clear these up out of the way ; otherwise , i 'm going to trip over them .
all right . so the rest of you can save them for when i say something particularly boring , and then you can fire at me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right . i think i 'm going to take these off now , because i ca n't see a damn thing when i 've - all right , ok .
so , ah , that was fun .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , good .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , ok , so why ?
so we have the finger blasters . other people have dinosaurs , you know .
why do we have them ? well , as i said , we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important .
but why is it important ?
we use it in a pretty pragmatic way , to be honest .
we think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions .
helps us do our jobs better , and helps us feel better when we do them .
now , an adult encountering a new situation - when we encounter a new situation we have a tendency to want to categorize it just as quickly as we can , you know .
and there 's a reason for that : we want to settle on an answer .
life 's complicated ; we want to figure out what 's going on around us very quickly .
i suspect , actually , that the evolutionary biologists probably have lots of reasons -lsb- for -rsb- why we want to categorize new things very , very quickly .
one of them might be , you know , when we see this funny stripy thing : is that a tiger just about to jump out and kill us ?
or is it just some weird shadows on the tree ?
we need to figure that out pretty fast .
well , at least , we did once .
most of us do n't need to anymore , i suppose .
this is some aluminum foil , right ? you use it in the kitchen .
that 's what it is , is n't it ? of course it is , of course it is .
well , not necessarily .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- kids are more engaged with open possibilities .
now , they 'll certainly - when they come across something new , they 'll certainly ask , " what is it ? "
of course they will . but they 'll also ask , " what can i do with it ? "
and you know , the more creative of them might get to a really interesting example .
and this openness is the beginning of exploratory play .
any parents of young kids in the audience ? there must be some .
yeah , thought so . so we 've all seen it , have n't we ?
we 've all told stories about how , on christmas morning , our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them .
and you know , from an exploration perspective , this behavior makes complete sense .
because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy .
even one like , say , tickle me elmo - which , despite its ingenuity , really only does one thing , whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices .
so again , this is another one of those playful activities that , as we get older , we tend to forget and we have to relearn .
so another one of bob mckim 's favorite exercises is called the " 30 circles test . "
so we 're back to work . you guys are going to get back to work again .
turn that piece of paper that you did the sketch on back over , and you 'll find those 30 circles printed on the piece of paper .
so it should look like this . you should be looking at something like this .
so what i 'm going to do is , i 'm going to give you minute , and i want you to adapt as many of those circles as you can into objects of some form .
so for example , you could turn one into a football , or another one into a sun . all i 'm interested in is quantity .
i want you to do as many of them as you can , in the minute that i 'm just about to give you .
so , everybody ready ? ok ? off you go .
okay . put down your pencils , as they say .
so , who got more than five circles figured out ?
hopefully everybody ? more than 10 ?
keep your hands up if you did 10 .
15 ? 20 ? anybody get all 30 ?
no ? oh ! somebody did . fantastic .
did anybody to a variation on a theme ? like a smiley face ?
happy face ? sad face ? sleepy face ? anybody do that ?
anybody use my examples ? the sun and the football ?
great . cool . so i was really interested in quantity .
i was n't actually very interested in whether they were all different .
i just wanted you to fill in as many circles as possible .
and one of the things we tend to do as adults , again , is we edit things .
we stop ourselves from doing things .
we self-edit as we 're having ideas .
and in some cases , our desire to be original is actually a form of editing .
and that actually is n't necessarily really playful .
so that ability just to go for it and explore lots of things , even if they do n't seem that different from each other , is actually something that kids do well , and it is a form of play .
so now , bob mckim did another version of this test in a rather famous experiment that was done in the 1960s .
anybody know what this is ? it 's the peyote cactus .
it 's the plant from which you can create mescaline , one of the psychedelic drugs .
for those of you around in the ' 60s , you probably know it well .
mckim published a paper in 1966 , describing an experiment that he and his colleagues conducted to test the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity .
so he picked 27 professionals - they were engineers , physicists , mathematicians , architects , furniture designers even , artists - and he asked them to come along one evening , and to bring a problem with them that they were working on .
he gave each of them some mescaline , and had them listen to some nice , relaxing music for a while .
and then he did what 's called the purdue creativity test .
you might know it as , " how many uses can you find for a paper clip ? "
it 's basically the same thing as the 30 circles thing that i just had you do .
now , actually , he gave the test before the drugs and after the drugs , to see what the difference was in people 's facility and speed with coming up with ideas .
and then he asked them to go away and work on those problems that they 'd brought .
and they 'd come up with a bunch of interesting solutions - and actually , quite valid solutions - to the things that they 'd been working on .
and so , some of the things that they figured out , some of these individuals figured out ; in one case , a new commercial building and designs for houses that were accepted by clients ; a design of a solar space probe experiment ; a redesign of the linear electron accelerator ; an engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder - you can tell this is a while ago ; the completion of a line of furniture ; and even a new conceptual model of the photon .
so it was a pretty successful evening .
in fact , maybe this experiment was the reason that silicon valley got off to its great start with innovation .
we do n't know , but it may be .
we need to ask some of the ceos whether they were involved in this mescaline experiment .
but really , it was n't the drugs that were important ; it was this idea that what the drugs did would help shock people out of their normal way of thinking , and getting them to forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas .
but it 's hard to break our habits , our adult habits .
at ideo we have brainstorming rules written on the walls .
edicts like , " defer judgment , " or " go for quantity . "
and somehow that seems wrong .
i mean , can you have rules about creativity ?
well , it sort of turns out that we need rules to help us break the old rules and norms that otherwise we might bring to the creative process .
and we 've certainly learnt that over time , you get much better brainstorming , much more creative outcomes when everybody does play by the rules .
now , of course , many designers , many individual designers , achieve this is in a much more organic way .
i think the eameses are wonderful examples of experimentation .
and they experimented with plywood for many years without necessarily having one single goal in mind .
they were exploring following what was interesting to them .
they went from designing splints for wounded soldiers coming out of world war ii and the korean war , i think , and from this experiment they moved on to chairs .
through constant experimentation with materials , they developed a wide range of iconic solutions that we know today , eventually resulting in , of course , the legendary lounge chair .
now , if the eameses had stopped with that first great solution , then we would n't be the beneficiaries of so many wonderful designs today .
and of course , they used experimentation in all aspects of their work , from films to buildings , from games to graphics .
so , they 're great examples , i think , of exploration and experimentation in design .
now , while the eameses were exploring those possibilities , they were also exploring physical objects .
and they were doing that through building prototypes .
and building is the next of the behaviors that i thought i 'd talk about .
so the average western first-grader spends as much as 50 percent of their play time taking part in what 's called " construction play . "
construction play - it 's playful , obviously , but also a powerful way to learn .
when play is about building a tower out of blocks , the kid begins to learn a lot about towers .
and as they repeatedly knock it down and start again , learning is happening as a sort of by-product of play .
it 's classically learning by doing .
now , david kelley calls this behavior , when it 's carried out by designers , " thinking with your hands . "
and it typically involves making multiple , low-resolution prototypes very quickly , often by bringing lots of found elements together in order to get to a solution .
on one of his earliest projects , the team was kind of stuck , and they came up with a mechanism by hacking together a prototype made from a roll-on deodorant .
now , that became the first commercial computer mouse for the apple lisa and the macintosh .
so , they learned their way to that by building prototypes .
another example is a group of designers who were working on a surgical instrument with some surgeons .
they were meeting with them ; they were talking to the surgeons about what it was they needed with this device .
and one of the designers ran out of the room and grabbed a white board marker and a film canister - which is now becoming a very precious prototyping medium - and a clothespin . he taped them all together , ran back into the room and said , " you mean , something like this ? "
and the surgeons grabbed hold of it and said , well , i want to hold it like this , or like that .
and all of a sudden a productive conversation was happening about design around a tangible object .
and in the end it turned into a real device .
and so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world , and having your thinking advanced as a result .
at ideo there 's a kind of a back-to-preschool feel sometimes about the environment .
the prototyping carts , filled with colored paper and play-doh and glue sticks and stuff - i mean , they do have a bit of a kindergarten feel to them .
but the important idea is that everything 's at hand , everything 's around .
so when designers are working on ideas , they can start building stuff whenever they want .
they do n't necessarily even have to go into some kind of formal workshop to do it .
and we think that 's pretty important .
and then the sad thing is , although preschools are full of this kind of stuff , as kids go through the school system it all gets taken away .
they lose this stuff that facilitates this sort of playful and building mode of thinking .
and of course , by the time you get to the average workplace , maybe the best construction tool we have might be the post-it notes . it 's pretty barren .
but by giving project teams and the clients who they 're working with permission to think with their hands , quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily .
this is a nurse using a very simple - as you can see - plasticine prototype , explaining what she wants out of a portable information system to a team of technologists and designers that are working with her in a hospital .
and just having this very simple prototype allows her to talk about what she wants in a much more powerful way .
and of course , by building quick prototypes , we can get out and test our ideas with consumers and users much more quickly than if we 're trying to describe them through words .
but what about designing something that is n't physical ?
something like a service or an experience ?
something that exists as a series of interactions over time ?
instead of building play , this can be approached with role-play .
so , if you 're designing an interaction between two people - such as , i do n't know - ordering food at a fast food joint or something , you need to be able to imagine how that experience might feel over a period of time .
and i think the best way to achieve that , and get a feeling for any flaws in your design , is to act it out .
so we do quite a lot of work at ideo trying to convince our clients of this .
they can be a little skeptical ; i 'll come back to that .
but a place , i think , where the effort is really worthwhile is where people are wrestling with quite serious problems - things like education or security or finance or health .
and this is another example in a healthcare environment of some doctors and some nurses and designers acting out a service scenario around patient care .
but you know , many adults are pretty reluctant to engage with role-play .
some of it 's embarrassment and some of it is because they just do n't believe that what emerges is necessarily valid .
they dismiss an interesting interaction by saying , you know , " that 's just happening because they 're acting it out . "
research into kids ' behavior actually suggests that it 's worth taking role-playing seriously .
because when children play a role , they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they 've learnt from us as adults .
if one kid plays " store , " and another one 's playing " house , " then the whole kind of play falls down .
so they get used to quite quickly to understanding the rules for social interactions , and are actually quite quick to point out when they 're broken .
so when , as adults , we role-play , then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized .
we 've gone through lots of experiences in life , and they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work .
so we 're very good , when acting out a solution , at spotting whether something lacks authenticity .
so role-play is actually , i think , quite valuable when it comes to thinking about experiences .
another way for us , as designers , to explore role-play is to put ourselves through an experience which we 're designing for , and project ourselves into an experience .
so here are some designers who are trying to understand what it might feel like to sleep in a confined space on an airplane .
and so they grabbed some very simple materials , you can see , and did this role-play , this kind of very crude role-play , just to get a sense of what it would be like for passengers if they were stuck in quite small places on airplanes .
this is one of our designers , kristian simsarian , and he 's putting himself through the experience of being an er patient .
now , this is a real hospital , in a real emergency room .
one of the reasons he chose to take this rather large video camera with him was because he did n't want the doctors and nurses thinking he was actually sick , and sticking something into him that he was going to regret later .
so anyhow , he went there with his video camera , and it 's kind of interesting to see what he brought back .
because when we looked at the video when he got back , we saw 20 minutes of this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and also , the amazing thing about this video - as soon as you see it you immediately project yourself into that experience .
and you know what it feels like : all of that uncertainty while you 're left out in the hallway while the docs are dealing with some more urgent case in one of the emergency rooms , wondering what the heck 's going on .
and so this notion of using role-play - or in this case , living through the experience as a way of creating empathy - particularly when you use video , is really powerful .
or another one of our designers , altay sendil : he 's here having his chest waxed , not because he 's very vain , although actually he is - no , i 'm kidding - but in order to empathize with the pain that chronic care patients go through when they 're having dressings removed .
and so sometimes these analogous experiences , analogous role-play , can also be quite valuable .
so when a kid dresses up as a firefighter , you know , he 's beginning to try on that identity .
he wants to know what it feels like to be a firefighter .
we 're doing the same thing as designers .
we 're trying on these experiences .
and so the idea of role-play is both as an empathy tool , as well as a tool for prototyping experiences .
and you know , we kind of admire people who do this at ideo anyway .
not just because they lead to insights about the experience , but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience .
in short , we admire their willingness to play .
playful exploration , playful building and role-play : those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work .
and so far , i admit , this might feel like it 's a message just to go out and play like a kid .
and to certain extent it is , but i want to stress a couple of points .
the first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy .
play has rules , especially when it 's group play .
when kids play tea party , or they play cops and robbers , they 're following a script that they 've agreed to .
and it 's this code negotiation that leads to productive play .
so , remember the sketching task we did at the beginning ?
the kind of little face , the portrait you did ?
well , imagine if you did the same task with friends while you were drinking in a pub .
but everybody agreed to play a game where the worst sketch artist bought the next round of drinks .
that framework of rules would have turned an embarrassing , difficult situation into a fun game .
as a result , we 'd all feel perfectly secure and have a good time - but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together .
but there are n't just rules about how to play ; there are rules about when to play .
kids do n't play all the time , obviously .
they transition in and out of it , and good teachers spend a lot of time thinking about how to move kids through these experiences .
as designers , we need to be able to transition in and out of play also .
and if we 're running design studios we need to be able to figure out , how can we transition designers through these different experiences ?
i think this is particularly true if we think about the sort of - i think what 's very different about design is that we go through these two very distinctive modes of operation .
we go through a sort of generative mode , where we 're exploring many ideas ; and then we come back together again , and come back looking for that solution , and developing that solution .
i think they 're two quite different modes : divergence and convergence .
and i think it 's probably in the divergent mode that we most need playfulness .
perhaps in convergent mode we need to be more serious .
and so being able to move between those modes is really quite important . so , it 's where there 's a more nuanced version view of play , i think , is required .
because it 's very easy to fall into the trap that these states are absolute .
you 're either playful or you 're serious , and you ca n't be both .
but that 's not really true : you can be a serious professional adult and , at times , be playful .
it 's not an either / or ; it 's an " and . "
you can be serious and play .
so to sum it up , we need trust to play , and we need trust to be creative . so , there 's a connection .
and there are a series of behaviors that we 've learnt as kids , and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers .
they include exploration , which is about going for quantity ; building , and thinking with your hands ; and role-play , where acting it out helps us both to have more empathy for the situations in which we 're designing , and to create services and experiences that are seamless and authentic .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about some of my discoveries around the world through my work .
these are not discoveries of planets or new technologies or science .
they 're discoveries of people and the way people are , and new leadership .
this is benki .
benki is a leader of the ashaninka nation .
his people live in brazil and in peru .
benki comes from a village so remote up in the amazon that to get there , either you have to fly and land on water , or go by canoe for several days .
i met benki three years ago in sao paulo when i 'd brought him and other leaders from indigenous peoples to meet with me and leaders from around the world , because we wanted to learn from each other .
we wanted to share our stories with each other .
the ashaninka people are known throughout south america for their dignity , their spirit and their resistance , starting with the incas and continuing through the 19th century with the rubber tappers .
today 's biggest threat to the ashaninka people and to benki comes from illegal logging - the people who come into the beautiful forest and cut down ancient mahogany trees , float them down the river to world markets .
benki knew this .
he could see what was happening to his forest , to his environment , because he was taken under his grandfather 's wing when he was only two years old to begin to learn about the forest and the way of life of his people .
his grandfather died when he was only 10 .
and at that young age , 10 years old , benki became the paje of his community .
now , in the ashaninka tradition and culture , the paje is the most important person in the community .
this is the person who contains within him all the knowledge , all the wisdom of centuries and centuries of life , and not just about his people , but about everything that his people 's survival depended on : the trees , the birds , the water , the soil , the forest .
so when he was only 10 and he became the paje , he began to lead his people .
he began to talk to them about the forest that they needed to protect , the way of life they needed to nurture .
he explained to them that it was not a question of survival of the fittest ; it was a question of understanding what they needed to survive and to protect that .
eight years later , when he was a young man of 18 , benki left the forest for the first time .
he went 3,000 miles on an odyssey to rio to the earth summit to tell the world what was happening in his tiny , little corner .
and he went because he hoped the world would listen .
some did , not everybody .
but if you can imagine this young man with his headdress and his flowing robe , learning a new language , portuguese , not to mention english , going to rio , building a bridge to reach out to people he 'd never met before - a pretty hostile world .
but he was n't dismayed .
benki came back to his village full of ideas - new technologies , new research , new ways of understanding what was going on .
since that time , he 's continued to work with his people , and not only the ashaninka nation , but all the peoples of the amazon and beyond .
he 's built schools to teach children to care for the forest .
together , he 's led the reforestation of over 25 percent of the land that had been destroyed by the loggers .
he 's created a cooperative to help people diversify their livelihoods .
and he 's brought the internet and satellite technology to the forest - both so that people themselves could monitor the deforestation , but also that he could speak from the forest to the rest of the world .
if you were to meet benki and ask him , " why are you doing this ?
why are you putting yourself at risk ?
why are you making yourself vulnerable to what is often a hostile world ? "
he would tell you , as he told me , " i asked myself , " he said , " what did my grandparents and my great-grandparents do to protect the forest for me ?
and what am i doing ? "
so when i think of that , i wonder what our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren , when they ask themselves that question , i wonder how they will answer .
for me , the world is veering towards a future we do n't much want when we really think about it deep inside .
it 's a future we do n't know the details of , but it 's a future that has signs , just like benki saw the signs around him .
we know we are running out of what we need .
we 're running out of fresh water .
we 're running out of fossil fuels .
we 're running out of land .
we know climate change is going to affect all of us .
we do n't know how , but we know it will .
and we know that there will be more of us than ever before - five times as many people in 40 years than 60 years ago .
we are running out of what we need .
and we also know that the world has changed in other ways , that since 1960 there are one-third as many new countries that exist as independent entities on the planet .
egos , systems of government - figuring it out - massive change .
and in addition to that , we know that five other really big countries are going to have a say in the future , a say we have n't even really started to hear yet - china , india , russia , south africa and benki 's own brazil , where benki got his civil rights only in the 1988 constitution .
but you know all that .
you know more than benki knew when he left his forest and went 3,000 miles .
you also know that we ca n't just keep doing what we 've always done , because we 'll get the results we 've always gotten .
and this reminds me of something i understand lord salisbury said to queen victoria over a hundred years ago , when she was pressing him , " please change . "
he said , " change ?
why change ?
things are bad enough as they are . "
we have to change .
it 's imperative to me , when i look around the world , that we need to change ourselves .
we need new models of what it means to be a leader .
we need new models of being a leader and a human in the world .
i started life as a banker .
now i do n't admit to that to anybody but my very close friends .
but for the past eight years , i 've done something completely different .
my work has taken me around the world , where i 've had the real privilege of meeting people like benki and many others who are making change happen in their communities - people who see the world differently , who are asking different questions , who have different answers , who understand the filters that they wear when they go out into the world .
this is sanghamitra .
sanghamitra comes from bangalore .
i met sanghamitra eight years ago when i was in bangalore organizing a workshop with leaders of different ngo 's working in some of the hardest aspects of society .
sanghamitra did n't start life as a leader of an ngo , she started her career as university professor , teaching english literature .
but she realized that she was much too detached from the world doing that .
she loved it , but she was too detached .
and so in 1993 , a long time ago , she decided to start a new organization called samraksha focused on one of the hardest areas , one of the hardest issues in india - anywhere in the world at the time - hiv / aids .
since that time , samraksha has grown from strength to strength and is now one of the leading health ngo 's in india .
but if you just think about the state of the world and knowledge of hiv / aids in 1993 - in india at that time it was skyrocketing and nobody understood why , and everyone was actually very , very afraid .
today there are still three million hiv-positive people in india .
that 's the second largest population in the world .
when i asked sanghamitra , " how did you get from english literature to hiv / aids ? "
not an obvious path , she said to me , " it 's all connected .
literature makes one sensitive , sensitive to people , to their dreams and to their ideas . "
since that time , under her leadership , samraksha has been a pioneer in all fields related to hiv / aids .
they have respite homes , the first , the first care centers , the first counseling services - and not just in urban , 7-million-population bangalore , but in the hardest to reach villages in the state of karnataka .
even that was n't enough .
she wanted to change policy at the government level .
10 of their programs that she pioneered are now government policy and funded by the government .
they take care of 20,000-odd people today in over 1,000 villages around karnataka .
she works with people like murali krishna .
murali krishna comes from one of those villages .
he lost his wife to aids a couple of years ago , and he 's hiv-positive .
but he saw the work , the care , the compassion that sanghamitra and her team brought to the village , and he wanted to be part of it .
he 's a leaders ' quest fellow , and that helps him with his work .
they 've pioneered a different approach to villages .
instead of handing out information in pamphlets , as is so often the case , they bring theater troupes , songs , music , dance .
and they sit around , and they talk about dreams .
sanghamitra told me just last week - she had just come back from two weeks in the villages , and she had a real breakthrough .
they were sitting in a circle , talking about the dreams for the village .
and the young women in the village spoke up and said , " we 've changed our dream .
our dream is for our partners , our husbands , not to be given to us because of a horoscope , because they 've been tested for hiv . "
if you are lucky enough to meet sanghamitra and ask her why and how , how have you achieved so much ?
she would look at you and very quietly , very softly say , " it just happened .
it 's the spirit inside . "
this is dr. fan jianchuan .
jianchuan comes from sichuan province in southwest china .
he was born in 1957 , and you can imagine what his childhood looked like and felt like , and what his life has been like over the last 50 tumultuous years .
he 's been a soldier , a teacher , a politician , a vice-mayor and a business man .
but if you sat down and asked him , " who are you really , and what do you do ? "
he would tell you , " i 'm a collector , and i curate a museum . "
i was lucky ; i had heard about him for years , and i finally met him earlier this year at his museum in chengdu .
he 's been a collector all of his life , starting when he was four or five in the early 1960 's .
now , just think of the early 1960 's in china .
over a lifetime , through everything , through the cultural revolution and everything afterward , he 's kept collecting , so that he now has over eight million pieces in his museums documenting contemporary chinese history .
these are pieces that you wo n't find anywhere else in the world , in part because they document parts of history chinese choose to forget .
for example , he 's got over one million pieces documenting the sino-japanese war , a war that 's not talked about in china very much and whose heroes are not honored .
why did he do all this ?
because he thought a nation should never repeat the mistakes of the past .
so , from commissioning slightly larger than life bronze statues of the heroes of the sino-japanese war , including those chinese who then fought with each other and left mainland china to go to taiwan , to commemorating all the unknown , ordinary soldiers who survived , by asking them to take prints of their hands , he is making sure - one man is making sure - that history is not forgotten .
but it 's not just chinese heroes he cares about .
this building contains the world 's largest collection of documents and artifacts commemorating the u.s. role in fighting on the chinese side in that long war - the flying tigers .
he has nine other buildings - that are already open to the public - filled to the rafters with artifacts documenting contemporary chinese history .
two of the most sensitive buildings include a lifetime of collection about the cultural revolution , a period that actually most chinese would prefer to forget .
but he does n't want his nation ever to forget .
these people inspire me , and they inspire me because they show us what is possible when you change the way you look at the world , change the way you look at your place in the world .
they looked outside , and then they changed what was on the inside .
they did n't go to business school .
they did n't read a manual , " how to be a good leader in 10 easy steps . "
but they have qualities we 'd all recognize .
they have drive , passion , commitment .
they 've gone away from what they did before , and they 've gone to something they did n't know .
they 've tried to connect worlds they did n't know existed before .
they 've built bridges , and they 've walked across them .
they have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it .
they know people have come before them and will follow them .
and they know that they 're part of a whole , that they depend on other people .
it 's not about them , they know that , but it has to start with them .
and they have humility .
it just happens .
but we know it does n't just happen , do n't we ?
we know it takes a lot to make it happen , and we know the direction the world is going in .
so i think we need succession planning on a global basis .
we ca n't wait for the next generation , the new joiners , to come in and learn how to be the good leaders we need .
i think it has to start with us .
and we know , just like they knew , how hard it is .
but the good news is that we do n't have to figure it out as we go along ; we have models , we have examples , like benki and sanghamitra and jianchuan .
we can look at what they 've done , if we look .
we can learn from what they 've learned .
we can change the way we see ourselves in the world .
and if we 're lucky , we can change the way our great-grandchildren will answer benki 's question .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and i feel like this whole evening has been very amazing to me .
i feel it 's sort of like the vimalakirti sutra , an ancient work from ancient india in which the buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area , vaishali , and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him .
all the young people , actually , from the city .
the old fogeys do n't come because they 're mad at buddha , because when he came to their city he accepted - he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him , from whoever it is , and the local geisha , a movie-star sort of person , raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first .
so he was hanging out with the movie star , and of course they were grumbling : " he 's supposed to be religious and all this .
what 's he doing over there at amrapali 's house with all his 500 monks , " and so on . they were all grumbling , and so they boycotted him .
they would n't go listen to him .
but the young people all came .
and they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol , and they put it on the ground .
and as soon as they had laid all these , all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient india , he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium , the wonder of the universe . everyone looked in that , and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes .
and of course , in the buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it , and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets .
so they do n't - when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky - they do n't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding .
they actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that .
he made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected .
and then leilei - i know his other name - told us about interconnection , and how we 're all totally interconnected here , and how we 've all known each other . and of course in the buddhist universe , we 've already done this already billions of times in many , many lifetimes in the past .
and i did n't give the talk always . you did , and we had to watch you , and so forth .
and we 're all still trying to , i guess we 're all trying to become tedsters , if that 's a modern form of enlightenment .
i guess so . because in a way , if a tedster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything , it 's the forging of a mass awareness , of where everybody can really know everything that 's going on everywhere in the planet .
and therefore it will become intolerable - what compassion is , is where it will become intolerable for us , totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoying the life of the mind or whatever it is , and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they can not have a bite of food and they have no place , or they 're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth .
it just becomes intolerable .
with all of us knowing everything , we 're kind of forced by technology to become buddhas or something , to become enlightened .
and of course , we all will be deeply disappointed when we do .
because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do , a little bit tired , we do suffer .
we do enjoy our misery in a certain way .
we distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere , but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there .
and occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other , and each one tries to get out of their own , and ultimately it fails of course , and then we 're back into this thing .
because our egocentric perception - from the buddha 's point of view , misperception - is that all we are is what is inside our skin .
and it 's inside and outside , self and other , and other is all very different .
and everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception , a little bit , right ?
you know , someone sitting next to you in a seat - that 's ok because you 're in a theater , but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you , you 'd freak out .
what do they want from me ? like , who 's that ?
and so you would n't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it 's you versus the universe - that 's all buddha discovered .
because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone , each of us , and everyone else is different , then that puts us in an impossible situation , does n't it ?
who is it who 's going to get enough attention from the world ?
who 's going to get enough out of the world ?
who 's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings - if you 're different from all the other beings ?
so where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way : through art , through meditation , through understanding , through knowledge actually , knowing that you have no such boundary , knowing your interconnectedness with other beings .
you can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them .
when you do that , you 're forced to feel what they feel .
luckily , they say - i still am not sure - but luckily , they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the buddhist literature , they say , " oh who would really want to be compassionate ?
how awful ! i 'm so miserable on my own . my head is aching .
my bones are aching . i go from birth to death . i 'm never satisfied .
i never have enough , even if i 'm a billionaire , i do n't have enough .
i need a hundred billion . " so i 'm like that .
imagine if i had to feel even a hundred other people 's suffering .
it would be terrible .
but apparently , this is a strange paradox of life .
when you 're no longer locked in yourself , and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world , that enables you to let your mind spread out , and empathize , and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing , and realizing that you are the other being , somehow by that opening , you can see the deeper nature of life . and you can , you get away from this terrible iron circle of i , me , me , mine , like the beatles used to sing .
you know , we really learned everything in the ' 60s .
too bad nobody ever woke up to it , and they 've been trying to suppress it since then .
i , me , me , mine . it 's like a perfect song , that song . a perfect teaching .
but when we 're relieved from that , we somehow then become interested in all the other beings .
and we feel ourselves differently . it 's totally strange .
it 's totally strange .
the dalai lama always likes to say - he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion , it 's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence .
it 's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that , or what , you know - and the more you focus on how you feel , by the way , the worse it gets .
like , even when you 're having a good time , when is the good time over ?
the good time is over when you think , how good is it ?
and then it 's never good enough .
i love that leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time , doing it by having a good time .
i think the dalai lama should have heard that . i wish he 'd been there to hear that .
he once told me - he looked kind of sad ; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots .
he looked a little sad , because he said , well , a hundred years ago , they went and took everything away from the haves .
you know , the big communist revolutions , russia and china and so forth .
they took it all away by violence , saying they were going to give it to everyone , and then they were even worse .
they did n't help at all .
so what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today ?
and so then he looks at me .
so i said , " well , you know , you 're all in this yourself . you teach : it 's generosity , " was all i could think of . what is virtue ?
but of course , what you said , i think the key to saving the world , the key to compassion is that it is more fun .
it should be done by fun . generosity is more fun . that 's the key .
everybody has the wrong idea . they think buddha was so boring , and they 're so surprised when they meet dalai lama and he 's fairly jolly .
even though his people are being genocided - and believe me , he feels every blow on every old nun 's head , in every chinese prison . he feels it .
he feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays .
i wo n't even say what they do . but he feels it .
and yet he 's very jolly . he 's extremely jolly .
because when you open up like that , then you ca n't just - what good does it do to add being miserable with others ' misery ?
you have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is , how it can be changed .
look at that beautiful thing chiho showed us . she scared us with the lava man .
she scared us with the lava man is coming , then the tsunami is coming , but then finally there were flowers and trees , and it was very beautiful .
it 's really lovely .
so , compassion means to feel the feelings of others , and the human being actually is compassion .
the human being is almost out of time .
the human being is compassion because what is our brain for ?
now , jim 's brain is memorizing the almanac .
but he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is , he will , he did .
he could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings .
and he would have tremendous fun doing that .
so the first person who gets happy , when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of , how happy am i , where you 're always dissatisfied - as mick jagger told us . you never get any satisfaction that way .
so then you decide , " well , i 'm sick of myself .
i 'm going to think of how other people can be happy .
i 'm going to get up in the morning and think , what can i do for even one other person , even a dog , my dog , my cat , my pet , my butterfly ? "
and the first person who gets happy when you do that , you do n't do anything for anybody else , but you get happier , you yourself , because your whole perception broadens and you suddenly see the whole world and all of the people in it .
and you realize that this - being with these people - is the flower garden that chiho showed us .
it is nirvana .
and my time is up . and i know the ted commandments .
thank you .
i want to help you re-perceive what philanthropy is , what it could be , and what your relationship to it is .
and in doing that , i want to offer you a vision , an imagined future , if you will , of how , as the poet seamus heaney has put it , " once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up , and hope and history rhyme . "
i want to start with these word pairs here .
we all know which side of these we 'd like to be on .
when philanthropy was reinvented a century ago , when the foundation form was actually invented , they did n't think of themselves on the wrong side of these either .
in fact they would never have thought of themselves as closed and set in their ways , as slow to respond to new challenges , as small and risk-averse .
and in fact they were n't . they were reinventing charity in those times , what rockefeller called " the business of benevolence . "
but by the end of the 20th century , a new generation of critics and reformers had come to see philanthropy just this way .
the thing to watch for as a global philanthropy industry comes about - and that 's exactly what is happening - is how the aspiration is to flip these old assumptions , for philanthropy to become open and big and fast and connected , in service of the long term .
this entrepreneurial energy is emerging from many quarters .
and it 's driven and propelled forward by new leaders , like many of the people here , by new tools , like the ones we 've seen here , and by new pressures .
i 've been following this change for quite a while now , and participating in it .
this report is our main public report .
what it tells is the story of how today actually could be as historic as 100 years ago .
what i want to do is share some of the coolest things that are going on with you .
and as i do that , i 'm not going to dwell much on the very large philanthropy that everybody already knows about - the gates or the soros or the google .
instead , what i want to do is talk about the philanthropy of all of us : the democratization of philanthropy .
this is a moment in history when the average person has more power than at any time .
what i 'm going to do is look at five categories of experiments , each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy .
the first is mass collaboration , represented here by wikipedia .
now , this may surprise you .
but remember , philanthropy is about giving of time and talent , not just money .
clay shirky , that great chronicler of everything networked , has captured the assumption that this challenges in such a beautiful way .
he said , " we have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money .
now we have wikipedia .
suddenly big things can be done for love . "
watch , this spring , for paul hawken 's new book - author and entrepreneur many of you may know about .
the book is called " blessed unrest . "
and when it comes out , a series of wiki sites under the label wiser , are going to launch at the same time .
wiser stands for world index for social and environmental responsibility .
wiser sets out to document , link and empower what paul calls the largest movement , and fastest-growing movement in human history : humanity 's collective immune response to today 's threats .
now , all of these big things for love - experiments - are n't going to take off .
but the ones that do are going to be the biggest , the most open , the fastest , the most connected form of philanthropy in human history .
second category is online philanthropy marketplaces .
this is , of course , to philanthropy what ebay and amazon are to commerce .
think of it as peer-to-peer philanthropy .
and this challenges yet another assumption , which is that organized philanthropy is only for the very wealthy .
take a look , if you have n't , at donorschoose .
omidyar network has made a big investment in donorschoose .
it 's one of the best known of these new marketplaces where a donor can go straight into a classroom and connect with what a teacher says they need .
take a look at changing the present , started by a tedster , next time you need a wedding present or a holiday present .
giveindia is for a whole country .
and it goes on and on .
the third category is represented by warren buffet , which i call aggregated giving .
it 's not just that warren buffet was so amazingly generous in that historic act last summer .
it 's that he challenged another assumption , that every giver should have his or her own fund or foundation .
there are now , today , so many new funds that are aggregating giving and investing , bringing together people around a common goal , to think bigger .
one of the best known is acumen fund , led by jacqueline novogratz , a tedster who got a big boost here at ted .
but there are many others : new profit in cambridge , new school 's venture fund in silicon valley , venture philanthropy partners in washington , global fund for women in san francisco .
take a look at these .
these funds are to philanthropy what venture capital , private equity , and eventually mutual funds are to investing , but with a twist - because often a community forms around these funds , as it has at acumen and other places .
now , imagine for a second these first three types of experiments : mass collaboration , online marketplaces , aggregated giving .
and understand how they help us re-perceive what organized philanthropy is .
it 's not about foundations necessarily ; it 's about the rest of us .
and imagine the mash-up , if you will , of these things , in the future , when these things come together in the experiments of the future - imagine that somebody puts up , say , 100 million dollars for an inspiring goal - there were 21 gifts of 100 million dollars or more in the us last year , not out of the question - but only puts it up if it 's matched by millions of small gifts from around the globe , thereby engaging lots of people , and building visibility and engaging people in the goal that 's stated .
i 'm going to look quickly at the fourth and fifth categories , which are innovation , competitions and social investing .
they 're betting a visible competition , a prize , can attract talent and money to some of the most difficult issues , and thereby speed the solution .
this tackles yet another assumption , that the giver and the organization is at the center , as opposed to putting the problem at the center .
you can look to these innovators to help us especially with things that require technological or scientific solution .
that leaves the final category , social investing , which is really , anyway , the biggest of them all , represented here by xigi.net.
and this , of course , tackles the biggest assumption of all , that business is business , and philanthropy is the vehicle of people who want to create change in the world .
xigi is a new community site that 's built by the community , linking and mapping this new social capital market .
it lists already 1,000 entities that are offering debt and equity for social enterprise .
so we can look to these innovators to help us remember that if we can leverage even a small amount of the capital that seeks a return , the good that can be driven could be astonishing .
now , what 's really interesting here is that we 're not thinking our way into a new way of acting ; we 're acting our way into a new way of thinking .
philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes .
and even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers do n't yet fulfill this aspiration , i think this is the new zeitgeist : open , big , fast , connected , and , let us also hope , long .
we have got to realize that it is going to take a long time to do these things .
if we do n't develop the stamina to stick with things - whatever it is you pick , stick with it - all of this stuff is just going to be , you know , a fad .
but i 'm really hopeful .
and i 'm hopeful because it 's not only philanthropy that 's reorganizing itself , it 's also whole other portions of the social sector , and of business , that are busy challenging " business as usual . "
and everywhere i go , including here at ted , i feel that there is a new moral hunger that is growing .
what we 're seeing is people really wrestling to describe what is this new thing that 's happening .
words like " philanthrocapitalism , " and " natural capitalism , " and " philanthroentrepreneur , " and " venture philanthropy . "
we do n't have a language for it yet .
whatever we call it , it 's new , it 's beginning , and i think it 's gong to quite significant .
and that 's where my imagined future comes in , which i am going to call the social singularity .
many of you will realize that i 'm ripping a bit off of the science fiction writer vernor vinge 's notion of a technological singularity , where a number of trends accelerate and converge and come together to create , really , a shockingly new reality .
it may be that the social singularity ahead is the one that we fear the most : a convergence of catastrophes , of environmental degradation , of weapons of mass destruction , of pandemics , of poverty .
that 's because our ability to confront the problems that we face has not kept pace with our ability to create them .
and as we 've heard here , it is no exaggeration to say that we hold the future of our civilization in our hands as never before .
the question is , is there a positive social singularity ?
is there a frontier for us of how we live together ?
our future does n't have to be imagined .
we can create a future where hope and history rhyme .
but we have a problem .
our experience to date , both individually and collectively , has n't prepared us for what we 're going to need to do , or who we 're going to need to be .
we are going to need a new generation of citizen leaders willing to commit ourselves to growing and changing and learning as rapidly as possible .
that 's why i have one last thing i want to show you .
this is a photograph taken about 100 years ago of my grandfather and great-grandfather .
this is a newspaper publisher and a banker .
and they were great community leaders .
and , yes , they were great philanthropists .
i keep this photograph close by to me - it 's in my office - because i 've always felt a mystical connection to these two men , both of whom i never knew .
and so , in their honor , i want to offer you this blank slide .
and i want you to imagine that this a photograph of you .
and i want you to think about the community that you want to be part of creating .
whatever that means to you .
and i want you to imagine that it 's 100 years from now , and your grandchild , or great-grandchild , or niece or nephew or god-child , is looking at this photograph of you .
what is the story you most want for them to tell ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so security is two different things : it 's a feeling , and it 's a reality .
and they 're different .
you could feel secure even if you 're not .
and you can be secure even if you do n't feel it .
really , we have two separate concepts mapped onto the same word .
and what i want to do in this talk is to split them apart - figuring out when they diverge and how they converge .
and language is actually a problem here .
there are n't a lot of good words for the concepts we 're going to talk about .
so if you look at security from economic terms , it 's a trade-off .
every time you get some security , you 're always trading off something .
whether this is a personal decision - whether you 're going to install a burglar alarm in your home - or a national decision - where you 're going to invade some foreign country - you 're going to trade off something , either money or time , convenience , capabilities , maybe fundamental liberties .
and the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer , but whether it 's worth the trade-off .
you 've heard in the past several years , the world is safer because saddam hussein is not in power .
that might be true , but it 's not terribly relevant .
the question is , was it worth it ?
and you can make your own decision , and then you 'll decide whether the invasion was worth it .
that 's how you think about security - in terms of the trade-off .
now there 's often no right or wrong here .
some of us have a burglar alarm system at home , and some of us do n't .
and it 'll depend on where we live , whether we live alone or have a family , how much cool stuff we have , how much we 're willing to accept the risk of theft .
in politics also , there are different opinions .
a lot of times , these trade-offs are about more than just security , and i think that 's really important .
now people have a natural intuition about these trade-offs .
we make them every day - last night in my hotel room , when i decided to double-lock the door , or you in your car when you drove here , when we go eat lunch and decide the food 's not poison and we 'll eat it .
we make these trade-offs again and again , multiple times a day .
we often wo n't even notice them .
they 're just part of being alive ; we all do it .
every species does it .
imagine a rabbit in a field , eating grass , and the rabbit 's going to see a fox .
that rabbit will make a security trade-off : " should i stay , or should i flee ? "
and if you think about it , the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce , and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve .
so you 'd think that us , as a successful species on the planet - you , me , everybody - would be really good at making these trade-offs .
yet it seems , again and again , that we 're hopelessly bad at it .
and i think that 's a fundamentally interesting question .
i 'll give you the short answer .
the answer is , we respond to the feeling of security and not the reality .
now most of the time , that works .
feeling and reality are the same .
certainly that 's true for most of human prehistory .
we 've developed this ability because it makes evolutionary sense .
one way to think of it is that we 're highly optimized for risk decisions that are endemic to living in small family groups in the east african highlands in 100,000 b.c.
2010 new york , not so much .
now there are several biases in risk perception .
a lot of good experiments in this .
and you can see certain biases that come up again and again .
so i 'll give you four .
we tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks - so flying versus driving .
the unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar .
one example would be , people fear kidnapping by strangers when the data supports kidnapping by relatives is much more common .
this is for children .
third , personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks - so bin laden is scarier because he has a name .
and the fourth is people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they do n't control .
so once you take up skydiving or smoking , you downplay the risks .
if a risk is thrust upon you - terrorism was a good example - you 'll overplay it because you do n't feel like it 's in your control .
there are a bunch of other of these biases , these cognitive biases , that affect our risk decisions .
there 's the availability heuristic , which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind .
so you can imagine how that works .
if you hear a lot about tiger attacks , there must be a lot of tigers around .
you do n't hear about lion attacks , there are n't a lot of lions around .
this works until you invent newspapers .
because what newspapers do is they repeat again and again rare risks .
i tell people , if it 's in the news , do n't worry about it .
because by definition , news is something that almost never happens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when something is so common , it 's no longer news - car crashes , domestic violence - those are the risks you worry about .
we 're also a species of storytellers .
we respond to stories more than data .
and there 's some basic innumeracy going on .
i mean , the joke " one , two , three , many " is kind of right .
we 're really good at small numbers .
one mango , two mangoes , three mangoes , 10,000 mangoes , 100,000 mangoes - it 's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot .
so one half , one quarter , one fifth - we 're good at that .
one in a million , one in a billion - they 're both almost never .
so we have trouble with the risks that are n't very common .
and what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality .
and the result is that feeling and reality get out of whack , they get different .
now you either have a feeling - you feel more secure than you are .
there 's a false sense of security .
or the other way , and that 's a false sense of insecurity .
i write a lot about " security theater , " which are products that make people feel secure , but do n't actually do anything .
there 's no real word for stuff that makes us secure , but does n't make us feel secure .
maybe it 's what the cia 's supposed to do for us .
so back to economics .
if economics , if the market , drives security , and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security , then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives are to make people feel secure .
and there are two ways to do this .
one , you can make people actually secure and hope they notice .
or two , you can make people just feel secure and hope they do n't notice .
so what makes people notice ?
well a couple of things : understanding of the security , of the risks , the threats , the countermeasures , how they work .
but if you know stuff , you 're more likely to have your feelings match reality .
enough real world examples helps .
now we all know the crime rate in our neighborhood , because we live there , and we get a feeling about it that basically matches reality .
security theater 's exposed when it 's obvious that it 's not working properly .
okay , so what makes people not notice ?
well , a poor understanding .
if you do n't understand the risks , you do n't understand the costs , you 're likely to get the trade-off wrong , and your feeling does n't match reality .
not enough examples .
there 's an inherent problem with low probability events .
if , for example , terrorism almost never happens , it 's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures .
this is why you keep sacrificing virgins , and why your unicorn defenses are working just great .
there are n't enough examples of failures .
also , feelings that are clouding the issues - the cognitive biases i talked about earlier , fears , folk beliefs , basically an inadequate model of reality .
so let me complicate things .
i have feeling and reality .
i want to add a third element . i want to add model .
feeling and model in our head , reality is the outside world .
it does n't change ; it 's real .
so feeling is based on our intuition .
model is based on reason .
that 's basically the difference .
in a primitive and simple world , there 's really no reason for a model because feeling is close to reality .
you do n't need a model .
but in a modern and complex world , you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face .
there 's no feeling about germs .
you need a model to understand them .
so this model is an intelligent representation of reality .
it 's , of course , limited by science , by technology .
we could n't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them .
it 's limited by our cognitive biases .
but it has the ability to override our feelings .
where do we get these models ? we get them from others .
we get them from religion , from culture , teachers , elders .
a couple years ago , i was in south africa on safari .
the tracker i was with grew up in kruger national park .
he had some very complex models of how to survive .
and it depended on if you were attacked by a lion or a leopard or a rhino or an elephant - and when you had to run away , and when you could n't run away , and when you had to climb a tree - when you could never climb a tree .
i would have died in a day , but he was born there , and he understood how to survive .
i was born in new york city .
i could have taken him to new york , and he would have died in a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because we had different models based on our different experiences .
models can come from the media , from our elected officials .
think of models of terrorism , child kidnapping , airline safety , car safety .
models can come from industry .
the two i 'm following are surveillance cameras , id cards , quite a lot of our computer security models come from there .
a lot of models come from science .
health models are a great example .
think of cancer , of bird flu , swine flu , sars .
all of our feelings of security about those diseases come from models given to us , really , by science filtered through the media .
so models can change .
models are not static .
as we become more comfortable in our environments , our model can move closer to our feelings .
so an example might be , if you go back 100 years ago when electricity was first becoming common , there were a lot of fears about it .
i mean , there were people who were afraid to push doorbells , because there was electricity in there , and that was dangerous .
for us , we 're very facile around electricity .
we change light bulbs without even thinking about it .
our model of security around electricity is something we were born into .
it has n't changed as we were growing up .
and we 're good at it .
or think of the risks on the internet across generations - how your parents approach internet security , versus how you do , versus how our kids will .
models eventually fade into the background .
intuitive is just another word for familiar .
so as your model is close to reality , and it converges with feelings , you often do n't know it 's there .
so a nice example of this came from last year and swine flu .
when swine flu first appeared , the initial news caused a lot of overreaction .
now it had a name , which made it scarier than the regular flu , even though it was more deadly .
and people thought doctors should be able to deal with it .
so there was that feeling of lack of control .
and those two things made the risk more than it was .
as the novelty wore off , the months went by , there was some amount of tolerance , people got used to it .
there was no new data , but there was less fear .
by autumn , people thought the doctors should have solved this already .
and there 's kind of a bifurcation - people had to choose between fear and acceptance - actually fear and indifference - they kind of chose suspicion .
and when the vaccine appeared last winter , there were a lot of people - a surprising number - who refused to get it - as a nice example of how people 's feelings of security change , how their model changes , sort of wildly with no new information , with no new input .
this kind of thing happens a lot .
i 'm going to give one more complication .
we have feeling , model , reality .
i have a very relativistic view of security .
i think it depends on the observer .
and most security decisions have a variety of people involved .
and stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision .
and i call that their agenda .
and you see agenda - this is marketing , this is politics - trying to convince you to have one model versus another , trying to convince you to ignore a model and trust your feelings , marginalizing people with models you do n't like .
this is not uncommon .
an example , a great example , is the risk of smoking .
in the history of the past 50 years , the smoking risk shows how a model changes , and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it does n't like .
compare that to the secondhand smoke debate - probably about 20 years behind .
think about seat belts .
when i was a kid , no one wore a seat belt .
nowadays , no kid will let you drive if you 're not wearing a seat belt .
compare that to the airbag debate - probably about 30 years behind .
all examples of models changing .
what we learn is that changing models is hard .
models are hard to dislodge .
if they equal your feelings , you do n't even know you have a model .
and there 's another cognitive bias i 'll call confirmation bias , where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs .
so evidence against our model , we 're likely to ignore , even if it 's compelling .
it has to get very compelling before we 'll pay attention .
new models that extend long periods of time are hard .
global warming is a great example .
we 're terrible at models that span 80 years .
we can do to the next harvest .
we can often do until our kids grow up .
but 80 years , we 're just not good at .
so it 's a very hard model to accept .
we can have both models in our head simultaneously , right , that kind of problem where we 're holding both beliefs together , right , the cognitive dissonance .
eventually , the new model will replace the old model .
strong feelings can create a model .
september 11th created a security model in a lot of people 's heads .
also , personal experiences with crime can do it , personal health scare , a health scare in the news .
you 'll see these called flashbulb events by psychiatrists .
they can create a model instantaneously , because they 're very emotive .
so in the technological world , we do n't have experience to judge models .
and we rely on others . we rely on proxies .
i mean , this works as long as it 's to correct others .
we rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe .
i flew here yesterday .
i did n't check the airplane .
i relied on some other group to determine whether my plane was safe to fly .
we 're here , none of us fear the roof is going to collapse on us , not because we checked , but because we 're pretty sure the building codes here are good .
it 's a model we just accept pretty much by faith .
and that 's okay .
now , what we want is people to get familiar enough with better models - have it reflected in their feelings - to allow them to make security trade-offs .
now when these go out of whack , you have two options .
one , you can fix people 's feelings , directly appeal to feelings .
it 's manipulation , but it can work .
the second , more honest way is to actually fix the model .
change happens slowly .
the smoking debate took 40 years , and that was an easy one .
some of this stuff is hard .
i mean really though , information seems like our best hope .
and i lied .
remember i said feeling , model , reality ; i said reality does n't change . it actually does .
we live in a technological world ; reality changes all the time .
so we might have - for the first time in our species - feeling chases model , model chases reality , reality 's moving - they might never catch up .
we do n't know .
but in the long-term , both feeling and reality are important .
and i want to close with two quick stories to illustrate this .
1982 - i do n't know if people will remember this - there was a short epidemic of tylenol poisonings in the united states .
it 's a horrific story . someone took a bottle of tylenol , put poison in it , closed it up , put it back on the shelf .
someone else bought it and died .
this terrified people .
there were a couple of copycat attacks .
there was n't any real risk , but people were scared .
and this is how the tamper-proof drug industry was invented .
those tamper-proof caps , that came from this .
it 's complete security theater .
as a homework assignment , think of 10 ways to get around it .
i 'll give you one , a syringe .
but it made people feel better .
it made their feeling of security more match the reality .
last story , a few years ago , a friend of mine gave birth .
i visit her in the hospital .
it turns out when a baby 's born now , they put an rfid bracelet on the baby , put a corresponding one on the mother , so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward , an alarm goes off .
i said , " well , that 's kind of neat .
i wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals . "
i go home , i look it up .
it basically never happens .
but if you think about it , if you are a hospital , and you need to take a baby away from its mother , out of the room to run some tests , you better have some good security theater , or she 's going to rip your arm off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's important for us , those of us who design security , who look at security policy , or even look at public policy in ways that affect security .
it 's not just reality ; it 's feeling and reality .
what 's important is that they be about the same .
it 's important that , if our feelings match reality , we make better security trade-offs .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how do you observe something you ca n't see ?
this is the basic question of somebody who 's interested in finding and studying black holes .
because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it , not even light , so you ca n't see it directly .
so , my story today about black holes is about one particular black hole .
i 'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive , what we like to call " supermassive " black hole at the center of our galaxy .
and the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist .
and second , it gives us the opportunity to understand how these supermassive black holes interact with their environment , and to understand how they affect the formation and evolution of the galaxies which they reside in .
so , to begin with , we need to understand what a black hole is so we can understand the proof of a black hole .
so , what is a black hole ?
well , in many ways a black hole is an incredibly simple object , because there are only three characteristics that you can describe : the mass , the spin , and the charge .
and i 'm going to only talk about the mass .
so , in that sense , it 's a very simple object .
but in another sense , it 's an incredibly complicated object that we need relatively exotic physics to describe , and in some sense represents the breakdown of our physical understanding of the universe .
but today , the way i want you to understand a black hole , for the proof of a black hole , is to think of it as an object whose mass is confined to zero volume .
so , despite the fact that i 'm going to talk to you about an object that 's supermassive , and i 'm going to get to what that really means in a moment , it has no finite size .
so , this is a little tricky .
but fortunately there is a finite size that you can see , and that 's known as the schwarzschild radius .
and that 's named after the guy who recognized why it was such an important radius .
this is a virtual radius , not reality ; the black hole has no size .
so why is it so important ?
it 's important because it tells us that any object can become a black hole .
that means you , your neighbor , your cellphone , the auditorium can become a black hole if you can figure out how to compress it down to the size of the schwarzschild radius .
at that point , what 's going to happen ?
at that point gravity wins .
gravity wins over all other known forces .
and the object is forced to continue to collapse to an infinitely small object .
and then it 's a black hole .
so , if i were to compress the earth down to the size of a sugar cube , it would become a black hole , because the size of a sugar cube is its schwarzschild radius .
now , the key here is to figure out what that schwarzschild radius is .
and it turns out that it 's actually pretty simple to figure out .
it depends only on the mass of the object .
bigger objects have bigger schwarzschild radii .
smaller objects have smaller schwarzschild radii .
so , if i were to take the sun and compress it down to the scale of the university of oxford , it would become a black hole .
so , now we know what a schwarzschild radius is .
and it 's actually quite a useful concept , because it tells us not only when a black hole will form , but it also gives us the key elements for the proof of a black hole .
i only need two things .
i need to understand the mass of the object i 'm claiming is a black hole , and what its schwarzschild radius is .
and since the mass determines the schwarzschild radius , there is actually only one thing i really need to know .
so , my job in convincing you that there is a black hole is to show that there is some object that 's confined to within its schwarzschild radius .
and your job today is to be skeptical .
okay , so , i 'm going to talk about no ordinary black hole ; i 'm going to talk about supermassive black holes .
so , i wanted to say a few words about what an ordinary black hole is , as if there could be such a thing as an ordinary black hole .
an ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star 's life .
so , if a star starts its life off with much more mass than the mass of the sun , it 's going to end its life by exploding and leaving behind these beautiful supernova remnants that we see here .
and inside that supernova remnant is going to be a little black hole that has a mass roughly three times the mass of the sun .
on an astronomical scale that 's a very small black hole .
now , what i want to talk about are the supermassive black holes .
and the supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of galaxies .
and this beautiful picture taken with the hubble space telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes .
there are big ones . there are little ones .
almost every object in that picture there is a galaxy .
and there is a very nice spiral up in the upper left .
and there are a hundred billion stars in that galaxy , just to give you a sense of scale .
and all the light that we see from a typical galaxy , which is the kind of galaxies that we 're seeing here , comes from the light from the stars .
so , we see the galaxy because of the star light .
now , there are a few relatively exotic galaxies .
i like to call these the prima donna of the galaxy world , because they are kind of show offs .
and we call them active galactic nuclei .
and we call them that because their nucleus , or their center , are very active .
so , at the center there , that 's actually where most of the starlight comes out from .
and yet , what we actually see is light that ca n't be explained by the starlight .
it 's way more energetic .
in fact , in a few examples it 's like the ones that we 're seeing here .
there are also jets emanating out from the center .
again , a source of energy that 's very difficult to explain if you just think that galaxies are composed of stars .
so , what people have thought is that perhaps there are supermassive black holes which matter is falling on to .
so , you ca n't see the black hole itself , but you can convert the gravitational energy of the black hole into the light we see .
so , there is the thought that maybe supermassive black holes exist at the center of galaxies .
but it 's a kind of indirect argument .
nonetheless , it 's given rise to the notion that maybe it 's not just these prima donnas that have these supermassive black holes , but rather all galaxies might harbor these supermassive black holes at their centers .
and if that 's the case - and this is an example of a normal galaxy ; what we see is the star light .
and if there is a supermassive black hole , what we need to assume is that it 's a black hole on a diet .
because that is the way to suppress the energetic phenomena that we see in active galactic nuclei .
if we 're going to look for these stealth black holes at the center of galaxies , the best place to look is in our own galaxy , our milky way .
and this is a wide field picture taken of the center of the milky way .
and what we see is a line of stars .
and that is because we live in a galaxy which has a flattened , disk-like structure .
and we live in the middle of it , so when we look towards the center , we see this plane which defines the plane of the galaxy , or line that defines the plane of the galaxy .
now , the advantage of studying our own galaxy is it 's simply the closest example of the center of a galaxy that we 're ever going to have , because the next closest galaxy is 100 times further away .
so , we can see far more detail in our galaxy than anyplace else .
and as you 'll see in a moment , the ability to see detail is key to this experiment .
so , how do astronomers prove that there is a lot of mass inside a small volume ?
which is the job that i have to show you today .
and the tool that we use is to watch the way stars orbit the black hole .
stars will orbit the black hole in the very same way that planets orbit the sun .
it 's the gravitational pull that makes these things orbit .
if there were no massive objects these things would go flying off , or at least go at a much slower rate because all that determines how they go around is how much mass is inside its orbit .
so , this is great , because remember my job is to show there is a lot of mass inside a small volume .
so , if i know how fast it goes around , i know the mass .
and if i know the scale of the orbit i know the radius .
so , i want to see the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible .
because i want to show there is a mass inside as small a region as possible .
so , this means that i want to see a lot of detail .
and that 's the reason that for this experiment we 've used the world 's largest telescope .
this is the keck observatory . it hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters , which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court .
now , this is wonderful , because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope , the smaller the detail that we can see .
but it turns out these telescopes , or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise .
and that is because of the atmosphere .
atmosphere is great for us ; it allows us to survive here on earth .
but it 's relatively challenging for astronomers who want to look through the atmosphere to astronomical sources .
so , to give you a sense of what this is like , it 's actually like looking at a pebble at the bottom of a stream .
looking at the pebble on the bottom of the stream , the stream is continuously moving and turbulent , and that makes it very difficult to see the pebble on the bottom of the stream .
very much in the same way , it 's very difficult to see astronomical sources , because of the atmosphere that 's continuously moving by .
so , i 've spent a lot of my career working on ways to correct for the atmosphere , to give us a cleaner view .
and that buys us about a factor of 20 .
and i think all of you can agree that if you can figure out how to improve life by a factor of 20 , you 've probably improved your lifestyle by a lot , say your salary , you 'd notice , or your kids , you 'd notice .
and this animation here shows you one example of the techniques that we use , called adaptive optics .
you 're seeing an animation that goes between an example of what you would see if you do n't use this technique - in other words , just a picture that shows the stars - and the box is centered on the center of the galaxy , where we think the black hole is .
so , without this technology you ca n't see the stars .
with this technology all of a sudden you can see it .
this technology works by introducing a mirror into the telescope optics system that 's continuously changing to counteract what the atmosphere is doing to you .
so , it 's kind of like very fancy eyeglasses for your telescope .
now , in the next few slides i 'm just going to focus on that little square there .
so , we 're only going to look at the stars inside that small square , although we 've looked at all of them .
so , i want to see how these things have moved .
and over the course of this experiment , these stars have moved a tremendous amount .
so , we 've been doing this experiment for 15 years , and we see the stars go all the way around .
now , most astronomers have a favorite star , and mine today is a star that 's labeled up there , so-2 .
absolutely my favorite star in the world .
and that 's because it goes around in only 15 years .
and to give you a sense of how short that is , the sun takes 200 million years to go around the center of the galaxy .
stars that we knew about before , that were as close to the center of the galaxy as possible , take 500 years .
and this one , this one goes around in a human lifetime .
that 's kind of profound , in a way .
but it 's the key to this experiment . the orbit tells me how much mass is inside a very small radius .
so , next we see a picture here that shows you before this experiment the size to which we could confine the mass of the center of the galaxy .
what we knew before is that there was four million times the mass of the sun inside that circle .
and as you can see , there was a lot of other stuff inside that circle .
you can see a lot of stars .
so , there was actually lots of alternatives to the idea that there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy , because you could put a lot of stuff in there .
but with this experiment , we 've confined that same mass to a much smaller volume that 's 10,000 times smaller .
and because of that , we 've been able to show that there is a supermassive black hole there .
to give you a sense of how small that size is , that 's the size of our solar system .
so , we 're cramming four million times the mass of the sun into that small volume .
now , truth in advertising . right ?
i have told you my job is to get it down to the schwarzchild radius .
and the truth is , i 'm not quite there .
but we actually have no alternative today to explaining this concentration of mass .
and , in fact , it 's the best evidence we have to date for not only existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy , but any in our universe .
so , what next ? i actually think this is about as good as we 're going to do with today 's technology , so let 's move on with the problem .
so , what i want to tell you , very briefly , is a few examples of the excitement of what we can do today at the center of the galaxy , now that we know that there is , or at least we believe , that there is a supermassive black hole there .
and the fun phase of this experiment is , while we 've tested some of our ideas about the consequences of a supermassive black hole being at the center of our galaxy , almost every single one has been inconsistent with what we actually see .
and that 's the fun .
so , let me give you the two examples .
you can ask , " what do you expect for the old stars , stars that have been around the center of the galaxy for a long time , they 've had plenty of time to interact with the black hole . "
what you expect there is that old stars should be very clustered around the black hole .
you should see a lot of old stars next to that black hole .
likewise , for the young stars , or in contrast , the young stars , they just should not be there .
a black hole does not make a kind neighbor to a stellar nursery .
to get a star to form , you need a big ball of gas and dust to collapse .
and it 's a very fragile entity .
and what does the big black hole do ?
it strips that gas cloud apart .
it pulls much stronger on one side than the other and the cloud is stripped apart .
in fact , we anticipated that star formation should n't proceed in that environment .
so , you should n't see young stars .
so , what do we see ?
using observations that are not the ones i 've shown you today , we can actually figure out which ones are old and which ones are young .
the old ones are red .
the young ones are blue . and the yellow ones , we do n't know yet .
so , you can already see the surprise .
there is a dearth of old stars .
there is an abundance of young stars , so it 's the exact opposite of the prediction .
so , this is the fun part .
and in fact , today , this is what we 're trying to figure out , this mystery of how do you get - how do you resolve this contradiction .
so , in fact , my graduate students are , at this very moment , today , at the telescope , in hawaii , making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage , where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars , and so few old stars .
to make further progress we really need to look at the orbits of stars that are much further away .
to do that we 'll probably need much more sophisticated technology than we have today .
because , in truth , while i said we 're correcting for the earth 's atmosphere , we actually only correct for half the errors that are introduced .
we do this by shooting a laser up into the atmosphere , and what we think we can do is if we shine a few more that we can correct the rest .
so this is what we hope to do in the next few years .
and on a much longer time scale , what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes , because , remember , bigger is better in astronomy .
so , we want to build a 30 meter telescope .
and with this telescope we should be able to see stars that are even closer to the center of the galaxy .
and we hope to be able to test some of einstein 's theories of general relativity , some ideas in cosmology about how galaxies form .
so , we think the future of this experiment is quite exciting .
so , in conclusion , i 'm going to show you an animation that basically shows you how these orbits have been moving , in three dimensions .
and i hope , if nothing else , i 've convinced you that , one , we do in fact have a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy .
and this means that these things do exist in our universe , and we have to contend with this , we have to explain how you can get these objects in our physical world .
second , we 've been able to look at that interaction of how supermassive black holes interact , and understand , maybe , the role in which they play in shaping what galaxies are , and how they work .
and last but not least , none of this would have happened without the advent of the tremendous progress that 's been made on the technology front .
and we think that this is a field that is moving incredibly fast , and holds a lot in store for the future .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- welcome . if i could have the first slide , please ?
contrary to calculations made by some engineers , bees can fly , dolphins can swim , and geckos can even climb up the smoothest surfaces . now , what i want to do , in the short time i have , is to try to allow each of you to experience the thrill of revealing nature 's design .
i get to do this all the time , and it 's just incredible .
i want to try to share just a little bit of that with you in this presentation .
the challenge of looking at nature 's designs - and i 'll tell you the way that we perceive it , and the way we 've used it .
the challenge , of course , is to answer this question : what permits this extraordinary performance of animals that allows them basically to go anywhere ?
and if we could figure that out , how can we implement those designs ?
well , many biologists will tell engineers , and others , organisms have millions of years to get it right ; they 're spectacular ; they can do everything wonderfully well .
so , the answer is bio-mimicry : just copy nature directly .
we know from working on animals that the truth is that 's exactly what you do n't want to do - because evolution works on the just-good-enough principle , not on a perfecting principle .
and the constraints in building any organism , when you look at it , are really severe . natural technologies have incredible constraints .
think about it . if you were an engineer and i told you that you had to build an automobile , but it had to start off to be this big , then it had to grow to be full size and had to work every step along the way .
or think about the fact that if you build an automobile , i 'll tell you that you also - inside it - have to put a factory that allows you to make another automobile .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you can absolutely never , absolutely never , because of history and the inherited plan , start with a clean slate .
so , organisms have this important history .
really evolution works more like a tinkerer than an engineer .
and this is really important when you begin to look at animals .
instead , we believe you need to be inspired by biology .
you need to discover the general principles of nature , and then use these analogies when they 're advantageous .
this is a real challenge to do this , because animals , when you start to really look inside them - how they work - appear hopelessly complex . there 's no detailed history of the design plans , you ca n't go look it up anywhere .
they have way too many motions for their joints , too many muscles .
even the simplest animal we think of , something like an insect , and they have more neurons and connections than you can imagine .
how can you make sense of this ? well , we believed - and we hypothesized - that one way animals could work simply , is if the control of their movements tended to be built into their bodies themselves .
what we discovered was that two- , four- , six- and eight-legged animals all produce the same forces on the ground when they move .
they all work like this kangaroo , they bounce .
and they can be modeled by a spring-mass system that we call the spring mass system because we 're biomechanists . it 's actually a pogo stick .
they all produce the pattern of a pogo stick . how is that true ?
well , a human , one of your legs works like two legs of a trotting dog , or works like three legs , together as one , of a trotting insect , or four legs as one of a trotting crab .
and then they alternate in their propulsion , but the patterns are all the same . almost every organism we 've looked at this way - you 'll see next week , i 'll give you a hint , there 'll be an article coming out that says that really big things like t. rex probably could n't do this , but you 'll see that next week .
now , what 's interesting is the animals , then - we said - bounce along the vertical plane this way , and in our collaborations with pixar , in " a bug 's life , " we discussed the bipedal nature of the characters of the ants .
and we told them , of course , they move in another plane as well .
and they asked us this question . they say , " why model just in the sagittal plane or the vertical plane , when you 're telling us these animals are moving in the horizontal plane ? " this is a good question .
nobody in biology ever modeled it this way .
we took their advice and we modeled the animals moving in the horizontal plane as well . we took their three legs , we collapsed them down as one .
we got some of the best mathematicians in the world from princeton to work on this problem .
and we were able to create a model where animals are not only bouncing up and down , but they 're also bouncing side to side at the same time .
and many organisms fit this kind of pattern .
now , why is this important to have this model ?
because it 's very interesting . when you take this model and you perturb it , you give it a push , as it bumps into something , it self-stabilizes , with no brain or no reflexes , just by the structure alone .
it 's a beautiful model . let 's look at the mathematics .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's enough !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the animals , when you look at them running , appear to be self-stabilizing like this , using basically springy legs . that is , the legs can do computations on their own ; the control algorithms , in a sense , are embedded in the form of the animal itself .
why have n't we been more inspired by nature and these kinds of discoveries ?
well , i would argue that human technologies are really different from natural technologies , at least they have been so far .
think about the typical kind of robot that you see .
human technologies have tended to be large , flat , with right angles , stiff , made of metal . they have rolling devices and axles . there are very few motors , very few sensors .
whereas nature tends to be small , and curved , and it bends and twists , and has legs instead , and appendages , and has many muscles and many , many sensors .
so it 's a very different design . however , what 's changing , what 's really exciting - and i 'll show you some of that next - is that as human technology takes on more of the characteristics of nature , then nature really can become a much more useful teacher .
and here 's one example that 's really exciting .
this is a collaboration we have with stanford .
and they developed this new technique , called shape deposition manufacturing .
it 's a technique where they can mix materials together and mold any shape that they like , and put in the material properties .
they can embed sensors and actuators right in the form itself .
for example , here 's a leg : the clear part is stiff , the white part is compliant , and you do n't need any axles there or anything .
it just bends by itself beautifully .
so , you can put those properties in . it inspired them to show off this design by producing a little robot they named sprawl .
our work has also inspired another robot , a biologically inspired bouncing robot , from the university of michigan and mcgill named rhex , for robot hexapod , and this one 's autonomous .
let 's go to the video , and let me show you some of these animals moving and then some of the simple robots that have been inspired by our discoveries .
here 's what some of you did this morning , although you did it outside , not on a treadmill .
here 's what we do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a death 's head cockroach . this is an american cockroach you think you do n't have in your kitchen .
this is an eight-legged scorpion , six-legged ant , forty-four-legged centipede .
now , i said all these animals are sort of working like pogo sticks - they 're bouncing along as they move . and you can see that in this ghost crab , from the beaches of panama and north carolina .
it goes up to four meters per second when it runs .
it actually leaps into the air , and has aerial phases when it does it , like a horse , and you 'll see it 's bouncing here .
what we discovered is whether you look at the leg of a human like richard , or a cockroach , or a crab , or a kangaroo , the relative leg stiffness of that spring is the same for everything we 've seen so far .
now , what good are springy legs then ? what can they do ?
well , we wanted to see if they allowed the animals to have greater stability and maneuverability .
so , we built a terrain that had obstacles three times the hip height of the animals that we 're looking at .
and we were certain they could n't do this . and here 's what they did .
the animal ran over it and it did n't even slow down !
it did n't decrease its preferred speed at all .
we could n't believe that it could do this . it said to us that if you could build a robot with very simple , springy legs , you could make it as maneuverable as any that 's ever been built .
here 's the first example of that . this is the stanford shape deposition manufactured robot , named sprawl .
it has six legs - there are the tuned , springy legs .
it moves in a gait that an insect uses , and here it is going on the treadmill . now , what 's important about this robot , compared to other robots , is that it ca n't see anything , it ca n't feel anything , it does n't have a brain , yet it can maneuver over these obstacles without any difficulty whatsoever .
it 's this technique of building the properties into the form .
this is a graduate student . this is what he 's doing to his thesis project - very robust , if a graduate student does that to his thesis project .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is from mcgill and university of michigan . this is the rhex , making its first outing in a demo .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- same principle : it only has six moving parts , six motors , but it has springy , tuned legs . it moves in the gait of the insect .
it has the middle leg moving in synchrony with the front , and the hind leg on the other side . sort of an alternating tripod , and they can negotiate obstacles just like the animal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- voice : oh my god . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- robert full : it 'll go on different surfaces - here 's sand - although we have n't perfected the feet yet , but i 'll talk about that later .
here 's rhex entering the woods .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- again , this robot ca n't see anything , it ca n't feel anything , it has no brain . it 's just working with a tuned mechanical system , with very simple parts , but inspired from the fundamental dynamics of the animal .
-lrb- voice : ah , i love him , bob . -rrb- rf : here 's it going down a pathway .
i presented this to the jet propulsion lab at nasa , and they said that they had no ability to go down craters to look for ice , and life , ultimately , on mars . and he said - especially with legged-robots , because they 're way too complicated .
nothing can do that . and i talk next . i showed them this video with the simple design of rhex here . and just to convince them we should go to mars in 2011 , i tinted the video orange just to give them the sense of being on mars .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- another reason why animals have extraordinary performance , and can go anywhere , is because they have an effective interaction with the environment . the animal i 'm going to show you , that we studied to look at this , is the gecko .
we have one here and notice its position . it 's holding on .
now i 'm going to challenge you . i 'm going show you a video .
one of the animals is going to be running on the level , and the other one 's going to be running up a wall . which one 's which ?
they 're going at a meter a second . how many think the one on the left is running up the wall ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay . the point is it 's really hard to tell , is n't it ? it 's incredible , we looked at students do this and they could n't tell .
they can run up a wall at a meter a second , 15 steps per second , and they look like they 're running on the level . how do they do this ?
it 's just phenomenal . the one on the right was going up the hill .
how do they do this ? they have bizarre toes . they have toes that uncurl like party favors when you blow them out , and then peel off the surface , like tape .
like if we had a piece of tape now , we 'd peel it this way .
they do this with their toes . it 's bizarre ! this peeling inspired irobot - that we work with - to build mecho-geckos .
here 's a legged version and a tractor version , or a bulldozer version .
let 's see some of the geckos move with some video , and then i 'll show you a little bit of a clip of the robots .
here 's the gecko running up a vertical surface . there it goes , in real time . there it goes again . obviously , we have to slow this down a little bit .
you ca n't use regular cameras .
you have to take 1,000 pictures per second to see this .
and here 's some video at 1,000 frames per second .
now , i want you to look at the animal 's back .
do you see how much it 's bending like that ? we ca n't figure that out - that 's an unsolved mystery . we do n't know how it works .
if you have a son or a daughter that wants to come to berkeley , come to my lab and we 'll figure this out . okay , send them to berkeley because that 's the next thing i want to do . here 's the gecko mill .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a see-through treadmill with a see-through treadmill belt , so we can watch the animal 's feet , and videotape them through the treadmill belt , to see how they move .
here 's the animal that we have here , running on a vertical surface .
pick a foot and try to watch a toe , and see if you can see what the animal 's doing .
see it uncurl and then peel these toes .
it can do this in 14 milliseconds . it 's unbelievable .
here are the robots that they inspire , the mecho-geckos from irobot .
first we 'll see the animals toes peeling - look at that .
and here 's the peeling action of the mecho-gecko .
it uses a pressure-sensitive adhesive to do it .
peeling in the animal . peeling in the mecho-gecko - that allows them climb autonomously . can go on the flat surface , transition to a wall , and then go onto a ceiling .
there 's the bulldozer version . now , it does n't use pressure-sensitive glue .
the animal does not use that .
but that 's what we 're limited to , at the moment .
what does the animal do ? the animal has weird toes .
and if you look at the toes , they have these little leaves there , and if you blow them up and zoom in , you 'll see that 's there 's little striations in these leaves .
and if you zoom in 270 times , you 'll see it looks like a rug .
and if you blow that up , and zoom in 900 times , you see there are hairs there , tiny hairs . and if you look carefully , those tiny hairs have striations . and if you zoom in on those 30,000 times , you 'll see each hair has split ends .
and if you blow those up , they have these little structures on the end .
the smallest branch of the hairs looks like spatulae , and an animal like that has one billion of these nano-size split ends , to get very close to the surface . in fact , there 's the diameter of your hair - a gecko has two million of these , and each hair has 100 to 1,000 split ends .
think of the contact of that that 's possible .
we were fortunate to work with another group at stanford that built us a special manned sensor , that we were able to measure the force of an individual hair .
here 's an individual hair with a little split end there .
when we measured the forces , they were enormous .
they were so large that a patch of hairs about this size - the gecko 's foot could support the weight of a small child , about 40 pounds , easily . now , how do they do it ?
we 've recently discovered this . do they do it by friction ?
no , force is too low . do they do it by electrostatics ?
no , you can change the charge - they still hold on .
do they do it by interlocking ? that 's kind of a like a velcro-like thing .
no , you can put them on molecular smooth surfaces - they do n't do it .
how about suction ? they stick on in a vacuum .
how about wet adhesion ? or capillary adhesion ?
they do n't have any glue , and they even stick under water just fine .
if you put their foot under water , they grab on .
how do they do it then ? believe it or not , they grab on by intermolecular forces , by van der waals forces .
you know , you probably had this a long time ago in chemistry , where you had these two atoms , they 're close together , and the electrons are moving around . that tiny force is sufficient to allow them to do that because it 's added up so many times with these small structures .
what we 're doing is , we 're taking that inspiration of the hairs , and with another colleague at berkeley , we 're manufacturing them .
and just recently we 've made a breakthrough , where we now believe we 're going to be able to create the first synthetic , self-cleaning , dry adhesive . many companies are interested in this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we also presented to nike even .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- we 'll see where this goes . we were so excited about this that we realized that that small-size scale - and where everything gets sticky , and gravity does n't matter anymore - we needed to look at ants and their feet , because one of my other colleagues at berkeley has built a six-millimeter silicone robot with legs . but it gets stuck . it does n't move very well .
but the ants do , and we 'll figure out why , so that ultimately we 'll make this move . and imagine : you 're going to be able to have swarms of these six-millimeter robots available to run around .
where 's this going ? i think you can see it already .
clearly , the internet is already having eyes and ears , you have web cams and so forth . but it 's going to also have legs and hands .
you 're going to be able to do programmable work through these kinds of robots , so that you can run , fly and swim anywhere . we saw david kelly is at the beginning of that with his fish .
so , in conclusion , i think the message is clear .
if you need a message , if nature 's not enough , if you care about search and rescue , or mine clearance , or medicine , or the various things we 're working on , we must preserve nature 's designs , otherwise these secrets will be lost forever .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is ryan lobo , and i 've been involved in the documentary filmmaking business all over the world for the last 10 years .
during the process of making these films i found myself taking photographs , often much to the annoyance of the video cameramen .
i found this photography of mine almost compulsive .
and at the end of a shoot , i would sometimes feel that i had photographs that told a better story than a sometimes-sensational documentary .
i felt , when i had my photographs , that i was holding on to something true , regardless of agendas or politics .
in 2007 , i traveled to three war zones .
i traveled to iraq , afghanistan and liberia .
and over there i experienced other people 's suffering , up close and personal , immersed myself in some rather intense and emotional stories , and at times i experienced great fear for my own life .
as always , i would return to bangalore , and often to animated discussions at friend 's homes , where we would discuss various issues while they complained bitterly about the new pub timings , where a drink often cost more than what they 'd paid their 14-year-old maid .
i would feel very isolated during these discussions .
but at the same time , i questioned myself and my own integrity and purpose in storytelling .
and i decided that i had compromised , just like my friends in those discussions , where we told stories in contexts we made excuses for , rather than taking responsibility for .
i wo n't go into details about what led to a decision i made , but let 's just say it involved alcohol , cigarettes , other substances and a woman .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i basically decided that it was i , not the camera or the network , or anything that lay outside myself , that was the only instrument in storytelling truly worth tuning .
in my life , when i tried to achieve things like success or recognition , they eluded me .
paradoxically , when i let go of these objectives , and worked from a place of compassion and purpose , looking for excellence , rather than the results of it , everything arrived on its own , including fulfillment .
photography transcended culture , including my own .
and it is , for me , a language which expressed the intangible , and gives voice to people and stories without .
i invite you into three recent stories of mine , which are about this way of looking , if you will , which i believe exemplify the tenets of what i like to call compassion in storytelling .
in 2007 i went to liberia , where a group of my friends and i did an independent , self-funded film , still in progress , on a very legendary and brutal war-lord named general butt naked .
his real name is joshua , and he 's pictured here in a cell where he once used to torture and murder people , including children .
joshua claims to have personally killed more than 10,000 people during liberia 's civil war .
he got his name from fighting stark naked .
and he is probably the most prolific mass murderer alive on earth today .
this woman witnessed the general murdering her brother .
joshua commanded his child-soldiers to commit unspeakable crimes , and enforced his command with great brutality .
today many of these children are addicted to drugs like heroin , and they are destitute , like these young men in the image .
how do you live with yourself if you know you 've committed horrific crimes ?
today the general is a baptized christian evangelist .
and he 's on a mission .
we accompanied joshua , as he walked the earth , visiting villages where he had once killed and raped .
he seeked forgiveness , and he claims to endeavor to improve the lives of his child-soldiers .
during this expedition i expected him to be killed outright , and us as well .
but what i saw opened my eyes to an idea of forgiveness which i never thought possible .
in the midst of incredible poverty and loss , people who had nothing absolved a man who had taken everything from them .
he begs for forgiveness , and receives it from the same woman whose brother he murdered .
senegalese , the young man seated on the wheelchair here , was once a child soldier , under the general 's command , until he disobeyed orders , and the general shot off both his legs .
he forgives the general in this image .
he risked his life as he walked up to people whose families he 'd murdered .
in this photograph a hostile crowd in a slum surrounds him .
and joshua remains silent as they vented their rage against him .
this image , to me , is almost like from a shakespearean play , with a man , surrounded by various influences , desperate to hold on to something true within himself , in a context of great suffering that he has created himself .
i was intensely moved during all this .
but the question is , does forgiveness and redemption replace justice ?
joshua , in his own words , says that he does not mind standing trial for his crimes , and speaks about them from soapboxes across monrovia , to an audience that often includes his victims .
a very unlikely spokesperson for the idea of separation of church and state .
the second story i 'm going to tell you about is about a group of very special fighting women with rather unique peace-keeping skills .
liberia has been devastated by one of africa 's bloodiest civil wars , which has left more than 200,000 people dead , thousands of women scarred by rape and crime on a spectacular scale .
liberia is now home to an all-woman united nations contingent of indian peacekeepers .
these women , many from small towns in india , help keep the peace , far away from home and family .
they use negotiation and tolerance more often than an armed response .
the commander told me that a woman could gauge a potentially violent situation much better than men .
and that they were definitely capable of diffusing it non-aggressively .
this man was very drunk , and he was very interested in my camera , until he noticed the women , who handled him with smiles , and ak-47s at the ready , of course .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this contingent seems to be quite lucky , and it has not sustained any casualties , even though dozens of peacekeepers have been killed in liberia .
and yes , all of those people killed were male .
many of the women are married with children , and they say the hardest part of their deployment was being kept away from their children .
i accompanied these women on their patrols , and watched as they walked past men , many who passed very lewd comments incessantly .
and when i asked one of the women about the shock and awe response , she said , " do n't worry , same thing back home .
we know how to deal with these fellows , " and ignored them .
in a country ravaged by violence against women , indian peacekeepers have inspired many local women to join the police force .
sometimes , when the war is over and all the film crews have left , the most inspiring stories are the ones that float just beneath the radar .
i came back to india and nobody was interested in buying the story .
and one editor told me that she was n't interested in doing what she called " manual labor stories . "
in 2007 and 2009 i did stories on the delhi fire service , the dfs , which , during the summer , is probably the world 's most active fire department .
they answer more than 5,000 calls in just two months .
and all this against incredible logistical odds , like heat and traffic jams .
something amazing happened during this shoot .
due to a traffic jam , we were late in getting to a slum , a large slum , which had caught fire .
as we neared , angry crowds attacked our trucks and stoned them , by hundreds of people all over the place .
these men were terrified , as the mob attacked our vehicle .
but nonetheless , despite the hostility , firefighters left the vehicle and successfully fought the fire .
running the gauntlet through hostile crowds , and some wearing motorbike helmets to prevent injury .
some of the local people forcibly took away the hoses from the firemen to put out the fire in their homes .
now , hundreds of homes were destroyed .
but the question that lingered in my mind was , what causes people to destroy fire trucks headed to their own homes ?
where does such rage come from ?
and how are we responsible for this ?
45 percent of the 14 million people who live in delhi live in unauthorized slums , which are chronically overcrowded .
they lack even the most basic amenities .
and this is something that is common to all our big cities .
back to the dfs . a huge chemical depot caught fire , thousands of drums filled with petrochemicals were blazing away and exploding all around us .
the heat was so intense , that hoses were used to cool down firefighters fighting extremely close to the fire , and with no protective clothing .
in india we often love to complain about our government bodies .
but over here , the heads of the dfs , mr. r.c. sharman , mr. a.k. sharman , led the firefight with their men .
something wonderful in a country where manual labor is often looked down upon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over the years , my faith in the power of storytelling has been tested .
and i 've had very serious doubt about its efficacy , and my own faith in humanity .
however , a film we shot still airs on the national geographic channel .
and when it airs i get calls from all the guys i was with and they tell me that they receive hundreds of calls congratulating them .
some of the firemen told me that they were also inspired to do better because they were so pleased to get thank-yous rather than brick bats .
it seems that this story helped change perceptions about the dfs , at least in the minds of an audience in part on televisions , read magazines and whose huts are n't on fire .
sometimes , focusing on what 's heroic , beautiful and dignified , regardless of the context , can help magnify these intangibles three ways , in the protagonist of the story , in the audience , and also in the storyteller .
and that 's the power of storytelling .
focus on what 's dignified , courageous and beautiful , and it grows . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling , but whose streets we ca n't walk .
by studying those twinkling lights though , we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life .
in this image of the tokyo skyline , i 've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block , the kepler mission .
can you see it ?
there we go .
this is just a tiny part of the sky the kepler stares at , where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars , all at once , every half hour , and very precisely .
and what we 're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us .
in just over two years of operations , we 've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars .
to give you some perspective , in the previous two decades of searching , we had only known about 400 prior to kepler .
when we see these little dips in the light , we can determine a number of things .
for one thing , we can determine that there 's a planet there , but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star .
that distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall .
and that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it 's a little like you or i sitting around a campfire : you want to be close enough to the campfire so that you 're warm , but not so close that you 're too toasty and you get burned .
however , there 's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall .
and i 'll tell you why .
this is our star . this is our sun .
it 's shown here in visible light .
that 's the light that you can see with your own human eyes .
you 'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball - that sun that we all draw when we 're children .
but you 'll notice something else , and that 's that the face of the sun has freckles .
these freckles are called sunspots , and they are just one of the manifestations of the sun 's magnetic field .
they also cause the light from the star to vary .
and we can measure this very , very precisely with kepler and trace their effects .
however , these are just the tip of the iceberg .
if we had uv eyes or x-ray eyes , we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our sun 's magnetic activity - the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well .
just think , even when it 's cloudy outside , these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time .
so when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable , whether it might be amenable to life , we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is , but we want to know about its space weather - this high-energy radiation , the uv and the x-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation .
and so , we ca n't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system .
i 'm showing here venus , earth and mars - three planets in our own solar system that are roughly the same size , but only one of which is really a good place to live .
but what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe .
kepler wo n't find a planet around every single star it looks at .
but really , every measurement it makes is precious , because it 's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets , and how it 's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe .
while it 's kepler the telescope , the instrument that stares , it 's we , life , who are searching .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope .
i am a native of burkina faso .
according to the world bank , burkina faso is one of the poorest countries in the world , but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that ?
i am an example of that .
i was born in a little village called gando .
in gando , there was no electricity , no access to clean drinking water , and no school .
but my father wanted me to learn how to read and write .
for this reason , i had to leave my family when i was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family .
in this place i sat in a class like that with more than 150 other kids , and for six years .
in this time , it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died .
today , not so much has changed .
there is still no electricity in my village .
people still are dying in burkina faso , and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem .
i had luck . i was lucky , because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that .
but i was lucky .
i had a scholarship .
i could go to germany to study .
so now , i suppose , i do n't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today .
from gando , my home village in burkina faso , to berlin in germany to become an architect is a big , big step .
but what to do with this privilege ?
since i was a student , i wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in gando .
i just wanted to use my skills and build a school .
but how do you do it when you 're still a student and you do n't have money ?
oh yes , i started to make drawings and asked for money .
fundraising was not an easy task .
i even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes , but to sponsor my school project .
in real wonder , two years later , i was able to collect 50,000 u.s. dollars .
when i came home to gando to bring the good news , my people were over the moon , but when they realized that i was planning to use clay , they were shocked .
" a clay building is not able to stand a rainy season , and francis wants us to use it and build a school .
is this the reason why he spent so much time in europe studying instead of working in the field with us ? "
my people build all the time with clay , but they do n't see any innovation with mud .
so i had to convince everybody .
i started to speak with the community , and i could convince everybody , and we could start to work .
and the women , the men , everybody from the village , was part of this building process .
i was allowed to use even traditional techniques .
so clay floor for example , the young men come and stand like that , beating , hours for hours , and then their mothers came , and they are beating in this position , for hours , giving water and beating .
and then the polishers come .
they start polishing it with a stone for hours .
and then you have this result , very fine , like a baby bottom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's not photoshopped . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the school , built with the community .
the walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from gando .
the roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete .
and the classroom , the ceiling is made out of both of them used together .
in this school , there was a simple idea : to create comfort in a classroom .
do n't forget , it can be 45 degrees in burkina faso , so with simple ventilation , i wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning .
and this is the project today , 12 years old , still in best condition .
and the kids , they love it .
and for me and my community , this project was a huge success .
it has opened up opportunities to do more projects in gando .
so i could do a lot of projects , and here i am going to share with you only three of them .
the first one is the school extension , of course .
how do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write ?
i started to build a prototype like that .
the innovation was to build a clay vault .
so then , i jumped on the top like that , with my team , and it works .
the community is looking . it still works .
so we can build . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we kept building , and that is the result .
the kids are happy , and they love it .
the community is very proud . we made it .
and even animals , like these donkeys , love our buildings .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next project is the library in gando .
and see now , we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings , but we often do n't have so much material .
something we have in gando are clay pots .
we wanted to use them to create openings .
so we just bring them like you can see to the building site .
we start cutting them , and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete , and you have this result .
the openings are letting the hot air out and light in .
very simple .
my most recent project in gando is a high school project .
i would like to share with you this .
the innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete .
how do you cast mud ?
we start making a lot of mortars , like you can see , and when everything is ready , when you know what is the best recipe and the best form , you start working with the community .
and sometimes i can leave .
they will do it themselves .
i came to speak to you like that .
another factor in gando is rain .
when the rains come , we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain .
do n't confound with christo and jeanne-claude .
it is simply how we protect our walls .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the rain in burkina comes very fast , and after that , you have floods everywhere in the country .
but for us , the rain is good .
it brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build .
we just wait for the rain to go .
we take the sand , we mix it with clay , and we keep building .
that is it .
the gando project was always connected to training the people , because i just wanted , one day when i fall down and die , that at least one person from gando keeps doing this work .
but you will be surprised . i 'm still alive .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves .
usually , for a young man from gando to earn money , you have to leave the country to the city , sometimes leave the country and some never come back , making the community weaker .
but now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family .
there 's a new quality in this work .
yes , you know it .
i have won a lot of awards through this work .
for sure , it has opened opportunities .
i have become myself known .
but the reason why i do what i do is my community .
when i was a kid , i was going to school , i was coming back every holiday to gando .
by the end of every holidays , i had to say goodbye to the community , going from one compound to another one .
all women in gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny .
in my culture , this is a symbol of deep affection .
as a seven-year-old guy , i was impressed .
i just asked my mother one day , " why do all these women love me so much ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she just answered , " they are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community . "
i hope now that i was able to make my community proud through this work , and i hope i was able to prove you the power of community , and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future .
merci beaucoup . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . thank you . thank you .
thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here because i have a very important message : i think we have found the most important factor for success .
and it was found close to here , stanford .
psychology professor took kids that were four years old and put them in a room all by themselves .
and he would tell the child , a four-year-old kid , " johnny , i am going to leave you here with a marshmallow for 15 minutes .
if , after i come back , this marshmallow is here , you will get another one . so you will have two . "
to tell a four-year-old kid to wait 15 minutes for something that they like , is equivalent to telling us , " we 'll bring you coffee in two hours . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- exact equivalent .
so what happened when the professor left the room ?
as soon as the door closed ...
two out of three ate the marshmallow .
five seconds , 10 seconds , 40 seconds , 50 seconds , two minutes , four minutes , eight minutes .
some lasted 14-and-a-half minutes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- could n't do it . could not wait .
what 's interesting is that one out of three would look at the marshmallow and go like this ...
would look at it .
put it back .
they would walk around . they would play with their skirts and pants .
that child already , at four , understood the most important principle for success , which is the ability to delay gratification .
self-discipline : the most important factor for success .
15 years later , 14 or 15 years later , follow-up study .
what did they find ?
they went to look for these kids who were now 18 and 19 .
and they found that 100 percent of the children that had not eaten the marshmallow were successful .
they had good grades . they were doing wonderful .
they were happy . they had their plans .
they had good relationships with the teachers , students .
they were doing fine .
a great percentage of the kids that ate the marshmallow , they were in trouble .
they did not make it to university .
they had bad grades . some of them dropped out .
a few were still there with bad grades .
a few had good grades .
i had a question in my mind : would hispanic kids react the same way as the american kids ?
so i went to colombia . and i reproduced the experiment .
and it was very funny . i used four , five and six years old kids .
and let me show you what happened .
-lrb- spanish -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so what happened in colombia ?
hispanic kids , two out of three ate the marshmallow ; one out of three did not .
this little girl was interesting ; she ate the inside of the marshmallow .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in other words , she wanted us to think that she had not eaten it , so she would get two .
but she ate it .
so we know she 'll be successful . but we have to watch her .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she should not go into banking , for example , or work at a cash register .
but she will be successful .
and this applies for everything . even in sales .
the sales person that - the customer says , " i want that . " and the person says , " okay , here you are . "
that person ate the marshmallow .
if the sales person says , " wait a second .
let me ask you a few questions to see if this is a good choice . "
then you sell a lot more .
so this has applications in all walks of life .
i end with - the koreans did this .
you know what ? this is so good that we want a marshmallow book for children .
we did one for children . and now it is all over korea .
they are teaching these kids exactly this principle .
and we need to learn that principle here in the states , because we have a big debt .
we are eating more marshmallows than we are producing .
thank you so much .
you know , one of the things that i 'd like to say upfront is that i 'm really here by accident .
and what i mean - not at ted - that i 'm - at this point in my life , truly my set of circumstances i would truly consider an accident .
but what i 'd like to talk to you about today is perhaps a way in which we could use technology to make those accidents happen often .
because i really think , when i look back at how i actually ended up in this accident , technology played a big role in that .
so , what i 'd like to do today is tell you a little bit about myself , because i 'd like to put in context what i 'm going to tell you .
and i think you will see why the two greatest passions in my life today are children and education .
and once i put that in context , i 'd like to tell you a little bit about technology : why i believe technology is a tremendous enabler ; a very powerful tool to help address some of these challenges .
then , about the initiative that chris mentioned , that we decided to launch at amd that we call 50x15 .
and then i 'll come back to the beginning , and tell you a little bit more - hopefully convince you - that i believe that in today 's world , it is really important for business leaders not only to have an idea of what their business is all about , but to have a passion for something that is meaningful .
so , with that in mind , first of all let me tell you , i 'm one of five children . i 'm the oldest , the other four are women .
so i grew up in a family of women .
i learned a lot about how to deal with that part of the world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , as you can imagine , if you can picture this : i was born in a very small village in mexico , in , unfortunately , very poor surroundings , and my parents did not have a college education .
but i was fortunate to be able to have one , and so were my four sisters .
that kind of tells you a little bit of an idea of the emphasis that my parents placed on education .
my parents were fanatics about learning , and i 'll come back to that a little bit later .
but one of the things that exposed me early to learning , and a tremendous curiosity that was instilled in me as a child , was through a technology which is on the screen - is a victrola .
my father found that in a junkyard , and was able to repair it and make it work . and somehow - to this day , i frankly do n't know how he was so aware of what was going on in the world - but , by inviting me to sit down with him when i was only a few years old , and playing records in this victrola by mozart , and he would tell me how mozart was the most romantic of all the classic composers ever , and how claire de lune , which was one of his favorites , was a real exposure to me to classical music .
he explained to me about johann strauss , and how he created the waltzes that became so famous in the world .
and would tell me a little bit about history too , when he 'd play the 1812 overture by tchaikovsky on this little victrola , and he would tell me about russia and all the things that were happening in russia at those times and why this music , in some way , represented a little bit of that history .
and even as a child , he was able to instill in me a lot of curiosity .
and perhaps to you this product may not look like high tech , but if you can imagine the time when this occurred - it was in the mid ' 40s - this was really , in his view , a pretty piece of high tech .
well , one of the things that is really critical to try to distill from that experience is that in addition to that , people ask me and say , " well , how did your parents treat you when you were a child ? "
and i always said that they were really tough on me .
and not tough in the sense that most people think of , where your parents yell at you or hit you or whatever .
they were tough in the sense that , as i grew up , both my mother and father would always say to me , it 's really important that you always remember two things .
first of all , when you go to bed at night , you 've got to look back on the day and make sure that you felt the day was a day which you contributed something , and that you did everything you could to do it the best way you could .
and the second thing they said : and we trust you , that no matter where you are or where you go , you will always do the right thing .
now , i do n't know how many of you have ever done that with your kids , but if you do , please trust me , it 's the most pressure you can put on a child , to say - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we trust you that you will always do the right thing .
when i was out with my friends drinking beer , i always was very aware of those words - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and very careful . one of the things that has happened with technology is that it can only be helpful if it is useful , of course , but it can only be helpful too if it 's accessible , and it can only be helpful if it 's affordable .
and in today 's world , being useful , affordable and accessible is not necessarily what happens in a lot of the technology that is done today .
so , one of our passions in our company , and now one of my personal passions , is to be able to really work hard at making the technology useful , accessible and affordable .
and to me , that is very , very critical .
now , technology has changed a lot since the victrola days .
you know , we now have , of course , incredibly powerful computers .
a tremendous thing that people refer to as a killer app is called the internet .
although frankly speaking , we do n't believe the internet is the killer app .
what we believe is that the internet , frankly , is a connection of people and ideas .
the internet happens to be just the medium in which those people and ideas get connected .
and the power of connecting people and ideas can be pretty awesome .
and so , we believe that through all the changes that have occurred , that we 're faced today with a tremendous opportunity .
if we can connect people and ideas more intensely - and although you 've seen a plethora and a myriad of products that have come to the market today , the key to me is how many of these products are able to provide people connectivity , in a useful way , accessibility , in an easy manner , and also affordability , that regardless of the economic status that a person could have , that they could have the opportunity to afford this technology .
so , when you look at that , we said , well , we would like to , then , enable that a little bit . we would like to create an initiative .
and a couple of years ago at amd , we came up with this idea of saying , what if we create this initiative we call 50x15 , where we are going to aim , that by the year 2015 , half of the world will be connected to the internet so that people and ideas can get connected .
we knew we could n't do it by ourselves , and by no means did we ever intend to imply that we at amd could do it alone .
we always felt that this was something that could be done through partnerships with governments , industry , educational institutions , a myriad of other companies and , frankly , even competitors .
so , it is really a rather lofty initiative , if you want to think that way , but we felt that we had to put a real stake up in the years ahead , that was bold enough and courageous enough that it would force us all to think of ways to do things differently .
and i 'll come back to that in a minute , because i think the results so far have been remarkable , and i can only anticipate and get real excited about what i think is going to happen in the next eight years , while we get to the 2015 initiative .
where are we today ?
that 's year by year . this comes from our friends at gapminder.com.
those of you who 've never looked at their website , you should look at it . it 's really impressive . and you can see how the internet penetration has changed over the years .
and so when we gave ourselves this scorecard to say well , where are we related to our goal towards 2015 , the thing that becomes apparent is three pieces .
one is the western world , defined mostly by western europe and the united states , has made an awful lot of progress .
the connectivity in these parts of the world are really truly phenomenal and continue to increase .
as a matter of fact , we think reaching 100 percent is very doable , even before the 2015 timeframe . in other parts of emerging countries , such as india and china , the progress has been good - has been solid , has been good . but in places that are not as developed , places like africa , latin america and other places in the world , the progress has been rather slow . as a matter of fact , i was just recently visiting south africa .
i had the opportunity to have a discussion with president mbeki , and one of the things that we talked about is , what is it that 's keeping this connectivity goal from moving ahead faster ?
and one of the reasons is , in south africa , it costs 100 dollars a month to have a broadband connectivity .
it is impossible , even in the united states , for that cost , to be able to enable the connectivity that we 're all trying to reach .
so , we talked about ways in which perhaps one could partner to be able to bring the cost of this technology down .
so , when you look at this chart , you look at the very last - it 's a logarithmic chart on a horizontal scale - you look at the very end : we 've got quite a long way to go to get to the 2015 goal of 50 percent .
but we 're excited in our company ; we 're motivated .
we really think it 's a phenomenal driver of things , to force us to do things differently , and we look forward to being able to actually , working with so many partners around the world , to be able to reach that goal .
now , one of the things i 'd like to explain -lsb- about -rsb- 50x15 , which i think is really critical , is that it is not a charity .
it is actually a business venture .
let 's take a small segment of this , of this unconnected world , and call it the education market .
when you look at elementary-school children , we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of children around the world that could benefit tremendously from being able to be connected to the internet .
therefore , when we see that , we see an opportunity to have a business that addresses the need of that segment .
and when we embarked in this initiative , from the very beginning we said it very clearly : this is not a charity .
this is really a business venture , one that addresses a very challenging segment of the market .
because what we have learned in the last three years is that this segment of the market , whether it 's education or under-developed nations , either way , it 's a segment that demands incredibly high quality , incredibly high reliability , tremendous low cost and access , and a lot of challenges that frankly , without actually doing it , it would be very difficult to understand , and i 'll explain that in just a minute .
it is an initiative that is focused on simple , accessible and human-centric solutions .
what we mean by that is , you know , frankly , the pc was invented in 1980 , roughly speaking more or less , and for 20-odd years , it has n't changed .
it is still , in most places , a gray or black box , and it looks the same .
and frankly - and i know that sometimes i offend some of my customers when i say this , but i truly mean it - if you could take the name of the computer off the top of it , it would be very difficult to judge who made it , because they 're all highly commoditized but they 're all different .
so , there has not been a human-centric approach to addressing this segment of the market , so we really believe it is critical to think of it .
it reminded me a lot of the talk we heard this morning , about this operating room machinery that was designed specifically for africa .
we 're talking about something very similar here .
and it has to be based on a geo-sensitive approach .
what i mean by that is that in some parts of the world , the government plays a key role in the development of technology .
in other parts , it does n't .
in other parts of the world , you have an infrastructure that allows for manufacturing to take place .
in other parts , it does n't . and then we have to be sensitive about how this technology can be developed and put into action in those regions .
and the last piece , which is really important - and this is an opinion that we have , not shared by many , this is one where we seem to stand alone , on this one - is that we really believe that the greatest success of this initiative can come by fostering local , integrated , end-to-end ecosystems .
what i mean by that , and let me use this example , the country of south africa , because i was just there , therefore i 'm a little bit familiar with some of the challenges they have .
it 's a country of 45 million people . it 's an economy that 's emerging .
it 's beginning to grow tremendously .
they have an objective to lowering the cost of connectivity .
they have a computer company that makes computers in south africa .
they 're developing a software-training environment in their universities .
what a place , what an ideal place to create an ecosystem that could build the hardware and the software needed for their schools . and to my surprise , i learned in south africa they have 18 dialects , i always thought they only had two - english and afrikaans - but it turns out they have 18 dialects .
and to be able to meet the needs of this rather complex educational system , it could only be done from inside .
i do n't think this segment of the market can be addressed by companies parachuting from another place of the world , and just dumping product and selling into the markets .
so , we believe that in those regions of the world where the population is large , and there 's an infrastructure that can provide it , that a local , integrated , end-to-end system is really critical for its success .
this is a picture of a classroom that we outfitted with computers in mexico , in my home country .
this particular classroom happens to be in the state of michoacan .
those of you that might be familiar with mexico - michoacan is a very colorful state .
children dress with very colorful , colorful clothes , and it is incredible to see the power that this has in the hands of kids , in a computer . and i have to tell you that it 's so easy to appreciate the impact that access to technology and connectivity can have in the lives and education of these kids .
we just recently opened a learning laboratory in a school in the west cape in south africa , in a school that 's called nelson mandela school , and when you see the faces and activities of these children being able to access computers , it 's just phenomenal .
and recently , they 've written us letters , telling us how excited they are about the impact that this has had on their lives , on their educational dreams , on their capabilities , and it 's just phenomenal .
we have now deployed 30 different technologists in 18 different countries , and we have been able to connect millions of people in an effort to continue to learn what this particular segment of the market needs and demands .
and i have to tell you that although millions does n't sound like a lot in terms of the billions that need to be connected , it 's a start . and we are learning a lot .
and we 're learning a tremendous amount about what we believe this segment needs to be able to be effective .
one example of this has been the one laptop per child .
some of you are familiar with this .
this is a partnership between mit and a group of companies - google is involved , red hat - and amd is a key player .
the electronics behind the one laptop per child are based on amd technology ; it 's a microprocessor .
but to give you an idea how creative this group of people can be , one of the objectives of the one laptop per child is to be able to achieve a 10-hour battery life .
because it was felt that a school day would last at least eight hours , and you wanted the child to have the ability to use the laptop for at least one full day without having to recharge it .
the engineers have done a phenomenal amount of innovation on this part , and battery life on this product is now 15 hours - just through a lot of innovative work people have done because they 're passionate and motivated to be able to do this .
we expect this to be deployed towards the end of this year , and we 're very excited at the opportunities that this is going to offer in the field of education .
it 's a highly focused product aimed at strictly the education market , not only in the developing countries , but actually in the developed regions as well , because there are parts of the united states where this can have also a huge impact on the ability to make education more fun and more efficient .
we also have partnered with ted in this project , with architecture for humanity , and along with the ted prize winner cameron sinclair , we 're having a contest that we have issued to the architectural community to come up with the best design for a computer lab for an emerging region .
and we 're really thrilled about the opportunity to be part of this , and ca n't wait to see what comes out of this exciting , exciting activity .
let me come back to the beginning , to end this presentation .
i 'll tell you that one of the things that i feel is really critical for us in industry , in business , is to be able to be passionate about solving these problems .
i do n't think it 's enough to be able to put them on a spreadsheet , and look at numbers and say , yes , that 's a good business .
i really believe that you have to have a passion for it .
and one of the things that i learned , too , from my parents - and i 'll give you a little anecdote - especially from my father .
and it took me a while to understand it , but he said to me , when i went to college , he said , " you 're the first person in the family to go to college .
and it 's really important you understand that for civilization to make progress , each generation has to do better than the last one .
and therefore , this is your opportunity to do better than my generation . "
frankly , i do n't know that i really understood what he told me at the time .
i was eager to go off to college , and go find girls , and study , and girls , and study , but then i finished college and i fell in love .
i graduated . i decided to get married .
and on my wedding day , my father came to me again and said , " you know , i 'm going to remind you again , that each generation has to do better than the last one .
you have to be a better husband than i was , because that 's how you make progress . " and now he began to make sense .
because i knew what a great husband he was , and now he was once again beginning to put pressure on me , like he did when i was a little kid . and then a few years later , i had a child , my first child , and again , my father comes to the hospital , and we 're looking at the glass , and see all the children on the other side , and he said , " i 've got to remind you again , that for each generation to do better , you 're going to have to be a better father than i was . "
that 's when it dawned on me the tremendous challenge that he was placing on me , because he was a great father .
but the key is that he instilled in me a passion to really get up every day in the morning and want to do better , to really get up and think that my role in life is not just to be the ceo of a fortune 500 company .
it 's got to be that someday i can look back , and this place is truly better through some small contribution that perhaps each of us could make .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the future of life , where the unraveling of our biology - and bring up the lights a little bit . i do n't have any slides .
i 'm just going to talk - about where that 's likely to carry us .
and you know , i saw all the visions of the first couple of sessions .
it almost made me feel a little bit guilty about having an uplifting talk about the future .
it felt wrong to do that in some way .
and yet , i do n't really think it is because when it comes down to it , it 's this larger trajectory that is really what is going to remain - what people in the future are going to remember about this period .
i want to talk to you a little bit about why the visions of jeremy rivkins , who would like to ban these sorts of technologies , or of the bill joys who would like to relinquish them , are actually - to follow those paths would be such a tragedy for us .
i 'm focusing on biology , the biological sciences .
the reason i 'm doing that is because those are going to be the areas that are the most significant to us .
the reason for that is really very simple .
it 's because we 're flesh and blood .
we 're biological creatures .
and what we can do with our biology is going to shape our future and that of our children and that of their children - whether we gain control over aging , whether we learn to protect ourselves from alzheimer 's , and heart disease , and cancer .
i think that shakespeare really put it very nicely .
and i 'm actually going to use his words in the same order that he did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " and so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe .
and then from hour to hour we rot and rot .
and thereby hangs a tale . "
life is short , you know .
and we need to think about planning a little bit .
we 're all going to eventually , even in the developed world , going to have to lose everything that we love .
when you 're beginning to rot a little bit , all of the videos crammed into your head , all of the extensions that extend your various powers , are going to being to seem a little secondary .
and you know , i 'm getting a little bit gray - so is ray kurzweil , so is eric drexler .
this is where it 's really central to our lives .
now i know there 's been a whole lot of hype about our power to control biology .
you just have to look at the human genome project .
it was n't two years ago that everybody was talking about - we 've found the holy grail of biology .
we 're deciphering the code of codes .
we 're reading the book of life .
it 's a little bit reminiscent of 1969 when neil armstrong walked on the moon , and everybody was about to race out toward the stars .
and we 've all seen " 2001 : a space odyssey . "
you know it 's 2003 , and there is no hal .
and there is no odyssey to our own moon , much less the moons of jupiter .
and we 're still picking up pieces of the challenger .
so it 's not surprising that some people would wonder whether maybe 30 or 40 years from now , we 'll look back at this instant in time , and all of the sort of talk about the human genome project , and what all this is going to mean to us - well , it will really mean precious little .
and i just want to say that that is absolutely not going to be the case .
because when we talk about our genetics and our biology , and modifying and altering and adjusting these things , we 're talking about changing ourselves .
and this is very critical stuff .
if you have any doubts about how technology affects our lives , you just have to go to any major city .
this is not the stomping ground of our pleistocene ancestors .
what 's happening is we 're taking this technology - it 's becoming more precise , more potent - and we 're turning it back upon ourselves .
before it 's all done we are going to alter ourselves every bit as much as we have changed the world around us .
it 's going to happen a lot sooner than people imagine .
on the way there it 's going to completely revolutionize medicine and health care ; that 's obvious .
it 's going to change the way we have children .
it 's going to change the way we manage and alter our emotions .
it 's going to probably change the human lifespan .
it will really make us question what it is to be a human being .
the larger context of this is that are two unprecedented revolutions that are going on today .
the first of them is the obvious one , the silicon revolution , which you all are very , very familiar with .
it 's changing our lives in so many ways , and it will continue to do that .
what the essence of that is , is that we 're taking the sand at our feet , the inert silicon at our feet , and we 're breathing a level of complexity into it that rivals that of life itself , and may even surpass it .
as an outgrowth of that , as a child of that revolution , is the revolution in biology .
the genomics revolution , proteomics , metabolomics , all of these " omics " that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans .
what we 're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future .
i mean we 're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward .
it 's not at all clear where it 's going to take us .
but in five to ten years we 're going to start see some very profound changes .
the most immediate changes that we 'll see are things like in medicine .
there is going to be a big shift towards preventative medicine as we start to be able to identify all of the risk factors that we have as individuals .
but who is going to pay for all this ?
and how are we going to understand all this complex information ?
that is going to be the it challenge of the next generation , is communicating all this information .
there 's pharmacogenomics , the combination of pharmacology and genetics : tailoring drugs to our individual constitutions that juan talked about a little bit earlier .
that 's going to have amazing impacts .
and it 's going to be used for diet as well , and nutritional supplements and such .
but it 's going to have a big impact because we 're going to have niche drugs .
and we are n't going to be able to support the kinds of expenses that we have to create blockbuster drugs today .
the approval process is going to fall apart , actually .
it 's too slow .
it 's too risk-averse .
and it is really not suited for the future that we 're moving into .
another thing is that we 're just going to have to deal with this knowledge .
it 's really wonderful when we hear , " oh , 99.9 percent of the letters in the code are the same .
we 're all identical to each other . is n't it wonderful ? "
and look around you and know that what we really care about is that little bit of difference .
we look the same to a visitor from another planet , maybe , but not to each other because we compete with each other all time .
and we 're going to have to come to grips with the fact that there are differences between us as individuals that we will know about , and between subpopulations of humans as well .
to deny that that 's the case is not a very good start on that .
a generation or so away there are going to be even more profound things that are going to happen .
that 's when we 're going to begin to use this knowledge to modify ourselves .
now i do n't mean extra gills or something - something we care about , like aging .
what if we could unravel aging and understand it - begin to retard the process or even reverse it ?
it would change absolutely everything .
and it 's obvious to anyone , that if we can do this , we absolutely will do this , whatever the consequences are .
the second is modifying our emotions .
i mean ritalin , viagra , things of that sort , prozac .
you know , this is just clumsy little baby steps .
what if you could take a little concoction of pharmaceuticals that would make you feel really contented , just happy to be you .
are you going to be able to resist that if it does n't have any overt side effects ?
probably not .
and if you do n't , who are you going to be ?
why do you do what you do ?
we 're sort of circumventing evolutionary programs that guide our behavior .
it 's going to be very challenging to deal with .
the third area is reproduction .
the idea that we 're going to chose our children 's genes , as we begin to understand what genes say about who we are .
that 's the focus of my book " redesigning humans , " where i talk about the kinds of choices we 'll make , and the challenges it 's going to present to society .
there are three obvious ways of doing this .
the first is cloning .
it did n't happen .
it 's a total media circus .
it will happen in five to 10 years .
and when it does it 's not going to be that big a deal .
the birth of a delayed identical twin is not going to shake western civilization .
but there are more important things that are already occurring : embryo screening .
you take a six to eight cell embryo , you tease out one of the cells , you run a genetic test on that cell , and depending on the results of that test you either implant that embryo or you discard it .
it 's already done to avoid rare diseases today .
and pretty soon it 's going to be possible to avoid virtually all genetic diseases in that way .
as that becomes possible this is going to move from something that is used by those who have infertility problems and are already doing in vitro fertilization , to the wealthy who want to protect their children , to just about everybody else .
and in that process that 's going to morph from being just for diseases , to being for lesser vulnerabilities , like risk of manic depression or something , to picking personalities , temperaments , traits , these sorts of things .
of course there is going to be genetic engineering .
directly going in - it 's a little bit further away , but not that far away - going in and altering the genes in the first cell in an embryo .
the way i suspect it will happen is using artificial chromosomes and extra chromosomes , so we go from 46 to 47 or 48 .
and one that is not heritable because who would want to pass on to their children the archaic enhancement modules that they got 25 years earlier from their parents ?
it 's a joke ; of course they would n't want to do that .
they 'll want the new release .
those kinds of loose analogies with -lrb- laughter -rrb- computers , and with programming , are actually much deeper than that .
they are really going to come to operate in this realm .
now not everything that can be done should be done .
and it wo n't be done .
but when something is feasible in thousands of laboratories all over the world , which is going to be the case with these technologies , when there are large numbers of people who see them as beneficial , which is already the case , and when they 're almost impossible to police , it 's not a question of if this is going to happen , it 's when and where and how it 's going to happen .
humanity is going to go down this path .
and it 's going to do so for two reasons .
the first is that all these technologies are just a spin-off of mainstream medical research that everybody wants to see happen .
it is being funded very very - in a big way .
the second is , we 're human .
that 's what we do .
we try and use our technology to improve our lives in one way or another .
to imagine that we 're not going to use these technologies when they become available , is as much a denial of who we are as to imagine that we 'll use these technologies and not fret and worry about it a great deal .
the lines are going to blur . and they already are between therapy and enhancement , between treatment and prevention , between need and desire .
that 's really the central one , i believe .
people can try and ban these things .
they undoubtedly will . they have .
but ultimately all this is going to do is just shift development elsewhere .
it 's going to drive these things from view .
it 's going to reserve the technology for the wealthy because they are in the best position to circumvent any of these sorts of laws .
and it 's going to deny us the information that we need to make wise decisions about how to use these technologies .
so , sure , we need to debate these things .
and i think it 's wonderful that we do .
but we should n't kid ourselves and think that we 're going to reach a consensus about these things .
that is simply not going to happen .
they touch us too deeply .
and they depend too much upon history , upon philosophy , upon religion , upon culture , upon politics .
some people are going to see this as an abomination , as the worst thing , as just awful .
other people are going to say , " this is great .
this is the flowering of human endeavor . "
the one thing though that is really dangerous about these sorts of technologies , is that it 's easy to become seduced by them .
and to focus too much on all the high-technology possibilities that exist .
and to lose touch with the basic rhythms of our biology and our health .
there are too many people that think that high-technology medicine is going to keep them , save them , from overeating , from eating a lot of fast foods , from not getting any exercise .
it 's not going to happen .
in the midst of all this amazing technology , and all these things that are occurring , it 's really interesting because there is sort of a counter-revolution that is going on : a resurgence of interest in remedies from the past , in nutraceuticals , in all of these sorts of things that some people , in the pharmaceutical industry particularly , like to brand as non-science .
but this whole effort is generated , is driven , by it as well because that is how we 're gathering all this information , and linking it , and integrating it together .
there is a lot in this rich biota that is going to serve us well .
and that 's where about half of our drugs come .
so we should n't dismiss this because it 's an enormous opportunity to use these sorts of results , or these random loose trials from the last thousand years about what has impacts on our health .
and to use our advanced technologies to pull out what is beneficial from this sea of noise , basically .
in fact this is n't just abstract .
i just formed a biotechnology company that is using this sort of an approach to develop therapeutics for alzheimer 's and other diseases of aging , and we 're making some real progress .
so here we are .
it 's the beginning of a new millennium .
if you look forward , i mean future humans , far before the end of this millennium , in a few hundred years , they are going to look back at this moment .
and from the beginning of today 's sessions you 'd think that they 're going to see this as this horrible difficult , painful period that we struggled through .
and i do n't think that 's what 's going to happen .
they 're going to do like everybody does . they are going to forget about all that stuff .
and they are actually going to romanticize this moment in time .
they are going to think about it as this glorious instant when we laid down the very foundations of their lives , of their society , of their future .
you know it 's a little bit like a birth .
where there is this bloody , awful mess happens .
and then what comes out of it ? new life .
actually as was pointed out earlier , we forget about all the struggle there was in getting there .
so to me , it 's clear that one of the foundations of that future is going to be the reworking of our biology .
it 's going to come gradually at first . it 's going to pick up speed .
we 're going to make lots of errors .
that 's the way these things work .
to me it 's an incredible privilege to be alive now and to be able to witness this thing .
it is something that is a unique instant in the history of all of life .
it will always be remembered .
and what 's extraordinary is that we 're not just observing this , we are the architects of this .
i think that we should be proud of it .
what is so difficult and challenging is that we are also the objects of these changes .
it 's our health , it 's our lives , it 's our future , it 's our children .
and that is why they are so very troubling to so many people who would pull back in fear .
i think that our choice in the choice of life , is not whether we 're going to go down this path .
we are , definitely .
it 's how we hold it in our hearts .
it 's how we look at it .
i think thucydides really spoke to us very clearly in 430 b.c. he put it nicely .
again , i 'll use the words in the same order he did .
" the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them , both glory and danger alike .
and yet notwithstanding , they go out and they meet it . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so today , i want us to reflect on the demise of guys .
guys are flaming out academically ; they 're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women .
other than that , there 's not much of a problem .
so what 's the data ?
so the data on dropping out is amazing .
boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school .
in canada , five boys drop out for every three girls .
girls outperform boys now at every level , from elementary school to graduate school .
there 's a 10 percent differential between getting ba 's and all graduate programs , with guys falling behind girls .
two-thirds of all students in special ed. remedial programs are guys .
and as you all know , boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder - and therefore we drug them with ritalin .
what 's the evidence of wiping out ?
first , it 's a new fear of intimacy .
intimacy means physical , emotional connection with somebody else - and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous , contradictory , phosphorescent signals .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and every year there 's research done on self-reported shyness among college students .
and we 're seeing a steady increase among males .
and this is two kinds .
it 's a social awkwardness .
the old shyness was a fear of rejection .
it 's a social awkwardness like you 're a stranger in a foreign land .
they do n't know what to say , they do n't know what to do , especially one-on-one -lsb- with the -rsb- opposite sex .
they do n't know the language of face contact , the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else , listen to somebody else .
there 's something i 'm developing here called social intensity syndrome , which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating .
it turns out , from earliest childhood , boys , and then men , prefer the company of guys - physical company .
and there 's actually a cortical arousal we 're looking at , because guys have been with guys in teams , in clubs , in gangs , in fraternities , especially in the military , and then in pubs .
and this peaks at super bowl sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers , watching a totally overdressed aaron rodgers of the green bay packers , rather than jennifer lopez totally naked in the bedroom .
the problem is they now prefer -lsb- the -rsb- asynchronistic internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships .
what are the causes ? well , it 's an unintended consequence .
i think it 's excessive internet use in general , excessive video gaming , excessive new access to pornography .
the problem is these are arousal addictions .
drug addiction , you simply want more .
arousal addiction , you want different .
drugs , you want more of the same - different .
so you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained .
and the problem is the industry is supplying it .
jane mcgonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21 , he 's played 10,000 hours of video games , most of that in isolation .
as you remember , cindy gallop said men do n't know the difference between making love and doing porn .
the average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week .
and there 's some guy watching a hundred , obviously .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in america - 15 billion annually .
for every 400 movies made in hollywood , there are 11,000 now made porn videos .
so the effect , very quickly , is it 's a new kind of arousal .
boys ' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change , novelty , excitement and constant arousal .
that means they 're totally out of sync in traditional classes , which are analog , static , interactively passive .
they 're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships , which build gradually and subtly .
so what 's the solution ? it 's not my job .
i 'm here to alarm . it 's your job to solve .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but who should care ? the only people who should care about this is parents of boys and girls , educators , gamers , filmmakers and women who would like a real man who they can talk to , who can dance , who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs .
no offense to banana slug owners . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to talk about my dad .
my dad has alzheimer 's disease .
he started showing the symptoms about 12 years ago , and he was officially diagnosed in 2005 .
now he 's really pretty sick . he needs help eating , he needs help getting dressed , he does n't really know where he is or when it is , and it 's been really , really hard .
my dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life , and i 've spent the last decade watching him disappear .
my dad 's not alone . there 's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia , and by 2030 they 're expecting that to double to 70 million .
that 's a lot of people .
dementia scares us . the confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia , the big numbers of people who get it , they frighten us .
and because of that fear , we tend to do one of two things : we go into denial : " it 's not me , it has nothing to do with me , it 's never going to happen to me . "
or , we decide that we 're going to prevent dementia , and it will never happen to us because we 're going to do everything right and it wo n't come and get us .
i 'm looking for a third way : i 'm preparing to get alzheimer 's disease .
prevention is good , and i 'm doing the things that you can do to prevent alzheimer 's .
i 'm eating right , i 'm exercising every day , i 'm keeping my mind active , that 's what the research says you should do .
but the research also shows that there 's nothing that will 100 percent protect you .
if the monster wants you , the monster 's gonna get you .
that 's what happened with my dad .
my dad was a bilingual college professor . his hobbies were chess , bridge and writing op-eds .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he got dementia anyway .
if the monster wants you , the monster 's gonna get you .
especially if you 're me , ' cause alzheimer 's tends to run in families .
so i 'm preparing to get alzheimer 's disease .
based on what i 've learned from taking care of my father , and researching what it 's like to live with dementia , i 'm focusing on three things in my preparation : i 'm changing what i do for fun , i 'm working to build my physical strength , and - this is the hard one - i 'm trying to become a better person .
let 's start with the hobbies . when you get dementia , it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself .
you ca n't sit and have long talks with your old friends , because you do n't know who they are .
it 's confusing to watch television , and often very frightening .
and reading is just about impossible .
when you care for someone with dementia , and you get training , they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar , hands-on , open-ended .
with my dad , that turned out to be letting him fill out forms .
he was a college professor at a state school ; he knows what paperwork looks like .
he 'll sign his name on every line , he 'll check all the boxes , he 'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers .
but it got me thinking , what would my caregivers do with me ?
i 'm my father 's daughter . i read , i write , i think about global health a lot .
would they give me academic journals so i could scribble in the margins ?
would they give me charts and graphs that i could color ?
so i 've been trying to learn to do things that are hands-on .
i 've always liked to draw , so i 'm doing it more even though i 'm really very bad at it .
i am learning some basic origami . i can make a really great box .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm teaching myself to knit , which so far i can knit a blob .
but , you know , it does n't matter if i 'm actually good at it . what matters is that my hands know how to do it .
because the more things that are familiar , the more things my hands know how to do , the more things that i can be happy and busy doing when my brain 's not running the show anymore .
they say that people who are engaged in activities are happier , easier for their caregivers to look after , and it may even slow the progress of the disease .
that all seems like win to me .
i want to be as happy as i can for as long as i can .
a lot of people do n't know that alzheimer 's actually has physical symptoms , as well as cognitive symptoms . you lose your sense of balance , you get muscle tremors , and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile .
they get scared to walk around . they get scared to move .
so i 'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance .
i 'm doing yoga and tai chi to improve my balance , so that when i start to lose it , i 'll still be able to be mobile .
i 'm doing weight-bearing exercise , so that i have the muscle strength so that when i start to wither , i have more time that i can still move around .
finally , the third thing . i 'm trying to become a better person .
my dad was kind and loving before he had alzheimer 's , and he 's kind and loving now .
i 've seen him lose his intellect , his sense of humor , his language skills , but i 've also seen this : he loves me , he loves my sons , he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers .
and that love makes us want to be around him , even now .
even when it 's so hard .
when you take away everything that he ever learned in this world , his naked heart still shines .
i was never as kind as my dad , and i was never as loving .
and what i need now is to learn to be like that .
i need a heart so pure that if it 's stripped bare by dementia , it will survive .
i do n't want to get alzheimer 's disease .
what i want is a cure in the next 20 years , soon enough to protect me .
but if it comes for me , i 'm going to be ready .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm afraid i 'm one of those speakers you hope you 're not going to meet at ted .
first , i do n't have a mobile , so i 'm on the safe side .
secondly , a political theorist who 's going to talk about the crisis of democracy is probably not the most exciting topic you can think about .
and plus , i 'm not going to give you any answers .
i 'm much more trying to add to some of the questions we 're talking about .
and one of the things that i want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions .
there is one more reason for you to be suspicious about me .
you people , the church of ted , are a very optimistic community .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- basically you believe in complexity , but not in ambiguity .
as you have been told , i 'm bulgarian .
and according to the surveys , we are marked the most pessimistic people in the world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness , and the title was " the happy , the unhappy and the bulgarians . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now when you know what to expect , let 's give you the story .
and this is a rainy election day in a small country - that can be my country , but could be also your country .
and because of the rain until four o 'clock in the afternoon , nobody went to the polling stations .
but then the rain stopped , people went to vote .
and when the votes had been counted , three-fourths of the people have voted with a blank ballot .
the government and the opposition , they have been simply paralyzed .
because you know what to do about the protests .
you know who to arrest , who to negotiate with .
but what to do about people who are voting with a blank ballot ?
so the government decided to have the elections once again .
and this time even a greater number , 83 percent of the people , voted with blank ballots .
basically they went to the ballot boxes to tell that they have nobody to vote for .
this is the opening of a beautiful novel by jose saramago called " seeing . "
but in my view it very well captures part of the problem that we have with democracy in europe these days .
on one level nobody 's questioning that democracy is the best form of government .
democracy is the only game in town .
the problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing .
for the last 30 years , political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout , and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting .
i mean the unemployed , the under-privileged .
and this is a major issue .
because especially now with the economic crisis , you can see that the trust in politics , that the trust in democratic institutions , was really destroyed .
according to the latest survey being done by the european commission , 89 percent of the citizens of europe believe that there is a growing gap between the opinion of the policy-makers and the opinion of the public .
only 18 percent of italians and 15 percent of greeks believe that their vote matters .
basically people start to understand that they can change governments , but they can not change policies .
and the question which i want to ask is the following : how did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before - we have more rights , we can travel easier , we have access to more information - at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed ?
so basically i want to ask : what went right and what went wrong in these 50 years when we talk about democracy ?
and i 'll start with what went right .
and the first thing that went right was , of course , these five revolutions which , in my view , very much changed the way we 're living and deepened our democratic experience .
and the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s , which put the individual at the center of politics .
it was the human rights moment .
basically this was also a major outbreak , a culture of dissent , a culture of basically non-conformism , which was not known before .
so i do believe that even things like that are very much the children of ' 68 - nevertheless that most of us had been even not born then .
but after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s .
and nevertheless that many people on the left try to hate it , the truth is that it was very much the market revolution that sent the message : " the government does not know better . "
and you have more choice-driven societies .
and of course , you have 1989 - the end of communism , the end of the cold war .
and it was the birth of the global world .
and you have the internet .
and this is not the audience to which i 'm going to preach to what extent the internet empowered people .
it has changed the way we are communicating and basically we are viewing politics .
the very idea of political community totally has changed .
and i 'm going to name one more revolution , and this is the revolution in brain sciences , which totally changed the way we understand how people are making decisions .
so this is what went right .
but if we 're going to see what went wrong , we 're going to end up with the same five revolutions .
because first you have the 1960s and 1970s , cultural and social revolution , which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose .
the very idea , all these collective nouns that we have been taught about - nation , class , family .
we start to like divorcing , if we 're married at all .
all this was very much under attack .
and it is so difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand .
and you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies .
remember , until the 1970s , the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality .
the more democratic our societies have been , the more equal they have been becoming .
now we have the reverse tendency .
the spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality .
and i find this very much disturbing when we 're talking about what 's going on right and wrong with democracy these days .
and if you go to 1989 - something that basically you do n't expect that anybody 's going to criticize - but many are going to tell you , " listen , it was the end of the cold war that tore the social contract between the elites and the people in western europe . "
when the soviet union was still there , the rich and the powerful , they needed the people , because they feared them .
now the elites basically have been liberated .
they 're very mobile . you can not tax them .
and basically they do n't fear the people .
so as a result of it , you have this very strange situation in which the elites basically got out of the control of the voters .
so this is not by accident that the voters are not interested to vote anymore .
and when we talk about the internet , yes , it 's true , the internet connected all of us , but we also know that the internet created these echo chambers and political ghettos in which for all your life you can stay with the political community you belong to .
and it 's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you .
i know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation , but -lsb- have you -rsb- seen what the digital world has done to american politics these days ?
this is also partly a result of the internet revolution .
this is the other side of the things that we like .
and when you go to the brain sciences , what political consultants learned from the brain scientists is do n't talk to me about ideas anymore , do n't talk to me about policy programs .
what really matters is basically to manipulate the emotions of the people .
and you have this very strongly to the extent that , even if you see when we talk about revolutions these days , these revolutions are not named anymore around ideologies or ideas .
before , revolutions used to have ideological names .
they could be communist , they could be liberal , they could be fascist or islamic .
now the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used .
you have facebook revolutions , twitter revolutions .
the content does n't matter anymore , the problem is the media .
i 'm saying this because one of my major points is what went right is also what went wrong .
and when we 're now trying to see how we can change the situation , when basically we 're trying to see what can be done about democracy , we should keep this ambiguity in mind .
because probably some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most .
these days it 's very popular to believe that this push for transparency , this kind of a combination between active citizens , new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics .
you believe that when you have these new technologies and people who are ready to use this , it can make it much more difficult for the governments to lie , it 's going to be more difficult for them to steal and probably even going to be more difficult for them to kill .
this is probably true .
but i do believe that we should be also very clear that now when we put the transparency at the center of politics where the message is , " it 's transparency , stupid . "
transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions .
transparency is politics ' management of mistrust .
we are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust .
and by the way , mistrust was always very important for democracy .
this is why you have checks and balances .
this is why basically you have all this creative mistrust between the representatives and those whom they represent .
but when politics is only management of mistrust , then - i 'm very glad that " 1984 " has been mentioned - now we 're going to have " 1984 " in reverse .
it 's not going to be the big brother watching you , it 's going to be we being the big brother watching the political class .
but is this the idea of a free society ?
for example , can you imagine that decent , civic , talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust ?
are you not afraid with all these technologies that are going to track down any statement the politicians are going to make on certain issues , are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions , even the very wrong positions , because consistency is going to be more important than common sense ?
and the americans who are in the room , are you not afraid that your presidents are going to govern on the basis of what they said in the primary elections ?
i find this extremely important , because democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions .
and we can lose this with the very noble idea to keep people accountable for showing the people that we 're not going to tolerate politicians the opportunism in politics .
so for me this is extremely important .
and i do believe that when we 're discussing politics these days , probably it makes sense to look also at this type of a story .
but also do n't forget , any unveiling is also veiling .
-lsb- regardless of -rsb- how transparent our governments want to be , they 're going to be selectively transparent .
in a small country that could be my country , but could be also your country , they took a decision - it is a real case story - that all of the governmental decisions , discussions of the council of ministers , were going to be published on the internet 24 hours after the council discussions took place .
and the public was extremely all for it .
so i had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister , why he made this decision .
he said , " listen , this is the best way to keep the mouths of my ministers closed .
because it 's going to be very difficult for them to dissent knowing that 24 hours after this is going to be on the public space , and this is in a certain way going to be a political crisis . "
so when we talk about transparency , when we talk about openness , i really do believe that what we should keep in mind is that what went right is what went wrong .
and this is goethe , who is neither bulgarian nor a political scientist , some centuries ago he said , " there is a big shadow where there is much light . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we do not invest in victims , we invest in survivors .
and in ways both big and small , the narrative of the victim shapes the way we see women .
you ca n't count what you do n't see .
and we do n't invest in what 's invisible to us .
but this is the face of resilience .
six years ago , i started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict .
i set out to write a compelling economic story , one that had great characters , that no one else was telling , and one that i thought mattered .
and that turned out to be women .
i had left abc news and a career i loved at the age of 30 for business school , a path i knew almost nothing about .
none of the women i had grown up with in maryland had graduated from college , let alone considered business school .
but they had hustled to feed their kids and pay their rent .
and i saw from a young age that having a decent job and earning a good living made the biggest difference for families who were struggling .
so if you 're going to talk about jobs , then you have to talk about entrepreneurs .
and if you 're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings , then you must talk about women , because they are the population you have left .
rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female .
i want to introduce you to some of those entrepreneurs i 've met and share with you some of what they 've taught me over the years .
i went to afghanistan in 2005 to work on a financial times piece , and there i met kamila , a young women who told me she had just turned down a job with the international community that would have paid her nearly $ 2,000 a month - an astronomical sum in that context .
and she had turned it down , she said , because she was going to start her next business , an entrepreneurship consultancy that would teach business skills to men and women all around afghanistan .
business , she said , was critical to her country 's future .
because long after this round of internationals left , business would help keep her country peaceful and secure .
and she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women .
so i was amazed .
i mean here was a girl who had never lived in peace time who somehow had come to sound like a candidate from " the apprentice . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i asked her , " how in the world do you know this much about business ?
why are you so passionate ? "
she said , " oh gayle , this is actually my third business .
my first business was a dressmaking business i started under the taliban .
and that was actually an excellent business , because we provided jobs for women all around our neighborhood .
and that 's really how i became an entrepreneur . "
think about this : here were girls who braved danger to become breadwinners during years in which they could n't even be on their streets .
and at a time of economic collapse when people sold baby dolls and shoe laces and windows and doors just to survive , these girls made the difference between survival and starvation for so many .
i could n't leave the story , and i could n't leave the topic either , because everywhere i went i met more of these women who no one seemed to know about , or even wish to .
i went on to bosnia , and early on in my interviews i met with an imf official who said , " you know , gayle , i do n't think we actually have women in business in bosnia , but there is a lady selling cheese nearby on the side of the road .
so maybe you could interview her . "
so i went out reporting and within a day i met narcisa kavazovic who at that point was opening a new factory on the war 's former front lines in sarajevo .
she had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage , sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members by the time we met , she had 20 employees , most of them women , who were sending their boys and their girls to school .
and she was just the start .
i met women running essential oils businesses , wineries and even the country 's largest advertising agency .
so these stories together became the herald tribune business cover .
and when this story posted , i ran to my computer to send it to the imf official .
and i said , " just in case you 're looking for entrepreneurs to feature at your next investment conference , here are a couple of women . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- but think about this .
the imf official is hardly the only person to automatically file women under micro .
the biases , whether intentional or otherwise , are pervasive , and so are the misleading mental images .
if you see the word " microfinance , " what comes to mind ?
most people say women .
and if you see the word " entrepreneur , " most people think men .
why is that ?
because we aim low and we think small when it comes to women .
microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect , but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women , because they have so much greater hopes for themselves .
they want to move from micro to medium and beyond .
and in many places , they 're there .
in the u.s. , women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018 .
in south korea and indonesia , women own nearly half a million firms .
china , women run 20 percent of all small businesses .
and in the developing world overall , that figure is 40 to 50 percent .
nearly everywhere i go , i meet incredibly interesting entrepreneurs who are seeking access to finance , access to markets and established business networks .
they are often ignored because they 're harder to help .
it is much riskier to give a 50,000 dollar loan than it is to give a 500 dollar loan .
and as the world bank recently noted , women are stuck in a productivity trap .
those in small businesses ca n't get the capital they need to expand and those in microbusiness ca n't grow out of them .
recently i was at the state department in washington and i met an incredibly passionate entrepreneur from ghana .
she sells chocolates .
and she had come to washington , not seeking a handout and not seeking a microloan .
she had come seeking serious investment dollars so that she could build the factory and buy the equipment she needs to export her chocolates to africa , europe , the middle east and far beyond - capital that would help her to employ more than the 20 people that she already has working for her , and capital that would fuel her own country 's economic climb .
the great news is we already know what works .
theory and empirical evidence have already taught us .
we do n't need to invent solutions because we have them - cash flow loans based in income rather than assets , loans that use secure contracts rather than collateral , because women often do n't own land .
and kiva.org , the microlender , is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans .
and that 's just to start .
recently it has become very much in fashion to call women " the emerging market of the emerging market . "
i think that is terrific .
you know why ?
because - and i say this as somebody who worked in finance - 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade .
because investors saw the potential for return at a time of slowing economic growth , and so they created financial products and financial innovation tailored to the emerging markets .
how wonderful would it be if we were prepared to replace all of our lofty words with our wallets and invest 500 billion dollars unleashing women 's economic potential ?
just think of the benefits when it comes to jobs , productivity , employment , child nutrition , maternal mortality , literacy and much , much more .
because , as the world economic forum noted , smaller gender gaps are directly correlated with increased economic competitiveness .
and not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation gap - not one .
so the great news is this is an incredible opportunity .
we have so much room to grow .
so you see , this is not about doing good , this is about global growth and global employment .
it is about how we invest and it 's about how we see women .
and women can no longer be both half the population and a special interest group .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oftentimes i get into very interesting discussions with reporters who say to me , " gayle , these are great stories , but you 're really writing about the exceptions . "
now that makes me pause for just a couple reasons .
first of all , for exceptions , there are a lot of them and they 're important .
secondly , when we talk about men who are succeeding , we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated .
and when we talk about women , they are either exceptions to be dismissed or aberrations to be ignored .
and finally , there is no society anywhere in all the world that is not changed except by its most exceptional .
so why would n't we celebrate and elevate these change makers and job creators rather than overlook them ?
this topic of resilience is very personal to me and in many ways has shaped my life .
my mom was a single mom who worked at the phone company during the day and sold tupperware at night so that i could have every opportunity possible .
we shopped double coupons and layaway and consignment stores , and when she got sick with stage four breast cancer and could no longer work , we even applied for food stamps .
and when i would feel sorry for myself as nine or 10 year-old girls do , she would say to me , " my dear , on a scale of major world tragedies , yours is not a three . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when i was applying to business school and felt certain i could n't do it and nobody i knew had done it , i went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact .
and she told me , " never import other people 's limitations . "
and when i complained to my grandmother , a world war ii veteran who worked in film for 50 years and who supported me from the age of 13 , that i was terrified that if i turned down a plum assignment at abc for a fellowship overseas , i would never ever , ever find another job , she said , " kiddo , i 'm going to tell you two things .
first of all , no one turns down a fulbright , and secondly , mcdonald 's is always hiring . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you will find a job . take the leap . "
the women in my family are not exceptions .
the women in this room and watching in l.a.
and all around the world are not exceptions .
we are not a special interest group .
we are the majority .
and for far too long , we have underestimated ourselves and been undervalued by others .
it is time for us to aim higher when it comes to women , to invest more and to deploy our dollars to benefit women all around the world .
we can make a difference , and make a difference , not just for women , but for a global economy that desperately needs their contributions .
together we can make certain that the so-called exceptions begin to rule .
when we change the way we see ourselves , others will follow .
and it is time for all of us to think bigger .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i thought if i skipped it might help my nerves , but i 'm actually having a paradoxical reaction to that , so that was a bad idea . -lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i was really delighted to receive the invitation to present to you some of my music and some of my work as a composer , presumably because it appeals to my well-known and abundant narcissism . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm not kidding , i just think we should just say that and move forward . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , but the thing is , a dilemma quickly arose , and that is that i 'm really bored with music , and i 'm really bored with the role of the composer ,
and so i decided to put that idea , boredom , as the focus of my presentation to you today .
and i 'm going to share my music with you , but i hope that i 'm going to do so in a way that tells a story , tells a story about how i used boredom as a catalyst for creativity and invention , and how boredom actually forced me to change the fundamental question that i was asking in my discipline , and how boredom also , in a sense , pushed me towards taking on roles beyond the sort of most traditional , narrow definition of a composer .
what i 'd like to do today is to start with an excerpt of a piece of music at the piano .
-lrb- music -rrb- okay , i wrote that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- no , it 's not - -lrb- applause -rrb- oh , why thank you .
no , no , i did n't write that .
in fact , that was a piece by beethoven , and so i was not functioning as a composer .
just now i was functioning in the role of the interpreter , and there i am , interpreter .
so , an interpreter of what ? of a piece of music , right ?
but we can ask the question , " but is it music ? "
and i say this rhetorically , because of course by just about any standard we would have to concede that this is , of course , a piece of music , but i put this here now because , just to set it in your brains for the moment , because we 're going to return to this question .
it 's going to be a kind of a refrain as we go through the presentation .
so here we have this piece of music by beethoven , and my problem with it is , it 's boring .
i mean , you - i 'm just like , a hush , huh - it 's like - -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's beethoven , how can you say that ?
no , well , i do n't know , it 's very familiar to me .
i had to practice it as a kid , and i 'm really sick of it . so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i would , so what i might like to try to do is to change it , to transform it in some ways , to personalize it , so i might take the opening , like this idea - -lrb- music -rrb- and then i might substitute - -lrb- music -rrb- and then i might improvise on that melody that goes forward from there - -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- so that might be the kind of thing - why thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that would be the kind of thing that i would do , and it 's not necessarily better than the beethoven .
in fact , i think it 's not better than it . the thing is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it 's more interesting to me . it 's less boring for me .
i 'm really leaning into me , because i , because i have to think about what decisions i 'm going to make on the fly as that beethoven text is running in time through my head and i 'm trying to figure out what kinds of transformations so this is an engaging enterprise for me , and i 've really leaned into that first person pronoun thing there , and now my face appears twice , so i think we can agree that this is a fundamentally solipsistic enterprise . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's an engaging one , and it 's interesting to me for a while , but then i get bored with it , and by it ,
i actually mean , the piano , because it becomes , it 's this familiar instrument , it 's timbral range is actually pretty compressed , at least when you play on the keyboard , and if you 're not doing things like listening to it after you 've lit it on fire or something like that , you know .
it gets a little bit boring , and so pretty soon i go through other instruments , they become familiar , and eventually i find myself designing and constructing my own instrument , and i brought one with me today , and i thought i would play a little bit on it for you so you can hear what it sounds like .
-lrb- music -rrb- you gotta have doorstops , that 's important . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've got combs . they 're the only combs that i own . -lrb- music -rrb- they 're all mounted on my instruments . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- i can actually do all sorts of things . i can play with a violin bow . i do n't have to use the chopsticks .
so we have this sound . -lrb- music -rrb- and with a bank of live electronics , i can change the sounds radically . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- like that , and like this . -lrb- music -rrb- and so forth .
so this gives you a little bit of an idea of the sound world of this instrument , which i think is quite interesting and it puts me in the role of the inventor , and the nice thing about - this instrument is called the mouseketeer ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the cool thing about it is i 'm the world 's greatest mouseketeer player . -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay ? -lrb- applause -rrb- so in that regard , this is one of the things , this is one of the privileges of being , and here 's another role , the inventor , and by the way , when i told you that i 'm the world 's greatest , if you 're keeping score , we 've had narcissism and solipsism
and now a healthy dose of egocentricism .
i know some of you are just , you know , bingo ! or , i do n't know . -lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , so this is also a really enjoyable role .
i should concede also that i 'm the world 's worst mouseketeer player , and it was this distinction that i was most worried about when i was on that prior side of the tenure divide .
i 'm glad i 'm past that . we 're not going to go into that .
i 'm crying on the inside . there are still scars .
anyway , but i guess my point is that all of these enterprises are engaging to me in their multiplicity , but as i 've presented them to you today , they 're actually solitary enterprises , and so pretty soon i want to commune with other people , and so i 'm delighted that in fact i get to compose works for them .
i get to write , sometimes for soloists and i get to work with one person , sometimes full orchestras , and i work with a lot of people , and this is probably the capacity , the role creatively for which i 'm probably best known professionally .
now , some of my scores as a composer look like this , and others look like this , and some look like this , and i make all of these by hand , and it 's really tedious .
it takes a long , long time to make these scores , and right now i 'm working on a piece that 's 180 pages in length , and it 's just a big chunk of my life , and i 'm just pulling out hair .
i have a lot of it , and that 's a good thing i suppose . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so this gets really boring and really tiresome for me , so after a while the process of notating is not only boring , but i actually want the notation to be more interesting , and so that 's pushed me to do other projects like this one .
this is an excerpt from a score called " the metaphysics of notation . "
the full score is 72 feet wide .
it 's a bunch of crazy pictographic notation .
let 's zoom in on one section of it right here . you can see it 's rather detailed . i do all of this with drafting templates , with straight edges , with french curves , and by freehand , and the 72 feet was actually split into 12 six-foot-wide panels that were installed around the cantor arts center museum lobby balcony , and it appeared for one year in the museum , and during that year , it was experienced as visual art most of the week , except , as you can see in these pictures , on fridays , from noon til one , and only during that time , various performers came and interpreted these strange
and undefined pictographic glyphs . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now this was a really exciting experience for me .
it was gratifying musically , but i think the more important thing is it was exciting because i got to take on another role , especially given that it appeared in a museum , and that is as visual artist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're going to fill up the whole thing , do n't worry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i am multitudes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so one of the things is that , i mean , some people would say , like , " oh , you 're being a dilettante , " and maybe that 's true . i can understand how , i mean , because i do n't have a pedigree in visual art and i do n't have any training , but it 's just something
that i wanted to do as an extension of my composition , as an extension of a kind of creative impulse .
i can understand the question , though . " but is it music ? "
i mean , there 's not any traditional notation .
i can also understand that sort of implicit criticism in this piece , " s-tog , " which i made when i was living in copenhagen .
i took the copenhagen subway map and i renamed all the stations to abstract musical provocations , and the players , who are synchronized with stopwatches , follow the timetables , which are listed in minutes past the hour .
so this is a case of actually adapting something , or maybe stealing something , and then turning it into a musical notation .
another adaptation would be this piece .
i took the idea of the wristwatch , and i turned it into a musical score .
i made my own faces , and had a company fabricate them , and the players follow these scores .
they follow the second hands , and as they pass over the various symbols , the players respond musically .
here 's another example from another piece , and then its realization .
so in these two capacities , i 've been scavenger , in the sense of taking , like , the subway map , right , or thief maybe , and i 've also been designer , in the case of making the wristwatches .
and once again , this is , for me , interesting .
another role that i like to take on is that of the performance artist .
some of my pieces have these kind of weird theatric elements , and i often perform them . i want to show you a clip from a piece called " echolalia . "
this is actually being performed by brian mcwhorter , who is an extraordinary performer .
let 's watch a little bit of this , and please notice the instrumentation .
-lrb- music -rrb- okay , i hear you were laughing nervously because you too could hear that the drill was a little bit sharp , the intonation was a little questionable . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's watch just another clip .
-lrb- music -rrb- you can see the mayhem continues , and there 's , you know , there were no clarinets and trumpets and flutes and violins . here 's a piece that has an even more unusual , more peculiar instrumentation .
this is " tlön , " for three conductors and no players . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this was based on the experience of actually watching two people having a virulent argument in sign language , which produced no decibels to speak of , but affectively , psychologically , was a very loud experience .
so , yeah , i get it , with , like , the weird appliances and then the total absence of conventional instruments and this glut of conductors , people might , you know , wonder , yeah , " is this music ? "
but let 's move on to a piece where clearly i 'm behaving myself , and that is my " concerto for orchestra . "
you 're going to notice a lot of conventional instruments in this clip . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- this , in fact , is not the title of this piece .
i was a bit mischievous . in fact , to make it more interesting , i put a space right in here , and this is the actual title of the piece .
let 's continue with that same excerpt .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's better with a florist , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- or at least it 's less boring . let 's watch a couple more clips .
-lrb- music -rrb- so with all these theatric elements , this pushes me in another role , and that would be , possibly , the dramaturge .
i was playing nice . i had to write the orchestra bits , right ?
okay ? but then there was this other stuff , right ?
there was the florist , and i can understand that , once again , we 're putting pressure on the ontology of music as we know it conventionally , but let 's look at one last piece today i 'm going to share with you .
this is going to be a piece called " aphasia , " and it 's for hand gestures synchronized to sound , and this invites yet another role , and final one i 'll share with you , which is that of the choreographer .
and the score for the piece looks like this , and it instructs me , the performer , to make various hand gestures at very specific times synchronized with an audio tape , and that audio tape is made up exclusively of vocal samples .
i recorded an awesome singer , and i took the sound of his voice in my computer , and i warped it in countless ways to come up with the soundtrack that you 're about to hear .
and i 'll perform just an excerpt of " aphasia " for you here . okay ?
-lrb- music -rrb- so that gives you a little taste of that piece . -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , okay , that 's kind of weird stuff .
is it music ? here 's how i want to conclude .
i 've decided , ultimately , that this is the wrong question , that this is not the important question .
the important question is , " is it interesting ? "
and i follow this question , not worrying about " is it music ? " - not worrying about the definition of the thing that i 'm making .
i allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me , and i do n't worry about the likeness of the result to some notion , some paradigm , of what music composition is supposed to be , and that has actually urged me , in a sense , to take on a whole bunch of different roles , and so what i want you to think about is , to what extent might you change the fundamental question in your discipline , and , okay , i 'm going to put one extra little footnote in here , because , like , i realized i mentioned some psychological defects earlier , and we also ,
along the way , had a fair amount of obsessive behavior , and there was some delusional behavior and things like that , and here i think we could say that this is an argument for self-loathing and a kind of schizophrenia , at least in the popular use of the term , and i really mean dissociative identity disorder , okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , despite those perils , i would urge you to think about the possibility that you might take on roles in your own work , whether they are neighboring or far-flung from your professional definition .
and with that , i thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i grew up in east los angeles , not even realizing i was poor .
my dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets .
everyone knew who i was , so i thought i was a pretty big deal , and i was protected , and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail , i had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent .
she worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean 's office , so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class , for whatever reason , who were waiting to be disciplined .
man , her office was packed .
so , see , kids like us , we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school , and sometimes we 're just not ready to focus .
but that does n't mean that we ca n't .
it just takes a little bit more .
like , i remember one day i found my dad convulsing , foaming at the mouth , od-ing on the bathroom floor .
really , do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list ?
not so much .
but i really needed a support network , a group of people who were going to help me make sure that i was n't going to be a victim of my own circumstance , that they were going to push me beyond what i even thought i could do .
i needed teachers , in the classroom , every day , who were going to say , " you can move beyond that . "
and unfortunately , the local junior high was not going to offer that .
it was gang-infested , huge teacher turnover rate .
so my mom said , " you 're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day . "
so for the next two years , that 's what i did .
i took a school bus to the fancy side of town .
and eventually , i ended up at a school where there was a mixture .
there were some people who were really gang-affiliated , and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school .
well , trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable .
you had to survive .
you just had to do things sometimes .
so there were a lot of teachers who were like , " she 's never going to make it .
she has an issue with authority .
she 's not going to go anywhere . "
some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause .
but then , they were very surprised when i graduated from high school .
i was accepted to pepperdine university , and i came back to the same school that i attended to be a special ed assistant .
and then i told them , " i want to be a teacher . "
and boy , they were like , " what ? why ?
why would you want to do that ? "
so i began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that i attended , and i really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me .
and so every year , i share my background with my kids , because they need to know that everyone has a story , everyone has a struggle , and everyone needs help along the way .
and i am going to be their help along the way .
so as a rookie teacher , i created opportunity .
i had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before .
i was like , " you need to go to a hospital , the school nurse , something . "
he 's like , " no , miss , i 'm not going .
i need to be in class because i need to graduate . "
so he knew that i was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance , but we were going to push forward and keep moving on .
and this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they 're going through , getting to know their families - i wanted that , but i could n't do it in a school with 1,600 kids , and teachers turning over year after year after year .
how do you get to build those relationships ?
so we created a new school .
and we created the san fernando institute for applied media .
and we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding , for support .
but with that , we were going to gain freedom : freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective ; freedom to control the curriculum so that we 're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five , no ; and freedom to control a budget , to spend money where it matters , not how a district or a state says you have to do it .
we wanted those freedoms .
but now , shifting an entire paradigm , it has n't been an easy journey , nor is it even complete .
but we had to do it .
our community deserved a new way of doing things .
and as the very first pilot middle school in all of los angeles unified school district , you better believe there was some opposition .
and it was out of fear - fear of , well , what if they get it wrong ?
yeah , what if we get it wrong ?
but what if we get it right ?
and we did .
so even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts - you ca n't teach , or you do n't want to teach , you do n't get to be at my school with my kids .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in our third year , how did we do it ?
well , we 're making school worth coming to every day .
we make our kids feel like they matter to us .
we make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them , and they use all the technology that they 're used to .
laptops , computers , tablets - you name it , they have it .
animation , software , moviemaking software , they have it all .
and because we connect it to what they 're doing - for example , they made public service announcements for the cancer society .
these were played in the local trolley system .
teaching elements of persuasion , it does n't get any more real than that .
our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we 've become our own school .
but it 's taken all stakeholders , working together - teachers and principals on one-year contracts , working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation .
and it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say , " know , the district is trying to impose this , but you have the freedom to do otherwise . "
and it takes an active parent center who is not only there , showing a presence every day , but who is part of our governance , making decisions for their kids , our kids .
because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live ?
they deserve a quality school in their neighborhood , a school that they can be proud to say they attend , and a school that the community can be proud of as well , and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances .
because it 's time that kids like me stop being the exception , and we become the norm .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do n't speak english .
i start speaking english , learning english , about a year ago .
i speak french and i grew up with french , so my english is franglais .
i 'm born in the western congo , in an area around here , and then went to university in kisangani .
and after i finished , i went to this area , the ituri forest .
but what i 've been doing - when i was about 14 , i grew in my uncle 's house .
and my father was a soldier , and my uncle was a fisherman and also a poacher .
what i 've been doing from 14 to 17 was , i was assisting them collecting ivory tusk , meat and whatever they were killing , poaching , hunting in the forest , bring it in the main city to get access to the market .
but finally , i got myself involved .
around 17 to 20 years , i became , myself , a poacher .
and i wanted to do it , because - i believed - to continue my studies .
i wanted to go to university , but my father was poor , my uncle even .
so , i did it .
and for three to four years , i went to university .
for three times , i applied to biomedical science , to be a doctor .
i was having my inscriptions , my admission to biology .
and i said , " no way , i 'm not doing it .
my family 's poor , my area do n't have better health care .
i want to be a doctor to serve them . "
three times , that means three years , and i start getting old .
i say , " oh , no , i continue . "
so , i did tropical ecology and plant botany .
when i finished , i went to the ituri forest for my internship .
it 's where i really getting passion with what i 'm doing right up to now - i 'm standing in front of you - doing botany and wildlife conservation .
that time the ituri forest was created as a forest reserve with some animals and also plants .
and the training center there was built around the scientific congolese staff and some american scientists also .
so , the okapi faunal reserve protects number - i think that is the largest number of elephants we have right now in protected areas in congo .
it has also chimpanzees .
and it has been named okapi faunal reserve because of this beautiful creature .
that is a forest giraffe .
i think you guys know it quite well .
here we have savanna giraffes , but through evolution we have this forest giraffe that lives only in congo .
it has also some beautiful primates .
thirteen species - highest diversity we can find in one single area in africa .
and it has the ituri forest itself - about 1,300 species of plants , so far known .
i joined the wildlife conservation society , working there , in 1995 , but i started working with them as a student in 1991 .
i was appointed as a teaching assistant at my university because i accomplished with honor .
but i did n't like the way - the instruction i got was very poor .
and i wanted to be formed to a training center and a research center .
with the end of the dictatorship regime of mobutu sese seko , that most of you know , life became very , very difficult .
and the work we have been doing was completely difficult to do and to achieve it .
when kabila started his movement to liberate congo , so mobutu soldiers started moving and retreated .
so they started fleeing from the east to the west .
and the okapi faunal reserve is there , so there was a road from goma , somewhere here , and coming like this .
so they might go through , pass through the okapi faunal reserve .
congo has five of the world 's richest sites of protected area , and the okapi faunal reserve is one of them .
so soldier was fleeing in the okapi faunal reserve .
on their way , they looted everything .
torture , wars - oh , my god , you ca n't believe .
every person was looking his way - where to go , we do n't know .
and it was for us , the young , the first time really we hear the language of war , of guns .
and even people who faced the rebellion of 1963 , after our independence , they did n't believe what was happening .
they were killing people . they were doing whatever they want because they have power .
who have been doing that ?
young children . child soldiers .
you ca n't ask him how old he is because he has guns .
but i was from the west , working in the east .
i even -lsb- at -rsb- that time was not speaking swahili .
and when they came , they looted everything .
you ca n't speak lingala because lingala was from mobutu , and everyone speaking lingala is soldier .
and i was from the same area to him .
all my friends said , we are leaving because we are a target .
but i 'm not going to the east , because i do n't know swahili .
i stay . if i go , i will be killed .
i ca n't go back to my area - it 's more than 1,000 kilometers -lsb- away -rsb- .
i stayed after they looted everything .
we have been doing research on botany , and we have a small herbarium of 4,500 sheets of plants .
we cut , we dry and we packed them , we mounted them on a folder .
purpose : so that we start them for agriculture , for medicine , for whatever , and for science , for the study of the flora and the change of the forest .
that is people moving around , that 's even pygmies .
and this is a bright guy , hard-working person , and pygmy .
i 've been working with him about 10 years .
and with soldiers , they went to the forest for poaching elephants .
because he 's pygmy , he knows how to track elephants in the forest .
he has been attacked by a leopard and they abandon him in the forest .
they came to told me , i have to save him .
and what i did , i gave him just antibiotics that we care for tuberculosis .
and fortunately , i saved his life .
and that was the language of the war .
everywhere there has been constant extraction of mineral , killing animals , the logging timbers and so on .
and what of important things - i think all of you here have a cell phone .
that mineral has killed a lot : five millions of congolese have gone because of this colombo-tantalite - they call it coltan - that they use it to make cell phones and it has been in that area , all over in congo . extraction , and good , big business of the war .
and what i did for the first war , after we have lost everything , i have to save something , even myself , my life and life of the staff .
i buried some of our new vehicle engines , i buried it to save it .
and some of equipment went with them , on the top of the canopy , to save it .
he 's not collecting plants , he 's going to save our equipment on the canopy .
and with the material that 's left - because they wanted to destroy it , to burn it , they did n't understand it , they did n't go to school - i packed it .
and that is me , going to , hurrying to uganda , to try to save that 4,000 material , with people carrying them on the bikes , bicycles .
and after that , we succeeded .
i housed that 4,000 material at the herbarium of makerere university .
and after the war , i have been able to bring it back home , so that we continue our studies .
the second war came while we did n't expect it .
with friends , we had been sitting and watching match football , and having some good music with worldspace radio , when it started , i think .
so , it was so bad .
we heard that now from the east again the war started , and it 's going fast .
this time i think kabila will go in place of , as he did with mobutu .
and the reserve was a target to the rebels .
three different movements and two militia acting in the same area and competing for natural resources .
and there was no way to work .
they destroy everything .
poaching - oh , no way .
and that 's the powerful men . we have to meet and to talk to them .
what 's the regulation of the reserve and what is the regulation of the parks ?
and they ca n't do what they are doing .
so we went to meet them .
that is coltan extraction , gold mining .
so , we started talking with them , convincing them that we are in a protected area .
there are regulations that it 's prohibited to do logging , mining and poaching , specifically .
but they said , " you guys , you think that soldiers who are dying are not important , and your animals you are protecting are most important .
we do n't think so .
we have to do it , because to let our movement advance . "
i say , " no way , you are not going to do it here . "
we started talking with them and i was negotiating .
tried to protect our equipment , tried to protect our staff and the villages of about 1,500 people .
and we continued .
but i was doing that , negotiating with them .
sometimes we are having meeting and they are talking with jean-pierre bemba , with mbusa nyamwisi , with kabila , and i 'm there .
sometimes , they talk to my own language , that is , lingala .
i hear it and what strategy they are doing , what they are planning .
sometimes , they are having a helicopter to supply them with ammunition and so on .
they used me to carry that , and i was doing counting , what comes from where , and where , and where .
i had only this equipment - my satellite phone , my computer and a plastic solar panel - that i hide it in the forest .
and every time , daily , after we have meeting , what compromise we have , whatever , i go , i write a short email , send it .
i do n't know how many people i had on my address .
i sent the message : what is going about the progress of the war and what they are planning to do .
they started suspecting that what we do on the morning , and the afternoon , it 's on the news , bbc , rfi .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- something might be going on .
and one day , we went for a meeting .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sorry .
one day , we went to meet the chief commander .
he had the same iridium cell phone like me .
and he asked me , " do you know how to use this ? "
i said , " i have never seen it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know . "
and i had mine on my pocket .
so , it was a chance that they trusted me a lot .
they did n't - they was not looking on me .
so i was scared .
and when we finished the meeting , i went to return it in the forest .
and i was sending news , doing whatever , reporting daily to the u.n. , to unesco , to our institution in new york , what have been going .
and for that , they have been having big pressure to leave , to free the area .
because there was no way - whatever they do , it 's known the same time .
during the first two rebellions , they killed all animals in the zoo .
we have a zoo of 14 okapis , and one of them was pregnant .
and during the war , after a week of heavy war , fighting in the area , we succeeded : we had the first okapi .
this is the only trouser and shirt remind me of this .
this is not local population , this is rebels .
they are now happy sending the news that they have protected the okapi with the war , because we sent the news that they are killing and poaching everywhere .
after a week , we celebrated the birthday of that okapi , they killed an elephant , just 50 meters to the area where the zoo , where okapi was born .
and i was mad .
i oppose it - that they are now going to dissect it , until i do my report and then i see the chief commander .
and i succeeded .
the elephant just decayed and they just got the tusks .
what we are doing after that - that was the situation of the war - we have to rebuild .
i had some money . i was paid 150 dollars .
i devoted half of it to rebuild the herbarium , because we did n't have good infrastructure to start plants .
wildlife conservation society more dealing with plants .
i started this with 70 dollars , and start fundraising money to where i 've been going .
i had opportunity to go all over , where herbarium for my african material is .
and they supported me a bit , and i built this .
now , it 's doing work to train young congolese .
and also , what one of the speciality we are doing , my design is tracking the global warming effect on biodiversity , and what the impacts of the ituri forest is playing to uptake carbon .
this is one of the studies we are doing on a 40-hectare plot , where we have tagged trees and lianas from one centimeters , and we are tracking them .
we have now data of about 15 years , to see how that forest is contributing to the carbon reductions .
and that is - i think it 's difficult for me .
this is a very embarrassing talk , i know .
i do n't know where to start , where to finish it .
when i was thinking to come here , what best title i wanted to say to my talk , i did n't find this .
but now i think that i would have titled it , " the language of guns . "
where are you people ?
now we are talking about reconstitution , rebuild africa .
but is gun industries a tool to rebuild , or is it a game ?
i think we see the war like a game - like soccer , football .
everybody is happy , but see what it 's doing , see what is going in darfur .
now we say , oh , my god .
see what the wars in rwanda .
that 's because of the language of guns .
i do n't think that someone may blame google , because it 's doing the right things , even if people like al-qaeda are using google to connect between them .
but it 's serving millions for the best .
but what is doing with gun industries ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you , thank you .
just wait over there .
it 's an amazing story .
i suspect a lot of people here have the same question i have .
how can we help you ?
corneille ewango : that 's really embarrassing questions .
i think that now i feel nervous .
and i think , helping us , people are acting sometimes by ignorance .
i did it myself .
if i know when i was young , that -lsb- by -rsb- killing an elephant , i 'm destroying biodiversity , i would not have done it .
many , many of you have seen the talents of africans , but there are few who are going to school .
many are dying because of all those kind of pandemics , hiv , malaria , poverty , not going to school .
what you can assist us , it 's by building capacities .
how many have got opportunity like me to go to u.s. , do a master 's ?
and go - now , i 'm in the netherlands to do a ph.d.
but many of them are just here , because they do n't have money .
and they ca n't go even to university .
they ca n't even attain the bachelor 's degree .
building capacities for the young generation is going to make a better generation and a better future tomorrow for africa .
ca : thank you , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a few weeks ago , i had a chance to go to saudi arabia .
and the first thing i wanted to do as a muslim was go to mecca and visit the kaaba , the holiest shrine of islam .
and i did that ; i put on my ritualistic dress ; i went to the holy mosque ; i did my prayers ; i observed all the rituals .
and meanwhile , besides all the spirituality , there was one mundane detail in the kaaba that was pretty interesting for me .
there was no separation of sexes .
in other words , men and women were worshiping all together .
they were together while doing the tawaf , the circular walk around the kaaba .
they were together while praying .
and if you wonder why this is interesting at all , you have to see the rest of saudi arabia because it 's a country which is strictly divided between the sexes .
in other words , as men , you are not simply supposed to be in the same physical space with women .
and i noticed this in a very funny way .
i left the kaaba to eat something in downtown mecca .
i headed to the nearest burger king restaurant .
and i went there - i noticed that there was a male section , which was carefully separated from the female section .
and i had to pay , order and eat at the male section .
" it 's funny , " i said to myself , " you can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy kaaba , but not at the burger king . "
quite ironic .
ironic , and it 's also , i think , quite telling .
because the kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of islam , that of prophet muhammad .
and if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women , the rituals around the kaaba could have been designed accordingly .
but apparently that was not an issue at the time .
so the rituals came that way .
this is also , i think , confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the koran , the very core of islam - the divine core of islam that all muslims , and equally myself , believe .
and i think it 's not an accident that you do n't find this idea in the very origin of islam .
because many scholars who study the history of islamic thought - muslim scholars or westerners - think that actually the practice of dividing men and women physically came as a later development in islam , as muslims adopted some preexisting cultures and traditions of the middle east .
seclusion of women was actually a byzantine and persian practice , and muslims adopted that and made that a part of their religion .
and actually this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon .
what we call today islamic law , and especially islamic culture - and there are many islamic cultures actually ; the one in saudi arabia is much different from where i come from in istanbul or turkey .
but still , if you 're going to speak about a muslim culture , this has a core , the divine message , which began the religion , but then many traditions , perceptions , many practices were added on top of it .
and these were traditions of the middle east - medieval traditions .
and there are two important messages , or two lessons , to take from that reality .
first of all , muslims - pious , conservative , believing muslims who want to be loyal to their religion - should not cling onto everything in their culture , thinking that that 's divinely mandated .
maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed .
on the other hand , the westerners who look at islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what islam ordains .
maybe it 's a middle eastern culture that became confused with islam .
there is a practice called female circumcision .
it 's something terrible , horrible .
it is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure .
and westerners , europeans or americans , who did n't know about this before faced this practice within some of the muslim communities who migrated from north africa .
and they 've thought , " oh , what a horrible religion that is which ordains something like that . "
but actually when you look at female circumcision , you see that it has nothing to do with islam , it 's just a north african practice , which predates islam .
it was there for thousands of years .
and quite tellingly , some muslims do practice that .
the muslims in north africa , not in other places .
but also the non-muslim communities of north africa - the animists , even some christians and even a jewish tribe in north africa is known to practice female circumcision .
so what might look like a problem within islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that muslims have subscribed to .
the same thing can be said for honor killings , which is a recurrent theme in the western media - and which is , of course , a horrible tradition .
and we see truly in some muslim communities that tradition .
but in the non-muslim communities of the middle east , such as some christian communities , eastern communities , you see the same practice .
we had a tragic case of an honor killing within turkey 's armenian community just a few months ago .
now these are things about general culture , but i 'm also very much interested in political culture and whether liberty and democracy is appreciated , or whether there 's an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to impose things on the citizens .
and it is no secret that many islamic movements in the middle east tend to be authoritarian , and some of the so-called " islamic regimes " such as saudi arabia , iran and the worst case was the taliban in afghanistan - they are pretty authoritarian . no doubt about that .
for example , in saudi arabia there is a phenomenon called the religious police .
and the religious police imposes the supposed islamic way of life on every citizen , by force - like women are forced to cover their heads - wear the hijab , the islamic head cover .
now that is pretty authoritarian , and that 's something i 'm very much critical of .
but when i realized that the non-muslim , or the non-islamic-minded actors in the same geography , sometimes behaved similarly , i realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole region , not just islam .
let me give you an example : in turkey where i come from , which is a very hyper-secular republic , until very recently we used to have what i call secularism police , which would guard the universities against veiled students .
in other words , they would force students to uncover their heads , and i think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it .
it should be the citizen 's decision .
but when i saw that , i said , " maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region , and some muslims have been influenced by that .
but the secular-minded people can be influenced by that .
maybe it 's a problem of the political culture , and we have to think about how to change that political culture . "
now these are some of the questions i had in mind a few years ago when i sat down to write a book .
i said , " well i will make a research about how islam actually came to be what it is today , and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken . "
the name of the book is " islam without extremes : a muslim case for liberty . "
and as the subtitle suggests , i looked at islamic tradition and the history of islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty , and i tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty .
and there are strengths in islamic tradition .
islam actually , as a monotheistic religion , which defined man as a responsible agent by itself , created the idea of the individual in the middle east and saved it from the communitarianism , the collectivism of the tribe .
you can derive many ideas from that .
but besides that , i also saw problems within islamic tradition .
but one thing was curious : most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later , not from the very divine core of islam , the koran , but from , again , traditions and mentalities , or the interpretations of the koran that muslims made in the middle ages .
the koran , for example , does n't condone stoning .
there is no punishment on apostasy .
there is no punishment on personal things like drinking .
these things which make islamic law , the troubling aspects of islamic law , were later developed into later interpretations of islam .
which means that muslims can , today , look at those things and say , " well , the core of our religion is here to stay with us .
it 's our faith , and we will be loyal to it .
but we can change how it was interpreted , because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the middle ages .
now we are living in a different world with different values and different political systems . "
that interpretation is quite possible and feasible .
now if i were the only person thinking that way , we would be in trouble .
but that 's not the case at all .
actually , from the 19th century on , there 's a whole revisionist , reformist - whatever you call it - tradition , a trend in islamic thinking .
and these were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century , and later , 20th century , which looked at europe basically and saw that europe has many things to admire , like science and technology .
but not just that ; also democracy , parliament , the idea of representation , the idea of equal citizenship .
these muslim thinkers and intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century looked at europe , saw these things .
they said , " why do n't we have these things ? "
and they looked back at islamic tradition , they saw that there are problematic aspects , but they 're not the core of the religion , so maybe they can be re-understood , and the koran can be reread in the modern world .
that trend is generally called islamic modernism , and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen , not just as an intellectual idea though , but also as a political program .
and that 's why actually in the 19th century the ottoman empire , which then covered the whole middle east , made very important reforms - reforms like giving christians and jews an equal citizenship status , accepting a constitution , accepting a representative parliament , advancing the idea of freedom of religion .
and that 's why the ottoman empire in its last decades turned into a proto-democracy , a constitutional monarchy , and freedom was a very important political value at the time .
similarly , in the arab world , there was what the great arab historian albert hourani defines as the liberal age .
he has a book , " arabic thought in the liberal age , " and the liberal age , he defines as 19th century and early 20th century .
quite notably , this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians .
but there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century , because we see a sharp decline in this islamic modernist line .
and in place of that , what happens is that islamism grows as an ideology which is authoritarian , which is quite strident , which is quite anti-western , and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision .
so islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the 20th century islamic world .
and even the very extreme forms of islamism led to terrorism in the name of islam - which is actually a practice that i think is against islam , but some , obviously , extremists did not think that way .
but there is a curious question : if islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries , why did islamism become so popular in the rest of the 20th century ?
and this is a question , i think , which needs to be discussed carefully .
and in my book , i went into that question as well .
and actually you do n't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that .
you just look at the political history of the 20th century , and you see things have changed a lot .
the context has changed .
in the 19th century , when muslims were looking at europe as an example , they were independent ; they were more self-confident .
in the early 20th century , with the fall of the ottoman empire , the whole middle east was colonized .
and when you have colonization what do you have ?
you have anti-colonization .
so europe is not just an example now to emulate ; it 's an enemy to fight and to resist .
so there 's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the muslim world , and what you see is more of a defensive , rigid , reactionary strain , which led to arab socialism , arab nationalism and ultimately to the islamist ideology .
and when the colonial period ended , what you had in place of that was , generally , secular dictators , which say they 're a country , but did not bring democracy to the country , and established their own dictatorship .
and i think the west , at least some powers in the west , particularly the united states , made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators , thinking that they were more helpful for their interests .
but the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country and suppressed islamic groups in their country actually made the islamists much more strident .
so in the 20th century , you had this vicious cycle in the arab world where you have a dictatorship suppressing its own people including the islamic-pious , and they 're reacting in reactionary ways .
there was one country , though , which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle .
and that 's the country where i come from ; that 's turkey .
turkey has never been colonized , so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the ottoman empire .
that 's one thing to remember .
they did not share the same anti-colonial hype that you can find in some other countries in the region .
secondly , and most importantly , turkey became a democracy earlier than any of the countries we are talking about .
in 1950 , turkey had the first free and fair elections , which ended the more autocratic secular regime , which was the beginning of turkey .
and the pious muslims in turkey saw that they can change the political system by voting .
and they realize that democracy is something that is compatible with islam , compatible with their values , and they 've been supportive of democracy .
that 's an experience that not every other muslim nation in the middle east had until very recently .
secondly , in the past two decades , thanks to globalization , thanks to the market economy , thanks to the rise of a middle-class , we in turkey see what i define as a rebirth of islamic modernism .
now there 's the more urban middle-class pious muslims who , again , look at their tradition and see that there are some problems in the tradition , and they understand that they need to be changed and questioned and reformed .
and they look at europe , and they see an example , again , to follow .
they see an example , at least , to take some inspiration from .
that 's why the e.u. process , turkey 's effort to join the e.u. , has been supported inside turkey by the islamic-pious , while some secular nations were against that .
well that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that not all europeans are that welcoming - but that 's another discussion .
but the pro-e.u. sentiment in turkey in the past decade has become almost an islamic cause and supported by the islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well , of course .
and thanks to that , turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in which islam and the most pious understandings of islam have become part of the democratic game , and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of the country .
and this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the islamic movements or some of the countries in the arab world .
you must have all seen the arab spring , which began in tunis and in egypt .
and arab masses just revolted against their dictators .
they were asking for democracy ; they were asking for freedom .
and they did not turn out to be the islamist boogyman that the dictators were always using to justify their regime .
they said that " we want freedom ; we want democracy .
we are muslim believers , but we want to be living as free people in free societies . "
of course , this is a long road .
democracy is not an overnight achievement ; it 's a process .
but this is a promising era in the muslim world .
and i believe that the islamic modernism which began in the 19th century , but which had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the muslim world , is having a rebirth .
and i think the getaway message from that would be that islam , despite some of the skeptics in the west , has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy , create its own way to liberalism , create its own way to freedom .
they just should be allowed to work for that .
thanks so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , culture was born of the imagination , and the imagination - the imagination as we know it - came into being when our species descended from our progenitor , homo erectus , and , infused with consciousness , began a journey that would carry it to every corner of the habitable world .
for a time , we shared the stage with our distant cousins , neanderthal , who clearly had some spark of awareness , but - whether it was the increase in the size of the brain , or the development of language , or some other evolutionary catalyst - we quickly left neanderthal gasping for survival .
by the time the last neanderthal disappeared in europe , 27,000 years ago , our direct ancestors had already , and for 5,000 years , been crawling into the belly of the earth , where in the light of the flickers of tallow candles , they had brought into being the great art of the upper paleolithic .
and i spent two months in the caves of southwest france with the poet clayton eshleman , who wrote a beautiful book called " juniper fuse . "
and you could look at this art and you could , of course , see the complex social organization of the people who brought it into being .
but more importantly , it spoke of a deeper yearning , something far more sophisticated than hunting magic .
and the way clayton put it was this way .
he said , " you know , clearly at some point , we were all of an animal nature , and at some point , we were n't . "
and he viewed proto-shamanism as a kind of original attempt , through ritual , to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost .
so , he saw this art not as hunting magic , but as postcards of nostalgia .
and viewed in that light , it takes on a whole other resonance .
and the most amazing thing about the upper paleolithic art is that as an aesthetic expression , it lasted for almost 20,000 years .
if these were postcards of nostalgia , ours was a very long farewell indeed .
and it was also the beginning of our discontent , because if you wanted to distill all of our experience since the paleolithic , it would come down to two words : how and why .
and these are the slivers of insight upon which cultures have been forged .
now , all people share the same raw , adaptive imperatives .
we all have children .
we all have to deal with the mystery of death , the world that waits beyond death , the elders who fall away into their elderly years .
all of this is part of our common experience , and this should n't surprise us , because , after all , biologists have finally proven it to be true , something that philosophers have always dreamt to be true .
and that is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters .
we are all cut from the same genetic cloth .
all of humanity , probably , is descended from a thousand people who left africa roughly 70,000 years ago .
but the corollary of that is that , if we all are brothers and sisters and share the same genetic material , all human populations share the same raw human genius , the same intellectual acuity .
and so whether that genius is placed into - technological wizardry has been the great achievement of the west - or by contrast , into unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth , is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation .
there is no progression of affairs in human experience .
there is no trajectory of progress . there 's no pyramid that conveniently places victorian england at the apex and descends down the flanks to the so-called primitives of the world .
all peoples are simply cultural options , different visions of life itself .
but what do i mean by different visions of life making for completely different possibilities for existence ?
well , let 's slip for a moment into the greatest culture sphere ever brought into being by the imagination , that of polynesia .
10,000 square kilometers , tens of thousands of islands flung like jewels upon the southern sea .
i recently sailed on the hokulea , named after the sacred star of hawaii , throughout the south pacific to make a film about the navigators .
these are men and women who , even today , can name 250 stars in the night sky .
these are men and women who can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon , simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their vessel , knowing full well that every island group in the pacific has its unique refractive pattern that can be read with the same perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint .
these are sailors who in the darkness , in the hull of the vessel , can distinguish as many as 32 different sea swells moving through the canoe at any one point in time , distinguishing local wave disturbances from the great currents that pulsate across the ocean , that can be followed with the same ease that a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea .
indeed , if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean , what you would get is polynesia .
and if we slip from the realm of the sea into the realm of the spirit of the imagination , you enter the realm of tibetan buddhism .
and i recently made a film called " the buddhist science of the mind . "
why did we use that word , science ?
what is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth ?
what is buddhism but 2,500 years of empirical observation as to the nature of mind ?
i travelled for a month in nepal with our good friend , matthieu ricard , and you 'll remember matthieu famously said to all of us here once at ted , " western science is a major response to minor needs . "
we spend all of our lifetime trying to live to be 100 without losing our teeth .
the buddhist spends all their lifetime trying to understand the nature of existence .
our billboards celebrate naked children in underwear .
their billboards are manuals , prayers to the well-being of all sentient creatures .
and with the blessing of trulshik rinpoche , we began a pilgrimage to a curious destination , accompanied by a great doctor .
and the destination was a single room in a nunnery , where a woman had gone into lifelong retreat 55 years before .
and en route , we took darshan from rinpoche , and he sat with us and told us about the four noble truths , the essence of the buddhist path .
all life is suffering . that does n't mean all life is negative .
it means things happen .
the cause of suffering is ignorance .
by that , the buddha did not mean stupidity ; he meant clinging to the illusion that life is static and predictable .
the third noble truth said that ignorance can be overcome .
and the fourth and most important , of course , was the delineation of a contemplative practice that not only had the possibility of a transformation of the human heart , but had 2,500 years of empirical evidence that such a transformation was a certainty .
and so , when this door opened onto the face of a woman who had not been out of that room in 55 years , you did not see a mad woman .
you saw a woman who was more clear than a pool of water in a mountain stream .
and of course , this is what the tibetan monks told us .
they said , at one point , you know , we do n't really believe you went to the moon , but you did .
you may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime , but we do .
and if we move from the realm of the spirit to the realm of the physical , to the sacred geography of peru - i 've always been interested in the relationships of indigenous people that literally believe that the earth is alive , responsive to all of their aspirations , all of their needs .
and , of course , the human population has its own reciprocal obligations .
i spent 30 years living amongst the people of chinchero and i always heard about an event that i always wanted to participate in .
once each year , the fastest young boy in each hamlet is given the honor of becoming a woman .
and for one day , he wears the clothing of his sister and he becomes a transvestite , a waylaka . and for that day , he leads all able-bodied men on a run , but it 's not your ordinary run .
you start off at 11,500 feet .
you run down to the base of the sacred mountain , antakillqa .
you run up to 15,000 feet , descend 3,000 feet .
climb again over the course of 24 hours .
and of course , the waylakama spin , the trajectory of the route , is marked by holy mounds of earth , where coke is given to the earth , libations of alcohol to the wind , the vortex of the feminine is brought to the mountaintop .
and the metaphor is clear : you go into the mountain as an individual , but through exhaustion , through sacrifice , you emerge as a community that has once again reaffirmed its sense of place in the planet .
and at 48 , i was the only outsider ever to go through this , only one to finish it .
i only managed to do it by chewing more coca leaves in one day than anyone in the 4,000-year history of the plant .
but these localized rituals become pan-andean , and these fantastic festivals , like that of the qoyllur rit 'i , which occurs when the pleiades reappear in the winter sky .
it 's kind of like an andean woodstock : 60,000 indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the sacred valley , called the sinakara , which is dominated by three tongues of the great glacier .
the metaphor is so clear . you bring the crosses from your community , in this wonderful fusion of christian and pre-columbian ideas .
you place the cross into the ice , in the shadow of ausangate , the most sacred of all apus , or sacred mountains of the inca .
and then you do the ritual dances that empower the crosses .
now , these ideas and these events allow us even to deconstruct iconic places that many of you have been to , like machu picchu .
machu picchu was never a lost city .
on the contrary , it was completely linked in to the 14,000 kilometers of royal roads the inca made in less than a century .
but more importantly , it was linked in to the andean notions of sacred geography .
the intiwatana , the hitching post to the sun , is actually an obelisk that constantly reflects the light that falls on the sacred apu of machu picchu , which is sugarloaf mountain , called huayna picchu .
if you come to the south of the intiwatana , you find an altar .
climb huayna picchu , find another altar .
take a direct north-south bearing , you find to your astonishment that it bisects the intiwatana stone , goes to the skyline , hits the heart of salcantay , the second of the most important mountains of the incan empire .
and then beyond salcantay , of course , when the southern cross reaches the southernmost point in the sky , directly in that same alignment , the milky way overhead .
but what is enveloping machu picchu from below ?
the sacred river , the urubamba , or the vilcanota , which is itself the earthly equivalent of the milky way , but it 's also the trajectory that viracocha walked at the dawn of time when he brought the universe into being .
and where does the river rise ?
right on the slopes of the koariti .
so , 500 years after columbus , these ancient rhythms of landscape are played out in ritual .
now , when i was here at the first ted , i showed this photograph : two men of the elder brothers , the descendants , survivors of el dorado .
these , of course , are the descendants of the ancient tairona civilization .
if those of you who are here remember that i mentioned that they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood , but the training for the priesthood is extraordinary .
taken from their families , sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness for 18 years - two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to evoke the nine months they spend in the natural mother 's womb .
all that time , the world only exists as an abstraction , as they are taught the values of their society .
values that maintain the proposition that their prayers , and their prayers alone , maintain the cosmic balance .
now , the measure of a society is not only what it does , but the quality of its aspirations .
and i always wanted to go back into these mountains , to see if this could possibly be true , as indeed had been reported by the great anthropologist , reichel-dolmatoff .
so , literally two weeks ago , i returned from having spent six weeks with the elder brothers on what was clearly the most extraordinary trip of my life .
these really are a people who live and breathe the realm of the sacred , a baroque religiosity that is simply awesome .
they consume more coca leaves than any human population , half a pound per man , per day .
the gourd you see here is - everything in their lives is symbolic .
their central metaphor is a loom .
they say , " upon this loom , i weave my life . "
they refer to the movements as they exploit the ecological niches of the gradient as " threads . "
when they pray for the dead , they make these gestures with their hands , spinning their thoughts into the heavens .
you can see the calcium buildup on the head of the poporo gourd .
the gourd is a feminine aspect ; the stick is a male .
you put the stick in the powder to take the sacred ashes - well , they 're not ashes , they 're burnt limestone - to empower the coca leaf , to change the ph of the mouth to facilitate the absorption of cocaine hydrochloride .
but if you break a gourd , you can not simply throw it away , because every stroke of that stick that has built up that calcium , the measure of a man 's life , has a thought behind it .
fields are planted in such an extraordinary way , that the one side of the field is planted like that by the women .
the other side is planted like that by the men . metaphorically , you turn it on the side , and you have a piece of cloth .
and they are the descendants of the ancient tairona civilization , the greatest goldsmiths of south america , who in the wake of the conquest , retreated into this isolated volcanic massif that soars to 20,000 feet above the caribbean coastal plain .
there are four societies : the kogi , the wiwa , the kankwano and the arhuacos .
i traveled with the arhuacos , and the wonderful thing about this story was that this man , danilo villafane - if we just jump back here for a second .
when i first met danilo , in the colombian embassy in washington , i could n't help but say , " you know , you look a lot like an old friend of mine . "
well , it turns out he was the son of my friend , adalberto , from 1974 , who had been killed by the farc .
and i said , " danilo , you wo n't remember this , but when you were an infant , i carried you on my back , up and down the mountains . "
and because of that , danilo invited us to go to the very heart of the world , a place where no journalist had ever been permitted .
not simply to the flanks of the mountains , but to the very iced peaks which are the destiny of the pilgrims .
and this man sitting cross-legged is now a grown-up eugenio , a man who i 've known since 1974 .
and this is one of those initiates .
no , it 's not true that they 're kept in the darkness for 18 years , but they are kept within the confines of the ceremonial men 's circle for 18 years .
this little boy will never step outside of the sacred fields that surround the men 's hut for all that time , until he begins his journey of initiation .
for that entire time , the world only exists as an abstraction , as he is taught the values of society , including this notion that their prayers alone maintain the cosmic balance .
before we could begin our journey , we had to be cleansed at the portal of the earth .
and it was extraordinary to be taken by a priest .
and you see that the priest never wears shoes because holy feet - there must be nothing between the feet and the earth for a mamo .
and this is actually the place where the great mother sent the spindle into the world that elevated the mountains and created the homeland that they call the heart of the world .
we traveled high into the paramo , and as we crested the hills , we realized that the men were interpreting every single bump on the landscape in terms of their own intense religiosity .
and then of course , as we reached our final destination , a place called mamancana , we were in for a surprise , because the farc were waiting to kidnap us .
and so we ended up being taken aside into these huts , hidden away until the darkness .
and then , abandoning all our gear , we were forced to ride out in the middle of the night , in a quite dramatic scene .
it 's going to look like a john ford western .
and we ran into a farc patrol at dawn , so it was quite harrowing .
it will be a very interesting film . but what was fascinating is that the minute there was a sense of dangers , the mamos went into a circle of divination .
and of course , this is a photograph literally taken the night we were in hiding , as they divine their route to take us out of the mountains .
we were able to , because we had trained people in filmmaking , continue with our work , and send our wiwa and arhuaco filmmakers to the final sacred lakes to get the last shots for the film , and we followed the rest of the arhuaco back to the sea , taking the elements from the highlands to the sea .
and here you see how their sacred landscape has been covered by brothels and hotels and casinos , and yet , still they pray .
and it 's an amazing thing to think that this close to miami , two hours from miami , there is an entire civilization of people praying every day for your well-being .
they call themselves the elder brothers .
they dismiss the rest of us who have ruined the world as the younger brothers . they can not understand why it is that we do what we do to the earth .
now , if we slip to another end of the world , i was up in the high arctic to tell a story about global warming , inspired in part by the former vice president 's wonderful book .
and what struck me so extraordinary was to be again with the inuit - a people who do n't fear the cold , but take advantage of it .
a people who find a way , with their imagination , to carve life out of that very frozen .
a people for whom blood on ice is not a sign of death , but an affirmation of life .
and yet tragically , when you now go to those northern communities , you find to your astonishment that whereas the sea ice used to come in in september and stay till july , in a place like kanak in northern greenland , it literally comes in now in november and stays until march .
so , their entire year has been cut in half .
now , i want to stress that none of these peoples that i 've been quickly talking about here are disappearing worlds .
these are not dying peoples .
on the contrary , you know , if you have the heart to feel and the eyes to see , you discover that the world is not flat .
the world remains a rich tapestry .
it remains a rich topography of the spirit .
these myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being new , failed attempts at being modern .
they 're unique facets of the human imagination .
they 're unique answers to a fundamental question : what does it mean to be human and alive ?
and when asked that question , they respond with 6,000 different voices .
and collectively , those voices become our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia .
our industrial society is scarcely 300 years old .
that shallow history should n't suggest to anyone that we have all of the answers for all of the questions that will confront us in the ensuing millennia .
the myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being us .
they are unique answers to that fundamental question : what does it mean to be human and alive ?
and there is indeed a fire burning over the earth , taking with it not only plants and animals , but the legacy of humanity 's brilliance .
right now , as we sit here in this room , of those 6,000 languages spoken the day that you were born , fully half are n't being taught to children .
so , you 're living through a time when virtually half of humanity 's intellectual , social and spiritual legacy is being allowed to slip away .
this does not have to happen .
these peoples are not failed attempts at being modern - quaint and colorful and destined to fade away as if by natural law .
in every case , these are dynamic , living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces .
that 's actually an optimistic observation , because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction , we can also be , and must be , the facilitators of cultural survival .
thank you very much .
so just by a show of hands , how many of you all have a robot at home ?
not very many of you .
okay . and actually of those hands , if you do n't include roomba how many of you have a robot at home ?
so a couple .
that 's okay .
that 's the problem that we 're trying to solve at romotive - that i and the other 20 nerds at romotive are obsessed with solving .
so we really want to build a robot that anyone can use , whether you 're eight or 80 .
and as it turns out , that 's a really hard problem , because you have to build a small , portable robot that 's not only really affordable , but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids .
this robot ca n't be creepy or uncanny .
he should be friendly and cute .
so meet romo .
romo 's a robot that uses a device you already know and love - your iphone - as his brain .
and by leveraging the power of the iphone 's processor , we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks , which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past .
when romo wakes up , he 's in creature mode .
so he 's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face .
if i duck down , he 'll follow me .
he 's wary , so he 'll keep his eyes on me .
if i come over here , he 'll turn to follow me .
if i come over here - -lrb- laughs -rrb- he 's smart .
and if i get too close to him , he gets scared just like any other creature .
so in a lot of ways , romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own .
thanks , little guy .
-lrb- sneezing sound -rrb- bless you .
and if i want to explore the world - uh-oh , romo 's tired - if i want to explore the world with romo , i can actually connect him from any other ios device .
so here 's the ipad .
and romo will actually stream video to this device .
so i can see everything that romo sees , and i get a robot 's-eye-view of the world .
now this is a free app on the app store , so if any of you guys had this app on your phones , we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together .
so i 'll show you really quickly , romo actually - he 's streaming video , so you can see me and the entire ted audience .
if i get in front of romo here .
and if i want to control him , i can just drive .
so i can drive him around , and i can take pictures of you .
i 've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person ted audience .
so i 'll snap a picture .
and in the same way that you scroll through content on an ipad , i can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device .
so there are all of you through romo 's eyes .
and finally , because romo is an extension of me , i can express myself through his emotions .
so i can go in and i can say let 's make romo excited .
but the most important thing about romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive .
you do not have to teach someone how to drive romo .
in fact , who would like to drive a robot ?
okay . awesome .
here you go .
thank you , scott .
and even cooler , you actually do n't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him .
so he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices .
so you can log in through the browser , and it 's kind of like skype on wheels .
so we were talking before about telepresence , and this is a really cool example .
you can imagine an eight-year-old girl , for example , who has an iphone , and her mom buys her a robot .
that girl can take her iphone , put it on the robot , send an email to grandma , who lives on the other side of the country .
grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night , when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year .
thanks , scott .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so those are a couple of the really cool things that romo can do today .
but i just want to finish by talking about something that we 're working on in the future .
this is actually something that one of our engineers , dom , built in a weekend .
it 's built on top of a google open framework called blockly .
this allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want .
you do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for romo .
and you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser , which is what you see romo doing on the left .
and then if you have something you like , you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life , run the program in real life .
and then if you have something you 're proud of , you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world .
so all of these wi-fi-enabled robots actually learn from each other .
the reason we 're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal .
they change from person to person .
so we think that if you 're going to have a robot in your home , that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination .
so i wish that i could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like .
to be honest , i have no idea .
but what we do know is that it is n't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away .
the future of personal robotics is happening today , and it 's going to depend on small , agile robots like romo and the creativity of people like yourselves .
so we ca n't wait to get you all robots , and we ca n't wait to see what you build .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm standing in front of you today in all humility , wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education .
and i 'm not a trained academic .
neither am i a veteran social worker .
i was 26 years in the corporate world , trying to make organizations profitable .
and then in 2003 i started parikrma humanity foundation from my kitchen table .
the first thing that we did was walk through the slums .
you know , by the way , there are two million people in bangalore , who live in 800 slums .
we could n't go to all the slums , but we tried to cover as much as we could .
we walked through these slums , identified houses where children would never go to school .
we talked to the parents , tried to convince them about sending their children to school .
we played with the children , and came back home really tired , exhausted , but with images of bright faces , twinkling eyes , and went to sleep .
we were all excited to start , but the numbers hit us then : 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school , but do not ; 100 million children who go to school but can not read ; 125 million who can not do basic maths .
we also heard that 250 billion indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling .
ninety percent of it was spent on teachers ' salary and administrators ' salary .
and yet , india has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world , with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year .
those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling , overwhelming , and we were constantly asked , " when will you start ? how many schools will you start ?
how many children will you get ?
how are you going to scale ?
how are you going to replicate ? "
it was very difficult not to get scared , not to get daunted .
but we dug our heels and said , " we 're not in the number game .
we want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school , sent to college , and get them prepared for better living , a high value job . "
so , we started parikrma .
the first parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line .
our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums , a second story building , the only second story building inside the slums .
and that rooftop did not have any ceiling , only half a tin sheet .
that was our first school . one hundred sixty-five children .
indian academic year begins in june .
so , june it rains , so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof , waiting for the rain to stop .
my god ! what a bonding exercise that was .
and all of us that were under that roof are still here together today .
then came the second school , the third school , the fourth school and a junior college .
in six years now , we have four schools , one junior college , 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages .
-lrb- applause -rrb- our dream is very simple : to send each of these kids , get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully , contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world .
now , when you talk global you have to talk english .
and so all our schools are english medium schools .
but they know there is this myth that children from the slums can not speak english well .
no one in their family has spoken english .
no one in their generation has spoken english .
but how wrong it is .
girl : i like adventurous books , and some of my favorites are alfred hitchcock and -lsb- unclear -rsb- and hardy boys .
although they are like in different contexts , one is magical , the other two are like investigation , i like those books because they have something special in them .
the vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing .
i mean like once i pick up one book i can not put it down until i finish the whole book .
even if it takes me four and a half hours , or three and half hours to finish my book , i do it .
boy : i did good research and i got the information -lsb- on the -rsb- world 's fastest cars .
i like ducati zz143 , because it is the fastest , the world 's fastest bike , and i like pulsar 220 dtsi because it is india 's fastest bike . -lrb- laughter -rrb- shukla bose : well , that girl that you saw , her father sells flowers on the roadside .
and this little boy has been coming to school for five years .
but is n't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- he has n't seen one , he has n't ridden one , of course , but he has done a lot of research through google search .
you know , when we started with our english medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible , the icse curriculum .
and again , there were people who laughed at me and said , " do n't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students .
they 'll never be able to cope . "
not only do our children cope very well , but they excel in it .
you should just come across to see how well our children do .
there is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school ; they 'd much rather put them to work .
that 's absolute hogwash .
all parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves , but they need to believe that change is possible .
video : -lrb- hindi -rrb- sb : we have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting .
sometimes it 's even 100 percent , much more than many privileged schools .
fathers have started to attend .
it 's very interesting . when we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register .
now they have started writing their signature .
the children have taught them .
it 's amazing how much children can teach .
we have , a few months ago , actually late last year , we had a few mothers who came to us and said , " you know , we want to learn how to read and write .
can you teach us ? " so , we started an afterschool for our parents , for our mothers .
we had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study .
we want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools .
ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics .
so , you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from .
we have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back , most times sober , we have to find a job for them so that they do n't regress .
we have about three fathers who have been trained to cook .
we have taught them nutrition , hygiene .
we have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children .
they do a very good job because their children are eating their food , but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect , and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile .
more than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families .
we 've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school .
vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school .
there is also this myth that children from the slums can not integrate with mainstream .
take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools , best schools in the country that was selected for the duke university talent identification program and was sent to iim ahmedabad .
video : girl : duke iima camp . whenever we see that iima , it was such a pride for us to go to that camp .
everybody was very friendly , especially i got a lot of friends .
and i felt that my english has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends .
there they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset , a totally different society .
i mingled with almost everyone .
they were very friendly .
i had very good friends there , who are from delhi , who are from mumbai .
even now we are in touch through facebook .
after this ahmedabad trip i 've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those .
before that i feel like i was n't like this .
i do n't even mingle , or start speaking with someone so quickly .
my accent with english improved a lot .
and i learned football , volleyball , frisbee , lots of games .
and i would n't want to go to bangalore . let me stay here .
such beautiful food , i enjoyed it . it was so beautiful .
i enjoyed eating food like -lsb- unclear -rsb- would come and ask me , " yes ma 'am , what you want ? " it was so good to hear !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- sb : this girl was working as a maid before she came to school .
and today she wants to be a neurologist .
our children are doing brilliantly in sports .
they are really excelling .
there is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in bangalore , where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city .
we 've got the best school award for three years successively .
and our children are coming back home with bags full of medals , with lots of admirers and friends .
last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school .
we also have our very own dream team .
why is this happening ? why this confidence ?
is it the exposure ? we have professors from mit , berkeley , stanford , indian institute of science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas , experiments , much beyond the classroom .
art , music are considered therapy and mediums of expression .
we also believe that it 's the content that is more important .
it is not the infrastructure , not the toilets , not the libraries , but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important .
creating an environment of learning , of inquiry , of exploration is what is true education .
when we started parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking .
we did n't hire mckinsey to do a business plan .
but we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time , not get bogged with numbers , and actually see the child complete the circle of life , and unleash his total potential .
we do not believe in scale because we believe in quality , and scale and numbers will automatically happen .
we have corporates that have stood behind us , and we are able to , now , open more schools .
but we began with the idea of one child at a time .
this is five-year-old parusharam .
he was begging by a bus stop a few years ago , got picked up and is now in an orphanage , has been coming to school for the last four and a half months .
he 's in kindergarten .
he has learned how to speak english .
we have a model by which kids can speak english and understand english in three month 's time .
he can tell you stories in english of the thirsty crow , of the crocodile and of the giraffe .
and if you ask him what he likes to do he will say , " i like sleeping .
i like eating . i like playing . "
and if you ask him what he wants to do , he will say , " i want to horsing . "
now , " horsing " is going for a horse ride .
so , parusharam comes to my office every day .
he comes for a tummy rub , because he believes that will give me luck . -lrb- laughter -rrb- when i started parikrma i began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world .
but today i have been transformed .
i have been changed with my children .
i 've learned so much from them : love , compassion , imagination and such creativity .
parusharam is parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go .
i promise you , parusharam will speak in the ted conference a few years from now .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the internet , the web as we know it , the kind of web - the things we 're all talking about - is already less than 5,000 days old .
so all of the things that we 've seen come about , starting , say , with satellite images of the whole earth , which we could n't even imagine happening before , all these things rolling into our lives , just this abundance of things that are right before us , sitting in front of our laptop , or our desktop .
this kind of cornucopia of stuff just coming and never ending is amazing , and we 're not amazed .
it 's really amazing that all this stuff is here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's in 5,000 days , all this stuff has come .
and i know that 10 years ago , if i had told you that this was all coming , you would have said that that 's impossible .
there 's simply no economic model that that would be possible .
and if i told you it was all coming for free , you would say , this is simply - you 're dreaming .
you 're a californian utopian . you 're a wild-eyed optimist .
and yet it 's here .
the other thing that we know about it was that 10 years ago , as i looked at what even wired was talking about , we thought it was going to be tv , but better .
that was the model . that was what everybody was suggesting was going to be coming .
and it turns out that that 's not what it was .
first of all , it was impossible , and it 's not what it was .
and so one of the things that i think we 're learning - if you think about , like , wikipedia , it 's something that was simply impossible .
it 's impossible in theory , but possible in practice .
and if you take all these things that are impossible , i think one of the things that we 're learning from this era , from this last decade , is that we have to get good at believing in the impossible , because we 're unprepared for it .
so , i 'm curious about what 's going to happen in the next 5,000 days .
but if that 's happened in the last 5,000 days , what 's going to happen in the next 5,000 days ?
so , i have a kind of a simple story , and it suggests that what we want to think about is this thing that we 're making , this thing that has happened in 5,000 days - that 's all these computers , all these handhelds , all these cell phones , all these laptops , all these servers - basically what we 're getting out of all these connections is we 're getting one machine .
if there is only one machine , and our little handhelds and devices are actually just little windows into those machines , but that we 're basically constructing a single , global machine .
and so i began to think about that .
and it turned out that this machine happens to be the most reliable machine that we 've ever made .
it has not crashed ; it 's running uninterrupted .
and there 's almost no other machine that we 've ever made that runs the number of hours , the number of days .
5,000 days without interruption - that 's just unbelievable .
and of course , the internet is longer than just 5,000 days ; the web is only 5,000 days .
so , i was trying to basically make measurements .
what are the dimensions of this machine ?
and i started off by calculating how many billions of clicks there are all around the globe on all the computers .
and there is a 100 billion clicks per day .
and there 's 55 trillion links between all the web pages of the world .
and so i began thinking more about other kinds of dimensions , and i made a quick list . was it chris jordan , the photographer , talking about numbers being so large that they 're meaningless ?
well , here 's a list of them . they 're hard to tell , but there 's one billion pc chips on the internet , if you count all the chips in all the computers on the internet .
there 's two million emails per second .
so it 's a very big number .
it 's just a huge machine , and it uses five percent of the global electricity on the planet .
so here 's the specifications , just as if you were to make up a spec sheet for it : 170 quadrillion transistors , 55 trillion links , emails running at two megahertz itself , 31 kilohertz text messaging , 246 exabyte storage . that 's a big disk .
that 's a lot of storage , memory . nine exabyte ram .
and the total traffic on this is running at seven terabytes per second .
brewster was saying the library of congress is about twenty terabytes .
so every second , half of the library of congress is swooshing around in this machine . it 's a big machine .
so i did something else . i figured out 100 billion clicks per day , 55 trillion links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain .
a quadrillion transistors is almost the same as the number of neurons in your brain .
so to a first approximation , we have these things - twenty petahertz synapse firings .
of course , the memory is really huge .
but to a first approximation , the size of this machine is the size - and its complexity , kind of - to your brain .
because in fact , that 's how your brain works - in kind of the same way that the web works .
however , your brain is n't doubling every two years .
so if we say this machine right now that we 've made is about one hb , one human brain , if we look at the rate that this is increasing , 30 years from now , there 'll be six billion hbs .
so by the year 2040 , the total processing of this machine will exceed a total processing power of humanity , in raw bits and stuff . and this is , i think , where ray kurzweil and others get this little chart saying that we 're going to cross .
so , what about that ? well , here 's a couple of things .
i have three kind of general things i would like to say , three consequences of this .
first , that basically what this machine is doing is embodying .
we 're giving it a body . and that 's what we 're going to do in the next 5,000 days - we 're going to give this machine a body .
and the second thing is , we 're going to restructure its architecture .
and thirdly , we 're going to become completely codependent upon it .
so let me go through those three things .
first of all , we have all these things in our hands .
we think they 're all separate devices , but in fact , every screen in the world is looking into the one machine .
these are all basically portals into that one machine .
the second thing is that - some people call this the cloud , and you 're kind of touching the cloud with this .
and so in some ways , all you really need is a cloudbook .
and the cloudbook does n't have any storage .
it 's wireless . it 's always connected .
there 's many things about it . it becomes very simple , and basically what you 're doing is you 're just touching the machine , you 're touching the cloud and you 're going to compute that way .
so the machine is computing .
and in some ways , it 's sort of back to the kind of old idea of centralized computing .
but everything , all the cameras , and the microphones , and the sensors in cars and everything is connected to this machine .
and everything will go through the web .
and we 're seeing that already with , say , phones .
right now , phones do n't go through the web , but they are beginning to , and they will .
and if you imagine what , say , just as an example , what google labs has in terms of experiments with google docs , google spreadsheets , blah , blah , blah - all these things are going to become web based .
they 're going through the machine .
and i am suggesting that every bit will be owned by the web .
right now , it 's not . if you do spreadsheets and things at work , a word document , they are n't on the web , but they are going to be . they 're going to be part of this machine .
they 're going to speak the web language .
they 're going to talk to the machine .
the web , in some sense , is kind of like a black hole that 's sucking up everything into it .
and so every thing will be part of the web .
so every item , every artifact that we make , will have embedded in it some little sliver of web-ness and connection , and it will be part of this machine , so that our environment - kind of in that ubiquitous computing sense - our environment becomes the web . everything is connected .
now , with rfids and other things - whatever technology it is , it does n't really matter . the point is that everything will have embedded in it some sensor connecting it to the machine , and so we have , basically , an internet of things .
so you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels , and a car as a chip with wheels , because basically most of the cost of manufacturing cars is the embedded intelligence and electronics in it , and not the materials .
a lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied , alternative , virtual existence , and that we would have the old economy of atoms .
but in fact , what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two , where we embed the information , and the digital nature of things into the material world .
that 's what we 're looking forward to . that is where we 're going - this union , this convergence of the atomic and the digital .
and so one of the consequences of that , i believe , is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now - tv , film , video - that basically becomes one media platform .
and while there 's many differences in some senses , they will share more and more in common with each other .
so that the laws of media , such as the fact that copies have no value , the value 's in the uncopiable things , the immediacy , the authentication , the personalization .
the media wants to be liquid .
the reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them , not so that they are " free " as in " beer , " but " free " as in " freedom . "
and the network effects rule , meaning that the more you have , the more you get .
the first fax machine - the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot , because there was nobody to fax to .
but here she became an evangelist , recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable .
those are the effects that we 're going to see .
attention is the currency .
so those laws are going to kind of spread throughout all media .
and the other thing about this embodiment is that there 's kind of what i call the mcluhan reversal .
mcluhan was saying , " machines are the extensions of the human senses . "
and i 'm saying , " humans are now going to be the extended senses of the machine , " in a certain sense .
so we have a trillion eyes , and ears , and touches , through all our digital photographs and cameras .
and we see that in things like flickr , or photosynth , this program from microsoft that will allow you to assemble a view of a touristy place from the thousands of tourist snapshots of it .
in a certain sense , the machine is seeing through the pixels of individual cameras .
now , the second thing that i want to talk about was this idea of restructuring , that what the web is doing is restructuring .
and i have to warn you , that what we 'll talk about is - i 'm going to give my explanation of a term you 're hearing , which is a " semantic web . "
so first of all , the first stage that we 've seen of the internet was that it was going to link computers .
and that 's what we called the net ; that was the internet of nets .
and we saw that , where you have all the computers of the world .
and if you remember , it was a kind of green screen with cursors , and there was really not much to do , and if you wanted to connect it , you connected it from one computer to another computer .
and what you had to do was - if you wanted to participate in this , you had to share packets of information .
so you were forwarding on . you did n't have control .
it was n't like a telephone system where you had control of a line : you had to share packets .
the second stage that we 're in now is the idea of linking pages .
so in the old one , if i wanted to go on to an airline web page , i went from my computer , to an ftp site , to another airline computer .
now we have pages - the unit has been resolved into pages , so one page links to another page .
and if i want to go in to book a flight , i go into the airline 's flight page , the website of the airline , and i 'm linking to that page .
and what we 're sharing were links , so you had to be kind of open with links .
you could n't deny - if someone wanted to link to you , you could n't stop them . you had to participate in this idea of opening up your pages to be linked by anybody .
so that 's what we were doing .
we 're now entering to the third stage , which is what i 'm talking about , and that is where we link the data .
so , i do n't know what the name of this thing is .
i 'm calling it the one machine . but we 're linking data .
so we 're going from machine to machine , from page to page , and now data to data .
so the difference is , is that rather than linking from page to page , we 're actually going to link from one idea on a page to another idea , rather than to the other page .
so every idea is basically being supported - or every item , or every noun - is being supported by the entire web .
it 's being resolved at the level of items , or ideas , or words , if you want .
so besides physically coming out again into this idea that it 's not just virtual , it 's actually going out to things .
so something will resolve down to the information about a particular person , so every person will have a unique id .
every person , every item will have a something that will be very specific , and will link to a specific representation of that idea or item .
so now , in this new one , when i link to it , i would link to my particular flight , my particular seat .
and so , giving an example of this thing , i live in pacifica , rather than - right now pacifica is just sort of a name on the web somewhere .
the web does n't know that that is actually a town , and that it 's a specific town that i live in , but that 's what we 're going to be talking about .
it 's going to link directly to - it will know , the web will be able to read itself and know that that actually is a place , and that whenever it sees that word , " pacifica , " it knows that it actually has a place , latitude , longitude , a certain population .
so here are some of the technical terms , all three-letter things , that you 'll see a lot more of .
all these things are about enabling this idea of linking to the data .
so i 'll give you one kind of an example .
there 's like a billion social sites on the web .
each time you go into there , you have to tell it again who you are and all your friends are .
why should you be doing that ? you should just do that once , and it should know who all your friends are .
so that 's what you want , is all your friends are identified , and you should just carry these relationships around .
all this data about you should just be conveyed , and you should do it once and that 's all that should happen .
and you should have all the networks of all the relationships between those pieces of data .
that 's what we 're moving into - where it sort of knows these things down to that level .
a semantic web , web 3.0 , giant global graph - we 're kind of trying out what we want to call this thing .
but what 's it 's doing is sharing data .
so you have to be open to having your data shared , which is a much bigger step than just sharing your web page , or your computer .
and all these things that are going to be on this are not just pages , they are things .
everything we 've described , every artifact or place , will be a specific representation , will have a specific character that can be linked to directly .
so we have this database of things .
and so there 's actually a fourth thing that we have not get to , that we wo n't see in the next 10 years , or 5,000 days , but i think that 's where we 're going to . and as the internet of things - where i 'm linking directly to the particular things of my seat on the plane - that that physical thing becomes part of the web .
and so we are in the middle of this thing that 's completely linked , down to every object in the little sliver of a connection that it has .
so , the last thing i want to talk about is this idea that we 're going to be codependent .
it 's always going to be there , and the closer it is , the better .
if you allow google to , it will tell you your search history .
and i found out by looking at it that i search most at 11 o 'clock in the morning .
so i am open , and being transparent to that .
and i think total personalization in this new world will require total transparency .
that is going to be the price .
if you want to have total personalization , you have to be totally transparent .
google . i ca n't remember my phone number , i 'll just ask google .
we 're so dependent on this that i have now gotten to the point where i do n't even try to remember things - i 'll just google it . it 's easier to do that .
and we kind of object at first , saying , " oh , that 's awful . "
but if we think about the dependency that we have on this other technology , called the alphabet , and writing , we 're totally dependent on it , and it 's transformed culture .
we can not imagine ourselves without the alphabet and writing .
and so in the same way , we 're going to not imagine ourselves without this other machine being there .
and what is happening with this is some kind of ai , but it 's not the ai in conscious ai , as being an expert , larry page told me that that 's what they 're trying to do , and that 's what they 're trying to do .
but when six billion humans are googling , who 's searching who ? it goes both ways .
so we are the web , that 's what this thing is .
we are going to be the machine .
so the next 5,000 days , it 's not going to be the web and only better .
just like it was n't tv and only better .
the next 5,000 days , it 's not just going to be the web but only better - it 's going to be something different .
and i think it 's going to be smarter .
it 'll have an intelligence in there , that 's not , again , conscious .
but it 'll anticipate what we 're doing , in a good sense .
secondly , it 's become much more personalized .
it will know us , and that 's good .
and again , the price of that will be transparency .
and thirdly , it 's going to become more ubiquitous in terms of filling your entire environment , and we will be in the middle of it .
and all these devices will be portals into that .
so the single idea that i wanted to leave with you is that we have to begin to think about this as not just " the web , only better , " but a new kind of stage in this development .
it looks more global . if you take this whole thing , it is a very big machine , very reliable machine , more reliable than its parts .
but we can also think about it as kind of a large organism .
so we might respond to it more as if this was a whole system , more as if this was n't a large organism that we are going to be interacting with . it 's a " one . "
and i do n't know what else to call it , than the one .
we 'll have a better word for it .
but there 's a unity of some sort that 's starting to emerge .
and again , i do n't want to talk about consciousness , i want to talk about it just as if it was a little bacteria , or a volvox , which is what that organism is .
so , to do , action , take-away . so , here 's what i would say : there 's only one machine , and the web is its os .
all screens look into the one . no bits will live outside the web .
to share is to gain . let the one read it .
it 's going to be machine-readable .
you want to make something that the machine can read .
and the one is us . we are in the one .
i appreciate your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to share with you the story as to how i have become an hiv / aids campaigner .
and this is the name of my campaign : sing campaign .
in november of 2003 , i was invited to take part in the launch of nelson mandela 's 46664 foundation - that is his hiv / aids foundation .
and 46664 is the number that mandela had when he was imprisoned in robben island .
and that 's me with youssou n 'dour , onstage , having the time of my life .
the next day , all the artists were invited to join mandela in robben island , where he was going to give a conference to the world 's press , standing in front of his former prison cell .
you can see the bars of the window there .
it was quite a momentous occasion for all of us .
in that moment in time , mandela told the world 's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country ; that post-apartheid rainbow nation , a thousand people were dying on a daily basis and that the front line victims , the most vulnerable of all , were women and children .
this was a huge impact on my mind , because i am a woman and i am a mother , and i had n't realized that the hiv / aids pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way .
and so i committed - when i left south africa , when i left capetown , i told myself , " this is going to be something that i have to talk about .
i have to serve . "
and so , subsequently i participated in every single 46664 event that i could take part in and gave news conferences , interviews , talking and using my platform as a musician , with my commitment to mandela - out of respect for the tremendous , unbelievable work that he had done .
everyone in the world respects nelson mandela , everyone reveres nelson mandela .
but do they all know about what has been taking place in south africa , his country , the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus ?
i think that if i went out into the street now and i told people what was happening there , they would be shocked .
i was very , very fortunate a couple of years later to have met zackie achmat , the founder of treatment action campaign , an incredible campaigner and activist .
i met him at a 46664 event .
he was wearing a t-shirt like the one i wear now .
this is a tool - this tells you i am in solidarity with people who have hiv , people who are living with hiv .
and in a way because of the stigma , by wearing this t-shirt i say , " yes , we can talk about this issue .
it does n't have to be in the closet . "
i became a member of treatment action campaign and i 'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization .
it 's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women , most of whom are hiv-positive .
they work in the field .
they have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus .
they have education programs .
they bring out the issues of stigma .
it 's quite extraordinary what they do .
and yes , my sing campaign has supported treatment action campaign in the way that i have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds .
a lot of the funding that i have managed to raise has gone directly to treatment action campaign and the incredible work that they do , and are still continuing to do in south africa .
so this is my sing campaign .
sing campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me .
i 've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years - i went to about 12 different countries .
here i am in oslo in norway , getting a nice , fat check ; singing in hong kong , trying to get people to raise money .
in johannesburg , i had the opportunity to play to a mainly white , middle-class south african audience who ended up in tears because i use film clips that really touch the heart , the whole nature , of this terrible tragedy that is taking place , that people are tending to avoid , because they are fatigued , and they really do n't quite know what the solutions are .
aaron motsoaledi , the current health minister , attended that concert and i had an opportunity to meet with him , and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change , which is absolutely necessary .
this is in the scottish parliament .
i 've subsequently become an envoy for scotland and hiv .
and i was showing them my experiences and trying to , again , raise awareness .
and once again , in edinburgh with the wonderful african children 's choir who i simply adore .
and it 's children like this , many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the aids virus .
i 'm sitting here in new york with michel sidibe - he 's the director of unaids .
and i 'm very honored by the fact that michel invited me , only a few months ago , to become a unaids ambassador .
and in this way , i 've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach .
the message that unaids are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015 .
it 's a very ambitious goal but we believe it can be achieved with political will .
this can happen .
and here i am with a pregnant woman , who is hiv positive and we 're smiling , both of us are smiling , because we 're very confident , because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she 's about to give birth to .
and her baby will receive pmtct , which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus .
now that is prevention at the very beginning of life .
it 's one way to start looking at intervention with the aids pandemic .
now , i just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about avelile .
this is avelile - she goes with me wherever i go .
i tell her story to everyone because she represents one of millions of hiv / aids orphans .
avelile 's mother had hiv virus - she died from aids-related illness .
avelile had the virus , she was born with the virus .
and here she is at seven years old , weighing no more than a one year-old baby .
at this point in her life , she 's suffering with full-blown aids and had pneumonia .
we met her in a hospital in the eastern cape and spent a whole afternoon with her - an adorable child .
the doctors and nurses were phenomenal .
they put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her .
and we did n't know when we left the hospital - because we filmed her story - we did n't know if she was going to survive .
so , it was obviously - it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience , this one child , you know , that story .
five months later , we went back to south africa to meet avelile again .
and i 'm getting - the hairs on my - i do n't know if you can see the hairs on my arms .
they 're standing up because i know what i 'm going to show you .
this is the transformation that took place .
is n't it extraordinary ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- that round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of avelile .
and i take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation .
so , i would like to say to you , each one in the audience , if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care , and you believe that the millennium development goals , specifically five and six , should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world - especially in sub-saharan africa - could you please stand up .
i think that 's fair to say , it 's almost everyone in the hall .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- whoa , dude . check out those killer equations . sweet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , for the next 18 minutes i 'm going to do the best i can to describe the beauty of particle physics without equations .
it turns out there 's a lot we can learn from coral .
coral is a very beautiful and unusual animal .
each coral head consists of thousand of individual polyps .
these polyps are continually budding and branching into genetically identical neighbors .
if we imagine this to be a hyper-intelligent coral , we can single out an individual and ask him a reasonable question .
we can ask how exactly he got to be in this particular location compared to his neighbors - if it was just chance , or destiny , or what ?
now , after admonishing us for turning the temperature up too high , he would tell us that our question was completely stupid .
these corals can be quite kind of mean , you see , and i have surfing scars to prove that .
but this polyp would continue and tell us that his neighbors were quite clearly identical copies of him .
that he was in all these other locations as well , but experiencing them as separate individuals .
for a coral , branching into different copies is the most natural thing in the world .
unlike us , a hyper-intelligent coral would be uniquely prepared to understand quantum mechanics .
the mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works .
and it tells us our reality is continually branching into different possibilities , just like a coral .
it 's a weird thing for us humans to wrap our minds around , since we only ever get to experience one possibility .
this quantum weirdness was first described by erwin schrödinger and his cat .
the cat likes this version better .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in this setup , schrödinger is in a box with a radioactive sample that , by the laws of quantum mechanics , branches into a state in which it is radiated and a state in which it is not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in the branch in which the sample radiates , it sets off a trigger that releases poison and schrödinger is dead .
but in the other branch of reality , he remains alive .
these realities are experienced separately by each individual .
as far as either can tell , the other one does n't exist .
this seems weird to us , because each of us only experiences an individual existence , and we do n't get to see other branches .
it 's as if each of us , like schrödinger here , are a kind of coral branching into different possibilities .
the mathematics of quantum mechanics tells us this is how the world works at tiny scales .
it can be summed up in a single sentence : everything that can happen , does .
that 's quantum mechanics .
but this does not mean everything happens .
the rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what ca n't .
what physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles .
and things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced .
now i 'll go ahead and describe how we know about these particles , what they are and how this balance works .
in this machine , a beam of protons and anti-protons are accelerated to near the speed of light and brought together in a collision , producing a burst of pure energy .
this energy is immediately converted into a spray of subatomic particles , with detectors and computers used to figure out their properties .
this enormous machine - the large hadron collider at cern in geneva - has a circumference of 17 miles and , when it 's operating , draws five times as much power as the city of monterey .
we ca n't predict specifically what particles will be produced in any individual collision .
quantum mechanics tells us all possibilities are realized .
but physics does tell us what particles can be produced .
these particles must have just as much mass and energy as is carried in by the proton and anti-proton .
any particles more massive than this energy limit are n't produced , and remain invisible to us .
this is why this new particle accelerator is so exciting .
it 's going to push this energy limit seven times beyond what 's ever been done before , so we 're going to get to see some new particles very soon .
but before talking about what we might see , let me describe the particles we already know of .
there 's a whole zoo of subatomic particles .
most of us are familiar with electrons .
a lot of people in this room make a good living pushing them around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the electron also has a neutral partner called the neutrino , with no electric charge and a very tiny mass .
in contrast , the up-and-down quarks have very large masses , and combine in threes to make the protons and neutrons inside atoms .
all of these matter particles come in left- and right-handed varieties , and have anti-particle partners that carry opposite charges .
these familiar particles also have less familiar second and third generations , which have the same charges as the first but have much higher masses .
these matter particles all interact with the various force particles .
the electromagnetic force interacts with electrically charged matter via particles called photons .
there is also a very weak force called , rather unimaginatively , the weak force , that interacts only with left-handed matter .
the strong force acts between quarks which carry a different kind of charge , called color charge , and come in three different varieties : red , green and blue .
you can blame murray gell-mann for these names - they 're his fault .
finally , there 's the force of gravity , which interacts with matter via its mass and spin .
the most important thing to understand here is that there 's a different kind of charge associated with each of these forces .
these four different forces interact with matter according to the corresponding charges that each particle has .
a particle that has n't been seen yet , but we 're pretty sure exists , is the higgs particle , which gives masses to all these other particles .
the main purpose of the large hadron collider is to see this higgs particle , and we 're almost certain it will .
but the greatest mystery is what else we might see .
and i 'm going to show you one beautiful possibility towards the end of this talk .
now , if we count up all these different particles using their various spins and charges , there are 226 .
that 's a lot of particles to keep track of .
and it seems strange that nature would have so many elementary particles .
but if we plot them out according to their charges , some beautiful patterns emerge .
the most familiar charge is electric charge .
electrons have an electric charge , a negative one , and quarks have electric charges in thirds .
so when two up quarks and a down quark are combined to make a proton , it has a total electric charge of plus one .
these particles also have anti-particles , which have opposite charges .
now , it turns out the electric charge is actually a combination of two other charges : hypercharge and weak charge .
if we spread out the hypercharge and weak charge and plot the charges of particles in this two-dimensional charge space , the electric charge is where these particles sit along the vertical direction .
the electromagnetic and weak forces interact with matter according to their hypercharge and weak charge , which make this pattern .
this is called the unified electroweak model , and it was put together back in 1967 .
the reason most of us are only familiar with electric charge and not both of these is because of the higgs particle .
the higgs , over here on the left , has a large mass and breaks the symmetry of this electroweak pattern .
it makes the weak force very weak by giving the weak particles a large mass .
since this massive higgs sits along the horizontal direction in this diagram , the photons of electromagnetism remain massless and interact with electric charge along the vertical direction in this charge space .
so the electromagnetic and weak forces are described by this pattern of particle charges in two-dimensional space .
we can include the strong force by spreading out its two charge directions and plotting the charges of the force particles in quarks along these directions .
the charges of all known particles can be plotted in a four-dimensional charge space , and projected down to two dimensions like this so we can see them .
whenever particles interact , nature keeps things in a perfect balance along all four of these charge directions .
if a particle and an anti-particle collide , it creates a burst of energy and a total charge of zero in all four charge directions .
at this point , anything can be created as long as it has the same energy and maintains a total charge of zero .
for example , this weak force particle and its anti-particle can be created in a collision .
in further interactions , the charges must always balance .
one of the weak particles could decay into an electron and an anti-neutrino , and these three still add to zero total charge .
nature always keeps a perfect balance .
so these patterns of charges are not just pretty .
they tell us what interactions are allowed to happen .
and we can rotate this charge space in four dimensions to get a better look at the strong interaction , which has this nice hexagonal symmetry .
in a strong interaction , a strong force particle , such as this one , interacts with a colored quark , such as this green one , to give a quark with a different color charge - this red one .
and strong interactions are happening millions of times each second in every atom of our bodies , holding the atomic nuclei together .
but these four charges corresponding to three forces are not the end of the story .
we can also include two more charges corresponding to the gravitational force .
when we include these , each matter particle has two different spin charges , spin-up and spin-down .
so they all split , and give a nice pattern in six-dimensional charge space .
we can rotate this pattern in six dimensions , and see that it 's quite pretty .
right now , this pattern matches our best current knowledge of how nature is built at the tiny scales of these elementary particles .
this is what we know for certain .
some of these particles are at the very limit of what we 've been able to reach with experiments .
from this pattern , we already know the particle physics of these tiny scales . the way the universe works with these tiny scales is very beautiful .
but now i 'm going to discuss some new and old ideas about things we do n't know yet .
we want to expand this pattern using mathematics alone , and see if we can get our hands on the whole enchilada .
we want to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe .
and we want to use this picture to predict new particles that we 'll see when experiments reach higher energies .
so there 's an old idea in particle physics that this known pattern of charges , which is not very symmetric , could emerge from a more perfect pattern that gets broken - similar to how the higgs particle breaks the electroweak pattern to give electromagnetism .
in order to do this , we need to introduce new forces with new charge directions .
when we introduce a new direction , we get to guess what charges the particles have along this direction , and then we can rotate it in with the others .
if we guess wisely , we can construct the standard charges in six charge dimensions as a broken symmetry of this more perfect pattern in seven charge dimensions .
this particular choice corresponds to a grand unified theory introduced by pati and salam in 1973 .
when we look at this new unified pattern , we can see a couple of gaps where particles seem to be missing .
this is the way theories of unification work .
a physicist looks for larger , more symmetric patterns that include the established pattern as a subset .
the larger pattern allows us to predict the existence of particles that have never been seen .
this unification model predicts the existence of these two new force particles , which should act a lot like the weak force , only weaker .
now we can rotate this set of charges in seven dimensions and consider an odd fact about the matter particles : the second and third generations of matter have exactly the same charges in six-dimensional charge space as the first generation .
these particles are not uniquely identified by their six charges .
they sit on top of one another in the standard charge space .
however , if we work in eight-dimensional charge space , then we can assign unique new charges to each particle .
then we can spin these in eight dimensions , and see what the whole pattern looks like .
here we can see the second and third generations of matter now related to the first generation by a symmetry called " triality . "
this particular pattern of charges in eight dimensions is actually part of the most beautiful geometric structure in mathematics .
it 's a pattern of the largest exceptional lie group , e8 .
this lie group is a smooth , curved shape with 248 dimensions .
each point in this pattern corresponds to a symmetry of this very complex and beautiful shape .
one small part of this e8 shape can be used to describe the curved space-time of einstein 's general relativity , explaining gravity .
together with quantum mechanics , the geometry of this shape could describe everything about how the universe works at the tiniest scales .
the pattern of this shape living in eight-dimensional charge space is exquisitely beautiful , and it summarizes thousands of possible interactions between these elementary particles , each of which is just a facet of this complicated shape .
as we spin it , we can see many of the other intricate patterns contained in this one .
and with a particular rotation , we can look down through this pattern in eight dimensions along a symmetry axis and see all the particles at once .
it 's a very beautiful object , and as with any unification , we can see some holes where new particles are required by this pattern .
there are 20 gaps where new particles should be , two of which have been filled by the pati-salam particles .
from their location in this pattern , we know that these new particles should be scalar fields like the higgs particle , but have color charge and interact with the strong force .
filling in these new particles completes this pattern , giving us the full e8 .
this e8 pattern has very deep mathematical roots .
it 's considered by many to be the most beautiful structure in mathematics .
it 's a fantastic prospect that this object of great mathematical beauty could describe the truth of particle interactions at the smallest scales imaginable .
and this idea that nature is described by mathematics is not at all new .
in 1623 , galileo wrote this : " nature 's grand book , which stands continually open to our gaze , is written in the language of mathematics .
its characters are triangles , circles and other geometrical figures , without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it ; without these , one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth . "
i believe this to be true , and i 've tried to follow galileo 's guidance in describing the mathematics of particle physics using only triangles , circles and other geometrical figures .
of course , when other physicists and i actually work on this stuff , the mathematics can resemble a dark labyrinth .
but it 's reassuring that at the heart of this mathematics is pure , beautiful geometry .
joined with quantum mechanics , this mathematics describes our universe as a growing e8 coral , with particles interacting at every location in all possible ways according to a beautiful pattern .
and as more of the pattern comes into view using new machines like the large hadron collider , we may be able to see whether nature uses this e8 pattern or a different one .
this process of discovery is a wonderful adventure to be involved in .
if the lhc finds particles that fit this e8 pattern , that will be very , very cool .
if the lhc finds new particles , but they do n't fit this pattern - well , that will be very interesting , but bad for this e8 theory .
and , of course , bad for me personally .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now how bad would that be ?
well , pretty bad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but predicting how nature works is a very risky game .
this theory and others like it are long shots .
one does a lot of hard work knowing that most of these ideas probably wo n't end up being true about nature .
that 's what doing theoretical physics is like : there are a lot of wipeouts .
in this regard , new physics theories are a lot like start-up companies .
as with any large investment , it can be emotionally difficult to abandon a line of research when it is n't working out .
but in science , if something is n't working , you have to toss it out and try something else .
now , the only way to maintain sanity and achieve happiness in the midst of this uncertainty is to keep balance and perspective in life .
i 've tried the best i can to live a balanced life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i try to balance my life equally between physics , love and surfing - my own three charge directions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this way , even if the physics i work on comes to nothing , i still know i 've lived a good life .
and i try to live in beautiful places .
for most of the past ten years i 've lived on the island of maui , a very beautiful place .
now it 's one of the greatest mysteries in the universe to my parents how i managed to survive all that time without engaging in anything resembling full-time employment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm going to let you in on that secret .
this was a view from my home office on maui .
and this is another , and another .
and you may have noticed that these beautiful views are similar , but in slightly different places .
that 's because this used to be my home and office on maui .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've chosen a very unusual life .
but not worrying about rent allowed me to spend my time doing what i love .
living a nomadic existence has been hard at times , but it 's allowed me to live in beautiful places and keep a balance in my life that i 've been happy with .
it allows me to spend a lot of my time hanging out with hyper-intelligent coral .
but i also greatly enjoy the company of hyper-intelligent people .
so i 'm very happy to have been invited here to ted .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i probably understood two percent of that , but i still absolutely loved it . so i 'm going to sound dumb .
your theory of everything - garrett lisi : i 'm used to coral .
ca : that 's right . the reason it 's got a few people at least excited is because , if you 're right , it brings gravity and quantum theory together .
so are you saying that we should think of the universe , at its heart - that the smallest things that there are , are somehow an e8 object of possibility ?
i mean , is there a scale to it , at the smallest scale , or ... ?
gl : well , right now the pattern i showed you that corresponds to what we know about elementary particle physics - that already corresponds to a very beautiful shape .
and that 's the one that i said we knew for certain .
and that shape has remarkable similarities - and the way it fits into this e8 pattern could be the rest of the picture .
and these patterns of points that i 've shown for you actually represent symmetries of this high-dimensional object that would be warping and moving and dancing over the space time that we experience .
and that would be what explains all these elementary particles that we see .
ca : but a string theorist , as i understand it , explains electrons in terms of much smaller strings vibrating - i know you do n't like string theory - vibrating inside it .
how should we think of an electron in relation to e8 ?
gl : no , it would be one of the symmetries of this e8 shape .
so what 's happening is , as the shape is moving over space-time , it 's twisting . and the direction it 's twisting as it moves is what particle we see . so it would be - ca : the size of the e8 shape , how does that relate to the electron ?
i kind of feel like i need that for my picture .
is it bigger ? is it smaller ?
gl : well , as far as we know electrons are point particles , so this would be going down to the smallest possible scales .
so the way these things are explained in quantum field theory is , all possibilities are expanding and developing at once .
and this is why i use the analogy to coral .
and in this way , the way that e8 comes in is it will be as a shape that 's attached at each point in space-time .
and , as i said , the way the shape twists - the directional along which way the shape is twisting as it moves over this curved surface - is what the elementary particles are , themselves .
so through quantum field theory , they manifest themselves as points and interact that way .
i do n't know if i 'll be able to make this any clearer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : it does n't really matter .
it 's evoking a kind of sense of wonder , and i certainly want to understand more of this .
but thank you so much for coming . that was absolutely fascinating .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my subject today is learning .
and in that spirit , i want to spring on you all a pop quiz .
ready ?
when does learning begin ?
now as you ponder that question , maybe you 're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten , the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher .
or maybe you 've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork .
maybe you 've encountered the zero-to-three movement , which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones .
and so your answer to my question would be : learning begins at birth .
well today i want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible , but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology .
and that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we 're born , while we 're still in the womb .
now i 'm a science reporter .
i write books and magazine articles .
and i 'm also a mother .
and those two roles came together for me in a book that i wrote called " origins . "
" origins " is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins .
fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago , and it 's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb .
now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me .
i was myself pregnant while i was doing the research for the book .
and one of the most fascinating insights i took from this work is that we 're all learning about the world even before we enter it .
when we hold our babies for the first time , we might imagine that they 're clean slates , unmarked by life , when in fact , they 've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in .
today i want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they 're still in their mothers ' bellies .
first of all , they learn the sound of their mothers ' voices .
because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother 's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus , the voices fetuses hear , starting around the fourth month of gestation , are muted and muffled .
one researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of charlie brown 's teacher in the old " peanuts " cartoon .
but the pregnant woman 's own voice reverberates through her body , reaching the fetus much more readily .
and because the fetus is with her all the time , it hears her voice a lot .
once the baby 's born , it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else 's .
how can we know this ?
newborn babies ca n't do much , but one thing they 're really good at is sucking .
researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples , so that if a baby sucks on one , it hears a recording of its mother 's voice on a pair of headphones , and if it sucks on the other nipple , it hears a recording of a female stranger 's voice .
babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one .
scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored .
this is how researchers discovered that , after women repeatedly read aloud a section of dr. seuss ' " the cat in the hat " while they were pregnant , their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb .
my favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born .
so fetuses are even learning about the particular language that 's spoken in the world that they 'll be born into .
a study published last year found that from birth , from the moment of birth , babies cry in the accent of their mother 's native language .
french babies cry on a rising note while german babies end on a falling note , imitating the melodic contours of those languages .
now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful ?
it may have evolved to aid the baby 's survival .
from the moment of birth , the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it - its mother .
it even makes its cries sound like the mother 's language , which may further endear the baby to the mother , and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language .
but it 's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero .
it 's also tastes and smells .
by seven months of gestation , the fetus ' taste buds are fully developed , and its olfactory receptors , which allow it to smell , are functioning .
the flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid , which is continuously swallowed by the fetus .
babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they 're out in the world .
in one experiment , a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy , while another group of pregnant women drank only water .
six months later , the women 's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice , and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it .
the offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal , and from the looks of it , they seemed to enjoy it more .
a sort of french version of this experiment was carried out in dijon , france where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life , and again , when they were tested later , on their fourth day of life .
babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as " yuck . "
what this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat .
fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they 'll be joining through one of culture 's most powerful expressions , which is food .
they 're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture 's cuisine even before birth .
now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons .
but before i get to that , i want to address something that you may be wondering about .
the notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus - like playing mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly .
but actually , the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that .
much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life - the air she breathes , the food and drink she consumes , the chemicals she 's exposed to , even the emotions she feels - are shared in some fashion with her fetus .
they make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself .
the fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body , makes them part of its flesh and blood .
and often it does something more .
it treats these maternal contributions as information , as what i like to call biological postcards from the world outside .
so what a fetus is learning about in utero is not mozart 's " magic flute " but answers to questions much more critical to its survival .
will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity ?
will it be safe and protected , or will it face constant dangers and threats ?
will it live a long , fruitful life or a short , harried one ?
the pregnant woman 's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind .
the resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus ' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility , our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments , from the country to the city , from the tundra to the desert .
to conclude , i want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they 're born .
in the autumn of 1944 , the darkest days of world war ii , german troops blockaded western holland , turning away all shipments of food .
the opening of the nazi 's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades - so cold the water in the canals froze solid .
soon food became scarce , with many dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day - a quarter of what they consumed before the war .
as weeks of deprivation stretched into months , some resorted to eating tulip bulbs .
by the beginning of may , the nation 's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted .
the specter of mass starvation loomed .
and then on may 5th , 1945 , the siege came to a sudden end when holland was liberated by the allies .
the " hunger winter , " as it came to be known , killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more .
but there was another population that was affected - the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege .
some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths , birth defects , low birth weights and infant mortality .
but others would n't be discovered for many years .
decades after the " hunger winter , " researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity , more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions .
these individuals ' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways .
they have higher blood pressure , poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance - a precursor of diabetes .
why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later ?
one explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation .
when food is scarce , they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ , the brain , and away from other organs like the heart and liver .
this keeps the fetus alive in the short-term , but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs , deprived early on , become more susceptible to disease .
but that may not be all that 's going on .
it seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly .
they 're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb .
the fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it .
and the basis of the fetus ' prediction is what its mother eats .
the meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story , a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation .
this story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems - an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival .
faced with severely limited resources , a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will , in fact , have a better chance of living to adulthood .
the real trouble comes when pregnant women are , in a sense , unreliable narrators , when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty .
this is what happened to the children of the dutch " hunger winter . "
and their higher rates of obesity , diabetes and heart disease are the result .
bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war western diet .
the world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born .
here 's another story .
at 8:46 a.m. on september 11th , 2001 , there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the world trade center in new york - commuters spilling off trains , waitresses setting tables for the morning rush , brokers already working the phones on wall street .
1,700 of these people were pregnant women .
when the planes struck and the towers collapsed , many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster - the overwhelming chaos and confusion , the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris , the heart-pounding fear for their lives .
about a year after 9/11 , researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the world trade center attack .
in the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome , or ptsd , following their ordeal , researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to ptsd - an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester .
in other words , the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero .
now consider this : post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong , causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering .
but there 's another way of thinking about ptsd .
what looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances .
in a particularly dangerous environment , the characteristic manifestations of ptsd - a hyper-awareness of one 's surroundings , a quick-trigger response to danger - could save someone 's life .
the notion that the prenatal transmission of ptsd risk is adaptive is still speculative , but i find it rather poignant .
it would mean that , even before birth , mothers are warning their children that it 's a wild world out there , telling them , " be careful . "
let me be clear .
fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy .
it 's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation .
that important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb .
learning is one of life 's most essential activities , and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you a little bit about user-generated content .
i 'm going to tell you three stories on the way to one argument that 's going to tell you a little bit about how we open user-generated content up for business .
so , here 's the first story .
1906 . this man , john philip sousa , traveled to this place , the united states capitol , to talk about this technology , what he called the , quote , " talking machines . "
sousa was not a fan of the talking machines .
this is what he had to say .
" these talking machines are going to ruin artistic development of music in this country .
when i was a boy , in front of every house in the summer evenings , you would find young people together singing the songs of the day , or the old songs .
today , you hear these infernal machines going night and day .
we will not have a vocal chord left , " sousa said .
" the vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came from the ape . "
now , this is the picture i want you to focus on .
this is a picture of culture .
we could describe it using modern computer terminology as a kind of read-write culture .
it 's a culture where people participate in the creation and the re-creation of their culture . in that sense , it 's read-write .
sousa 's fear was that we would lose that capacity because of these , quote , " infernal machines . " they would take it away .
and in its place , we 'd have the opposite of read-write culture , what we could call read-only culture .
culture where creativity was consumed but the consumer is not a creator .
a culture which is top-down , owned , where the vocal chords of the millions have been lost .
now , as you look back at the twentieth century , at least in what we think of as the , quote , " developed world " - hard not to conclude that sousa was right .
never before in the history of human culture had it been as professionalized , never before as concentrated .
never before has creativity of the millions been as effectively displaced , and displaced because of these , quote , " infernal machines . "
the twentieth century was that century where , at least for those places we know the best , culture moved from this read-write to read-only existence .
so , second . land is a kind of property - it is property . it 's protected by law .
as lord blackstone described it , land is protected by trespass law , for most of the history of trespass law , by presuming it protects the land all the way down below and to an indefinite extent upward .
now , that was a pretty good system for most of the history of the regulation of land , until this technology came along , and people began to wonder , were these instruments trespassers as they flew over land without clearing the rights of the farms below as they traveled across the country ?
well , in 1945 , supreme court got a chance to address that question .
two farmers , thomas lee and tinie causby , who raised chickens , had a significant complaint because of these technologies .
the complaint was that their chickens followed the pattern of the airplanes and flew themselves into the walls of the barn when the airplanes flew over the land .
and so they appealed to lord blackstone to say these airplanes were trespassing .
since time immemorial , the law had said , you ca n't fly over the land without permission of the landowner , so this flight must stop .
well , the supreme court considered this 100-years tradition and said , in an opinion written by justice douglas , that the causbys must lose .
the supreme court said the doctrine protecting land all the way to the sky has no place in the modern world , otherwise every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits .
common sense , a rare idea in the law , but here it was . common sense - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - revolts at the idea . common sense .
finally . before the internet , the last great terror to rain down on the content industry was a terror created by this technology . broadcasting : a new way to spread content , and therefore a new battle over the control of the businesses that would spread content .
now , at that time , the entity , the legal cartel , that controlled the performance rights for most of the music that would be broadcast using these technologies was ascap .
they had an exclusive license on the most popular content , and they exercised it in a way that tried to demonstrate to the broadcasters who really was in charge .
so , between 1931 and 1939 , they raised rates by some 448 percent , until the broadcasters finally got together and said , okay , enough of this .
and in 1939 , a lawyer , sydney kaye , started something called broadcast music inc . we know it as bmi .
and bmi was much more democratic in the art that it would include within its repertoire , including african american music for the first time in the repertoire .
but most important was that bmi took public domain works and made arrangements of them , which they gave away for free to their subscribers . so that in 1940 , when ascap threatened to double their rates , the majority of broadcasters switched to bmi .
now , ascap said they did n't care .
the people will revolt , they predicted , because the very best music was no longer available , because they had shifted to the second best public domain provided by bmi .
well , they did n't revolt , and in 1941 , ascap cracked .
and the important point to recognize is that even though these broadcasters were broadcasting something you would call second best , that competition was enough to break , at that time , this legal cartel over access to music .
okay . three stories . here 's the argument .
in my view , the most significant thing to recognize about what this internet is doing is its opportunity to revive the read-write culture that sousa romanticized .
digital technology is the opportunity for the revival of these vocal chords that he spoke so passionately to congress about .
user-generated content , spreading in businesses in extraordinarily valuable ways like these , celebrating amateur culture .
by which i do n't mean amateurish culture , i mean culture where people produce for the love of what they 're doing and not for the money .
i mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time .
for when you think of what sousa romanticized in the young people together , singing the songs of the day , of the old songs , you should recognize what your kids are doing right now .
taking the songs of the day and the old songs and remixing them to make them something different .
it 's how they understand access to this culture .
so , let 's have some very few examples to get a sense of what i 'm talking about here .
here 's something called anime music video , first example , taking anime captured from television re-edited to music tracks .
-lrb- music -rrb- this one you should be - confidence . jesus survives . do n't worry .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is the best .
-lrb- music -rrb- my love ...
there 's only you in my life ...
the only thing that 's bright ...
my first love ...
you 're every breath that i take ...
you 're every step i make ...
and i .
i want to share all my love with you ...
no one else will do ...
and your eyes ...
they tell me how much you care ...
-lrb- music -rrb- so , this is remix , right ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- and it 's important to emphasize that what this is not is not what we call , quote , " piracy . "
i 'm not talking about nor justifying people taking other people 's content in wholesale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner .
i 'm talking about people taking and recreating using other people 's content , using digital technologies to say things differently .
now , the importance of this is not the technique that you 've seen here .
because , of course , every technique that you 've seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years .
the importance is that that technique has been democratized .
it is now anybody with access to a $ 1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently .
these tools of creativity have become tools of speech .
it is a literacy for this generation . this is how our kids speak .
it is how our kids think . it is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationship to themselves .
now , in response to this new use of culture using digital technologies , the law has not greeted this sousa revival with very much common sense .
instead , the architecture of copyright law and the architecture of digital technologies , as they interact , have produced the presumption that these activities are illegal .
because if copyright law at its core regulates something called copies , then in the digital world the one fact we ca n't escape is that every single use of culture produces a copy .
every single use therefore requires permission ; without permission , you are a trespasser .
you 're a trespasser with about as much sense as these people were trespassers .
common sense here , though , has not yet revolted in response to this response that the law has offered to these forms of creativity .
instead , what we 've seen is something much worse than a revolt .
there 's a growing extremism that comes from both sides in this debate , in response to this conflict between the law and the use of these technologies .
one side builds new technologies , such as one recently announced that will enable them to automatically take down from sites like youtube any content that has any copyrighted content in it , whether or not there 's a judgment of fair use that might be applied to the use of that content .
and on the other side , among our kids , there 's a growing copyright abolitionism , a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do , rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible .
the extremism on one side begets extremism on the other , a fact we should have learned many , many times over , and both extremes in this debate are just wrong .
now , the balance that i try to fight for , i , as any good liberal , try to fight for first by looking to the government . total mistake , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- looked first to the courts and the legislatures to try to get them to do something to make the system make more sense .
it failed partly because the courts are too passive , partly because the legislatures are corrupted , by which i do n't mean that there 's bribery operating to stop real change , but more the economy of influence that governs how congress functions means that policymakers here will not understand this until it 's too late to fix it .
so , we need something different , we need a different kind of solution .
and the solution here , in my view , is a private solution , a solution that looks to legalize what it is to be young again , and to realize the economic potential of that , and that 's where the story of bmi becomes relevant .
because , as bmi demonstrated , competition here can achieve some form of balance . the same thing can happen now .
we do n't have a public domain to draw upon now , so instead what we need is two types of changes .
first , that artists and creators embrace the idea , choose that their work be made available more freely .
so , for example , they can say their work is available freely for non-commercial , this amateur-type of use , but not freely for any commercial use .
and second , we need the businesses that are building out this read-write culture to embrace this opportunity expressly , to enable it , so that this ecology of free content , or freer content , can grow on a neutral platform where they both exist simultaneously , so that more-free can compete with less-free , and the opportunity to develop the creativity in that competition can teach one the lessons of the other .
now , i would talk about one particular such plan that i know something about , but i do n't want to violate ted 's first commandment of selling , so i 'm not going to talk about this at all .
i 'm instead just going to remind you of the point that bmi teaches us .
that artist choice is the key for new technology having an opportunity to be open for business , and we need to build artist choice here if these new technologies are to have that opportunity .
but let me end with something i think much more important - much more important than business .
it 's the point about how this connects to our kids .
we have to recognize they 're different from us . this is us , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we made mixed tapes ; they remix music .
we watched tv ; they make tv .
it is technology that has made them different , and as we see what this technology can do , we need to recognize you ca n't kill the instinct the technology produces . we can only criminalize it .
we ca n't stop our kids from using it .
we can only drive it underground .
we ca n't make our kids passive again .
we can only make them , quote , " pirates . " and is that good ?
we live in this weird time . it 's kind of age of prohibitions , where in many areas of our life , we live life constantly against the law .
ordinary people live life against the law , and that 's what i - we are doing to our kids .
they live life knowing they live it against the law .
that realization is extraordinarily corrosive , extraordinarily corrupting .
and in a democracy , we ought to be able to do better .
do better , at least for them , if not for opening for business .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a year ago , i spoke to you about a book that i was just in the process of completing , that has come out in the interim , and i would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired .
the book is called " the blank slate , " based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate , and that all of its structure comes from socialization , culture , parenting , experience .
the " blank slate " was an influential idea in the 20th century .
here are a few quotes indicating that : " man has no nature , " from the historian jose ortega y gasset ; " man has no instincts , " from the anthropologist ashley montagu ; " the human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none , " from the late scientist stephen jay gould .
there are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate , and some of them just come from common sense .
as many people have told me over the years , anyone who 's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents ; it does n't all come from the outside .
oh , and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child , exposed to speech , will acquire a human language , whereas the house pet wo n't , presumably because of some innate different between them .
and anyone who 's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable .
there are also , i think , increasing results from the scientific study of humans that , indeed , we 're not born blank slates .
one of them , from anthropology , is the study of human universals .
if you 've ever taken anthropology , you know that it 's a - kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be , and that there are places out there where , supposedly , everything is the opposite to the way it is here .
but if you instead look at what is common to the world 's cultures , you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world 's 6,000-odd cultures .
the anthropologist donald brown has tried to list them all , and they range from aesthetics , affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning , weapons , weather , attempts to control , the color white and a worldview .
also , genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured .
this is a recent study by the neurobiologist paul thompson and his colleagues in which they - using mri - measured the distribution of gray matter - that is , the outer layer of the cortex - in a large sample of pairs of people .
they coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme , in which no difference is coded as purple , and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation .
well , this is what happens when you pair people up at random .
by definition , two people picked at random ca n't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex .
this is what happens in people who share half of their dna - fraternal twins .
and as you can see , large amounts of the brain are not purple , showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region , so does his fraternal twin .
and here 's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their dna - namely , clones or identical twins .
and you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter .
now , these are n't just differences in anatomy , like the shape of your ear lobes , but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by charles addams : " separated at birth , the mallifert twins meet accidentally . "
as you can see , there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap , meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney .
now , the cartoon is not such an exaggeration , because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities .
and this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied - but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth .
my favorite example is a pair of twins , one of whom was brought up as a catholic in a nazi family in germany , the other brought up in a jewish family in trinidad .
when they walked into the lab in minnesota , they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulettes ; both of them liked to dip buttered toast in coffee , both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists , both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after , and both of them liked to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump .
now - the story might seem to good to be true , but when you administer batteries of psychological tests , you get the same results - namely , identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities .
now , given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question , why should it have been such an appealing notion ?
well , there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial .
the foremost is that if we 're blank slates , then , by definition , we are equal , because zero equals zero equals zero .
but if something is written on the slate , then some people could have more of it than others , and according to this line of thinking , that would justify discrimination and inequality .
another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates , we can perfect mankind - the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering .
whereas , if we 're born with certain instincts , then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness , prejudice and violence .
well , in the book , i argue that these are , in fact , non sequiturs .
and just to make a long story short : first of all , the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness .
and so when thomas jefferson wrote in the declaration of independence , " we hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal , " he did not mean " we hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are clones . "
rather , that all men are equal in terms of their rights , and that every person ought to be treated as an individual , and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to .
also , even if we were born with certain ignoble motives , they do n't automatically lead to ignoble behavior .
that is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts , and some of them can inhibit others .
for example , there 's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense , and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history .
so even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed , that 's not the only thing in the skull , and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them .
in the book , i go over controversies such as this one , and a number of other hot buttons , hot zones , chernobyls , third rails , and so on - including the arts , cloning , crime , free will , education , evolution , gender differences , god , homosexuality , infanticide , inequality , marxism , morality , nazism , parenting , politics , race , rape , religion , resource depletion , social engineering , technological risk and war .
and needless to say , there were certain risks in taking on these subjects .
when i wrote a first draft of the book , i circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments , and here are some of the reactions that i got : " better get a security camera for your house . "
" do n't expect to get any more awards , job offers or positions in scholarly societies . "
" tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio . "
" do you have tenure ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , the book came out in october , and nothing terrible has happened .
i - i like - there was indeed reason to be nervous , and there were moments in which i did feel nervous , knowing the history of what has happened to people who 've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences .
there are many cases , some of which i talk about in the book , of people who have been slandered , called nazis , physically assaulted , threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings .
and you never know when you 're going to come across one of these booby traps .
my favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers , and published some data showing that left-handers are , on average , more susceptible to disease , more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan .
it 's not clear , by the way , since then , whether that is an accurate generalization , but the data at the time seemed to support that .
well , pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters , death threats , ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals , coming from irate left-handers and their advocates , and they were literally afraid to open their mail because of the venom and vituperation that they had inadvertently inspired .
well , the night is young , but the book has been out for half a year , and nothing terrible has happened .
none of the dire professional consequences has taken place - i have n't been exiled from the city of cambridge .
but what i wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that the blank slate has received .
i 'll just put that list up for a few seconds , and see if you can guess which two - i would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews .
it 's not violence and war , it 's not race , it 's not gender , it 's not marxism , it 's not nazism .
they are : the arts and parenting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so let me tell you what aroused such irate responses , and i 'll let you decide if whether they - the claims are really that outrageous .
let me start with the arts .
i note that among the long list of human universals that i presented a few slides ago are art .
there is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts .
visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal .
the telling of stories , music , dance , poetry - found in all cultures , and many of the motifs and themes that give us pleasure in the arts can be found in all human societies : a preference for symmetrical forms , the use of repetition and variation , even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world , you have lines that are very close to three seconds long , separated by pauses .
now , on the other hand , in the second half of the 20th century , the arts are frequently said to be in decline .
and i have a collection , probably 10 or 15 headlines , from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time .
i 'll give you a couple of representative quotes : " we can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline , that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago , and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity . "
that 's a quote from t. s. eliot , a little more than 50 years ago .
and a more recent one : " the possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical .
serious book stores are losing their franchise , nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory , symphony orchestras are diluting their programs , public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of british sitcoms , classical radio stations are dwindling , museums are resorting to blockbuster shows , dance is dying . "
that 's from robert brustein , the famous drama critic and director , in the new republic about five years ago .
well , in fact , the arts are not in decline .
i do n't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room , but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent .
there are , of course , entirely new art forms and new media , many of which you 've heard over these few days .
by any economic standard , the demand for art of all forms is skyrocketing , as you can tell from the price of opera tickets , by the number of books sold , by the number of books published , the number of musical titles released , the number of new albums and so on .
the only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres .
one of them is in elite art since the 1930s - say , the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras , where most of the repertory is before 1930 , or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums .
in literary criticism and analysis , probably 40 or 50 years ago , literary critics were a kind of cultural hero ; now they 're kind of a national joke .
and the humanities and arts programs in the universities , which by many measures , indeed are in decline .
students are staying away in droves , universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities .
well , here 's a diagnosis .
they did n't ask me , but by their own admission , they need all the help that they can get .
and i would like to suggest that it 's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespread denial of human nature .
a famous quotation can be found - if you look on the web , you can find it in literally scores of english core syllabuses - " in or about december 1910 , human nature changed . "
a paraphrase of a quote by virginia woolf , and there 's some debate as to what she actually meant by that .
but it 's very clear , looking at these syllabuses , that - it 's used now as a way of saying that all forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries , or millennia , in the 20th century were discarded .
the beauty and pleasure in art - probably a human universal - were - began to be considered saccharine , or kitsch , or commercial .
barnett newman had a famous quote that " the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty " - which was considered bourgeois or tacky .
and here 's just one example .
i mean , this is perhaps a representative example of the visual depiction of the female form in the 15th century ; here is a representative example of the depiction of the female form in the 20th century .
and , as you can see , there - something has changed in the way the elite arts appeal to the senses .
indeed , in movements of modernism and post-modernism , there was visual art without beauty , literature without narrative and plot , poetry without meter and rhyme , architecture and planning without ornament , human scale , green space and natural light , music without melody and rhythm , and criticism without clarity , attention to aesthetics and insight into the human condition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let me give just you an example to back up that last statement .
but here , there - one of the most famous literary english scholars of our time is the berkeley professor , judith butler .
and here is an example of one of her analyses : " the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition , convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure , and marked a shift from the form of althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects ... "
well , you get the idea .
by the way , this is one sentence - you can actually parse it .
well , the argument in " the blank slate " was that elite art and criticism in the 20th century , although not the arts in general , have disdained beauty , pleasure , clarity , insight and style .
people are staying away from elite art and criticism .
what a puzzle - i wonder why .
well , this turned out to be probably the most controversial claim in the book .
someone asked me whether i stuck it in in order to deflect ire from discussions of gender and nazism and race and so on . i wo n't comment on that .
but it certainly inspired an energetic reaction from many university professors .
well , the other hot button is parenting .
and the starting point is the - for that discussion was the fact that we have all been subject to the advice of the parenting industrial complex .
now , here is - here is a representative quote from a besieged mother : " i 'm overwhelmed with parenting advice .
i 'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so i can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they 'll grow up to be healthy adults .
and i 'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual play so they 'll grow up smart .
and there are all kinds of play - clay for finger dexterity , word games for reading success , large motor play , small motor play . i feel like i could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids . "
i think anyone who 's recently been a parent can sympathize with this mother .
well , here 's some sobering facts about parenting .
most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless . they 're useless because they do n't control for heritability . they measure some correlation between what the parents do , how the children turn out and assume a causal relation : that the parenting shaped the child .
parents who talk a lot to their kids have kids who grow up to be articulate , parents who spank their kids have kids who grow up to be violent and so on .
and very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for - that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on .
until the studies are redone with adoptive children , who provide an environment but not genes to their kids , we have no way of knowing whether these conclusions are valid .
the genetically controlled studies have some sobering results .
remember the mallifert twins : separated at birth , then they meet in the patent office - remarkably similar .
well , what would have happened if the mallifert twins had grown up together ?
you might think , well , then they 'd be even more similar , because not only would they share their genes , but they would also share their environment .
that would make them super-similar , right ?
wrong . identical twins , or any siblings , who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together .
everything that happens to you in a given home over all of those years appears to leave no permanent stamp on your personality or intellect .
a complementary finding , from a completely different methodology , is that adopted siblings reared together - the mirror image of identical twins reared apart , they share their parents , their home , their neighborhood , do n't share their genes - end up not similar at all .
ok - two different bodies of research with a similar finding .
what it suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents over the long run , but in part - only in part - by their genes , in part by their culture - the culture of the country at large and the children 's own culture , namely their peer group - as we heard from jill sobule earlier today , that 's what kids care about - and , to a very large extent , larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge , by chance : chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero ; chance events as you live your life .
so let me conclude with just a remark to bring it back to the theme of choices .
i think that the sciences of human nature - behavioral genetics , evolutionary psychology , neuroscience , cognitive science - are going to , increasingly in the years to come , upset various dogmas , careers and deeply-held political belief systems .
and that presents us with a choice .
the choice is whether certain facts about humans , or topics , are to be considered taboos , forbidden knowledge , where we should n't go there because no good can come from it , or whether we should explore them honestly .
i have my own answer to that question , which comes from a great artist of the 19th century , anton chekhov , who said , " man will become better when you show him what he is like . "
and i think that the argument ca n't be put any more eloquently than that .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of my favorite words in the whole of the oxford english dictionary is " snollygoster . "
just because it sounds so good .
and what snollygoster means is " a dishonest politician . "
although there was a 19th-century newspaper editor who defined it rather better when he said , " a snollygoster is a fellow who seeks office regardless of party , platform or principle , and who , when he wins , gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i have no idea what " talknophical " is .
something to do with words , i assume .
but it 's very important that words are at the center of politics , and all politicians know they have to try and control language .
it was n't until , for example , 1771 that the british parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber .
and this was actually all down to the bravery of a guy with the extraordinary name of brass crosby , who took on parliament .
and he was thrown into the tower of london and imprisoned , but he was brave enough , he was brave enough to take them on , and in the end he had such popular support in london that he won .
and it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase " as bold as brass . "
most people think that 's down to the metal .
it 's not . it 's down to a campaigner for the freedom of the press .
but to really show you how words and politics interact , i want to take you back to the united states of america , just after they 'd achieved independence .
and they had to face the question of what to call george washington , their leader .
they did n't know .
what do you call the leader of a republican country ?
and this was debated in congress for ages and ages .
and there were all sorts of suggestions on the table , which might have made it .
i mean , some people wanted him to be called chief magistrate washington , and other people , his highness george washington , and other people , protector of the liberties of the people of the united states of america washington .
not that catchy .
some people just wanted to call him king .
they thought it was tried and tested .
and they were n't even being monarchical there , they had the idea that you could be elected king for a fixed term .
and , you know , it could have worked .
and everybody got insanely bored , actually , because this debate went on for three weeks .
i read a diary of this poor senator , who just keeps coming back , " still on this subject . "
and the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the house of representatives were against the senate .
the house of representatives did n't want washington to get drunk on power .
in case that gave him ideas , or his successor ideas .
so they wanted to give him the humblest , meagerest , most pathetic title that they could think of .
and that title was " president . "
president . they did n't invent the title . i mean , it existed before , but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting .
it was like the foreman of the jury .
and it did n't have much more grandeur than the term " foreman " or " overseer . "
there were occasional presidents of little colonial councils and bits of government , but it was really a nothing title .
and that 's why the senate objected to it .
they said , that 's ridiculous , you ca n't call him president .
this guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries .
and who 's going to take him seriously if he 's got a silly little title like president of the united states of america ?
and after three weeks of debate , in the end the senate did not cave in .
instead , they agreed to use the title " president " for now , but they also wanted it absolutely set down that they did n't agree with it from a decent respect for the opinions and practice of civilized nations , whether under republican or monarchical forms of government , whose custom it is to annex , through the office of the chief magistrate , titles of respectability - not bloody president - and that in the intercourse with foreign nations , the majesty of the people of the united states may not be hazarded by an appearance of singularity , i.e. , we do n't want to look like bloody weirdos .
now you can learn three interesting things from this .
first of all - and this is my favorite - is that so far as i 've ever been able to find out , the senate has never formally endorsed the title of president .
barack obama , president obama , is there on borrowed time , just waiting for the senate to spring into action .
second thing you can learn is that when a government says that this is a temporary measure - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you can still be waiting 223 years later .
and this is the really important one , this is the point i want to leave you on , is that the title , president of the united states of america , does n't sound that humble at all these days , does it ?
something to do with the slightly over 5,000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff .
reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur .
and so the senate won in the end .
they got their title of respectability .
and also , the senate 's other worry , the appearance of singularity - well , it was a singularity back then .
but now , do you know how many nations have a president ?
all because they want to sound like the guy who 's got the 5,000 nuclear warheads , etc .
and so , in the end , the senate won and the house of representatives lost , because nobody 's going to feel that humble when they 're told that they are now the president of the united states of america .
and that 's the important lesson i think you can take away , and the one i want to leave you with .
politicians try to pick words and use words to shape reality and control reality , but in fact , reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality .
thank you very much .
today i want to talk to you about swimming across the north pole , across the most northern place in the whole world .
and perhaps the best place to start is with my late father .
he was a great storyteller .
he could tell a story about an event , and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment .
and one of the stories he told me so often when i was a young boy was of the first british atomic bomb test .
he had been there and watched it go off .
and he said that the explosion was so loud and the light was so intense , that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes .
and he said that he could actually see an x-ray of his fingers , because the light was so bright .
and i know that watching that atomic bomb going off had a very , very big impact on my late father .
every holiday i had as a young boy was in a national park .
what he was trying to do with me was to inspire me to protect the world , and show me just how fragile the world is .
he also told me about the great explorers .
he loved history . he would tell me about captain scott walking all the way to the south pole and sir edmund hillary climbing up mount everest .
and so ever since i think i was just six years old , i dreamed of going to the polar regions .
i really , really wanted to go to the arctic .
there was something about that place which drew me to it .
and , well , sometimes it takes a long time for a dream to come true .
but seven years ago , i went to the arctic for the first time .
and it was so beautiful that i 've been back there ever since , for the last seven years .
i love the place .
but i have seen that place change beyond all description , just in that short period of time .
i have seen polar bears walking across very , very thin ice in search of food .
i have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much .
and i have also , every year , seen less and less sea ice .
and i wanted the world to know what was happening up there .
in the two years before my swim , 23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover just melted away .
and i wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders to get them to understand what is happening .
so i decided to do this symbolic swim at the top of the world , in a place which should be frozen over , but which now is rapidly unfreezing .
and the message was very clear : climate change is for real , and we need to do something about it .
and we need to do something about it right now .
well , swimming across the north pole , it 's not an ordinary thing to do .
i mean , just to put it in perspective , 27 degrees is the temperature of a normal indoor swimming pool .
this morning , the temperature of the english channel was 18 degrees .
the passengers who fell off the titanic fell into water of just five degrees centigrade .
fresh water freezes at zero .
and the water at the north pole is minus 1.7 .
it 's fucking freezing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm sorry , but there is no other way to describe it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i had to assemble an incredible team around me to help me with this task .
i assembled this team of 29 people from 10 nations .
some people think that swimming is a very solo sport , you just dive into the sea and off you go .
it could n't be further from the truth for me .
and i then went and did a huge amount of training , swimming in icy water , backwards and forwards .
but the most important thing was to train my mind to prepare myself for what was going to happen .
and i had to visualize the swim .
i had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end .
i had to taste the salt water in my mouth .
i had to see my coach screaming for me , " come on lewis ! come on ! go ! go ! go ! do n't slow down ! "
and so i literally swam across the north pole hundreds and hundreds of times in my mind .
and then , after a year of training , i felt ready .
i felt confident that i could actually do this swim .
so myself and the five members of the team , we hitched a ride on an icebreaker and on day four , we decided to just do a quick five minute test swim .
i had never swum in water of minus 1.7 degrees before , because it 's just impossible to train in those types of conditions .
so we stopped the ship , as you do .
we all got down onto the ice , and i then got into my swimming costume and i dived into the sea .
i have never in my life felt anything like that moment .
i could barely breathe . i was gasping for air .
i was hyperventilating so much , and within seconds my hands were numb .
and it was - the paradox is that you 're in freezing cold water , but actually you 're on fire .
i swam as hard as i could for five minutes .
i remember just trying to get out of the water .
i climbed out of the ice .
and i remember taking the goggles off my face and looking down at my hands in sheer shock , because my fingers had swollen so much that they were like sausages .
and they were swollen so much , i could n't even close them .
what had happened is that we are made partially of water , and when water freezes it expands .
and so what had actually happened is that the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded .
and they had burst . and i was in so much agony .
i immediately got rushed onto the ship and into a hot shower .
and i remember standing underneath the hot shower and trying to defrost my fingers .
and i thought , in two days ' time , i was going to do this swim across the north pole .
i was going to try and do a 20-minute swim , for one kilometer across the north pole .
and this dream which i had had ever since i was a young boy with my father , was just going out the window .
there is no possibility that this was going to happen .
and i remember then getting out of the shower and realizing i could n't even feel my hands .
and for a swimmer , you need to feel your hands because you need to be able to grab the water and pull it through with you .
the next morning , i woke up and i was in such a state of depression , and all i could think about was sir ranulph fiennes .
for those of you who do n't know him , he 's the great british explorer .
a number of years ago , he tried to ski all the way to the north pole .
he accidentally fell through the ice into the sea .
and after just three minutes in that water , he was able to get himself out .
and his hands were so badly frostbitten that he had to return to england .
he went to a local hospital and there they said , " ran , there is no possibility of us being able to save these fingers .
we are going to actually have to take them off . "
and ran decided to go into his tool shed and take out a saw and do it himself .
and all i could think of was , if that happened to ran after three minutes , and i ca n't feel my hands after five minutes , what on earth is going to happen if i try 20 minutes ?
at the very best , i 'm going to end up losing some fingers .
and at worst , i did n't even want to think about it .
we carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the north pole .
and my close friend david , he saw the way i was thinking , and he came up to me and he said , " lewis , i 've known you since you were 18 years old .
i 've known you , and i know , lewis , deep down , right deep down here , that you are going to make this swim .
i so believe in you lewis . i 've seen the way you 've been training .
and i realize the reason why you 're going to do this .
this is such an important swim .
we stand at a very , very important moment in this history , and you 're going to make a symbolic swim here to try to shake the lapels of world leaders .
lewis , have the courage to go in there , because we are going to look after you every moment of it . "
and i just , i got so much confidence from him saying that , because he knew me so well .
so we carried on sailing and we arrived at the north pole .
and we stopped the ship , and it was just as the scientists had predicted .
there were open patches of sea everywhere .
and i went down into my cabin and i put on my swimming costume .
and then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor , which measures my core body temperature and my heart rate .
and then we walked out onto the ice .
and i remember looking into the ice , and there were big chunks of white ice in there , and the water was completely black .
i had never seen black water before .
and it is 4,200 meters deep .
and i said to myself , " lewis , do n't look left , do n't look right .
just scuttle forward and go for it . "
and so i now want to show you a short video of what happened there on the ice .
narrator -lrb- video -rrb- : we 're just sailing out of harbor now , and it 's at this stage when one can have a bit of a wobble mentally .
everything just looks so gray around here , and looks so cold .
we 've just seen our first polar bears .
it was absolutely magical .
a mother and a cub , such a beautiful sight .
and to think that in 30 , 40 years they could become extinct .
it 's a very frightening , very , very frightening thought .
we 're finally at the north pole . this is months and months and months of dreaming to get here , years of training and planning and preparation .
ooh . in a couple of hours ' time i 'm going to get in here and do my swim .
it 's all a little bit frightening , and emotional .
amundson , you ready ? amudson : ready .
lewis pugh : ten seconds to swim . ten seconds to swim .
take the goggles off . take the goggles off !
man : take the shoes . take the shoes .
well done lad ! you did it ! you did it lewis !
you did it ! you did it man !
lp : how on earth did we do that ?
man : against the current ! you did it against the current !
-lrb- applause -rrb- lp : thank you very much . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much .
audience : encore !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- lp : i 'd just like to end off by just saying this : it took me four months again to feel my hands .
but was it worth it ? yes , absolutely it was .
there are very , very few people who do n't know now about what is happening in the arctic .
and people ask me , " lewis , what can we do about climate change ? "
and i say to them , i think we need to do three things .
the first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down into manageable chunks .
you saw during that video all those flags .
those flags represented the countries from which my team came from .
and equally , when it comes to climate change , every single country is going to have to make cuts .
britain , america , japan , south africa , the congo .
all of us together , we 're all on the same ship together .
the second thing we need to do is we need to just look back at how far we have come in such a short period of time .
i remember , just a few years ago , speaking about climate change , and people heckling me in the back and saying it does n't even exist .
i 've just come back from giving a series of speeches in some of the poorest townships in south africa to young children as young as 10 years old .
four or five children sitting behind a desk , and even in those poorest conditions , they all have a very , very good grasp of climate change .
we need to believe in ourselves .
now is the time to believe .
we 've come a long way . we 're doing good .
but the most important thing we must do is , i think , we must all walk to the end of our lives and turn around , and ask ourselves a most fundamental question .
and that is , " what type of world do we want to live in , and what decision are we going to make today to ensure that we all live in a sustainable world ? "
ladies and gentlemen , thank you very , very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i was in the hospital for a long time .
and a few years after i left , i went back , and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me - said , " dan , i have a fantastic new treatment for you . "
i was very excited . i walked with him to his office .
and he explained to me that , when i shave , i have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is , but on the right side of my face i was badly burned so i have no hair , and this creates lack of symmetry .
and what 's the brilliant idea he had ?
he was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric .
it sounded interesting . he asked me to go and shave .
let me tell you , this was a strange way to shave , because i thought about it and i realized that the way i was shaving then would be the way i would shave for the rest of my life - because i had to keep the width the same .
when i got back to his office , i was n't really sure .
i said , " can i see some evidence for this ? "
so he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots - not very informative .
i said , " what happens when i grow older and my hair becomes white ?
what would happen then ? "
" oh , do n't worry about it , " he said .
" we have lasers ; we can whiten it out . "
but i was still concerned , so i said , " you know what , i 'm not going to do it . "
and then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life .
this is coming from a jewish guy , all right , so that means a lot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he said , " dan , what 's wrong with you ?
do you enjoy looking non-symmetric ?
do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this ?
do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently ? "
none of those happened .
and this was very surprising to me , because i 've gone through many treatments - there were many treatments i decided not to do - and i never got this guilt trip to this extent .
but i decided not to have this treatment .
and i went to his deputy and asked him , " what was going on ?
where was this guilt trip coming from ? "
and he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already , and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now you probably think that this guy 's a schmuck .
right , that 's what he seems like .
but let me give you a different perspective on the same story .
a few years ago , i was running some of my own experiments in the lab .
and when we run experiments , we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another .
so we had one group that i hoped their performance would be very high , another group that i thought their performance would be very low , and when i got the results , that 's what we got - i was very happy - aside from one person .
there was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly .
and he pulled the whole mean down , destroying my statistical significance of the test .
so i looked carefully at this guy .
he was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample .
and i remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy .
" fantastic ! " i thought . " let 's throw him out .
who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample ? "
but a couple of days later , we thought about it with my students , and we said , " what would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition ?
what would have happened if he was in the other group ?
would we have thrown him out then ? "
we probably would n't have looked at the data at all , and if we did look at the data , we 'd probably have said , " fantastic ! what a smart guy who is performing this low , " because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower , giving us even stronger statistical results than we could .
so we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment .
but you know , these stories , and lots of other experiments that we 've done on conflicts of interest , basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me .
the first one is that in life we encounter many people who , in some way or another , try to tattoo our faces .
they just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased .
and i 'm sure that it 's something that we all recognize , and we see that it happens .
maybe we do n't recognize it every time , but we understand that it happens .
the most difficult thing , of course , is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives .
and that 's a much , much more difficult lesson to take into account .
because we do n't see how conflicts of interest work on us .
when i was doing these experiments , in my mind , i was helping science .
i was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through .
i was n't doing something bad .
in my mind , i was actually a knight trying to help science move along .
but this was not the case .
i was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions .
and i think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us , and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it , but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors , because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances .
i do want to leave you with one positive thought .
i mean , this is all very depressing , right - people have conflicts of interest , we do n't see it , and so on .
the positive perspective , i think , of all of this is that , if we do understand when we go wrong , if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail , we can actually hope to fix things .
and that , i think , is the hope . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a boy , i loved cars .
when i turned 18 , i lost my best friend to a car accident .
like this .
and then i decided i 'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year .
now i have n't succeeded , so this is just a progress report , but i 'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars .
i saw the concept first in the darpa grand challenges where the u.s. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert .
and even though a hundred teams were there , these cars went nowhere .
so we decided at stanford to build a different self-driving car .
we built the hardware and the software .
we made it learn from us , and we set it free in the desert .
and the unimaginable happened : it became the first car to ever return from a darpa grand challenge , winning stanford 2 million dollars .
yet i still had n't saved a single life .
since , our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves - any street in california .
we 've driven 140,000 miles .
our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving .
it 's the perfect driving mechanism .
we 've driven in cities , like in san francisco here .
we 've driven from san francisco to los angeles on highway 1 .
we 've encountered joggers , busy highways , toll booths , and this is without a person in the loop ; the car just drives itself .
in fact , while we drove 140,000 miles , people did n't even notice .
mountain roads , day and night , and even crooked lombard street in san francisco .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sometimes our cars get so crazy , they even do little stunts .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : oh , my god .
what ?
second man : it 's driving itself .
sebastian thrun : now i ca n't get my friend harold back to life , but i can do something for all the people who died .
do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people ?
and do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error , and can therefore be prevented by machines ?
do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we did n't rely on human precision on staying in the lane - improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes , and do away with all traffic jams on highways ?
do you realize that you , ted users , spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic , wasting your time on your daily commute ?
you could regain this time .
this is four billion hours wasted in this country alone .
and it 's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted .
now i think there 's a vision here , a new technology , and i 'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the first question is this .
our country has two exploration programs .
one is nasa , with a mission to explore the great beyond , to explore the heavens , which we all want to go to if we 're lucky .
and you can see we have sputnik , and we have saturn , and we have other manifestations of space exploration .
well , there 's also another program , in another agency within our government , in ocean exploration .
it 's in noaa , the national oceanic and atmospheric administration .
and my question is this : " why are we ignoring the oceans ? "
here 's the reason , or not the reason , but here 's why i ask that question .
if you compare nasa 's annual budget to explore the heavens , that one-year budget would fund noaa 's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years .
why ? why are we looking up ? is it because it 's heaven ?
and hell is down here ? is it a cultural issue ?
why are people afraid of the ocean ?
or do they just assume the ocean is just a dark , gloomy place that has nothing to offer ?
i 'm going to take you on a 16-minute trip on 72 percent of the planet , so buckle up .
ok . and what we 're going to do is we 're going to immerse ourselves in my world .
and what i 'm going to try - i hope i make the following points .
i 'm going to make it right now in case i forget .
everything i 'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when i went to school .
and most of all , it was not even in my college textbooks .
i 'm a geophysicist , and all my earth science books when i was a student - i had to give the wrong answer to get an a.
we used to ridicule continental drift . it was something we laughed at .
we learned of marshall kay 's geosynclinal cycle , which is a bunch of crap .
in today 's context , it was a bunch of crap , but it was the law of geology , vertical tectonics .
all the things we 're going to walk through in our explorations and discoveries of the oceans were mostly discoveries made by accident .
mostly discoveries made by accident .
we were looking for something and found something else .
and everything we 're going to talk about represents a one tenth of one percent glimpse , because that 's all we 've seen .
i have a characterization .
this is a characterization of what it would look like if you could remove the water .
it gives you the false impression it 's a map .
it is not a map .
in fact , i have another version at my office and i ask people , " why are there mountains here , on this area here , but there are none over here ? " and they go , " well , gee , i do n't know , " saying , " is it a fracture zone ? is it a hot spot ? "
no , no , that 's the only place a ship 's been .
most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored .
we had more exploration ships down there during captain cook 's time than now . it 's amazing .
all right . so we 're going to immerse ourselves in the 72 percent of the planet because , you know , it 's really naive to think that the easter bunny put all the resources on the continents .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , it 's just ludicrous .
we are always , constantly playing the zero sum game .
you know , we 're going to do this , we 're going to take it away from something else .
i believe in just enriching the economy .
and we 're leaving so much on the table , 72 percent of the planet .
and as i will point out later in the presentation , 50 percent of the united states of america lies beneath the sea .
50 percent of our country that we own , have all legal jurisdiction , have all rights to do whatever we want , lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of mars than that 50 percent .
why ? ok . now , i began my explorations the hard way .
back then - actually my first expedition was when i was 17 years old . it was 49 years ago .
do the math , i 'm 66 . and i went out to sea on a scripps ship and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave , and i was too young to be - you know , i thought it was great !
i was a body surfer and i thought , " wow , that was an incredible wave ! "
and we almost sank the ship , but i became enraptured with mounting expeditions . and over the last 49 years , i 've done about 120 , 121 - i keep doing them - expeditions .
but in the early days , the only way i could get to the bottom was to crawl into a submarine , a very small submarine , and go down to the bottom .
i dove in a whole series of different deep diving submersibles .
alvin and sea cliff and cyana , and all the major deep submersibles we have , which are about eight .
in fact , on a good day , we might have four or five human beings at the average depth of the earth - maybe four or five human beings out of whatever billions we 've got going .
and so it 's very difficult to get there , if you do it physically .
but i was enraptured , and in my graduate years was the dawn of plate tectonics . and we realized that the greatest mountain range on earth lies beneath the sea .
the mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam on a baseball .
this is on a mercator projection .
but if you were to put it on an equal area projection , you 'd see that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23 percent of the earth 's total surface area .
almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we did n't enter it until after neil armstrong and buzz aldrin went to the moon .
so we went to the moon , played golf up there , before we went to the largest feature on our own planet .
and our interest in this mountain range , as earth scientists in those days , was not only because of its tremendous size , dominating the planet , but the role it plays in the genesis of the earth 's outer skin .
because it 's along the axis of the mid-ocean ridge where the great crustal plates are separating .
and like a living organism , you tear it open , it bleeds its molten blood , rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere , hardens , forms new tissue and moves laterally .
but no one had actually gone down into the actual site of the boundary of creation as we call it - into the rift valley - until a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973 , 1974 and were the first human beings to enter the great rift valley .
we went down into the rift valley .
this is all accurate except for one thing - it 's pitch black .
it 's absolutely pitch black , because photons can not reach the average depth of the ocean , which is 12,000 feet . in the rift valley , it 's 9,000 feet .
most of our planet does not feel the warmth of the sun .
most of our planet is in eternal darkness .
and for that reason , you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea .
and with the absence of photosynthesis you have no plant life , and as a result , you have very little animal life living in this underworld .
or so we thought . and so in our initial explorations , we were totally focused on exploring the boundary of creation , looking at the volcanic features running along that entire 42,000 miles .
running along this entire 42,000 miles are tens of thousands of active volcanoes .
tens of thousands of active volcanoes .
there are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude .
so , it 's a phenomenally active region , it 's not just a dark , boring place . it 's a very alive place .
and it 's then being ripped open .
but we were dealing with a particular scientific issue back then .
we could n't understand why you had a mountain under tension .
in plate tectonic theory , we knew that if you had plates collide , it made sense : they would crush into one another , you would thicken the crust , you 'd uplift it .
that 's why you get , you know , you get seashells up on mount everest .
it 's not a flood , it was pushed up there .
we understood mountains under compression , but we could not understand why we had a mountain under tension .
it should not be . until one of my colleagues said , " it looks to me like a thermal blister , and the mid-ocean ridge must be a cooling curve . " we said , " let 's go find out . "
we punched a bunch of heat probes . everything made sense , except , at the axis , there was missing heat . it was missing heat .
it was hot . it was n't hot enough .
so , we came up with multiple hypotheses : there 's little green people down there taking it ; there 's all sorts of things going on .
but the only logical -lsb- explanation -rsb- was that there were hot springs .
so , there must be underwater hot springs .
we mounted an expedition to look for the missing heat .
and so we went along this mountain range , in an area along galapagos rift , and did we find the missing heat .
it was amazing . these giant chimneys , huge giant chimneys .
we went up to them with our submersible .
we wanted to get a temperature probe , we stuck it in there , looked at it - it pegged off scale .
the pilot made this great observation : " that 's hot . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff - it could have melted . but it turns out the exiting temperature was 650 degrees f , hot enough to melt lead .
this is what a real one looks like , on the juan de fuca ridge .
what you 're looking at is an incredible pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean .
everything you see in this picture is commercial grade : copper , lead , silver , zinc and gold .
so the easter bunny has put things in the ocean floor , and you have massive heavy metal deposits that we 're making in this mountain range .
we 're making huge discoveries of large commercial-grade ore along this mountain range , but it was dwarfed by what we discovered .
we discovered a profusion of life , in a world that it should not exist -lsb- in -rsb- . giant tube worms , 10 feet tall .
i remember having to use vodka - my own vodka - to pickle it because we do n't carry formaldehyde .
we went and found these incredible clam beds sitting on the barren rock . large clams , and when we opened them , they did n't look like a clam .
and when we cut them open , they did n't have the anatomy of a clam .
no mouth , no gut , no digestive system .
their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism , a bacterium , that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark , through a process we now call chemosynthesis .
none of it in our textbooks . none of this in our textbooks .
we did not know about this life system .
we were not predicting it .
we stumbled on it , looking for some missing heat .
so , we wanted to accelerate this process .
we wanted to get away from this silly trip , up and down on a submarine : average depth of the ocean , 12,000 feet ; two and half hours to get to work in the morning ; two and half hours to get to home . five hour commute to work .
three hours of bottom time , average distance traveled - one mile .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- on a 42,000 mile mountain range . great job security , but not the way to go .
so , i began designing a new technology of telepresence , using robotic systems to replicate myself , so i would n't have to cycle my vehicle system .
we began to introduce that in our explorations , and we continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies . again , looking for something else , moving from one part of the mid-ocean ridge to another .
the scientists were off watch and they came across incredible life forms .
they came across new creatures they had not seen before .
but more importantly , they discovered edifices down there that they did not understand .
that did not make sense . they were not above a magma chamber .
they should n't be there . and we called it lost city .
and lost city was characterized by these incredible limestone formations and upside down pools . look at that .
how do you do that ? that 's water upside down .
we went in underneath and tapped it , and we found that it had the ph of drano .
the ph of 11 , and yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria living in it and at this extreme environment .
and the hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment .
all the way at the other end , in an alkaline environment , at a ph of 11 , life existed .
so life was much more creative than we had ever thought .
again , discovered by accident . just two years ago working off santorini , where people are sunning themselves on the beach , unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby , we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and more life systems .
this was two miles from where people go to sunbathe , and they were oblivious to the existence of this system .
again , you know , we stop at the water 's edge .
recently , diving off - in the gulf of mexico , finding pools of water , this time not upside down , right side up .
bingo . you 'd think you 're in air , until a fish swims by .
you 're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs .
near that was methane . i 've never seen volcanoes of methane .
instead of belching out lava , they were belching out big , big bubbles of methane . and they were creating these volcanoes , and there were flows , not of lava , but of the mud coming out of the earth but driven by - i 've never seen this before .
moving on , there 's more than just natural history beneath the sea - human history . our discoveries of the titanic .
the realization that the deep sea is the largest museum on earth .
it contains more history than all of the museums on land combined .
and yet we 're only now penetrating it .
finding the state of preservation .
we found the bismarck in 16,000 feet . we then found the yorktown .
people always ask , " did you find the right ship ? "
it said yorktown on the stern .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- more recently , finding ancient history .
how many ancient mariners have had a bad day ? the number 's a million .
we 've been discovering these along ancient trade routes , where they 're not supposed to be .
this shipwreck sank 100 years before the birth of christ .
this one sank carrying a prefabricated , home depot roman temple .
and then here 's one that sank at the time of homer , at 750 b.c.
more recently , into the black sea , where we 're exploring .
because there 's no oxygen there , it 's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on earth . shipwrecks are perfectly preserved .
all their organics are perfectly preserved . we begin to excavate them .
we expect to start hauling out the bodies in perfect condition with their dna .
look at the state of preservation - still the ad mark of a carpenter . look at the state of those artifacts .
you still see the beeswax dripping . when they dropped , they sealed it .
this ship sank 1,500 years ago .
fortunately , we 've been able to convince congress .
we begin to go on the hill and lobby .
and we stole recently a ship from the united states navy .
the okeanos explorer on its mission .
its mission is as good as you could get .
its mission is to go where no one has gone before on planet earth .
and i was looking at it yesterday , it 's up in seattle . ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it comes online this summer , and it begins its journey of exploration .
but we have no idea what we 're going find when we go out there with our technology .
but certainly , it 's going to be going to the unknown america .
this is that part of the united states that lies beneath the sea .
we own all of that blue and yet , like i say , particularly the western territorial trust , we do n't have maps of them . we do n't have maps of them .
we have maps of venus , but not of the western territorial trust .
the way we 're going to run this - we have no idea what we 're going to discover .
we have no idea what we 're going to discover .
we 're going to discover an ancient shipwreck , a phoenician off brazil , or a new rock formation , a new life .
so , we 're going to run it like an emergency hospital .
we 're going to connect our command center , via a high-bandwidth satellite link to a building we 're building at the university of rhode island , called the interspace center .
and within that , we 're going to run it just like you run a nuclear submarine , blue-gold team , switching them off and on , running 24 hours a day .
a discovery is made , that discovery is instantly seen in the command center a second later .
but then it 's connected through internet too - the new internet highway that makes internet one look like a dirt road on the information highway - with 10 gigabits of bandwidth .
we 'll go into areas we have no knowledge of .
it 's a big blank sheet on our planet . we 'll map it within hours , have the maps disseminated out to the major universities .
it turns out that 90 percent of all the oceanographic intellect in this country are at 12 universities . they 're all on i-2 .
we can then build a command center .
this is a remote center at the university of washington .
she 's talking to the pilot . she 's 5,000 miles away , but she 's assumed command .
but the beauty of this , too , is we can then disseminate it to children .
we can disseminate .
they can follow this expedition . i 've started a program - where are you jim ? jim young who helped me start a program called the jason project . more recently , we 've started a program with the boys and girls clubs of america , so that we can use exploration , and the excitement of live exploration , to motivate them and excite them and then give them what they 're already ready for .
i would not let an adult drive my robot .
you do n't have enough gaming experience .
but i will let a kid with no license take over control of my vehicle system .
-lrb- applause -rrb- because we want to create - we want to create the classroom of tomorrow .
we have stiff competition and we need to motivate and it 's all being done .
you win or lose an engineer or a scientist by eighth grade .
the game is not over - it 's over by the eighth grade , it 's not beginning .
we need to be not only proud of our universities .
we need to be proud of our middle schools .
and when we have the best middle schools in the world , we 'll have the best kids pumped out of that system , let me tell you .
because this is what we want . this is what we want .
this is a young lady , not watching a football game , not watching a basketball game .
watching exploration live from thousands of miles away , and it 's just dawning on her what she 's seeing .
and when you get a jaw drop , you can inform .
you can put so much information into that mind , it 's in full -lsb- receiving -rsb- mode .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this , i hope , will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battle for truth .
and my final question , my final question - why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea ?
why do we have programs to build habitation on mars , and we have programs to look at colonizing the moon , but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet ?
and the technology is at hand .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you for being here .
and i say " thank you for being here " because i was silent for 17 years .
and the first words that i spoke were in washington , d.c. , on the 20th anniversary of earth day .
and my family and friends had gathered there to hear me speak .
and i said , " thank you for being here . "
my mother , out in the audience , she jumped up , " hallelujah , johnny 's talking ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- imagine if you were quiet for 17 years and your mother was out in the audience , say .
my dad said to me , " that 's one " - i 'll explain that .
but i turned around because i did n't recognize where my voice was coming from .
i had n't heard my voice in 17 years , so i turned around and i looked and i said , " god , who 's saying what i 'm thinking ? "
and then i realized it was me , you know , and i kind of laughed .
and i could see my father : " yeah , he really is crazy . "
well , i want to take you on this journey .
and the journey , i believe , is a metaphor for all of our journeys .
even though this one is kind of unusual , i want you to think about your own journey .
my journey began in 1971 when i witnessed two oil tankers collide beneath the golden gate , and a half a million gallons of oil spilled into the bay .
it disturbed me so much that i decided that i was going to give up riding and driving in motorized vehicles .
that 's a big thing in california .
and it was a big thing in my little community of point reyes station in inverness , california , because there were only about 350 people there in the winter - this was back in ' 71 now .
and so when i came in and i started walking around , people - they just knew what was going on .
and people would drive up next to me and say , " john , what are you doing ? "
and i 'd say , " well , i 'm walking for the environment . "
and they said , " no , you 're walking to make us look bad , right ?
you 're walking to make us feel bad . "
and maybe there was some truth to that , because i thought that if i started walking , everyone would follow .
because of the oil , everybody talked about the polllution .
and so i argued with people about that , i argued and i argued .
i called my parents up .
i said , " i 've given up riding and driving in cars . "
my dad said , " why did n't you do that when you were 16 ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't know about the environment then .
they 're back in philadelphia .
and so i told my mother , " i 'm happy though , i 'm really happy . "
she said , " if you were happy , son , you would n't have to say it . "
mothers are like that .
and so , on my 27th birthday i decided , because i argued so much and i talk so much , that i was going to stop speaking for just one day - one day - to give it a rest .
and so i did .
i got up in the morning and i did n't say a word .
and i have to tell you , it was a very moving experience , because for the first time , i began listening - in a long time .
and what i heard , it kind of disturbed me .
because what i used to do , when i thought i was listening , was i would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that i could - i knew what they were going to say , and so i stopped listening .
and in my mind , i just kind of raced ahead and thought of what i was going to say back , while they were still finishing up .
and then i would launch in .
well , that just ended communication .
so on this first day i actually listened .
and it was very sad for me , because i realized that for those many years i had not been learning .
i was 27 . i thought i knew everything .
i did n't .
and so i decided i 'd better do this for another day , and another day , and another day until finally , i promised myself for a year i would keep quiet because i started learning more and more and i needed to learn more .
so for a year i said i would keep quiet , and then on my birthday i would reassess what i had learned and maybe i would talk again .
well , that lasted 17 years .
now during that time - those 17 years - i walked and i played the banjo and i painted and i wrote in my journal , and i tried to study the environment by reading books .
and i decided that i was going to go to school . so i did .
i walked up to ashland , oregon , where they were offering an environmental studies degree .
it 's only 500 miles .
and i went into the registrar 's office and - " what , what , what ? "
i had a newspaper clipping .
" oh , so you really want to go to school here ?
you do n't ... ?
we have a special program for you . " they did .
and in those two years , i graduated with my first degree - a bachelor 's degree .
and my father came out , he was so proud .
he said , " listen , we 're really proud of you son , but what are you going to do with a bachelor 's degree ?
you do n't ride in cars , you do n't talk - you 're going to have to do those things . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i hunched my shoulder , i picked my backpack up again and i started walking .
i walked all the way up to port townsend , washington , where i built a wooden boat , rode it across puget sound and walked across washington -lsb- to -rsb- idaho and down to missoula , montana .
i had written the university of montana two years earlier and said i 'd like to go to school there .
i said i 'd be there in about two years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was there . i showed up in two years and they - i tell this story because they really helped me .
there are two stories in montana .
the first story is i did n't have any money - that 's a sign i used a lot .
and they said , " do n't worry about that . "
the director of the program said , " come back tomorrow . "
he gave me 150 dollars , and he said , " register for one credit .
you 're going to go to south america , are n't you ? "
and i said - rivers and lakes , the hydrological systems , south america .
so i did that .
he came back ; he said to me , " ok john , now that you 've registered for that one credit , you can have a key to an office , you can matriculate - you 're matriculating , so you can use the library .
and what we 're going to do is , we 're going to have all of the professors allow you to go to class .
they 're going to save your grade , and when we figure out how to get you the rest of the money , then you can register for that class and they 'll give you the grade . "
wow , they do n't do that in graduate schools , i do n't think .
but i use that story because they really wanted to help me .
they saw that i was really interested in the environment , and they really wanted to help me along the way .
and during that time , i actually taught classes without speaking .
i had 13 students when i first walked into the class .
i explained , with a friend who could interpret my sign language , that i was john francis , i was walking around the world , i did n't talk and this was the last time this person 's going to be here interpreting for me .
all the students sat around and they went ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i could see they were looking for the schedule , to see when they could get out .
they had to take that class with me .
two weeks later , everyone was trying to get into our class .
and i learned in that class - because i would do things like this ...
and they were all gathered around , going , " what 's he trying to say ? "
" i do n't know , i think he 's talking about clear cutting . " " yeah , clear cutting . "
" no , no , no , that 's not clear cutting , that 's - he 's using a handsaw . "
" well , you ca n't clearcut with a ... "
" yes , you can clear cut ... "
" no , i think he 's talking about selective forestry . "
now this was a discussion class and we were having a discussion .
i just backed out of that , you know , and i just kind of kept the fists from flying .
but what i learned was that sometimes i would make a sign and they said things that i absolutely did not mean , but i should have .
and so what came to me is , if you were a teacher and you were teaching , if you were n't learning you probably were n't teaching very well .
and so i went on .
my dad came out to see me graduate and , you know , i did the deal , and my father said , " we 're really proud of you son , but ... " you know what went on , he said , " you 've got to start riding and driving and start talking .
what are you going to do with a master 's degree ? "
i hunched my shoulder , i got my backpack and i went on to the university of wisconsin .
i spent two years there writing on oil spills .
no one was interested in oil spills .
but something happened - exxon valdez .
and i was the only one in the united states writing on oil spills .
my dad came out again .
he said , " i do n't know how you do this , son - i mean , you do n't ride in cars , you do n't talk .
my sister said maybe i should leave you alone , because you seem to be doing a lot better when you 're not saying anything . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , i put on my backpack again .
i put my banjo on and i walked all the way to the east coast , put my foot in the atlantic ocean - it was seven years and one day it took me to walk across the united states .
and on earth day , 1990 - the 20th anniversary of earth day - that 's when i began to speak .
and that 's why i said , " thank you for being here . "
because it 's sort of like that tree in the forest falling ; and if there 's no one there to hear , does it really make a sound ?
and i 'm thanking you , and i 'm thanking my family because they had come to hear me speak .
and that 's communication .
and they also taught me about listening - that they listened to me .
and it 's one of those things that came out of the silence , the listening to each other .
really , very important - we need to listen to each other .
well , my journey kept going on .
my dad said , " that 's one , " and i still did n't let that go .
i worked for the coastguard , was made a u.n. goodwill ambassador .
i wrote regulations for the united states - i mean , i wrote oil spill regulations .
20 years ago , if someone had said to me , " john , do you really want to make a difference ? "
" yeah , i want to make a difference . "
he said , " you just start walking east ; get out of your car and just start walking east . "
and as i walked off a little bit , they 'd say , " yeah , and shut up , too . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you 're going to make a difference , buddy . "
how could that be , how could that be ?
how could doing such a simple thing like walking and not talking make a difference ?
well , my time at the coast guard was a really good time .
and after that - i only worked one year - i said , " that 's enough . one year 's enough for me to do that . "
i got on a sailboat and i sailed down to the caribbean , and walked through all of the islands , and to venezuela .
and you know , i forgot the most important thing , which is why i started talking , which i have to tell you .
i started talking because i had studied environment .
i 'd studied environment at this formal level , but there was this informal level .
and the informal level - i learned about people , and what we do and how we are .
and environment changed from just being about trees and birds and endangered species to being about how we treated each other .
because if we are the environment , then all we need to do is look around us and see how we treat ourselves and how we treat each other .
and so that 's the message that i had .
and i said , " well , i 'm going to have to spread that message . "
and i got in my sailboat , sailed all the way through the caribbean - it was n't really my sailboat , i kind of worked on that boat - got to venezuela and i started walking .
this is the last part of this story , because it 's how i got here , because i still did n't ride in motorized vehicles .
i was walking through el dorado - it 's a prison town , famous prison , or infamous prison - in venezuela , and i do n't know what possessed me , because this was not like me .
there i am , walking past the guard gate and the guard stops and says , " pasaporte , pasaporte , " and with an m16 pointed at me .
and i looked at him and i said , " passport , huh ?
i do n't need to show you my passport . it 's in the back of my pack .
i 'm dr. francis ; i 'm a u.n. ambassador and i 'm walking around the world . "
and i started walking off .
what possessed me to say this thing ?
the road turned into the jungle .
i did n't get shot .
and i got to - i start saying , " free at last - thank god almighty , i 'm free at last . "
" what was that about , " i 'm saying . what was that about ?
it took me 100 miles to figure out that , in my heart , in me , i had become a prisoner .
i was a prisoner and i needed to escape .
the prison that i was in was the fact that i did not drive or use motorized vehicles .
now how could that be ?
because when i started , it seemed very appropriate to me not to use motorized vehicles .
but the thing that was different was that every birthday , i asked myself about silence , but i never asked myself about my decision to just use my feet .
i had no idea i was going to become a u.n. ambassador .
i had no idea i would have a ph.d.
and so i realized that i had a responsibility to more than just me , and that i was going to have to change .
you know , we can do it .
i was going to have to change .
and i was afraid to change , because i was so used to the guy who only just walked .
i was so used to that person that i did n't want to stop .
i did n't know who i would be if i changed .
but i know i needed to .
i know i needed to change , because it would be the only way that i could be here today .
and i know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we 've gotten to , but there 's another place for us to go .
and we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we 've become , and go to the place of who we are becoming .
and so , i want to encourage you to go to that next place , to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in , as comfortable as it may be , because we have to do something now .
we have to change now .
as our former vice president said , we have to become activists .
so if my voice can touch you , if my actions can touch you , if my being here can touch you , please let it be .
and i know that all of you have touched me while i 've been here .
so , let 's go out into the world and take this caring , this love , this respect that we 've shown each other right here at ted , and take this out into the world .
because we are the environment , and how we treat each other is really how we 're going to treat the environment .
so i want to thank you for being here and i want to end this in five seconds of silence .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , if president obama invited me to be the next czar of mathematics , then i would have a suggestion for him that i think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country .
and it would be easy to implement and inexpensive .
the mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra .
and everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject .
and at top of that pyramid , it 's calculus .
and i 'm here to say that i think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid ...
that the correct summit - that all of our students , every high school graduate should know - should be statistics : probability and statistics .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i mean , do n't get me wrong . calculus is an important subject .
it 's one of the great products of the human mind .
the laws of nature are written in the language of calculus .
and every student who studies math , science , engineering , economics , they should definitely learn calculus but i 'm here to say , as a professor of mathematics , that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious , meaningful way , in their day-to-day lives .
on the other hand , statistics - that 's a subject that you could , and should , use on daily basis . right ?
it 's risk . it 's reward . it 's randomness .
it 's understanding data .
i think if our students , if our high school students - if all of the american citizens - knew about probability and statistics , we would n't be in the economic mess that we 're in today . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- not only - thank you - not only that ...
but if it 's taught properly , it can be a lot of fun .
i mean , probability and statistics , it 's the mathematics of games and gambling .
it 's analyzing trends . it 's predicting the future .
look , the world has changed from analog to digital .
and it 's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital , from the more classical , continuous mathematics , to the more modern , discrete mathematics - the mathematics of uncertainty , of randomness , of data - that being probability and statistics .
in summary , instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus , i think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means . and i mean it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- frugal digital is essentially a small research group at c.i.d.
where we are looking to find alternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society .
that 's what we 're after .
and we do this because we actually believe that silicon technology today is mostly about a culture of excess .
it 's about the fastest and the most efficient and the most dazzling gadget you can have , while about two-thirds of the world can hardly reach the most basic of this technology to even address fundamental needs in life , including health care , education and all these kinds of very fundamental issues .
so before i start , i want to talk about a little anecdote , a little story about a man i met once in mumbai .
so this man , his name is sathi shri .
he is an outstanding person , because he 's a small entrepreneur .
he runs a little shop in one of the back streets of mumbai .
he has this little 10-square-meter store , where so much is being done .
it 's incredible , because i could n't believe my eyes when i once just happened to bump into him .
basically , what he does is , he has all these services for micro-payments and booking tickets and all kinds of basic things that you would go online for , but he does it for people offline and connects to the digital world .
more importantly , he makes his money by selling these mobile recharge coupons , you know , for the prepaid subscriptions .
but then , in the backside , he 's got this little nook with a few of his employees where they can fix almost anything .
any cell phone , any gadget you can bring them , they can fix it .
and it 's pretty incredible because i took my iphone there , and he was like , " yeah , do you want an upgrade ? "
" yes . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i was a bit skeptical , but then , i decided to give him a nokia instead . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i was amazed about is this reverse engineering and know-how that 's built into this little two meters of space .
they have figured out everything that 's required to dismantle , take things apart , rewrite the circuitry , re-flash the firmware , do whatever you want to with the phone , and they can fix anything so quickly .
you can hand over a phone this morning and you can go pick it up after lunch , and it was quite incredible .
but then we were wondering whether this is a local phenomenon , or is truly global ?
and , over time , we started understanding and systematically researching what this tinkering ecosystem is about , because that is something that 's happening not just in one street corner in mumbai .
it 's actually happening in all parts of the country .
it 's even happening in africa , like , for example , in cape town we did extensive research on this .
even here in doha i found this little nook where you can get alarm clocks and watches fixed , and it 's a lot of tiny little parts . it 's not easy .
you 've got to try it on your own to believe it .
but what fuels this ?
it 's this entire ecosystem of low-cost parts and supplies that are produced all over the world , literally , and then redistributed to basically service this industry , and you can even buy salvaged parts .
basically , you do n't have to necessarily buy brand new things . you have condemned computers that are stripped apart , and you can buy salvaged components and things that you can reassemble in a new configuration .
but what does this new , sort of , approach give us ?
that 's the real question , because this is something that 's been there , part of every society that 's deprived of enough resources .
but there 's an interesting paradigm .
there 's the traditional crafts , we call it the technology crafts because these are emerging .
they 're not something that 's been established .
it 's not something that 's institutionalized .
it 's not taught in universities .
it 's taught -lsb- by -rsb- word of mouth , and it 's an informal education system around this .
so we said , " what can we get out of this ?
you know , like , what are the key values that we can get out of this ? "
the main thing is a fix-it-locally culture , which is fantastic because it means that your product or your service does n't have to go through a huge bureaucratic system to get it fixed .
it also affords us cheap fabrication , which is fantastic , so it means that you can do a lot more with it .
and then , the most important thing is , it gives us large math for low cost .
so it means that you can actually embed pretty clever algorithms and lots of other kinds of extendable ideas into really simple devices .
so , what we call this is a silicon cottage industry .
it 's basically what was the system or the paradigm before the industrial revolution is now re-happening in a whole new way in small digital shops across the planet in most developing countries .
so , we kind of toyed around with this idea , and we said , " what can we do with this ?
can we make a little product or a service out of it ? "
so one of the first things we did is this thing called a multimedia platform . we call it a lunch box .
basically one of the contexts that we studied was schools in very remote parts of india .
so there is this amazing concept called the one-teacher school , which is basically a single teacher who is a multitasker who teaches this amazing little social setting .
it 's an informal school , but it 's really about holistic education .
the only thing that they do n't have is access to resources . they do n't even have a textbook sometimes , and they do n't even have a proper curriculum .
so we said , " what can we do to empower this teacher to do more ? " how to access the digital world ?
instead of being the sole guardian of information , be a facilitator to all this information .
so we said , " what are the steps required to empower the teacher ? "
how do you make this teacher into a digital gateway , and how do you design an inexpensive multimedia platform that can be constructed locally and serviced locally ? "
so we walked around .
we went and scavenged the nearby markets , and we tried to understand , " what can we pick up that will make this happen ? "
so the thing that we got was a little mobile phone with a little pico projector that comes for about 60 dollars .
we went a bought a flashlight with a very big battery , and a bunch of small speakers .
so essentially , the mobile phone gives us a connected multimedia platform .
it allows us to get online and allows us to load up files of different formats and play them .
the flashlight gives us this really intense , bright l.e.d. , and six hours worth of rechargeable battery pack , and the lunch box is a nice little package in which you can put everything inside , and a bunch of mini speakers to sort of amplify the sound large enough .
believe me , those little classrooms are really noisy .
they are kids who scream at the top of their voices , and you really have to get above that .
and we took it back to this little tinkering setup of a mobile phone repair shop , and then the magic happens .
we reassemble it in a new configuration , and we do this hardware mashup , systematically training the guy how to do this .
out comes this , a little lunch box - form factor .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and we systematically field tested , because in the field testing we learned some important lessons , and we went through many iterations .
one of the key issues was battery consumption and charging .
luminosity was an issue , when you have too much bright sunlight outside .
often the roofs are broken , so you do n't have enough darkness in the classroom to do these things .
we extended this idea . we tested it many times over , and the next version we came up with was a box that kind of could trickle charge on solar energy , but most importantly connect to a car battery , because a car battery is a ubiquitous source of power in places where there 's not enough electricity or erratic electricity .
and the other key thing that we did was make this box run off a usb key , because we realized that even though there was gprs and all that on paper , at least , in theory , it was much more efficient to send the data on a little usb key by surface mail .
it might take a few days to get there , but at least it gets there in high definition and in a reliable quality .
so we made this box , and we tested it again and again and again , and we 're going through multiple iterations to do these things .
but it 's not limited to just education .
this kind of a technique or metrology can actually be applied to other kinds of areas , and i 'm going to tell you one more little story .
it 's about this little device called a medi-meter .
it 's basically a little health care screening tool that we developed .
in india , there is a context of these amazing people , the health care workers called asha workers .
they are essentially foot soldiers for the health care system who live in the local community and are trained with basic tools and basic concepts of health care , and the main purpose is basically to inform people to basically , how to lead a better life , but also to divert or sort of make recommendations of what kind of health care should they approach ?
they are basically referral services , essentially .
but the problem with that is that we realized after a bunch of research that they are amazing at referring people to the nearest clinic public health care system is this : these incredibly long lines and too many people who overload the system simply because there 's not enough doctors and facilities for the population that 's being referred .
so everything from a common cold to a serious case of malaria gets almost the same level of attention , and there 's no priorities .
so we said , " come on , there 's got to be a better way of doing this for sure . "
so we said , " what can we do with the asha worker that 'll allow this asha worker to become an interesting filter , but not just a filter , a really well thought through referral system that allows load balancing of the network , and directs patients to different sources of health care based on the severity or the criticalness of those situations ? "
so the real key question was , how do we empower this woman ?
how do we empower her with simple tools that 's not diagnostic but more screening in nature so she at least knows how to advise the patients better ?
because the amount of waiting time and the amount of distances that people need to travel , often sometimes seven to 15 kilometers , sometimes by foot , to get a simple health check done , is very , very detrimental in the sense that it really dissuades people from getting access to health care .
so if there was something that she could do , that would be amazing .
so what we did was that we converted this device into a medical device .
i want to demo this actually , because it 's a very simple process .
bruno , do you want to join us ? -lrb- cheers -rrb- come along . -lrb- applause -rrb- so , what we 're going to do is that we 're going to measure a few basic parameters on you , including your pulse rate and the amount of oxygen that 's there in your blood .
so you 're going to put your thumb on top of this .
bruno giussani : like this , works ?
vinay venkatraman : yeah . that 's right . bg : okay .
vv : so i 'm going to start it up . i hope it works .
-lrb- beeps -rrb- it even beeps , because it 's an alarm clock , after all .
so ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i take it into the start position , and then i press the read button . -lrb- beeps -rrb- so it 's taking a little reading from you . -lrb- beeps -rrb- and then the pointer goes and points to three different options .
let 's see what happens here .
-lrb- beeps -rrb- oh bruno , you can go home , actually .
bg : great . good news . -lrb- applause -rrb- vv : so ... -lrb- applause -rrb- so the thing about this is that if the pointer , unfortunately , had pointed to the red spot , we would have to rush you to a hospital .
luckily , not today . and if it had pointed to the orange or the amber , it basically meant you had to have , sort of , more continuous care from the health care worker .
so that was a very simple three-step screening process that could basically change the equation of how public health care works in so many different ways .
bg : thank you for the good news . vv : yeah .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , very briefly , i 'll just explain to you how this is done , because that 's the more interesting part .
so essentially , the three things that are required to make this conversion from this guy to this guy is a cheap remote control for a television that you can almost find in every home today , some parts from a computer mouse , basically , something that you can scavenge for very low cost , and a few parts that have to be pre-programmed .
basically this is a micro-controller with a few extra components that can be shipped for very little cost across the world , and that 's what is all required with a little bit of local tinkering talent to convert the device into something else .
so we are right now doing some systematic field tests to basically ascertain whether something like this actually makes sense to the asha worker .
we are going through some reference tests to compare it against professional equipment to see if there 's a degree of change in efficacy and if it actually makes an impact in people 's lives . but most importantly , what we are trying to do right now is we are trying to scale this up , because there are over 250,000 asha workers on the ground who are these amazing foot soldiers , and if we can give at least a fraction of them the access to these things , it just changes the way the economics of public health care works , and it changes the way systems actually function ,
not just on a systematic planning level , but also in a very grassroots , bottom-up level .
so that 's it , and we hope to do this in a big way .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : and now we go live to caracas to see one of maestro abreu 's great proteges .
he is the new musical director of the los angeles philharmonic orchestra .
he 's the greatest young conductor in the world .
gustavo dudamel !
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- gustavo dudamel : hi everybody in l.a.
hi quincy . hi maestro zander . hi mark .
we are very happy to have the possibility to be with you in the other side of the world .
we can speak only with music .
we are very happy because we have the opportunity to have this angel in the world - not only in our country , venezuela , but in our world .
he has given us the possibility to have dreams and to make true the dreams .
and here are the results of this wonderful project that is the system in venezuela .
we hope to have , our maestro , to have orchestras in all the countries in all americas .
and we want to play a little piece for you by one of the most important composers of america .
a mexican composer : arturo marquez .
" danzon no. 2 . "
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to talk today about an idea . it 's a big idea .
actually , i think it 'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that 's emerged in the past century .
it 's the idea of computation .
now , of course , that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on .
but there 's actually a lot more to computation than that .
it 's really a very deep , very powerful , very fundamental idea , whose effects we 've only just begun to see .
well , i myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously .
so i started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools .
then , i started drilling down , thinking about the computations i might want to do , trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible .
eventually , i created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build mathematica .
and for the past 23 years , at an increasing rate , we 've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into mathematica , and i 'm happy to say that that 's led to many good things in r & d and education , lots of other areas .
well , i have to admit , actually , that i also had a very selfish reason for building mathematica : i wanted to use it myself , a bit like galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago .
but i wanted to look not at the astronomical universe , but at the computational universe .
so we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes .
but what about the space of all possible programs ?
here 's a representation of a really simple program .
so , if we run this program , this is what we get .
very simple .
so let 's try changing the rule for this program a little bit .
now we get another result , still very simple .
try changing it again .
you get something a little bit more complicated .
but if we keep running this for a while , we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate , it has a very regular structure .
so the question is : can anything else happen ?
well , we can do a little experiment .
let 's just do a little mathematical experiment , try and find out .
let 's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we 're looking at .
they 're called cellular automata .
you can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here .
most of them do very simple things , but if you look along all these different pictures , at rule number 30 , you start to see something interesting going on .
so let 's take a closer look at rule number 30 here .
so here it is .
we 're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here , but we 're getting all this amazing stuff .
it 's not at all what we 're used to , and i must say that , when i first saw this , it came as a huge shock to my intuition .
and , in fact , to understand it , i eventually had to create a whole new kind of science .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this science is different , more general , than the mathematics-based science that we 've had for the past 300 or so years .
you know , it 's always seemed like a big mystery : how nature , seemingly so effortlessly , manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex .
well , i think we 've found its secret : it 's just sampling what 's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like rule 30 or like this .
and knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science .
it also brings up new issues , though , like computational irreducibility .
i mean , we 're used to having science let us predict things , but something like this is fundamentally irreducible .
the only way to find its outcome is , effectively , just to watch it evolve .
it 's connected to , what i call , the principle of computational equivalence , which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything .
it does n't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation ; just something that happens , naturally , things with rules as simple as these can do it .
well , this has deep implications about the limits of science , about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies , about intelligence in the universe , about questions like free will and about creating technology .
you know , in working on this science for many years , i kept wondering , " what will be its first killer app ? "
well , ever since i was a kid , i 'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable .
people like leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier .
but i 'd always assumed that to make progress , i 'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain .
well , then i got to thinking : this scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different - and , by the way , i 've now got huge computation capabilities in mathematica , and i 'm a ceo with some worldly resources to do large , seemingly crazy , projects - so i decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that 's out there in the world we could make computable .
so , it 's been a big , very complex project , which i was not sure was going to work at all .
but i 'm happy to say it 's actually going really well .
and last year we were able to release the first website version of wolfram alpha .
its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions .
so let 's give it a try .
let 's start off with something really easy .
hope for the best .
very good . okay .
so far so good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's try something a little bit harder .
let 's do some mathy thing , and with luck it 'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math .
we could ask it something about the real world .
let 's say - i do n't know - what 's the gdp of spain ?
and it should be able to tell us that .
now we could compute something related to this , let 's say ... the gdp of spain divided by , i do n't know , the - hmmm ...
let 's say the revenue of microsoft .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the idea is that we can just type this in , this kind of question in , however we think of it .
so let 's try asking a question , like a health related question .
so let 's say we have a lab finding that ...
you know , we have an ldl level of 140 for a male aged 50 .
so let 's type that in , and now wolfram alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on .
or let 's try asking about , i do n't know , the international space station .
and what 's happening here is that wolfram alpha is not just looking up something ; it 's computing , in real time , where the international space station is right now at this moment , how fast it 's going , and so on .
so wolfram alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things .
it 's got , by now , pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library .
but the goal is to go much further and , very broadly , to democratize all of this knowledge , and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas .
to be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have , not by searching what other people may have written down before , but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions .
now , of course , wolfram alpha is a monumentally huge , long-term project with lots and lots of challenges .
for a start , one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data , and we built quite a pipeline of mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this .
but that 's just the beginning .
given raw facts or data to actually answer questions , one has to compute : one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries .
well , even starting from mathematica , this is still a huge amount of work .
so far , there are about 8 million lines of mathematica code in wolfram alpha built by experts from many , many different fields .
well , a crucial idea of wolfram alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language , which means that we 've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them .
and i must say that i thought that step might just be plain impossible .
two big things happened : first , a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe ; and second , the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language .
and , of course , now with wolfram alpha actually out in the wild , we can learn from its actual usage .
and , in fact , there 's been an interesting coevolution that 's been going on between wolfram alpha and its human users , and it 's really encouraging .
right now , if we look at web queries , more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time .
and if you look at things like the iphone app , the fraction is considerably larger .
so , i 'm pretty pleased with it all .
but , in many ways , we 're still at the very beginning with wolfram alpha .
i mean , everything is scaling up very nicely and we 're getting more confident .
you can expect to see wolfram alpha technology showing up in more and more places , working both with this kind of public data , like on the website , and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on .
you know , i 've realized that wolfram alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing , in which one 's starting not just from raw computation , but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge .
and when one does that , one really changes the economics of delivering computational things , whether it 's on the web or elsewhere .
you know , we have a fairly interesting situation right now .
on the one hand , we have mathematica , with its sort of precise , formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines .
let me show you a couple of examples here .
so here 's a trivial piece of mathematica programming .
here 's something where we 're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here .
here we 'll just create , in this line , a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there .
if you go on , that 's a slightly more complicated program that 's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on .
but it 's something that is very precise stuff .
it 's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes mathematica to know what to do here .
then on the other hand , we have wolfram alpha , with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it .
so what happens when you put these things together ?
i think it 's actually rather wonderful .
with wolfram alpha inside mathematica , you can , for example , make precise programs that call on real world data .
here 's a real simple example .
you can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have wolfram alpha figure out what you 're talking about .
let 's try this here .
but actually i think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming .
i mean , anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language .
then , the idea is that wolfram alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they 're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger , precise programs .
so , sometimes , wolfram alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with .
here 's a big website where we 've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things .
i 'll show you one example here .
this is just an example of one of these computable documents .
this is probably a fairly small piece of mathematica code that 's able to be run here .
okay . let 's zoom out again .
so , given our new kind of science , is there a general way to use it to make technology ?
so , with physical materials , we 're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes .
well , it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe .
there 's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there .
the challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes .
something like rule 30 , for example , turns out to be a really good randomness generator .
other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world .
and , for example , wolfram alpha and mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe .
and , for example , this - if we go back here - this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe .
in a sense , we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity .
i 'm hoping we can , for example , use that even to get wolfram alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly , and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with .
well , so , that leads to kind of an ultimate question : could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe ?
perhaps there 's even some quite simple rule , some simple program for our universe .
well , the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated .
but in the computational universe , we 've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior .
so could that be what 's going on with our whole universe ?
if the rules for the universe are simple , it 's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level ; operating , for example , far below the level of space or time , which makes it hard to represent things .
but in at least a large class of cases , one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network , which , when it gets big enough , behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid .
well , then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network .
and each possible rule , in a sense , corresponds to a candidate universe .
actually , i have n't shown these before , but here are a few of the candidate universes that i 've looked at .
some of these are hopeless universes , completely sterile , with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space , no notion of time , no matter , other problems like that .
but the exciting thing that i 've found in the last few years is that you actually do n't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that are n't obviously not our universe .
here 's the problem : any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility .
which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave , and whether it matches our physical universe .
a few years ago , i was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity , and even general relativity and gravitation , and at least give hints of quantum mechanics .
so , will we find the whole of physics ?
i do n't know for sure , but i think at this point it 's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try .
not an easy project .
one 's got to build a lot of technology .
one 's got to build a structure that 's probably at least as deep as existing physics .
and i 'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is .
build a team , open it up , offer prizes and so on .
but i 'll tell you , here today , that i 'm committed to seeing this project done , to see if , within this decade , we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes ...
and be able to type into wolfram alpha , " the theory of the universe , " and have it tell us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years , building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on .
with every passing year , i realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is .
it 's taken us a long way already , but there 's so much more to come .
from the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition , i think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that was astonishing .
stay here . i 've got a question .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , that was , fair to say , an astonishing talk .
are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe ?
stephen wolfram : well , the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true , things like the standard model of physics : what i 'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it 's simply wrong .
the things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model , but has n't quite gotten there .
my guess is that some great simplifications of what i 'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what 's been done in string theory , but that 's a complicated math thing that i do n't yet know how it 's going to work out .
ca : benoit mandelbrot is in the audience .
he also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start .
does your work relate to his ?
sw : i think so .
i view benoit mandelbrot 's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area .
benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns , in fractals and so on , where the structure is something that 's kind of tree-like , and where there 's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on .
that 's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity .
i think things like the rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level .
in fact , in a very precise way , they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity that 's sort of as great as complexity can ever get ...
i could go on about this at great length , but i wo n't . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : stephen wolfram , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i was 10 years old , a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school .
and as a special treat , he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands .
and there it was , the seat of human consciousness , the powerhouse of the human body , sitting in my hands .
and that day i knew that when i grew up , i was going to become a brain doctor , scientist , something or the other .
years later , when i finally grew up , my dream came true .
and it was while i was doing my ph.d.
on the neurological causes of dyslexia in children that i encountered a startling fact that i 'd like to share with you all today .
it is estimated that one in six children , that 's one in six children , suffer from some developmental disorder .
this is a disorder that retards mental development in the child and causes permanent mental impairments .
which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder .
but here 's what really perplexed me .
despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain , most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior .
but diagnosing a brain disorder without actually looking at the brain is analogous to treating a patient with a heart problem based on their physical symptoms , without even doing an ecg or a chest x-ray to look at the heart .
it seemed so intuitive to me .
to diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately , it would be necessary to look at the brain directly .
looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete , or even a misleading , picture of the child 's problems .
yet , despite all the advances in medical technology , the diagnosis of brain disorders in one in six children still remained so limited .
and then i came across a team at harvard university that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it , instead of in brain research , towards diagnosing brain disorders in children .
their groundbreaking technology records the eeg , or the electrical activity of the brain , in real time , allowing us to watch the brain as it performs various functions and then detect even the slightest abnormality in any of these functions : vision , attention , language , audition .
a program called brain electrical activity mapping then triangulates the source of that abnormality in the brain .
and another program called statistical probability mapping then performs mathematical calculations to determine whether any of these abnormalities are clinically significant , allowing us to provide a much more accurate neurological diagnosis of the child 's symptoms .
and so i became the head of neurophysiology for the clinical arm of this team , and we 're finally able to use this technology towards actually helping children with brain disorders .
and i 'm happy to say that i 'm now in the process of setting up this technology here in india .
i 'd like to tell you about one such child , whose story was also covered by abc news .
seven-year-old justin senigar came to our clinic with this diagnosis of very severe autism .
like many autistic children , his mind was locked inside his body .
there were moments when he would actually space out for seconds at a time .
and the doctors told his parents he was never going to be able to communicate or interact socially , and he would probably never have too much language .
when we used this groundbreaking eeg technology to actually look at justin 's brain , the results were startling .
it turned out that justin was almost certainly not autistic .
he was suffering from brain seizures that were impossible to see with the naked eye , but that were actually causing symptoms that mimicked those of autism .
after justin was given anti-seizure medication , the change in him was amazing .
within a period of 60 days , his vocabulary went from two to three words to 300 words .
and his communication and social interaction were improved so dramatically that he was enrolled into a regular school and even became a karate super champ .
research shows that 50 percent of children , almost 50 percent of children diagnosed with autism are actually suffering from hidden brain seizures .
these are the faces of the children that i have tested with stories just like justin .
all these children came to our clinic with a diagnosis of autism , attention deficit disorder , mental retardation , language problems .
instead , our eeg scans revealed very specific problems hidden within their brains that could n't possibly have been detected by their behavioral assessments .
so these eeg scans enabled us to provide these children with a much more accurate neurological diagnosis and much more targeted treatment .
for too long now , children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen .
and for too long , these children and their parents have suffered undue frustration and desperation .
but we are now in a new era of neuroscience , one in which we can finally look directly at brain function in real time with no risks and no side effects , non-invasively , and find the true source of so many disabilities in children .
so if i could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder , then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved .
one more mind will be unlocked .
and one more child who has been misdiagnosed or even undiagnosed by the system will finally realize his or her true potential while there 's still time for his or her brain to recover .
and all this by simply watching the child 's brainwaves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to talk about trust , and i 'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust .
i think these are so commonplace , they 've become clichés of our society .
and i think there are three .
one 's a claim : there has been a great decline in trust , very widely believed .
the second is an aim : we should have more trust .
and the third is a task : we should rebuild trust .
i think that the claim , the aim and the task are all misconceived .
so what i 'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim , an aim and a task which i think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter .
first the claim : why do people think trust has declined ?
and if i really think about it on the basis of my own evidence , i do n't know the answer .
i 'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others .
i do n't have an overview .
but , of course , i can look at the opinion polls , and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined .
when you actually look at opinion polls across time , there 's not much evidence for that .
that 's to say , the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago , principally journalists and politicians , are still mistrusted .
and the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted : judges , nurses .
the rest of us are in between , and by the way , the average person in the street is almost exactly midway .
but is that good evidence ?
what opinion polls record is , of course , opinions .
what else can they record ?
so they 're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions .
do you trust politicians ? do you trust teachers ?
now if somebody said to you , " do you trust greengrocers ?
do you trust fishmongers ?
do you trust elementary school teachers ? "
you would probably begin by saying , " to do what ? "
and that would be a perfectly sensible response .
and you might say , when you understood the answer to that , " well , i trust some of them , but not others . "
that 's a perfectly rational thing .
in short , in our real lives , we seek to place trust in a differentiated way .
we do n't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform .
i might , for example , say that i certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher i know to teach the reception class to read , but in no way to drive the school minibus .
i might , after all , know that she was n't a good driver .
i might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not - but perhaps not to keep a secret .
simple .
so if we 've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated , why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly ?
i think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists , because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust .
secondly , what about the aim ?
the aim is to have more trust .
well frankly , i think that 's a stupid aim .
it 's not what i would aim at .
i would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy .
in fact , i aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy .
and i think , of those people who , for example , placed their savings with the very aptly named mr. madoff , who then made off with them , and i think of them , and i think , well , yes , too much trust .
more trust is not an intelligent aim in this life .
intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim .
well once one says that , one says , yeah , okay , that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness .
it 's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects .
and i think that judgment requires us to look at three things .
are they competent ? are they honest ? are they reliable ?
and if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters , and reliable and honest , we 'll have a pretty good reason to trust them , because they 'll be trustworthy .
but if , on the other hand , they 're unreliable , we might not .
i have friends who are competent and honest , but i would not trust them to post a letter , because they 're forgetful .
i have friends who are very confident they can do certain things , but i realize that they overestimate their own competence .
and i 'm very glad to say , i do n't think i have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if so , i have n't yet spotted it .
but that 's what we 're looking for : trustworthiness before trust .
trust is the response .
trustworthiness is what we have to judge .
and , of course , it 's difficult .
across the last few decades , we 've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness .
a lot of these systems have the converse effect .
they do n't work as they 're supposed to .
i remember i was talking with a midwife who said , " well , you see , the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby . "
and all over our public life , our institutional life , we find that problem , that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite .
it is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks , like midwives , from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes , as we say .
you can all give your own examples there .
so so much for the aim .
the aim , i think , is more trustworthiness , and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people , and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy .
it 's not easy . it is judgment , and simple reaction , attitudes , do n't do adequately here .
now thirdly , the task .
calling the task rebuilding trust , i think , also gets things backwards .
it suggests that you and i should rebuild trust .
well , we can do that for ourselves .
we can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness .
we can do it two people together trying to improve trust .
but trust , in the end , is distinctive because it 's given by other people .
you ca n't rebuild what other people give you .
you have to give them the basis for giving you their trust .
so you have to , i think , be trustworthy .
and that , of course , is because you ca n't fool all of the people all of the time , usually .
but you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy .
how to do it ?
well every day , all over the place , it 's being done by ordinary people , by officials , by institutions , quite effectively .
let me give you a simple commercial example .
the shop where i buy my socks says i may take them back , and they do n't ask any questions .
they take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color i wanted .
that 's super . i trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me .
i think there 's a big lesson in that .
if you make yourself vulnerable to the other party , then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying .
so in the end , i think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern .
it is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy .
so the moral of all this is , we need to think much less about trust , let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls , much more about being trustworthy , and how you give people adequate , useful and simple evidence that you 're trustworthy .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- last year at ted i gave an introduction to the lhc .
and i promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked .
so this is it . and for those of you that were n't there , the lhc is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted - 27 kilometers in circumference .
its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began , up to 600 million times a second .
it 's nothing if not ambitious .
this is the machine below geneva .
we take the pictures of those mini-big bangs inside detectors .
this is the one i work on . it 's called the atlas detector - 44 meters wide , 22 meters in diameter .
spectacular picture here of atlas under construction so you can see the scale .
on the 10th of september last year we turned the machine on for the first time .
and this picture was taken by atlas .
it caused immense celebration in the control room .
it 's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the lhc , colliding with a piece of the lhc deliberately , and showering particles into the detector .
in other words , when we saw that picture on september 10th we knew the machine worked , which is a great triumph .
i do n't know whether this got the biggest cheer , or this , when someone went onto google and saw the front page was like that .
it means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact .
about a week later we had a problem with the machine , related actually to these bits of wire here - these gold wires .
those wires carry 13 thousand amps when the machine is working in full power .
now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say , " no they do n't . they 're small wires . "
they can do that because when they are very cold they are what 's called superconducting wire .
so at minus 271 degrees , colder than the space between the stars , those wires can take that current .
in one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in lhc , there was a manufacturing defect .
so the wire heated up slightly , and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance .
this was the result .
now that 's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons , and they moved about a foot .
so we damaged about 50 of the magnets .
we had to take them out , which we did .
we reconditioned them all , fixed them .
they 're all on their way back underground now .
by the end of march the lhc will be intact again .
we will switch it on , and we expect to take data in june or july , and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are .
now of course , in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge . it 's easy to refute .
i think that the fact that it 's so difficult , the fact that we 're overreaching , is the value of things like the lhc .
i will leave the final word to an english scientist , humphrey davy , who , i suspect , when defending his protege 's useless experiments - his protege was michael faraday - said this , " nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate , that there are no mysteries in nature , that our triumphs are complete , and that there are no new worlds to conquer . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , these are the dark ages .
and the dark ages are the time between when you put away the lego for the last time as a kid , and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid 's toy .
started out with my then four-year-old : " oh , should buy the kid some lego .
that stuff 's cool . "
walked into the lego store .
bought him this .
it 's totally appropriate for a four-year-old .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think the box says - let 's see here - " 8 to 12 " on it .
i turn to my wife and said , " who are we buying this for ? "
she 's like , " oh , us . " i 'm like , " okay . all right . that 's cool . "
pretty soon it got a little bit out of control .
the dining room looked like this .
you walk there , and it hurts .
so we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an abu ghraib annex .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- torture , very funny .
wow , you guys are great .
and we put down those little floor tiles , and then i went onto ebay and bought 150 pounds of lego - -lrb- laughter -rrb- which is insane .
my daughter - the day we got it , i was tucking her in - and i said , " honey , you 're my treasure . "
and she said , " no , the lego is the treasure . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then she said , " dad , we 're lego rich . "
i was like , " yeah .
i suppose we are . "
so then once you do that you 're like , " oh , crap . where am i going to put all this ? "
so you go to the container store and spend an enormous amount of money , and then you start this crazy sorting process that never - it 's just nuts .
whatever .
so then you realize there are these conventions .
and you go to one of these conventions , and some dude built the titanic .
and you 're like , " holy shit !
he had to come in like a truck , a semi , with this thing . "
and then someone built this - this is the smith tower in seattle .
just beautiful .
and there 's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for lego , because lego - the danish - no , they 're not into guns .
but the americans ? oh , we 'll make some guns for lego , no problem .
and at a certain point , you look around , you 're like , " whoa , this is a really nerdy crowd . "
and i mean like this is a nerdy crowd , but that 's like a couple of levels above furries .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the nerds here , they get laid - except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket - and you say to yourself at some point , " am i part of this group ? like , am i into this ? "
and i was just like , " yeah , i guess i am .
i 'm coming out .
i 'm kind of into this stuff , and i 'm going to stop being embarrassed . "
so then you really get into it , and you 're like , " well , the lego people in denmark , they 've got all this software to let you build your own virtually . "
and so this is like this cad program where you build it .
and then whatever you design virtually , you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later .
and then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store .
the lego guys do n't give you any royalties , strangely , but some user made this and then it sold .
and it 's pretty amazing actually .
then you notice that if that lego-provided cad program is n't enough , there 's an entire open-source , third-party , independent lego cad program that lets you do 3d modeling and 3d rendering and make , in fact , movies out of lego , 3d films of which there are thousands on youtube , and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content - just beautiful - and people recreating all sorts of things .
i have to take a moment .
i love the guy who 's like running away with his clasps , his hooks .
okay . anyway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a whole programming language and robotics tool , so if you want to teach someone how to program , kid , adult , whatever it is .
and the guy that made this , he made a slot machine out of lego .
and i do n't mean he made lego that looked like a slot machine ; i mean he made a slot machine out of lego .
the insides were lego .
there 's people getting drunk building lego , and you 've got to finish the thing before you puke .
there 's a whole gray market for lego , thousands of home-based businesses .
and some people will fund their entire lego habit by selling the little guy , but then you have no guys in your ships .
and then , just some examples . this stuff really is sculpture .
this is amazing what you can do .
and do n't kid yourself : some architectural details , incredible organic shapes and just , even , nature out of , again , little blocks .
this is my house .
and this is my house .
i was afraid a car was going to come smash it as i was taking a picture for you guys .
anyway , i 'm out of time .
but just very quickly - we 'll just see if i can do this quick .
because there are n't enough ted logos around here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's see here .
okay .
ta-da .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to begin with a thought experiment .
imagine that it 's 4,000 years into the future .
civilization as we know it has ceased to exist - no books , no electronic devices , no facebook or twitter .
all knowledge of the english language and the english alphabet has been lost .
now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities .
what might they find ?
well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them .
perhaps some circular pieces of metal .
maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them .
and perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers - buried in the hills somewhere in north america - massive versions of these same symbols .
now let 's ask ourselves , what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future ?
this is no hypothetical question .
in fact , this is exactly the kind of question we 're faced with when we try to understand the indus valley civilization , which existed 4,000 years ago .
the indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known egyptian and the mesopotamian civilizations , but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations .
it occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers , covering what is now pakistan , northwestern india and parts of afghanistan and iran .
given that it was such a vast civilization , you might expect to find really powerful rulers , kings , and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings .
in fact , what archeologists have found is none of that .
they 've found small objects such as these .
here 's an example of one of these objects .
well obviously this is a replica .
but who is this person ?
a king ? a god ?
a priest ?
or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me ?
we do n't know .
but the indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them .
well no , not pieces of plastic , but stone seals , copper tablets , pottery and , surprisingly , one large sign board , which was found buried near the gate of a city .
now we do n't know if it says hollywood , or even bollywood for that matter .
in fact , we do n't even know what any of these objects say , and that 's because the indus script is undeciphered .
we do n't know what any of these symbols mean .
the symbols are most commonly found on seals .
so you see up there one such object .
it 's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it .
now that 's a magnificent piece of art .
so how big do you think that is ?
perhaps that big ?
or maybe that big ?
well let me show you .
here 's a replica of one such seal .
it 's only about one inch by one inch in size - pretty tiny .
so what were these used for ?
we know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other .
so you know those packing slips you get on your fedex boxes ?
these were used to make those kinds of packing slips .
you might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text .
perhaps they 're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other - we do n't know .
we need to decipher the script to answer that question .
deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle ; it 's actually become a question that 's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of south asia .
in fact , the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people .
first , there 's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the indus script does not represent a language at all .
these people believe that the symbols or the emblems you find on shields .
there 's a second group of people who believe that the indus script represents an indo-european language .
if you look at a map of india today , you 'll see that most of the languages spoken in north india belong to the indo-european language family .
so some people believe that the indus script represents an ancient indo-european language such as sanskrit .
there 's a last group of people who believe that the indus people were the ancestors of people living in south india today .
these people believe that the indus script represents an ancient form of the dravidian language family , which is the language family spoken in much of south india today .
and the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of dravidian-speaking people in the north , actually near afghanistan , and they say that perhaps , sometime in the past , dravidian languages were spoken all over india and that this suggests that the indus civilization is perhaps also dravidian .
which of these hypotheses can be true ?
we do n't know , but perhaps if you deciphered the script , you would be able to answer this question .
but deciphering the script is a very challenging task .
first , there 's no rosetta stone .
i do n't mean the software ; i mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text .
we do n't have such an artifact for the indus script .
and furthermore , we do n't even know what language they spoke .
and to make matters even worse , most of the text that we have are extremely short .
so as i showed you , they 're usually found on these seals that are very , very tiny .
and so given these formidable obstacles , one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the indus script .
in the rest of my talk , i 'd like to tell you about how i learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the indus script .
i 've always been fascinated by the indus script ever since i read about it in a middle school textbook .
and why was i fascinated ?
well it 's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world .
my career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist , so in my day job , i create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions , how the brain makes decisions , how the brain learns and so on .
but in 2007 , my path crossed again with the indus script .
that 's when i was in india , and i had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script .
and so it was then that i realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists , and so i jumped at that opportunity .
and i 'd like to describe some of the results that we have found .
or better yet , let 's all collectively decipher .
are you ready ?
the first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing .
here are two texts that contain some symbols on them .
can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right ?
i 'll give you a couple of seconds .
okay . right to left , how many ? okay .
okay . left to right ?
oh , it 's almost 50/50 . okay .
the answer is : if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts , you 'll notice that there 's a cramping of signs , and it seems like 4,000 years ago , when the scribe was writing from right to left , they ran out of space .
and so they had to cram the sign .
one of the signs is also below the text on the top .
this suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left , and so that 's one of the first things we know , that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts .
and the indus script now has this particular property .
what other properties of language does the script show ?
languages contain patterns .
if i give you the letter q and ask you to predict the next letter , what do you think that would be ?
most of you said u , which is right .
now if i asked you to predict one more letter , what do you think that would be ?
now there 's several thoughts . there 's e. it could be i. it could be a , but certainly not b , c or d , right ?
the indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns .
there 's a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol .
and this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol .
and this is very similar to a q and u example .
this symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs , but never by these other signs at the bottom .
and furthermore , there 's some signs that really prefer the end of texts , such as this jar-shaped sign , and this sign , in fact , happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script .
given such patterns , here was our idea .
the idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns , and so we gave the computer the existing texts .
and the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other .
given the computer model , we can test the model by essentially quizzing it .
so we could deliberately erase some symbols , and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols .
here are some examples .
you may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of wheel of fortune .
what we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol .
in the rest of the cases , typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer .
there 's also practical use for this particular procedure .
there 's a lot of these texts that are damaged .
here 's an example of one such text .
and we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction .
here 's an example of a symbol that was predicted .
and this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze .
now here 's one other thing you can do with the computer model .
so imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard .
i think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this .
such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy .
this is a physics and information theory term .
but just imagine it 's a really random jumble of letters .
how many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard ?
you might have encountered the stuck-key problem - so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again .
this kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there 's no variation at all .
language , on the other hand , has an intermediate level of entropy ; it 's neither too rigid , nor is it too random .
what about the indus script ?
here 's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences .
at the very top you find the uniformly random sequence , which is a random jumble of letters - and interestingly , we also find the dna sequence from the human genome and instrumental music .
and both of these are very , very flexible , which is why you find them in the very high range .
at the lower end of the scale , you find a rigid sequence , a sequence of all a 's , and you also find a computer program , in this case in the language fortran , which obeys really strict rules .
linguistic scripts occupy the middle range .
now what about the indus script ?
we found that the indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts .
when this result was first published , it was highly controversial .
there were people who raised a hue and cry , and these people were the ones who believed that the indus script does not represent language .
i even started to get some hate mail .
my students said that i should really seriously consider getting some protection .
who 'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession ?
what does this result really show ?
it shows that the indus script shares an important property of language .
so , as the old saying goes , if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script , then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands .
what other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language ?
well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages .
so for example , here 's the same sentence written in english and the same sentence written in dutch using the same letters of the alphabet .
if you do n't know dutch and you only know english and i give you some words in dutch , you 'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns .
some things are not right , and you 'll say these words are probably not english words .
the same thing happens in the case of the indus script .
the computer found several texts - two of them are shown here - that have very unusual patterns .
so for example the first text : there 's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign .
this sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the indus script , and it 's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair .
why is that the case ?
we went back and looked at where these particular texts were found , and it turns out that they were found very , very far away from the indus valley .
they were found in present day iraq and iran .
and why were they found there ?
what i have n't told you is that the indus people were very , very enterprising .
they used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived , and so in this case , they were traveling by sea all the way to mesopotamia , present-day iraq .
and what seems to have happened here is that the indus traders , the merchants , were using this script to write a foreign language .
it 's just like our english and dutch example .
and that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the indus valley .
this suggests that the same script , the indus script , could be used to write different languages .
the results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the indus script probably does represent language .
if it does represent language , then how do we read the symbols ?
that 's our next big challenge .
so you 'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans , of insects , of fishes , of birds .
most ancient scripts use the rebus principle , which is , using pictures to represent words .
so as an example , here 's a word .
can you write it using pictures ?
i 'll give you a couple seconds .
got it ?
okay . great .
here 's my solution .
you could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf - and that 's " belief , " right .
there could be other solutions .
in the case of the indus script , the problem is the reverse .
you have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense .
so this is just like a crossword puzzle , except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles because the stakes are so high if you solve it .
my colleagues , iravatham mahadevan and asko parpola , have been making some headway on this particular problem .
and i 'd like to give you a quick example of parpola 's work .
here 's a really short text .
it contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign .
and i want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods , so it 's quite likely that these tags , at least some of them , contain names of merchants .
and it turns out that in india there 's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth .
in dravidian languages , the word for fish is " meen " which happens to sound just like the word for star .
and so seven stars would stand for " elu meen , " which is the dravidian word for the big dipper star constellation .
similarly , there 's another sequence of six stars , and that translates to " aru meen , " which is the old dravidian name for the star constellation pleiades .
and finally , there 's other combinations , such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it .
and that could be translated into " mey meen , " which is the old dravidian name for the planet saturn .
so that was pretty exciting .
it looks like we 're getting somewhere .
but does this prove that these seals contain dravidian names based on planets and star constellations ?
well not yet .
so we have no way of validating these particular readings , but if more and more of these readings start making sense , and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct , then we know that we are on the right track .
today , we can write a word such as ted in egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script , because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century .
the decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly .
the mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century , but the indus civilization remains silent .
why should we care ?
the indus civilization does not belong to just the south indians or the north indians or the pakistanis ; it belongs to all of us .
these are our ancestors - yours and mine .
they were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history .
if we decipher the script , we would enable them to speak to us again .
what would they tell us ?
what would we find out about them ? about us ?
i ca n't wait to find out .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- beverly joubert : we are truly passionate about the african wilderness and protecting the african wilderness , and so what we 've done is we 've focused on iconic cats .
and i know , in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change , one would wonder , why worry about a few cats ?
well today we 're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character - this leopard .
dereck joubert : well , our lives have basically been like a super long episode of " csi " - something like 28 years .
in essence , what we 've done is we 've studied the science , we 've looked at the behavior , we 've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals .
but one of the things that science really lets us down on is that personality , that individual personality that these animals have .
and here 's a prime example .
we found this leopard in a 2,000-year-old baobab tree in africa , the same tree that we found her mother in and her grandmother .
and she took us on a journey and revealed something very special to us - her own daughter , eight days old .
and the minute we found this leopard , we realized that we needed to move in , and so we basically stayed with this leopard for the next four-and-a-half years - following her every day , getting to know her , that individual personality of hers , and really coming to know her .
now i 'm destined to spend a lot of time with some unique , very , very special , individualistic and often seductive female characters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- beverly 's clearly one of them , and this little leopard , legadema , is another , and she changed our lives .
bj : well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her - in fact , more time than even her mother did .
when her mother would go off hunting , we would stay and film .
and early on , a lightning bolt hit a tree 20 paces away from us .
it was frightening , and it showered us with leaves and a pungent smell .
and of course , we were stunned for a while , but when we managed to get our wits about us , we looked at it and said , " my gosh , what 's going to happen with that little cub ?
she 's probably going to forever associate that deafening crash with us . "
well , we need n't have worried .
she came charging out of the thicket straight towards us , sat next to us , shivering , with her back towards dereck , and looking out .
and actually from that day on , she 's been comfortable with us .
so we felt that that day was the day that she really earned her name .
we called her legadema , which means , " light from the sky . "
dj : now we 've found these individualisms in all sorts of animals , in particular in the cats .
this particular one is called eetwidomayloh , " he who greets with fire , " and you can just see that about him , you know - that 's his character .
but only by getting up close to these animals and spending time with them can we actually even reach out and dig out these personal characters that they have .
bj : but through our investigation , we have to seek the wildest places in africa .
and right now this is in the okavango delta in botswana .
yes , it is swamp . we live in the swamp in a tent , but i must tell you , every day is exhilarating .
but also , our hearts are in our throats a huge amount of the time , because we 're driving through water , and it 's an unknown territory .
but we 're really there seeking and searching and filming the iconic cats .
dj : now one of the big things , of course , everybody knows that cats hate water , and so this was a real revelation for us .
and we could only find this by pushing ourselves , by going where no sane person should go - not without some prompting , by the way , from beverly - and just pushing the envelope , going out there , pushing our vehicle , pushing ourselves .
but we 've managed to find that these lions are 15 percent bigger than any others , and they specialize in hunting buffalo in the water .
bj : and then of course , the challenge is knowing when to turn around .
we do n't always get that right , and on this particular day , we seriously underestimated the depth .
we got deeper and deeper , until it was at dereck 's chest-height .
well then we hit a deep depression , and we seriously submerged the vehicle .
we actually managed to drown two million dollars ' worth of camera gear .
we drowned our pride , i must tell you , which was really serious , and we seized the engine .
dj : and of course , one of the rules that we have in the vehicle is that he who drowns the vehicle gets to swim with the crocodiles .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you will notice also that all of these images here are taken from the top angle by beverly - the dry top angle , by the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but all the places we get stuck in really have great views .
and it was n't a moment , and these lions came back towards us , and beverly was able to get a great photograph .
bj : but we truly do spend day and night trying to capture unique footage .
and 20 years ago , we did a film called " eternal enemies " where we managed to capture this unusual disturbing behavior across two species - lions and hyenas .
and surprisingly , it became a cult film .
and we can only work that out as people were seeing parallels between the thuggish side of nature and gang warfare .
dj : it was amazing , because you can see that this lion is doing exactly what his name , eetwidomayloh , represents .
he 's focused on this hyena , and he is going to get it .
-lrb- animal sounds -rrb- but that 's , i think , what this is all about , is that these individuals have these personalities and characters .
but for us to get them , not only do we push ourselves , but we live by certain rules of engagement , which mean we ca n't interfere .
this sort of behavior has been going on for three , four , five million years , and we ca n't step in and say , " that 's wrong , and that 's right . "
but that 's not always easy for us .
bj : so , as dereck says , we have to work through extremes - extreme temperatures , push ourselves at night .
sleep deprivation is extreme .
we 're on the edge through a large part of the time .
but , for 10 years , we tried to capture lions and elephants together - and never ever managed until this particular night .
and i have to tell you that it was a disturbing night for me .
i had tears rolling down my cheeks .
i was shaking with anxiety , but i knew that -lsb- i had -rsb- to capture something that had never been seen before , had never been documented .
and i do believe you should stay with us .
dj : the amazing thing about these moments - and this is probably a highlight of our career - is that you never know how it 's going to end .
many people believe , in fact , that death begins in the eyes , not in the heart , not in the lungs , and that 's when people give up hope , or when any life form gives up hope .
and you can see the start of it here .
this elephant , against overwhelming odds , simply gives up hope .
but by the same token , you can get your hope back again .
so just when you think it 's all over , something else happens , some spark gets into you , some sort of will to fight - that iron will that we all have , that this elephant has , that conservation has , that big cats have .
everything has that will to survive , to fight , to push through that mental barrier and to keep going .
and for us , in many ways , this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us , a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now back to the leopard .
we were spending so much time with this leopard and getting to understand her individualism , her personal character , that maybe we were taking it a little bit far .
we were perhaps taking her for granted , and maybe she did n't like that that much .
this is about couples working together , and so i do need to say that within the vehicle we have quite strict territories , beverly and i.
beverly sits on the one side where all her camera gear is , and i 'm on the other side where my space is .
these are precious to us , these divides .
bj : but when this little cub saw that i had vacated my seat and climbed to the back to get some camera gear , she came in like a curious cat to come and investigate .
it was phenomenal , and we felt grateful that she trusted us to that extent .
but at the same time , we were concerned that if she created this as a habit and jumped into somebody else 's car , it might not turn out the same way - she might get shot for that .
so we knew we had to react quickly .
and the only way we thought we could without scaring her is to try and simulate a growl like her mother would make - a hiss and a sound .
so dereck turned on the heater fan in the car - very innovative .
dj : it was the only way for me to save the marriage , because beverly felt she was being replaced , you see .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but really and truly , this was how this little leopard was displaying her individual personality .
but nothing prepared us for what happened next in our relationship with her , when she started hunting .
bj : and on this first hunt , we truly were excited .
it was like watching a graduation ceremony .
we felt like we were surrogate parents .
and of course , we knew now that she was going to survive .
but only when we saw the tiny baby baboon clinging to the mother 's fur did we realize that something very unique was taking place here with legadema .
and of course , the baby baboon was so innocent , it did n't turn and run .
so what we watched over the next couple of hours was very unique .
it was absolutely amazing when she picked it up to safety , protecting it from the hyena .
and over the next five hours , she took care of it .
we realized that we actually do n't know everything , and that nature is so unpredictable , we have to be open at all times .
dj : okay , so she was a little bit rough .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in fact , what we were seeing here was interesting .
because she is a cub wanting to play , but she was also a predator needing to kill , and yet conflicted in some way , because she was also an emerging mother .
she had this maternal instinct , much like a young girl on her way to womanhood , and so this really took us to this new level of understanding that personality .
bj : and of course , through the night , they lay together .
they ended up sleeping for hours .
but i have to tell you - everybody always asks , " what happened to the baby baboon ? "
it did die , and we suspect it was from the freezing winter nights .
dj : so at this stage , i guess , we had very , very firm ideas on what conservation meant .
we had to deal with these individual personalities .
we had to deal with them with respect and celebrate them .
and so we , with the national geographic , formed the big cats initiative to march forward into conservation , taking care of the big cats that we loved - and then had an opportunity to look back over the last 50 years to see how well we had all collectively been doing .
so when beverly and i were born , there were 450,000 lions , and today there are 20,000 .
tigers have n't fared any better - 45,000 down to maybe 3,000 .
bj : and then cheetahs have crashed all the way down to 12,000 .
leopards have plummeted from 700,000 down to a mere 50,000 .
now in the extraordinary time that we have worked with legadema - which is really over a five-year period - 10,000 leopards were legally shot by safari hunters .
and that 's not the only leopards that were being killed through that period .
there 's an immense amount of poaching as well , and so possibly the same amount .
it 's simply not sustainable .
we admire them , and we fear them , and yet , as man , we want to steal their power .
it used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin , but now throughout rituals and ceremonies , traditional healers and ministers .
and of course , looking at this lion paw that has been skinned , it eerily reminds me of a human hand , and that 's ironic , because their fate is in our hands .
dj : there 's a burgeoning bone trade .
south africa just released some lion bones onto the market .
lion bones and tiger bones look exactly the same , and so in a stroke , the lion bone industry is going to wipe out all the tigers .
so we have a real problem here , no more so than the lions do , the male lions .
so the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring , because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions , and they all are actually infected with the same disease .
i call it complacency - our complacency .
because there 's a sport , there 's an activity going on that we 're all aware of , that we condone .
and that 's probably because we have n't seen it like we are today .
bj : and you have to know that , when a male lion is killed , it completely disrupts the whole pride .
a new male comes into the area and takes over the pride , and , of course , first of all kills all the cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs .
so we 've estimated that between 20 -lsb- and -rsb- 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place .
dj : so what our investigations have shown is that these lions are essential .
they 're essential to the habitat .
if they disappear , whole ecosystems in africa disappear .
there 's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into africa .
so this is not just a concern about lions ; it 's a concern about communities in africa as well .
if they disappear , all of that goes away .
but what i 'm more concerned about in many ways is that , as we de-link ourselves from nature , as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals , we lose hope , we lose that spiritual connection , our dignity , that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet .
bj : so you have to know , looking into the eyes of lions and leopards right now , it is all about critical awareness .
and so what we are doing , in february , we 're bringing out a film called " the last lion , " and " the last lion " is exactly what is happening right now .
that is the situation we 're in - the last lions .
that is , if we do n't take action and do something , these plains will be completely devoid of big cats , and then , in turn , everything else will disappear .
and simply , if we ca n't protect them , we 're going to have a job protecting ourselves as well .
dj : and in fact , that original thing that we spoke about and designed our lives by - that conservation was all about respect and celebration - is probably true . that 's really what it needs .
we need it . we respect and celebrate each other as a man and a woman , as a community and as part of this planet , and we need to continue that .
and legadema ?
well we can report , in fact , that we 're grandparents .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bj / dj : thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i was 14 years old , i had low self-esteem .
i felt i was not talented at anything .
one day , i bought a yo-yo .
when i tried my first trick , it looked like this .
i could n't even do the simplest trick , but it was very natural for me , because i was not dextrous , and hated all sports .
but after one week of practicing , my throws became more like this .
a bit better .
i thought , the yo-yo is something for me to be good at , for the first time in my life .
i found my passion .
i was spending all my time practicing .
it took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level .
and then , four years later , when i was 18 years old , i was standing onstage at the world yo-yo contest .
and i won .
i was so excited . " yes , i did it ! i became a hero .
i may get many sponsors , a lot of money , tons of interviews , and be on tv ! " i thought . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but after coming back to japan , totally nothing changed in my life .
i realized society did n't value my passion .
so i went back to my college and became a typical japanese worker as a systems engineer .
i felt my passion , heart and soul , had left my body .
i felt i was not alive anymore .
so i started to consider what i should do , and i thought , i wanted to make my performance better , and to show onstage how spectacular the yo-yo could be to change the public 's image of the yo-yo .
so i quit my company and started a career as a professional performer .
i started to learn classic ballet , jazz dance , acrobatics and other things to make my performance better .
as a result of these efforts , and the help of many others , it happened .
i won the world yo-yo contest again in the artistic performance division .
i passed an audition for cirque du soleil .
today , i am standing on the ted stage with the yo-yo in front of you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i learned from the yo-yo is , if i make enough effort with huge passion , there is no impossible .
could you let me share my passion with you through my performance ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- water sounds -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the fragrance that you will smell , you will never be able to smell this way again .
it 's a fragrance called beyond paradise , which you can find in any store in the nation .
except here it 's been split up in parts by estée lauder and by the perfumer who did it , calice becker , and i 'm most grateful to them for this .
and it 's been split up in successive bits and a chord .
so what you 're smelling now is the top note .
and then will come what they call the heart , the lush heart note .
i will show it to you .
the eden top note is named after the eden project in the u.k.
the lush heart note , melaleuca bark note - which does not contain any melaleuca bark , because it 's totally forbidden .
and after that , the complete fragrance .
now what you are smelling is a combination of - i asked how many molecules there were in there , and nobody would tell me .
so i put it through a g.c. , a gas chromatograph that i have in my office , and it 's about 400 .
so what you 're smelling is several hundred molecules floating through the air , hitting your nose .
and do not get the impression that this is very subjective .
you are all smelling pretty much the same thing , ok ?
smell has this reputation of being somewhat different for each person .
it 's not really true .
and perfumery shows you that ca n't be true , because if it were like that it would n't be an art , ok ?
now , while the smell wafts over you , let me tell you the history of an idea .
everything that you 're smelling in here is made up of atoms that come from what i call the upper east side of the periodic table - a nice , safe neighborhood .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you really do n't want to leave it if you want to have a career in perfumery .
some people have tried in the 1920s to add things from the bad parts , and it did n't really work .
these are the five atoms from which just about everything that you 're going to smell in real life , from coffee to fragrance , are made of .
the top note that you smelled at the very beginning , the cut-grass green , what we call in perfumery - they 're weird terms - and this would be called a green note , because it smells of something green , like cut grass .
this is cis-3-hexene-1-ol . and i had to learn chemistry on the fly in the last three years . a very expensive high school chemistry education .
this has six carbon atoms , so " hexa , " hexene-1-ol .
it has one double bond , it has an alcohol on the end , so it 's " ol , " and that 's why they call it cis-3-hexene-1-ol .
once you figure this out , you can really impress people at parties .
this smells of cut grass . now , this is the skeleton of the molecule .
if you dress it up with atoms , hydrogen atoms - that 's what it looks like when you have it on your computer - but actually it 's sort of more like this , in the sense that the atoms have a certain sphere that you can not penetrate . they repel .
ok , now . why does this thing smell of cut grass , ok ?
why does n't it smell of potatoes or violets ? well , there are really two theories .
but the first theory is : it must be the shape .
and that 's a perfectly reasonable theory in the sense that almost everything else in biology works by shape .
enzymes that chew things up , antibodies , it 's all , you know , the fit between a protein and whatever it is grabbing , in this case a smell .
and i will try and explain to you what 's wrong with this notion .
and the other theory is that we smell molecular vibrations .
now , this is a totally insane idea .
and when i first came across it in the early ' 90s , i thought my predecessor , malcolm dyson and bob wright , had really taken leave of their senses , and i 'll explain to you why this was the case .
however , i came to realize gradually that they may be right - and i have to convince all my colleagues that this is so , but i 'm working on it .
here 's how shape works in normal receptors .
you have a molecule coming in , it gets into the protein , which is schematic here , and it causes this thing to switch , to turn , to move in some way by binding in certain parts .
and the attraction , the forces , between the molecule and the protein cause the motion . this is a shape-based idea .
now , what 's wrong with shape is summarized in this slide .
the way - i expect everybody to memorize these compounds .
this is one page of work from a chemist 's workbook , ok ?
working for a fragrance company .
he 's making 45 molecules , and he 's looking for a sandalwood , something that smells of sandalwood .
because there 's a lot of money in sandalwoods .
and of these 45 molecules , only 4629 actually smells of sandalwood .
and he puts an exclamation mark , ok ? this is an awful lot of work .
this actually is roughly , in man-years of work , 200,000 dollars roughly , if you keep them on the low salaries with no benefits .
so this is a profoundly inefficient process .
and my definition of a theory is , it 's not just something that you teach people ; it 's labor saving .
a theory is something that enables you to do less work .
i love the idea of doing less work . so let me explain to you why - a very simple fact that tells you why this shape theory really does not work very well .
this is cis-3-hexene-1-ol . it smells of cut grass .
this is cis-3-hexene-1-thiol , and this smells of rotten eggs , ok ?
now , you will have noticed that vodka never smells of rotten eggs .
if it does , you put the glass down , you go to a different bar .
this is - in other words , we never get the o-h - we never mistake it for an s-h , ok ?
like , at no concentration , even pure , you know , if you smelt pure ethanol , it does n't smell of rotten eggs .
conversely , there is no concentration at which the sulfur compound will smell like vodka .
it 's very hard to explain this by molecular recognition .
now , i showed this to a physicist friend of mine who has a profound distaste for biology , and he says , " that 's easy ! the things are a different color ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have to go a little beyond that . now let me explain why vibrational theory has some sort of interest in it . these molecules , as you saw in the beginning , the building blocks had springs connecting them to each other .
in fact , molecules are able to vibrate at a set of frequencies which are very specific for each molecule and for the bonds connecting them .
so this is the sound of the o-h stretch , translated into the audible range .
s-h , quite a different frequency .
now , this is kind of interesting , because it tells you that you should be looking for a particular fact , which is this : nothing in the world smells like rotten eggs except s-h , ok ?
now , fact b : nothing in the world has that frequency except s-h .
if you look on this , imagine a piano keyboard .
the s-h stretch is in the middle of a part of the keyboard that has been , so to speak , damaged , and there are no neighboring notes , nothing is close to it .
you have a unique smell , a unique vibration .
so i went searching when i started in this game to convince myself that there was any degree of plausibility to this whole crazy story .
i went searching for a type of molecule , any molecule , that would have that vibration and that - the obvious prediction was that it should absolutely smell of sulfur .
if it did n't , the whole idea was toast , and i might as well move on to other things .
now , after searching high and low for several months , i discovered that there was a type of molecule called a borane which has exactly the same vibration .
now the good news is , boranes you can get hold of .
the bad news is they 're rocket fuels .
most of them explode spontaneously in contact with air , and when you call up the companies , they only give you minimum ten tons , ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was not what they call a laboratory-scale experiment , and they would n't have liked it at my college .
however , i managed to get a hold of a borane eventually , and here is the beast .
and it really does have the same - if you calculate , if you measure the vibrational frequencies , they are the same as s-h .
now , does it smell of sulfur ? well , if you go back in the literature , there 's a man who knew more about boranes than anyone alive then or since , alfred stock , he synthesized all of them .
and in an enormous 40-page paper in german he says , at one point - my wife is german and she translated it for me - and at one point he says , " ganz widerlich geruch , " an " absolutely repulsive smell , " which is good . reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide .
so this fact that boranes smell of sulfur had been known since 1910 , and utterly forgotten until 1997 , 1998 .
now , the slight fly in the ointment is this : that if we smell molecular vibrations , we must have a spectroscope in our nose .
now , this is a spectroscope , ok , on my laboratory bench .
and it 's fair to say that if you look up somebody 's nose , you 're unlikely to see anything resembling this .
and this is the main objection to the theory .
ok , great , we smell vibrations . how ? all right ?
now when people ask this kind of question , they neglect something , which is that physicists are really clever , unlike biologists .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a joke . i 'm a biologist , ok ?
so it 's a joke against myself .
bob jacklovich and john lamb at ford motor company , in the days when ford motor was spending vast amounts of money on fundamental research , discovered a way to build a spectroscope that was intrinsically nano-scale .
in other words , no mirrors , no lasers , no prisms , no nonsense , just a tiny device , and he built this device . and this device uses electron tunneling .
now , i could do the dance of electron tunneling , but i 've done a video instead , which is much more interesting . here 's how it works .
electrons are fuzzy creatures , and they can jump across gaps , but only at equal energy . if the energy differs , they ca n't jump .
unlike us , they wo n't fall off the cliff .
ok . now . if something absorbs the energy , the electron can travel .
so here you have a system , you have something - and there 's plenty of that stuff in biology - some substance giving an electron , and the electron tries to jump , and only when a molecule comes along that has the right vibration does the reaction happen , ok ?
this is the basis for the device that these two guys at ford built .
and every single part of this mechanism is actually plausible in biology .
in other words , i 've taken off-the-shelf components , and i 've made a spectroscope .
what 's nice about this idea , if you have a philosophical bent of mind , is that then it tells you that the nose , the ear and the eye are all vibrational senses .
of course , it does n't matter , because it could also be that they 're not .
but it has a certain - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it has a certain ring to it which is attractive to people who read too much 19th-century german literature .
and then a magnificent thing happened : i left academia and joined the real world of business , and a company was created around my ideas to make new molecules using my method , along the lines of , let 's put someone else 's money where your mouth is .
and one of the first things that happened was we started going around to fragrance companies asking for what they needed , because , of course , if you could calculate smell , you do n't need chemists .
you need a computer , a mac will do it , if you know how to program the thing right , ok ? so you can try a thousand molecules , you can try ten thousand molecules in a weekend , and then you only tell the chemists to make the right one .
and so that 's a direct path to making new odorants .
and one of the first things that happened was we went to see some perfumers in france - and here 's where i do my charles fleischer impression - and one of them says , " you can not make a coumarin . "
he says to me , " i bet you can not make a coumarin . "
now , coumarin is a very common thing , a material , in fragrance which is derived from a bean that comes from south america .
and it is the classic synthetic aroma chemical , ok ?
it 's the molecule that has made men 's fragrances smell the way they do since 1881 , to be exact .
and the problem is it 's a carcinogen .
so nobody likes particularly to - you know , aftershave with carcinogens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are some reckless people , but it 's not worth it , ok ?
so they asked us to make a new coumarin . and so we started doing calculations .
and the first thing you do is you calculate the vibrational spectrum of coumarin , and you smooth it out , so that you have a nice picture of what the sort of chord , so to speak , of coumarin is .
and then you start cranking the computer to find other molecules , related or unrelated , that have the same vibrations .
and we actually , in this case , i 'm sorry to say , it happened - it was serendipitous .
because i got a phone call from our chief chemist and he said , look , i 've just found this such a beautiful reaction , that even if this compound does n't smell of coumarin , i want to do it , it 's just such a nifty , one step - i mean , chemists have weird minds - one step , 90 percent yield , you know , and you get this lovely crystalline compound . let us try it .
and i said , first of all , let me do the calculation on that compound , bottom right , which is related to coumarin , but has an extra pentagon inserted into the molecule .
calculate the vibrations , the purple spectrum is that new fellow , the white one is the old one .
and the prediction is it should smell of coumarin .
they made it ... and it smelled exactly like coumarin .
and this is our new baby , called tonkene .
you see , when you 're a scientist , you 're always selling ideas .
and people are very resistant to ideas , and rightly so .
why should new ideas be accepted ?
but when you put a little 10-gram vial on the table in front of perfumers and it smells like coumarin , and it is n't coumarin , and you 've found it in three weeks , this focuses everybody 's mind wonderfully .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and people often ask me , is your theory accepted ?
and i said , well , by whom ? i mean most , you know - there 's three attitudes : you 're right , and i do n't know why , which is the most rational one at this point .
you 're right , and i do n't care how you do it , in a sense ; you bring me the molecules , you know .
and : you 're completely wrong , and i 'm sure you 're completely wrong .
ok ? now , we 're dealing with people who only want results , and this is the commercial world .
and they tell us that even if we do it by astrology , they 're happy .
but we 're not actually doing it by astrology .
but for the last three years , i 've had what i consider to be the best job in the entire universe , which is to put my hobby - which is , you know , fragrance and all the magnificent things - plus a little bit of biophysics , a small amount of self-taught chemistry at the service of something that actually works .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you ask people about what part of psychology do they think is hard , and you say , " well , what about thinking and emotions ? "
most people will say , " emotions are terribly hard .
they 're incredibly complex . they ca n't - i have no idea of how they work .
but thinking is really very straightforward : it 's just sort of some kind of logical reasoning , or something .
but that 's not the hard part . "
so here 's a list of problems that come up .
one nice problem is , what do we do about health ?
the other day , i was reading something , and the person said probably the largest single cause of disease is handshaking in the west .
and there was a little study about people who do n't handshake , and comparing them with ones who do handshake .
and i have n't the foggiest idea of where you find the ones that do n't handshake , because they must be hiding .
and the people who avoid that have 30 percent less infectious disease or something .
or maybe it was 31 and a quarter percent .
so if you really want to solve the problem of epidemics and so forth , let 's start with that . and since i got that idea , i 've had to shake hundreds of hands .
and i think the only way to avoid it is to have some horrible visible disease , and then you do n't have to explain .
education : how do we improve education ?
well , the single best way is to get them to understand that what they 're being told is a whole lot of nonsense .
and then , of course , you have to do something about how to moderate that , so that anybody can - so they 'll listen to you .
pollution , energy shortage , environmental diversity , poverty .
how do we make stable societies ? longevity .
okay , there 're lots of problems to worry about .
anyway , the question i think people should talk about - and it 's absolutely taboo - is , how many people should there be ?
and i think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million .
and then notice that a great many of these problems disappear .
if you had 100 million people properly spread out , then if there 's some garbage , you throw it away , preferably where you ca n't see it , and it will rot .
or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it .
the problem is , how many people should there be ?
and it 's a sort of choice we have to make .
most people are about 60 inches high or more , and there 's these cube laws . so if you make them this big , by using nanotechnology , i suppose - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - then you could have a thousand times as many .
that would solve the problem , but i do n't see anybody doing any research on making people smaller .
now , it 's nice to reduce the population , but a lot of people want to have children .
and there 's one solution that 's probably only a few years off .
you know you have 46 chromosomes . if you 're lucky , you 've got 23 from each parent . sometimes you get an extra one or drop one out , but - so you can skip the grandparent and great-grandparent stage and go right to the great-great-grandparent . and you have 46 people and you give them a scanner , or whatever you need , and they look at their chromosomes and each of them says which one he likes best , or she - no reason to have just two sexes any more , even . so each child has 46 parents , and i suppose you could let each group of 46 parents have 15 children .
would n't that be enough ? and then the children would get plenty of support , and nurturing , and mentoring , and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy .
timesharing is a little further off in the future .
and there 's this great novel that arthur clarke wrote twice , called " against the fall of night " and " the city and the stars . "
they 're both wonderful and largely the same , except that computers happened in between .
and arthur was looking at this old book , and he said , " well , that was wrong .
the future must have some computers . "
so in the second version of it , there are 100 billion or 1,000 billion people on earth , but they 're all stored on hard disks or floppies , or whatever they have in the future .
and you let a few million of them out at a time .
a person comes out , they live for a thousand years doing whatever they do , and then , when it 's time to go back for a billion years - or a million , i forget , the numbers do n't matter - but there really are n't very many people on earth at a time .
and you get to think about yourself and your memories , and before you go back into suspension , you edit your memories and you change your personality and so forth .
the plot of the book is that there 's not enough diversity , so that the people who designed the city make sure that every now and then an entirely new person is created .
and in the novel , a particular one named alvin is created . and he says , maybe this is n't the best way , and wrecks the whole system .
i do n't think the solutions that i proposed are good enough or smart enough .
i think the big problem is that we 're not smart enough to understand which of the problems we 're facing are good enough .
therefore , we have to build super intelligent machines like hal .
as you remember , at some point in the book for " 2001 , " hal realizes that the universe is too big , and grand , and profound for those really stupid astronauts . if you contrast hal 's behavior with the triviality of the people on the spaceship , you can see what 's written between the lines .
well , what are we going to do about that ? we could get smarter .
i think that we 're pretty smart , as compared to chimpanzees , but we 're not smart enough to deal with the colossal problems that we face , either in abstract mathematics or in figuring out economies , or balancing the world around .
so one thing we can do is live longer .
and nobody knows how hard that is , but we 'll probably find out in a few years .
you see , there 's two forks in the road . we know that people live twice as long as chimpanzees almost , and nobody lives more than 120 years , for reasons that are n't very well understood .
but lots of people now live to 90 or 100 , unless they shake hands too much or something like that .
and so maybe if we lived 200 years , we could accumulate enough skills and knowledge to solve some problems .
so that 's one way of going about it .
and as i said , we do n't know how hard that is . it might be - after all , most other mammals live half as long as the chimpanzee , so we 're sort of three and a half or four times , have four times the longevity of most mammals . and in the case of the primates , we have almost the same genes . we only differ from chimpanzees , in the present state of knowledge , which is absolute hogwash , maybe by just a few hundred genes .
what i think is that the gene counters do n't know what they 're doing yet .
and whatever you do , do n't read anything about genetics that 's published within your lifetime , or something .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the stuff has a very short half-life , same with brain science .
and so it might be that if we just fix four or five genes , we can live 200 years .
or it might be that it 's just 30 or 40 , and i doubt that it 's several hundred .
so this is something that people will be discussing and lots of ethicists - you know , an ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's very hard to find an ethicist who considers any change worth making , because he says , what about the consequences ?
and , of course , we 're not responsible for the consequences of what we 're doing now , are we ? like all this complaint about clones .
and yet two random people will mate and have this child , and both of them have some pretty rotten genes , and the child is likely to come out to be average .
which , by chimpanzee standards , is very good indeed .
if we do have longevity , then we 'll have to face the population growth problem anyway . because if people live 200 or 1,000 years , then we ca n't let them have a child more than about once every 200 or 1,000 years .
and so there wo n't be any workforce .
and one of the things laurie garrett pointed out , and others have , is that a society that does n't have people of working age is in real trouble . and things are going to get worse , because there 's nobody to educate the children or to feed the old .
and when i 'm talking about a long lifetime , of course , i do n't want somebody who 's 200 years old to be like our image of what a 200-year-old is - which is dead , actually .
you know , there 's about 400 different parts of the brain which seem to have different functions .
nobody knows how most of them work in detail , but we do know that there 're lots of different things in there .
and they do n't always work together . i like freud 's theory that most of them are cancelling each other out .
and so if you think of yourself as a sort of city with a hundred resources , then , when you 're afraid , for example , you may discard your long-range goals , but you may think deeply and focus on exactly how to achieve that particular goal .
you throw everything else away . you become a monomaniac - all you care about is not stepping out on that platform .
and when you 're hungry , food becomes more attractive , and so forth .
so i see emotions as highly evolved subsets of your capability .
emotion is not something added to thought . an emotional state is what you get when you remove 100 or 200 of your normally available resources .
so thinking of emotions as the opposite of - as something less than thinking is immensely productive . and i hope , in the next few years , to show that this will lead to smart machines .
and i guess i better skip all the rest of this , which are some details on how we might make those smart machines and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and the main idea is in fact that the core of a really smart machine is one that recognizes that a certain kind of problem is facing you .
this is a problem of such and such a type , and therefore there 's a certain way or ways of thinking that are good for that problem .
so i think the future , main problem of psychology is to classify types of predicaments , types of situations , types of obstacles and also to classify available and possible ways to think and pair them up .
so you see , it 's almost like a pavlovian - we lost the first hundred years of psychology by really trivial theories , where you say , how do people learn how to react to a situation ? what i 'm saying is , after we go through a lot of levels , including designing a huge , messy system with thousands of ports , we 'll end up again with the central problem of psychology .
saying , not what are the situations , but what are the kinds of problems and what are the kinds of strategies , how do you learn them , how do you connect them up , how does a really creative person invent a new way of thinking out of the available resources and so forth .
so , i think in the next 20 years , if we can get rid of all of the traditional approaches to artificial intelligence , like neural nets and genetic algorithms and rule-based systems , and just turn our sights a little bit higher to say , can we make a system that can use all those things for the right kind of problem ? some problems are good for neural nets ; we know that others , neural nets are hopeless on them .
genetic algorithms are great for certain things ; i suspect i know what they 're bad at , and i wo n't tell you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so my name is taylor wilson .
i am 17 years old and i am a nuclear physicist , which may be a little hard to believe , but i am .
and i would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point , that the bridge that t. boone pickens talked about will get us to .
so nuclear fusion is our energy future .
and the second point , making the case that kids can really change the world .
so you may ask - -lrb- applause -rrb- you may ask me , well how do you know what our energy future is ?
well i built a fusion reactor when i was 14 years old .
that is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor .
i started building this project when i was about 12 or 13 years old .
i decided i wanted to make a star .
now most of you are probably saying , well there 's no such thing as nuclear fusion .
i do n't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy .
well it does n't break even .
it does n't produce more energy out than i put in , but it still does some pretty cool stuff .
and i assembled this in my garage , and it now lives in the physics department of the university of nevada , reno .
and it slams together deuterium , which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it .
so this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that 's going on inside the sun .
and i 'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together , and in the process it has some byproducts , and i utilize those byproducts .
so this previous year , i won the intel international science and engineering fair .
i developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that homeland security has .
for hundreds of dollars , i 've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars .
i built this in my garage .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i 've developed a system to produce medical isotopes .
instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities i 've developed a device that , on a very small scale , can produce these isotopes .
so that 's my fusion reactor in the background there .
that is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor .
oh , by the way , i make yellowcake in my garage , so my nuclear program is as advanced as the iranians .
so maybe i do n't want to admit to that .
this is me at cern in geneva , switzerland , which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world .
and this is me with president obama , showing him my homeland security research .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in about seven years of doing nuclear research , i started out with a dream to make a " star in a jar , " a star in my garage , and i ended up meeting the president and developing things that i think can change the world , and i think other kids can too .
so thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am known best for human-powered flight , but that was just one thing that got me going in the sort of things that i 'm working in now .
as a youngster , i was very interested in model airplanes , ornithopters , autogyros , helicopters , gliders , power planes , indoor models , outdoor models , everything , which i just thought was a lot of fun , and wondered why most other people did n't share my same enthusiasm with them .
and then , navy pilot training , and , after college , i got into sailplane flying , power plane flying , and considered the sailplanes as a sort of hobby and fun , but got tangled up with some great professor types , who convinced me and everybody else in the field that this was a good way to get into really deep science .
while this was all going on , i was in the field of weather modification , although getting a ph.d. in aeronautics .
the weather modification subject was getting started , and as a graduate student , i could go around to the various talks that were being given , on a hitchhiker ride to the east coast , and so on . and everybody would talk to me , but all the professionals in the field hated each other , and they would n't communicate . and as a result , i got the absolutely unique background in that field , and started a company , which did more research in weather modification than anybody , and there are a lot of things that i just ca n't go into .
but then , 1971 started aerovironment , with no employees - then one or two , three , and sort of fumbled along on trying to get interesting projects .
we had airdynamisis , who , like i , did not want to work for aerospace companies on some big , many year project , and so we did our small projects , and the company slowly grew .
the thing that is exciting was , in 1976 , i suddenly got interested in the human-powered airplane because i 'd made a made a loan to a friend of 100,000 dollars , or i guaranteed the money at the bank .
he needed them - he needed the money for starting a company .
the company did not succeed , and he could n't pay the money back , and i was the guarantor of the note . so , i had a $ 100,000 debt , and i noticed that the kramer prize for human-powered flight , which had then been around for - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - 17 years at the time , was 50,000 pounds , which , at the exchange rate , was just about 100,000 dollars .
so suddenly , i was interested in human-powered flight - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and did not - the way i approached it , first , thinking about ways to make the planes , was just like they 'd been doing in england , and not succeeding , and i gave it up . i figured , nah , there is n't any simple , easy way .
but then , got off on a vacation trip , and was studying bird flight , just for the fun of it , and you can watch a bird soaring around in circles , and measure the time , and estimate the bank angle , and immediately , figure out its speed , and the turning radius , and so on , which i could do in the car , as we 're driving along on a vacation trip - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - with my three sons , young sons , helping me , but ridiculing the whole thing very much .
but that began thinking about how birds went around , and then how airplanes would , how hang gliders would fly , and then other planes , and the idea of the gossamer-condor-type airplane quickly emerged , was so logical , one should have thought of it in the first place , but one did n't . and it was just , keep the weight down - 70 pounds was all it weighed - but let the size swell up , like a hang glider , but three times the span , three times the cord .
you 're down to a third of the speed , a third of the power , and a good bicyclist can put out that power , and that worked , and we won the prize a year later .
we did n't - a lot of flying , a lot of experiments , a lot of things that did n't work , and ones that did work , and the plane kept getting a little better , a little better .
got a good pilot , brian allen , to operate it , and finally , succeeded . but unfortunately , about 65,000 dollars was spent on the project .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there was only about 30 to help retire the debt .
but fortunately , henry kramer , who put up the prize for - that was a one-mile flight - put up a new prize for flying the english channel , 21 miles .
and he thought it would take another 18 years for somebody to win that .
we realized that if you just cleaned up our gossamer condor a little bit , the power to fly would be decreased a little bit , and if you decrease the power required a little , the pilot can fly a much longer period of time .
and brian allen was able , in a miraculous flight , to get the gossamer albatross across the english channel , and we won the 100,000-pound , 200,000-dollar prize for that .
and when all expenses were paid , the debt was handled , and everything was fine .
it turned out that giving the planes to the museum was worth much more than the debt , so for five years , six years , i only had to pay one third income tax .
so , there were good economic reasons for the project , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that 's not , well , the project was done entirely for economic reasons , and we have not been involved in any human-powered flight since then - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because the prizes are all over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that sure started me thinking about various things , and immediately , we began making a solar-powered plane because we felt solar power was going to be so important for the country and the world , we did n't want the small funding in the government to be decreased , which is what the government was trying to do with it .
and we thought a solar-powered plane would n't really make sense , but you could do it and it would get a lot of publicity for solar power and maybe help that field .
and that project continued , did succeed , and we then got into other projects in aviation and mechanical things and ground devices .
but while this was going on , in 1982 , i got a prize from the lindbergh foundation - their annual prize - and i had to prepare a paper on it , which collected all my varied thoughts and varied interests over the years .
this was the one chance that i had to focus on what i , really , was after , and what was important . and to my surprise , i realized the importance of environmental issues , which charles lindbergh devoted the last third of his life to , and preparing that paper did me a lot of good .
i thought back about if i was a space traveler , and came and visited earth every 5,000 years .
and for a few thousand visits , i would see the same thing every time , the little differences in the earth .
but this last time , just coming round , right now , suddenly , there 'd be huge changes in the environment , in the concentration of people , and it was just unbelievable , the amount of - all the change in it .
i wanted to - well , one of the biggest changes is , 200 years ago , we began using coal from underground , which has a lot of pollution , and 100 years ago , began getting gasoline from underground , with a lot of pollution . and gasoline consumption , or production , will reach its limit in about ten years , and then go down , and we wonder what 's going to happen with transportation .
i wanted to show the slide - this slide , i think , is the most important one any of you will see , ever , because - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - it shows nature versus humans , and goes from 1850 to 2050 .
and so , the year 2000 , you see there .
and this is the weight of all air and land vertebrates .
humans and muskrats and giraffes and birds and so on , are - the red line goes up . that 's the humans and livestock and pets portion .
the green line goes down . that 's the wild nature portion .
humans , livestock and pets are , now , 98 percent of the total world 's mass of vertebrates on land and air .
and you do n't know what the future will hold , but it 's not going to get a lower percentage .
ten thousand years ago , the humans and livestock and pets were not even one tenth of one percent and would n't even have been visible on such a curve .
now they are 98 percent , and it , i think , shows human domination of the earth .
i give a talk to some remarkable high school students each summer , and ask them , after they 've asked me questions , and i give them a talk and so on . then i ask them questions .
what 's the population of the earth ?
what 's the population of the earth going to be when you 're the age of your parents ?
which i 'd never , really - they had never , really , thought about but , now , they think about it .
and then , what population of the earth would be an equilibrium that could continue on , and be for 2050 , 2100 , 2150 ?
and they form little groups , all fighting with each other , and when i leave , two hours later , most of them are saying about 2 billion people , and they do n't have any clue about how to get down to 2 billion , nor do i , but i think they 're right and this is a serious problem .
rachel carson was thinking of these , and came out with " silent spring , " way back .
" solar manifesto " by hermann scheer , in germany , claims all energy on earth can be derived , for every country , from solar energy and water , and so on .
you do n't need to dig down for these chemicals , and we can do things much more efficiently .
let 's have the next slide .
so this just summarizes it . " over billions of years , on a unique sphere , chance has painted a thin covering of life - complex and probable , wonderful and fragile .
suddenly , we humans , a recently arrived species , no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature , have grown in population , technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power . we , now , wield the paintbrush . "
we 're in charge . it 's frightening .
and i do a painting every 20 or 25 years . this is the last one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and -lsb- it -rsb- shows the earth in a time flag : on the right , in trilobites and dinosaurs and so on ; and over the triangle , we now get to civilization and tv and traffic jams and so on .
i have no idea of what comes next , so i just used robotic and natural cockroaches as the future , as a little warning .
and two weeks after this drawing was done , we actually had our first project contract , at aerovironment , on robotic cockroaches , which was very frightening to me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- paper rustling -rrb- well , that 'll be all the slides .
as time went on , we stopped our environmental programs .
we focused more on the really serious energy problems of the future , and we produced products for the company .
and we developed the impact car that general motors made , the ev1 , out of - and got the air resources board to have the regulations that stimulated the electric cars , but they 've since come apart .
and we 've done a lot of things , small drone airplanes and so on .
i have a helios . we have the first video .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : with a wingspan of 247 feet , this makes her larger than a boeing 747 .
-lrb- music -rrb- her designers ' attention to detail and her construction gives helios ' structure the flexibility and strength to deal with the turbulence encountered in the atmosphere .
this enables her to easily ride through the air currents as if she 's sliding along on the ocean waves .
paul maccready : the wings could touch together on top and not break . we think .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- narrator : and helios now begins the process of turning her back to the sun , to maximize the power from her solar array .
-lrb- music -rrb- as the sky gets darker , and the outside air temperatures drop below minus 100 degrees fahrenheit , the most environmentally hostile segment of helios 's journey has gone by without notice , except for being recorded by specially designed data acquisition systems and their associated sensors .
approaching a peak radar altitude of 96,863 feet , at 4:12 p.m. , helios is standing on top of 98 percent of the earth 's atmosphere .
this is more than 10,000 feet higher than the previous world 's altitude record held by the sr-71 blackbird .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : that plane has many purposes , but it 's aimed for communications , and it can fly so slowly that it 'll just stay up at 65,000 feet .
eventually , it will be able to have to stay up day , night , day , night , for six months at a time , acting like the synchronous satellite , but only ten miles above the earth .
let 's have the next video . this shows the other end of the spectrum .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : a tiny airplane , the av pointer serves for surveillance .
in effect a pair of roving eyeglasses , a cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle .
it is convenient to carry , assemble , and launch by hand .
battery-powered , it is silent and rarely noticed .
it sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator .
with on-board gps , it can navigate autonomously , and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage .
pm : okay , and let 's have the next .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that plane is widely used by the military , now , in all their operations .
let 's have the next video .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- alan alda : he 's got it , he 's got it , he 's got it on his head .
-lrb- music -rrb- we 're going to end our visit with paul maccready 's flying circus by meeting his son , tyler , who , with his two brothers , helped build the gossamer condor , 25 years ago .
tyler maccready : you can chase it , like this , for hours .
aa : when they got bored with their father 's project , they invented an extraordinary little plane of their own .
tm : and i can control it by putting the lift on one side of the wing , or on the other .
aa : they called it their walkalong glider .
-lrb- music -rrb- i 've never seen anything like that .
how old were you when you invented that ?
tm : oh , 10 , 11 . -lrb- aa : oh my god . -rrb- tm : 12 , something like that . -lrb- aa : that 's amazing . -rrb- pm : and tyler 's here to show you the walkalong .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tm : all right . you all got a couple of these in your gift bags , and one of the first things , the production version seemed to dive a little bit , and so i would just suggest you bend the wing tips up a little bit before you try flying it .
i 'll give you a demonstration of how it works .
the idea is that it soars on the lift over your body , like a seagull soaring on a cliff .
as the wind comes up , it has to go over the cliff , so as you walk through the air , it goes around your body , some has to go over you .
and so you just keep the glider positioned in that up current .
the launch is the difficult part : you 've got to hold it high up , over your head , and you start walking forward , and just let go of it , and you can control it like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then also , like it said in the video , you can turn it left or right just by putting the lift under one wing or another .
so i can do it - oops , that was going to be a right turn .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , this one will be a left turn .
here , but - -lrb- applause -rrb- - anyway .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's it , so you can just control it , wherever you want , and it 's just hours of fun . and these are no longer in production , so you have real collector 's items .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this , we just wanted to show you - if we can get the video running on this , yeah - just an example of a little video surveillance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was flying around in the party last night , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you can see how it just can fly around , and you can spy on anybody you want .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's it . i was going to bring an airplane , but i was worried about hitting people in here , so i thought this would be a little bit more gentle .
and that 's it , yeah , just a few inventions .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right .
how many of you had to fill out some sort of web form where you 've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this ?
how many of you found it really , really annoying ?
okay , outstanding . so i invented that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or i was one of the people who did it .
that thing is called a captcha .
and the reason it is there is to make sure you , the entity filling out the form , are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times .
the reason it works is because humans , at least non-visually-impaired humans , have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters , whereas computer programs simply ca n't do it as well yet .
so for example , in the case of ticketmaster , the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets , two at a time .
captchas are used all over the internet .
and since they 're used so often , a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that is shown to the user is not so fortunate .
so this is an example from the yahoo registration page .
the random characters that happened to be shown to the user were w , a , i , t , which , of course , spell a word .
but the best part is the message that the yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later .
text : " help ! i 've been waiting for over 20 minutes , and nothing happens . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this person thought they needed to wait .
this of course , is not as bad as this poor person .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- captcha project is something that we did here at carnegie melllon over 10 years ago , and it 's been used everywhere .
let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later , which is sort of the next evolution of captcha .
this is a project that we call recaptcha , which is something that we started here at carnegie mellon , then we turned it into a startup company .
and then about a year and a half ago , google actually acquired this company .
so let me tell you what this project started .
so this project started from the following realization : it turns out that approximately 200 million captchas are typed everyday by people around the world .
when i first heard this , i was quite proud of myself .
i thought , look at the impact that my research has had .
but then i started feeling bad .
see here 's the thing , each time you type a captcha , essentially you waste 10 seconds of your time .
and if you multiply that by 200 million , you get that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying captchas .
so then i started feeling bad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i started thinking , well , of course , we ca n't just get rid of captchas , because the security of the web sort of depends on them .
but then i started thinking , is there any way we can use this effort for something that is good for humanity ?
so see , here 's the thing .
while you 're typing a captcha , during those 10 seconds , your brain is doing something amazing .
your brain is doing something that computers can not yet do .
so can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds ?
another way of putting it is , is there some humongous problem that we can not yet get computers to solve , yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a captcha they solve a little bit of this problem ?
and the answer to that is " yes , " and this is what we 're doing now .
so what you may not know is that nowadays while you 're typing a captcha , not only are you authenticating yourself as a human , but in addition you 're actually helping us to digitize books .
so let me explain how this works .
so there 's a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books .
google has one . the internet archive has one .
amazon , now with the kindle , is trying to digitize books .
basically the way this works is you start with an old book .
you 've seen those things , right ? like a book ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so you start with a book , and then you scan it .
now scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book .
it gives you an image for every page of the book .
this is an image with text for every page of the book .
the next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image .
that 's using a technology called ocr , for optical character recognition , which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there .
now the problem is that ocr is not perfect .
especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow , ocr can not recognize a lot of the words .
for example , for things that were written more than 50 years ago , the computer can not recognize about 30 percent of the words .
so what we 're doing now is we 're taking all of the words that the computer can not recognize and we 're getting people to read them for us while they 're typing a captcha on the internet .
so the next time you type a captcha , these words that you 're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize .
and now the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because , you see , one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book , it did n't know what it was , and it 's going to present it to you .
but since it does n't know the answer for it , it can not grade it for you .
so what we do is we give you another word , one for which the system does know the answer .
we do n't tell you which one 's which , and we say , please type both .
and if you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer , it assumes you are human , and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly .
and if we repeat this process to like 10 different people and all of them agree on what the new word is , then we get one more word digitized accurately .
so this is how the system works .
and basically , since we released it about three or four years ago , a lot of websites have started switching from the old captcha where people wasted their time to the new captcha where people are helping to digitize books .
so for example , ticketmaster .
so every time you buy tickets on ticketmaster , you help to digitize a book .
facebook : every time you add a friend or poke somebody , you help to digitize a book .
twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using recaptcha .
and in fact , the number of sites that are using recaptcha is so high that the number of words that we 're digitizing per day is really , really large .
it 's about 100 million a day , which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year .
and this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing captchas on the internet .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now of course , since we 're doing so many words per day , funny things can happen .
and this is especially true because now we 're giving people two randomly chosen english words next to each other .
so funny things can happen .
for example , we presented this word .
it 's the word " christians " ; there 's nothing wrong with it .
but if you present it along with another randomly chosen word , bad things can happen .
so we get this . -lrb- text : bad christians -rrb- but it 's even worse , because the particular website where we showed this actually happened to be called the embassy of the kingdom of god .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oops .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here 's another really bad one .
johnedwards.com -lrb- text : damn liberal -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we keep on insulting people left and right everyday .
now , of course , we 're not just insulting people .
see here 's the thing , since we 're presenting two randomly chosen words , interesting things can happen .
so this actually has given rise to a really big internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in , which is called captcha art .
i 'm sure some of you have heard about it .
here 's how it works .
imagine you 're using the internet and you see a captcha that you think is somewhat peculiar , like this captcha . -lrb- text : invisible toaster -rrb- then what you 're supposed to do is you take a screen shot of it .
then of course , you fill out the captcha because you help us digitize a book .
but then , first you take a screen shot , and then you draw something that is related to it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's how it works .
there are tens of thousands of these .
some of them are very cute . -lrb- text : clenched it -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- some of them are funnier .
-lrb- text : stoned founders -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- and some of them , like paleontological shvisle , they contain snoop dogg .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so this is my favorite number of recaptcha .
so this is the favorite thing that i like about this whole project .
this is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through recaptcha : 750 million , which is a little over 10 percent of the world 's population , has helped us digitize human knowledge .
and it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda .
so the question that motivates my research is the following : if you look at humanity 's large-scale achievements , these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically - like for example , building the pyramids of egypt or the panama canal or putting a man on the moon - there is a curious fact about them , and it is that they were all done with about the same number off people .
it 's weird ; they were all done with about 100,000 people .
and the reason for that is because , before the internet , coordinating more than 100,000 people , let alone paying them , was essentially impossible .
but now with the internet , i 've just shown you a project where we 've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge .
so the question that motivates my research is , if we can put a man on the moon with 100,000 , what can we do with 100 million ?
so based on this question , we 've had a lot of different projects that we 've been working on .
let me tell you about one that i 'm most excited about .
this is something that we 've been semi-quietly working on for the last year and a half or so .
it has n't yet been launched . it 's called duolingo .
since it has n't been launched , shhhhh !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i can trust you 'll do that .
so this is the project . here 's how it started .
it started with me posing a question to my graduate student , severin hacker .
okay , that 's severin hacker .
so i posed the question to my graduate student .
by the way , you did hear me correctly ; his last name is hacker .
so i posed this question to him : how can we get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free ?
okay , so there 's a lot of things to say about this question .
first of all , translating the web .
so right now the web is partitioned into multiple languages .
a large fraction of it is in english .
if you do n't know any english , you ca n't access it .
but there 's large fractions in other different languages , and if you do n't know those languages , you ca n't access it .
so i would like to translate all of the web , or at least most of the web , into every major language .
so that 's what i would like to do .
now some of you may say , why ca n't we use computers to translate ?
why ca n't we use machine translation ?
machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there .
why ca n't we use it to translate the whole web ?
well the problem with that is that it 's not yet good enough and it probably wo n't be for the next 15 to 20 years .
it makes a lot of mistakes .
even when it does n't make a mistake , since it makes so many mistakes , you do n't know whether to trust it or not .
so let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine .
actually it was a forum post .
it was somebody who was trying to ask a question about javascript .
it was translated from japanese into english .
so i 'll just let you read .
this person starts apologizing for the fact that it 's translated with a computer .
so the next sentence is is going to be the preamble to the question .
so he 's just explaining something .
remember , it 's a question about javascript .
-lrb- text : at often , the goat-time install a error is vomit . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- then comes the first part of the question .
-lrb- text : how many times like the wind , a pole , and the dragon ? -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- then comes my favorite part of the question .
-lrb- text : this insult to father 's stones ? -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then comes the ending , which is my favorite part of the whole thing .
-lrb- text : please apologize for your stupidity . there are a many thank you . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so computer translation , not yet good enough .
so back to the question .
so we need people to translate the whole web .
so now the next question you may have is , well why ca n't we just pay people to do this ?
we could pay professional language translators to translate the whole web .
we could do that .
unfortunately , it would be extremely expensive .
for example , translating a tiny , tiny fraction of the whole web , wikipedia , into one other language , spanish .
wikipedia exists in spanish , but it 's very small compared to the size of english .
it 's about 20 percent of the size of english .
if we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into spanish , it would cost at least 50 million dollars - and this is at even the most exploited , outsourcing country out there .
so it would be very expensive .
so what we want to do is we want to get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free .
now if this is what you want to do , you pretty quickly realize you 're going to run into two pretty big hurdles , two big obstacles .
the first one is a lack of bilinguals .
so i do n't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the web who are bilingual enough to help us translate .
that 's a big problem .
the other problem you 're going to run into is a lack of motivation .
how are we going to motivate people to actually translate the web for free ?
normally , you have to pay people to do this .
so how are we going to motivate them to do it for free ?
now when we were starting to think about this , we were blocked by these two things .
but then we realized , there 's actually a way to solve both these problems with the same solution .
there 's a way to kill two birds with one stone .
and that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do , and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals , and that is language education .
so it turns out that today , there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language .
people really , really want to learn a foreign language .
and it 's not just because they 're being forced to do so in school .
for example , in the united states alone , there are over five million people who have paid over $ 500 for software to learn a new language .
so people really , really want to learn a new language .
so what we 've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website - it 's called duolingo - where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the web .
and so basically they 're learning by doing .
so the way this works is whenever you 're a just a beginner , we give you very , very simple sentences .
there 's , of course , a lot of very simple sentences on the web .
we give you very , very simple sentences along with what each word means .
and as you translate them , and as you see how other people translate them , you start learning the language .
and as you get more and more advanced , we give you more and more complex sentences to translate .
but at all times , you 're learning by doing .
now the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works .
first of all , people are really , really learning a language .
we 're mostly done building it , and now we 're testing it .
people really can learn a language with it .
and they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software .
so people really do learn a language .
and not only do they learn it as well , but actually it 's way more interesting .
because you see with duolingo , people are actually learning with real content .
as opposed to learning with made-up sentences , people are learning with real content , which is inherently interesting .
so people really do learn a language .
but perhaps more surprisingly , the translations that we get from people using the site , even though they 're just beginners , the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators , which is very surprising .
so let me show you one example .
this is a sentence that was translated from german into english .
the top is the german .
the middle is an english translation that was done by somebody who was a professional english translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation .
and the bottom is a translation by users of duolingo , none of whom knew any german before they started using the site .
you can see , it 's pretty much perfect .
now of course , we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators .
we combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator .
now even though we 're combining the translations , the site actually can translate pretty fast .
so let me show you , this is our estimates of how fast we could translate wikipedia from english into spanish .
remember , this is 50 million dollars-worth of value .
so if we wanted to translate wikipedia into spanish , we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users .
and we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users .
since all the projects that my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users , we 're hopeful that we 'll be able to translate extremely fast with this project .
now the thing that i 'm most excited about with duolingo is i think this provides a fair business model for language education .
so here 's the thing : the current business model for language education is the student pays , and in particular , the student pays rosetta stone 500 dollars .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the current business model .
the problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world 's population does n't have 500 dollars .
so it 's extremely unfair towards the poor .
this is totally biased towards the rich .
now see , in duolingo , because while you learn you 're actually creating value , you 're translating stuff - which for example , we could charge somebody for translations .
so this is how we could monetize this .
since people are creating value while they 're learning , they do n't have to pay their money , they pay with their time .
but the magical thing here is that they 're paying with their time , but that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language .
so the nice thing about duolingo is i think it provides a fair business model - one that does n't discriminate against poor people .
so here 's the site . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so here 's the site .
we have n't yet launched , but if you go there , you can sign up to be part of our private beta , which is probably going to start in about three or four weeks .
we have n't yet launched this duolingo .
by the way , i 'm the one talking here , but actually duolingo is the work of a really awesome team , some of whom are here .
so thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was trying to think , how is sync connected to happiness , and it occurred to me that for some reason we take pleasure in synchronizing .
we like to dance together , we like singing together .
and so , if you 'll put up with this , i would like to enlist your help with a first experiment today . the experiment is - and i notice , by the way , that when you applauded , that you did it in a typical north american way , that is , you were raucous and incoherent .
you were not organized . it did n't even occur to you to clap in unison .
do you think you could do it ? i would like to see if this audience would - no , you have n't practiced , as far as i know - can you get it together to clap in sync ?
-lrb- clapping -rrb- whoa ! now , that 's what we call emergent behavior .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i did n't expect that , but - i mean , i expected you could synchronize .
it did n't occur to me you 'd increase your frequency .
it 's interesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what do we make of that ? first of all , we know that you 're all brilliant .
this is a room full of intelligent people , highly sensitive .
some trained musicians out there .
is that what enabled you to synchronize ?
so to put the question a little more seriously , let 's ask ourselves what are the minimum requirements for what you just did , for spontaneous synchronization .
do you need , for instance , to be as smart as you are ?
do you even need a brain at all just to synchronize ?
do you need to be alive ? i mean , that 's a spooky thought , right ?
inanimate objects that might spontaneously synchronize themselves .
it 's real . in fact , i 'll try to explain today that sync is maybe one of , if not one of the most , perhaps the most pervasive drive in all of nature .
it extends from the subatomic scale to the farthest reaches of the cosmos .
it 's a deep tendency toward order in nature that opposes what we 've all been taught about entropy .
i mean , i 'm not saying the law of entropy is wrong - it 's not .
but there is a countervailing force in the universe - the tendency towards spontaneous order . and so that 's our theme .
now , to get into that , let me begin with what might have occurred to you immediately when you hear that we 're talking about synchrony in nature , which is the glorious example of birds that flock together , or fish swimming in organized schools .
so these are not particularly intelligent creatures , and yet , as we 'll see , they exhibit beautiful ballets .
this is from a bbc show called " predators , " and what we 're looking at here are examples of synchrony that have to do with defense .
when you 're small and vulnerable , like these starlings , or like the fish , it helps to swarm to avoid predators , to confuse predators .
let me be quiet for a second because this is so gorgeous .
for a long time , biologists were puzzled by this behavior , wondering how it could be possible .
we 're so used to choreography giving rise to synchrony .
these creatures are not choreographed .
they 're choreographing themselves .
and only today is science starting to figure out how it works .
i 'll show you a computer model made by iain couzin , a researcher at oxford , that shows how swarms work .
there are just three simple rules .
first , all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors .
second , all the individuals have a tendency to line up .
and third , they 're all attracted to each other , but they try to keep a small distance apart .
and when you build those three rules in , automatically you start to see swarms that look very much like fish schools or bird flocks .
now , fish like to stay close together , about a body length apart .
birds try to stay about three or four body lengths apart .
but except for that difference , the rules are the same for both .
now , all this changes when a predator enters the scene .
there 's a fourth rule : when a predator 's coming , get out of the way .
here on the model you see the predator attacking .
the prey move out in random directions , and then the rule of attraction brings them back together again , so there 's this constant splitting and reforming .
and you see that in nature .
keep in mind that , although it looks as if each individual is acting to cooperate , what 's really going on is a kind of selfish darwinian behavior .
each is scattering away at random to try to save its scales or feathers .
that is , out of the desire to save itself , each creature is following these rules , and that leads to something that 's safe for all of them .
even though it looks like they 're thinking as a group , they 're not .
you might wonder what exactly is the advantage to being in a swarm , so you can think of several .
as i say , if you 're in a swarm , your odds of being the unlucky one are reduced as compared to a small group .
there are many eyes to spot danger .
and you 'll see in the example with the starlings , with the birds , when this peregrine hawk is about to attack them , that actually waves of panic can propagate , sending messages over great distances .
you 'll see - let 's see , it 's coming up possibly at the very end - maybe not .
information can be sent over half a kilometer away in a very short time through this mechanism .
yes , it 's happening here .
see if you can see those waves propagating through the swarm .
it 's beautiful . the birds are , we sort of understand , we think , from that computer model , what 's going on .
as i say , it 's just those three simple rules , plus the one about watch out for predators .
there does n't seem to be anything mystical about this .
we do n't , however , really understand at a mathematical level .
i 'm a mathematician . we would like to be able to understand better .
i mean , i showed you a computer model , but a computer is not understanding .
a computer is , in a way , just another experiment .
we would really like to have a deeper insight into how this works and to understand , you know , exactly where this organization comes from .
how do the rules give rise to the patterns ?
there is one case that we have begun to understand better , and it 's the case of fireflies .
if you see fireflies in north america , like so many north american sorts of things , they tend to be independent operators . they ignore each other .
they each do their own thing , flashing on and off , paying no attention to their neighbors .
but in southeast asia - places like thailand or malaysia or borneo - there 's a beautiful cooperative behavior that occurs among male fireflies .
you can see it every night along the river banks .
the trees , mangrove trees , are filled with fireflies communicating with light .
specifically , it 's male fireflies who are all flashing in perfect time together , in perfect synchrony , to reinforce a message to the females .
and the message , as you can imagine , is " come hither . mate with me . "
-lrb- music -rrb- in a second i 'm going to show you a slow motion of a single firefly so that you can get a sense . this is a single frame .
then on , and then off - a 30th of a second , there .
and then watch this whole river bank , and watch how precise the synchrony is .
on , more on and then off .
the combined light from these beetles - these are actually tiny beetles - is so bright that fishermen out at sea can use them as navigating beacons to find their way back to their home rivers . it 's stunning .
for a long time it was not believed when the first western travelers , like sir francis drake , went to thailand and came back with tales of this unbelievable spectacle .
no one believed them .
we do n't see anything like this in europe or in the west .
and for a long time , even after it was documented , it was thought to be some kind of optical illusion .
scientific papers were published saying it was twitching eyelids that explained it , or , you know , a human being 's tendency to see patterns where there are none .
but i hope you 've convinced yourself now , with this nighttime video , that they really were very well synchronized .
okay , well , the issue then is , do we need to be alive to see this kind of spontaneous order , and i 've already hinted that the answer is no .
well , you do n't have to be a whole creature .
you can even be just a single cell .
like , take , for instance , your pacemaker cells in your heart right now .
they 're keeping you alive .
every beat of your heart depends on this crucial region , the sinoatrial node , which has about 10,000 independent cells that would each beep , have an electrical rhythm - a voltage up and down - to send a signal to the ventricles to pump .
now , your pacemaker is not a single cell .
it 's this democracy of 10,000 cells that all have to fire in unison for the pacemaker to work correctly .
i do n't want to give you the idea that synchrony is always a good idea .
if you have epilepsy , there is an instance of billions of brain cells , or at least millions , discharging in pathological concert .
so this tendency towards order is not always a good thing .
you do n't have to be alive . you do n't have to be even a single cell .
if you look , for instance , at how lasers work , that would be a case of atomic synchrony .
in a laser , what makes laser light so different from the light above my head here is that this light is incoherent - many different colors and different frequencies , sort of like the way you clapped initially - but if you were a laser , it would be rhythmic applause .
it would be all atoms pulsating in unison , emitting light of one color , one frequency .
now comes the very risky part of my talk , which is to demonstrate that inanimate things can synchronize .
hold your breath for me .
what i have here are two empty water bottles .
this is not keith barry doing a magic trick .
this is a klutz just playing with some water bottles .
i have some metronomes here .
can you hear that ?
all right , so , i 've got a metronome , and it 's the world 's smallest metronome , the - well , i should n't advertise .
anyway , so this is the world 's smallest metronome .
i 've set it on the fastest setting , and i 'm going to now take another one set to the same setting .
we can try this first . if i just put them on the table together , there 's no reason for them to synchronize , and they probably wo n't .
maybe you 'd better listen to them . i 'll stand here .
what i 'm hoping is that they might just drift apart because their frequencies are n't perfectly the same .
right ? they did .
they were in sync for a while , but then they drifted apart .
and the reason is that they 're not able to communicate .
now , you might think that 's a bizarre idea .
how can metronomes communicate ?
well , they can communicate through mechanical forces .
so i 'm going to give them a chance to do that .
i also want to wind this one up a bit . how can they communicate ?
i 'm going to put them on a movable platform , which is the " guide to graduate study at cornell . " okay ? so here it is .
let 's see if we can get this to work .
my wife pointed out to me that it will work better if i put both on at the same time because otherwise the whole thing will tip over .
all right . so there we go . let 's see . ok , i 'm not trying to cheat - let me start them out of sync . no , hard to even do that .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right . so before any one goes out of sync , i 'll just put those right there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , that might seem a bit whimsical , but this pervasiveness of this tendency towards spontaneous order sometimes has unexpected consequences .
and a clear case of that , was something that happened in london in the year 2000 .
the millennium bridge was supposed to be the pride of london - a beautiful new footbridge erected across the thames , first river crossing in over 100 years in london .
there was a big competition for the design of this bridge , and the winning proposal was submitted by an unusual team - in the ted spirit , actually - of an architect - perhaps the greatest architect in the united kingdom , lord norman foster - working with an artist , a sculptor , sir anthony caro , and an engineering firm , ove arup .
and together they submitted a design based on lord foster 's vision , which was - he remembered as a kid reading flash gordon comic books , and he said that when flash gordon would come to an abyss , he would shoot what today would be a kind of a light saber .
he would shoot his light saber across the abyss , making a blade of light , and then scamper across on this blade of light .
he said , " that 's the vision i want to give to london .
i want a blade of light across the thames . "
so they built the blade of light , and it 's a very thin ribbon of steel , the world 's - probably the flattest and thinnest suspension bridge there is , with cables that are out on the side .
you 're used to suspension bridges with big droopy cables on the top .
these cables were on the side of the bridge , like if you took a rubber band and stretched it taut across the thames - that 's what 's holding up this bridge .
now , everyone was very excited to try it out .
on opening day , thousands of londoners came out , and something happened .
and within two days the bridge was closed to the public .
so i want to first show you some interviews with people who were on the bridge on opening day , who will describe what happened .
man : it really started moving sideways and slightly up and down , rather like being on the boat .
woman : yeah , it felt unstable , and it was very windy , and i remember it had lots of flags up and down the sides , so you could definitely - there was something going on sideways , it felt , maybe .
interviewer : not up and down ? boy : no .
interviewer : and not forwards and backwards ? boy : no .
interviewer : just sideways . about how much was it moving , do you think ?
boy : it was about - interviewer : i mean , that much , or this much ?
boy : about the second one .
interviewer : this much ? boy : yeah .
man : it was at least six , six to eight inches , i would have thought .
interviewer : right , so , at least this much ? man : oh , yes .
woman : i remember wanting to get off .
interviewer : oh , did you ? woman : yeah . it felt odd .
interviewer : so it was enough to be scary ? woman : yeah , but i thought that was just me .
interviewer : ah ! now , tell me why you had to do this ?
boy : we had to do this because , to keep in balance because if you did n't keep your balance , then you would just fall over about , like , to the left or right , about 45 degrees .
interviewer : so just show me how you walk normally . right .
and then show me what it was like when the bridge started to go . right .
so you had to deliberately push your feet out sideways and - oh , and short steps ?
man : that 's right . and it seemed obvious to me that it was probably the number of people on it .
interviewer : were they deliberately walking in step , or anything like that ?
man : no , they just had to conform to the movement of the bridge .
steven strogatz : all right , so that already gives you a hint of what happened .
think of the bridge as being like this platform .
think of the people as being like metronomes .
now , you might not be used to thinking of yourself as a metronome , but after all , we do walk like - i mean , we oscillate back and forth as we walk .
and especially if we start to walk like those people did , right ?
they all showed this strange sort of skating gait that they adopted once the bridge started to move .
and so let me show you now the footage of the bridge .
but also , after you see the bridge on opening day , you 'll see an interesting clip of work done by a bridge engineer at cambridge named allan mcrobie , who figured out what happened on the bridge , and who built a bridge simulator to explain exactly what the problem was .
it was a kind of unintended positive feedback loop between the way the people walked and the way the bridge began to move , that engineers knew nothing about .
actually , i think the first person you 'll see is the young engineer who was put in charge of this project . okay .
-lrb- video -rrb- interviewer : did anyone get hurt ? engineer : no .
interviewer : right . so it was quite small - engineer : yes . interviewer : - but real ?
engineer : absolutely . interviewer : you thought , " oh , bother . "
engineer : i felt i was disappointed about it .
we 'd spent a lot of time designing this bridge , and we 'd analyzed it , we 'd checked it to codes - to heavier loads than the codes - and here it was doing something that we did n't know about .
interviewer : you did n't expect . engineer : exactly .
narrator : the most dramatic and shocking footage shows whole sections of the crowd - hundreds of people - apparently rocking from side to side in unison , not only with each other , but with the bridge .
this synchronized movement seemed to be driving the bridge .
but how could the crowd become synchronized ?
was there something special about the millennium bridge that caused this effect ?
this was to be the focus of the investigation .
interviewer : well , at last the simulated bridge is finished , and i can make it wobble .
now , allan , this is all your fault , is n't it ? allan mcrobie : yes .
interviewer : you designed this , yes , this simulated bridge , and this , you reckon , mimics the action of the real bridge ?
am : it captures a lot of the physics , yes .
interviewer : right . so if we get on it , we should be able to wobble it , yes ?
allan mcrobie is a bridge engineer from cambridge who wrote to me , suggesting that a bridge simulator ought to wobble in the same way as the real bridge - provided we hung it on pendulums of exactly the right length .
am : this one 's only a couple of tons , so it 's fairly easy to get going .
just by walking . interviewer : well , it 's certainly going now .
am : it does n't have to be a real dangle . just walk . it starts to go .
interviewer : it 's actually quite difficult to walk .
you have to be careful where you put your feet down , do n't you , because if you get it wrong , it just throws you off your feet .
am : it certainly affects the way you walk , yes . you ca n't walk normally on it .
interviewer : no . if you try and put one foot in front of another , it 's moving your feet away from under you . am : yes .
interviewer : so you 've got to put your feet out sideways .
so already , the simulator is making me walk in exactly the same way as our witnesses walked on the real bridge .
am : ... ice-skating gait . there is n't all this sort of snake way of walking .
interviewer : for a more convincing experiment , i wanted my own opening-day crowd , the sound check team .
their instructions : just walk normally .
it 's really intriguing because none of these people is trying to drive it .
they 're all having some difficulty walking .
and the only way you can walk comfortably is by getting in step .
but then , of course , everyone is driving the bridge .
you ca n't help it . you 're actually forced by the movement of the bridge to get into step , and therefore to drive it to move further .
ss : all right , well , with that from the ministry of silly walks , maybe i 'd better end . i see i 've gone over .
but i hope that you 'll go outside and see the world in a new way , to see all the amazing synchrony around us . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , now we 're going to the bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that i 've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years .
now i 'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild .
and we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives , but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence ?
well , we know a few things .
we know that their brain-to-body ratio , which is a physical measure of intelligence , is second only to humans .
cognitively , they can understand artificially-created languages .
and they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors .
and in some parts of the world , they use tools , like sponges to hunt fish .
but there 's one big question left : do they have a language , and if so , what are they talking about ?
so decades ago , not years ago , i set out to find a place in the world where i could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system .
now in most parts of the world , the water 's pretty murky , so it 's very hard to observe animals underwater , but i found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful , clear , shallow sandbanks of the bahamas which are just east of florida .
and they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows , but at night , they go off the edge and hunt in deep water .
now , it 's not a bad place to be a researcher , either .
so we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran , and we live , sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time .
my main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone , which is an underwater microphone , and this is so i can correlate sound and behavior .
and most of our work 's pretty non-invasive .
we try to follow dolphin etiquette while we 're in the water , since we 're actually observing them physically in the water .
now , atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons .
they 're born without spots , and they get spots with age , and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases , so that 's fun to track their behavior .
and by about the age of 15 , they 're fully spotted black and white .
now the mother you see here is mugsy .
she 's 35 years old in this shot , but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s .
and like all the dolphins in our community , we photographed mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin , and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time .
now , young dolphins learn a lot as they 're growing up , and they use their teenage years to practice social skills , and at about the age of nine , the females become sexually mature , so they can get pregnant , and the males mature quite a bit later , at around 15 years of age .
and dolphins are very promiscuous , and so we have to determine who the fathers are , so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting dna .
so what that means is , after 28 years , we are tracking three generations , including grandmothers and grandfathers .
now , dolphins are natural acousticians .
they make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do .
but they have other communication signals they use .
they have good vision , so they use body postures to communicate .
they have taste , not smell .
and they have touch .
and sound can actually be felt in the water , because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water 's about the same .
so dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance .
now , we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors .
now , the signature whistle is a whistle that 's specific to an individual dolphin , and it 's like a name . -lrb- dolphin whistling noises -rrb- and this is the best-studied sound , because it 's easy to measure , really , and you 'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting , for example .
another well studied sound are echolocation clicks .
this is the dolphin 's sonar . -lrb- dolphin echolocation noises -rrb- and they use these clicks to hunt and feed .
but they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially .
for example , males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase .
you know , i 've been buzzed in the water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do n't tell anyone . it 's a secret .
and you can really feel the sound . that was my point with that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so dolphins are also political animals , so they have to resolve conflicts .
-lrb- dolphin noises -rrb- and they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they 're fighting .
and these are very unstudied sounds because they 're hard to measure .
now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight .
-lrb- dolphin noises -rrb- so you 're going to see two groups , and you 're going to see the head-to-head posturing , some open mouths , lots of squawking .
there 's a bubble .
and basically , one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine , and it does n't really escalate into violence too much .
now , in the bahamas , we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins .
for example , they babysit each other 's calves .
the males have dominance displays that they use when they 're chasing each other 's females .
and the two species actually form temporary alliances when they 're chasing sharks away .
and one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony .
they synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger .
-lrb- dolphins noises -rrb- now , these are bottlenose dolphins , and you 'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds .
-lrb- dolphin noises -rrb- you see , they 're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad .
i wish i was that coordinated .
now , it 's important to remember that you 're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds , and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds , and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds .
now , researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory , and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages .
but burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery .
now , these are three spectragrams .
two are human words , and one is a dolphin vocalizing .
so just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin .
now , it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes .
now , one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean , but it 's a difficult job , and we actually do n't have a rosetta stone yet .
but a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology , an interface to do two-way communication , and that 's what we 've been trying to do in the bahamas and in real time .
now , scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins .
this underwater keyboard in orlando , florida , at the epcot center , was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information .
so we wanted to develop an interface like this in the bahamas , but in a more natural setting .
and one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity .
they were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures , and they were also inviting us into dolphin games .
now , dolphins are social mammals , so they love to play , and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed , and they 're very adept . they like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage .
now in this footage , the adult is caroh .
she 's 25 years old here , and this is her newborn , cobalt , and he 's just learning how to play this game .
-lrb- dolphin noises -rrb- she 's kind of teasing him and taunting him .
he really wants that sargassum .
now , when dolphins solicit humans for this game , they 'll often sink vertically in the water , and they 'll have a little sargassum on their flipper , and they 'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it , and then we 'll have a little seaweed keep away game .
but when we do n't dive down and get it , they 'll bring it to the surface and they 'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves , and then we 'll pick it up and have a game .
and so we started thinking , well , would n't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time , their favorite toys ?
so the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer , and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other .
but we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard .
they 've got better things to do in the wild .
they might do it in captivity , but in the wild - so we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water , and we labeled four objects they like to play with , the scarf , rope , sargassum , and also had a bow ride , which is a fun activity for a dolphin . -lrb- whistle -rrb- and that 's the scarf whistle , which is also associated with a visual symbol .
and these are artificially created whistles .
they 're outside the dolphin 's normal repertoire , but they 're easily mimicked by the dolphins .
and i spent four years with my colleagues adam pack and fabienne delfour , working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching .
and the dolphins could get in on the game .
they could point at the visual object , or they could mimic the whistle .
now this is video of a session .
the diver here has a rope toy , and i 'm on the keyboard on the left , and i 've just played the rope key , and that 's the request for the toy from the human .
so i 've got the rope , i 'm diving down , and i 'm basically trying to get the dolphin 's attention , because they 're kind of like little kids .
you have to keep their attention .
i 'm going to drop the rope , see if they come over .
here they come , and then they 're going to pick up the rope and drag it around as a toy .
now , i 'm at the keyboard on the left , and this is actually the first time that we tried this .
i 'm going to try to request this toy , the rope toy , from the dolphins using the rope sound .
let 's see if they might actually understand what that means .
-lrb- whistle -rrb- that 's the rope whistle .
up come the dolphins , and drop off the rope , yay . wow .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so this is only once .
we do n't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles .
okay , so here 's a second toy in the water .
this is a scarf toy , and i 'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal .
now this dolphin , we call her " the scarf thief , " because over the years she 's absconded with about 12 scarves .
in fact , we think she has a boutique somewhere in the bahamas .
so i 'm reaching over . she 's got the scarf on her right side .
and we try to not touch the animals too much , we really do n't want to over-habituate them .
and i 'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard .
and the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf .
so i try to give her the scarf .
whoop . almost lost it .
but this is the moment where everything becomes possible .
the dolphin 's at the keyboard .
you 've got full attention .
and this sometimes went on for hours .
and i wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs , because they have n't happened yet , but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have , and interest in the system .
and because of this , we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology .
so we joined forces with georgia tech , with thad starner 's wearable computing group , to build us an underwater wearable computer that we 're calling chat . -lsb- chat : cetacean hearing and telemetry -rsb- now , instead of pushing a keyboard through the water , the diver 's wearing the complete system , and it 's acoustic only , so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm , the sounds go out through an underwater speaker , if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle , the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones .
the computer can localize who requested the toy if there 's a word match .
and the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition , so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately .
and we 're at prototype stage , but this is how we hope it will play out .
so diver a and diver b both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle , the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water , but also as a word through bone conduction .
so diver a plays the scarf whistle or diver b plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it .
what we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle , and if diver a has the sargassum , if that 's the sound that was played and requested , then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they 'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever .
now , how far can this kind of communication go ?
well , chat is designed specifically to empower the dolphins to request things from us .
it 's designed to really be two-way .
now , will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally ?
we hope so and we think so .
but as we decode their natural sounds , we 're also planning to put those back into the computerized system .
for example , right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin .
likewise , we can create our own whistles , our own whistle names , and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with .
now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road .
in the case of a dolphin , you know , it 's a species that , well , they 're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now , but they live in quite a different environment , and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems .
i mean , imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hello , my name is thomas heatherwick .
i have a studio in london that has a particular approach to designing buildings .
when i was growing up , i was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale .
and i was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications i was seeing felt soulless and cold .
and there on the smaller scale , the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument , was a materiality and a soulfulness .
and this influenced me .
the first building i built was 20 years ago .
and since , in the last 20 years , i 've developed a studio in london .
sorry , this was my mother , by the way , in her bead shop in london .
i spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that .
i 'm just going to show , for people who do n't know my studio 's work , a few projects that we 've worked on .
this is a hospital building .
this is a shop for a bag company .
this is studios for artists .
this is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball .
and this is a window display .
and this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to st. paul 's cathedral in london .
and this is a temple in japan for a buddhist monk .
and this is a cafe by the sea in britain .
and just very quickly , something we 've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of london to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again .
because the original routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with , which had this open platform at the back - in fact , i think all our routemasters are here in california now actually .
but they are n't in london .
and so you 're stuck on a bus .
and if the bus is going to stop and it 's three yards away from the bus stop , you 're just a prisoner .
but the mayor of london wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform .
so we 've been working with transport for london , and that organization has n't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years .
and so we 've been very lucky to have a chance to work .
the brief is that the bus should use 40 percent less energy .
so it 's got hybrid drive .
and we 've been working to try to improve everything from the fabric to the format and structure and aesthetics .
i was going to show four main projects .
and this is a project for a bridge .
and so we were commissioned to design a bridge that would open .
and openings seemed - everyone loves opening bridges , but it 's quite a basic thing .
i think we all kind of stand and watch .
but the bridges that we saw that opened and closed - i 'm slightly squeamish - but i once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball .
and as he was diving , someone had stamped on his knee , and it had broken like this .
and then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just could n't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken .
and so this is in paddington in london .
and it 's a very boring bridge , as you can see .
it 's just steel and timber .
but instead of what it is , our focus was on the way it worked .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we actually had to halve its speed , because everyone was too scared when we first did it .
so that 's it speeded up .
a project that we 've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station - so a power station that uses organic waste material .
in the news , the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from and we used to be quite proud of the way we generated power .
but recently , any annual report of a power company does n't have a power station on it .
it has a child running through a field , or something like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so when a consortium of engineers approached us and asked us to work with them on this power station , our condition was that we would work with them and that , whatever we did , we were not just going to decorate a normal power station .
and instead , we had to learn - we kind of forced them to teach us .
and so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements , and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that were n't being capitalized on .
that just taking a field and banging all these things out is n't necessarily the most efficient way that they could work .
so we looked at how we could compose all those elements - instead of just litter , create one composition .
and what we found - this area is one of the poorest parts of britain .
it was voted the worst place in britain to live .
and there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station .
so it felt this has a social dimension .
it has a symbolic importance .
and we should be proud of where our power is coming from , rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of .
so we were looking at how we could make a power station , that , instead of keeping people out and having a big fence around the outside , could be a place that pulls you in .
and it has to be - i 'm trying to get my - 250 feet high .
so it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in , and using the spare soil that 's there on the site , we could make a power station that was silent as well .
because just that soil could make the acoustic difference .
and we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this .
the finished project is meant to be more than just a power station .
it has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's a power park .
so people can come and really experience this and also look out all around the area , and use that height that we have to have for its function .
in shanghai , we were invited to build - well we were n't invited ; what am i talking about .
we won the competition , and it was painful to get there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we won the competition to build the u.k. pavilion .
and an expo is a totally bonkers thing .
there 's 250 pavilions .
it 's the world 's biggest ever expo that had ever happened .
so there are up to a million people there everyday .
and 250 countries all competing .
and the british government saying , " you need to be in the top five . "
and so that became the governmental goal - is , how do you stand out in this chaos , which is an expo of stimulus ?
so our sense was we had to do one thing , and only one thing , instead of trying to have everything .
and so what we also felt was that whatever we did we could n't do a cheesy advert for britain .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the thing that was true , the expo was about the future of cities , and particularly the victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities .
and the world 's first public park of modern times was in britain .
and the world 's first major botanical institution is in london , and they have this extraordinary project where they 've been collecting 25 percent of all the world 's plant species .
so we suddenly realized that there was this thing .
and everyone agrees that trees are beautiful , and i 've never met anyone who says , " i do n't like trees . "
and the same with flowers .
i 've never met anyone who says , " i do n't like flowers . "
but we realized that seeds - there 's been this very serious project happening - but that seeds - at these major botanical gardens , seeds are n't on show .
but you just have to go to a garden center , and they 're in little paper packets .
but this phenomenal project 's been happening .
so we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds , some kind of seed cathedral .
but how could we show these teeny-weeny things ?
and the film " jurassic park " actually really helped us .
because the dna of the dinosaur that was trapped in the amber gave us some kind of clue that these tiny things could be trapped and be made to seem precious , rather than looking like nuts .
so the challenge was , how are we going to bring light and expose these things ?
we did n't want to make a separate building and have separate content .
so we were trying to think , how could we make a whole thing emanate .
by the way , we had half the budget of the other western nations .
so that was also in the mix with the site the size of a football pitch .
and so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue .
-lrb- video -rrb- voice over : the new play-doh mop top hair shop .
song : ♫ we 've got the mop tops , the play-doh mop tops ♫ ♫ just turn the chair and grow play-doh hair ♫ ♫ they 're the mop tops ♫ thomas heatherwick : okay , you get the idea .
so the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us , and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box , very simple box element , and make it a building that could move in the wind .
so the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows .
and inside , the daylight - each one is an optic and it brings light into the center .
and by night , artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside .
and to make the project affordable , we focused our energy .
instead of building a building as big as the football pitch , we focused it on this one element .
and the government agreed to do that and not do anything else , and focus our energy on that .
and so the rest of the site was a public space .
and with a million people there a day , it just felt like offering some public space .
we worked with an astroturf manufacturer to develop a mini-me version of the seed cathedral , so that , even if you 're partially-sighted , that it was kind of crunchy and soft , that piece of landscape that you see there .
and then , you know when a pet has an operation and they shave a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur - in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral , in effect , we 've shaved it .
and inside there 's nothing ; there 's no famous actor 's voice ; there 's no projections ; there 's no televisions ; there 's no color changing .
there 's just silence and a cool temperature .
and if a cloud goes past , you can see a cloud on the tips where it 's letting the light through .
this is the only project that we 've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a key thing was how people would interact .
i mean , in a way it was the most serious thing you could possible do at the expo .
and i just wanted to show you .
the british government - any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have .
and there was a lot of terror .
but there was an underlying support .
and so there was a moment when suddenly - actually , the next thing .
this is the head of u.k. trade and investment , who was our client , with the chinese children , using the landscape .
-lrb- video -rrb- children : one , two , three , go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- th : i 'm sorry about my stupid voice there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so finally , texture is something .
in the projects we 've been working on , these slick buildings , where they might be a fancy shape , but the materiality feels the same , is something that we 've been trying to research really , and explore alternatives .
and the project that we 're building in malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer .
and it 's in a piece of land that 's this site .
and the mayor of kuala lumpur said that , if this developer would give something that gave something back to the city , they would give them more gross floor area , buildable .
so there was an incentive for the developer to really try to think about what would be better for the city .
and the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower , and you squeeze a few trees around the edge , and you see cars parked .
it 's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience , and the rest of it is just for postcards .
the lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this .
so if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom , we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer .
and by linking these together , we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest , instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we 're building these buildings .
they 're actually identical , so it 's quite cost-effective .
they 're just chopped at different heights .
but the key part is trying to give back an extraordinary piece of landscape , rather than engulf it .
and that 's my final slide .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- june cohen : so thank you . thank you , thomas . you 're a delight .
since we have an extra minute here , i thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these seeds , which maybe came from the shaved bit of the building .
th : these are a few of the tests we did when we were building the structure .
so there were 66,000 of these .
this optic was 22 feet long .
and so the daylight was just coming - it was caught on the outside of the box and was coming down to illuminate each seed .
waterproofing the building was a bit crazy .
because it 's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway , but if you say you 're going to drill 66,000 holes in it - we had quite a time .
there was one person in the contractors who was the right size - and it was n't a child - who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building .
jc : thank you , thomas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right , so let 's take four subjects that obviously go together : big data , tattoos , immortality and the greeks .
right ?
now , the issue about tattoos is that , without a word , tattoos really do shout .
-lsb- beautiful -rsb- -lsb- intriguing -rsb- so you do n't have to say a lot .
-lsb- allegiance -rsb- -lsb- very intimate -rsb- -lsb- serious mistakes -rsb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- and tattoos tell you a lot of stories .
if i can ask an indiscreet question , how many of you have tattoos ?
a few , but not most .
what happens if facebook , google , twitter , linkedin , cell phones , gps , foursquare , yelp , travel advisor , all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos ?
and what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would ?
what 's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are tweeting , blogging , following you , watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself .
and electronic tattoos also shout .
and as you 're thinking of the consequences of that , it 's getting really hard to hide from this stuff , among other things , because it 's not just the electronic tattoos , it 's facial recognition that 's getting really good .
so you can take a picture with an iphone and get all the names , although , again , sometimes it does make mistakes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but that means you can take a typical bar scene like this , take a picture , say , of this guy right here , get the name , and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody , because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos .
and so there 's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online .
here 's what happened to this company .
-lsb- company sold to facebook , june 18 , 2012 ... -rsb- there are other companies that will place a camera like this - this has nothing to do with facebook - they take your picture , they tie it to the social media , they figure out you really like to wear black dresses , so maybe the person in the store comes up and says , " hey , we 've got five black dresses that would just look great on you . "
so what if andy was wrong ?
here 's andy 's theory .
-lsb- in the future , everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes . -rsb- what if we flip this ?
what if you 're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- well , then , because of electronic tattoos , maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality , because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will .
and if that 's true , then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the greeks and one lesson from a latin american .
why the greeks ?
well , the greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time .
so lesson number one : sisyphus .
remember ? he did a horrible thing , condemned for all time to roll this rock up , it would roll back down , roll back up , roll back down .
it 's a little like your reputation .
once you get that electronic tattoo , you 're going to be rolling up and down for a long time , so as you go through this stuff , just be careful what you post .
myth number two : orpheus , wonderful guy , charming to be around , great partier , great singer , loses his beloved , charms his way into the underworld , only person to charm his way into the underworld , charms the gods of the underworld , they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they 're out .
so he 's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just ca n't resist . he looks at her , loses her forever .
with all this data out here , it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love .
lesson number three : atalanta .
greatest runner . she would challenge anybody .
if you won , she would marry you .
if you lost , you died .
how did hippomenes beat her ?
well , he had all these wonderful little golden apples , and she 'd run ahead , and he 'd roll a little golden apple .
she 'd run ahead , and he 'd roll a little golden apple .
she kept getting distracted . he eventually won the race .
just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message .
and then , of course , there 's narcissus .
nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with narcissus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but as you 're thinking about narcissus , just do n't fall in love with your own reflection .
last lesson , from a latin american : this is the great poet jorge luis borges .
when he was threatened by the thugs of the argentine military junta , he came back and said , " oh , come on , how else can you threaten , other than with death ? "
the interesting thing , the original thing , would be to threaten somebody with immortality .
and that , of course , is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well this is a really extraordinary honor for me .
i spend most of my time in jails , in prisons , on death row .
i spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there 's a great deal of hopelessness .
and being here at ted and seeing the stimulation , hearing it , has been very , very energizing to me .
and one of the things that 's emerged in my short time here is that ted has an identity .
and you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world .
and sometimes when it comes through ted , it has meaning and power that it does n't have when it does n't .
and i mention that because i think identity is really important .
and we 've had some fantastic presentations .
and i think what we 've learned is that , if you 're a teacher your words can be meaningful , but if you 're a compassionate teacher , they can be especially meaningful .
if you 're a doctor you can do some good things , but if you 're a caring doctor you can do some other things .
and so i want to talk about the power of identity .
and i did n't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that i do .
i actually learned about this from my grandmother .
i grew up in a house that was the traditional african-american home that was dominated by a matriarch , and that matriarch was my grandmother .
she was tough , she was strong , she was powerful .
she was the end of every argument in our family .
she was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family .
she was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved .
her parents were born in slavery in virginia in the 1840 's .
she was born in the 1880 's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world .
and my grandmother was tough , but she was also loving .
when i would see her as a little boy , she 'd come up to me and she 'd give me these hugs .
and she 'd squeeze me so tight i could barely breathe and then she 'd let me go .
and an hour or two later , if i saw her , she 'd come over to me and she 'd say , " bryan , do you still feel me hugging you ? "
and if i said , " no , " she 'd assault me again , and if i said , " yes , " she 'd leave me alone .
and she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her .
and the only challenge was that she had 10 children .
my mom was the youngest of her 10 kids .
and sometimes when i would go and spend time with her , it would be difficult to get her time and attention .
my cousins would be running around everywhere .
and i remember , when i was about eight or nine years old , waking up one morning , going into the living room , and all of my cousins were running around .
and my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me .
and at first i thought we were playing a game .
and i would look at her and i 'd smile , but she was very serious .
and after about 15 or 20 minutes of this , she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said , " come on , bryan . you and i are going to have a talk . "
and i remember this just like it happened yesterday .
i never will forget it .
she took me out back and she said , " bryan , i 'm going to tell you something , but you do n't tell anybody what i tell you . "
i said , " okay , mama . "
she said , " now you make sure you do n't do that . " i said , " sure . "
then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said , " i want you to know i 've been watching you . "
and she said , " i think you 're special . "
she said , " i think you can do anything you want to do . "
i will never forget it .
and then she said , " i just need you to promise me three things , bryan . "
i said , " okay , mama . "
she said , " the first thing i want you to promise me is that you 'll always love your mom . "
she said , " that 's my baby girl , and you have to promise me now you 'll always take care of her . "
well i adored my mom , so i said , " yes , mama . i 'll do that . "
then she said , " the second thing i want you to promise me is that you 'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing . "
and i thought about it and i said , " yes , mama . i 'll do that . "
then finally she said , " the third thing i want you to promise me is that you 'll never drink alcohol . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well i was nine years old , so i said , " yes , mama . i 'll do that . "
i grew up in the country in the rural south , and i have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger .
when i was about 14 or 15 , one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer - i do n't know where he got it - and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods .
and we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did .
and he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some , and they offered it to me .
i said , " no , no , no . that 's okay . you all go ahead . i 'm not going to have any beer . "
my brother said , " come on . we 're doing this today ; you always do what we do .
i had some , your sister had some . have some beer . "
i said , " no , i do n't feel right about that . y 'all go ahead . y 'all go ahead . "
and then my brother started staring at me .
he said , " what 's wrong with you ? have some beer . "
then he looked at me real hard and he said , " oh , i hope you 're not still hung up on that conversation mama had with you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " well , what are you talking about ? "
he said , " oh , mama tells all the grandkids that they 're special . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was devastated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm going to admit something to you .
i 'm going to tell you something i probably should n't .
i know this might be broadcast broadly .
but i 'm 52 years old , and i 'm going to admit to you that i 've never had a drop of alcohol .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do n't say that because i think that 's virtuous ; i say that because there is power in identity .
when we create the right kind of identity , we can say things to the world around us that they do n't actually believe makes sense .
we can get them to do things that they do n't think they can do .
when i thought about my grandmother , of course she would think all her grandkids were special .
my grandfather was in prison during prohibition .
my male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases .
and these were the things she thought we needed to commit to .
well i 've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system .
this country is very different today than it was 40 years ago .
in 1972 , there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons .
today , there are 2.3 million .
the united states now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world .
we have seven million people on probation and parole .
and mass incarceration , in my judgment , has fundamentally changed our world .
in poor communities , in communities of color there is this despair , there is this hopelessness , that is being shaped by these outcomes .
one out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail , in prison , on probation or parole .
in urban communities across this country - los angeles , philadelphia , baltimore , washington - 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole .
our system is n't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race , they 're also distorted by poverty .
we have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you 're rich and guilty than if you 're poor and innocent .
wealth , not culpability , shapes outcomes .
and yet , we seem to be very comfortable .
the politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems .
we 've been disconnected .
it 's interesting to me .
we 're looking at some very interesting developments in our work .
my state of alabama , like a number of states , actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction .
right now in alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote .
we 're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it 's been since prior to the passage of the voting rights act .
and there is this stunning silence .
i represent children .
a lot of my clients are very young .
the united states is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison .
we have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country .
and we 're actually doing some litigation .
the only country in the world .
i represent people on death row .
it 's interesting , this question of the death penalty .
in many ways , we 've been taught to think that the real question is , do people deserve to die for the crimes they 've committed ?
and that 's a very sensible question .
but there 's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity .
the other way of thinking about it is not , do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit , but do we deserve to kill ?
i mean , it 's fascinating .
death penalty in america is defined by error .
for every nine people who have been executed , we 've actually identified one innocent person who 's been exonerated and released from death row .
a kind of astonishing error rate - one out of nine people innocent .
i mean , it 's fascinating .
in aviation , we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash .
but somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem .
it 's not our problem .
it 's not our burden .
it 's not our struggle .
i talk a lot about these issues .
i talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill .
and it 's interesting , when i teach my students about african-american history , i tell them about slavery .
i tell them about terrorism , the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to world war ii .
we do n't really know very much about it .
but for african-americans in this country , that was an era defined by terror .
in many communities , people had to worry about being lynched .
they had to worry about being bombed .
it was the threat of terror that shaped their lives .
and these older people come up to me now and they say , " mr. stevenson , you give talks , you make speeches , you tell people to stop saying we 're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation 's history after 9/11 . "
they tell me to say , " no , tell them that we grew up with that . "
and that era of terrorism , of course , was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid .
and yet , we have in this country this dynamic where we really do n't like to talk about our problems .
we do n't like to talk about our history .
and because of that , we really have n't understood what it 's meant to do the things we 've done historically .
we 're constantly running into each other .
we 're constantly creating tensions and conflicts .
we have a hard time talking about race , and i believe it 's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation .
in south africa , people understood that we could n't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation .
in rwanda , even after the genocide , there was this commitment , but in this country we have n't done that .
i was giving some lectures in germany about the death penalty .
it was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said , " well you know it 's deeply troubling to hear what you 're talking about . "
he said , " we do n't have the death penalty in germany .
and of course , we can never have the death penalty in germany . "
and the room got very quiet , and this woman said , " there 's no way , with our history , we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings .
it would be unconscionable for us to , in an intentional and deliberate way , set about executing people . "
and i thought about that .
what would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of germany was executing people , especially if they were disproportionately jewish ?
i could n't bear it .
it would be unconscionable .
and yet , in this country , in the states of the old south , we execute people - where you 're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black , 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white - in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched .
and yet , there is this disconnect .
well i believe that our identity is at risk .
that when we actually do n't care about these difficult things , the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated .
we love innovation .
we love technology . we love creativity .
we love entertainment .
but ultimately , those realities are shadowed by suffering , abuse , degradation , marginalization .
and for me , it becomes necessary to integrate the two .
because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful , more committed , more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world .
and for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor , the disadvantaged , those who will never get to ted .
but thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives .
you know ultimately , we all have to believe things we have n't seen .
we do . as rational as we are , as committed to intellect as we are .
innovation , creativity , development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone .
they come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart .
and it 's that mind-heart connection that i believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things , but also the dark and difficult things .
vaclav havel , the great czech leader , talked about this .
he said , " when we were in eastern europe and dealing with oppression , we wanted all kinds of things , but mostly what we needed was hope , an orientation of the spirit , a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness . "
well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what i believe even ted communities have to be engaged in .
there is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering , to poverty , to exclusion , to unfairness , to injustice .
now i will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that do n't pay attention to this .
it will get to you .
i had the great privilege , when i was a young lawyer , of meeting rosa parks .
and ms. parks used to come back to montgomery every now and then , and she would get together with two of her dearest friends , these older women , johnnie carr who was the organizer of the montgomery bus boycott - amazing african-american woman - and virginia durr , a white woman , whose husband , clifford durr , represented dr. king .
and these women would get together and just talk .
and every now and then ms. carr would call me , and she 'd say , " bryan , ms. parks is coming to town . we 're going to get together and talk .
do you want to come over and listen ? "
and i 'd say , " yes , ma 'am , i do . "
and she 'd say , " well what are you going to do when you get here ? "
i said , " i 'm going to listen . "
and i 'd go over there and i would , i would just listen .
it would be so energizing and so empowering .
and one time i was over there listening to these women talk , and after a couple of hours ms. parks turned to me and she said , " now bryan , tell me what the equal justice initiative is .
tell me what you 're trying to do . "
and i began giving her my rap .
i said , " well we 're trying to challenge injustice .
we 're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted .
we 're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice .
we 're trying to end life without parole sentences for children .
we 're trying to do something about the death penalty .
we 're trying to reduce the prison population .
we 're trying to end mass incarceration . "
i gave her my whole rap , and when i finished she looked at me and she said , " mmm mmm mmm . "
she said , " that 's going to make you tired , tired , tired . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's when ms. carr leaned forward , she put her finger in my face , she said , " that 's why you 've got to be brave , brave , brave . "
and i actually believe that the ted community needs to be more courageous .
we need to find ways to embrace these challenges , these problems , the suffering .
because ultimately , our humanity depends on everyone 's humanity .
i 've learned very simple things doing the work that i do .
it 's just taught me very simple things .
that each of us is more than the worst thing we 've ever done .
i believe that for every person on the planet .
i think if somebody tells a lie , they 're not just a liar .
i think if somebody takes something that does n't belong to them , they 're not just a thief .
i think even if you kill someone , you 're not just a killer .
and because of that there 's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law .
i also believe that in many parts of this country , and certainly in many parts of this globe , that the opposite of poverty is not wealth .
i do n't believe that .
i actually think , in too many places , the opposite of poverty is justice .
and finally , i believe that , despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating , we will ultimately not be judged by our technology , we wo n't be judged by our design , we wo n't be judged by our intellect and reason .
ultimately , you judge the character of a society , not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged , but by how they treat the poor , the condemned , the incarcerated .
because it 's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are .
i sometimes get out of balance . i 'll end with this story .
i sometimes push too hard .
i do get tired , as we all do .
sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important .
and i 've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences .
and i go to the jail and i see my client who 's 13 and 14 , and he 's been certified to stand trial as an adult .
i start thinking , well , how did that happen ?
how can a judge turn you into something that you 're not ?
and the judge has certified him as an adult , but i see this kid .
and i was up too late one night and i starting thinking , well gosh , if the judge can turn you into something that you 're not , the judge must have magic power .
yeah , bryan , the judge has some magic power .
you should ask for some of that .
and because i was up too late , was n't thinking real straight , i started working on a motion .
and i had a client who was 14 years old , a young , poor black kid .
and i started working on this motion , and the head of the motion was : " motion to try my poor , 14-year-old black male client like a privileged , white 75-year-old corporate executive . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct .
there was a crazy line in there about how there 's no conduct in this county , it 's all misconduct .
and the next morning , i woke up and i thought , now did i dream that crazy motion , or did i actually write it ?
and to my horror , not only had i written it , but i had sent it to court .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a couple months went by , and i had just forgotten all about it .
and i finally decided , oh gosh , i 've got to go to the court and do this crazy case .
and i got into my car and i was feeling really overwhelmed - overwhelmed .
and i got in my car and i went to this courthouse .
and i was thinking , this is going to be so difficult , so painful .
and i finally got out of the car and i started walking up to the courthouse .
and as i was walking up the steps of this courthouse , there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse .
when this man saw me , he came over to me and he said , " who are you ? "
i said , " i 'm a lawyer . " he said , " you 're a lawyer ? " i said , " yes , sir . "
and this man came over to me and he hugged me .
and he whispered in my ear .
he said , " i 'm so proud of you . "
and i have to tell you , it was energizing .
it connected deeply with something in me about identity , about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community , to a perspective that is hopeful .
well i went into the courtroom .
and as soon as i walked inside , the judge saw me coming in .
he said , " mr. stevenson , did you write this crazy motion ? "
i said , " yes , sir . i did . " and we started arguing .
and people started coming in because they were just outraged .
i had written these crazy things .
and police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers .
and before i knew it , the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race , that we were talking about poverty , that we were talking about inequality .
and out of the corner of my eye , i could see this janitor pacing back and forth .
and he kept looking through the window , and he could hear all of this holler .
he kept pacing back and forth .
and finally , this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me , almost at counsel table .
about 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break .
and during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court .
and this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man .
he said , " jimmy , what are you doing in this courtroom ? "
and this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said , " i came into this courtroom to tell this young man , keep your eyes on the prize , hold on . "
i 've come to ted because i believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long , but it bends toward justice .
that we can not be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity .
that all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone .
that our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity , compassion and justice .
and more than anything , for those of you who share that , i 've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize , hold on .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience , this community , to help you on your way and to do something on this issue .
other than writing a check , what could we do ?
bs : well there are opportunities all around us .
if you live in the state of california , for example , there 's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there 's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment .
for example , here in california we 're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years - one billion dollars .
and yet , 46 percent of all homicide cases do n't result in arrest .
56 percent of all rape cases do n't result .
so there 's an opportunity to change that .
and this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety .
and i think that opportunity exists all around us .
ca : there 's been this huge decline in crime in america over the last three decades .
and part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it 's about increased incarceration rates .
what would you say to someone who believed that ?
bs : well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable .
the great increase in mass incarceration in this country was n't really in violent crime categories .
it was this misguided war on drugs .
that 's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population .
and we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment .
and so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle , for low-level property crimes , rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized .
i believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime , not do less .
and i think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one .
and i think that 's the orientation that we have to change .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : bryan , you 've struck a massive chord here .
you 're an inspiring person .
thank you so much for coming to ted . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's pretend right here we have a machine .
a big machine , a cool , ted-ish machine , and it 's a time machine .
and everyone in this room has to get into it .
and you can go backwards , you can go forwards ; you can not stay where you are .
and i wonder what you 'd choose , because i 've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back .
i do n't know . they want to go back before there were automobiles or twitter or " american idol . "
i do n't know .
i 'm convinced that there 's some sort of pull to nostalgia , to wishful thinking .
and i understand that .
i 'm not part of that crowd , i have to say .
i do n't want to go back , and it 's not because i 'm adventurous .
it 's because possibilities on this planet , they do n't go back , they go forward .
so i want to get in the machine , and i want to go forward .
this is the greatest time there 's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose : health , wealth , mobility , opportunity , declining rates of disease ...
there 's never been a time like this .
my great-grandparents died , all of them , by the time they were 60 .
my grandparents pushed that number to 70 .
my parents are closing in on 80 .
so there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number .
but it 's not even about people like us , because this is a bigger deal than that .
a kid born in new delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago .
think about that , it 's an incredible fact .
and why is it true ?
smallpox . smallpox killed billions of people on this planet .
it reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has .
it 's gone . it 's vanished .
we vanquished it . puff .
in the rich world , diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist , hardly .
diphtheria , rubella , polio ...
does anyone even know what those things are ?
vaccines , modern medicine , our ability to feed billions of people , those are triumphs of the scientific method .
and to my mind , the scientific method - trying stuff out , seeing if it works , changing it when it does n't - is one of the great accomplishments of humanity .
so that 's the good news .
unfortunately , that 's all the good news because there are some other problems , and they 've been mentioned many times .
and one of them is that despite all our accomplishments , a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day .
that number 's rising , and it 's rising really rapidly , and it 's disgraceful .
and not only that , we 've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe .
potable water , arable land , rainforests , oil , gas : they 're going away , and they 're going away soon , and unless we innovate our way out of this mess , we 're going away too .
so the question is : can we do that ? and i think we can .
i think it 's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on .
i think we can power this world with energy that does n't also destroy it .
i really do believe that , and , no , it ai n't wishful thinking .
but here 's the thing that keeps me up at night - one of the things that keeps me up at night : we 've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now . never .
and we 've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today .
we 're on the verge of amazing , amazing events in many fields , and yet i actually think we 'd have to go back hundreds , 300 years , before the enlightenment , to find a time when we battled progress , when we fought about these things more vigorously , on more fronts , than we do now .
people wrap themselves in their beliefs , and they do it so tightly that you ca n't set them free .
not even the truth will set them free .
and , listen , everyone 's entitled to their opinion ; they 're even entitled to their opinion about progress .
but you know what you 're not entitled to ?
you 're not entitled to your own facts . sorry , you 're not .
and this took me awhile to figure out .
about a decade ago , i wrote a story about vaccines for the new yorker . a little story .
and i was amazed to find opposition : opposition to what is , after all , the most effective public health measure in human history .
i did n't know what to do , so i just did what i do : i wrote a story and i moved on .
and soon after that , i wrote a story about genetically engineered food .
same thing , only bigger .
people were going crazy .
so i wrote a story about that too , and i could n't understand why people thought this was " frankenfoods , " why they thought moving molecules around in a specific , rather than a haphazard way , was trespassing on nature 's ground .
but , you know , i do what i do . i wrote the story , i moved on .
i mean , i 'm a journalist .
we type , we file , we go to dinner . it 's fine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but these stories bothered me , and i could n't figure out why , and eventually i did .
and that 's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy were n't actually fanatics at all .
they were thoughtful people , educated people , decent people .
they were exactly like the people in this room .
and it just disturbed me so much .
but then i thought , you know , let 's be honest .
we 're at a point in this world where we do n't have the same relationship to progress that we used to .
we talk about it ambivalently .
we talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it : " progress . "
okay , there are reasons for that , and i think we know what those reasons are .
we 've lost faith in institutions , in authority , and sometimes in science itself , and there 's no reason we should n't have .
you can just say a few names and people will understand .
chernobyl , bhopal , the challenger , vioxx , weapons of mass destruction , hanging chads .
you know , you can choose your list .
there are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right , so be skeptical .
ask questions , demand proof , demand evidence .
do n't take anything for granted .
but here 's the thing : when you get proof , you need to accept the proof , and we 're not that good at doing that .
and the reason that i can say that is because we 're now in an epidemic of fear like one i 've never seen and hope never to see again .
about 12 years ago , there was a story published , a horrible story , that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles , mumps and rubella vaccine shot .
very scary .
tons of studies were done to see if this was true .
tons of studies should have been done ; it 's a serious issue .
the data came back .
the data came back from the united states , from england , from sweden , from canada , and it was all the same : no correlation , no connection , none at all .
it does n't matter . it does n't matter because we believe anecdotes , we believe what we see , what we think we see , what makes us feel real .
we do n't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data , and i do understand that , i think we all do .
but you know what ?
the result of that has been disastrous .
disastrous because here 's a fact : the united states is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down .
that is disgraceful , and we should be ashamed of ourselves .
it 's horrible .
what kind of a thing happened that we could do that ?
now , i understand it . i do understand it .
because , did anyone have measles here ?
has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles ?
does n't happen very much .
does n't happen in this country at all , but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year .
that 's a lot of death of measles - 20 an hour .
but since it did n't happen here , we can put it out of our minds , and people like jenny mccarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like " oprah " and " larry king live . "
and they can do it because they do n't link causation and correlation .
they do n't understand that these things seem the same , but they 're almost never the same .
and it 's something we need to learn , and we need to learn it really soon .
this guy was a hero , jonas salk .
he took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us .
no fear , no agony . polio - puff , gone .
that guy in the middle , not so much .
his name is paul offit .
he just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people .
it 'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year .
pretty good , right ?
well , it 's good , except that paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining .
and he actually says it that way .
so , paul 's a terrorist .
when paul speaks in a public hearing , he ca n't testify without armed guards .
he gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school .
and why ? because paul made a vaccine .
i do n't need to say this , but vaccines are essential .
you take them away , disease comes back , horrible diseases . and that 's happening .
we have measles in this country now .
and it 's getting worse , and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it 's just a numbers game .
and they 're not just going to die of measles .
what about polio ? let 's have that . why not ?
a college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought i was a little strident .
no one 's ever said that before .
she was n't going to vaccinate her kid against polio , no way .
fine .
why ? because we do n't have polio . and you know what ?
we did n't have polio in this country yesterday .
today , i do n't know , maybe a guy got on a plane in lagos this morning , and he 's flying to lax , right now he 's over ohio .
and he 's going to land in a couple of hours , he 's going to rent a car , and he 's going to come to long beach , and he 's going to attend one of these fabulous ted dinners tonight .
and he does n't know that he 's infected with a paralytic disease , and we do n't either because that 's the way the world works .
that 's the planet we live on . do n't pretend it is n't .
now , we love to wrap ourselves in lies . we love to do it .
everyone take their vitamins this morning ?
echinacea , a little antioxidant to get you going .
i know you did because half of americans do every day .
they take the stuff , and they take alternative medicines , and it does n't matter how often we find out that they 're useless .
the data says it all the time .
they darken your urine . they almost never do more than that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's okay , you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine ?
i 'm totally with you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dark urine . dark .
why do we do that ? why do we do that ?
well , i think i understand , we hate big pharma .
we hate big government . we do n't trust the man .
and we should n't : our health care system sucks .
it 's cruel to millions of people .
it 's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it .
so we run away from it , and where do we run ?
we leap into the arms of big placebo .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's fantastic . i love big placebo .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but , you know , it 's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap , and we spend billions of dollars on it .
and i have all sorts of little props here .
none of it ... ginkgo , fraud ; echinacea , fraud ; acai - i do n't even know what that is but we 're spending billions of dollars on it - it 's fraud .
and you know what ? when i say this stuff , people scream at me , and they say , " what do you care ? let people do what they want to do .
it makes them feel good . "
and you know what ? you 're wrong .
because i do n't care if it 's the secretary of hhs who 's saying , " hmm , i 'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms , " or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas .
when you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science , you end up in a place you do n't want to be .
you end up in thabo mbeki south africa .
he killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot , garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of aids .
hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease .
please , do n't tell me there are no consequences to these things .
there are . there always are .
now , the most mindless epidemic we 're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite .
it 's an idiotic debate . it has to stop .
it 's a debate about words , about metaphors .
it 's ideology , it 's not science .
every single thing we eat , every grain of rice , every sprig of parsley , every brussels sprout has been modified by man .
you know , there were n't tangerines in the garden of eden .
there was n't any cantaloupe . -lrb- laughter -rrb- there were n't christmas trees . we made it all .
we made it over the last 11,000 years .
and some of it worked , and some of it did n't .
we got rid of the stuff that did n't .
now we can do it in a more precise way - and there are risks , absolutely - but we can put something like vitamin a into rice , and that stuff can help millions of people , millions of people , prolong their lives .
you do n't want to do that ?
i have to say , i do n't understand it .
we object to genetically engineered food .
why do we do that ?
well , the things i constantly hear are : too many chemicals , pesticides , hormones , monoculture , we do n't want giant fields of the same thing , that 's wrong .
we do n't companies patenting life .
we do n't want companies owning seeds .
and you know what my response to all of that is ?
yes , you 're right . let 's fix it .
it 's true , we 've got a huge food problem , but this is n't science .
this has nothing to do with science .
it 's law , it 's morality , it 's patent stuff .
you know science is n't a company .
it 's not a country .
it 's not even an idea ; it 's a process .
it 's a process , and sometimes it works and sometimes it does n't , but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we 're afraid , is really very deadening , and it 's preventing millions of people from prospering .
you know , in the next 50 years we 're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now , 70 percent .
this investment in africa over the last 30 years .
disgraceful . disgraceful .
they need it , and we 're not giving it to them .
and why ? genetically engineered food .
we do n't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff , like cassava for instance .
cassava 's something that half a billion people eat .
it 's kind of like a potato .
it 's just a bunch of calories . it sucks .
it does n't have nutrients , it does n't have protein , and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now .
and then people would be able to eat it and they 'd be able to not go blind .
they would n't starve , and you know what ?
that would be nice . it would n't be chez panisse , but it would be nice .
and all i can say about this is : why are we fighting it ?
i mean , let 's ask ourselves : why are we fighting it ?
because we do n't want to move genes around ?
this is about moving genes around . it 's not about chemicals .
it 's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones , our insistence on having bigger food , better food , singular food .
this is n't about rice krispies , this is about keeping people alive , and it 's about time we started to understand what that meant .
because , you know something ?
if we do n't , if we continue to act the way we 're acting , we 're guilty of something that i do n't think we want to be guilty of : high-tech colonialism .
there 's no other way to describe what 's going on here .
it 's selfish , it 's ugly , it 's beneath us , and we really have to stop it .
so after this amazingly fun conversation , -lrb- laughter -rrb- you might want to say , " so , you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward ? "
absolutely . absolutely , i do .
it 's stuck in the present right now , but we have an amazing opportunity .
we can set that time machine on anything we want .
we can move it where we want to move it , and we 're going to move it where we want to move it .
we have to have these conversations and we have to think , but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead , we 're going to be happy we do .
i know that we can , and as far as i 'm concerned , that 's something the world needs right now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
thank you .
if nothing else , at least i 've discovered what it is we put our speakers through : sweaty palms , sleepless nights , a wholly unnatural fear of clocks .
i mean , it 's quite brutal .
and i 'm also a little nervous about this .
there are nine billion humans coming our way .
now , the most optimistic dreams can get dented by the prospect of people plundering the planet .
but recently , i 've become intrigued by a different way of thinking of large human crowds , because there are circumstances where they can do something really cool .
it 's a phenomenon that i think any organization or individual can tap into .
it certainly impacted the way we think about ted 's future , and perhaps the world 's future overall .
so , let 's explore .
the story starts with just a single person , a child , behaving a little strangely .
this kid is known online as lil demon .
he 's doing tricks here , dance tricks , that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before .
how did he learn them ?
and what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice this must have taken ?
here 's a clue .
-lrb- video -rrb- lil demon : ♫ step your game up . oh . oh . ♫ ♫ step your game up . oh . oh . ♫ chris anderson : so , that was sent to me by this man , a filmmaker , jonathan chu , who told me that was the moment he realized the internet was causing dance to evolve .
this is what he said at ted in february .
in essence , dancers were challenging each other online to get better ; incredible new dance skills were being invented ; even the six-year-olds were joining in .
it felt like a revolution .
and so jon had a brilliant idea : he went out to recruit the best of the best dancers off of youtube to create this dance troupe - the league of extraordinary dancers , the lxd .
i mean , these kids were web-taught , but they were so good that they got to play at the oscars this year .
and at ted here in february , their passion and brilliance just took our breath away .
so , this story of the evolution of dance seems strangely familiar .
you know , a while after tedtalks started taking off , we noticed that speakers were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation .
it was resulting in incredible new talks like these two .
... months of preparation crammed into 18 minutes , raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers , with the effects that we 've seen this week .
it 's not as if j.j. and jill actually ended their talks saying , " step your game up , " but they might as well have .
so , in both of these cases , you 've got these cycles of improvement , apparently driven by people watching web video .
what is going on here ?
well , i think it 's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call " crowd-accelerated innovation . "
and there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear .
you can think of them as three dials on a giant wheel .
you turn up the dials , the wheel starts to turn .
and the first thing you need is ... a crowd , a group of people who share a common interest .
the bigger the crowd , the more potential innovators there are .
that 's important , but actually most people in the crowd occupy these other roles .
they 're creating the ecosystem from which innovation emerges .
the second thing you need is light .
you need clear , open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of , because that is how you will learn how you will be empowered to participate .
and third , you need desire .
you know , innovation 's hard work .
it 's based on hundreds of hours of research , of practice .
absent desire , not going to happen .
now , here 's an example - pre-internet - of this machine in action .
dancers at a street corner - it 's a crowd , a small one , but they can all obviously see what each other can do .
and the desire part comes , i guess , from social status , right ?
best dancer walks tall , gets the best date .
there 's probably going to be some innovation happening here .
but on the web , all three dials are ratcheted right up .
the dance community is now global .
there 's millions connected .
and amazingly , you can still see what the best can do , because the crowd itself shines a light on them , either directly , through comments , ratings , email , facebook , twitter , or indirectly , through numbers of views , through links that point google there .
so , it 's easy to find the good stuff , and when you 've found it , you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it .
that 's a lot of light .
but the desire element is really dialed way up .
i mean , you might just be a kid with a webcam , but if you can do something that goes viral , you get to be seen by the equivalent of sports stadiums crammed with people .
you get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you .
and even if it 's not that eloquent - and it 's not - it can still really make your day .
so , this possibility of a new type of global recognition , i think , is driving huge amounts of effort .
and it 's important to note that it 's not just the stars who are benefiting : because you can see the best , everyone can learn .
also , the system is self-fueling .
it 's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire , but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination that attract new people to the crowd .
so , this is a model that pretty much any organization could use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation .
invite the crowd , let in the light , dial up the desire .
and the hardest part about that is probably the light , because it means you have to open up , you have to show your stuff to the world .
it 's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret that maybe millions of people are empowered to help improve it .
and , very happily , there 's one class of people who really ca n't make use of this tool .
the dark side of the web is allergic to the light .
i do n't think we 're going to see terrorists , for example , publishing their plans online and saying to the world , " please , could you help us to actually make them work this time ? "
but you can publish your stuff online .
and if you can get that wheel to turn , look out .
so , at ted , we 've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness .
in fact , my colleague , june cohen , has taken to calling it " radical openness , " because it works for us each time .
we opened up our talks to the world , and suddenly there are millions of people out there helping spread our speakers ' ideas , and thereby making it easier for us to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers .
by opening up our translation program , thousands of heroic volunteers - some of them watching online right now , and thank you ! - have translated our talks into more than 70 languages , thereby tripling our viewership in non-english-speaking countries .
by giving away our tedx brand , we suddenly have a thousand-plus live experiments in the art of spreading ideas .
and these organizers , they 're seeing each other , they 're learning from each other .
we are learning from them .
we 're getting great talks back from them .
the wheel is turning .
okay , step back a minute .
i mean , it 's really not news for me to tell you that innovation emerges out of groups .
you know , we 've heard that this week - this romantic notion of the lone genius with the " eureka ! " moment that changes the world is misleading .
even he said that , and he would know .
we 're a social species .
we spark off each other .
it 's also not news to say that the internet has accelerated innovation .
for the past 15 years , powerful communities have been connecting online , sparking off each other .
if you take programmers , you know , the whole open-source movement is a fantastic instance of crowd-accelerated innovation .
but what 's key here is , the reason these groups have been able to connect is because their work output is of the type that can be easily shared digitally - a picture , a music file , software .
and that 's why what i 'm excited about , and what i think is under-reported , is the significance of the rise of online video .
this is the technology that 's going to allow the rest of the world 's talents to be shared digitally , thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation .
the first few years of the web were pretty much video-free , for this reason : video files are huge ; the web could n't handle them .
but in the last 10 years , bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold .
suddenly , here we are .
humanity watches 80 million hours of youtube every day .
cisco actually estimates that , within four years , more than 90 percent of the web 's data will be video .
if it 's all puppies , porn and piracy , we 're doomed .
i do n't think it will be .
video is high-bandwidth for a reason .
it packs a huge amount of data , and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it .
here , let me introduce you to sam haber .
he 's a unicyclist .
before youtube , there was no way for him to discover his sport 's true potential , because you ca n't communicate this stuff in words , right ?
but looking at video clips posted by strangers , a world of possibility opens up for him .
suddenly , he starts to emulate and then to innovate .
and a global community of unicyclists discover each other online , inspire each other to greatness .
and there are thousands of other examples of this happening - of video-driven evolution of skills , ranging from the physical to the artful .
and i have to tell you , as a former publisher of hobbyist magazines , i find this strangely beautiful .
i mean , there 's a lot of passion right here on this screen .
but if rube goldberg machines and video poetry are n't quite your cup of tea , how about this .
jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video .
there 's a problem with a traditional scientific paper .
it can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print .
here 's one such frustrated scientist , moshe pritsker , the founder of jove .
he told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this .
but look at this video .
i mean , look : if you can show instead of just describing , that problem goes away .
so it 's not far-fetched to say that , at some point , online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance .
here 's another example that 's close to our hearts at ted , where video is sometimes more powerful than print - the sharing of an idea .
why do people like watching tedtalks ?
all those ideas are already out there in print .
it 's actually faster to read than to view .
why would someone bother ?
well , so , there 's some showing as well as telling .
but even leaving the screen out of it , there 's still a lot more being transferred than just words .
and in that non-verbal portion , there 's some serious magic .
somewhere hidden in the physical gestures , the vocal cadence , the facial expressions , the eye contact , the passion , the kind of awkward , british body language , the sense of how the audience are reacting , there are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand , and whether you 're inspired - light , if you like , and desire .
incredibly , all of this can be communicated on just a few square inches of a screen .
reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions .
face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution .
that 's what 's made it into this mysterious , powerful thing it is .
someone speaks , there 's resonance in all these receiving brains , the whole group acts together .
i mean , this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action .
it 's probably driven our culture for millennia .
500 years ago , it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage .
it 's right here .
print scaled .
the world 's ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide , and so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine .
but now , in the blink of an eye , the game has changed again .
it 's not too much to say that what gutenberg did for writing , online video can now do for face-to-face communication .
so , that primal medium , which your brain is exquisitely wired for ...
that just went global .
now , this is big .
we may have to reinvent an ancient art form .
i mean , today , one person speaking can be seen by millions , shedding bright light on potent ideas , creating intense desire for learning and to respond - and in his case , intense desire to laugh .
for the first time in human history , talented students do n't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers .
they can sit two feet in front of the world 's finest .
now , ted is just a small part of this .
i mean , the world 's universities are opening up their curricula .
thousands of individuals and organizations are sharing their knowledge and data online .
thousands of people are figuring out new ways to learn and , crucially , to respond , completing the cycle .
and so , as we 've thought about this , you know , it 's become clear to us what the next stage of ted 's evolution has to be .
tedtalks ca n't be a one-way process , one-to-many .
our future is many-to-many .
so , we 're dreaming of ways to make it easier for you , the global ted community , to respond to speakers , to contribute your own ideas , maybe even your own tedtalks , and to help shine a light on the very best of what 's out there .
because , if we can bubble up the very best from a vastly larger pool , this wheel turns .
now , is it possible to imagine a similar process to this , happening to global education overall ?
i mean , does it have to be this painful , top-down process ?
why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate ?
it 's the participation age , right ?
schools ca n't be silos .
we ca n't stop learning at age 21 .
what if , in the coming crowd of nine billion ...
what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors , instead of net plunderers ?
that changes everything , right ?
i mean , that would take more teachers than we 've ever had .
but the good news is they are out there .
they 're in the crowd , and the crowd is switching on lights , and we can see them for the first time , not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers , but as individuals we can learn from .
who 's the teacher ?
you 're the teacher .
you 're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history , a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter , wiser , more beautiful place .
here 's a group of kids in a village in pakistan near where i grew up .
within five years , each of these kids is going to have access to a cellphone capable of full-on web video and capable of uploading video to the web .
i mean , is it crazy to think that this girl , in the back , at the right , in 15 years , might be sharing the idea that keeps the world beautiful for your grandchildren ?
it 's not crazy ; it 's actually happening right now .
i want to introduce you to a good friend of ted who just happens to live in africa 's biggest shantytown .
-lrb- video -rrb- christopher makau : hi . my name is christopher makau .
i 'm one of the organizers of tedxkibera .
there are so many good things which are happening right here in kibera .
there 's a self-help group .
they turned a trash place into a garden .
the same spot , it was a crime spot where people were being robbed .
they used the same trash to form green manure .
the same trash site is feeding more than 30 families .
we have our own film school .
they are using flip cameras to record , edit , and reporting to their own channel , kibera tv .
because of a scarcity of land , we are using the sacks to grow vegetables , and also -lsb- we 're -rsb- able to save on the cost of living .
change happens when we see things in a different way .
today , i see kibera in a different way .
my message to tedglobal and the entire world is : kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : you know what ?
i bet chris has always been an inspiring guy .
what 's new - and it 's huge - is that , for the first time , we get to see him , and he can see us .
right now , chris and kevin and dennis and dickson and their friends are watching us , in nairobi , right now .
guys , we 've learned from you today .
thank you .
and thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my story begins right here actually in rajasthan about two years ago .
i was in the desert , under the starry skies with the sufi singer mukhtiar ali .
and we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient indian epic " the mahabharata . "
so back in the day , when us indians wanted to travel we 'd jump into a chariot and we 'd zoom across the sky .
now we do the same with airplanes .
back then , when arjuna , the great indian warrior prince , when he was thirsty , he 'd take out a bow , he 'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out .
now we do the same with drills and machines .
the conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery .
and this made me really sad .
i found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe .
i was terrified by this idea that i would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me , without tweeting it to my friends .
and it felt like technology should enable magic , not kill it .
when i was a little girl , my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch .
and this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me .
it became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination .
so i felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming .
they stopped us from being inspired .
and so i jumped in , i jumped into this world of technology , to see how i could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it .
i 've been illustrating books since i was 16 .
and so when i saw the ipad , i saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world .
it can know how we 're holding it .
it can know where we are .
it brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch .
storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial .
but what are we doing with it ?
so i 'm actually just going to go in and launch khoya , an interactive app for the ipad .
so it says , " place your fingers upon each light . "
and so - -lrb- music -rrb- it says , " this box belongs to ... " and so i type in my name .
and actually i become a character in the book .
at various points , a little letter drops down to me - and the ipad knows where you live because of gps - which is actually addressed to me .
the child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities .
now i 've been talking a lot about magic .
and i do n't mean wizards and dragons , i mean the kind of childhood magic , those ideas that we all harbored as children .
this idea of fireflies in a jar , for some reason , was always really exciting to me .
and so over here you need to tilt your ipad , take the fireflies out .
and they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book .
another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble .
and so over here , each book and each world becomes a little marble that i drag in to this magical device within the device .
and it opens up a map .
all along , all fantasy books have always had maps , but these maps have been static .
this is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book .
it reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well .
so i 'm just going to enter in .
another thing that 's actually really important to me is creating content that is indian and yet very contemporary .
over here , these are the apsaras .
so we 've all heard about fairies and we 've all heard about nymphs , but how many people outside of india know about their indian counterparts , the apsaras ?
these poor apsaras have been trapped inside indra 's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book .
and so we 're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children .
and a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis .
-lrb- music -rrb- speaking of the environmental crisis , i think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms , glued to their pcs , they have n't been able to get out .
but now with mobile technology , we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology .
one of the interactions in the book is that you 're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside , take out your camera on the ipad and collect pictures of different natural objects .
when i was a child , i had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells .
and somehow kids do n't do that anymore .
so in bringing back this childhood ritual , you need to go out and , in one chapter , take a picture of a flower and then tag it .
in another chapter , you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that .
and what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online .
a child in london puts up a picture of a fox and says , " oh , i saw a fox today . "
a child in india says , " i saw a monkey today . "
and it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you 've actually taken .
in the possibilities of linking together magic , the earth and technology , there are multiple possibilities .
in the next book , we plan on having an interaction where you take your ipad out with the video on and through augmented reality , you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that 's outside your house .
at one point , your screen is filled up with leaves .
and so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book .
we 're moving , we 're all moving here , to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology , and magic and technology can come closer together .
we 're harnessing energy from the sun .
we 're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i think data can actually make us more human .
we 're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we 're living our lives , and it 's enabling us to tell some amazing stories .
recently , a wise media theorist tweeted , " the 19th century culture was defined by the novel , the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema , and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface . "
and i believe this is going to prove true .
our lives are being driven by data , and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories .
so i 'm going to show you a few of the projects that i 've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems .
this is a project called flight patterns .
what you 're looking at is airplane traffic over north america for a 24-hour period .
as you see , everything starts to fade to black , and you see people going to sleep .
followed by that , you see on the west coast planes moving across , the red-eye flights to the east coast .
and you 'll see everybody waking up on the east coast , followed by european flights coming in the upper right-hand corner .
everybody 's moving from the east coast to the west coast .
you see san francisco and los angeles start to make their journeys down to hawaii in the lower left-hand corner .
i think it 's one thing to say there 's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time , and it 's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows .
this is a time-lapse image of that exact same data , but i 've color-coded it by type , so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us .
and i started making these , and i put them into google maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there .
so here we can see the white represents low altitudes , and the blue are higher altitudes .
and you can zoom in . this is taking a look at atlanta .
you can see this is a major shipping airport , and there 's all kinds of activity there .
you can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer .
see again , the diversity .
and you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have .
this is scrolling up the east coast .
you can see some of the chaos that 's happening in new york with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other .
so zooming back out real quick , we see , again , the u.s. - you get florida down in the right-hand corner .
moving across to the west coast , you see san francisco and los angeles - big low-traffic zones across nevada and arizona .
and that 's us down there in l.a. and long beach on the bottom .
i started taking a look as well at different perimeters , because you can choose what you want to pull out from the data .
this is looking at ascending versus descending flights .
and you can see , over time , the ways the airports change .
you see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen .
and you can see , eventually the airport actually flips directions .
so this is another project that i worked on with the sensible cities lab at mit .
this is visualizing international communications .
so it 's how new york communicates with other international cities .
and we set this up as a live globe in the museum of modern art in new york for the design the elastic mind exhibition .
and it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset , so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through at & t 's data and revealing itself .
this is another project i worked on with sensible cities lab and currentcity.org.
and it 's visualizing sms messages being sent in the city of amsterdam .
so you 're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending sms messages from different parts of the city , until we approach new year 's eve , where everybody says , " happy new year ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city .
this is looking at another event . this is called queen 's day .
so again , you get this daily ebb and flow of people sending sms messages from different parts of the city .
and then you 're going to see people start to gather in the center of the city to celebrate the night before , which happens right here .
and then you can see people celebrating the next day .
and you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases .
so now on to something completely different .
some of you may recognize this .
this is baron wolfgang von kempelen 's mechanical chess playing machine .
and it 's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well , except for one thing : it 's not a robot at all .
there 's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player .
this was the inspiration for a web service by amazon called the mechanical turk - named after this guy .
and it 's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people , but really difficult for computers .
so they made this web service and said , " any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people . "
the nerdy side of me thought , " wow , this is amazing .
i can tap into thousands of people 's minds . "
and the other nerdy side of me thought , " this is horrible . this is completely bizarre .
what does this mean for the future of mankind , where we 're all plugged into this borg ? "
i was probably being a little extreme .
but what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we 're working on , and we 're just doing these little labors ?
so i created this drawing tool .
i asked people to draw a sheep facing to the left .
and i said , " i 'll pay you two cents for your contribution . "
and i started collecting sheep .
and i collected a lot , a lot of different sheep .
lots of sheep .
i took the first 10,000 sheep that i collected , and i put them on a website called thesheepmarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep .
you ca n't pick individual sheep , but you can buy a single plate block of stamps as a commodity .
and juxtaposed against this grid , you see actually , by rolling over each individual one , the humanity behind this hugely mechanical process .
i think there 's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil - something we can all relate to , this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing .
i think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid .
kind of amazing what some people did .
so here 's a few statistics from the project .
approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour , which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour .
there were 662 rejected sheep that did n't meet " sheep-like " criteria and were thrown out of the flock .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes .
that gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication .
and there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project , or were unique ip addresses - so about how many people contributed .
but only one of them out of the 7,599 said this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which i was pretty surprised by .
i expected people to be wondering , " why did i draw a sheep ? "
and i think it 's a pretty valid question .
and there 's a lot of reasons why i chose sheep .
sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts , the first to be selectively bred for production traits , the first animal to be cloned .
obviously , we think of sheep as followers .
and there 's this reference to " le petit prince " where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep .
he draws sheep after sheep .
the narrator 's only appeased when he draws a box .
and he says , " it 's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep .
it 's about your own interpretation and doing something different . "
and i like that .
so this is a clip from charlie chaplin 's " modern times . "
it 's showing charlie chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the industrial revolution .
so there were no longer shoe makers , but now there are people slapping soles on people 's shoes .
and the whole idea of one 's relationship to their work changed a lot .
so i thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the mechanical turk with a drawing tool .
this basically allowed - what you see on the left side is the original frame , and on the right side you see that frame as interpreted by 16 people who have no idea what it is they 're doing .
and this was the inspiration for a project that i worked on with my friend takashi kawashima .
we decided to use the mechanical turk for exactly what it was meant for , which is making money .
so we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces , and we fed those into the mechanical turk .
we asked people to draw what it was that they saw .
but here there was no sheep-like criteria .
people , if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face , it actually made it into the bill .
so what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do .
so we took these hundred dollar bills , and we put them on a website called tenthousandscents.com , where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions .
and you can also trade real hundred-dollar bills for fake hundred-dollar bills and make a donation to the hundred dollar laptop project , which is now known as one laptop per child .
this is again showing all the different contributions .
you see some people did beautiful stipple renderings , like this one on top - spent a long time making realistic versions .
and other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces .
here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing , " $ 0.01 ! ! ! really ? "
that 's all i 'm getting paid for this ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the last mechanical turk project i 'm going to talk to you about is called bicycle built for 2000 .
this is a collaboration with my friend daniel massey .
you may recognize these two guys .
this is max mathews and john kelly from bell labs in the ' 60s , where they created the song " daisy bell , " which was the world 's first singing computer .
you may recognize it from " 2001 : a space odyssey . "
when hal 's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song , as a reference to when computers became human .
so we resynthesized this song .
this is what that sounded like .
we broke down all the individual notes in the singing as well as the phonemes in the singing .
daisy bell : ♫ daisy , daisy ... ♫ aaron koblin : and we took all of those individual pieces , and we fed them into another turk request .
this is what it would look like if you went to the site .
you type in your code , but you first test your mic .
you 'd be fed a simple audio clip .
-lrb- honk -rrb- and then you 'd do your best to recreate that with your own voice .
after previewing it and confirming it 's what you submitted , you could submit it into the mechanical turk with no other context .
and this is what we first got back from the very first set of submissions .
recording : ♫ daisy , daisy ♫ ♫ give me your answer do ♫ ♫ i 'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ it ca n't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ i ca n't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ but you 'll look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ ak : so james surowieki has this idea of the wisdom of crowds , that says that a whole bunch of people are smarter than any individual .
we wanted to see how this applies to collaborative , distributed music making , where nobody has any idea what it is they 're working on .
so if you go to the bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together .
i 'm sorry for this .
-lrb- noise -rrb- chorus : ♫ daisy , daisy ♫ ♫ give me your answer do ♫ ♫ i 'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ it ca n't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ i ca n't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ but you 'd look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ ak : so stepping back for a quick second , when i was at ucla going to grad school , i was also working at a place called the center for embedded network sensing .
and i was writing software to visualize laser scanners .
so basically motion through 3d space .
and this was seen by a director in l.a. named james frost who said , " wait a minute .
you mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video ? "
so we did exactly that .
we made a music video for one of my favorite bands , radiohead .
and i think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers , but we also open sourced it , and we made it released as a google code project , where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it .
and people were making some amazing things .
this is actually two of my favorites : the pin-board thom yorke and a lego thom yorke .
a whole youtube channel of people submitting really interesting content .
more recently , somebody even 3d-printed thom yorke 's head , which is a little creepy , but pretty cool .
so with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on , i was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something .
and i met a music video director named chris milk .
and we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project .
but we knew we really needed the right person to kind of rally behind and build something for .
so we put the idea on the back burner for a few months .
and he ended up talking to rick rubin , who was finishing up johnny cash 's final album called " ai n't no grave . "
the lyrics to the leading track are " ai n't no grave can hold my body down . "
so we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for johnny cash .
so i teamed up with my good friend ricardo cabello , also known as mr. doob , who 's a much better programmer than i am , and he made this amazing flash drawing tool .
as you know , an animation is a series of images .
so what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of johnny cash , and at eight frames a second , we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video .
so i do n't have time to play the entire thing for you , but i want to show you two short clips .
one is the beginning of the music video .
and that 's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- johnny cash : ♫ there ai n't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body down ♫ ♫ there ai n't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold body down ♫ ♫ when i hear the trumpet sound ♫ ♫ i 'm going to ride right out of the ground ♫ ♫ ai n't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body ... ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- ak : what better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs .
collaborator : i felt really sad when he died .
and i just thought it 'd be wonderful , it 'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory .
collaborator two : it really allows this last recording of his to be a living , breathing memorial .
collaborator three : for all of the frames to be drawn by fans , each individual frame , it 's got a very powerful feeling to it .
collaborator four : i 've seen everybody from japan , venezuela , to the states , to knoxville , tennessee .
collaborator five : as much as is different from frame to frame , it really is personal .
collaborator six : watching the video in my room , i could see me not understanding at the beginning of it .
and i just worked and worked through problems , until my little wee battles that i was fighting within the picture all began to resolve themselves .
you can actually see the point when i know what i 'm doing , and a lot of light and dark comes into it .
and in a weird way , that 's what i actually like about johnny cash 's music as well .
it 's the sum total of his life , all the things that had happened - the bad things , the good things .
you 're hearing a person 's life .
ak : so if you go to the website johnnycashproject.com , what you 'll see is the video playing above .
and below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project .
so this is n't finished at all , but it 's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate .
if you roll over any one of those individual thumbnails , you can see the person who drew that individual thumbnail and where they were located .
and if you find one that you 're interested in , you can actually click on it and open up an information panel where you 're able to rate that frame , which helps it bubble up to the top .
and you can also see the way that it was drawn .
again , you can get the playback and personal contribution .
in addition to that , it 's listed , the artist 's name , the location , how long they spent drawing it .
and you can pick a style . so this one was tagged " abstract . "
but there 's a bunch of different styles .
and you can sort the video a number of different ways .
you can say , " i want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version .
and then this is , again , the abstract version , which ends up getting a little bit crazy .
so the last project i want to talk to you about is another collaboration with chris milk .
and this is called " the wilderness downtown . "
it 's an online music video for the arcade fire .
chris and i were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers , where you have html5 audio and video and the power of javascript to render amazingly fast .
and we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen .
but most importantly , i think , we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the johnny cash project , where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone .
what if we had a very low commitment , but delivered something individually unique to each person who contributed ?
so the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up .
and you type in the address - it actually creates a music video specifically for you , pulling in google maps and streetview images into the experience itself .
so this should really be seen at home with you typing in your own address , but i 'm going to give you a little preview of what you can expect .
-lrb- video -rrb- win butler : ♫ now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ still moving through the pain ♫ ♫ we used to wait for it ♫ ♫ we used to wait for it ♫ ♫ we used to wait for it ♫ ak : so i think , if there 's one thing to take away from my talk today ,
it 's that an interface can be a powerful narrative device .
and as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data , we have an opportunity , and maybe even an obligation , to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together .
thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago .
because the way things stand today , electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply .
if in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage , some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid , the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately .
but coal plants , nuclear plants ca n't respond fast enough .
a giant battery could .
with a giant battery , we 'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal , gas and nuclear do today .
you see , the battery is the key enabling device here .
with it , we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun does n't shine .
and that changes everything .
because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings , here to center stage .
today i want to tell you about such a device .
it 's a new form of energy storage that i invented at mit along with a team of my students and post-docs .
now the theme of this year 's ted conference is full spectrum .
the oed defines spectrum as " the entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation , from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part . "
so i 'm not here today only to tell you how my team at mit has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world 's great problems .
i want to go full spectrum and tell you how , in the process of developing this new technology , we 've uncovered some surprising heterodoxies that can serve as lessons for innovation , ideas worth spreading .
and you know , if we 're going to get this country out of its current energy situation , we ca n't just conserve our way out ; we 're going to do it the old-fashioned american way , we 're going to invent our way out , working together .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now let 's get started .
the battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor , alessandro volta , at the university of padua in italy .
his invention gave birth to a new field of science , electrochemistry , and new technologies such as electroplating .
perhaps overlooked , volta 's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- until volta , nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use .
here 's the first battery - a stack of coins , zinc and silver , separated by cardboard soaked in brine .
this is the starting point for designing a battery - two electrodes , in this case metals of different composition , and an electrolyte , in this case salt dissolved in water .
the science is that simple .
admittedly , i 've left out a few details .
now i 've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling , but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid - namely uncommonly high power , long service lifetime and super-low cost .
we need to think about the problem differently .
we need to think big , we need to think cheap .
so let 's abandon the paradigm of let 's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we 'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product .
instead , let 's invent to the price point of the electricity market .
so that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits .
this battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements .
i say , if you want to make something dirt cheap , make it out of dirt - -lrb- laughter -rrb- preferably dirt that 's locally sourced .
and we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that do n't cost us a fortune .
so about six years ago , i started thinking about this problem .
and in order to adopt a fresh perspective , i sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage .
in fact , i looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity , but instead consumes electricity , huge amounts of it .
i 'm talking about the production of aluminum .
the process was invented in 1886 by a couple of 22-year-olds - hall in the united states and heroult in france .
and just a few short years following their discovery , aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material .
you 're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter .
it 's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile - row after row of cells that , inside , resemble volta 's battery , with three important differences .
volta 's battery works at room temperature .
it 's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that 's a solution of salt and water .
the hall-heroult cell operates at high temperature , a temperature high enough that the aluminum metal product is liquid .
the electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water , but rather salt that 's melted .
it 's this combination of liquid metal , molten salt and high temperature that allows us to send high current through this thing .
today , we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound .
that 's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy .
it is this that caught and held my attention to the point that i became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale .
and i did .
i made the battery all liquid - liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte .
i 'll show you how .
so i put low-density liquid metal at the top , put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom , and molten salt in between .
so now , how to choose the metals ?
for me , the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table , enunciated by another professor , dimitri mendeleyev .
everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here .
and that includes our own bodies .
i recall the very moment one day when i was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance , different , opposite density and high mutual reactivity .
i felt the thrill of realization when i knew i 'd come upon the answer .
magnesium for the top layer .
and antimony you know , i 've got to tell you , one of the greatest benefits of being a professor : colored chalk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so to produce current , magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion , which then migrates across the electrolyte , accepts two electrons from the antimony , and then mixes with it to form an alloy .
the electrons go to work in the real world out here , powering our devices .
now to charge the battery , we connect a source of electricity .
it could be something like a wind farm .
and then we reverse the current .
and this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode , restoring the initial constitution of the battery .
and the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature .
it 's pretty cool , at least in theory .
but does it really work ?
so what to do next ?
we go to the laboratory .
now do i hire seasoned professionals ?
no , i hire a student and mentor him , teach him how to think about the problem , to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose .
this is that student , david bradwell , who , in this image , appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work .
what i did n't tell david at the time was i myself was n't convinced it would work .
but david 's young and he 's smart and he wants a ph.d. , and he proceeds to build - -lrb- laughter -rrb- he proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry .
and based on david 's initial promising results , which were paid with seed funds at mit , i was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government .
and that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people , a mix of graduate students , post-docs and even some undergraduates .
and i was able to attract really , really good people , people who share my passion for science and service to society , not science and service for career building .
and if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery , their answer would hearken back to president kennedy 's remarks at rice university in 1962 when he said - and i 'm taking liberties here - " we choose to work on grid-level storage , not because it is easy , but because it is hard . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- so this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery .
we start here with our workhorse one watt-hour cell .
i called it the shotglass .
we 've operated over 400 of these , perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries - not just magnesium and antimony .
along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell .
i call it the hockey puck .
and we got the same remarkable results .
and then it was onto the saucer .
that 's 200 watt-hours .
the technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable .
but the pace was n't fast enough for us .
so a year and a half ago , david and i , along with another research staff-member , formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product .
so today at lmbc , we 're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour - 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell .
we call that the pizza .
and then we 've got a four kilowatt-hour cell on the horizon .
it 's going to be 36 inches in diameter .
we call that the bistro table , but it 's not ready yet for prime-time viewing .
and one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules , aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field .
and this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours - two million watt-hours .
that 's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 american households .
so here you have it , grid-level storage : silent , emissions-free , no moving parts , remotely controlled , without subsidy .
so what have we learned from all this ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what have we learned from all this ?
let me share with you some of the surprises , the heterodoxies .
they lie beyond the visible .
temperature : conventional wisdom says set it low , at or near room temperature , and then install a control system to keep it there .
avoid thermal runaway .
liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation .
our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges .
scaling : conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many .
liquid metal battery is designed to reduce cost by producing fewer , but they 'll be larger .
and finally , human resources : conventional wisdom says hire battery experts , seasoned professionals , who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge .
to develop liquid metal battery , i hired students and post-docs and mentored them .
in a battery , i strive to maximize electrical potential ; when mentoring , i strive to maximize human potential .
so you see , the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology , it 's a blueprint for inventing inventors , full-spectrum .
-lrb- applause -rrb- those of you who may remember me from tedglobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me .
one of them was : why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the eurostar train when , for about 10 percent of that money , you could have top supermodels , male and female , serving free chateau petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey ?
you 'd still have five billion left in change , and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down .
now , you may remember me asking the question as well , a very interesting observation , that actually those strange little signs that actually flash " 35 " at you , occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown , according to whether you 're within or outside the speed limit - those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras , which come with the actual threat of real punishment .
so there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work , i think , in many areas of human problem solving , particularly those which involve human psychology , which is : the tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible , as much compulsion as possible , whereas actually , the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied .
so there seems to be a complete disconnect here .
so what i 'm asking for is the creation of a new job title - i 'll come to this a little later - and perhaps the addition of a new word into the english language .
because it does seem to me that large organizations including government , which is , of course , the largest organization of all , have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people .
let me give you one example of this .
you may remember this as the aol-time warner merger , okay , heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time .
it may still be , for all i know .
now , all of you in this room , in one form or other , are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged .
just interested , did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all ?
so unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity , you 're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody , okay ?
by contrast , years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do , the most potent things are actually very , very small .
this is from virgin atlantic upper-class , it 's the cruet salt and pepper set .
quite nice in itself , they 're little , sort of , airplane things .
what 's really , really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought , which is , " i reckon i can heist these . "
however , you pick them up and underneath , actually engraved in the metal , are the words , " stolen from virgin atlantic airways upper-class . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , years after you remember the strategic question of whether you 're flying in a 777 or an airbus , you remember those words and that experience .
similarly , this is from a hotel in stockholm , the lydmar .
has anybody stayed there ?
it 's the lift , it 's a series of buttons in the lift .
nothing unusual about that at all , except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor .
it starts with garage at the bottom , i suppose , appropriately , but it does n't go up garage , grand floor , mezzanine , one , two , three , four .
it actually says garage , funk , rhythm and blues .
you have a series of buttons . you actually choose your lift music .
my guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the lydmar hotel in stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max .
it 's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we 've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars , in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you 've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life .
now , these are trivial marketing examples , i accept .
but i was at a ted event recently and esther duflo , probably one of the leading experts in , effectively , the eradication of poverty in the developing world , actually spoke .
and she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which , in a business context or a government context , would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing .
it was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by , not only making it a social event - i think good use of behavioral economics in that , if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated , your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone .
but secondly , to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated .
it 's a tiny , tiny thing .
if you 're a senior person at unesco and someone says , " so what are you doing to eradicate world poverty ? "
you 're not really confident standing up there saying , " i 've got it cracked ; it 's the lentils , " are you ?
our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important , and most of all , expensive solutions attached to them .
and yet , what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there 's a very , very strong disproportionality at work , that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed , or the degree of force that 's applied .
but everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality .
so what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very , very large budget .
and once you have a very , very large budget , you actually look for expensive things to spend it on .
what is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power , but no money at all .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's those people i 'd quite like to create in the world going forward .
now , here 's another thing that happens , which is what i call sometimes " terminal 5 syndrome , " which is that big , expensive things get big , highly-intelligent attention , and they 're great , and terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent , until you get down to the small detail , the usability , which is the signage , which is catastrophic .
you come out of " arrive " at the airport , and you follow a big yellow sign that says " trains " and it 's in front of you .
so you walk for another hundred yards , expecting perhaps another sign , that might courteously be yellow , in front of you and saying " trains . "
no , no , no , the next one is actually blue , to your left , and says " heathrow express . "
i mean , it could almost be rather like that scene from the film " airplane . "
a yellow sign ? that 's exactly what they 'll be expecting .
actually , what happens in the world increasingly - now , all credit to the british airport authority .
i spoke about this before , and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said , " okay , what can you do ? "
so i did come up with five suggestions , which they are actually actioning .
one of them also being , although logically it 's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it , if it only serves two floors , it 's actually bloody terrifying , okay ?
because when the door closes and there 's nothing for you to do , you 've actually just stepped into a hammer film .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so these questions ... what is happening in the world is the big stuff , actually , is done magnificently well .
but the small stuff , what you might call the user interface , is done spectacularly badly .
but also , there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions .
because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as " strategy " to actually solve them .
i tried this exercise recently , talking about banking .
they said , " can we do an advertising campaign ?
what can we do and encourage more online banking ? "
i said , " it 's really , really easy . "
i said , " when people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they 'd probably quite like to look at .
the last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance . "
i 've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there 's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen .
why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news ?
okay , you simply would n't .
i said , " if you make , actually , ' tell me my balance . ' if you make that an option rather than the default , you 'll find twice as many people log on to online banking , and they do it three times as often . "
let 's face it , most of us - how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine ?
and you 're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large .
now , interesting that no single person does that , or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it .
but what 's interesting about that suggestion was that , to implement that suggestion would n't cost 10 million pounds ; it would n't involve large amounts of expenditure ; it would actually cost about 50 quid .
and yet , it never happens .
because there 's a fundamental disconnect , as i said , that actually , the people with the power want to do big expensive things .
and there 's to some extent a big strategy myth that 's prevalent in business now .
and if you think about it , it 's very , very important that the strategy myth is maintained .
because , if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors , it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company 's success might actually lie somewhere else , in small pieces of tactical activity .
but what is happening is that effectively - and the invention of the spreadsheet has n't helped this ; lots of things have n't helped this - business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy .
it wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate .
it 's a kind of mechanistic world that we 'd all love to live in where , effectively , it sits very nicely on spreadsheets , everything is numerically expressible , and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success .
that 's the world people actually want .
in truth , we do live in a world that science can understand .
unfortunately , the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases , very , very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects , and equally , vast areas of activity , enormous mergers , can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all .
but it 's very , very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we 're living in such a world .
but what i 'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach .
that is actually strategy , and i 'm not denying that strategy has a role .
you know , there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot .
and i 'd be wrong to dis that completely .
moving over , we come , of course , to consultancy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought it was very indecent of accenture to ditch tiger woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way .
i mean , tiger surely was actually obeying the accenture model .
he developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services , -lrb- laughter -rrb- no longer tied to a single monopoly provider , in many cases , sourcing things locally , and of course , the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing .
so what accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that , i 'm not sure .
then there are other things that do n't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing .
that 's called trivia .
but there 's a fourth thing .
and the fundamental problem is we do n't actually have a word for this stuff .
we do n't know what to call it .
and actually we do n't spend nearly enough money looking for those things , looking for those tiny things that may or may not work , but which , if they do work , can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense , their efforts and the disruption they cause .
so the first thing i 'd like is a competition - to anybody watching this as a film - is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right .
and the second thing , i think , is that the world needs to have people in charge of that .
that 's why i call for the " chief detail officer . "
every corporation should have one , and every government should have a ministry of detail .
the people who actually have no money , who have no extravagant budget , but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay , but you 'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible english .
and if actually we created a ministry of detail and business actually had chief detail officers , then that fourth quadrant , which is so woefully neglected at the moment , might finally get the attention it deserves .
thank you very much .
i grew up in bihar , india 's poorest state , and i remember when i was six years old , i remember coming home one day to find a cart full of the most delicious sweets at our doorstep .
my brothers and i dug in , and that 's when my father came home .
he was livid , and i still remember how we cried when that cart with our half-eaten sweets was pulled away from us .
later , i understood why my father got so upset .
those sweets were a bribe from a contractor who was trying to get my father to award him a government contract .
my father was responsible for building roads in bihar , and he had developed a firm stance against corruption , even though he was harassed and threatened .
his was a lonely struggle , because bihar was also india 's most corrupt state , where public officials were enriching themselves , -lsb- rather -rsb- than serving the poor who had no means to express their anguish if their children had no food or no schooling .
and i experienced this most viscerally when i traveled to remote villages to study poverty .
and as i went village to village , i remember one day , when i was famished and exhausted , and i was almost collapsing in a scorching heat under a tree , and just at that time , one of the poorest men in that village invited me into his hut and graciously fed me .
only i later realized that what he fed me was food for his entire family for two days .
this profound gift of generosity challenged and changed the very purpose of my life .
i resolved to give back .
later , i joined the world bank , which sought to fight such poverty by transferring aid from rich to poor countries .
my initial work focused on uganda , where i focused on negotiating reforms with the finance ministry of uganda so they could access our loans .
but after we disbursed the loans , i remember a trip in uganda where i found newly built schools without textbooks or teachers , new health clinics without drugs , and the poor once again without any voice or recourse .
it was bihar all over again .
bihar represents the challenge of development : abject poverty surrounded by corruption .
globally , 1.3 billion people live on less than $ 1.25 a day , and the work i did in uganda represents the traditional approach to these problems that has been practiced since 1944 , when winners of world war ii , 500 founding fathers , and one lonely founding mother , gathered in new hampshire , usa , to establish the bretton woods institutions , including the world bank .
and that traditional approach to development had three key elements . first , transfer of resources from rich countries in the north to poorer countries in the south , accompanied by reform prescriptions .
second , the development institutions that channeled these transfers were opaque , with little transparency of what they financed or what results they achieved .
and third , the engagement in developing countries was with a narrow set of government elites with little interaction with the citizens , who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development assistance .
today , each of these elements is opening up due to dramatic changes in the global environment .
open knowledge , open aid , open governance , and together , they represent three key shifts that are transforming development and that also hold greater hope for the problems i witnessed in uganda and in bihar .
the first key shift is open knowledge .
you know , developing countries today will not simply accept solutions that are handed down to them by the u.s. , europe or the world bank .
they get their inspiration , their hope , their practical know-how , from successful emerging economies in the south .
they want to know how china lifted 500 million people out of poverty in 30 years , how mexico 's oportunidades program improved schooling and nutrition for millions of children .
this is the new ecosystem of open-knowledge flows , not just traveling north to south , but south to south , and even south to north , with mexico 's oportunidades today inspiring new york city .
and just as these north-to-south transfers are opening up , so too are the development institutions that channeled these transfers .
this is the second shift : open aid .
recently , the world bank opened its vault of data for public use , releasing 8,000 economic and social indicators for 200 countries over 50 years , and it launched a global competition to crowdsource innovative apps using this data .
development institutions today are also opening for public scrutiny the projects they finance .
take geomapping . in this map from kenya , the red dots show where all the schools financed by donors are located , and the darker the shade of green , the more the number of out-of-school children .
so this simple mashup reveals that donors have not financed any schools in the areas with the most out-of-school children , provoking new questions . is development assistance targeting those who most need our help ?
in this manner , the world bank has now geomapped 30,000 project activities in 143 countries , and donors are using a common platform to map all their projects .
this is a tremendous leap forward in transparency and accountability of aid .
and this leads me to the third , and in my view , the most significant shift in development : open governance . governments today are opening up just as citizens are demanding voice and accountability .
from the arab spring to the anna hazare movement in india , using mobile phones and social media not just for political accountability but also for development accountability .
are governments delivering services to the citizens ?
so for instance , several governments in africa and eastern europe are opening their budgets to the public .
but , you know , there is a big difference between a budget that 's public and a budget that 's accessible .
this is a public budget . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and as you can see , it 's not really accessible or understandable to an ordinary citizen that is trying to understand how the government is spending its resources .
to tackle this problem , governments are using new tools to visualize the budget so it 's more understandable to the public .
in this map from moldova , the green color shows those districts that have low spending on schools but good educational outcomes , and the red color shows the opposite .
tools like this help turn a shelf full of inscrutable documents into a publicly understandable visual , and what 's exciting is that with this openness , there are today new opportunities for citizens to give feedback and engage with government .
so in the philippines today , parents and students can give real-time feedback on a website , checkmyschool.org , or using sms , whether teachers and textbooks are showing up in school , the same problems i witnessed in uganda and in bihar .
and the government is responsive . so for instance , when it was reported on this website that 800 students were at risk because school repairs had stalled due to corruption , the department of education in the philippines took swift action .
and you know what 's exciting is that this innovation is now spreading south to south , from the philippines to indonesia , kenya , moldova and beyond .
in dar es salaam , tanzania , even an impoverished community was able to use these tools to voice its aspirations .
this is what the map of tandale looked like in august , 2011 . but within a few weeks , university students were able to use mobile phones and an open-source platform to dramatically map the entire community infrastructure .
and what is very exciting is that citizens were then able to give feedback as to which health or water points were not working , aggregated in the red bubbles that you see , which together provides a graphic visual of the collective voices of the poor .
today , even bihar is turning around and opening up under a committed leadership that is making government transparent , accessible and responsive to the poor .
but , you know , in many parts of the world , governments are not interested in opening up or in serving the poor , and it is a real challenge for those who want to change the system .
these are the lonely warriors like my father and many , many others , and a key frontier of development work is to help these lonely warriors join hands so they can together overcome the odds .
so for instance , today , in ghana , courageous reformers from civil society , parliament and government , have forged a coalition for transparent contracts in the oil sector , and , galvanized by this , reformers in parliament are now investigating dubious contracts .
these examples give new hope , new possibility to the problems i witnessed in uganda or that my father confronted in bihar .
two years ago , on april 8th , 2010 , i called my father .
it was very late at night , and at age 80 , he was typing a 70-page public interest litigation against corruption in a road project .
though he was no lawyer , he argued the case in court himself the next day . he won the ruling , but later that very evening , he fell , and he died .
he fought till the end , increasingly passionate that to combat corruption and poverty , not only did government officials need to be honest , but citizens needed to join together to make their voices heard .
these became the two bookends of his life , and the journey he traveled in between mirrored the changing development landscape .
today , i 'm inspired by these changes , and i 'm excited that at the world bank , we are embracing these new directions , a significant departure from my work in uganda 20 years ago .
we need to radically open up development so knowledge flows in multiple directions , inspiring practitioners , so aid becomes transparent , accountable and effective , so governments open up and citizens are engaged and empowered with reformers in government .
we need to accelerate these shifts .
if we do , we will find that the collective voices of the poor will be heard in bihar , in uganda , and beyond .
we will find that textbooks and teachers will show up in schools for their children .
we will find that these children , too , have a real chance of breaking their way out of poverty .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to tell you a story connecting the notorious privacy incident involving adam and eve , and the remarkable shift in the boundaries between public and private which has occurred in the past 10 years .
you know the incident .
adam and eve one day in the garden of eden realize they are naked .
they freak out .
and the rest is history .
nowadays , adam and eve would probably act differently .
-lsb- @ adam last nite was a blast ! loved dat apple lol -rsb- -lsb- @ eve yep .. babe , know what happened to my pants tho ? -rsb- we do reveal so much more information about ourselves online than ever before , and so much information about us is being collected by organizations .
now there is much to gain and benefit from this massive analysis of personal information , or big data , but there are also complex tradeoffs that come from giving away our privacy .
and my story is about these tradeoffs .
we start with an observation which , in my mind , has become clearer and clearer in the past few years , that any personal information can become sensitive information .
back in the year 2000 , about 100 billion photos were shot worldwide , but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online .
in 2010 , only on facebook , in a single month , 2.5 billion photos were uploaded , most of them identified .
in the same span of time , computers ' ability to recognize people in photos improved by three orders of magnitude .
what happens when you combine these technologies together : increasing availability of facial data ; improving facial recognizing ability by computers ; but also cloud computing , which gives anyone in this theater the kind of computational power which a few years ago was only the domain of three-letter agencies ; and ubiquitous computing , which allows my phone , which is not a supercomputer , to connect to the internet and do there hundreds of thousands of face metrics in a few seconds ?
well , we conjecture that the result of this combination of technologies will be a radical change in our very notions of privacy and anonymity .
to test that , we did an experiment on carnegie mellon university campus .
we asked students who were walking by to participate in a study , and we took a shot with a webcam , and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop .
while they were filling out the survey , we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster , and we started using a facial recognizer to match that shot to a database of some hundreds of thousands of images which we had downloaded from facebook profiles .
by the time the subject reached the last page on the survey , the page had been dynamically updated with the 10 best matching photos which the recognizer had found , and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo .
do you see the subject ?
well , the computer did , and in fact did so for one out of three subjects .
so essentially , we can start from an anonymous face , offline or online , and we can use facial recognition to give a name to that anonymous face thanks to social media data .
but a few years back , we did something else .
we started from social media data , we combined it statistically with data from u.s. government social security , and we ended up predicting social security numbers , which in the united states are extremely sensitive information .
do you see where i 'm going with this ?
so if you combine the two studies together , then the question becomes , can you start from a face and , using facial recognition , find a name and publicly available information about that name and that person , and from that publicly available information infer non-publicly available information , much more sensitive ones which you link back to the face ?
and the answer is , yes , we can , and we did .
of course , the accuracy keeps getting worse .
-lsb- 27 % of subjects ' first 5 ssn digits identified -lrb- with 4 attempts -rrb- -rsb- but in fact , we even decided to develop an iphone app which uses the phone 's internal camera to take a shot of a subject and then upload it to a cloud and then do what i just described to you in real time : looking for a match , finding public information , trying to infer sensitive information , and then sending back to the phone so that it is overlaid on the face of the subject , an example of augmented reality , probably a creepy example of augmented reality .
in fact , we did n't develop the app to make it available , just as a proof of concept .
in fact , take these technologies and push them to their logical extreme .
imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their google glasses or , one day , their contact lenses , and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you .
what will this future without secrets look like ?
and should we care ?
we may like to believe that the future with so much wealth of data would be a future with no more biases , but in fact , having so much information does n't mean that we will make decisions which are more objective .
in another experiment , we presented to our subjects information about a potential job candidate .
we included in this information some references to some funny , absolutely legal , but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online .
now interestingly , among our subjects , some had posted comparable information , and some had not .
which group do you think was more likely to judge harshly our subject ?
paradoxically , it was the group who had posted similar information , an example of moral dissonance .
now you may be thinking , this does not apply to me , because i have nothing to hide .
but in fact , privacy is not about having something negative to hide .
imagine that you are the h.r. director of a certain organization , and you receive résumés , and you decide to find more information about the candidates .
therefore , you google their names and in a certain universe , you find this information .
or in a parallel universe , you find this information .
do you think that you would be equally likely to call either candidate for an interview ?
if you think so , then you are not like the u.s. employers who are , in fact , part of our experiment , meaning we did exactly that .
we created facebook profiles , manipulating traits , then we started sending out résumés to companies in the u.s. , and we detected , we monitored , whether they were searching for our candidates , and whether they were acting on the information they found on social media . and they were .
discrimination was happening through social media for equally skilled candidates .
now marketers like us to believe that all information about us will always be used in a manner which is in our favor .
but think again . why should that be always the case ?
in a movie which came out a few years ago , " minority report , " a famous scene had tom cruise walk in a mall and holographic personalized advertising would appear around him .
now , that movie is set in 2054 , about 40 years from now , and as exciting as that technology looks , it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you , and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect .
so as an example , this is another experiment actually we are running , not yet completed .
imagine that an organization has access to your list of facebook friends , and through some kind of algorithm they can detect the two friends that you like the most .
and then they create , in real time , a facial composite of these two friends .
now studies prior to ours have shown that people do n't recognize any longer even themselves in facial composites , but they react to those composites in a positive manner .
so next time you are looking for a certain product , and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it , it will not be just a standard spokesperson .
it will be one of your friends , and you will not even know that this is happening .
now the problem is that the current policy mechanisms we have to protect ourselves from the abuses of personal information are like bringing a knife to a gunfight .
one of these mechanisms is transparency , telling people what you are going to do with their data .
and in principle , that 's a very good thing .
it 's necessary , but it is not sufficient .
transparency can be misdirected .
you can tell people what you are going to do , and then you still nudge them to disclose arbitrary amounts of personal information .
so in yet another experiment , this one with students , we asked them to provide information about their campus behavior , including pretty sensitive questions , such as this one .
-lsb- have you ever cheated in an exam ? -rsb- now to one group of subjects , we told them , " only other students will see your answers . "
to another group of subjects , we told them , " students and faculty will see your answers . "
transparency . notification . and sure enough , this worked , in the sense that the first group of subjects were much more likely to disclose than the second .
it makes sense , right ?
but then we added the misdirection .
we repeated the experiment with the same two groups , this time adding a delay between the time we told subjects how we would use their data and the time we actually started answering the questions .
how long a delay do you think we had to add in order to nullify the inhibitory effect of knowing that faculty would see your answers ?
ten minutes ?
five minutes ?
one minute ?
how about 15 seconds ?
fifteen seconds were sufficient to have the two groups disclose the same amount of information , as if the second group now no longer cares for faculty reading their answers .
now i have to admit that this talk so far may sound exceedingly gloomy , but that is not my point .
in fact , i want to share with you the fact that there are alternatives .
the way we are doing things now is not the only way they can done , and certainly not the best way they can be done .
when someone tells you , " people do n't care about privacy , " consider whether the game has been designed and rigged so that they can not care about privacy , and coming to the realization that these manipulations occur is already halfway through the process of being able to protect yourself .
when someone tells you that privacy is incompatible with the benefits of big data , consider that in the last 20 years , researchers have created technologies to allow virtually any electronic transactions to take place in a more privacy-preserving manner .
we can browse the internet anonymously .
we can send emails that can only be read by the intended recipient , not even the nsa .
we can have even privacy-preserving data mining .
in other words , we can have the benefits of big data while protecting privacy .
of course , these technologies imply a shifting of cost and revenues between data holders and data subjects , which is why , perhaps , you do n't hear more about them .
which brings me back to the garden of eden .
there is a second privacy interpretation of the story of the garden of eden which does n't have to do with the issue of adam and eve feeling naked and feeling ashamed .
you can find echoes of this interpretation in john milton 's " paradise lost . "
in the garden , adam and eve are materially content .
they 're happy . they are satisfied .
however , they also lack knowledge and self-awareness .
the moment they eat the aptly named fruit of knowledge , that 's when they discover themselves .
they become aware . they achieve autonomy .
the price to pay , however , is leaving the garden .
so privacy , in a way , is both the means and the price to pay for freedom .
again , marketers tell us that big data and social media are not just a paradise of profit for them , but a garden of eden for the rest of us .
we get free content .
we get to play angry birds . we get targeted apps .
but in fact , in a few years , organizations will know so much about us , they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them , and perhaps buy products on our behalf before we even know we need them .
now there was one english author who anticipated this kind of future where we would trade away our autonomy and freedom for comfort .
even more so than george orwell , the author is , of course , aldous huxley .
in " brave new world , " he imagines a society where technologies that we created originally for freedom end up coercing us .
however , in the book , he also offers us a way out of that society , similar to the path that adam and eve had to follow to leave the garden .
in the words of the savage , regaining autonomy and freedom is possible , although the price to pay is steep .
so i do believe that one of the defining fights of our times will be the fight for the control over personal information , the fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom , rather than a force which will hiddenly manipulate us .
right now , many of us do not even know that the fight is going on , but it is , whether you like it or not .
and at the risk of playing the serpent , i will tell you that the tools for the fight are here , the awareness of what is going on , and in your hands , just a few clicks away .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the global challenge that i want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages .
it , however , is enormous in both scale and importance .
look , you all are very well traveled ; this is tedglobal after all .
but i do hope to take you to some places you 've never been to before .
so , let 's start off in china .
this photo was taken two weeks ago .
actually , one indication is that little boy on my husband 's shoulders has just graduated from high school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this is tiananmen square .
many of you have been there . it 's not the real china .
let me take you to the real china .
this is in the dabian mountains in the remote part of hubei province in central china .
dai manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts .
she lives with her parents , her two brothers and her great-aunt .
they have a hut that has no electricity , no running water , no wristwatch , no bicycle .
and they share this great splendor with a very large pig .
dai manju was in sixth grade when her parents said , " we 're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us .
you 're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies .
why would we waste this money on you ? "
this is what happens to girls in remote areas .
turns out that dai manju was the best pupil in her grade .
she still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors .
we wrote about her in the new york times .
we got a flood of donations - mostly 13-dollar checks because new york times readers are very generous in tiny amounts -lrb- laughter -rrb- but then , we got a money transfer for $ 10,000 - really nice guy .
we turned the money over to that man there , the principal of the school .
he was delighted .
he thought , " oh , i can renovate the school .
i can give scholarships to all the girls , you know , if they work hard and stay in school .
so dai manju basically finished out middle school .
she went to high school .
she went to vocational school for accounting .
she scouted for jobs down in guangdong province in the south .
she found a job , she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends .
she sent money back to her family .
they built a new house , this time with running water , electricity , a bicycle , no pig .
what we saw was a natural experiment .
it is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls ' education .
and over the years , as we followed dai manju , we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle .
she not only changed her own dynamic , she changed her household , she changed her family , her village .
the village became a real standout .
of course , most of china was flourishing at the time , but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of china .
and that brings me to my first major of two tenets of " half the sky . "
and that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity .
in the 19th century , it was slavery .
in the 20th century , it was totalitarianism .
the cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender .
so some of you may be thinking , " gosh , that 's hyperbole .
she 's exaggerating . "
well , let me ask you this question .
how many of you think there are more males or more females in the world ?
let me take a poll . how many of you think there are more males in the world ?
hands up , please .
how many of you think - a few - how many of you there are more females in the world ?
okay , most of you .
well , you know this latter group , you 're wrong .
there are , true enough , in europe and the west , when women and men have equal access to food and health care , there are more women , we live longer .
but in most of the rest of the world , that 's not the case .
in fact , demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population .
and , you know , it happens for several reasons .
for instance , in the last half-century , more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century .
sometimes it 's also because of the sonogram .
girls get aborted before they 're even born when there are scarce resources .
this girl here , for instance , is in a feeding center in ethiopia .
the entire center was filled with girls like her .
what 's remarkable is that her brothers , in the same family , were totally fine .
in india , in the first year of life , from zero to one , boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast , and the breast shows no son preference .
from one to five , girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys , in all of india .
the second tenet of " half the sky " is that , let 's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all , and just on a purely practical level , we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force .
poverty , for instance .
there are three reasons why this is the case .
for one , overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty .
and you know , when you educate a boy , his family tends to have fewer kids , but only slightly .
when you educate a girl , she tends to have significantly fewer kids .
the second reason is it has to do with spending .
it 's kind of like the dirty , little secret of poverty , which is that , not only do poor people take in very little income , but also , the income that they take in , they do n't spend it very wisely , and unfortunately , most of that spending is done by men .
so research has shown , if you look at people who live under two dollars a day - one metric of poverty - two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here , in education .
20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol , tobacco , sugary drinks - and prostitution and festivals .
if you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket , you would have a transformative effect .
the last reason has to do with women being part of the solution , not the problem .
you need to use scarce resources .
it 's a waste of resources if you do n't use someone like dai manju .
bill gates put it very well when he was traveling through saudi arabia .
he was speaking to an audience much like yourselves .
however , two-thirds of the way there was a barrier .
on this side was men , and then the barrier , and this side was women .
and someone from this side of the room got up and said , " mr. gates , we have here as our goal in saudi arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology .
do you think we 'll make it ? "
so bill gates , as he was staring out at the audience , he said , " if you 're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country , there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10 . "
so here is bill of arabia .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what would some of the specific challenges look like ?
i would say , on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking .
and i 'll just say two things about this .
the slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s : there were about 80,000 slaves transported from africa to the new world .
now , modern slavery : according to state department rough statistics , there are about 800,000 - 10 times the number - that are trafficked across international borders .
and that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders , which is a substantial portion .
and if you look at another factor , another contrast , a slave back then is worth about $ 40,000 in today 's money .
today , you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars , which means she 's actually more disposable .
but you know , there is progress being made in places like cambodia and thailand .
we do n't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed .
the second item on the agenda is maternal mortality .
you know , childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event .
in niger , one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth .
around the world , one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth .
you know , it 's not as though we do n't have the technological solution , but these women have three strikes against them : they are poor , they are rural and they are female .
you know , for every woman who does die , there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury .
and the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula .
it 's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent .
let me tell you about mahabuba .
she lives in ethiopia .
she was married against her will at age 13 .
she got pregnant , ran to the bush to have the baby , but you know , her body was very immature , and she ended up having obstructed labor .
the baby died , and she ended up with a fistula .
so that meant she was incontinent ; she could n't control her wastes .
in a word , she stank .
the villagers thought she was cursed ; they did n't know what to do with her .
so finally , they put her at the edge of the village in a hut .
they ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night .
that night , there was a stick in the hut .
she fought off the hyenas with that stick .
and the next morning , she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary , she would be saved .
because she had some damage to her nerves , she crawled all the way - 30 miles - to that doorstep , half dead .
the foreign missionary opened the door , knew exactly what had happened , took her to a nearby fistula hospital in addis ababa , and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation .
the doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor , she was really clever , and they made her a nurse .
so now , mahabuba , she is saving the lives of hundreds , thousands , of women .
she has become part of the solution , not the problem .
she 's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle .
i 've talked about some of the challenges , let me talk about some of the solutions , and there are predictable solutions .
i 've hinted at them : education and also economic opportunity .
so of course , when you educate a girl , she tends to get married later on in life , she tends to have kids later on in life , she tends to have fewer kids , and those kids that she does have , she educates them in a more enlightened fashion .
with economic opportunity , it can be transformative .
let me tell you about saima .
she lives in a small village outside lahore , pakistan .
and at the time , she was miserable .
she was beaten every single day by her husband , who was unemployed .
he was kind of a gambler type - and unemployable , therefore - and took his frustrations out on her .
well , when she had her second daughter , her mother in-law told her son , " i think you 'd better get a second wife .
saima 's not going to produce you a son . "
this is when she had her second daughter .
at the time , there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan .
saima took that money , and she started an embroidery business .
the merchants liked her embroidery ; it sold very well , and they kept asking for more .
and when she could n't produce enough , she hired other women in the village .
pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business .
and then , when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace , she needed someone to help her do the transport , so she hired her husband .
so now they 're in it together .
he does the transportation and distribution , and she does the production and sourcing .
and now they have a third daughter , and the daughters , all of them , are being tutored in education because saima knows what 's really important .
which brings me to the final element , which is education .
larry summers , when he was chief economist at the world bank , once said that , " it may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls ' education . "
let me tell you about beatrice biira .
beatrice was living in uganda near the congo border , and like dai manju , she did n't go to school .
actually , she had never been to school , not to a lick , one day .
her parents , again , said , " why should we spend the money on her ?
she 's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth . "
well , it just so happens , at that time , there was a group in connecticut called the niantic community church group in connecticut .
they made a donation to an organization based in arkansas called heifer international .
heifer sent two goats to africa .
one of them ended up with beatrice 's parents , and that goat had twins .
the twins started producing milk .
they sold the milk for cash .
the cash started accumulating , and pretty soon the parents said , " you know , we 've got enough money . let 's send beatrice to school . "
so at nine years of age , beatrice started in first grade - after all , she 'd never been to a lick of school - with a six year-old .
no matter , she was just delighted to be in school .
she rocketed to the top of her class .
she stayed at the top of her class through elementary school , middle school , she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village , ever , to come to the united states on scholarship .
two years ago , she graduated from connecticut college .
on the day of her graduation , she said , " i am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that goat was $ 120 .
so you see how transformative little bits of help can be .
but i want to give you a reality check .
look : u.s. aid , helping people is not easy , and there have been books that have criticized u.s. aid .
there 's bill easterly 's book .
there 's a book called " dead aid . "
you know , the criticism is fair ; it is n't easy .
you know , people say how half of all water well projects , a year later , are failed .
when i was in zimbabwe , we were touring a place with the village chief - he wanted to raise money for a secondary school - and there was some construction a few yards away , and i said , " what 's that ? "
he sort of mumbled .
turns out that it 's a failed irrigation project .
a few yards away was a failed chicken coop .
one year , all the chickens died , and no one wanted to put the chickens in there .
it 's true , but we think that you do n't through the baby out with the bathwater ; you actually improve .
you learn from your mistakes , and you continuously improve .
we also think that individuals can make a difference , and they should , because individuals , together , we can all help create a movement .
and a movement of men and women is what 's needed to bring about social change , change that will address this great moral challenge .
so then , i ask , what 's in it for you ?
you 're probably asking that . why should you care ?
i will just leave you with two things .
one is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of - which most of us , all of us , here in this room do - research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness .
one of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself .
and the second thing , it 's an anecdote that i 'll leave you with .
and that is the story of an aid worker in darfur .
here was a woman who had worked in darfur , seeing things that no human being should see .
throughout her time there , she was strong , she was steadfast .
she never broke down .
and then she came back to the united states and was on break , christmas break .
she was in her grandmother 's backyard , and she saw something that made her break down in tears .
what that was was a bird feeder .
and she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted , where we not only can feed , clothe and house ourselves , but also provide for wild birds so they do n't go hungry in the winter .
and she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility .
and so , like her , you , me , we have all won the lottery of life .
and so the question becomes : how do we discharge that responsibility ?
so , here 's the cause .
join the movement .
feel happier and help save the world .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so let me ask for a show of hands .
how many people here are over the age of 48 ?
well , there do seem to be a few .
well , congratulations , because if you look at this particular slide of u.s. life expectancy , you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900 .
but look what happened in the course of that century .
if you follow that curve , you 'll see that it starts way down there .
there 's that dip there for the 1918 flu .
and here we are at 2010 , average life expectancy of a child born today , age 79 , and we are not done yet .
now , that 's the good news .
but there 's still a lot of work to do .
so , for instance , if you ask , how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis ?
turns out it 's about 4,000 , which is pretty amazing , because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while .
it 's exciting to see that in terms of what we 've learned , but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available ?
only about 250 .
so we have this huge challenge , this huge gap .
you would think this would n't be too hard , that we would simply have the ability to take this fundamental information that we 're learning about how it is that basic biology teaches us about the causes of disease and build a bridge across this yawning gap between what we 've learned about basic science and its application , a bridge that would look maybe something like this , where you 'd have to put together a nice shiny way to get from one side to the other .
well , would n't it be nice if it was that easy ?
unfortunately , it 's not .
in reality , trying to go from fundamental knowledge to its application is more like this .
there are no shiny bridges .
you sort of place your bets .
maybe you 've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way , and the rains come and the lightning flashes , and oh my gosh , there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble , and , uh oh , the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized , and that tugboat , well , it hit the rocks , and maybe if you 're lucky , somebody gets across .
well , what does this really look like ?
well , what is it to make a therapeutic , anyway ?
what 's a drug ? a drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen , carbon , oxygen , nitrogen , and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape , and it 's those shapes that determine whether , in fact , that particular drug is going to hit its target .
is it going to land where it 's supposed to ?
so look at this picture here - a lot of shapes dancing around for you .
now what you need to do , if you 're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or alzheimer 's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe .
and when you look at what happens to that pipeline , you start out maybe with thousands , tens of thousands of compounds .
you weed down through various steps that cause many of these to fail .
ultimately , maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these , and if all goes well , 14 years after you started , you will get one approval .
and it will cost you upwards of a billion dollars for that one success .
so we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would , and say , " how can we do better ? "
and that 's the main theme of what i want to say to you this morning .
how can we make this go faster ?
how can we make it more successful ?
well , let me tell you about a few examples where this has actually worked .
one that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis .
but it 's taken a long time to get there .
cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in toronto , discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7 .
that picture you see there ?
here it is . that 's the same kid .
that 's danny bessette , 23 years later , because this is the year , and it 's also the year where danny got married , where we have , for the first time , the approval by the fda of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding .
that 's the good news .
the bad news is , this drug does n't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis , and it wo n't work for danny , and we 're still waiting for that next generation to help him .
but it took 23 years to get this far . that 's too long .
how do we go faster ?
well , one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology , and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome , the ability to be able to look at a chromosome , to unzip it , to pull out all the dna , and to be able to then read out the letters in that dna code , the a 's , c 's , g 's and t 's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things , and the cost of doing this , which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars , has in the course of the last 10 years
fallen faster than moore 's law , down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced , or mine , and we 're headed for the $ 1,000 genome fairly soon .
well , that 's exciting .
how does that play out in terms of application to a disease ?
i want to tell you about another disorder .
this one is a disorder which is quite rare .
it 's called hutchinson-gilford progeria , and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging .
only about one in every four million kids has this disease , and in a simple way , what happens is , because of a mutation in a particular gene , a protein is made that 's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate .
let me show you a video of what that does to the cell .
the normal cell , if you looked at it under the microscope , would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell , which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that .
a progeria cell , on the other hand , because of this toxic protein called progerin , has these lumps and bumps in it .
so what we would like to do after discovering this back in 2003 is to come up with a way to try to correct that .
well again , by knowing something about the molecular pathways , it was possible to pick one of those many , many compounds that might have been useful and try it out .
in an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon , if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria , and you watch to see what happened , in just 72 hours , that cell becomes , for all purposes that we can determine , almost like a normal cell .
well that was exciting , but would it actually work in a real human being ?
this has led , in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial , to a test of that very compound .
and the kids that you see here all volunteered to be part of this , 28 of them , and you can see as soon as the picture comes up that they are in fact a remarkable group of young people all afflicted by this disease , all looking quite similar to each other .
and instead of telling you more about it , i 'm going to invite one of them , sam berns from boston , who 's here this morning , to come up on the stage and tell us about his experience as a child affected with progeria .
sam is 15 years old . his parents , scott berns and leslie gordon , both physicians , are here with us this morning as well .
sam , please have a seat .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so sam , why do n't you tell these folks what it 's like being affected with this condition called progeria ?
sam burns : well , progeria limits me in some ways .
i can not play sports or do physical activities , but i have been able to take interest in things that progeria , luckily , does not limit .
but when there is something that i really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of , like marching band or umpiring , we always find a way to do it , and that just shows that progeria is n't in control of my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- francis collins : so what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this ?
what would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well ?
sb : well , research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years , and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far , and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria , and it shows that if that drive exists , anybody can cure any disease , and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future , and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that francis was talking about .
fc : excellent . so sam took the day off from school today to be here , and he is - -lrb- applause -rrb- - he is , by the way , a straight-a + student in the ninth grade in his school in boston .
please join me in thanking and welcoming sam .
sb : thank you very much . fc : well done . well done , buddy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i just want to say a couple more things about that particular story , and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases , as sam says , these 4,000 that are waiting for answers .
you might have noticed that the drug that is now in clinical trial for progeria is not a drug that was designed for that .
it 's such a rare disease , it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug .
this is a drug that was developed for cancer .
turned out , it did n't work very well for cancer , but it has exactly the right properties , the right shape , to work for progeria , and that 's what 's happened .
would n't it be great if we could do that more systematically ?
could we , in fact , encourage all the companies that are out there that have drugs in their freezers that are known to be safe in humans but have never actually succeeded in terms of being effective for the treatments they were tried for ?
now we 're learning about all these new molecular pathways - some of those could be repositioned or repurposed , or whatever word you want to use , for new applications , basically teaching old drugs new tricks .
that could be a phenomenal , valuable activity .
we have many discussions now between nih and companies about doing this that are looking very promising .
and you could expect quite a lot to come from this .
there are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances .
the first drug for hiv / aids was not developed for hiv / aids .
it was developed for cancer . it was azt .
it did n't work very well for cancer , but became the first successful antiretroviral , and you can see from the table there are others as well .
so how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort ?
well , we have to come up with a partnership between academia , government , the private sector , and patient organizations to make that so .
at nih , we have started this new national center for advancing translational sciences .
it just started last december , and this is one of its goals .
let me tell you another thing we could do .
would n't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it 's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk , because that first time you 're never quite sure ?
how do we know , for instance , whether drugs are safe before we give them to people ? we test them on animals .
and it 's not all that reliable , and it 's costly , and it 's time-consuming .
suppose we could do this instead on human cells .
you probably know , if you 've been paying attention to some of the science literature that you can now take a skin cell and encourage it to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell or a brain cell for any of us .
so what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it 's going to be safe ?
here you see a picture of a lung on a chip .
this is something created by the wyss institute in boston , is to take cells from an individual , turn them into the kinds of cells that are present in the lung , and determine what would happen if you added to this various drug compounds to see if they are toxic or safe .
you can see this chip even breathes .
it has an air channel . it has a blood channel .
and it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound .
are those cells happy or not ?
you can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys , for hearts , for muscles , all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem , for the liver .
and ultimately , because you can do this for the individual , we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip , what we 're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety .
so let me sum up .
we are in a remarkable moment here .
for me , at nih now for almost 20 years , there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us .
we have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world .
what do we need to capitalize on this ? first of all , we need resources .
this is research that 's high-risk , sometimes high-cost .
the payoff is enormous , both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth . we need to support that .
second , we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations , just like the one i 've been describing here , in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds .
and third , and maybe most important , we need talent .
we need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort - all ages , all different groups - because this is the time , folks .
this is the 21st-century biology that you 've been waiting for , and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will , in fact , knock out disease . that 's my goal .
i hope that 's your goal .
i think it 'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we 're trying to do here and why it matters .
it matters for now . it matters as soon as possible .
if you do n't believe me , just ask sam .
thank you all very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i call myself a body architect .
i trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion .
as a body architect , i fascinate with the human body and explore how i can transform it .
i worked at philips electronics in the far-future design research lab , looking 20 years into the future .
i explored the human skin , and how technology can transform the body .
i worked on concepts like an electronic tattoo , which is augmented by touch , or dresses that blushed and shivered with light .
i started my own experiments .
these were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations i was having .
these are q-tips stuck to my roommate with wig glue .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i started a collaboration with a friend of mine , bart hess - he does n't normally look like this - and we used ourselves as models .
we transformed our apartments into our laboratories , and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way .
we were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution .
whilst i was at philips , we discussed this idea of a maybe technology , something that was n't either switched on or off , but in between .
a maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid .
and i became obsessed with this idea of blurring the perimeter of the body , so you could n't see where the skin ended and the near environment started .
i set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing , and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile .
i was introduced to robyn , the swedish pop star , and she was also exploring how technology coexists with raw human emotion .
and she talked about how technology with these new feathers , this new face paint , this punk , the way that we identify with the world , and we made this music video .
i 'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology , and i remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology , in the future , away from disease and aging .
and i thought about this concept of , imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor , modify and biologically enhance it , and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other ?
or the way that we attract sexual partners ?
and would we revert back to being more like animals , more primal modes of communication ?
i worked with a synthetic biologist , and i created a swallowable perfume , which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out through the skin 's surface when you perspire .
it completely blows apart the way that perfume is , and provides a whole new format .
it 's perfume coming from the inside out .
it redefines the role of skin , and our bodies become an atomizer .
i 've learned that there 's no boundaries , and if i look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense .
but when i look towards the future , the next project is completely unknown and wide open .
i feel like i have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me , and it 's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas , and they kind of instinctively come out .
as a body architect , i 've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever i want .
and i feel like i 've just got started .
so here 's to another day at the office .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you !
thank you !
so when i do my job , people hate me .
in fact , the better i do my job , the more people hate me .
and no , i 'm not a meter maid , and i 'm not an undertaker .
i am a progressive lesbian talking head on fox news . -lrb- applause -rrb- so y 'all heard that , right ? just to make sure , right ?
i am a gay talking head on fox news .
i am going to tell you how i do it and the most important thing i 've learned .
so i go on television .
i debate people who literally want to obliterate everything i believe in , in some cases , who do n't want me and people like me to even exist .
it 's sort of like thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids , with a live television audience of millions .
it 's totally almost just like that .
and that 's just on air .
the hate mail i get is unbelievable .
last week alone , i got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than i can even count .
i was called an idiot , a traitor , a scourge , a cunt , and an ugly man , and that was just in one email .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what have i realized , being on the receiving end of all this ugliness ?
well , my biggest takeaway is that for decades , we 've been focused on political correctness , but what matters more is emotional correctness .
let me give you a small example .
i do n't care if you call me a dyke . i really do n't .
i care about two things .
one , i care that you spell it right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- just quick refresher , it 's d-y-k-e .
you 'd totally be surprised .
and second , i do n't care about the word , i care about how you use it .
are you being friendly ? are you just being naive ?
or do you really want to hurt me personally ?
emotional correctness is the tone , the feeling , how we say what we say , the respect and compassion we show one another .
and what i 've realized is that political persuasion does n't begin with ideas or facts or data .
political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct .
so when i first went to go work at fox news , true confession , i expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging .
that , by the way , in case you 're paying attention , is not emotionally correct .
but liberals on my side , we can be self-righteous , we can be condescending , we can be dismissive of anyone who does n't agree with us .
in other words , we can be politically right but emotionally wrong .
and incidentally , that means that people do n't like us . right ?
now here 's the kicker .
conservatives are really nice .
i mean , not all of them , and not the ones who send me hate mail , but you would be surprised .
sean hannity is one of the sweetest guys i 've ever met .
he spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates , and i know that if i ever had a problem , he would do anything he could to help .
now , i think sean hannity is 99 percent politically wrong , but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive , and that 's why people listen to him .
because you ca n't get anyone to agree with you if they do n't even listen to you first .
we spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements , and if we can start to find compassion for one another , then we have a shot at building common ground .
it actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here , but when you try to put it in practice , it 's really powerful .
so someone who says they hate immigrants , i try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they 've always known .
or someone who says they do n't like teachers ' unions , i bet they 're really devastated to see their kid 's school going into the gutter , and they 're just looking for someone to blame .
our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us .
that is emotional correctness .
i 'm not saying it 's easy .
an average of , like , 5.6 times per day i have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities .
this whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me , and i ai n't the dalai lama .
i 'm not perfect , but what i am is optimistic , because i do n't just get hate mail .
i get a lot of really nice letters , lots of them .
and one of my all-time favorites begins , " i am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic , but i 'm a big fan of you as a person . "
now this guy does n't agree with me , yet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he 's listening , not because of what i said , but because of how i said it , and somehow , even though we 've never met , we 've managed to form a connection .
that 's emotional correctness , and that 's how we start the conversations that really lead to change .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so sometimes i get invited to give weird talks .
i got invited to speak to the people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting events .
unfortunately i could n't go .
but it got me thinking about the fact that these guys , at least most of them , know what it is that they do for a living .
what they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events .
shortly after that i got invited to speak at the convention of the people who make balloon animals .
and again , i could n't go . but it 's a fascinating group . they make balloon animals .
there is a big schism between the ones who make gospel animals and porn animals , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons .
sometimes they get in trouble , but not often .
and the other thing about these guys is , they also know what they do for a living .
they make balloon animals .
but what do we do for a living ?
what exactly to the people watching this do every day ?
and i want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything .
that we try to find a piece of the status quo - something that bothers us , something that needs to be improved , something that is itching to be changed - and we change it .
we try to make big , permanent , important change .
but we do n't think about it that way .
and we have n't spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like .
and i 've been studying it for a couple years .
and i want to share a couple stories with you today .
first , about a guy named nathan winograd .
nathan was the number two person at the san francisco spca .
and what you may not know about the history of the spca is , it was founded to kill dogs and cats .
cities gave them a charter to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them .
in a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed , most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street .
nathan and his boss saw this , and they could not tolerate it .
so they set out to make san francisco a no-kill city : create an entire city where every dog and cat , unless it was ill or dangerous , would be adopted , not killed .
and everyone said it was impossible .
nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance .
and people from spcas and humane shelters around the country flew to san francisco to testify against them - to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane .
they persisted . and nathan went directly to the community .
he connected with people who cared about this : nonprofessionals , people with passion .
and within just a couple years , san francisco became the first no-kill city , running no deficit , completely supported by the community .
nathan left and went to tompkins county , new york - a place as different from san francisco as you can be and still be in the united states . and he did it again .
he went from being a glorified dogcatcher to completely transforming the community .
and then he went to north carolina and did it again .
and he went to reno and he did it again .
and when i think about what nathan did , and when i think about what people here do , i think about ideas .
and i think about the idea that creating an idea , spreading an idea has a lot behind it .
i do n't know if you 've ever been to a jewish wedding , but what they do is , they take a light bulb and they smash it .
now there is a bunch of reasons for that , and stories about it .
but one reason is because it indicates a change , from before to after .
it is a moment in time .
and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented .
we started with the factory idea : that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change .
we then went to the tv idea , that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece , if you could get on tv enough times , if you could buy enough ads , you could win .
and now we 're in this new model of leadership , where the way we make change is not by using money or power to lever a system , but by leading .
so let me tell you about the three cycles . the first one is the factory cycle .
henry ford comes up with a really cool idea .
it enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day .
because he 's got an efficient enough factory .
well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars .
you can make a lot of change . you can get roads built .
you can change the fabric of an entire country .
that the essence of what you 're doing is you need ever-cheaper labor , and ever-faster machines .
and the problem we 've run into is , we 're running out of both .
ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we shift gears for a minute , and say , " i know : television ; advertising . push push .
take a good idea and push it on the world .
i have a better mousetrap .
and if i can just get enough money to tell enough people , i 'll sell enough . "
and you can build an entire industry on that .
if necessary you can put babies in your ads .
if necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff .
and if babies do n't work , you can use doctors .
but be careful .
because you do n't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition , where you 're talking about one thing instead of the other .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this model requires you to act like the king , like the person in the front of the room throwing things to the peons in the back .
that you are in charge , and you 're going to tell people what to do next .
the quick little diagram of it is , you 're up here , and you are pushing it out to the world .
this method - mass marketing - requires average ideas , because you 're going to the masses , and plenty of ads .
what we 've done as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea , hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause , hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate .
and , unfortunately , it does n't work so well anymore either .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but there is good news around the corner - really good news .
i call it the idea of tribes .
what tribes are , is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years .
it 's about leading and connecting people and ideas .
and it 's something that people have wanted forever .
lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe , or a church tribe , having a work tribe , having a community tribe .
but now , thanks to the internet , thanks to the explosion of mass media , thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world , tribes are everywhere .
the internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all .
instead what it 's allowed is silos of interest .
so you 've got the red-hat ladies over here .
you 've got the red-hat triathletes over there .
you 've got the organized armies over here .
you 've got the disorganized rebels over here .
you 've got people in white hats making food .
and people in white hats sailing boats .
the point is that you can find ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them , because you want to be connected .
that people on the fringes can find each other , connect and go somewhere .
every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this way of thinking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now it turns out this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo .
people i know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon .
and that what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that is going to be torn down , and they burn it down instead , and practice putting it out .
but they always stop and take a picture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one .
they 've got their own flag . they 've got the eye patches .
you can tell when you 're running into someone in a tribe .
and it turns out that it 's tribes - not money , not factories - that can change our world , that can change politics , that can align large numbers of people .
not because you force them to do something against their will , but because they wanted to connect .
that what we do for a living now , all of us , i think , is find something worth changing , and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea .
and it becomes something far bigger than ourselves , it becomes a movement .
so when al gore set out to change the world again , he did n't do it by himself .
and he did n't do it by buying a lot of ads .
he did it by creating a movement .
thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him , because he ca n't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night .
you do n't need everyone .
what kevin kelley has taught us is you just need , i do n't know , a thousand true fans - a thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round .
and that means that the idea you create , the product you create , the movement you create is n't for everyone , it 's not a mass thing . that 's not what this is about .
what it 's about instead is finding the true believers .
it 's easy to look at what i 've said so far , and say , " wait a minute , i do n't have what it takes to be that kind of leader . "
so here are two leaders . they do n't have a lot in common .
they 're about the same age . but that 's about it .
what they did , though , is each in their own way , created a different way of navigating your way through technology .
so some people will go out and get people to be on one team .
and some people will get people to be on the other team .
it also informs the decisions you make when you make products or services .
you know , this is one of my favorite devices .
but what a shame that it 's not organized to help authors create movements .
what would happen if , when you 're using your kindle , you could see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment .
or from your book group . or from your friends , or from the circle you want .
what would happen if authors , or people with ideas could use version two , which comes out on monday , and use it to organize people who want to talk about something .
now there is a million things i could share with you about the mechanics here .
but let me just try a couple .
the beatles did not invent teenagers .
they merely decided to lead them .
that most movements , most leadership that we 're doing is about finding a group that 's disconnected but already has a yearning - not persuading people to want something they do n't have yet .
when diane hatz worked on " the meatrix , " her video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated , she did n't invent the idea of being a vegan .
she did n't invent the idea of caring about this issue .
but she helped organize people , and helped turn it into a movement .
hugo chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class of venezuela . he merely led them .
bob marley did not invent rastafarians .
he just stepped up and said , " follow me . "
derek sivers invented cd baby , which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man - to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to , and connect with each other .
what all these people have in common is that they are heretics .
that heretics look at the status quo and say , " this will not stand . i ca n't abide this status quo .
i am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward .
i see what the status quo is ; i do n't like it . "
that instead of looking at all the little rules and following each one of them , that instead of being what i call a sheepwalker - somebody who 's half asleep , following instructions , keeping their head down , fitting in - every once in a while someone stands up and says , " not me . "
someone stands up and says , " this one is important .
we need to organize around it . "
and not everyone will . but you do n't need everyone .
you just need a few people - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - who will look at the rules , realize they make no sense , and realize how much they want to be connected .
so tony hsieh does not run a shoe store .
zappos is n't a shoe store .
zappos is the one , the only , the best-there-ever-was to talk about their passion , to connect with people who care more about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow .
it can be something as prosaic as shoes , and something as complicated as overthrowing a government .
it 's exactly the same behavior though .
what it requires , as geraldine carter has discovered , is to be able to say , " i ca n't do this by myself .
but if i can get other people to join my climb and ride , then together we can get something that we all want .
we 're just waiting for someone to lead us . "
michelle kaufman has pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture .
she does n't do it by quietly building one house at a time .
she does it by telling a story to people who want to hear it .
by connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to be connected to each other .
by leading a movement and making change .
and around and around and around it goes .
so three questions i 'd offer you .
the first one is , who exactly are you upsetting ?
because if you 're not upsetting anyone , you 're not changing the status quo .
the second question is , who are you connecting ?
because for a lot of people , that 's what they 're in it for : the connections that are being made , one to the other .
and the third one is , who are you leading ?
because focusing on that part of it - not the mechanics of what you 're building , but the who , and the leading part - is where change comes .
so blake , at tom 's shoes , had a very simple idea .
" what would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes i gave exactly the same pair to someone who does n't even own a pair of shoes ? "
this is not the story of how you get shelf space at neiman marcus .
it 's a story of a product that tells a story .
and as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes and someone says , " what are those ? "
you get to tell the story on blake 's behalf , on behalf of the people who got the shoes .
and suddenly it 's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes .
it 's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes .
my friend red maxwell has spent the last 10 years fighting against juvenile diabetes .
not fighting the organization that 's fighting it - fighting with them , leading them , connecting them , challenging the status quo because it 's important to him .
and the people he surrounds himself with need the connection .
they need the leadership . it makes a difference .
you do n't need permission from people to lead them .
but in case you do , here it is : they 're waiting , we 're waiting for you to show us where to go next .
so here is what leaders have in common . the first thing is , they challenge the status quo .
they challenge what 's currently there .
the second thing is , they build a culture .
a secret language , a seven-second handshake , a way of knowing that you 're in or out .
they have curiosity . curiosity about people in the tribe , curiosity about outsiders . they 're asking questions .
they connect people to one another .
do you know what people want more than anything ?
they want to be missed .
they want to be missed the day they do n't show up .
they want to be missed when they 're gone .
and tribe leaders can do that .
it 's fascinating , because all tribe leaders have charisma , but you do n't need charisma to become a leader .
being a leader gives you charisma .
if you look and study the leaders who have succeeded , that 's where charisma comes from - from the leading .
finally , they commit .
they commit to the cause . they commit to the tribe .
they commit to the people who are there .
so i 'd like you to do something for me .
and i hope you 'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand .
what i want you to do , it only takes 24 hours , is : create a movement .
something that matters . start . do it . we need it .
thank you very much . i appreciate it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- come with me to the bottom of the world , antarctica , the highest , driest , windiest , and yes , coldest region on earth - more arid than the sahara and , in parts , colder than mars .
the ice of antarctica glows with a light so dazzling , it blinds the unprotected eye .
early explorers rubbed cocaine in their eyes to kill the pain of it .
the weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level , beneath its weight .
yet , the ice of antarctica is a calendar of climate change .
it records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onset of the last ice ages .
nowhere on earth offers us such a perfect record .
and here , scientists are drilling into the past of our planet to find clues to the future of climate change .
this past january , i traveled to a place called wais divide , about 600 miles from the south pole .
it is the best place on the planet , many say , to study the history of climate change .
there , about 45 scientists from the university of wisconsin , the desert research institute in nevada and others have been working to answer a central question about global warming .
what is the exact relationship between levels of greenhouse gases and planetary temperatures ?
it 's urgent work . we know that temperatures are rising .
this past may was the warmest worldwide on record .
and we know that levels of greenhouse gases are rising too .
what we do n't know is the exact , precise , immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns - winds , ocean currents , precipitation rates , cloud formation , things that bear on the health and well-being of billions of people .
their entire camp , every item of gear , was ferried 885 miles from mcmurdo station , the main u.s. supply base on the coast of antarctica .
wais divide itself though , is a circle of tents in the snow .
in blizzard winds , the crew sling ropes between the tents so that people can feel their way safely to the nearest ice house and to the nearest outhouse .
it snows so heavily there , the installation was almost immediately buried .
indeed , the researchers picked this site because ice and snow accumulates here 10 times faster than anywhere else in antarctica .
they have to dig themselves out every day .
it makes for an exotic and chilly commute .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but under the surface is a hive of industrial activity periodically , this drill , like a biopsy needle , plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice to extract a marrow of gases and isotopes for analysis .
ten times a day , they extract the 10-foot long cylinder of compressed ice crystals that contain the unsullied air and trace chemicals laid down by snow , season after season for thousands of years .
it 's really a time machine .
at the peak of activity earlier this year , the researchers lowered the drill an extra hundred feet deeper into the ice every day and another 365 years deeper into the past .
periodically , they remove a cylinder of ice , like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell from the barrel of a drill .
they inspect it , they check it for cracks , for drill damage , for spalls , for chips .
more importantly , they prepare it for inspection and analysis by 27 independent laboratories in the united states and europe , who will examine it for 40 different trace chemicals related to climate , some in parts per quadrillion .
yes , i said that with a q , quadrillion .
they cut the cylinders up into three-foot sections for easier handling and shipment back to these labs , some 8,000 miles from the drill site .
each cylinder is a parfait of time .
this ice formed as snow 15,800 years ago , when our ancestors were daubing themselves with paint and considering the radical new technology of the alphabet .
bathed in polarized light and cut in cross-section , this ancient ice reveals itself as a mosaic of colors , each one showing how conditions at depth in the ice have affected this material at depths where pressures can reach a ton per square inch .
every year , it begins with a snowflake , and by digging into fresh snow , we can see how this process is ongoing today .
this wall of undisturbed snow , back-lit by sunlight , shows the striations of winter and summer snow , layer upon layer .
each storm scours the atmosphere , washing out dust , soot , trace chemicals , and depositing them on the snow pack year after year , millennia after millennia , creating a kind of periodic table of elements that at this point is more than 11,000 feet thick .
from this , we can detect an extraordinary number of things .
we can see the calcium from the world 's deserts , soot from distant wildfires , methane as an indicator of the strength of a pacific monsoon , all wafted on winds from warmer latitudes to this remote and very cold place .
most importantly , these cylinders and this snow trap air .
each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air , a pristine time capsule of greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide , methane , nitrous oxide - all unchanged from the day that snow formed and first fell .
and this is the object of their scrutiny .
but do n't we already know what we need to know about greenhouse gases ?
why do we need to study this anymore ?
do n't we already know how they affect temperatures ?
do n't we already know the consequences of a changing climate on our settled civilization ?
the truth is , we only know the outlines , and what we do n't completely understand , we ca n't properly fix .
indeed , we run the risk of making things worse .
consider , the single most successful international environmental effort of the 20th century , the montreal protocol , in which the nations of earth banded together to protect the planet from the harmful effects of ozone-destroying chemicals used at that time in air conditioners , refrigerators and other cooling devices .
we banned those chemicals , and we replaced them , unknowingly , with other substances that , molecule per molecule , are a hundred times more potent as heat-trapping , greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide .
this process requires extraordinary precautions .
the scientists must insure that the ice is not contaminated .
moreover , in this 8,000-mile journey , they have to insure this ice does n't melt .
imagine juggling a snowball across the tropics .
they have to , in fact , make sure this ice never gets warmer than about 20 degrees below zero , otherwise , the key gases inside it will dissipate .
so , in the coldest place on earth , they work inside a refrigerator .
as they handle the ice , in fact , they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven , so that , when their work gloves freeze and their fingers stiffen , they can don a fresh pair .
they work against the clock and against the thermometer .
so far , they 've packed up about 4,500 feet of ice cores for shipment back to the united states .
this past season , they manhandled them across the ice to waiting aircraft .
the 109th air national guard flew the most recent shipment of ice back to the coast of antarctica , where it was boarded onto a freighter , shipped across the tropics to california , unloaded , put on a truck , driven across the desert to the national ice core laboratory in denver , colorado , where , as we speak , scientists are now slicing this material up for samples , for analysis , to be distributed to the laboratories around the country and in europe .
antarctica was this planet 's last empty quarter - the blind spot in our expanding vision of the world .
early explorers sailed off the edge of the map , and they found a place where the normal rules of time and temperature seem suspended .
here , the ice seems a living presence .
the wind that rubs against it gives it voice .
it is a voice of experience .
it is a voice we should heed .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- by birth and by choice , i 've been involved with the auto industry my entire life , and for the past 30 years , i 've worked at ford motor company .
and for most of those years , i worried about , how am i going to sell more cars and trucks ?
but today i worry about , what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks ?
what happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles , triples , or even quadruples ?
my life is guided by two great passions , and the first is automobiles .
i literally grew up with the ford motor company .
i thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest ford or lincoln and leave it in the driveway .
and i decided about that time , about age 10 , that it would be really cool if i was a test driver .
so my parents would go to dinner .
they 'd sit down ; i 'd sneak out of the house .
i 'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway , and it was a blast .
and that went on for about two years , until - i think i was about 12 - my dad brought home a lincoln mark iii .
and it was snowing that day .
so he and mom went to dinner , and i snuck out and thought it 'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow .
my dad finished dinner early that evening .
and he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time i hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car - and almost ended up in the front hall .
so it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while .
but i really began to love cars then .
and my first car was a 1975 electric-green mustang .
and even though the color was pretty hideous , i did love the car , and it really cemented my love affair with cars that 's continued on to this day .
but cars are really more than a passion of mine ; they 're quite literally in my blood .
my great grandfather was henry ford , and on my mother 's side , my great grandfather was harvey firestone .
so when i was born , i guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me .
but my great grandfather , henry ford , really believed that the mission of the ford motor company was to make people 's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them .
because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress .
and that 's a belief that i share .
my other great passion is the environment .
and as a young boy , i used to go up to northern michigan and fish in the rivers that hemingway fished in and then later wrote about .
and it really struck me as the years went by , in a very negative way , when i would go to some stream that i 'd loved , and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies , and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it .
and so even at a young age , that really resonated with me , and the whole notion of environmental preservation , at a very basic level , sunk in with me .
as a high-schooler , i started to read authors like thoreau and aldo leopold and edward abbey , and i really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world .
but it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature .
and that was true until i got to college .
and when i got to college , you can imagine my surprise when i would go to class and a number of my professors would say that ford motor company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country .
they thought that we were more interested , as an industry , in profits , rather than progress , and that we filled the skies with smog - and frankly , we were the enemy .
i joined ford after college , after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do .
but i decided that i wanted to go and see if i could affect change there .
and as i look back over 30 years ago , it was a little naive to think at that age that i could . but i wanted to .
and i really discovered that my professors were n't completely wrong .
in fact , when i got back to detroit , my environmental leanings were n't exactly embraced by those in my own company , and certainly by those in the industry .
i had some very interesting conversations , as you can imagine .
there were some within ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that i needed to stop hanging out with " environmental wackos . "
i was considered a radical .
and i 'll never forget the day i was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- of course , i had no intention of doing that , and i kept speaking out about the environment , and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability .
and in time , my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today .
i mean , i think most people in the industry understand that we 've got to get on with it .
and the good news is today we are tackling the big issues , of cars and the environment - not only at ford , but really as an industry .
we 're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights .
and with new technology , we 're reducing - and i believe , someday we 'll eliminate - co2 emissions .
we 're starting to sell electric cars , which is great .
we 're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word - economically , socially and environmentally .
and actually , although we 've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do , i can see the day where my two great passions - cars and the environment - actually come into harmony .
but unfortunately , as we 're on our way to solving one monstrous problem - and as i said , we 're not there yet ; we 've got a lot of work to do , but i can see where we will - but even as we 're in the process of doing that , another huge problem is looming , and people are n't noticing .
and that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened , just as the environment is .
the problem , put in its simplest terms , is one of mathematics .
today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world , and within our lifetime , that number 's going to grow to about nine billion .
and at that population level , our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth .
and with that growth comes some severe practical problems , one of which is our transportation system simply wo n't be able to deal with it .
when we look at the population growth in terms of cars , it becomes even clearer .
today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide .
but with more people and greater prosperity around the world , that number 's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century .
and this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before .
now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives .
today the average american spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams , and that 's a huge waste of time and resources .
but that 's nothing compared to what 's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest .
today the average driver in beijing has a five-hour commute .
and last summer - many of you probably saw this - there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in china .
in the decades to come , 75 percent of the world 's population will live in cities , and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more .
so you can see the size of the issue that we 're facing .
when you factor in population growth , it 's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow .
frankly , four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars , and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam .
so , if we make no changes today , what does tomorrow look like ?
well i think you probably already have the picture .
traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge , and they 're really very , very inconvenient , but that 's all they are .
but the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care , particularly to people that live in city centers .
and our quality of life is going to be severely compromised .
so what 's going to solve this ?
well the answer is n't going to be more of the same .
my great grandfather once said before he invented the model t , " if i had asked people then what they wanted , they would have answered , ' we want faster horses . " ' so the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads .
when america began moving west , we did n't add more wagon trains , we built railroads .
and to connect our country after world war ii , we did n't build more two-lane highways , we built the interstate highway system .
today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future .
we are going to build smart cars , but we also need to build smart roads , smart parking , smart public transportation systems and more .
we do n't want to waste our time sitting in traffic , sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots .
we need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers .
and frankly , that 's the kind of system that 's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable .
now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world .
the city of masdar in abu dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another , and they go underneath the city streets .
and up above , you 've got a series of pedestrian walkways .
on new york city 's 34th street , gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors .
pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created , and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in new york from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes .
now if you look at hong kong , they have a very interesting system called octopus there .
it 's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system .
so parking garages , buses , trains , they all operate within the same system .
now shared car services are also springing up around the world , and these efforts , i think , are great .
they 're relieving congestion , and they 're frankly starting to save some fuel .
these are all really good ideas that will move us forward .
but what really inspires me is what 's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other .
very soon , the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and gps information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network .
every morning i drive about 30 miles from my home in ann arbor to my office in dearborn , michigan .
and every night i go home , my commute is a total crapshoot .
and i often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home .
but very soon we 're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other .
so if the car ahead of me on i-94 hits traffic , it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way .
and these systems are being tested right now , and frankly they 're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon .
but the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless .
so just imagine : one day very soon , you 're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system .
so you get in your car , and as you get in your car , your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive - no more driving around looking for one , which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today 's cars in urban areas - is looking for parking spots .
or think about being in new york city and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you do n't have to wait in the cold to hail one .
or being at a future ted conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time .
this is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system .
so i think it 's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem .
but as we found out with addressing co2 issues , and also fossil fuels , there is no one silver bullet .
the solution is not going to be more cars , more roads or a new rail system ; it can only be found , i believe , in a global network of interconnected solutions .
now i know we can develop the technology that 's going to make this work , but we 've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions - whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we have n't even thought of yet ; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options .
we need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue .
companies , entrepreneurs , venture capitalists , they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity , as well as an enormous social problem .
and just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge - and it 's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power , how much money and how much serious thought has , really over the last three years , just poured into the green energy field .
we need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock .
but we need people like all of you in this room , leading thinkers .
i mean , frankly , i need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue .
and we need people from all walks of life ; not just inventors , we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they 're going to respond to this challenge .
this is n't going to be solved by any one person or one group .
it 's going to really require a national energy policy , frankly for each country , because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels , traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are .
but we need to get going , and we need to get going today .
and we must have an infrastructure that 's designed to support this flexible future .
you know , we 've come a long way .
since the model t , most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime .
and since then , the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live , where we work , where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around .
we do n't want to regress and lose that freedom .
we 're on our way to solving - the one big issue that we 're all focused on that threatens it , and that 's the environmental issue , but i believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock .
because in doing so , we 're going to preserve what we 've really come to take for granted , which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world .
and it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this .
because , if you can envision , as i do , a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today , that 's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow .
i believe we 're at our best when we 're confronted with big issues .
this is a big one , and it wo n't wait .
so let 's get started now .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up in a very small village in canada , and i 'm an undiagnosed dyslexic .
i had a really hard time in school .
in fact , my mother told me eventually that i was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school .
i ran away .
i left when i was 25 years old to go to bali , and there i met my incredible wife , cynthia , and together , over 20 years , we built an amazing jewelry business .
it was a fairy tale , and then we retired .
then she took me to see a film that i really did n't want to see .
it ruined my life - -lrb- laughter -rrb- " the inconvenient truth " and mr. gore .
i have four kids , and even if part of what he says is true , they 're not going to have the life that i had .
and i decided at that moment that i would spend the rest of my life doing whatever i could to improve their possibilities .
so here 's the world , and here we are in bali .
it 's a tiny , little island - 60 miles by 90 miles .
it has an intact hindu culture .
cynthia and i were there .
we had had a wonderful life there , and we decided to do something unusual .
we decided to give back locally .
and here it is : it 's called the green school .
i know it does n't look like a school , but it is something we decided to do , and it is extremely , extremely green .
the classrooms have no walls .
the teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard .
the desks are not square .
at green school , the children are smiling - an unusual thing for school , especially for me .
and we practice holism .
and for me it 's just the idea that , if this little girl graduates as a whole person , chances are she 'll demand a whole world - a whole world - to live on .
our children spend 181 days going to school in a box .
the people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials .
so if this gentleman had had a holistic education , would he be sitting there ?
would he have had more possibilities in his life ?
the classrooms have natural light .
they 're beautiful . they 're bamboo .
the breeze passes through them .
and when the natural breeze is n't enough , the kids deploy bubbles , but not the kind of bubbles you know .
these bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree .
so we basically turned the box into a bubble .
and these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future .
we pay the bill at the end of the month , but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren .
we have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible .
these kids did a little graffiti on their desks , and then they signed up for two extra courses .
the first one was called sanding and the second one was called re-waxing .
but since that happened , they own those desks .
they know they can control their world .
we 're on the grid . we 're not proud of it .
but an amazing alternative energy company in paris is taking us off the grid with solar .
and this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world , in a two-and-a-half meter drop on a river .
when the turbine drops in , it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity , day and night .
and you know what these are .
there 's nowhere to flush .
and as long as we 're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water - you 're all really smart , just do the math .
how many people times how much water .
there is n't enough water .
these are compost toilets , and nobody at the school wanted to know about them , especially the principal .
and they work . people use them . people are okay .
it 's something you should think about doing .
not many things did n't work .
the beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months .
we had to replace them with recyclable plastic .
the teachers dragged giant pvc whiteboards into the classrooms .
so we had some good ideas : we took old automobile windshields , put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard .
green school sits in south-central bali , and it 's on 20 acres of rolling garden .
there 's an amazing river traveling through it , and you can see there how we manage to get across the river .
i met a father the other day ; he looked a little crazed .
i said , " welcome to green school . "
he said , " i 've been on an airplane for 24 hours . "
i asked him , " why ? "
he said , " i had a dream once about a green school , and i saw a picture of this green school , i got on an airplane .
in august i 'm bringing my sons . "
this was a great thing .
but more than that , people are building green houses around green school , so their kids can walk to school on the paths .
and people are bringing their green industries , hopefully their green restaurants , to the green school .
it 's becoming a community .
it 's becoming a green model .
we had to look at everything .
no petrochemicals in the pavement .
no pavement .
these are volcanic stones laid by hand .
there are no sidewalks .
the sidewalks are gravel . they flood when it rains , but they 're green .
this is the school buffalo .
he 's planning to eat that fence for dinner .
all the fences at green school are green .
and when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate , they found out the fence was made out of tapioca .
they took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen , sliced them thinly and made delicious chips .
landscaping .
we manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms .
we dropped them gently in .
we made space for these guys who are bali 's last black pigs .
and the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field .
these young ladies are living in a rice culture , but they know something that few people know in a rice culture .
they know how to plant organic rice , they know how to look after it , they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it .
they 're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future .
this young man is picking organic vegetables .
we feed 400 people lunch every day and it 's not a normal lunch . there 's no gas .
local balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know .
the food is incredible .
green school is a place of pioneers , local and global .
and it 's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world .
the kids are from 25 countries .
when i see them together , i know that they 're working out how to live in the future .
green school is going into its third year with 160 children .
it 's a school where you do learn reading - one of my favorites - writing - i was bad at it - arithmetic .
but you also learn other things .
you learn bamboo building .
you practice ancient balinese arts .
this is called mud wrestling in the rice fields .
the kids love it .
the mothers are n't quite convinced .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives , and we said , okay , local , what does " local " mean ?
local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be balinese , and this was a really big commitment .
and we were right .
and people are coming forward from all over the world to support the balinese scholarship fund , because these kids will be bali 's next green leaders .
the teachers are as diverse as the student body , and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up .
a man came from java with a new kind of organic agriculture .
a woman came from africa with music .
and together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global , green leaders .
the green school effect - we do n't know what it is .
we need someone to come and study it .
but what 's happening , our learning-different kids - dyslexic - we 've renamed them prolexic - are doing well in these beautiful , beautiful classrooms .
and all the kids are thriving .
and how did we do all this ?
on giant grass .
it 's bamboo .
it comes out of the ground like a train .
it grows as high as a coconut tree in two months and three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this .
it 's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof .
when the architects came , they brought us these things , and you 've probably seen things like this .
the yellow box was called the administration complex .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we squashed it , we rethought it , but mainly we renamed it " the heart of school , " and that changed everything forever .
it 's a double helix .
it has administrators in it and many , many other things .
and the problem of building it - when the balinese workers saw long reams of plans , they looked at them and said , " what 's this ? "
so we built big models .
we had them engineered by the engineers .
and balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers , selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques , mostly by hand .
it was chaos .
and the balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do , so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down , we realized that we had a cathedral , a cathedral to green , and a cathedral to green education .
the heart of school has seven kilometers from the time the foundations were finished , in three months it had roofs and floors .
it may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world , but many people believe that it 's the most beautiful .
is this doable in your community ?
we believe it is .
green school is a model we built for the world .
it 's a model we built for bali .
and you just have to follow these simple , simple rules : be local , let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build .
so , mr. gore , thank you .
you ruined my life , but you gave me an incredible future .
and if you 're interested in being involved in finishing green school and building the next 50 around the world , please come and see us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- actually , i come from britain , but i 've been living in maldives for 26 years now .
so , that 's home really .
the maldives , as i 'm sure you 're aware , are a chain of islands off the southwest coast of india here .
capital , malé , where i live .
actually , sitting here today in mysore , we 're closer to malé than we are to delhi , for example .
if you 're in it , india , obviously , is the place to be at the moment .
but if you 're a marine biologist , maldives is not such a bad place to be .
and it has been my home these years .
for those of you who 've been there , fantastic coral reefs , fantastic diving , fantastic snorkeling .
i spend as much of my time as possible investigating the marine life .
i study fish , also the bigger things , whales and dolphins .
this is a blue whale . we have blue whales in the waters around here , off maldives , around the waters of india . you can see them off kerala .
and , in fact , we 're very lucky in this region .
one of the best places in the world to see blue whales is here in this region .
in sri lanka , if you go down to the south coast of sri lanka , during the northeast monsoon season , you can see blue whales very , very easily .
it 's probably the best place in the world to see them .
now , when i talk about the northeast monsoon season , i 'm sure many of you here know exactly what i mean , but perhaps some of you are not quite so sure .
i need to explain a little bit about monsoons .
now , monsoon , the root of the word " monsoon " comes from the word " season . "
so , it 's just a season . and there are two seasons in most of south asia .
and in the summer india heats up , gets very hot .
hot air rises , and air is drawn in off the sea to replace it .
and the way it works is , it comes from the southwest .
it comes off the ocean here and is drawn up towards india .
so it comes from the southwest . it 's a southwest monsoon .
picks up moisture as it crosses the ocean .
that 's what brings the monsoon rain .
and then in the winter things cool down .
high pressure builds over india .
and the whole system goes into reverse .
so , the wind is now coming from the northeast out of india , across the indian ocean , this way towards africa .
keep that in mind .
now , i 'm a marine biologist , but i 'm actually a bit of an old fashioned naturalist , i suppose .
i 'm interested in all sorts of things , almost everything that moves , including dragonflies . and i 'm actually going to talk , this afternoon , about dragonflies .
this is a very beautiful species , it 's called the oriental scarlet .
and one thing you need to know about dragonflies , one important thing , is that they lay their eggs in fresh water .
they need fresh water to breed .
they lay the eggs into fresh water .
little larvae hatch out in fresh water .
they feed on other little things . they feed on mosquito larvae .
so , they 're very important .
they control mosquito larvae , among other things .
and they grow and grow by stages . and they climb out of the water , burst out , as the adult which we see .
and typically , there is a lot of variation , but if you have a dragonfly with , say , a one year life cycle , which is quite typical , the larva , living in the fresh water , lives for 10 or 11 months .
and then the adult , which comes after , lives for one or two months .
so it 's essentially a freshwater animal .
it really does need fresh water .
now , the particular species of dragonfly i want to talk about is this one , because most dragonflies , like the one we 've just seen , when the adult is there for its brief one or two months of life , it does n't go very far . it ca n't travel very far .
a few kilometers , maybe , is quite typical .
they are very good fliers , but they do n't go too far .
but this guy is an exception .
and this is called the globe skimmer , or wandering glider .
and , as the name might suggest , it is found pretty much around the world .
it lives throughout the tropics , the americas , africa , asia , australia , into the pacific .
and it wanders far and wide . we know that much about it .
but it really has n't been studied very much .
it 's a rather mediocre looking dragonfly .
if you 're going to study dragonflies , you want to study those really bright beautiful ones , like that red one . or the really rare ones , the endemic endangered ones .
this is , it seems a bit dull you know .
it 's sort of dull-colored . and it 's fairly common .
and it occurs everywhere - you know , why bother ?
but if you take that attitude , you 're actually missing something rather special .
because this dragonfly has a rather amazing story to tell .
and i feel very privileged to have stumbled across it living in the maldives .
when i first went to the maldives , dead keen on diving , spent as much of my time as i could in and under the water .
did n't notice any dragonflies ; maybe they were there , maybe they were n't .
did n't notice them .
but after some time , after some months , one day as i was going out and about , suddenly i noticed hundreds of dragonflies , hundreds of dragonflies .
something like this , these are all this species globe skimmer .
i did n't know at the time , but i know now , they 're globe skimmers , hundreds of them .
and they were there for some time . and then they were gone .
and i did n't think anything more of it until the following year , when it happened again , and then the year after that , and then the year after that .
and i was a bit slow , i did n't really take too much notice .
but i asked some maldivian friends and colleagues , and yes they come every year .
and i asked people about them and yes , they knew , but they did n't know anything , where they came from , or anything .
and again i did n't think too much of it .
but slowly it began to dawn on me that something rather special was happening .
because dragonflies need fresh water to breed .
and the maldives , and i 'm sure some of you have been there - so here is home .
so , maldives , beautiful place .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's built entirely of coral reefs .
and on top of the coral reefs are sand banks .
average height , about that much above sea level .
so , global warming , sea level rise , it 's a real serious issue .
but i 'm not going to talk about that .
another important point of these sand banks is that when it rains , the rainwater soaks down into the soil . so , it 's gone .
so , it stays under the soil .
the trees can put their roots into it .
humans can dig holes and make a well .
but dragonflies - a bit tricky .
there is no surface fresh water .
there are no ponds , streams , rivers , lakes , nothing like that .
so , why is it that every year millions of dragonflies , millions , millions of dragonflies turn up ?
i got a little bit curious . in fact i 'll stop here , because i want to ask , and there is a lot of people who , from india of course , people who grew up spending your childhood here .
those of you who are indian or spent your childhood here , let me have a show of hands , who of you - not yet , not yet !
you 're too keen . you 're too keen . no . hang on . hang on .
wait for the go . i 'll say go .
those of you who grew up in india , do you remember in your childhood , dragonflies , swarms of dragonflies ? maybe at school , maybe tying little bits of string onto them ?
maybe pulling bits off ? i 'm not asking about that .
you 've only got to say , do you remember seeing lots of dragonflies .
any hands ? any hands ? yes . thank you . thank you .
it 's a widespread phenomenon throughout south asia , including the maldives .
and i got a bit curious about it .
in the maldives - now , in india there is plenty of water , so , dragonflies , yeah , of course . why not ?
but in maldives , no fresh water . so , what on earth is going on ?
and the first thing i did was started recording when they turned up in the maldives .
and there is the answer , 21st of october .
not every year , that 's the average date .
so , i 've been writing it down for 15 years now .
you 'd think they 're coming from india . it 's the closest place .
but in october , remember , we 're still in southwest monsoon , maldives is still in the southwest monsoon .
but wind is , invariably , every time , is from the west .
it 's going towards india , not from india .
so , are these things , how are these things getting here ?
are they coming from india against the wind ?
seemed a bit unlikely .
so , next thing i did is i got on the phone .
maldives is a long archipelago .
it stretches about 500 miles , of course it 's india here .
i got on the phone and emailed to friends and colleagues .
when do you see the dragonflies appear ?
and pretty soon , a picture started emerging .
in bangalore , a colleague there sent me information for three years , average , 24th of september , so late september .
down in trivandrum , a bit later .
far north of maldives , a bit later .
then malé , then further south .
and then the southernmost maldives .
it 's pretty obvious , they 're coming from india .
but they are coming 400 miles across the ocean , against the wind .
how on earth are they doing that ?
i did n't know .
the next thing i did was i started counting dragonflies .
i wanted to know about their seasonality , what time of year , this is when they first arrive , but how long are they around for ? does that give any clues ?
so , i started a very rigorous scientific process .
i had a rigorous scientific transect .
i got on my bicycle , and i cycled around the island of malé .
it 's about five kilometers around , counting the dragonflies as i go , trying not to bump into people as i 'm looking in the trees .
and they 're here for a very short time , october , november , december . that 's it .
and then they tail off , there 's a few , but that 's it .
october , november , december . that is not the northeast monsoon season .
that 's not the southwest season .
that 's the inter-monsoon , the time when the monsoon changes .
now , what i said was , you get the southwest monsoon going one way , and then it changes and you get the northeast monsoon going the other way .
and that sort of gives the impression you 've got one air mass going up and down , up and down . it does n't work like that .
what happens , actually , is there is two air masses .
and there is a front between them , and the front moves .
so , if you 've got india here , when the front is up above india you 're into the southwest monsoon .
then the front moves into the northeast monsoon .
and that front in the middle is not vertical , it 's at an angle .
so , as it comes over towards malé i 'm standing in malé underneath the front .
i can be in the southwest monsoon .
but the wind above is from the northeast monsoon .
so , the dragonflies are actually coming from india on the northeast monsoon , but at an altitude at 1,000 to 2,000 meters up in the air . incredible .
these little insects , it 's the same ones we see out here -lsb- in india -rsb- , two inches long , five centimeters long , flying in their millions , 400 miles across the ocean , at 2,000 meters up . quite incredible .
so , i was quite pleased with myself . i thought wow , i 've tracked this one , i know how they come here . then i scratched my head a bit , and that 's okay , i know how they come here , but why do they come here ?
what are millions of dragonflies doing , flying out over the ocean every year to their apparent doom ?
it does n't make sense . there is nothing for them in maldives .
what on earth are they doing ?
well , to cut a long story short , they 're actually flying right across the ocean .
they 're making it all the way across to east africa .
i know that because i have friends who work on fisheries ' research vessels who have sent to me reports from boats out in the ocean .
i know because we have reports from seychelles , which fit in as well , down here .
and i know because when you look at the rainfall , these particular insects , these globe skimmers breed in temporary rain water pools .
okay , they lay their eggs where the seasonal rains are , the monsoon rains .
the larvae have to develop very quickly .
they only take six weeks . instead of 11 months , they 're six weeks .
they 're up , and they 're off .
now , here we have , in case you ca n't read at the back , the top is rainfall for india .
and we 're starting in june . so this is the monsoon rain .
by september , october , it 's drying out .
nothing for these dragonflies . there is no more seasonal rain .
they 've got to go hunting for seasonal rain .
and they fly south . as the monsoon withdraws to the south they come down through karnataka , into kerala .
and then they run out of land .
but they are incredibly good fliers . this particular species , it can fly for thousands of kilometers .
and it just keeps going . and the wind , the northeast wind swooshes it around and carries it off across the ocean to africa , where it 's raining .
and they are breeding in the rains of africa .
now , this is southeast africa . it makes it look like there are sort of two breeding periods here . it 's slightly more complicated than that .
what 's happening is they are breeding in the monsoon rains here .
and the dragonflies you can see today outside here , on the campus , are the young of this generation .
they hatched out in india .
they 're looking for somewhere to breed . if it rains here they 'll breed .
but most of them are going to carry on . and next stop , perhaps only four or five days away is going to be east africa .
the wind will swoosh them out across here .
if they pass the maldives they might go and have a look , nothing there , they 'll carry on .
here , here , kenya , east africa , they 've actually just come out of a long drought .
just last week the rains broke . the short rains broke and it 's raining there now .
and the dragonflies are there . i have reports from my various contacts .
the dragonflies are here now . they 're breeding there .
when those guys , they 'll lay their eggs now .
they 'll hatch out in six weeks . by that time the seasonal rains have moved on . it 's not there , it 's down here .
they 'll fly down here . and the clever thing is the wind is always converging to where the rain is .
the rain occurs , these are summer rains .
this is a summer monsoon .
the sun is overhead there . summer rains in southern africa .
the sun is overhead , maximum heating , maximum evaporation , maximum clouds , maximum rainfall , maximum opportunities for reproduction .
not only that , because you have this convection , you have this rising of the air where it 's hot , air is drawn in .
there 's a convergence . so , wherever the rain is falling , the air is drawn towards it to replace the air that 's rising .
so , the little fellow that hatches out here , he gets up into the air , he is automatically carried to where the rain is falling .
lay their eggs , next generation , they come up , automatically carried to where the rain is falling .
it 's now back there . they come out , it 's time to come back .
so , in four generations , one , two , three , four and then back .
a complete circuit of the indian ocean .
this is a circuit of about 16,000 kilometers .
16,000 kilometers , four generations , mind you , for a two inch long insect . it 's quite incredible .
those of you from north america will be familiar with the monarch butterfly .
which , up until now has had the longest known insect migration .
it 's only half the length of this one .
and this crossing here , of the ocean , is the only truly regular transoceanic crossing of any insect .
a quite incredible feat .
and i only stumbled on this because i was living in malé , in maldives for long enough for it to percolate into my brain that something rather special was going on .
but dragonflies are not the only creatures that make the crossing .
there is more to the story .
i 'm also interested in birds . and i 'm familiar with this fellow . this is a rather special bird .
it 's a falcon . it 's called the eastern red-footed falcon , obviously .
but it 's also called the amur falcon .
and it 's called the amur falcon because it breeds in amurland .
which is an area along the amur river , which is up here .
it 's the border , much of it is the border between china and russia , up here in the far east .
so , siberia , manchuria .
and that 's where it breeds .
and if you 're a falcon it 's quite a nice place to be in the summer .
but it 's a pretty miserable place to be in the winter .
it 's , well , you can imagine .
so , as any sensible bird would do , he moves south . they move south . the whole population moves south .
but then the being sensible stopped .
so , now they do n't stop here , or even down here .
no , they turn across here .
they have a little refueling stop in northeastern india .
they come to the latitude of about mumbai or goa .
and then they strike out across the ocean , down to kenya .
and down here , and they winter down here -lsb- in southern africa -rsb- .
incredible . this is the most extraordinary migration of any bird of prey . a quite incredible migration .
and they are not the only one that makes the crossing .
they have the most incredible journey , but several make the crossing from india to africa . includes this one , the hobby .
this fellow is a very nice bird , this is the pied cuckoo .
those of you from northern india will be familiar with this .
it comes with the monsoons .
this time of year they cross back to africa .
and this guy , the roller , a rather beautiful bird .
it 's known as the eurasian roller . in india it occurs in the northwest , so it 's known as the kashmir roller .
and these birds , what i 've done is i 've complied all the records , all the available records of these birds , put them together , and found out they migrate at exactly the same time as the dragonflies .
they make use of exactly the same winds .
they travel at exactly the same time with the same winds to make the crossing . i know they travel at the same altitude .
it 's known about the amur falcon . this guy , unfortunately , one of these met an unfortunate end .
he was flying off the coast of goa , 21 years ago , 1988 . october , 1988 .
an indian navy jet was flying off goa , bang ! in the middle of the night . fortunately , a two engine jet got back to base , and they pulled the remains of one of these -lsb- eurasian rollers -rsb- out .
flying at night over the indian ocean 2,424 meters .
same height as the dragonflies go .
so , they are using the same winds .
and the other thing , the other important factor for all these birds , all medium sized fellows , and this includes the next slide as well , which is a bee-eater .
bee-eaters eat bees . this one has a nice blue cheek .
it 's a blue-cheeked bee-eater .
and every one of these birds that makes the crossing from india to east africa eats insects , large insects , the size of dragonflies . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good afternoon .
if you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks , you may have heard of a kind of crisis between china and the u.s.
regarding cyberattacks against the american company google .
many things have been said about this .
some people have called a cyberwar what may actually be just a spy operation - and obviously , a quite mishandled one .
however , this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons .
it so happens that these weapons are dangerous .
they 're of a new nature : they could lead the world into a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle .
these virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world .
in 1982 , in the middle of the cold war in soviet siberia , a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons , the equivalent of a fourth of the hiroshima bomb .
now we know today - this was revealed by thomas reed , ronald reagan 's former u.s. air force secretary - this explosion was actually the result of a cia sabotage operation , in which they had managed to infiltrate the it management systems of that pipeline .
more recently , the u.s. government revealed that in september 2008 , more than 3 million people in the state of espirito santo in brazil were plunged into darkness , victims of a blackmail operation from cyber pirates .
even more worrying for the americans , in december 2008 the holiest of holies , the it systems of centcom , the central command managing the wars in iraq and afghanistan , may have been infiltrated by hackers who used these : plain but infected usb keys .
and with these keys , they may have been able to get inside centcom 's systems , to see and hear everything , and maybe even infect some of them .
as a result , the americans take the threat very seriously .
i 'll quote general james cartwright , vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff , who says in a report to congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction .
moreover , the americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities .
and across the world today , we see a sort of cyber arms race , with cyberwar units built up by countries like north korea or even iran .
yet , what you 'll never hear from spokespeople from the pentagon or the french department of defence is that the question is n't really who 's the enemy , but actually the very nature of cyber weapons .
and to understand why , we must look at how , through the ages , military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace .
for example , if we 'd had tedxparis 350 years ago , we would have talked about the military innovation of the day - the massive vauban-style fortifications - and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in europe .
which was indeed the case in europe between 1650 and 1750 .
similarly , if we 'd had this talk 30 or 40 years ago , we would have seen how the rise of nuclear weapons , and the threat of mutually assured destruction they imply , prevents a direct fight between the two superpowers .
however , if we 'd had this talk 60 years ago , we would have seen how the emergence of new aircraft and tank technologies , which give the advantage to the attacker , make the blitzkrieg doctrine very credible and thus create the possibility of war in europe .
so military technologies can influence the course of the world , can make or break world peace - and there lies the issue with cyber weapons .
the first issue : imagine a potential enemy announcing they 're building a cyberwar unit , but only for their country 's defense .
okay , but what distinguishes it from an offensive unit ?
it gets even more complicated when the doctrines of use become ambiguous .
just 3 years ago , both the u.s. and france were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace , strictly to defend their it systems .
but today both countries say the best defense is to attack .
and so , they 're joining china , whose doctrine of use for 15 years has been both defensive and offensive .
the second issue : your country could be under cyberattack with entire regions plunged into total darkness , and you may not even know who 's attacking you .
cyber weapons have this peculiar feature : they can be used without leaving traces .
this gives a tremendous advantage to the attacker , because the defender does n't know who to fight back against .
and if the defender retaliates against the wrong adversary , they risk making one more enemy and ending up diplomatically isolated .
this issue is n't just theoretical .
in may 2007 , estonia was the victim of cyberattacks , that damaged its communication and banking systems .
estonia accused russia .
but nato , though it defends estonia , reacted very prudently . why ?
because nato could n't be 100 % sure that the kremlin was indeed behind these attacks .
so to sum up , on the one hand , when a possible enemy announces they 're building a cyberwar unit , you do n't know whether it 's for attack or defense .
on the other hand , we know that these weapons give an advantage to attacking .
in a major article published in 1978 , professor robert jervis of columbia university in new york described a model to understand how conflicts could arise .
in this context , when you do n't know if the potential enemy is preparing for defense or attack , and if the weapons give an advantage to attacking , then this environment is most likely to spark a conflict .
this is the environment that 's being created by cyber weapons today , and historically it was the environment in europe at the onset of world war i.
so cyber weapons are dangerous by nature , but in addition , they 're emerging in a much more unstable environment .
if you remember the cold war , it was a very hard game , but a stable one played only by two players , which allowed for some coordination between the two superpowers .
today we 're moving to a multipolar world in which coordination is much more complicated , as we have seen at copenhagen .
and this coordination may become even trickier with the introduction of cyber weapons .
why ? because no nation knows for sure whether its neighbor is about to attack .
so nations may live under the threat of what nobel prize winner thomas schelling called the " reciprocal fear of surprise attack , " as i do n't know if my neighbor is about to attack me or not - i may never know - so i might take the upper hand and attack first .
just last week , in a new york times article dated january 26 , 2010 , it was revealed for the first time that officials at the national security agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the u.s. was about to be cyberattacked .
and these preemptive attacks might not just remain in cyberspace .
in may 2009 , general kevin chilton , commander of the u.s. nuclear forces , stated that in the event of cyberattacks against the u.s. , all options would be on the table .
cyber weapons do not replace conventional or nuclear weapons - they just add a new layer to the existing system of terror .
but in doing so , they also add their own risk of triggering a conflict - as we 've just seen , a very important risk - and a risk we may have to confront with a collective security solution which includes all of us : european allies , nato members , our american friends and allies , our other western allies , and maybe , by forcing their hand a little , our russian and chinese partners .
the information technologies joël de rosnay was talking about , which were historically born from military research , are today on the verge of developing an offensive capability of destruction , which could tomorrow , if we 're not careful , completely destroy world peace .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me start by asking you a question , just with a show of hands : who has an iphone ?
who has an android phone ?
who has a blackberry ?
who will admit in public to having a blackberry ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and let me guess , how many of you , when you arrived here , like me , went and bought a pay-as-you-go sim card ? yeah ?
i 'll bet you did n't even know you 're using african technology .
pay-as-you-go was a technology , or an idea , pioneered in africa by a company called vodacom a good 15 years ago , and now , like franchising , pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces of economic activity in the world .
so i 'm going to talk about innovation in africa , which i think is the purest form , innovation out of necessity .
but first , i 'm going to ask you some other questions .
you do n't have to put your hands up .
these are rhetorical .
why did nikola tesla have to invent the alternating current that powers the lights in this building or the city that we 're in ?
why did henry ford have to invent the production line to produce these fords that came in anything as long as they were black ?
and why did eric merrifield have to invent the dolos ?
blank stares . that is what a dolos looks like , and in the background , you can see robben island .
this is a small dolos , and eric merrifield is the most famous inventor you 've never heard of .
in 1963 , a storm ripped up the harbor in a small south african town called east london , and while he was watching his kids playing with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse , he had the idea for this .
it 's a bit like a huge jumping jack , and they have used this in every harbor in the world as a breakwater .
the global shipping economy would not be possible without african technology like this .
so whenever you talk about africa , you have to put up this picture of the world from space , and people go , " look , it 's the dark continent . "
actually , it is n't .
what it is is a map of innovation .
and it 's really easy to see where innovation 's going on .
all the places with lots of electricity , it is n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and the reason it is n't is because everybody 's watching television or playing angry birds .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so where it 's happening is in africa .
now , this is real innovation , not the way people have expropriated the word to talk about launching new products .
this is real innovation , and i define it as problem-solving .
people are solving real problems in africa .
why ? because we have to .
because we have real problems .
and when we solve real problems for people , we solve them for the rest of the world at the same time .
so in california , everybody 's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card , and people say , " we 've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal . "
fantastic . why do you even need a credit card ?
in africa , we 've been doing that for years , and we 've been doing it on phones like this .
this is a picture i took at a place called kitengela , about an hour south of nairobi , and the thing that 's so remarkable about the payment system that 's been pioneered in africa called m-pesa is that it works on phones like this .
it works on every single phone possible , because it uses sms .
you can pay bills with it , you can buy your groceries , you can pay your kids ' school fees , and i 'm told you can even bribe customs officials .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through m-pesa .
forty percent of kenya 's gdp moves through m-pesa using phones like this .
and you think this is just a feature phone .
actually it 's the smartphone of africa .
it 's also a radio , and it 's also a torch , and more than anything else , it has really superb battery life .
why ? because that 's what we need .
we have really severe energy problems in africa .
by the way , you can update facebook and send gmail from a phone like this .
so we have found a way to use the available technology to send money via m-pesa , which is a bit like a check system for the mobile age .
i come from johannesburg , which is a mining town .
it 's built on gold .
this is a picture i instagrammed earlier .
and the difference today is that the gold of today is mobile .
if you think about the railroad system in north america and how that worked , first came the infrastructure , then came the industry around it , the brothels - it 's a bit like the internet today , right ? - and everything else that worked with it : bars , saloons , etc .
the gold of today is mobile , and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible .
so what are some of the things that you can do with it ?
well , this is by a guy called bright simons from ghana , and what you do is you take medication , something that some people might spend their entire month 's salary on , and you scratch off the code , and you send that to an sms number , and it tells you if that is legitimate or if it 's expired .
really simple , really effective , really life-saving .
in kenya , there 's a service called icow , which just sends you really important information about how to look after your dairy .
the dairy business in kenya is a $ 463 million business , and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer is only a couple of liters of milk a day .
and if you can do that , you can rise out of poverty .
really simple , using a basic phone .
if you do n't have electricity , no problem !
we 'll just make it out of old bicycle parts using a windmill , as william kamkwamba did .
there 's another great african that you 've heard that 's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world .
he 's also finding a way to reinvent solar power and the electricity industry in north america , and if he 's lucky , he 'll get us to mars , hopefully in my lifetime .
he comes from pretoria , the capital of -lsb- south africa -rsb- , about 50 kilometers from where i live .
so back to joburg , which is sometimes called egoli , which means city of gold .
and not only is mobile the gold of today , i do n't believe that the gold is under the ground .
i believe we are the gold .
like you 've heard the other economists say , we are at the point where china was when its boom years began , and that 's where we 're going .
so , you hear the west talk about innovation at the edge .
well , of course it 's happening at the edge , because in the middle , everybody 's updating facebook , or worse still , they 're trying to understand facebook 's privacy settings .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is not that catchy catchphrase .
this is innovation over the edge .
so , people like to call africa a mobile-first continent , but actually it 's mobile-only , so while everybody else is doing all of those things , we 're solving the world 's problems .
so there 's only one thing left to say .
-lsb- " you 're welcome " -rsb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- we are here today because -lsb- the -rsb- united nations have defined goals for the progress of countries .
they 're called millennium development goals .
and the reason i really like these goals is that there are eight of them .
and by specifying eight different goals , the united nations has said that there are so many things needed to change in a country in order to get the good life for people .
look here - you have to end poverty , education , gender , child and maternal health , control infections , protect the environment and get the good global links between nations in every aspect from aid to trade .
there 's a second reason i like these development goals , and that is because each and every one is measured .
take child mortality ; the aim here is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds , from 1990 to 2015 .
that 's a four percent reduction per year - and this , with measuring .
that 's what makes the difference between political talking like this and really going for the important thing , a better life for people .
and what i 'm so happy about with this is that we have already documented that there are many countries in asia , in the middle east , in latin america and east europe that -lsb- are -rsb- reducing with this rate .
and even mighty brazil is going down with five percent per year , and turkey with seven percent per year .
so there 's good news .
but then i hear people saying , " there is no progress in africa .
and there 's not even statistics on africa to know what is happening . "
i 'll prove them wrong on both points .
come with me to the wonderful world of statistics .
i bring you to the webpage , childmortality.org , where you can take deaths in children below five years of age for all countries - it 's done by u.n. specialists .
and i will take kenya as an example .
here you see the data .
do n't panic - do n't panic now , i 'll help you through this .
it looks nasty , like in college when you did n't like statistics .
but first thing , when you see dots like this , you have to ask yourself : from where do the data come ?
what is the origin of the data ?
is it so that in kenya , there are doctors and other specialists who write the death certificate at the death of the child and it 's sent to the statistical office ?
no - low-income countries like kenya still do n't have that level of organization .
it exists , but it 's not complete because so many deaths occur in the home with the family , and it 's not registered .
what we rely on is not an incomplete system .
we have interviews , we have surveys .
and this is highly professional female interviewers who sit down for one hour with a woman and ask her about -lsb- her -rsb- birth history .
how many children did you have ?
are they alive ?
if they died , at what age and what year ?
and then this is done in a representative sample of thousands of women in the country and put together in what used to be called a demographic health survey report .
but these surveys are costly , so they can only be done -lsb- in -rsb- three- to five-year intervals .
but they have good quality .
so this is a limitation .
and all these colored lines here are results ; each color is one survey .
but that 's too complicated for today , so i 'll simplify it for you , and i give you one average point for each survey .
this was 1977 , 1988 , 1992 , ' 97 and 2002 .
and when the experts in the u.n.
have got these surveys in place in their database , then they use advanced mathematical formulas to produce a trend line , and the trend line looks like this .
see here - it 's the best fit they can get of this point .
but watch out - they continue the line beyond the last point out into nothing .
and they estimated that in 2008 , kenya had per child mortality of 128 .
and i was sad , because we could see this reversal in kenya with an increased child mortality in the 90s .
it was so tragic .
but in june , i got a mail in my inbox from demographic health surveys , and it showed good news from kenya .
i was so happy .
this was the estimate of the new survey .
then it just took another three months for -lsb- the -rsb- u.n. to get it into their server , and on friday we got the new trend line - it was down here .
is n't it nice - is n't it nice , yeah ?
i was actually , on friday , sitting in front of my computer , and i saw the death rate fall from 128 to 84 just that morning .
so we celebrated .
but now , when you have this trend line , how do we measure progress ?
i 'm going into some details here , because -lsb- the -rsb- u.n. do it like this .
they start -lsb- in -rsb- 1990 - they measure to 2009 .
they say , " 0.9 percent , no progress . "
that 's unfair .
as a professor , i think i have the right to propose something differently .
i would say , at least do this - 10 years is enough to follow the trend .
it 's two surveys , and you can see what 's happening now .
they have 2.4 percent .
had i been in the ministry of health in kenya , i may have joined these two points .
so what i 'm telling you is that we know the child mortality .
we have a decent trend .
it 's coming into some tricky things then when we are measuring mdgs .
and the reason here for africa is especially important , because ' 90s was a bad decade , not only in kenya , but across africa .
the hiv epidemic peaked .
there was resistance for the old malaria drugs , until we got the new drugs .
we got , later , the mosquito netting .
and there was socio-economic problems , which are now being solved at a much better scale .
so look at the average here - this is the average for all of sub-saharan africa .
and -lsb- the -rsb- u.n. says it 's a reduction with 1.8 percent .
now this sounds a little theoretical , but it 's not so theoretical .
you know , these economists , they love money , they want more and more of it , they want it to grow .
so they calculate the percent annual growth rate of -lsb- the -rsb- economy .
we in public health , we hate child death , so we want less and less and less of child deaths .
so we calculate the percent reduction per year , but it 's sort of the same percentage .
if your economy grows with four percent , you ought to reduce child mortality four percent ; if it 's used well and people are really involved and can get the use of the resources in the way they want it .
so is this fair now to measure this over 19 years ?
an economist would never do that .
i have just divided it into two periods .
in the 90s , only 1.2 percent , only 1.2 percent .
whereas now , second gear - it 's like africa had first gear , now they go into second gear .
but even this is not a fair representation of africa , because it 's an average , it 's an average speed of reduction in africa .
and look here when i take you into my bubble graphs .
still here , child death per 1,000 on that axis .
here we have -lsb- the -rsb- year .
and i 'm now giving you a wider picture than the mdg .
i start 50 years ago when africa celebrated independence in most countries .
i give you congo , which was high , ghana - lower . and kenya - even lower .
and what has happened over the years since then ? here we go .
you can see , with independence , literacy improved and vaccinations started , smallpox was eradicated , hygiene was improved , and things got better .
but then , in the ' 80s , watch out here .
congo got into civil war , and they leveled off here .
ghana got very ahead , fast .
this was the backlash in kenya , and ghana bypassed , but then kenya and ghana go down together - still a standstill in congo .
that 's where we are today .
you can see it does n't make sense to make an average of this zero improvement and this very fast improvement .
time has come to stop thinking about sub-saharan africa as one place .
their countries are so different , and they merit to be recognized in the same way , as we do n't talk about europe as one place .
i can tell you that the economy in greece and sweden are very different - everyone knows that .
and they are judged , each country , on how they are doing .
so let me show the wider picture .
my country , sweden : 1800 , we were up there .
what a strange personality disorder we must have , counting the children so meticulously in spite of a high child death rate .
it 's very strange . it 's sort of embarrassing .
but we had that habit in sweden , you know , that we counted all the child deaths , even if we did n't do anything about it .
and then , you see , these were famine years .
these were bad years , and people got fed up with sweden .
my ancestors moved to the united states .
and eventually , soon they started to get better and better here .
and here we got better education , and we got health service , and child mortality came down .
we never had a war ; sweden was in peace all this time .
but look , the rate of lowering in sweden was not fast .
sweden achieved a low child mortality because we started early .
we had primary school actually started in 1842 .
and then you get that wonderful effect when we got female literacy one generation later .
you have to realize that the investments we do in progress are long-term investments .
it 's not about just five years - it 's long-term investments .
and sweden never reached -lsb- the -rsb- millennium development goal rate , 3.1 percent when i calculated .
so we are off track - that 's what sweden is .
but you do n't talk about it so much .
we want others to be better than we were , and indeed , others have been better .
let me show you thailand , see what a success story , thailand from the 1960s - how they went down here and reached almost the same child mortality levels as sweden .
and i 'll give you another story - egypt , the most hidden , glorious success in public health .
egypt was up here in 1960 , higher than congo .
the nile delta was a misery for children with diarrheal disease and malaria and a lot of problems .
and then they got the aswan dam . they got electricity in their homes , they increased education and they got primary health care .
and down they went , you know .
and they got safer water , they eradicated malaria .
and is n't it a success story .
millennium development goal rates for child mortality is fully possible .
and the good thing is that ghana today is going with the same rate as egypt did at its fastest .
kenya is now speeding up .
here we have a problem .
we have a severe problem in countries which are at a standstill .
now , let me now bring you to a wider picture , a wider picture of child mortality .
i 'm going to show you the relationship between child mortality on this axis here - this axis here is child mortality - and here i have the family size .
the relationship between child mortality and family size .
one , two , three , four children per woman : six , seven , eight children per woman .
this is , once again , 1960 - 50 years ago .
each bubble is a country - the color , you can see , a continent .
the dark blue here is sub-saharan africa .
and the size of the bubble is the population .
and these are the so-called " developing " countries .
they had high , or very high , child mortality and family size , six to eight .
and the ones over there , they were so-called western countries .
they had low child mortality and small families .
what has happened ?
what i want you -lsb- to do -rsb- now is to see with your own eyes the relation between fall in child mortality and decrease in family size .
i just want not to have any room for doubt - you have to see that for yourself .
this is what happened . now i start the world .
here we come down with the eradication of smallpox , better education , health service .
it got down there - china comes into the western box here .
and here brazil is in the western box .
india is approaching . the first african countries coming into the western box , and we get a lot a new neighbors .
welcome to a decent life .
come on . we want everyone down there .
this is the vision we have , is n't it .
and look now , the first african countries here are coming in .
there we are today .
there is no such thing as a " western world " and " developing world . "
this is the report from -lsb- the -rsb- u.n. , which came out on friday .
it 's very good - " levels and trends in child mortality " - except this page .
this page is very bad ; it 's a categorization of countries .
it labels " developing countries , " - i can read from the list here - huh ?
they get samsung , how can they be -lsb- a -rsb- developing country ?
they have here singapore .
they have the lowest child mortality in the world , singapore .
they bypassed sweden five years ago , and they are labeled a developing country .
they have here qatar .
it 's the richest country in the world with al jazeera .
how the heck could they be -lsb- a -rsb- developing country ?
this is crap .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the rest here is good - the rest is good .
we have to have a modern concept , which fits to the data .
and we have to realize that we are all going to into this , down to here .
what is the importance now with the relations here .
look - even if we look in africa - these are the african countries .
you can clearly see the relation with falling child mortality and decreasing family size , even within africa .
it 's very clear that this is what happens .
and a very important piece of research came out on friday from the institute of health metrics and evaluation in seattle showing that almost 50 percent of the fall in child mortality can be attributed to female education .
that is , when we get girls in school , we 'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later , which is a secular trend which is very strong .
that 's why we must have that long-term perspective , but we must measure the impact over 10-year periods .
it 's fully possible to get child mortality down in all of these countries and to get them down in the corner where we all would like to live together .
and of course , lowering child mortality is a matter of utmost importance from humanitarian aspects .
it 's a decent life for children , we are talking about .
but it is also a strategic investment in the future of all mankind , because it 's about the environment .
we will not be able to manage the environment and avoid the terrible climate crisis if we do n't stabilize the world population .
let 's be clear about that .
and the way to do that , that is to get child mortality down , get access to family planning and behind that drive female education .
and that is fully possible . let 's do it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . this is my mobile phone .
a mobile phone can change your life , and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom .
with a mobile phone , you can shoot a crime against humanity in syria .
with a mobile phone , you can tweet a message and start a protest in egypt .
and with a mobile phone , you can record a song , load it up to soundcloud and become famous .
all this is possible with your mobile phone .
i 'm a child of 1984 , and i live in the city of berlin .
let 's go back to that time , to this city .
here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change .
this is autumn 1989 , and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket .
who in the room has a mobile phone with you ?
hold it up .
hold your phones up , hold your phones up !
hold it up . an android , a blackberry , wow .
that 's a lot . almost everybody today has a mobile phone .
but today i will talk about me and my mobile phone , and how it changed my life .
and i will talk about this .
these are 35,830 lines of information .
raw data .
and why are these informations there ?
because in the summer of 2006 , the e.u. commission tabled a directive .
this directive -lsb- is -rsb- called data retention directive .
this directive says that each phone company in europe , each internet service company all over europe , has to store a wide range of information about the users .
who calls whom ? who sends whom an email ?
who sends whom a text message ?
and if you use your mobile phone , where you are .
all this information is stored for at least six months , up to two years by your phone company or your internet service provider .
and all over europe , people stood up and said , " we do n't want this . "
they said , we do n't want this data retention .
we want self-determination in the digital age , and we do n't want that phone companies and internet companies have to store all this information about us .
they were lawyers , journalists , priests , they all said : " we do n't want this . "
and here you can see , like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of berlin and said , " freedom , not fear . "
and some even said , this would be stasi 2.0 .
stasi was the secret police in east germany .
and i also ask myself , does it really work ?
can they really store all this information about us ?
every time i use my mobile phone ?
so i asked my phone company , deutsche telekom , which was at that time the largest phone company in germany , and i asked them , please , send me all the information you have stored about me .
and i asked them once , and i asked them again , and i got no real answer . it was only blah blah answers .
but then i said , i want to have this information , because this is my life you are protocoling .
so i decided to start a lawsuit against them , because i wanted to have this information .
but deutsche telekom said , no , we will not give you this information .
so at the end , i had a settlement with them .
i 'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information i ask for .
because in the mean time , the german constitutional court ruled that the implementation of this e.u. directive into german law was unconstitutional .
so i got this ugly brown envelope with a c.d. inside .
and on the c.d. , this was on .
thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information .
at first i saw it , and i said , okay , it 's a huge file . okay .
but then after a while i realized , this is my life .
this is six months of my life , into this file .
so i was a little bit skeptical , what should i do with it ?
because you can see where i am , where i sleep at night , what i am doing .
but then i said , i want to go out with this information .
i want to make them public .
because i want to show the people what does data retention mean .
so together with zeit online and open data city , i did this .
this is a visualization of six months of my life .
you can zoom in and zoom out , you can wind back and fast forward .
you can see every step i take .
and you can even see how i go from frankfurt by train to cologne , and how often i call in between .
all this is possible with this information .
that 's a little bit scary .
but it is not only about me .
it 's about all of us .
first , it 's only like , i call my wife and she calls me , and we talk to each other a couple of times .
and then there are some friends calling me , and they call each other .
and after a while you are calling you , and you are calling you , and you have this great communication network .
but you can see how your people are communicating with each other , what times they call each other , when they go to bed .
you can see all of this .
you can see the hubs , like who are the leaders in the group .
if you have access to this information , you can see what your society is doing .
if you have access to this information , you can control your society .
this is a blueprint for countries like china and iran .
this is a blueprint how to survey your society , because you know who talks to whom , who sends whom an email , all this is possible if you have access to this information .
and this information is stored for at least six months in europe , up to two years .
like i said at the beginning , imagine that all those people on the streets of berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket .
and the stasi would have known who took part at this protest , and if the stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it , this may never have happened .
the fall of the berlin wall would maybe not -lsb- have been -rsb- there .
and in the aftermath , also not the fall of the iron curtain .
because today , state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us , online and offline .
they want to have the possibility to track our lives , and they want to store them for all time .
but self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction .
but you have to fight for your self-determination today .
you have to fight for it every day .
so , when you go home , tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century , and it 's not outdated .
when you go home , tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information , they do n't have to do it .
and if you do n't believe me , ask your phone company what information they store about you .
so , in the future , every time you use your mobile phone , let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- last january , my company , fark.com , was sued along with yahoo , msn , reddit , aol , techcrunch and others by a company called gooseberry natural resources .
gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now it may seem kind of strange that such a thing can actually be patented , but it does happen all the time .
take something already being done and patent it for an emerging technology - like phone calls on the internet or video listings for tv shows or radio but for cellphones , and so on .
the problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional , and as a result , most of these lawsuits end in settlements .
and because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement , no one knows what the terms were .
and as a result , the patent troll can claim that they won the case .
in the case of gooseberry natural resources , this patent on emailing news releases had sort of a fatal flaw as it pertained to myself , and that was that in the mainstream media world there is only one definition for news release , and it turns out that is press release - as in p.r.
now my company , fark , deals with news , ostensibly , and as a result we were not in violation of this patent .
so case closed , right ?
wrong .
one of the major problems with patent law is that , in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll , the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant , which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they 're suing you on .
and this can take quite a while .
you need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win .
that is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll .
now i had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies in order to defend against this lawsuit , but one-by-one they settled out of the case , even though - and this is important - none of these companies infringed on this patent - not a one of them .
and they started settling out .
the reason they settled out is because it 's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit - clearly , two million dollars cheaper in some cases , and much worse if you actually lose .
it would also constitute a massive distraction for management of a company , especially a small eight-man shop like my company .
six months into the lawsuit , we finally reached the discovery phase .
and in discovery phase , we asked the patent troll to please provide screenshots of fark where the infringement of their patent was actually occurring .
now perhaps it 's because no such screenshots actually existed , but suddenly gooseberry wanted to settle .
their attorney : " ah , yes . my company 's having a reorganization on our end . "
never mind the fact that the address led to a strip mall somewhere in northern l.a.
with no employees .
" and we 'd like to go ahead and close this out .
so would you mind giving us your best and final offer ? "
my response : " how about nothing ? ! "
-lrb- applause -rrb- we did n't have high hopes for that outcome .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but they settled .
no counter offer .
now , as mentioned before , one of the reasons i can talk to you about this is because there 's no non-disclosure agreement on this case .
now how did that happen ?
well during the settlement process , when we received our copy , i struck it .
my attorney said , " nah , no chance of that working . "
it came back signed .
now why ? you can call them .
they 're not under nda either .
now what did i learn from this case ? well , three things .
first of all , if you can , do n't fight the patent , fight the infringement .
patents are very difficult to overturn .
infringement is a lot easier to disprove .
secondly , make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money .
now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they 're able to recover in settlements .
if it becomes clear to them that they can not recover any money , they become less interested in pursuing the case .
finally , make sure that you can tell them that you will make this process as annoying and as painful and as difficult as possible for them .
now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way .
it turns out , because they 're paid on contingency , it works really , really well in reverse .
do n't forget that .
so what does all this mean ?
well to sum up , it boils down to one thing : do n't negotiate with terrorists .
-lrb- applause -rrb- patent trolls have done more damage to the united states economy than any domestic or foreign every year .
and what do they do with that money ?
they plow it right back into filing more troll lawsuits .
now this is the point in the talk where i 'm supposed to come up with some kind of a solution for the patent system .
and the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system .
the health care industry would like stronger protections for inventors .
the hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers .
and these goals are n't necessarily diametrically opposed , but they are at odds .
and as a result , patent trolls can kind of live in the space in between .
so unfortunately i 'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem .
however , i did have this idea , and it was kind of good .
and i thought , " i should patent this . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- behold , patent infringement via mobile device - defined as a computer which is not stationary .
my solution : award me this patent and i will troll them out of existence .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to start here .
this is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in brooklyn a few years ago .
the store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar .
and kids could bring in drawings and have the store print a sugar plate for the top of their birthday cake .
but unfortunately , one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters .
they liked to draw the little mermaid , they 'd like to draw a smurf , they 'd like to draw micky mouse .
but it turns out to be illegal to print a child 's drawing of micky mouse onto a plate of sugar .
and it 's a copyright violation .
and policing copyright violations for children 's birthday cakes was such a hassle that the college bakery said , " you know what , we 're getting out of that business .
if you 're an amateur , you do n't have access to our machine anymore .
if you want a printed sugar birthday cake , you have to use one of our prefab images - only for professionals . "
so there 's two bills in congress right now .
one is called sopa , the other is called pipa .
sopa stands for the stop online piracy act .
it 's from the senate .
pipa is short for protectip , which is itself short for preventing real online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property - because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands .
and what sopa and pipa want to do is they want to do this .
they want to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs .
now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright - although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills - and then they want to remove them from the domain name system .
they want to take them out of the domain name system .
now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names , like google.com , into the kinds of addresses machines expect - 74.125.226.212 .
now the problem with this model of censorship , of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system , is that it wo n't work .
and you 'd think that would be a pretty big problem for a law , but congress seems not to have let that bother them too much .
now the reason it wo n't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and you 'll still go to google .
so the policing layer around the problem becomes the real threat of the act .
now to understand how congress came to write a bill that wo n't accomplish its stated goals , but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects , you have to understand a little bit about the back story .
and the back story is this : sopa and pipa , as legislation , were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century .
the 20th century was a great time to be a media company , because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity .
if you were making a tv show , it did n't have to be better than all other tv shows ever made ; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time - which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty .
which meant that if you fielded average content , you got a third of the u.s. public for free - tens of millions of users for simply doing something that was n't too terrible .
this is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink .
but technology moved on , as technology is wont to do .
and slowly , slowly , at the end of the 20th century , that scarcity started to get eroded - and i do n't mean by digital technology ; i mean by analog technology .
cassette tapes , video cassette recorders , even the humble xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business .
because it turned out we 're not really couch potatoes .
we do n't really like to only consume .
we do like to consume , but every time one of these new tools came along , it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share .
and this freaked the media businesses out - it freaked them out every time .
jack valenti , who was the head lobbyist for the motion picture association of america , once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to jack the ripper and poor , helpless hollywood to a woman at home alone .
that was the level of rhetoric .
and so the media industries begged , insisted , demanded that congress do something .
and congress did something .
by the early 90s , congress passed the law that changed everything .
and that law was called the audio home recording act of 1992 .
what the audio home recording act of 1992 said was , look , if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends , that is not a crime . that 's okay .
taping and remixing and sharing with your friends is okay .
if you make lots and lots of high quality copies and you sell them , that 's not okay .
but this taping business , fine , let it go .
and they thought that they clarified the issue , because they 'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying .
but that was n't what the media businesses wanted .
they had wanted congress to outlaw copying full-stop .
so when the audio home recording act of 1992 was passed , the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if congress was acting in their framework , they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment .
so they went for plan b.
it took them a while to formulate plan b.
plan b appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 - something called the digital millennium copyright act .
it was a complicated piece of legislation , a lot of moving parts .
but the main thrust of the dmca was that it was legal to sell you uncopyable digital material - except that there 's no such things as uncopyable digital material .
it would be , as ed felton once famously said , " like handing out water that was n't wet . "
bits are copyable . that 's what computers do .
that is a side effect of their ordinary operation .
so in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits , the dmca also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices .
every dvd player and game player and television and computer you brought home - no matter what you thought you were getting when you bought it - could be broken by the content industries , if they wanted to set that as a condition of selling you the content .
and to make sure you did n't realize , or did n't enact their capabilities as general purpose computing devices , they also made it illegal for you to try to reset the copyability of that content .
the dmca marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means .
now the dmca had , and is continuing to have , a lot of complicated effects , but in this one domain , limiting sharing , it has mostly not worked .
and the main reason it has n't worked is the internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined .
the mixtape , the fanzine , that was nothing compared to what we 're seeing now with the internet .
we are in a world where most american citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online .
we share written things , we share images , we share audio , we share video .
some of the stuff we share is stuff we 've made .
some of the stuff we share is stuff we 've found .
some of the stuff we share is stuff we 've made out of what we 've found , and all of it horrifies those industries .
so pipa and sopa are round two .
but where the dmca was surgical - we want to go down into your computer , we want to go down into your television set , down into your game machine , and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store - pipa and sopa are nuclear and they 're saying , we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content .
now the mechanism , as i said , for doing this , is you need to take out anybody pointing to those ip addresses .
you need to take them out of search engines , you need to take them out of online directories , you need to take them out of user lists .
and because the biggest producers of content on the internet are not google and yahoo , they 're us , we 're the people getting policed .
because in the end , the real threat to the enactment of pipa and sopa is our ability to share things with one another .
so what pipa and sopa risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept , innocent until proven guilty , and reversing it - guilty until proven innocent .
you ca n't share until you show us that you 're not sharing something we do n't like .
suddenly , the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities .
and if it costs even a dime to police a user , that will crush a service with a hundred million users .
so this is the internet they have in mind .
imagine this sign everywhere - except imagine it does n't say college bakery , imagine it says youtube and facebook and twitter .
imagine it says ted , because the comments ca n't be policed at any acceptable cost .
the real effects of sopa and pipa are going to be different than the proposed effects .
the threat , in fact , is this inversion of the burden of proof , where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we 're given the freedom to create , to produce or to share .
and the people who provide those capabilities to us - the youtubes , the facebooks , the twitters and teds - are in the business of having to police us , or being on the hook for contributory infringement .
there 's two things you can do to help stop this - a simple thing and a complicated thing , an easy thing and a hard thing .
the simple thing , the easy thing , is this : if you 're an american citizen , call your representative , call your senator .
when you look at the people who co-signed on the sopa bill , people who 've co-signed on pipa , what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries .
you do n't have millions and millions of dollars , but you can call your representatives , and you can remind them that you vote , and you can ask not to be treated like a thief , and you can suggest that you would prefer that the internet not be broken .
and if you 're not an american citizen , you can contact american citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same .
because this seems like a national issue , but it is not .
these industries will not be content with breaking our internet .
if they break it , they will break it for everybody .
that 's the easy thing .
that 's the simple thing .
the hard thing is this : get ready , because more is coming .
sopa is simply a reversion of coica , which was purposed last year , which did not pass .
and all of this goes back to the failure of the dmca to disallow sharing as a technical means .
and the dmca goes back to the audio home recording act , which horrified those industries .
because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that , that turns out to be really inconvenient .
" we 'd prefer not to do that , " says the content industries .
and what they want is not to have to do that .
they do n't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing .
they just want the sharing to go away .
pipa and sopa are not oddities , they 're not anomalies , they 're not events .
they 're the next turn of this particular screw , which has been going on 20 years now .
and if we defeat these , as i hope we do , more is coming .
because until we convince congress that the way to deal with copyright violation is the way copyright violation was dealt with with napster , with youtube , which is to have a trial with all the presentation of evidence and the hashing out of facts and the assessment of remedies that goes on in democratic societies .
that 's the way to handle this .
in the meantime , the hard thing to do is to be ready .
because that 's the real message of pipa and sopa .
time warner has called and they want us all back on the couch , just consuming - not producing , not sharing - and we should say , " no . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trees are wonderful arenas for discovery because of their tall stature , their complex structure , the biodiversity they foster and their quiet beauty .
i used to climb trees for fun all the time and now , as a grown-up , i have made my profession understanding trees and forests , through the medium of science .
the most mysterious part of forests is the upper tree canopy .
and dr. terry erwin , in 1983 , called the canopy , " the last biotic frontier . "
i 'd like to take you all on a journey up to the forest canopy , and share with you what canopy researchers are asking and also how they 're communicating with other people outside of science .
let 's start our journey on the forest floor of one of my study sites in costa rica .
because of the overhanging leaves and branches , you 'll notice that the understory is very dark , it 's very still .
and what i 'd like to do is take you up to the canopy , not by putting all of you into ropes and harnesses , but rather showing you a very short clip from a national geographic film called " heroes of the high frontier . "
this was filmed in monteverde , costa rica and i think it gives us the best impression of what it 's like to climb a giant strangler fig .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- growling -rrb- -lrb- rustling -rrb- so what you 'll see up there is that it 's really like the atmosphere of an open field , and there are tremendous numbers of plants and animals that have adapted to make their way and their life in the canopy .
common groups , like the sloth here , have clear adaptations for forest canopies , hanging on with their very strong claws .
but i 'd like to describe to you a more subtle kind of diversity and tell you about the ants .
there are 10,000 species of ants that taxonomists - people who describe and name animals - have named .
4,000 of those ants live exclusively in the forest canopy .
one of the reasons i tell you about ants is because of my husband , who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married , he promised to name an ant after me , which he did - procryptocerus nalini , a canopy ant .
we 've had two children , august andrew and erika and actually , he named ants after them .
so we may be the only family that has an ant named after each one of us .
but my passion - in addition to jack and my children - are the plants , the so-called epiphytes , those plants that grow up on trees .
they do n't have roots that go into trunks nor to the forest floor .
but rather , it is their leaves that are adapted to intercept the dissolved nutrients that come to them in the form of mist and fog .
these plants occur in great diversity , over 28,000 species around the world .
they grow in tropical forests like this one and they also grow in temperate rainforests , that we find in washington state .
these epiphytes are mainly dominated by the mosses .
one thing i want to point out is that underneath these live epiphytes , as they die and decompose , they actually construct an arboreal soil , both in the temperate zone and in the tropics .
and these mosses , generated by decomposing , are like peat moss in your garden .
they have a tremendous capacity for holding on to nutrients and water .
one of the surprising things i discovered is that , if you pull back with me on those mats of epiphytes , what you 'll find underneath them are connections , networks of what we call canopy roots .
these are not epiphyte roots : these are roots that emerge from the trunk and branch of the host trees themselves .
and so those epiphytes are actually paying the landlord a bit of rent in exchange for being supported high above the forest floor .
i was interested , and my canopy researcher colleagues have been interested in the dynamics of the canopy plants that live in the forest .
we 've done stripping experiments where we 've removed mats of epiphytes and looked at the rates of recolonization .
we had predicted that they would grow back very quickly and that they would come in encroaching from the side .
what we found , however , was that they took an extremely long time - over 20 years - to regenerate , starting from the bottom and growing up .
and even now , after 25 years , they 're not up there , they have not recolonized completely .
and i use this little image to say this is what happens to mosses .
if it 's gone , it 's gone , and if you 're really lucky you might get something growing back from the bottom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , recolonization is really very slow .
these canopy communities are fragile .
well , when we look out , you and i , over that canopy of the intact primary forest , what we see is this enormous carpet of carbon .
one of the challenges that canopy researchers are attacking today is trying to understand the amount of carbon that is being sequestered .
we know it 's a lot , but we do not yet know the answers to how much , and by what processes , carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere , held in its biomass , and moving on through the ecosystem .
so i hope i 've showed you that canopy-dwellers are not just insignificant bits of green up high in the canopy that tarzan and jane were interested in , but rather that they foster biodiversity contribute to ecosystem nutrient cycles , and they also help to keep our global climate stable .
up in the canopy , if you were sitting next to me and you turned around from those primary forest ecosystems , you would also see scenes like this .
scenes of forest destruction , forest harvesting and forest fragmentation , thereby making that intact tapestry of the canopy unable to function in the marvelous ways that it has when it is not disturbed by humans .
i 've also looked out on urban places like this and thought about people who are disassociated from trees in their lives .
people who grew up in a place like this did not have the opportunity to climb trees and form a relationship with trees and forests , as i did when i was a young girl .
this troubles me .
here in 2009 , you know , it 's not an easy thing to be a forest ecologist , gripping ourselves with these kinds of questions and trying to figure out how we can answer them .
and especially , you know , as a small brown woman in a little college , in the upper northwest part of our country , far away from the areas of power and money , i really have to ask myself , " what can i do about this ?
how can i reconnect people with trees ? "
well , i think that i can do something .
i know that as a scientist , i have information and as a human being , i can communicate with anybody , inside or outside of academia .
and so , that 's what i 've begin doing , and so i 'd like to unveil the international canopy network here .
we consult to the media about canopy questions ; we have a canopy newsletter ; we have an email listserv .
and so we 're trying to disseminate information about the importance of the canopy , the beauty of the canopy , the necessity of intact canopies , to people outside of academia .
we also recognize that a lot of the products that we make - those videos and so forth - you know , they do n't reach everybody , and so we 've been fostering projects that reach people outside of academia , and outside of the choir that most ecologists preach to .
treetop barbie is a great example of that .
what we do , my students in my lab and i , is we buy barbies from goodwill and value village , we dress her in clothes that have been made by seamstresses and we send her out with a canopy handbook .
and my feeling is - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- - that we 've taken this pop icon and we have just tweaked her a little bit to become an ambassador who can carry the message that being a woman scientist studying treetops is actually a really great thing .
we 've also made partnerships with artists , with people who understand and can communicate the aesthetic beauty of trees and forest canopies .
and i 'd like to just tell you one of our projects , which is the generation of canopy confluences .
what i do is i bring together scientists and artists of all kinds , and we spend a week in the forest on these little platforms ; and we look at nature , we look at trees , we look at the canopy , and we communicate , and exchange , and express what we see together .
the results have been fantastic .
i 'll just give you a few examples .
this is a fantastic installation by bruce chao who is chair of the sculpture and glass blowing department at rhode island school of design .
he saw nests in the canopy at one of our canopy confluences in the pacific northwest , and created this beautiful sculpture .
we 've had dance people up in the canopy .
jodi lomask , and her wonderful troupe capacitor , joined me in the canopy in my rainforest site in costa rica .
they made a fabulous dance called " biome . "
they danced in the forest , and we are taking this dance , my scientific outreach communications , and also linking up with environmental groups , to go to different cities and to perform the science , the dance and the environmental outreach that we hope will make a difference .
we brought musicians to the canopy , and they made their music - and it 's fantastic music .
we had wooden flutists , we had oboists , we had opera singers , we had guitar players , and we had rap singers .
and i brought a little segment to give you of duke brady 's " canopy rap . "
-lrb- music -rrb- that 's duke !
-lrb- applause -rrb- this experience of working with duke also led me to initiate a program called sound science .
i saw the power of duke 's song with urban youth - an audience , you know , i as a middle-aged professor , i do n't have a hope of getting to - in terms of convincing them of the importance of wildlands .
so i engaged caution , this rap singer , with a group of young people from inner-city tacoma .
we went out to the forest , i would pick up a branch , caution would rap on it , and suddenly that branch was really cool .
and then the students would come into our sound studios , they would make their own rap songs with their own beats .
they ended up making a cd which they took home to their family and friends , thereby expressing their own experiences with nature in their own medium .
the final project i 'll talk about is one that 's very close to my heart , and it involves an economic and social value that is associated with epiphytic plants .
in the pacific northwest , there 's a whole industry of moss-harvesting from old-growth forests .
these mosses are taken from the forest ; they 're used by the floriculture industry , by florists , to make arrangements and make hanging baskets .
it 's a 265 million dollar industry and it 's increasing rapidly .
if you remember that bald guy , you 'll know that what has been stripped off of these trunks in the pacific northwest old-growth forest is going to take decades and decades to come back .
so this whole industry is unsustainable .
what can i , as an ecologist , do about that ?
well , my thought was that i could learn how to grow mosses , and that way we would n't have to take them out of the wild .
and i thought , if i had some partners that could help me with this , that would be great .
and so , i thought perhaps incarcerated men and women - who do n't have access to nature , who often have a lot of time , they often have space , and you do n't need any sharp tools to work with mosses - would be great partners .
and they have become excellent partners .
the best i can imagine .
they were very enthusiastic .
-lrb- applause -rrb- they were incredibly enthusiastic about the work .
they learned how to distinguish different species of mosses , which , to tell you the truth , is a lot more than my undergraduate students at the evergreen college can do .
and they embraced the idea that they could help develop a research design in order to grow these mosses .
we 've been successful as partners in figuring out which species grow the fastest , and i 've just been overwhelmed with how successful this has been .
because the prison wardens were very enthusiastic about this as well , i started a science and sustainability seminar in the prisons .
i brought my scientific colleagues and sustainability practitioners into the prison .
we gave talks once a month , and that actually ended up implementing some amazing sustainability projects at the prisons - organic gardens , worm culture , recycling , water catchment and beekeeping . -lrb- applause -rrb- our latest endeavor , with a grant from the department of corrections at washington state , they 've asked us to expand this program to three more prisons .
and our new project is having the inmates and ourselves learn how to raise the oregon spotted frog which is a highly endangered amphibian in washington state and oregon .
so they will raise them - in captivity , of course - from eggs to tadpoles and onward to frogs .
and they will have the pleasure , many of them , of seeing those frogs that they 've raised from eggs and helped develop , helped nurture , move out into protected wildlands to augment the number of endangered species out there in the wild .
and so , i think for many reasons - ecological , social , economic and perhaps even spiritual - this has been a tremendous project and i 'm really looking forward to not only myself and my students doing it , but also to promote and teach other scientists how to do this .
as many of you are aware , the world of academia is a rather inward-looking one .
i 'm trying to help researchers move more outward to have their own partnerships with people outside of the academic community .
and so i 'm hoping that my husband jack , the ant taxonomist , can perhaps work with mattel to make taxonomist ken .
perhaps ben zander and bill gates could get together and make an opera about aids .
or perhaps al gore and naturally 7 could make a song about climate change that would really make you clap your hands .
so , although it 's a little bit of a fantasy , i think it 's also a reality .
given the duress that we 're feeling environmentally in these times , it is time for scientists to reach outward , and time for those outside of science to reach towards academia as well .
i started my career with trying to understand the mysteries of forests with the tools of science .
by making these partnerships that i described to you , i have really opened my mind and , i have to say , my heart to have a greater understanding , to make other discoveries about nature and myself .
when i look into my heart , i see trees - this is actually an image of a real heart - there are trees in our hearts , there are trees in your hearts .
when we come to understand nature , we are touching the most deep , the most important parts of our self .
in these partnerships , i have also learned that people tend to compartmentalize themselves into it people , and movie star people , and scientists , but when we share nature , when we share our perspectives about nature , we find a common denominator .
finally , as a scientist and as a person and now , as part of the ted community , i feel that i have better tools to go out to trees , to go out to forests , to go out to nature , to make new discoveries about nature - and about humans ' place in nature wherever we are and whomever you are .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so my freshman year of college i signed up for an internship in the housing unit at greater boston legal services .
showed up the first day ready to make coffee and photocopies , but was paired with this righteous , deeply inspired attorney named jeff purcell , who thrust me onto the front lines from the very first day .
and over the course of nine months i had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in boston who would come in presenting with housing issues , but always had an underlying health issue .
so i had a client who came in , about to be evicted because he has n't paid his rent .
but he has n't paid his rent , of course , because he 's paying for his hiv medication and just ca n't afford both .
we had moms who would come in , daughter has asthma , wakes up covered in cockroaches every morning .
and one of our litigation strategies was actually to send me into the home of these clients with these large glass bottles .
and i would collect the cockroaches , hot glue-gun them to this poster board that we 'd bring to court for our cases .
and we always won because the judges were just so grossed out .
far more effective , i have to say , than anything i later learned in law school .
but over the course of these nine months , i grew frustrated with feeling like we were intervening too far downstream in the lives of our clients - that by the time they came to us , they were already in crisis .
and at the end of my freshman year of college , i read an article about the work that dr. barry zuckerman was doing as chair of pediatrics at boston medical center .
and his first hire was a legal services attorney to represent the patients .
so i called barry , and with his blessing , in october 1995 walked into the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic at boston medical center .
i 'll never forget , the tvs played this endless reel of cartoons .
and the exhaustion of mothers who had taken two , three , sometimes four buses to bring their child to the doctor was just palpable .
the doctors , it seemed , never really had enough time for all the patients , try as they might .
and over the course of six months , i would corner them in the hallway and ask them a sort of naive but fundamental question : " if you had unlimited resources , what 's the one thing you would give your patients ? "
and i heard the same story again and again , a story we 've heard hundreds of times since then .
they said , " every day we have patients that come into the clinic - child has an ear infection , i prescribe antibiotics .
but the real issue is there 's no food at home .
the real issue is that child is living with 12 other people in a two-bedroom apartment .
and i do n't even ask about those issues because there 's nothing i can do .
i have 13 minutes with each patient .
patients are piling up in the clinic waiting room .
i have no idea where the nearest food pantry is .
and i do n't even have any help . "
in that clinic , even today , there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients , which is better than a lot of the clinics out there .
so health leads was born of these conversations - a simple model where doctors and nurses can prescribe nutritious food , heat in the winter and other basic resources for their patients the same way they prescribe medication .
patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources .
so we began with a card table in the clinic waiting room - totally lemonade stand style .
but today we have a thousand college student advocates who are working to connect nearly 9,000 patients and their families with the resources that they need to be healthy .
so 18 months ago i got this email that changed my life .
and the email was from dr. jack geiger , who had written to congratulate me on health leads and to share , as he said , a bit of historical context .
in 1965 dr. geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country , in a brutally poor area in the mississippi delta .
and so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them .
and they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket , which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic .
and when the office of economic opportunity in washington , d.c. - which was funding geiger 's clinic - they were furious .
and they sent this bureaucrat down to tell geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care - to which geiger famously and logically responded , " the last time i checked my textbooks , the specific therapy for malnutrition was food . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so when i got this email from dr. geiger , i knew i was supposed to be proud to be part of this history .
but the truth is i was devastated .
here we are , 45 years after geiger has prescribed food for his patients , and i have doctors telling me , " on those issues , we practice a ' do n't ask , do n't tell ' policy . "
forty-five years after geiger , health leads has to reinvent the prescription for basic resources .
so i have spent hours upon hours trying to make sense of this weird groundhog day .
how is it that if for decades we had a pretty straightforward tool for keeping patients , and especially low-income patients , healthy , that we did n't use it ?
if we know what it takes to have a healthcare system rather than a sick-care system , why do n't we just do it ?
these questions , in my mind , are not hard because the answers are complicated , they are hard because they require that we be honest with ourselves .
my belief is that it 's almost too painful to articulate our aspirations for our healthcare system , or even admit that we have any at all .
because if we did , they would be so removed from our current reality .
but that does n't change my belief that all of us , deep inside , here in this room and across this country , share a similar set of desires .
that if we are honest with ourselves and listen quietly , that we all harbor one fiercely held aspiration for our healthcare : that it keep us healthy .
this aspiration that our healthcare keep us healthy is an enormously powerful one .
and the way i think about this is that healthcare is like any other system .
it 's just a set of choices that people make .
what if we decided to make a different set of choices ?
what if we decided to take all the parts of healthcare that have drifted away from us and stand firm and say , " no .
these things are ours .
they will be used for our purposes .
they will be used to realize our aspiration " ?
what if everything we needed to realize our aspiration for healthcare was right there in front of us just waiting to be claimed ?
so that 's where health leads began .
we started with the prescription pad - a very ordinary piece of paper - and we asked , not what do patients need to get healthy - antibiotics , an inhaler , medication - but what do patients need to be healthy , to not get sick in the first place ?
and we chose to use the prescription for that purpose .
so just a few miles from here at children 's national medical center , when patients come into the doctor 's office , they 're asked a few questions .
they 're asked , " are you running out of food at the end of the month ?
do you have safe housing ? "
and when the doctor begins the visit , she knows height , weight , is there food at home , is the family living in a shelter .
and that not only leads to a better set of clinical choices , but the doctor can also prescribe those resources for the patient , using health leads like any other sub-specialty referral .
the problem is , once you get a taste of what it 's like to realize your aspiration for healthcare , you want more .
so we thought , if we can get individual doctors to prescribe these basic resources for their patients , could we get an entire healthcare system to shift its presumption ?
and we gave it a shot .
so now at harlem hospital center when patients come in with an elevated body mass index , the electronic medical record automatically generates a prescription for health leads .
and our volunteers can then work with them to connect patients to healthy food and excercise programs in their communities .
we 've created a presumption that if you 're a patient at that hospital with an elevated bmi , the four walls of the doctor 's office probably are n't going to give you everything you need to be healthy .
you need more .
so on the one hand , this is just a basic recoding of the electronic medical record .
and on the other hand , it 's a radical transformation of the electronic medical record from a static repository of diagnostic information to a health promotion tool .
in the private sector , when you squeeze that kind of additional value out of a fixed-cost investment , it 's called a billion-dollar company .
but in my world , it 's called reduced obesity and diabetes .
it 's called healthcare - a system where doctors can prescribe solutions to improve health , not just manage disease .
same thing in the clinic waiting room .
so every day in this country three million patients pass through about 150,000 clinic waiting rooms in this country .
and what do they do when they 're there ?
they sit , they watch the goldfish in the fish tank , they read extremely old copies of good housekeeping magazine .
but mostly we all just sit there forever , waiting .
how did we get here where we devote hundreds of acres and thousands of hours to waiting ?
what if we had a waiting room where you do n't just sit when you 're sick , but where you go to get healthy .
if airports can become shopping malls and mcdonald 's can become playgrounds , surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room .
and that 's what health leads has tried to do , to reclaim that real estate and that time and to use it as a gateway to connect patients to the resources they need to be healthy .
so it 's a brutal winter in the northeast , your kid has asthma , your heat just got turned off , and of course you 're in the waiting room of the er , because the cold air triggered your child 's asthma .
but what if instead of waiting for hours anxiously , the waiting room became the place where health leads turned your heat back on ?
and of course all of this requires a broader workforce .
but if we 're creative , we already have that too .
we know that our doctors and nurses and even social workers are n't enough , that the ticking minutes of health care are too constraining .
health just takes more time .
it requires a non-clinical army of community health workers and case managers and many others .
what if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country ?
unencumbered by clinical responsibilities , unwilling to take no for an answer from those bureaucracies that tend to crush patients , and with an unparalleled ability for information retrieval honed through years of using google .
now lest you think it improbable that a college volunteer can make this kind of commitment , i have two words for you : march madness .
the average ncaa division i men 's basketball player dedicates 39 hours a week to his sport .
now we may think that 's good or bad , but in either case it 's real .
and health leads is based on the presumption that for too long we have asked too little of our college students when it comes to real impact in vulnerable communities .
college sports teams say , " we 're going to take dozens of hours at some field across campus at some ungodly hour of the morning and we 're going to measure your performance , and your team 's performance , and if you do n't measure up or you do n't show up , we 're going to cut you off the team .
but we 'll make huge investments in your training and development , and we 'll give you an extraordinary community of peers . "
and people line up out the door just for the chance to be part of it .
so our feeling is , if it 's good enough for the rugby team , it 's good enough for health and poverty .
health leads too recruits competitively , trains intensively , coaches professionally , demands significant time , builds a cohesive team and measures results - a kind of teach for america for healthcare .
now in the top 10 cities in the u.s.
with the largest number of medicaid patients , each of those has at least 20,000 college students .
new york alone has half a million college students .
and this is n't just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources , it 's a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline who 've spent two , three , four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs .
and they leave with the conviction , the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care .
and the thing is , there 's thousands of these folks already out there .
so mia lozada is chief resident of internal medicine at ucsf medical center , but for three years as an undergraduate she was a health leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at boston medical center .
mia says , " when my classmates write a prescription , they think their work is done .
when i write a prescription , i think , can the family read the prescription ?
do they have transportation to the pharmacy ?
do they have food to take with the prescription ?
do they have insurance to fill the prescription ?
those are the questions i learned at health leads , not in medical school . "
now none of these solutions - the prescription pad , the electronic medical record , the waiting room , the army of college students - are perfect .
but they are ours for the taking - simple examples of the vast under-utilized healthcare resources that , if we reclaimed and redeployed , could realize our most basic aspiration of healthcare .
so i had been at legal services for about nine months when this idea of health leads started percolating in my mind .
and i knew i had to tell jeff purcell , my attorney , that i needed to leave .
and i was so nervous , because i thought he was going to be disappointed in me for abandoning our clients for some crazy idea .
and i sat down with him and i said , " jeff , i have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients ' most basic health needs . "
and i 'll be honest , all i wanted was for him to not be angry at me .
but he said this , " rebecca , when you have a vision , you have an obligation to realize that vision .
you must pursue that vision . "
and i have to say , i was like " whoa .
that 's a lot of pressure . "
i just wanted a blessing , i did n't want some kind of mandate .
but the truth is i 've spent every waking minute nearly since then chasing that vision .
i believe that we all have a vision for healthcare in this country .
i believe that at the end of the day when we measure our healthcare , it will not be by the diseases cured , but by the diseases prevented .
it will not be by the excellence of our technologies or the sophistication of our specialists , but by how rarely we needed them .
and most of all , i believe that when we measure healthcare , it will be , not by what the system was , but by what we chose it to be .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this sound , this smell , this sight all remind me of the campfires of my childhood , when anyone could become a storyteller in front of the dancing flames .
there was this wondrous ending when people and fire fell asleep almost in unison .
it was dreaming time .
now my story has a lot to do with dreaming , although i 'm known to make my dreams come true .
last year , i created a one-man show .
for an hour and a half i shared with the audience a lifetime of creativity , how i pursue perfection , how i cheat the impossible .
and then ted challenged me : " philippe , can you shrink this lifetime to 18 minutes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- eighteen minutes , clearly impossible .
but here i am .
one solution was to rehearse a machine gun delivery in which every syllable , every second will have its importance and hope to god the audience will be able to follow me .
no , no , no .
no , the best way for me to start is to pay my respects to the gods of creativity .
so please join me for a minute of silence .
okay , i cheated , it was a mere 20 seconds .
but hey , we 're on ted time .
when i was six years old , i fell in love with magic .
for christmas i got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation .
somehow i was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box .
so i looked in the book for the most difficult move , and it was this .
now i 'm not supposed to share that with you , but i have to show you the card is hidden in the back of the hand .
now that manipulation was broken down into seven moves described over seven pages .
one , two , three , four , five , six and seven .
and let me show you something else .
the cards were bigger than my hands .
two months later , six years old , i 'm able to do one , two , three , four , five , six , seven .
and i go to see a famous magician and proudly ask him , " well what do you think ? "
six years old .
the magician looked at me and said , " this is a disaster .
you can not do that in two seconds and have a minuscule part of the card showing .
for the move to be professional , it has to be less than one second and it has to be perfect . "
two years later , one - zoop .
and i 'm not cheating . it 's in the back . it 's perfect .
passion is the motto of all my actions .
as i 'm studying magic , juggling is mentioned repeatedly as a great way to acquire dexterity and coordination .
now i had long admired how fast and fluidly jugglers make objects fly .
so that 's it . i 'm 14 ; i 'm becoming a juggler .
i befriend a young juggler in a juggling troupe , and he agrees to sell me three clubs .
but in america you have to explain . what are clubs ?
nothing to do with golf .
they are those beautiful oblong objects , but quite difficult to make .
they have to be precisely lathed .
oh , when i was buying the clubs , somehow the young juggler was hiding from the others .
well i did n't think much of it at the time .
anyway , here i was progressing with my new clubs .
but i could not understand .
i was pretty fast , but i was not fluid at all .
the clubs were escaping me at each throw .
and i was trying constantly to bring them back to me .
until one day i practiced in front of francis brunn , the world 's greatest juggler .
and he was frowning .
and he finally asked , " can i see those ? "
so i proudly showed him my clubs .
he said , " philippe , you have been had .
these are rejects . they are completely out of alignment .
they are impossible to juggle . "
tenacity is how i kept at it against all odds .
so i went to the circus to see more magicians , more jugglers , and i saw - oh no , no , no , i did n't see .
it was more interesting ; i heard .
i heard about those amazing men and women who walk on thin air - the high-wire walkers .
now i have been playing with ropes and climbing all my childhood , so that 's it . i 'm 16 ; i 'm becoming a wire walker .
i found two trees - but not any kind of trees , trees with character - and then a very long rope .
and i put the rope around and around and around and around and around till i had no more rope .
now i have all of those ropes parallel like this .
i get a pair of pliers and some coat hangers , and i gather them together in some kind of ropey path .
so i just created the widest tightrope in the world .
what did i need ? i needed the widest shoes in the world .
so i found some enormous , ridiculous , giant ski boots and then wobbly , wobbly i get on the ropes .
well within a few days i 'm able to do one crossing .
so i cut one rope off .
and the next day one rope off .
and a few days later , i was practicing on a single tightrope .
now you can imagine at that time i had to switch the ridiculous boots for some slippers .
so that is how - in case there are people here in the audience who would like to try - this is how not to learn wire walking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- intuition is a tool essential in my life .
in the meantime , i am being thrown out of five different schools because instead of listening to the teachers , i am my own teacher , progressing in my new art and becoming a street juggler .
on the high wire , within months , i 'm able to master all the tricks they do in the circus , except i am not satisfied .
i was starting to invent my own moves and bring them to perfection .
but nobody wanted to hire me .
so i started putting a wire up in secret and performing without permission .
notre dame , the sydney harbor bridge , the world trade center .
and i developed a certitude , a faith that convinced me that i will get safely to the other side .
if not , i will never do that first step .
well nonetheless , on the top of the world trade center my first step was terrifying .
all of a sudden the density of the air is no longer the same .
manhattan no longer spreads its infinity .
the murmur of the city dissolves into a squall whose chilling power i no longer feel .
i lift the balancing pole . i approach the edge .
i step over the beam .
i put my left foot on the cable , the weight of my body raised on my right leg anchored to the flank of the building .
shall i ever so slightly shift my weight to the left ?
my right leg will be unburdened , my right foot will freely meet the wire .
on one side , a mass of a mountain , a life i know .
on the other , the universe of the clouds , so full of unknown we think it 's empty .
at my feet , the path to the north tower - 60 yards of wire rope .
it 's a straight line , which sags , which sways , which vibrates , which rolls on itself , which is ice , which is three tons tight , ready to explode , ready to swallow me .
an inner howl assails me , the wild longing to flee .
but it is too late .
the wire is ready .
decisively my other foot sets itself onto the cable .
faith is what replaces doubt in my dictionary .
so after the walk people ask me , " how can you top that ? "
well i did n't have that problem .
i was not interested in collecting the gigantic , in breaking records .
in fact , i put my world trade center crossing at the same artistic level as some of my smaller walks - or some completely different type of performance .
let 's see , such as my street juggling , for example .
so each time i draw my circle of chalk on the pavement and enter as the improvising comic silent character i created 45 years ago , i am as happy as when i am in the clouds .
but this here , this is not the street .
so i can not street juggle here , you understand .
so you do n't want me to street juggle here , right ?
you know that , right ?
you do n't want me to juggle , right ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
each time i street juggle i use improvisation .
now improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown .
and since what 's impossible is always unknown , it allows me to believe i can cheat the impossible .
now i have done the impossible not once , but many times .
so what should i share ? oh , i know . israel .
some years ago i was invited to open the israel festival by a high-wire walk .
and i chose to put my wire between the arab quarters and the jewish quarter of jerusalem over the ben hinnom valley .
and i thought it would be incredible if in the middle of the wire i stopped and , like a magician , i produce a dove and send her in the sky as a living symbol of peace .
well now i must say , it was a little bit hard to find a dove in israel , but i got one .
and in my hotel room , each time i practiced making it appear and throwing her in the air , she would graze the wall and end up on the bed .
so i said , now it 's okay . the room is too small .
i mean , a bird needs space to fly .
it will go perfectly on the day of the walk .
now comes the day of the walk .
eighty thousand people spread over the entire valley .
the mayor of jerusalem , teddy kollek , comes to wish me the best .
but he seemed nervous .
there was tension in my wire , but i also could feel tension on the ground .
because all those people were made up of people who , for the most part , considered each other enemies .
so i start the walk . everything is fine .
i stop in the middle .
i make the dove appear .
people applaud in delight .
and then in the most magnificent gesture , i send the bird of peace into the azure .
but the bird , instead of flying away , goes flop , flop , flop and lands on my head .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and people scream .
so i grab the dove , and for the second time i send her in the air .
but the dove , who obviously did n't go to flying school , goes flop , flop , flop and ends up at the end of my balancing pole .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you laugh , you laugh . but hey .
i sit down immediately . it 's a reflex of wire walkers .
now in the meantime , the audience , they go crazy .
they must think this guy with this dove , he must have spent years working with him .
what a genius , what a professional .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i take a bow . i salute with my hand .
and at the end i bang my hand against the pole to dislodge the bird .
now the dove , who , now you know , obviously can not fly , does for the third time a little flop , flop , flop and ends up on the wire behind me .
and the entire valley goes crazy .
now but hold on , i 'm not finished .
so now i 'm like 50 yards from my arrival and i 'm exhausted , so my steps are slow .
and something happened .
somebody somewhere , a group of people , starts clapping in rhythm with my steps .
and within seconds the entire valley is applauding in unison with each of my steps .
but not an applause of delight like before , an applause encouragement .
for a moment , the entire crowd had forgotten their differences .
they had become one , pushing me to triumph .
i want you just for a second to experience this amazing human symphony .
so let 's say i am here and the chair is my arrival .
so i walk , you clap , everybody in unison .
-lrb- clapping -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so after the walk , teddy and i become friends .
and he tells me , he has on his desk a picture of me in the middle of the wire with a dove on my head .
he did n't know the true story .
and whenever he 's daunted by an impossible situation to solve in this hard-to-manage city , instead of giving up , he looks at the picture and he says , " if philippe can do that , i can do this , " and he goes back to work .
inspiration .
by inspiring ourselves we inspire others .
i will never forget this music , and i hope now neither will you .
please take this music with you home , and start gluing feathers to your arms and take off and fly , and look at the world from a different perspective .
and when you see mountains , remember mountains can be moved .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to try and explain why it is that perhaps we do n't understand as much as we think we do .
i 'd like to begin with four questions .
this is not some sort of cultural thing for the time of year .
that 's an in-joke , by the way .
but these four questions , actually , are ones that people who even know quite a lot about science find quite hard .
and they 're questions that i 've asked of science television producers , of audiences of science educators - so that 's science teachers - and also of seven-year-olds , and i find that the seven-year-olds do marginally better than the other audiences , which is somewhat surprising .
so the first question , and you might want to write this down , either on a bit of paper , physically , or a virtual piece of paper in your head . and , for viewers at home , you can try this as well .
a little seed weighs next to nothing and a tree weighs a lot , right ?
i think we agree on that . where does the tree get the stuff that makes up this chair , right ? where does all this stuff come from ?
-lrb- knocks -rrb- and your next question is , can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery , a bulb and one piece of wire ?
and would you be able to , kind of , draw a - you do n't have to draw the diagram , but would you be able to draw the diagram , if you had to do it ? or would you just say , that 's actually not possible ?
the third question is , why is it hotter in summer than in winter ?
i think we can probably agree that it is hotter in summer than in winter , but why ? and finally , would you be able to - and you can sort of scribble it , if you like - scribble a plan diagram of the solar system , showing the shape of the planets ' orbits ?
would you be able to do that ?
and if you can , just scribble a pattern .
ok . now , children get their ideas not from teachers , as teachers often think , but actually from common sense , from experience of the world around them , from all the things that go on between them and their peers , and their carers , and their parents , and all of that . experience .
and one of the great experts in this field , of course , was , bless him , cardinal wolsey . be very careful what you get into people 's heads because it 's virtually impossible to shift it afterwards , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm not quite sure how he died , actually .
was he beheaded in the end , or hung ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , those questions , which , of course , you 've got right , and you have n't been conferring , and so on .
and i - you know , normally , i would pick people out and humiliate , but maybe not in this instance .
a little seed weighs a lot and , basically , all this stuff , 99 percent of this stuff , came out of the air .
now , i guarantee that about 85 percent of you , or maybe it 's fewer at ted , will have said it comes out of the ground . and some people , probably two of you , will come up and argue with me afterwards , and say that actually , it comes out of the ground .
now , if that was true , we 'd have trucks going round the country , filling people 's gardens in with soil , it 'd be a fantastic business .
but , actually , we do n't do that .
the mass of this comes out of the air .
now , i passed all my biology exams in britain .
i passed them really well , but i still came out of school thinking that that stuff came out of the ground .
second one : can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery bulb and one piece of wire ?
yes , you can , and i 'll show you in a second how to do that .
now , i have some rather bad news , which is that i had a piece of video that i was about to show you , which unfortunately - the sound does n't work in this room , so i 'm going to describe to you , in true " monty python " fashion , what happens in the video . and in the video , a group of researchers go to mit on graduation day .
we chose mit because , obviously , that 's a very long way away from here , and you would n't mind too much , but it sort of works the same way in britain and in the west coast of the usa .
and we asked them these questions , and we asked those questions of science graduates , and they could n't answer them .
and so , there 's a whole lot of people saying , " i 'd be very surprised if you told me that this came out of the air .
that 's very surprising to me . " and those are science graduates .
and we intercut it with , " we are the premier science university in the world , " because of british-like hubris .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when we gave graduate engineers that question , they said it could n't be done .
and when we gave them a battery , and a piece of wire , and a bulb , and said , " can you do it ? " they could n't do it . right ?
and that 's no different from imperial college in london , by the way , it 's not some sort of anti-american thing going on .
as if . now , the reason this matters is we pay lots and lots of money for teaching people - we might as well get it right .
and there are also some societal reasons why we might want people to understand what it is that 's happening in photosynthesis . for example , one half of the carbon equation is how much we emit , and the other half of the carbon equation , as i 'm very conscious as a trustee of kew , is how much things soak up , and they soak up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere .
that 's what plants actually do for a living .
and , for any finnish people in the audience , this is a finnish pun : we are , both literally and metaphorically , skating on thin ice if we do n't understand that kind of thing .
now , here 's how you do the battery and the bulb .
it 's so easy , is n't it ? of course , you all knew that .
but if you have n't played with a battery and a bulb , if you 've only seen a circuit diagram , you might not be able to do that , and that 's one of the problems .
so , why is it hotter in summer than in winter ?
we learn , as children , that you get closer to something that 's hot , and it burns you . it 's a very powerful bit of learning , and it happens pretty early on .
by extension , we think to ourselves , " why it 's hotter in summer than in winter must be because we 're closer to the sun . "
i promise you that most of you will have got that .
oh , you 're all shaking your heads , but only a few of you are shaking your heads very firmly .
other ones are kind of going like this . all right .
it 's hotter in summer than in winter because the rays from the sun are spread out more , right , because of the tilt of the earth .
and if you think the tilt is tilting us closer , no , it is n't .
the sun is 93 million miles away , and we 're tilting like this , right ?
it makes no odds . in fact , in the northern hemisphere , we 're further from the sun in summer , as it happens , but it makes no odds , the difference .
ok , now , the scribble of the diagram of the solar system .
if you believe , as most of you probably do , that it 's hotter in summer than in winter because we 're closer to the sun , you must have drawn an ellipse .
right ? that would explain it , right ?
except , in your - you 're nodding - now , in your ellipse , have you thought , " well , what happens during the night ? "
between australia and here , right , they 've got summer and we 've got winter , and what - does the earth kind of rush towards the sun at night , and then rush back again ? i mean , it 's a very strange thing going on , and we hold these two models in our head , of what 's right and what is n't right , and we do that , as human beings , in all sorts of fields .
so , here 's copernicus ' view of what the solar system looked like as a plan .
that 's pretty much what you should have on your piece of paper . right ?
and this is nasa 's view . they 're stunningly similar .
i hope you notice the coincidence here .
what would you do if you knew that people had this misconception , right , in their heads , of elliptical orbits caused by our experiences as children ?
what sort of diagram would you show them of the solar system , to show that it 's not really like that ?
you 'd show them something like this , would n't you ?
it 's a plan , looking down from above .
but , no , look what i found in the textbooks .
that 's what you show people , right ? these are from textbooks , from websites , educational websites - and almost anything you pick up is like that .
and the reason it 's like that is because it 's dead boring to have a load of concentric circles , whereas that 's much more exciting , to look at something at that angle , is n't it ? right ? and by doing it at that angle , if you 've got that misconception in your head , then that two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional thing will be ellipses .
so you 've - it 's crap , is n't it really ? as we say .
so , these mental models - we look for evidence that reinforces our models .
we do this , of course , with matters of race , and politics , and everything else , and we do it in science as well . so we look , just look - and scientists do it , constantly - we look for evidence that reinforces our models , and some folks are just all too able and willing to provide the evidence that reinforces the models .
so , being i 'm in the united states , i 'll have a dig at the europeans .
these are examples of what i would say is bad practice in science teaching centers . these pictures are from la villette in france and the welcome wing of the science museum in london .
and , if you look at the , kind of the way these things are constructed , there 's a lot of mediation by glass , and it 's very blue , and kind of professional - in that way that , you know , woody allen comes up from under the sheets in that scene in " annie hall , " and said , " god , that 's so professional . " and that you do n't - there 's no passion in it , and it 's not hands on , right , and , you know , pun intended . whereas good interpretation - i 'll use an example from nearby - is san francisco exploratorium , where all the things that - the demonstrations , and so on ,
are made out of everyday objects that children can understand , it 's very hands-on , and they can engage with , and experiment with .
and i know that if the graduates at mit and in the imperial college in london had had the battery and the wire and the bit of stuff , and you know , been able to do it , they would have learned how it actually works , rather than thinking that they follow circuit diagrams and ca n't do it .
so good interpretation is more about things that are bodged and stuffed and of my world , right ?
and things that - where there is n't an extra barrier of a piece of glass or machined titanium , and it all looks fantastic , ok ?
and the exploratorium does that really , really well .
and it 's amateur , but amateur in the best sense , in other words , the root of the word being of love and passion .
so , children are not empty vessels , ok ?
so , as " monty python " would have it , this is a bit lord privy seal to say so , but this is - children are not empty vessels .
they come with their own ideas and their own theories , and unless you work with those , then you wo n't be able to shift them , right ? and i probably have n't shifted your ideas of how the world and universe operates , either .
but this applies , equally , to matters of trying to sell new technology .
for example , we are , in britain , we 're trying to do a digital switchover of the whole population into digital technology -lsb- for television -rsb- .
and it 's one of the difficult things is that when people have preconceptions of how it all works , it 's quite difficult to shift those .
so we 're not empty vessels ; the mental models that we have as children persist into adulthood .
poor teaching actually does more harm than good .
in this country and in britain , magnetism is understood better by children before they 've been to school than afterwards , ok ?
same for gravity , two concepts , so it 's - which is quite humbling , as a , you know , if you 're a teacher , and you look before and after , that 's quite worrying . they do worse in tests afterwards , after the teaching .
and we collude . we design tests , or at least in britain , so that people pass them . right ?
and governments do very well . they pat themselves on the back .
ok ? we collude , and actually if you - if someone had designed a test for me when i was doing my biology exams , to really understand , to see whether i 'd understood more than just kind of putting starch and iodine together and seeing it go blue , and really understood that plants took their mass out of the air , then i might have done better at science .
so the most important thing is to get people to articulate their models .
your homework is - you know , how does an aircraft 's wing create lift ?
an obvious question , and you 'll have an answer now in your heads .
and the second question to that then is , ensure you 've explained how it is that planes can fly upside down .
ah ha , right . second question is , why is the sea blue ? all right ?
and you 've all got an idea in your head of the answer .
so , why is it blue on cloudy days ? ah , see .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've always wanted to say that in this country .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- finally , my plea to you is to allow yourselves , and your children , and anyone you know , to kind of fiddle with stuff , because it 's by fiddling with things that you , you know , you complement your other learning . it 's not a replacement , it 's just part of learning that 's important .
thank you very much .
now - oh , oh yeah , go on then , go on .
-lrb- applause -rrb- salaam alaikum .
welcome to doha .
i am in charge of making this country 's food secure .
that is my job for the next two years , to design an entire master plan , and then for the next 10 years to implement it - of course , with so many other people .
but first , i need to talk to you about a story , which is my story , about the story of this country that you 're all here in today .
and of course , most of you have had three meals today , and probably will continue to have after this event .
so going in , what was qatar in the 1940s ?
we were about 11,000 people living here .
there was no water . there was no energy , no oil , no cars , none of that .
most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages , fishing , or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water .
none of the glamour that you see today existed .
no cities like you see today in doha or dubai or abu dhabi or kuwait or riyadh .
it was n't that they could n't develop cities .
resources were n't there to develop them .
and you can see that life expectancy was also short .
most people died around the age of 50 .
so let 's move to chapter two : the oil era .
1939 , that 's when they discovered oil .
but unfortunately , it was n't really fully exploited commercially until after the second world war .
what did it do ?
it changed the face of this country , as you can see today and witness .
it also made all those people who roamed around the desert - looking for water , looking for food , trying to take care of their livestock - urbanize .
you might find this strange , but in my family we have different accents .
my mother has an accent that is so different to my father , and we 're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country .
there are about five or six accents in this country as i speak .
someone says , " how so ? how could this happen ? "
because we lived scattered .
we could n't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources .
and when the resources came , be it oil , we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration .
people started to get to know each other .
and we realized that there are some differences in accents .
so that is the chapter two : the oil era .
let 's look at today .
this is probably the skyline that most of you know about doha .
so what 's the population today ?
it 's 1.7 million people .
that is in less than 60 years .
the average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years .
lifespan has increased to 78 .
water consumption has increased to 430 liters .
and this is amongst the highest worldwide .
from having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree , higher than any other nation .
i do n't know if this was a reaction to lack of water .
but what is interesting about the story that i 've just said ?
the interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water .
now that is historic . it 's never happened before in history .
cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water .
this is history being made in this region .
not only cities that we 're building , but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists , doctors .
build a nice home , bring the architect , design my house .
these people are adamant that this is a livable space when it was n't .
but of course , with the use of technology .
so brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain .
qatar has 74 , and we have that growth rate .
the question is how .
how could we survive that ?
we have no water whatsoever .
simply because of this gigantic , mammoth machine called desalination .
energy is the key factor here . it changed everything .
it is that thing that we pump out of the ground , we burn tons of , probably most of you used it coming to doha .
so that is our lake , if you can see it .
that is our river .
that is how you all happen to use and enjoy water .
this is the best technology that this region could ever have : desalination .
so what are the risks ?
do you worry much ?
i would say , perhaps if you look at the global facts , you will realize , of course i have to worry .
there is growing demand , growing population .
we 've turned seven billion only a few months ago .
and so that number also demands food .
and there 's predictions that we 'll be nine billion by 2050 .
so a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders .
there 's also changing diets .
by elevating to a higher socio-economic level , they also change their diet .
they start eating more meat and so on and so forth .
on the other hand , there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors .
and so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen .
this is the situation in qatar , for those who do n't know .
we only have two days of water reserve .
we import 90 percent of our food , and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land .
the limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions , etc . , etc .
so we also face risks .
these risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity .
the question is , is there a solution ?
is there a sustainable solution ?
indeed there is .
this slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we 've been working on over the past two years .
let 's start with the water .
so we know very well - i showed you earlier - that we need this energy .
so if we 're going to need energy , what sort of energy ?
a depletable energy ? fossil fuel ?
or should we use something else ?
do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy ?
i guess most of you by now realize that we do : 300 days of sun .
and so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need .
and we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water .
and that is a lot of water .
that water will go then to the farmers , and the farmers will be able to water their plants , and they will be able then to supply society with food .
but in order to sustain the horizontal line - because these are the projects , these are the systems that we will deliver - we need to also develop the vertical line : system sustenance , high-level education , research and development , industries , technologies , to produce these technologies for application , and finally markets .
but what gels all of it , what enables it , is legislation , policies , regulations .
without it we ca n't do anything .
so that 's what we are planning to do .
within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation .
our objective is to be a millennium city , just like many millennium cities around : istanbul , rome , london , paris , damascus , cairo .
we are only 60 years old , but we want to live forever as a city , to live in peace .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- growing up in taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher , one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty , the shape and the form of chinese characters .
ever since then , i was fascinated by this incredible language .
but to an outsider , it seems to be as impenetrable as the great wall of china .
over the past few years , i 've been wondering if i can break down this wall , so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so .
i started thinking about how a new , fast method of learning chinese might be useful .
since the age of five , i started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence .
i learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years .
since we only have five minutes , it 's better that we have a fast and simpler way .
a chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters .
you only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy .
the top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature - enough to read road signs , restaurant menus , to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers .
today i 'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works .
you are ready ?
open your mouth as wide as possible until it 's square .
you get a mouth .
this is a person going for a walk .
person .
if the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides , as if she was yelling frantically , " help ! i 'm on fire ! " - this symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame , but i like to think that way . whichever works for you .
this is a tree .
tree .
this is a mountain .
the sun .
the moon .
the symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west .
i call these eight characters radicals .
they are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters .
a person .
if someone walks behind , that is " to follow . "
as the old saying goes , two is company , three is a crowd .
if a person stretched their arms wide , this person is saying , " it was this big . "
the person inside the mouth , the person is trapped .
he 's a prisoner , just like jonah inside the whale .
one tree is a tree . two trees together , we have the woods .
three trees together , we create the forest .
put a plank underneath the tree , we have the foundation .
put a mouth on the top of the tree , that 's " idiot . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- easy to remember , since a talking tree is pretty idiotic .
remember fire ?
two fires together , i get really hot .
three fires together , that 's a lot of flames .
set the fire underneath the two trees , it 's burning .
for us , the sun is the source of prosperity .
two suns together , prosperous .
three together , that 's sparkles .
put the sun and the moon shining together , it 's brightness .
it also means tomorrow , after a day and a night .
the sun is coming up above the horizon . sunrise .
a door . put a plank inside the door , it 's a door bolt .
put a mouth inside the door , asking questions .
knock knock . is anyone home ?
this person is sneaking out of a door , escaping , evading .
on the left , we have a woman .
two women together , they have an argument .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- three women together , be careful , it 's adultery .
so we have gone through almost 30 characters .
by using this method , the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32 .
the next group of eight characters will build an extra 32 .
so with very little effort , you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters , which is the same as a chinese eight-year-old .
so after we know the characters , we start building phrases .
for example , the mountain and the fire together , we have fire mountain . it 's a volcano .
we know japan is the land of the rising sun .
this is a sun placed with the origin , because japan lies to the east of china .
so a sun , origin together , we build japan .
a person behind japan , what do we get ?
a japanese person .
the character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other .
in ancient china , that means in exile , because chinese emperors , they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains .
nowadays , exile has turned into getting out .
a mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit .
this is a slide to remind me that i should stop talking and get off of the stage . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i thought in getting up to my ted wish i would try to begin by putting in perspective what i try to do and how it fits with what they try to do .
we live in a world that everyone knows is interdependent , but insufficient in three major ways .
it is , first of all , profoundly unequal : half the world 's people still living on less than two dollars a day ; a billion people with no access to clean water ; two and a half billion no access to sanitation ; a billion going to bed hungry every night ; one in four deaths every year from aids , tb , malaria and the variety of infections associated with dirty water - 80 percent of them under five years of age .
even in wealthy countries it is common now to see inequality growing .
in the united states , since 2001 we 've had five years of economic growth , five years of productivity growth in the workplace , but median wages are stagnant and the percentage of working families dropping below the poverty line is up by four percent .
the percentage of working families without health care up by four percent .
so this interdependent world which has been pretty good to most of us - which is why we 're all here in northern california doing what we do for a living , enjoying this evening - is profoundly unequal .
it is also unstable .
unstable because of the threats of terror , weapons of mass destruction , the spread of global disease and a sense that we are vulnerable to it in a way that we were n't not so many years ago .
and perhaps most important of all , it is unsustainable because of climate change , resource depletion and species destruction .
when i think about the world i would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren i hope to have , it is a world that moves away from unequal , unstable , unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities - locally , nationally and globally - that share the characteristics of all successful communities : a broadly shared , accessible set of opportunities , a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the common enterprise and a genuine sense of belonging .
all easier said than done .
when the terrorist incidents occurred in the united kingdom a couple of years ago , i think even though they did n't claim as many lives as we lost in the united states on 9/11 , i think the thing that troubled the british most was that the perpetrators were not invaders , but homegrown citizens whose religious and political identities were more important to them than the people they grew up with , went to school with , worked with , shared weekends with , shared meals with .
in other words , they thought their differences were more important than their common humanity .
it is the central psychological plague of humankind in the 21st century .
into this mix , people like us , who are not in public office , have more power to do good than at any time in history , because more than half the world 's people live under governments they voted in and can vote out .
and even non-democratic governments are more sensitive to public opinion .
because primarily of the power of the internet , people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree .
when the tsunami hit south asia , the united states contributed 1.2 billion dollars .
30 percent of our households gave .
half of them gave over the internet .
the median contribution was somewhere around 57 dollars .
and thirdly , because of the rise of non-governmental organizations .
they , businesses , other citizens ' groups , have enormous power to affect the lives of our fellow human beings .
when i became president in 1993 , there were none of these organizations in russia .
there are now a couple of hundred thousand .
none in india . there are now at least a half a million active .
none in china . there are now 250,000 registered with the government , probably twice again that many who are not registered for political reasons .
when i organized my foundation , and i thought about the world as it is and the world that i hope to leave to the next generation , and i tried to be realistic about what i had cared about all my life that i could still have an impact on .
i wanted to focus on activities that would help to alleviate poverty , fight disease , combat climate change , bridge the religious , racial and other divides that torment the world , but to do it in a way that would either use whatever particular skills we could put together in our group to change the way some public good function was performed so that it would sweep across the world more .
you saw one reference to that in what we were able to do with aids drugs .
and i want to say that the head of our aids effort , and the person who also is primarily active in the wish i 'll make tonight , ira magaziner , is here with me and i want to thank him for everything he 's done .
he 's over there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i got out of office and was asked to work , first in the caribbean , to try to help deal with the aids crisis , generic drugs were available for about 500 dollars a person a year .
if you bought them in vast bulks , you could get them at a little under 400 dollars .
the first country we went to work in , the bahamas , was paying 3,500 dollars for these drugs .
the market was so terribly disorganized that they were buying this medicine through two agents who were gigging them sevenfold .
so the very first week we were working , we got the price down to 500 dollars .
and all of a sudden , they could save seven times as many lives for the same amount of money .
then we went to work with the manufacturers of aids medicines , one of whom was cited in the film , and negotiated a whole different change in business strategy , because even at 500 dollars , these drugs were being sold on a high-margin , low-volume , uncertain-payment basis .
so we worked on improving the productivity of the operations and the supply chain , and went to a low-margin , high-volume , absolutely certain-payment business .
i joked that the main contribution we made to the battle against aids was to get the manufacturers to change from a jewelry store to a grocery store strategy .
but the price went to 140 dollars from 500 .
and pretty soon , the average price was 192 dollars .
now we can get it for about 100 dollars .
children 's medicine was 600 dollars , because nobody could afford to buy any of it .
we negotiated it down to 190 .
then , the french imposed their brilliantly conceived airline tax to create a something called unitaid , got a bunch of other countries to help .
that children 's medicine is now 60 dollars a person a year .
the only thing that is keeping us from basically saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive are the absence of systems necessary to diagnose , treat and care for people and deliver this medicine .
we started a childhood obesity initiative with the heart association in america .
we tried to do the same thing by negotiating industry-right deals with the soft drink and the snack food industry to cut the caloric and other dangerous content of food going to our children in the schools .
we just reorganized the markets .
and it occurred to me that in this whole non-governmental world , somebody needs to be thinking about organizing public goods markets .
and that is now what we 're trying to do , and working with this large cities group to fight climate change , to negotiate huge , big , volume deals that will enable cities which generate 75 percent of the world 's greenhouse gases , to drastically and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is good economics .
and this whole discussion as if it 's some sort of economic burden , is a mystery to me .
i think it 's a bird 's nest on the ground .
when al gore won his well-deserved oscar for the " inconvenient truth " movie , i was thrilled , but i had urged him to make a second movie quickly .
for those of you who saw " an inconvenient truth , " the most important slide in the gore lecture is the last one , which shows here 's where greenhouse gases are going if we do n't do anything , here 's where they could go .
and then there are six different categories of things we can do to change the trajectory .
we need a movie on those six categories .
and all of you need to have it embedded in your brains and to organize yourselves around it .
so we 're trying to do that .
so organizing these markets is one thing we try to do .
now we have taken on a second thing , and this gets to my wish .
it has been my experience in working in developing countries that while the headlines may all be - the pessimistic headlines may say , well , we ca n't do this , that or the other thing because of corruption - i think incapacity is a far bigger problem in poor countries than corruption , and feeds corruption .
we now have the money , given these low prices , to distribute aids drugs all over the world to people we can not presently reach .
today these low prices are available in the 25 countries where we work , and in a total of 62 countries , and about 550,000 people are getting the benefits of them .
but the money is there to reach others .
the systems are not there to reach the people .
so what we have been trying to do , working first in rwanda and then in malawi and other places - but i want to talk about rwanda tonight - is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with aids , tb , malaria , other infectious diseases , maternal and child health , and a whole range of health issues poor people are grappling with in the developing world , that can first be scaled for the whole nation of rwanda , and then will be a model that could literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world .
and the test is : one , will it do the job ?
will it provide high quality care ?
and two , will it do it at a price that will enable the country to sustain a health care system without foreign donors after five to 10 years ?
because the longer i deal with these problems , the more convinced i am that we have to - whether it 's economics , health , education , whatever - we have to build systems .
and the absence of systems that function break the connection which got you all in this seat tonight .
you think about whatever your life has been , however many obstacles you have faced in your life , at critical junctures you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved .
in a world with no systems , with chaos , everything becomes a guerilla struggle , and this predictability is not there .
and it becomes almost impossible to save lives , educate kids , develop economies , whatever .
the person , in my view , who has done the best job of this in the health care area , of building a system in a very poor area , is dr. paul farmer , who , many of you know , has worked for now 20 years with his group , partners in health , primarily in haiti where he started , but they 've also worked in russia , in peru and other places around the world .
as poor as haiti is , in the area where farmer 's clinic is active - and they serve a catchment area far greater than the medical professionals they have would indicate they could serve - since 1988 , they have not lost one person to tuberculosis , not one .
and they 've achieved a lot of other amazing health results .
so when we decided to work in rwanda on trying to dramatically increase the income of the country and fight the aids problem , we wanted to build a healthcare network , because it had been totally destroyed during the genocide in 1994 , and the per capita income was still under a dollar a day .
so i rang up , asked paul farmer if he would help .
because it seemed to me if we could prove there was a model in haiti and a model in rwanda that we could then take all over the country , number one , it would be a wonderful thing for a country that has suffered as much as any on earth in the last 15 years , and number two , we would have something that could then be adapted to any other poor country anywhere in the world .
and so we have set about doing that .
now , we started working together 18 months ago .
and we 're working in an area called southern kayonza , which is one of the poorest areas in rwanda , with a group that originally includes about 400,000 people .
we 're essentially implementing what paul farmer did in haiti : he develops and trains paid community health workers who are able to identify health problems , ensure that people who have aids or tb are properly diagnosed and take their medicine regularly , who work on bringing about health education , clean water and sanitation , providing nutritional supplements and moving people up the chain of health care if they have problems of the severity that require it .
the procedures that make this work have been perfected , as i said , by paul farmer and his team in their work in rural haiti over the last 20 years .
recently we did an evaluation of the first 18 months of our efforts in rwanda .
and the results were so good that the rwandan government has now agreed to adopt the model for the entire country , and has strongly supported and put the full resources of the government behind it .
i 'll tell you a little bit about our team because it 's indicative of what we do .
we have about 500 people around the world working in our aids program , some of them for nothing - just for transportation , room and board .
and then we have others working in these other related programs .
our business plan in rwanda was put together under the leadership of diana noble , who is an unusually gifted woman , but not unusual in the type of people who have been willing to do this kind of work .
she was the youngest partner at schroder ventures in london in her 20s .
she was ceo of a successful e-venture - she started and built reed elsevier ventures - and at 45 she decided she wanted to do something different with her life .
so she now works full-time on this for very little pay .
she and her team of former business people have created a business plan that will enable us to scale this health system up for the whole country .
and it would be worthy of the kind of private equity work she used to do when she was making a lot more money for it .
when we came to this rural area , 45 percent of the children under the age of five had stunted growth due to malnutrition .
23 percent of them died before they reached the age of five .
mortality at birth was over two-and-a-half percent .
over 15 percent of the deaths among adults and children occurred because of intestinal parasites and diarrhea from dirty water and inadequate sanitation - all entirely preventable and treatable .
over 13 percent of the deaths were from respiratory illnesses - again , all preventable and treatable .
and not a single soul in this area was being treated for aids or tuberculosis .
within the first 18 months , the following things happened : we went from zero to about 2,000 people being treated for aids .
that 's 80 percent of the people who need treatment in this area .
listen to this : less than four-tenths of one percent of those being treated stopped taking their medicine or otherwise defaulted on treatment .
that 's lower than the figure in the united states .
less than three-tenths of one percent had to transfer to the more expensive second-line drugs .
400,000 pregnant women were brought into counseling and will give birth for the first time within an organized healthcare system .
that 's about 43 percent of all the pregnancies .
about 40 percent of all the people - i said 400,000 . i meant 40,000 .
about 40 percent of all the people who need tb treatment are now getting it - in just 18 months , up from zero when we started .
43 percent of the children in need of an infant feeding program to prevent malnutrition and early death are now getting the food supplements they need to stay alive and to grow .
we 've started the first malaria treatment programs they 've ever had there .
patients admitted to a hospital that was destroyed during the genocide that we have renovated along with four other clinics , complete with solar power generators , good lab technology .
we now are treating 325 people a month , despite the fact that almost 100 percent of the aids patients are now treated at home .
and the most important thing is because we 've implemented paul farmer 's model , using community health workers , we estimate that this system could be put into place for all of rwanda for between five and six percent of gdp , and that the government could sustain that without depending on foreign aid after five or six years .
and for those of you who understand healthcare economics you know that all wealthy countries spend between nine and 11 percent of gdp on health care , except for the united states , we spend 16 - but that 's a story for another day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're now working with partners in health and the ministry of health in rwanda and our foundation folks to scale this system up .
we 're also beginning to do this in malawi and lesotho .
and we have similar projects in tanzania , mozambique , kenya and ethiopia with other partners trying to achieve the same thing : to save as many lives as quickly as we can , but to do it in a systematic way that can be implemented nationwide and then with a model that can be implemented in any country in the world .
we need initial upfront investment to train doctors , nurses , health administration and community health workers throughout the country , to set up the information technology , the solar energy , the water and sanitation , the transportation infrastructure .
but over a five- to 10-year period , we will take down the need for outside assistance and eventually it will be phased out .
my wish is that ted assist us in our work and help us to build a high-quality rural health system in a poor country , rwanda , that can be a model for africa , and indeed , for any poor country anywhere in the world .
my belief is that this will help us to build a more integrated world with more partners and fewer terrorists , with more productive citizens and fewer haters , a place we 'd all want our kids and our grandchildren to grow up in .
it has been an honor for me , particularly , to work in rwanda where we also have a major economic development project in partnership with sir tom hunter , the scottish philanthropist , where last year we , using the same thing with aids drugs , cut the cost of fertilizer and the interest rates on microcredit loans by 30 percent and achieved three- to four-hundred percent increases in crop yields with the farmers .
these people have been through a lot and none of us , most of all me , helped them when they were on the verge of destroying each other .
we 're undoing that now , and they are so over it and so into their future .
we 're doing this in an environmentally responsible way .
i 'm doing my best to convince them not to run the electric grid to the 35 percent of the people that have no access , but to do it with clean energy . to have responsible reforestation projects , the rwandans , interestingly enough , have been quite good , mr. wilson , in preserving their topsoil .
there 's a couple of guys from southern farming families - the first thing i did when i went out to this place was to get down on my hands and knees and dig in the dirt and see what they 'd done with it .
we have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence can practice reconciliation , reorganize itself , focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive , quality health care with minimal outside help .
i am grateful for this prize , and i will use it to that end .
we could use some more help to do this , but think of what it would mean if we could have a world-class health system in rwanda - in a country with a less-than-one-dollar-a-day-per-capita income , one that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the next decade if applied to every similarly situated country on earth .
it 's worth a try and i believe it would succeed .
thank you and god bless you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what does the happiest man in the world look like ?
he certainly does n't look like me .
he looks like this .
his name is matthieu ricard .
so how do you get to be the happiest man in the world ?
well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain .
and you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fmri , versus the right prefrontal cortex .
and matthieu 's happiness measure is off the charts .
he 's by far the happiest man ever measured by science .
which leads us to a question : what was he thinking when he was being measured ?
perhaps something very naughty .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , he was meditating on compassion .
matthieu 's own experience is that compassion is the happiest state ever .
reading about matthieu was one of the pivotal moments of my life .
my dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime - and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale .
and learning about matthieu gave me a new angle to look at my work .
matthieu 's brain scan shows that compassion is not a chore .
compassion is something that creates happiness .
compassion is fun .
and that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game .
because if compassion was a chore , nobody 's going to do it , except maybe the dalai lama or something .
but if compassion was fun , everybody 's going to do it .
therefore , to create the conditions for global compassion , all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun .
but fun is not enough .
what if compassion is also profitable ?
what if compassion is also good for business ?
then , every boss , every manager in the world , will want to have compassion - like this .
that would create the conditions for world peace .
so , i started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting .
fortunately , i did n't have to look very far .
because what i was looking for was right in front of my eyes - in google , my company .
i know there are other compassionate companies in the world , but google is the place i 'm familiar with because i 've been there for 10 years , so i 'll use google as the case study .
google is a company born of idealism .
it 's a company that thrives on idealism .
and maybe because of that , compassion is organic and widespread company-wide .
in google , expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern .
it 's sort of a funny pattern .
it starts with a small group of googlers taking the initiative to do something .
and they do n't usually ask for permission ; they just go ahead and do it , and then other googlers join in , and it just gets bigger and bigger .
and sometimes it gets big enough to become official .
so in other words , it almost always starts from the bottom up .
and let me give you some examples .
the first example is the largest annual community event - where googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities - was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official , because it just became too big .
another example , three googlers - a chef , an engineer and , most funny , a massage therapist - three of them , they learned about a region in india where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility .
so what do they do ?
they just go ahead and start a fundraiser .
and they raise enough money to build this hospital - the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people .
during the haiti earthquake , a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones .
and expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices .
in china for example , one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in china , involving more than 1,000 schools in china , working on issues such as education , poverty , health care and the environment .
there is so much organic social action all around google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts .
and this idea , again , came from the grassroots , from two googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job .
and i found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy .
it was two persons saying , " let 's do this , " and the company said , " yes . "
so it turns out that google is a compassionate company , because googlers found compassion to be fun .
but again , fun is not enough .
there are also real business benefits .
so what are they ?
the first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders .
what does that mean ?
there are three components of compassion .
there is the affective component , which is , " i feel for you . "
there is the cognitive component , which is , " i understand you . "
and there is a motivational component , which is , " i want to help you . "
so what has this got to do with business leadership ?
according to a very comprehensive study led by jim collins , and documented in the book " good to great , " it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness .
and he calls them " level 5 leaders . "
these are leaders who , in addition to being highly capable , possess two important qualities , and they are humility and ambition .
these are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good .
and because they 're ambitious for a greater good , they feel no need to inflate their own egos .
and they , according to the research , make the best business leaders .
and if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion , we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion - understanding people and empathizing with people - inhibits , tones down , what i call the excessive self-obsession that 's in us , therefore creating the conditions for humility .
the motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good .
in other words , compassion is the way to grow level 5 leaders .
and this is the first compelling business benefit .
the second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce .
employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good .
it creates a vibrant , energetic community where people admire and respect each other .
i mean , you come to work in the morning , and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in india .
it 's like how can you not be inspired by those people - your own coworkers ?
so this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration , initiative and creativity .
it makes us a highly effective company .
so , having said all that , what is the secret formula for brewing compassion in the corporate setting ?
in our experience , there are three ingredients .
the first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good .
so always think : how is your company and your job serving the greater good ?
or , how can you further serve the greater good ?
this awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in .
that 's one .
the second ingredient is autonomy .
so in google , there 's a lot of autonomy .
and one of our most popular managers jokes that , this is what he says , " google is a place where the inmates run the asylum . "
and he considers himself one of the inmates .
if you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free , they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way .
the third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth .
leadership training in google , for example , places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities , such as self-awareness , self-mastery , empathy and compassion , because we believe that leadership begins with character .
we even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence , which we jokingly call " searching inside yourself . "
it 's less naughty than it sounds .
so i 'm an engineer by training , but i 'm one of the creators and instructors of this course , which i find kind of funny , because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence .
what a company .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so " search inside yourself " - how does it work ?
it works in three steps .
the first step is attention training .
attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities .
therefore , any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training .
the idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time .
and this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence .
the second step follows the first step .
the second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery .
so using the supercharged attention from step one , we create a high-resolution perception into the cognitive and emotive processes .
what does that mean ?
it means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity , objectivity and from a third-person perspective .
and once you can do that , you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery .
the third step , following the second step , is to create new mental habits .
what does that mean ? imagine this .
imagine whenever you meet any other person , any time you meet a person , your habitual , instinctive first thought is , " i want you to be happy .
i want you to be happy . "
imagine you can do that .
having this habit , this mental habit , changes everything at work .
because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people , and it creates trust , and trust creates a lot of good working relationships .
and this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace .
someday , we hope to open-source " search inside yourself " so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference .
and in closing , i want to end the same place i started , with happiness .
i want to quote this guy - the guy in robes , not the other guy - the dalai lama , who said , " if you want others to be happy , practice compassion .
if you want to be happy , practice compassion . "
i found this to be true , both on the individual level and at a corporate level .
and i hope that compassion will be both fun and profitable for you too .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- believe me or not , i come offering a solution to a very important part of this larger problem , with the requisite focus on climate .
and the solution i offer is to the biggest culprit in this massive mistreatment of the earth by humankind , and the resulting decline of the biosphere .
that culprit is business and industry , which happens to be where i have spent the last 52 years since my graduation from georgia tech in 1956 .
as an industrial engineer , cum aspiring and then successful entrepreneur .
after founding my company , interface , from scratch in 1973 , 36 years ago , to produce carpet tiles in america for the business and institution markets , and shepherding it through start-up and survival to prosperity and global dominance in its field , i read paul hawken 's book , " the ecology of commerce , " the summer of 1994 .
in his book , paul charges business and industry as , one , the major culprit in causing the decline of the biosphere , and , two , the only institution that is large enough , and pervasive enough , and powerful enough , to really lead humankind out of this mess .
and by the way he convicted me as a plunderer of the earth .
and i then challenged the people of interface , my company , to lead our company and the entire industrial world to sustainability , which we defined as eventually operating our petroleum-intensive company in such a way as to take from the earth only what can be renewed by the earth , naturally and rapidly - not another fresh drop of oil - and to do no harm to the biosphere .
take nothing : do no harm .
i simply said , " if hawken is right and business and industry must lead , who will lead business and industry ?
unless somebody leads , nobody will . "
it 's axiomatic . why not us ?
and thanks to the people of interface , i have become a recovering plunderer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i once told a fortune magazine writer that someday people like me would go to jail .
and that became the headline of a fortune article .
they went on to describe me as america 's greenest ceo .
from plunderer to recovering plunderer , to america 's greenest ceo in five years - that , frankly , was a pretty sad commentary on american ceos in 1999 .
asked later in the canadian documentary , " the corporation , " what i meant by the " go to jail " remark , i offered that theft is a crime .
and theft of our children 's future would someday be a crime .
but i realized , for that to be true - for theft of our children 's future to be a crime - there must be a clear , demonstrable alternative to the take-make-waste industrial system that so dominates our civilization , and is the major culprit , stealing our children 's future , by digging up the earth and converting it to products that quickly become waste in a landfill or an incinerator - in short , digging up the earth and converting it to pollution .
according to paul and anne ehrlich and a well-known environmental impact equation , impact - a bad thing - is the product of population , affluence and technology .
that is , impact is generated by people , what they consume in their affluence , and how it is produced .
and though the equation is largely subjective , you can perhaps quantify people , and perhaps quantify affluence , but technology is abusive in too many ways to quantify .
so the equation is conceptual .
still it works to help us understand the problem .
so we set out at interface , in 1994 , to create an example : to transform the way we made carpet , a petroleum-intensive product for materials as well as energy , and to transform our technologies so they diminished environmental impact , rather than multiplied it .
paul and anne ehrlich 's environmental impact equation : i is equal to p times a times t : population , affluence and technology .
i wanted interface to rewrite that equation so that it read i equals p times a divided by t.
now , the mathematically-minded will see immediately that t in the numerator increases impact - a bad thing - but t in the denominator decreases impact .
so i ask , " what would move t , technology , from the numerator - call it t1 - where it increases impact , to the denominator - call it t2 - where it reduces impact ?
i thought about the characteristics of first industrial revolution , t1 , as we practiced it at interface , and it had the following characteristics .
extractive : taking raw materials from the earth .
linear : take , make , waste .
powered by fossil fuel-derived energy .
wasteful : abusive and focused on labor productivity .
more carpet per man-hour .
thinking it through , i realized that all those attributes must be changed to move t to the denominator .
in the new industrial revolution extractive must be replaced by renewable ; linear by cyclical ; fossil fuel energy by renewable energy , sunlight ; wasteful by waste-free ; and abusive by benign ; and labor productivity by resource productivity .
and i reasoned that if we could make those transformative changes , and get rid of t1 altogether , we could reduce our impact to zero , including our impact on the climate .
and that became the interface plan in 1995 , and has been the plan ever since .
we have measured our progress very rigorously .
so i can tell you how far we have come in the ensuing 12 years .
net greenhouse gas emissions down 82 percent in absolute tonnage .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over the same span of time sales have increased by two-thirds and profits have doubled .
so an 82 percent absolute reduction translates into a 90 percent reduction in greenhouse gas intensity relative to sales .
this is the magnitude of the reduction the entire global technosphere must realize by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate disruption - so the scientists are telling us .
fossil fuel usage is down 60 percent per unit of production , due to efficiencies in renewables .
the cheapest , most secure barrel of oil there is is the one not used through efficiencies .
water usage is down 75 percent in our worldwide carpet tile business .
down 40 percent in our broadloom carpet business , which we acquired in 1993 right here in california , city of industry , where water is so precious .
renewable or recyclable materials are 25 percent of the total , and growing rapidly .
renewable energy is 27 percent of our total , going for 100 percent .
we have diverted 148 million pounds - that 's 74,000 tons - of used carpet from landfills , closing the loop on material flows through reverse logistics and post-consumer recycling technologies that did not exist when we started 14 years ago .
those new cyclical technologies have contributed mightily to the fact that we have produced and sold 85 million square yards of climate-neutral carpet since 2004 , meaning no net contribution to global climate disruption in producing the carpet throughout the supply chain , from mine and well head clear to end-of-life reclamation - independent third-party certified .
we call it cool carpet .
and it has been a powerful marketplace differentiator , increasing sales and profits .
three years ago we launched carpet tile for the home , under the brand flor , misspelled f-l-o-r .
you can point and click today at flor.com and have cool carpet delivered to your front door in five days .
it is practical , and pretty too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- we reckon that we are a bit over halfway to our goal : zero impact , zero footprint .
we 've set 2020 as our target year for zero , for reaching the top , the summit of mount sustainability .
we call this mission zero .
and this is perhaps the most important facet : we have found mission zero to be incredibly good for business .
a better business model , a better way to bigger profits .
here is the business case for sustainability .
from real life experience , costs are down , not up , reflecting some 400 million dollars of avoided costs in pursuit of zero waste - the first face of mount sustainability .
this has paid all the costs for the transformation of interface .
and this dispels a myth too , this false choice between the environment and the economy .
our products are the best they 've ever been , inspired by design for sustainability , an unexpected wellspring of innovation .
our people are galvanized around this shared higher purpose .
you can not beat it for attracting the best people and bringing them together .
and the goodwill of the marketplace is astonishing .
no amount of advertising , no clever marketing campaign , at any price , could have produced or created this much goodwill .
costs , products , people , marketplaces - what else is there ?
it is a better business model .
and here is our 14-year record of sales and profits .
there is a dip there , from 2001 to 2003 : a dip when our sales , over a three-year period , were down 17 percent .
but the marketplace was down 36 percent .
we literally gained market share .
we might not have survived that recession but for the advantages of sustainability .
if every business were pursuing interface plans , would that solve all our problems ?
i do n't think so .
i remain troubled by the revised ehrlich equation , i equals p times a divided by t2 .
that a is a capital a , suggesting that affluence is an end in itself .
but what if we reframed ehrlich further ?
and what if we made a a lowercase ' a , ' suggesting that it is a means to an end , and that end is happiness - more happiness with less stuff .
you know that would reframe civilization itself - -lrb- applause -rrb- - and our whole system of economics , if not for our species , then perhaps for the one that succeeds us : the sustainable species , living on a finite earth , ethically , happily and ecologically in balance with nature and all her natural systems for a thousand generations , or 10,000 generations - that is to say , into the indefinite future .
but does the earth have to wait for our extinction as a species ?
well maybe so . but i do n't think so .
at interface we really intend to bring this prototypical sustainable , zero-footprint industrial company fully into existence by 2020 .
we can see our way now , clear to the top of that mountain .
and now the challenge is in execution .
and as my good friend and adviser amory lovins says , " if something exists , it must be possible . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if we can actually do it , it must be possible .
if we , a petro-intensive company can do it , anybody can .
and if anybody can , it follows that everybody can .
hawken fulfilled business and industry , leading humankind away from the abyss because , with continued unchecked decline of the biosphere , a very dear person is at risk here - frankly , an unacceptable risk .
who is that person ?
not you . not i.
but let me introduce you to the one who is most at risk here .
and i myself met this person in the early days of this mountain climb .
on a tuesday morning in march of 1996 , i was talking to people , as i did at every opportunity back then , bringing them along and often not knowing whether i was connecting .
but about five days later back in atlanta , i received an email from glenn thomas , one of my people in the california meeting .
he was sending me an original poem that he had composed after our tuesday morning together .
and when i read it it was one of the most uplifting moments of my life .
because it told me , by god , one person got it .
here is what glenn wrote . and here is that person , most at risk .
please meet " tomorrow 's child . "
" without a name , an unseen face , and knowing not your time or place , tomorrow 's child , though yet unborn , i met you first last tuesday morn .
a wise friend introduced us two .
and through his sobering point of view i saw a day that you would see , a day for you but not for me .
knowing you has changed my thinking .
for i never had an inkling that perhaps the things i do might someday , somehow threaten you .
tomorrow 's child , my daughter , son , i 'm afraid i 've just begun to think of you and of your good , though always having known i should .
begin , i will .
the way the cost of what i squander , what is lost , if ever i forget that you will someday come and live here too . "
well , every day of my life since , " tomorrow 's child " has spoken to me with one simple but profound message , which i presume to share with you .
we are , each and every one , a part of the web of life .
the continuum of humanity , sure , but in a larger sense , the web of life itself .
and we have a choice to make during our brief , brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet : to hurt it or to help it .
for you , it 's your call .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the machine i 'm going to talk you about is what i call the greatest machine that never was .
it was a machine that was never built , and yet , it will be built .
it was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers .
if you know anything about the history of computers , you will know that in the ' 30s and the ' 40s , simple computers were created that started the computer revolution we have today , and you would be correct , except for you 'd have the wrong century .
the first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s , not the 1930s and 1940s .
it was designed , and parts of it were prototyped , and the bits of it that were built are here in south kensington .
that machine was built by this guy , charles babbage .
now , i have a great affinity for charles babbage because his hair is always completely unkempt like this in every single picture . -lrb- laughter -rrb- he was a very wealthy man , and a sort of , part of the aristocracy of britain , and on a saturday night in marylebone , were you part of the intelligentsia of that period , you would have been invited round to his house for a soiree - and he invited everybody : kings , the duke of wellington , many , many famous people - and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines .
i really miss that era , you know , where you could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but babbage , babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century , and was a fairly famous mathematician .
he held the post that newton held at cambridge , and that was recently held by stephen hawking .
he 's less well known than either of them because he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices and never made any of them .
the reason he never made any of them , he 's a classic nerd .
every time he had a good idea , he 'd think , " that 's brilliant , i 'm going to start building that one .
i 'll spend a fortune on it . i 've got a better idea .
i 'm going to work on this one . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm going to do this one . "
he did this until sir robert peel , then prime minister , basically kicked him out of number 10 downing street , and kicking him out , in those days , that meant saying , " i bid you good day , sir . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- the thing he designed was this monstrosity here , the analytical engine . now , just to give you an idea of this , this is a view from above .
every one of these circles is a cog , a stack of cogs , and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive .
so as i go through this talk , i want you to imagine this gigantic machine . we heard those wonderful sounds of what this thing would have sounded like .
and i 'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine - that 's why it 's computer architecture - and tell you about this machine , which is a computer .
so let 's talk about the memory . the memory is very like the memory of a computer today , except it was all made out of metal , stacks and stacks of cogs , 30 cogs high .
imagine a thing this high of cogs , hundreds and hundreds of them , and they 've got numbers on them .
it 's a decimal machine . everything 's done in decimal .
and he thought about using binary . the problem with using binary is that the machine would have been so tall , it would have been ridiculous . as it is , it 's enormous .
so he 's got memory .
the memory is this bit over here .
you see it all like this .
this monstrosity over here is the cpu , the chip , if you like .
of course , it 's this big .
completely mechanical . this whole machine is mechanical .
this is a picture of a prototype for part of the cpu which is in the science museum .
the cpu could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic - so addition , multiplication , subtraction , division - which already is a bit of a feat in metal , but it could also do something that a computer does and a calculator does n't : this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision .
it could do the " if then " for basic programmers , and that fundamentally made it into a computer .
it could compute . it could n't just calculate . it could do more .
now , if we look at this , and we stop for a minute , and we think about chips today , we ca n't look inside a silicon chip . it 's just so tiny .
yet if you did , you would see something very , very similar to this .
there 's this incredible complexity in the cpu , and this incredible regularity in the memory .
if you 've ever seen an electron microscope picture , you 'll see this . this all looks the same , then there 's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated .
all this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does , but of course you need to program this thing , and of course , babbage used the technology of the day and the technology that would reappear in the ' 50s , ' 60s and ' 70s , which is punch cards . this thing over here is one of three punch card readers in here , and this is a program in the science museum , just not far from here , created by charles babbage , that is sitting there - you can go see it - waiting for the machine to be built .
and there 's not just one of these , there 's many of them .
he prepared programs anticipating this would happen .
now , the reason they used punch cards was that jacquard , in france , had created the jacquard loom , which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards , so he was just repurposing the technology of the day , and like everything else he did , he 's using the technology of his era , so 1830s , 1840s , 1850s , cogs , steam , mechanical devices . ironically , born the same year as charles babbage was michael faraday , who would completely revolutionize everything with the dynamo , transformers , all these sorts of things .
babbage , of course , wanted to use proven technology , so steam and things .
now , he needed accessories .
obviously , you 've got a computer now .
you 've got punch cards , a cpu and memory .
you need accessories you 're going to come with .
you 're not just going to have that , so , first of all , you had sound . you had a bell , so if anything went wrong - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - or the machine needed the attendant to come to it , there was a bell it could ring . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's actually an instruction on the punch card which says " ring the bell . " so you can imagine this " ting ! "
you know , just stop for a moment , imagine all those noises , this thing , " click , clack click click click , " steam engine , " ding , " right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- you also need a printer , obviously , and everyone needs a printer .
this is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for another machine of his , called the difference engine no. 2 , which he never built , but which the science museum did build in the ' 80s and ' 90s .
it 's completely mechanical , again , a printer .
it prints just numbers , because he was obsessed with numbers , but it does print onto paper , and it even does word wrapping , so if you get to the end of the line , it goes around like that .
you also need graphics , right ?
i mean , if you 're going to do anything with graphics , so he said , " well , i need a plotter . i 've got a big piece of paper and an ink pen and i 'll make it plot . "
so he designed a plotter as well , and , you know , at that point , i think he got pretty much a pretty good machine .
along comes this woman , ada lovelace .
now , imagine these soirees , all these great and good comes along .
this lady is the daughter of the mad , bad and dangerous-to-know lord byron , and her mother , being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of lord byron 's madness and badness , thought , " i know the solution : mathematics is the solution .
we 'll teach her mathematics . that 'll calm her down . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because of course , there 's never been a mathematician that 's gone crazy , so , you know , that 'll be fine . -lrb- laughter -rrb- everything 'll be fine . so she 's got this mathematical training , and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother , and charles babbage , you know , gets out his machine .
the duke of wellington is there , you know , get out the machine , obviously demonstrates it , and she gets it . she 's the only person in his lifetime , really , who said , " i understand what this does , and i understand the future of this machine . "
and we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that babbage was intending to build because of her .
now , some people call her the first programmer .
this is actually from one of - the paper that she translated .
this is a program written in a particular style .
it 's not , historically , totally accurate that she 's the first programmer , and actually , she did something more amazing .
rather than just being a programmer , she saw something that babbage did n't .
babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics .
he was building a machine to do mathematics , and lovelace said , " you could do more than mathematics on this machine . " and just as you do , everyone in this room already 's got a computer on them right now , because they 've got a phone .
if you go into that phone , every single thing in that phone or computer or any other computing device is mathematics . it 's all numbers at the bottom .
whether it 's video or text or music or voice , it 's all numbers , it 's all , underlying it , mathematical functions happening , and lovelace said , " just because you 're doing mathematical functions and symbols does n't mean these things ca n't represent other things in the real world , such as music . "
this was a huge leap , because babbage is there saying , " we could compute these amazing functions and print out tables of numbers and draw graphs , " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and lovelace is there and she says , " look , this thing could even compose music if you told it a representation of music numerically . "
so this is what i call lovelace 's leap .
when you say she 's a programmer , she did do some , but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much , much more than this .
now , a hundred years later , this guy comes along , alan turing , and in 1936 , and invents the computer all over again .
now , of course , babbage 's machine was entirely mechanical .
turing 's machine was entirely theoretical .
both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective , but turing told us something very important .
he laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science , and said , " it does n't matter how you make a computer . "
it does n't matter if your computer 's mechanical , like babbage 's was , or electronic , like computers are today , or perhaps in the future , cells , or , again , mechanical again , once we get into nanotechnology .
we could go back to babbage 's machine and just make it tiny . all those things are computers .
there is in a sense a computing essence .
this is called the church-turing thesis .
and so suddenly , you get this link where you say this thing babbage had built really was a computer .
in fact , it was capable of doing everything we do today with computers , only really slowly . -lrb- laughter -rrb- to give you an idea of how slowly , it had about 1k of memory .
it used punch cards , which were being fed in , and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first zx81 .
it did have a ram pack .
you could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , where does that bring us today ?
so there are plans .
over in swindon , the science museum archives , there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages of notes written by charles babbage about this analytical engine .
one of those is a set of plans that we call plan 28 , and that is also the name of a charity that i started with doron swade , who was the curator of computing at the science museum , and also the person who drove the project to build a difference engine , and our plan is to build it .
here in south kensington , we will build the analytical engine .
the project has a number of parts to it .
one was the scanning of babbage 's archive .
that 's been done . the second is now the study of all of those plans to determine what to build .
the third part is a computer simulation of that machine , and the last part is to physically build it at the science museum .
when it 's built , you 'll finally be able to understand how a computer works , because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you , you 've got to look at this humongous thing and say , " ah , i see the memory operating , i see the cpu operating , i hear it operating . i probably smell it operating . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- but in between that we 're going to do a simulation .
babbage himself wrote , he said , as soon as the analytical engine exists , it will surely guide the future course of science .
of course , he never built it , because he was always fiddling with new plans , but when it did get built , of course , in the 1940s , everything changed .
now , i 'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like in motion with a video which shows just one part of the cpu mechanism working .
so this is just three sets of cogs , and it 's going to add . this is the adding mechanism in action , so you imagine this gigantic machine .
so , give me five years .
before the 2030s happen , we 'll have it .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to talk to you about today is virtual worlds , digital globes , the 3-d web , the metaverse .
what does this all mean for us ?
what it means is the web is going to become an exciting place again .
it 's going to become super exciting as we transform to this highly immersive and interactive world .
with graphics , computing power , low latencies , these types of applications and possibilities are going to stream rich data into your lives .
so the virtual earth initiative , and other types of these initiatives , are all about extending our current search metaphor .
when you think about it , we 're so constrained by browsing the web , remembering urls , saving favorites .
as we move to search , we rely on the relevance rankings , the web matching , the index crawling .
but we want to use our brain !
we want to navigate , explore , discover information .
in order to do that , we have to put you as a user back in the driver 's seat .
we need cooperation between you and the computing network and the computer .
so what better way to put you back in the driver 's seat than to put you in the real world that you interact in every day ?
why not leverage the learnings that you 've been learning your entire life ?
so virtual earth is about starting off creating the first digital representation , comprehensive , of the entire world .
what we want to do is mix in all types of data .
tag it . attribute it . metadata . get the community to add local depth , global perspective , local knowledge .
so when you think about this problem , what an enormous undertaking . where do you begin ?
well , we collect data from satellites , from airplanes , from ground vehicles , from people .
this process is an engineering problem , a mechanical problem , a logistical problem , an operational problem .
here is an example of our aerial camera .
this is panchromatic . it 's actually four color cones .
in addition , it 's multi-spectral .
we collect four gigabits per second of data , if you can imagine that kind of data stream coming down .
that 's equivalent to a constellation of 12 satellites at highest res capacity .
we fly these airplanes at 5,000 feet in the air .
you can see the camera on the front . we collect multiple viewpoints , vantage points , angles , textures . we bring all that data back in .
we sit here - you know , think about the ground vehicles , the human scale - what do you see in person ? we need to capture that up close to establish that what it 's like-type experience .
i bet many of you have seen the apple commercials , kind of poking at the pc for their brilliance and simplicity .
so a little unknown secret is - did you see the one with the guy , he 's got the web cam ?
the poor pc guy . they 're duct taping his head . they 're just wrapping it on him .
well , a little unknown secret is his brother actually works on the virtual earth team .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- . so they 've got a little bit of a sibling rivalry thing going on here .
but let me tell you - it does n't affect his day job .
we think a lot of good can come from this technology .
this was after katrina . we were the first commercial fleet of airplanes to be cleared into the disaster impact zone .
we flew the area . we imaged it . we sent in people . we took pictures of interiors , disaster areas . we helped with the first responders , the search and rescue .
often the first time anyone saw what happened to their house was on virtual earth .
we made it all freely available on the web , just to - it was obviously our chance of helping out with the cause .
when we think about how all this comes together , it 's all about software , algorithms and math .
you know , we capture this imagery but to build the 3-d models we need to do geo-positioning . we need to do geo-registering of the images .
we have to bundle adjust them . find tie points .
extract geometry from the images .
this process is a very calculated process .
in fact , it was always done manual .
hollywood would spend millions of dollars to do a small urban corridor for a movie because they 'd have to do it manually .
they 'd drive the streets with lasers called lidar .
they 'd collected information with photos . they 'd manually build each building .
we do this all through software , algorithms and math - a highly automated pipeline creating these cities .
we took a decimal point off what it cost to build these cities , and that 's how we 're going to be able to scale this out and make this reality a dream .
we think about the user interface .
what does it mean to look at it from multiple perspectives ?
an ortho-view , a nadir-view . how do you keep the precision of the fidelity of the imagery while maintaining the fluidity of the model ?
i 'll wrap up by showing you the - this is a brand-new peek i have n't really shown into the lab area of virtual earth .
what we 're doing is - people like this a lot , this bird 's eye imagery we work with . it 's this high resolution data .
but what we 've found is they like the fluidity of the 3-d model .
a child can navigate with an xbox controller or a game controller .
so here what we 're trying to do is we bring the picture and project it into the 3-d model space .
you can see all types of resolution . from here , i can slowly pan the image over .
i can get the next image . i can blend and transition .
by doing this i do n't lose the original detail . in fact , i might be recording history .
the freshness , the capacity . i can turn this image .
i can look at it from multiple viewpoints and angles .
what we 're trying to do is build a virtual world .
we hope that we can make computing a user model you 're familiar with , and really derive insights from you , from all different directions .
i thank you very much for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to read a few strips .
these are , most of these are from a monthly page i do in and architecture and design magazine called metropolis .
and the first story is called " the faulty switch . "
another beautifully designed new building ruined by the sound of a common wall light switch .
it 's fine during the day when the main rooms are flooded with sunlight .
but at dusk everything changes .
the architect spent hundreds of hours designing the burnished brass switchplates for his new office tower .
and then left it to a contractor to install these 79-cent switches behind them .
we know instinctively where to reach when we enter a dark room .
we automatically throw the little nub of plastic upward .
but the sound we are greeted with , as the room is bathed in the simulated glow of late-afternoon light , recalls to mind a dirty men 's room in the rear of a greek coffee shop .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this sound colors our first impression of any room ; it ca n't be helped .
but where does this sound , commonly described as a click , come from ?
is it simply the byproduct of a crude mechanical action ?
or is it an imitation of one half the set of sounds we make to express disappointment ?
the often dental consonant of no indo-european language .
or is it the amplified sound of a synapse firing in the brain of a cockroach ?
in the 1950s they tried their best to muffle this sound with mercury switches and silent knob controls .
but today these improvements seem somehow inauthentic .
the click is the modern triumphal clarion proceeding us through life , announcing our entry into every lightless room .
the sound made flicking a wall switch off is of a completely different nature .
it has a deep melancholy ring .
children do n't like it .
it 's why they leave lights on around the house . -lrb- laughter -rrb- adults find it comforting .
but would n't it be an easy matter to wire a wall switch so that it triggers the muted horn of a steam ship ?
or the recorded crowing of a rooster ?
or the distant peel of thunder ?
thomas edison went through thousands of unlikely substances before he came upon the right one for the filament of his electric light bulb .
why have we settled so quickly for the sound of its switch ?
that 's the end of that .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the next story is called " in praise of the taxpayer . "
that so many of the city 's most venerable taxpayers have survived yet another commercial building boom , is cause for celebration .
these one or two story structures , designed to yield only enough income to cover the taxes on the land on which they stand , were not meant to be permanent buildings .
yet for one reason or another they have confounded the efforts of developers to be combined into lots suitable for high-rise construction .
although they make no claim to architectural beauty , they are , in their perfect temporariness , a delightful alternative to the large-scale structures that might someday take their place .
the most perfect examples occupy corner lots .
they offer a pleasant respite from the high-density development around them .
a break of light and air , an architectural biding of time .
so buried in signage are these structures , that it often takes a moment to distinguish the modern specially constructed taxpayer from its neighbor : the small commercial building from an earlier century , whose upper floors have been sealed , and whose groundfloor space now functions as a taxpayer .
the few surfaces not covered by signs are often clad in a distinctive , dark green-gray , striated aluminum siding .
take-out sandwich shops , film processing drop-offs , peep-shows and necktie stores .
now these provisional structures have , in some cases , remained standing for the better part of a human lifetime .
the temporary building is a triumph of modern industrial organization , a healthy sublimation of the urge to build , and proof that not every architectural idea need be set in stone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the next story is called , " on the human lap . "
for the ancient egyptians the lap was a platform upon which to place the earthly possessions of the dead - 30 cubits from foot to knee .
it was not until the 14th century that an italian painter recognized the lap as a grecian temple , upholstered in flesh and cloth .
over the next 200 years we see the infant christ go from a sitting to a standing position on the virgin 's lap , and then back again .
every child recapitulates this ascension , straddling one or both legs , sitting sideways , or leaning against the body .
from there , to the modern ventriloquist 's dummy , is but a brief moment in history .
you were late for school again this morning .
the ventriloquist must first make us believe that a small boy is sitting on his lap .
the illusion of speech follows incidentally .
what have you got to say for yourself , jimmy ?
as adults we admire the lap from a nostalgic distance .
we have fading memories of that provisional temple , erected each time an adult sat down .
on a crowded bus there was always a lap to sit on .
it is children and teenage girls who are most keenly aware of its architectural beauty .
they understand the structural integrity of a deep avuncular lap , as compared to the shaky arrangement of a neurotic niece in high heels .
the relationship between the lap and its owner is direct and intimate .
i envision a 36-story , 450-unit residential high-rise - a reason to consider the mental health of any architect before granting an important commission .
the bathrooms and kitchens will , of course , have no windows .
the lap of luxury is an architectural construct of childhood , which we seek , in vain , as adults , to employ .
that 's the end .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next story is called " the haverpiece collection " a nondescript warehouse , visible for a moment from the northbound lanes of the prykushko expressway , serves as the temporary resting place for the haverpiece collection of european dried fruit .
the profound convolutions on the surface of a dried cherry .
the foreboding sheen of an extra-large date .
do you remember wandering as a child through those dark wooden storefront galleries ?
where everything was displayed in poorly labeled roach-proof bins .
pears dried in the form of genital organs .
apricot halves like the ears of cherubim .
in 1962 the unsold stock was purchased by maurice haverpiece , a wealthy prune juice bottler , and consolidated to form the core collection .
as an art form it lies somewhere between still-life painting and plumbing .
upon his death in 1967 , a quarter of the items were sold off for compote to a high-class hotel restaurant .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unsuspecting guests were served stewed turn-of-the-century turkish figs for breakfast .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the rest of the collection remains here , stored in plain brown paper bags until funds can be raised to build a permanent museum and study center .
a shoe made of apricot leather for the daughter of a czar .
that 's the end . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the idea behind the stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple .
we do n't want iran to get the bomb .
their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the natanz uranium enrichment facility .
the gray boxes that you see , these are real-time control systems .
now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves , we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge .
the gray boxes do n't run windows software ; they are a completely different technology .
but if we manage to place a good windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box , then we are in business .
and this is the plot behind stuxnet .
so we start with a windows dropper .
the payload goes onto the gray box , damages the centrifuge , and the iranian nuclear program is delayed - mission accomplished .
that 's easy , huh ?
i want to tell you how we found that out .
when we started our research on stuxnet six months ago , it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was .
the only thing that was known is it 's very , very complex on the windows part , the dropper part , used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities .
and it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes , these real-time control systems .
so that got our attention , and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with stuxnet and checked this thing out .
and then some very funny things happened .
stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that did n't like our cheese - sniffed , but did n't want to eat .
did n't make sense to me .
and after we experimented with different flavors of cheese , i realized , well , this is a directed attack .
it 's completely directed .
the dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found , and even if the actual program code that it 's trying to infect is actually running on that target .
and if not , stuxnet does nothing .
so that really got my attention , and we started to work on this nearly around the clock , because i thought , " well , we do n't know what the target is .
it could be , let 's say for example , a u.s. power plant , or a chemical plant in germany .
so we better find out what the target is soon . "
so we extracted and decompiled the attack code , and we discovered that it 's structured in two digital bombs - a smaller one and a bigger one .
and we also saw that they are very professionally engineered by people who obviously had all insider information .
they knew all the bits and bites that they had to attack .
they probably even know the shoe size of the operator .
so they know everything .
and if you have heard that the dropper of stuxnet is complex and high-tech , let me tell you this : the payload is rocket science .
it 's way above everything that we have ever seen before .
here you see a sample of this actual attack code .
we are talking about - around about 15,000 lines of code .
looks pretty much like old-style assembly language .
and i want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code .
so what we were looking for is , first of all , system function calls , because we know what they do .
and then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world - to potential real world targets .
so we do need target theories that we can prove or disprove .
in order to get target theories , we remember that it 's definitely hardcore sabotage , it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in iran , because that 's where most of the infections had been reported .
now you do n't find several thousand targets in that area .
it basically boils down to the bushehr nuclear power plant and to the natanz fuel enrichment plant .
so i told my assistant , " get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base . "
and i phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data .
and that worked pretty well .
so we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control .
the rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge , that black object that you see .
and if you manipulate the speed of this rotor , you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode .
what we also saw is that the goal of the attack was really to do it slowly and creepy - obviously in an effort to drive maintenance engineers crazy , that they would not be able to figure this out quickly .
the big digital warhead - we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures .
so for example , the number 164 really stands out in that code ; you ca n't overlook it .
i started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade , and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges .
so that made sense , that was a match .
and it even got better .
these centrifuges in iran are subdivided into 15 , what is called , stages .
and guess what we found in the attack code ?
an almost identical structure .
so again , that was a real good match .
and this gave us very high confidence for what we were looking at .
now do n't get me wrong here , it did n't go like this .
these results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor .
and we often went into just a dead end and had to recover .
anyway , so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target , but from different angles .
the small warhead is taking one cascade , and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down , and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves .
so in all , we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is .
it is natanz , and it is only natanz .
so we do n't have to worry that other targets might be hit by stuxnet .
here 's some very cool stuff that we saw - really knocked my socks off .
down there is the gray box , and on the top you see the centrifuges .
now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors - so for example , from pressure sensors and vibration sensors - and it provides legitimate program code , which is still running during the attack , with fake input data .
and as a matter of fact , this fake input data is actually prerecorded by stuxnet .
so it 's just like from the hollywood movies where during the heist , the observation camera is fed with prerecorded video .
that 's cool , huh ?
the idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room .
it actually is much more dangerous and aggressive .
the idea is to circumvent a digital safety system .
we need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough .
so for example , in a power plant , when your big steam turbine gets too over speed , you must open relief valves within a millisecond .
obviously , this can not be done by a human operator .
so this is where we need digital safety systems .
and when they are compromised , then real bad things can happen .
your plant can blow up .
and neither your operators nor your safety system will notice it .
that 's scary .
but it gets worse .
and this is very important , what i 'm going to say .
think about this : this attack is generic .
it does n't have anything to do , in specifics , with centrifuges , with uranium enrichment .
so it would work as well , for example , in a power plant or in an automobile factory .
it is generic .
and you do n't have - as an attacker - you do n't have to deliver this payload by a usb stick , as we saw it in the case of stuxnet .
you could also use conventional worm technology for spreading .
just spread it as wide as possible .
and if you do that , what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction .
that 's the consequence that we have to face .
so unfortunately , the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the middle east .
they 're in the united states and europe and in japan .
so all of the green areas , these are your target-rich environments .
we have to face the consequences , and we better start to prepare right now .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i 've got a question .
ralph , it 's been quite widely reported that people assume that mossad is the main entity behind this .
is that your opinion ?
ralph langner : okay , you really want to hear that ?
yeah . okay .
my opinion is that the mossad is involved , but that the leading force is not israel .
so the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower .
there is only one , and that 's the united states - fortunately , fortunately .
because otherwise , our problems would even be bigger .
ca : thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us . thank you , ralph .
-lrb- applause -rrb- humans have long held a fascination for the human brain .
we chart it , we 've described it , we 've mapped it .
now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology - think google maps , think gps - the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation .
so let 's take a look at the brain .
most people , when they first look at a fresh human brain , they say , " it does n't look what you 're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain . "
typically , what you 're looking at is a fixed brain . it 's gray .
and this outer layer , this is the vasculature , which is incredible , around a human brain .
this is the blood vessels .
20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs , 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart , is servicing this one organ .
that 's basically , if you hold two fists together , it 's just slightly larger than the two fists .
scientists , sort of at the end of the 20th century , learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain .
so for example , they can see in the back part of the brain , which is just turning around there .
there 's the cerebellum ; that 's keeping you upright right now .
it 's keeping me standing . it 's involved in coordinated movement .
on the side here , this is temporal cortex .
this is the area where primary auditory processing - so you 're hearing my words , you 're sending it up into higher language processing centers .
towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought , decision making - it 's the last to mature in late adulthood .
this is where all your decision-making processes are going on .
it 's the place where you 're deciding right now you probably are n't going to order the steak for dinner .
so if you take a deeper look at the brain , one of the things , if you look at it in cross-section , what you can see is that you ca n't really see a whole lot of structure there .
but there 's actually a lot of structure there .
it 's cells and it 's wires all wired together .
so about a hundred years ago , some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells .
and that 's shown here in the the very light blue .
you can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained .
and what you can see is it 's very non-uniform . you see a lot more structure there .
so the outer part of that brain is the neocortex .
it 's one continuous processing unit , if you will .
but you can also see things underneath there as well .
and all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through .
they 're probably less cell dense .
so there 's about 86 billion neurons in our brain .
and as you can see , they 're very non-uniformly distributed .
and how they 're distributed really contributes to their underlying function .
and of course , as i mentioned before , since we can now start to map brain function , we can start to tie these into the individual cells .
so let 's take a deeper look .
let 's look at neurons .
so as i mentioned , there are 86 billion neurons .
there are also these smaller cells as you 'll see .
these are support cells - astrocytes glia .
and the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input .
they 're storing it , they 're processing it .
each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain .
and each neuron itself is largely unique .
the unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry .
these are proteins .
they 're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement .
they 're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with .
and they 're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do .
so if we zoom in to an even deeper level , all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes .
we each have 23 pairs of chromosomes .
we get one from mom , one from dad .
and on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes .
they 're encoded in the dna .
and the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they 're turned on .
and so our project is seeking to look at this readout , understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on .
so in order to undertake such a project , we obviously need brains .
so we sent our lab technician out .
we were seeking normal human brains .
what we actually start with is a medical examiner 's office .
this a place where the dead are brought in .
we are seeking normal human brains .
there 's a lot of criteria by which we 're selecting these brains .
we want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60 , they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain , no history of psychiatric disease , no drugs on board - we do a toxicology workup .
and we 're very careful about the brains that we do take .
we 're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue , we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death .
because what we 're trying to measure , the rna - which is the readout from our genes - is very labile , and so we have to move very quickly .
one side note on the collection of brains : because of the way that we collect , and because we require consent , we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains .
males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life .
and men are much more likely to have their significant other , spouse , give consent than the other way around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what 's called an mr.
this is magnetic resonance imaging - mri .
it 's a standard template by which we 're going to hang the rest of this data .
so we collect this mr.
and you can think of this as our satellite view for our map .
the next thing we do is we collect what 's called a diffusion tensor imaging .
this maps the large cabling in the brain .
and again , you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways , if you will .
the brain is removed from the skull , and then it 's sliced into one-centimeter slices .
and those are frozen solid , and they 're shipped to seattle .
and in seattle , we take these - this is a whole human hemisphere - and we put them into what 's basically a glorified meat slicer .
there 's a blade here that 's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide .
we 're going to then apply one of those stains to it , and we scan it .
and then what we get is our first mapping .
so this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments .
you could consider this state boundaries , if you will , those pretty broad outlines .
from this , we 're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces , which then we can put on a smaller cryostat .
and this is just showing this here - this frozen tissue , and it 's being cut .
this is 20 microns thin , so this is about a baby hair 's width .
and remember , it 's frozen .
and so you can see here , old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied .
we take a microscope slide .
then we very carefully melt onto the slide .
this will then go onto a robot that 's going to apply one of those stains to it .
and our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this .
so again this is what they can see under the microscope .
you can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places .
and from there it 's routine . they understand where to make these assignments .
and they can make basically what 's a reference atlas .
this is a more detailed map .
our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what 's called laser scanning microdissection .
so the technician takes the instructions .
they scribe along a place there .
and then the laser actually cuts .
you can see that blue dot there cutting . and that tissue falls off .
you can see on the microscope slide here , that 's what 's happening in real time .
there 's a container underneath that 's collecting that tissue .
we take that tissue , we purify the rna out of it using some basic technology , and then we put a florescent tag on it .
we take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray .
now this may look like a bunch of dots to you , but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass .
this has roughly 60,000 elements on it , so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome .
and when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it , we get a unique fingerprint , if you will , quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample .
now we do this over and over again , this process for any given brain .
we 're taking over a thousand samples for each brain .
this area shown here is an area called the hippocampus .
it 's involved in learning and memory .
and it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples .
so each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements , a thousand samples .
so roughly , we have 50 million data points for a given human brain .
we 've done right now two human brains-worth of data .
we 've put all of that together into one thing , and i 'll show you what that synthesis looks like .
it 's basically a large data set of information that 's all freely available to any scientist around the world .
they do n't even have to log in to come use this tool , mine this data , find interesting things out with this .
so here 's the modalities that we put together .
you 'll start to recognize these things from what we 've collected before .
here 's the mr. it provides the framework .
there 's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn , it allows you to zoom in , it allows you to highlight individual structures .
but most importantly , we 're now mapping into this anatomic framework , which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on .
so the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree .
green is the sort of cool areas where it 's not turned on .
and each gene gives us a fingerprint .
and remember that we 've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available .
so what can scientists learn about this data ?
we 're just starting to look at this data ourselves .
there 's some basic things that you would want to understand .
two great examples are drugs , prozac and wellbutrin .
these are commonly prescribed antidepressants .
now remember , we 're assaying genes .
genes send the instructions to make proteins .
proteins are targets for drugs .
so drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off , etc .
so if you want to understand the action of drugs , you want to understand how they 're acting in the ways you want them to , and also in the ways you do n't want them to .
in the side effect profile , etc . , you want to see where those genes are turned on .
and for the first time , we can actually do that .
we can do that in multiple individuals that we 've assayed too .
so now we can look throughout the brain .
we can see this unique fingerprint .
and we get confirmation .
we get confirmation that , indeed , the gene is turned on - for something like prozac , in serotonergic structures , things that are already known be affected - but we also get to see the whole thing .
we also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before , and we see these genes turned on there .
it 's as interesting a side effect as it could be .
one other thing you can do with such a thing is you can , because it 's a pattern matching exercise , because there 's unique fingerprint , we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint .
so if you 're in drug discovery , for example , you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize .
most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying , " scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect x. "
and so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they 're great . they analyze large populations .
they look at their entire genomes , and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes .
but what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes .
it tells you the what , but it does n't tell you the where .
and so it 's very important for those researchers that we 've created this resource .
now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity .
they can start to look at common pathways - other things that they simply have n't been able to do before .
so i think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality .
and i think every human , we all have different genetic backgrounds , we all have lived separate lives .
but the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar .
we 're similar at the genetic level .
and what we 're finding is actually , even at the brain biochemical level , we are quite similar .
and so this shows it 's not 99 percent , but it 's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff , so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated .
and then we find some outliers , some things that lie beyond the cloud .
and those genes are interesting , but they 're very subtle .
so i think it 's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences , we are quite similar even at the brain level .
now what do those differences look like ?
this is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were - and they 're quite subtle .
these are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type .
these are two genes that we found as good examples .
one is called reln - it 's involved in early developmental cues .
disc1 is a gene that 's deleted in schizophrenia .
these are n't schizophrenic individuals , but they do show some population variation .
and so what you 're looking at here in donor one and donor four , which are the exceptions to the other two , that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells .
it 's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that 's telling us a gene is turned on there .
whether or not that 's due to an individual 's genetic background or their experiences , we do n't know .
those kinds of studies require much larger populations .
so i 'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go .
i think these resources are incredibly valuable .
they give researchers a handle on where to go .
but we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point .
we 're certainly going to be looking at more .
i 'll just close by saying that the tools are there , and this is truly an unexplored , undiscovered continent .
this is the new frontier , if you will .
and so for those who are undaunted , but humbled by the complexity of the brain , the future awaits .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a couple of years ago , harvard business school chose the best business model of that year .
it chose somali piracy .
pretty much around the same time , i discovered that there were 544 seafarers being held hostage on ships , often anchored just off the somali coast in plain sight .
and i learned these two facts , and i thought , what 's going on in shipping ?
and i thought , would that happen in any other industry ?
would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months , or a year ?
would we see 544 greyhound bus drivers ?
it would n't happen .
so i started to get intrigued .
and i discovered another fact , which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that i had n't known it before at the age of 42 , 43 .
that is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping .
because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry , something brought by sailboat with moby dicks and jack sparrows .
but shipping is n't that .
shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been .
shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade .
shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970 .
we are more dependent on it now than ever .
and yet , for such an enormous industry - there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea - it 's become pretty much invisible .
now that sounds absurd in singapore to say that , because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but elsewhere in the world , if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea , you will get essentially a blank face .
you will ask someone on the street if they 've heard of microsoft .
i should think they 'll say yes , because they 'll know that they make software that goes on computers , and occasionally works .
but if you ask them if they 've heard of maersk , i doubt you 'd get the same response , even though maersk , which is just one shipping company amongst many , has revenues pretty much on a par with microsoft .
-lsb- $ 60.2 billion -rsb- now why is this ?
a few years ago , the first sea lord of the british admiralty - he is called the first sea lord , although the chief of the army is not called a land lord - he said that we , and he meant in the industrialized nations in the west , that we suffer from sea blindness .
we are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work .
it 's just something we fly over , a patch of blue on an airline map .
nothing to see , move along .
so i wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness , so i ran away to sea .
a couple of years ago , i took a passage on the maersk kendal , a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 7,000 boxes , and i departed from felixstowe , on the south coast of england , and i ended up right here in singapore five weeks later , considerably less jet-lagged than i am right now .
and it was a revelation .
we traveled through five seas , two oceans , nine ports , and i learned a lot about shipping .
and one of the first things that surprised me when i got on board kendal was , where are all the people ?
i have friends in the navy who tell me they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time , but on kendal there were only 21 crew .
now that 's because shipping is very efficient .
containerization has made it very efficient .
ships have automation now .
they can operate with small crews .
but it also means that , in the words of a port chaplain i once met , the average seafarer you 're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted , because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element , a strange phrase which they do n't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman .
so most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time .
they do n't have time to relax .
they 're at sea for months at a time , and even when they 're on board , they do n't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted , the internet .
and another thing that surprised me when i got on board kendal was who i was sitting next to - not the queen ; i ca n't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait - but around that dining table in the officer 's saloon , i was sitting next to a burmese guy , i was opposite a romanian , a moldavian , an indian .
on the next table was a chinese guy , and in the crew room , it was entirely filipinos .
so that was a normal working ship .
now how is that possible ?
because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 60 years , when most of the general public stopped noticing it , was something called an open registry , or a flag of convenience .
ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry .
you can get a flag from the landlocked nation of bolivia , or mongolia , or north korea , though that 's not very popular .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we have these very multinational , global , mobile crews on ships .
and that was a surprise to me .
and when we got to pirate waters , down the bab-el-mandeb strait and into the indian ocean , the ship changed .
and that was also shocking , because suddenly , i realized , as the captain said to me , that i had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship .
we were no longer allowed on deck .
there were double pirate watches .
and at that time , there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage , and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience .
not all of them , but some of them were , because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners , it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience .
what else does our sea blindness mask ?
well , if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship , and look up to the funnel , you 'll see very black smoke .
and that 's because shipping has very tight margins , and they want cheap fuel , so they use something called bunker fuel , which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery , or just one step up from asphalt .
and shipping is the greenest method of transport .
in terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile , it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking .
but it 's not benign , because there 's so much of it .
so shipping emissions are about three to four percent , almost the same as aviation 's .
and if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries ' carbon emissions , it would come in about sixth , somewhere near germany .
it was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world .
and the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping .
there are interesting initiatives going on .
but why has it taken so long ?
when are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles ?
i also traveled to cape cod to look at the plight of the north atlantic right whale , because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea , and what it made me think about .
we know about man 's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing , but we do n't really know much about what 's happening underneath the water .
and in fact , shipping has a role to play here , because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures .
light does n't penetrate beneath the surface of the water , so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound .
and a north atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles .
a humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean .
but a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean , and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use , then it can damage their acoustic habitat , and they need this for breeding , for finding feeding grounds , for finding mates .
and the acoustic habitat of the north atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 90 percent .
but there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet .
and when i arrived in singapore , and i apologize for this , but i did n't want to get off my ship .
i 'd really loved being on board kendal .
i 'd been well treated by the crew , i 'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain , and i would happily have signed up for another five weeks , something that the captain also said i was crazy to think about .
but i was n't there for nine months at a time like the filipino seafarers , who , when i asked them to describe their job to me , called it " dollar for homesickness . "
they had good salaries , but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element .
but when i get to this part , i 'm in two minds , because i want to salute those seafarers who bring us 90 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it .
i want to salute the 100,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work , coming in and out every day , bringing us what we need .
but i also want to see shipping , and us , the general public , who know so little about it , to have a bit more scrutiny , to be a bit more transparent , to have 90 percent transparency .
because i think we could all benefit from doing something very simple , which is learning to see the sea .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you may not know this , but you are celebrating an anniversary with me .
i 'm not married , but one year ago today , i woke up from a month-long coma , following a double lung transplant .
crazy , i know . insane .
thank you .
six years before that , i was starting my career as an opera singer in europe , when i was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension - also known as ph .
it happens when there 's a thickening in the pulmonary veins , making the right side of the heart work overtime , and causing what i call the reverse-grinch effect .
my heart was three-and-a-half sizes too big .
physical activity becomes very difficult for people with this condition , and usually after two to five years , you die .
i went to see this specialist , and she was top-of-the-field and told me i had to stop singing .
she said , " those high notes are going to kill you . "
while she did n't have any medical evidence to back up her claim that there was a relationship between operatic arias and pulmonary hypertension , she was absolutely emphatic i was singing my own obituary .
i was very limited by my condition , physically .
but i was not limited when i sang , and as air came up from my lungs , through my vocal cords and passed my lips as sound , it was the closest thing i had ever come to transcendence .
and just because of someone 's hunch , i was n't going to give it up .
thankfully , i met reda girgis , who is dry as toast , but he and his team at johns hopkins did n't just want me to survive , they wanted me to live a meaningful life .
this meant making trade-offs .
i come from colorado .
it 's a mile high , and i grew up there with my 10 brothers and sisters and two adoring parents .
well , the altitude exacerbated my symptoms .
so i moved to baltimore to be near my doctors and enrolled in a conservatory nearby .
i could n't walk as much as i used to , so i opted for five-inch heels .
and i gave up salt , i went vegan , and i started taking huge doses of sildenafil , also known as viagra .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for ph , but after six months , i could n't walk up a small hill . i could n't climb a flight of stairs .
i could barely stand up without feeling like i was going to faint .
i had a heart catheterization , where they measure this internal arterial pulmonary pressure , which is supposed to be between 15 and 20 .
mine was 146 .
i like to do things big , and it meant one thing : there is a big gun treatment for pulmonary hypertension called flolan , and it 's not just a drug ; it 's a way of life .
doctors insert a catheter into your chest , which is attached to a pump that weighs about four-and-a-half pounds .
every day , 24 hours , that pump is at your side , administering medicine directly to your heart , and it 's not a particularly preferable medicine in many senses .
this is a list of the side effects : if you eat too much salt , like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich , you 'll probably end up in the icu .
if you go through a metal detector , you 'll probably die .
if you get a bubble in your medicine - because you have to mix it every morning - and it stays in there , you probably die .
if you run out of medicine , you definitely die .
no one wants to go on flolan .
but when i needed it , it was a godsend .
within a few days , i could walk again .
within a few weeks , i was performing , and in a few months , i debuted at the kennedy center .
the pump was a little bit problematic when performing , so i 'd attach it to my inner thigh with the help of the girdle and an ace bandage .
literally hundreds of elevator rides were spent with me alone stuffing the pump into my spanx , hoping the doors would n't open unexpectedly .
and the tubing coming out of my chest was a nightmare for costume designers .
i graduated from graduate school in 2006 , and i got a fellowship to go back to europe .
a few days after arriving , i met this wonderful , old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles .
and before long , i was commuting between budapest , milan and florence .
though i was attached to this ugly , unwanted , high-maintenance , mechanical pet , my life was kind of like the happy part in an opera - very complicated , but in a good way .
then in february of 2008 , my grandfather passed away .
he was a big figure in all of our lives , and we loved him very much .
it certainly did n't prepare me for what came next .
seven weeks later , i got a call from my family .
my father had been in a catastrophic car accident , and he died .
at 24 , my death would have been entirely expected .
but his - well , the only way i can articulate how it felt was that it precipitated my medical decline .
against my doctors ' and family 's wishes , i needed to go back for the funeral .
i had to say goodbye in some way , shape or form .
but soon i was showing signs of right-heart failure , and i had to return to sea level , doing so knowing that i probably would never see my home again .
i canceled most of my engagements that summer , but i had one left in tel aviv , so i went .
after one performance , i could barely drag myself from the stage to the taxicab .
i sat down and felt the blood rush down from my face , and in the heat of the desert , i was freezing cold .
my fingers started turning blue , and i was like , " what is going on here ? "
i heard my heart 's valves snapping open and closed .
the cab stopped , and i pulled my body from it feeling each ounce of weight as i walked to the elevator .
i fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where i found my problem : i had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine .
i was dying , and if i did n't mix that stuff up fast , i would never leave that apartment alive .
i started mixing , and i felt like everything was going to fall out through one hole or another , but i just kept on going .
finally , with the last bottle in and the last bubble out , i attached the pump to the tubing and lay there hoping it would kick in soon enough .
if it did n't , i 'd probably see my father sooner than i anticipated .
thankfully , in a few minutes , i saw the signature hive-like rash appear on my legs , which is a side effect of the medication , and i knew i 'd be okay .
we 're not big on fear in my family , but i was scared .
i went back to the states , anticipating i 'd return to europe , but the heart catheterization showed that i was n't going anywhere further that a flight-for-life from johns hopkins hospital .
i performed here and there , but as my condition deteriorated , so did my voice .
my doctor wanted me to get on the list for a lung transplant .
i did n't .
i had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries .
i knew another young man , though , who had ph who died while waiting for one .
i wanted to live .
i thought stem cells were a good option , but they had n't developed to a point where i could take advantage of them yet .
i officially took a break from singing , and i went to the cleveland clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years , for transplant .
i was sitting there kind of unenthusiastically talking with the head transplant surgeon , and i asked him if i needed a transplant , what i could do to prepare .
he said , " be happy .
a happy patient is a healthy patient . "
it was like in one verbal swoop he had channeled my thoughts on life and medicine and confucius .
i still did n't want a transplant , but in a month , i was back in the hospital with some severely edemic kankles - very attractive .
and it was right-heart failure .
i finally decided it was time to take my doctor 's advice .
it was time for me to go to cleveland and to start the agonizing wait for a match .
but the next morning , while i was still in the hospital , i got a telephone call .
it was my doctor in cleveland , marie budev .
and they had lungs .
it was a match .
they were from texas .
and everybody was really happy for me , but me .
because , despite their problems , i had spent my whole life training my lungs , and i was not particularly enthusiastic about giving them up .
i flew to cleveland , and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye .
but organs do n't wait , and i went into surgery before i could say goodbye .
the last thing i remember was lying on a white blanket , telling my surgeon that i needed to see my mother again , and to please try and save my voice .
i fell into this apocalyptic dream world .
during the thirteen-and-a-half-hour surgery , i flatlined twice , 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body .
and in my surgeon 's 20-year career , he said it was among the most difficult transplants that he 's ever performed .
they left my chest open for two weeks .
you could see my over-sized heart beating inside of it .
i was on a dozen machines that were keeping me alive .
an infection ravaged my skin .
i had hoped my voice would be saved , but my doctors knew that the breathing tubes going down my throat might have already destroyed it .
if they stayed in , there was no way i would ever sing again .
so my doctor got the ent , the top guy at the clinic , to come down and give me surgery to move the tubes around my voice box .
he said it would kill me .
so my own surgeon performed the procedure in a last-ditch attempt to save my voice .
though my mom could n't say goodbye to me before the surgery , she did n't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed .
and if you want an example of perseverance , grit and strength in a beautiful , little package , it is her .
one year ago to this very day , i woke up .
i was 95 lbs .
there were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body .
i could n't walk , i could n't talk , i could n't eat , i could n't move , i certainly could n't sing , i could n't even breathe , but when i looked up and i saw my mother , i could n't help but smile .
whether by a mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs , death happens .
but life is n't really just about avoiding death , is it ?
it 's about living .
medical conditions do n't negate the human condition .
and when people are allowed to pursue their passions , doctors will find they have better , happier and healthier patients .
my parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place , but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time .
and i 'm so grateful they did .
this past summer , when i was running and singing and dancing and playing with my nieces and my nephews and my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my grandmother in the colorado rockies , i could n't help but think of that doctor who told me that i could n't sing .
and i wanted to tell her , and i want to tell you , we need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams .
when we do , we will find that patients do n't just survive ; we thrive .
and some of us might even sing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- singing : french -rsb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and i 'd like to thank my pianist , monica lee .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much .
thank you .
first place i 'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world 's deepest natural abyss .
and i say believe because this process is still ongoing .
right now there are major expeditions being planned for next year that i 'll talk a little bit about .
one of the things that 's changed here , in the last 150 years since jules verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like , is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about .
we can now descend thousands of meters into the earth with relative impunity .
along the way we 've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight .
when you go on a thing like this , we can usually be in the field for anywhere from two to four months , with a team as small as 20 or 30 , to as big as 150 .
and a lot of people ask me , you know , what kind of people do you get for a project like this ?
while our selection process is not as rigorous as nasa , it 's nonetheless thorough .
we 're looking for competence , discipline , endurance , and strength .
in case you 're wondering , this is our strength test .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we also value esprit de corps and the ability to diplomatically resolve inter-personal conflict while under great stress in remote locations .
we have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance .
from the entrance , this is nothing like a commercial cave .
you 're looking at camp two in a place called j2 , not k2 , but j2 .
we 're roughly two days from the entrance at that point .
and it 's kind of like a high altitude mountaineering trip in reverse , except that you 're now running a string of these things down .
the idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you 're down there , otherwise in damp , moist , cold conditions in utterly dark places .
i should mention that everything you 're seeing here , by the way , is artificially illuminated at great effort .
otherwise it is completely dark in these places .
the deeper you go , the more you run into a conflict with water .
it 's basically like a tree collecting water coming down .
and eventually you get to places where it is formidable and dangerous and unfortunately slides just do n't do justice .
so i 've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s .
so descend into huautla plateau in mexico .
-lrb- video -rrb- now i have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous .
we would not do this today unless we were doing it for film .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- along that same line , i have to tell you that with the spate of hollywood movies that came out last year , we have never seen monsters underground - at least the kind that eat you .
if there is a monster underground , it is the crushing psychological remoteness that begins to hit every member of the team once you cross about three days inbound from the nearest entrance .
next year i 'll be leading an international team to j2 .
we 're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters - that 's a little over 8,600 feet down - at 30 kilometers from the entrance .
the lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight .
i do n't think there 's been a mission like that in a long time .
eventually , if you keep going down in these things , probability says that you 're going to run into a place like this .
it 's a place where there 's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof .
and when you used to find these things , they would put a label on a map that said terminal siphon .
now i remember that term really well for two reasons .
number one , it 's the name of my rock band , and second , is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor .
and we 've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this .
this is some life-support equipment closed-cycle .
and you can use that now to go for many kilometers horizontally underwater and to depths of 200 meters straight down underwater .
when you do this kind of stuff it 's like doing eva .
it 's like doing extra-vehicular activity in space , but at much greater distances , and at much greater physical peril .
so it makes you think about how to design your equipment for long range , away from a safe haven .
here 's a clip from a national geographic movie that came out in 1999 .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before .
this is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet .
to experience it is a privilege .
bill stone : that was taken in wakulla springs , florida .
couple of things to note about that movie . every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999 .
it was developed within a two-year period and used on actual exploratory projects .
this gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper , and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave , and it happened to be underwater in wakulla springs .
it was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world .
this is europa .
carolyn porco mentioned another one called enceladus the other day .
this is one of the places where planetary scientists believe there is a highest probability of the detection of the first life off earth in the ocean that exists below there .
for those who have never seen this story , jim cameron produced a really wonderful imax movie couple of years ago , called " aliens of the deep . "
there was a brief clip - -lrb- video -rrb- narrator : a mission to explore under the ice of europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge .
europa is so far away that even at the speed of light , it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle .
it has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice .
now we have to get through the ice .
you need a melt probe .
it 's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo .
the ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep .
week after week , the melt probe will sink of its own weight through the ancient ice , until finally - now , what are you going to do when you reach the surface of that ocean ?
you need an auv , an autonomous underwater vehicle .
it needs to be one smart puppy , able to navigate and make decisions on its own in an alien ocean .
bs : what jim did n't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier nasa had funded a team i assembled to develop a prototype for the europa auv .
i mean , i cut through three years of engineering meetings , design and system integration , and introduced depthx - deep phreatic thermal explorer .
and as the movie says , this is one smart puppy .
it 's got 96 sensors , 36 onboard computers , 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code , packs more than 10 kilos of tnt in electrical onboard equivalent .
this is the target site , the world 's deepest hydrothermal spring at cenote zacaton in northern mexico .
it 's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything .
this is part of depthx 's mission .
there are two primary targets we 're doing here .
one is , how do you do science autonomy underground ?
how do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist ?
there are more stages involved here than i 've got time to tell you about , but basically we drive through the space , we populate it with environmental variables - sulphide , halide , things like that .
we calculate gradient surfaces , and drive the bot over to a wall where there 's a high probability of life .
we move along the wall , in what 's called proximity operations , looking for changes in color .
if we see something that looks interesting , we pull it into a microscope .
if it passes the microscopic test , we go for a collection .
we either draw in a liquid sample , or we can actually take a solid core from the wall .
no hands at the wheel .
this is all behavioral autonomy here that 's being conducted by the robot on its own .
the real hat trick for this vehicle , though , is a disruptive new navigation system we 've developed , known as 3d slam , for simultaneous localization and mapping .
depthx is an all-seeing eyeball .
its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time , allowing it to do new exploration while it 's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it 's gone through already .
what i 'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that 's ever been done .
this may , we 're going to go from minus 1,000 meters in zacaton , and if we 're very lucky , depthx will bring back the first robotically-discovered division of bacteria .
the next step after that is to test it in antartica and then , if the funding continues and nasa has the resolution to go , we could potentially launch by 2016 , and by 2019 we may have the first evidence of life off this planet .
what then of manned space exploration ?
the government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024 .
the successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots .
it will leave us no further along in the general expansion of humanity into space than we were 50 years ago .
something fundamental has to change if we are to see common access to space in our lifetime .
what i 'm going to show you next are a couple of controversial ideas .
and i hope you 'll bear with me and have some faith that there 's credibility behind what we 're going to say here .
there are three underpinnings of working in space privately .
one of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport .
the bert rutans and richard bransons of this world have got this in their sights and i salute them .
go , go , go .
the next thing we need are places to stay on orbit .
orbital hotels to start with , but workshops for the rest of us later on .
the final missing piece , the real paradigm-buster , is this : a gas station on orbit .
it 's not going to look like that .
if it existed , it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning .
now , to give you a chance to understand why there is power in that statement , i 've got to give you the basics of space 101 .
and the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram .
anybody drink one of these here this week ?
you 'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit .
that 's more than you pay for ted , if google dropped their sponsorship .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant .
thus , every time you 'd want to do anything in space , you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator .
not even the guys at tesla can fight that physics .
so , what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price ?
there is a place where you can .
in fact , you can get it better - you can get it at 14 times lower if you can find propellant on the moon .
there is a little-known mission that was launched by the pentagon , 13 years ago now , called clementine .
and the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon .
that signal was so strong , it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment , collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material .
if we 're going to get that , and make that gas station possible , we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space .
we ca n't do that right now .
the way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground , and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces .
we have to beat that .
we can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics .
we can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything .
this is an idea that , again , came out of livermore back in 1989 , with dr. lowell wood 's group .
and we can extend that now to just about everything .
bob bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit .
we can go much further .
we can build space tugs , orbiting platforms for holding cryogens and water .
there 's another thing .
when you 're coming back from the moon , you have to deal with orbital mechanics .
it says you 're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station .
you got two choices .
you can burn rocket fuel to get there , or you can do something really incredible .
you can dive into the stratosphere , and precisely dissipate that velocity , and come back out to the space station .
it has never been done .
it 's risky and it 's going to be one hell of a ride - better than disney .
the traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency .
if you try to do that for the moon , you 're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there .
but if you send a mining team there , without the return propellant , first - -lrb- laughter -rrb- did any of you guys hear the story of cortez ?
this is not like that . i 'm much more like scotty .
i like this equipment , you know , and i really value it so we 're not going to burn the gear .
but , if you were truly bold you could get it there , manufacture it , and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done .
there 's a myth that you ca n't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years .
that 's not true .
in seven years , we could pull off an industrial mission to shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit .
we 're living in one of the most exciting times in history .
we 're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space .
the orbital refueling stations i 've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration .
to bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed .
we can do it by jump-starting with an industrial lewis and clark expedition to shackleton crater , to mine the moon for resources , and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit .
talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing .
i would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at ted .
i intend to lead that expedition .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it can be done in seven years with the right backing .
those who join me in making it happen will become a part of history and join other bold individuals from time past who , had they been here today , would have heartily approved .
there was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier .
we have collectively forgotten that lesson .
now we 're at a time when boldness is required to move forward .
100 years after sir ernest shackleton wrote these words , i intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier , in our time , for all of us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- four years ago , on the ted stage , i announced a company i was working with at the time called odeo .
and because of that announcement , we got a big article in the new york times , which led to more press , which led to more attention , and me deciding to become ceo of that company - whereas i was just an adviser - and raising a round of venture capital and ramping up hiring .
one of the guys i hired was an engineer named jack dorsey , and a year later , when we were trying to decide which way to go with odeo , jack presented an idea he 'd been tinkering around with for a number of years that was based around sending simple status updates to friends .
we were also playing with sms at the time at odeo , so we kind of put two and two together , and in early 2006 we launched twitter as a side project at odeo .
now , it 's hard to justify doing a side project at a startup , where focus is so critical , but i had actually launched blogger as a side project to my previous company , thinking it was just a little thing we 'd do on the side , and it ended up taking over not only the company , but my life for the next five or six years .
so i learned to follow hunches even though you ca n't necessarily justify them or know where they 're going to go .
and that 's kind of what 's happened with twitter , time after time .
so , for those of you unfamiliar , twitter is based around a very simple , seemingly trivial concept .
you say what you 're doing in 140 characters or less , and people who are interested in you get those updates .
if they 're really interested , they get the update as a text message on their cell phone .
so , for instance , i may twitter right now that i 'm giving a talk at ted .
and in my case , when i hit send , up to 60,000 people will receive that message in a matter of seconds .
now , the fundamental idea is that twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want , be they momentous occasions or mundane ones .
it is by sharing these moments as they 're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch , despite distance , and in real time .
this is the primary use we saw of twitter from the beginning , and what got us excited .
what we did n't anticipate was the many , many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system .
one of the things we realized was how important twitter could be during real-time events .
when the wildfires broke out in san diego , in october of 2007 , people turned to twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them .
but it was n't just individuals .
the l.a. times actually turned to twitter to dispense information as well , and put a twitter feed on the front page , and the l.a. fire department and red cross used it to dispense news and updates as well .
at this event , dozens of people here are twittering and thousands of people around the world are following along because they want to know what it feels like to be here and what 's happening .
among the other interesting things that have cropped up are many things from businesses , from marketing and communications and predictable things , to an insanely popular korean-barbecue taco truck that drives around l.a. and twitters where it stops , causing a line to form around the block .
politicians have recently begun twittering .
in fact , there are 47 members of congress who currently have twitter accounts .
and they 're tweeting , in some cases , from behind closed-door sessions with the president .
in this case , this guy 's not liking what he 's hearing .
the president himself is our most popular twitter user , although his tweets have dropped off as of late , while senator mccain 's have picked up .
as have this guy 's .
twitter was originally designed as a broadcast medium : you send one message and it goes out to everybody , and you receive the messages you 're interested in .
one of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message .
so , this syntax , the " @ username " that shaquille o 'neal 's using here to reply to one of his fans , was completely invented by users , and we did n't build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier .
this is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system .
another is via the api .
we built an application-programming interface , which basically means that programmers can write software that interacts with twitter .
we currently know about over 2,000 pieces of software that can send twitter updates - interfaces for mac , windows , your iphone , your blackberry - as well as things like a device that lets an unborn baby twitter when it kicks or a plant twitter when it needs water .
probably the most important third-party development came from a little company in virginia called summize .
summize built a twitter search engine .
and they tapped into the fact that , if you have millions of people around the world talking about what they 're doing and what 's around them , you have an incredible resource to find out about any topic or event while it 's going on .
this really changed how we perceived twitter .
for instance , here 's what people are saying about ted .
this is another way that our mind was shifted , and twitter was n't what we thought it was .
we liked this so much we actually bought the company and are folding it into the main product .
this not only lets you view twitters in different ways , but it introduces new use cases as well .
one of my favorites is what happened a few months ago when there was a gas shortage in atlanta .
some users figured out that they would twitter when they found gas - where it was , and how much it cost - and then appended the keyword " # atlgas " which let other people search for that and find gas themselves .
and this trend of people using this communication network to help each other out goes far beyond the original idea of just keeping up with family and friends .
it 's happened more and more lately , whether it 's raising money for homeless people or to dig wells in africa or for a family in crisis .
people have raised tens of thousands of dollars over twitter in a matter of days on several occasions .
it seems like when you give people easier ways to share information , more good things happen .
i have no idea what will happen next with twitter .
i 've learned to follow the hunch , but never assume where it will go .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : we 're not quite done yet .
so , look , if we could have this screen live .
this is actually the most terrifying thing that any speaker can do after they 've been to an event .
it 's totally intimidating .
so , this would be the twitter search screen .
so we 're going to just type a couple of random words into twitter .
for example : " evan williams . "
" evan williams , give people more good ways to share information and follow your hunch at ted . "
" currently listening to evan williams . " " currently listening to evan williams . " " evan williams - " oh .
" evan williams is just dying on stage here at ted .
worst talk ever ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- evan williams : nice . thanks .
ca : just kidding .
but , literally in the eight minutes he was talking , there are about fifty tweets that already came on the talk .
so he 'll see every aspect of the reaction : the fact that barack obama is the biggest twitterer , the fact that it came out of ted .
i do n't think there 's any other way of getting instant feedback that way .
you have build something very fascinating , and it looks like its best times are still ahead of it .
so , thank you very much , evan . ew : thank you .
ca : that was very interesting .
good morning everybody .
i work with really amazing , little , itty-bitty creatures called cells .
and let me tell you what it 's like to grow these cells in the lab .
i work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment .
we plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes .
and we feed them - sterilely of course - with what we call cell culture media - which is like their food - and we grow them in incubators .
why do i do this ?
we observe the cells in a plate , and they 're just on the surface .
but what we 're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them .
what does that even mean ?
well it means growing an actual heart , let 's say , or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body .
not only that , but they can also be used for disease models .
and for this purpose , traditional cell culture techniques just really are n't enough .
the cells are kind of homesick ; the dish does n't feel like their home .
and so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive .
we call this the biomimetic paradigm - copying nature in the lab .
let 's take the example of the heart , the topic of a lot of my research .
what makes the heart unique ?
well , the heart beats , rhythmically , tirelessly , faithfully .
we copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes .
these electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab .
what else do we know about the heart ?
well , heart cells are pretty greedy .
nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very , very dense blood supply .
in the lab , we micro-pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells , and this allows us to flow the cell culture media , the cells ' food , through the scaffolds where we 're growing the cells - a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart .
so this brings me to lesson number one : life can do a lot with very little .
let 's take the example of electrical stimulation .
let 's see how powerful just one of these essentials can be .
on the left , we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that i engineered from rat cells in the lab .
it 's about the size of a mini marshmallow .
and after one week , it 's beating .
you can see it in the upper left-hand corner .
but do n't worry if you ca n't see it so well .
it 's amazing that these cells beat at all .
but what 's really amazing is that the cells , when we electrically stimulate them , like with a pacemaker , that they beat so much more .
but that brings me to lesson number two : cells do all the work .
in a sense , tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here , because structural engineers build bridges and big things , computer engineers , computers , but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves .
what does this mean for us ?
let 's do something really simple .
let 's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept .
let 's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way .
" we are what we eat , " could easily be described as , " we are what our cells eat . "
and in the case of the flora in our gut , these cells may not even be human .
but it 's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life .
behind every sound , sight , touch , taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us .
it begs the question : shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies ?
i invite you to talk about this with me further , and in the meantime , i wish you luck .
may none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so would n't it be amazing if our phones could see the world in the same way that we do , as we 're walking around being able to point a phone at anything , and then have it actually recognize images and objects like the human brain , and then be able to pull in information from an almost infinite library of knowledge and experiences and ideas .
well , traditionally that was seen as science fiction , but now we 've moved to a world where actually this has become possible .
so the best way of explaining it is to just show it .
what you can see over here is tamara , who is holding my phone that 's now plugged in .
so let me start with this .
what we have here is a painting of the great poet rabbie burns , and it 's just a normal image , but if we now switch inputs over to the phone , running our technology , you can see effectively what tamara 's seeing on the screen , and when she points at this image , something magical happens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- bagpipes -rrb- -lrb- bagpipes -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- bagpipes -rrb- voice : now simmer blinks on flowery braes ...
matt mills : now , what 's great about this is , there 's no trickery here .
there 's nothing done to this image .
and what 's great about this is the technology 's actually allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does .
not only that , but as i move the object around , it 's going to track it and overlay that content seamlessly .
again , the thing that 's incredible about this is this is how advanced these devices have become .
all the processing to do that was actually done on the device itself .
now , this has applications everywhere , whether in things like art in museums , like you just saw , or in the world of , say , advertising , or print journalism .
so a newspaper becomes out of date as soon as it 's printed .
and here is this morning 's newspaper , and we have some wimbledon news , which is great .
now what we can do is point at the front of the newspaper and immediately get the bulletin .
voice : ... to the grass , and it 's very important that you adapt and you , you have to be flexible , you have to be willing to change direction at a split second , and she does all that . she 's won this title .
mm : and that linking of the digital content to something that 's physical is what we call an aura , and i 'll be using that term a little bit as we go through the talk .
so , what 's great about this is it is n't just a faster , more convenient way to get information in the real world , but there are times when actually using this medium allows you to be able to display information in a way that was never before possible .
so what i have here is a wireless router .
my american colleagues have told me i 've got to call it a router , so that everyone here understands - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but nonetheless , here is the device .
so now what i can do is , rather than getting the instructions for the device online , i can simply point at it , the device is recognized , and then - voice : begin by plugging in the grey adsl cable .
then connect the power . finally , the yellow ethernet cable .
congratulations . you have now completed setup .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- mm : awesome . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the incredible work that made that possible was done here in the u.k. by scientists at cambridge , and they work in our offices , and i 've got a lovely picture of them here .
they could n't all be on stage , but we 're going to bring their aura to the stage , so here they are .
they 're not very animated . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this was the fourth take , i 'm told . -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . so , as we 're talking about cambridge , let 's now move on to technical advancements , because since we started putting this technology on mobile phones less than 12 months ago , the speed and the processing in these devices has grown at a really phenomenal rate , and that means that i can now take cinema-quality 3d models and place them in the world around me , so i have one over here .
tamara , would you like to jump in ?
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- dinosaur roaring -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- mm : i should leap in .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- dinosaur roaring -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so then , after the fun , comes the more emotional side of what we do , because effectively , this technology allows you to see the world through someone 's eyes , and for that person to be able to take a moment in time and effectively store it and tag it to something physical that exists in the real world .
what 's great about this is , the tools to do this are free .
they 're open , they 're available to everyone within our application , and educators have really got on board with the classrooms .
so we have teachers who 've tagged up textbooks , teachers who 've tagged up school classrooms , and a great example of this is a school in the u.k.
i have a picture here from a video , and we 're now going to play it .
teacher : see what happens . -lrb- children talking -rrb- keep going .
child : tv . -lrb- children react -rrb- child : oh my god .
teacher : now move it either side . see what happens .
move away from it and come back to it .
child : oh , that is so cool .
teacher : and then , have you got it again ?
child : oh my god ! how did you do that ?
second child : it 's magic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- mm : -lrb- laughs -rrb- so , it 's not magic .
it 's available for everyone to do , and actually i 'm going to show you how easy it is to do by doing one right now .
so , as sort of - i 'm told it 's called a stadium wave , so we 're going to start from this side of the room on the count of three , and go over to here .
tamara , are you recording ?
okay , so are you all ready ?
one , two , three . go !
audience : whooooooo !
mm : fellows are really good at that . -lrb- laughs -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . now we 're going to switch back into the aurasma application , and what tamara 's going to do is tag that video that we just took onto my badge , so that i can remember it forever .
now , we have lots of people who are doing this already , and we 've talked a little bit about the educational side .
on the emotional side , we have people who 've done things like send postcards and christmas cards back to their family with little messages on them .
we have people who have , for example , taken the inside of the engine bay of an old car and tagged up different components within an engine , so that if you 're stuck and you want to find out more , you can point and discover the information .
we 're all very , very familiar with the internet .
in the last 20 years , it 's really changed the way that we live and work , and the way that we see the world , and what 's great is , we sort of think this is the next paradigm shift , because now we can literally take the content that we share , we discover , and that we enjoy and make it a part of the world around us .
it 's completely free to download this application .
if you have a good wi-fi connection or 3g , this process is very , very quick .
oh , there we are . we can save it now .
it 's just going to do a tiny bit of processing to convert that image that we just took into a sort of digital fingerprint , and the great thing is , if you 're a professional user , - so , a newspaper - the tools are pretty much identical to what we 've just used to create this demonstration .
the only difference is that you 've got the ability to add in links and slightly more content . are you now ready ?
tamara roukaerts : we 're ready to go .
mm : okay . so , i 'm told we 're ready , which means we can now point at the image , and there you all are .
mm on video : one , two , three . go !
mm : well done . we 've been aurasma . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects .
but the coolest i ever worked on was around this guy .
this guy 's name is tempt .
tempt was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s .
and he came up home from a run one day and said , " dad , my legs are tingling . "
and that was the onset of als .
so tempt is now completely paralyzed .
he only has use of his eyes .
i was exposed to him .
i have a company that does design and animation , so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world .
and so we decided that we were going to sponsor tony , tempt , and his cause .
so i went and met with his brother and father and said , " we 're going to give you this money .
what are you going to do with it ? "
and his brother said , " i just want to be able to talk to tony again .
i just want to be able to communicate with him and i said , " wait a second , is n't that - i 've seen stephen hawking - do n't all paralyzed people have the ability to communicate via these devices ? "
and he said , " no , unless you 're in the upper echelon and you 've got really amazing insurance , you ca n't actually do that .
these devices are n't accessible to people . "
and i said , " well , how do you actually communicate ? "
has everyone seen the movie " the diving bell and the butterfly ? "
that 's how they communicate - so run their finger along .
i said , " that 's archaic . how can that be ? "
so i showed up with the desire to just write a check , and instead , i wrote a check that i had no freaking idea how i was going to cash .
i committed to his brother and his father right then and there - i 'm like , " all right , here 's the deal : tony 's going to speak , we 're going to get him a machine , and we 're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again .
because it 's a travesty that someone who still has all of that in him is n't able to communicate it . "
so i spoke at a conference a couple months after that .
i met these guys called grl , graffiti research lab , and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then , with a laser pointer , draw on it , and it just registers the negative space .
so they go around and do art installations like this .
all the things that go up there , they said there 's a life cycle .
first it starts with the sexual organs , then it starts with cuss words , then it was bush slanders and then people actually got to art .
but there was always a life cycle to their presentations .
so i went home and was having dinner with my wife and was telling her about this , and we were like , " well wait a second . if we know that this technology exists where you can use your eyes to control things , why do n't we figure out a way for tempt to control a laser and he could do graf again ? well that would be awesome . "
so that started the journey .
and about two years later , about a year later , after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around , we 'd accomplished a couple things .
one , we battered down the doors of the insurance companies , and we actually got tempt a machine that let him communicate - a stephen hawking machine .
-lrb- applause -rrb- which was awesome .
and he 's seriously one of the funniest - i call him yoda , because you talk to the guy , you get an email from him , and you 're like , " i 'm not worthy . this guy 's so amazing . "
the other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world - literally every corner of the world - into our house .
my wife and kids and i moved to our back garage , and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house .
a lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls .
but for over two weeks , we programmed , we went to the venice boardwalk , my kids got involved , my dog got involved , and we created this .
this is called the eyewriter , and you can see the description .
this is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the venice beach boardwalk , some copper wire and some stuff from home depot and radio shack .
we took a ps3 camera , hacked it open , mounted it to an led light , and now there 's a device that is free - you build this yourself , we publish the code for free , you download the software for free .
and now we 've created a device that has absolutely no limitations .
there 's no insurance company that can say " no . "
there 's no hospital that can say " no . "
anybody who 's paralyzed now has access to actually draw or communicate using only their eyes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
thank you guys very much . that was awesome .
so at the end of the two weeks , we went back to tempt 's room .
i love this picture , because this is someone else 's room and that 's his room .
so there 's all this hustle and bustle going on for the big unveiling .
and after over a year of planning , two weeks of programming , carb-fest and all-night sessions , tony drew again for the first time in seven years .
and this is an amazing picture , because this is his life support system , and he 's looking over his life support system .
we kicked his bed so that he could see out .
and we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital .
and he drew again for the first time , in front of his family and friends - and you can only imagine what the feeling in the parking lot was .
the funny thing was , we had to break into the parking lot too , so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at the end of this , he sent us an email , and this is what the email said : " that was the first time i 've drawn anything for seven years .
i feel like i had been held underwater , and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so i could breathe . "
is n't that awesome ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so that 's kind of our battle cry .
that 's what keeps us going and keeps us developing .
and we 've got such a long way to go with this .
this is an amazing device , but it 's the equivalent of an etch a sketch .
and someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more .
so we 're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better , faster , stronger .
since that time , we 've had all kinds of acknowledgment .
we 've won a bunch of awards .
remember , it 's free ; none of us are making any money on this thing .
it 's all coming out of our own pockets .
so the awards were like , " oh , this is fantastic . "
armstrong twittered about us , and then in december , time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010 , which was really cool .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the coolest thing about this - and this is what 's completing the whole circle - is that in april of this year , at the geffen moca in downtown los angeles , there 's going to be an exhibition called " art of the streets . "
and " art of the streets " is going to have pretty much the bad-asses of the street art scene - banksy , shepard fairey , kaws - all of these guys will be there .
tempt 's going to be in the show , which is pretty awesome .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so basically this is my point : if you see something that 's not possible , make it possible .
everything in this room was n't possible - this stage , this computer , this mic , the eyewriter - was n't possible at one point .
make it possible , everyone in this room .
i 'm not a programmer , never done anything with ocular recognition technology , but i just recognized something and associated myself with amazing people so that we could make something happen .
and this is the question i want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done : if not now , then when ? and if not me , then who ?
thank you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week , four words that will come to define this century .
here they are : the earth is full .
it 's full of us , it 's full of our stuff , full of our waste , full of our demands .
yes , we are a brilliant and creative species , but we 've created a little too much stuff - so much that our economy is now bigger than its host , our planet .
this is not a philosophical statement , this is just science based in physics , chemistry and biology .
there are many science-based analyses of this , but they all draw the same conclusion - that we 're living beyond our means .
the eminent scientists of the global footprint network , for example , calculate that we need about 1.5 earths to sustain this economy .
in other words , to keep operating at our current level , we need 50 percent more earth than we 've got .
in financial terms , this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn , going further into debt every year .
but of course , you ca n't borrow natural resources , so we 're burning through our capital , or stealing from the future .
so when i say full , i mean really full - well past any margin for error , well past any dispute about methodology .
what this means is our economy is unsustainable .
i 'm not saying it 's not nice or pleasant or that it 's bad for polar bears or forests , though it certainly is .
what i 'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable .
in other words , thanks to those pesky laws of physics , when things are n't sustainable , they stop .
but that 's not possible , you might think .
we ca n't stop economic growth .
because that 's what will stop : economic growth .
it will stop because of the end of trade resources .
it will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources , all the capacity , all the systems of the earth , which is now having economic damage .
when we think about economic growth stopping , we go , " that 's not possible , " because economic growth is so essential to our society that is is rarely questioned .
although growth has certainly delivered many benefits , it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around .
even though it has delivered many benefits , it is based on a crazy idea - the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet .
and i 'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes .
that the crazy idea is just that , it is crazy , and with the earth full , it 's game over .
come on , you 're thinking .
that 's not possible .
technology is amazing . people are innovative .
there are so many ways we can improve the way we do things .
we can surely sort this out .
that 's all true .
well , it 's mostly true .
we are certainly amazing , and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity .
so if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the earth 's capacity , we could do that .
the problem is we 're just warming up this growth engine .
we plan to take this highly-stressed economy and make it twice as big and then make it four times as big - not in some distant future , but in less than 40 years , in the life time of most of you .
china plans to be there in just 20 years .
the only problem with this plan is that it 's not possible .
in response , some people argue , but we need growth , we need it to solve poverty .
we need it to develop technology .
we need it to keep social stability .
i find this argument fascinating , as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs .
it 's like the earth does n't care what we need .
mother nature does n't negotiate ; she just sets rules and describes consequences .
and these are not esoteric limits .
this is about food and water , soil and climate , the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives .
so the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient , solar-powered , knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion .
it 's not that it 's not possible to feed , clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives .
it certainly is .
but the idea that we can gently grow there with a few minor hiccups is just wrong , and it 's dangerously wrong , because it means we 're not getting ready for what 's really going to happen .
see what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down .
and that 's what will happen to us .
many of you will be thinking , but surely we can still stop this .
if it 's that bad , we 'll react .
let 's just think through that idea .
now we 've had 50 years of warnings .
we 've had science proving the urgency of change .
we 've had economic analysis pointing out that , not only can we afford it , it 's cheaper to act early .
and yet , the reality is we 've done pretty much nothing to change course .
we 're not even slowing down .
last year on climate , for example , we had the highest global emissions ever .
the story on food , on water , on soil , on climate is all much the same .
i actually do n't say this in despair .
i 've done my grieving about the loss .
i accept where we are .
it is sad , but it is what it is .
but it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we 're not acting , we 're not close to acting and we 're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy .
and that 's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for .
so when does this transition begin ?
when does this breakdown begin ?
in my view , it is well underway .
i know most people do n't see it that way .
we tend to look at the world , not as the integrated system that it is , but as a series of individual issues .
we see the occupy protests , we see spiraling debt crises , we see growing inequality , we see money 's influence on politics , we see resource constraint , food and oil prices .
but we see , mistakenly , each of these issues as individual problems to be solved .
in fact , it 's the system in the painful process of breaking down - our system , of debt-fueled economic growth , of ineffective democracy , of overloading planet earth , is eating itself alive .
i could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this , but i wo n't because , if you want to see it , that evidence is all around you .
i want to talk to you about fear .
i want to do so because , in my view , the most important issue we face is how we respond to this question .
the crisis is now inevitable .
this issue is , how will we react ?
of course , we ca n't know what will happen .
the future is inherently uncertain .
but let 's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen .
imagine our economy when the carbon bubble bursts , when the financial markets recognize that , to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control , the oil and coal industries are finished .
imagine china , india and pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water .
imagine the middle east without oil income , but with collapsing governments .
imagine our highly-tuned , just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying .
imagine 30 percent unemployment in america as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty .
now imagine what that means for you , your family , your friends , your personal financial security .
imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen .
imagine what you 'll tell your children when they ask you , " so , in 2012 , mom and dad , what was it like when you 'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row , when every scientific body in the world was saying you 've got a major problem , when the oceans were acidifying , when oil and food prices were spiking , when they were rioting in the streets of london and occupying wall street ?
when the system was so clearly breaking down , mom and dad , what did you do , what were you thinking ? "
so how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind , when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges ?
just take a moment and take a breath and think , what do you feel at this point ?
perhaps denial .
perhaps anger .
maybe fear .
of course , we ca n't know what 's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty .
but when we think about the kind of possibilities i paint , we should feel a bit of fear .
we are in danger , all of us , and we 've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response , to help us bravely face a threat .
but this time it 's not a tiger at the cave mouth .
you ca n't see the danger at your door .
but if you look , you can see it at the door of your civilization .
that 's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on , because if we wait until the crisis takes hold , we may panic and hide .
if we feel it now and think it through , we will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself .
yes , things will get ugly , and it will happen soon - certainly in our lifetime - but we are more than capable of getting through everything that 's coming .
you see , those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem , that technology is limitless , that markets can be a force for good , are in fact right .
the only thing they 're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going .
when we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things .
think about war .
after the bombing of pearl harbor , it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry , and from there to rationing of food and energy .
think about how a company responds to a bankruptcy threat and how a change that seemed impossible just gets done .
think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy .
we are smart , in fact , we really are quite amazing , but we do love a good crisis .
and the good news , this one 's a monster .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sure , if we get it wrong , we could face the end of this civilization , but if we get it right , it could be the beginning of civilization instead .
and how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that ?
there 's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way .
scientists like james hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net co2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades .
i wanted to know what that would take , so i worked with professor jorgen randers from norway to find the answer .
we developed a plan called " the one degree war plan " - so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required .
to my surprise , eliminating net co2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap , not very cheap , but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization .
we did n't calculate that precisely , but we understand that 's very expensive .
you can read the details , but in summary , we can transform our economy .
we can do it with proven technology .
we can do it at an affordable cost .
we can do it with existing political structures .
the only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel .
and this is where you come in .
when we think about the future i paint , of course we should feel a bit of fear .
but fear can be paralyzing or motivating .
we need to accept the fear and then we need to act .
we need to act like the future depends on it .
we need to act like we only have one planet .
we can do this .
i know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth , more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do .
they 're wrong .
we can be more , we can be much more .
we have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago .
we 've built a powerful foundation of science , knowledge and technology - more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent , meaningful and satisfying lives .
the earth can support that if we choose the right path .
we can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society 's evolution - like , what do we want to be when we grow up , when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality ?
well it 's time to grow up , to be wiser , to be calmer , like generations before us , we 'll be growing up in war - not a war between civilizations , but a war for civilization , for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age .
we can choose life over fear .
we can do what we need to do , but it will take every entrepreneur , every artist , every scientist , every communicator , every mother , every father , every child , every one of us .
this could be our finest hour .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , as alexander graham bell famously said on his first successful telephone call , " hello , is that domino 's pizza ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just really want to thank you very much .
as another famous man , jerry garcia , said , " what a strange , long trip . "
and he should have said , " what a strange , long trip it 's about to become . "
at this very moment , you are viewing my upper half .
my lower half is appearing at a different conference -lrb- laughter -rrb- in a different country .
you can , it turns out , be in two places at once .
but still , i 'm sorry i ca n't be with you in person .
i 'll explain at another time .
and though i 'm a rock star , i just want to assure you that none of my wishes will include a hot tub .
but what really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on mp3 players .
the revolution - this revolution - is much bigger than that .
i hope , i believe .
what turns me on about the digital age , what excites me personally , is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing .
you see , it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song , you needed a studio and a producer .
now , you need a laptop .
if you wanted to make a film , you needed a mass of equipment and a hollywood budget .
now , you need a camera that fits in your palm , and a couple of bucks for a blank dvd .
imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints .
and that really , really excites me .
i 'm excited when i glimpse that kind of thinking writ large .
what i would like to see is idealism decoupled from all constraints .
political , economic , psychological , whatever .
the geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world .
from the ease with which you swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged .
and that 's actually what i 'd like to talk about today .
first , though , i should probably explain why , and how , i got to this place .
it 's a journey that started 20 years ago .
you may remember that song , " we are the world , " or , " do they know it 's christmas ? "
band aid , live aid .
another very tall , grizzled rock star , my friend sir bob geldof , issued a challenge to " feed the world . "
it was a great moment , and it utterly changed my life .
that summer , my wife , ali , and myself went to ethiopia .
we went on the quiet to see for ourselves what was going on .
we lived in ethiopia for a month , working at an orphanage .
the children had a name for me .
they called me , " the girl with the beard . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do n't ask .
anyway , we found africa to be a magical place .
big skies , big hearts , big , shining continent .
beautiful , royal people .
anybody who ever gave anything to africa got a lot more back .
ethiopia did n't just blow my mind ; it opened my mind .
anyway , on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said , " would you take my son with you ? "
he knew , in ireland , that his son would live , and that in ethiopia , his son would die .
it was the middle of that awful famine .
well , i turned him down .
and it was a funny kind of sick feeling , but i turned him down .
and it 's a feeling i ca n't ever quite forget .
and in that moment , i started this journey .
in that moment , i became the worst thing of all : i became a rock star with a cause . -lrb- laughter -rrb- except this is n't the cause , is it ?
six-and-a-half thousand africans dying every single day from aids - a preventable , treatable disease - for lack of drugs we can get in any pharmacy .
that 's not a cause . that 's an emergency .
11 million aids orphans in africa , 20 million by the end of the decade .
that 's not a cause . that 's an emergency .
today , every day , 9,000 more africans will catch hiv because of stigmatization and lack of education .
that 's not a cause . that 's an emergency .
so what we 're talking about here is human rights .
the right to live like a human .
the right to live , period .
and what we 're facing in africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality .
the next thing i 'd like to be clear about is what this problem is , and what this problem is n't .
because this is not all about charity .
this is about justice . really .
this is not about charity . this is about justice .
that 's right .
and that 's too bad , because we 're very good at charity .
americans , like irish people , are good at it .
even the poorest neighborhoods give more than they can afford .
we like to give , and we give a lot .
look at the response to the tsunami - it 's inspiring .
but justice is a tougher standard than charity .
you see , africa makes a fool of our idea of justice .
it makes a farce of our idea of equality .
it mocks our pieties . it doubts our concern .
it questions our commitment .
because there is no way we can look at what 's happening in africa , and if we 're honest , conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else .
as you heard in the film , anywhere else , not here .
not here , not in america , not in europe .
in fact , a head of state that you 're all familiar with admitted this to me . and it 's really true .
there is no chance this kind of hemorrhaging of human life would be accepted anywhere else other than africa .
africa is a continent in flames .
and deep down , if we really accepted that africans were equal to us , we would all do more to put the fire out .
we 're standing around with watering cans , when what we really need is the fire brigade .
you see , it 's not as dramatic as the tsunami .
it 's crazy , really , when you think about it .
does stuff have to look like an action movie these days to exist in the front of our brain ?
the slow extinguishing of countless lives is just not dramatic enough , it would appear .
catastrophes that we can avert are not as interesting as ones we could avert .
funny , that .
anyway , i believe that that kind of thinking offends the intellectual rigor in this room .
six-and-a-half thousand people dying a day in africa may be africa 's crisis , but the fact that it 's not on the nightly news , that we in europe , or you in america , are not treating it like an emergency - i want to argue with you tonight that that 's our crisis .
i want to argue that though africa is not the front line in the war against terror , it could be soon .
every week , religious extremists take another african village .
they 're attempting to bring order to chaos .
well , why are n't we ?
poverty breeds despair . we know this .
despair breeds violence . we know this .
in turbulent times , is n't it cheaper , and smarter , to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later ?
" the war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty . "
and i did n't say that . colin powell said that .
now when the military are telling us that this is a war that can not be won by military might alone , maybe we should listen .
there 's an opportunity here , and it 's real .
it 's not spin . it 's not wishful thinking .
the problems facing the developing world afford us in the developed world a chance to re-describe ourselves to the world .
we will not only transform other people 's lives , but we will also transform the way those other lives see us .
and that might be smart in these nervous , dangerous times .
do n't you think that on a purely commercial level , that anti-retroviral drugs are great advertisements for western ingenuity and technology ?
does n't compassion look well on us ?
and let 's cut the crap for a second .
in certain quarters of the world , brand eu , brand usa , is not at its shiniest .
the neon sign is fizzing and cracking .
someone 's put a brick through the window .
the regional branch managers are getting nervous .
never before have we in the west been so scrutinized .
our values : do we have any ?
our credibility ?
these things are under attack around the world .
brand usa could use some polishing .
and i say that as a fan , you know ?
as a person who buys the products .
but think about it .
more anti-retrovirals make sense .
but that 's just the easy part , or ought to be .
but equality for africa - that 's a big , expensive idea .
you see , the scale of the suffering numbs us into a kind of indifference .
what on earth can we all do about this ?
well , much more than we think .
we ca n't fix every problem , but the ones we can , i want to argue , we must .
and because we can , we must .
this is the straight truth , the righteous truth .
it is not a theory .
the fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye , look across the ocean to africa , and say this , and mean it : we do not have to stand for this .
a whole continent written off - we do not have to stand for this .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and let me say this without a trace of irony - before i back it up to a bunch of ex-hippies .
forget the ' 60s . we can change the world .
i ca n't ; you ca n't , as individuals ; but we can change the world .
i really believe that , the people in this room .
look at the gates foundation .
they 've done incredible stuff , unbelievable stuff .
but working together , we can actually change the world .
we can turn the inevitable outcomes , and transform the quality of life for millions of lives who look and feel rather like us , when you 're up close .
i 'm sorry to laugh here , but you do look so different than you did in haight-ashbury in the ' 60s .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i want to argue that this is the moment that you are designed for .
it is the flowering of the seeds you planted in earlier , headier days .
ideas that you gestated in your youth .
this is what excites me .
this room was born for this moment , is really what i want to say to you tonight .
most of you started out wanting to change the world , did n't you ?
most of you did , the digital world .
well , now , actually because of you , it is possible to change the physical world .
it 's a fact .
economists confirm it , and they know much more than i do .
so why , then , are we not pumping our fists into the air ?
probably because when we admit we can do something about it , we 've got to do something about it .
it is a pain in the arse .
this equality business is actually a pain in the arse .
but for the first time in history , we have the technology ; we have the know-how ; we have the cash ; we have the life-saving drugs .
do we have the will ?
i hope this is obvious , but i 'm not a hippie .
and i 'm not really one for the warm , fuzzy feeling .
i do not have flowers in my hair .
actually , i come from punk rock .
the clash wore big army boots , not sandals .
but i know toughness when i see it .
and for all the talk of peace and love on the west coast , there was muscle to the movement that started out here .
you see , idealism detached from action is just a dream .
but idealism allied with pragmatism , with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit , is very exciting . it 's very real . it 's very strong .
and it 's very present in a crowd like you .
last year at data , this organization i helped set up , we launched a campaign to summon this spirit in the fight against aids and extreme poverty .
we 're calling it the one campaign .
it 's based on our belief that the action of one person can change a lot , but the actions of many coming together as one can change the world .
well , we feel that now is the time to prove we 're right .
there are moments in history when civilization redefines itself .
we believe this is one .
we believe that this could be the time when the world finally decides that the wanton loss of life in africa is just no longer acceptable .
this could be the time that we finally get serious about changing the future for most people who live on planet earth .
momentum has been building .
lurching a little , but it 's building .
this year is a test for us all , especially the leaders of the g8 nations , who really are on the line here , with all the world in history watching .
i have been , of late , disappointed with the bush administration .
they started out with such promise on africa .
they made some really great promises , and actually have fulfilled a lot of them .
but some of them they have n't .
they do n't feel the push from the ground , is the truth .
but my disappointment has much more perspective when i talk to american people , and i hear their worries about the deficit , and the fiscal well being of their country .
i understand that .
but there 's much more push from the ground than you 'd think , if we got organized .
what i try to communicate , and you can help me if you agree , is that aid for africa is just great value for money at a time when america really needs it .
putting it in the crassest possible terms , the investment reaps huge returns .
not only in lives saved , but in goodwill , stability and security that we 'll gain .
so this is what i hope that you will do , if i could be so bold , and not have it deducted from my number of wishes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i hope is that beyond individual merciful acts , that you will tell the politicians to do right by africa , by america and by the world .
give them permission , if you like , to spend their political capital and your financial capital , your national purse on saving the lives of millions of people .
that 's really what i would like you to do .
because we also need your intellectual capital : your ideas , your skills , your ingenuity .
and you , at this conference , are in a unique position .
some of the technologies we 've been talking about , you invented them , or at least revolutionized the way that they 're used .
together you have changed the zeitgeist from analog to digital , and pushed the boundaries .
and we 'd like you to give us that energy .
give us that kind of dreaming , that kind of doing .
as i say , there 're two things on the line here .
there 's the continent africa .
but there 's also our sense of ourselves .
people are starting to figure this out .
movements are springing up .
artists , politicians , pop stars , priests , ceos , ngos , mothers ' unions , student unions .
a lot of people are getting together , and working under this umbrella i told you about earlier , the one campaign .
i think they just have one idea in their mind , which is , where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- history , like god , is watching what we do .
when the history books get written , i think our age will be remembered for three things .
really , it 's just three things this whole age will be remembered for .
the digital revolution , yes .
the war against terror , yes .
and what we did or did not do to put out the fires in africa .
some say we ca n't afford to . i say we ca n't afford not to .
thank you , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , my three wishes .
the ones that ted has offered to grant .
you see , if this is true , and i believe it is , that the digital world you all created has uncoupled the creative imagination from the physical constraints of matter , this should be a piece of piss .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i should add that this started out as a much longer list of wishes .
most of them impossible , some of them impractical and one or two of them certainly immoral .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this business , it gets to be addictive , you know what i mean , when somebody else is picking up the tab .
anyway , here 's number one .
i wish for you to help build a social movement of more than one million american activists for africa .
that is my first wish .
i believe it 's possible .
a few minutes ago , i talked about all the citizens ' campaigns that are springing up .
you know , there 's lots out there .
and with this one campaign as our umbrella , my organization , data , and other groups , have been tapping into the energy and the enthusiasm that 's out there from hollywood into the heartland of america .
we know there 's more than enough energy to power this movement .
we just need your help in making it happen .
we want all of you here , church america , corporate america , microsoft america , apple america , coke america , pepsi america , nerd america , noisy america .
we ca n't afford to be cool and sit this one out .
i do believe if we build a movement that 's one million americans strong , we 're not going to be denied .
we will have the ear of congress .
we 'll be the first page in condi rice 's briefing book , and right into the oval office .
if there 's one million americans - and i really know this - who are ready to make phone calls , who are ready to be on email , i am absolutely sure that we can actually change the course of history , literally , for the continent of africa .
anyway , so i 'd like your help in getting that signed up .
i know john gage and sun microsystems are already on board for this , but there 's lots of you we 'd like to talk to .
right , my second wish , number two .
i would like one media hit for every person on the planet who is living on less than one dollar a day .
that 's one billion media hits .
could be on google , could be on aol .
steve case , larry , sergey - they 've done a lot already .
it could be nbc . it could be abc .
actually we 're talking to abc today about the oscars .
we have a film , produced by jon kamen at radical media .
but you know , we want , we need some airtime for our ideas .
we need to get the math ; we need to get the statistics out to the american people .
i really believe that old truman line , that if you give the american people the facts , they 'll do the right thing .
and , the other thing that 's important is that this is not sally struthers .
this has to be described as an adventure , not a burden .
-lrb- video -rrb- : one by one they step forward , a nurse , a teacher , a homemaker , and lives are saved .
the problem is enormous .
every three seconds one person dies .
another three seconds , one more .
the situation is so desperate in parts of africa , asia , even america , that aid groups , just as they did for the tsunami , are uniting as one , acting as one .
we can beat extreme poverty , starvation , aids .
but we need your help .
one more person , letter , voice will mean the difference between life and death for millions of people .
please join us by working together .
americans have an unprecedented opportunity .
we can make history .
we can start to make poverty history .
one , by one , by one .
please visit one at this address .
we 're not asking for your money . we 're asking for your voice .
bono : all right . i wish for ted to truly show the power of information , its power to rewrite the rules and transform lives , by connecting every hospital , health clinic and school in one african country .
and i would like it to be ethiopia .
i believe we can connect every school in ethiopia , every health clinic , every hospital - we can connect to the internet .
that is my wish , my third wish .
i think it 's possible .
i think we have the money and brains in the room to do that .
and that would be a mind-blowing wish to come true .
i 've been to ethiopia , as i said earlier .
it 's actually where it all started for me .
the idea that the internet , which changed all of our lives , can transform a country - and a continent that has hardly made it to analog , let alone digital - blows my mind .
but it did n't start out that way .
the first long-distance line from boston to new york was used in 1885 on the phone .
it was just nine years later that addis ababa was connected by phone to harare , which is 500 kilometers away .
since then , not that much has changed .
the average waiting time to get a landline in ethiopia is actually about seven or eight years .
but wireless technology was n't dreamt up then .
anyway , i 'm irish , and as you can see , i know how important talking is .
communication is very important for ethiopia - will transform the country .
nurses getting better training , pharmacists being able to order supplies , doctors sharing their expertise in all aspects of medicine .
it 's a very , very good idea to get them wired .
and that is my third and final wish for you at the ted conference .
thank you very much once again .
-lrb- applause -rrb- cities are the crucible of civilization .
they have been expanding , urbanization has been expanding , at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century , the planet will be completely dominated by cities .
cities are the origins of global warming , impact on the environment , health , pollution , disease , finance , economies , energy - they 're all problems that are confronted by having cities .
that 's where all these problems come from .
and the tsunami of problems that we feel we 're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet .
here 's some numbers .
two hundred years ago , the united states was less than a few percent urbanized .
it 's now more than 82 percent .
the planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago .
china 's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years .
now listen to this : every week for the foreseeable future , until 2050 , every week more than a million people are being added to our cities .
this is going to affect everything .
everybody in this room , if you stay alive , is going to be affected by what 's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon .
however , cities , despite having this negative aspect to them , are also the solution .
because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people , creating ideas , innovation , wealth and so on .
so we have this kind of dual nature .
and so there 's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities .
now these are my comrades in arms .
this work has been done with an extraordinary group of people , and they 've done all the work , and i 'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this , having things like this , doing things like this , with economies that are growing like this , not realizing that entropy produces things like this , this , this and this .
and the question is : are going to look like in 2050 , or is it going to be this ?
that 's the question .
i must say , many of the indicators look like this is what it 's going to look like , but let 's talk about it .
so my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities .
and scientific theory means quantifiable - relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework .
that 's the quest .
is that conceivable ?
are there universal laws ?
so here 's two questions that i have in my head when i think about this problem .
the first is : are cities part of biology ?
is london a great big whale ?
is edinburgh a horse ?
is microsoft a great big anthill ?
what do we learn from that ?
we use them metaphorically - the dna of a company , the metabolism of a city , and so on - is that just bullshit , metaphorical bullshit , or is there serious substance to it ?
and if that is the case , how come that it 's very hard to kill a city ?
you could drop an atom bomb on a city , and 30 years later it 's surviving .
very few cities fail .
all companies die , all companies .
and if you have a serious theory , you should be able to predict when google is going to go bust .
so is that just another version of this ?
well we understand this very well .
that is , you ask any generic question about this - how many trees of a given size , how many branches of a given size does a tree have , how many leaves , what is the energy flowing through each branch , what is the size of the canopy , what is its growth , what is its mortality ?
we have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions .
and the idea is can we do the same for this ?
so the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life , is that it is scalable , it works over an extraordinary range .
this is just a tiny range actually : it 's us mammals ; we 're one of these .
the same principles , the same dynamics , the same organization is at work in all of these , including us , and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size .
and that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust - scalability .
we 're going to discuss that in a moment more .
but you know , at a local level , you scale ; everybody in this room is scaled .
that 's called growth .
here 's how you grew .
rat , that 's a rat - could have been you .
we 're all pretty much the same .
and you see , you 're very familiar with this .
you grow very quickly and then you stop .
and that line there is a prediction from the same theory , based on the same principles , that describes that forest .
and here it is for the growth of a rat , and those points on there are data points .
this is just the weight versus the age .
and you see , it stops growing .
very , very good for biology - also one of the reasons for its great resilience .
very , very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm .
this is what we believe .
this is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us , particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner : hockey sticks .
this is a bunch of software companies - and what it is is their revenue versus their age - all zooming away , and everybody making millions and billions of dollars .
okay , so how do we understand this ?
so let 's first talk about biology .
this is explicitly showing you how things scale , and this is a truly remarkable graph .
what is plotted here is metabolic rate - how much energy you need per day to stay alive - versus your weight , your mass , for all of us bunch of organisms .
and it 's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10 , otherwise you could n't get everything on the graph .
and what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line .
despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe , there 's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this .
it 's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms , each subsystem , each cell type , each gene , has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history .
and yet , despite all of that darwinian evolution and natural selection , they 've been constrained to lie on a line .
something else is going on .
before i talk about that , i 've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve , this straight line .
it 's three-quarters , roughly , which is less than one - and we call that sublinear .
and here 's the point of that .
it says that , if it were linear , the steepest slope , then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy .
but it 's sublinear , and what that translates into is that , if you double the size of the organism , you actually only need 75 percent more energy .
so a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale .
the bigger you are systematically , according to very well-defined rules , less energy per capita .
now any physiological variable you can think of , any life history event you can think of , if you plot it this way , looks like this .
there is an extraordinary regularity .
so you tell me the size of a mammal , i can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology , life history , etc .
and the reason for this is because of networks .
all of life is controlled by networks - from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level .
and you 're very familiar with these networks .
that 's a little thing that lives inside an elephant .
and here 's the summary of what i 'm saying .
if you take those networks , this idea of networks , and you apply universal principles , mathematizable , universal principles , all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow , including the description of the forest , the description of your circulatory system , the description within cells .
one of the things i did not stress in that introduction was that , systematically , the pace of life decreases as you get bigger .
heart rates are slower ; you live longer ; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower , etc .
the question is : is any of this true for cities and companies ?
so is london a scaled up birmingham , which is a scaled up brighton , etc . , etc . ?
is new york a scaled up san francisco , which is a scaled up santa fe ?
do n't know . we will discuss that .
but they are networks , and the most important network of cities is you .
cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions , our interactions , and the clustering and grouping of individuals .
here 's just a symbolic picture of that .
and here 's scaling of cities .
this shows that in this very simple example , which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size - plotted in the same way as the biology - you see exactly the same kind of thing .
there is a scaling .
that is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size .
the slope of that is less than linear .
there is an economy of scale .
less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are - not surprising .
but here 's what 's surprising .
it scales in the same way everywhere .
this is just european countries , but you do it in japan or china or colombia , always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree .
and any infrastructure you look at - whether it 's the length of roads , length of electrical lines - anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way .
it 's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on .
but even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities , quantities that have no analog in biology , that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago .
the top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way .
and the bottom one is you lot - super-creatives plotted in the same way .
and what you see is a scaling phenomenon .
but most important in this , the exponent , the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate , is bigger than one - it 's about 1.15 to 1.2 .
here it is , which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita , unlike biology - higher wages , more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger , more patents per capita , more crime per capita .
and we 've looked at everything : more aids cases , flu , etc .
and here , they 're all plotted together .
just to show you what we plotted , here is income , gdp - gdp of the city - crime and patents all on one graph .
and you can see , they all follow the same line .
and here 's the statement .
if you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000 , from a million to two million , 10 to 20 million , it does n't matter , then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages , wealth , number of aids cases , number of police , anything you can think of .
it goes up by 15 percent , and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure .
this , no doubt , is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities .
because they think that all those wonderful things - like creative people , wealth , income - is what attracts them , forgetting about the ugly and the bad .
what is the reason for this ?
well i do n't have time to tell you about all the mathematics , but underlying this is the social networks , because this is a universal phenomenon .
this 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet - japan , chile , portugal , scotland , does n't matter .
always , all the data shows it 's the same , despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently .
something universal is going on .
the universality , to repeat , is us - that we are the city .
and it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions .
so there it is , i 've said it again .
so if it is those networks and their mathematical structure , unlike biology , which had sublinear scaling , economies of scale , you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger .
if it 's social networks with super-linear scaling - more per capita - then the theory says that you increase the pace of life .
the bigger you are , life gets faster .
on the left is the heart rate showing biology .
on the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of european cities , showing that increase .
lastly , i want to talk about growth .
this is what we had in biology , just to repeat .
economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior .
you grow fast and then stop - part of our resilience .
that would be bad for economies and cities .
and indeed , one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation , then indeed you get , from the same theory , a beautiful rising exponential curve - lovely .
and in fact , if you compare it to data , it fits very well with the development of cities and economies .
but it has a terrible catch , and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse .
and it 's destined to collapse for many reasons - kind of malthusian reasons - that you run out of resources .
and how do you avoid that ? well we 've done it before .
what we do is , as we grow and we approach the collapse , a major innovation takes place and we start over again , and we start over again as we approach the next one , and so on .
so there 's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse .
the catch , however , to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster .
so the image is that we 're not only on a treadmill that 's going faster , but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster .
we have to accelerate on a continuous basis .
and the question is : can we , as socio-economic beings , avoid a heart attack ?
so lastly , i 'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies .
see companies , they scale .
the top one , in fact , is walmart on the right .
it 's the same plot .
this happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees .
we could use sales , anything you like .
there it is : after some little fluctuations at the beginning , when companies are innovating , they scale beautifully .
and we 've looked at 23,000 companies in the united states , may i say .
and i 'm only showing you a little bit of this .
what is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology , indicating that they 're dominated , not by super-linear innovation and ideas ; they become dominated by economies of scale .
in that interpretation , by bureaucracy and administration , and they do it beautifully , may i say .
so if you tell me the size of some company , some small company , i could have predicted the size of walmart .
if it has this sublinear scaling , the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth .
there 's walmart . does n't look very sigmoidal .
that 's what we like , hockey sticks .
but you notice , i 've cheated , because i 've only gone up to ' 94 .
let 's go up to 2008 .
that red line is from the theory .
so if i 'd have done this in 1994 , i could have predicted what walmart would be now .
and then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies .
there they are . that 's 23,000 companies .
they all start looking like hockey sticks , they all bend over , and they all die like you and me .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i dabble in design . i 'm a curator of architecture and design ; i happen to be at the museum of modern art .
but what we 're going to talk about today is really design . really good designers are like sponges : they really are curious and absorb every kind of information that comes their way , and transform it so that it can be used by people like us .
and so that gives me an opportunity , because every design show that i curate kind of looks at a different world . and it 's great , because it seems like every time i change jobs .
and what i 'm going to do today is i 'm going to give you a preview of the next exhibition that i 'm working on , which is called " design and the elastic mind . "
the world that i decided to focus on this particular time is the world of science and the world of technology .
technology always comes into play when design is involved , but science does a little less .
but designers are great at taking big revolutions that happen and transforming them so that we can use them .
and this is what this exhibition looks at .
if you think about your life today , you go every day through many different scales , many different changes of rhythm and pace .
you work over different time zones , you talk to very different people , you multitask . we all know it , and we do it kind of automatically .
some of the minds in this audience are super elastic , others are a little slower , others have a few stretch marks , but nonetheless this is a quite exceptional audience from that viewpoint .
other people are not as elastic .
i ca n't get my father in italy to work on the internet .
he does n't want to put high-speed internet at home .
and that 's because there 's some little bit of fear , little bit of resistance or just clogged mechanisms .
so designers work on this particular malaise that we have , these kinds of discomforts that we have , and try to make life easier for us .
elasticity of mind is something that we really need , you know , we really need , we really cherish and we really work on .
and this exhibition is about the work of designers that help us be more elastic , and also of designers that really work on this elasticity as an opportunity . and one last thing is that it 's not only designers , but it 's also scientists .
and before i launch into the display of some of the slides and into the preview , i would like to point out this beautiful detail about scientists and design .
you can say that the relationship between science and design goes back centuries . you can of course talk about leonardo da vinci and many other renaissance men and women - and there 's a gigantic history behind it .
but according to a really great science historian you might know , peter galison - he teaches at harvard - what nanotechnology in particular and quantum physics have brought to designers is this renewed interest , this real passion for design .
so basically , the idea of being able to build things bottom up , atom by atom , has made them all into tinkerers .
and all of a sudden scientists are seeking designers , just like designers are seeking scientists .
it 's a brand-new love affair that we 're trying to cultivate at moma . together with adam bly , who is the founder of seed magazine - that 's now a multimedia company , you might know it - we founded about a year ago a monthly salon for designers and scientists , and it 's quite beautiful .
and keith has come , and also jonathan has come and many others .
and it was great , because at the beginning was this apology fest - you know , scientists would tell designers , you know , i do n't know what style is , i 'm not really elegant .
and designers would like , oh , i do n't know how to do an equation , i do n't understand what you 're saying . and then all of a sudden they really started talking each others ' language , and now we 're already at the point that they collaborate .
paul steinhardt , a physicist from new york , and aranda / lasch , architects , collaborated in an installation in london at the serpentine .
and it 's really interesting to see how this happens .
the exhibition will talk about the work of both designers and scientists , and show how they 're presenting the possibilities of the future to us .
i 'm showing to you different sections of the show right now , just to give you a taste of it .
nanophysics and nanotechnology , for instance , have really opened the designer 's mind .
in this case i 'm showing more the designers ' work , because they 're the ones that have really been stimulated .
a lot of the objects in the show are concepts , not objects that exist already . but what you 're looking at here is the work of some scientists from ucla .
this kind of alphabet soup is a new way to mark proteins - not only by color but literally by alphabet letters .
so they construct it , and they can construct all kinds of forms at the nanoscale . this is the work of design students from the royal college of arts in london that have been working together with their tutor , tony dunne , and with a bunch of scientists around great britain on the possibilities of nanotechnology for design in the future .
new sensing elements on the body - you can grow hairs on your nails , and therefore grab some of the particles from another person .
they seem very , very obsessed with finding out more about the ideal mate .
so they 're working on enhancing everything : touch , smell - everything they can , in order to find the perfect mate .
very interesting . this is a typeface designer from israel who has designed - he calls them " typosperma . "
he 's thinking - of course it 's all a concept - of injecting typefaces into spermatozoa , i do n't know how to say it in english - spermatazoi - in order to make them become - to almost have a song or a whole poem written with every ejaculation . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i tell you , designers are quite fantastic , you know .
so , tissue design .
in this case too , you have a mixture of scientists and designers .
this here is part of the same lab at the royal college of arts .
the rca is really quite an amazing school from that viewpoint .
one of the assignments for a year was to work with in-vitro meat .
you know that already you can grow meat in vitro .
in australia they did it - this research company , called symbiotica .
but the problem is that it 's a really ugly patty .
and so , the assignment to the students was , how should the steak of tomorrow be ?
when you do n't have to kill cows and it can have any shape , what should it be like ?
so this particular student , james king , went around the beautiful english countryside , picked the best , best cow that he could see , and then put her in the mri machine .
then , he took the scans of the best organs and made the meat - of course , this is done with a japanese resins food maker , but you know , in the future it could be made better - which reproduces the best mri scan of the best cow he could find .
instead , this element here is much more banal .
something that you know can be done already is to grow bone tissue , so that you can make a wedding ring out of the bone tissue of your loved one - literally .
so , this is indeed made of human bone tissue .
this is symbiotica , and they 've been working - they were the first ones to do this in-vitro meat - and now they 've also done an in-vitro coat , a leather coat .
it 's miniscule , but it 's a real coat . it 's shaped like one .
so , we 'll be able to really not have any excuse to be wearing everything leather in the future .
one of the most important topics of the show - you know , as anything in our life today , we can look at it from many , many different viewpoints , and at different levels .
one of the most interesting and most important concepts is the idea of scale . we change scale very often : we change resolution of screens , and we 're not really fazed by it , we do it very comfortably .
so you go , even in the exhibition , from the idea of nanotechnology and the nanoscale to the manipulation of really great amounts of data - the mapping and tagging of the universe and of the world .
in this particular case a section will be devoted to information design .
you see here the work of ben fry . this is " human vs. chimps " - the few chromosomes that distinguish us from chimps .
it was a beautiful visualization that he did for seed magazine .
and here 's the whole code of pac-man , visualized with all the go-to , go-back-to , also made into a beautiful choreography .
and then also graphs by scientists , this beautiful diagraph of protein homology .
scientists are starting to also consider aesthetics .
we were discussing with keith shrubb * this morning the fact that many scientists tend not to use anything beautiful in their presentations , otherwise they 're afraid of being considered dumb blondes .
so they pick the worst background from any kind of powerpoint presentation , the worst typeface .
it 's only recently that this kind of marriage between design and science is producing some of the first " pretty " - if we can say so - scientific presentations .
another aspect of contemporary design that i think is mind-opening , promising and will really be the future of design , is the idea of collective design .
you know , the whole xo laptop , from one laptop per child , is based on the idea of collaboration and mash and networking .
so , the more the merrier .
the more computers , the stronger the signal , and children work on the interface so that it 's all based on doing things together , tasks together .
so the idea of collective design is something that will become even bigger in the future , and this is chosen as an example .
related to the idea of collective design and to the new balance between the individual and the collectiveness , collectivity is the idea of existence maximum .
that 's a term that i coined a few years ago while i was thinking of how pressed we are together , and at the same time how these small objects , like the walkman first and then the ipod , create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space .
you can be in the subway and you can be completely isolated and have your own room in your ipod .
and this is the work of several designers that really enhance the idea of solitude and expansion by means of various techniques .
this is a spa telephone . the idea is that it 's become so difficult to have a private conversation anywhere that you go to the spa , you have a massage , you have a facial , maybe a rub , and then you have this beautiful pool with this perfect temperature , and you can have this isolation tank phone conversation with whomever you 've been wanting to talk with for a long time .
and same thing here , social tele-presence .
it 's actually already used by the military a little bit , but it 's the idea of being able to be somewhere else with your senses while you 're removed from it physically .
and this is called blind date . it 's a -lsb- unclear -rsb- , so if you 're too shy to be really at the date , you can stay at a distance with your flowers and somebody else reenacts the date for you .
rapid manufacturing is another big area in which technology and design are , i think , bound to change the world . you 've heard about it before many times .
rapid manufacturing is a computer file sent directly from the computer to the manufacturing machine .
it used to be called rapid prototyping , rapid modeling .
it started out in the ' 80s , but at the beginning it was machines carving out of a foam block a model that was very , very fragile , and could not have any real use .
slowly but surely , the materials became better - better resins .
techniques became better - not only carving but also stereolithography and laser - solidifying all kinds of resins , whether in powder or in liquid form . and the vats became bigger , to the point that now we can have actual chairs made by rapid manufacturing .
it takes seven days today to manufacture a chair , but you know what ? one day it will take seven hours .
and then the dream is that you 'll be able to , from home , customize your chair . you know , companies and designers will be designing the matrix or the margins that respect both solidity and brand , and design identity .
and then you can send it to the kinko 's store at the corner and go get your chair . now , the implications of this are enormous , not only regarding the participation of the final buyer in the design process , but also no tracking , no warehousing , no wasted materials .
also , i can imagine many design manufacturers will have to retool their own business plans and maybe invest in this kinko 's store . but it really is a big change .
and here i 'm showing a picture that was in wired magazine - you know , the artifacts of the future section that i love so much - that shows you can have your desktop 3d printer and print your own basketball .
but here instead are examples , you can already 3d-print textiles , which is very interesting .
this is just a really nice touch - it 's called slow prototyping .
it 's a designer that put 10,000 bees at work and they built this vase .
they had a particular shape that they had to stay in .
mapping and tagging .
as the capacity of computers becomes really , really big , and the capacity of our mind not that much bigger , we find that we need to tag as much as we can what we do in order to then retrace our path .
also , we do it in order to share with other people .
again , this communal sense of experience that seems to be so important today .
so , various ways to map and tag are also the work of many designers nowadays .
also , the senses - designers and scientists all work on trying to expand our senses capabilities so that we can achieve more .
and also animal senses in a way .
this particular object that many people love so much is actually based on kind of a scientific experiment - the fact that bees have a very strong olfactory sense , and so - much like dogs that can smell certain kinds of skin cancer - bees can be trained by pavlovian reflex to detect one type of cancer , and also pregnancy .
and so this student at the rca designed this beautiful blown-glass object where the bees move from one chamber to the other if they detect that particular smell that signifies , in this case , pregnancy .
another shape is made for cancer .
design for debate is a very interesting new endeavor that designers have really shaped for themselves .
some designers do n't design objects , products , things that we 're going to actually use , but rather , they design scenarios that are object-based .
they 're still very useful .
they help companies and other designers think better about the future .
and usually they are accompanied by videos .
this is quite beautiful . it 's dunne and raby , " all the robots . "
those are a series of robots that are meant to be taken care of .
we always think that robots will take care of us , and instead they designed these robots that are very , very needy .
you need to take one in your arms and look at it in the eyes for about five minutes before it does something .
another one gets really , really nervous if you get in to the room , and starts shaking , so you have to calm it down .
so it 's really a way to make us think more about what robots mean to us .
noam toran and " accessories for lonely men " : the idea is that when you lose your loved one or you go through a bad breakup , what you miss the most are those annoying things that you used to hate when you were with the other person .
so he designed all these series of accessories .
this one is something that takes away the sheets from you at night .
then there 's another one that breathes on your neck .
there 's another one that throws plates and breaks them .
so it 's just this idea of what we really miss in life .
elio caccavale : he took the idea of those dolls that explain leukemia .
he 's working on dolls that explain xenotransplantation , and also the spider gene into the goat , from a few years ago .
he 's working for the exhibition on a whole series of dolls that explain to children where babies come from today .
because it 's not anymore mom , dad , the flowers and the bees , and then there 's the baby . no , it can be two moms , three dads , in-vitro - there 's the whole idea of how babies can be made today that has changed .
so it 's a series of dolls that he 's working on right now .
one of the most beautiful things is that designers really work on life , even though they take technology into account .
and many designers have been working recently on the idea of death and mourning , and what we can do about it today with new technologies .
or how we should behave about it with new technologies .
these three objects over there are hard drives with a bluetooth connection . but they 're in reality very , very beautiful sculpted artifacts that contain the whole desktop and computer memory of somebody who passed away .
so instead of having only the pictures , you will be able to put this object next to the computer and all of a sudden have , you know , gertrude 's whole life and all of her files and her address book come alive .
and this is even better . this is auger-loizeau , " afterlife . "
it 's the idea that some people do n't believe in an afterlife .
so to give them something tangible that shows that there is something after death , they take the gastric juices of people who passed away and concentrate them , and put them into a battery that can actually be used to power flashlights . they also go - you know , sex toys , whatever .
it 's quite amazing how these things can make you smile , can make you laugh , can make you cry sometimes .
but i 'm hoping that this particular exhibition will be able to trace a new portrait of where design is going - which is always , hopefully , a portrait a few years in advance of where the world is going .
thank you very much .
so there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does .
we stand in elections ; we vote in elections ; we observe elections .
our democracies rely on elections .
we all understand why we have elections , and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote .
we cherish the opportunity to have our say , to help decide the future of the country .
the fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us , to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all .
without that mandate , they would be corrupt .
well unfortunately , power corrupts , and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power , including doing bad things to elections .
you see , even if the idea of the election is perfect , running a countrywide election is a big project , and big projects are messy .
whenever there is an election , it seems like something always goes wrong , someone tries to cheat , or something goes accidentally awry - a ballot box goes missing here , chads are left hanging over here .
to make sure as few things as possible go wrong , we have all these procedures around the election .
so for example , you come to the polling station , and a poll station worker asks for your id before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote .
when you come back out , you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes , so that no one knows how you voted .
well , what i want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that , after you drop your vote into the ballot box .
and most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted , because they trust that the election system works .
they trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly .
the ballot boxes go to counting places .
they 're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted .
most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote , and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election .
so we have to trust a lot of people .
we have to trust a lot of procedures .
and sometimes we even have to trust computers .
so imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes , all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines , and you can not help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better .
well in the face of all these bad headlines , researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently .
they 've zoomed out and looked at the big picture .
and the big picture is this : elections should be verifiable .
voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly , without breaking election secrecy , which is so very important .
and that 's the tough part .
how do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret ?
well , the way we 've come up with uses computers but does n't depend on them .
and the secret is the ballot form .
and if you look closely at these ballot forms , you 'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one .
and that means , if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list , i wo n't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for .
and on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2d barcode on the right .
and there 's some complicated cryptography going on in there , but what 's not complicated is voting with one of these forms .
so we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us , and then we 'll use the paper for verification .
so this is how you vote .
you get one of these ballot forms at random , and then you go into the voting booth , and you mark your choices , and you tear along a perforation .
and you shred the candidate list .
and the bit that remains , the one with your marks - this is your encrypted vote .
so you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote .
and because it 's encrypted , it can be submitted , stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see , including you .
so you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt .
and after the close of the election , you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website .
and remember , the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth , so if an election official wants to find out how you voted , they will not be able to .
if the government wants to find out how you voted , they wo n't be able to .
no hacker can break in and find out how you voted .
no hacker can break in and change your vote , because then it wo n't match your receipt .
votes ca n't go missing because then you wo n't find yours when you look for it .
but the election magic does n't stop there .
instead , we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves .
they can check that all the votes were counted correctly .
they can check that the announced result of the election is the correct one .
and these are elections by the people , for the people .
so the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am a neuroscientist with a mixed background in physics and medicine .
my lab at the swiss federal institute of technology focuses on spinal cord injury , which affects more than 50,000 people around the world every year , with dramatic consequences for affected individuals , whose life literally shatters in a matter of a handful of seconds .
and for me , the man of steel , christopher reeve , has best raised the awareness on the distress of spinal cord injured people .
and this is how i started my own personal journey in this field of research , working with the christopher and dana reeve foundation .
i still remember this decisive moment .
it was just at the end of a regular day of work with the foundation .
chris addressed us , the scientists and experts , " you have to be more pragmatic .
when leaving your laboratory tomorrow , i want you to stop by the rehabilitation center to watch injured people fighting to take a step , struggling to maintain their trunk .
and when you go home , think of what you are going to change in your research on the following day to make their lives better . "
these words , they stuck with me .
this was more than 10 years ago , but ever since , my laboratory has followed the pragmatic approach to recovery after spinal cord injury .
and my first step in this direction was to develop a new model of spinal cord injury that would more closely mimic some of the key features of human injury while offering well-controlled experimental conditions .
and for this purpose , we placed two hemisections on opposite sides of the body .
they completely interrupt the communication between the brain and the spinal cord , thus leading to complete and permanent paralysis of the leg .
but , as observed , after most injuries in humans , there is this intervening gap of intact neural tissue through which recovery can occur .
but how to make it happen ?
well , the classical approach consists of applying intervention that would promote the growth of the severed fiber to the original target .
and while this certainly remained the key for a cure , this seemed extraordinarily complicated to me .
to reach clinical fruition rapidly , it was obvious : i had to think about the problem differently .
it turned out that more than 100 years of research on spinal cord physiology , starting with the nobel prize sherrington , had shown that the spinal cord , below most injuries , contained all the necessary and sufficient neural networks to coordinate locomotion , but because input from the brain is interrupted , they are in a nonfunctional state , like kind of dormant .
my idea : we awaken this network .
and at the time , i was a post-doctoral fellow in los angeles , after completing my ph.d. in france , where independent thinking is not necessarily promoted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was afraid to talk to my new boss , but decided to muster up my courage .
i knocked at the door of my wonderful advisor , reggie edgerton , to share my new idea .
he listened to me carefully , and responded with a grin .
" why do n't you try ? "
and i promise to you , this was such an important moment in my career , when i realized that the great leader believed in young people and new ideas .
and this was the idea : i 'm going to use a simplistic metaphor to explain to you this complicated concept .
imagine that the locomotor system is a car .
the engine is the spinal cord .
the transmission is interrupted . the engine is turned off .
how could we re-engage the engine ?
first , we have to provide the fuel ; second , press the accelerator pedal ; third , steer the car .
it turned out that there are known neural pathways coming from the brain that play this very function during locomotion .
my idea : replace this missing input to provide the spinal cord with the kind of intervention that the brain would deliver naturally in order to walk .
for this , i leveraged 20 years of past research in neuroscience , first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire , and second , to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation .
so here imagine an electrode implanted on the back of the spinal cord to deliver painless stimulation .
it took many years , but eventually we developed an electrochemical neuroprosthesis that transformed the neural network in the spinal cord from dormant to a highly functional state .
immediately , the paralyzed rat can stand .
as soon as the treadmill belt starts moving , the animal shows coordinated movement of the leg , but without the brain .
here what i call " the spinal brain " cognitively processes sensory information arising from the moving leg and makes decisions as to how to activate the muscle in order to stand , to walk , to run , and even here , while sprinting , instantly stand if the treadmill stops moving .
this was amazing .
i was completely fascinated by this locomotion without the brain , but at the same time so frustrated .
this locomotion was completely involuntary .
the animal had virtually no control over the legs .
clearly , the steering system was missing .
and it then became obvious from me that we had to move away from the classical rehabilitation paradigm , stepping on a treadmill , and develop conditions that would encourage the brain to begin voluntary control over the leg .
with this in mind , we developed a completely new robotic system to support the rat in any direction of space .
imagine , this is really cool .
so imagine the little 200-gram rat attached at the extremity of this 200-kilo robot , but the rat does not feel the robot .
the robot is transparent , just like you would hold a young child during the first insecure steps .
let me summarize : the rat received a paralyzing lesion of the spinal cord .
the electrochemical neuroprosthesis enabled a highly functional state of the spinal locomotor networks .
the robot provided the safe environment to allow the rat to attempt anything to engage the paralyzed legs .
and for motivation , we used what i think is the most powerful pharmacology of switzerland : fine swiss chocolate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , the first results were very , very , very disappointing .
here is my best physical therapist completely failing to encourage the rat to take a single step , whereas the same rat , five minutes earlier , walked beautifully on the treadmill .
we were so frustrated .
but you know , one of the most essential qualities of a scientist is perseverance .
we insisted . we refined our paradigm , and after several months of training , the otherwise paralyzed rat could stand , and whenever she decided , initiated full weight-bearing locomotion to sprint towards the rewards .
this is the first recovery ever observed of voluntary leg movement after an experimental lesion of the spinal cord leading to complete and permanent paralysis .
in fact - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
in fact , not only could the rat initiate and sustain locomotion on the ground , they could even adjust leg movement , for example , to resist gravity in order to climb a staircase .
i can promise you this was such an emotional moment in my laboratory .
it took us 10 years of hard work to reach this goal .
but the remaining question was , how ?
i mean , how is it possible ?
and here , what we found was completely unexpected .
this novel training paradigm encouraged the brain to create new connections , some relay circuits that relay information from the brain past the injury and restore cortical control over the locomotor networks below the injury .
and here , you can see one such example , where we label the fibers coming from the brain in red .
this blue neuron is connected with the locomotor center , and what this constellation of synaptic contacts means is that the brain is reconnected with the locomotor center with only one relay neuron .
but the remodeling was not restricted to the lesion area .
it occurred throughout the central nervous system , including in the brain stem , where we observed up to 300-percent increase in the density of fibers coming from the brain .
we did not aim to repair the spinal cord , yet we were able to promote one of the more extensive remodeling of axonal projections ever observed in the central nervous system of adult mammal after an injury .
and there is a very important message hidden behind this discovery .
they are the result of a young team of very talented people : physical therapists , neurobiologists , neurosurgeons , engineers of all kinds , who have achieved together what would have been impossible by single individuals .
this is truly a trans-disciplinary team .
they are working so close to each other that there is horizontal transfer of dna .
we are creating the next generation of m.d. 's and engineers capable of translating discoveries all the way from bench to bedside .
and me ?
i am only the maestro who orchestrated this beautiful symphony .
now , i am sure you are all wondering , are n't you , will this help injured people ?
me too , every day .
the truth is that we do n't know enough yet .
this is certainly not a cure for spinal cord injury , but i begin to believe that this may lead to an intervention to improve recovery and people 's quality of life .
i would like you all to take a moment and dream with me .
imagine a person just suffered a spinal cord injury .
after a few weeks of recovery , we will implant a programmable pump to deliver a personalized pharmacological cocktail directly to the spinal cord .
at the same time , we will implant an electrode array , a sort of second skin covering the area of the spinal cord controlling leg movement , and this array is attached to an electrical pulse generator that delivers stimulations that are tailored to the person 's needs .
this defines a personalized electrochemical neuroprosthesis that will enable locomotion during training with a newly designed supporting system .
and my hope is that after several months of training , there may be enough remodeling of residual connection to allow locomotion without the robot , maybe even without pharmacology or stimulation .
my hope here is to be able to create the personalized condition to boost the plasticity of the brain and the spinal cord .
and this is a radically new concept that may apply to other neurological disorders , what i termed " personalized neuroprosthetics , " where by sensing and stimulating neural interfaces , i implanted throughout the nervous system , in the brain , in the spinal cord , even in peripheral nerves , based on patient-specific impairments .
but not to replace the lost function , no - to help the brain help itself .
and i hope this enticed your imagination , because i can promise to you this is not a matter of whether this revolution will occur , but when .
and remember , we are only as great as our imagination , as big as our dream .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much , chris . everybody who came up here said they were scared . i do n't know if i 'm scared , but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this .
and i do n't have any smart technology for you to look at .
there are no slides , so you 'll just have to be content with me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different africa .
already this morning there were some allusions to the africa that you hear about all the time : the africa of hiv / aids , the africa of malaria , the africa of poverty , the africa of conflict , and the africa of disasters .
while it is true that those things are going on , there 's an africa that you do n't hear about very much .
and sometimes i 'm puzzled , and i ask myself why .
this is the africa that is changing , that chris alluded to .
this is the africa of opportunity .
this is the africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies .
and this is the africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this . that 's what i want to talk about today .
and i want to start by telling you a story about that change in africa .
on 15th of september 2005 , mr. diepreye alamieyeseigha , a governor of one of the oil-rich states of nigeria , was arrested by the london metropolitan police on a visit to london .
he was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family .
this arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the london metropolitan police and the economic and financial crimes commission of nigeria - led by one of our most able and courageous people : mr. nuhu ribadu .
alamieyeseigha was arraigned in london .
due to some slip-ups , he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from london back to nigeria where , according to our constitution , those in office as governors , president - as in many countries - have immunity and can not be prosecuted . but what happened : people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office .
today , alams - as we call him for short - is in jail .
this is a story about the fact that people in africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders .
this is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good , and not taken out to places where they 'll benefit just a few of the elite .
and therefore , when you hear about the corrupt africa - corruption all the time - i want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries , and that some successes are emerging .
does it mean the problem is over ? the answer is no .
there 's still a long way to go , but that there 's a will there .
and that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight .
so when you hear about corruption , do n't just feel that nothing is being done about this - that you ca n't operate in any african country because of the overwhelming corruption . that is not the case .
there 's a will to fight , and in many countries , that fight is ongoing and is being won . in others , like mine , where there has been a long history of dictatorship in nigeria , the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go .
but the truth of the matter is that this is going on .
the results are showing : independent monitoring by the world bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption , and governance is improving .
a study by the economic commission for africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 african countries .
and let me say just one more thing before i leave this area of governance .
that is that people talk about corruption , corruption .
all the time when they talk about it you immediately think about africa .
that 's the image : african countries . but let me say this : if alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in london - if the other people who had taken money , estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries ' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries - if they 're able to do this , what is that ? is that not corruption ?
in this country , if you receive stolen goods , are you not prosecuted ?
so when we talk about this kind of corruption , let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe - where the money 's going and what can be done to stop it .
i 'm working on an initiative now , along with the world bank , on asset recovery , trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad - developing countries ' moneys - to get that sent back .
because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back , it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the second thing i want to talk about is the will for reform .
africans , after - they 're tired , we 're tired of being the subject of everybody 's charity and care .
we are grateful , but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform .
and what is happening in many african countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us . we have to do it .
we can invite partners who can support us , but we have to start .
we have to reform our economies , change our leadership , become more democratic , be more open to change and to information .
and this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent , nigeria .
in fact , if you 're not in nigeria , you 're not in africa .
i want to tell you that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one in four sub-saharan africans is nigerian , and it has 140 million dynamic people - chaotic people - but very interesting people . you 'll never be bored .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves .
and with the support of a leader who was willing , at the time , to do the reforms , we put forward a comprehensive reform program , which we developed ourselves .
not the international monetary fund . not the world bank , where i worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president .
no one can do it for you . you have to do it for yourself .
we put together a program that would , one : get the state out of businesses it had nothing - it had no business being in .
the state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it 's inefficient and incompetent .
so we decided to privatize many of our enterprises .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we - as a result , we decided to liberalize many of our markets .
can you believe that prior to this reform - which started at the end of 2003 , when i left washington to go and take up the post of finance minister - we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury .
you could n't get it . you had to bribe .
you had to do everything to get your phone .
when president obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector , we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million gsm lines , and counting .
nigeria 's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world , after china . we are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms . and nobody knows , except a few smart people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the smartest one , first to come in , was the mtn company of south africa .
and in the three years that i was finance minister , they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year .
360 million in a market - in a country that is a poor country , with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita .
so the market is there .
when they kept this under wraps , but soon others got to know .
nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies , and three or four others have come in .
but there 's a huge market out there , and people do n't know about it , or they do n't want to know .
so privatization is one of the things we 've done .
the other thing we 've also done is to manage our finances better .
because nobody 's going to help you and support you if you 're not managing your own finances well .
and nigeria , with the oil sector , had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well .
so what did we try to do ? we introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price .
before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in , because oil is the biggest , most revenue-earning sector in the economy : 70 percent of our revenues come from oil .
we de-linked that , and once we did it , we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price .
we did n't know we could pull it off ; it was very controversial .
but what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development - where , even if oil prices were high , we would grow very fast .
when they crashed , we crashed .
and we could hardly even pay anything , any salaries , in the economy .
that smoothened out . we were able to save , just before i left , 27 billion dollars . whereas - and this went to our reserves - when i arrived in 2003 , we had seven billion dollars in reserves .
by the time i left , we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars . and as we speak now , we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances .
and that shores up our economy , makes it stable .
our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy .
we brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent .
and we had gdp grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now .
so all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy .
and what is more important , because we want to get away from oil and diversify - and there are so many opportunities in this one big country , as in many countries in africa - what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone , but from non-oil .
agriculture grew at better than eight percent .
as telecoms sector grew , housing and construction , and i could go on and on . and this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out , the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous .
we have opportunities in agriculture , like i said .
we have opportunities in solid minerals . we have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored . and we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible , that would n't happen . so we 've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world .
we have opportunities in housing and real estate .
there was nothing in a country of 140 million people - no shopping malls as you know them here .
this was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people .
and now , we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected .
so , huge things in construction , real estate , mortgage markets . financial services : we had 89 banks . too many not doing their real business .
we consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital - share capital .
and it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars .
the banks - these banks are now consolidated , and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside .
barclays bank of the u.k. is bringing in 500 million .
standard chartered has brought in 140 million .
and i can go on . dollars , on and on , into the system .
we are doing the same with the insurance sector .
so in financial services , a great deal of opportunity .
in tourism , in many african countries , a great opportunity .
and that 's what many people know east africa for : the wildlife , the elephants , and so on .
but managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important .
so what am i trying to say ? i 'm trying to tell you that there 's a new wave on the continent .
a new wave of openness and democratization in which , since 2000 , more than two-thirds of african countries have had multi-party democratic elections .
not all of them have been perfect , or will be , but the trend is very clear .
i 'm trying to tell you that since the past three years , the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum .
this is better than the performance of many oecd countries .
so it 's clear that things are changing .
conflicts are down on the continent ; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago , we are down to three or four conflicts - one of the most terrible , of course , of which is darfur .
and , you know , you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent , it looks like the entire continent is affected .
but you should know that this continent is not - is a continent of many countries , not one country .
and if we are down to three or four conflicts , it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable , growing , exciting economies where there 's plenty of opportunity .
and i want to just make one point about this investment .
the best way to help africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet .
and the best way to do that is by helping create jobs .
there 's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children 's lives . that 's not what i 'm saying . that is fine .
but imagine the impact on a family : if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school , that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves .
if we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet , is n't that a wonderful opportunity ? is n't that the way to go ?
and i want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a cd here . i 'm sorry that i did n't say anything on time .
otherwise , i would have liked you to have seen this .
it says , " africa : open for business . "
and this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year .
understand that the woman who made it is going to be in tanzania , where they 're having the session in june .
but it shows you africans , and particularly african women , who against all odds have developed businesses , some of them world-class .
one of the women in this video , adenike ogunlesi , making children 's clothes - which she started as a hobby and grew into a business .
mixing african materials , such as we have , with materials from elsewhere .
so , she 'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys , with african material mixed in . very creative designs , has reached a stage where she even had an order from wal-mart .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for 10,000 pieces .
so that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing .
and the women are diligent . they are focused ; they work hard .
i could go on giving examples : beatrice gakuba of rwanda , who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the dutch auction in amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her .
however , many of these are starved for capital to expand , because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary . nobody thinks in terms of a market .
nobody thinks there 's opportunity .
but i 'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now , will miss it forever .
so if you want to be in africa , think about investing .
think about the beatrices , think about the adenikes of this world , who are doing incredible things , that are bringing them into the global economy , whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed , and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income .
so i invite you to explore the opportunities .
when you go to tanzania , listen carefully , because i 'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent , for the people and for yourselves .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about the power of a word : jihad .
to the vast majority of practicing muslims , jihad is an internal struggle for the faith .
it is a struggle within , a struggle against vice , sin , temptation , lust , greed .
it is a struggle to try and live a life that is set by the moral codes written in the koran .
in that original idea , the concept of jihad is as important to muslims as the idea of grace is to christians .
it 's a very powerful word , jihad , if you look at it in that respect , and there 's a certain almost mystical resonance to it .
and that 's the reason why , for hundreds of years , muslims everywhere have named their children jihad , their daughters as much as their sons , in the same way that , say , christians name their daughters grace , and hindus , my people , name our daughters bhakti , which means , in sanskrit , spiritual worship .
but there have always been , in islam , a small group , a minority , who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith , or the faithul .
and some of these people believe that in that struggle , it is sometimes okay to take up arms .
and so the thousands of young muslim men who flocked to afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the soviet occupation of a muslim country , in their minds they were fighting a jihad , they were doing jihad , and they named themselves the mujahideen , which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad .
and we forget this now , but back then the mujahideen were celebrated in this country , in america .
we thought of them as holy warriors who were taking the good fight to the ungodly communists .
america gave them weapons , gave them money , gave them support , encouragement .
but within that group , a tiny , smaller group , a minority within a minority within a minority , were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad , and in time this group would come to be led by osama bin laden , and he refined the idea .
his idea of jihad was a global war of terror , primarily targeted at the far enemy , at the crusaders from the west , against america .
and the things he did in the pursuit of this jihad were so horrendous , so monstrous , and had such great impact , that his definition was the one that stuck , not just here in the west .
we did n't know any better . we did n't pause to ask .
we just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad , then that 's what jihad must mean .
but it was n't just us . even in the muslim world , his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance .
a year ago i was in tunis , and i met the imam of a very small mosque , an old man .
fifteen years ago , he named his granddaughter jihad , after the old meaning . he hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life .
but he told me that after 9/11 , he began to have second thoughts .
he worried that if he called her by that name , especially outdoors , outside in public , he might be seen as endorsing bin laden 's idea of jihad .
on fridays in his mosque , he gave sermons trying to reclaim the meaning of the word , but his congregants , the people who came to his mosque , they had seen the videos . they had seen pictures of the planes going into the towers , the towers coming down .
they had heard bin laden say that that was jihad , and claimed victory for it . and so the old imam worried that his words were falling on deaf ears . no one was paying attention .
he was wrong . some people were paying attention , but for the wrong reasons .
the united states , at this point , was putting pressure on all its arab allies , including tunisia , to stamp out extremism in their societies , and this imam found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of the tunisian intelligence service .
they had never paid him any attention before - old man , small mosque - but now they began to pay visits , and sometimes they would drag him in for questions , and always the same question : " why did you name your granddaughter jihad ?
why do you keep using the word jihad in your friday sermons ?
do you hate americans ?
what is your connection to osama bin laden ? "
so to the tunisian intelligence agency , and organizations like it all over the arab world , jihad equaled extremism , bin laden 's definition had become institutionalized .
that was the power of that word that he was able to do .
and it filled this old imam , it filled him with great sadness .
he told me that , of bin laden 's many crimes , this was , in his mind , one that did n't get enough attention , that he took this word , this beautiful idea .
he did n't so much appropriate it as kidnapped it and debased it and corrupted it and turned it into something it was never meant to be , and then persuaded all of us that it always was a global jihad .
but the good news is that the global jihad is almost over , as bin laden defined it .
it was dying well before he did , and now it 's on its last legs .
opinion polls from all over the muslim world show that there is very little interest among muslims in a global holy war against the west , against the far enemy .
the supply of young men willing to fight and die for this cause is dwindling .
the supply of money - just as important , more important perhaps - the supply of money to this activity is also dwindling .
the wealthy fanatics who were previously sponsoring this kind of activity are now less generous .
what does that mean for us in the west ?
does it mean we can break out the champagne , wash our hands of it , disengage , sleep easy at night ?
no . disengagement is not an option , because if you let local jihad survive , it becomes international jihad .
and so there 's now a lot of different violent jihads all over the world .
in somalia , in mali , in nigeria , in iraq , in afghanistan , pakistan , there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of osama bin laden .
they use his rhetoric .
they even use the brand name he created for his jihad .
so there is now an al qaeda in the islamic maghreb , there 's an al qaeda in the arabian peninsula , there is an al qaeda in mesopotamia .
there are other groups - in nigeria , boko haram , in somalia , al shabaab - and they all pay homage to osama bin laden .
but if you look closely , they 're not fighting a global jihad .
they 're fighting battles over much narrower issues .
usually it has to do with ethnicity or race or sectarianism , or it 's a power struggle .
more often than not , it 's a power struggle in one country , or even a small region within one country .
occasionally they will go across a border , from iraq to syria , from mali to algeria , from somalia to kenya , but they 're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy .
but that does n't mean that we can relax .
i was in yemen recently , where - it 's the home of the last al qaeda franchise that still aspires to attack america , attack the west .
it 's old school al qaeda .
you may remember these guys .
they are the ones who tried to send the underwear bomber here , and they were using the internet to try and instigate violence among american muslims .
but they have been distracted recently .
last year , they took control over a portion of southern yemen , and ran it , taliban-style .
and then the yemeni military got its act together , and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out , and since then , most of their activities , most of their attacks have been directed at yemenis .
so i think we 've come to a point now where we can say that , just like all politics , all jihad is local .
but that 's still not reason for us to disengage , because we 've seen that movie before , in afghanistan .
when those mujahideen defeated the soviet union , we disengaged .
and even before the fizz had gone out of our celebratory champagne , the taliban had taken over in kabul , and we said , " local jihad , not our problem . "
and then the taliban gave the keys of kandahar to osama bin laden . he made it our problem .
local jihad , if you ignore it , becomes global jihad again .
the good news is that it does n't have to be .
we know how to fight it now .
we have the tools . we have the knowhow , and we can take the lessons we 've learned from the fight against global jihad , the victory against global jihad , and apply those to local jihad .
what are those lessons ? we know who killed bin laden : seal team six .
do we know , do we understand , who killed bin ladenism ?
who ended the global jihad ?
there lie the answers to the solution to local jihad .
who killed bin ladenism ? let 's start with bin laden himself .
he probably thought 9/11 was his greatest achievement .
in reality , it was the beginning of the end for him .
he killed 3,000 innocent people , and that filled the muslim world with horror and revulsion , and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream .
he condemned himself to operating on the lunatic fringes of his own community .
9/11 did n't empower him ; it doomed him .
who killed bin ladenism ? abu musab al-zarqawi killed it .
he was the especially sadistic head of al qaeda in iraq who sent hundreds of suicide bombers to attack not americans but iraqis . muslims . sunni as well as shiites .
any claim that al qaeda had to being protectors of islam against the western crusaders was drowned in the blood of iraqi muslims .
who killed osama bin laden ? the seal team six .
who killed bin ladenism ? al jazeera did , al jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in arabic , because they circumvented the old , state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people .
al jazeera brought information to them , showed them what was being said and done in the name of their religion , exposed the hypocrisy of osama bin laden and al qaeda , and allowed them , gave them the information that allowed them to come to their own conclusions .
who killed bin ladenism ? the arab spring did , because it showed a way for young muslims to bring about change in a manner that osama bin laden , with his limited imagination , could never have conceived .
who defeated the global jihad ? the american military did , the american soldiers did , with their allies , fighting in faraway battlefields .
and perhaps , a time will come when they get the rightful credit for it .
so all these factors , and many more besides , we do n't even fully understand some of them yet , these came together to defeat a monstrosity as big as bin ladenism , the global jihad , you needed this group effort .
now , not all of these things will work in local jihad .
the american military is not going to march into nigeria to take on boko haram , and it 's unlikely that seal team six will rappel into the homes of al shabaab 's leaders and take them out .
but many of these other factors that were in play are now even stronger than before . half the work is already done .
we do n't have to reinvent the wheel .
the notion of violent jihad in which more muslims are killed than any other kind of people is already thoroughly discredited .
we do n't have to go back to that .
satellite television and the internet are informing and empowering young muslims in exciting new ways .
and the arab spring has produced governments , many of them islamist governments , who know that , for their own self-preservation , they need to take on the extremists in their midsts .
we do n't need to persuade them , but we do need to help them , because they have n't really come to this place before .
the good news , again , is that a lot of the things they need we already have , and we are very good at giving : economic assistance , not just money , but expertise , technology , knowhow , private investment , fair terms of trade , medicine , education , technical support for training for their police forces to become more effective , for their anti-terror forces to become more efficient .
we 've got plenty of these things .
some of the other things that they need we 're not very good at giving . maybe nobody is .
time , patience , subtlety , understanding - these are harder to give .
i live in new york now . just this week , posters have gone up in subway stations in new york that describe jihad as savage .
but in all the many years that i have covered the middle east , i have never been as optimistic as i am today that the gap between the muslim world and the west is narrowing fast , and one of the many reasons for my optimism is that , because i know there are millions , hundreds of millions of people , muslims like that old imam in tunis , who are reclaiming this word and restoring to its original , beautiful purpose .
bin laden is dead . bin ladenism has been defeated .
his definition of jihad can now be expunged .
to that jihad we can say , " goodbye . good riddance . "
to the real jihad we can say , " welcome back . good luck . "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i have , like , a thing about sleeping .
i do n't sleep that much , and i 've come to this thing about , like , not sleeping much as being a great virtue , after years of kind of battling it as being a terrible detriment , or something .
and now i really like sort of sitting up , you know .
but for years i 've been sitting up and i think that , like , my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia .
i lie awake . i think thoughts . i walk aimlessly .
sometimes i used to walk more at night .
i walk during the day and i follow people who i think look interesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and sometimes - actually , once it was on page six in the post , that i was cruising this guy , like , sort of , whatever , but i was actually just following because he had these really great shoes on .
and so i was following this guy .
and i took a picture of his shoes , and we thanked each other and just went on our way .
but i do that all the time .
as a matter of fact , i think a lot of my design ideas come from mistakes and tricks of the eye .
because i feel like , you know , there are so many images out there , so many clothes out there .
and the only ones that look interesting to me are the ones that look slightly mistaken , of course , or very , very surprising .
and often , i 'm driving in a taxi and i see a hole in a shirt , or something that looks very interesting or pretty or functional in some way that i 'd never seen happen before .
and so i 'd make the car stop , and i 'd get out of the car and walk , and see that in fact there was n't a hole , but it was a trick of my eye , it was a shadow , you know .
or if there was a hole i 'd think like , oh damn , there was actually someone thought of that thought already .
someone made that mistake already so i ca n't do it anymore .
i do n't know where inspiration comes from .
it does not come for me from research .
i do n't get necessarily inspired by research .
as a matter of fact , one of the most fun things i 've ever , ever done in my whole life , was this christmas season at the guggenheim in new york .
i read " peter and the wolf " with this beautiful band from juilliard .
and i did like , you know , the narrator , and i read it .
and i saw this really smart critic who i love .
this woman , joan acocella , who 's a friend of mine , and she came backstage and she said , oh , you know , isaac , did you know that , talking about stalinism and talking about , you know , like the ' 30s in russia .
and i said , how do i know about stalinism ?
i know about a wolf and a bird and , you know , he ate the bird , and then in the end you hear , you know , you hear the bird squeaking , or something , you know ?
so i do n't really know that . i do n't really - actually i do my own kind of research , you know .
if i 'm commissioned to do the costumes for an 18th-century opera , or something like that , i will do a lot of research , because it 's interesting , not because it 's what i 'm supposed to do .
i 'm very , very , very inspired by movies .
the color of movies and the way light makes the colors , light from behind the projection , or light from the projection , makes the colors look so impossible .
and anyway , roll this little clip , i 'll just show you .
i sit up at night and i watch movies and i watch women in movies a lot .
and i think about , you know , their roles , and about how you have to , like , watch what your daughters look at .
because i look at the way women are portrayed all the time .
whether they 're kind of glorified in this way , or whether they 're kind of , you know , ironically glorified , or whether they 're , you know , sort of denigrated , or ironically denigrated .
i go back to color all the time .
color is something that motivates me a lot .
it 's rarely color that i find in nature , although , you know , juxtaposed next to artificial color , natural color is so beautiful .
so that 's what i do . i study color a lot .
but for the most part , i think , like , how can i ever make anything that is as beautiful as that image of natalie wood ?
how can i ever make anything as beautiful as greta garbo ?
i mean , that 's just not possible , you know .
and so that 's what makes me lie awake at night , i guess , you know .
i want to show you - i 'm also like a big - i go to astrologers and tarot card readers often , and that 's another thing that motivates me a lot .
people say , oh , do that . an astrologer tells me to do something .
so i do it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i was about 21 , an astrologer told me that i was going to meet the man of my dreams , and that his name was going to be eric , right ?
so , you know , for years i would go to bars and , sort of , anyone i met whose name was eric i was humping immediately , or something .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there were times when i was actually so desperate i would just , you know , walk into a room and just go like , " eric ! "
and anybody who would turn around i would , sort of , make a beeline for .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i had this really interesting tarot reading a long time ago .
the last card he pulled , which was representing my destiny was this guy on like a straw boater with a cane and you know , sort of spats and this , you know , a minstrel singer , right ?
i want to show you this clip because i do this kind of crazy thing where i do a cabaret act .
so actually , check this out .
very embarrassing .
-lrb- video -rrb- : thank you . we can do anything you ask .
the name of the show is based on this story that i have to tell you about my mother .
it 's sort of an excerpt from a quote of hers .
i was dating this guy , right ?
and this has to do with being happy , i swear .
i was dating this guy and it was going on for about a year , right .
and we were getting serious , so we decided to invite them all to dinner , our parents .
and we , you know , sort of introduced them to each other .
my mother was , sort of , very sensitive to his mother , who it seemed was a little bit skeptical about the whole alternative lifestyle thing .
you know , homosexuality , right ?
so my mother was a little offended . she turned to her and she said , " are you kidding ? they have the greatest life together .
they eat out , they see shows . "
they eat out , they see shows .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the name of the show , they eat out , they - that 's on my tombstone when i die .
" he ate out , he saw shows , " right ?
so in editing these clips , i did n't have the audacity to edit a clip of me singing at joe 's pub .
so you 'll have to , like , go check it out and come see me or something .
because it 's mortifying , and yet it feels ...
i do n't know how to put this .
i feel as little comfort as possible is a good thing , you know .
and at least , you know , in my case , because if i just do one thing all the time , i do n't know , i get very , very bored . i bore very easily .
and you know , i do n't say that i do everything well , i just say that i do a lot of things , that 's all .
and i kind of try not to look back , you know .
except , i guess , that 's what staying up every night is about .
like , looking back and thinking , what a fool you made of yourself , you know .
but i guess that 's okay . right ?
because if you do many things you get to feel lousy about everything , and not just one , you know .
you do n't master feeling lousy about one thing .
yeah , exactly .
i will show you this next thing , speaking of costumes for operas .
i do work with different choreographers .
i work with twyla tharp a lot , and i work with mark morris a lot , who is one of my best friends .
and i designed three operas with him , and the most recent one , " king arthur . "
i 'd been very ingrained in the dance world since i was a teenager .
i went to performing arts high school , where i was an actor .
and many of my friends were ballet dancers .
again , i do n't know where inspiration comes from .
i do n't know where it comes from .
i started making puppets when i was a kid .
maybe that 's where the whole inspiration thing started from , puppets , right .
and then performing arts high school .
there i was in high school , meeting dancers and acting .
and somehow , from there , i got interested in design .
i went to parsons school of design and then i began my career as a designer .
i do n't really think of myself as a designer , i do n't really think of myself necessarily as a fashion designer .
and frankly , i do n't really know what to call myself .
i think of myself as a ... i do n't know what i think of myself as .
it 's just that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i must say , this whole thing about being slightly bored all the time , that is what - i think that is a very important thing for a fashion designer .
you always have to be slightly bored with everything .
and if you 're not , you have to pretend to be slightly bored with everything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i am really a little bored with everything .
i always say to my partner , marisa gardini , who books everything - she books everything and she makes everything happen .
and she makes all the deals .
and i always tell her that i find myself with a lot of time on the computer bridge program .
too much time on computer bridge , which is , you know , like that 's so ... somehow , like , about ten years ago i thought that the most unboring place in the world would be like a t.v. studio , like for a day show . some kind of day talk show .
because it 's all of these things that i love all kind of in one place .
and if you ever get bored you can look at another thing , and do another thing and talk about it , right ?
and so i had this t.v. show .
and that was a very , very , very big part of my process .
actually , could you roll the clip , please ?
this is one of my favorite clips of rosie .
-lrb- video -rrb- isaac mizrahi : we 're back on the set .
hi there .
rosie o 'donnell : hello , ben .
im : look how cute she looks with this , just a slick back .
man : her grandmother says , " delish ! "
im : ah , wow , delish . all right . so now where should i position myself ?
i want to stay out of the way .
i do n't want to be - okay . here we go .
do you get nervous , ashleigh ?
ashleigh : doing what ?
rod : cutting hair .
a : cutting hair ? never , never .
i do n't think there was ever a day where i cut hair i was nervous .
im : you look so cute already , by the way .
rod : you like it ? all right .
im : do you have a problem with looking cute ? you want to look cute .
rod : of course i want to look cute .
im : just checking , because some people want to look , you know , aggressively ugly .
rod : no , not me , no .
im : you read about all these people who have a lot of money and they have kids and the kids always end up somehow , like , really messed up , you know what i mean ?
and there 's got to be some way to do that , rosie .
because just because if you 're fabulously rich , and fabulously famous , does that mean you should n't have kids , because you know they 're going to end up getting messed up ?
rod : no , but it means that your priority has to be their well-being first , i think .
but you have to make the decision for yourself .
my kids are seven , who the hell knows .
they 're going to be like 14 and in rehab .
and they 're going to be playing this clip : " i 'm such a good mother . "
my god , this is the shortest i 've ever had .
im : it looks good , yeah ?
a : i was going to ask you , has your hair ever been - rod : no ! it 's all right - go crazy .
im : i feel like it needs to be a little closer down here .
a : oh no , we 're just staging , rod : we 're just staging it .
im : are you freaking out ? you look so cute .
rod : no , i love it . it 's the new me .
im : oh , it 's so fabulous !
rod : flock of rosie . wooo !
im : so by the way . of all the most unboring things in the world , right .
i mean , like making someone who 's already cute look terrible like that .
that is not boring . that is nothing if it 's not boring .
actually , i read this great quote the other day , which was , " style makes you feel great because it takes your mind off the fact that you 're going to die . "
right ? and then i realized , that was on my website , and then it said , like , you know , the quote was attributed to me and i thought , oh , i said something , you know , in an interview .
i forgot that i said that . but it 's really true .
i want to show you this last clip because it 's going to be my last goodbye .
i 'll tell you that i cook a lot also . i love to cook .
and i often look at things as though they 're food .
like i say , oh , you know , would you serve a rotten chicken ?
then how could you serve , you know , a beat up old dress or something .
how could you show a beat up old dress ?
i always relate things to kitchen-ry .
and so i think that 's what it all boils down to .
everything boils down to that .
so check this out .
this is what i 've been doing because i think it 's the most fun thing in the world .
it 's , like , this website .
it 's got a lot of different things on it .
it 's a polymathematical website .
we actually shoot segments like t.v. show segments .
and it 's kind of my favorite thing in the world .
and it just began like in the beginning of february . so who knows ?
and again , i do n't say it 's good , i just think it 's not boring , right ?
and here is the last bit .
-lrb- video -rrb- im : i have to tell you , i make buttermilk pancakes or buttermilk waffles all the time .
chef : do you ?
im : yeah , but i can never find buttermilk , ever .
chef : oh .
im : you ca n't find buttermilk at citarella ; you ca n't find buttermilk .
chef : you ca n't ?
im : it 's always low-fat buttermilk .
chef : no , but that 's all it is .
im : is that all it is ?
chef : oh , you do n't know ? let me tell you something .
let me tell you something interesting .
im : you know what ? stop laughing . it 's not funny .
just because i do n't know that whole - that there 's no such thing as whole buttermilk .
sorry , what ?
chef : well , here 's the deal . let me tell you the deal .
in the old days when they used to make butter , you know how you make butter ?
im : churns ?
chef : for cream ?
im : yeah , exactly .
chef : so you take heavy , high-fat milk , which is cream , and you churn it until it separates into these curds and water .
the liquid is actually that clear liquid .
if you 've ever overbeaten your whipped cream , it 's actually buttermilk .
and that 's what it was in the early days .
and that 's what people used for baking and all sorts of things .
now , the buttermilk that you get is actually low-fat or skim milk .
im : excuse me , i did n't know . all right ?
chef : the reason he thought that is because buttermilk is so wonderfully thick and delicious .
im : yeah , it is , exactly .
so who would think that it was low-fat ?
well , that 's it . thank you very much .
happy ted . it 's so wonderful here . i love it . i love it . i love it .
thanks . bye .
to be new at ted - it 's like being the last high-school virgin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know that all of the cool people are - they 're doing it .
and you 're on the outside , you 're at home .
you 're like the raspyni brothers , where you 've got your balls in cold water . and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you just play with your fingers all day . and then you get invited .
and you 're on the inside , and it 's everything you hoped it would be .
it 's exciting and there 's music playing all of the time and then suddenly it 's over . and it 's only taken five minutes .
and you want to go back and do it again .
but i really appreciate being here . and thank you , chris , and also , thank you , deborah patton , for making this possible .
so anyway , today we 'll talk about architecture a little bit , within the subject of creation and optimism .
and if you put creation and optimism together , you 've got two choices that you can talk about .
you can talk about creationism - which i think would n't go down well with this audience , at least not from a view where you were a proponent of it - or you can talk about optimisations , spelled the british way , with an s , instead of a z.
and i think that 's what i 'd like to talk about today .
but any kind of conversation about architecture - which is , in fact , what you were just talking about , what was going on here , setting up ted , small-scale architecture - at the present time ca n't really happen without a conversation about this , the world trade center , and what 's been going on there , what it means to us .
because if architecture is what i believe it to be , which is the built form of our cultural ambitions , what do you do when presented with an opportunity to rectify a situation that represents somebody else 's cultural ambitions relative to us ?
and our own opportunity to make something new there ?
this has been a really galvanizing issue for a long time .
i think that the world trade center in , rather an unfortunate way , brought architecture into focus in a way that i do n't think people had thought of in a long time , and made it a subject for common conversation .
i do n't remember , in my 20-year career of practicing and writing about architecture , a time when five people sat me down at a table and asked me very serious questions about zoning , fire exiting , safety concerns and whether carpet burns .
these are just not things we talked about very often .
and yet , now , it 's talked about all the time .
at the point where you can weaponize your buildings , you have to suddenly think about architecture in a very different way .
and so now we 're going to think about architecture in a very different way , we 're going to think about it like this .
how many of you saw usa today , today ? there it is . looks like that .
there 's the world trade center site , on the front cover .
they 've made a selection .
they 've chosen a project by daniel libeskind , the enfant terrible of the moment of architecture .
child-prodigy piano player , he started on the squeezebox , and moved to a little more serious issue , a bigger instrument , and now to an even larger instrument , upon which to work his particular brand of deconstructivist magic , as you see here .
he was one of six people who were invited to participate in this competition , after six previous firms struck out with things that were so stupid and banal that even the city of new york was forced to go , " oh , i 'm really sorry , we screwed up . "
right . can we do this again from the top , except use some people with a vague hint of talent , instead of just six utter boobs like we brought in last time , real estate hacks of the kind who usually plan our cities .
let 's bring in some real architects for a change .
and so we got this , or we had a choice of that . oh , stop clapping .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's too late . that is gone .
this was a scheme by a team called think , a new york-based team , and then there was that one , which was the libeskind scheme .
this one , this is going to be the new world trade center : a giant hole in the ground with big buildings falling into it .
now , i do n't know what you think , but i think this is a pretty stupid decision , because what you 've done is just made a permanent memorial to destruction by making it look like the destruction is going to continue forever .
but that 's what we 're going to do .
but i want you to think about these things in terms of a kind of ongoing struggle that american architecture represents , and that these two things talk about very specifically .
and that is the wild divergence in how we choose our architects , in trying to decide whether we want architecture from the kind of technocratic solution to everything - that there is a large , technical answer that can solve all problems , be they social , be they physical , be they chemical - or something that 's more of a romantic solution .
now , i do n't mean romantic as in , this is a nice place to take someone on a date .
i mean romantic in the sense of , there are things larger and grander than us .
so , in the american tradition , the difference between the technocratic and the romantic , would be the difference between thomas jefferson 's cartesian grids spreading across the united states , that gives us basically the whole shape of every western state in the united states , as a really , truly , technocratic solution , a bowing to the - in jefferson 's time - current , popular philosophy of rationalism .
or the way we went to describe that later : manifest destiny .
now , which would you rather be ? a grid , or manifest destiny ?
manifest destiny .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a big deal . it sounds big , it sounds important , it sounds solid . it sounds american . ballsy , serious , male .
and that kind of fight has gone on back and forth in architecture all the time .
i mean , it goes on in our private lives , too , every single day .
we all want to go out and buy an audi tt , do n't we ?
everyone here must own one , or at least they craved one the moment they saw one .
and then they hopped in it , turned the little electronic key , rather than the real key , zipped home on their new superhighway , and drove straight into a garage that looks like a tudor castle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- why ? why ? why do you want to do that ?
why do we all want to do that ? i even owned a tudor thing once myself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's in our nature to go ricocheting back and forth between this technocratic solution and a larger , sort of more romantic image of where we are .
so we 're going to go straight into this .
can i have the lights off for a moment ?
i 'm going to talk about two architects very , very briefly that represent the current split , architecturally , between these two traditions of a technocratic or technological solution and a romantic solution .
and these are two of the top architectural practices in the united states today .
one very young , one a little more mature .
this is the work of a firm called shop , and what you 're seeing here , is their isometric drawings of what will be a large-scale camera obscura in a public park .
does everybody know what a camera obscura is ?
yeah , it 's one of those giant camera lenses that takes a picture of the outside world - it 's sort of a little movie , without any moving parts - and projects it on a page , and you can see the world outside you as you walk around it .
this is just the outline of it , and you can see , does it look like a regular building ? no .
it 's actually non-orthogonal : it 's not up and down , square , rectangular , anything like that , that you 'd see in a normal shape of a building .
the computer revolution , the technocratic , technological revolution , has allowed us to jettison normal-shaped buildings , traditionally shaped buildings , in favor of non-orthogonal buildings such as this .
what 's interesting about it is not the shape .
what 's interesting about it is how it 's made . how it 's made .
a brand-new way to put buildings together , something called mass customization . no , it is not an oxymoron .
what makes the building expensive , in the traditional sense , is making individual parts custom , that you ca n't do over and over again .
that 's why we all live in developer houses .
they all want to save money by building the same thing 500 times .
that 's because it 's cheaper .
mass customization works by an architect feeding into a computer , a program that says , manufacture these parts .
the computer then talks to a machine - a computer-operated machine , a cad-cam machine - that can make a zillion different changes , at a moment 's notice , because the computer is just a machine .
it does n't care . it 's manufacturing the parts .
it does n't see any excess cost . it does n't spend any extra time .
it 's not a laborer - it 's simply an electronic lathe , so the parts can all be cut at the same time .
meanwhile , instead of sending someone working drawings , which are those huge sets of blueprints that you 've seen your whole life , what the architect can do is send a set of assembly instructions , like you used to get when you were a child , when you bought little models that said , " bolt a to b , and c to d. "
and so what the builder will get is every single individual part that has been custom manufactured off-site and delivered on a truck to the site , to that builder , and a set of these instruction manuals .
just simple " bolt a to b " and they will be able to put them together .
here 's the little drawing that tells them how that works - and that 's what will happen in the end .
you 're underneath it , looking up into the lens of the camera obscura .
lest you think this is all fiction , lest you think this is all fantasy , or romance , these same architects were asked to produce something for the central courtyard of ps1 , which is a museum in brooklyn , new york , as part of their young architects summer series .
and they said , well , it 's summer , what do you do ?
in the summer , you go to the beach .
and when you go to the beach , what do you get ? you get sand dunes .
so let 's make architectural sand dunes and a beach cabana .
so they went out and they modeled a computer model of a sand dune .
they took photographs , they fed the photographs into their computer program , and that computer program shaped a sand dune and then took that sand dune shape and turned it into - at their instructions , using standard software with slight modifications - a set of instructions for pieces of wood .
and those are the pieces of wood . those are the instructions .
these are the pieces , and here 's a little of that blown up .
what you can see is there 's about six different colors , and each color represents a type of wood to be cut , a piece of wood to be cut .
all of which were delivered by flat bed , on a truck , and hand assembled in 48 hours by a team of eight people , only one of whom had ever seen the plans before .
only one of whom had ever seen the plans before .
and here comes dune-scape , coming up out of the courtyard , and there it is fully built .
there are only 16 different pieces of wood , only 16 different assembly parts here .
looks like a beautiful piano sounding board on the inside .
it has its own built-in swimming pool , very , very cool .
it 's a great place for parties - it was , it was only up for six weeks .
it 's got little dressing rooms and cabanas , where lots of interesting things went on , all summer long .
now , lest you think that this is only for the light at heart , or just temporary installations , this is the same firm working at the world trade center , replacing the bridge that used to go across west street , that very important pedestrian connection between the city of new york and the redevelopment of the west side .
they were asked to design , replace that bridge in six weeks , building it , including all of the parts , manufactured .
and they were able to do it . that was their design , using that same computer modeling system and only five or six really different kinds of parts , a couple of struts , like this , some exterior cladding material and a very simple framing system that was all manufactured off-site and delivered by truck .
they were able to create that .
they were able to create something wonderful .
they 're now building a 16-story building on the side of new york , using the same technology .
here we 're going to walk across the bridge at night .
it 's self-lit , you do n't need any overhead lighting , so the neighbors do n't complain about metal-halide lighting in their face .
here it is going across . and there , down the other side , and you get the same kind of grandeur .
now , let me show you , quickly , the opposite , if i may .
woo , pretty , huh . this is the other side of the coin .
this is the work of david rockwell from new york city , whose work you can see out here today .
the current king of the romantics , who approaches his work in a very different fashion .
it 's not to create a technological solution , it 's to seduce you into something that you can do , into something that will please you , something that will lift your spirits , something that will make you feel as if are in another world - such as his nobu restaurant in new york , which is supposed to take you from the clutter of new york city to the simplicity of japan and the elegance of japanese tradition .
" when it 's all said and done , it 's got to look like seaweed , " said the owner .
or his restaurant , pod , in philadelphia , pennsylvania .
i want you to know the room you 're looking at is stark white .
every single surface of this restaurant is white .
the reason it has so much color is that it changes using lighting .
it 's all about sensuality . it 's all about transforming .
watch this - i 'm not touching any buttons , ladies and gentlemen .
this is happening by itself .
it transforms through the magic of lighting .
it 's all about sensuality . it 's all about touch .
rosa mexicano restaurant , where he transports us to the shores of acapulco , up on the upper west side , with this wall of cliff divers who - there you go , like that .
let 's see it one more time .
okay , just to make sure that you 've enjoyed it .
and finally , it 's about comfort , it 's about making you feel good in places that you would n't have felt good before .
it 's about bringing nature to the inside .
in the guardian tower of new york , converted to a w union square - i 'm sorry i 'm rushing - where we had to bring in the best horticulturists in the world to make sure that the interior of this dragged the garden space of the court garden of the union square into the building itself .
it 's about stimulation .
this is a wine-buying experience simplified by color and taste .
fizzy , fresh , soft , luscious , juicy , smooth , big and sweet wines , all explained to you by color and texture on the wall .
and finally , it 's about entertainment , as in his headquarters for the cirque du soleil , orlando , florida , where you 're asked to enter the greek theater , look under the tent and join the magic world of cirque du soleil .
and i think i 'll probably leave it at that . thank you very much .
you know , one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways , who still feel their past in the wind , touch it in stones polished by rain , taste it in the bitter leaves of plants .
just to know that jaguar shamans still journey beyond the milky way , or the myths of the inuit elders still resonate with meaning , or that in the himalaya , the buddhists still pursue the breath of the dharma , is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology , and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense , but is just one model of reality , the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made , albeit successfully , many generations ago .
and of course , we all share the same adaptive imperatives .
we 're all born . we all bring our children into the world .
we go through initiation rites .
we have to deal with the inexorable separation of death , so it should n't surprise us that we all sing , we all dance , we all have art .
but what 's interesting is the unique cadence of the song , the rhythm of the dance in every culture .
and whether it is the penan in the forests of borneo , or the voodoo acolytes in haiti , or the warriors in the kaisut desert of northern kenya , the curandero in the mountains of the andes , or a caravanserai in the middle of the sahara - this is incidentally the fellow that i traveled into the desert with a month ago - or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of qomolangma , everest , the goddess mother of the world .
all of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being , other ways of thinking , other ways of orienting yourself in the earth .
and this is an idea , if you think about it , can only fill you with hope .
now , together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet , and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere .
and you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere , and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams , myths , ideas , inspirations , intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness .
the ethnosphere is humanity 's great legacy .
it 's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species .
and just as the biosphere has been severely eroded , so too is the ethnosphere - and , if anything , at a far greater rate .
no biologists , for example , would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true , and yet that - the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity - scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity .
and the great indicator of that , of course , is language loss .
when each of you in this room were born , there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet .
now , a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules .
a language is a flash of the human spirit .
it 's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world .
every language is an old-growth forest of the mind , a watershed , a thought , an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities .
and of those 6,000 languages , as we sit here today in monterey , fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children .
they 're no longer being taught to babies , which means , effectively , unless something changes , they 're already dead .
what could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence , to be the last of your people to speak your language , to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children ?
and yet , that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on earth roughly every two weeks , because every two weeks , some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue .
and i know there 's some of you who say , " well , would n't it be better , would n't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language ? " and i say , " great , let 's make that language yoruba . let 's make it cantonese .
let 's make it kogi . "
and you 'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language .
and so , what i 'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere , a brief journey through the ethnosphere , to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost .
now , there are many of us who sort of forget that when i say " different ways of being , " i really do mean different ways of being .
take , for example , this child of a barasana in the northwest amazon , the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes .
now , this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens upon which the people depend .
they have a curious language and marriage rule which is called " linguistic exogamy : " you must marry someone who speaks a different language .
and this is all rooted in the mythological past , yet the curious thing is in these long houses , where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage , you never hear anyone practicing a language .
they simply listen and then begin to speak .
or , one of the most fascinating tribes i ever lived with , the waorani of northeastern ecuador , an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958 .
in 1957 , five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake .
they dropped from the air 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures , forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives .
they picked up these photographs from the forest floor , tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure , found nothing , and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil , so they speared the five missionaries to death .
but the waorani did n't just spear outsiders .
they speared each other .
54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other .
we traced genealogies back eight generations , and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it , they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old , so we speared him anyway . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing .
their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind .
in the early ' 80s , i had a really astonishing assignment when i was asked by my professor at harvard if i was interested in going down to haiti , infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation of duvalier 's strength and tonton macoutes , and securing the poison used to make zombies .
in order to make sense out of sensation , of course , i had to understand something about this remarkable faith of vodoun . and voodoo is not a black magic cult .
on the contrary , it 's a complex metaphysical worldview .
it 's interesting .
if i asked you to name the great religions of the world , what would you say ?
christianity , islam , buddhism , judaism , whatever .
there 's always one continent left out , the assumption being that sub-saharan africa had no religious beliefs . well , of course , they did and voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic diaspora of the slavery era .
but , what makes voodoo so interesting is that it 's this living relationship between the living and the dead .
so , the living give birth to the spirits .
the spirits can be invoked from beneath the great water , responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living , so that for that brief shining moment , the acolyte becomes the god .
that 's why the voodooists like to say that " you white people go to church and speak about god .
we dance in the temple and become god . "
and because you are possessed , you are taken by the spirit - how can you be harmed ?
so you see these astonishing demonstrations : voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity , a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation .
now , of all the peoples that i 've ever been with , the most extraordinary are the kogi of the sierra nevada de santa marta in northern colombia .
descendants of the ancient tairona civilization which once carpeted the caribbean coastal plain of colombia , in the wake of the conquest , these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the caribbean coastal plain .
in a bloodstained continent , these people alone were never conquered by the spanish .
to this day , they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary .
the young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four , sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years : two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother 's womb ; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother .
and for this entire time , they are inculturated into the values of their society , values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic - or we might say the ecological - balance .
and at the end of this amazing initiation , one day they 're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives , at the age of 18 , they see a sunrise . and in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape , suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory . and the priest steps back and says , " you see ? it 's really as i 've told you .
it is that beautiful . it is yours to protect . "
they call themselves the " elder brothers " and they say we , who are the younger brothers , are the ones responsible for destroying the world .
now , this level of intuition becomes very important .
whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape , we either invoke rousseau and the old canard of the " noble savage , " which is an idea racist in its simplicity , or alternatively , we invoke thoreau and say these people are closer to the earth than we are .
well , indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia .
there 's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the asmat or in the chilling winds of tibet , but they have , nevertheless , through time and ritual , forged a traditional mystique of the earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it , but on a far subtler intuition : the idea that the earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness .
now , what does that mean ?
it means that a young kid from the andes who 's raised to believe that that mountain is an apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined .
whether it 's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant .
what 's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world .
i was raised in the forests of british columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut .
that made me a different human being than my friends amongst the kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of huxwhukw and the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world , spirits they would have to engage during their hamatsa initiation .
now , if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities , you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries . take this plant here .
it 's a photograph i took in the northwest amazon just last april .
this is ayahuasca , which many of you have heard about , the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman 's repertoire .
what makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation , but the elaboration of it . it 's made really of two different sources : on the one hand , this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines , harmine , harmaline , mildly hallucinogenic - to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness - but it 's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called psychotria viridis .
this plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines , very close to brain serotonin , dimethyltryptamine , 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine .
if you 've ever seen the yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses , that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine .
to have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it does n't create the distortion of reality ; it creates the dissolution of reality .
in fact , i used to argue with my professor , richard evan shultes - who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in mexico in the 1930s - i used to argue that you could n't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you 're under the effects there 's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but the thing about tryptamines is they can not be taken orally because they 're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase .
they can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the mao .
now , the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are mao inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine . so you ask yourself a question .
how , in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants , do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way , created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts ?
well , we use that great euphemism , " trial and error , " which is exposed to be meaningless .
but you ask the indians , and they say , " the plants talk to us . "
well , what does that mean ?
this tribe , the cofan , has 17 varieties of ayahuasca , all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest , all of which are referable to our eye as one species .
and then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say , " i thought you knew something about plants .
i mean , do n't you know anything ? " and i said , " no . "
well , it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon , and it sings to you in a different key .
now , that 's not going to get you a ph.d. at harvard , but it 's a lot more interesting than counting stamens . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now - -lrb- applause -rrb- - the problem - the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world , meaning our world , moves on .
well , the truth is the 20th century , 300 years from now , is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations , but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet . now , the problem is n't change .
all cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life .
and the problem is not technology itself .
the sioux indians did not stop being sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an american stopped being an american when he gave up the horse and buggy .
it 's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere . it is power , the crude face of domination .
wherever you look around the world , you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away ; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to : whether it 's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the penan - a nomadic people from southeast asia , from sarawak - a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago , and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers , where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of borneo away
to the south china sea , where the japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest - or , in the case of the yanomami , it 's the disease entities that have come in , in the wake of the discovery of gold .
or if we go into the mountains of tibet , where i 'm doing a lot of research recently , you 'll see it 's a crude face of political domination .
you know , genocide , the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned , but ethnocide , the destruction of people 's way of life , is not only not condemned , it 's universally , in many quarters , celebrated as part of a development strategy .
and you can not understand the pain of tibet until you move through it at the ground level .
i once travelled 6,000 miles from chengdu in western china overland through southeastern tibet to lhasa with a young colleague , and it was only when i got to lhasa that i understood the face behind the statistics you hear about : 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes , 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the cultural revolution .
this young man 's father had been ascribed to the panchen lama .
that meant he was instantly killed at the time of the chinese invasion .
his uncle fled with his holiness in the diaspora that took the people to nepal .
his mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy .
he was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she could n't bear to be without him .
the sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp .
one day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of mao , and for that transgression , she was given seven years of hard labor .
the pain of tibet can be impossible to bear , but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold .
and in the end , then , it really comes down to a choice : do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity ?
margaret mead , the great anthropologist , said , before she died , that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought , but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities .
and it 's humbling to remember that our species has , perhaps , been around for -lsb- 150,000 -rsb- years .
the neolithic revolution - which gave us agriculture , at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed ; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood ; we created hierarchy specialization surplus - is only 10,000 years ago .
the modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old .
now , that shallow history does n't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia .
when these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human , they respond with 10,000 different voices .
and it 's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are : a fully conscious species , fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish . and there are great moments of optimism .
this is a photograph i took at the northern tip of baffin island when i went narwhal hunting with some inuit people , and this man , olayuk , told me a marvelous story of his grandfather .
the canadian government has not always been kind to the inuit people , and during the 1950s , to establish our sovereignty , we forced them into settlements .
this old man 's grandfather refused to go .
the family , fearful for his life , took away all of his weapons , all of his tools .
now , you must understand that the inuit did not fear the cold ; they took advantage of it .
the runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide .
so , this man 's grandfather was not intimidated by the arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing .
he simply slipped outside , pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand . and as the feces began to freeze , he shaped it into the form of a blade .
he put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid , he butchered a dog with it .
he skinned the dog and improvised a harness , took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled , harnessed up an adjacent dog , and disappeared over the ice floes , shit knife in belt .
talk about getting by with nothing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this , in many ways - -lrb- applause -rrb- - is a symbol of the resilience of the inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world .
the canadian government in april of 1999 gave back to total control of the inuit an area of land larger than california and texas put together .
it 's our new homeland . it 's called nunavut .
it 's an independent territory . they control all mineral resources .
an amazing example of how a nation-state can seek restitution with its people .
and finally , in the end , i think it 's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who 've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet , to realize that they 're not remote at all .
they 're homelands of somebody .
they represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time . and for all of us , the dreams of these children , like the dreams of our own children , become part of the naked geography of hope .
so , what we 're trying to do at the national geographic , finally , is , we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything .
we think that polemics - -lrb- applause -rrb- - we think that polemics are not persuasive , but we think that storytelling can change the world , and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world . we get 35 million hits on our website every month .
156 nations carry our television channel .
our magazines are read by millions .
and what we 're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we 're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they can not help but come away dazzled by what they have seen , and hopefully , therefore , embrace gradually , one by one , the central revelation of anthropology : that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way , that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural , pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about post-conflict recovery and how we might do post-conflict recovery better .
the record on post-conflict recovery is not very impressive .
40 percent of all post-conflict situations , historically , have reverted back to conflict within a decade .
in fact , they 've accounted for half of all civil wars .
why has the record been so poor ?
well , the conventional approach to post-conflict situations has rested on , on kind of , three principles .
the first principle is : it 's the politics that matters .
so , the first thing that is prioritized is politics .
try and build a political settlement first .
and then the second step is to say , " the situation is admittedly dangerous , but only for a short time . "
so get peacekeepers there , but get them home as soon as possible .
so , short-term peacekeepers .
and thirdly , what is the exit strategy for the peacekeepers ?
it 's an election .
that will produce a legitimate and accountable government .
so that 's the conventional approach .
i think that approach denies reality .
we see that there is no quick fix .
there 's certainly no quick security fix .
i 've tried to look at the risks of reversion to conflict , during our post-conflict decade .
and the risks stay high throughout the decade .
and they stay high regardless of the political innovations .
does an election produce an accountable and legitimate government ?
what an election produces is a winner and a loser .
and the loser is unreconciled .
the reality is that we need to reverse the sequence .
it 's not the politics first ; it 's actually the politics last .
the politics become easier as the decade progresses if you 're building on a foundation of security and economic development - the rebuilding of prosperity .
why does the politics get easier ?
and why is it so difficult initially ?
because after years of stagnation and decline , the mentality of politics is that it 's a zero-sum game .
if the reality is stagnation , i can only go up if you go down .
and that does n't produce a productive politics .
and so the mentality has to shift from zero-sum to positive-sum before you can get a productive politics .
you can only get positive , that mental shift , if the reality is that prosperity is being built .
and in order to build prosperity , we need security in place .
so that is what you get when you face reality .
but the objective of facing reality is to change reality .
and so now let me suggest two complimentary approaches to changing the reality of the situations .
the first is to recognize the interdependence of three key actors , who are different actors , and at the moment are uncoordinated .
the first actor is the security council .
the security council typically has the responsibility for providing the peacekeepers who build the security .
and that needs to be recognized , first of all , that peacekeeping works .
it is a cost-effective approach .
it does increase security .
but it needs to be done long-term .
it needs to be a decade-long approach , rather than just a couple of years .
that 's one actor , the security council .
the second actor , different cast of guys , is the donors .
the donors provide post-conflict aid .
typically in the past , the donors have been interested in the first couple of years , and then they got bored .
they moved on to some other situation .
post-conflict economic recovery is a slow process .
there are no quick processes in economics except decline .
you can do that quite fast .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the donors have to stick with this situation for at least a decade .
and then the third key actor is the post-conflict government .
and there are two key things it 's got to do .
one is it 's got to do economic reform , not fuss about the political constitution .
it 's got to reform economic policy .
why ? because during conflict economic policy typically deteriorates .
governments snatch short-term opportunities and , by the end of the conflict , the chickens have come home to roost .
so this legacy of conflict is really bad economic policy .
so there is a reform agenda , and there is an inclusion agenda .
the inclusion agenda does n't come from elections .
elections produce a loser , who is then excluded .
so the inclusion agenda means genuinely bringing people inside the tent .
so those three actors .
and they are interdependent over a long term .
if the security council does n't commit to security over the course of a decade , you do n't get the reassurance which produces private investment .
if you do n't get the policy reform and the aid , you do n't get the economic recovery , which is the true exit strategy for the peacekeepers .
so we should recognize that interdependence , by formal , mutual commitments .
the united nations actually has a language for these mutual commitments , the recognition of mutual commitments ; it 's called the language of compact .
and so we need a post-conflict compact .
the united nations even has an agency which could broker these compacts ; it 's called the peace building commission .
it would be ideal to have a standard set of norms where , when we got to a post-conflict situation , there was an expectation of these mutual commitments from the three parties .
so that 's idea one : recognize interdependence .
and now let me turn to the second approach , which is complimentary .
and that is to focus on a few critical objectives .
typical post-conflict situation is a zoo of different actors with different priorities .
and indeed , unfortunately , if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda , because in these situations , needs are everywhere , but the capacity to implement change is very limited .
so we have to be disciplined and focus on things that are critical .
and i want to suggest that in the typical post-conflict situation three things are critical .
one is jobs .
one is improvements in basic services - especially health , which is a disaster during conflict .
so jobs , health , and clean government .
those are the three critical priorities .
so i 'm going to talk a little about each of them .
jobs .
what is a distinctive approach to generating jobs in post-conflict situations ?
and why are jobs so important ?
jobs for whom ? especially jobs for young men .
in post-conflict situations , the reason that they so often revert to conflict , is not because elderly women get upset .
it 's because young men get upset .
and why are they upset ? because they have nothing to do .
and so we need a process of generating jobs , for ordinary young men , fast .
now , that is difficult .
governments in post-conflict situation often respond by puffing up the civil service .
that is not a good idea .
it 's not sustainable .
in fact , you 're building a long-term liability by inflating civil service .
but getting the private sector to expand is also difficult , because any activity which is open to international trade is basically going to be uncompetitive in a post-conflict situation .
these are not environments where you can build export manufacturing .
there 's one sector which is n't exposed to international trade , and which can generate a lot of jobs , and which is , in any case , a sensible sector to expand , post-conflict , and that is the construction sector .
the construction sector has a vital role , obviously , in reconstruction .
but typically that sector has withered away during conflict .
during conflict people are doing destruction .
there is n't any construction going on . and so the sector shrivels away .
and then when you try and expand it , because it 's shriveled away , you encounter a lot of bottlenecks .
basically , prices soar and crooked politicians then milk the rents from the sector , but it does n't generate any jobs .
and so the policy priority is to break the bottlenecks in expanding the construction sector .
what might the bottlenecks be ?
just think what you have to do successfully to build a structure , using a lot of labor .
first you need access to land .
often the legal system is broken down so you ca n't even get access to land .
secondly you need skills , the mundane skills of the construction sector .
in post-conflict situations we do n't just need doctors without borders , we need bricklayers without borders , to rebuild the skill set .
we need firms . the firms have gone away .
so we need to encourage the growth of local firms .
if we do that , we not only get the jobs , we get the improvements in public infrastructure , the restoration of public infrastructure .
let me turn from jobs to the second objective , which is improving basic social services .
and to date , there has been a sort of a schizophrenia in the donor community , as to how to build basic services in post-conflict sectors .
on the one hand it pays lip service to the idea of rebuild an effective state in the image of scandinavia in the 1950s .
lets develop line ministries of this , that , and the other , that deliver these services .
and it 's schizophrenic because in their hearts donors know that 's not a realistic agenda , and so what they also do is the total bypass : just fund ngos .
neither of those approaches is sensible .
and so what i 'd suggest is what i call independent service authorities .
it 's to split the functions of a monopoly line ministry up into three .
the planning function and policy function stays with the ministry ; the delivery of services on the ground , you should use whatever works - churches , ngos , local communities , whatever works .
and in between , there should be a public agency , the independent service authority , which channels public money , and especially donor money , to the retail providers .
so the ngos become part of a public government system , rather than independent of it .
one advantage of that is that you can allocate money coherently .
another is , you can make ngos accountable .
you can use yardstick competition , so they have to compete against each other for the resources .
the good ngos , like oxfam , are very keen on this idea .
they want to have the discipline and accountability .
so that 's a way to get basic services scaled up .
and because the government would be funding it , it would be co-branding these services .
so they would n't be provided thanks to the united states government and some ngo .
they would be co-branded as being done by the post-conflict government , in the country .
so , jobs , basic services , finally , clean government .
clean means follow their money .
the typical post-conflict government is so short of money that it needs our money just to be on a life-support system .
you ca n't get the basic functions of the state done unless we put money into the core budget of these countries .
but , if we put money into the core budget , we know that there are n't the budget systems with integrity that mean that money will be well spent .
and if all we do is put money in and close our eyes it 's not just that the money is wasted - that 's the least of the problems - it 's that the money is captured .
it 's captured by the crooks who are at the heart of the political problem .
and so inadvertently we empower the people who are the problem .
so building clean government means , yes , provide money to the budget , but also provide a lot of scrutiny , which means a lot of technical assistance that follows the money .
paddy ashdown , who was the grand high nabob of bosnia to the united nations , in his book about his experience , he said , " i realize what i needed was accountants without borders , to follow that money . "
so that 's the - let me wrap up , this is the package .
what 's the goal ?
if we follow this , what would we hope to achieve ?
that after 10 years , the focus on the construction sector would have produced both jobs and , hence , security - because young people would have jobs - and it would have reconstructed the infrastructure .
so that 's the focus on the construction sector .
the focus on the basic service delivery through these independent service authorities would have rescued basic services from their catastrophic levels , and it would have given ordinary people the sense that the government was doing something useful .
the emphasis on clean government would have gradually squeezed out the political crooks , because there would n't be any money in taking part in the politics .
and so gradually the selection , the composition of politicians , would shift from the crooked to the honest .
where would that leave us ?
gradually it would shift from a politics of plunder to a politics of hope . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- most of the talks that you 've heard in the last several fabulous days have been from people who have the characteristic that they have thought about something , they are experts , they know what 's going on .
all of you know about the topic that i 'm supposed to talk about .
that is , you know what simplicity is , you know what complexity is .
the trouble is , i do n't .
and what i 'm going to do is share with you my ignorance on this subject .
i want you to read this , because we 're going to come back to it in a moment .
the quote is from the fabled potter stewart opinion on pornography .
and let me just read it , the important details here : " shorthand description , -lsb- ' hardcore pornography ' -rsb- ; and perhaps i could never succeed in intelligibly defining it .
but i know it when i see it . "
i 'm going to come back to that in a moment .
so , what is simplicity ?
it 's good to start with some examples .
a coffee cup - we do n't think about coffee cups , but it 's much more interesting than one might think - a coffee cup is a device , which has a container and a handle .
the handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid .
why is that important ?
well , it enables you to drink coffee .
but also , by the way , the coffee is hot , the liquid is sterile ; you 're not likely to get cholera that way .
so the coffee cup , or the cup with a handle , is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health .
scissors are your clothes , glasses enable you to see things and keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or run down by automobiles , and books are , after all , your education .
but there 's another class of simple things , which are also very important .
simple in function , but not at all simple in how they 're constructed .
and the two here are just examples .
one is the cellphone , which we use every day .
and it rests on a complexity , which has some characteristics very different from those that my friend benoit mandelbrot discussed , but are very interesting .
and the other , of course , is a birth control pill , which , in a very simple way , fundamentally changed the structure of society by changing the role of women in it by providing to them the opportunity to make reproductive choices .
so , there are two ways of thinking about this word , i think .
and here i 've corrupted the potter stewart quotation by saying that we can think about something - which spans all the way from scissors to the cell phone , internet and birth control pills - by saying that they 're simple , the functions are simple , and we recognize what that simplicity is when we see it .
or there may be another way of doing it , which is to think about the problem in terms of what - if you associate with moral philosophers - is called the teapot problem .
the teapot problem i 'll pose this way .
suppose you see a teapot , and the teapot is filled with hot water .
and you then ask the question : why is the water hot ?
and that 's a simple question .
it 's like , what is simplicity ?
one answer would be : because the kinetic energy of the water molecules is high and they bounce against things rapidly - that 's a kind of physical science argument .
a second argument would be : because it was sitting on a stove with the flame on - that 's an historical argument .
a third is that i wanted hot water for tea - that 's an intentional argument .
and , since this is coming from a moral philosopher , the fourth would be that it 's part of god 's plan for the universe .
all of these are possibilities .
the point is that you get into trouble when you ask a single question with a single box for an answer , in which that single question actually is many questions with quite different meanings , but with the same words .
asking , " what is simplicity ? " i think falls in that category .
what is the state of science ?
and , interestingly , complexity is very highly evolved .
we have a lot of interesting information about what complexity is .
simplicity , for reasons that are a little bit obscure , is almost not pursued , at least in the academic world .
we academics - i am an academic - we love complexity .
you can write papers about complexity , and the nice thing about complexity is it 's fundamentally intractable in many ways , so you 're not responsible for outcomes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- simplicity - all of you really would like your waring blender in the morning to make whatever a waring blender does , but not explode or play beethoven .
you 're not interested in the limits of these things .
so what one is interested in has a lot to do with the rewards of the system .
and there 's a lot of rewards in thinking about complexity and emergence , not so much in thinking about simplicity .
one of the things i want to do is to help you with a very important task - which you may not know that you have very often - which is to understand how to sit next to a physicist at a dinner party and have a conversation . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the words that i would like you to focus on are complexity and emergence , because these will enable you to start the conversation and then daydream about other things .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , what is complexity in this view of things , and what is emergence ?
we have , actually , a pretty good working definition of complexity .
it is a system , like traffic , which has components .
the components interact with one another .
these are cars and drivers . they dissipate energy .
it turns out that , whenever you have that system , weird stuff happens , and you in los angeles probably know this better than anyone .
here 's another example , which i put up because it 's an example of really important current science .
you ca n't possibly read that . it 's not intended that you read it , but that 's a tiny part of the chemical reactions going on in each of your cells at any given moment .
and it 's like the traffic that you see .
the amazing thing about the cell is that it actually does maintain a fairly stable working relationship with other cells , but we do n't know why .
anyone who tells you that we understand life , walk away .
and let me reduce this to the simplest level .
we 've heard from bill gates recently .
all of us , to some extent , study this thing called a bill gates .
terrific . you learn everything you can about that .
and then there 's another kind of thing that you might study , and you study that hard .
that 's a bono , this is a bono .
but then , if you know everything you can know about those two things , and you put them together , what can you say about this combination ?
the answer is , not a lot .
and that 's complexity .
now , imagine building that up to a city , or to a society , and you 've got , obviously , an interesting problem .
all right , so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind .
and i want to introduce a word that i think is very useful , which is stacking .
and i 'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that i can build things with it .
or i 'm going to use simple to mean reliable , predictable , repeatable .
and i 'm going to use as an example the internet , because it 's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity .
we call it a complex system , which it is , but it 's also something else .
the internet starts with mathematics , it starts with binary .
and if you look at the list of things on the bottom , we are familiar with the arabic numbers one to 10 and so on .
in binary , one is 0001 , seven is 0111 .
the question is : why is binary simpler than arabic ?
and the answer is , simply , that if i hold up three fingers , you can count that easily , but if i hold up this , it 's sort of hard to say that i just did seven .
the virtue of binary is that it 's the simplest possible way of representing numbers .
anything else is more complicated .
you can catch errors with it , it 's unambiguous in its reading , there are lots of good things about binary .
so it is very , very simple once you learn how to read it .
now , if you like to represent this zero and one of binary , you need a device .
and think of things in your life that are binary , one of them is light switches .
they can be on and off . that 's binary .
now wall switches , we all know , fail .
but our friends who are condensed matter physicists managed to come up , some 50 years ago , with a very nice device , shown under that bell jar , which is a transistor .
a transistor is nothing more than a wall switch .
it turns things on and off , but it does so without moving parts and it does n't fail , basically , for a very long period of time .
so the second layer of simplicity was the transistor in the internet .
so , since the transistor is so simple , you can put lots of them together .
and you put lots of them together and you come with something called integrated circuits .
and a current integrated circuit might have in each one of these chips something like a billion transistors , all of which have to work perfectly every time .
so that 's the next layer of simplicity , and , in fact , integrated circuits are really simple in the sense that they , in general , work really well .
with integrated circuits , you can build cellphones .
you all are accustomed to having your cellphones work the large majority of the time .
in boston ... boston is a little bit like namibia in its cell phone coverage , -lrb- laughter -rrb- so that we 're not accustomed to that all the time , but some of the time .
but , in fact , if you have cell phones , you can now go to this nice lady who 's somewhere like namibia , and who is extremely happy with the fact that although she does not have an master 's degree in electrical engineering from mit , she 's nonetheless able to hack her cell phone to get power in some funny way .
and from that comes the internet .
and this is a map of bitflows across the continent .
the two blobs that are light in the middle there are the united states and europe .
and then back to simplicity again .
so here we have what i think is one of the great ideas , which is google .
which , in this simple portal makes the claim that it makes accessible all of the world 's information .
but the point is that that extraordinary simple idea rests on layers of simplicity each compounded into a complexity that is itself simple , in the sense that it is completely reliable .
all right , let me then finish off with four general statements , an example and two aphorisms .
the characteristics , which i think are useful to think about for simple things : first , they are predictable .
their behavior is predictable .
now , one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it 's going to do , in general .
so simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things .
the second is , and this is a real world statement , they 're cheap .
if you have things that are cheap enough , people will find uses for them , even if they seem very primitive .
so , for example , stones .
you can build cathedrals out of stones , you just have to know what it does .
you carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another , and they support weight .
so there has to be function , the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low .
what that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost .
and then i would propose as this last component that they serve , or have the potential to serve , as building blocks .
that is , you can stack them .
and stack can mean this way , or it can mean this way , or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space .
but if you have something that has a function , and it 's really cheap , people will find new ways of putting it together to make new things .
cheap , functional , reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine .
there 's no way of predicting the internet based on the first transistor .
it just is not possible .
so these are the components .
now , the example is something that i want to give you from the work that we ourselves do .
we are very interested in delivering health care in the developing world , and one of the things that we wish to do in this particular business is to find a way of doing medical diagnosis at as close to zero cost as we can manage .
so , how does one do that ?
this is a world in which there 's no electricity , there 's no money , there 's no medical competence .
and i do n't want to spend your time in going through the details , but in the lower right-hand corner , you see an example of the kind of thing that we have .
it 's a little paper chip .
it has a few things printed on it using the same technology that you use for making comic books , which was the inspiration for this particular idea .
and you put a drop , in this case , of urine at the bottom .
it wicks its way up into these little branches .
you know , no power required .
it turns colors . in this particular case , you 're reading kidney function .
and , since the health care worker of much of this part of the world is an 18 year-old with an ak-47 , who happens to be out of work and is willing to go around and do this sort of thing , he can take a picture of it with his cellphone , send the picture back to where there is a doctor , and the doctor can look at it .
so what you 've done is to take a technology , which is available everywhere , make a device , which is extremely cheap , and make it in such a fashion that it is very , very reliable .
if we can pull this off , if we can build more function , it will be stackable .
that is to say , if we can make the basic technology of one or two things work , it will be applicable to a very , very large variety of human conditions , and hence , extendable in both vertical and horizontal directions .
part of my interest in this , i have to say , is that i would like to - how do i put this politely ? - change the way , or maybe eviscerate , the capital structure of the u.s. health care system , which i think is fundamentally broken .
so , let me close - -lrb- applause -rrb- let me close with my two aphorisms .
one of them is from mr. einstein , and he says , " everything should be made as simple as possible , but not simpler . "
and i think that 's a very good way of thinking about the problem .
if you take too much out of something that 's simple , you lose function .
you have to have low cost , but you also have to have a function .
so you ca n't make it too simple .
and the second is a design issue , and it 's not directly relevant , but it 's a nice statement .
this is by de saint-exupery .
and he says , " you know you 've achieved perfection in design , not when you have nothing more to add , but when you have nothing more to take away . "
and that certainly is going in the right direction .
so , what i think one can begin to do with this kind of cut at the word simplicity , which does n't cover brancusi , it does n't answer the question of why mondrian is better or worse or simpler or less simpler than van gogh , and certainly does n't address the question of whether mozart is simpler than bach .
but it does make a point - which is one which , in a sense , differentiates the real world of people who make things , and the world of people who think about things , which is , there is an intellectual merit to asking : how do we make things as simple as we can , as cheap as we can , as functional as we can and as freely interconnectable as we can ?
if we make that kind of simplicity in our technology and then give it to you guys , you can go off and do all kinds of fabulous things with it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : quick question .
so can you picture that a science of simplicity might get to the point where you could look out at various systems - say a financial system or a legal system , health system - and say , " that has got to the point of danger or dysfunctionality for the following reasons , and this is how we might simplify it " ?
george whitesides : yes , i think you could . because if you look at the components from which the system is made and examine their fragility , or their stability , you can probably build a kind of risk assessment based on that basis .
ca : have you started to do that ?
i mean , with the health system , you got a sort of radical solution on the cost side , but in terms of the system itself ?
gw : well , no .
how do i put that simply ? no .
ca : that was a simple , powerful answer . gw : yes .
ca : so , in terms of where is that , and when do you see that maybe getting rolled out to scale .
gw : that 's coming out soon . i mean , the systems work , and we have to find out how to manufacture them and do things of this kind , but the basic technology works .
ca : you 've got a company set up to ...
gw : a foundation , a foundation . not-for-profit .
ca : all right . well , thank you so much for your talk . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- sixty-five million years ago , a very important and catastrophic event changed the course of life on land .
and although we know that the land animals i 'm going to talk about are just the scum of the earth on the land - the little bits of land floating around - but they are important to us because they 're sort of in our scale of experience from millimeters to meters .
and these animals disappeared , and a separate life , mammals , radiated out to take their place . and so , we know this in extraordinary detail . and so this is a core from near bermuda . we know that the tsunamis , the earthquakes , and the things that we 've experienced in the entire record of humankind history ca n't really quite get around the kind of disaster that this represented for the earth .
so even before that impact was known , even before scientists in general came to an agreement over the theory of evolution , scientists and natural historians of all kinds of stripes actually had divided earth 's life 's history into these two episodes : mesozoic , the middle life , and the cenozoic , the recent life .
and as it turns out , it actually corresponds really nicely with geologic history .
so we have a mesozoic period , an age of fragmentation , and a cenozoic period , an age of reconnection - south america to north america , india to asia .
and so my work , really , is trying to understand the character of that mesozoic radiation compared to the cenozoic radiation to see what mysteries we can understand from dinosaurs and from other animals about what life on drifting continents really can tell us about evolution .
the work immediately begs the question , " why did n't they go into the waters ? "
i mean , certainly mammals did . this is one example .
you can go outside - see many other examples .
within five , 10 million years of the bolide impact we had a whole variety of animals going into the water . why did n't they do that ?
why did n't they hang around in trees at good size , and why did n't they burrow ?
why did n't they do all these things , and if they did n't do all these things , what kinds of animals were in those spaces ?
and if there were no animals in those spaces , what does that tell us about , you know , how evolution works on land ?
really interesting questions . i think a lot of it has to do with body size .
in fact , i think that most of it has to do with body size - the size you are when you inherit a vacant ecospace from whatever natural disaster .
looking at dinosaur evolution and studying it , digging it up for many years , i end up looking at the mammal radiation , and it seems as though everything is quick time , just like technology , advancing by an order of magnitude .
dinosaur evolution proceeded at a stately pace , an order of magnitude slower on any way you want to measure it .
you want to measure it by diversity ?
you want to measure it by the time it took to reach maximum body size ?
yes , they do have larger body size , but many of them are smaller , but we 're interested in the time it took them to achieve that .
fifty million years to achieve this maximum body size .
and that is 10 times longer than it took the mammals to achieve maximum body size and invade all those habitats .
so there 's lessons to learn , and there 's lessons to learn from the exception , the exception that we know very well today from the discoveries we 've made , and many other scholars have made around the world .
this slide was shown before . this is the famous jurassic bird archaeopteryx .
we now know this transition is the one time that dinosaurs actually went below that body size - we 're going to see where they began in a minute - and it is the one time that they rapidly invaded all the habitats i just told you that dinosaurs were n't in .
they became marine . we now know them today from the ice caps .
there 's burrowing birds .
they inhabit the trees at all body sizes , and , of course , they inhabit the land .
so we were the first to actually name a bird from the famous series that later exploded onto the pages of science and nature .
we called this bird sinornis . it 's a little bit more advanced than archaeopteryx , and if you go to different layers , you find things that are less advanced than archaeopteryx , and every grade in between , so that if you find something today , we 're usually splitting hairs - or , more appropriately , feathers - as to decide whether it 's actually a non-avian or an avian .
it is the greatest transition that we have , actually , on land from one habitat to another , bar none , to understand how a bony , fairly heavy , kilogram or a couple-of-kilogram animal could make such a transition .
it is really our greatest - one of our greatest - evolutionary sequences .
now , my work began at the beginning .
i thought if i 'm going to understand dinosaur evolution , i 'd have to go back to those beds where the earliest dinosaurs existed .
i 'd like to call for this little video clip to give you some idea of , sort of , what we face . normally , we get asked a lot of questions : " well , how do you find fossils in areas that look like this ? "
if we could roll that first video clip .
this is sort of a nice helicopter ride through those early beds , and they 're located in northeastern argentina .
and we 're coming over a cliff , and at the top of that cliff , dinosaurs had basically taken over .
at the bottom of the cliff , we find that they 're rare as hens ' teeth .
that 's where dinosaur origins is to be found : at the bottom of the cliff .
you go into an area like this , you get a geologic map , you get a topographic map , and the best , most-inspired team you can bring to the area .
and the rest is up to you . you 've got to find fossils .
you 've got to dig a hole that 's usually quite a bit bigger than that to get it out ; you 've got to climb those cliffs and find , really , everything that existed - not just the dinosaurs , but the entire story . if you 're lucky , and you dig a place like that , you actually find the ash bed to dig it , and we did .
228 million years old , we found what really is the most primitive dinosaur : that 's the ur-dinosaur .
a three-and-a-half foot thing , beautiful skull , predator , meat-eater , a two-legged animal .
so , all the other dinosaurs that you know , or your kids know , at least , on four legs .
this is sort of a look at the skull , and it 's an absolutely fantastic thing about five or six inches long .
it looks rather bird-like because it is .
it 's bird-like and hollow .
a predator . maybe 25 pounds , or 10 kilograms .
that 's where dinosaurs began . that 's where the radiation began .
that is 10 times larger than the mammal radiation , which was a four-legged radiation .
we are extremely dinosaur-like , and unusual in our two-legged approach to life .
now , if you want to understand what happened then when the continents broke apart , and dinosaurs found - landlubbers , as they are - found themselves adrift . there 's some missing puzzle pieces .
most of those missing puzzle pieces are southern continents , because it was those continents that are least explored .
if you want to add to this picture and try and sketch it globally , you really have to force yourself to go down to the four corners of the earth - africa , india , antarctica , australia - and start putting together some of these pieces .
i 've been to some of those continents , but africa was , in the words of steven pinker , was a blank slate , largely .
but one with an immense chalkboard in the middle , with lots of little areas of dinosaur rock if you could survive an expedition .
there 's no roads into the sahara . it 's an enormous place .
to be able to excavate the 80 tons of dinosaurs that we have in the sahara and take them out , you really have to put together an expedition team that can handle the conditions .
some of them are political . many of them are physical .
some of them - the most important - are mental .
and you really have to be able to withstand conditions - you have to drive into the desert , you will see landscapes in many cases - you can see from what we 've discovered - that nobody else has ever seen .
and the kinds of teams they bring in ?
well , they 're composed of people who understand science as adventure with a purpose .
they 're usually students who 've never seen a desert .
some of them are more experienced .
your job as a leader - this is definitely a team sport - your job as a leader is to try to inspire them to do more work than they 've ever done in their life under conditions that they ca n't imagine .
so , 125 degrees is normal .
the ground surface at 150 - typical .
so , you ca n't leave your normal metal tools out because you 'll get a first-degree burn if you grab them sometimes .
so , you are finding yourself also in an amazing cultural milieu .
you 're really rubbing shoulders with the world 's last great nomadic people .
these are the tuareg nomads , and they 're living their lives much as they have for centuries .
your job is to excavate things like this in the foreground , and make them enter the pages of history .
to do that , you 've got to actually transport them thousands of miles out of the desert .
we 're talking about ethiopia , but let 's talk about niger - or niger , in our english language - north of nigeria - that 's where this photograph was taken .
basically you 're talking about a country that , when we started working there , did not have container traffic .
you transported the bones out yourself to the coast of africa , onto a boat , if you wanted to get them out of the middle of the sahara .
that 's a 2,000 mile journey .
so enormous excavations and a lot of work , and out of essentially a partial herd of dinosaurs that you saw buried there - 20 tons of material - we erect jobaria , a sauropod dinosaur like we have n't seen on some other continents .
it really is a little bit out of place temporally .
it looks nothing like what we would find if we dug in contemporary beds in north america .
here 's the animal that was causing it trouble .
and , you know , on and on - a whole menagerie . when you pick up something like this - and some of you have had the chance to touch it - this is a piece of history . you 're touching something that 's 110 million years old .
this is a thumb claw . there it was , moments after it was discovered .
it is an incredible view of life , and it really began when we began to understand the depth of time .
it 's only been with us for less than a century , and in that time , that fourth dimension , when radioactive dating came about , less than a century ago , and we could actually tell how old some of these things were , is probably the most profound transformation , because it changes the way we look at ourselves and the world dramatically .
when you pick up a piece of history like that , i think it can transform kids that are possibly interested in science .
that 's the animal that thumb claw came from : suchomimus .
here 's some others .
this is something we found in morocco , an immense animal .
we prototyped by cat-scanning the brain out of this animal .
it turns out to have a forebrain one-fifteenth the size of a human .
this was the cover of science , because they thought that humans were more intelligent than these animals , but we can see by some in our administration that despite the enormous advantage in brain volume some of the attitudes remain the same . anyway , smaller raptors .
all the stuff from jurassic park that you know of - all those small animals - they all come from northern continents .
this is the first skeleton from a southern continent , and guess what ? you start preparing it .
it has no big claw on its hind foot . it does n't look like a velociraptor .
it 's really a wholly separate radiation .
so what we 're trying to piece together here is a story .
it involves flying reptiles like this pterosaur that we reconstructed from africa .
crocodiles , of course , and that 's a nasty one we have n't named yet .
and huge things - i mean , this is a lower jaw just laying there in the desert of this enormous crocodile .
the crocodile is technically called sarcosuchus .
that 's an adult orinoco crocodile in its jaws .
we had to try and reconstruct this .
we had to actually look at recent crocodiles to understand how crocodiles scale .
could i have the second little video clip ?
now , this field is just - and , of course , science in general - is just - adventure .
we had to find and measure the largest crocodiles living today .
narrator : ... as long as their boat .
man : look at that set of choppers ! yeah , he 's a big one .
narrator : if they can just land it , this croc will provide useful data , helping paul in his quest to understand sarcosuchus .
man : ok , hand me some more here . man 2 : ok .
narrator : it falls to paul to cover its eyes .
man : watch out ! watch out ! no , no , no , no . you 're going to have to get on the back legs .
man : i got the back legs .
man 2 : you have the back legs ? no , you have the front legs , my friend .
i 've got it . i 've got the back legs .
somebody get the front legs .
paul sereno : let 's get this tape measure on him . put it right there .
wow .
sixty-five . wow .
that 's a big skull .
narrator : big , but less than half the size of supercroc 's skull .
man : enormous . ps : you 've got a ... 14-foot croc .
man : i knew it was big .
ps : do n't get off . you do n't get off , but do n't worry about me .
narrator : paul has his data , so they decide to release the animal back into the river .
narrator : paul has never seen a fossil do that .
ps : okay , when i say three , we move .
one , two , three !
whoa !
so - there were - -lrb- applause -rrb- well , you know , the - the fossil record is truly amazing because it really forces you to look at living animals in a new way .
we proved with those measurements that crocodiles scaled isometrically .
it depended on the shape of their skull , though , so we had to actually get those measurements to be sure that we had reconstructed and could prove to the scientific world that supercroc in fact is a 40-foot crocodile , probably a male .
anyway , you find other things , too .
i 'm going to lead an expedition to the sahara to dig up africa 's largest neolithic site .
we found this last year .
two hundred skeletons , tools , jewelry .
this is a ceremonial disk .
an amazing record of the colonization of the sahara 5,000 years ago is been sitting out there waiting for us to go back . so , really exciting .
and then work later is going to take us to tibet .
now , we normally think of tibet as a highland .
it 's really an island continent .
it was a precursor to india , a messenger from gondwana - a lost paradise of dinosaurs isolated for millions of years .
no one 's found them . we know where they are , and we 're going to go and get them next year .
they 're only between 13 and 14,000 feet , but if you go in the warm part of the year , it 's o.k.
now , i tried to suture together a dinosaur evolutionary history so that we can try to understand some basic patterns of evolution .
i 've talked about a few of them . we really need to take that further .
we need to delve into this mass of anatomy that we 've been compiling to understand where the changes are occurring and what this means .
we ca n't predict , necessarily , what will happen in evolution , but we can learn some of the rules of the game , and that 's really what we 're trying to do .
with regard to the biogeographic question , the earth is dividing .
these are all landlubbing animals . there 's a couple of choices .
you get divided , and a continent 's division corresponds to a fork in the evolutionary tree , or you 're crafty , and you manage to escape from one to the other and erase that division , or you 're living peacefully on each side , and on one side you just go extinct , and you survive on the other side and create a difference .
and the fourth thing is that you actually did one or the other of those three things , but the paleontologist never found you .
and you take those four instances and you realize you have a complex problem .
and so , in addition to digging , i think we have some answers from the dinosaur record . i think these dinosaurs migrated - we call it dispersal - around the globe , with the slightest land bridge .
they did it within two or three degrees of the pole , to maintain similarity between continents .
but when they were divided , indeed they were divided , and we do see the continents carving differences among dinosaurs .
but there 's one thing that 's even more important , and i think that 's extinction .
we have downgraded this factor .
it carves up the history of life , and gives us the differences that we see in the dinosaur world towards the end , right before the bolide impact .
the best way to test this is to actually create a model .
so if we move back , this is a two-dimensional typical tree of life .
i want to give you three dimensions .
so you see the tree of life , but now i 've added the dimension of area .
so the tree of life is normally divergence over time .
now we have divergence over time , but we 've created the third dimension of area .
this is a computer program which has three knobs .
we can control those things that we 're worried about : extinction , sampling , dispersal - going from one area to another .
and ultimately we can control the branching to mimic what we think the continents were like , and run it a thousand times , so we can estimate the parameters , to answer the question whether we are on the mark or not , at least to know the barriers of the problems . so that 's a little bit about the science .
today i 'm going to spend the rest of my few minutes up here talking about the other stuff that i do in chicago , which is related to the fact that i never - and actually , in talking to a lot of tedsters , there 's a number of you out there - i do n't know that i 'd get an answer honestly , if i asked you to raise your hand , but there are a number of you out there that started your scientific , technical , entertainment career as failures , by society 's standards , as failures by schools .
i was one of those . i was failed by my school - my school failed me .
who 's pointing fingers ?
several teachers nearly killed me .
i found myself in art .
i was a total failure in school , not really headed to graduate high school .
and i went on - that 's my first painting on canvas .
i read a dictionary . i got into college .
i became an artist . o.k. , and started drawing .
it became abstract .
i worked up a portfolio , and i was headed to new york .
sometimes i would see bones when there was a body there .
something was going on in the background . i headed to new york to a studio .
i took a side trip to the american museum , and i never recovered .
but really it 's the same discipline - they 're kindred disciplines .
i mean , is there anything that is not visualizing what ca n't be seen , in terms of discovering this dinosaur bone from a small piece of it that 's out there , or seeing the distortion that we try to see as evolutionary distortion in one animal to another ?
this is a very extraordinarily visual .
i give you a human face because you 're experts at that .
it takes us years to understand how to do that with dinosaurs .
they 're really kindred disciplines .
but what we 're trying to create in chicago is a way to get , collect together , those students who are least represented in our science and technology spheres .
we all know , and there 's been several allusions to it , that we are failing in our ability to produce enough scientists , engineers and technicians .
we 've known that for a long time . we 've gone through the sputnik phase , and now , as you see the increase in the pace of what we 're doing , it becomes even more prominent . where are all these people going to come from ?
and a more general question for our society is , what 's going to happen to all the rest that are left behind ?
what about all the kids like me that were in school - kids like some of you out there - that were in school and did n't get a chance and will never get a chance to participate in science and technology ?
those are the questions i ask . and we talk about ethiopia , and it 's very important .
niger is equally important , and i 'm trying desperately to do something in niger .
they have an aids problem . i asked - the u.s. state department asked the government recently , what do you want to do ? and they gave them two problems .
dinosaurs was one of them .
give us a museum of dinosaurs , and we will attract tourists , which is our number two industry .
and i hope to god the united states government , me , or ted , or somebody helps us do that , because that would be an incredible thing for their country .
but when we look back at our own country , we 're looking back at our cities , the cities where most of you come from - certainly the city i come from - there 's legions of kids out there like these .
and the question is - and we started to address this question for centuries - as to how we get these kids involved in science .
we 've started in chicago an organization - a non-profit organization - called project exploration .
these are two kids from project exploration .
we met them in their early stages in high school . they were - failing to poor students , and they are now - one at the university of chicago , another in illinois .
we 've got students at harvard . we 're six years old .
and we created a track record .
because when you go out there as a scholar , and you try to find out longitudinal studies , track records like that , there essentially are very few , if none .
so , we 've created an incredible track record of 100 percent graduation , 90 percent going to college , many first-generation , 90 percent of those choosing science as a career .
it 's an impressive track record , and so we look back and we say , well , we did n't really exactly work this out theoretically from the start , but when we look back , there are theoretical movements in science education .
it 's gone through science as an inquiry , which was a big advance , and dewey back at chicago - you learn by doing .
to - you learn by envisioning yourself as a scientist , and then you learn to envision yourself as a scientist .
the next step is to learn the capability to make yourself a scientist .
you have to have those steps . if you have - it 's easy to get kids interested in science .
it 's hard to get them to envision themselves as a scientist , which involves standing up in front of people like we 're doing here at this symposium and presenting something as a knowledgeable person , and then seeing yourself in the role as a scientist and giving yourself the tools to pursue that .
and so , that 's what we 're going to do . we 're planning a permanent home in chicago .
we have lots of ideas , but i guarantee you this one thing - and i 've talked to some people here at ted - it 's not going to look like anything you 've seen before .
it 's going to be part-school , part-museum hall , part-conservatory , part-zoo , and part of an answer to the problem of how you interest kids in science .
thank you very much .
so today i 'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption .
i 'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you - in just 15 minutes - that this is n't a flimsy idea , or a short-term trend , but a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume , but how we consume .
now i 'm going to start with a deceptively simple example .
hands up - how many of you have books , cds , dvds , or videos lying around your house that you probably wo n't use again , but you ca n't quite bring yourself to throw away ?
ca n't see all the hands , but it looks like all of you , right ?
on our shelves at home , we have a box set of the dvd series " 24 , " season six to be precise .
i think it was bought for us around three years ago for a christmas present .
now my husband , chris , and i love this show .
but let 's face it , when you 've watched it once maybe , or twice , you do n't really want to watch it again , because you know how jack bauer is going to defeat the terrorists .
so there it sits on our shelves obsolete to us , but with immediate latent value to someone else .
now before we go on , i have a confession to make .
i lived in new york for 10 years , and i am a big fan of " sex and the city . "
now i 'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week .
so how easily could i swap our unwanted copy of " 24 " for a wanted copy of " sex and the city ? "
now you may have noticed there 's a new sector emerging called swap-trading .
now the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media .
what it does is use the internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person a 's " haves " with person c 's " wants , " whatever they may be .
the other week , i went on one of these sites , appropriately called swaptree , and there were over 59,300 items that i could instantly swap for my copy of " 24 . "
lo and behold , there in reseda , ca was rondoron who wanted swap his or her " like new " copy of " sex and the city " for my copy of " 24 . "
so in other words , what 's happening here is that swaptree solves my carrying company 's sugar rush problem , a problem the economists call " the coincidence of wants , " in approximately 60 seconds .
what 's even more amazing is it will print out a postage label on the spot , because it knows the way of the item .
now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as swaptree , but that 's not my interest , and nor is swap trading , per se .
my passion , and what i 've spent the last few years dedicated to researching , is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics inherent in these systems .
when you think about it , it would have seemed like a crazy idea , even a few years ago , that i would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name i did n't know and without any money changing hands .
yet 99 percent of trades on swaptree happen successfully , and the one percent that receive a negative rating , it 's for relatively minor reasons , like the item did n't arrive on time .
so what 's happening here ?
an extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play .
namely , that technology is enabling trust between strangers .
we now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face , but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before .
so what 's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back .
we 're bartering , trading , swapping , sharing , but they 're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms .
what i find fascinating is that we 've actually wired our world to share , whether that 's our neighborhood , our school , our office , or our facebook network , and that 's creating an economy of " what 's mine is yours . "
from the mighty ebay , the grandfather of exchange marketplaces , to car-sharing companies such as goget , where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour , to social lending platforms such as zopa , that will take anyone in this audience with 100 dollars to lend , and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world , we 're sharing and collaborating again in ways that i believe are more hip than hippie .
i call this " groundswell collaborative consumption . "
now before i dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption , i 'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked , which is , where did this idea come from ?
now i 'd like to say i woke up one morning and said , " i 'm going to write about collaborative consumption , " but actually it was a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas .
over the next minute , you 're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots that went on in my head .
the first thing i began to notice : how many big concepts were emerging - from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs - around how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose .
and linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world - from the election of a president to the infamous wikipedia , and everything in between - on what the power of numbers could achieve .
now , you know when you learn a new word , and then you start to see that word everywhere ?
that 's what happened to me when i noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators , to highly enabled collaborators .
what 's happening is the internet is removing the middleman , so that anyone from a t-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer .
and the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates .
i mean , it 's amazing to think that , in every single minute of this speech , 25 hours of youtube video will be loaded .
now what i find fascinating about these examples is how they 're actually tapping into our primate instincts .
i mean , we 're monkeys , and we 're born and bred to share and cooperate .
and we were doing so for thousands of years , whether it 's when we hunted in packs , or farmed in cooperatives , before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms .
but things are changing , and one of the reasons why is the digital natives , or gen-y .
they 're growing up sharing - files , video games , knowledge .
it 's second nature to them .
so we , the millennials - i am just a millennial - are like foot soldiers , moving us from a culture of " me " to a culture of " we . "
the reason why it 's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration .
we now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone , anytime , in real-time , from a small device in our hands .
all of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008 , when , of course , the great financial crash happened .
thomas friedman is one of my favorite new york times columnists , and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall , when mother nature and the market both said , " no more . "
now we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption is a ponzi scheme . it 's a house of cards .
yet , it 's hard for us to individually know what to do .
so all of this is a lot of twittering , right ?
well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head , until actually i realized it was happening because of four key drivers .
one , a renewed belief in the importance of community , and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means .
a torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies , fundamentally changing the way we behave .
three , pressing unresolved environmental concerns .
and four , a global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors .
these four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift - away from the 20th century , defined by hyper-consumption , towards the 21st century , defined by collaborative consumption .
i generally believe we 're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors - through sites such as flickr and twitter that are becoming second nature online - are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives .
from morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food , we are consuming and collaborating once again .
so my co-author , roo rogers , and i have actually gathered thousands of examples from all around the world of collaborative consumption .
and although they vary enormously in scale , maturity and purpose , when we dived into them , we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems .
the first is redistribution markets .
redistribution markets , just like swaptree , are when you take a used , or pre-owned , item and move it from where it 's not needed to somewhere , or someone , where it is .
they 're increasingly thought of as the fifth ' r ' - reduce , reuse , recycle , repair and redistribute - because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste .
the second is collaborative lifestyles .
this is the sharing of resources of things like money , skills and time .
i bet , in a couple of years , that phrases like " coworking " and " couchsurfing " and " time banks " are going to become a part of everyday vernacular .
one of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called landshare .
it 's a scheme in the u.k.
that matches mr. jones , with some spare space in his back garden , with mrs. smith , a would-be grower .
together they grow their own food .
it 's one of those ideas that 's so simple , yet brilliant , you wonder why it 's never been done before .
now , the third system is product-service systems .
this is where you pay for the benefit of the product - what it does for you - without needing to own the product outright .
this idea is particularly powerful for things that have high-idling capacity .
and that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to - how many of you have a power drill , own a power drill ? right .
that power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's kind of ridiculous , right ?
because what you need is the hole , not the drill .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so why do n't you rent the drill , or , even better , rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it ?
these three systems are coming together , allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles , or their cherished personal freedoms .
i 'm not asking people to share nicely in the sandpit .
so i want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors .
the average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run .
yet , that car sits idle for 23 hours a day .
so when you consider these two facts , it starts to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright .
so this is where car-sharing companies such as zipcar and goget come in .
in 2009 , zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities - and they 're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies - and got them to surrender their keys for a month .
instead , these people had to walk , bike , take the train , or other forms of public transport .
they could only use their zipcar membership when absolutely necessary .
the results of this challenge after just one month was staggering .
it 's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise .
but my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back .
in other words , the car addicts had lost their urge to own .
now products-service systems have been around for years .
just think of libraries and laundrettes .
but i think they 're entering a new age , because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun .
there 's a great quote that was written in the new york times that said , " sharing is to ownership what the ipod is to the 8-track , what solar power is to the coal mine . "
i believe also , our generation , our relationship to satisfying what we want is far less tangible than any other previous generation .
i do n't want the dvd ; i want the movie it carries .
i do n't want a clunky answering machine ; i want the message it saves .
i do n't want a cd ; i want the music it plays .
in other words , i do n't want stuff ; i want the needs or experiences it fulfills .
this is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions - or as kevin kelly , the editor of wired magazine , puts it , " where access is better than ownership . "
now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud , a blurry line is appearing between what 's mine , what 's yours , and what 's ours .
i want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening .
this represents an eight-year time span .
we 've gone from traditional car-ownership to car-sharing companies , such as zipcar and goget , to ride-sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry , which is peer-to-peer car rental , where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor .
now all of these systems require a degree of trust , and the cornerstone to this working is reputation .
now in the old consumer system , our reputation did n't matter so much , because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review .
but now with the web , we leave a trail .
with every spammer we flag , with every idea we post , comment we share , we 're actually signaling how well we collaborate , and whether we can or ca n't be trusted .
let 's go back to my first example , swaptree .
i can see that rondoron has completed 553 trades with a 100 percent success rate .
in other words , i can trust him or her .
now mark my words , it 's only a matter of time before we 're going to be able to perform a google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital .
and this reputation capital will determine our access to collaborative consumption .
it 's a new social currency , so to speak , that could become as powerful as our credit rating .
now as a closing thought , i believe we 're actually in a period where we 're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste , and we 're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity .
i believe it will be referred to as a revolution , so to speak - when society , faced with great challenges , made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good .
i 'm on a mission to make sharing cool .
i 'm on a mission to make sharing hip .
because i really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business , help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today to talk about a disturbing question , which has an equally disturbing answer .
my topic is the secrets of domestic violence , and the question i 'm going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks : why does she stay ?
why would anyone stay with a man who beats her ?
i 'm not a psychiatrist , a social worker or an expert in domestic violence .
i 'm just one woman with a story to tell .
i was 22 . i had just graduated from harvard college .
i had moved to new york city for my first job as a writer and editor at seventeen magazine .
i had my first apartment , my first little green american express card , and i had a very big secret .
my secret was that i had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who i thought was my soulmate , many , many times .
the man who i loved more than anybody on earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than i can even remember .
i 'm here to tell you the story of crazy love , a psychological trap disguised as love , one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year .
it may even be your story .
i do n't look like a typical domestic violence survivor .
i have a b.a. in english from harvard college , an mba in marketing from wharton business school .
i 've spent most of my career working for fortune 500 companies including johnson & johnson , leo burnett and the washington post .
i 've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together .
my dog is a black lab , and i drive a honda odyssey minivan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone - all races , all religions , all income and education levels .
it 's everywhere .
and my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women , that it 's a women 's issue .
not exactly .
over 85 percent of abusers are men , and domestic abuse happens only in intimate , interdependent , long-term relationships , in other words , in families , the last place we would want or expect to find violence , which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing .
i would have told you myself that i was the last person on earth who would stay with a man who beats me , but in fact i was a very typical victim because of my age .
i was 22 , and in the united states , women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages , and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners , boyfriends , and husbands in the united states .
i was also a very typical victim because i knew nothing about domestic violence , its warning signs or its patterns .
i met conor on a cold , rainy january night .
he sat next to me on the new york city subway , and he started chatting me up .
he told me two things .
one was that he , too , had just graduated from an ivy league school , and that he worked at a very impressive wall street bank .
but what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy .
he had these big cheeks , these big apple cheeks and this wheat-blond hair , and he seemed so sweet .
one of the smartest things conor did , from the very beginning , was to create the illusion that i was the dominant partner in the relationship .
he did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me .
we started dating , and he loved everything about me , that i was smart , that i 'd gone to harvard , that i was passionate about helping teenage girls , and my job .
he wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams .
conor believed in me , as a writer and a woman , in a way that no one else ever had .
and he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret , which was that , as a very young boy starting at age four , he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather , and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade , even though he was very smart , and he 'd spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life .
which is why that ivy league degree and the wall street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him .
if you had told me that this smart , funny , sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not i wore makeup , how short my skirts were , where i lived , what jobs i took , who my friends were and where i spent christmas , i would have laughed at you , because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in conor at the beginning .
i did n't know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim .
i also did n't know that the second step is to isolate the victim .
now , conor did not come home one day and announce , " you know , hey , all this romeo and juliet stuff has been great , but i need to move into the next phase where i isolate you and i abuse you " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - " so i need to get you out of this apartment where the neighbors can hear you scream and out of this city where you have friends and family and coworkers who can see the bruises . "
instead , conor came home one friday evening and he told me that he had quit his job that day , his dream job , because i had made him feel so safe and loved that he did n't need to prove himself on wall street anymore , and he just wanted to get out of the city and away from his abusive , dysfunctional family , and move to a tiny town in new england where he could start his life over with me by his side .
now , the last thing i wanted to do was leave new york , and my dream job , but i thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate , so i agreed , and i quit my job , and conor and i left manhattan together .
i had no idea i was falling into crazy love , that i was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical , financial and psychological trap .
the next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts .
and here 's where those guns come in .
as soon as we moved to new england - you know , that place where connor was supposed to feel so safe - he bought three guns .
he kept one in the glove compartment of our car .
he kept one under the pillows on our bed , and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times .
and he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he 'd experienced as a young boy .
he needed them to feel protected .
but those guns were really a message for me , and even though he had n't raised a hand to me , my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day .
conor first physically attacked me five days before our wedding .
it was 7 a.m. i still had on my nightgown .
i was working on my computer trying to finish a freelance writing assignment , and i got frustrated , and conor used my anger as an excuse to put both of his hands around my neck and to squeeze so tightly that i could not breathe or scream , and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall .
five days later , the ten bruises on my neck had just faded , and i put on my mother 's wedding dress , and i married him .
despite what had happened , i was sure we were going to live happily ever after , because i loved him , and he loved me so much .
and he was very , very sorry .
he had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me .
it was an isolated incident , and he was never going to hurt me again .
it happened twice more on the honeymoon .
the first time , i was driving to find a secret beach and i got lost , and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver 's side window .
and then a few days later , driving home from our honeymoon , he got frustrated by traffic , and he threw a cold big mac in my face .
conor proceeded to beat me once or twice a week for the next two and a half years of our marriage .
i was mistaken in thinking that i was unique and alone in this situation .
one in three american women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life , and the cdc reports that 15 million children are abused every year , 15 million .
so actually , i was in very good company .
back to my question : why did i stay ?
the answer is easy .
i did n't know he was abusing me .
even though he held those loaded guns to my head , pushed me down stairs , threatened to kill our dog , pulled the key out of the car ignition as i drove down the highway , poured coffee grinds on my head as i dressed for a job interview , i never once thought of myself as a battered wife .
instead , i was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man , and i was the only person on earth who could help conor face his demons .
the other question everybody asks is , why does n't she just leave ?
why did n't i walk out ? i could have left any time .
to me , this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask , because we victims know something you usually do n't : it 's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser .
because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her .
over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship , after she 's gotten out , because then the abuser has nothing left to lose .
other outcomes include long-term stalking , even after the abuser remarries ; denial of financial resources ; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children , who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother .
and still we ask , why does n't she just leave ?
i was able to leave , because of one final , sadistic beating that broke through my denial .
i realized that the man who i loved so much was going to kill me if i let him .
so i broke the silence .
i told everyone : the police , my neighbors , my friends and family , total strangers , and i 'm here today because you all helped me .
we tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines , self-destructive women , damaged goods .
the question , " why does she stay ? "
is code for some people for , " it 's her fault for staying , " as if victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us .
but since publishing " crazy love , " i have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out , who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened , and who rebuilt lives - joyous , happy lives - as employees , wives and mothers , lives completely free of violence , like me .
because it turns out that i 'm actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor .
i remarried a kind and gentle man , and we have those three kids .
i have that black lab , and i have that minivan .
what i will never have again , ever , is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me .
right now , maybe you 're thinking , " wow , this is fascinating , " or , " wow , how stupid was she , " but this whole time , i 've actually been talking about you .
i promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves .
abuse could be affecting your daughter , your sister , your best friend right now .
i was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence .
i 'm still breaking the silence today .
it 's my way of helping other victims , and it 's my final request of you .
talk about what you heard here .
abuse thrives only in silence .
you have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it .
we victims need everyone .
we need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence .
show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children , your coworkers , your friends and family .
recast survivors as wonderful , lovable people with full futures .
recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene , deescalate it , show victims a safe way out .
together we can make our beds , our dinner tables and our families the safe and peaceful oases they should be .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- at 7:45 a.m. , i open the doors to a building dedicated to building , yet only breaks me down .
i march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors , but i never have the decency to honor their names .
lockers left open like teenage boys ' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else .
masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers , camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs .
teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here .
oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim , part like the red sea when the bell rings .
this is a training ground .
my high school is chicago , diverse and segregated on purpose .
social lines are barbed wire .
labels like " regulars " and " honors " resonate .
i am an honors but go home with regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them .
this is a training ground to sort out the regulars from the honors , a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system .
trained at a young age to capitalize , letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there .
this is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow .
no wonder so many of my people spit bars , because the truth is hard to swallow .
the need for degrees has left so many people frozen .
homework is stressful , but when you go home every day and your home is work , you do n't want to pick up any assignments .
reading textbooks is stressful , but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written , either dead or getting booked .
taking tests is stressful , but bubbling in a scantron does not stop bullets from bursting .
i hear education systems are failing , but i believe they 're succeeding at what they 're built to do - to train you , to keep you on track , to track down an american dream that has failed so many of us all .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you are a blind child in india , you will very likely have to contend with at least two big pieces of bad news .
the first bad news is that the chances of getting treatment are extremely slim to none , and that 's because most of the blindness alleviation programs in the country are focused on adults , and there are very , very few hospitals that are actually equipped to treat children .
in fact , if you were to be treated , you might well end up being treated by a person who has no medical credentials as this case from rajasthan illustrates .
this is a three-year-old orphan girl who had cataracts .
so , her caretakers took her to the village medicine man , and instead of suggesting to the caretakers that the girl be taken to a hospital , the person decided to burn her abdomen with red-hot iron bars to drive out the demons .
the second piece of bad news will be delivered to you by neuroscientists , who will tell you that if you are older than four or five years of age , that even if you have your eye corrected , the chances of your brain learning how to see are very , very slim - again , slim or none .
so when i heard these two things , it troubled me deeply , both because of personal reasons and scientific reasons .
so let me first start with the personal reason .
it 'll sound corny , but it 's sincere .
that 's my son , darius .
as a new father , i have a qualitatively different sense of just how delicate babies are , what our obligations are towards them and how much love we can feel towards a child .
i would move heaven and earth in order to get treatment for darius , and for me to be told that there might be other dariuses who are not getting treatment , that 's just viscerally wrong .
so that 's the personal reason .
scientific reason is that this notion from neuroscience of critical periods - that if the brain is older than four or five years of age , it loses its ability to learn - that does n't sit well with me , because i do n't think that idea has been tested adequately .
the birth of the idea is from david hubel and torsten wiesel 's work , two researchers who were at harvard , and they got the nobel prize in 1981 for their studies of visual physiology , which are remarkably beautiful studies , but i believe some of their work has been extrapolated into the human domain prematurely .
so , they did their work with kittens , with different kinds of deprivation regiments , and those studies , which date back to the ' 60s , are now being applied to human children .
so i felt that i needed to do two things .
one : provide care to children who are currently being deprived of treatment .
that 's the humanitarian mission .
and the scientific mission would be to test the limits of visual plasticity .
and these two missions , as you can tell , thread together perfectly . one adds to the other ; in fact , one would be impossible without the other .
so , to implement these twin missions , a few years ago , i launched project prakash .
prakash , as many of you know , is the sanskrit word for light , and the idea is that in bringing light into the lives of children , we also have a chance of shedding light on some of the deepest mysteries of neuroscience .
and the logo - even though it looks extremely irish , it 's actually derived from the indian symbol of diya , an earthen lamp .
the prakash , the overall effort has three components : outreach , to identify children in need of care ; medical treatment ; and in subsequent study .
and i want to show you a short video clip that illustrates the first two components of this work .
this is an outreach station conducted at a school for the blind .
-lrb- text : most of the children are profoundly and permanently blind ... -rrb- pawan sinha : so , because this is a school for the blind , many children have permanent conditions .
that 's a case of microphthalmos , which is malformed eyes , and that 's a permanent condition ; it can not be treated .
that 's an extreme of micropthalmos called enophthalmos .
but , every so often , we come across children who show some residual vision , and that is a very good sign that the condition might actually be treatable .
so , after that screening , we bring the children to the hospital .
that 's the hospital we 're working with in delhi , the schroff charity eye hospital .
it has a very well-equipped pediatric ophthalmic center , which was made possible in part by a gift from the ronald mcdonald charity .
so , eating burgers actually helps .
-lrb- text : such examinations allow us to improve eye-health in many children , and ...
... help us find children who can participate in project prakash . -rrb- ps : so , as i zoom in to the eyes of this child , you will see the cause of his blindness .
the whites that you see in the middle of his pupils are congenital cataracts , so opacities of the lens .
in our eyes , the lens is clear , but in this child , the lens has become opaque , and therefore he ca n't see the world .
so , the child is given treatment . you 'll see shots of the eye .
here 's the eye with the opaque lens , the opaque lens extracted and an acrylic lens inserted .
and here 's the same child three weeks post-operation , with the right eye open .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , even from that little clip , you can begin to get the sense that recovery is possible , and we have now provided treatment to over 200 children , and the story repeats itself .
after treatment , the child gains significant functionality .
in fact , the story holds true even if you have a person who got sight after several years of deprivation .
we did a paper a few years ago about this woman that you see on the right , srd , and she got her sight late in life , and her vision is remarkable at this age .
i should add a tragic postscript to this - she died two years ago in a bus accident .
so , hers is just a truly inspiring story - unknown , but inspiring story .
so when we started finding these results , as you might imagine , it created quite a bit of stir in the scientific and the popular press .
here 's an article in nature that profiled this work , and another one in time .
so , we were fairly convinced - we are convinced - that recovery is feasible , despite extended visual deprivation .
the next obvious question to ask : what is the process of recovery ?
so , the way we study that is , let 's say we find a child who has light sensitivity .
the child is provided treatment , and i want to stress that the treatment is completely unconditional ; there is no quid pro quo .
we treat many more children then we actually work with .
every child who needs treatment is treated .
after treatment , about every week , we run the child on a battery of simple visual tests in order to see how their visual skills are coming on line .
and we try to do this for as long as possible .
this arc of development gives us unprecedented and extremely valuable information about how the scaffolding of vision gets set up .
what might be the causal connections between the early developing skills and the later developing ones ?
and we 've used this general approach to study many different visual proficiencies , but i want to highlight one particular one , and that is image parsing into objects .
so , any image of the kind that you see on the left , be it a real image or a synthetic image , it 's made up of little regions that you see in the middle column , regions of different colors , different luminances .
the brain has this complex task of putting together , integrating , subsets of these regions into something that 's more meaningful , into what we would consider to be objects , as you see on the right .
and nobody knows how this integration happens , and that 's the question we asked with project prakash .
so , here 's what happens very soon after the onset of sight .
here 's a person who had gained sight just a couple of weeks ago , and you see ethan myers , a graduate student from mit , running the experiment with him .
his visual-motor coordination is quite poor , but you get a general sense of what are the regions that he 's trying to trace out .
if you show him real world images , if you show others like him real world images , they are unable to recognize most of the objects because the world to them is over-fragmented ; it 's made up of a collage , a patchwork , of regions of different colors and luminances .
and that 's what 's indicated in the green outlines .
when you ask them , " even if you ca n't name the objects , just point to where the objects are , " these are the regions that they point to .
so the world is this complex patchwork of regions .
even the shadow on the ball becomes its own object .
interestingly enough , you give them a few months , and this is what happens .
doctor : how many are these ?
patient : these are two things .
doctor : what are their shapes ?
patient : their shapes ...
this one is a circle , and this is a square .
ps : a very dramatic transformation has come about .
and the question is : what underlies this transformation ?
it 's a profound question , and what 's even more amazing is how simple the answer is .
the answer lies in motion and that 's what i want to show you in the next clip .
doctor : what shape do you see here ?
patient : i ca n't make it out .
doctor : now ?
patient : triangle .
doctor : how many things are these ?
now , how many things are these ?
patient : two .
doctor : what are these things ?
patient : a square and a circle .
ps : and we see this pattern over and over again .
the one thing the visual system needs in order to begin parsing the world is dynamic information .
so the inference we are deriving from this , and several such experiments , is that dynamic information processing , or motion processing , serves as the bedrock for building the rest of the complexity of visual processing ; it leads to visual integration and eventually to recognition .
this simple idea has far reaching implications .
and let me just quickly mention two , one , drawing from the domain of engineering , and one from the clinic .
so , from the perspective of engineering , we can ask : goven that we know that motion is so important for the human visual system , can we use this as a recipe for constructing machine-based vision systems that can learn on their own , that do n't need to be programmed by a human programmer ?
and that 's what we 're trying to do .
i 'm at mit , at mit you need to apply whatever basic knowledge you gain .
so we are creating dylan , which is a computational system with an ambitious goal of taking in visual inputs of the same kind that a human child would receive , and autonomously discovering : what are the objects in this visual input ?
so , do n't worry about the internals of dylan .
here , i 'm just going to talk about how we test dylan .
the way we test dylan is by giving it inputs , as i said , of the same kind that a baby , or a child in project prakash would get .
but for a long time we could n't quite figure out : wow can we get these kinds of video inputs ?
so , i thought , could we have darius serve as our babycam carrier , and that way get the inputs that we feed into dylan ?
so that 's what we did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i had to have long conversations with my wife .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , pam , if you 're watching this , please forgive me .
so , we modified the optics of the camera in order to mimic the baby 's visual acuity .
as some of you might know , babyies are born pretty much legally blind .
their acuity - our acuity is 20/20 ; babies ' acuity is like 20/800 , so they are looking at the world in a very , very blurry fashion .
here 's what a baby-cam video looks like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thankfully , there is n't any audio to go with this .
what 's amazing is that working with such highly degraded input , the baby , very quickly , is able to discover meaning in such input .
but then two or three days afterward , babies begin to pay attention to their mother 's or their father 's face .
how does that happen ? we want dylan to be able to do that , and using this mantra of motion , dylan actually can do that .
so , given that kind of video input , with just about six or seven minutes worth of video , dylan can begin to extract patterns that include faces .
so , it 's an important demonstration of the power of motion .
the clinical implication , it comes from the domain of autism .
visual integration has been associated with autism by several researchers .
when we saw that , we asked : could the impairment in visual integration be the manifestation of something underneath , of dynamic information processing deficiencies in autism ?
because , if that hypothesis were to be true , it would have massive repercussions in our understanding of what 's causing the many different aspects of the autism phenotype .
what you 're going to see are video clips of two children - one neurotypical , one with autism , playing pong .
so , while the child is playing pong , we are tracking where they 're looking .
in red are the eye movement traces .
this is the neurotypical child , and what you see is that the child is able to make cues of the dynamic information to predict where the ball is going to go .
even before the ball gets to a place , the child is already looking there .
contrast this with a child with autism playing the same game .
instead of anticipating , the child always follows where the ball has been .
the efficiency of the use of dynamic information seems to be significantly compromised in autism .
so we are pursuing this line of work and hopefully we 'll have more results to report soon .
looking ahead , if you think of this disk as representing all of the children we 've treated so far , this is the magnitude of the problem .
the red dots are the children we have not treated .
so , there are many , many more children who need to be treated , and in order to expand the scope of the project , we are planning on launching the prakash center for children , which will have a dedicated pediatric hospital , a school for the children we are treating and also a cutting-edge research facility .
the prakash center will integrate health care , education and research in a way that truly creates the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts .
so , to summarize : prakash , in its five years of existence , it 's had an impact in multiple areas , ranging from basic neuroscience plasticity and learning in the brain , to clinically relevant hypotheses like in autism , the development of autonomous machine vision systems , education of the undergraduate and graduate students , and most importantly in the alleviation of childhood blindness .
and for my students and i , it 's been just a phenomenal experience because we have gotten to do interesting research , while at the same time helping the many children that we have worked with .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i collaborate with bacteria .
and i 'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that i made recently where you 'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour .
so what you 're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing , and as they do so they create an electrical charge .
and this attracts metals from their local environment .
and these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria .
one of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water .
and the desalination process is one where we take out salts .
we can use it for drinking and agriculture .
removing the salts from water - particularly seawater - through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe .
so seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology .
we take the water from the sea and we apply pressure .
and this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane .
this takes energy , producing clean water .
but we 're also left with a concentrated salt solution , or brine .
but the process is very expensive and it 's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe .
and also , the brine that 's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea .
and this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it 's pumped back out into .
so i work in singapore at the moment , and this is a place that 's really a leading place for desalination technology .
and singapore proposes by 2060 to produce -lsb- 900 -rsb- million liters per day of desalinated water .
but this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine .
and this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play .
so what we 're doing at the moment like calcium , potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine .
and this , in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that i just mentioned , equates to a $ 4.5 billion mining industry for singapore - a place that does n't have any natural resources .
so i 'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one has n't existed before ; imagine a mining industry that does n't mean defiling the earth ; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine .
and what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube , a mining industry that is in harmony with nature .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think we 're all aware that the world today is full of problems .
we 've been hearing them today and yesterday and every day for decades .
serious problems , big problems , pressing problems .
poor nutrition , access to water , climate change , deforestation , lack of skills , insecurity , not enough food , not enough healthcare , pollution .
there 's problem after problem , and i think what really separates this time from any time i can remember in my brief time on earth is the awareness of these problems .
we 're all very aware .
why are we having so much trouble dealing with these problems ?
that 's the question i 've been struggling with , coming from my very different perspective .
i 'm not a social problem guy .
i 'm a guy that works with business , helps business make money .
god forbid .
so why are we having so many problems with these social problems , and really is there any role for business , and if so , what is that role ?
i think that in order to address that question , we have to step back and think about how we 've understood and pondered both the problems and the solutions to these great social challenges that we face .
now , i think many have seen business as the problem , or at least one of the problems , in many of the social challenges we face .
you know , think of the fast food industry , the drug industry , the banking industry .
you know , this is a low point in the respect for business .
business is not seen as the solution .
it 's seen as the problem now , for most people .
and rightly so , in many cases .
there 's a lot of bad actors out there that have done the wrong thing , that actually have made the problem worse .
so this perspective is perhaps justified .
how have we tended to see the solutions to these social problems , these many issues that we face in society ?
well , we 've tended to see the solutions in terms of ngos , in terms of philanthropy .
indeed , the kind of unique organizational entity of this age is this tremendous rise of ngos and social organizations .
this is a unique , new organizational form that we 've seen grown up .
enormous innovation , enormous energy , enormous talent now has been mobilized through this structure to try to deal with all of these challenges .
and many of us here are deeply involved in that .
i 'm a business school professor , but i 've actually founded , i think , now , four nonprofits .
whenever i got interested and became aware of a societal problem , that was what i did , form a nonprofit .
that was the way we 've thought about how to deal with these issues .
even a business school professor has thought about it that way .
but i think at this moment , we 've been at this for quite a while .
we 've been aware of these problems for decades .
we have decades of experience with our ngos and with our government entities , and there 's an awkward reality .
the awkward reality is we 're not making fast enough progress .
we 're not winning .
these problems still seem very daunting and very intractable , and any solutions we 're achieving are small solutions .
we 're making incremental progress .
what 's the fundamental problem we have in dealing with these social problems ?
if we cut all the complexity away , we have the problem of scale .
we ca n't scale .
we can make progress . we can show benefits .
we can show results . we can make things better .
we 're helping . we 're doing better . we 're doing good .
we ca n't scale .
we ca n't make a large-scale impact on these problems .
why is that ?
because we do n't have the resources .
and that 's really clear now .
and that 's clearer now than it 's been for decades .
there 's simply not enough money to deal with any of these problems at scale using the current model .
there 's not enough tax revenue , there 's not enough philanthropic donations , to deal with these problems the way we 're dealing with them now .
we 've got to confront that reality .
and the scarcity of resources for dealing with these problems is only growing , certainly in the advanced world today , with all the fiscal problems we face .
so if it 's fundamentally a resource problem , where are the resources in society ?
how are those resources really created , the resources we 're going to need to deal with all these societal challenges ?
well there , i think the answer is very clear : they 're in business .
all wealth is actually created by business .
business creates wealth when it meets needs at a profit .
that 's how all wealth is created .
it 's meeting needs at a profit that leads to taxes and that leads to incomes and that leads to charitable donations .
that 's where all the resources come from .
only business can actually create resources .
other institutions can utilize them to do important work , but only business can create them .
and business creates them when it 's able to meet a need at a profit .
the resources are overwhelmingly generated by business .
the question then is , how do we tap into this ?
how do we tap into this ?
business generates those resources when it makes a profit .
that profit is that small difference between the price and the cost it takes to produce whatever solution business has created to whatever problem they 're trying to solve .
but that profit is the magic .
why ? because that profit allows whatever solution we 've created to be infinitely scalable .
because if we can make a profit , we can do it for 10 , 100 , a million , 100 million , a billion .
the solution becomes self-sustaining .
that 's what business does when it makes a profit .
now what does this all have to do with social problems ?
well , one line of thinking is , let 's take this profit and redeploy it into social problems .
business should give more .
business should be more responsible .
and that 's been the path that we 've been on in business .
but again , this path that we 've been on is not getting us where we need to go .
now , i started out as a strategy professor , and i 'm still a strategy professor .
i 'm proud of that .
but i 've also , over the years , worked more and more on social issues .
i 've worked on healthcare , the environment , economic development , reducing poverty , and as i worked more and more in the social field , i started seeing something that had a profound impact on me and my whole life , in a way .
the conventional wisdom in economics and the view in business has historically been that actually , there 's a tradeoff between social performance and economic performance .
the conventional wisdom has been that business actually makes a profit by causing a social problem .
the classic example is pollution .
if business pollutes , it makes more money than if it tried to reduce that pollution .
reducing pollution is expensive , therefore businesses do n't want to do it .
it 's profitable to have an unsafe working environment .
it 's too expensive to have a safe working environment , therefore business makes more money if they do n't have a safe working environment .
that 's been the conventional wisdom .
a lot of companies have fallen into that conventional wisdom .
they resisted environmental improvement .
they resisted workplace improvement .
that thinking has led to , i think , much of the behavior that we have come to criticize in business , that i come to criticize in business .
but the more deeply i got into all these social issues , one after another , and actually , the more i tried to address them myself , personally , in a few cases , through nonprofits that i was involved with , the more i found actually that the reality is the opposite .
business does not profit from causing social problems , actually not in any fundamental sense .
that 's a very simplistic view .
the deeper we get into these issues , the more we start to understand that actually business profits from solving from social problems .
that 's where the real profit comes .
let 's take pollution .
we 've learned today that actually reducing pollution and emissions is generating profit .
it saves money .
it makes the business more productive and efficient .
it does n't waste resources .
having a safer working environment actually , and avoiding accidents , it makes the business more profitable , because it 's a sign of good processes .
accidents are expensive and costly .
issue by issue by issue , we start to learn that actually there 's no trade-off between social progress and economic efficiency in any fundamental sense .
another issue is health .
i mean , what we 've found is actually health of employees is something that business should treasure , because that health allows those employees to be more productive and come to work and not be absent .
the deeper work , the new work , the new thinking on the interface between business and social problems is actually showing that there 's a fundamental , deep synergy , particularly if you 're not thinking in the very short run .
in the very short run , you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking that there 's fundamentally opposing goals , but in the long run , ultimately , we 're learning in field after field that this is simply not true .
so how could we tap into the power of business to address the fundamental problems that we face ?
imagine if we could do that , because if we could do it , we could scale .
we could tap into this enormous resource pool and this organizational capacity .
and guess what ? that 's happening now , finally , partly because of people like you who have raised these issues now for year after year and decade after decade .
we see organizations like dow chemical leading the revolution away from trans fat and saturated fat with innovative new products .
this is an example of jain irrigation .
this is a company that 's brought drip irrigation technology to thousands and millions of farmers , reducing substantially the use of water .
we see companies like the brazilian forestry company fibria that 's figured out how to avoid tearing down old growth forest and using eucalyptus and getting much more yield per hectare of pulp and making much more paper than you could make by cutting down those old trees .
you see companies like cisco that are training so far four million people in i.t. skills to actually , yes , be responsible , but help expand the opportunity to disseminate i.t. technology and grow the whole business .
there 's a fundamental opportunity for business today to impact and address these social problems , and this opportunity is the largest business opportunity we see in business .
and the question is , how can we get business thinking to adapt this issue of shared value ?
this is what i call shared value : addressing a social issue with a business model .
that 's shared value .
shared value is capitalism , but it 's a higher kind of capitalism .
it 's capitalism as it was ultimately meant to be , meeting important needs , not incrementally competing for trivial differences in product attributes and market share .
shared value is when we can create social value and economic value simultaneously .
it 's finding those opportunities that will unleash the greatest possibility we have to actually address these social problems because we can scale .
we can address shared value at multiple levels .
it 's real . it 's happening .
but in order to get this solution working , we have to now change how business sees itself , and this is thankfully underway .
businesses got trapped into the conventional wisdom that they should n't worry about social problems , that this was sort of something on the side , that somebody else was doing it .
we 're now seeing companies embrace this idea .
but we also have to recognize business is not going to do this as effectively as if we have ngos and government working in partnership with business .
the new ngos that are really moving the needle are the ones that have found these partnerships , that have found these ways to collaborate .
the governments that are making the most progress are the governments that have found ways to enable shared value in business rather than see government as the only player that has to call the shots .
and government has many ways in which it could impact the willingness and the ability of companies to compete in this way .
i think if we can get business seeing itself differently , and if we can get others seeing business differently , we can change the world .
i know it . i 'm seeing it .
i 'm feeling it .
young people , i think , my harvard business school students , are getting it .
if we can break down this sort of divide , this unease , this tension , this sense that we 're not fundamentally collaborating here in driving these social problems , we can break this down , and we finally , i think , can have solutions .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader ?
see , i 've asked that question all the way across the country , and everywhere i ask it , no matter where , there 's always a huge portion of the audience that wo n't put up their hand .
and i 've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us .
we 've made into something beyond us .
we 've made it about changing the world .
and we 've taken this title of leader , and we treat it as if it 's something that one day we 're going to deserve , but to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we 're not comfortable with .
and i worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do that we 've convinced ourselves that those are the only things worth celebrating , and we start to devalue the things that we can do every day , and we start to take moments where we truly are a leader and we do n't let ourselves take credit for it , and we do n't let ourselves feel good about it .
and i 've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with some amazing people who have helped me redefine leadership in a way that i think has made me happier .
and with my short time today , i just want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition .
i went to school in a little school called mount allison university in sackville , new brunswick , and on my last day there , a girl came up to me and she said , " i remember the first time that i met you . "
and then she told me a story that had happened four years earlier .
she said , " on the day before i started university , i was in the hotel room with my mom and my dad , and i was so scared and so convinced that i could n't do this , that i was n't ready for university , that i just burst into tears .
and my mom and my dad were amazing . they were like , ' look , we know you 're scared , but let 's just go tomorrow .
let 's go to the first day , and if at any point you feel as if you ca n't do this , that 's fine , just tell us , we will take you home . we love you no matter what . " ' and she says , " so i went the next day and i was standing in line getting ready for registration , and i looked around and i just knew i could n't do it .
i knew i was n't ready . i knew i had to quit . "
and she says , " i made that decision , and as soon as i made it , there was this incredible feeling of peace that came over me .
and i turned to my mom and my dad to tell them that we needed to go home , and just at that moment , you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat i have ever seen in my life . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " it was awesome .
and you had a big sign promoting shinerama , which is students fighting cystic fibrosis , " - a charity i 've worked with for years - " and you had a bucketful of lollipops .
and you were walking along and you were handing the lollipops out to people in line and talking about shinerama .
and all of a sudden , you got to me , and you just stopped , and you stared . it was creepy . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- this girl right here knows exactly what i 'm talking about . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and then you looked at the guy next to me , and you smiled , and you reached in your bucket , and you pulled out a lollipop , and you held it out to him , and you said , ' you need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman standing next to you . " ' and she said , " i have never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life .
he turned beet red , and he would n't even look at me .
he just kind of held the lollipop out like this . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and i felt so bad for this dude that i took the lollipop , and as soon as i did , you got this incredibly severe look on your face and you looked at my mom and my dad , and you said , ' look at that . look at that .
first day away from home , and already she 's taking candy from a stranger ? ! " ' -lrb- laughter -rrb- and she said , " everybody lost it . twenty feet in every direction , everyone started to howl .
and i know this is cheesy , and i do n't know why i 'm telling you this , but in that moment when everyone was laughing , i knew that i should n't quit .
i knew that i was where i was supposed to be , and i knew that i was home , and i have n't spoken to you once in the four years since that day , but i heard that you were leaving , and i had to come up and tell you that you 've been an incredibly important person in my life , and i 'm going to miss you . good luck . "
and she walks away , and i 'm flattened .
and she gets about six feet away , she turns around and smiles , and goes , " you should probably know this , too .
i 'm still dating that guy four years later . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- a year and a half after i moved to toronto , i got an invitation to their wedding .
here 's the kicker . i do n't remember that .
i have no recollection of that moment , and i 've searched my memory banks , because that is funny and i should remember doing it , and i do n't remember it .
and that was such an eye-opening , transformative moment for me to think that maybe the biggest impact i 'd ever had on anyone 's life , a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say , " you 've been an incredibly important person in my life , " was a moment that i did n't even remember .
how many of you guys have a lollipop moment , a moment where someone said something or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better ?
all right . how many of you have told that person they did it ?
see , why not ? we celebrate birthdays , where all you have to do is not die for 365 days - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it .
and every single one of you , every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment .
you have made someone 's life better by something that you said or that you did , and if you think you have n't , think about all the hands that did n't go back up when i asked that question .
you 're just one of the people who has n't been told .
but it is so scary to think of ourselves as that powerful .
it can be frightening to think that we can matter that much to other people , because as long as we make leadership something bigger than us , as long as we keep leadership something beyond us , as long as we make it about changing the world , we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day from ourselves and from each other .
marianne williamson said , " our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate .
our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure .
it is our light , and not our darkness , that frightens us . "
and my call to action today is that we need to get over that .
we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other 's lives .
we need to get over it so we can move beyond it , and our little brothers and our little sisters , and one day our kids - or our kids right now - can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other 's lives more than money and power and titles and influence .
we need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments , how many of them we create , how many of them we acknowledge , how many of them we pay forward , and how many of them we say thank you for .
because we 've made leadership about changing the world , and there is no world . there 's only six billion understandings of it , and if you change one person 's understanding of it , one person 's understanding of what they 're capable of , one person 's understanding of how much people care about them , one person 's understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world , you 've changed the whole thing .
and if we can understand leadership like that , i think if we can redefine leadership like that , i think we can change everything .
and it 's a simple idea , but i do n't think it 's a small one , and i want to thank you all so much for letting me share it with you today .
i 'm going to be talking to you about how we can tap a really underutilized resource in health care , which is the patient , or , as i like to use the scientific term , people .
because we are all patients , we are all people .
even doctors are patients at some point .
so i want to talk about that as an opportunity that we really have failed to engage with very well in this country and , in fact , worldwide .
if you want to get at the big part - i mean from a public health level , where my training is - you 're looking at behavioral issues .
you 're looking at things where people are actually given information , and they 're not following through with it .
it 's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes , obesity , many forms of heart disease , even some forms of cancer - when you think of smoking .
those are all behaviors where people know what they 're supposed to do .
they know what they 're supposed to be doing , but they 're not doing it .
now behavior change is something that is a long-standing problem in medicine .
it goes all the way back to aristotle .
and doctors hate it , right ?
i mean , they complain about it all the time .
we talk about it in terms of engagement , or non-compliance .
when people do n't take their pills , when people do n't follow doctors ' orders - these are behavior problems .
but for as much as clinical medicine agonizes over behavior change , there 's not a lot of work done in terms of trying to fix that problem .
so the crux of it comes down to this notion of decision-making - giving information to people in a form that does n't just educate them or inform them , but actually leads them to make better decisions , better choices in their lives .
one part of medicine , though , has faced the problem of behavior change pretty well , and that 's dentistry .
dentistry might seem - and i think it is - many dentists would have to acknowledge it 's somewhat of a mundane backwater of medicine .
not a lot of cool , sexy stuff happening in dentistry .
but they have really taken this problem of behavior change and solved it .
it 's the one great preventive health success we have in our health care system .
people brush and floss their teeth .
they do n't do it as much as they should , but they do it .
so i 'm going to talk about one experiment that a few dentists in connecticut cooked up about 30 years ago .
so this is an old experiment , but it 's a really good one , because it was very simple , so it 's an easy story to tell .
so these connecticut dentists decided that they wanted to get people to brush their teeth and floss their teeth more often , and they were going to use one variable : they wanted to scare them .
they wanted to tell them how bad it would be if they did n't brush and floss their teeth .
they had a big patient population .
they divided them up into two groups .
they had a low-fear population , where they basically gave them a 13-minute presentation , all based in science , but told them that , if you did n't brush and floss your teeth , you could get gum disease . if you get gum disease , you will lose your teeth , but you 'll get dentures , and it wo n't be that bad .
so that was the low-fear group .
the high-fear group , they laid it on really thick .
they showed bloody gums .
they showed puss oozing out from between their teeth .
they told them that their teeth were going to fall out .
they said that they could have infections that would spread from their jaws to other parts of their bodies , and ultimately , yes , they would lose their teeth .
they would get dentures , and if you got dentures , you were n't going to be able to eat corn-on-the-cob , you 'll eat mush for the rest of your life .
so go brush and floss your teeth .
that was the message . that was the experiment .
now they measured one other variable .
they wanted to capture one other variable , which was the patients ' sense of efficacy .
this was the notion of whether the patients felt that they actually would go ahead and brush and floss their teeth .
so they asked them at the beginning , " do you think you 'll actually be able to stick with this program ? "
and the people who said , " yeah , yeah . i 'm pretty good about that , " they were characterized as high efficacy , and the people who said , " eh , i never get around to brushing and flossing as much as i should , " they were characterized as low efficacy .
so the upshot was this .
the upshot of this experiment was that fear was not really a primary driver of the behavior at all .
the people who brushed and flossed their teeth were not necessarily the people who were really scared about what would happen - it 's the people who simply felt that they had the capacity to change their behavior .
so fear showed up as not really the driver .
it was the sense of efficacy .
so i want to isolate this , because it was a great observation - 30 years ago , right , 30 years ago - and it 's one that 's laid fallow in research .
it was a notion that really came out of albert bandura 's work , who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment .
the notion of efficacy basically boils down to one - that if somebody believes that they have the capacity to change their behavior .
in health care terms , you could characterize this as whether or not somebody feels that they see a path towards better health , that they can actually see their way towards getting better health , and that 's a very important notion .
it 's an amazing notion .
we do n't really know how to manipulate it , though , that well .
except , maybe we do .
so fear does n't work , right ? fear does n't work .
and this is a great example of how we have n't learned that lesson at all .
this is a campaign from the american diabetes association .
this is still the way we 're communicating messages about health .
i mean , i showed my three-year-old this slide last night , and he 's like , " papa , why is an ambulance in these people 's homes ? "
and i had to explain , " they 're trying to scare people . "
and i do n't know if it works .
now here 's what does work : personalized information works .
again , bandura recognized this years ago , decades ago .
when you give people specific information about their health , where they stand , and where they want to get to , where they might get to , that path , that notion of a path - that tends to work for behavior change .
so let me just spool it out a little bit .
so you start with personalized data , personalized information that comes from an individual , and then you need to connect it to their lives .
you need to connect it to their lives , hopefully not in a fear-based way , but one that they understand .
okay , i know where i sit . i know where i 'm situated .
and that does n't just work for me in terms of abstract numbers - this overload of health information that we 're inundated with .
but it actually hits home .
it 's not just hitting us in our heads ; it 's hitting us in our hearts .
there 's an emotional connection to information because it 's from us .
that information then needs to be connected to choices , needs to be connected to a range of options , directions that we might go to - trade-offs , benefits .
finally , we need to be presented with a clear point of action .
we need to connect the information always with the action , and then that action feeds back into different information , and it creates , of course , a feedback loop .
now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change .
but the problem is that things - in the upper-right corner there - personalized data , it 's been pretty hard to come by .
it 's a difficult and expensive commodity , until now .
so i 'm going to give you an example , a very simple example of how this works .
so we 've all seen these . these are the " your speed limit " signs .
you 've seen them all around , especially these days as radars are cheaper .
and here 's how they work in the feedback loop .
so you start with the personalized data where the speed limit on the road that you are at that point is 25 , and , of course , you 're going faster than that .
we always are . we 're always going above the speed limit .
the choice in this case is pretty simple .
we either keep going fast , or we slow down .
we should probably slow down , and that point of action is probably now .
we should take our foot off the pedal right now , and generally we do . these things are shown to be pretty effective in terms of getting people to slow down .
they reduce speeds by about five to 10 percent .
they last for about five miles , in which case we put our foot back on the pedal .
but it works , and it even has some health repercussions .
your blood pressure might drop a little bit .
maybe there 's fewer accidents , so there 's public health benefits .
but by and large , this is a feedback loop that 's so nifty and too rare .
because in health care , most health care , the data is very removed from the action .
it 's very difficult to line things up so neatly .
but we have an opportunity .
so i want to talk about , i want to shift now to think about how we deliver health information in this country , how we actually get information .
this is a pharmaceutical ad .
actually , it 's a spoof . it 's not a real pharmaceutical ad .
nobody 's had the brilliant idea of calling their drug havidol quite yet .
but it looks completely right .
so it 's exactly the way we get health information and pharmaceutical information , and it just sounds perfect .
and then we turn the page of the magazine , and we see this - now this is the page the fda requires pharmaceutical companies to put into their ads , or to follow their ads , and to me , this is one of the most cynical exercises in medicine .
because we know .
who among us would actually say that people read this ?
and who among us would actually say that people who do try to read this actually get anything out of it ?
this is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information .
there is no good faith in this .
so this is a different approach .
this is an approach that has been developed by a couple researchers at dartmouth medical school , lisa schwartz and steven woloshin .
and they created this thing called the " drug facts box . "
they took inspiration from , of all things , cap 'n crunch .
they went to the nutritional information box and saw that what works for cereal , works for our food , actually helps people understand what 's in their food .
god forbid we should use that same standard that we make cap 'n crunch live by and bring it to drug companies .
so let me just walk through this quickly .
it says very clearly what the drug is for , specifically who it is good for , so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you .
you can understand exactly what the benefits are .
it is n't this kind of vague promise that it 's going to work no matter what , but you get the statistics for how effective it is .
and finally , you understand what those choices are .
you can start to unpack the choices involved because of the side effects .
every time you take a drug , you 're walking into a possible side effect .
so it spells those out in very clean terms , and that works .
so i love this . i love that drug facts box .
and so i was thinking about , what 's an opportunity that i could have to help people understand information ?
what 's another latent body of information that 's out there that people are really not putting to use ?
and so i came up with this : lab test results .
blood test results are this great source of information .
they 're packed with information .
they 're just not for us . they 're not for people . they 're not for patients .
they go right to doctors .
and god forbid - i think many doctors , if you really asked them , they do n't really understand all this stuff either .
this is the worst presented information .
you ask tufte , and he would say , " yes , this is the absolute worst presentation of information possible . "
what we did at wired was we went , and i got our graphic design department to re-imagine these lab reports .
so that 's what i want to walk you through .
so this is the general blood work before , and this is the after , this is what we came up with .
the after takes what was four pages - that previous slide was actually the first of four pages of data that 's just the general blood work .
it goes on and on and on , all these values , all these numbers you do n't know .
this is our one-page summary .
we use the notion of color .
it 's an amazing notion that color could be used .
so on the top-level you have your overall results , the things that might jump out at you from the fine print .
then you can drill down and understand how actually we put your level in context , and we use color to illustrate exactly where your value falls .
in this case , this patient is slightly at risk of diabetes because of their glucose level .
likewise , you can go over your lipids and , again , understand what your overall cholesterol level is and then break down into the hdl and the ldl if you so choose .
but again , always using color and personalized proximity to that information .
all those other values , all those pages and pages of values that are full of nothing , we summarize .
we tell you that you 're okay , you 're normal .
but you do n't have to wade through it . you do n't have to go through the junk .
and then we do two other very important things that kind of help fill in this feedback loop : we help people understand in a little more detail what these values are and what they might indicate .
and then we go a further step - we tell them what they can do .
we give them some insight into what choices they can make , what actions they can take .
so that 's our general blood work test .
then we went to crp test .
in this case , it 's a sin of omission .
they have this huge amount of space , and they do n't use it for anything , so we do .
now the crp test is often done following a cholesterol test , or in conjunction with a cholesterol test .
so we take the bold step of putting the cholesterol information on the same page , which is the way the doctor is going to evaluate it .
so we thought the patient might actually want to know the context as well .
it 's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed , which might be a risk for heart disease .
what you 're actually measuring is spelled out in clean language .
then we use the information that 's already in the lab report .
we use the person 's age and their gender to start to fill in the personalized risks .
so we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that 's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is .
the last one i 'll show you is a psa test .
here 's the before , and here 's the after .
now a lot of our effort on this one - as many of you probably know , a psa test is a very controversial test .
it 's used to test for prostate cancer , but there are all sorts of reasons why your prostate might be enlarged .
and so we spent a good deal of our time indicating that .
we again personalized the risks .
so this patient is in their 50s , so we can actually give them a very precise estimate of what their risk for prostate cancer is .
in this case it 's about 25 percent , based on that .
and then again , the follow-up actions .
so our cost for this was less than 10,000 dollars , all right .
that 's what wired magazine spent on this .
why is wired magazine doing this ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- quest diagnostics and labcorp , the two largest lab testing companies - last year , they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively .
now this is not a problem of resources ; this is a problem of incentives .
we need to recognize that the target of this information should not be the doctor , should not be the insurance company .
it should be the patient .
it 's the person who actually , in the end , is going to be having to change their lives and then start adopting new behaviors .
this is information that is incredibly powerful .
it 's an incredibly powerful catalyst to change .
but we 're not using it . it 's just sitting there .
it 's being lost .
so i want to just offer four questions that every patient should ask , because i do n't actually expect people to start developing these lab test reports .
but you can create your own feedback loop .
anybody can create their feedback loop by asking these simple questions : can i have my results ?
and the only acceptable answer is - -lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- - yes .
what does this mean ? help me understand what the data is .
what are my options ? what choices are now on the table ?
and then , what 's next ?
how do i integrate this information into the longer course of my life ?
so i want to wind up by just showing that people have the capacity to understand this information .
this is not beyond the grasp of ordinary people .
you do not need to have the education level of people in this room .
ordinary people are capable of understanding this information , if we only go to the effort of presenting it to them in a form that they can engage with .
and engagement is essential here , because it 's not just giving them information ; it 's giving them an opportunity to act .
that 's what engagement is . it 's different from compliance .
it works totally different from the way we talk about behavior in medicine today .
and this information is out there .
i 've been talking today about latent information , all this information that exists in the system that we 're not putting to use .
but there are all sorts of other bodies of information that are coming online , and we need to recognize the capacity of this information to engage people , to help people and to change the course of their lives .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am passionate about the american landscape and how the physical form of the land , from the great central valley of california to the bedrock of manhattan , has really shaped our history and our character .
but one thing is clear .
in the last 100 years alone , our country - and this is a sprawl map of america - our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we 've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet .
and so , how i see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them .
this graph represents what we 're dealing with now in the built environment .
and it 's really a conflux of urban population rising , biodiversity plummeting and also , of course , sea levels rising and climate changing .
so when i also think about design , i think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph and you can see from the arrow here indicating " you are here , " i 'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology , and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way .
so the era of big infrastructure is over .
i mean , these sort of top-down , mono-functional , capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it .
we need new tools and new approaches .
similarly , the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field , devoid of context , is really not the - excuse me , it 's fairly blatant - is really not the approach that we need to take .
so we need new stories , new heroes and new tools .
so now i want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war , and that is the eastern oyster .
so , albeit a very small creature and very modest , because it can agglomerate into these mega-reef structures .
it can grow ; you can grow it ; and - did i mention ? - it 's quite tasty .
so the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that i did about the new york harbor called " oyster-tecture . "
and the core idea of oyster-tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels , eelgrass and oysters - species that live in the harbor - and , at the same time , harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now .
here 's a map of my city , new york city , showing inundation in red .
and what 's circled is the site that i 'm going to talk about , the gowanus canal and governors island .
if you look here at this map , showing everything in blue is out in the water , and everything in yellow is upland .
but you can see , even just intuit , from this map , that the harbor has dredged and flattened , and went from a rich , three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years .
another set of views of actually the gowanus canal itself .
now the gowanus is particularly smelly - i will admit it .
there are problems of sewage overflow and contamination , but i would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition , and it 's a condition that we 're all facing .
and here 's a map of that condition , showing the contaminants in yellow and green , exacerbated by this new flow of storm-surge and sea-level rise .
so we really had a lot to deal with .
when we started this project , one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there .
and you can see from this map , there 's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement .
we also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the gowanus canal itself .
so our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept , harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern .
and the idea has two core stages .
one is to develop a new artificial ecology , a reef out in the harbor , that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the gowanus .
because if you have cleaner water and slower water , you can imagine a new way of living with that water .
so the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way , i think .
here we are , back to our hero , the oyster .
and again , it 's this incredibly exciting animal .
it accepts algae and detritus in one end , and through this beautiful , glamorous out the other end comes cleaner water .
and one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day .
oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days .
they were key in our culture and our economy .
basically , new york was built on the backs of oystermen , and our streets were literally built over oyster shells .
this image is an image of an oyster cart , which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today .
so again , we got the short end of the deal there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- finally , oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures .
they really become nature 's wave attenuators .
and they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem .
many , many species depend on them .
so we were inspired by the oyster , but i was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster .
it can move from a fertilized egg to a spat , which is when they 're floating through the water , and when they 're ready to attach onto another oyster , to an adult male oyster or female oyster , we reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the gowanus , then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the bayridge reef .
and so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive .
how does the reef work ? well , it 's very , very simple .
a core concept here is that climate change is n't something that - the answers wo n't land down from the moon .
and with a $ 20 billion price tag , we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what 's in front of us .
so this image is simply showing - it 's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope .
what is fuzzy rope , you ask ?
it 's just that ; it 's this very inexpensive thing , available practically at your hardware store , and it 's very cheap .
so we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so in the studio , rather than drawing , we began to learn how to knit .
the concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on .
you can see in the diagram how it grows over time from an infrastructural space into a new public urban space .
and that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change .
it also creates this incredibly interesting , i think , new amphibious public space , where you can imagine working , you can imagine recreating in a new way .
in the end , what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century - an amphibious park , if you will .
so get your tevas on .
so you can imagine scuba diving here .
this is an image of high school students , scuba divers that we worked with on our team .
so you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water , and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring .
another new vocabulary word for the brave new world : this is the word " flupsy " - it 's short for " floating upwelling system . "
and this glorious , readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below .
so the water is churned through this raft .
you can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them .
so rather than having 10 oysters , you have 10,000 oysters .
and then those spat are then seeded .
here 's the gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines - the flupsification of the gowanus .
new word .
and also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges .
and finally , how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef .
i get asked two questions about this project .
one is : why is n't it happening now ?
and the second one is : when can we eat the oysters ?
and the answer is : not yet , they 're working .
but we imagine , with our calculations , that by 2050 , you might be able to sink your teeth into a gowanus oyster .
to conclude , this is just one cross-section of one piece of city , but my dream is , my hope is , that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable , a more livable and a more delicious future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- once upon a time , there was a dread disease that afflicted children .
and in fact , among all the diseases that existed in this land , it was the worst . it killed the most children .
and along came a brilliant inventor , a scientist , who came up with a partial cure for that disease .
and it was n't perfect . many children still died , but it was certainly better than what they had before .
and one of the good things about this cure was that it was free , virtually free , and was very easy to use .
but the worst thing about it was that you could n't use it on the youngest children , on infants , and on one-year-olds .
and so , as a consequence , a few years later , another scientist - perhaps maybe this scientist not quite as brilliant as the one who had preceded him , but building on the invention of the first one - came up with a second cure .
and the beauty of the second cure for this disease was that it could be used on infants and one-year-olds .
and the problem with this cure was it was very expensive , and it was very complicated to use .
and although parents tried as hard as they could to use it properly , almost all of them ended up using it wrong in the end .
but what they did , of course , since it was so complicated and expensive , they only used it on the zero-year-olds and the one-year-olds .
and they kept on using the existing cure that they had on the two-year-olds and up .
and this went on for quite some time . people were happy .
they had their two cures . until a particular mother , whose child had just turned two , died of this disease .
and she thought to herself , " my child just turned two , and until the child turned two , i had always used this complicated , expensive cure , you know , this treatment .
and then the child turned two , and i started using the cheap and easy treatment , and i wonder " - and she wondered , like all parents who lose children wonder - " if there is n't something that i could have done , like keep on using that complicated , expensive cure . "
and she told all the other people , and she said , " how could it possibly be that something that 's cheap and simple works as well as something that 's complicated and expensive ? "
and the people thought , " you know , you 're right .
it probably is the wrong thing to do to switch and use the cheap and simple solution . "
and the government , they heard her story and the other people , and they said , " yeah , you 're right , we should make a law .
we should outlaw this cheap and simple treatment and not let anybody use this on their children . "
and the people were happy . they were satisfied .
for many years this went along , and everything was fine .
but then along came a lowly economist , who had children himself , and he used the expensive and complicated treatment .
but he knew about the cheap and simple one .
and he thought about it , and the expensive one did n't seem that great to him . so he thought , " i do n't know anything about science , but i do know something about data , so maybe i should go and look at the data and see whether this expensive and complicated treatment actually works any better than the cheap and simple one . "
and lo and behold , when he went through the data , he found that it did n't look like the expensive , complicated solution was any better than the cheap one , at least for the children who were two and older - the cheap one still did n't work on the kids who were younger .
and so , he went forth to the people and he said , " i 've made this wonderful finding : it looks as if we could just use the cheap and simple solution , and by doing so we could save ourselves 300 million dollars a year , and we could spend that on our children in other ways . "
and the parents were very unhappy , and they said , " this is a terrible thing , because how can the cheap and easy thing be as good as the hard thing ? " and the government was very upset .
and in particular , the people who made this expensive solution were very upset because they thought , " how can we hope to compete with something that 's essentially free ?
we would lose all of our market . "
and people were very angry , and they called him horrible names .
and he decided that maybe he should leave the country for a few days , and seek out some more intelligent , open-minded people in a place called oxford , and come and try and tell the story at that place .
and so , anyway , here i am . it 's not a fairy tale .
it 's a true story about the united states today , and the disease i 'm referring to is actually motor vehicle accidents for children .
and the free cure is adult seatbelts , and the expensive cure - the 300-million-dollar-a-year cure - is child car seats .
and what i 'd like to talk to you about today is some of the evidence why i believe this to be true : that for children two years old and up , there really is no real benefit - proven benefit - of car seats , in spite of the incredible energy that has been devoted toward expanding the laws and making it socially unacceptable to put your children into seatbelts . and then talk about why - what is it that makes that true ?
and then , finally talk a little bit about a third way , about another technology , which is probably better than anything we have , but which - there has n't been any enthusiasm for adoption precisely because people are so enamored with the current car seat solution . ok .
so , many times when you try to do research on data , it records complicated stories - it 's hard to find in the data .
it does n't turn out to be the case when you look at seatbelts versus car seats .
so the united states keeps a data set of every fatal accident that 's happened since 1975 .
so in every car crash in which at least one person dies , they have information on all of the people .
so if you look at that data - it 's right up on the national highway transportation safety administration 's website - you can just look at the raw data , and begin to get a sense of the limited amount of evidence that 's in favor of car seats for children aged two and up .
so , here is the data . here i have , among two- to six-year-olds - anyone above six , basically no one uses car seats , so you ca n't compare - 29.3 percent of the children who are unrestrained in a crash in which at least one person dies , themselves die .
if you put a child in a car seat , 18.2 percent of the children die .
if they 're wearing a lap-and-shoulder belt , in this raw data , 19.4 percent die . and interestingly , wearing a lap-only seatbelt , 16.7 percent die . and actually , the theory tells you that the lap-only seatbelt 's got to be worse than the lap-and-shoulder belt . and that just reminds you that when you deal with raw data , there are hundreds of confounding variables that may be getting in the way .
so what we do in the study is - and this is just presenting the same information , but turned into a figure to make it easier .
so the yellow bar represents car seats , the orange bar lap-and-shoulder , and the red bar lap-only seatbelts .
and this is all relative to unrestrained - the bigger the bar , the better . okay .
so , this is the data i just showed , ok ?
so the highest bar is what you 're striving to beat .
so you can control for the basic things , like how hard the crash was , what seat the child was sitting in , etc . , the age of the child .
and that 's that middle set of bars .
and so , you can see that the lap-only seatbelts start to look worse once you do that .
and then finally , the last set of bars , which are really controlling for everything you could possibly imagine about the crash , 50 , 75 , 100 different characteristics of the crash .
and what you find is that the car seats and the lap-and-shoulder belts , when it comes to saving lives , fatalities look exactly identical .
and the standard error bands are relatively small around these estimates as well .
and it 's not just overall . it 's very robust to anything you want to look at .
one thing that 's interesting : if you look at frontal-impact crashes - when the car crashes , the front hits into something - indeed , what you see is that the car seats look a little bit better .
and i think this is n't just chance .
in order to have the car seat approved , you need to pass certain federal standards , all of which involve slamming your car into a direct frontal crash .
but when you look at other types of crashes , like rear-impact crashes , indeed , the car seats do n't perform as well .
and i think that 's because they 've been optimized to pass , as we always expect people to do , to optimize relative to bright-line rules about how affected the car will be .
and the other thing you might argue is , " well , car seats have got a lot better over time .
and so if we look at recent crashes - the whole data set is almost 30 years ' worth of data - you wo n't see it in the recent crashes . the new car seats are far , far better . "
but indeed , in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts , actually , are doing even better than the car seats .
they say , " well , that 's impossible , that ca n't be . "
and the line of argument , if you ask parents , is , " but car seats are so expensive and complicated , and they have this big tangle of latches , how could they possibly not work better than seatbelts because they are so expensive and complicated ? "
it 's kind of an interesting logic , i think , that people use . and the other logic , they say , " well , the government would n't have told us -lsb- to -rsb- use them if they were n't much better . "
but what 's interesting is the government telling us to use them is not actually based on very much .
it really is based on some impassioned pleas of parents whose children died after they turned two , which has led to the passage of all these laws - not very much on data .
so you can only get so far , i think , in telling your story by using these abstract statistics .
and so i had some friends over to dinner , and i was asking - we had a cookout - i was asking them what advice they might have for me about proving my point . they said , " why do n't you run some crash tests ? "
and i said , " that 's a great idea . "
so we actually tried to commission some crash tests .
and it turns out that as we called around to the independent crash test companies around the country , none of them wanted to do our crash test because they said , some explicitly , some not so explicitly , " all of our business comes from car seat manufacturers .
we ca n't risk alienating them by testing seatbelts relative to car seats . "
now , eventually , one did . under the conditions of anonymity , they said they would be happy to do this test for us - so anonymity , and 1,500 dollars per seat that we crashed .
and so , we went to buffalo , new york , and here is the precursor to it .
these are the crash test dummies , waiting for their chance to take the center stage .
and then , here 's how the crash test works .
here , they do n't actually crash the entire car , you know - it 's not worth ruining a whole car to do it .
so they just have these bench seats , and they strap the car seat and the seatbelt onto it .
so i just wanted you to look at this .
and i think this gives you a good idea of why parents think car seats are so great . look at the kid in the car seat .
does he not look content , ready to go , like he could survive anything ? and then , if you look at the kid in back , it looks like he 's already choking before the crash even happens .
it 's hard to believe , when you look at this , that that kid in back is going to do very well when you get in a crash .
so this is going to be a crash where they 're going to slam this thing forward into a wall at 30 miles an hour , and see what happens . ok ?
so , let me show you what happens .
these are three-year-old dummies , by the way .
so here - this is the car seat . now watch two things : watch how the head goes forward , and basically hits the knees - and this is in the car seat - and watch how the car seat flies around , in the rebound , up in the air .
the car seat 's moving all over the place .
bear in mind there are two things about this .
this is a car seat that was installed by someone who has installed 1,000 car seats , who knew exactly how to do it .
and also it turned out these bench seats are the very best way to install car seats .
having a flat back makes it much easier to install them .
and so this is a test that 's very much rigged in favor of the car seat , ok ? so , that kid in this crash fared very well .
the federal standards are that you have to score below a 1,000 to be an approved car seat on this crash , in some metric of units which are not important .
and this crash would have been about a 450 .
so this car seat was actually an above-average car seat from consumer reports , and did quite well .
so the next one . now , this is the kid , same crash , who is in the seatbelt . he hardly moves at all , actually , relative to the other child . the funny thing is , the cam work is terrible because they 've only set it up to do the car seats , and so , they actually do n't even have a way to move the camera so you can see the kid that 's on the rebound .
anyway , it turns out that those two crashes , that actually the three-year-old did slightly worse . so , he gets about a 500 out of - you know , on this range - relative to a 400 and something .
but still , if you just took that data from that crash to the federal government , and said , " i have invented a new car seat .
i would like you to approve it for selling , " then they would say , " this is a fantastic new car seat , it works great .
it only got a 500 , it could have gotten as high up as a 1,000 . "
and this seatbelt would have passed with flying colors into being approved as a car seat .
so , in some sense , what this is suggesting is that it 's not just that people are setting up their car seats wrong , which is putting children at risk . it 's just that , fundamentally , the car seats are n't doing much .
so here 's the crash . so these are timed at the same time , so you can see that it takes much longer with the car seat - at rebound , it takes a lot longer - but there 's just a lot less movement for child who 's in the seatbelt .
so , i 'll show you the six-year-old crashes as well .
the six-year-old is in a car seat , and it turns out that looks terrible , but that 's great . that 's like a 400 , ok ?
so that kid would do fine in the crash .
nothing about that would have been problematic to the child at all .
and then here 's the six-year-old in the seatbelt , and in fact , they get exactly within , you know , within one or two points of the same . so really , for the six-year-old , the car seat did absolutely nothing whatsoever .
that 's some more evidence , so in some sense - i was criticized by a scientist , who said , " you could never publish a study with an n of 4 , " meaning those four crashes .
so i wrote him back and i said , " what about an n of 45,004 ? "
because i had the other 45,000 other real-world crashes .
and i just think that it 's interesting that the idea of using real-world crashes , which is very much something that economists think would be the right thing to do , is something that scientists do n't actually , usually think - they would rather use a laboratory , a very imperfect science of looking at the dummies , than actually 30 years of data of what we 've seen with children and with car seats .
and so i think the answer to this puzzle is that there 's a much better solution out there , that 's gotten nobody excited because everyone is so delighted with the way car seats are presumably working .
and if you think from a design perspective , about going back to square one , and say , " i just want to protect kids in the back seat . "
i do n't there 's anyone in this room who 'd say , " well , the right way to start would be , let 's make a great seat belt for adults .
and then , let 's make this really big contraption that you have to rig up to it in this daisy chain . "
i mean , why not start - who 's sitting in the back seat anyway except for kids ?
but essentially , do something like this , which i do n't know exactly how much it would cost to do , but there 's no reason i could see why this should be much more expensive than a regular car seat .
it 's just actually - you see , this is folding up - it 's behind the seat .
you 've got a regular seat for adults , and then you fold it down , and the kid sits on top , and it 's integrated .
it seems to me that this ca n't be a very expensive solution , and it 's got to work better than what we already have .
so the question is , is there any hope for adoption of something like this , which would presumably save a lot of lives ?
and i think the answer , perhaps , lies in a story .
the answer both to why has a car seat been so successful , and why this may someday be adopted or not , lies in a story that my dad told me , relating to when he was a doctor in the u.s. air force in england . and this is a long time ago : you were allowed to do things then you ca n't do today .
so , my father would have patients come in who he thought were not really sick .
and he had a big jar full of placebo pills that he would give them , and he 'd say , " come back in a week , if you still feel lousy . "
ok , and most of them would not come back , but some of them would come back .
and when they came back , he , still convinced they were not sick , had another jar of pills . in this jar were huge horse pills .
they were almost impossible to swallow .
and these , to me , are the analogy for the car seats .
people would look at these and say , " man , this thing is so big and so hard to swallow . if this does n't make me feel better , you know , what possibly could ? "
and it turned out that most people would n't come back , because it worked . but every once in a while , there was still a patient convinced that he was sick , and he 'd come back . and my dad had a third jar of pills .
and the jar of pills he had , he said , were the tiniest little pills he could find , so small you could barely see them .
and he would say , listen , i know i gave you that huge pill , that complicated , hard-to-swallow pill before , but now i 've got one that 's so potent , that is really tiny and small and almost invisible .
it 's almost like this thing here , which you ca n't even see . "
and it turned out that never , in all the times my dad gave out this pill , the really tiny pill , did anyone ever come back still complaining of sickness .
so , my dad always took that as evidence that this little , teeny , powerful pill had the ultimate placebo effect . and in some sense , if that 's the right story , i think integrated car seats you will see , very quickly , becoming something that everyone has . the other possible conclusion is , well , maybe after coming to my father three times , getting sent home with placebos , he still felt sick , he went and found another doctor .
and that 's completely possible . and if that 's the case , then i think we 're stuck with conventional car seats for a long time to come .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- audience : i just wanted to ask you , when we wear seatbelts we do n't necessarily wear them just to prevent loss of life , it 's also to prevent lots of serious injury .
your data looks at fatalities . it does n't look at serious injury .
is there any data to show that child seats are actually less effective , or just as effective as seatbelts for serious injury ? because that would prove your case . -rrb- steven levitt : yeah , that 's a great question . in my data , and in another data set i 've looked at for new jersey crashes , i find very small differences in injury .
so in this data , it 's statistically insignificant differences in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts .
in the new jersey data , which is different , because it 's not just fatal crashes , but all crashes in new jersey that are reported , it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries , but generally they 're the minor injuries .
now , what 's interesting , i should say this as a disclaimer , there is medical literature that is very difficult to resolve with this other data , which suggests that car seats are dramatically better .
and they use a completely different methodology that involves - after the crash occurs , they get from the insurance companies the names of the people who were in the crash , and they call them on the phone , and they asked them what happened .
and i really ca n't resolve , yet , and i 'd like to work with these medical researchers to try to understand how there can be these differences , which are completely at odds with one another .
but it 's obviously a critical question .
the question is even if - are there enough serious injuries to make these cost-effective ? it 's kind of tricky .
even if they 're right , it 's not so clear that they 're so cost-effective .
ladies and gentlemen , i present to you the human genome .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chromosome one , top left .
bottom right are the sex chromosomes .
women have two copies of that big x chromosome ; men have the x and , of course , that small copy of the y.
sorry boys , but it 's just a tiny little thing that makes you different .
so if you zoom in on this genome , then what you see , of course , is this double helix structure - the code of life spelled out with these four biochemical letters , or we call them bases , right : a , c , g and t.
how many are there in the human genome ? three billion .
is that a big number ?
well , everybody can throw around big numbers .
but in fact , if i were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280 by 800 resolution screen , we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome .
so it 's really quite big .
and perhaps because of its size , a group of people - all , by the way , with y chromosomes - decided they would want to sequence it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so 15 years , actually , and about four billion dollars later , the genome was sequenced and published .
in 2003 , the final version was published , and they keep working on it .
that was all done on a machine that looks like this .
it costs about a dollar for each base - a very slow way of doing it .
well folks , i 'm here to tell you that the world has completely changed and none of you know about it .
so now what we do is we take a genome , we make maybe 50 copies of it , we cut all those copies up into little 50-base reads , and then we sequence them , massively parallel .
and then we bring that into software , and we reassemble it and we tell you what the story is .
and so just to give you a picture of what this looks like , the human genome project : 3 gigabases , right .
one run on one of these machines : 200 gigabases in a week .
and that 200 is going to change to 600 this summer , and there 's no sign of this pace slowing .
so the price of a base , to sequence a base , has fallen 100 million times .
that 's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998 , waiting until 2011 , and now you can drive to jupiter and back twice .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- world population , pc placements , the archive of all the medical literature , moore 's law , the old way of sequencing , and here 's all the new stuff .
guys , this is a log scale ; you do n't typically see lines that go up like that .
so the worldwide capacity to sequence human genomes is something like 50,000 to 100,000 human genomes this year .
and we know this based on the machines that are being placed .
this is expected to double , triple or maybe quadruple year over year for the foreseeable future .
in fact , there 's one lab in particular that represents 20 percent of all that capacity .
it 's called the beijing genomics institute .
the chinese are absolutely winning this race to the new moon , by the way .
what does this mean for medicine ?
so a woman is age 37 .
she presents with stage 2 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer .
she is treated with surgery , chemotherapy and radiation .
she goes home .
two years later , she comes back with stage three c ovarian cancer .
unfortunately , treated again with surgery and chemotherapy .
she comes back three years later at age 42 with more ovarian cancer , more chemotherapy .
six months later , she comes back with acute myeloid leukemia .
she goes into respiratory failure and dies eight days later .
so first , the way in which this woman was treated , in as little as 10 years , will look like bloodletting .
and it 's because of people like my colleague , rick wilson , at the genome institute at washington university , who decided to take a look at this woman postmortem .
and he sequenced , he took skin cells , healthy skin , and cancerous bone marrow , and he sequenced the whole genomes of both of them in a couple of weeks , no big deal .
and then he compared those two genomes in software , and what he found , among other things , was a deletion , a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called tp53 .
if you have this deleterious mutation in this gene , you 're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life .
so unfortunately , this does n't help this woman , but it does have severe , profound if you will , implications to her family .
i mean , if they have the same mutation , and they get this genetic test , and they understand it , then they can go and get regular screens , and they can catch cancer early and potentially live a significantly longer life .
let me introduce you now to the beery twins , diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two .
their mom is a very brave woman who did n't believe that the symptoms were n't matching up , and through some heroic efforts and a lot of internet searching , she was able to convince the medical community that , in fact , they had something else .
what they had was dopa-responsive dystonia .
and so they were given l-dopa , and their symptoms did improve , but they were n't totally asymptomatic .
significant problems remained .
turns out the gentleman in this picture is a guy named joe beery , who was lucky enough to be the cio of a company called life technologies .
they 're one of the two companies that makes these massive whole genome sequencing tools .
and so what he did was he got his kids sequenced .
and what they found was a series of mutations in a gene called spr , which is responsible for producing serotonin , among other things .
so on top of l-dopa , they gave these kids a serotonin precursor drug , and they 're effectively normal now .
guys , this would never have happened without whole genome sequencing .
and at the time - this was a few years ago - it cost $ 100,000 .
today it 's $ 10,000 . next year it 's $ 1,000 .
the year after it 's $ 100 , give or take a year .
that 's how fast this is moving .
so here 's little nick - likes batman and squirt guns .
and it turns out nick shows up at the children 's hospital with this distended belly like a famine victim .
and it 's not that he 's not eating , it 's that when he eats , his intestine basically opens up and feces spill out into his gut .
so a hundred surgeries later , he looks at his mom and says , " mom , please pray for me . i 'm in so much pain . "
his pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what 's going on , but he says , " let 's get this kid 's genome sequenced . "
and what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death .
so the theory is that he 's having some immunological reaction to what 's going on to the food essentially , and that 's a natural reaction , which causes some programmed cell death .
but the gene that regulates that down is broken .
and so this informs , among other things , of course , a treatment for bone marrow transplant , which he undertakes .
and after nine months of grueling recovery , he 's now eating steak with a1 sauce .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the prospect of using the genome as a universal diagnostic is upon us today .
today , it 's here .
and what it means for all of us is that everybody in this room could live an extra five , 10 , 20 years just because of this one thing .
which is a fantastic story , unless you think about humanity 's footprint on the planet and our ability to keep up food production .
so it turns out that the very same technology is also being used to grow new lines of corn , wheat , soybean and other crops that are highly tolerant of drought , of flood , of pests and pesticides .
now look , as long as we continue to increase the population , we 're going to have to continue to grow and eat genetically modified foods , and that 's the only position that i 'll take today .
unless there 's anybody in the audience that would like to volunteer to stop eating ?
none , not one .
this is a typewriter , a staple of every desktop for decades .
and in fact , the typewriter was essentially deleted by this thing .
and then more general versions of word processors came about .
but ultimately , it was a disruption on top of a disruption .
it was bob metcalfe inventing the ethernet and the connection of all these computers that fundamentally changed everything .
and suddenly we had netscape , and we had yahoo and we had , indeed , the entire dotcom bubble .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not to worry though , that was quickly rescued by the ipod , facebook and , indeed , angry birds .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- look , this is where we are today .
this is the genomic revolution today . this is where we are .
so what i 'd like you to consider is : what does it mean when these dots do n't represent the individual bases of your genome , but they connect to genomes all across the planet ?
so i just recently had to buy life insurance .
and i was required to answer : a. i have never had a genetic test , b. i 've had one , here you go , and c. i 've had one and i 'm not telling .
thankfully , i was able to answer a , and i say that honestly in case my life insurance agent is listening .
but what would have happened if i had said c ?
consumer applications for genomics , they will flourish .
do you want to see whether you 're genetically compatible with your girlfriend ? sure .
dna sequencing on your iphone ? there 's an app for that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- personalized genomic massage anyone ?
there 's already a lab today that tests for allele 334 of the avpr1 gene , the so-called cheating gene .
so anybody who 's here today with your significant other , just turn over to them and swab their mouth , send it to the lab and you 'll know for sure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do you really want to elect a president whose genome suggests cardiomyopathy ?
now think of it , it 's 2016 and the leading candidate releases not only her four years of back tax returns , but also her personal genome .
and it looks really good .
and then she challenges all of her competitors to do the same .
do you think that 's not going to happen ?
do you think it would have helped john mccain ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how many people in the audience have the last name resnick like me ? raise your hand .
anybody ? nobody .
typically , there 's one or two .
so my father 's father was one of 10 resnick brothers .
they all hated each other .
and they all moved to different parts of the planet .
so it 's likely that i 'm related to every resnick that i ever meet , but i do n't know .
but imagine if my genome were deidentified , sitting in software , and a third cousin 's genome was also sitting there , and there was software that could compare these two and make these associations .
not hard to imagine . my company has software that does this right now .
and so imagine one more thing : that that software is able to ask both parties for mutual consents , " would you be willing to meet your third cousin ? "
and if we both say yes , voila ! welcome to chromosomally linkedin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this is probably a good thing , right ?
you have bigger clan gatherings and so on .
but maybe it 's a bad thing as well .
how many fathers in the room ? raise your hands .
okay , so experts think that one to three percent of you are not actually the father of your child .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- look - -lrb- laughter -rrb- these genomes , these 23 chromosomes , they do n't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society - at least not yet .
and like any new technology , it 's really in humanity 's hands to wield it for the betterment of mankind , or not .
and so i urge you all to wake up and to tune in and to influence the genomic revolution that 's happening all around you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who do n't - into the religious and the atheists .
and for the last decade or so , it 's been quite clear what being an atheist means .
there have been some very vocal atheists who 've pointed out , not just that religion is wrong , but that it 's ridiculous .
these people , many of whom have lived in north oxford , have argued - they 've argued that believing in god is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game .
now i think it 's too easy .
i think it 's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way .
and it 's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel .
and what i 'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist - if you like , a new version of atheism we could call atheism 2.0 .
now what is atheism 2.0 ?
well it starts from a very basic premise : of course , there 's no god .
of course , there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels , etc .
now let 's move on ; that 's not the end of the story , that 's the very , very beginning .
i 'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines : that thinks , " i ca n't believe in any of this stuff .
i ca n't believe in the doctrines .
i do n't think these doctrines are right .
but , " a very important but , " i love christmas carols .
i really like the art of mantegna .
i really like looking at old churches .
i really like turning the pages of the old testament . "
whatever it may be , you know the kind of thing i 'm talking about - people who are attracted to the ritualistic side , the moralistic , communal side of religion , but ca n't bear the doctrine .
until now , these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice .
it 's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff , or you reject the doctrine and you 're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of cnn and walmart .
so that 's a sort of tough choice .
i do n't think we have to make that choice .
i think there is an alternative .
i think there are ways - and i 'm being both very respectful and completely impious - of stealing from religions .
if you do n't believe in a religion , there 's nothing wrong with picking and mixing , with taking out the best sides of religion .
and for me , atheism 2.0 is about both , as i say , a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying , " what here could we use ? "
the secular world is full of holes .
we have secularized badly , i would argue .
and a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well .
and i 'd like to run through a few of these today .
i 'd like to kick off by looking at education .
now education is a field the secular world really believes in .
when we think about how we 're going to make the world a better place , we think education ; that 's where we put a lot of money .
education is going to give us , not only commercial skills , industrial skills , it 's also going to make us better people .
you know the kind of thing a commencement address is , and graduation ceremonies , those lyrical claims that education , the process of education - particularly higher education - will make us into nobler and better human beings .
that 's a lovely idea .
interesting where it came from .
in the early 19th century , church attendance in western europe started sliding down very , very sharply , and people panicked .
they asked themselves the following question .
they said , where are people going to find the morality , where are they going to find guidance , and where are they going to find sources of consolation ?
and influential voices came up with one answer .
they said culture .
it 's to culture that we should look for guidance , for consolation , for morality .
let 's look to the plays of shakespeare , the dialogues of plato , the novels of jane austen .
in there , we 'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the gospel of saint john .
now i think that 's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea .
they wanted to replace scripture with culture .
and that 's a very plausible idea .
it 's also an idea that we have forgotten .
if you went to a top university - let 's say you went to harvard or oxford or cambridge - and you said , " i 've come here because i 'm in search of morality , guidance and consolation ; i want to know how to live , " they would show you the way to the insane asylum .
this is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of .
why ? they do n't think we need it .
they do n't think we are in an urgent need of assistance .
they see us as adults , rational adults .
what we need is information .
we need data , we do n't need help .
now religions start from a very different place indeed .
all religions , all major religions , at various points call us children .
and like children , they believe that we are in severe need of assistance .
we 're only just holding it together .
perhaps this is just me , maybe you .
but anyway , we 're only just holding it together .
and we need help . of course , we need help .
and so we need guidance and we need didactic learning .
you know , in the 18th century in the u.k. , the greatest preacher , greatest religious preacher , was a man called john wesley , who went up and down this country delivering sermons , advising people how they could live .
he delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents , the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich .
he was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons , the classic medium of delivery of religions .
now we 've given up with the idea of sermons .
if you said to a modern liberal individualist , " hey , how about a sermon ? "
they 'd go , " no , no . i do n't need one of those .
i 'm an independent , individual person . "
what 's the difference between a sermon and our modern , secular mode of delivery , the lecture ?
well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information .
and i think we need to get back to that sermon tradition .
the tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable , because we are in need of guidance , morality and consolation - and religions know that .
another point about education : we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once , they 'll remember it .
sit them in a classroom , tell them about plato at the age of 20 , send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years , and that lesson will stick with them .
religions go , " nonsense .
you need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day .
so get on your knees and repeat it . "
that 's what all religions tell us : " get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day . "
otherwise our minds are like sieves .
so religions are cultures of repetition .
they circle the great truths again and again and again .
we associate repetition with boredom .
" give us the new , " we 're always saying .
" the new is better than the old . "
if i said to you , " okay , we 're not going to have new ted .
we 're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they 're so true .
we 're going to watch elizabeth gilbert five times because what she says is so clever , " you 'd feel cheated .
not so if you 're adopting a religious mindset .
the other things that religions do is to arrange time .
all the major religions give us calendars .
what is a calendar ?
a calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas .
in the catholic chronology , catholic calendar , at the end of march you will think about st. jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor .
you wo n't do that by accident ; you will do that because you are guided to do that .
now we do n't think that way .
in the secular world we think , " if an idea is important , i 'll bump into it .
i 'll just come across it . "
nonsense , says the religious world view .
religious view says we need calendars , we need to structure time , we need to synchronize encounters .
this comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings .
take the moon . it 's really important to look at the moon .
you know , when you look at the moon , you think , " i 'm really small . what are my problems ? "
it sets things into perspective , etc . , etc .
we should all look at the moon a bit more often . we do n't .
why do n't we ? well there 's nothing to tell us , " look at the moon . "
but if you 're a zen buddhist in the middle of september , you will be ordered out of your home , made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of tsukimi , where you will be given poems to read in honor of the moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of .
you 'll be handed rice cakes .
and the moon and the reflection on the moon will have a secure place in your heart .
that 's very good .
the other thing that religions are really aware of is : speak well - i 'm not doing a very good job of this here - but oratory , oratory is absolutely key to religions .
in the secular world , you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career .
but the religious world does n't think that way .
what you 're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it .
so if you go to an african-american pentecostalist church in the american south and you listen to how they talk , my goodness , they talk well .
after every convincing point , people will go , " amen , amen , amen . "
at the end of a really rousing paragraph , they 'll all stand up , and they 'll go , " thank you jesus , thank you christ , thank you savior . "
if we were doing it like they do it - let 's not do it , but if we were to do it - i would tell you something like , " culture should replace scripture . "
and you would go , " amen , amen , amen . "
and at the end of my talk , you would all stand up and you would go , " thank you plato , thank you shakespeare , thank you jane austen . "
and we 'd know that we had a real rhythm going .
all right , all right . we 're getting there . we 're getting there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the other thing that religions know is we 're not just brains , we are also bodies .
and when they teach us a lesson , they do it via the body .
so for example , take the jewish idea of forgiveness .
jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh .
they do n't just deliver us sermons on this .
they do n't just give us books or words about this .
they tell us to have a bath .
so in orthodox jewish communities , every friday you go to a mikveh .
you immerse yourself in the water , and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea .
we do n't tend to do that .
our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another .
religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two .
let 's look at art now .
now art is something that in the secular world , we think very highly of . we think art is really , really important .
a lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums , etc .
we sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals , or our new churches .
you 've heard that saying .
now i think that the potential is there , but we 've completely let ourselves down .
and the reason we 've let ourselves down is that we 're not properly studying how religions handle art .
the two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art : the first idea is that art should be for art 's sake - a ridiculous idea - an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world .
i could n't disagree more .
the other thing that we believe is that art should n't explain itself , that artists should n't say what they 're up to , because if they said it , it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy .
that 's why a very common feeling when you 're in a museum - let 's admit it - is , " i do n't know what this is about . "
but if we 're serious people , we do n't admit to that .
but that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art .
now religions have a much saner attitude to art .
they have no trouble telling us what art is about .
art is about two things in all the major faiths .
firstly , it 's trying to remind you of what there is to love .
and secondly , it 's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate .
and that 's what art is .
art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith .
so as you walk around a church , or a mosque or a cathedral , what you 're trying to imbibe , what you 're imbibing is , through your eyes , through your senses , truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind .
essentially it 's propaganda .
rembrandt is a propagandist in the christian view .
now the word " propaganda " sets off alarm bells .
we think of hitler , we think of stalin . do n't , necessarily .
propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something .
and if that thing is good , there 's no problem with it at all .
my view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions .
and they should make sure that when you walk into a museum - if i was a museum curator , i would make a room for love , a room for generosity .
all works of art are talking to us about things .
and if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told , use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind , we would get a lot more out of art .
art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we 've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas .
art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society .
art should be didactic .
let 's think of something else .
the people in the modern world , in the secular world , who are interested in matters of the spirit , in matters of the mind , in higher soul-like concerns , tend to be isolated individuals .
they 're poets , they 're philosophers , they 're photographers , they 're filmmakers .
and they tend to be on their own .
they 're our cottage industries . they are vulnerable , single people .
and they get depressed and they get sad on their own .
and they do n't really change much .
now think about religions , think about organized religions .
what do organized religions do ?
they group together , they form institutions .
and that has all sorts of advantages .
first of all , scale , might .
the catholic church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the wall street journal .
these are massive machines .
they 're collaborative , they 're branded , they 're multinational , and they 're highly disciplined .
these are all very good qualities .
we recognize them in relation to corporations .
and corporations are very like religions in many ways , except they 're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs .
they 're selling us shoes and cars .
whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff - the therapists , the poets - are on their own and they have no power , they have no might .
so religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind .
now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us , but we can admire the institutional way in which they 're doing it .
books alone , books written by lone individuals , are not going to change anything .
we need to group together .
if you want to change the world , you have to group together , you have to be collaborative .
and that 's what religions do .
they are multinational , as i say , they are branded , they have a clear identity , so they do n't get lost in a busy world .
that 's something we can learn from .
i want to conclude .
really what i want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields , there is something to learn from the example of religion - even if you do n't believe any of it .
if you 're involved in anything that 's communal , that involves lots of people getting together , there are things for you in religion .
if you 're involved , say , in a travel industry in any way , look at pilgrimage .
look very closely at pilgrimage .
we have n't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we have n't looked at what religions do with travel .
if you 're in the art world , look at the example of what religions are doing with art .
and if you 're an educator in any way , again , look at how religions are spreading ideas .
you may not agree with the ideas , but my goodness , they 're highly effective mechanisms for doing so .
so really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion , but at the end of the day , religions are so subtle , so complicated , so intelligent in many ways that they 're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone ; they 're for all of us .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : now this is actually a courageous talk , because you 're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters .
ab : you can get shot by both sides .
you can get shot by the hard-headed atheists , and you can get shot by those who fully believe .
ca : incoming missiles from north oxford at any moment .
ab : indeed .
ca : but you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from , which is this sense - that 's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who 's religious - of spiritual experience , of some kind of connection with something that 's bigger than you are .
is there any room for that experience in atheism 2.0 ?
ab : absolutely . i , like many of you , meet people who say things like , " but is n't there something bigger than us , something else ? "
and i say , " of course . " and they say , " so are n't you sort of religious ? "
and i go , " no . " why does that sense of mystery , that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe , need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling ?
science and just observation gives us that feeling without it , so i do n't feel the need .
the universe is large and we are tiny , without the need for further religious superstructure .
so one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit .
ca : actually , let me just ask a question .
how many people here would say that religion is important to them ?
is there an equivalent process by which there 's a sort of bridge between what you 're talking about and what you would say to them ?
ab : i would say that there are many , many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged .
it 's not as though , as i try to suggest , it 's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things , or you do n't have religion and then you 're cut off from all these very good things .
it 's so sad that we constantly say , " i do n't believe so i ca n't have community , so i 'm cut off from morality , so i ca n't go on a pilgrimage . "
one wants to say , " nonsense . why not ? "
and that 's really the spirit of my talk .
there 's so much we can absorb .
atheism should n't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion .
ca : it seems to me that there 's plenty of people in the ted community who are atheists .
but probably most people in the community certainly do n't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common .
are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where , instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war , that there could be bridging ?
ab : no , we need to be polite about differences .
politeness is a much-overlooked virtue .
it 's seen as hypocrisy .
but we need to get to a stage when you 're an atheist and someone says , " well you know , i did pray the other day , " you politely ignore it .
you move on .
because you 've agreed on 90 percent of things , because you have a shared view on so many things , and you politely differ .
and i think that 's what the religious wars of late have ignored .
they 've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement .
ca : and finally , does this new thing that you 're proposing that 's not a religion but something else , does it need a leader , and are you volunteering to be the pope ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ab : well , one thing that we 're all very suspicious of is individual leaders .
it does n't need it .
what i 've tried to lay out is a framework and i 'm hoping that people can just fill it in .
i 've sketched a sort of broad framework .
but wherever you are , as i say , if you 're in the travel industry , do that travel bit .
if you 're in the communal industry , look at religion and do the communal bit .
so it 's a wiki project .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : alain , thank you for sparking many conversations later .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , since this is tedglobal , who can tell me what this is called in french ?
i see you 're all up on the history of hurdy-gurdy - " vielle à roue . "
and in spanish , " zanfona . "
and in italian , " ghironda , " okay ?
hurdy-gurdy , or wheel fiddle .
so , these are the different kinds and shapes of the hurdy-gurdy .
the hurdy-gurdy is the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings , like the bow of a violin , to produce music .
it has three different kinds of strings .
the first string is the drone string , which plays a continuous sound like the bagpipe .
the second string is a melody string , which is played with a wooden keyboard tuned like a piano .
and the third string is pretty innovative .
it 's also the only instrument that uses this kind of technique .
it activates what 's called the buzzing bridge , or the dog .
when i turn the crank and i apply pressure , it makes a sound like a barking dog .
so all of this is pretty innovative , if you consider that the hurdy-gurdy appeared about a thousand years ago and it took two people to play it ; one to turn the crank , and another person - yes - to play the melody by physically pulling up large wooden pegs .
luckily , all of this changed a couple of centuries later .
so , one person could actually play and almost - this is pretty heavy - carry the hurdy-gurdy .
the hurdy-gurdy has been used , historically , through the centuries in mostly dance music because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boombox here .
and today , the hurdy-gurdy is used in all sorts of music - traditional folk music , dance , contemporary and world music - in the u.k. , in france , in spain and in italy .
and this kind of hurdy-gurdy takes anywhere from three to five years -lsb- to order and receive it -rsb- .
it 's made by specialized luthiers , also in europe .
and it 's very difficult to tune .
so without further ado , would you like to hear it ?
-lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- caroline phillips : i did n't hear you . would you like to hear it ? -lrb- audience : yes ! -rrb- cp : okay .
there i go .
i 'd like to sing in basque , which is the language spoken in the basque country where i live , in the region in france and spain .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- basque -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a song that i wrote based on traditional basque rhythms .
and this is a song that has a kind of a celtic feel .
-lrb- music -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- those of you who have seen the film " moneyball , " or have read the book by michael lewis , will be familiar with the story of billy beane .
billy was supposed to be a tremendous ballplayer ; all the scouts told him so .
they told his parents that they predicted that he was going to be a star .
but what actually happened when he signed the contract - and by the way , he did n't want to sign that contract , he wanted to go to college - which is what my mother , who actually does love me , said that i should do too , and i did - well , he did n't do very well . he struggled mightily .
he got traded a couple of times , he ended up in the minors for most of his career , and he actually ended up in management . he ended up as a general manager of the oakland a 's .
now for many of you in this room , ending up in management , which is also what i 've done , is seen as a success .
i can assure you that for a kid trying to make it in the bigs , going into management ai n't no success story . it 's a failure .
and what i want to talk to you about today , and share with you , is that our healthcare system , our medical system , is just as bad at predicting what happens to people in it - patients , others - as those scouts were at predicting what would happen to billy beane .
and yet , every day thousands of people in this country are diagnosed with preconditions .
we hear about pre-hypertension , we hear about pre-dementia , we hear about pre-anxiety , and i 'm pretty sure that i diagnosed myself with that in the green room .
we also refer to subclinical conditions .
there 's subclinical atherosclerosis , subclinical hardening of the arteries , obviously linked to heart attacks , potentially .
one of my favorites is called subclinical acne .
if you look up subclinical acne , you may find a website , which i did , which says that this is the easiest type of acne to treat .
you do n't have the pustules or the redness and inflammation .
maybe that 's because you do n't actually have acne .
i have a name for all of these conditions , it 's another precondition : i call them preposterous .
in baseball , the game follows the pre-game .
season follows the pre-season .
but with a lot of these conditions , that actually is n't the case , or at least it is n't the case all the time . it 's as if there 's a rain delay , every single time in many cases .
we have pre-cancerous lesions , which often do n't turn into cancer .
and yet , if you take , for example , subclinical osteoporosis , a bone thinning disease , the precondition , otherwise known as osteopenia , you would have to treat 270 women for three years in order to prevent one broken bone .
that 's an awful lot of women when you multiply by the number of women who were diagnosed with this osteopenia .
and so is it any wonder , given all of the costs and the side effects of the drugs that we 're using to treat these preconditions , that every year we 're spending more than two trillion dollars on healthcare and yet 100,000 people a year - and that 's a conservative estimate - are dying not because of the conditions they have , but because of the treatments that we 're giving them and the complications of those treatments ?
we 've medicalized everything in this country .
women in the audience , i have some pretty bad news that you already know , and that 's that every aspect of your life has been medicalized .
strike one is when you hit puberty .
you now have something that happens to you once a month that has been medicalized .
it 's a condition ; it has to be treated . strike two is if you get pregnant .
that 's been medicalized as well .
you have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy , otherwise something might go wrong .
strike three is menopause .
we all know what happened when millions of women were given hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms for decades until all of a sudden we realized , because a study came out , a big one , nih-funded .
it said , actually , a lot of that hormone replacement therapy may be doing more harm than good for many of those women .
just in case , i do n't want to leave the men out - i am one , after all - i have really bad news for all of you in this room , and for everyone listening and watching elsewhere : you all have a universally fatal condition .
so , just take a moment .
it 's called pre-death .
every single one of you has it , because you have the risk factor for it , which is being alive .
but i have some good news for you , because i 'm a journalist , i like to end things in a happy way or a forward-thinking way .
and that good news is that if you can survive to the end of my talk , which we 'll see if that happens for everyone , you will be a pre-vivor .
i made up pre-death .
if i used someone else 's pre-death , i apologize , i think i made it up .
i did n't make up pre-vivor .
pre-vivor is what a particular cancer advocacy group would like everyone who just has a risk factor , but has n't actually had that cancer , to call themselves .
you are a pre-vivor .
we 've had hbo here this morning . i 'm wondering if mark burnett is anywhere in the audience , i 'd like to suggest a reality tv show called " pre-vivor . "
if you develop a disease , you 're off the island .
but the problem is , we have a system that is completely - basically promoted this .
we 've selected , at every point in this system , to do what we do , and to give everyone a precondition and then eventually a condition , in some cases .
start with the doctor-patient relationship . doctors , most of them , are in a fee-for-service system . they are basically incentivized to do more - procedures , tests , prescribe medications .
patients come to them , they want to do something . we 're americans , we ca n't just stand there , we have to do something . and so they want a drug .
they want a treatment . they want to be told , this is what you have and this is how you treat it . if the doctor does n't give you that , you go somewhere else .
that 's not very good for doctors ' business .
or even worse , if you are diagnosed with something eventually , and the doctor did n't order that test , you get sued .
we have pharmaceutical companies that are constantly trying to expand the indications , expand the number of people who are eligible for a given treatment , because that obviously helps their bottom line . we have advocacy groups , like the one that 's come up with pre-vivor , who want to make more and more people feel they are at risk , or might have a condition , so that they can raise more funds and raise visibility , et cetera .
but this is n't actually , despite what journalists typically do , this is n't actually about blaming particular players .
we are all responsible .
i 'm responsible .
i actually root for the yankees , i mean talk about rooting for the worst possible offender when it comes to doing everything you can do .
thank you .
but everyone is responsible .
i went to medical school , and i did n't have a course called how to think skeptically , or how not to order tests .
we have this system where that 's what you do .
and it actually took being a journalist to understand all these incentives . you know , economists like to say , there are no bad people , there are just bad incentives .
and that 's actually true .
because what we 've created is a sort of field of dreams , when it comes to medical technology .
so when you put another mri in every corner , you put a robot in every hospital saying that everyone has to have robotic surgery .
well , we 've created a system where if you build it , they will come .
but you can actually perversely tell people to come , convince them that they have to come .
it was when i became a journalist that i really realized how i was part of this problem , and how we all are part of this problem .
i was medicalizing every risk factor , i was writing stories , commissioning stories , every day , that were trying to , not necessarily make people worried , although that was what often happened .
but , you know , there are ways out .
i saw my own internist last week , and he said to me , " you know , " and he told me something that everyone in this audience could have told me for free , but i paid him for the privilege , which is that i need to lose some weight .
well , he 's right . i 've had honest-to-goodness high blood pressure for a dozen years now , same age my father got it , and it 's a real disease . it 's not pre-hypertension , it 's actual hypertension , high blood pressure .
well , he 's right , but he did n't say to me , well , you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes , or anything like that . he did n't say , better start taking this statin , you need to lower your cholesterol .
no , he said , " go out and lose some weight . come back and see me in a bit , or just give me a call and let me know how you 're doing . "
so that 's , to me , a way forward .
billy beane , by the way , learned the same thing .
he learned , from watching this kid who he eventually hired , who was really successful for him , that it was n't swinging for the fences , it was n't swinging at every pitch like the sluggers do , which is what all the expensive teams like the yankees like to - they like to pick up those guys .
this kid told him , you know , you gotta watch the guys , and you gotta go out and find the guys who like to walk , because getting on base by a walk is just as good , and in our healthcare system we need to figure out , is that really a good pitch or should we let it go by and not swing at everything ?
thanks .
good morning . my name is david rose .
i am a serial entrepreneur turned serial investor .
and by the use of pitching powerpoints to vcs , i have personally raised tens of millions of dollars from vcs through powerpoint pitches .
and then , turning round to the other side of the equation , i have personally supervised the investment of tens of millions of dollars into companies who have been pitching me with powerpoint presentations .
so i think it 's safe to say i know a little bit about the process of pitching .
so , the very first question that you 've all got to figure out is : what is the single most important thing that a vc is looking for when you come to them pitching your new business idea ?
and there are obviously all kinds of things .
there are business models , and there are financials , and there are markets and there is that . overall , of all the things that you have to do , what is the single most important thing the vc is going to be investing in ?
somebody ? what ?
-lrb- audience : people . -rrb- david s. rose : people ? you ! that 's it - you are the person .
and so therefore , the entire purpose of a vc pitch is to convince them that you are the entrepreneur in whom they are going to invest their money and make a lot of money in return .
now , how do you do this ?
you ca n't just walk up and say , you know , " hi , i 'm a really good guy , and a good girl , and you should really invest in me . " right ?
so , in the course of your vc pitch , you have a very few minutes , and most vc pitches - most angel pitches are about 15 minutes , most vc pitches should be less than half an hour .
people 's attention span after 18 minutes begins to drop off , tests have shown .
so in that 18 minutes , or 10 minutes , or five minutes , you have to convey a whole bunch of different characteristics .
you actually have to convey about 10 different characteristics while you 're standing up there .
what 's the single most important thing you 've got to convey ?
what ?
-lrb- audience : integrity . -rrb- dsr : boy , oh boy , oh boy ! and that 's a straight line we got right over there . and i did n't even prompt him .
you 're right , integrity . because that 's the key thing .
i would much rather invest in somebody - you know , take a chance on somebody - who i know is straight than somebody where there 's any possible question of , you know , who are they looking out for , and what 's going on .
so the most important thing is integrity .
and what 's the second most important thing after integrity ?
let 's see if you can get this one .
-lrb- audience : self-confidence . -rrb- dsr : close enough ! passion .
right , so here you want - entrepreneurs by definition are people who are leaving something else , starting a new world over here , creating and putting their lifeblood into this kind of thing .
you 've got to convey passion .
if you 're not passionate about your own company , why on earth should anyone else be passionate ?
why should they put more money into your company , if you 're not passionate about it ?
so , integrity and passion : the single most important things out there .
then there are a whole panoply of other things that you 've got to do , to wrap up in this package that you 're presenting to a vc .
experience .
you 've got to be able to say , " hey , you know , i 've done this before . "
and " done this before " is starting an enterprise and creating value , and taking something from beginning to end .
so that 's why vcs love to fund serial entrepreneurs .
because even if you did n't do it right the first time , you 've learned the lessons , which are going to stand you in very good stead the next time .
and now along with that , along with the experience of starting an enterprise , or running something - and it does n't have to be a business .
it can be in an organization at school , it can be a not-for-profit .
but they want experience in creating an organization .
next up is knowledge .
if you 're telling me you 're going to be the great developer of the map of the human genome , you 'd better know what a human genome is .
i mean , i want you to have domain expertise .
so i do n't want somebody who 's saying , " hey , i 've got a great idea in a business i know nothing about .
i do n't know who the players are .
i do n't know what the market is like . "
so you 've got to know your market .
you 've got to know your area .
and then you have to have the skills that it takes to get a company going .
and those skills include everything from technical skills , if it 's a technology business , to marketing , and sales , and management , and so on .
but , you know , not everybody has all these skills .
there are very few people who have the full set of skills that it takes to run a company .
so what else do you require ?
well , leadership .
you 've got to be able to convince us that you either have developed a team that has all those factors in it , or else you can .
and you have the charisma and the management style and the ability to get people to follow your lead , to inspire them , to motivate them to be part of your team .
all right , then , having done all that , what else do i want to know as a vc ?
i want to know that you have commitment .
that you are going to be here to the end .
i want you to say , or i want you to convey , that you are going to die if you have to , with your very last breath , with your fingernails scratching as they drag you out .
you 're going to keep my money alive and you 're going to make more money out of it .
so i do n't want somebody who 's going to cut and run at the first opportunity .
because bad things happen .
there 's never been an angel- or a venture-funded company where bad things did n't happen .
so i want to know that you 're committed to be there to the very end .
you 've got to have vision .
you 've got to be able to see where this is going .
i do n't want another " me too " product .
i want somebody who knows , who can change the world out there .
but on top of that , i also need realism .
because i need to know that you know that while changing the world is great , it does n't always happen .
and before you get to change the world , bad things are going to take place .
and you 've got to be able to deal with that .
and you have to have rational projections and stuff .
and then finally , you 're asking for my money , not just because it 's my money , but because it 's me .
you need to be coachable .
so i need to know that you have the ability to listen .
we 've had a lot of experience .
people who are vcs or angels investing in you have had experience and they 'd like to know that you want to hear that experience .
okay , so how do you convey all these 10 things in 10 minutes without saying any more ?
you ca n't say , " hey , i 've got high integrity , invest in me ! " right ?
you 've got to do a whole pitch that conveys this without conveying it .
so think about your pitch as a timeline .
it starts off , you walk in the door .
they know nothing at all , whatsoever , about you .
and you can take them on an emotional - all pitches , or all sales presentations , are emotional at some level .
you can go up , you can go down , right ?
and it goes from beginning to end .
you walk in the door . so the first thing you 've got to do - the overall , you know , arc of your presentation - it 's got to start like a rocket .
you 've got maybe 10 seconds - between 10 and 30 seconds , depending on how long the pitch is - to get their attention .
in my case , " i 've invested . i have got tens of millions of dollars from powerpoint pitches .
i have invested tens of millions of dollars . "
that 's it - that should get you right there .
this can be a factor , and everybody can be saying it 's counterintuitive . it can be a story , it can be experience .
but you 've got to grab their emotional attention , focused on you , within that first few seconds .
and then from there , you 've got to take them on a very solid , steady , upward path , right from beginning to end .
and everything has got to be reinforcing this .
and you 've got to get better , and better , and better , and better .
and it 's revving up to the very end , and then at the very end you 've got to - boom ! - knock them out of the park .
you want to be able to get them to such an emotional high that they are ready to write you a check , throw money at you , right there before you leave .
okay , so how do you do that ?
well , first of all , logical progression .
any time you go backwards , any time you skip a step - imagine walking up a staircase where some of the treads are missing , or the heights are different heights .
you stop , you 've got to figure it out .
you want a nice logical progression .
start with telling them what the market is .
why are you going to do x , y or z.
and then you 've got to tell me how you 're going to do it , and what it is you 're going to do . how you 're going to do it .
and the whole - it 's got to flow from beginning to end .
you 've also got to let me know that there are touchstones .
you want to tie in to the rest of the world out there .
so , for example , if you reference companies i 've heard of , or basic items in your business , i want to know about them . things that i can relate to : validators , or anything that tells me somebody else has approved this , or there 's outside validation .
it can be sales ; it can be you 've got an award for something ; it can be , people have done it before ; it can be your beta tests are going great .
whatever . i want to know validation , that you 're telling me not just what you 're telling me , but that somebody else - or something else out there - says this makes sense .
and then , because i 'm looking for the upside here , i 've got to have believable upside .
and that 's two parts .
it 's got to be upside , and it 's got to be believable .
the upside means that if you 're telling me that you 're going to be out there , five years out , making a million dollars a year - hmm . that 's not really upside .
telling me you 're going to be out there making a billion dollars a year - that 's not believable .
so it 's got to be both sides .
on the other hand , there are a lot of things that drive me down , take the emotional level down , and you 've got to recover from those .
and those , for example , are anything you tell me that i know is not true .
" we have no competition . there 's nobody else who 's ever made a widget like this . "
odds are i probably know somebody who has made a widget .
and the minute you tell me that - boom ! you know , i discount half of what you 're saying from then on .
anything that makes me think . anything that i do n't understand , where i have to make the leap myself , in my own head , is going to stop the flow of the presentation .
so , you 've got to take me through like a sixth grader - dub , dub , dub , dub , dub - but without patronizing me .
and it 's a very tricky path to do it .
but if you can do it , it works really , really well .
anything that 's inconsistent within the concept of your thing .
if you tell me sales of x , y or z are 10 million dollars , and the next slide , or five slides later , they 're five million dollars .
well , one may have been gross sales , one may have been net sales , but i want to know that all the numbers make sense together .
and then finally , anything that 's an error , or a typo , or a stupid mistake , or a line that 's in the wrong place .
that shows me that - if you ca n't even do a presentation , how the heck can you run a company ?
so this all feeds in together .
all right , so the best way to do this stuff is to look at our betters , look at people who have done this before .
so let 's look at the most successful technology executive in the business and see how a presentation goes .
bill gates ' powerpoint presentation over here .
here 's gates doing a thing for windows .
is this the way you should do a powerpoint presentation ?
what do you think ?
no . who do you think we should look at as our role model ?
oh , is n't that funny ! there 's another great one over here .
yes ? ok , steve jobs .
you want absolute - this is the zen of presentation , right ?
here he is . one little guy , black jeans and stuff , on a totally empty stage .
what are you focusing on ?
you 're focusing on him ! this is steve jobs .
so , you know , our great - these wonderful long bullet points , a whole list of things , you know - good !
no , they 're not .
the long bullet points are bad .
what 's good ? short , short bullet points .
but you know what ?
even better than short bullet points are no bullet points .
just give me the headline over here .
and you know what ?
how many bullet points or headlines does steve jobs use ?
basically none .
what do you do ?
best of all , images . just a simple image .
i looked at the image - a picture 's worth a thousand words .
you look at the image and you see that , and you drop the whole thing .
and then , you come back to me .
and you 're focused on me and why i 'm such a great guy , and why you want to invest in me .
and why this whole thing makes sense .
so with that said , we only have a very , very short time .
so let 's run through the things you 've got to include in your presentation .
well , first of all , start out . none of these big , long-titled slides with blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah and i 'm presenting to so-and-so , such-and-such a date .
i know the day , i know who i am , i know you 're presenting .
i do n't need all that .
just give me your company logo .
i look at the logo , and it sort of ties it to my brain .
and then i come back to you . i 'm focused on you , ok ?
you do that , you give me your quick 15-second or 30-second intro , grab my attention .
and then you want to give me a quick business overview .
this is not a five-minute pitch . this is , you know , two sentences .
" we build widgets for the x , y , z market . "
or , " we sell services to help somebody do x. " you know , whatever .
and that is like the picture on the outside of a jigsaw puzzle box .
that lets me know the context .
it gives me the armature for the whole thing you 're going to be going through .
and it lets me put everything else in relation to something you 've already told me .
so there you go - walk me through , show me who your management team is .
it 's helpful that you 've had experience and you 've done this kind of thing before .
and i want to know the market - the size of the market .
why is this market worth getting at over here ?
i want to know your product , and that 's very important .
now , this is not a product pitch , not a sales pitch .
and the gazuntas and the yaddas and stuff .
i just want to know - what the heck is it ?
if it 's a website , show me a screenshot of your website .
you know , do n't do a live demo .
no , never do a live demo .
do a canned demo , or do something that lets me know why people are going to buy whatever it is .
then i want to know - now that i know what you 're selling , tell me how you make money on it .
for every x you sell , you get y , you do your services of z.
i want to know what the business model is on a sort of per-unit basis , or for the actual product that you 're selling .
i want to know who you 're selling this thing to , in terms of customers .
and i want to know if you have any relationships that are going to be special to help you .
whether you have a distribution relationship with somebody , you know , you have a producing partner . or , you know , again , validation .
this helps to say you 're bigger than just one little thing over here .
but then , everybody has competition .
there has never been a company that does n't have competition .
even if the competition is the old way of doing something .
i want to know exactly what your competition is , and then that will help me judge how you fit into the whole operation over here .
but then , i want to know how you 're special .
if i know what your competition does , how are you going to prevent your competition from eating your lunch over here ?
and then all this ties into the financial overview .
and you have to have - you ca n't do a vc pitch without giving me your financials .
i want to know three and , you know , a year or two back , or as long as you 've been in existence .
and i want to know three or four or five years forward .
five is a bit much . probably four is rational .
and i want to know how that business model that you showed me on a product basis is going to translate into a company model .
and , you know , how many widgets are you going to sell ?
you 're making x amount per widget .
i want to know what the driver is .
we 're going to have 1,000 customers this year , and 10,000 next year .
and our revenues are going to go this , that and the other thing .
and so that gives me the whole picture for the next several years into which i 'm investing .
and i want to know how the money you 're going to get from me is going to help you get there .
you 're going to open an offshore plant in china , you 're going to spend it all on sales and marketing , you 're going to go to tahiti , or whatever out there .
but then comes the ask .
this is where you tell me how much you actually want to get .
you 're looking for 5 million - at what kind of valuation ?
two million at 100,000 .
what 's the money in so far ? who invested ?
i hope you invested personally .
because i 'm following on .
if you ca n't invest in your own thing , why should i invest in it ?
so i like to know if you have friends and family , or angel investors in there , or you 've had more vcs before .
what 's the capital structure up until this point ?
and then finally , having done all that , you 've now told me the whole thing , so now you 've got to bring it back to that conclusion .
this is that rocket going up .
so hopefully everything has been positive , positive , positive , more positive .
and everything , everything you say clicks with me , and it all makes sense .
and i 'm thinking , " this is really , really great . "
and then you take me back to your logo .
just your logo on the screen .
and i look at the logo - okay , good .
now i come back to you . nothing else to look at , right ?
and now , you 've got to wrap it up and tie it up here .
you 've got to give me the final , you know - boom ! - the final pitch that 's going to send me into space .
now , in the process of doing this over here , how do you remember the sequences and doers ?
you 've noticed here that i 'm not looking at the screen , right ?
the screen is , actually , in this room , is set up so it 's in front of me .
so , i could n't even see if i wanted to .
so now , how do i know what 's going on here ?
well , i 've got a laptop in front of me , but you 're looking at me . and you 're looking at this .
what do you think i 'm looking at ?
you think that i 'm looking at that ?
no , i 'm looking actually at a special version of powerpoint over here , which shows me the slides ahead , the slides behind , my notes from here , so i can see what 's going on .
powerpoint has this built into every copy of powerpoint that 's shipped .
if you use apple 's keynote , it 's got an even better version in keynote .
and then there 's another program , called ovation , you can get from adobe , that they just bought last summer .
which actually helps you run the whole timers , and it lets you figure out what 's going on .
so , here 's my wrap up to take you to the moon , right ?
david 's - i usually do a top 10 , we do n't have time for top 10s .
so david 's top five presentation tips .
number one : always use presenter mode , or ovation , or presenter tools , because it lets you know exactly where you 're going .
it helps you pace yourself , it gives you a timer so we end on time and the whole bit .
number four : always use remote control .
have you seen me touch the computer ?
no , you have n't . why not ?
because i 'm using remote control over here .
always use remote control .
number three : the handouts you give are not your presentation .
if you follow my suggestions , you 're going to have a very spare , very zen-like presentation , which is great for conveying who you are and getting people emotionally involved .
but it 's not really good as a handout .
you want to have a handout that gives a lot more information , because the handout has to stand without you over here .
number three : do n't read your speech .
can you imagine ? " well , you should invest in my company because it 's really good . "
it does n't work , right ? do n't read your speech .
and the number one presentation tip : never , ever look at the screen .
you 're making a connection with your audience over here , and you always want to do a one-on-one connection .
the screen should come up visually behind you , and supplement what you 're doing instead of replace you .
and that is how to pitch to a vc .
i want to say that really and truly , after these incredible speeches and ideas that are being spread , i am in the awkward position of being here to talk to you today about television .
so most everyone watches tv .
we like it . we like some parts of it .
here in america , people actually love tv .
the average american watches tv for almost 5 hours a day .
okay ?
now i happen to make my living these days in television , so for me , that 's a good thing .
but a lot of people do n't love it so much .
they , in fact , berate it .
they call it stupid , and worse , believe me .
my mother , growing up , she called it the " idiot box . "
but my idea today is not to debate whether there 's such a thing as good tv or bad tv ; my idea today is to tell you that i believe television has a conscience .
so why i believe that television has a conscience is that i actually believe that television directly reflects the moral , political , social and emotional need states of our nation - that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system .
so all these things are uniquely human , and they all add up to our idea of conscience .
now today , we 're not talking about good and bad tv .
we 're talking about popular tv .
we 're talking about top-10 nielsen-rated shows over the course of 50 years .
how do these nielsen ratings reflect not just what you 've heard about , which is the idea of our social , collective unconscious , but how do these top-10 nielsen-rated shows over 50 years reflect the idea how does television evolve over time , and what does this say about our society ?
now speaking of evolution , from basic biology , you probably remember that the animal kingdom , including humans , have four basic primal instincts .
you have hunger ; you have sex ; you have power ; and you have the urge for acquisitiveness .
as humans , what 's important to remember is that we 've developed , we 've evolved over time to temper , or tame , these basic animal instincts .
we have the capacity to laugh and cry .
we feel awe , we feel pity .
that is separate and apart from the animal kingdom .
the other thing about human beings is that we love to be entertained .
we love to watch tv .
this is something that clearly separates us from the animal kingdom .
animals might love to play , but they do n't love to watch .
so i had an ambition to discover what could be understood from this uniquely human relationship between television programs and the human conscious .
why has television entertainment evolved the way it has ?
i kind of think of it as this cartoon devil or angel sitting on our shoulders .
is television literally functioning as our conscience , tempting us and rewarding us at the same time ?
so to begin to answer these questions , we did a research study .
we went back 50 years to the 1959/1960 television season .
we surveyed the top-20 nielsen shows every year for 50 years - a thousand shows .
we talked to over 3,000 individuals - almost 3,600 - aged 18 to 70 , and we asked them how they felt emotionally .
how did you feel watching every single one of these shows ?
did you feel a sense of moral ambiguity ?
did you feel outrage ? did you laugh ?
what did this mean for you ?
so to our global ted audiences , i want to say that this was a u.s. sample .
but as you can see , these emotional need states are truly universal .
and on a factual basis , over 80 percent of the u.s. 's most popular shows are exported around the world .
so i really hope our global audiences can relate .
two acknowledgments before our first data slide : for inspiring me to even think about the idea of conscience and the tricks that conscience can play on us on a daily basis , i thank legendary rabbi , jack stern .
and for the way in which i 'm going to present the data , i want to thank ted community superstar hans rosling , who you may have just seen .
okay , here we go .
so here you see , from 1960 to 2010 , the 50 years of our study .
two things we 're going to start with - the inspiration state and the moral ambiguity state , which , for this purpose , we defined inspiration as television shows that uplift me , that make me feel much more positive about the world .
moral ambiguity are televisions shows in which i do n't understand the difference between right and wrong .
as we start , you see in 1960 inspiration is holding steady .
that 's what we 're watching tv for .
moral ambiguity starts to climb .
right at the end of the 60s , moral ambiguity is going up , inspiration is kind of on the wane .
why ?
the cuban missile crisis , jfk is shot , the civil rights movement , race riots , the vietnam war , mlk is shot , bobby kennedy is shot , watergate .
look what happens .
in 1970 , inspiration plummets .
moral ambiguity takes off .
they cross , but ronald reagan , a telegenic president , is in office .
it 's trying to recover .
but look , it ca n't : aids , iran-contra , the challenger disaster , chernobyl .
moral ambiguity becomes the dominant meme in television from 1990 for the next 20 years .
take a look at this .
this chart is going to document a very similar trend .
but in this case , we have comfort - the bubble in red - social commentary and irreverence in blue and green .
now this time on tv you have " bonanza , " do n't forget , you have " gunsmoke , " you have " andy griffith , " you have domestic shows all about comfort .
this is rising . comfort stays whole .
irreverence starts to rise .
social commentary is all of a sudden spiking up .
you get to 1969 , and look what happens .
you have comfort , irreverence , and social commentary , not only battling it out in our society , but you literally have two establishment shows - " gunsmoke " and " gomer pyle " - in 1969 are the number-two- and number-three-rated television shows .
what 's number one ?
the socially irreverent hippie show , " rowan and martin 's laugh-in . "
they 're all living together , right .
viewers had responded dramatically .
look at this green spike in 1966 to a bellwether show .
when you guys hear this industry term , a breakout hit , what does that mean ?
it means in the 1966 television season , the " smothers brothers " came out of nowhere .
this was the first show that allowed viewers to say , " my god , i can comment on how i feel about the vietnam war , about the presidency , through television ? "
that 's what we mean by a breakout show .
so then , just like the last chart , look what happens .
in 1970 , the dam bursts . the dam bursts .
comfort is no longer why we watch television .
social commentary and irreverence rise throughout the 70s .
now look at this .
the 70s means who ? norman lear .
you have " all in the family , " " sanford and son , " and the dominant show - in the top-10 for the entire 70s - " mas * h. "
in the entire 50 years of television that we studied , seven of 10 shows ranked most highly for irreverence appeared on air during the vietnam war , five of the top-10 during the nixon administration .
only one generation , 20 years in , and we discovered , wow ! tv can do that ?
it can make me feel this ?
it can change us ?
so to this very , very savvy crowd , i also want to note the digital folks did not invent disruptive .
archie bunker was shoved out of his easy chair along with the rest of us 40 years ago .
this is a quick chart . here 's another attribute : fantasy and imagination , which are shows defined as , " takes me out of my everyday realm " and " makes me feel better . "
that 's mapped against the red dot , unemployment , which is a simple bureau of labor department statistic .
you 'll see that every time fantasy and imagination shows rise , it maps to a spike in unemployment .
do we want to see shows about people saving money and being unemployed ?
no . in the 70s you have the bellwether show " the bionic woman " that rocketed into the top-10 in 1973 , followed by the " six million-dollar man " and " charlie 's angels . "
another spike in the 1980s - another spike in shows about control and power .
what were those shows ?
glamorous and rich .
" dallas , " " fantasy island . "
incredible mapping of our national psyche with some hard and fast facts : unemployment .
so here you are , in my favorite chart , because this is our last 20 years .
whether or not you 're in my business , you have surely heard or read of the decline of the thing called the three-camera sitcom and the rise of reality tv .
well , as we say in the business , x marks the spot .
the 90s - the big bubbles of humor - we 're watching " friends , " " frasier , " " cheers " and " seinfeld . "
everything 's good , low unemployment .
but look : x marks the spot .
in 2001 , the september 2001 television season , humor succumbs to judgment once and for all .
why not ?
we had a 2000 presidential election decided by the supreme court .
we had the bursting of the tech bubble .
we had 9/11 .
anthrax becomes part of the social lexicon .
look what happens when we keep going .
at the turn of the century , the internet takes off , reality television has taken hold .
what do people want in their tv then ?
i would have thought revenge or nostalgia .
give me some comfort ; my world is falling apart .
no , they want judgment .
i can vote you off the island .
i can keep sarah palin 's daughter dancing .
i can choose the next american idol . you 're fired .
that 's all great , right ?
so as dramatically different as these television shows , pure entertainment , have been over the last 50 years - what did i start with ? - one basic instinct remains .
we 're animals , we need our moms .
there has not been a decade of television without a definitive , dominant tv mom .
the 1950s : june cleever in the original comfort show , " leave it to beaver . "
lucille ball kept us laughing through the rise of social consciousness in the 60s .
maude findlay , the epitome of the irreverent 1970s , who tackled abortion , divorce , even menopause on tv .
the 1980s , our first cougar was given to us in the form of alexis carrington .
murphy brown took on a vice president when she took on the idea of single parenthood .
this era 's mom , bree van de kamp .
now i do n't know if this is the devil or the angel sitting on our conscience , sitting on television 's shoulders , but i do know that i absolutely love this image .
so to you all , the women of tedwomen , the men of tedwomen , the global audiences of tedwomen , thank you for letting me present my idea about the conscience of television .
but let me also thank the incredible creators who get up everyday to put their ideas on our television screens throughout all these ages of television .
they give it life on television , for sure , but it 's you as viewers , through your collective social consciences , that give it life , longevity , power or not .
so thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- kurt andersen : like many architects , david is a hog for the limelight but is sufficiently reticent - or at least pretends to be - that he asked me to question him rather than speaking .
in fact what we 're going to talk about , i think , is in fact a subject that is probably better served by a conversation than an address .
and i guess we have a bit of news clip to precede .
dan rather : since the september 11th attack on the world trade center , many people have flocked to downtown new york to see and pay respects at what amounts to the 16-acre burial ground .
now , as cbs 's jim axelrod reports , they 're putting the finishing touches on a new way for people to visit and view the scene .
jim axelrod : forget the empire state building or the statue of liberty .
there 's a new place in new york where the crowds are thickest - ground zero .
tourist : i 've taken my step-daughter here from indianapolis .
this was - out of all the tourist sites in new york city - this was her number-one pick .
ja : thousands now line up on lower broadway .
tourist : i 've been wanting to come down here since this happened .
ja : even on the coldest winter days .
to honor and remember .
tourist : it 's reality , it 's us . it happened here .
this is ours .
ja : so many , in fact , that seeing has become a bit of a problem .
tourist : i think that people are very frustrated that they 're not able to get closer to see what 's going on .
ja : but that is about to change .
in record time , a team of architects and construction workers designed and built a viewing platform to ease the frustration and bring people closer .
man : they 'll get an incredible panorama and understand , i think more completely , the sheer totality of the destruction of the place .
ja : if you think about it , ground zero is unlike most any other tourist site in america .
unlike the grand canyon or the washington monument , people come here to see what 's no longer there .
david rockwell : the first experience people will have here when they see this is not as a construction site but as this incredibly moving burial ground .
ja : the walls are bare by design , so people can fill them with their own memorials the way they already have along the current perimeter .
tourist : from our hearts , it affected us just as much .
ja : the ramps are made of simple material - the kind of plywood you see at construction sites - which is really the whole point .
in the face of america 's worst destruction people are building again .
jim axelrod , cbs news , new york .
ka : this is not an obvious subject to be in the sensuality segment , but certainly david you are known as - i know , a phrase you hate - an entertainment architect .
your work is highly sensual , even hedonistic .
dr : i like that word .
ka : it 's about pleasure - casinos and hotels and restaurants .
how did the shock that all of us - and especially all of us in new york - felt on the 11th of september transmute into your desire to do this thing ?
dr : well the truth of the matter is , post-september 11th , i felt myself in the role originally - first of all as someone who lives in tribeca and whose neighborhood was devastated , and as someone who works less than a mile from there - that i was in the role of forcing 100 people who work with me about creating the places we had been creating .
in fact we 're finishing a book which is called " pleasure , " which is about sensual pleasure in spaces .
but i 've got to tell you - it became impossible to do that .
we were really paralyzed .
and i found myself the friday after september 11th - two days afterwards - literally unable to motivate anyone to do anything .
we gave the office a few days off .
and in discussing this with other architects , we had seen people saying in the press that they should rebuild the towers as they were - they should rebuild them 50 stories taller .
and i thought it was astonishing to speculate , as if this were a competition , on something that was such a fresh wound .
and i had a series of discussions - first with rick scofidio and liz diller , who collaborated with us on this , and several other people - and really felt like we had to find relevance in doing something .
and that as people who create places , the ultimate way to help was n't to pontificate or to make up scenarios , but to help right now .
so we tried to come up with a way , as a group , to have a kind of design swat team .
and that was the mission that we came up with .
ka : were you conscious of suddenly - as a designer whose work is all about fulfilling wants - suddenly fulfilling needs ?
dr : well what i was aware of was , there was this overwhelming need to act now .
and we were asked to participate in a few projects before this .
there was a school , ps 234 , that had been evacuated down at ground zero .
they moved to an abandoned school .
we took about 20 or 30 architects and designers and artists , and over four days - it was like this urban barn-raising - to renovate it , and everyone wanted to help .
it was just extraordinary .
tom otterness contributed , maira kalman contributed and it became this cathartic experience for us .
ka : and that was done , effectively , by october 8 or something ?
dr : yeah .
ka : obviously , what you faced in trying to do something as substantial as this project - and this is only one of four that you 've designed to surround the site - you must have run up against the incredibly byzantine , entrenched bureaucracy and powers that be in new york real estate and new york politics .
dr : well , it 's a funny thing .
we finished ps 234 , and had dinner with a small group .
i was actually asked to be a committee chair on an aia committee to rebuild .
and i sat in on several meetings .
and there were the most circuitous grand plans that had to do with long-term infrastructure and rebuilding the entire city .
and the fact is that there were immediate wounds and needs that needed to be filled , and there was talk about inclusion and wanting it to be an inclusive process .
and it was n't an inclusive group .
so we said , what is - ka : it was not an inclusive group ?
dr : it was not an inclusive group .
it was predominantly a white , rich , corporate group that was not representative of the city .
ka : shocking .
dr : yeah , surprising .
so rick and liz and kevin and i came up with the idea .
the city actually approached us .
we first approached the city about pier 94 .
we saw how ps 234 worked .
the families - the victims of the families - were going to this pier that was incredibly dehumanizing .
ka : on the hudson river ?
dr : yeah . and the city actually - through tim zagat initially , and then through christyne nicholas , then we got to giuliani - said , " you know we do n't want to do anything with pier 94 right now , but we have an observation platform for the families down at ground zero that we 'd like to be a more dignified experience for the families , and a way to protect it from the weather . "
so i went down there with rick and liz and kevin , and i 've got to say , it was the most moving experience of my life .
it was devastating to see the simple plywood platform with a rail around it , where the families of the victims had left notes to them .
and there was no mediation between us and the experience .
there was no filter .
and i remembered on september 11th , on 14th street , the roof of our building - we can see the world trade towers prominently - and i saw the first building collapse from a conference room on the eighth floor on a tv that we had set up .
and then everyone was up on the roof , so i ran up there .
and it was amazing how much harder it was to believe in real life than it was on tv .
there was something about the comfort of the filter and how much information was between us and the experience .
so seeing this in a very simple , dignified way was a very powerful experience .
so we went back to the city and said we 're not particularly interested in the upgrade of this as a vip platform , but we 've spent some time down there .
at the same time the city had this need .
they were looking for a solution to deal with 30 or 40 thousand people a day who were going down there , that had nowhere to go .
and there was no way to deal with the traffic around the site .
so dealing with it is just an immediate master plan .
there was a way - there had to be a way - to get people to move around the site .
ka : but then you 've got to figure out a way - we will skip over the insanely tedious process of getting permits and getting everybody on board - but simply funding this thing .
it looks like a fairly simple thing , but this was a half a million dollar project ?
dr : well , we knew that if it was n't privately funded , it was n't going to happen .
and we also , frankly , knew that if it did n't happen by the end of the giuliani administration , then everyone who we were dealing with at the dot and the police department and all of the - we were meeting with 20 or 30 people with the city at a time , and it was set up by the office of emergency management .
this incredible act on their part , because they really wanted this , and they sensed that this needed to happen .
ka : and there was therefore this ticking clock , because giuliani was obviously out three months after that .
dr : yeah . so the first thing we had to do was find a way to get this - we had to work with the families of the victims , through the city , to make sure that they knew this was happening .
because this did n't want to be a surprise .
and we also had to be as under the radar screen as we could be in new york , because the key was not raising a lot of objection and sort of working as quietly as possible .
we came up with the idea of setting up a foundation , mainly because when we found a contractor who would build this , he would not agree to do this , even if we would pay him the money .
there needed to be a foundation in place .
so we came up with a foundation , and actually what happened was one major developer in new york - ka : who shall remain nameless , i guess ?
dr : yeah . his initials are js , and he owns rockefeller center , if that helps anyone - volunteered to help .
and we met with him .
the prices from the contractors were between five to 700,000 dollars .
and atlantic-heydt , who 's the largest scaffolding contractor in the country , volunteered to do it at cost .
so this developer said , " you know what , we 'll underwrite the entire expense . "
and we said , " that 's incredible ! "
and i think this was the 21st , and we knew this had to be built and up by the 28th .
and we had to start construction the next day .
we had a meeting that evening with his contractor of choice , and the contractor showed up with the drawings of the platform about half the size that we had drawn it .
ka : sort of like the spinal tap scene where you get the tiny little stonehenge , i guess ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dr : in fact , it was as if this was going to be window-washing scaffolding .
there was no sense of the fact that this is next to saint paul - that this is really a place that needs to be kind of dignified , and a place to reflect and remember .
and i 've got to say that we spent a lot of time in putting this together , watching the crowds that gathered at saint paul - which is just to the right - and moving around the site .
and i live down there , so we spent a lot of time looking at the need .
and i think people were amazed at two things - i think they were amazed at the destruction , but i think there was a sense of disbelief about the heroics of new yorkers that i found very moving .
just the sort of everyday heroics of new yorkers .
so we were in this meeting and the contractor literally said , " i 'm going to lock the door , because this developer will not agree to have you leave till you 've signed off on this . "
and we said , " well , this is half the size , it does n't have any of the design features that have been agreed upon by everyone - everyone in the city .
we 'd have to go back to the beginning to do this . "
and i convinced him that we should leave the room with the agreement to build it as designed .
the next day i got an email from the developer saying that he was withdrawing all funding .
so we did n't know what to do , but we decided to cast a very wide net .
we emailed out letters to as many people as we could - several people in the audience here - who were very helpful .
ka : there was no thought of abandoning ship at that point ?
dr : no . in fact i told the contractor to go ahead .
he had already ordered materials based on my go-ahead .
we knew that one way or another this was going to happen .
and we just felt it had to happen .
ka : you were funding it yourself and with contributions and this foundation .
richard , i think very correctly , made the point at the beginning - before all the chair designers came out - about the history of chair designers imposing aesthetic solutions on this kind of universal , banal , common problem of sitting .
it seems to me with this , that it was the opposite of that .
this was an unprecedented , singular design problem .
dr : well here 's the issue : we knew that this was not in the sense of - we think about the site , and think about the need for a memorial .
it was important that this not be categorized as a memorial .
that this was a place for people to reflect , to remember - a kind of quiet place .
so it led us to using design solutions that created as few filters between the viewer - as we said about the families ' platform - and the experience as possible .
it 's all incredibly humble material .
it 's scaffolding and plywood .
and it allows - by sort of the procession of the movement , up by saint paul 's and down the other side - it gives you about 300 feet to go up 13 feet from the ground to where you get the 360 degree view .
but the design was driven by a need to be quick , cheap , safe , respectful , flexible .
one of the other things is this is designed to be moveable .
because when we looked at the four platforms around the site , one of which is an upgrade of the families ' platform , we knew that these had to be moveable to respond to changing conditions , and the changing definition of what ground zero is .
ka : your work - i mean , we 've talked about this before - a lot of your work , i think , is informed by your belief in , or your focus on the temporariness of all things and the evanescence of things , and a kind of " eat , drink , and be merry , for tomorrow we die , " this is clearly not a work for the ages .
you know , a couple of years this thing is n't going to be here .
did that require , as an architect , a new way of thinking about what you were doing ?
to think of it as this purely temporary installation ?
dr : no , i do n't think so .
i think this is , obviously , substantially different from anything we 'd ever thought about doing before , just by the nature of it .
where it overlaps with thoughts about our work in general is , number one - the notion of collaboration as a sort of way to get things done .
and kevin kennon , rick scofidio , liz diller and all the people within the city - norman lear , who i spoke to four hours before our deadline for funding , offered to give us a bridge loan to help us get through it .
so the notion of collaboration - i think this reinforces how important that is .
and in terms of the temporary nature of it , our goal was not to create something that would be there longer than it needed to be .
i think what we were most interested in was promoting a kind of dialogue that we felt may not have been happening enough in this city , about what 's really happening there .
and a day or two before it opened was giuliani 's farewell address , where he proposed the idea of all of ground zero being a memorial .
which was very controversial , but it resonated with a lot of people .
and i think regardless of what the position is about how this sacred piece of land is to be used , having it come out of actually seeing it in a real encounter , i think makes it a more powerful dialogue .
and that 's what we were interested in .
so that , very much , is in the realm of things i 've been interested in before .
ka : it seems to me , among other things , a lovely piece of civic infrastructure .
it enables that conversation to get serious .
and six months after the fact - and only a few months away from the site being cleaned - we are very quickly , now , getting to the point where those conversations about what should go there are getting serious .
do you have - having been as physically involved in the site as you have been doing this project - have any ideas about what should or should n't be done ?
dr : well , i think one thing that should n't be done is evaluate - i think right now the discussion is a very closed discussion on the master plan .
the protetch gallery recently had a show on ideas for buildings , which had some sort of inventive ideas of buildings .
ka : but it had some really terrible ideas .
dr : and it also felt a little bit like a kind of competition of ideas , where i think the focus of ideas should be on master planning and uses .
and i think there should be a broader - which there 's starting to be - the dialogue is really opening up to , what does this site really want to be ?
and i truly believe until the issue of memorial is sorted out , that it 's going to be very hard to have an intelligent discussion .
there 's a few discussions right now that i think are very positive , about depressing the west side highway and connecting this over , so that there 's one uninterrupted piece of land .
ka : well , i think that 's interesting .
and it gets to another issue that was probably inappropriate to discuss six months ago , but perhaps is n't now , which is , not many of us love the world trade center as a piece of architecture , as what it had done to this city and that huge plaza .
is this an opportunity , is the silver lining - a silver lining , here - to rebuild some more traditional city grid , or not ?
dr : i think there 's a real opportunity to engage in a discussion of why we live in cities .
and why do we live in places where such dissimilar people collide up against us each day ?
i do n't think it has much to do with 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 thousand new office spaces , regardless of what the number is .
so yeah , i think there is a chance to re-look at how we think about cities .
and in fact , there 's a proposal on the table now for building number seven .
ka : which was the building just north of the towers ?
dr : right , which the towers fell into .
and the reason that 's been held up is essentially by community outrage that they 're not re-opening the street to connect that back to the rest of the city .
i think a public dialogue - i think , you know , i 'd like to see an international competition , and a call for ideas for uses .
ka : whether it 's arts , whether it 's housing , whether it 's what amount of shopping ?
dr : right . and we 're looking for other things .
this small foundation we put together is looking for other ways to help .
including taking a small piece adjacent to the site and inviting 10 architects who currently do n't have a voice in new york to do artist housing .
and find other ways to encourage the discussion to be against sort of monolithic , single solutions , and more about a multiplicity of things .
ka : before we end , i know you have a piece of digital video of the experience of being on this platform ?
dr : john kamen - who 's here , actually - put together a two and a half minute piece that shows the platform in use .
so i thought that would be good to end with .
dr : we 're looking from fulton street , west .
one of the tricky issues we had with the giuliani administration was i had forgotten how anti-graffiti he was .
and essentially our structure was designed to be written on .
ka : as you say , it 's not a memorial .
but were you conscious of memorials ? the vietnam memorial ?
those kinds of forms ?
dr : we certainly did as much research as we could , and we were conscious of other memorials .
and also the complexity and length of time they really take to do .
it 's 350 people on the committee for oklahoma city , which is why we thought of this as a sort of ad-hoc , spontaneous solution that expanded on union square and the places that were ad-hoc memorials in the city already .
the scaffolding you can see built up over the street is de-mountable .
what 's interesting now is the nature of the site has totally changed , so that what you 're aware of is not just the destruction of the buildings in ground zero , but all of the buildings around it - and the scars on the building around it , which are enormous .
this shows saint paul 's on the left .
ka : i just want to thank you on behalf of new yorkers for making this happen and getting this done .
but the kind of virtually instantaneous nature of its erection , and its being there , almost before you could believe that a response of this magnitude could be accomplished , is part of its extraordinary - i do n't know if beauty is the word - but presence .
dr : it was an honor to do .
and we were thrilled to be able to show it here .
i want to argue to you that in fact , politics and religion , which are the two primary factors - not the sole , but overwhelmingly , the primary factors - which are driving towards a war which looks extremely likely - bordering on the inevitable at this point , whether one is in favor of that or not - that politics and religion are , in fact , themselves better conceptualized as kinds of technology , and subject to kinds of questions that we regularly consider in the space of conceptual design .
here 's what i mean . politics and - let 's focus on the political system in particular question here , which is the system of democracy .
democracy , as a type of politics , is a technology for the control and deployment of power .
you can deploy power in a wide range of ways .
the famous ones - despotism is a good one ; anarchy is a way to not deploy the power in any organized way , to do it in a radically diffused fashion ; and democracy is a set of technologies , which have the effect of , in principle , diffusing the power source to a large number of people and then re-concentrating it in a smaller group of people who govern , and who themselves are , in principle , authorized to govern by virtue of what the broader public has done .
now , consider religion - in this case islam , which is the religion that , in some direct sense , can be said to be precipitating what we 're about to enter .
let me say parenthetically why i think that 's the case , because i think it 's a potentially controversial statement .
i would put it in the following equation : no 9/11 , no war .
at the beginning of the bush administration , when president bush , now president bush , was running for president , he made it very clear that he was not interested in intervening broadly in the world .
in fact , the trend was for disengagement with the rest of the world .
that 's why we heard about the backing away from the kyoto protocol , for example .
after 9/11 , the tables were turned .
and the president decided , with his advisors , to undertake some kind of an active intervention in the world around us .
that began with afghanistan , and when afghanistan went extremely smoothly and quickly , a decision was made through the technology of democracy - again , notice , not a perfect technology - but through the technology of democracy that this administration was going to push in the direction of another war - this time , a war in iraq .
now , the reason i begin by saying " no 9/11 , no war " is that we have to acknowledge that islam , as interpreted by a very , very small , extremely radical group of people , was a precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks - the precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks - and as a consequence , at one degree of remove , the precipitating cause of the coming war that we 're about to be engaged in .
and i would add that bin laden and his followers are consciously devoted to the goal of creating a conflict between democracy , or at least capitalist democracy , on the one hand , and the world of islam as they see and define it .
now , how is islam a technology in this conceptual apparatus ?
well , it 's a technology for , first , salvation in its most basic sense .
it 's meant to be a mechanism for construing the universe in a way that will bring about the salvation of the individual believer , but it 's also meant by the islamists - and i use that term to mean people who believe that islam - they follow the slogan , islam is the answer to a wide range of questions , whether they 're social , or political , or personal , or spiritual .
within the sphere of people who have that view , and it 's a large number of people in the muslim world who disagree with bin laden in his application , but agree that islam is the answer .
islam represents a way of engaging the world through which one can achieve certain desirable goals .
and the goals from the perspective of muslims are , in principle , peace , justice and equality , but on terms that correspond to traditional muslim teachings .
now , i do n't want to leave a misimpression by identifying either of these propositions - rather , either of these phenomena , democracy or islam - as technologies .
i do n't want to suggest that they are a single thing that you can point to .
and i think a good way to prove this is simply to demonstrate to you what my thought process was when deciding what to put on the wall behind me when i spoke .
and i ran immediately into a conceptual problem : you ca n't show a picture of democracy .
you can show a slogan , or a symbol , or a sign that stands for democracy .
you can show the capitol - i had the same problem when i was designing the cover of my forthcoming book , in fact - what do you put on the cover to show democracy ?
and the same problem with respect to islam .
you can show a mosque , or you can show worshippers , but there 's not a straightforward way of depicting islam .
that 's because these are the kinds of concepts that are not susceptible to easy representation .
now , it follows from that , that they 're deeply contestable .
it follows from that that all of the people in the world who say that they are muslims can , in principle , subscribe to a wide range of different interpretations of what islam really is , and the same is true of democracy .
in other words , unlike the word hope , which one could look up in a dictionary and derive origins for , and , perhaps , reach some kind of a consensual use analysis , these are essentially contested concepts .
they 're ideas about which people disagree in the deepest possible sense .
and as a consequence of this disagreement , it 's very , very difficult for anyone to say , " i have the right version of islam . "
you know , post-9/11 , we were treated to the amazing phenomenon of george w. bush saying , " islam means peace . "
well , so says george w. bush .
other people would say it means something else .
some people would say that islam means submission .
other people would say it means an acknowledgement or recognition of god 's sovereignty .
there are a wide range of different things that islam can mean .
and ostensibly , the same is true of democracy .
some people say that democracy consists basically in elections .
other people say no , that 's not enough , there have to be basic liberal rights : free speech , free press , equality of citizens .
these are contested points , and it 's impossible to answer them by saying , " ah ha , i looked in the right place , and i found out what these concepts mean . "
now , if islam and democracy are at present in a moment of great confrontation , what does that mean ?
well , you could fit it into a range of different interpretative frameworks .
you could begin with the one that we began with a couple of days ago , which was fear .
fear is not an implausible reaction with a war just around the corner and with a very , very high likelihood that many , many people are going to die as a consequence of this confrontation - a confrontation which many , many people in the muslim world do not want , many , many people in the american democracy do not want , many people elsewhere in the world do not want , but which nonetheless is favored by a large enough number of people - at least in the relevant space , which is the united states - to actually go forward . so fear is not a crazy response at all .
and i think that that 's , in fact , probably the first appropriate response .
what i want to suggest to you , though , in the next couple of minutes is that there 's also a hopeful response to this .
and the hopeful response derives from recognizing that islam and democracy are technologies .
and by virtue of being technologies , they 're manipulable .
and they 're manipulable in ways that can produce some extremely positive outcomes .
what do i have in mind ?
well , all over the muslim world there are people who take islam deeply seriously , people who care about islam , for whom it 's a source either of faith , or of civilization , or of deep values , or just a source of powerful personal identity , who think and are saying loudly that islam and democracy are in fact not in conflict , but are in fact deeply compatible .
and these muslims - and it 's the vast majority of muslims - disagree profoundly with bin laden 's approach , profoundly .
and they furthermore think overwhelmingly - again one ca n't speak of every person , but overwhelmingly , and one can find this by reading any of the sources that they have produced , and they 're all over the internet and in all sorts of languages - one can see that they 're saying that their concern in their own countries is primarily to free up themselves to have choice in the spheres of personal life , in the sphere of economics , in the sphere of politics , and , yes , in the sphere of religion , which is itself closely regulated in most of the muslim world .
and many of these muslims further say that their disagreement with the united states is that it , in the past and still in the present , has sided with autocratic rulers in the muslim world in order to promote america 's short-term interests .
now , during the cold war , that may have been a defensible position for the united states to take .
that 's an academic question .
it may be that there was a great war to be fought between west and east , and it was necessary on the axis of democracy against communism .
and it was necessary in some way for these to contradict each other , and as a consequence you have to make friends wherever you can get them .
but now that the cold war is over , there 's nearly universal consensus in the muslim world - and pretty close to the same here in the united states , if you talk to people and ask them - that in principle , there 's no reason that democracy and islam can not co-exist .
and we see this among activist , practical muslims , like the muslims who are presently the elected , parliamentary , democratic government of turkey , who are behaving pragmatically , not ideologically , who are promoting their own religious values , who are elected by their own people because they were perceived as honest and sincere because of their religious values , but who do not think that islam and a democratic system of governance are fundamentally incompatible .
now , you may say , but surely , what we 've seen on television about saudi islam convinces us that it ca n't possibly be compatible with what we consider the core of democracy - namely , free political choice , basic liberty and basic equality .
but i 'm here to tell you that technologies are more malleable than that .
i 'm here to tell you that many , many muslims believe - the vast majority , in fact - in fact i think i would go so far as to say that many muslims in saudi arabia believe that the core values of islam , namely acknowledgement of god 's sovereignty and basic human equality before god , are themselves compatible with liberty , equality and free political choice .
and there are muslims , many muslims out there , who are saying precisely this .
and they 're making this argument wherever they 're permitted to make it .
but their governments , needless to say , are relatively threatened by this .
and for the most part try to stop them from making this argument .
so , for example , a group of young activists in egypt try to form a party known as the center party , which advocated the compatibility of islam and democracy .
they were n't even allowed to form a party .
they were actually blocked from even forming a party under the political system there . why ?
because they would have done extraordinarily well .
in the most recent elections in the muslim world - which are those in pakistan , those in morocco and those in turkey - in each case , people who present themselves to the electorate as islamic democrats were far and away the most successful vote-getters every place they were allowed to run freely .
so in morocco , for example , they finished third in the political race but they were only allowed to contest half the seats .
so had they contested a larger number of the seats , they would have done even better .
now what i want to suggest to you is that the reason for hope in this case is that we are on the edge of a real transformation in the muslim world .
and that 's a transformation in which many sincerely believing muslims - who care very , very deeply about their traditions , who do not want to compromise those values - believe , through the malleability of the technology of democracy and the malleability and synthetic capability of the technology of islam , that these two ideas can work together .
now what would that look like ?
what does it mean to say that there 's an islamic democracy ?
well , one thing is , it 's not going to look identical to democracy as we know it in the united states .
that may be a good thing , in light of some of the criticisms we 've heard today - for example , in the regulatory context - of what democracy produces .
it will also not look exactly the way either the people in this room , or muslims out in the rest of the world - i do n't mean to imply there are n't muslims here , there probably are - conceptualize islam .
it will be transformative of islam as well .
and as a result of this convergence , this synthetic attempt to make sense of these two ideas together , there 's a real possibility that , instead of a clash of islamic civilization - if there is such a thing - and democratic civilization - if there is such a thing - we 'll in fact have close compatibility .
now , i began with the war because it 's the elephant in the room , and you ca n't pretend that there is n't about to be a war if you 're talking about these issues .
the war has tremendous risks for the model that i 'm describing because it 's very possible that as a consequence of a war , many muslims will conclude that the united states is not the kind of place that they want to emulate with respect to its forms of political government .
on the other hand , there 's a further possibility that many americans , swept up in the fever of a war , will say , and feel , and think that islam is the enemy somehow - that islam ought to be construed as the enemy .
and even though , for political tactical reasons , the president has been very , very good about saying that islam is not the enemy , nonetheless , there 's a natural impulse when one enters war to think of the other side as an enemy .
and one furthermore has the impulse to generalize , as much as possible , in defining who that enemy is .
so the risks are very great .
on the other hand , the capacities for positive results in the aftermath of a war are also not to be underestimated , even by , and i would say especially by , people who are deeply skeptical about whether we should go to war in the first place .
those who oppose the war ought to realize that if a war happens , it can not be the right strategy , either pragmatically , or spiritually , or morally , to say after the war , " well , let 's let it all run itself out , and play out however it wants to play out , because we opposed the war in the first place . "
that 's not the way human circumstances operate .
you face the circumstances you have in front of you and you go forward .
well , what i 'm here to say then is , for people who are skeptical about the war , it 's especially important to recognize that in the aftermath of the war there is a possibility for the government of the united states and the muslim peoples with whom it interacts to create real forms of government that are truly democratic and also truly islamic .
and it is crucial - it is crucial in a practical , activist way - for people who care about these issues to make sure that within the technology of democracy , in this system , they exercise their preferences , their choices and their voices to encourage that outcome .
that 's a hopeful message , but it 's a message that 's hopeful only if you understand it as incurring serious obligation for all of us .
and i think that we are capable of taking on that obligation , but only if we put what we can into it .
and if we do , then i do n't think that the hope will be unwarranted altogether .
thanks .
i know this is going to sound strange , but i think robots can inspire us to be better humans .
see , i grew up in bethlehem , pennsylvania , the home of bethlehem steel .
my father was an engineer , and when i was growing up , he would teach me how things worked .
we would build projects together , like model rockets and slot cars .
here 's the go-kart that we built together .
that 's me behind the wheel , with my sister and my best friend at the time , and one day , he came home , when i was about 10 years old , and at the dinner table , he announced that for our next project , we were going to build a robot .
a robot .
now , i was thrilled about this , because at school , there was a bully named kevin , and he was picking on me because i was the only jewish kid in class .
so i could n't wait to get started to work on this so i could introduce kevin to my robot . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- robot noises -rrb- but that was n't the kind of robot my dad had in mind .
see , he owned a chromium plating company , and they had to move heavy steel parts between tanks of chemicals , and so he needed an industrial robot like this that could basically do the heavy lifting .
but my dad did n't get the kind of robot he wanted , either .
he and i worked on it for several years , but it was the 1970s , and the technology that was available to amateurs just was n't there yet .
so dad continued to do this kind of work by hand , and a few years later , he was diagnosed with cancer .
you see , what the robot we were trying to build was telling him was not about doing the heavy lifting .
it was a warning about his exposure to the toxic chemicals .
he did n't recognize that at the time , and he contracted leukemia , and he died at the age of 45 .
i was devastated by this , and i never forgot the robot that he and i tried to build .
when i was in college , i decided to study engineering , like him .
and i went to carnegie mellon , and i earned my phd in robotics .
i 've been studying robots ever since .
so what i 'd like to tell you about are four robot projects and how they 've inspired me to be a better human .
by 1993 , i was a young professor at usc , and i was just building up my own robotics lab , and this was the year that the world wide web came out .
and i remember my students were the ones who told me about it , and we would - we were just amazed .
we started playing with this , and that afternoon , we realized that we could use this new , universal interface to allow anyone in the world to operate the robot in our lab .
so , rather than have it fight or do industrial work , we decided to build a planter , put the robot into the center of it , and we called it the telegarden .
and we had put a camera in the gripper of the hand of the robot , and we wrote some special scripts and software so that anyone in the world could come in and by clicking on the screen they could move the robot around and visit the garden .
but we also allowed , set up some other software that lets you participate and help us water the garden remotely , and if you water it a few times , we 'd give you your own seed to plant .
now , this was a project , an engineering project , and we published some papers on the design , the system design of it , but we also thought of it as an art installation .
it was invited , after the first year , by the ars electronica museum in austria to have it installed in their lobby , and i 'm happy to say it remained online there , 24 hours a day , for almost nine years .
that robot was operated by more people than any other robot in history .
now , one day , i got a call out of the blue from a student , who asked a very simple but profound question .
he said , " is the robot real ? "
now , everyone else had assumed it was , and we knew it was because we were working with it .
but i knew what he meant , because it would be possible to take a bunch of pictures of flowers in a garden and then , basically , index them in a computer system such that it would appear that there was a real robot when there was n't .
and the more i thought about it , i could n't think of a good answer for how he could tell the difference .
this was right about the time that i was offered a position here at berkeley , and when i got here , i looked up hubert dreyfus , who 's a world-renowned professor of philosophy , and i talked with him about this , and he said , " this is one of the oldest and most central problems in philosophy . it goes back to the skeptics , and up through descartes .
it 's the issue of epistemology , the study of how do we know that something is true . "
so he and i started working together , and we coined a new term : telepistemology , the study of knowledge at a distance .
we invited leading artists , engineers , and philosophers to write essays about this , and the results , the results are collected in this book from mit press .
so thanks to this student who questioned what everyone else had assumed to be true , this project taught me an important lesson about life , which is to always question assumptions .
now , the second project i 'll tell you about grew out of the telegarden .
as it was operating , my students and i were very interested in how people were interacting with each other and what they were doing with the garden .
so we started thinking , what if the robot could leave the garden and go out into some other interesting environment ?
like , for example , what if it could go to a dinner party at the white house ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , because we were interested more in the system design and the user interface than in the hardware , we decided that , rather than have a robot replace the human to go to the party , we 'd have a human replace the robot .
we called it the tele-actor .
we got a human , someone who 's very outgoing and gregarious , and she was outfitted with a helmet with various equipment , cameras and microphones , and then a backpack with wireless internet connection , and the idea was that she could go into a remote and interesting environment , and then over the internet , people could experience what she was experiencing , so they could see what she was seeing , but then , more importantly , they could participate by interacting with each other and coming up with ideas about what she should do next and where she should go , and then conveying those to the tele-actor .
so we got a chance to take the tele-actor to the webby awards in san francisco , and that year , sam donaldson was the host .
just before the curtain went up , i had about 30 seconds to explain to mr. donaldson what we were gonna do , and i said , " the tele-actor is going to be joining you on stage , and this is a new experimental project , and people are watching her on their screens , and she 's got - there 's cameras involved and there 's microphones and she 's got an earbud in her ear , and people over the network are giving her advice about what to do next . "
and he said , " wait a second , that 's what i do . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so he loved the concept , and when the tele-actor walked onstage , she walked right up to him , and she gave him a big kiss right on the lips . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we were totally surprised .
we had no idea that would happen .
and he was great . he just gave her a big hug in return , and it worked out great .
but that night , as we were packing up , i asked the tele-actor , how did the tele-directors decide that they would give a kiss to sam donaldson ?
and she said they had n't .
she said , when she was just about to walk on stage , the tele-directors were still trying to agree on what to do , and so she just walked on stage and did what felt most natural . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the success of the tele-actor that night was due to the fact that she was a wonderful actor .
she knew when to trust her instincts , and so that project taught me another lesson about life , which is that , when in doubt , improvise . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the third project grew out of my experience when my father was in the hospital .
he was undergoing a treatment , chemotherapy treatments , and there 's a related treatment called brachytherapy , where tiny , radioactive seeds are placed into the body to treat cancerous tumors .
and the way it 's done , as you can see here , is that surgeons insert needles into the body to deliver the seeds , and all this , all these needles are inserted in parallel , so it 's very common that some of the needles penetrate sensitive organs , and as a result , the needles damage these organs , cause damage which leads to trauma and side effects .
so my students and i wondered , what if we could modify the system so that the needles could come in at different angles ?
so we simulated this , and we developed some optimization algorithms and we simulated this , and we were able to show that we are able to avoid the delicate organs and yet still achieve the coverage of the tumors with the radiation .
so now , we 're working with doctors at ucsf and engineers at johns hopkins and we 're building a robot that has a number of , it 's a specialized design with different joints that can allow the needles to come in at an infinite variety of angles , and as you can see here , they can avoid delicate organs and still reach the targets they 're aiming for .
so , by questioning this assumption that all the needles have to be parallel , this project also taught me an important lesson : when in doubt - when your path is blocked , pivot .
and the last project also has to do with medical robotics .
and this is something that 's grown out of a system called the da vinci surgical robot , and this is a commercially available device .
it 's being used in over 2,000 hospitals around the world , and the idea is it allows the surgeon to operate comfortably in his own coordinate frame , but many of the subtasks in surgery are very routine and tedious , like suturing , and currently , all of these are performed under the specific and immediate control of the surgeon , so the surgeon becomes fatigued over time .
and we 've been wondering , what if we could program the robot to perform some of these subtasks , and thereby free the surgeons to focus on the more complicated parts of the surgery , and also cut down on the time that the surgery would take if we could get the robot to do them a little bit faster ?
now , it 's hard to program a robot to do delicate things like this , but it turns out my colleague , pieter abbeel , who 's here at berkeley , has develeloped a new set of techniques for teaching robots from example .
so he 's gotten robots to fly helicopters , do incredibly interesting , beautiful acrobatics , by watching human experts fly them .
so we got one of these robots .
we started working with pieter and his students , and we asked a surgeon to perform a task , and what we do is we , with the robot , so what we 're doing is asking the robot , the surgeon to perform the task , and we record the motions of the robot .
so here 's an example . i 'll use a figure eight , tracing out a figure eight as an example .
so here 's what it looks like when the robot , this is what the robot 's path looks like , those three examples .
now , those are much better than what a novice like i could do , but they 're still jerky and imprecise .
so we record all these examples , the data , and then we go through a sequence of steps .
first , we used a technique called dynamic time warping from speech recognition , and this allows us to temporally align all of the examples , and then we apply kalman filtering , a technique from control theory , that allows us to statistically analyze all the noise and extract the desired trajectory that underlies them .
human demonstrations , they 're all noisy and imperfect , and we extract from them an inferred task trajectory and control sequence for the robot .
we then execute that on the robot , we observe what happens , then we adjust the controls using a sequence of techniques called iterative learning .
then what we do is , we increase the velocity a little bit .
we observe the results , adjust the controls again , and observe what happens .
and we go through this several rounds .
and here 's the result .
that 's the inferred task trajectory , and here 's the robot moving at the speed of the human .
here 's four times the speed of the human .
here 's seven times .
and here 's the robot operating at 10 times the speed of the human .
so we 're able to get a robot to perform a delicate task , like a surgical subtask , at 10 times the speed of a human .
so this project also , because of its involved practicing and learning , doing something over and over again , this project also has a lesson , which is , if you want to do something well , there 's no substitute for practice , practice , practice .
so these are four of the lessons that i 've learned from robots over the years , and robotics , the field of robotics has gotten much better over time .
nowadays , high school students can build robots like the industrial robot my dad and i tried to build .
and now , i have a daughter , named odessa .
she 's eight years old , and she likes robots , too .
maybe it runs in the family . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i wish she could meet my dad .
and now i get to teach her how things work , and we get to build projects together , and i wonder what kind of lessons that she 'll learn from them .
robots are the most human of our machines .
they ca n't solve all of the world 's problems , but i think they have something important to teach us .
i invite all of you to think about the innovations that you 're interested in , the machines that you wish for , and think about what they might be telling you , because i have a hunch that many of our technological innovations , the devices we dream about , can inspire us to be better humans .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've always wanted to be a cyborg .
one of my favorite shows as a kid was " the six million dollar man , " and this is a little bit closer to the 240 dollar man or so , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- at at any rate . i would normally feel very self-conscious and geeky wearing this around , but a few days ago i saw one world-renowned statistician swallowing swords on stage here , so i figure it 's ok amongst this group .
but that 's not what i want to talk about today .
i want to talk about toys , and the power that i see inherent in them .
when i was a kid , i attended montessori school up to sixth grade in atlanta , georgia .
and at the time i did n't think much about it , but then later , i realized that that was the high point of my education .
from that point on , everything else was pretty much downhill .
and it was n't until later , as i started making games , that - i really actually think of them more as toys .
people call me a game designer , but i really think of these things more as toys .
but i started getting very interested in maria montessori and her methods , and the way she went about things , and the way she thought it very valuable for kids to kind of discover things on their own rather than being taught these things overtly .
and she would design these toys , where kids in playing with the toys would actually come to understand these deep principles of life and nature through play .
and since they discovered those things , it really stuck with them so much more , and also they would experience their own failures ; there was a failure-based aspect to learning there . it was very important .
and so , the games that i do , i think of really more as modern montessori toys .
and i really kind of want them to be presented in a way to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles .
so a few years ago , i actually started getting very interested in the seti program . and that 's the way i work .
i get interested in different kinds of subjects , i dive in , i research them , and then i try to figure out how to craft a toy around that , so that other people can kind of experience the same sense of discovery as i did as i was learning that subject .
and it kind of led me to astrobiology , which is the study of possible life in the universe .
and then drake 's equation , which is looking at the probability of life arising on planets , how long it might last , how many planets are out there , stuff like that .
and i started looking at how interesting drake 's equation was , because it spanned all these different subjects - physics , chemistry , sociology , economics , astronomy .
and another thing that really impressed me a long time ago was " powers of ten , " charles and ray eames ' film .
and i started putting those two together and wondering , could i build a toy where kids would kind of trip across all these interesting principles of life , as it exists and as it might go in the future .
things where you might trip across things like the copernican principle , the fermi paradox , the anthropic principle , the origin of life .
and so i 'm going to show you a toy today that i 've been working on , that i think of more than anything else as kind of a philosophy toy .
in playing this toy , you kind of - this will bring up philosophical questions in you .
this game 's called " spore . " i 've been working on it for several years .
it 's getting pretty close to finished now .
it occurs at all these different scales , first of all , from very , very small to very , very large .
i 'm just going to pop in at the start of the game .
and you actually start this game in a drop of water , as a very , very small single-cell creature , and right off the bat you basically just have to live , survive , reproduce .
so here we are , at a very microscopic scale , swimming around . and i actually realize that cells do n't have eyes , but it helps to make it cute .
the players are going to play through every generation of this species , and as you play the game the creature is actually growing bit by bit .
and as we start growing the camera will actually start zooming out , and things that you see in the background there will actually start slowly pulling into the foreground , showing you a little bit of what you 'll be interacting with as you grow .
so as we eat , the camera starts pulling out , and then we start interacting with kind of larger and larger organisms .
now , we actually play through many generations here , at the cellular scale .
i 'm going to skip ahead here . at some point we get larger , and we actually get to a macro-evolution scale .
now at this point we 're leaving the water , and one thing that 's kind of important about this game is that , at every level , the player is designing their creature , and that 's a fundamental aspect of this .
now , in the evolution game here , the creature scale , basically you have to eat , survive , and then reproduce . you know , very darwinian .
one thing we noticed with " the sims , " which is a game i did earlier , is that players love making stuff .
when they were able to make stuff in the game they had a tremendous amount of empathy in connection to it . even if it was n't as pretty as what other people would make it - as a professional artist would make for games - it really stuck with them and they really cared about what would happen to it .
so at this point , we 've left the water , and now with this little creature - we could bring up the volume a little bit - and now we might try to eat .
we might sneak up on this little guy over here maybe , and try and eat him .
ok , well , we fight .
ok , we got him . now we get a meal .
so really , at this part of the game , what we 're doing is we 're running around and surviving , and also getting to the next generation , because we 're going to play through every generation of this creature .
we can mate , so i 'm going to see if one of these creatures wants to mate with me . yeah .
we did n't want to replay actual evolution with humans and all that , because it 's almost more interesting to look at alternate possibilities in evolution .
evolution is usually presented as this one path that we took through , but really it represents this huge set of possibilities .
now once we mate , we click on the egg .
and this is where the game starts getting interesting , because one of the things we really focused on here was giving the players very high-leverage tools , so that for a very small amount of effort the player can make something very cool . and it involves a lot of intelligence on the tool side .
but basically , this is the editor where we 're going to design the next generation of our creature . so it has a little spine .
i can move around here . i can extend .
i can also inflate or deflate it with the mouse wheel , so you sculpt it like clay . we have parts here that i can put on or pull off .
the idea is that the player can basically design anything they can think of in this editor , and we 'll basically bring it to life .
so , for instance , i might put some limbs on the character here .
i 'll inflate them kind of large .
and in this case i might decide i 'm going to put - i 'll put mouths on the limbs .
so pretty much players are encouraged to be very creative in the game .
here , i 'll give it one eye in the middle , maybe scale it up a bit . point it down .
and i 'll also give it a few legs .
so in some sense we want this to feel like an amplifier for the player 's imagination , so that with a very small number of clicks a player can create something that they did n't really think was possible before .
you know , this is almost like designing something like maya that an eight-year-old can use .
but really the goal here was , within about a minute , i wanted somebody to replicate what typically takes a pictorial artist several weeks to create .
ok , now i 'll put some hands on it .
ok , so here i 've basically thrown together a little creature .
let me give it a little weapon on the tail here , so it can fight .
ok , so that 's the complete model . now we can actually go to the painting phase .
now , at this phase , the program actually has some understanding of the topology of this creature . it kind of knows where the backbone is , where the spine , the limbs are .
it kind of knows how stripes should run , how it should be shaded .
and so we 're procedurally generating the texture map , and this is something a texture artist would take many , many days to work on .
and then we can test it out , once we 've done that , and see how it would move around .
and so at this point the computer is procedurally animating this creature .
it 's looking at whatever i 've designed . it will actually bring it to life .
and i can see how it might dance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how it might show emotions , how it might fight .
so it 's acting with its two mouths there .
i can even have it pose for a photo . snap a little photo of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at any rate , then i bring this back into the game . it 's born , and i play the next generation of my creature through evolution .
now again , the empathy that the players have when they create the content is tremendous . now , when players create content in this game , it 's automatically sent up to a server and then redistributed to all the other players transparently .
so in fact , as i 'm interacting in this world with other creatures , these creatures are transparently coming from other players as they play .
so the process of playing the game is a process of building up this huge database of content . and pretty much everything you 're going to see in this game , there 's an editor for in the game that the player can create , all the way up through civilization . this is my baby .
when i eat , i 'll actually start growing . this is the next generation .
but i 'm going to skip way ahead here . now , normally what would happen is these creatures would work their way up , eventually become intelligent .
i 'd start dealing with tribes , cities and civilizations of them over time .
i 'm going to skip way ahead here to the space phase .
eventually they would go out into space , and start colonizing and exploring the universe .
now really , in some sense , i want the players to be building this world in their imagination , and then extracting it from them with the least amount of pain .
so that 's kind of what these tools are about , are : how do we make the game play the player 's imagination-amplifier ?
and how do we make these tools , these editors , something that are just as fun as the game itself ?
so this is the planet that we 've been playing on up to this point in the game .
so far the entire game has been played on the surface of this little world here .
now , at this point we 're actually dealing with a very little toy planet .
almost , again , like the montessori toy idea .
you know , what happens if you give somebody a toy planet , and let them play with a lot of dynamics on it , what could they discover ? what might they learn on this ?
this world was actually extracted from the player 's imagination .
so , this is the planet that the player evolved on .
things like the buildings , and the vehicles , the architecture , civilizations were all designed by the player up to this point .
so here 's a little city with some of our guys kind of walking around in it .
and most games kind of put the player in the role of luke skywalker , this protagonist playing through this story .
really , this is more about putting the player in the role of george lucas , you know ?
i want them , after they 've played this game , to have extracted an entire world that they 're now interacting with .
now , as we pull down here , we still have a whole set of creatures living on the surface of the planet . there are all these different dynamics going on here .
in fact , i can look over here , and this is kind of a little simplified food web that 's going on with the creatures .
i can open this up and then scan what exists on the surface , and get some sense of the diversity of creatures that were brought in .
some of these were created by the player , others by other players and automatically sent over here .
but there 's a very simple little kind of calculation of what 's required , how much plants are required for the herbivores to live , how many herbivores for the carnivores to eat , etc . , that you actually have to balance actively .
now also with this phase , we 're getting more and more god-like powers for the player , and you can kind of experiment with this planet again as a toy .
so i can come in and i can do things , and just treat this planet as a lump of clay .
we have very simple little weather systems you see here , very simple geology . for instance , i could open one of my tools here and then carve out rivers .
so this whole thing is kind of like a big lump of clay , a sculpture .
i can also play with the dynamics of this world over time .
so one of the things i can do is start pumping more co2 gases into the atmosphere , and so that 's what i 'm doing here .
there 's actually a little read out down there of our planetary atmosphere , pressure and temperature .
so as i start pumping in more atmosphere , we 're going to start pushing up the greenhouse gases here and if you 'll start noticing , we start seeing the ocean levels rise over time .
and our cities are going to be at risk too , because a lot of these are coastal cities .
you can see the ocean levels are rising now and as they encroach upon the cities , i 'll start losing cities here .
so basically , i want the players to be able to experiment and explore a huge amount of failure space . so there goes one city .
now over time , this is actually going to heat up the planet .
so at first what we 're going to see is a global ocean rise here on this little toy planet , but then over time - i can speed it up just a little bit - we 'll actually see the heat impact of that as well .
so not only will it get hotter , but at some point it 's going to get so hot the oceans will entirely evaporate .
so at first they 'll go up , and then they 'll evaporate , and that 'll be my planet .
so basically , what we 're getting here is the sequel to " an inconvenient truth , " in about two minutes , and that actually brings up an interesting point about games .
now here , our entire oceans are evaporating off the surface , and as it keeps getting hotter at some point the entire planet 's going to melt down .
here it goes .
so we 're not only simulating biological dynamics - food webs and all that - but also geologic , you know , on a very simple core scale .
and what 's interesting to me about games , in some sense , is that i think we can take a lot of long-term dynamics and compress them into very short-term kind of experiences .
because it 's so hard for people to think 50 or 100 years out , but when you can give them a toy , and they can experience these long-term dynamics in just a few minutes , i think it 's an entirely different kind of point of view , where we 're actually mapping , using the game to re-map our intuition .
it 's almost in the same way that a telescope or microscope recalibrates your eyesight ; i think computer simulations can recalibrate your instinct across vast scales of both space and time .
so here 's our little solar system , as we pull away from our melted planet here .
we actually have a couple of other planets in this solar system .
let 's fly to another one .
so in fact , we 're going to have this unlimited number of worlds you can kind of explore here . now , as we move into the future , we 're drawing a lot from things like science fiction .
and all my favorite science fiction movies i want to basically play out here as different dynamics .
so this planet actually has some life on it .
here it is , some indigenous life down here .
now one of the tools i can eventually earn for my ufo is a monolith that i can drop down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now as you can see , these guys are actually starting to go up and bow to it , and over time , once they touch it , they will become intelligent .
so i can actually pick a species on a planet and then make them sentient .
you see , now they 've actually gone to tribal dynamics .
and now , because i 'm actually the one here , i can , if i want to , get out of the ufo and walk up , and they should be worshipping me at this point as a god .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- at first they 're a little freaked out .
ok , well maybe they 're not worshipping me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think i 'll leave before they get hostile .
but we basically want a diversity of activities the players can play through this .
basically , i want to be able to play , " the day the earth stood still , " " 2001 : a space odyssey , " " star trek , " " war of the worlds . "
now as we pull away from this world - we 're going to keep pulling away from the star now .
one of the things that always frustrated me a little bit about astronomy when i was a kid is how it was always presented so two-dimensionally and so static . as we pull away from the star here , we 're actually going now out into interstellar space , and we 're getting a sense of the space around our home star .
now what i really wanted to do is to present this , basically as wonderfully 3d as it is actually is .
and not only that , but also show the dynamics , and a lot of the interesting objects that you might find , maybe like in the hubble , at pretty much realistic frequencies and scales .
so most people have no idea of the difference between like , an emission nebula and a planetary nebula .
but these are the things that we can kind of put in this little galaxy here .
so we 're flying over here to what looks like a black hole .
i want to basically have the entire zoo of hubble objects that people can kind of interact with and play with , again , as toys .
so here 's a little black hole that we probably do n't want to get too close to .
but we also have stars and things as well .
if we pull all the way back , we start seeing the entire galaxy here , kind of slowly in motion . and this is another thing where , typically when people present galaxies , it 's always been these very beautiful photos , but they 're always static . and when you actually bring it forward in time and start animating it , it 's actually kind of amazing , what a galaxy would look like , fast forwarded .
this would be about one million years a second , because you have about roughly one supernova every century or so .
and so you 'd have this wonderful sparkling thing , with the disk slowly rotating , and this is roughly what it would look like . and so really , part of this is about bringing the beauty of this , of the natural world , to somebody in a very imaginative way , so that they can start calibrating their instinct across these vast scales of space and time .
chris was wondering what kind of gods that the players would become .
because if you think about it , you 're going to have 15-year-olds , 20-year-olds , whatever , flying around this universe .
and they might be a nurturing god . they might be boot-strapping life on planets , trying to terra-form and spread civilization .
you might be a vengeful god and going out and conquesting , because you actually can do that , you can go in and attack other intelligent races .
you might be a networking god , building alliances , which you can also do in the game , or just curious , going around and wanting to explore as much as you possibly can .
but basically , the reason why i make toys like this is because i think if there 's one difference i could possibly make in the world , that i would choose to make , it 's that i would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking .
because i think most of the problems that our world is facing right now is the result of short-term thinking , and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50 , 100 , or 1,000 years out .
and i think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics , very long-term dynamics over the short term , and getting some sense of what we 're doing now , what it 's going to be like in 100 years , i think probably is the most effective thing i can be doing to help the world .
and so that 's why i think , personally , that toys can change the world .
thank you .
i 'm going to discuss with you three of my inventions that can have an effect on 10 to a 100 million people , which we will hope to see happen .
we discussed , in the prior film , some of the old things that we did , like stents and insulin pumps for the diabetic .
and i 'd like to talk very briefly about three new inventions that will change the lives of many people .
at the present time , it takes an average of three hours after the first symptoms of a heart attack are recognized by the patient , before that patient arrives at an emergency room .
and people with silent ischemia - which , translated into english , means they do n't have any symptoms - it takes even longer for them to get to the hospital .
the ami , acute myocardial infarction , which is a doctor 's big word so they can charge you more money - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - means a heart attack . annual incidence : 1.2 million americans .
mortality : 300,000 people dying each year .
about half of them , 600,000 , have permanent damage to their heart that will cause them to have very bad problems later on .
thus 900,000 people either have died or have significant damage to their heart muscle .
symptoms are often denied by the patient , particularly us men , because we are very brave . we are very brave , and we do n't want to admit that i 'm having a hell of a chest pain .
then , approximately 25 percent of all patients never have any symptoms .
what are we going to do about them ? how can we save their lives ?
it 's particularly true of diabetics and elderly women .
well , what is needed for the earliest possible warning of a heart attack ?
a means to determine if there 's a complete blockage of a coronary artery .
that , ladies and gentlemen , is a heart attack .
the means consist of noting something a little technical , st segment elevation of the electrogram - translated into english , that means that if there 's an electrical signal in the heart , and one part of the ecg - which we call the st segment - elevates , that is a sure sign of a heart attack .
and if we had a computer put into the body of a person who 's at risk , we could know , before they even have symptoms , that they 're having a heart attack , to save their life .
well , the doctor can program a level of this st elevation voltage that will trigger an emergency alarm , vibration like your cell phone , but right by your clavicle bone .
and when it goes beep , beep , beep , you better do something about it , because if you want to live you have to get to some medical treatment .
so we have to try these devices out because the fda wo n't just let us use them on people unless we try it out first , and the best model for this happens to be pigs .
and what we tried with the pig was external electrodes on the skin , like you see in an emergency room , and i 'm going to show you why they do n't work very well .
and then we put a lead , which is a wire , in the right ventricle inside the heart , which does the electrogram , which is the signal voltage from inside the heart .
well , with the pig , at the baseline , before we blocked the pig 's artery to simulate a heart attack , that was the signal .
after 43 seconds , even an expert could n't tell the difference , and after three minutes - well , if you really studied it , you 'd see a difference .
but what happened when we looked inside the pig 's heart , to the electrogram ?
there was the baseline - first of all , a much bigger and more reliable signal .
second of all , i 'll bet even you people who are untrained can see the difference , and we see here an st segment elevation right after this sharp line .
look at the difference there . it does n't take much - every layperson could see that difference , and computers can be programmed to easily detect it .
then , look at that after three minutes .
we see that the signal that 's actually in the heart , we can use it to tell people that they 're having a heart attack even before they have symptoms so we can save their life .
then we tried it with my son , dr. tim fischell , we tried it on some human patients who had to have a stent put in .
well , he kept the balloon filled to block the artery , to simulate a blockage , which is what a heart attack is .
and it 's not hard to see that - the baseline is the first picture on the upper left .
next to it , at 30 seconds , you see this rise here , then this rise - that 's the st elevation .
and if we had a computer that could detect it , we could tell you you 're having a heart attack so early it could save your life and prevent congestive heart failure .
and then he did it again . we filled the balloon again a few minutes later and here you see , even after 10 seconds , a great rise in this piece , which we can have computers inside , under your chest like a pacemaker , with a wire into your heart like a pacemaker .
and computers do n't go to sleep .
we have a little battery and on this little battery that computer will run for five years without needing replacement .
what does the system look like ?
well , on the left is the imd , which is implantable medical device , and tonight in the tent you can see it - they 've exhibited it .
it 's about this big , the size of a pacemaker .
it 's implanted with very conventional techniques .
and the exd is an external device that you can have on your night table .
it 'll wake you up and tell you to get your tail to the emergency room when the thing goes off because , if you do n't , you 're in deep doo-doo .
and then , finally , a programmer that will set the level of the stimulation , which is the level which says you are having a heart attack .
the fda says , ok , test this final device after it 's built in some animal , which we said is a pig , so we had to get this pig to have a heart attack .
and when you go to the farmyard , you ca n't easily get pigs to have heart attacks , so we said , well , we 're experts in stents .
tonight you 'll see some of our invented stents .
we said , so we 'll put in a stent , but we 're not going to put in a stent that we 'd put in people .
we 're putting in a copper stent , and this copper stent erodes the artery and causes heart attacks .
that 's not very nice , but , after all , we had to find out what the answer is .
so we took two copper stents and we put it in the artery of this pig , and let me show you the result that 's very gratifying as far as people who have heart disease are concerned .
so there it was , thursday morning we stopped the pig 's medication and there is his electrogram , the signal from inside the pig 's heart coming out by radio telemetry .
then , on friday at 6:43 , he began to get certain signs , which later we had the pig run around - i 'm not going to go into this early stage .
but look what happened at 10:06 after we removed this pig 's medication that kept him from having a heart attack .
any one of you now is an expert on st elevation . can you see it there ?
can you see it in the picture after the big rise of the qrs - you see st elevation ?
this pig at 10:06 was having a heart attack .
what happens after you have the heart attack , this blockage ?
your rhythm becomes irregular , and that 's what happened 45 minutes later .
then , ventricular fibrillation , the heart quivers instead of beats - this is just before death of the pig - and then the pig died ; it went flat-line .
but we had a little bit over an hour where we could 've saved this pig 's life .
well , because of the fda , we did n't save the pig 's life , because we need to do this type of animal research for humans .
but when it comes to the sake of a human , we can save their life .
we can save the lives of people who are at high risk for a heart attack .
what is the response to acute myocardial infarction , a heart attack , today ?
well , you feel some chest pain or indigestion .
it 's not all that bad ; you decide not to do anything .
several hours pass and it gets worse , and even the man wo n't ignore it .
finally , you go to the emergency room .
you wait as burns and other critical patients are treated , because 75 percent of the patients who go to an emergency room with chest pains do n't have ami , so you 're not taken very seriously .
they finally see you . it takes more time to get your electrocardiogram on your skin and diagnose it , and it 's hard to do because they do n't have the baseline data , which the computer we put in you gets .
finally , if you 're lucky , you are treated in three or four hours after the incident , but the heart muscle has died .
and that is the typical treatment in the advanced world - not africa - that 's the typical treatment in the advanced world today .
so we developed the angelmed guardian system and we have a device inside this patient , called the implanted angelmed guardian .
and when you have a blockage , the alarm goes off and it sends the alarm and the electrogram to an external device , which gets your baseline electrogram from 24 hours ago and the one that caused the alarm , so you can take it to the emergency room and show them , and say , take care of me right away .
then it goes to a network operations center , where they get your data from your patient database that 's been put in at some central location , say , in the united states .
then it goes to a diagnostic center , and within one minute of your heart attack , your signal appears on the screen of a computer and the computer analyzes what your problem is .
and the person who 's there , the medical practitioner , calls you - this is also a cell phone - and says , " mr. smith , you 're in deep doo-doo ; you have a problem .
we 've called the ambulance . the ambulance is on the way .
it 'll pick you up , and then we 're going to call your doctor , tell him about it .
we 're going to send him the signal that we have , that says you have a heart attack , and we 're going to send the signal to the hospital and we 're going to have it analyzed there , and there you 're going to be with your doctor and you 'll be taken care of so you wo n't die of a heart attack . "
that 's the first invention that i wanted to describe .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and now i want to talk about something entirely different .
at first i did n't think migraine headaches were a big problem because i 'd never had a migraine headache , but then i spoke to some people who have three or four every week of their life , and their lives are being totally ruined by it .
we have a mission statement for our company doing migraine , which is , " prevent or ameliorate migraine headaches by the application of a safe , controlled magnetic pulse applied , as needed , by the patient . "
now , you 're probably very few physicists here .
if you 're a physicist you 'd know there 's a certain faraday 's law , which says if i apply a magnetic pulse on salt water - that 's your brains by the way - it 'll generate electric currents , and the electric current in the brain can erase a migraine headache .
that 's what we have discovered .
so here 's a picture of what we 're doing .
the patients who have a migraine preceded by an aura have a band of excited neurons - that 's shown in red - that moves at three to five millimeters a minute towards the mid-brain .
and when it hits the mid-brain , that 's when the headache begins .
there 's this migraine that is preceded by a visual aura , and this visual aura , by the way - and i 'll show you a picture - but it sort of begins with little dancing lights , gets bigger and bigger until it fills your whole visual field .
and what we tried was this ; here is a device called the cadwell model mes10 .
weighs about 70 pounds , has a wire about an inch in diameter .
and here 's one of the patients who has an aura and always has a headache , bad one , after the aura . what do we do ?
this is what an aura looks like .
it 's sort of funny dancing lights , shown there on the left and right side .
and that 's a fully developed visual aura , as we see on top .
in the middle , our experimentalist , the neurologist , who said , " i 'm going to move this down a little and i 'm going to erase half your aura . "
and , by god , the neurologist did erase it , and that 's the middle picture : half of the aura erased by a short magnetic pulse .
what does that mean ?
that means that the magnetic pulse is generating an electric current that 's interfering with the erroneous electrical activity in the brain .
and finally he says , " ok , now i 'm going to - " all of the aura get erased with an appropriately placed magnetic pulse .
what is the result ? we designed a magnetic depolarizer that looks like this , that you could have - a lady , in her pocket book - and when you get an aura you can try it and see how it works .
well , the next thing they have to show is what was on abc news , channel 7 , last week in new york city , in the 11 o 'clock news .
anchor : for anyone who suffers from migraine headaches - and there are 30 million americans who do - tonight : a possible answer .
eyewitness news reporter stacy sager tonight , with a small and portable machine that literally zaps your migraines away .
christina sidebottom : well , my first reaction was that it was - looked awfully gun-like , and it was very strange .
stacy sager : but for christina sidebottom , almost anything was worth trying if it could stop a migraine .
it may look silly or even frightening as you walk around with it in your purse , but researchers here in ohio organizing clinical trials for this migraine zapper , say it is scientifically sound - that , in fact , when the average person gets a migraine , it 's caused by something similar to an electrical impulse .
the zapper creates a magnetic field to counteract that .
yousef mohammed : in other words , we 're treating electricity with electricity , rather than treating electricity with the chemicals that we 're using nowadays .
ss : but is it safe to use everyday ?
experts say the research has actually been around for more than a decade , and more long-term studies need to be done . christina now swears by it .
cs : it 's been the most wonderful thing for my migraine .
ss : researchers are hoping to present their studies to the fda this summer .
robert fischell : and that is the invention to treat migraines .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you see , the problem is , 30 million americans have migraine headaches , and we need a means to treat it , and i think that we now have it .
and this is the first device that we did , and i 'm going to talk about my second wish , which has something to do with this .
our conclusions from our studies so far , at three research centers , is there is a marked improvement in pain levels after using it just once .
the most severe headaches responded better after we did it several times , and the unexpected finding indicates that even established headaches , not only those with aura , get treated and get diminished .
and auras can be erased and the migraine , then , does not occur .
and that is the migraine invention that we are talking about and that we are working on .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the third and last invention began with an idea .
epilepsy can best be treated by responsive electrical stimulation .
now , why do we use - add on , nearly , an epileptic focus ?
now , unfortunately , us technical people , unlike mr. bono , have to get into all these technical words .
well , " responsive electrical stimulation " means that we sense , at a place in your brain which is called an " epileptic focus , " which is where the epileptic seizure begins - we sense there , that it 's going to happen , and then we respond by applying an electrical energy at that spot , which erases the errant signal so that you do n't get the clinical manifestations of the migraine headache .
we use current pacemaker defibrillator technology that 's used for the heart .
we thought we could adapt it for the brain .
the device could be implanted under the scalp to be totally hidden and avoid wire breakage , which occurs if you put it in the chest and you try to move your neck around .
form a company to develop a neuro-pacemaker for epilepsy , as well as other diseases of the brain , because all diseases of the brain are a result of some electrical malfunction in it , that causes many , if not all , of brain disorders .
we formed a company called neuropace and we started work on responsive neurostimulation , and this is a picture of what the device looked like , that 's placed into the cranial bone .
this is probably a better picture .
here we have our device in which we put in a frame .
there 's a cut made in the scalp ; it 's opened ; the neurosurgeon has a template ; he marks it around , and uses a dental burr to remove a piece of the cranial bone exactly the size of our device .
and tonight , you 'll be able to see the device in the tent .
and then with four screws , we put in a frame , then we snap in the device and we run with wires - the one shown in green will go to the surface of the brain with electrodes , to the epileptic focus , the origin of the epilepsy , where we can sense the electrical signal and have computer analysis that tells us when to hit it with some electrical current to prevent the clinical manifestation of the seizure .
in the blue wire , we see what 's called a deep brain electrode .
if that 's the source of the epilepsy , we can attack that as well .
the comprehensive solution : this is the device ; it 's about one inches by two inches and , oddly enough , just the thickness of most cranial bones .
the advantages of responsive neurostimulation : it can detect and terminate seizures before the clinical symptoms occur , provide stimulation only when needed , can be turned off if seizures disappear ; it has minimal side effects - as a matter of fact , in all our clinical trials to date , we 've seen no side effects in the 40 or so patients in whom it 's been implanted - and it 's invisible , cosmetically hidden , so , if you have epilepsy and you have the device , no one will know it because you ca n't tell that it 's there .
and this shows what an electroencephalogram is , and on the left is the signal of a spontaneous seizure of one of the patients .
then we stimulated , and you see how that heavy black line and then you see the electroencephalogram signal going to normal , which means they did not get the epileptic seizure .
that concludes my discussion of epilepsy , which is the third invention that i want to discuss here this afternoon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have three wishes . well , i ca n't do much about africa .
i 'm a tech ; i 'm into medical gadgetry , which is mostly high-tech stuff like mr. bono talked about .
the first wish is to use the epilepsy responsive neurostimulator , called rns , for responsive neurostimulator - that 's a brilliant acronym - for the treatment of other brain disorders .
well , if we 're going to do it for epilepsy , why the hell not try it for something else ?
then you saw what that device looked like , that the woman was using to fix her migraines ?
i tell you this : that 's something which some research engineer like me would concoct , not a real designer of good equipment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we want to have some people , who really know how to do this , perform human engineering studies to develop the optimum design for the portable device for treating migraine headaches .
and some of the sponsors of this ted meeting are such organizations .
then we 're going to challenge the ted attendees to come up with a way to improve health care in the usa , where we have problems that africa does n't have .
and by reducing malpractice litigation - malpractice litigation is not an african problem ; it 's an american problem .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , to get quickly to my first wish - the brain operates by electrical signals .
if the electrical signals create a brain disorder , electro-stimulation can overcome that disorder by acting on the brain 's neurons .
in other words , if you 've screwed up electrical signals , maybe , by putting other electrical signals from a computer in the brain , we can counteract that .
a signal in the brain that triggers brain dysfunction might be sensed as a trigger for electro-stimulation like we 're doing with epilepsy .
but even if there is no signal , electro-stimulation of an appropriate part of the brain can turn off a brain disorder .
and consider treating psychotic disorders - and i want this involved with the ted group - such as obsessive-compulsive disorder that , presently , is not well treated with drugs , and includes five million americans .
and mr. fischer , and his group at neuropace , and myself believe that we can have a dramatic effect in improving ocd in america and in the world .
that is the first wish .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the second wish is , at the present time , the clinical trials of transcranial magnetic stimulators - that 's what tms means , device to treat migraine headaches - appears to be quite successful .
well , that 's the good news .
the present portable device is far from optimally designed , both as to human factors as appearance .
i think she said it looks like a gun . a lot of people do n't like guns .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- engage a company having prior successes for human factors engineering and industrial design to optimize the design of the first portable tms device and that is the second wish .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and , of the 100,000-dollar prize money , that ted was so generous to give me , i am donating 50,000 dollars to the neuropace people to get on with the treatment of ocd , obsessive-compulsive disorder , and i 'm making another 50,000 available for a company to optimize the design of the device for migraines .
and that 's how i 'll use my 100,000-dollar prize money .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , the third and final wish is somewhat - unfortunately , it 's much more complicated because it involves lawyers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , medical malpractice litigation in the us has escalated the cost of malpractice insurance , so that competent physicians are leaving their practice .
lawyers take cases on contingency with the hope of a big share of a big settlement by a sympathetic jury , because this patient really ended up badly .
the high cost of health care in the us is partly due to litigation and insurance costs .
i 've seen pictures , graphs in today 's usa today showing it skyrocketing out of control , and this is one factor .
well , how can the ted community help with this situation ?
i have a couple of ideas to begin with .
as a starting point for discussion with the ted group , a major part of the problem is the nature of the written extent of informed consent that the patient or spouse must read and sign .
for example , i asked the epilepsy people what are they using for informed consent .
would you believe , 12 pages , single space , the patient has to read before they 're in our trial to cure their epilepsy ?
what do you think someone has at the end of reading 12 single-spaced pages ?
they do n't understand what the hell it 's about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the present system . how about making a video ?
we have entertainment people here ; we have people who know how to do videos , with visual presentation of the anatomy and procedure done with animation .
everybody knows that we can do better with a visual thing that can be interactive with the patient , where they see the video and they 're being videoed and they press , do you understand this ? no , i do n't .
well , then let 's go to a simpler explanation .
then there 's a simpler one and , oh yes , i understand that .
well , press the button and you 're on record , you understand .
and that is one of the ideas .
now , also a video is done of the patient or spouse and medical presenter , with the patient agreeing that he understands the procedure to be done , including all the possible failure modes .
the patient or spouse agrees not to file a lawsuit if one of the known procedure failures occurs .
now , in america , in fact , you can not give up your right to trial by jury .
however , if a video is there that everything was explained to you , and you have it all in the video file , it 'll be much less likely that some hotshot lawyer will take this case on contingency , because it wo n't be nearly as good a case .
if a medical error occurs , the patient or spouse agrees to a settlement for fair compensation by arbitration instead of going to court .
that would save hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs in the united states and would decrease the cost of medicine for everyone .
these are just some starting points .
and , so there , that 's the end of all my wishes .
i wish i had more wishes but three is what i 've got and there they are .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result , the architectural object .
is the latest tower in london a gherkin or a sausage or a sex tool ?
so recently , we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects , maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually sort of tell stories about architecture .
and we discovered that we did n't have to invent it , it already existed in the form of a comic book .
so we basically copied the format of the comic book to actually tell the stories of behind the scenes , how our projects actually evolve through adaptation and improvisation .
sort of through the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world .
we call this comic book " yes is more , " which is obviously a sort of evolution of the ideas of some of our heroes .
in this case it 's mies van der rohe 's less is more .
he triggered the modernist revolution .
after him followed the post-modern counter-revolution , robert venturi saying , " less is a bore . "
after him , philip johnson sort of introduced -lrb- laughter -rrb- you could say promiscuity , or at least openness to new ideas with , " i am a whore . "
recently , obama has introduced optimism at a sort of time of global financial crisis .
and what we 'd like to say with " yes is more " is basically trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined , as who or what we are against .
the cliche of the radical architect is the sort of angry young man rebelling against the establishment .
or this idea of the misunderstood genius , frustrated that the world does n't fit in with his or her ideas .
rather than revolution , we 're much more interested in evolution , this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world .
in fact , i actually think that darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process .
his famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work .
as you can see , a project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings .
at each meeting , there 's way too many ideas .
only the best ones can survive .
and through a process of architectural selection , we might choose a really beautiful model or we might have a very functional model .
we mate them . they have sort of mutant offspring .
and through these sort of generations of design meetings we arrive at a design .
a very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and a hotel in copenhagen .
the design process was really tough , almost like a struggle for survival , but gradually an idea evolved : this sort of idea of a rational tower that melts together with the surrounding city , sort of expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a scandinavian version of the spanish steps in rome , but sort of public on the outside , as well as on the inside , with the library .
but darwin does n't only explain the evolution of a single idea .
as you can see , sometimes a subspecies branches off .
and quite often we sit in a design meeting and we discover that there is this great idea .
it does n't really work in this context .
but for another client in another culture , it could really be the right answer to a different question .
so as a result , we never throw anything out .
we keep our office almost like an archive of architectural biodiversity .
you never know when you might need it .
and what i 'd like to do now , in an act of warp-speed storytelling , is tell the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world .
the first story starts last year when we went to shanghai to do the competition for the danish national pavilion for the world expo in 2010 .
and we saw this guy , haibao .
he 's the mascot of the expo , and he looks strangely familiar .
in fact he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of sweden .
when we submitted it for the swedish competition we thought it was a really cool scheme , but it did n't exactly look like something from the north of sweden .
the swedish jury did n't think so either . so we lost .
but then we had a meeting with a chinese businessman who saw our design and said , " wow , that 's the chinese character for the word ' people . " ' -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , apparently this is how you write " people , " as in the people 's republic of china .
we even double checked .
and at the same time , we got invited to exhibit at the shanghai creative industry week .
so we thought like , this is too much of an opportunity , so we hired a feng shui master .
we scaled the building up three times to chinese proportions , and went to china .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the people 's building , as we called it .
this is our two interpreters , sort of reading the architecture .
it went on the cover of the wen wei po newspaper , which got mr. liangyu chen , the mayor of shanghai , to visit the exhibition .
and we had the chance to explain the project .
and he said , " shanghai is the city in the world with most skyscrapers , " but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over .
and with the people 's building , he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of china and the progressive future of china .
so we obviously profoundly agreed with him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- unfortunately , mr. chen is now in prison for corruption .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but like i said , haibao looked very familiar , because he is actually the chinese character for " people . "
and they chose this mascot because the theme of the expo is " better city , better life . "
sustainability .
and we thought , sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo-protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good .
you know , you 're not supposed to take long , warm showers .
you 're not supposed to fly on holidays because it 's bad for the environment .
gradually , you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life .
so we thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life .
we also asked ourselves , what could denmark possibly show china that would be relevant ?
you know , it 's one of the biggest countries in the world , one of the smallest .
china symbolized by the dragon .
denmark , we have a national bird , the swan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- china has many great poets , but we discovered that in the people 's republic public school curriculum , they have three fairy tales by an tu sheng , or hans christian anderson , as we call him .
so that means that all 1.3 billion chinese have grown up with " the emperor 's new clothes , " " the matchstick girl " and " the little mermaid . "
it 's almost like a fragment of danish culture integrated into chinese culture .
the biggest tourist attraction in china is the great wall .
the great wall is the only thing that can be seen from the moon .
the big tourist attraction in denmark is the little mermaid .
that can actually hardly be seen from the canal tours .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it sort of shows the difference between these two cities .
copenhagen , shanghai , modern , european .
but then we looked at recent urban development , and we noticed that this is like a shanghai street , 30 years ago . all bikes , no cars .
this is how it looks today ; all traffic jam .
bicycles have become forbidden many places .
meanwhile , in copenhagen we 're actually expanding the bicycle lanes .
a third of all the people commute by bike .
we have a free system of bicycles called the city bike that you can borrow if you visit the city .
so we thought , why do n't we reintroduce the bicycle in china ?
we donate 1,000 bikes to shanghai .
so if you come to the expo , go straight to the danish pavilion , get a danish bike , and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions .
like i said , shanghai and copenhagen are both port cities , but in copenhagen the water has gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it .
one of the first projects we ever did was the harbor bath in copenhagen , sort of continuing the public realm into the water .
so we thought that these expos quite often have a lot of state financed propaganda , images , statements , but no real experience .
so just like with a bike , we do n't talk about it .
you can try it .
like with the water , instead of talking about it , we 're going to sail a million liters of harbor water from copenhagen to shanghai , so the chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is .
this is where people normally object that it does n't sound very sustainable to sail water from copenhagen to china .
but in fact , the container ships go full of goods from china to denmark , and then they sail empty back .
so quite often you load water for ballast .
so we can actually hitch a ride for free .
and in the middle of this sort of harbor bath , we 're actually going to put the actual little mermaid .
so the real mermaid , the real water , and the real bikes .
and when she 's gone , we 're going to invite a chinese artist to reinterpret her .
the architecture of the pavilion is this sort of loop of exhibition and bikes .
when you go to the exhibition , you 'll see the mermaid and the pool .
you 'll walk around , start looking for a bicycle on the roof , jump on your ride and then continue out into the rest of the expo .
so when we actually won the competition we had to do an exhibition in china explaining the project .
and to our surprise we got one of our boards back with corrections from the chinese state censorship .
the first thing , the china map missed taiwan .
it 's a very serious political issue in china . we will add on .
the second thing , we had compared the swan to the dragon , and then the chinese state said , " suggest change to panda . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , when it came out in denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument , the national people 's party sort of rebelled against it .
they tried to pass a law against moving the mermaid .
so for the first time , i got invited to speak at the national parliament .
it was kind of interesting because in the morning , from 9 to 11 , they were discussing the bailout package - how many billions to invest in saving the danish economy .
and then at 11 o 'clock they stopped talking about these little issues .
and then from 11 to 1 , they were debating whether or not to send the mermaid to china .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but to conclude , if you want to see the mermaid from may to december next year , do n't come to copenhagen , because she 's going to be in shanghai .
if you do come to copenhagen , you will probably see an installation by ai weiwei , the chinese artist .
but if the chinese government intervenes , it might even be a panda .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the second story that i 'd like to tell is , actually starts in my own house .
this is my apartment .
this is the view from my apartment , over the sort of landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the leonardo dicaprio balcony .
and they form this sort of vertical backyard where , on a nice summer day , you 'll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters .
the house is sort of a distortion of a square block .
trying to zigzag it to make sure that all of the apartments look at the straight views , instead of into each other .
until recently , this was the view from my apartment , onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site .
and he said that he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure .
and we thought , rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars , why do n't we turn all the apartments into penthouses , put them on a podium of cars .
and because copenhagen is completely flat , if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view , you basically have to do it yourself .
then we sort of cut up the volume , so we would n't block the view from my apartment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and essentially the parking is sort of occupying the deep space underneath the apartments .
and up in the sun , you have a single layer of apartments that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle , like a house with a garden with a sort of metropolitan view , and a sort of dense urban location .
this is our first architectural model .
this is an aerial photo taken last summer .
and essentially , the apartments cover the parking .
they are accessed through this diagonal elevator .
it 's actually a stand-up product from switzerland , because in switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the facade of the parking , we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated , so we needed to perforate it .
and we discovered that by controlling the size of the holes , we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic , naturally ventilated , rasterized image .
and since we always refer to the project as the mountain , we commissioned this japanese himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of mount everest , making the entire building a 3,000 square meter artwork .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if you go back into the parking , into the corridors , it 's almost like traveling into a parallel universe from cars and colors , into this sort of south-facing urban oasis .
the wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facades .
if you go even further , it turns into this green garden .
and all the rainwater that drops on the mountain is actually accumulated .
and there is an automatic irrigation system that makes sure that this sort of landscape of gardens , in one or two years it will sort of transform into a cambodian temple ruin , completely covered in green .
so , the mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy .
this idea that you can actually create , if not gold , then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients , like normal apartments and normal parking , and in this case actually offer people the chance that they do n't have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city .
they can actually have both .
as an architect , it 's really hard to set the agenda .
you ca n't just say that now i 'd like to do a sustainable city in central asia , because that 's not really how you get commissions .
you always have to sort of adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen , and the sort of turmoil of the world .
one last example is that recently we , like last summer , we won the competition to design a nordic national bank .
this was the director of the bank when he was still smiling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was in the middle of the capital so we were really excited by this opportunity .
unfortunately , it was the national bank of iceland .
at the same time , we actually had a visitor - a minister from azerbaijan came to our office .
we took him to see the mountain . and he got very excited by this idea that you could actually make mountains out of architecture , because azerbaijan is known as the alps of central asia .
so he asked us if we could actually imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of azerbaijan .
so we took the commission .
and we made this small movie that i 'd like to show .
we quite often make little movies .
we always argue a lot about the soundtrack , but in this case it was really easy to choose the song .
so basically , baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking the island of zira , the island that we are planning - almost like the diagram of their flag .
and our main idea was to sort of sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of azerbaijan and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures , inhabitable of human life .
then we place these mountains on the island , surrounding this sort of central green valley , almost like a central park .
and what makes it interesting is that the island right now is just a piece of desert . it has no vegetation .
it has no water . it has no energy , no resources .
so we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem , exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants , and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings .
and all the sort of excess freshwater wastewater is filtered organically into the landscape , gradually transforming the desert island into sort of a green , lush landscape .
so , you can say where an urban development normally happens at the expense of nature , in this case it 's actually creating nature .
and the buildings , they do n't only sort of invoke the imagery of the mountains , they also operate like mountains .
they create shelter from the wind .
they accumulate the solar energy .
they accumulate the water .
so they actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem .
so we recently presented the master plan , and it has gotten approved .
and this summer we are starting the construction documents of the two first mountains , in what 's going to be the first carbon-neutral island in central asia .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yes , maybe just to round off .
so in a way you can see how the mountain in copenhagen sort of evolved into the seven peaks of azerbaijan .
with a little luck and some more evolution , maybe in 10 years it could be the five mountains on mars .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right . so , like all good stories , this starts a long , long time ago when there was basically nothing .
so here is a complete picture of the universe about 14-odd billion years ago .
all energy is concentrated into a single point of energy .
for some reason it explodes , and you begin to get these things .
so you 're now about 14 billion years into this .
and these things expand and expand and expand into these giant galaxies , and you get trillions of them .
and within these galaxies you get these enormous dust clouds .
and i want you to pay particular attention to the three little prongs in the center of this picture .
if you take a close-up of those , they look like this .
and what you 're looking at is columns of dust where there 's so much dust - by the way , the scale of this is a trillion vertical miles - and what 's happening is there 's so much dust , it comes together and it fuses and ignites a thermonuclear reaction .
and so what you 're watching is the birth of stars .
these are stars being born out of here .
when enough stars come out , they create a galaxy .
this one happens to be a particularly important galaxy , because you are here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as you take a close-up of this galaxy , you find a relatively normal , not particularly interesting star .
by the way , you 're now about two-thirds of the way into this story .
so this star does n't even appear until about two-thirds of the way into this story .
and then what happens is there 's enough dust left over that it does n't ignite into a star , it becomes a planet .
and this is about a little over four billion years ago .
and soon thereafter there 's enough material left over that you get a primordial soup , and that creates life .
and life starts to expand and expand and expand , until it goes kaput .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now the really strange thing is life goes kaput , not once , not twice , but five times .
so almost all life on earth is wiped out about five times .
and as you 're thinking about that , what happens is you get more and more complexity , more and more stuff to build new things with .
and we do n't appear until about 99.96 percent of the time into this story , just to put ourselves and our ancestors in perspective .
so within that context , there 's two theories of the case as to why we 're all here .
the first theory of the case is that 's all she wrote .
under that theory , we are the be-all and end-all of all creation .
and the reason for trillions of galaxies , sextillions of planets , is to create something that looks like that and something that looks like that .
and that 's the purpose of the universe ; and then it flat-lines , it does n't get any better .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the only question you might want to ask yourself is , could that be just mildly arrogant ?
and if it is - and particularly given the fact that we came very close to extinction .
there were only about 2,000 of our species left .
a few more weeks without rain , we would have never seen any of these .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so maybe you have to think about a second theory if the first one is n't good enough .
second theory is : could we upgrade ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , why would one ask a question like that ?
because there have been at least 29 upgrades so far of humanoids .
so it turns out that we have upgraded .
we 've upgraded time and again and again .
and it turns out that we keep discovering upgrades .
we found this one last year .
we found another one last month .
and as you 're thinking about this , you might also ask the question : so why a single human species ?
would n't it be really odd if you went to africa and asia and antarctica and found exactly the same bird - particularly given that we co-existed at the same time with at least eight other versions of humanoid at the same time on this planet ?
so the normal state of affairs is not to have just a homo sapiens ; the normal state of affairs is to have various versions of humans walking around .
and if that is the normal state of affairs , then you might ask yourself , all right , so if we want to create something else , how big does a mutation have to be ?
well svante paabo has the answer .
the difference between humans and neanderthal is 0.004 percent of gene code .
that 's how big the difference is one species to another .
this explains most contemporary political debates .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but as you 're thinking about this , one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place .
difference human / neanderthal is sperm and testis , smell and skin .
and those are the specific genes that differ from one to the other .
so very small changes can have a big impact .
and as you 're thinking about this , we 're continuing to mutate .
so about 10,000 years ago by the black sea , we had one mutation in one gene which led to blue eyes .
and this is continuing and continuing and continuing .
and as it continues , one of the things that 's going to happen this year is we 're going to discover the first 10,000 human genomes , because it 's gotten cheap enough to do the gene sequencing .
and when we find these , we may find differences .
and by the way , this is not a debate that we 're ready for , because we have really misused the science in this .
in the 1920s , we thought there were major differences between people .
that was partly based on francis galton 's work .
he was darwin 's cousin .
but the u.s. , the carnegie institute , stanford , american neurological association took this really far .
that got exported and was really misused .
in fact , it led to some absolutely horrendous treatment of human beings .
so since the 1940s , we 've been saying there are no differences , we 're all identical .
we 're going to know at year end if that is true .
and as we think about that , we 're actually beginning to find things like , do you have an ace gene ?
why would that matter ?
because nobody 's ever climbed an 8,000-meter peak without oxygen that does n't have an ace gene .
and if you want to get more specific , how about a 577r genotype ?
well it turns out that every male olympic power athelete ever tested carries at least one of these variants .
if that is true , it leads to some very complicated questions for the london olympics .
three options : do you want the olympics to be a showcase for really hardworking mutants ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- option number two : why do n't we play it like golf or sailing ?
because you have one and you do n't have one , i 'll give you a tenth of a second head start .
version number three : because this is a naturally occurring gene and you 've got it and you did n't pick the right parents , you get the right to upgrade .
three different options .
if these differences are the difference between an olympic medal and a non-olympic medal .
and it turns out that as we discover these things , we human beings really like to change how we look , how we act , what our bodies do .
and we had about 10.2 million plastic surgeries in the united states , except that with the technologies that are coming online today , today 's corrections , deletions , augmentations and enhancements are going to seem like child 's play .
you already saw the work by tony atala on ted , but this ability to start filling things like inkjet cartridges with cells are allowing us to print skin , organs and a whole series of other body parts .
and as these technologies go forward , you keep seeing this , you keep seeing this , you keep seeing things - 2000 , human genome sequence - and it seems like nothing 's happening , until it does .
and we may just be in some of these weeks .
and as you 're thinking about these two guys sequencing a human genome in 2000 and the public project sequencing the human genome in 2000 , then you do n't hear a lot , until you hear about an experiment last year in china , where they take skin cells from this mouse , put four chemicals on it , turn those skin cells into stem cells , let the stem cells grow and create a full copy of that mouse .
that 's a big deal .
because in essence what it means is you can take a cell , which is a pluripotent stem cell , which is like a skier at the top of a mountain , and those two skiers become two pluripotent stem cells , four , eight , 16 , and then it gets so crowded after 16 divisions that those cells have to differentiate .
so they go down one side of the mountain , they go down another .
and as they pick that , these become bone , and then they pick another road and these become platelets , and these become macrophages , and these become t cells .
but it 's really hard , once you ski down , to get back up .
unless , of course , if you have a ski lift .
and what those four chemicals do is they take any cell and take it way back up the mountain so it can become any body part .
and as you think of that , what it means is potentially you can rebuild a full copy of any organism out of any one of its cells .
that turns out to be a big deal because now you can take , not just mouse cells , but you can human skin cells and turn them into human stem cells .
and then what they did in october is they took skin cells , turned them into stem cells and began to turn them into liver cells .
so in theory , you could grow any organ from any one of your cells .
here 's a second experiment : if you could photocopy your body , maybe you also want to take your mind .
and one of the things you saw at ted about a year and a half ago was this guy .
and he gave a wonderful technical talk .
he 's a professor at mit .
but in essence what he said is you can take retroviruses , which get inside brain cells of mice .
you can tag them with proteins that light up when you light them .
and you can map the exact pathways when a mouse sees , feels , touches , remembers , loves .
and then you can take a fiber optic cable and light up some of the same things .
and by the way , as you do this , you can image it in two colors , which means you can download this information as binary code directly into a computer .
so what 's the bottom line on that ?
well it 's not completely inconceivable that someday you 'll be able to download your own memories , maybe into a new body .
and maybe you can upload other people 's memories as well .
and this might have just one or two small ethical , political , moral implications .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just a thought .
here 's the kind of questions that are becoming interesting questions for philosophers , for governing people , for economists , for scientists .
because these technologies are moving really quickly .
and as you think about it , let me close with an example of the brain .
the first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today , both because of the inputs , which are becoming massive , and because of the plasticity of the organ , is the brain .
do we have any evidence that that is happening ?
well let 's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand .
here 's what it looks like in 2000 .
here 's what it looks like in 2002 , 2006 , 2008 .
here 's the increase in less than a decade .
and we still do n't know why this is happening .
what we do know is , potentially , the brain is reacting in a hyperactive , hyper-plastic way , and creating individuals that are like this .
and this is only one of the conditions that 's out there .
you 've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart , people who can remember everything they 've seen in their lives , people who 've got synesthesia , people who 've got schizophrenia .
you 've got all kinds of stuff going on out there , and we still do n't understand how and why this is happening .
but one question you might want to ask is , are we seeing a rapid evolution of the brain and of how we process data ?
because when you think of how much data 's coming into our brains , we 're trying to take in as much data in a day as people used to take in in a lifetime .
and as you 're thinking about this , there 's four theories as to why this might be going on , plus a whole series of others .
i do n't have a good answer .
there really needs to be more research on this .
one option is the fast food fetish .
there 's beginning to be some evidence that obesity and diet have something to do with gene modifications , which may or may not have an impact on how the brain of an infant works .
a second option is the sexy geek option .
these conditions are highly rare .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but what 's beginning to happen is because these geeks are all getting together , because they are highly qualified for computer programming and it is highly remunerated , as well as other very detail-oriented tasks , that they are concentrating geographically and finding like-minded mates .
so this is the assortative mating hypothesis of these genes reinforcing one another in these structures .
the third , is this too much information ?
we 're trying to process so much stuff that some people get synesthetic and just have huge pipes that remember everything .
other people get hyper-sensitive to the amount of information .
other people react with various psychological conditions or reactions to this information .
or maybe it 's chemicals .
but when you see an increase of that order of magnitude in a condition , either you 're not measuring it right or there 's something going on very quickly , and it may be evolution in real time .
here 's the bottom line .
what i think we are doing is we 're transitioning as a species .
and i did n't think this when steve gullans and i started writing together .
i think we 're transitioning into homo evolutis that , for better or worse , is not just a hominid that 's conscious of his or her environment , it 's a hominid that 's beginning to directly and deliberately control the evolution of its own species , of bacteria , of plants , of animals .
and i think that 's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about two stories today .
one is how we need to use market-based pricing to affect demand and use wireless technologies to dramatically reduce our emissions in the transportation sector .
and the other is that there is an incredible opportunity if we choose the right wireless technologies ; how we can generate a new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce c02 in the other sectors .
i 'm really scared .
we need to reduce c02 emissions in ten to fifteen years by 80 percent in order to avert catastrophic effects .
and i am astounded that i 'm standing here to tell you that .
what are catastrophic effects ? a three degree centigrade climate change rise that will result in 50 percent species extinction .
it 's not a movie . this is real life .
and i 'm really worried , because when people talk about cars - which i know something about - the press and politicians and people in this room are all thinking , " let 's use fuel-efficient cars . "
if we started today , 10 years from now , at the end of this window of opportunity , those fuel-efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by four percent .
that is not enough .
but now i 'll talk about some more pleasant things .
here are some ways that we can make some dramatic changes .
so , zipcar is a company that i founded seven years ago , but it 's an example of something called car sharing .
what zipcar does is we park cars throughout dense urban areas for members to reserve , by the hour and by the day , instead of using their own car .
how does it feel to be a person using a zipcar ?
it means that i pay only for what i need .
all those hours when a car is sitting idle , i 'm not paying for it .
it means that i can choose a car exactly for that particular trip .
so , here 's a woman that reserved minimia , and she had her day .
i can take a bmw when i 'm seeing clients .
i can drive my toyota element when i 'm going to go on that surfing trip .
and the other remarkable thing is it 's , i think , the highest status of car ownership .
not only do i have a fleet of cars available to me in seven cities around the world that i can have at my beck and call , but heaven forbid i would ever maintain or deal with the repair or have anything to do with it .
it 's like the car that you always wanted that your mom said that you could n't have .
i get all the good stuff and none of the bad .
so , what is the social result of this ?
the social result is that today 's zipcar has 100,000 members driving 3,000 cars parked in 3,000 parking spaces .
instead of driving 12,000 miles a year , which is what the average city dweller does , they drive 500 miles a year . are they happy ?
the company has been doubling in size ever since i founded it , or greater .
people adore the company . and it 's better , you know ? they like it .
so , how is it that people went from the 12,000 miles a year to 500 miles ?
it 's because they said , " it 's eight to 10 dollars an hour and 65 dollars a day .
if i 'm going to go buy some ice cream , do i really want to spend eight dollars to go buy the ice cream ? or maybe i 'll do without .
maybe i would have bought the ice cream when i did some other errand . "
so , people really respond very quickly to it , to prices .
and the last point i want to make is zipcar would never be possible without technology .
it required that it was completely trivial : that it takes 30 seconds to reserve a car , go get it , drive it .
and for me , as a service provider , i would never be able to provide you a car for an hour if the transaction cost was anything .
so , without these wireless technologies , this , as a concept , could never happen .
so , here 's another example . this company is goloco - i 'm launching it in about three weeks - and i hope to do for ridesharing what i did for car sharing .
this will apply to people across all of america .
today , 75 percent of the trips are single-occupancy vehicles , yet 12 percent of trips to work are currently carpool .
and i think that we can apply social networks and online payment systems to completely change how people feel about ridesharing and make that trip much more efficient .
and so when i think about the future , people will be thinking that sharing the ride with someone is this incredibly great social event out of their day .
you know , how did you get to ted ? you went with other tedsters .
how fabulous . why would you ever want to go by yourself in your own car ?
how did you go food shopping ? you went with your neighbor , what a great social time .
you know it 's going to really transform how we feel about travel , and it will also , i think , enhance our freedom of mobility .
where can i go today and who can i do it with ?
those are the types of things that you will look at and feel .
and the social benefits : the rate of single-occupancy vehicles is , i told you , 75 percent ; i think we can get that down to 50 percent .
the demand for parking , of course , is down , congestion and the co2 emissions .
one last piece about this , of course , is that it 's enabled by wireless technologies .
and it 's the cost of driving that 's making people want to be able to do this .
the average american spends 19 percent of their income on their car , and there 's a pressure for them to reduce that cost , yet they have no outlet today .
so , the last example of this is congestion pricing , very famously done in london .
it 's when you charge a premium for people to drive on congested roads .
in london , the day they turned the congestion pricing on , there was a 25 percent decrease in congestion overnight , and that 's persisted for the four years in which they 've been doing congestion pricing .
and again , do people like the outcome ?
ken livingstone was reelected .
so again , we can see that price plays an enormous role in people 's willingness to reduce their driving behavior .
we 've tripled the miles that we drive since 1970 and doubled them since 1982 .
there 's a huge slack in that system ; with the right pricing we can undo that .
congestion pricing is being discussed in every major city around the world and is , again , wirelessly enabled .
you were n't going to put tollbooths around the city of london and open and shut those gates .
and what congestion pricing is is that it 's a technology trial and a psychological trial for something called road pricing .
and road pricing is where we 're all going to have to go , because today we pay for our maintenance and wear and tear on our cars with gas taxes .
and as we get our cars more fuel-efficient , that 's going to be reducing the amount of revenue that you get off of those gas taxes , so we need to charge people by the mile that they drive .
whatever happens with congestion pricing and those technologies will be happening with road pricing .
why do we travel too much ?
car travel is underpriced and therefore we over-consumed .
we need to put this better market feedback .
and if we have it , you 'll decide how many miles to drive , what mode of travel , where to live and work .
and wireless technologies make this real-time loop possible .
so , i want to move now to the second part of my story , which is : when are we going to start doing this congestion pricing ? road pricing is coming .
when are we going to do it ? are we going to wait 10 to 15 years for this to happen or are we going to finally have this political will to make it happen in the next two years ?
because i 'm going to say , that is going to be the tool that 's going to turn our usage overnight .
and what kind of wireless technology are we going to use ?
this is my big vision .
there is a tool that can help us bridge the digital divide , respond to emergencies , get traffic moving , provide a new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce co2 emissions in every sector .
and this is a moment from " the graduate . " do you remember this moment ?
you guys are going to be the handsome young guy and i 'm going to be the wise businessman .
" i want to say one word to you , just one word . "
" yes , sir ? " " are you listening ? " " yes i am . "
" ad-hoc peer-to-peer self-configuring wireless networks . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are also called mesh networks .
and in a mesh , every device contributes to and expands the network , and i think you might have heard a little bit about it before .
i 'm going to give you some examples .
you 'll be hearing later today from alan kay .
these laptops , when a child opens them up , they communicate with every single child in the classroom , within that school , within that village .
and what is the cost of that communication system ?
zero dollars a month .
here 's another example : in new orleans , video cameras were mesh-enabled so that they could monitor crime in the downtown french quarter .
when the hurricane happened , the only communication system standing was the mesh network .
volunteers flew in , added a whole bunch of devices , and for the next 12 months , mesh networks were the only wireless that was happening in new orleans .
another example is in portsmouth , u.k.
they mesh-enabled 300 buses and they speak to these smart terminals .
you can look at the terminal and be able to see precisely where your bus is on the street and when it 's coming , and you can buy your tickets in real time .
again , all mesh-enabled . monthly communication cost : zero .
so , the beauty of mesh networks : you can have these very low-cost devices .
zero ongoing communication costs . highly scalable ; you can just keep adding them , and as in katrina , you can keep subtracting them - as long as there 's some , we can still communicate .
they 're resilient ; their redundancy is built into this fabulous decentralized design .
what are the incredible weaknesses ?
there is n't anybody in washington lobbying to make it happen - or in those municipalities , to build out their cities with these wireless networks - because there 's zero ongoing communications cost .
so , the examples that i gave you are these islands of mesh networks , and networks are interesting only as they are big .
how do we create a big network ?
are you guys ready again - " the graduate " ?
this time you will still play the handsome young thing , but i 'll be the sexy woman .
these are the next two lines in the movie .
" where did you do it ? " " in his car . "
so you know , when you stick this idea ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- where would we expect me , robin chase , to be thinking is imagine if we put a mesh-network device in every single car across america .
we could have a coast-to-coast , free wireless communication system .
i guess i just want you to think about that .
and why is this going to happen ? because we 're going to do congestion pricing , we are going to do road tolls , gas taxes are going to become road pricing .
these things are going to happen .
what 's the wireless technology we 're going to use ?
maybe we should use a good one . when are we going to do it ?
maybe we should n't wait for the 10 or 15 years for this to happen .
we should pull it forward .
so , i 'd like us to launch the wireless internet interstate wireless mesh system , and require that this network be accessible to everyone , with open standards .
right now in the transportation sector , we 're creating these wireless devices - i guess you guys might have fast pass here or easy lane - that are single-purpose devices in these closed networks .
what is the point ?
we 're transferring just a few little data bits when we 're doing road controlling , road pricing .
we have this incredible excess capacity .
so , we can provide the lowest-cost means of going wireless coast-to-coast , we can have resilient nationwide communication systems , we have a new tool for creating efficiencies in all sectors .
imagine what happens when the cost of getting information from anywhere to anywhere is close to zero .
what you can do with that tool : we can create an economic engine .
information should be free , and access to information should be free , and we should be charging people for carbon .
i think this is a more powerful tool than the interstate highway act , and i think this is as important and world changing to our economy as electrification .
and if i had my druthers , we would have an open-source version in addition to open standards .
and this open-source version means that it could be - if we did a brilliant job of it - it could be used around the world very quickly .
so , going back to one of my earlier thoughts .
imagine if every one of these buses in lagos was part of the mesh network .
when i went this morning to larry brilliant 's tedtalk prize - his fabulous networks - imagine if there was an open-source mesh communications device that can be put into those networks , to make all that happen .
and we can be doing it if we could just get over the fact that this little slice of things is going to be for free .
we could make billions of dollars on top of it , but this one particular slice of communications needs to be open source .
so , let 's take control of this nightmare : implement a gas tax immediately ; transition across the nation to road-tolling with this wireless mesh ; require that the mesh be open to all , with open standards ; and , of course , use mesh networks .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to talk to you today about aids in sub-saharan africa .
and this is a pretty well-educated audience , so i imagine you all know something about aids .
you probably know that roughly 25 million people in africa are infected with the virus , that aids is a disease of poverty , and that if we can bring africa out of poverty , we would decrease aids as well .
if you know something more , you probably know that uganda , to date , is the only country in sub-saharan africa that has had success in combating the epidemic .
using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain , be faithful , and use condoms - the abc campaign - they decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years .
if you follow policy , you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years , and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic .
so today i 'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic , and i 'm actually also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know .
to do that i 'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic .
and i 'm not really going to talk much about the economy .
i 'm not going to tell you about exports and prices .
but i 'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that 's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology .
and i think in that sense , this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea .
here i 'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another .
so we think , first and foremost , aids is a policy issue .
and probably for most people in this room , that 's how you think about it .
but this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic .
it 's going to be about thinking about how it evolves , and how people respond to it .
i think it may seem like i 'm ignoring the policy stuff , which is really the most important , but i 'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually can not develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works .
and the first thing that i want to talk about , the first thing i think we need to understand is : how do people respond to the epidemic ?
so aids is a sexually transmitted infection , and it kills you .
so this means that in a place with a lot of aids , there 's a really significant cost of sex .
if you 're an uninfected man living in botswana , where the hiv rate is 30 percent , if you have one more partner this year - a long-term partner , girlfriend , mistress - your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points .
that is a huge effect .
and so i think that we really feel like then people should have less sex .
and in fact among gay men in the us we did see that kind of change in the 1980s .
so if we look in this particularly high-risk sample , they 're being asked , " did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months ? "
over a period from ' 84 to ' 88 , that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent .
it 's a huge change in a very short period of time .
we did n't see anything like that in africa .
so we do n't have quite as good data , but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex , or married men having extra-marital sex , and how that changes from the early ' 90s to late ' 90s , and late ' 90s to early 2000s . the epidemic is getting worse .
people are learning more things about it .
we see almost no change in sexual behavior .
these are just tiny decreases - two percentage points - not significant .
this seems puzzling . but i 'm going to argue that you should n't be surprised by this , and that to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does - as an investment .
so if you 're a software engineer and you 're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program , it 's important to think about how much it costs .
it 's also important to think about what the benefit is .
and one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active .
if version 10 is coming out next week , there 's no point in adding more functionality into version nine .
but your health decisions are the same .
every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie , every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies , that 's a costly investment in your health .
but how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future , even if you do n't make those investments .
aids is the same kind of thing . it 's costly to avoid aids .
people really like to have sex .
but , you know , it has a benefit in terms of future longevity .
but life expectancy in africa , even without aids , is really , really low : 40 or 50 years in a lot of places .
i think it 's possible , if we think about that intuition , and think about that fact , that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change .
but we really need to test that .
and a great way to test that is to look across areas in africa and see : do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more ?
and the way that i 'm going to do that is , i 'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria .
so malaria is a disease that kills you .
it 's a disease that kills a lot of adults in africa , in addition to a lot of children .
and so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria .
so one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there 's less malaria .
so that 's what this figure shows you .
this shows you - in areas with low malaria , medium malaria , high malaria - what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase hiv prevalence .
if you look at the blue line , the areas with low levels of malaria , you can see in those areas , actually , the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as hiv prevalence goes up .
areas with medium levels of malaria it decreases some - it does n't decrease as much . and areas with high levels of malaria - actually , it 's increasing a little bit , although that 's not significant .
this is not just through malaria .
young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to hiv than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality .
there 's another risk , and they respond less to this existing risk .
so by itself , i think this tells a lot about how people behave .
it tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in africa .
but it also tells us something about policy .
even if you only cared about aids in africa , it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria , in combating poor indoor air quality , in improving maternal mortality rates .
because if you improve those things , then people are going to have an incentive to avoid aids on their own .
but it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before .
education campaigns , like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding , may not be enough , at least not alone .
if people have no incentive to avoid aids on their own , even if they know everything about the disease , they still may not change their behavior .
so the other thing that i think we learn here is that aids is not going to fix itself .
people are n't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic .
so we 're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective .
and a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past .
the reason that we know that the abc campaign was effective in uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time .
in uganda we see the prevalence went down .
we know they had this campaign . that 's how we learn about what works .
it 's not the only place we had any interventions .
other places have tried things , so why do n't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence ?
unfortunately , there 's almost no good data on hiv prevalence in the general population in africa until about 2003 .
so if i asked you , " why do n't you go and find me the prevalence in burkina faso in 1991 ? "
you get on google , you google , and you find , actually the only people tested in burkina faso in 1991 are std patients and pregnant women , which is not a terribly representative group of people .
then if you poked a little more , you looked a little more at what was going on , you 'd find that actually that was a pretty good year , because in some years the only people tested are iv drug users .
but even worse - some years it 's only iv drug users , some years it 's only pregnant women .
we have no way to figure out what happened over time .
we have no consistent testing .
now in the last few years , we actually have done some good testing .
in kenya , in zambia , and a bunch of countries , there 's been testing in random samples of the population .
but this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge .
so i can tell you what the prevalence was in kenya in 2003 , but i ca n't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983 .
so this is a problem for policy . it was a problem for my research .
and i started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of hiv was in africa in the past .
and i think that the answer is , we can look at mortality data , and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past .
to do this , we 're going to have to rely on the fact that aids is a very specific kind of disease .
it kills people in the prime of their lives .
not a lot of other diseases have that profile . and you can see here - this is a graph of death rates by age in botswana and egypt .
botswana is a place with a lot of aids , egypt is a place without a lot of aids .
and you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people .
that suggests it 's pretty similar levels of development .
but in this middle region , between 20 and 45 , the death rates in botswana are much , much , much higher than in egypt .
but since there are very few other diseases that kill people , we can really attribute that mortality to hiv .
but because people who died this year of aids got it a few years ago , we can use this data on mortality to figure out what hiv prevalence was in the past .
so it turns out , if you use this technique , actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population , but they 're very , very different than what unaids tells us the prevalences are .
so this is a graph of prevalence estimated by unaids , and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in africa .
you can see , almost without exception , the unaids estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates .
unaids tell us that the hiv rate in zambia is 20 percent , and mortality estimates suggest it 's only about 5 percent .
and these are not trivial differences in mortality rates .
so this is another way to see this .
you can see that for the prevalence to be as high as unaids says , we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group .
i 'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about how we can use this kind of information to learn something that 's going to help us think about the world .
but this also tells us that one of these facts that i mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right .
if you think that 25 million people are infected , if you think that the unaids numbers are much too high , maybe that 's more like 10 or 15 million .
it does n't mean that aids is n't a problem . it 's a gigantic problem .
but it does suggest that that number might be a little big .
what i really want to do , is i want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the hiv epidemic grow faster or slower .
and i said in the beginning , i was n't going to tell you about exports .
when i started working on these projects , i was not thinking at all about economics , but eventually it kind of sucks you back in .
so i am going to talk about exports and prices .
and i want to talk about the relationship between economic activity , in particular export volume , and hiv infections .
so obviously , as an economist , i 'm deeply familiar with the fact that development , that openness to trade , is really good for developing countries .
it 's good for improving people 's lives .
but openness and inter-connectedness , it comes with a cost when we think about disease . i do n't think this should be a surprise .
on wednesday , i learned from laurie garrett that i 'm definitely going to get the bird flu , and i would n't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with asia .
and hiv is actually particularly closely linked to transit .
the epidemic was introduced to the us by actually one male steward on an airline flight , who got the disease in africa and brought it back .
and that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the us .
in africa , epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people .
areas with a lot of economic activity - with a lot of roads , with a lot of urbanization - those areas have higher prevalence than others .
but that actually does n't mean at all that if we gave people more exports , more trade , that that would increase prevalence .
by using this new data , using this information about prevalence over time , we can actually test that . and so it seems to be - fortunately , i think - it seems to be the case that these things are positively related .
more exports means more aids . and that effect is really big .
so the data that i have suggests that if you double export volume , it will lead to a quadrupling of new hiv infections .
so this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy .
from a forecasting perspective , if we know where trade is likely to change , for example , because of the african growth and opportunities act or other policies that encourage trade , we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with hiv .
and we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there .
likewise , as we 're developing policies to try to encourage exports , if we know there 's this externality - this extra thing that 's going to happen as we increase exports - we can think about what the right kinds of policies are .
but it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know .
even though it is the case that poverty is linked to aids , in the sense that africa is poor and they have a lot of aids , it 's not necessarily the case that improving poverty - at least in the short run , that improving exports and improving development - it 's not necessarily the case that that 's going to lead to a decline in hiv prevalence .
so throughout this talk i 've mentioned a few times the special case of uganda , and the fact that it 's the only country in sub-saharan africa with successful prevention .
it 's been widely heralded .
it 's been replicated in kenya , and tanzania , and south africa and many other places .
but now i want to actually also question that .
because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in uganda in the 1990s . it 's true that they had an education campaign .
but there was actually something else that happened in uganda in this period .
there was a big decline in coffee prices .
coffee is uganda 's major export .
their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s - and actually that decline lines up really , really closely with this decline in new hiv infections .
so you can see that both of these series - the black line is export value , the red line is new hiv infections - you can see they 're both increasing .
starting about 1987 they 're both going down a lot .
and then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade .
so if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that i talked about before , it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign .
but that 's enormously important for policy .
we 're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign .
and if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was , then there are all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead .
trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases .
trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision .
there are tons of other things that we should think about doing .
and maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things .
i hope that in the last 16 minutes i 've told you something that you did n't know about aids , and i hope that i 've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know .
and i hope that i 've convinced you maybe that it 's important to understand things about the epidemic in order to think about policy .
but more than anything , you know , i 'm an academic .
and when i leave here , i 'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office , and my computer , and my data .
and the thing that 's most exciting about that is every time i think about research , there are more questions .
there are more things that i think that i want to do .
and what 's really , really great about being here is i 'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very , very different than the questions that i think up myself .
and i ca n't wait to hear about what they are .
so thank you very much .
this is tim ferriss circa 1979 a.d. age two .
you can tell by the power squat , i was a very confident boy - and not without reason .
i had a very charming routine at the time , which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day 's work , doing their crossword puzzles , watching television .
i would run into the living room , jump up on the couch , rip the cushions off , throw them on the floor , scream at the top of my lungs and run out because i was the incredible hulk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- obviously , you see the resemblance .
and this routine went on for some time .
when i was seven i went to summer camp .
my parents found it necessary for peace of mind .
and at noon each day the campers would go to a pond , where they had floating docks .
you could jump off the end into the deep end .
i was born premature . i was always very small .
my left lung had collapsed when i was born .
and i 've always had buoyancy problems .
so water was something that scared me to begin with .
but i would go in on occasion .
and on one particular day , the campers were jumping through inner tubes , they were diving through inner tubes . and i thought this would be great fun .
so i dove through the inner tube , and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles .
and i tried to come up for air , and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube .
and i went wild eyed and thought i was going to die .
a camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us .
from that point onward i was terrified of swimming .
that is something that i did not get over .
my inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments .
that is when i realized that i was not the incredible hulk .
but there is a happy ending to this story .
at age 31 - that 's my age now - in august i took two weeks to re-examine swimming , and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming .
and went from swimming one lap - so 20 yards - like a drowning monkey , at about 200 beats per minute heart rate - i measured it - to going to montauk on long island , close to where i grew up , and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water , getting out and feeling better than when i went in .
and i came out , in my speedos , european style , feeling like the incredible hulk .
and that 's what i want everyone in here to feel like , the incredible hulk , at the end of this presentation .
more specifically , i want you to feel like you 're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer , a world-class language learner , and a tango champion .
and i would like to share my art .
if i have an art , it 's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me .
so , moving onward .
swimming , first principles .
first principles , this is very important .
i find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions .
and the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said , " i will go a year without any stimulants " - this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy - " if you can complete a one kilometer open water race . "
so the clock started ticking .
i started seeking out triathletes because i found that lifelong swimmers often could n't teach what they did .
i tried kickboards .
my feet would slice through the water like razors , i would n't even move . i would leave demoralized , staring at my feet .
hand paddles , everything .
even did lessons with olympians - nothing helped .
and then chris sacca , who is now a dear friend mine , had completed an iron man with 103 degree temperature , said , " i have the answer to your prayers . "
and he introduced me to the work of a man named terry laughlin who is the founder of total immersion swimming .
that set me on the road to examining biomechanics .
so here are the new rules of swimming , if any of you are afraid of swimming , or not good at it .
the first is , forget about kicking . very counterintuitive .
so it turns out that propulsion is n't really the problem .
kicking harder does n't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion .
the problem is hydrodynamics .
so what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body , much like a small car behind a big car on the highway .
and you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position .
the only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water .
the body is denser than water . 95 percent of it would be , at least , submerged naturally .
so you end up , number three , not swimming , in the case of freestyle , on your stomach , as many people think , reaching on top of the water .
but actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left , maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible .
so let 's look at some examples . this is terry .
and you can see that he 's extending his right arm below his head and far in front .
and so his entire body really is underwater .
the arm is extended below the head .
the head is held in line with the spine , so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up - very important , especially for people with lower body fat .
here is an example of the stroke .
so you do n't kick . but you do use a small flick .
you can see this is the left extension .
then you see his left leg .
small flick , and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side .
and the entry point for his right hand - notice this , he 's not reaching in front and catching the water .
rather , he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm , and then propelling himself by streamlining - very important .
incorrect , above , which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you .
not their fault , honestly .
and i 'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment .
below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what i did , which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach , no video monitoring .
and now i love swimming . i ca n't wait to go swimming .
i 'll be doing a swimming lesson later , for myself , if anyone wants to join me .
last thing , breathing . a problem a lot of us have , certainly , when you 're swimming .
in freestyle , easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll , and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water .
and that will get you very far .
that 's it . that 's really all you need to know .
languages . material versus method .
i , like many people , came to the conclusion that i was terrible at languages .
i suffered through spanish for junior high , first year of high school , and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much , " donde esta el bano ? "
and i would n't even catch the response . a sad state of affairs .
then i transferred to a different school sophomore year , and i had a choice of other languages . most of my friends were taking japanese .
so i thought why not punish myself ? i 'll do japanese .
six months later i had the chance to go to japan .
my teachers assured me , they said , " do n't worry .
you 'll have japanese language classes every day to help you cope .
it will be an amazing experience . " my first overseas experience in fact .
so my parents encouraged me to do it . i left .
i arrived in tokyo . amazing .
i could n't believe i was on the other side of the world .
i met my host family . things went quite well i think , all things considered .
my first evening , before my first day of school , i said to my mother , very politely , " please wake me up at eight a.m. "
so , -lrb- japanese -rrb- but i did n't say -lrb- japanese -rrb- . i said , -lrb- japanese -rrb- . pretty close .
but i said , " please rape me at eight a.m. "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 've never seen a more confused japanese woman .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i walked in to school .
and a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper .
i could n't read any of it - hieroglyphics , it could have been - because it was kanji , chinese characters adapted into the japanese language .
asked him what this said .
and he goes , " ahh , okay okay , eehto , world history , ehh , calculus , traditional japanese . " and so on .
and so it came to me in waves .
there had been something lost in translation .
the japanese classes were not japanese instruction classes , per se .
they were the normal high school curriculum for japanese students - the other 4,999 students in the school , who were japanese , besides the american .
and that 's pretty much my response .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method .
i tried everything . i went to kinokuniya .
i tried every possible book , every possible cd .
nothing worked until i found this .
this is the joyo kanji . this is a tablet rather , or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the ministry of education in 1981 .
many of the publications in japan limit themselves to these characters , to facilitate literacy - some are required to .
and this became my holy grail , my rosetta stone .
as soon as i focused on this material , i took off .
i ended up being able to read asahi shinbu , asahi newspaper , about six months later - so a total of 11 months later - and went from japanese i to japanese vi .
ended up doing translation work at age 16 when i returned to the u.s. , and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now .
someone who was terrible at languages , and at any given time , speak , read and write five or six .
this brings us to the point , which is , it 's oftentimes what you do , not how you do it , that is the determining factor .
this is the difference between being effective - doing the right things - and being efficient - doing things well whether or not they 're important .
you can also do this with grammar .
i came up with these six sentences after much experimentation .
having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar , by translating these sentences into past , present , future , will show you subject , object , verb , placement of indirect , direct objects , gender and so forth .
from that point , you can then , if you want to , acquire multiple languages , alternate them so there is no interference .
we can talk about that if anyone in interested .
and now i love languages .
so ballroom dancing , implicit versus explicit - very important .
you might look at me and say , " that guy must be a ballroom dancer . "
but no , you 'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things - pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps .
i used to be much bigger , much more muscular .
and so i ended up walking like this .
i looked a lot like an orangutan , our close cousins , or the incredible hulk .
not very good for ballroom dancing .
i found myself in argentina in 2005 , decided to watch a tango class - had no intention of participating .
went in , paid my ten pesos , walked up - 10 women two guys , usually a good ratio .
the instructor says , " you are participating . "
immediately : death sweat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- fight-or-flight fear sweat , because i tried ballroom dancing in college - stepped on the girl 's foot with my heel . she screamed .
i was so concerned with her perception of what i was doing , that it exploded in my face , never to return to the ballroom dancing club .
she comes up , and this was her approach , the teacher .
" okay , come on , grab me . "
gorgeous assistant instructor .
she was very pissed off that i had pulled her from her advanced practice .
so i did my best . i did n't know where to put my hands .
and she pulled back , threw down her arms , put them on her hips , turned around and yelled across the room , " this guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle , and he 's grabbing me like a fucking frenchman , " -lrb- laughter -rrb- which i found encouraging .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- everyone burst into laughter . i was humiliated .
she came back . she goes , " come on . i do n't have all day . "
as someone who wrestled since age eight , i proceeded to crush her , " of mice and men " style .
and she looked up and said , " now that 's better . "
so i bought a month 's worth of classes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and proceeded to look at - i wanted to set competition so i 'd have a deadline - parkinson 's law , the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it .
so i had a very short deadline for a competition .
i got a female instructor first , to teach me the female role , the follow , because i wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop , so i would n't have a repeat of college .
and then i took an inventory of the characteristics , along with her , of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who 'd won championships .
i interviewed these people because they all taught in buenos aires .
i compared the two lists , and what you find is that there is explicitly , expertise they recommended , certain training methods .
then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing .
now the protectionism of argentine dance teachers aside , i found this very interesting . so i decided to focus on three of those commonalities .
long steps . so a lot of milongueros - the tango dancers will use very short steps .
i found that longer steps were much more elegant .
so you can have - and you can do it in a very small space in fact .
secondly , different types of pivots .
thirdly , variation in tempo .
these seemed to be the three areas that i could exploit to compete if i wanted to comptete against people who 'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years .
that photo is of the semi-finals of the buenos aires championships , four months later .
then one month later , went to the world championships , made it to the semi-final . and then set a world record , following that , two weeks later .
i want you to see part of what i practiced .
i 'm going to jump forward here .
this is the instructor that alicia and i chose for the male lead .
his name is gabriel misse .
one of the most elegant dancers of his generation , known for his long steps , and his tempo changes and his pivots .
alicia , in her own right , very famous .
so i think you 'll agree , they look quite good together .
now what i like about this video is it 's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead . he had a strong lead .
he did n't lead with his chest , which requires you lean forward .
i could n't develop the attributes in my toes , the strength in my feet , to do that .
so he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm .
so he can lift the woman to break her , for example .
that 's just one benefit of that .
so then we broke it down .
this would be an example of one pivot .
this is a back step pivot .
there are many different types .
i have hundreds of hours of footage - all categorized , much like george carlin categorized his comedy .
so using my arch-nemesis , spanish , no less , to learn tango .
so fear is your friend . fear is an indicator .
sometimes it shows you what you should n't do .
more often than not it shows you exactly what you should do .
and the best results that i 've had in life , the most enjoyable times , have all been from asking a simple question : what 's the worst that can happen ?
especially with fears you gained when you were a child .
take the analytical frameworks , the capabilities you have , apply them to old fears .
apply them to very big dreams .
and when i think of what i fear now , it 's very simple .
when i imagine my life , what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that i had , it makes me wonder .
i 've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the american public school system , to either fix it or replace it .
and have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far - built , i 'd say , about a half dozen schools , my readers , at this point .
and if any of you are interested in that , i would love to speak with you .
i know nothing . i 'm a beginner .
but i ask a lot of questions , and i would love your advice .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- right when i was 15 was when i first got interested in solar energy .
my family had moved from fort lee , new jersey to california , and we moved from the snow to lots of heat , and gas lines .
there was gas rationing in 1973 .
the energy crisis was in full bore .
i started reading popular science magazine , and i got really excited about the potential of solar energy to try and solve that crisis .
i had just taken trigonometry in high school , i learned about the parabola and how it could concentrate rays of light to a single focus .
that got me very excited .
and i really felt that there would be potential to build some kind of thing that could concentrate light .
so , i started this company called solar devices .
and this was a company where i built parabolas , i took metal shop , and i remember walking into metal shop building parabolas and stirling engines .
and i was building this stirling engine over on the lathe , and all the biker guys - motorcycle guys - came over and said , " you 're building a bong , are n't you ? "
and i said , " no , it 's a stirling engine . it really is . "
but they did n't believe me .
i sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of popular science magazine , for four dollars each .
and i earned enough money to pay for my first year of caltech .
it was a really big excitement for me to get into caltech .
and my first year at caltech , i continued the business .
but then , in the second year of caltech , they started grading .
the whole first year was pass / fail , but the second year was graded .
i was n't able to keep up with the business , and i ended up with a 25-year detour .
my dream had been to convert solar energy at a very practical cost , but then i had this big detour .
first , the coursework at caltech .
then , when i graduated from caltech , the ibm p.c. came out , and i got addicted to the ibm p.c. in 1981 .
and then in 1983 , lotus 1-2-3 came out , and i was completely blown away by lotus 1-2-3 .
i began operating my business with 1-2-3 , began writing add-ins for 1-2-3 , wrote a natural language interface to 1-2-3 .
i started an educational software company after i joined lotus , and then i started idealab so i could have a roof under which i could build multiple companies in succession then , much much later - in 2000 , very recently - the new california energy crisis - or what was purported to be a big energy crisis - was coming .
and i was trying to figure if there was some way we could build something that would capitalize on that and try and get people back-up energy , in case the crisis really came .
and i started looking at how we could build battery back-up systems that could give people five hours , 10 hours , maybe even a full day , or three days ' worth of back-up power .
i 'm glad you heard earlier today , batteries are unbelievably energy - lack of density compared to fuel .
so much more energy can be stored with fuel than with batteries .
you 'd have to fill your entire parking space of one garage space just to give yourself four hours of battery back-up .
and i concluded , after researching every other technology that we could deploy for storing energy - flywheels , different formulations of batteries - it just was n't practical to store energy .
so what about making energy ?
maybe we could make energy .
i tried to figure out - maybe solar 's become attractive .
it 's been 25 years since i was doing this , let me go back and look at what 's been happening with solar cells .
and the price had gone down from 10 dollars a watt to about four or five dollars a watt , but it stabilized .
and it really needed to get much lower than that to be cost effective .
i studied all the new things that had happened in solar cells , and was trying to look for ways we could innovate and make solar cells more inexpensively .
there are a lot of new things that are happening to do that , but fundamentally the process requires a tremendous amount of energy .
some people even say it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it will give out in its entire life .
hopefully , if we can reduce the amount of energy it takes to make the cells , that will become more practical .
but right now , you pretty much have to take silicon , put it in an oven at 1600 degrees fahrenheit for 17 hours , to make the cells .
a lot of people are working on things to try and reduce that , but i did n't have anything to contribute in that area .
so i tried to figure out what other way could we try and make cost-effective solar electricity .
so i thought of an idea - what if we collect the sun with a large reflector - like i had been thinking about way back when , when i was in high school - but maybe with modern technology we could make a cheaper , large collector , concentrate it to a small converter , and then the conversion device would n't have to be as expensive , because it 's much smaller , rather than solar cells , which have to be covering the entire surface area that you want to gather sun from .
this seemed practical now , because a lot of new technologies had come in the 25 years since i had last looked at it .
first of all , there was a lot of new manufacturing techniques , not to mention really cheap miniature motors - brushless motors , servo motors , stepper motors , that are used in printers and scanners and things like that .
so , that 's a breakthrough .
of course , inexpensive microprocessors and then a very important breakthrough - genetic algorithms .
i 'll be very short on genetic algorithms .
it 's a powerful way of solving intractable problems using natural selection .
you take a problem that you ca n't solve with a pure mathematical answer , you build an evolutionary system to try multiple tries at guessing , you add sex - where you take half of one solution and half of another and then make new mutations - and you use natural selection to kill off not as good solutions .
usually , with a genetic algorithm on a computer today , with a three gigahertz processor you can solve many , many formerly intractable problems in just a matter of minutes .
we tried to come up with a way to use genetic algorithms to create a new type of concentrator .
and i 'll show you what we came up with .
traditionally , concentrators look like this .
those shapes are parabolas .
they take all the parallel incoming rays and focus it to a single spot .
they have to track the sun , because they have to be pointing directly at the sun .
they usually have about a one degree acceptance angle , meaning once they 're more than about a degree off , none of the sunlight rays will hit the focus .
so we tried to come up with a way of making a non-tracking collector , a collector that would gather much more than one degree of light , with no moving parts .
so we created this genetic algorithm to try this out , we made a model in xl of a multi-surface reflector , and an amazing thing evolved , literally evolved , from trying a billion cycles , a billion different attempts , with a fitness function that defined how can you collect the most light , from the most angles , over a day , from the sun .
and this is the shape that evolved .
it 's this non-tracking collector with these six tuba-like horns , and each of them collect light in the following way - if the sunlight strikes right here , it might bounce right to the center , the hot spot , directly , but if the sun is off-axis and comes from the side , it might hit two places and take two bounces .
so for direct light , it takes only one bounce , for off-axis light it might take two , and for extreme off-axis , it might take three .
your efficiency goes down with more bounces , because you lose about 10 percent with each bounce , but this allowed us to collect light from a plus or minus 25 degree angle .
so , about two and a half hours of the day we could collect with a stationary component .
solar cells collect light for four and a half hours though .
on an average adjusted day , a solar cell - because the sun 's moving across the sky , at the off-axis angles .
it collects about four and a half average hours of sunlight a day .
so , even this , although it was great with no moving parts - we could achieve high temperatures - was n't enough .
we needed to beat solar cells .
so we took a look at another idea .
we looked at a way to break up a parabola into individual petals that would track .
so what you see here is 12 separate petals , that each could be controlled with individual microprocessors that would only cost a dollar .
you can buy a two megahertz microprocessor for a dollar now .
and you can buy stepper motors that pretty much never wear out because they have no brushes , for a dollar .
we can control all 12 of these petals for under 50 dollars and what this would allow us to do is not have to move the focus any more , but only move the petals .
the whole system would have a much lower profile , but also we could gather sunlight for six and a half to seven hours a day .
now that we have concentrated sunlight , what are we going to put at the center to convert sunlight to electricity ?
so we tried to look at all the different heat engines that have been used in history to try and convert sunlight to electricity , or heat to electricity .
and one of the great ones of all time , james watt 's steam engine of 1788 was a major , major breakthrough .
james watt did n't actually invent the steam engine , he just refined it .
but , his refinements were incredible .
he added new linear motion guides to the pistons , he added a condenser to cool the steam outside the cylinder , he made the engine double-acting so it had double the power .
those were major breakthroughs .
i mean , all of the improvements he made - and it 's justifiable that our measure of energy , the watt , today is named after him .
so we looked at this engine , and this had some potential .
steam engines are dangerous , and they had tremendous impact on the world , as you know - industrial revolution and ships and locomotives .
but they 're usually good to be large , so they 're not good for distributed power generation .
but they 're also very high pressure , so they 're dangerous .
another type of engine is the hot air engine .
and the hot air engine also was not invented by robert stirling , but robert stirling came along in 1816 and radically improved it .
this engine , because it was so interesting - it only worked on air , no steam - has led to hundreds of creative designs over the years that use the stirling engine principle .
but after the stirling engine , otto came along , and also , he did n't invent the internal combustion engine , he just refined it .
he showed it in paris in 1867 , and it was a major achievement because it brought the power density of the engine way up .
you could now get a lot more power in a lot smaller space , and that allowed the engine to be used for mobile applications .
so , once you have mobility , now you 're making a lot of engines because you 've got lots of units , as opposed to steam ships or big factories where you 're not making as many units , so this was the engine that ended up benefiting from mass production where all the other engines did n't benefit .
so , because it went into mass production , costs were reduced , 100 years of refinement , emissions were reduced , tremendous production value .
there have been hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines built , compared to thousands of stirling engines built .
and not nearly as many small steam engines being built anymore , only large ones for big operations .
so after looking at these three , and 47 others , we concluded that the stirling engine would be the best one to use .
i want to give you a brief explanation of how we looked at it and how it works .
so we tried to look at the stirling engine in a new way , because it was practical - weight no longer mattered for our application the internal combustion engine took off because weight mattered because you were moving around .
but if you 're trying to generate solar energy in a static place the weight does n't matter so much .
the other thing we discovered is that efficiency does n't matter so much if your energy source is free .
normally , efficiency is crucial because the fuel cost of your engine over its life dwarfs the cost of the engine .
but if your fuel source is free , then the only thing that matters is the up-front capital cost of the engine .
so you do n't want to optimize for efficiency , you want to optimize for power per dollar .
so using that new twist , with the new criteria , we thought we could re-look at the stirling engine , and also bring genetic algorithms in .
basically , robert stirling did n't have gordon moore before him to get us three gigahertz of processor power .
so we took the same genetic algorithm that we used earlier to make that concentrator , which did n't work out for us , to optimize the stirling engine , and make its design sizes and all of its dimensions the exact optimum to get the most power per dollar , irrespective of weight , irrespective of size , to get the most conversion of solar energy , because the sun is free .
and that 's the process we took - let me show you how the engine works .
the simplest heat engine , or hot air engine , of all time would be this - take a box , a steel canister , with a piston .
put a flame under it , the piston moves up .
take it off the flame and pour water on it , or let it cool down , the piston moves down .
that 's a heat engine .
that 's basically the most fundamental heat engine you could possibly have .
the problem is the efficiency is one hundredth of one percent , because you 're heating all the metal of the chamber and then cooling all the metal of the chamber each time .
and you 're only getting power from the air that 's heating at the same time , but you 're wasting all the energy heating the metal and cooling the metal .
so someone came up with a very clever idea , to - instead of heating the whole cylinder and cooling the whole cylinder , what about if you put a displacer inside - a little thing that shuttles the air back and forth .
you move that up and down with a little bit of energy but now you 're only shifting the air down to the hot end and up to the cold end , down to the hot end and up to the cold end .
so , now you 're not alternately heating and cooling the metal , you 're just alternately heating and cooling the air .
that allows you to get the efficiency up from a hundredth of a percent to about two percent .
and then robert stirling came along with this genius idea , which was , well i 'm still not heating the metal now , with this kind of engine , but i 'm still reheating all the air .
i 'm still heating the air every time and cooling the air every time .
what about if i put a thermal sponge in the middle , in the passageway between where the air has to move between hot and cold ?
so he made fine wires , and cracked glass , and all different kinds of materials to be a heat sponge .
so when the air pushes up to go from the hot end to the cold end , it puts some heat into the sponge .
and then when the air comes back after it 's been cooled it picks up that heat again .
so you 're reusing your energy five or six times , and that brings the efficiency up between 30 and 40 percent it 's a little known , but brilliant , genius invention of robert stirling that takes the hot air engine from being somewhat impractical - like i found out when i made the real simple version in high school - to very potentially possible , once you get the efficiency up , if you can design this to be low enough cost .
so we really set out on a path to try and make the lowest cost possible .
we built a huge mathematical model of how a stirling engine works .
we applied the genetic algorithm .
we got the results from that for the optimal engine .
we built engines - so we built 100 different engines over the last two years .
we measured each one , we readjusted the model to what we measured , and then we led that to the current prototype .
it led to a very compact , inexpensive engine , and this is what the engine looks like .
let me show you what it looks like in real life .
so this is the engine .
it 's just a small cylinder down here which holds the generator inside and all the linkage and it 's the hot cap - the hot cylinder on the top - this part gets hot , this part is cool , and electricity comes out .
the exact converse is also true .
if you put electricity in , this will get hot and this will get cold , you get refrigeration .
so it 's a complete reversible cycle , a very efficient cycle , and quite a simple thing to make .
so now you put the two things together .
so you have the engine , now what if you combine the petals and the engine in the center ?
the petals track and the engine gets the concentrated sunlight , take that heat and turn it into electricity .
this is what the first prototype of our system looked like together with the petals and the engine in the center .
this is being run out in the sun , and now i want to show you what the actual thing looks like .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so this is a unit with the 12 petals these petals cost about a dollar each - they 're lightweight , injection molded plastic , aluminized .
the mechanism to control each petal is below there with a microprocessor on each one .
there are thermocouples on the engine - little sensors that detect the heat when the sunlight strikes them .
each petal adjusts itself separately to keep the highest temperature on it .
when the sun comes out in the morning , the petals will seek the sun , find it by searching for the highest temperature about a minute and a half or two minutes after the rays are striking the hot cap the engine will be warm enough to start and then the engine will generate electricity for about six and a half hours a day - six and a half to seven hours as the sun moves across the sky a critical part that we can take advantage of is that we have these inexpensive microprocessors and each one of these petals are autonomous ,
and each one of these petals figures out where the sun is with no user set-up .
so you do n't have to tell what latitude , longitude you 're at , you do n't have to tell what your roof slope angle is , you do n't have to tell what orientation .
it does n't really care .
what it does is it searches to find the hottest spot , it searches again a half an hour later , it searches again a day later , it searches again a month later .
it basically figures out where on earth you are by watching the direction the sun moves , so you do n't have to actually enter anything about that .
the way the unit works is , when the sun comes out the engine will start and you get power out here .
we have a.c. and d.c. , get 12 volts d.c. , so that could be used for certain applications .
we have an inverter in there , so you get 117 volts a.c.
and you also get hot water .
the hot water 's optional .
you do n't have to use the hot water , it will cool itself .
but you can use it to optionally heat hot water and that brings the efficiency up even higher because some of the heat that you would normally be rejecting , you can now use as useful energy , whether it 's for a pool or hot water .
let me show you a quick movie of what this looks like running .
so this is the first test where we took it outside and each of the petals were individually seeking .
and what they do is step , very coarsely at first , and then very finely afterward .
once they get a temperature reading on the thermocouple indicating they found the sun , then they slow down and do a fine search , then all the petals will move into position , and then the engine will start .
so , we 've been working on this for the last two years .
we 're very excited about the progress , we do have a very long way to go though still , and let me tell you a little bit more about that .
this is how we envision it would be in a residential installation : you 'd probably have more than one unit on your roof .
it could be on your roof , or in your backyard , or somewhere else .
you do n't have to have enough units to power your entire house , you just save money with each incremental one you add .
so you 're still using the grid potentially , in this type of application , to be your back-up supply - of course , you ca n't use these at night , and you ca n't use these on cloudy days .
but by reducing your energy use , pretty much at the peak times - usually when you have you air conditioning on , or other times like that - this generates the peak power at the peak usage time , so it 's very complementary in that sense .
this is how we would envision a residential application .
we also think there 's very big potential for energy farms , especially in remote land where there happens to be a lot of sun .
it 's a really good combination of those two factors .
it turns out there 's a lot of powerful sun all around the world , obviously , but in special places where it happens to be relatively inexpensive to place these and also in many more places where there is high wind power .
so an example of that is , here 's the map of the united states .
pretty much everywhere that 's not green or blue is a really ideal place , but even the green or blue areas are good , just not as good as the places that are red , orange and yellow .
but the hot sport right around las vegas and death valley and that area is very , very good .
and all this does is affect the payback period , it does n't mean that you could n't use solar energy ; you could use solar energy anywhere on earth .
it just affects the payback period if you 're comparing to grid-supplied electricity .
but if you do n't have grid-supplied electricity , then the whole question of payback is a different one entirely .
it 's just how many watts do you get per dollar , and how could you benefit from that using that power to change your life in some way .
this is the map of the united states .
this is the map of the whole earth and again , you can see a huge swathe in the middle of pretty much where a large part of the population is , there 's tremendous chances for solar energy .
and of course , look at africa .
it 's just unbelievable what the potential is to take advantage of solar energy there , and i 'm really excited to talk more about finding ways we can help with that .
so , in conclusion , i would say my journey has shown me that you can revisit old ideas in a new light , and sometimes ideas that have been discarded in the past can be practical now if you apply some new technology or new twists .
we believe we 're getting very close to something practical and affordable .
our short-term goal for this is to be half the price of solar cells and our longer-term goal is to be less than a five-year payback .
and at less than a five-year payback , all of a sudden this becomes very economic so you do n't have to just want to have a feel-good attitude about energy to want to have one of these .
it just makes economic sense .
right now , solar paybacks are between 30 and 50 years .
if you get it down below five years then it becomes almost a no-brainer because the interest to own it - someone else will finance it for you and you can just make money , basically from day one .
so that 's our real powerful goal that we 're really shooting for in the company .
two other things that i learned that were very surprising to me - one was how casual we are about energy .
i was walking from the elevator over here , and even just looking at the stage right now - so there 's probably 20 500 watt lights right now .
there 's 10,000 watts of light pouring on the stage , one horsepower is 756 watts , at full power .
so there 's basically 15 horses running at full speed just to keep the stage lit .
not to mention the 200 horses that are probably running right now to keep the airconditioning going .
and it 's just amazing , walk in the elevator and there 's lights on in the elevator .
of course , now i 'm very sensitive at home when we leave the lights on by mistake .
but , everywhere around us we have insatiable use for energy because it 's so cheap .
and it 's cheap because we 've been subsidized by energy that 's been concentrated by the sun .
basically , oil is solar energy concentrate .
it 's been pounded for a billion years with a lot of energy to make it have all that energy contained in it .
and we do n't have a birthright to just use that up as fast as we are , i think .
and it would be great if we could find a way to make our energy usage renewable , where as we 're using the energy we 're creating it at the same pace , and i really hope we can get there .
thank you very much , you 've been a great audience .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the national portrait gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great american lives , amazing people .
and that 's what it 's about .
we use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives , but that 's it .
and so i 'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today .
i 'm going to talk about a program i started there , which , from my point of view , is the proudest thing i did .
i started to worry about the fact that a lot of people do n't get their portraits painted anymore , and they 're amazing people , and we want to deliver them to future generations .
so , how do we do that ?
and so i came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series .
and the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and i would interview .
and so what i 'm going to do is , not so much give you the great hits of that program , as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation , what you try to find out about them , and when people deliver and when they do n't and why .
now , i had two preconditions .
one was that they be american .
that 's just because , in the nature of the national portrait gallery , it 's created to look at american lives .
that was easy , but then i made the decision , maybe arbitrary , that they needed to be people of a certain age , which at that point , when i created this program , seemed really old .
sixties , seventies , eighties and nineties .
for obvious reasons , it does n't seem that old anymore to me .
and why did i do that ?
well , for one thing , we 're a youth-obsessed culture .
and i thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk .
but the second part of it - and the older i get , the more convinced i am that that 's true .
it 's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out .
that 's the one advantage that older people have .
well , they have other , little bit of advantage , but they also have some disadvantages , but the one thing they or we have is that we 've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out .
so , we can then go back in our lives , if we 've got an interviewer who gets that , and begin to reflect on how we got there .
all of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited .
so , i thought okay , now , what is it going to take to make this work ?
there are many kinds of interviews . we know them .
there are the journalist interviews , which are the interrogation that is expected .
this is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee .
then there 's the celebrity interview , where it 's more important who 's asking the question than who answers .
that 's barbara walters and others like that , and we like that .
that 's frost-nixon , where frost seems to be as important as nixon in that process .
fair enough .
but i wanted interviews that were different .
i wanted to be , as i later thought of it , empathic , which is to say , to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation .
by the way , this was always done in public .
this was not an oral history program .
this was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual , and having me be the brush in their self-portrait .
now , it turns out that i was pretty good at that .
i did n't know it coming into it .
and the only reason i really know that is because of one interview i did with senator william fulbright , and that was six months after he 'd had a stroke .
and he had never appeared in public since that point .
this was not a devastating stroke , but it did affect his speaking and so forth .
and i thought it was worth a chance , he thought it was worth a chance , and so we got up on the stage , and we had an hour conversation about his life , and after that a woman rushed up to me , essentially did , and she said , " where did you train as a doctor ? "
and i said , " i have no training as a doctor . i never claimed that . "
and she said , " well , something very weird was happening .
when he started a sentence , particularly in the early parts of the interview , and paused , you gave him the word , the bridge to get to the end of the sentence , and by the end of it , he was speaking complete sentences on his own . "
i did n't know what was going on , but i was so part of the process of getting that out .
so i thought , okay , fine , i 've got empathy , or empathy , at any rate , is what 's critical to this kind of interview .
but then i began to think of other things .
who makes a great interview in this context ?
it had nothing to do with their intellect , the quality of their intellect .
some of them were very brilliant , some of them were , you know , ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals , but it was never about that .
it was about their energy .
it 's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives .
i 'm convinced of it .
and it had nothing to do with the energy of being young .
these were people through their 90s .
in fact , the first person i interviewed was george abbott , who was 97 , and abbott was filled with the life force - i guess that 's the way i think about it - filled with it .
and so he filled the room , and we had an extraordinary conversation .
he was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent , for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two .
and , in fact , he did wind up opening up - by the way , his energy is evidenced in other ways .
he subsequently got married again at 102 , so he , you know , he had a lot of the life force in him .
but after the interview , i got a call , very gruff voice , from a woman .
i did n't know who she was , and she said , " did you get george abbott to talk ? "
and i said , " yeah . apparently i did . "
and she said , " i 'm his old girlfriend , maureen stapleton , and i could never do it . "
and then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that george abbott actually could talk .
so , you know , you want energy , you want the life force , but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing .
the worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest .
never ever get up on a stage with somebody who 's modest , because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them , and they sit there and they say , " aw , shucks , it was an accident . "
there 's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them .
the worst interview i ever did : william l. shirer .
the journalist who did " the rise and fall of the third reich . "
this guy had met hitler and gandhi within six months , and every time i 'd ask him about it , he 'd say , " oh , i just happened to be there .
did n't matter . " whatever .
awful .
i never would ever agree to interview a modest person .
they have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you .
but it comes down , in the end , to how do you get through all the barriers we have .
all of us are public and private beings , and if all you 're going to get from the interviewee is their public self , there 's no point in it .
it 's pre-programmed . it 's infomercial , and we all have infomercials about our lives .
we know the great lines , we know the great moments , we know what we 're not going to share , and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody .
this was n't - and some of you will remember mike wallace 's old interviews - tough , aggressive and so forth . they have their place .
i was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say , to break out of their own cocoon of the public self , and the more public they had been , the more entrenched that person , that outer person was .
and let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series .
it all has to do with that shell that most of us have , and particularly certain people .
there 's an extraordinary woman named clare boothe luce .
it 'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you .
she did so much . she was a playwright .
she did an extraordinary play called " the women . "
she was a congresswoman when there were n't very many congresswomen .
she was editor of vanity fair , one of the great phenomenal women of her day .
and , incidentally , i call her the eleanor roosevelt of the right .
she was sort of adored on the right the way eleanor roosevelt was on the left .
and , in fact , when we did the interview - i did the living self-portrait with her - there were three former directors of the cia basically sitting at her feet , just enjoying her presence .
and i thought , this is going to be a piece of cake , because i always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes .
we never talk before that because if you talk before , you do n't get it on the stage .
so she and i had a delightful conversation .
we were on the stage and then - by the way , spectacular .
it was all part of clare boothe luce 's look .
she was in a great evening gown .
she was 80 , almost that day of the interview , and there she was and there i was , and i just proceeded into the questions .
and she stonewalled me . it was unbelievable .
anything that i would ask , she would turn around , dismiss , and i was basically up there - any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage .
and i was dying . she was absolutely not giving me a thing .
and i began to wonder what was going on , and you think while you talk , and basically , i thought , i got it .
when we were alone , i was her audience .
now i 'm her competitor for the audience .
that 's the problem here , and she 's fighting me for that , and so then i asked her a question - i did n't know how i was going to get out of it - i asked her a question about her days as a playwright , and again , characteristically , instead of saying , " oh yes , i was a playwright , and this is what blah blah blah , " she said , " oh , playwright . everybody knows i was a playwright .
most people think that i was an actress . i was never an actress . "
but i had n't asked that , and then she went off on a tear , and she said , " oh , well , there was that one time that i was an actress .
it was for a charity in connecticut when i was a congresswoman , and i got up there , " and she went on and on , " and then i got on the stage . "
and then she turned to me and said , " and you know what those young actors did ?
they upstaged me . " and she said , " do you know what that is ? "
just withering in her contempt .
and i said , " i 'm learning . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she looked at me , and it was like the successful arm-wrestle , and then , after that , she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like .
i have to end that one . this is my tribute to clare boothe luce .
again , a remarkable person .
i 'm not politically attracted to her , but through her life force , i 'm attracted to her .
and the way she died - she had , toward the end , a brain tumor .
that 's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine , and very few of us were invited to a dinner party .
and she was in horrible pain .
we all knew that .
she stayed in her room .
everybody came . the butler passed around canapes .
the usual sort of thing .
then at a certain moment , the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed , completely composed .
the public self , the beauty , the intellect , and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again .
she wanted the control of her final moment , and she did it amazingly .
now , there are other ways that you get somebody to open up , and this is just a brief reference .
it was n't this arm-wrestle , but it was a little surprising for the person involved .
i interviewed steve martin . it was n't all that long ago .
and we were sitting there , and almost toward the beginning of the interview , i turned to him and i said , " steve , " or " mr. martin , it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods .
was yours unhappy ? "
and he looked at me , you know , as if to say , " this is how you 're going to start this thing , right off ? "
and then he turned to me , not stupidly , and he said , " what was your childhood like ? "
and i said - these are all arm wrestles , but they 're affectionate - and i said , " my father was loving and supportive , which is why i 'm not funny . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he looked at me , and then we heard the big sad story .
his father was an sob , and , in fact , he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood , but then we were off and running .
so the question is : what is the key that 's going to allow this to proceed ?
now , these are arm wrestle questions , but i want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really , very often , are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked .
and i 'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints .
one was an interview i did with one of the great american biographers .
again , some of you will know him , most of you wo n't , dumas malone .
he did a five-volume biography of thomas jefferson , spent virtually his whole life with thomas jefferson , and by the way , at one point i asked him , " would you like to have met him ? "
and he said , " well , of course , but actually , i know him better than anyone who ever met him , because i got to read all of his letters . "
so , he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years .
and i asked him one question .
i said , " did jefferson ever disappoint you ? "
and here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering jefferson and connecting with him , and he said , " well ... " - i 'm going to do a bad southern accent .
dumas malone was from mississippi originally .
but he said , " well , " he said , " i 'm afraid so . "
he said , " you know , i 've read everything , and sometimes mr. jefferson would smooth the truth a bit . "
and he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had , because he saw the letters .
he said , " but i understand that . " he said , " i understand that . "
he said , " we southerners do like a smooth surface , so that there were times when he just did n't want the confrontation . "
and he said , " now , john adams was too honest . "
and he started to talk about that , and later on he invited me to his house , and i met his wife who was from massachusetts , and he and she had exactly the relationship of thomas jefferson and john adams .
she was the new englander and abrasive , and he was this courtly fellow .
but really the most important question i ever asked , and most of the times when i talk about it , people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity , or cruelty , but i promise you it was the right question .
this was to agnes de mille .
agnes de mille is one of the great choreographers in our history .
she basically created the dances in " oklahoma , " transforming the american theater .
an amazing woman .
at the time that i proposed to her that - by the way , i would have proposed to her ; she was extraordinary - but proposed to her that she come on .
she said , " come to my apartment . "
she lived in new york .
" come to my apartment and we 'll talk for those 15 minutes , and then we 'll decide whether we proceed . "
and so i showed up in this dark , rambling new york apartment , and she called out to me , and she was in bed .
i had known that she had had a stroke , and that was some 10 years before .
and so she spent almost all of her life in bed , but - i speak of the life force - her hair was askew .
she was n't about to make up for this occasion .
and she was sitting there surrounded by books , and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will , which she had by her side .
she was n't unhappy about this . she was resigned .
she said , " i keep this will by my bed , memento mori , and i change it all the time just because i want to . "
and she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life .
i thought , this is somebody i 've got to get in this series .
she agreed .
she came on . of course she was wheelchaired on .
half of her body was stricken , the other half not .
she was , of course , done up for the occasion , but this was a woman in great physical distress .
and we had a conversation , and then i asked her this unthinkable question .
i said , " was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful ? "
and the audience just - you know , they 're always on the side of the interviewee , and they felt that this was a kind of assault , but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life .
and she began to talk about her childhood , when she was beautiful , and she literally turned - here she was , in this broken body - and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth , and then she said , " and then puberty hit . "
and she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face , and how she could no longer count on her beauty , and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given .
and she had to go along just to be with her sister for company , and in that process , she made a number of decisions .
first of all , was that dance , even though it had n't been offered to her , was her life .
and secondly , she had better be , although she did dance for a while , a choreographer because then her looks did n't matter .
but she was thrilled to get that out as a real , real fact in her life .
it was an amazing privilege to do this series .
there were other moments like that , very few moments of silence .
the key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions , so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are , and i commend that to you , even if you 're not doing interviews .
just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family .
thank you very much .
well , this is 2009 .
and it 's the bicentenary of charles darwin .
and all over the world , eminent evolutionists are anxious to celebrate this .
on almost every aspect of darwin and his life , and how he changed our thinking .
i say almost every aspect , because there is one aspect of this story which they have thrown no light on .
and they seem anxious to skirt around it and step over it and to talk about something else .
so i 'm going to talk about it .
it 's the question of , why are we so different from the chimpanzees ?
we get the geneticists keeping on telling us how extremely closely we are related - hardly any genes of difference , very , very closely related .
and yet , when you look at the phenotypes , there 's a chimp , there 's a man ; they 're astoundingly different , no resemblance at all .
i 'm not talking about airy-fairy stuff about culture or psychology , or behavior .
i 'm talking about ground-base , nitty-gritty , measurable physical differences .
they , that one , is hairy and walking on four legs .
that one is a naked biped . why ?
i mean - -lrb- laughter -rrb- if i 'm a good darwinist , i 've got to believe there 's a reason for that .
if we changed so much , something must have happened .
what happened ?
now 50 years ago , that was a laughably simple question .
everybody knew the answer .
they knew what happened .
the ancestor of the apes stayed in the trees ; our ancestors went out onto the plain .
that explained everything .
we had to get up on our legs to peer over the tall grass , or to chase after animals , or to free our hands for weapons .
and we got so overheated in the chase that we had to take off that fur coat and throw it away .
everybody knew that , for generations .
but then , in the ' 90s , something began to unravel .
the paleontologists themselves looked a bit more closely at the accompanying microfauna that lived in the same time and place as the hominids .
and they were n't savanna species .
and they looked at the herbivores . and they were n't savanna herbivores .
and then they were so clever , they found a way to analyze fossilized pollen .
shock , horror .
the fossilized pollen was not of savanna vegetation .
some of it even came from lianas , those things that dangle in the middle of the jungle .
so we 're left with a situation where we know that our earliest ancestors were moving around on four legs in the trees , before the savanna ecosystem even came into existence .
this is not something i 've made up .
it 's not a minority theory .
everybody agrees with it .
professor tobias came over from south africa and spoke to university college london .
he said , " everything i 've been telling you for the last 20 years , forget about it . it was wrong .
we 've got to go back to square one and start again . "
it made him very unpopular . they did n't want to go back to square one .
i mean , it 's a terrible thing to happen .
you 've got this beautiful paradigm .
you 've believed it through generations .
nobody has questioned it .
you 've been constructing fanciful things on top of it , relying on it to be as solid as a rock .
and now it 's whipped away from under you .
what do you do ? what does a scientist do in that case ?
well , we know the answer because thomas s. kuhn wrote a seminal treatise about this back in 1962 .
he said what scientists do when a paradigm fails is , guess what - they carry on as if nothing had happened .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if they have n't got a paradigm they ca n't ask the question .
so they say , " yes it 's wrong , but supposing it was right ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the only other option open to them is to stop asking the questions .
so that is what they have done now .
that 's why you do n't hear them talking about it . it 's yesterday 's question .
some of them have even elevated it into a principle .
it 's what we ought to be doing .
aaron filler from harvard said , " is n't it time we stopped talking about selective pressures ?
i mean , why do n't we talk about , well , there 's chromosomes , and there 's genes .
and we just record what we see . "
charles darwin must be spinning in his grave !
he knew all about that kind of science .
and he called it hypothesis-free science .
and he despised it from the bottom of his heart .
and if you 're going to say , " i 'm going to stop talking about selective pressures , " you can take " the origin of species " and throw it out of the window , for it 's about nothing else but selective pressures .
and the irony of it is , that this is one occasion of a paradigm collapse where we did n't have to wait for a new paradigm to come up .
there was one waiting in the wings .
it had been waiting there since 1960 when alister hardy , a marine biologist , said , " i think what happened , perhaps our ancestors had a more aquatic existence for some of the time . "
he kept it to himself for 30 years .
but then the press got hold of it and all hell broke loose .
all his colleagues said , " this is outrageous .
you 've exposed us to public ridicule !
you must never do that again . "
and at that time , it became set in stone : the aquatic theory should be dumped with the ufos and the yetis , as part of the lunatic fringe of science .
well i do n't think that .
i think that hardy had a lot going for him .
i 'd like to talk about just a handful of what have been called the hallmarks of mankind , the things that made us different from everybody else , and all our relatives .
let 's look at our naked skin .
it 's obvious that most of the things we think about that have lost their body hair , mammals without body hair , are aquatic ones , like the dugong , the walrus , the dolphin , the hippopotamus , the manatee .
and a couple of wallowers-in-mud like the babirusa .
and you 're tempted to think , well perhaps , could that be why we are naked ?
i suggested it and people said , " no no no .
i mean , look at the elephant .
you 've forgotten all about the elephant have n't you ? "
so back in 1982 i said , " well perhaps the elephant had an aquatic ancestor . "
peals of merry laughter !
" that crazy woman . she 's off again . she 'll say anything wo n't she ? "
but by now , everybody agrees that the elephant had an aquatic ancestor .
this has come ' round to be that all those naked pachyderms have aquatic ancestors .
the last exception was supposed to be the rhinoceros .
last year in florida they found extinct ancestor of a rhinoceros and said , " seems to have spent most of its time in the water . "
so this is a close connection between nakedness and water .
as an absolute connection , it only works one way .
you ca n't say all aquatic animals are naked , because look at the sea otter .
but you can say that every animal that has become naked has been conditioned by water , in its own lifetime , or the lifetime of its ancestors . i think this is significant .
the only exception is the naked somalian mole-rat , which never puts its nose above the surface of the ground .
and take bipedality .
here you ca n't find anybody to compare it with , because we 're the only animal that walks upright on two legs .
but you can say this : all the apes and all the monkeys are capable of walking on two legs , if they want to , for a short time .
there is only one circumstance in which they always , all of them , walk on two legs , and that is when they are wading through water .
do you think that 's significant ?
david attenborough thinks it 's significant , as the possible beginning of our bipedalism .
look at the fat layer .
we have got , under our skin , a layer of fat , all over : nothing in the least like that in any other primate .
why should it be there ?
well they do know , that if you look at other aquatic mammals , the fat that in most land mammals is deposited inside the body wall , around the kidneys and the intestines and so on , has started to migrate to the outside , and spread out in a layer inside the skin .
in the whale it 's complete : no fat inside at all , all in blubber outside .
we can not avoid the suspicion that in our case it 's started to happen .
we have got skin lined with this layer .
it 's the only possible explanation of why humans , if they 're very unlucky , can become grossly obese , in a way that would be totally impossible for any other primate , physically impossible .
something very odd , matter-of-factly , never explained .
the question of why we can speak .
we can speak .
and the gorilla ca n't speak . why ?
nothing to do with his teeth or his tongue or his lungs or anything like that - purely has to do with its conscious control of its breath .
you ca n't even train a gorilla to say " ah " on request .
the only creatures that have got conscious control of their breath are the diving animals and the diving birds .
it was an absolute precondition for our being able to speak .
and then again , there is the fact that we are streamlined .
trying to imagine a diver diving into water - hardly makes a splash .
try to imagine a gorilla performing the same maneuver , and you can see that , compared with gorilla , we are halfway to being shaped like a fish .
i am trying to suggest that , for 40-odd years , this aquatic idea has been miscategorized as lunatic fringe , and it is not lunatic fringe .
and the ironic thing about it is that they are not staving off the aquatic theory to protect a theory of their own , which they 've all agreed on , and they love .
there is nothing there .
they are staving off the aquatic theory to protect a vacuum .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- how do they react when i say these things ?
one very common reaction i 've heard about 20 times is , " but it was investigated .
they conducted a serious investigation of this at the beginning , when hardy put forward his article . "
i do n't believe it .
for 35 years i 've been looking for any evidence of any incident of that kind , and i 've concluded that that 's one of the urban myths .
it 's never been done .
i ask people sometimes , and they say , " i like the aquatic theory !
everybody likes the aquatic theory .
of course they do n't believe it , but they like it . "
well i say , " why do you think it 's rubbish ? "
they say " well ...
everybody i talk to says it 's rubbish .
and they ca n't all be wrong , can they ? "
the answer to that , loud and clear , is , " yes ! they can all be wrong . "
history is strewn with the cases when they 've all got it wrong .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and if you 've got a scientific problem like that , you ca n't solve it by holding a head count , and saying , " more of us say yes than say no . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- apart from that , some of the heads count more than others .
some of them have come over .
there was professor tobias . he 's come over .
daniel dennett , he 's come over .
sir david attenborough , he 's come over .
anybody else out there ? come on in .
the water is lovely .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and now we 've got to look to the future .
ultimately one of three things is going to happen .
either they will go on for the next 40 years , 50 years , 60 years .
" yeah well we do n't talk about that . let 's talk about something interesting . "
that would be very sad .
the second thing that could happen is that some young genius will arrive , and say , " i 've found it .
it was not the savanna , it was not the water , it was this ! "
no sign of that happening either .
i do n't think there is a third option .
so the third thing that might happen is a very beautiful thing .
if you look back at the early years of the last century , there was a stand-off , a lot of bickering and bad feeling between the believers in mendel , and the believers in darwin .
it ended with a new synthesis : darwin 's ideas and mendel 's ideas blending together .
and i think the same thing will happen here .
you 'll get a new synthesis .
hardy 's ideas and darwin 's ideas will be blended together .
and we can move forward from there , and really get somewhere .
that would be a beautiful thing .
it would be very nice for me if it happened soon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i 'm older now than george burns was when he said , " at my age , i do n't even buy green bananas . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so if it 's going to come and it 's going to happen , what 's holding it up ?
i can tell you that in three words .
academia says no .
they decided in 1960 , " that belongs with the ufos and the yetis . "
and it 's not easy to change their minds .
the professional journals wo n't touch it with a barge pole .
the textbooks do n't mention it .
the syllabus does n't mention even the fact that we 're naked , let alone look for a reason to it .
" horizon , " which takes its cue from the academics , wo n't touch it with a barge pole .
so we never hear the case put for it , except in jocular references to people on the lunatic fringe .
i do n't know quite where this diktat comes from .
somebody up there is issuing the commandment , " thou shalt not believe in the aquatic theory .
and if you hope to make progress in this profession , and you do believe it , you 'd better keep it to yourself , because it will get in your way . "
so i get the impression that some parts of the scientific establishment are morphing into a kind of priesthood .
but you know , that makes me feel good , because richard dawkins has told us how to treat a priesthood .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he says , " firstly , you 've got to refuse to give it all the excessive awe and reverence it 's been trained to receive . "
right . i 'll go ahead with that .
and secondly , he says , " you must never be afraid to rock the boat . "
i 'll go along with that too .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm a woman with chronic schizophrenia .
i 've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals .
i might have ended up spending most of my life on the back ward of a hospital , but that is n't how my life turned out .
in fact , i 've managed to stay clear of hospitals for almost three decades , perhaps my proudest accomplishment .
that 's not to say that i 've remained clear of all psychiatric struggles .
after i graduated from the yale law school and got my first law job , my new haven analyst , dr. white , announced to me that he was going to close his practice in three months , several years before i had planned to leave new haven .
white had been enormously helpful to me , and the thought of his leaving shattered me .
my best friend steve , sensing that something was terribly wrong , flew out to new haven to be with me .
now i 'm going to quote from some of my writings : " i opened the door to my studio apartment .
steve would later tell me that , for all the times he had seen me psychotic , nothing could have prepared him for what he saw that day .
for a week or more , i had barely eaten .
i was gaunt . i walked as though my legs were wooden .
my face looked and felt like a mask .
i had closed all the curtains in the apartment , so in the middle of the day the apartment was in near total darkness .
the air was fetid , the room a shambles .
steve , both a lawyer and a psychologist , has treated many patients with severe mental illness , and to this day he 'll say i was as bad as any he had ever seen .
' hi , ' i said , and then i returned to the couch , where i sat in silence for several moments .
' thank you for coming , steve .
crumbling world , word , voice .
tell the clocks to stop .
time is . time has come . ' ' white is leaving , ' steve said somberly .
' i 'm being pushed into a grave . the situation is grave , ' i moan .
' gravity is pulling me down .
i 'm scared . tell them to get away . " ' as a young woman , i was in a psychiatric hospital on three different occasions for lengthy periods .
my doctors diagnosed me with chronic schizophrenia , and gave me a prognosis of " grave . "
that is , at best , i was expected to live in a board and care , and work at menial jobs .
fortunately , i did not actually enact that grave prognosis .
instead , i 'm a chaired professor of law , psychology and psychiatry at the usc gould school of law , i have many close friends and i have a beloved husband , will , who 's here with us today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
he 's definitely the star of my show .
i 'd like to share with you how that happened , and also describe my experience of being psychotic .
i hasten to add that it 's my experience , because everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own way .
let 's start with the definition of schizophrenia .
schizophrenia is a brain disease .
its defining feature is psychosis , or being out of touch with reality .
delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness .
delusions are fixed and false beliefs that are n't responsive to evidence , and hallucinations are false sensory experiences .
for example , when i 'm psychotic i often have the delusion that i 've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts .
i sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain .
occasionally , i have hallucinations , like one time i turned around and saw a man with a raised knife .
imagine having a nightmare while you 're awake .
often , speech and thinking become disorganized to the point of incoherence .
loose associations involves putting together words that may sound a lot alike but do n't make sense , and if the words get jumbled up enough , it 's called " word salad . "
contrary to what many people think , schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder or split personality .
the schizophrenic mind is not split , but shattered .
everyone has seen a street person , unkempt , probably ill-fed , standing outside of an office building muttering to himself or shouting .
this person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia .
but schizophrenia presents itself across a wide array of socioeconomic status , and there are people with the illness who are full-time professionals with major responsibilities .
several years ago , i decided to write down my experiences and my personal journey , and i want to share some more of that story with you today to convey the inside view .
so the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at yale law school .
quoting from my writings : " my two classmates , rebel and val , and i had made the date to meet in the law school library on friday night to work on our memo assignment together .
but we did n't get far before i was talking in ways that made no sense .
' memos are visitations , ' i informed them .
' they make certain points . the point is on your head .
pat used to say that . have you killed you anyone ? ' rebel and val looked at me as if they or i had been splashed in the face with cold water .
' what are you talking about , elyn ? ' ' oh , you know , the usual . who 's what , what 's who , heaven and hell . let 's go out on the roof .
it 's a flat surface . it 's safe . ' rebel and val followed and they asked what had gotten into me .
' this is the real me , ' i announced , waving my arms above my head .
and then , late on a friday night , on the roof of the yale law school , i began to sing , and not quietly either .
' come to the florida sunshine bush .
do you want to dance ? ' ' are you on drugs ? ' one asked . ' are you high ? ' ' high ? me ? no way , no drugs .
come to the florida sunshine bush , where there are lemons , where they make demons . ' ' you 're frightening me , ' one of them said , and rebel and val headed back into the library .
i shrugged and followed them .
back inside , i asked my classmates if they were having the same experience of words jumping around our cases as i was .
' i think someone 's infiltrated my copies of the cases , ' i said .
' we 've got to case the joint .
i do n't believe in joints , but they do hold your body together . " ' - it 's an example of loose associations . - " eventually i made my way back to my dorm room , and once there , i could n't settle down .
my head was too full of noise , too full of orange trees and law memos i could not write and mass murders i knew i would be responsible for .
sitting on my bed , i rocked back and forth , moaning in fear and isolation . "
this episode led to my first hospitalization in america .
i had two earlier in england .
continuing with the writings : " the next morning i went to my professor 's office to ask for an extension on the memo assignment , and i began gibbering unintelligably as i had the night before , and he eventually brought me to the emergency room .
once there , someone i 'll just call ' the doctor ' and his whole team of goons swooped down , lifted me high into the air , and slammed me down on a metal bed with such force that i saw stars .
then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps .
a sound came out of my mouth that i 'd never heard before : half groan , half scream , barely human and pure terror .
then the sound came again , forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw . "
this incident resulted in my involuntary hospitalization .
one of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that i was " gravely disabled . "
to support this view , they wrote in my chart that i was unable to do my yale law school homework .
i wondered what that meant about much of the rest of new haven .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- during the next year , i would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital .
at times , i spent up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints , arms tied , arms and legs tied down , arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across my chest .
i never struck anyone .
i never harmed anyone . i never made any direct threats .
if you 've never been restrained yourself , you may have a benign image of the experience .
there 's nothing benign about it .
every week in the united states , it 's been estimated that one to three people die in restraints .
they strangle , they aspirate their vomit , they suffocate , they have a heart attack .
it 's unclear whether using mechanical restraints is actually saving lives or costing lives .
while i was preparing to write my student note for the yale law journal on mechanical restraints , i consulted an eminent law professor who was also a psychiatrist , and said surely he would agree that restraints must be degrading , painful and frightening .
he looked at me in a knowing way , and said , " elyn , you do n't really understand : these people are psychotic .
they 're different from me and you .
they would n't experience restraints as we would . "
i did n't have the courage to tell him in that moment that , no , we 're not that different from him .
we do n't like to be strapped down to a bed and left to suffer for hours any more than he would .
in fact , until very recently , and i 'm sure some people still hold it as a view , that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe .
i 've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed with that view .
today , i 'd like to say i 'm very pro-psychiatry but very anti-force .
i do n't think force is effective as treatment , and i think using force is a terrible thing to do to another person with a terrible illness .
eventually , i came to los angeles to teach at the university of southern california law school .
for years , i had resisted medication , making many , many efforts to get off .
i felt that if i could manage without medication , i could prove that , after all , i was n't really mentally ill , it was some terrible mistake .
my motto was the less medicine , the less defective .
my l.a. analyst , dr. kaplan , was urging me just to stay on medication and get on with my life , but i decided i wanted to make one last college try to get off .
quoting from the text : " i started the reduction of my meds , and within a short time i began feeling the effects .
after returning from a trip to oxford , i marched into kaplan 's office , headed straight for the corner , crouched down , covered my face , and began shaking .
all around me i sensed evil beings poised with daggers .
they 'd slice me up in thin slices or make me swallow hot coals .
kaplan would later describe me as ' writhing in agony . ' even in this state , what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic , i refused to take more medication .
the mission is not yet complete .
immediately after the appointment with kaplan , i went to see dr. marder , a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects .
he was under the impression that i had a mild psychotic illness .
once in his office , i sat on his couch , folded over , and began muttering .
' head explosions and people trying to kill .
is it okay if i totally trash your office ? ' ' you need to leave if you think you 're going to do that , ' said marder .
' okay . small . fire on ice . tell them not to kill me .
tell them not to kill me . what have i done wrong ?
hundreds of thousands with thoughts , interdiction . ' ' elyn , do you feel like you 're dangerous to yourself or others ?
i think you need to be in the hospital .
i could get you admitted right away , and the whole thing could be very discrete . ' ' ha , ha , ha .
you 're offering to put me in hospitals ?
hospitals are bad , they 're mad , they 're sad .
one must stay away . i 'm god , or i used to be . " ' at that point in the text , where i said " i 'm god , or i used to be , " my husband made a marginal note .
he said , " did you quit or were you fired ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " ' i give life and i take it away .
forgive me , for i know not what i do . ' eventually , i broke down in front of friends , and everybody convinced me to take more medication .
i could no longer deny the truth , and i could not change it .
the wall that kept me , elyn , professor saks , separate from that insane woman hospitalized years past , lay smashed and in ruins . "
everything about this illness says i should n't be here , but i am . and i am , i think , for three reasons : first , i 've had excellent treatment .
four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy for decades and continuing , and excellent psychopharmacology .
second , i have many close family members and friends who know me and know my illness .
these relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth , and they also helped me navigate my life in the face of symptoms .
third , i work at an enormously supportive workplace at usc law school .
this is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them .
it 's also a very intellectually stimulating place , and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness .
even with all that - excellent treatment , wonderful family and friends , supportive work environment - i did not make my illness public until relatively late in life , and that 's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that i did n't feel safe with people knowing .
if you hear nothing else today , please hear this : there are not " schizophrenics . "
there are people with schizophrenia , and these people may be your spouse , they may be your child , they may be your neighbor , they may be your friend , they may be your coworker .
so let me share some final thoughts .
we need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness .
the better we understand these illnesses , the better the treatments we can provide , and the better the treatments we can provide , the more we can offer people care , and not have to use force .
also , we must stop criminalizing mental illness .
it 's a national tragedy and scandal that the l.a. county jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the united states .
american prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness , and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment .
i could have easily ended up there or on the streets myself .
a message to the entertainment industry and to the press : on the whole , you 've done a wonderful job fighting stigma and prejudice of many kinds .
please , continue to let us see characters in your movies , your plays , your columns , who suffer with severe mental illness .
portray them sympathetically , and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people and not as diagnoses .
recently , a friend posed a question : if there were a pill i could take that would instantly cure me , would i take it ?
the poet rainer maria rilke was offered psychoanalysis .
he declined , saying , " do n't take my devils away , because my angels may flee too . "
my psychosis , on the other hand , is a waking nightmare in which my devils are so terrifying that all my angels have already fled .
so would i take the pill ? in an instant .
that said , i do n't wish to be seen as regretting the life i could have had if i 'd not been mentally ill , nor am i asking anyone for their pity .
what i rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not .
what those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants : in the words of sigmund freud , " to work and to love . "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . you 're very kind . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- college presidents are not the first people who come to mind when the subject is the uses of the creative imagination .
so i thought i 'd start by telling you how i got here .
the story begins in the late ' 90s .
i was invited to meet with leading educators from the newly free eastern europe and russia .
they were trying to figure out how to rebuild their universities .
since education under the soviet union was essentially propaganda serving the purposes of a state ideology , they appreciated that it would take wholesale transformations if they were to provide an education worthy of free men and women .
given this rare opportunity to start fresh , they chose liberal arts as the most compelling model because of its historic commitment to furthering its students ' broadest intellectual , and deepest ethical potential .
having made that decision they came to the united states , home of liberal arts education , to talk with some of us most closely identified with that kind of education .
they spoke with a passion , an urgency , an intellectual conviction that , for me , was a voice i had not heard in decades , a dream long forgotten .
for , in truth , we had moved light years from the passions that animated them .
but for me , unlike them , in my world , the slate was not clean , and what was written on it was not encouraging .
in truth , liberal arts education no longer exists - at least genuine liberal arts education - in this country .
we have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature .
over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment . -lrb- applause -rrb- expertise has for sure had its moments .
but the price of its dominance is enormous .
subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces , with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure .
we have even managed to make the study of literature arcane .
you may think you know what is going on in that jane austen novel - that is , until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism .
the progression of today 's college student is to jettison every interest except one .
and within that one , to continually narrow the focus , learning more and more about less and less ; this , despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things .
lest you think i exaggerate , here are the beginnings of the a-b-cs of anthropology .
as one moves up the ladder , values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion .
questions such as , " what kind of a world are we making ?
what kind of a world should we be making ?
what kind of a world can we be making ? "
are treated with more and more skepticism , and move off the table .
in so doing , the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists , who , you can be sure , have no compunctions about using education to further their values : the absolutes of a theocracy .
meanwhile , the values and voices of democracy are silent .
either we have lost touch with those values or , no better , believe they need not or can not be taught .
this aversion to social values may seem at odds with the explosion of community service programs .
but despite the attention paid to these efforts , they remain emphatically extracurricular .
in effect , civic-mindedness is treated as outside the realm of what purports to be serious thinking and adult purposes .
simply put , when the impulse is to change the world , the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment .
this brew - oversimplification of civic engagement , idealization of the expert , fragmentation of knowledge , emphasis on technical mastery , neutrality as a condition of academic integrity - is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good , between intellectual integrity and human freedom , which were at the heart - -lrb- applause -rrb- - of the challenge posed to and by my european colleagues .
when the astronomical distance between the realities of the academy and the visionary intensity of this challenge were more than enough , i can assure you , what was happening outside higher education made backing off unthinkable .
whether it was threats to the environment , inequities in the distribution of wealth , lack of a sane policy or a sustainable policy with respect to the continuing uses of energy , we were in desperate straits .
and that was only the beginning .
the corrupting of our political life had become a living nightmare ; nothing was exempt - separation of powers , civil liberties , the rule of law , the relationship of church and state .
accompanied by a squandering of the nation 's material wealth that defied credulity .
a harrowing predilection for the uses of force had become commonplace , with an equal distaste for the alternative forms of influence .
at the same time , all of our firepower was impotent when it came to halting or even stemming the slaughter in rwanda , darfur , myanmar .
our public education , once a model for the world , has become most noteworthy for its failures .
mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy eludes vast numbers of our students .
despite having a research establishment that is the envy of the world , more than half of the american public do n't believe in evolution .
and do n't press your luck about how much those who do believe in it actually understand it .
incredibly , this nation , with all its material , intellectual and spiritual resources , seems utterly helpless to reverse the freefall in any of these areas .
equally startling , from my point of view , is the fact that no one was drawing any connections between what is happening to the body politic , and what is happening in our leading educational institutions .
we may be at the top of the list when it comes to influencing access to personal wealth .
we are not even on the list when it comes to our responsibility for the health of this democracy .
we are playing with fire .
you can be sure jefferson knew what he was talking about when he said , " if a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization , it expects what never was , and never will be . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- on a more personal note , this betrayal of our principles , our decency , our hope , made it impossible for me to avoid the question , " what will i say , years from now , when people ask , ' where were you ? " ' as president of a leading liberal arts college , famous for its innovative history , there were no excuses .
so the conversation began at bennington .
knowing that if we were to regain the integrity of liberal education , it would take radical rethinking of basic assumptions , beginning with our priorities .
enhancing the public good becomes a primary objective .
the accomplishment of civic virtue is tied to the uses of intellect and imagination at their most challenging .
our ways of approaching agency and authority turn inside out to reflect the reality that no one has the answers to the challenges facing citizens in this century , and everyone has the responsibility for trying and participating in finding them .
bennington would continue to teach the arts and sciences as areas of immersion that acknowledge differences in personal and professional objectives .
but the balances redressed , our shared purposes assume an equal if not greater importance .
when the design emerged it was surprisingly simple and straightforward .
the idea is to make the political-social challenges themselves - from health and education to the uses of force - the organizers of the curriculum .
they would assume the commanding role of traditional disciplines .
but structures designed to connect , rather than divide mutually dependent circles , rather than isolating triangles .
and the point is not to treat these topics as topics of study , but as frameworks of action .
the challenge : to figure out what it will take to actually do something that makes a significant and sustainable difference .
contrary to widely held assumptions , an emphasis on action provides a special urgency to thinking .
the importance of coming to grips with values like justice , equity , truth , becomes increasingly evident as students discover that interest alone can not tell them what they need to know when the issue is rethinking education , our approach to health , or strategies for achieving an economics of equity .
the value of the past also comes alive ; it provides a lot of company .
you are not the first to try to figure this out , just as you are unlikely to be the last .
even more valuable , history provides a laboratory in which we see played out the actual , as well as the intended consequences of ideas .
in the language of my students , " deep thought matters when you 're contemplating what to do about things that matter . "
a new liberal arts that can support this action-oriented curriculum has begun to emerge .
rhetoric , the art of organizing the world of words to maximum effect .
design , the art of organizing the world of things .
mediation and improvisation also assume a special place in this new pantheon .
quantitative reasoning attains its proper position at the heart of what it takes to manage change where measurement is crucial .
as is a capacity to discriminate systematically between what is at the core and what is at the periphery .
and when making connections is of the essence , the power of technology emerges with special intensity .
but so does the importance of content .
the more powerful our reach , the more important the question " about what ? "
when improvisation , resourcefulness , imagination are key , artists , at long last , take their place at the table , when strategies of action are in the process of being designed .
in this dramatically expanded ideal of a liberal arts education where the continuum of thought and action is its life 's blood , knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential .
social activists , business leaders , lawyers , politicians , professionals will join the faculty as active and ongoing participants in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good .
students , in turn , continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly .
and of course , this new wine needs new bottles if we are to capture the liveliness and dynamism of this idea .
the most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil , but between competing goods .
this discovery is transforming .
it undercuts self-righteousness , radically alters the tone and character of controversy , and enriches dramatically the possibilities for finding common ground .
ideology , zealotry , unsubstantiated opinions simply wo n't do .
this is a political education , to be sure .
but it is a politics of principle , not of partisanship .
so the challenge for bennington is to do it .
on the cover of bennington 's 2008 holiday card is the architect 's sketch of a building opening in 2010 that is to be a center for the advancement of public action .
the center will embody and sustain this new educational commitment .
think of it as a kind of secular church .
the words on the card describe what will happen inside .
we intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power , passion and boldness of our students , faculty and staff to developing strategies for acting on the critical challenges of our time .
so we are doing our job .
while these past weeks have been a time of national exhilaration in this country , it would be tragic if you thought this meant your job was done .
the glacial silence we have experienced in the face of the shredding of the constitution , the unraveling of our public institutions , the deterioration of our infrastructure is not limited to the universities .
we the people have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance , beyond waiting another four years .
we persist also in being sidelined by the idea of the expert as the only one capable of coming up with answers , despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary .
the problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts , zealots , politicians and spectators .
-lrb- applause -rrb- people will continue and should continue to learn everything there is to know about something or other .
we actually do it all the time .
and there will be and should be those who spend a lifetime pursuing a very highly defined area of inquiry .
but this single-mindedness will not yield the flexibilities of mind , the multiplicity of perspectives , the capacities for collaboration and innovation this country needs .
that is where you come in .
what is certain is that the individual talent exhibited in such abundance here , needs to turn its attention to that collaborative , messy , frustrating , contentious and impossible world of politics and public policy .
president obama and his team simply can not do it alone .
if the question of where to start seems overwhelming you are at the beginning , not the end of this adventure .
being overwhelmed is the first step if you are serious about trying to get at things that really matter , on a scale that makes a difference .
so what do you do when you feel overwhelmed ?
well , you have two things .
you have a mind . and you have other people .
start with those , and change the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- text : beatjazz .
beatjazz is : 1 . live looping , 2 . jazz improvisation and 3 . " gestural " sound design .
accelerometers on each hand read hand position .
the color of the lights indicates which sound i am playing .
red = drums , blue = bass , green = chords , orange = leads , purple = pads the mouthpiece consists of ...
a button , two guitar picks and lots of hot glue .
the heads-up display is a smartphone that displays system parameters .
why ?
to atomize music culture so that all past , present and future genres can be studied and abstracted , live .
and " beatjazzers " become as common as d.j. ' s .
but mostly ...
to make the future rather than wait for it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there have been many revolutions over the last century , but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution .
we are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did .
think about that .
that 's an entire second adult lifetime that 's been added to our lifespan .
and yet , for the most part , our culture has not come to terms with what this means .
we 're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch .
that 's the metaphor , the old metaphor .
you 're born , you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- age as pathology .
but many people today - philosophers , artists , doctors , scientists - are taking a new look at what i call the third act , the last three decades of life .
they realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance - as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood .
and they are asking - we should all be asking - how do we use this time ?
how do we live it successfully ?
what is the appropriate new metaphor for aging ?
i 've spent the last year researching and writing about this subject .
and i have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit , bringing us into wisdom , wholeness and authenticity .
age not at all as pathology ; age as potential .
and guess what ?
this potential is not for the lucky few .
it turns out , most people over 50 feel better , are less stressed , are less hostile , less anxious .
we tend to see commonalities more than differences .
some of the studies even say we 're happier .
this is not what i expected , trust me .
i come from a long line of depressives .
as i was approaching my late 40s , when i would wake up in the morning my first six thoughts would all be negative .
and i got scared .
i thought , oh my gosh .
i 'm going to become a crotchety old lady .
but now that i am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act , i realize i 've never been happier .
i have such a powerful feeling of well-being .
and i 've discovered that when you 're inside oldness , as opposed to looking at it from the outside , fear subsides .
you realize , you 're still yourself - maybe even more so .
picasso once said , " it takes a long time to become young . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't want to romanticize aging .
obviously , there 's no guarantee that it can be a time of fruition and growth .
some of it is a matter of luck .
some of it , obviously , is genetic .
one third of it , in fact , is genetic .
and there is n't much we can do about that .
but that means that two-thirds of how well we do in the third act , we can do something about .
we 're going to discuss what we can do to make these added years really successful and use them to make a difference .
now let me say something about the staircase , which may seem like an odd metaphor for seniors given the fact that many seniors are challenged by stairs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- myself included .
as you may know , the entire world operates on a universal law : entropy , the second law of thermodynamics .
entropy means that everything in the world , everything , is in a state of decline and decay , the arch .
there 's only one exception to this universal law , and that is the human spirit , which can continue to evolve upwards - the staircase - bringing us into wholeness , authenticity and wisdom .
and here 's an example of what i mean .
this upward ascension can happen even in the face of extreme physical challenges .
about three years ago , i read an article in the new york times .
it was about a man named neil selinger - 57 years old , a retired lawyer - who had joined the writers group at sarah lawrence where he found his writer 's voice .
two years later , he was diagnosed with als , commonly known as lou gehrig 's disease .
it 's a terrible disease . it 's fatal .
it wastes the body , but the mind remains intact .
in this article , mr. selinger wrote the following to describe what was happening to him .
and i quote , " as my muscles weakened , my writing became stronger .
as i slowly lost my speech , i gained my voice .
as i diminished , i grew .
as i lost so much , i finally started to find myself . "
neil selinger , to me , is the embodiment of mounting the staircase in his third act .
now we 're all born with spirit , all of us , but sometimes it gets tamped down beneath the challenges of life , violence , abuse , neglect .
perhaps our parents suffered from depression .
perhaps they were n't able to love us beyond how we performed in the world .
perhaps we still suffer from a psychic pain , a wound .
perhaps we feel that many of our relationships have not had closure .
and so we can feel unfinished .
perhaps the task of the third act is to finish up the task of finishing ourselves .
for me , it began as i was approaching my third act , my 60th birthday .
how was i supposed to live it ?
what was i supposed to accomplish in this final act ?
and i realized that , in order to know where i was going , i had to know where i 'd been .
and so i went back and i studied my first two acts , trying to see who i was then , who i really was - not who my parents or other people told me i was , or treated me like i was .
but who was i ? who were my parents - not as parents , but as people ?
who were my grandparents ?
how did they treat my parents ?
these kinds of things .
i discovered a couple of years later that this process that i had gone through is called by psychologists " doing a life review . "
and they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person 's life .
you may discover , as i did , that a lot of things that you used to think were your fault , a lot of things you used to think about yourself , really had nothing to do with you .
it was n't your fault ; you 're just fine .
and you 're able to go back and forgive them and forgive yourself .
you 're able to free yourself from your past .
you can work to change your relationship to your past .
now while i was writing about this , i came upon a book called " man 's search for meaning " by viktor frankl .
viktor frankl was a german psychiatrist who 'd spent five years in a nazi concentration camp .
and he wrote that , while he was in the camp , he could tell , should they ever be released , which of the people would be okay and which would not .
and he wrote this : " everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing , your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation .
this is what determines the quality of the life we 've lived - not whether we 've been rich or poor , famous or unknown , healthy or suffering .
what determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities , what kind of meaning we assign them , what kind of attitude we cling to about them , what state of mind we allow them to trigger . "
perhaps the central purpose of the third act is to go back and to try , if appropriate , to change our relationship to the past .
it turns out that cognitive research shows when we are able to do this , it manifests neurologically - neural pathways are created in the brain .
you see , if you have , over time , reacted negatively to past events and people , neural pathways are laid down by chemical and electrical signals that are sent through the brain .
and over time , these neural pathways become hardwired , they become the norm - even if it 's bad for us because it causes us stress and anxiety .
if however , we can go back and alter our relationship , re-vision our relationship to past people and events , neural pathways can change .
and if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past , that becomes the new norm .
it 's like resetting a thermostat .
it 's not having experiences that make us wise , it 's reflecting on the experiences that we 've had that makes us wise - and that helps us become whole , brings wisdom and authenticity .
it helps us become what we might have been .
women start off whole , do n't we ?
i mean , as girls , we start off feisty - " yeah , who says ? "
we have agency .
we are the subjects of our own lives .
but very often , many , if not most of us , when we hit puberty , we start worrying about fitting in and being popular .
and we become the subjects and objects of other people 's lives .
but now , in our third acts , it may be possible for us to circle back to where we started and know it for the first time .
and if we can do that , it will not just be for ourselves .
older women are the largest demographic in the world .
if we can go back and redefine ourselves and become whole , this will create a cultural shift in the world , and it will give an example to younger generations so that they can reconceive their own lifespan .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this story is about taking imagination seriously .
fourteen years ago , i first encountered this ordinary material , fishnet , used the same way for centuries .
today , i 'm using it to create permanent , billowing , voluptuous forms the scale of hard-edged buildings in cities around the world .
i was an unlikely person to be doing this .
i never studied sculpture , engineering or architecture .
in fact , after college i applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven .
i went off on my own to become an artist , and i painted for 10 years , when i was offered a fulbright to india .
promising to give exhibitions of paintings , i shipped my paints and arrived in mahabalipuram .
the deadline for the show arrived - my paints did n't .
i had to do something .
this fishing village was famous for sculpture .
so i tried bronze casting .
but to make large forms was too heavy and expensive .
i went for a walk on the beach , watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand .
i 'd seen it every day , but this time i saw it differently - a new approach to sculpture , a way to make volumetric form without heavy solid materials .
my first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen .
it 's a self-portrait titled " wide hips . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we hoisted them on poles to photograph .
i discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns .
i was mesmerized .
i continued studying craft traditions and collaborating with artisans , next in lithuania with lace makers .
i liked the fine detail it gave my work , but i wanted to make them larger - to shift from being an object you look at to something you could get lost in .
returning to india to work with those fishermen , we made a net of a million and a half hand-tied knots - installed briefly in madrid .
thousands of people saw it , and one of them was the urbanist manual sola-morales who was redesigning the waterfront in porto , portugal .
he asked if i could build this as a permanent piece for the city .
i did n't know if i could do that and preserve my art .
durable , engineered , permanent - those are in opposition to idiosyncratic , delicate and ephemeral .
for two years , i searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays , salt , air , pollution , and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind .
we needed something to hold the net up out there in the middle of the traffic circle .
so we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring .
we had to engineer it to move gracefully in an average breeze and survive in hurricane winds .
but there was no engineering software to model something porous and moving .
i found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for america 's cup racing yachts named peter heppel .
he helped me tackle the twin challenges of precise shape and gentle movement .
i could n't build this the way i knew because hand-tied knots were n't going to withstand a hurricane .
so i developed a relationship with an industrial fishnet factory , learned the variables of their machines , and figured out a way to make lace with them .
there was no language to translate this ancient , idiosyncratic handcraft into something machine operators could produce .
so we had to create one .
three years and two children later , we raised this 50,000-square-foot lace net .
it was hard to believe that what i had imagined was now built , permanent and had lost nothing in translation .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this intersection had been bland and anonymous .
now it had a sense of place .
i walked underneath it as i watched the wind 's choreography unfold , i felt sheltered and , at the same time , connected to limitless sky .
my life was not going to be the same .
i want to create these oases of sculpture in spaces of cities around the world .
i 'm going to share two directions that are new in my work .
historic philadelphia city hall : its plaza , i felt , needed a material for sculpture that was lighter than netting .
so we experimented with tiny atomized water particles to create a dry mist that is shaped by the wind and in testing , discovered that it can be shaped by people who can interact and move through it without getting wet .
i 'm using this sculpture material to trace the paths of subway trains above ground in real time - like an x-ray of the city 's circulatory system unfolding .
next challenge , the biennial of the americas in denver asked , could i represent the 35 nations of the western hemisphere and their interconnectedness in a sculpture ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't know where to begin , but i said yes .
i read about the recent earthquake in chile and the tsunami that rippled across the entire pacific ocean .
it shifted the earth 's tectonic plates , sped up the planet 's rotation and literally shortened the length of the day .
so i contacted noaa , and i asked if they 'd share their data on the tsunami , and translated it into this .
its title : " 1.26 " refers to the number of microseconds that the earth 's day was shortened .
i could n't build this with a steel ring , the way i knew .
its shape was too complex now .
so i replaced the metal armature with a soft , fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel .
the sculpture could now be entirely soft , which made it so light it could tie in to existing buildings - literally becoming part of the fabric of the city .
there was no software that could extrude these complex net forms and model them with gravity .
so we had to create it .
then i got a call from new york city asking if i could adapt these concepts to times square or the high line .
this new soft structural method enables me to model these and build these sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers .
they do n't have funding yet , but i dream now of bringing these to cities around the world where they 're most needed .
fourteen years ago , i searched for beauty in the traditional things , in craft forms .
now i combine them with hi-tech materials and engineering to create voluptuous , billowing forms the scale of buildings .
my artistic horizons continue to grow .
i 'll leave you with this story .
i got a call from a friend in phoenix .
an attorney in the office who 'd never been interested in art , never visited the local art museum , dragged everyone she could from the building and got them outside to lie down underneath the sculpture .
there they were in their business suits , laying in the grass , noticing the changing patterns of wind beside people they did n't know , sharing the rediscovery of wonder .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
thank you .
thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a bug lover , myself - not from childhood , by the way , but rather late .
when i bachelored , majoring in zoology in tel aviv university , i kind of fell in love with bugs .
and then , within zoology , the science of insects .
and then i thought , myself , how can i be practical or help in the science of entomology ?
and then i moved to the world of plant protection - plant protection from insects , from bad bugs .
and then within plant protection , i came into the discipline of biological pest control which we actually define as the use of living organisms to reduce populations of noxious plant pests .
so it 's a whole discipline in plant protection that 's aiming at the reduction of chemicals .
or these good bugs that we are talking about , for a long , long time .
but only in the last 120 years people started , or people knew more and more how to exploit , or how to use , this biological control phenomenon , or in fact , natural control phenomenon , to their own needs .
because biological control phenomenon , you can see it in your backyard .
just take a magnifying glass . you see what i have here ?
that 's a magnifier times 10 .
yeah , times 10 .
just open it .
you just twist leaves , and you see a whole new world of minute insects , or little spiders of one millimeter , one and a half , two millimeters long , and you can distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones .
so this phenomenon of natural control exists literally everywhere .
here , in front of this building , i 'm sure .
just have a look at the plants .
so it 's everywhere , and we need to know how to exploit it .
well let us go hand by hand what is a pest ?
what damage -lsb- does -rsb- it actually inflict on the plant ?
and what is the natural enemy , the biologically controlled agent , or the good bug , that we are talking about ?
in general , i 'm going to talk about insects and spiders , or mites , let us call them .
insects , those six-legged organisms and spiders or mites , the eight-legged organisms .
let 's have a look at that .
here is a pest , devastating pest , a spider mite , because it does a lot of webbing like a spider .
you see the mother in between and two daughters , probably on the left and right , and a single egg on the right-hand side .
and then you see what kind of damage it can inflict .
on your right-hand side you can see a cucumber leaf , and on the middle , cotton leaf , and on the left a tomato leaf with these little stipplings .
they can literally turn from green to white because of the sucking , piercing mouthparts of those spiders .
but here comes nature that provides us with a good spider .
this is a predatory mite - just as small as a spider mite , by the way , one millimeter , two millimeters long , not more than that , running quickly , hunting , chasing the spider mites .
and here you can see this lady in action on your left-hand side - just pierces , sucks the body fluids on the left-hand side of the pest mite .
and after five minutes , this is what you see : just a typical dead corpse , shriveled , sucked-out , dead corpse of the spider mite , and next to it , two satiated individuals of predatory mites , a mother on the left-hand side , a young nymph on the right-hand side .
by the way , a meal for them for 24 hours is about five individuals of the spider mites , of the bad mites , or 15 to 20 eggs of the pest mites .
by the way , they are hungry always .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there is another example : aphids .
by the way , it 's springtime now in israel .
when temperature rises sharply , you can see those bad ones , those aphids , all over the plants , in your hibiscus , in your lantana , in the young , fresh foliage of the spring flush , so-called .
by the way , with aphids you have only females , like amazons .
females giving rise to females giving rise to other females .
no males at all .
parthenogenesis , -lsb- as it -rsb- was so called .
and they are very happy with that , apparently .
here we can see the damage .
those aphids secrete some sticky , sugary liquid called honeydew , and this just globs the upper parts of the plant .
here you see a typical cucumber leaf that turned actually from green to black because of a black fungus , sooty mold , which is covering it .
and here comes the salvation through this parasitic wasp .
here we are not talking about a predator .
here we are talking a parasite - not a two-legged parasite , this is a parasitic wasp , again , two millimeters long , slender , a very quick and sharp flier .
and here you can see this parasite in action , like in an acrobatic maneuver .
she stands vis-a-vis in front of the victim at the right-hand side , bending its abdomen and inserting a single egg , a single egg into the body fluids of the aphid .
by the way , the aphid tries to escape .
she kicks and bites and secretes different liquids , but nothing will happen , in fact .
only the egg of the parasite will be inserted into the body fluids of the aphid .
and after a few days , depending upon temperature , the egg will hatch and the larva of this parasite will eat the aphid from the inside .
this is all natural . this is all natural .
this is not fiction , nothing at all .
again , in your backyard , in your backyard .
but this is the end result .
this is the end result : mummies - m-u-m-m-y .
this is the visual result of a dead aphid encompassing inside , in fact , a developing parasitoid that after a few minutes you see halfway out .
the birth is almost complete .
you can see , by the way , in different movies , etc . , it takes just a few minutes .
and if this is a female , she 'll immediately mate with a male and off she goes because time is very short .
this female can live only three to four days , and she needs to give rise to around 400 eggs .
that means she has 400 bad aphids to put her eggs into their body fluids .
and this is of course not the end of it .
there is a whole wealth of other natural enemies and this is just the last example .
again , we 'll start first with the pest : the thrips .
by the way , all these weird names - i did n't bother you with the latin names of these creatures , okay , just the popular names .
but this is a nice , slender , very bad pest .
if you can see this , sweet peppers .
this is not just an exotic , ornamental sweet pepper .
this is a sweet pepper which is not consumable because it is suffering from a viral disease transmitted by those thrip adults .
and here comes the natural enemy , minute pirate bug , " minute " because it is rather small .
here you can see the adult , black , and two young ones .
and again , in action .
this adult pierces the thrips , sucking it within just several minutes , just going to the other prey , continuing all over the place .
and if we spread those minute pirate bugs , the good ones , for example , in a sweet pepper plot , they go to the flowers .
and look , this flower is flooded with predatory bugs , with the good ones after wiping out the bad ones , the thrips .
so this is a very positive situation , by the way .
no harm to the developing fruit . no harm to the fruit set .
everything is just fine under these circumstances .
but again , the question is , here you saw them on a one-to-one basis - the pest , the natural enemy .
what we do is actually this .
in northeast israel , in kibbutz sde eliyahu , there is a facility that mass-produces those natural enemies .
in other words , what we do there , we amplify , we amplify the natural control , or the biological control phenomenon .
and in 30,000 square meters of state-of-the-art greenhouses , there , we are mass-producing those predatory mites , those minute pirate bugs , those parasitic wasps , etc . , etc .
many different parts .
by the way , they have a very nice landscape - you see the jordanian mountains on the one hand and the jordan valley on the other hand , and a good , mild winter and a nice , hot summer , which is an excellent condition to mass-produce those creatures .
and by the way , mass-production - it is not genetic manipulation .
there are no gmos - genetically modified organisms - whatsoever .
we take them from nature , and the only thing that we do , we give them the optimal conditions , under the greenhouses or in the climate rooms , in order to proliferate , multiply and reproduce .
and that 's what we get , in fact .
you see under a microscope .
you see in the upper left corner , you see a single predatory mite .
and this is the whole bunch of predatory mites .
you see this ampoule . you see this one .
i have one gram of those predatory mites .
one gram 's 80,000 individuals , 80,000 individuals are good enough to control one acre , 4,000 square meters , of a strawberry plot against spider mites for the whole season of almost one year .
and we can produce from this , believe you me , several dozens of kilograms so this is what i call amplification of the phenomenon .
and no , we do not disrupt the balance .
on the contrary , because we bring it to every cultural plot where the balance was already disrupted by the chemicals .
here we come with those natural enemies in order to reverse a little bit of the wheel and to bring more natural balance to the agricultural plot by reducing those chemicals .
that 's the whole idea .
and what is the impact ?
in this table , you can actually see what is an impact of a successful biological control by good bugs .
for example , in israel , where we employ more than 1,000 hectares - 10,000 dunams in israeli terms - of biological pest controlling sweet pepper under protection , 75 percent of the pesticides were actually reduced .
and israeli strawberries , even more - 80 percent of the pesticides , especially those aimed against pest mites in strawberries .
so the impact is very strong .
and there goes the question , especially if you ask growers , agriculturists : why biological control ?
why good bugs ?
by the way , the number of answers you get equals the number of people you ask .
but if we go , for example , to this place , southeast israel , the arava area above the great rift valley , where the really top-notch - the pearl of the israeli agriculture is located , especially under greenhouse conditions , or under screenhouse conditions - if you drive all the way to eilat , you see this just in the middle of the desert .
and if you zoom in , you can definitely watch this , grandparents with their grandchildren , distributing the natural enemies , the good bugs , instead of wearing special clothes and gas masks and applying chemicals .
so safety , with respect to the application , this is the number one answer that we get from growers , why biological control .
number two , many growers are in fact petrified from the idea of resistance , that the pests will become resistant to the chemicals , just in our case that bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics .
it 's the same , and it can happen very quickly .
fortunately , in either biological control or even natural control , resistance is extremely rare .
it hardly happens .
because this is evolution , this is the natural ratio , unlike resistance , which happens in the case of chemicals .
and thirdly , public demand .
public demand - the more the public demands the reduction of chemicals , the more growers become aware of the fact they should , wherever they can and wherever possible , replace the chemical control with biological control .
even here , there is another grower , you see , very interested in the bugs , the bad ones and the good ones , wearing this magnifier already on her head , just walking safely in her crop .
finally , i want to get actually to my vision , or in fact , to my dream .
because , you see , this is the reality .
have a look at the gap .
if we take the overall turnover of the biocontrol industry worldwide , it 's 250 million dollars .
and look at the overall pesticide industry in all the crops throughout the world .
i think it 's times 100 or something like that .
twenty-five billion .
so there is a huge gap to bridge .
so actually , how can we do it ?
how can we bridge , or let 's say , narrow , this gap in the course of the years ?
first of all , we need to find more robust , good and reliable biological solutions , more good bugs that we can either mass-produce or actually conserve in the field .
secondly , to create even more intensive and strict public demand to reduction of chemicals in the agricultural fresh produce .
and thirdly , also to increase awareness by the growers to the potential of this industry .
and this gap really narrows .
step by step , it does narrow .
so i think my last slide is : all we are saying , we can actually sing it : give nature a chance .
so i 'm saying it on behalf of all the biocontrol petitioners and implementers , in israel and abroad , really give nature a chance .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when you think about resilience and technology it 's actually much easier .
you 're going to see some other speakers today , i already know , who are going to talk about breaking-bones stuff , and , of course , with technology it never is .
so it 's very easy , comparatively speaking , to be resilient .
i think that , if we look at what happened on the internet , with such an incredible last half a dozen years , that it 's hard to even get the right analogy for it .
a lot of how we decide , how we 're supposed to react to things and what we 're supposed to expect about the future depends on how we bucket things and how we categorize them .
and so i think the tempting analogy for the boom-bust that we just went through with the internet is a gold rush .
it 's easy to think of this analogy as very different from some of the other things you might pick .
for one thing , both were very real .
in 1849 , in that gold rush , they took over $ 700 million worth of gold out of california . it was very real .
the internet was also very real . this is a real way for humans to communicate with each other . it 's a big deal .
huge boom . huge boom . huge bust . huge bust .
you keep going , and both things are lots of hype .
i do n't have to remind you of all the hype that was involved with the internet - like getrich.com.
but you had the same thing with the gold rush . " gold . gold . gold . "
sixty-eight rich men on the steamer portland . stacks of yellow metal .
some have 5,000 . many have more .
a few bring out 100,000 dollars each .
people would get very excited about this when they read these articles .
" the eldorado of the united states of america : the discovery of inexhaustible gold mines in california . "
and the parallels between the gold rush and the internet rush continue very strongly .
so many people left what they were doing .
and what would happen is - and the gold rush went on for years .
people on the east coast in 1849 , when they first started to get the news , they thought , " ah , this is n't real . "
but they keep hearing about people getting rich , and then in 1850 they still hear that . and they think it 's not real .
by about 1852 , they 're thinking , " am i the stupidest person on earth by not rushing to california ? " and they start to decide they are .
these are community affairs , by the way .
local communities on the east coast would get together and whole teams of 10 , 20 people would caravan across the united states , and they would form companies .
these were typically not solitary efforts . but no matter what , if you were a lawyer or a banker , people dropped what they were doing , no matter what skill set they had , to go pan for gold .
this guy on the left , dr. richard beverley cole , he lived in philadelphia and he took the panama route .
they would take a ship down to panama , across the isthmus , and then take another ship north .
this guy , dr. toland , went by covered wagon to california .
this has its parallels , too . doctors leaving their practices .
these are both very successful - a physician in one case , a surgeon in the other .
same thing happened on the internet . you get drkoop.com.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in the gold rush , people literally jumped ship .
the san francisco harbor was clogged with 600 ships at the peak because the ships would get there and the crews would abandon to go search for gold .
so there were literally 600 captains and 600 ships .
they turned the ships into hotels , because they could n't sail them anywhere .
you had dotcom fever . and you had gold fever .
and you saw some of the excesses that the dotcom fever created and the same thing happened .
the fort in san francisco at the time had about 1,300 soldiers .
half of them deserted to go look for gold .
and they would n't let the other half out to go look for the first half because they were afraid they would n't come back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one of the soldiers wrote home , and this is the sentence that he put : " the struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and 75 dollars a day is a rather severe one . "
they had bad burn rate in the gold rush . a very bad burn rate .
this is actually from the klondike gold rush . this is the white pass trail .
they loaded up their mules and their horses .
and they did n't plan right .
and they did n't know how far they would really have to go , and they overloaded the horses with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of stuff .
in fact it was so bad that most of the horses died before they could get where they were going .
it got renamed the " dead horse trail . "
and the canadian minister of the interior wrote this at the time : " thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way , sometimes in bunches under the cliffs , with pack saddles and packs where they 've fallen from the rock above , sometimes in tangled masses , filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march , often , i regret to say , exhausted , but still alive , a fact we were unaware of , until after the miserable wretches turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade .
the eyeless sockets of the pack animals everywhere account for the myriads of ravens along the road .
the inhumanity which this trail has been witness to , the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone , can not be imagined . they certainly can not be described . "
and you know , without the smell that would have accompanied that , we had the same thing on the internet : very bad burn rate calculations .
i 'll just play one of these and you 'll remember it .
this is a commercial that was played on the super bowl in the year 2000 .
-lrb- video -rrb- : bride # 1 : you said you had a large selection of invitations . clerk : but we do .
bride # 2 : then why does she have my invitation ?
announcer : what may be a little thing to some ... bride # 3 : you are mine , little man .
announcer : could be a really big deal to you . husband # 1 : is that your wife ?
husband # 2 : not for another 15 minutes . announcer : after all , it 's your special day .
ourbeginning.com. life 's an event . announce it to the world .
jeff bezos : it 's very difficult to figure out what that ad is for .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but they spent three and a half million dollars in the 2000 super bowl to air that ad , even though , at the time , they only had a million dollars in annual revenue .
now , here 's where our analogy with the gold rush starts to diverge , and i think rather severely .
and that is , in a gold rush , when it 's over , it 's over .
here 's this guy : " there are many men in dawson at the present time who feel keenly disappointed .
they 've come thousands of miles on a perilous trip , risked life , health and property , spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them . "
and that was , of course , the very common story .
because when you take out that last piece of gold - and they did incredibly quickly . i mean , if you look at the 1849 gold rush - the entire american river region , within two years - every stone had been turned . and after that , only big companies who used more sophisticated mining technologies started to take gold out of there .
so there 's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic and that analogy is the electric industry .
and there are a lot of similarities between the internet and the electric industry .
with the electric industry you actually have to - one of them is that they 're both sort of thin , horizontal , enabling layers that go across lots of different industries .
it 's not a specific thing .
but electricity is also very , very broad , so you have to sort of narrow it down .
you know , it can be used as an incredible means of transmitting power .
it 's an incredible means of coordinating , in a very fine-grained way , information flows .
there 's a bunch of things that are interesting about electricity .
and the part of the electric revolution that i want to focus on is sort of the golden age of appliances .
the killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb .
so the light bulb is what wired the world .
and they were n't thinking about appliances when they wired the world .
they were really thinking about - they were n't putting electricity into the home ; they were putting lighting into the home .
and , but it really - it got the electricity . it took a long time .
this was a huge - as you would expect - a huge capital build out .
all the streets had to be torn up .
this is work going on down in lower manhattan where they built some of the first electric power generating stations .
and they 're tearing up all the streets .
the edison electric company , which became edison general electric , which became general electric , paid for all of this digging up of the streets . it was incredibly expensive .
but that is not the - and that 's not the part that 's really most similar to the web .
because , remember , the web got to stand on top of all this heavy infrastructure that had been put in place because of the long-distance phone network .
so all of the cabling and all of the heavy infrastructure - i 'm going back now to , sort of , the explosive part of the web in 1994 , when it was growing 2,300 percent a year .
how could it grow at 2,300 percent a year in 1994 when people were n't really investing in the web ?
well , it was because that heavy infrastructure had already been laid down .
so the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure , and then home appliances started coming into being .
and this was huge . the first one was the electric fan - this was the 1890 electric fan .
and the appliances , the golden age of appliances really lasted - it depends how you want to measure it - but it 's anywhere from 40 to 60 years . it goes on a long time .
it starts about 1890 . and the electric fan was a big success .
the electric iron , also very big .
by the way , this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's asbestos under that handle there .
this is the first vacuum cleaner , the 1905 skinner vacuum , from the hoover company . and this one weighed 92 pounds and took two people to operate and cost a quarter of a car .
so it was n't a big seller .
this was truly , truly an early-adopter product - -lrb- laughter -rrb- the 1905 skinner vacuum .
but three years later , by 1908 , it weighed 40 pounds .
now , not all these things were highly successful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the electric tie press , which never really did catch on .
people , i guess , decided that they would not wrinkle their ties .
these never really caught on either : the electric shoe warmer and drier . never a big seller .
this came in , like , six different colors .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know why . but i thought , you know , sometimes it 's just not the right time for an invention ; maybe it 's time to give this one another shot .
so i thought we could build a super bowl ad for this .
we 'd need the right partner . and i thought that really - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought that would really work , to give that another shot .
now , the toaster was huge because they used to make toast on open fires , and it took a lot of time and attention .
i want to point out one thing . this is - you guys know what this is .
they had n't invented the electric socket yet .
so this was - remember , they did n't wire the houses for electricity .
they wired them for lighting . so your - your appliances would plug in .
they would - each room typically had a light bulb socket at the top .
and you 'd plug it in there .
in fact , if you 've seen the carousel of progress at disney world , you 've seen this . here are the cables coming up into this light fixture .
all the appliances plug in there . and you would just unscrew your light bulb if you wanted to plug in an appliance .
the next thing that really was a big , big deal was the washing machine .
now , this was an object of much envy and lust .
everybody wanted one of these electric washing machines .
on the left-hand side , this was the soapy water .
and there 's a rotor there - that this motor is spinning .
and it would clean your clothes .
this is the clean rinse-water . so you 'd take the clothes out of here , put them in here , and then you 'd run the clothes through this electric ringer .
and this was a big deal .
you 'd keep this on your porch . it was a little bit messy and kind of a pain .
and you 'd run a long cord into the house where you could screw it into your light socket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's actually kind of an important point in my presentation , because they had n't invented the off switch .
that was to come much later - the off switch on appliances - because it did n't make any sense .
i mean , you did n't want this thing clogging up a light socket .
so you know , when you were done with it , you unscrewed it .
that 's what you did . you did n't turn it off .
and as i said before , they had n't invented the electric outlet either , so the washing machine was a particularly dangerous device .
and there are - when you research this , there are gruesome descriptions of people getting their hair and clothes caught in these devices .
and they could n't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there was no off switch , so it was n't very good .
and you might think that that was incredibly stupid of our ancestors to be plugging things into a light socket like this .
but , you know , before i get too far into condemning our ancestors , i thought i 'd show you : this is my conference room .
this is a total kludge , if you ask me .
first of all , this got installed upside down . this light socket - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so the cord keeps falling out , so i taped it in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is supposed - do n't even get me started . but that 's not the worst one .
this is what it looks like under my desk .
i took this picture just two days ago .
so we really have n't progressed that much since 1908 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a total , total mess .
and , you know , we think it 's getting better , but have you tried to install 802.11 yourself ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i challenge you to try . it 's very hard .
i know ph.d.s in computer science - this process has brought them to tears , absolute tears . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's assuming you already have dsl in your house .
try to get dsl installed in your house .
the engineers who do it everyday ca n't do it .
they have to - typically , they come three times .
and one friend of mine was telling me a story : not only did they get there and have to wait , but then the engineers , when they finally did get there , for the third time , they had to call somebody .
and they were really happy that the guy had a speakerphone because then they had to wait on hold for an hour to talk to somebody to give them an access code after they got there .
so we 're not - we 're pretty kludge-y ourselves .
by the way , dsl is a kludge .
i mean , this is a twisted pair of copper that was never designed for the purpose it 's being put to - you know it 's the whole thing - we 're very , very primitive . and that 's kind of the point .
because , you know , resilience - if you think of it in terms of the gold rush , then you 'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone .
but the good thing is , with innovation , there is n't a last nugget .
every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities .
and if you believe that , then you believe that where we are - this is what i think - i believe that where we are with the incredible kludge - and i have n't even talked about user interfaces on the web - but there 's so much kludge , so much terrible stuff - we are at the 1908 hurley washing machine stage with the internet .
that 's where we are . we do n't get our hair caught in it , but that 's the level of primitiveness of where we are .
we 're in 1908 .
and if you believe that , then stuff like this does n't bother you . this is 1996 : " all the negatives add up to making the online experience not worth the trouble . "
1998 : " amazon.toast. " in 1999 : " amazon.bomb. "
my mom hates this picture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she - but you know , if you really do believe that it 's the very , very beginning , if you believe it 's the 1908 hurley washing machine , then you 're incredibly optimistic . and i do think that that 's where we are .
and i do think there 's more innovation ahead of us than there is behind us .
and in 1917 , sears - i want to get this exactly right .
this was the advertisement that they ran in 1917 .
it says : " use your electricity for more than light . "
and i think that 's where we are .
we 're very , very early . thank you very much .
i 'm kind of tired of talking about simplicity , actually , so i thought i 'd make my life more complex , as a serious play .
so , i 'm going to , like , go through some slides from way back when , and walk through them to give you a sense of how i end up here .
so , basically it all began with this whole idea of a computer .
who has a computer ? yeah .
o.k. , so , everyone has a computer .
even a mobile phone , it 's a computer .
and - anyone remember this workbook , " instant activities for your apple " - free poster in each book ?
this was how computing began .
do n't forget : a computer came out ; it had no software .
you 'd buy that thing , you 'd bring it home , you 'd plug it in , and it would do absolutely nothing at all .
so , you had to program it , and there were great programming , like , tutorials , like this .
i mean , this was great .
it 's , like , you know , herbie the apple ii .
it 's such a great way to - i mean , they should make java books like this , and we 've have no problem learning a program .
but this was a great , grand time of the computer , when it was just a raw , raw , what is it ? kind of an era .
and , you see , this era coincided with my own childhood .
i grew up in a tofu factory in seattle .
who of you grew up in a family business , suffered the torture ? yes , yes .
the torture was good . was n't it good torture ?
it was just life-changing , you know . and so , in my life , you know , i was in the tofu ; it was a family business .
and my mother was a kind of a designer , also .
she 'd make this kind of , like , wall of tofu cooking , and it would confuse the customers , because they all thought it was a restaurant .
a bad sort of branding thing , or whatever .
but , anyway , that 's where i grew up , in this little tofu factory in seattle , and it was kind of like this : a small room where i kind of grew up . i 'm big there in that picture .
that 's my dad . my dad was kind of like macgyver , really : he would invent , like , ways to make things heavy .
like back here , there 's like , concrete block technology here , and he would need the concrete blocks to press the tofu , because tofu is actually kind of a liquidy type of thing , and so you have to have heavy stuff to push out the liquid and make it hard .
tofu comes out in these big batches , and my father would sort of cut them by hand .
i ca n't tell you - family business story : you 'd understand this - my father was the most sincere man possible .
he walked into a safeway once on a rainy day , slipped , broke his arm , rushed out : he did n't want to inconvenience safeway .
so , instead , you know , my father 's , like , arm 's broken for two weeks in the store , and that week - now , those two weeks were when my older brother and i had to do everything .
and that was torture , real torture .
because , you see , we 'd seen my father taking the big block of tofu and cutting it , like , knife in , zap , zap , zap . we thought , wow .
so , the first time i did that , i went , like , whoa ! like this .
bad blocks . but anyways , the tofu to me was kind of my origin , basically .
and because working in a store was so hard , i liked going to school ; it was like heaven .
and i was really good at school .
so , when i got to mit , you know , as most of you who are creatives , your parents all told you not to be creative , right ?
so , same way , you know , i was good at art and good at math , and my father says , he 's - john 's good at math .
i went to mit , did my math , but i had this wonderful opportunity , because computers had just become visual .
the apple - macintosh just came out ; i had a mac in hand when i went to mit .
and it was a time when a guy who , kind of , could cross the two sides - it was a good time .
and so , i remember that my first major piece of software was on a direct copy of then-aldus pagemaker .
i made a desktop publishing system way back when , and that was , kind of , my first step into figuring out how to - oh , these two sides are kind of fun to mix .
and the problem when you 're younger - for all you students out there - is , your head gets kind of big really easy .
and when i was making icons , i was , like , the icon master , and i was , like , yeah , i 'm really good at this , you know .
i had the fortune of going to something called a library , and in the library i came upon this very book .
i found this book . it 's called , " thoughts on design , " by a man named paul rand .
it 's a little slim volume ; i 'm not sure if you 've seen this .
it 's a very nice little book . it 's about this guy , paul rand , who was one of the greatest graphic designers , and also a great writer as well .
and when i saw this man 's work , i realized how bad i was at design , or whatever i called it back then , and i suddenly had a kind of career goal , kind of in hot pursuit .
so i kind of switched . i went to mit , finished .
i got my masters , and then went to art school after that .
and just began to design stuff , like chopstick wrappers , napkins , menus - whatever i could get a handle on : sort of wheel-and-deal , move up in the design world , whatever .
and is n't it that strange moment when you publish your design ?
remember that moment - publishing your designs ?
remember that moment ? it felt so good , did n't it ?
so , i was published , you know , so , wow , my design 's in a book , you know ?
after that , things kind of got strange , and i got thinking about the computer , because the computer to me always , kind of , bothered me .
i did n't quite get it . and paul rand was a kind of crusty designer , you know , a crusty designer , like a good - kind of like a good french bread ?
you know , he wrote in one of his books : " a yale student once said , ' i came here to learn how to design , not how to use a computer . ' design schools take heed . "
this is in the ' 80s , in the great clash of computer / non-computer people .
a very difficult time , actually .
and this to me was an important message from rand .
and so i began to sort of mess with the computer at the time .
this is the first sort of play thing i did , my own serious play .
i built a working version of an adobe illustrator-ish thing .
it looks like illustrator ; it can , like , draw .
it was very hard to make this , actually .
it took a month to make this part .
and then i thought , what if i added this feature , where i can say , this point , you can fly like a bird . you 're free , kind of thing .
so i could , sort of , change the kind of stability with a little control there on the dial , and i can sort of watch it flip around .
and this is in 1993 .
and when my professors saw this , they were very upset at me .
they were saying , why 's it moving ?
they were saying , make it stop now .
now , i was saying , well , that 's the whole point : it 's moving .
and he says , well , when 's it going to stop ?
and i said , never .
and he said , even worse . stop it now .
i started studying this whole idea , of like , what is this computer ? it 's a strange medium .
it 's not like print . it 's not like video .
it lasts forever . it 's a very strange medium .
so , i went off with this , and began to look for things even more .
and so in japan , i began to experiment with people .
this is actually bad : human experiments .
i would do these things where i 'd have students become pens : there 's blue pen , red pen , green pen , black pen .
and someone sits down and draws a picture .
they 're laughing because he said , draw from the middle-right to the middle , and he kind of messed up .
see , humans do n't know how to take orders ; the computer 's so good at it .
this guy figured out how to get the computer to draw with two pens at once : you know , you , pen , do this , and you , pen , do this .
and so began to have multiple pens on the page - again , hard to do with our hands .
and then someone discovered this " a-ha moment " where you could use coordinate systems .
we thought , ah , this is when it 's going to happen .
in the end , he drew a house . it was the most boring thing .
it became computerish ; we began to think computerish - the x , y system - and so that was kind of a revelation .
and after this i wanted to build a computer out of people , called a human-powered computer .
so , this happened in 1993 .
sound down , please .
it 's a computer where the people are the parts .
i have behind this wall a disk drive , a cpu , a graphics card , a memory system .
they 're picking up a giant floppy disk made of cardboard .
it 's put inside the computer .
and that little program 's on that cardboard disk .
so , she wears the disk , and reads the data off the sectors of the disk , and the computer starts up ; it sort of boots up , really .
and it 's a sort of a working computer . and when i built this computer , i had a moment of - what is it called ? - the epiphany where i realized that the computer 's just so fast .
this computer appears to be fast - she 's working pretty hard , and people are running around , and we think , wow , this is happening at a fast rate .
and this computer 's programmed to do only one thing , which is , if you move your mouse , the mouse changes on the screen .
on the computer , when you move your mouse , that arrow moves around .
on this computer , if you move the mouse , it takes half an hour for the mouse cursor to change .
to give you a sense of the speed , the scale : the computer is just so amazingly fast , o.k. ?
and so , after this i began to do experiments for different companies .
this is something i did for sony in 1996 .
it was three sony " h " devices that responded to sound .
so , if you talk into the mike , you 'll hear some music in your headphones ; if you talk in the phone , then video would happen .
so , i began to experiment with industry in different ways with this kind of mixture of skills .
i did this ad . i do n't believe in this kind of alcohol , but i do drink sometimes .
and chanel . so , getting to do different projects .
and also , one thing i realized is that i like to make things .
we like to make things . it 's fun to make things .
and so i never developed the ability to have a staff .
i have no staff ; it 's all kind of made by hand - these sort of broken hands .
and these hands were influenced by this man , mr. inami naomi .
this guy was my kind of like mentor .
he was the first digital media producer in tokyo .
he 's the guy that kind of discovered me , and kind of got me going in digital media .
he was such an inspirational guy .
i remember , like , we 'd be in his studio , like , at 2 a.m. , and then he 'd show up from some client meeting .
he 'd come in and say , you know , if i am here , everything is okay .
and you 'd feel so much better , you know .
and i 'll never forget how , like , but - i 'll never forget how , like , he had a sudden situation with his - he had an aneurysm .
he went into a coma .
and so , for three years he was out , and he could only blink , and so i realized at this moment , i thought , wow - how fragile is this thing we 're wearing , this body and mind we 're wearing , and so i thought , how do you go for it more ?
how do you take that time you have left and go after it ?
so , naomi was pivotal in that .
and so , i began to think more carefully about the computer .
this was a moment where i was thinking about , so , you have a computer program , it responds to motion - x and y - and i realized that each computer program has all these images inside the program .
so , if you can see here , you know , that program you 're seeing in the corner , if you spread it out , it 's all these things all at once .
it 's real simultaneity . it 's nothing we 're used to working with .
we 're so used to working in one vector .
this is all at the same time .
the computer lives in so many dimensions .
and also , at the same time i was frustrated , because i would go to all these art and design schools everywhere , and there were these , like , " the computer lab , " you know , and this is , like , in the late 1990s , and this is in basel , a great graphic design school .
and here 's this , like , dirty , kind of , shoddy , kind of , dark computer room .
and i began to wonder , is this the goal ?
is this what we want , you know ?
and also , i began to be fascinated by machines - you know , like copy machines - and so this is actually in basel .
i noticed how we spent so much time on making it interactive - this is , like , a touch screen - and i noticed how you can only touch five places , and so , " why are we wasting so much interactivity everywhere ? "
became a question . and also , the sound : i discovered i can make my thinkpad pretend it 's a telephone .
you get it ? no ? o.k.
and also , i discovered in logan airport , this was , like , calling out to me .
do you hear that ? it 's like cows . this is at 4 a.m. at logan .
so , i was wondering , like , what is this thing in front of me , this computer thing ?
it did n't make any sense .
so , i began to make things again . this is another series of objects made of old computers from my basement .
i made - i took my old macintoshes and made different objects out of them from tokyo .
i began to be very disinterested in computers themselves , so i began to make paintings out of palmpilots .
i made this series of works .
they 're paintings i made and put a palmpilot in the middle as a kind of display that 's sort of thinking , i 'm abstract art . what am i ? i 'm abstract .
and so it keeps thinking out loud of its own abstraction .
i began to be fascinated by plastic , so i spent four months making eight plastic blocks perfectly optically transparent , as a kind of release of stress .
because of that , i became interested in blue tape , so in san francisco , at c.c. , i had a whole exhibition on blue tape .
i made a whole installation out of blue tape - blue painters ' tape .
and at this point my wife kind of got worried about me , so i stopped doing blue tape and began to think , well , what else is there in life ?
and so computers , as you know , these big computers , there are now tiny computers .
they 're littler computers , so the one-chip computers , i began to program one-chip computers and make objects out of p.c. boards , leds .
i began to make led sculptures that would live inside little boxes out of mdf .
this is a series of light boxes i made for a show in italy .
very simple boxes : you just press one button and some led interaction occurs .
this is a series of lamps i made . this is a bento box lamp : it 's sort of a plastic rice lamp ; it 's very friendly .
i did a show in london last year made out of ipods - i used ipods as a material .
so i took 16 ipod nanos and made a kind of a nano fish , basically .
recently , this is for reebok .
i 've done shoes for reebok as well , as a kind of a hobby for apparel .
so anyways , there are all these things you can do , but the thing i love the most is to experience , taste the world .
the world is just so tasty .
we think we 'll go to a museum ; that 's where all the tastes are .
no , they 're all out there .
so , this is , like , in front of the eiffel tower , really , actually , around the louvre area .
this i found , where nature had made a picture for me .
this is a perfect 90-degree angle by nature .
in this strange moment where , like , these things kind of appeared .
we all are creative people .
we have this gene defect in our mind .
we ca n't help but stop , right ? this feeling 's a wonderful thing .
it 's the forever-always-on museum .
this is from the cape last year .
i discovered that i had to find the equation of art and design , which we know as circle-triangle-square .
it 's everywhere on the beach , i discovered .
i began to collect every instance of circle-triangle-square .
i put these all back , by the way .
and i also discovered how .
some rocks are twins separated at birth .
this is also out there , you know .
i 'm , like , how did this happen , kind of thing ?
i brought you guys together again .
so , three years ago i discovered , the letters m-i-t occurring in simplicity and complexity .
my alma mater , mit , and i had this moment - a kind of m. night shayamalan moment - where i thought , whoa ! i have to do this .
and i went after it with passion .
however , recently this risd opportunity kind of arose - going to risd - and i could n't reconcile this real easy , because the letters had told me , mit forever .
but i discovered in the french word raison d 'être .
i was , like , aha , wait a second .
and there risd appeared .
and so i realized it was o.k. to go .
so , i 'm going to risd , actually .
who 's a risd alum out there ?
risd alums ? yeah , risd . there we go , risd . woo , risd .
i 'm sorry , i 'm sorry , art center - art center is good , too .
risd is kind of my new kind of passion , and i 'll tell you a little bit about that .
so , risd is - i was outside risd , and some student wrote this on some block , and i thought , wow , risd wants to know what itself is .
and i have no idea what risd should be , actually , or what it wants to be , but one thing i have to tell you is that although i 'm a technologist , i do n't like technology very much .
it 's a , kind of , the qi thing , or whatever .
people say , are you going to bring risd into the future ?
and i say , well , i 'm going to bring the future back to risd .
there 's my perspective . because in reality , the problem is n't how to make the world more technological .
it 's about how to make it more humane again .
and if anything , i think risd has a strange dna .
it 's a strange exuberance about materials , about the world : a fascination that i think the world needs quite very much right now .
so , thank you everyone .
this is the ocean as i used to know it .
and i find that since i 've been in the gulf a couple of times , i really kind of am traumatized because whenever i look at the ocean now , no matter where i am , even where i know none of the oil has gone , i sort of see slicks , and i 'm finding that i 'm very much haunted by it .
but what i want to talk to you about today is a lot of things that try to put all of this in context , not just about the oil eruption , but what it means and why it has happened .
first , just a little bit about me .
i 'm basically just a guy that likes to go fishing ever since i was a little kid , and because i did , i wound up studying sea birds to try to stay in the coastal habitats that i so loved .
and now i mainly write books about how the ocean is changing , and the ocean is certainly changing very rapidly .
now we saw this kind of graphic earlier on , that we really live on a hard marble that has just a slight bit of wetness to it .
it 's like you dipped a marble in water .
and the same thing with the atmosphere : if you took all the atmosphere and rolled it up in a ball , you would get that little sphere of gas on the right .
so we live on the most fragile , little soap bubble you can imagine , a very sacred soap bubble , but one that is very , very easy to affect .
and all the burning of oil and coal and gas , all the fossil fuels , have changed the atmosphere greatly .
carbon dioxide level has gone up and up and up .
we 're warming the climate .
so the blowout in the gulf is just a little piece of a much larger problem that we have with the energy that we use to run civilization .
beyond warming , we have the problem of the oceans getting more acidified - and already measurably so , and already affecting animals .
now in the laboratory , if you take a clam and you put it in the ph that is - not 8.1 , which is the normal ph of seawater - but 7.5 , it dissolves in about three days .
if you take a sea urchin larva from 8.1 , put it in a ph of 7.7 - not a huge change - it becomes deformed and dies .
and already , commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places .
coral reefs are growing slower in some places because of this problem .
so this really matters .
now , let 's take a little tour around the gulf a little bit .
one of the things that really impresses me about the people in the gulf : they are really , really aquatic people .
and they can handle water .
they can handle a hurricane that comes and goes .
when the water goes down , they know what to do .
but when it 's something other than water , and their water habitat changes , they do n't have many options .
in fact , those entire communities really do n't have many options .
they do n't have another thing they can do .
they ca n't go and work in the local hotel business because there is n't one in their community .
if you go to the gulf and you look around , you do see a lot of oil .
you see a lot of oil on the ocean .
you see a lot of oil on the shoreline .
if you go to the site of the blowout , it looks pretty unbelievable .
it looks like you just emptied the oil pan in your car , and you just dumped it in the ocean .
and one of the really most incredible things , i think , is that there 's nobody out there trying to collect it parts of the ocean there look just absolutely apocalyptic .
you go in along the shore , you can find it everywhere .
it 's really messy .
if you go to the places where it 's just arriving , like the eastern part of the gulf , in alabama , there 's still people using the beach while there are people cleaning up the beach .
and they have a very strange way of cleaning up the beach .
they 're not allowed to put more than 10 pounds of sand in a 50-gallon plastic bag .
they have thousands and thousands of plastic bags .
i do n't know what they 're going to do with all that stuff .
meanwhile , there are still people trying to use the beach .
they do n't see the little , tiny sign their kids are in the water ; they 're getting tar all over their clothes and their sandals . it 's a mess .
if you go to the place where the oil has been a while , it 's an even bigger mess .
and there 's basically nobody there anymore , a few people trying to keep using it .
you see people who are really shell-shocked .
they are very hardworking people .
all they know about life is they get up in the morning , and if their engine starts , they go to work .
they always felt that they could rely on the assurances that nature brought them through the ecosystem of the gulf .
they 're finding that their world is really collapsing .
and so you can see , literally , signs of their shock , signs of their outrage , signs of their anger , and signs of their grief .
these are the things that you can see .
there 's a lot you ca n't see , also , underwater .
what 's going on underwater ?
well , some people say there are oil plumes .
some people say there are not oil plumes .
and congressman markey asks , you know , " is it going to take a submarine ride to see if there are really oil plumes ? "
but i could n't take a submarine ride - especially between the time i knew i was coming here and today - so i had to do a little experiment myself to see if there was oil in the gulf of mexico .
so this is the gulf of mexico , sparkling place full of fish .
i created a little oil spill in the gulf of mexico .
and i learned - in fact , i confirmed - the hypothesis that oil and water do n't mix until you add a dispersant , and then they start mixing .
and you add a little energy from the wind and the waves , and you get a big mess , a big mess that you ca n't possibly clean , you ca n't touch , you ca n't extract and , i think most importantly - this is what i think - you ca n't see it .
i think it 's being hidden on purpose .
now this is such a catastrophe and such a mess , that lots of stuff is leaking out on the edges of the information stream .
but as many people have said , there 's a large attempt to suppress what 's going on .
personally , i think that the dispersants are a major strategy to hide the body , because we put the murderer in charge of the crime scene .
but you can see it .
you can see where the oil is concentrated at the surface , and then it is attacked , because they do n't want the evidence , in my opinion .
okay .
we heard that bacteria eat oil ?
so do sea turtles .
when it breaks up , it has a long way to go before it gets down to bacteria .
turtles eat it . it gets in the gills of fish .
these guys have to swim around through it .
i heard the most incredible story today when i was on the train coming here .
a writer named ted williams called me , and he was asking me a couple of questions about what i saw , because he 's writing an article for audubon magazine .
he said that he had been in the gulf a little while ago - like about a week ago - and a guy who had been a recreational fishing guide took him out to show him what 's going on .
that guide 's entire calendar year is canceled bookings .
he has no bookings left .
everybody wanted their deposit back . everybody is fleeing .
that 's the story of thousands of people .
but he told ted that on the last day he went out , a bottlenose dolphin suddenly appeared next to the boat , and it was splattering oil out its blowhole .
and he moved away because it was his last fishing trip , and he knew that the dolphins scare fish .
so he moved away from it , turned around a few minutes later , it was right next to the side of the boat again .
he said that in 30 years of fishing he had never seen a dolphin do that .
and he felt that - he felt that it was coming to ask for help . sorry .
now , in the exxon valdez spill , about 30 percent of the killer whales died in the first few months .
their numbers have never recovered .
so the recovery rate of all this stuff is going to be variable .
it 's going to take longer for some things .
and some things , i think , will probably come back a little faster .
the other thing about the gulf that is important is that there are a lot of animals that concentrate in the gulf at certain parts of the year .
so the gulf is a really important piece of water - more important than a similar volume of water in the open atlantic ocean .
these tuna swim the entire ocean .
they get in the gulf stream . they go all the way to europe .
when it comes time to spawn , they come inside , and these two tuna that were tagged , you can see them on the spawning grounds very much right in the area of the slick .
they 're probably having , at the very least , a catastrophic spawning season this year .
i 'm hoping that maybe the adults are avoiding that dirty water .
they do n't usually like to go into water that is very cloudy anyway .
but these are really high-performance athletic animals .
i do n't know what this kind of stuff will do in their gills .
i do n't know if it 'll affect the adults .
if it 's not , it 's certainly affecting their eggs and larvae , i would certainly think .
but if you look at that graph that goes down and down and down , that 's what we 've done to this species through overfishing over many decades .
so while the oil spill , the leak , the eruption , is a catastrophe , i think it 's important to keep in mind that we 've done a lot to affect what 's in the ocean for a very , very long time .
it 's not like we 're starting with something that 's been okay .
we 're starting with something that 's had a lot of stresses and a lot of problems to begin with .
if you look around at the birds , there are a lot of birds in the gulf that concentrate in the gulf at certain times of the year , but then leave .
and they populate much larger areas .
so for instance , most of the birds in this picture are migratory birds .
they were all on the gulf in may , while oil was starting to come ashore in certain places .
down on the lower left there are ruddy turnstones and sanderlings .
they breed in the high arctic , and they winter down in southern south america .
but they concentrate in the gulf and then fan out all across the arctic .
i saw birds that breed in greenland in the gulf , so this is a hemispheric issue .
the economic effects go at least nationally in many ways .
the biological effects are certainly hemispheric .
i think that this is one of the most absolutely mind-boggling examples of total unpreparedness that i can even think of .
even when the japanese bombed pearl harbor , at least they shot back .
and we just seem to be unable to figure out what to do .
there was nothing ready , and , you know , as we can see by what they 're doing .
mainly what they 're doing is booms and dispersants .
the booms are absolutely not made for open water .
they do n't even attempt to corral the oil where it is most concentrated .
they get near shore . look at these two boats .
that one on the right is called fishing fool .
and i think , you know , that 's a great name for boats that think that they 're going to do anything to make a dent in this by dragging a boom between them when there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles in the gulf right now with oil at the surface .
the dispersants make the oil go right under the booms .
the booms are only about 13 inches in diameter .
so it 's just absolutely crazy .
here are shrimp boats employed .
there are hundreds of shrimp boats employed to drag booms instead of nets .
here they are working .
you can see easily that all the oily water just goes over the back of the boom .
all they 're doing is stirring it .
it 's just ridiculous .
also , for all the shoreline that has booms - hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline - all of the shoreline that has booms , there 's adjacent shoreline that does n't have any booms .
there is ample opportunity for oil and dirty water to get in behind them .
and that lower photo , that 's a bird colony that has been boomed .
everybody 's trying to protect the bird colonies there .
well , as an ornithologist , i can tell you that birds fly , and that - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and that booming a bird colony does n't do it ; it does n't do it .
these birds make a living by diving into the water .
in fact , really what i think they should do , if anything - they 're trying so hard to protect those nests - actually , if they destroyed every single nest some of the birds would leave , and that would be better for them this year .
as far as cleaning them , i do n't mean to cast any aspersion on people cleaning birds .
it 's really , really important that we express our compassion .
i think that 's the most important thing that people have , is compassion .
it 's really important to get those images and to show it .
but really , where are those birds going to get released to ?
it 's like taking somebody out of a burning building , treating them for smoke inhalation and sending them back into the building , because the oil is still gushing .
i refuse to acknowledge this as anything like an accident .
i think that this is the result of gross negligence .
-lrb- applause -rrb- not just b.p.
b.p. operated very sloppily and very recklessly because they could .
and they were allowed to do so because of the absolute failure of oversight of the government that 's supposed to be our government , protecting us .
it turns out that - you see this sign on almost every commercial vessel in the united states - you know , if you spilled a couple of gallons of oil , you would be in big trouble .
and you have to really wonder who are the laws made for , and who has gotten above the laws .
now there are things that we can do in the future .
we could have the kinds of equipment that we would really need .
it would not take an awful lot to anticipate that after making 30,000 holes in the sea floor of the gulf of mexico looking for oil , oil might start coming out of one of them .
and you 'd have some idea of what to do .
that 's certainly one of the things we need to do .
but i think we have to understand where this leak really started from .
it really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it 's our government , meant to protect the larger public interest .
so i think that the oil blowout , the bank bailout , the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause .
we still seem to understand that at least we need the police to protect us from a few bad people .
and even though the police can be a little annoying at times - giving us tickets and stuff like that - nobody says that we should just get rid of them .
but in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years , there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from , buying the government out from under us .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now this has been a problem for a very , very long time .
you can see that corporations were illegal at the founding of america , and even thomas jefferson complained that they were already bidding defiance to the laws of our country .
okay , people who say they 're conservative , if they really wanted to be really conservative and really patriotic , they would tell these corporations to go to hell .
that 's what it would really mean to be conservative .
so what we really need to do is regain the idea that it 's our government safeguarding our interests and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost .
i think there are signs of hope .
we seem to be waking up a little bit .
the glass-steagall act - which was really to protect us from the kind of thing that caused the recession to happen , and the bank meltdown and all that stuff that required the bailouts - that was put in effect in 1933 , was systematically destroyed .
now there 's a mood to put some of that stuff back in place , but the lobbyists are already there trying to weaken the regulations after the legislation has just passed .
so it 's a continued fight .
it 's a historic moment right now .
we 're either going to have an absolutely unmitigated catastrophe of this oil leak in the gulf , or we will make the moment we need out of this , as many people have noted today .
there 's certainly a common theme about needing to make the moment out of this .
we 've been through this before with other ways of offshore drilling .
the first offshore wells were called whales .
the first offshore drills were called harpoons .
we emptied the ocean of the whales at that time .
now are we stuck with this ?
ever since we lived in caves , every time we wanted any energy , we lit something on fire , and that is still what we 're doing .
we 're still lighting something on fire every time we want energy .
and people say we ca n't have clean energy because it 's too expensive .
who says it 's too expensive ?
people who sell us fossil fuels .
we 've been here before with energy , and people saying the economy can not withstand a switch , because the cheapest energy was slavery .
energy is always a moral issue .
it 's an issue that is moral right now .
it 's a matter of right and wrong .
thank you very much .
i 've always been interested in the relationship of formal structures and human behavior .
if you build a wide road out to the outskirts of town , people will move there .
well , law is also a powerful driver of human behavior .
and what i 'd like to discuss today is the need to overhaul and simplify the law to release the energy and passion of americans , so that we can begin to address the challenges of our society .
you might have noticed that law has grown progressively denser in your lives over the last decade or two .
if you run a business , it 's hard to do much of anything without calling your general counsel .
indeed , there is this phenomenon now where the general counsels are becoming the ceos .
it 's a little bit like the invasion of the body snatchers .
you need a lawyer to run the company , because there 's so much law .
but it 's not just business that 's affected by this , it 's actually pressed down into the daily activities of ordinary people .
a couple of years ago i was hiking near cody , wyoming .
it was in a grizzly bear preserve , although no one told me that before we went .
and our guide was a local science teacher .
she was wholly unconcerned about the bears , but she was terrified of lawyers .
the stories started pouring out .
she 'd just been involved in an episode where a parent had threatened to sue the school because she lowered the grade of the student by 10 percent when he turned the paper in late .
the principal did n't want to stand up to the parent because he did n't want to get dragged into some legal proceedings .
so , she had to go to meeting after meeting , same arguments made over and over again .
after 30 days of sleepless nights , she finally capitulated and raised the grade .
she said , " life 's too short , i just ca n't keep going with this . "
about the same time , she was going to take two students to a leadership conference in laramie , which is a couple of hours away , and she was going to drive them in her car , but the school said , " no , you ca n't drive them in the car for liability reasons .
you have to go in a school bus . "
so , they provided a bus that held 60 people and drove the three of them back and forth several hours to laramie .
her husband is also a science teacher , and he takes his biology class on a hike in the nearby national park .
but he was told he could n't go on the hike this year because one of the students in the class was disabled , so the other 25 students did n't get to go on the hike either .
at the end of this day i could have filled a book just with stories about law from this one teacher .
now , we 've been taught to believe that law is the foundation of freedom .
but somehow or another , in the last couple of decades , the land of the free has become a legal minefield .
it 's really changed our lives in ways that are sort of imperceptible ; and yet , when you pull back , you see it all the time .
it 's changed the way we talk . i was talking to a pediatrician friend in north carolina . he said , " well you know , i do n't deal with patients the same way anymore .
you would n't want to say something off-the-cuff that might be used against you . "
this is a doctor , whose life is caring for people .
my own law firm has a list of questions that i 'm not allowed to ask when interviewing candidates , such as the sinister question , bulging with hidden motives and innuendo , " where are you from ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now for 20 years , tort reformers have been sounding the alarm that lawsuits are out of control .
and we read every once in while about these crazy lawsuits , like the guy in the district of columbia who sued his dry cleaners for 54 million dollars because they lost his pair of pants .
the case went on for two years ; i think he 's still appealing the case .
but the reality is , these crazy cases are relatively rare . they do n't usually win .
and the total of direct tort cost in this country is about two percent , which is twice as much as in other countries but , as taxes go , hardly crippling .
but the direct costs are really only the tip of the iceberg .
what 's happened here , again , almost without our knowing , is our culture has changed .
people no longer feel free to act on their best judgment .
so , what do we do about it ?
we certainly do n't want to give up the rights , when people do something wrong , to seek redress in the courts .
we need regulation to make sure people do n't pollute and such .
we lack even a vocabulary to deal with this problem , and that 's because we have the wrong frame of reference .
we 've been trained to think that the way to look at every dispute , every issue , is a matter of kind of individual rights .
and so we peer through a legal microscope , and look at everything .
is it possible that there are extenuating circumstances that explain why johnny turned his paper in late in cody , wyoming ?
is it possible that the doctor might have done something differently when the sick person gets sicker ?
and of course the hindsight bias is perfect .
there 's always a different scenario that you can sketch out where it 's possible that something could have been done differently .
and yet , we 've been trained to squint into this legal microscope , hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society , where everyone will agree what 's fair , and where accidents will be extinct , risk will be no more .
of course , this is utopia ; it 's a formula for paralysis , not freedom .
it 's not the basis of the rule of law , it 's not the basis of a free society .
so , now i have the first of four propositions i 'm going to leave with you about how you simplify the law : you 've got to judge law mainly by its effect on the broader society , not individual disputes .
absolutely vital .
so , let 's pull back from the anecdotes for a second and look at our society from high above .
is it working ?
what does the macro-data show us ?
well , the healthcare system has been transformed : a culture pervaded with defensiveness , universal distrust of the system of justice , universal practice of defensive medicine .
it 's very hard to measure because there are mixed motives .
doctors can make more on ordering tests sometimes , and also they no longer even know what 's right or wrong .
but reliable estimates range between 60 billion and 200 billion dollars per year .
that 's enough to provide care to all the people in america who do n't have it .
the trial lawyers say , " well , this legal fear makes doctors practice better medicine . "
well that 's been studied too , by the institute of medicine and others . turns out that 's not the case .
the fear has chilled professional interaction so thousands of tragic errors occur because doctors are afraid to speak up : " are you sure that 's the right dosage ? "
because they 're not sure , and they do n't want to take legal responsibility .
let 's go to schools .
as we saw with the teacher in cody , wyoming , she seems to be affected by the law .
well it turns out the schools are literally drowning in law .
you could have a separate section of a law library around each of the following legal concepts : due process , special education , no child left behind , zero tolerance , work rules ...
it goes on . we did a study of all the rules that affect one school in new york . the board of ed. had no idea .
tens of thousands of discreet rules , 60 steps to suspend a student from school : it 's a formula for paralysis .
what 's the effect of that ? one is a decline in order .
again , studies have shown it 's directly attributable to the rise of due process .
public agenda did a survey for us a couple of years ago where they found that 43 percent of the high school teachers in america say that they spend at least half of their time maintaining order in the classroom .
that means those students are getting half the learning they 're supposed to , because if one child is disrupting the class no one can learn .
and what happens when the teacher tries to assert order ?
they 're threatened with a legal claim .
we also surveyed that . seventy-eight percent of the middle and high school teachers in america have been threatened by their students with violating their rights , with lawsuits by their students . they are threatening , their students .
it 's not that they usually sue , it 's not that they would win , but it 's an indication of the corrosion of authority .
and how has this system of law worked for government ?
it does n't seem to be working very well does it ?
neither in sacramento nor in washington .
the other day at the state of the union speech , president obama said , and i think we could all agree with this goal , " from the first railroads to the interstate highway system , our nation has always been the first to compete .
there is no reason europe or china should have the fastest trains . "
well , actually there is a reason : environmental review has evolved into a process of no pebble left unturned for any major project taking the better part of a decade , then followed by years of litigation by anybody who does n't like the project .
then , just staying above the earth for one more second , people are acting like idiots , -lrb- laughter -rrb- all across the country .
-lrb- applause -rrb- idiots . a couple of years ago , broward county , florida , banned running at recess .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that means all the boys are going to be add .
i mean it 's just absolutely a formula for failure .
my favorite , though , are all the warning labels .
" caution : contents are hot , " on billions of coffee cups .
archeologists will dig us up in a thousand years and they wo n't know about defensive medicine and stuff , but they 'll see all these labels , " contents are extremely hot . "
they 'll think it was some kind of aphrodisiac .
that 's the only explanation . because why would you have to tell people that something was actually hot ?
my favorite warning was one on a five-inch fishing lure .
i grew up in the south and whiled away the summers fishing .
five-inch fishing lure , it 's a big fishing lure , with a three pronged hook in the back , and outside it said , " harmful if swallowed . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , none of these people are doing what they think is right .
and why not ? they do n't trust the law . why do n't they trust the law ?
because it gives us the worst of both worlds : it 's random - anybody can sue for almost anything and take it to a jury , not even an effort at consistency - and it 's also too detailed .
in the areas that are regulated , there are so many rules no human could possibly know it .
well how do you fix it ? we could spend 10,000 lifetimes trying to prune this legal jungle .
but the challenge here is not one of just amending the law , because the hurdle for success is trust .
people - for law to be the platform for freedom , people have to trust it .
so , that 's my second proposition : trust is an essential condition to a free society .
life is complicated enough without legal fear .
but law is different than other kinds of uncertainties , because it carries with it the power of state .
and so the state can come in .
it actually changes the way people think .
it 's like having a little lawyer on your shoulders all day long , whispering in your ear , " could that go wrong ? might that go wrong ? "
it drives people from the smart part of the brain - that dark , deep well of the subconscious , where instincts and experience , and all the other factors of creativity and good judgment are - it drives us to the thin veneer of conscious logic .
pretty soon the doctor 's saying , " well , i doubt if that headache could be a tumor , but who would protect me if it were ? so maybe i 'll just order the mri . "
then you 've wasted 200 billion dollars in unnecessary tests .
if you make people self-conscious about their judgments , studies show you will make them make worse judgments .
if you tell the pianist to think about how she 's hitting the notes when she 's playing the piece , she ca n't play the piece .
self-consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment .
edison stated it best . he said , " hell , we ai n't got no rules around here , we 're trying to accomplish something . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , how do you restore trust ?
tweaking the law 's clearly not good enough , and tort reform , which is a great idea , lowers your cost if you 're a businessperson , but it 's like a band-aid on this gaping wound of distrust .
states with extensive tort reform still suffer all these pathologies .
so , what 's needed is not just to limit claims , but actually create a dry ground of freedom .
it turns out that freedom actually has a formal structure .
and it is this : law sets boundaries , and on one side of those boundaries are all the things you ca n't do or must do - you ca n't steal , you 've got to pay your taxes - but those same boundaries are supposed to define and protect a dry ground of freedom .
isaiah berlin put it this way : " law sets frontiers , not artificially drawn , within which men shall be inviolable . "
we 've forgotten that second part .
those dikes have burst . people wade through law all day long .
so , what 's needed now is to rebuild these boundaries .
and it 's especially important to rebuild them for lawsuits .
because what people can sue for establishes the boundaries for everybody else 's freedom .
if someone brings a lawsuit over , " a kid fell off the seesaw , " it does n't matter what happens in the lawsuit , all the seesaws will disappear .
because no one will want to take the risk of a lawsuit .
and that 's what 's happened . there are no seesaws , jungle gyms , merry-go-rounds , climbing ropes , nothing that would interest a kid over the age of four , because there 's no risk associated with it .
so , how do we rebuild it ?
life is too complex for ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- life is too complex for a software program .
all these choices involve value judgments and social norms , not objective facts .
and so here is the fourth proposition .
this is what we have , the philosophy we have to change to .
and there are two essential elements of it : we have to simplify the law .
we have to migrate from all this complexity towards general principles and goals .
the constitution is only 16 pages long .
worked pretty well for 200 years .
law has to be simple enough so that people can internalize it in their daily choices .
if they ca n't internalize it , they wo n't trust it .
and how do you make it simple ?
because life is complex , and here is the hardest and biggest change : we have to restore the authority to judges and officials to interpret and apply the law .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we have to rehumanize the law .
to make law simple so that you feel free , the people in charge have to be free to use their judgment to interpret and apply the law in accord with reasonable social norms .
as you 're going down , and walking down the sidewalk during the day , you have to think that if there is a dispute , there 's somebody in society who sees it as their job to affirmatively protect you if you 're acting reasonably .
that person does n't exist today .
this is the hardest hurdle .
it 's actually not very hard . ninety-eight percent of cases , this is a piece of cake .
maybe you 've got a claim in small claims court for your lost pair of pants for $ 100 , but not in a court of general jurisdiction for millions of dollars .
case dismissed without prejudice or refiling in small claims court .
takes five minutes . that 's it , it 's not that hard .
but it 's a hard hurdle because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values : racism , gender discrimination , pollution - they were bad values . and we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore .
the problem is , we created a system where we eliminated the right to have good values .
it does n't mean that people in authority can do whatever they want .
they 're still bounded by legal goals and principles : the teacher is accountable to the principal , the judge is accountable to an appellate court , the president is accountable to voters .
but the accountability 's up the line judging the decision against the effect on everybody , not just on the disgruntled person .
you ca n't run a society by the lowest common denominator .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , what 's needed is a basic shift in philosophy .
we can pull the plug on a lot of this stuff if we shift our philosophy .
we 've been taught that authority is the enemy of freedom .
it 's not true . authority , in fact , is essential to freedom .
law is a human institution ; responsibility is a human institution .
if teachers do n't have authority to run the classroom , to maintain order , everybody 's learning suffers .
if the judge does n't have the authority to toss out unreasonable claims , then all of us go through the day looking over our shoulders .
if the environmental agency ca n't decide that the power lines are good for the environment , then there 's no way to bring the power from the wind farms to the city .
a free society requires red lights and green lights , otherwise it soon descends into gridlock .
that 's what 's happened to america . look around .
what the world needs now is to restore the authority to make common choices .
it 's the only way to get our freedom back , and it 's the only way to release the energy and passion needed so that we can meet the challenges of our time . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the world is changing with really remarkable speed .
if you look at the chart at the top here , you 'll see that in 2025 , these goldman sachs projections suggest that the chinese economy will be almost the same size as the american economy .
and if you look at the chart for 2050 , it 's projected that the chinese economy will be twice the size of the american economy , and the indian economy will be almost the same size as the american economy .
and we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the western financial crisis .
a couple of weeks ago , i was looking at the latest projection by bnp paribas for when china will have a larger economy than the united states .
goldman sachs projected 2027 .
the post-crisis projection is 2020 .
that 's just a decade away .
china is going to change the world in two fundamental respects .
first of all , it 's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people , which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year .
and within a decade , it will have the largest economy in the world .
never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country , rather than a developed country .
secondly , for the first time in the modern era , the dominant country in the world - which i think is what china will become - will be not from the west and from very , very different civilizational roots .
now , i know it 's a widespread assumption in the west that as countries modernize , they also westernize .
this is an illusion .
it 's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition , markets and technology .
it is not . it is also shaped equally by history and culture .
china is not like the west , and it will not become like the west .
it will remain in very fundamental respects very different .
now the big question here is obviously , how do we make sense of china ?
how do we try to understand what china is ?
and the problem we have in the west at the moment , by and large , is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in western terms , using western ideas .
we ca n't .
now i want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what china is like , just as a beginning .
the first is this : that china is not really a nation-state .
okay , it 's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years , but everyone who knows anything about china knows it 's a lot older than this .
this was what china looked like with the victory of the qin dynasty in 221 b.c. at the end of the warring-state period - the birth of modern china .
and you can see it against the boundaries of modern china .
or immediately afterward , the han dynasty , still 2,000 years ago .
and you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as eastern china , which is where the vast majority of chinese lived then and live now .
now what is extraordinary about this is , what gives china its sense of being china , what gives the chinese the sense of what it is to be chinese , comes not from the last hundred years , not from the nation-state period , which is what happened in the west , but from the period , if you like , of the civilization-state .
i 'm thinking here , for example , of customs like ancestral worship , of a very distinctive notion of the state , likewise , a very distinctive notion of the family , social relationships like guanxi , confucian values and so on .
these are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state .
in other words , china , unlike the western states and most countries in the world , is shaped by its sense of civilization , its existence as a civilization-state , rather than as a nation-state .
and there 's one other thing to add to this , and that is this : of course we know china 's big , huge , demographically and geographically , with a population of 1.3 billion people .
what we often are n't really aware of is the fact that china is extremely diverse and very pluralistic , and in many ways very decentralized .
you ca n't run a place on this scale simply from beijing , even though we think this to be the case .
it 's never been the case .
so this is china , a civilization-state , rather than a nation-state .
and what does it mean ?
well , i think it has all sorts of profound implications .
i 'll give you two quick ones .
the first is that the most important political value for the chinese is unity , is the maintenance of chinese civilization .
you know , 2,000 years ago , europe : breakdown - the fragmentation of the holy roman empire .
it divided , and it 's remained divided ever since .
china , over the same time period , went in exactly the opposite direction , very painfully holding this huge civilization , civilization-state , together .
the second is maybe more prosaic , which is hong kong .
do you remember the handover of hong kong by britain to china in 1997 ?
you may remember what the chinese constitutional proposition was .
one country , two systems .
and i 'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the west believed them .
" window dressing .
when china gets its hands on hong kong , that wo n't be the case . "
thirteen years on , the political and legal system in hong kong is as different now as it was in 1997 .
we were wrong . why were we wrong ?
we were wrong because we thought , naturally enough , in nation-state ways .
think of german unification , 1990 .
what happened ?
well , basically the east was swallowed by the west .
one nation , one system .
that is the nation-state mentality .
but you ca n't run a country like china , a civilization-state , on the basis of one civilization , one system .
it does n't work .
so actually the response of china to the question of hong kong - as it will be to the question of taiwan - was a natural response : one civilization , many systems .
let me offer you another building block to try and understand china - maybe not sort of a comfortable one .
the chinese have a very , very different conception of race to most other countries .
do you know , of the 1.3 billion chinese , over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race , the han ?
now , this is completely different from the world 's -lsb- other -rsb- most populous countries .
india , the united states , indonesia , brazil - all of them are multiracial .
the chinese do n't feel like that .
china is only multiracial really at the margins .
so the question is , why ?
well the reason , i think , essentially is , again , back to the civilization-state .
a history of at least 2,000 years , a history of conquest , occupation , absorption , assimilation and so on , led to the process by which , over time , this notion of the han emerged - of course , nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity .
now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that , without the han , china could never have held together .
the han identity has been the cement which has held this country together .
the great disadvantage of it is that the han have a very weak conception of cultural difference .
they really believe in their own superiority , and they are disrespectful of those who are not .
hence their attitude , for example , to the uyghurs and to the tibetans .
or let me give you my third building block , the chinese state .
now the relationship between the state and society in china is very different from that in the west .
now we in the west overwhelmingly seem to think - in these days at least - that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy .
the problem with this proposition is that the chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the chinese than is true with any western state .
and the reason for this is because - well , there are two reasons , i think .
and it 's obviously got nothing to do with democracy , because in our terms the chinese certainly do n't have a democracy .
and the reason for this is , firstly , because the state in china is given a very special - it enjoys a very special significance as the representative , the embodiment and the guardian of chinese civilization , of the civilization-state .
this is as close as china gets to a kind of spiritual role .
and the second reason is because , whereas in europe and north america , the state 's power is continuously challenged - i mean in the european tradition , historically against the church , against other sectors of the aristocracy , against merchants and so on - for 1,000 years , the power of the chinese state has not been challenged .
it 's had no serious rivals .
so you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in china is very different from our experience in western history .
the result , by the way , is that the chinese have a very different view of the state .
whereas we tend to view it as an intruder , a stranger , certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained , the chinese do n't see the state like that at all .
the chinese view the state as an intimate - not just as an intimate actually , as a member of the family - not just in fact as a member of the family , but as the head of the family , the patriarch of the family .
this is the chinese view of the state - very , very different to ours .
it 's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the west .
and i would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here , in the chinese context , is a new kind of paradigm , which is different from anything we 've had to think about in the past .
know that china believes in the market and the state .
i mean , adam smith , already writing in the late 18th century , said , " the chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in europe . "
and , apart from the mao period , that has remained more or less the case ever since .
but this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state .
the state is everywhere in china .
i mean , it 's leading firms - many of them are still publicly owned .
private firms , however large they are , like lenovo , depend in many ways on state patronage .
targets for the economy and so on are set by the state .
and the state , of course , its authority flows into lots of other areas - as we are familiar with - with something like the one-child policy .
moreover , this is a very old state tradition , a very old tradition of statecraft .
i mean , if you want an illustration of this , the great wall is one .
but this is another , this is the grand canal , which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century b.c.
and was finally completed in the seventh century a.d.
it went for 1,114 miles , linking beijing with hangzhou and shanghai .
so there 's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in china , which i suppose helps us to explain what we see today , which is something like the three gorges dam and many other expressions of state competence within china .
so there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is china - the civilization-state , the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society .
and yet we still insist , by and large , in thinking that we can understand china by simply drawing on western experience , looking at it through western eyes , using western concepts .
if you want to know why we unerringly seem to get china wrong - our predictions about what 's going to happen to china are incorrect - this is the reason .
unfortunately , i think , i have to say that i think attitude towards china is that of a kind of little westerner mentality .
it 's kind of arrogant .
it 's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best , and therefore we have the universal measure .
and secondly , it 's ignorant .
we refuse to really address the issue of difference .
you know , there 's a very interesting passage in a book by paul cohen , the american historian .
and paul cohen argues that the west thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures .
but it 's not .
in many ways , it 's the most parochial , because for 200 years , the west has been so dominant in the world that it 's not really needed to understand other cultures , other civilizations .
because , at the end of the day , it could , if necessary by force , get its own way .
whereas those cultures - virtually the rest of the world , in fact , which have been in a far weaker position , vis-a-vis the west - have been thereby forced to understand the west , because of the west 's presence in those societies .
and therefore , they are , as a result , more cosmopolitan in many ways than the west .
i mean , take the question of east asia .
east asia : japan , korea , china , etc . - a third of the world 's population lives there .
now the largest economic region in the world .
and i 'll tell you now , that east asianers , people from east asia , are far more knowledgeable about the west than the west is about east asia .
now this point is very germane , i 'm afraid , to the present .
because what 's happening ? back to that chart at the beginning , the goldman sachs chart .
what is happening is that , very rapidly in historical terms , the world is being driven and shaped , not by the old developed countries , but by the developing world .
we 've seen this in terms of the g20 usurping very rapidly the position of the g7 , or the g8 .
and there are two consequences of this .
first , the west is rapidly losing its influence in the world .
there was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago - copenhagen , climate change conference .
europe was not at the final negotiating table .
when did that last happen ?
i would wager it was probably about 200 years ago .
and that is what is going to happen in the future .
and the second implication is that the world will inevitably , as a consequence , become increasingly unfamiliar to us , because it 'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with , or conversant with .
and at last , i 'm afraid - take europe ; america is slightly different - but europeans by and large , i have to say , are ignorant , are unaware about the way the world is changing .
some people - i 've got an english friend in china , and he said , " the continent is sleepwalking into oblivion . "
well , maybe that 's true , maybe that 's an exaggeration .
but there 's another problem which goes along with this - that europe is increasingly out of touch with the world - and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future .
i mean , europe once , of course , once commanded the future in its confidence .
take the 19th century , for example .
but this , alas , is no longer true .
if you want to feel the future , if you want to taste the future , try china - there 's old confucius .
this is a railway station the likes of which you 've never seen before .
it does n't even look like a railway station .
this is the new -lsb- wuhan -rsb- railway station for the high-speed trains .
china already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together .
or take this : now this is an idea , but it 's an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of beijing .
here you have a megabus , on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people .
it travels on rails down a suburban road , and the cars travel underneath it .
and it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour .
now this is the way things are going to move , because china has a very specific problem , which is different from europe and different from the united states : china has huge numbers of people and no space .
so this is a solution to a situation where china 's going to have many , many , many cities over 20 million people .
okay , so how would i like to finish ?
well , what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us ?
i think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it .
but i want to argue , above all , a big-picture positive for this world .
for 200 years , the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population .
that 's what europe and north america represented .
the arrival of countries like china and india - between them 38 percent of the world 's population - and others like indonesia and brazil and so on , represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years .
civilizations and cultures , which had been ignored , which had no voice , which were not listened to , which were not known about , will have a different sort of representation in this world .
as humanists , we must welcome , surely , this transformation , and we will have to learn about these civilizations .
this big ship here was the one sailed in by zheng he in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the south china sea , the east china sea and across the indian ocean to east africa .
the little boat in front of it was the one in which , 80 years later , christopher columbus crossed the atlantic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or , look carefully at this silk scroll made by zhuzhou in 1368 .
i think they 're playing golf .
christ , the chinese even invented golf .
welcome to the future . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when we use the word " architect " or " designer , " what we usually mean is a professional , someone who gets paid , and we tend to assume that it 's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big , systemic design challenges that we face like climate change , urbanization and social inequality .
that 's our kind of working presumption .
and i think it 's wrong , actually .
in 2008 , i was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years , and go out and get a job , and this happened .
the economy ran out of jobs .
and a couple of things struck me about this .
one , do n't listen to career advisers .
and two , actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture , which is that , as a society , we 've never needed design thinking more , and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed .
it strikes me that we talk very deeply about design , but actually there 's an economics behind architecture that we do n't talk about , and i think we need to .
and a good place to start is your own paycheck .
so , as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate , i might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds .
that 's about 36,000 , 37,000 dollars .
now in terms of the whole world 's population , that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people , which raises the question of , who is it i 'm working for ?
the uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world 's population , and it always has been .
the reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when , actually , the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent , for various different reasons , whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century , communism in the early 20th , the welfare state , and most recently , of course , through this inflated real estate bubble .
and all of those booms , in their own various ways , have now kicked the bucket , and we 're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population .
now it 's not just that that 's bad for democracy , though i think it probably is , it 's actually not a very clever business strategy , actually .
i think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is , how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent ?
and i want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done .
the first is , i think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings .
actually , a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem .
and fundamentally , design should be much , much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions .
so here 's a story .
the office was working with a school , and they had an old victorian school building .
and they said to the architects , " look , our corridors are an absolute nightmare .
they 're far too small . they get congested between classes .
there 's bullying . we ca n't control them .
so what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building , and we know it 's going to cost several million pounds , but we 're reconciled to the fact . "
and the team thought about this , and they went away , and they said , " actually , do n't do that .
instead , get rid of the school bell .
and instead of having one school bell that goes off once , have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times , distribute the traffic through the corridors . "
it solves the same problem , but instead of spending several million pounds , you spend several hundred pounds .
now , it looks like you 're doing yourself out of a job , but you 're not . you 're actually making yourself more useful .
architects are actually really , really good at this kind of resourceful , strategic thinking .
and the problem is that , like a lot of design professions , we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product , and i do n't think that needs to be the case anymore .
the second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big - big buildings and big finance .
actually , we 've got ourselves locked into this industrial era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf , procuring whole neighborhoods in single , monolithic projects , and of course , form follows finance .
so what you end up with are single , monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model .
and a lot of people ca n't even afford them .
but what if , actually , it 's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit ?
and when they do , they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live .
and it raises really interesting questions about , how will we plan cities ? how will finance development ?
how will we sell design services ?
what would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build ?
and in a way it should be kind of obvious , right , that in the 21st century , maybe cities can be developed by citizens .
and thirdly , we need to remember that , from a strictly economic point of view , design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly - mostly it 's done by amateurs .
and that 's a good thing .
most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what 's called the social economy or the core economy , which is people doing it for themselves .
and the problem is that , up until now , it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools .
so the challenge we face is , how are we going to build the tools , the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture 's social economy ?
and that began with open-source software .
and over the last few years , it 's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware , which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves .
and that 's where 3d printing gets really , really interesting .
right ? when suddenly you had a 3d printer that was open-source , the parts for which could be made on another 3d printer .
or the same idea here , which is for a cnc machine , which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood .
what these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill .
they 're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it 's got to be one-size-fits-all .
and they 're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities .
we 're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere , and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone .
that really is an industrial revolution .
and when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production , and these technologies are coming back with a solution : actually , maybe no one . all of us .
and we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture .
so about a year and a half ago , we started working on a project called wikihouse , and wikihouse is an open-source construction system .
and the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online , access a freely shared library of 3d models which they can download and adapt in , at the moment , sketchup , because it 's free , and it 's easy to use , and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them , in effect , to print out the parts from a house using a cnc machine and a standard sheet material like plywood .
and the parts are all numbered , and basically what you end up with is a really big ikea kit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it goes together without any bolts .
it uses wedge and peg connections .
and even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well .
and a team of about two or three people , working together , can build this .
they do n't need any traditional construction skills .
they do n't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that , and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what 's cheap and what 's available .
of course , the house is never finished .
we 're shifting our heads here , so the house is not a finished product .
with the cnc machine , you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door .
so we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source , citizen-led urban development model , potentially .
and we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now , and some really interesting lessons here .
one of them is that it 's always incredibly sociable .
people get confused between construction work and having fun .
but the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane , physical details .
like , never designing a piece that ca n't be lifted up .
or , when you 're designing a piece , make sure you either ca n't put it in the wrong way round , or , if you do , it does n't matter , because it 's symmetrical .
probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by linus torvalds , the open-source pioneer , which was that idea of , " be lazy like a fox . "
do n't reinvent the wheel every time .
take what already works , and adapt it for your own needs .
contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school , copying is good .
which is appropriate , because actually , this approach is not innovative .
it 's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings .
the only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection , but it 's a really , really big difference .
we shared the whole of wikihouse under a creative commons license , and now what 's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it , and it 's amazing .
there 's a cool group over in christchurch in new zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing , and thanks to the ted city prize , we 're working with an awesome group in one of rio 's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university .
these are very , very small beginnings , and actually there 's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they 're not even on this map .
i hope next time you see it , you wo n't even be able to see the map .
we 're aware that wikihouse is a very , very small answer , but it 's a small answer to a really , really big question , which is that globally , right now , the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities .
they 're self-made cities in one form or another .
if we 're talking about the 21st-century city , these are the guys who are going to be making it .
you know , like it or not , welcome to the world 's biggest design team .
so if we 're serious about problems like climate change , urbanization and health , actually , our existing development models are n't going to do it .
as i think robert neuwirth said , there is n't a bank or a corporation or a government or an ngo who 's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers .
how extraordinary would it be , though , if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we 've been working on , but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning , off-grid energy , off-grid sanitation - low-cost , open-source , high-performance solutions that anyone can very , very easily make , and to put them all into a commons where they 're owned by everyone and they 're accessible by everyone ?
a kind of wikipedia for stuff ?
and once something 's in the commons , it will always be there .
how much would that change the rules ?
and i think the technology 's on our side .
if design 's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption - that was henry ford , levittown , coca-cola , ikea - i think design 's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production .
and when it comes to architecture in cities , that really matters .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you 've all seen lots of articles on climate change , and here 's yet another new york times article , just like every other darn one you 've seen .
it says all the same stuff as all the other ones you 've seen .
it even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you 've seen .
what 's unusual about this one , maybe , is that it 's from 1953 .
and the reason i 'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent .
that people have just sort of figured out about it , and now with kyoto and the governator and people beginning to actually do something , we may be on the road to a solution .
the fact is - uh-uh .
we 've known about this problem for 50 years , depending on how you count it .
we have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so .
and we 've accomplished close to zip .
this is the growth rate of co2 in the atmosphere .
you 've seen this in various forms , but maybe you have n't seen this one .
what this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating .
and that it 's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back .
so that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible , that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line .
but in fact , they 're growing faster .
here 's some data from actually just 10 days ago , which shows this year 's minimum of the arctic sea ice , and it 's the lowest by far .
and the rate at which the arctic sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models .
so despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel , and politicians signing treaties - in fact , you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative , because it 's just consumed a lot of jet fuel . -lrb- laughter -rrb- no , no ! in terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing - our big economy - we 've really hardly started .
really , we 're doing this , basically . really , not very much .
i do n't want to depress you too much .
the problem is absolutely soluble , and even soluble in a way that 's reasonably cheap .
cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military , not the cost of medical care .
cheap meaning a few percent of gdp .
no , this is really important to have this sense of scale .
so the problem is soluble , and the way we should go about solving it is , say , dealing with electricity production , which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of co2 emissions .
and we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation , and wind power , nuclear power and coal to co2 capture , which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment , and work .
all we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place .
instead , we spend our time talking .
but nevertheless , that 's not what i 'm going to talk to you about tonight .
what i 'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing .
and it 's this stuff in the middle here , which is what you do if you do n't stop the emissions quickly enough .
and you need to deal - somehow break the link between human actions that change climate , and the climate change itself . and that 's particularly important because , of course , while we can adapt to climate change - and it 's important to be honest here , there will be some benefits to climate change .
oh , yes , i think it 's bad . i 've spent my whole life working to stop it .
but one of the reasons it 's politically hard is there are winners and losers - not all losers .
but , of course , the natural world , polar bears .
i spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high arctic .
they will completely lose .
and there 's no adaption .
so this problem is absolutely soluble .
this geo-engineering idea , in it 's simplest form , is basically the following .
you could put signed particles , say sulfuric acid particles - sulfates - into the upper atmosphere , the stratosphere , where they 'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet .
and i know for certain that that will work .
not that there are n't side effects , but i know for certain it will work .
and the reason is , it 's been done .
and it was done not by us , not by me , but by nature .
here 's mount pinatubo in the early ' 90s . that put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud .
the result of that was pretty dramatic .
after that , and some previous volcanoes we have , you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere .
so this lower bar is the upper atmosphere , the stratosphere , and it heats up after these volcanoes .
but you 'll notice that in the upper bar , which is the lower atmosphere and the surface , it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit .
there 's no big mystery about it .
there 's lots of mystery in the details , and there 's some bad side effects , like it partially destroys the ozone layer - and i 'll get to that in a minute .
but it clearly cools down .
and one other thing : it 's fast .
it 's really important to say . so much of the other things that we ought to do , like slowing emissions , are intrinsically slow , because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions .
and not only that , when you cut emissions , you do n't cut concentrations , because concentrations , the amount of co2 in the air , is the sum of emissions over time .
so you ca n't step on the brakes very quickly .
but if you do this , it 's quick .
and there are times you might like to do something quick .
another thing you might wonder about is , does it work ?
can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added co2 , and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally ?
and the answer seems to be yes .
so here are the graphs you 've seen lots of times before .
that 's what the world looks like , under one particular climate model 's view , with twice the amount of co2 in the air .
the lower graph is with twice the amount of co2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight , and you 're back to the original climate .
and this graph from ken caldeira . it 's important to say came , because ken - at a meeting that i believe marty hoffart was also at in the mid- ' 90s - ken and i stood up at the back of the meeting and said , " geo-engineering wo n't work . "
and to the person who was promoting it said , " the atmosphere 's much more complicated . "
gave a bunch of physical reasons why it would n't do a very good compensation .
ken went and ran his models , and found that it did .
this topic is also old .
that report that landed on president johnson 's desk when i was two years old - 1965 .
that report , in fact , which had all the modern climate science - the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering .
it did n't even talk about cutting emissions , which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem .
i 'm not saying we should n't cut emissions .
we should , but it made exactly this point .
so , in a sense , there 's not much new .
the one new thing is this essay .
so i should say , i guess , that since the time of that original president johnson report , and the various reports of the u.s. national academy - 1977 , 1982 , 1990 - people always talked about this idea .
not as something that was foolproof , but as an idea to think about .
but when climate became , politically , a hot topic - if i may make the pun - in the last 15 years , this became so un-pc , we could n't talk about it .
it just sunk below the surface . we were n't allowed to speak about it .
but in the last year , paul crutzen published this essay saying roughly what 's all been said before : that maybe , given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts , we should think about things like this .
he said roughly what 's been said before .
the big deal was he happened to have won the nobel prize for ozone chemistry .
and so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this , even though there will be some ozone impacts .
and in fact , he had some ideas to make them go away .
there was all sorts of press coverage , all over the world , going right down to " dr. strangelove saves the earth , " from the economist .
and that got me thinking . i 've worked on this topic on and off , but not so much technically . and i was actually lying in bed thinking one night .
and i thought about this child 's toy - hence , the title of my talk - and i wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin ' round in the child 's radiometer , to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there .
one of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly .
the other problem is they 're right in the ozone layer , and i 'd prefer them above the ozone layer .
and it turns out , i woke up the next morning , and i started to calculate this .
it was very hard to calculate from first principles . i was stumped .
but then i found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere .
so it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere , about 100 kilometers up , that already have this effect .
i 'll tell you very quickly how the effect works .
there are a lot of fun complexities that i 'd love to spend the whole evening on , but i wo n't .
but let 's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it 's unevenly heated .
so the side facing the sun is warmer ; the side away , cooler .
gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it 's warm .
and so you see a net force away from the sun .
that 's called the photophoretic force .
there are a bunch of other versions of it that i and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit .
and of course , we may be wrong - this has n't all been peer reviewed , we 're in the middle of thinking about it - but so far , it seems good .
but it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes - much longer than before - because they 're levitated .
we can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere , in principle solving the ozone problem .
i 'm sure there will be other problems that arise .
finally , we could make the particles migrate to over the poles , so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles .
which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet , where we live , and do the maximum job of what we might need to do , which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency , if you like .
this is a new idea that 's crept up that may be , essentially , a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in .
whether this idea is right or some other idea is right , i think it 's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in .
that if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this , it 's amazing how we can affect the planet .
the one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage .
this improved science and engineering will , whether we like it or not , give us more and more leverage to affect the planet , to control the planet , to give us weather and climate control - not because we plan it , not because we want it , just because science delivers it to us bit by bit , with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it .
now , suppose that space aliens arrived .
maybe they 're going to land at the u.n. headquarters down the road here , or maybe they 'll pick a smarter spot - but suppose they arrive and they give you a box .
and the box has two knobs .
one knob is the knob for controlling global temperature .
maybe another knob is a knob for controlling co2 concentrations .
you might imagine that we would fight wars over that box .
because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs .
we have no global governance .
and different people will have different places they want it set .
now , i do n't think that 's going to happen . it 's not very likely .
but we 're building that box .
the scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece , in their labs .
even when they 're doing it for other reasons .
even when they 're thinking they 're just working on protecting the environment .
they have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet .
they develop science that makes it easier and easier to do .
and so i guess my view on this is not that i want to do it - i do not - but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously .
because sooner or later , we 'll be confronted with decisions about this , and it 's better if we think hard about it , even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it .
i 'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it .
but what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this .
we need a broader debate .
a debate that involves musicians , scientists , philosophers , writers , who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are .
so here 's one way to think about it , which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it 's cheaper .
i guess the thing i have n't said about this is , it is absurdly cheap .
it 's conceivable that , say , using the sulfates method or this method i 've come up with , you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of gdp .
it 's very cheap . we have a lot of leverage .
it 's not a good idea , but it 's just important . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll tell you how big the lever is : the lever is that big .
and that calculation is n't much in dispute .
you might argue about the sanity of it , but the leverage is real . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so because of this , we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions , and just as the concentrations go up , we can increase the amount of geo-engineering .
i do n't think anybody takes that seriously .
because under this scenario , we walk further and further away from the current climate .
we have all sorts of other problems , like ocean acidification that come from co2 in the atmosphere , anyway .
nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this .
but here 's a case which is harder to reject .
let 's say that we do n't do geo-engineering , we do what we ought to do , which is get serious about cutting emissions .
but we do n't really know how quickly we have to cut them .
there 's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much .
so let 's say that we work hard , and we actually do n't just tap the brakes , but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations .
and maybe someday - like 2075 , october 23 - we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side .
and we have global celebrations , and we 've actually started to - you know , we 've seen the worst of it .
but maybe on that day we also find that the greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast , fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years , and remove some of the biggest cities from the map .
that 's an absolutely possible scenario .
we might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy , that it 's a lot better than not geo-engineering .
and that 's a very different way to look at the problem .
it 's using this as risk control , not instead of action .
it 's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off , not that you 'd use it as a substitute for action .
but there is a problem with that view .
and the problem is the following : knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome , and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today .
this is what economists call a moral hazard .
and that 's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about , and , in general , i think it 's the underlying reason that it 's been politically unacceptable to talk about this .
but you do n't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer .
i 'll leave you with three questions , and then one final quote .
should we do serious research on this topic ?
should we have a national research program that looks at this ?
not just at how you would do it better , but also what all the risks and downsides of it are .
right now , you have a few enthusiasts talking about it , some in a positive side , some in a negative side - but that 's a dangerous state to be in because there 's very little depth of knowledge on this topic .
a very small amount of money would get us some .
many of us - maybe now me - think we should do that .
but i have a lot of reservations .
my reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem , and i do n't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard .
i think there is a serious problem : as you talk about this , people begin to think they do n't need to work so hard to cut emissions .
another thing is , maybe we need a treaty .
a treaty that decides who gets to do this .
right now we may think of a big , rich country like the u.s. doing this .
but it might well be that , in fact , if china wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable , they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this , and they may just decide they 'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world .
and we 'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision .
so here 's one last thought , which was said much , much better 25 years ago in the u.s. national academy report than i can say today .
and i think it really summarizes where we are here .
that the co2 problem , the climate problem that we 've heard about , is driving lots of things - innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions - but also , i think , inevitably , it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control , whether we like it or not .
and it 's time to begin thinking about it , even if the reason we 're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we should n't do it .
thank you very much .
i 'm going around the world giving talks about darwin , and usually what i 'm talking about is darwin 's strange inversion of reasoning .
now that title , that phrase , comes from a critic , an early critic , and this is a passage that i just love , and would like to read for you .
" in the theory with which we have to deal , absolute ignorance is the artificer ; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system , that , in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine , it is not requisite to know how to make it .
this proposition will be found on careful examination to express , in condensed form , the essential purport of the theory , and to express in a few words all mr. darwin 's meaning ; who , by a strange inversion of reasoning , seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in the achievements of creative skill . "
exactly . exactly . and it is a strange inversion .
a creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it : " test two : do you know of any building that did n't have a builder ? yes / no .
do you know of any painting that did n't have a painter ? yes / no .
do you know of any car that did n't have a maker ? yes / no .
if you answered ' yes ' for any of the above , give details . "
a-ha ! i mean , it really is a strange inversion of reasoning .
you would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer .
but darwin shows that it 's just false .
today , though , i 'm going to talk about darwin 's other strange inversion , which is equally puzzling at first , but in some ways just as important .
it stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet .
guys go for girls like this because they are sexy .
we adore babies because they 're so cute .
and , of course , we are amused by jokes because they are funny .
this is all backwards . it is . and darwin shows us why .
let 's start with sweet . our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector , because sugar is high energy , and it 's just been wired up to the preferer , to put it very crudely , and that 's why we like sugar .
honey is sweet because we like it , not " we like it because honey is sweet . "
there 's nothing intrinsically sweet about honey .
if you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind , you would n't see why they tasted sweet .
you have to look in our brains to understand why they 're sweet .
so if you think first there was sweetness , and then we evolved to like sweetness , you 've got it backwards ; that 's just wrong . it 's the other way round .
sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved .
and there 's nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies .
and it 's a good thing that there is n't , because if there were , then mother nature would have a problem : how on earth do you get chimps to mate ?
now you might think , ah , there 's a solution : hallucinations .
that would be one way of doing it , but there 's a quicker way .
just wire the chimps up to love that look , and apparently they do .
that 's all there is to it .
over six million years , we and the chimps evolved our different ways .
we became bald-bodied , oddly enough ; for one reason or another , they did n't .
if we had n't , then probably this would be the height of sexiness .
our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food .
it was n't designed for chocolate cake .
chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus .
the term is owed to niko tinbergen , who did his famous experiments with gulls , where he found that that orange spot on the gull 's beak - if he made a bigger , oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder .
it was a hyperstimulus for them , and they loved it .
what we see with , say , chocolate cake is it 's a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring .
and there are lots of supernormal stimuli ; chocolate cake is one .
there 's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness .
and there 's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness . here 's a pretty good example .
it 's important that we love babies , and that we not be put off by , say , messy diapers .
so babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing , and they do .
and , by the way , a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby .
so nature works on many levels here .
but now , if babies did n't look the way they do - if babies looked like this , that 's what we would find adorable , that 's what we would find - we would think , oh my goodness , do i ever want to hug that .
this is the strange inversion .
well now , finally what about funny . my answer is , it 's the same story , the same story .
this is the hard one , the one that is n't obvious . that 's why i leave it to the end .
and i wo n't be able to say too much about it .
but you have to think evolutionarily , you have to think , what hard job that has to be done - it 's dirty work , somebody 's got to do it - is so important to give us such a powerful , inbuilt reward for it when we succeed .
now , i think we 've found the answer - i and a few of my colleagues .
it 's a neural system that 's wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job .
our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging .
now i 'm not going to have time to spell it all out , but i 'll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward .
and what we 're doing is we 're using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off , by turning the knob on a joke - now it 's not funny ... oh , now it 's funnier ...
now we 'll turn a little bit more ... now it 's not funny - in this way , we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain , the functional architecture of the brain .
matthew hurley is the first author of this . we call it the hurley model .
he 's a computer scientist , reginald adams a psychologist , and there i am , and we 're putting this together into a book .
thank you very much .
this may sound strange , but i 'm a big fan of the concrete block .
the first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea : modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together .
very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world .
they enabled us to to build things that were larger than us , buildings , bridges , one brick at a time .
essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time .
almost a hundred years later in 1947 , lego came up with this .
it was called the automatic binding brick .
and in a few short years , lego bricks took place in every household .
it 's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced - or 75 bricks for every person on the planet .
you do n't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses , beautiful bridges , beautiful buildings .
lego made it accessible .
lego has essentially taken the concrete block , the building block of the world , and made it into the building block of our imagination .
meanwhile the exact same year , at bell labs the next revolution was about to be announced , the next building block .
the transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive .
like the concrete block , the transistor allows you to build much larger , more complex circuits , one brick at a time .
but there 's a main difference : the transistor was only for experts .
i personally do n't accept this , that the building block of our time is reserved for experts , so i decided to change that .
eight years ago when i was at the media lab , i started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers .
a few years ago i started developing littlebits .
let me show you how they work .
littlebits are electronic modules with each one specific function .
they 're pre-engineered to be light , sound , motors and sensors .
and the best part about it is they snap together with magnets .
so you ca n't put them the wrong way .
the bricks are color-coded .
green is output , blue is power , pink is input and orange is wire .
so all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits .
you put a blue to a green , you can make light .
you can put a knob in between and now you 've made a little dimmer .
switch out the knob for a pulse module , which is here , and now you 've made a little blinker .
add this buzzer for some extra punch and you 've created a noise machine .
i 'm going to stop that .
so beyond simple play , littlebits are actually pretty powerful .
instead of having to program , to wire , to solder , littlebits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures .
so to make this blink faster or slower , you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower .
the idea behind littlebits is that it 's a growing library .
we want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick .
lights , sounds , solar panels , motors - everything should be accessible .
we 've been giving littlebits to kids and seeing them play with them .
and it 's been an incredible experience .
the nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they do n't learn at schools .
for example , how a nightlight works , or why an elevator door stays open , or how an ipod responds to touch .
we 've also been taking littlebits to design schools .
so for example , we 've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littlebits as a material .
here you see , with felt and paper water bottles , we have geordie making ...
-lrb- clanging -rrb- -lrb- buzzing -rrb- a few weeks ago we took littlebits to risd and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever - just cardboard , wood and paper - and told them " make something . "
here 's an example of a project they made , a motion-activated confetti canon ball .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but wait , this is actually my favorite project .
it 's a lobster made of playdough that 's afraid of the dark .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- to these non-engineers , littlebits became another material , electronics became just another material .
and we want to make this material accessible to everyone .
so littlebits is open-source .
you can go on the website , download all the design files , make them yourself .
we want to encourage a world of creators , of inventors , of contributors , because this world that we live in , this interactive world , is ours .
so go ahead and start inventing .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how will we be remembered in 200 years ?
i happen to live in a little town , princeton , in new jersey , which every year celebrates the great event in princeton history : the battle of princeton , which was , in fact , a very important battle .
it was the first battle that george washington won , in fact , and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence .
it happened 225 years ago .
it was actually a terrible disaster for princeton .
the town was burned down ; it was in the middle of winter , and it was a very , very severe winter .
and about a quarter of all the people in princeton died that winter from hunger and cold , but nobody remembers that .
what they remember is , of course , the great triumph , that the brits were beaten , and we won , and that the country was born .
and so i agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered .
it 's the child that 's remembered .
and that 's what we 're going through at this time .
i wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology , because i think i know very little about that - i 'm not a biologist - so everything i know about it can be said in one minute .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm saying is that we should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry , that what really turned computers into a great success , in the world as a whole , is toys . as soon as computers became toys , when kids could come home and play with them , then the industry really took off . and that has to happen with biotech .
there 's a huge - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - there 's a huge community of people in the world who are practical biologists , who are dog breeders , pigeon breeders , orchid breeders , rose breeders , people who handle biology with their hands , and who are dedicated to producing beautiful things , beautiful creatures , plants , animals , pets . these people will be empowered with biotech , and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology .
that will blow away a lot of the opposition .
when people have this technology in their hands , you have a do-it-yourself biotech kit , grow your own - grow your dog , grow your own cat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- just buy the software , you design it . i wo n't say anymore , you can take it on from there . it 's going to happen , and i think it has to happen before the technology becomes natural , becomes part of the human condition , something that everybody 's familiar with and everybody accepts .
so , let 's leave that aside .
i want to talk about something quite different , which is what i know about , and that is astronomy .
and i 'm interested in searching for life in the universe .
and it 's open to us to introduce a new way of doing that , and that 's what i 'll talk about for 10 minutes , or whatever the time remains .
the important fact is , that most of the real estate that 's accessible to us - i 'm not talking about the stars , i 'm talking about the solar system , the stuff that 's within reach for spacecraft and within reach of our earthbound telescopes - most of the real estate is very cold and very far from the sun .
if you look at the solar system , as we know it today , it has a few planets close to the sun . that 's where we live .
it has a fairly substantial number of asteroids between the orbit of the earth out through - to the orbit of jupiter .
the asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate , but not very large . and it 's not very promising for life , since most of it consists of rock and metal , mostly rock .
it 's not only cold , but very dry .
so the asteroids we do n't have much hope for .
there stand some interesting places a little further out : the moons of jupiter and saturn .
particularly , there 's a place called europa , which is - europa is one of the moons of jupiter , where we see a very level ice surface , which looks as if it 's floating on top of an ocean .
so , we believe that on europa there is , in fact , a deep ocean .
and that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore .
ocean - probably the most likely place for life to originate , just as it originated on the earth . so we would love to explore europa , to go down through the ice , find out who is swimming around in the ocean , whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters - whatever there may be that 's exciting - or cephalopods .
but that 's hard to do . unfortunately , the ice is thick .
we do n't know just how thick it is , probably miles thick , so it 's very expensive and very difficult to go down there - send down your submarine or whatever it is - and explore .
that 's something we do n't yet know how to do .
there are plans to do it , but it 's hard .
go out a bit further , you 'll find that beyond the orbit of neptune , way out , far from the sun , that 's where the real estate really begins .
you 'll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which , in what we call the kuiper belt or the oort cloud - these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the sun . mostly , they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system , but they are biologically very interesting indeed , because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals , which are just the right ones for developing life .
so if life could be established out there , it would have all the essentials - chemistry and sunlight - everything that 's needed .
so , what i 'm proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life , rather than on mars , although mars is , of course , also a very promising and interesting place .
but we can look outside , very cheaply and in a simple fashion .
and that 's what i 'm going to talk about .
there is a - imagine that life originated on europa , and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years .
it 's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface , just as it did on the earth .
staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for 2 billion years , finally came out onto the land . and then of course it had great - much greater freedom , and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean .
and the step from the ocean to the land was not easy , but it happened .
now , if life had originated on europa in the ocean , it could also have moved out onto the surface .
there would n't have been any air there - it 's a vacuum .
it is out in the cold , but it still could have come .
you can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice , growing on the surface .
what would they need in order to grow on the surface ?
they 'd need , first of all , to have a thick skin to protect themselves from losing water through the skin .
so they would have to have something like a reptilian skin .
but better - what is more important is that they would have to concentrate sunlight .
the sunlight in jupiter , on the satellites of jupiter , is 25 times fainter than it is here , since jupiter is five times as far from the sun .
so they would have to have - these creatures , which i call sunflowers , which i imagine living on the surface of europa , would have to have either lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight , so they could keep themselves warm on the surface .
otherwise , they would be at a temperature of minus 150 , which is certainly not favorable for developing life , at least of the kind we know .
but if they just simply could grow , like leaves , little lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight , then they could keep warm on the surface .
they could enjoy all the benefits of the sunlight and have roots going down into the ocean ; life then could flourish much more .
so , why not look ? of course , it 's not very likely that there 's life on the surface of europa .
none of these things is likely , but my , my philosophy is , look for what 's detectable , not for what 's probable .
there 's a long history in astronomy of unlikely things turning out to be there . and i mean , the finest example of that was radio astronomy as a whole .
this was - originally , when radio astronomy began , mr. jansky , at the bell labs , detected radio waves coming from the sky .
and the regular astronomers were scornful about this .
they said , " it 's all right , you can detect radio waves from the sun , but the sun is the only object in the universe that 's close enough and bright enough actually to be detectable . you can easily calculate that radio waves from the sun are fairly faint , and everything else in the universe is millions of times further away , so it certainly will not be detectable .
so there 's no point in looking . "
and that , of course , that set back the progress of radio astronomy by about 20 years .
since there was nothing there , you might as well not look .
well , of course , as soon as anybody did look , which was after about 20 years , when radio astronomy really took off . because it turned out the universe is absolutely full of all kinds of wonderful things radiating in the radio spectrum , much brighter than the sun .
so , the same thing could be true for this kind of life , which i 'm talking about , on cold objects : that it could in fact be very abundant all over the universe , and it 's not been detected just because we have n't taken the trouble to look .
so , the last thing i want to talk about is how to detect it .
there is something called pit lamping .
that 's the phrase which i learned from my son george , who is there in the audience .
you take - that 's a canadian expression .
if you happen to want to hunt animals at night , you take a miner 's lamp , which is a pit lamp .
you strap it onto your forehead , so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal . so , if you go out at night , you shine a flashlight , the animals are bright .
you see the red glow in their eyes , which is the reflection of the flashlight .
and then , if you 're one of these unsporting characters , you shoot the animals and take them home .
and of course , that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime , so in canada that 's illegal . in new zealand , it 's legal , because the new zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits , because the rabbits compete with the sheep in new zealand .
so , the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps , and shine the headlights , and anything that does n't look like a sheep , you shoot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i have proposed to apply the same trick to looking for life in the universe .
that if these creatures who are living on cold surfaces - either on europa , or further out , anywhere where you can live on a cold surface - those creatures must be provided with reflectors .
in order to concentrate sunlight , they have to have lenses and mirrors - in order to keep themselves warm .
and then , when you shine sunlight at them , the sunlight will be reflected back , just as it is in the eyes of an animal .
so these creatures will be bright against the cold surroundings .
and the further out you go in this , away from the sun , the more powerful this reflection will be . so actually , this method of hunting for life gets stronger and stronger as you go further away , because the optical reflectors have to be more powerful so the reflected light shines out even more in contrast against the dark background .
so as you go further away from the sun , this becomes more and more powerful .
so , in fact , you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the earth .
why are n't we doing it ? simply because nobody thought of it yet .
but i hope that we shall look , and with any - we probably wo n't find anything , none of these speculations may have any basis in fact .
but still , it 's a good chance . and of course , if it happens , it will transform our view of life altogether .
because it means that - the way life can live out there , it has enormous advantages as compared with living on a planet .
it 's extremely hard to move from one planet to another .
we 're having great difficulties at the moment and any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck .
especially if you breathe air , it 's very hard to get from planet a to planet b , because there 's no air in between . but if you breathe air - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you 're dead - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - as soon as you 're off the planet , unless you have a spaceship .
but if you live in a vacuum , if you live on the surface of one of these objects , say , in the kuiper belt , this - an object like pluto , or one of the smaller objects in the neighborhood of pluto , and you happened - if you 're living on the surface there , and you get knocked off the surface by a collision , then it does n't change anything all that much .
you still are on a piece of ice , you can still have sunlight and you can still survive while you 're traveling from one place to another .
and then if you run into another object , you can stay there and colonize the other object . so life will spread , then , from one object to another . so if it exists at all in the kuiper belt , it 's likely to be very widespread . and you will have then a great competition amongst species - darwinian evolution - so there 'll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision . and there 'll be advantages for spreading out long , sort of kelp-like forest of vegetation .
i call these creatures sunflowers .
they look like , maybe like sunflowers .
they have to be all the time pointing toward the sun , and they will be able to spread out in space , because gravity on these objects is weak .
so they can collect sunlight from a big area .
so they will , in fact , be quite easy for us to detect .
so , i hope in the next 10 years , we 'll find these creatures , and then , of course , our whole view of life in the universe will change .
if we do n't find them , then we can create them ourselves .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's another wonderful opportunity that 's opening .
we can - as soon as we have a little bit more understanding of genetic engineering , one of the things you can do with your take-it-home , do-it-yourself genetic engineering kit - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - is to design a creature that can live on a cold satellite , a place like europa , so we could colonize europa with our own creatures .
that would be a fun thing to do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in the long run , of course , it would also make it possible for us to move out there .
what 's going to happen in the end , it 's not going to be just humans colonizing space , it 's going to be life moving out from the earth , moving it into its kingdom . and the kingdom of life , of course , is going to be the universe . and if life is already there , it makes it much more exciting , in the short run .
but in the long run , if there 's no life there , we create it ourselves .
we transform the universe into something much more rich and beautiful than it is today .
so again , we have a big and wonderful future to look forward .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- just to put everything in context , and to kind of give you a background to where i 'm coming from , so that a lot of the things i 'm going to say , and the things i 'm going to do - or things i 'm going to tell you i 've done - you will understand exactly why and how i got motivated to be where i am .
i graduated high school in cleveland , ohio , 1975 .
and just like my parents did when they finished studying abroad , we went back home .
finished university education , got a medical degree , 1986 .
and by the time i was an intern house officer , i could barely afford to maintain my mother 's 13-year-old car - and i was a paid doctor .
this brings us to why a lot of us , who are professionals , are now , as they say , in diaspora .
now , are we going to make that a permanent thing , where we all get trained , and we leave , and we do n't go back ?
perhaps not , i should certainly hope not - because that is not my vision .
all right , for good measure , that 's where nigeria is on the african map , and just there is the delta region that i 'm sure everybody 's heard of .
people getting kidnapped , where the oil comes from , the oil that sometimes i think has driven us all crazy in nigeria .
but , critical poverty : this slide is from a presentation i gave not that long ago . gapminder.org tells the story of the gap between africa and the rest of the world in terms of health care .
very interesting .
how many people do you think are on that taxi ?
and believe it or not , that is a taxi in nigeria .
and the capital - well , what used to be the capital of nigeria - lagos , that 's a taxi , and you have police on them .
so , tell me , how many policemen do you think are on this taxi ? and now ? three .
so , when these kind of people - and , believe me , it 's not just the police that use these taxis in lagos . we all do . i 've been on one of these , and i did n't have a helmet , either .
and it just reminds me of the thought of what happens when one of us on a taxi like this falls off , has an accident and needs a hospital .
believe it or not , some of us do survive .
some of us do survive malaria ; we do survive aids .
and like i tell my family , and my wife reminds me every time , " you 're risking your life , you know , every time you go to that country . "
and she 's right . every time you go there , you know that if you actually need critical care - critical care of any sort - if you have an accident - of which there are many , there are accidents everywhere - where do they go ?
where do they go when they need help for this kind of stuff ?
i 'm not saying instead of , i 'm saying as well as , aids , tb , malaria , typhoid - the list goes on .
i 'm saying , where do they go when they 're like me ?
when i go back home - and i do all kinds of things , i teach , i train - but i catch one of these things , or i 'm chronically ill with one of those , where do they go ?
what 's the economic impact when one of them dies or becomes disabled ?
i think it 's quite significant . this is where they go .
these are not old pictures and these are not from some downtrodden - this is a major hospital . in fact , it 's from a major teaching hospital in nigeria .
now that is less than a year old , in an operating room .
that 's sterilizing equipment in nigeria .
you remember all that oil ?
yes , i 'm sorry if it upsets some of you , but i think you need to see this . that 's the floor , ok ?
you can say some of this is education .
you can say it 's hygiene . i 'm not pleading poverty .
i 'm saying we need more than just , you know , vaccination , malaria , aids , because i want to be treated in a proper hospital if something happens to me out there .
in fact , when i start running around saying , " hey , boys and girls , you 're cardiologists in the u.s. , can you come home with me and do a mission ? "
i want them to think , " well there 's some hope . "
now , have a look at that . that 's the anesthesiology machine .
and that 's my specialty , right ?
anesthesiology and critical care - look at that bag .
it 's been taped with tape that we even stopped using in the u.k.
and believe me , these are current pictures .
now , if something like this , which has happened in the u.k. , that 's where they go . this is the intensive care unit in which i work .
all right , this is a slide from a talk i gave about intensive care units in nigeria , and jokingly we refer to it as " expensive scare . "
because it 's scary and it 's expensive , but we need to have it , ok ?
so , these are the problems .
there are no prizes for telling us what the problems are , are there ?
i think we all know . and several speakers before and speakers after me are going to tell us even more problems .
these are a few of them . so , what did i do ?
there we go - we 're going on a mission .
we 're going to do some open-heart surgery . i was the only brit , on a team of about nine american cardiac surgeons , cardiac nurse , intensive care nurse .
we all went out and did a mission and we 've done three of them so far .
just so you know , i do believe in missions , i do believe in aid and i do believe in charity . they have their place , but where do they go for those things we talked about earlier ?
because it 's not everyone that 's going to benefit from a mission .
health is wealth , in the words of hans rosling .
you get wealthier faster if you are healthy first .
so , here we are , mission . big trouble .
open-heart surgery in nigeria - big trouble .
that 's mike , mike comes out from mississippi .
does he look like he 's happy ?
it took us two days just to organize the place , but hey , you know , we worked on it . does he look happy ?
yes , that 's the medical advice the committee chairman says , " yes , i told you , you were n't going to be able to , you ca n't do this , i just know it . "
look , that 's the technician we had . so yes , you go on , all right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i got him to come with me - anesthesia tech - come with me from the u.k.
yes , let 's just go work this thing out .
see , that 's one of the problems we have in nigeria and in africa generally .
we get a lot of donated equipment .
equipment that 's obsolete , equipment that does n't quite work , or it works and you ca n't fix it . and there 's nothing wrong with that , so long as we use it and we move on .
but we had problems with it . we had severe problems there .
he had to get on the phone . this guy was always on the phone .
so what we going to do now ?
it looks like all these americans are here and yes , one brit , and he 's not going to do anything - he thinks he 's british actually , and he 's actually nigerian , i just thought about that .
we eventually got it working , is the truth , but it was one of these . even older than the one you saw .
the reason i have this picture here , this x-ray , it 's just to tell you where and how we were viewing x-rays .
do you figure where that is ? it was on a window .
i mean , what 's an x-ray viewing box ? please .
well , nowadays everything 's on pax anyway .
you look at your x-rays on a screen and you do stuff with them , you email them . but we were still using x-rays , but we did n't even have a viewing box !
and we were doing open-heart surgery .
ok , i know it 's not aids , i know it 's not malaria , but we still need this stuff . oh yeah , echo - this was just to get the children ready and the adults ready .
people still believe in voodoo . heart disease , vsd , hole in the heart , tetralogies .
you still get people who believe in it and they came .
at 67 percent oxygen saturation , the normal is about 97 .
her condition , open-heart surgery that as she required , would have been treated when she was a child .
we had to do these for adults . so , we did succeed and we still do .
we 've done three . we 're planning another one in july in the north of the country . so , we certainly still do open-heart , but you can see the contrast between everything that was shipped in - we ship everything , instruments . we had explosions because the kit was designed and installed by people who were n't used to it .
the oxygen tanks did n't quite work right .
but how many did we do the first one ? 12 .
we did 12 open-heart surgical patients successfully .
here is our very first patient , out of intensive care , and just watch that chair , all right ?
this is what i mean about appropriate technology .
that 's what he was doing , propping up the bed because the bed simply did n't work .
have you seen one of those before ?
no ? yes ? does n't matter , it worked .
i 'm sure you 've all seen or heard this before : " we , the willing , have been doing so much with so little for so long - -lrb- applause -rrb- - we are now qualified to do anything with nothing . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . sustainable solutions - this was my first company .
this one 's sole aim is to provide the very things that i think are missing .
so , we put my hand in my pocket and say , " guys , let 's just buy stuff .
let 's go set up a company that teaches people , educates them , gives them the tools they need to keep going . "
and that 's a perfect example of one .
usually when you buy a ventilator in a hospital , you buy a different one for children , you buy a different one for transport . this one will do everything , and it will do it at half the price and does n't need compressed air .
if you 're in america and you do n't know about this one , we do , because we make it our duty to find out what 's appropriate technology for africa - what 's appropriately priced , does the job , and we move on . anesthesia machine : multi-parameter monitor , operating lights , suction .
this little unit here - remember your little 12-volt plug in the car , that charges your , whatever , game boy , telephone ?
that 's exactly how the outlets are designed .
yes , it will take a solar panel . yes a solar panel will charge it .
but if you 've got mains as well , it will charge the batteries in there .
and guess what ? we have a little pedal charger too , just in case .
and guess what , if it all fails , if you can find a car that 's still got a live battery and you stick it in , it will still work . then you can customize it .
is it dental surgery you want ? general surgery you want ?
decide which instruments , stock it up with consumables .
and currently we 're working on oxygen - oxygen delivery on-site .
the technology for oxygen delivery is not new .
oxygen concentrators are very old technology . what is new , and what we will have in a few months , i hope , is that ability to use this same renewable energy system to provide and produce oxygen on site . zeolite - it 's not new - zeolite removes nitrogen from air and nitrogen is 78 percent of air .
if you take nitrogen out , what 's left ? oxygen , pretty much .
so that 's not new . what we 're doing is applying this technology to it .
these are the basic features of my device , or our device .
this is what makes it so special .
apart from the awards it 's won , it 's portable and it 's certified . it 's registered , the mhra - and the ce mark , for those who do n't know , for europe , is the equivalent of the fda in the u.s.
if you compare it with what 's on the market , price-wise , size-wise , ease of use , complexity ...
this picture was taken last year .
these are members of my graduating class , 1986 .
it was in this gentleman 's house in the potomac , for those of you who are familiar with maryland .
there are too many of us outside and everybody , just to borrow a bit from hans - hans rosling , he 's my guy - if the size of the text represents what gets the most attention , it 's the problems . but what we really need are african solutions that are appropriate for africa - looking at the culture , looking at the people , looking at how much money they 've got .
african people , because they will do it with a passion , i hope .
and lots and lots of that little bit down there , sacrifice .
you have to do it . africans have to do it , in conjunction with everyone else .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this talk is about righting writing wrongs .
no , the sound 's not faulty - righting writing wrongs .
the middle east is huge , and with all our problems , one thing 's for sure : we love to laugh .
i think humor is a great way to celebrate our differences .
we need to take our responsibilities seriously , but not ourselves .
do n't get me wrong : it 's not like we do n't have comedy in the middle east .
i grew up at a time when iconic actors from kuwait , syria , egypt used laughter to unite the region , just as football can .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now is the time for us to laugh at ourselves , before others can laugh with us .
this is the story of the rise and rise of stand-up comedy in the middle east - a stand-up uprising , if you will .
working in london as tv maker and writer , i quickly realized that comedy connects audiences .
now , the best breeding ground for good comic writing is the stand-up comedy circuit , where they just happen to say that you kill when you do well and you bomb when you do badly .
an unfortunate connection for us maybe , but it reminds me that we 'd like to thank one man for , over the past decade , working tirelessly to support comedians all around the world , specifically comedians with a middle eastern background .
-lrb- applause -rrb- like my good friends , dean and maysoon , at the bottom of the screen , who , two years after 9/11 , started a festival to change the way middle easterners are perceived in the world .
it 's still going strong , with positive press to die for .
also , three guys working for years in los angeles , an iranian , a palestinian and an egyptian , created the aptly named axis of evil comedy act .
and wherever they went , they killed .
now , i did n't start this fire , but i did pour petrol on it .
i moved to dubai as the head of original content for a western tv network .
my job was to connect the brand with a middle eastern audience .
now , the american head of programming wanted new local arabic comedy .
in a thick arabic accent , my brain went , " berfect . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i had friends in the u.s.
who had started a successful new tribe .
and i had every intention of taking this tribe from being outliers in the middle east towards success .
now , as with any new idea , it was n't easy .
i had four phases to this plan .
first , we 'd need to buy content from the west and air it .
then i 'd bring my friends , and we 'd show local amateurs how it 's done .
we would film that and air it , and then i could work with the local amateurs and write new comedy .
i excitedly presented this to the big boss , and his reaction was , " um , i do n't get it . "
so i retreated back to my cave and continued to support and produce comedy and let my friends use my couch as a regional operations hub .
now , fast forward two years , to early 2007 .
the earth rotated , as did our management , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and as if by divine intervention , things came together to help this revolution take shape .
here 's how the dots connected .
first , the axis guys recorded a comedy central special that aired in the states , and it was getting great hits on youtube .
our new french ceo believed in the power of positive pr ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and ideas du bon marche .
let 's just say " value for money . "
i produced in dubai a show for ahmed ahmed to showcase his new axis special to a packed room .
i invited our new ceo , and as soon as he realized we had a room packed full of laughing infidels , his reaction was very simple : " let 's make this happen .
and one more thing : no , do n't f it up . "
so i quickly went to work with a great team around me .
i happened to find a funny guy to present it in arabic , who is originally korean , a perfect fit for the axis of evil .
this is all true .
now , while preparing for the tour , i had to remind the guys to be culturally sensitive .
i used the three bs of stand-up do n'ts as i call them in the middle east : blue content , keep it clean ; beliefs , not religion ; and the third b , bolitics .
stay away from bolitics in the middle east .
oh course , you might think , what 's left without bolitics , sex and religion , how can you make people laugh ?
i 'd say , watch any successful well-written , family-friendly sitcom in the west for your answers .
now , were the axis successful ?
in five countries , in just under a month , we had thousands of fanatical fans come and see them live .
we had millions see them on tv and on tv news .
in jordan , we had his majesty the king come and see them .
in fact , they were so successful that you could buy a pirated copy of their dvd , even before it was released in the middle east .
anywhere you go .
so everywhere we went , we auditioned amateurs .
we filmed that process and aired a documentary .
i called it " three guys and wonho . "
it really is his name .
and all this tv and internet exposure has led to a great many recruits to our cause .
in dubai this year , we 've just had the first all-women 's , homegrown stand-up show .
and notice two of them are wearing headscarves , and yes , even they can laugh .
dubai , to me , is like a hand that supports anyone who wants to make things happen .
20 years ago , no one had heard of it .
look at it now .
with an inspirational leader , i think this year , the opening of the tallest tower in the world is like adding a finger to that hand , that points at all those who spread fallacious stories about us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , in three short years , we 've come a long way with stand-up comedy shows happening even in saudi arabia .
these comics are now going to the new york festival .
and the lebanese , brilliant lebanese , nemr abou nassar , we featured in our first tour , has just been performing in l.a. 's legendary comedy clubs .
so clearly , from the inside , we are doing our best to change our image , and it 's exploding .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , as for the outsiders looking in , watch the cnn report on the second amman comedy festival .
the reporter did a great job , and i thank her , but somebody forgot to send the positive pr email to the person operating the automatic news ticker that appears at the bottom .
for example , when dean talks , the ticker says , " u.s. : suspect gave ' actionable intel . "
well , if you 're used to listening to comedians , then i 'm not surprised .
sadly , this leads me to another three bs that represents how the media in the west talks about us as bombers , billionaires and belly dancers .
enough .
we 're not all angry fanatics who want to kill the infidel .
we have a positive story to tell and image to sell .
in fact , one thing 's for sure , in my experience , we love to laugh like hell .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here are three questions that i like to use to test the truthiness of our representation in any media story .
one : is the middle east being shown in a current time and correct context ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- two : do the middle eastern characters laugh or smile without showing the whites of their eyes ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- three : is the middle eastern character being played by one ?
clearly , there are wrongs that need to be righted .
we 've started in our region .
my challenge to the rest of the world is please , start using positive middle eastern images in your stories .
for inspiration , go to one of our festivals , go online , drop us a line .
let 's change the narrative together and let 's start righting writing wrongs .
i 'd like to end , before going back to the middle east , with a quote from one of the greatest sheikhs to put quill to parchment .
as my father likes to call him , " asheikh azubare ; " as my mother would say , " shakespeare . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and now we go in content to liberty and not to banishment . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- skateboard sounds -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , that 's what i 've done with my life . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- as a kid , i grew up on a farm in florida , and i did what most little kids do .
i played a little baseball , did a few other things like that , but i always had the sense of being an outsider , and it was n't until i saw pictures in the magazines that a couple other guys skate , i thought , " wow , that 's for me , " you know ?
because there was no coach standing directly over you , and these guys , they were just being themselves .
there was no opponent directly across from you .
and i loved that sense , so i started skating when i was about 10 years old , in 1977 , and when i did , i picked it up pretty quickly .
in fact , here 's some footage from about 1984 .
it was n't until ' 79 i won my first amateur championship , and then , by ' 81 , i was 14 , and i won my first world championship , which was amazing to me , and in a very real sense , that was the first real victory i had .
oh , watch this .
this is a casper slide , where the board 's upside down .
mental note on that one . -lrb- laughs -rrb- and this one here ? an ollie .
so , as she mentioned , that is overstated for sure , but that 's why they called me the godfather of modern street skating .
here 's some images of that .
now , i was about halfway through my pro career in , i would say , the mid- ' 80s .
freestyle itself , we developed all these flat ground tricks as you saw , but there was evolving a new kind of skateboarding , where guys were taking it to the streets , and they were using that ollie , like i showed you ? they were using it to get up onto stuff like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells and all kinds of cool stuff .
so it was evolving upwards .
in fact , when someone tells you they 're a skater today , they pretty much mean a street skater , because freestyle , it took about five years for it to die , and at that stage , i 'd been a " champion " champion for 11 years , which , phew !
and suddenly it was over for me . that 's it .
it was gone . they took my pro model off the shelf , which was essentially pronouncing you dead publicly .
that 's how you make your money , you know ?
you have a signature board and wheels and shoes and clothes . i had all that stuff , and it 's gone .
the crazy thing was , there was a really liberating sense about it , because i no longer had to protect my record as a champion . " champion , " again .
champion sounds so goofy , but it 's what it was , right ?
and i got to - what drew me to skateboarding , the freedom was now restored , where i could just create things , because that 's where the joy was for me , always , was creating new stuff .
the other thing that i had was a deep well of tricks to draw from that were rooted in these flat ground tricks .
stuff the normal guys were doing was very much different .
so , as humbling and rotten as it was - and believe me , it was rotten . i would go to skate spots , and i was already , like , " famous guy , " right ?
and everyone thought i was good . but in this new terrain , i was horrible . so people would go , " oh , he 's all - oh , what happened to mullen ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughs -rrb- so , humbling as it was , i began again .
here are some tricks that i started to bring to that new terrain . -lrb- skateboard noises -rrb- and again , there 's this undergirding layer of influence of freestyle that made me - oh , that one ?
that 's , like , the hardest thing i 've ever done .
okay , look at that . it 's a darkslide .
see how it 's sliding on the backside ?
those are super-fun . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and , actually , not that hard .
you know , at the very root of that , see , caspers , see how you throw it ? -lrb- skateboard noises -rrb- simple as that , right ? no biggie . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and your front foot , the way it grabs it , is - i 'd seen someone slide on the back of the board like that , and i was like , " how can i get it over ? "
because that had not yet been done . and then it dawned on me , and here 's part of what i 'm saying .
i had an infrastructure . i had this deep layer , where it was like , oh my gosh , it 's just your foot .
it 's just the way you throw your board over .
just let the ledge do that , and it 's easy , and the next thing you know , there 's 20 more tricks based out of the variations .
so that 's the kind of thing that , here , check this out , here 's another way , and i wo n't overdo this .
a little indulgent , i understand .
there 's something called a primo slide .
-lrb- skateboard noises -rrb- it is the funnest trick ever to do .
-lrb- skateboard noises -rrb- it 's like skinboarding .
and this one , look how it slides sideways , every which way ?
okay , so when you 're skating , and you take a fall , the board slips that way or that way . it 's kind of predictable .
this ? it goes every which way . it 's like a cartoon , the falls , and that 's what i love the most about it .
it 's so much fun to do . in fact , when i started doing them , i remember , because i got hurt . i had to get a knee surgery , right ? so there were a couple of days where , actually a couple of weeks , where i could n't skate at all .
it would give out on me . and i would watch the guys , i 'd go to this warehouse where a lot of the guys were skating , my friends , and i was like , " man i gotta do something new . i want to do something new .
i want to start fresh . i want to start fresh . "
and so the night before my surgery , i 'd watched , and i was like , " how am i going to do this ? "
so i ran up , and i jumped on my board , and i cavemanned , and i flipped it down , and i remember thinking , i landed so light-footed , thinking , if my knee gives , they 'll just have more work to do in the morning .
-lrb- laughs -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , when it was the crazy thing .
i do n't know how many of you guys have had surgery , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you are so helpless , right ?
you 're on this gurney and you 're watching the ceiling go by , every time it 's always that , and right when they 're putting the mask on you before you go to sleep , all i was thinking is , " man , when i wake up and i get better , the first thing i 'm going to do is film that trick . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and indeed i did . it was the very first thing i filmed , which was awesome .
now , let me - i told you a little bit about the evolution of the tricks . consider that content , in a sense .
what we do as street skaters is , you have these tricks . say i 'm working on darkslides , or a primo , that you guys know this stuff now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughs -rrb- what you do is you cruise around the same streets that you 've seen a hundred times , but suddenly , because you already have something in this fixed domain of this target , it 's like , what will match this trick ?
how can i expand , how can the context , how can the environment change the very nature of what i do ?
so you drive and drive and drive , and , actually i gotta admit , just because i was struggling with this because i 'm here , but i 'll just say it , is , i can not tell you , not only to be here in front of you , but what a privilege it is to be at usc campus , because i have been escorted off of this campus so many times . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so let me give you another example of how context shapes content .
this is a place not that far from here .
it 's a rotten neighborhood . your first consideration is , am i gonna get beat up ? you go out and - see this wall ?
it 's fairly mellow , and it 's beckoning to do bank tricks , right ?
but there 's this other aspect of it for wheelies , so check this out . there 's a few tricks , again , how environment changes the nature of your tricks .
freestyle oriented , manual down - wheelie down .
watch , this one ? oh , i love this . it 's like surfing , this one , the way you catch it .
this one , a little sketchy going backwards , and watch the back foot , watch the back foot .
oop . -lrb- laughs -rrb- mental note right there . again , we 'll get back to that .
here . back foot , back foot . okay , up there ?
that was called a 360 flip . notice how the board flipped and spun this way , both axes .
and another example of how the context changed , and the creative process for me and for most skaters , is , you go , you get out of the car , you check for security , you check for stuff . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's funny , you get to know their rhythms , you know , the guys that cruise around , and skateboarding is such a humbling thing , man .
no matter how good you are , right , you still gotta deal with - so you hit this wall , and when i hit it , the first thing you do is you fall forward , and i 'm like , all right , all right .
as you adjust , you punch it up , and then when i would do that , it was throwing my shoulder this way , which as i was doing it , i was like , " oh wow , that 's begging for a 360 flip , " because that 's how you load up for a 360 flip .
and so this is what i want to emphasize that , as you can imagine , all of these tricks are made of sub-movements , executive motor functions , more granular to the degree to which i ca n't quite tell you , but one thing i do know is , every trick is made of combining two or three or four or five movements . and so , as i 'm going up , these things are floating around , and you have to sort of let the cognitive mind , like , rest back , pull it back a little bit , and let your intuition go as you feel these things .
and these sub-movements are just kind of floating around , and as the wall hits you , they connect themselves " oh , 360 flip , i 'm going to make that . "
so that 's how that works to me , the creative process , the process itself of street skating .
so , next - oh , mind you . -lrb- laughs -rrb- those are the community .
these are some of the best skaters in the world .
these are my friends . oh my gosh , they 're such good people .
and the beauty of skateboarding is that , no one guy is the best . in fact , i know this is rotten to say , they 're my friends , but a couple of them actually do n't look that comfortable on their board .
what makes them great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves .
every single one of these guys , you look at them , you can see a silhouette of them , and you realize , like , " oh , that 's him , that 's haslam , that 's koston , there 's these guys , these are the guys .
and skaters , i think they tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging , but belonging on their own terms , and real respect is given by how much we take what other guys do , these basic tricks , 360 flips , we take that , we make it our own , and then we contribute back to the community the inner way that edifies the community itself .
the greater the contribution , the more we express and form our individuality , which is so important to a lot of us who feel like rejects to begin with .
the summation of that gives us something we could never achieve as an individual .
i should say this . there 's some sort of beautiful symmetry that the degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality , which we are expressing by what we do .
next . these guys . very similar community that 's extremely conducive to innovation .
notice a couple of these shots from the police department .
but it is quite similar . i mean , what is it to hack , right ?
it 's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it and steer it to do things it was never intended to do , right ?
and they 're not all bad .
you can be a linux kernel hacker , make it more stable , right ?
more safe , more secure . you can be an ios hacker , make your iphone do stuff it was n't supposed to .
not authorized , but not illegal .
and then you 've got some of these guys , right ?
what they do is very similar to our creative process .
they connect disparate information , and they bring it together in a way that a security analyst does n't expect . right ?
it does n't make them good people , but it 's at the heart of engineering , at the heart of a creative community , an innovative community , and the open source community , the basic ethos of it is , take what other people do , make it better , give it back so we all rise further .
very similar communities , very similar .
we have our edgier sides , too . it 's funny , my dad was right .
these are my peers .
but i respect what they do , and they respect what i do , because they can do things . it 's amazing what they can do .
in fact , one of them , he was ernst & young 's entrepreneur of the year for san diego county , so they 're not , you never know who you 're dealing with .
we 've all had some degree of fame .
in fact , i 've had so much success that i strangely always feel unworthy of .
i 've had a patent , and that was cool , and we started a company , and it grew , and it became the biggest , and then it went down , and then it became the biggest again , which is harder than the first time , and then we sold it , and then we sold it again .
so i 've had some success . and in the end , when you 've had all of these things , what is it that continues to drive you ? as i mentioned , the knee stuff and these things , what is it that will punch you ?
because it 's not just the mind .
what is it that will punch you and make you do something and bring it to another level , and when you 've had it all , sometimes , guys , they die on the vine with all of that talent , and one of the things we 've had , all of us , is fame , i think the best kind of fame , because you can take it off .
i 've been all around the world , and there will be a thousand kids crying out your name , and it 's such a weird , visceral experience .
it 's like , it 's disorienting .
and you get in a car , and you drive away , and 10-minute drive , and you get out , and no one gives a rat 's who you are . -lrb- laughs -rrb- and it gives you that clarity of perspective of , man , i 'm just me , and popularity , what does that really mean again ? not much .
it 's peer respect that drives us . that 's the one thing that makes us do what we do . i 've had over a dozen bones , these guys , this guy , over , what , eight , 10 concussions , to the point where it 's comedy , right ?
it is actually comedy . they mess with him .
next . and this is something deeper , and this is where i 'm - i think i was on tour when i , i was reading one of the feynman biographies . it was the red one or the blue one .
and he made this statement that was so profound to me .
it was that the nobel prize was the tombstone on all great work , and it resonated because i had won 35 out of 36 contests that i 'd entered over 11 years , and it made me bananas .
in fact , winning is n't the word . i won it once .
the rest of the time , you 're just defending , and you get into this , like , turtle posture , you know ?
where you 're not doing . it usurped the joy of what i loved to do because i was no longer doing it to create and have fun , and when it died out from under me , that was one of the most liberating things because i could create .
and look , i understand that i am on the very edge of preachy , right here . i 'm not here to do that .
it 's just that i 'm in front of a very privileged audience .
if you guys are n't already leaders in your community , you probably will be , and if there 's anything i can give you that will transcend what i 've gotten from skateboarding , the only things of meaning , i think , and of permanence , it 's not fame , it 's not all these things . what it is is that there 's an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it , and better than that , because , man , i 'm 46 years old , or i 'll be 46 , and how pathetic is that i 'm still skateboarding , but there is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - there is this beauty in dropping it into
a community of your own making , and seeing it dispersed , and seeing younger , more talented , just different talent , take it to levels you can never imagine , because that lives on . so thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- krisztina holly : i have a question for you .
so you 've really reinvented yourself in the past from freestyle to street , and , i think it was about four years ago you officially retired . is that it ? what 's next ?
rodney mullen : that 's a good question .
kh : something tells me it 's not the end .
rm : yeah . i , every time you think you 've chased something down , it 's funny , no matter how good you are , and i know guys like this , it feels like you 're polishing a turd .
you know ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i thought , the only way i can extend this is to change something infrastructural , and so that 's what i proceeded to do , through a long story , one of desperation , so if i do it , rather than talk about it , if i do it , you 'll be the first to know . kh : all right , we wo n't ask you any more .
rm : you 'll get a text .
kh : -lrb- laughs -rrb- right . thank you . good job . -lrb- applause -rrb- rm : thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- alisa volkman : so this is where our story begins - the dramatic moments of the birth of our first son , declan .
obviously a really profound moment , and it changed our lives in many ways .
it also changed our lives in many unexpected ways , and those unexpected ways we later reflected on , that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us , and a year later , we launched babble , a website for parents .
rufus griscom : now i think of our story as starting a few years earlier . av : that 's true .
rg : you may remember , we fell head over heels in love .
av : we did .
rg : we were at the time running a very different kind of website .
it was a website called nerve.com , the tagline of which was " literate smut . "
it was in theory , and hopefully in practice , a smart online magazine about sex and culture .
av : that spawned a dating site .
but you can understand the jokes that we get . sex begets babies .
you follow instructions on nerve and you should end up on babble , which we did .
and we might launch a geriatric site as our third . we 'll see .
rg : but for us , the continuity between nerve and babble was not just the life stage thing , which is , of course , relevant , but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about .
it seems to us that when people start dissembling , people start lying about things , that 's when it gets really interesting .
that 's a subject that we want to dive into .
and we 've been surprised to find , as young parents , that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex .
av : it 's true . so like we said , the early years were really wonderful , but they were also really difficult .
and we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we subscribed to a lot of magazines , did our homework , but really everywhere you look around , we were surrounded by images like this .
and we went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this .
the sun was always streaming in , and our children would never be crying .
i would always be perfectly coiffed and well rested , and in fact , it was not like that at all .
rg : when we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at , with these beautiful images , and looked at the scene in our actual living room , it looked a little bit more like this .
these are our three sons .
and of course , they 're not always crying and screaming , but with three boys , there 's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should .
av : yes , you can see where the disconnect was happening for us .
we really felt like what we went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing , and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight .
we really wanted to let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way .
rg : so today , what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos .
and of course , there are many more than four things you ca n't say about parenting , but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally .
so the first , taboo number one : you ca n't say you did n't fall in love with your baby in the very first minute .
i remember vividly , sitting there in the hospital .
we were in the process of giving birth to our first child .
av : we , or i ?
rg : i 'm sorry .
misuse of the pronoun .
alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child - -lrb- av : thank you . -rrb- - and i was there with a catcher 's mitt .
and i was there with my arms open .
the nurse was coming at me with this beautiful , beautiful child , and i remember , as she was approaching me , the voices of friends saying , " the moment they put the baby in your hands , you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is -lsb- on -rsb- an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you 've ever experienced in your entire life . "
so i was bracing myself for the moment .
the baby was coming , and i was ready for this mack truck of love to just knock me off my feet .
and instead , when the baby was placed in my hands , it was an extraordinary moment .
this picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and i brought him over .
and you can see , our eyes were glistening .
i was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife , with deep , deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child .
and it was also , of course , surreal .
i mean , i had to check the tags and make sure .
i was incredulous , " are you sure this is our child ? "
and this was all quite remarkable .
but what i felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection , but nothing like what i feel for him now , five years later .
and so we 've done something here that is heretical .
we have charted our love for our child over time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this , as you know , is an act of heresy .
you 're not allowed to chart love .
the reason you 're not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing .
you 're either in love , or you 're not in love .
you love , or you do n't love .
and i think the reality is that love is a process , and i think the problem with thinking of love as something that 's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent , or inadequate , or what have you .
and i think i 'm speaking obviously here to the father 's experience .
but i think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months , maybe their first year , that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion .
av : well , i 'm glad rufus is bringing this up , because you can notice where he dips in the first years where i think i was doing most of the work .
but we like to joke , in the first few months of all of our children 's lives , this is uncle rufus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rg : i 'm a very affectionate uncle , very affectionate uncle .
av : yes , and i often joke with rufus when he comes home that i 'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up amongst other babies .
so i actually threw a pop quiz here onto rufus .
rg : uh oh .
av : i do n't want to embarrass him too much . but i am going to give him three seconds .
rg : that is not fair . this is a trick question . he 's not up there , is he ?
av : our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here , and i want to see if rufus can actually quickly identify him .
rg : the far left . av : no !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rg : cruel .
av : nothing more to be said .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll move on to taboo number two .
you ca n't talk about how lonely having a baby can be .
i enjoyed being pregnant . i loved it .
i felt incredibly connected to the community around me .
i felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy , all around me , tracking it down till the actual due-date .
i felt like i was a vessel of the future of humanity .
that continued into the the hospital . it was really exhilarating .
i was shower with gifts and flowers and visitors .
it was a really wonderful experience , but when i got home , i suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out , and i was really surprised by those feelings .
i did expect it to be difficult , have sleepless nights , constant feedings , but i did not expect the feelings of isolation and loneliness that i experienced , and i was really surprised that no one had talked to me , that i was going to be feeling this way .
and i called my sister whom i 'm very close to - and had three children - and i asked her , " why did n't you tell me i was going to be feeling this way , that i was going to have these - feeling incredibly isolated ? "
and she said - i 'll never forget - " it 's just not something you want to say to a mother that 's having a baby for the first time . "
rg : and of course , we think it 's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time .
and that this , of course , one of the themes for us is that we think that candor and brutal honesty is critical to us collectively being great parents .
and it 's hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world .
so alisa 's experience is not isolated .
so your 58 percent of mothers surveyed report feelings of loneliness .
of those , 67 percent are most lonely when their kids are zero to five - probably really zero to two .
in the process of preparing this , we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time , because here in the western world , less than 50 percent of us live near our family members , which i think is part of why this is such a tough period .
so to take one example among many : in southern india there 's a practice known as jholabhari , in which the pregnant woman , when she 's seven or eight months pregnant , moves in with her mother and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies , give birth and returns home to her nuclear family several months after the child is born .
and this is one of many ways that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period .
av : so taboo number three : you ca n't talk about your miscarriage - but today i 'll talk about mine .
so after we had declan , we kind of recalibrated our expectations .
we thought we actually could go through this again and thought we knew what we would be up against .
and we were grateful that i was able to get pregnant , and i soon learned that we were having a boy , and then when i was five months , we learned that we had lost our child .
this is actually the last little image we have of him .
and it was obviously a very difficult time - really painful .
as i was working through that mourning process , i was amazed that i did n't want to see anybody .
i really wanted to crawl into a hole , and i did n't really know how i was going to work my way back into my surrounding community .
and i realize , i think , the way i was feeling that way , is on a really deep gut level , i was feeling a lot of shame and embarrassed , frankly , that , in some respects , i had failed at delivering what i 'm genetically engineered to do .
and of course , it made me question , if i was n't able to have another child , what would that mean for my marriage , and just me as a woman .
so it was a very difficult time .
as i started working through it more , i started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people .
i was really amazed by all the stories that started flooding in .
people i interacted with daily , worked with , was friends with , family members that i had known a long time , had never shared with me their own stories .
and i just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork , and i felt like i happened upon this secret society of women that i now was a part of , which was reassuring and also really concerning .
and i think , miscarriage is an invisible loss .
there 's not really a lot of community support around it .
there 's really no ceremony , rituals , or rites .
and i think , with a death , you have a funeral , you celebrate the life , and there 's a lot of community support , and it 's something women do n't have with miscarriage .
rg : which is too bad because , of course , it 's a very common and very traumatic experience .
fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage , and i find this astounding .
in a survey , 74 percent of women said that miscarriage , they felt , was partly their fault , which is awful .
and astoundingly , 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse .
so taboo number four : you ca n't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child .
the party line is that every single aspect of my life has just gotten dramatically better ever since i participated in the miracle that is childbirth and family .
i 'll never forget , i remember vividly to this day , our first son , declan , was nine months old , and i was sitting there on the couch , and i was reading daniel gilbert 's wonderful book , " stumbling on happiness . "
and i got about two-thirds of the way through , and there was a chart on the right-hand side - on the right-hand page - that we 've labeled here " the most terrifying chart imaginable for a new parent . "
this chart is comprised of four completely independent studies .
basically , there 's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction , which is closely aligned , we all know , with broader happiness , that does n't rise again until your first child goes to college .
so i 'm sitting here looking at the next two decades of my life , this chasm of happiness that we 're driving our proverbial convertible straight into .
we were despondent .
av : so you can imagine , i mean again , the first few months were difficult , but we 'd come out of it , and were really shocked to see this study .
so we really wanted to take a deeper look at it in hopes that we would find a silver lining .
rg : and that 's when it 's great to be running a website for parents , because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies .
we said , something is wrong here .
there 's something missing from these studies .
it ca n't possibly be that bad .
so liz mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece , and she interviewed four scientists , and she also interviewed daniel gilbert , and we did indeed find a silver lining .
so this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life .
average happiness is , of course , inadequate , because it does n't speak to the moment-by-moment experience , and so this is what we think it looks like when you layer in moment-to-moment experience .
and so we all remember as children , the tiniest little thing - and we see it on the faces of our children - the teeniest little thing can just rocket them to these heights of just utter adulation , and then the next teeniest little thing can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair .
and it 's just extraordinary to watch , and we remember it ourselves .
and then , of course , as you get older , it 's almost like age is a form of lithium .
as you get older , you become more stable .
and part of what happens , i think , in your ' 20s and ' 30s , is you start to learn to hedge your happiness .
you start to realize that " hey , i could go to this live music event and have an utterly transforming experience that will cover my entire body with goosebumps , but it 's more likely that i 'll feel claustrophobic and i wo n't be able to get a beer .
so i 'm not going to go .
i 've got a good stereo at home . so , i 'm not going to go . "
so your average happiness goes up , but you lose those transcendent moments .
av : yeah , and then you have your first child , and then you really resubmit yourself to these highs and lows - the highs being the first steps , the first smile , your child reading to you for the first time - the lows being , our house , any time from six to seven every night .
but you realize you resubmit yourself to losing control in a really wonderful way , which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives and is quite gratifying .
rg : and so in effect , we trade average happiness .
we trade the sort of security and safety of a certain level of contentment for these transcendent moments .
so where does that leave the two of us as a family with our three little boys in the thick of all this ?
there 's another factor in our case .
we have violated yet another taboo in our own lives , and this is a bonus taboo .
av : a quick bonus taboo for you , that we should not be working together , especially with three children - and we are .
rg : and we had reservations about this on the front end .
everybody knows , you should absolutely not work with your spouse .
in fact , when we first went out to raise money to start babble , the venture capitalists said , " we categorically do n't invest in companies founded by husbands and wives , because there 's an extra point of failure .
it 's a bad idea . do n't do it . "
and we obviously went forward . we did .
we raised the money , and we 're thrilled that we did , because in this phase of one 's life , the incredibly scarce resource is time .
and if you 're really passionate about what you do every day - which we are - and you 're also passionate about your relationship , this is the only way we know how to do it .
and so the final question that we would ask is : can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards ?
it 's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy , but they 're sometimes pretty quick .
and so how about that average baseline of happiness ?
can we move that up a little bit ?
av : and we kind of feel that the happiness gap , which we talked about , is really the result of walking into parenting - and really any long-term partnership for that matter - with the wrong expectations .
and if you have the right expectations and expectation management , we feel like it 's going to be a pretty gratifying experience .
rg : and so this is what - and we think that a lot of parents , when you get in there - in our case anyway - you pack your bags for a trip to europe , and you 're really excited to go .
get out of the airplane , it turns out you 're trekking in nepal .
and trekking in nepal is an extraordinary experience , particularly if you pack your bags properly and you know what you 're getting in for and you 're psyched .
so the point of all this for us today is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty , but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences , that we can all collectively bend that happiness baseline up a little bit .
rg + av : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i thought i would think about changing your perspective on the world a bit , and showing you some of the designs that we have in nature .
and so , i have my first slide to talk about the dawning of the universe and what i call the cosmic scene investigation , that is , looking at the relics of creation and inferring what happened at the beginning , and then following it up and trying to understand it .
and so one of the questions that i asked you is , when you look around , what do you see ?
well , you see this space that 's created by designers and by the work of people , but what you actually see is a lot of material that was already here , being reshaped in a certain form .
and so the question is : how did that material get here ?
how did it get into the form that it had before it got reshaped , and so forth ?
it 's a question of what 's the continuity ?
so one of the things i look at is , how did the universe begin and shape ?
what was the whole process in the creation and the evolution of the universe to getting to the point that we have these kinds of materials ?
so that 's sort of the part , and let me move on then and show you the hubble ultra deep field .
if you look at this picture , what you will see is a lot of dark with some light objects in it .
and everything but - four of these light objects are stars , and you can see them there - little pluses .
this is a star , this is a star , everything else is a galaxy , ok ?
so there 's a couple of thousand galaxies you can see easily with your eye in here .
and when i look out at particularly this galaxy , which looks a lot like ours , i wonder if there 's an art design college conference going on , and intelligent beings there are thinking about , you know , what designs they might do , and there might be a few cosmologists trying to understand where the universe itself came from , and there might even be some in that galaxy looking at ours trying to figure out what 's going on over here .
but there 's a lot of other galaxies , and some are nearby , and they 're kind of the color of the sun , and some are further away and they 're a little bluer , and so forth .
but one of the questions is - this should be , to you - how come there are so many galaxies ?
because this represents a very clean fraction of the sky .
this is only 1,000 galaxies .
we think there 's on the order - visible to the hubble space telescope , if you had the time to scan it around - about 100 billion galaxies . right ?
it 's a very large number of galaxies .
and that 's roughly how many stars there are in our own galaxy .
but when you look at some of these regions like this , you 'll see more galaxies than stars , which is kind of a conundrum .
so the question should come to your mind is , what kind of design , you know , what kind of creative process and what kind of design produced the world like that ?
and then i 'm going to show you it 's actually a lot more complicated .
we 're going to try and follow it up .
we have a tool that actually helps us out in this study , and that 's the fact that the universe is so incredibly big that it 's a time machine , in a certain sense .
we draw this set of nested spheres cut away so you see it .
put the earth at the center of the nested spheres , just because that 's where we 're making observations .
and the moon is only two seconds away , so if you take a picture of the moon using ordinary light , it 's the moon two seconds ago , and who cares .
two seconds is like the present .
the sun is eight minutes ago . that 's not such a big deal , right , unless there 's solar flares coming then you want to get out the way .
you 'd like to have a little advance warning .
but you get out to jupiter and it 's 40 minutes away . it 's a problem .
you hear about mars , it 's a problem communicating to mars because it takes light long enough to go there .
but if you look out to the nearest set of stars , to the nearest 40 or 50 stars , it 's about 10 years .
so if you take a picture of what 's going on , it 's 10 years ago .
but you go and look to the center of the galaxy , it 's thousands of years ago .
if you look at andromeda , which is the nearest big galaxy , and it 's two million years ago .
if you took a picture of the earth two million years ago , there 'd be no evidence of humans at all , because we do n't think there were humans yet .
i mean , it just gives you the scale .
with the hubble space telescope , we 're looking at hundreds of millions of years to a billion years .
but if we were capable to come up with an idea of how to look even further - there 's some things even further , and that was what i did in a lot of my work , was to develop the techniques - we could look out back to even earlier epochs before there were stars and before there were galaxies , back to when the universe was hot and dense and very different .
and so that 's the sort of sequence , and so i have a more artistic impression of this .
there 's the galaxy in the middle , which is the milky way , and around that are the hubble - you know , nearby kind of galaxies , and there 's a sphere that marks the different times .
and behind that are some more modern galaxies .
you see the whole big picture ?
the beginning of time is funny - it 's on the outside , right ?
and then there 's a part of the universe we ca n't see because it 's so dense and so hot , light ca n't escape .
it 's like you ca n't see to the center of the sun ; you have to use other techniques to know what 's going on inside the sun .
but you can see the edge of the sun , and the universe gets that way , and you can see that .
and then you see this sort of model area around the outside , and that is the radiation coming from the big bang , which is actually incredibly uniform .
the universe is almost a perfect sphere , but there are these very tiny variations which we show here in great exaggeration .
and from them in the time sequence we 're going to have to go from these tiny variations to these irregular galaxies and first stars to these more advanced galaxies , and eventually the solar system , and so forth .
so it 's a big design job , but we 'll see about how things are going on .
so the way these measurements were done , there 's been a set of satellites , and this is where you get to see .
so there was the cobe satellite , which was launched in 1989 , and we discovered these variations .
and then in 2000 , the map satellite was launched - the wmap - and it made somewhat better pictures .
and later this year - this is the cool stealth version , the one that actually has some beautiful design features to it , and you should look - the planck satellite will be launched , and it will make very high-resolution maps .
and that will be the sequence of understanding the very beginning of the universe .
and what we saw was , we saw these variations , and then they told us the secrets , both about the structure of space-time , and about the contents of the universe , and about how the universe started in its original motions .
so we have this picture , which is quite a spectacular picture , and i 'll come back to the beginning , where we 're going to have some mysterious process that kicks the universe off at the beginning .
and we go through a period of accelerating expansion , and the universe expands and cools until it gets to the point where it becomes transparent , then to the dark ages , and then the first stars turn on , and they evolve into galaxies , and then later they get to the more expansive galaxies .
and somewhere around this period is when our solar system started forming .
and it 's maturing up to the present time .
and there 's some spectacular things .
and this wastebasket part , that 's to represent what the structure of space-time itself is doing during this period .
and so this is a pretty weird model , right ?
what kind of evidence do we have for that ?
so let me show you some of nature 's patterns that are the result of this .
i always think of space-time as being the real substance of space , and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean .
it 's a marker of where the interesting waves are and whatever went on .
so here is the sloan digital sky survey showing the location of a million galaxies .
so there 's a dot on here for every galaxy .
they go out and point a telescope at the sky , take a picture , identify what are stars and throw them away , look at the galaxies , estimate how far away they are , and plot them up .
and just put radially they 're going out that way .
and you see these structures , this thing we call the great wall , but there are voids and those kinds of stuff , and they kind of fade out because the telescope is n't sensitive enough to do it .
now i 'm going to show you this in 3d .
what happens is , you take pictures as the earth rotates , you get a fan across the sky .
there are some places you ca n't look because of our own galaxy , or because there are no telescopes available to do it .
so the next picture shows you the three-dimensional version of this rotating around .
do you see the fan-like scans made across the sky ?
remember , every spot on here is a galaxy , and you see the galaxies , you know , sort of in our neighborhood , and you sort of see the structure .
and you see this thing we call the great wall , and you see the complicated structure , and you see these voids .
there are places where there are no galaxies and there are places where there are thousands of galaxies clumped together , right .
so there 's an interesting pattern , but we do n't have enough data here to actually see the pattern .
we only have a million galaxies , right ?
so we 're keeping , like , a million balls in the air but , what 's going on ?
there 's another survey which is very similar to this , called the two-degree field of view galaxy redshift survey .
now we 're going to fly through it at warp a million .
and every time there 's a galaxy - at its location there 's a galaxy - and if we know anything about the galaxy , which we do , because there 's a redshift measurement and everything , you put in the type of galaxy and the color , so this is the real representation .
and when you 're in the middle of the galaxies it 's hard to see the pattern ; it 's like being in the middle of life .
it 's hard to see the pattern in the middle of the audience , it 's hard to see the pattern of this .
so we 're going to go out and swing around and look back at this .
and you 'll see , first , the structure of the survey , and then you 'll start seeing the structure of the galaxies that we see out there .
so again , you can see the extension of this great wall of galaxies showing up here .
but you can see the voids , you can see the complicated structure , and you say , well , how did this happen ?
suppose you 're the cosmic designer .
how are you going to put galaxies out there in a pattern like that ?
it 's not just throwing them out at random .
there 's a more complicated process going on here .
how are you going to end up doing that ?
and so now we 're in for some serious play .
that is , we have to seriously play god , not just change people 's lives , but make the universe , right .
so if that 's your responsibility , how are you going to do that ?
what 's the kind of technique ?
what 's the kind of thing you 're going to do ?
so i 'm going to show you the results of a very large-scale simulation of what we think the universe might be like , using , essentially , some of the play principles and some of the design principles that , you know , humans have labored so hard to pick up , but apparently nature knew how to do at the beginning .
and that is , you start out with very simple ingredients and some simple rules , but you have to have enough ingredients to make it complicated .
and then you put in some randomness , some fluctuations and some randomness , and realize a whole bunch of different representations .
so what i 'm going to do is show you the distribution of matter as a function of scales .
we 're going to zoom in , but this is a plot of what it is .
and we had to add one more thing to make the universe come out right .
it 's called dark matter .
that is matter that does n't interact with light the typical way that ordinary matter does , the way the light 's shining on me or on the stage .
it 's transparent to light , but in order for you to see it , we 're going to make it white . ok ?
so the stuff that 's in this picture that 's white , that is the dark matter .
it should be called invisible matter , but the dark matter we 've made visible .
and the stuff that is in the yellow color , that is the ordinary kind of matter that 's turned into stars and galaxies .
so i 'll show you the next movie .
so this - we 're going to zoom in .
notice this pattern and pay attention to this pattern .
we 're going to zoom in and zoom in .
and you 'll see there are all these filaments and structures and voids .
and when a number of filaments come together in a knot , that makes a supercluster of galaxies .
this one we 're zooming in on is somewhere between 100,000 and a million galaxies in that small region .
so we live in the boonies .
we do n't live in the center of the solar system , we do n't live in the center of the galaxy and our galaxy 's not in the center of the cluster .
so we 're zooming in .
this is a region which probably has more than 100,000 , on the order of a million galaxies in that region .
we 're going to keep zooming in . ok .
and so i forgot to tell you the scale .
a parsec is 3.26 light years .
so a gigaparsec is three billion light years - that 's the scale .
so it takes light three billion years to travel over that distance .
now we 're into a distance sort of between here and here .
that 's the distance between us and andromeda , right ?
these little specks that you 're seeing in here , they 're galaxies .
now we 're going to zoom back out , and you can see this structure that , when we get very far out , looks very regular , but it 's made up of a lot of irregular variations .
so they 're simple building blocks .
there 's a very simple fluid to begin with .
it 's got dark matter , it 's got ordinary matter , it 's got photons and it 's got neutrinos , which do n't play much role in the later part of the universe .
and it 's just a simple fluid and it , over time , develops into this complicated structure .
and so you know when you first saw this picture , it did n't mean quite so much to you .
here you 're looking across one percent of the volume of the visible universe and you 're seeing billions of galaxies , right , and nodes , but you realize they 're not even the main structure .
there 's a framework , which is the dark matter , the invisible matter , that 's out there that 's actually holding it all together .
so let 's fly through it , and you can see how much harder it is when you 're in the middle of something to figure this out .
so here 's that same end result .
you see a filament , you see the light is the invisible matter , and the yellow is the stars or the galaxies showing up .
and we 're going to fly around , and we 'll fly around , and you 'll see occasionally a couple of filaments intersect , and you get a large cluster of galaxies .
and then we 'll fly in to where the very large cluster is , and you can see what it looks like .
and so from inside , it does n't look very complicated , right ?
it 's only when you look at it at a very large scale , and explore it and so forth , you realize it 's a very intricate , complicated kind of a design , right ?
and it 's grown up in some kind of way .
so the question is , how hard would it be to assemble this , right ?
how big a contractor team would you need to put this universe together , right ?
that 's the issue , right ?
and so here we are .
you see how the filament - you see how several filaments are coming together , therefore making this supercluster of galaxies .
and you have to understand , this is not how it would actually look if you - first , you ca n't travel this fast , everything would be distorted , but this is using simple rendering and graphic arts kind of stuff .
this is how , if you took billions of years to go around , it might look to you , right ?
and if you could see invisible matter , too .
and so the idea is , you know , how would you put together the universe in a very simple way ?
we 're going to start and realize that the entire visible universe , everything we can see in every direction with the hubble space telescope plus our other instruments , was once in a region that was smaller than an atom .
it started with tiny quantum mechanical fluctuations , but expanding at a tremendous rate .
and those fluctuations were stretched to astronomical sizes , and those fluctuations eventually are the things we see in the cosmic microwave background .
and then we needed some way to turn those fluctuations into galaxies and clusters of galaxies and make these kinds of structures go on .
so i 'm going to show you a smaller simulation .
this simulation was run on 1,000 processors for a month in order to make just this simple visible one .
so i 'm going to show you one that can be run on a desktop in two days in the next picture .
so you start out with teeny fluctuations when the universe was at this point , now four times smaller , and so forth .
and you start seeing these networks , this cosmic web of structure forming .
and this is a simple one , because it does n't have the ordinary matter and it just has the dark matter in it .
and you see how the dark matter lumps up , and the ordinary matter just trails along behind .
so there it is .
at the beginning it 's very uniform .
the fluctuations are a part in 100,000 .
there are a few peaks that are a part in 10,000 , and then over billions of years , gravity just pulls in .
this is light over density , pulls the material around in .
that pulls in more material and pulls in more material .
but the distances on the universe are so large and the time scales are so large that it takes a long time for this to form .
and it keeps forming until the universe is roughly about half the size it is now , in terms of its expansion .
and at that point , the universe mysteriously starts accelerating its expansion and cuts off the formation of larger-scale structure .
so we 're just seeing as large a scale structure as we can see , and then only things that have started forming already are going to form , and then from then on it 's going to go on .
so we 're able to do the simulation , but this is two days on a desktop .
we need , you know , 30 days on 1,000 processors to do the kind of simulation that i showed you before .
so we have an idea of how to play seriously , creating the universe by starting with essentially less than an eyedrop full of material , and we create everything we can see in any direction , right , from almost nothing - that is , something extremely tiny , extremely small - and it is almost perfect , except it has these tiny fluctuations at a part in 100,000 level , which turn out to produce the interesting patterns and designs we see , that is , galaxies and stars and so forth .
so we have a model , and we can calculate it , and we can use it to make designs of what we think the universe really looks like .
and that design is sort of way beyond what our original imagination ever was .
so this is what we started with 15 years ago , with the cosmic background explorer - made the map on the upper right , which basically showed us that there were large-scale fluctuations , and actually fluctuations on several scales . you can kind of see that .
since then we 've had wmap , which just gives us higher angular resolution .
we see the same large-scale structure , but we see additional small-scale structure .
and on the bottom right is if the satellite had flipped upside down and mapped the earth , what kind of a map we would have got of the earth .
you can see , well , you can , kind of pick out all the major continents , but that 's about it .
but what we 're hoping when we get to planck , we 'll have resolution about equivalent to the resolution you see of the earth there , where you can really see the complicated pattern that exists on the earth .
and you can also tell , because of the sharp edges and the way things fit together , there are some non-linear processes .
geology has these effects , which is moving the plates around and so forth .
you can see that just from the map alone .
we want to get to the point in our maps of the early universe we can see whether there are any non-linear effects that are starting to move , to modify , and are giving us a hint about how space-time itself was actually created at the beginning moments .
so that 's where we are today , and that 's what i wanted to give you a flavor of .
give you a different view about what the design and what everything else looks like .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you go on the ted website , you can currently find there over a full week of tedtalk videos , over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings .
and that 's a huge amount of data .
and it got me wondering : if you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis , could you reverse engineer a tedtalk ?
could you create the ultimate tedtalk ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and also , could you create the worst possible tedtalk that they would still let you get away with ?
to find this out , i looked at three things : i looked at the topic that you should choose , i looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage .
now , with the topic : there 's a whole range of topics you can choose , but you should choose wisely , because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk .
now , to make this more concrete , let 's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite tedtalks and in the least favorite tedtalks .
so if you came here to talk about how french coffee will spread happiness in our brains , that 's a go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- whereas , if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen , girls , aircraft - actually , i would like to hear that talk , -lrb- laughter -rrb- but statistics say it 's not so good .
oh , well .
if you generalize this , the most favorite tedtalks are those that feature topics we can connect with , both easily and deeply , such as happiness , our own body , food , emotions .
and the more technical topics , such as architecture , materials and , strangely enough , men , those are not good topics to talk about .
how should you deliver your talk ?
ted is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock , so they 're going to hate me for revealing this , because , actually , you should talk as long as they will let you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because the most favorite tedtalks are , on average , over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones .
and this holds true for all ranking lists on ted.com except if you want to have a talk that 's beautiful , inspiring or funny .
then , you should be brief . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but other than that , talk until they drag you off the stage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , while ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- while you 're pushing the clock , there 's a few rules to obey .
i found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite tedtalks as opposed to the least favorite tedtalks .
i 'll give you three examples .
first of all , i must , as a speaker , provide a service to the audience and talk about what i will give you , instead of saying what i ca n't have .
secondly , it 's imperative that you do not cite the new york times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and finally , it 's okay for the speaker - that 's the good news - to fake intellectual capacity .
if i do n't understand something , i can just say , " etc . , etc . "
you 'll all stay with me .
it 's perfectly fine .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , let 's go to the visuals .
the most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker .
and analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite ted speakers , you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average , make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average ted speaker .
slides are okay , though you might consider going for props .
and now the most important thing , that is the mood onstage .
color plays a very important role .
color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for example , fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color , -lrb- laughter -rrb- much more than the average tedtalk .
ingenious tedtalks , much more this green color , etc . , et .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , personally , i think i 'm not the first one who has done this analysis , but i 'll leave this to your good judgment .
so , now it 's time to put it all together and design the ultimate tedtalk .
now , since this is tedactive , and i learned from my analysis that i should actually give you something , i will not impose the ultimate or worst tedtalk on you , but rather give you a tool to create your own .
and i call this tool the tedpad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the tedpad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected , highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own tedtalk .
you only have to make one decision , and that is : are you going to use the white version for very good tedtalks , about creativity , human genius ?
or are you going to go with a black version , which will allow you to create really bad tedtalks , mostly about blogs , politics and stuff ?
so , download it and have fun with it .
now i hope you enjoy the session .
i hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible tedtalks .
and i hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this , which i really want to see .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
if we look around us , much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world .
but , of course , they do n't look like rocks and sludge now .
they look like tv cameras , monitors , annoying radio mics .
and so this magical transformation is what i was trying to get at with my project , which became known as the toaster project .
and it was also inspired by this quote from douglas adams , and the situation is from " the hitchhiker 's guide to the galaxy . "
and the situation it describes is the hero of the book - he 's a 20th-century man - finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people .
and he kind of assumes that , yes , he 'll become - these villagers - he 'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements , but , of course , realizes that without the rest of human society , he can barely make a sandwich , let alone a toaster .
but he did n't have wikipedia .
so i thought , okay , i 'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch .
and , working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer , i went and bought the cheapest toaster i could find , took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that , inside this object , which i 'd bought for just 3.49 pounds , there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials .
i did n't have the rest of my life to do this project .
i had maybe nine months .
so i thought , okay , i 'll start with five .
and these were steel , mica , plastic , copper and nickel .
so , starting with steel : how do you make steel ?
i went and knocked on the door of the rio tinto chair of advanced mineral extraction at the royal school of mines and said , " how do you make steel ? "
and professor cilliers was very kind and talked me through it .
and my vague rememberings from gcse science - well , steel comes from iron , so i phoned up an iron mine .
and said , " hi , i 'm trying to make a toaster .
can i come up and get some iron ? "
unfortunately , when i got there - emerges ray .
he had misheard me and thought i was coming up because i was trying to make a poster , and so was n't prepared to take me into the mines .
but after some nagging , i got him to do that .
-lrb- video -rrb- ray : it was crease limestone , and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice , warm , sunny atmosphere .
when you study geology , you can see what 's happened in the past , and there were terrific changes in the earth .
thomas thwaites : as you can see , they had the christmas decorations up .
and of course , it was n't actually a working mine anymore , because , though ray was a miner there , the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction , because , of course , it ca n't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in south america , australia , wherever .
but anyway , i got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to london on the train , and then was faced with the problem : okay , how do you make this rock into components for a toaster ?
so i went back to professor cilliers , and he said , " go to the library . "
so i did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy - completely useless for what i was trying to do .
because , of course , they do n't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you do n't have a smelting plant .
so i ended up going to the history of science library and looking at this book .
this is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the west , at least .
and there you can see that woodcut is basically what i ended up doing .
but instead of a bellows , i had a leaf blower .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that was something that reoccurred throughout the project , was , the smaller the scale you want to work on , the further back in time you have to go .
and so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron .
i dragged out this stuff , and it was n't iron .
but luckily , i found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves , and at 30 minutes at full power , and i was able to finish off the process .
so , my next - -lrb- applause -rrb- the next thing i was trying to get was copper .
again , this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world .
it 's not anymore , but i found a retired geology professor to take me down , and he said , " okay , i 'll let you have some water from the mine . "
and the reason i was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up , dissolving the minerals from the mine .
and a good example of this is the rio tinto , which is in portugal .
as you can see , it 's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it .
so many such that it 's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic , toxic conditions .
but anyway , the water i dragged back from the isle of anglesey where the mine was - there was enough copper in it such that i could cast the pins of my metal electric plug .
so my next thing : i was off to scotland to get mica .
and mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity .
that 's me getting mica .
and the last material i 'm going to talk about today is plastic , and , of course , my toaster had to have a plastic case .
plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods .
and so plastic comes from oil , so i phoned up bp and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the pr office at bp that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil .
bp obviously has a bit more on their mind now .
but even then they were n't convinced and said , " okay , we 'll phone you back " - never did .
so i looked at other ways of making plastic .
and you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants , but also from starches .
so this is attempting to make potato starch plastic .
and for a while that was looking really good .
i poured it into the mold , which you can see there , which i 've made from a tree trunk .
and it was looking good for a while , but i left it outside , because you had to leave it outside to dry , and unfortunately i came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato .
so kind of out of desperation , i decided that i could think laterally .
and geologists have actually christened - well , they 're debating whether to christen - the age that we 're living in - they 're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the anthropocene , the age of man .
and that 's because geologists of the future would kind of see a sharp shift in the strata of rock that is being laid down now .
so suddenly , it will become kind of radioactive from chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945 .
and there 'd also be an extinction event - like fossils would suddenly disappear .
and also , i thought that there would be synthetic polymers , plastics , embedded in the rock .
so i looked up a plastic - so i decided that i could mine some of this modern-day rock .
and i went up to manchester to visit a place called axion recycling .
and they 're at the sharp end of what 's called the weee , which is this european electrical and electronic waste directive .
and that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill .
but this is it .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so there 's a picture of my toaster .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's it without the case on .
and there it is on the shelves .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : i 'm told you did plug it in once .
tt : yeah , i did plug it in .
i do n't know if you could see , but i was never able to make insulation for the wires .
kew gardens were insistent that i could n't come and hack into their rubber tree .
so the wires were uninsulated .
so there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires , homemade plug .
and for about five seconds , the toaster toasted , but then , unfortunately , the element kind of melted itself .
but i considered it a partial success , to be honest .
bg : thomas thwaites . tt : thanks .
i 'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals ' latest and nastiest creations .
so basically , please do n't go and download any of the viruses that i show you .
some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like , and i thought i 'd give you a quick insight into my career so far .
it 's a pretty accurate description .
this is what someone that specializes in malware and hacking looks like .
so today , computer viruses and trojans , designed to do everything from stealing data to watching you in your webcam to the theft of billions of dollars .
some malicious code today goes as far as targeting power , utilities and infrastructure .
let me give you a quick snapshot of what malicious code is capable of today .
right now , every second , eight new users are joining the internet .
today , we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses .
we will see 30,000 new infected websites .
and , just to kind of tear down a myth here , lots of people think that when you get infected with a computer virus , it 's because you went to a porn site .
right ? well , actually , statistically speaking , if you only visit porn sites , you 're safer .
people normally write that down , by the way . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , about 80 percent of these are small business websites getting infected .
today 's cybercriminal , what do they look like ?
well , many of you have the image , do n't you , of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement , hacking away for notoriety .
but actually today , cybercriminals are wonderfully professional and organized .
in fact , they have product adverts .
you can go online and buy a hacking service to knock your business competitor offline .
check out this one i found .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : so you 're here for one reason , and that reason is because you need your business competitors , rivals , haters , or whatever the reason is , or who , they are to go down .
well you , my friend , you 've came to the right place .
if you want your business competitors to go down , well , they can .
if you want your rivals to go offline , well , they will .
not only that , we are providing a short-term-to-long-term ddos service or scheduled attack , starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites to 10 to 50 dollars per hour .
james lyne : now , i did actually pay one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website .
things got a bit tricky when i tried to expense it at the company .
turns out that 's not cool .
but regardless , it 's amazing how many products and services are available now to cybercriminals .
for example , this testing platform , which enables the cybercriminals to test the quality of their viruses before they release them on the world .
for a small fee , they can upload it and make sure everything is good .
but it goes further .
cybercriminals now have crime packs with business intelligence reporting dashboards to manage the distribution of their malicious code .
this is the market leader in malware distribution , the black hole exploit pack , responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution in the last couple of quarters .
it comes with technical installation guides , video setup routines , and get this , technical support .
you can email the cybercriminals and they 'll tell you how to set up your illegal hacking server .
so let me show you what malicious code looks like today .
what i 've got here is two systems , an attacker , which i 've made look all matrix-y and scary , and a victim , which you might recognize from home or work .
now normally , these would be on different sides of the planet or of the internet , but i 've put them side by side because it makes things much more interesting .
now , there are many ways you can get infected .
you will have come in contact with some of them .
maybe some of you have received an email that says something like , " hi , i 'm a nigerian banker , and i 'd like to give you 53 billion dollars because i like your face . "
or funnycats.exe , which rumor has it was quite successful in china 's recent campaign against america .
now there are many ways you can get infected .
i want to show you a couple of my favorites .
this is a little usb key .
now how do you get a usb key to run in a business ?
well , you could try looking really cute .
awww .
or , in my case , awkward and pathetic .
so imagine this scenario : i walk into one of your businesses , looking very awkward and pathetic , with a copy of my c.v.
which i 've covered in coffee , and i ask the receptionist to plug in this usb key and print me a new one .
so let 's have a look here on my victim computer .
what i 'm going to do is plug in the usb key .
after a couple of seconds , things start to happen on the computer on their own , usually a bad sign .
this would , of course , normally happen in a couple of seconds , really , really quickly , but i 've kind of slowed it down so you can actually see the attack occurring .
malware is very boring otherwise .
so this is writing out the malicious code , and a few seconds later , on the left-hand side , you 'll see the attacker 's screen get some interesting new text .
now if i place the mouse cursor over it , this is what we call a command prompt , and using this we can navigate around the computer .
we can access your documents , your data .
you can turn on the webcam .
that can be very embarrassing .
or just to really prove a point , we can launch programs like my personal favorite , the windows calculator .
so is n't it amazing how much control the attackers can get with such a simple operation ?
let me show you how most malware is now distributed today .
what i 'm going to do is open up a website that i wrote .
it 's a terrible website . it 's got really awful graphics .
and it 's got a comments section here where we can submit comments to the website .
many of you will have used something a bit like this before .
unfortunately , when this was implemented , the developer was slightly inebriated and managed to forget all of the secure coding practices he had learned .
so let 's imagine that our attacker , called evil hacker just for comedy value , inserts something a little nasty .
this is a script .
it 's code which will be interpreted on the webpage .
so i 'm going to submit this post , and then , on my victim computer , i 'm going to open up the web browser and browse to my website , www.incrediblyhacked.com.
notice that after a couple of seconds , i get redirected .
that website address at the top there , which you can just about see , microshaft.com , the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs , and up pops fake antivirus .
this is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software , and it will go through and it will scan the system , have a look at what its popping up here .
it creates some very serious alerts .
oh look , a child porn proxy server .
we really should clean that up .
what 's really insulting about this is not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data , but when the scan finishes , they tell you in order to clean up the fake viruses , you have to register the product .
now i liked it better when viruses were free .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people now pay cybercriminals money to run viruses , which i find utterly bizarre .
so anyway , let me change pace a little bit .
chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day is a massive challenge , and those numbers are only growing directly in proportion to the length of my stress line , you 'll note here .
so i want to talk to you briefly about a group of hackers we tracked for a year and actually found - and this is a rare treat in our job .
now this was a cross-industry collaboration , people from facebook , independent researchers , guys from sophos .
so here we have a couple of documents which our cybercriminals had uploaded to a cloud service , kind of like dropbox or skydrive , like many of you might use .
at the top , you 'll notice a section of source code .
what this would do is send the cybercriminals a text message every day telling them how much money they 'd made that day , so a kind of cybercriminal billings report , if you will .
if you look closely , you 'll notice a series of what are russian telephone numbers .
now that 's obviously interesting , because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals .
down below , highlighted in red , in the other section of source code , is this bit " leded : leded . "
that 's a username , kind of like you might have on twitter .
so let 's take this a little further .
there are a few other interesting pieces the cybercriminals had uploaded .
lots of you here will use smartphones to take photos and post them from the conference .
an interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones is that when you take a photo , it embeds gps data about where that photo was taken .
in fact , i 've been spending a lot of time on internet dating sites recently , obviously for research purposes , and i 've noticed that about 60 percent of the profile pictures on internet dating sites contain the gps coordinates of where the photo was taken , which is kind of scary because you would n't give out your home address to lots of strangers , but we 're happy to give away our gps coordinates to plus or minus 15 meters .
and our cybercriminals had done the same thing .
so here 's a photo which resolves to st. petersburg .
we then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool .
we used google .
using the email address , the telephone number and the gps data , on the left you see an advert for a bmw that one of our cybercriminals is selling , on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens .
one of these was more stereotypical for me .
a little more searching , and here 's our cybercriminal .
imagine , these are hardened cybercriminals sharing information scarcely .
imagine what you could find about each of the people in this room .
a bit more searching through the profile and there 's a photo of their office .
they were working on the third floor .
and you can also see some photos from his business companion where he has a taste in a certain kind of image .
it turns out he 's a member of the russian adult webmasters federation .
but this is where our investigation starts to slow down .
the cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well .
and herein is the greatest lesson of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now .
our friends , our families and our colleagues can break our security even when we do the right things .
this is mobsoft , one of the companies that this cybercriminal gang owned , and an interesting thing about mobsoft is the 50-percent owner of this posted a job advert , and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers from the code earlier .
this woman was maria , and maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals .
and it 's kind of like she went into her social media settings and clicked on every option imaginable to make herself really , really insecure .
by the end of the investigation , where you can read the full 27-page report at that link , we had photos of the cybercriminals , even the office christmas party when they were out on an outing .
that 's right , cybercriminals do have christmas parties , as it turns out .
now you 're probably wondering what happened to these guys .
let me come back to that in just a minute .
i want to change pace to one last little demonstration , a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic , but is interesting in exposing how much information we 're all giving away , and it 's relevant because it applies to us as a ted audience .
this is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately .
many of you all know about the concept of scanning for wireless networks .
you do it every time you take out your iphone or your blackberry and connect to something like tedattendees .
but what you might not know is that you 're also beaming out a list of networks you 've previously connected to , even when you 're not using wireless actively .
so i ran a little scan .
i was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals , who would n't be so concerned by law , and here you can see my mobile device .
okay ? so you can see a list of wireless networks .
tedattendees , hyattlb . where do you think i 'm staying ?
my home network , prettyflyforawifi , which i think is a great name .
sophos _ visitors , sansemea , companies i work with .
loganwifi , that 's in boston . hiltonlondon .
ciasurveillancevan .
we called it that at one of our conferences because we thought that would freak people out , which is quite fun .
this is how geeks party .
so let 's make this a little bit more interesting .
let 's talk about you .
twenty-three percent of you have been to starbucks recently and used the wireless network .
things get more interesting .
forty-six percent of you i could link to a business , xyz employee network .
this is n't an exact science , but it gets pretty accurate .
seven hundred and sixty-one of you i could identify a hotel you 'd been to recently , absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe .
two hundred and thirty-four of you , well , i know where you live .
your wireless network name is so unique that i was able to pinpoint it using data available openly on the internet with no hacking or clever , clever tricks .
and i should mention as well that some of you do use your names , " james lyne 's iphone , " for example .
and two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity .
so something for you to think about : as we adopt these new applications and mobile devices , as we play with these shiny new toys , how much are we trading off convenience for privacy and security ?
next time you install something , look at the settings and ask yourself , " is this information that i want to share ?
would someone be able to abuse it ? "
we also need to think very carefully about how we develop our future talent pool .
you see , technology 's changing at a staggering rate , and that 250,000 pieces of malware wo n't stay the same for long .
there 's a very concerning trend that whilst many people coming out of schools now are much more technology-savvy , they know how to use technology , fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects to know how that technology works under the covers .
in the u.k. , a 60 percent reduction since 2003 , and there are similar statistics all over the world .
we also need to think about the legal issues in this area .
the cybercriminals i talked about , despite theft of millions of dollars , actually still have n't been arrested , and at this point possibly never will .
most laws are national in their implementation , despite cybercrime conventions , where the internet is borderless and international by definition .
countries do not agree , which makes this area exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective .
but my biggest ask is this : you see , you 're going to leave here and you 're going to see some astonishing stories in the news .
you 're going to read about malware doing incredible and terrifying , scary things .
however , 99 percent of it works because people fail to do the basics .
so my ask is this : go online , find these simple best practices , find out how to update and patch your computer .
get a secure password .
make sure you use a different password on each of your sites and services online .
find these resources . apply them .
the internet is a fantastic resource for business , for political expression , for art and for learning .
help me and the security community make life much , much more difficult for cybercriminals .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ picture yourself in a world where there 's no one else , ♫ ♫ nobody anywhere . ♫ ♫ a moment ago , there were voices and faces to look upon , ♫ ♫ you ca n't see them anywhere . ♫ ♫ nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and no one left to say it to , anyway . ♫ ♫ oh , listen to what i say . ♫ ♫ everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference . ♫ ♫ everybody can be somebody . ♫ ♫ everybody is free to make a difference in this world . ♫ ♫ now picture a world where the people all feel their worth . ♫
♫ children are everywhere . ♫ ♫ now there is a reason for everyone 's time on earth . ♫ ♫ wondering why you should care , yeah . ♫ ♫ nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and only love can see us through , anyway . ♫ ♫ oh , listen what i say , yeah . ♫ ♫ everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference . ♫ ♫ everybody can be somebody . ♫ ♫ everybody is free to make a difference . ♫ ♫ you do n't have to be a big celebrity ♫ ♫ to feel the power , the power in your soul , no . ♫
♫ you do n't have to be a big star on mtv ♫ ♫ to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see . ♫ ♫ everybody can be somebody . ♫ ♫ everybody is free to make a difference in this world . ♫ ♫ you can make a little difference in this world . ♫ ♫ i can make a little difference in this world . ♫ ♫ she can make a little difference in this world . ♫ ♫ he can make a little difference in this world . ♫ ♫ you can , i can , she can , he can , ♫ ♫ we can make a little bit of difference in this world . ♫
♫ everybody gonna make a little ♫ ♫ little difference , yeah . ♫ ♫ talking ' bout everybody gonna make a little difference . ♫ ♫ everybody gonna make a little difference in this world , ♫ ♫ oh yeah . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a song that came about because i think it 's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what 's going on , and the wars and so forth .
this song kind of came out of all of that .
and i wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record , which i still stand by , but this has got something else in it .
it 's called " peace on earth . "
♫ there is no hope . ♫ ♫ there is no future . ♫ ♫ no faith in god to save the day . ♫ ♫ there is no reason , no understanding ♫ ♫ no sacred place to hide away . ♫ ♫ there is no earnest conversation . ♫ ♫ no words of wisdom from the wise . ♫ ♫ there is no reconciliation ♫ ♫ and no collective compromise . ♫ ♫ peace on earth , ♫ ♫ that 's what we want . ♫ ♫ peace on earth , ♫ ♫ that 's what we all say . ♫ ♫ peace on earth . ♫ ♫ yet , there in the hallway ♫
♫ lurks the ghost of war . ♫ ♫ he wants more , and more , and more , and more , ♫ ♫ and more , and more , and more , and more . ♫ ♫ there is no darkness , no sunshine . ♫ ♫ there is no great society . ♫ ♫ there is no freedom without conviction . ♫ ♫ there is no freedom to be free . ♫ ♫ there is no heaven , no fire and brimstone . ♫ ♫ there is no brotherhood of man . ♫ ♫ there is no country , no one religion . ♫ ♫ there is no universal plan . ♫ ♫ peace on earth , ♫ ♫ that 's what we want . ♫
♫ peace on earth , ♫ ♫ that 's what we all say . ♫ ♫ peace on earth . ♫ ♫ yet , there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war . ♫ ♫ he wants more , and more , and more , and more , ♫ ♫ and more , and more , and more , and more , and more . ♫ ♫ the answer is ♫ ♫ mutual-assured destruction , ♫ ♫ a balance of power , ♫ ♫ a weapon for everyone . ♫ ♫ mutual-assured destruction ♫ ♫ bringing peace to everyone . ♫ -lrb- trumpet sounds -rrb- -lrb- trumpet sounds -rrb- ♫ peace on earth , ♫ ♫ that 's what we want . ♫
♫ peace on earth , ♫ ♫ that 's what we all say . ♫ ♫ peace on earth . ♫ ♫ there in the hallway , ♫ ♫ peace on earth . ♫ ♫ peace on earth . ♫ ♫ peace on earth . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- the 2011 arab spring captured the attention of the world .
it also captured the attention of authoritarian governments in other countries , who were worried that revolution would spread .
to respond , they ramped up surveillance of activists , journalists and dissidents who they feared would inspire revolution in their own countries .
one prominent bahraini activist , who was arrested and tortured by his government , has said that the interrogators showed him transcripts of his telephone calls and text messages .
of course , it 's no secret that governments are able to intercept telephone calls and text messages .
it 's for that reason that many activists specifically avoid using the telephone .
instead , they use tools like skype , which they think are immune to interception .
they 're wrong .
there have now been over the last few years an industry of companies who provide surveillance technology to governments , specifically technology that allows those governments to hack into the computers of surveillance targets .
rather than intercepting the communications as they go over the wire , instead they now hack into your computer , enable your webcam , enable your microphone , and steal documents from your computer .
when the government of egypt fell in 2011 , activists raided the office of the secret police , and among the many documents they found was this document by the gamma corporation , by gamma international .
gamma is a german company that manufactures surveillance software and sells it only to governments .
it 's important to note that most governments do n't really have the in-house capabilities to develop this software .
smaller ones do n't have the resources or the expertise , and so there 's this market of western companies who are happy to supply them with the tools and techniques for a price .
gamma is just one of these companies .
i should note also that gamma never actually sold their software to the egyptian government .
they 'd sent them an invoice for a sale , but the egyptians never bought it .
instead , apparently , the egyptian government used a free demo version of gamma 's software .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this screenshot is from a sales video that gamma produced .
really , they 're just emphasizing in a relatively slick presentation the fact that the police can sort of sit in an air-conditioned office and remotely monitor someone without them having any idea that it 's going on .
you know , your webcam light wo n't turn on .
there 's nothing to indicate that the microphone is enabled .
this is the managing director of gamma international .
his name is martin muench .
there are many photos of mr. muench that exist .
this is perhaps my favorite .
i 'm just going to zoom in a little bit onto his webcam .
you can see there 's a little sticker that 's placed over his camera .
he knows what kind of surveillance is possible , and so clearly he does n't want it to be used against him .
muench has said that he intends for his software to be used to capture terrorists and locate pedophiles .
of course , he 's also acknowledged that once the software has been sold to governments , he has no way of knowing how it can be used .
gamma 's software has been located on servers in countries around the world , many with really atrocious track records and human rights violations .
they really are selling their software around the world .
gamma is not the only company in the business .
as i said , it 's a $ 5 billion industry .
one of the other big guys in the industry is an italian company called hacking team .
now , hacking team has what is probably the slickest presentation .
the video they 've produced is very sexy , and so i 'm going to play you a clip just so you can get a feel both for the capabilities of the software but also how it 's marketed to their government clients .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : you want to look through your target 's eyes .
-lrb- music -rrb- you have to hack your target .
-lsb- " while your target is browsing the web , exchanging documents , receiving sms , crossing the borders " -rsb- you have to hit many different platforms .
-lsb- " windows , os x , ios , android , blackberry , symbian , linux " -rsb- you have to overcome encryption and capture relevant data .
-lsb- skype & encrypted calls , target location , messaging , relationships , web browsing , audio & video " -rsb- being stealth and untraceable .
-lsb- " immune to any protection system hidden collection infrastructure " -rsb- deployed all over your country .
-lsb- " up to hundreds of thousands of targets managed from a single spot " -rsb- exactly what we do .
christopher soghoian : so , it would be funny if it was n't true , but , in fact , hacking team 's software is being sold to governments around the world .
last year we learned , for example , that it 's been used to target moroccan journalists by the moroccan government .
many , many countries it 's been found in .
so , hacking team has also been actively courting the u.s. law enforcement market .
in the last year or so , the company has opened a sales office in maryland .
the company has also hired a spokesperson .
they 've been attending surveillance industry conferences where law enforcement officials show up .
they 've spoken at the conferences .
what i thought was most fascinating was they 've actually paid for the coffee break at one of the law enforcement conferences earlier this year .
i ca n't tell you for sure that hacking team has sold their technology in the united states , but what i can tell you that if they have n't sold it , it is n't because they have n't been trying hard .
so as i said before , governments that do n't really have the resources to build their own tools will buy off-the-shelf surveillance software , and so for that reason , you see that the government of , say , tunisia , might use the same software as the government of germany .
they 're all buying off-the-shelf stuff .
the federal bureau of investigation in the united states does have the budget to build their own surveillance technology , and so for several years , i 've been trying to figure out if and how the fbi is hacking into the computers of surveillance targets .
my friends at an organization called the electronic frontier foundation - obtained hundreds of documents from the fbi detailing their next generation of surveillance technologies .
most of these documents were heavily redacted , but what you can see from the slides , if i zoom in , is this term : remote operations unit .
now , when i first looked into this , i 'd never heard of this unit before .
i 've been studying surveillance for more than six years .
i 'd never heard of it .
and so i went online and i did some research , and ultimately i hit the mother lode when i went to linkedin , the social networking site for job seekers .
there were lots of former u.s. government contractors who had at one point worked for the remote operating unit , and were describing in surprising detail on their cvs what they had done in their former job .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i took this information and i gave it to a journalist that i know and trust at the wall street journal , and she was able to contact several other former law enforcement officials who spoke on background and confirmed that yes , in fact , the fbi has a dedicated team that does nothing but hack into the computers of surveillance targets .
like gamma and hacking team , the fbi also has the capability to remotely activate webcams , microphones , steal documents , get web browsing information , the works .
there 's sort of a big problem with governments going into hacking , and that 's that terrorists , pedophiles , drug dealers , journalists and human rights activists all use the same kinds of computers .
there 's no drug dealer phone and there 's no journalist laptop .
we all use the same technology , and what that means then is that for governments to have the capability to hack into the computers of the real bad guys , they also have to have the capability to hack into our devices too .
so governments around the world have been embracing this technology .
they 've been embracing hacking as a law enforcement technique , but without any real debate .
in the united states , where i live , there have been no congressional hearings .
there 's no law that 's been passed specifically authorizing this technique , and because of its power and potential for abuse , it 's vital that we have an informed public debate .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi , my name is roz savage and i row across oceans .
four years ago , i rowed solo across the atlantic , and since then , i 've done two out of three stages across the pacific , from san francisco to hawaii and from hawaii to kiribati .
and tomorrow , i 'll be leaving this boat to fly back to kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the pacific .
cumulatively , i will have rowed over 8,000 miles , taken over three million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean on a 23 foot rowboat .
this has given me a very special relationship with the ocean .
we have a bit of a love / hate thing going on .
i feel a bit about it like i did about a very strict math teacher that i once had at school .
i did n't always like her , but i did respect her , and she taught me a heck of a lot .
so today i 'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they 've taught me , and how i think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now .
now , some of you might be thinking , " hold on a minute . she does n't look very much like an ocean rower .
is n't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide and maybe look a bit more like these guys ? "
you 'll notice , they 've all got something that i do n't .
well , i do n't know what you 're thinking , but i 'm talking about the beards . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and no matter how long i 've spent on the ocean , i have n't yet managed to muster a decent beard , and i hope that it remains that way .
for a long time , i did n't believe that i could have a big adventure .
the story that i told myself was that adventurers looked like this .
i did n't look the part .
i thought there were them and there were us , and i was not one of them .
so for 11 years , i conformed .
i did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do .
i was working in an office in london as a management consultant .
and i think i knew from day one that it was n't the right job for me .
but that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years , until i reached my mid-30s and i thought , " you know , i 'm not getting any younger .
i feel like i 've got a purpose in this life , and i do n't know what it is , but i 'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it .
so , fast forward a few years .
i 'd gone through some changes .
to try and answer that question of , " what am i supposed to be doing with my life ? "
i sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary , the one that i wanted , a life of adventure , and the one that i was actually heading for which was a nice , normal , pleasant life , but it was n't where i wanted to be by the end of my life .
i wanted to live a life that i could be proud of .
and i remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking , " oh boy , i 'm on totally the wrong track here .
if i carry on living as i am now , i 'm just not going to end up where i want to be in five years , or 10 years , or at the end of my life . "
i made a few changes , let go of some loose trappings of my old life , and through a bit of a leap of logic , decided to row across the atlantic ocean .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the atlantic rowing race runs from the canaries to antigua , it 's about 3,000 miles , and it turned out to be the hardest thing i had ever done .
sure , i had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone , but what i 'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is , by definition , extremely uncomfortable .
and my timing was not great either : 2005 , when i did the atlantic , was the year of hurricane katrina .
there were more tropical storms in the north atlantic than ever before , since records began .
and pretty early on , those storms started making their presence known .
all four of my oars broke before i reached halfway across .
oars are not supposed to look like this .
but what can you do ? you 're in the middle of the ocean .
oars are your only means of propulsion .
so i just had to look around the boat and figure out what i was going to use to fix up these oars so that i could carry on .
so i found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it .
then , when that gave out , i sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those .
and then when those gave out , i cannibalized one of the broken oars .
i 'd never been very good at fixing stuff when i was living my old life , but it 's amazing how resourceful you can become when you 're in the middle of the ocean and there 's only one way to get to the other side .
and the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways i went beyond what i thought were my limits .
i suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom .
i really struggled psychologically , totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge , realizing that , if i carried on moving at two miles an hour , 3,000 miles was going to take me a very , very long time .
there were so many times when i thought i 'd hit that limit , but had no choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how i was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy .
and eventually after 103 days at sea , i arrived in antigua .
i do n't think i 've ever felt so happy in my entire life .
it was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an oscar all rolled into one .
i was euphoric .
and to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the cliff tops and clapping and cheering , i just felt like a movie star .
it was absolutely wonderful .
and i really learned then that , the bigger the challenge , the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it .
so this might be a good moment to take a quick time-out to answer a few faqs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind .
number one that i get asked : what do you eat ?
a few freeze-dried meals , but mostly i try and eat much more unprocessed foods .
so i grow my own beansprouts .
i eat fruits and nut bars , a lot of nuts .
and generally arrive about 30 pounds lighter at the other end .
question number two : how do you sleep ?
with my eyes shut . ha-ha .
i suppose what you mean is : what happens to the boat while i 'm sleeping ?
well , i plan my route so that i 'm drifting with the winds and the currents while i 'm sleeping .
on a good night , i think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction .
worst ever , 13 miles in the wrong direction .
that 's a bad day at the office .
what do i wear ?
mostly , a baseball cap , rowing gloves and a smile - or a frown , depending on whether i went backwards overnight - and lots of sun lotion .
do i have a chase boat ?
no i do n't . i 'm totally self-supporting out there .
i do n't see anybody for the whole time that i 'm at sea , generally .
and finally : am i crazy ?
well , i leave that one up to you to judge .
so , how do you top rowing across the atlantic ?
well , naturally , you decide to row across the pacific .
well , i thought the atlantic was big , but the pacific is really , really big .
i think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps .
i do n't know for sure that the brits invented this particular view of the world , but i suspect we might have done so : we are right in the middle , and we 've cut the pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world .
whereas if you look in google earth , this is how the pacific looks .
it pretty much covers half the planet .
you can just see a little bit of north america up here and a sliver of australia down there .
it is really big - 65 million square miles - and to row in a straight line across it would be about 8,000 miles .
unfortunately , ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line .
by the time i get to australia , if i get to australia , i will have rowed probably nine or 10,000 miles in all .
so , because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past hawaii without dropping in , i decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments .
the first attempt did n't go so well .
in 2007 , i did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours .
a bit like being in a washing machine .
boat got a bit dinged up , so did i.
i blogged about it . unfortunately , somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided that this damsel was in distress and needed saving .
the first i knew about this was when the coast guard plane turned up overhead .
i tried to tell them to go away .
we had a bit of a battle of wills .
i lost and got airlifted .
awful , really awful .
it was one of the worst feelings of my life , as i was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 foot waves and wondering if i would ever see her again .
so i had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before i could get back out onto the ocean again .
but what do you do ?
fall down nine times , get up 10 .
so , the following year , i set out and , fortunately , this time made it safely across to hawaii .
but it was not without misadventure .
my watermaker broke , only the most important piece of kit that i have on the boat .
powered by my solar panels , it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater .
but it does n't react very well to being immersed in ocean , which is what happened to it .
fortunately , help was at hand .
there was another unusual boat out there at the same time , doing as i was doing , bringing awareness to the north pacific garbage patch , that area in the north pacific about twice the size of texas , with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it , circulating at the center of that north pacific gyre .
so , to make the point , these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash , 15,000 empty water bottles latched together into two pontoons .
they were going very slowly .
partly , they 'd had a bit of a delay .
they 'd had to pull in at catalina island shortly after they left long beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone , and they were starting to sink .
so they 'd had to pull in and do all the lids up .
but , as i was approaching the end of my water reserves , luckily , our courses were converging .
they were running out of food ; i was running out of water .
so we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up .
and it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge .
i was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots , and they were doing only marginally less pathetic speed of about 1.4 : it was like two snails in a mating dance .
but , eventually , we did manage to meet up and joel hopped overboard , caught us a beautiful , big mahi-mahi , which was the best food i 'd had in , ooh , at least three months .
fortunately , the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier .
when they opened this one up , they found its stomach was full of plastic .
and this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance .
it leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it , and then we come along and eat that poor critter , and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well .
so there are very real implications for human health .
i eventually made it to hawaii still alive .
and , the following year , set out on the second stage of the pacific , from hawaii down to tarawa .
and you 'll notice something about tarawa ; it is very low-lying .
it 's that little green sliver on the horizon , which makes them very nervous about rising oceans .
this is big trouble for these guys .
they 've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level .
and also , as an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change , they 're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef , which will contaminate their fresh water supply .
i had a meeting with the president there , who told me about his exit strategy for his country .
he expects that within the next 50 years , the 100,000 people that live there will have to relocate to new zealand or australia .
and that made me think about how would i feel if britain was going to disappear under the waves ; if the places where i 'd been born and gone to school and got married , if all those places were just going to disappear forever .
how , literally , ungrounded that would make me feel .
very shortly , i 'll be setting out to try and get to australia , and if i 'm successful , i 'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the pacific .
and i try to use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues , to bring a human face to the ocean .
if the atlantic was about my inner journey , discovering my own capabilities , maybe the pacific has been about my outer journey , figuring out how i can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world , and to take some of those things that i 've learned out there and apply them to the situation that humankind now finds itself in .
i think there are probably three key points here .
the first one is about the stories that we tell ourselves .
for so long , i told myself that i could n't have an adventure because i was n't six foot tall and athletic and bearded .
and then that story changed .
i found out that people had rowed across oceans .
i even met one of them and she was just about my size .
so even though i did n't grow any taller , i did n't sprout a beard , something had changed : my interior dialogue had changed .
at the moment , the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff , that we need oil .
but what about if we just change that story ?
we do have alternatives , and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives , those sustainable ones , to create a greener future .
the second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions .
we might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean , that it ca n't really make a difference .
but it does . generally , we have n't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters .
yes , there have been the exxon valdezes and the chernobyls , but mostly it 's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals , day after day and year after year .
and , by the same token , we can turn that tide .
we can start making better , wiser , more sustainable decisions .
and when we do that , we 're not just one person .
anything that we do spreads ripples .
other people will see if you 're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag .
maybe if we all start doing this , we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the checkout line .
that 's just one example .
this is a world-wide community .
the other point : it 's about taking responsibility .
for so much of my life , i wanted something else to make me happy .
i thought if i had the right house or the right car or the right man in my life , then i could be happy .
but when i wrote that obituary exercise , i actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that i needed to create my own future .
i could n't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me .
and i suppose i 'm a selfish environmentalist .
i plan on being around for a long time , and when i 'm 90 years old , i want to be happy and healthy .
and it 's very difficult to be happy on a planet that 's racked with famine and drought .
it 's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we 've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air .
so , shortly , i 'm going to be launching a new initiative called eco-heroes .
and the idea here is that all our eco-heroes will log at least one green deed every day .
it 's meant to be a bit of a game .
we 're going to make an iphone app out of it .
we just want to try and create that awareness because , sure , changing a light bulb is n't going to change the world , but that attitude , that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug , that is what could change the world .
i really believe that we stand at a very important point in history .
we have a choice . we 've been blessed , or cursed , with free will .
we can choose a greener future , and we can get there if we all pull together to take it one stroke at a time .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a magician , i 'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion .
and one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater , which was popular in the early part of the 20th century .
it used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage . now , i wo n't use mirrors , but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater .
so let the story begin .
on a dark and stormy night - really ! - it was the 10th of july , 1856 .
lightning lit the sky , and a baby was born .
his name was nikola , nikola tesla .
now the baby grew into a very smart guy .
let me show you .
tesla , what is 236 multiplied by 501 ?
nikola tesla : the result is 118,236 .
marco tempest : now tesla 's brain worked in the most extraordinary way .
when a word was mentioned , an image of it instantly appeared in his mind .
tree . chair . girl .
they were hallucinations , which vanished the moment he touched them .
probably a form of synesthesia .
but it was something he later turned to his advantage .
where other scientists would play in their laboratory , tesla created his inventions in his mind .
nt : to my delight , i discovered i could visualize my inventions with the greatest facility .
mt : and when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination , he would build them in his workshop .
nt : i needed no models , drawings or experiments .
i could picture them as real in my mind , and there i run it , test it and improve it .
only then do i construct it .
mt : his great idea was alternating current .
but how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe ?
to sell his idea , he became a showman .
nt : we are at the dawn of a new age , the age of electricity .
i have been able , through careful invention , to transmit , with the mere flick of a switch , electricity across the ether .
it is the magic of science .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tesla has over 700 patents to his name : radio , wireless telegraphy , remote control , robotics .
he even photographed the bones of the human body .
but the high point was the realization of a childhood dream : harnessing the raging powers of niagara falls , and bringing light to the city .
but tesla 's success did n't last .
nt : i had bigger ideas .
illuminating the city was only the beginning .
a world telegraphy center - imagine news , messages , sounds , images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly .
mt : it 's a great idea ; it was a huge project . expensive , too .
nt : they would n't give me the money .
mt : well , maybe you should n't have told them it could be used to contact other planets .
nt : yes , that was a big mistake .
mt : tesla 's career as an inventor never recovered .
he became a recluse .
dodged by death , he spent much of his time in his suite at the waldorf-astoria .
nt : everything i did , i did for mankind , for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich , where products of intellect , science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life .
mt : nikola tesla died on the 7th of january , 1943 .
his final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the nikola tesla museum in belgrade .
his legacy is with us still .
tesla became the man who lit the world , but this was only the beginning .
tesla 's insight was profound .
nt : tell me , what will man do when the forests disappear , and the coal deposits are exhausted ?
mt : tesla thought he had the answer .
we are still asking the question .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so here 's the most important economic fact of our time .
we are living in an age of surging income inequality , particularly between those at the very top and everyone else .
this shift is the most striking in the u.s. and in the u.k. , but it 's a global phenomenon .
it 's happening in communist china , in formerly communist russia , it 's happening in india , in my own native canada .
we 're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like sweden , finland and germany .
let me give you a few numbers to place what 's happening .
in the 1970s , the one percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the united states .
today , their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent .
but what 's even more striking is what 's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution .
the 0.1 percent in the u.s.
today account for more than eight percent of the national income .
they are where the one percent was 30 years ago .
let me give you another number to put that in perspective , and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by robert reich , the secretary of labor in the clinton administration .
reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men , bill gates and warren buffett , and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the u.s. population , 120 million people .
now , as it happens , warren buffett is not only himself a plutocrat , he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon , and he has his own favorite number .
buffett likes to point out that in 1992 , the combined wealth of the people on the forbes 400 list - and this is the list of the 400 richest americans - was 300 billion dollars .
just think about it .
you did n't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992 .
well , today , that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion , and i probably do n't need to tell you that we have n't seen anything similar happen to the middle class , whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased .
so we 're living in the age of the global plutocracy , but we 've been slow to notice it .
one of the reasons , i think , is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon .
changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic .
think about what happened , after all , to the poor frog .
but i think there 's something else going on .
talking about income inequality , even if you 're not on the forbes 400 list , can make us feel uncomfortable .
it feels less positive , less optimistic , to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger .
and if you do happen to be on the forbes 400 list , talking about income distribution , and inevitably its cousin , income redistribution , can be downright threatening .
so we 're living in the age of surging income inequality , especially at the top .
what 's driving it , and what can we do about it ?
one set of causes is political : lower taxes , deregulation , particularly of financial services , privatization , weaker legal protections for trade unions , all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very , very top .
a lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of " crony capitalism , " political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but do n't actually do much good for the rest of us .
in practice , getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult .
think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in russia , for instance , or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the great depression , or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies , including those whose motto might be " do n't do evil , " to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class .
but while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really , really hard , at least intellectually , it 's an easy problem .
after all , no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism .
indeed , this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right .
a critique of crony capitalism is as central to the tea party as it is to occupy wall street .
but if crony capitalism is , intellectually at least , the easy part of the problem , things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality .
in and of themselves , these are n't too mysterious .
globalization and the technology revolution , the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy , are also powering the rise of the super-rich .
just think about it .
for the first time in history , if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product , you have almost instant , almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people .
as a result , if you are very , very smart and very , very lucky , you can get very , very rich very , very quickly .
the latest poster boy for this phenomenon is david karp .
the 26-year-old founder of tumblr recently sold his company to yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars .
think about that for a minute : 1.1 billion dollars , 26 years old .
it 's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields , like sports and entertainment .
we can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before .
but today , that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy .
we have superstar technologists .
we have superstar bankers .
we have superstar lawyers and superstar architects .
there are superstar cooks and superstar farmers .
there are even , and this is my personal favorite example , superstar dentists , the most dazzling exemplar of whom is bernard touati , the frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like russian oligarch roman abramovich or european-born american fashion designer diane von furstenberg .
but while it 's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy , what 's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it .
and that 's because , in contrast with crony capitalism , so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive .
let 's start with technology .
i love the internet . i love my mobile devices .
i love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium .
i 'm even more of a fan of globalization .
this is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world 's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class , and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world , it 's made many new products affordable - who do you think built your iphone ? - and things that we 've relied on for a long time much cheaper .
think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt .
so what 's not to like ?
well , a few things .
one of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy .
imagine you 're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process .
it gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor .
and that 's no mere hypothetical example .
think about amazon , apple , google , starbucks .
these are among the world 's most admired , most beloved , most innovative companies .
they also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very , very significantly .
and why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage ?
once you have the tremendous economic power that we 're seeing at the very , very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails , it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor .
again , this is no mere hypothetical .
it 's what the russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of russia 's natural resources .
it 's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the u.s. and the u.k.
a second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy .
one way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks , and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today 's economy .
that 's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children .
the middle class is spending more on schooling too , but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at harvard , stanford or mit , the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the one percent .
the result is something that economists alan krueger and miles corak call the great gatsby curve .
as income inequality increases , social mobility decreases .
the plutocracy may be a meritocracy , but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race .
the third thing , and this is what worries me the most , is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in western industrialized economies .
let 's start with technology .
those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs .
when 's the last time you used a travel agent ?
and in contrast with the industrial revolution , the titans of our new economy are n't creating that many new jobs .
at its zenith , g.m. employed hundreds of thousands , facebook fewer than 10,000 .
the same is true of globalization .
for all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets , it 's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed western economies .
the terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity .
that 's shown in what i consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time .
since the late 1990s , increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases that means that our countries are getting richer , our companies are getting more efficient , but we 're not creating more jobs and we 're not paying people , as a whole , more .
one scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment .
what worries me more is a different nightmare scenario .
after all , in a totally free labor market , we could find jobs for pretty much everyone .
the dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages .
so when i get really depressed about all of this , i comfort myself in thinking about the industrial revolution .
after all , for all its grim , satanic mills , it worked out pretty well , did n't it ?
after all , all of us here are richer , healthier , taller - well , there are a few exceptions - and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century .
but it 's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the industrial revolution with the broad swathes of society , we had to go through two depressions , the great depression of the 1930s , the long depression of the 1870s , two world wars , communist revolutions in russia and in china , and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the west .
we also , not coincidentally , went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions .
we created the modern welfare state .
we created public education .
we created public health care .
we created public pensions .
we created unions .
today , we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the industrial revolution .
to be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats , we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change .
we need a new new deal .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the question is , what is invisible ?
there is more of it than you think , actually .
everything , i would say . everything that matters except every thing and except matter .
we can see matter . but we ca n't see what 's the matter .
as in this cryptic sentence i found in the guardian recently : " the marriage suffered a setback in 1965 , when the husband was killed by the wife . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a world of invisibility there , is n't there ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , we can see the stars and the planets , but we ca n't see what holds them apart or what draws them together .
with matter , as with people , we see only the skin of things .
we ca n't see into the engine room .
we ca n't see what makes people tick , at least not without difficulty .
and the closer we look at anything , the more it disappears .
in fact , if you look really closely at stuff , if you look at the basic substructure of matter , there is n't anything there .
electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz , and there is only energy . and you ca n't see energy .
so everything that matters , that 's important , is invisible .
one slightly silly thing that 's invisible is this story , which is invisible to you .
and i 'm now going to make it visible to you in your minds .
it 's about an m.p. called geoffrey dickens .
the late geoffrey dickens , m.p. was attending a fete in his constituency .
wherever he went , at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- try as he might , he could n't get away from her .
a few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him , had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph .
after her name , written in brackets was the apt description , horse face .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 've misjudged this women , " thought mr. dickens .
" not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness , she turns it to her advantage .
a photo is not enough . "
so he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in .
and on the photograph , he wrote with a flourish , " to horse face , with love from geoffrey dickens , m.p. "
after it had been sent off , his secretary said to him , " did you get that letter from the woman at the fete ?
i wrote horse face on her , so you 'd remember who she was . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i bet he thought he wished he was invisible , do n't you ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we ca n't see we also ca n't understand .
gravity is one thing that we ca n't see and which we do n't understand .
it 's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces , and the weakest .
and nobody really knows what it is or why it 's there .
for what it 's worth , sir isaac newton , the greatest scientist who ever lived , he thought jesus came to earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity .
that 's what he thought he was there for .
so , bright guy , could be wrong on that one , i do n't know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- consciousness . i see all your faces .
i have no idea what any of you are thinking . is n't that amazing ?
is n't that incredible that we ca n't read each other 's minds ?
but we can touch each other , taste each other perhaps , if we get close enough .
but we ca n't read each other 's minds . i find that quite astonishing .
in the sufi faith , this great middle eastern religion , which some claim is the route of all religions , sufi masters are all telepaths , so they say .
but their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it does n't exist .
so that 's why we do n't think it exists , the sufi masters working on us .
in the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence , artificial intelligence has really , like the study of consciousness , gotten nowhere . we have no idea how consciousness works .
with artificial intelligence , not only have they not created artificial intelligence , they have n't yet created artificial stupidity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the laws of physics : invisible , eternal , omnipresent , all-powerful .
remind you of anyone ?
interesting . i 'm , as you can guess , not a materialist , i 'm an immaterialist .
and i 've found a very useful new word , ignostic . okay ?
i 'm an ignostic .
i refuse to be drawn on the question of whether god exists , until somebody properly defines the terms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another thing we ca n't see is the human genome .
and this is increasingly peculiar , because about 20 years ago , when they started delving into the genome , they thought it would probably contain around 100,000 genes .
geneticists will know this , but every year since , it 's been revised downwards .
we now think there are likely to be only just over 20,000 genes in the human genome .
this is extraordinary . because rice - get this - rice is known to have 38 thousand genes .
potatoes , potatoes have 48 chromosomes . do you know that ?
two more than people , and the same as a gorilla .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you ca n't see these things , but they are very strange .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the stars by day . i always think that 's fascinating .
the universe disappears .
the more light there is , the less you can see .
time , nobody can see time .
i do n't know if you know this . modern physics , there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time does n't really exist , because it 's too inconvenient for the figures .
it 's much easier if it 's not really there .
you ca n't see the future , obviously .
and you ca n't see the past , except in your memory .
one of the interesting things about the past is you particularly ca n't see . my son asked me this the other day , he said , " dad , can you remember what i was like when i was two ? "
and i said , " yes . " and he said , " why ca n't i ? "
is n't that extraordinary ? you can not remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three , which is great news for psychoanalysts , because otherwise they 'd be out of a job .
because that 's where all the stuff happens -lrb- laughter -rrb- that makes you who you are .
another thing you ca n't see is the grid on which we hang .
this is fascinating . you probably know , some of you , that cells are continually renewed . you can see it in skin and this kind of stuff .
skin flakes off , hairs grow , nails , that kind of stuff .
but every cell in your body is replaced at some point .
taste buds , every 10 days or so .
livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer . a spine takes several years .
but at the end of seven years , not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago .
the question is , who , then , are we ?
what are we ? what is this thing that we hang on , that is actually us ?
okay . atoms , you ca n't see them .
nobody ever will . they 're smaller than the wavelength of light .
gas , you ca n't see that .
interesting . somebody mentioned 1600 recently .
gas was invented in 1600 by a dutch chemist called van helmont .
it 's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual .
quite good . he also invented a word called " blas , " meaning astral radiation .
did n't catch on , unfortunately .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but well done , him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there is so many things that - light .
you ca n't see light . when it 's dark , in a vacuum , if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes , you wo n't see it . slightly technical , some physicists will disagree with this .
but it 's odd that you ca n't see the beam of light , you can only see what it hits .
i find that extraordinary , not to be able to see light , not to be able to see darkness .
electricity , you ca n't see that .
do n't let anyone tell you they understand electricity .
they do n't . nobody knows what it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire , do n't you , at the speed of light when you turn the light on . they do n't .
electrons bumble down the wire , about the speed of spreading honey , they say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- galaxies , 100 billion of them estimated in the universe .
100 billion . how many can we see ? five .
five out of the 100 billion galaxies , with the naked eye , and one of them is quite difficult to see unless you 've got very good eyesight .
radio waves . there 's another thing .
heinrich hertz , when he discovered radio waves in 1887 , he called them radio waves because they radiated .
and somebody said to him , " well what 's the point of these , heinrich ?
what 's the point of these radio waves that you 've found ? "
and he said , " well , i 've no idea .
but i guess somebody will find a use for them someday . "
and that 's what they do , radio . that 's what they discovered .
anyway , so the biggest thing that 's invisible to us is what we do n't know .
it is incredible how little we know .
thomas edison once said , " we do n't know one percent of one millionth about anything . "
and i 've come to the conclusion - because you 've asked this other question , " what 's another thing you ca n't see ? "
the point , most of us . what 's the point ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you ca n't see a point . it 's by definition dimensionless , like an electron , oddly enough .
but the point , what i 've got it down to , is there are only two questions really worth asking .
" why are we here ? " and " what should we do about it while we are ?
and to help you , i 've got two things to leave you with , from two great philosophers , perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century , one a mathematician and an engineer , and the other a poet .
the first is ludwig wittgenstein who said , " i do n't know why we are here .
but i 'm pretty sure it 's not in order to enjoy ourselves . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was a cheerful bastard was n't he ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and secondly and lastly , w.h. auden , one of my favorite poets , who said , " we are here on earth to help others .
what the others are here for , i 've no idea . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what is it about flying cars ?
we 've wanted to do this for about a hundred years .
and there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success .
but we have n't yet gotten to the point where on your way here this morning you see something that really , truly seamlessly integrates the two-dimensional world that we 're comfortable in with the three-dimensional sky above us - that , i do n't know about you , but i really enjoy spending time in .
we looked at the historical attempts that had been out there and realized that , despite the fact that we have a lot of modern innovations to draw on today that were n't available previously - we have modern composite materials , we have aircraft engines that get good fuel economy and have better power-to-rate ratios than have ever been available , we have glass cockpit avionics that bring the information you need to fly directly to you in the cockpit - but without fundamentally addressing the problem from a different perspective , we realized that we were going to be getting the same result that people had been getting
for the last hundred years , which is n't where we want to be right now .
so instead of trying to make a car that can fly , we decided to try to make a plane that could drive .
and the result is the terrafugia transition .
it 's a two-seat , single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane .
you take off and land at a local airport .
then once you 're on the ground , you fold up the wings , drive it home , park it in your garage .
and it works .
after two years of an innovative design and construction process , the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008 .
now like with anything that 's really different from the status quo , it did n't always go so well testing that aircraft .
and we discovered that it 's a very good thing that , when you go home with something that 's been broken , you 've actually learned a lot more than when you managed to tick off all of your test objectives the first time through .
still , we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we 'd all helped build in the air , off the ground , like it was supposed to be .
and on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate new york , we got to do that for the first time .
the picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time .
and we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over .
the flight testing that followed that was as basic and low-risk as we could make it , but it still accomplished what we needed to to take the program to the next step and to gain the credibility that we needed within our eventual market , the general aviation community , and with the regulators that govern the use of design of aircraft , particularly in the states .
the faa , about a year ago , gave us an exemption for the transition to allow us to have an additional 110 lbs .
within the light sport aircraft category .
now that does n't sound like a lot , but it 's very important , because being able to deliver the transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it , but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it .
a sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time .
and at 110 lbs . , that 's very important for solving the other side of the equation - driving .
it turns out that driving , with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles , is actually a harder problem to solve than flying .
for those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground , this may be counter-intuitive , but driving has potholes , cobblestones , pedestrians , other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with .
fortunately , necessity remains the mother of invention , and a lot of the design work that we 're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground - everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic , to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you 're flying or the wheels on the ground , to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we 'll see in a moment , to crash safety features .
we have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car .
now this also , as good as it is , was n't quite enough .
the regulations for vehicles on the road were n't written with an airplane in mind .
so we did need a little bit of support from the national highway traffic safety administration .
now you may have seen in the news recently , they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the transition to be sold in the same category as suvs and light trucks .
as a multi-purpose passenger vehicle , it is now officially " designed for occasional off-road use . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now let 's see it in action .
you can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane .
you 're not powering the propeller , you 're powering the wheels .
and it is under seven feet tall , so it will fit in a standard construction garage .
and that 's the automated wing-folding mechanism .
that 's real time .
you just push a few buttons in the cockpit , and the wings come out .
once they 're fully deployed , there 's a mechanical lock that goes into place , again , from inside the cockpit .
and they 're now fully capable of handling any of the loads you would see in flight - just like putting down your convertible top .
and you 're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that .
-lrb- video -rrb- test pilot : until the vehicle flies , 75 percent of your risk is that first flight .
radio : it actually flew . yes .
radio 2 : that was gorgeous .
radio : what did you think of that ?
that was beautiful from up here , i tell you .
amd : see , we 're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop .
and our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight , which was that it was " remarkably unremarkable . "
he would go onto tell us that the transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he 'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot .
so despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary , we really focused on doing as little new as possible .
we leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing .
when we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box , we use an incremental design , build , test , redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps .
now since we started terrafugia about 6 years ago , we 've had a lot of those baby steps .
we 've gone from being three of us working in the basement at mit while we were still in graduate school to about two-dozen of us working in an initial production facility outside of boston .
we 've had to overcome challenges like keeping the weight below the light sport limit that i talked about , figuring out how to politely respond when a regulator tells you , " but that wo n't fit through a toll booth with the wings extended - -lrb- laughter -rrb- to all of the other associated durability and engineering issues that we talked about on the ground .
still , if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we 're working on right now , those first deliveries to the , about a hundred , people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year .
the transition will cost in line with other small airplanes .
and i 'm certainly not out to replace your chevy , but i do think that the transition should be your next airplane .
here 's why .
while nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports , there is a huge underutilized resource out there .
there are thousands of local airstrips that do n't see nearly as many aircraft operations a day as they could .
on average , there 's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the united states .
the transition gives you a safer , more convenient and more fun way of using this resource .
for those of you who are n't yet pilots , there 's four main reasons why those of us who are do n't fly as much as we 'd like to : the weather , primarily , cost , long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination .
now , bad weather comes in , just land , fold up the wings , drive home .
does n't matter if it rains a little , you have a windshield wiper .
instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger , park it in your garage .
and the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas .
door-to-door travel time is reduced , because now , instead of lugging bags , finding a parking space , taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger , you 're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go .
and mobility to your destination is clearly solved .
just fold up the wings and keep going .
the transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller , more accessible place .
it also continues to be a fabulous adventure .
i hope you 'll each take a moment to think about how you could use something like this to give yourself more access to your own world , and to make your own travel more convenient and more fun .
thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- to understand the business of mythology and what a chief belief officer is supposed to do , you have to hear a story of ganesha , the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers , and his brother , the athletic warlord of the gods , kartikeya .
the two brothers one day decided to go on a race , three times around the world .
kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans .
he went around once , he went around twice , he went around thrice .
but his brother , ganesha , simply walked around his parents once , twice , thrice , and said , " i won . "
" how come ? " said kartikeya .
and ganesha said , " you went around ' the world . ' i went around ' my world . " ' what matters more ?
if you understand the difference between ' the world ' and ' my world , ' you understand the difference between logos and mythos .
' the world ' is objective , logical , universal , factual , scientific .
' my world ' is subjective .
it 's emotional . it 's personal .
it 's perceptions , thoughts , feelings , dreams .
it is the belief system that we carry .
it 's the myth that we live in .
' the world ' tells us how the world functions , how the sun rises , how we are born .
' my world ' tells us why the sun rises , why we were born .
every culture is trying to understand itself : " why do we exist ? "
and every culture comes up with its own understanding of life , its own customized version of mythology .
culture is a reaction to nature , and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories , symbols and rituals , which are always indifferent to rationality .
and so , when you study it , you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world .
different people see things differently - different viewpoints .
there is my world and there is your world , and my world is always better than your world , because my world , you see , is rational and yours is superstition .
yours is faith .
yours is illogical .
this is the root of the clash of civilizations .
it took place , once , in 326 b.c.
on the banks of a river called the indus , now in pakistan .
this river lends itself to india 's name .
india . indus .
alexander , a young macedonian , met there what he called a " gymnosophist , " which means " the naked , wise man . "
we do n't know who he was .
perhaps he was a jain monk , like bahubali over here , the gomateshwara bahubali whose image is not far from mysore .
or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock , staring at the sky and the sun and the moon .
alexander asked , " what are you doing ? "
and the gymnosophist answered , " i 'm experiencing nothingness . "
then the gymnosophist asked , " what are you doing ? "
and alexander said , " i am conquering the world . "
and they both laughed .
each one thought that the other was a fool .
the gymnosophist said , " why is he conquering the world ?
it 's pointless . "
and alexander thought , " why is he sitting around , doing nothing ?
what a waste of a life . "
to understand this difference in viewpoints , we have to understand the subjective truth of alexander - his myth , and the mythology that constructed it .
alexander 's mother , his parents , his teacher aristotle told him the story of homer 's " iliad . "
they told him of a great hero called achilles , who , when he participated in battle , victory was assured , but when he withdrew from the battle , defeat was inevitable .
" achilles was a man who could shape history , a man of destiny , and this is what you should be , alexander . "
that 's what he heard .
" what should you not be ?
you should not be sisyphus , who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night .
do n't live a life which is monotonous , mediocre , meaningless .
be spectacular ! - like the greek heroes , like jason , who went across the sea with the argonauts and fetched the golden fleece .
be spectacular like theseus , who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed minotaur .
when you play in a race , win ! - because when you win , the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods . "
because , you see , the greeks believed you live only once , and when you die , you have to cross the river styx .
and if you have lived an extraordinary life , you will be welcomed to elysium , or what the french call " champs-élysées " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the heaven of the heroes .
but these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard .
he heard a very different story .
he heard of a man called bharat , after whom india is called bhārata .
bharat also conquered the world .
and then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called meru .
and he wanted to hoist his flag to say , " i was here first . "
but when he reached the mountain peak , he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him , each one claiming " ' i was here first ' ...
that 's what i thought until i came here . "
and suddenly , in this canvas of infinity , bharat felt insignificant .
this was the mythology of the gymnosophist .
you see , he had heroes , like ram - raghupati ram and krishna , govinda hari .
but they were not two characters on two different adventures .
they were two lifetimes of the same hero .
when the ramayana ends the mahabharata begins .
when ram dies , krishna is born .
when krishna dies , eventually he will be back as ram .
you see , the indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead .
but you do n't cross it once .
you go to and fro endlessly .
it was called the vaitarani .
you go again and again and again .
because , you see , nothing lasts forever in india , not even death .
and so , you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days ...
and what do you do at the end of 10 days ?
you dunk it in the river .
because it has to end .
and next year , she will come back .
what goes around always comes around , and this rule applies not just to man , but also the gods .
you see , the gods have to come back again and again and again as ram , as krishna .
not only do they live infinite lives , but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all .
" groundhog day . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- two different mythologies .
which is right ?
two different mythologies , two different ways of looking at the world .
one linear , one cyclical .
one believes this is the one and only life .
the other believes this is one of many lives .
and so , the denominator of alexander 's life was one .
so , the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements .
the denominator of the gymnosophist 's life was infinity .
so , no matter what he did , it was always zero .
and i believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired indian mathematicians to discover the number zero .
who knows ?
and that brings us to the mythology of business .
if alexander 's belief influenced his behavior , if the gymnosophist 's belief influences his behavior , then it was bound to influence the business they were in .
you see , what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves ?
and if you look at cultures around the world , all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business .
take a look .
if you live only once , in one-life cultures around the world , you will see an obsession with binary logic , absolute truth , standardization , absoluteness , linear patterns in design .
but if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives , you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic , with opinion , with contextual thinking , with everything is relative , sort of - -lrb- laughter -rrb- mostly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you look at art . look at the ballerina , how linear she is in her performance .
and then look at the indian classical dancer , the kuchipudi dancer , the bharatanatyam dancer , curvaceous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then look at business .
standard business model : vision , mission , values , processes .
sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land , with the commandments held by the leader .
and if you comply , you will go to heaven .
but in india there is no " the " promised land .
there are many promised lands , depending on your station in society , depending on your stage of life .
you see , businesses are not run as institutions , by the idiosyncrasies of individuals .
it 's always about taste .
it 's always about my taste .
you see , indian music , for example , does not have the concept of harmony .
there is no orchestra conductor .
there is one performer standing there , and everybody follows .
and you can never replicate that performance twice .
it is not about documentation and contract .
it 's about conversation and faith .
it 's not about compliance . it 's about setting , getting the job done , by bending or breaking the rules - just look at your indian people around here , you 'll see them smile ; they know what it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then look at people who have done business in india , you 'll see the exasperation on their faces .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you see , this is what india is today . the ground reality is based on a cyclical world view .
so , it 's rapidly changing , highly diverse , chaotic , ambiguous , unpredictable .
and people are okay with it .
and then globalization is taking place .
the demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in .
which is rooted in one-life culture .
and a clash is going to take place , like on the banks of the indus .
it is bound to happen .
i have personally experienced it . i 'm trained as a medical doctor .
i did not want to study surgery . do n't ask me why .
i love mythology too much .
i wanted to learn mythology . but there is nowhere you can study .
so , i had to teach it to myself .
and mythology does not pay , well , until now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i had to take up a job . and i worked in the pharma industry .
and i worked in the healthcare industry .
and i worked as a marketing guy , and a sales guy , and a knowledge guy , and a content guy , and a training guy .
i even was a business consultant , doing strategies and tactics .
and i would see the exasperation between my american and european colleagues , when they were dealing with india .
example : please tell us the process to invoice hospitals .
step a. step b. step c. mostly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how do you parameterize " mostly " ?
how do you put it in a nice little software ? you ca n't .
i would give my viewpoints to people .
but nobody was interested in listening to it , you see , until i met kishore biyani of the future group .
you see , he has established the largest retail chain , called big bazaar .
and there are more than 200 formats , across 50 cities and towns of india .
and he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets .
and he knew very intuitively , that best practices , developed in japan and china and europe and america will not work in india .
he knew that institutional thinking does n't work in india . individual thinking does .
he had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of india .
so , he had asked me to be the chief belief officer , and said , " all i want to do is align belief . "
sounds so simple .
but belief is not measurable .
you ca n't measure it . you ca n't manage it .
so , how do you construct belief ?
how do you enhance the sensitivity of people to indian-ness .
even if you are indian , it is not very explicit , it is not very obvious .
so , i tried to work on the standard model of culture , which is , develop stories , symbols and rituals .
and i will share one of the rituals with you .
you see it is based on the hindu ritual of darshan .
hindus do n't have the concept of commandments .
so , there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life .
so , you 're not really sure how you stand in front of god .
so , when you go to the temple , all you seek is an audience with god .
you want to see god .
and you want god to see you , and hence the gods have very large eyes , large unblinking eyes , sometimes made of silver , so they look at you .
because you do n't know whether you 're right or wrong , and so all you seek is divine empathy .
" just know where i came from , why i did the jugaad . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " why did i do the setting , why i do n't care for the processes . just understand me , please . "
and based on this , we created a ritual for leaders .
after a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store , we blindfold him , we surround him with the stakeholders , the customer , his family , his team , his boss .
you read out his kra , his kpi , you give him the keys , and then you remove the blindfold .
and invariably , you see a tear , because the penny has dropped .
he realizes that to succeed , he does not have to be a " professional , " he does not have to cut out his emotions , he has to include all these people in his world to succeed , to make them happy , to make the boss happy , to make everyone happy .
the customer is happy , because the customer is god .
that sensitivity is what we need . once this belief enters , behavior will happen , business will happen .
and it has .
so , then we come back to alexander and to the gymnosophist .
and everybody asks me , " which is the better way , this way or that way ? "
and it 's a very dangerous question , because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence .
so , i will not answer the question .
what i will give you is an indian answer , the indian head-shake .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- depending on the context , depending on the outcome , choose your paradigm .
you see , because both the paradigms are human constructions .
they are cultural creations , not natural phenomena .
and so the next time you meet someone , a stranger , one request : understand that you live in the subjective truth , and so does he .
understand it .
and when you understand it you will discover something spectacular .
you will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth .
who sees it all ?
varuna has but a thousand eyes .
indra , a hundred .
you and i , only two .
thank you . namaste .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so here it is . you can check : i am short , i 'm french , i have a pretty strong french accent , so that 's going to be clear in a moment .
maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about .
and i suspect many of you gave something to the people of haiti this year .
and there is something else i believe in the back of your mind you also know .
that is , every day , 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes .
that 's a haiti earthquake every eight days .
and i suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well , but somehow it does n't happen with the same intensity .
so why is that ?
well , here is a thought experiment for you .
imagine you have a few million dollars that you 've raised - maybe you 're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend . you want to spend it on the poor : how do you go about it ?
do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money ?
that we know how to eradicate poverty , we just need to do more ?
or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help , on the contrary it might hurt , it might exacerbate corruption , dependence , etc . ?
or maybe you turn to the past .
after all , we have spent billions of dollars on aid .
maybe you look at the past and see .
has it done any good ?
and , sadly , we do n't know .
and worst of all , we will never know .
and the reason is that - take africa for example .
africans have already got a lot of aid .
these are the blue bars .
and the gdp in africa is not making much progress .
okay , fine . how do you know what would have happened without the aid ?
maybe it would have been much worse , or maybe it would have been better .
we have no idea . we do n't know what the counterfactual is .
there 's only one africa .
so what do you do ?
to give the aid , and hope and pray that something comes out of it ?
or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen ?
the thing is , if we do n't know whether we are doing any good , we are not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches .
sometimes the patient gets better , sometimes the patient dies .
is it the leeches ? is it something else ?
we do n't know .
so here are some other questions .
they 're smaller questions , but they are not that small .
immunization , that 's the cheapest way to save a child 's life .
and the world has spent a lot of money on it : the gavi and the gates foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it , and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort .
and yet , every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get .
so this is what you call a " last mile problem . "
the technology is there , the infrastructure is there , and yet it does n't happen .
so you have your million .
how do you use your million to solve this last mile problem ?
and here 's another question : malaria . malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year , most of them in sub-saharan africa , most of them under five .
in fact , that is the leading cause of under-five mortality .
we already know how to kill malaria , but some people come to you and say , " you have your millions . how about bed nets ? "
bed nets are very cheap .
for 10 dollars , you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them .
and , not only do they protect the people who sleep under them , but they have these great contagion benefits .
if half of a community sleeps under a net , the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread .
and yet , only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net .
societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net , give them for free , or , for that matter , pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits .
" not so fast , " say other people .
" if you give the nets for free , people are not going to value them .
they 're not going to use them , or at least they 're not going to use them as bed nets , maybe as fishing nets . "
so , what do you do ?
do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage , or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them ?
how do you know ?
and a third question : education .
maybe that 's the solution , maybe we should send kids to school .
but how do you do that ?
do you hire teachers ? do you build more schools ?
do you provide school lunch ?
how do you know ?
so here is the thing .
i can not answer the big question , whether aid did any good or not .
but these three questions , i can answer them .
it 's not the middle ages anymore , it 's the 21st century .
and in the 20th century , randomized , controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that do n't work .
and you can do the same randomized , controlled trial for social policy .
you can put social innovation to the same rigorous , scientific tests that we use for drugs .
and in this way , you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works , what does n't work and why .
and i 'll give you some examples with those three questions .
so i start with immunization .
here 's udaipur district , rajasthan . beautiful .
well , when i started working there , about one percent of children were fully immunized .
that 's bad , but there are places like that .
now , it 's not because the vaccines are not there - they are there and they are free - and it 's not because parents do not care about their kids .
the same child that is not immunized against measles , if they do get measles , parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them .
so you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals .
so what is the problem ?
well , part of the problem , surely , is people do not fully understand .
after all , in this country as well , all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization .
so if that 's the case , that 's difficult , because persuasion is really difficult .
but maybe there is another problem as well .
it 's going from intention to action .
imagine you are a mother in udaipur district , rajasthan .
you have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized .
and maybe when you get there , what you find is this : the subcenter is closed . ao you have to come back , and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do , you will always tend to postpone and postpone , and eventually it gets too late .
well , if that 's the problem , then that 's much easier .
because a , we can make it easy , and b , we can maybe give people a reason to act today , rather than wait till tomorrow .
so these are simple ideas , but we did n't know .
so let 's try them .
so what we did is we did a randomized , controlled trial in 134 villages in udaipur districts .
so the blue dots are selected randomly .
we made it easy - i 'll tell you how in a moment .
in the red dots , we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now .
the white dots are comparisons , nothing changed .
so we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized .
and then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization .
now , a kilo of lentils is tiny .
it 's never going to convince anybody to do something that they do n't want to do .
on the other hand , if your problem is you tend to postpone , then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later .
so what do we find ?
well , beforehand , everything is the same .
that 's the beauty of randomization .
afterwards , the camp - just having the camp - increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent .
that 's full immunization .
that 's not bad , that 's a good improvement .
add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent .
so here you 've got your answer .
make it easy and give a kilo of lentils , you multiply immunization rate by six .
now , you might say , " well , but it 's not sustainable .
we can not keep giving lentils to people . "
well , it turns out it 's wrong economics , because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them .
since you have to pay for the nurse anyway , the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you do n't .
how about bed nets ?
should you give them for free , or should you ask people to pay for them ?
so the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions .
one is : if people must pay for a bed net , are they going to purchase them ?
the second one is : if i give bed nets for free , are people going to use them ?
and the third one is : do free bed nets discourage future purchase ?
the third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts , it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets .
now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric .
it 's more ideological than practical , but it turns out it 's an easy question .
we can know the answer to this question .
we can just run an experiment .
and many experiments have been run , and they all have the same results , so i 'm just going to talk to you about one .
and this one that was in kenya , they went around and distributed to people vouchers , discount vouchers .
so people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy .
and some people get 100 percent discount , and some people get 20 percent discounts , and some people get 50 percent discount , etc .
and now we can see what happens .
so , how about the purchasing ?
well , what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets , the coverage rate really falls down a lot .
so even with partial subsidy , three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net , and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets , you lose the health immunity , that 's not great .
second thing is , how about the use ?
well , the good news is , people , if they have the bed nets , will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it .
if they get it for free , they use it .
if they have to pay for it , they use it .
how about the long term ?
in the long term , people who got the free bed nets , one year later , were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars .
and people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who did n't get a free one .
so people do not get used to handouts ; they get used to nets .
maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit .
so , that 's for bed nets . so you will think , " that 's great .
you know how to immunize kids , you know how to give bed nets . "
but what politicians need is a range of options .
they need to know : out of all the things i could do , what is the best way to achieve my goals ?
so suppose your goal is to get kids into school .
there are so many things you could do . you could pay for uniforms , you could eliminate fees , you could build latrines , you could give girls sanitary pads , etc . , etc .
so what 's the best ?
well , at some level , we think all of these things should work .
so , is that sufficient ? if we think they should work intuitively , should we go for them ?
well , in business , that 's certainly not the way we would go about it .
consider for example transporting goods .
before the canals were invented in britain before the industrial revolution , goods used to go on horse carts .
and then canals were built , and with the same horseman and the same horse , you could carry ten times as much cargo .
so should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts , on the ground , that they would eventually get there ?
well , if that had been the case , there would have been no industrial revolution .
so why should n't we do the same with social policy ?
in technology , we spend so much time experimenting , fine-tuning , getting the absolute cheapest way to do something , so why are n't we doing that with social policy ?
well , with experiments , what you can do is answer a simple question .
suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions .
how many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars ?
now i 'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions .
so the first ones are if you want the usual suspects , hire teachers , school meals , school uniforms , scholarships .
and that 's not bad . for your hundred dollars , you get between one and three extra years of education .
things that do n't work so well is bribing parents , just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money .
and here are the most surprising results .
tell people the benefits of education , that 's very cheap to do .
so for every hundred dollars you spend doing that , you get 40 extra years of education .
and , in places where there are worms , intestinal worms , cure the kids of their worms .
and for every hundred dollars , you get almost 30 extra years of education .
so this is not your intuition , this is not what people would have gone for , and yet , these are the programs that work .
we need that kind of information , we need more of it , and then we need to guide policy .
so now , i started from the big problem , and i could n't answer it .
and i cut it into smaller questions , and i have the answer to these smaller questions .
and they are good , scientific , robust answers .
so let 's go back to haiti for a moment .
in haiti , about 200,000 people died - actually , a bit more by the latest estimate .
and the response of the world was great : two billion dollars got pledged just last month , so that 's about 10,000 dollars per death .
that does n't sound like that much when you think about it .
but if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies , that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem .
and yet it does n't happen .
so , why is that ?
well , i think what part of the problem is that , in haiti , although the problem is huge , somehow we understand it , it 's localized .
you give your money to doctors without borders , you give your money to partners in health , and they 'll send in the doctors , and they 'll send in the lumber , and they 'll helicopter things out and in .
and the problem of poverty is not like that .
so , first , it 's mostly invisible ; second , it 's huge ; and third , we do n't know whether we are doing the right thing .
there 's no silver bullet .
you can not helicopter people out of poverty .
and that 's very frustrating .
but look what we just did today .
i gave you three simple answers to three questions : give lentils to immunize people , provide free bed nets , deworm children .
with immunization or bed nets , you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved .
with deworming , you can get an extra year of education for three dollars .
so we can not eradicate poverty just yet , but we can get started .
and maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective .
here 's an example of how this can be powerful .
deworming .
worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines .
they are not beautiful and do n't kill anybody .
and yet , when the young global leader in davos showed the numbers i gave you , they started deworm the world .
and thanks to deworm the world , and the effort of many country governments and foundations , 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009 .
so this evidence is powerful .
it can prompt action .
so we should get started now .
it 's not going to be easy .
it 's a very slow process .
you have to keep experimenting , and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality .
and sometimes what works somewhere does n't work elsewhere .
so it 's a slow process , but there is no other way .
these economics i 'm proposing , it 's like 20th century medicine .
it 's a slow , deliberative process of discovery .
there is no miracle cure , but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year , and we can do the same thing .
and now , maybe , we can go back to the bigger question that i started with at the beginning .
i can not tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference , but can we come back here in 30 years and say , " what we have done , it really prompted a change for the better . "
i believe we can and i hope we will .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy , but before that , a little preamble .
let 's start here .
this is martha payne . martha 's a 9-year-old scot who lives in the council of argyll and bute .
a couple months ago , payne started a food blog called neverseconds , and she would take her camera with her every day to school to document her school lunches .
can you spot the vegetable ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and , as sometimes happens , this blog acquired first dozens of readers , and then hundreds of readers , and then thousands of readers , as people tuned in to watch her rate her school lunches , including on my favorite category , " pieces of hair found in food . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- this was a zero day . that 's good .
and then two weeks ago yesterday , she posted this .
a post that read : " goodbye . "
and she said , " i 'm very sorry to tell you this , but my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me i 'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore .
i really enjoyed doing this .
thank you for reading . goodbye . "
you can guess what happened next , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- the outrage was so swift , so voluminous , so unanimous , that the council of argyll and bute reversed themselves the same day and said , " we would , we would never censor a nine-year-old . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- except , of course , this morning . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this brings up the question , what made them think they could get away with something like that ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the answer is , all of human history prior to now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation ?
now , this is n't just a contemporaneous question .
this is something we 've faced several times over the last few centuries .
when the telegraph came along , it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry .
what would this lead to ?
well , obviously , it would lead to world peace .
the television , a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see , literally see , what was going on elsewhere in the world , what would this lead to ?
world peace . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the telephone ?
you guessed it : world peace .
sorry for the spoiler alert , but no world peace . not yet .
even the printing press , even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce catholic intellectual hegemony across europe .
instead , what we got was martin luther 's 95 theses , the protestant reformation , and , you know , the thirty years ' war . all right , so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation , it changes society .
what they got exactly wrong was what happens next .
the more ideas there are in circulation , the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with .
more media always means more arguing .
that 's what happens when the media 's space expands .
and yet , when we look back on the printing press in the early years , we like what happened .
we are a pro-printing press society .
so how do we square those two things , that it leads to more arguing , but we think it was good ?
and the answer , i think , can be found in things like this .
this is the cover of " philosophical transactions , " the first scientific journal ever published in english in the middle of the 1600s , and it was created by a group of people who had been calling themselves " the invisible college , " a group of natural philosophers who only later would call themselves scientists , and they wanted to improve the way natural philosophers argued with each other , and they needed to do two things for this .
they needed openness . they needed to create a norm which said , when you do an experiment , you have to publish not just your claims , but how you did the experiment .
if you do n't tell us how you did it , we wo n't trust you .
but the other thing they needed was speed .
they had to quickly synchronize what other natural philosophers knew . otherwise , you could n't get the right kind of argument going .
the printing press was clearly the right medium for this , but the book was the wrong tool . it was too slow .
and so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists .
the scientific revolution was n't created by the printing press .
it was created by scientists , but it could n't have been created if they did n't have a printing press as a tool .
so what about us ? what about our generation , and our media revolution , the internet ?
well , predictions of world peace ? check . -lrb- laughter -rrb- more arguing ? gold star on that one . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , youtube is just a gold mine . -lrb- laughter -rrb- better arguing ? that 's the question .
so i study social media , which means , to a first approximation , i watch people argue .
and if i had to pick a group that i think is our invisible college , is our generation 's collection of people trying to take these tools and to press it into service , not for more arguments , but for better arguments , i 'd pick the open-source programmers .
programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer , some source code , and the computer it 's meant to run on , but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it 's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute , and that 's if one person is writing it .
once you get more than one person writing it , it 's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other 's work if they 're working on the same file , or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke , and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved .
to a first approximation , the problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay .
now , for decades there has been a canonical solution to this problem , which is to use something called and a version control system does what is says on the tin .
it provides a canonical copy of the software on a server somewhere .
the only programmers who can change it are people who 've specifically been given permission to access it , and they 're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change .
and when people draw diagrams of version control systems , the diagrams always look something like this .
all right . they look like org charts .
and you do n't have to squint very hard to see the political ramifications of a system like this .
this is feudalism : one owner , many workers .
now , that 's fine for the commercial software industry .
it really is microsoft 's office . it 's adobe 's photoshop .
the corporation owns the software .
the programmers come and go .
but there was one programmer who decided that this was n't the way to work .
this is linus torvalds .
torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer , created linux , obviously , and torvalds looked at the way the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem .
open-source software , the core promise of the open-source license , is that everybody should have access to all the source code all the time , but of course , this creates the very threat of chaos you have to forestall in order to get anything working .
so most open-source projects just held their noses and adopted the feudal management systems .
but torvalds said , " no , i 'm not going to do that . "
his point of view on this was very clear .
when you adopt a tool , you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool , and he was n't going to adopt anything that did n't work the way the linux community worked .
and to give you a sense of how enormous a decision like this was , this is a map of the internal dependencies within linux , within the linux operating system , which sub-parts of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going .
this is a tremendously complicated process .
this is a tremendously complicated program , and yet , for years , torvalds ran this not with automated tools but out of his email box .
people would literally mail him changes that they 'd agreed on , and he would merge them by hand .
and then , 15 years after looking at linux and figuring out how the community worked , he said , " i think i know how to write a version control system for free people . "
and he called it " git . " git is distributed version control .
it has two big differences with traditional version control systems .
the first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise of open-source . everybody who works on a project has access to all of the source code all of the time .
and when people draw diagrams of git workflow , they use drawings that look like this .
and you do n't have to understand what the circles and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more complicated way of working than is supported by ordinary version control systems .
but this is also the thing that brings the chaos back , and this is git 's second big innovation .
this is a screenshot from github , the premier git hosting service , and every time a programmer uses git to make any important change at all , creating a new file , modifying an existing one , merging two files , git creates this kind of signature .
this long string of numbers and letters here is a unique identifier tied to every single change , but without any central coordination .
every git system generates this number the same way , which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change .
this has the following effect : a programmer in edinburgh and a programmer in entebbe can both get the same - a copy of the same piece of software .
each of them can make changes and they can merge them after the fact even if they did n't know of each other 's existence beforehand .
this is cooperation without coordination .
this is the big change .
now , i tell you all of this not to convince you that it 's great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working , although i think that is great .
i tell you all of this because of what i think it means for the way communities come together .
once git allowed for cooperation without coordination , you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex .
this is a graph of the ruby community .
it 's an open-source programming language , and all of the interconnections between the people - this is now not a software graph , but a people graph , all of the interconnections among the people working on that project - and this does n't look like an org chart .
this looks like a dis-org chart , and yet , out of this community , but using these tools , they can now create something together .
so there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law .
when you make the claim , in fact , that something on the internet is going to be good for democracy , you often get this reaction .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- which is , are you talking about the thing with the singing cats ? like , is that the thing you think is going to be good for society ?
to which i have to say , here 's the thing with the singing cats . that always happens .
and i do n't just mean that always happens with the internet , i mean that always happens with media , full stop .
it did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you do n't have to have an economic incentive to sell books very long before someone says , " hey , you know what i bet people would pay for ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- it took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal , right ? so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so the harnessing by the invisible college of the printing press to create the scientific journal was phenomenally important , but it did n't happen big , and it did n't happen quick , and it did n't happen fast , so
if you 're going to look for where the change is happening , you have to look on the margins .
so , the law is also dependency-related .
this is a graph of the u.s. tax code , and the dependencies of one law on other laws for the overall effect .
so there 's that as a site for source code management .
but there 's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation , but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy , and when you go onto github , and you look around , there are millions and millions of projects , almost all of which are source code , but if you look around the edges , you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that .
someone put up all the wikileaked cables from the state department , along with software used to interpret them , including my favorite use ever of the cablegate cables , which is a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in state department prose .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the new york senate has put up something called open legislation , also hosting it on github , again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity .
you can go and pick your senator and then you can see a list of bills they have sponsored .
someone going by divegeek has put up the utah code , the laws of the state of utah , and they 've put it up there not just to distribute the code , but with the very interesting possibility that this could be used to further the development of legislation .
somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate last year in the senate , saying , " it 's strange that hollywood has more access to canadian legislators than canadian citizens do . why do n't we use github to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like ? "
and it includes this very evocative screenshot .
this is a called a " diff , " this thing on the right here .
this shows you , for text that many people are editing , when a change was made , who made it , and what the change is .
the stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted .
the stuff in green is the stuff that got added .
programmers take this capability for granted .
no democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets , even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money .
now , i would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale , distributed , cheap , and in sync with the ideals of democracy , i would love to tell you that because those tools are in place , the innovation is inevitable . but it 's not .
part of the problem , of course , is just a lack of information .
somebody put a question up on quora saying , " why is it that lawmakers do n't use distributed version control ? "
this , graphically , was the answer . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that is indeed part of the problem , but only part .
the bigger problem , of course , is power .
the people experimenting with participation do n't have legislative power , and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation .
they are experimenting with openness .
there 's no democracy worth the name that does n't have a transparency move , but transparency is openness in only one direction , and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens .
so consider this .
the thing that got martha payne 's opinions out into the public was a piece of technology , but the thing that kept them there was political will .
it was the expectation of the citizens that she would not be censored .
that 's now the state we 're in with these collaboration tools .
we have them . we 've seen them . they work .
can we use them ?
can we apply the techniques that worked here to this ?
t.s. eliot once said , " one of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose . "
i think that 's wrong , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think it 's right for argumentation . right ?
a momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing : trial by jury , voting , peer review , now this . right ?
a new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes , in the last decade , in fact .
it 's large , it 's distributed , it 's low-cost , and it 's compatible with the ideals of democracy .
the question for us now is , are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves ?
or are we going to try and take it and press it into service for society at large ?
thank you for listening . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- do we live in a borderless world ?
before you answer that , have a look at this map .
contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today .
that 's probably more than at any time in centuries .
now , many of you will object .
for you this would be a more appropriate map .
you could call it tedistan .
in tedistan , there are no borders , just connected spaces and unconnected spaces .
most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen , of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy .
but let 's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born .
for them , nations , countries , boundaries , borders still matter a great deal , and often violently .
now here at ted , we 're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe .
well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved : our basic political geography .
how do we distribute ourselves around the world ?
now this is important , because border conflicts justify so much of the world 's military-industrial complex .
border conflicts can derail so much of the progress that we hope to achieve here .
so i think we need a deeper understanding of how people , money , power , religion , culture , technology interact to change the map of the world .
and we can try to anticipate those changes , and shape them in a more constructive direction .
so we 're going to look at some maps of the past , the present and some maps you have n't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going .
let 's start with the world of 1945 .
1945 there were just 100 countries in the world .
after world war ii , europe was devastated , but still held large overseas colonies : french west africa , british east africa , south asia , and so forth .
then over the late ' 40s , ' 50s , ' 60s , ' 70s and ' 80s , waves of decolonization took place .
over 50 new countries were born .
you can see that africa has been fragmented .
india , pakistan , bangladesh , south east asian nations created .
then came the end of the cold war .
the end of the cold war and the disintegration of the soviet union .
you had the creation of new states in eastern europe , the former yugoslav republics and the balkans , and the ' stans of central asia .
today we have 200 countries in the world .
the entire planet is covered by sovereign , independent nation-states .
does that mean that someone 's gain has to be someone else 's loss ?
let 's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world , eastern eurasia .
as you can see on this map , russia is still the largest country in the world .
and as you know , china is the most populous .
and they share a lengthy land border .
what you do n't see on this map is that most of russia 's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to europe .
and only 30 million people are in its eastern areas .
in fact , the world bank predicts that russia 's population is declining towards about 120 million people and there is another thing that you do n't see on this map .
stalin , khrushchev and other soviet leaders forced russians out to the far east to be in gulags , labor camps , nuclear cities , whatever the case was .
but as oil prices rose , russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country , east and west .
but nothing has more perversely impacted russia 's demographic distribution , because the people in the east , who never wanted to be there anyway , have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west .
as a result , in the russian far east today , which is twice the size of india , you have exactly six million russians .
so let 's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world .
we can start with mongolia , or as some call it , mine-golia .
why do they call it that ?
because in mine-golia , chinese firms operate and own most of the mines - copper , zinc , gold - and they truck the resources south and east into mainland china .
china is n't conquering mongolia .
it 's buying it .
colonies were once conquered . today countries are bought .
so let 's apply this principle to siberia .
siberia most of you probably think of as a cold , desolate , unlivable place .
but in fact , with global warming and rising temperatures , all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness , and grain being produced in siberia .
but who is it going to feed ?
well , just on the other side of the amo river , in the heilongjiang and harbin provinces of china , you have over 100 million people .
that 's larger than the entire population of russia .
every single year , for at least a decade or more , -lsb- 60,000 -rsb- of them have been voting with their feet , crossing , moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain .
they set up their own bazaars and medical clinics .
they 've taken over the timber industry and been shipping the lumber east , back into china .
again , like mongolia , china is n't conquering russia . it 's just leasing it .
that 's what i call globalization chinese style .
now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years .
but hold on . this map is 700 years old .
this is the map of the yuan dynasty , led by kublai khan , the grandson of genghis khan .
so history does n't necessarily repeat itself , but it does rhyme .
this is just to give you a taste of what 's happening in this part of the world .
again , globalization chinese style .
because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography .
so , the history of east asia in fact , people do n't think about nations and borders .
they think more in terms of empires and hierarchies , usually chinese or japanese .
well it 's china 's turn again .
so let 's look at how china is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far east .
it starts with the global hubs .
remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy ?
east asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world .
tokyo , seoul , beijing , shanghai , hong kong , singapore and sidney .
these are the filters and funnels of global capital .
trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region , so much of it being invested into china .
then there is trade .
these vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that china has with every country in the region .
specifically , it targets japan and korea and australia , countries that are strong allies of the united states .
australia , for example , is heavily dependent on exporting iron ore and natural gas to china .
for poorer countries , china reduces tariffs so that laos and cambodia can sell their goods more cheaply and become dependent on exporting to china as well .
and now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to china to lead the rebound , the economic rebound , not just in asia , but potentially for the world .
the asian free trade zone , almost free trade zone , that 's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the pacific .
so china is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region .
another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy .
china has signed military agreements with many countries in the region .
it has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the east asian community .
some of these organizations do n't even have the united states as a member .
there is a treaty of nonaggression between countries , such that if there were a conflict between china and the united states , most countries vow to just sit it out , including american allies like korea and australia .
another pillar of the strategy , like russia , is demographic .
china exports business people , nannies , students , teachers to teach chinese around the region , to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies .
already ethnic chinese people in malaysia , thailand and indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there .
chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result .
singapore , for example , used to ban chinese language education .
now it encourages it .
if you add it all up what do you get ?
well , if you remember before world war ii , japan had a vision for a greater japanese co-prosperity sphere .
what 's emerging today is what you might call a greater chinese co-prosperity sphere .
so no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders , what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures , but in a much more fluid , imperial zone .
all of this is happening without firing a shot .
that 's most certainly not the case in the middle east where countries are still very uncomfortable in the borders left behind by european colonialists .
so what can we do to think about borders differently in this part of the world ?
what lines on the map should we focus on ?
what i want to present to you is what i call state building , day by day .
let 's start with iraq .
six years after the u.s. invasion of iraq , the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality .
oil used to be one of the forces holding iraq together ; now it is the most significant cause of the country 's disintegration .
the reason is kurdistan .
the kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence , and now is their chance to finally have it .
these are pipeline routes , which emerge from kurdistan , which is an oil-rich region .
and today , if you go to kurdistan , you 'll see that kurdish peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the sunni iraqi army .
but what are they guarding ?
is it really a border on the map ?
no . it 's the pipelines .
if the kurds can control their pipelines , they can set the terms of their own statehood .
now should we be upset about this , about the potential disintegration of iraq ?
i do n't believe we should .
iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world , behind saudi arabia .
and we 'll have a chance to solve a 3,000 year old dispute .
now remember kurdistan is landlocked .
it has no choice but to behave .
in order to profit from its oil it has to export it through turkey or syria , and other countries , and iraq itself .
and therefore it has to have amicable relations with them .
now lets look at a perennial conflict in the region .
that is , of course , in palestine .
palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it 's two parts palestinian , one part israel .
30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict .
what might ? i believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure .
today donors are spending billions of dollars on this .
these two arrows are an arc , an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the west bank and gaza .
if gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the west bank , you can have a viable palestinian state , palestinian economy .
that , i believe , is going to bring peace to this particular conflict .
the lesson from kurdistan and from palestine is that independence alone , without infrastructure , is futile .
now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders , when the insecurities might abate ?
the last time that was the case was actually a century ago , during the ottoman empire .
this is the hejaz railway .
the hejaz railway ran from istanbul to medina via damascus .
it even had an offshoot running to haifa in what is today israel , on the mediterranean sea .
but today the hejaz railway lies in tatters , ruins .
if we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map , infrastructure , that cross the straight lines , the borders , i believe the middle east would be a far more peaceful region .
now let 's look at another part of the world , the former soviet republics of central asia , the ' stans .
these countries ' borders originate from stalin 's decrees .
he purposely did not want these countries to make sense .
he wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule .
fortunately for them , most of their oil and gas resources were discovered after the soviet union collapsed .
now i know some of you may be thinking , " oil , oil , oil .
why is it all he 's talking about is oil ? "
well , there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we 're talking about it now .
before it was , how do we control their oil ?
now it 's their oil for their own purposes .
and i assure you it 's every bit as important to them as it might have been to colonizers and imperialists .
here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades .
a great deal of them .
for a number of countries in this part of the world , having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves .
just take azerbaijan .
azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the caucuses , but now with the baku-tbilisi-ceyhan pipeline into turkey , it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west .
then there is turkmenistan , which most people think of as a frozen basket case .
but now it 's contributing gas across the caspian sea to provide for europe , and even a potentially turkmen- afghan-pakistan-india pipeline as well .
then there is kazakhstan , which did n't even have a name before .
it was more considered south siberia during the soviet union .
today most people recognize kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player . why ?
because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the caspian , north through russia , and even east to china .
more pipelines means more silk roads , instead of the great game .
the great game connotes dominance of one over the other .
silk road connotes independence and mutual trust .
the more pipelines we have , the more silk roads we 'll have , and the less of a dominant great game competition we 'll have in the 21st century .
now let 's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders , and how that has enhanced its strength .
and that is , of course , europe .
the european union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries , and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of germany to happen in a peaceful way .
but then eventually it grew into 12 countries , and those are the 12 stars on the european flag .
the e.u. also became a currency block , and is now the most powerful trade block in the entire world .
on average , the e.u. has grown by one country per year since the end of the cold war .
in fact most of that happened on just one day .
in 2004 , 15 new countries joined the e.u.
and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people .
so what is next ? what is the future of the european union ?
well in light blue , you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the european union for trade and investment .
what does that tell us ? trade and investment tell us that europe is putting its money where its mouth is .
even if these regions are n't part of the e.u. , they are becoming part of its sphere of influence .
just take the balkans . croatia , serbia bosnia , they 're not members of the e.u. yet .
but you can get on a german ice train and make it almost to albania .
in bosnia you use the euro currency already , and that 's the only currency they 're probably ever going to have .
so , looking at other parts of europe 's periphery , such as north africa .
on average , every year or two , a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the mediterranean , connecting north africa to europe .
that not only helps europe diminish its reliance on russia for energy , but if you travel to north africa today , you 'll hear more and more people saying that they do n't really think of their region as the middle east .
so in other words , i believe that president sarkozy of france is right when he talks about a mediterranean union .
now let 's look at turkey and the caucasus .
i mentioned azerbaijan before .
that corridor of turkey and the caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of europe 's energy supply .
so does turkey really have to be a member of the european union ?
i do n't think it does . i think it 's already part of a euro-turkish superpower .
so what 's next ? where are we going to see borders change and new countries born ?
well , south central asia , south west asia is a very good place to start .
eight years after the u.s. invaded afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability .
pakistan and afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of pashtun nationalism .
this is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million pashtuns who live on both sides of the afghan and pakistan border .
let 's not neglect the insurgency just to the south , balochistan . two weeks ago , balochi rebels attacked a pakistani military garrison , and this was the flag that they raised over it .
the post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating , and i expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment .
of course , we ca n't forget africa .
53 countries , and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map .
if we were to look at all of africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more , tribal divisions and so forth .
but let 's just look at sudan , the second-largest country in africa .
it has three ongoing civil wars , the genocide in darfur , which you all know about , the civil war in the east of the country , and south sudan .
south sudan is going to be having a referendum in 2011 in which it is very likely to vote itself independence .
now let 's go up to the arctic circle .
there is a great race on for energy resources under the arctic seabed .
who will win ? canada ? russia ? the united states ?
actually greenland .
several weeks ago greenland 's -lsb- 60,000 -rsb- people voted themselves self-governance rights from denmark .
so denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller .
what is the lesson from all of this ?
geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline .
it 's constantly morphing and changing the world , like climate change .
and like our relationship with the ecosystem we 're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet .
now we fear changes on the map .
we fear civil wars , death tolls , having to learn the names of new countries .
but i believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent .
the question is how do we change those borders , and what lines do we focus on ?
i believe we focus on the lines that cross borders , the infrastructure lines .
then we 'll wind up with the world we want , a borderless one .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this room may appear to be holding 600 people , but there 's actually so many more , because in each one of us there is a multitude of personalities .
i have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since i was a little girl .
i call them " the mystic " and " the warrior . "
i was born into a family of politically active , intellectual atheists .
there was this equation in my family that went something like this : if you are intelligent , you therefore are not spiritual .
i was the freak of the family .
i was this weird little kid who wanted to have deep talks about the worlds that might exist beyond the ones that we perceive with our senses .
i wanted to know if what we human beings see and hear and think is a full and accurate picture of reality .
so , looking for answers , i went to catholic mass .
i tagged along with my neighbors .
i read sartre and socrates .
and then a wonderful thing happened when i was in high school : gurus from the east started washing up on the shores of america .
and i said to myself , " i wanna get me one of them . "
and ever since , i 've been walking the mystic path , trying to peer beyond what albert einstein called " the optical delusion of everyday consciousness . "
so what did he mean by this ? i 'll show you .
take a breath right now of this clear air in this room .
now , see this strange , underwater , coral reef-looking thing ?
it 's actually a person 's trachea , and those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now , all around us .
if we 're blind to this simple biology , imagine what we 're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now and at the grandest cosmic levels .
my years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions .
they 've made me a proud i-do n't-know-it-all .
now when the mystic part of me jabbers on and on like this , the warrior rolls her eyes .
she 's concerned about what 's happening in this world right now .
she 's worried .
she says , " excuse me , i 'm pissed off , and i know a few things , and we better get busy about them right now . "
i 've spent my life as a warrior , working for women 's issues , working on political campaigns , being an activist for the environment .
and it can be sort of crazy-making , housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body .
i 've always been attracted to those rare people who pull that off , who devote their lives to humanity with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic - people like martin luther king , jr . , who wrote , " i can never be what i ought to be until you are what you ought to be .
this , " he wrote , " is the interrelated structure of reality . "
then mother teresa , another mystic warrior , who said , " the problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small . "
and nelson mandela , who lives by the african concept of " ubuntu , " which means " i need you in order to be me , and you need me in order to be you . "
now we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors as if they were born with the saint gene .
but we all actually have the same capacity that they do , and we need to do their work now .
i 'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing " the other " by the voice we 're giving to the most divisive among us .
listen to these titles of some of the bestselling books from both sides of the political divide here in the u.s.
" liberalism is a mental disorder , " " rush limbaugh is a big fat idiot , " " pinheads and patriots , " " arguing with idiots . "
they 're supposedly tongue-in-cheek , but they 're actually dangerous .
now here 's a title that may sound familiar , but whose author may surprise you : " four-and-a-half-years of struggle against lies , stupidity and cowardice . "
who wrote that ?
that was adolf hitler 's first title for " mein kampf " - " my struggle " - the book that launched the nazi party .
the worst eras in human history , whether in cambodia or germany or rwanda , they start like this , with negative other-izing .
and then they morph into violent extremism .
this is why i 'm launching a new initiative .
and it 's to help all of us , myself included , to counteract the tendency to " otherize . "
and i realize we 're all busy people , so do n't worry , you can do this on a lunch break .
i 'm calling my initiative , " take the other to lunch . "
if you are a republican , you can take a democrat to lunch , or if you 're a democrat , think of it as taking a republican to lunch .
now if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch makes you lose your appetite , i suggest you start more local , because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood .
maybe that person who worships at the mosque , or the church or the synagogue , down the street .
or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict .
or maybe your brother-in-law who does n't believe in global warming .
anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you , or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears .
a couple of weeks ago , i took a conservative tea party woman to lunch .
now on paper , she passed my smoking ears test .
she 's an activist from the right , and i 'm an activist from the left .
and we used some guidelines to keep our conversation elevated , and you can use them too , because i know you 're all going to take an other to lunch .
so first of all , decide on a goal : to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped .
and then , before you get together , agree on some ground rules .
my tea party lunchmate and i came up with these : do n't persuade , defend or interrupt .
be curious ; be conversational ; be real .
and listen .
from there , we dove in .
and we used these questions : share some of your life experiences with me .
what issues deeply concern you ?
and what have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side ?
my lunch partner and i came away with some really important insights , and i 'm going to share just one with you .
i think it has relevance to any problem between people anywhere .
i asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies about my side .
" what ? " she wanted to know .
" like we 're a bunch of elitist , morally-corrupt terrorist-lovers . "
well , she was shocked .
she thought my side beat up on her side way more often , that we called them brainless , gun-toting racists , and we both marveled at the labels that fit none of the people we actually know .
and since we had established some trust , we believed in each other 's sincerity .
we agreed we 'd speak up in our own communities when we witnessed the kind of " otherizing " talk that can wound and fester into paranoia and then be used by those on the fringes to incite .
by the end of our lunch , we acknowledged each other 's openness .
neither of us had tried to change the other .
but we also had n't pretended that our differences were just going to melt away after a lunch .
instead , we had taken first steps together , past our knee-jerk reactions , to the ubuntu place , which is the only place where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems will be found .
who should you invite to lunch ?
next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing , that will be your clue .
and what might happen at your lunch ?
will the heavens open and " we are the world " play over the restaurant sound system ?
probably not .
because ubuntu work is slow , and it 's difficult .
it 's two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls .
it 's two people , two warriors , dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other .
here 's how the great persian poet rumi put it : " out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing , there is a field .
i 'll meet you there . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- so when i was eight years old , a new girl came to join the class , and she was so impressive , as the new girl always seems to be .
she had vast quantities of very shiny hair and a cute little pencil case , super strong on state capitals , just a great speller .
and i just curdled with jealousy that year , until i hatched my devious plan .
so one day i stayed a little late after school , a little too late , and i lurked in the girls ' bathroom .
when the coast was clear , i emerged , crept into the classroom , and took from my teacher 's desk the grade book .
and then i did it .
i fiddled with my rival 's grades , just a little , just demoted some of those a 's .
all of those a 's . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i got ready to return the book to the drawer , when hang on , some of my other classmates had appallingly good grades too .
so , in a frenzy , i corrected everybody 's marks , not imaginatively .
i gave everybody a row of d 's and i gave myself a row of a 's , just because i was there , you know , might as well .
and i am still baffled by my behavior .
i do n't understand where the idea came from .
i do n't understand why i felt so great doing it .
i felt great .
i do n't understand why i was never caught .
i mean , it should have been so blatantly obvious .
i was never caught .
but most of all , i am baffled by , why did it bother me so much that this little girl , this tiny little girl , was so good at spelling ?
jealousy baffles me .
it 's so mysterious , and it 's so pervasive .
we know babies suffer from jealousy .
we know primates do . bluebirds are actually very prone .
we know that jealousy is the number one cause of spousal murder in the united states .
and yet , i have never read a study that can parse to me its loneliness or its longevity or its grim thrill .
for that , we have to go to fiction , because the novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration .
in fact , i do n't know if it 's an exaggeration to say that if we did n't have jealousy , would we even have literature ?
well no faithless helen , no " odyssey . "
no jealous king , no " arabian nights . "
no shakespeare .
there goes high school reading lists , because we 're losing " sound and the fury , " we 're losing " gatsby , " " sun also rises , " we 're losing " madame bovary , " " anna k. "
no jealousy , no proust . and now , i mean , i know it 's fashionable to say that proust has the answers to everything , but in the case of jealousy , he kind of does .
this year is the centennial of his masterpiece , " in search of lost time , " and it 's the most exhaustive study of sexual jealousy and just regular competitiveness , my brand , that we can hope to have . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we think about proust , we think about the sentimental bits , right ?
we think about a little boy trying to get to sleep .
we think about a madeleine moistened in lavender tea .
we forget how harsh his vision was .
we forget how pitiless he is .
i mean , these are books that virginia woolf said were tough as cat gut .
i do n't know what cat gut is , but let 's assume it 's formidable .
let 's look at why they go so well together , the novel and jealousy , jealousy and proust .
is it something as obvious as that jealousy , which boils down into person , desire , impediment , is such a solid narrative foundation ?
i do n't know . i think it cuts very close to the bone , because let 's think about what happens when we feel jealous .
when we feel jealous , we tell ourselves a story .
we tell ourselves a story about other people 's lives , and these stories make us feel terrible because they 're designed to make us feel terrible .
as the teller of the tale and the audience , we know just what details to include , to dig that knife in . right ?
jealousy makes us all amateur novelists , and this is something proust understood .
in the first volume , swann 's way , the series of books , swann , one of the main characters , is thinking very fondly of his mistress and how great she is in bed , and suddenly , in the course of a few sentences , and these are proustian sentences , so they 're long as rivers , but in the course of a few sentences , he suddenly recoils and he realizes , " hang on , everything i love about this woman , somebody else would love about this woman .
everything that she does that gives me pleasure could be giving somebody else pleasure , maybe right about now . "
and this is the story he starts to tell himself , and from then on , proust writes that every fresh charm swann detects in his mistress , he adds to his " collection of instruments in his private torture chamber . "
now swann and proust , we have to admit , were notoriously jealous .
you know , proust 's boyfriends would have to leave the country if they wanted to break up with him .
but you do n't have to be that jealous to concede that it 's hard work . right ?
jealousy is exhausting .
it 's a hungry emotion . it must be fed .
and what does jealousy like ?
jealousy likes information .
jealousy likes details .
jealousy likes the vast quantities of shiny hair , the cute little pencil case .
jealousy likes photos .
that 's why instagram is such a hit . -lrb- laughter -rrb- proust actually links the language of scholarship and jealousy .
when swann is in his jealous throes , and suddenly he 's listening at doorways and bribing his mistress ' servants , he defends these behaviors .
he says , " you know , look , i know you think this is repugnant , but it is no different from interpreting an ancient text or looking at a monument . "
he says , " they are scientific investigations with real intellectual value . "
proust is trying to show us that jealousy feels intolerable and makes us look absurd , but it is , at its crux , a quest for knowledge , a quest for truth , painful truth , and actually , where proust is concerned , the more painful the truth , the better .
grief , humiliation , loss : these were the avenues to wisdom for proust .
he says , " a woman whom we need , who makes us suffer , elicits from us a gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us . "
is he telling us to just go and find cruel women ?
no . i think he 's trying to say that jealousy reveals us to ourselves .
and does any other emotion crack us open in this particular way ?
does any other emotion reveal to us our aggression and our hideous ambition and our entitlement ?
does any other emotion teach us to look with such peculiar intensity ?
freud would write about this later .
one day , freud was visited by this very anxious young man who was consumed with the thought of his wife cheating on him .
and freud says , it 's something strange about this guy , because he 's not looking at what his wife is doing .
because she 's blameless ; everybody knows it .
the poor creature is just under suspicion for no cause .
but he 's looking for things that his wife is doing without noticing , unintentional behaviors .
is she smiling too brightly here , or did she accidentally brush up against a man there ?
-lsb- freud -rsb- says that the man is becoming the custodian of his wife 's unconscious .
the novel is very good on this point .
the novel is very good at describing how jealousy trains us to look with intensity but not accuracy .
in fact , the more intensely jealous we are , the more we become residents of fantasy .
and this is why , i think , jealousy does n't just provoke us to do violent things or illegal things .
jealousy prompts us to behave in ways that are wildly inventive .
now i 'm thinking of myself at eight , i concede , but i 'm also thinking of this story i heard on the news .
a 52-year-old michigan woman was caught creating a fake facebook account from which she sent vile , hideous messages to herself for a year .
for a year . a year .
and she was trying to frame her ex-boyfriend 's new girlfriend , and i have to confess when i heard this , i just reacted with admiration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because , i mean , let 's be real .
what immense , if misplaced , creativity . right ?
this is something from a novel .
this is something from a patricia highsmith novel .
now highsmith is a particular favorite of mine .
she is the very brilliant and bizarre woman of american letters .
she 's the author of " strangers on a train " and " the talented mr. ripley , " books that are all about how jealousy , it muddles our minds , and once we 're in the sphere , in that realm of jealousy , the membrane between what is and what could be can be pierced in an instant .
take tom ripley , her most famous character .
now , tom ripley goes from wanting you or wanting what you have to being you and having what you once had , and you 're under the floorboards , he 's answering to your name , he 's wearing your rings , emptying your bank account .
that 's one way to go .
but what do we do ? we ca n't go the tom ripley route .
i ca n't give the world d 's , as much as i would really like to , some days .
and it 's a pity , because we live in envious times .
we live in jealous times .
i mean , we 're all good citizens of social media , are n't we , where the currency is envy ?
does the novel show us a way out ? i 'm not sure .
so let 's do what characters always do when they 're not sure , when they are in possession of a mystery .
let 's go to 221b baker street and ask for sherlock holmes .
when people think of holmes , they think of his nemesis being professor moriarty , right , this criminal mastermind .
but i 've always preferred -lsb- inspector -rsb- lestrade , who is the rat-faced head of scotland yard who needs holmes desperately , needs holmes ' genius , but resents him .
oh , it 's so familiar to me .
so lestrade needs his help , resents him , and sort of seethes with bitterness over the course of the mysteries .
but as they work together , something starts to change , and finally in " the adventure of the six napoleons , " once holmes comes in , dazzles everybody with his solution , lestrade turns to holmes and he says , " we 're not jealous of you , mr. holmes .
we 're proud of you . "
and he says that there 's not a man at scotland yard who would n't want to shake sherlock holmes ' hand .
it 's one of the few times we see holmes moved in the mysteries , and i find it very moving , this little scene , but it 's also mysterious , right ?
it seems to treat jealousy as a problem of geometry , not emotion .
you know , one minute holmes is on the other side from lestrade .
the next minute they 're on the same side .
suddenly , lestrade is letting himself admire this mind that he 's resented .
could it be so simple though ?
what if jealousy really is a matter of geometry , just a matter of where we allow ourselves to stand in relation to another ?
well , maybe then we would n't have to resent somebody 's excellence .
we could align ourselves with it .
but i like contingency plans .
so while we wait for that to happen , let us remember that we have fiction for consolation .
fiction alone demystifies jealousy .
fiction alone domesticates it , invites it to the table .
and look who it gathers : sweet lestrade , terrifying tom ripley , crazy swann , marcel proust himself .
we are in excellent company .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the north coast of california has rainforests - temperate rainforests - where it can rain more than 100 inches a year .
this is the realm of the coast redwood tree .
its species name is sequoia sempervirens .
sequoia sempervirens is the tallest living organism on earth .
the range of the species goes up to as much as 380 feet tall .
that 's 38 stories tall .
these are trees that would stand out in midtown manhattan .
nobody knows how old the oldest living coast redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings , and , in any case , the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow .
but it 's believed that the oldest living redwoods are perhaps 2,500 years old - roughly the age of the parthenon - although it 's also suspected that there may be individual trees that are older than that .
you can see the range of the coast redwoods . it 's here , in red .
the largest individuals of this species , the dreadnoughts of their kind , live just on the north coast of california , where the rain is really intense .
in recent historic times , about 96 percent of the coast redwood forest was cut down , especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging , clear-cutting that took place in the 1970s through the early 1990s .
even so , about four percent of the primeval redwood rainforest remains intact , wild and now protected - entirely protected - in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of california , including redwood national park .
but curiously , redwood rainforests , the fragments that we have left , to this day remain under-explored .
redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through , and even today , individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before , including , in the summer of 2006 , hyperion , the world 's tallest tree .
i 'm going to do a little gedanken experiment .
i 'm going to ask you to imagine what a redwood really is as a living organism .
and , chris , if i could have you up here ? i have a tape measure .
it 's a kind loaner from ted .
and chris , if you could take the end of that tape measure ?
we 're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big redwood is .
unfortunately , this tape is n't long enough - it 's only a 25-foot tape .
chris , could you extend your arm out that way ? there we go . ok .
and maybe about here , about 30 feet , is the diameter of a big redwood .
now , let your imagination go upward into space .
think about this tree , rising upward into redwood space , 325 feet , 32 stories , an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time .
the redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time : not human time , but what we might call redwood time .
redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time .
to us , when we look at a redwood tree , it seems to be motionless and still , and yet redwoods are constantly in motion , moving upward into space , articulating themselves and filling redwood space over redwood time , over thousands of years .
plant this small seed , wait 2,000 years , and you get this : the lost monarch .
it dwells in the grove of titans on the north coast , and was discovered in 1998 .
and yet , when you look at the base of a redwood tree , you 're not seeing the organism .
you 're like a mouse looking at the foot of an elephant , and most of the organism is overhead , unseen .
i became very interested , and i wrote about a couple .
steve sillett and marie antoine are the principal explorers of the redwood forest canopy . they 're world-class athletes , and they also are world-class forest ecology scientists .
steve sillett , when he was a 19-year-old college student at reed college , had heard that the redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so-called redwood desert .
that is to say , at that time it was believed that there was nothing up there except the branches of redwood trees .
and with a friend of his , he took it upon himself to free-climb a redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there .
he climbed up a small tree next to this giant redwood , and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands , and ended up hanging , like catching a bar of a trapeze .
and then , from there , he climbed directly up the bark until he got to the top of the tree .
his friend , a guy named marwood harris , was following behind .
neither one of them had noticed that there was a yellow jacket wasp 's nest the size of a bowling ball hanging from the branch that steve had jumped into .
and when marwood made the jump , he was covered with wasps stinging him in the face and eyes . he nearly let go .
he would have fallen to his death , being 75 feet above the ground .
but they made it to the top , and what they found was not a redwood desert , but a lost world - a kind of three-dimensional labyrinth in the air , filled with unknown life .
now , i had been working on other topics : the emergence of infectious diseases , which come out of the natural ecosystems of the earth , make a trans-species jump , and get into humans .
after three books on this , it got to be a bit much , in a way .
my wife and i adore our children .
and i began climbing trees with my kids as just something to do with them , using the so-called arborist climbing technique , with ropes . you use ropes to get yourself up into the crown of a tree .
children are incredibly adept at climbing trees .
that 's my son , oliver .
they do n't seem to suffer from the same fear of heights that humans do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny , then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest .
humans appear to be the only primates that i know of that are afraid of heights .
all other primates , when they 're scared , they run up a tree , where they feel safe .
we camped overnight in the trees , in tree boats .
this is my daughter laura , then 15 , looking out of a tree boat .
she 's , by the way , tied in with a rope so she ca n't fall .
looking out of a tree boat in the morning and hearing birdsong coming in three dimensions around us .
we had been visited in the night by flying squirrels , who do n't seem to recognize humans for what they are because they 've never seen them in the canopy before .
and we practiced advanced techniques like sky-walking , where you can move from tree to tree through space , rather like spiderman .
it became a writing project .
when steve sillett gets up into a big redwood , he fires an arrow , which trails a fishing line , which gets over a branch in the tree , and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line .
you ascend 30 stories .
there are two people climbing this tree , gaya , which is thought to be one of the oldest redwoods . there they are .
they are only one-seventh of the way up that tree .
you do feel a sense of exposure .
there is a small person right down there on the ground .
you feel like you 're climbing a wall of wood .
but then you enter the redwood canopy , and it 's like coming through a layer of clouds .
and all of a sudden , you lose sight of the ground , and you also lose sight of the sky , and you 're in a three-dimensional labyrinth in the air filled with hanging gardens of ferns growing out of soil , which is populated with all kinds of small organisms .
there are epiphytes , plants that grow on trees .
these are huckleberry bushes .
many species of mosses , and then all sorts of lichens just plastering the tree .
when you get near the top of the tree , you feel like you ca n't fall - in fact , it 's difficult to move .
you 're worming your way through branches which are crowded with living things that do n't occur near the ground .
it 's like scuba diving into a coral reef , except you 're going upward instead of downward .
and then the trees tend to flare out into platform-like areas at the top .
maria 's sitting on one of them .
these limbs could be five to six hundred years old .
redwoods grow very slowly in their tops .
they also have a feature : thickets of huckleberry bushes that grow out of the tops of redwood trees that are technically known as huckleberry afros , and you can sit there and snack on the berries while you 're resting .
redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration .
a redwood is a fractal . and as they put out limbs , the limbs burst into small trees , copies of the redwood .
now , here we see a reiteration in chronos , one of the older redwoods .
this reiteration is a huge flying buttress that comes out the tree itself .
this buttress is less than halfway up the tree .
and then it bursts into a forest of redwoods .
this particular extra trunk is a meter across at the base and extends upward for 150 feet .
it 's as big as any of the biggest trees east of the mississippi river , and yet it 's only a minor feature on chronos .
this three-dimensional map of the crown structure of a redwood named iluvatar , made by steve sillett , marie antoine and their colleagues , gives you an idea .
what you 're seeing here is a hierarchical schematic development of the trunks of this tree as it has elaborated itself over time into six layers of fractal , of trunks springing from trunks springing from trunks .
i asked steve to put a human being in this to give a sense of scale .
there 's the person , right there . the person is waving to us .
i 've wanted to ask craig venter if it would be possible to insert a synthetic chromosome into a human so that we could reiterate ourselves if we wanted to .
and if we were able to reiterate , then the fingers of our hand would be people who looked like us , and they would have people on their hands and so on .
and if we had redwood-like biology , we would have six layers of people on our hands , as it were .
and it would be a lovely thing to be able to wave to someone and have all our reiterations wave at the same time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- to reiterate the point , let 's go closer into iluvatar .
we 're looking at that yellow box .
and this hallucinatory drawing shows you - everything you see in this drawing is iluvatar .
these are millennial structures - portions of the tree that are believed to be more than 1,000 years old .
there are four humans in this shot - one , two , three , four .
and there 's also something that i want to show you .
this is a flying buttress .
redwoods grow back into themselves as they expand into space , and this flying buttress is a limb shot out of that small trunk , going back into the main trunk and fusing with it .
flying buttresses , just as in a cathedral , help strengthen the crown of the tree and help the tree exist longer through time .
the scientists are doing all kinds of experiments in these trees .
they 've wired them like patients in an icu .
they 're finding out that redwoods can move moisture out of the air and down into their trunks , possibly all the way into their root systems .
they also have the ability to put roots anywhere in the tree itself .
if a portion of a redwood is rotting , the redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart .
if we had redwood-like biology , if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just , you know , extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off .
canopy soil can occur up to a meter deep , hundreds of feet above the ground , and there are organisms in this soil that have , as yet , no names .
this is an unnamed species of copepod . a copepod is a crustacean .
these copepods are a major constituent of the oceans , and they are a major part of the diet of grazing baleen whales .
what they 're doing in the redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean , or how they got there , is completely unknown .
there are some interesting theories that , if i had time , i would tell you about .
but as you go and you look closer at a tree , what you see is , you see increasing complexity .
we 're looking at the very top of gaya , which is thought to be the oldest redwood .
gaya may be 3,000 to 5,000 years old , no one really knows , but its top has broken off and it 's been rotting back now .
this little japanese garden-like creation probably took 700 years to form in its complexity that we see right now .
as you look at a tree , it takes a magnifying glass to see a giant tree .
i have to show you something unfortunately very sad at the conclusion of this talk .
the eastern hemlock tree has often been described as the redwood of the east .
and we 're moving in a full circle now .
in the 1950s , a small organism appeared in richmond , virginia , called the hemlock woolly adelgid .
it made a trans-species jump out of some other organism in asia , where it was living on hemlock trees in asia .
when it moved into its new host , the eastern hemlock tree , it escaped its predators , and the new tree had no resistance to it .
the eastern hemlock forest is being considered in some ways the last fragments of primeval rainforest east of the mississippi river .
i had n't even known that there were rainforests in the east , but in great smoky mountains national park it can rain up to 100 inches of rain a year .
and in the last two to three summers , these invasive organisms , this kind of ebola of the trees , as it were , has swept through the primeval hemlock forest of the east , and has absolutely wiped it out . i climbed there this past summer .
this is great smoky mountains national park , and the hemlocks are dead as far as the eye can see .
and what we 're seeing is not just the potential death of the eastern hemlock species - that is to say , its extinction from nature due to this invading parasite - but we 're also seeing the death of an incredibly complex ecosystem for which these trees are merely the substrate for the aerial labyrinth of the sky that exists in their crowns .
it 's absolutely heartbreaking to see .
one of the things that is just - i almost ca n't conceive it - is the idea that the national news media has n't picked this up at all , and this is the devastation of one of the most important ecosystems in north america .
what can the redwoods tell us about ourselves ?
well , i think they can tell us something about human time .
the flickering , transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love .
but we 're different from trees , and they can also teach us something about ourselves in the differences that we have .
we are human , and we have the capacity to love , we have the capacity to wonder , and we have a sort of boundless curiosity , a restless inquisitiveness that so suits us as primates , i think .
and at least for me , personally , the trees have taught me an entirely new way of loving my children .
exploring with them the forest canopy has been one of the most lovely things of my existence on earth .
and i think that one of the happiest things is the sense that with my children i 've been able to introduce them into the very small circle of humans who are lucky enough , or possibly stupid enough , to still climb trees .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i think at a previous ted , i think it was nathan myhrvold who told me that it was thought that because these trees are like , 2,000 years and older , on many of them there are ecosystems where there are species that are not found anywhere on the earth except on that one tree . is that correct ?
richard preston : yes , that is correct . i mentioned hyperion , the world 's tallest tree .
and i was a member of a climbing team that made the first climb of it , in 2006 .
and while we were climbing hyperion , marie antoine spotted an unknown species of golden-brown ant about halfway up the trunk .
ants are not known to occur in redwood trees , curiously enough , and we wondered whether this ant , this species of ant , was only endemic to that one tree , or possibly to that grove .
and in subsequent climbs they could never find that ant again , and so no specimens have ever been collected .
we do n't know what it is - we just know it 's there .
ca : so , you have to wonder when , you know , if some other species than us was recording the stories that mattered on earth , you know , our stories are about iraq and war and politics and celebrity gossip .
you 've just told us a different story of this tragic arms race that 's happening , and maybe whole ecosystems gone forever .
it 's an amazing sense of wonder you 've given me , and a sense of just how fragile this whole thing is .
rp : it is fragile , and you know , i think about emerging human diseases - parasites that move into the human species .
but that 's just a very small facet of a much greater problem of invasions of species worldwide , all through the ecosystems , and you know , the earth itself - ca : partly caused by us , inadvertently .
rp : caused by humans . caused by the movement of humans .
you can think of the earth 's biosphere as a palace , and the continents are rooms in the palace , and the islands are small rooms .
but lately , the doors of the palace have been flung open , and the walls are coming down .
ca : richard preston , thank you very much , i think .
rp : thank you .
so that 's johnny depp , of course .
and that 's johnny depp 's shoulder .
and that 's johnny depp 's famous shoulder tattoo .
some of you might know that , in 1990 , depp got engaged to winona ryder , and he had tattooed on his right shoulder " winona forever . "
and then three years later - which in fairness , kind of is forever by hollywood standards - they broke up , and johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done .
and now his shoulder says , " wino forever . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so like johnny depp , and like 25 percent of americans between the ages of 16 and 50 , i have a tattoo .
i first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s , but i deliberately waited a really long time .
because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30 .
that did n't happen to me .
i got my tattoo when i was 29 , and i regretted it instantly .
and by " regretted it , " i mean that i stepped outside of the tattoo place - this is just a couple miles from here down on the lower east side - and i had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of east broadway and canal street .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is a great place to do it because nobody cares .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i went home that night , and i had an even larger emotional meltdown , which i 'll say more about in a minute .
and this was all actually quite shocking to me , because prior to this moment , i had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets .
i made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions , of course .
i do that hourly .
but i had always felt like , look , you know , i made the best choice i could make given who i was then , given the information i had on hand .
i learned a lesson from it .
it somehow got me to where i am in life right now .
and okay , i would n't change it .
in other words , i had drunk our great cultural kool-aid about regret , which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time , that we should always look forward and not backward , and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets .
this idea is nicely captured by this quote : " things without all remedy should be without regard ; what 's done is done . "
and it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first - something we might all agree to sign onto ...
until i tell you who said it .
right , so this is lady macbeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people .
and as it happens , shakespeare was onto something here , as he generally was .
because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths .
it 's also , by the way , a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage .
so people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions .
so if , in fact , you want to live a life free of regret , there is an option open to you .
it 's called a lobotomy .
but if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane , i think you need to learn to live , not without regret , but with it .
so let 's start off by defining some terms .
what is regret ?
regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past .
so in other words , regret requires two things .
it requires , first of all , agency - we had to make a decision in the first place .
and second of all , it requires imagination .
we need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice , and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present .
and in fact , the more we have of either of these things - the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret , the more acute that regret will be .
so let 's say for instance that you 're on your way to your best friend 's wedding and you 're trying to get to the airport and you 're stuck in terrible traffic , and you finally arrive at your gate and you 've missed your flight .
you 're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20 .
why ?
well because , if you miss your flight by three minutes , it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome .
" i should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel .
i should have gone through that yellow light . "
these are the classic conditions that create regret .
we feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly , but almost came out well .
now within that framework , we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things .
this session today is about behavioral economics .
and most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain .
we have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them - buyer 's remorse , basically .
but then finally , it occurred to some researchers to step back and say , well okay , but overall , what do we regret most in life ?
here 's what the answers turn out to look like .
so top six regrets - the things we regret most in life : number one by far , education .
33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education .
we wish we 'd gotten more of it .
we wish we 'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have .
we wish we 'd chosen to study a different topic .
others very high on our list of regrets include career , romance , parenting , various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time - or actually more specifically , how we fail to spend our leisure time .
the remaining regrets pertain to these things : finance , family issues unrelated to romance or parenting , health , friends , spirituality and community .
so in other words , we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance .
but it turns out , when you look overall at what people regret in life , you know what , our financial decisions do n't even rank .
they account for less than three percent of our total regrets .
so if you 're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap , or company a versus company b , or should you buy the subaru or the prius , you know what , let it go .
odds are , you 're not going to care in five years .
but for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around , what does that experience feel like ?
we all know the short answer .
it feels terrible . regret feels awful .
but it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways .
so the first consistent component of regret is basically denial .
when i went home that night after getting my tattoo , i basically stayed up all night .
and for the first several hours , there was exactly one thought in my head .
and the thought was , " make it go away ! "
this is an unbelievably primitive emotional response .
i mean , it 's right up there with , " i want my mommy ! "
we 're not trying to solve the problem .
we 're not trying to understand how the problem came about .
we just want it to vanish .
the second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment .
so the other thing i thought about there in my bedroom that night was , " how could i have done that ?
what was i thinking ? "
this real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret .
we ca n't identify with that part .
we do n't understand that part .
and we certainly do n't have any empathy for that part - which explains the third consistent component of regret , which is an intense desire to punish ourselves .
that 's why , in the face of our regret , the thing we consistently say is , " i could have kicked myself . "
the fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative .
to perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing .
now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop .
so it 's not that i sat there in my bedroom that night , thinking , " make it go away . "
it 's that i sat there and i thought , " make it go away . make it go away .
make it go away . make it go away . "
so if you look at the psychological literature , these are the four consistent defining components of regret .
but i want to suggest that there 's also a fifth one .
and i think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call .
that night in my apartment , after i got done kicking myself and so forth , i lay in bed for a long time , and i thought about skin grafts .
and then i thought about how , much as travel insurance does n't cover acts of god , probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy .
in point of fact , no insurance covers acts of idiocy .
the whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured ; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of , frankly , a fairly indifferent universe .
this is obviously an incredibly painful experience .
and i think it 's particularly painful for us now in the west in the grips of what i sometimes think of as a control-z culture - control-z like the computer command , undo .
we 're incredibly used to not having to face life 's hard realities , in a certain sense .
we think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem - we can undo and unfriend and unfollow .
and the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we can not .
sometimes instead of control-z , we actually have zero control .
and for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists - and i know where of i speak - this is really hard , because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right .
now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos , and i 'm going to return to that point in a few minutes .
but first i want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we 're feeling regretful about .
so for instance , here 's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- text : relpy to all .
and the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing , you can accidentally hit " reply all " to an email and torpedo a relationship .
or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work .
or you can have your last day at work .
and this does n't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life .
because of course , sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences , either for our own or for other people 's health and happiness and livelihoods , and in the very worst case scenario , even their lives .
now obviously , those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring .
i mean , even the stupid " reply all " regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days .
so how are we supposed to live with this ?
i want to suggest that there 's three things that help us to make our peace with regret .
and the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality .
if you google regret and tattoo , you will get 11.5 million hits .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the fda estimates that of all the americans who have tattoos , 17 percent of us regret getting them .
that is johnny depp and me and our seven million friends .
and that 's just regret about tattoos .
we are all in this together .
the second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves .
now in my case , this really was n't a problem , because it 's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you 're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you do n't like your new tattoo .
but it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets .
i do n't think that 's the case though .
all of us who 've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive .
it connects the poles of our lives back together , the positive and the negative , and it sends a little current of life back into us .
the third way that i think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time , which , as we know , heals all wounds - except for tattoos , which are permanent .
so it 's been several years since i got my own tattoo .
and do you guys just want to see it ?
all right .
actually , you know what , i should warn you , you 're going to be disappointed .
because it 's actually not that hideous .
i did n't tattoo marilyn manson 's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something .
when other people see my tattoo , for the most part they like how it looks .
it 's just that i do n't like how it looks .
and as i said earlier , i 'm a perfectionist .
but i 'll let you see it anyway .
this is my tattoo .
i can guess what some of you are thinking .
so let me reassure you about something .
some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are .
i got this tattoo because i spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling .
and when i came and settled in new york afterward , i was worried that i would forget some of the most important lessons that i learned during that time .
specifically the two things i learned about myself that i most did n't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and , simultaneously , how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north .
and what i loved about this image of the compass was that i felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image .
and i thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device .
well it did .
but it turns out , it does n't remind me of the thing i thought it would ; it reminds me constantly of something else instead .
it actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us , which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us .
and ironically , i think it 's probably the single most important thing i possibly could have tattooed onto my body - partly as a writer , but also just as a human being .
here 's the thing , if we have goals and dreams , and we want to do our best , and if we love people and we do n't want to hurt them or lose them , we should feel pain when things go wrong .
the point is n't to live without any regrets .
the point is to not hate ourselves for having them .
the lesson that i ultimately learned from my tattoo and that i want to leave you with today is this : we need to learn to love the flawed , imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them .
regret does n't remind us that we did badly .
it reminds us that we know we can do better .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm really scared . i do n't think we 're going to make it .
probably by now most of you have seen al gore 's amazing talk .
shortly after i saw that , we had some friends over for dinner with the family . the conversation turned to global warming , and everybody agreed , there 's a real problem .
we 've got a climate crisis .
so , we went around the table to talk about what we should do .
the conversation came to my 15-year-old daughter , mary .
she said , " i agree with everything that 's been said .
i 'm scared and i 'm angry . " and then she turned to me and said , " dad , your generation created this problem ; you 'd better fix it . " wow .
all the conversation stopped . all the eyes turned to me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't know what to say . kleiner 's second law is , " there is a time when panic is the appropriate response . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we 've reached that time . we can not afford to underestimate this problem . if we face irreversible and catastrophic consequences , we must act , and we must act decisively .
i 've got to tell you , for me , everything changed that evening .
and so , my partners and i , we set off on this mission to learn more , to try to do much more . so , we mobilized . we got on airplanes .
we went to brazil . we went to china and to india , to bentonville , arkansas , to washington , d.c. and to sacramento .
and so , what i 'd like to do now is to tell you about what we 've learned in those journeys .
because the more we learned , the more concerned we grew .
you know , my partners at kleiner and i were compulsive networkers , and so when we see a big problem or an opportunity like avian flu or personalized medicine , we just get together the smartest people we know .
for this climate crisis , we assembled a network , really , of superstars , from policy activists to scientists and entrepreneurs and business leaders . fifty or so of them .
and so , i want to tell you about what we 've learned in doing that and four lessons i 've learned in the last year .
the first lesson is that companies are really powerful , and that matters a lot . this is a story about how wal-mart went green , and what that means .
two years ago , the ceo , lee scott , believed that green is the next big thing , and so wal-mart made going green a top priority .
they committed that they 're going to take their existing stores and reduce their energy consumption by 20 percent , and their new stores by 30 percent , and do all that in seven years .
the three biggest uses of energy in a store are heating and air conditioning , then lighting , and then refrigeration .
so , look what they did .
they painted the roofs of all their stores white .
they put smart skylights through their stores so they could harvest the daylight and reduce the lighting demands .
and , third , they put the refrigerated goods behind closed doors with led lighting .
i mean , why would you try to refrigerate a whole store ?
these are really simple , smart solutions based on existing technology .
why does wal-mart matter ? well , it 's massive .
they 're the largest private employer in america .
they 're the largest private user of electricity .
they have the second-largest vehicle fleet on the road .
and they have one of the world 's most amazing supply chains , 60,000 suppliers . if wal-mart were a country , it would be the sixth-largest trading partner with china .
and maybe most important , they have a big effect on other companies .
when wal-mart declares it 's going to go green and be profitable , it has a powerful impact on other great institutions .
so , let me tell you this : when wal-mart achieves 20 percent energy reductions , that 's going to be a very big deal . but i 'm afraid it 's not enough .
we need wal-mart and every other company to do the same .
the second thing that we learned is that individuals matter , and they matter enormously .
i 've got another wal-mart story for you , ok ?
wal-mart has over 125 million u.s. customers .
that 's a third of the u.s. population .
65 million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year .
and wal-mart has committed they 're going to sell another 100 million light bulbs in the coming year . but it 's not easy .
consumers do n't really like these light bulbs .
the light 's kind of funny , they wo n't dim , takes a while for them to start up .
but the pay-off is really enormous .
100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs means that we 'll save 600 million dollars in energy bills , and 20 million tons of co2 every year , year in and year out .
it does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing .
it is stupid that we use two tons of steel , glass and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall .
it 's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in fiji and ship it here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's hard to change consumer behavior because consumers do n't know how much this stuff costs . do you know ?
do you know how much co2 you generated to drive here or fly here ?
i do n't know , and i should .
those of us who care about all this would act better if we knew what the real costs were .
but as long as we pretend that co2 is free , as long as these uses are nearly invisible , how can we expect change ?
i 'm really afraid , because i think the kinds of changes we can reasonably expect from individuals are going to be clearly not enough .
the third lesson we learned is that policy matters . it really matters .
in fact , policy is paramount .
i 've got a behind-the-scenes story for you about that green tech network i described .
at the end of our first meeting , we got together to talk about what the action items would be , how we 'd follow up .
and bob epstein raised a hand . he stood up .
you know , bob 's that berkeley techie type who started sybase .
well , bob said the most important thing we could do right now is to make it clear in sacramento , california that we need a market-based system of mandates that 's going to cap and reduce greenhouse gases in california .
it 's necessary and , just as important , it 's good for the california economy .
so , eight of us went to sacramento in august and we met with the seven undecided legislators and we lobbied for ab32 .
you know what ? six of those seven voted yes in favor of the bill , so it passed , and it passed by a vote of 47 to 32 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- please . thank you .
i think it 's the most important legislation of 2006 . why ?
because california was the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020 .
and the result of that is , we 're going to generate 83,000 new jobs , four billion dollars a year in annual income , and reduce the co2 emissions by 174 million tons a year .
california emits only seven percent of u.s. co2 emissions .
it 's only a percent and a half of the country 's co2 emissions . it 's a great start , but i 've got to tell you - where i started - i 'm really afraid .
in fact , i 'm certain california 's not enough .
here 's a story about national policy that we could all learn from .
you know tom friedman says , " if you do n't go , you do n't know " ?
well , we went to brazil to meet dr. jose goldemberg .
he 's the father of the ethanol revolution .
he told us that brazil 's government mandated that every gasoline station in the country would carry ethanol .
and they mandated that their new vehicles would be flex-fuel compatible , right ?
they 'd run ethanol or ordinary gasoline .
and so , here 's what 's happened in brazil .
they now have 29,000 ethanol pumps - this versus 700 in the u.s. , and a paltry two in california - and in three years their new car fleet has gone from four percent to 85 percent flex-fuel .
compare that to the u.s. : five percent are flex-fuel .
and you know what ? most consumers who have them do n't even know it .
so , what 's happened in brazil is , they 've replaced 40 percent of the gasoline consumed by their automotive fleet with ethanol .
that 's 59 billion dollars since 1975 that they did n't ship to the middle east .
it 's created a million jobs inside that country , and it 's saved 32 million tons of co2 . it 's really substantial .
that 's 10 percent of the co2 emissions across their entire country .
but brazil 's only 1.3 percent of the world 's co2 emission .
so , brazil 's ethanol miracle , i 'm really afraid , is not enough .
in fact , i 'm afraid all of the best policies we have are not going to be enough .
the fourth and final lesson we 've learned is about the potential of radical innovation .
so , i want to tell you about a tragic problem and a breakthrough technology .
every year a million and a half people die of a completely preventable disease . that 's malaria . 6,000 people a day .
all for want of two dollars ' worth of medications that we can buy at the corner drugstore .
well , two dollars , two dollars is too much for africa .
so , a team of berkeley researchers with 15 million dollars from the gates foundation is engineering , designing a radical new way to make the key ingredient , called artemisinin , and they 're going to make that drug 10 times cheaper .
and in doing so , they 'll save a million lives - at least a million lives a year . a million lives .
their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology .
this leverages millions of years of evolution by redesigning bugs to make really useful products .
now , what you do is , you get inside the microbe , you change its metabolic pathways , and you end up with a living chemical factory .
now , you may ask , john , what has this got to go with green and with climate crisis ?
well , i 'll tell you - a lot .
we 've now formed a company called amyris , and this technology that they 're using can be used to make better biofuels .
do n't let me skip over that . better biofuels are a really big deal .
that means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way .
so , if all goes well , they 're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels .
i guess that 's better living through bugs .
alan kay is famous for saying the best way to predict the future is to invent it .
and , of course , at kleiner we , kind of , apologize and say the second best way is to finance it .
and that 's why we 're investing 200 million dollars in a wide range of really disruptive new technologies for innovation in green technologies .
and we 're encouraging others to do it as well .
we 're talking a lot about this .
in 2005 , there were 600 million dollars invested in new technologies of the sort you see here . it doubled in 2006 to 1.2 billion dollars .
but i 'm really afraid we need much , much more .
for reference , fact one : exxon 's revenues in 2005 were a billion dollars a day .
do you know , they only invested 0.2 percent of revenues in r & d ?
second fact : the president 's new budget for renewable energy is barely a billion dollars in total .
less than one day of exxon 's revenues .
third fact : i bet you did n't know that there 's enough energy in hot rocks under the country to supply america 's energy needs for the next thousand years . and the federal budget calls for a measly 20 million dollars of r & d in geothermal energy .
it is almost criminal that we are not investing more in energy research in this country .
and i am really afraid that it 's absolutely not enough .
so , in a year 's worth of learning we found a bunch of surprises .
who would have thought that a mass retailer could make money by going green ? who would have thought that a database entrepreneur could transform california with legislation ?
who would have thought that the ethanol biofuel miracle would come from a developing country in south america ?
and who would have thought that scientists trying to cure malaria could come up with breakthroughs in biofuels ?
and who would have thought that all that is not enough ?
not enough to stabilize the climate .
not enough to keep the ice in greenland from crashing into the ocean .
the scientists tell us - and they 're only guessing - that we 've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one half , and do it as fast as possible .
now , we may have the political will to do this in the u.s. , but i 've got to tell you , we 've got only one atmosphere , and so somehow we 're going to have to find the political will to do this all around the world . the wild card in this deck is china .
to size the problem , china 's co2 emissions today are 3.3 gigatons ; the u.s. is 5.8 . business as usual means we 'll have 23 gigatons from china by 2050 .
that 's about as much co2 as there is in the whole world .
and if it 's business as usual , we 're going out of business .
when i was in davos , china 's mayor of dalian was pressed about their co2 strategy , and he said the following , " you know , americans use seven times the co2 per capita as chinese . "
then he asked , " why should china sacrifice our growth so that the west can continue to be profligate and stupid ? "
does anybody here have an answer for him ? i do n't .
we 've got to make this economic so that all people and all nations make the right outcome , the profitable outcome , and therefore the likely outcome .
energy 's a six-trillion-dollar business worldwide .
it is the mother of all markets . you remember that internet ?
well , i 'll tell you what . green technologies - going green - is bigger than the internet .
it could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century .
moreover , if we succeed , it 's going to be the most important transformation for life on the planet since , as bill joy says , we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere .
now , here 's the hard question , if the trajectory of all the world 's companies and individuals and policies and innovation is not going to be enough , what are we going to do ? i do n't know .
everyone here cares about changing the world and has made a difference in that one way or another .
so , our call to action - my call to you - is for you to make going green your next big thing , your gig .
what can you do ? you can personally get carbon neutral .
go to climatecrisis.org or carboncalculator.com and buy carbon credits . you could join other leaders in mandating , lobbying for mandated cap and trade in u.s. greenhouse gas reductions .
there 's six bills right now in congress . let 's get one of them passed .
and the most important thing you can do , i think , is to use your personal power and your rolodex to lead your business , your institution , in going green .
do it like wal-mart , get it to go green for its customers and its suppliers and for itself .
really think outside the box .
can you imagine what it would be like if amazon or ebay or google or microsoft or apple really went green and you caused that to happen ?
it could be bigger than wal-mart .
i ca n't wait to see what we tedsters do about this crisis .
and i really , really hope that we multiply all of our energy , all of our talent and all of our influence to solve this problem .
because if we do , i can look forward to the conversation i 'm going to have with my daughter in 20 years .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was a student in the ' 60s , a time of social upheaval and questioning , and - on a personal level - an awakening sense of idealism .
the war in vietnam was raging , the civil rights movement was under way and pictures had a powerful influence on me .
our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another .
i believed the photographers and so did millions of other americans .
their images fuelled resistance to the war and to racism .
they not only recorded history - they helped change the course of history .
their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and , as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience , change became not only possible , but inevitable .
it puts a human face on issues which , from afar , can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact .
what happens at ground level , far from the halls of power , happens to ordinary citizens one by one .
and i understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view .
it gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice .
my ted wish . there 's a vital story that needs to be told and i wish for ted to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era .
thank you very much .
-lsb- 10.3.08 - the story breaks . -rsb- -lsb- " i have been a witness , and these pictures are my testimony . " -rsb- -lsb- south africa -rsb- -lsb- this is happening now . -rsb- -lsb- cambodia -rsb- -lsb- swaziland -rsb- -lsb- one person dies every 20 seconds . -rsb- -lsb- thailand -rsb- -lsb- an ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form . -rsb- -lsb- siberia -rsb- -lsb- lesotho -rsb- -lsb- tuberculosis : the next pandemic ? -rsb- -lsb- india -rsb- -lsb- tb is preventable and curable , -rsb- -lsb- but it is mutating due to inadequate treatment . -rsb- -lsb- xdr-tb : -rsb- -lsb- extreme drug resistant tuberculosis . -rsb- -lsb- there is no reliable cure . -rsb-
-lsb- patients often die within weeks of diagnosis . -rsb- -lsb- 49 countries have reported xdr-tb . -rsb- -lsb- xdr-tb is a critical threat to global health . -rsb- -lsb- extreme outbreak , suffering , affliction -rsb- -lsb- extreme loss , pain , pandemic -rsb- -lsb- extremely preventable . -rsb- -lsb- xdr-tb . -rsb- -lsb- we can stop this now . -rsb- -lsb- spread the story . stop the disease . -rsb- -lsb- go to xdrtb.org now . -rsb- -lsb- xdrtb.org : we are the treatment . -rsb- -lsb- we are the treatment . -rsb- -lsb- made possible through the kind support of bd . -rsb- i 'm here today to talk about social change , not a new therapy or a new intervention
or a new way of working with kids or something like that , but a new business model for social change , a new way of tackling the problem .
in britain , 63 percent of all men who come out of short sentences from prison re-offend again within a year .
now how many previous offenses do you think they have on average managed to commit ?
forty-three .
and how many previous times do you think they 've been in prison ?
seven .
so we went to talk to the ministry of justice , and we said to the ministry of justice , what 's it worth to you if fewer of these guys re-offend ?
it 's got to be worth something , right ?
i mean , there 's prison costs , all these things that you 're spending money on to deal with these guys . what 's it worth ?
now , of course , we care about the social value .
social finance , the organization i helped set up , cares about social stuff .
but we wanted to make the economic case , because if we could make the economic case , then the value of doing this would be completely compelling .
and if we can agree on both a value and a way of measuring whether we 've been successful at reducing that re-offending , then we can do something we think rather interesting .
the idea is called the social impact bond .
now , the social impact bond is simply saying , if we can get the government to agree , that we can create a contract where they only pay if it worked .
so that means that they can try out new stuff without the embarrassment of having to pay if it did n't work , which for still quite a lot of bits of government , that 's a serious issue .
now , many of you may have noticed there 's a problem at this point , and that is that it takes a long time to measure whether those outcomes have happened .
so we have to raise some money .
we use the contract to raise money from socially motivated investors .
socially motivated investors : there 's an interesting idea , right ?
but actually , there 's a lot of people who , if they 're given the chance , would love to invest in something that does social good .
and here 's the opportunity .
do you want to also help government find whether there 's a better economic model , not just leaving these guys to come out of prison and waiting till they re-offend and putting them back in again , but actually working with them to move to a different path to end up with fewer crimes and fewer victims ?
so we find some investors , and they pay for a set of services , and if those services are successful , then they improve outcomes , and with those measured reductions in re-offending , government saves money , and with those savings , they can pay outcomes .
and the investors do not just get their money back , but they make a return .
so in march 2010 , we signed the first social impact bond with the ministry of justice around peterborough prison .
it was to work with 3,000 offenders split into three cohorts of 1,000 each .
now , each of those cohorts would get measured over the two years that they were coming out of prison .
they 've got to have a year to commit their crimes , six months to get through the court system , and then they would be compared to a group taken from the police national computer , as similar as possible , and we would get paid providing we achieved a hurdle rate of 10-percent reduction , for every conviction event that did n't happen .
so we get paid for crimes saved .
now if we achieved that 10-percent reduction across all three cohorts , then the investors get a seven and a half percent annualized return on their investment , and if we do better than that , they can get up to 13 percent annualized return on their investment , which is okay .
so everyone wins here , right ?
the ministry of justice can try out a new program and they only pay if it works .
investors get two opportunities : for the first time , they can invest in social change .
also , they make a reasonable return , and they also know that first investors in these kinds of things , they 're going to have to believers .
they 're going to have to care in the social program , but if this builds a track record over five or 10 years , then you can widen that investor community as more people have confidence in the product .
the service providers , well , for the first time , they 've got an opportunity to provide services and grow the evidence for what they 're doing in a really constructive way and learn and demonstrate the value of what they 're doing over five or six years , not just one or two as often happens at the moment .
society wins : fewer crimes , fewer victims .
now , the offenders , they also benefit .
instead of just coming out of the prison with 46 pounds in their pocket , half of them not knowing where they 're spending their first night out of jail , actually , someone meets them in prison , learns about their issues , meets them at the gate , takes them through to somewhere to stay , connects them to benefits , connects them to employment , drug rehabilitation , mental health , whatever 's needed .
so let 's think of another example : working with children in care .
social impact bonds work great for any area where there is at the moment very expensive provision that produces poor outcomes for people .
so children in the state care tend to do very badly .
only 13 percent achieve a reasonable level of five gcses at 16 , against 58 percent of the wider population .
more troublingly , 27 percent of offenders in prison have spent some time in care .
and even more worryingly , and this is a home office statistic , 70 percent of prostitutes have spent some time in care .
the state is not a great parent .
but there are great programs for adolescents who are on the edge of care , and 30 percent of kids going into care are adolescents .
so we set up a program with essex county council to test out intensive family therapeutic support for those families with adolescents on the edge of the care system .
essex only pays in the event that it 's saving them care costs .
investors have put in 3.1 million pounds .
that program started last month .
others , around homelessness in london , around youth and employment and education elsewhere in the country .
there are now 13 social impact bonds in britain , and amazing levels of interest in this idea all over the world .
so david cameron 's put 20 million pounds into a social outcomes fund to support this idea .
obama has suggested 300 million dollars in the u.s. budget for these kinds of ideas and structures to move it forward , and a lot of other countries are demonstrating considerable interest .
so what 's caused this excitement ?
why is this so different for people ?
well , the first piece , which we 've talked about , is innovation .
it enables testing of new ideas in a way that 's less difficult for everybody .
the second piece it brings is rigor .
by working to outcomes , people really have to test and bring data into the situation that one 's dealing with .
so taking peterborough as an example , we add case management across all of the different organizations that we 're working with so they know what actually has been done with different prisoners , and at the same time they learn from the ministry of justice , and we learn , because we pushed for the data , what actually happens , whether they get re-arrested or not .
and we learn and adapt the program accordingly .
and this leads to the third element , which is new , and that 's flexibility .
because normal contracting for things , when you 're spending government money , you 're spending our money , tax money , and the people who are in charge of that are very aware of it so the temptation is to control exactly how you spend it .
now any entrepreneur in the room knows that version 1.0 , the business plan , is not the one that generally works .
so when you 're trying to do something like this , you need the flexibility to adapt the program .
and again , in peterborough , we started off with a program , but we also collected data , and over the period of time , we nuanced and changed that program to add a range of other elements , so that the service adapts and we meet the needs of the long term as well as the short term : greater engagement from the prisoners , longer-term engagement as well .
the last element is partnership .
there is , at the moment , a stale debate going on very often : state 's better , public sector 's better , private sector 's better , social sector 's better , for a lot of these programs .
actually , for creating social change , we need to bring in the expertise in order to make this work .
and this creates a structure through which they can combine .
so where does this leave us ?
this leaves us with a way that people can invest in social change .
we 've met thousands , possibly millions of people , who want the opportunity to invest in social change .
we 've met champions all over the public sector keen to make these kinds of differences .
with this kind of model , we can help bring them together .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- intelligence - what is it ?
if we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed , one seminal example has been edsger dijkstra 's famous quote that " the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim . "
now , edsger dijkstra , when he wrote this , intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science , like alan turing .
however , if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that -lsb- fly -rsb- , you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines .
and so , several years ago , i undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence .
let 's take a step back .
let 's first begin with a thought experiment .
pretend that you 're an alien race that does n't know anything about earth biology or earth neuroscience or earth intelligence , but you have amazing telescopes and you 're able to watch the earth , and you have amazingly long lives , so you 're able to watch the earth over millions , even billions of years .
and you observe a really strange effect .
you observe that , over the course of the millennia , earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point , and that at some point , corresponding roughly to our year , 2000 ad , asteroids that are on a collision course with the earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the earth .
now of course , as earthlings , we know the reason would be that we 're trying to save ourselves .
we 're trying to prevent an impact .
but if you 're an alien race who does n't know any of this , does n't have any concept of earth intelligence , you 'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how , up until a certain point in time , asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that .
and so i claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence .
so in this program that i undertook several years ago , i looked at a variety of different threads across science , across a variety of disciplines , that were pointing , i think , towards a single , underlying mechanism for intelligence .
in cosmology , for example , there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence , and , in particular , for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures .
in game play , for example , in go - everyone remembers in 1997 when ibm 's deep blue beat garry kasparov at chess - fewer people are aware that in the past 10 years or so , the game of go , arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor , has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason : the best techniques right now for computers playing go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play .
finally , in robotic motion planning , there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks .
and so , taking all of these different threads and putting them together , i asked , starting several years ago , is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads ?
is there a single equation for intelligence ?
and the answer , i believe , is yes . -lsb- " f = t ∇ sτ " -rsb- what you 're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an e = mc ² for intelligence that i 've seen .
so what you 're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force , f , that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action .
it acts to maximize future freedom of action , or keep options open , with some strength t , with the diversity of possible accessible futures , s , up to some future time horizon , tau .
in short , intelligence does n't like to get trapped .
intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open .
and so , given this one equation , it 's natural to ask , so what can you do with this ?
how predictive is it ?
does it predict human-level intelligence ?
does it predict artificial intelligence ?
so i 'm going to show you now a video that will , i think , demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder , or " entropy , " over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves .
but what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship ?
what if intelligent behavior does n't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy , but actually emerges directly from it ?
to find out , we developed a software engine called entropica , designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in .
amazingly , entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests , play human games , and even earn money trading stocks , all without being instructed to do so .
here are some examples of entropica in action .
just like a human standing upright without falling over , here we see entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart .
this behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave entropica a goal .
it simply decided on its own to balance the pole .
this balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies .
just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces , here we see that entropica , again on its own initiative , was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk , representing a tool , to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position .
this tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture .
in addition , just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food , here we see that entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task .
this cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields .
entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains .
for example , here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself , illustrating its potential for gaming .
here we see entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected .
this same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care , energy , and intelligence .
here we see entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships , successfully discovering and utilizing the panama canal to globally extend its reach from the atlantic to the pacific .
by the same token , entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense , logistics and transportation .
finally , here we see entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low , sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock , successfully growing assets under management exponentially .
this risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance .
alex wissner-gross : so what you 've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation , which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action .
now , there 's a profound irony here .
going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot , the play " rur , " there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence , there would be a cybernetic revolt .
the machines would rise up against us .
one major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades , we 've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse .
it 's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world .
it 's quite the opposite , that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence , that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing , rather than vice versa .
another important consequence is goal seeking .
i 'm often asked , how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework ?
and the answer is , the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense : just like you would travel through a tunnel , a bottleneck in your future path space , in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on , or just like you would invest in a financial security , reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term , goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action .
finally , richard feynman , famous physicist , once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization , that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they 're far apart but repel each other when they 're close together .
my equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence , is the following : intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how does the news shape the way we see the world ?
here 's the world based on the way it looks - based on landmass .
and here 's how news shapes what americans see .
this map - -lrb- applause -rrb- - this map shows the number of seconds that american network and cable news organizations dedicated to news stories , by country , in february of 2007 - just one year ago .
now , this was a month when north korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities .
there was massive flooding in indonesia .
and in paris , the ipcc released its study confirming man 's impact on global warming .
the u.s. accounted for 79 percent of total news coverage .
and when we take out the u.s. and look at the remaining 21 percent , we see a lot of iraq - that 's that big green thing there - and little else .
the combined coverage of russia , china and india , for example , reached just one percent .
when we analyzed all the news stories and removed just one story , here 's how the world looked .
what was that story ? the death of anna nicole smith .
this story eclipsed every country except iraq , and received 10 times the coverage of the ipcc report .
and the cycle continues ; as we all know , britney has loomed pretty large lately .
so , why do n't we hear more about the world ?
one reason is that news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half .
aside from one-person abc mini-bureaus in nairobi , new delhi and mumbai , there are no network news bureaus in all of africa , india or south america - places that are home to more than two billion people .
the reality is that covering britney is cheaper .
and this lack of global coverage is all the more disturbing when we see where people go for news .
local tv news looms large , and unfortunately only dedicates 12 percent of its coverage to international news .
and what about the web ?
the most popular news sites do n't do much better .
last year , pew and the colombia j-school analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on google news ' front page .
and they , in fact , covered the same 24 news events .
similarly , a study in e-content showed that much of global news from u.s. news creators is recycled stories from the ap wire services and reuters , and do n't put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it .
so , if you put it all together , this could help explain why today 's college graduates , as well as less educated americans , know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago .
and if you think it 's simply because we are not interested , you would be wrong .
in recent years , americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50 percent .
the real question : is this distorted worldview what we want for americans in our increasingly interconnected world ?
i know we can do better .
and can we afford not to ? thank you .
the future , as we know it , is very unpredictable .
the best minds in the best institutions generally get it wrong .
this is in technology . this is in the area of politics , where pundits , the cia , mi6 always get it wrong .
and it 's clearly in the area of finance .
with institutions established to think about the future , the imf , the bis , the financial stability forum , could n't see what was coming .
over 20,000 economists whose job it is , competitive entry to get there , could n't see what was happening .
globalization is getting more complex .
and this change is getting more rapid .
the future will be more unpredictable .
urbanization , integration , coming together , leads to a new renaissance .
it did this a thousand years ago .
the last 40 years have been extraordinary times .
life expectancy has gone up by about 25 years .
it took from the stone age to achieve that .
income has gone up for a majority of the world 's population , despite the population going up by about two billion people over this period .
and illiteracy has gone down , from a half to about a quarter of the people on earth .
a huge opportunity , unleashing of new potential for innovation , for development .
but there is an underbelly .
there are two achilles ' heels of globalization .
there is the achilles ' heel of growing inequality - those that are left out , those that feel angry , those that are not participating . globalization has not been inclusive .
the second achilles ' heel is complexity - a growing fragility , a growing brittleness .
what happens in one place very quickly affects everything else .
this is a systemic risk , systemic shock .
we 've seen it in the financial crisis . we 've seen it in the pandemic flu .
it will become virulent and it 's something we have to build resilience against .
a lot of this is driven by what 's happening in technology .
there have been huge leaps . there will be a million-fold improvement in what you can get for the same price in computing by 2030 .
that 's what the experience of the last 20 years has been .
it will continue .
our computers , our systems will be as primitive as the apollo 's are for today .
our mobile phones are more powerful than the total apollo space engine .
our mobile phones are more powerful than some of the strongest computers of 20 years ago .
so what will this do ?
it will create huge opportunities in technology .
miniaturization as well .
there will be invisible capacity . invisible capacity in our bodies , in our brains , and in the air .
this is a dust mite on a nanoreplica .
this sort of ability to do everything in new ways unleashes potential , not least in the area of medicine .
this is a stem cell that we 've developed here in oxford , from an embryonic stem cell .
we can develop any part of the body .
increasingly , over time , this will be possible from our own skin - able to replicate parts of the body .
fantastic potential for regenerative medicine .
i do n't think there will be a special olympics long after 2030 , because of this capacity to regenerate parts of the body .
but the question is , " who will have it ? "
the other major development is going to be in the area of what can happen in genetics .
the capacity to create , as this mouse has been genetically modified , something which goes three times faster , lasts for three times longer , we could produce , as this mouse can , to the age of our equivalent of 80 years , using about the same amount of food .
but will this only be available for the super rich , for those that can afford it ? are we headed for a new eugenics ?
will only those that are able to afford it be able to be this super race of the future ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the big question for us is , " how do we manage this technological change ? "
how do we ensure that it creates a more inclusive technology , a technology which means that not only as we grow older , that we can also grow wiser , and that we 're able to support the populations of the future ?
one of the most dramatic manifestations of these improvements will be moving from population pyramids to what we might term population coffins .
there is unlikely to be a pension or a retirement age in 2030 .
these will be redundant concepts . and this is n't only something of the west .
the most dramatic changes will be the skyscraper type of new pyramids that will take place in china and in many other countries .
so forget about retirements if you 're young .
forget about pensions . think about life and where it 's going to be going .
of course , migration will become even more important .
the war on talent , the need to attract people at all skill ranges , to push us around in our wheelchairs , but also to drive our economies . our innovation will be vital .
the employment in the rich countries will go down from about 800 to about 700 million of these people .
this would imply a massive leap in migration .
so the concerns , the xenophobic concerns of today , of migration , will be turned on their head , as we search for people to help us sort out our pensions and our economies in the future .
and then , the systemic risks .
we understand that these will become much more virulent , that what we see today is this interweaving of societies , of systems , fastened by technologies and hastened by just-in-time management systems .
small levels of stock push resilience into other people 's responsibility .
the collapse in biodiversity , climate change , pandemics , financial crises : these will be the currency that we will think about .
and so a new awareness will have to arise , of how we deal with these , how we mobilize ourselves , in a new way , and come together as a community to manage systemic risk .
it 's going to require innovation .
it 's going to require an understanding that the glory of globalization could also be its downfall .
this could be our best century ever because of the achievements , or it could be our worst .
and of course we need to worry about the individuals , particularly the individuals that feel that they 've been left out in one way or another .
an individual , for the first time in the history of humanity , will have the capacity , by 2030 , to destroy the planet , to wreck everything , through the creation , for example , of a biopathogen .
how do we begin to weave these tapestries together ?
how do we think about complex systems in new ways ?
that will be the challenge of the scholars , and of all of us engaged in thinking about the future .
the rest of our lives will be in the future . we need to prepare for it now .
we need to understand that the governance structure in the world is fossilized .
it can not begin to cope with the challenges that this will bring .
we have to develop a new way of managing the planet , collectively , through collective wisdom .
we know , and i know from my own experience , that amazing things can happen , when individuals and societies come together to change their future .
i left south africa , and 15 years later , after thinking i would never go back , i had the privilege and the honor to work in the government of nelson mandela .
this was a miracle . we can create miracles , collectively , in our lifetime .
it is vital that we do so .
it is vital that the ideas that are nurtured in ted , that the ideas that we think about look forward , and make sure that this will be the most glorious century , and not one of eco-disaster and eco-collapse .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- my name 's seth priebatsch . i 'm the chief ninja of scvngr .
i am a proud princeton dropout .
also proud to have relocated here to boston , where i actually grew up .
yeah , boston .
easy wins . i should just go and name the counties that we 've got around here .
so , i 'm also fairly determined to try and build a game layer on top of the world .
and this is sort of a new concept , and it 's really important .
because while the last decade was the decade of social and the decade of where the framework in which we connect with other people was built , this next decade will be the decade where the game framework is built , where the motivations that we use to actually influence behavior , and the framework in which that is constructed , is decided upon , and that 's really important .
and so i say that i want to build a game layer on top of the world , but that 's not quite true because it 's already under construction ; it 's already happening .
and it looks like this right now .
it looks like the web did back in 1997 , right ?
it 's not very good . it 's cluttered .
it 's filled with lots of different things that , in short , are n't that fun .
there are credit card schemes and airline mile programs and coupon cards and all these loyalty schemes that actually do use game dynamics and actually are building the game layer : they just suck .
they 're not very well designed , right ?
so , that 's unfortunate .
but luckily , as my favorite action hero , bob the builder , says , " we can do better . we can build this better . "
and the tools , the resources that we use to build a game layer are game dynamics themselves .
and so , sort of , the crux of this presentation is going to go through four really important game dynamics , really interesting things , that , if you use consciously , you can use to influence behavior , both for good , for bad , for in-between .
hopefully for good .
but this is sort of the important stages in which that framework will get built , and so we want to all be thinking about it consciously now .
just before we jump into that , there 's sort of a question of : why is this important ?
i 'm sort of making this claim that there is a game layer on top of the world , and that it 's very important that we build it properly .
the reason that it 's so important is that , the last decade , what we 've seen has been building the social layer , has been this framework for connections , and construction on that layer is over , it 's finished .
there 's still a lot to explore .
there 's still a lot of people who are trying to figure out social and how do we leverage this and how do we use this , but the framework itself is done , and it 's called facebook .
and that 's okay , right ? a lot of people are very happy with facebook .
i like it quite a lot .
they 've created this thing called the open graph , and they own all of our connections .
they own half a billion people .
and so when you want to build on the social layer , the framework has been decided ; it is the open graph api .
and if you 're happy with that , fantastic .
if you 're not , too bad . there 's nothing you can do .
but this next decade - and that 's a real thing .
i mean , we want to build frameworks in a way that makes it acceptable and makes it , you know , productive down the road .
so , the social layer is all about these connections .
the game layer is all about influence .
it 's not about adding a social fabric to the web and connecting you to other people everywhere you are and everywhere you go .
it 's actually about using dynamics , using forces , to influence the behavior of where you are , what you do there , how you do it .
that 's really , really powerful , and it 's going to be more important than the social layer .
it 's going to affect our lives more deeply and perhaps more invisibly .
and so it 's incredibly critical that at this moment , while it 's just getting constructed , while the frameworks like facebook , like the open graph , are being created for the game layer equivalent , that we think about it very consciously , and that we do it in a way that is open , that is available , and that can be leveraged for good .
and so that 's what i want to talk about for game dynamics , because construction has just begun , and the more consciously we can think about this , the better we 'll be able to use it for anything that we want .
so like i said , the way that you go through and build on the game layer is not with glass and steel and cement .
and the resources that we use are not this two-dimensional swath of land that we have .
the resources are mindshare and the tools , the raw materials are these game dynamics .
so with that , you know , a couple game dynamics to talk about .
four . back at scvngr , we like to joke that with seven game dynamics , you can get anyone to do anything .
and so today , i 'm going to show you four , because i hope to have a competitive advantage at the end of this , still .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the first one , it 's a very simple game dynamic .
it 's called the appointment dynamic .
and this is a dynamic in which to succeed , players have to do something at a predefined time , generally at a predefined place .
and these dynamics are a little scary sometimes , because you think , you know , other people can be using forces that will manipulate how i interact : what i do , where i do it , when i do it .
this sort of loss of free will that occurs in games can be frightening , so with each dynamic , i 'm going to give three examples : one that shows how this is already being used in the real world , so you can sort of rationalize it a little bit ; one that shows it in what we consider a conventional game - i think everything is a game , but this is sort of more of a what you would think is a game played on a board or on a computer screen , and then one how this can be used for good , so we can see that these forces can really be very powerful .
so the first one - the most famous appointment dynamic in the world - is something called happy hour .
so i just recently dropped out of princeton and actually ended up for the first time in a bar , and i saw these happy hour things all over the place , right .
and this is simply an appointment dynamic .
come here at a certain time , get your drinks half off .
to win , all you have to do is show up at the right place at the right time .
this game dynamic is so powerful that it does n't just influence our behavior , it 's influenced our entire culture .
that 's a really scary thought , that one game dynamic can change things so powerfully .
it also exists in more conventional game forms .
i 'm sure you 've all heard of farmville by now .
if you have n't , i recommend playing it .
you wo n't do anything else with the rest of your day .
farmville has more active users than twitter .
it 's incredibly powerful , and it has this dynamic where you have to return at a certain time to water your crops - fake crops - or they wilt .
and this is so powerful that , when they tweak their stats , when they say your crops wilt after eight hours , or after six hours , or after 24 hours , it changes the lifecycle of 70 million-some people during the day .
they will return like clockwork at different times .
so if they wanted the world to end , if they wanted productivity to stop , they could make this a 30-minute cycle , and no one could do anything else , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a little scary .
but this could also be used for good .
this is a local company called vitality , and they 've created a product to help people take their medicine on time .
that 's an appointment .
it 's something that people do n't do very well .
and they have these glowcaps , which , you know , flash and email you and do all sorts of cool things to remind you to take your medicine .
this is one that is n't a game yet , but really should be .
you should get points for doing this on time .
you should lose points for not doing this on time .
they should consciously recognize that they 've built an appointment dynamic and leverage the games .
and then you can really achieve good in some interesting ways .
we 're going to jump onto the next one , maybe . yes .
influence and status .
so this is one of the most famous game dynamics .
it 's used all over the place .
it 's used in your wallets , right now .
we all want that credit card on the far left because it 's black .
and you see someone at cvs or - not cvs - at christian dior or something , and then ...
i do n't know . i do n't have a black card ; i 've got a debit card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they whip it out . and you see men , they have that black card .
i want that because that means that they 're cooler than i am , and i need that .
and this is used in games as well .
" modern warfare , " one of the most successful selling games of all time .
i 'm only a level four , but i desperately want to be a level 10 , because they 've got that cool red badge thing , and that means that i am somehow better than everyone else .
and that 's very powerful to me . status is really good motivator .
it 's also used in more conventional settings and can be used more consciously in conventional settings .
school - and remember , i made it through one year , so i think i 'm qualified to talk on school - is a game , it 's just not a terribly well-designed game , right .
there are levels . there are c. there are b. there is a.
there are statuses . i mean , what is valedictorian , but a status ?
if we called valedictorian a " white knight paladin level 20 , " i think people would probably work a lot harder .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so school is a game , and there have been lots of experimentations on how we do this properly .
but let 's use it consciously . like why have games that you can lose ?
why go from an a to an f or a b to a c ?
that sucks . why not level-up ?
and at princeton , they 've actually experimented with this , where they have quizzes where you gain experience points , and you level up from b to an a.
and it 's very powerful .
it can be used in interesting ways .
the third one i want to talk about quickly is the progression dynamic , where you have to sort of make progress , you have to move through different steps in a very granular fashion .
this is used all over the place , including linkedin , where i am an un-whole individual .
i am only 85 percent complete on linkedin , and that bothers me .
and this is so deep-seated in our psyche that when we 're presented with a progress bar and presented with easy , granular steps to take to try and complete that progress bar , we will do it .
we will find a way to move that blue line all the way to the right edge of the screen .
this is used in conventional games as well .
i mean , you see this is a paladin level 10 , and that 's a paladin level 20 , and if you were going to fight , you know , orcs on the fields of mordor against the raz al ghul , you 'd probably want to be the bigger one , right .
i would .
and so people work very hard to level-up .
" world of warcraft " is one of the most successful games of all time .
the average player spends something like six , six-and-a-half hours a day on it .
their most dedicated players , it 's like a full-time job .
it 's insane . and they have these systems where you can level-up .
and that 's a very powerful thing . progression is powerful .
it can also be used in very compelling ways for good .
one of the things that we work on at scvngr is how do you use games to drive traffic and drive business to local businesses , to sort of something that is very key to the economy .
and here we have a game that people play .
they go places , they do challenges , they earn points .
and we 've introduced a progression dynamic into it , where , by going to the same place over and over , by doing challenges , by engaging with the business , you move a green bar from the left edge of the screen to the right edge of the screen , and you eventually unlock rewards .
and this is powerful enough that we can see that it hooks people into these dynamics , pulls them back to the same local businesses , creates huge loyalty , creates engagement , and is able to drive meaningful revenue and fun and engagement to businesses .
these progression dynamics are powerful and can be used in the real world .
the final one i want to talk about - and it 's a great one to end on - is this concept of communal discovery , a dynamic in which everyone has to work together to achieve something .
and communal discovery is powerful because it leverages the network that is society to solve problems .
this is used in some sort of famous consumer web stories , like digg , which i 'm sure you 've all heard of .
digg is a communal dynamic to try to find and source the best news , the most interesting stories .
and they made this into a game , initially .
they had a leader board , where , if you recommended the best stories , you would get points .
and that really motivated people to find the best stories .
but it became so powerful that there was actually a cabal , a group of people , the top seven on the leader board , who would work together to make sure they maintained that position .
and they would recommend other people 's stories , and the game became more powerful than the goal .
and they actually had to end up shutting down the leader board because while it was effective , it was so powerful that it stopped sourcing the best stories and started having people work to maintain their leadership .
so we have to use this one carefully .
it 's also used in things like mcdonald 's monopoly , where the game is not the monopoly game you 're playing , but the sort of cottage industries that form to try and find boardwalk , right .
and now they 're just looking for a little sticker that says " boardwalk . "
but it can also be used to find real things .
this is the darpa balloon challenge , where they hid a couple balloons all across the united states and said , " use networks .
try and find these balloons fastest , and the winner will get $ 40,000 . "
and the winner was actually a group out of mit , where they created sort of a pyramid scheme , a network , where the first person to recommend the location of a balloon got $ 2,000 and anyone else to push that recommendation up also got a cut of it .
and in 12 hours , they were able to find all these balloons , all across the country , right .
really powerful dynamic .
and so , i 've got about 20 seconds left , so if i 'm going to leave you with anything , last decade was the decade of social .
this next decade is the decade of games .
we use game dynamics to build on it . we build with mindshare .
we can influence behavior .
it is very powerful . it is very exciting .
let 's all build it together , let 's do it well and have fun playing .
i 'd like to tell you about two games of chess .
the first happened in 1997 , in which garry kasparov , a human , lost to deep blue , a machine .
to many , this was the dawn of a new era , one where man would be dominated by machine .
but here we are , 20 years on , and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the ipad , not hal .
the second game was a freestyle chess tournament in 2005 , in which man and machine could enter together as partners , rather than adversaries , if they so chose .
at first , the results were predictable .
even a supercomputer was beaten by a grandmaster with a relatively weak laptop .
the surprise came at the end . who won ?
not a grandmaster with a supercomputer , but actually two american amateurs using three relatively weak laptops .
their ability to coach and manipulate their computers to deeply explore specific positions effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of the grandmasters and the superior computational power of other adversaries .
this is an astonishing result : average men , average machines beating the best man , the best machine .
and anyways , is n't it supposed to be man versus machine ?
instead , it 's about cooperation , and the right type of cooperation .
we 've been paying a lot of attention to marvin minsky 's vision for artificial intelligence over the last 50 years .
it 's a sexy vision , for sure . many have embraced it .
it 's become the dominant school of thought in computer science .
but as we enter the era of big data , of network systems , of open platforms , and embedded technology , i 'd like to suggest it 's time to reevaluate an alternative vision that was actually developed around the same time .
i 'm talking about j.c.r. licklider 's human-computer symbiosis , perhaps better termed " intelligence augmentation , " i.a.
licklider was a computer science titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology and the internet .
his vision was to enable man and machine to cooperate in making decisions , controlling complex situations without the inflexible dependence on predetermined programs .
note that word " cooperate . "
licklider encourages us not to take a toaster and make it data from " star trek , " but to take a human and make her more capable .
humans are so amazing - how we think , our non-linear approaches , our creativity , iterative hypotheses , all very difficult if possible at all for computers to do .
licklider intuitively realized this , contemplating humans setting the goals , formulating the hypotheses , determining the criteria , and performing the evaluation .
of course , in other ways , humans are so limited .
we 're terrible at scale , computation and volume .
we require high-end talent management to keep the rock band together and playing .
licklider foresaw computers doing all the routinizable work that was required to prepare the way for insights and decision making .
silently , without much fanfare , this approach has been compiling victories beyond chess .
protein folding , a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess - there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe .
this is a world-changing problem with huge implications for our ability to understand and treat disease .
and for this task , supercomputer field brute force simply is n't enough .
foldit , a game created by computer scientists , illustrates the value of the approach .
non-technical , non-biologist amateurs play a video game in which they visually rearrange the structure of the protein , allowing the computer to manage the atomic forces and interactions and identify structural issues .
this approach beat supercomputers 50 percent of the time and tied 30 percent of the time .
foldit recently made a notable and major scientific discovery by deciphering the structure of the mason-pfizer monkey virus .
a protease that had eluded determination for over 10 years was solved was by three players in a matter of days , perhaps the first major scientific advance to come from playing a video game .
last year , on the site of the twin towers , the 9/11 memorial opened .
it displays the names of the thousands of victims using a beautiful concept called " meaningful adjacency . "
it places the names next to each other based on their relationships to one another : friends , families , coworkers .
when you put it all together , it 's quite a computational challenge : 3,500 victims , 1,800 adjacency requests , the importance of the overall physical specifications and the final aesthetics .
when first reported by the media , full credit for such a feat was given to an algorithm from the new york city design firm local projects . the truth is a bit more nuanced .
while an algorithm was used to develop the underlying framework , humans used that framework to design the final result .
so in this case , a computer had evaluated millions of possible layouts , managed a complex relational system , and kept track of a very large set of measurements and variables , allowing the humans to focus on design and compositional choices .
so the more you look around you , the more you see licklider 's vision everywhere .
whether it 's augmented reality in your iphone or gps in your car , human-computer symbiosis is making us more capable .
so if you want to improve human-computer symbiosis , what can you do ?
you can start by designing the human into the process .
instead of thinking about what a computer will do to solve the problem , design the solution around what the human will do as well .
when you do this , you 'll quickly realize that you spent all of your time on the interface between man and machine , specifically on designing away the friction in the interaction .
in fact , this friction is more important than the power of the man or the power of the machine in determining overall capability .
that 's why two amateurs with a few laptops handily beat a supercomputer and a grandmaster .
what kasparov calls process is a byproduct of friction .
the better the process , the less the friction .
and minimizing friction turns out to be the decisive variable .
or take another example : big data .
every interaction we have in the world is recorded by an ever growing array of sensors : your phone , your credit card , your computer . the result is big data , and it actually presents us with an opportunity to more deeply understand the human condition .
the major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on , " how do i store this data ? how do i search this data ? how do i process this data ? "
these are necessary but insufficient questions .
the imperative is not to figure out how to compute , but what to compute . how do you impose human intuition on data at this scale ?
again , we start by designing the human into the process .
when paypal was first starting as a business , their biggest challenge was not , " how do i send money back and forth online ? "
it was , " how do i do that without being defrauded by organized crime ? "
why so challenging ? because while computers can learn to detect and identify fraud based on patterns , they ca n't learn to do that based on patterns they 've never seen before , and organized crime has a lot in common with this audience : brilliant people , relentlessly resourceful , entrepreneurial spirit - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and one huge and important difference : purpose .
and so while computers alone can catch all but the cleverest fraudsters , catching the cleverest is the difference between success and failure .
there 's a whole class of problems like this , ones with adaptive adversaries . they rarely if ever present with a repeatable pattern that 's discernable to computers .
instead , there 's some inherent component of innovation or disruption , and increasingly these problems are buried in big data .
for example , terrorism . terrorists are always adapting in minor and major ways to new circumstances , and despite what you might see on tv , these adaptations , and the detection of them , are fundamentally human .
computers do n't detect novel patterns and new behaviors , but humans do . humans , using technology , testing hypotheses , searching for insight by asking machines to do things for them .
osama bin laden was not caught by artificial intelligence .
he was caught by dedicated , resourceful , brilliant people in partnerships with various technologies .
as appealing as it might sound , you can not algorithmically data mine your way to the answer .
there is no " find terrorist " button , and the more data we integrate from a vast variety of sources across a wide variety of data formats from very disparate systems , the less effective data mining can be .
instead , people will have to look at data and search for insight , and as licklider foresaw long ago , the key to great results here is the right type of cooperation , and as kasparov realized , that means minimizing friction at the interface .
now this approach makes possible things like combing through all available data from very different sources , identifying key relationships and putting them in one place , something that 's been nearly impossible to do before .
to some , this has terrifying privacy and civil liberties implications . to others it foretells of an era of greater privacy and civil liberties protections , but privacy and civil liberties are of fundamental importance .
that must be acknowledged , and they ca n't be swept aside , even with the best of intents .
so let 's explore , through a couple of examples , the impact that technologies built to drive human-computer symbiosis have had in recent time .
in october , 2007 , u.s. and coalition forces raided an al qaeda safe house in the city of sinjar on the syrian border of iraq .
they found a treasure trove of documents : 700 biographical sketches of foreign fighters .
these foreign fighters had left their families in the gulf , the levant and north africa to join al qaeda in iraq .
these records were human resource forms .
the foreign fighters filled them out as they joined the organization .
it turns out that al qaeda , too , is not without its bureaucracy . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they answered questions like , " who recruited you ? "
" what 's your hometown ? " " what occupation do you seek ? "
in that last question , a surprising insight was revealed .
the vast majority of foreign fighters were seeking to become suicide bombers for martyrdom - hugely important , since between 2003 and 2007 , iraq had 1,382 suicide bombings , a major source of instability .
analyzing this data was hard . the originals were sheets of paper in arabic that had to be scanned and translated .
the friction in the process did not allow for meaningful results in an operational time frame using humans , pdfs and tenacity alone .
the researchers had to lever up their human minds with technology to dive deeper , to explore non-obvious hypotheses , and in fact , insights emerged .
twenty percent of the foreign fighters were from libya , 50 percent of those from a single town in libya , hugely important since prior statistics put that figure at three percent . it also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in al qaeda , abu yahya al-libi , a senior cleric in the libyan islamic fighting group .
in march of 2007 , he gave a speech , after which there was a surge in participation amongst libyan foreign fighters .
perhaps most clever of all , though , and least obvious , by flipping the data on its head , the researchers were able to deeply explore the coordination networks in syria that were ultimately responsible for receiving and transporting the foreign fighters to the border .
these were networks of mercenaries , not ideologues , who were in the coordination business for profit .
for example , they charged saudi foreign fighters substantially more than libyans , money that would have otherwise gone to al qaeda .
perhaps the adversary would disrupt their own network if they knew they cheating would-be jihadists .
in january , 2010 , a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck haiti , third deadliest earthquake of all time , left one million people , 10 percent of the population , homeless .
one seemingly small aspect of the overall relief effort became increasingly important as the delivery of food and water started rolling .
january and february are the dry months in haiti , yet many of the camps had developed standing water .
the only institution with detailed knowledge of haiti 's floodplains had been leveled in the earthquake , leadership inside .
so the question is , which camps are at risk , how many people are in these camps , what 's the timeline for flooding , and given very limited resources and infrastructure , how do we prioritize the relocation ?
the data was incredibly disparate . the u.s. army had detailed knowledge for only a small section of the country .
there was data online from a 2006 environmental risk conference , other geospatial data , none of it integrated .
the human goal here was to identify camps for relocation based on priority need .
the computer had to integrate a vast amount of geospacial information , social media data and relief organization information to answer this question .
by implementing a superior process , what was otherwise a task for 40 people over three months became a simple job for three people in 40 hours , all victories for human-computer symbiosis .
we 're more than 50 years into licklider 's vision for the future , and the data suggests that we should be quite excited about tackling this century 's hardest problems , man and machine in cooperation together .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language .
it has generated considerable insight in physics , in biology and economics , but not that much in the humanities and in history .
i think there 's a belief that it 's just impossible , that you can not quantify the doings of mankind , that you can not measure history .
but i do n't think that 's right .
i want to show you a couple of examples why .
so my collaborator erez and i were considering the following fact : that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language .
that 's a powerful historical force .
so the king of england , alfred the great , will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop , jay-z .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now it 's just the way it is .
language changes over time , and it 's a powerful force .
so erez and i wanted to know more about that .
so we paid attention to a particular grammatical rule , past-tense conjugation .
so you just add " ed " to a verb at the end to signify the past .
" today i walk . yesterday i walked . "
but some verbs are irregular .
" yesterday i thought . "
now what 's interesting about that is irregular verbs between alfred and jay-z have become more regular .
like the verb " to wed " that you see here has become regular .
so erez and i followed the fate of over 100 irregular verbs through 12 centuries of english language , and we saw that there 's actually a very simple mathematical pattern that captures this complex historical change , namely , if a verb is 100 times more frequent than another , it regularizes 10 times slower .
that 's a piece of history , but it comes in a mathematical wrapping .
now in some cases math can even help explain , or propose explanations for , historical forces .
so here steve pinker and i were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries .
there 's actually a well-known regularity to them where the number of wars that are 100 times deadlier is 10 times smaller .
so there are 30 wars that are about as deadly as the six days war , but there 's only four wars that are 100 times deadlier - like world war i.
so what kind of historical mechanism can produce that ?
what 's the origin of this ?
so steve and i , through mathematical analysis , propose that there 's actually a very simple phenomenon at the root of this , which lies in our brains .
this is a very well-known feature in which we perceive quantities in relative ways - quantities like the intensity of light or the loudness of a sound .
for instance , committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot .
it 's relatively enormous if you 've already committed 1,000 soldiers previously .
but it does n't sound so much , it 's not relatively enough , it wo n't make a difference if you 've already committed 100,000 soldiers previously .
so you see that because of the way we perceive quantities , as the war drags on , the number of soldiers committed to it and the casualties will increase not linearly - like 10,000 , 11,000 , 12,000 - but exponentially - 10,000 , later 20,000 , later 40,000 .
and so that explains this pattern that we 've seen before .
so here mathematics is able to link a well-known feature of the individual mind with a long-term historical pattern that unfolds over centuries and across continents .
so these types of examples , today there are just a few of them , but i think in the next decade they will become commonplace .
the reason for that is that the historical record is becoming digitized at a very fast pace .
so there 's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time .
companies like google have digitized many of them - above 20 million actually .
and when the stuff of history is available in digital form , it makes it possible for a mathematical analysis to very quickly and very conveniently review trends in our history and our culture .
so i think in the next decade , the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind .
and i think that mathematics will be a very powerful language to do that .
it will be able to reveal new trends in our history , sometimes to explain them , and maybe even in the future to predict what 's going to happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a studio in berlin - let me cue on here - which is down there in this snow , just last weekend .
in the studio we do a lot of experiments .
i would consider the studio more like a laboratory .
i have occasional meetings with scientists .
and i have an academy , a part of the university of fine arts in berlin .
we have an annual gathering of people , and that is called life in space .
life in space is really not necessarily about how we do things , but why we do things .
do you mind looking , with me , at that little cross in the center there ?
so just keep looking . do n't mind me .
so you will have a yellow circle , and we will do an after-image experiment .
when the circle goes away you will have another color , the complementary color .
i am saying something . and your eyes and your brain are saying something back .
this whole idea of sharing , the idea of constituting reality by overlapping what i say and what you say - think of a movie .
since two years now , with some stipends from the science ministry in berlin , i 've been working on these films where we produce the film together .
i do n't necessarily think the film is so interesting .
obviously this is not interesting at all in the sense of the narrative .
but nevertheless , what the potential is - and just keep looking there - what the potential is , obviously , is to kind of move the border of who is the author , and who is the receiver .
who is the consumer , if you want , and who has responsibility for what one sees ?
i think there is a socializing dimension in , kind of , moving that border .
who decides what reality is ?
this is the tate modern in london .
the show was , in a sense , about that .
it was about a space in which i put half a semi-circular yellow disk .
i also put a mirror in the ceiling , and some fog , some haze .
and my idea was to make the space tangible .
with such a big space , the problem is obviously that there is a discrepancy between what your body can embrace , and what the space , in that sense , is .
so here i had the hope that by inserting some natural elements , if you want - some fog - i could make the space tangible .
and what happens is that people , they start to see themselves in this space .
so look at this . look at the girl .
of course they have to look through a bloody camera in a museum . right ? that 's how museums are working today .
but look at her face there , as she 's checking out , looking at herself in the mirror .
" oh ! that was my foot there ! "
she was n't really sure whether she was seeing herself or not .
and in that whole idea , how do we configure the relationship between our body and the space ?
how do we reconfigure it ?
how do we know that being in a space makes a difference ?
do you see when i said in the beginning , it 's about why , rather than how ?
the why meant really , " what consequences does it have when i take a step ? "
" what does it matter ? "
" does it matter if i am in the world or not ? "
" and does it matter whether the kind of actions i take filter into a sense of responsibility ? "
is art about that ?
i would say yes . it is obviously about not just about decorating the world , and making it look even better , or even worse , if you ask me .
it 's obviously also about taking responsibility , like i did here when throwing some green dye in the river in l.a. , stockholm , norway and tokyo , among other places .
the green dye is not environmentally dangerous , but it obviously looks really rather frightening .
and it 's on the other side also , i think , quite beautiful , as it somehow shows the turbulence in these kind of downtown areas , in these different places of the world .
the " green river , " as a kind of activist idea , not a part of an exhibition , it was really about showing people , in this city , as they walk by , that space has dimensions . a space has time .
and the water flows through the city with time .
the water has an ability to make the city negotiable , tangible .
negotiable meaning that it makes a difference whether you do something or not .
it makes a difference whether you say , " i 'm a part of this city .
and if i vote it makes a difference .
if i take a stand , it makes a difference . "
this whole idea of a city not being a picture is , i think , something that art , in a sense , always was working with .
the idea that art can actually evaluate the relationship between what it means to be in a picture , and what it means to be in a space . what is the difference ?
the difference between thinking and doing .
so these are different experiments with that . i wo n't go into them .
iceland , lower right corner , my favorite place .
these kinds of experiments , they filter into architectural models .
these are ongoing experiments .
one is an experiment i did for bmw , an attempt to make a car .
it 's made out of ice .
a crystalline stackable principle in the center on the top , which i am trying to turn into a concert hall in iceland .
a sort of a run track , or a walk track , on the top of a museum in denmark , which is made of colored glass , going all around .
so the movement with your legs will change the color of your horizon .
and two summers ago at the hyde park in london , with the serpentine gallery : a kind of a temporal pavilion where moving was the only way you could see the pavilion .
this summer , in new york : there is one thing about falling water which is very much about the time it takes for water to fall .
it 's quite simple and fundamental .
i 've walked a lot in the mountains in iceland .
and as you come to a new valley , as you come to a new landscape , you have a certain view .
if you stand still , the landscape does n't necessarily tell you how big it is .
it does n't really tell you what you 're looking at .
the moment you start to move , the mountain starts to move .
the big mountains far away , they move less .
the small mountains in the foreground , they move more .
and if you stop again , you wonder , " is that a one-hour valley ?
or is that a three-hour hike , or is that a whole day i 'm looking at ? "
if you have a waterfall in there , right out there at the horizon ; you look at the waterfall and you go , " oh , the water is falling really slowly . "
and you go , " my god it 's really far away and it 's a giant waterfall . "
if a waterfall is falling faster , it 's a smaller waterfall which is closer by - because the speed of falling water is pretty constant everywhere .
and your body somehow knows that .
so this means a waterfall is a way of measuring space .
of course being an iconic city like new york , that has had an interest in somehow playing around with the sense of space , you could say that new york wants to seem as big as possible .
adding a measurement to that is interesting : the falling water suddenly gives you a sense of , " oh , brooklyn is exactly this much - the distance between brooklyn and manhattan , in this case the lower east river is this big . "
so it was not just necessarily about putting nature into the cities .
it was also about giving the city a sense of dimension .
and why would we want to do that ?
because i think it makes a difference whether you have a body that feels a part of a space , rather than having a body which is just in front of a picture .
and " ha-ha , there is a picture and here is i. and what does it matter ? "
is there a sense of consequences ?
so if i have a sense of the space , if i feel that the space is tangible , if i feel there is time , if there is a dimension i could call time , i also feel that i can change the space .
and suddenly it makes a difference in terms of making space accessible .
one could say this is about community , collectivity .
it 's about being together .
how do we create public space ?
what does the word " public " mean today anyway ?
so , asked in that way , i think it raises great things about parliamentary ideas , democracy , public space , being together , being individual .
how do we create an idea which is both tolerant to individuality , and also to collectivity , without polarizing the two into two different opposites ?
of course the political agendas in the world has been very obsessed , polarizing the two against each other into different , very normative ideas .
i would claim that art and culture , and this is why art and culture are so incredibly interesting in the times we 're living in now , have proven that one can create a kind of a space which is both sensitive to individuality and to collectivity .
it 's very much about this causality , consequences .
it 's very much about the way we link thinking and doing .
so what is between thinking and doing ?
and right in-between thinking and doing , i would say , there is experience .
and experience is not just a kind of entertainment in a non-casual way .
experience is about responsibility .
having an experience is taking part in the world .
taking part in the world is really about sharing responsibility .
so art , in that sense , i think holds an incredible relevance in the world in which we 're moving into , particularly right now .
that 's all i have . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was informed by this kind of unoriginal and trite idea that new technologies were an opportunity for social transformation , which is what drove me then , and still , it 's a delusion that drives me now .
i wanted to update what i 've been doing since then - but it 's still the same theme song - and introduce you to my lab and current work , which is the environmental health clinic that i run at nyu .
and what it is - it 's a twist on health .
because , really , what i 'm trying to do now is redefine what counts as health .
it 's a clinic like a health clinic at any other university , except people come to the clinic with environmental health concerns , and they walk out with prescriptions for things they can do to improve environmental health , as opposed to coming to a clinic with medical concerns and walking out with prescriptions for pharmaceuticals .
it 's a handy-dandy quote from hippocrates of the hippocratic oath that says , " the greater part of the soul lays outside the body , treatment of the inner requires treatment of the outer . "
but that suggests the issue that i 'm trying to get at here , that we have an opportunity to redefine what is health .
because this idea that health is internal and atomized and individual and pharmaceutical is largely an error .
and i would use this study , a recent study by philip landrigan , to motivate a different view of health , where he went to most of the pediatricians in manhattan and the new york area and logged what they spent their patient hours on .
80 to 90 percent of their time was spent on five things .
number one was asthma , number two was developmental delays , number three was 400-fold increases in rare childhood cancers in the last eight to 10 , 15 years .
number four and five were childhood obesity and diabetes-related issues .
so all of those - what 's common about all of those ?
the environment is implicated , radically implicated , right .
this is not the germs that medicos were trained to deal with ; this is a different definition of health , health that has a great advantage because it 's external , it 's shared , we can do something about it , as opposed to internal , genetically predetermined or individualized .
people who come to the clinic are called , not patients , but impatients , because they 're too impatient to wait for legislative change to address local and environmental health issues .
and i meet them at the university , i also have a few field offices that i set up in various places that provide an immersion in some of the environmental challenges we face .
i like this one from the belgian field office , where we met in a roundabout , precisely because the roundabout iconified the headless social movement that informs much social transformation , as opposed to the top-down control of red light traffic intersections .
in this case , of course , the roundabout with that micro-decisions being made in situ by people not being told what to do .
but , of course , affords greater throughput , fewer accidents , and an interesting model of social movement .
some of the things that the monitoring protocols have developed : this is the tadpole bureaucrat protocol , or keeping tabs , if you will .
what they are is an addition of tadpoles that are named after a local bureaucrat whose decisions affect your water quality .
so an impatient concerned for water quality would raise a tadpole bureaucrat in a sample of water in which they 're interested .
and we give them a couple of things to do that , to help them do companion animal devices while they 're blogging and doing their email .
this is a tadpole walker to take your tadpole walking in the evening .
and the interesting thing that happens - because we 're using tadpoles , of course , because they have the most exquisite biosenses that we have , several orders of magnitude more sensitive than some of our senses for sensing , responding in a biologically meaningful way , to that whole class of industrial contaminants we call endocrine disruptors or hormone emulators .
but by taking your tadpole out for a walk in the evening - there 's a few action shots - your neighbors are likely to say , " what are you doing ? "
and then you have to introduce your tadpole and who it 's named after .
you have to explain what you 're doing and how the developmental events of a tadpole are , of course , very observable and they use the same t3-mediated hormones that we do .
and so next time your neighbor sees you they 'll say , " how is that tadpole doing ? "
and you can let them social network with your tadpole , because the environmental health clinic has a social networking site for , not only impatients , humans , but non-humans , social networking for humans and non-humans .
and of course , these endocrine disruptors are things that are implicated in the breast cancer epidemic , the obesity epidemic , the two and a half year drop in the average age of onset of puberty in young girls and other related things .
the culmination of this is if you 've successfully raised your tadpole , observing the behavioral and developmental events , you will then go and introduce your tadpole to its namesake and discuss the evidence that you 've seen .
another quick protocol - and i 'm going to go through these quickly , but just to give you the material sense of what we 're doing here - instead of asking you for urine samples , i 'll ask you for a mouse sample .
anyone here lucky enough to share , to cohabit with a mouse - a domestic partnership with mice ?
very lucky .
mice , of course , are the quintessential model organism .
they 're even better models of environmental health , because not only the same mammalian biology , but they share your diet , largely .
they share your environmental stressors , the asbestos levels and lead levels , whatever you 're exposed to .
and they 're geographically more limited than you are , because we do n't know if you 've been exposed to persistent organic pollutants in your home , or occupationally or as a child .
mice are a very good representation .
so it starts by building a better mousetrap , of course .
this is one of them .
coping with environmental stressors is tricky .
is anybody here on antidepressants ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a lot of people in manhattan are .
and we were testing if the mice would also self-administer ssris .
so this was prozac , this was zoloft , this was a black jellybean and this was muscle relaxant , all of which were the medications that the impatient was taking .
so do you think the mice self-administered antidepressants ?
what 's the - -lrb- audience : sure . yes . -rrb- how did you know that ? they did .
this was vodka and solution , gin and solution .
this guy also liked plain water and the muscle relaxant .
where 's our expert ?
vodka , gin - -lrb- audience : -lsb- unclear -rsb- -rrb- yes . yes . you know your mice well .
they did , yes .
so they drank as much vodka as they did plain water , which was interesting .
then of course , it goes into the entrapment device .
there 's an old cellphone in there - a good use for old cellphones - which dials the clinic , we go and pick up the mouse .
we take the blood sample and do the blood work and hair work on the mice .
and i want to sort of point out the big advantage of framing health in this external way .
but we do have a few prescription products through this .
it 's very different from the medical model .
anything you do to improve your water quality or air quality , or to understand it or to change it , the benefits are enjoyed by anyone you share that water quality or air quality with .
and that aggregating effect , that collective action effect , is actually something we can use to our advantage .
so i want to show you one prescription product in the clinic called the no park .
this is a prescription to improve water quality .
many impatients are very concerned for water quality and air quality .
what we do is we take a fire hydrant , a " no parking " space associated with a fire hydrant , and we prescribe the removal of the asphalt to create an engineered micro landscape , to create an infiltration opportunity .
because , many of you will know , that the biggest pollution burden that we have on the new york , new jersey harbor right now is no longer the point sources , no longer the big polluters , no longer the ges , but that massive network of roads , -lsb- those -rsb- impervious surfaces , that collect all that cadmium neurotoxin that comes from your brake liners or the oily hydrocarbon waste in every single storm event and medieval infrastructure washes it straight into the estuary system .
that does n't do a lot of good .
these are little opportunities to intercept those pollutants before they enter the harbor , and they 're produced by impatients on various city blocks in some very interesting ways .
i just want to say it was sort of a rule of thumb though , there 's about two or three fire hydrants on every city block .
by creating engineered micro landscapes to infiltrate in them , we do n't prevent them from being used as emergency vehicle parking spaces , because , of course , a firetruck can come and park there .
they flatten a few plants . no big deal , they 'll regenerate .
but if we did this in every single - every fire hydrant we could redefine the emergency .
that 99 percent of the time when a firetruck is not parking there , it 's infiltrating pollutants .
it 's also increasing fixing co2s , sequestering some of the airborne pollutants .
and aggregated , these smaller interceptions could actually infiltrate all the roadborne pollution that now runs into the estuary system , up to a seven inch rain event , up to a hundred-year storm .
so these are small actions that can amount to a significant effect to improve local environmental health .
this is one of the more ambitious ones .
what the climate crisis has revealed to us is a secondary , more insidious and more pervasive crisis , which is the crisis of agency , which is what to do .
somehow buying a local lettuce , changing a light bulb , driving the speed limit , changing your tires regularly , does n't seem sufficient in the face of climate crisis .
and this is an interesting icon that happened - you remember these : fallout shelters .
what is the fallout shelter for the climate crisis ?
this was civic mobilization .
churches , school groups , hospitals , private residents - everyone built one of these in a matter of months .
and they still remain as icons of civic response in the face of shared , uncertain , collective threat .
fallout shelter for the climate crisis , i would say , looks something like this , or this , which is an intensive urban agriculture facility that 's due to go on my lab building at nyu .
what it does is a very simple idea of taking - 80 to 90 percent of the co2 produced in manhattan is building related - we take , just like a commercial greenhouse , we take the co2 from the building - co2-enriched air - we force it through the urban agriculture facility , and then we resupply oxygen-enriched air .
you ca n't actually build much on a roof , they 're not designed for that .
so it 's on legs , so it focuses all the load on the masonry walls and the columns .
it 's built as a barn raising , using open source hardware .
this is the quarter-scale prototype that was functioning in spain .
this is what it will look like , fingers crossed , nyu willing .
and what i want to show you is - actually this is one of the components of it that we 've just recently been testing - which is a solar chimney - we have got 17 of them now put around new york at the moment - that passively draws air up .
you understand a solar chimney .
hot air rises .
you put a bit of black plastic on the side of a building , it 'll heat up , and you 'll get passive airflow .
what we do is actually put a standard hvac filter on the top of that .
that actually removes about 95 percent of the carbon black , that stuff that , with ozone , is responsible for about half of global warming 's effects , because it changes , it settles on the snow , it changes the reflectors , it changes the transmission qualities of the atmosphere .
carbon black is that grime that otherwise lodges in your pretty pink lungs , and it 's associated with .
it 's not good stuff , and it 's from inefficient combustion , not from combustion itself .
when we put it through our solar chimney , we remove actually about 95 percent of that .
and then i swap it out with the students and actually re-release that carbon black .
and we make pencils the length of which measures the grime that we 've pulled out of the air .
here 's one of them that we have up now .
here 's who put them up and who are avid pencil users .
okay , so i want to show you just two more interfaces , because i think one of our big challenges is re-imagining our relationship to natural systems , not only through this model of twisted personalized health , but through the animals with whom we cohabit .
we are not alone ; the animals are moving in .
in fact , urban migration now describes the movement of animals formerly known as wild into urban centers .
you know , coyote in central park , a whale in the gowanus canal , elk in westchester county .
it 's happening all over the developed world , probably for loss of habitat , but also because our cities are a little bit more livable than they have been .
and every green space we create is an invitation for non-humans to cohabit with us .
but we 've kind of lacked imagination in how we could do that well or interestingly .
and i want to show you a few of the technological interfaces that have been developed under the moniker of ooz - which is zoo backwards and without cages - to try and reform that relationship .
this is communication technology for birds . it looks like this .
when a bird lands on it , they trigger a sound file .
this is actually in the whitney museum , where there were six of them , each of which had a different argument on it , different sound file .
they said things like this .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- recorded voice : here 's what you need to do .
go down there and buy some of those health food bars , the ones you call bird food , and bring it here and scatter it around .
there 's a good person .
natalie jeremijenko : okay . -lrb- laugher -rrb- so there was several of these .
the birds were able to jump from one to the other .
these are just your average urban pigeon .
and an early test which argument elicited cooperative behavior from the people below - about a hundred to one decided that this was the argument that worked best on us .
recorded voice : tick , tick , tick .
that 's the sound of genetic mutations of the avian flu becoming a deadly human flu .
do you know what slows it down ?
healthy sub-populations of birds , increasing biodiversity generally .
it is in your interests that i 'm healthy , happy , well-fed .
hence , you could share some of your nutritional resources instead of monopolizing them .
that is , share your lunch .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nj : it worked , and it 's true .
the final project i 'd like to show you is a new interface for fish that has just been launched - it 's actually officially launched next week - with a wonderful commission from the architectural league .
you may not have known that you need to communicate with fish , but there is now a device for you to do so .
it looks like this : buoys that float on the water , project three foot up , three foot down .
when a fish swims underneath , a light goes on .
this is what it looks like .
so there 's another function on here .
this top light is - i 'm sorry if i 'm making you seasick - this top light is actually a water quality display that shifts from red , when the dissolved oxygen is low , to a blue / green , when its dissolved oxygen is high .
and then you can also text the fish .
so there 's business cards down there that 'll give you contact details .
and they text back .
when the buoys get your text , they wink at you twice to say , we 've got your message .
but perhaps the most popular has been that we 've got another array of these boys in the bronx river , where the first beaver - crazy as he is - to have moved in and built a lodge in new york in 250 years , hangs out .
so updates from a beaver .
you can subscribe to updates from him . you can talk to him .
and what i like to think of is this is an interface that re-scripts how we interact with natural systems , specifically by changing who has information , where they have it , who can make sense of that information , and what you can do about it .
in this case , instead of throwing chewing gum , or doritos or whatever you have in your pocket at the fish - there 's a body of water in iceland that i 've been dealing with that 's in the middle of the city , and the largest pollution burden on it is not the roadborne pollution , it 's actually white bread from people feeding the fish and the birds .
instead of doing that actually , we 've developed some fish sticks that you can feed the fish .
they 're delicious .
they 're cross-species delicious that is , delicious for humans and non-humans .
but they also have a chelating agent in them .
they 're nutritionally appropriate , not like doritos .
and so every time that desire to interact with the animals , which is at least as ubiquitous as that sign : " do not feed the animals . "
and there 's about three of them on every new york city park .
and yellowstone national park , there 's more " do not feed the animals " signs than there are animals you might wish to feed .
but in that action , that interaction , by re-scripting that , by changing it into an opportunity to offer food that is nutritionally appropriate , that could augment the nutritional resources that we ourselves have depleted for augmenting the fish population and also adding chelating agent , which , like any chelating agent that we use medicinally , binds to the bioaccumulated heavy metals and pcbs that are in the fish living in this particular habitat and allows them to pass it out as a harmless salt where it 's complexed by a reactive , effectively removing it from bioavailability .
but i wanted to say that interaction , re-scripting that interaction , into collective action , collective remediative action , very different from the approach that 's being used on the other side on the hudson river , where we 're dredging the pcbs - after 30 years of legislative and legal struggle , ge 's paying for the dredging of the largest superfund site in the world - we 're dredging it , and it 'll probably get shipped off to pennsylvania or the nearest third world country , where it will continue to be toxic sludge .
displacement is not the way to deal with environmental issues .
and that 's typically the paradigm under which we 've operated .
by actually taking the opportunity that new technologies , new interactive technologies , present to re-script our interactions , to script them , not just as isolated , individuated interactions , but as collective aggregating actions that can amount to something , we can really begin to address some of our important environmental challenges .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was raised in seoul , korea , and moved to new york city in 1999 to attend college .
i was pre-med at the time , and i thought i would become a surgeon because i was interested in anatomy and dissecting animals really piqued my curiosity .
at the same time , i fell in love with new york city .
i started to realize that i could look at the whole city as a living organism .
i wanted to dissect it and look into its unseen layers .
and the way to it , for me , was through artistic means .
so , eventually i decided to pursue an mfa instead of an m.d.
and in grad school i became interested in creatures that dwell in the hidden corners of the city .
in new york city , rats are part of commuters ' daily lives .
most people ignore them or are frightened of them .
but i took a liking to them because they dwell on the fringes of society .
and even though they 're used in labs to promote human lives , they 're also considered pests .
i also started looking around in the city and trying to photograph them .
one day , in the subway , i was snapping pictures of the tracks hoping to catch a rat or two , and a man came up to me and said , " you ca n't take photographs here .
the mta will confiscate your camera . "
i was quite shocked by that , and thought to myself , " well , ok then .
i 'll follow the rats . "
then i started going into the tunnels , which made me realize that there 's a whole new dimension to the city that i never saw before and most people do n't get to see .
around the same time , i met like-minded individuals who call themselves urban explorers , adventurers , spelunkers , guerrilla historians , etc .
i was welcomed into this loose , internet-based network of people who regularly explore urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations , tunnels , sewers , aqueducts , factories , hospitals , shipyards and so on .
when i took photographs in these locations , i felt there was something missing in the pictures .
simply documenting these soon-to-be-demolished structures was n't enough for me .
so i wanted to create a fictional character or an animal that dwells in these underground spaces , and the simplest way to do it , at the time , was to model myself .
i decided against clothing because i wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements .
i wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying , derelict spaces .
this was taken in the riviera sugar factory in red hook , brooklyn .
it 's now an empty , six-acre lot waiting for a shopping mall right across from the new ikea .
i was very fond of this space because it 's the first massive industrial complex i found on my own that is abandoned .
when i first went in , i was scared , because i heard dogs barking and i thought they were guard dogs .
but they happened to be wild dogs living there , and it was right by the water , so there were swans and ducks swimming around and trees growing everywhere and bees nesting in the sugar barrels .
the nature had really reclaimed the whole complex .
and , in a way , i wanted the human figure in the picture to become a part of that nature .
when i got comfortable in the space , it also felt like a big playground .
i would climb up the tanks and hop across exposed beams as if i went back in time and became a child again .
this was taken in the old croton aqueduct , which supplied fresh water to new york city for the first time .
the construction began in 1837 .
it lasted about five years .
it got abandoned when the new croton aqueducts opened in 1890 .
when you go into spaces like this , you 're directly accessing the past , because they sit untouched for decades .
i love feeling the aura of a space that has so much history .
instead of looking at reproductions of it at home , you 're actually feeling the hand-laid bricks and shimmying up and down narrow cracks and getting wet and muddy and walking in a dark tunnel with a flashlight .
this is a tunnel underneath riverside park .
it was built in the 1930s by robert moses .
the murals were done by a graffiti artist to commemorate the hundreds of homeless people that got relocated from the tunnel in 1991 when the tunnel reopened for trains .
walking in this tunnel is very peaceful .
there 's nobody around you , and you hear the kids playing in the park above you , completely unaware of what 's underneath .
when i was going out a lot to these places , i was feeling a lot of anxiety and isolation because i was in a solitary phase in my life , and i decided to title my series " naked city spleen , " which references charles baudelaire .
" naked city " is a nickname for new york , and " spleen " embodies the melancholia and inertia that come from feeling alienated in an urban environment .
this is the same tunnel .
you see the sunbeams coming from the ventilation ducts and the train approaching .
this is a tunnel that 's abandoned in hell 's kitchen .
i was there alone , setting up , and a homeless man approached .
i was basically intruding in his living space .
i was really frightened at first , but i calmly explained to him that i was working on an art project and he did n't seem to mind and so i went ahead and put my camera on self-timer and ran back and forth .
and when i was done , he actually offered me his shirt to wipe off my feet and kindly walked me out .
it must have been a very unusual day for him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one thing that struck me , after this incident , was that a space like that holds so many deleted memories of the city .
that homeless man , to me , really represented an element of the unconscious of the city .
he told me that he was abused above ground and was once in riker 's island , and at last he found peace and quiet in that space .
the tunnel was once built for the prosperity of the city , but is now a sanctuary for outcasts , who are completely forgotten in the average urban dweller 's everyday life .
this is underneath my alma mater , columbia university .
the tunnels are famous for having been used during the development of the manhattan project .
this particular tunnel is interesting because it shows the original foundations of bloomingdale insane asylum , which was demolished in 1890 when columbia moved in .
this is the new york city farm colony , which was a poorhouse in staten island from the 1890s to the 1930s .
most of my photos are set in places that have been abandoned for decades , but this is an exception .
this children 's hospital was closed in 1997 ; it 's located in newark .
when i was there three years ago , the windows were broken and the walls were peeling , but everything was left there as it was .
you see the autopsy table , morgue trays , x-ray machines and even used utensils , which you see on the autopsy table .
after exploring recently-abandoned buildings , i felt that everything could fall into ruins very fast : your home , your office , a shopping mall , a church - any man-made structures around you .
i was reminded of how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are .
i love to travel , and berlin has become one of my favorite cities .
it 's full of history , and also full of underground bunkers and ruins from the war .
this was taken under a homeless asylum built in 1885 to house 1,100 people .
i saw the structure while i was on the train , and i got off at the next station and met people there that gave me access to their catacomb-like basement , which was used for ammunition storage during the war and also , at some point , to hide groups of jewish refugees .
this is the actual catacombs in paris .
i explored there extensively in the off-limits areas and fell in love right away .
there are more than 185 miles of tunnels , and only about a mile is open to the public as a museum .
the first tunnels date back to 60 b.c.
they were consistently dug as limestone quarries and by the 18th century , the caving-in of some of these quarries posed safety threats , so the government ordered reinforcing of the existing quarries and dug new observation tunnels in order to monitor and map the whole place .
as you can see , the system is very complex and vast .
it 's very dangerous to get lost in there .
and at the same time , there was a problem in the city with overflowing cemeteries .
so the bones were moved from the cemeteries into the quarries , making them into the catacombs .
the remains of over six million people are housed in there , some over 1,300 years old .
this was taken under the montparnasse cemetery where most of the ossuaries are located .
there are also phone cables that were used in the ' 50s and many bunkers from the world war ii era .
this is a german bunker .
nearby there 's a french bunker , and the whole tunnel system is so complex that the two parties never met .
the tunnels are famous for having been used by the resistance , which victor hugo wrote about in " les miserables . "
and i saw a lot of graffiti from the 1800s , like this one .
after exploring the underground of paris , i decided to climb up , and i climbed a gothic monument that 's right in the middle of paris .
this is the tower of saint jacques .
it was built in the early 1500s .
i do n't recommend sitting on a gargoyle in the middle of january , naked .
it was not very comfortable . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and all this time , i never saw a single rat in any of these places , until recently , when i was in the london sewers .
this was probably the toughest place to explore .
i had to wear a gas mask because of the toxic fumes - i guess , except for in this picture .
and when the tides of waste matter come in it sounds as if a whole storm is approaching you .
this is a still from a film i worked on recently , called " blind door . "
i 've become more interested in capturing movement and texture .
and the 16mm black-and-white film gave a different feel to it .
and this is the first theater project i worked on .
i adapted and produced " a dream play " by august strindberg .
it was performed last september one time only in the atlantic avenue tunnel in brooklyn , which is considered to be the oldest underground train tunnel in the world , built in 1844 .
i 've been leaning towards more collaborative projects like these , lately .
but whenever i get a chance i still work on my series .
the last place i visited was the mayan ruins of copan , honduras .
this was taken inside an archaeological tunnel in the main temple .
i like doing more than just exploring these spaces .
i feel an obligation to animate and humanize these spaces continually in order to preserve their memories in a creative way - before they 're lost forever .
thank you .
the will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places .
this is where i come from , todmorden .
it 's a market town in the north of england , 15,000 people , between leeds and manchester , fairly normal market town .
it used to look like this , and now it 's more like this , with fruit and veg and herbs sprouting up all over the place .
we call it propaganda gardening . -lrb- laughter -rrb- corner row railway , station car park , front of a health center , people 's front gardens , and even in front of the police station . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've got edible canal towpaths , and we 've got sprouting cemeteries .
the soil is extremely good . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've even invented a new form of tourism .
it 's called vegetable tourism , and believe it or not , people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds , even when there 's not much growing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it starts a conversation . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , we 're not doing it because we 're bored . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're doing it because we want to start a revolution .
we tried to answer this simple question : can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living , see spaces around them differently , think about the resources they use differently , interact differently ?
can we find that language ?
and then , can we replicate those actions ?
and the answer would appear to be yes , and the language would appear to be food .
so , three and a half years ago , a few of us sat around a kitchen table and we just invented the whole thing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- we came up with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting .
we did not consult . we did not write a report .
enough of all that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we said to that public meeting in todmorden , look , let 's imagine that our town is focused around three plates : a community plate , the way we live our everyday lives ; a learning plate , what we teach our kids in school and what new skills we share amongst ourselves ; and business , what we do with the pound in our pocket and which businesses we choose to support .
now , let 's imagine those plates agitated with community actions around food .
if we start one of those community plates spinning , that 's really great , that really starts to empower people , but if we can then spin that community plate with the learning plate , and then spin it with the business plate , we 've got a real show there , we 've got some action theater .
we 're starting to build resilience ourselves .
we 're starting to reinvent community ourselves , and we 've done it all without a flipping strategy document .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and here 's the thing as well .
we 've not asked anybody 's permission to do this , we 're just doing it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we are certainly not waiting for that check to drop through the letterbox before we start , and most importantly of all , we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments that say , " these small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow 's problems , " because i have seen the power of small actions , and it is awesome .
so , back to the public meeting . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we put that proposition to the meeting , two seconds , and then the room exploded .
i have never , ever experienced anything like that in my life .
and it 's been the same in every single room , in every town that we 've ever told our story .
people are ready and respond to the story of food .
they want positive actions they can engage in , and in their bones , they know it 's time to take personal responsibility and invest in more kindness to each other and to the environment .
and since we had that meeting three and a half years ago , it 's been a heck of a roller coaster .
we started with a seed swap , really simple stuff , and then we took an area of land , a strip on the side of our main road , which was a dog toilet , basically , and we turned it into a really lovely herb garden .
we took the corner of the car park in the station that you saw , and we made vegetable beds for everybody to share and pick from themselves .
we went to the doctors . we 've just had a 6-million-pound health center built in todmorden , and for some reason that i can not comprehend , it has been surrounded by prickly plants . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we went to the doctors , said , " would you mind us taking them up ? "
they said , " absolutely fine , provided you get planning permission and you do it in latin and you do it in triplicate , " so we did - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and now there are fruit trees and bushes and herbs and vegetables around that doctor 's surgery .
and there 's been lots of other examples , like the corn that was in front of the police station , and the old people 's home that we 've planted it with food that they can pick and grow .
but it is n't just about growing , because we all are part of this jigsaw .
it 's about taking those artistic people in your community and doing some fabulous designs in those raised beds to explain to people what 's growing there , because there 's so many people that do n't really recognize a vegetable unless it 's in a bit of plastic with a bit of an instruction packet on the top . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we have some people who designed these things , " if it looks like this , please do n't pick it , but if it looks like this , help yourself . "
this is about sharing and investing in kindness .
and for those people that do n't want to do either of those things , maybe they can cook , so we pick them seasonally and then we go on the street , or in the pub , or in the church , or wherever people are living their lives .
this is about us going to the people and saying , " we are all part of the local food jigsaw , we are all part of a solution . "
and then , because we know we 've got vegetable tourists and we love them to bits and they 're absolutely fantastic , we thought , what could we do to give them an even better experience ?
so we invented , without asking , of course , the incredible edible green route .
and this is a route of exhibition gardens , and edible towpaths , and bee-friendly sites , and the story of pollinators , and it 's a route that we designed that takes people through the whole of our town , past our cafes and our small shops , through our market , not just to and fro from the supermarket , and we 're hoping that , in changing people 's footfall around our town , we 're also changing their behavior .
and then there 's the second plate , the learning plate .
well , we 're in partnership with a high school .
we 've created a company . we are designing and building an aquaponics unit in some land that was spare at the back of the high school , like you do , and now we 're going to be growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees , and the kids are helping us build that , and the kids are on the board , and because the community was really keen on working with the high school , the high school is now teaching agriculture , and because it 's teaching agriculture , we started to think , how could we then get those kids that never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited about growing ,
how can we give them some more experience ?
so we got some land that was donated by a local garden center .
it was really quite muddy , but in a truly incredible way , totally voluntary-led , we have turned that into a market garden training center , and that is polytunnels and raised beds and all the things you need to get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there 's a job in this for me in the future .
and because we were doing that , some local academics said , " you know , we could help design a commercial horticulture course for you .
there 's not one that we know of . "
so they 're doing that , and we 're going to launch it later this year , and it 's all an experiment , and it 's all voluntary .
and then there 's the third plate , because if you walk through an edible landscape , and if you 're learning new skills , and if you start to get interested in what 's growing seasonally , you might just want to spend more of your own money in support of local producers , not just veg , but meat and cheese and beer and whatever else it might be .
but then , we 're just a community group , you know .
we 're just all volunteers . what could we actually do ?
so we did some really simple things .
we fundraised , we got some blackboards , we put " incredible edible " on the top , we gave it every market trader that was selling locally , and they scribbled on what they were selling in any one week .
really popular . people congregated around it .
sales were up .
and then , we had a chat with the farmers , and we said , " we 're really serious about this , " but they did n't actually believe us , so we thought , okay , what should we do ? i know . if we can create a campaign around one product and show them there is local loyalty to that product , maybe they 'll change their mind and see we 're serious .
so we launched a campaign - because it just amuses me - called every egg matters . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and what we did was we put people on our egg map .
it 's a stylized map of togmorden .
anybody that 's selling their excess eggs at the garden gate , perfectly legally , to their neighbors , we 've stuck on there . we started with four , and we 've now got 64 on , and the result of that was that people were then going into shops asking for a local todmorden egg , and the result of that was , some farmers upped the amount of flocks they got of free range birds , and then they went on to meat birds , and although these are really , really small steps , that increasing local economic confidence is starting to play out in a number of ways , and we now have farmers doing cheese
and they 've upped their flocks and rare breed pigs , they 're doing pasties and pies and things that they would have never done before .
we 've got increasing market stalls selling local food , and in a survey that local students did for us , 49 percent of all food traders in that town said that their bottom line had increased because of what we were actually doing .
and we 're just volunteers and it 's only an experiment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , none of this is rocket science .
it certainly is not clever , and it 's not original .
but it is joined up , and it is inclusive .
this is not a movement for those people that are going to sort themselves out anyway .
this is a movement for everyone .
we have a motto : if you eat , you 're in . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- across age , across income , across culture .
it 's been really quite a roller coaster experience , but going back to that first question that we asked , is it replicable ? yeah . it most certainly is replicable .
more than 30 towns in england now are spinning the incredible edible plate .
whichever way they want to do it , of their own volition , they 're trying to make their own lives differently , and worldwide , we 've got communities across america and japan - it 's incredible , is n't it ? i mean , america and japan and new zealand .
people after the earthquake in new zealand visited us in order to incorporate some of this public spiritedness around local growing into the heart of christchurch .
and none of this takes more money and none of this demands a bureaucracy , but it does demand that you think things differently and you are prepared to bend budgets and work programs in order to create that supportive framework that communities can bounce off .
and there 's some great ideas already in our patch .
our local authority has decided to make everywhere incredible edible , and in support of that have decided to do two things .
first , they 're going to create an asset register of spare land that they 've got , put it in a food bank so that communities can use that wherever they live , and they 're going to underpin that with a license .
and then they 've said to every single one of their workforce , if you can , help those communities grow , and help them to maintain their spaces .
suddenly , we 're seeing actions on the ground from local government . we 're seeing this mainstreamed .
we are responding creatively at last to what rio demanded of us , and there 's lots more you could do .
i mean , just to list a few . one , please stop putting prickly plants around public buildings . it 's a waste of space .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- secondly , please create - please , please create edible landscapes so that our children start to walk past their food day in , day out , on our high streets , in our parks , wherever that might be .
inspire local planners to put the food sites at the heart of the town and the city plan , not relegate them to the edges of the settlements that nobody can see .
encourage all our schools to take this seriously .
this is n't a second class exercise .
if we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow , then please let us say to every school , create a sense of purpose around the importance to the environment , local food and soils .
put that at the heart of your school culture , and you will create a different generation .
there are so many things you can do , but ultimately this is about something really simple .
through an organic process , through an increasing recognition of the power of small actions , we are starting , at last , to believe in ourselves again , and to believe in our capacity , each and every one of us , to build a different and a kinder future , and in my book , that 's incredible .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today , as june said , to talk about a project that my twin sister and i have been doing for the past three and half years .
we 're crocheting a coral reef .
and it 's a project that we 've actually been now joined by hundreds of people around the world , who are doing it with us . indeed thousands of people have actually been involved in this project , in many of its different aspects .
it 's a project that now reaches across three continents , and its roots go into the fields of mathematics , marine biology , feminine handicraft and environmental activism .
it 's true .
it 's also a project that in a very beautiful way , the development of this has actually paralleled the evolution of life on earth , which is a particularly lovely thing to be saying right here in february 2009 - which , as one of our previous speakers told us , is the 200th anniversary of the birth of charles darwin .
all of this i 'm going to get to in the next 18 minutes , i hope .
but let me first begin by showing you some pictures of what this thing looks like .
just to give you an idea of scale , that installation there is about six feet across , and the tallest models are about two or three feet high .
this is some more images of it .
that one on the right is about five feet high .
the work involves hundreds of different crochet models .
and indeed there are now thousands and thousands of models that people have contributed all over the world as part of this .
the totality of this project involves tens of thousands of hours of human labor - 99 percent of it done by women .
on the right hand side , that bit there is part of an installation that is about 12 feet long .
my sister and i started this project in 2005 because in that year , at least in the science press , there was a lot of talk about global warming , and the effect that global warming was having on coral reefs .
corals are very delicate organisms , and they are devastated by any rise in sea temperatures .
it causes these vast bleaching events that are the first signs of corals of being sick .
and if the bleaching does n't go away - if the temperatures do n't go down - reefs start to die .
a great deal of this has been happening in the great barrier reef , particularly in coral reefs all over the world .
this is our invocation in crochet of a bleached reef .
we have a new organization together called the institute for figuring , which is a little organization we started to promote , to do projects about the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics .
and i went and put a little announcement up on our site , asking for people to join us in this enterprise .
to our surprise , one of the first people who called was the andy warhol museum .
and they said they were having an exhibition about artists ' response to global warming , and they 'd like our coral reef to be part of it .
i laughed and said , " well we 've only just started it , you can have a little bit of it . "
so in 2007 we had an exhibition , a small exhibition of this crochet reef .
and then some people in chicago came along and they said , " in late 2007 , the theme of the chicago humanities festival is global warming . and we 've got this 3,000 square-foot gallery and we want you to fill it with your reef . "
and i , naively by this stage , said , " oh , yes , sure . "
now i say " naively " because actually my profession is as a science writer .
what i do is i write books about the cultural history of physics .
i 've written books about the history of space , the history of physics and religion , and i write articles for people like the new york times and the l.a. times .
so i had no idea what it meant to fill a 3,000 square-foot gallery .
so i said yes to this proposition .
and i went home , and i told my sister christine .
and she nearly had a fit because christine is a professor at one of l.a. 's major art colleges , calarts , and she knew exactly what it meant to fill a 3,000 square-foot gallery .
she thought i 'd gone off my head .
but she went into crochet overdrive .
and to cut a long story short , eight months later we did fill the chicago cultural center 's 3,000 square foot gallery .
by this stage the project had taken on a viral dimension of its own , which got completely beyond us .
the people in chicago decided that as well as exhibiting our reefs , what they wanted to do was have the local people there make a reef .
so we went and taught the techniques . we did workshops and lectures .
and the people in chicago made a reef of their own .
and it was exhibited alongside ours .
there were hundreds of people involved in that .
we got invited to do the whole thing in new york , and in london , and in los angeles .
in each of these cities , the local citizens , hundreds and hundreds of them , have made a reef .
and more and more people get involved in this , most of whom we 've never met .
so the whole thing has sort of morphed into this organic , ever-evolving creature , that 's actually gone way beyond christine and i.
now some of you are sitting here thinking , " what planet are these people on ?
why on earth are you crocheting a reef ?
woolenness and wetness are n't exactly two concepts that go together .
why not chisel a coral reef out of marble ?
cast it in bronze . "
but it turns out there is a very good reason why we are crocheting it because many organisms in coral reefs have a very particular kind of structure .
the frilly crenulated forms that you see in corals , and kelps , and sponges and nudibranchs , is a form of geometry known as hyperbolic geometry .
and the only way that mathematicians know how to model this structure is with crochet . it happens to be a fact .
it 's almost impossible to model this structure any other way , and it 's almost impossible to do it on computers .
so what is this hyperbolic geometry that corals and sea slugs embody ?
the next few minutes is , we 're all going to get raised up to the level of a sea slug .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this sort of geometry revolutionized mathematics when it was first discovered in the 19th century .
but not until 1997 did mathematicians actually understand how they could model it .
in 1997 a mathematician at cornell , daina taimina , made the discovery that this structure could actually be done in knitting and crochet .
the first one she did was knitting .
but you get too many stitches on the needle . so she quickly realized crochet was the better thing .
but what she was doing was actually making a model of a mathematical structure , that many mathematicians had thought it was actually impossible to model .
and indeed they thought that anything like this structure was impossible per se .
some of the best mathematicians spent hundreds of years trying to prove that this structure was impossible .
so what is this impossible hyperbolic structure ?
before hyperbolic geometry , mathematicians knew about two kinds of space : euclidean space , and spherical space .
and they have different properties .
mathematicians like to characterize things by being formalist .
you all have a sense of what a flat space is , euclidean space is .
but mathematicians formalize this in a particular way .
and what they do is , they do it through the concept of parallel lines .
so here we have a line and a point outside the line .
and euclid said , " how can i define parallel lines ?
i ask the question , how many lines can i draw through the point but never meet the original line ? "
and you all know the answer . does someone want to shout it out ?
one . great . okay .
that 's our definition of a parallel line .
it 's a definition really of euclidean space .
but there is another possibility that you all know of : spherical space .
think of the surface of a sphere - just like a beach ball , the surface of the earth .
i have a straight line on my spherical surface .
and i have a point outside the line . how many straight lines can i draw through the point but never meet the original line ?
what do we mean to talk about a straight line on a curved surface ?
now mathematicians have answered that question .
they 've understood there is a generalized concept of straightness , it 's called a geodesic .
and on the surface of a sphere , a straight line is the biggest possible circle you can draw .
so it 's like the equator or the lines of longitude .
so we ask the question again , " how many straight lines can i draw through the point , but never meet the original line ? "
does someone want to guess ?
zero . very good .
now mathematicians thought that was the only alternative .
it 's a bit suspicious is n't it ? there is two answers to the question so far , zero and one .
two answers ? there may possibly be a third alternative .
to a mathematician if there are two answers , and the first two are zero and one , there is another number that immediately suggests itself as the third alternative .
does anyone want to guess what it is ?
infinity . you all got it right . exactly .
there is , there 's a third alternative .
this is what it looks like .
there 's a straight line , and there is an infinite number of lines that go through the point and never meet the original line .
this is the drawing .
this nearly drove mathematicians bonkers because , like you , they 're sitting there feeling bamboozled .
thinking , how can that be ? you 're cheating . the lines are curved .
but that 's only because i 'm projecting it onto a flat surface .
mathematicians for several hundred years had to really struggle with this .
how could they see this ?
what did it mean to actually have a physical model that looked like this ?
it 's a bit like this : imagine that we 'd only ever encountered euclidean space .
then our mathematicians come along and said , " there 's this thing called a sphere , and the lines come together at the north and south pole . "
but you do n't know what a sphere looks like .
and someone that comes along and says , " look here 's a ball . "
and you go , " ah ! i can see it . i can feel it .
i can touch it . i can play with it . "
and that 's exactly what happened when daina taimina in 1997 , showed that you could crochet models in hyperbolic space .
here is this diagram in crochetness .
i 've stitched euclid 's parallel postulate on to the surface .
and the lines look curved .
but look , i can prove to you that they 're straight because i can take any one of these lines , and i can fold along it .
and it 's a straight line .
so here , in wool , through a domestic feminine art , is the proof that the most famous postulate in mathematics is wrong .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and you can stitch all sorts of mathematical theorems onto these surfaces .
the discovery of hyperbolic space ushered in the field of mathematics that is called non-euclidean geometry .
and this is actually the field of mathematics that underlies general relativity and is actually ultimately going to show us about the shape of the universe .
so there is this direct line between feminine handicraft , euclid and general relativity .
now , i said that mathematicians thought that this was impossible .
here 's two creatures who 've never heard of euclid 's parallel postulate - did n't know it was impossible to violate , and they 're simply getting on with it .
they 've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years .
i once asked the mathematicians why it was that mathematicians thought this structure was impossible when sea slugs have been doing it since the silurian age .
their answer was interesting .
they said , " well i guess there are n't that many mathematicians sitting around looking at sea slugs . "
and that 's true . but it also goes deeper than that .
it also says a whole lot of things about what mathematicians thought mathematics was , what they thought it could and could n't do , what they thought it could and could n't represent .
even mathematicians , who in some sense are the freest of all thinkers , literally could n't see not only the sea slugs around them , but the lettuce on their plate - because lettuces , and all those curly vegetables , they also are embodiments of hyperbolic geometry .
and so in some sense they literally , they had such a symbolic view of mathematics , they could n't actually see what was going on on the lettuce in front of them .
it turns out that the natural world is full of hyperbolic wonders .
and so , too , we 've discovered that there is an infinite taxonomy of crochet hyperbolic creatures .
we started out , chrissy and i and our contributors , doing the simple mathematically perfect models .
but we found that when we deviated from the specific setness of the mathematical code that underlies it - the simple algorithm crochet three , increase one - when we deviated from that and made embellishments to the code , the models immediately started to look more natural .
and all of our contributors , who are an amazing collection of people around the world , do their own embellishments .
as it were , we have this ever-evolving , crochet taxonomic tree of life .
just as the morphology and the complexity of life on earth is never ending , little embellishments and complexifications in the dna code lead to new things like giraffes , or orchids - so too , do little embellishments in the crochet code lead to new and wondrous creatures in the evolutionary tree of crochet life .
so this project really has taken on this inner organic life of its own .
there is the totality of all the people who have come to it .
and their individual visions , and their engagement with this mathematical mode .
we have these technologies . we use them .
but why ? what 's at stake here ? what does it matter ?
for chrissy and i , one of the things that 's important here is that these things suggest the importance and value of embodied knowledge .
we live in a society that completely tends to valorize symbolic forms of representation - algebraic representations , equations , codes .
we live in a society that 's obsessed with presenting information in this way , teaching information in this way .
but through this sort of modality , crochet , other plastic forms of play - people can be engaged with the most abstract , high-powered , theoretical ideas , the kinds of ideas that normally you have to go to university departments to study in higher mathematics , which is where i first learned about hyperbolic space .
but you can do it through playing with material objects .
one of the ways that we 've come to think about this is that what we 're trying to do with the institute for figuring and projects like this , we 're trying to have kindergarten for grown-ups .
and kindergarten was actually a very formalized system of education , established by a man named friedrich froebel , who was a crystallographer in the 19th century .
he believed that the crystal was the model for all kinds of representation .
he developed a radical alternative system of engaging the smallest children with the most abstract ideas through physical forms of play .
and he is worthy of an entire talk on his own right .
the value of education is something that froebel championed , through plastic modes of play .
we live in a society now where we have lots of think tanks , where great minds go to think about the world .
they write these great symbolic treatises called books , and papers , and op-ed articles .
we want to propose , chrissy and i , through the institute for figuring , another alternative way of doing things , which is the play tank .
and the play tank , like the think tank , is a place where people can go and engage with great ideas .
but what we want to propose , is that the highest levels of abstraction , things like mathematics , computing , logic , etc . - all of this can be engaged with , not just through purely cerebral algebraic symbolic methods , but by literally , physically playing with ideas .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- announcer : threats , in the wake of bin laden 's death , have spiked .
announcer two : famine in somalia . announcer three : police pepper spray .
announcer four : vicious cartels . announcer five : caustic cruise lines .
announcer six : societal decay . announcer seven : 65 dead .
announcer eight : tsunami warning . announcer nine : cyberattacks .
multiple announcers : drug war . mass destruction . tornado .
recession . default . doomsday . egypt . syria .
crisis . death . disaster .
oh , my god .
peter diamandis : so those are just a few of the clips i collected over the last six months - could have easily been the last six days or the last six years .
the point is that the news media preferentially feeds us negative stories because that 's what our minds pay attention to .
and there 's a very good reason for that .
every second of every day , our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains .
and because nothing is more important to us than survival , the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala .
now the amygdala is our early warning detector , our danger detector .
it sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us .
so given a dozen news stories , we will preferentially look at the negative news .
and that old newspaper saying , " if it bleeds it leads , " is very true .
so given all of our digital devices that are bringing all the negative news to us seven days a week , 24 hours a day , it 's no wonder that we 're pessimistic .
it 's no wonder that people think that the world is getting worse .
but perhaps that 's not the case .
perhaps instead , of what 's really going on .
perhaps the tremendous progress we 've made over the last century by a series of forces are , in fact , accelerating to a point that we have the potential in the next three decades to create a world of abundance .
now i 'm not saying we do n't have our set of problems - climate crisis , species extinction , water and energy shortage - we surely do .
and as humans , we are far better at seeing the problems way in advance , but ultimately we knock them down .
so let 's look at what this last century has been to see where we 're going .
over the last hundred years , the average human lifespan has more than doubled , average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled .
childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10 .
add to that the cost of food , electricity , transportation , communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold .
steve pinker has showed us that , in fact , we 're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history .
and charles kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years .
we truly are living in an extraordinary time .
and many people forget this .
and we keep setting our expectations higher and higher .
in fact , we redefine what poverty means .
think of this , in america today , the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity , water , toilets , refrigerators , television , mobile phones , air conditioning and cars .
the wealthiest robber barons of the last century , the emperors on this planet , could have never dreamed of such luxuries .
underpinning much of this is technology , and of late , exponentially growing technologies .
my good friend ray kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve , on moore 's law , and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months .
that 's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the ' 70s .
now look at this curve .
this is moore 's law over the last hundred years .
i want you to notice two things from this curve .
number one , how smooth it is - through good time and bad time , war time and peace time , recession , depression and boom time .
this is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers .
it does n't slow for any of our grand challenges .
and also , even though it 's plotted on a log curve on the left , it 's curving upwards .
the rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster .
and on this curve , riding on moore 's law , are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies available to all of us .
cloud computing , what my friends at autodesk call infinite computing ; sensors and networks ; robotics ; 3d printing , which is the ability to democratize and distribute personalized production around the planet ; synthetic biology ; fuels , vaccines and foods ; digital medicine ; nanomaterials ; and a.i.
i mean , how many of you saw the winning of jeopardy by ibm 's watson ?
i mean , that was epic .
in fact , i scoured the headlines looking for the best headline in a newspaper i could .
and i love this : " watson vanquishes human opponents . "
jeopardy 's not an easy game .
it 's about the nuance of human language .
and imagine if you would a.i. 's like this on the cloud available to every person with a cellphone .
four years ago here at ted , ray kurzweil and i started a new university called singularity university .
and we teach our students all of these technologies , and particularly how they can be used to solve humanity 's grand challenges .
and every year we ask them to start a company or a product or a service that can affect positively the lives of a billion people within a decade .
think about that , the fact that , literally , a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today .
30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous .
today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that .
when i think about creating abundance , it 's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet ; it 's about creating a life of possibility .
it is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant .
you see , scarcity is contextual , and technology is a resource-liberating force .
let me give you an example .
so this is a story of napoleon iii in the mid-1800s .
he 's the dude on the left .
he invited over to dinner the king of siam .
all of napoleon 's troops were fed with silver utensils , napoleon himself with gold utensils .
but the king of siam , he was fed with aluminum utensils .
you see , aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet , worth more than gold and platinum .
it 's the reason that the tip of the washington monument is made of aluminum .
you see , even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the earth by mass , it does n't come as a pure metal .
it 's all bound by oxygen and silicates .
but then the technology of electrolysis came along and literally made aluminum so cheap that we use it with throw-away mentality .
so let 's project this analogy going forward .
we think about energy scarcity .
ladies and gentlemen , we are on a planet that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy than we use in a year .
16 terawatts of energy hits the earth 's surface every 88 minutes .
it 's not about being scarce , it 's about accessibility .
and there 's good news here .
for the first time , this year the cost of solar-generated electricity is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in india - 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees .
the cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year .
last month , mit put out a study showing that by the end of this decade , in the sunny parts of the united states , solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour compared to 15 cents as a national average .
and if we have abundant energy , we also have abundant water .
now we talk about water wars .
do you remember when carl sagan turned the voyager spacecraft back towards the earth , in 1990 after it just passed saturn ?
he took a famous photo . what was it called ?
" a pale blue dot . "
because we live on a water planet .
we live on a planet 70 percent covered by water .
yes , 97.5 percent is saltwater , two percent is ice , and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet , but here too there is hope .
and there is technology coming online , not 10 , 20 years from now , right now .
there 's nanotechnology coming on , nanomaterials .
and the conversation i had with dean kamen this morning , one of the great diy innovators , i 'd like to share with you - he gave me permission to do so - his technology called slingshot that many of you may have heard of , it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator .
it 's able to generate a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day out of any source - saltwater , polluted water , latrine - at less than two cents a liter .
the chairman of coca-cola has just agreed to do a major test of hundreds of units of this in the developing world .
and if that pans out , which i have every confidence it will , coca-cola will deploy this globally to 206 countries around the planet .
this is the kind of innovation , empowered by this technology , that exists today .
and we 've seen this in cellphones .
my goodness , we 're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013 .
think about it , that a masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of kenya has better mobile comm than president reagan did 25 years ago .
and if they 're on a smartphone on google , they 've got access to more knowledge and information than president clinton did 15 years ago .
they 're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted .
better than that , the things that you and i spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for - gps , hd video and still images , libraries of books and music , medical diagnostic technology - are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing into your cellphone .
probably the best part of it is what 's coming down the pike in health .
last month , i had the pleasure of announcing with qualcomm foundation something called the $ 10 million qualcomm tricorder x prize .
we 're challenging teams around the world to basically combine these technologies into a mobile device that you can speak to , because it 's got a.i. , you can cough on it , you can do a finger blood prick .
and to win , it needs to be able to diagnose you better than a team of board-certified doctors .
so literally , imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors , 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers .
when this device sequences an rna or dna virus that it does n't recognize , it calls the cdc and prevents the pandemic from happening in the first place .
but here , here is the biggest force for bringing about a world of abundance .
i call it the rising billion .
so the white lines here are population .
we just passed the seven billion mark on earth .
and by the way , the biggest protection against a population explosion is making the world educated and healthy .
in 2010 , we had just short of two billion people online , connected .
by 2020 , that 's going from two billion to five billion internet users .
three billion new minds who have never been heard from before are connecting to the global conversation .
what will these people want ?
what will they consume ? what will they desire ?
and rather than having economic shutdown , we 're about to have the biggest economic injection ever .
these people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected into the global economy .
and they will get healthier by using the tricorder , and they 'll become better educated by using the khan academy , and by literally being able to use 3d printing and infinite computing -lsb- become -rsb- more productive than ever before .
so what could three billion rising , healthy , educated , productive members of humanity bring to us ?
how about a set of voices that have never been heard from before .
what about giving the oppressed , wherever they might be , the voice to be heard and the voice to act for the first time ever ?
what will these three billion people bring ?
what about contributions we ca n't even predict ?
the one thing i 've learned at the x prize is that small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things , things that large corporations and governments could only do in the past .
let me share and close with a story that really got me excited .
there is a program that some of you might have heard of .
it 's a game called foldit .
it came out of the university of washington in seattle .
and this is a game where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids and figure out how the protein is going to fold .
and how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality .
and it 's very important for research in medicine .
and up until now , it 's been a supercomputer problem .
and this game has been played by university professors and so forth .
and it 's literally , hundreds of thousands of people came online and started playing it .
and it showed that , in fact , today , the human pattern recognition machinery is better at folding proteins than the best computers .
and when these individuals went and looked at who was the best protein folder in the world , it was n't an mit professor , it was n't a caltech student , it was a person from england , from manchester , a woman who , during the day , was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic and , at night , was the world 's best protein folder .
ladies and gentlemen , what gives me tremendous confidence in the future is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals to take on the grand challenges of this planet .
we have the tools with this exponential technology .
we have the passion of the diy innovator .
we have the capital of the techno-philanthropist .
and we have three billion new minds coming online to work with us to solve the grand challenges , to do that which we must do .
we are living into extraordinary decades ahead .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to start with a short story .
it 's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp .
they would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis , and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls , but at the same time they excited him .
and the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work .
let 's fast-forward to the san francisco bay area many decades later , where i started a technology company that brought the world its first 3d laser scanning system .
let me show you how it works .
female voice : long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that 's a laser beam of light .
the system measures the beam 's time of flight , recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return .
with two mirrors , the scanner calculates the beam 's horizontal and vertical angles , giving accurate x , y , and z coordinates .
the point is then recorded into a 3d visualization program .
all of this happens in seconds .
ben kacyra : you can see here , these systems are extremely fast .
they collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution .
a surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day .
these babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second .
so , as you can imagine , this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry .
approximately ten years ago , my wife and i started a foundation to do good , and right about that time , the magnificent bamiyan buddhas , hundred and eighty foot tall in afghanistan , were blown up by the taliban .
they were gone in an instant .
and unfortunately , there was no detailed documentation of these buddhas .
this clearly devastated me , and i could n't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends , the winged bulls , and the fate of the many , many heritage sites all over the world .
both my wife and i were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites .
we called the project cyark , which stands for cyber archive .
to date , with the help of a global network of partners , we 've completed close to fifty projects .
let me show you some of them : chichen itza , rapa nui - and what you 're seeing here are the cloud of points - babylon , rosslyn chapel , pompeii , and our latest project , mt . rushmore , which happened to be one of our most challenging projects .
as you see here , we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal .
the results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers .
we also produce media for dissemination to the public - free through the cyark website .
these would be used for education , cultural tourism , etc .
what you 're looking at in here is a 3d viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of -lsb- the -rsb- cloud of points in real time , cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions .
this happens to be the cloud of points for tikal .
in here you see a traditional 2d architectural engineering drawing that 's used for preservation , and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs .
and here , this is a fly-through the cloud of points of tikal , and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site .
and so this is not a video .
this is actual 3d points with two to three millimeter accuracy .
and of course the data can be used to develop 3d models that are very accurate and very detailed .
and here you 're looking at a model that 's extracted from the cloud of points for stirling castle .
it 's used for studies , for visualization , as well as for education .
and finally , we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools .
the more i got involved in the heritage field , the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them .
of course , earthquakes and all the natural phenomena - floods , tornadoes , etc . - take their toll .
however , what occurred to me was human-caused destruction , which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction , but actually it was accelerating .
this includes arson , urban sprawl , acid rain , not to mention terrorism and wars .
it was getting more and more apparent that we 're fighting a losing battle .
we 're losing our sites and the stories , and basically we 're losing a piece - and a significant piece - of our collective memory .
imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from .
luckily , in the last two or three decades , digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we 've brought to bear in the digital preservation , in our digital preservation war .
this includes , for example , the 3d laser scanning systems , ever more powerful personal computers , 3d graphics , high-definition digital photography , not to mention the internet .
because of this accelerated pace of destruction , it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work .
and we created a project we call the cyark 500 challenge - and that is to digitally preserve 500 world heritage sites in five years .
we do have the technology that 's scaleable , and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate , so we 're comfortable that this task can be accomplished .
however , to me , the 500 is really just the first 500 .
in order to sustain our work into the future , we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them , whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites , and at the same time , it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future .
let me close with another short story .
two years ago , we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site , a unesco heritage site in uganda , the royal kasubi tombs .
the work was done successfully in the field , and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the cyark website .
last march , we received very sad news .
the royal tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson .
a few days later , we received a call : " is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction ? "
our answer , of course , was yes .
let me leave you with a final thought .
our heritage is much more than our collective memory - it 's our collective treasure .
we owe it to our children , our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
thank you .
thank you .
well , i 'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology and so , while i 've been speaking , you have been scanned .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the two wizards that i have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is all in 3d and of course you can fly through the cloud of points .
you can look at it from on top , from the ceiling .
you can look from different vantage points , but i 'm going to ask doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd , just to show the amount of detail that we can create .
so you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd like to thank the wizards here .
we were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this : the historic scotland , and the glasgow school of art .
i 'd like to also thank personally the efforts of david mitchell , who is the director of conservation at historic scotland .
david .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and doug pritchard , who 's the head of visualization at the glasgow school of art .
let 's give them a hand .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , about three years ago i was in london , and somebody called howard burton came to me and said , i represent a group of people , and we want to start an institute in theoretical physics .
we have about 120 million dollars , and we want to do it well .
we want to be in the forefront fields , and we want to do it differently .
we want to get out of this thing where the young people have all the ideas , and the old people have all the power and decide what science gets done .
it took me about 25 seconds to decide that that was a good idea .
three years later , we have the perimeter institute for theoretical physics in waterloo , ontario . it 's the most exciting job i 've ever had .
and it 's the first time i 've had a job where i 'm afraid to go away because of everything that 's going to happen in this week when i 'm here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in any case , what i 'm going to do in my little bit of time is take you on a quick tour of some of the things that we talk about and we think about .
so , we think a lot about what really makes science work ?
the first thing that anybody who knows science , and has been around science , is that the stuff you learn in school as a scientific method is wrong . there is no method .
on the other hand , somehow we manage to reason together as a community , from incomplete evidence to conclusions that we all agree about .
and this is , by the way , something that a democratic society also has to do .
so how does it work ?
well , my belief is that it works because scientists are a community bound together by an ethics .
and here are some of the ethical principles .
i 'm not going to read them all to you because i 'm not in teacher mode .
i 'm in entertain , amaze mode .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but one of the principles is that everybody who is part of the community gets to fight and argue as hard as they can for what they believe .
but we 're all disciplined by the understanding that the only people who are going to decide , you know , whether i 'm right or somebody else is right , are the people in our community in the next generation , in 30 and 50 years .
so it 's this combination of respect for the tradition and community we 're in , and rebellion that the community requires to get anywhere , that makes science work .
and being in this process of being in a community that reasons from shared evidence to conclusions , i believe , teaches us about democracy .
not only is there a relationship between the ethics of science and the ethics of being a citizen in democracy , but there has been , historically , a relationship between how people think about space and time , and what the cosmos is , and how people think about the society that they live in .
and i want to talk about three stages in that evolution .
the first science of cosmology that was anything like science was aristotelian science , and that was hierarchical .
the earth is in the center , then there are these crystal spheres , the sun , the moon , the planets and finally the celestial sphere , where the stars are . and everything in this universe has a place .
and aristotle 's law of motion was that everything goes to its natural place , which was of course , the rule of the society that aristotle lived in , and more importantly , the medieval society that , through christianity , embraced aristotle and blessed it .
and the idea is that everything is defined .
where something is , is defined with respect to this last sphere , the celestial sphere , outside of which is this eternal , perfect realm , where lives god , who is the ultimate judge of everything .
so that is both aristotelian cosmology , and in a certain sense , medieval society .
now , in the 17th century there was a revolution in thinking about space and time and motion and so forth of newton .
and at the same time there was a revolution in social thought of john locke and his collaborators .
and they were very closely associated .
in fact , newton and locke were friends .
their way of thinking about space and time and motion on the one hand , and a society on the other hand , were closely related .
and let me show you .
in a newtonian universe , there 's no center - thank you .
there are particles and they move around with respect to a fixed , absolute framework of space and time .
it 's meaningful to say absolutely where something is in space , because that 's defined , not with respect to say , where other things are , but with respect to this absolute notion of space , which for newton was god .
now , similarly , in locke 's society there are individuals who have certain rights , properties in a formal sense , and those are defined with respect to some absolute , abstract notions of rights and justice , and so forth , which are independent of what else has happened in the society .
of who else there is , of the history and so forth .
there is also an omniscient observer who knows everything , who is god , who is in a certain sense outside the universe , because he has no role in anything that happens , but is in a certain sense everywhere , because space is just the way that god knows where everything is , according to newton , ok ?
so this is the foundations of what 's called , traditionally , liberal political theory and newtonian physics .
now , in the 20th century we had a revolution that was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century , and which is still going on .
it was begun with the invention of relativity theory and quantum theory .
and merging them together to make the final quantum theory of space and time and gravity , is the culmination of that , something that 's going on right now .
and in this universe there 's nothing fixed and absolute . zilch , ok .
this universe is described by being a network of relationships .
space is just one aspect , so there 's no meaning to say absolutely where something is .
there 's only where it is relative to everything else that is .
and this network of relations is ever-evolving .
so we call it a relational universe .
all properties of things are about these kinds of relationships .
and also , if you 're embedded in such a network of relationships , your view of the world has to do with what information comes to you through the network of relations .
and there 's no place for an omniscient observer or an outside intelligence knowing everything and making everything .
so this is general relativity , this is quantum theory .
this is also , if you talk to legal scholars , the foundations of new ideas in legal thought .
they 're thinking about the same things .
and not only that , they make the analogy to relativity theory and cosmology often .
so there 's an interesting discussion going on there .
this last view of cosmology is called the relational view .
so the main slogan here is that there 's nothing outside the universe , which means that there 's no place to put an explanation for something outside .
so in such a relational universe , if you come upon something that 's ordered and structured , like this device here , or that device there , or something beautiful , like all the living things , all of you guys in the room - " guys " in physics , by the way , is a generic term : men and women .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then you want to know , you 're a person , you want to know how is it made .
and in a relational universe the only possible explanation was , somehow it made itself .
there must be mechanisms of self-organization inside the universe that make things .
because there 's no place to put a maker outside , as there was in the aristotelian and the newtonian universe .
so in a relational universe we must have processes of self-organization .
now , darwin taught us that there are processes of self-organization that suffice to explain all of us and everything we see .
so it works . but not only that , if you think about how natural selection works , then it turns out that natural selection would only make sense in such a relational universe .
that is , natural selection works on properties , like fitness , which are about relationships of some species to some other species .
darwin would n't make sense in an aristotelian universe , and would n't really make sense in a newtonian universe .
so a theory of biology based on natural selection requires a relational notion of what are the properties of biological systems .
and if you push that all the way down , really , it makes the best sense in a relational universe where all properties are relational .
now , not only that , but einstein taught us that gravity is the result of the world being relational .
if it was n't for gravity , there would n't be life , because gravity causes stars to form and live for a very long time , keeping pieces of the world , like the surface of the earth , out of thermal equilibrium for billions of years so life can evolve .
in the 20th century , we saw the independent development of two big themes in science .
in the biological sciences , they explored the implications of the notion that order and complexity and structure arise in a self-organized way .
that was the triumph of neo-darwinism and so forth .
and slowly , that idea is leaking out to the cognitive sciences , the human sciences , economics , et cetera .
at the same time , we physicists have been busy trying to make sense of and build on and integrate the discoveries of quantum theory and relativity .
and what we 've been working out is the implications , really , of the idea that the universe is made up of relations .
21st-century science is going to be driven by the integration of these two ideas : the triumph of relational ways of thinking about the world , on the one hand , and self-organization or darwinian ways of thinking about the world , on the other hand .
and also , is that in the 21st century our thinking about space and time and cosmology , and our thinking about society are both going to continue to evolve .
and what they 're evolving towards is the union of these two big ideas , darwinism and relationalism .
now , if you think about democracy from this perspective , a new pluralistic notion of democracy would be one that recognizes that there are many different interests , many different agendas , many different individuals , many different points of view .
each one is incomplete , because you 're embedded in a network of relationships .
any actor in a democracy is embedded in a network of relationships .
and you understand some things better than other things , and because of that there 's a continual jostling and give and take , which is politics .
and politics is , in the ideal sense , the way in which we continually address our network of relations in order to achieve a better life and a better society .
and i also think that science will never go away and - i 'm finishing on this line .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , i 'm finished . science will never go away .
one out of two of you women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in your lifetime .
so this is the leading killer of women .
it 's a closely held secret for reasons i do n't know .
in addition to making this personal - so we 're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women 's relationship with their heart - we 're going to wax into the politics .
because the personal , as you know , is political .
and not enough is being done about this .
and as we have watched women conquer breast cancer through the breast cancer campaign , this is what we need to do now with heart .
since 1984 , more women die in the u.s. than men .
so where we used to think of heart disease as being a man 's problem primarily - which that was never true , but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and ' 60s , and it was in all the textbooks .
it 's certainly what i learned when i was training .
if we were to remain sexist , and that was not right , but if we were going to go forward and be sexist , it 's actually a woman 's disease .
so it 's a woman 's disease now .
and one of the things that you see is that male line , the mortality is going down , down , down , down , down .
and you see the female line since 1984 , the gap is widening .
more and more women , two , three , four times more women , dying of heart disease than men .
and that 's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change .
so what this really suggested to us was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies , which had been developed in men , by men , for men for the last 50 years - and they work pretty well in men , do n't they ? - were n't working so well for women .
so that was a big wake-up call in the 1980 's .
heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer .
and the breast cancer campaign - again , this is not a competition .
we 're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign .
we need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis .
now sometimes when people see this , i hear this gasp .
we can all think of someone , often a young woman , who has been impacted by breast cancer .
we often ca n't think of a young woman who has heart disease .
i 'm going to tell you why .
heart disease kills people , often very quickly .
so the first time heart disease strikes in women and men , half of the time it 's sudden cardiac death - no opportunity to say good-bye , no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy , no opportunity to help her pick out a wig .
breast cancer , mortality is down to four percent .
and that is the 40 years that women have advocated .
betty ford , nancy reagan stood up and said , " i 'm a breast cancer survivor , " and it was okay to talk about it .
and then physicians have gone to bat .
we 've done the research .
we have effective therapies now .
women are living longer than ever .
that has to happen in heart disease , and it 's time .
it 's not happening , and it 's time .
we owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women .
as barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies , " yentl , " she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education .
and she wanted to study the talmud .
and so how did she get educated then ?
she had to impersonate a man .
she had to look like a man .
she had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had .
bernadine healy , dr. healy , was a cardiologist .
and right around that time , in the 1980 's , that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up , up , up , up , up , she wrote an editorial in the new england journal of medicine and said , the yentl syndrome .
women are dying of heart disease , two , three , four times more than men .
mortality is not going down , it 's going up .
and she questioned , she hypothesized , is this a yentl syndrome ?
and here 's what the story is .
is it because women do n't look like men , they do n't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we 've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics , and therefore , they 're not recognized for their heart disease .
and they 're just passed .
they do n't get treated , they do n't get detected , they do n't get the benefit of all the modern medicines .
doctor healy then subsequently became the first female director of our national institutes of health .
and this is the biggest biomedical enterprise research in the world .
and it funds a lot of my research .
it funds research all over the place .
it was a very big deal for her to become director .
and she started , the women 's health initiative .
and every woman in the room here has benefited from that women 's health initiative .
it told us about hormone replacement therapy .
it 's informed us about osteoporosis .
it informed us about breast cancer , colon cancer in women .
so a tremendous fund of knowledge despite , again , that so many people told her not to do it , it was too expensive .
and the under-reading was women are n't worth it .
she was like , " nope . sorry . women are worth it . "
well there was a little piece of that women 's health initiative that went to national heart , lung , and blood institute , which is the cardiology part of the nih .
and we got to do the wise study - and the wise stands for women 's ischemia syndrome evaluation - and i have chaired this study for the last 15 years .
it was a study to specifically ask , what 's going on with women ?
why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease ?
so in the wise , 15 years ago , we started out and said , " well wow , there 's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that . "
and our colleagues in washington , d.c.
had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die , compared to men who have heart attacks and die - and again , this is millions of people , happening every day - women , in their fatty plaque - and this is their coronary artery , so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle - women erode , men explode .
you 're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first .
hollywood heart attack . ughhhh .
horrible chest pain .
ekg goes pbbrrhh , so the doctors can see this hugely abnormal ekg .
there 's a big clot in the middle of the artery .
and they go up to the cath lab and boom , boom , boom get rid of the clot .
that 's a man heart attack .
some women have those heart attacks , but a whole bunch of women have this kind of heart attack , where it erodes , does n't completely fill with clot , symptoms are subtle , ekg findings are different - female-pattern .
so what do you think happens to these gals ?
they 're often not recognized , sent home .
i 'm not sure what it was . might have been gas .
so we picked up on that and we said , " you know , we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called ivus : intravascular ultrasound . "
and we said , " we 're going to hypothesize that the fatty plaque in women is actually probably different , and deposited differently , than men . "
and because of the common knowledge of how women and men get fat .
when we watch people become obese , where do men get fat ?
right here , it 's just a focal - right there .
where do women get fat ?
all over .
cellulite here , cellulite here .
so we said , " look , women look like they 're pretty good about putting kind of the garbage away , smoothly putting it away .
men just have to dump it in a single area . "
so we said , " let 's look at these . "
and so the yellow is the fatty plaque , and panel a is a man .
and you can see , it 's lumpy bumpy .
he 's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries .
panel b is the woman , very smooth .
she 's just laid it down nice and tidy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you did that angiogram , which is the red , you can see the man 's disease .
so 50 years of honing and crafting these angiograms , we easily recognize male-pattern disease .
kind of hard to see that female-pattern disease .
so that was a discovery .
now what are the implications of that ?
well once again , women get the angiogram and nobody can tell that they have a problem .
so we are working now on a non-invasive - again , these are all invasive studies .
ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively .
and again , 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing , we 're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests .
so this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging .
we 're doing this at the cedars-sinai heart institute in the women 's heart center .
we selected this for the research .
this is not in your community hospital , but we would hope to translate this .
and we 're about two and a half years into a five-year study .
this was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart .
and if you look carefully , you can see that there 's a black blush right there .
and that is microvascular obstruction .
the syndrome , the female-pattern now is called microvascular coronary dysfunction , or obstruction .
the second reason we really liked mri is that there 's no radiation .
so unlike the cat scans , x-rays , thalliums , for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart , every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation , we say , " do we really need that test ? "
so we 're very excited about m.r.
you ca n't go and order it yet , but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men .
what are the downstream consequences then , when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized ?
this is a figure from an editorial that i published in the european heart journal this last summer .
and it was just a pictogram to sort of show why more women are dying of heart disease , despite these good treatments that we know and we have work .
and when the woman has male-pattern disease - so she looks like barbara in the movie - they get treated .
and when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman , as barbara does here with her husband , they do n't get the treatment .
these are our life-saving treatments .
and those little red boxes are deaths .
so those are the consequences .
and that is female-pattern and why we think the yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps .
there 's been wonderful news also about studying women , finally , in heart disease .
and one of the the cutting-edge areas that we 're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy .
if you ask , what is the big difference between women and men physiologically ?
why are there women and men ?
because women bring new life into the world .
that 's all stem cells .
so we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury , doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs , which is one of the things that we 're trying to do with stem cell therapy .
these are female and male stem cells .
and if you had an injured organ , if you had a heart attack and we wanted to repair that injured area , do you want those robust , plentiful stem cells on the top ?
or do you want these guys , that look like they 're out to lunch ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells - and this is in animals and increasingly we 're showing this in humans - that female stem cells , when put even into a male body , do better than male stem cells going into a male body .
one of the things that we say about all of this female physiology - because again , as much as we 're talking about women and heart disease , women do , on average , have better longevity than men - is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women .
so this is not a zero-sum game in anyway .
okay , so here 's where we started .
and remember , paths crossed in 1984 , and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease .
what has happened in the last 15 years with this work ?
we are bending the curve .
we 're bending the curve .
so just like the breast cancer story , doing research , getting awareness going , it works , you just have to get it going .
now are we happy with this ?
we still have two to three more women dying for every man .
and i would propose , with the better longevity that women have overall , that women probably should theoretically do better , if we could just get treated .
so this is where we are , but we have a long row to hoe .
we 've worked on this for 15 years .
and i 've told you , we 've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years .
so we 're 35 years behind .
and we 'd like to think it 's not going to take 35 years .
and in fact , it probably wo n't .
but we can not stop now .
too many lives are at stake .
so what do we need to do ?
you now , hopefully , have a more personal relationship with your heart .
women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns .
the women are very good about getting mammograms now .
and women do fundraising .
women participate .
they have put their money where their mouth is and they have done advocacy and they have joined campaigns .
this is what we need to do with heart disease now .
and it 's political .
women 's health , from a federal funding standpoint , sometimes it 's popular , sometimes it 's not so popular .
so we have these feast and famine cycles .
so i implore you to join the red dress campaign in this fundraising .
breast cancer , as we said , kills women , but heart disease kills a whole bunch more .
so if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge , we have a lot of lives to save .
so thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about religion .
but it 's a broad and very delicate subject , so i have to limit myself .
and therefore i will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a very serious talk .
so i will talk of what i remember as the most wonderful .
it 's when the young couple whisper , " tonight we are going to make a baby . "
my talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman .
this is indeed important , because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet .
and there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this - three billion in 1960 , seven billion just last year - and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies , and it may continue like this .
to what extent are these people right ?
when i was born there was less than one billion children in the world , and today , 2000 , there 's almost two billion .
what has happened since , and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century ?
this is a quiz . what do you think ?
do you think it will decrease to one billion ?
will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century ?
will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years , or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there ?
i will tell you by the end of my speech .
but now , what does religion have to do with it ?
when you want to classify religion , it 's more difficult than you think .
you go to wikipedia and the first map you find is this .
it divides the world into abrahamic religions and eastern religion , but that 's not detailed enough .
so we went on and we looked in wikipedia , we found this map .
but that subdivides christianity , islam and buddhism into many subgroups , which was too detailed .
therefore at gapminder we made our own map , and it looks like this .
each country 's a bubble .
the size is the population - big china , big india here .
and the color now is the majority religion .
it 's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong .
it 's eastern religion in india and china and neighboring asian countries .
islam is the majority religion all the way from the atlantic ocean across the middle east , southern europe and through asia all the way to indonesia .
that 's where we find islamic majority .
and christian majority religions , we see in these countries . they are blue .
and that is most countries in america and europe , many countries in africa and a few in asia .
the white here are countries which can not be classified , because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there 's some other reason .
so we were careful with that .
so bear with our simplicity now when i take you over to this shot .
this is in 1960 .
and now i show the number of babies per woman here : two , four or six - many babies , few babies .
and here the income per person in comparable dollars .
the reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies .
so low income here , high income there .
and indeed in 1960 , you had to be a rich christian to have few babies .
the exception was japan .
japan here was regarded as an exception .
otherwise it was only christian countries .
but there was also many christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman .
but they were in latin america or they were in africa .
and countries with islam as the majority religion , all of them almost had six to seven children per woman , irregardless of the income level .
and all the eastern religions except japan had the same level .
now let 's see what has happened in the world .
i start the world , and here we go .
now 1962 - can you see they 're getting a little richer , but the number of babies per woman is falling ?
look at china . they 're falling fairly fast .
and all of the muslim majority countries across the income are coming down , as do the christian majority countries in the middle income range .
and when we enter into this century , you 'll find more than half of mankind down here .
and by 2010 , we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a quite amazing development which has happened .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and these are countries from united states here , with $ 40,000 per capita , france , russia , iran , mexico , turkey , algeria , indonesia , india and all the way to bangladesh and vietnam , which has less than five percent of the income per person of the united states and the same amount of babies per woman .
i can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries .
we get that from the census data .
it 's not one of these statistics which is very doubtful .
so what we can conclude is you do n't have to get rich to have few children .
it has happened across the world .
and then when we look at religions , we can see that the eastern religions , indeed there 's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children .
whereas with islam as a majority religion and christianity , you see countries all the way .
but there 's no major difference .
there 's no major difference between these religions .
there is a difference with income .
the countries which have many babies per woman here , they have quite low income .
most of them are in sub-saharan africa .
but there are also countries here like guatemala , like papua new guinea , like yemen and afghanistan .
many think that afghanistan here and congo , which have suffered severe conflicts , that they do n't have fast population growth .
it 's the other way around .
in the world today , it 's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth .
because the death of a child is compensated by one more child .
these countries have six children per woman .
they have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman .
but 30 years from now , afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million .
congo will go from 60 to 120 .
that 's where we have the fast population growth .
and many think that these countries are stagnant , but they are not .
let me compare senegal , a muslim dominated country , with a christian dominated country , ghana .
i take them backwards here to their independence , when they were up here in the beginning of the 1960s .
just look what they have done .
it 's an amazing improvement , from seven children per woman , they 've gone all the way down to between four and five .
it 's a tremendous improvement .
so what does it take ?
well we know quite well what is needed in these countries .
you need to have children to survive .
you need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family .
you need to have access to some family planning .
and you need the fourth factor , which perhaps is the most important factor .
but let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at qatar .
here we have qatar today , and there we have bangladesh today .
if i take these countries back to the years of their independence , which is almost the same year - ' 71 , ' 72 - it 's a quite amazing development which had happened .
look at bangladesh and qatar .
with so different incomes , it 's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman .
and what is the reason in qatar ?
well i do as i always do .
i went to the statistical authority of qatar , to their webpage - it 's a very good webpage . i recommend it - and i looked up - oh yeah , you can have lots of fun here - and provided free of charge , i found qatar 's social trends .
very interesting . lots to read .
i found fertility at birth , and i looked at total fertility rate per woman .
these are the scholars and experts in the government agency in qatar , and they say the most important factors are : " increased age at first marriage , increased educational level of qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force . "
i could n't agree more . science could n't agree more .
this is a country that indeed has gone through a very , very interesting modernization .
so what it is , is these four : children should survive , children should n't be needed for work , women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible .
now look again at this .
the average number of children in the world is like in colombia - it 's 2.4 today .
there are countries up here which are very poor .
and that 's where family planning , better child survival is needed .
i strongly recommend melinda gates ' last tedtalk .
and here , down , there are many countries which are less than two children per woman .
so when i go back now to give you the answer of the quiz , it 's two .
we have reached peak child .
the number of children is not growing any longer in the world .
we are still debating peak oil , but we have definitely reached peak child .
and the world population will stop growing .
the united nations population division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion .
but why do they grow if the number of children does n't grow ?
well i will show you here .
i will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came .
they are quite useful for educational purposes .
each card box is one billion people .
and there are two billion children in the world .
there are two billion young people between 15 and 30 .
these are rounded numbers .
then there is one billion between 30 and 45 , almost one between 45 and 60 .
and then it 's my box .
this is me : 60-plus .
we are here on top .
so what will happen now is what we call " the big fill-up . "
you can see that it 's like three billion missing here .
they are not missing because they 've died ; they were never born .
because before 1980 , there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years .
so what will happen now is quite straightforward .
the old , sadly , we will die .
the rest of you , you will grow older and you will get two billion children .
then the old will die .
the rest will grow older and get two billion children .
and then again the old will die and you will get two billion children .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is the great fill-up .
it 's inevitable .
and can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children ?
religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman .
all the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world .
and we will be just 10 billion in this world , if the poorest people get out of poverty , their children survive , they get access to family planning .
that is needed .
but it 's inevitable that we will be two to three billion more .
so when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future , for human beings on this planet , you have to plan for 10 billion .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about 4.6 billion years of history in 18 minutes .
that 's 300 million years per minute .
let 's start with the first photograph nasa obtained of planet mars .
this is fly-by , mariner iv .
it was taken in 1965 .
when this picture appeared , that well-known scientific journal , the new york times , wrote in its editorial , " mars is uninteresting .
it 's a dead world . nasa should not spend any time or effort studying mars anymore . "
fortunately , our leaders in washington at nasa headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet .
one of the key questions in all of science , " is there life outside of earth ? "
i believe that mars is the most likely target for life outside the earth .
i 'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on mars .
but let me start with a viking photograph .
this is a composite taken by viking in 1976 .
viking was developed and managed at the nasa langley research center .
we sent two orbiters and two landers in the summer of 1976 .
we had four spacecraft , two around mars , two on the surface - an amazing accomplishment .
this is the first photograph taken from the surface of any planet .
this is a viking lander photograph of the surface of mars .
and yes , the red planet is red .
mars is half the size of the earth , but because two-thirds of the earth is covered by water , the land area on mars is comparable to the land area on earth .
so , mars is a pretty big place even though it 's half the size .
we have obtained topographic measurements of the surface of mars . we understand the elevation differences .
we know a lot about mars .
mars has the largest volcano in the solar system , olympus mons .
mars has the grand canyon of the solar system , valles marineris .
very , very interesting planet .
mars has the largest impact crater in the solar system , hellas basin .
this is 2,000 miles across .
if you happened to be on mars when this impactor hit , it was a really bad day on mars .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is olympus mons .
this is bigger than the state of arizona .
volcanoes are important , because volcanoes produce atmospheres and they produce oceans .
we 're looking at valles marineris , the largest canyon in the solar system , superimposed on a map of the united states , 3,000 miles across .
one of the most intriguing features about mars , the national academy of science says one of the 10 major mysteries of the space age , is why certain areas of mars are so highly magnetized .
we call this crustal magnetism .
there are regions on mars , where , for some reason - we do n't understand why at this point - the surface is very , very highly magnetized .
is there water on mars ?
the answer is no , there is no liquid water on the surface of mars today .
but there is intriguing evidence that suggests that the early history of mars there may have been rivers and fast flowing water .
today mars is very very dry .
we believe there 's some water in the polar caps , there are polar caps of north pole and south pole .
here are some recent images .
this is from spirit and opportunity .
these images that show at one time , there was very fast flowing water on the surface of mars .
why is water important ? water is important because if you want life you have to have water .
water is the key ingredient in the evolution , the origin of life on a planet .
here is some picture of antarctica and a picture of olympus mons , very similar features , glaciers .
so , this is frozen water .
this is ice water on mars .
this is my favorite picture . this was just taken a few weeks ago .
it has not been seen publicly .
this is european space agency mars express , image of a crater on mars and in the middle of the crater we have liquid water , we have ice .
very intriguing photograph .
we now believe that in the early history of mars , which is 4.6 billion years ago , 4.6 billion years ago , mars was very earth-like .
mars had rivers , mars had lakes , but more important mars had planetary-scale oceans .
we believe that the oceans were in the northern hemisphere , and this area in blue , which shows a depression of about four miles , was the ancient ocean area on the surface of mars .
where did the ocean 's worth of water on mars go ?
well , we have an idea .
this is a measurement we obtained a few years ago from a mars-orbiting satellite called odyssey .
sub-surface water on mars , frozen in the form of ice .
and this shows the percent . if it 's a blueish color , it means 16 percent by weight .
sixteen percent , by weight , of the interior contains frozen water , or ice .
so , there is a lot of water below the surface .
the most intriguing and puzzling measurement , in my opinion , we 've obtained of mars , was released earlier this year in the magazine science .
and what we 're looking at is the presence of the gas methane , ch4 , in the atmosphere of mars .
and you can see there are three distinct regions of methane .
why is methane important ?
because on earth , almost all - 99.9 percent - of the methane is produced by living systems , not little green men , but microscopic life below the surface or at the surface .
we now have evidence that methane is in the atmosphere of mars , a gas that , on earth , is biogenic in origin , produced by living systems .
these are the three plumes : a , b1 , b2 .
and this is the terrain it appears over , and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on mars .
in fact , the earth and mars are both 4.6 billion years old .
the oldest rock on earth is only 3.6 billion .
the reason there is a billion-year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics , the crust of the earth has been recycled .
we have no geological record prior for the first billion years .
that record exists on mars .
and this terrain that we 're looking at dates back to 4.6 billion years when earth and mars were formed .
it was a tuesday .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a map that shows where we 've put our spacecraft on the surface of mars .
here is viking i , viking ii .
this is opportunity . this is spirit .
this is mars pathfinder . this is phoenix , we just put two years ago .
notice all of our rovers and all of our landers have gone to the northern hemisphere .
that 's because the northern hemisphere is the region of the ancient ocean basin .
there are n't many craters .
and that 's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites .
but look in the southern hemisphere .
in the southern hemisphere there are impact craters , there are volcanic craters .
here 's hellas basin , a very very different place , geologically .
look where the methane is , the methane is in a very rough terrain area .
what is the best way to unravel the mysteries on mars that exist ?
we asked this question 10 years ago .
we invited 10 of the top mars scientists to the langley research center for two days .
we addressed on the board the major questions that have not been answered .
and we spent two days deciding how to best answer this question .
and the result of our meeting was a robotic rocket-powered airplane we call ares .
it 's an aerial regional-scale environmental surveyor .
there 's a model of ares here .
this is a 20-percent scale model .
this airplane was designed at the langley research center .
if any place in the world can build an airplane to fly on mars , it 's the langley research center , for almost 100 years a leading center of aeronautics in the world .
we fly about a mile above the surface .
we cover hundreds of miles , and we fly about 450 miles an hour .
we can do things that rovers ca n't do and landers ca n't do : we can fly above mountains , volcanoes , impact craters ; we fly over valleys ; we can fly over surface magnetism , the polar caps , subsurface water ; and we can search for life on mars .
but , of equal importance , as we fly through the atmosphere of mars , we transmit that journey , the first flight of an airplane outside of the earth , we transmit those images back to earth .
and our goal is to inspire the american public who is paying for this mission through tax dollars .
but more important we will inspire the next generation of scientists , technologists , engineers and mathematicians .
and that 's a critical area of national security and economic vitality , to make sure we produce the next generation of scientists , engineers , mathematicians and technologists .
this is what ares looks like as it flies over mars .
we preprogram it .
we will fly where the methane is .
we will have instruments aboard the plane that will sample , every three minutes , the atmosphere of mars .
we will look for methane as well as other gasses produced by living systems .
we will pinpoint where these gases emanate from , because we can measure the gradient where it comes from , and there , we can direct the next mission to land right in that area .
how do we transport an airplane to mars ?
in two words , very carefully .
the problem is we do n't fly it to mars , we put it in a spacecraft and we send it to mars .
the problem is the spacecraft 's largest diameter is nine feet ; ares is 21-foot wingspan , 17 feet long .
how do we get it to mars ?
we fold it , and we transport it in a spacecraft .
and we have it in something called an aeroshell .
this is how we do it .
and we have a little video that describes the sequence .
video : seven , six . green board . five , four , three , two , one .
main engine start , and liftoff .
joel levine : this is a launch from the kennedy space center in florida .
this is the spacecraft taking nine months to get to mars .
it enters the atmosphere of mars .
a lot of heating , frictional heating . it 's going 18 thousand miles an hour .
a parachute opens up to slow it down .
the thermal tiles fall off .
the airplane is exposed to the atmosphere for the first time .
it unfolds .
the rocket engine begins .
we believe that in a one-hour flight we can rewrite the textbook on mars by making high-resolution measurements of the atmosphere , looking for gases of biogenic origin , looking for gases of volcanic origin , studying the surface , studying the magnetism on the surface , which we do n't understand , as well as about a dozen other areas .
practice makes perfect .
how do we know we can do it ?
because we have tested ares model , several models in a half a dozen wind tunnels at the nasa langley research center for eight years , under mars conditions .
and , of equal importance is , we test ares in the earth 's atmosphere , at 100,000 feet , which is comparable to the density and pressure of the atmosphere on mars where we 'll fly .
now , 100,000 feet , if you fly cross-country to los angeles , you fly 37,000 feet .
we do our tests at 100,000 feet .
and i want to show you one of our tests .
this is a half-scale model .
this is a high-altitude helium balloon .
this is over tilamook , oregon .
we put the folded airplane on the balloon - it took about three hours to get up there - and then we released it on command at 103,000 feet , and we deploy the airplane and everything works perfectly .
and we 've done high-altitude and low-altitude tests , just to perfect this technique .
we 're ready to go .
i have a scale model here .
but we have a full-scale model in storage at the nasa langley research center .
we 're ready to go . all we need is a check from nasa headquarters -lrb- laughter -rrb- to cover the costs .
i 'm prepared to donate my honorarium for today 's talk for this mission .
there 's actually no honorarium for anyone for this thing .
this is the ares team ; we have about 150 scientists , engineers ; where we 're working with jet propulsion laboratory , goddard space flight center , ames research center and half a dozen major universities and corporations in developing this .
it 's a large effort . it 's all at nasa langley research center .
and let me conclude by saying not too far from here , right down the road in kittyhawk , north carolina , a little more than 100 years ago history was made when we had the first powered flight of an airplane on earth .
we are on the verge right now to make the first flight of an airplane outside the earth 's atmosphere .
we are prepared to fly this on mars , rewrite the textbook about mars .
if you 're interested in more information , we have a website that describes this exciting and intriguing mission , and why we want to do it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a big impact on the planet to travel here by plane .
i emitted , in the atmosphere , nine tons of co2 ; that is the weight of two elephants .
i came here to speak about ecology , and i emitted as much co2 as a frenchman in one year .
so what do i have to do ?
i have to kill a frenchman when i come back at home ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have to do my carbon offset in another way , like i do every time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact my work is to show our impact on our planet .
i 'm going to show you some examples of the last pictures i 've done in the last year .
alberta sand oil , a lot of pollution .
you know the problem ; we do n't want to believe what we know .
in alberta people work nonstop , 24 hours by seven to extract as much oil as they can .
we know about the end of oil .
oil sand is not a long-term solution .
but we use three times more oil than we find every year .
we do n't want to believe what we know .
deny .
coral reef in new caledonia .
100 percent of the coral may be wiped out before 2050 because of global warming .
and you know how coral are very sensitive to temperature , and are very important for the biodiversity of the sea .
north pole . i 've done this picture last summer .
it was impossible to do this picture 15 years ago .
now there is a new way open between atlantic and pacific .
the thickness of the arctic decreased more than 40 percent since 1960 .
there is a new face of kilimanjaro without ice .
sad picture .
it lost 80 percent of its ice .
according to scientists , in 100 years all the mountain glacier will be gone .
glaciers are very important for the life on earth .
like al gore told you , two billion people live on the water from the glacier of himalaya .
return of fish men .
one fifth of human kind depend on fish to live .
today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited .
according to fao , if we do n't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050 .
we do n't want to believe what we know .
the beautiful picture , by -lsb- unclear -rsb- in africa .
one human of six have not enough to eat in the world .
one billion people have not enough to eat .
in africa , corn is one of the main foods in many places .
here in america , 90 percent of the corn cultivated is used to feed animals or to do oil .
palm tree plantation in borneo .
every year we lose 50 thousand square miles in deforestation .
refugee camp in darfur .
today we have 20 million refugees in the world .
according to the u.n. , we speak about 250 million refugees in 2050 .
i always show my pictures in the street .
we have done already 100 exhibitions in the cities .
but how to understand the world without the voice of people ?
landscape was not enough .
it was obvious to me to do another work .
i launched a project named six billion others .
i sent around the world six cameramen asking the same question , the same crucial question , about life .
we have done five thousand interviews .
i 'm going to show you this .
man : the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life ?
it 's when my dad told me , " here , i give you this girl as your fiance . "
woman : love ? love is nice if you can have it .
second man : romeo and juliet , sassi and panno , dodi and diana , heer and ranjha , this is love ! third man : my greatest fear is ...
woman : you 're asking me a hard question .
fourth man : i live happily because what else should i do ?
fifth man : the first thing i remember ... -lrb- sixth man : that 's how i learned , by my mother , -rrb- fifth man : ... from my childhood , -lrb- sixth man : that you should respect humans . -rrb- fifth man : we were having fun , biking . -lrb- sixth man : i will never forget those words . -rrb- seventh man : we invented stories , we flew around the world , while remaining in our attic .
eighth man : i had a big laugh today .
ninth man : you see , family is ... it 's awful .
10th man : in the word life , you have the life .
11th man : who am i ? is n't that the biggest question ?
12th man : if i was to go back to iraq and speak to the people , i 'd have to bow down and kiss their feet .
just as that woman tried to kiss my feet when we were taking her sons .
i feel ashamed .
and i feel humbled by their strength .
and i will forever feel a need to make reparations to iraq .
second woman : dad , mom , i grew up .
you should n't worry about me . dad does n't need to go to work .
my family ... what can i say ?
at the moment , my family is very poor , my life here in shenzhen is just about showing myself that i can earn more and to let my parents stay and have something to live on .
i do n't want them to spend their whole lives in poverty .
if someday i can achieve something , i would like to say thank you daddy and mommy .
thank you .
thank you for having fed me and raised me , and for making my life of today . thank you .
13th man : after seven years now of being in a wheelchair , i 've done more in life being in a chair than out of a chair .
i still surf . i sail the world . i freedive .
after many people said i could n't do that .
and i think that comes from connecting with nature , connecting with the energy of life , because we 're all disabled in some way on the planet - spiritually , mentally or physically .
i got the easy part .
14th man : let 's say that you and me like each other .
you come from elsewhere .
you do n't know me . i do n't know you .
we talk without lying .
if i do like you , i give you one cow and many other things and we become friends .
how can we make it all by ourselves ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- yab : you can also go to the website , answer - respond to the questions also .
forty crucial questions .
now i am going to speak to you about my movie .
for the last three years , i was shooting the earth for the movie .
the name of the movie is " home " - " maison . "
it is about the state of the planet .
it 's a fantastic story of life on the earth .
i 'm very proud to show you the teaser .
video : this earth is four and a half billion years old .
these plants , several hundred million years old .
and we humans have been walking upright for only 200 thousand years .
we 've managed to adapt , and have conquered the whole planet .
for generations , we 've been raising our children , not unlike millions of other species living beside us .
for the past 30 years i 've been closely watching the earth and its dwellers from high up in the sky .
our life is tied to the well-being of our planet .
we depend on water , forests , deserts , oceans .
fishing , breeding , farming are still the world 's foremost human occupations .
and what binds us together is far greater than what divides us .
we all share the same need for the earth 's gifts - the same wish to rise above ourselves , and become better .
and yet we carry on raising walls to keep us apart .
today our greatest battle is to protect the natural offerings of our planet .
in less than 50 years we 've altered it more thoroughly than in the entire history of mankind .
half of the world 's forests have vanished .
water resources are running low .
intensive farming is depleting soils .
our energy sources are not sustainable .
the climate is changing .
we are endangering ourselves .
we 're only trying to improve our lives .
but the wealth gaps are growing wider .
we have n't yet understood that we 're going at a much faster pace than the planet can sustain .
we know that solutions are available today .
we all have the power to change this trend for the better .
so what are we waiting for ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- yab : luc besson is the producer of the movie .
but it is not a normal movie .
the film is going to be distributed free .
this film has no copyright .
on the five of june , the environment day , everybody can download the movie on internet .
the film is given for free to the distributor for tv and theater to show it the fifth of june .
there is no business on this movie .
it is also available for school , cities , ngos and you .
we have to believe what we know .
let me tell you something .
it 's too late to be pessimistic - really too late .
we have all a part of the solutions .
to finish , i would like to welcome the 4,700th baby born since the beginning of this talk .
merci beaucoup . i love you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great pleasure to be here .
it 's a great pleasure to speak after brian cox from cern .
i think cern is the home of the large hadron collider .
what ever happened to the small hadron collider ?
where is the small hadron collider ?
because the small hadron collider once was the big thing .
now , the small hadron collider is in a cupboard , overlooked and neglected .
you know when the large hadron collider started , and it did n't work , and people tried to work out why , it was the small hadron collider team who sabotaged it because they were so jealous .
the whole hadron collider family needs unlocking .
the lesson of brian 's presentation , in a way - all those fantastic pictures - is this really : that vantage point determines everything that you see .
what brian was saying was science has opened up successively different vantage points from which we can see ourselves , and that 's why it 's so valuable .
so the vantage point you take determines virtually everything that you will see .
the question that you will ask will determine much of the answer that you get .
and so if you ask this question : where would you look to see the future of education ?
the answer that we 've traditionally given to that is very straightforward , at least in the last 20 years : you go to finland .
finland is the best place in the world to see school systems .
the finns may be a bit boring and depressive and there 's a very high suicide rate , but by golly , they are qualified .
and they have absolutely amazing education systems .
so we all troop off to finland , and we wonder at the social democratic miracle of finland and its cultural homogeneity and all the rest of it , and then we struggle to imagine how we might bring lessons back .
well , so , for this last year , with the help of cisco who sponsored me , for some balmy reason , to do this , i 've been looking somewhere else .
because actually radical innovation does sometimes come from the very best , but it often comes from places where you have huge need - unmet , latent demand - and not enough resources for traditional solutions to work - traditional , high-cost solutions , which depend on professionals , which is what schools and hospitals are .
so i ended up in places like this .
this is a place called monkey hill .
it 's one of the hundreds of favelas in rio .
most of the population growth of the next 50 years will be in cities .
we 'll grow by six cities of 12 million people a year for the next 30 years .
almost all of that growth will be in the developed world .
almost all of that growth will be in places like monkey hill .
this is where you 'll find the fastest growing young populations of the world .
so if you want recipes to work - for virtually anything - health , education , government politics and education - you have to go to these places .
and if you go to these places , you meet people like this .
this is a guy called juanderson .
at the age of 14 , in common with many 14-year-olds in the brazilian education system , he dropped out of school .
it was boring .
and juanderson , instead , went into in the place that he lived , which was the drugs trade .
and by the age of 16 , with rapid promotion , he was running the drugs trade in 10 favelas .
he was turning over 200,000 dollars a week .
he employed 200 people .
he was going to be dead by the age of 25 .
and luckily , he met this guy , who is rodrigo baggio , the owner of the first laptop to ever appear in brazil .
1994 , rodrigo started something called cdi , which took computers donated by corporations , put them into community centers in favelas and created places like this .
what turned juanderson around was technology for learning that made learning fun and accessible .
or you can go to places like this .
this is kibera , which is the largest slum in east africa .
millions of people living here , stretched over many kilometers .
and there i met these two , azra on the left , maureen on the right .
they just finished their kenyan certificate of secondary education .
that name should tell you that the kenyan education system borrows almost everything from britain , circa 1950 , but has managed to make it even worse .
so there are schools in slums like this .
they 're places like this .
that 's where maureen went to school .
they 're private schools . there are no state schools in slums .
and the education they got was pitiful .
it was in places like this . this a school set up by some nuns in another slum called nakuru .
half the children in this classroom have no parents because they 've died through aids .
the other half have one parent because the other parent has died through aids .
so the challenges of education in this kind of place are not to learn the kings and queens of kenya or britain .
they are to stay alive , to earn a living , to not become hiv positive .
the one technology that spans rich and poor in places like this is not anything to do with industrial technology .
it 's not to do with electricity or water .
it 's the mobile phone .
if you want to design from scratch virtually any service in africa , you would start now with the mobile phone .
or you could go to places like this .
this is a place called the madangiri settlement colony , which is a very developed slum about 25 minutes outside new delhi , where i met these characters who showed me around for the day .
the remarkable thing about these girls , and the sign of the kind of social revolution sweeping through the developing world is that these girls are not married .
ten years ago , they certainly would have been married .
now they 're not married , and they want to go on to study further , to have a career .
they 've been brought up by mothers who are illiterate , who have never ever done homework .
all across the developing world there are millions of parents - tens , hundreds of millions - who for the first time are with children doing homework and exams .
and the reason they carry on studying is not because they went to a school like this .
this is a private school .
this is a fee-pay school . this is a good school .
this is the best you can get in hyderabad in indian education .
the reason they went on studying was this .
this is a computer installed in the entrance to their slum by a revolutionary social entrepreneur called sugata mitra who has conducted the most radical experiments , showing that children , in the right conditions , can learn on their own with the help of computers .
those girls have never touched google .
they know nothing about wikipedia .
imagine what their lives would be like if you could get that to them .
so if you look , as i did , through this tour , and by looking at about a hundred case studies of different social entrepreneurs working in these very extreme conditions , look at the recipes that they come up with for learning , they look nothing like school .
what do they look like ?
well , education is a global religion .
and education , plus technology , is a great source of hope .
you can go to places like this .
this is a school three hours outside of sao paulo .
most of the children there have parents who are illiterate .
many of them do n't have electricity at home .
but they find it completely obvious to use computers , websites , make videos , so on and so forth .
when you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull , not push .
most of our education system is push .
i was literally pushed to school .
when you get to school , things are pushed at you : knowledge , exams , systems , timetables .
if you want to attract people like juanderson who could , for instance , buy guns , wear jewelry , ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade , and you want to attract him into education , having a compulsory curriculum does n't really make sense .
that is n't really going to attract him .
you need to pull him .
and so education needs to work by pull , not push .
and so the idea of a curriculum is completely irrelevant in a setting like this .
you need to start education from things that make a difference to them in their settings .
what does that ?
well , the key is motivation , and there are two aspects to it .
one is to deliver extrinsic motivation , that education has a payoff .
our education systems all work on the principle that there is a payoff , but you have to wait quite a long time .
that 's too long if you 're poor .
waiting 10 years for the payoff from education is too long when you need to meet daily needs , when you 've got siblings to look after or a business to help with .
so you need education to be relevant and help people to make a living there and then , often .
and you also need to make it intrinsically interesting .
so time and again , i found people like this .
this is an amazing guy , sebastiao rocha , in belo horizonte , in the third largest city in brazil .
he 's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun .
in the schools and communities that taio works in , the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question .
imagine an education system that started from questions , not from knowledge to be imparted , or started from a game , not from a lesson , or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them .
our education systems , you do all that stuff afterward , if you 're lucky , sport , drama , music .
these things , they teach through .
they attract people to learning because it 's really a dance project or a circus project or , the best example of all - el sistema in venezuela - it 's a music project .
and so you attract people through that into learning , not adding that on after all the learning has been done and you 've eaten your cognitive greens .
so el sistema in venezuela uses a violin as a technology of learning .
taio rocha uses making soap as a technology of learning .
and what you find when you go to these schemes is that they use people and places in incredibly creative ways .
masses of peer learning .
how do you get learning to people when there are no teachers , when teachers wo n't come , when you ca n't afford them , and even if you do get teachers , what they teach is n't relevant to the communities that they serve ?
well , you create your own teachers .
you create peer-to-peer learning , or you create para-teachers , or you bring in specialist skills .
but you find ways to get learning that 's relevant to people through technology , people and places that are different .
so this is a school in a bus on a building site in pune , the fastest growing city in asia .
pune has 5,000 building sites .
it has 30,000 children on those building sites .
that 's one city .
imagine that urban explosion that 's going to take place across the developing world and how many thousands of children will spend their school years on building sites .
well , this is a very simple scheme to get the learning to them through a bus .
and they all treat learning , not as some sort of academic , analytical activity , but as that 's something that 's productive , something you make , something that you can do , perhaps earn a living from .
so i met this character , steven .
he 'd spent three years in nairobi living on the streets because his parents had died of aids .
and he was finally brought back into school , not by the offer of gcses , but by the offer of learning how to become a carpenter , a practical making skill .
so the trendiest schools in the world , high tech high and others , they espouse a philosophy of learning as productive activity .
here , there is n't really an option .
learning has to be productive in order for it to make sense .
and finally , they have a different model of scale , and it 's a chinese restaurant model of how to scale .
and i learned it from this guy , who is an amazing character .
he 's probably the most remarkable social entrepreneur in education in the world .
his name is madhav chavan , and he created something called pratham .
and pratham runs preschool play groups for , now , 21 million children in india .
it 's the largest ngo in education in the world .
and it also supports working-class kids going into indian schools .
he 's a complete revolutionary .
he 's actually a trade union organizer by background , and that 's how he learned the skills to build his organization .
when they got to a certain stage , pratham got big enough to attract some pro bono support from mckinsey .
mckinsey came along and looked at his model and said , " you know what you should do with this , madhav ?
you should turn it into mcdonald 's .
and what you do when you go to any new site is you kind of roll out a franchise .
and it 's the same wherever you go .
it 's reliable and people know exactly where they are .
and there will be no mistakes . "
and madhav said , " why do we have to do it that way ?
why ca n't we do it more like the chinese restaurants ? "
there are chinese restaurants everywhere , but there is no chinese restaurant chain .
yet , everyone knows what is a chinese restaurant .
they know what to expect , even though it 'll be subtly different and the colors will be different and the name will be different .
you know a chinese restaurant when you see it .
these people work with the chinese restaurant model - same principles , different applications and different settings - not the mcdonald 's model .
the mcdonald 's model scales .
the chinese restaurant model spreads .
so mass education started with social entrepreneurship in the 19th century .
and that 's desperately what we need again on a global scale .
and what can we learn from all of that ?
well , we can learn a lot because our education systems are failing desperately in many ways .
they fail to reach the people they most need to serve .
they often hit their target but miss the point .
improvement is increasingly difficult to organize ; our faith in these systems , incredibly fraught .
and this is just a very simple way of understanding what kind of innovation , what kind of different design we need .
there are two basic types of innovation .
there 's sustaining innovation , which will sustain an existing institution or an organization , and disruptive innovation that will break it apart , create some different way of doing it .
there are formal settings - schools , colleges , hospitals - in which innovation can take place , and informal settings - communities , families , social networks .
almost all our effort goes in this box , sustaining innovation in formal settings , getting a better version of the essentially bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century .
and as i said , the trouble with this is that , in the developing world there just are n't teachers to make this model work .
you 'd need millions and millions of teachers in china , india , nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need .
and in our system , we know that simply doing more of this wo n't eat into deep educational inequalities , especially in inner cities and former industrial areas .
so that 's why we need three more kinds of innovation .
we need more reinvention .
and all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves .
they 're recognizably schools , but they look different .
there are big picture schools in the u.s. and australia .
there are kunskapsskolan schools in sweden .
of 14 of them , only two of them are in schools .
most of them are in other buildings not designed as schools .
there is an amazing school in northen queensland called jaringan .
and they all have the same kind of features : highly collaborative , very personalized , often pervasive technology , learning that starts from questions and problems and projects , not from knowledge and curriculum .
so we certainly need more of that .
but because so many of the issues in education are n't just in school , they 're in family and community , what you also need , definitely , is more on the right hand side .
you need efforts to supplement schools .
the most famous of these is reggio emilia in italy , the family-based learning system to support and encourage people in schools .
the most exciting is the harlem children 's zone , which over 10 years , led by geoffrey canada , has , through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects , attempted to transform not just education in schools , but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in harlem .
we need more of that completely new and radical thinking .
you can go to places an hour away , less , from this room , just down the road , which need that , which need radicalism of a kind that we have n't imagined .
and finally , you need transformational innovation that could imagine getting learning to people in completely new and different ways .
so we are on the verge , 2015 , of an amazing achievement , the schoolification of the world .
every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015 .
it 's an amazing thing .
but it is , unlike cars , which have developed so rapidly and orderly , actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century , from a bismarkian model of german schooling that got taken up by english reformers , and often by religious missionaries , taken up in the united states as a force of social cohesion , and then in japan and south korea as they developed .
it 's recognizably 19th century in its roots .
and of course it 's a huge achievement .
and of course it will bring great things .
it will bring skills and learning and reading .
but it will also lay waste to imagination .
it will lay waste to appetite . it will lay waste to social confidence .
it will stratify society as much as it liberates it .
and we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform .
that is why we need really radical thinking , and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- sydney . i had been waiting my whole life to get to sydney .
i got to the airport , to the hotel , checked in , and , sitting there in the lobby , was a brochure for the sydney festival . i thumbed through it , and i came across a show called " minto : live . "
the description read : " the suburban streets of minto become the stage for performances created by international artists in collaboration with the people of minto . "
what was this place called minto ?
sydney , as i would learn , is a city of suburbs , and minto lies southwest , about an hour away .
i have to say , it was n't exactly what i had in mind for my first day down under .
i mean , i 'd thought about the harbour bridge or bondi beach , but minto ? but still , i 'm a producer , and the lure of a site-specific theater project was more than i could resist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , off i went into friday afternoon traffic , and i 'll never forget what i saw when i got there .
for the performance , the audience walked around the neighborhood from house to house , and the residents , who were the performers , they came out of their houses , and they performed these autobiographical dances on their lawns , on their driveways . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the show is a collaboration with a u.k.-based performance company called lone twin .
lone twin had come to minto and worked with the residents , and they had created these dances .
this australian-indian girl , she came out and started to dance on her front lawn , and her father peered out the window to see what all the noise and commotion was about , and he soon joined her .
and he was followed by her little sister .
and soon they were all dancing this joyous , exuberant dance right there on their lawn . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and as i walked through the neighborhood , i was amazed and i was moved by the incredible sense of ownership this community clearly felt about this event .
" minto : live " brought sydneysiders into dialogue with international artists , and really celebrated the diversity of sydney on its own terms .
the sydney festival which produced " minto : live " i think represents a new kind of 21st-century arts festival .
these festivals are radically open .
they can transform cities and communities .
to understand this , i think it kind of makes sense to look where we 've come from .
modern arts festivals were born in the rubble of world war ii .
civic leaders created these annual events to celebrate culture as the highest expression of the human spirit .
in 1947 , the edinburgh festival was born and avignon was born and hundreds of others would follow in their wake .
the work they did was very , very high art , and stars came along like laurie anderson and merce cunningham and robert lepage who made work for this circuit , and you had these seminal shows like " the mahabharata " and the monumental " einstein on the beach . "
but as the decades passed , these festivals , they really became the establishment , and as the culture and capital accelerated , the internet brought us all together , high and low kind of disappeared , a new kind of festival emerged .
the old festivals , they continued to thrive , but from brighton to rio to perth , something new was emerging , and these festivals were really different .
they 're open , these festivals , because , like in minto , they understand that the dialogue between the local and the global is essential .
they 're open because they ask the audience to be a player , a protagonist , a partner , rather than a passive spectator , and they 're open because they know that imagination can not be contained in buildings , and so much of the work they do is site-specific or outdoor work .
so , the new festival , it asks the audience to play an essential role in shaping the performance .
companies like de la guarda , which i produce , and punchdrunk create these completely immersive experiences that put the audience at the center of the action , but the german performance company rimini protokoll takes this all to a whole new level .
in a series of shows that includes " 100 percent vancouver , " " 100 percent berlin , " rimini protokoll makes shows that actually reflect society .
rimini protokoll chooses 100 people that represent that city at that moment in terms of race and gender and class , through a careful process that begins three months before , and then those 100 people share stories about themselves and their lives , and the whole thing becomes a snapshot of that city at that moment .
lift has always been a pioneer in the use of venues .
they understand that theater and performance can happen anywhere .
you can do a show in a schoolroom , in an airport , - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - in a department store window .
artists are explorers . who better to show us the city anew ?
artists can take us to a far-flung part of the city that we have n't explored , or they can take us into that building that we pass every day but we never went into .
an artist , i think , can really show us people that we might overlook in our lives .
back to back is an australian company of people with intellectual disabilities . i saw their amazing show in new york at the staten island ferry terminal at rush hour .
we , the audience , were given headsets and seated on one side of the terminal .
the actors were right there in front of us , right there among the commuters , and we could hear them , but we might not have otherwise seen them .
so back to back takes site-specific theater and uses it to gently remind us about who and what we choose to edit out of our daily lives .
so , the dialogue with the local and the global , the audience as participant and player and protagonist , the innovative use of site , all of these things come to play in the amazing work of the fantastic french company royal de luxe .
royal de luxe 's giant puppets come into a city and they live there for a few days .
for " the sultan 's elephant , " royal de luxe came to central london and brought it to a standstill with their story of a giant little girl and her friend , a time-traveling elephant .
for a few days , they transformed a massive city into a community where endless possibility reigned .
the guardian wrote , " if art is about transformation , then there can be no more transformative experience .
what ' the sultan 's elephant ' represents is no less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people . "
we can talk about the economic impacts of these festivals on their cities , but i 'm much -lsb- more -rsb- interested in many more things , like how a festival helps a city to express itself , how it lets it come into its own .
festivals promote diversity , they bring neighbors into dialogue , they increase creativity , they offer opportunities for civic pride , they improve our general psychological well-being .
in short , they make cities better places to live .
case in point : when " the sultan 's elephant " came to london just nine months after 7/7 , a londoner wrote , " for the first time since the london bombings , my daughter called up with that sparkle back in her voice .
she had gathered with others to watch ' the sultan 's elephant , ' and , you know , it just made all the difference . "
lyn gardner in the guardian has written that a great festival can show us a map of the world , a map of the city and a map of ourselves , but there is no one fixed festival model .
i think what 's so brilliant about the festivals , the new festivals , is that they are really fully capturing the complexity and the excitement of the way we all live today .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i am no designer , nope , no way .
my dad was , which is kind of an interesting way to grow up .
i had to figure out what it is my dad did and why it was important .
dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up , you know , " bad design is just people not thinking , john , " he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or , say , a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen .
you know , " design - bad design , there 's just no excuse for it .
it 's letting stuff happen without thinking about it .
every object should be about something , john .
it should imagine a user .
it should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object .
good design , " my dad said , " is about supplying intent . "
that 's what he said .
dad helped design the control panels for the ibm 360 computer .
that was a big deal ; that was important . he worked for kodak for a while ; that was important .
he designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for steelcase ; that was important .
i knew design was important in my house because , for heaven 's sake , it put food on our table , right ?
and design was in everything my dad did .
he had a dixieland jazz band when we were growing up , and he would always cover louis armstrong tunes .
and i would ask him every once in a while , " dad , do you want it to sound like the record ? "
we had lots of old jazz records lying around the house .
and he said , " no , never , john , never .
the song is just a given , that 's how you have to think about it .
you gotta make it your own . you gotta design it .
show everyone what you intend , " is what he said .
" doing that , acting by design , is what we all should be doing .
it 's where we all belong . "
all of us ? designers ?
oh , oh , dad . oh , dad .
the song is just a given .
it 's how you cover it that matters .
well , let 's hold on to that thought for just a minute .
it 's kind of like this wheelchair i 'm in , right ?
the original tune ? it 's a little scary .
" ooh , what happened to that dude ?
he ca n't walk . anybody know the story ?
anybody ? "
i do n't like to talk about this very much , but i 'll tell you guys the story today .
all right , exactly 36 years ago this week , that 's right , i was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in pennsylvania , and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car .
but ever since then , the wheelchair has been a given in my life .
my life , at the mercy of good design and bad design .
think about it . now , in design terms , a wheelchair is a very difficult object .
it mostly projects tragedy and fear and misfortune , and it projects that message , that story , so strongly that it almost blots out anything else .
i roll swiftly through an airport , right ?
and moms grab their kids out of the way and say , " do n't stare ! "
the poor kid , you know , has this terrified look on his face , god knows what they think .
and for decades , i 'm going , why does this happen ? what can i do about it ? how can i change this ? i mean there must be something .
so i would roll , i 'd make no eye contact - just kinda frown , right ?
or i 'd dress up really , really sharply or something .
or i 'd make eye contact with everyone - that was really creepy ; that did n't work at all .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know anything , i 'd try . i would n't shower for a week - nothing worked .
nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago , my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that i had , and they said , " oh , dad ! dad ! look , you gotta get these , these flashy wheels - you gotta get ' em ! "
and i said , " oh , girls , dad is a very important journalist , that just would n't do at all . "
and of course , they immediately concluded , " oh , what a bummer , dad . journalists are n't allowed to have flashy wheels .
i mean , how important could you be then ? " they said .
i went , " wait a minute , all right , right - i 'll get the wheels . " purely out of protest , i got the flashy wheels , and i installed them and - check this out . could i have my special light cue please ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- look at that !
now ... look at , look at this ! look at this !
so what you are looking at here has completely changed my life , i mean totally changed my life .
instead of blank stares and awkwardness , now it is pointing and smiling !
people going , " awesome wheels , dude ! those are awesome !
i mean , i want some of those wheels ! " little kids say , " can i have a ride ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course there 's the occasional person - usually a middle-aged male who will say , " oh , those wheels are great !
i guess they 're for safety , right ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no ! they 're not for safety .
no , no , no , no , no .
what 's the difference here , the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights ?
the difference is intent .
that 's right , that 's right ; i 'm no longer a victim .
i chose to change the situation - i 'm the commander of the starship wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front . right ?
intent changes the picture completely .
i choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element .
acting with intent .
it conveys authorship .
it suggests that someone is driving .
it 's reassuring ; people are drawn to it .
someone making the experience their own .
covering the tragic tune with something different , something radically different .
people respond to that .
now it seems simple , but actually i think in our society and culture in general , we have a huge problem with intent .
now go with me here . look at this guy . you know who this is ?
it 's anders breivik . now , if he intended to kill in olso , norway last year , dozens and dozens of young people - if he intended to do that , he 's a vicious criminal . we punish him .
life in prison . death penalty in the united states , not so much in norway .
but , if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy , if he was motivated by some random mental illness , he 's in a completely different category .
we may put him away for life , but we watch him clinically .
it 's a completely different domain .
as an intentional murderer , anders breivik is merely evil .
but as a dysfunctional , as a dysfunctional murderer / psychotic , he 's something much more complicated .
he 's the breath of some primitive , ancient chaos .
he 's the random state of nature we emerged from .
he 's something very , very different .
it 's as though intent is an essential component for humanity .
it 's what we 're supposed to do somehow .
we 're supposed to act with intent .
we 're supposed to do things by design .
intent is a marker for civilization .
now here 's an example a little closer to home : my family is all about intent .
you can probably tell there are two sets of twins , the result of ivf technology , in vitro fertilization technology , due to some physical limitations i wo n't go into .
anyway , in vitro technology , ivf , is about as intentional as agriculture .
let me tell you , some of you may have the experience .
in fact , the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian .
i met the dude . he 's a great guy .
he carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he 'd worked with , all the different animals .
probes he designed , and in fact , he was really , really proud of these probes .
he would say , " you 're right between horse and squirrel , john . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but anyway , so when my wife and i decided to upgrade our early middle age - we had four kids , after all - with a little different technology that i wo n't explain in too much detail here - my urologist assured me i had nothing whatsoever to worry about .
" no need for birth control , doc , are you sure about that ? "
" john , john , i looked at your chart .
from your sperm tests we can confidently say that you 're basically a form of birth control . "
well !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what a liberating thought ! yes !
and after a couple very liberating weekends , my wife and i , utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a tedtalk someday but i wo n't get into it now , we noticed some familiar , if unexpected , symptoms .
i was n't exactly a form of birth control .
look at that font there . my wife was so pissed .
i mean , did a designer come up with that ?
no , i do n't think a designer did come up with that .
in fact , maybe that 's the problem .
and so , little ajax was born .
he 's like our other children , but the experience is completely different .
it 's something like my accident , right ?
he came out of nowhere .
but we all had to change , but not just react to the given ; we bend to this new experience with intent .
we 're five now . five .
facing the given with intent . doing things by design .
hey , the name ajax - you ca n't get much more intentional than that , right ?
we 're really hoping he thanks us for that later on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i never became a designer . no , no , no , no . never attempted . never even close .
i did love some great designs as i was growing up : the hp 35s calculator - god , i loved that thing . oh god , i wish i had one .
man , i love that thing .
i could afford that .
other designs i really could n't afford , like the 1974 911 targa .
in school , i studied nothing close to design or engineering ; i studied useless things like the classics , but there were some lessons even there - this guy , plato , it turns out he 's a designer .
he designed a state in " the republic , " a design never implemented .
listen to one of the design features of plato 's government 4.0 : " the state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed , and the state in which they are most eager , the worst . "
well , got that wrong , did n't we ?
but look at that statement ; it 's all about intent . that 's what i love about it .
but consider what plato is doing here . what is he doing ?
it 's a grand idea of design - a huge idea of design , common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the classical period .
what was going on then ?
they were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive ?
as the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos , a confrontation with random , brutal nature , they suddenly had a moment to think - and there was a lot to think about .
all of a sudden , human existence needed an intent .
human life needed a reason .
reality itself needed a designer .
the given was replaced by various aspects of intent , by various designs , by various gods .
gods we 're still fighting about . oh yeah .
today we do n't confront the chaos of nature .
today it is the chaos of humanity 's impact on the earth itself that we confront .
this young discipline called design , i think , is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question : what shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created ?
what shall we do ?
how shall we inscribe intent on all the objects we create , on all the circumstances we create , on all the places we change ?
the consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting .
that 's the tune we 're all covering today , all of us .
and we ca n't just imitate the past . no .
that wo n't do .
that wo n't do at all .
here 's my favorite design moment : in the city of kinshasa in zaire in the 1990s , i was working for abc news , and i was reporting on the fall of mobutu sese seko , the dictator , the brutal dictator in zaire , who raped and pillaged that country .
there was rioting in the middle of kinshasa .
the place was falling apart ; it was a horrible , horrible place , and i needed to go and explore the center of kinshasa to report on the rioting and the looting .
people were carrying off vehicles , carrying off pieces of buildings .
soldiers were in the streets shooting at looters and herding some in mass arrests .
in the middle of this chaos , i 'm rolling around in a wheelchair , and i was completely invisible . completely .
i was in a wheelchair ; i did n't look like a looter .
i was in a wheelchair ; i did n't look like a journalist , particularly , at least from their perspective .
and i did n't look like a soldier , that 's for sure .
i was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of zaire , completely invisible .
and all of a sudden , from around a corner , comes this young man , paralyzed , just like me , in this metal and wood and leather pedal , three-wheel tricycle-wheelchair device , and he pedals up to me as fast as he can .
he goes , " hey , mister ! mister ! "
and i looked at him - he did n't know any other english than that , but we did n't need english , no , no , no , no , no .
we sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes .
and i looked at his whacky pedal mechanism ; he was full of pride over his design .
i wish i could show you that contraption .
his smile , our glow as we talked a universal language of design , invisible to the chaos around us .
his machine : homemade , bolted , rusty , comical .
my machine : american-made , confident , sleek .
he was particularly proud of the comfortable seat , really comfortable seat he had made in his chariot and its beautiful fabric fringe around the edge .
oh , i wish i 'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him , man !
he would have loved those ! oh yeah .
he would have understood those ; a chariot of pure intent - think about it - in a city out of control .
design blew it all away for a moment .
we spoke for a few minutes and then each of us vanished back into the chaos .
he went back to the streets of kinshasa ; i went to my hotel . and i think of him now , now ...
and i pose this question .
an object imbued with intent - it has power , it 's treasure , we 're drawn to it .
an object devoid of intent - it 's random , it 's imitative , it repels us . it 's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away .
this is what we must demand of our lives , of our objects , of our things , of our circumstances : living with intent .
and i have to say that on that score , i have a very unfair advantage over all of you .
and i want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day .
thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment , a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question , but the nurse was already there with an answer .
" you 've had a terrible accident , young man . you 've broken your back .
you 'll never walk again . "
i said , " i know all that - what day is it ? "
you see , i knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of february , and i knew that 1976 was a leap year .
" nurse ! is this the 28th or the 29th ? "
and she looked at me and said , " it 's march 1st . "
and i went , " oh my god .
i 've got some catching up to do ! "
and from that moment , i knew the given was that accident ; i had no option but to make up this new life without walking .
intent - a life with intent - lived by design , covering the original with something better .
it 's something for all of us to do or find a way to do in these times .
to get back to this , to get back to design , and as my daddy suggested a long time ago , " make the song your own , john .
show everybody what you intend . "
daddy , this one 's for you .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ jo jo was a man who thought he was a loner ♫ ♫ but he was another man . ♫ ♫ jo jo left his home in tucson , arizona to attend a california bash . ♫ ♫ get back , get back , ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged . ♫ ♫ get back , get back , ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to talk to you about why many e-health projects fail .
and i really think that the most important thing of it is that we stopped listening to patients .
and one of the things we did at radboud university is we appointed a chief listening officer .
not in a very scientific way - she puts up a little cup of coffee or cup of tea and asks patients , family , relatives , " what 's up ?
how could we help you ? "
and we think , we like to think , that this is one of the major problems why all - maybe not all - but most of the e-health projects fail , since we stopped listening .
this is my wifi scale . it 's a very simple thing .
it 's got one knob , on / off .
and every morning i hop on it .
and yes , i 've got a challenge , as you might see .
and i put my challenge on 95 kg .
but the thing is that it 's made this simple that whenever i hop on , it sends my data through google health as well .
and it 's collected by my general practitioner as well , so he can see what 's my problem in weight , not on the very moment that i need cardiologic support or something like it , but also looking backward .
but there 's another thing .
as some of you might know , i 've got more than 4,000 followers on twitter .
so every morning i hop on my wifi scale and before i 'm in my car , people start talking to me , " i think you need a light lunch today , lucien . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that 's the nicest thing that could happen , since this is peer pressure , peer pressure used to help patients - since this could be used for obesity , it could be used to stop smoking in patients .
but on the other hand , it also could be used to get people from out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health .
as of next week , it will soon be available .
there will be this little blood pressure meter connected to an iphone or something or other .
and people will be able , from their homes , to take their blood pressure , send it into their doctor and eventually share it with others , for instance , for over a hundred dollars .
and this is the point where patients get into position and can collect , not only their own control again , be captain of their own ship , but also can help us in health care due to the challenges that we face , like health care cost explosion , doubled demand and things like that .
make techniques that are easy to use and start with this to embrace patients in the team .
and you can do this with techniques like this , but also by crowd-sourcing .
and one of the things we did i would like to share with you introduced by a little video .
-lrb- music -rrb- we 've all got navigation controls in our car .
we maybe even -lsb- have -rsb- it in our cellphone .
we know perfectly where all the atms are about the city of maastricht .
the other thing is we know where all the gas stations are .
and sure , we could find fast food chains .
but where would be the nearest aed to help this patient ?
we asked around and nobody knew .
nobody knew where the nearest life-saving aed was to be obtained right now .
so what we did , we crowdsourced the netherlands .
we set up a website and asked the crowd , " if you see an aed , please submit it , tell us where it is , tell us when it 's open , " since sometimes in office hours sometimes it 's closed , of course .
and over 10,000 aeds already in the netherlands already have been submitted .
the next step we took was to find the applications for it .
and we built an ipad application .
we made an application for layar , augmented reality , to find these aeds .
and whenever you are in a city like maastricht and somebody collapses , you can use your iphone , and within the next weeks also run your microsoft cellphone , to find the nearest aed which can save lives .
and as of today , we would like to introduce this , not only as aed4eu , which is what the product is called , but also aed4us .
and we would like to start this on a worldwide level .
and -lsb- we 're -rsb- asking all of our colleagues in the rest of the world , colleague universities , to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowd-source all these aeds all around the world .
that whenever you 're on holiday and somebody collapses , might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you , you can find this .
the other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these aeds .
these might be courier services or cable guys for instance , just to see whether the aed that 's submitted still is in place .
so please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better , but take control of it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the spirit of jacques cousteau , who said , " people protect what they love , " i want to share with you today what i love most in the ocean , and that 's the incredible number and variety of animals in it that make light .
my addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called wasp ; that 's not an acronym - just somebody thought it looked like the insect .
it was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet .
right after i completed my ph.d. , i was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists that was using it for the first time as a tool for ocean exploration .
we trained in a tank in port hueneme , and then my first open ocean dive was in santa barbara channel .
it was an evening dive .
i went down to a depth of 880 feet and turned out the lights .
and the reason i turned out the lights is because i knew i would see this phenomenon of animals making light called bioluminescence .
but i was totally unprepared for how much there was and how spectacular it was .
i saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores that were longer than this room , pumping out so much light that i could read the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight ; and puffs and billows of what looked like luminous blue smoke ; and explosions of sparks that would swirl up out of the thrusters - just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire , but these were icy , blue embers .
it was breathtaking .
now , usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all , it 's these guys ; it 's fireflies .
and there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light - some insects , earthworms , fungi - but in general , on land , it 's really rare .
in the ocean , it 's the rule rather than the exception .
if i go out in the open ocean environment , virtually anywhere in the world , and i drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface , most of the animals - in fact , in many places , 80 to 90 percent of the animals that i bring up in that net - make light .
this makes for some pretty spectacular light shows .
now i want to share with you a little video that i shot from a submersible .
i first developed this technique working from a little single-person submersible called deep rover and then adapted it for use on the johnson sea-link , which you see here .
so , mounted in front of the observation sphere , there 's a a three-foot diameter hoop with a screen stretched across it .
and inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera that 's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye , albeit a little fuzzy .
so you turn on the camera , turn out the lights .
that sparkle you 're seeing is not luminescence , that 's just electronic noise on these super intensified cameras .
you do n't see luminescence until the submersible begins to move forward through the water , but as it does , animals bumping into the screen are stimulated to bioluminesce .
now , when i was first doing this , all i was trying to do was count the numbers of sources .
i knew my forward speed , i knew the area , and so i could figure out how many hundreds of sources there were per cubic meter .
but i started to realize that i could actually identify animals by the type of flashes they produced .
and so , here , in the gulf of maine at 740 feet , i can name pretty much everything you 're seeing there to the species level .
like those big explosions , sparks , are from a little comb jelly , and there 's krill and other kinds of crustaceans , and jellyfish .
there was another one of those comb jellies .
and so i 've worked with computer image analysis engineers to develop automatic recognition systems that can identify these animals and then extract the xyz coordinate of the initial impact point .
and we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land , and do nearest neighbor distances .
but you do n't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean to see a light show like this .
you can actually see it in surface waters .
this is some shot , by dr. mike latz at scripps institution , of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton .
and this is n't someplace exotic like one of the bioluminescent bays in puerto rico , this was actually shot in san diego harbor .
and sometimes you can see it even closer than that , because the heads on ships - that 's toilets , for any land lovers that are listening - are flushed with unfiltered seawater that often has bioluminescent plankton in it .
so , if you stagger into the head late at night and you 're so toilet-hugging sick that you forget to turn on the light , you may think that you 're having a religious experience . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , how does a living creature make light ?
well , that was the question that 19th century french physiologist raphael dubois , asked about this bioluminescent clam .
he ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals ; one , the enzyme , he called luciferase ; the substrate , he called luciferin after lucifer the lightbearer .
that terminology has stuck , but it does n't actually refer to specific chemicals because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms .
in fact , most of the people studying bioluminescence today are focused on the chemistry , because these chemicals have proved so incredibly valuable for developing antibacterial agents , cancer fighting drugs , testing for the presence of life on mars , detecting pollutants in our waters - which is how we use it at orca .
in 2008 , the nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish , and it 's been equated to the invention of the microscope , in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering .
another thing all these molecules are telling us that , apparently , bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times , maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history , which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival .
so , what is it about bioluminescence that 's so important to so many animals ?
well , for animals that are trying to avoid predators by staying in the darkness , light can still be very useful for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive : and that 's find food , attract a mate and avoid being eaten .
so , for example , this fish has a built-in headlight behind its eye that it can use for finding food or attracting a mate .
and then when it 's not using it , it actually can roll it down into its head just like the headlights on your lamborghini .
this fish actually has high beams .
and this fish , which is one of my favorites , has three headlights on each side of its head .
now , this one is blue , and that 's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean because evolution has selected for the color that travels farthest through seawater in order to optimize communication .
so , most animals make blue light , and most animals can only see blue light , but this fish is a really fascinating exception because it has two red light organs .
and i have no idea why there 's two , and that 's something i want to solve some day - but not only can it see blue light , but it can see red light .
so it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper 's scope to be able to sneak up on animals that are blind to red light and be able to see them without being seen .
it 's also got a little chin barbel here with a blue luminescent lure on it that it can use to attract prey from a long way off .
and a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure .
this is another one of my favorite fish .
this is a viperfish , and it 's got a lure on the end of a long fishing rod that it arches in front of the toothy jaw that gives the viperfish its name .
the teeth on this fish are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish , it would actually impale its own brain .
so instead , it slides in grooves on the outside of the head .
this is a christmas tree of a fish ; everything on this fish lights up , it 's not just that lure .
it 's got a built-in flashlight .
it 's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly that it uses for a type of camouflage that obliterates its shadow , so when it 's swimming around and there 's a predator looking up from below , it makes itself disappear .
it 's got light organs in the mouth , in a mucus layer on the back and the belly , all used for different things - some of which we know about , some of which we do n't .
and we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to pixar , and i 'm very grateful to pixar for sharing my favorite topic with so many people .
i do wish , with their budget , that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money to pay a consulting fee to some poor , starving graduate student , who could have told them that those are the eyes of a fish that 's been preserved in formalin .
these are the eyes of a living anglerfish .
so , she 's got a lure that she sticks out in front of this living mousetrap of needle-sharp teeth in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey .
and this one has a lure with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it .
now we used to think that the different shape of the lure was to attract different types of prey , but then stomach content analyses on these fish done by scientists , or more likely their graduate students , have revealed that they all eat pretty much the same thing .
so , now we believe that the different shape of the lure is how the male recognizes the female in the anglerfish world , because many of these males are what are known as dwarf males .
this little guy has no visible means of self-support .
he has no lure for attracting food and no teeth for eating it when it gets there .
his only hope for existence on this planet is as a gigolo . -lrb- laughter -rrb- he 's got to find himself a babe and then he 's got to latch on for life .
so this little guy has found himself this babe , and you will note that he 's had the good sense to attach himself in a way that he does n't actually have to look at her .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he still knows a good thing when he sees it , and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss .
his flesh fuses with her flesh , her bloodstream grows into his body , and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , this is a deep-sea version of women 's lib .
she always knows where he is , and she does n't have to be monogamous , because some of these females come up with multiple males attached .
so they can use it for finding food , for attracting mates .
they use it a lot for defense , many different ways .
a lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud .
this shrimp is actually spewing light out of its mouth like a fire breathing dragon in order to blind or distract this viperfish so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness .
and there are a lot of different animals that can do this : there 's jellyfish , there 's squid , there 's a whole lot of different crustaceans , there 's even fish that can do this .
this fish is called the shining tubeshoulder because it actually has a tube on its shoulder that can squirt out light .
and i was luck enough to capture one of these when we were on a trawling expedition off the northwest coast of africa for " blue planet , " for the deep portion of " blue planet . "
and we were using a special trawling net that we were able to bring these animals up alive .
so we captured one of these , and i brought it into the lab .
so i 'm holding it , and i 'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder , and when i do , you 'll see bioluminescence coming out .
but to me , what 's shocking is not just the amount of light , but the fact that it 's not just luciferin and luciferase .
for this fish , it 's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes .
it 's energetically very costly for this fish to do this , and we have no idea why it does it - another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved .
now , another form of defense is something called a burglar alarm - same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car ; the honking horn and flashing lights are meant to attract the attention of , hopefully , the police that will come and take the burglar away - when an animal 's caught in the clutches of a predator , its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier that will attack their attacker , thereby affording them a chance for escape .
this jellyfish , for example , has a spectacular bioluminescent display .
this is us chasing it in the submersible .
that 's not luminescence , that 's reflected light from the gonads .
we capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition , bring it into the lab on the ship .
and then to generate the display you 're about to see , all i did was touch it once per second on its nerve ring with a sharp pick that 's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish .
and once this display gets going , i 'm not touching it anymore .
this is an unbelievable light show .
it 's this pinwheel of light , and i 've done calculations that show that this could be seen from as much as 300 feet away by a predator .
and i thought , " you know , that might actually make a pretty good lure . "
because one of the things that 's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean .
the primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships .
and i defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology .
the other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles .
i 've made hundreds of dives in submersibles .
when i 'm sitting in a submersible though , i know that i 'm not unobtrusive at all - i 've got bright lights and noisy thrusters - any animal with any sense is going to be long gone .
so , i 've wanted for a long time to figure out a different way to explore .
and so , sometime ago , i got this idea for a camera system .
it 's not exactly rocket science . we call this thing eye-in-the-sea .
and scientists have done this on land for years ; we just use a color that the animals ca n't see and then a camera that can see that color .
you ca n't use infrared in the sea .
we use far-red light , but even that 's a problem because it gets absorbed so quickly .
made an intensified camera , wanted to make this electronic jellyfish .
thing is , in science , you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you 're going to discover before they 'll give you the money .
and i did n't know what i was going to discover , so i could n't get the funding for this .
so i kluged this together , i got the harvey mudd engineering clinic to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially , and then i kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources .
monterey bay aquarium research institute gave me time with their rov so that i could test it and we could figure out , you know , for example , which colors of red light we had to use so that we could see the animals , but they could n't see us - get the electronic jellyfish working .
and you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was , because we cast these 16 blue leds in epoxy and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used , the word ziploc is still visible .
needless to say , when it 's kluged together like this , there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working .
but there came a moment when it all came together , and everything worked .
and , remarkably , that moment got caught on film by photographer mark richards , who happened to be there at the precise moment that we discovered that it all came together .
that 's me on the left , my graduate student at the time , erika raymond , and lee fry , who was the engineer on the project .
and we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor with the caption : " engineer satisfying two women at once . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we were very , very happy .
so now we had a system that we could actually take to some place that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean that might be patrolled by large predators .
and so , the place that we took it to was this place called a brine pool , which is in the northern part of the gulf of mexico .
it 's a magical place .
and i know this footage is n't going to look like anything to you - we had a crummy camera at the time - but i was ecstatic .
we 're at the edge of the brine pool , there 's a fish that 's swimming towards the camera .
it 's clearly undisturbed by us .
and i had my window into the deep sea .
i , for the first time , could see what animals were doing down there when we were n't down there disturbing them in some way .
four hours into the deployment , we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the first time .
eighty-six seconds after it went into its pinwheel display , we recorded this : this is a squid , over six feet long , that is so new to science , it can not be placed in any known scientific family .
i could not have asked for a better proof of concept .
and based on this , i went back to the national science foundation and said , " this is what we will discover . "
and they gave me enough money to do it right , which has involved developing the world 's first deep-sea webcam - which has been installed in the monterey canyon for the past year - and now , more recently , a modular form of this system , a much more mobile form that 's a lot easier to launch and recover , that i hope can be used on sylvia 's " hope spots " to help explore and protect these areas , and , for me , learn more about the bioluminescence in these " hope spots . "
so one of these take-home messages here is , there is still a lot to explore in the oceans .
and sylvia has said that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what 's in them , and she 's right .
so if you ever , ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible , say yes - a thousand times , yes - and please turn out the lights .
i promise , you 'll love it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i got my first computer when i was a teenager growing up in accra , and it was a really cool device .
you could play games with it . you could program it in basic .
and i was fascinated .
so i went into the library to figure out how did this thing work .
i read about how the cpu is constantly shuffling data back and forth between the memory , the ram and the alu , the arithmetic and logic unit .
and i thought to myself , this cpu really has to work like crazy just to keep all this data moving through the system .
but nobody was really worried about this .
when computers were first introduced , they were said to be a million times faster than neurons .
people were really excited . they thought they would soon outstrip the capacity of the brain .
this is a quote , actually , from alan turing : " in 30 years , it will be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person . "
this was in 1946 . and now , in 2007 , it 's still not true .
and so , the question is , why are n't we really seeing this kind of power in computers that we see in the brain ?
what people did n't realize , and i 'm just beginning to realize right now , is that we pay a huge price for the speed that we claim is a big advantage of these computers .
let 's take a look at some numbers .
this is blue gene , the fastest computer in the world .
it 's got 120,000 processors ; they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second .
that 's 10 to the sixteenth . and they consume one and a half megawatts of power .
so that would be really great , if you could add that to the production capacity in tanzania .
it would really boost the economy .
just to go back to the states , if you translate the amount of power or electricity this computer uses to the amount of households in the states , you get 1,200 households in the u.s.
that 's how much power this computer uses .
now , let 's compare this with the brain .
this is a picture of , actually rory sayres ' girlfriend 's brain .
rory is a graduate student at stanford .
he studies the brain using mri , and he claims that this is the most beautiful brain that he has ever scanned .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's true love , right there .
now , how much computation does the brain do ?
i estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second , which is actually about very similar to what blue gene does .
so that 's the question . the question is , how much - they are doing a similar amount of processing , similar amount of data - the question is how much energy or electricity does the brain use ?
and it 's actually as much as your laptop computer : it 's just 10 watts .
so what we are doing right now with computers with the energy consumed by 1,200 houses , the brain is doing with the energy consumed by your laptop .
so the question is , how is the brain able to achieve this kind of efficiency ?
and let me just summarize . so the bottom line : the brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have .
how is the brain able to do this ?
let 's just take a look about how the brain works , and then i 'll compare that with how computers work .
so , this clip is from the pbs series , " the secret life of the brain . "
it shows you these cells that process information .
they are called neurons .
they send little pulses of electricity down their processes to each other , and where they contact each other , those little pulses of electricity can jump from one neuron to the other .
that process is called a synapse .
you 've got this huge network of cells interacting with each other - about 100 million of them , sending about 10 quadrillion of these pulses around every second .
and that 's basically what 's going on in your brain right now as you 're watching this .
how does that compare with the way computers work ?
in the computer , you have all the data going through the central processing unit , and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck , whereas in the brain , what you have is these neurons , and the data just really flows through a network of connections among the neurons . there 's no bottleneck here .
it 's really a network in the literal sense of the word .
the net is doing the work in the brain .
if you just look at these two pictures , these kind of words pop into your mind .
this is serial and it 's rigid - it 's like cars on a freeway , everything has to happen in lockstep - whereas this is parallel and it 's fluid .
information processing is very dynamic and adaptive .
so i 'm not the first to figure this out . this is a quote from brian eno : " the problem with computers is that there is not enough africa in them . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- brian actually said this in 1995 .
and nobody was listening then , but now people are beginning to listen because there 's a pressing , technological problem that we face .
and i 'll just take you through that a little bit in the next few slides .
this is - it 's actually really this remarkable convergence between the devices that we use to compute in computers , and the devices that our brains use to compute .
the devices that computers use are what 's called a transistor .
this electrode here , called the gate , controls the flow of current from the source to the drain - these two electrodes .
and that current , electrical current , is carried by electrons , just like in your house and so on .
and what you have here is , when you actually turn on the gate , you get an increase in the amount of current , and you get a steady flow of current .
and when you turn off the gate , there 's no current flowing through the device .
your computer uses this presence of current to represent a one , and the absence of current to represent a zero .
now , what 's happening is that as transistors are getting smaller and smaller and smaller , they no longer behave like this .
in fact , they are starting to behave like the device that neurons use to compute , which is called an ion channel .
and this is a little protein molecule .
i mean , neurons have thousands of these .
and it sits in the membrane of the cell and it 's got a pore in it .
and these are individual potassium ions that are flowing through that pore .
now , this pore can open and close .
but , when it 's open , because these ions have to line up and flow through , one at a time , you get a kind of sporadic , not steady - it 's a sporadic flow of current .
and even when you close the pore - which neurons can do , they can open and close these pores to generate electrical activity - even when it 's closed , because these ions are so small , they can actually sneak through , a few can sneak through at a time .
so , what you have is that when the pore is open , you get some current sometimes .
these are your ones , but you 've got a few zeros thrown in .
and when it 's closed , you have a zero , but you have a few ones thrown in .
now , this is starting to happen in transistors .
and the reason why that 's happening is that , right now , in 2007 - the technology that we are using - a transistor is big enough that several electrons can flow through the channel simultaneously , side by side .
in fact , there 's about 12 electrons can all be flowing this way .
and that means that a transistor corresponds to about 12 ion channels in parallel .
now , in a few years time , by 2015 , we will shrink transistors so much .
this is what intel does to keep adding more cores onto the chip .
or your memory sticks that you have now can carry one gigabyte of stuff on them - before , it was 256 .
transistors are getting smaller to allow this to happen , and technology has really benefitted from that .
but what 's happening now is that in 2015 , the transistor is going to become so small , that it corresponds to only one electron at a time can flow through that channel , and that corresponds to a single ion channel .
and you start having the same kind of traffic jams that you have in the ion channel .
the current will turn on and off at random , even when it 's supposed to be on .
and that means your computer is going to get its ones and zeros mixed up , and that 's going to crash your machine .
so , we are at the stage where we do n't really know how to compute with these kinds of devices .
and the only kind of thing - the only thing we know right now that can compute with these kinds of devices are the brain .
ok , so a computer picks a specific item of data from memory , it sends it into the processor or the alu , and then it puts the result back into memory .
that 's the red path that 's highlighted .
the way brains work , i told you all , you have got all these neurons .
and the way they represent information is they break up that data into little pieces that are represented by pulses and different neurons .
so you have all these pieces of data distributed throughout the network .
and then the way that you process that data to get a result is that you translate this pattern of activity into a new pattern of activity , just by it flowing through the network .
so you set up these connections such that the input pattern just flows and generates the output pattern .
what you see here is that there 's these redundant connections .
so if this piece of data or this piece of the data gets clobbered , it does n't show up over here , these two pieces can activate the missing part with these redundant connections .
so even when you go to these crappy devices where sometimes you want a one and you get a zero , and it does n't show up , there 's redundancy in the network that can actually recover the missing information .
it makes the brain inherently robust .
what you have here is a system where you store data locally .
and it 's brittle , because each of these steps has to be flawless , otherwise you lose that data , whereas in the brain , you have a system that stores data in a distributed way , and it 's robust .
what i want to basically talk about is my dream , which is to build a computer that works like the brain .
this is something that we 've been working on for the last couple of years .
and i 'm going to show you a system that we designed to model the retina , which is a piece of brain that lines the inside of your eyeball .
we did n't do this by actually writing code , like you do in a computer .
in fact , the processing that happens in that little piece of brain is very similar to the kind of processing that computers do when they stream video over the internet .
they want to compress the information - they just want to send the changes , what 's new in the image , and so on - and that is how your eyeball is able to squeeze all that information down to your optic nerve , to send to the rest of the brain .
instead of doing this in software , or doing those kinds of algorithms , we went and talked to neurobiologists who have actually reverse engineered that piece of brain that 's called the retina .
and they figured out all the different cells , and they figured out the network , and we just took that network and we used it as the blueprint for the design of a silicon chip .
so now the neurons are represented by little nodes or circuits on the chip , and the connections among the neurons are represented , actually modeled by transistors .
and these transistors are behaving essentially just like ion channels behave in the brain .
it will give you the same kind of robust architecture that i described .
here is actually what our artificial eye looks like .
the retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here .
and the chip - i 'm going to show you a video that the silicon retina put out of its output when it was looking at kareem zaghloul , who 's the student who designed this chip .
let me explain what you 're going to see , ok , because it 's putting out different kinds of information , it 's not as straightforward as a camera .
the retina chip extracts four different kinds of information .
it extracts regions with dark contrast , which will show up on the video as red .
and it extracts regions with white or light contrast , which will show up on the video as green .
this is kareem 's dark eyes and that 's the white background that you see here .
and then it also extracts movement .
when kareem moves his head to the right , you will see this blue activity there ; it represents regions where the contrast is increasing in the image , that 's where it 's going from dark to light .
and you also see this yellow activity , which represents regions where contrast is decreasing ; it 's going from light to dark .
and these four types of information - your optic nerve has about a million fibers in it , and 900,000 of those fibers send these four types of information .
so we are really duplicating the kind of signals that you have on the optic nerve .
what you notice here is that these snapshots taken from the output of the retina chip are very sparse , right ?
it does n't light up green everywhere in the background , only on the edges , and then in the hair , and so on .
and this is the same thing you see when people compress video to send : they want to make it very sparse , because that file is smaller . and this is what the retina is doing , and it 's doing it just with the circuitry , and how this network of neurons that are interacting in there , which we 've captured on the chip .
but the point that i want to make - i 'll show you up here .
so this image here is going to look like these ones , but here i 'll show you that we can reconstruct the image , so , you know , you can almost recognize kareem in that top part there .
and so , here you go .
yes , so that 's the idea .
when you stand still , you just see the light and dark contrasts .
but when it 's moving back and forth , the retina picks up these changes .
and that 's why , you know , when you 're sitting here and something happens in your background , you merely move your eyes to it .
there are these cells that detect change and you move your attention to it .
so those are very important for catching somebody who 's trying to sneak up on you .
let me just end by saying that this is what happens when you put africa in a piano , ok .
this is a steel drum here that has been modified , and that 's what happens when you put africa in a piano .
and what i would like us to do is put africa in the computer , and come up with a new kind of computer that will generate thought , imagination , be creative and things like that .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : question for you , kwabena .
do you put together in your mind the work you 're doing , the future of africa , this conference - what connections can we make , if any , between them ?
kwabena boahen : yes , like i said at the beginning , i got my first computer when i was a teenager , growing up in accra .
and i had this gut reaction that this was the wrong way to do it .
it was very brute force ; it was very inelegant .
i do n't think that i would 've had that reaction , if i 'd grown up reading all this science fiction , hearing about rd2d2 , whatever it was called , and just - you know , buying into this hype about computers .
i was coming at it from a different perspective , where i was bringing that different perspective to bear on the problem .
and i think a lot of people in africa have this different perspective , and i think that 's going to impact technology .
and that 's going to impact how it 's going to evolve .
and i think you 're going to be able to see , use that infusion , to come up with new things , because you 're coming from a different perspective .
i think we can contribute . we can dream like everybody else .
ca : thanks kwabena , that was really interesting .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's just start by looking at some great photographs .
this is an icon of national geographic , an afghan refugee taken by steve mccurry .
but the harvard lampoon is about to come out with a parody of national geographic , and i shudder to think what they 're going to do to this photograph .
oh , the wrath of photoshop .
this is a jet landing at san francisco , by bruce dale .
he mounted a camera on the tail .
a poetic image for a story on tolstoy , by sam abell .
pygmies in the drc , by randy olson .
i love this photograph because it reminds me of degas ' bronze sculptures of the little dancer .
a polar bear swimming in the arctic , by paul nicklen .
polar bears need ice to be able to move back and forth - they 're not very good swimmers - and we know what 's happening to the ice .
these are camels moving across the rift valley in africa , photographed by chris johns .
shot straight down , so these are the shadows of the camels .
this is a rancher in texas , by william albert allard , a great portraitist .
and jane goodall , making her own special connection , photographed by nick nichols .
this is a soap disco in spain , photographed by david alan harvey .
and david said that there was lot of weird stuff happening on the dance floor .
but , hey , at least it 's hygienic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are sea lions in australia doing their own dance , by david doubilet .
and this is a comet , captured by dr. euan mason .
and finally , the bow of the titanic , without movie stars , photographed by emory kristof .
photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today 's saturated , media world , because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment .
here 's an example .
four years ago , i was at the beach with my son , and he was learning how to swim in this relatively soft surf of the delaware beaches .
but i turned away for a moment , and he got caught into a riptide and started to be pulled out towards the jetty .
i can stand here right now and see , as i go tearing into the water after him , the moments slowing down and freezing into this arrangement .
i can see the rocks are over here .
there 's a wave about to crash onto him .
i can see his hands reaching out , and i can see his face in terror , looking at me , saying , " help me , dad . "
i got him . the wave broke over us .
we got back on shore ; he was fine .
we were a little bit rattled .
but this flashbulb memory , as it 's called , is when all the elements came together to define not just the event , but my emotional connection to it .
and this is what a photograph taps into when it makes its own powerful connection to a viewer .
now i have to tell you , i was talking to kyle last week about this , that i was going to tell this story .
and he said , " oh , yeah , i remember that too !
i remember my image of you was that you were up on the shore yelling at me . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought i was a hero .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this represents - this is a cross-sample of some remarkable images taken by some of the world 's greatest photojournalists , working at the very top of their craft - except one .
this photograph was taken by dr. euan mason in new zealand last year , and it was submitted and published in national geographic .
last year , we added a section to our website called " your shot , " where anyone can submit photographs for possible publication .
and it has become a wild success , tapping into the enthusiast photography community .
the quality of these amateur photographs can , at times , be amazing .
and seeing this reinforces , for me , that every one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them .
but to be a great photojournalist , you have to have more than just one or two great photographs in you .
you 've got to be able to make them all the time .
but even more importantly , you need to know how to create a visual narrative .
you need to know how to tell a story .
so i 'm going to share with you some coverages that i feel demonstrate the storytelling power of photography .
photographer nick nichols went to document a very small and relatively unknown wildlife sanctuary in chad , called zakouma .
the original intent was to travel there and bring back a classic story of diverse species , of an exotic locale .
and that is what nick did , up to a point .
this is a serval cat .
he 's actually taking his own picture , shot with what 's called a camera trap .
there 's an infrared beam that 's going across , and he has stepped into the beam and taken his photograph .
these are baboons at a watering hole .
nick - the camera , again , an automatic camera took thousands of pictures of this .
and nick ended up with a lot of pictures of the rear ends of baboons .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a lion having a late night snack - notice he 's got a broken tooth .
and a crocodile walks up a riverbank toward its den .
i love this little bit of water that comes off the back of his tail .
but the centerpiece species of zakouma are the elephants .
it 's one of the largest intact herds in this part of africa .
here 's a photograph shot in moonlight , something that digital photography has made a big difference for .
it was with the elephants that this story pivoted .
nick , along with researcher dr. michael fay , collared the matriarch of the herd .
they named her annie , and they began tracking her movements .
the herd was safe within the confines of the park , because of this dedicated group of park rangers .
but once the annual rains began , the herd would begin migrating to feeding grounds outside the park .
and that 's when they ran into trouble .
for outside the safety of the park were poachers , who would hunt them down only for the value of their ivory tusks .
the matriarch that they were radio tracking , after weeks of moving back and forth , in and out of the park , came to a halt outside the park .
annie had been killed , along with 20 members of her herd .
and they only came for the ivory .
this is actually one of the rangers .
they were able to chase off one of the poachers and recover this ivory , because they could n't leave it there , because it 's still valuable .
but what nick did was he brought back a story that went beyond the old-school method of just straight , " is n't this an amazing world ? "
and instead , created a story that touched our audiences deeply .
instead of just knowledge of this park , he created an understanding and an empathy for the elephants , the rangers and the many issues surrounding human-wildlife conflicts .
now let 's go over to india .
sometimes you can tell a broad story in a focused way .
we were looking at the same issue that richard wurman touches upon in his new world population project .
for the first time in history , more people live in urban , rather than rural , environments .
and most of that growth is not in the cities , but in the slums that surround them .
jonas bendiksen , a very energetic photographer , came to me and said , " we need to document this , and here 's my proposal .
let 's go all over the world and photograph every single slum around the world . "
and i said , " well , you know , that might be a bit ambitious for our budget . "
so instead , what we did was we decided to , instead of going out and doing what would result in what we 'd consider sort of a survey story - where you just go in and see just a little bit of everything - we put jonas into dharavi , which is part of mumbai , india , and let him stay there , and really get into the heart and soul of this really major part of the city .
what jonas did was not just go and do a surface look at the awful conditions that exist in such places .
he saw that this was a living and breathing and vital part of how the entire urban area functioned .
by staying tightly focused in one place , jonas tapped into the soul and the enduring human spirit that underlies this community .
and he did it in a beautiful way .
sometimes , though , the only way to tell a story is with a sweeping picture .
we teamed up underwater photographer brian skerry and photojournalist randy olson to document the depletion of the world 's fisheries .
we were n't the only ones to tackle this subject , but the photographs that brian and randy created are among the best to capture both the human and natural devastation of overfishing .
here , in a photo by brian , a seemingly crucified shark is caught up in a gill net off of baja .
i 've seen sort of ok pictures of bycatch , the animals accidentally scooped up while fishing for a specific species .
but here , brian captured a unique view by positioning himself underneath the boat when they threw the waste overboard .
and brian then went on to even greater risk to get this never-before-made photograph of a trawl net scraping the ocean bottom .
back on land , randy olson photographed a makeshift fish market in africa , where the remains of filleted fish were sold to the locals , the main parts having already been sent to europe .
and here in china , randy shot a jellyfish market .
as prime food sources are depleted , the harvest goes deeper into the oceans and brings in more such sources of protein .
this is called fishing down the food chain .
but there are also glimmers of hope , and i think anytime we 're doing a big , big story on this , we do n't really want to go and just look at all the problems .
we also want to look for solutions .
brian photographed a marine sanctuary in new zealand , where commercial fishing had been banned - the result being that the overfished species have been restored , and with them a possible solution for sustainable fisheries .
photography can also compel us to confront issues that are potentially distressing and controversial .
james nachtwey , who was honored at last year 's ted , took a look at the sweep of the medical system that is utilized to handle the american wounded coming out of iraq .
it is like a tube where a wounded soldier enters on one end and exits back home , on the other .
jim started in the battlefield .
here , a medical technician tends to a wounded soldier on the helicopter ride back to the field hospital .
here is in the field hospital .
the soldier on the right has the name of his daughter tattooed across his chest , as a reminder of home .
from here , the more severely wounded are transported back to germany , where they meet up with their families for the first time .
and then back to the states to recuperate at veterans ' hospitals , such as here in walter reed .
and finally , often fitted with high-tech prosthesis , they exit the medical system and attempt to regain their pre-war lives .
jim took what could have been a straight-up medical science story and gave it a human dimension that touched our readers deeply .
now , these stories are great examples of how photography can be used to address some of our most important topics .
but there are also times when photographers simply encounter things that are , when it comes down to it , just plain fun .
photographer paul nicklin traveled to antarctica to shoot a story on leopard seals .
they have been rarely photographed , partly because they are considered one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean .
in fact , a year earlier , a researcher had been grabbed by one and pulled down to depth and killed .
so you can imagine paul was maybe a little bit hesitant about getting into the water .
now , what leopard seals do mostly is , they eat penguins .
you know of " the march of the penguins . "
this is sort of the munch of the penguins .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here a penguin goes up to the edge and looks out to see if the coast is clear .
and then everybody kind of runs out and goes out .
but then paul got in the water .
and he said he was never really afraid of this .
well , this one female came up to him .
she 's probably - it 's a shame you ca n't see it in the photograph , but she 's 12 feet long .
so , she is pretty significant in size .
and paul said he was never really afraid , because she was more curious about him than threatened .
this mouthing behavior , on the right , was really her way of saying to him , " hey , look how big i am ! "
or you know , " my , what big teeth you have . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then paul thinks that she simply took pity on him .
to her , here was this big , goofy creature in the water that for some reason did n't seem to be interested in chasing penguins .
so what she did was she started to bring penguins to him , alive , and put them in front of him .
she dropped them off , and then they would swim away .
she 'd kind of look at him , like " what are you doing ? "
go back and get them , and then bring them back and drop them in front of him .
and she did this over the course of a couple of days , until the point where she got so frustrated with him that she started putting them directly on top of his head .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which just resulted in a fantastic photograph .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- eventually , though , paul thinks that she just figured that he was never going to survive .
this is her just puffing out , you know , snorting out in disgust .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and lost interest with him , and went back to what she does best .
paul set out to photograph a relatively mysterious and unknown creature , and came back with not just a collection of photographs , but an amazing experience and a great story .
it is these kinds of stories , ones that go beyond the immediate or just the superficial that demonstrate the power of photojournalism .
i believe that photography can make a real connection to people , and can be employed as a positive agent for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing our world today .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the biggest challenges in computer graphics has been being able to create a photo-real , digital human face .
and one of the reasons it is so difficult is that , unlike aliens and dinosaurs , we look at human faces every day .
they are very important to how we communicate with each other .
as a result , we 're tuned in to the subtlest things that could possibly be wrong with a computer rendering , in order to believe whether these things are realistic .
and what i 'm going to do in the next five minutes is take you through a process where we tried to create a reasonably photo-realistic computer-generated face , using some computer graphics technology we 've developed , and also some collaborators at a company called image metrics .
and we 're going to try to do a photo-real face of an actress named emily o 'brien , who is right there .
and that 's actually a completely computer-generated rendering of her face .
by the end of the talk , we 're going to see it move .
the way that we did this is we tried to start with emily herself , who was gracious enough to come to our laboratory in marina del rey , and sit for a session in light stage 5 .
this is a face-scanning sphere , with 156 white leds all around that allow us to photograph her in a series of very controlled illumination conditions .
and the lighting that we use these days looks something like this .
we shoot all of these photographs in about three seconds .
and we basically capture enough information with video projector patterns that drape over the contours of her face , and different principle directions of light from the light stage , to figure out both the coarse-scale and the fine-scale detail of her face .
if we zoom in on this photograph right here , we can see it 's a really nice photograph to have of her , because she is lit from absolutely everywhere at the same time to get a nice image of her facial texture .
and in addition , we 've actually used polarizers on all the lights - just like polarized sunglasses can block the glare off of the road , polarizers can block the shine off of the skin , so we do n't get all those specular reflections to take this map .
now , if we turn the polarizers around just a little bit , we can actually bring that specular reflection of the skin back in , and you can see she looks kind of shiny and oily at this point .
if you take the difference between these two images here , you can get an image lit from the entire sphere of light of just the shine off of emily 's skin .
i do n't think any photograph like this had ever been taken before we had done this .
and this is very important light to capture , because this is the light that reflects off the first surface of the skin .
it does n't get underneath the translucent layers of the skin and blur out .
and , as a result , it 's a very good cue to the detailed shape of the skin-pore structure and all of the fine wrinkles that all of us have , the things that actually make us look like real humans .
so , if we use information that comes off of this specular reflection , we can go from a traditional face scan that might have the gross contours of the face and the basic shape , and augment it with information that puts in all of that skin pore structure and fine wrinkles .
and , even more importantly , since this is a photometric process that only takes three seconds to capture , we can shoot emily in just part of an afternoon , in many different facial poses and facial expressions .
so , here you can see her moving her eyes around , moving her mouth around .
and these we 're actually going to use to create a photo-real digital character .
if you take a look at these scans that we have of emily , you can see that the human face does an enormous amount of amazing things as it goes into different facial expressions .
you can see things . not only the face shape changes , but all sorts of different skin buckling and skin wrinkling occurs .
you can see that the skin pore structure changes enormously from stretched skin pores to the regular skin texture .
you can see the furrows in the brow and how the microstructure changes there .
you can see muscles pulling down at flesh to bring her eyebrows down .
her muscles bulging in her forehead when she winces like that .
in addition to this kind of high-resolution geometry , since it 's all captured with cameras , we 've got a great texture map to use for the face .
and by looking at how the different color channels of the illumination , the red and the green and the blue , diffuse the light differently , we can come up with a way of shading the skin on the computer .
then , instead of looking like a plaster mannequin , it actually looks like it 's made out of living human flesh .
and this is what we used to give to the company image metrics to create a rigged , digital version of emily .
we 're just seeing the coarse-scale geometry here .
but they basically created a digital puppet of her , where you can pull on these various strings , and it actually moves her face in ways that are completely consistent with the scans that we took .
and , in addition to the coarse-scale geometry , they also used all of that detail to create a set of what are called " displacement maps " that animate as well .
these are the displacement maps here .
and you can see those different wrinkles actually show up as she animates .
so the next process was then to animate her .
we actually used one of her own performances to provide the source data .
so , by analyzing this video with computer vision techniques , they were able to drive the facial rig with the computer-generated performance .
so what you 're going to see now , after this , is a completely photo-real digital face .
we can turn the volume up a little bit if that 's available .
emily : image metrics is a markerless , performance-driven animation company .
we specialize in high-quality facial animation for video games and films .
image metrics is a markerless , performance-driven animation company .
we specialize in high quality facial animation for video games and films .
paul debevec : so , if we break that down into layers , here 's that diffuse component we saw in the first slide .
here is the specular component animating .
you can see all the wrinkles happening there .
and there is the underlying wireframe mesh .
and that is emily herself .
now , where are we going with this here ?
we 've gone a little bit beyond light stage 5 . this is light stage 6 , and we 're looking at taking this technology and applying it to whole human bodies .
this is bruce lawmen , one of our researchers in the group , who graciously agreed to get captured running in the light stage .
and let 's take a look at a computer-generated version of bruce , running in a new environment .
and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is jonathan zittrain , and in my recent work i 've been a bit of a pessimist .
so i thought this morning i would try to be the optimist , and give reason to hope for the future of the internet by drawing upon its present .
now , it may seem like there is less hope today than there was before .
people are less kind . there is less trust around .
i do n't know . as a simple example , we could run a test here .
how many people have ever hitchhiked ?
i know . how many people have hitchhiked within the past 10 years ?
right . so what has changed ?
it 's not better public transportation .
so that 's one reason to think that we might be declensionists , going in the wrong direction .
but i want to give you three examples to try to say that the trend line is in fact in the other direction , and it 's the internet helping it along .
so example number one : the internet itself .
these are three of the founders of the internet .
they were actually high school classmates together at the same high school in suburban los angles in the 1960s .
you might have had a french club or a debate club .
they had a " let 's build a global network " club , and it worked out very well .
they are pictured here for their 25th anniversary newsweek retrospective on the internet .
and as you can tell , they are basically goof balls .
they had one great limitation and one great freedom as they tried to conceive of a global network .
the limitation was that they did n't have any money .
no particular amount of capital to invest , of the sort that for a physical network you might need for trucks and people and a hub to move packages around overnight .
they had none of that .
but they had an amazing freedom , which was they did n't have to make any money from it .
the internet has no business plan , never did .
no ceo , no firm responsible , singly , for building it .
instead , it 's folks getting together to do something for fun , rather than because they were told to , or because they were expecting to make a mint off of it .
that ethos led to a network architecture , a structure that was unlike other digital networks then or since .
so unusual , in fact , that it was said that it 's not clear the internet could work .
as late as 1992 , ibm was known to say you could n't possibly build a corporate network using internet protocol .
and even some internet engineers today say the whole thing is a pilot project and the jury is still out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's why the mascot of internet engineering , if it had one , is said to be the bumblebee .
because the fur-to-wingspan ratio of the bumblebee is far too large for it to be able to fly .
and yet , mysteriously , somehow the bee flies .
i 'm pleased to say that , thanks to massive government funding , about three years ago we finally figured out how bees fly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's very complicated , but it turns out they flap their wings very quickly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what is this bizarre architecture configuration that makes the network sing and be so unusual ?
well , to move data around from one place to another - again , it 's not like a package courier .
it 's more like a mosh pit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- imagine , you being part of a network where , you 're maybe at a sporting event , and you 're sitting in rows like this , and somebody asks for a beer , and it gets handed at the aisle .
and your neighborly duty is to pass the beer along , at risk to your own trousers , to get it to the destination .
no one pays you to do this .
it 's just part of your neighborly duty .
and , in a way , that 's exactly how packets move around the internet , sometimes in as many as 25 or 30 hops , with the intervening entities that are passing the data around having no particular contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver .
now , of course , in a mosh pit it 's hard to specify a destination .
you need a lot of trust , but it 's not like , " i 'm trying to get to pensacola , please . "
so the internet needs addressing and directions .
it turns out there is no one overall map of the internet .
instead , again , it is as if we are all sitting together in a theater , but we can only see amidst the fog the people immediately around us .
so what do we do to figure out who is where ?
we turn to the person on the right , and we tell that person what we see on our left , and vice versa .
and they can lather , rinse , repeat . and before you know it , you have a general sense of where everything is .
this is how internet addressing and routing actually work .
this is a system that relies on kindness and trust , which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable .
in rare but striking instances , a single lie told by just one entity in this honeycomb can lead to real trouble .
so , for example , last year , the government of pakistan asked its internet service providers there to prevent citizens of pakistan from seeing youtube .
there was a video there that the government did not like and they wanted to make sure it was blocked .
this is a common occurrence . governments everywhere are often trying to block and filter and censor content on the internet .
well this one isp in pakistan chose to effectuate the block for its subscribers in a rather unusual way .
it advertised - the way that you might be asked , if you were part of the internet , to declare what you see near you - it advertised that near it , in fact , it had suddenly awakened to find that it was youtube .
" that 's right , " it said , " i am youtube . "
which meant that packets of data from subscribers going to youtube stopped at the isp , since they thought they were already there , and the isp threw them away unopened because the point was to block it .
but it did n't stop there .
you see , that announcement went one click out , which got reverberated , one click out .
and it turns out that as you look at the postmortem of this event , you have at one moment perfectly working youtube .
then , at moment number two , you have the fake announcement go out .
and within two minutes , it reverberates around and youtube is blocked everywhere in the world .
if you were sitting in oxford , england , trying to get to youtube , your packets were going to pakistan and they were n't coming back .
now just think about that .
one of the most popular websites in the world , run by the most powerful company in the world , and there was nothing that youtube or google were particularly privileged to do about it .
and yet , somehow , within about two hours , the problem was fixed .
how did this happen ?
well , for a big clue , we turn to nanog .
the north american network operators group , a group of people who , on a beautiful day outside , enter into a windowless room , at their terminals reading email and messages in fixed proportion font , like this , and they talk about networks .
and some of them are mid-level employees at internet service providers around the world .
and here is the message where one of them says , " looks like we 've got a live one . we have a hijacking of youtube !
this is not a drill . it 's not just the cluelessness of youtube engineers . i promise .
something is up in pakistan . "
and they came together to help find the problem and fix it .
so it 's kind of like if your house catches on fire .
the bad news is there is no fire brigade .
the good news is random people apparate from nowhere , put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was trying to think of the right model to describe this form of random acts of kindness by geeky strangers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , it 's just like the hail goes out and people are ready to help .
and it turns out this model is everywhere , once you start looking for it .
example number two : wikipedia .
if a man named jimbo came up to you in 2001 and said , " i 've got a great idea ! we start with seven articles that anybody can edit anything , at any time , and we 'll get a great encyclopedia ! eh ? "
right . dumbest idea ever .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , wikipedia is an idea so profoundly stupid that even jimbo never had it .
jimbo 's idea was for nupedia .
it was going to be totally traditional . he would pay people money because he was feeling like a good guy , and the money would go to the people and they would write the articles .
the wiki was introduced so others could make suggestions on edits - as almost an afterthought , a back room .
and then it turns out the back room grew to encompass the entire project .
and today , wikipedia is so ubiquitous that you can now find it on chinese restaurant menus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i am not making this up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have a theory i can explain later .
suffice it to say for now that i prefer my wikipedia stir-fried with pimentos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but now , wikipedia does n't just spontaneously work .
how does it really work ? it turns out there is a back room that is kind of windowless , metaphorically speaking .
and there are a bunch of people who , on a sunny day , would rather be inside and monitoring this , the administrator 's notice board , itself a wiki page that anyone can edit .
and you just bring your problems to the page .
it 's reminiscent of the description of history as " one damn thing after another , " right ?
number one : " tendentious editing by user andyvphil . "
apologies , andyvphil , if you 're here today .
i 'm not taking sides .
" anon attacking me for reverting . "
here is my favorite : " a long story . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it turns out there are more people checking this page for problems and wanting to solve them than there are problems arising on the page .
and that 's what keeps wikipedia afloat .
at all times , wikipedia is approximately 45 minutes away from utter destruction . right ?
there are spambots crawling it , trying to turn every article into an ad for a rolex watch .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's this thin geeky line that keeps it going .
not because it 's a job , not because it 's a career , but because it 's a calling .
it 's something they feel impelled to do because they care about it .
they even gather together in such groups as the counter-vandalism unit - " civility , maturity , responsibility " - to just clean up the pages .
it does make you wonder if there were , for instance , a massive , extremely popular star trek convention one weekend , who would be minding the store ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what we see - -lrb- laughter -rrb- what we see in this phenomenon is something that the crazed , late traffic engineer hans monderman discovered in the netherlands , and here in south kensington , that sometimes if you remove some of the external rules and signs and everything else , you can actually end up with a safer environment in which people can function , and one in which they are more human with each other .
they 're realizing that they have to take responsibility for what they do .
and wikipedia has embraced this .
some of you may remember star wars kid , the poor teenager who filmed himself with a golf ball retriever , acting as if it were a light saber .
the film , without his permission or even knowledge at first , found its way onto the internet .
hugely viral video . extremely popular .
totally mortifying to him .
now , it being encyclopedic and all , wikipedia had to do an article about star wars kid .
every article on wikipedia has a corresponding discussion page , and on the discussion page they had extensive argument among the wikipedians as to whether to have his real name featured in the article .
you could see arguments on both sides .
here is just a snapshot of some of them .
they eventually decided - not unanimously by any means - not to include his real name , despite the fact that nearly all media reports did .
they just did n't think it was the right thing to do .
it was an act of kindness .
and to this day , the page for star wars kid has a warning right at the top that says you are not to put his real name on the page .
if you do , it will be removed immediately , removed by people who may have disagreed with the original decision , but respect the outcome and work to make it stay because they believe in something bigger than their own opinion .
as a lawyer , i 've got to say these guys are inventing the law and stare decisis and stuff like that as they go along .
now , this is n't just limited to wikipedia .
we see it on blogs all over the place .
i mean , this is a 2005 business week cover .
wow . blogs are going to change your business .
i know they look silly . and sure they look silly .
they start off on all sorts of goofy projects .
this is my favorite goofy blog : catsthatlooklikehitler.com.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you send in a picture of your cat if it looks like hitler .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i know . number four , it 's like , can you imagine coming home to that cat everyday ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then , you can see the same kind of whimsy applied to people .
so this is a blog devoted to unfortunate portraiture .
this one says , " bucolic meadow with split-rail fence .
is that an animal carcass behind her ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're like , " you know ? i think that 's an animal carcass behind her . "
and it 's one after the other .
but then you hit this one . image removed at request of owner .
that 's it . image removed at request of owner .
it turns out that somebody lampooned here wrote to the snarky guy that does the site , not with a legal threat , not with an offer of payment , but just said , " hey , would you mind ? "
the person said , " no , that 's fine . "
i believe we can build architectures online to make such human requests that much easier to do , to make it possible for all of us to see that the data we encounter online is just stuff on which to click and paste and copy and forward that actually represents human emotion and endeavor and impact , and to be able to have an ethical moment where we decide how we want to treat it .
i even think it can go into the real world .
we can end up , as we get in a world with more censors - everywhere there is something filming you , maybe putting it online - to be able to have a little clip you could wear that says , " you know , i 'd rather not . "
and then have technology that the person taking the photo will know later , this person requested to be contacted before this goes anywhere big , if you do n't mind .
and that person taking the photo can make a decision about how and whether to respect it .
in the real world , we see filtering of this sort taking place in pakistan .
and we now have means that we can build , like this system , so that people can report the filtering as they encounter it .
and it 's no longer just a " i do n't know . i could n't get there . i guess i 'll move on , " but suddenly a collective consciousness about what is blocked and censored where online .
in fact , talk about technology imitating life imitating tech , or maybe it 's the other way around .
an nyu researcher here took little cardboard robots with smiley faces on them , and a motor that just drove them forward and a flag sticking out the back with a desired destination .
it said , " can you help me get there ? "
released it on the streets of manhattan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they 'll fund anything these days .
here is the chart of over 43 people helping to steer the robot that could not steer and get it on its way , from one corner from one corner of washington square park to another .
that leads to example number three : hitchhiking .
i 'm not so sure hitchhiking is dead .
why ? there is the craigslist rideshare board .
if it were called the craigslist hitchhiking board , tumbleweeds would be blowing through it .
but it 's the rideshare board , and it 's basically the same thing .
now why are people using it ?
i do n't know . maybe they think that , uh , killers do n't plan ahead ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no . i think the actual answer is that once you reframe it , once you get out of one set of stale expectations from a failed project that had its day , but now , for whatever reason , is tarnished , you can actually rekindle the kind of human kindness and sharing that something like this on craigslist represents .
and then you can highlight it into something like , yes , couchsurfing.org.
couchsurfing : one guy 's idea to , at last , put together people who are going somewhere far away and would like to sleep on a stranger 's couch for free , with people who live far away , and would like someone they do n't know to sleep on their couch for free .
it 's a brilliant idea .
it 's a bee that , yes , flies .
amazing how many successful couch surfings there have been .
and if you 're wondering , no , there have been no known fatalities associated with couchsurfing .
although , to be sure , the reputation system , at the moment , works that you leave your report after the couch surfing experience , so there may be some selection bias there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , my urging , my thought , is that the internet is n't just a pile of information .
it 's not a noun . it 's a verb .
and when you go on it , if you listen and see carefully and closely enough , what you will discover is that that information is saying something to you .
what it 's saying to you is what we heard yesterday , demosthenes was saying to us .
it 's saying , " let 's march . " thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm speaking about compassion from an islamic point of view , and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion .
the truth of the matter is otherwise .
our holy book , the koran , consists of 114 chapters , and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala , the saying of " in the name of god , the all compassionate , the all merciful , " or , as sir richard burton - not the richard burton who was married to elizabeth taylor , but the sir richard burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature - translates it . " in the name of god , the compassionating , the compassionate . "
and in a saying of the koran , which to muslims is god speaking to humanity , god says to his prophet muhammad - whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets , beginning with adam , including noah , including moses , including abraham , including jesus christ , and ending with muhammad - that , " we have not sent you , o muhammad , except as a ' rahmah , ' except as a source of compassion to humanity . "
for us human beings , and certainly for us as muslims , whose mission , and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet .
and the prophet , in one of his sayings , said , " adorn yourselves with the attributes of god . "
and because god himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion - in fact , the koran says that " god decreed upon himself compassion , " or , " reigned himself in by compassion " - therefore , our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion , activators of compassion , actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion .
that is all well and good , but where do we go wrong , and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world ?
for the answer to this , we turn to our spiritual path .
in every religious tradition , there is the outer path and the inner path , or the exoteric path and the esoteric path .
the esoteric path of islam is more popularly known as sufism , or " tasawwuf " in arabic .
and these doctors or these masters , these spiritual masters of the sufi tradition , refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies .
in one of the battles that the prophet waged , he told his followers , " we are returning from the lesser war to the greater war , to the greater battle . "
and they said , " messenger of god , we are battle-weary .
how can we go to a greater battle ? "
he said , " that is the battle of the self , the battle of the ego . "
the sources of human problems have to do with egotism , " i. "
the famous sufi master rumi , who is very well known to most of you , has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend , and he knocks on the door , and a voice answers , " who 's there ? "
" it 's me , " or , more grammatically correctly , " it is i , " the voice says , " go away . "
after many years of training , of disciplining , of search and struggle , he comes back .
with much greater humility , he knocks again on the door .
the voice asks , " who is there ? "
he said , " it is you , o heartbreaker . "
the door swings open , and the voice says , " come in , for there is no room in this house for two i 's , " - two capital i 's , not these eyes - " for two egos . "
and rumi 's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path .
in the presence of god , there is no room for more than one " i , " and that is the " i " of divinity .
in a teaching - called a " hadith qudsi " in our tradition - god says that , " my servant , " or " my creature , my human creature , does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what i have asked them to do . "
and those of you who are employers know exactly what i mean .
you want your employees to do what you ask them to do , and if they 've done that , then they can do extra .
but do n't ignore what you 've asked them to do .
" and , " god says , " my servant continues to get nearer to me , by doing more of what i 've asked them to do " - extra credit , we might call it - " until i love him or love her .
and when i love my servant , " god says , " i become the eyes by which he or she sees , the ears by which he or she listens , the hand by which he or she grasps , and the foot by which he or she walks , and the heart by which he or she understands . "
it is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions .
muslims regard jesus as the master of sufism , the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path .
when he says , " i am the spirit , and i am the way , " and when the prophet muhammad said , " whoever has seen me has seen god , " it is because they became so much an instrument of god , they became part of god 's team - so that god 's will was manifest through them , and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos .
compassion on earth is given , it is in us .
all we have to do is to get our egos out of the way , get our egotism out of the way .
i 'm sure , probably all of you here , or certainly the very vast majority of you , have had what you might call a spiritual experience , a moment in your lives when , for a few seconds , a minute perhaps , the boundaries of your ego dissolved .
and at that minute , you felt at one with the universe - one with that jug of water , one with every human being , one with the creator - and you felt you were in the presence of power , of awe , of the deepest love , the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives .
that is a moment which is a gift of god to us - a gift when , for a moment , he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on " i , i , i , me , me , me , " and instead , like the person in rumi 's story , we say , " oh , this is all you .
this is all you . and this is all us .
and us , and i , and us are all part of you .
o , creator ! o , the objective ! the source of our being and the end of our journey , you are also the breaker of our hearts .
you are the one whom we should all be towards , for whose purpose we live , and for whose purpose we shall die , and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to god to what extent we have been compassionate beings . "
our message today , and our purpose today , and those of you who are here today , and the purpose of this charter of compassion , is to remind .
for the koran always urges us to remember , to remind each other , because the knowledge of truth is within every human being .
we know it all .
we have access to it all .
jung may have called it " the subconscious . "
through our subconscious , in your dreams - the koran calls our state of sleep " the lesser death , " " the temporary death " - in our state of sleep we have dreams , we have visions , we travel even outside of our bodies , for many of us , and we see wonderful things .
we travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it , and beyond the limitations of time as we know it .
but all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating , the compassionate .
god , bokh , whatever name you want to call him with , allah , ram , om , whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity , it is the locus of absolute being , absolute love and mercy and compassion , and absolute knowledge and wisdom , what hindus call " satchidananda . "
the language differs , but the objective is the same .
rumi has another story about three men , a turk , an arab and - and i forget the third person , but for my sake , it could be a malay .
one is asking for angur - one is , say , an englishman - one is asking for eneb , and one is asking for grapes .
and they have a fight and an argument because - " i want grapes . " " i want eneb . " i want angur . " - not knowing that the word that they 're using refers to the same reality in different languages .
there 's only one absolute reality by definition , one absolute being by definition , because absolute is , by definition , single , and absolute and singular .
there 's this absolute concentration of being , the absolute concentration of consciousness , awareness , an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity .
and these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human .
for what defines humanity , perhaps biologically , is our physiology , but god defines humanity by our spirituality , by our nature .
and the koran says , he speaks to the angels and says , " when i have finished the formation of adam from clay , and breathed into him of my spirit , then , fall in prostration to him . "
the angels prostrate , not before the human body , but before the human soul .
why ? because the soul , the human soul , embodies a piece of the divine breath , a piece of the divine soul .
this is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image .
what is the imagery of god ?
the imagery of god is absolute being , absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love .
and therefore , for us to be human - in the greatest sense of what it means to be human , in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human - means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us , and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being , of being alive , of beingness ; the attribute of wisdom , of consciousness , of awareness ; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings .
this is what i understand from my faith tradition , and this is what i understand from my studies of other faith traditions , and this is the common platform on which we must all stand , and when we stand on this platform as such , i am convinced that we can make a wonderful world .
and i believe , personally , that we 're on the verge and that , with the presence and help of people like you here , we can bring about the prophecy of isaiah .
for he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore .
we have reached a stage in human history that we have no option : we must , we must lower our egos , control our egos - whether it is individual ego , personal ego , family ego , national ego - and let all be for the glorification of the one .
thank you , and god bless you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- just a moment ago , my daughter rebecca texted me for good luck .
her text said , " mom , you will rock . "
i love this .
getting that text was like getting a hug .
and so there you have it .
i embody the central paradox .
i 'm a woman who loves getting texts who 's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem .
actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story .
1996 , when i gave my first tedtalk , rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row .
i had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and i was about to be on the cover of wired magazine .
in those heady days , we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities .
we were exploring different aspects of ourselves .
and then we unplugged .
i was excited .
and , as a psychologist , what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves , about our identity , to live better lives in the real world .
now fast-forward to 2012 .
i 'm back here on the ted stage again .
my daughter 's 20 . she 's a college student .
she sleeps with her cellphone , so do i.
and i 've just written a new book , but this time it 's not one that will get me on the cover of wired magazine .
so what happened ?
i 'm still excited by technology , but i believe , and i 'm here to make the case , that we 're letting it take us places that we do n't want to go .
over the past 15 years , i 've studied technologies of mobile communication and i 've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people , young and old , about their plugged in lives .
and what i 've found is that our little devices , those little devices in our pockets , are so psychologically powerful that they do n't only change what we do , they change who we are .
some of the things we do now with our devices are things that , only a few years ago , we would have found odd or disturbing , but they 've quickly come to seem familiar , just how we do things .
so just to take some quick examples : people text or do email during corporate board meetings .
they text and shop and go on facebook during classes , during presentations , actually during all meetings .
people talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you 're texting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people explain to me that it 's hard , but that it can be done .
parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents ' full attention .
but then these same children deny each other their full attention .
this is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together .
and we even text at funerals .
i study this .
we remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones .
why does this matter ?
it matters to me because i think we 're setting ourselves up for trouble - trouble certainly in how we relate to each other , but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection .
we 're getting used to a new way of being alone together .
people want to be with each other , but also elsewhere - connected to all the different places they want to be .
people want to customize their lives .
they want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention .
so you want to go to that board meeting , but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you .
and some people think that 's a good thing .
but you can end up hiding from each other , even as we 're all constantly connected to each other .
a 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he does n't have colleagues anymore at work .
when he goes to work , he does n't stop by to talk to anybody , he does n't call .
and he says he does n't want to interrupt his colleagues because , he says , " they 're too busy on their email . "
but then he stops himself and he says , " you know , i 'm not telling you the truth .
i 'm the one who does n't want to be interrupted .
i think i should want to , but actually i 'd rather just do things on my blackberry . "
across the generations , i see that people ca n't get enough of each other , if and only if they can have each other at a distance , in amounts they can control .
i call it the goldilocks effect : not too close , not too far , just right .
but what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships .
an 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully , " someday , someday , but certainly not now , i 'd like to learn how to have a conversation . "
when i ask people " what 's wrong with having a conversation ? "
people say , " i 'll tell you what 's wrong with having a conversation .
it takes place in real time and you ca n't control what you 're going to say . "
so that 's the bottom line .
texting , email , posting , all of these things let us present the self as we want to be .
we get to edit , and that means we get to delete , and that means we get to retouch , the face , the voice , the flesh , the body - not too little , not too much , just right .
human relationships are rich and they 're messy and they 're demanding .
and we clean them up with technology .
and when we do , one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection .
we short-change ourselves .
and over time , we seem to forget this , or we seem to stop caring .
i was caught off guard when stephen colbert asked me a profound question , a profound question .
he said , " do n't all those little tweets , do n't all those little sips of online communication , add up to one big gulp of real conversation ? "
my answer was no , they do n't add up .
connecting in sips may work for gathering discreet bits of information , they may work for saying , " i 'm thinking about you , " or even for saying , " i love you , " - i mean , look at how i felt when i got that text from my daughter - but they do n't really work for learning about each other , for really coming to know and understand each other .
and we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves .
so a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection .
for kids growing up , that skill is the bedrock of development .
over and over i hear , " i would rather text than talk . "
and what i 'm seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation , so used to getting by with less , that they 've become almost willing to dispense with people altogether .
so for example , many people share with me this wish , that some day a more advanced version of siri , the digital assistant on apple 's iphone , will be more like a best friend , someone who will listen when others wo n't .
i believe this wish reflects a painful truth that i 've learned in the past 15 years .
that feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology .
that 's why it 's so appealing to have a facebook page or a twitter feed - so many automatic listeners .
and the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us .
we 're developing robots , they call them sociable robots , that are specifically designed to be companions - to the elderly , to our children , to us .
have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other ?
during my research i worked in nursing homes , and i brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood .
and one day i came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal .
it seemed to be looking in her eyes .
it seemed to be following the conversation .
it comforted her .
and many people found this amazing .
but that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life .
that robot put on a great show .
and we 're vulnerable .
people experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing .
so during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy , i was thinking , " that robot ca n't empathize .
it does n't face death .
it does n't know life . "
and as that woman took comfort in her robot companion , i did n't find it amazing ; i found it one of the most wrenching , complicated moments in my 15 years of work .
but when i stepped back , i felt myself at the cold , hard center of a perfect storm .
we expect more from technology and less from each other .
and i ask myself , " why have things come to this ? "
and i believe it 's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable .
and we are vulnerable .
we 're lonely , but we 're afraid of intimacy .
and so from social networks to sociable robots , we 're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship .
we turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control .
but we 're not so comfortable .
we are not so much in control .
these days , those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies .
one , that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be ; two , that we will always be heard ; and three , that we will never have to be alone .
and that third idea , that we will never have to be alone , is central to changing our psyches .
because the moment that people are alone , even for a few seconds , they become anxious , they panic , they fidget , they reach for a device .
just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light .
being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved .
and so people try to solve it by connecting .
but here , connection is more like a symptom than a cure .
it expresses , but it does n't solve , an underlying problem .
but more than a symptom , constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves .
it 's shaping a new way of being .
the best way to describe it is , i share therefore i am .
we use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we 're having them .
so before it was : i have a feeling , i want to make a call .
now it 's : i want to have a feeling , i need to send a text .
the problem with this new regime of " i share therefore i am " is that , if we do n't have connection , we do n't feel like ourselves .
we almost do n't feel ourselves .
so what do we do ? we connect more and more .
but in the process , we set ourselves up to be isolated .
how do you get from connection to isolation ?
you end up isolated if you do n't cultivate the capacity for solitude , the ability to be separate , to gather yourself .
solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments .
when we do n't have the capacity for solitude , we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive .
when this happens , we 're not able to appreciate who they are .
it 's as though we 're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self .
we slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone .
but we 're at risk , because actually it 's the opposite that 's true .
if we 're not able to be alone , we 're going to be more lonely .
and if we do n't teach our children to be alone , they 're only going to know how to be lonely .
when i spoke at ted in 1996 , reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities , i said , " those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection . "
and that 's what i 'm calling for here , now : reflection and , more than that , a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us , what it might be costing us .
we 're smitten with technology .
and we 're afraid , like young lovers , that too much talking might spoil the romance .
but it 's time to talk .
we grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up .
but it 's not , it 's early days .
there 's plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it , how we build it .
i 'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices , just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them , with each other and with ourselves .
i see some first steps .
start thinking of solitude as a good thing .
make room for it .
find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children .
create sacred spaces at home - the kitchen , the dining room - and reclaim them for conversation .
do the same thing at work .
at work , we 're so busy communicating that we often do n't have time to think , we do n't have time to talk , about the things that really matter .
change that .
most important , we all really need to listen to each other , including to the boring bits .
because it 's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other .
technology is making a bid to redefine human connection - how we care for each other , how we care for ourselves - but it 's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction .
i 'm optimistic .
we have everything we need to start .
we have each other .
and we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability .
that we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler .
so in my work , i hear that life is hard , relationships are filled with risk .
and then there 's technology - simpler , hopeful , optimistic , ever-young .
it 's like calling in the cavalry .
an ad campaign promises that online and with avatars , you can " finally , love your friends love your body , love your life , online and with avatars . "
we 're drawn to virtual romance , to computer games that seem like worlds , to the idea that robots , robots , will someday be our true companions .
we spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends .
but our fantasies of substitution have cost us .
now we all need to focus on the many , many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives , our own bodies , our own communities , our own politics , our own planet .
they need us .
let 's talk about how we can use digital technology , the technology of our dreams , to make this life the life we can love .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we always hear that texting is a scourge .
the idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy , or at least writing ability , among young people in the united states and now the whole world today .
the fact of the matter is that it just is n't true , and it 's easy to think that it is true , but in order to see it in another way , in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing , not just energetic , but a miraculous thing , a kind of emergent complexity that we 're seeing happening right now , we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is , in which case , one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all .
what do i mean by that ?
basically , if we think about language , language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years , at least 80,000 years , and what it arose as is speech . people talked .
that 's what we 're probably genetically specified for .
that 's how we use language most .
writing is something that came along much later , and as we saw in the last talk , there 's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened , but according to traditional estimates , if humanity had existed for 24 hours , then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m.
that 's how much of a latterly thing writing is .
so first there 's speech , and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice .
now do n't get me wrong , writing has certain advantages .
when you write , because it 's a conscious process , because you can look backwards , you can do things with language that are much less likely if you 're just talking .
for example , imagine a passage from edward gibbon 's " the decline and fall of the roman empire : " " the whole engagement lasted above twelve hours , till the graduate retreat of the persians was changed into a disorderly flight , of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the surenas himself . "
that 's beautiful , but let 's face it , nobody talks that way .
or at least , they should n't if they 're interested in reproducing . that - -lrb- laughter -rrb- is not the way any human being speaks casually .
casual speech is something quite different .
linguists have actually shown that when we 're speaking casually in an unmonitored way , we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words .
you 'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking .
that 's what speech is like .
speech is much looser . it 's much more telegraphic .
it 's much less reflective - very different from writing .
so we naturally tend to think , because we see language written so often , that that 's what language is , but actually what language is , is speech . they are two things .
now of course , as history has gone by , it 's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing .
so , for example , in a distant era now , it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing .
so i mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat , and they go , " ahem , ladies and gentlemen , " and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech .
it 's formal . it uses long sentences like this gibbon one .
it 's basically talking like you write , and so , for example , we 're thinking so much these days about lincoln because of the movie .
the gettysburg address was not the main meal of that event .
for two hours before that , edward everett spoke on a topic that , frankly , can not engage us today and barely did then .
the point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing .
ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours .
it was perfectly natural .
that 's what people did then , speaking like writing .
well , if you can speak like writing , then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak .
the problem was just that in the material , mechanical sense , that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials do n't lend themselves to it .
it 's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand , and then communication is limited .
on a manual typewriter it was very difficult , and even when we had electric typewriters , or then computer keyboards , the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech , more or less , you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly .
once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message , then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak .
and that 's where texting comes in .
and so , texting is very loose in its structure .
no one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts , but then again , do you think about those things when you talk ?
no , and so therefore why would you when you were texting ?
what texting is , despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing , is fingered speech . that 's what texting is .
now we can write the way we talk .
and it 's a very interesting thing , but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline .
we see this general bagginess of the structure , the lack of concern with rules and the way that we 're used to learning on the blackboard , and so we think that something has gone wrong .
it 's a very natural sense .
but the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity .
that 's what we 're seeing in this fingered speech .
and in order to understand it , what we want to see is the way , in this new kind of language , there is new structure coming up .
and so , for example , there is in texting a convention , which is lol .
now lol , we generally think of as meaning " laughing out loud . "
and of course , theoretically , it does , and if you look at older texts , then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud .
but if you text now , or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it 's become , you 'll notice that lol does not mean laughing out loud anymore .
it 's evolved into something that is much subtler .
this is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago .
" i love the font you 're using , btw . "
julie : " lol thanks gmail is being slow right now " now if you think about it , that 's not funny .
no one 's laughing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and yet , there it is , so you assume there 's been some kind of hiccup .
then susan says " lol , i know , " again more guffawing than we 're used to when you 're talking about these inconveniences .
so julie says , " i just sent you an email . "
susan : " lol , i see it . "
very funny people , if that 's what lol means .
this julie says , " so what 's up ? "
susan : " lol , i have to write a 10 page paper . "
she 's not amused . let 's think about it .
lol is being used in a very particular way .
it 's a marker of empathy . it 's a marker of accommodation .
we linguists call things like that pragmatic particles .
any spoken language that 's used by real people has them .
if you happen to speak japanese , think about that little word " ne " that you use at the end of a lot of sentences .
if you listen to the way black youth today speak , think about the use of the word " yo . "
whole dissertations could be written about it , and probably are being written about it .
a pragmatic particle , that 's what lol has gradually become .
it 's a way of using the language between actual people .
another example is " slash . "
now , we can use slash in the way that we 're used to , along the lines of , " we 're going to have a party-slash-networking session . "
that 's kind of like what we 're at .
slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today .
it 's used to change the scene .
so for example , this sally person says , " so i need to find people to chill with " and jake says , " haha " - you could write a dissertation about " haha " too , but we do n't have time for that - " haha so you 're going by yourself ? why ? "
sally : " for this summer program at nyu . "
jake : " haha . slash i 'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye . "
the slash is interesting .
i do n't really even know what jake is talking about after that , but you notice that he 's changing the topic .
now that seems kind of mundane , but think about how in real life , if we 're having a conversation and we want to change the topic , there are ways of doing it gracefully .
you do n't just zip right into it .
you 'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance , or you 'll say something like , " hmm , makes you think - " when it really did n't , but what you 're really - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - what you 're really trying to do is change the topic .
you ca n't do that while you 're texting , and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium .
all spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker - or two , or three .
texting has developed one from this slash .
so we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing , and yet it 's easy to think , well , something is still wrong .
there 's a lack of structure of some sort .
it 's not as sophisticated as the language of the wall street journal .
well , the fact of the matter is , look at this person in 1956 , and this is when texting does n't exist , " i love lucy " is still on the air .
" many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table , can not write grammatically - " we 've heard that sort of thing before , not just in 1956 . 1917 , connecticut schoolteacher .
1917 . this is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on " downton abbey " are articulate , or something like that .
so , " from every college in the country goes up the cry , ' our freshmen ca n't spell , ca n't punctuate . " ' and so on . you can go even further back than this .
it 's the president of harvard . it 's 1871 .
there 's no electricity . people have three names .
" bad spelling , incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing . "
and he 's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies .
you can go even further back .
1841 , some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time " noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original " blah blah blah blah blah .
or you can go all the way back to 63 a.d. - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and there 's this poor man who does n't like the way people are speaking latin .
as it happens , he was writing about what had become french .
and so , there are always - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning .
and so , the way i 'm thinking of texting these days is that what we 're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing , which they 're using alongside their ordinary writing skills , and that means that they 're able to do two things .
increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial .
that 's also true of being bidialectal .
that 's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing .
and so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today , not consciously , of course , but it 's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire .
it 's very simple .
if somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993 , the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of " love story , " but they would understand what was on that message board .
take that person from 1993 - not that long ago , this is " bill and ted 's excellent adventure " - those people .
take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today .
often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they 're batting around so in closing , if i could go into the future , if i could go into 2033 , the first thing i would ask is whether david simon had done a sequel to " the wire . " i would want to know .
and - i really would ask that - and then i 'd want to know actually what was going on on " downton abbey . "
that 'd be the second thing .
and then the third thing would be , please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls , because i would want to know where this language had developed since our times , and ideally i would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- is e.t. out there ?
well , i work at the seti institute .
that 's almost my name . seti : search for extraterrestrial intelligence .
in other words , i look for aliens , and when i tell people that at a cocktail party , they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face .
i try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate .
now , a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic , ridiculous , maybe even hopeless , but i just want to talk to you a little bit about why i think that the job i have is actually a privilege , okay , and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work , if that 's what you call it .
this thing - whoops , can we go back ?
hello , come in , earth .
there we go . all right .
this is the owens valley radio observatory behind the sierra nevadas , and in 1968 , i was working there collecting data for my thesis .
now , it 's kinda lonely , it 's kinda tedious , just collecting data , so i would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself , because , you know , at night , i would be the only hominid within about 30 miles .
so here are pictures of myself .
the observatory had just acquired a new book , written by a russian cosmologist by the name of joseph shklovsky , and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known cornell astronomer by the name of carl sagan .
and i remember reading that book , and at 3 in the morning i was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas i was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate , to send bits of information from one star system to another .
now , at 3 o 'clock in the morning when you 're all alone , have n't had much sleep , that was a very romantic idea , but it was that idea - the fact that you could in fact prove that there 's somebody out there just using this same technology - that appealed to me so much that 20 years later i took a job at the seti institute . now , i have to say that my memory is notoriously porous , and i 've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story , or i was just , you know , misremembering something , but i recently just blew up this old negative of mine ,
and sure enough , there you can see the shklovsky and sagan book underneath that analog calculating device .
so it was true .
all right . now , the idea for doing this , it was n't very old at the time that i made that photo .
the idea dates from 1960 , when a young astronomer by the name of frank drake used this antenna in west virginia , pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on e.t.
now , frank did n't hear anything .
actually he did , but it turned out to be the u.s. air force , which does n't count as extraterrestrial intelligence .
but drake 's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing - and i 'll get back to that - and on the basis of this experiment , which did n't succeed , we have been doing seti ever since , not continuously , but ever since .
we still have n't heard anything .
we still have n't heard anything .
in fact , we do n't know about any life beyond earth , but i 'm going to suggest to you that that 's going to change rather soon , and part of the reason , in fact , the majority of the reason why i think that 's going to change is that the equipment 's getting better .
this is the allen telescope array , about 350 miles from whatever seat you 're in right now .
this is something that we 're using today to search for e.t. , and the electronics have gotten very much better too .
this is frank drake 's electronics in 1960 .
this is the allen telescope array electronics today .
some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960 , 100 trillion times better .
that 's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card , okay ?
but something that 's not appreciated by the public is , in fact , that the experiment continues to get better , and , consequently , tends to get faster .
this is a little plot , and every time you show a plot , you lose 10 percent of the audience .
i have 12 of these . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i plotted here is just some metric that shows how fast we 're searching .
in other words , we 're looking for a needle in a haystack .
we know how big the haystack is . it 's the galaxy .
but we 're going through the haystack no longer with a teaspoon but with a skip loader , because of this increase in speed .
in fact , those of you who are still conscious and mathematically competent , will note that this is a semi-log plot .
in other words , the rate of increase is exponential .
it 's exponentially improving . now , exponential is an overworked word . you hear it on the media all the time .
they do n't really know what exponential means , but this is exponential .
in fact , it 's doubling every 18 months , and , of course , every card-carrying member of the digerati knows that that 's moore 's law .
so this means that over the course of the next two dozen years , we 'll be able to look at a million star systems , a million star systems , looking for signals that would prove somebody 's out there .
well , a million star systems , is that interesting ?
i mean , how many of those star systems have planets ?
and the facts are , we did n't know the answer to that even as recently as 15 years ago , and in fact , we really did n't know it even as recently as six months ago .
but now we do . recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets , and more than one .
they 're like , you know , kittens . you get a litter .
you do n't get one kitten . you get a bunch .
so in fact , this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy , just in our galaxy , by the way , and i remind the non-astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of 100 billion that we can see with our telescopes .
that 's a lot of real estate , but of course , most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless , like , you know , mercury , or neptune .
neptune 's probably not very big in your life .
so the question is , what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life ?
we do n't know the answer to that either , but we will learn that answer this year , thanks to nasa 's kepler space telescope , and in fact , the smart money , which is to say the people who work on this project , the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand , one in a hundred , something like that .
well , even taking the pessimistic estimate , that it 's one in a thousand , that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the earth just in our own galaxy .
okay , now i 've given you a lot of numbers here , but they 're mostly big numbers , okay , so , you know , keep that in mind . there 's plenty of real estate , plenty of real estate in the universe , and if we 're the only bit of real estate in which there 's some interesting occupants , that makes you a miracle , and i know you like to think you 're a miracle , but if you do science , you learn rather quickly that every time you think you 're a miracle , you 're wrong , so probably not the case .
all right , so the bottom line is this : because of the increase in speed , and because of the vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos , i figure we 're going to pick up a signal within two dozen years .
and i feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you : either we 're going to find e.t. in the next two dozen years , or i 'll buy you a cup of coffee .
so that 's not so bad . i mean , even with two dozen years , you open up your browser and there 's news of a signal , or you get a cup of coffee .
now , let me tell you about some aspect of this that people do n't think about , and that is , what happens ? suppose that what i say is true .
i mean , who knows , but suppose it happens .
suppose some time in the next two dozen years we pick up a faint line that tells us we have some cosmic company .
what is the effect ? what 's the consequence ?
now , i might be at ground zero for this .
i happen to know what the consequence for me would be , because we 've had false alarms . this is 1997 , and this is a photo i made at about 3 o 'clock in the morning in mountain view here , when we were watching the computer monitors because we had picked up a signal that we thought , " this is the real deal . " all right ?
and i kept waiting for the men in black to show up . right ?
i kept waiting for - i kept waiting for my mom to call , somebody to call , the government to call . nobody called .
nobody called . i was so nervous that i could n't sit down . i just wandered around taking photos like this one , just for something to do .
well , at 9:30 in the morning , with my head down on my desk because i obviously had n't slept all night , the phone rings and it 's the new york times .
and i think there 's a lesson in that , and that lesson is that if we pick up a signal , the media , the media will be on it faster than a weasel on ball bearings . it 's going to be fast .
you can be sure of that . no secrecy .
that 's what happens to me . it kind of ruins my whole week , because whatever i 've got planned that week is kind of out the window .
but what about you ? what 's it going to do to you ?
and the answer is that we do n't know the answer .
we do n't know what that 's going to do to you , not in the long term , and not even very much in the short term .
i mean , that would be a bit like asking chris columbus in 1491 , " hey chris , you know , what happens if it turns out that there 's a continent between here and japan , where you 're sailing to , what will be the consequences for humanity if that turns out to be the case ? "
and i think chris would probably offer you some answer that you might not have understood , but it probably would n't have been right , and i think that to predict what finding e.t. 's going to mean , we ca n't predict that either .
but here are a couple things i can say .
to begin with , it 's going to be a society that 's way in advance of our own .
you 're not going to hear from alien neanderthals .
they 're not building transmitters .
they 're going to be ahead of us , maybe by a few thousand years , maybe by a few millions years , but substantially ahead of us , and that means , if you can understand anything that they 're going to say , then you might be able to short-circuit history by getting information from a society that 's way beyond our own .
now , you might find that a bit hyperbolic , and maybe it is , but nonetheless , it 's conceivable that this will happen , and , you know , you could consider this like , i do n't know , giving julius caesar english lessons and the key to the library of congress .
it would change his day , all right ?
that 's one thing . another thing that 's for sure going to happen is that it will calibrate us .
we will know that we 're not that miracle , right , that we 're just another duck in a row , we 're not the only kids on the block , and i think that that 's philosophically a very profound thing to learn .
we 're not a miracle , okay ?
the third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague , but i think interesting and important , and that is , if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society , because they will be , that will tell you something about our own possibilities , that we 're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction .
because they survived their technology , we could do it too .
normally when you look out into the universe , you 're looking back in time . all right ?
that 's interesting to cosmologists .
but in this sense , you actually can look into the future , hazily , but you can look into the future .
so those are all the sorts of things that would come from a detection .
now , let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime , and that is , seti , i think , is important , because it 's exploration , and it 's not only exploration , it 's comprehensible exploration .
now , i gotta tell you , i 'm always reading books about explorers . i find exploration very interesting , arctic exploration , you know , people like magellan , amundsen , shackleton , you see franklin down there , scott , all these guys . it 's really nifty , exploration .
and they 're just doing it because they want to explore , and you might say , " oh , that 's kind of a frivolous opportunity , " but that 's not frivolous . that 's not a frivolous activity , because , i mean , think of ants .
you know , most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line , but there are a couple of ants , maybe one percent of those ants , that are what they call pioneer ants , and they 're the ones that wander off .
they 're the ones you find on the kitchen countertop .
you gotta get them with your thumb before they find the sugar or something .
but those ants , even though most of them get wiped out , those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive . so exploration is important .
i also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what i think is a critical lack in our society , and that is the lack of science literacy , the lack of the ability to even understand science .
now , look , a lot has been written about the deplorable state of science literacy in this country .
you 've heard about it .
well , here 's one example , in fact .
polls taken , this poll was taken 10 years ago .
it shows like roughly one third of the public thinks that aliens are not only out there , we 're looking for them out there , but they 're here , right ?
sailing the skies in their saucers and occasionally abducting people for experiments their parents would n't approve of .
well , that would be interesting if it was true , and job security for me , but i do n't think the evidence is very good . that 's more , you know , sad than significant .
but there are other things that people believe that are significant , like the efficacy of homeopathy , or that evolution is just , you know , sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs , or , you know , evolution , all that sort of thing , or global warming .
these sorts of ideas do n't really have any validity , that you ca n't trust the scientists .
now , we 've got to solve that problem , because that 's a critically important problem , and you might say , " well , okay , how are we gonna solve that problem with seti ? "
well , let me suggest to you that seti obviously ca n't solve the problem , but it can address the problem .
it can address the problem by getting young people interested in science . look , science is hard , it has a reputation of being hard , and the facts are , it is hard , and that 's the result of 400 years of science , right ?
i mean , in the 18th century , in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library , if you could find the library , right ?
in the 19th century , if you had a basement lab , you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home . right ? because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up .
now , that 's not true anymore .
today , you 've got to spend years in grad school and post-doc positions just to figure out what the important questions are .
it 's hard . there 's no doubt about it .
and in fact , here 's an example : the higgs boson , finding the higgs boson .
ask the next 10 people you see on the streets , " hey , do you think it 's worthwhile to spend billions of swiss francs looking for the higgs boson ? "
and i bet the answer you 're going to get , is , " well , i do n't know what the higgs boson is , and i do n't know if it 's important . "
and probably most of the people would n't even know the value of a swiss franc , okay ?
and yet we 're spending billions of swiss francs on this problem .
okay ? so that does n't get people interested in science because they ca n't comprehend what it 's about .
seti , on the other hand , is really simple .
we 're going to use these big antennas and we 're going to try to eavesdrop on signals . everybody can understand that .
yes , technologically , it 's very sophisticated , but everybody gets the idea .
so that 's one thing . the other thing is , it 's exciting science .
it 's exciting because we 're naturally interested in other intelligent beings , and i think that 's part of our hardwiring .
i mean , we 're hardwired to be interested in beings that might be , if you will , competitors , or if you 're the romantic sort , possibly even mates . okay ?
i mean , this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth . right ?
we 're interested in things that have big teeth , and you can see the evolutionary value of that , and you can also see the practical consequences by watching animal planet .
you notice they make very few programs about gerbils .
it 's mostly about things that have big teeth .
okay , so we 're interested in these sorts of things .
and not just us . it 's also kids .
this allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science , because seti involves all kinds of science , obviously biology , obviously astronomy , but also geology , also chemistry , various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of , " we 're looking for e.t. "
so to me this is interesting and important , and in fact , it 's my policy , even though i give a lot of talks to adults , you give talks to adults , and two days later they 're back where they were .
but if you give talks to kids , you know , one in 50 of them , some light bulb goes off , and they think , " gee , i 'd never thought of that , " and then they go , you know , read a book or a magazine or whatever .
they get interested in something .
now it 's my theory , supported only by anecdotal , personal anecdotal evidence , but nonetheless , that kids get interested in something between the ages of eight and 11 . you 've got to get them there .
so , all right , i give talks to adults , that 's fine , but i try and make 10 percent of the talks that i give , i try and make those for kids .
i remember when a guy came to our high school , actually , it was actually my junior high school . i was in sixth grade .
and he gave some talk . all i remember from it was one word : electronics .
it was like dustin hoffman in " the graduate , " right , when he said " plastics , " whatever that means , plastics .
all right , so the guy said electronics . i do n't remember anything else . in fact , i do n't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year , but i remember electronics .
and so i got interested in electronics , and you know , i studied to get my ham license . i was wiring up stuff .
here i am at about 15 or something , doing that sort of stuff .
okay ? that had a big effect on me .
so that 's my point , that you can have a big effect on these kids .
in fact , this reminds me , i do n't know , a couple years ago i gave a talk at a school in palo alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk .
i had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour .
eleven-year-olds , they 're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes , and i started , there was a white board behind me , and i started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it , and i said , " all right , now look , this is the number of stars in the visible universe , and this number is so big there 's not even a name for it . "
and one of these kids shot up his hand , and he said , " well , actually there is a name for it .
it 's a sextra-quadra-hexa-something or other . " right ?
now , that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude , but there was no doubt about it , these kids were smart .
okay ? so i stopped giving the lecture .
all they wanted to do was ask questions .
in fact , my last comments to these kids , at the end i said , " you know , you kids are smarter than the people i work with . " now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- they did n't even care about that .
what they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let me just say , look , my job is a privilege because we 're in a special time .
previous generations could n't do this experiment at all .
in another generation down the line , i think we will have succeeded .
so to me , it is a privilege , and when i look in the mirror , the facts are that i really do n't see myself .
what i see is the generation behind me .
these are some kids from the huff school , fourth graders .
i talked there , what , two weeks ago , something like that .
i think that if you can instill some interest in science and how it works , well , that 's a payoff beyond easy measure . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's time to start designing for our ears .
architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these .
they use these to design with and they design for them , which is why we end up sitting in restaurants that look like this - -lrb- loud crowd noise -rrb- - and sound like this , shouting from a foot away to try and be heard by our dinner companion , or why we get on airplanes - -lrb- flight attendant announcements -rrb- - which cost 200 million pounds , with somebody talking through an old-fashioned telephone handset on a cheap stereo system , making us jump out of our skins .
we 're designing environments that make us crazy . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's not just our quality of life which suffers .
it 's our health , our social behavior , and our productivity as well .
how does this work ? well , two ways .
first of all , ambience . i have a whole tedtalk about this .
sound affects us physiologically , psychologically , cognitively and behaviorally all the time .
the sound around us is affecting us even though we 're not conscious of it .
there 's a second way though , as well .
that 's interference . communication requires sending and receiving , and i have another whole tedtalk about the importance of conscious listening , but i can send as well as i like , and you can be brilliant conscious listeners .
if the space i 'm sending it in is not effective , that communication ca n't happen .
spaces tend to include noise and acoustics .
a room like this has acoustics , this one very good acoustics .
many rooms are not so good .
let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which i think we all care about : health and education .
-lrb- hospital noises -rrb- when i was visiting my terminally ill father in a hospital , i was asking myself , how does anybody get well in a place that sounds like this ?
hospital sound is getting worse all the time .
noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years , and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there .
i think we would like for dispensing errors to be zero , would n't we ? and yet , as noise levels go up , so do the errors in dispensing made by the staff in hospitals .
most of all , though , it affects the patients , and that could be you , it could be me .
sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery .
it 's when we regenerate , when we rebuild ourselves , and with threatening noise like this going on , your body , even if you are able to sleep , your body is telling you , " i 'm under threat . this is dangerous . "
and the quality of sleep is degraded , and so is our recovery .
there are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care .
this is an area i intend to take on this year .
education .
when i see a classroom that looks like this , can you imagine how this sounds ?
i am forced to ask myself a question .
-lrb- " do architects have ears ? " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , that 's a little unfair . some of my best friends are architects . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they definitely do have ears .
but i think sometimes they do n't use them when they 're designing buildings . here 's a case in point .
this is a 32-million-pound flagship academy school which was built quite recently in the u.k. and designed by one of britain 's top architects .
unfortunately , it was designed like a corporate headquarters , with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all .
the children could n't hear their teachers .
they had to go back in and spend 600,000 pounds putting the walls in . let 's stop this madness of open plan classrooms right now , please .
it 's not just these modern buildings which suffer .
old-fashioned classrooms suffer too .
a study in florida just a few years ago found that if you 're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom , row four , speech intelligibility is just 50 percent .
children are losing one word in two .
now that does n't mean they only get half their education , but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what 's going on .
this is affected massively by reverberation time , how reverberant a room is .
in a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds , which is pretty common , this is what it sounds like .
-lrb- inaudible echoing voice -rrb- not so good , is it ?
if you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments , sound absorbing materials and so forth , this is what you get .
voice : in language , infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters . in arithmetic , infinitely many numbers can be composed from just a few digits with the help of the simple zero .
julian treasure : what a difference .
now that education you would receive , and thanks to the british acoustician adrian james for those simulations . the signal was the same , the background noise was the same .
all that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples .
if education can be likened to watering a garden , which is a fair metaphor , sadly , much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers , especially for some groups , for example , those with hearing impairment .
now that 's not just deaf children . that could be any child who 's got a cold , glue ear , an ear infection , even hay fever . on a given day , one in eight children fall into that group , on any given day .
then you have children for whom english is a second language , or whatever they 're being taught in is a second language .
in the u.k. , that 's more than 10 percent of the school population .
and finally , after susan cain 's wonderful tedtalk in february , we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they 're in a noisy environment doing group work .
add those up . that is a lot of children who are not receiving their education properly .
it 's not just the children who are affected , though .
-lrb- noisy conversation -rrb- this study in germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels .
i have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound , and teachers are not just raising their voices .
this chart maps the teacher 's heart rate against the noise level .
noise goes up , heart rate goes up .
that is not good for you .
in fact , 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that , that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction .
to you and me , that 's a heart attack .
it may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day .
what does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time ?
two and a half thousand pounds .
and the essex study which has just been done in the u.k. , which incidentally showed that when you do this , you do not just make a room that 's suitable for hearing-impaired children , you make a room where behavior improves , and results improve significantly , this found that sending a child out of area to a school that does have such a room , if you do n't have one , costs 90,000 pounds a year .
i think the economics are pretty clear on this .
i 'm glad that debate is happening on this .
i just moderated a major conference in london a few weeks ago called sound education , which brought together top acousticians , government people , teachers , and so forth .
we 're at last starting to debate this issue , and the benefits that are available for designing for the ears in education , unbelievable .
out of that conference , incidentally , also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they 're having to work at home , for example , in a noisy kitchen .
and that 's free out of that conference .
let 's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities .
we have urban planners .
where are the urban sound planners ?
i do n't know of one in the world , and the opportunity is there to transform our experience in our cities .
the world health organization estimates that a quarter of europe 's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities . we can do better than that .
and in our offices , we spend a lot of time at work .
where are the office sound planners ?
people who say , do n't sit that team next to this team , because they like noise and they need quiet .
or who say , do n't spend all your budget on a huge screen in the conference room , and then place one tiny microphone in the middle of a table for 30 people . -lrb- laughter -rrb- if you can hear me , you can understand me without seeing me . if you can see me without hearing me , that does not work .
so office sound is a huge area , and incidentally , noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful , less enjoy their teamwork , and less productive at work .
finally , we have homes . we use interior designers .
where are the interior sound designers ?
hey , let 's all be interior sound designers , take on listening to our rooms and designing sound that 's effective and appropriate .
my friend richard mazuch , an architect in london , coined the phrase " invisible architecture . "
i love that phrase .
it 's about designing , not appearance , but experience , so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look , that are fit for purpose , that improve our quality of life , our health and well being , our social behavior and our productivity .
it 's time to start designing for the ears .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- what technology can we really apply to reducing global poverty ?
and what i found was quite surprising .
we started looking at things like death rates in the 20th century , and how they 'd been improved , and very simple things turned out .
you 'd think maybe antibiotics made more difference than clean water , but it 's actually the opposite .
and so very simple things - off-the-shelf technologies that we could easily find on the then-early web - would clearly make a huge difference to that problem .
but i also , in looking at more powerful technologies and nanotechnology and genetic engineering and other new emerging kind of digital technologies , became very concerned about the potential for abuse .
if you think about it , in history , a long , long time ago we dealt with the problem of an individual abusing another individual .
we came up with something - the ten commandments : thou shalt not kill .
that 's a , kind of a one-on-one thing .
we organized into cities . we had many people .
and to keep the many from tyrannizing the one , we came up with concepts like individual liberty .
and then , to have to deal with large groups , say , at the nation-state level , and we had to have mutual non-aggression , or through a series of conflicts , we eventually came to a rough international bargain to largely keep the peace .
but now we have a new situation , really what people call an asymmetric situation , where technology is so powerful that it extends beyond a nation-state .
it 's not the nation-states that have potential access to mass destruction , but individuals .
and this is a consequence of the fact that these new technologies tend to be digital .
we saw genome sequences .
you can download the gene sequences of pathogens off the internet if you want to , and clearly someone recently - i saw in a science magazine - they said , well , the 1918 flu is too dangerous to fedex around .
if people want to use it in their labs for working on research , just reconstruct it yourself , because , you know , it might break in fedex .
so that this is possible to do this is not deniable .
so individuals in small groups super-empowered by access to these kinds of self-replicating technologies , whether it be biological or other , are clearly a danger in our world .
and the danger is that they can cause roughly what 's a pandemic .
and we really do n't have experience with pandemics , and we 're also not very good as a society at acting to things we do n't have direct and sort of gut-level experience with .
so it 's not in our nature to pre-act .
and in this case , piling on more technology does n't solve the problem , because it only super-empowers people more .
so the solution has to be , as people like russell and einstein and others imagine in a conversation that existed in a much stronger form , i think , early in the 20th century , that the solution had to be not just the head but the heart .
you know , public policy and moral progress .
the bargain that gives us civilization is a bargain to not use power .
we get our individual rights by society protecting us from others not doing everything they can do but largely doing only what is legal .
and so to limit the danger of these new things , we have to limit , ultimately , the ability of individuals to have access , essentially , to pandemic power .
we also have to have sensible defense , because no limitation is going to prevent a crazy person from doing something .
and you know , and the troubling thing is that it 's much easier to do something bad than to defend against all possible bad things , so the offensive uses really have an asymmetric advantage .
so these are the kind of thoughts i was thinking in 1999 and 2000 , and my friends told me i was getting really depressed , and they were really worried about me .
and then i signed a book contract to write more gloomy thoughts about this and moved into a hotel room in new york with one room full of books on the plague , and you know , nuclear bombs exploding in new york where i would be within the circle , and so on .
and then i was there on september 11th , and i stood in the streets with everyone .
and it was quite an experience to be there .
i got up the next morning and walked out of the city , and all the sanitation trucks were parked on houston street and ready to go down and start taking the rubble away .
and i walked down the middle , up to the train station , and everything below 14th street was closed .
it was quite a compelling experience , but not really , i suppose , a surprise to someone who 'd had his room full of the books .
it was always a surprise that it happened then and there , but it was n't a surprise that it happened at all .
and everyone then started writing about this .
thousands of people started writing about this .
and i eventually abandoned the book , and then chris called me to talk at the conference . i really do n't talk about this anymore because , you know , there 's enough frustrating and depressing things going on .
but i agreed to come and say a few things about this .
and i would say that we ca n't give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat , which is what we seem to be doing because of the present , the people that are in power , because that 's to give up the thing that makes civilization .
and we ca n't fight the threat in the kind of stupid way we 're doing , because a million-dollar act causes a billion dollars of damage , causes a trillion dollar response which is largely ineffective and arguably , probably almost certainly , has made the problem worse .
so we ca n't fight the thing with a million-to-one cost , one-to-a-million cost-benefit ratio .
so after giving up on the book - and i had the great honor to be able to join kleiner perkins about a year ago , and to work through venture capital on the innovative side , and to try to find some innovations that could address what i saw as some of these big problems .
things where , you know , a factor of 10 difference can make a factor of 1,000 difference in the outcome .
i 've been amazed in the last year at the incredible quality and excitement of the innovations that have come across my desk .
it 's overwhelming at times . i 'm very thankful for google and wikipedia so i can understand at least a little of what people are talking about who come through the doors .
but i wanted to share with you three areas that i 'm particularly excited about and that relate to the problems that i was talking about in the wired article .
the first is this whole area of education , and it really relates to what nicholas was talking about with a $ 100 computer .
and that is to say that there 's a lot of legs left in moore 's law .
the most advanced transistors today are at 65 nanometers , and we 've seen , and i 've had the pleasure to invest in , companies that give me great confidence that we 'll extend moore 's law all the way down to roughly the 10 nanometer scale .
another factor of , say , six in dimensional reduction , which should give us about another factor of 100 in raw improvement in what the chips can do . and so , to put that in practical terms , if something costs about 1,000 dollars today , say , the best personal computer you can buy , that might be its cost , i think we can have that in 2020 for 10 dollars . okay ?
now , just imagine what that $ 100 computer will be in 2020 as a tool for education .
i think the challenge for us is - i 'm very certain that that will happen , the challenge is , will we develop the kind of educational tools and things with the net to let us take advantage of that device ?
i 'd argue today that we have incredibly powerful computers , but we do n't have very good software for them .
and it 's only in retrospect , after the better software comes along , and you take it and you run it on a ten-year-old machine , you say , god , the machine was that fast ?
i remember when they took the apple mac interface and they put it back on the apple ii .
the apple ii was perfectly capable of running that kind of interface , we just did n't know how to do it at the time .
so given that we know and should believe - because moore 's law 's been , like , a constant , i mean , it 's just been very predictable progress over the last 40 years or whatever .
we can know what the computers are going to be like in 2020 .
it 's great that we have initiatives to say , let 's go create the education and educate people in the world , because that 's a great force for peace .
and we can give everyone in the world a $ 100 computer or a $ 10 computer in the next 15 years .
the second area that i 'm focusing on is the environmental problem , because that 's clearly going to put a lot of pressure on this world .
we 'll hear a lot more about that from al gore very shortly .
the thing that we see as the kind of moore 's law trend that 's driving improvement in our ability to address the environmental problem is new materials .
we have a challenge , because the urban population is growing in this century from two billion to six billion in a very short amount of time . people are moving to the cities .
they all need clean water , they need energy , they need transportation , and we want them to develop in a green way .
we 're reasonably efficient in the industrial sectors .
we 've made improvements in energy and resource efficiency , but the consumer sector , especially in america , is very inefficient .
but these new materials bring such incredible innovations that there 's a strong basis for hope that these things will be so profitable that they can be brought to the market .
and i want to give you a specific example of a new material that was discovered 15 years ago .
if we take carbon nanotubes , you know , iijima discovered them in 1991 , they just have incredible properties .
and these are the kinds of things we 're going to discover as we start to engineer at the nano scale .
their strength : they 're almost the strongest material , tensile strength material known .
they 're very , very stiff . they stretch very , very little .
in two dimensions , if you make , like , a fabric out of them , they 're 30 times stronger than kevlar .
and if you make a three-dimensional structure , like a buckyball , they have all sorts of incredible properties .
if you shoot a particle at them and knock a hole in them , they repair themselves ; they go zip and they repair the hole in femtoseconds , which is not - is really quick .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you shine a light on them , they produce electricity .
in fact , if you flash them with a camera they catch on fire .
if you put electricity on them , they emit light .
if you run current through them , you can run 1,000 times more current through one of these than through a piece of metal .
you can make both p- and n-type semiconductors , which means you can make transistors out of them .
they conduct heat along their length but not across - well , there is no width , but not in the other direction if you stack them up ; that 's a property of carbon fiber also .
if you put particles in them , and they go shooting out the tip - they 're like miniature linear accelerators or electron guns .
the inside of the nanotubes is so small - the smallest ones are 0.7 nanometers - that it 's basically a quantum world .
it 's a strange place inside a nanotube .
and so we begin to see , and we 've seen business plans already , where the kind of things lisa randall 's talking about are in there .
i had one business plan where i was trying to learn more about witten 's cosmic dimension strings to try to understand what the phenomenon was going on in this proposed nanomaterial .
so inside of a nanotube , we 're really at the limit here .
so what we see is with these and other new materials that we can do things with different properties - lighter , stronger - and apply these new materials to the environmental problems .
new materials that can make water , new materials that can make fuel cells work better , new materials that catalyze chemical reactions , that cut pollution and so on .
ethanol - new ways of making ethanol .
new ways of making electric transportation .
the whole green dream - because it can be profitable .
and we 've dedicated - we 've just raised a new fund , we dedicated 100 million dollars to these kinds of investments .
we believe that genentech , the compaq , the lotus , the sun , the netscape , the amazon , the google in these fields are yet to be found , because this materials revolution will drive these things forward .
the third area that we 're working on , and we just announced last week - we were all in new york .
we raised 200 million dollars in a specialty fund to work on a pandemic in biodefense .
and to give you an idea of the last fund that kleiner raised was a $ 400 million fund , so this for us is a very substantial fund .
and what we did , over the last few months - well , a few months ago , ray kurzweil and i wrote an op-ed in the new york times about how publishing the 1918 genome was very dangerous .
and john doerr and brook and others got concerned , -lsb- unclear -rsb- , and we started looking around at what the world was doing about being prepared for a pandemic . and we saw a lot of gaps .
and so we asked ourselves , you know , can we find innovative things that will go fill these gaps ? and brooks told me in a break here , he said he 's found so much stuff he ca n't sleep , because there 's so many great technologies out there , we 're essentially buried . and we need them , you know .
we have one antiviral that people are talking about stockpiling that still works , roughly . that 's tamiflu .
but tamiflu - the virus is resistant . it is resistant to tamiflu .
we 've discovered with aids we need cocktails to work well so that the viral resistance - we need several anti-virals .
we need better surveillance .
we need networks that can find out what 's going on .
we need rapid diagnostics so that we can tell if somebody has a strain of flu which we have only identified very recently .
we 've got to be able to make the rapid diagnostics quickly .
we need new anti-virals and cocktails . we need new kinds of vaccines .
vaccines that are broad spectrum .
vaccines that we can manufacture quickly .
cocktails , more polyvalent vaccines .
you normally get a trivalent vaccine against three possible strains .
we need - we do n't know where this thing is going .
we believe that if we could fill these 10 gaps , we have a chance to help really reduce the risk of a pandemic .
and the difference between a normal flu season and a pandemic is about a factor of 1,000 in deaths and certainly enormous economic impact .
so we 're very excited because we think we can fund 10 , or speed up 10 projects and see them come to market in the next couple years that will address this .
so if we can address , use technology , help address education , help address the environment , help address the pandemic , does that solve the larger problem that i was talking about in the wired article ? and i 'm afraid the answer is really no , because you ca n't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology .
if we let an unlimited amount of power loose , then we will - a very small number of people will be able to abuse it .
we ca n't fight at a million-to-one disadvantage .
so what we need to do is , we need better policy .
and for example , some things we could do that would be policy solutions which are not really in the political air right now but perhaps with the change of administration would be - use markets .
markets are a very strong force .
for example , rather than trying to regulate away problems , which probably wo n't work , if we could price into the cost of doing business , the cost of catastrophe , so that people who are doing things that had a higher cost of catastrophe would have to take insurance against that risk .
so if you wanted to put a drug on the market you could put it on .
but it would n't have to be approved by regulators ; you 'd have to convince an actuary that it would be safe .
and if you apply the notion of insurance more broadly , you can use a more powerful force , a market force , to provide feedback .
how could you keep the law ?
i think the law would be a really good thing to keep .
well , you have to hold people accountable .
the law requires accountability .
today scientists , technologists , businessmen , engineers do n't have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions .
so if you tie that - you have to tie that back with the law .
and finally , i think we have to do something that 's not really - it 's almost unacceptable to say this - which , we have to begin to design the future .
we ca n't pick the future , but we can steer the future .
our investment in trying to prevent pandemic flu is affecting the distribution of possible outcomes .
we may not be able to stop it , but the likelihood that it will get past us is lower if we focus on that problem .
so we can design the future if we choose what kind of things we want to have happen and not have happen , and steer us to a lower-risk place .
vice president gore will talk about how we could steer the climate trajectory into a lower probability of catastrophic risk .
but above all , what we have to do is we have to help the good guys , the people on the defensive side , have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things .
and what we have to do to do that is we have to limit access to certain information .
and growing up as we have , and holding very high the value of free speech , this is a hard thing for us to accept - for all of us to accept .
it 's especially hard for the scientists to accept who still remember , you know , galileo essentially locked up , and who are still fighting this battle against the church .
but that 's the price of having a civilization .
the price of retaining the rule of law is to limit the access to the great and kind of unbridled power .
thank you .
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-lrb- applause -rrb- maya penn : i 've been drawing ever since i could hold a crayon , and i 've been making animated flip books since i was three years old .
at that age , i also learned about what an animator was .
there was a program on tv about jobs most kids do n't know about .
when i understood that an animator makes the cartoons i saw on tv , i immediately said , " that 's what i want to be . "
i do n't know if i said it mentally or out loud , but that was a greatly defining moment in my life .
animation and art has always been my first love .
it was my love for technology that sparked the idea for " malicious dishes . "
there was a virus on my computer , and i was trying to get rid of it , and all of a sudden , i just thought , what if viruses have their own little world inside the computer ?
maybe a restaurant where they meet up and do virusy things ?
and thus , " malicious dishes " was born .
at four years old , my dad showed me how to take apart a computer and put it back together again .
that started my love for technology .
i built my first website myself in html , and i 'm learning javascript and python .
i 'm also working on an animated series called " the pollinators . "
it 's about bees and other pollinators in our environment and why they 're so important .
if plants are n't pollinated by the pollinators , then all creatures , including ourselves , that depend on these plants , would starve .
so i decided to take these cool creatures and make a superhero team .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- foot stomp -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- roar -rrb- pollinator : deforestsaurus ! i should have known !
i need to call on the rest of the pollinators !
-lrb- music -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- all of my animations start with ideas , but what are ideas ?
ideas can spark a movement .
ideas are opportunities and innovation .
ideas truly are what make the world go round .
if it was n't for ideas , we would n't be where we are now with technology , medicine , art , culture , and how we even live our lives .
at eight years old , i took my ideas and started my own business called maya 's ideas , and my nonprofit , maya 's ideas for the planet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i make eco-friendly clothing and accessories .
i 'm 13 now , and although i started my business in 2008 , my artistic journey started way before then .
i was greatly influenced by art , and i wanted to incorporate it in everything i did , even my business .
i would find different fabrics around the house , and say , & quot ; this could be a scarf or a hat , & quot ; and i had all these ideas for designs .
i noticed when i wore my creations , people would stop me and say , " wow , that 's really cute . where can i get one ? "
and i thought , i can start my own business .
now i did n't have any business plans at only eight years old .
i only knew i wanted to make pretty creations that were safe for the environment and i wanted to give back .
my mom taught me how to sew , and on my back porch , i would sit and make little headbands out of ribbon , and i would write down the names and the price of each item .
i started making more items like hats , scarves and bags .
soon , my items began selling all over the world , and i had customers in denmark , italy , australia , canada and more .
now , i had a lot to learn about my business , like branding and marketing , and seeing what sold the most and the least .
soon , my business really started to take off .
then one day , forbes magazine contacted me when i was 10 years old .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they wanted to feature me and my company in their article .
now a lot of people ask me , why is your business eco-friendly ?
i 've had a passion for protecting the environment and its creatures since i was little .
my parents taught me at an early age about giving back and being a good steward to the environment .
i heard about how the dyes in some clothing or the process of even making the items was harmful to the people and the planet , so i started doing my own research , and i discovered that even after dyeing has being completed , there is a waste issue that gives a negative impact on the environment .
for example , the grinding of materials , or the dumping of dried powder materials .
these actions can pollute the air , making it toxic to anyone or anything that inhales it .
so when i started my business , i knew two things : all of my items had to be eco-friendly , and 10 to 20 percent of the profits i made went to local and global charities and environmental organizations .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i feel i 'm part of the new wave of entrepreneurs that not only seeks to have a successful business , but also a sustainable future .
i feel that i can meet the needs of my customers without compromising the ability of future generations to live in a greener tomorrow .
we live in a big , diverse and beautiful world , and that makes me even more passionate to save it .
but it 's never enough to just to get it through your heads about the things that are happening in our world .
it takes to get it through your hearts , because when you get it through your heart , that is when movements are sparked .
that is when opportunities and innovation are created , and that is why ideas come to life .
thank you , and peace and blessings .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- pat mitchell : so , you heard maya talk about the amazing parents who are behind this incredible woman . where are they ?
please , mr. and mrs. penn . would you just - ah !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am a vicar in the church of england .
i 've been a priest in the church for 20 years .
for most of that time , i 've been struggling and grappling with questions about the nature of god . who is god ?
and i 'm very aware that when you say the word " god , " many people will turn off immediately .
and most people , both within and outside the organized church , still have a picture of a celestial controller , a rule maker , a policeman in the sky who orders everything , and causes everything to happen .
he will protect his own people , and answer the prayers of the faithful .
and in the worship of my church , the most frequently used adjective about god is " almighty . "
but i have a problem with that .
i have become more and more uncomfortable with this perception of god over the years .
do we really believe that god is the kind of male boss that we 've been presenting in our worship and in our liturgies over all these years ?
of course , there have been thinkers who have suggested different ways of looking at god .
exploring the feminine , nurturing side of divinity .
suggesting that god expresses himself or herself through powerlessness , rather than power .
acknowledging that god is unknown and unknowable by definition .
finding deep resonances with other religions and philosophies and ways of looking at life as part of what is a universal and global search for meaning .
these ideas are well known in liberal academic circles , but clergy like myself have been reluctant to air them , for fear of creating tension and division in our church communities , for fear of upsetting the simple faith of more traditional believers .
i have chosen not to rock the boat .
then , on december 26th last year , just two months ago , that underwater earthquake triggered the tsunami .
and two weeks later , sunday morning , 9th of january , i found myself standing in front of my congregation - intelligent , well meaning , mostly thoughtful christian people - and i needed to express , on their behalf , our feelings and our questions .
i had my own personal responses , but i also have a public role , and something needed to be said .
and this is what i said .
shortly after the tsunami i read a newspaper article written by the archbishop of canterbury - fine title - about the tragedy in southern asia .
the essence of what he said was this : the people most affected by the devastation and loss of life do not want intellectual theories about how god let this happen .
he wrote , " if some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense , would we feel happier , or safer , or more confident in god ? "
if the man in the photograph that appeared in the newspapers , holding the hand of his dead child was standing in front of us now , there are no words that we could say to him .
a verbal response would not be appropriate .
the only appropriate response would be a compassionate silence and some kind of practical help .
it is n't a time for explanation , or preaching , or theology ; it 's a time for tears .
this is true . and yet here we are , my church in oxford , semi-detached from events that happened a long way away , but with our faith bruised .
and we want an explanation from god .
we demand an explanation from god .
some have concluded that we can only believe in a god who shares our pain .
in some way , god must feel the anguish , and grief , and physical pain that we feel .
in some way the eternal god must be able to enter into the souls of human beings and experience the torment within .
and if this is true , it must also be that god knows the joy and exaltation of the human spirit , as well .
we want a god who can weep with those who weep , and rejoice with those who rejoice .
this seems to me both a deeply moving and a convincing re-statement of christian belief about god .
for hundreds of years , the prevailing orthodoxy , the accepted truth , was that god the father , the creator , is unchanging and therefore by definition can not feel pain or sadness .
now the unchanging god feels a bit cold and indifferent to me .
and the devastating events of the 20th century have forced people to question the cold , unfeeling god .
the slaughter of millions in the trenches and in the death camps have caused people to ask , " where is god in all this ?
who is god in all this ? "
and the answer was , " god is in this with us , or god does n't deserve our allegiance anymore . "
if god is a bystander , observing but not involved , then god may well exist , but we do n't want to know about him .
many jews and christians now feel like this , i know .
and i am among them .
so we have a suffering god - a god who is intimately connected with this world and with every living soul .
i very much relate to this idea of god .
but it is n't enough . i need to ask some more questions , and i hope they are questions that you will want to ask , as well , some of you .
over the last few weeks i have been struck by the number of times that words in our worship have felt a bit inappropriate , a bit dodgy .
we have a pram service on tuesday mornings for mums and their pre-school children .
and last week we sang with the children one of their favorite songs , " the wise man built his house upon the rock . "
perhaps some of you know it . some of the words go like this : " the foolish man built his house upon the sand / and the floods came up / and the house on the sand went crash . "
then in the same week , at a funeral , we sang the familiar hymn " we plow the fields and scatter , " a very english hymn .
in the second verse comes the line , " the wind and waves obey him . "
do they ? i do n't feel we can sing that song again in church , after what 's happened .
so the first big question is about control .
does god have a plan for each of us ? is god in control ?
does god order each moment ? does the wind and the waves obey him ?
from time to time , one hears christians telling the story of how god organized things for them , so that everything worked out all right - some difficulty overcome , some illness cured , some trouble averted , a parking space found at a crucial time .
i can remember someone saying this to me , with her eyes shining with enthusiasm at this wonderful confirmation of her faith and the goodness of god .
but if god can or will do these things - intervene to change the flow of events - then surely he could have stopped the tsunami .
do we have a local god who can do little things like parking spaces , but not big things like 500 mile-per-hour waves ?
that 's just not acceptable to intelligent christians , and we must acknowledge it .
either god is responsible for the tsunami , or god is not in control .
after the tragedy , survival stories began to emerge .
you probably heard some of them : the man who surfed the wave , the teenage girl who recognized the danger because she had just been learning about tsunamis at school .
then there was the congregation who had left their usual church building on the shore to hold a service in the hills .
the preacher delivered an extra long sermon , so that they were still out of harm 's way when the wave struck .
afterwards someone said that god must have been looking after them .
so the next question is about partiality .
can we earn god 's favor by worshipping him or believing in him ?
does god demand loyalty , like any medieval tyrant ?
a god who looks after his own , so that christians are ok , while everyone else perishes ?
a cosmic us and them , and a god who is guilty of the worst kind of favoritism ?
that would be appalling , and that would be the point at which i would hand in my membership .
such a god would be morally inferior to the highest ideals of humanity .
so who is god , if not the great puppet-master or the tribal protector ?
perhaps god allows or permits terrible things to happen , so that heroism and compassion can be shown .
perhaps god is testing us : testing our charity , or our faith .
perhaps there is a great , cosmic plan that allows for horrible suffering so that everything will work out ok in the end .
perhaps , but these ideas are all just variations on god controlling everything , the supreme commander toying with expendable units in a great campaign .
we are still left with a god who can do the tsunami and allow auschwitz .
in his great novel , " the brothers karamazov , " dostoevsky gives these words to ivan , addressed to his naive and devout younger brother , alyosha : " if the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth , then i say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price .
we can not afford to pay so much for admission .
it is not god that i do not accept .
i merely , most respectfully , return him the ticket . "
or perhaps god set the whole universe going at the beginning and then relinquished control forever , so that natural processes could occur , and evolution run its course .
this seems more acceptable , but it still leaves god with the ultimate moral responsibility .
is god a cold , unfeeling spectator ?
or a powerless lover , watching with infinite compassion things god is unable to control or change ?
is god intimately involved in our suffering , so that he feels it in his own being ?
if we believe something like this , we must let go of the puppet-master completely , take our leave of the almighty controller , abandon traditional models .
we must think again about god .
maybe god does n't do things at all .
maybe god is n't an agent like all of us are agents .
early religious thought conceived god as a sort of superhuman person , doing things all over the place .
beating up the egyptians , drowning them in the red sea , wasting cities , getting angry .
the people knew their god by his mighty acts .
but what if god does n't act ? what if god does n't do things at all ?
what if god is in things ?
the loving soul of the universe .
an in-dwelling compassionate presence , underpinning and sustaining all things .
what if god is in things ?
in the infinitely complex network of relationships and connections that make up life .
in the natural cycle of life and death , the creation and destruction that must happen continuously .
in the process of evolution .
in the incredible intricacy and magnificence of the natural world .
in the collective unconscious , the soul of the human race .
in you , in me , mind and body and spirit .
in the tsunami , in the victims . in the depth of things .
in presence and in absence . in simplicity and complexity .
in change and development and growth .
how does this in-ness , this innerness , this interiority of god work ?
it 's hard to conceive , and begs more questions .
is god just another name for the universe , with no independent existence at all ?
i do n't know .
to what extent can we ascribe personality to god ?
i do n't know .
in the end , we have to say , " i do n't know . "
if we knew , god would not be god .
to have faith in this god would be more like trusting an essential benevolence in the universe , and less like believing a system of doctrinal statements .
is n't it ironic that christians who claim to believe in an infinite , unknowable being then tie god down in closed systems and rigid doctrines ?
how could one practice such a faith ?
by seeking the god within . by cultivating my own inwardness .
in silence , in meditation , in my inner space , in the me that remains when i gently put aside my passing emotions and ideas and preoccupations .
in awareness of the inner conversation .
and how would we live such a faith ? how would i live such a faith ?
by seeking intimate connection with your inwardness .
the kind of relationships when deep speaks to deep .
if god is in all people , then there is a meeting place where my relationship with you becomes a three-way encounter .
there is an indian greeting , which i 'm sure some of you know : " namaste , " accompanied by a respectful bow , which , roughly translated means , " that which is of god in me greets that which of god is in you . "
namaste .
and how would one deepen such a faith ?
by seeking the inwardness which is in all things .
in music and poetry , in the natural world of beauty and in the small ordinary things of life , there is a deep , indwelling presence that makes them extraordinary .
it needs a profound attentiveness and a patient waiting , a contemplative attitude and a generosity and openness to those whose experience is different from my own .
when i stood up to speak to my people about god and the tsunami , i had no answers to offer them .
no neat packages of faith , with bible references to prove them .
only doubts and questioning and uncertainty .
i had some suggestions to make - possible new ways of thinking about god .
ways that might allow us to go on , down a new and uncharted road .
but in the end , the only thing i could say for sure was , " i do n't know , " and that just might be the most profoundly religious statement of all .
thank you .
when i was about three or four years old , i remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers , and i remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book , to feel the picture they were discussing .
and my mum said , " darling , remember that you ca n't see and you ca n't feel the picture and you ca n't feel the print on the page . "
and i thought to myself , " but that 's what i want to do .
i love stories . i want to read . "
little did i know that i would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true .
i was born premature by about 10 weeks , which resulted in my blindness , some 64 years ago .
the condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia , and it 's now very rare in the developed world .
little did i know , lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that i 'd been born at the right place and the right time , that i was in a country where i could participate in the technological revolution .
there are 37 million totally blind people on our planet , but those of us who 've shared in the technological changes mainly come from north america , europe , japan and other developed parts of the world .
computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world , but i think they 've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group .
and so i want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person i am today .
it 's an interaction between volunteers , passionate inventors and technology , and it 's a story that many other blind people could tell .
but let me tell you a bit about it today .
when i was five , i went to school and i learned braille .
it 's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper , and i can feel them with my fingers .
in fact , i think they 're putting up my grade six report .
i do n't know where julian morrow got that from .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was pretty good in reading , but religion and musical appreciation needed more work .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when you leave the opera house , you 'll find there 's braille signage in the lifts .
look for it . have you noticed it ?
i do . i look for it all the time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i was at school , the books were transcribed by transcribers , voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so i 'd have volumes to read , and that had been going on , mainly by women , since the late 19th century in this country , but it was the only way i could read .
when i was in high school , i got my first philips reel-to-reel tape recorder , and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning .
i could have family and friends read me material , and i could then read it back as many times as i needed .
and it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers .
for example , when i studied at graduate school at queen 's university in canada , the prisoners at the collins bay jail agreed to help me .
i gave them a tape recorder , and they read into it .
as one of them said to me , " ron , we ai n't going anywhere at the moment . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but think of it . these men , who had n't had the educational opportunities i 'd had , helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help .
well , i went back and became an academic at melbourne 's monash university , and for those 25 years , tape recorders were everything to me .
in fact , in my office in 1990 , i had 18 miles of tape .
students , family and friends all read me material .
mrs. lois doery , whom i later came to call my surrogate mum , read me many thousands of hours onto tape .
one of the reasons i agreed to give this talk today was that i was hoping that lois would be here so i could introduce you to her and publicly thank her .
but sadly , her health has n't permitted her to come today .
but i thank you here , lois , from this platform .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i saw my first apple computer in 1984 , and i thought to myself , " this thing 's got a glass screen , not much use to me . "
how very wrong i was .
in 1987 , in the month our eldest son gerard was born , i got my first blind computer , and it 's actually here .
see it up there ?
and you see it has no , what do you call it , no screen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a blind computer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a keynote gold 84k , and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do n't laugh , it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think there 's more memory in my watch .
it was invented by russell smith , a passionate inventor in new zealand who was trying to help blind people .
sadly , he died in a light plane crash in 2005 , but his memory lives on in my heart .
it meant , for the first time , i could read back what i had typed into it .
it had a speech synthesizer .
i 'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory .
this now allowed me to read back what i 'd written and to enter the computer world , even with its 84k of memory .
in 1974 , the great ray kurzweil , the american inventor , worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech .
optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font , but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers , he developed a machine that could read any font .
and his machine , which was as big as a washing machine , was launched on the 13th of january , 1976 .
i saw my first commercially available kurzweil in march 1989 , and it blew me away , and in september 1989 , the month that my associate professorship at monash university was announced , the law school got one , and i could use it .
for the first time , i could read what i wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner .
i did n't have to be nice to people !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i no longer would be censored .
for example , i was too shy then , and i 'm actually too shy now , to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , you know , i could pop a book on in the middle of the night , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , the kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop .
that 's what it 's shrunk to .
and now i can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries .
i can keep up with my friends .
there are many people who have helped me in my life , and many that i have n't met .
one is another american inventor ted henter .
ted was a motorcycle racer , but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight , which is devastating if you 're trying to ride motorbikes .
he then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier .
but in 1989 , he teamed up with bill joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the net or from what was on the computer .
it 's called jaws , job access with speech , and it sounds like this .
-lrb- jaws speaking -rrb- ron mccallum : is n't that slow ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you see , if i read like that , i 'd fall asleep .
i slowed it down for you .
i 'm going to ask that we play it at the speed i read it .
can we play that one ?
-lrb- jaws speaking -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- rm : you know , when you 're marking student essays , you want to get through them fairly quickly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iphone and on yours as well .
but , you know , i find reading with machines a very lonely process .
i grew up with family , friends , reading to me , and i loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading .
do you love being read to ?
and one of my most enduring memories is in 1999 , mary reading to me and the children down near manly beach " harry potter and the philosopher 's stone . "
is n't that a great book ?
i still love being close to someone reading to me .
but i would n't give up the technology , because it 's allowed me to lead a great life .
of course , talking books for the blind predated all this technology .
after all , the long-playing record was developed and now we put talking books on cds using the digital access system known as daisy .
but when i 'm reading with synthetic voices , i love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice .
now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities .
many websites we ca n't read using jaws and the other technologies .
websites are often very visual , and there are all these sorts of graphs that are n't labeled and buttons that are n't labeled , and that 's why the world wide web consortium 3 , known as w3c , has developed worldwide standards for the internet .
and we want all internet users or internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field .
there are other barriers brought about by our laws .
for example , australia , like about one third of the world 's countries , has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons .
but those books ca n't travel across borders .
for example , in spain , there are a 100,000 accessible books in spanish .
in argentina , there are 50,000 .
in no other latin american country are there more than a couple of thousand .
but it 's not legal to transport the books from spain to latin america .
there are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the united states , britain , canada , australia , etc . , but they ca n't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where english is the first and the second language .
and remember i was telling you about harry potter .
well , because we ca n't transport books across borders , there had to be separate versions read in all the different english-speaking countries : britain , united states , canada , australia , and new zealand all had to have separate readings of harry potter .
and that 's why , next month in morocco , a meeting is taking place between all the countries .
it 's something that a group of countries and the world blind union are advocating , a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception , we can transport those books across borders and give life to people , particularly in developing countries , blind people who do n't have the books to read .
i want that to happen .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do , whether it be at the university of sydney law school , where i served a term as dean , or now as i sit on the united nations committee on the rights of persons with disabilities , in geneva .
i 've indeed been a very fortunate human being .
i wonder what the future will hold .
the technology will advance even further , but i can still remember my mum saying , 60 years ago , " remember , darling , you 'll never be able to read the print with your fingers . "
i 'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers , volunteer readers and passionate inventors , has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world .
i 'd like to thank my researcher hannah martin , who is my slide clicker , who clicks the slides , and my wife , professor mary crock , who 's the light of my life , is coming on to collect me .
i want to thank her too .
i think i have to say goodbye now .
bless you . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yay ! -lrb- applause -rrb- okay . okay . okay . okay . okay . -lrb- applause -rrb- as technology progresses , and as it advances , many of us assume that these advances make us more intelligent , make us smarter and more connected to the world .
and what i 'd like to argue is that that 's not necessarily the case , as progress is simply a word for change , and with change you gain something , but you also lose something .
and to really illustrate this point , what i 'd like to do is to show you how technology has dealt with a very simple , a very common , an everyday question .
and that question is this .
what time is it ? what time is it ?
if you glance at your iphone , it 's so simple to tell the time .
but , i 'd like to ask you , how would you tell the time if you did n't have an iphone ?
how would you tell the time , say , 600 years ago ?
how would you do it ?
well , the way you would do it is by using a device that 's called an astrolabe .
so , an astrolabe is relatively unknown in today 's world .
but , at the time , in the 13th century , it was the gadget of the day .
it was the world 's first popular computer .
and it was a device that , in fact , is a model of the sky .
so , the different parts of the astrolabe , in this particular type , the rete corresponds to the positions of the stars .
the plate corresponds to a coordinate system .
and the mater has some scales and puts it all together .
if you were an educated child , you would know how to not only use the astrolabe , you would also know how to make an astrolabe .
and we know this because the first treatise on the astrolabe , the first technical manual in the english language , was written by geoffrey chaucer .
yes , that geoffrey chaucer , in 1391 , to his little lewis , his 11-year-old son .
and in this book , little lewis would know the big idea .
and the central idea that makes this computer work is this thing called stereographic projection .
and basically , the concept is , how do you represent the three-dimensional image of the night sky that surrounds us onto a flat , portable , two-dimensional surface .
the idea is actually relatively simple .
imagine that that earth is at the center of the universe , and surrounding it is the sky projected onto a sphere .
each point on the surface of the sphere is mapped through the bottom pole , onto a flat surface , where it is then recorded .
so the north star corresponds to the center of the device .
the ecliptic , which is the path of the sun , moon , and planets correspond to an offset circle .
the bright stars correspond to little daggers on the rete .
and the altitude corresponds to the plate system .
now , the real genius of the astrolabe is not just the projection .
the real genius is that it brings together two coordinate systems so they fit perfectly .
there is the position of the sun , moon and planets on the movable rete .
and then there is their location on the sky as seen from a certain latitude on the back plate . okay ?
so how would you use this device ?
well , let me first back up for a moment .
this is an astrolabe . pretty impressive , is n't it ?
and so , this astrolabe is on loan from us from the oxford school of - museum of history .
and you can see the different components .
this is the mater , the scales on the back .
this is the rete . okay . do you see that ?
that 's the movable part of the sky .
and in the back you can see a spider web pattern .
and that spider web pattern corresponds to the local coordinates in the sky .
this is a rule device . and on the back are some other devices , measuring tools and scales , to be able to make some calculations . okay ?
you know , i 've always wanted one of these .
for my thesis i actually built one of these out of paper .
and this one , this is a replica from a 15th-century device .
and it 's worth probably about three macbook pros .
but a real one would cost about as much as my house , and the house next to it , and actually every house on the block , on both sides of the street , maybe a school thrown in , and some - you know , a church .
they are just incredibly expensive .
but let me show you how to work this device .
so let 's go to step one .
first thing that you do is you select a star in the night sky , if you 're telling time at night .
so , tonight , if it 's clear you 'll be able to see the summer triangle .
and there is a bright star called deneb . so let 's select deneb .
second , is you measure the altitude of deneb .
so , step two , i hold the device up , and then i sight its altitude there so i can see it clearly now .
and then i measure its altitude .
so , it 's about 26 degrees . you ca n't see it from over there .
step three is identify the star on the front of the device .
deneb is there . i can tell .
step four is i then move the rete , move the sky , so the altitude of the star corresponds to the scale on the back .
okay , so when that happens everything lines up .
i have here a model of the sky that corresponds to the real sky . okay ?
so , it is , in a sense , holding a model of the universe in my hands .
and then finally , i take a rule , and move the rule to a date line which then tells me the time here .
right . so , that 's how the device is used .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i know what you 're thinking : " that 's a lot of work , is n't it ? is n't it a ton of work to be able to tell the time ? "
as you glance at your ipod to just check out the time .
but there is a difference between the two , because with your ipod you can tell - or your iphone , you can tell exactly what the time is , with precision .
the way little lewis would tell the time is by a picture of the sky .
he would know where things would fit in the sky .
he would not only know what time it was , he would also know where the sun would rise , and how it would move across the sky .
he would know what time the sun would rise , and what time it would set .
and he would know that for essentially every celestial object in the heavens .
so , in computer graphics and computer user interface design , there is a term called affordances .
so , affordances are the qualities of an object that allow us to perform an action with it .
and what the astrolabe does is it allows us , it affords us , to connect to the night sky , to look up into the night sky and be much more - to see the visible and the invisible together .
so , that 's just one use . incredible , there is probably 350 , 400 uses .
in fact , there is a text , and that has over a thousand uses of this first computer .
on the back there is scales and measurements for terrestrial navigation .
you can survey with it . the city of baghdad was surveyed with it .
it can be used for calculating mathematical equations of all different types .
and it would take a full university course to illustrate it .
astrolabes have an incredible history .
they are over 2,000 years old .
the concept of stereographic projection originated in 330 b.c.
and the astrolabes come in many different sizes and shapes and forms .
there is portable ones . there is large display ones .
and i think what is common to all astrolabes is that they are beautiful works of art .
there is a quality of craftsmanship and precision that is just astonishing and remarkable .
astrolabes , like every technology , do evolve over time .
so , the earliest retes , for example , were very simple and primitive .
and advancing retes became cultural emblems .
this is one from oxford .
and i find this one really extraordinary because the rete pattern is completely symmetrical , and it accurately maps a completely asymmetrical , or random sky .
how cool is that ? this is just amazing .
so , would little lewis have an astrolabe ?
probably not one made of brass . he would have one made out of wood , or paper . and the vast majority of this first computer was a portable device that you could keep in the back of your pocket .
so , what does the astrolabe inspire ?
well , i think the first thing is that it reminds us just how resourceful people were , our forebears were , years and years ago .
it 's just an incredible device .
every technology advances .
every technology is transformed and moved by others .
and what we gain with a new technology , of course , is precision and accuracy .
but what we lose , i think , is an accurate - a felt sense of the sky , a sense of context .
knowing the sky , knowing your relationship with the sky , is the center of the real answer to knowing what time it is .
so , it 's - i think astrolabes are just remarkable devices .
and so , what can you learn from these devices ?
well , primarily that there is a subtle knowledge that we can connect with the world .
and astrolabes return us to this subtle sense of how things all fit together , and also how we connect to the world .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for the last 10 years , i 've been spending my time trying to figure out how and why human beings assemble themselves into social networks .
and the kind of social network i 'm talking about is not the recent online variety , but rather , the kind of social networks that human beings have been assembling for hundreds of thousands of years , ever since we emerged from the african savannah .
so , i form friendships and co-worker and sibling and relative relationships with other people who in turn have similar relationships with other people .
and this spreads on out endlessly into a distance .
and you get a network that looks like this .
every dot is a person .
every line between them is a relationship between two people - different kinds of relationships .
and you can get this kind of vast fabric of humanity , in which we 're all embedded .
and my colleague , james fowler and i have been studying for quite sometime what are the mathematical , social , biological and psychological rules that govern how these networks are assembled and what are the similar rules that govern how they operate , how they affect our lives .
but recently , we 've been wondering whether it might be possible to take advantage of this insight , to actually find ways to improve the world , to do something better , to actually fix things , not just understand things .
so one of the first things we thought we would tackle would be how we go about predicting epidemics .
and the current state of the art in predicting an epidemic - if you 're the cdc or some other national body - is to sit in the middle where you are and collect data from physicians and laboratories in the field that report the prevalence or the incidence of certain conditions .
so , so and so patients have been diagnosed with something , or other patients have been diagnosed , and all these data are fed into a central repository , with some delay .
and if everything goes smoothly , one to two weeks from now you 'll know where the epidemic was today .
and actually , about a year or so ago , there was this promulgation of the idea of google flu trends , with respect to the flu , where by looking at people 's searching behavior today , we could know where the flu - what the status of the epidemic was today , what 's the prevalence of the epidemic today .
but what i 'd like to show you today is a means by which we might get not just rapid warning about an epidemic , but also actually early detection of an epidemic .
and , in fact , this idea can be used not just to predict epidemics of germs , but also to predict epidemics of all sorts of kinds .
for example , anything that spreads by a form of social contagion could be understood in this way , from abstract ideas on the left like patriotism , or altruism , or religion to practices like dieting behavior , or book purchasing , or drinking , or bicycle-helmet -lsb- and -rsb- other safety practices , or products that people might buy , purchases of electronic goods , anything in which there 's kind of an interpersonal spread .
a kind of a diffusion of innovation could be understood and predicted by the mechanism i 'm going to show you now .
so , as all of you probably know , the classic way of thinking about this is the diffusion-of-innovation , or the adoption curve .
so here on the y-axis , we have the percent of the people affected , and on the x-axis , we have time .
and at the very beginning , not too many people are affected , and you get this classic sigmoidal , or s-shaped , curve .
and the reason for this shape is that at the very beginning , let 's say one or two people are infected , or affected by the thing and then they affect , or infect , two people , who in turn affect four , eight , 16 and so forth , and you get the epidemic growth phase of the curve .
and eventually , you saturate the population .
there are fewer and fewer people who are still available that you might infect , and then you get the plateau of the curve , and you get this classic sigmoidal curve .
and this holds for germs , ideas , product adoption , behaviors , and the like .
but things do n't just diffuse in human populations at random .
they actually diffuse through networks .
because , as i said , we live our lives in networks , and these networks have a particular kind of a structure .
now if you look at a network like this - this is 105 people .
and the lines represent - the dots are the people , and the lines represent friendship relationships .
you might see that people occupy different locations within the network .
and there are different kinds of relationships between the people .
you could have friendship relationships , sibling relationships , spousal relationships , co-worker relationships , neighbor relationships and the like .
and different sorts of things spread across different sorts of ties .
for instance , sexually transmitted diseases will spread across sexual ties .
or , for instance , people 's smoking behavior might be influenced by their friends .
or their altruistic or their charitable giving behavior might be influenced by their coworkers , or by their neighbors .
but not all positions in the network are the same .
so if you look at this , you might immediately grasp that different people have different numbers of connections .
some people have one connection , some have two , some have six , some have 10 connections .
and this is called the " degree " of a node , or the number of connections that a node has .
but in addition , there 's something else .
so , if you look at nodes a and b , they both have six connections .
but if you can see this image -lsb- of the network -rsb- from a bird 's eye view , you can appreciate that there 's something very different about nodes a and b.
so , let me ask you this - i can cultivate this intuition by asking a question - who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network , a or b ?
-lrb- audience : b. -rrb- nicholas christakis : b , it 's obvious .
b is located on the edge of the network .
now , who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip were spreading through the network ?
a. and you have an immediate appreciation that a is going to be more likely to get the thing that 's spreading and to get it sooner by virtue of their structural location within the network .
a , in fact , is more central , and this can be formalized mathematically .
so , if we want to track something that was spreading through a network , what we ideally would like to do is to set up sensors on the central individuals within the network , including node a , monitor those people that are right there in the middle of the network , and somehow get an early detection of whatever it is that is spreading through the network .
so if you saw them contract a germ or a piece of information , you would know that , soon enough , everybody was about to contract this germ or this piece of information .
and this would be much better than monitoring six randomly chosen people , without reference to the structure of the population .
and in fact , if you could do that , what you would see is something like this .
on the left-hand panel , again , we have the s-shaped curve of adoption .
in the dotted red line , we show what the adoption would be in the random people , and in the left-hand line , shifted to the left , we show what the adoption would be in the central individuals within the network .
on the y-axis is the cumulative instances of contagion , and on the x-axis is the time .
and on the right-hand side , we show the same data , but here with daily incidence .
and what we show here is - like , here - very few people are affected , more and more and more and up to here , and here 's the peak of the epidemic .
but shifted to the left is what 's occurring in the central individuals .
and this difference in time between the two is the early detection , the early warning we can get , about an impending epidemic in the human population .
the problem , however , is that mapping human social networks is not always possible .
it can be expensive , not feasible , unethical , or , frankly , just not possible to do such a thing .
so , how can we figure out who the central people are in a network without actually mapping the network ?
what we came up with was an idea to exploit an old fact , or a known fact , about social networks , which goes like this : do you know that your friends have more friends than you do ?
your friends have more friends than you do , and this is known as the friendship paradox .
imagine a very popular person in the social network - like a party host who has hundreds of friends - and a misanthrope who has just one friend , and you pick someone at random from the population ; they were much more likely to know the party host .
and if they nominate the party host as their friend , that party host has a hundred friends , therefore , has more friends than they do .
and this , in essence , is what 's known as the friendship paradox .
the friends of randomly chosen people have higher degree , and are more central than the random people themselves .
and you can get an intuitive appreciation for this if you imagine just the people at the perimeter of the network .
if you pick this person , the only friend they have to nominate is this person , who , by construction , must have at least two and typically more friends .
and that happens at every peripheral node .
and in fact , it happens throughout the network as you move in , everyone you pick , when they nominate a random - when a random person nominates a friend of theirs , you move closer to the center of the network .
so , we thought we would exploit this idea in order to study whether we could predict phenomena within networks .
because now , with this idea we can take a random sample of people , have them nominate their friends , those friends would be more central , and we could do this without having to map the network .
and we tested this idea with an outbreak of h1n1 flu at harvard college in the fall and winter of 2009 , just a few months ago .
we took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates , we had them nominate their friends , and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic .
and we did this passively by looking at whether or not they 'd gone to university health services .
and also , we had them -lsb- actively -rsb- email us a couple of times a week .
exactly what we predicted happened .
so the random group is in the red line .
the epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left , over here .
and the difference in the two is 16 days .
by monitoring the friends group , we could get 16 days advance warning of an impending epidemic in this human population .
now , in addition to that , if you were an analyst who was trying to study an epidemic or to predict the adoption of a product , for example , what you could do is you could pick a random sample of the population , also have them nominate their friends and follow the friends and follow both the randoms and the friends .
among the friends , the first evidence you saw of a blip above zero in adoption of the innovation , for example , would be evidence of an impending epidemic .
or you could see the first time the two curves diverged , as shown on the left .
when did the randoms - when did the friends take off and leave the randoms , and -lsb- when did -rsb- their curve start shifting ?
and that , as indicated by the white line , occurred 46 days before the peak of the epidemic .
so this would be a technique whereby we could get more than a month-and-a-half warning about a flu epidemic in a particular population .
i should say that how far advanced a notice one might get about something depends on a host of factors .
it could depend on the nature of the pathogen - different pathogens , using this technique , you 'd get different warning - or other phenomena that are spreading , or frankly , on the structure of the human network .
now in our case , although it was n't necessary , we could also actually map the network of the students .
so , this is a map of 714 students and their friendship ties .
and in a minute now , i 'm going to put this map into motion .
we 're going to take daily cuts through the network for 120 days .
the red dots are going to be cases of the flu , and the yellow dots are going to be friends of the people with the flu .
and the size of the dots is going to be proportional to how many of their friends have the flu .
so bigger dots mean more of your friends have the flu .
and if you look at this image - here we are now in september the 13th - you 're going to see a few cases light up .
you 're going to see kind of blooming of the flu in the middle .
here we are on october the 19th .
the slope of the epidemic curve is approaching now , in november .
bang , bang , bang , bang , bang - you 're going to see lots of blooming in the middle , and then you 're going to see a sort of leveling off , fewer and fewer cases towards the end of december .
and this type of a visualization can show that epidemics like this take root and affect central individuals first , before they affect others .
now , as i 've been suggesting , this method is not restricted to germs , but actually to anything that spreads in populations .
information spreads in populations , norms can spread in populations , behaviors can spread in populations .
and by behaviors , i can mean things like criminal behavior , or voting behavior , or health care behavior , like smoking , or vaccination , or product adoption , or other kinds of behaviors that relate to interpersonal influence .
if i 'm likely to do something that affects others around me , this technique can get early warning or early detection about the adoption within the population .
the key thing is that for it to work , there has to be interpersonal influence .
it can not be because of some broadcast mechanism affecting everyone uniformly .
now the same insights can also be exploited - with respect to networks - can also be exploited in other ways , for example , in the use of targeting specific people for interventions .
so , for example , most of you are probably familiar with the notion of herd immunity .
so , if we have a population of a thousand people , and we want to make the population immune to a pathogen , we do n't have to immunize every single person .
if we immunize 960 of them , it 's as if we had immunized a hundred -lsb- percent -rsb- of them .
because even if one or two of the non-immune people gets infected , there 's no one for them to infect .
they are surrounded by immunized people .
so 96 percent is as good as 100 percent .
well , some other scientists have estimated what would happen if you took a 30 percent random sample of these 1000 people , 300 people and immunized them .
would you get any population-level immunity ?
and the answer is no .
but if you took this 30 percent , these 300 people and had them nominate their friends and took the same number of vaccine doses and vaccinated the friends of the 300 - the 300 friends - you can get the same level of herd immunity as if you had vaccinated 96 percent of the population at a much greater efficiency , with a strict budget constraint .
and similar ideas can be used , for instance , to target distribution of things like bed nets in the developing world .
if we could understand the structure of networks in villages , we could target to whom to give the interventions to foster these kinds of spreads .
or , frankly , for advertising with all kinds of products .
if we could understand how to target , it could affect the efficiency of what we 're trying to achieve .
and in fact , we can use data from all kinds of sources nowadays -lsb- to do this -rsb- .
this is a map of eight million phone users in a european country .
every dot is a person , and every line represents a volume of calls between the people .
and we can use such data , that 's being passively obtained , to map these whole countries and understand who is located where within the network .
without actually having to query them at all , we can get this kind of a structural insight .
and other sources of information , as you 're no doubt aware are available about such features , from email interactions , online interactions , online social networks and so forth .
and in fact , we are in the era of what i would call " massive-passive " data collection efforts .
they 're all kinds of ways we can use massively collected data to create sensor networks to follow the population , understand what 's happening in the population , and intervene in the population for the better .
because these new technologies tell us not just who is talking to whom , but where everyone is , and what they 're thinking based on what they 're uploading on the internet , and what they 're buying based on their purchases .
and all this administrative data can be pulled together and processed to understand human behavior in a way we never could before .
so , for example , we could use truckers ' purchases of fuel .
so the truckers are just going about their business , and they 're buying fuel .
and we see a blip up in the truckers ' purchases of fuel , and we know that a recession is about to end .
or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway , and the phone company can see , as the velocity is slowing down , that there 's a traffic jam .
and they can feed that information back to their subscribers , but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam !
or we can monitor doctors prescribing behaviors , passively , and see how the diffusion of innovation with pharmaceuticals occurs within -lsb- networks of -rsb- doctors .
or again , we can monitor purchasing behavior in people and watch how these types of phenomena can diffuse within human populations .
and there are three ways , i think , that these massive-passive data can be used .
one is fully passive , like i just described - as in , for instance , the trucker example , where we do n't actually intervene in the population in any way .
one is quasi-active , like the flu example i gave , where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends - do they have the flu , or not ? - and then get warning .
or another example would be , if you 're a phone company , you figure out who 's central in the network and you ask those people , " look , will you just text us your fever every day ?
just text us your temperature . "
and collect vast amounts of information about people 's temperature , but from centrally located individuals .
and be able , on a large scale , to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people .
or , finally , it can be more fully active - as i know subsequent speakers will also talk about today - where people might globally participate in wikis , or photographing , or monitoring elections , and upload information in a way that allows us to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena .
in fact , the availability of these data , i think , heralds a kind of new era of what i and others would like to call " computational social science . "
it 's sort of like when galileo invented - or , did n't invent - came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way , or leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope - or actually invented - and could see biology in a new way .
but now we have access to these kinds of data that allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before possible .
and with this science , we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts .
and actually , we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being .
thank you .
so yesterday , i was out in the street in front of this building , and i was walking down the sidewalk , and i had company , several of us , and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks .
we 're not talking each other . we 're facing forward .
we 're moving .
when the person in front of me slows down .
and so i 'm watching him , and he slows down , and finally he stops .
well , that was n't fast enough for me , so i put on my turn signal , and i walked around him , and as i walked , i looked to see what he was doing , and he was doing this .
he was texting , and he could n't text and walk at the same time .
now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective .
we 're going to do working memory today .
now , working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day .
you 're going it right now .
it 's not something we can turn off .
if you turn it off , that 's called a coma , okay ?
so right now , you 're doing just fine .
now working memory has four basic components .
it allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge .
it allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it , mixes it , processes it in light of whatever our current goal is .
now the current goal is n't something like , i want to be president or the best surfer in the world .
it 's more mundane . i 'd like that cookie , or i need to figure out how to get into my hotel room .
now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that , our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal .
now working memory capacity has a fairly long history , and it 's associated with a lot of positive effects .
people with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers .
they tend to solve and do well on standardized tests , however important that is .
they 're able to have high levels of writing ability .
they 're also able to reason at high levels .
so what we 're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that .
so i 'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks , and we 're going to take your working memory out for a ride .
you up for that ? okay .
i 'm going to give you five words , and i just want you to hang on to them .
do n't write them down . just hang on to them .
five words .
while you 're hanging on to them , i 'm going to ask you to answer three questions .
i want to see what happens with those words .
so here 's the words : tree , highway , mirror , saturn and electrode .
so far so good ?
okay . what i want you to do is i want you to tell me what the answer is to 23 times eight .
just shout it out .
-lrb- mumbling -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact it 's - -lrb- mumbling -rrb- - exactly . -lrb- laughter -rrb- all right . i want you to take out your left hand and i want you to go , " one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 . "
it 's a neurological test , just in case you were wondering .
all right , now what i want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the english alphabet backwards .
you should have started with z.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right . how many people here are still pretty sure you 've got all five words ?
okay . typically we end up with about less than half , right , which is normal . there will be a range .
some people can hang on to five .
some people can hang on to 10 .
some will be down to two or three .
what we know is this is really important to the way we function , right ?
and it 's going to be really important here at ted because you 're going to be exposed to so many different ideas .
now the problem that we have is that life comes at us , and it comes at us very quickly , and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that 's about the size of a pea .
now do n't get me wrong , working memory is awesome .
working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward .
it allows us to make sense of the world around us .
but it does have certain limits .
now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate .
we can have a conversation , and i can build a narrative around that so i know where we 've been and where we 're going and how to contribute to this conversation .
it allows us to problem-solve , critical think .
we can be in the middle of a meeting , listen to somebody 's presentation , evaluate it , decide whether or not we like it , ask follow-up questions .
all of that occurs within working memory .
it also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we 're really looking for is red bull and bacon . -lrb- laughter -rrb- gotta make sure we 're getting what we 're looking for .
now , a central issue with working memory is that it 's limited .
it 's limited in capacity , limited in duration , limited in focus .
we tend to remember about four things .
okay ? it used to be seven , but with functional mris , apparently it 's four , and we were overachieving .
now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it , unless we process it , unless we apply it to something , unless we talk to somebody about it .
when we think about working memory , we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us .
have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you 're there ?
you do know the solution to that , right ?
you go back to that original room . -lrb- laughter -rrb- have you ever forgotten your keys ?
you ever forgotten your car ?
you ever forgotten your kids ?
have you ever been involved in a conversation , and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so you 're nodding and you 're smiling , but you 're really paying attention to this one over here , until you hear that last word go up , and you realize , you 've been asked a question . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and you 're really hoping the answer is no , because that 's what you 're about to say .
all of that talks about working memory , what we can do and what we ca n't do .
we need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity , and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that .
we negotiate that through strategies .
so what i want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here , and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days .
now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence , our life , immediately and repeatedly .
we need to process what 's going on the moment it happens , not 10 minutes later , not a week later , at the moment .
so we need to think about , well , do i agree with him ?
what 's missing ? what would i like to know ?
do i agree with the assumptions ?
how can i apply this in my life ?
it 's a way of processing what 's going on so that we can use it later .
now we also need to repeat it . we need to practice .
so we need to think about it here .
in between , we want to talk to people about it .
we 're going to write it down , and when you get home , pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time .
practice for some reason became a very negative thing .
it 's very positive .
the next thing is , we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively .
oftentimes , we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge .
what we want to do is spin that around .
we want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful .
we also want to use imagery . we are built for images .
we need to take advantage of that .
think about things in images , write things down that way .
if you read a book , pull things up .
i just got through reading " the great gatsby , " and i have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head , so my own version .
the last one is organization and support .
we are meaning-making machines . it 's what we do .
we try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us .
organization helps , so we need to structure what we 're doing in ways that make sense .
if we are providing knowledge and experience , we need to structure that .
and the last one is support .
we all started as novices .
everything we do is an approximation of sophistication .
we should expect it to change over time . we have to support that .
the support may come in asking people questions , giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images , but we need to support it .
now , the final piece of this , the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this : what we process , we learn .
if we 're not processing life , we 're not living it .
live life . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- five years ago , i experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be alice in wonderland .
penn state asked me , a communications teacher , to teach a communications class for engineering students .
and i was scared . -lrb- laughter -rrb- really scared . scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big , unfamiliar words .
but as these conversations unfolded , i experienced what alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world .
that 's just how i felt as i had those conversations with the students . i was amazed at the ideas that they had , and i wanted others to experience this wonderland as well .
and i believe the key to opening that door is great communication .
we desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world .
our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges , from energy to environment to health care , among others , and if we do n't know about it and understand it , then the work is n't done , and i believe it 's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions .
but these great conversations ca n't occur if our scientists and engineers do n't invite us in to see their wonderland .
so scientists and engineers , please , talk nerdy to us .
i want to share a few keys on how you can do that to make sure that we can see that your science is sexy and that your engineering is engaging .
first question to answer for us : so what ?
tell us why your science is relevant to us .
do n't just tell me that you study trabeculae , but tell me that you study trabeculae , which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it 's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis .
and when you 're describing your science , beware of jargon .
jargon is a barrier to our understanding of your ideas .
sure , you can say " spatial and temporal , " but why not just say " space and time , " which is so much more accessible to us ?
and making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down .
instead , as einstein said , make everything as simple as possible , but no simpler .
you can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas .
a few things to consider are having examples , stories and analogies . those are ways to engage and excite us about your content .
and when presenting your work , drop the bullet points .
have you ever wondered why they 're called bullet points ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- what do bullets do ? bullets kill , and they will kill your presentation .
a slide like this is not only boring , but it relies too much on the language area of our brain , and causes us to become overwhelmed .
instead , this example slide by genevieve brown is much more effective . it 's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the eiffel tower .
and the trick here is to use a single , readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost , and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what 's being described .
so i think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering .
and because the engineers that i 've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd , i want to summarize with an equation . -lrb- laughter -rrb- take your science , subtract your bullet points and your jargon , divide by relevance , meaning share what 's relevant to the audience , and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you 're doing , and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding .
and so , scientists and engineers , when you 've solved this equation , by all means , talk nerdy to me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- suppose that two american friends are traveling together in italy .
they go to see michelangelo 's " david , " and when they finally come face to face with the statue , they both freeze dead in their tracks .
the first guy - we 'll call him adam - is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form .
the second guy - we 'll call him bill - is transfixed by embarrassment , at staring at the thing there in the center .
so here 's my question for you : which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for george bush , which for al gore ?
i do n't need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes .
we all know that it 's bill .
and in this case , the stereotype corresponds to reality .
it really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience .
people who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty , variety , diversity , new ideas , travel .
people low on it like things that are familiar , that are safe and dependable .
if you know about this trait , you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior .
you can understand why artists are so different from accountants .
you can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read , what kinds of places they like to travel to , and what kinds of food they like to eat .
once you understand this trait , you can understand why anybody would eat at applebee 's , but not anybody that you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this trait also tells us a lot about politics .
the main researcher of this trait , robert mccrae says that , " open individuals have an affinity for liberal , progressive , left-wing political views " - they like a society which is open and changing - " whereas closed individuals prefer conservative , traditional , right-wing views . "
this trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join .
so here 's the description of a group i found on the web .
what kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture , who seek a deeper understanding of the world , and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all ?
this is from some guy named ted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , let 's see now , if openness predicts who becomes liberal , and openness predicts who becomes a tedster , then might we predict that most tedsters are liberal ?
let 's find out .
i 'm going to ask you to raise your hand , whether you are liberal , left of center - on social issues , we 're talking about , primarily - or conservative , and i 'll give a third option , because i know there are a number of libertarians in the audience .
so , right now , please raise your hand - down in the simulcast rooms , too , let 's let everybody see who 's here - please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center .
please raise your hand high right now . ok .
please raise your hand if you 'd say you 're libertarian .
ok , about a - two dozen .
and please raise your hand if you 'd say you are right of center or conservative .
one , two , three , four , five - about eight or 10 .
ok . this is a bit of a problem .
because if our goal is to understand the world , to seek a deeper understanding of the world , our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder .
because when people all share values , when people all share morals , they become a team , and once you engage the psychology of teams , it shuts down open-minded thinking .
when the liberal team loses , as it did in 2004 , and as it almost did in 2000 , we comfort ourselves .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we try to explain why half of america voted for the other team .
we think they must be blinded by religion , or by simple stupidity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , if you think that half of america votes republican because they are blinded in this way , then my message to you is that you 're trapped in a moral matrix , in a particular moral matrix .
and by the matrix , i mean literally the matrix , like the movie " the matrix . "
but i 'm here today to give you a choice .
you can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions , or you can take the red pill , learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix .
now , because i know - -lrb- applause -rrb- - ok , i assume that answers my question .
i was going to ask you which one you picked , but no need .
you 're all high in openness to experience , and besides , it looks like it might even taste good , and you 're all epicures .
so anyway , let 's go with the red pill .
let 's study some moral psychology and see where it takes us .
let 's start at the beginning .
what is morality and where does it come from ?
the worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth .
developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds , and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others .
the best definition of innateness i 've ever seen - this just clarifies so many things for me - is from the brain scientist gary marcus .
he says , " the initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience .
nature provides a first draft , which experience then revises .
built-in does n't mean unmalleable ; it means organized in advance of experience . "
ok , so what 's on the first draft of the moral mind ?
to find out , my colleague , craig joseph , and i read through the literature on anthropology , on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology , looking for matches .
what are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines ?
that you find across cultures and even across species ?
we found five - five best matches , which we call the five foundations of morality .
the first one is harm / care .
we 're all mammals here , we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others , care for others , feel compassion for others , especially the weak and vulnerable .
it gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm .
this moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements i 've heard here at ted .
the second foundation is fairness / reciprocity .
there 's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals , but the evidence for people could not be clearer .
this norman rockwell painting is called " the golden rule , " and we heard about this from karen armstrong , of course , as the foundation of so many religions .
that second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements i 've heard here at ted .
the third foundation is in-group / loyalty .
you do find groups in the animal kingdom - you do find cooperative groups - but these groups are always either very small or they 're all siblings .
it 's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate , join together into groups , but in this case , groups that are united to fight other groups .
this probably comes from our long history of tribal living , of tribal psychology .
and this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we do n't have tribes , we go ahead and make them , because it 's fun .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sports is to war as pornography is to sex .
we get to exercise some ancient , ancient drives .
the fourth foundation is authority / respect .
here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species .
but authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality , as it is in other primates .
it 's based on more voluntary deference , and even elements of love , at times .
the fifth foundation is purity / sanctity .
this painting is called " the allegory of chastity , " but purity 's not just about suppressing female sexuality .
it 's about any kind of ideology , any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body , by controlling what you put into your body .
and while the political right may moralize sex much more , the political left is really doing a lot of it with food .
food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays , and a lot of it is ideas about purity , about what you 're willing to touch , or put into your body .
i believe these are the five best candidates for what 's written on the first draft of the moral mind .
i think this is what we come with , at least a preparedness to learn all of these things .
but as my son , max , grows up in a liberal college town , how is this first draft going to get revised ?
and how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in lynchburg , virginia ?
to think about culture variation , let 's try a different metaphor .
if there really are five systems at work in the mind - five sources of intuitions and emotions - then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels , where you can set it to a different setting on every channel .
and my colleagues , brian nosek and jesse graham , and i , made a questionnaire , which we put up on the web at www.yourmorals.org.
and so far , 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire , and you can too .
here are the results .
here are the results from about 23,000 american citizens .
on the left , i 've plotted the scores for liberals ; on the right , those for conservatives ; in the middle , the moderates .
the blue line shows you people 's responses on the average of all the harm questions .
so , as you see , people care about harm and care issues .
they give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board , but as you also see , liberals care about it a little more than conservatives - the line slopes down .
same story for fairness .
but look at the other three lines .
for liberals , the scores are very low .
liberals are basically saying , " no , this is not morality .
in-group , authority , purity - this stuff has nothing to do with morality . i reject it . "
but as people get more conservative , the values rise .
we can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel , or two-foundation morality .
conservatives have more of a five-foundation , or five-channel morality .
we find this in every country we look at .
here 's the data for 1,100 canadians .
i 'll just flip through a few other slides .
the u.k. , australia , new zealand , western europe , eastern europe , latin america , the middle east , east asia and south asia .
notice also that on all of these graphs , the slope is steeper on in-group , authority , purity .
which shows that within any country , the disagreement is n't over harm and fairness .
everybody - i mean , we debate over what 's fair - but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter .
moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group , authority , purity .
this effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question .
in one recent study , we asked people to suppose you 're about to get a dog .
you picked a particular breed , you learned some new information about the breed .
suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded , and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal ?
well , if you are a liberal , you say , " hey , that 's great ! "
because liberals like to say , " fetch , please . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if you 're conservative , that 's not so attractive .
if you 're conservative , and you learn that a dog 's extremely loyal to its home and family , and does n't warm up quickly to strangers , for conservatives , well , loyalty is good - dogs ought to be loyal .
but to a liberal , it sounds like this dog is running for the republican nomination .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , you might say , ok , there are these differences between liberals and conservatives , but what makes those three other foundations moral ?
are n't those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and puritanism ?
what makes them moral ?
the answer , i think , is contained in this incredible triptych from hieronymus bosch , " the garden of earthly delights . "
in the first panel , we see the moment of creation .
all is ordered , all is beautiful , all the people and animals are doing what they 're supposed to be doing , where they 're supposed to be .
but then , given the way of the world , things change .
we get every person doing whatever he wants , with every aperture of every other person and every other animal .
some of you might recognize this as the ' 60s .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the ' 60s inevitably gives way to the ' 70s , where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more .
of course , bosch called this hell .
so this triptych , these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay .
the truth of social entropy .
but lest you think this is just some part of the christian imagination where christians have this weird problem with pleasure , here 's the same story , the same progression , told in a paper that was published in nature a few years ago , in which ernst fehr and simon gachter had people play a commons dilemma .
a game in which you give people money , and then , on each round of the game , they can put money into a common pot , and then the experimenter doubles what 's in there , and then it 's all divided among the players .
so it 's a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues , where we 're asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves do n't really benefit from their own sacrifice .
but you really want everybody else to sacrifice , but everybody has a temptation to a free ride .
and what happens is that , at first , people start off reasonably cooperative - and this is all played anonymously .
on the first round , people give about half of the money that they can .
but they quickly see , " you know what , other people are n't doing so much though .
i do n't want to be a sucker . i 'm not going to cooperate . "
and so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good , down to close to zero .
but then - and here 's the trick - fehr and gachter said , on the seventh round , they told people , " you know what ? new rule .
if you want to give some of your own money to punish people who are n't contributing , you can do that . "
and as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on , cooperation shoots up .
it shoots up and it keeps going up .
there 's a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems , it really helps .
it 's not enough to just appeal to people 's good motives .
it really helps to have some sort of punishment .
even if it 's just shame or embarrassment or gossip , you need some sort of punishment to bring people , when they 're in large groups , to cooperate .
there 's even some recent research suggesting that religion - priming god , making people think about god - often , in some situations , leads to more cooperative , more pro-social behavior .
some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere , in part for the purpose of trusting each other , and then being more effective at competing with other groups .
i think that 's probably right , although this is a controversial issue .
but i 'm particularly interested in religion , and the origin of religion , and in what it does to us and for us .
because i think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the grand canyon .
the grand canyon is really simple .
it 's just a lot of rock , and then a lot of water and wind , and a lot of time , and you get the grand canyon .
it 's not that complicated .
this is what 's really complicated , that there were people living in places like the grand canyon , cooperating with each other , or on the savannahs of africa , or on the frozen shores of alaska , and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of babylon , and rome , and tenochtitlan .
how did this happen ?
this is an absolute miracle , much harder to explain than the grand canyon .
the answer , i think , is that they used every tool in the toolbox .
it took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups .
yes , you do need to be concerned about harm , you do need a psychology of justice .
but it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups , and if those sub-groups have some internal structure , and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality , to pursue higher , nobler ends .
and now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives .
because liberals reject three of these foundations .
they say " no , let 's celebrate diversity , not common in-group membership . "
they say , " let 's question authority . "
and they say , " keep your laws off my body . "
liberals have very noble motives for doing this .
traditional authority , traditional morality can be quite repressive , and restrictive to those at the bottom , to women , to people that do n't fit in .
so liberals speak for the weak and oppressed .
they want change and justice , even at the risk of chaos .
this guy 's shirt says , " stop bitching , start a revolution . "
if you 're high in openness to experience , revolution is good , it 's change , it 's fun .
conservatives , on the other hand , speak for institutions and traditions .
they want order , even at some cost to those at the bottom .
the great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve .
it 's really precious , and it 's really easy to lose .
so as edmund burke said , " the restraints on men , as well as their liberties , are to be reckoned among their rights . "
this was after the chaos of the french revolution .
so once you see this - once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute , that they form a balance on change versus stability - then i think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix .
this is the great insight that all the asian religions have attained .
think about yin and yang .
yin and yang are n't enemies . yin and yang do n't hate each other .
yin and yang are both necessary , like night and day , for the functioning of the world .
you find the same thing in hinduism .
there are many high gods in hinduism .
two of them are vishnu , the preserver , and shiva , the destroyer .
this image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body .
you have the markings of vishnu on the left , so we could think of vishnu as the conservative god .
you have the markings of shiva on the right , shiva 's the liberal god . and they work together .
you find the same thing in buddhism .
these two stanzas contain , i think , the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology .
from the zen master seng-ts 'an : " if you want the truth to stand clear before you , never be for or against .
the struggle between for and against is the mind 's worst disease . "
now unfortunately , it 's a disease that has been caught by many of the world 's leaders .
but before you feel superior to george bush , before you throw a stone , ask yourself , do you accept this ?
do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil ?
can you be not for or against anything ?
so , what 's the point ? what should you do ?
well , if you take the greatest insights from ancient asian philosophies and religions , and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology , i think you come to these conclusions : that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams , to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth .
so what should you do ? am i telling you to not strive ?
am i telling you to embrace seng-ts 'an and stop , stop with this struggle of for and against ?
no , absolutely not . i 'm not saying that .
this is an amazing group of people who are doing so much , using so much of their talent , their brilliance , their energy , their money , to make the world a better place , to fight - to fight wrongs , to solve problems .
but as we learned from samantha power , in her story about sergio vieira de mello , you ca n't just go charging in , saying , " you 're wrong , and i 'm right . "
because , as we just heard , everybody thinks they are right .
a lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people .
and if you want to change other people , a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are - understand our moral psychology , understand that we all think we 're right - and then step out , even if it 's just for a moment , step out - check in with seng-ts 'an .
step out of the moral matrix , just try to see it as a struggle playing out , in which everybody does think they 're right , and everybody , at least , has some reasons - even if you disagree with them - everybody has some reasons for what they 're doing .
step out .
and if you do that , that 's the essential move to cultivate moral humility , to get yourself out of this self-righteousness , which is the normal human condition .
think about the dalai lama .
think about the enormous moral authority of the dalai lama - and it comes from his moral humility .
so i think the point - the point of my talk , and i think the point of ted - is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better .
people here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place .
but there is also a passionate commitment to the truth .
and so i think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what is so special about the human brain ?
why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us ?
what does a human brain have or do that no other brain does ?
when i became interested in these questions about 10 years ago , scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of .
though it was based on very little evidence , many scientists thought that all mammalian brains , including the human brain , were made in the same way , with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain .
this means that two brains of the same size , like these two , with a respectable 400 grams , should have similar numbers of neurons .
now , if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain , then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities .
and yet , one is a chimp , and the other is a cow .
now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it , but we eat them .
i think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex , elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are .
so this is a first indication that the " all brains are made the same way " scenario is not quite right .
but let 's play along .
if all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes , larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains , and the larger the brain , the more cognitively able its owner should be .
so the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able .
and here comes the bad news : our brain , not the largest one around .
it seems quite vexing .
our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos , but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos , and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos , which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities .
it must be really extraordinary , an exception to the rule .
theirs may be bigger , but ours is better , and it could be better , for example , in that it seems larger than it should be , with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies .
so that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body .
that 's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body .
so the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes .
gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are , so their brains should also be larger than ours , but instead it 's the other way around .
our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain .
the human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses .
although it weighs only two percent of the body , it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day .
that 's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories , just to keep your brain working .
so the human brain is larger than it should be , it uses much more energy than it should , so it 's special .
and this is where the story started to bother me .
in biology , we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general , so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us ?
maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way .
maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons .
maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain .
maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain , regardless of its size , especially in the cerebral cortex .
so this to me became the important question to answer : how many neurons does the human brain have , and how does that compare to other animals ?
now , you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons , so 10 years ago , i asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from .
but nobody did .
i 've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number , and i could never find it .
it seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain , or in any other brain for that matter .
so i came up with my own way to count cells in the brain , and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup .
it works like this : you take a brain , or parts of that brain , and you dissolve it in detergent , which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact , so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this , like a clear soup .
this soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain .
now , the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup , you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid , so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution , you can count nuclei , and therefore tell how many cells that brain had .
it 's simple , it 's straightforward , and it 's really fast .
so we 've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far , and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way .
take rodents and primates , for instance : in larger rodent brains , the average size of the neuron increases , so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons .
but primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger , which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain .
the result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size , and the larger the brain , the larger this difference will be .
well , what about our brain then ?
we found that we have , on average , 86 billion neurons , 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex , and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning , and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has , i think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities .
but just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean .
because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically , we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain .
so , a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos .
that 's not possible .
a brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight , and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons .
i do n't think it looks like us .
so this brings us to a very important conclusion already , which is that we are not rodents .
the human brain is not a large rat brain .
compared to a rat , we might seem special , yes , but that 's not a fair comparison to make , given that we know that we are not rodents .
we are primates , so the correct comparison is to other primates .
and there , if you do the math , you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos , which seems just right , in a body of some 66 kilos , which in my case is exactly right , which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion : i am a primate .
and all of you are primates .
and so was darwin .
i love to think that darwin would have really appreciated this .
his brain , like ours , was made in the image of other primate brains .
so the human brain may be remarkable , yes , but it is not special in its number of neurons .
it is just a large primate brain .
i think that 's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature .
why does it cost so much energy , then ?
well , other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs , and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of , we could do the math .
and it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same , an average of six calories per billion neurons per day .
so the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple , linear function of its number of neurons , and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect .
so the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons , and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal , the relative cost of our brain is large , but just because we 're primates , not because we 're special .
last question , then : how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons , and in particular , if great apes are larger than we are , why do n't they have a larger brain than we do , with more neurons ?
when we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain , i figured , maybe there 's a simple reason .
they just ca n't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons .
so we did the math .
we calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods , and on the other hand , how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs , and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day .
and what we found is that because neurons are so expensive , there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons .
so a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons , but then its body can not be any bigger than 25 kilos .
to weigh any more than that , it has to give up neurons .
so it 's either a large body or a large number of neurons .
when you eat like a primate , you ca n't afford both .
one way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating , but that gets dangerous , and past a certain point , it 's just not possible .
gorillas and orangutans , for instance , afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating , and that seems to be about as much as they can do .
nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate .
what about us ?
with our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass , we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding , which is just not feasible .
if we ate like a primate , we should not be here .
how did we get here , then ?
well , if our brain costs just as much energy as it should , and if we ca n't spend every waking hour of the day feeding , then the only alternative , really , is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods .
and remarkably , that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago , when they invented cooking .
to cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body .
cooked foods are softer , so they 're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth , so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut , which makes them yield much more energy in much less time .
so cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food , looking for food , and gobbling down food all day long .
so because of cooking , what once was a major liability , this large , dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons , could now become a major asset , now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them .
so i think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution , all of the while remaining just a primate brain .
with this large brain now affordable by cooking , we went rapidly from raw foods to culture , agriculture , civilization , grocery stores , electricity , refrigerators , all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint .
so what once was a solution now became the problem , and ironically , we look for the solution in raw food .
so what is the human advantage ?
what is it that we have that no other animal has ?
my answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex , and i think that 's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities .
and what is it that we do that no other animal does , and which i believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large , largest number of neurons in the cortex ?
in two words , we cook .
no other animal cooks its food . only humans do .
and i think that 's how we got to become human .
studying the human brain changed the way i think about food .
i now look at my kitchen , and i bow to it , and i thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the adirondack mountains , a wilderness area in the northern part of new york state .
it was a beautiful day .
the forest was sparkling .
the sun made the leaves glow like stained glass , and if it were n't for the path we were following , we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land .
we got to our campsite .
it was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal , beautiful lake , when i discovered a horror .
behind the lean-to was a dump , maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil , and a dead sneaker .
and i was astonished , i was very angry , and i was deeply confused .
the campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in , who did they think would clean up after them ?
that question stayed with me , and it simplified a little .
who cleans up after us ?
however you configure or wherever you place the us , who cleans up after us in istanbul ?
who cleans up after us in rio or in paris or in london ?
here in new york , the department of sanitation cleans up after us , to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day .
i wanted to get to know them as individuals .
i wanted to understand who takes the job .
what 's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden ?
so i started a research project with them .
i rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city , and i learned a lot , but i was still an outsider .
i needed to go deeper .
so i took the job as a sanitation worker .
i did n't just ride in the trucks now . i drove the trucks .
and i operated the mechanical brooms and i plowed the snow .
it was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education .
everyone asks about the smell .
it 's there , but it 's not as prevalent as you think , and on days when it is really bad , you get used to it rather quickly .
the weight takes a long time to get used to .
i knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week .
then there 's the danger .
according to the bureau of labor statistics , sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country , and i learned why .
you 're in and out of traffic all day , and it 's zooming around you .
it just wants to get past you , so it 's often the motorist is not paying attention .
that 's really bad for the worker .
and then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm .
i also learned about the relentlessness of trash .
when you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck , you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself .
it never stops coming .
it 's also like a form of respiration or circulation .
it must always be in motion .
and then there 's the stigma .
you put on the uniform , and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you 've blocked traffic with your truck , or you 're taking a break too close to their home , or you 're drinking coffee in their diner , and they will come and scorn you , and tell you that they do n't want you anywhere near them .
i find the stigma especially ironic , because i strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city , for three reasons .
they are the first guardians of public health .
if they 're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day , it starts to spill out of its containments , and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways .
diseases we 've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us .
the economy needs them .
if we ca n't throw out the old stuff , we have no room for the new stuff , so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised .
i 'm not advocating capitalism , i 'm just pointing out their relationship .
and then there 's what i call our average , necessary quotidian velocity .
by that i simply mean how fast we 're used to moving in the contemporary day and age .
we usually do n't care for , repair , clean , carry around our coffee cup , our shopping bag , our bottle of water .
we use them , we throw them out , we forget about them , because we know there 's a workforce on the other side that 's going to take it all away .
so i want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane .
their work , i think , is kind of liturgical .
they 're on the streets every day , rhythmically .
they wear a uniform in many cities .
you know when to expect them .
and their work lets us do our work .
they are almost a form of reassurance .
the flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves , from our own dross , our cast-offs , and that flow must be maintained always no matter what .
on the day after september 11 in 2001 , i heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street , and i grabbed my infant son and i ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every wednesday .
and i tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days , but i started to cry .
and he looked at me , and he just nodded , and he said , " we 're going to be okay .
we 're going to be okay . "
it was a little while later that i started my research with sanitation , and i met that man again .
his name is paulie , and we worked together many times , and we became good friends .
i want to believe that paulie was right .
we are going to be okay .
but in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet , we must include and take account of all the costs , including the very real human cost of the labor .
and we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about , how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling , which is a remarkable success across 40 years , across the united states and countries around the world , and lift us up to a broader horizon where we 're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources .
municipal waste , what we think of when we talk about garbage , accounts for three percent of the nation 's waste stream .
it 's a remarkable statistic .
so in the flow of your days , in the flow of your lives , next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you , take a moment to acknowledge them .
take a moment to say thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time , video : all right , start the clock please . 30 seconds studio .
keep it quiet please . settle down .
it 's about time . end sequence . take one .
15 seconds studio .
10 , nine , eight , seven , six , five , four , three , two ...
philip zimbardo : let 's tune into the conversation of the principals in adam 's temptation .
" come on adam , do n't be so wishy-washy . take a bite . " " i did . "
" one bite , adam . do n't abandon eve . "
" i do n't know , guys .
i do n't want to get in trouble . "
" okay . one bite . what the hell ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- life is temptation . it 's all about yielding , resisting , yes , no , now , later , impulsive , reflective , present focus and future focus .
promised virtues fall prey to the passions of the moment .
of teenage girls who pledged sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage - thank you george bush - the majority , 60 percent , yielded to sexual temptations within one year .
and most of them did so without using birth control .
so much for promises .
now lets tempt four-year-olds , giving them a treat .
they can have one marshmallow now . but if they wait until the experimenter comes back , they can have two .
of course it pays , if you like marshmallows , to wait .
what happens is two-thirds of the kids give in to temptation .
they can not wait . the others , of course , wait .
they resist the temptation . they delay the now for later .
walter mischel , my colleague at stanford , went back 14 years later , to try to discover what was different about those kids .
there were enormous differences between kids who resisted and kids who yielded , in many ways .
the kids who resisted scored 250 points higher on the sat .
that 's enormous . that 's like a whole set of different iq points .
they did n't get in as much trouble . they were better students .
they were self-confident and determined . and the key for me today , the key for you , is , they were future-focused rather than present-focused .
so what is time perspective ? that 's what i 'm going to talk about today .
time perspective is the study of how individuals , all of us , divide the flow of your human experience into time zones or time categories .
and you do it automatically and non-consciously .
they vary between cultures , between nations , between individuals , between social classes , between education levels .
and the problem is that they can become biased , because you learn to over-use some of them and under-use the others .
what determines any decision you make ?
you make a decision on which you 're going to base an action .
for some people it 's only about what is in the immediate situation , what other people are doing and what you 're feeling .
and those people , when they make their decisions in that format - we 're going to call them " present-oriented , " because their focus is what is now .
for others , the present is irrelevant .
it 's always about " what is this situation like that i 've experienced in the past ? "
so that their decisions are based on past memories .
and we 're going to call those people " past-oriented , " because they focus on what was .
for others it 's not the past , it 's not the present , it 's only about the future .
their focus is always about anticipated consequences .
cost-benefit analysis .
we 're going to call them " future-oriented . " their focus is on what will be .
so , time paradox , i want to argue , the paradox of time perspective , is something that influences every decision you make , you 're totally unaware of .
namely , the extent to which you have one of these biased time perspectives .
well there is actually six of them . there are two ways to be present-oriented .
there is two ways to be past-oriented , two ways to be future .
you can focus on past-positive , or past-negative .
you can be present-hedonistic , namely you focus on the joys of life , or present-fatalist - it does n't matter , your life is controlled .
you can be future-oriented , setting goals .
or you can be transcendental future : namely , life begins after death .
developing the mental flexibility to shift time perspectives fluidly depending on the demands of the situation , that 's what you 've got to learn to do .
so , very quickly , what is the optimal time profile ?
high on past-positive . moderately high on future .
and moderate on present-hedonism .
and always low on past-negative and present-fatalism .
so the optimal temporal mix is what you get from the past - past-positive gives you roots . you connect your family , identity and your self .
what you get from the future is wings to soar to new destinations , new challenges .
what you get from the present hedonism is the energy , the energy to explore yourself , places , people , sensuality .
any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives .
what do futures sacrifice for success ?
they sacrifice family time . they sacrifice friend time .
they sacrifice fun time . they sacrifice personal indulgence .
they sacrifice hobbies . and they sacrifice sleep . so it affects their health .
and they live for work , achievement and control .
i 'm sure that resonates with some of the tedsters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it resonated for me . i grew up as a poor kid in the south bronx ghetto , a sicilian family - everyone lived in the past and present .
i 'm here as a future-oriented person who went over the top , who did all these sacrifices because teachers intervened , and made me future oriented .
told me do n't eat that marshmallow , because if you wait you 're going to get two of them , until i learned to balance out .
i 've added present-hedonism , i 've added a focus on the past-positive , so , at 76 years old , i am more energetic than ever , more productive , and i 'm happier than i have ever been .
i just want to say that we are applying this to many world problems : changing the drop-out rates of school kids , combating addictions , enhancing teen health , curing vets ' ptsd with time metaphors - getting miracle cures - promoting sustainability and conservation , reducing physical rehabilitation where there is a 50-percent drop out rate , altering appeals to suicidal terrorists , and modifying family conflicts as time-zone clashes .
so i want to end by saying : many of life 's puzzles can be solved by understanding your time perspective and that of others .
and the idea is so simple , so obvious , but i think the consequences are really profound .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's hard to believe that it 's less than a year since the extraordinary moment when the finance , the credit , which drives our economies froze .
a massive cardiac arrest .
the effect , the payback , perhaps , for years of vampire predators like bernie madoff , whom we saw earlier .
abuse of steroids , binging and so on .
and it 's only a few months since governments injected enormous sums of money to try and keep the whole system afloat .
and we 're now in a very strange sort of twilight zone , where no one quite knows what 's worked , or what does n't .
we do n't have any very clear maps , any compass to guide us .
we do n't know which experts to believe anymore .
what i 'm going to try and do is to give some pointers to what i think is the landscape on the other side of the crisis , what things we should be looking out for and how we can actually use the crisis .
there 's a definition of leadership which says , " it 's the ability to use the smallest possible crisis for the biggest possible effect . "
and i want to talk about how we ensure that this crisis , which is by no means small , really is used to the full .
i want to start just by saying a bit about where i 'm coming from .
i 've got a very confused background which perhaps makes me appropriate for confused times .
i 've got a ph.d. in telecoms , as you can see .
i trained briefly as a buddhist monk under this guy .
i 've been a civil servant , and i 've been in charge of policy for this guy as well .
but what i want to talk about begins when i was at this city , this university , as a student .
and then as now , it was a beautiful place of balls and punts , beautiful people , many of whom took to heart ronald reagan 's comment that , " even if they say hard work does n't do you any harm , why risk it ? "
but when i was here , a lot of my fellow teenagers were in a very different situation , leaving school at a time then of rapidly growing youth unemployment , and essentially hitting a brick wall in terms of their opportunities .
and i spent quite a lot of time with them rather than in punts .
and they were people who were not short of wit , or grace or energy , but they had no hope , no jobs , no prospects .
and when people are n't allowed to be useful , they soon think that they 're useless .
and although that was great for the music business at the time , it was n't much good for anything else .
and ever since then , i 've wondered why it is that capitalism is so amazingly efficient at some things , but so inefficient at others , why it 's so innovative in some ways and so un-innovative in others .
now , since that time , we 've actually been through an extraordinary boom , the longest boom ever in the history of this country .
unprecedented wealth and prosperity , but that growth has n't always delivered what we needed .
h.l. mencken once said that , " to every complex problem , there is a simple solution and it 's wrong . "
but i 'm not saying growth is wrong , but it 's very striking that throughout the years of growth , many things did n't get better .
rates of depression carried on up , right across the western world .
if you look at america , the proportion of americans with no one to talk to about important things went up from a tenth to a quarter .
we commuted longer to work , but as you can see from this graph , the longer you commute the less happy you 're likely to be .
and it became ever clearer that economic growth does n't automatically translate into social growth or human growth .
we 're now at another moment when another wave of teenagers are entering a cruel job market .
there will be a million unemployed young people here by the end of the year , thousands losing their jobs everyday in america .
we 've got to do whatever we can to help them , but we 've also got to ask , i think , a more profound question of whether we use this crisis to jump forward to a different kind of economy that 's more suited to human needs , to a better balance of economy and society .
and i think one of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity .
they bring ideas from the margins into the mainstream .
they often lead to the acceleration of much-needed reforms .
and you saw that in the ' 30s , when the great depression paved the way for bretton woods , welfare states and so on .
and i think you can see around us now , some of the green shoots of a very different kind of economy and capitalism which could grow .
you can see it in daily life .
when times are hard , people have to do things for themselves , and right across the world , oxford , omaha , omsk , you can see an extraordinary explosion of urban farming , people taking over land , taking over roofs , turning barges into temporary farms .
and i 'm a very small part of this .
i have 60,000 of these things in my garden .
a few of these . this is atilla the hen .
and i 'm a very small part of a very large movement , which for some people is about survival , but is also about values , about a different kind of economy , which is n't so much about consumption and credit , but about things which matter to us .
and everywhere too , you can see a proliferation of time banks and parallel currencies , people using smart technologies to link up all the resources freed up by the market - people , buildings , land - and linking them to whomever has got the most compelling needs .
there 's a similar story , i think , for governments .
ronald reagan , again , said the two funniest sentences in the english language are , " i 'm from the government . and i 'm here to help . "
but i think last year when governments did step in , people were quite glad that they were there , that they did act .
but now , a few months on , however good politicians are at swallowing frogs without pulling a face , as someone once put it , they ca n't hide their uncertainty .
because it 's already clear how much of the enormous amount of money they put into the economy , really went into fixing the past , bailing out the banks , the car companies , not preparing us for the future .
how much of the money is going into concrete and boosting consumption , not into solving the really profound problems we have to solve .
and everywhere , as people think about the unprecedented sums which are being spent of our money and our children 's money , now , in the depth of this crisis , they 're asking : surely , we should be using this with a longer-term vision to accelerate the shift to a green economy , to prepare for aging , to deal with some of the inequalities which scar countries like this and the united states rather than just giving the money to the incumbents ?
surely , we should be giving the money to entrepreneurs , to civil society , for people able to create the new , not to the big , well-connected companies , big , clunky government programs .
and , after all this , as the great chinese sage lao tzu said , " governing a great country is like cooking a small fish .
do n't overdo it . "
and i think more and more people are also asking : why boost consumption , rather than change what we consume ?
like the mayor of são paulo who 's banned advertising billboards , or the many cities like san francisco putting in infrastructures for electric cars .
you can see a bit of the same thing happening in the business world .
some , i think some of the bankers who have appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing .
but ask yourselves : what will be the biggest sectors of the economy in 10 , 20 , 30 years time ? it wo n't be the ones lining up for handouts , like cars and aerospace and so on .
the biggest sector , by far , will be health - already 18 percent of the american economy , predicted to grow to 30 , even 40 percent by mid-century .
elder care , child care , already much bigger employers than cars .
education : six , seven , eight percent of the economy and growing .
environmental services , energy services , the myriad of green jobs , they 're all pointing to a very different kind of economy which is n't just about products , but is using distributed networks , and it 's founded above all on care , on relationships , on what people do to other people , often one to one , rather than simply selling them a product .
and i think that what connects the challenge for civil society , the challenge for governments and the challenge for business now is , in a way , a very simple one , but quite a difficult one .
we know our societies have to radically change .
we know we ca n't go back to where we were before the crisis .
but we also know it 's only through experiment that we 'll discover exactly how to run a low carbon city , how to care for a much older population , how to deal with drug addiction and so on .
and here 's the problem .
in science , we do experiments systematically .
our societies now spend two , three , four percent of gdp to invest systematically in new discovery , in science , in technology , to fuel the pipeline of brilliant inventions which illuminate gatherings like this .
it 's not that our scientists are necessarily much smarter than they were a hundred years ago , maybe they are , but they have a hell of a lot more backing than they ever did .
and what 's striking though , is that in society there 's almost nothing comparable , no comparable investment , no systematic experiment , in the things capitalism is n't very good at , like compassion , or empathy , or relationships or care .
now , i did n't really understand that until i met this guy who was then an 80-year-old , slightly shambolic man who lived on tomato soup and thought ironing was very overrated .
he had helped shape britain 's post-war institutions , its welfare state , its economy , but had sort of reinvented himself as a social entrepreneur , became an inventor of many , many different organizations .
some famous ones like the open university , which has 110,000 students , the university of the third age , which has nearly half a million older people teaching other older people , as well as strange things like diy garages and language lines and schools for social entrepreneurs .
and he ended his life selling companies to venture capitalists .
he believed if you see a problem , you should n't tell someone to act , you should act on it yourself , and he lived long enough and saw enough of his ideas first scorned and then succeed that he said you should always take no as a question and not as an answer .
and his life was a systematic experiment to find better social answers , not from a theory , but from experiment , and experiment involving the people with the best intelligence on social needs , which were usually the people living with those needs .
and he believed we live with others , we share the world with others and therefore our innovation must be done with others too , not doing things at people , for them , and so on .
now , what he did did n't used to have a name , but i think it 's rapidly becoming quite mainstream .
it 's what we do in the organization named after him where we try and invent , create , launch new ventures , whether it 's schools , web companies , health organizations and so on .
and we find ourselves part of a very rapidly growing global movement of institutions working on social innovation , using ideas from design or technology or community organizing to develop the germs of a future world , but through practice and through demonstration and not through theory .
and they 're spreading from korea to brazil to india to the usa and across europe .
and they 've been given new momentum by the crisis , by the need for better answers to joblessness , community breakdown and so on .
some of the ideas are strange .
these are complaints choirs .
people come together to sing about the things that really bug them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- others are much more pragmatic : health coaches , learning mentors , job clubs .
and some are quite structural , like social impact bonds where you raise money to invest in diverting teenagers from crime or helping old people keep out of hospital , and you get paid back according to how successful your projects are .
now , the idea that all of this represents , i think , is rapidly becoming a common sense and part of how we respond to the crisis , recognizing the need to invest in innovation for social progress as well as technological progress .
there were big health innovation funds launched earlier this year in this country , as well as a public service innovation lab .
across northern europe , many governments now have innovation laboratories within them .
and just a few months ago , president obama launched the office of social innovation in the white house .
and what people are beginning to ask is : surely , just as we invest in r and d , two , three , four percent , of our gdp , of our economy , what if we put , let 's say , one percent of public spending into social innovation , into elder care , new kinds of education , new ways of helping the disabled ?
perhaps we 'd achieve similar productivity gains in society to those we 've had in the economy and in technology .
and if , a generation or two ago , the big challenges were ones like getting a man on the moon , perhaps the challenges we need to set ourselves now are ones like eliminating child malnutrition , stopping trafficking , or one , i think closer to home for america or europe , why do n't we set ourselves the goal of achieving a billion extra years of life for today 's citizens .
now those are all goals which could be achieved within a decade , but only with radical and systematic experiment , not just with technologies , but also with lifestyles and culture and policies and institutions too .
now , i want to end by saying a little bit about what i think this means for capitalism .
i think what this is all about , this whole movement which is growing from the margins , remains quite small .
nothing like the resources of a cern or a darpa or an ibm or a dupont .
what it 's telling us is that capitalism is going to become more social .
it 's already immersed in social networks .
it will become more involved in social investment , and social care and in industries where the value comes from what you do with others , not just from what you sell to them , and from relationships as well as from consumption .
but interestingly too , it implies a future where society learns a few tricks from capitalism about how you embed the dna of restless continual innovation into society , trying things out and then growing and scaling the ones that work .
now , i think this future will be quite surprising to many people .
in recent years , a lot of intelligent people thought that capitalism had basically won .
history was over and society would inevitably have to take second place to economy .
but i 've been struck with a parallel in how people often talk about capitalism today and how they talked about the monarchy 200 years ago , just after the french revolution and the restoration of the monarchy in france .
then , people said monarchy dominated everywhere because it was rooted in human nature .
we were naturally deferential . we needed hierarchy .
just as today , the enthusiasts of unrestrained capitalism say it 's rooted in human nature , only now it 's individualism , inquisitiveness , and so on .
then monarchy had seen off its big challenger , mass democracy , which was seen as a well-intentioned but doomed experiment , just as capitalism has seen off socialism .
even fidel castro now says that the only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is not being exploited by multinational capitalism .
and whereas then monarchies , palaces and forts dominated every city skyline and looked permanent and confident , today it 's the gleaming towers of the banks which dominate every big city .
i 'm not suggesting the crowds are about to storm the barricades and string up every investment banker from the nearest lamppost , though that might be quite tempting .
but i do think we 're on the verge of a period when , just as happened to the monarchy and , interestingly , the military too , the central position of finance capital is going to come to an end , and it 's going to steadily move to the sides , the margins of our society , transformed from being a master into a servant , a servant to the productive economy and of human needs .
and as that happens , we will remember something very simple and obvious about capitalism , which is that , unlike what you read in economics textbooks , it 's not a self-sufficient system .
it depends on other systems , on ecology , on family , on community , and if these are n't replenished , capitalism suffers too .
and our human nature is n't just selfish , it 's also compassionate .
it 's not just competitive , it 's also caring .
because of the depth of the crisis , i think we are at a moment of choice .
the crisis is almost certainly deepening around us .
it will be worse at the end of this year , quite possibly worse in a year 's time than it is today .
but this is one of those very rare moments when we have to choose whether we 're just pedaling furiously to get back to where we were a year or two ago , and a very narrow idea of what the economy is for , or whether this is a moment to jump ahead , to reboot and to do some of the things we probably should have been doing anyway .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i am a papercutter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i cut stories .
so my process is very straightforward .
i take a piece of paper , i visualize my story , sometimes i sketch , sometimes i do n't .
and as my image is already inside the paper , i just have to remove what 's not from that story .
so i did n't come to papercutting in a straight line .
in fact , i see it more as a spiral .
i was not born with a blade in my hand .
and i do n't remember papercutting as a child .
as a teenager , i was sketching , drawing , and i wanted to be an artist .
but i was also a rebel .
and i left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs .
so among them , i have been a shepherdess , a truck driver , a factory worker , a cleaning lady .
i worked in tourism for one year in mexico , one year in egypt .
i moved for two years in taiwan .
and then i settled in new york where i became a tour guide .
and i still worked as a tour leader , traveled back and forth in china , tibet and central asia .
so of course , it took time , and i was nearly 40 , and i decided it 's time to start as an artist .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i chose papercutting because paper is cheap , it 's light , and you can use it in a lot of different ways .
and i chose the language of silhouette because graphically it 's very efficient .
and it 's also just getting to the essential of things .
so the word " silhouette " comes from a minister of finance , etienne de silhouette .
and he slashed so many budgets that people said they could n't afford paintings anymore , and they needed to have their portrait " a la silhouette . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i made series of images , cuttings , and i assembled them in portfolios .
and people told me - like these 36 views of the empire state building - they told me , " you 're making artist books . "
so artist books have a lot of definitions .
they come in a lot of different shapes .
but to me , they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story .
they can be with words or without words .
and i have a passion for images and for words .
i love pun and the relation to the unconscious .
i love oddities of languages .
and everywhere i lived , i learned the languages , but never mastered them .
so i 'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages .
so as you can guess , my mother tongue is french .
and my daily language is english .
so i did a series of work where it was identical words in french and in english .
so one of these works is the " spelling spider . "
so the spelling spider is a cousin of the spelling bee .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's much more connected to the web .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this spider spins a bilingual alphabet .
so you can read " architecture active " or " active architecture . "
so this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives .
so if you do n't know one of these languages , it 's instant learning .
and one ancient form of the book is scrolls .
so scrolls are very convenient , because you can create a large image on a very small table .
so the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image , so it makes a very freestyle architecture .
and i 'm making all those kinds of windows .
so it 's to look beyond the surface .
it 's to have a look at different worlds .
and very often i 've been an outsider .
so i want to see how things work and what 's happening .
so each window is an image and is a world that i often revisit .
and i revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do , and what are the words , colloquialisms , that we have with the expressions .
it 's all if .
so what if we were living in balloon houses ?
it would make a very uplifting world .
and we would leave a very low footprint on the planet .
it would be so light .
so sometimes i view from the inside , like egocentricity and the inner circles .
sometimes it 's a global view , to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams .
and we can use them also as a safety net .
and my inspirations are very eclectic .
i 'm influenced by everything i read , everything i see .
i have some stories that are humorous , like " dead beats . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- other ones are historical .
here it 's " candycity . "
it 's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar .
it goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between .
and sometimes i have an emotional response to news , such as the 2010 haitian earthquake .
other times , it 's not even my stories .
people tell me their lives , their memories , their aspirations , and i create a mindscape .
i channel their history -lsb- so that -rsb- they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities .
i call them freudian cities .
i can not speak for all my images , so i 'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title .
" modicity . "
" electricity . "
" mad growth on columbus circle . "
" reefcity . "
" a web of time . "
" chaos city . "
" daily battles . "
" felicity . "
" floating islands . "
and at one point , i had to do " the whole nine yards . "
so it 's actually a papercut that 's nine yards long .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so in life and in papercutting , everything is connected .
one story leads to another .
i was also interested in the physicality of this format , because you have to walk to see it .
and parallel to my cutting is my running .
i started with small images , i started with a few miles .
larger images , i started to run marathons .
then i went to run 50k , then 60k .
then i ran 50 miles - ultramarathons .
and i still feel i 'm running , it 's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and running gives me a lot of energy .
here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the museum of arts and design in new york city .
the result is " hells and heavens . "
it 's two panels 13 ft. high .
they were installed in the museum on two floors , but in fact , it 's a continuous image .
and i call it " hells and heavens " because it 's daily hells and daily heavens .
there is no border in between .
some people are born in hells , and against all odds , they make it to heavens .
other people make the opposite trip .
that 's the border .
you have sweatshops in hells .
you have people renting their wings in the heavens .
and then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action , and the result puts you in hells or in heavens .
so the whole " hells and heavens " is about free will and determinism .
and in papercutting , you have the drawing as the structure itself .
so you can take it off the wall .
here it 's an artist book installation called " identity project . "
it 's not autobiographical identities .
they are more our social identities .
and then you can just walk behind them and try them on .
so it 's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity .
that 's another artist book project .
in fact , in the picture , you have two of them .
it 's one i 'm wearing and one that 's on exhibition at the center for books arts in new york city .
why do i call it a book ?
it 's called " fashion statement , " and there are quotes about fashion , so you can read it , and also , because the definition of artist book is very generous .
so artist books , you take them off the wall .
you take them for a walk .
you can also install them as public art .
here it 's in scottsdale , arizona , and it 's called " floating memories . "
so it 's regional memories , and they are just randomly moved by the wind .
i love public art .
and i entered competitions for a long time .
after eight years of rejection , i was thrilled to get my first commission with the percent for art in new york city .
it was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen .
i made an artist book that 's in stainless steel instead of paper .
i called it " working in the same direction . "
but i added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions .
with public art , i could also make cut glass .
here it 's faceted glass in the bronx .
and each time i make public art , i want something that 's really relevant to the place it 's installed .
so for the subway in new york , i saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading .
it is travel in time , travel on time .
and bronx literature , it 's all about bronx writers and their stories .
another glass project is in a public library in san jose , california .
so i made a vegetable point of view of the growth of san jose .
so i started in the center with the acorn for the ohlone indian civilization .
then i have the fruit from europe for the ranchers .
and then the fruit of the world for silicon valley today .
and it 's still growing .
so the technique , it 's cut , sandblasted , etched and printed glass into architectural glass .
and outside the library , i wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind .
i took library material that had fruit in their title and i used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge .
i also planted the bibliotree .
so it 's a tree , and in its trunk you have the roots of languages .
and it 's all about international writing systems .
and on the branches you have library material growing .
you can also have function and form with public art .
so in aurora , colorado it 's a bench .
but you have a bonus with this bench .
because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts , you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another functional work , it 's in the south side of chicago for a subway station .
and it 's called " seeds of the future are planted today . "
it 's a story about transformation and connections .
so it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter , and not to have objects falling on the rails .
to be able to change fences and window guards into flowers , it 's fantastic .
and here i 've been working for the last three years with a south bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing .
so each building has its own personality .
and sometimes it 's about a legacy of the neighborhood , like in morrisania , about the jazz history .
and for other projects , like in paris , it 's about the name of the street .
it 's called rue des prairies - prairie street .
so i brought back the rabbit , the dragonfly , to stay in that street .
and in 2009 , i was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in new york city for a year .
so that was a very captive audience .
and i wanted to give them an escape .
i created " all around town . "
it is a papercutting , and then after , i added color on the computer .
so i can call it techno-crafted .
and along the way , i 'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques .
but the result is always to have stories .
so the stories , they have a lot of possibilities .
they have a lot of scenarios .
i do n't know the stories .
i take images from our global imagination , from cliché , from things we are thinking about , from history .
and everybody 's a narrator , because everybody has a story to tell .
but more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world .
and in all these universes , it 's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with , but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic .
and it 's what story cutting is all about .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sergey brin : i want to discuss a question i know that 's been pressing on many of your minds .
we spoke to you last several years ago .
and before i get started today , since many of you are wondering , i just wanted to get it out of the way .
the answer is boxers .
now i hope all of you feel better .
do you know what this might be ? does anyone know what that is ?
audience : yes .
sb : what is it ?
audience : it 's people logging on to google around the world .
sb : wow , ok . i did n't really realize what it was when i first saw it .
but this is what helped me see it .
this is what we run at the office , that actually runs real time .
here it 's slightly logged .
but here you can see around the world how people are using google .
and every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20 , 30 searches , or something like that .
and they 're labeled by color right now , by language .
so you can see : here we are in the u.s. , and they 're all coming up red .
there we are in monterey - hopefully i can get it right .
you can see that japan is busy at night , right there .
we have tokyo coming in in japanese .
there 's a lot of activity in china .
there 's a lot of activity in india .
there 's some in the middle east , the little pockets .
and europe , which is right now in the middle of the day , is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages .
now you can also see , if i turn this around here - hopefully i wo n't shake the world too much .
but you can also see , there are places where there 's not so much .
australia , because there just are n't very many people there .
and this is something that we should really work on , which is africa , which is just a few trickles , basically in south africa and a few other urban cities .
but basically , what we 've noticed is these queries , which come in at thousands per second , are available everywhere there is power .
and pretty much everywhere there is power , there is the internet .
and even in antarctica - well , at least this time of year - we from time to time will see a query rising up .
and if we had it plotted correctly , i think the international space station would have it , too .
so this is some of the challenge that we have here , is you can see that it 's actually kind of hard to get the - there we go .
this is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions .
you can see that there 's a lot of data running around .
it has to go all over the world : through fibers , through satellites , through all kinds of connections .
and it 's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to . hopefully your experience is good .
but you can see also , once again - so some places are much more wired than others , and you can see all the bandwidth across the u.s. , going up over to asia , europe in the other direction , and so forth .
now what i would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like .
and if we can switch to slides - all right , here we go .
so this is slowed down .
this is what one second looks like .
and this is what we spend a lot of our time doing , is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load .
now , each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own .
i mean , it could be somebody 's health , it could be somebody 's career , something important to them .
and it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce , or in this case , ketchup .
so this is a query that we had - i guess it 's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others .
you can see that it got started right here .
in the u.s. and spain , it was popular at the same time .
but it did n't have quite the same pickup in the u.s.
as it did in spain .
and then from spain , it went to italy , and then germany got excited , and maybe right now the u.k. is enjoying it .
and so i guess the u.s. finally , finally started to like it , too .
and i just wanted to play it for you .
anyway , you can all enjoy it for yourselves - hopefully that search will work .
as a part of - you know , part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches .
and what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated .
more animals , if they start doing searches as well .
but partly , we want to make the world a better place , and so one thing that we 're embarking upon is the google foundation , and we 're in the process of setting that up .
we also have a program already called google grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world , and these are some of the charities that are on there .
and it 's something i 'm very excited to be a part of .
in fact , many of the organizations that are here - the acumen fund , i think approtec we have running , i 'm not sure if that one 's up yet - and many of the people who have presented here are running through google grants .
they run google ads , and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know .
one of the earlier results that we got - we have a singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 vietnamese girls for their education , and that was one of the earliest results . and as i said , now there have been many , many stories that have come in , because we do have hundreds of charities in there , and the google foundation will be an even broader endeavor .
now does anybody know who this is ?
a-ha !
audience : orkut .
sb : yes ! somebody got it .
this is orkut . is anybody here on orkut ?
okay , not very many people know about it .
i 'll explain it in a second .
this is one of our engineers .
we find that they work better when they 're submerged and covered with leaves .
that 's how we churn those products out .
orkut had a vision to create a social network .
i know all of you are thinking , " yet another social network . "
but it was a dream of his , and we , basically , when people really want to do something , well , we generally let them .
so this is what he built .
we just released it in a test phase last month , and it 's been taking off .
this is our vp of engineering .
you can see the red hair , and i do n't know if you can see the nose ring there .
and these are all of his friends .
so this is how - we just deployed it - we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service , and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out .
and now we 've grown to over 100,000 members .
and they spread , actually , very quickly , even outside the u.s.
you can see , even though the u.s. is still the majority here - though , by the way , search-wise , it 's only about 30 percent of our traffic - but it 's already going to japan , and the u.k. , and europe , and all the rest of the countries .
so it 's a fun little project .
there are a variety of demographics . i wo n't bore you with these .
but it 's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes .
and - well , i 'll leave you in suspense .
larry , you can explain this one .
larry page : thank you , sergey .
so one of the things - both sergey and i went to a montessori school , and i think , for some reason , this has been incorporated in google .
and sergey mentioned orkut , which is something that , you know , orkut wanted to do in his time , and we call this - at google , we 've embodied this as " the 20 percent time , " and the idea is , for 20 percent of your time , if you 're working at google , you can do what you think is the best thing to do .
and many , many things at google have come out of that , such as orkut and also google news .
and i think many other things in the world also have come out of this .
mendel , who was supposed to be teaching high-school students , actually , you know , discovered the laws of genetics - as a hobby , basically .
so many , many useful things come out of this .
and news , which i just mentioned , was started by a researcher .
and he just - he - after 9/11 , he got really interested in the news .
and he said , " why do n't i look at the news better ? "
and so he started clustering it by category , and then he started using it , and then his friends started using it .
and then , besides just looking cute on a baby 's bottom , we made it a googlette , which is basically a small project at google .
so it 'd be like three people , or something like that , and they would try to make a product .
and we would n't really be sure if it 's going to work or not .
and in news ' case , you know , they had a couple of people working on it for a while , and then more and more people started using it , and then we put it out on the internet , and more and more people started using it .
and now it 's a real , full-blown project with more people on it .
and this is how we keep our innovation running .
i think usually , as companies get bigger , they find it really hard to have small , innovative projects .
and we had this problem , too , for a while , and we said , " oh , we really need a new concept . "
you know , the googlettes - that 's a small project that we 're not quite sure if it 's going to work or not , but we hope it will , and if we do enough of them , some of them will really work and turn out , such as news .
but then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects .
and i do n't know about all of you , but i have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once .
and we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them - and these are kind of made up .
do n't really pay attention to them .
for example , the " buy iceland " was from a media article .
we would never do such a crazy thing , but - in any case , we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them , that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be .
and this was kind of a surprise to me , but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head , which you did by writing them down , that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources .
and so that 's basically what we 've done since we instituted that a few years ago , and i think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized .
the other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important , and so naturally , people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities .
i just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new , or you might not know about .
and the top thing , actually , is the deskbar .
so this is a new - how many of you use the google toolbar ?
raise your hands .
how many of you use the deskbar ?
all right , see ? you guys should try it out .
but if you go to our site and search for " deskbar , " you 'll get this .
and the idea is , instead of a toolbar , it 's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom , and you can do searches really easily .
and it 's sort of like a better version of the toolbar .
thank you , sergey .
this is another example of a project that somebody at google was really passionate about , and they just , they got going , and it 's really , really a great product , and really taking off .
google answers is something we started , which is really cool , which lets you - for five to 100 dollars , you can type a question in , and then there 's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you , and it 's guaranteed and all that , and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself .
froogle lets you search shopping information , and blogger lets you publish things .
but all of these - well , these were all sort of innovative things that we did that - you know , we try many , many different things in our company .
we also like to innovate in our physical space , and we noticed in meetings , you know , you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off , and they 're noisy , so people shut them off .
and we did n't like that , so we actually , in maybe a couple of weeks , we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors , and so we can leave them on all the time and they 're completely silent .
and as a result , we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting , so when you walk into a meeting room now , it lists all the meetings that are happening , you can very easily take notes , and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting .
and as we become more of a global company , we find these things really affect us - you know , can we work effectively with people who are n't in the room ?
and things like that . and simple things like this can really make a big difference .
we also have a lot of engineers in those meetings , and they do n't always do their laundry as much as they should .
and so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines , for our younger employees especially , and ...
we also allow dogs and things like that , and we 've had , i think , a really fun culture at our company , which helps people work and enjoy what they 're doing .
this is actually our " cult picture . "
i just wanted to show quickly .
we had this on our website for a while , but we found that after we put it on our website , we did n't get any job applications anymore .
but anyway , every year we 've taken the whole company on a ski trip .
a lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other , and informally .
and i think we 've done a good job encouraging that .
it makes it a really fun place to work .
along with our logos , too , which i think really embody our culture when we change things .
in the early days , we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand , you know , because , you know , you 'd never want to change your logo .
you want it to be consistent .
and we said , " well , that does n't sound so much fun .
why do n't we try changing it every day ? "
one of the things that really excites me about what we 're doing now is we have this thing called adsense , and this is a little bit foreshadowing - this is from before dean dropped out .
but the idea is , like , on a newspaper , for example , we show you relevant ads .
and this is hard to read , but this says " battle for new hampshire : howard dean for president " - articles on howard dean .
and these ads are generated automatically - like in this case , on the washington post - from the content on the site .
and so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements , so we pick the one that 's most relevant to what you 're actually looking at , much as we do on search .
so the idea is we can make advertising useful , not just annoying , right ?
and the nice thing about this , we have a self-serve program , and many thousands of websites have signed up , and this let 's them really make money . and i - you know , there 's a number of people i met - i met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party , and he said , " you know , i was n't making any money .
i just put this thing on my site and i 'm making 10,000 dollars a month .
and , you know , thank you .
i do n't have to do my other job now . "
and i think this is really important for us , because it makes the internet work better .
it makes content get better , it makes searching work better , when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content .
so this session is supposed to be about the future , so i 'd thought i 'd talk at least briefly about it .
and the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search , you really have to be smart .
because you can type , you know , any kind of thing into google , and you expect an answer back , right ?
but finding things is tricky , and so you really want intelligence .
and in fact , the ultimate search engine would be smart .
it would be artificial intelligence .
and so that 's something we work on , and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now , and that 's really their goal .
so we always hope that google will be smart , but we 're always surprised when other people think that it is .
and so i just wanted to give a funny example of this .
this is a blog from iraq , and it 's not really what i 'm going to talk about , but i just wanted to show you an example .
maybe , sergey , you can highlight this .
so we decided - actually , the highlight 's right there . oh , thank you .
so , " related searches , " right there . you ca n't see it that well , but we decided we should put in this feature into our adsense ads , called " related searches . "
and so we 'd say , you know , " did you mean ' search for " ' - what is this , in this case , " saddam hussein , " because this blog is about iraq - and you know , in addition to the ads , and we thought this would be a great idea .
and so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed , and he said , " you know , i 'm sleeping a lot . "
he was just kind of writing about his life .
and our algorithms - not a person , of course , but our algorithms , our computers - the related search was , " i am bored . "
and he read this , and he thought a person had decided that he was boring , and it was very unfortunate , and he said , " you know , what are these , you know , bastards at google doing ?
why do n't they like my blog ? "
and so then we read his blog , which was getting - you know , sort of going from bad to worse , and we said the related search was , " retards . "
and then , you know , he got even more mad , and he wrote - like , started swearing and so on .
and then we produced " you suck . "
and finally , it ended with " kiss my ass . "
and so basically , he thought he was dealing with something smart , and of course , you know , we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out , and it did n't quite work , and we do n't have this feature anymore .
so with that , maybe i can switch back to the world .
i wanted to end just by saying that there 's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with google , and one of those is that we 're able to make money largely through advertising , and one of the benefits that i did n't expect from that was that we 're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about , you know , places that do n't have as much money .
so we do n't have to worry about our products being sold , for example , for less money in places that are poor , and then they get re-imported into the u.s. - for example , with the drug industry .
and i think we 're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search , and i think that 's a tremendous , tremendous benefit .
the other thing i wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information , and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine - that we should provide very objective information .
and so in our search results , we never accept payment for our search results .
we accept payment for advertising , and we mark it as such .
and that 's unlike many of our competitors .
and i think decisions we 're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world , and it makes me really proud to be involved with google .
so thank you .
i 'm 150 feet down an illegal mine shaft in ghana .
the air is thick with heat and dust , and it 's hard to breathe .
i can feel the brush of sweaty bodies passing me in the darkness , but i ca n't see much else .
i hear voices talking , but mostly the shaft is this cacophony of men coughing , and stone being broken with primitive tools .
like the others , i wear a flickering , cheap flashlight tied to my head with this elastic , tattered band , and i can barely make out the slick tree limbs holding up the walls of the three-foot square hole dropping hundreds of feet into the earth .
when my hand slips , i suddenly remember a miner i had met days before who had lost his grip and fell countless feet down that shaft .
as i stand talking to you today , these men are still deep in that hole , risking their lives without payment or compensation , and often dying .
i got to climb out of that hole , and i got to go home , but they likely never will , because they 're trapped in slavery .
for the last 28 years , i 've been documenting indigenous cultures in more than 70 countries on six continents , and in 2009 i had the great honor of being the sole exhibitor at the vancouver peace summit .
amongst all the astonishing people i met there , i met a supporter of free the slaves , an ngo dedicated to eradicating modern day slavery .
we started talking about slavery , and really , i started learning about slavery , for i had certainly known it existed in the world , but not to such a degree .
after we finished talking , i felt so horrible and honestly ashamed at my own lack of knowledge of this atrocity in my own lifetime , and i thought , if i do n't know , how many other people do n't know ?
it started burning a hole in my stomach , so within weeks , i flew down to los angeles to meet with the director of free the slaves and offer them my help .
thus began my journey into modern day slavery .
oddly , i had been to many of these places before .
some i even considered like my second home .
but this time , i would see the skeletons hidden in the closet .
a conservative estimate tells us there are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today .
that 's double the amount of people taken from africa during the entire trans-atlantic slave trade .
a hundred and fifty years ago , an agricultural slave cost about three times the annual salary of an american worker .
that equates to about $ 50,000 in today 's money .
yet today , entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $ 18 .
astonishingly , slavery generates profits of more than $ 13 billion worldwide each year .
many have been tricked by false promises of a good education , a better job , only to find that they 're forced to work without pay under the threat of violence , and they can not walk away .
today 's slavery is about commerce , so the goods that enslaved people produce have value , but the people producing them are disposable .
slavery exists everywhere , nearly , in the world , and yet it is illegal everywhere in the world .
in india and nepal , i was introduced to the brick kilns .
this strange and awesome sight was like walking into ancient egypt or dante 's inferno .
enveloped in temperatures of 130 degrees , men , women , children , entire families in fact , were cloaked in a heavy blanket of dust , while mechanically stacking bricks on their head , up to 18 at a time , and carrying them from the scorching kilns to trucks hundreds of yards away .
deadened by monotony and exhaustion , they work silently , doing this task over and over for 16 or 17 hours a day .
there were no breaks for food , no water breaks , and the severe dehydration made urinating pretty much inconsequential .
so pervasive was the heat and the dust that my camera became too hot to even touch and ceased working .
every 20 minutes , i 'd have to run back to our cruiser to clean out my gear and run it under an air conditioner to revive it , and as i sat there , i thought , my camera is getting far better treatment than these people .
back in the kilns , i wanted to cry , but the abolitionist next to me quickly grabbed me and he said , " lisa , do n't do that . just do n't do that here . "
and he very clearly explained to me that emotional displays are very dangerous in a place like this , not just for me , but for them .
i could n't offer them any direct help .
i could n't give them money , nothing .
i was n't a citizen of that country .
i could get them in a worse situation than they were already in .
i 'd have to rely on free the slaves to work within the system for their liberation , and i trusted that they would .
as for me , i 'd have to wait until i got home to really feel my heartbreak .
in the himalayas , i found children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting at roads below .
the big sheets of slate were heavier than the children carrying them , and the kids hoisted them from their heads using these handmade harnesses of sticks and rope and torn cloth .
it 's difficult to witness something so overwhelming .
how can we affect something so insidious , yet so pervasive ?
some do n't even know they 're enslaved , people working 16 , 17 hours a day without any pay , because this has been the case all their lives .
they have nothing to compare it to .
when these villagers claimed their freedom , the slaveholders burned down all of their houses .
i mean , these people had nothing , and they were so petrified , they wanted to give up , but the woman in the center rallied for them to persevere , and abolitionists on the ground helped them get a quarry lease of their own , so that now they do the same back-breaking work , but they do it for themselves , and they get paid for it , and they do it in freedom .
sex trafficking is what we often think of when we hear the word slavery , and because of this worldwide awareness , i was warned that it would be difficult for me to work safely within this particular industry .
in kathmandu , i was escorted by women who had previously been sex slaves themselves .
they ushered me down a narrow set of stairs that led to this dirty , dimly fluorescent lit basement .
this was n't a brothel , per se .
it was more like a restaurant .
cabin restaurants , as they 're known in the trade , are venues for forced prostitution .
each has small , private rooms , where the slaves , women , along with young girls and boys , some as young as seven years old , are forced to entertain the clients , encouraging them to buy more food and alcohol .
each cubicle is dark and dingy , identified with a painted number on the wall , and partitioned by plywood and a curtain .
the workers here often endure tragic sexual abuse at the hands of their customers .
standing in the near darkness , i remember feeling this quick , hot fear , and in that instant , i could only imagine what it must be like to be trapped in that hell .
i had only one way out : the stairs from where i 'd come in .
there were no back doors .
there were no windows large enough to climb through .
these people have no escape at all , and as we take in such a difficult subject , it 's important to note that slavery , including sex trafficking , occurs in our own backyard as well .
tens of hundreds of people are enslaved in agriculture , in restaurants , in domestic servitude , and the list can go on .
recently , the new york times reported that between 100,000 and 300,000 american children are sold into sex slavery every year .
it 's all around us . we just do n't see it .
the textile industry is another one we often think of when we hear about slave labor .
i visited villages in india where entire families were enslaved in the silk trade .
this is a family portrait .
the dyed black hands are the father , while the blue and red hands are his sons .
they mix dye in these big barrels , and they submerge the silk into the liquid up to their elbows , but the dye is toxic .
my interpreter told me their stories .
" we have no freedom , " they said .
" we hope still , though , that we could leave this house someday and go someplace else where we actually get paid for our dyeing . "
it 's estimated that more than 4,000 children are enslaved on lake volta , the largest man-made lake in the world .
when we first arrived , i went to have a quick look .
i saw what seemed to be a family fishing on a boat , two older brothers , some younger kids , makes sense right ?
wrong . they were all enslaved .
children are taken from their families and trafficked and vanished , and they 're forced to work endless hours on these boats on the lake , even though they do not know how to swim .
this young child is eight years old .
he was trembling when our boat approached , frightened it would run over his tiny canoe .
he was petrified he would be knocked in the water .
the skeletal tree limbs submerged in lake volta often catch the fishing nets , and weary , frightened children are thrown into the water to untether the lines .
many of them drown .
for as long as he can recall , he 's been forced to work on the lake .
terrified of his master , he will not run away , and since he 's been treated with cruelty all his life , he passes that down to the younger slaves that he manages .
i met these boys at five in the morning , when they were hauling in the last of their nets , but they had been working since 1 a.m.
in the cold , windy night .
and it 's important to note that these nets weigh more than a thousand pounds when they 're full of fish .
i want to introduce you to kofi .
kofi was rescued from a fishing village .
i met him at a shelter where free the slaves rehabilitates victims of slavery .
here he 's seen taking a bath at the well , pouring big buckets of water over his head , and the wonderful news is , as you and i are sitting here talking today , kofi has been reunited with his family , and what 's even better , his family has been given tools to make a living and to keep their children safe .
kofi is the embodiment of possibility .
who will he become because someone took a stand and made a difference in his life ?
driving down a road in ghana with partners of free the slaves , a fellow abolitionist on a moped suddenly sped up to our cruiser and tapped on the window .
he told us to follow him down a dirt road into the jungle .
at the end of the road , he urged us out of the car , and told the driver to quickly leave .
then he pointed toward this barely visible footpath , and said , " this is the path , this is the path . go . "
as we started down the path , we pushed aside the vines blocking the way , and after about an hour of walking in , found that the trail had become flooded by recent rains , so i hoisted the photo gear above my head as we descended into these waters up to my chest .
after another two hours of hiking , the winding trail abruptly ended at a clearing , and before us was a mass of holes that could fit into the size of a football field , and all of them were full of enslaved people laboring .
many women had children strapped to their backs while they were panning for gold , wading in water poisoned by mercury .
mercury is used in the extraction process .
these miners are enslaved in a mine shaft in another part of ghana .
when they came out of the shaft , they were soaking wet from their own sweat .
i remember looking into their tired , bloodshot eyes , for many of them had been underground for 72 hours .
the shafts are up to 300 feet deep , and they carry out heavy bags of stone that later will be transported to another area , where the stone will be pounded so that they can extract the gold .
at first glance , the pounding site seems full of powerful men , but when we look closer , we see some less fortunate working on the fringes , and children too .
all of them are victim to injury , illness and violence .
in fact , it 's very likely that this muscular person will end up like this one here , racked with tuberculosis this is manuru . when his father died , his uncle trafficked him to work with him in the mines .
when his uncle died , manuru inherited his uncle 's debt , which further forced him into being enslaved in the mines .
when i met him , he had been working in the mines for 14 years , and the leg injury that you see here is actually from a mining accident , one so severe doctors say his leg should be amputated .
on top of that , manuru has tuberculosis , yet he 's still forced to work day in and day out in that mine shaft .
even still , he has a dream that he will become free and become educated with the help of local activists like free the slaves , and it 's this sort of determination , in the face of unimaginable odds , that fills me with complete awe .
i want to shine a light on slavery .
when i was working in the field , i brought lots of candles with me , and with the help of my interpreter , i imparted to the people i was photographing that i wanted to illuminate their stories and their plight , so when it was safe for them , and safe for me , i made these images .
they knew their image would be seen by you out in the world .
i wanted them to know that we will be bearing witness to them , and that we will do whatever we can to help make a difference in their lives .
i truly believe , if we can see one another as fellow human beings , then it becomes very difficult to tolerate atrocities like slavery .
these images are not of issues . they are of people , real people , like you and me , all deserving of the same rights , dignity and respect in their lives .
there is not a day that goes by that i do n't think of these many beautiful , mistreated people i 've had the tremendous honor of meeting .
i hope that these images awaken a force in those who view them , people like you , and i hope that force will ignite a fire , and that fire will shine a light on slavery , for without that light , the beast of bondage can continue to live in the shadows .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , before i became a dermatologist , i started in general medicine , as most dermatologists do in britain .
at the end of that time , i went off to australia , about 20 years ago .
what you learn when you go to australia is the australians are very competitive .
and they are not magnanimous in victory .
and that happened a lot : " you pommies , you ca n't play cricket , rugby . "
i could accept that .
but moving into work - and we have each week what 's called a journal club , when you 'd sit down with the other doctors and you 'd study a scientific paper in relation to medicine .
and after week one , it was about cardiovascular mortality , a dry subject - how many people die of heart disease , what the rates are .
and they were competitive about this : " you pommies , your rates of heart disease are shocking . "
and of course , they were right .
australians have about a third less heart disease than we do - less deaths from heart attacks , heart failure , less strokes - they 're generally a healthier bunch .
and of course they said this was because of their fine moral standing , their exercise , because they 're australians and we 're weedy pommies , and so on .
but it 's not just australia that has better health than britain .
within britain , there is a gradient of health - and this is what 's called standardized mortality , basically your chances of dying .
this is looking at data from the paper about 20 years ago , but it 's true today .
comparing your rates of dying 50 degrees north - that 's the south , that 's london and places - by latitude , and 55 degrees - the bad news is that 's here , glasgow .
i 'm from edinburgh . worse news , that 's even edinburgh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what accounts for this horrible space here between us up here in southern scotland and the south ?
now , we know about smoking , deep-fried mars bars , chips - the glasgow diet .
all of these things .
but this graph is after taking into account all of these known risk factors .
this is after accounting for smoking , social class , diet , all those other known risk factors .
we are left with this missing space of increased deaths the further north you go .
now , sunlight , of course , comes into this .
and vitamin d has had a great deal of press , and a lot of people get concerned about it .
and we need vitamin d. it 's now a requirement that children have a certain amount .
my grandmother grew up in glasgow , back in the 1920s and ' 30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in .
and that really prevented the rickets that used to be common in this city .
and i as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother .
i distinctly - nobody forgets cod liver oil .
but an association : the higher people 's blood levels of vitamin d are , the less heart disease they have , the less cancer .
there seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin d is very good for you .
and it is , to prevent rickets and so on .
but if you give people vitamin d supplements , you do n't change that high rate of heart disease .
and the evidence for it preventing cancers is not yet great .
so what i 'm going to suggest is that vitamin d is not the only story in town .
it 's not the only reason preventing heart disease .
high vitamin d levels , i think , are a marker for sunlight exposure , and sunlight exposure , in methods i 'm going to show , is good for heart disease .
anyway , i came back from australia , and despite the obvious risks to my health , i moved to aberdeen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , in aberdeen , i started my dermatology training .
but i also became interested in research , and in particular i became interested in this substance , nitric oxide .
now these three guys up here , furchgott , ignarro and murad , won the nobel prize for medicine back in 1998 .
and they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter , nitric oxide .
what nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels , so it lowers your blood pressure .
it also dilates the coronary arteries , so it stops angina .
and what was remarkable about it was in the past when we think of chemical messengers within the body , we thought of complicated things like estrogen and insulin , or nerve transmission .
very complex processes with very complex chemicals that fit into very complex receptors .
and here 's this incredibly simple molecule , a nitrogen and an oxygen that are stuck together , and yet these are hugely important for -lsb- unclear -rsb- our low blood pressure , for neurotransmission , for many , many things , but particularly cardiovascular health .
and i started doing research , and we found , very excitingly , that the skin produces nitric oxide .
so it 's not just in the cardiovascular system it arises .
it arises in the skin .
well , having found that and published that , i thought , well , what 's it doing ?
how do you have low blood pressure in your skin ?
it 's not the heart . what do you do ?
so i went off to the states , as many people do if they 're going to do research , and i spent a few years in pittsburgh . this is pittsburgh .
and i was interested in these really complex systems .
we thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death , and how cells survive , and their resistance to other things .
and i first off started work in cell culture , growing cells , and then i was using knockout mouse models - mice that could n't make the gene .
we worked out a mechanism , which - no was helping cells survive .
and i then moved back to edinburgh .
and in edinburgh , the experimental animal we use is the medical student .
it 's a species close to human , with several advantages over mice : they 're free , you do n't shave them , they feed themselves , and nobody pickets your office saying , " save the lab medical student . "
so they 're really an ideal model .
but what we found was that we could n't reproduce in man the data we had shown in mice .
it seemed we could n't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans .
we put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it , we injected things . we could n't turn off the nitric oxide .
and the reason for this , it turned out , after two or three years ' work , was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide , because nitric oxide is a gas , and it 's released - -lrb- poof ! -rrb- - and in a few seconds it 's away , but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide - nitrate , no3 ; nitrite , no2 ; nitrosothiols .
and these are more stable , and your skin has got really large stores of no .
and we then thought to ourselves , with those big stores , i wonder if sunlight might activate those stores and release them from the skin , where the stores are about 10 times as big as what 's in the circulation .
could the sun activate those stores into the circulation , and there in the circulation do its good things for your cardiovascular system ?
well , i 'm an experimental dermatologist , so what we did was we thought we 'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight .
and so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light .
so these are kind of sunlamps .
now , what we were careful to do was , vitamin d is made by ultraviolet b rays and we wanted to separate our story from the vitamin d story .
so we used ultraviolet a , which does n't make vitamin d.
when we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in edinburgh , what we produced was , we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide .
so we put patients with these subjects under the uv , and their no levels do go up , and their blood pressure goes down .
not by much , as an individual level , but enough at a population level to shift the rates of heart disease in a whole population .
and when we shone uv at them , or when we warmed them up to the same level as the lamps , but did n't actually let the rays hit the skin , this did n't happen .
so this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin .
now , we 're still collecting data .
a few good things here : this appeared to be more marked in older people .
i 'm not sure exactly how much .
one of the subjects here was my mother-in-law , and clearly i do not know her age .
but certainly in people older than my wife , this appears to be a more marked effect .
and the other thing i should mention was there was no change in vitamin d.
this is separate from vitamin d.
so vitamin d is good for you - it stops rickets , it prevents calcium metabolism , important stuff .
but this is a separate mechanism from vitamin d.
now , one of the problems with looking at blood pressure is your body does everything it can to keep your blood pressure at the same place .
if your leg is chopped off and you lose blood , your body will clamp down , increase the heart rate , do everything it can to keep your blood pressure up .
that is an absolutely fundamental physiological principle .
so what we 've next done is we 've moved on to looking at blood vessel dilatation .
so we 've measured - this is again , notice no tail and hairless , this is a medical student .
in the arm , you can measure blood flow in the arm by how much it swells up as some blood flows into it .
and what we 've shown is that doing a sham irradiation - this is the thick line here - this is shining uv on the arm so it warms up but keeping it covered so the rays do n't hit the skin .
there is no change in blood flow , in dilatation of the blood vessels .
but the active irradiation , during the uv and for an hour after it , there is dilation of the blood vessels .
this is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure , by which you dilate the coronary arteries also , to let the blood be supplied with the heart .
so here , further data that ultraviolet - that 's sunlight - has benefits on the blood flow and the cardiovascular system .
so we thought we 'd just kind of model - different amounts of uv hit different parts of the earth at different times of year , so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide - the nitrates , nitrites , nitrosothiols in the skin - cleave to release no .
different wavelengths of light have different activities of doing that .
so you can look at the wavelengths of light that do that .
and you can look - so , if you live on the equator , the sun comes straight overhead , it comes through a very thin bit of atmosphere .
in winter or summer , it 's the same amount of light .
if you live up here , in summer the sun is coming fairly directly down , but in winter it 's coming through a huge amount of atmosphere , and much of the ultraviolet is weeded out , and the range of wavelengths that hit the earth are different from summer to winter .
so what you can do is you can multiply those data by the no that 's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation .
now , if you 're on the equator here - that 's these two lines here , the red line and the purple line - the amount of nitric oxide that 's released is the area under the curve , it 's the area in this space here .
so if you 're on the equator , december or june , you 've got masses of no being released from the skin .
so ventura is in southern california .
in summer , you might as well be at the equator .
it 's great . lots of no is released .
ventura mid-winter , well , there 's still a decent amount .
edinburgh in summer , the area beneath the curve is pretty good , but edinburgh in winter , the amount of no that can be released is next to nothing , tiny amounts .
so what do we think ?
we 're still working at this story , we 're still developing it , we 're still expanding it .
we think it 's very important .
we think it probably accounts for a lot of the north-south health divide within britain , it 's of relevance to us .
we think that the skin - well , we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms .
we suspect a lot of these come from diet , green leafy vegetables , beetroot , lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin .
we think they 're then stored in the skin , and we think the sunlight releases this where it has generally beneficial effects .
and this is ongoing work , but dermatologists - i mean , i 'm a dermatologist .
my day job is saying to people , " you 've got skin cancer , it 's caused by sunlight , do n't go in the sun . "
i actually think a far more important message is that there are benefits as well as risks to sunlight .
yes , sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer , but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer .
and i think that we need to be more aware of , and we need to find the risk-benefit ratio .
how much sunlight is safe , and how can we finesse this best for our general health ?
so , thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to speak about a tiny , little idea .
and this is about shifting baseline .
and because the idea can be explained in one minute , i will tell you three stories before to fill in the time .
and the first story is about charles darwin , one of my heroes .
and he was here , as you well know , in ' 35 .
and you 'd think he was chasing finches , but he was n't .
he was actually collecting fish .
and he described one of them as very " common . "
this was the sailfin grouper .
a big fishery was run on it until the ' 80s .
now the fish is on the iucn red list .
now this story , we have heard it lots of times on galapagos and other places , so there is nothing particular about it .
but the point is , we still come to galapagos .
we still think it is pristine .
the brochures still say it is untouched .
so what happens here ?
the second story , also to illustrate another concept , is called shifting waistline .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i was there in ' 71 , studying a lagoon in west africa .
i was there because i grew up in europe and i wanted later to work in africa .
and i thought i could blend in .
and i got a big sunburn , and i was convinced that i was really not from there .
this was my first sunburn .
and the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees , as you can see , and a few mangrove .
and it had tilapia about 20 centimeters , a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia .
and the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in ghana .
when i went there 27 years later , the fish had shrunk to half of their size .
they were maturing at five centimeters .
they had been pushed genetically .
there were still fishes .
they were still kind of happy .
and the fish also were happy to be there .
so nothing has changed , but everything has changed .
my third little story is that i was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in southeast asia .
in the ' 70s - well , beginning in the ' 60s - europe did lots of development projects .
fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers and this boat , quite ugly , is called the mutiara 4 .
and i went sailing on it , and we did surveys throughout the southern south china sea and especially the java sea .
and what we caught , we did n't have words for it .
what we caught , i know now , is the bottom of the sea .
and 90 percent of our catch were sponges , other animals that are fixed on the bottom .
and actually most of the fish , they are a little spot on the debris , the piles of debris , were coral reef fish .
essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down .
and these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid .
within a year , you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins .
the bottom is transformed from , in this case , a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess .
this is a dead turtle .
they were not eaten , they were thrown away because they were dead .
and one time we caught a live one .
it was not drowned yet .
and then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat .
this mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that 's never been fished .
but it 's not documented .
we transform the world , but we do n't remember it .
we adjust our baseline to the new level , and we do n't recall what was there .
if you generalize this , something like this happens .
you have on the y axis some good thing : biodiversity , numbers of orca , the greenness of your country , the water supply .
and over time it changes - it changes because people do things , or naturally .
every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward .
and the difference then , they perceive as a loss .
but they do n't perceive what happened before as a loss .
you can have a succession of changes .
at the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers .
and that , to a large extent , is what we want to do now .
we want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were .
now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies , they killed animals and they did n't know they had done so after a few generations .
because , obviously , an animal that is very abundant , before it gets extinct , it becomes rare .
so you do n't lose abundant animals .
you always lose rare animals .
and therefore they 're not perceived as a big loss .
over time , we concentrate on large animals , and in a sea that means the big fish .
they become rarer because we fish them .
over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline .
and the question is , why do people accept this ?
well because they do n't know that it was different .
and in fact , lots of people , scientists , will contest that it was really different .
and they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented .
for example , the anecdote that some present , as captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area can not be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists , because it 's not " scientific . "
so you have a situation where people do n't know the past , even though we live in literate societies , because they do n't trust the sources of the past .
and hence , the enormous role that a marine protected area can play .
because with marine protected areas , we actually recreate the past .
we recreate the past that people can not conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low .
that is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides , which enables them to reset their baseline .
how about the people who ca n't do that because they have no access - the people in the midwest for example ?
there i think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap , and simulation .
this is a simulation of chesapeake bay .
there were gray whales in chesapeake bay a long time ago - 500 years ago .
and you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like " avatar . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you think about " avatar , " if you think of why people were so touched by it - never mind the pocahontas story - why so touched by the imagery ?
because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost .
and so my recommendation , it 's the only one i will provide , is for cameron to do " avatar ii " underwater .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sometimes i go browsing -lsb- through -rsb- a very old magazine .
i found this observation test about the story of the ark .
and the artist that drew this observation test did some errors , had some mistakes - there are more or less 12 mistakes .
some of them are very easy .
there is a funnel , an aerial part , a lamp and clockwork key on the ark .
some of them are about the animals , the number .
but there is a much more fundamental mistake in the overall story of the ark that 's not reported here .
and this problem is : where are the plants ?
so now we have god that is going to submerge earth permanently or at least for a very long period , and no one is taking care of plants .
noah needed to take two of every kind of bird , of every kind of animal , of every kind of creature that moves , but no mention about plants .
why ?
in another part of the same story , all the living creatures are just the living creatures that came out from the ark , so birds , livestock and wild animals .
plants are not living creatures - this is the point .
that is a point that is not coming out from the bible , but it 's something that really accompanied humanity .
let 's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a renaissance book .
here we have the description of the order of nature .
it 's a nice description because it 's starting from left - you have the stones - immediately after the stones , the plants that are just able to live .
we have the animals that are able to live and to sense , and on the top of the pyramid , there is the man .
this is not the common man .
the " homo studiosus " - the studying man .
this is quite comforting for people like me - i 'm a professor - this to be over there on the top of creation .
but it 's something completely wrong .
you know very well about professors .
but it 's also wrong about plants , because plants are not just able to live ; they are able to sense .
they are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals .
just to give you an example , every single root apex is able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters .
and they also are able to show and to exhibit such a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence .
well , but this is something - this underestimation of plants is something that is always with us .
let 's have a look at this short movie now .
we have david attenborough .
now david attenborough is really a plant lover ; he did some of the most beautiful movies about plant behavior .
now , when he speaks about plants , everything is correct .
when he speaks about animals , -lsb- he -rsb- tends to remove the fact that plants exist .
the blue whale , the biggest creature that exists on the planet - that is wrong , completely wrong .
the blue whale , it 's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet - that is , this wonderful , magnificent sequoiadendron giganteum .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons .
now , the story that plants are some low-level organisms has been formalized many times ago by aristotle , that in " de anima " - that is a very influential book for the western civilization - wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and not living .
they have just a kind of very low-level soul .
it 's called the vegetative soul , because they lack movement , and so they do n't need to sense .
let 's see .
okay , some of the movements of the plants are very well-known .
this is a very fast movement .
this is a dionaea , a venus fly trap hunting snails - sorry for the snail .
this has been something that has been refused for centuries , despite the evidence .
no one can say that the plants were able to eat an animal , because it was against the order of nature .
but plants are also able to show a lot of movement .
some of them are very well known , like the flowering .
it 's just a question to use some techniques like the time lapse .
some of them are much more sophisticated .
look at this young bean that is moving to catch the light every time .
and it 's really so graceful ; it 's like a dancing angel .
they are also able to play - they are really playing .
these are young sunflowers , and what they are doing can not be described with any other terms than playing .
they are training themselves , as many young animals do , to the adult life where they will be called to track the sun all the day .
they are able to respond to gravity , of course , so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots toward the vector of gravity .
but they are also able to sleep .
this is one , mimosa pudica .
so during the night , they curl the leaves and reduce the movement , and during the day , you have the opening of the leaves - there is much more movement .
this is interesting because this sleeping machinery , it 's perfectly conserved .
it 's the same in plants , in insects and in animals .
and so if you need to study this sleeping problem , it 's easy to study on plants , for example , than in animals and it 's much more easy even ethically .
it 's a kind of vegetarian experimentation .
plants are even able to communicate - they are extraordinary communicators .
they communicate with other plants .
they are able to distinguish kin and non-kin .
they communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles , for example , during the pollination .
now with the pollination , it 's a very serious issue for plants , because they move the pollen from one flower to the other , yet they can not move from one flower to the other .
so they need a vector - and this vector , it 's normally an animal .
many insects have been used by plants as vectors for the transport of the pollination , but not just insects ; even birds , reptiles , and mammals like bats rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen .
this is a serious business .
we have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweet substance - very energizing - having in change this transportation of the pollen .
but some plants are manipulating animals , like in the case of orchids that promise sex and nectar and give in change nothing for the transportation of the pollen .
now , there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we have seen .
how is it possible to do this without a brain ?
we need to wait until 1880 , when this big man , charles darwin , publishes a wonderful , astonishing book that starts a revolution .
the title is " the power of movement in plants . "
no one was allowed to speak about movement in plants before charles darwin .
in his book , assisted by his son , francis - who was the first professor of plant physiology in the world , in cambridge - they took into consideration every single movement for 500 pages .
and in the last paragraph of the book , it 's a kind of stylistic mark , because normally charles darwin stored , in the last paragraph of a book , the most important message .
he wrote that , " it 's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animals . "
this is not a metaphor .
he wrote some very interesting letters to one of his friends who was j.d. hooker , or at that time , president of the royal society , so the maximum scientific authority in britain speaking about the brain in the plants .
now , this is a root apex growing against a slope .
so you can recognize this kind of movement , the same movement that worms , snakes and every animal that are moving on the ground without legs is able to display .
and it 's not an easy movement because , to have this kind of movement , you need to move different regions of the root and to synchronize these different regions without having a brain .
so we studied the root apex and we found that there is a specific region that is here , depicted in blue - that is called the " transition zone . "
and this region , it 's a very small region - it 's less than one millimeter .
and in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important , you have these kinds of signals here .
the signals that you are seeing here are action potential , are the same signals that the neurons of my brain , of our brain , use to exchange information .
now we know that a root apex has just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature , but we know how big the root apparatus of a small plant , like a plant of rye .
we have almost 14 million roots .
we have 11 and a half million root apex and a total length of 600 or more kilometers and a very high surface area .
now let 's imagine that each single root apex is working in network with all the others .
here were have on the left , the internet and on the right , the root apparatus .
they work in the same way .
they are a network of small computing machines , working in networks .
and why are they so similar ?
because they evolved for the same reason : to survive predation .
they work in the same way .
so you can remove 90 percent of the root apparatus and the plants -lsb- continue -rsb- to work .
you can remove 90 percent of the internet and it is -lsb- continuing -rsb- to work .
so , a suggestion for the people working with networks : plants are able to give you good suggestions about how to evolve networks .
and another possibility is a technological possibility .
let 's imagine that we can build robots and robots that are inspired by plants .
until now , the man was inspired just by man or the animals in producing a robot .
we have the animaloid - and the normal robots inspired by animals , insectoid , so on .
we have the androids that are inspired by man .
but why have we not any plantoid ?
well , if you want to fly , it 's good that you look at birds - to be inspired by birds .
but if you want to explore soils , or if you want to colonize new territory , to best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are masters in doing this .
we have another possibility we are working -lsb- on -rsb- in our lab , -lsb- which -rsb- is to build hybrids .
it 's much more easy to build hybrids .
hybrid means it 's something that 's half living and half machine .
it 's much more easy to work with plants than with animals .
they have computing power , they have electrical signals .
the connection with the machine is much more easy , much more even ethically possible .
and these are three possibilities that we are working on to build hybrids , driven by algae or by the leaves at the end , by the most , most powerful parts of the plants , by the roots .
well , thank you for your attention .
and before i finish , i would like to reassure that no snails were harmed in making this presentation .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i was trained to become a gymnast for two years in hunan , china in the 1970s .
when i was in the first grade , the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes , all expenses paid .
but my tiger mother said , " no . "
my parents wanted me to become an engineer like them .
after surviving the cultural revolution , they firmly believed there 's only one sure way to happiness : a safe and well-paid job .
it is not important if i like the job or not .
but my dream was to become a chinese opera singer .
that is me playing my imaginary piano .
an opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics , so i tried everything i could to go to opera school .
i even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show .
but no adults liked the idea .
no adults believed i was serious .
only my friends supported me , but they were kids , just as powerless as i was .
so at age 15 , i knew i was too old to be trained .
my dream would never come true .
i was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness but that 's so unfair .
so i was determined to find another calling .
nobody around to teach me ? fine .
i turned to books .
i satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians . -lsb- " correspondence in the family of fou lei " -rsb- i found my role model of an independent woman when confucian tradition requires obedience . -lsb- " jane eyre " -rsb- and i learned to be efficient from this book . -lsb- " cheaper by the dozen " -rsb- and i was inspired to study abroad after reading these .
-lsb- " complete works of sanmao " -lrb- aka echo chan -rrb- -rsb- -lsb- " lessons from history " by nan huaijin -rsb- i came to the u.s. in 1995 , so which books did i read here first ?
books banned in china , of course .
" the good earth " is about chinese peasant life .
that 's just not convenient for propaganda . got it .
the bible is interesting , but strange .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a topic for a different day .
but the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany : " you shall honor your father and mother . "
" honor , " i said . " that 's so different , and better , than obey . "
so it becomes my tool to climb out of this confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents .
encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading .
it offers many insights .
for example , i found this map out of place at first because this is what chinese students grew up with .
it had never occurred to me , china does n't have to be at the center of the world .
a map actually carries somebody 's view .
comparative reading actually is nothing new .
it 's a standard practice in the academic world .
there are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature .
compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic .
so i thought , well , if comparative reading works for research , why not do it in daily life too ?
so i started reading books in pairs .
so they can be about people - -lsb- " benjamin franklin " by walter isaacson -rsb- -lsb- " john adams " by david mccullough -rsb- - who are involved in the same event , or friends with shared experiences .
-lsb- " personal history " by katharine graham -rsb- -lsb- " the snowball : warren buffett and the business of life , " by alice schroeder -rsb- i also compare the same stories in different genres - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lsb- holy bible : king james version -rsb- -lsb- " lamb " by chrisopher moore -rsb- - or similar stories from different cultures , as joseph campbell did in his wonderful book . -lsb- " the power of myth " by joseph campbell -rsb- for example , both the christ and the buddha went through three temptations .
for the christ , the temptations are economic , political and spiritual .
for the buddha , they are all psychological : lust , fear and social duty - interesting .
so if you know a foreign language , it 's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages .
-lsb- " the way of chuang tzu " thomas merton -rsb- -lsb- " tao : the watercourse way " alan watts -rsb- instead of lost in translation , i found there is much to gain .
for example , it 's through translation that i realized " happiness " in chinese literally means " fast joy . " huh !
" bride " in chinese literally means " new mother . " uh-oh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present .
i know i shall never feel lonely or powerless again .
having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered .
i have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream .
its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from , where passion comes from , where happiness comes from .
even a shattered dream can do that for you .
so because of books , i 'm here today , happy , living again with a purpose and a clarity , most of the time .
so may books be always with you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- guitar music starts -rrb- -lrb- music ends -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- distorted guitar music starts -rrb- -lrb- music ends -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- ambient / guitar music starts -rrb- -lrb- music ends -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- my talk today is about something maybe a couple of you have already heard about .
it 's called the arab spring .
anyone heard of it ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in 2011 , power shifted , from the few to the many , from oval offices to central squares , from carefully guarded airwaves to open-source networks .
but before tahrir was a global symbol of liberation , there were representative surveys already giving people a voice in quieter but still powerful ways .
i study muslim societies around the world at gallup .
since 2001 , we 've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people - young and old , men and women , educated and illiterate .
my talk today draws on this research to reveal why arabs rose up and what they want now .
now this region 's very diverse , and every country is unique .
but those who revolted shared a common set of grievances and have similar demands today .
i 'm going to focus a lot of my talk on egypt .
it has nothing to do with the fact that i was born there , of course .
but it 's the largest arab country and it 's also one with a great deal of influence .
but i 'm going to end by widening the lens to the entire region to look at the mundane topics of arab views of religion and politics and how this impacts women , revealing some surprises along the way .
so after analyzing mounds of data , what we discovered was this : unemployment and poverty alone did not lead to the arab revolts of 2011 .
if an act of desperation by a tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions , it was the difference between what arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel .
to tell you what i mean , consider this trend in egypt .
on paper the country was doing great .
in fact , it attracted accolades from multinational organizations because of its economic growth .
but under the surface was a very different reality .
in 2010 , right before the revolution , even though gdp per capita had been growing at five percent for several years , egyptians had never felt worse about their lives .
now this is very unusual , because globally we find that , not surprisingly , people feel better as their country gets richer .
and that 's because they have better job opportunities and their state offers better social services .
but it was exactly the opposite in egypt .
as the country got more well-off , unemployment actually rose and people 's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted .
but it was n't just anger at economic injustice .
it was also people 's deep longing for freedom .
contrary to the clash of civilizations theory , arabs did n't despise western liberty , they desired it .
as early as 2001 , we asked arabs , and muslims in general around the world , what they admired most about the west .
among the most frequent responses was liberty and justice .
in their own words to an open-ended question we heard , " their political system is transparent and it 's following democracy in its true sense . "
another said it was " liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other . "
majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in egypt , indonesia and iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right , especially in egypt .
eighty-eight percent said moving toward greater democracy would help muslims progress - the highest percentage of any country we surveyed .
but pressed up against these democratic aspirations was a very different day-to-day experience , especially in egypt .
while aspiring to democracy the most , they were the least likely population in the world to say that they had actually voiced their opinion to a public official in the last month - at only four percent .
so while economic development made a few people rich , it left many more worse off .
as people felt less and less free , they also felt less and less provided for .
so rather than viewing their former regimes as generous if overprotective fathers , they viewed them as essentially prison wardens .
so now that egyptians have ended mubarak 's 30-year rule , they potentially could be an example for the region .
if egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law , it could be a model .
if , however , the core issues that propelled the revolution are n't addressed , the consequences could be catastrophic - not just for egypt , but for the entire region .
the signs do n't look good , some have said .
islamists , not the young liberals that sparked the revolution , won the majority in parliament .
the military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country 's economy continues to suffer .
evaluating egypt on this basis alone , however , ignores the real revolution .
because egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years , far less divided on religious-secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy .
whether they support islamists or liberals , egyptians ' priorities for this government are identical , and they are jobs , stability and education , not moral policing .
but most of all , for the first time in decades , they expect to be active participants , not spectators , in the affairs of their country .
i was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from egypt and tunisia a couple of weeks ago .
and what really struck me about them was that they were n't only optimistic , but they kind of struck me as nervous , for lack of a better word .
one said to me , " our people used to gather in cafes to watch football " - or soccer , as we say in america - " and now they gather to watch parliament . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " they 're really watching us , and we ca n't help but worry that we 're not going to live up to their expectations . "
and what really struck me is that less than 24 months ago , it was the people that were nervous about being watched by their government .
and the reason that they 're expecting a lot is because they have a new-found hope for the future .
so right before the revolution we said that egyptians had never felt worse about their lives , but not only that , they thought their future would be no better .
what really changed after the ouster of mubarak was n't that life got easier .
it actually got harder .
but people 's expectations for their future went up significantly .
and this hope , this optimism , endured a year of turbulent transition .
one reason that there 's this optimism is because , contrary to what many people have said , most egyptians think things really have changed in many ways .
so while egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution , the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout - men and women .
where scarcely a quarter believed in the honesty of elections in 2010 - i 'm surprised it was a quarter - 90 percent thought that this last election was honest .
now why this matters is because we discovered a link between people 's faith in their democratic process and their faith that oppressed people can change their situation through peaceful means alone .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now i know what some of you are thinking .
the egyptian people , and many other arabs who 've revolted and are in transition , have very high expectations of the government .
they 're just victims of a long-time autocracy , expecting a paternal state to solve all their problems .
but this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in egypt far from the cameras in tahrir square .
and that is egyptians ' elevated expectations are placed first on themselves .
in the country once known for its passive resignation , where , as bad as things got , only four percent expressed their opinion to a public official , today 90 percent tell us that if there 's a problem in their community , it 's up to them to fix it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and three-fourths believe they not only have the responsibility , but the power to make change .
and this empowerment also applies to women , whose role in the revolts can not be underestimated .
they were doctors and dissidents , artists and organizers .
a full third of those who braved tanks and tear gas to ask or to demand liberty and justice in egypt were women .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now people have raised some real concerns about what the rise of islamist parties means for women .
what we 've found about the role of religion in law and the role of religion in society is that there 's no female consensus .
we found that women in one country look more like the men in that country than their female counterparts across the border .
now what this suggests is that how women view religion 's role in society is shaped more by their own country 's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women .
where women agree , however , is on their own role , and that it must be central and active .
and here is where we see the greatest gender difference within a country - on the issue of women 's rights .
now how men feel about women 's rights matters to the future of this region .
because we discovered a link between men 's support for women 's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country .
so the question becomes , what drives men 's support for women 's rights ?
what about men 's views of religion and law ?
-lsb- does -rsb- a man 's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women 's rights ?
the answer is no .
we found absolutely no correlation , no impact whatsoever , between these two variables .
what drives men 's support for women 's employment is men 's employment , their level of education as well as a high score on their country 's u.n. human development index .
what this means is that human development , not secularization , is what 's key to women 's empowerment in the transforming middle east .
and the transformation continues .
from wall street to mohammed mahmoud street , it has never been more important to understand the aspirations of ordinary people .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one thing the world needs , one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates .
we need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you think about the arguments we have , most of the time it 's shouting matches on cable television , ideological food fights on the floor of congress .
i have a suggestion .
look at all the arguments we have these days over health care , over bonuses and bailouts on wall street , over the gap between rich and poor , over affirmative action and same-sex marriage .
lying just beneath the surface of those arguments , with passions raging on all sides , are big questions of moral philosophy , big questions of justice .
but we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics .
so what i would like to do today is have something of a discussion .
first , let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality , give you a very short lecture on aristotle of ancient athens , aristotle 's theory of justice , and then have a discussion here to see whether aristotle 's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today .
so , are you ready for the lecture ?
according to aristotle , justice means giving people what they deserve .
that 's it ; that 's the lecture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you may say , well , that 's obvious enough .
the real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why .
take the example of flutes .
suppose we 're distributing flutes .
who should get the best ones ?
let 's see what people - what would you say ?
who should get the best flute ?
you can just call it out .
-lrb- audience : random . -rrb- michael sandel : at random . you would do it by lottery .
or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them .
who else ?
-lrb- audience : the best flute players . -rrb- ms : the best flute players . -lrb- audience : the worst flute players . -rrb- ms : the worst flute players .
how many say the best flute players ?
why ?
actually , that was aristotle 's answer too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but here 's a harder question .
why do you think , those of you who voted this way , that the best flutes should go to the best flute players ?
peter : the greatest benefit to all .
ms : the greatest benefit to all .
we 'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players .
that 's peter ? -lrb- audience : peter . -rrb- ms : all right .
well , it 's a good reason .
we 'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music .
but peter , aristotle does n't agree with you that that 's the reason .
that 's all right .
aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players .
he said , that 's what flutes are for - to be played well .
he says that to reason about just distribution of a thing , we have to reason about , and sometimes argue about , the purpose of the thing , or the social activity - in this case , musical performance .
and the point , the essential nature , of musical performance is to produce excellent music .
it 'll be a happy byproduct that we 'll all benefit .
but when we think about justice , aristotle says , what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing .
one of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy , but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians .
now , flutes may seem ... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case .
let 's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice .
it had to do with golf .
casey martin - a few years ago , casey martin - did any of you hear about him ?
he was a very good golfer , but he had a disability .
he had a bad leg , a circulatory problem , that made it very painful for him to walk the course .
in fact , it carried risk of injury .
he asked the pga , the professional golfers ' association , for permission to use a golf cart in the pga tournaments .
they said , " no .
now that would give you an unfair advantage . "
he sued , and his case went all the way to the supreme court , believe it or not , the case over the golf cart , because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated , provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity .
he says , " i 'm a great golfer .
i want to compete .
but i need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next . "
suppose you were on the supreme court .
suppose you were deciding the justice of this case .
how many here would say that casey martin does have a right to use a golf cart ?
and how many say , no , he does n't ?
all right , let 's take a poll , show of hands .
how many would rule in favor of casey martin ?
and how many would not ? how many would say he does n't ?
all right , we have a good division of opinion here .
someone who would not grant casey martin the right to a golf cart , what would be your reason ?
raise your hand , and we 'll try to get you a microphone .
what would be your reason ?
-lrb- audience : it 'd be an unfair advantage . -rrb- ms : it would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart .
all right , those of you , i imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage .
what about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart ?
how would you answer the objection ?
yes , all right .
audience : the cart 's not part of the game .
ms : what 's your name ? -lrb- audience : charlie . -rrb- ms : charlie says - we 'll get charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply .
tell us , charlie , why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart ?
charlie : the cart 's not part of the game .
ms : but what about walking from hole to hole ?
charlie : it does n't matter ; it 's not part of the game .
ms : walking the course is not part of the game of golf ?
charlie : not in my book , it is n't .
ms : all right . stay there , charlie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- who has an answer for charlie ?
all right , who has an answer for charlie ?
what would you say ?
audience : the endurance element is a very important part of the game , walking all those holes .
ms : walking all those holes ?
that 's part of the game of golf ? -lrb- audience : absolutely . -rrb- ms : what 's your name ? -lrb- audience : warren . -rrb- ms : warren .
charlie , what do you say to warren ?
charley : i 'll stick to my original thesis .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ms : warren , are you a golfer ?
warren : i am not a golfer .
charley : and i am . -lrb- ms : okay . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you know , it 's interesting .
in the case , in the lower court , they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue .
is walking the course essential to the game ?
and they brought in jack nicklaus and arnold palmer .
and what do you suppose they all said ?
yes . they agreed with warren .
they said , yes , walking the course is strenuous physical exercise .
the fatigue factor is an important part of golf .
and so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart .
now , notice , something interesting - well , i should tell you about the supreme court first .
the supreme court decided .
what do you suppose they said ?
they said yes , that casey martin must be provided a golf cart .
seven to two , they ruled .
what was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we 've just had is that the discussion about the right , the justice , of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf .
and the supreme court justices wrestled with that question .
and justice stevens , writing for the majority , said he had read all about the history of golf , and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible , and that walking was not essential , but incidental .
now , there were two dissenters , one of whom was justice scalia .
he would n't have granted the cart , and he had a very interesting dissent .
it 's interesting because he rejected the aristotelian premise underlying the majority 's opinion .
he said it 's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf .
here 's how he put it .
" to say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object .
but since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement , -lrb- laughter -rrb- that is , what distinguishes games from productive activity , -lrb- laughter -rrb- it is quite impossible to say that any of a game 's arbitrary rules is essential . "
so there you have justice scalia taking on the aristotelian premise of the majority 's opinion .
justice scalia 's opinion is questionable for two reasons .
first , no real sports fan would talk that way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary , rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring , we would n't care about the outcome of the game .
it 's also objectionable on a second ground .
on the face of it , it seemed to be - this debate about the golf cart - an argument about fairness , what 's an unfair advantage .
but if fairness were the only thing at stake , there would have been an easy and obvious solution .
what would it be ? -lrb- audience : let everyone use the cart . -rrb- let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to .
then the fairness objection goes away .
but letting everyone ride in a cart would have been , i suspect , more anathema to the golfing greats and to the pga , even than making an exception for casey martin .
why ?
because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf , but , relatedly , the question : what abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents ?
let me put the point as delicately as possible : golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after all , there 's no running or jumping , and the ball stands still .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart , it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer , the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes .
that illustrates that with golf , as with flutes , it 's hard to decide the question of what justice requires , without grappling with the question , " what is the essential nature of the activity in question , and what qualities , what excellences connected with that activity , are worthy of honor and recognition ? "
let 's take a final example that 's prominent in contemporary political debate : same-sex marriage .
there are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman , and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage .
how many here favor the first policy : the state should recognize traditional marriage only ?
and how many favor the second , same-sex marriage ?
now , put it this way : what ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage ?
the opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage , fundamentally , is procreation , and that 's what 's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging .
and the defenders of same-sex marriage say no , procreation is not the only purpose of marriage ; what about a lifelong , mutual , loving commitment ?
that 's really what marriage is about .
so with flutes , with golf carts , and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage , aristotle has a point .
very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition .
so let 's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve , elevate , the terms of political discourse in the united states , and for that matter , around the world .
there is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics , that 's a recipe for disagreement , and for that matter , a recipe for intolerance and coercion .
so better to shy away from , to ignore , the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life .
it seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite , that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life , rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter .
that , it seems to me , is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
thanks . thank you .
chris .
thanks , chris .
chris anderson : from flutes to golf courses to same-sex marriage - that was a genius link .
now look , you 're a pioneer of open education .
your lecture series was one of the first to do it big .
what 's your vision for the next phase of this ?
ms : well , i think that it is possible .
in the classroom , we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions .
and i think we can do that in public life more generally .
and so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we 've created of the course - it 's available now , online , free for everyone anywhere in the world - and to see whether we can partner with institutions , at universities in china , in india , in africa , around the world , to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate .
ca : so you picture , at some point , live , in real time , you could have this kind of conversation , inviting questions , but with people from china and india joining in ?
ms : right . we did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in long beach , and we do it in a classroom at harvard with about 1,000 students .
would n't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing , engaging seriously with big moral questions , exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup , students in beijing and mumbai and in cambridge , massachusetts and create a global classroom .
that 's what i would love to do .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : so , i would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor .
michael sandel . thank you so much . -lrb- ms : thanks so much . -rrb- five hundred seventy-one million two hundred thirty thousand pounds of paper towels are used by americans every year .
if we could - correction , wrong figure - 13 billion used every year .
if we could reduce the usage of paper towels , one paper towel per person per day , 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used .
we can do that .
now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers .
there 's the tri-fold . people typically take two or three .
there 's the one that cuts it , that you have to tear off .
people go one , two , three , four , tear .
this much , right ?
there 's the one that cuts itself .
people go , one , two , three , four .
or there 's the same thing , but recycled paper , you have to get five of those because they 're not as absorbant , of course .
the fact is , you can do it all with one towel .
the key , two words : this half of the room , your word is " shake . "
let 's hear it . shake . louder .
audience : shake .
joe smith : your word is " fold . "
audience : fold .
js : again .
audience : fold . js : really loud .
audience : shake . fold .
js : okay . wet hands .
shake - one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 .
why 12 ? twelve apostles , twelve tribes , twelve zodiac signs , twelve months . the one i like the best : it 's the biggest number with one syllable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tri-fold . fold ...
dry .
-lrb- applause -rrb- audience : shake .
fold .
js : cuts itself . fold . the fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension .
you do n't have to remember that part , but trust me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- audience : shake . fold .
js : cuts itself .
you know the funny thing is , i get my hands drier than people do with three or four , because they ca n't get in between the cracks .
if you think this is n't as good ...
audience : shake . fold .
js : now , there 's now a real fancy invention , it 's the one where you wave your hand and it kicks it out .
it 's way too big a towel .
let me tell you a secret .
if you 're really quick , if you 're really quick - and i can prove this - this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building .
how ? as soon as it starts , you just tear it off .
it 's smart enough to stop .
and you get half a towel .
audience : shake . fold .
js : now , let 's all say it together . shake . fold .
you will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel .
and remember , one towel per person for one year - 571,230,000 pounds of paper . no small thing .
and next year , toilet paper .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought i 'd start with telling you or showing you the people who started -lsb- jet propulsion lab -rsb- .
when they were a bunch of kids , they were kind of very imaginative , very adventurous , as they were trying at caltech to mix chemicals and see which one blows up more .
well , i do n't recommend that you try to do that now .
naturally , they blew up a shack , and caltech , well , then , hey , you go to the arroyo and really do all your tests in there .
so , that 's what we call our first five employees during the tea break , you know , in here .
as i said , they were adventurous people .
as a matter of fact , one of them , who was , kind of , part of a cult which was not too far from here on orange grove , and unfortunately he blew up himself because he kept mixing chemicals and trying to figure out which ones were the best chemicals .
so , that gives you a kind of flavor of the kind of people we have there .
we try to avoid blowing ourselves up .
this one i thought i 'd show you .
guess which one is a jpl employee in the heart of this crowd .
i tried to come like him this morning , but as i walked out , then it was too cold , and i said , i 'd better put my shirt back on .
but more importantly , the reason i wanted to show this picture : look where the other people are looking , and look where he is looking .
wherever anybody else looks , look somewhere else , and go do something different , you know , and doing that .
and that 's kind of what has been the spirit of what we are doing .
and i want to tell you a quote from ralph emerson that one of my colleagues , you know , put on my wall in my office , and it says , " do not go where the path may lead .
go instead where there is no path , and leave a trail . "
and that 's my recommendation to all of you : look what everybody is doing , what they are doing ; go do something completely different .
do n't try to improve a little bit on what somebody else is doing , because that does n't get you very far .
in our early days we used to work a lot on rockets , but we also used to have a lot of parties , you know .
as you can see , one of our parties , you know , a few years ago .
but then a big difference happened about 50 years ago , after sputnik was launched . we launched the first american satellite , and that 's the one you see on the left in there .
and here we made 180 degrees change : we changed from a rocket house to be an exploration house .
and that was done over a period of a couple of years , and now we are the leading organization , you know , exploring space on all of your behalf .
but even when we did that , we had to remind ourselves , sometimes there are setbacks .
so you see , on the bottom , that rocket was supposed to go upward ; somehow it ended going sideways .
so that 's what we call the misguided missile .
but then also , just to celebrate that , we started an event at jpl for " miss guided missile . "
so , we used to have a celebration every year and select - there used to be competition and parades and so on .
it 's not very appropriate to do it now . some people tell me to do it ; i think , well , that 's not really proper , you know , these days .
so , we do something a little bit more serious .
and that 's what you see in the last rose bowl , you know , when we entered one of the floats .
that 's more on the play side . and on the right side , that 's the rover just before we finished its testing to take it to the cape to launch it .
these are the rovers up here that you have on mars now .
so that kind of tells you about , kind of , the fun things , you know , and the serious things that we try to do .
but i said i 'm going to show you a short clip of one of our employees to kind of give you an idea about some of the talent that we have .
video : morgan hendry : beware of safety is an instrumental rock band .
it branches on more the experimental side .
there 's the improvisational side of jazz .
there 's the heavy-hitting sound of rock .
being able to treat sound as an instrument , and be able to dig for more abstract sounds and things to play live , mixing electronics and acoustics .
the music 's half of me , but the other half - i landed probably the best gig of all .
i work for the jet propulsion lab . i 'm building the next mars rover .
some of the most brilliant engineers i know are the ones who have that sort of artistic quality about them .
you 've got to do what you want to do .
and anyone who tells you you ca n't , you do n't listen to them .
maybe they 're right - i doubt it .
tell them where to put it , and then just do what you want to do .
i 'm morgan hendry . i am nasa .
charles elachi : now , moving from the play stuff to the serious stuff , always people ask , why do we explore ?
why are we doing all of these missions and why are we exploring them ?
well , the way i think about it is fairly simple .
somehow , 13 billion years ago there was a big bang , and you 've heard a little bit about , you know , the origin of the universe .
but somehow what strikes everybody 's imagination - or lots of people 's imagination - somehow from that original big bang we have this beautiful world that we live in today .
you look outside : you have all that beauty that you see , all that life that you see around you , and here we have intelligent people like you and i who are having a conversation here .
all that started from that big bang . so , the question is : how did that happen ? how did that evolve ? how did the universe form ?
how did the galaxies form ? how did the planets form ?
why is there a planet on which there is life which have evolved ?
is that very common ?
is there life on every planet that you can see around the stars ?
so we literally are all made out of stardust .
we started from those stars ; we are made of stardust .
so , next time you are really depressed , look in the mirror and you can look and say , hi , i 'm looking at a star here .
you can skip the dust part .
but literally , we are all made of stardust .
so , what we are trying to do in our exploration is effectively write the book of how things have came about as they are today .
and one of the first , or the easiest , places we can go and explore that is to go towards mars .
and the reason mars takes particular attention : it 's not very far from us .
you know , it 'll take us only six months to get there .
six to nine months at the right time of the year .
it 's a planet somewhat similar to earth . it 's a little bit smaller , but the land mass on mars is about the same as the land mass on earth , you know , if you do n't take the oceans into account .
it has polar caps . it has an atmosphere somewhat thinner than ours , so it has weather . so , it 's very similar to some extent , and you can see some of the features on it , like the grand canyon on mars , or what we call the grand canyon on mars .
it is like the grand canyon on earth , except a hell of a lot larger .
so it 's about the size , you know , of the united states .
it has volcanoes on it . and that 's mount olympus on mars , which is a kind of huge volcanic shield on that planet .
and if you look at the height of it and you compare it to mount everest , you see , it 'll give you an idea of how large that mount olympus , you know , is , relative to mount everest .
so , it basically dwarfs , you know , mount everest here on earth .
so , that gives you an idea of the tectonic events or volcanic events which have happened on that planet .
recently from one of our satellites , this shows that it 's earth-like - we caught a landslide occurring as it was happening .
so it is a dynamic planet , and activity is going on as we speak today .
and these rovers , people wonder now , what are they doing today , so i thought i would show you a little bit what they are doing .
this is one very large crater . geologists love craters , because craters are like digging a big hole in the ground without really working at it , and you can see what 's below the surface .
so , this is called victoria crater , which is about a few football fields in size .
and if you look at the top left , you see a little teeny dark dot .
this picture was taken from an orbiting satellite .
if i zoom on it , you can see : that 's the rover on the surface .
so , that was taken from orbit ; we had the camera zoom on the surface , and we actually saw the rover on the surface .
and we actually used the combination of the satellite images and the rover to actually conduct science , because we can observe large areas and then you can get those rovers to move around and basically go to a certain location .
so , specifically what we are doing now is that rover is going down in that crater .
as i told you , geologists love craters .
and the reason is , many of you went to the grand canyon , and you see in the wall of the grand canyon , you see these layers .
and what these layers - that 's what the surface used to be a million years ago , 10 million years ago , 100 million years ago , and you get deposits on top of them .
so if you can read the layers it 's like reading your book , and you can learn the history of what happened in the past in that location .
so what you are seeing here are the layers on the wall of that crater , and the rover is going down now , measuring , you know , the properties and analyzing the rocks as it 's going down , you know , that canyon .
now , it 's kind of a little bit of a challenge driving down a slope like this .
if you were there you would n't do it yourself .
but we really made sure we tested those rovers before we got them down - or that rover - and made sure that it 's all working well .
now , when i came last time , shortly after the landing - i think it was , like , a hundred days after the landing - i told you i was surprised that those rovers are lasting even a hundred days .
well , here we are four years later , and they 're still working .
now you say , charles , you are really lying to us , and so on , but that 's not true . we really believed they were going to last 90 days or 100 days , because they are solar powered , and mars is a dusty planet , so we expected the dust would start accumulating on the surface , and after a while we would n't have enough power , you know , to keep them warm .
well , i always say it 's important that you are smart , but every once in a while it 's good to be lucky .
and that 's what we found out . it turned out that every once in a while there are dust devils which come by on mars , as you are seeing here , and when the dust devil comes over the rover , it just cleans it up .
it is like a brand new car that you have , and that 's literally why they have lasted so long .
and now we designed them reasonably well , but that 's exactly why they are lasting that long and still providing all the science data .
now , the two rovers , each one of them is , kind of , getting old .
you know , one of them , one of the wheels is stuck , is not working , one of the front wheels , so what we are doing , we are driving it backwards .
and the other one has arthritis of the shoulder joint , you know , it 's not working very well , so it 's walking like this , and we can move the arm , you know , that way .
but still they are producing a lot of scientific data .
now , during that whole period , a number of people got excited , you know , outside the science community about these rovers , so i thought i 'd show you a video just to give you a reflection about how these rovers are being viewed by people other than the science community .
so let me go on the next short video .
by the way , this video is pretty accurate of how the landing took place , you know , about four years ago .
video : okay , we have parachute aligned .
okay , deploy the airbags . open .
camera . we have a picture right now .
yeah !
ce : that 's about what happened in the houston operation room . it 's exactly like this .
video : now , if there is life , the dutch will find it .
what is he doing ?
what is that ?
ce : not too bad .
so anyway , let me continue on showing you a little bit about the beauty of that planet .
as i said earlier , it looked very much like earth , so you see sand dunes .
it looks like i could have told you these are pictures taken from the sahara desert or somewhere , and you 'd have believed me , but these are pictures taken from mars .
but one area which is particularly intriguing for us is the northern region , you know , of mars , close to the north pole , because we see ice caps , and we see the ice caps shrinking and expanding , so it 's very much like you have in northern canada .
and we wanted to find out - and we see all kinds of glacial features on it .
so , we wanted to find out , actually , what is that ice made of , and could that have embedded in it some organic , you know , material .
so we have a spacecraft which is heading towards mars , called phoenix , and that spacecraft will land 17 days , seven hours and 20 seconds from now , so you can adjust your watch .
so it 's on may 25 around just before five o 'clock our time here on the west coast , actually we will be landing on another planet .
and as you can see , this is a picture of the spacecraft put on mars , but i thought that just in case you 're going to miss that show , you know , in 17 days , i 'll show you , kind of , a little bit of what 's going to happen .
video : that 's what we call the seven minutes of terror .
so the plan is to dig in the soil and take samples that we put them in an oven and actually heat them and look what gases will come from it .
so this was launched about nine months ago .
we 'll be coming in at 12,000 miles per hour , and in seven minutes we have to stop and touch the surface very softly so we do n't break that lander .
ben cichy : phoenix is the first mars scout mission .
it 's the first mission that 's going to try to land near the north pole of mars , and it 's the first mission that 's actually going to try and reach out and touch water on the surface of another planet .
lynn craig : where there tends to be water , at least on earth , there tends to be life , and so it 's potentially a place where life could have existed on the planet in the past .
erik bailey : the main purpose of edl is to take a spacecraft that is traveling at 12,500 miles an hour and bring it to a screeching halt in a soft way in a very short amount of time .
bc : we enter the martian atmosphere .
we 're 70 miles above the surface of mars .
and our lander is safely tucked inside what we call an aeroshell .
eb : looks kind of like an ice cream cone , more or less .
bc : and on the front of it is this heat shield , this saucer-looking thing that has about a half-inch of essentially what 's cork on the front of it , which is our heat shield .
now , this is really special cork , and this cork is what 's going to protect us from the violent atmospheric entry that we 're about to experience .
rob grover : friction really starts to build up on the spacecraft , and we use the friction when it 's flying through the atmosphere bc : from this point , we 're going to decelerate from 12,500 miles an hour down to 900 miles an hour .
eb : the outside can get almost as hot as the surface of the sun .
rg : the temperature of the heat shield can reach 2,600 degrees fahrenheit .
eb : the inside does n't get very hot .
it probably gets about room temperature .
richard kornfeld : there is this window of opportunity within which we can deploy the parachute .
eb : if you fire the ' chute too early , the parachute itself could fail .
the fabric and the stitching could just pull apart .
and that would be bad .
bc : in the first 15 seconds after we deploy the parachute , we 'll decelerate from 900 miles an hour to a relatively slow 250 miles an hour .
we no longer need the heat shield to protect us from the force of atmospheric entry , so we jettison the heat shield , exposing for the first time our lander to the atmosphere of mars .
lc : after the heat shield has been jettisoned and the legs are deployed , the next step is to have the radar system begin to detect how far phoenix really is from the ground .
bc : we 've lost 99 percent of our entry velocity .
so , we 're 99 percent of the way to where we want to be .
but that last one percent , as it always seems to be , is the tricky part .
eb : now the spacecraft actually has to decide when it 's going to get rid of its parachute .
bc : we separate from the lander going 125 miles an hour at roughly a kilometer above the surface of mars : 3,200 feet .
that 's like taking two empire state buildings and stacking them on top of one another .
eb : that 's when we separate from the back shell , and we 're now in free-fall .
it 's a very scary moment ; a lot has to happen in a very short amount of time .
lc : so it 's in a free-fall , but it 's also trying to use all of its actuators to make sure that it 's in the right position to land .
eb : and then it has to light up its engines , right itself , and then slowly slow itself down and touch down on the ground safely .
bc : earth and mars are so far apart that it takes over ten minutes for a signal from mars to get to earth .
and edl itself is all over in a matter of seven minutes .
so by the time you even hear from the lander that edl has started it 'll already be over .
eb : we have to build large amounts of autonomy into the spacecraft so that it can land itself safely .
bc : edl is this immense , technically challenging problem .
it 's about getting a spacecraft that 's hurtling through deep space and using all this bag of tricks to somehow figure out how to get it down to the surface of mars at zero miles an hour .
it 's this immensely exciting and challenging problem .
ce : hopefully it all will happen the way you saw it in here .
so it will be a very tense moment , you know , as we are watching that spacecraft landing on another planet .
so now let me talk about the next things that we are doing .
so we are in the process , as we speak , of actually designing the next rover that we are going to be sending to mars .
so i thought i would go a little bit and tell you , kind of , the steps we go through .
it 's very similar to what you do when you design your product .
as you saw a little bit earlier , when we were doing the phoenix one , we have to take into account the heat that we are going to be facing .
so we have to study all kinds of different materials , the shape that we want to do .
in general we do n't try to please the customer here .
what we want to do is to make sure we have an effective , you know , an efficient kind of machine .
first we start by we want to have our employees to be as imaginative as they can .
and we really love being close to the art center , because we have , as a matter of fact , one of the alumni from the art center , eric nyquist , had put a series of displays , far-out displays , you know , in our what we call mission design or spacecraft design room , just to get people to think wildly about things .
we have a bunch of legos . so , as i said , this is a playground for adults , where they sit down and try to play with different shapes and different designs .
then we get a little bit more serious , so we have what we call our cad / cams and all the engineers who are involved , or scientists who are involved , who know about thermal properties , know about design , know about atmospheric interaction , parachutes , all of these things , which they work in a team effort and actually design a spacecraft in a computer to some extent , so to see , does that meet the requirement that we need .
on the right , also , we have to take into account the environment of the planet where we are going .
if you are going to jupiter , you have a very high-radiation , you know , environment . it 's about the same radiation environment close by jupiter as inside a nuclear reactor .
so just imagine : you take your p.c. and throw it into a nuclear reactor and it still has to work .
so these are kind of some of the little challenges , you know , that we have to face .
if we are doing entry , we have to do tests of parachutes .
you saw in the video a parachute breaking . that would be a bad day , you know , if that happened , so we have to test , because we are deploying this parachute at supersonic speeds .
we are coming at extremely high speeds , and we are deploying them to slow us down . so we have to do all kinds of tests .
to give you an idea of the size , you know , of that parachute relative to the people standing there .
next step , we go and actually build some kind of test models and actually test them , you know , in the lab at jpl , in what we call our mars yard .
we kick them , we hit them , we drop them , just to make sure we understand how , where would they break .
and then we back off , you know , from that point .
and then we actually do the actual building and the flight .
and this next rover that we 're flying is about the size of a car .
that big shield that you see outside , that 's a heat shield which is going to protect it .
and that will be basically built over the next year , and it will be launched june a year from now .
now , in that case , because it was a very big rover , we could n't use airbags .
and i know many of you , kind of , last time afterwards said well , that was a cool thing to have - those airbags .
unfortunately this rover is , like , ten times the size of the , you know , mass-wise , of the other rover , or three times the mass .
so we ca n't use airbags . so we have to come up with another ingenious idea of how do we land it .
and we did n't want to take it propulsively all the way to the surface because we did n't want to contaminate the surface ; we wanted the rover to immediately land on its legs .
so we came up with this ingenious idea , which is used here on earth for helicopters .
actually , the lander will come down to about 100 feet and hover above that surface for 100 feet , and then we have a sky crane which will take that rover and land it down on the surface .
hopefully it all will work , you know , it will work that way .
and that rover will be more kind of like a chemist .
what we are going to be doing with that rover as it drives around , it 's going to go and analyze the chemical composition of rocks .
so it will have an arm which will take samples , put them in an oven , crush and analyze them .
but also , if there is something that we can not reach because it is too high on a cliff , we have a little laser system which will actually zap the rock , evaporate some of it , and actually analyze what 's coming from that rock .
so it 's a little bit like " star wars , " you know , but it 's real .
it 's real stuff .
and also to help you , to help the community so you can do ads on that rover , we are going to train that rover to actually in addition to do this , to actually serve cocktails , you know , also on mars .
so that 's kind of giving you an idea of the kind of , you know , fun things we are doing on mars .
i thought i 'd go to " the lord of the rings " now and show you some of the things we have there .
now , " the lord of the rings " has two things played through it .
one , it 's a very attractive planet - it just has the beauty of the rings and so on .
but for scientists , also the rings have a special meaning , because we believe they represent , on a small scale , how the solar system actually formed .
some of the scientists believe that the way the solar system formed , that the sun when it collapsed and actually created the sun , a lot of the dust around it created rings and then the particles in those rings accumulated together , and they formed bigger rocks , and then that 's how the planets , so , the idea is , by watching saturn we 're actually watching our solar system in real time being formed on a smaller scale , so it 's like a test bed for it .
so , let me show you a little bit on what that saturnian system looks like .
first , i 'm going to fly you over the rings .
by the way , all of this is real stuff .
this is not animation or anything like this .
this is actually taken from the satellite that we have in orbit around saturn , the cassini .
and you see the amount of detail that is in those rings , which are the particles .
some of them are agglomerating together to form larger particles .
so that 's why you have these gaps , is because a small satellite , you know , is being formed in that location .
now , you think that those rings are very large objects .
yes , they are very large in one dimension ; in the other dimension they are paper thin . very , very thin .
what you are seeing here is the shadow of the ring on saturn itself .
and that 's one of the satellites which was actually formed on that one .
so , think about it as a paper-thin , huge area of many hundreds of thousands of miles , which is rotating .
and we have a wide variety of kind of satellites which will form , each one looking very different and very odd , and that keeps scientists busy for tens of years trying to explain this , and telling nasa we need more money so we can explain what these things look like , or why they formed that way .
well , there were two satellites which were particularly interesting .
one of them is called enceladus .
it 's a satellite which was all made of ice , and we measured it from orbit . made of ice .
but there was something bizarre about it .
if you look at these stripes in here , what we call tiger stripes , when we flew over them , all of a sudden we saw an increase in the temperature , which said that those stripes are warmer than the rest of the planet .
so as we flew by away from it , we looked back . and guess what ?
we saw geysers coming out .
so this is a yellowstone , you know , of saturn .
we are seeing geysers of ice which are coming out of that planet , which indicate that most likely there is an ocean , you know , below the surface .
and somehow , through some dynamic effect , we 're having these geysers which are being , you know , emitted from it .
and the reason i showed the little arrow there , i think that should say 30 miles , we decided a few months ago to actually fly the spacecraft through the plume of that geyser so we can actually measure the material that it is made of .
that was -lsb- unclear -rsb- also - you know , because we were worried about the risk of it , but it worked pretty well .
we flew at the top of it , and we found that there is a fair amount of organic material which is being emitted in combination with the ice .
and over the next few years , as we keep orbiting , you know , saturn , we are planning to get closer and closer down to the surface and make more accurate measurements .
now , another satellite also attracted a lot of attention , and that 's titan . and the reason titan is particularly interesting , it 's a satellite bigger than our moon , and it has an atmosphere .
and that atmosphere is very - as dense as our own atmosphere .
so if you were on titan , you would feel the same pressure that you feel in here . except it 's a lot colder , and that atmosphere is heavily made of methane .
now , methane gets people all excited , because it 's organic material , so immediately people start thinking , could life have evolved in that location , when you have a lot of organic material .
so people believe now that titan is most likely what we call a pre-biotic planet , because it 's so cold organic material did not get to the stage of becoming biological material , and therefore life could have evolved on it .
so it could be earth , frozen three billion years ago before life actually started on it .
so that 's getting a lot of interest , and to show you some example of what we did in there , we actually dropped a probe , which was developed by our colleagues in europe , we dropped a probe as we were orbiting saturn .
we dropped a probe in the atmosphere of titan .
and this is a picture of an area as we were coming down .
just looked like the coast of california for me .
you see the rivers which are coming along the coast , and you see that white area which looks like catalina island , and that looks like an ocean .
and then with an instrument we have on board , a radar instrument , we found there are lakes like the great lakes in here , so it looks very much like earth .
it looks like there are rivers on it , there are oceans or lakes , we know there are clouds . we think it 's raining also on it .
so it 's very much like the cycle on earth except because it 's so cold , it could not be water , you know , because water would have frozen .
what it turned out , that all that we are seeing , all this liquid , -lsb- is made of -rsb- hydrocarbon and ethane and methane , similar to what you put in your car .
so here we have a cycle of a planet which is like our earth , but is all made of ethane and methane and organic material .
so if you were on mars - sorry , on titan , you do n't have to worry about four-dollar gasoline .
you just drive to the nearest lake , stick your hose in it , and you 've got your car filled up .
on the other hand , if you light a match the whole planet will blow up .
so in closing , i said i want to close by a couple of pictures .
and just to kind of put us in perspective , this is a picture of saturn taken with a spacecraft from behind saturn , looking towards the sun .
the sun is behind saturn , so we see what we call " forward scattering , " so it highlights all the rings . and i 'm going to zoom .
there is a - i 'm not sure you can see it very well , but on the top left , around 10 o 'clock , there is a little teeny dot , and that 's earth .
you barely can see ourselves . so what i did , i thought i 'd zoom on it .
so as you zoom in , you know , you can see earth , you know , just in the middle here . so we zoomed all the way on the art center .
so thank you very much .
i want you to imagine this for a moment .
two men , rahul and rajiv , living in the same neighborhood , from the same educational background , similar occupation , and they both turn up at their local accident emergency complaining of acute chest pain .
rahul is offered a cardiac procedure , but rajiv is sent home .
what might explain the difference in the experience of these two nearly identical men ?
rajiv suffers from a mental illness .
the difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness .
even in the best-resourced countries in the world , this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years .
is even larger .
but of course , mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well . the most obvious example is suicide .
it might surprise some of you here , as it did me , when i discovered that suicide is at the top of the list of the leading causes of death in young people in all countries in the world , including the poorest countries of the world .
but beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy , we 're also concerned about the quality of life lived .
now , in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived , we need to use a metric called the daly , which stands for a disability-adjusted life year .
now when we do that , we discover some startling things about mental illness from a global perspective .
we discover that , for example , mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world .
depression , for example , is the third-leading cause of disability , alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children .
when you put all the mental illnesses together , they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease .
indeed , mental illnesses are also very damaging to people 's lives , but beyond just the burden of disease , let us consider the absolute numbers .
the world health organization estimates that there are nearly four to five hundred million people living on our tiny planet who are affected by a mental illness .
now some of you here look a bit astonished by that number , but consider for a moment the incredible diversity of mental illnesses , from autism and intellectual disability in childhood , through to depression and anxiety , substance misuse and psychosis in adulthood , all the way through to dementia in old age , and i 'm pretty sure that each and every one us present here today can think of at least one person , at least one person , who 's affected by mental illness in our most intimate social networks .
i see some nodding heads there .
but beyond the staggering numbers , what 's truly important from a global health point of view , what 's truly worrying from a global health point of view , is that the vast majority of these affected individuals do not receive the care that we know can transform their lives , and remember , we do have robust evidence that a range of interventions , medicines , psychological interventions , and social interventions , can make a vast difference .
and yet , even in the best-resourced countries , for example here in europe , roughly 50 percent of affected people do n't receive these interventions .
in the sorts of countries i work in , that so-called treatment gap approaches an astonishing 90 percent .
it is n't surprising , then , that if you should speak to anyone affected by a mental illness , the chances are that you will hear stories of hidden suffering , shame and discrimination in nearly every sector of their lives .
but perhaps most heartbreaking of all are the stories of the abuse of even the most basic human rights , such as the young woman shown in this image here that are played out every day , sadly , even in the very institutions that were built to care for people with mental illnesses , the mental hospitals .
it 's this injustice that has really driven my mission to try to do a little bit to transform the lives of people affected by mental illness , and a particularly critical action that i focused on is to bridge the gulf between the knowledge we have that can transform lives , the knowledge of effective treatments , and how we actually use that knowledge in the everyday world .
and an especially important challenge that i 've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals , such as psychiatrists and psychologists , particularly in the developing world .
now i trained in medicine in india , and after that i chose psychiatry as my specialty , much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son .
any case , i went on , i soldiered on with psychiatry , and found myself training in britain in some of the best hospitals in this country . i was very privileged .
i worked in a team of incredibly talented , compassionate , but most importantly , highly trained , specialized mental health professionals .
soon after my training , i found myself working first in zimbabwe and then in india , and i was confronted by an altogether new reality .
this was a reality of a world in which there were almost no mental health professionals at all .
in zimbabwe , for example , there were just about a dozen psychiatrists , most of whom lived and worked in harare city , leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside .
in india , i found the situation was not a lot better .
to give you a perspective , if i had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in britain to india , one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in india .
in reality , take a guess .
the actual number is about 3,000 , about two percent of that number .
it became quickly apparent to me that i could n't follow the sorts of mental health care models that i had been trained in , one that relied heavily on specialized , expensive mental health professionals to provide mental health care in countries like india and zimbabwe .
i had to think out of the box about some other model of care .
it was then that i came across these books , and in these books i discovered the idea of task shifting in global health .
the idea is actually quite simple . the idea is , when you 're short of specialized health care professionals , use whoever is available in the community , train them to provide a range of health care interventions , and in these books i read inspiring examples , for example of how ordinary people had been trained to deliver babies , diagnose and treat early pneumonia , to great effect .
and it struck me that if you could train ordinary people to deliver such complex health care interventions , then perhaps they could also do the same with mental health care .
well today , i 'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade , and i want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments , all three of which focused on depression , the most common of all mental illnesses .
in rural uganda , paul bolton and his colleagues , using villagers , demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and , using a randomized control design , showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages .
similarly , using a randomized control trial in rural pakistan , atif rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors , who are community maternal health workers in pakistan 's health care system , could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed , again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates . roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages .
and in my own trial in goa , in india , we again showed that lay counselors drawn from local communities could be trained to deliver psychosocial interventions for depression , anxiety , leading to 70 percent recovery rates as compared to 50 percent in the comparison primary health centers .
now , if i had to draw together all these different experiments in task shifting , and there have of course been many other examples , and try and identify what are the key lessons we can learn that makes for a successful task shifting operation , i have coined this particular acronym , sundar .
what sundar stands for , in hindi , is " attractive . "
it seems to me that there are five key lessons that i 've shown on this slide that are critically important for effective task shifting .
the first is that we need to simplify the message that we 're using , stripping away all the jargon that medicine has invented around itself .
we need to unpack complex health care interventions into smaller components that can be more easily transferred to less-trained individuals .
we need to deliver health care , not in large institutions , but close to people 's homes , and we need to deliver health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities .
and importantly , we need to reallocate the few specialists who are available to perform roles such as capacity-building and supervision .
now for me , task shifting is an idea with truly global significance , because even though it has arisen out of the situation of the lack of resources that you find in developing countries , i think it has a lot of significance for better-resourced countries as well . why is that ?
well , in part , because health care in the developed world , the health care costs in the -lsb- developed -rsb- world , are rapidly spiraling out of control , and a huge chunk of those costs are human resource costs .
but equally important is because health care has become so incredibly professionalized that it 's become very remote and removed from local communities .
for me , what 's truly sundar about the idea of task shifting , though , is n't that it simply makes health care more accessible and affordable but that it is also fundamentally empowering .
it empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community , and in doing so , to become better guardians of their own health . indeed , for me , task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge , and therefore , medical power .
just over 30 years ago , the nations of the world assembled at alma-ata and made this iconic declaration .
well , i think all of you can guess that 12 years on , we 're still nowhere near that goal .
still , today , armed with that knowledge that ordinary people in the community can be trained and , with sufficient supervision and support , can deliver a range of health care interventions effectively , perhaps that promise is within reach now .
indeed , to implement the slogan of health for all , we will need to involve all in that particular journey , and in the case of mental health , in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers .
it is for this reason that , some years ago , the movement for global mental health was founded as a sort of a virtual platform upon which professionals like myself and people affected by mental illness could stand together , shoulder-to-shoulder , and advocate for the rights of people with mental illness to receive the care that we know can transform their lives , and to live a life with dignity .
and in closing , when you have a moment of peace or quiet in these very busy few days or perhaps afterwards , spare a thought for that person you thought about who has a mental illness , or persons that you thought about who have mental illness , and dare to care for them . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background .
i was in my 20s before i ever went to an art museum .
i grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural arkansas , an hour from the nearest movie theater .
and i think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because i grew up around quirky , colorful characters who were great at making with their hands .
and my childhood is more hick than i could ever possibly relate to you , and also more intellectual than you would ever expect .
for instance , me and my sister , when we were little , we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but on the other side of that , though , we were big readers in our house .
and if the tv was on , we were watching a documentary .
and my dad is the most voracious reader i know .
he can read a novel or two a day .
but when i was little , i remember , he would kill flies in our house with my bb gun .
and what was so amazing to me about that - well he would be in his recliner , would holler for me to fetch the bb gun , and i 'd go get it .
and what was amazing to me - well it was pretty kickass ; he was killing a fly in the house with a gun - but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough how to pump it .
and he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on .
so i should talk about art .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or we 'll be here all day with my childhood stories .
i love contemporary art , but i 'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene .
a few years ago , i spent months in europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world .
and i was struck by going to so many , one after the other , with some clarity of what it was that i was longing for .
and i was longing for several things that i was n't getting , or not getting enough of .
but two of the main things : one of it , i was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public , that was accessible .
and the second thing that i was longing for was some more exquisite craftsmanship and technique .
so i started thinking and listing what all it was that i thought would make a perfect biennial .
so i decided , i 'm going to start my own biennial .
i 'm going to organize it and direct it and get it going in the world .
so i thought , okay , i have to have some criteria of how to choose work .
so amongst all the criteria i have , there 's two main things .
one of them , i call my mimaw 's test .
and what that is is i imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes , and if i ca n't explain it in five minutes , then it 's too obtuse or esoteric and it has n't been refined enough yet .
it needs to worked on until it can speak fluently .
and then my other second set of rules - i hate to say " rules " because it 's art - my criteria would be the three h 's , which is head , heart and hands .
and great art would have " head " : it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts .
it would have " heart " in that it would have passion and heart and soul .
and it would have " hand " in that it would be greatly crafted .
so i started thinking about how am i going to do this biennial , how am i going to travel the world and find these artists ?
and then i realized one day , there 's an easier solution to this .
i 'm just going to make the whole thing myself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this is what i did .
so i thought , a biennial needs artists .
i 'm going to do an international biennial ; i need artists from all around the world .
so what i did was i invented a hundred artists from around the world .
i figured out their bios , their passions in life and their art styles , and i started making their work .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i felt , oh this is the kind of project that i could spend my whole life doing .
so i decided , i 'm going to make this a real biennial .
it 's going to be two years of studio work .
and i 'm going to create this in two years , and i have .
so i should start to talk about these guys .
well the range is quite a bit .
and i 'm such a technician , so i loved this project , getting to play with all the techniques .
so for example , in realist paintings , it ranges from this , which is kind of old masters style , to really realistic still-life , to this type of painting where i 'm painting with a single hair .
and then at the other end , there 's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one , and outdoor installations like this one and this one .
i know i should mention : i 'm making all these things .
this is n't photoshopped .
i 'm under the river with those fish .
so now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you .
this is nell remmel .
nell is interested in agricultural processes , and her work is based in these practices .
this piece , which is called " flipped earth " - she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground .
and by taking giant mirrors - -lrb- applause -rrb- and here she 's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt .
and this is 22 feet long .
and what i loved about her work is , when i would walk around it and look down into the sky , looking down to watch the sky , and it unfolded in a new way .
and probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground 's dark , but there 's still the light above , bright above .
and so you 're standing there and everything else is dark , but there 's this portal that you want to jump in .
this piece was great . this is in my parents ' backyard in arkansas .
and i love to dig a hole .
so this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt .
the next artist is kay overstry , and she 's interested in ephemerality and transience .
and in her most recent project , it 's called " weather i made . "
and she 's making weather on her body 's scale .
and this piece is " frost . "
and what she did was she went out on a cold , dry night and breathed back and forth on the lawn to leave - to leave her life 's mark , the mark of her life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so this is five-foot , five-inches of frost that she left behind .
the sun rises , and it melts away .
and that was played by my mom .
so the next artist , this is a group of japanese artists , a collective of japanese artists - -lrb- laughter -rrb- in tokyo .
and they were interested in developing a new , alternative art space , and they needed funding for it , so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects .
one of these is scratch-off masterpieces .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so what they 're doing - each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card , which they sell for 10 bucks , they drew original works of art .
and you buy one , and maybe you get a real piece , and maybe not .
well this has sparked a craze in japan , because everyone 's wanting a masterpiece .
and the ones that are the most sought after are the ones that are only barely scratched off .
and all these works , in some way , talk about luck or fate or chance .
those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win .
and in this one it 's called " drawing the short stick . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i love this piece because i have a little cousin at home who introduced me - which i think is such a great introduction - to a friend one day as , " this is my cousin shea .
he draws sticks real good . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is one of the best compliments ever .
this artist is gus weinmueller , and he 's doing a project , a large project , called " art for the peoples . "
and within this project , he 's doing a smaller project called " artists in residence . "
and what he does is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- he spends a week at a time with a family .
and he shows up on their porch , their doorstep , with a toothbrush and pajamas , and he 's ready to spend the week with them .
and using only what 's present , he goes in and makes a little abode studio to work out of .
and he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is .
he has all these discussions with their family , and he digs through everything they have , and he finds materials to make work .
and he makes a work that answers what they think great art is .
for this family , he made this still-life painting .
and whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property .
this next project , this is by jaochim parisvega , and he 's interested in - he believes art is everywhere waiting - that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen .
and he provides this push by harnessing natural forces , like in his series where he used rain to make paintings .
this project is called " love nests . "
what he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him .
so he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them , and they crafted his nests for him .
and this one 's called " lovelock 's nest . "
this one 's called " mixtape love song 's nest . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this one 's called " lovemaking nest . "
-lrb- laughted -rrb- next is sylvia slater .
sylvia 's interested in art training .
she 's a very serious swiss artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she was thinking about her friends and family who work in chaos-ridden places and developing countries , and she was thinking , what can i make that would be of value to them , in case something bad happens and they have to buy their way across the border or pay off a gunman ?
and so she came up with creating these pocket-sized artworks that are portraits of the person that would carry them .
and you would carry this around with you , and if everything went to hell , you could make payments and buy your life .
so this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director .
so hopefully what happens is you never use it , and it 's an heirloom that you pass down .
and she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments , or they could be like these , which are leaves that can be payments .
and so they 're valuable . this is precious metals and gemstones .
and this one had to get broken up .
he had to break off a piece to get out of egypt recently .
this is by a duo , michael abernathy and bud holland .
and they 're interested in creating culture , just tradition .
so what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area .
so this is in eastern tennessee , and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death .
so they came up with " dig jigs . "
and a dig jig - a dig jig is where , for a milestone anniversary or a birthday , you gather all your friends and family together and you dance on where you 're going to be buried .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we got a lot of attention when we did it .
i talked my family into doing this , and they did n't know what i was doing .
and i was like , " get dressed for a funeral . we 're going to go do some work . "
and so we got to the grave and made this , which was hilarious - the attention that we got .
so what happens is you dance on the grave , and after you 've done your dance , everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are .
and you in essence have a funeral that you get to be present for .
that 's my mom and dad .
this is by jason birdsong .
he is interested in how we see as an animal , how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage .
you know , we look down a dark alley or a jungle path , trying to make out a face or a creature .
we just have that natural way of seeing .
and he plays with this idea .
and this piece : those are n't actually leaves .
they 're butterfly specimens who have a natural camouflage .
so he pairs these up .
there 's another pile of leaves .
those are actually all real butterfly specimens .
and he pairs these up with paintings .
like this is a painting of a snake in a box .
so you open the box and you think , " whoa , there 's a snake in there . "
but it 's actually a painting .
so he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next artist is hazel clausen .
hazel clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided , " you know , i would learn a lot about culture if i created a culture that does n't exist from scratch . "
so that 's what she did .
she created the swiss people named the uvulites , and they have this distinctive yodeling song that they use the uvula for .
and also they reference how the uvula - everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit .
and that 's the symbol of their culture .
and this is from a documentary called " sexual practices and populations control among the uvulites . "
this is a typical angora embroidery for them .
this is one of their founders , gert schaeffer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and actually this is my aunt irene .
it was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things .
and i crack up at this piece , because when i see it i know that 's french angora and all antique german ribbons and wool that i got in a nebraska mill and carried around for 10 years and then antique chinese skirts .
the next is a collective of artists called the silver dobermans , and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they 're really interested in how over-coddled we 've become .
so this is one of their comments on how over-coddled we 've become .
and what they 've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and this is called " horse sense fence . "
the next artist is k. m. yoon , a really interesting south korean artist .
and he 's reworking a confucian art tradition of scholar stones .
next is maynard sipes .
and i love maynard sipes , but he 's off in his own world , and , bless his heart , he 's so paranoid .
next is roy penig , a really interesting kentucky artist , and he 's the nicest guy .
he even once traded a work of art for a block of government cheese because the person wanted it so badly .
next is an australian artist , janeen jackson , and this is from a project of hers called " what an artwork does when we 're not watching . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- next is by a lithuanian fortune teller , jurgi petrauskas .
next is ginger cheshire .
this is from a short film of hers called " the last person . "
and that 's my cousin and my sister 's dog , gabby .
the next , this is by sam sandy .
he 's an australian aboriginal elder , and he 's also an artist .
and this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he 's doing .
this is from estelle willoughsby .
she heals with color .
and she 's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists , even though she 's going to be 90 next year .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is by z. zhou , and he 's interested in stasis .
next is by hilda singh , and she 's doing a whole project called " social outfits . "
next is by vera sokolova .
and i have to say , vera kind of scares me .
you ca n't look her directly in the eyes because she 's kind of scary .
and it 's good that she 's not real ; she 'd be mad that i said that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she 's an optometrist in st. petersburg , and she plays with optics .
next , this is by thomas swifton .
this is from a short film , " adventures with skinny . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is by cicily bennett , and it 's from a series of short films .
and after this one , there 's 77 other artists .
and all together with those other 77 you 're not seeing , that 's my biennial .
thank you . thank you .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . it 's really an honor and a privilege to be here spending my last day as a teenager .
today i want to talk to you about the future , but first i 'm going to tell you a bit about the past .
my story starts way before i was born .
my grandmother was on a train to auschwitz , the death camp .
and she was going along the tracks , and the tracks split .
and somehow - we do n't really know exactly the whole story - but the train took the wrong track and went to a work camp rather than the death camp .
my grandmother survived and married my grandfather .
they were living in hungary , and my mother was born .
and when my mother was two years old , the hungarian revolution was raging , and they decided to escape hungary .
they got on a boat , and yet another divergence - the boat was either going to canada or to australia .
they got on and did n't know where they were going , and ended up in canada .
so , to make a long story short , they came to canada .
my grandmother was a chemist . she worked at the banting institute in toronto , and at 44 she died of stomach cancer . i never met my grandmother , but i carry on her name - her exact name , eva vertes - and i like to think i carry on her scientific passion , too .
i found this passion not far from here , actually , when i was nine years old .
my family was on a road trip and we were in the grand canyon .
and i had never been a reader when i was young - my dad had tried me with the hardy boys ; i tried nancy drew ; i tried all that - and i just did n't like reading books .
and my mother bought this book when we were at the grand canyon called " the hot zone . " it was all about the outbreak of the ebola virus .
and something about it just kind of drew me towards it .
there was this big sort of bumpy-looking virus on the cover , and i just wanted to read it . i picked up that book , and as we drove from the edge of the grand canyon to big sur , and to , actually , here where we are today , in monterey , i read that book , and from when i was reading that book , i knew that i wanted to have a life in medicine .
i wanted to be like the explorers i 'd read about in the book , who went into the jungles of africa , went into the research labs and just tried to figure out what this deadly virus was . so from that moment on , i read every medical book i could get my hands on , and i just loved it so much .
i was a passive observer of the medical world .
it was n't until i entered high school that i thought , " maybe now , you know - being a big high school kid - i can maybe become an active part of this big medical world . "
i was 14 , and i emailed professors at the local university to see if maybe i could go work in their lab . and hardly anyone responded .
but i mean , why would they respond to a 14-year-old , anyway ?
and i got to go talk to one professor , dr. jacobs , who accepted me into the lab .
at that time , i was really interested in neuroscience and wanted to do a research project in neurology - specifically looking at the effects of heavy metals on the developing nervous system .
so i started that , and worked in his lab for a year , and found the results that i guess you 'd expect to find when you feed fruit flies heavy metals - that it really , really impaired the nervous system .
the spinal cord had breaks . the neurons were crossing in every which way .
and from then i wanted to look not at impairment , but at prevention of impairment .
so that 's what led me to alzheimer 's . i started reading about alzheimer 's and tried to familiarize myself with the research , and at the same time when i was in the - i was reading in the medical library one day , and i read this article about something called " purine derivatives . "
and they seemed to have cell growth-promoting properties .
and being naive about the whole field , i kind of thought , " oh , you have cell death in alzheimer 's which is causing the memory deficit , and then you have this compound - purine derivatives - that are promoting cell growth . "
and so i thought , " maybe if it can promote cell growth , it can inhibit cell death , too . "
and so that 's the project that i pursued for that year , and it 's continuing now as well , and found that a specific purine derivative called " guanidine " had inhibited the cell growth by approximately 60 percent .
so i presented those results at the international science fair , which was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life .
and there i was awarded " best in the world in medicine , " which allowed me to get in , or at least get a foot in the door of the big medical world .
and from then on , since i was now in this huge exciting world , i wanted to explore it all . i wanted it all at once , but knew i could n't really get that .
and i stumbled across something called " cancer stem cells . "
and this is really what i want to talk to you about today - about cancer .
at first when i heard of cancer stem cells , i did n't really know how to put the two together . i 'd heard of stem cells , and i 'd heard of them as the panacea of the future - the therapy of many diseases to come in the future , perhaps .
but i 'd heard of cancer as the most feared disease of our time , so how did the good and bad go together ?
last summer i worked at stanford university , doing some research on cancer stem cells .
and while i was doing this , i was reading the cancer literature , trying to - again - familiarize myself with this new medical field .
and it seemed that tumors actually begin from a stem cell .
this fascinated me . the more i read , the more i looked at cancer differently and almost became less fearful of it .
it seems that cancer is a direct result to injury .
if you smoke , you damage your lung tissue , and then lung cancer arises .
if you drink , you damage your liver , and then liver cancer occurs .
and it was really interesting - there were articles correlating if you have a bone fracture , and then bone cancer arises .
because what stem cells are - they 're these phenomenal cells that really have the ability to differentiate into any type of tissue .
so , if the body is sensing that you have damage to an organ and then it 's initiating cancer , it 's almost as if this is a repair response .
and the cancer , the body is saying the lung tissue is damaged , we need to repair the lung . and cancer is originating in the lung trying to repair - because you have this excessive proliferation of these remarkable cells that really have the potential to become lung tissue .
but it 's almost as if the body has originated this ingenious response , but ca n't quite control it .
it has n't yet become fine-tuned enough to finish what has been initiated .
so this really , really fascinated me .
and i really think that we ca n't think about cancer - let alone any disease - in such black-and-white terms .
if we eliminate cancer the way we 're trying to do now , with chemotherapy and radiation , we 're bombarding the body or the cancer with toxins , or with radiation , trying to kill it .
it 's almost as if we 're getting back to this starting point .
we 're removing the cancer cells , but we 're revealing the previous damage that the body has tried to fix .
should n't we think about manipulation , rather than elimination ?
if somehow we can cause these cells to differentiate - to become bone tissue , lung tissue , liver tissue , whatever that cancer has been put there to do - it would be a repair process . we 'd end up better than we were before cancer .
so , this really changed my view of looking at cancer .
and while i was reading all these articles about cancer , it seemed that the articles - a lot of them - focused on , you know , the genetics of breast cancer , and the genesis and the progression of breast cancer - tracking the cancer through the body , tracing where it is , where it goes .
but it struck me that i 'd never heard of cancer of the heart , or cancer of any skeletal muscle for that matter .
and skeletal muscle constitutes 50 percent of our body , or over 50 percent of our body . and so at first i kind of thought , " well , maybe there 's some obvious explanation why skeletal muscle does n't get cancer - at least not that i know of . "
so , i looked further into it , found as many articles as i could , and it was amazing - because it turned out that it was very rare .
some articles even went as far as to say that skeletal muscle tissue is resistant to cancer , and furthermore , not only to cancer , but of metastases going to skeletal muscle .
and what metastases are is when the tumor - when a piece - breaks off and travels through the blood stream and goes to a different organ . that 's what a metastasis is .
it 's the part of cancer that is the most dangerous .
if cancer was localized , we could likely remove it , or somehow - you know , it 's contained . it 's very contained .
but once it starts moving throughout the body , that 's when it becomes deadly .
so the fact that not only did cancer not seem to originate in skeletal muscles , but cancer did n't seem to go to skeletal muscle - there seemed to be something here .
so these articles were saying , you know , " skeletal - metastasis to skeletal muscle - is very rare . "
but it was left at that . no one seemed to be asking why .
so i decided to ask why . at first - the first thing i did was i emailed some professors who specialized in skeletal muscle physiology , and pretty much said , " hey , it seems like cancer does n't really go to skeletal muscle .
is there a reason for this ? " and a lot of the replies i got were that muscle is terminally differentiated tissue .
meaning that you have muscle cells , but they 're not dividing , so it does n't seem like a good target for cancer to hijack .
but then again , this fact that the metastases did n't go to skeletal muscle made that seem unlikely .
and furthermore , that nervous tissue - brain - gets cancer , and brain cells are also terminally differentiated .
so i decided to ask why . and here 's some of , i guess , my hypotheses that i 'll be starting to investigate this may at the sylvester cancer institute in miami .
and i guess i 'll keep investigating until i get the answers .
but i know that in science , once you get the answers , inevitably you 're going to have more questions .
so i guess you could say that i 'll probably be doing this for the rest of my life .
some of my hypotheses are that when you first think about skeletal muscle , there 's a lot of blood vessels going to skeletal muscle .
and the first thing that makes me think is that blood vessels are like highways for the tumor cells .
tumor cells can travel through the blood vessels .
and you think , the more highways there are in a tissue , the more likely it is to get cancer or to get metastases .
so first of all i thought , you know , " would n't it be favorable to cancer getting to skeletal muscle ? " and as well , cancer tumors require a process called angiogenesis , which is really , the tumor recruits the blood vessels to itself to supply itself with nutrients so it can grow .
without angiogenesis , the tumor remains the size of a pinpoint and it 's not harmful .
so angiogenesis is really a central process to the pathogenesis of cancer .
and one article that really stood out to me when i was just reading about this , trying to figure out why cancer does n't go to skeletal muscle , was that it had reported 16 percent of micro-metastases to skeletal muscle upon autopsy .
16 percent ! meaning that there were these pinpoint tumors in skeletal muscle , but only .16 percent of actual metastases - suggesting that maybe skeletal muscle is able to control the angiogenesis , is able to control the tumors recruiting these blood vessels .
we use skeletal muscles so much . it 's the one portion of our body - our heart 's always beating . we 're always moving our muscles .
is it possible that muscle somehow intuitively knows that it needs this blood supply ? it needs to be constantly contracting , so therefore it 's almost selfish . it 's grabbing its blood vessels for itself .
therefore , when a tumor comes into skeletal muscle tissue , it ca n't get a blood supply , and ca n't grow .
so this suggests that maybe if there is an anti-angiogenic factor in skeletal muscle - or perhaps even more , an angiogenic routing factor , so it can actually direct where the blood vessels grow - this could be a potential future therapy for cancer .
and another thing that 's really interesting is that there 's this whole - the way tumors move throughout the body , it 's a very complex system - and there 's something called the chemokine network .
and chemokines are essentially chemical attractants , and they 're the stop and go signals for cancer .
so a tumor expresses chemokine receptors , and another organ - a distant organ somewhere in the body - will have the corresponding chemokines , and the tumor will see these chemokines and migrate towards it .
is it possible that skeletal muscle does n't express this type of molecules ?
and the other really interesting thing is that when skeletal muscle - there 's been several reports that when skeletal muscle is injured , that 's what correlates with metastases going to skeletal muscle .
and , furthermore , when skeletal muscle is injured , that 's what causes chemokines - these signals saying , " cancer , you can come to me , " the " go signs " for the tumors - it causes them to highly express these chemokines .
so , there 's so much interplay here .
i mean , there are so many possibilities for why tumors do n't go to skeletal muscle .
but it seems like by investigating , by attacking cancer , by searching where cancer is not , there has got to be something - there 's got to be something - that 's making this tissue resistant to tumors .
and can we utilize - can we take this property , this compound , this receptor , whatever it is that 's controlling these anti-tumor properties and apply it to cancer therapy in general ?
now , one thing that kind of ties the resistance of skeletal muscle to cancer - to the cancer as a repair response gone out of control in the body - is that skeletal muscle has a factor in it called " myod . "
and what myod essentially does is , it causes cells to differentiate into muscle cells . so this compound , myod , has been tested on a lot of different cell types and been shown to actually convert this variety of cell types into skeletal muscle cells .
so , is it possible that the tumor cells are going to the skeletal muscle tissue , but once in contact inside the skeletal muscle tissue , myod acts upon these tumor cells and causes them to become skeletal muscle cells ?
maybe tumor cells are being disguised as skeletal muscle cells , and this is why it seems as if it is so rare .
it 's not harmful ; it has just repaired the muscle .
muscle is constantly being used - constantly being damaged .
if every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way , cancer occurred - i mean , everybody would have cancer almost .
and i hate to say that . but it seems as though muscle cell , possibly because of all its use , has adapted faster than other body tissues to respond to injury , to fine-tune this repair response and actually be able to finish the process which the body wants to finish . i really believe that the human body is very , very smart , and we ca n't counteract something the body is saying to do .
it 's different when a bacteria comes into the body - that 's a foreign object - we want that out .
but when the body is actually initiating a process and we 're calling it a disease , it does n't seem as though elimination is the right solution . so even to go from there , it 's possible , although far-fetched , that in the future we could almost think of cancer being used as a therapy .
if those diseases where tissues are deteriorating - for example alzheimer 's , where the brain , the brain cells , die and we need to restore new brain cells , new functional brain cells - what if we could , in the future , use cancer ? a tumor - put it in the brain and cause it to differentiate into brain cells ?
that 's a very far-fetched idea , but i really believe that it may be possible .
these cells are so versatile , these cancer cells are so versatile - we just have to manipulate them in the right way .
and again , some of these may be far-fetched , but i figured if there 's anywhere to present far-fetched ideas , it 's here at ted , so thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i live in south central .
this is south central : liquor stores , fast food , vacant lots .
so the city planners , they get together and they figure they 're going to change the name south central to make it represent something else , so they change it to south los angeles , like this is going to fix what 's really going wrong in the city .
this is south los angeles . -lrb- laughter -rrb- liquor stores , fast food , vacant lots .
just like 26.5 million other americans , i live in a food desert , south central los angeles , home of the drive-thru and the drive-by .
funny thing is , the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys .
people are dying from curable diseases in south central los angeles .
for instance , the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than , say , beverly hills , which is probably eight , 10 miles away .
i got tired of seeing this happening .
and i was wondering , how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food , if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood ?
i see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars .
i see dialysis centers popping up like starbucks .
and i figured , this has to stop .
so i figured that the problem is the solution .
food is the problem and food is the solution .
plus i got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that was n't impregnated with pesticides .
so what i did , i planted a food forest in front of my house .
it was on a strip of land that we call a parkway .
it 's 150 feet by 10 feet .
thing is , it 's owned by the city .
but you have to maintain it .
so i 'm like , " cool . i can do whatever the hell i want , since it 's my responsibility and i gotta maintain it . "
and this is how i decided to maintain it .
so me and my group , l.a. green grounds , we got together and we started planting my food forest , fruit trees , you know , the whole nine , vegetables .
what we do , we 're a pay-it-forward kind of group , where it 's composed of gardeners from all walks of life , from all over the city , and it 's completely volunteer , and everything we do is free .
and the garden , it was beautiful .
and then somebody complained .
the city came down on me , and basically gave me a citation saying that i had to remove my garden , which this citation was turning into a warrant .
and i 'm like , " come on , really ?
a warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was like , " cool . bring it . "
because this time it was n't coming up .
so l.a. times got ahold of it . steve lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman , and one of the green grounds members , they put up a petition on change.org , and with 900 signatures , we were a success .
we had a victory on our hands .
my councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we 're doing .
i mean , come on , why would n't they ?
l.a. leads the united states in vacant lots that the city actually owns .
they own 26 square miles of vacant lots .
that 's 20 central parks .
that 's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants .
why in the hell would they not okay this ?
growing one plant will give you 1,000 , 10,000 seeds .
when one dollar 's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars ' worth of produce .
it 's my gospel , when i 'm telling people , grow your own food .
growing your own food is like printing your own money .
-lrb- applause -rrb- see , i have a legacy in south central .
i grew up there . i raised my sons there .
and i refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people , and i 'm manufacturing my own reality .
see , i 'm an artist .
gardening is my graffiti . i grow my art .
just like a graffiti artist , where they beautify walls , me , i beautify lawns , parkways .
i use the garden , the soil , like it 's a piece of cloth , and the plants and the trees , that 's my embellishment for that cloth .
you 'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas .
you just could n't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people .
so what happened ?
i have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education , a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood .
to change the community , you have to change the composition of the soil .
we are the soil .
you 'd be surprised how kids are affected by this .
gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do , especially in the inner city .
plus you get strawberries .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i remember this time , there was this mother and a daughter came , it was , like , 10:30 at night , and they were in my yard , and i came out and they looked so ashamed .
so i 'm like , man , it made me feel bad that they were there , and i told them , you know , you do n't have to do this like this .
this is on the street for a reason .
it made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry , and this only reinforced why i do this , and people asked me , " fin , are n't you afraid people are going to steal your food ? "
and i 'm like , " hell no , i ai n't afraid they 're gonna steal it .
that 's why it 's on the street .
that 's the whole idea .
i want them to take it , but at the same time , i want them to take back their health . "
there 's another time when i put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown los angeles .
these are the guys , they helped me unload the truck .
it was cool , and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother , and it was just cool to see how this changed them , if it was only for that one moment .
so green grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens .
we 've had , like , 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate , and it 's all volunteers .
if kids grow kale , kids eat kale .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if they grow tomatoes , they eat tomatoes . -lrb- applause -rrb- but when none of this is presented to them , if they 're not shown how food affects the mind and the body , they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them .
i see young people and they want to work , but they 're in this thing where they 're caught up - i see kids of color and they 're just on this track that 's designed for them , that leads them to nowhere .
so with gardening , i see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities , to have a sustainable life .
and when we do this , who knows ?
we might produce the next george washington carver .
but if we do n't change the composition of the soil , we will never do this .
now this is one of my plans . this is what i want to do .
i want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block .
i want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes .
now do n't get me wrong .
i 'm not talking about no free shit , because free is not sustainable .
the funny thing about sustainability , you have to sustain it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm talking about is putting people to work , and getting kids off the street , and letting them know the joy , the pride and the honor in growing your own food , opening farmer 's markets .
so what i want to do here , we gotta make this sexy .
so i want us all to become ecolutionary renegades , gangstas , gangsta gardeners .
we gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is .
if you ai n't a gardener , you ai n't gangsta .
get gangsta with your shovel , okay ?
and let that be your weapon of choice .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so basically , if you want to meet with me , you know , if you want to meet , do n't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit - where you talk about doing some shit .
if you want to meet with me , come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit .
peace . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- as an architect you design for the present , with an awareness of the past , for a future which is essentially unknown .
the green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day .
and i 'd like to share some experience over the last 40 years - we celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year - and to explore and to touch on some observations about the nature of sustainability .
how far you can anticipate , what follows from it , what are the threats , what are the possibilities , the challenges , the opportunities ?
i think that - i 've said in the past , many , many years ago , before anybody even invented the concept of a green agenda , that it was n't about fashion - it was about survival .
but what i never said , and what i 'm really going to make the point is , that really , green is cool .
i mean , all the projects which have , in some way , been inspired by that agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle , in a way celebrating the places and the spaces which determine the quality of life .
i rarely actually quote anything , so i 'm going to try and find a piece of paper if i can , -lsb- in -rsb- which somebody , at the end of last year , ventured the thought about what for that individual , as a kind of important observer , analyst , writer - a guy called thomas friedman , who wrote in the herald tribune , about 2006 .
he said , " i think the most important thing to happen in 2006 was that living and thinking green hit main street .
we reached a tipping point this year where living , acting , designing , investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens , entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic , capitalistic , geo-political and competitive thing they could do .
hence my motto : green is the new red , white and blue . "
and i asked myself , in a way , looking back , " when did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear ? "
and i think it was july 20 , 1969 , when , for the first time , man could look back at planet earth .
and , in a way , it was buckminster fuller who coined that phrase .
and before the kind of collapse of the communist system , i was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in space city and other places in russia .
and interestingly , as i think back , they were the first true environmentalists .
they were filled with a kind of pioneering passion , fired about the problems of the aral sea .
and at that period it was - in a way , a number of things were happening .
buckminster fuller was the kind of green guru - again , a word that had not been coined .
he was a design scientist , if you like , a poet , but he foresaw all the things that are happening now .
it 's another subject . it 's another conversation .
you can go back to his writings : it 's quite extraordinary .
it was at that time , with an awareness fired by bucky 's prophecies , his concerns as a citizen , as a kind of citizen of the planet , that influenced my thinking and what we were doing at that time .
and it 's a number of projects .
i select this one because it was 1973 , and it was a master plan for one of the canary islands .
and this probably coincided with the time when you had the planet earth 's sourcebook , and you had the hippie movement .
and there are some of those qualities in this drawing , which seeks to sum up the recommendations .
and all the components are there which are now in common parlance , in our vocabulary , you know , 30-odd years later : wind energy , recycling , biomass , solar cells .
and in parallel at that time , there was a very kind of exclusive design club .
people who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of dieter rams , and the objects that he would create for the company called braun .
this is going back the mid- ' 50s , ' 60s .
and despite bucky 's prophecies that everything would be miniaturized and technology would make an incredible style - access to comfort , to amenities - it was very , very difficult to imagine that everything that we see in this image , would be very , very stylishly packaged .
and that , and more besides , would be in the palm of your hand .
and i think that that digital revolution now is coming to the point where , as the virtual world , which brings so many people together here , finally connects with the physical world , there is the reality that that has become humanized , so that digital world has all the friendliness , all the immediacy , the orientation of the analog world .
probably summed up in a way by the stylish or alternative available here , as we generously had gifted at lunchtime , the -lsb- unclear -rsb- , which is a further kind of development - and again , inspired by the incredible sort of sensual feel .
a very , very beautiful object .
so , something which in -lsb- the -rsb- ' 50s , ' 60s was very exclusive has now become , interestingly , quite inclusive .
and the reference to the ipod as iconic , and in a way evocative of performance , delivery - quite interesting that -lsb- in -rsb- the beginning of the year 2007 , the financial times commented that the detroit companies envy the halo effect that toyota has gained from the prius as the hybrid , energy-conscious vehicle , which rivals the ipod as an iconic product .
and i think it 's very tempting to , in a way , seduce ourselves - as architects , or anybody involved with the design process - that the answer to our problems lies with buildings .
buildings are important , but they 're only a component of a much bigger picture .
in other words , as i might seek to demonstrate , if you could achieve the impossible , the equivalent of perpetual motion , you could design a carbon-free house , for example .
that would be the answer .
unfortunately , it 's not the answer .
it 's only the beginning of the problem .
you can not separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit .
for example , if , in that bucky-inspired phrase , we draw back and we look at planet earth , and we take a kind of typical , industrialized society , then the energy consumed would be split between the buildings , 44 percent , transport , 34 percent , and industry .
but again , that only shows part of the picture .
if you looked at the buildings together with the associated transport , in other words , the transport of people , which is 26 percent , then 70 percent of the energy consumption is influenced by the way that our cites and infrastructure work together .
so the problems of sustainability can not be separated from the nature of the cities , of which the buildings are a part .
for example , if you take , and you make a comparison between a recent kind of city , what i 'll call , simplistically , a north american city - and detroit is not a bad example , it is very car dependent .
the city goes out in annular rings , consuming more and more green space , and more and more roads , and more and more energy in the transport of people between the city center - which again , the city center , as it becomes deprived of the living and just becomes commercial , again becomes dead .
if you compared detroit with a city of a northern european example - and munich is not a bad example of that , with the greater dependence on walking and cycling - then a city which is really only twice as dense , is only using one-tenth of the energy .
in other words , you take these comparable examples and the energy leap is enormous .
so basically , if you wanted to generalize , you can demonstrate that as the density increases along the bottom there , that the energy consumed reduces dramatically .
of course you ca n't separate this out from issues like social diversity , mass transit , the ability to be able to walk a convenient distance , the quality of civic spaces .
but again , you can see detroit , in yellow at the top , extraordinary consumption , down below copenhagen .
and copenhagen , although it 's a dense city , is not dense compared with the really dense cities .
in the year 2000 , a rather interesting thing happened .
you had for the first time mega-cities , -lsb- of -rsb- 5 million or more , which were occurring in the developing world .
and now , out of typically 46 cities , 33 of those mega-cities are in the developing world .
so you have to ask yourself - the environmental impact of , for example , china or india .
if you take china , and you just take beijing , you can see on that traffic system , and the pollution associated with the consumption of energy as the cars expand at the price of the bicycles .
in other words , if you put onto the roads , as is currently happening , 1,000 new cars every day - statistically , it 's the biggest booming auto market in the world - and the half a billion bicycles serving one and a third billion people are reducing .
and that urbanization is extraordinary , accelerated pace .
so , if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities , which took 200 years , then that same process is happening in 20 years .
in other words , it is accelerating by a factor of 10 .
and quite interestingly , over something like a 60-year period , we 're seeing the doubling in life expectancy , over that period where the urbanization has trebled .
if i pull back from that global picture , and i look at the implication over a similar period of time in terms of the technology - which , as a tool , is a tool for designers , and i cite our own experience as a company , and i just illustrate that by a small selection of projects - then how do you measure that change of technology ?
how does it affect the design of buildings ?
and particularly , how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy , create less pollution and are more socially responsible ?
that story , in terms of buildings , started in the late ' 60s , early ' 70s .
the one example i take is a corporate headquarters for a company called willis and faber , in a small market town in the northeast of england , commuting distance with london .
and here , the first thing you can see is that this building , the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket , a kind of insulating garden , which is also about the celebration of public space .
in other words , for this community , they have this garden in the sky .
so the humanistic ideal is very , very strong in all this work , encapsulated perhaps by one of my early sketches here , where you can see greenery , you can see sunlight , you have a connection with nature .
and nature is part of the generator , the driver for this building .
and symbolically , the colors of the interior are green and yellow .
it has facilities like swimming pools , it has flextime , it has a social heart , a space , you have contact with nature .
now this was 1973 .
in 2001 , this building received an award .
and the award was about a celebration for a building which had been in use over a long period of time .
and the people who 'd created it came back : the project managers , the company chairmen then .
and they were saying , you know , " the architects , norman was always going on about designing for the future , and you know , it did n't seem to cost us any more .
so we humored him , we kept him happy . "
the image at the top , what it does n't - if you look at it in detail , really what it is saying is you can wire this building .
this building was wired for change .
so , in 1975 , the image there is of typewriters .
and when the photograph was taken , it 's word processors .
and what they were saying on this occasion was that our competitors had to build new buildings for the new technology .
we were fortunate , because in a way our building was future-proofed .
it anticipated change , even though those changes were not known .
round about that design period leading up to this building , i did a sketch , which we pulled out of the archive recently .
and i was saying , and i wrote , " but we do n't have the time , and we really do n't have the immediate expertise at a technical level . "
in other words , we did n't have the technology to do what would be really interesting on that building .
and that would be to create a kind of three-dimensional bubble - a really interesting overcoat that would naturally ventilate , would breathe and would seriously reduce the energy loads .
notwithstanding the fact that the building , as a green building , is very much a pioneering building .
and if i fast-forward in time , what is interesting is that the technology is now available and celebratory .
the library of the free university , which opened last year , is an example of that .
and again , the transition from one of the many thousands of sketches and computer images to the reality .
and a combination of devices here , the kind of heavy mass concrete of these book stacks , and the way in which that is enclosed by this skin , which enables the building to be ventilated , to consume dramatically less energy , and where it 's really working with the forces of nature .
and what is interesting is that this is hugely popular by the people who use it .
again , coming back to that thing about the lifestyle , and in a way , the ecological agenda is very much at one with the spirit .
so it 's not a kind of sacrifice , quite the reverse .
i think it 's a great - it 's a celebration .
and you can measure the performance , in terms of energy consumption , of that building against a typical library .
if i show another aspect of that technology then , in a completely different context - this apartment building in the alps in switzerland .
prefabricated from the most traditional of materials , but that material - because of the technology , the computing ability , the ability to prefabricate , make high-performance components out of timber - very much at the cutting edge .
and just to give a sort of glimpse of that technology , the ability to plot points in the sky and to transmit , to transfer that information now , directly into the factory .
so if you cross the border - just across the border - a small factory in germany , and here you can see the guy with his computer screen , and those points in space are communicated .
and on the left are the cutting machines , which then , in the factory , enable those individual pieces to be fabricated and plus or minus very , very few millimeters , to be slotted together on site .
and then interestingly , that building to then be clad in the oldest technology , which is the kind of hand-cut shingles .
one quarter of a million of them applied by hand as the final finish .
and again , the way in which that works as a building , for those of us who can enjoy the spaces , to live and visit there .
if i made the leap into these new technologies , then how did we - what happened before that ?
i mean , you know , what was life like before the mobile phone , the things that you take for granted ?
well , obviously the building still happened .
i mean , this is a glimpse of the interior of our hong kong bank of 1979 , which opened in 1985 , with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here .
and in the absence of computers , you have to physically model .
so for example , we would put models under an artificial sky .
for wind tunnels , we would literally put them in a wind tunnel and blast air , and the many kilometers of cable and so on .
and the turning point was probably , in our terms , when we had the first computer .
and that was at the time that we sought to redesign , reinvent the airport .
this is terminal four at heathrow , typical of any terminal - big , heavy roof , blocking out the sunlight , lots of machinery , big pipes , whirring machinery .
and stansted , the green alternative , which uses natural light , is a friendly place : you know where you are , you can relate to the outside .
and for a large part of its cycle , not needing electric light - electric light , which in turn creates more heat , which creates more cooling loads and so on .
and at that particular point in time , this was one of the few solitary computers .
and that 's a little image of the tree of stansted .
not going back very far in time , 1990 , that 's our office .
and if you looked very closely , you 'd see that people were drawing with pencils , and they were pushing , you know , big rulers and triangles .
it 's not that long ago , 17 years , and here we are now .
i mean , major transformation .
going back in time , there was a lady called valerie larkin , and in 1987 , she had all our information on one disk .
now , every week , we have the equivalent of 84 million disks , which record our archival information on past , current and future projects .
that reaches 21 kilometers into the sky .
this is the view you would get , if you looked down on that .
but meanwhile , as you know , wonderful protagonists like al gore are noting the inexorable rise in temperature , set in the context of that , interestingly , those buildings which are celebratory and very , very relevant to this place .
our reichstag project , which has a very familiar agenda , i 'm sure , as a public place where we sought to , in a way , through a process of advocacy , reinterpret the relationship between society and politicians , public space . and maybe its hidden agenda , an energy manifesto - something that would be free , completely free of fuel as we know it .
so it would be totally renewable .
and again , the humanistic sketch , the translation into the public space , but this very , very much a part of the ecology .
but here , not having to model it for real .
obviously the wind tunnel had a place , but the ability now with the computer to explore , to plan , to see how that would work in terms of the forces of nature : natural ventilation , to be able to model the chamber below , and to look at biomass .
a combination of biomass , aquifers , burning vegetable oil - a process that , quite interestingly , was developed in eastern germany , at the time of its dependence on the soviet bloc .
so really , retranslating that technology and developing something which was so clean , it was virtually pollution-free .
you can measure it again .
you can compare how that building , in terms of its emission in tons of carbon dioxide per year - at the time that we took that project , over 7,000 tons - what it would have been with natural gas and finally , with the vegetable oil , 450 tons .
i mean , a 94 percent reduction - virtually clean .
we can see the same processes at work in terms of the commerce bank - its dependence on natural ventilation , the way that you can model those gardens , the way they spiral around .
but again , very much about the lifestyle , the quality - something that would be more enjoyable as a place to work .
and again , we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption .
there is an evolution here between the projects , and swiss re again develops that a little bit further - the project in the city in london .
and this sequence shows the buildup of that model .
but what it shows first , which i think is quite interesting , is that here you see the circle , you see the public space around it .
what are the other ways of putting the same amount of space on the site ?
if , for example , you seek to do a building which goes right to the edge of the pavement , it 's the same amount of space .
and finally , you profile this , you cut grooves into it .
the grooves become the kind of green lungs which give views , which give light , ventilation , make the building fresher .
and you enclose that with something that also is central to its appearance , which is a mesh of triangulated structures - again , in a long connection evocative of some of those works of buckminster fuller , and the way in which triangulation can increase performance and also give that building its sense of identity .
and here , if we look at a detail of the way that the building opens up and breathes into those atria , the way in which now , with a computer , we can model the forces , we can see the high pressure , the low pressure , the way in which the building behaves rather like an aircraft wing .
so it also has the ability , all the time , regardless of the direction of the wind , to be able to make the building fresh and efficient .
and unlike conventional buildings , the top of the building is celebratory .
it 's a viewing place for people , not machinery .
and the base of the building is again about public space .
comparing it with a typical building , what happens if we seek to use such design strategies in terms of really large-scale thinking ?
and i 'm just going to give two images out of a kind of company research project .
it 's been well known that the dead sea is dying .
the level is dropping , rather like the aral sea .
and the dead sea is obviously much lower than the oceans and seas around it .
so there has been a project which rescues the dead sea by creating a pipeline , a pipe , sometimes above the surface , sometimes buried , that will redress that , and will feed from the gulf of aqaba into the dead sea .
and our translation of that , using a lot of the thinking built up over the 40 years , is to say , what if that , instead of being just a pipe , what if it is a lifeline ?
what if it is the equivalent , depending on where you are , of the grand canal , in terms of tourists , habitation , desalination , agriculture ?
in other words , water is the lifeblood .
and if you just go back to the previous image , and you look at this area of volatility and hostility , that a unifying design idea as a humanitarian gesture could have the affect of bringing all those warring factions together in a united cause , in terms of something that would be genuinely green and productive in the widest sense .
infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication .
and whether that communication is the virtual world or it is the physical world , then it 's absolutely central to society .
and how do we make more legible in this growing world , especially in some of the places that i 'm talking about - china , for example , which in the next ten years will create 400 new airports .
now what form do they take ?
how do you make them more friendly at that scale ?
hong kong i refer to as a kind of analog experience in a digital age , because you always have a point of reference .
so what happens when we take that and you expand that further into the chinese society ?
and what is interesting is that that produces in a way perhaps the ultimate mega-building .
it is physically the largest project on the planet at the moment .
250 - excuse me , 50,000 people working 24 hours , seven days .
larger by 17 percent than every terminal put together at heathrow - built - plus the new , un-built terminal five .
and the challenge here is a building that will be green , that is compact despite its size and is about the human experience of travel , is about friendly , is coming back to that starting point , is very , very much about the lifestyle .
and perhaps these , in the end , as celebratory spaces .
as hubert was talking over lunch , as we sort of engaged in conversation , talked about this , talked about cities .
hubert was saying , absolutely correctly , " these are the new cathedrals . "
and in a way , one aspect of this conversation was triggered on new year 's eve , when i was talking about the olympic agenda in china in terms of its green ambitions and aspirations .
and i was voicing the thought that - it just crossed my mind that new year 's eve , a sort of symbolic turning point as we move from 2006 to 2007 - that maybe , you know , the future was the most powerful , innovative sort of nation .
the way in which somebody like kennedy inspirationally could say , " we put a man on the moon . "
you know , who is going to say that we cracked this thing of the dependence on fossil fuels , with all that being held to ransom by rogue regimes , and so on .
and that 's a concerted platform .
it 's more than one device , you know , it 's renewable .
and i voiced the thought that maybe at the turn of the year , i thought that the inspiration was more likely to come from those other , larger countries out there - the chinas , the indias , the asian-pacific tigers .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to address the issue of compassion .
compassion has many faces .
some of them are fierce ; some of them are wrathful ; some of them are tender ; some of them are wise .
a line that the dalai lama once said , he said , " love and compassion are necessities .
they are not luxuries .
without them , humanity can not survive . "
and i would suggest , it is not only humanity that wo n't survive , but it is all species on the planet , as we 've heard today .
it is the big cats , and it 's the plankton .
two weeks ago , i was in bangalore in india .
i was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of bangalore .
and early in the morning , i went into the ward .
in that hospice , there were 31 men and women who were actively dying .
and i walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly , fragile , obviously in the latter phase of active dying .
i looked into her face .
i looked into the face of her son sitting next to her , and his face was just riven with grief and confusion .
and i remembered a line from the mahabharata , the great indian epic : " what is the most wondrous thing in the world , yudhisthira ? "
and yudhisthira replied , " the most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we do n't realize it can happen to us . "
i looked up .
tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around bangalore .
i looked into the face of one of these women , and i saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present .
i watched her hands as she bathed an old man .
my gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person .
and it reminded me of something that i had just been present for .
every year or so , i have the privilege of taking clinicians into the himalayas and the tibetan plateau .
and we run clinics in these very remote regions where there 's no medical care whatsoever .
and on the first day at simikot in humla , far west of nepal , the most impoverished region of nepal , an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags .
and he walked in , and somebody said something to him , we realized he was deaf , and we looked into the rags , and there was this pair of eyes .
the rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned .
again , the eyes and hands of avalokiteshvara .
it was the young women , the health aids , who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds .
i know those hands and eyes ; they touched me as well .
they touched me at that time .
they have touched me throughout my 68 years .
they touched me when i was four and i lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed .
and my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me .
and that woman did not have sentimental compassion .
she had phenomenal strength .
and it was really her strength , i believe , that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life .
so we can ask : what is compassion comprised of ?
and there are various facets .
and there 's referential and non-referential compassion .
but first , compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering .
it is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that i 'm not separate from this suffering .
but that is not enough , because compassion , which activates the motor cortex , means that we aspire , we actually aspire to transform suffering .
and if we 're so blessed , we engage in activities that transform suffering .
but compassion has another component , and that component is really essential .
that component is that we can not be attached to outcome .
now i worked with dying people for over 40 years .
i had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security -lsb- prison -rsb- for six years .
and i realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience , from working with dying people and training caregivers , that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe .
and when i worked in the prison system , it was so clear to me , this : that many of us in this room , and almost all of the men that i worked with on death row , the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered .
that compassion is actually an inherent human quality .
it is there within every human being .
but the conditions for compassion to be activated , to be aroused , are particular conditions .
i had that condition , to a certain extent , from my own childhood illness .
eve ensler , whom you 'll hear later , has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through .
and what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies , and those enemies are things like pity , moral outrage , fear .
and you know , we have a society , a world , that is paralyzed by fear .
and in that paralysis , of course , our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed .
the very word terror is global .
the very feeling of terror is global .
so our work , in a certain way , is to address this imago , this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities .
for example : a person who is cultivating compassion , when they are in the presence of suffering , they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do .
however , they return to baseline a lot sooner .
this is called resilience .
many of us think that compassion drains us , but i promise you it is something that truly enlivens us .
another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what 's called neural integration .
it hooks up all parts of the brain .
another , which has been discovered by various researchers at emory and at davis and so on , is that compassion enhances our immune system .
hey , we live in a very noxious world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons , of the toxins of our world .
but compassion , the generation of compassion , actually mobilizes our immunity .
you know , if compassion is so good for us , i have a question .
why do n't we train our children in compassion ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- if compassion is so good for us , why do n't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they 're supposed to do , which is to really transform suffering ?
and if compassion is so good for us , why do n't we vote on compassion ?
why do n't we vote for people in our government based on compassion , so that we can have a more caring world ?
in buddhism , we say , " it takes a strong back and a soft front . "
it takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions .
and that is the mental quality of equanimity .
but it also takes a soft front - the capacity to really be open to the world as it is , to have an undefended heart .
and the archetype of this in buddhism is avalokiteshvara , kuan-yin .
it 's a female archetype : she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world .
she stands with 10,000 arms , and in every hand , there is an instrument of liberation , and in the palm of every hand , there are eyes , and these are the eyes of wisdom .
i say that , for thousands of years , women have lived , exemplified , met in intimacy , the archetype of avalokitesvara , of kuan-yin , she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world .
women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered , unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is .
they have infused societies with kindness , and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half .
and they have actualized compassion through direct action .
jody williams called it : it 's good to meditate .
i 'm sorry , you 've got to do a little bit of that , jody .
step back , give your mother a break , okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the other side of the equation is you 've got to come out of your cave .
you have to come into the world like asanga did , who was looking to realize maitreya buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave .
he said , " i 'm out of here . "
he 's going down the path .
he sees something in the path .
he looks , it 's a dog , he drops to his knees .
he sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg .
the wound is just filled with maggots .
he puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots , so as not to harm them .
and at that moment , the dog transformed into the buddha of love and kindness .
i believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men - with their fathers , with their sons , with their brothers , with the plumbers , the road builders , the caregivers , the doctors , the lawyers , with our president , and with all beings .
the women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire .
may we actualize that capacity for women everywhere .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do two things : i design mobile computers and i study brains .
and today 's talk is about brains and , yay , somewhere i have a brain fan out there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm going to , if i can have my first slide up here , and you 'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations .
so what i 'm going to talk about is why we do n't have a good brain theory , why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it .
and i 'll try to do all that in 20 minutes . i have two affiliations .
most of you know me from my palm and handspring days , but i also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the redwood neuroscience institute in menlo park , and we study theoretical neuroscience , and we study how the neocortex works .
i 'm going to talk all about that .
i have one slide on my other life , the computer life , and that 's the slide here .
these are some of the products i 've worked on over the last 20 years , starting back from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on , and ending up most recently with the treo , and we 're continuing to do this .
and i 've done this because i really believe that mobile computing is the future of personal computing , and i 'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things .
but this was , i have to admit , all an accident .
i really did n't want to do any of these products and very early in my career i decided i was not going to be in the computer industry .
and before i tell you about that , i just have to tell you this one little picture of graffiti there i picked off the web the other day .
i was looking for a picture of graffiti , little text input language , and i found the website dedicated to teachers who want to make these , you know , the script writing things across the top of their blackboard , and they had added graffiti to it , and i 'm sorry about that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what happened was , when i was young and got out of engineering school at cornell in ' 79 , i decided - i went to work for intel and i was in the computer industry - and three months into that , i fell in love with something else , and i said , " i made the wrong career choice here , " and i fell in love with brains .
this is not a real brain . this is a picture of one , a line drawing .
but i do n't remember exactly how it happened , but i have one recollection , which was pretty strong in my mind .
in september 1979 , scientific american came out with a single topic issue about the brain . and it was quite good .
it was one of the best issues ever . and they talked about the neuron and development and disease and vision and all the things you might want to know about brains . it was really quite impressive .
and one might have the impression that we really knew a lot about brains .
but the last article in that issue was written by francis crick of dna fame .
today is , i think , the 50th anniversary of the discovery of dna .
and he wrote a story basically saying , well , this is all well and good , but you know what , we do n't know diddley squat about brains and no one has a clue how these things work , so do n't believe what anyone tells you .
this is a quote from that article . he said , " what is conspicuously lacking , " he 's a very proper british gentleman so , " what is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches . "
i thought the word framework was great .
he did n't say we did n't even have a theory . he says , we do n't even know how to begin to think about it - we do n't even have a framework .
we are in the pre-paradigm days , if you want to use thomas kuhn .
and so i fell in love with this , and said look , we have all this knowledge about brains . how hard can it be ?
and this is something we can work on my lifetime . i felt i could make a difference , and so i tried to get out of the computer business , into the brain business .
first , i went to mit , the ai lab was there , and i said , well , i want to build intelligent machines , too , but the way i want to do it is to study how brains work first .
and they said , oh , you do n't need to do that .
we 're just going to program computers ; that 's all we need to do .
and i said , no , you really ought to study brains . they said , oh , you know , you 're wrong . and i said , no , you 're wrong , and i did n't get in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i was a little disappointed - pretty young - but i went back again a few years later and this time was in california , and i went to berkeley .
and i said , i 'll go in from the biological side .
so i got in - in the ph.d. program in biophysics , and i was , all right , i 'm studying brains now , and i said , well , i want to study theory .
and they said , oh no , you ca n't study theory about brains .
that 's not something you do . you ca n't get funded for that .
and as a graduate student , you ca n't do that . so i said , oh my gosh .
i was very depressed . i said , but i can make a difference in this field .
so what i did is i went back in the computer industry and said , well , i 'll have to work here for a while , do something .
that 's when i designed all those computer products .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , i want to do this for four years , make some money , like i was having a family , and i would mature a bit , and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit .
well , it took longer than four years . it 's been about 16 years .
but i 'm doing it now , and i 'm going to tell you about it .
so why should we have a good brain theory ?
well , there 's lots of reasons people do science .
one is - the most basic one is - people like to know things .
we 're curious , and we just go out and get knowledge , you know ?
why do we study ants ? well , it 's interesting .
maybe we 'll learn something really useful about it , but it 's interesting and fascinating .
but sometimes , a science has some other attributes which makes it really , really interesting .
sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves , it 'll tell us who we are .
rarely , you know : evolution did this and copernicus did this , where we have a new understanding of who we are .
and after all , we are our brains . my brain is talking to your brain .
our bodies are hanging along for the ride , but my brain is talking to your brain .
and if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive , we really understand what brains are .
another thing is sometimes science leads to really big societal benefits and technologies , or businesses , or whatever , that come out of it . and this is one , too , because when we understand how brains work , we 're going to be able to build intelligent machines , and i think that 's actually a good thing on the whole , and it 's going to have tremendous benefits to society , just like a fundamental technology .
so why do n't we have a good theory of brains ?
and people have been working on it for 100 years .
well , let 's first take a look at what normal science looks like .
this is normal science .
normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists .
and so the theorist guys say , well , i think this is what 's going on , and the experimentalist says , no , you 're wrong .
and it goes back and forth , you know ?
this works in physics . this works in geology . but if this is normal science , what does neuroscience look like ? this is what neuroscience looks like .
we have this mountain of data , which is anatomy , physiology and behavior .
you ca n't imagine how much detail we know about brains .
there were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year , and every one of them is doing research in brains .
a lot of data . but there 's no theory . there 's a little , wimpy box on top there .
and theory has not played a role in any sort of grand way in the neurosciences .
and it 's a real shame . now why has this come about ?
if you ask neuroscientists , why is this the state of affair , they 'll first of all admit it . but if you ask them , they 'll say , well , there 's various reasons we do n't have a good brain theory .
some people say , well , we do n't still have enough data , we need to get more information , there 's all these things we do n't know .
well , i just told you there 's so much data coming out your ears .
we have so much information , we do n't even know how to begin to organize it .
what good is more going to do ?
maybe we 'll be lucky and discover some magic thing , but i do n't think so .
this is actually a symptom of the fact that we just do n't have a theory .
we do n't need more data - we need a good theory about it .
another one is sometimes people say , well , brains are so complex , it 'll take another 50 years .
i even think chris said something like this yesterday .
i 'm not sure what you said , chris , but something like , well , it 's one of the most complicated things in the universe . that 's not true .
you 're more complicated than your brain . you 've got a brain .
and it 's also , although the brain looks very complicated , things look complicated until you understand them .
that 's always been the case . and so all we can say , well , my neocortex , which is the part of the brain i 'm interested in , has 30 billion cells .
but , you know what ? it 's very , very regular .
in fact , it looks like it 's the same thing repeated over and over and over again .
it 's not as complex as it looks . that 's not the issue .
some people say , brains ca n't understand brains .
very zen-like . whoo . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , it sounds good , but why ? i mean , what 's the point ?
it 's just a bunch of cells . you understand your liver .
it 's got a lot of cells in it too , right ?
so , you know , i do n't think there 's anything to that .
and finally , some people say , well , you know , i do n't feel like a bunch of cells , you know . i 'm conscious .
i 've got this experience , i 'm in the world , you know .
i ca n't be just a bunch of cells . well , you know , people used to believe there was a life force to be living , and we now know that 's really not true at all .
and there 's really no evidence that says - well , other than people just have disbelief that cells can do what they do .
and so , if some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism , some really smart people , too , but we can reject all that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , i 'm going to tell you there 's something else , and it 's really fundamental , and this is what it is : there 's another reason why we do n't have a good brain theory , and it 's because we have an intuitive , strongly-held , but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer .
there 's something we believe that just , it 's obvious , but it 's wrong .
now , there 's a history of this in science and before i tell you what it is , i 'm going to tell you a bit about the history of it in science .
you look at some other scientific revolutions , and this case , i 'm talking about the solar system , that 's copernicus , darwin 's evolution , and tectonic plates , that 's wegener .
they all have a lot in common with brain science .
first of all , they had a lot of unexplained data . a lot of it .
but it got more manageable once they had a theory .
the best minds were stumped - really , really smart people .
we 're not smarter now than they were then .
it just turns out it 's really hard to think of things , but once you 've thought of them , it 's kind of easy to understand it .
my daughters understood these three theories in their basic framework by the time they were in kindergarten .
and now it 's not that hard , you know , here 's the apple , here 's the orange , you know , the earth goes around , that kind of stuff .
finally , another thing is the answer was there all along , but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing , and that 's the thing .
it was an intuitive , strong-held belief that was wrong .
in the case of the solar system , the idea that the earth is spinning and the surface of the earth is going like a thousand miles an hour , and the earth is going through the solar system about a million miles an hour .
this is lunacy . we all know the earth is n't moving .
do you feel like you 're moving a thousand miles an hour ?
of course not . you know , and someone who said , well , it was spinning around in space and it 's so huge , they would lock you up , and that 's what they did back then .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it was intuitive and obvious . now what about evolution ?
evolution 's the same thing . we taught our kids , well , the bible says , you know , god created all these species , cats are cats , dogs are dogs , people are people , plants are plants , they do n't change .
noah put them on the ark in that order , blah , blah , blah . and , you know , the fact is , if you believe in evolution , we all have a common ancestor , and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby .
this is what evolution tells us . and , it 's true . it 's kind of unbelievable .
and the same thing about tectonic plates , you know ?
all the mountains and the continents are kind of floating around on top of the earth , you know ? it 's like , it does n't make any sense .
so what is the intuitive , but incorrect assumption , that 's kept us from understanding brains ?
now i 'm going to tell it to you , and it 's going to seem obvious that that is correct , and that 's the point , right ? then i 'm going to have to make an argument why you 're incorrect about the other assumption .
the intuitive but obvious thing is that somehow intelligence is defined by behavior , that we are intelligent because of the way that we do things and the way we behave intelligently , and i 'm going to tell you that 's wrong .
what it is is intelligence is defined by prediction .
and i 'm going to work you through this in a few slides here , give you an example of what this means . here 's a system .
engineers like to look at systems like this . scientists like to look at systems like this .
they say , well , we have a thing in a box , and we have its inputs and its outputs .
the ai people said , well , the thing in the box is a programmable computer because that 's equivalent to a brain , and we 'll feed it some inputs and we 'll get it to do something , have some behavior .
and alan turing defined the turing test , which is essentially saying , we 'll know if something 's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human .
a behavioral metric of what intelligence is , and this has stuck in our minds for a long period of time .
reality though , i call it real intelligence .
real intelligence is built on something else .
we experience the world through a sequence of patterns , and we store them , and we recall them . and when we recall them , we match them up against reality , and we 're making predictions all the time .
it 's an eternal metric . there 's an eternal metric about us sort of saying , do we understand the world ? am i making predictions ? and so on .
you 're all being intelligent right now , but you 're not doing anything .
maybe you 're scratching yourself , or picking your nose , i do n't know , but you 're not doing anything right now , but you 're being intelligent ; you 're understanding what i 'm saying .
because you 're intelligent and you speak english , you know what word is at the end of this - -lrb- silence -rrb- sentence .
the word came into you , and you 're making these predictions all the time .
and then , what i 'm saying is , is that the eternal prediction is the output in the neocortex .
and that somehow , prediction leads to intelligent behavior .
and here 's how that happens . let 's start with a non-intelligent brain .
well i 'll argue a non-intelligent brain , we got hold of an old brain , and we 're going to say it 's like a non-mammal , like a reptile , so i 'll say , an alligator ; we have an alligator .
and the alligator has some very sophisticated senses .
it 's got good eyes and ears and touch senses and so on , a mouth and a nose . it has very complex behavior .
it can run and hide . it has fears and emotions . it can eat you , you know .
it can attack . it can do all kinds of stuff .
but we do n't consider the alligator very intelligent , not like in a human sort of way .
but it has all this complex behavior already .
now , in evolution , what happened ?
first thing that happened in evolution with mammals , we started to develop a thing called the neocortex .
and i 'm going to represent the neocortex here , by this box that 's sticking on top of the old brain .
neocortex means new layer . it is a new layer on top of your brain .
if you do n't know it , it 's the wrinkly thing on the top of your head that , it 's got wrinkly because it got shoved in there and does n't fit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , really , that 's what it is . it 's about the size of a table napkin .
and it does n't fit , so it gets all wrinkly . now look at how i 've drawn this here .
the old brain is still there . you still have that alligator brain .
you do . it 's your emotional brain .
it 's all those things , and all those gut reactions you have .
and on top of it , we have this memory system called the neocortex .
and the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain .
and so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain , it also goes up into the neocortex . and the neocortex is just memorizing .
it 's sitting there saying , ah , i 'm going to memorize all the things that are going on : where i 've been , people i 've seen , things i 've heard , and so on .
and in the future , when it sees something similar to that again , so in a similar environment , or the exact same environment , it 'll play it back . it 'll start playing it back .
oh , i 've been here before . and when you 've been here before , this happened next . it allows you to predict the future .
it allows you to , literally it feeds back the signals into your brain ; they 'll let you see what 's going to happen next , will let you hear the word " sentence " before i said it .
and it 's this feeding back into the old brain that 'll allow you to make very more intelligent decisions .
this is the most important slide of my talk , so i 'll dwell on it a little bit .
and so , all the time you say , oh , i can predict the things .
and if you 're a rat and you go through a maze , and then you learn the maze , the next time you 're in a maze , you have the same behavior , but all of a sudden , you 're smarter because you say , oh , i recognize this maze , i know which way to go , i 've been here before , i can envision the future . and that 's what it 's doing .
in humans - by the way , this is true for all mammals ; it 's true for other mammals - and in humans , it got a lot worse .
in humans , we actually developed the front part of the neocortex called the anterior part of the neocortex . and nature did a little trick .
it copied the posterior part , the back part , which is sensory , and put it in the front part .
and humans uniquely have the same mechanism on the front , but we use it for motor control .
so we are now able to make very sophisticated motor planning , things like that .
i do n't have time to get into all this , but if you want to understand how a brain works , you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works , how it is we store patterns and make predictions .
so let me give you a few examples of predictions .
i already said the word " sentence . " in music , if you 've heard a song before , if you heard jill sing those songs before , when she sings them , the next note pops into your head already - you anticipate it as you 're going . if it was an album of music , the end of one album , the next song pops into your head .
and these things happen all the time . you 're making these predictions .
i have this thing called the altered door thought experiment .
and the altered door thought experiment says , you have a door at home , and when you 're here , i 'm changing it , i 've got a guy back at your house right now , moving the door around , and they 're going to take your doorknob and move it over two inches .
and when you go home tonight , you 're going to put your hand out there , and you 're going to reach for the doorknob and you 're going to notice it 's in the wrong spot , and you 'll go , whoa , something happened .
it may take a second to figure out what it was , but something happened .
now i could change your doorknob in other ways .
i can make it larger or smaller , i can change its brass to silver , i could make it a lever . i can change your door , put colors on ; i can put windows in . i can change a thousand things about your door , and in the two seconds you take to open your door , you 're going to notice that something has changed .
now , the engineering approach to this , the ai approach to this , is to build a door database . it has all the door attributes .
and as you go up to the door , you know , let 's check them off one at time .
door , door , door , you know , color , you know what i 'm saying .
we do n't do that . your brain does n't do that .
what your brain is doing is making constant predictions all the time about what is going to happen in your environment .
as i put my hand on this table , i expect to feel it stop .
when i walk , every step , if i missed it by an eighth of an inch , i 'll know something has changed .
you 're constantly making predictions about your environment .
i 'll talk about vision here briefly . this is a picture of a woman .
and when you look at people , your eyes are caught over at two to three times a second .
you 're not aware of this , but your eyes are always moving .
and so when you look at someone 's face , you 'd typically go from eye to eye to eye to nose to mouth .
now , when your eye moves from eye to eye , if there was something else there like , a nose , you 'd see a nose where an eye is supposed to be , and you 'd go , oh shit , you know - -lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's something wrong about this person .
and that 's because you 're making a prediction .
it 's not like you just look over there and say , what am i seeing now ?
a nose , that 's okay . no , you have an expectation of what you 're going to see .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- every single moment . and finally , let 's think about how we test intelligence .
we test it by prediction . what is the next word in this , you know ?
this is to this as this is to this . what is the next number in this sentence ?
here 's three visions of an object .
what 's the fourth one ? that 's how we test it . it 's all about prediction .
so what is the recipe for brain theory ?
first of all , we have to have the right framework .
and the framework is a memory framework , not a computation or behavior framework . it 's a memory framework .
how do you store and recall these sequences or patterns ? it 's spatio-temporal patterns .
then , if in that framework , you take a bunch of theoreticians .
now biologists generally are not good theoreticians .
it 's not always true , but in general , there 's not a good history of theory in biology .
so i found the best people to work with are physicists , engineers and mathematicians , who tend to think algorithmically .
then they have to learn the anatomy , and they 've got to learn the physiology .
you have to make these theories very realistic in anatomical terms .
anyone who gets up and tells you their theory about how the brain works and does n't tell you exactly how it 's working in the brain and how the wiring works in the brain , it is not a theory .
and that 's what we 're doing at the redwood neuroscience institute .
i would love to have more time to tell you we 're making fantastic progress in this thing , and i expect to be back up on this stage , maybe this will be some other time in the not too distant future and tell you about it .
i 'm really , really excited . this is not going to take 50 years at all .
so what will brain theory look like ?
first of all , it 's going to be a theory about memory .
not like computer memory . it 's not at all like computer memory .
it 's very , very different . and it 's a memory of these very high-dimensional patterns , like the things that come from your eyes .
it 's also memory of sequences .
you can not learn or recall anything outside of a sequence .
a song must be heard in sequence over time , and you must play it back in sequence over time .
and these sequences are auto-associatively recalled , so if i see something , i hear something , it reminds me of it , and then it plays back automatically .
it 's an automatic playback . and prediction of future inputs is the desired output .
and as i said , the theory must be biologically accurate , it must be testable , and you must be able to build it .
if you do n't build it , you do n't understand it . so , one more slide here .
what is this going to result in ? are we going to really build intelligent machines ?
absolutely . and it 's going to be different than people think .
no doubt that it 's going to happen , in my mind .
first of all , it 's going to be built up , we 're going to build the stuff out of silicon .
the same techniques we use for building silicon computer memories , we can use for here .
but they 're very different types of memories .
and we 're going to attach these memories to sensors , and the sensors will experience real-live , real-world data , and these things are going to learn about their environment .
now it 's very unlikely the first things you 're going to see are like robots .
not that robots are n't useful and people can build robots .
but the robotics part is the hardest part . that 's the old brain . that 's really hard .
the new brain is actually kind of easier than the old brain .
so the first thing we 're going to do are the things that do n't require a lot of robotics .
so you 're not going to see c-3po .
you 're going to more see things like , you know , intelligent cars that really understand what traffic is and what driving is and have learned that certain types of cars with the blinkers on for half a minute probably are n't going to turn , things like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we can also do intelligent security systems .
anywhere where we 're basically using our brain , but not doing a lot of mechanics .
those are the things that are going to happen first .
but ultimately , the world 's the limit here .
i do n't know how this is going to turn out .
i know a lot of people who invented the microprocessor and if you talk to them , they knew what they were doing was really significant , but they did n't really know what was going to happen .
they could n't anticipate cell phones and the internet and all this kind of stuff .
they just knew like , hey , they were going to build calculators and traffic light controllers . but it 's going to be big .
in the same way , this is like brain science and these memories are going to be a very fundamental technology , and it 's going to lead to very unbelievable changes in the next 100 years .
and i 'm most excited about how we 're going to use them in science .
so i think that 's all my time , i 'm over it , and i 'm going to end my talk right there .
i 'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006 .
i was a surgical resident at the johns hopkins hospital , taking emergency call .
i got paged by the e.r. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot .
i can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as i pulled the curtain back to see her .
and everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital .
that was n't being asked .
the question that was being asked of me was a different one , which was , did she also need an amputation ?
now , looking back on that night , i 'd love so desperately to believe that i treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion i 'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the e.r. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer .
in her case , i knew there was nothing i could do that was actually going to save her life .
the cancer was too advanced .
but i was committed to making sure that i could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable . i brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee .
i brought some for her parents .
but more importantly , see , i passed no judgment on her , because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself .
so why was it that , just a few nights later , as i stood in that same e.r. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation , why did i hold her in such bitter contempt ?
you see , unlike the woman the night before , this woman had type 2 diabetes .
she was fat .
and we all know that 's from eating too much and not exercising enough , right ?
i mean , how hard can it be ?
as i looked down at her in the bed , i thought to myself , if you just tried caring even a little bit , you would n't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you 've never met about to amputate your foot .
why did i feel justified in judging her ?
i 'd like to say i do n't know .
but i actually do .
you see , in the hubris of my youth , i thought i had her all figured out .
she ate too much . she got unlucky .
she got diabetes . case closed .
ironically , at that time in my life , i was also doing cancer research , immune-based therapies for melanoma , to be specific , and in that world i was actually taught to question everything , to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards .
yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills americans eight times more frequently than melanoma , i never once questioned the conventional wisdom .
i actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science .
three years later , i found out how wrong i was .
but this time , i was the patient .
despite exercising three or four hours every single day , and following the food pyramid to the letter , i 'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome .
some of you may have heard of this .
i had become insulin-resistant .
you can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat , whether we burn it or store it .
this is called fuel partitioning in the lingo .
now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life .
and insulin resistance , as its name suggests , is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job .
once you 're insulin-resistant , you 're on your way to getting diabetes , which is what happens when your pancreas ca n't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin .
now your blood sugar levels start to rise , and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease , cancer , even alzheimer 's disease , and amputations , just like that woman a few years earlier .
with that scare , i got busy changing my diet radically , adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking .
i did this and lost 40 pounds , weirdly while exercising less .
i , as you can see , i guess i 'm not overweight anymore .
more importantly , i do n't have insulin resistance .
but most important , i was left with these three burning questions that would n't go away : how did this happen to me if i was supposedly doing everything right ?
if the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me , was it possible it was failing someone else ?
and underlying these questions , i became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance .
now , most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance .
logically , then , if you want to treat insulin resistance , you get people to lose weight , right ?
you treat the obesity .
but what if we have it backwards ?
what if obesity is n't the cause of insulin resistance at all ?
in fact , what if it 's a symptom of a much deeper problem , the tip of a proverbial iceberg ?
i know it sounds crazy because we 're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic , but hear me out .
what if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell ?
i 'm not suggesting that obesity is benign , but what i am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils .
you can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel , as i alluded to a moment ago , taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately .
when we become insulin-resistant , the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state .
so now , when insulin says to a cell , i want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe , the cell , in effect , says , " no thanks , i 'd actually rather store this energy . "
and because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells , it 's probably the safest place to store it .
so for many of us , about 75 million americans , the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat , not the reverse , getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat .
this is a really subtle distinction , but the implication could be profound .
consider the following analogy : think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table .
sure , the bruise hurts like hell , and you almost certainly do n't like the discolored look , but we all know the bruise per se is not the problem .
in fact , it 's the opposite . it 's a healthy response to the trauma , all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body .
now , imagine we thought bruises were the problem , and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises : masking creams , painkillers , you name it , all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables .
how much better would we be if we treated the cause - telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room - rather than the effect ?
getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world .
getting it wrong , and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins .
cause and effect .
so what i 'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance .
maybe we should be asking ourselves , is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity , at least in most people ?
what if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening , an underlying epidemic , the one we ought to be worried about ?
let 's look at some suggestive facts .
we know that 30 million obese americans in the united states do n't have insulin resistance .
and by the way , they do n't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people .
conversely , we know that six million lean people in the united states are insulin-resistant , and by the way , they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases i mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts .
now i do n't know why , but it might be because , in their case , their cells have n't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy .
so if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance , and you can be lean and have it , this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what 's going on .
so what if we 're fighting the wrong war , fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance ?
even worse , what if blaming the obese means we 're blaming the victims ?
what if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong ?
personally , i ca n't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore , let alone the luxury of certainty .
i have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this , but i 'm wide open to others .
now , my hypothesis , because everybody always asks me , is this .
if you ask yourself , what 's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant , the answer probably is n't too much food .
it 's more likely too much glucose : blood sugar .
now , we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run , and there 's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly .
so if you put these physiological processes to work , i 'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains , sugars and starches that 's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes , but through insulin resistance , you see , and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising .
when i lost my 40 pounds a few years ago , i did it simply by restricting those things , which admittedly suggests i have a bias based on my personal experience .
but that does n't mean my bias is wrong , and most important , all of this can be tested scientifically .
but step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity , diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested .
i 'm betting my career on this .
today , i devote all of my time to working on this problem , and i 'll go wherever the science takes me .
i 've decided that what i ca n't and wo n't do anymore is pretend i have the answers when i do n't .
i 've been humbled enough by all i do n't know .
for the past year , i 've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country , and the best part is , just like abraham lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals , we 've done the same thing .
we 've recruited a team of scientific rivals , the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what 's at the heart of this epidemic .
some think it 's too many calories consumed .
others think it 's too much dietary fat .
others think it 's too many refined grains and starches .
but this team of multi-disciplinary , highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things .
first , this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer .
and two , if we 're willing to be wrong , if we 're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer , we can solve this problem .
i know it 's tempting to want an answer right now , some form of action or policy , some dietary prescription - eat this , not that - but if we want to get it right , we 're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription .
briefly , to address this , our research program is focused around three meta-themes , or questions .
first , how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism , hormones and enzymes , and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms ?
second , based on these insights , can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that 's safe and practical to implement ?
and finally , once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet , how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception ?
just because you know what to do does n't mean you 're always going to do it .
sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier , and believe it or not , that can be studied scientifically .
i do n't know how this journey is going to end , but this much seems clear to me , at least : we ca n't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like i did .
most of them actually want to do the right thing , but they have to know what that is , and it 's got to work .
i dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance , because as medical professionals , we 've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals : open minds , the courage to throw out yesterday 's ideas when they do n't appear to be working , and the understanding that scientific truth is n't final , but constantly evolving .
staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science .
if obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness , what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy ?
sometimes i think back to that night in the e.r.
seven years ago .
i wish i could speak with that woman again .
i 'd like to tell her how sorry i am .
i 'd say , as a doctor , i delivered the best clinical care i could , but as a human being , i let you down .
you did n't need my judgment and my contempt .
you needed my empathy and compassion , and above all else , you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you did n't let the system down .
maybe the system , of which i was a part , was letting you down .
if you 're watching this now , i hope you can forgive me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- good afternoon .
as you 're all aware , we face difficult economic times .
i come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden .
this idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at mit .
he was struggling to explain something to me : a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter .
now he confused me from the very start , because light does n't cool things down .
it makes it hotter . it 's happening right now .
the reason that you can see me standing here is because this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons , and they 're moving randomly through the space , near the speed of light .
all of them are different colors , they 're rippling with different frequencies , and they 're bouncing off every surface , including me , and some of those are flying directly into your eyes , and that 's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here .
now a laser is different .
it also uses photons , but they 're all synchronized , and if you focus them into a beam , what you have is an incredibly useful tool .
the control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye , you can use it to store massive amounts of data , and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain .
first you trap atoms in a special bottle .
it uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms from the noise of the environment .
and the atoms themselves are quite violent , but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency , an atom will briefly absorb those photons and tend to slow down .
little by little it gets colder until eventually it approaches absolute zero .
now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough , something truly bizarre happens .
it 's no longer a solid , a liquid or a gas .
it enters a new state of matter called a superfluid .
the atoms lose their individual identity , and the rules from the quantum world take over , and that 's what gives superfluids such spooky properties .
for example , if you shine light through a superfluid , it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour .
another spooky property is that it flows with absolutely no viscosity or friction , so if you were to take the lid off that bottle , it wo n't stay inside .
a thin film will creep up the inside wall , flow over the top and right out the outside .
now of course , the moment that it does hit the outside environment , and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree , it immediately turns back into normal matter .
superfluids are one of the most fragile things we 've ever discovered .
and this is the great pleasure of science : the defeat of our intuition through experimentation .
but the experiment is not the end of the story , because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people .
i have a ph.d in molecular biology .
i still barely understand what most scientists are talking about .
so as my friend was trying to explain that experiment , it seemed like the more he said , the less i understood .
because if you 're trying to give someone the big picture of a complex idea , to really capture its essence , the fewer words you use , the better .
in fact , the ideal may be to use no words at all .
i remember thinking , my friend could have explained that entire experiment with a dance .
of course , there never seem to be any dancers around when you need them .
now , the idea is not as crazy as it sounds .
i started a contest four years ago called dance your ph.d.
instead of explaining their research with words , scientists have to explain it with dance .
now surprisingly , it seems to work .
dance really can make science easier to understand .
but do n't take my word for it .
go on the internet and search for " dance your ph.d. "
there are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you .
the most surprising thing that i 've learned while running this contest is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research .
for example , at the university of minnesota , there 's a biomedical engineer named david odde , and he works with dancers to study how cells move .
they do it by changing their shape .
when a chemical signal washes up on one side , it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side , because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment .
so that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions .
but what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside , because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers , and those fibers are constantly falling apart .
but just as quickly as they explode , more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer , so it 's constantly changing just to remain exactly the same .
now , david builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab , but before he does that , he works with dancers to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place .
it 's basically efficient brainstorming , and when i visited david to learn about his research , he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method : powerpoint .
and this brings me to my modest proposal .
i think that bad powerpoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now it does depend on how you measure it , of course , but one estimate has put the drain at 250 million dollars per day .
now that assumes half-hour presentations for an average audience of four people with salaries of 35,000 dollars , and it conservatively assumes that about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time , and given that there are some apparently 30 million powerpoint presentations created every day , that would indeed add up to an annual waste of 100 billion dollars .
of course , that 's just the time we 're losing sitting through presentations .
there are other costs , because powerpoint is a tool , and like any tool , it can and will be abused .
to borrow a concept from my country 's cia , it helps you to soften up your audience .
it distracts them with pretty pictures , irrelevant data .
it allows you to create the illusion of competence , the illusion of simplicity , and most destructively , the illusion of understanding .
so now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt .
our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money .
one idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts .
for example , our national endowment for the arts , with its $ 150 million budget , slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent .
one certainly ca n't argue with those numbers .
however , once we eliminate public funding for the arts , there will be some drawbacks .
the artists on the street will swell the ranks of the unemployed .
many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution , and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods .
all of this could wipe out the savings we 're hoping to make in the first place .
i shall now , therefore , humbly propose my own thoughts , which i hope will not be liable to the least objection .
once we eliminate public funding for the artists , let 's put them back to work by using them instead of powerpoint .
as a test case , i propose we start with american dancers .
after all , they are the most perishable of their kind , prone to injury and very slow to heal due to our health care system .
rather than dancing our ph.ds , we should use dance to explain all of our complex problems .
imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank .
it 's sure to help .
of course someday , in the deep future , a technology of persuasion even more powerful than powerpoint may be invented , rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric .
however , i trust that by that day , we shall have passed this present financial calamity .
perhaps by then we will be able to afford the luxury of just sitting in an audience with no other purpose than to witness the human form in motion .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what you 're doing , right now , at this very moment , is killing you .
more than cars or the internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about , the technology you 're using the most almost every day is this , your tush .
nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day , which is more than we 're sleeping , at 7.7 hours .
sitting is so incredibly prevalent , we do n't even question how much we 're doing it , and because everyone else is doing it , it does n't even occur to us that it 's not okay .
in that way , sitting has become the smoking of our generation .
of course there 's health consequences to this , scary ones , besides the waist .
things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical -lsb- activity -rsb- , ten percent in fact , on both of those .
six percent for heart disease , seven percent for type 2 diabetes , which is what my father died of .
now , any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more , but if you 're anything like me , it wo n't .
what did get me moving was a social interaction .
someone invited me to a meeting , but could n't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting , and said , " i have to walk my dogs tomorrow . could you come then ? "
it seemed kind of odd to do , and actually , that first meeting , i remember thinking , " i have to be the one to ask the next question , " because i knew i was going to huff and puff during this conversation .
and yet , i 've taken that idea and made it my own .
so instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings , i ask people to go on a walking meeting , to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week .
it 's changed my life .
but before that , what actually happened was , you could take care of your health , or you could take care of obligations , and one always came at the cost of the other .
so now , several hundred of these walking meetings later , i 've learned a few things .
first , there 's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking .
whether it 's nature or the exercise itself , it certainly works .
and second , and probably the more reflective one , is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they 're really not that way .
and if we 're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently , whether it 's in governance or business or environmental issues , job creation , maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true .
because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable .
so i started this talk talking about the tush , so i 'll end with the bottom line , which is , walk and talk .
walk the talk .
you 'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as an indian , and now as a politician and a government minister , i 've become rather concerned about the hype we 're hearing about our own country , all this talk about india becoming a world leader , even the next superpower .
in fact , the american publishers of my book , " the elephant , the tiger and the cell phone , " added a gratuitous subtitle saying , " india : the next 21st-century power . "
and i just do n't think that 's what india 's all about , or should be all about .
indeed , what worries me is the entire notion of world leadership seems to me terribly archaic .
it 's redolent of james bond movies and kipling ballads .
after all , what constitutes a world leader ?
if it 's population , we 're on course to top the charts .
we will overtake china by 2034 .
is it military strength ? well , we have the world 's fourth largest army .
is it nuclear capacity ? we know we have that .
the americans have even recognized it , in an agreement .
is it the economy ? well , we have now the fifth-largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms .
and we continue to grow . when the rest of the world took a beating last year , we grew at 6.7 percent .
but , somehow , none of that adds up to me , to what i think india really can aim to contribute in the world , in this part of the 21st century .
and so i wondered , could what the future beckons for india to be all about be a combination of these things allied to something else , the attraction of india 's culture , what , in other words , people like to call " soft power . "
soft power is a concept invented by a harvard academic , joseph nye , a friend of mine .
and , very simply , and i 'm really cutting it short because of the time limits here , it 's essentially the ability of a country to attract others because of its culture , its political values , its foreign policies .
and , you know , lots of countries do this . he was writing initially about the states , but we know the alliance francaise is all about french soft power , the british council .
the beijing olympics were an exercise in chinese soft power .
americans have the voice of america and the fulbright scholarships .
but , the fact is , in fact , that probably hollywood and mtv and mcdonalds have done more for american soft power around the world than any specifically government activity .
so soft power is something that really emerges partly because of governments , but partly despite governments .
and in the information era we all live in today , what we might call the ted age , i 'd say that countries are increasingly being judged by a global public that 's been fed of televised images , of cellphone videos , of email gossip .
in other words , all sorts of communication devices are telling us the stories of countries , whether or not the countries concerned want people to hear those stories .
now , in this age , again , countries with access to multiple channels of communication and information have a particular advantage .
and of course they have more influence , sometimes , about how they 're seen .
india has more all-news tv channels than any country in the world , in fact in most of the countries in this part of the world put together .
but , the fact still is that it 's not just that .
in order to have soft power , you have to be connected .
one might argue that india has become an astonishingly connected country .
i think you 've already heard the figures .
we 've been selling 15 million cellphones a month .
currently there are 509 million cellphones in indian hands , in india .
and that makes us larger than the u.s. as a telephone market .
in fact , those 15 million cellphones are the most connections that any country , including the u.s. and china , has ever established in the history of telecommunications .
but , what perhaps some of you do n't realize is how far we 've come to get there .
you know , when i grew up in india , telephones were a rarity .
in fact , they were so rare that elected members of parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy .
if you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist , or a doctor or something , you might have a telephone .
but sometimes it just sat there .
i went to high school in calcutta .
and we would look at this instrument sitting in the front foyer .
but half the time we would pick it up with an expectant look on our faces , there would be no dial tone .
if there was a dial tone and you dialed a number , the odds were two in three you would n't get the number you were intending to reach .
in fact the words " wrong number " were more popular than the word " hello . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you then wanted to connect to another city , let 's say from calcutta you wanted to call delhi , you 'd have to book something called a trunk call , and then sit by the phone all day , waiting for it to come through .
or you could pay eight times the going rate for something called a lightning call .
but , lightning struck rather slowly in our country in those days , so , it was like about a half an hour for a lightning call to come through .
in fact , so woeful was our telephone service that a member of parliament stood up in 1984 and complained about this .
and the then-communications minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country communications are a luxury , not a right , that the government had no obligation to provide better service , and if the honorable member was n't satisfied with his telephone , could he please return it , since there was an eight-year-long waiting list for telephones in india .
now , fast-forward to today and this is what you see : the 15 million cell phones a month .
but what is most striking is who is carrying those cell phones .
you know , if you visit friends in the suburbs of delhi , on the side streets you will find a fellow with a cart that looks like it was designed in the 16th century , wielding a coal-fired steam iron that might have been invented in the 18th century .
he 's called an isthri wala . but he 's carrying a 21st-century instrument .
he 's carrying a cell phone because most incoming calls are free , and that 's how he gets orders from the neighborhood , to know where to collect clothes to get them ironed .
the other day i was in kerala , my home state , at the country farm of a friend , about 20 kilometers away from any place you 'd consider urban .
and it was a hot day and he said , " hey , would you like some fresh coconut water ? "
and it 's the best thing and the most nutritious and refreshing thing you can drink on a hot day in the tropics , so i said sure .
and he whipped out his cellphone , dialed the number , and a voice said , " i 'm up here . "
and right on top of the nearest coconut tree , with a hatchet in one hand and a cell phone in the other , was a local toddy tapper , who proceeded to bring down the coconuts for us to drink .
fishermen are going out to sea and carrying their cell phones .
when they catch the fish they call all the market towns along the coast to find out where they get the best possible prices .
farmers now , who used to have to spend half a day of backbreaking labor to find out if the market town was open , if the market was on , whether the product they 'd harvested could be sold , what price they 'd fetch .
they 'd often send an eight year old boy all the way on this trudge to the market town to get that information and come back , then they 'd load the cart .
today they 're saving half a day 's labor with a two minute phone call .
so this empowerment of the underclass is the real result of india being connected .
and that transformation is part of where india is heading today .
but , of course that 's not the only thing about india that 's spreading .
you 've got bollywood . my attitude to bollywood is best summarized in the tale of the two goats at a bollywood garbage dump - mr. shekhar kapur , forgive me - and they 're chewing away on cans of celluloid discarded by a bollywood studio .
and the first goat , chewing away , says , " you know , this film is not bad . "
and the second goat says , " no , the book was better . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i usually tend to think that the book is usually better , but , having said that , the fact is that bollywood is now taking a certain aspect of indian-ness and indian culture around the globe , not just in the indian diaspora in the u.s. and the u.k. , but to the screens of arabs and africans , of senegalese and syrians .
i 've met a young man in new york whose illiterate mother in a village in senegal takes a bus once a month to the capital city of dakar , just to watch a bollywood movie .
she ca n't understand the dialogue .
she 's illiterate , so she ca n't read the french subtitles .
but these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps , and she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action .
she goes away with stars in her eyes about india , as a result .
and this is happening more and more .
afghanistan , we know what a serious security problem afghanistan is for so many of us in the world .
india does n't have a military mission there .
you know what was india 's biggest asset in afghanistan in the last seven years ?
one simple fact : you could n't try to call an afghan at 8:30 in the evening .
why ? because that was the moment when the indian television soap opera , " kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi , " dubbed into dari , was telecast on tolo t.v.
and it was the most popular television show in afghan history .
every afghan family wanted to watch it .
they had to suspend functions at 8:30 .
weddings were reported to be interrupted so guests could cluster around the t.v. set , and then turn their attention back to the bride and groom .
crime went up at 8:30 . i have read a reuters dispatch - so this is not indian propaganda , a british news agency - about how robbers in the town of musarri sharif * stripped a vehicle of its windshield wipers , its hubcaps , its sideview mirrors , any moving part they could find , at 8:30 , because the watchmen were busy watching the t.v. rather than minding the store .
and they scrawled on the windshield in a reference to the show 's heroine , " tulsi zindabad " : " long live tulsi . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's soft power . and that is what india is developing through the " e " part of ted : its own entertainment industry .
the same is true , of course - we do n't have time for too many more examples - but it 's true of our music , of our dance , of our art , yoga , ayurveda , even indian cuisine .
i mean , the proliferation of indian restaurants since i first went abroad as a student , in the mid ' 70s , and what i see today , you ca n't go to a mid-size town in europe or north america and not find an indian restaurant . it may not be a very good one .
but , today in britain , for example , indian restaurants in britain employ more people than the coal mining , ship building and iron and steel industries combined .
so the empire can strike back .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but , with this increasing awareness of india , with you and with i , and so on , with tales like afghanistan , comes something vital in the information era , the sense that in today 's world it 's not the side of the bigger army that wins , it 's the country that tells a better story that prevails .
and india is , and must remain , in my view , the land of the better story .
stereotypes are changing . i mean , again , having gone to the u.s.
as a student in the mid ' 70s , i knew what the image of india was then , if there was an image at all .
today , people in silicon valley and elsewhere speak of the iits , the indian institutes of technology with the same reverence they used to accord to mit .
this can sometimes have unintended consequences . ok .
i had a friend , a history major like me , who was accosted at schiphol airport in amsterdam , by an anxiously perspiring european saying , " you 're indian , you 're indian ! can you help me fix my laptop ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've gone from the image of india as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails , and snake charmers with the indian rope trick , to the image of india as a land of mathematical geniuses , computer wizards , software gurus .
but that too is transforming the indian story around the world .
but , there is something more substantive to that .
the story rests on a fundamental platform of political pluralism .
it 's a civilizational story to begin with .
because india has been an open society for millennia .
india gave refuge to the jews , fleeing the destruction of the first temple by the babylonians , and said thereafter by the romans .
in fact , legend has is that when doubting thomas , the apostle , saint thomas , landed on the shores of kerala , my home state , somewhere around 52 a.d. , he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing jewish girl .
and to this day remains the only jewish diaspora in the history of the jewish people , which has never encountered a single incident of anti-semitism .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's the indian story .
islam came peacefully to the south , slightly more differently complicated history in the north .
but all of these religions have found a place and a welcome home in india .
you know , we just celebrated , this year , our general elections , the biggest exercise in democratic franchise in human history .
and the next one will be even bigger , because our voting population keeps growing by 20 million a year .
but , the fact is that the last elections , five years ago , gave the world extraordinary phenomenon of an election being won by a woman political leader of italian origin and roman catholic faith , sonia gandhi , who then made way for a sikh , mohan singh , to be sworn in as prime minister by a muslim , president abdul kalam , in a country 81 percent hindu .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is india , and of course it 's all the more striking because it was four years later that we all applauded the u.s. , the oldest democracy in the modern world , more than 220 years of free and fair elections , which took till last year to elect a president or a vice president who was n't white , male or christian .
so , maybe - oh sorry , he is christian , i beg your pardon - and he is male , but he is n't white .
all the others have been all those three .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all his predecessors have been all those three , and that 's the point i was trying to make .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , the issue is that when i talked about that example , it 's not just about talking about india , it 's not propaganda .
because ultimately , that electoral outcome had nothing to do with the rest of the world .
it was essentially india being itself .
and ultimately , it seems to me , that always works better than propaganda .
governments are n't very good at telling stories .
but people see a society for what it is , and that , it seems to me , is what ultimately will make a difference in today 's information era , in today 's ted age .
so india now is no longer the nationalism of ethnicity or language or religion , because we have every ethnicity known to mankind , practically , we 've every religion know to mankind , with the possible exception of shintoism , though that has some hindu elements somewhere .
we have 23 official languages that are recognized in our constitution .
and those of you who cashed your money here might be surprised to see how many scripts there are on the rupee note , spelling out the denominations .
we 've got all of that .
we do n't even have geography uniting us , because the natural geography of the subcontinent framed by the mountains and the sea was hacked by the partition with pakistan in 1947 .
in fact , you ca n't even take the name of the country for granted , because the name " india " comes from the river indus , which flows in pakistan .
but , the whole point is that india is the nationalism of an idea .
it 's the idea of an ever-ever-land , emerging from an ancient civilization , united by a shared history , but sustained , above all , by pluralist democracy .
that is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one .
and it 's the nationalism of an idea that essentially says you can endure differences of caste , creed , color , culture , cuisine , custom and costume , consonant , for that matter , and still rally around a consensus .
and the consensus is of a very simple principle , that in a diverse plural democracy like india you do n't really have to agree on everything all the time , so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree .
the great success story of india , a country that so many learned scholars and journalists assumed would disintegrate , in the ' 50s and ' 60s , is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus .
now , that is the india that is emerging into the 21st century .
and i do want to make the point that if there is anything worth celebrating about india , it is n't military muscle , economic power .
all of that is necessary , but we still have huge amounts of problems to overcome .
somebody said we are super poor , and we are also super power .
we ca n't really be both of those .
we have to overcome our poverty . we have to deal with the hardware of development , the ports , the roads , the airports , all the infrastructural things we need to do , and the software of development , the human capital , the need for the ordinary person in india to be able to have a couple of square meals a day , to be able to send his or her children to a decent school , and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in their lives that can transform themselves .
but , it 's all taking place , this great adventure of conquering those challenges , those real challenges which none of us can pretend do n't exist .
but , it 's all taking place in an open society , in a rich and diverse and plural civilization , in one that is determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people .
that 's why india belongs at ted , and that 's why ted belongs in india .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ever since i was a little girl seeing " star wars " for the first time , i 've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots .
and as a little girl , i loved the idea of a robot that interacted with us much more like a helpful , trusted sidekick - something that would delight us , enrich our lives and help us save a galaxy or two .
i knew robots like that did n't really exist , but i knew i wanted to build them .
so 20 years pass - i am now a graduate student at mit studying artificial intelligence , the year is 1997 , and nasa has just landed the first robot on mars .
but robots are still not in our home , ironically .
and i remember thinking about all the reasons why that was the case .
but one really struck me .
robotics had really been about interacting with things , not with people - certainly not in a social way that would be natural for us and would really help people accept robots into our daily lives .
for me , that was the white space ; that 's what robots could not do yet .
and so that year , i started to build this robot , kismet , the world 's first social robot .
three years later - a lot of programming , working with other graduate students in the lab - kismet was ready to start interacting with people .
-lrb- video -rrb- scientist : i want to show you something .
kismet : -lrb- nonsense -rrb- scientist : this is a watch that my girlfriend gave me .
kismet : -lrb- nonsense -rrb- scientist : yeah , look , it 's got a little blue light in it too .
i almost lost it this week .
cynthia breazeal : so kismet interacted with people like kind of a non-verbal child or pre-verbal child , which i assume was fitting because it was really the first of its kind .
it did n't speak language , but it did n't matter .
this little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us - and with that , the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots .
so over the past several years i 've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots , now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students .
and one of my favorite robots is leonardo .
we developed leonardo in collaboration with stan winston studio .
and so i want to show you a special moment for me of leo .
this is matt berlin interacting with leo , introducing leo to a new object .
and because it 's new , leo does n't really know what to make of it .
but sort of like us , he can actually learn about it from watching matt 's reaction .
-lrb- video -rrb- matt berlin : hello , leo .
leo , this is cookie monster .
can you find cookie monster ?
leo , cookie monster is very bad .
he 's very bad , leo .
cookie monster is very , very bad .
he 's a scary monster .
he wants to get your cookies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- cb : all right , so leo and cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start , but they get along great now .
so what i 've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology , where it 's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality .
and with that shift in thinking , we can now start to imagine new questions , new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise .
but what do i mean when i say " push our social buttons ? "
well , one of the things that we 've learned is that , if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language , the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use - like nexi , our humanoid robot , is doing here - what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people .
people use these cues to determine things like how persuasive someone is , how likable , how engaging , how trustworthy .
it turns out it 's the same for robots .
it 's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior .
to answer questions like , how is it that , from a brief encounter , we 're able to make an estimate of how trustworthy another person is ?
mimicry 's believed to play a role , but how ?
is it the mimicking of particular gestures that matters ?
it turns out it 's really hard to learn this or understand this from watching people because when we interact we do all of these cues automatically .
we ca n't carefully control them because they 're subconscious for us .
but with the robot , you can .
and so in this video here - this is a video taken from david desteno 's lab at northeastern university .
he 's a psychologist we 've been collaborating with .
there 's actually a scientist carefully controlling nexi 's cues to be able to study this question .
and the bottom line is - the reason why this works is because it turns out people just behave like people even when interacting with a robot .
so given that key insight , we can now start to imagine new kinds of applications for robots .
for instance , if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues , maybe they would be a cool , new communication technology .
so imagine this : what about a robot accessory for your cellphone ?
you call your friend , she puts her handset in a robot , and , bam ! you 're a mebot - you can make eye contact , you can talk with your friends , you can move around , you can gesture - maybe the next best thing to really being there , or is it ?
to explore this question , my student , siggy adalgeirsson , did a study where we brought human participants , people , into our lab to do a collaborative task with a remote collaborator .
the task involved things like looking at a set of objects on the table , discussing them in terms of their importance and relevance to performing a certain task - this ended up being a survival task - and then rating them in terms of how valuable and important they thought they were .
the remote collaborator was an experimenter from our group who used one of three different technologies to interact with the participants .
the first was just the screen .
this is just like video conferencing today .
the next was to add mobility - so , have the screen on a mobile base .
this is like , if you 're familiar with any of the telepresence robots today - this is mirroring that situation .
and then the fully expressive mebot .
so after the interaction , we asked people to rate their quality of interaction with the technology , with a remote collaborator through this technology , in a number of different ways .
we looked at psychological involvement - how much empathy did you feel for the other person ?
we looked at overall engagement .
we looked at their desire to cooperate .
and this is what we see when they use just the screen .
it turns out , when you add mobility - the ability to roll around the table - you get a little more of a boost .
and you get even more of a boost when you add the full expression .
so it seems like this physical , social embodiment actually really makes a difference .
now let 's try to put this into a little bit of context .
today we know that families are living further and further apart , and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance .
for me , i have three young boys , and i want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents .
but my parents live thousands of miles away , so they just do n't get to see each other that often .
we try skype , we try phone calls , but my boys are little - they do n't really want to talk ; they want to play .
so i love the idea of thinking about robots as a new kind of distance-play technology .
i imagine a time not too far from now - my mom can go to her computer , open up a browser and jack into a little robot .
and as grandma-bot , she can now play , really play , with my sons , with her grandsons , in the real world with his real toys .
i could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters , with their friends , and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house , like sharing a bedtime story .
and through this technology , being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren 's lives in a way that 's not possible today .
let 's think about some other domains , like maybe health .
so in the united states today , over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese , and now it 's a big problem with our children as well .
and we know that as you get older in life , if you 're obese when you 're younger , that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life , but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system .
but if robots can be engaging , if we like to cooperate with robots , if robots are persuasive , maybe a robot can help you maintain a diet and exercise program , maybe they can help you manage your weight .
sort of like a digital jiminy - as in the well-known fairy tale - a kind of friendly , supportive presence that 's always there to be able to help you make the right decision in the right way at the right time to help you form healthy habits .
so we actually explored this idea in our lab .
this is a robot , autom .
cory kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work .
and it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach .
it had a couple of simple non-verbal skills it could do .
it could make eye contact with you .
it could share information looking down at a screen .
you 'd use a screen interface to enter information , like how many calories you ate that day , how much exercise you got .
and then it could help track that for you .
and the robot spoke with a synthetic voice to engage you in a coaching dialogue modeled after trainers and patients and so forth .
and it would build a working alliance with you through that dialogue .
it could help you set goals and track your progress , and it would help motivate you .
so an interesting question is , does the social embodiment really matter ? does it matter that it 's a robot ?
is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters ?
to explore that question , we did a study in the boston area where we put one of three interventions in people 's homes for a period of several weeks .
one case was the robot you saw there , autom .
another was a computer that ran the same touch-screen interface , ran exactly the same dialogues .
the quality of advice was identical .
and the third was just a pen and paper log , because that 's the standard intervention you typically get when you start a diet-and-exercise program .
so one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost , but really how long they interacted with the robot .
because the challenge is not losing weight , it 's actually keeping it off .
and the longer you could interact with one of these interventions , well that 's indicative , potentially , of longer-term success .
so the first thing i want to look at is how long , how long did people interact with these systems .
it turns out that people interacted with the robot significantly more , even though the quality of the advice was identical to the computer .
when it asked people to rate it on terms of the quality of the working alliance , people rated the robot higher and they trusted the robot more .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when you look at emotional engagement , it was completely different .
people would name the robots .
they would dress the robots .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and even when we would come up to pick up the robots at the end of the study , they would come out to the car and say good-bye to the robots .
they did n't do this with a computer .
the last thing i want to talk about today is the future of children 's media .
we know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today , whether it 's television or computer games or whatnot .
my sons , they love the screen . they love the screen .
but i want them to play ; as a mom , i want them to play , like , real-world play .
and so i have a new project in my group i wanted to present to you today called playtime computing that 's really trying to think about how we can take what 's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child , where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play .
so here 's the first exploration of this idea , where characters can be physical or virtual , and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back .
i like to think of this as the atari pong of this blended-reality play .
but we can push this idea further .
what if - -lrb- game -rrb- nathan : here it comes . yay !
cb : - the character itself could come into your world ?
it turns out that kids love it when the character becomes real and enters into their world .
and when it 's in their world , they can relate to it and play with it in a way that 's fundamentally different from how they play with it on the screen .
another important idea is this notion of persistence of character across realities .
so changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world .
so here , nathan has changed the letter a to the number 2 .
you can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world .
so they are now sending the character back into that world .
and now it 's got number power .
and then finally , what i 've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids , where they really feel like they are part of that story , a part of that experience .
and i really want to spark their imaginations the way mine was sparked as a little girl watching " star wars . "
but i want to do more than that .
i actually want them to create those experiences .
i want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own .
so we 've been exploring a lot of ideas in telepresence and mixed reality to literally allow kids to project their ideas into this space where other kids can interact with them and build upon them .
i really want to come up with new ways of children 's media that foster creativity and learning and innovation .
i think that 's very , very important .
so this is a new project .
we 've invited a lot of kids into this space , and they think it 's pretty cool .
but i can tell you , the thing that they love the most is the robot .
what they care about is the robot .
robots touch something deeply human within us .
and so whether they 're helping us to become creative and innovative , or whether they 're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance , or whether they are our trusted sidekick who 's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves , for me , robots are all about people .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now when we think of our senses , we do n't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved , from a biological perspective .
we do n't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses , but that 's probably why our senses really evolved - to keep us safe , to allow us to live .
really when we think of our senses , or when we think of the loss of the sense , we really think about something more like this : the ability to touch something luxurious , to taste something delicious , to smell something fragrant , to see something beautiful .
this is what we want out of our senses .
we want beauty ; we do n't just want function .
and when it comes to sensory restoration , we 're still very far away from being able to provide beauty .
and that 's what i 'd like to talk to you a little bit about today .
likewise for hearing .
when we think about why we hear , we do n't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren , although clearly that 's an important thing .
really what we want to hear is music .
-lrb- music -rrb- so many of you know that that 's beethoven 's seventh symphony .
many of you know that he was deaf , or near profoundly deaf , when he wrote that .
now i 'd like to impress upon you how unusual it is that we can hear music .
music is just one of the strangest things that there is .
it 's acoustic vibrations in the air , little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum .
somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones , which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music .
that process is entirely abstract and very , very unusual .
and we could discuss that topic alone for days to really try to figure out , how is it that we hear something that 's emotional from something that starts out as a vibration in the air ?
turns out that if you have hearing loss , most people that lose their hearing lose it at what 's called the cochlea , the inner ear .
and it 's at the hair cell level that they do this .
now if you had to pick a sense to lose , i have to be very honest with you and say , we 're better at restoring hearing than we are at restoring any sense that there is .
in fact , nothing even actually comes close to our ability to restore hearing .
and as a physician and a surgeon , i can confidently tell my patients that if you had to pick a sense to lose , we are the furthest along medically and surgically with hearing .
as a musician , i can tell you that if i had to have a cochlear implant , i 'd be heartbroken . i 'd just be plainly heartbroken , because i know that music would never sound the same to me .
now this is a video that i 'm going to show you of a girl who 's born deaf .
she 's in a very supportive environment .
her mother 's doing everything she can .
okay , play that video please .
-lrb- video -rrb- mother : that 's an owl .
owl , yeah .
owl . owl .
yeah .
baby . baby .
you want it ?
-lrb- kiss -rrb- charles limb : now despite everything going for this child in terms of family support and simple infused learning , there is a limitation to what a child who 's deaf , an infant who was born deaf , has in this world in terms of social , educational , vocational opportunities .
i 'm not saying that they ca n't live a beautiful , wonderful life .
i 'm saying that they 're going to face obstacles that most people who have normal hearing will not have to face .
now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years .
i mean literally , they used to do things like stick ear-shaped objects onto your ears and stick funnels in .
and that was the best you could do for hearing loss .
back then you could n't even look at the eardrum .
so it 's not too surprising that there were no good treatments for hearing loss .
and now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant , which is an outpatient procedure .
it 's surgically placed inside the inner ear .
it takes about an hour and a half to two hours , depending on where it 's done , under general anesthesia .
and in the end , you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea .
now actually , this is quite crude in comparison to our regular inner ear .
but here is that same girl who is implanted now .
this is her 10 years later .
and this is a video that was taken by my surgical mentor , dr. john niparko , who implanted her .
if we could play this video please .
-lrb- video -rrb- john niparko : so you 've written two books ?
girl : i have written two books . -lrb- mother : was the other one a book or a journal entry ? -rrb- girl : no , the other one was a book . -lrb- mother : oh , okay . -rrb- jn : well this book has seven chapters , and the last chapter is entitled " the good things about being deaf . "
do you remember writing that chapter ?
girl : yes i do . i remember writing every chapter .
jn : yeah .
girl : well sometimes my sister can be kind of annoying .
so it comes in handy to not be annoyed by her .
jn : i see . and who is that ?
girl : holly . -lrb- jn : okay . -rrb- mother : her sister . -lrb- jn : her sister . -rrb- girl : my sister .
jn : and how can you avoid being annoyed by her ?
girl : i just take off my ci , and i do n't hear anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it comes in handy .
jn : so you do n't want to hear everything that 's out there ?
girl : no .
cl : and so she 's phenomenal .
and there 's no way that you ca n't look at that as an overwhelming success .
it is . it 's a huge success story in modern medicine .
however , despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language , you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they ca n't hear music almost at all .
in fact , most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad .
and so when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody 's life , we have a long way to go when it comes to audition .
now there are a lot of reasons for that .
i mentioned earlier the fact that music is a different capacity because it 's abstract .
language is very different . language is very precise .
in fact , the whole reason we use it is because it has semantic-specificity .
when you say a word , what you care is that word was perceived correctly .
you do n't care that the word sounded pretty when it was spoken .
music is entirely different .
when you hear music , if it does n't sound good , what 's the point ?
there 's really very little point in listening to music when it does n't sound good to you .
the acoustics of music are much harder than those of language .
and you can see on this figure , that the frequency range and the decibel range , the dynamic range of music is far more heterogeneous .
so if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant , what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission .
because i always view music as the pinnacle of hearing .
if you can hear music , you should be able to hear anything .
now the problems begin first with pitch perception .
i mean , most of us know that pitch is a fundamental building block of music .
and without the ability to perceive pitch well , music and melody is a very difficult thing to do - forget about a harmony and things like that .
now this is a midi arrangement of rachmaninoff 's prelude .
now if we could just play this .
-lrb- music -rrb- okay , now if we consider that in a cochlear implant patient pitch perception could be off as much as two octaves , let 's see what happens here when we randomize this to within one semitone .
we would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users .
go ahead and play this one .
-lrb- music -rrb- now my goal in showing you that is to show you that music is not robust to degradation .
you distort it a little bit , especially in terms of pitch , and you 've changed it .
and it might be that you kind of like that .
that 's kind of hypnotic .
but it certainly was n't the way the music was intended .
and you 're not hearing the same thing that most people who have normal hearing are hearing .
now the other issue comes with , not just the ability to tell pitches apart , but the ability to tell sounds apart .
most cochlear implant users can not tell the difference between an instrument .
if we could play these two sound clips in succession .
-lrb- trumpet -rrb- the trumpet .
and the second one .
-lrb- violin -rrb- that 's a violin .
these have similar wave forms . they 're both sustained instruments .
cochlear implant users can not tell the difference between these instruments .
the sound quality , or the sound of the sound is how i like to describe timbre , tone color - they can not tell these things whatsoever .
this implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth .
now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech , have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody , what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech .
you would think that because these implants are optimized for speech , they were designed for speech .
but actually if you look at melody , what you find is that there 's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls .
so for whatever reason , this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception .
now the next question is , well how does it really sound ?
now we 've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users .
i 'm going to play you two clips of usher , one which is normal and one which has almost no high frequencies , almost no low frequencies and not even that many mid frequencies .
go ahead and play that .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- limited frequency music -rrb- i had patients tell me that those sound the same .
they can not differentiate sound quality differences between those two clips .
again , we are very , very far away in just getting to where we want to get to .
now the question comes to mind : is there any hope ?
and yes , there is hope .
now i do n't know if anybody knows who this is .
this is ... does somebody know ?
this is beethoven .
now why would we know what beethoven 's skull looks like ?
because his grave was exhumed .
and it turns out that his temporal bones were harvested when he died to try to look at the cause of his deafness , which is why he has molding clay and his skull is bulging out on the side there .
but beethoven composed music long after he lost his hearing .
what that suggests is that , even in the case of hearing loss , the capacity for music remains .
the brains remain hardwired for music .
i 've been very lucky to work with dr. david ryugo where i 've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants .
this is a cat that 's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food .
-lrb- music -rrb- text : beethoven does n't excite her .
-lrb- music -rrb- the " 1812 overture " is n't worth waking for .
-lrb- trumpet -rrb- but she jumps to action when called to duty !
-lrb- trumpet -rrb- cl : now i 'm not suggesting that the cat is hearing that trumpet the way we 're hearing it .
i 'm suggesting that with training you can imbue a musical sound with significance , even in a cat .
if we were to direct efforts towards training cochlear implant users to hear music - because right now there 's virtually no effort put towards that , no rehabilitative strategies , very little in the way of technological advances to actually improve music - we would come a long way .
now i want to show you one last video .
and this is of a student of mine named joseph who i had the good fortune to work with for three years in my lab .
he 's deaf , and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant .
and here 's a video of joseph .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- joseph : i was born in 1986 .
and at about four months old , i was diagnosed with profoundly severe hearing loss .
not long after , i was fitted with hearing aids .
but although these hearing aids were the most powerful hearing aids on the market at the time , they were n't very helpful .
so as a result , i had to rely on lip reading a lot , and i could n't really hear what people were saying .
when i was 12 years old , i was one of the first few people in singapore who underwent cochlear implantation .
and not long after i got my cochlear implant , i started learning how to play piano .
and it was absolutely wonderful .
since then , i 've never looked back .
cl : joseph is phenomenal . he 's brilliant .
he is now a medical student at yale university , and he 's contemplating a surgical career - one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery .
there are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere .
and this is really unheard of stuff , and this is all because of this technology .
and the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain .
truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant , because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time .
you do n't actually have to hear it .
i know he does n't hear well , because i 've heard him do karaoke .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's one of the most awful things - heartwarming , but awful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so there is certainly a lot of hope , but there 's a lot more that needs to be done .
so i just want to conclude with the following words .
when it comes to restoration of hearing , we have certainly come a long way , a remarkably long way .
and we have a much longer way to go when it comes to the idea of restoring perfect hearing .
and let me tell you right now , it 's fine that we would all be very happy with speech .
but i tell you , if we lost our hearing , if anyone here suddenly lost your hearing , you would want perfect hearing back .
you would n't want decent hearing , you would want perfect hearing .
restoration of basic sensory function is critical .
and i do n't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function .
but it 's really restoration of the ability to perceive beauty where we can get inspiring .
and i do n't think that we should give up on beauty .
and i want to thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we 're going to make matter come alive .
now this may seem a bit ambitious , but when you look at yourself , you look at your hands , you realize that you 're alive .
so this is a start .
now this quest started four billion years ago on planet earth .
there 's been four billion years of organic , biological life .
and as an inorganic chemist , my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic , living world and the inorganic , dead world .
and what i 'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic , dead matter into living matter , into inorganic biology .
before we do that , i want to kind of put biology in its place .
and i 'm absolutely enthralled by biology .
i love to do synthetic biology .
i love things that are alive .
i love manipulating the infrastructure of biology .
but within that infrastructure , we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution .
and evolution , although it was established well over 100 years ago by charles darwin and a vast number of other people , evolution still is a little bit intangible .
and when i talk about darwinian evolution , i mean one thing and one thing only , and that is survival of the fittest .
and so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way .
think about evolution in terms of offspring competing , and some winning .
so bearing that in mind , as a chemist , i wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology : what is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo darwinian evolution ?
and this seems quite a profound question .
and as a chemist , we 're not used to profound questions every day .
so when i thought about it , then suddenly i realized that biology gave us the answer .
and in fact , the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is , in fact , a single cell - a bacteria .
so this raises three really important questions : what is life ?
is biology special ?
biologists seem to think so .
is matter evolvable ?
now if we answer those questions in reverse order , the third question - is matter evolvable ? - if we can answer that , then we 're going to know how special biology is , and maybe , just maybe , we 'll have some idea of what life really is .
so here 's some inorganic life .
this is a dead crystal , and i 'm going to do something to it , and it 's going to become alive .
and you can see , it 's kind of pollinating , germinating , growing .
this is an inorganic tube .
and all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago , and they look alive .
of course , they 're not alive .
it 's a chemistry experiment where i 've made a crystal garden .
but when i saw this , i was really fascinated , because it seemed lifelike .
and as i pause for a few seconds , have a look at the screen .
you can see there 's architecture growing , filling the void .
and this is dead .
so i was positive that , if somehow we can make things mimic life , let 's go one step further .
let 's see if we can actually make life .
but there 's a problem , because up until maybe a decade ago , we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe .
in fact , we were the only people in the universe .
now , that 's a bit boring .
so as a chemist , i wanted to say , " hang on . what is going on here ?
is life that improbable ? "
and this is really the question .
i think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars .
and in fact , let 's take that one step further .
let 's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe , maybe the physics of life is as well .
and so the problem with chemists - and this is a massive advantage as well - is we like to focus on our elements .
in biology , carbon takes center stage .
and in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology , then we have all this wonderful diversity of life .
in fact , we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate .
we 're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards .
well what about matter ?
if we can make matter alive , would we have a matterhazard ?
so think , this is a serious question .
if your pen could replicate , that would be a bit of a problem .
so we have to think differently if we 're going to make stuff come alive .
and we also have to be aware of the issues .
but before we can make life , let 's think for a second what life really is characterized by .
and forgive the complicated diagram .
this is just a collection of pathways in the cell .
and the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing .
synthetic biologists are manipulating it .
chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease .
and you have all these pathways going on at the same time .
you have regulation ; information is transcribed ; catalysts are made ; stuff is happening .
but what does a cell do ?
well it divides , it competes , it survives .
and i think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life .
but what else is life characterized by ?
well , i like think of it as a flame in a bottle .
and so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating , metabolizing , burning through chemistries .
and so we have to understand that if we 're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life , we need to power it somehow .
so before we can really start to make life , we have to really think about where it came from .
and darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere - maybe not in scotland , maybe in africa , maybe somewhere else .
but the real honest answer is , we just do n't know , because there is a problem with the origin .
imagine way back , four and a half billion years ago , there is a vast chemical soup of stuff .
and from this stuff we came .
so when you think about the improbable nature of what i 'm going to tell you in the next few minutes , just remember , we came from stuff on planet earth .
and we went through a variety of worlds .
the rna people would talk about the rna world .
we somehow got to proteins and dna .
we then got to the last ancestor .
evolution kicked in - and that 's the cool bit .
and here we are .
but there 's a roadblock that you ca n't get past .
you can decode the genome , you can look back , you can link us all together by a mitochondrial dna , but we ca n't get further than the last ancestor , the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history .
so we do n't know how we got here .
so there are two options : intelligent design , direct and indirect - so god , or my friend .
now talking about e.t. putting us there , or some other life , just pushes the problem further on .
i 'm not a politician , i 'm a scientist .
the other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity .
this seems most likely .
so we have some kind of primordial soup .
and this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids .
and somehow these amino acids are combined , and life begins .
but life begins , what does that mean ?
what is life ? what is this stuff of life ?
so in the 1950s , miller-urey did their fantastic chemical frankenstein experiment , where they did the equivalent in the chemical world .
they took the basic ingredients , put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through .
and they had a look at what was in the soup , and they found amino acids , but nothing came out , there was no cell .
so the whole area 's been stuck for a while , and it got reignited in the ' 80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on .
in my own laboratory , the way we 're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats .
so what we 're trying to do is do reactions - not in one flask , but in tens of flasks , and connect them together , as you can see with this flow system , all these pipes .
we can do it microfluidically , we can do it lithographically , we can do it in a 3d printer , we can do it in droplets for colleagues .
and the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away .
but that 's probably going to end in failure , so we need to be a bit more focused .
and the answer , of course , lies with mice .
this is how i remember what i need as a chemist .
i say , " well i want molecules . "
but i need a metabolism , i need some energy .
i need some information , and i need a container .
because if i want evolution , i need containers to compete .
so if you have a container , it 's like getting in your car .
" this is my car , and i 'm going to drive around and show off my car . "
and i imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life .
so these things together give us evolution , perhaps .
and the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal .
so what we 're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic lego kit of molecules .
and so forgive the molecules on the screen , but these are a very simple kit .
there 's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present .
and we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of dna and proteins , but there 's no carbon in sight .
carbon is banned .
and so with this lego kit , we have the diversity required for complex information storage without dna .
but we need to make some containers .
and just a few months ago in my lab , we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them .
and you can see on the screen a cell being made .
and we 're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell .
and all i wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes , in real cells , and then it sets up a kind of molecular darwinism , a molecular survival of the fittest .
and this movie here shows this competition between molecules .
molecules are competing for stuff .
they 're all made of the same stuff , but they want their shape to win .
they want their shape to persist .
and that is the key .
if we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete , they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete .
if we manage to do that , forget the molecular detail .
let 's zoom out to what that could mean .
so we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology , to us .
if we could get evolution into the material world , then i propose we should have a general theory of evolution .
and that 's really worth thinking about .
does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe ?
is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete ?
so that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution .
so you imagine , if we 're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form , not only will this tell us about the origin of life - that it 's possible that the universe does n't need carbon to be alive ; it can use anything - we can then take -lsb- it -rsb- one step further and develop new technologies , because we can then use software control for evolution to code in .
so imagine we make a little cell .
we want to put it out in the environment , and we want it to be powered by the sun .
what we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on .
and we do n't use design anymore . we find what works .
we should take our inspiration from biology .
biology does n't care about the design unless it works .
so this will reorganize the way we design things .
but not only just that , we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology .
would n't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we could n't really deal with ?
the real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything , because it 's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution .
evolution can not be cut apart .
you need to somehow find the fitness function .
and the profound realization for me is that , if this works , the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level , and we really start talking about selfish matter .
and what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff ?
you 're sitting on chairs .
they 're inanimate , they 're not alive .
but you are made of stuff , and you are using stuff , and you enslave stuff .
so using evolution in biology , and in inorganic biology , for me is quite appealing , quite exciting .
and we 're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive .
and again , when you 're thinking about how improbable this is , remember , five billion years ago , we were not here , and there was no life .
so what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life ?
but perhaps , for me as a chemist , i want to keep away from general terms ; i want to think about specifics .
so what does it mean about defining life ?
we really struggle to do this .
and i think , if we can make inorganic biology , and we can make matter become evolvable , that will in fact define life .
i propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive , and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : just a quick question on timeline .
you believe you 're going to be successful in this project ?
when ?
lee cronin : so many people think that life took millions of years to kick in .
we 're proposing to do it in just a few hours , once we 've set up the right chemistry .
ca : and when do you think that will happen ?
lc : hopefully within the next two years .
ca : that would be a big story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in your own mind , what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life , walking or oozing or something ?
lc : i think it 's 100 percent .
because the thing is , we are so chauvinistic to biology , if you take away carbon , there 's other things that can happen .
so the other thing that if we were able to create life that 's not based on carbon , maybe we can tell nasa what really to look for .
do n't go and look for carbon , go and look for evolvable stuff .
ca : lee cronin , good luck . -lrb- lc : thank you very much . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i and my colleagues art aron and lucy brown and others , have put 37 people who are madly in love into a functional mri brain scanner .
17 who were happily in love , 15 who had just been dumped , and we 're just starting our third experiment : studying people who report that they 're still in love after 10 to 25 years of marriage .
so , this is the short story of that research .
in the jungles of guatemala , in tikal , stands a temple .
it was built by the grandest sun king , of the grandest city-state , of the grandest civilization of the americas , the mayas .
his name was jasaw chan k 'awiil .
he stood over six feet tall .
he lived into his 80s , and he was buried beneath this monument in 720 ad .
and mayan inscriptions proclaim that he was deeply in love with his wife .
so , he built a temple in her honor , facing his .
and every spring and autumn , exactly at the equinox , the sun rises behind his temple , and perfectly bathes her temple with his shadow .
and as the sun sets behind her temple in the afternoon , it perfectly bathes his temple with her shadow .
after 1,300 years , these two lovers still touch and kiss from their tomb .
around the world , people love .
they sing for love , they dance for love , they compose poems and stories about love .
they tell myths and legends about love .
they pine for love , they live for love , they kill for love , and they die for love .
as walt whitman once said , he said , " oh , i would stake all for you . "
anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies .
they 've never found a society that did not have it .
but love is n't always a happy experience .
in one study of college students , they asked a lot of questions about love , but the two that stood out to me the most were , " have you ever been rejected by somebody who you really loved ? "
and the second question was , " have you ever dumped somebody who really loved you ? "
and almost 95 percent of both men and women said yes to both .
almost nobody gets out of love alive .
so , before i start telling you about the brain , i want to read for you what i think is the most powerful love poem on earth .
there 's other love poems that are , of course , just as good , but i do n't think this one can be surpassed .
it was told by an anonymous kwakiutl indian of southern alaska to a missionary in 1896 , and here it is .
i 've never had the opportunity to say it before .
" fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you .
pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you .
pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you , consumed by fire with my love for you .
i remember what you said to me .
i am thinking of your love for me .
i am torn by your love for me .
pain and more pain - where are you going with my love ?
i am told you will go from here .
i am told you will leave me here .
my body is numb with grief .
remember what i said , my love .
goodbye , my love , goodbye . "
emily dickinson once wrote , " parting is all we need to know of hell . "
how many people have suffered in all the millions of years of human evolution ?
how many people around the world are dancing with elation at this very minute ?
romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on earth .
so , several years ago , i decided to look into the brain and study this madness .
our first study of people who were happily in love has been widely publicized , so i 'm only going to say a very little about it .
we found activity in a tiny , little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area .
we found activity in some cells called the a10 cells , cells that actually make dopamine , a natural stimulant , and spray it to many brain regions .
indeed , this part , the vta , is part of the brain 's reward system .
it 's way below your cognitive thinking process .
it 's below your emotions .
it 's part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain , associated with wanting , with motivation , with focus and with craving .
in fact , the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine .
but romantic love is much more than a cocaine high - at least you come down from cocaine .
romantic love is an obsession . it possesses you .
you lose your sense of self .
you ca n't stop thinking about another human being .
somebody is camping in your head .
as an eighth-century japanese poet said , " my longing had no time when it ceases . "
wild is love .
and the obsession can get worse when you 've been rejected .
so , right now , lucy brown and i , the neuroscientist on our project , are looking at the data of the people who were put into the machine after they had just been dumped .
it was very difficult actually , putting these people in the machine , because they were in such bad shape .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so anyway , we found activity in three brain regions .
we found activity in the brain region , in exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love .
what a bad deal .
you know , when you 've been dumped , the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being , and then go on with your life - but no , you just love them harder .
as the poet terence , the roman poet once said , he said , " the less my hope , the hotter my love . "
and indeed , we now know why .
two thousand years later , we can explain this in the brain .
that brain system - the reward system for wanting , for motivation , for craving , for focus - becomes more active when you ca n't get what you want .
in this case , life 's greatest prize : an appropriate mating partner .
we found activity in other brain regions also - in a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses .
you know , you 're lying there , you 're looking at the picture , and you 're in this machine , and you 're calculating , you know , what went wrong .
how , you know , what have i lost ?
as a matter of fact , lucy and i have a little joke about this .
it comes from a david mamet play , and there 's two con artists in the play , and the woman is conning the man , and the man looks at the woman and says , " oh , you 're a bad pony , i 'm not going to bet on you . "
and indeed , it 's this part of the brain , the core of the nucleus accumbens , actually , that is becoming active as you 're measuring your gains and losses .
it 's also the brain region that becomes active when you 're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses .
last but not least , we found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual .
no wonder people suffer around the world , and we have so many crimes of passion .
when you 've been rejected in love , not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love , but you 're feeling deep attachment to this individual .
moreover , this brain circuit for reward is working , and you 're feeling intense energy , intense focus , intense motivation and the willingness to risk it all to win life 's greatest prize .
so , what have i learned from this experiment that i would like to tell the world ?
foremost , i have come to think that romantic love is a drive , a basic mating drive .
not the sex drive - the sex drive gets you out there , looking for a whole range of partners .
romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time , conserve your mating energy , and start the mating process with this single individual .
i think of all the poetry that i 've read about romantic love , what sums it up best is something that is said by plato , over 2,000 years ago .
he said , " the god of love lives in a state of need .
it is a need . it is an urge .
it is a homeostatic imbalance .
like hunger and thirst , it 's almost impossible to stamp out . "
i 've also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction : a perfectly wonderful addiction when it 's going well , and a perfectly horrible addiction when it 's going poorly .
and indeed , it has all of the characteristics of addiction .
you focus on the person , you obsessively think about them , you crave them , you distort reality , your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person .
and it 's got the three main characteristics of addiction : tolerance , you need to see them more , and more , and more ; withdrawals ; and last , relapse .
i 've got a girlfriend who 's just getting over a terrible love affair .
it 's been about eight months , she 's beginning to feel better .
and she was driving along in her car the other day , and suddenly she heard a song on the car radio that reminded her of this man .
and she - not only did the instant craving come back , but she had to pull over from the side of the road and cry .
so , one thing i would like the medical community , and the legal community , and even the college community , to see if they can understand , that indeed , romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on earth .
i would also like to tell the world that animals love .
there 's not an animal on this planet that will copulate with anything that comes along .
too old , too young , too scruffy , too stupid , and they wo n't do it .
unless you 're stuck in a laboratory cage - and you know , if you spend your entire life in a little box , you 're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with - but i 've looked in a hundred species , and everywhere in the wild , animals have favorites .
as a matter of fact ethologists know this .
there are over eight words for what they call " animal favoritism : " selective proceptivity , mate choice , female choice , sexual choice .
and indeed , there are now three academic articles in which they 've looked at this attraction , which may only last for a second , but it 's a definite attraction , and either this same brain region , this reward system , or the chemicals of that reward system are involved .
in fact , i think animal attraction can be instant - you can see an elephant instantly go for another elephant .
and i think that this is really the origin of what you and i call " love at first sight . "
people have often asked me whether what i know about love has spoiled it for me .
and i just simply say , " hardly . "
you can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake , and then when you sit down and eat that cake , you can still feel that joy .
and certainly , i make all the same mistakes that everybody else does too , but it 's really deepened my understanding and compassion , really , for all human life .
as a matter of fact , in new york , i often catch myself looking in baby carriages and feeling a little sorry for the tot .
and in fact , sometimes i feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate , when i think of how intense this brain system is .
our newest experiment has been hatched by my colleague , art aron - putting people who are reporting that they are still in love , in a long-term relationship , into the functional mri .
we 've put five people in so far , and indeed , we found exactly the same thing . they 're not lying .
the brain areas associated with intense romantic love still become active , 25 years later .
there are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love .
the question that i 'm working on right this minute - and i 'm only going to say it for a second , and then end - is , why do you fall in love with one person , rather than another ?
i never would have even thought to think of this , but match.com , the internet-dating site , came to me three years ago and asked me that question .
and i said , i do n't know .
i know what happens in the brain , when you do become in love , but i do n't know why you fall in love with one person rather than another .
and so , i 've spent the last three years on this .
and there are many reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another , that psychologists can tell you .
and we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background , the same general level of intelligence , the same general level of good looks , the same religious values .
your childhood certainly plays a role , but nobody knows how .
and that 's about it , that 's all they know .
no , they 've never found the way two personalities fit together to make a good relationship .
so , it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another .
and i have concocted a questionnaire to see to what degree you express dopamine , serotonin , estrogen and testosterone .
i think we 've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain .
and on this dating site that i have created , called chemistry.com , i ask you first a series of questions to see to what degree you express these chemicals , and i 'm watching who chooses who to love .
and 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in america .
about 600,000 people have taken it in 33 other countries .
i 'm putting the data together now , and at some point - there will always be magic to love , but i think i will come closer to understanding why it is you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background , your same general level of intelligence , your same general level of good looks , and you do n't feel pulled towards all of them .
i think there 's biology to that .
i think we 're going to end up , in the next few years , to understand all kinds of brain mechanisms that pull us to one person rather than another .
so , i will close with this . these are my older people .
faulkner once said , " the past is not dead , it 's not even the past . "
indeed , we carry a lot of luggage from our yesteryear in the human brain .
and so , there 's one thing that makes me pursue my understanding of human nature , and this reminds me of it .
these are two women .
women tend to get intimacy differently than men do .
women get intimacy from face-to-face talking .
we swivel towards each other , we do what we call the " anchoring gaze " and we talk .
this is intimacy to women .
i think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face , cajoling it , reprimanding it , educating it with words .
men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as soon as one guy looks up , the other guy will look away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think it comes from millions of years of standing behind that - sitting behind the bush , looking straight ahead , trying to hit that buffalo on the head with a rock .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think , for millions of years , men faced their enemies , they sat side by side with friends .
so my final statement is : love is in us .
it 's deeply embedded in the brain .
our challenge is to understand each other . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we invent .
my company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas .
and we do that for a couple of reasons .
we invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit .
the two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it is n't fun , you would n't have the time to do it .
so we do this fun and profit-oriented inventing for most of what we do , but we also have a program where we invent for humanity - where we take some of our best inventors , and we say , " are there problems where we have a good idea for solving a problem the world has ? " - and to solve it in the way we try to solve problems , which is with dramatic , crazy , out-of-the-box solutions .
bill gates is one of those smartest guys of ours that work on these problems and he also funds this work , so thank you .
so i 'm going to briefly discuss a couple of problems that we have and a couple of problems where we 've got some solutions underway .
vaccination is one of the key techniques in public health , a fantastic thing .
but in the developing world a lot of vaccines spoil before they 're administered , and that 's because they need to be kept cold .
almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures .
they go bad very quickly if you do n't , and if you do n't have stable power grid , this does n't happen , so kids die .
it 's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters ; it 's the fact that those kids do n't get vaccinated .
this is one of the ways that vaccines are carried : these are styrofoam chests . these are being carried by people , but they 're also put on the backs of pickup trucks .
we 've got a different solution .
now , one of these styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it .
and we thought , well , that 's not really good enough .
so we made this thing .
this lasts six months with no power ; absolutely zero power , because it loses less than a half a watt .
now , this is our second generations prototype .
the third generation prototype is , right now , in uganda being tested .
now , the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas : one is that this is similar to a cryogenic dewar , something you 'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in .
they have incredible insulation , so let 's put some incredible insulation here .
the other idea is kind of interesting , which is , you ca n't reach inside anymore .
because if you open it up and reach inside , you 'd let the heat in , the game would be over .
so the inside of this thing actually looks like a coke machine .
it vends out little individual vials .
so a simple idea , which we hope is going to change the way vaccines are distributed in africa and around the world .
we 'll move on to malaria .
malaria is one of the great public health problems .
esther duflo talked a little bit about this .
two hundred million people a year .
every 43 seconds a child in africa dies ; 27 will die during my talk .
and there 's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved .
another comment of esther 's was that we react when there 's a tragedy like haiti , but that tragedy is ongoing .
so what can we do about it ?
well , there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria .
you can spray ; the problem is there are environmental issues .
you can try to treat people and create awareness .
that 's great , except the places that have malaria really bad , they do n't have health care systems .
a vaccine would be a terrific thing , only they do n't work yet .
people have tried for a long time . there are a couple of interesting candidates .
it 's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for .
you can distribute bed nets , and bed nets are very effective if you use them .
you do n't always use them for that . people fish with them .
they do n't always get to everyone .
and bed nets have an effect on the epidemic , but you 're never going to make it extinct with bed nets .
now , malaria is an incredibly complicated disease .
we could spend hours going over this .
it 's got this sort of soap opera-like lifestyle ; they have sex , they burrow into your liver , they tunnel into your blood cells ...
it 's an incredibly complicated disease , but that 's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria : there 's a lot of potential ways in .
one of those ways might be better diagnosis .
so we hope this year to prototype each of these devices .
one does an automatic malaria diagnosis in the same way that a diabetic 's glucose meter works : you take a drop of blood , you put it in there and it automatically tells you .
today , you need to do a complicated laboratory procedure , create a bunch of microscope slides and have a trained person examine it .
the other thing is , you know , it would be even better if you did n't have to draw the blood .
and if you look through the eye , or you look at the vessels on the white of the eye , in fact , you may be able to do this directly , without drawing any blood at all , or through your nail beds .
because if you actually look through your fingernails , you can see blood vessels , and once you see blood vessels , we think we can see the malaria .
we can see it because of this molecule called hemozoin .
it 's produced by the malaria parasite and it 's a very interesting crystalline substance .
interesting , anyway , if you 're a solid-state physicist .
there 's a lot of cool stuff we can do with it .
this is our femtosecond laser lab .
so this creates pulses of light that last a femtosecond .
that 's really , really , really short .
this is a pulse of light that 's only about one wavelength of light long , so it 's a whole bunch of photons all coming and hitting simultaneously .
it creates a very high peak power and it lets you do all kinds of interesting things ; in particular , it lets you find hemozoin .
so here 's an image of red blood cells , and now we can actually map where the hemozoin and where the malaria parasites are inside those red blood cells .
and using both this technique and other optical techniques , we think we can make those diagnostics .
we also have another hemozoin-oriented therapy for malaria : a way , in acute cases , to actually take the malaria parasite and filter it out of the blood system .
sort of like doing dialysis , but for relieving the parasite load .
this is our thousand-core supercomputer .
we 're kind of software guys , and so nearly any problem that you pose , we like to try to solve with some software .
one of the problems that you have if you 're trying to eradicate malaria or reduce it is you do n't know what 's the most effective thing to do .
okay , we heard about bed nets earlier .
you spend a certain amount per bed net .
or you could spray .
you can give drug administration .
there 's all these different interventions but they have different kinds of effectiveness .
how can you tell ?
so we 've created , using our supercomputer , the world 's best computer model of malaria , which we 'll show you now .
we picked madagascar .
we have every road , every village , every , almost , square inch of madagascar .
we have all of the precipitation data and the temperature data .
that 's very important because the humidity and precipitation tell you whether you 've got standing pools of water for the mosquitoes to breed .
so that sets the stage on which you do this .
you then have to introduce the mosquitoes , and you have to model that and how they come and go .
ultimately , it gives you this .
this is malaria spreading across madagascar .
and this is this latter part of the rainy season .
we 're going to the dry season now .
it nearly goes away in the dry season , because there 's no place for the mosquitoes to breed .
and then , of course , the next year it comes roaring back .
by doing these kinds of simulations , we want to eradicate or control malaria thousands of times in software before we actually have to do it in real life ; to be able to simulate both the economic trade-offs - how many bed nets versus how much spraying ? - or the social trade-offs - what happens if unrest breaks out ?
we also try to study our foe .
this is a high-speed camera view of a mosquito .
and , in a moment , we 're going to see a view of the airflow .
here , we 're trying to visualize the airflow around the wings of the mosquito with little particles we 're illuminating with a laser .
by understanding how mosquitoes fly , we hope to understand how to make them not fly .
now , one of the ways you can make them not fly is with ddt .
this is a real ad .
this is one of those things you just ca n't make up .
once upon a time , this was the primary technique , and , in fact , many countries got rid of malaria through ddt .
the united states did .
in 1935 , there were 150,000 cases a year of malaria in the united states , but ddt and a massive public health effort managed to squelch it .
so we thought , " well , we 've done all these things that are focused on the plasmodium , the parasite involved .
what can we do to the mosquito ?
well , let 's try to kill it with consumer electronics . "
now , that sounds silly , but each of these devices has something interesting in it that maybe you could use .
your blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser .
your laser printer has a mirror galvanometer that 's used to steer a laser beam very accurately ; that 's what makes those little dots on the page .
and , of course , there 's signal processing and digital cameras .
so what if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , in our company , this is what we call " the pinky-suck moment . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what if we could do that ?
now , just suspend disbelief for a moment , and let 's think of what could happen if we could do that .
well , we could protect very high-value targets like clinics .
clinics are full of people that have malaria .
they 're sick , and so they 're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes .
you really want to protect them .
of course , if you do that , you could also protect your backyard .
and farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to whole foods because our photons are 100 percent organic . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they 're completely natural .
now , it actually gets better than this .
you could , if you 're really smart , you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it , and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size .
and then you could decide : " is this an insect i want to kill , or an insect i do n't want to kill ? "
moore 's law made computing cheap ; so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , it turns out we only kill the female mosquitoes .
they 're the only ones that are dangerous .
mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs .
mosquitoes actually live ... their day-to-day nutrition comes from nectar , from flowers - in fact , in the lab , we feed ours raisins - but the female needs the blood meal .
so , this sounds really crazy , right ?
would you like to see it ?
audience : yeah !
nathan myhrvold : okay , so our legal department prepared a disclaimer , and here it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , after thinking about this a little bit we thought , you know , it probably would be simpler to do this with a nonlethal laser .
so , eric johanson , who built the device , actually , with parts from ebay ; and pablos holman over here , he 's got mosquitoes in the tank .
we have the device over here .
and we 're going to show you , instead of the kill laser , which will be a very brief , instantaneous pulse , we 're going to have a green laser pointer that 's going to stay on the mosquito for , actually , quite a long period of time ; otherwise , you ca n't see it very well .
take it away eric .
eric johanson : what we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage .
and we have ... this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around .
and pablos , if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around .
now , that 's a fairly straightforward image processing routine , and let me show you how it works .
here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they 're flying around , which is kind of fun .
next we can actually light them up with a laser . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this is a low powered laser , and we can actually pick up a wing-beat frequency .
so you may be able to hear some mosquitoes flying around .
nm : that 's a mosquito wing beat you 're hearing .
ej : finally , let 's see what this looks like .
there you can see mosquitoes as they fly around , being lit up .
this is slowed way down so that you have an opportunity to see what 's happening .
here we have it running at high-speed mode .
so this system that was built for ted is here to illustrate that it is technically possible to actually deploy a system like this , and we 're looking very hard at how to make it highly cost-effective to use in places like africa and other parts of the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- nm : so it would n't be any fun to show you that without showing you what actually happens when we hit ' em .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is very satisfying .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is one of the first ones we did .
the energy 's a little bit high here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 'll loop around here in just a second , and you 'll see another one .
here 's another one . bang .
an interesting thing is , we kill them all the time ; we 've never actually gotten the wings to shut off in midair .
the wing motor is very resilient .
i mean , here we 're blowing wings off but the wing motor keeps all the way down .
so , that 's what i have . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- take a look at this picture .
it poses a very fascinating puzzle for us .
these african students are doing their homework under streetlights at the airport in the capital city because they do n't have any electricity at home .
now , i have n't met these particular students , but i 've met students like them .
let 's just pick one - for example , the one in the green shirt .
let 's give him a name , too : nelson .
i 'll bet nelson has a cellphone .
so here is the puzzle .
why is it that nelson has access to a cutting-edge technology , like the cellphone , but does n't have access to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home ?
now , in a word , the answer is " rules . "
bad rules can prevent the kind of win-win solution that 's available when people can bring new technologies in and make them available to someone like nelson .
what kinds of rules ?
the electric company in this nation operates under a rule , which says that it has to sell electricity at a very low , subsidized price - in fact , a price that is so low it loses money on every unit that it sells .
so it has neither the resources , nor the incentives , to hook up many other users .
the president wanted to change this rule .
he 's seen that it 's possible to have a different set of rules , rules where businesses earn a small profit , so they have an incentive to sign up more customers .
that 's the kind of rules that the cellphone company that nelson purchases his telephony from operates under .
the president has seen how those rules worked well .
so he tried to change the rules for pricing on electricity , but ran into a firestorm of protest from businesses and consumers who wanted to preserve the existing subsidized rates .
so he was stuck with rules that prevented him from letting the win-win solution help his country .
and nelson is stuck studying under the streetlights .
the real challenge then , is to try to figure out how we can change rules .
are there some rules we can develop for changing rules ?
i want to argue that there is a general abstract insight that we can make practical , which is that , if we can give more choices to people , and more choices to leaders - who , in many countries , are also people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , it 's useful to present the opposition between these two .
because the kind of choice you might want to give to a leader , a choice like giving the president the choice to raise prices on electricity , takes away a choice that people in the economy want .
they want the choice to be able to continue consuming subsidized electric power .
so if you give just to one side or the other , you 'll have tension or friction .
but if we can find ways to give more choices to both , that will give us a set of rules for changing rules that get us out of traps .
now , nelson also has access to the internet .
and he says that if you want to see the damaging effects of rules , the ways that rules can keep people in the dark , look at the pictures from nasa of the earth at night .
in particular check out asia .
if you zoom in here , you can see north korea , in outline here , which is like a black hole compared to its neighbors .
now , you wo n't be surprised to learn that the rules in north korea keep people there in the dark .
but it is important to recognize that north korea and south korea started out with identical sets of rules in both the sense of laws and regulations , but also in the deeper senses of understandings , norms , culture , values and beliefs .
when they separated , they made choices that led to very divergent paths for their sets of rules .
so we can change - we as humans can change the rules that we use to interact with each other , for better , or for worse .
now let 's look at another region , the caribbean .
zoom in on haiti , in outline here .
haiti is also dark , compared to its neighbor here , the dominican republic , which has about the same number of residents .
both of these countries are dark compared to puerto rico , which has half as many residents as either haiti or the dominican republic .
what haiti warns us is that rules can be bad because governments are weak .
it 's not just that the rules are bad because the government is too strong and oppressive , as in north korea .
so that if we want to create environments with good rules , we ca n't just tear down .
we 've got to find ways to build up , as well .
now , china dramatically demonstrates both the potential and the challenges of working with rules .
back in the beginning of the data presented in this chart , china was the world 's high-technology leader .
chinese had pioneered technologies like steel , printing , gunpowder .
but the chinese never adopted , at least in that period , effective rules for encouraging the spread of those ideas - a profit motive that could have encouraged the spread .
and they soon adopted rules which slowed down innovation and cut china off from the rest of the world .
so as other countries in the world innovated , in the sense both of developing newer technologies , but also developing newer rules , the chinese were cut off from those advances .
income there stayed stagnant , as it zoomed ahead in the rest of the world .
this next chart looks at more recent data .
it plots income , average income in china as a percentage of average income in the united states .
in the ' 50s and ' 60s you can see that it was hovering at about three percent .
but then in the late ' 70s something changed .
growth took off in china . the chinese started catching up very quickly with the united states .
if you go back to the map at night , you can get a clue to the process that lead to the dramatic change in rules in china .
the brightest spot in china , which you can see on the edge of the outline here , is hong kong .
hong kong was a small bit of china that , for most of the 20th century , operated under a very different set of rules than the rest of mainland china - rules that were copied from working market economies of the time , and administered by the british .
in the 1950s , hong kong was a place where millions of people could go , from the mainland , to start in jobs like sewing shirts , making toys .
but , to get on a process of increasing income , increasing skills led to very rapid growth there .
hong kong was also the model which leaders like deng xiaoping could copy , when they decided to move all of the mainland towards the market model .
but deng xiaoping instinctively understood the importance of offering choices to his people .
so instead of forcing everyone in china to shift immediately to the market model , they proceeded by creating some special zones that could do , in a sense , what britain did : make the opportunity to go work with the market rules available to the people who wanted to opt in there .
so they created four special economic zones around hong kong : zones where chinese could come and work , and cities grew up very rapidly there ; also zones where foreign firms could come in and make things .
one of the zones next to hong kong has a city called shenzhen .
in that city there is a taiwanese firm that made the iphone that many of you have , and they made it with labor from chinese who moved there to shenzhen .
so after the four special zones , there were 14 coastal cites that were open in the same sense , and eventually demonstrated successes in these places that people could opt in to , that they flocked to because of the advantages they offered .
demonstrated successes there led to a consensus for a move toward the market model for the entire economy .
now the chinese example shows us several points .
one is : preserve choices for people .
two : operate on the right scale .
if you try to change the rules in a village , you could do that , but a village would be too small to get the kinds of benefits you can get if you have millions of people all working under good rules .
on the other hand , the nation is too big .
if you try to change the rules in the nation , you ca n't give some people a chance to hold back , see how things turn out , and let others zoom ahead and try the new rules .
but cities give you this opportunity to create new places , with new rules that people can opt in to .
and they 're large enough to get all of the benefits that we can have when millions of us work together under good rules .
so the proposal is that we conceive of something called a charter city .
we start with a charter that specifies all the rules required to attract the people who we 'll need to build the city .
we 'll need to attract the investors who will build out the infrastructure - the power system , the roads , the port , the airport , the buildings .
you 'll need to attract firms , who will come hire the people who move there first .
and you 'll need to attract families , the residents who will come and live there permanently , raise their children , get an education for their children , and get their first job .
with that charter , people will move there .
the city can be built .
and we can scale this model .
we can go do it over and over again .
to make it work , we need good rules . we 've already discussed that .
those are captured in the charter .
we also need the choices for people .
that 's really built into the model if we allow for the possibility of building cities on uninhabited land .
you start from uninhabited territory .
people can come live under the new charter , but no one is forced to live under it .
the final thing we need are choices for leaders .
and , to achieve the kind of choices we want for leaders we need to allow for the potential for partnerships between nations : cases where nations work together , in effect , de facto , the way china and britain worked together to build , first a little enclave of the market model , and then scale it throughout china .
in a sense , britain , inadvertently , through its actions in hong kong , did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we 've undertaken in the last century .
so if we allow for these kind of partnerships to replicate this again , we can get those kinds of benefits scaled throughout the world .
in some cases this will involve a delegation of responsibility , a delegation of control from one country to another to take over certain kinds of administrative responsibilities .
now , when i say that , some of you are starting to think , " well , is this just bringing back colonialism ? "
it 's not . but it 's important to recognize that the kind of emotions that come up when we start to think about these things , can get in the way , can make us pull back , can shut down our ability , and our interest in trying to explore new ideas .
why is this not like colonialism ?
the thing that was bad about colonialism , and the thing which is residually bad in some of our aid programs , is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension .
this model is all about choices , both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places .
and , choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension .
so let 's talk about how this could play out in practice .
let 's take a particular leader , raul castro , who is the leader of cuba .
it must have occurred to castro that he has the chance to do for cuba what deng xiaoping did for china , but he does n't have a hong kong there on the island in cuba .
he does , though , have a little bit of light down in the south that has a very special status .
there is a zone there , around guantanamo bay , where a treaty gives the united states administrative responsibility for a piece of land that 's about twice the size of manhattan .
castro goes to the prime minister of canada and says , " look , the yankees have a terrible pr problem .
they want to get out .
why do n't you , canada , take over ?
build - run a special administrative zone .
allow a new city to be built up there .
allow many people to come in .
let us have a hong kong nearby .
some of my citizens will move into that city as well .
others will hold back . but this will be the gateway that will connect the modern economy and the modern world to my country . "
now , where else might this model be tried ?
well , africa . i 've talked with leaders in africa .
many of them totally get the notion of a special zone that people can opt into as a rule .
it 's a rule for changing rules .
it 's a way to create new rules , and let people opt-in without coercion , and the opposition that coercion can force .
they also totally get the idea that in some instances they can make more credible promises to long-term investors - the kind of investors who will come build the port , build the roads , in a new city - they can make more credible promises if they do it along with a partner nation .
perhaps even in some arrangement that 's a little bit like an escrow account , where you put land in the escrow account and the partner nation takes responsibility for it .
there is also lots of land in africa where new cities could be built .
this is a picture i took when i was flying along the coast .
there are immense stretches of land like this - land where hundreds of millions of people could live .
now , if we generalize this and think about not just one or two charter cites , but dozens - cities that will help create places for the many hundreds of millions , perhaps billions of people who will move to cities in the coming century - is there enough land for them ?
well , throughout the world , if we look at the lights at night , the one thing that 's misleading is that , visually , it looks like most of the world is already built out .
so let me show you why that 's wrong .
take this representation of all of the land .
turn it into a square that stands for all the arable land on earth .
and let these dots represent the land that 's already taken up by the cities that three billion people now live in .
if you move the dots down to the bottom of the rectangle you can see that the cities for the existing three billion urban residents take up only three percent of the arable land on earth .
so if we wanted to build cities for another billion people , they would be dots like this .
we 'd go from three percent of the arable land , to four percent .
we 'd dramatically reduce the human footprint on earth by building more cities that people can move to .
and if these are cities governed by good rules , they can be cities where people are safe from crime , safe from disease and bad sanitation , where people have a chance to get a job .
they can get basic utilities like electricity .
their kids can get an education .
so what will it take to get started building the first charter cities , scaling this so we build many more ?
it would help to have a manual .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what university professors could do is write some details that might go into this manual .
you would n't want to let us run the cities , go out and design them .
you would n't let academics out in the wild . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but , you could set us to work thinking about questions like , suppose it is n't just canada that does the deal with raul castro .
perhaps brazil comes in as a participant , and spain as well . and perhaps cuba wants to be one of the partners in a four-way joint venture .
how would we write the treaty to do that ?
there is less precedent for that , but that could easily be worked out .
how would we finance this ?
turns out singapore and hong kong are cities that made huge gains on the value of the land that they owned when they got started .
you could use the gains on the value of the land to pay for things like the police , the courts , but the school system and the health care system too , which make this a more attractive place to live , makes this a place where people have higher incomes - which , incidentally , makes the land more valuable .
so the incentives for the people helping to construct this zone and build it , and set up the basic rules , go very much in the right direction .
so there are many other details like this .
how could we have buildings that are low cost and affordable for people who work in a first job , assembling something like an iphone , but make those buildings energy efficient , and make sure that they are safe , so they do n't fall down in an earthquake or a hurricane .
many technical details to be worked out , but those of us who are already starting to pursue these things can already tell that there is no roadblock , there 's no impediment , other than a failure of imagination , that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win-win solution .
let me conclude with this picture .
the reason we can be so well off , even though there is so many people on earth , is because of the power of ideas .
we can share ideas with other people , and when they discover them , they share with us .
it 's not like scarce objects , where sharing means we each get less .
when we share ideas we all get more .
when we think about ideas in that way , we usually think about technologies .
but there is another class of ideas : the rules that govern how we interact with each other ; rules like , let 's have a tax system that supports a research university that gives away certain kinds of knowledge for free .
let 's have a system where we have ownership of land that is registered in a government office , that people can pledge as collateral .
if we can keep innovating on our space of rules , and particularly innovate in the sense of coming up with rules for changing rules , so we do n't get stuck with bad rules , then we can keep moving progress forward and truly make the world a better place , so that people like nelson and his friends do n't have to study any longer under the streetlights . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- einstein said that " i never think about the future - it comes soon enough . "
and he was right , of course .
so today , i 'm here to ask you to think of how the future is happening now .
over the past 200 years , the world has experienced two major waves of innovation .
first , the industrial revolution brought us machines and factories , railways , electricity , air travel , and our lives have never been the same .
then the internet revolution brought us computing power , data networks , unprecedented access to information and communication , and our lives have never been the same .
now we are experiencing another metamorphic change : the industrial internet .
it brings together intelligent machines , advanced analytics , and the creativity of people at work .
it 's the marriage of minds and machines .
and our lives will never be the same .
in my current role , i see up close how technology is beginning to transform industrial sectors that play a huge role in our economy and in our lives : energy , aviation , transportation , health care .
for an economist , this is highly unusual , and it 's extremely exciting , because this is a transformation as powerful as the industrial revolution and more , and before the industrial revolution , there was no economic growth to speak of .
so what is this industrial internet ?
industrial machines are being equipped with a growing number of electronic sensors that allow them to see , hear , feel a lot more than ever before , generating prodigious amounts of data .
increasingly sophisticated analytics then sift through the data , providing insights that allow us to operate the machines in entirely new ways , a lot more efficiently .
and not just individual machines , but fleets of locomotives , airplanes , entire systems like power grids , hospitals .
it is asset optimization and system optimization .
of course , electronic sensors have been around for some time , but something has changed : a sharp decline in the cost of sensors and , thanks to advances in cloud computing , a rapid decrease in the cost of storing and processing data .
so we are moving to a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent ; they are brilliant .
they are self-aware , they are predictive , reactive and social .
it 's jet engines , locomotives , gas turbines , medical devices , communicating seamlessly with each other and with us .
it 's a world where information itself becomes intelligent and comes to us automatically when we need it without having to look for it .
we are beginning to deploy throughout the industrial system embedded virtualization , multi-core processor technology , advanced cloud-based communications , a new software-defined machine infrastructure which allows machine functionality to become virtualized in software , decoupling machine software from hardware , and allowing us to remotely and automatically monitor , manage and upgrade industrial assets .
why does any of this matter at all ?
well first of all , it 's already allowing us to shift towards preventive , condition-based maintenance , which means fixing machines just before they break , without wasting time servicing them on a fixed schedule .
and this , in turn , is pushing us towards zero unplanned downtime , which means there will be no more power outages , no more flight delays .
so let me give you a few examples of how these brilliant machines work , and some of the examples may seem trivial , some are clearly more profound , but all of them are going to have a very powerful impact .
let 's start with aviation .
today , 10 percent of all flights cancellations and delays are due to unscheduled maintenance events .
something goes wrong unexpectedly .
this results in eight billion dollars in costs for the airline industry globally every year , not to mention the impact on all of us : stress , inconvenience , missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal .
so how can the industrial internet help here ?
we 've developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft .
it 's self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss .
the aircraft , while in flight , will communicate with technicians on the ground .
by the time it lands , they will already know if anything needs to be serviced .
just in the u.s. , a system like this can prevent over 60,000 delays and cancellations every year , helping seven million passengers get to their destinations on time .
or take healthcare .
today , nurses spend an average of 21 minutes per shift looking for medical equipment .
that seems trivial , but it 's less time spent caring for patients .
st. luke 's medical center in houston , texas , which has deployed industrial internet technology to electronically monitor and connect patients , staff and medical equipment , has reduced bed turnaround times by nearly one hour .
if you need surgery , one hour matters .
it means more patients can be treated , more lives can be saved .
another medical center , in washington state , is piloting an application that allows medical images from city scanners and mris to be analyzed in the cloud , developing better analytics at a lower cost .
imagine a patient who has suffered a severe trauma , and needs the attention of several specialists : a neurologist , a cardiologist , an orthopedic surgeon .
if all of them can have instantaneous and simultaneous access to scans and images as they are taken , they will be able to deliver better healthcare faster .
so all of this translates into better health outcomes , but it can also deliver substantial economic benefits .
just a one-percent reduction in existing inefficiencies could yield savings of over 60 billion dollars to the healthcare industry worldwide , and that is just a drop in the sea compared to what we need to do to make healthcare affordable on a sustainable basis .
similar advances are happening in energy , including renewable energy .
wind farms equipped with new remote monitorings and diagnostics that allow wind turbines to talk to each other and adjust the pitch of their blades in a coordinated way , depending on how the wind is blowing , can now produce electricity at a cost of less than five cents per kilowatt / hour .
ten years ago , that cost was 30 cents , six times as much .
the list goes on , and it will grow fast , because industrial data are now growing exponentially .
by 2020 , they will account for over 50 percent of all digital information .
but this is not just about data , so let me switch gears and tell you how this is impacting already the jobs we do every day , because this new wave of innovation is bringing about new tools and applications that will allow us to collaborate in a smarter and faster way , making our jobs not just more efficient but more rewarding .
imagine a field engineer arriving at the wind farm with a handheld device telling her which turbines need servicing .
she already has all the spare parts , because the problems were diagnosed in advanced .
and if she faces an unexpected issue , the same handheld device will allow her to communicate with colleagues at the service center , let them see what she sees , transmit data that they can run through diagnostics , and they can stream videos that will guide her , step by step , through whatever complex procedure is needed to get the machines back up and running .
and their interaction gets documented and stored in a searchable database .
let 's stop and think about this for a minute , because this is a very important point .
this new wave of innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work .
and i know that many of you will be concerned about the impact that innovation might have on jobs .
unemployment is already high , and there is always a fear that innovation will destroy jobs .
and innovation is disruptive .
but let me stress two things here .
first , we 've already lived through mechanization of agriculture , automation of industry , and employment has gone up , because innovation is fundamentally about growth .
it makes products more affordable .
it creates new demand , new jobs .
second , there is a concern that in the future , there will only be room for engineers , data scientists , and other highly-specialized workers .
and believe me , as an economist , i am also scared .
but think about it : just as a child can easily figure out how to operate an ipad , so a new generation of mobile and intuitive industrial applications will make life easier for workers of all skill levels .
the worker of the future will be more like iron man than the charlie chaplin of " modern times . "
and to be sure , new high-skilled jobs will be created : mechanical digital engineers who understand both the machines and the data ; managers who understand their industry and the analytics and can reorganize the business to take full advantage of the technology .
but now let 's take a step back .
let 's look at the big picture .
there are people who argue that today 's innovation is all about social media and silly games , with nowhere near the transformational power of the industrial revolution .
they say that all the growth-enhancing innovations are behind us .
and every time i hear this , i ca n't help thinking that even back in the stone age , there must have been a group of cavemen sitting around a fire one day looking very grumpy , and looking disapprovingly at another group of cavemen rolling a stone wheel up and down a hill , and saying to each other , " yeah , this wheel thing , cool toy , sure , but compared to fire , it will have no impact .
the big discoveries are all behind us . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this technological revolution is as inspiring and transformational as anything we have ever seen .
human creativity and innovation have always propelled us forward .
they 've created jobs .
they 've raised living standards .
they 've made our lives healthier and more rewarding .
and the new wave of innovation which is beginning to sweep through industry is no different .
in the u.s. alone , the industrial internet could raise average income by 25 to 40 percent over the next 15 years , boosting growth to rates we have n't seen in a long time , and adding between 10 and 15 trillion dollars to global gdp .
that is the size of the entire u.s. economy today .
but this is not a foregone conclusion .
we are just at the beginning of this transformation , and there will be barriers to break , obstacles to overcome .
we will need to invest in the new technologies .
we will need to adapt organizations and managerial practices .
we will need a robust cybersecurity approach that protects sensitive information and intellectual property and safeguards critical infrastructure from cyberattacks .
and the education system will need to evolve to ensure students are equipped with the right skills .
it 's not going to be easy , but it is going to be worth it .
the economic challenges facing us are hard , but when i walk the factory floor , and i see how humans and brilliant machines are becoming interconnected , and i see the difference this makes in a hospital , in an airport , in a power generation plant , i 'm not just optimistic , i 'm enthusiastic .
this new technological revolution is upon us .
so think about the future - it will be here soon enough .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about the strategizing brain .
we 're going to use an unusual combination of tools from game theory and neuroscience to understand how people interact socially when value is on the line .
so game theory is a branch of , originally , applied mathematics , used mostly in economics and political science , a little bit in biology , that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone 's actions affect everyone else .
that 's a lot of things : competition , cooperation , bargaining , games like hide-and-seek , and poker .
here 's a simple game to get us started .
everyone chooses a number from zero to 100 , we 're going to compute the average of those numbers , and whoever 's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize .
so you want to be a little bit below the average number , but not too far below , and everyone else wants to be a little bit below the average number as well .
think about what you might pick .
as you 're thinking , this is a toy model of something like selling in the stock market during a rising market . right ?
you do n't want to sell too early , because you miss out on profits , but you do n't want to wait too late to when everyone else sells , triggering a crash .
you want to be a little bit ahead of the competition , but not too far ahead .
okay , here 's two theories about how people might think about this , and then we 'll see some data .
some of these will sound familiar because you probably are thinking that way . i 'm using my brain theory to see .
a lot of people say , " i really do n't know what people are going to pick , so i think the average will be 50 . "
they 're not being really strategic at all .
" and i 'll pick two-thirds of 50 . that 's 33 . " that 's a start .
using more working memory , say , " i think people will pick 33 because they 're going to pick a response to 50 , and so i 'll pick 22 , which is two-thirds of 33 . "
they 're doing one extra step of thinking , two steps .
that 's better . and of course , in principle , you could do three , four or more , but it starts to get very difficult .
just like in language and other domains , we know that it 's hard for people to parse very complex sentences with a kind of recursive structure .
this is called a cognitive hierarchy theory , by the way .
it 's something that i 've worked on and a few other people , and it indicates a kind of hierarchy along with some assumptions about how many people stop at different steps and how the steps of thinking are affected a very different theory , a much more popular one , and an older one , due largely to john nash of " a beautiful mind " fame , is what 's called equilibrium analysis .
so if you 've ever taken a game theory course at any level , you will have learned a little bit about this .
an equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do .
it is a very useful concept , but behaviorally , it may not exactly explain what people do the first time they play these types of economic games or in situations in the outside world .
in this case , the equilibrium makes a very bold prediction , which is everyone wants to be below everyone else , therefore they 'll play zero .
let 's see what happens . this experiment 's been done many , many times .
some of the earliest ones were done in the ' 90s by me and rosemarie nagel and others .
this is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest .
the contest said , send in your numbers and whoever is close to two-thirds of the average will win a big prize .
and as you can see , there 's so much data here , you can see the spikes very visibly .
there 's a spike at 33 . those are people doing one step .
there is another spike visible at 22 .
and notice , by the way , that most people pick numbers right around there .
they do n't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22 .
there 's something a little bit noisy around it .
but you can see those spikes , and they 're there .
there 's another group of people who seem to have a firm grip on equilibrium analysis , because they 're picking zero or one .
but they lose , right ?
because picking a number that low is actually a bad choice if other people are n't doing equilibrium analysis as well .
so they 're smart , but poor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- where are these things happening in the brain ?
one study by coricelli and nagel gives a really sharp , interesting answer .
so they had people play this game while they were being scanned in an fmri , and two conditions : in some trials , they 're told you 're playing another person who 's playing right now and we 're going to match up your behavior at the end and pay you if you win .
in the other trials , they 're told , you 're playing a computer .
they 're just choosing randomly .
so what you see here is a subtraction of areas in which there 's more brain activity when you 're playing people compared to playing the computer .
and you see activity in some regions we 've seen today , medial prefrontal cortex , dorsomedial , however , up here , ventromedial prefrontal cortex , anterior cingulate , an area that 's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution , like if you 're playing " simon says , " and also the right and left temporoparietal junction .
and these are all areas which are fairly reliably known to be part of what 's called a " theory of mind " circuit , or " mentalizing circuit . "
that is , it 's a circuit that 's used to imagine what other people might do .
so these were some of the first studies to see this tied in to game theory .
what happens with these one- and two-step types ?
so we classify people by what they picked , and then we look at the difference between playing humans versus playing computers , which brain areas are differentially active .
on the top you see the one-step players .
there 's almost no difference .
the reason is , they 're treating other people like a computer , and the brain is too .
the bottom players , you see all the activity in dorsomedial pfc .
so we know that those two-step players are doing something differently .
now if you were to step back and say , " what can we do with this information ? "
you might be able to look at brain activity and say , " this person 's going to be a good poker player , " or , " this person 's socially naive , " and we might also be able to study things like development of adolescent brains once we have an idea of where this circuitry exists .
okay . get ready .
i 'm saving you some brain activity , because you do n't need to use your hair detector cells .
you should use those cells to think carefully about this game .
this is a bargaining game .
two players who are being scanned using eeg electrodes are going to bargain over one to six dollars .
if they can do it in 10 seconds , they 're going to actually earn that money .
if 10 seconds goes by and they have n't made a deal , they get nothing .
that 's kind of a mistake together .
the twist is that one player , on the left , is informed about how much on each trial there is .
they play lots of trials with different amounts each time .
in this case , they know there 's four dollars .
the uninformed player does n't know , but they know that the informed player knows .
so the uninformed player 's challenge is to say , " is this guy really being fair or are they giving me a very low offer in order to get me to think that there 's only one or two dollars available to split ? "
in which case they might reject it and not come to a deal .
so there 's some tension here between trying to get the most money but trying to goad the other player into giving you more .
and the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars , and they 're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets , and the informed player 's going to get the rest .
so this is like a management-labor negotiation in which the workers do n't know how much profits the privately held company has , right , and they want to maybe hold out for more money , but the company might want to create the impression that there 's very little to split : " i 'm giving you the most that i can . "
first some behavior . so a bunch of the subject pairs , they play face to face .
we have some other data where they play across computers .
that 's an interesting difference , as you might imagine .
but a bunch of the face-to-face pairs agree to divide the money evenly every single time .
boring . it 's just not interesting neurally .
it 's good for them . they make a lot of money .
but we 're interested in , can we say something about when disagreements occur versus do n't occur ?
so this is the other group of subjects who often disagree .
so they have a chance of - they bicker and disagree and end up with less money .
they might be eligible to be on " real housewives , " the tv show .
you see on the left , when the amount to divide is one , two or three dollars , they disagree about half the time , and when the amount is four , five , six , they agree quite often .
this turns out to be something that 's predicted by a very complicated type of game theory you should come to graduate school at caltech and learn about .
it 's a little too complicated to explain right now , but the theory tells you that this shape kind of should occur .
your intuition might tell you that too .
now i 'm going to show you the results from the eeg recording .
very complicated . the right brain schematic is the uninformed person , and the left is the informed .
remember that we scanned both brains at the same time , so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously , just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you 'd expect common activity in language regions when they 're actually kind of listening and communicating .
so the arrows connect regions that are active at the same time , and the direction of the arrows flows from the region that 's active first in time , and the arrowhead goes to the region that 's active later .
so in this case , if you look carefully , most of the arrows flow from right to left .
that is , it looks as if the uninformed brain activity is happening first , and then it 's followed by activity in the informed brain .
and by the way , these were trials where their deals were made .
this is from the first two seconds .
we have n't finished analyzing this data , so we 're still peeking in , but the hope is that we can say something in the first couple of seconds about whether they 'll make a deal or not , which could be very useful in thinking about avoiding litigation and ugly divorces and things like that .
those are all cases in which a lot of value is lost by delay and strikes .
here 's the case where the disagreements occur .
you can see it looks different than the one before .
there 's a lot more arrows .
that means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity , and the arrows flow clearly from left to right .
that is , the informed brain seems to be deciding , " we 're probably not going to make a deal here . "
and then later there 's activity in the uninformed brain .
next i 'm going to introduce you to some relatives .
they 're hairy , smelly , fast and strong .
you might be thinking back to your last thanksgiving .
maybe if you had a chimpanzee with you .
charles darwin and i and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago .
they 're still our closest genetic kin .
we share 98.8 percent of the genes .
we share more genes with them than zebras do with horses .
and we 're also their closest cousin .
they have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas .
so how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution .
so this is an amazing memory test from nagoya , japan , primate research institute , where they 've done a lot of this research .
this goes back quite a ways . they 're interested in working memory .
the chimp is going to see , watch carefully , they 're going to see 200 milliseconds ' exposure - that 's fast , that 's eight movie frames - of numbers one , two , three , four , five .
then they disappear and they 're replaced by squares , and they have to press the squares that correspond to the numbers from low to high to get an apple reward .
let 's see how they can do it .
this is a young chimp . the young ones are better than the old ones , just like humans .
and they 're highly experienced , so they 've done this thousands and thousands of time .
obviously there 's a big training effect , as you can imagine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can see they 're very blasé and kind of effortless .
not only can they do it very well , they do it in a sort of lazy way .
right ? who thinks you could beat the chimps ?
wrong . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we can try . we 'll try . maybe we 'll try .
okay , so the next part of this study i 'm going to go quickly through is based on an idea of tetsuro matsuzawa .
he had a bold idea that - what he called the cognitive trade-off hypothesis .
we know chimps are faster and stronger .
they 're also very obsessed with status .
his thought was , maybe they 've preserved brain activities and they practice them in development to negotiate status and to win , which is something like strategic thinking during competition .
so we 're going to check that out by having the chimps actually play a game by touching two touch screens .
the chimps are actually interacting with each other through the computers .
they 're going to press left or right .
one chimp is called a matcher .
they win if they press left , left , like a seeker finding someone in hide-and-seek , or right , right .
the mismatcher wants to mismatch .
they want to press the opposite screen of the chimp .
and the rewards are apple cube rewards .
so here 's how game theorists look at these data .
this is a graph of the percentage of times the matcher picked right on the x-axis , and the percentage of times they predicted right by the mismatcher on the y-axis .
so a point here is the behavior by a pair of players , one trying to match , one trying to mismatch .
the ne square in the middle - actually ne , ch and qre - those are three different theories of nash equilibrium , and others , tells you what the theory predicts , which is that they should match 50-50 , because if you play left too much , for example , i can exploit that if i 'm the mismatcher by then playing right .
and as you can see , the chimps , each chimp is one triangle , are circled around , hovering around that prediction .
now we move the payoffs .
we 're actually going to make the left , left payoff for the matcher a little bit higher .
now they get three apple cubes .
game theoretically , that should actually make the mismatcher 's behavior shift , because what happens is , the mismatcher will think , oh , this guy 's going to go for the big reward , and so i 'm going to go to the right , make sure he does n't get it .
and as you can see , their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the nash equilibrium .
finally , we changed the payoffs one more time .
now it 's four apple cubes , and their behavior again moves towards the nash equilibrium .
it 's sprinkled around , but if you average the chimps out , they 're really , really close , within .01 .
they 're actually closer than any species we 've observed .
what about humans ? you think you 're smarter than a chimpanzee ?
here 's two human groups in green and blue .
they 're closer to 50-50 . they 're not responding to payoffs as closely , and also if you study their learning in the game , they are n't as sensitive to previous rewards .
the chimps are playing better than the humans , better in the sense of adhering to game theory .
and these are two different groups of humans from japan and africa . they replicate quite nicely .
none of them are close to where the chimps are .
so here are some things we learned today .
people seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind .
we have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money , and chimps are better competitors than humans , as judged by game theory .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so a friend of mine who 's a political scientist , he told me several months ago exactly what this month would be like .
he said , you know , there 's this fiscal cliff coming , it 's going to come at the beginning of 2013 .
both parties absolutely need to resolve it , but neither party wants to be seen as the first to resolve it .
neither party has any incentive to solve it a second before it 's due , so he said , december , you 're just going to see lots of angry negotiations , negotiations breaking apart , reports of phone calls that are n't going well , people saying nothing 's happening at all , and then sometime around christmas or new year 's , we 're going to hear , " okay , they resolved everything . "
he told me that a few months ago . he said he 's 98 percent positive they 're going to resolve it , and i got an email from him today saying , all right , we 're basically on track , but now i 'm 80 percent positive that they 're going to resolve it .
and it made me think . i love studying these moments in american history when there was this frenzy of partisan anger , that the economy was on the verge of total collapse .
the most famous early battle was alexander hamilton and thomas jefferson over what the dollar would be and how it would be backed up , with alexander hamilton saying , " we need a central bank , the first bank of the united states , or else the dollar will have no value .
this economy wo n't work , " and thomas jefferson saying , " the people wo n't trust that .
they just fought off a king . they 're not going to accept some central authority . "
this battle defined the first 150 years of the u.s. economy , and at every moment , different partisans saying , " oh my god , the economy 's about to collapse , " and the rest of us just going about , spending our bucks on whatever it is we wanted to buy .
to give you a quick primer on where we are , a quick refresher on where we are .
so the fiscal cliff , i was told that that 's too partisan a thing to say , although i ca n't remember which party it 's supporting or attacking .
people say we should call it the fiscal slope , or we should call it an austerity crisis , but then other people say , no , that 's even more partisan .
so i just call it the self-imposed , self-destructive arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem .
and this is what the inevitable problem looks like .
so this is a projection of u.s. debt as a percentage of our overall economy , of gdp .
the light blue dotted line represents the congressional budget office 's best guess of what will happen if congress really does n't do anything , and as you can see , sometime around 2027 , we reach greek levels of debt , somewhere around 130 percent of gdp , which tells you that some time in the next 20 years , if congress does absolutely nothing , we 're going to hit a moment where the world 's investors , the world 's bond buyers , are going to say , " we do n't trust america anymore . we 're not going to lend them any money , except at really high interest rates . "
and at that moment our economy collapses .
but remember , greece is there today .
we 're there in 20 years . we have lots and lots of time to avoid that crisis , and the fiscal cliff was just one more attempt at trying to force the two sides to resolve the crisis .
here 's another way to look at exactly the same problem .
the dark blue line is how much the government spends .
the light blue line is how much the government gets in .
and as you can see , for most of recent history , except for a brief period , we have consistently spent more than we take in . thus the national debt .
but as you can also see , projected going forward , the gap widens a bit and raises a bit , and this graph is only through 2021 .
it gets really , really ugly out towards 2030 .
and this graph sort of sums up what the problem is .
the democrats , they say , well , this is n't a big deal .
we can just raise taxes a bit and close that gap , especially if we raise taxes on the rich .
the republicans say , hey , no , no , we 've got a better idea .
why do n't we lower both lines ?
why do n't we lower government spending and lower government taxes , and then we 'll be on an even more favorable long-term deficit trajectory ?
and behind this powerful disagreement between how to close that gap , there 's the worst kind of cynical party politics , the worst kind of insider baseball , lobbying , all of that stuff , but there 's also this powerfully interesting , respectful disagreement between two fundamentally different economic philosophies .
and i like to think , when i picture how republicans see the economy , what i picture is just some amazingly well-engineered machine , some perfect machine .
unfortunately , i picture it made in germany or japan , but this amazing machine that 's constantly scouring every bit of human endeavor and taking resources , money , labor , capital , machinery , away from the least productive parts and towards the more productive parts , and while this might cause temporary dislocation , what it does is it builds up the more productive areas and lets the less productive areas fade away and die , and as a result the whole system is so much more efficient , so much richer for everybody .
and this view generally believes that there is a role for government , a small role , to set the rules so people are n't lying and cheating and hurting each other , maybe , you know , have a police force and a fire department and an army , but to have a very limited reach into the mechanisms of this machinery .
and when i picture how democrats and democratic-leaning economists picture this economy , most democratic economists are , you know , they 're capitalists , they believe , yes , that 's a good system a lot of the time .
it 's good to let markets move resources to their more productive use .
but that system has tons of problems .
wealth piles up in the wrong places .
wealth is ripped away from people who should n't be called unproductive .
that 's not going to create an equitable , fair society .
that machine does n't care about the environment , about racism , about all these issues that make this life worse for all of us , and so the government does have a role to take resources from more productive uses , or from richer sources , and give them to other sources .
and when you think about the economy through these two different lenses , you understand why this crisis is so hard to solve , because the worse the crisis gets , the higher the stakes are , the more each side thinks they know the answer and the other side is just going to ruin everything .
and i can get really despairing . i 've spent a lot of the last few years really depressed about this , until this year , i learned something that i felt really excited about . i feel like it 's really good news , and it 's so shocking , i do n't like saying it , because i think people wo n't believe me .
but here 's what i learned .
the american people , taken as a whole , when it comes to these issues , to fiscal issues , are moderate , pragmatic centrists .
and i know that 's hard to believe , that the american people are moderate , pragmatic centrists .
but let me explain what i 'm thinking .
when you look at how the federal government spends money , so this is the battle right here , 55 percent , more than half , is on social security , medicare , medicaid , a few other health programs , 20 percent defense , 19 percent discretionary , and six percent interest .
so when we 're talking about cutting government spending , this is the pie we 're talking about , and americans overwhelmingly , and it does n't matter what party they 're in , overwhelmingly like that big 55 percent chunk .
they like social security . they like medicare .
they even like medicaid , even though that goes to the poor and indigent , which you might think would have less support .
and they do not want it fundamentally touched , although the american people are remarkably comfortable , and democrats roughly equal to republicans , with some minor tweaks to make the system more stable .
social security is fairly easy to fix .
the rumors of its demise are always greatly exaggerated .
so gradually raise social security retirement age , maybe only on people not yet born .
americans are about 50/50 , whether they 're democrats or republicans .
reduce medicare for very wealthy seniors , seniors who make a lot of money . do n't even eliminate it . just reduce it .
people generally are comfortable with it , democrats and republicans .
raise medical health care contributions ?
everyone hates that equally , but republicans and democrats hate that together .
and so what this tells me is , when you look at the discussion of how to resolve our fiscal problems , we are not a nation that 's powerfully divided on the major , major issue .
we 're comfortable with it needing some tweaks , but we want to keep it .
we 're not open to a discussion of eliminating it .
now there is one issue that is hyper-partisan , and where there is one party that is just spend , spend , spend , we do n't care , spend some more , and that of course is republicans when it comes to military defense spending .
they way outweigh democrats .
the vast majority want to protect military defense spending .
that 's 20 percent of the budget , and that presents a more difficult issue .
i should also note that the -lsb- discretionary -rsb- spending , which is about 19 percent of the budget , that is democratic and republican issues , so you do have welfare , food stamps , other programs that tend to be popular among democrats , but you also have the farm bill and all sorts of department of interior inducements for oil drilling and other things , which tend to be popular among republicans .
now when it comes to taxes , there is more disagreement .
that 's a more partisan area .
you have democrats overwhelmingly supportive of raising the income tax on people who make 250,000 dollars a year , republicans sort of against it , although if you break it out by income , republicans who make less than 75,000 dollars a year like this idea .
so basically republicans who make more than 250,000 dollars a year do n't want to be taxed .
raising taxes on investment income , you also see about two thirds of democrats but only one third of republicans are comfortable with that idea .
this brings up a really important point , which is that we tend in this country to talk about democrats and republicans and think there 's this little group over there called independents that 's , what , two percent ?
if you add democrats , you add republicans , you 've got the american people .
but that is not the case at all .
and it has not been the case for most of modern american history .
roughly a third of americans say that they are democrats .
around a quarter say that they are republicans .
a tiny little sliver call themselves libertarians , or socialists , or some other small third party , and the largest block , 40 percent , say they 're independents .
so most americans are not partisan , and most of the people in the independent camp fall somewhere in between , so even though we have tremendous overlap between the views on these fiscal issues of democrats and republicans , we have even more overlap when you add in the independents .
now we get to fight about all sorts of other issues .
we get to hate each other on gun control and abortion and the environment , but on these fiscal issues , these important fiscal issues , we just are not anywhere nearly as divided as people say .
and in fact , there 's this other group of people who are not as divided as people might think , and that group is economists .
i talk to a lot of economists , and back in the ' 70s and ' 80s it was ugly being an economist .
you were in what they called the saltwater camp , meaning harvard , princeton , mit , stanford , berkeley , or you were in the freshwater camp , university of chicago , university of rochester .
you were a free market capitalist economist or you were a keynesian liberal economist , and these people did n't go to each other 's weddings , they snubbed each other at conferences .
it 's still ugly to this day , but in my experience , it is really , really hard to find an economist under 40 who still has that kind of way of seeing the world .
the vast majority of economists - it is so uncool to call yourself an ideologue of either camp .
the phrase that you want , if you 're a graduate student or a postdoc or you 're a professor , a 38-year-old economics professor , is , " i 'm an empiricist .
i go by the data . "
and the data is very clear .
none of these major theories have been completely successful .
the 20th century , the last hundred years , is riddled with disastrous examples of times that one school or the other tried to explain the past or predict the future and just did an awful , awful job , so the economics profession has acquired some degree of modesty .
they still are an awfully arrogant group of people , i will assure you , but they 're now arrogant about their impartiality , and they , too , see a tremendous range of potential outcomes .
and this nonpartisanship is something that exists , that has existed in secret in america for years and years and years .
i 've spent a lot of the fall talking to the three major organizations that survey american political attitudes : pew research , the university of chicago 's national opinion research center , and the most important but the least known is the american national election studies group that is the world 's longest , most respected poll of political attitudes .
they 've been doing it since 1948 , and what they show consistently throughout is that it 's almost impossible to find americans who are consistent ideologically , who consistently support , " no we must n't tax , and we must limit the size of government , " or , " no , we must encourage government to play a larger role in redistribution and correcting the ills of capitalism . "
those groups are very , very small .
the vast majority of people , they pick and choose , they see compromise and they change over time when they hear a better argument or a worse argument .
and that part of it has not changed .
what has changed is how people respond to vague questions .
if you ask people vague questions , like , " do you think there should be more government or less government ? "
" do you think government should " - especially if you use loaded language - " do you think the government should provide handouts ? "
or , " do you think the government should redistribute ? "
then you can see radical partisan change .
but when you get specific , when you actually ask about the actual taxing and spending issues under consideration , people are remarkably centrist , they 're remarkably open to compromise .
so what we have , then , when you think about the fiscal cliff , do n't think of it as the american people fundamentally ca n't stand each other on these issues and that we must be ripped apart into two separate warring nations .
think of it as a tiny , tiny number of ancient economists and misrepresentative ideologues have captured the process .
and they 've captured the process through familiar ways , through a primary system which encourages that small group of people 's voices , because that small group of people , the people who answer all yeses or all noes on those ideological questions , they might be small but every one of them has a blog , every one of them has been on fox or msnbc in the last week .
every one of them becomes a louder and louder voice , but they do n't represent us .
they do n't represent what our views are .
and that gets me back to the dollar , and it gets me back to reminding myself that we know this experience .
we know what it 's like to have these people on tv , in congress , yelling about how the end of the world is coming if we do n't adopt their view completely , because it 's happened about the dollar ever since there 's been a dollar .
we had the battle between jefferson and hamilton .
in 1913 , we had this ugly battle over the federal reserve , when it was created , with vicious , angry arguments over how it would be constituted , and a general agreement that the way it was constituted was the worst possible compromise , a compromise guaranteed to destroy this valuable thing , this dollar , but then everyone agreeing , okay , so long as we 're on the gold standard , it should be okay .
the fed ca n't mess it up so badly .
but then we got off the gold standard for individuals during the depression and we got off the gold standard as a source of international currency coordination during richard nixon 's presidency .
each of those times , we were on the verge of complete collapse .
and nothing happened at all .
throughout it all , the dollar has been one of the most long-standing , stable , reasonable currencies , and we all use it every single day , no matter what the people screaming about tell us , no matter how scared we 're supposed to be .
and this long-term fiscal picture that we 're in right now , i think what is most maddening about it is , if congress were simply able to show not that they agree with each other , not that they 're able to come up with the best possible compromise , but that they are able to just begin the process towards compromise , we all instantly are better off .
the fear is that the world is watching .
the fear is that the longer we delay any solution , the more the world will look to the u.s.
not as the bedrock of stability in the global economy , but as a place that ca n't resolve its own fights , and the longer we put that off , the more we make the world nervous , the higher interest rates are going to be , the quicker we 're going to have to face a day of horrible calamity .
and so just the act of compromise itself , and sustained , real compromise , would give us even more time , would allow both sides even longer to spread out the pain and reach even more compromise down the road .
so i 'm in the media . i feel like my job to make this happen is to help foster the things that seem to lead to compromise , to not talk about this in those vague and scary terms that do polarize us , but to just talk about it like what it is , not an existential crisis , not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views , but a math problem , a really solvable math problem , one where we 're not all going to get what we want and one where , you know , there 's going to be a little pain to spread around .
but the more we address it as a practical concern , the sooner we can resolve it , and the more time we have to resolve it , paradoxically .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i went to spain a few months ago and i had the best foie gras of my life .
the best culinary experience of my life .
because what i saw , i 'm convinced , is the future of cooking .
ridiculous , right ?
foie gras and the future of cooking .
there 's not a food today that 's more maligned than foie gras , right ?
i mean , it 's crucified .
it was outlawed in chicago for a while .
it 's pending here in california , and just recently in new york .
it 's like if you 're a chef and you put it on your menu , you risk being attacked .
really , it happened here in san francisco to a famous chef .
i 'm not saying that there 's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras .
the reasons usually just boil down to the gavage , which is the force feeding .
basically you take a goose or a duck and you force feed a ton of grain down its throat .
more grain in a couple of weeks than it would ever get in a lifetime .
its liver expands by eight times .
suffice to say it 's like - it 's not the prettiest picture of sustainable farming .
the problem for us chefs is that it 's so freakin ' delicious .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , i love the stuff .
it is fatty , it 's sweet , it 's silky , it 's unctuous .
it makes everything else you put it with taste incredible .
can we produce a menu that 's delicious without foie gras ?
yes , sure .
you can also bike the tour de france without steroids , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not a lot of people are doing it .
and for good reason .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so several months ago , a friend of mine sent me this link to this guy , eduardo sousa .
eduardo is doing what he calls natural foie gras .
natural foie gras .
what 's natural about foie gras ?
to take advantage of when the temperature drops in the fall , geese and ducks gorge on food to prepare for the harsh realities of winter .
and the rest of the year they 're free to roam around eduardo 's land and eat what they want .
so no gavage , no force feeding , no factory-like conditions , no cruelty .
and it 's shockingly not a new idea .
his great-granddad started - patería de sousa - in 1812 .
and they 've been doing it quietly ever since .
that is until last year , when eduardo won the coup de coeur , the coveted french gastronomic prize .
it 's like the olympics of food products .
he placed first for his foie gras .
big , big problem .
as he said to me , that really pissed the french off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said it sort of gleefully .
it was all over the papers .
i read about it . it was in le monde .
" spanish chef accused ... " - and the french accused him .
" spanish chef accused of cheating . "
they accused him of paying off the judges .
they implicated actually , the spanish government , amazingly .
huh , amazing .
a huge scandal for a few weeks .
could n't find a shred of evidence .
now , look at the guy .
he does n't look like a guy who 's paying off french judges for his foie gras .
so that died down , and very soon afterward , new controversy .
he should n't win because it 's not foie gras .
it 's not foie gras because it 's not gavage .
there 's no force feeding .
so by definition , he 's lying and should be disqualified .
as funny as it sounds , articulating it now and reading about it - actually , if we had talked about it before this controversy , i would have said , " that 's kind of true . "
you know , foie gras by definition , force feeding , it 's gavage , and that 's what you get when you want foie gras .
that is , until i went to eduardo 's farm in extremadura , 50 miles north of seville , right on the portugal border .
i saw first-hand a system that is incredibly complex and then at the same time , like everything beautiful in nature , is utterly simple .
and he said to me , really from the first moment , my life 's work is to give the geese what they want .
he repeated that about 50 times in the two days i was with him .
i 'm just here to give the geese what they want .
actually , when i showed up he was lying down with the geese with his cell phone taking pictures of them like his children in the grass .
amazing .
he 's really just in love with - he 's at one with - he 's the goose whisperer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when i was speaking to him , you know , i thought , like i 'm speaking to you now , right , but sort of in the middle of my questions , my excited questions , because the more i got to know him and his system , the more exciting this whole idea became .
he kept going like this to me .
and i thought , ok , excited jew from new york , right ?
i 'm talking a little too aggressively , whatever , so you know , i slowed down .
and finally , by the end of the day i was like , ed-uar-do , you know like this ?
but he was still going like this .
i figured it out .
i was speaking too loudly .
so i hushed my voice .
i kind of like asked these questions and chatted with him through a translator in kind of a half whisper .
and he stopped doing this .
and amazingly , the geese who were on the other side of the paddock when i was around - " get the hell away from this kid ! " - when i lowered my voice , they all came right up to us .
right up to us , like right up to here .
right along the fence line .
and fence line was amazing in itself .
the fence - like this conception of fence that we have it 's totally backward with him .
the electricity on this fiberglass fence is only on the outside .
he rewired it . he invented it .
i 've never seen it . have you ?
you fence in animals . you electrify the inside .
he does n't .
he electrifies only the outside .
why ?
because he said to me that he felt like the geese - and he proved this actually , not just a conceit , he proved this - the geese felt manipulated when they were imprisoned in their little paddocks .
even though they were imprisoned in this garden of eden with figs and everything else .
he felt like they felt manipulated .
so he got rid of the electricity , he got rid of current on the inside and kept it on the outside , so it would protect them against coyotes and other predators .
now , what happened ?
they ate , and he showed me on a chart , how they ate about 20 percent more feed to feed their livers .
the landscape is incredible .
i mean , his farm is incredible .
it really is the garden of eden .
there 's figs and everything else there for the taking .
and the irony of ironies is because extremadura , the area - what does extremadura mean ?
extra hard land , right ?
extra difficult . extra hard .
but over four generations , he and his family have literally transformed this extra hard land into a tasting menu .
upgrades the life for these geese .
and they are allowed to take whatever they want .
another irony , the double irony is that on the figs and the olives , eduardo can make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras .
he does n't care .
he lets them take what they want and he says , " usually , it 's about 50 percent . they 're very fair . "
the other 50 percent , he takes and he sells and he makes money on them .
part of the income for his farm .
a big part of his income for his farm .
but he never controls it .
they get what they want , they leave the rest for me and i sell it .
his biggest obstacle , really , was the marketplace , which demands these days bright yellow foie gras .
that 's how i 've been trained .
you want to look and see what good foie gras is , it 's got to be bright yellow .
it 's the indication that it 's the best foie gras .
well , because he does n't force feed , because he does n't gavage tons of corn , his livers were pretty grey .
or they were .
but he found this wild plant called the lupin bush .
the lupin bush , it 's all around extremadura .
he let it go to seed , he took the seeds , he planted it on his 30 acres , all around .
and the geese love the lupin bush .
not for the bush , but for the seeds .
and when they eat the seeds , their foie gras turns yellow .
radioactive yellow .
bright yellow .
of the highest quality foie gras yellow i 've ever seen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'm listening to all this , you know , and i 'm like , is this guy for real ? is he making some of this up ?
is he like , you know - because he seemed to have an answer for everything , and it was always nature .
it was never him .
and i was like , you know , i always get a little , like , weirded out by people who deflect everything away from themselves .
because , really , they want you to look at themselves , right ?
but he deflected everything away from his ingenuity into working with his landscape .
so it 's like , here i am , i 'm on the fence about this guy , but increasingly , eating up his every word .
and we 're sitting there , and i hear -lsb- clapping -rsb- from a distance , so i look over .
and he grabs my arm and the translator 's , and ducks us under a bush and says , " watch this . "
" shush , " he says again for the 500th time to me .
" shush , watch this . "
and this squadron of geese come over .
-lsb- clapping -rsb- and they 're getting louder , louder , louder , like really loud , right over us .
and like airport traffic control , as they start to go past us they 're called back - and they 're called back and back and back .
and then they circle around .
and his geese are calling up now to the wild geese .
-lsb- clapping -rsb- and the wild geese are calling down .
-lsb- clapping -rsb- and it 's getting louder and louder and they circle and circle and they land .
and i 'm just saying , " no way . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no way .
and i look at eduardo , who 's near tears looking at this , and i say , " you 're telling me that your geese are calling to the wild geese to say come for a visit ? "
and he says , " no , no , no .
they 've come to stay . "
they 've come to stay ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's like the dna of a goose is to fly south in the winter , right ?
i said that . i said " is n't that what they 're put on this earth for ?
to fly south in the winter and north when it gets warm ? "
he said , " no , no , no .
their dna is to find the conditions that are conducive to life .
to happiness .
they find it here .
they do n't need anything more . "
they stop . they mate with his domesticated geese , and his flock continues .
think about that for a minute .
it 's brilliant , right ?
imagine - i do n't know , imagine a hog farm in , like , north carolina , and a wild pig comes upon a factory farm and decides to stay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so how did it taste ?
i finally got to taste it before i left .
he took me to his neighborhood restaurant and he served me some of his foie gras , confit de foie gras .
it was incredible .
and the problem with saying that , of course , is that you know , at this point it risks hyperbole really easily .
and i 'd like to make a metaphor , but i do n't have one really .
i was drinking this guy 's kool-aid so much , he could have served me goose feathers and i would have been like , this guy 's a genius , you know ?
i 'm really in love with him at this point .
but it truly was the best foie gras of my life .
so much so that i do n't think i had ever really had foie gras until that moment .
i 'd had something that was called foie gras .
but this was transformative . really transformative .
and i say to you , i might not stick to this , but i do n't think i 'll ever serve foie gras on my menu again because of that taste experience with eduardo .
it was sweet , it was unctuous .
it had all the qualities of foie gras , but its fat had a lot of integrity and a lot of honesty .
and you could taste herbs , you could taste spices .
and i kept - i said , you know , i swear to god i tasted star anise .
i was sure of it .
and i 'm not like some super taster , you know ?
but i can taste things .
there 's 100 percent star anise in there .
and he says , " no . "
and i ended up like going down the spices , and finally , it was like , ok , salt and pepper , thinking he 's salted and peppered his liver .
but no .
he takes the liver when he harvests the foie gras , he sticks them in this jar and he confits it .
no salt , no pepper , no oil , no spices .
what ?
we went back out for the final tour of the farm , and he showed me the wild pepper plants and the plants that he made sure existed on his farm for salinity .
he does n't need salt and pepper .
and he does n't need spices , because he 's got this potpourri of herbs and flavors that his geese love to gorge on .
i turned to him at the end of the meal , and it 's a question i asked several times , and he had n't , kind of , answered me directly , but i said , " now look , you 're in spain , some of the greatest chefs in the world are - ferran adria , the preeminent chef of the world today , not that far from you .
how come you do n't give him this ?
how come no one 's really heard of you ? "
and it may be because of the wine , or it may be because of my excitement , he answered me directly and he said , " because chefs do n't deserve my foie gras . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he was right .
he was right .
chefs take foie gras and they make it their own .
they create a dish where all the vectors point at us .
with eduardo it 's about the expression of nature .
and as he said , i think fittingly , it 's a gift from god , with god saying , you 've done good work .
simple .
i flew home , i 'm on the flight with my little black book and i took , you know , pages and pages of notes about it .
i really was moved .
and in the corner of one of these - one of my notes , is this note that says , when asked , what do you think of conventional foie gras ?
what do you think of foie gras that 99.99999 percent of the world eats ?
he said , " i think it 's an insult to history . "
and i wrote , insult to history .
i 'm on the plane and i 'm just tearing my hair out .
it 's like , why did n't i follow up on that ?
what the hell does that mean ?
insult to history .
so i did some research when i got back , and here 's what i found .
the history of foie gras .
jews invented foie gras .
true story .
true story .
by accident .
they were looking for an alternative to schmaltz .
gotten sick of the chicken fat .
they were looking for an alternative .
and they saw in the fall that there was this natural , beautiful , sweet , delicious fat from geese .
and they slaughtered them , used the fat throughout the winter for cooking .
the pharaoh got wind of this - this is true , right off the internet .
the pharaoh got - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i swear to god .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the pharaoh got wind of this and wanted to taste it .
he tasted it and fell in love with it .
he started demanding it .
and he did n't want it just in the fall , he wanted it all year round .
and he demanded that the jews supply enough for everyone .
and the jews , fearing for their life , had to come up with an ingenious idea , or at least try and satisfy the pharaoh 's wishes , of course .
and they invented , what ? gavage .
they invented gavage in a great moment of fear for their lives , and they provided the pharaoh with gavage liver , and the good stuff they kept for themselves .
supposedly , anyway . i believe that one .
that 's the history of foie gras .
and if you think about it , it 's the history of industrial agriculture .
it 's the history of what we eat today .
most of what we eat today .
mega-farms , feed lots , chemical amendments , long-distance travel , food processing .
all of it , our food system .
that 's also an insult to history .
it 's an insult to the basic laws of nature and of biology .
whether we 're talking about beef cattle or we 're talking about chickens , or we 're talking about broccoli or brussels sprouts , or in the case of this morning 's new york times , catfish - which wholesale are going out of business .
whatever it is , it 's a mindset that is reminiscent of general motors .
it 's rooted in extraction .
take more , sell more , waste more .
and for the future it wo n't serve us .
jonas salk has a great quote .
he said , " if all the insects disappeared , life on earth as we know it would disappear within 50 years .
if human beings disappeared , life on earth as we know it would flourish . "
and he 's right .
we need now to adopt a new conception of agriculture .
really new .
one in which we stop treating the planet as if it were some kind of business in liquidation .
and stop degrading resources under the guise of cheap food .
we can start by looking to farmers like eduardo .
farmers that rely on nature for solutions , for answers , rather than imposing solutions on nature .
listening as janine benyus , one of my favorite writers and thinkers about this topic says , " listening to nature 's operating instructions . "
that 's what eduardo does , and does so brilliantly .
and what he showed me and what he can show all of us , i think , is that the great thing for chefs , the great blessing for chefs , and for people that care about food and cooking , is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food .
whether we 're talking about brussels sprouts or foie gras .
and it 's also almost always , and i have n't found an example otherwise , but almost always , the most delicious choice .
that 's serendipitous .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been in afghanistan for 21 years .
i work for the red cross and i 'm a physical therapist .
my job is to make arms and legs - well it 's not completely true .
we do more than that .
we provide the patients , the afghan disabled , first with the physical rehabilitation then with the social reintegration .
it 's a very logical plan , but it was not always like this .
for many years , we were just providing them with artificial limbs .
it took quite many years for the program to become what it is now .
today , i would like to tell you a story , the story of a big change , and the story of the people who made this change possible .
i arrived in afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims .
and then , not only for war victims , but it was for any kind of patient .
i was also working in the orthopedic center , we call it .
this is the place where we make the legs .
at that time i found myself in a strange situation .
i felt not quite ready for that job .
there was so much to learn .
there were so many things new to me .
but it was a terrific job .
but as soon as the fighting intensified , the physical rehabilitation was suspended .
there were many other things to do .
so the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority .
it was a strange sensation .
anyway , you know every time i make this speech - it 's not the first time - but it 's an emotion .
it 's something that comes out from the past .
it 's 21 years , but they are still all there .
anyway , in 1992 , the mujahideen took all afghanistan .
and the orthopedic center was closed .
i was assigned to work for the homeless , for the internally displaced people .
but one day , something happened .
i was coming back from a big food distribution in a mosque where tens and tens of people were squatting in terrible conditions .
i wanted to go home . i was driving .
you know , when you want to forget , you do n't want to see things , so you just want to go to your room , to lock yourself inside and say , " that 's enough . "
a bomb fell not far from my car - well , far enough , but big noise .
and everybody disappeared from the street .
the cars disappeared as well .
i ducked .
and only one figure remained in the middle of the road .
it was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away .
well i 'm not a particularly brave person , i have to confess it , but i could not just ignore him .
so i stopped the car and i went to help .
the man was without legs and only with one arm .
behind him there was a child , his son , red in the face in an effort to push the father .
so i took him into a safe place .
and i ask , " what are you doing out in the street in this situation ? "
" i work , " he said .
i wondered , what work ?
and then i ask an even more stupid question : " why do n't you have the prostheses ?
why do n't you have the artificial legs ? "
and he said , " the red cross has closed . "
well without thinking , i told him " come tomorrow .
we will provide you with a pair of legs . "
the man , his name was mahmoud , and the child , whose name was rafi , left .
and then i said , " oh , my god . what did i say ?
the center is closed , no staff around .
maybe the machinery is broken .
who is going to make the legs for him ? "
so i hoped that he would not come .
this is the streets of kabul in those days .
so i said , " well i will give him some money . "
and so the following day , i went to the orthopedic center .
and i spoke with a gatekeeper .
i was ready to tell him , " listen , if someone such-and-such comes tomorrow , please tell him that it was a mistake .
nothing can be done .
give him some money . "
but mahmoud and his son were already there .
and they were not alone .
there were 15 , maybe 20 , people like him waiting .
and there was some staff too .
among them there was my right-hand man , najmuddin .
and the gatekeeper told me , " they come everyday to see if the center will open . "
i said , " no .
we have to go away . we can not stay here . "
they were bombing - not very close - but you could hear the noise of the bombs .
so , " we can not stay here , it 's dangerous .
it 's not a priority . "
but najmuddin told me , " listen now , we 're here . "
at least we can start repairing the prostheses , the broken prostheses of the people and maybe try to do something for people like mahmoud . "
i said , " no , please . we can not do that .
it 's really dangerous .
we have other things to do . "
but they insisted .
when you have 20 people and you are the one who has to decide ...
so we started doing some repairs .
also one of the physical therapists reported that mahmoud could be provided with a leg , but not immediately .
the legs were swollen and the knees were stiff , so he needed a long preparation .
believe me , i was worried because i was breaking the rules .
i was doing something that i was not supposed to do .
in the evening , i went to speak with the bosses at the headquarters , and i told them - i lied - i told them , " listen , we are going to start a couple of hours per day , just a few repairs . "
maybe some of them are here now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we started .
i was working , i was going everyday to work for the homeless .
and najmuddin was staying there , doing everything and reporting on the patients .
he was telling me , " patients are coming . "
we knew that many more patients could not come , prevented by the fighting .
but people were coming .
and mahmoud was coming every day .
and slowly , slowly week after week his legs were improving .
the stump or cast prosthesis was made , and he was starting the real physical rehabilitation .
he was coming every day , crossing the front line .
a couple of times i crossed the front line in the very place where mahmoud and his son were crossing .
i tell you , it was something so sinister that i was astonished he could do it every day .
but finally , the great day arrived .
mahmoud was going to be discharged with his new legs .
it was april , i remember , a very beautiful day .
april in kabul is beautiful , full of roses , full of flowers .
we could not possibly stay indoors , with all these sandbags at the windows .
very sad , dark .
so we chose a small spot in the garden .
and mahmoud put on his prostheses , the other patients did the same , and they started practicing for the last time before being discharged .
suddenly , they started fighting .
two groups of mujahideen started fighting .
we could hear in the air the bullets passing .
so we dashed , all of us , towards the shelter .
mahmoud grabbed his son , i grabbed someone else .
everybody was grabbing something .
and we ran .
you know , 50 meters can be a long distance if you are totally exposed , but we managed to reach the shelter .
inside , all of us panting , i sat a moment and i heard rafi telling his father , " father , you can run faster than me . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and mahmoud , " of course i can .
i can run , and now you can go to school .
no need of staying with me all the day pushing my wheelchair . "
later on , we took them home .
and i will never forget mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair .
and then i understood , physical rehabilitation is a priority .
dignity can not wait for better times .
from that day on , we never closed a single day .
well sometimes we were suspended for a few hours , but we never , we never closed it again .
i met mahmoud one year later .
he was in good shape - a bit thinner .
he needed to change his prostheses - a new pair of prostheses .
i asked about his son .
he told me , " he 's at school . he 'd doing quite well . "
but i understood he wanted to tell me something .
so i asked him , " what is that ? "
he was sweating .
he was clearly embarrassed .
and he was standing in front of me , his head down .
he said , " you have taught me to walk .
thank you very much .
now help me not to be a beggar anymore . "
that was the job .
" my children are growing .
i feel ashamed .
i do n't want them to be teased at school by the other students . "
i said , " okay . "
i thought , how much money do i have in my pocket ?
just to give him some money .
it was the easiest way .
he read my mind , and he said , " i ask for a job . "
and then he added something i will never forget for the rest of my life .
he said , " i am a scrap of a man , but if you help me , i 'm ready to do anything , even if i have to crawl on the ground . "
and then he sat down .
i sat down too with goosebumps everywhere .
legless , with only one arm , illiterate , unskilled - what job for him ?
najmuddin told me , " well we have a vacancy in the carpentry shop . "
" what ? " i said , " stop . "
" well yes , we need to increase the production of feet .
we need to employ someone to glue and to screw the sole of the feet .
we need to increase the production . "
" excuse me ? "
i could not believe .
and then he said , " no , we can modify the workbench maybe to put a special stool , a special anvil , special vice , and maybe an electric screwdriver . "
i said , " listen , it 's insane .
and it 's even cruel to think of anything like this .
that 's a production line and a very fast one .
it 's cruel to offer him a job knowing that he 's going to fail . "
but with najmuddin , we can not discuss .
so the only things i could manage to obtain was a kind of a compromise .
only one week - one week try and not a single day more .
one week later , mahmoud was the fastest in the production line .
i told najmuddin , " that 's a trick .
i ca n't believe it . "
the production was up 20 percent .
" it 's a trick , it 's a trick , " i said .
and then i asked for verification .
it was true .
the comment of najmuddin was mahmoud has something to prove .
i understood that i was wrong again .
mahmoud had looked taller .
i remember him sitting behind the workbench smiling .
he was a new man , taller again .
of course , i understood that what made him stand tall - yeah they were the legs , thank you very much - but as a first step , it was the dignity .
he has regained his full dignity thanks to that job .
so of course , i understood .
and then we started a new policy - a new policy completely different .
we decided to employ as many disabled as possible to train them in any possible job .
it became a policy of " positive discrimination , " we call it now .
and you know what ?
it 's good for everybody .
everybody benefits from that - those employed , of course , because they get a job and dignity .
but also for the newcomers .
they are 7,000 every year - people coming for the first time .
and you should see the faces of these people when they realize that those assisting them are like them .
sometimes you see them , they look , " oh . "
and you see the faces .
and then the surprise turns into hope .
and it 's easy for me as well to train someone who has already passed through the experience of disability .
poof , they learn much faster - the motivation , the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different , completely .
scraps of men do not exist .
people like mahmoud are agents of change .
and when you start changing , you can not stop .
so employing people , yes , but also we started programming projects of microfinance , education .
and when you start , you can not stop .
so you do vocational training , home education for those who can not go to school .
physical therapies can be done , not only in the orthopedic center , but also in the houses of the people .
there is always a better way to do things .
that 's najmuddin , the one with the white coat .
terrible najmuddin , is that one .
i have learned a lot from people like najmuddin , mahmoud , rafi .
they are my teachers .
i have a wish , a big wish , that this way of working , this way of thinking , is going to be implemented in other countries .
there are plenty of countries at war like afghanistan .
it is possible and it is not difficult .
all we have to do is to listen to the people that we are supposed assist , to make them part of the decision-making process and then , of course , to adapt .
this is my big wish .
well do n't think that the changes in afghanistan are over ; not at all . we are going on .
recently we have just started a program , a sport program - basketball for wheelchair users .
we transport the wheelchairs everywhere .
we have several teams in the main part of afghanistan .
at the beginning , when anajulina told me , " we would like to start it , " i hesitated .
i said , " no , " you can imagine .
i said , " no , no , no , no , we ca n't . "
and then i asked the usual question : " is it a priority ?
is it really necessary ? "
well now you should see me .
i never miss a single training session .
the night before a match i 'm very nervous .
and you should see me during the match .
i shout like a true italian .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what 's next ? what is going to be the next change ?
well i do n't know yet , but i 'm sure najmuddin and his friends , they have it already in mind .
that was my story . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i bring to you a message from tens of thousands of people - in the villages , in the slums , in the hinterland of the country - who have solved problems through their own genius , without any outside help .
when our home minister announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of india , about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable , he missed the point .
the point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years , the point that people may be economically poor , but they 're not poor in the mind .
in other words , the minds on the margin are not the marginal minds .
that is the message , which we started 31 years ago .
and what did it start ?
let me just tell you , briefly , my personal journey , which led me to come to this point .
in ' 85 , ' 86 , i was in bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands , on the fields of the poor people , and how to develop research technologies , which are based on the knowledge of the people .
i came back in ' 86 .
i had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that i found in that country , which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity .
i started looking at my own work : the work that i had done for the previous 10 years , almost every time , that people had shared .
now , i was paid in dollars as a consultant , and i looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself : " is there a line in my return , which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has made it possible ?
was it because i 'm brilliant that i 'm getting this reward , or because of the revolution ?
is it that i write very well ?
is it that i articulate very well ?
is it that i analyze the data very well ?
is it because i 'm a professor , and , therefore , i must be entitled to this reward from society ? "
i tried to convince myself that , " no , no , i have worked for the policy changes .
you know , the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor , and , therefore i think it 's okay . "
but it appeared to me that all these years that i 'd been working on exploitation - exploitation by landlords , by moneylenders , by traders - gave me an insight that probably i was also an exploiter , because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of the people - those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me - and nothing ever went back to them .
so much so , that much of my work till that time was in the english language .
the majority of the people from whom i learned did n't know english .
so what kind of a contributor was i ?
i was talking about social justice , and here i was , a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act - of taking knowledge from the people , making them anonymous , getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy , writing papers and publishing them in the papers , getting invited to the conferences , getting consultancies and whatever have you .
so then , a dilemma rose in the mind that , if i 'm also an exploiter , then this is not right ; life can not go on like that .
and this was a moment of great pain and trauma because i could n't live with it any longer .
so i did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research , wrote , read about 100 papers .
and i came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique , dilemma is not unique ; the solution had to be unique .
and one day - i do n't know what happened - while coming back from the office towards home , maybe i saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if i only could be like the honey bee , life would be wonderful .
what the honey bee does : it pollinates , takes nectar from the flower , pollinates another flower , cross-pollinates .
and when it takes the nectar , the flowers do n't feel shortchanged .
in fact , they invite the honey bees through their colors , and the bees do n't keep all the honey for themselves .
these are the three guiding principles of the honey bee network : that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language .
they must not remain anonymous .
and i must tell you that after 20 years , i have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of this art .
that is a great tragedy - which i 'm carrying still with me and i hope that all of you will carry this with you - that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making them anonymous .
the research guidelines of u.s. national academy of sciences or research councils of the u.k.
or of indian councils of science research do not require that whatever you learn from people , you must share back with them .
we are talking about an accountable society , a society that is fair and just , and we do n't even do justice in the knowledge market .
and india wants to be a knowledge society .
how will it be a knowledge society ?
so , obviously , you can not have two principles of justice , one for yourself and one for others .
it must be the same .
you can not discriminate .
you can not be in favor of your own values , which are at a distance from the values that you espouse .
so , fairness to one and to the other is not divisible .
look at this picture .
can you tell me where has it been taken from , and what is it meant for ? anybody ?
i 'm a professor ; i must quiz you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- anybody ? any guess at all ?
pardon ? -lrb- audience member : rajasthan . -rrb- anil gupta : but what has it been used for ? what has it been used for ?
-lrb- murmuring -rrb- pardon ?
you know , you 're so right . we must give him a hand , because this man knows how insensitive our government is .
look at this . this is the site of the government of india .
it invites tourists to see the shame of our country .
i 'm so sorry to say that .
is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture ?
it depends upon how you look at the life of the people .
if this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles , you can not be celebrating that .
we should be doing something about it .
and let me tell you , with all the science and technology at our command , millions of women still carry water on their heads .
and we do not ask this question .
you must have taken tea in the morning .
think for a minute .
the leaves of the tea , plucked from the bushes ; you know what the action is ? the action is : the lady picks up a few leaves , puts them in the basket on the backside .
just do it 10 times ; you will realize the pain in this shoulder .
and she does it a few thousand times every day .
the rice that you ate in the lunch , and you will eat today , is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture , millions of them , every season , in the paddy season , when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water .
and feet in the water will develop fungus , infections , and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point .
and every year , 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually .
no machines have been developed .
so the silence of scientists , of technologists , of public policy makers , of the change agent , drew our attention that this is not on , this is not on ; this is not the way society will work .
this is not what our parliament would do . you know , we have a program for employment : one hundred , 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100 days by this great country .
doing what ? breaking stones , digging earth .
so we asked a question to the parliament : do poor have heads ?
do poor have legs , mouth and hands , but no head ?
so honey bee network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich .
and what has happened ?
an anonymous , faceless , nameless person gets in contact with the network , and then gets an identity .
this is what honey bee network is about .
and this network grew voluntarily , continues to be voluntary , and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative .
they could be creative in terms of education , they may be creative in terms of culture , they may be creative in terms of institutions ; but a lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity , the innovations , either in terms of contemporary innovations , or in terms of traditional knowledge .
and it all begins with curiosity .
it all begins with curiosity .
this person , whom we met - and you will see it on the website , www.sristi.org - this tribal person , he had a wish .
and he said , " if my wish gets fulfilled " - somebody was sick and he had to monitor - " god , please cure him .
and if you cure him , i will get my wall painted . "
and this is what he got painted .
somebody was talking yesterday about maslowian hierarchy .
there could be nothing more wrong than the maslowian model of hierarchy of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment .
kabir , rahim , all the great sufi saints , they were all poor people , and they had a great reason . -lrb- applause -rrb- please do not ever think that only after meeting your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment .
any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment , only by the resolve that they have in their mind that they must achieve something .
look at this .
we saw it in shodh yatra . every six months we walk in different parts of the country .
i 've walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years .
so on the wayside we found these dung cakes , which are used as a fuel .
now , this lady , on the wall of the dung cake heap , has made a painting .
that 's the only space she could express her creativity .
and she 's so marvelous .
look at this lady , ram timari devi , on a grain bin . in champaran , we had a shodh yatra and we were walking in the land where gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy , pain of indigo growers .
bhabi mahato in purulia and bankura .
look at what she has done .
the whole wall is her canvas . she 's sitting there with a broom .
is she an artisan or an artist ?
obviously she 's an artist ; she 's a creative person .
if we can create markets for these artists , we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones .
they will be paid for what they are good at , not what they 're bad at .
-lrb- applause -rrb- look at what rojadeen has done .
in motihari in champaran , there are a lot of people who sell tea on the shack and , obviously , there 's a limited market for tea .
every morning you have tea , as well as coffee .
so he thought , why do n't i convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine ?
so this is a coffee machine . just takes a few hundred rupees .
people bring their own cooker , he attaches a valve and a steam pipe , and now he gives you espresso coffee . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this is a real , affordable coffee percolator that works on gas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- look at what sheikh jahangir has done .
a lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground .
so this fellow is bringing a flour-grinding machine on a two-wheeler .
if you have 500 grams , 1000 , one kilogram , he will grind it for it for you ; the flourmill will not grind such a small quantity .
please understand the problem of poor people .
they have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of energy , in terms of cost , in terms of quality .
they do n't want second-standard , second-quality outputs .
but to be able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs .
and that is what sheikh jahangir did .
but that 's not enough , what he did . look at what he did here .
if you have clothes , and you do n't have enough time to wash them , he brought a washing machine to your doorstep , mounted on a two-wheeler .
so here 's a model where a two-wheeler washing machine ...
he is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you bring your water , you bring your soap , i wash the clothes for you . charge 50 paisa , one rupee for you per lot , and a new business model can emerge .
now , what we need is , we need people who will be able to scale them up .
look at this .
it looks like a beautiful photograph .
but you know what it is ? can anybody guess what it is ?
somebody from india would know , of course .
it 's a tawa .
it 's a hot plate made of clay .
now , what is the beauty in it ?
when you have a non-stick pan , it costs about , maybe , 250 rupees , five dollars , six dollars .
this is less than a dollar and this is non-stick ; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials .
and the best part is that , while you use a costly non-stick pan , you eat the so-called teflon or teflon-like material because after some time the stuff disappears . where has it gone ?
it has gone in your stomach . it was not meant for that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know ? but here in this clay hot plate , it will never go into your stomach .
so it is better , it is safer ; it is affordable , it is energy-efficient .
in other words , solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper , need not be , so-called , jugaad , need not be some kind of makeshift arrangement .
they have to be better , they have to be more efficient , they have to be affordable .
and that is what mansukh bhai prajapati has done .
he has designed this plate with a handle .
and now with one dollar , you can afford a better alternative than the people market is offering you .
this lady , she developed a herbal pesticide formulation .
we filed the patent for her , the national innovation foundation .
and who knows ? somebody will license this technology and develop marketable products , and she would get revenue .
now , let me mention one thing : i think we need a polycentric model of development , where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country , in different parts of the world , would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner .
higher the local fit , greater is the chance of scaling up .
in the scaling up , there 's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people , point by point , with the supply that you 're making .
so why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch ?
things can scale up , and they have scaled up .
for example , cell phones : we have 400 million cellphones in this country .
now , it is possible that i use only two buttons on the cellphone , only three options on the cellphone .
it has 300 options , i 'm paying for 300 ; i 'm using only three but i 'm willing to live with it , therefore it is scaling up .
but if i had to get a match to match , obviously , i would need a different design of a cellphone .
so what we 're saying is that scalability should not become an enemy of sustainability .
there must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a locality , and yet , one can be able to fund them .
one of the greatest studies that we 've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question - " what is a scalable model ? " - as if the need of a community , which is only located in a space and time and has those needs only located in those places , has no legitimate right to get them for free because it 's not part of a larger scale .
so either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out .
now , the eminent model , the long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books , for example , having only a few copies sold can still be a viable model .
and we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio , will invest in the portfolio , where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities , and yet , the overall platform of the model will become viable .
look at what he is doing .
saidullah sahib is an amazing man .
at the age of 70 , he is linking up something very creative .
-lrb- music -rrb- saidullah sahib : i could n't wait for the boat .
i had to meet my love .
my desperation made me an innovator .
even love needs help from technology .
innovation is the light of my wife , noor .
new inventions are the passion of my life .
my technology .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ag : saidulluh sahib is in motihari , again in champaran .
wonderful human being , but he stills sells , at this age , honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood , because we have n't been able to convince the water park people , the lake people , in -lsb- unclear -rsb- operations .
and we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in mumbai - where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers , wading in the water - that , look , you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will not go , where your transport will not go .
so we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue device , as a vending device during the floods in eastern india , when you have to deliver things to people in different islands where they 're marooned .
but the idea has a merit . the idea has a merit .
what has appachan done ? appachan , unfortunately , is no more , but he has left behind a message .
a very powerful message appachan : i watch the world wake up every day .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's not that a coconut fell on my head , and i came upon this idea .
with no money to fund my studies , i scaled new heights .
now , they call me the local spiderman .
my technology .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ag : many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally - what i call a g2g model , grassroots to global .
and a professor in the university of massachusetts , in the zoology department , bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy .
and this device makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms , rather than only a few , because otherwise she had to make a big platform and then climb her -lsb- unclear -rsb- would climb on that .
so , you know , we are advancing the frontiers of science .
remya jose has developed ...
you can go to the youtube and find india innovates and then you will find these videos .
innovation by her when she was in class 10th : a washing machine-cum-exercising machine .
mr. kharai who is a physically challenged person , one and a half foot height , only .
but he has modified a two-wheeler so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility .
this innovation is from the slums of rio .
and this person , mr. ubirajara .
we were talking about , my friends in brazil , how we scale up this model in china and brazil .
and we have a very vibrant network in china , particularly , but also emerging in brazil and other parts of the world .
this stand on the front wheel , you will not find on any cycle .
india and china have the largest number of cycles .
but this innovation emerged in brazil .
the point is , none of us should be parochial , none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good ideas will come only from our country .
no , we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically poor people , wherever they are .
and look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations : cycle that 's a sprayer , cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road .
i ca n't change the condition of the road , but i can make the cycle run faster .
that is what kanak das has done .
and in south africa , we had taken our innovators , and many of us had gone there share with the colleagues in south africa as to how innovation can become a means of liberation from the drudgery that people have .
and this is a donkey cart which they modified .
there 's an axle here , of 30 , 40 kg , serving no purpose .
remove it , the cart needs one donkey less .
this is in china . this girl needed a breathing apparatus .
these three people in the village sat down and decided to think , " how do we elongate the life of this girl of our village ? "
they were not related to her , but they tried to find out , " how can we use ... " they used a cycle , they put together a breathing apparatus .
and this breathing apparatus now saved the life , and she 's very welcome .
there 's a whole range of innovations that we have .
a car , which runs on compressed air with six paisa per kilometer .
assam , kanak gogoi .
and you would not find this car in u.s. or europe , but this is available in india .
now , this lady , she used to do the winding of the yarn for pochampally saree .
in one day , 18,000 times , she had to do this winding to generate two sarees .
this is what her son has done after seven years of struggle .
she said , " change your profession . "
he said , " i ca n't . this is the only thing i know , but i 'll invent a machine , which will solve your problem . "
and this is what he did , a sewing machine in uttar pradesh .
so , this is what sristi is saying : " give me a place to stand , and i will move the world . "
i will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity , a whole range of things .
we have sold things all over the world , from ethiopia to turkey to u.s. to wherever .
products have gone to the market , a few .
these are the people whose knowledge made this herbavate cream for eczema possible .
and here , a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every time a user uses it , it asks the user , " you can also be an innovator .
if you have an idea , send it back to us . "
so , creativity counts , knowledge matters , innovations transform , incentives inspire .
and incentives : not just material , but also non-material incentives .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature .
the bad news is that mother nature 's back office is n't working yet , so those invoices do n't get issued .
but we need to do something about this problem .
i began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest , but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature , and which does n't get priced by the markets .
a project called teeb was started in 2007 , and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the g8 + 5 .
and their basic inspiration was a stern review of lord stern .
they asked themselves a question : if economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change , well why ca n't the same be done for conservation ?
why ca n't an equivalent case be made for nature ?
and the answer is : yeah , it can .
but it 's not that straightforward .
biodiversity , the living fabric of this planet , is not a gas .
it exists in many layers , ecosystems , species and genes across many scales - international , national , local , community - and doing for nature what lord stern and his team did for nature is not that easy .
and yet , we began .
we began the project with an interim report , which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many , many researchers .
and amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that , in fact , we were losing natural capital - the benefits that flow from nature to us .
we were losing it at an extraordinary rate - in fact , of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital .
this came out in 2008 , which was , of course , around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars .
so this was comparable in size to that kind of loss .
we then have gone on since to present for -lsb- the -rsb- international community , for governments , for local governments and for business and for people , for you and me , a whole slew of reports , which were presented at the u.n. last year , which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it .
what is this about ?
a picture that you 're familiar with - the amazon rainforests .
it 's a massive store of carbon , it 's an amazing store of biodiversity , but what people do n't really know is this also is a rain factory .
because the northeastern trade winds , as they go over the amazonas , effectively gather the water vapor .
something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds , and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the la plata basin .
this rainfall cycle , this rainfall factory , effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in latin america .
but the question arises : okay , so how much do uruguay , paraguay , argentina and indeed the state of mato grosso in brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of amazonas , which produces that rainfall ?
and the answer is zilch , exactly zero .
that 's the economic invisibility of nature .
that ca n't keep going on , because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful .
economics has become the currency of policy .
and unless we address this invisibility , we are going to get the results that we are seeing , which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset .
it 's not just about the amazonas , or indeed about rainforests .
no matter what level you look at , whether it 's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level , we see the same problem again and again .
so rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level .
at the species level , it 's been estimated that insect-based pollination , bees pollinating fruit and so on , is something like 190 billion dollars-worth .
that 's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally .
it completely passes below the radar screen .
but when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice ?
or for that matter , if you look at the genetic level , 60 percent of medicines were prospected , were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef .
once again , most of that does n't get paid .
and that brings me to another aspect of this , which is , to whom should this get paid ?
that genetic material probably belonged , if it could belong to anyone , to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule , which then became the medicine .
they were the ones that did n't get paid .
and if you look at the species level , you saw about fish .
today , the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor , the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods , to feed their families .
something like a billion people depend on fish , the quantity of fish in the oceans .
a billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein .
and at this rate at which we are losing fish , it is a human problem of enormous dimensions , a health problem of a kind we have n't seen before .
and finally , at the ecosystem level , whether it 's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests , or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats , or whether it 's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest , it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services .
we did estimates in our study that for countries like brazil , india and indonesia , even though ecosystem services - these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free - they 're not very big in percentage terms of gdp - two , four , eight , 10 , 15 percent - but in these countries , if we measure how much they 're worth to the poor , the answers are more like 45 percent , 75 percent , 90 percent .
that 's the difference .
because these are important benefits for the poor .
and you ca n't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you 're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset , the most important asset , which is your development asset , that is ecological infrastructure .
how bad can things get ?
well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance .
it 's basically a measure of how many tigers , toads , ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around .
the green represents the percentage .
if you start green , it 's like 80 to 100 percent .
if it 's yellow , it 's 40 to 60 percent .
and these are percentages versus the original state , so to speak , the pre-industrial era , 1750 .
now i 'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this .
and just watch the change in colors in india , china , europe , sub-saharan africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us .
see that again .
the only places that remain green - and that 's not good news - is , in fact , places like the gobi desert , like the tundra and like the sahara .
but that does n't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place .
this is the challenge .
the reason this is happening boils down , in my mind , to one basic problem , which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits .
we tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth , it 's common goods .
and here 's an example from thailand where we found that , because the value of a mangrove is not that much - it 's about $ 600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured - compared to its value as a shrimp farm , which is more like $ 9,600 , there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms .
but of course , if you look at exactly what those profits are , almost 8,000 of those dollars are , in fact , subsidies .
so you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it 's more like 1,200 to 600 .
that 's not that hard .
but on the other hand , if you start measuring , how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use ?
once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects , that answer is more like $ 12,000 of cost .
and if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries , the fish nurseries , that provide fish for the poor , that answer is more like $ 11,000 .
so now look at the different lens .
if you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits , you get a completely different answer , which is clearly conservation makes more sense , and not destruction .
so is this just a story from south thailand ?
sorry , this is a global story .
and here 's what the same calculation looks like , which was done recently - well i say recently , over the last 10 years - by a group called trucost .
and they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations , what are the externalities ?
in other words , what are the costs of doing business as usual ?
this is not illegal stuff , this is basically business as usual , which causes climate-changing emissions , which have an economic cost .
it causes pollutants being issued , which have an economic cost , health cost and so on .
use of freshwater .
if you drill water to make coke near a village farm , that 's not illegal , but yes , it costs the community .
can we stop this , and how ?
i think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital .
basically the stuff of life is natural capital , and we need to recognize and build that into our systems .
when we measure gdp as a measure of economic performance at the national level , we do n't include our biggest asset at the country level .
when we measure corporate performances , we do n't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society .
that has to stop .
in fact , this was what really inspired my interest in this phase .
i began a project way back called the green accounting project .
that was in the early 2000s when india was going gung-ho about gdp growth as the means forward - looking at china with its stellar growths of eight , nine , 10 percent and wondering , why can we do the same ?
and a few friends of mine and i decided this does n't make sense .
this is going to create more cost to society and more losses .
so we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for india and its states .
that 's how my interests began and went to the teeb project .
calculating this at the national level is one thing , and it has begun .
and the world bank has acknowledged this and they 've started a project called waves - wealth accounting and valuation of ecosystem services .
but calculating this at the next level , that means at the business sector level , is important .
and actually we 've done this with the teeb project .
we 've done this for a very difficult case , which was for deforestation in china .
this is important , because in china in 1997 , the yellow river actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society .
just a year later the yangtze flooded , causing something like 5,500 deaths .
so clearly there was a problem with deforestation .
it was associated largely with the construction industry .
and the chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling .
a retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs - the cost of loss of topsoil , the cost of loss of waterways , the lost productivity , the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors , desertification and so on - those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber .
so in fact , the price of timber in the beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within china .
of course , after the event one can be wise .
the way to do this is to do it on a company basis , to take leadership forward , and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost , and to disclose these answers .
someone once asked me , " who is better or worse , is it unilever or is it p & g when it comes to their impact on rainforests in indonesia ? "
and i could n't answer because neither of these companies , good though they are and professional though they are , do not calculate or disclose their externalities .
but if we look at companies like puma - jochen zeitz , their ceo and chairman , once challenged me at a function , saying that he 's going to implement my project before i finish it .
well i think we kind of did it at the same time , but he 's done it .
he 's basically worked the cost to puma .
puma has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover , 300 million dollars of profits , 200 million dollars after tax , 94 million dollars of externalities , cost to business .
now that 's not a happy situation for them , but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say , " here 's what we are measuring .
we are measuring it because we know that you can not manage what you do not measure . "
that 's an example , i think , for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from .
if more companies did this , and if more sectors engaged this as sectors , you could have analysts , business analysts , and you could have people like us and consumers and ngos actually look and compare the social performance of companies .
today we ca n't yet do that , but i think the path is laid out .
this can be done .
and i 'm delighted that the institute of chartered accountants in the u.k.
has already set up a coalition to do this , an international coalition .
the other favorite , if you like , solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets .
and by the way , these are my favorites - externalities calculation and green carbon markets .
teeb has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it , but these are the favorites .
what 's green carbon ?
today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace .
it 's about energy emissions .
the european union ets is the main marketplace .
it 's not doing too well . we 've over-issued .
a bit like inflation : you over-issue currency , you get what you see , declining prices .
but that 's all about energy and industry .
but what we 're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon , that is soot .
what we 're also missing is blue carbon , which , by the way , is the largest store of carbon - more than 55 percent .
thankfully , the flux , in other words , the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa , is more or less balanced .
in fact , what 's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions , which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans .
more of that in a minute .
and finally , there 's deforestation , and there 's emission of methane from agriculture .
green carbon , which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions , and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions .
we have the means already in our hands , through a structure , through a mechanism , called redd plus - a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation .
and already norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards indonesia and brazil to implement this red plus scheme .
so we actually have some movement forward .
but the thing is to do a lot more of that .
will this solve the problem ? will economics solve everything ?
well i 'm afraid not .
there is an area that is the oceans , coral reefs .
as you can see , they cut across the entire globe all the way from micronesia across indonesia , malaysia , india , madagascar and to the west of the caribbean .
these red dots , these red areas , basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people .
so that 's almost an eighth of society .
and the sad thing is that , as these coral reefs are lost - and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs - we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species , the warm water corals , we 're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans , but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries .
so in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations , what we have done is we 've made an ethical choice .
we 've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs .
well what i will say to you in parting is that we may have done that .
let 's think about it and what it means , but please , let 's not do more of that .
because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital .
i do n't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tyler dewar : the way i feel right now is that all of the other speakers have said exactly what i wanted to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it seems that the only thing left for me to say is to thank you all for your kindness .
td : but maybe in the spirit of appreciating the kindness of you all , i could share with you a little story about myself .
td : from the time i was very young , onward , i was given a lot of different responsibilities , and it always seemed to me , when i was young , that everything was laid out before me .
all of the plans for me were already made .
i was given the clothes that i needed to wear and told where i needed to be , given these very precious and holy looking robes to wear , with the understanding that it was something sacred or important .
td : but before that kind of formal lifestyle happened for me , i was living in eastern tibet with my family .
and when i was seven years old , all of a sudden , a search party arrived at my home .
they were looking the next karmapa , and i noticed they were talking to my mom and dad , and the news came to me that they were telling me that i was the karmapa .
and these days , people ask me a lot , how did that feel .
how did that feel when they came and whisked you away , and your lifestyle completely changed ?
and what i mostly say is that , at that time , it was a pretty interesting idea to me .
i thought that things would be pretty fun and there would be more things to play with .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- td : but it did n't turn out to be so fun and entertaining , as i thought it would have been .
i was placed in a pretty strictly controlled environment .
and immediately , a lot of different responsibilities , in terms of my education and so forth , were heaped upon me .
i was separated , largely , from my family , including my mother and father .
i did n't have have many personal friends to spend time with , but i was expected to perform these prescribed duties .
so it turned out that my fantasy about an entertaining life of being the karmapa was n't going to come true .
it more felt to be the case to me that i was being treated like a statue , and i was to sit in one place like a statue would .
td : nevertheless , i felt that , even though i 've been separated from my loved ones - and , of course , now i 'm even further away .
when i was 14 , i escaped from tibet and became even further removed from my mother and father , my relatives , my friends and my homeland .
but nevertheless , there 's no real sense of separation from me in my heart , in terms of the love that i feel for these people .
i feel , still , a very strong connection of love for all of these people and for the land .
td : and i still do get to keep in touch with my mother and father , albeit infrequently .
i talk to my mother once in a blue moon on the telephone .
and my experience is that , when i 'm talking to her , with every second that passes during our conversation , the feeling of love that binds us is bringing us closer and closer together .
td : so those were just a few remarks about my personal background .
and in terms of other things that i wanted to share with you , in terms of ideas , i think it 's wonderful to have a situation like this , where so many people from different backgrounds and places can come together , exchange their ideas and form relationships of friendship with each other .
and i think that 's symbolic of what we 're seeing in the world in general , that the world is becoming smaller and smaller , and that all of the peoples in the world are enjoying more opportunities for connection .
that 's wonderful , but we should also remember that we should have a similar process happening on the inside .
along with outward development and increase of opportunity , there should be inward development and deepening of our heart connections as well as our outward connections .
so we spoke and we heard some about design this week .
i think that it 's important for us to remember that we need to keep pushing forward on the endeavor of the design of the heart .
we heard a lot about technology this week , and it 's important for us to remember to invest a lot of our energy in improving the technology of the heart .
td : so , even though i 'm somewhat happy about the wonderful developments that are happening in the world , still , i feel a sense of impediment , when it comes to the ability that we have to connect with each other on a heart-to-heart , or a mind-to-mind , level .
i feel that there are some things that are getting in the way .
tc : my relationship to this concept of heart-to-heart connection , or mind-to-mind connection , is an interesting one , because , as a spiritual leader , i 'm always attempting to open my heart to others and offer myself up for heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind connections in a genuine way with other people , but at the same time , i 've always been advised that i need to emphasize intelligence over the heart-to-heart connections , because , being someone in a position like mine , if i do n't rely primarily on intelligence , then something dangerous may happen to me .
so it 's an interesting paradox at play there .
but i had a really striking experience once , when a group from afghanistan came to visit me , and we had a really interesting conversation .
td : so we ended up talking about the bamiyan buddhas , which , as you know , were destroyed some years ago in afghanistan .
but the basis of our conversation was the different approach to spirituality on the part of the muslim and buddhist traditions .
of course , in muslim , because of the teachings around the concept of idolatry , you do n't find as many physical representations of divinity or of spiritual liberation as you do in the buddhist tradition , where , of course , there are many statues of the buddha that are highly revered .
so , we were talking about the differences between the traditions and what many people perceived as the tragedy of the destruction of the bamiyan buddhas , but i offered the suggestion that perhaps we could look at this in a positive way .
what we saw in the destruction of the bamiyan buddhas was the depletion of matter , some solid substance falling down and disintegrating .
maybe we could look at that to be more similar to the falling of the berlin wall , where a divide that had kept two types of people apart had collapsed and opened up a door for further communication .
so i think that , in this way , it 's always possible for us to derive something positive that can help us understand one another better .
td : so , with regard to the development that we 've been talking about here at this conference , i really feel that the development that we make should n't create a further burden for us as human beings , but should be used to improve our fundamental lifestyle td : of course , i rejoice in the development and the growth and the rise of the noble land of india , the great country of india , but at the same time , i think , as some of us have acknowledged , we need to be aware that some aspects of this rise are coming at the cost of the very ground
on which we stand .
so , as we are climbing the tree , some of the things that we 're doing in order to climb the tree are actually undermining the tree 's very root .
and so , what i think it comes down to is a question of , not only having information of what 's going on , but paying attention to that and letting that shift our motivation to become more sincere and genuinely positive .
we have hear , this week , about the horrible sufferings , for example , that so many women of the world are enduring day-to-day .
we have that information , but what often happens to us is that we do n't really choose to pay attention to it .
we do n't really choose to allow that to cause there to be a shift in our hearts .
so i think the way forward for the world - one that will bring the path of outer development in harmony with the real root of happiness - is that we allow the information that we have to really make a change in our heart .
td : so i think that sincere motivation is very important for our future well-being , or deep sense of well-being as humans , and i think that means sinking in to whatever it is you 're doing now .
whatever work you 're trying to do now to benefit the world , sink into that , get a full taste of that .
td : so , since we 've been here this week , we 've taken millions of breaths , collectively , and perhaps we have n't witnessed any course changes happening in our lives , but we often miss the very subtle changes .
and i think that sometimes we develop grand concepts of what happiness might look like for us , but that , if we pay attention , we can see that there are little symbols of happiness in every breath that we take .
td : so , every one of you who has come here is so talented , and you have so much to offer to the world , i think it would be a good note to conclude on then to just take a moment to appreciate how fortunate we are to have come together in this way and exchanged ideas and really form a strong aspiration and energy within ourselves that we will take the good that has come from this conference , the momentum , the positivity , and we will spread that and plant it in all of the corners of the world .
his holiness the karmapa : tomorrow is my talk .
td : lakshmi has worked incredibly hard , even in inviting me , let alone everything else that she has done to make this happen , and i was somewhat resistant at times , and i was also very nervous throughout this week .
i was feeling under the weather and dizzy and so forth , and people would ask me , why .
i would tell them , " it 's because i have to talk tomorrow . "
and so lakshmi had to put up with me through all of that , but i very much appreciate the opportunity she 's given me to be here .
and to you , everyone , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hh : thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i spent the better part of a decade looking at american responses to mass atrocity and genocide .
and i 'd like to start by sharing with you one moment that to me sums up what there is to know about american and democratic responses to mass atrocity .
and that moment came on april 21 , 1994 .
so 14 years ago , almost , in the middle of the rwandan genocide , in which 800,000 people would be systematically exterminated by the rwandan government and some extremist militia .
on april 21 , in the new york times , the paper reported that somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people had already been killed in the genocide .
it was in the paper - not on the front page .
it was a lot like the holocaust coverage , it was buried in the paper .
rwanda itself was not seen as newsworthy , and amazingly , genocide itself was not seen as newsworthy .
but on april 21 , a wonderfully honest moment occurred .
and that was that an american congresswoman named patricia schroeder from colorado met with a group of journalists .
and one of the journalists said to her , what 's up ?
what 's going on in the u.s. government ?
two to 300,000 people have just been exterminated in the last couple of weeks in rwanda .
it 's two weeks into the genocide at that time , but of course , at that time you do n't know how long it 's going to last .
and the journalist said , why is there so little response out of washington ?
why no hearings , no denunciations , no people getting arrested in front of the rwandan embassy or in front of the white house ? what 's the deal ?
and she said - she was so honest - she said , " it 's a great question .
all i can tell you is that in my congressional office in colorado and my office in washington , we 're getting hundreds and hundreds of calls about the endangered ape and gorilla population in rwanda , but nobody is calling about the people .
the phones just are n't ringing about the people . "
and the reason i give you this moment is there 's a deep truth in it .
and that truth is , or was , in the 20th century , that while we were beginning to develop endangered species movements , we did n't have an endangered people 's movement .
we had holocaust education in the schools .
most of us were groomed not only on images of nuclear catastrophe , but also on images and knowledge of the holocaust .
there 's a museum , of course , on the mall in washington , right next to lincoln and jefferson .
i mean , we have owned never again culturally , appropriately , interestingly .
and yet the politicization of never again , the operationalization of never again , had never occurred in the 20th century .
and that 's what that moment with patricia schroeder i think shows : that if we are to bring about an end to the world 's worst atrocities , we have to make it such .
there has to be a role - there has to be the creation of political noise and political costs in response to massive crimes against humanity , and so forth .
so that was the 20th century .
now here - and this will be a relief to you at this point in the afternoon - there is good news , amazing news , in the 21st century , and that is that , almost out of nowhere , there has come into being an anti-genocide movement , an anti-genocide constituency , and one that looks destined , in fact , to be permanent .
it grew up in response to the atrocities in darfur .
it is comprised of students . there are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country .
it 's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement .
there are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in darfur .
evangelicals have joined it . jewish groups have joined it .
" hotel rwanda " watchers have joined it . it is a cacophonous movement .
to call it a movement , as with all movements , perhaps , is a little misleading .
it 's diverse . it 's got a lot of different approaches .
it 's got all the ups and the downs of movements .
but it has been amazingly successful in one regard , in that it has become , it has congealed into this endangered people 's movement that was missing in the 20th century .
it sees itself , such as it is , the it , as something that will create the impression that there will be political cost , there will be a political price to be paid , for allowing genocide , for not having an heroic imagination , for not being an upstander but for being , in fact , a bystander .
now because it 's student-driven , there 's some amazing things that the movement has done .
they have launched a divestment campaign that has now convinced , i think , 55 universities in 22 states to divest their holdings of stocks with regard to companies doing business in sudan .
they have a 1-800-genocide number - this is going to sound very kitsch , but for those of you who may not be , i mean , may be apolitical , but interested in doing something about genocide , you dial 1-800-genocide and you type in your zip code , and you do n't even have to know who your congressperson is .
it will refer you directly to your congressperson , to your u.s. senator , to your governor where divestment legislation is pending .
they 've lowered the transaction costs of stopping genocide .
i think the most innovative thing they 've introduced recently are genocide grades .
and it takes students to introduce genocide grades .
so what you now have when a congress is in session is members of congress calling up these 19-year-olds or 24-year-olds and saying , i 'm just told i have a d minus on genocide ; what do i do to get a c ? i just want to get a c. help me .
and the students and the others who are part of this incredibly energized base are there to answer that , and there 's always something to do .
now , what this movement has done is it has extracted from the bush administration from the united states , at a time of massive over-stretch - military , financial , diplomatic - a whole series of commitments to darfur that no other country in the world is making .
for instance , the referral of the crimes in darfur to the international criminal court , which the bush administration does n't like .
the expenditure of 3 billion dollars in refugee camps to try to keep , basically , the people who 've been displaced from their homes by the sudanese government , by the so-called janjaweed , the militia , to keep those people alive until something more durable can be achieved .
and recently , or now not that recently , about six months ago , the authorization of a peacekeeping force of 26,000 that will go .
and that 's all the bush administration 's leadership , and it 's all because of this bottom-up pressure and the fact that the phones have n't stopped ringing from the beginning of this crisis .
the bad news , however , to this question of will evil prevail , is that evil lives on .
the people in those camps are surrounded on all sides by so-called janjaweed , these men on horseback with spears and kalashnikovs .
women who go to get firewood in order to heat the humanitarian aid in order to feed their families - humanitarian aid , the dirty secret of it is it has to be heated , really , to be edible - are themselves subjected to rape , which is a tool of the genocide that is being used .
and the peacekeepers i 've mentioned , the force has been authorized , but almost no country on earth has stepped forward since the authorization to actually put its troops or its police in harm 's way .
so we have achieved an awful lot relative to the 20th century , and yet far too little relative to the gravity of the crime that is unfolding as we sit here , as we speak .
why the limits to the movement ?
why is what has been achieved , or what the movement has done , been necessary but not sufficient to the crime ?
i think there are a couple - there are many reasons - but a couple just to focus on briefly .
the first is that the movement , such as it is , stops at america 's borders . it is not a global movement .
it does not have too many compatriots abroad who themselves are asking their governments to do more to stop genocide .
and the holocaust culture that we have in this country makes americans , sort of , more prone to , i think , want to bring never again to life .
the guilt that the clinton administration expressed , that bill clinton expressed over rwanda , created a space in our society for a consensus that rwanda was bad and wrong and we wish we had done more , and that is something that the movement has taken advantage of .
european governments , for the most part , have n't acknowledged responsibility , and there 's nothing to kind of to push back and up against .
so this movement , if it 's to be durable and global , will have to cross borders , and you will have to see other citizens in democracies , not simply resting on the assumption that their government would do something in the face of genocide , but actually making it such .
governments will never gravitate towards crimes of this magnitude naturally or eagerly .
as we saw , they have n't even gravitated towards protecting our ports or reigning in loose nukes .
why would we expect in a bureaucracy that it would orient itself towards distant suffering ?
so one reason is it has n't gone global .
the second is , of course , that at this time in particular in america 's history , we have a credibility problem , a legitimacy problem in international institutions .
it is structurally really , really hard to do , as the bush administration rightly does , which is to denounce genocide on a monday and then describe water boarding on a tuesday as a no-brainer and then turn up on wednesday and look for troop commitments .
now , other countries have their own reasons for not wanting to get involved .
let me be clear .
they 're in some ways using the bush administration as an alibi .
but it is essential for us to be a leader in this sphere , of course to restore our standing and our leadership in the world .
the recovery 's going to take some time .
we have to ask ourselves , what now ? what do we do going forward as a country and as citizens in relationship to the world 's worst places , the world 's worst suffering , killers , and the kinds of killers that could come home to roost sometime in the future ?
the place that i turned to answer that question was to a man that many of you may not have ever heard of , and that is a brazilian named sergio vieira de mello who , as chris said , was blown up in iraq in 2003 .
he was the victim of the first-ever suicide bomb in iraq .
it 's hard to remember , but there was actually a time in the summer of 2003 , even after the u.s. invasion , where , apart from looting , civilians were relatively safe in iraq .
now , who was sergio ? sergio vieira de mello was his name .
in addition to being brazilian , he was described to me before i met him in 1994 as someone who was a cross between james bond on the one hand and bobby kennedy on the other .
and in the u.n. , you do n't get that many people who actually manage to merge those qualities .
he was james bond-like in that he was ingenious .
he was drawn to the flames , he chased the flames , he was like a moth to the flames . something of an adrenalin junkie .
he was successful with women .
he was bobby kennedy-like because in some ways one could never tell if he was a realist masquerading as an idealist or an idealist masquerading as a realist , as people always wondered about bobby kennedy and john kennedy in that way .
what he was was a decathlete of nation-building , of problem-solving , of troubleshooting in the world 's worst places and in the world 's most broken places .
in failing states , genocidal states , under-governed states , precisely the kinds of places that threats to this country exist on the horizon , and precisely the kinds of places where most of the world 's suffering tends to get concentrated .
these are the places he was drawn to .
he moved with the headlines .
he was in the u.n. for 34 years . he joined at the age of 21 .
started off when the causes in the wars du jour in the ' 70s were wars of independence and decolonization .
he was there in bangladesh dealing with the outflow of millions of refugees - the largest refugee flow in history up to that point .
he was in sudan when the civil war broke out there .
he was in cyprus right after the turkish invasion .
he was in mozambique for the war of independence .
he was in lebanon . amazingly , he was in lebanon - the u.n. base was used - palestinians staged attacks out from behind the u.n. base .
israel then invaded and overran the u.n. base .
sergio was in beirut when the u.s. embassy was hit by the first-ever suicide attack against the united states .
people date the beginning of this new era to 9/11 , but surely 1983 , with the attack on the us embassy and the marine barracks - which sergio witnessed - those are , in fact , in some ways , the dawning of the era that we find ourselves in today .
from lebanon he went to bosnia in the ' 90s .
the issues were , of course , ethnic sectarian violence .
he was the first person to negotiate with the khmer rouge .
talk about evil prevailing . i mean , here he was in the room with the embodiment of evil in cambodia .
he negotiates with the serbs .
he actually crosses so far into this realm of talking to evil and trying to convince evil that it does n't need to prevail that he earns the nickname - not sergio but serbio while he 's living in the balkans and conducting these kinds of negotiations .
he then goes to rwanda and to congo in the aftermath of the genocide , and he 's the guy who has to decide - huh , ok , the genocide is over ; 800,000 people have been killed ; the people responsible are fleeing into neighboring countries - into congo , into tanzania .
i 'm sergio , i 'm a humanitarian , and i want to feed those - well , i do n't want to feed the killers but i want to feed the two million people who are with them , so we 're going to go , we 're going to set up camps , and we 're going to supply humanitarian aid .
but , uh-oh , the killers are within the camps .
well , i 'd like to separate the sheep from the wolves .
let me go door-to-door to the international community and see if anybody will give me police or troops to do the separation .
and their response , of course , was no more than we wanted to stop the genocide and put our troops in harm 's way to do that , nor do we now want to get in the way and pluck genocidaires from camps .
so then you have to make the decision .
do you turn off the international spigot of life support and risk two million civilian lives ?
or do you continue feeding the civilians , knowing that the genocidaires are in the camps , literally sharpening their knives for future battle ?
what do you do ?
it 's all lesser-evil terrain in these broken places .
late ' 90s : nation-building is the cause du jour .
he 's the guy put in charge . he 's the paul bremer or the jerry bremer of first kosovo and then east timor . he governs the places .
he 's the viceroy . he has to decide on tax policy , on currency , on border patrol , on policing . he has to make all these judgments .
he 's a brazilian in these places . he speaks seven languages .
he 's been up to that point in 14 war zones so he 's positioned to make better judgments , perhaps , than people who have never done that kind of work .
but nonetheless , he is the cutting edge of our experimentation with doing good with very few resources being brought to bear in , again , the world 's worst places .
and then after timor , 9/11 has happened , he 's named u.n. human rights commissioner , and he has to balance liberty and security and figure out , what do you do when the most powerful country in the united nations is bowing out of the geneva conventions , bowing out of international law ? do you denounce ?
well , if you denounce , you 're probably never going to get back in the room .
maybe you stay reticent . maybe you try to charm president bush - and that 's what he did . and in so doing he earned himself , unfortunately , his final and tragic appointment to iraq - the one that resulted in his death .
one note on his death , which is so devastating , is that despite predicating the war on iraq on a link between saddam hussein and terrorism in 9/11 , believe it or not , the bush administration or the invaders did no planning , no pre-war planning , to respond to terrorism .
so sergio - this receptacle of all of this learning on how to deal with evil and how to deal with brokenness , lay under the rubble for three and a half hours without rescue .
stateless . the guy who tried to help the stateless people his whole career .
like a refugee . because he represents the u.n.
if you represent everyone , in some ways you represent no one .
you 're un-owned .
and what the american - the most powerful military in the history of mankind was able to muster for his rescue , believe it or not , was literally these heroic two american soldiers went into the shaft . building was shaking .
one of them had been at 9/11 and lost his buddies on september 11th , and yet went in and risked his life in order to save sergio .
but all they had was a woman 's handbag - literally one of those basket handbags - and they tied it to a curtain rope from one of the offices at u.n. headquarters , and created a pulley system into this shaft in this quivering building in the interests of rescuing this person , the person we most need to turn to now , this shepherd , at a time when so many of us feel like we 're lacking guidance .
and this was the pulley system . this was what we were able to muster for sergio .
the good news , for what it 's worth , is after sergio and 21 others were killed that day in the attack on the u.n. , the military created a search and rescue unit that had the cutting equipment , the shoring wood , the cranes , the things that you would have needed to do the rescue .
but it was too late for sergio .
i want to wrap up , but i want to close with what i take to be the four lessons from sergio 's life on this question of how do we prevent evil from prevailing , which is how i would have framed the question .
here 's this guy who got a 34-year head start thinking about the kinds of questions we as a country are grappling with , we as citizens are grappling with now . what do we take away ?
first , i think , is his relationship to , in fact , evil is something to learn from .
he , over the course of his career , changed a great deal .
he had a lot of flaws , but he was very adaptive .
i think that was his greatest quality .
he started as somebody who would denounce harmdoers , he would charge up to people who were violating international law , and he would say , you 're violating , this is the u.n. charter .
do n't you see it 's unacceptable what you 're doing ?
and they would laugh at him because he did n't have the power of states , the power of any military or police .
he just had the rules , he had the norms , and he tried to use them .
and in lebanon , southern lebanon in ' 82 , he said to himself and to everybody else , i will never use the word " unacceptable " again .
i will never use it . i will try to make it such , but i will never use that word again .
but he lunged in the opposite direction .
he started , as i mentioned , to get in the room with evil , to not denounce , and became almost obsequious when he won the nickname serbio , for instance , and even when he negotiated with the khmer rouge would black-box what had occurred prior to entering the room .
but by the end of his life , i think he had struck a balance that we as a country can learn from .
be in the room , do n't be afraid of talking to your adversaries , but do n't bracket what happened before you entered the room .
do n't black-box history . do n't check your principles at the door .
and i think that 's something that we have to be in the room , whether it 's nixon going to china or khrushchev and kennedy or reagan and gorbachev .
all the great progress in this country with relation to our adversaries has come by going into the room .
and it does n't have to be an act of weakness .
you can actually do far more to build an international coalition against a harmdoer or a wrongdoer by being in the room and showing to the rest of the world that that person , that regime , is the problem and that you , the united states , are not the problem .
second take-away from sergio 's life , briefly .
what i take away , and this in some ways is the most important , he espoused and exhibited a reverence for dignity that was really , really unusual .
at a micro level , the individuals around him were visible .
he saw them .
at a macro level , he thought , you know , we talk about democracy promotion , but we do it in a way sometimes that 's an affront to people 's dignity .
we put people on humanitarian aid and we boast about it because we 've spent three billion .
it 's incredibly important , those people would no longer be alive if the united states , for instance , had n't spent that money in darfur , but it 's not a way to live .
if we think about dignity in our conduct as citizens and as individuals with relation to the people around us , and as a country , if we could inject a regard for dignity into our dealings with other countries , it would be something of a revolution .
third point , very briefly . he talked a lot about freedom from fear .
and i recognize there is so much to be afraid of .
there are so many genuine threats in the world .
but what sergio was talking about is , let 's calibrate our relationship to the threat .
let 's not hype the threat ; let 's actually see it clearly .
we have reason to be afraid of melting ice caps .
we have reason to be afraid that we have n't secured loose nuclear material in the former soviet union .
let 's focus on what are the legitimate challenges and threats , but not lunge into bad decisions because of a panic , of a fear .
in times of fear , for instance , one of the things sergio used to say is , fear is a bad advisor .
we lunge towards the extremes when we are n't operating and trying to , again , calibrate our relationship to the world around us .
fourth and final point : he somehow , because he was working in all the world 's worst places and all lesser evils , had a humility , of course , and an awareness of the complexity of the world around him .
i mean , such an acute awareness of how hard it was .
how sisyphean this task was of mending , and yet aware of that complexity , humbled by it , he was n't paralyzed by it .
and we as citizens , as we go through this experience of the kind of , the crisis of confidence , crisis of competence , crisis of legitimacy , i think there 's a temptation to pull back from the world and say , ah , katrina , iraq - we do n't know what we 're doing .
we ca n't afford to pull back from the world .
it 's a question of how to be in the world .
and the lesson , i think , of the anti-genocide movement that i mentioned , that is a partial success but by no means has it achieved what it has set out to do - it 'll be many decades , probably , before that happens - but is that if we want to see change , we have to become the change .
we ca n't rely upon our institutions to do the work of necessarily talking to adversaries on their own without us creating a space for that to happen , for having respect for dignity , and for bringing that combination of humility and a sort of emboldened sense of responsibility to our dealings with the rest of the world .
so will evil prevail ? is that the question ?
i think the short answer is : no , not unless we let it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the world 's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world , canada 's boreal forest .
it stretches right across northern canada , in labrador , it 's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world , the george river caribou herd , numbering approximately 400,000 animals .
unfortunately , when i was there i could n't find one of them , but you have the antlers as proof .
all across the boreal , we 're blessed with this incredible abundance of wetlands .
wetlands globally are one of the most endangered ecosystems .
they 're absolutely critical ecosystems , they clean air , they clean water , they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases , and they 're home to a huge diversity of species .
in the boreal , they are also the home where almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species found in north america migrate north to breed and raise their young .
in ontario , the boreal marches down south to the north shore of lake superior .
and these incredibly beautiful boreal forests were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in canadian history , the group of seven were very inspired by this landscape , and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage , but also an important part of our cultural heritage .
in manitoba , this is an image from the east side of lake winnipeg , and this is the home of the newly designated unesco cultural heritage site .
in saskatchewan , as across all of the boreal , home to some of our most famous rivers , an incredible network of rivers and lakes that every school-age child learns about , the peace , the athabasca , the churchill here , the mackenzie , and these networks were the historical routes for the voyageur and the coureur des bois , the first non-aboriginal explorers of northern canada that , taking from the first nations people , used canoes and paddled to explore for a trade route , a northwest passage for the fur trade .
in the north , the boreal is bordered by the tundra , and just below that , in yukon , we have this incredible valley , the tombstone valley .
and the tombstone valley is home to the porcupine caribou herd .
now you 've probably heard about the porcupine caribou herd in the context of its breeding ground in arctic national wildlife refuge .
well , the wintering ground is also critical and it also is not protected , and is potentially , could be potentially , exploited for gas and mineral rights .
the western border of the boreal in british columbia is marked by the coast mountains , and on the other side of those mountains is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world , the great bear rainforest , and we 'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail .
all across the boreal , it 's home for a huge incredible range of indigenous peoples , and a rich and varied culture .
and i think that one of the reasons why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past , know their native languages , the songs , the dances , the traditions , i think part of that reason is because of the remoteness , the span and the wilderness of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem .
and i think particularly now , as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis , we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years .
in the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis of all of these values that we 've been talking about , and i think these are some of the core values that make us proud to be canadians .
this is the alberta tar sands , the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of saudi arabia .
trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern alberta are these vast reserves of this sticky , tar-like bitumen .
and the mining and the exploitation of that is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before .
i want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this .
if you look at that truck there , it is the largest truck of its kind of the planet .
it is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high .
if i stand beside that truck , my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap .
within the dimensions of that truck , you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily . i did the math .
so instead of thinking of that as a truck , think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home .
that 's not a bad size home .
and line those trucks / homes back and forth across there from the bottom all the way to the top .
and then think of how large that very small section of one mine is .
now , you can apply that same kind of thinking here as well .
now , here you see - of course , as you go further on , these trucks become like a pixel .
again , imagine those all back and forth there .
how large is that one portion of a mine ?
that would be a huge , vast metropolitan area , probably much larger than the city of victoria .
and this is just one of a number of mines , 10 mines so far right now .
this is one section of one mining complex , and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process .
no tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval , so it is essentially a rubber stamp .
the other method of extraction is what 's called the in-situ .
and here , massive amounts of water are super-heated and pumped through the ground , through these vasts networks of pipelines , seismic lines , drill paths , compressor stations .
and even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant as the mines , it 's even more damaging in some ways .
it impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness , where there is 90 percent reduction of key species , like woodland caribou and grizzly bears , and it consumes even more energy , more water , and produces at least as much greenhouse gas .
so these in-situ developments are at least as ecologically damaging as the mines .
the oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil .
this is one of the reasons why it 's called the world 's dirtiest oil .
it 's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in canada , and it is also a reason why canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person .
the tailings ponds are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet .
oil sands - or rather i should say tar sands - " oil sands " is a p.r.-created term so that the oil companies would n't be trying to promote something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance that 's the world 's dirtiest oil .
so they decided to call it oil sands .
the tar sands consume more water than any other oil process , three to five barrels of water are taken , polluted and then returned into tailings ponds , the largest toxic impoundments on the planet .
semcrude , just one of the licensees , in just one of their tailings ponds , dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day .
that 's creating the largest toxic impoundments in the history of the planet .
so far , this is enough toxin to cover the face of lake eerie a foot deep .
and the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres .
that 's two-thirds the size of the entire island of manhattan .
that 's like from wall street at the southern edge of manhattan up to maybe 120th street .
so this is an absolutely - this is one of the larger tailings ponds .
this might be , what ? i do n't know , half the size of manhattan .
and you can see in the context , it 's just a relatively small section of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50 on stream to be approved soon .
and of course , these tailings ponds - well , you ca n't see many ponds from outer space and you can see these , so maybe we should stop calling them ponds - these massive toxic wastelands are built unlined and on the banks of the athabasca river .
and the athabasca river drains downstream to a range of aboriginal communities .
in fort chippewa , the 800 people there , are finding toxins in the food chain , this has been scientifically proven .
the tar sands toxins are in the food chain , and this is causing cancer rates up to 10 times what they are in the rest of canada .
in spite of that , people have to live , have to eat this food in order to survive .
the incredibly high price of flying food into these remote northern aboriginal communities and the high rate of unemployment makes this an absolute necessity for survival .
and not that many years ago , i was lent a boat by a first nations man .
and he said , " when you go out on the river , do not under any circumstances eat the fish .
it 's carcinogenic . "
and yet , on the front porch of that man 's cabin , i saw four fish . he had to feed his family to survive .
and as a parent , i just ca n't imagine what that does to your soul .
and that 's what we 're doing .
the boreal forest is also perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change .
the boreal forest sequesters more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem .
and this is absolutely key .
so what we 're doing is , we 're taking the most concentrated greenhouse gas sink , twice as much greenhouse gases are sequestered in the boreal per acre than the tropical rainforests .
and what we 're doing is we 're destroying this carbon sink , turning it into a carbon bomb .
and we 're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world , which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse gas emitting oil in the world .
and we 're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet .
this is one of the reasons why canada , originally a climate change hero - we were one of the first signatories of the kyoto accord .
now we 're the country that has full-time lobbyists in the european union and washington , d.c.
threatening trade wars when these countries talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation to limit the import of high-carbon fuels , of greenhouse gas emissions , anything like this , at international conferences , whether they 're in copenhagen or cancun , international conferences on climate change , we 're the country that gets the dinosaur award every single day as being the biggest obstacle to progress on this issue .
just 70 miles downstream is the world 's largest freshwater delta , the peace-athabasca delta , the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways .
this is a globally significant wetland , perhaps the greatest on the planet .
incredible habitat for half the bird species you find in north america , migrating here .
and also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison , and also , of course , critical habitat for another whole range of other species .
but it too is being threatened by the massive amount of water being drawn from the athabasca , which feeds these wetlands , and also the incredible toxic burden of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet , which are leaching in to the food chain for all the species downstream .
so as bad as all that is , things are going to get much worse , much , much worse .
this is the infrastructure as we see it about now .
this is what 's planned for 2015 .
and you can see here the keystone pipeline , which would take tar sands raw down to the gulf coast , punching a pipeline through the heart , the agricultural heart of north america , of the united states , and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the united states , and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean energy future for america .
here you see the route down the mackenzie valley .
this would put a pipeline to take natural gas from the beaufort sea through the heart of the third largest watershed basin in the world , and the only one which is 95 percent intact .
and building a pipeline with an industrial highway would change forever this incredible wilderness , which is a true rarity on the planet today .
so the great bear rainforest is just over the hill there , within a few miles we go from these dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees , maybe 10 inches across , and soon we 're in the coastal temperate rainforest , rain-drenched , 1,000-year-old trees , 20 feet across , a completely different ecosystem .
and the great bear rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world .
some of the greatest densities of , some of the most iconic and threatened species on the planet , and yet there 's a proposal , of course , to build a pipeline to take huge tankers , 10 times the size of the exxon valdez , through some of the most difficult to navigate waters in the world , where only just a few years ago , a b.c. ferry ran aground .
when one of these tar sands tankers , carrying the dirtiest oil , 10 times as much as the exxon valdez , eventually hits a rock and goes down , we 're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters this planet has ever seen .
and here we have the plan out to 2030 .
what they 're proposing is an almost four-times increase in production , and that would industrialize an area the size of florida .
in doing so , we 'll be removing a large part of our greatest carbon sink and replacing it with the most high greenhouse gas emission oil in the future .
the world does not need any more tar mines .
the world does not need any more pipelines to wed our addiction to fossil fuels .
and the world certainly does not need the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply and further threaten the downstream communities .
and let 's face it , we all live downstream in an era of global warming and climate change .
what we need , is we all need to act to ensure that canada respects the massive amounts of freshwater that we hold in this country .
we need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected , and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere .
and we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands .
and we can do that . there is a huge network all over the world fighting to stop this project .
and i quite simply think that this is not something that should be decided just in canada .
everyone in this room , everyone across canada , everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and , i think , a responsibility .
because what we do here is going to change our history , it 's going to color our possibility to survive , and for our children to survive and have a rich future .
we have an incredible gift in the boreal , an incredible opportunity to preserve our best defense against global warming , but we could let that slip away .
the tar sands could threaten not just a large section of the boreal .
it compromises the life and the health of some of our most underprivileged and vulnerable people , the aboriginal communities that have so much to teach us .
it could destroy the athabasca delta , the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet .
it could destroy the great bear rainforest , the largest temperate rainforest in the world .
and it could have huge impacts on the future of the agricultural heartland of north america .
i hope that you will all , if you 've been moved by this presentation , join with the growing international community to get canada to step up to its responsibilities , to convince canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain , and to say no to the tar sands , and yes to a clean energy future for all .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are today talking about moral persuasion .
what is moral and immoral in trying to change people 's behaviors by using technology and using design ?
and i do n't know what you expect , but when i was thinking about that issue , i early on realized what i 'm not able to give you are answers .
i 'm not able to tell you what is moral or immoral because we 're living in a pluralist society .
my values can be radically different from your values .
which means that what i consider moral or immoral based on that might not necessarily be what you consider moral or immoral .
but i also realized that there is one thing that i could give you .
and that is what this guy behind me gave the world - socrates .
it is questions .
what i can do and what i would like to do with you is give you , like that initial question , a set of questions to figure out for yourself , layer by layer , like peeling an onion , getting at the core of what you believe is moral or immoral persuasion .
and i 'd like to do that with a couple of examples of technologies where people have used game elements to get people to do things .
so it 's a first very simple , a very obvious question i would like to give you : what are your intentions if you are designing something ?
and obviously intentions are not the only thing , so here is another example for one of these applications .
there are a couple of these kinds of eco-dashboards right now - so dashboards built into cars which try to motivate you to drive more fuel efficiently .
this here is nissan 's myleaf , where your driving behavior is compared with the driving behavior of other people , so you can compete for who drives around the most fuel efficiently .
and these things are very effective , it turns out , so effective that they motivate people to engage in unsafe driving behaviors - like not stopping on a red headlight .
because that way you have to stop and restart the engine , and that would use quite some fuel , would n't it ?
so despite this being a very well-intended application , obviously there was a side effect of that .
and here 's another example for one of these side effects .
commendable : a site that allows parents to give their kids little badges for doing the things that parents want their kids to do - like tying their shoes .
and at first that sounds very nice , very benign , well intended .
but it turns out , if you look into research on people 's mindset , that caring about outcomes , caring about public recognition , caring about these kinds of public tokens of recognition is not necessarily very helpful for your long-term psychological well-being .
it 's better if you care about learning something .
it 's better when you care about yourself than how you appear in front of other people .
so that kind of motivational tool that is used actually in and of itself has a long-term side effect in that every time we use a technology that uses something like public recognition or status , we 're actually positively endorsing this as a good and a normal thing to care about - that way , possibly having a detrimental effect on the long-term psychological well-being of ourselves as a culture .
so that 's a second , very obvious question : what are the effects of what you 're doing ?
the effects that you 're having with the device , like less fuel , as well as the effects of the actual tools you 're using to get people to do things - public recognition .
now is that all - intention , effect ?
well there are some technologies which obviously combine both .
both good long-term and short-term effects and a positive intention like fred stutzman 's freedom , where the whole point of that application is , well , we 're usually so bombarded with calls and requests by other people , with this device you can shut off the internet connectivity of your pc of choice for a preset amount of time to actually get some work done .
and i think most of us will agree , well that 's something well intended and also has good consequences .
in the words of michel foucault , " it is a technology of the self . "
it is a technology that empowers the individual to determine its own life course , to shape itself .
but the problem is , as foucault points out , that every technology of the self has a technology of domination as its flip side .
as you see in today 's modern liberal democracies , the society , the state , not only allows us to determine our self , to shape our self , it also demands it of us .
it demands that we optimize ourselves , that we control ourselves , that we self-manage continuously because that 's the only way in which such a liberal society works .
these technologies want us to stay in the game that society has devised for us .
they want us to fit in even better .
they want us to optimize ourselves to fit in .
now i do n't say that is necessarily a bad thing .
i just think that this example points us to a general realization , and that is no matter what technology or design you look at , even something we consider as well intended and as good in its effects - like stutzman 's freedom - comes with certain values embedded in it .
and we can question these values .
we can question : is it a good thing that all of us continuously self-optimize ourselves to fit better into that society ?
or to give you another example , what about a piece of persuasive technology that convinces muslim women to wear their headscarves ?
is that a good or a bad technology in its intentions or in its effects ?
well that basically depends on the kind of values that you bring to bear to make these kinds of judgments .
so that 's a third question : what values do you use to judge ?
and speaking of values , i 've noticed that in the discussion about moral persuasion online , and when i 'm talking with people , more often than not there is a weird bias .
and that bias is that we 're asking , is this or that " still " ethical ?
is it " still " permissible ?
we 're asking things like , is this oxfam donation form - where the regular monthly donation is the preset default and people , maybe without intending it , are that way encouraged or nudged into giving a regular donation instead of a one-time donation - is that still permissible ?
is it still ethical ?
we 're fishing at the low end .
but in fact , that question " is it still ethical ? "
is just one way of looking at ethics .
because if you look at the beginning of ethics in western culture , you see a very different idea of what ethics also could be .
for aristotle , ethics was not about the question , is that still good , or is it bad ?
ethics was about the question of how to live life well .
and he put that in the word " arete , " which we , from the -lsb- ancient greek -rsb- , translate as " virtue . "
but really it means excellence .
it means living up to your own full potential as a human being .
and that is an idea that , i think , that paul richard buchanan nicely put in a recent essay where he said , " products are vivid arguments about how we should live our lives . "
our designs are not ethical or unethical in that they 're using ethical or unethical means of persuading us .
they have a moral component just in the kind of vision and the aspiration of the good life that they present to us .
and if you look into the designed environment around us with that kind of lens , asking , " what is the vision of the good life that our products , our design , present to us ? , " then you often get the shivers , because of how little we expect of each other , of how little we actually seem to expect of our life and what the good life looks like .
so that 's the fourth question i 'd like to leave you with : what vision of the good life do your designs convey ?
and speaking of design , you notice that i already broadened the discussion .
because it 's not just persuasive technology that we 're talking about here , it 's any piece of design that we put out here in the world .
i do n't know whether you know the great communication researcher paul watzlawick who , back in the ' 60s , made the argument we can not not communicate .
even if we choose to be silent , we chose to be silent . we 're communicating something by choosing to be silent .
and in the same way that we can not not communicate , we can not not persuade .
whatever we do or refrain from doing , whatever we put out there as a piece of design into the world has a persuasive component .
it tries to affect people .
it puts a certain vision of the good life out there in front of us .
which is what peter-paul verbeek , the dutch philosopher of technology , says .
no matter whether we as designers intend it or not , we materialize morality .
we make certain things harder and easier to do .
we organize the existence of people .
we put a certain vision of what good or bad or normal or usual is in front of people by everything we put out there in the world .
even something as innocuous as a set of school chairs is a persuasive technology .
because it presents and materializes a certain vision of the good life - the good life in which teaching and learning and listening is about one person teaching , the others listening , in which it is about , learning is done while sitting , in which you learn for yourself , in which you 're not supposed to change these rules because the chairs are fixed to the ground .
and even something as innocuous as a single design chair - like this one by arne jacobsen - is a persuasive technology .
because , again , it communicates an idea of the good life .
a good life - a life that you say you as a designer consent to by saying , " in the good life , goods are produced as sustainably or unsustainably as this chair .
workers are treated as well or as badly as the workers were treated who built that chair . "
the good life is a life where design is important because somebody obviously took the time and spent the money for that kind of well-designed chair , where tradition is important because this is a traditional classic and someone cared about this , and where there is something as conspicuous consumption , where it is okay and normal to spend a humungous amount of money on such a chair to signal to other people what your social status is .
so these are the kinds of layers , the kinds of questions i wanted to lead you through today - the question of , what are the intentions that you bring to bear when you 're designing something ?
what are the effects , intended and unintended , that you 're having ?
what are the values you 're using to judge those ?
what are the virtues , the aspirations that you 're actually expressing in that ?
and how does that apply , not just to persuasive technology , but to everything you design ?
do we stop there ?
i do n't think so .
i think that all of these things are eventually informed by the core of all of this - and this is nothing but life itself .
why , when the question of what the good life is informs everything that we design , should we stop at design and not ask ourselves , how does it apply to our own life ?
" why should the lamp or the house be an art object , but not our life ? "
as michel foucault puts it .
just to give you a practical example of buster benson .
this is buster setting up a pull-up machine at the office of his new startup habit labs , where they 're trying to build up other applications like health month for people .
and why is he building a thing like this ?
well here is the set of axioms that habit labs , buster 's startup , put up for themselves on how they wanted to work together as a team when they 're building these applications - a set of moral principles they set themselves for working together - and one of them being , " we take care of our own health and manage our own burnout . "
because ultimately how can you ask yourselves and how can you find an answer on what vision of the good life you want to convey and create with your designs without asking the question , what vision of the good life do you yourself want to live ?
and with that , i thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how many creationists do we have in the room ?
probably none . i think we 're all darwinians .
and yet many darwinians are anxious , a little uneasy - would like to see some limits on just how far the darwinism goes .
it 's all right .
you know spiderwebs ? sure , they are products of evolution .
the world wide web ? not so sure .
beaver dams , yes . hoover dam , no .
what do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves , fruits of the tree of life , and hence , in some sense , obeying evolutionary rules ?
and yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking - to our thinking .
and so i 'm going to talk a little bit about that , keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here .
so you 're out in the woods , or you 're out in the pasture , and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass .
it climbs up to the top , and it falls , and it climbs , and it falls , and it climbs - trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass .
what is this ant doing ? what is this in aid of ?
what goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass ?
what 's in it for the ant ?
and the answer is : nothing . there 's nothing in it for the ant .
well then , why is it doing this ?
is it just a fluke ?
yeah , it 's just a fluke . it 's a lancet fluke .
it 's a little brain worm .
it 's a parasitic brain worm that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle .
salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds , and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant , crawl into its brain , and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle .
so there 's nothing in it for the ant .
the ant 's brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain , inducing suicidal behavior .
pretty scary .
well , does anything like that happen with human beings ?
this is all on behalf of a cause other than one 's own genetic fitness , of course .
well , it may already have occurred to you that islam means " surrender , " or " submission of self-interest to the will of allah . "
well , it 's ideas - not worms - that hijack our brains .
now , am i saying that a sizable minority of the world 's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas ?
no , it 's worse than that .
most people have .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are a lot of ideas to die for .
freedom , if you 're from new hampshire .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- justice . truth . communism .
many people have laid down their lives for communism , and many have laid down their lives for capitalism .
and many for catholicism . and many for islam .
these are just a few of the ideas that are to die for .
they 're infectious .
yesterday , amory lovins spoke about " infectious repititis . "
it was a term of abuse , in effect .
this is unthinking engineering .
well , most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant , new , out-of-the-box thinking .
it 's " infectious repetitis , " and we might as well try to have a theory of what 's going on when that happens so that we can understand the conditions of infection .
hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others .
i myself am a philosopher , and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is .
and you have to have a bumper sticker , you know . you have to have a statement .
so , this is mine .
the secret of happiness is : find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it .
most of us - now that the " me decade " is well in the past - now we actually do this .
one set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives .
this is what our summum bonum is .
it 's not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have .
now , this is a profound biological effect .
it 's the subordination of genetic interest to other interests .
and no other species does anything at all like it .
well , how are we going to think about this ?
it is , on the one hand , a biological effect , and a very large one .
unmistakable .
now , what theories do we want to use to look at this ?
well , many theories . but how could something tie them together ?
the idea of replicating ideas ; ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain .
richard dawkins , whom you 'll be hearing later in the day , invented the term " memes , " and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book " the selfish gene . "
now here am i talking about his idea .
well , you see , it 's not his . yes - he started it .
but it 's everybody 's idea now .
and he 's not responsible for what i say about memes .
i 'm responsible for what i say about memes .
actually , i think we 're all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas , but for their likely misuses .
so it is important , i think , to richard , and to me , that these ideas not be abused and misused .
they 're very easy to misuse . that 's why they 're dangerous .
and it 's just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another .
so we have to keep plugging away , trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread .
but it is a problem .
we do n't have much time , and i 'm going to go over just a little bit of this and cut out , because there 's a lot of other things that are going to be said .
so let me just point out : memes are like viruses .
that 's what richard said , back in ' 93 .
and you might think , " well , how can that be ?
i mean , a virus is - you know , it 's stuff ! what 's a meme made of ? "
yesterday , negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications but - what 's a virus ?
a virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that is , there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does .
and that 's what a meme is . it 's an information packet with attitude .
what 's a meme made of ? what are bits made of , mom ?
not silicon .
they 're made of information , and can be carried in any physical medium .
what 's a word made of ?
sometimes when people say , " do memes exist ? "
i say , " well , do words exist ? are they in your ontology ? "
if they are , words are memes that can be pronounced .
then there 's all the other memes that ca n't be pronounced .
there are different species of memes .
remember the shakers ? gift to be simple ?
simple , beautiful furniture ?
and , of course , they 're basically extinct now .
and one of the reasons is that among the creed of shaker-dom is that one should be celibate .
not just the priests . everybody .
well , it 's not so surprising that they 've gone extinct . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but in fact that 's not why they went extinct .
they survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets were n't there .
and there were lots of widows and orphans , people like that , who needed a foster home .
and so they had a ready supply of converts .
and they could keep it going .
and , in principle , it could 've gone on forever , with perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts .
the idea being passed on through proselytizing , instead of through the gene line .
so the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they 're not being passed on genetically .
a meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness .
after all , the meme for shaker-dom was essentially a sterilizing parasite .
there are other parasites that do this - which render the host sterile .
it 's part of their plan .
they do n't have to have minds to have a plan .
i 'm just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective , which i recommend .
i 've not time to go into more of it .
in jared diamond 's wonderful book , " guns , germs and steel , " he talks about how it was germs , more than guns and steel , that conquered the new hemisphere - the western hemisphere - that conquered the rest of the world .
when european explorers and travelers spread out , they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to , that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years , thousands of years , of living with domesticated animals who were the sources of those pathogens .
and they just wiped out - these pathogens just wiped out the native people , who had no immunity to them at all .
and we 're doing it again .
we 're doing it this time with toxic ideas .
yesterday , a number of people - nicholas negroponte and others - spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out , thanks to all the new technology all over the world .
and i agree . it is largely wonderful . largely wonderful .
but among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology , are a lot of toxic ideas .
now , this has been realized for some time .
sayyid qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical islam , one of the ideologues that inspired osama bin laden .
" one has only to glance at its press films , fashion shows , beauty contests , ballrooms , wine bars and broadcasting stations . " memes .
these memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures .
they are wiping out languages .
they are wiping out traditions and practices .
and it 's not our fault , anymore than it 's our fault when our germs lay waste to people that have n't developed the immunity .
we have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture .
we 're a free society , so we let pornography and all these things - we shrug them off .
they 're like a mild cold .
they 're not a big deal for us .
but we should recognize that for many people in the world , they are a big deal .
and we should be very alert to this .
as we spread our education and our technology , one of the things that we are doing is we 're the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes - the memes that they are prepared to die for .
well now , how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes ?
that is not the job of the science of memetics .
memetics is morally neutral . and so it should be .
this is not the place for hate and anger .
if you 've had a friend who 's died of aids , then you hate hiv .
but the way to deal with that is to do science , and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective .
get the facts .
work out the implications .
there 's plenty of room for moral passion once we 've got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do .
and , as with germs , the trick is not to try to annihilate them .
you will never annihilate the germs .
what you can do , however , is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence .
that will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties .
that 's all the time i have , so thank you very much for your attention .
the brilliant playwright , adrienne kennedy , wrote a volume called " people who led to my plays . "
and if i were to write a volume , it would be called , " artists who have led my exhibitions " because my work , in understanding art and in understanding culture , has come by following artists , by looking at what artists mean and what they do and who they are .
j.j. from " good times , " -lrb- applause -rrb- significant to many people of course because of " dy-no-mite , " but perhaps more significant as the first , really , black artist on primetime tv .
jean-michel basquiat , important to me because -lsb- he was -rsb- the first black artist in real time that showed me the possibility of who and what i was about to enter into .
my overall project is about art - specifically , about black artists - very generally about the way in which art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves .
my interest is in artists who understand and rewrite history , who think about themselves within the narrative of the larger world of art , but who have created new places for us to see and understand .
i 'm showing two artists here , glenn ligon and kara walker , two of many who really form for me the essential questions that i wanted to bring as a curator to the world .
i was interested in the idea of why and how i could create a new story , a new narrative in art history and a new narrative in the world .
and to do this , i knew that i had to see the way in which artists work , understand the artist 's studio as a laboratory , imagine , then , reinventing the museum as a think tank and looking at the exhibition as the ultimate white paper - asking questions , providing the space to look and to think about answers .
in 1994 , when i was a curator at the whitney museum , i made an exhibition called black male .
it looked at the intersection of race and gender in contemporary american art .
it sought to express the ways in which art could provide a space for dialogue - complicated dialogue , dialogue with many , many points of entry - and how the museum could be the space for this contest of ideas .
this exhibition included over 20 artists of various ages and races , but all looking at black masculinity from a very particular point of view .
what was significant about this exhibition is the way in which it engaged me in my role as a curator , as a catalyst , for this dialogue .
one of the things that happened very distinctly in the course of this exhibition is i was confronted with the idea of how powerful images can be in people 's understanding of themselves and each other .
i 'm showing you two works , one on the right by leon golub , one on the left by robert colescott .
and in the course of the exhibition - which was contentious , controversial and ultimately , for me , life-changing in my sense of what art could be - a woman came up to me on the gallery floor to express her concern about the nature of how powerful images could be and how we understood each other .
and she pointed to the work on the left to tell me how problematic this image was , as it related , for her , to the idea of how black people had been represented .
and she pointed to the image on the right as an example , to me , of the kind of dignity that needed to be portrayed to work against those images in the media .
she then assigned these works racial identities , basically saying to me that the work on the right , clearly , was made by a black artist , the work on the left , clearly , by a white artist , when , in effect , that was the opposite case : bob colescott , african-american artist ; leon golub , a white artist .
the point of that for me was to say - in that space , in that moment - that i really , more than anything , wanted to understand how images could work , how images did work , and how artists provided a space bigger than one that we could imagine in our day-to-day lives to work through these images .
fast-forward and i end up in harlem ; home for many of black america , very much the psychic heart of the black experience , really the place where the harlem renaissance existed .
harlem now , sort of explaining and thinking of itself in this part of the century , looking both backwards and forwards ...
i always say harlem is an interesting community because , unlike many other places , it thinks of itself in the past , present and the future simultaneously ; no one speaks of it just in the now .
it 's always what it was and what it can be .
and , in thinking about that , then my second project , the second question i ask is : can a museum be a catalyst in a community ?
can a museum house artists and allow them to be change agents as communities rethink themselves ?
this is harlem , actually , on january 20th , thinking about itself in a very wonderful way .
so i work now at the studio museum in harlem , thinking about exhibitions there , thinking about what it means to discover art 's possibility .
now , what does this mean to some of you ?
in some cases , i know that many of you are involved in cross-cultural dialogues , you 're involved in ideas of creativity and innovation .
think about the place that artists can play in that - that is the kind of incubation and advocacy that i work towards , in working with young , black artists .
think about artists , not as content providers , though they can be brilliant at that , but , again , as real catalysts .
the studio museum was founded in the late 60s .
and i bring this up because it 's important to locate this practice in history .
to look at 1968 , in the incredible historic moment that it is , and think of the arc that has happened since then , to think of the possibilities that we are all privileged to stand in today and imagine that this museum that came out of a moment of great protest and one that was so much about examining the history and the legacy of important african-american artists to the history of art in this country like jacob lawrence , norman lewis , romare bearden .
and then , of course , to bring us to today .
in 1975 , muhammad ali gave a lecture at harvard university .
after his lecture , a student got up and said to him , " give us a poem . "
and mohammed ali said , " me , we . "
a profound statement about the individual and the community .
the space in which now , in my project of discovery , of thinking about artists , of trying to define what might be black art cultural movement of the 21st century .
what that might mean for cultural movements all over this moment , the " me , we " seems incredibly prescient totally important .
to this end , the specific project that has made this possible for me is a series of exhibitions , all titled with an f - freestyle , frequency and flow - which have set out to discover and define the young , black artists working in this moment who i feel strongly will continue to work over the next many years .
this series of exhibitions was made specifically to try and question the idea of what it would mean now , at this point in history , to see art as a catalyst ; what it means now , at this point in history , as we define and redefine culture , black culture specifically in my case , but culture generally .
i named this group of artists around an idea , which i put out there called post-black , really meant to define them as artists who came and start their work now , looking back at history but start in this moment , historically .
it is really in this sense of discovery that i have a new set of questions that i 'm asking .
this new set of questions is : what does it mean , right now , to be african-american in america ?
what can artwork say about this ?
where can a museum exist as the place for us all to have this conversation ?
really , most exciting about this is thinking about the energy and the excitement that young artists can bring .
their works for me are about , not always just simply about the aesthetic innovation that their minds imagine , that their visions create and put out there in the world , but more , perhaps , importantly , through the excitement of the community that they create as important voices that would allow us right now to understand our situation , as well as in the future .
i am continually amazed by the way in which the subject of race can take itself in many places that we do n't imagine it should be .
i am always amazed by the way in which artists are willing to do that in their work .
it is why i look to art .
it 's why i ask questions of art .
it is why i make exhibitions .
now , this exhibition , as i said , 40 young artists done over the course of eight years , and for me it 's about considering the implications .
it 's considering the implications of what this generation has to say to the rest of us .
it 's considering what it means for these artists to be both out in the world as their work travels , but in their communities as people who are seeing and thinking about the issues that face us .
it 's also about thinking about the creative spirit and nurturing it , and imagining , particularly in urban america , about the nurturing of the spirit .
now , where , perhaps , does this end up right now ?
for me , it is about re-imagining this cultural discourse in an international context .
so the last iteration of this project has been called flow , with the idea now of creating a real network of artists around the world ; really looking , not so much from harlem and out , but looking across , and flow looked at artists all born on the continent of africa .
and as many of us think about that continent and think about what if means to us all in the 21st century , i have begun that looking through artists , through artworks , and imagining what they can tell us about the future , what they tell us about our future , and what they create in their sense of offering us this great possibility of watching that continent emerge as part of our bigger dialogue .
so , what do i discover when i look at artworks ?
what do i think about when i think about art ?
i feel like the privilege i 've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works , the discovery of exciting works .
but , really , it has been what i 've discovered about myself and what i can offer in the space of an exhibition , to talk about beauty , to talk about power , to talk about ourselves , and to talk and speak to each other .
that 's what makes me get up every day and want to think about this generation of black artists and artists around the world .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- one of the problems of writing , and working , and looking at the internet is that it 's very hard to separate fashion from deep change .
and so , to start helping that , i want to take us back to 1835 .
in 1835 , james gordon bennett founded the first mass-circulation newspaper in new york city .
and it cost about 500 dollars to start it , which was about the equivalent of 10,000 dollars of today .
by 15 years later , by 1850 , doing the same thing - starting what was experienced as a mass - circulation daily paper - would come to cost two and a half million dollars .
10,000 , two and a half million , 15 years .
that 's the critical change that is being inverted by the net .
and that 's what i want to talk about today , and how that relates to the emergence of social production .
starting with newspapers , what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information , knowledge and culture , which led to a stark bifurcation between producers - who had to be able to raise financial capital , just like any other industrial organization - and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce .
now , the term " information society , " " information economy , " for a very long time has been used as the thing that comes after the industrial revolution . but in fact , for purposes of understanding what 's happening today , that 's wrong . because for 150 years , we 've had an information economy .
it 's just been industrial , which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those two and a half million dollars , and later , more for the telegraph , and the radio transmitter , and the television , and eventually the mainframe .
and that meant they were market based , or they were government owned , depending on what kind of system they were in . and this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years .
now , let me tell you a different story . around june 2002 , the world of supercomputers had a bombshell .
the japanese had , for the first time , created the fastest supercomputer - the nec earth simulator - taking the primary from the u.s. , and about two years later - this , by the way , is measuring the trillion floating-point operations per second that the computer 's capable of running - sigh of relief : ibm -lsb- blue gene -rsb- has just edged ahead of the nec earth simulator .
all of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period , there 's another supercomputer running in the world - seti @ home .
four and a half million users around the world , contributing their leftover computer cycles , whenever their computer is n't working , by running a screen saver , and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that nasa harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes .
what this picture suggests to us is that we 've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized . not that it 's become less capital intensive - that there 's less money that 's required - but that the ownership of this capital , the way the capitalization happens , is radically distributed . each of us , in these advanced economies , has one of these , or something rather like it - a computer .
they 're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network .
and computation , storage and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person - and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information , knowledge and culture , in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet .
what this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution , the most important means , the most important components of the core economic activities - remember , we are in an information economy - of the most advanced economies , and there more than anywhere else , are in the hands of the population at large . this is completely different than what we 've seen since the industrial revolution . so we 've got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population , and we 've got human creativity , human wisdom , human experience - the other major experience , the other major input - which unlike simple labor - stand here turning this lever all day long -
is not something that 's the same or fungible among people .
any one of you who has taken someone else 's job , or tried to give yours to someone else , no matter how detailed the manual , you can not transmit what you know , what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances .
in that we 're unique , and each of us holds this critical input into production as we hold this machine .
what 's the effect of this ? so , the story that most people know is the story of free or open source software .
this is market share of apache web server - one of the critical applications in web-based communications .
in 1995 , two groups of people said , " wow , this is really important , the web ! we need a much better web server ! "
one was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided , you know , we really need this , we should write one , and what are we going to do with what - well , we 're gonna share it ! and other people will be able to develop it .
the other was microsoft .
now , if i told you that 10 years later , the motley crew of people , who did n't control anything that they produced , acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line , it would be amazing ! right ?
think of it in minivans . a group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with toyota . right ?
but , in fact , of course , the story is it 's the 70 percent , including the major e-commerce site - 70 percent of a critical application on which web-based communications and applications work is produced in this form , in direct competition with microsoft . not in a side issue - in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the net .
software has done this in a way that 's been very visible , because it 's measurable . but the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the web .
so , nasa , at some point , did an experiment where they took images of mars that they were mapping , and they said , instead of having three or four fully trained ph.d.s doing this all the time , let 's break it up into small components , put it up on the web , and see if people , using a very simple interface , will actually spend five minutes here , 10 minutes there , clicking . after six months , 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in , which was , quote , " practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained ph.d. , " once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average .
now , if you have a little girl , and she goes and writes to - well , not so little , medium little - tries to do research on barbie .
and she 'll come to encarta , one of the main online encyclopedias .
this is what you 'll find out about barbie . this is it , there 's nothing more to the definition , including , " manufacturers " - plural - " now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls , like this black barbie . " which is vastly better than what you 'll find in the encyclopedia.com , which is barbie , klaus . -lrb- laughter -rrb- on the other hand , if they go to wikipedia , they 'll find a genuine article - and i wo n't talk a lot about wikipedia , because jimmy wales is here - but roughly equivalent to what you would find in the britannica , differently written , including the controversies over body image and commercialization , the claims about the way in which she 's a good role model , etc .
another portion is not only how content is produced , but how relevance is produced .
the claim to fame of yahoo ! was , we hire people to look - originally , not anymore - we hire people to look at websites and tell you - if they 're in the index , they 're good . this , on the other hand , is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the open directory project , each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about , to say , this is good . so , this is the open directory project , with 60,000 volunteers , each one spending a little bit of time , as opposed to a few hundred fully paid employees . no one owns it , no one owns the output ,
it 's free for anyone to use and it 's the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting .
this is not only outside of businesses . when you think of what is the critical innovation of google , the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing - the decision about what 's relevant - to the community of the web as a whole , doing whatever they want to do : so , page rank .
the critical innovation here is instead of our engineers , or our people saying which is the most relevant , we 're going to go out and count what you , people out there on the web , for whatever reason - vanity , pleasure - produced links , and tied to each other . we 're going to count those , and count them up .
and again , here , you see barbie.com , but also , very quickly , adiosbarbie.com , the body image for every size . a contested cultural object , which you wo n't find anywhere soon on overture , which is the classic market-based mechanism : whoever pays the most is highest on the list .
so , all of that is in the creation of content , of relevance , basic human expression .
but remember , the computers were also physical . just physical materials - our pcs - we share them together . we also see this in wireless .
it used to be wireless was one person owned the license , they transmitted in an area , and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed or based on property .
what we 're seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we 're developing algorithms to let people own machines , like wi-fi devices , and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle : when i 'm listening , when i 'm not using , i can help you transfer your messages ; and when you 're not using , you 'll help me transfer yours .
and this is not an idealized version . these are working models that at least in some places in the united states are being implemented , at least for public security .
if in 1999 i told you , let 's build a data storage and retrieval system .
it 's got to store terabytes . it 's got to be available 24 hours a day , seven days a week . it 's got to be available from anywhere in the world .
it has to support over 100 million users at any given moment . it 's got to be robust to attack , including closing the main index , injecting malicious files , armed seizure of some major nodes . you 'd say that would take years .
it would take millions . but of course , what i 'm describing is p2p file sharing .
right ? we always think of it as stealing music , but fundamentally , it 's a distributed data storage and retrieval system , where people , for very obvious reasons , are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something .
so , essentially what we 're seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework . it used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things . they could be market based , or non-market based ; they could be decentralized , or centralized .
the price system was a market-based and decentralized system .
if things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them , you had firms , if you wanted to be in the market - or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market .
it was too expensive to have decentralized social production , to have decentralized action in society . that was not about society itself .
that was , in fact , economic .
but what we 're seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange .
not that it 's the first time that we do nice things to each other , or for each other , as social beings . we do it all the time .
it 's that it 's the first time that it 's having major economic impact .
what characterizes them is decentralized authority .
you do n't have to ask permission , as you do in a property-based system .
may i do this ? it 's open for anyone to create and innovate and share , if they want to , by themselves or with others , because property is one mechanism of coordination .
but it 's not the only one .
instead , what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market : information flows to decide what are interesting problems ; who 's available and good for something ; motivation structures - remember , money is n't always the best motivator .
if you leave a $ 50 check after dinner with friends , you do n't increase the probability of being invited back .
and if dinner is n't entirely obvious , think of sex . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it also requires certain new organizational approaches .
and in particular , what we 've seen is task organization .
you have to hire people who know what they 're doing .
you have to hire them to spend a lot of time .
now , take the same problem , chunk it into little modules , and motivations become trivial .
five minutes , instead of watching tv ?
five minutes i 'll spend just because it 's interesting . just because it 's fun .
just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning , or , in places that are more involved , like wikipedia , gives me a certain set of social relations .
so , a new social phenomenon is emerging .
it 's creating , and it 's most visible when we see it as a new form of competition .
peer-to-peer networks assaulting the recording industry ; free and open source software taking market share from microsoft ; skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms ; wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias .
but it 's also a new source of opportunities for businesses .
as you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging , you have new opportunities . some of them are toolmakers .
instead of building well-behaved appliances - things that you know what they 'll do in advance - you begin to build more open tools . there 's a new set of values , a new set of things people value .
you build platforms for self-expression and collaboration .
like wikipedia , like the open directory project , you 're beginning to build platforms , and you see that as a model .
and you see surfers , people who see this happening , and in some sense build it into a supply chain , which is a very curious one . right ?
you have a belief : stuff will flow out of connected human beings .
that 'll give me something i can use , and i 'm going to contract with someone .
i will deliver something based on what happens . it 's very scary - that 's what google does , essentially .
that 's what ibm does in software services , and they 've done reasonably well .
so , social production is a real fact , not a fad .
it is the critical long-term shift caused by the internet .
social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon . in some contexts , it 's even more efficient because of the quality of the information , the ability to find the best person , the lower transaction costs . it 's sustainable and growing fast .
but - and this is the dark lining - it is threatened by - in the same way that it threatens - the incumbent industrial systems .
so next time you open the paper , and you see an intellectual property decision , a telecoms decision , it 's not about something small and technical .
it is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other , and the way information , knowledge and culture will be produced .
because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes , or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model , and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see .
thank you .
so , what i 'm going to do is just give you the latest episode of india 's - maybe the world 's - longest running soap opera , which is cricket .
and may it run forever , because it gives people like me a living .
it 's got everything that you 'd want a normal soap opera to want : it 's got love , joy , happiness , sadness , tears , laughter , lots of deceit , intrigue .
and like all good soaps , it jumps 20 years when the audience interest changes .
and that 's exactly what cricket has done .
it 's jumped 20 years into 20-over game .
and that 's what i 'm going to talk about , how a small change leads to a very big revolution .
but it was n't always like that .
cricket was n't always this speed-driven generations game .
there was a time when you played cricket , you played timeless test matches , when you played on till the game got over .
and there was this game in march 1939 that started on the third of march and ended on the 14th of march .
and it only ended because the english cricketers had to go from durban to cape town , which is a two-hour train journey , to catch the ship that left on the 17th , because the next ship was n't around for a long time .
so , the match was ended in between .
and one of the english batsmen said , " you know what ?
another half an hour and we would have won . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another half an hour after 12 days .
there were two sundays in between . but of course , sundays are church days , so you do n't play on sundays . and one day it rained , so they all sat around making friends with each other .
but there is a reason why india fell in love with cricket : because we had about the same pace of life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the mahabharata was like that as well , was n't it ?
you fought by day , then it was sunset , so everyone went back home .
and then you worked out your strategy , and you came and fought the next day , and you went back home again .
the only difference between the mahabharata and our cricket was that in cricket , everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day .
princes patronize the game , not because they love the game , but because it was a means of ingratiating themselves to the british rulers .
but there is one other reason why india fell in love with cricket , which was , all you needed was a plank of wood and a rubber ball , and any number of people could play it anywhere .
take a look : you could play it in the dump with some rocks over there , you could play it in a little alley - you could n't hit square anywhere , because the bat hit the wall ; do n't forget the air conditioning and the cable wires .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you could play it on the banks of the ganges - that 's as clean as the ganges has been for a long time .
or you could play many games in one small patch of land , even if you did n't know which game you were actually in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as you can see , you can play anywhere .
but slowly the game moved on , you know , finally .
you do n't always have five days . so , we moved on , and we started playing 50-over cricket .
and then an enormous accident took place .
in indian sport we do n't make things happen , accidents happen and we 're in the right place at the right time , sometimes .
and we won this world cup in 1983 .
and suddenly we fell in love with the 50-over game , and we played it virtually every day .
there was more 50-over cricket than anywhere .
but there was another big date .
1983 was when we won the world cup .
1991 , ' 92 , we found a finance minister and a prime minister willing to let the world look at india , rather than be this great country of intrigue and mystery in this closed country .
and so we allowed multinationals into india .
we cut customs duties , we reduced import duties , and we got all the multinationals coming in , with multinational budgets , who looked at per-capita income and got very excited about the possibilities in india , and were looking for a vehicle to reach every indian .
and there are only two vehicles in india - one real , one scripted .
the scripted one is what you see in the movies , the real one was cricket .
and so one of my friends sitting right here in front of me , ravi dhariwal from pepsi , decided he 's going to take it all over the world .
and pepsi was this big revolution , because they started taking cricket all over .
and so cricket started becoming big ; cricket started bringing riches in .
television started covering cricket . for a long time television said , " we wo n't cover cricket unless you pay us to cover it . "
then they said , " ok , the next rights are sold for 55 million dollars .
the next rights are sold for 612 million dollars . "
so , it 's a bit of a curve , that .
and then another big accident happened in our cricket .
england invented 20 overs cricket , and said , " the world must play 20 overs cricket . "
just as england invented cricket , and made the rest of the world play it .
thank god for them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , india had to go and play the t20 world cup , you see .
india did n't want to play the t20 world cup .
but we were forced to play it by an 8-1 margin .
and then something very dramatic happened .
we got to the final , and then this moment , that will remain enshrined forever , for everybody , take a look .
-lrb- crowd cheering -rrb- the pakistani batsman trying to clear the fielder .
announcer : and zishan takes it ! india wins !
what a match for a twenty20 final .
india , the world champions .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- india , t20 champions .
but what a game we had , m. s. dhoni got it right in the air , but misbah-ul-haq , what a player .
a massive , massive success : india , the world tt champions .
harsha bhogle : suddenly india discovered this power of 20-overs cricket .
the accident , of course , there , was that the batsman thought the bowler was bowling fast .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if he had bowled fast , the ball would have gone where it was meant to go , but it did n't go . and we suddenly discovered that we could be good at this game .
and what it also did was it led to a certain pride in the fact that india could be the best in the world .
it was at a time when investment was coming in , india was feeling a little more confident about itself .
and so there was a feeling that there was great pride in what we can do .
and thankfully for all of us , the english are very good at inventing things , and then the gracious people that they are , they let the world become very good at it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so england invented t20 cricket , and allowed india to hijack it .
it was not like reengineering that we do in medicine , we just took it straight away , as is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , we launched our own t20 league .
six weeks , city versus city .
it was a new thing for us . we had only ever supported our country - the only two areas in which india was very proud about their country , representing itself on the field .
one was war , the indian army , which we do n't like to happen very often .
the other was indian cricket .
now , suddenly we had to support city leagues .
but the people getting into these city leagues were people who were taking their cues from the west .
america is a home of leagues . and they said , " right , we 'll build some glitzy leagues here in india . "
but was india ready for it ?
because cricket , for a long time in india was always organized .
it was never promoted , it was never sold - it was organized .
and look what they did with our beautiful , nice , simple family game .
all of a sudden , you had that happening .
-lrb- music -rrb- an opening ceremony to match every other .
this was an india that was buying corvettes . this was an india that was buying jaguar .
this was an india that was adding more mobile phones per month than new zealand 's population twice over .
so , it was a different india .
but it was also a slightly more orthodox india that was very happy to be modern , but did n't want to say that to people .
and so , they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived .
everyone secretly watched them , but everyone claimed not to .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- the new owners of indian cricket were not the old princes .
they were not bureaucrats who were forced into sport because they did n't actually love it ; these were people who ran serious companies .
and so they started promoting cricket big time , started promoting clubs big time .
and they 've started promoting them with huge money behind it .
i mean the ipl had 2.3 billion dollars before a ball was bowled , 1.6 billion dollars for television revenue over 10 years , and another 70 million dollars plus from all these franchises that were putting in money . and then they had to appeal to their cities , but they had to do it like the west , right ? because we are setting up leagues .
but what they were very good at doing was making it very localized .
so , just to give you an example of how they did it - not manchester united style promotion , but very mumbai style promotion . take a look .
-lrb- music -rrb- of course , a lot of people said , " maybe they dance better than they play . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that 's all right . what it did also is it changed the way we looked at cricket .
all along , if you wanted a young cricketer , you picked him up from the bylanes of your own little locality , your own city , and you were very proud of the system that produced those cricketers .
now , all of the sudden , if you were to bowl a shot - if mumbai were to bowl a shot , for example , they need n't go to kalbadevi or shivaji park or somewhere to source them , they could go to trinidad .
this was the new india , was n't it ? this was the new world , where you can source from anywhere as long as you get the best product at the best price .
and all of a sudden , indian sport had awakened to the reality that you can source the best product for the best price anywhere in the world .
so , the mumbai indians flew in dwayne bravo from trinidad and tobago , overnight . and when he had to go back to represent the west indies , they asked him , " when do you have to reach ? "
he said , " i have to be there by a certain time , so i have to leave today . "
we said , " no , no , no . it 's not about when you have to leave ; it 's about when do you have to reach there ? "
and so he said , " i 've got to reach on date x. "
and they said , " fine , you play to date x , minus one . "
so , he played in hyderabad , went , straight after the game , went from the stadium to hyderabad airport , sat in a private corporate jet - first refueling in portugal , second refueling in brazil ; he was in west indies in time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- never would india have thought on this scale before .
never would india have said , " i want a player to play one game for me , and i will use a corporate jet to send him all the way back to kingston , jamaica to play a game . "
and i just thought to myself , " wow , we 've arrived somewhere in the world , you know ?
we have arrived somewhere . we are thinking big . "
but what this also did was it started marrying the two most important things in indian cricket , which is cricket and the movies in indian entertainment .
there is cricket and the movies .
and they came together because people in the movies now started owning clubs .
and so , people started going to the cricket to watch preity zinta .
they started going to the cricket to watch shah rukh khan .
and something very interesting happened .
we started getting song and dance in indian cricket .
and so it started resembling the indian movies more and more .
and of course , if you were on preity zinta 's team - as you will see on the clip that follows - if you did well , you got a hug from preity zinta .
so that was the ultimate reason to do well . take a look - everyone 's watching preity zinta .
-lrb- music -rrb- and then of course there was shah rukh playing the kolkata crowd .
we 'd all seen matches in kolkata , but we 'd never seen anything like this : shah rukh , with the bengali song , getting the audiences all worked up for kolkata - not for india , but for kolkata .
but take a look at this .
-lrb- music -rrb- an indian film star hugging a pakistani cricketer because they 'd won in kolkata .
can you imagine ?
and do you know what the pakistani cricketer said ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- " i wish i was playing for preity zinta 's team . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i thought i 'd take this opportunity - there 's a few people from pakistan in here .
i 'm so happy that you 're here because i think we can show that we can both be together and be friends , right ?
we can play cricket together , we can be friends .
so thank you very much for coming , all of you from pakistan .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there was criticism too because they said , " players are being bought and sold ?
are they grain ?
are they cattle ? "
because we had this auction , you see .
how do you fix a price for a player ?
and so the auction that followed literally had people saying , " bang ! so many million dollars for so-and-so player . "
there it is .
-lrb- music -rrb- auctioneer : going at 1,500,000 dollars . chennai .
shane warne sold for 450,000 dollars .
hb : suddenly , a game which earned its players 50 rupees a day - so 250 rupees for a test match , but if you finish in four days you only got 200 .
the best indian players who played every test match - every one of the internationals , the top of the line players - standard contracts are 220,000 dollars in a whole year .
now they were getting 500,000 for six days ' work .
then andrew flintoff came by from england , he got one and a half million dollars , and he went back and said , " for four weeks , i 'm earning more than frank lampard and steven gerrard , and i 'm earning more than the footballers , wow . "
and where was he earning it from ? from a little club in india .
could you have imagined that day would come ?
one and a half million dollars for six weeks ' work .
that 's not bad , is it ?
so , at 2.3 billion dollars before the first ball was bowled .
what india was doing , though , was benchmarking itself against the best in the world , and it became a huge brand .
lalit modi was on the cover of business today .
ipl became the biggest brand in india and , because our elections , had to be moved to south africa , and we had to start the tournament in three weeks .
move a whole tournament to south africa in three weeks .
but we did it . you know why ?
because no country works as slowly as we do till three weeks before an event , and nobody works fast as we do in the last three weeks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- our population , which for a long time we thought was a problem , suddenly became our biggest asset because there were more people watching - the huge consuming class - everybody came to watch the cricket .
we 'd also made cricket the only sport in india , which is a pity , but in india every other sport pushes cricket to become big , which is a bit of a tragedy of our times .
now , this last minute before i go - there 's a couple of side effects of all this .
for a long time , india was this country of poverty , dust , beggars , snake charmers , filth , delhi belly - people heard delhi belly stories before they came .
and , all of a sudden , india was this land of opportunity .
cricketers all over the world said , " you know , we love india . we love to play in india . "
and that felt good , you know ?
we said , " the dollar 's quite powerful actually . "
can you imagine , you 've got the dollar on view and there 's no delhi belly in there anymore .
there 's no filth , there 's no beggars , all the snake charmers have vanished , everybody 's gone . this tells you how the capitalist world rules .
right so , finally , an english game that india usurped a little bit , but t20 is going to be the next missionary in the world .
if you want to take the game around the world , it 's got to be the shortest form of the game .
you ca n't take a timeless test to china and sit through 14 days with no result in the end , or you ca n't take it all over the world .
so that 's what t20 is doing .
hopefully , it 'll make everyone richer , hopefully it 'll make the game bigger and hopefully it 'll give cricket commentators more time in the business .
thank you very much . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so raise your hand if you know someone in your immediate family or circle of friends who suffers from some form of mental illness .
yeah . i thought so . not surprised .
and raise your hand if you think that basic research on fruit flies has anything to do with understanding mental illness in humans .
yeah . i thought so . i 'm also not surprised .
i can see i 've got my work cut out for me here .
as we heard from dr. insel this morning , psychiatric disorders like autism , depression and schizophrenia take a terrible toll on human suffering .
we know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body .
think about it : in 2013 , the second decade of the millennium , if you 're concerned about a cancer diagnosis and you go to your doctor , you get bone scans , biopsies and blood tests .
in 2013 , if you 're concerned about a depression diagnosis , you go to your doctor , and what do you get ?
a questionnaire .
now , part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders .
we tend to view them - and the popular press aids and abets this view - as chemical imbalances in the brain , as if the brain were some kind of bag of chemical soup full of dopamine , serotonin and norepinephrine .
this view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders , like prozac , act by globally changing brain chemistry , as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup .
but that ca n't be the answer , because these drugs actually do n't work all that well .
a lot of people wo n't take them , or stop taking them , because of their unpleasant side effects .
these drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block .
some of it will dribble into the right place , but a lot of it will do more harm than good .
now , an emerging view that you also heard about from dr. insel this morning , is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion , mood and affect .
when we think about cognition , we analogize the brain to a computer . that 's no problem .
well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion .
it 's just that we do n't tend to think about it that way .
but we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis .
now , it 's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders .
it 's just that they do n't bathe the brain like soup .
rather , they 're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain .
so if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders , we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act .
otherwise , we 're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences .
now to begin to overcome our ignorance of the role of brain chemistry in brain circuitry , it 's helpful to work on what we biologists call " model organisms , " animals like fruit flies and laboratory mice , in which we can apply powerful genetic techniques to molecularly identify and pinpoint specific classes of neurons , as you heard about in allan jones 's talk this morning .
moreover , once we can do that , we can actually activate specific neurons or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons .
so if we inhibit a particular type of neuron , and we find that a behavior is blocked , we can conclude that those neurons are necessary for that behavior .
on the other hand , if we activate a group of neurons and we find that that produces the behavior , we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior .
so in this way , by doing this kind of test , we can draw cause and effect relationships between the activity of specific neurons in particular circuits and particular behaviors , something that is extremely difficult , if not impossible , to do right now in humans .
but can an organism like a fruit fly , which is - it 's a great model organism because it 's got a small brain , it 's capable of complex and sophisticated behaviors , it breeds quickly , and it 's cheap .
but can an organism like this teach us anything about emotion-like states ?
do these organisms even have emotion-like states , or are they just little digital robots ?
charles darwin believed that insects have emotion and express them in their behaviors , as he wrote in his 1872 monograph on the expression of the emotions in man and animals .
and my eponymous colleague , seymour benzer , believed it as well .
seymour is the man that introduced the use of drosophila here at caltech in the ' 60s as a model organism to study the connection between genes and behavior .
seymour recruited me to caltech in the late 1980s .
he was my jedi and my rabbi while he was here , and seymour taught me both to love flies and also to play with science .
so how do we ask this question ?
it 's one thing to believe that flies have emotion-like states , but how do we actually find out whether that 's true or not ?
now , in humans we often infer emotional states , as you 'll hear later today , from facial expressions .
however , it 's a little difficult to do that in fruit flies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's kind of like landing on mars and looking out the window of your spaceship at all the little green men who are surrounding it and trying to figure out , " how do i find out if they have emotions or not ? "
what can we do ? it 's not so easy .
well , one of the ways that we can start is to try to come up with some general characteristics or properties of emotion-like states such as arousal , and see if we can identify any fly behaviors that might exhibit some of those properties .
so three important ones that i can think of are persistence , gradations in intensity , and valence .
persistence means long-lasting .
we all know that the stimulus that triggers an emotion causes that emotion to last long after the stimulus is gone .
gradations of intensity means what it sounds like .
you can dial up the intensity or dial down the intensity of an emotion .
if you 're a little bit unhappy , the corners of your mouth turn down and you sniffle , and if you 're very unhappy , tears pour down your face and you might sob .
valence means good or bad , positive or negative .
so we decided to see if flies could be provoked into showing the kind of behavior that you see by the proverbial wasp at the picnic table , you know , the one that keeps coming back to your hamburger the more vigorously you try to swat it away , and it seems to keep getting irritated .
so we built a device , which we call a puff-o-mat , in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away .
and what we found is that if we gave these flies in the puff-o-mat several puffs in a row , they became somewhat hyperactive and continued to run around for some time after the air puffs actually stopped and took a while to calm down .
so we quantified this behavior using custom locomotor tracking software developed with my collaborator pietro perona , who 's in the electrical engineering division here at caltech .
and what this quantification showed us is that , upon experiencing a train of these air puffs , the flies appear to enter a kind of state of hyperactivity which is persistent , long-lasting , and also appears to be graded .
more puffs , or more intense puffs , make the state last for a longer period of time .
so now we wanted to try to understand something about what controls the duration of this state .
so we decided to use our puff-o-mat and our automated tracking software to screen through hundreds of lines of mutant fruit flies to see if we could find any that showed abnormal responses to the air puffs .
and this is one of the great things about fruit flies .
there are repositories where you can just pick up the phone and order hundreds of vials of flies of different mutants and screen them in your assay and then find out what gene is affected in the mutation .
so doing the screen , we discovered one mutant that took much longer than normal to calm down after the air puffs , and when we examined the gene that was affected in this mutation , it turned out to encode a dopamine receptor .
that 's right - flies , like people , have dopamine , and it acts on their brains and on their synapses through the same dopamine receptor molecules that you and i have .
dopamine plays a number of important functions in the brain , including in attention , arousal , reward , and disorders of the dopamine system have been linked to a number of mental disorders including drug abuse , parkinson 's disease , and adhd .
now , in genetics , it 's a little counterintuitive .
we tend to infer the normal function of something by what does n't happen when we take it away , by the opposite of what we see when we take it away .
so when we take away the dopamine receptor and the flies take longer to calm down , from that we infer that the normal function of this receptor and dopamine is to cause the flies to calm down faster after the puff .
and that 's a bit reminiscent of adhd , which has been linked to disorders of the dopamine system in humans .
indeed , if we increase the levels of dopamine in normal flies by feeding them cocaine after getting the appropriate dea license - oh my god - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we find indeed that these cocaine-fed flies calm down faster than normal flies do , and that 's also reminiscent of adhd , which is often treated with drugs like ritalin that act similarly to cocaine .
so slowly i began to realize that what started out as a rather playful attempt to try to annoy fruit flies might actually have some relevance to a human psychiatric disorder .
now , how far does this analogy go ?
as many of you know , individuals afflicted with adhd also have learning disabilities .
is that true of our dopamine receptor mutant flies ?
remarkably , the answer is yes .
as seymour showed back in the 1970s , flies , like songbirds , as you just heard , are capable of learning .
you can train a fly to avoid an odor , shown here in blue , if you pair that odor with a shock .
then when you give those trained flies the chance to choose between a tube with the shock-paired odor and another odor , it avoids the tube containing the blue odor that was paired with shock .
well , if you do this test on dopamine receptor mutant flies , they do n't learn . their learning score is zero .
they flunk out of caltech .
so that means that these flies have two abnormalities , or phenotypes , as we geneticists call them , that one finds in adhd : hyperactivity and learning disability .
now what 's the causal relationship , if anything , between these phenotypes ?
in adhd , it 's often assumed that the hyperactivity causes the learning disability .
the kids ca n't sit still long enough to focus , so they do n't learn .
but it could equally be the case that it 's the learning disabilities that cause the hyperactivity .
because the kids ca n't learn , they look for other things to distract their attention .
and a final possibility is that there 's no relationship at all between learning disabilities and hyperactivity , but that they are caused by a common underlying mechanism in adhd .
now people have been wondering about this for a long time in humans , but in flies we can actually test this .
and the way that we do this is to delve deeply into the mind of the fly and begin to untangle its circuitry using genetics .
we take our dopamine receptor mutant flies and we genetically restore , or cure , the dopamine receptor by putting a good copy of the dopamine receptor gene back into the fly brain .
but in each fly , we put it back only into certain neurons and not in others , and then we test each of these flies for their ability to learn and for hyperactivity .
remarkably , we find we can completely dissociate these two abnormalities .
if we put a good copy of the dopamine receptor back in this elliptical structure called the central complex , the flies are no longer hyperactive , but they still ca n't learn .
on the other hand , if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body , the learning deficit is rescued , the flies learn well , but they 're still hyperactive .
what that tells us is that dopamine is not bathing the brain of these flies like soup .
rather , it 's acting to control two different functions on two different circuits , so the reason there are two things wrong with our dopamine receptor flies is that the same receptor is controlling two different functions in two different regions of the brain .
whether the same thing is true in adhd in humans we do n't know , but these kinds of results should at least cause us to consider that possibility .
so these results make me and my colleagues more convinced than ever that the brain is not a bag of chemical soup , and it 's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup .
what we need to do is to use our ingenuity and our scientific knowledge to try to design a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders .
if we can do that , we may be able to cure these disorders without the unpleasant side effects , putting the oil back in our mental engines , there 's a lot of exciting things happening in the design world and at ideo this past year , and i 'm pleased to get a chance to share some of those with you .
i did n't attend the first ted back in 1984 but i 've been to a lot of them since that time .
i thought it -lsb- would -rsb- kind of be interesting to think back to that time when richard got the whole thing started . thank you very much , richard ; it 's been a big , enjoyable part of my life , coming here .
and so thinking back , i was thinking those of us in silicon valley were really focused on products or objects - certainly technological objects .
and so it was great fun in those days , and some of those of you who are in the audience were my clients .
we 'd come in with some prototype underneath a black cloth and we 'd put it on the conference table , and we 'd pull off the black cloth and everybody would " ooh " and " ah . "
that was a really good time .
and so we 'll continue to focus on products , as we always have .
and if you were here last year , i probably wrestled you to the floor and tried to show you my new eyemodule 2 , which was a camera that plugged into the handspring .
and i took a lot of pictures last year ; very few people knew what i was up to , but i took a lot of pictures .
this year - maybe you could show the slides - this year we 're carrying this treo , which we had a lot to do with and helped handspring design it .
also , though we designed it a few years ago - it 's just become ubiquitous in the last year or so - this heartstream defibrillator which is saving lives .
maybe you 've seen them in the airports ? they seem to be everywhere now .
lots of lives are being saved by those .
and , we 're just about to announce the zinio reader product that i believe will make magazines even more enjoyable to read .
so , we really will continue to focus on products .
but something 's happened in the last 18 years since richard started ted , and that 's that people like us - i know people in other places have caught onto this for a long time , but for us , we 've really just started ... we 've kind of climbed maslow 's hierarchy a little bit - and so we 're now focused more and more on human-centered design , human-centeredness in an approach to design .
that really involves designing behaviors and personality into products .
and i think you 're starting to see that , and it 's making our job even more enjoyable .
interestingly enough , we used to primarily build 3-d models - you know , you 've seen some today - and 3-d renderings .
then we 'd go and we 'd show those as communicating our ideas .
but firms like ours are having to move to a point where we get those objects that we 're designing and get them in motion , showing how they 'll be used .
and so in order to do that we 've been forming internal video-production groups in order to make these kind of experience prototypes that show just what we mean about the man-machine relationship .
and it 's a much better way to see .
it 's kind of like architects who show people in their houses , as opposed to them being empty .
so i thought that i would show you a few videos to show off this new , broader definition of design in products and services and environments .
i have a few of them - they 're no more than a minute or a minute-and-a-half apiece - but i thought you might be interested in seeing some of our work over the last year , and how it responds in video .
so , prada new york : we were asked by rem koolhaas and oma to help us conceive the technology that 's in their retail store in new york .
he wanted a new kind of store - a new one - a store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one .
and that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use .
so , there 're lots of things . everything has rf tags : there 's rf tags on the user , on the cards , there 's the staff devices that are all around the store .
you pick them up , and once you see something that you 're interested in , the staff person can scan them in and then they can be shown on any screen throughout the store .
you can look at color , and sizes , and how it appeared on the runway , or whatever .
and so then the object - the merchandise that you 're interested in - can be scanned . it 's taken into the dressing room , and in the dressing room there are scanners so that we know exactly what clothing you have in the dressing room .
we can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that , and get more information about the clothing that you 're interested in as you 're trying it on .
it 's been used a lot of places , but i particularly like the use here of liquid crystal displays in the changing room .
the last time i went to see this store , there was a huge buzz about people standing outside and wondering , " am i going to actually get to see the people changing clothes here ? "
but if you push the button , of course , the whole wall goes dark .
so you can try to get approval , or not , for whatever you 're wearing .
and then one of my favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror , where you put on the clothes .
there 's a big display in the mirror , and you can turn around - but there 's a three second delay .
so you can see what you look like from the back or all the way around , as you look .
-lrb- applause -rrb- about a year and a half ago we were asked to design an installation in the museum - this is a new wing of the science museum in london , and it 's primarily about digital and biomedical issues .
and a group at itch , which is now part of ideo , designed this interactive wall that 's about four stories tall .
i do n't know if anybody 's seen this - it 's pretty spectacular in the room .
anyway , it 's based on the london subway system .
and so you can see that the goal is to bring some of the feedback that the people who had gone to the museum were giving , and get it up on the wall so everybody could see . just for everybody to see .
so you enter your information . then , like the london tube system , the little trains go around with what you 're thinking about .
and then when you get to a station , it 's expanded so that you can actually read it .
then when you exit the imax theatre on the fourth floor - mostly teenagers coming out of there - there 's this big open space that has these tables in it that have interactive games which are quite fun , also designed by durrell -lsb- bishop -rsb- and andrew -lsb- hirniak -rsb- of itch .
and the topics include things that the museum is about : male fertility , choosing the sex of your baby or what a driverless car might be like .
there 's lots of room , so people can come up and understand what it is before they get involved .
and also , it 's not shown in the video , but these are very beautiful .
they go to the top of the wall and when they reach all the way to the top , after they 've bounced around , they disperse into bits and go off into the atmosphere .
the next video is not done by us .
this is cbs sunday morning that aired about two weeks ago .
scott adams ran into us and asked us if we would n't help to design the ultimate cubicle for dilbert , which sounded like a fun thing and so we could n't pass it up .
he 's always been interested in technology in the future .
-lrb- video : scott adams : i realized that at some point i might be the world 's expert on what 's wrong with cubicles .
so we thought , well , would n't it be fun to get together with some of the smartest design guys in the world and try to figure out if we could make the cubicle better ?
narrator : though they work in a wide-open office space spectacularly set under san francisco 's oakland bay bridge , the team built their own little cubicles to fully experience the problems .
woman : a one-way mirror . i can look out ; you can look at yourself .
narrator : they took pictures .
woman : you feel so trapped , when someone kind of leans over and you 're sort of held captive there for a minute .
sa : so far it 's chaos , but a lot of people are doing stuff , so that 's good .
we 'll see what happens .
narrator : the first group builds a cubicle in which the walls are screens for the computer and for family photos .
in the second group 's scenario , the walls are alive and actually give dilbert a group hug .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- behind the humor is the idea of making the cubicle more human . -rrb- david kelley : so here 's the final thing , complete with orange lighting that follows the sun across - that follows the tracks of the sun - across the sky .
so you feel that in your cubicle .
and my favorite feature , which is a flower in a vase that wilts when you leave in disappointment , and then when you come back , it comes up to greet you , happy to see you .
-lrb- sa : the storage is built right into the wall . -rrb- dk : you know , it has homey touches like a built-in fish tank in the walls , or something to be aggressive with to release tension .
-lrb- sa : customizable for the boss of your choice . -rrb- dk : and of course : a hammock for your afternoon nap that stretches across your cubicle .
-lrb- sa : life would be sweet in a cubicle like this . -rrb- dk : this next project , we were asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the recycling of the water on the millennium dome in london .
the dome has an incredible amount of water that washes off of it , as well as wastewater .
so this building actually celebrates the water as it comes out of the recycling plant and goes into the reed bed so that it can be filtered for the final time .
the pavilion 's design goal was to be kind of quiet and peaceful .
in contrast to if you went inside the dome , where it 's kind of wild and crazy and everybody 's learning all kinds of things , or fooling around , or whatever they 're doing .
but it was intended to be quite quiet .
and then you would wander around and gather information , in a straightforward fashion , about the recycling process and what 's being done , and how they 're going to reuse the water once it comes through the plant .
and then , if you saw , the panels actually rotate . so you can get the information on the front side , but as they rotate , you can see the actual recycling plant behind , with all the machines as they actually process the water .
you can see : there 's the plant .
these are all very low-budget videos , like quick prototypes .
and we 're announcing a new product here tonight , which is the first time this has ever been shown in public .
it 's called spyfish , and it 's a company called h2eye , started by nigel jagger in london .
and it 's a company that 's trying to bring the experience - many people have boats , or enjoy being on boats , but a very small percentage of people actually have the capability or the interest in going under the water and actually seeing what 's there , and enjoying what scuba divers do .
this product , it has two cameras .
you throw it over the side of your boat and you basically scuba dive without getting wet .
for us - there 's the object - for us , it was two projects . one , to design the interface so that the interface does n't get in your way .
you could have that kind of immersive experience of being underwater - of feeling like you 're underwater - seeing what 's going on .
and the other one was to design the object and make sure that it was a consumer product and not a research tool .
and so we spent a lot of time - this has been going on for about seven or eight years , this project - and -lsb- we 're -rsb- just ready to start building them .
-lrb- narrator : the spyfish is a revolutionary subaquatic video camera .
it can dive to 500 feet , to where sunlight does not penetrate , and is equipped with powerful lights .
it becomes your eyes and ears as you venture into the deep .
the battery-powered spyfish sends the live video-feed through a slender cable . -rrb- dk : this slender cable was a huge technological advancement and it allowed the whole thing to be the size that it is .
-lrb- narrator : and this central box connects the whole system together .
maneuvering the spyfish is simple with the wireless remote control .
you watch the video with superimposed graphics that indicate your depth and compass heading .
the fluid graphics and ambient sounds combine to help you completely lose yourself underwater . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dk : and the last thing i 'll talk about is approtec , which is a project that i 'm very excited about .
approtec is a company started by dr. martin fisher , who 's a good friend of mine . he 's a ph.d. from stanford .
he found himself in kenya on a fulbright and he had a very interesting insight , which is that he said , " there must be entrepreneurs in kenya ; there must be entrepreneurs everywhere . "
and he noticed that for weddings and funerals there they could find enough money to put something together .
so he decided to start manufacturing products in kenya with kenyan manufacturers - designed by people like us , but taken there .
and to this date - he 's been gone for only a few years - he 's started 19,000 companies .
he 's made 30,000 new jobs .
and just the sales of the products - this is a non-profit - the sales of these products is now .6 % of the gdp of kenya .
this is one guy doing this . this is a pretty spectacular thing .
so we 're in the process of helping them design deep-well , low-cost manual pumps in order for these people who have a quarter acre of land to be able to grow crops in the off-season .
what they do now is : they can grow crops in the rainy season but they ca n't grow them in the off-season .
and so by doing that , the woman that you saw in the first thing - she 's a school teacher - always wanted to send her kids to college and she 's going to be able to do it because of these things .
so with seed-squeezers , and pumps , and hay-balers and very straightforward things that we 're designing - my students are doing this as class projects and ideo has donated their time to do this kind of work - it 's really amazing to see his success , martin 's .
we also were thinking about the experience of richard , and so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we designed this hat , because i knew i 'd be the last one in the day and i needed to deal with him . so i just have one more thing to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- can you read it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , it 's always kind of funny when he comes up and hovers .
you know , you do n't want to be rude to him and you do n't want to feel guilty , and so i thought this would do it , where i just sit here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so we saw a lot of interesting things being designed today in this session , and from all the different presenters .
and in my own practice , from product to approtec , it 's really exciting that we 're taking a more human-centered approach to design , that we 're including behaviors and personalities in the things we do , and i think this is great .
designers are more trusted and more integrated into the business strategy of companies , and i have to say , for one , i feel very lucky at the progress that design has made since the first ted . thanks a lot .
thank you so much . it 's really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart .
i 'm here to tell you a few tales of passion .
there 's a jewish saying that i love .
what is truer than truth ? answer : the story .
i 'm a storyteller . i want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity .
all stories interest me , and some haunt me until i end up writing them .
certain themes keep coming up : justice , loyalty , violence , death , political and social issues , freedom .
i 'm aware of the mystery around us , so i write about coincidences , premonitions , emotions , dreams , the power of nature , magic .
in the last 20 years i have published a few books , but i have lived in anonymity until february of 2006 , when i carried the olympic flag in the winter olympics in italy .
that made me a celebrity . now people recognize me in macy 's , and my grandchildren think that i 'm cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame .
one of the organizers of the olympic ceremony , of the opening ceremony , called me and said that i had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers .
i replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity because i 'm as far as you can get from being an athlete .
actually , i was n't even sure that i could go around the stadium without a walker .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was told that this was no laughing matter .
this would be the first time that only women would carry the olympic flag .
five women , representing five continents , and three olympic gold medal winners .
my first question was , naturally , what was i going to wear ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a uniform , she said , and asked for my measurements .
my measurements .
i had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak , looking like the michelin man .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- by the middle of february , i found myself in turin , where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the 80 olympic teams was in the street .
those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games .
they all deserved to win , but there 's the element of luck .
a speck of snow , an inch of ice , the force of the wind , can determine the result of a race or a game .
however , what matters most - more than training or luck - is the heart .
only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal .
it is all about passion .
the streets of turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the olympics .
passion lives here . is n't it always true ?
heart is what drives us and determines our fate .
that is what i need for my characters in my books : a passionate heart .
i need mavericks , dissidents , adventurers , outsiders and rebels , who ask questions , bend the rules and take risks .
people like all of you in this room .
nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they only make good former spouses .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in the green room of the stadium , i met the other flag bearers : three athletes , and the actresses susan sarandon and sophia loren .
also , two women with passionate hearts : wangari maathai , the nobel prizewinner from kenya who has planted 30 million trees . and by doing so , she has changed the soil , the weather , in some places in africa , and of course the economic conditions in many villages .
and somaly mam , a cambodian activist who fights passionately against child prostitution .
when she was 14 years old , her grandfather sold her to a brothel .
she told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them from aids .
and of brothels where children are forced to receive five , 15 clients per day , and if they rebel , they are tortured with electricity .
in the green room i received my uniform .
it was not the kind of outfit that i normally wear , but it was far from the michelin man suit that i had anticipated . not bad , really .
i looked like a refrigerator .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but so did most of the flag-bearers , except sophia loren , the universal symbol of beauty and passion .
sophia is over 70 and she looks great .
she 's sexy , slim and tall , with a deep tan .
now , how can you have a deep tan and have no wrinkles ?
i do n't know .
when asked in a tv interview , " how could she look so good ? "
she replied , " posture . my back is always straight , and i do n't make old people 's noises . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on earth .
no grunting , no coughing , no wheezing , no talking to yourselves , no farting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , she did n't say that exactly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- at some point around midnight , we were summoned to the wings of the stadium , and the loudspeakers announced the olympic flag , and the music started - by the way , the same music that starts here , the aida march .
sophia loren was right in front of me - she 's a foot taller than i am , not counting the poofy hair .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she walked elegantly , like a giraffe on the african savannah , holding the flag on her shoulder . i jogged behind -lrb- laughter -rrb- - on my tiptoes - holding the flag on my extended arm , so that my head was actually under the damn flag .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all the cameras were , of course , on sophia .
that was fortunate for me , because in most press photos i appear too , although often between sophia 's legs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a place where most men would love to be .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the best four minutes of my entire life were those in the olympic stadium .
my husband is offended when i say this - although i have explained to him that what we do in private usually takes less than four minutes - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so he should n't take it personally .
i have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes , because i do n't want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells .
i want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the olympics - passion .
so here 's a tale of passion .
the year is 1998 , the place is a prison camp for tutsi refugees in congo .
by the way , 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls .
we can call this place in congo a death camp , because those who are not killed will die of disease or starvation .
the protagonists of this story are a young woman , rose mapendo , and her children .
she 's pregnant and a widow .
soldiers have forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed .
somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive , and a few months later , she gives birth to premature twins .
two tiny little boys .
she cuts the umbilical cord with a stick , and ties it with her own hair .
she names the twins after the camp 's commanders to gain their favor , and feeds them with black tea because her milk can not sustain them .
when the soldiers burst in her cell to rape her oldest daughter , she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go , even when they hold a gun to her head .
somehow , the family survives for 16 months , and then , by extraordinary luck , and the passionate heart of a young american man , sasha chanoff , who manages to put her in a u.s. rescue plane , rose mapendo and her nine children end up in phoenix , arizona , where they 're now living and thriving .
mapendo , in swahili , means great love .
the protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like rose mapendo .
i do n't make them up . there 's no need for that .
i look around and i see them everywhere .
i have worked with women and for women all my life .
i know them well .
i was born in ancient times , at the end of the world , in a patriarchal catholic and conservative family .
no wonder that by age five i was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached chile yet , so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom , and for questioning the patriarchy .
but i was happy to pay it , because for every blow that i received , i was able to deliver two .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- once , when my daughter paula was in her twenties , she said to me that feminism was dated , that i should move on .
we had a memorable fight . feminism is dated ?
yes , for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today , but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage , prostitution , forced labor - they have children that they do n't want or they can not feed .
they have no control over their bodies or their lives .
they have no education and no freedom .
they are raped , beaten up and sometimes killed with impunity .
for most western young women of today , being called a feminist is an insult .
feminism has never been sexy , but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting , and i have seldom suffered from lack of men .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- feminism is not dead , by no means .
it has evolved . if you do n't like the term , change it , for goddess ' sake .
call it aphrodite , or venus , or bimbo , or whatever you want ; the name does n't matter , as long as we understand what it is about , and we support it .
so here 's another tale of passion , and this is a sad one .
the place is a small women 's clinic in a village in bangladesh .
the year is 2005 .
jenny is a young american dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during her three-week vacation .
she 's prepared to clean teeth , but when she gets there , she finds out that there are no doctors , no dentists , and the clinic is just a hut full of flies .
outside , there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated .
the first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars .
jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth .
she 's not licensed for that ; she has never done it .
she risks a lot and she 's terrified .
she does n't even have the proper instruments , but fortunately she has brought some novocaine .
jenny has a brave and passionate heart .
she murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation .
at the end , the relieved patient kisses her hands .
that day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth .
the next morning , when she comes again to the so-called clinic , her first patient is waiting for her with her husband .
the woman 's face looks like a watermelon .
it is so swollen that you ca n't even see the eyes .
the husband , furious , threatens to kill the american .
jenny is horrified at what she has done , but then the translator explains that the patient 's condition has nothing to do with the operation .
the day before , her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him .
millions of women live like this today .
they are the poorest of the poor .
although women do two-thirds of the world 's labor , they own less than one percent of the world 's assets .
they are paid less than men for the same work if they 're paid at all , and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence , and they are constantly threatened by exploitation , violence and abuse .
it is a fact that giving women education , work , the ability to control their own income , inherit and own property , benefits the society .
if a woman is empowered , her children and her family will be better off .
if families prosper , the village prospers , and eventually so does the whole country .
wangari maathai goes to a village in kenya .
she talks with the women and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees .
she gets the women to plant new trees and water them , drop by drop .
in a matter of five or six years , they have a forest , the soil is enriched , and the village is saved .
the poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down .
yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy .
for every dollar given to a women 's program , 20 dollars are given to men 's programs .
women are 51 percent of humankind .
empowering them will change everything - more than technology and design and entertainment .
i can promise you that women working together - linked , informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet .
in any war today , most of the casualties are civilians , mainly women and children . they are collateral damage .
men run the world , and look at the mess we have .
what kind of world do we want ?
this is a fundamental question that most of us are asking .
does it make sense to participate in the existing world order ?
we want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody , not only for the privileged .
in january i saw an exhibit of fernando botero 's paintings at the uc berkeley library .
no museum or gallery in the united states , except for the new york gallery that carries botero 's work , has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the abu ghraib prison .
they are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power , in the voluminous botero style .
i have not been able to get those images out of my mind or my heart .
what i fear most is power with impunity .
i fear abuse of power , and the power to abuse .
in our species , the alpha males define reality , and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules .
the rules change all the time , but they always benefit them , and in this case , the trickle-down effect , which does not work in economics , works perfectly .
abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom .
women and children , especially the poor , are at the bottom .
even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse - a woman or a child .
i 'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender , income , race , and class .
i think that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization .
but for real change , we need feminine energy in the management of the world .
we need a critical number of women in positions of power , and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men .
i 'm talking about men with young minds , of course .
old guys are hopeless ; we have to wait for them to die off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes , i would love to have sophia loren 's long legs and legendary breasts .
but given a choice , i would rather have the warrior hearts of wangari maathai , somaly mam , jenny and rose mapendo .
i want to make this world good .
not better , but to make it good .
why not ? it is possible . look around in this room - all this knowledge , energy , talent and technology .
let 's get off our fannies , roll up our sleeves and get to work , passionately , in creating an almost perfect world .
thank you .
" my air jordans cost a hundred with tax .
my suede starters jacket says raiders on the back .
i 'm stylin ' , smilin ' , lookin ' real mean , because it ai n't about being heard , just being seen .
my leather adidas baseball cap matches my fake gucci backpack . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ai n't nobody who looks as good as me , but this costs money , it sure ai n't free , and i gots no job , no money at all , but it 's easy to steal all this from the mall .
parents say i should n't , but i knows i should .
got to do what i can to make sure i look good , and the reason i have to look real good , well , to tell you the truth , man , i do n't know why . guess it makes me feel special inside .
when i 'm wearing fresh gear i do n't have to hide , and i really must get some new gear soon or my ego will pop like a 10-cent balloon .
but security is tight at all the shops . every day there are more and more cops .
my crew is laughing at me because i 'm wearing old gear .
school 's almost over . summer is near .
and i 'm sportin ' torn jordans .
i need something new . only one thing left to do .
cut school friday , catch the subway downtown , check out my victims hangin ' around .
maybe i 'll get lucky and find easy prey .
got to get some new gear . there 's no other way .
i 'm ready and willing . i 'm packing my gun .
this is serious business . this ai n't no fun .
and i ca n't have my posse laughin ' at me .
i 'mma cop something dope , just wait , you 'll see .
come out of the station , west 4th near the park , brothers shooting hoops and someone remarks , ' hey homes , where you get them nik 's ? ' i says to myself , ' yeah . i likes ' em , i likes . ' they were q-tip white , bright and blinding my eyes .
the red emblem of michael looked as if it could fly .
not one spot of dirt . the airs were brand new .
had my pistol and knew just what to do .
waited until it was just the right time , followed him very closely behind .
he made a left turn on houston , i pulled out my gun , and i said , ' gimme them jordans ! ' and the punk tried to run .
took off fast , did n't get far . i fired , ' pow ! ' fool fell between two parked cars .
he was coughing , crying , blood spilled on the street .
and i snatched them air jordans off of his feet .
while laying there dying , all he could say was , " please man , do n't take my air jordans away . "
you 'd think he 'd be worried about staying alive .
as i took off with his sneakers , there was tears in his eyes .
very next day , i bopped into school with my brand new air jordans , man , i was cool .
i killed to get ' em , but hey , i do n't care , because now i needs a new jacket to wear . "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- for the last 15 years that i have been performing , all i ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world .
see , it was n't enough for me to write a book .
it was n't enough for me to join a slam competition , and while those things hold weight , it was n't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad .
the hunger and thirst was , and still remains : how do i get people who hate poetry to love me ?
because i 'm an extension of my work , and if they love me , then they will love my work , and if they love my work , then they will love poetry , and if they love poetry , then i will have done my job , which is to transcend it to the world .
and in 1996 , i found the answer in principles in a master spoken-word artist named reg e. gaines , who wrote the famous poem , " please do n't take my air jordans . "
and i followed this guy everywhere until i had him in the room , and i read him one of my pieces , and you know what he told me ?
" yo ' wack .
you know what the problem is with you , homie ?
you do n't read other people 's poetry , and you do n't got any subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- now he kept on rambling about poetry and styles and nuyorican friday nights .
now i could have quit . i should have quit .
i mean , i thought poetry was just self-expression .
i did n't know you actually have to have creative control .
so instead of quitting , i followed him everywhere .
when he was writing a broadway show , i would be outside of the door .
i would wake him up at , like , 6:30 in the morning to ask him who 's the best poet .
i remember eating the eyes of a fish right out of the sea because he told me it was brain food .
then one day i told him , " reg e. , what is subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named etheridge knight and the oral nature of poetry , and from that point , reggie stopped becoming the best to me , because what etheridge knight taught me was that i could make my words sound like music , even my small ones , the monosyllables , the ifs , ands , buts , whats , the gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear , and from then on , i started chasing etheridge knight .
i wanted to know which poet he read , and i landed on a poem called -lsb- " dark prophecy : sing of shine " -rsb- , a toast signifying that got me on the biggest stage a poet could ever be : broadway , baby .
and from that point , i learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body .
but that was n't the biggest lesson i ever learned .
the biggest lesson i learned was many years later when i went to beverly hills and i ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said i do n't look like i have any experience to be working in this business .
and i said to him , " listen , punk fool , you 're a failed actor who became an agent , and you know why you failed as an actor ?
because people like me took your job .
i 've traveled all the way from cleveland and essex in east new york , took the local 6 line up to the hookers of hunt 's point who were in my way on my way to master the art of space , and the one-to-infinite amount of man , woman and child you can fit in there only so i can push them to the back of the wall with my experience .
people have bought tickets to my experience and used them as refrigerator magnets to let them know that the revolution is near , so stock up .
i 'm so experienced that when you went to a privileged school to learn a shakespearean sonnet , i was getting those beats kicked and shoved into me .
i can master shock of " the crying game " with the awe of a child being called an aids victim by a bully who did n't know that it was his father who gave it to my mother , and that 's a double entendre .
i 'm so experienced that when you went to the fell school and all the rich little fairy boys decided to sponsor a child in it , that was me , but kicked me out when i was caught teaching the fairy boys how to rob the pats off a pair of lee jeans and bring them to vim . let me see chekhov pull that off .
sanford meisner was my uncle artie yelling silently to himself , " something 's always wrong when nothing 's always right . "
method acting is nothing but a mixture of multiple personalities , believing your own lies are reality , like in high school cool kenny telling me he wanted to be a cop .
dude , you go to riker 's island academy .
i could make david mamet psychoanalyze my attack on dialogue , stanislavski be as if he were bruce lee kicking your roster of talentless students up and down crenshaw .
so what , your actors studied guerrilla theater at the london rep ?
let me tell you an ancient chinese saturday afternoon kung fu secret .
boards do n't hit back .
you think black entertainers have it hard finding work in this business ? i 'm a suspicious mulatto , which means i 'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right .
forget the american ghetto . i 've cracked stages in soweto , buried abortion babies in potter 's field and still managed to keep a smile on my face , so whatever you curse at me to your caddyshack go-for-this , go-for-that assistant when i walk out that door , whatever slander you send my way , your mother .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- something happened in the early morning hours of may 2nd , 2000 , that had a profound effect on the way our society operates .
ironically , hardly anyone noticed at the time .
the change was silent , imperceptible , unless you knew exactly what to look for .
on that morning , u.s. president bill clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the global positioning system .
instantaneously , every civilian gps receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room .
it 's hard to overstate the effect that this change in accuracy has had on us .
before this switch was thrown , we did n't have in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions , because back then , gps could n't tell you what block you were on , let alone what street .
for geolocation , accuracy matters , and things have only improved over the last 10 years .
with more base stations , more ground stations , better receivers and better algorithms , gps can now not only tell you what street you are on , but what part of the street .
this level of accuracy has unleashed a firestorm of innovation .
in fact , many of you navigated here today with the help of your tomtom or your smartphone .
paper maps are becoming obsolete .
but we now stand on the verge of another revolution in geolocation accuracy .
what if i told you that the two-meter positioning that our current cell phones and our tomtoms give us is pathetic compared to what we could be getting ?
for some time now , it 's been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the gps signal , and if you have an internet connection , then you can go from meter level to centimeter level , even millimeter-level positioning .
so why do n't we have this capability on our phones ?
only , i believe , for a lack of imagination .
manufacturers have n't built this carrier phase technique into their cheap gps chips because they 're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation so accurate that you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand .
but you and i and other innovators , we can see the potential in this next leap in accuracy .
imagine , for example , an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on top of the physical world .
i could build for you a structure up here in 3d , millimeter accurate , that only you could see , or my friends at home .
so this level of positioning , this is what we 're looking for , and i believe that , within the next few years , i predict , that this kind of hyper-precise , carrier phase-based positioning will become cheap and ubiquitous , and the consequences will be fantastic .
the holy grail , of course , is the gps dot .
do you remember the movie " the da vinci code ? "
here 's professor langdon examining a gps dot , which his accomplice tells him is a tracking device accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe , but we know that in the world of nonfiction , the gps dot is impossible , right ?
for one thing , gps does n't work indoors , and for another , they do n't make devices quite this small , especially when those devices have to relay their measurements back over a network .
well , these objections were perfectly reasonable a few years ago , but things have changed .
there 's been a strong trend toward miniaturization , better sensitivity , so much so that , a few years ago , a gps tracking device looked like this clunky box to the left of the keys .
compare that with the device released just months ago that 's now packaged into something the size of a key fob , and if you take a look at the state of the art for a complete gps receiver , which is only a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever , you realize that the gps dot will soon move from fiction to nonfiction .
imagine what we could do with a world full of gps dots .
it 's not just that you 'll never lose your wallet or your keys anymore , or your child when you 're at disneyland .
you 'll buy gps dots in bulk , and you 'll stick them on everything you own worth more than a few tens of dollars .
i could n't find my shoes one recent morning , and , as usual , had to ask my wife if she had seen them .
but i should n't have to bother my wife with that kind of triviality .
i should be able to ask my house where my shoes are .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- those of you who have made the switch to gmail , remember how refreshing it was to go from organizing all of your email to simply searching it .
the gps dot will do the same for our possessions .
now , of course , there is a flip side to the gps dot .
i was in my office some months back and got a telephone call .
the woman on the other end of the line , we 'll call her carol , was panicked .
apparently , an ex-boyfriend of carol 's from california had found her in texas and was following her around .
so you might ask at this point why she 's calling you .
well , so did i.
but it turned out there was a technical twist to carol 's case .
every time her ex-boyfriend would show up , at the most improbable times and the most improbable locations , he was carrying an open laptop , and over time carol realized that he had planted a gps tracking device on her car , so she was calling me for help to disable it .
" well , you should go to a good mechanic and have him look at your car , " i said .
" i already have , " she told me .
" he did n't see anything obvious , and he said he 'd have to take the car apart piece by piece . "
" well then , you 'd better go to the police , " i said .
" i already have , " she replied .
" they 're not sure this rises to the level of harassment , and they 're not set up technically to find the device . "
" okay , what about the fbi ? "
" i 've talked to them too , and same story . "
we then talked about her coming to my lab and us performing a radio sweep of her car , but i was n't even sure that would work , given that some of these devices are configured to only transmit when they 're inside safe zones or when the car is moving .
so , there we were .
carol is n't the first , and certainly wo n't be the last , to find herself in this kind of fearsome environment , worrisome situation caused by gps tracking .
in fact , as i looked into her case , i discovered to my surprise that it 's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else 's car .
the supreme court ruled last month that a policeman has to get a warrant if he wants to do prolonged tracking , but the law is n't clear about civilians doing this to one another , so it 's not just big brother we have to worry about , but big neighbor . -lrb- laughter -rrb- there is one alternative that carol could have taken , very effective . it 's called the wave bubble .
it 's an open-source gps jammer , developed by limor fried , a graduate student at mit , and limor calls it " a tool for reclaiming our personal space . "
with a flip of the switch you create a bubble around you within which gps signals ca n't reside .
they get drowned out by the bubble .
and limor designed this , in part , because , like carol , she felt threatened by gps tracking .
then she posted her design to the web , and if you do n't have time to build your own , you can buy one .
chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the internet .
so you might be thinking , the wave bubble sounds great .
i should have one . might come in handy if somebody ever puts a tracking device on my car .
but you should be aware that its use is very much illegal in the united states .
and why is that ?
well , because it 's not a bubble at all .
its jamming signals do n't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car .
they go on to jam innocent gps receivers for miles around you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , if you 're carol or limor , or someone who feels threatened by gps tracking , it might not feel wrong to turn on a wave bubble , but in fact , the results can be disastrous .
imagine , for example , you 're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a wave bubble .
all of a sudden your gps readout goes blank , and now it 's just you and the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar system if you remember how to work it .
they - in fact , they do n't update or upkeep lighthouses anymore , and loran , the only backup to gps , was discontinued last year .
our modern society has a special relationship with gps .
we 're almost blindly reliant on it .
it 's built deeply into our systems and infrastructure .
some call it " the invisible utility . "
so , turning on a wave bubble might not just cause inconvenience .
it might be deadly .
but as it turns out , for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general gps reliability , there 's something even more potent and more subversive than a wave bubble , and that is a gps spoofer .
the idea behind the gps spoofer is simple .
instead of jamming the gps signals , you fake them .
you imitate them , and if you do it right , the device you 're attacking does n't even know it 's being spoofed .
so let me show you how this works .
in any gps receiver , there 's a peak inside that corresponds to the authentic signals .
these three red dots represent the tracking points that try to keep themselves centered on that peak .
but if you send in a fake gps signal , another peak pops up , and if you can get these two peaks perfectly aligned , the tracking points ca n't tell the difference , and they get hijacked by the stronger counterfeit signal , with the authentic peak getting forced off .
at this point , the game is over .
the fake signals now completely control this gps receiver .
so is this really possible ?
can someone really manipulate the timing and positioning of a gps receiver just like that , with a spoofer ?
well , the short answer is yes .
the key is that civil gps signals are completely open .
they have no encryption . they have no authentication .
they 're wide open , vulnerable to a kind of spoofing attack .
even so , up until very recently , nobody worried about gps spoofers .
people figured that it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one .
but i , and a friend of mine from graduate school , we did n't see it that way .
we knew it was n't going to be so hard , and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against gps spoofing .
i remember vividly the week it all came together .
we built it at my home , which means that i got a little extra help from my three-year-old son ramon .
here 's ramon - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - looking for a little attention from dad that week .
at first , the spoofer was just a jumble of cables and computers , though we eventually got it packaged into a small box .
now , the dr. frankenstein moment , when the spoofer finally came alive and i glimpsed its awful potential , came late one night when i tested the spoofer against my iphone .
let me show you some actual footage from that very first experiment .
i had come to completely trust this little blue dot and its reassuring blue halo .
they seemed to speak to me .
they 'd say , " here you are . here you are . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and " you can trust us . "
so something felt very wrong about the world .
it was a sense , almost , of betrayal , when this little blue dot started at my house , and went running off toward the north leaving me behind . i was n't moving .
what i then saw in this little moving blue dot was the potential for chaos .
i saw airplanes and ships veering off course , with the captain learning only too late that something was wrong .
i saw the gps-derived timing of the new york stock exchange being manipulated by hackers .
you can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a gps spoofer .
there is , though , one redeeming feature of the gps spoofer .
it 's the ultimate weapon against an invasion of gps dots .
imagine , for example , you 're being tracked .
well , you can play the tracker for a fool , pretending to be at work when you 're really on vacation .
or , if you 're carol , you could lure your ex-boyfriend into some empty parking lot where the police are waiting for him .
so i 'm fascinated by this conflict , a looming conflict , between privacy on the one hand and the need for a clean radio spectrum on the other .
we simply can not tolerate gps jammers and spoofers , and yet , given the lack of effective legal means for protecting our privacy from the gps dot , can you really blame people for wanting to turn them on , for wanting to use them ?
i hold out hope that we 'll be able to reconcile this conflict with some sort of , some yet uninvented technology .
but meanwhile , grab some popcorn , because things are going to get interesting .
within the next few years , many of you will be the proud owner of a gps dot .
maybe you 'll have a whole bag full of them .
you 'll never lose track of your things again .
the gps dot will fundamentally reorder your life .
but will you be able to resist the temptation to track your fellow man ?
or will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a gps spoofer or a wave bubble to protect your own privacy ?
so , as usual , what we see just beyond the horizon is full of promise and peril .
it 'll be fascinating to see how this all turns out .
thanks . -lrb- applause -rrb- before march , 2011 , i was a photographic retoucher based in new york city .
we 're pale , gray creatures .
we hide in dark , windowless rooms , and generally avoid sunlight .
we make skinny models skinnier , perfect skin more perfect , and the impossible possible , and we get criticized in the press all the time , but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography .
on march 11 , 2011 , i watched from home , as the rest of the world did , as the tragic events unfolded in japan .
soon after , an organization i volunteer with , all hands volunteers , were on the ground , within days , working as part of the response efforts .
i , along with hundreds of other volunteers , knew we could n't just sit at home , so i decided to join them for three weeks .
on may the 13th , i made my way to the town of ōfunato .
it 's a small fishing town in iwate prefecture , about 50,000 people , one of the first that was hit by the wave .
the waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height , and traveled over two miles inland .
as you can imagine , the town had been devastated .
we pulled debris from canals and ditches .
we cleaned schools . we de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation .
we cleared tons and tons of stinking , rotting fish carcasses from the local fish processing plant .
we got dirty , and we loved it .
for weeks , all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things .
they 'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and sd cards .
and everyone was doing the same .
they were collecting them up , and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping .
now , it was n't until this point that i realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt .
as they had run from the wave , and for their lives , absolutely everything they had , at the end of my first week there , i found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town .
i was helping clean the onsen , the communal onsen , the huge giant bathtubs .
this happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos .
this is where people were handing them in , and i was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them .
now , it was emotional and it was inspiring , and i 've always heard about thinking outside the box , but it was n't until i had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened .
as i looked through the photos , there were some were over a hundred years old , some still in the envelope from the processing lab , i could n't help but think as a retoucher that i could fix that tear and mend that scratch , and i knew hundreds of people who could do the same .
so that evening , i just reached out on facebook and asked a few of them , and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive , i knew we had to give it a go .
so we started retouching photos .
this was the very first .
not terribly damaged , but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl 's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy .
otherwise , that little girl is n't going to look like that little girl anymore , and surely that 's as tragic as having the photo damaged .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over time , more photos came in , thankfully , and more retouchers were needed , and so i reached out again on facebook and linkedin , and within five days , 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries .
within two weeks , i had 150 people wanting to join in .
within japan , by july , we 'd branched out to the neighboring town of rikuzentakata , further north to a town called yamada .
once a week , we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up , where people were reclaiming their photos .
the older ladies sometimes had n't seen a scanner before , but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo , they could give it to us , have it scanned , uploaded to a cloud server , it would be downloaded by a gaijin , a stranger , somewhere on the other side of the globe , and it 'd start being fixed .
the time it took , however , to get it back is a completely different story , and it depended obviously on the damage involved .
it could take an hour . it could take weeks .
it could take months .
the kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn , or pieced together , picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water had n't damaged .
it was very time-consuming .
now , all these photos had been damaged by water , submerged in salt water , covered in bacteria , in sewage , sometimes even in oil , all of which over time is going to continue to damage them , so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project .
we could n't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned , dry and reclaimed .
now , we were lucky with our hand-cleaning .
we had an amazing local woman who guided us .
it 's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos .
as my team leader wynne once said , it 's like doing a tattoo on someone .
you do n't get a chance to mess it up .
the lady who brought us these photos was lucky , as far as the photos go .
she had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage .
she also had duplicates .
areas like her husband and her face , which otherwise would have been completely impossible to fix , we could just put them together in one good photo , and remake the whole photo .
when she collected the photos from us , she shared a bit of her story with us .
her photos were found by her husband 's colleagues at a local fire department in the debris a long way from where the home had once stood , and they 'd recognized him .
the day of the tsunami , he 'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed .
he had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded .
her two little boys , not so little anymore , but her two boys were both at school , separate schools .
one of them got caught up in the water .
it took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived .
the day i gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son 's 14th birthday .
for her , despite all of this , those photos were the perfect gift back to him , something he could look at again , something he remembered from before that was n't still scarred from that day in march when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed .
after six months in japan , 1,100 volunteers had passed through all hands , hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs , the large majority - -lrb- applause -rrb- - a large majority of which did actually find their home again , importantly .
over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back , fully restored and retouched .
during this time , we had n't really spent more than about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials , most of which was printer inks .
we take photos constantly .
a photo is a reminder of someone or something , a place , a relationship , a loved one .
they 're our memory-keepers and our histories , the last thing we would grab and the first thing you 'd go back to look for .
that 's all this project was about , about restoring those little bits of humanity , giving someone that connection back .
when a photo like this can be returned to someone like this , it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it .
the project 's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers .
for some of them , it 's given them a connection to something bigger , giving something back , using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin .
i would like to conclude by reading an email i got from one of them , cindy , the day i finally got back from japan after six months .
" as i worked , i could n't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images .
one in particular , a photo of women of all ages , from grandmother to little girl , gathered around a baby , struck a chord , because a similar photo from my family , my grandmother and mother , myself , and newborn daughter , hangs on our wall .
across the globe , throughout the ages , our basic needs are just the same , are n't they ? "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- a fact came out of mit , couple of years ago . ken hale , who 's a linguist , said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on earth right now , 3,000 are n't spoken by the children .
so that in one generation , we 're going to halve our cultural diversity .
he went on to say that every two weeks , an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture .
so an entire philosophy , a body of knowledge about the natural world that had been empirically gleaned over centuries , goes away .
and this happens every two weeks .
so for the last 20 years , since my dental experience , i have been traveling the world and coming back with stories about some of these people .
what i 'd like to do right now is share some of those stories with you .
this is tamdin .
she is a 69-year-old nun .
she was thrown in prison in tibet for two years for putting up a little tiny placard protesting the occupation of her country .
and when i met her , she had just taken a walk over the himalayas from lhasa , the capital of tibet , into nepal , across to india - 30 days - to meet her leader , the dalai lama .
the dalai lama lives in dharamsala , india .
so i took this picture three days after she arrived , and she had this beat-up pair of tennis shoes on , with her toes sticking out .
and she crossed in march , and there 's a lot of snow at 18,500 feet in march .
this is paldin .
paldin is a 62-year-old monk .
and he spent 33 years in prison .
his whole monastery was thrown into prison at the time of the uprising , when the dalai lama had to leave tibet .
and he was beaten , starved , tortured - lost all his teeth while in prison .
and when i met him , he was a kind gentle old man .
and it really impressed me - i met him two weeks after he got out of prison - that he went through that experience , and ended up with the demeanor that he had .
so i was in dharamsala meeting these people , and i 'd spent about five weeks there , and i was hearing these similar stories of these refugees that had poured out of tibet into dharamsala .
and it just so happened , on the fifth week , there was a public teaching by the dalai lama .
and i was watching this crowd of monks and nuns , many of which i had just interviewed , and heard their stories , and i watched their faces , and they gave us a little fm radio , and we could listen to the translation of his teachings .
and what he said was : treat your enemies as if they were precious jewels , because it 's your enemies that build your tolerance and patience on the road to your enlightenment .
that hit me so hard , telling these people that had been through this experience .
so , two months later , i went into tibet , and i started interviewing the people there , taking my photographs . that 's what i do .
i interview and do portraits .
and this is a little girl .
i took her portrait up on top of the jokhang temple .
and i 'd snuck in - because it 's totally illegal to have a picture of the dalai lama in tibet - it 's the quickest way you can get arrested .
so i snuck in a bunch of little wallet-sized pictures of the dalai lama , and i would hand them out .
and when i gave them to the people , they 'd either hold them to their heart , or they 'd hold them up to their head and just stay there .
and this is - well , at the time - i did this 10 years ago - that was 36 years after the dalai lama had left .
so i was going in , interviewing these people and doing their portraits .
this is jigme and her sister , sonam .
and they live up on the chang tang , the tibetan plateau , way in the western part of the country .
this is at 17,000 feet .
and they had just come down from the high pastures , same thing : gave her a picture , she held it up to her forehead .
and i usually hand out polaroids when i do these , because i 'm setting up lights , and checking my lights , and when i showed her her polaroid , she screamed and ran into her tent .
this is tenzin gyatso ; he was found to be the buddha of compassion at the age of two , out in a peasant 's house , way out in the middle of nowhere .
at the age of four , he was installed as the 14th dalai lama .
as a teenager , he faced the invasion of his country , and had to deal with it - he was the leader of the country .
eight years later , when they discovered there was a plot to kill him , they dressed him up like a beggar and snuck him out of the country on horseback , and took the same trip that tamdin did .
and he 's never been back to his country since .
and if you think about this man , 46 years later , still sticking to this non-violent response to a severe political and human rights issue .
and the young people , young tibetans , are starting to say , listen , this does n't work .
you know , violence as a political tool is all the rage right now .
and he still is holding this line .
so this is our icon to non-violence in our world - one of our living icons .
this is another leader of his people .
this is moi . this is in the ecuadorian amazon .
and moi is 35 years old .
and this area of the ecuadorian amazon - oil was discovered in 1972 .
and in this period of time - since that time - as much oil , or twice as much oil as was spilled in the exxon valdez accident , was spilled in this little area of the amazon , and the tribes in this area have constantly had to move .
and moi belongs to the huaorani tribe , and they 're known as very fierce , they 're known as " auca . "
and they 've managed to keep out the seismologists and the oil workers with spears and blowguns .
and we spent - i was with a team - two weeks with these guys out in the jungle watching them hunt .
this was on a monkey hunt , hunting with curare-tipped darts .
and the knowledge that these people have about the natural environment is incredible .
they could hear things , smell things , see things i could n't see .
and i could n't even see the monkeys that they were getting with these darts .
this is yadira , and yadira is five years old . she 's in a tribe that 's neighboring the huaorani .
and her tribe has had to move three times in the last 10 years because of the oil spills .
and we never hear about that . and the latest infraction against these people is , as part of plan colombia , we 're spraying paraquat or round up , whatever it is - we 're defoliating thousands of acres of the ecuadorian amazon in our war on drugs .
and these people are the people who take the brunt of it .
this is mengatoue .
he 's the shaman of the huaorani , and he said to us , you know , i 'm an older man now ; i 'm getting tired , you know ; i 'm tired of spearing these oil workers .
i wish they would just go away .
and i was - i usually travel alone when i do my work , but i did this - i hosted a program for discovery , and when i went down with the team , i was quite concerned about going in with a whole bunch of people , especially into the huaorani , deep into the huaorani tribe .
and as it turned out , these guys really taught me a thing or two about blending in with the locals .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one of the things i did just before 9/11 - august of 2001 - i took my son , dax , who was 16 at the time , and i took him to pakistan .
because at first i wanted - you know , i 've taken him on a couple of trips , but i wanted him to see people that live on a dollar a day or less .
i wanted him to get an experience in the islamic world and i also wanted him to - i was going there to work with a group , do a story on a group called the kalash , that are a group of animists , 3,000 animists , that live - very small area - surrounded by islam - there 's 3,000 of these kalash left ; they 're incredible people .
so it was a great experience for him . he stayed up all night with them , drumming and dancing .
and he brought a soccer ball , and we had soccer every night in this little village .
and then we went up and met their shaman .
by the way , mengatoue was the shaman of his tribe as well .
and this is john doolikahn , who 's the shaman of the kalash .
and he 's up in the mountains , right on the border with afghanistan .
in fact , on that other side is the area , tora bora , the area where osama bin laden 's supposed to be . this is the tribal area .
and we watched and stayed with john doolikahn .
and the shaman - i did a whole series on shamanism , which is an interesting phenomenon .
but around the world , they go into trance in different ways , and in pakistan , the way they do it is they burn juniper leaves and they sacrifice an animal , pour the blood of the animal on the leaves and then inhale the smoke .
and they 're all praying to the mountain gods as they go into trance .
you know , getting kids used to different realities , i think , is so important . what dan dennett said the other day - having a curriculum where they study different religions , just to make a mental flexibility , give them a mental flexibility in different belief systems - i think this is so necessary in our world today as you see these clash of beliefs taking place .
and all the security issues they cause us .
so , one thing we did five years ago : we started a program that links kids in indigenous communities with kids in the united states .
so we first hooked up a spot in the navajo nation with a classroom in seattle .
we now have 15 sites .
we have one in kathmandu , nepal ; dharamsala , india ; takaungu , kenya - takaungu is one-third christian , one-third muslim and one-third animist , the community is - ollantaytambo , peru , and arctic village , alaska .
this is daniel ; he 's one of our students in arctic village , alaska .
he lives in this log cabin - no running water , no heat other than - no windows and high-speed internet connection .
and this is - i see this rolling out all over - this is our site in ollantaytambo , peru , four years ago , where they first saw their first computers ; now they have computers in their classrooms .
and the way we 've done this - we teach digital storytelling to these kids .
and we have them tell stories about issues in their community in their community that they care about .
and this is in peru , where the kids told the story about a river that they cleaned up .
and the way we do it is , we do it in workshops , and we bring people who want to learn digital workflow and storytelling , and have them work with the kids .
and just this last year we 've taken a group of teenagers in , and this has worked the best .
so our dream is to bring teenagers together , so they 'll have a community service experience as well as a cross-cultural experience , as they teach kids in these areas and help them build their communication infrastructure .
this is teaching photoshop in the tibetan children 's village in dharamsala .
we have the website , where the kids all get their homepage .
this is all their movies . we 've got about 60 movies that these kids have made , and they 're quite incredible .
the one i want to show you - after we get them to make the movies , we have a night where we show the movies to the community .
and this is in takaungu - we 've got a generator and a digital projector , and we 're projecting it up against a barn , and showing one of the movies that they made .
and if you get a chance , you can go to our website , and you 'll see the incredible work these kids do .
the other thing : i wanted to give indigenous people a voice .
that was one of the big motivating factors .
but the other motivating factor is the insular nature of our country .
national geographic just did a roper study of 18 to 26 year olds in our country and in nine other industrialized countries .
it was a two million dollar study .
united states came in second to last in geographic knowledge .
70 percent of the kids could n't find afghanistan or iraq on a map ; 60 percent could n't find india ; 30 percent could n't find the pacific ocean .
and this is a study that was just done a couple of years ago .
so what i 'd like to show you now , in the couple of minutes i have left , is a film that a student made in guatemala .
we just had a workshop in guatemala .
a week before we got to the workshop , a massive landslide , caused by hurricane stan , last october , came in and buried 600 people alive in their village .
and this kid lived in the village - he was n't there at the time - and this is the little movie he put together about that .
and he had n't seen a computer before we did this movie . we taught him photoshop and - yeah , we can play it .
this is an old mayan funeral chant that he got from his grandfather .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- mosquito buzzing -rrb- -lrb- swat -rrb- gotcha .
mosquitos . i hate them .
do n't you ?
that awful buzzing sound at night around your ears that drives you absolutely crazy ?
knowing that she wants to stick a needle in your skin and suck out your blood ? that 's awful , right ?
in fact , there 's only one good thing i can think of when it gets to mosquitos .
when they fly into our bedroom at night , they prefer to bite my wife .
but that 's fascinating , right ?
why does she receive more bites than i do ?
and the answer is smell , the smell of her body .
and since we all smell different and produce chemicals on our skin that either attract or repel mosquitos , some of us are just more attractive than others .
so my wife smells nicer than i do , or i just stink more than she does .
either way , mosquitos find us in the dark by sniffing us out . they smell us .
and during my ph.d , i wanted to know exactly what chemicals from our skin mosquitos used , african malarial mosquitos use to track us down at night .
and there 's a whole range of compounds that they do use .
and this was not going to be an easy task .
and therefore , we set up various experiments .
why did we set up these experiments ?
because half the world 's population runs the risk of contracting a killer disease like malaria through a simple mosquito bite .
every 30 seconds , somewhere on this planet , a child dies of malaria , and paul levy this morning , he was talking about the metaphor of the 727 crashing into the united states .
well , in africa , we have the equivalent of seven jumbo 747s crashing every day .
but perhaps if we can attract these mosquitos to traps , bait it with our smell , we may be able to stop transmission of disease .
now solving this puzzle was not an easy thing , because we produce hundreds of different chemicals on the skin , but we undertook some remarkable experiments that managed us to resolve this puzzle very quickly indeed .
first , we observed that not all mosquito species bite on the same part of the body . strange .
so we set up an experiment whereby we put a naked volunteer in a large cage , and in that cage we released mosquitos to see where they were biting on the body of that person .
and we found some remarkable differences .
on the left here you see the bites by the dutch malarial mosquito on this person .
they had a very strong preference for biting on the face .
in contrast , the african malarial mosquito had a very strong preference for biting the ankles and feet of this person , and that of course we should have known all along because they 're called mosqui-toes , you see ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's right . -lrb- applause -rrb- and so we started focusing on the smell of feet , on the smell of human feet , until we came across a remarkable statement in the literature that said that cheese smells after feet rather than the reverse . think of it .
and this triggered us to do a remarkable experiment .
we tried , with a tiny little piece of limburger cheese , which smells badly after feet , to attract african malaria mosquitos .
and you know what ? it worked .
in fact , it worked so well that now we have a synthetic mixture of the aroma of limburger cheese that we 're using in tanzania and has been shown there to be two to three times more attractive to mosquitos than humans .
limburg , be proud of your cheese , as it is now used in the fight against malaria .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's the cheese , just to show you .
my second story is remarkable as well .
it 's about man 's best friend . it 's about dogs .
and i will show you how we can use dogs in the fight against malaria .
one of the best ways of killing mosquitos is not to wait until they fly around like adults and bite people and transmit disease .
it 's to kill them when they 're still in the water as larvae .
why ? because they are just like the cia .
in that pool of water , these larvae are concentrated .
they 're all together there . they are immobile .
they ca n't escape from that water . they ca n't fly .
and they 're accessible . you can actually walk up to that pool and you can kill them there , right ?
so the problem that we face with this is that , throughout the landscape , all these pools of water with the larvae , they are scattered all over the place , which makes it very hard for an inspector like this to actually find all these breeding sites and treat them with insecticides .
and last year we thought very , very hard , how can we resolve this problem ? until we realized that just like us , we have a unique smell , that mosquito larvae also have a very unique smell .
and so we set up another crazy experiment , because we collected the smell of these larvae , put it on pieces of cloth , and then did something very remarkable .
here we have a bar with four holes , and we put the smell of these larvae in the left hole .
ooh , that was very quick .
and then you see the dog . it 's called tweed . it 's a border collie .
he 's examining these holes , and now he 's got it already .
he 's going back to check the control holes again , but he 's coming back to the first one , and now he 's locking into that smell , which means that now we can use dogs with these inspectors to much better find the breeding sites of mosquitos in the field , and therefore have a much bigger impact on malaria .
this lady is ellen van der zweep . she 's one of the best dog-trainers in the world , and she believes that we can do a lot more .
since we also know that people that carry malaria parasites smell different compared to people that are uninfected , she 's convinced that we can train dogs to find people that carry the parasite .
that means that in a population where malaria has gone down all the way , and there 's few people remaining with parasites , that the dogs can find these people , we can treat them with anti-malarial drugs , and give the final blow to malaria .
man 's best friend in the fight against malaria .
my third story is perhaps even more remarkable , and , i should say , has never been shown to the public until today .
yeah .
it 's a crazy story , but i believe it 's perhaps the best and ultimate revenge against mosquitos ever .
in fact , people have told me that now they will enjoy being bitten by mosquitos .
and the question of course is , what would make someone enjoy being bitten by mosquitos ?
and the answer i have right here in my pocket , if i get it .
it 's a tablet , a simple tablet , and when i take it with water , it does miracles .
thank you .
-lrb- drinking -rrb- now let me show you how this works .
here in this box i have a cage with several hundred hungry female mosquitos that i 'm just about to release . -lrb- laughter -rrb- just kidding , just kidding .
what i 'm going to show you is i 'm gonna stick my arm into it and i will show you how quickly they will bite .
here we go .
do n't worry , i do this all the time in the lab .
there we go . okay .
now , on the video , on the video here , i 'm going to show you exactly the same thing , except that what i 'm showing you on the video happened one hour after i took the tablet .
have a look . that does n't work . okay . sorry about that .
i 'm sticking in my arm , i 'm giving them a big juicy blood meal , i 'm shaking them off , and we follow them through time to see these mosquitos get very , very sick indeed , here shown in fast motion , and three hours later what we see at the bottom of the cage is dead mosquitos , very dead mosquitos , and i 'm going to say , ladies and gentlemen , we have swapped the cards with mosquitos .
they do n't kill us . we kill them .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - maastricht , be prepared .
now think of what we can do with this .
we can actually use this to contain outbreaks of mosquito-born diseases , of epidemics , right ?
and better still , imagine what would happen if , in a very large area , everyone would take these drugs , this drug , for just three weeks .
that would give us an opportunity to actually eliminate malaria as a disease .
so cheese , dogs and a pill to kill mosquitos .
that 's the kind of out-of-the-box science that i love doing , for the betterment of mankind , but especially for her , so that she can grow up in a world without malaria . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- hi there . i 'm hasan . i 'm an artist .
and usually when i tell people i 'm an artist , they just look at me and say , " do you paint ? "
or " what kind of medium do you work in ? "
well most of my work that i work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique .
so what i 'm really interested in is creative problem solving .
and i had a little bit of a problem a few years ago .
so let me show you a little of that .
so it started over here .
and this is the detroit airport in june 19th of 2002 .
i was flying back to the u.s. from an exhibition overseas .
and as i was coming back , well i was taken by the fbi , met by an fbi agent , and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions - " where were you ? what were you doing ? who were you talking with ?
why were you there ? who pays for your trips ? " - all these little details .
and then literally just out of nowhere , the guy asks me , " where were you september 12th ? "
and when most of us get asked , " where were you september 12th ? "
or any date for that fact , it 's like , " i do n't exactly remember , but i can look it up for you . "
so i pulled out my little pda , and i said , " okay , let 's look up my appointments for september 12th . "
i had september 12th - from 10:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. , i paid my storage bill .
from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. , i met with judith who was one of my graduate students at the time .
from 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. , i taught my intro class , 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. , i taught my advanced class .
" where were you the 11th ? " " where were you the 10th ? "
" where were you the 29th ? the 30th ? "
" where were you october 5th ? "
we read about six months of my calendar .
and i do n't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what i did .
but good thing i did , because i do n't look good in orange .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he asked me - -lrb- applause -rrb- " so this storage unit that you paid the rent on , what did you have in it ? "
this was in tampa , florida , so i was like , " winter clothes that i have no use for in florida .
furniture that i ca n't fit in my ratty apartment .
just assorted garage sale junk , because i 'm a pack rat . "
and he looks at me really confused and says , " no explosives ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was like , " no , no . i 'm pretty certain there were no explosives .
and if there were , i would have remembered that one . "
and he 's still a little confused , but i think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes i 'm not exactly a terrorist threat .
and so we 're sitting there , and eventually after about an hour , hour and a half of just going back and forth , he says , " okay , i have enough information here .
i 'm going to pass this onto the tampa office . they 're the ones who initiated this .
they 'll follow up with you , and we 'll take care of it . "
i was like , " great . "
so i got home and the phone rings , and a man introduced himself .
basically this is the fbi offices in tampa where i spent six months of my life - back and forth , not six months continuously .
by the way , you folks know that in the united states , you ca n't take photographs of federal buildings , but google can do it for you .
so to the folks from google , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i spent a lot of time in this building .
questions like : " have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the united states or a foreign nation ? "
and you also have to consider the state of mind you 're in when you 're doing this .
you 're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death .
or questions such as - actually , during the polygraph , which was how it finally ended after nine consecutive of them - one of the polygraph questions was ...
well the first one was , " is your name hasan ? " " yes . "
" are we in florida ? " " yes . " " is today tuesday ? " " yes . "
because you have to base it on a yes or no .
then , of course , the next question is : " do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the united states ? "
i work at a university .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was like , " maybe you want to ask some of my colleagues that directly . "
but they said , " okay , aside from what we had discussed , do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the united states ? "
so at the end of six months of this and nine consecutive polygraphs , they said , " hey , everything 's fine . "
i was like , " i know . that 's what i 've been trying to tell you guys all along .
i know everything 's fine . "
so they 're looking at me really odd .
and it 's like , " guys , i travel a lot . "
this is with the fbi .
and i was like , " all we need is alaska not to get the last memo , and here we go all over again . "
and there was a sincere concern there .
and he was like , " you know , if you get into trouble , give us a call - we 'll take care of it . "
so ever since then , before i would go anywhere , i would call the fbi .
i would tell them , " hey guys , this is where i 'm going . this is my flight .
northwest flight seven coming into seattle on march 12th " or whatever .
a couple weeks later , i 'd call again , let them know .
it was n't that i had to , but i chose to .
just wanted to say , " hey guys .
do n't want to make it look like i 'm making any sudden moves . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i do n't want you guys to think that i 'm about to flee .
just letting you know . heads up . "
and so i just kept doing this over and over and over .
and then the phone calls turned into emails , and the emails got longer and longer and longer ...
with pictures , with travel tips .
then i 'd make websites .
and then i built this over here . let me go back to it over here .
so i actually designed this back in 2003 .
so this kind of tracks me at any given moment .
i wrote some code for my mobile phone .
basically , what i decided is okay guys , you want to watch me , that 's cool .
but i 'll watch myself . it 's okay .
you do n't have to waste your energy or your resources .
and i 'll help you out .
so in the process , i start thinking , well what else might they know about me ?
well they probably have all my flight records , so i decided to put all my flight records from birth online .
so you can see , delta 1252 going from kansas city to atlanta .
and then you see , these are some of the meals that i 've been fed on the planes .
this was on delta 719 going from jfk to san francisco .
see that ? they wo n't let me on a plane with that , but they 'll give it to me on the plane .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are the airports that i hang out in , because i like airports .
that 's kennedy airport , may 19th , tuesday .
this is in warsaw .
singapore . you can see , they 're kind of empty .
these images are shot really anonymously to the point where it could be anyone .
but if you can cross-reference this with the other data , then you 're basically replaying the roll of the fbi agent and putting it all together .
and when you 're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence , you 're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner .
at the time that this was going on , the last thing on my mind was " art project . "
i was certainly not thinking , hey , i got new work here .
but after going through this , after realizing , well what just happened ?
and after piecing together this , this and this , this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this , and it actually became this project .
so these are the stores that i shop in - some of them - because they need to know .
this is me buying some duck flavored paste at the ranch 99 in daly city on sunday , november 15th .
at coreana supermarket buying my kimchi because i like kimchi .
and i bought some crabs too right around there , and some chitlins at the safeway in emoryville .
and laundry too . laundry detergent at west oakland - east oakland , sorry .
and then my pickled jellyfish at the hong kong supermarket on route 18 in east brunswick .
now if you go to my bank records , it 'll actually show something from there , so you know that , on may 9th , that i bought $ 14.79 in fuel from safeway vallejo .
so not only that i 'm giving this information here and there , but now there 's a third party , an independent third party , my bank , that 's verifying that , yes indeed , i was there at this time .
so there 's points , and these points are actually being cross-referenced .
and there 's a verification taking place .
sometimes they 're really small purchases .
so 34 cents foreign transaction fee .
all of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts , and everything pops up right away .
sometimes there 's a lot of information .
this is exactly where my old apartment in san francisco was .
and then sometimes you get this .
sometimes you just get this , just an empty hallway in salt lake city , january 22nd .
and i can tell you exactly who i was with , where i was , because this is what i had to do with the fbi .
i had to tell them every little detail of everything .
i spend a lot of time on the road .
this is a parking lot in elko , nevada off of route 80 at 8:01 p.m. on august 19th .
i spend a lot of time in gas stations too - empty train stations .
so there 's multiple databases .
and there 's thousands and thousands and thousands of images .
there 's actually 46,000 images right now on my site , and the fbi has seen all of them - at least i trust they 've seen all of them .
and then sometimes you do n't get much information at all , you just get this empty bed .
and sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information .
so you get something like this .
this , by the way , is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in california - vietnamese sandwich .
so there 's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations , empty gas stations .
these are some of the meals that i 've been cooking at home .
so how do you know these are meals eaten at home ?
well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times .
so again , you have to do some detective work here .
so sometimes the databases get so specific .
these are all tacos eaten in mexico city near a train station on july fifth to july sixth .
at 11:39 a.m. was this one .
at 1:56 p.m. was this one . at 4:59 p.m. was this one .
so i time-stamp my life every few moments .
every few moments i shoot the image .
now it 's all done on my iphone , and it all goes straight up to my server , and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together .
they need to know where i 'm doing my business , because they want to know about my business .
so on december 4th , i went here .
and on sunday , june 14th at 2009 - this was actually about two o 'clock in the afternoon in skowhegan , maine - this was my apartment there .
so what you 're basically seeing here if you go to my site , there 's tons of things .
and really , it 's not the most user-friendly interface .
it 's actually quite user-unfriendly .
and one of the reasons , also being part of the user-unfriendliness , is that everything is there , but you have to really work through it .
so by me putting all this information out there , what i 'm basically telling you is i 'm telling you everything .
but in this barrage of noise that i 'm putting out , i actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life .
and you know very little about me actually .
and really so i 've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy , particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded , there 's no need to delete information anymore .
so what do you do when everything is out there ?
well you have to take control over it .
and if i give you this information directly , it 's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces .
the other thing that 's also interesting that 's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies - they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information , or restricted access to information .
and the reason their information has any value is , well , because no one else has access to it .
and by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you , the information that the fbi has has no value , so thus devaluing their currency .
and i understand that , on an individual level , it 's purely symbolic .
but if 300 million people in the u.s.
started doing this , we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up .
because it just would n't work if everybody was sharing everything .
and we 're getting to that .
when i first started this project , people were looking at me and saying , " why would you want to tell everybody what you 're doing , where you 're at ?
why are you posting these photos ? "
this was an age before people were tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people .
so in a way , i 'm glad that i 'm completely obsolete .
i 'm still doing this project , but it is obsolete , because you 're all doing it .
this is something that we all are doing on a daily basis , whether we 're aware of it or not .
so we 're creating our own archives and so on .
and you know , some of my friends have always said , " hey , you 're just paranoid . why are you doing this ?
because no one 's really watching .
no one 's really going to bother you . "
so one of the things that i do is i actually look through my server logs very carefully .
because it 's about surveillance .
i 'm watching who 's watching me .
and i came up with these .
so these are some of my sample logs .
and just little bits and pieces , and you can see some of the things there .
and i cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see .
so you can see that the homeland security likes to come by - department of homeland security .
you can see the national security agency likes to come by .
i actually moved very close to them . i live right down the street from them now .
central intelligence agency .
executive office of the president .
not really sure why they show up , but they do .
i think they kind of like to look at art .
and i 'm glad that we have patrons of the arts in these fields .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : hasan , just curious .
you said , " now everything automatically goes from my iphone , " but actually you do take the pictures and put on information .
so how many hours of the day does that take ?
he : almost none .
it 's no different than sending a text .
it 's no different than checking an email .
it 's one of those things , we got by just fine before we had to do any of those .
so it 's just become another day .
i mean , when we update a status message , we do n't really think about how long that 's going to take .
so it 's really just a matter of my phone clicking a couple of clicks , send , and then it 's done .
and everything 's automated at the other end .
bg : on the day you are in a place where there is no coverage , the fbi gets crazy ?
he : well it goes to the last point that i was at .
so it holds onto the very last point .
so if i 'm on a 12-hour flight , you 'll see the last airport that i departed from .
bg : hasan , thank you very much . -lrb- he : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century .
and basically , what i 'd like to tell you is that power is changing , and there are two types of changes i want to discuss .
one is power transition , which is change of power amongst states .
and there the simple version of the message is it 's moving from west to east .
the other is power diffusion , the way power is moving from all states west or east to non-state actors .
those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century .
and i want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why , in the end , there may be some good news .
when we talk about power transition , we often talk about the rise of asia .
it really should be called the recovery or return of asia .
if we looked at the world in 1800 , you 'd find that more than half of the world 's people lived in asia and they made more than half the world 's product .
now fast forward to 1900 : half the world 's people - more than half - still live in asia , but they 're now making only a fifth of the world 's product .
what happened ? the industrial revolution , which meant that all of a sudden , europe and america became the dominant center of the world .
what we 're going to see in the 21st century is asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world 's population and more than half of the world 's product .
that 's important and it 's an important shift .
but let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that i 'm talking about , which is power diffusion .
to understand power diffusion put this in your mind : computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century .
now that 's a big abstract number .
but to make it more real , if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power , you could buy a car today for five dollars .
now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically , the barriers to entry go down .
anybody can play in the game .
so in 1970 , if you wanted to communicate from oxford to johannesburg to new delhi to brasilia and anywhere simultaneously , you could do it .
the technology was there .
but to be able to do it , you had to be very rich - a government , a multinational corporation , maybe the catholic church - but you had to be pretty wealthy .
now , anybody has that capacity , which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors .
if they have the price of entry into an internet cafe - the last time i looked , it was something like a pound an hour - and if you have skype , it 's free .
so capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone .
and what that means is not that the age of the state is over .
the state still matters .
but the stage is crowded .
the state 's not alone . there are many , many actors .
some of that 's good : oxfam , a great non-governmental actor .
some of it 's bad : al qaeda , another non-governmental actor .
but think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts .
we think in terms of war and interstate war .
and you can think back to 1941 when the government of japan attacked the united states at pearl harbor .
it 's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the united states in 2001 killed more americans than the government of japan did in 1941 .
you might think of that as the privatization of war .
so we 're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power .
now the problem is that we 're not thinking about it in very innovative ways .
so let me step back and ask : what 's power ?
power is simple the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want , and you can do it in three ways .
you can do it with threats of coercion , " sticks , " you can do it with payments , " carrots , " or you can do it by getting others to want what you want .
and that ability to get others to want what you want , to get the outcomes you want without coercion or payment , is what i call soft power .
and that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood , and yet it 's tremendously important .
indeed , if you can learn to use more soft power , you can save a lot on carrots and sticks .
traditionally , the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power .
for example , the great oxford historian who taught here at this university , a.j.p. taylor , defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war .
but we need a new narrative if we 're to understand power in the 21st century .
it 's not just prevailing at war , though war still persists .
it 's not whose army wins ; it 's also whose story wins .
and we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective .
now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what 's happening there .
the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers .
and the current narrative is all about the rise of china and the decline of the united states .
indeed , with the 2008 financial crisis , many people said this was the beginning of the end of american power .
the tectonic plates of world politics were shifting .
and president medvedev of russia , for example , pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of united states power .
but in fact , this metaphor of decline is often very misleading .
if you look at history , in recent history , you 'll see the cycles of belief in american decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so .
in 1958 , after the soviets put up sputnik , it was " that 's the end of america . "
in 1973 , with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window , that was the end of america .
in the 1980s , as america went through a transition in the reagan period , between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the silicon valley economy of california , that was the end of america .
but in fact , what we 've seen is none of those were true .
indeed , people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s , thinking america could do anything , which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures , and now we 're back to decline again .
the moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality .
if we try to focus on the reality , then what we need to focus on is what 's really happening goldman sachs has projected that china , the chinese economy , will surpass that of the u.s.
by 2027 .
so we 've got , what , 17 more years to go or so before china 's bigger .
now someday , with a billion point three people getting richer , they are going to be bigger than the united states .
but be very careful about these projections such as the goldman sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century .
let me mention three reasons why it 's too simple .
first of all , it 's a linear projection .
you know , everything says , here 's the growth rate of china , here 's the growth rate of the u.s. , here it goes - straight line .
history is not linear .
there are often bumps along the road , accidents along the way .
that the chinese economy passes the u.s. economy in , let 's say , 2030 , which it may it , that will be a measure of total economic size , but not of per capita income - wo n't tell you about the composition of the economy .
china still has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy .
and that the chinese wo n't catch up or pass the americans until somewhere in the latter part , after 2050 , of this century .
the other point that 's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is .
you know , it looks at economic power measured by gdp .
does n't tell you much about military power , does n't tell you very much about soft power .
it 's all very one-dimensional .
and also , when we think about the rise of asia , or return of asia as i called it a little bit earlier , it 's worth remembering asia 's not one thing .
if you 're sitting in japan , or in new delhi , or in hanoi , your view of the rise of china is a little different than if you 're sitting in beijing .
indeed , one of the advantages that the americans will have in terms of power in asia is all those countries want an american insurance policy against the rise of china .
it 's as though mexico and canada were hostile neighbors to the united states , which they 're not .
so these simple projections of the goldman sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition .
but you might ask , well so what in any case ?
why does it matter ? who cares ?
is this just a game that diplomats and academics play ?
the answer is it matters quite a lot .
because , if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this , the facts , not the myths , you may have policies which are very dangerous .
let me give you an example from history .
the peloponnesian war was the great conflict in which the greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago .
what caused it ?
thucydides , the great historian of the the peloponnesian war , said it was the rise in the power of athens and the fear it created in sparta .
notice both halves of that explanation .
many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century , in which world war one , the great conflagration in which the european state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world , that that was caused by and the fear it created in britain .
so there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today , that what we 're going to see is the same thing now in this century .
no , i think that 's wrong .
it 's bad history .
for one thing , germany had surpassed britain in industrial strength by 1900 .
and as i said earlier , china has not passed the united states .
but also , if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear , it leads to overreaction .
and the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the east is fear .
to paraphrase franklin roosevelt from a different context , the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself .
we do n't have to fear the rise of china or the return of asia .
and if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective , we 're going to be able to manage this process .
let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together .
if you ask how is power distributed in the world today , it 's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game .
top board : military power among states .
the united states is the only superpower , and it 's likely to remain that way for two or three decades .
china 's not going to replace the u.s. on this military board .
middle board of this three-dimensional chess game : economic power among states .
power is multi-polar .
there are balancers - the u.s. , europe , china , japan can balance each other .
the bottom board of this three-dimensional , the board of transnational relations , things that cross borders outside the control of governments , things like climate change , drug trade , financial flows , pandemics , all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments , there nobody 's in charge .
it makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar .
power is chaotically distributed .
and the only way you can solve these problems - and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century - is through cooperation , through working together , which means that soft power becomes more important , that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation .
another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century , we want to get away from the idea that power 's always zero sum - my gain is your loss and vice versa .
power can also be positive sum , where your gain can be my gain .
if china develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions , that 's good for us as well as good for china so empowering china to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody , and it 's not a zero sum , i win , you lose .
it 's one in which we can all gain .
so as we think about power in this century , we want to get away from this view that it 's all i win , you lose .
now i do n't mean to be pollyannaish about this .
wars persist . power persists .
military power is important .
keeping balances is important .
all this still persists .
hard power is there , and it will remain .
but unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that i call smart power , you 're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we 're facing .
so the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods , things from which all of us can benefit ?
how do we define our national interests so that it 's not just zero sum , but positive sum .
in that sense , if we define our interests , for example , for the united states the way britain defined its interests in the 19th century , keeping an open trading system , keeping a monetary stability , keeping freedom of the seas - those were good for britain , they were good for others as well .
and in the 21st century , you have to do an analog to that .
how do we produce global public goods , which are good for us , but good for everyone at the same time ?
and that 's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century .
there are ways to define our interests in which , while protecting ourselves with hard power , we can organize with others in networks to produce , not only public goods , but ways that will enhance our soft power .
so if one looks at the statements that have been made about this , i am impressed that when hillary clinton described the foreign policy of the obama administration , she said that the foreign policy of the obama administration was going to be smart power , as she put it , " using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box . "
and if we 're going to deal with these two great power shifts that i 've described , the power shift represented by transition among states , the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states , we 're going to have to develop a new narrative of power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power .
and that 's the good news i have . we can do that .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- back in new york , i am the head of development for a non-profit called robin hood .
when i 'm not fighting poverty , i 'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company .
now in our town , where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff , you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action .
i remember my first fire .
i was the second volunteer on the scene , so there was a pretty good chance i was going to get in .
but still it was a real footrace against the other volunteers to get to the captain in charge to find out what our assignments would be .
when i found the captain , he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner , who was surely having one of the worst days of her life .
here it was , the middle of the night , she was standing outside in the pouring rain , under an umbrella , in her pajamas , barefoot , while her house was in flames .
the other volunteer who had arrived just before me - let 's call him lex luther - -lrb- laughter -rrb- got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner 's dog .
the dog ! i was stunned with jealousy .
here was some lawyer or money manager who , for the rest of his life , gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature , just because he beat me by five seconds .
well , i was next .
the captain waved me over .
he said , " bezos , i need you to go into the house .
i need you to go upstairs , past the fire , and i need you to get this woman a pair of shoes . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i swear .
so , not exactly what i was hoping for , but off i went - up the stairs , down the hall , past the ' real ' firefighters , who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point , into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes .
now i know what you 're thinking , but i 'm no hero .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i carried my payload back downstairs where i met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door .
we took our treasures outside to the homeowner , where , not surprisingly , his received much more attention than did mine .
a few weeks later , the department received a letter from the homeowner thanking us for the valiant effort displayed in saving her home .
the act of kindness she noted above all others : someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in both my vocation at robin hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter , i am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale , but i 'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis .
and you know what i 've learned ?
they all matter .
so as i look around this room at people who either have achieved , or are on their way to achieving , remarkable levels of success , i would offer this reminder : do n't wait .
do n't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody 's life .
if you have something to give , give it now .
serve food at a soup kitchen . clean up a neighborhood park .
be a mentor .
not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody 's life , but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one .
so get in the game . save the shoes .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : mark , mark , come back .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mark bezos : thank you .
-lrb- aquatic noises -rrb- so this video was taken at aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of key largo , about 60 feet below the surface .
nasa uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts , and last year , they invited us along for the ride .
all the footage was taken from our open rov , which is a robot that we built in our garage .
so rov stands for remote operated vehicle , which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside .
it 's open source , meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online , allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design .
it 's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the rovs james cameron used to explore the titanic .
so rovs are n't new .
they 've been around for decades .
scientists use rovs to explore the oceans .
oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction .
what we 've built is n't unique .
it 's how we 've built it that 's really unique .
so i want to give you a quick story of how it got started .
so a few years ago , my friend eric and i decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the sierras .
we had heard this story about lost gold from a gold rush-era robbery , and we wanted to go up there .
unfortunately , we did n't have any money and we did n't have any tools to do it .
so eric had an initial design idea for a robot , but we did n't have all the parts figured out , so we did what anybody would do in our situation : we asked the internet for help .
more specifically , we created this website , openrov.com , and shared our intentions and our plans for the first few months , it was just eric and i talking back to each other on the forums , but pretty soon , we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists , and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do .
we kept working on it . we learned a lot .
we kept prototyping , and eventually , we decided we wanted to go to the cave . we were ready .
so about that time , our little expedition became quite a story , and it got picked up in the new york times .
and we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open rov themselves .
so we decided to put the project on kickstarter , and when we did , we raised our funding goal in about two hours , and all of a sudden , had this money to make these kits .
but then we had to learn how to make them .
i mean , we had to learn small batch manufacturing .
so we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation .
but we were able to do it , we got all the kits made , thanks a lot to techshop , which was a big help to us , and we shipped these kits all over the world just before christmas of last year , so it was just a few months ago .
but we 're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world , including this shot from under the ice in antarctica .
we 've also learned the penguins love robots .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 're still publishing all the designs online , encouraging anyone to build these themselves .
that 's the only way that we could have done this .
by being open source , we 've created this distributed r & d network , and we 're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart .
but the actual robot is really only half the story .
the real potential , the long term potential , is with this community of diy ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe .
what can we discover when there 's thousands of these devices roaming the seas ?
so you 're probably all wondering : the cave .
did you find the gold ?
well , we did n't find any gold , but we decided that what we found was much more valuable .
it was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration .
it 's something that 's not limited to the james camerons of the world , but something that we 're all participating in .
it 's an underwater world we 're all exploring together .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a brain scientist , and as a brain scientist , i 'm actually interested in how the brain learns , and i 'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter , better and faster .
this is in this context i 'm going to tell you about video games . when we say video games , most of you think about children .
it 's true . ninety percent of children do play video games .
but let 's be frank .
when the kids are in bed , who is in front of the playstation ?
most of you . the average age of a gamer is 33 years old , not eight years old , and in fact , if we look at the projected demographics of video game play , the video game players of tomorrow are older adults . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so video -lsb- gaming -rsb- is pervasive throughout our society .
it is clearly here to stay . it has an amazing impact on our everyday life . consider these statistics released by activision . after one month of release of the game " call of duty : black ops , " it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide , right ?
would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra ?
so what we are asking in the lab is , how can we leverage that power ?
now i want to step back a bit .
i know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games .
-lrb- shooting noises -rrb- the name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you , right ?
and i 'm almost sure most of you have thought , " oh , come on , ca n't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies ? "
i 'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading shakespeare . right ?
most parents would find that great .
well , i 'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health .
it 's not , and binging is never good .
but i 'm going to argue that in reasonable doses , actually the very game i showed you at the beginning , those action-packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior .
there 's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you , right ? you 're all bombarded with that .
i 'd like to put this kind of friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab .
what we do in the lab is actually measure directly , in a quantitative fashion , what is the impact of video games on the brain .
and so i 'm going to take a few examples from our work .
one first saying that i 'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse .
that 's a statement about vision .
there may be vision scientists among you .
we actually know how to test that statement .
we can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is .
well , guess what ? people that do n't play a lot of action games , that do n't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens , have normal , or what we call corrective-to-normal vision . that 's okay .
the issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week , 10 hours per week , 15 hours per week .
by that statement , their vision should be really bad , right ?
guess what ? their vision is really , really good .
it 's better than those that do n't play .
and it 's better in two different ways .
the first way is that they 're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter , and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses , you can actually do it with just your eyesight .
the other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray .
imagine you 're driving in a fog . that makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident , or getting into an accident .
so we 're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision , and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better .
clearly , when it comes to action video games , screen time does n't make your eyesight worse .
another saying that i 'm sure you have all heard around : video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability .
okay , we know how to measure attention in the lab .
i 'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so .
i 'm going to ask you to participate , so you 're going to have to actually play the game with me . i 'm going to show you colored words . i want you to shout out the color of the ink .
right ? so this is the first example .
-lsb- " chair " -rsb- orange , good . -lsb- " table " -rsb- green .
-lsb- " board " -rsb- audience : red.daphne bavelier : red .
-lsb- " horse " -rsb- db : yellow . audience : yellow .
-lsb- " yellow " -rsb- db : red . audience : yellow .
-lsb- " blue " -rsb- db : yellow .
okay , you get my point , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're getting better , but it 's hard . why is it hard ?
because i introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color .
how good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict , so the young guys here at the top of their game probably , like , did a little better than some of us that are older .
what we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games , they actually resolve the conflict faster .
so clearly playing those action games does n't lead to attention problems .
actually , those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention , and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world .
this is something we use all the time . when you 're driving , you 're tracking , keeping track of the cars around you .
you 're also keeping track of the pedestrian , the running dog , and that 's how you can actually be safe driving , right ?
in the lab , we get people to come to the lab , sit in front of a computer screen , and we give them little tasks that i 'm going to get you to do again .
you 're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces . these are children in the schoolyard in geneva during a recess during the winter . most kids are happy . it 's actually recess .
but a few kids are sad and blue because they 've forgotten their coat .
everybody begins to move around , and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who did n't . so i 'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid . it 's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes . you can track , you can track , and then when it stops , and there is a question mark , and i ask you , did this kid have a coat or not ?
was it yellow initially or blue ?
i hear a few yellow . good . so most of you have a brain . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm now going to ask you to do the task , but now with a little more challenging task . there are going to be three of them that are blue . do n't move your eyes .
please do n't move your eyes . keep your eyes fixated and expand , pull your attention . that 's the only way you can actually do it . if you move your eyes , you 're doomed .
yellow or blue ?
audience : yellow.db : good .
so your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention .
that 's what we just did . your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention , which is what is shown in this video here .
that 's for you guys , action video game players .
a bit more challenging , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- yellow or blue ? blue . we have some people that are serious out there . yeah . -lrb- laughter -rrb- good . so in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people 's behavior , we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain , and we do find many changes , but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention . so one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention .
the other one is the frontal lobe , which controls how we sustain attention , and another one is the anterior cingulate , which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict .
now , when we do brain imaging , we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games .
this actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain .
you all know about multitasking . you all have been faulty of multitasking when you 're driving and you pick up your cellphone . bad idea . very bad idea .
why ? because as your attention shifts to your cell phone , you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you , and so you 're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident .
now , we can measure that kind of skills in the lab .
we obviously do n't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have . that would be a little costly proposition . but we design tasks on the computer where we can measure , to millisecond accuracy , how good they are at switching from one task to another .
when we do that , we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really , really good .
they switch really fast , very swiftly . they pay a very small cost .
now i 'd like you to remember that result , and put it in the context of another group of technology users , a group which is actually much revered by society , which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking .
what is multimedia-tasking ? it 's the fact that most of us , most of our children , are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they 're doing search on the web at the same time as they 're chatting on facebook with their friends .
that 's a multimedia-tasker .
there was a first study done by colleagues at stanford and that we replicated that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely abysmal at multitasking .
when we measure them in the lab , they 're really bad .
makes two main points .
the first one is that not all media are created equal .
you ca n't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games . they have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition , perception and attention .
even within video games , i 'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games .
different video games have a different effect on your brains .
so we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game .
the other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight .
i showed that to you already , like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time , those action gamers have a lot of very good vision , etc .
here , what was really striking is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging in a lot of high multimedia-tasking are convinced they aced the test .
so you show them their data , you show them they are bad and they 're like , " not possible . " you know , they have this sort of gut feeling that , really , they are doing really , really good .
that 's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain .
now in a sense , when we think about the effect of video games on the brain , it 's very similar to the effect of wine on the health .
there are some very poor uses of wine . there are some very poor uses of video games . but when consumed in reasonable doses , and at the right age , wine can be very good for health . there are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy .
so it 's the same way , like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity , learning , attention , vision , etc . , and so we need and we 're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games , either for education or for rehabilitation of patients .
now because we are interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients , we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours on end perform .
i 'm much more interested in taking any of you and showing that by forcing you to play an action game , i can actually change your vision for the better , whether you want to play that action game or not , right ?
that 's the point of rehabilitation or education .
most of the kids do n't go to school saying , " great , two hours of math ! "
so that 's really the crux of the research , and to do that , we need to go one more step .
and one more step is to do training studies .
so let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation .
mental rotation is a task where i 'm going to ask you , and again you 're going to do the task , to look at this shape . study it , it 's a target shape , and i 'm going to present to you four different shapes .
one of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape . i want you to tell me which one : the first one , second one , third one or fourth one ?
okay , i 'll help you . fourth one .
one more . get those brains working . come on .
that 's our target shape .
third . good ! this is hard , right ?
like , the reason that i asked you to do that is because you really feel your brain cringing , right ?
it does n't really feel like playing mindless action video games .
well , what we do in these training studies is , people come to the lab , they do tasks like this one , we then force them to play 10 hours of action games .
they do n't play 10 hours of action games in a row .
they do distributed practice , so little shots of 40 minutes several days over a period of two weeks .
then , once they are done with the training , they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task . so this is work from a colleague in toronto . what they showed is that , initially , you know , subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age . after two weeks of training on action video games , they actually perform better , and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training . that 's really , really important .
why ? because i told you we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation . we need to have effects that are going to be long-lasting .
now , at this point , a number of you are probably wondering well , what are you waiting for , to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy , or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia , for example ?
well , we 're working on it , but here is a challenge .
there are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects , and that 's what i 'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation .
there is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you ca n't resist .
that 's the chocolate side of the equation .
the issue is we need to put the two together , and it 's a little bit like with food .
who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli ?
none of you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and you probably have had that feeling , right , picking up an education game and sort of feeling , hmm , you know , it 's not really fun , it 's not really engaging . so what we need is really a new brand of chocolate , a brand of chocolate that is irresistible , that you really want to play , but that has all the ingredients , the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you ca n't recognize but are still working on your brains . and we 're working on it , but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together , people that work in the entertainment software industry ,
and publishers , so these are not people that usually meet every day , but it 's actually doable , and we are on the right track .
i 'd like to leave you with that thought , and thank you for your attention . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- stephanie white : i 'm going to let her introduce herself to everybody .
can you tell everybody your name ?
einstein : einstein .
sw : this is einstein . can you tell everyone " hi " ?
e : hello .
sw : that 's nice . can you be polite ?
e : hi , sweetheart .
sw : much better . well , einstein is very honored to be here at ted 2006 , amongst all you modern-day einsteins . in fact , she 's very excited .
e : woo .
sw : yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- since we 've arrived , there 's been a constant buzz about all the exciting speakers here for the conference .
this morning we 've heard a lot of whispers about tom reilly 's wrap-up on saturday . einstein , did you hear whispers ?
e : -lsb- squawks -rsb- sw : yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- einstein 's especially interested in penelope 's talk .
a lot of her research goes on in caves , which can get pretty dusty .
e : achoo !
sw : it could make her sneeze . but more importantly , her research could help einstein find a cure for her never-ending scratchy throat .
einstein : -lsb- coughs -rsb- sw : yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , bob russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level .
well , that 's really cool , but what einstein 's really hoping is that maybe he 'll genetically engineer a five-pound peanut .
e : oh , my god ! my god ! my god !
sw : yeah . she would get really , really excited .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that is one big peanut . since einstein is a bird , she 's very interested in things that fly .
she thinks burt rutan is very impressive .
e : ooh .
sw : yeah . she especially likes his latest achievement , spaceshipone .
einstein , would you like to ride in burt 's spaceship ?
e : -lsb- spaceship noise -rsb- sw : even if it does n't have a laser ?
e : -lsb- laser noise -rsb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : yeah , yeah . that was pretty funny , einstein .
now , einstein also thinks , you know , working in caves and travelling through space - it 's all very dangerous jobs .
it would be very dangerous if you fell down .
e : wheeeeeee ! -lsb- splat -rsb- sw : yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- little splat at the end there . einstein , did that hurt ?
e : ow , ow , ow .
sw : yeah . it 's all a lot of hard work .
e : -lsb- squawks -rsb- sw : yeah . it can get a bird like einstein frustrated .
e : -lsb- squawks -rsb- sw : yeah , it sure can . but when einstein needs to relax from her job educating the public , she loves to take in the arts .
if the children of the uganda need another dance partner , einstein could sure fit the bill , because she loves to dance .
can you get down ?
e : -lsb- bobbing head -rsb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : let 's get down for everybody . come on now .
she 's going to make me do it , too . ooh , ooh .
einstein : ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh .
sw : do your head now .
e : ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : or maybe sirena huang would like to learn some arias on her violin , and einstein can sing along with some opera ?
e : -lsb- operatic squawk -rsb- sw : very good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or maybe stu just needs another backup singer ?
einstein , can you also sing ?
i know , you need to get rid of that seed first . can you sing ?
e : la , la .
sw : there you go . and , of course , if all else fails , you can just run off and enjoy a fun fiesta .
e : -lsb- squawks -rsb- sw : all right . well , einstein was pretty embarrassed to admit this earlier , but she was telling me backstage that she had a problem .
e : what 's the matter ?
sw : no , i do n't have a problem . you have the problem , remember ?
you were saying that you were really embarrassed , because you 're in love with a pirate ?
e : yar .
sw : there you go . and what do pirates like to drink ?
e : beer .
sw : yeah , that 's right . but you do n't like to drink beer , einstein .
you like to drink water .
e : -lsb- water sound -rsb- sw : very good . now , really , she is pretty nervous .
because one of her favorite folks from back home is here , and she 's pretty nervous to meet him .
she thinks al gore is a really good-looking man .
what do you say to a good-looking man ?
e : hey , baby .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : and so do all the folks back home in tennessee .
e : yee haw .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : and since she 's such a big fan , she knows that his birthday is coming up at the end of march .
and we did n't think he 'd be in town then , so einstein wanted to do something special for him .
so let 's see if einstein will sing " happy birthday " to al gore .
can you sing " happy birthday " to him ?
e : happy birthday to you .
sw : again .
e : happy birthday to you .
sw : again .
e : happy birthday to you .
sw : big finish .
e : happy birthday to you .
sw : good job !
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , before we wrap it up , she would like to give a shout out to all our animal friends back at the knoxville zoo .
einstein , do you want to say " hi " to all the owls ?
e : woo , woo , woo .
sw : what about the other birds ?
e : tweet , tweet , tweet .
sw : and the penguin ?
e : quack , quack , quack .
sw : there we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's get that one out of there . how about a chimpanzee ?
e : ooh , ooh , ooh . aah , aah , aah .
sw : very good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what about a wolf ?
e : ooooowww .
sw : and a pig ?
e : oink , oink , oink .
sw : and the rooster ?
e : cock-a-doodle-doo !
sw : and how about those cats ?
e : meow .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : at the zoo we have big cats from the jungle .
e : grrrrr .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : what about a skunk ?
e : stinker .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sw : she 's a comedian . i suppose you think you 're famous ? are you famous ?
e : superstar .
sw : yeah . you are a superstar .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , we would like to encourage all of you to do your part to help protect einstein 's animal friends , and to do your part to help protect their homes that they live -lsb- in -rsb- .
now , einstein does say it best when we ask her .
why do we want to protect your home ?
e : i 'm special .
sw : you are very special . what would you like to say to all these nice people ?
e : i love you .
sw : that 's good . can you blow them a kiss ?
e : -lsb- kissing noise -rsb- sw : and what do you say when it 's time to go ?
e : goodbye .
sw : good job . thank you all .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me talk about india through the evolution of ideas .
now i believe this is an interesting way of looking at it because in every society , especially an open democratic society , it 's only when ideas take root that things change .
slowly ideas lead to ideology , lead to policies that lead to actions .
in 1930 this country went through a great depression , which led to all the ideas of the state and social security , and all the other things that happened in roosevelt 's time .
in the 1980s we had the reagan revolution , which lead to deregulation .
and today , after the global economic crisis , there was a whole new set of rules about how the state should intervene .
so ideas change states .
and i looked at india and said , really there are four kinds of ideas which really make an impact on india .
the first , to my mind , is what i call as " the ideas that have arrived . "
these ideas have brought together something which has made india happen the way it is today .
the second set of ideas i call " ideas in progress . "
those are ideas which have been accepted but not implemented yet .
the third set of ideas are what i call as " ideas that we argue about " - those are ideas where we have a fight , an ideological battle about how to do things .
and the fourth thing , which i believe is most important , is " the ideas that we need to anticipate . "
because when you are a developing country in the world where you can see the problems that other countries are having , you can actually anticipate what that did and do things very differently .
now in india 's case i believe there are six ideas which are responsible for where it has come today .
the first is really the notion of people .
in the ' 60s and ' 70s we thought of people as a burden .
we thought of people as a liability .
today we talk of people as an asset .
we talk of people as human capital .
and i believe this change in the mindset , of looking at people as something of a burden to human capital , has been one of the fundamental changes in the indian mindset .
and this change in thinking of human capital is linked to the fact that india is going through a demographic dividend .
as healthcare improves , as infant mortality goes down , fertility rates start dropping . and india is experiencing that .
india is going to have a lot of young people with a demographic dividend for the next 30 years .
what is unique about this demographic dividend is that india will be the only country in the world to have this demographic dividend .
in other words , it will be the only young country in an aging world .
and this is very important . at the same time if you peel away the demographic dividend in india , there are actually two demographic curves .
one is in the south and in the west of india , which is already going to be fully expensed by 2015 , because in that part of the country , the fertility rate is almost equal to that of a west european country .
then there is the whole northern india , which is going to be the bulk of the future demographic dividend .
but a demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital .
only if the people have education , they have roads to go to work , they have lights to study at night - only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend .
in other words , if you do n't really invest in the human capital , the same demographic dividend can be a demographic disaster .
therefore india is at a critical point where either it can leverage its demographic dividend or it can lead to a demographic disaster .
the second thing in india has been the change in the role of entrepreneurs .
when india got independence entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot , as people who would exploit .
but today , after 60 years , because of the rise of entrepreneurship , entrepreneurs have become role models , and they are contributing hugely to the society .
this change has contributed to the vitality and the whole economy .
the third big thing i believe that has changed india is our attitude towards the english language .
english language was seen as a language of the imperialists .
but today , with globalization , with outsourcing , english has become a language of aspiration .
this has made it something that everybody wants to learn .
and the fact that we have english is now becoming a huge strategic asset .
the next thing is technology .
forty years back , computers were seen as something which was forbidding , something which was intimidating , something that reduced jobs .
today we live in a country which sells eight million mobile phones a month , of which 90 percent of those mobile phones are prepaid phones because people do n't have credit history .
forty percent of those prepaid phones are recharged at less than 20 cents at each recharge .
that is the scale at which technology has liberated and made it accessible .
and therefore technology has gone from being seen as something forbidding and intimidating to something that is empowering .
twenty years back , when there was a report on bank computerization , they did n't name the report as a report on computers , they call them as " ledger posting machines . "
they did n't want the unions to believe that they were actually computers .
and when they wanted to have more advanced , more powerful computers they called them " advanced ledger posting machines . "
so we have come a long way from those days where the telephone has become an instrument of empowerment , and really has changed the way indians think of technology .
and then i think the other point is that indians today are far more comfortable with globalization .
again , after having lived for more than 200 years under the east india company and under imperial rule , indians had a very natural reaction towards globalization believing it was a form of imperialism .
but today , as indian companies go abroad , as indians come and work all over the world , indians have gained a lot more confidence and have realized that globalization is something they can participate in .
and the fact that the demographics are in our favor , because we are the only young country in an aging world , makes globalization all the more attractive to indians .
and finally , india has had the deepening of its democracy .
when democracy came to india 60 years back it was an elite concept .
it was a bunch of people who wanted to bring in democracy because they wanted to bring in the idea of universal voting and parliament and constitution and so forth .
but today democracy has become a bottom-up process where everybody has realized the benefits of having a voice , the benefits of being in an open society .
and therefore democracy has become embedded .
i believe these six factors - the rise of the notion of population as human capital , the rise of indian entrepreneurs , the rise of english as a language of aspiration , technology as something empowering , globalization as a positive factor , and the deepening of democracy - has contributed to why india is today growing at rates it has never seen before .
but having said that , then we come to what i call as ideas in progress .
those are the ideas where there is no argument in a society , but you are not able to implement those things .
and really there are four things here .
one is the question of education .
for some reason , whatever reason - lack of money , lack of priorities , because of religion having an older culture - primary education was never given the focus it required .
but now i believe it 's reached a point where it has become very important .
unfortunately the government schools do n't function , so children are going to private schools today .
even in the slums of india more than 50 percent of urban kids are going into private schools .
so there is a big challenge in getting the schools to work .
but having said that , there is an enormous desire among everybody , including the poor , to educate their children .
so i believe primary education is an idea which is arrived but not yet implemented .
similarly , infrastructure - for a long time , infrastructure was not a priority .
those of you who have been to india have seen that .
it 's certainly not like china .
but today i believe finally infrastructure is something which is agreed upon and which people want to implement .
it is reflected in the political statements .
20 years back the political slogan was , " roti , kapada , makaan , " which meant , " food , clothing and shelter . "
and today 's political slogan is , " bijli , sadak , pani , " which means " electricity , water and roads . "
and that is a change in the mindset where infrastructure is now accepted .
so i do believe this is an idea which has arrived , but simply not implemented .
the third thing is again cities .
it 's because gandhi believed in villages and because the british ruled from the cities , therefore nehru thought of new delhi as an un-indian city .
for a long time we have neglected our cities .
and that is reflected in the kinds of situations that you see .
but today , finally , after economic reforms , and economic growth , i think the notion that cities are engines of economic growth , cities are engines of creativity , cities are engines of innovation , have finally been accepted .
and i think now you 're seeing the move towards improving our cities .
again , an idea which is arrived , but not yet implemented .
the final thing is the notion of india as a single market - because when you did n't think of india as a market , you did n't really bother about a single market , because it did n't really matter .
and therefore you had a situation where every state had its own market for products .
every province had its own market for agriculture .
increasingly now the policies of taxation and infrastructure and all that , are moving towards creating india as a single market .
so there is a form of internal globalization which is happening , which is as important as external globalization .
these four factors i believe - the ones of primary education , infrastructure , urbanization , and single market - in my view are ideas in india which have been accepted , but not implemented .
then we have what i believe are the ideas in conflict .
the ideas that we argue about .
these are the arguments we have which cause gridlock .
what are those ideas ? one is , i think , are ideological issues .
because of the historical indian background , in the caste system , and because of the fact that there have been many people who have been left out in the cold , a lot of the politics is about how to make sure that we 'll address that .
and it leads to reservations and other techniques .
it 's also related to the way that we subsidize our people , and all the left and right arguments that we have .
a lot of the indian problems are related to the ideology of caste and other things .
this policy is causing gridlock .
this is one of the factors which needs to be resolved .
the second one is the labor policies that we have , which make it so difficult for entrepreneurs to create standardized jobs in companies , that 93 percent of indian labor is in the unorganized sector .
they have no benefits : they do n't have social security ; they do n't have pension ; they do n't have healthcare ; none of those things .
this needs to be fixed because unless you can bring these people into the formal workforce , you will end up creating a whole lot of people who are completely disenfranchised .
therefore we need to create a new set of labor laws , which are not as onerous as they are today .
at the same time give a policy for a lot more people to be in the formal sector , and create the jobs for the millions of people that we need to create jobs for .
the third thing is our higher education .
indian higher education is completely regulated .
it 's very difficult to start a private university .
it 's very difficult for a foreign university to come to india .
as a result of that our higher education is simply not keeping pace with india 's demands .
that is leading to a lot of problems which we need to address .
but most important i believe are the ideas we need to anticipate .
here india can look at what is happening in the west and elsewhere , and look at what needs to be done .
the first thing is , we 're very fortunate that technology is at a point where it is much more advanced than when other countries had the development .
so we can use technology for governance .
we can use technology for direct benefits .
we can use technology for transparency , and many other things .
the second thing is , the health issue .
india has equally horrible health problems of the higher state of cardiac issue , the higher state of diabetes , the higher state of obesity .
so there is no point in replacing a set of poor country diseases with a set of rich country diseases .
therefore we 're to rethink the whole way we look at health .
we really need to put in place a strategy so that we do n't go to the other extreme of health .
similarly today in the west you 're seeing the problem of entitlement - the cost of social security , the cost of medicare , the cost of medicaid .
therefore when you are a young country , again you have a chance to put in place a modern pension system so that you do n't create entitlement problems as you grow old .
and then again , india does not have the luxury of making its environment dirty , because it has to marry environment and development .
just to give an idea , the world has to stabilize at something like 20 gigatons per year .
on a population of nine billion our average carbon emission will have to be about two tons per year .
india is already at two tons per year .
but if india grows at something like eight percent , income per year per person will go to 16 times by 2050 .
so we 're saying : income growing at 16 times and no growth in carbon .
therefore we will fundamentally rethink the way we look at the environment , the way we look at energy , the way we create whole new paradigms of development .
now why does this matter to you ?
why does what 's happening 10 thousand miles away matter to all of you ?
number one , this matters because this represents more than a billion people .
a billion people , 1/6th of the world population .
it matters because this is a democracy .
and it is important to prove that growth and democracy are not incompatible , that you can have a democracy , that you can have an open society , and you can have growth .
it 's important because if you solve these problems , you can solve the problems of poverty in the world .
it 's important because you need it to solve the world 's environment problems .
if we really want to come to a point , we really want to put a cap on our carbon emission , we want to really lower the use of energy - it has to be solved in countries like india .
you know if you look at the development in the west over 200 years , the average growth may have been about two percent .
here we are talking about countries growing at eight to nine percent .
and that makes a huge difference .
when india was growing at about three , 3.5 percent and the population was growing at two percent , its per capita income was doubling every 45 years .
when the economic growth goes to eight percent and population growth drops to 1.5 percent , then per capita income is doubling every nine years .
in other words , you 're certainly fast-forwarding this whole process of a billion people going to prosperity .
and you must have a clear strategy which is important for india and important for the world .
that is why i think all of you should be equally concerned with it as i am .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- newspapers are dying for a few reasons .
readers do n't want to pay for yesterday 's news , and advertisers follow them .
your iphone , your laptop , is much more handy than new york times on sunday .
and we should save trees in the end .
so it 's enough to bury any industry .
so , should we rather ask , " can anything save newspapers ? "
there are several scenarios for the future newspaper .
some people say it should be free ; it should be tabloid , or even smaller : a4 ; it should be local , run by communities , or niche , for some smaller groups like business - but then it 's not free ; it 's very expensive .
it should be opinion-driven ; less news , more views .
and we 'd rather read it during breakfast , because later we listen to radio in a car , check your mail at work and in the evening you watch tv .
sounds nice , but this can only buy time .
because in the long run , i think there is no reason , no practical reason for newspapers to survive .
so what can we do ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let me tell you my story .
20 years ago , bonnier , swedish publisher , started to set newspapers in the former soviet bloc .
after a few years , they had several newspapers in central and eastern europe .
they were run by an inexperienced staff , with no visual culture , no budgets for visuals - in many places there were not even art directors .
i decided to be - to work for them as an art director .
before , i was an architect , and my grandmother asked me once , " what are you doing for a living ? "
i said , " i 'm designing newspapers . "
" what ? there 's nothing to design there . it 's just boring letters " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and she was right . i was very frustrated , until one day .
i came to london , and i 've seen performance by cirque du soleil .
and i had a revelation . i thought , " these guys took some creepy , run-down entertainment , and put it to the highest possible level of performance art . "
i thought " oh my god , maybe i can do the same with these boring newspapers . "
and i did . we started to redesign them , one by one .
the front page became our signature .
it was my personal intimate channel to talk to the readers .
i 'm not going to tell you stories about teamwork or cooperation .
my approach was very egotistic .
i wanted my artistic statement , my interpretation of reality .
i wanted to make posters , not newspapers .
not even magazines : posters .
we were experimenting with type , with illustration , with photos . and we had fun .
soon it started to bring results .
in poland , our pages were named " covers of the year " three times in a row .
other examples you can see here are from latvia , lithuania , estonia - the central european countries .
but it 's not only about the front page .
the secret is that we were treating the whole newspaper as one piece , as one composition - like music .
and music has a rhythm , has ups and downs .
and design is responsible for this experience .
flipping through pages is readers experience , and i 'm responsible for this experience .
we treated two pages , both spreads , as a one page , because that 's how readers perceive it .
you can see some russian pages here which got many awards on biggest infographic competition in spain .
but the real award came from society for newspaper design .
just a year after redesigning this newspaper in poland , they name it the world 's best-designed newspaper .
and two years later , the same award came to estonia .
is n't amazing ?
what really makes it amazing : that the circulation of these newspapers were growing too .
just some examples : in russia , plus 11 after one year , plus 29 after three years of the redesign .
same in poland : plus 13 , up to 35 percent raise of circulation after three years .
you can see on a graph , after years of stagnation , the paper started to grow , just after redesign .
but the real hit was in bulgaria .
and that is really amazing .
did design do this ?
design was just a part of the process .
and the process we made was not about changing the look , it was about improving the product completely .
i took an architectural rule about function and form and translated it into newspaper content and design .
and i put strategy at the top of it .
so first you ask a big question : why we do it ? what is the goal ?
then we adjust the content accordingly .
and then , usually after two months , we start designing .
my bosses , in the beginning , were very surprised .
why am i asking all of these business questions , instead of just showing them pages ?
but soon they realized that this is the new role of designer : to be in this process from the very beginning to the very end .
so what is the lesson behind it ?
the first lesson is about that design can change not just your product .
it can change your workflow - actually , it can change everything in your company ; it can turn your company upside down .
it can even change you .
and who 's responsible ? designers .
give power to designers .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but the second is even more important .
you can live in a small poor country , like me .
you can work for a small company , in a boring branch .
you can have no budgets , no people - but still can put your work to the highest possible level .
and everybody can do it .
you just need inspiration , vision and determination .
and you need to remember that to be good is not enough .
thank you .
i was born and raised in north korea .
although my family constantly struggled against poverty , i was always loved and cared for first , because i was the only son and the youngest of two in the family .
but then the great famine began in 1994 .
i was four years old .
my sister and i would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight .
i would wander the streets searching for food , and i remember seeing a small child tied to a mother 's back eating chips , and wanting to steal them from him .
hunger is humiliation . hunger is hopelessness .
for a hungry child , politics and freedom are not even thought of .
on my ninth birthday , my parents could n't give me any food to eat .
but even as a child , i could feel the heaviness in their hearts .
over a million north koreans died of starvation in that time , and in 2003 , when i was 13 years old , my father became one of them .
i saw my father wither away and die .
in the same year , my mother disappeared one day , and then my sister told me that she was going to china to earn money , but that she would return with money and food soon .
since we had never been separated , and i thought we would be together forever , i did n't even give her a hug when she left .
it was the biggest mistake i have ever made in my life .
but again , i did n't know it was going to be a long goodbye .
i have not seen my mom or my sister since then .
suddenly , i became an orphan and homeless .
my daily life became very hard , but very simple .
my goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash .
but that is no way to survive .
i started to realize , begging would not be the solution .
so i started to steal from food carts in illegal markets .
sometimes , i found small jobs in exchange for food .
once , i even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine , 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day .
i was not uncommon .
many other orphans survived this way , or worse .
when i could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains , i hoped that , the next morning , my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food .
that hope kept me alive .
i do n't mean big , grand hope .
i mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread , even though it usually did n't .
but if i did n't believe it , i would n't even try , and then i would die .
hope kept me alive .
every day , i told myself , no matter how hard things got , still i must live .
after three years of waiting for my sister 's return , i decided to go to china to look for her myself .
i realized i could n't survive much longer this way .
i knew the journey would be risky , but i would be risking my life either way .
i could die of starvation like my father in north korea , or at least i could try for a better life by escaping to china .
i had learned that many people tried to cross the border to china in the nighttime to avoid being seen .
north korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission .
chinese soldiers will catch and send back north koreans , where they face severe punishment .
i decided to cross during the day , first because i was still a kid and scared of the dark , second because i knew i was already taking a risk , and since not many people tried to cross during the day , i thought i might be able to cross without being seen by anyone .
i made it to china on february 15 , 2006 .
i was 16 years old .
i thought things in china would be easier , since there was more food .
i thought more people would help me .
but it was harder than living in north korea , because i was not free .
i was always worried about being caught and sent back .
by a miracle , some months later , i met someone who was running an underground shelter for north koreans , and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years .
later that year , an activist helped me escape china and go to the united states as a refugee .
i went to america without knowing a word of english , yet my social worker told me that i had to go to high school .
even in north korea , i was an f student .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i barely finished elementary school .
and i remember i fought in school more than once a day .
textbooks and the library were not my playground .
my father tried very hard to motivate me into studying , but it did n't work .
at one point , my father gave up on me .
he said , " you 're not my son anymore . "
i was only 11 or 12 , but it hurt me deeply .
but nevertheless , my level of motivation still did n't change before he died .
so in america , it was kind of ridiculous that they said i should go to high school .
i did n't even go to middle school .
i decided to go , just because they told me to , without trying much .
but one day , i came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner .
and during dinner , i wanted to have one more wing , but i realized there were not enough for everyone , so i decided against it .
when i looked down at my plate , i saw the last chicken wing , that my foster father had given me his .
i was so happy .
i looked at him sitting next to me .
he just looked back at me very warmly , but said no words .
suddenly i remembered my biological father .
my foster father 's small act of love reminded me of my father , who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry , even if he was starving .
i felt so suffocated that i had so much food in america , yet my father died of starvation .
my only wish that night was to cook a meal for him , and that night i also thought of what else i could do to honor him .
and my answer was to promise to myself that i would study hard and get the best education in america to honor his sacrifice .
i took school seriously , and for the first time ever in my life , i received an academic award for excellence , and made dean 's list from the first semester in high school .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that chicken wing changed my life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hope is personal . hope is something that no one can give to you .
you have to choose to believe in hope .
you have to make it yourself .
in north korea , i made it myself .
hope brought me to america .
but in america , i did n't know what to do , because i had this overwhelming freedom .
my foster father at that dinner gave me a direction , and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in america .
i did not come here by myself .
i had hope , but hope by itself is not enough .
many people helped me along the way to get here .
north koreans are fighting hard to survive .
they have to force themselves to survive , have hope to survive , but they can not make it without help .
this is my message to you .
have hope for yourself , but also help each other .
life can be hard for everyone , wherever you live .
my foster father did n't intend to change my life .
in the same way , you may also change someone 's life with even the smallest act of love .
a piece of bread can satisfy your hunger , and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive .
but i confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another joseph 's life and change thousands of other josephs who are still having hope to survive .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- adrian hong : joseph , thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us .
i know you have n't seen your sister for , you said , it was almost exactly a decade , and in the off chance that she may be able to see this , we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message .
joseph kim : in korean ?
ah : you can do english , then korean as well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jk : okay , i 'm not going to make it any longer in korean because i do n't think i can make it without tearing up .
nuna , it has been already 10 years that i have n't seen you .
i just wanted to say that i miss you , and i love you , and please come back to me and stay alive .
and i - oh , gosh .
i still have n't given up my hope to see you .
i will live my life happily and study hard until i see you , and i promise i will not cry again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes , i 'm just looking forward to seeing you , and if you ca n't find me , i will also look for you , and i hope to see you one day .
and can i also make a small message to my mom ?
ah : sure , please .
jk : i have n't spent much time with you , but i know that you still love me , and you probably still pray for me and think about me .
i just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tommy mizzone : tonight we 're going to play you two songs .
we 're three brothers from new jersey , and the funny thing is that , believe it or not , we are hooked on bluegrass and we 're excited to play it for you tonight .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- tm : thank you , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- robbie mizzone : thank you .
i 'm robbie mizzone . i 'm 13 , and i play the fiddle .
this is my brother , jonny . he 's 10 , and he plays the banjo .
and on guitar is my 14-year-old brother , tommy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we call ourselves the sleepy man banjo boys .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- tm : thank you .
jm : thank you all .
tm : thank you very much .
i grew up in northern ireland , right up in the very , very north end of it there , where it 's absolutely freezing cold .
this was me running around in the back garden mid-summer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i could n't pick a career .
in ireland the obvious choice is the military , but to be honest it actually kind of sucks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my mother wanted me to be a dentist .
but the problem was that people kept blowing everything up .
so i actually went to school in belfast , which was where all the action happened .
and this was a pretty common sight .
the school i went to was pretty boring .
they forced us to learn things like latin .
the school teachers were n't having much fun , the sports were very dirty or very painful .
so i cleverly chose rowing , which i got very good at .
and i was actually rowing for my school here until this fateful day , and i flipped over right in front of the entire school .
and that was the finishing post right there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was extremely embarrassing .
but our school at that time got a grant from the government , and they got an incredible computer - the research machine 3dz - and they left the programming manuals lying around .
and so students like myself with nothing to do , we would learn how to program it .
also around this time , at home , this was the computer that people were buying .
it was called the sinclair zx80 . this was a 1k computer , and you 'd buy your programs on cassette tape .
actually i 'm just going to pause for one second , because i heard that there 's a prerequisite to speak here at ted - you had to have a picture of yourself from the old days with big hair .
so i brought a picture with big hair .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
i just want to get that out of the way .
so after the sinclair zx80 came along the very cleverly named sinclair zx81 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and - you see the picture at the bottom ?
there 's a picture of a guy doing homework with his son .
that 's what they thought they had built it for .
the reality is we got the programming manual and we started making games for it .
we were programming in basic , which is a pretty awful language for games , so we ended up learning assembly language so we could really take control of the hardware .
this is the guy that invented it , sir clive sinclair , and he 's showing his machine .
you had this same thing in america , it was called the timex sinclair1000 .
to play a game in those days you had to have an imagination to believe that you were really playing " battlestar galactica . "
the graphics were just horrible .
you had to have an even better imagination to play this game , " death rider . "
but of course the scientists could n't help themselves .
they started making their own video games .
this is one of my favorite ones here , where they have rabbit breeding , so males choose the lucky rabbit .
it was around this time we went from 1k to 16k , which was quite the leap .
and if you 're wondering how much 16k is , this ebay logo here is 16k .
and in that amount of memory someone programmed a full flight simulation program .
and that 's what it looked like .
i spent ages flying this flight simulator , and i honestly believed i could fly airplanes by the end of it .
here 's clive sinclair now launching his color computer .
he 's recognized as being the father of video games in europe .
he 's a multi-millionaire , and i think that 's why he 's smiling in this photograph .
so i went on for the next 20 years or so making a lot of different games .
some of the highlights were things like " the terminator , " " aladdin , " the " teenage mutant hero turtles . "
because i was from the united kingdom , they thought the word ninja was a little too mean for children , so they decided to call it hero instead .
i personally preferred the spanish version , which was " tortugas ninja . "
that was much better .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then the last game i did was based on trying to get the video game industry and hollywood to actually work together on something - instead of licensing from each other , to actually work .
now , chris did ask me to bring some statistics with me , so i 've done that .
the video game industry in 2005 became a 29 billion dollar business .
it grows every year .
last year was the biggest year .
by 2008 , we 're going to kick the butt of the music industry .
by 2010 , we 're going to hit 42 billion .
43 percent of gamers are female .
so there 's a lot more female gamers than people are really aware .
the average age of gamers ?
well , obviously it 's for children , right ?
well , no , actually it 's 30 years old .
and interestingly , the people who buy the most games are 37 .
so 37 is our target audience .
all video games are violent .
of course the newspapers love to beat on this .
but 83 percent of games do n't have any mature content whatsoever , so it 's just not true .
online gaming statistics .
i brought some stuff on " world of warcraft . " it 's 5.5 million players .
it makes about 80 million bucks a month in subscriptions .
it costs 50 bucks just to install it on your computer , making the publisher about another 275 million .
the game costs about 80 million dollars to make , so basically it pays for itself in about a month .
a player in a game called " project entropia " actually bought his own island for 26,500 dollars .
you have to remember that this is not a real island .
he did n't actually buy anything , just some data .
but he got great terms on it .
this purchase included mining and hunting rights , ownership of all land on the island , and a castle with no furniture included .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this market is now estimated at over 800 million dollars annually .
and what 's interesting about it is the market was actually created by the gamers themselves .
they found clever ways to trade items and to sell their accounts to each other so that they could make money while they were playing their games .
i dove onto ebay a couple of days ago just to see what was gong on , typed in world of warcraft , got 6,000 items .
i liked this one the best : a level 60 warlock with lots of epics for 174,000 dollars .
it 's like that guy obviously had some pain while making it .
so as far as popularity of games , what do you think these people are doing here ?
it turns out they 're actually in hollywood bowl in los angeles listening to the l.a. philharmonic playing video game music .
that 's what the show looks like .
you would expect it to be cheesy , but it 's not .
it 's very , very epic and a very beautiful concert .
and the people that went there absolutely loved it .
what do you think these people are doing ?
they 're actually bringing their computers so they can play games against each other .
and this is happening in every city around the world .
this is happening in your local cities too , you 're probably just not aware of it .
now , chris told me that you had a timeline video a few years ago here just to show how video game graphics have been improving .
i wanted to update that video and give you a new look at it .
but what i want you to do is to try to understand it .
we 're on this curve , and the graphics are getting so ridiculously better .
and i 'm going to show you up to maybe 2007 .
but i want you to try and think about what games could look like 10 years from now .
so we 're going to start that video .
video : throughout human history people have played games .
as man 's intellect and technology have evolved so too have the games he plays .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- david perry : the thing again i want you to think about is , do n't look at these graphics and think of that 's the way it is .
think about that 's where we are right now , and the curve that we 're on means that this is going to continue to get better .
this is an example of the kind of graphics you need to be able to draw if you wanted to get a job in the video game industry today .
you need to be really an incredible artist .
and once we get enough of those guys , we 're going to want more fantasy artists that can create places we 've never been to before , or characters that we 've just never seen before .
so the obvious thing for me to talk about today is graphics and audio .
but if you were to go to a game developers conference , what they 're all talking about is emotion , purpose , meaning , understanding and feeling .
you 'll hear about talks like , can a video game make you cry ?
and these are the kind of topics we really actually care about .
i came across a student who 's absolutely excellent at expressing himself , and this student agreed that he would not show his video to anybody until you here at ted had seen it .
so i 'd like to play this video .
so this is a student 's opinion on what his experience of games are .
video : i , like many of you , live somewhere between reality and video games .
some part of me - a true living , breathing person - has become programmed , electronic and virtual .
the boundary of my brain that divides real from fantasy has finally begun to crumble .
i 'm a video game addict and this is my story .
-lrb- music -rrb- in the year of my birth the nintendo entertainment system also went into development .
i played in the backyard , learned to read , and even ate some of my vegetables .
most of my childhood was spent playing with legos .
but as was the case for most of my generation , i spent a lot of time in front of the tv .
mr. rogers , walt disney , nick junior , and roughly half a million commercials have undoubtedly left their mark on me .
when my parents bought my sister and i our first nintendo , whatever inherent addictive quality this early interactive electronic entertainment possessed quickly took hold of me .
at some point something clicked .
-lrb- music -rrb- with the combination of simple , interactive stories and the warmth of the tv set , my simple 16-bit nintendo became more than just an escape .
it became an alternate existence , my virtual reality .
-lrb- music -rrb- i 'm a video game addict , and it 's not because of a certain number of hours i have spent playing , or nights i have gone without sleep to finish the next level .
it is because i have had life-altering experiences in virtual space , and video games had begun to erode my own understanding of what is real and what is not .
i 'm addicted , because even though i know i 'm losing my grip on reality , i still crave more .
-lrb- music -rrb- from an early age i learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen .
today , after 20 years of watching tv geared to make me emotional , even a decent insurance commercial can bring tears to my eyes .
i am just one of a new generation that is growing up .
a generation who may experience much more meaning through video games than they will through the real world .
video games are nearing an evolutionary leap , a point where game worlds will look and feel just as real as the films we see in theatres , or the news we watch on tv .
and while my sense of free will in these virtual worlds may still be limited , what i do learn applies to my real life .
play enough video games and eventually you will really believe you can snowboard , fly a plane , drive a nine-second quarter mile , or kill a man .
i know i can .
unlike any pop culture phenomenon before it , video games actually allow us to become part of the machine .
they allow us to sublimate into the culture of interactive , downloaded , streaming , hd reality .
we are interacting with our entertainment .
i have come to expect this level of interaction .
without it , the problems faced in the real world - poverty , war , disease and genocide - lack the levity they should .
their importance blends into the sensationalized drama of prime time tv .
but the beauty of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics , the vibrating joysticks or virtual surround sound .
it lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional .
i have fought in wars , feared for my own survival , watched my cohorts die on beaches and woods that look and feel more real than any textbook or any news story .
the people who create these games are smart .
they know what makes me scared , excited , panicked , proud or sad .
then they use these emotions to dimensionalize the worlds they create .
a well-designed video game will seamlessly weave the user into the fabric of the virtual experience .
as one becomes more experienced the awareness of physical control melts away .
i know what i want and i do it .
no buttons to push , no triggers to pull , just me and the game .
my fate and the fate of the world around me lie inside my hands .
i know violent video games make my mother worry .
what troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence , but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game .
-lrb- music -rrb- these are all troubles outside of myself .
i , however , have a problem very close to home .
something has happened to my brain .
-lrb- music -rrb- perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts , the things we know to do before we even think .
while some of these instincts may be innate , most are learned , and all of them are hardwired into our brains .
these instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds .
only in recent years has the technology behind video games allowed for a true overlap in stimuli .
as gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life , only virtually .
consider this - my real life car has about 25,000 miles on it .
in all my driving games , i 've driven a total of 31,459 miles .
to some degree i 've learned how to drive from the game .
the sensory cues are very similar .
it 's a funny feeling when you have spent more time doing something on the tv than you have in real life .
when i am driving down a road at sunset all i can think is , this is almost as beautiful as my games are .
for my virtual worlds are perfect .
more beautiful and rich than the real world around us .
i 'm not sure what the implications of my experience are , but the potential for using realistic video game stimuli in repetition on a vast number of loyal participants is frightening to me .
today i believe big brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with video games rather than just simply tvs .
video games are fun , engaging , and leave your brain completely vulnerable to re-programming .
but maybe brainwashing is n't always bad .
imagine a game that teaches us to respect each other , or helps us to understand the problems we 're all facing in the real world .
there is a potential to do good as well .
it is critical , as these virtual worlds continue to mirror the real world we live in , that game developers realize that they have tremendous responsibilities before them .
i 'm not sure what the future of video games holds for our civilization .
but as virtual and real world experiences increasingly overlap there is a greater and greater potential for other people to feel the same way i do .
what i have only recently come to realize is that beyond the graphics , sound , game play and emotion it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addictive to me .
i know that i am losing my grip .
part of me is just waiting to let go .
i know though , that no matter how amazing video games may become , or how flat the real world may seem to us , that we must stay aware of what our games are teaching us and how they leave us feeling when we finally do unplug .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dp : wow .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i found that video very , very thought provoking , and that 's why i wanted to bring it here for you guys to see .
and what was interesting about it is the obvious choice for me to talk about was graphics and audio .
but as you heard , michael talked about all these other elements as well .
video games give an awful lot of other things too , and that 's why people get so addicted .
the most important one being fun .
the name of this track is " the magic to come . "
who is that going to come from ?
is it going to come from the best directors in the world as we thought it probably would ?
i do n't think so .
i think it 's going to come from the children who are growing up now that are n't stuck with all of the stuff that we remember from the past .
they 're going to do it their way , using the tools that we 've created .
the same with students or highly creative people , writers and people like that .
as far as colleges go , there 's about 350 colleges around the world teaching video game courses .
that means there 's literally thousands of new ideas .
some of the ideas are really dreadful and some of them are great .
there 's nothing worse than having to listen to someone try and pitch you a really bad video game idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- chris anderson : you 're off , you 're off . that 's it .
he 's out of time .
dp : i 've just got a little tiny bit more if you 'll indulge me .
ca : go ahead . i 'm going to stay right here though .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dp : this is just a cool shot , because this is students coming to school after class .
the school is closed ; they 're coming back at midnight because they want to pitch their video game ideas .
i 'm sitting at the front of the class , and they 're actually pitching their ideas .
so it 's hard to get students to come back to class , but it is possible .
this is my daughter , her name 's emma , she 's 17 months old .
and i 've been asking myself , what is emma going to experience in the video game world ?
and as i 've shown here , we have the audience .
she 's never going to know a world where you ca n't press a button and have millions of people ready to play .
you know , we have the technology .
she 's never going to know a world where the graphics just are n't stunning and really immersive .
and as the student video showed , we can impact and move .
she 's never going to know a world where video games are n't incredibly emotional and will probably make her cry .
i just hope she likes video games .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , my closing thought .
games on the surface seem simple entertainment , but for those that like to look a little deeper , the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big .
where better to challenge those minds than here at ted ?
thank you .
chris anderson : david perry . that was awesome .
i was only four years old when i saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life .
that was a great day for my mother .
my mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine , and the first day it was going to be used , even grandma was invited to see the machine .
and grandma was even more excited .
throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood , and she had hand washed laundry for seven children .
and now she was going to watch electricity do that work .
my mother carefully opened the door , and she loaded the laundry into the machine , like this .
and then , when she closed the door , grandma said , " no , no , no , no .
let me , let me push the button . "
and grandma pushed the button , and she said , " oh , fantastic !
i want to see this ! give me a chair !
give me a chair ! i want to see it , " and she sat down in front of the machine , and she watched the entire washing program .
she was mesmerized .
to my grandmother , the washing machine was a miracle .
today , in sweden and other rich countries , people are using so many different machines .
look , the homes are full of machines .
i ca n't even name them all .
and they also , when they want to travel , they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations .
and yet , in the world , there are so many people who still heat the water on fire , and they cook their food on fire .
sometimes they do n't even have enough food , and they live below the poverty line .
there are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day .
and the richest people over there - there 's one billion people - and they live above what i call the " air line , " because they spend more than $ 80 a day on their consumption .
but this is just one , two , three billion people , and obviously there are seven billion people in the world , so there must be one , two , three , four billion people more who live in between the poverty and the air line .
they have electricity , but the question is , how many have washing machines ?
i 've done the scrutiny of market data , and i 've found that , indeed , the washing machine has penetrated below the air line , and today there 's an additional one billion people out there who live above the " wash line . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they consume more than $ 40 per day .
so two billion have access to washing machines .
and the remaining five billion , how do they wash ?
or , to be more precise , how do most of the women in the world wash ?
because it remains hard work for women to wash .
they wash like this : by hand .
it 's a hard , time-consuming labor , which they have to do for hours every week .
and sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home , or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off .
and they want the washing machine .
they do n't want to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so relatively low productivity .
and there 's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma .
look here , two generations ago in sweden - picking water from the stream , heating with firewood and washing like that .
they want the washing machine in exactly the same way .
but when i lecture to environmentally-concerned students , they tell me , " no , everybody in the world can not have cars and washing machines . "
how can we tell this woman that she ai n't going to have a washing machine ?
and then i ask my students , i 've asked them - over the last two years i 've asked , " how many of you does n't use a car ? "
and some of them proudly raise their hand and say , " i do n't use a car . "
and then i put the really tough question : " how many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bed sheets ? "
and no one raised their hand .
even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so how come -lsb- this is -rsb- something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it ? what is special with this ?
i had to do an analysis about the energy used in the world .
here we are .
look here , you see the seven billion people up there : the air people , the wash people , the bulb people and the fire people .
one unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel - oil , coal or gas .
that 's what most of electricity and the energy in the world is .
and it 's 12 units used in the entire world , and the richest one billion , they use six of them .
half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world 's population .
and these ones who have washing machines , but not a house full of other machines , they use two .
this group uses three , one each .
and they also have electricity .
and over there they do n't even use one each .
that makes 12 of them .
but the main concern for the environmentally-interested students - and they are right - is about the future .
what are the trends ? if we just prolong the trends , without any real advanced analysis , to 2050 , there are two things that can increase the energy use .
first , population growth .
second , economic growth .
population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman .
and -lsb- with -rsb- that you will get two extra , but that wo n't change the energy use very much .
what will happen is economic growth .
the best of here in the emerging economies - i call them the new east - they will jump the air line .
" wopp ! " they will say .
and they will start to use as much as the old west are doing already .
and these people , they want the washing machine .
i told you . they 'll go there .
and they will double their energy use .
and we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light .
and they 'll get a two-child family without a stop in population growth .
but the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units .
and these 22 units - still the richest people use most of it .
so what needs to be done ?
because the risk , the high probability of climate change is real .
it 's real .
of course they must be more energy-efficient .
they must change behavior in some way .
they must also start to produce green energy , much more green energy .
but until they have the same energy consumption per person , they should n't give advice to others - what to do and what not to do .
-lrb- applause -rrb- here we can get more green energy all over .
this is what we hope may happen .
it 's a real challenge in the future .
but i can assure you that this woman in the favela in rio , she wants a washing machine .
she 's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone - so happy that she even voted for her .
and she became dilma rousseff , the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world - moving from minister of energy to president .
if you have democracy , people will vote for washing machines .
they love them .
and what 's the magic with them ?
my mother explained the magic with this machine the very , very first day .
she said , " now hans , we have loaded the laundry .
the machine will make the work .
and now we can go to the library . "
because this is the magic : you load the laundry , and what do you get out of the machine ?
you get books out of the machines , children 's books .
and mother got time to read for me .
she loved this . i got the " abc 's " - this is where i started my career as a professor , when my mother had time to read for me .
and she also got books for herself .
she managed to study english and learn that as a foreign language .
and she read so many novels , so many different novels here .
and we really , we really loved this machine .
and what we said , my mother and me , " thank you industrialization .
thank you steel mill .
thank you power station .
and thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet .
and i think arthur c. clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet planet ocean .
and the oceans are hugely productive , as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis , the production of new life .
in fact , the oceans produce half of the new life every day on earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe .
in addition to that , it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on earth , and much of it we do n't know about .
but i 'll tell you some of that today .
that also does n't even get into the whole protein extraction that we do from the ocean .
that 's about 10 percent of our global needs and 100 percent of some island nations .
if you were to descend into the 95 percent of the biosphere that 's livable , it would quickly become pitch black , interrupted only by pinpoints of light from bioluminescent organisms .
and if you turn the lights on , you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by , because those are the denizens of the deep , the things that live in the deep ocean .
and eventually , the deep sea floor would come into view .
this type of habitat covers more of the earth 's surface than all other habitats combined .
and yet , we know more about the surface of the moon and about mars than we do about this habitat , despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food , a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies .
and so 10 years ago , an international program began called the census of marine life , which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans .
it involved 17 different projects around the world .
as you can see , these are the footprints of the different projects .
and i hope you 'll appreciate the level of global coverage that it managed to achieve .
it all began when two scientists , fred grassle and jesse ausubel , met in woods hole , massachusetts where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute .
and fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it .
well , from that discussion grew this program that involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries around the world who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions at a combined cost of 650 million dollars to study the distribution , diversity and abundance of life in the global ocean .
and so what did we find ?
we found spectacular new species , the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked - from the shoreline to the abyss , form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between .
and the limiting step here was n't the unknown diversity of life , but rather the taxonomic specialists who can identify and catalog these species that became the limiting step .
they , in fact , are an endangered species themselves .
there are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans .
and as i say , it could be a much larger number .
now , i come from newfoundland in canada - it 's an island off the east coast of that continent - where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history .
and so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish .
it 's around 1900 .
now , when i was a boy of about his age , i would go out fishing with my grandfather and we would catch fish about half that size .
and i thought that was the norm , because i had never seen fish like this .
if you were to go out there today , 20 years after this fishery collapsed , if you could catch a fish , which would be a bit of a challenge , it would be half that size still .
so what we 're experiencing is something called shifting baselines .
our expectations of what the oceans can produce is something that we do n't really appreciate because we have n't seen it in our lifetimes .
now most of us , and i would say me included , think that human exploitation of the oceans really only became very serious in the last 50 to , perhaps , 100 years or so .
the census actually tried to look back in time , using every source of information they could get their hands on .
and so anything from restaurant menus to monastery records to ships ' logs to see what the oceans looked like .
because science data really goes back to , at best , world war ii , for the most part .
and so what they found , in fact , is that exploitation really began heavily with the romans .
and so at that time , of course , there was no refrigeration .
so fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day .
but the romans developed salting .
and with salting , it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances .
and so began industrial fishing .
and so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have of what sort of loss we 've had relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean .
they range from 65 to 98 percent for these major groups of organisms , as shown in the dark blue bars .
now for those species the we managed to leave alone , that we protect - for example , marine mammals in recent years and sea birds - there is some recovery .
so it 's not all hopeless .
but for the most part , we 've gone from salting to exhausting .
now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one .
it 's from trophy fish caught off the coast of florida .
and so this is a photograph from the 1950s .
i want you to notice the scale on the slide , because when you see the same picture from the 1980s , we see the fish are much smaller and we 're also seeing a change in terms of the composition of those fish .
by 2007 , the catch was actually laughable in terms of the size for a trophy fish .
but this is no laughing matter .
the oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we 're responsible for it .
so what 's left ? actually quite a lot .
there 's a lot of exciting things , and i 'm going to tell you a little bit about them .
and i want to start with a bit on technology , because , of course , this is a ted conference and you want to hear something on technology .
so one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean are remotely operated vehicles .
so these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor where they 're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom .
so a couple of years ago , i was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise and i could n't go because of a scheduling conflict .
but through a satellite link i was able to sit at my study at home with my dog curled up at my feet , a cup of tea in my hand , and i could tell the pilot , " i want a sample right there . "
and that 's exactly what the pilot did for me .
that 's the sort of technology that 's available today that really was n't available even a decade ago .
so it allows us to sample these amazing habitats that are very far from the surface and very far from light .
and so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans is acoustics , or sound waves .
and the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water , unlike light .
and so we can send out sound waves , they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back .
and so in this example , a census scientist took out two ships .
one would send out sound waves that would bounce back .
they would be received by a second ship , and that would give us very precise estimates , in this case , of 250 billion herring in a period of about a minute .
and that 's an area about the size of manhattan island .
and to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool , because knowing how many fish are there is really critical .
we can also use satellite tags to track animals as they move through the oceans .
and so for animals that come to the surface to breathe , such as this elephant seal , it 's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean .
and so from that we can produce these tracks .
for example , the dark blue shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north pacific .
now i realize for those of you who are colorblind , this slide is not very helpful , but stick with me nonetheless .
for animals that do n't surface , we have something called pop-up tags , which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets .
and then at some period of time it pops up to the surface and , again , relays that data back to shore .
because gps does n't work under water . that 's why we need these tools .
and so from this we 're able to identify these blue highways , these hot spots in the ocean , that should be real priority areas for ocean conservation .
now one of the other things that you may think about is that , when you go to the supermarket and you buy things , they 're scanned .
and so there 's a barcode on that product that tells the computer exactly what the product is .
geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding .
and what barcoding does is use a specific gene called co1 that 's consistent within a species , but varies among species .
and so what that means is we can unambiguously identify which species are which even if they look similar to each other , but may be biologically quite different .
now one of the nicest examples i like to cite on this is the story of two young women , high school students in new york city , who worked with the census .
they went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in new york city and they barcoded it .
well what they found was mislabeled fish .
so for example , they found something which was sold as tuna , which is very valuable , was in fact tilapia , which is a much less valuable fish .
they also found an endangered species sold as a common one .
so barcoding allows us to know what we 're working with and also what we 're eating .
the ocean biogeographic information system is the database for all the census data .
it 's open access ; you can all go in and download data as you wish .
and it contains all the data from the census plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute .
and so what you can do with that is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans .
what i 've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand .
this is where our sampling effort has concentrated .
now what you can see is we 've sampled the area in the north atlantic , in the north sea in particular , and also the east coast of north america fairly well .
that 's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region .
the cold colors , the blue and the black , show areas where we have almost no data .
so even after a 10-year census , there are large areas that still remain unexplored .
now there are a group of scientists living in texas , working in the gulf of mexico who decided really as a labor of love to pull together all the knowledge they could about biodiversity in the gulf of mexico .
and so they put this together , a list of all the species , where they 're known to occur , and it really seemed like a very esoteric , scientific type of exercise .
but then , of course , there was the deep horizon oil spill .
so all of a sudden , this labor of love for no obvious economic reason has become a critical piece of information in terms of how that system is going to recover , how long it will take and how the lawsuits and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years are likely to be resolved .
so what did we find ?
well , i could stand here for hours , but , of course , i 'm not allowed to do that .
but i will tell you some of my favorite discoveries from the census .
so one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity ?
where do we find the most species of ocean life ?
and what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution .
and what we see is that for coastal tags , for those organisms that live near the shoreline , they 're most diverse in the tropics .
this is something we 've actually known for a while , so it 's not a real breakthrough .
what is really exciting though is that the oceanic tags , or the ones that live far from the coast , are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes .
this is the sort of data , again , that managers could use if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve .
you can do this on a global scale , but you can also do it on a regional scale .
and that 's why biodiversity data can be so valuable .
now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census are things that are small and hard to see , that certainly was n't always the case .
for example , while it 's hard to believe that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists , it did until a few years ago when south african fishermen requested an export permit and scientists realized that this was something new to science .
similarly this golden v kelp collected in alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species .
even though it 's three meters long , it actually , again , eluded science .
now this guy , this bigfin squid , is seven meters in length .
but to be fair , it lives in the deep waters of the mid-atlantic ridge , so it was a lot harder to find .
but there 's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things .
this particular shrimp , we 've dubbed it the jurassic shrimp , it 's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago - at least it was , until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of australia .
and it shows that the ocean , because of its vastness , can hide secrets for a very long time .
so , steven spielberg , eat your heart out .
if we look at distributions , in fact distributions change dramatically .
and so one of the records that we had was this sooty shearwater , which undergoes these spectacular migrations all the way from new zealand all the way up to alaska and back again in search of endless summer as they complete their life cycles .
we also talked about the white shark cafe .
this is a location in the pacific where white shark converge .
we do n't know why they converge there , we simply do n't know .
that 's a question for the future .
one of the things that we 're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive .
now this little critter , it 's only about half a millimeter in size , not terribly charismatic .
but it was only discovered in the early 1980s .
but the really interesting thing about it is that , a few years ago , census scientists discovered that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments in the deep mediterranean sea .
so now they know that , in fact , animals can live without oxygen , at least some of them , and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions .
if you were to suck all the water out of the ocean , this is what you 'd be left behind with , and that 's the biomass of life on the sea floor .
now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles and not much biomass in between .
we found life in the extremes .
and so there were new species that were found that live inside ice and help to support an ice-based food web .
and we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at easter island .
and this particular species really captured the public 's attention .
we also found the deepest vents known yet - 5,000 meters - the hottest vents at 407 degrees celsius - vents in the south pacific and also in the arctic where none had been found before .
so even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable .
now in terms of the unknowns , there are many .
and i 'm just going to summarize just a few of them very quickly for you .
first of all , we might ask , how many fishes in the sea ?
we actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean other than marine mammals .
and so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery how many more species we 're likely to discover .
and from that , we actually calculate that we know about 16,500 marine species and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go .
so we 've done pretty well .
we 've got about 75 percent of the fish , maybe as much as 90 percent .
but the fishes , as i say , are the best known .
so our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms .
now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper that 's going to come out in the journal plos biology .
and what is does is predict how many more species there are on land and in the ocean .
and what they found is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean .
that means 91 percent , even after the census , still remain to be discovered .
and so that turns out to be about two million species once all is said and done .
so we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns .
now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of chile .
and these mats actually cover an area the size of greece .
and so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye .
but you can imagine the biomass that represents .
but the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are .
a single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes .
and the oceans themselves are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types .
so that 's really exciting . what are they all doing out there ?
we actually do n't know .
the most exciting thing , i would say , about this census is the role of global science .
and so as we see in this image of light during the night , there are lots of areas of the earth where human development is much greater and other areas where it 's much less , but between them we see large dark areas of relatively unexplored ocean .
the other point i 'd like to make about this is that this ocean 's interconnected .
marine organisms do not care about international boundaries ; they move where they will .
and so the importance then of global collaboration becomes all the more important .
we 've lost a lot of paradise .
for example , these tuna that were once so abundant in the north sea are now effectively gone .
there were trawls taken in the deep sea in the mediterranean , which collected more garbage than they did animals .
and that 's the deep sea , that 's the environment that we consider to be among the most pristine left on earth .
and there are a lot of other pressures .
ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with , as well as ocean warming , and the effects they 're going to have on coral reefs .
on the scale of decades , in our lifetimes , we 're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs .
and i could spend the rest of my time , which is getting very limited , going through this litany of concerns about the ocean , but i want to end on a more positive note .
and so the grand challenge then is to try and make sure that we preserve what 's left , because there is still spectacular beauty .
and the oceans are so productive , there 's so much going on in there that 's of relevance to humans that we really need to , even from a selfish perspective , try to do better than we have in the past .
so we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them .
when we look at pictures like this , they take our breath away , in addition to helping to give us breath by the oxygen that the oceans provide .
census scientists worked in the rain , they worked in the cold , they worked under water and they worked above water trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery , the still vast unknown , the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life .
so whether you 're a yak herder living in the mountains of chile , whether you 're a stockbroker in new york city or whether you 're a tedster living in edinburgh , the oceans matter .
and as the oceans go so shall we .
thanks for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not about technology , it 's about people and stories .
i could show you what recently was on television as a high quality video : 60 minutes , many of you may have seen it .
and it was the now director of the entire piece of the veteran 's administration - who , himself , had lost an arm 39 years ago in vietnam - who was adamantly opposed to these crazy devices that do n't work .
and it turns out that with 60 minutes cameras rolling in the background , after he pretty much made his position clear on this - he had his hook and he had his - he wore this arm for less than two hours and was able to pour himself a drink and got quite emotional over the fact that , quote - his quote - it 's the first time he 's felt like he 's had an arm in 39 years .
but that would sort of be jumping to the middle of the story , and i 'm not going to show you that polished video .
i 'm going to , instead , in a minute or two , show you an early , crude video because i think it 's a better way to tell a story .
a few years ago i was visited by the guy that runs darpa , the people that fund all the advanced technologies that businesses and universities probably would n't take the risk of doing .
they have a particular interest in ones that will help our soldiers .
i get this sort of unrequested - by me anyway - visit , and sitting in my conference room is a very senior surgeon from the military and the guy that runs darpa .
they proceed to tell me a story which comes down to basically the following . we have used such advanced technologies now and made them available hills of afghanistan , iraq ...
they were quite proud of the fact that you know , before the dust clears , if some soldier has been hurt they will have collected him or her , they will have brought him back , they will be getting world-class triage emergency care faster than you and i would be getting it if we were hurt in a car accident in a major city in the united states .
that 's the good news .
the bad news is if they 've collected this person and he or she is missing an arm or leg , part of the face , it 's probably not coming back .
so , they started giving me the statistics on how many of these kids had lost an arm .
and then the surgeon pointed out , with a lot of anger , he said , " why is it ? at the end of the civil war , they were shooting each other with muskets . if somebody lost an arm , we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it .
now we 've got f18s and f22s , and if somebody loses an arm , we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it . "
and they basically said , " this is unacceptable , " and then the punchline : " so , dean , we 're here because you make medical stuff .
you 're going to give us an arm . "
and i was waiting for the 500 pages of bureaucracy , paperwork and dods .
no , the guy says , " we 're going to bring a guy into this conference room , and wearing the arm you 're going to give us , he or she is going to pick up a raisin or a grape off this table .
if it 's the grape , they wo n't break it . "
great he needs efferent , afferent , haptic response sensors .
" if it 's the raisin , they wo n't drop it . "
so he wants fine motor control : flex at the wrist , flex at the elbow , abduct and flex at the shoulder .
either way they were going to eat it .
" oh , by the way dean . it 's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame - namely 32 inches from the long finger - and weigh less than nine pounds . "
50th percentile female frame .
" and it 's going to be completely self contained including all its power . "
so , they finished that . and i , as you can tell , am a bashful guy .
i told them they 're nuts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they 've been watching too much " terminator . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then , the surgeon says to me , " dean , you need to know more than two dozen of these kids have come back bilateral . "
now , i can not imagine - i 'm sorry , you may have a better imagination than i do - i ca n't imagine losing my arm , and typically at 22 years old .
but compared to that , losing two ?
seems like that would be an inconvenience .
anyway , i went home that night . i thought about it .
i literally could not sleep thinking about , " i wonder how you 'd roll over with no shoulders . "
so , i decided we 've got to do this .
and trust me , i 've got a day job , i 've got a lot of day jobs .
most of my day job keeps me busy funding my fantasies like first and water and power .
and i 've got a lot of day jobs .
but i figured i gotta do this .
did a little investigation , went down to washington , told them i still think they 're nuts but we 're going to do it .
and i told them i 'd build them an arm .
i told them it would probably take five years to get through the fda , and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional .
look what it takes to make things like ipods .
" great , " he said , " you got two years . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " i 'll tell you what . i 'll build you an arm that 's under nine pounds that has all that capability in one year .
it will take the other nine to make it functional and useful . "
we sort of agreed to disagree .
i went back and i started putting a team together , the best guys i could find with a passion to do this .
at the end of exactly one year we had a device with 14 degrees of freedom , all the sensors , all the microprocessors , all the stuff inside .
i could show you it with a cosmesis on it that 's so real it 's eerie , but then you would n't see all this cool stuff .
i then thought it would be years before we 'd be able to make it really , really useful .
it turned out , as i think you could see in aimee 's capabilities and attitudes , people with a desire to do something are quite remarkable and nature is quite adaptable .
anyway , with less than 10 hours of use , two guys - one that 's bilateral .
he 's literally , he 's got no shoulder on one side , and he 's high trans-humeral on the other .
and that 's chuck and randy together , after 10 hours - were playing in our office .
and we took some pretty cruddy home movies .
at the end of the one i 'm going to show , it 's only about a minute and a couple of seconds long , chuck does something that to this day i 'm jealous of , i ca n't do it .
he picks up a spoon , picks it up , scoops out some shredded wheat and milk , holds the spoon level as he translates it , moving all these joints simultaneously , to his mouth , and he does n't drop any milk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i can not do that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- his wife was standing behind me .
chuck has n't fed himself in 19 years .
so , you 've got a choice : we keep the arm , or you keep chuck . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , can we see that ?
this is chuck showing simultaneous control of all the joints .
he 's punching our controls guy . the guy behind him is our engineer / surgeon , which is a convenient guy to have around .
there 's randy , these guys are passing a rubber little puck between them .
and just as in the spirit of first , gracious professionalism , they are quite proud of this , so they decide to share a drink .
this is a non-trivial thing to do , by the way .
imagine doing that with a wooden stick and a hook on the end of it , doing either of those .
now chuck is doing something quite extraordinary , at least for my limited physical skill .
and now he 's going to do what darpa asked me for .
he 's going to pick up a grape - he did n't drop it , he did n't break it - and he 's going to eat it .
so , that 's where we were at the end of about 15 months .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but , as i 've learned from richard , the technology , the processors , the sensors , the motors , is not the story .
i had n't dealt with this kind of problem or frankly , this whole segment of the medical world .
i 'll give you some astounding things that have happened as we started this .
after we were pretty much convinced we had a good design , and we 'd have to make all the standard engineering trade-offs you always make - you can always get three out of four of anything you want ; the weight , the size , the cost , the functionality - i put a bunch of guys in my plane and i said , " we 're flying down to walter reed , and we 're going talk to these kids , because frankly it does n't matter whether we like this arm .
it does n't matter whether the department of defense likes this arm . "
when i told them that they were n't entirely enthusiastic , but i told them , " it really does n't matter what their opinion is .
there is only one opinion that matters , the kids that are either going to use it or not . "
i told a bunch of my engineers , " look we 're going to walk into walter reed , and you 're going to see people , lots of them , missing major body parts .
they 're probably going to be angry , depressed , frustrated .
we 're probably going to have to give them support , encouragement .
but we 've got to extract from them enough information to make sure we 're doing the right thing . "
we walked into walter reed and i could not have been more wrong .
we did see a bunch of people , a lot of them missing a lot of body parts , and parts they had left were burned ; half a face gone , an ear burned off .
they were sitting at a table . they were brought together for us .
and we started asking them all questions .
" look , " i 'd say to them , " we 're not quite as good as nature yet .
i could give you fine motor control , or i could let you curl 40 pounds ; i probably ca n't do both .
i can give you fast control with low reduction ratios in these gears , or i can give you power ; i ca n't give you both .
and we were trying to get them to all help us know what to give them .
not only were they enthusiastic , they kept thinking they 're there to help us .
" well , would it help if i ... "
" guys , and woman , you 've given enough .
we 're here to help you . we need data . we need to know what you need . "
after a half an hour , maybe , there was one guy at the far end of the table who was n't saying much .
you could see he was missing an arm .
he was leaning on his other arm .
i called down to the end , " hey , you have n't said much .
if we needed this or this , what would you want ? "
and he said , " you know , i 'm the lucky guy at this table .
i lost my right arm , but i 'm a lefty . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , he would n't say much .
he had a great spirit , like all the rest of them had great spirits .
and he made a few comments .
and then the meeting ended . we said goodbye to all these guys .
and that guy pushed himself back from the table ...
he has no legs .
so , we left .
and i was thinking , " we did n't give them support and encouragement ; they gave it to us .
they 're not finished giving yet . "
it was astounding .
so , we went back .
and i started working harder , faster .
then we went out to brooke army medical center .
and we saw lots of these kids , lots of them .
and it was astounding how positive they are .
so , we went back , and we 've been working harder yet .
we 're in clinical trials , we 've got five of them on people .
we 're screaming along .
and i get a call and we go back to washington .
we go back to walter reed , and a kid , literally , 20 some-odd days before that was blown up .
and they shipped him to germany and 24 hours later they shipped him from germany to walter reed .
and he was there , and they said we needed to come .
and i went down and they rolled him into a room .
he 's got no legs .
he 's got no arms .
he 's got a small residual limb on one side .
half of his face is gone , but they said his vision is coming back .
he had one good eye .
his name is brandon marrocco .
and he said , " i need your arms , but i need two of them . "
" you 'll get them . "
this kid was from staten island .
and he said , " i had a truck , before i went over there , and it had a stick .
you think i 'll be able to drive it ? "
" sure . "
and i turned around and went , " how are we going to do this ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , he was just like all the rest of them .
he does n't really want a lot .
he wants to help . he told me that he wanted to go back to help his buddies .
so , i was on my way out here .
i was asked to stop at texas .
there were 3,500 people , the veteran 's administration , u.s. ... just 3,500 at this huge event to help the families of all the kids - some that have died , some that are like brandon - and they wanted me to speak .
i said , " what am i going to say ?
this is not a happy thing . look , if this happens to you , i can give you ... this stuff is still not as good at the original equipment . "
" you need to come . "
so , i went .
and , as i think you get the point , there were a lot people there recovering .
some further along than others .
but universally , these people that had been through this had astounding attitudes , and just the fact that people care makes a huge difference to them .
i 'll shut up , except one message or concern i have .
i do n't think anybody does it intentionally , but there were people there literally talking about , " well , how much will they get ? "
you know , this country is involved as we 've all heard , in this great healthcare debate .
" who is entitled to what ?
who is entitled to how much ?
who is going to pay for it ? "
those are tough questions .
i do n't have an answer to that . not everybody can be entitled to everything simply because you were born here .
it 's not possible . it would be nice but let 's be realistic .
they were tough questions . there 's polarized groups down there .
i do n't know the answers .
there are other questions that are tough .
" should we be there ?
how do we get out ?
what do we need to do ? " there 's very polarized answers to that question too , and i do n't have any answers to that .
those are political questions , economic questions , strategic questions .
i do n't have the answer . but let me give you a simple concern or maybe statement , then .
it is an easy answer .
i know what these kids deserve on the healthcare side .
i was talking to one of them , and he was really liking this arm - it 's way , way , way better than a plastic stick with a hook on it - but there 's nobody in this room that would rather have that than the one you got .
but i was saying to him , " you know , the first airplane went 100 feet in 1903 .
wilbur and orville .
but you know what ? it would n't have made an old pigeon jealous .
but now we got eagles out there , f15s , even that bald eagle .
i 've never seen a bird flying around at mach 2 .
i think eventually we 'll make these things extraordinary . "
and i said to that kid , " i 'll stop when your buddies are envious of your luke arm because of what it can do , and how it does it .
and we 'll keep working . and i 'm not going to stop working until we do that . "
and i think this country ought to continue its great debate , whining and complaining , " i 'm entitled . " " you 're a victim . "
and whining and complaining about what our foreign policy ought to be .
but while we have the luxury of whining and complaining about who 's paying for what and how much we get , the people that are out there giving us that great privilege of whining and complaining , everything humanly possible .
and we ought to give it to them .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to try to give you a view of the world as i see it , the problems and the opportunities that we face , and then ask the question if we should be optimistic or pessimistic .
and then i 'll let you in on a secret , which is why i am an incurable optimist .
let me start off showing you an al gore movie that you may have seen before .
now , you 've all seen " inconvenient truth . " this is a little more inconvenient .
-lrb- video -rrb- : man : ... extremely dangerous questions .
because , with our present knowledge , we have no idea what would happen .
even now , man may be unwittingly changing the world 's climate through the waste products of his civilization .
due to our release , through factories and automobiles every year , of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide - which helps air absorb heat from the sun - our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer .
this is bad ?
well , it 's been calculated a few degrees ' rise in the earth 's temperature would melt the polar ice caps .
and if this happens , an inland sea would fill a good portion of the mississippi valley .
tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of miami through 150 feet of tropical water .
for , in weather , we 're not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters , but with life itself .
larry brilliant : should we feel good , or should we feel bad that 50 years of foreknowledge accomplished so little ?
well , it depends , really , on what your goals are .
and i think , as my goals , i always go back to gandhi 's talisman .
when mahatma gandhi was asked , " how do you know if the next act that you are about to do is the right one or the wrong one ? " he said , " consider the face of the poorest , most vulnerable human being that you ever chanced upon , and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person .
and if it will be , it 's the right thing to do , and if not , rethink it . "
for those of us in this room , it 's not just the poorest and the most vulnerable individual , it 's the community , it 's the culture , it 's the world itself .
and the trends for those who are at the periphery of our society , who are the poorest and the most vulnerable , the trends give rise to a great case for pessimism .
but there 's also a wonderful case for optimism .
let 's review them both . first of all , the megatrends .
there 's two degrees , or three degrees of climate change baked into the system .
it will cause rising seas . it will cause saline deposited into wells and into lands .
it will disproportionately harm the poorest and the most vulnerable , as will the increasing rise of population .
even though we 've dodged paul ehrlich 's population bomb , and we will not see 20 billion people in this decade , as he had forecast , we eat as if we were 20 billion .
and we consume so much that again , a rise of 6.5 billion to 9.5 billion in our grandchildren 's lifetime will disproportionately hurt the poorest and the most vulnerable .
that 's why they migrate to cities .
that 's why in june of this year , we passed , as a species , 51 percent of us living in cities , and bustees , and slums , and shantytowns .
the rural areas are no longer producing as much food as they did .
the green revolution never reached africa .
and with desertification , sandstorms , the gobi desert , the ogaden , we are finding increasing difficulty of a hectare to produce as many calories as it did even 15 years ago .
so humans are turning more towards animal consumption .
in africa last year , africans ate 600 million wild animals , and consumed two billion kilograms of bush meat .
and every kilogram of bush meat contained hundreds of thousands of novel viruses that have never been charted , the genomic sequences of which we do n't know .
their fitness for creating pandemics we are unaware of , but we are ripe for zoonotic-borne , emerging communicable diseases .
increasingly , i would say explosive growth of technology .
most of us are the beneficiaries of that growth . but it has a dark side - in bioweapons , and in technology that puts us on a collision course to magnify any anger , hatred or feeling of marginalization .
and in fact , with increasing globalization - for which there are big winners and even bigger losers - today the world is more diverse and unfair than perhaps it has ever been in history .
one percent of us own 40 percent of all the goods and services .
what will happen if the billion people today who live on less than one dollar a day rise to three billion in the next 30 years ?
the one percent will own even more than 40 percent of all the world 's goods and services . not because they 've grown richer , but because the rest of the world has grown increasingly poorer .
last week , bill clinton at the ted awards said , " this situation is unprecedented , unequal , unfair and unstable . "
so there 's lots of reason for pessimism .
darfur is , at its origin , a resource war .
last year , there were 85,000 riots in china , 230 a day , that required police or military intervention .
most of them were about resources .
we are facing an unprecedented number , scale of disasters .
some are weather-related , human-rights related , epidemics .
and the newly emerging diseases may make h5n1 and bird flu a quaint forerunner of things to come . it 's a destabilized world .
and unlike destabilized world in the past , it will be broadcast to you on youtube , you will see it on digital television and on your cell phones .
what will that lead to ?
for some , it will lead to anger , religious and sectarian violence and terrorism .
for others , withdrawal , nihilism , materialism .
for us , where does it take us , as social activists and entrepreneurs ?
as we look at these trends , do we become despondent , or will we become energized ?
let 's look at one case , the case of bangladesh .
first , even if carbon dioxide emissions stopped today , global warming would continue .
and even with global warming - if you can see these blue lines , the dotted line shows that even if emissions of greenhouse gasses stopped today , the next decades will see rising sea levels .
a minimum of 20 to 30 inches of increase in sea levels is the best case that we can hope for , and it could be 10 times that .
what will that do to bangladesh ? let 's take a look .
so here 's bangladesh .
70 percent of bangladesh is at less than five feet above sea level .
let 's go up and take a look at the himalayas .
and we 'll watch as global warming makes them melt . more water comes down , the deforested areas , here in the tarai , will be unable to absorb the effluent , because trees are like straws that suck up the extra seasonal water .
now we 're looking down south , through the kali gandaki .
many of you , i think , have probably trekked here .
and we 're going to cruise down and take a look at bangladesh and see what the impact will be of twin increases in water coming from the north , and in the seas rising from the south .
looking at the five major rivers that feed bangladesh .
and now let 's look from the south , looking up , and let 's see this in relief .
a minimum of 20 to 40 inches of increase in seas , coupled with increasing flows from the himalayas . and take a look at this .
as many as 100 million refugees from bangladesh could be expected to migrate into india and into china .
this is the difficulty that one country faces .
but if you look at the globe , all around the earth , wherever there is low-lying area , populated areas near the water , you will find increase in sea level that will challenge our way of life .
sub-saharan africa , and even our own san francisco bay area .
we 're all in this together .
this is not something that happens far away to people that we do n't know .
global warming is something that happens to all of us , all at once .
as are these newly emerging communicable diseases , names that you had n't heard 20 years ago : ebola , lhasa fever , monkey pox .
with the erosion of the green belt separating animals from humans , we live in each other 's viral environment .
do you remember , 20 years ago , no one had ever heard of west nile fever ?
and then we watched , as one case arrived on the east coast of the united states and it marched every year , westwardly .
do you remember no one had heard of ebola until we heard of hundreds of people dying in central africa from it ?
it 's just the beginning , unfortunately .
there have been 30 novel emerging communicable diseases that begin in animals that have jumped species in the last 30 years .
it 's more than enough reason for pessimism .
but now let 's look at the case for optimism . -lrb- laughter -rrb- enough of the bad news . human beings have always risen to the challenge .
you just need to look at the list of nobel laureates to remind ourselves .
we 've been here before , paralyzed by fear , paralyzed into inaction , when some - probably one of you in this room - jumped into the breach and created an organization like physicians for social responsibility , which fought against the nuclear threat , medicins sans frontieres , that renewed our commitment to disaster relief , mohamed elbaradei , and the tremendous hope and optimism that he brought all of us , and our own muhammad yunus .
we 've seen the eradication of smallpox .
we may see the eradication of polio this year .
last year , there were only 2,000 cases in the world .
we may see the eradication of guinea worm next year - there are only 35,000 cases left in the world .
20 years ago , there were three and a half million .
and we 've seen a new disease , not like the 30 novel emerging communicable diseases .
this disease is called sudden wealth syndrome . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's an amazing phenomenon .
all throughout the technology world , we 're seeing young people bitten by this disease of sudden wealth syndrome .
but they 're using their wealth in a way that their forefathers never did .
they 're not waiting until they die to create foundations .
they 're actively guiding their money , their resources , their hearts , their commitments , to make the world a better place .
certainly , nothing can give you more optimism than that .
more reasons to be optimistic : in the ' 60s , and i am a creature of the ' 60s , there was a movement .
we all felt that we were part of it , that a better world was right around the corner , that we were watching the birth of a world free of hatred and violence and prejudice .
today , there 's another kind of movement . it 's a movement to save the earth .
it 's just beginning .
five weeks ago , a group of activists from the business community gathered together to stop a texas utility from building nine coal-fired electrical plants that would have contributed to destroying the environment .
six months ago , a group of business activists gathered together to join with the republican governor in california to pass ab 32 , the most far-reaching legislation in environmental history .
al gore made presentations in the house and the senate as an expert witness .
can you imagine ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're seeing an entente cordiale between science and religion that five years ago i would not have believed , as the evangelical community has understood the desperate situation of global warming .
and now 4,000 churches have joined the environmental movement .
it is something to be greatly optimistic about .
the european 20-20-20 plan is an amazing breakthrough , something that should make all of us feel that hope is on the horizon .
and on april 14th , there will be step up day , where there will be a thousand individual mobilized social activist movements in the united states on protest against legislation - pushing for legislation to stop global warming .
and on july 7th , around the world , i learned only yesterday , there will be global live earth concerts .
and you can feel this optimistic move to save the earth in the air .
now , that does n't mean that people understand that global warming hurts the poorest and the weakest the most .
that means that people are beginning the first step , which is acting out of their own self-interest .
but i am seeing in the major funders , in care , rockefeller , rockefeller brothers fund , hewlett , mercy corps , you guys , google , so many other organizations , a beginning of understanding that we need to work not just on primary prevention of global warming , but on the secondary prevention of the consequences of global warming on the poorest and the most vulnerable .
but for me , i have another reason to be an incurable optimist .
and you 've heard so many inspiring stories here , and i heard so many last night that i thought i would share a little bit of mine .
my background is not exactly conventional medical training .
and i lived in a himalayan monastery , and i studied with a very wise teacher , who kicked me out of the monastery one day and told me that it was my destiny - it felt like yoda - it is your destiny to go to work for who and to help eradicate smallpox , at a time when there was no smallpox program .
it should make you optimistic that smallpox no longer exists because it was the worst disease in history .
in the last century - that 's the one that was seven years ago - half a billion people died from smallpox : more than all the wars in history , more than any other infectious disease in the history of the world .
in the summer of love , in 1967 , two million people , children , died of smallpox .
it 's not ancient history .
when you read the biblical plague of boils , that was smallpox .
pharaoh ramses the fifth , whose picture is here , died of smallpox .
to eradicate smallpox , we had to gather the largest united nations army in history .
we visited every house in india , searching for smallpox - 120 million houses , once every month , for nearly two years .
in a cruel reversal , after we had almost conquered smallpox - and this is what you must learn as a social entrepreneur , the realm of the final inch .
when we had almost eradicated smallpox , it came back again , because the company town of tatanagar drew laborers , who could come there and get employment .
and they caught smallpox in the one remaining place that had smallpox , and they went home to die .
and when they did , they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic .
and we had to start all over again .
but , in the end , we succeeded , and the last case of smallpox : this little girl , rahima banu - barisal , in bangladesh - when she coughed or breathed , and the last virus of smallpox left her lungs and fell on the dirt and the sun killed that last virus , thus ended a chain of transmission of history 's greatest horror .
how can that not make you optimistic ?
a disease which killed hundreds of thousands in india , and blinded half of all of those who were made blind in india , ended .
and most importantly for us here in this room , a bond was created .
doctors , health workers , from 30 different countries , of every race , every religion , every color , worked together , fought alongside each other , fought against a common enemy , did n't fight against each other .
how can that not make you feel optimistic for the future ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms : bacteria , viruses and fungi .
our desks , our computers , our pencils , our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes .
as we design these things , we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds , and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems .
our bodies are home to trillions of microbes , and these creatures define who we are .
the microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods .
the microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system .
the microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath , or not , and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch .
so , for example , when you touch a pencil , microbial exchange happens .
if we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings , this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways .
i get asked all of the time from people , " is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems ? "
and i believe the answer is yes .
i think we 're doing it right now , but we 're doing it unconsciously .
i 'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how , through both conscious and unconscious design , we 're impacting these invisible worlds .
this is the lillis business complex at the university of oregon , and i worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building .
we wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building , and to do this , we sampled dust .
from the dust , we pulled out bacterial cells , broke them open , and compared their gene sequences .
this means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project .
this is a picture of tim , who , right when i snapped this picture , reminded me , he said , " jessica , the last lab group i worked in i was doing fieldwork in the costa rican rainforest , and things have changed dramatically for me . "
so i 'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices , and we 're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that i 've been working on in partnership with autodesk .
the way that you look at this data is , first , look around the outside of the circle .
you 'll see broad bacterial groups , and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe , it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group .
so at 12 o 'clock , you 'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria , and at one o 'clock you 'll see that bacilli are relatively rare .
let 's take a look at what 's going on in different space types in this building .
if you look inside the restrooms , they all have really similar ecosystems , and if you were to look inside the classrooms , those also have similar ecosystems .
but if you look across these space types , you can see that they 're fundamentally different from one another .
i like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest .
i told tim , " if you could just see the microbes , it 's kind of like being in costa rica . kind of . "
and i also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland .
this perspective is a really powerful one for designers , because you can bring on principles of ecology , and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal , the way organisms move around .
we know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air .
so the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system .
mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable , that the air flow and temperature is just right .
they do this using principles of physics and chemistry , but they could also be using biology .
if you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building , you 'll see that they 're all very similar to one another .
and if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit , you 'll see that they 're fundamentally different .
the rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago , and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers , and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to .
another facet of how microbes get around is by people , and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people , or the sharing of ideas , like in labs and in offices .
given that microbes travel around with people , you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes .
and that is exactly what we found .
if you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another , they have very similar ecosystems , but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away , the ecosystem is fundamentally different .
and when i see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns , it makes me think that it 's possible to tackle really challenging problems , like hospital-acquired infections .
i believe this has got to be , in part , a building ecology problem .
all right , i 'm going to tell you one more story about this building .
i am collaborating with charlie brown .
he 's an architect , and charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change .
he 's dedicated his life to sustainable design .
when he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building , he got really excited , because it added a new dimension to what he did .
he went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health .
he helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated .
so what i 'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building .
what you 're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air , and how they vary over time .
next i 'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms .
we blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation .
a lot of buildings are operated this way , probably where you work , and companies do this to save money on their energy bill .
what we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until saturday , when we opened the vents up again .
when you walked into those rooms , they smelled really bad , and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before .
contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers .
in these rooms , the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well , and when charlie saw this , he got really excited .
he felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building 's resident microbial landscape .
the examples that i just gave you are about architecture , but they 're relevant to the design of anything .
imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone .
there 's a new microbe , i just discovered it .
it 's called blis , and it 's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath .
would n't it be awesome if we all had blis on our phones ?
a conscious approach to design , i 'm calling it bioinformed design , and i think it 's possible .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you will understand nothing with my type of english .
it 's good for you because you can have a break after all these fantastic people .
i must tell you i am like that , not very comfortable , because usually , in life , i think my job is absolutely useless .
i mean , i feel useless .
now after carolyn , and all the other guys , i feel like shit .
and definitively , i do n't know why i am here , but - you know the nightmare you can have , like you are an impostor , you arrive at the opera , and they push you , " you must sing ! "
i do n't know . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , so , because i have nothing to show , nothing to say , we shall try to speak about something else .
we can start , if you want , by understanding - it 's just to start , it 's not interesting , but - how i work .
when somebody comes to me and ask for what i am known , i mean , yes , lemon squeezer , toilet brush , toothpick , beautiful toilet seats , and why not - a toothbrush ?
i do n't try to design the toothbrush .
i do n't try to say , " oh , that will be a beautiful object , " or something like that .
that does n't interest me .
because there is different types of design .
the one , we can call it the cynical design , that means the design invented by raymond loewy in the ' 50s , who said , what is ugly is a bad sale , la laideur se vend mal , which is terrible .
it means the design must be just the weapon for marketing , for producer to make product more sexy , like that , they sell more : it 's shit , it 's obsolete , it 's ridiculous .
i call that the cynical design .
after , there is the narcissistic design : it 's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers . -lrb- laughter -rrb- after , there is people like me , who try to deserve to exist , and who are so ashamed to make this useless job , who try to do it in another way , and they try , i try , to not make the object for the object but for the result , for the profit for the human being , the person who will use it .
if we take the toothbrush - i do n't think about the toothbrush .
i think , " what will be the effect of the brush in the mouth ? "
and to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth , i must imagine : who owns this mouth ?
what is the life of the owner of this mouth ? in what society -lsb- does -rsb- this guy live ?
what civilization creates this society ?
what animal species creates this civilization ?
when i arrive - and i take one minute , i am not so intelligent - when i arrive at the level of animal species , that becomes real interesting .
me , i have strictly no power to change anything .
but when i come back , i can understand why i shall not do it , because today to not do it , it 's more positive than do it , or how i shall do it .
but to come back , where i am at the animal species , there is things to see .
there is things to see , there is the big challenge .
the big challenge in front of us .
because there is not a human production which exists outside of what i call " the big image . "
the big image is our story , our poetry , our romanticism .
our poetry is our mutation , our life .
we must remember , and we can see that in any book of my son of 10 years old , that life appears four billion years ago , around - four billion point two ?
voice offstage : four point five .
yes , point five , ok , ok , ok ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm a designer , that 's all , of christmas gifts .
and before , there was this soup , called " soupe primordiale , " this first soup - bloop bloop bloop - sort of dirty mud , no life , nothing .
so then - pshoo-shoo - lightning - pshoo - arrive - pshoo-shoo - makes life - bloop bloop - and that dies .
some million years after - pshoo-shoo , bloop-bloop - ah , wake up !
at the end , finally , that succeeds , and life appears .
we was so , so stupid . the most stupid bacteria .
even , i think , we copy our way to reproduce , you know what i mean , and something of - oh no , forget it .
after , we become a fish ; after , we become a frog ; after , we become a monkey ; after , we become what we are today : a super-monkey , and the fun is , the super-monkey we are today , is at half of the story .
can you imagine ? from that stupid bacteria to us , with a microphone , with a computer , with an ipod : four billion years .
and we know , and especially carolyn knows , that when the sun will implode , the earth will burn , explode , i do n't know what , and this is scheduled for four , four billion years ?
yes , she said , something like that . ok , that means we are at half of the story .
fantastic ! it 's a beauty !
can you imagine ? it 's very symbolic .
because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today .
and today , we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years .
and this territory is fantastic .
that is our poetry . that is our beautiful story .
it 's our romanticism . mu-ta-tion . we are mutants .
and if we do n't deeply understand , if we do n't integrate that we are mutants , we completely miss the story .
because every generation thinks we are the final one .
we have a way to look at earth like that , you know , " i am the man . the final man .
you know , we mutate during four billion years before , but now , because it 's me , we stop . fin . -lrb- laughter -rrb- for the end , for the eternity , it is one with a red jacket . "
something like that . i am not sure of that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because that is our intelligence of mutation and things like that .
there is so many things to do ; it 's so fresh .
and here is something : nobody is obliged to be a genius , but everybody is obliged to participate .
and to participate , for a mutant , there is a minimum of exercise , a minimum of sport .
we can say that .
the first , if you want - there is so many - but one which is very easy to do , is the duty of vision .
i can explain you . i shall try .
if you walk like that , it 's ok , it 's ok , you can walk , but perhaps , because you walk with the eyes like that , you will not see , oh , there is a hole .
and you will fall , and you will die . dangerous .
that 's why , perhaps , you will try to have this angle of vision .
ok , i can see , if i found something , up , up , and they continue , up up up .
i raise the angle of vision , but it 's still very - selfish , selfish , egoiste - yes , selfish .
you , you survive . it 's ok .
if you raise the level of your eyes a little more you go , " i see you , oh my god you are here , how are you , i can help you , i can design for you a new toothbrush , new toilet brush , " something like that .
i live in society ; i live in community .
it 's ok . you start to be in the territory of intelligence , we can say .
from this level , the more you can raise this angle of view , the more you will be important for the society .
the more you will rise , the more you will be important for the civilization .
the more you will rise , to see far and high , like that , the more you will be important for the story of our mutation .
that means intelligent people are in this angle . that is intelligence .
from this to here , that , it 's genius .
ptolemy , eratosthenes , einstein , things like that .
nobody 's obliged to be a genius .
it 's better , but nobody .
take care , in this training , to be a good mutant .
there is some danger , there is some trap . one trap : the vertical .
because at the vertical of us , if you look like that , " ah ! my god , there is god . ah ! god ! "
god is a trap . god is the answer when we do n't know the answer .
that means , when your brain is not enough big , when you do n't understand , you go , " ah , it 's god , it 's god . " that 's ridiculous .
that 's why - jump , like that ? no , do n't jump .
come back . because , after , there is another trap .
if you look like that , you look to the past , or you look inside if you are very flexible , inside yourself .
it 's called schizophrenia , and you are dead also .
that 's why every morning , now , because you are a good mutant , out , more of the horizontal . you are an intelligence .
never forget - like that , like that .
it 's very , very , very important .
what , what else we can say about that ? why do that ?
it 's because we - if we look from far , we see our line of evolution .
this line of evolution is clearly positive .
from far , this line looks very smooth , like that .
but if you take a lens , like that , this line is ack , ack , ack , ack , ack . like that .
it 's made of light and shadow .
we can say light is civilization , shadow is barbaria .
and it 's very important to know where we are .
because some cycle , there is a spot in the cycle , and you have not the same duty in the different parts of the cycle .
that means , we can imagine - i do n't say it was fantastic , but in the ' 80s , there was not too much war , like that , it was - we can imagine that the civilization can become civilized .
in this case , people like me are acceptable .
we can say , " it 's luxurious time . "
we have time to think , we have time to i do n't know what , speak about art and things like that .
it 's ok . we are in the light .
but sometimes , like today , we fall , we fall so fast , so fast to shadow , we fall so fast to barbaria .
with many , many , many , many face of barbaria .
because it 's not , the barbaria we have today , it 's perhaps not the barbaria we think .
there is different type of barbaria .
that 's why we must adapt .
that means , when barbaria is back , forget the beautiful chairs , forget the beautiful hotel , forget design , even - i 'm sorry to say - forget art .
forget all that . there is priority ; there is urgency .
you must go back to politics , you must go back to radicalization , i 'm sorry if that 's not very english .
you must go back to fight , to battle .
that 's why today i 'm so ashamed to make this job .
that 's why i am here , to try to do it the best possible .
but i know that even i do it the best possible - that 's why i 'm the best - it 's nothing .
because it 's not the right time .
that 's why i say that . i say that , because , i repeat , nothing exist if it 's not in the good reason , the reason of our beautiful dream , of this civilization .
and because we must all work to finish this story .
because the scenario of this civilization - about love , progress , and things like that - it 's ok , but there is so many different , other scenarios of other civilizations .
this scenario , of this civilization , was about becoming powerful , intelligent , like this idea we have invented , this concept of god .
we are god now . we are . it 's almost done .
we have just to finish the story .
that is very , very important .
and when you do n't understand really what 's happened , you can not go and fight and work and build and things like that .
you go to the future back , back , back , back , like that .
and you can fall , and it 's very dangerous .
no , you must really understand that .
because we have almost finished , i 'll repeat this story .
and the beauty of this , in perhaps 50 years , 60 years , we can finish completely this civilization , and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story , a new poetry , a new romanticism .
with billions of people who have been born , worked , lived and died before us , these people who have worked so much , we have now bring beautiful things , beautiful gifts , we know so many things .
we can say to our children , ok , done , that was our story . that passed .
now you have a duty : invent a new story . invent a new poetry .
the only rule is , we have not to have any idea about the next story .
we give you white pages . invent .
we give you the best tools , the best tools , and now , do it .
that 's why i continue to work , even if it 's for toilet brush .
so , i 'm an artist .
i live in new york , and i 've been working in advertising for - ever since i left school , so about seven , eight years now , and it was draining .
i worked a lot of late nights . i worked a lot of weekends , and i found myself never having time for all the projects that i wanted to work on on my own .
and one day i was at work and i saw a talk by stefan sagmeister on ted , and it was called " the power of time off , " and he spoke about how every seven years , he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects , and i was instantly inspired , and i just said , " i have to do that . i have to take a year off .
i need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas . "
so the first of those projects ended up being something i called " one second every day . "
basically i 'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life , chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until , you know , i ca n't record them anymore .
the purpose of this project is , one : i hate not remembering things that i 've done in the past .
there 's all these things that i 've done with my life that i have no recollection of unless someone brings it up , and sometimes i think , " oh yeah , that 's something that i did . "
and something that i realized early on in the project was that if i was n't doing anything interesting , i would probably forget to record the video .
so the day - the first time that i forgot , it really hurt me , because it 's something that i really wanted to - from the moment that i turned 30 , i wanted to keep this project going until forever , and having missed that one second , i realized , it just kind of created this thing in my head where i never forgot ever again .
so if i live to see 80 years of age , i 'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life .
when i turn 40 , i 'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s .
this has really invigorated me day-to-day , when i wake up , to try and do something interesting with my day .
now , one of the things that i have issues with is that , as the days and weeks and months go by , time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and , you know , i hated that , and visualization is the way to trigger memory .
you know , this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that i 've done .
even just this one second allows me to remember everything else i did that one day .
it 's difficult , sometimes , to pick that one second .
on a good day , i 'll have maybe three or four seconds that i really want to choose , but i 'll just have to narrow it down to one , but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway .
it 's also kind of a protest , a personal protest , against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert , and they 're disturbing you .
they 're not even enjoying the show .
they 're watching the concert through their cell phone .
i hate that . i admittedly used to be that guy a little bit , back in the day , and i 've decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person , is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of , " yeah , that concert was amazing . i really loved that concert . "
and it just takes a quick , quick second .
i was on a three-month road trip this summer .
it was something that i 've been dreaming about doing my whole life , just driving around the u.s. and canada and just figuring out where to go the next day , and it was kind of outstanding .
i actually ran out , i spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that i had to take my year off , so i had to , i went to seattle and i spent some time with friends working on a really neat project .
one of the reasons that i took my year off was to spend more time with my family , and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law , her intestine suddenly strangled one day , and we took her to the emergency room , and she was , she was in really bad shape .
we almost lost her a couple of times , and i was there with my brother every day .
it helped me realize something else during this project , is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult .
it 's not - we tend to take our cameras out when we 're doing awesome things .
or we 're , " oh , yeah , this party , let me take a picture . "
but we rarely do that when we 're having a bad day , and something horrible is happening .
and i found that it 's actually been very , very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment .
it really helps you appreciate the good times .
it 's not always a good day , so when you have a bad one , i think it 's important to remember it , just as much as it is important to remember the -lsb- good -rsb- days .
now one of the things that i do is i do n't use any filters , i do n't use anything to - i try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that i saw it with my own eyes .
i started a rule of first person perspective .
early on , i think i had a couple of videos where you would see me in it , but i realized that was n't the way to go .
the way to really remember what i saw was to record it as i actually saw it .
now a couple of things that i have in my head about this project are , would n't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this ?
i turned 31 last week , which is there .
i think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this .
i think everyone would have a different interpretation of it .
i think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day .
personally , i 'm tired of forgetting , and this is a really easy thing to do .
i mean , we all have hd-capable cameras in our pockets right now - most people in this room , i bet - and it 's something that 's - i never want to forget another day that i 've ever lived , and this is my way of doing that , and it 'd be really interesting also to see , if you could just type in on a website , " june 18 , 2018 , " and you would just see a stream of people 's lives on that particular day from all over the world .
and i do n't know , i think this project has a lot of possibilities , and i encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day , so you can never forget that that day , you lived .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the universe is really big .
we live in a galaxy , the milky way galaxy .
there are about a hundred billion stars in the milky way galaxy .
and if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky , and you just keep the shutter open , as long as your camera is attached to the hubble space telescope , it will see something like this .
every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our milky way - a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs .
there are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe .
100 billion is the only number you need to know .
the age of the universe , between now and the big bang , is a hundred billion in dog years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which tells you something about our place in the universe .
one thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it .
it 's extremely beautiful .
i 've often wondered , what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they did n't have any .
but we would also like to understand it .
as a cosmologist , i want to ask , why is the universe like this ?
one big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time .
if you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity , it would be moving away from you .
and if you look at a galaxy even farther away , it would be moving away faster .
so we say the universe is expanding .
what that means , of course , is that , in the past , things were closer together .
in the past , the universe was more dense , and it was also hotter .
if you squeeze things together , the temperature goes up .
that kind of makes sense to us .
the thing that does n't make sense to us as much is that the universe , at early times , near the big bang , was also very , very smooth .
you might think that that 's not a surprise .
the air in this room is very smooth .
you might say , " well , maybe things just smoothed themselves out . "
but the conditions near the big bang are very , very different than the conditions of the air in this room .
in particular , things were a lot denser .
the gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the big bang .
what you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies , a hundred billion stars each .
at early times , those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big - literally - at early times .
and you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections , without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else .
because if there had been , they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole .
keeping the universe very , very smooth at early times is not easy ; it 's a delicate arrangement .
it 's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly .
there is something that made it that way .
we would like to know what .
so part of our understanding of this was given to us by ludwig boltzmann , an austrian physicist in the 19th century .
and boltzmann 's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy .
you 've heard of entropy .
it 's the randomness , the disorder , the chaoticness of some systems .
boltzmann gave us a formula - engraved on his tombstone now - that really quantifies what entropy is .
and it 's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you do n't notice , so that macroscopically it looks the same .
if you have the air in this room , you do n't notice each individual atom .
a low entropy configuration is one in which there 's only a few arrangements that look that way .
a high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way .
this is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics - the law that says that entropy increases in the universe , or in some isolated bit of the universe .
the reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy .
that 's a wonderful insight , but it leaves something out .
this insight that entropy increases , by the way , is what 's behind what we call the arrow of time , the difference between the past and the future .
every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing - the fact that you can remember the past , but not the future .
the fact that you are born , and then you live , and then you die , always in that order , that 's because entropy is increasing .
boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy , it 's very natural for it to increase because there 's more ways to be high entropy .
what he did n't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place .
the fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very , very smooth .
we 'd like to understand that .
that 's our job as cosmologists .
unfortunately , it 's actually not a problem that we 've been giving enough attention to .
it 's not one of the first things people would say , if you asked a modern cosmologist , " what are the problems we 're trying to address ? "
one of the people who did understand that this was a problem was richard feynman .
50 years ago , he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures .
he gave the popular lectures that became " the character of physical law . "
he gave lectures to caltech undergrads that became " the feynman lectures on physics . "
he gave lectures to caltech graduate students that became " the feynman lectures on gravitation . "
in every one of these books , every one of these sets of lectures , he emphasized this puzzle : why did the early universe have such a small entropy ?
so he says - i 'm not going to do the accent - he says , " for some reason , the universe , at one time , had a very low entropy for its energy content , and since then the entropy has increased .
the arrow of time can not be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding . "
so that 's our job .
we want to know - this is 50 years ago , " surely , " you 're thinking , " we 've figured it out by now . "
it 's not true that we 've figured it out by now .
the reason the problem has gotten worse , rather than better , is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we did n't know before .
we learned that it 's accelerating .
the universe is not only expanding .
if you look at the galaxy , it 's moving away .
if you come back a billion years later and look at it again , it will be moving away faster .
individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating .
unlike the low entropy of the early universe , even though we do n't know the answer for this , we at least have a good theory that can explain it , if that theory is right , and that 's the theory of dark energy .
it 's just the idea that empty space itself has energy .
in every little cubic centimeter of space , whether or not there 's stuff , whether or not there 's particles , matter , radiation or whatever , there 's still energy , even in the space itself .
and this energy , according to einstein , exerts a push on the universe .
it is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other .
because dark energy , unlike matter or radiation , does not dilute away as the universe expands .
the amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same , even as the universe gets bigger and bigger .
this has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future .
for one thing , the universe will expand forever .
back when i was your age , we did n't know what the universe was going to do .
some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future .
einstein was fond of this idea .
but if there 's dark energy , and the dark energy does not go away , the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever .
14 billion years in the past , 100 billion dog years , but an infinite number of years into the future .
meanwhile , for all intents and purposes , space looks finite to us .
space may be finite or infinite , but because the universe is accelerating , there are parts of it we can not see and never will see .
there 's a finite region of space that we have access to , surrounded by a horizon .
so even though time goes on forever , space is limited to us .
finally , empty space has a temperature .
in the 1970s , stephen hawking told us that a black hole , even though you think it 's black , it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics .
the curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation , and the black hole radiates .
a precisely similar calculation by hawking and gary gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space , then the whole universe radiates .
the energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations .
and so even though the universe will last forever , and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away , there will always be some radiation , some thermal fluctuations , even in empty space .
so what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever .
well what is the implication of that ?
that implication was studied by boltzmann back in the 19th century .
he said , well , entropy increases because there are many , many more ways for the universe to be high entropy , rather than low entropy .
but that 's a probabilistic statement .
it will probably increase , and the probability is enormously huge .
it 's not something you have to worry about - the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us .
it 's very , very unlikely .
except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever , that would happen .
everything that is allowed , every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room , would eventually be obtained .
so boltzmann says , look , you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium .
he did n't know about the big bang . he did n't know about the expansion of the universe .
he thought that space and time were explained by isaac newton - they were absolute ; they just stuck there forever .
so his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere - the everything molecules .
but if you 're boltzmann , you know that if you wait long enough , the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations .
and then , of course , in the natural course of things , they will expand back .
so it 's not that entropy must always increase - you can get fluctuations into lower entropy , more organized situations .
well if that 's true , boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas - the multiverse and the anthropic principle .
he says , the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we ca n't live there .
remember , life itself depends on the arrow of time .
we would not be able to process information , metabolize , walk and talk , if we lived in thermal equilibrium .
so if you imagine a very , very big universe , an infinitely big universe , with randomly bumping into each other particles , there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states , and then they relax back .
but there will also be large fluctuations .
occasionally , you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies .
so boltzmann says , we will only live in the part of the multiverse , in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles , where life is possible .
that 's the region where entropy is low .
maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time .
now your homework assignment is to really think about this , to contemplate what it means .
carl sagan once famously said that " in order to make an apple pie , you must first invent the universe . "
but he was not right .
in boltzmann 's scenario , if you want to make an apple pie , you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie .
that will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven , and then making you an apple pie .
so this scenario makes predictions .
and the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal .
even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are , and we have , not only our memories , but our impression that outside there 's something called caltech and the united states and the milky way galaxy , it 's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into caltech , the united states and the galaxy .
the good news is that , therefore , this scenario does not work ; it is not right .
this scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation .
even if you left our galaxy out , you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies .
and feynman also understood this .
feynman says , " from the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation , all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we 've never seen before , we will find it mixed up , and not like the piece we 've just looked at - high entropy .
if our order were due to a fluctuation , we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it .
we therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation . "
so that 's good . the question is then what is the right answer ?
if the universe is not a fluctuation , why did the early universe have a low entropy ?
and i would love to tell you the answer , but i 'm running out of time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here is the universe that we tell you about , versus the universe that really exists .
i just showed you this picture .
the universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so .
it 's cooling off .
but we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more .
if the dark energy remains around , the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel , they will stop burning .
they will fall into black holes .
we will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes .
that universe will last 10 to the 100 years - a lot longer than our little universe has lived .
the future is much longer than the past .
but even black holes do n't last forever .
they will evaporate , and we will be left with nothing but empty space .
that empty space lasts essentially forever .
however , you notice , since empty space gives off radiation , there 's actually thermal fluctuations , and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space .
so even though the universe lasts forever , there 's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe .
they all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years .
so here 's two questions for you .
number one : if the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years , why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it , in the warm , comfortable afterglow of the big bang ?
why are n't we in empty space ?
you might say , " well there 's nothing there to be living , " but that 's not right .
you could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness .
why are n't you ?
more homework assignment for you .
so like i said , i do n't actually know the answer .
i 'm going to give you my favorite scenario .
either it 's just like that . there is no explanation .
this is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions .
or maybe the big bang is not the beginning of the universe .
an egg , an unbroken egg , is a low entropy configuration , and yet , when we open our refrigerator , we do not go , " hah , how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator . "
that 's because an egg is not a closed system ; it comes out of a chicken .
maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken .
maybe there is something that naturally , through the growth of the laws of physics , gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations .
if that 's true , it would happen more than once ; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse .
that 's my favorite scenario .
so the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation .
my bold speculation is that i will be absolutely vindicated by history .
and 50 years from now , all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities .
we will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse .
and even better , we will understand what happened at the big bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations .
this is a prediction . i might be wrong .
but we 've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like , why it came to be in the way it did for many , many years .
it 's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 're going to talk - my - a new lecture , just for ted - and i 'm going show you some illusions that we 've created for ted , and i 'm going to try to relate this to happiness . what i was thinking about with happiness is , what gives happiness - or happiness , which i equate with joy in my particular area , and i think there 's something very fundamental . and i was thinking about this . and it 's in terms of both illusions and movies that we go see and jokes and magic shows is that there 's something about these things where our expectations are violated in some sort of pleasing
way . you go see a movie . and it has an unexpected twist - something that you did n't expect - and you find a joyful experience . you look at those sort of illusions in my book and it 's not as what you 'd expect . and there 's something joyful about it . and it 's the same thing with jokes and all these sorts of things . so , what i 'm going to try and do in my lecture is go a little bit further and see if i can violate your expectations in a pleasing way . i mean , sometimes expectations that are violated are not pleasant , but i 'm going to try
to do it in a pleasant way , in a very primal way , so i can make the audience here happy .
so i 'm going to show you some ways that we can violate your expectations . first of all , i want to show you the particular illusion here . i want you first of all when it pops up on the screen to notice that the two holes are perpendicular to each other . these are all perceptual tricks . these are real objects that i 'm going to show you . now i 'm going to show you how it is done . i 've looped the film here so you can get a very interesting experience . i want you to see how this illusion is constructed , and it 's going to rotate so you see
that it 's inside out . now watch , as it rotates back , how quickly your perception snaps . ok now .
watch it as it rotates back again . and this is a very bright audience , all right ? see if you can stop it from happening , even though you know 100 percent it 's true that - bam ! you ca n't undo it . what does that tell you about yourselves ? we 're going to do it again . no doubt about it . see if you can stop it from happening . no . it 's difficult .
and we can violate your expectations in a whole variety of ways about representation , about shape , about color and so forth and it 's very primal . and it 's an interesting question to ponder , why these things - we find these things joyful . why would we find them joyful ? so , here 's something that lionel did a while ago . i like these sort of little things like this .
again , this is not an optical trick . this is what you would see . in other words , it 's not a camera cut . it 's a perceptual trick .
ok . we can violate your expectations about shape .
we can violate your expectations on representation - what an image represents . what do you see here ?
how many of you here see dolphins ? raise your hand if you see dolphins . ok , those people who raised their hands , afterwards , the rest of the audience , go talk to them , all right ? actually , this is the best example of priming by experience that i know .
if you are a child under the age of 10 who have n't been ruined yet , you will look at this image and see dolphins . now , some of you adults here are saying , " what dolphins ? what dolphins ? "
but in fact , if you reversed the figure ground - in other words , the dark areas here - i forgot to ask for a pointer - but if you reverse it , you 'll see a whole series of little dolphins . by the way , if you 're also a student at caltech - they also tend to just see the dolphins . it 's based on experience .
now , something like this can be used because this is after all talk about design , too . this was done by saatchi and saatchi , and they actually got away with this ad in australia . so , if you look at this ad for beer , all those people are in sort of provocative positions . but they got it passed , and actually won the clio awards , so it 's funny how you can do these things .
remember that sort of , um . this is the joke i did when the florida ballot was going around . you know , count the dots for gore ; count the dots for bush ; count ' em again ...
you can violate your expectations about experience . here is an outside water fountain that i created with some friends of mine , but you can stop the water in drops and - actually make all the drops levitate . this is something we 're building for , you know , amusement parks and that kind of stuff .
now let 's take a static image . can you see this ?
do you see the middle section moving down and the outer sections moving up ? it 's completely static .
it 's a static image . how many people see this illusion ? it 's completely static .
right . now , when - it 's interesting that when we look at an image we see , you know , color , depth , texture . and you can look at this whole scene and analyze it . you can see the woman is in closer than the wall and so forth . but the whole thing is actually flat . it 's painted . it 's trompe l 'oeil .
and it was such a good trompe l 'oeil that people got irritated when they tried to talk to the woman and she would n't respond .
now , you can make design mistakes . like this building in new york . so that when you see it from this side , it looks like the balconies tilt up , and when you walk around to the other side it looks like the balconies go down . so there are cases where you have mistakes in design that incorporate illusions .
or , you take this particular un-retouched photograph . now , interestingly enough , i get a lot of emails from people who say , " is there any perceptual difference between males and females ? "
and i really say , " no . " i mean , women can navigate through the world just as well as males can - and why would n't they ? however , this is the one illusion that women can consistently do better than males : in matching which head because they rely on fashion cues . they can match the hat .
okay , now getting to a part - i want to show design in illusions . i believe that the first example of illusions being used purposely was by da vinci in this anamorphic image of an eye . so that when you saw from one little angle was like this . and this little technique got popular in the 16th century and the 17th century to disguise hidden meanings , where you could flip the image and see it from one little point of view like this .
but these are early incorporations of illusions brought to - sort of high point with hans holbein 's " ambassadors . " and hans holbein worked for henry viii . this was hung on a wall where you could walk down from the stair and you can see this hidden skull .
all right , now i 'm going to show you some designers who work with illusions to give that element of surprise . one of my favorites is scott kim . i worked with scott to create some illusions for ted that i hope you will enjoy . we have one here on ted and happiness .
ok now . arthur -lsb- ganson -rsb- has n't talked yet , but his is going to be a delightful talk and he has some of his really fantastic machines outside . and so , we - scott created this wonderful tribute to arthur ganson .
well , there 's analog and digital . thought that was appropriate here .
and figure goes to ground .
and for the musicians .
and of course , since happiness - we want " joy to the world . "
now , another great designer - he 's very well known in japan - shigeo fukuda . and he just builds some fantastic things . this is simply amazing . this is a pile of junk that when you view it from one particular angle , you see its reflection in the mirror as a perfect piano .
pianist transforms to violinist .
this is really wild . this assemblage of forks , knives and spoons and various cutlery , welded together . it gives a shadow of a motorcycle . you learn something in the sort of thing that i do , which is there are people out there with a lot of time on their hands .
ken knowlton does wonderful composite images , like creating jacques cousteau out of seashells - un-retouched seashells , but just by rearranging them . he did einstein out of dice because , after all , einstein said , " god does not play dice with the universe . " bert herzog out of un-retouched keyboards . will shortz , crossword puzzle . john cederquist does these wonderful trompe l 'oeil cabinets .
now , i 'm going to skip ahead since i 'm sort of running -lsb- behind -rsb- . i want to show you quickly what i 've created , some new type of illusions . i 've done something with taking the pixar-type illusions . so you see these kids the same size here , running down the hall . the two table tops of the same size .
they 're looking out two directions at once . you have a larger piece fitting in with a smaller . and that 's something for you to think about , all right ? so you see larger pieces fitting in within smaller pieces here . does everyone see that ? which is impossible . you can see the two kids are looking out simultaneously out of two different directions at once . now can you believe these two table tops are the same size and shape ? they are .
so , if you measured them , they would be . and as i say , those two figures are identical in size and shape .
and it 's interesting , by doing this in this sort of rendered fashion , how much stronger the illusions are . any case , i hope this has brought you a little joy and happiness , and if you 're interested in seeing more cool effects , see me outside . i 'd be happy to show you lots of things .
you know , cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy .
for students , it 's quite an experience , but for a school , it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain .
so we learned the majority of anatomic classes taught , they do not have a cadaver dissection lab .
maybe those reasons , or depending on where you are , cadavers may not be easily available .
so to address this , we developed with a dr. brown in stanford : virtual dissection table .
so we call this anatomage table .
so with this anatomage table , students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver .
and the table form is important , and since it 's touch-interactive , just like the way they do dissections in the lab , or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table .
our digital body is one-to-one life size , so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy .
i 'm going to do some demonstrations .
as you can see , i use my finger to interact with my digital body .
i 'm going to do some cuts .
i can cut any way i want to , so i cut right here .
then it 's going to show inside .
and i can change my cut to see different parts .
maybe i can cut there , see the brain , and i can change my cut .
you can see some internal organs .
so we call this the slicer mode .
ok , i 'm going to do another cut .
right there .
this shows a lot of internal structures .
so if i want to see the back side , i can flip and see from behind .
like this .
so if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you , that means we did the right job .
so our doctors said these are eye candies .
so instead of just butchering the body , i 'd like to do more clinically meaningful dissections .
what i 'm going to do is i 'm going to peel off all the skin , muscles and bones , just to see a few internal organs .
right here .
let 's say i 'm going to cut the liver right here .
ok .
let 's say i 'm interested in looking at the heart .
i 'm going to do some surgery here .
i 'm going to cut some veins , arteries .
oops ! ...
you do n't want to hear " oops " in real surgery .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but fortunately , our digital man has " undo . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
all right then .
let me zoom in .
i 'm going to make a cut right there .
and then you can see the inside of the heart .
you can see the atrium and the ventricles , how blood flows to our arteries and veins .
just like this , students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to .
it does n't have to be always dissection .
since it 's digital , we can do reverse dissection .
so let me show you , i 'm going to start with the skeletal structure , and i can add a few internal organs .
yep .
maybe i can add quickly this way .
and i can build muscles gradually , just like that .
we can see tendons and muscles .
wish i could build my muscle this fast .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is another way to learn anatomy .
another thing i can show you is , more often than not , doctors get to meet patients in x-ray form .
so , anatomage table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in x-ray .
you can also interact with your x-ray , and also if you want , you can compare with how anatomy would appear in x-ray , too .
so when you are done , just bring back the body and then it 's ready for another session .
it looks like our table also can transform gender , too .
it 's a female now .
so this is anatomage table . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day , at the exact same moment , each conceiving a baby - okay ?
so two couples each conceiving one baby .
now i do n't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception , because if you spend all that time imagining that conception , you 're not going to listen to me .
so just imagine that for a moment .
and in this scenario , i want to imagine that , in one case , the sperm is carrying a y chromosome , meeting that x chromosome of the egg .
and in the other case , the sperm is carrying an x chromosome , meeting the x chromosome of the egg .
both are viable ; both take off .
we 'll come back to these people later .
so i wear two hats in most of what i do .
as the one hat , i do history of anatomy .
i 'm a historian by training , and what i study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy - meaning human bodies , animal bodies - how they dealt with bodily fluids , concepts of bodies ; how have they thought about bodies .
the other hat that i 've worn in my work is as an activist , as a patient advocate - or , as i sometimes say , as an impatient advocate - for people who are patients of doctors .
in that case , what i 've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms .
so some of what i 've worked on , for example , is people who are conjoined twins - two people within one body .
some of what i 've worked on is people who have dwarfism - so people who are much shorter than typical .
and a lot of what i 've worked on is people who have atypical sex - so people who do n't have the standard male or the standard female body types .
and as a general term , we can use the term intersex for this .
intersex comes in a lot of different forms .
i 'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that is n't standard for male or female .
so in one instance , you can have somebody who has an xy chromosomal basis , and that sry gene on the y chromosome tells the proto-gonads , which we all have in the fetal life , to become testes .
and so in the fetal life the testes are pumping out testosterone .
but because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone , the body does n't react to the testosterone .
and this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome .
so lots of levels of testosterone , but no reaction to it .
as a consequence , the body develops more along the female typical path .
when the child is born , she looks like a girl .
she is a girl . she is raised as a girl .
and it 's often not until she hits puberty and she 's growing and developing breasts , but she 's not getting her period , that somebody figures out something 's up here .
and they do some tests and figure out that , instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus , she actually has testes inside , and she has a y chromosome .
now what 's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male , but they 're really not .
females , like males , have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands .
they 're in the back of our body .
and the adrenal glands make androgens , which are a masculinizing hormone .
most females like me - i believe myself to be a typical female - i do n't actually know my chromosomal make-up but i think i 'm probably typical - most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive .
we 're making androgen , and we 're responding to androgens .
the consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome .
so sex is really complicated ; it 's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum - in some ways , they can be all over the place .
another example : a few years ago i got a call from a man who was 19 years old , who was born a boy , raised a boy , had a girlfriend , had sex with his girlfriend , had a life as a guy and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside .
what he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia .
he had xx chromosomes , and in the womb , his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created , essentially , a masculine hormonal environment .
and as a consequence , his genitals were masculinzed , his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones .
and he was born looking like a boy - nobody suspected anything .
and it was only when he had reached the age of 19 that he began to have enough medical problems actually from menstruating internally , that doctors figured out that , in fact , he was female internally .
okay , so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex .
some people who have xx chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis , which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it .
and we 're not exactly sure why that happens .
so sex can come in lots of different varieties .
the reason that children with these kinds of bodies - whether it 's dwarfism , or it 's conjoined twinning , or it 's an intersex type - are often normalized by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health .
in many cases , people are actually perfectly healthy .
the reason they 're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories .
or system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity .
so we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity ; what it means to be a black person is , allegedly , is to have an african anatomy in terms of your history .
and so we have this terribly simplistic idea .
and when we 're faced with a body that actually presents us something quite different , it startles us in terms of those categorizations .
so we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism .
and our nation 's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism .
well you can imagine how startling then it is when you have children that are born who are two people inside of one body .
where i ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year the south african runner , caster semenya , had her sex called into question at the international games in berlin .
i had a lot of journalists calling me , asking me , " which is the test they 're going to run that will tell us whether or not caster semenya is male or female ? "
and i had to explain to the journalists there is n't such a test .
in fact , we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature does n't draw the line for us between male and female , or between male and intersex and female and intersex ; we actually draw that line on nature .
so what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes , the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought .
and it 's not just in terms of sex .
it 's also in terms of race , which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed .
as we look , we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas .
we look , for example , about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our dna with chimpanzees .
what are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only really by a few nucleotides ?
and as we get farther and farther with our science , we get more and more into a discomforted zone where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we 've had are probably overly simplistic .
so we 're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life .
one of the places we 're seeing it , for example , in our culture today , in the united states today , is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life .
we have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human , such that it has a different right than a fetal life .
we have very difficult conversations nowadays - probably not out in the open as much as within medicine - about the question of when somebody 's dead .
in the past , our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead .
at most , they 'd stick a feather on somebody 's nose , and if it twitched , they did n't bury them yet .
if it stopped twitching , you bury them .
but today , we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings .
and as a consequence , we 're stuck with having to struggle with this really difficult question about who 's dead , and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we do n't have such simple categories as we 've had before .
now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories would make somebody like me really happy .
i 'm a political progressive , i defend people with unusual bodies , but i have to admit to you that it makes me nervous .
understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense .
and it makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy .
so in order to tell you about that tension , i have to first admit to you that i 'm a huge fan of the founding fathers .
i know they were racists , i know they were sexist , but they were great .
i mean , they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did that i find myself watching that cheesy musical " 1776 " every few years , and it 's not because of the music , which is totally forgettable .
it 's because of what happened in 1776 with the founding fathers .
the founding fathers were , for my point of view , the original anatomical activists , and this is why .
what they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years .
so as you all recall , what our founding fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy , and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy .
the monarchs of the old world did n't have a concept of dna , but they did have a concept of birthright .
they had a concept of blue blood .
they had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth .
the founding fathers rejected that idea , and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept , and that concept was all men are created equal .
they leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy , not the difference in anatomy , and that was a really radical thing to do .
now they were doing it in part because they were part of an enlightenment system where two things were growing up together .
and that was democracy growing up , but it was also science growing up at the same time .
and it 's really clear , if you look at the history of the founding fathers , a lot of them were very interested in science , and they were interested in a concept of a naturalistic world .
they were moving away from supernatural explanations , and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power , where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright .
they were moving towards a naturalistic concept .
and if you look , for example , in the declaration of independence , they talk about nature and nature 's god .
they do n't talk about god and god 's nature .
they 're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are .
so as part of that , they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality .
and in doing so , they were really setting up in a beautiful way the civil rights movement of the future .
they did n't think of it that way , but they did it for us , and it was great .
so what happened years afterward ?
what happened was women , for example , who wanted the right to vote , took the founding fathers ' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said , " the fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we should n't have the right to vote , the right to full citizenship , the right to own property , etc . , etc . "
and women successfully argued that .
next came the successful civil rights movement , where we found people like sojourner truth talking about , " ai n't i a woman ? "
we find men on the marching lines of the civil rights movement saying , " i am a man . "
again , people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy , again , successfully .
we see the same thing with the disability rights movement .
the problem is , of course , that , as we begin to look at all that commonality , we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions .
now mind you , i want to maintain some divisions , anatomically , in our culture .
for example , i do n't want to give a fish the same rights as a human .
i do n't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy .
i do n't want to say five-year-olds should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry .
so there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that i think we should retain .
but the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are and why do we retain them and do they have meaning .
so let 's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk .
we have two beings , both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day .
let 's imagine one of them , mary , is born three months prematurely , so she 's born on june 1 , 1980 .
henry , by contrast , is born at term , so he 's born on march 1 , 1980 .
simply by virtue of the fact that mary was born prematurely three months , she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than henry does - the right to consent to sex , the right to vote , the right to drink .
henry has to wait for all of that , not because he 's actually any different in age , biologically , except in terms of when he was born .
we find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are .
henry , by virtue of being assumed to be male - although i have n't told you that he 's the xy one - by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted , which mary does not need to worry about .
mary , meanwhile , can not in all the states have the same right that henry has in all the states , namely , the right to marry .
henry can marry in every state a woman , but mary can only marry today in a few states a woman .
so we have these anatomical categories that persist that are in many ways problematic and questionable .
and the question to me becomes : what do we do , as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy , that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that 's been based on anatomy might start falling apart ?
i do n't want to give up the science , but at the same time it kind of feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us .
so where do we go ?
it seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude : " well , we have to draw the line somewhere , so we will draw the line somewhere . "
but a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position .
so for example , texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you do n't have a y chromosome , and what it means to marry a woman means you do have a y chromosome .
now in practice they do n't actually test people for their chromosomes .
but this is also very bizarre , because of the story i told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome .
if we look at one of the founding fathers of modern democracy , dr. martin luther king , he offers us something of a solution in his " i have a dream " speech .
he says we should judge people " based not on the color of their skin , but on the content of their character , " moving beyond anatomy .
and i want to say , " yeah , that sounds like a really good idea . "
but in practice , how do you do it ?
how do you judge people based on the content of character ?
i also want to point out that i 'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans , because , i have to admit , that there are some golden retrievers i know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans i know .
i also want to say there are probably also some yellow labradors that i know that are more capable of informed , intelligent , mature decisions about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that i know .
so how do we operationalize the question of content of character ?
it turns out to be really difficult .
and part of me also wonders , what if content of character turns out to be something that 's scannable in the future - able to be seen with an fmri ?
do we really want to go there ?
i 'm not sure where we go .
what i do know is that it seems to be really important to think about the idea of the united states being in the lead of thinking about this issue of democracy .
we 've done a really good job struggling with democracy , and i think we would do a good job in the future .
we do n't have a situation that iran has , for example , where a man who 's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered , unless he 's willing to submit to a sex change , in which case he 's allowed to live .
we do n't have that kind of situation .
i 'm glad to say we do n't have the kind of situation with - a surgeon i talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them , partly to make a name for himself .
but when i was on the phone with him , asking why he was going to do this surgery - this was a very high-risk surgery - his answer was that , in this other nation , these children were going to be treated very badly , and so he had to do this .
my response to him was , " well , have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery ? "
the united states has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are , without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state .
so i think we have to be in the lead .
well , just to close , i want to suggest to you that i 've been talking a lot about the fathers .
and i want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like , or might have looked like , if we had more involved the mothers .
and i want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist , and that is that i think that there may be different kinds of insights that can come from different kinds of anatomies , particularly when we have people thinking in groups .
now for years , because i 've been interested in intersex , i 've also been interested in sex difference research .
and one of the things that i 've been really interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world .
and what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females , on average - not everyone , but on average - are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are basically vulnerable within the group .
and so if we think about that , we have an interesting situation on our hands .
years ago , when i was in graduate school , one of my graduate advisers who knew i was interested in feminism - i considered myself a feminist , as i still do - asked a really strange question .
he said , " tell me what 's feminine about feminism . "
and i thought , " well that 's the dumbest question i 've ever heard .
feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender , so there 's nothing feminine about feminism . "
but the more i thought about his question , the more i thought there might be something feminine about feminism .
that is to say , there might be something , on average , different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable .
so whereas the fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state , it 's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept , what we would have is more of a concept of , not just how to protect , but how to care for each other .
and maybe that 's where we need to go in the future , when we take democracy beyond anatomy , is to think less about the individual body , in terms of the identity , and think more about those relationships .
so that as we the people try to create a more perfect union , we 're thinking about what we do for each other .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to share with you this morning some stories about the ocean through my work as a still photographer for national geographic magazine .
i guess i became an underwater photographer and a photojournalist because i fell in love with the sea as a child .
and i wanted to tell stories about all the amazing things i was seeing underwater , incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors .
and after even 30 years of doing this , after 30 years of exploring the ocean , i never cease to be amazed at the extraordinary encounters that i have while i 'm at sea .
but more and more frequently these days i 'm seeing terrible things underwater as well , things that i do n't think most people realize .
and i 've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues to tell a more complete story .
i want people to see what 's happening underwater , both the horror and the magic .
the first story that i did for national geographic , where i recognized the ability to include environmental issues within a natural history coverage , was a story i proposed on harp seals .
the story i wanted to do initially was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year where these animals migrate down from the canadian arctic to the gulf of st. lawrence in canada to engage in courtship , mating and to have their pups .
and all of this is played out against the backdrop of transient pack ice that moves with wind and tide .
and because i 'm an underwater photographer , i wanted to do this story from both above and below , to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water .
but as i got more involved in the story , i realized that there were two big environmental issues i could n't ignore .
the first was that these animals continue to be hunted , killed with hakapiks at about eight , 15 days old .
it actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet , with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year .
but as disturbing as that is , i think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming .
this is an aerial picture that i made that shows the gulf of st. lawrence during harp seal season .
and even though we see a lot of ice in this picture , there 's a lot of water as well , which was n't there historically .
and the ice that is there is quite thin .
the problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice in order to nurse from their moms .
they only need 12 days from the moment they 're born until they 're on their own .
but if they do n't get 12 days , they can fall into the ocean and die .
this is a photo that i made showing one of these pups that 's only about five or seven days old - still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly - that has fallen in because of the thin ice , and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe and to get it back to stable purchase .
this problem has continued to grow each year since i was there .
i read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the gulf of st. lawrence .
so , clearly , this species has a lot of problems going forward .
this ended up becoming a cover story at national geographic .
and it received quite a bit of attention .
and with that , i saw the potential to begin doing other stories about ocean problems .
so i proposed a story on the global fish crisis , in part because i had personally witnessed a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years , but also because i read a scientific paper that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years .
these are the tuna , the billfish and the sharks .
when i read that , i was blown away by those numbers .
i thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet , but it really was n't , so i wanted to do a story that was a very different kind of underwater story .
i wanted it to be more like war photography , where i was making harder-hitting pictures that showed readers what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet .
the first component of the story that i thought was essential , however , was to give readers a sense of appreciation for the ocean animals that they were eating .
you know , i think people go into a restaurant , and somebody orders a steak , and we all know where steak comes from , and somebody orders a chicken , and we know what a chicken is , but when they 're eating bluefin sushi , do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they 're consuming ?
these are the lions and tigers of the sea .
in reality , these animals have no terrestrial counterpart ; they 're unique in the world .
these are animals that can practically swim from the equator to the poles and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year .
if we were n't so efficient at catching them , because they grow their entire life , would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton .
but the truth is we 're way too efficient at catching them , and their stocks have collapsed worldwide .
this is the daily auction at the tsukiji fish market that i photographed a couple years ago .
and every single day these tuna , bluefin like this , are stacked up like cordwood , just warehouse after warehouse .
as i wandered around and made these pictures , it sort of occurred to me that the ocean 's not a grocery store , you know .
we ca n't keep taking without expecting serious consequences as a result .
i also , with the story , wanted to show readers how fish are caught , some of the methods that are used to catch fish , like a bottom trawler , which is one of the most common methods in the world .
this was a small net that was being used in mexico to catch shrimp , but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world .
you have a large net in the middle with two steel doors on either end .
and as this assembly is towed through the water , the doors meet resistance with the ocean , and it opens the mouth of the net , and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom .
and this just drags over the bottom , in this case to catch shrimp .
but as you can imagine , it 's catching everything else in its path as well .
and it 's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom , things like sponges and corals , that critical habitat for other animals .
this photograph i made of the fisherman holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour .
so he had a handful of shrimp , maybe seven or eight shrimp , and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch .
these are animals that died in the process , but have no commercial value .
so this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner , maybe seven or eight shrimp and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process .
and to make that point even more visual , i swam under the shrimp boat and made this picture of the guy shoveling this bycatch into the sea as trash and photographed this cascade of death , you know , animals like guitarfish , bat rays , flounder , pufferfish , that only an hour before , were on the bottom of the ocean , alive , but now being thrown back as trash .
i also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry because , currently on planet earth , we 're killing over 100 million sharks every single year .
but before i went out to photograph this component , i sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers you know , i think there 's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark .
but this one morning i jumped in and found this thresher that had just recently died in the gill net .
and with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible , it struck me as sort of a crucifixion , if you will .
this ended up being the lead picture in the global fishery story in national geographic .
and i hope that it helped readers to take notice of this problem of 100 million sharks .
and because i love sharks - i 'm somewhat obsessed with sharks - i wanted to do another , more celebratory , story about sharks , as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation .
so i went to the bahamas because there 're very few places in the world where sharks are doing well these days , but the bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy , largely due to the fact that the government there had outlawed longlining several years ago .
and i wanted to show several species that we had n't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations .
one of the locations was this place called tiger beach , in the northern bahamas where tiger sharks aggregate in shallow water .
this is a low-altitude photograph that i made showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks sort of just swimming around behind .
but the one thing i definitely did n't want to do with this coverage was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters .
i did n't want them to be overly threatening or scary .
and with this photograph of a beautiful 15-feet , probably 14-feet , i guess , female tiger shark , i sort of think i got to that goal , where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose , and my strobe created a shadow on her face .
and i think it 's a gentler picture , a little less threatening , a little more respectful of the species .
i also searched on this story for the elusive great hammerhead , an animal that really had n't been photographed much until maybe about seven or 10 years ago .
it 's a very solitary creature .
but this is an animal that 's considered data deficient by science in both florida and in the bahamas .
you know , we know almost nothing about them .
we do n't know where they migrate to or from , where they mate , where they have their pups , and yet , hammerhead populations in the atlantic have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years .
you know , we 're losing them faster than we can possibly find them .
this is the oceanic whitetip shark , an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species , if you pay attention to such lists .
but it 's an animal that 's about 98 percent in decline throughout most of its range .
because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water , and because we were n't working on the bottom , i brought along a shark cage here , and my friend , shark biologist wes pratt is inside the cage .
you 'll see that the photographer , of course , was not inside the cage here , so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer i guess .
and lastly with this story , i also wanted to focus on baby sharks , shark nurseries .
and i went to the island of bimini , in the bahamas , to work with lemon shark pups .
this is a photo of a lemon shark pup , and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives in these protective mangroves .
this is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph .
it 's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture .
but , you know , here we see a shark that 's maybe 10 or 11 inches long swimming in about a foot of water .
but this is crucial habitat and it 's where they spend the first two , three years of their lives , until they 're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef .
after i left bimini , i actually learned that this habitat was being bulldozed to create a new golf course and resort .
and other recent stories have looked at single , flagship species , if you will , that are at risk in the ocean as a way of talking about other threats .
one such story i did documented the leatherback sea turtle .
this is the largest , widest-ranging , deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species .
here we see a female crawling out of the ocean under moonlight on the island of trinidad .
these are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years .
and there was a time in their lifespan where they were coming out of the water to nest and saw tyrannosaurus rex running by .
and today , they crawl out and see condominiums .
but despite this amazing longevity , they 're now considered critically endangered .
in the pacific , where i made this photograph , their stocks have declined about 90 percent in the last 15 years .
this is a photograph that shows a hatchling about to taste saltwater for the very first time beginning this long and perilous journey .
only one in a thousand leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity .
but that 's due to natural predators like vultures that pick them off on a beach or predatory fish that are waiting offshore .
nature has learned to compensate with that , and females have multiple clutches of eggs to overcome those odds .
but what they ca n't deal with is anthropogenic stresses , human things , like this picture that shows a leatherback caught at night in a gill net .
i actually jumped in and photographed this , and with the fisherman 's permission , i cut the turtle out , and it was able to swim free .
but , you know , thousands of other leatherbacks each year are not so fortunate , and the species ' future is in great danger .
another charismatic megafauna species that i worked with is the story i did on the right whale .
and essentially , the story is this with right whales , that about a million years ago , there was one species of right whale on the planet , but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated , the species sort of separated , and today we have essentially two distinct stocks .
we have the southern right whale that we see here and the north atlantic right whale that we see here with a mom and calf off the coast of florida .
now , both species were hunted to the brink of extinction by the early whalers , but the southern right whales have rebounded a lot better because they 're located in places farther away from human activity .
the north atlantic right whale is listed as the most endangered species on the planet today because they are urban whales ; they live along the east coast of north america , united states and canada , and they have to deal with all these urban ills .
this photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of florida .
you can see the coal burning plant in the background .
they have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals that are flushed out into the ocean , and maybe even affecting their reproduction .
they also get entangled in fishing gear .
this is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale .
and those white markings are not natural markings .
these are entanglement scars .
72 percent of the population has such scars , but most do n't shed the gear , things like lobster traps and crab pots .
they hold on to them , and it eventually kills them .
and the other problem is they get hit by ships .
and this was an animal that was struck by a ship in nova scotia , canada being towed in , where they did a necropsy to confirm the cause of death , which was indeed a ship strike .
so all of these ills are stacking up against these animals and keeping their numbers very low .
and to draw a contrast with that beleaguered north atlantic population , i went to a new pristine population of southern right whales that had only been discovered about 10 years ago in the sub-antarctic of new zealand , a place called the auckland islands .
i went down there in the winter time .
and these are animals that had never seen humans before , and i was one of the first people they probably had ever seen .
and i got in the water with them , and i was amazed at how curious they were .
this photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet and one of these amazingly beautiful , 45-foot , 70-ton whales , like a city bus just swimming up , you know .
they were in perfect condition , very fat and healthy , robust , no entanglement scars , the way they 're supposed to look .
you know , i read that the pilgrims , when they landed at plymouth rock in massachusetts in 1620 , wrote that you could walk across cape cod bay on the backs of right whales .
and we ca n't go back and see that today , but maybe we can preserve what we have left .
and i wanted to close this program with a story of hope , a story i did on marine reserves as sort of a solution to the problem of overfishing , the global fish crisis story .
i settled on working in the country of new zealand because new zealand was rather progressive , and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean .
and i really wanted this story to be about three things : i wanted it to be about abundance , about diversity and about resilience .
and one of the first places i worked was a reserve called goat island in leigh of new zealand .
what the scientists there told me was that when protected this first marine reserve in 1975 , for example , they hoped that certain species of fish like the new zealand snapper would return because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction .
and they did come back . what they could n't predict was that other things would happen .
for example , these fish predate on sea urchins , and when the fish were all gone , all anyone ever saw underwater was just acres and acres of sea urchins .
but when the fish came back and began predating and controlling the urchin population , low and behold , kelp forests emerged in shallow water .
and that 's because the urchins eat kelp .
so when the fish control the urchin population , the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium .
you know , this is probably how the ocean looked here one or 200 years ago , but nobody was around to tell us .
i worked in other parts of new zealand as well , in beautiful , fragile , protected areas like in fiordland , where this sea pen colony was found .
little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color .
in the northern part of new zealand , i dove in the blue water , where the water 's a little warmer , and photographed animals like this giant sting ray swimming through an underwater canyon .
every part of the ecosystem in this place seems very healthy , from tiny , little animals like a nudibrank crawling over encrusting sponge or a leatherjacket that is a very important animal in this ecosystem because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold .
and i wanted to finish with this photograph , a picture i made on a very stormy day in new zealand when i just laid on the bottom amidst a school of fish swirling around me .
and i was in a place that had only been protected about 20 years ago .
and i talked to divers that had been diving there for many years , and they said that the marine life was better here today than it was in the 1960s .
and that 's because it 's been protected , that it has come back .
so i think the message is clear .
the ocean is , indeed , resilient and tolerant to a point , but we must be good custodians .
i became an underwater photographer because i fell in love with the sea , and i make pictures of it today because i want to protect it , and i do n't think it 's too late .
thank you very much .
-lrb- music -rrb- what you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure , wind and temperature readings that were recorded of hurricane noel in 2007 .
the musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this .
every single bead , every single colored band , represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note .
i find weather extremely fascinating .
weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us .
so i use sculpture and music to make it , not just visible , but also tactile and audible .
all of my work begins very simple .
i extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices - generally anything i can find in the hardware store .
i then compare my information to the things i find on the internet - satellite images , weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys .
that 's both historical as well as real data .
and then i compile all of these numbers on these clipboards that you see here .
these clipboards are filled with numbers .
and from all of these numbers , i start with only two or three variables .
that begins my translation process .
my translation medium is a very simple basket .
a basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements .
when i assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements , i can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form .
i use natural reed , because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that i can not fully control .
that means that it is the numbers that control the form , not me .
what i come up with are forms like these .
these forms are completely made up of weather data or science data .
every colored bead , every colored string , represents a weather element .
and together , these elements , not only construct the form , but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph .
when you step closer , you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers .
the vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day .
so all the way around , you have a 24-hour timeline .
but it 's also used to assign a temperature range .
on that grid , i can then weave the high tide readings , water temperature , air temperature and moon phases .
i also translate weather data into musical scores .
and musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it .
so all of these scores are made up of weather data .
every single color , dot , every single line , is a weather element .
and together , these variables construct a score .
i use these scores to collaborate with musicians .
this is the 1913 trio performing one of my pieces at the milwaukee art museum .
meanwhile , i use these scores as blueprints to translate into sculptural forms like this , that function still in the sense of being a three-dimensional weather visualization , but now they 're embedding the visual matrix of the musical score , so it can actually be read as a musical score .
what i love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art , versus science .
this piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it .
you place it in an art museum , it becomes a sculpture .
you place it in a science museum , it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data .
you place it in a music hall , it all of a sudden becomes a musical score .
and i really like that , because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music .
the other reason why i really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science .
and not everyone has a ph.d. in science .
so for me , that was my way into it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you should be nice to nerds .
in fact , i 'd go so far as to say , if you do n't already have a nerd in your life , you should get one .
i 'm just saying .
scientists and engineers change the world .
i 'd like to tell you about a magical place called darpa where scientists and engineers defy the impossible and refuse to fear failure .
now these two ideas are connected more than you may realize , because when you remove the fear of failure , impossible things suddenly become possible .
if you want to know how , ask yourself this question : what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail ?
if you really ask yourself this question , you ca n't help but feel uncomfortable .
i feel a little uncomfortable .
because when you ask it , you begin to understand how the fear of failure constrains you , how it keeps us from attempting great things , and life gets dull , amazing things stop happening .
sure , good things happen , but amazing things stop happening .
now i should be clear , i 'm not encouraging failure , i 'm discouraging fear of failure .
because it 's not failure itself that constrains us .
the path to truly new , never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way .
we 're tested .
and in part , that testing feels an appropriate part of achieving something great .
clemenceau said , " life gets interesting when we fail , because it 's a sign that we 've surpassed ourselves . "
in 1895 , lord kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible .
in october of 1903 , the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly .
and two months later on december 17th , orville wright powered the first airplane across a beach in north carolina .
the flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet .
that was 1903 .
one year later , the next declarations of impossibilities began .
ferdinand foch , a french army general credited with having one of the most original and subtle minds in the french army , said , " airplanes are interesting toys , but of no military value . "
40 years later , aero experts coined the term transonic .
they debated , should it have one s or two ?
you see , they were having trouble in this flight regime , and it was n't at all clear that we could fly faster than the speed of sound .
in 1947 , there was no wind tunnel data beyond mach 0.85 .
and yet , on tuesday , october 14th , 1947 , chuck yeager climbed into the cockpit of his bell x-1 and he flew towards an unknown possibility , and in so doing , he became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound .
six of eight atlas rockets blew up on the pad .
after 11 complete mission failures , we got our first images from space .
and on that first flight we got more data than in all u-2 missions combined .
it took a lot of failures to get there .
since we took to the sky , we have wanted to fly faster and farther .
and to do so , we 've had to believe in impossible things .
and we 've had to refuse to fear failure .
that 's still true today .
today , we do n't talk about flying transonically , or even supersonically , we talk about flying hypersonically - not mach 2 or mach 3 , mach 20 .
at mach 20 , we can fly from new york to long beach in 11 minutes and 20 seconds .
at that speed , the surface of the airfoil is the temperature of molten steel - 3,500 degrees fahrenheit - like a blast furnace .
we are essentially burning the airfoil as we fly it .
and we are flying it , or trying to .
darpa 's hypersonic test vehicle is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built .
it 's boosted to near-space atop a minotaur iv rocket .
now the minotaur iv has too much impulse , so we have to bleed it off by flying the rocket at an 89 degree angle of attack for portions of the trajectory .
that 's an unnatural act for a rocket .
the third stage has a camera .
we call it rocketcam .
and it 's pointed at the hypersonic glider .
this is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one .
now to conceal the shape , we changed the aspect ratio a little bit .
but this is what it looks like from the third stage of the rocket looking at the unmanned glider as it heads into the atmosphere back towards earth .
we 've flown twice .
in the first flight , no aerodynamic control of the vehicle .
but we collected more hypersonic flight data than in 30 years of ground-based testing combined .
and in the second flight , three minutes of fully-controlled , aerodynamic flight at mach 20 .
we must fly again , because amazing , never-been-done-before things require that you fly .
you ca n't learn to fly at mach 20 unless you fly .
and while there 's no substitute for speed , maneuverability is a very close second .
if a mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from new york to long beach , a hummingbird would take , well , days .
you see , hummingbirds are not hypersonic , but they are maneuverable .
in fact , the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards .
it can fly up , down , forwards , backwards , even upside-down .
and so if we wanted to fly in this room or places where humans ca n't go , we 'd need an aircraft small enough and maneuverable enough to do so .
this is a hummingbird drone .
it can fly in all directions , even backwards .
it can hover and rotate .
this prototype aircraft is equipped with a video camera .
it weighs less than one aa battery .
it does not eat nectar .
in 2008 , it flew for a whopping 20 seconds , a year later , two minutes , then six , eventually 11 .
many prototypes crashed - many .
but there 's no way to learn to fly like a hummingbird unless you fly .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's beautiful , is n't it .
wow .
it 's great .
matt is the first ever hummingbird pilot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- failure is part of creating new and amazing things .
we can not both fear failure and make amazing new things - like a robot with the stability of a dog on rough terrain , or maybe even ice ; a robot that can run like a cheetah , or climb stairs like a human with the occasional clumsiness of a human .
or perhaps , spider man will one day be gecko man .
a gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe .
one square millimeter of a gecko 's footpad has 14,000 hair-like structures called setae .
they are used to help it grip to surfaces using intermolecular forces .
today we can manufacture structures that mimic the hairs of a gecko 's foot .
the result , a four-by-four-inch artificial nano-gecko adhesive .
can support a static load of 660 pounds .
that 's enough to stick six 42-inch plasma tv 's to your wall , no nails .
so much for velcro , right ?
and it 's not just passive structures , it 's entire machines .
this is a spider mite .
it 's one millimeter long , but it looks like godzilla next to these micromachines .
in the world of godzilla spider mites , we can make millions of mirrors , each one-fifth the diameter of a human hair , moving at hundreds of thousands of times per second to make large screen displays , so that we can watch movies like " godzilla " in high-def .
and if we can build machines at that scale , what about eiffel tower-like trusses at the microscale ?
today we are making metals that are lighter than styrofoam , so light they can sit atop a dandelion puff and be blown away with a wisp of air - so light that you can make a car that two people can lift , but so strong that it has the crash-worthiness of an suv .
from the smallest wisp of air to the powerful forces of nature 's storms .
there are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe .
each lightning bolt heats the air to 44,000 degrees fahrenheit - hotter than the surface of the sun .
what if we could use these electromagnetic pulses as beacons , beacons in a moving network of powerful transmitters ?
experiments suggest that lightning could be the next gps .
electrical pulses form the thoughts in our brains .
using a grid the size of your thumb , with 32 electrodes on the surface of his brain , tim uses his thoughts to control an advanced prosthetic arm .
and his thoughts made him reach for katie .
this is the first time a human has controlled a robot with thought alone .
and it is the first time that tim has held katie 's hand in seven years .
that moment mattered to tim and katie , and this green goo may someday matter to you .
this green goo is perhaps the vaccine that could save your life .
it was made in tobacco plants .
tobacco plants can make millions of doses of vaccine in weeks instead of months , and it might just be the first healthy use of tobacco ever .
and if it seems far-fetched that tobacco plants could make people healthy , what about gamers that could solve problems that experts ca n't solve ?
last september , the gamers of foldit solved the three-dimensional structure of the retroviral protease that contributes to aids in rhesus monkeys .
now understanding this structure is very important for developing treatments .
for 15 years , it was unsolved in the scientific community .
the gamers of foldit solved it in 15 days .
now they were able to do so by working together .
they were able to work together because they 're connected by the internet .
and others , also connected to the internet , used it as an instrument of democracy .
and together they changed the fate of their nation .
the internet is home to two billion people , or 30 percent of the world 's population .
it allows us to contribute and to be heard as individuals .
it allows us to amplify our voices and our power as a group .
but it too had humble beginnings .
in 1969 , the internet was but a dream , a few sketches on a piece of paper .
and then on october 29th , the first packet-switched message was sent from ucla to sri .
the first two letters of the word " login , " that 's all that made it through - an l and an o - and then a buffer overflow crashed the system .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- two letters , an l and an o , now a worldwide force .
so who are these scientists and engineers at a magical place called darpa ?
they are nerds , and they are heroes among us .
they challenge existing perspectives at the edges of science and under the most demanding of conditions .
they remind us that we can change the world if we defy the impossible and we refuse to fear failure .
they remind us that we all have nerd power .
sometimes we just forget .
you see , there was a time when you were n't afraid of failure , when you were a great artist or a great dancer and you could sing , you were good at math , you could build things , you were an astronaut , an adventurer , jacques cousteau , you could jump higher , run faster , kick harder than anyone .
you believed in impossible things and you were fearless .
you were totally and completely in touch with your inner superhero .
scientists and engineers can indeed change the world .
so can you .
you were born to .
so go ahead , ask yourself , what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail ?
now i want to say , this is not easy .
it 's hard to hold onto this feeling , really hard .
i guess in some way , i sort of believe it 's supposed to be hard .
doubt and fear always creep in .
we think someone else , someone smarter than us , someone more capable , someone with more resources will solve that problem .
but there is n't anyone else ; there 's just you .
and if we 're lucky , in that moment , someone steps into that doubt and fear , takes a hand and says , " let me help you believe . "
jason harley did that for me .
jason started at darpa on march 18th , 2010 .
he was with our transportation team .
i saw jason nearly every day , sometimes twice a day .
and more so than most , he saw the highs and the lows , the celebrations and the disappointments .
and on one particularly dark day for me , jason sat down and he wrote an email .
he was encouraging , but firm .
and when he hit send , he probably did n't realize what a difference it would make .
it mattered to me .
in that moment and still today when i doubt , when i feel afraid , when i need to reconnect with that feeling , i remember his words , they were so powerful .
text : " there is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you . "
♫ superhero , superhero . ♫ ♫ superhero , superhero . ♫ ♫ superhero , superhero . ♫ ♫ superhero , superhero . ♫ ♫ superhero , superhero . ♫ voice : because that 's what being a superhero is all about .
rd : " there is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you . "
and remember , be nice to nerds .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : regina , thank you .
i have a couple of questions .
so that glider of yours , the mach 20 glider , the first one , no control , it ended up in the pacific i think somewhere .
rd : yeah , yeah . it did . -lrb- ca : what happened on that second flight ? -rrb- yeah , it also went into the pacific . -lrb- ca : but this time under control ? -rrb- we did n't fly it into the pacific .
no , there are multiple portions of the trajectory that are demanding in terms of really flying at that speed .
and so in the second flight , we were able to get three minutes of fully aerodynamic control of the vehicle before we lost it .
ca : i imagine you 're not planning to open up to passenger service from new york to long beach anytime soon .
rd : it might be a little warm .
ca : what do you picture that glider being used for ?
rd : well our responsibility is to develop the technology for this .
how it 's ultimately used will be determined by the military .
now the purpose of the vehicle though , the purpose of the technology , is to be able to reach anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes .
ca : and to carry a payload of more than a few pounds ? -lrb- rd : yeah . -rrb- like what 's the payload it could carry ?
rd : well i do n't think we ultimately know what it will be , right .
we 've got to fly it first .
ca : but not necessarily just a camera ?
rd : no , not necessarily just a camera .
ca : it 's amazing .
the hummingbird ?
rd : yeah ?
ca : i 'm curious , you started your beautiful sequence on flight with a plane kind of trying to flap its wings and failing horribly , and there have n't been that many planes built since that flap wings .
why did we think that this was the time to go biomimicry and copy a hummingbird ?
is n't that a very expensive solution for a small maneuverable flying object ?
rd : so i mean , in part , we wondered if it was possible to do it .
and you have to revisit these questions over time .
the folks at aerovironment tried 300 or more different wing designs , 12 different forms of the avionics .
it took them 10 full prototypes to get something that would actually fly .
but there 's something really interesting about a flying machine that looks like something you 'd recognize .
so we often talk about stealth as a means for avoiding any type of sensing , but when things looks just natural , you also do n't see them .
ca : ah . so it 's not necessarily just the performance .
it 's partly the look . -lrb- rd : sure . -rrb- it 's actually , " look at that cute hummingbird flying into my headquarters . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i think , as well as the awe of looking at that , i 'm sure some people here are thinking , technology catches up so quick , how long is it before some crazed geek with a little remote control flies one through a window of the white house ?
i mean , do you worry about the pandora 's box issue here ?
rd : well look , our singular mission is the creation and prevention of strategic surprise .
that 's what we do .
it would be inconceivable for us to do that work if we did n't make people excited and uncomfortable with the things that we do at the same time .
it 's just the nature of what we do .
now our responsibility is to push that edge .
and we have to be , of course , mindful and responsible of how the technology is developed and ultimately used , but we ca n't simply close our eyes and pretend that it is n't advancing ; it 's advancing .
ca : i mean , you 're clearly a really inspiring leader .
and you persuade people to go to these great feats of invention , but at a personal level , in a way i ca n't imagine doing your job .
do you wake up in the night sometimes , just asking questions about the possibly unintended consequences of your team 's brilliance ?
rd : sure .
i think you could n't be human if you did n't ask those questions .
ca : how do you answer them ?
rd : well i do n't always have answers for them , right .
i think that we learn as time goes on .
my job is one of the most exhilarating jobs you could have .
i work with some of the most amazing people .
and with that exhilaration , comes a really deep sense of responsibility .
and so you have on the one hand this tremendous lift of what 's possible and this tremendous seriousness of what it means .
ca : regina , that was jaw-dropping , as they say .
thank you so much for coming to ted . -lrb- rd : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to have a pretty simple idea that i 'm just going to tell you over and over until i get you to believe it , and that is all of us are makers .
i really believe that .
all of us are makers .
we 're born makers .
we have this ability to make things , to grasp things with our hands .
we use words like " grasp " metaphorically to also think about understanding things .
we do n't just live , but we make .
we create things .
well i 'm going to show you a group of makers from maker faire and various places .
it does n't come out particularly well , but that 's a particularly tall bicycle .
it 's a scraper bike ; it 's called - from oakland .
and this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size .
but he 's trying to power it , or motorize it , with a drill .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the question he had is , " can i do it ? can it be done ? "
apparently it can .
so makers are enthusiasts ; they 're amateurs ; they 're people who love doing what they do .
they do n't always even know why they 're doing it .
we have begun organizing makers at our maker faire .
there was one held in detroit here last summer , and it will be held again next summer , at the henry ford .
but we hold them in san francisco - -lrb- applause -rrb- - and in new york .
and it 's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation .
-lrb- video -rrb- guy : i might get one of those .
dale dougherty : these are electric muffins .
guy : where did you guys get those ?
muffin : will you glide with us ? -lrb- guy : no . -rrb- dd : i know ford has new electric vehicles coming out .
we got there first .
lady : will you glide with us ?
dd : this is something i call " swinging in the rain . "
and you can barely see it , but it 's - a controller at top cycles the water to fall just before and after you pass through the bottom of the arc .
so imagine a kid : " am i going to get wet ? am i going to get wet ?
no , i did n't get wet . am i going to get wet ? am i going to get wet ? "
that 's the experience of a clever ride .
and of course , we have fashion .
people are remaking things into fashion .
i do n't know if this is called a basket-bra , but it ought to be something like that .
we have art students getting together , taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it .
they did that in the summer , and it was very warm .
now this one takes a little bit of explaining .
you know what those are , right ?
billy-bob , or billy bass , or something like that .
now the background is - the guy who did this is a physicist .
and here he 'll explain a little bit about what it does .
-lrb- video -rrb- richard carter : i 'm richard carter , and this is the sashimi tabernacle choir .
choir : ♫ when you hold me in your arms ♫ dd : this is all computer-controlled in an old volvo .
choir : ♫ i 'm hooked on a feelin ' ♫ ♫ i 'm high on believin ' ♫ ♫ that you 're in love with me ♫ dd : so richard came up from houston last year to visit us in detroit here and show the wonderful sashimi tabernacle choir .
so , are you a maker ?
how many people here would say you 're a maker , if you raise your hand ?
that 's a pretty good - but there 's some of you out there that wo n't admit that you 're makers .
and again , think about it .
you 're makers of food ; you 're makers of shelter ; you 're makers of lots of different things , and partly what interests me today is you 're makers of your own world , and particularly the role that technology has in your life .
you 're really a driver or a passenger - to use a volkswagen phrase .
makers are in control .
that 's what fascinates them . that 's why they do what they do .
they want to figure out how things work ; they want to get access to it ; and they want to control it .
they want to use it to their own purpose .
makers today , to some degree , are out on the edge .
they 're not mainstream .
they 're a little bit radical .
they 're a bit subversive in what they do .
but at one time , it was fairly commonplace to think of yourself as a maker .
it was not something you 'd even remark upon .
and i found this old video .
and i 'll tell you more about it , but just ...
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- narrator : of all things americans are , we are makers .
with our strengths and our minds and spirit , we gather , we form , and we fashion .
makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers .
dd : so it goes on to show you people making things out of wood , a grandfather making a ship in a bottle , a woman making a pie - somewhat standard fare of the day .
but it was a sense of pride that we made things , that the world around us was made by us .
it did n't just exist .
we made it , and we were connected to it that way .
and i think that 's tremendously important .
now i 'm going to tell you one funny thing about this .
this particular reel - it 's an industrial video - but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 - in the detroit area , in fact - and it preceded alfred hitchcock 's " psycho . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this , plus " psycho . "
this is andrew archer .
i met andrew at one of our community meetings putting together maker faire .
andrew had moved to detroit from duluth , minnesota .
and i talked to his mom , and i ended up doing a story on him for a magazine called kidrobot .
he 's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys .
he liked to take things apart .
his mother gave him a part of the garage , and he collected things from yard sales , and he made stuff .
and then he did n't particularly like school that much , but he got involved in robotics competitions , and he realized he had a talent , and , more importantly , he had a real passion for it .
and he began building robots .
and when i sat down next to him , he was telling me about a company he formed , and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor .
and that 's why he moved to michigan .
but he also moved here to meet other people doing what he 's doing .
and this kind of gets to this important idea today .
this is jeff and bilal and several others here in a hackerspace .
and there 's about three hackerspaces or more in detroit .
and there 's probably even some new ones since i 've been here last .
but these are like clubs - they 're sharing tools , sharing space , sharing expertise in what to make .
and so it 's a very interesting phenomenon that 's going across the world .
but essentially these are people that are playing with technology .
let me say that again : playing .
they do n't necessarily know what they 're doing or why they 're doing it .
they 're playing to discover what the technology can do , and probably to discover what they can do themselves , what their own capabilities are .
now the other thing that i think is taking off , another reason making is taking off today , is there 's some great new tools out there .
and you ca n't see this very well on the screen , but arduino - arduino is an open-source hardware platform .
it 's a micro-controller .
if you do n't know what those are , they 're just the " brains . "
so they 're the brains of maker projects , and here 's an example of one .
and i do n't know if you can see it that well , but that 's a mailbox - so an ordinary mailbox and an arduino .
so you figure out how to program this , and you put this in your mailbox .
and when someone opens your mailbox , you get a notification , an alert message goes to your iphone .
now that could be a dog door , it could be someone going somewhere where they should n't , like a little brother into a little sister 's room .
there 's all kinds of different things that you can imagine for that .
now here 's something - a 3d printer .
that 's another tool that 's really taken off - really , really interesting .
this is makerbot .
and there are industrial versions of this - about 20,000 dollars .
these guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars , and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3d printers .
now they do n't know what they want to do with it , but they 're going to figure it out .
they will only figure it out by getting their hands on it and playing with it .
one of the coolest things is , makerbot sent out an upgrade , some new brackets for the box .
well you printed out the brackets and then replaced the old brackets with the new ones .
is n't that cool ?
so makers harvest technology from all the places around us .
this is a radar speed detector that was developed from a hot wheels toy .
and they do interesting things .
they 're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think - the military is doing drones - well , there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes , or vehicles - something that you could program to fly on its own , without a stick or anything , to figure out what path it 's going .
fascinating work they 're doing .
we just had an issue on space exploration , diy space exploration .
this is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space .
you could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars .
think how much money and how many years it took nasa to get satellites into space .
in fact , these guys actually work for nasa , and they 're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components , cheap things that are n't specialized that they can combine and send up into space .
makers are a source of innovation , and i think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry .
this is steve wozniak . where does he learn about computers ?
it 's the homebrew computer club - just like a hackerspace .
and he says , " i could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free . "
well he did a little bit better than free .
but it 's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries - even like henry ford - come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups .
well , if i have n't convinced you that you 're a maker , i hope i could convince you that our next generation should be makers , that kids are particularly interested in this , in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots .
and we 've got to get this into schools , or into communities in many , many ways - the ability to tinker , to shape and reshape the world around us .
there 's a great opportunity today - and that 's what i really care about the most .
an the answer to the question : what will america make ?
it 's more makers .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is very strange for me , because i 'm not used to doing this : i usually stand on the other side of the light , and now i 'm feeling the pressure i put other people into . and it 's hard ...
the previous speaker has , i think , really painted a very good background as to the impulse behind my work and what drives me , and my sense of loss , and trying to find the answer to the big questions .
but this , for me , i mean , coming here to do this , feels like - there 's this sculptor that i like very much , giacometti , who after many years of living in france - and learning , you know , studying and working - he returned home and he was asked , what did you produce ?
what have you done with so many years of being away ?
and he sort of , he showed a handful of figurines .
and obviously they were , " is this what you spent years doing ?
and we expected huge masterpieces ! "
but what struck me is the understanding that in those little pieces was the culmination of a man 's life , search , thought , everything - just in a reduced , small version .
in a way , i feel like that .
i feel like i 'm coming home to talk about what i 've been away doing for 20 years .
and i will start with a brief taster of what i 've been about : a handful of films - nothing much , two feature films and a handful of short films .
so , we 'll go with the first piece .
-lrb- video -rrb- woman : " i destroy lives , " mum said .
i love her , you know .
she 's not even my real mum .
my real mum and dad dumped me and fucked off back to nigeria .
the devil is in me , court .
court : sleep .
woman : have you ever been ?
court : where ?
woman : nigeria .
court : never .
my mum wanted to , could n't afford it .
woman : wish i could .
i have this feeling i 'd be happy there .
why does everyone get rid of me ?
court : i do n't want to get rid of you .
woman : you do n't need me .
you 're just too blind to see it now .
boy : what do you do all day ?
marcus : read .
boy : do n't you get bored ?
and how come you ai n't got a job anyway ?
marcus : i am retired .
boy : so ?
marcus : so i 've done my bit for queen and country , now i work for myself .
boy : no , now you sit around like a bum all day .
marcus : because i do what i like ?
boy : look man , reading do n't feed no one .
and it particularly do n't feed your spliff habit .
marcus : it feeds my mind and my soul .
boy : arguing with you is a waste of time , marcus .
marcus : you 're a rapper , am i right ?
boy : yeah .
marcus : a modern day poet .
boy : yeah , you could say that .
marcus : so what do you talk about ?
boy : what 's that supposed to mean ?
marcus : simple . what do you rap about ?
boy : reality , man .
marcus : whose reality ?
boy : my fuckin ' reality .
marcus : tell me about your reality .
boy : racism , oppression , people like me not getting a break in life .
marcus : so what solutions do you offer ? i mean , the job of a poet is not just - boy : man , fight the power ! simple : blow the motherfuckers out of the sky .
marcus : with an ak-47 ?
boy : man , if i had one , too fuckin ' right .
marcus : and how many soldiers have you recruited to fight this war with you ?
boy : oh , marcus , you know what i mean .
marcus : when a man resorts to profanities , it 's a sure sign of his inability to express himself .
boy : see man , you 're just taking the piss out of me now .
marcus : the panthers .
boy : panthers ?
ass kickin ' guys who were fed up with all that white supremacist , powers-that-be bullshit , and just went in there and kicked everybody 's arse .
fuckin ' wicked , man . i saw the movie . bad ! what ?
director 1 : i saw his last film .
épuise , right ?
woman 1 : yes .
d1 : not to make a bad joke , but it was really épuisé .
epuisé - tired , exhausted , fed up .
director 2 : can you not shut up ?
now , you talk straight to me , what 's wrong with my films ?
let 's go .
w1 : they suck .
woman 2 : they suck ? what about yours ?
what , what , what , what about , what ?
what do you think about your movie ?
d1 : my movies , they are ok , fine .
they are better than making documentaries no one ever sees .
what the fuck are you talking about ?
did you ever move your fuckin ' ass from hollywood to go and film something real ?
you make people fuckin ' sleep .
dream about bullshit .
-lrb- applause -rrb- newton aduaka : thank you . the first clip , really , is totally trying to capture what cinema is for me , and where i 'm coming from in terms of cinema .
the first piece was , really , there 's a young woman talking about nigeria , that she has a feeling she 'll be happy there .
these are the sentiments of someone that 's been away from home .
and that was something that i went through , you know , and i 'm still going through .
i 've not been home for quite a while , for about five years now .
i 've been away 20 years in total .
and so it 's really - it 's really how suddenly , you know , this was made in 1997 , which is the time of abacha - the military dictatorship , the worst part of nigerian history , this post-colonial history .
so , for this girl to have these dreams is simply how we preserve a sense of what home is .
how - and it 's sort of , perhaps romantic , but i think beautiful , because you just need something to hold on to , especially in a society where you feel alienated .
which takes us to the next piece , where the young man talks about lack of opportunity : living as a black person in europe , the glass ceiling that we all know about , that we all talk about , and his reality .
again , this was my - this was me talking about - this was , again , the time of multiculturalism in the united kingdom , and there was this buzzword - and it was trying to say , what exactly does this multiculturalism mean in the real lives of people ?
and what would a child - what does a child like jamie - the young boy - think , i mean , with all this anger that 's built up inside of him ?
what happens with that ?
what , of course , happens with that is violence , which we see when we talk about the ghettos and we talk about , you know , south central l.a. and this kind of stuff , and which eventually , when channeled , becomes , you know , evolves and manifests itself as riots - like the one in france two years ago , where i live , which shocked everybody , because everyone thought , " oh well , france is a liberal society . "
but i lived in england for 18 years .
i 've lived in france for about four , and i feel actually thrown back 20 years , living in france .
and then , the third piece . the third piece for me is the question : what is cinema to you ? what do you do with cinema ?
there 's a young director , hollywood director , with his friends - fellow filmmakers - talking about what cinema means .
i suppose that will take me to my last piece - what cinema means for me .
my life started as a - i started life in 1966 , a few months before the biafran , which lasted for three years and it was three years of war .
so that whole thing , that whole childhood echoes and takes me into the next piece .
-lrb- video -rrb- voice : onicha , off to school with your brother .
onicha : yes , mama .
commander : soldiers , you are going to fight a battle , so you must get ready and willing to die .
you must get - ?
child soldiers : ready and willing to die .
c : success , the change is only coming through the barrel of the gun .
cs : the barrel of the gun !
c : this is the gun .
cs : this is the gun .
c : this is an ak-47 rifle . this is your life .
this is your life . this is ... this is ... this is your life .
ezra : they give us the special drugs . we call it bubbles .
amphetamines .
soldiers : rain come , sun come , soldier man dey go .
i say rain come , sun come , soldier man dey go .
we went from one village to another - three villages .
i do n't remember how we got there .
witness : we walked and walked for two days .
we did n't eat .
there was no food , just little rice .
without food - i was sick .
the injection made us not to have mind .
god will forgive us .
he knows we did not know . we did not know !
committee chairman : do you remember january 6th , 1999 ?
ezra : i do n't remember .
various voices : you will die ! you will die ! -lrb- screaming -rrb- onicha : ezra ! -lrb- ezra : onicha ! onicha ! -rrb- various voices : ♫ we do n't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ no more trouble ♫ they killed my mother .
the mende sons of bastards .
-lrb- shouting -rrb- who is she ?
me .
why you giving these to me ?
so you can stop staring at me .
my story is a little bit complicated .
i 'm interested .
mariam is pregnant .
you know what you are ? a crocodile .
big mouth . short legs .
in front of rufus you are ezra the coward .
he 's not taking care of his troops .
troop , pay your last honor . salute .
open your eyes , ezra .
a blind man can see that the diamonds end up in his pocket .
♫ we do n't need no more trouble ♫ get that idiot out !
i take you are preparing a major attack ?
this must be the mine .
your girl is here .
well done , well done .
that is what you are here for , no ?
you are planning to go back to fight are you ?
♫ we do n't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ no more trouble ♫ ♫ we do n't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ no more trouble . ♫ wake up ! everybody wake up . road block !
♫ we do n't need no more ... ♫ committee chairman : we hope that , with your help and the help of others , that this commission will go a long way towards understanding the causes of the rebel war .
more than that , begin a healing process and finally to - as an act of closure to a terrible period in this country 's history .
the beginning of hope .
mr. ezra gelehun , please stand .
state your name and age for the commission .
ezra : my name is ezra gelehun .
i am 15 or 16 . i do n't remember .
ask my sister , she is the witch , she knows everything .
-lrb- sister : 16 . -rrb- cc : mr. gelehun , i 'd like to remind you you 're not on trial here for any crimes you committed .
e : we were fighting for our freedom .
if killing in a war is a crime , then you have to charge every soldier in the world .
war is a crime , yes , but i did not start it .
you too are a retired general , not so ?
cc : yes , correct .
e : so you too must stand trial then .
our government was corrupt .
lack of education was their way to control power .
if i may ask , do you pay for school in your country ?
cc : no , we do n't .
e : you are richer than us .
but we pay for school .
your country talks about democracy , but you support corrupt governments like my own .
why ? because you want our diamond .
ask if anyone in this room have ever seen real diamond before ?
no .
cc : mr. gelehun , i 'd like to remind you , you 're not on trial here today .
you are not on trial .
e : then let me go .
cc : i ca n't do that , son .
e : so you are a liar .
-lrb- applause -rrb- na : thank you . just very quickly to say that my point really here , is that while we 're making all these huge advancements , what we 're doing , which for me , you know , i think we should - africa should move forward , but we should remember , so we do not go back here again .
thank you .
emeka okafor : thank you , newton .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the themes that comes through very strongly in the piece we just watched is this sense of the psychological trauma of the young that have to play this role of being child soldiers .
and considering where you are coming from , and when we consider the extent to which it 's not taken as seriously as it should be , what would you have to say about that ?
na : in the process of my research , i actually spent a bit of time in sierra leone researching this .
and i remember i met a lot of child soldiers - ex-combatants , as they like to be called .
i met psychosocial workers who worked with them .
i met psychiatrists who spent time with them , aid workers , ngos , the whole lot .
but i remember on the flight back on my last trip , i remember breaking down in tears and thinking to myself , if any kid in the west , in the western world , went through a day of what any of those kids have gone through , they will be in therapy for the rest of their natural lives .
so for me , the thought that we have all these children - it 's a generation , we have a whole generation of children - who have been put through so much psychological trauma or damage , and africa has to live with that .
but i 'm just saying to factor that in , factor that in with all this great advancement , all this pronouncement of great achievement .
that 's really my thinking .
eo : well , we thank you again for coming to the ted stage .
that was a very moving piece .
na : thank you .
eo : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the awesome story : it begins about 40 years ago , when my mom and my dad came to canada .
my mom left nairobi , kenya .
my dad left a small village outside of amritsar , india .
and they got here in the late 1960s .
they settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of toronto , and they settled into a new life .
they saw their first dentist , they ate their first hamburger , and they had their first kids .
my sister and i grew up here , and we had quiet , happy childhoods .
we had close family , good friends , a quiet street .
we grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents could n't take for granted when they grew up - things like power always on in our houses , things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard .
we grew up , and we grew older .
i went to high school .
i graduated .
i moved out of the house , i got a job , i found a girl , i settled down - and i realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a cat stevens ' song - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but life was pretty good .
life was pretty good .
2006 was a great year .
under clear blue skies in july in the wine region of ontario , i got married , surrounded by 150 family and friends .
2007 was a great year .
i graduated from school , and i went on a road trip with two of my closest friends .
here 's a picture of me and my friend , chris , on the coast of the pacific ocean .
we actually saw seals out of our car window , and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so you ca n't actually see them , but it was breathtaking , believe me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher .
i know that they were tougher for a lot of people , not just me .
first of all , the news was so heavy .
it 's still heavy now , and it was heavy before that , but when you flipped open a newspaper , when you turned on the tv , it was about ice caps melting , wars going on around the world , earthquakes , hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse , and then eventually did collapse , and so many of us losing our homes , or our jobs , or our retirements , or our livelihoods .
2008 , 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason , too .
i was going through a lot of personal problems at the time .
my marriage was n't going well , and we just were growing further and further apart .
one day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage , through a lot of tears , to have a very honest conversation .
and she said , " i do n't love you anymore , " and it was one of the most painful things i 'd ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing i 'd ever heard , until only a month later , when i heard something even more heartbreaking .
my friend chris , who i just showed you a picture of , had been battling mental illness for some time .
and for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness , you know how challenging it can be .
i spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m.
on a sunday night .
we talked about the tv show we watched that evening .
and monday morning , i found out that he disappeared .
very sadly , he took his own life .
and it was a really heavy time .
and as these dark clouds were circling me , and i was finding it really , really difficult to think of anything good , i said to myself that i really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow .
so i came home from work one night , and i logged onto the computer , and i started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com.
i was trying to remind myself of the simple , universal , little pleasures that we all love , but we just do n't talk about enough - things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking , being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding , wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer , or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line - even if you were last at the other line , swoop right in there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and slowly over time , i started putting myself in a better mood .
i mean , 50,000 blogs are started a day , and so my blog was just one of those 50,000 .
and nobody read it except for my mom .
although i should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i got excited when it started getting tens of hits , and then i started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions .
it started getting bigger and bigger and bigger .
and then i got a phone call , and the voice at the other end of the line said , " you 've just won the best blog in the world award . "
i was like , that sounds totally fake .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- which african country do you want me to wire all my money to ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it turns out , i jumped on a plane , and i ended up walking a red carpet between sarah silverman and jimmy fallon and martha stewart .
and i went onstage to accept a webby award for best blog .
and the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to toronto , when , in my inbox , 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book .
flash-forward to the next year and " the book of awesome " has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but look , i said i wanted to do three things with you today .
i said i wanted to tell you the awesome story , i wanted to share with you the three as of awesome , and i wanted to leave you with a closing thought .
so let 's talk about those three as .
over the last few years , i have n't had that much time to really think .
but lately i have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself : " what is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website , but also grow myself ? "
and i 've summarized those things , for me personally , as three as .
they are attitude , awareness and authenticity .
i 'd love to just talk about each one briefly .
so attitude : look , we 're all going to get lumps , and we 're all going to get bumps .
none of us can predict the future , but we do know one thing about it and that 's that it ai n't gonna go according to plan .
we will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages , father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room , but between those high highs , we may also have some lumps and some bumps too .
it 's sad , and it 's not pleasant to talk about , but your husband might leave you , your girlfriend could cheat , your headaches might be more serious than you thought , or your dog could get hit by a car on the street .
it 's not a happy thought , but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes .
your mom could get cancer , your dad could get mean .
and there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well , too , with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart , and when that bad news washes over you , and when that pain sponges and soaks in , i just really hope you feel like you 've always got two choices .
one , you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever , or two , you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes .
having a great attitude is about choosing option number two , and choosing , no matter how difficult it is , no matter what pain hits you , choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future .
the second " a " is awareness .
i love hanging out with three year-olds .
i love the way that they see the world , because they 're seeing the world for the first time .
i love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk .
i love the way that they 'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand , soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs .
i love the way that they 'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for thanksgiving dinner .
i love the way that they see the world , because they 're seeing the world for the first time .
having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old .
because you all used to be three years old .
that three-year-old boy is still part of you .
that three-year-old girl is still part of you .
they 're in there .
and being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you 've seen for the first time once , too .
so there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work .
there was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air , or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said , " found money . "
the last " a " is authenticity .
and for this one , i want to tell you a quick story .
let 's go all the way back to 1932 when , on a peanut farm in georgia , a little baby boy named roosevelt grier was born .
roosevelt grier , or rosey grier , as people used to call him , grew up and grew into a 300-pound , six-foot-five linebacker in the nfl .
he 's number 76 in the picture .
here he is pictured with the " fearsome foursome . "
these were four guys on the l.a. rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against .
they were tough football players doing what they love , which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field .
but rosey grier also had another passion .
in his deeply authentic self , he also loved needlepoint . -lrb- laughter -rrb- he loved knitting .
he said that it calmed him down , it relaxed him , it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks .
that 's what he said .
i mean , he loved it so much that , after he retired from the nfl , he started joining clubs .
and he even put out a book called " rosey grier 's needlepoint for men . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great cover .
if you notice , he 's actually needlepointing his own face .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so what i love about this story is that rosey grier is just such an authentic person , and that 's what authenticity is all about .
it 's just about being you and being cool with that .
and i think when you 're authentic , you end up following your heart , and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy .
you meet people that you like talking to .
you go places you 've dreamt about .
and you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled .
so those are the three a 's .
for the closing thought , i want to take you all the way back to my parents coming to canada .
i do n't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you 're in your mid-20s .
i do n't know , because i never did it , but i would imagine that it would take a great attitude .
i would imagine that you 'd have to be pretty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you 're starting to see in your new world .
and i think you 'd have to be really authentic , you 'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you 're being exposed to .
i 'd like to pause my tedtalk for about 10 seconds right now , because you do n't get many opportunities in life to do something like this , and my parents are sitting in the front row .
so i wanted to ask them to , if they do n't mind , stand up .
and i just wanted to say thank you to you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i was growing up , my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in canada .
and it 's a great story , because what happened was he got off the plane at the toronto airport , and he was welcomed by a non-profit group , which i 'm sure someone in this room runs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to canada .
and my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread .
there was bread , there was those little , mini dill pickles , there was olives , those little white onions .
there was rolled up turkey cold cuts , rolled up ham cold cuts , rolled up roast beef cold cuts and little cubes of cheese .
there was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches .
there was lasagna , there was casseroles , there was brownies , there was butter tarts , and there was pies , lots and lots of pies .
and when my dad tells the story , he says , " the craziest thing was , i 'd never seen any of that before , except bread .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't know what was meat , what was vegetarian .
i was eating olives with pie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just could n't believe how many things you can get here . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i was five years old , my dad used to take me grocery shopping , and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables .
he would say , " look , can you believe they have a mango here from mexico ?
they 've got an apple here from south africa .
can you believe they 've got a date from morocco ? "
he 's like , " do you know where morocco even is ? "
and i 'd say , " i 'm five . i do n't even know where i am .
is this a & p ? "
and he 'd say , " i do n't know where morocco is either , but let 's find out . "
and so we 'd buy the date , and we 'd go home .
and we 'd actually take an atlas off the shelf , and we 'd flip through until we found this mysterious country .
and when we did , my dad would say , " can you believe someone climbed a tree over there , picked this thing off it , put it in a truck , drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the atlantic ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house , so they could sell it to us for 25 cents ? "
and i 'd say , " i do n't believe that . "
and he 's like , " i do n't believe it either .
things are amazing . there 's just so many things to be happy about . "
when i stop to think about it , he 's absolutely right .
there are so many things to be happy about .
we are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we 've ever seen , capable of experiencing so many of these things .
i mean , we 're the only ones with architecture and agriculture .
we 're the only ones with jewelry and democracy .
we 've got airplanes , highway lanes , interior design and horoscope signs .
we 've got fashion magazines , house party scenes .
you can watch a horror movie with monsters .
you can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming .
we 've got books , buffets and radio waves , wedding brides and rollercoaster rides .
you can sleep in clean sheets .
you can go to the movies and get good seats .
you can smell bakery air , walk around with rain hair , pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap .
we 've got all that , but we 've only got 100 years to enjoy it .
and that 's the sad part .
the cashiers at your grocery store , the foreman at your plant , the guy tailgating you home on the highway , the telemarketer calling you during dinner , every teacher you 've ever had , everyone that 's ever woken up beside you , every politician in every country , every actor in every movie , every single person in your family , everyone you love , everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years .
life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet .
and that moment is right now , and those moments are counting down , and those moments are always , always , always fleeting .
you will never be as young as you are right now .
and that 's why i believe that if you live your life with a great attitude , choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow , living with a sense of awareness of the world around you , embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself , being you and being cool with that , letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you , then i think you 'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying , and i think you 'll live a life that is truly awesome .
thank you .
i 'd like to start with a couple of quick examples .
these are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider .
they produce six different types of silk , which is spun together into a fiber , tougher than any fiber humans have ever made .
the nearest we 've come is with aramid fiber .
and to make that , it involves extremes of temperature , extremes of pressure and loads of pollution .
and yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water .
it does suggest we 've still got a bit to learn .
this beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away .
that 's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors .
and what 's more , this guy does n't need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels .
so these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver .
if we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does , we could achieve factor 10 , factor 100 , maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use .
and if we 're to make progress with the sustainability revolution , i believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about .
firstly , radical increases in resource efficiency .
secondly , shifting from a linear , wasteful , polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model .
and thirdly , changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy .
and for all three of these , i believe , biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we 're going to need .
you could look at nature as being like a catalog of products , and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period .
and given that level of investment , it makes sense to use it .
so i 'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas .
and let 's start with radical increases in resource efficiency .
when we were working on the eden project , we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular , but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried .
it was a hell of a challenge , and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues .
so for instance , it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels .
studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons .
the next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons .
and to do that we had to find an alternative to glass , which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes .
and in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes .
so we started exploring this material called etfe .
it 's a high-strength polymer .
and what you do is you put it together in three layers , you weld it around the edge , and then you inflate it .
and the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass , and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing .
so that was a factor-100 saving .
and what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another .
so with such large , lightweight pillows , we had much less steel .
with less steel we were getting more sunlight in , which meant we did n't have to put as much extra heat in winter .
and with less overall weight in the superstructure , there were big savings in the foundations .
and at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building .
so i think the eden project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency - delivering the same function , but with a fraction of the resource input .
and actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions .
so for instance , you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant amazon water lilies , whole buildings inspired by abalone shells , super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells .
there 's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool .
so now i want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea .
the way we tend to use resources is we extract them , we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them .
nature works very differently .
in ecosystems , the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system .
and there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems .
and one of my favorites is called the cardboard to caviar project by graham wiles .
and in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food , cardboard and plastic waste .
it was ending up in landfills .
now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste .
and i 'm just going to talk through this animation .
so they were paid to collect it from the restaurants .
they then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding .
when that was soiled , they were paid again to collect it .
they put it into worm recomposting systems , which produced a lot of worms , which they fed to siberian sturgeon , which produced caviar , which they sold back to the restaurants .
so it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model , and it created more value in the process .
graham wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this , turning waste streams into schemes that create value .
and just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time , there 's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing .
and i know it 's a quirky example , but i think the implications of this are quite radical , because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem - waste - into a massive opportunity .
and particularly in cities - we could look at the whole metabolism of cities , and look at those as opportunities .
and that 's what we 're doing on the next project i 'm going to talk about , the mobius project , where we 're trying to bring together a number of activities , all within one building , so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another .
and the kind of elements i 'm talking about are , firstly , we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse , a bit like this one in amsterdam called de kas .
then we would have an anaerobic digester , which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area , turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid .
we 'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater , turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms .
we 'd have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant .
and we 'd also have a coffee shop , and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms .
so you can see that we 're bringing together cycles of food , energy and water and waste all within one building .
and just for fun , we 've proposed this for a roundabout in central london , which at the moment is a complete eyesore .
some of you may recognize this .
and with just a little bit of planning , we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people , reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities .
so the final project i want to talk about is the sahara forest project , which we 're working on at the moment .
it may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago .
so for instance , when julius caesar arrived in north africa , huge areas of north africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests .
and during the evolution of life on the earth , it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy .
the converse is also true .
the more vegetation we lose , the more that 's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification .
and this animation , this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years , and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot , and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt , or maybe even reverse , desertification .
and if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts , there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity .
this is the namibian fog-basking beetle , and it 's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert .
the way it does this is it comes out at night , crawls to the top of a sand dune , and because it 's got a matte black shell , is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings .
so when the moist breeze blows in off the sea , you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle 's shell .
just before sunrise , he tips his shell up , the water runs down into his mouth , has a good drink , goes off and hides for the rest of the day .
and the ingenuity , if you could call it that , goes even further .
because if you look closely at the beetle 's shell , there are lots of little bumps on that shell .
and those bumps are hydrophilic ; they attract water .
between them there 's a waxy finish which repels water .
and the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps , they stay in tight , spherical beads , which means they 're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle 's shell .
so even when there 's only a small amount of moisture in the air , it 's able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth .
so amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment - and in that sense , very relevant to the kind of challenges we 're going to be facing over the next few years , next few decades .
we 're working with the guy who invented the seawater greenhouse .
this is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions , and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills , and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through , it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process .
so inside it 's cool and humid , which means the plants need less water to grow .
and then at the back of the greenhouse , it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle .
and what they found with the first seawater greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside .
so they just started spreading this on the land around , and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area .
this photograph was taken on completion day , and just one year later , it looked like that .
so it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land - and in that sense , going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design .
so we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits .
and when you think about nature , often you think about it as being all about competition .
but actually in mature ecosystems , you 're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships .
so an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters .
and the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the seawater greenhouse is concentrated solar power , which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun 's heat to create electricity .
and just to give you some sense of the potential of csp , consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms - 10,000 times .
so our energy problems are not intractable .
it 's a challenge to our ingenuity .
and the kind of synergies i 'm talking about are , firstly , both these technologies work very well in hot , sunny deserts .
csp needs a supply of demineralized freshwater .
that 's exactly what the seawater greenhouse produces .
csp produces a lot of waste heat .
we 'll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits .
and finally , in the shade under the mirrors , it 's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight .
so this is how this scheme would look .
the idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind .
we 'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way .
some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts .
and with biomimicry , if you 've got an underutilized resource , you do n't think , " how am i going to dispose of this ? "
you think , " what can i add to the system to create more value ? "
and it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages .
when you evaporate seawater , the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate .
and that builds up on the evaporators - and that 's what that image on the left is - gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate .
so after a while , we could take that out , use it as a lightweight building block .
and if you think about the carbon in that , that would have come out of the atmosphere , into the sea and then locked away in a building product .
the next thing is sodium chloride .
you can also compress that into a building block , as they did here .
this is a hotel in bolivia .
and then after that , there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract , like phosphates , that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them .
and there 's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater .
so it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries .
and in parts of the arabian gulf , the seawater , the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants .
and it 's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse .
now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine .
we could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts , transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity .
really the sahara forest project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food , abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas .
so returning to those big challenges that i mentioned at the beginning : radical increases in resource efficiency , closing loops and a solar economy .
they 're not just possible ; they 're critical .
and i firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions .
but perhaps more than anything , what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design .
far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language .
but here it 's about synergies and abundance and optimizing .
and this is an important point .
antoine de saint-exupery once said , " if you want to build a flotilla of ships , you do n't sit around talking about carpentry .
no , you need to set people 's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores . "
and that 's what we need to do , so let 's be positive , and let 's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we 've ever seen .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ like the heather ♫ ♫ on the hillside ♫ ♫ as they drove us ♫ ♫ from the highlands ♫ ♫ like the ice flow ♫ ♫ from the arctic ♫ ♫ where we landed ♫ ♫ in newfoundland ♫ ♫ there 's a color ♫ ♫ to my sorrow ♫ ♫ there 's a name for ♫ ♫ all this sadness ♫ ♫ like the ocean ♫ ♫ in between us ♫ ♫ i am blue ♫ ♫ blue is a river ♫ ♫ blue remembered ♫ ♫ blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ blue like a planet ♫
♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ -lrb- fiddle and synthesizer -rrb- ♫ so i came here ♫ ♫ to the city ♫ ♫ where the dream burns ♫ ♫ like a furnace ♫ ♫ and i dazzled ♫ ♫ in these dark streets ♫ ♫ like a diamond ♫ ♫ in a coalface ♫ ♫ then the cold wind ♫ ♫ from the islands ♫ ♫ blew a storm cloud ♫ ♫ across the new moon ♫ ♫ like the gun smoke ♫ ♫ above the houses ♫ ♫ in my home ♫ ♫ blue is a river ♫
♫ blue remembered ♫ ♫ blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ blue like a planet ♫ ♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ ♫ blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ -lrb- fiddle and synthesizer -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this is a story of a place that i now call home .
it 's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both .
so this is bertie county , north carolina , usa .
to give you an idea of the " where : " so here 's north carolina , and if we zoom in , bertie county is in the eastern part of the state .
it 's about two hours east driving-time from raleigh .
and it 's very flat . it 's very swampy .
it 's mostly farmland .
the entire county is home to just 20,000 people , and they 're very sparsely distributed .
so there 's only 27 people per square mile , which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer .
bertie county is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural america .
we 've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the american borders .
we know the symptoms .
it 's the hollowing out of small towns .
it 's downtowns becoming ghost towns .
the brain drain - where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back .
it 's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban .
and bertie county is no exception to this .
perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with , like many communities similar to it , is that there 's no shared , collective investment in the future of rural communities .
only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the u.s. right now benefits rural communities , and yet 20 percent of our population lives there .
so bertie county is not only very rural ; it 's incredibly poor .
it is the poorest county in the state .
it has one in three of its children living in poverty , and it 's what is referred to as a " rural ghetto . "
the economy is mostly agricultural .
the biggest crops are cotton and tobacco , and we 're very proud of our bertie county peanut .
the biggest employer is the purdue chicken processing plant .
the county seat is windsor .
this is like times square of windsor that you 're looking at right now .
it 's home to only 2,000 people , and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years .
there are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use .
you can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand - bunn 's barbecue being my absolute favorite .
but in the whole county there is no coffee shop , there 's no internet cafe , there 's no movie theater , there 's no bookstore .
there is n't even a walmart .
racially , the county is about 60 percent african-american , but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private lawrence academy .
so the public school students are about 86 percent african-american .
and this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class , and you can see the difference is pretty stark .
so to say that the public education system in bertie county is struggling would be a huge understatement .
there 's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from , and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor 's degree or higher .
so there is n't a big legacy in the pride of education .
in fact , two years ago , only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both english and math .
so it sounds like i 'm painting a really bleak picture of this place , but i promise there is good news .
the biggest asset , in my opinion , one of the biggest assets in bertie county right now is this man : this is dr. chip zullinger , fondly known as dr. z.
he was brought in in october 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system .
and he previously was a superintendent in charleston , south carolina and then in denver , colorado .
he started some of the country 's first charter schools in the late ' 80s in the u.s.
and he is an absolute renegade and a visionary , and he is the reason that i now live and work there .
so in february of 2009 , dr. zullinger invited us , project h design - which is a non-profit design firm that i founded - to come to bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district .
and he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process - one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that do n't usually have access to design services or creative capital .
specifically , we use these six design directives , probably the most important being number two : we design with , not for - in that , when we 're doing humanitarian-focused design , it 's not about designing for clients anymore .
it 's about designing with people , and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within .
so at the time of being invited down there , we were based in san francisco , and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009 , spending about half our time in bertie county .
and when i say we , i mean project h , but more specifically , i mean myself and my partner , matthew miller , who 's an architect and a sort of macgyver-type builder .
so fast-forward to today , and we now live there .
i have strategically cut matt 's head out of this photo , because he would kill me if he knew i was using it because of the sweatsuits .
but this is our front porch . we live there .
we now call this place home .
over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth , we realized we had fallen in love with the place .
we had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we 're able to do in a rural place like bertie county , that , as designers and builders , you ca n't do everywhere .
there 's space to experiment and to weld and to test things .
we have an amazing advocate in dr. zullinger .
there 's a nobility of real , hands-on , dirt-under-your-fingernails work .
but beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there , there is a huge need .
there is a total vacuum of creative capital in bertie county .
there is n't a single licensed architect in the whole county .
and so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool , something that bertie county did n't otherwise have , and to be sort of the - to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit .
the initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with dr. zullinger - that was why we were there .
but beyond that , we recognized that bertie county , as a community , was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking .
so the goal became , yes , to apply design within education , but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development .
so in order to do this , we 've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education .
and i should say that these are three things that we 've done in bertie county , but i feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the u.s. and maybe even beyond .
so the first of the three is design for education .
this is the most kind of direct , obvious intersection of the two things .
it 's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students .
this is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we 're building schools out of these days .
and so this played out for us in a couple different ways .
the first was a series of renovations of computer labs .
so traditionally , the computer labs , particularly in an under-performing school like bertie county , where they have to benchmark test every other week , the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility .
you come in , you face the wall , you take your test and you leave .
so we wanted to change the way that students approach technology , to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging , more accessible , and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction .
so this is the lab at the high school , and the principal there is in love with this room .
every time he has visitors , it 's the first place that he takes them .
and this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape .
it allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid .
so this game that the kids are playing here - in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called match me .
and in match me , you take the class , divide it into two teams , one team on each side of the playground , and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires .
and then she 'll call out a math problem - so let 's say four times four - and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it .
so the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins .
and the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing .
some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores , a greater comfort level with the material , especially with the boys , that in going outside and playing , they are n't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem - and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material .
so with design for education , i think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers , so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them .
so this is mr. perry . he 's the assistant superintendent .
he came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of match me in a row and was very proud of himself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the second approach is redesigning education itself .
this is the most complex .
it 's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom .
so in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change , which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities .
so for us , this was a graphic public campaign called connect bertie .
there are thousands of these blue dots all over the county .
and this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system .
right now i should say , there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home internet connection .
and the only places to get wifi are in the school buildings , or at the bojangles fried chicken joint , which i find myself squatting outside of a lot .
aside from , you know , getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place , it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community .
it asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community 's development .
so the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer , and we 're helping dr. zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day .
and then the third approach , which is what i 'm most excited about , which is where we are now , is : design as education .
so " design as education " means that we could actually teach design within public schools , and not design-based learning - not like " let 's learn physics by building a rocket , " but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose .
it also means that designers are no longer consultants , but we 're teachers , and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation .
and what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring , rigid , verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by .
it 's hands-on , it 's in-your-face , it requires an active engagement , and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways .
so we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class - wood and metal shop class in particular - historically , has been something intended for kids who are n't going to go to college .
it 's a vocational training path .
it 's working-class ; it 's blue-collar .
the projects are things like , let 's make a birdhouse for your mom for christmas .
and in recent decades , a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely .
so we thought , what if you could bring back shop class , but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed , and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process .
so we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with dr. zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class .
and so this starts in four weeks , at the end of the summer , and my partner and i , matthew and i , just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it .
and this is what it looks like .
so over the course of two semesters , the fall and the spring , the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio / shop space .
and during that time , they 're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need-finding , coming back into the studio , doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work , and then moving into the shop and actually testing them , building them , prototyping them , figuring out if they are going to work and refining that .
and then over the summer , they 're offered a summer job .
they 're paid as employees of project h to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community .
so the first project , which will be built next summer , is an open-air farmers ' market downtown , followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year .
so these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say , " i built that , and i 'm proud of it . "
so i want you to meet three of our students .
this is ryan .
she is 15 years old .
she loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher .
she wants to go to college , but she wants to come back to bertie county , because that 's where her family is from , where she calls home , and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she 's been fairly fortunate in .
so what studio h might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way .
this is eric . he plays for the football team .
he is really into dirtbike racing , and he wants to be an architect .
so for him , studio h offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect , everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client .
and then this is anthony .
he is 16 years old , loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands , and so for him , studio h means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement .
he 's interested in forestry , but he is n't sure , so if he ends up not going to college , he will have developed some industry-relevant skills .
what design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom .
so this building downtown , which may very well become the site of our future farmers ' market , is now the classroom .
and going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why - that 's a homework assignment .
and the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers ' market and it 's open to the public - that 's the final exam .
and for the community , what design and building offers is real , visible , built progress .
it 's one project per year , and it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future .
so we recognize that studio h , especially in its first year , is a small story - 13 students , it 's two teachers , it 's one project in one place .
but we feel like this could work in other places .
and i really , strongly believe in the power of the small story , because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale .
because , when you zoom out that far , you lose the ability to view people as humans .
ultimately , design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers .
and let 's face it , designers , we need to reinvent ourselves .
we need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter , we need to work outside of our comfort zones more , and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard .
so while this is a very small story , we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is how war starts .
one day you 're living your ordinary life , you 're planning to go to a party , you 're taking your children to school , you 're making a dentist appointment .
the next thing , the telephones go out , the tvs go out , there 's armed men on the street , there 's roadblocks .
your life as you know it goes into suspended animation .
it stops .
i 'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine , a bosnian friend , about what happened to her , because i think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like .
she was walking to work one day in april , 1992 , in a miniskirt and high heels . she worked in a bank .
she was a young mother . she was someone who liked to party .
great person .
and suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of sarajevo knocking everything out of its path .
she thinks she 's dreaming , but she 's not .
and she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover , and she hides behind a trash bin , in her high heels and her miniskirt .
and as she 's hiding there , she 's feeling ridiculous , but she 's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos and she thinks , " i feel like alice in wonderland going down the rabbit hole , down , down , down into chaos , and my life will never be the same again . "
a few weeks later , my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus , which was one of the last buses leaving sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe .
and she remembers struggling with her mother to the front , crowds and crowds of people , " take my child ! take my child ! "
and passing her son to someone through a window .
and she did n't see him for years .
the siege went on for three and a half years , and it was a siege without water , without power , without electricity , without heat , without food , in the middle of europe , in the middle of the 20th century .
i had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege , and i say i have the honor and the privilege of being there because it 's taught me everything , not just about being a reporter , but about being a human being .
i learned about compassion .
i learned about ordinary people who could be heroes .
i learned about sharing . i learned about camaraderie .
most of all , i learned about love .
even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos , i learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors , share food , raise their children , drag someone who 's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life , helping people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals .
i learned so much about myself .
martha gellhorn , who 's one of my heroes , once said , " you can only love one war . the rest is responsibility . "
i went on to cover many , many , many wars after that , so many that i lost count , but there was nothing like sarajevo .
last april , i went back to a very strange - what i called a deranged high school reunion .
what it was , was the 20th anniversary of the siege , the beginning of the siege of sarajevo , and i do n't like the word " anniversary , " because it sounds like a party , and this was not a party .
it was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war , humanitarian aid workers , and of course the brave and courageous people of sarajevo themselves .
and the thing that struck me the most , that broke my heart , was walking down the main street of sarajevo , where my friend aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago , and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs , empty , and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege , just in sarajevo , not in all of bosnia , and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it , and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children .
i now cover syria , and i started reporting it because i believed that it needs to be done .
i believe a story there has to be told .
i see , again , a template of the war in bosnia .
and when i first arrived in damascus , i saw this strange moment where people did n't seem to believe that war was going to descend , and it was exactly the same in bosnia and nearly every other country i 've seen where war comes .
people do n't want to believe it 's coming , so they do n't leave , they do n't leave before they can .
they do n't get their money out .
they stay because you want to stay in your home .
and then war and chaos descend .
rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot .
in 1994 , i briefly left sarajevo to go report the genocide in rwanda .
between april and august , 1994 , one million people were slaughtered .
now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number , i want you just for a second to think of a million people .
and to give you some example , i remember standing and looking down a road as far as i could see , at least a mile , and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead .
and that was just a small percentage of the dead .
and there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes .
so we learn a lot from war , and i mention rwanda because it is one place , like south africa , where nearly 20 years on , there is healing .
fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women , which is fantastic , and there 's also within the national constitution now , you 're actually not allowed to say hutu or tutsi .
you 're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity , which is , of course , what started the slaughter in the first place .
and an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story , or i find it beautiful .
there was a group of children , mixed hutus and tutsis , and a group of women who were adopting them , and they lined up and one was just given to the next .
there was no kind of compensation for , you 're a tutsi , you 're a hutu , you might have killed my mother , you might have killed my father .
they were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation , and i find this remarkable .
so when people ask me how i continue to cover war , and why i continue to do it , this is why .
when i go back to syria , next week in fact , what i see is incredibly heroic people , some of them fighting for democracy , for things we take for granted every single day .
and that 's pretty much why i do it .
in 2004 , i had a little baby boy , and i call him my miracle child , because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life , this ray of hope was born .
and i called him luca , which means " the bringer of light , " because he does bring light to my life .
but i 'm talking about him because when he was four months old , my foreign editor forced me to go back to baghdad where i had been reporting all throughout the saddam regime and during the fall of baghdad and afterwards , and i remember getting on the plane in tears , crying to be separated from my son , and while i was there , a quite famous iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me , " what are you doing here ?
why are n't you home with luca ? "
and i said , " well , i have to see . " it was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in iraq , " i have to see , i have to see what is happening here .
i have to report it . "
and he said , " go home , because if you miss his first tooth , if you miss his first step , you 'll never forgive yourself .
but there will always be another war . "
and there , sadly , will always be wars .
and i am deluding myself if i think , as a journalist , as a reporter , as a writer , what i do can stop them . i ca n't .
i 'm not kofi annan . he ca n't stop a war .
he tried to negotiate syria and could n't do it .
i 'm not a u.n. conflict resolution person .
i 'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor , and i ca n't tell you the times of how helpless i 've felt to have people dying in front of me , and i could n't save them .
all i am is a witness .
my role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless .
a colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world .
and that 's what i try to do .
i 'm not always successful , and sometimes it 's incredibly frustrating , because you feel like you 're writing into a void , or you feel like no one cares .
who cares about syria ? who cares about bosnia ?
who cares about the congo , the ivory coast , liberia , sierra leone , all of these strings of places that i will remember for the rest of my life ?
but my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux , the heart of the matter , for us reporters who do this .
and all i can really do is hope , not to policymakers or politicians , because as much as i 'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something , i do n't delude myself .
but what i do hope is that if you remember anything i said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast , if you can remember the story of sarajevo , or the story of rwanda , then i 've done my job .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today , i 'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes .
my base of operations is in the u.s. , but let 's start at the other end of the map , in kyoto , japan , where i was living with a japanese family while i was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago .
i knew even then that i would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings , but they popped up when i least expected it .
on my first day , i went to a restaurant , and i ordered a cup of green tea with sugar .
after a pause , the waiter said , " one does not put sugar in green tea . "
" i know , " i said . " i 'm aware of this custom .
but i really like my tea sweet . "
in response , he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation .
" one does not put sugar in green tea . "
" i understand , " i said , " that the japanese do not put sugar in their green tea , but i 'd like to put some sugar in my green tea . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- surprised by my insistence , the waiter took up the issue with the manager .
pretty soon , a lengthy discussion ensued , and finally the manager came over to me and said , " i am very sorry . we do not have sugar . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , since i could n't have my tea the way i wanted it , i ordered a cup of coffee , which the waiter brought over promptly .
resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar .
my failure to procure myself a cup of sweet , green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding .
this was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice .
from my american perspective , when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences , she has every right to have that request met .
the american way , to quote burger king , is to " have it your way , " because , as starbucks says , " happiness is in your choices . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but from the japanese perspective , it 's their duty to protect those who do n't know any better - -lrb- laughter -rrb- in this case , the ignorant gaijin - from making the wrong choice .
let 's face it : the way i wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards , and they were doing their best to help me save face .
americans tend to believe that they 've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice .
they think that choice , as seen through the american lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans .
unfortunately , these beliefs are based on assumptions that do n't always hold true in many countries , in many cultures .
at times they do n't even hold true at america 's own borders .
i 'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them .
as i do so , i hope you 'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds .
first assumption : if a choice affects you , then you should be the one to make it .
this is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for .
it is essential for success .
in america , the primary locus of choice is the individual .
people must choose for themselves , sometimes sticking to their guns , regardless of what other people want or recommend .
it 's called " being true to yourself . "
but do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice ?
mark lepper and i did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question .
in one study , which we ran in japantown , san francisco , we brought seven- to nine-year-old anglo- and asian-american children into the laboratory , and we divided them up into three groups .
the first group came in , and they were greeted by miss smith , who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles .
the kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do , and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with .
when the second group of children came in , they were brought to the same room , shown the same anagrams , but this time miss smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with .
now when the third group came in , they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in reality , the kids who were told what to do , whether by miss smith or their mothers , were actually given the very same activity , which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen .
with this procedure , we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity , making it easier for us to compare performance .
such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed .
anglo-americans , they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them , as compared to when it was chosen for them by miss smith or their mothers .
it did n't matter who did the choosing , if the task was dictated by another , their performance suffered .
in fact , some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one girl named mary said , " you asked my mother ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in contrast , asian-american children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice , second best when they chose for themselves , and least well when it had been chosen by miss smith .
a girl named natsumi even approached miss smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked , " could you please tell my mommy i did it just like she said ? "
the first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents ' approach to choice .
for them , choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality , but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected .
if they had a concept of being true to one 's self , then that self , most likely , -lsb- was -rsb- composed , not of an individual , but of a collective .
success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one 's own preferences .
or , you could say that the individual 's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others .
the assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others .
when , in contrast , two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected , then they may amplify one another 's success by turning choosing into a collective act .
to insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships .
yet that is exactly what the american paradigm demands .
it leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility .
it requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act .
people that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating , but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone .
the second assumption which informs the american view of choice goes something like this .
the more choices you have , the more likely you are to make the best choice .
so bring it on , walmart , with 100,000 different products , and amazon , with 27 million books and match.com with - what is it ? - 15 million date possibilities now .
you will surely find the perfect match .
let 's test this assumption by heading over to eastern europe .
here , i interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries , who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society .
one of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question , but from a simple gesture of hospitality .
when the participants arrived for their interview , i offered them a set of drinks : coke , diet coke , sprite - seven , to be exact .
during the very first session , which was run in russia , one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard .
" oh , but it does n't matter .
it 's all just soda . that 's just one choice . "
-lrb- murmuring -rrb- i was so struck by this comment that from then on , i started to offer all the participants those seven sodas , and i asked them , " how many choices are these ? "
again and again , they perceived these seven different sodas , not as seven choices , but as one choice : soda or no soda .
when i put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas , now they perceived it as only three choices - juice , water and soda .
compare this to the die-hard devotion of many americans , not just to a particular flavor of soda , but to a particular brand .
you know , research shows repeatedly that we ca n't actually tell the difference between coke and pepsi .
of course , you and i know that coke is the better choice .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for modern americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world , choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is .
combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better , and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters .
but for eastern europeans , the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge .
they were flooded with choice before they could protest that they did n't know how to swim .
when asked , " what words and images do you associate with choice ? "
grzegorz from warsaw said , " ah , for me it is fear .
there are some dilemmas you see .
i am used to no choice . "
bohdan from kiev said , in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace , " it is too much .
we do not need everything that is there . "
a sociologist from the warsaw survey agency explained , " the older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them .
they were never given a chance to learn how to react . "
and tomasz , a young polish man said , " i do n't need twenty kinds of chewing gum .
i do n't mean to say that i want no choice , but many of these choices are quite artificial . "
in reality , many choices are between things that are not that much different .
the value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options .
americans train their whole lives to play " spot the difference . "
they practice this from such an early age that they 've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability .
in fact , though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice , we do n't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent .
when someone ca n't see how one choice is unlike another , or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast , the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating .
instead of making better choices , we become overwhelmed by choice , sometimes even afraid of it .
choice no longer offers opportunities , but imposes constraints .
it 's not a marker of liberation , but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae .
in other words , choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in america when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it .
but it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice .
americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice .
we all have physical , mental and emotional -lrb- laughter -rrb- limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter , even in the grocery store , let alone over the course of our entire lives .
a number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they 're making a choice , they make poorer decisions , whether it be health care , investment , other critical areas .
yet still , many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them .
this brings me to the third , and perhaps most problematic , assumption : " you must never say no to choice . "
to examine this , let 's go back to the u.s.
and then hop across the pond to france .
right outside chicago , a young couple , susan and daniel mitchell , were about to have their first baby .
they 'd already picked out a name for her , barbara , after her grandmother .
one night , when susan was seven months pregnant , she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room .
the baby was delivered through a c-section , but barbara suffered cerebral anoxia , a loss of oxygen to the brain .
unable to breathe on her own , she was put on a ventilator .
two days later , the doctors gave the mitchells a choice : they could either remove barbara off the life support , in which case she would die within a matter of hours , or they could keep her on life support , in which case she might still die within a matter of days .
if she survived , she would remain in a permanent vegetative state , never able to walk , talk or interact with others .
what do they do ?
what do any parent do ?
in a study i conducted with simona botti and kristina orfali , american and french parents were interviewed .
they had all suffered the same tragedy .
in all cases , the life support was removed , and the infants had died .
but there was a big difference .
in france , the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed , while in the united states , the final decision rested with the parents .
we wondered : does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one ?
we found that it did .
even up to a year later , american parents were more likely to express negative emotions , as compared to their french counterparts .
french parents were more likely to say things like , " noah was here for so little time , but he taught us so much .
he gave us a new perspective on life . "
american parents were more likely to say things like , " what if ? what if ? "
another parent complained , " i feel as if they purposefully tortured me .
how did they get me to do that ? "
and another parent said , " i feel as if i 've played a role in an execution . "
but when the american parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctors make the decision , they all said , " no . "
they could not imagine turning that choice over to another , even though having made that choice made them feel trapped , guilty , angry .
in a number of cases they were even clinically depressed .
these parents could not contemplate giving up the choice , because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice .
in her essay , " the white album , " joan didion writes , " we tell ourselves stories in order to live .
we interpret what we see , select the most workable of the multiple choices .
we live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images , by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria , which is our actual experience . "
the story americans tell , the story upon which the american dream depends , is the story of limitless choice .
this narrative promises so much : freedom , happiness , success .
it lays the world at your feet and says , " you can have anything , everything . "
it 's a great story , and it 's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it .
but when you take a close look , you start to see the holes , and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways .
americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice , believing that they will be , or ought to be , welcomed with open hearts and minds .
but the history books and the daily news tell us it does n't always work out that way .
the phantasmagoria , the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative , varies from place to place .
no single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere .
moreover , americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative , which has been driving their choices for so long .
robert frost once said that , " it is poetry that is lost in translation . "
this suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving , whatever gives us a new way to see , can not be communicated to those who speak a different language .
but joseph brodsky said that , " it is poetry that is gained in translation , " suggesting that translation can be a creative , transformative act .
when it comes to choice , we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives .
instead of replacing one story with another , we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written .
no matter where we 're from and what your narrative is , we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do , and what it can represent .
and this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism .
rather , it teaches us when and how to act .
it brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice , to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but does n't always deliver .
if we learn to speak to one another , albeit through translation , then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness , complexity and compelling beauty .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : thank you .
sheena , there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book .
but by now it 's evident to everyone in this room . you 're blind .
and i guess one of the questions on everybody 's mind is : how does that influence your study of choosing because that 's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on ?
sheena iyengar : well , it 's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that 's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices .
and as you just mentioned , there 's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days .
yeah , i - as you would expect - get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because i have to rely on what other people suggest .
and i ca n't decide .
and so one time i was in a beauty salon , and i was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink .
and one was called " ballet slippers . "
and the other one was called " adorable . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i asked these two ladies , and the one lady told me , " well , you should definitely wear ' ballet slippers . " ' " well , what does it look like ? "
" well , it 's a very elegant shade of pink . "
" okay , great . "
the other lady tells me to wear " adorable . "
" what does it look like ? "
" it 's a glamorous shade of pink . "
and so i asked them , " well , how do i tell them apart ?
what 's different about them ? "
and they said , " well , one is elegant , the other one 's glamorous . "
okay , we got that .
and the only thing they had consensus on : well , if i could see them , i would clearly be able to tell them apart .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what i wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color , so i decided to do a little experiment .
so i brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory , and i stripped the labels off .
and i brought women into the laboratory , and i asked them , " which one would you pick ? "
50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick , of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- at which point you start to wonder who the trick 's really played on .
now , of the women that could tell them apart , when the labels were off , they picked " adorable , " and when the labels were on , they picked " ballet slippers . "
so as far as i can tell , a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different .
bg : thank you . sheena iyengar . thank you sheena .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . i 'm here to talk about congestion , namely road congestion .
road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon .
it exists in basically all of the cities all around the world , which is a little bit surprising when you think about it .
i mean , think about how different cities are , actually .
i mean , you have the typical european cities , with a dense urban core , good public transportation mostly , not a lot of road capacity .
but then , on the other hand , you have the american cities .
it 's moving by itself , okay .
anyway , the american cities : lots of roads dispersed over large areas , almost no public transportation .
and then you have the emerging world cities , with a mixed variety of vehicles , mixed land-use patterns , also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core .
and traffic planners all around the world have tried lots of different measures : dense cities or dispersed cities , lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information , or lots of different things , but nothing seems to work .
but all of these attempts have one thing in common .
they 're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving .
they 're essentially , to a point , attempts at planning what other people should do , planning their life for them .
now , planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do , and let me tell you a story .
back in 1989 , when the berlin wall fell , an urban planner in london got a phone call from a colleague in moscow saying , basically , " hi , this is vladimir . i 'd like to know , who 's in charge of london 's bread supply ? "
and the urban planner in london goes , " what do you mean , who 's in charge of london 's - i mean , no one is in charge . "
" oh , but surely someone must be in charge .
i mean , it 's a very complicated system . someone must control all of this . "
" no . no . no one is in charge .
i mean , it basically - i have n't really thought of it .
it basically organizes itself . "
it organizes itself .
that 's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing , and this is a very deep insight .
when you try to solve really complex social problems , the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives .
you do n't plan the details , and people will figure out what to do , how to adapt to this new framework .
and let 's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion .
this is a map of stockholm , my hometown .
now , stockholm is a medium-sized city , roughly two million people , but stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges - narrow bridges , old bridges - which means lots of road congestion .
and these red dots show the most congested parts , which are the bridges that lead into the inner city .
and then someone came up with the idea that , apart from good public transport , apart from spending money on roads , let 's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks .
now , one or two euros , that is n't really a lot of money , i mean compared to parking charges and running costs , etc . , so you would probably expect that car drivers would n't really react to this fairly small charge .
you would be wrong .
one or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours .
now , 20 percent , well , that 's a fairly huge figure , you might think , but you 've still got 80 percent left of the problem , right ?
because you still have 80 percent of the traffic .
now , that 's also wrong , because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon , meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really , really rapidly .
but fortunately , it also works the other way around .
if you can reduce traffic even somewhat , then congestion will go down much faster than you might think .
now , congestion charges were introduced in stockholm on january 3 , 2006 , and the first picture here is a picture of stockholm , one of the typical streets , january 2 .
the first day with the congestion charges looked like this .
this is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets .
you really reduce congestion quite substantially .
but , well , as i said , i mean , car drivers adapt , right ?
so after a while they would all come back because they have sort of gotten used to charges .
wrong again . it 's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in stockholm , and we basically have the same low traffic levels still .
but you see , there 's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007 .
well , the thing is that , the congestion charges , they were introduced first as a trial , so they were introduced in january and then abolished again at the end of july , followed by a referendum , and then they were reintroduced again in 2007 , which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity .
i mean , this was a really fun experiment to start with , and we actually got to do it twice .
and personally , i would like to do this every once a year or so , but they wo n't let me do that .
but it was fun anyway .
so , we followed up . what happened ?
this is the last day with the congestion charges , july 31 , and you see the same street but now it 's summer , and summer in stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year , and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this .
all the cars were back again , and you even have to admire the car drivers . they adapt so extremely quickly .
the first day they all came back .
and this effect hanged on . so 2007 figures looked like this .
now these traffic figures are really exciting and a little bit surprising and very useful to know , but i would say that the most surprising slide here i 'm going to show you today is not this one . it 's this one .
this shows public support for congestion pricing of stockholm , and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of spring 2006 , people were fiercely against it .
seventy percent of the population did n't want this .
but what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect , that people hated it more and more .
no , on the contrary , they changed , up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges , meaning that - i mean , let me repeat that : 70 percent of the population in stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free .
okay . so why can that be ? why is that ?
well , think about it this way . who changed ?
i mean , the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared , surely they must be discontent in a way .
and where did they go ? if we can understand this , then maybe we can figure out how people can be so happy with this .
well , so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services , and tried to figure out who changed , and where did they go ?
and it turned out that they do n't know themselves . -lrb- laughter -rrb- for some reason , the car drivers are - they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do .
and why is that ? it 's because that travel patterns are much less stable than you might think .
each day , people make new decisions , and people change and the world changes around them , and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people do n't even notice .
they 're not even aware of this themselves .
and the other question , who changed their mind ?
who changed their opinion , and why ?
so we did another interview survey , tried to figure out why people changed their mind , and what type of group changed their minds ?
and after analyzing the answers , it turned out that more than half of them believe that they have n't changed their minds .
they 're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along .
which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent , and reduced congestion by enormous numbers , and people are n't even aware that they have changed , and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along .
this is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems , and when you do that , you should n't try to tell people how to adapt .
you should just nudge them in the right direction .
and if you do it right , people will actually embrace the change , and if you do it right , people will actually even like it .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- well , i have a big announcement to make today , and i 'm really excited about this .
and this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what i 've done well .
i 've really tried to solve some big problems : counterterrorism , nuclear terrorism , and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer , but i started thinking about all these problems , and i realized that the really biggest problem we face , what all these other problems come down to , is energy , is electricity , the flow of electrons .
and i decided that i was going to set out to try to solve this problem .
and this probably is not what you 're expecting .
you 're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion , because that 's what i 've done most of my life .
but this is actually a talk about , okay - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but this is actually a talk about fission .
it 's about perfecting something old , and bringing something old into the 21st century .
let 's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works .
in a nuclear power plant , you have a big pot of water that 's under high pressure , and you have some fuel rods , and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium , and they 're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel , and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level , and that reaction heats up water , the water turns to steam , steam turns the turbine , and you produce electricity from it .
this is the same way we 've been producing electricity , the steam turbine idea , for 100 years , and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water , but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine .
and i thought , you know , is this the best way to do it ?
is fission kind of played out , or is there something left to innovate here ?
and i realized that i had hit upon something that i think has this huge potential to change the world .
and this is what it is .
this is a small modular reactor .
so it 's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here .
this is between 50 and 100 megawatts .
but that 's a ton of power .
that 's between , say at an average use , that 's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that .
now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they 're built in a factory .
so they 're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line , and they 're trucked anywhere in the world , you plop them down , and they produce electricity .
this region right here is the reactor .
and this is buried below ground , which is really important .
for someone who 's done a lot of counterterrorism work , i ca n't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns .
and inside this reactor is a molten salt , so anybody who 's a fan of thorium , they 're going to be really excited about this , because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle , uranium-233 .
but i 'm not really concerned about the fuel .
you can run these off - they 're really hungry , they really like down-blended weapons pits , so that 's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that 's been down-blended .
it 's made into a grade where it 's not usable for a nuclear weapon , but they love this stuff .
and we have a lot of it sitting around , because this is a big problem .
you know , in the cold war , we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons , and that was great , and we do n't need them anymore , and what are we doing with all the waste , essentially ?
what are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons ?
well , we 're securing them , and it would be great if we could burn them , eat them up , and this reactor loves this stuff .
so it 's a molten salt reactor . it has a core , and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt , the radioactive salt , to a cold salt which is n't radioactive .
it 's still thermally hot but it 's not radioactive .
and then that 's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really , really interesting , and that 's a heat exchanger to a gas .
so going back to what i was saying before about all power being produced - well , other than photovoltaic - being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine , that 's actually not that efficient , and in fact , in a nuclear power plant like this , it 's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient .
that 's how much thermal energy the reactor 's putting out to how much electricity it 's producing .
and the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature .
they operate anywhere from , you know , maybe 200 to 300 degrees celsius .
and these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees celsius , which means the higher the temperature you go to , thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies .
and this reactor does n't use water . it uses gas , so supercritical co2 or helium , and that goes into a turbine , and this is called the brayton cycle .
this is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity , and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient , between 45 and 50 percent efficiency .
and i 'm really excited about this , because it 's a very compact core .
molten salt reactors are very compact by nature , but what 's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you 're fissioning , not to mention the fact that these burn up .
their burn-up is much higher .
so for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor , a lot more of it 's being used .
and the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is , you 've got these rods that are clad in zirconium , and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets .
well , uranium dioxide 's a ceramic , and ceramic does n't like releasing what 's inside of it .
so you have what 's called the xenon pit , and so some of these fission products love neutrons .
they love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place .
and they eat them up , which means that , combined with the fact that the cladding does n't last very long , you can only run one of these reactors for roughly , say , 18 months without refueling it .
so these reactors run for 30 years without refueling , which is , in my opinion , very , very amazing , because it means it 's a sealed system .
no refueling means you can seal them up and they 're not going to be a proliferation risk , and they 're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores .
but let 's go back to safety , because everybody after fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear , and one of the things when i set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe , and i 'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons .
one , it does n't operate at high pressure .
so traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor , they 're very , very hot water at very high pressures , and this means , essentially , in the event of an accident , if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel , the coolant would leave the core .
these reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure , so there 's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident .
also , they operate at high temperatures , and the fuel is molten , so they ca n't melt down , but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances , or you lost off-site power in the case of something like fukushima , there 's a dump tank .
because your fuel is liquid , and it 's combined with your coolant , you could actually just drain the core into what 's called a sub-critical setting , basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers .
and this is really important , because the reaction stops .
in this kind of reactor , you ca n't do that .
the fuel , like i said , is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods , and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors , fukushima and three mile island - looking back at three mile island , we did n't really see this for a while - but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods , what happens is , when they see high pressure water , steam , in an oxidizing environment , they 'll actually produce hydrogen , and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products .
so the core of this reactor , since it 's not under pressure and it does n't have this chemical reactivity , means that there 's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor .
so even in the event of an accident , yeah , the reactor may be toast , which is , you know , sorry for the power company , but we 're not going to contaminate large quantities of land .
so i really think that in the , say , 20 years it 's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality , this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity .
carbon-free electricity .
and it 's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change , but it 's an innovation .
it 's a way to bring power to the developing world , because it 's produced in a factory and it 's cheap .
you can put them anywhere in the world you want to .
and maybe something else .
as a kid , i was obsessed with space .
well , i was obsessed with nuclear science too , to a point , but before that i was obsessed with space , and i was really excited about , you know , being an astronaut and designing rockets , which was something that was always exciting to me .
but i think i get to come back to this , because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts .
that is the rocket designer 's dream .
that 's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet 's dream .
not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there , but you have power once you get there .
you know , rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells , i mean a few watts or kilowatts - wow , that 's a lot of power .
i mean , now we 're talking about 100 megawatts .
that 's a ton of power .
that could power a martian community .
that could power a rocket there .
and so i hope that maybe i 'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that i explore my nuclear passion .
and people say , " oh , well , you 've launched this thing , and it 's radioactive , into space , and what about accidents ? "
but we launch plutonium batteries all the time .
everybody was really excited about curiosity , and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238 , which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors , which means that the effects would be negligible , because you launch it cold , and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor .
so i 'm really excited .
i think that i 've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy , provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications , and i 'm really prepared to do this .
i graduated high school in may , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - i graduated high school in may , and i decided that i was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that i 've developed , these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes , but i want to do this , and i 've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people i 've ever had the chance to work with , and i 'm really prepared to make this a reality .
and i think , i think , that looking at the technology , this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas , and you do n't have to refuel it for 30 years , which is an advantage for the developing world .
and i 'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with , which is weird for a scientist .
but i think there 's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars , because the stars are giant fusion reactors .
they 're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky .
the energy that i 'm able to talk to you today , while it was converted to chemical energy in my food , originally came from a nuclear reaction , and so there 's something poetic about , in my opinion , perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy .
so thank you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is called hooked on a feeling : the pursuit of happiness and human design .
i put up a somewhat dour darwin , but a very happy chimp up there .
my first point is that the pursuit of happiness is obligatory .
man wishes to be happy , only wishes to be happy , and can not wish not to be so .
we are wired to pursue happiness , not only to enjoy it , but to want more and more of it .
so given that that 's true , how good are we at increasing our happiness ?
well , we certainly try .
if you look on the amazon site , there are over 2,000 titles with advice on the seven habits , the nine choices , the 10 secrets , the 14,000 thoughts that are supposed to bring happiness .
now another way we try to increase our happiness is we medicate ourselves .
and so there 's over 120 million prescriptions out there for antidepressants .
prozac was really the first absolute blockbuster drug .
it was clean , efficient , there was no high , there was really no danger , it had no street value .
in 1995 , illegal drugs were a $ 400 billion business , representing eight percent of world trade , roughly the same as gas and oil .
these routes to happiness have n't really increased happiness very much .
one problem that 's happening now is , although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon , depression and anxiety are rising .
some people say this is because we have better diagnosis , and more people are being found out .
it is n't just that . we 're seeing it all over the world .
in the united states right now there are more suicides than homicides .
there is a rash of suicide in china .
and the world health organization predicts by the year 2020 that depression will be the second largest cause of disability .
now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world , we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy .
but this does not follow any of the usual trends .
for example , these two show great growth in income , absolutely flat happiness curves .
my field , the field of psychology , has n't done a whole lot to help us move forward in understanding human happiness .
in part , we have the legacy of freud , who was a pessimist , who said that pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest , is propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality .
he said , " one feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation . "
so the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy was really what freud called ordinary misery .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and freud in part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system - which is that we have both a positive and a negative system , and our negative system is extremely sensitive .
so for example , we 're born loving the taste of something sweet and reacting aversively to the taste of something bitter .
we also find that people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain .
the formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks , or interactions , for every one negative .
and that 's how powerful the one negative is .
especially expressions of contempt or disgust , well you really need a lot of positives to upset that .
i also put in here the stress response .
we 're wired for dangers that are immediate , that are physical , that are imminent , and so our body goes into an incredible reaction where endogenous opioids come in .
we have a system that is really ancient , and really there for physical danger .
and so over time , this becomes a stress response , which has enormous effects on the body .
cortisol floods the brain ; it destroys hippocampal cells and memory , and can lead to all kinds of health problems .
but unfortunately , we need this system in part .
if we were only governed by pleasure we would not survive .
we really have two command posts .
emotions are short-lived intense responses to challenge and to opportunity .
and each one of them allows us to click into alternate selves that tune in , turn on , drop out thoughts , perceptions , feelings and memories .
we tend to think of emotions as just feelings .
but in fact , emotions are an all-systems alert that change what we remember , what kind of decisions we make , and how we perceive things .
so let me go forward to the new science of happiness .
we 've come away from the freudian gloom , and people are now actively studying this .
and one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints of a single continuum .
the freudian model is really one continuum that , as you get less miserable , you get happier .
and that is n't true - when you get less miserable , you get less miserable .
and that happiness is a whole other end of the equation .
and it 's been missing . it 's been missing from psychotherapy .
so when people 's symptoms go away , they tend to recur , because there is n't a sense of the other half - of what pleasure , happiness , compassion , gratitude , what are the positive emotions .
and of course we know this intuitively , that happiness is not just the absence of misery .
but somehow it was not put forward until very recently , seeing these as two parallel systems .
so that the body can both look for opportunity and also protect itself from danger , at the same time .
and they 're sort of two reciprocal and dynamically interacting systems .
people have also wanted to deconstruct .
we use this word " happy , " and it 's this very large umbrella of a term .
and then three emotions for which there are no english words : fiero , which is the pride in accomplishment of a challenge ; schadenfreude , which is happiness in another 's misfortune , a malicious pleasure ; and naches , which is a pride and joy in one 's children .
absent from this list , and absent from any discussions of happiness , are happiness in another 's happiness .
we do n't seem to have a word for that .
we are very sensitive to the negative , but it is in part offset by the fact that we have a positivity .
we 're also born pleasure-seekers .
babies love the taste of sweet and hate the taste of bitter .
they love to touch smooth surfaces rather than rough ones .
they like to look at beautiful faces rather than plain faces .
they like to listen to consonant melodies instead of dissonant melodies .
babies really are born with a lot of innate pleasures .
there was once a statement made by a psychologist that said that 80 percent of the pursuit of happiness is really just about the genes , and it 's as difficult to become happier as it is to become taller .
that 's nonsense .
there is a decent contribution to happiness from the genes - about 50 percent - but there is still that 50 percent that is unaccounted for .
let 's just go into the brain for a moment , and see where does happiness arise from in evolution .
we have basically at least two systems here , and they both are very ancient .
one is the reward system , and that 's fed by the chemical dopamine .
and it starts in the ventral tegmental area .
it goes to the nucleus accumbens , all the way up to the prefrontal cortex , orbital frontal cortex , where decisions are made , high level .
this was originally seen as a system that was the pleasure system of the brain .
in the 1950s , olds and milner put electrodes into the brain of a rat .
and the rat would just keep pressing that bar thousands and thousands and thousands of times .
it would n't eat . it would n't sleep . it would n't have sex .
it would n't do anything but press this bar .
so they assumed this must be , you know , the brain 's orgasmatron .
it turned out that it was n't , that it really is a system of motivation , a system of wanting .
it gives objects what 's called incentive salience .
it makes something look so attractive that you just have to go after it .
that 's something different from the system that is the pleasure system , which simply says , " i like this . "
the pleasure system , as you see , which is the internal opiates , there is a hormone oxytocin , is widely spread throughout the brain .
dopamine system , the wanting system , is much more centralized .
the other thing about positive emotions is that they have a universal signal .
and we see here the smile .
and the universal signal is not just raising the corner of the lips to the zygomatic major .
it 's also crinkling the outer corner of the eye , the orbicularis oculi .
so you see , even 10-month-old babies , when they see their mother , will show this particular kind of smile .
extroverts use it more than introverts .
people who are relieved of depression show it more after than before .
so if you want to unmask a true look of happiness , you will look for this expression .
our pleasures are really ancient .
and we learn , of course , many , many pleasures , but many of them are base . and one of them , of course , is biophilia - that we have a response to the natural world that 's very profound .
very interesting studies done on people recovering from surgery , who found that people who faced a brick wall versus people who looked out on trees and nature , the people who looked out on the brick wall were in the hospital longer , needed more medication , and had more medical complications .
there is something very restorative about nature , and it 's part of how we are tuned .
humans , particularly so , we 're very imitative creatures .
and we imitate from almost the second we are born .
here is a three-week-old baby .
and if you stick your tongue out at this baby , the baby will do the same .
we are social beings from the beginning .
and even studies of cooperation show that cooperation between individuals lights up reward centers of the brain .
one problem that psychology has had is instead of looking at this intersubjectivity - or the importance of the social brain to humans who come into the world helpless and need each other tremendously - is that they focus instead on the self and self-esteem , and not self-other .
it 's sort of " me , " not " we . "
and i think this has been a really tremendous problem that goes against our biology and nature , and has n't made us any happier at all .
because when you think about it , people are happiest when in flow , when they 're absorbed in something out in the world , when they 're with other people , when they 're active , engaged in sports , focusing on a loved one , learning , having sex , whatever .
they 're not sitting in front of the mirror trying to figure themselves out , or thinking about themselves .
these are not the periods when you feel happiest .
the other thing is , that a piece of evidence is , is if you look at computerized text analysis of people who commit suicide , what you find there , and it 's quite interesting , is use of the first person singular - " i , " " me , " " my , " not " we " and " us " - and the letters are less hopeless than they are really alone .
and being alone is very unnatural to the human .
there is a profound need to belong .
but there are ways in which our evolutionary history can really trip us up .
because , for example , the genes do n't care whether we 're happy , they care that we replicate , that we pass our genes on .
so for example we have three systems that underlie reproduction , because it 's so important .
there 's lust , which is just wanting to have sex .
and that 's really mediated by the sex hormones .
romantic attraction , that gets into the desire system .
and that 's dopamine-fed . and that 's , " i must have this one person . "
there 's attachment , which is oxytocin , and the opiates , which says , " this is a long-term bond . "
see the problem is that , as humans , these three can separate .
so a person can be in a long term attachment , become romantically infatuated with someone else , and want to have sex with a third person .
the other way in which our genes can sometimes lead us astray is in social status .
we are very acutely aware of our social status and always seek to further and increase it .
now in the animal world , there is only one way to increase status , and that 's dominance .
i seize command by physical prowess , and i keep it by beating my chest , and you make submissive gestures .
now , the human has a whole other way to rise to the top , and that is a prestige route , which is freely conferred .
someone has expertise and knowledge , and knows how to do things , and we give that person status .
and that 's clearly the way for us to create many more niches of status so that people do n't have to be lower on the status hierarchy as they are in the animal world .
the data is n't terribly supportive of money buying happiness .
but it 's not irrelevant .
so if you look at questions like this , life satisfaction , you see life satisfaction going up with each rung of income .
you see mental distress going up with lower income .
so clearly there is some effect .
but the effect is relatively small .
and one of the problems with money is materialism .
what happens when people pursue money too avidly , is they forget about the real basic pleasures of life .
so we have here , this couple .
" do you think the less-fortunate are having better sex ? "
and then this kid over here is saying , " leave me alone with my toys . "
so one of the things is that it really takes over .
that whole dopamine-wanting system takes over and derails from any of the pleasure system .
maslow had this idea back in the 1950s that as people rise above their biological needs , as the world becomes safer and we do n't have to worry about basic needs being met - our biological system , whatever motivates us , is being satisfied - we can rise above them , to think beyond ourselves toward self-actualization or transcendence , and rise above the materialist .
so to just quickly conclude with some brief data that suggests this might be so .
one is people who underwent what is called a quantum change : they felt their life and their whole values had changed .
and sure enough , if you look at the kinds of values that come in , you see wealth , adventure , achievement , pleasure , fun , be respected , before the change , and much more post-materialist values after .
women had a whole different set of value shifts .
but very similarly , the only one that survived there was happiness .
they went from attractiveness and happiness and wealth and self-control to generosity and forgiveness .
i end with a few quotes .
" there is only one question : how to love this world ? "
and rilke , " if your daily life seems poor , do not blame it ; blame yourself .
tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches . "
" first , say to yourself what you would be .
then do what you have to do . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you had caught me straight out of college in the halls of the vermont state house where i was a lobbyist in training and asked me what i was going to do with my life , i would have told you that i 'd just passed the hanyu shuiping kaoshi , the chinese equivalency exam , and i was going to go study law in beijing , and i was going to improve u.s.-china relations through top-down policy changes and judicial system reforms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i had a plan , and i never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo .
little did i know what a huge impact it would have on me one night when i was at a party and i heard a sound coming out of a record player in the corner of a room .
and it was doc watson singing and playing " shady grove . "
♫ shady grove , my little love ♫ ♫ shady grove , my darlin ' ♫ ♫ shady grove , my little love ♫ ♫ going back to harlan ♫ that sound was just so beautiful , the sound of doc 's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo .
and after being totally and completely obsessed with the mammoth richness and history of chinese culture , it was like this total relief to hear something so truly american and so truly awesome .
i knew i had to take a banjo with me to china .
so before going to law school in china i bought a banjo , i threw it in my little red truck and i traveled down through appalachia and i learned a bunch of old american songs , and i ended up in kentucky at the international bluegrass music association convention .
and i was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me .
and they said , " hey , do you want to jam ? "
and i was like , " sure . "
so i picked up my banjo and i nervously played four songs that i actually knew with them .
and a record executive walked up to me and invited me to nashville , tennessee to make a record .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's been eight years , and i can tell you that i did n't go to china to become a lawyer .
in fact , i went to nashville .
and after a few months i was writing songs .
and the first song i wrote was in english , and the second one was in chinese .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- chinese -rsb- outside your door the world is waiting .
inside your heart a voice is calling .
the four corners of the world are watching , so travel daughter , travel .
go get it , girl .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's really been eight years since that fated night in kentucky .
and i 've played thousands of shows .
and i 've collaborated with so many incredible , inspirational musicians around the world .
and i see the power of music .
i see the power of music to connect cultures .
i see it when i stand on a stage in a bluegrass festival in east virginia and i look out at the sea of lawn chairs and i bust out into a song in chinese .
-lsb- chinese -rsb- and everybody 's eyes just pop wide open like it 's going to fall out of their heads .
and they 're like , " what 's that girl doing ? "
and then they come up to me after the show and they all have a story .
they all come up and they 're like , " you know , my aunt 's sister 's babysitter 's dog 's chicken went to china and adopted a girl . "
and i tell you what , it like everybody 's got a story .
it 's just incredible .
and then i go to china and i stand on a stage at a university and i bust out into a song in chinese and everybody sings along and they roar with delight at this girl with the hair and the instrument , and she 's singing their music .
and i see , even more importantly , the power of music to connect hearts .
like the time i was in sichuan province and i was singing for kids in relocation schools in the earthquake disaster zone .
and this little girl comes up to me .
-lsb- chinese -rsb- " big sister wong , " washburn , wong , same difference .
" big sister wong , can i sing you a song that my mom sang for me before she was swallowed in the earthquake ? "
and i sat down , she sat on my lap .
she started singing her song .
and the warmth of her body and the tears rolling down her rosy cheeks , and i started to cry .
and the light that shone off of her eyes was a place i could have stayed forever .
and in that moment , we were n't our american selves , we were n't our chinese selves , we were just mortals sitting together in that light that keeps us here .
i want to dwell in that light with you and with everyone .
and i know u.s.-china relations does n't need another lawyer .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do n't know about you , but i have n't quite figured out exactly what technology means in my life .
i 've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about .
should i be pro-technology ? should i embrace it full arms ?
should i be wary ? like you , i 'm very tempted by the latest thing .
but at the other hand , a couple of years ago i gave up all of my possessions , sold all my technology - except for a bicycle - and rode across 3,000 miles on the u.s. back roads under the power of my one body , fuelled mostly by twinkies and junk food .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 've since then tried to keep technology at arm 's length in many ways , so it does n't master my life .
at the same time , i run a website on cool tools , where i issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology .
so i 'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is as it relates to humanity , as it relates to nature , as it relates to the spiritual .
and i 'm not even sure we know what technology is .
and one definition of technology is that which is first recorded .
this is the first example of the modern use of technology that i can find .
it was the suggested syllabus for dealing with the applied arts and science at cambridge university in 1829 .
before that , obviously , technology did n't exist . but obviously it did .
i like one of the definitions that alan kay has for technology .
he says technology is anything that was invented after you were born .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it sums up a lot of what we 're talking about .
danny hillis actually has an update on that - he says technology is anything that does n't quite work yet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which also , i think , gets into a little bit of our current idea .
but i was interested in another definition of technology .
something , again , that went back to something more fundamental .
something that was deeper . and as i struggled to understand that , i came up with a way of framing the question that seemed to work for me in my investigations .
and i 'm , this morning , going to talk about this for the first time .
so this is a very rough attempt to think out loud .
the question that i came up with was this question : what does technology want ? and by that , i do n't mean , does it want chocolate or vanilla ? by what it wants , i mean , what are its inherent trends and biases ?
what are its tendencies over time ? one way to think about this is thinking about biological organisms , which we 've heard a lot about .
and the trick that richard dawkins does , which is to say , to look at them as simply as genes , as vehicles for genes .
so he 's saying , what do genes want ? the selfish gene .
and i 'm applying a similar trick to say , what if we looked at the universe in our culture through the eyes of technology ? what does technology want ?
obviously , this in an incomplete question , just as looking at an organism as only a gene is an incomplete way of looking at it .
but it 's still very , very productive . so i 'm attempting to say , if we take technology 's view of the world , what does it want ?
and i think once we ask that question we have to go back , actually , to life . because obviously , if we keep extending the origins of technology far back , i think we come back to life at some point .
so that 's where i want to begin my little exploration , is in life .
and like you heard from the previous speakers , we do n't really know what life there is on earth right now .
we have really no idea .
craig venter 's tremendous and brilliant attempt to dna sequence things in the ocean is great .
brian farrell 's work is all part of this agenda to try and actually discover all the species on earth .
and one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects , just to see what 's on life . and if we did that with our little martian probe , which we have not done on earth , we would begin to see some incredible species .
this is not on another planet . these are things that are hidden away on our planet .
this is an ant that stores its colleagues ' honey in its abdomen .
each one of these organisms that we 've described - that you 've seen from jamie and others , these magnificent things - what they 're doing , each one of them , is they 're hacking the rules of life .
i ca n't think of a single general principle of biology that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism .
every single thing that we can think of - and if you heard olivia 's talk about the sexual habits , you 'll realize that there is n't anything we can say that 's true for all life , because every single one of them is hacking something about it .
this is a solar-powered sea slug . it 's a nudibranch that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy .
this is another version of that . this is a sea dragon , and the one on the bottom , the blue one , is a juvenile that has not yet swallowed the acid , has not yet taken in the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy .
these are hacks , and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are , current consensus , six kingdoms . six different broad approaches : the plants , the animals , the fungi , the protests - the little things - the bacteria and the archaea bacteria . the archaeas .
those are the general approaches to life . that 's one way to look at life on earth today .
but a more interesting way , the current way to take the long view , is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective .
and here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution go over the linear time , we have it coming out from the center .
so in the center is the most primitive , and this is a genealogical chart of all life on earth . this is all the same six kingdoms .
you see 4,000 representative species , and you can see where we are .
but what i like about this is it shows that every living organism on earth today is equally evolved .
those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans .
they 've been around just as long and gone through just the same kind of trial and error to get here .
but we see that each one of these is actually hacking , and has a different way of finding out how to do life .
and if we take the long-term trends of life , if we begin to say , what does evolution want ? there 's several things that we see .
one of the things about evolution is that nowhere on earth have we ever been where we do n't find life .
we find life at the bottom of every long-term , long-distance drilling core into the center of rock that we bring up - and there 's bacteria in the pores of that rock .
and wherever life is , it never retreats . it 's ubiquitous and it wants to be more .
more and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life .
the second thing is is we see diversity . we also see specialization .
we see the movement from a general-purpose cell to the more specific and specialized .
and we see a drift towards complexity that 's very intuitive .
and actually , we have current data that does show that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time .
and the last thing , i bring back this nudibranch .
one of the things we see about life is that it moves from the inner to increasing sociability . and by that it means that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life .
like those chloroplast cells - they 're completely surrounded by other life .
they never touch the inner matter . there is more and more co-evolution .
and so the general , long-term trends of evolution are roughly these five : ubiquity , diversity , specialization , complexity and socialization . now , i took that and said , ok , what are the long-term trends in technology ?
and again , my question is , what does technology want ?
and so , remarkably , i discovered that there 's also a drift toward specialization .
that we see there 's a general hammer , and hammers become more and more specific over time .
there 's obviously diversity . huge numbers of things .
this is all the contents of a japanese home .
i actually had my daughter - gave her a tally counter , and i gave her an assignment last summer to go around and count the number of species of technology in our household .
and it came up with 6,000 different species of products .
i did some research and found out that the king of england , henry viii , had only about 7,000 items in his household .
and he was the king of england , and that was the entire wealth of england at the time .
so we 're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things .
this is a scene from star wars where the 3po comes out and he sees machines making machines . how depraved !
well , this is actually what we 're headed towards : world machines .
and the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies .
most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology and not non-technology , or even life .
and thirdly , the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex is at this point a cliche . and i 'm happy to say , i was partly responsible for that cliche that machines are becoming biological , but that 's pretty evident .
so the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution . the same drives that we see towards ubiquity , towards diversity , towards socialization , towards complexity . that is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out , say , the evolution of armor , you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree .
i suggest that , in fact , technology is the seventh kingdom of life .
that its operations and how it works is so similar that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom .
and so it would be sort of approximately up there , coming out of the animal kingdom . and if we were to do that , we would find out - we could actually approach technology in this way .
this is niles eldredge . he was the co-developer with stephen jay gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium .
but as a sideline , he happens to collect cornets .
he has one of the world 's largest collections - about 500 of them .
and he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites , or snails , and to do a morphological analysis , and try to derive their genealogical history over time .
this is his chart , which is not quite published yet .
but the most interesting aspect about this is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom , those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet that was no longer made . that does not happen in biology .
when something is extinct , you ca n't have it as your parent .
but that does happen in technology . and it turns out that that 's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree , and you can actually use it to determine that this is a technological system versus a biological system .
in fact , this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important that i began to think about what happens with old technology .
and it turns out that , in fact , technologies do n't die .
so i suggested this to an historian of science , and he said , " well , what about , you know , come on , what about steam cars ?
they 're not around anymore . " well actually , they are .
in fact , they 're so around that you can buy new parts for a stanley steam automobile .
and this is a website of a guy who 's selling brand new parts for the stanley automobile . and the thing that i liked is sort of this one-click , add-to-your-cart button - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - for buying steam valves . i mean , it was just - it was really there .
and so , i began to think about , well , maybe that 's just a random sample .
maybe i should do this sort of in a more conservative way .
so i took the great big 1895 montgomery ward 's catalog and i randomly went through it . and i took a page - not quite a random page - i took a page that was actually more difficult than others because lots of the pages are filled with things that are still being made . but i took this page and i said , how many of these things are still being made ?
and not antiques . i want to know how many of these things are still in production .
and the answer is : all of them .
all of them are still being produced . so you 've got corn shellers .
i do n't know who needs a corn sheller .
be it corn shellers - you 've got ploughs ; you 've got fan mills ; all these things - and these are not , again , antiques . these are - you can order these . you can go to the web and you can buy them now , brand-new made . so in a certain sense , technologies do n't die .
in fact , you can buy , for 50 bucks , a stone-age knife made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago .
it 's short , bone handle , 50 bucks . and in fact , what 's important is that this information actually never died out .
it 's not just that it was resurrected . it 's continued all along .
and in papua new guinea , they were making stone axes until two decades ago , just as a course of practical matters .
even when we try to get rid of a technology , it 's actually very hard .
so we 've all heard about the amish giving up cars .
we 've heard about the japanese giving up guns .
we 've heard about this and that . but i actually went back and took what i could find , the examples in history where there have been prohibitions against technology , and then i tried to find out when they came back in , because they always came back in . and it turns out that the time , the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited , is decreasing over time . and that basically , you can delay technology , but you ca n't kill it . so this makes sense , because in a certain sense what culture is , is the accumulation of ideas .
that 's what it 's for . it 's so that ideas do n't die out .
and when we take that , we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long-term trajectory - again , in life 's evolution - we find that each case - each of the major transitions in life - what they 're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens .
they 're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated .
so all these steps in evolution are increasing , basically , the evolution of evolvability .
so what 's happening over time in life is that the ways in which you generate these new ideas , these new hacks , are increasing . and the real tricks are ways in which you kind of explore the way of exploring .
and then what we see in the singularity , that prophesized by kurzweil and others - his idea that technology is accelerating evolution .
it 's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas .
so if you have life hacking - life means hacking , the game of survival - then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game .
and what technology is really about is better ways to evolve .
that is what we call an " infinite game . "
that 's the definition of " infinite game . " a finite game is play to win , and an infinite game is played to keep playing .
and i believe that technology is actually a cosmic force .
the origins of technology was not in 1829 , but was actually at the beginning of the big bang , and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed . the entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot , and it was so tight in there , there was no room for any difference at all .
that 's the definition . there was no temperature .
there was no difference whatsoever . and at the big bang , what it expanded was the potential for difference .
so as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences , diversity , options , choices , opportunities , possibilities and freedoms .
those are all basically the same thing .
and those are the things that technology brings us .
that 's what technology is bringing us : choices , possibilities , freedoms .
that 's what it 's about . it 's this expansion of room to make differences .
and so a hammer , when we grab a hammer , that 's what we 're grabbing .
and that 's why we continue to grab technology - because we want those things . those things are good .
differences , freedom , choices , possibilities .
and each time we make a new opportunity place , we 're allowing a platform to make new ones .
and i think it 's really important . because if you can imagine mozart before the technology of the piano was invented - what a loss to society there would be .
imagine van gogh being born before the technologies of cheap oil paints .
imagine hitchcock before the technologies of film .
somewhere , today , there are millions of young children being born whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented .
we have a moral obligation to invent technology so that every person on the globe has the potential to realize their true difference .
we want a trillion zillion species of one individuals .
that 's what technology really wants .
i 'm going to skip through some of the objections because i do n't have answers to why there 's deforestation .
i do n't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be bad technologies . i do n't have an answer to how this impacts on our dignity , other than to suggest that maybe the seventh kingdom , because it 's so close to what life is about , maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life .
maybe in some ways the fact that what we 're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it .
it 's a terrible thing to spray ddt on cotton fields , but it 's a really good thing to use to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village .
our humanity is actually defined by technology .
all the things that we think that we really like about humanity is being driven by technology . this is the infinite game .
that 's what we 're talking about .
you see , technology is a way to evolve the evolution .
it 's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more .
and it 's actually a way of playing the game , of playing all the games .
that 's what technology wants .
and so when i think about what technology wants , i think that it has to do with the fact that every person here - and i really believe this - every person here has an assignment . and your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is .
that recursive nature is the infinite game .
and if you play that well , you 'll have other people involved , so even that game extends and continues even when you 're gone .
that is the infinite game . and what technology is is the medium in which we play that infinite game .
and so i think that we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of our journey in finding out who we are .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a designer and an educator .
i 'm a multitasking person , and i push my students to fly through a very creative , multitasking design process .
but how efficient is , really , this multitasking ?
let 's consider for a while the option of monotasking .
a couple of examples .
look at that .
this is my multitasking activity result . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so trying to cook , answering the phone , writing sms , and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue .
so someone tells us the story about supertaskers , so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment .
but what about ourselves , and what about our reality ?
when 's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend ?
so this is a project i 'm working on , and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super , hyper - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- to downgrade our super , hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function .
another example : have you ever been to venice ?
how beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island .
but our multitasking reality is pretty different , and full of tons of information .
so what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure ?
i know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge , but i push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task , or maybe turning your digital senses totally off .
so nowadays , everyone could produce his mono product .
why not ? so find your monotask spot within the multitasking world .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have been teaching for a long time , and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that i really wish more people would understand about the potential of students .
in 1931 , my grandmother - bottom left for you guys over here - graduated from the eighth grade .
she went to school to get the information because that 's where the information lived .
it was in the books ; it was inside the teacher 's head ; and she needed to go there to get the information , because that 's how you learned .
fast-forward a generation : this is the one-room schoolhouse , oak grove , where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse .
and he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher , stored it in the only portable memory he has , which is inside his own head , and take it with him , because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world .
when i was a kid , we had a set of encyclopedias at my house .
it was purchased the year i was born , and it was extraordinary , because i did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information .
the information was inside my house and it was awesome .
this was different than either generation had experienced before , and it changed the way i interacted with information even at just a small level .
but the information was closer to me .
i could get access to it .
in the time that passes between when i was a kid in high school and when i started teaching , we really see the advent of the internet .
right about the time that the internet gets going as an educational tool , i take off from wisconsin and move to kansas , small town kansas , where i had an opportunity to teach in a lovely , small-town , rural kansas school district , where i was teaching my favorite subject , american government .
my first year - super gung-ho - going to teach american government , loved the political system .
kids in the 12th grade : not exactly all that enthusiastic about the american government system .
year two : learned a few things - had to change my tactic .
and i put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves .
i did n't tell them what to do or how to do it .
i posed a problem in front of them , which was to put on an election forum for their own community .
they produced flyers . they called offices .
they checked schedules . they were meeting with secretaries .
they produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates .
they invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well , and really had this robust experiential learning .
the older teachers - more experienced - looked at me and went , " oh , there she is . that 's so cute . she 's trying to get that done . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " she does n't know what she 's in for . "
but i knew that the kids would show up , and i believed it , and i told them every week what i expected out of them .
and that night , all 90 kids - dressed appropriately , doing their job , owning it .
i had to just sit and watch .
it was theirs . it was experiential . it was authentic .
it meant something to them .
and they will step up .
from kansas , i moved on to lovely arizona , where i taught in flagstaff for a number of years , this time with middle school students .
luckily , i did n't have to teach them american government .
could teach them the more exciting topic of geography .
again , " thrilled " to learn .
but what was interesting about this position i found myself in in arizona , was i had this really in a truly public school , and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities .
and one opportunity was we got to go and meet paul rusesabagina , which is the gentleman that the movie " hotel rwanda " is based after .
and he was going to speak at the high school next door to us .
we could walk there . we did n't even have to pay for the buses .
there was no expense cost . perfect field trip .
the problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful , and they know what to do with it .
and so we chose to look at paul rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive .
i then challenged the kids to identify someone in their own life , or in their own story , or in their own world , that they could identify that had done a similar thing .
i asked them to produce a little movie about it .
it 's the first time we 'd done this .
nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer , but they were into it . and i asked them to put their own voice over it .
it was the most awesome moment of revelation that when you ask kids to use their own voice and ask them to speak for themselves , what they 're willing to share .
the last question of the assignment is : how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people ?
the things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary .
fast-forward to pennsylvania , where i find myself today .
i teach at the science leadership academy , which is a partnership school between the franklin institute and the school district of philadelphia .
we are a nine through 12 public school , but we do school quite differently .
i moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that i knew that kids learned , and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when you are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past , of information scarcity when my grandmother was in school and when my father was in school and even when i was in school , and to a moment when we have information surplus .
so what do you do when the information is all around you ?
why do you have kids come to school if they no longer have to come there to get the information ?
in philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program , so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday , taking them home , getting access to information .
and here 's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you 've given the tool to acquire information to students , is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process .
we deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test , and i am here to share with you : it is not learning .
that is the absolute wrong thing to ask , to tell kids to never be wrong .
to ask them to always have the right answer does n't allow them to learn .
so we did this project , and this is one of the artifacts of the project .
i almost never show them off because of the issue of the idea of failure .
my students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill .
i asked them to take the examples that we were seeing of the info-graphics that existed in a lot of mass media , and take a look at what were the interesting components of it , and produce one for themselves of a different man-made disaster from american history .
and they had certain criteria to do it .
they were a little uncomfortable with it , because we 'd never done this before , and they did n't know exactly how to do it .
they can talk - they 're very smooth , and they can write very , very well , but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them .
but i gave them the room to just do the thing .
go create . go figure it out .
let 's see what we can do .
and the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint .
this was done in like two or three days .
and this is the work of the student that consistently did it .
and when i sat the students down , i said , " who 's got the best one ? "
and they immediately went , " there it is . "
did n't read anything . " there it is . "
and i said , " well what makes it great ? "
and they 're like , " oh , the design 's good , and he 's using good color .
and there 's some ... " and they went through all that we processed out loud .
and i said , " go read it . "
and they 're like , " oh , that one was n't so awesome . "
and then we went to another one - it did n't have great visuals , but it had great information - and spent an hour talking about the learning process , because it was n't about whether or not it was perfect , or whether or not it was what i could create .
it asked them to create for themselves , and it allowed them to fail , process , learn from .
and when we do another round of this in my class this year , they will do better this time , because learning has to include an amount of failure , because failure is instructional in the process .
there are a million pictures that i could click through here , and had to choose carefully - this is one of my favorites - of students learning , of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information , but instead , ask them what they can do with it .
ask them really interesting questions .
they will not disappoint .
ask them to go to places , to see things for themselves , to actually experience the learning , to play , to inquire .
this is one of my favorite photos , because this was taken on tuesday , when i asked the students to go to the polls .
this is robbie , and this was his first day of voting , and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that .
but this is learning too , because we asked them to go out into real spaces .
the main point is that , if we continue to look at education as if it 's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning , empowering student voice and embracing failure , we 're missing the mark .
and everything that everybody is talking about today is n't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities , because we wo n't get there with a standardized test , and we wo n't get there with a culture of one right answer .
we know how to do this better , and it 's time to do better .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to speak about technology trends , which is something that many of you follow - but we also follow , for related reasons .
obviously , being a technology magazine , technology trends are something that we write about and need to know about .
but also it 's part of being any monthly magazine - you live in the future . and we have a long lead-time .
we have to plan issues many months in advance ; we have to guess at what public appetites are going to be six months , nine months down the road . so we 're in the forecasting business .
we also , like a lot of companies , create a product that 's based on technology trends .
in this case , ours is about ideas and information , and , if we 're lucky , some entertainment . but the concept 's quite the same .
and so we have to understand not only why tech 's important , where it 's going , but also , very importantly , when - the timing is everything .
and it 's interesting , when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s , about e-commerce , or internet traffic , or broadband adoption , or internet advertising , they were all right - they were just wrong in time .
almost every one of those has come true just a few years later .
but the difference of a few years on stock-market valuations is obviously extreme . and that 's why timing is everything .
you 've probably seen something like this before .
this is the classic gartner hype curve , which talks about kind of the trajectory of a technology 's lifespan .
and just for fun , we put a bunch of technologies on it , to show whether they were kind of rising for the first high peak , or whether they were about to crash into the trough of disillusionment , or rise back in the slope of enlightenment , etc .
and this is one way to do technology forecasting : get a sense of where technology is and then anticipate the next upturn .
we tend to do any technology that we think is sufficiently important ; we 'll typically do it twice . once , we want to do it first .
we want to be the first to do it , for the geeks who appreciate that , we 'll catch it right there at the technology-trigger .
you can see in 1997 , we put linux on the cover .
but then it comes back . and sufficiently big technologies are going to hit the mainstream , and they 're going to burst out .
and then it 's time to do it again . last year .
and that 's one way that we try to time technology trends .
i 'd like to talk about a way of thinking about technology trends that i call my " grand unified theory of predicting the future , " but it 's closer to a petite unified theory of predicting the future .
it 's based on the presumption , the observation even , that all important technologies go through four stages in their life - at least one of the four stages , sometimes all four of the stages .
and at each one of these stages , can be seen as a collision - a collision with something else - for example , a critical price-line that changes both the technology and also changes its effect on the world . it 's an inflection point .
and these are the inflection points that tell you what the next chapter in that technology 's life is going to be , and maybe how you can do something about it .
the first is the critical price .
the first stage in a technology 's advance is that it 'll fall below a critical price .
after it falls below a critical price , it will tend , if it 's successful , to rise above a critical mass , a penetration .
many technologies , at that point , displace another technology , and that 's another important point .
and then finally , a lot of technologies commoditize .
towards the end of their life , they become nearly free .
each one of those is an opportunity to do something about it ; it 's an opportunity for the technology to change .
and even if you missed , you know , the first boom of wi-fi - you know , wi-fi did the critical price , it did the critical mass , but has n't done displacement yet , and has n't done free yet - there 's still more opportunity in that .
i 'd like to demonstrate what i mean by this by telling the story of the dvd , which is a technology which has done all of these .
the dvd , as you know , was introduced in the mid-1990s and it was quite expensive . but you can see that by 1998 , it had fallen below 400 dollars , and 400 dollars was a psychological threshold .
and it started to take off . and you can see that the units started to trend up , the hidden inflection point - it was taking off .
the next thing it hit , a year later , was critical mass . in this case , 20 percent is often a good proxy for critical mass in a household .
and what 's interesting here is that something else took off along with it : home-theater units .
suddenly you have a dvd in the house ; you 've got high-quality digital video ; you have a reason to have a big-screen television ; you have a reason for dolby 5.1 surround-sound .
and maybe you have reasons for starting to connect them , and bring the rest of your entertainment in .
what 's interesting also is - note that netflix was founded in 1999 .
reed hastings is here . he clearly saw that that was a moment , that was an inflection point that he could do something with .
the next phase it hit was displacement .
you can see around 2001 it finally out-sold the vcr .
and here too , you can see the implications in the world at large .
netflix was right - the netflix model could capitalize on the dvd in a way that the video-rental stores could n't .
among the dvd 's many assets is that it 's very small ; you can stick it in the mailer and post it cheaply .
that gave an advantage ; that was an implication of the technology 's rise that was n't obvious to everybody .
and then finally , dvds are approaching free .
there 's a company called apex , a no-name chinese firm , who has , several times in the past year , been the number-one dvd seller in america . their average price , for last year , was 48 dollars .
you 're aware of the perhaps apocryphal wal-mart stampede over the 30-dollar dvd .
but they 're getting very , very cheap , and look at the interesting implication of it . as they get cheaper , the premium brands , the sonys and such , are losing market share , and the no-names , the apexes , are gaining them .
they 're being commodified , and that 's what happens when things go to zero . it 's a tough market out there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now they 've introduced these four ways of looking at technology , these four stages of technology 's life .
i 'd like to talk about some other technologies out there , just technologies on our radar - and i 'll use this lens , these four , as a way to kind of tell you where each one of those technologies is in its development .
they 're not necessarily the top-10 technologies out there - they 're just examples of technologies that are in each one of these periods .
but i think that the implications of them approaching these crossovers , these intersections , are interesting to think about .
start with gene sequencing .
as you probably know , gene sequencing - in a large part , because it 's built on computers - is falling in price at a kind of a moore 's law-like level .
it is now possible - will be possible , and if craig venter indeed comes today , he may tell you something about this - to sequence the human genome for 40 million dollars by the end of this year .
that 's as opposed to billions just a few years ago .
you know , our ability to capture the tools of creation is getting closer and closer .
what 's interesting is that at the same time , the number of genes that we 're discovering is rising very quickly .
each one of these genes has potential diagnostic test .
there will come a day when you can have hundreds of thousands of tests done , very cheaply , if you want to know . you can learn about your own mosaic .
here 's another technology that 's approaching a critical price .
this is a fascinating research from who that shows the effect of generic drugs on anti-retroviral drug compounds and cocktails .
in january 2000 , the price was 10,000 dollars , or 27 dollars a day .
the generics came in , first in brazil and elsewhere , and the effect was just dramatic on pricing .
today it 's less than 50 cents a day .
and what 's interesting is if you look at the price elasticity , if you look at the correlation between these two , as the anti-retrovirals come down , the number of people you can treat goes radically up . and the clinton foundation and who believe that they can treat three million people worldwide by 2005 - two million in sub-saharan africa .
and the falling price of drugs has a lot to do with that .
linux is another good example .
now we 've switched to critical mass .
these are now technologies that are hitting critical mass .
if you look here , here 's linux in red , and it 's hit 20 percent .
interestingly , it 's done a crossover before , but not the crossovers that matter .
the crossover that 's going to matter is the one with the blue .
but you can look and see the direction those lines are going , you can see that at the 20 percent , it 's now taken seriously .
it 's not just for the geeks any more .
that is , i imagine , what people in redmond wake up in the middle of the night thinking about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another technology that we see all around us out here is hybrid cars .
i do n't know whether anybody has a prius 2004 , but they 're fantastic .
and if you look at the trends here , by about 2008 - and i do n't think this is a crazy forecast - they 'll be two percent of auto sales .
two percent is n't 20 percent , but in the car business , which is slow moving , that 's huge ; that 's arrival .
at two percent , you start seeing them on the roads everywhere .
and what 's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you 've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry .
it 's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years .
and once you have electric motors , you can do anything : you can change the structure of the car in any way you want .
you can have regenerative braking ; you can have drive-by-wire ; you can have replaceable body shapes - it 's a little thing that starts with a hybrid , but it can lead to a whole new era of the car .
voice over ip is something you may have heard something about .
again , it 's kind of coming out of nowhere ; it 's a little hard to use right now .
there 's a company created by the kazaa founders called skype .
look at these numbers . they launched it in august of last year ; they already have nearly four million registered users - that 's critical mass .
and the same thing 's happening on the carrier side .
you 're looking at ip taking over from some of the traditional telecom standards . this is a tipping point - if malcolm 's here , forgive me - and it 's going to change the economics , and the speed , and the players in the industry .
it 's going to look a little bit like that .
and finally , free . free is really , really interesting .
free is something that comes with digital , because the reproduction costs are essentially free . it comes with ip , because it 's such an efficient protocol . it comes with fiber optics , because there 's so much bandwidth .
free is really , you know , the gift of silicon valley to the world .
it 's an economic force ; it 's a technical force .
it 's a deflationary force , if not handled right .
it is abundance , as opposed to scarcity .
free is probably the most interesting thing .
and here you have just the number of songs that can be stored on a hard drive .
you know , there could be a film 's -lsb- unclear -rsb- there , but it 's basically , every song ever made could be stored on 400 dollars worth of storage by 2008 . it takes that entire element , the physical element , of songs off the table .
and you 've seen the numbers .
i mean , you know , the music industry is imploding in front of our very eyes , and hollywood 's worried as well .
they 're facing a force that they have n't faced before .
and their response is draconian , and not necessarily the one that 's going to get them out of this .
and finally , i 'll give you one last example of free - perhaps the most powerful of all . i mentioned fiber optics - their abundance tends to make things free .
this is the price of a phone call to india per minute .
and what 's interesting is that it was just 1990 when it was more than two dollars a minute .
india had , still has , a regulated phone system and so did we .
it was surprisingly non-innovative , moved very slowly , but then there was just so much fiber out there , you could n't hold back , and look how quickly the price fell .
it 's seven cents a minute , in many cases .
and the consequence of cheap phone calling , free phone calling , to india , is the pissed-off programmer , is the outsourcing .
it is probably one of the most dramatic shifts in globalization and one of the most powerful economic tools that we 're seeing in our world today .
the force of india , and then china , and any other country that can contact our markets and will work with our companies - because the communications are free - is just beginning to be felt .
and i think that 's probably one of the most important technology trends that we 're looking at today .
thank you .
twelve years ago , i was in the street writing my name to say , " i exist . "
then i went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say , " they exist . "
from the suburbs of paris to the wall of israel and palestine , the rooftops of kenya to the favelas of rio , paper and glue - as easy as that .
i asked a question last year : can art change the world ?
well let me tell you , in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year , because the arab spring is still spreading , the eurozone has collapsed ... what else ?
the occupy movement found a voice , and i still have to speak english constantly .
so there has been a lot of change .
so when i had my ted wish last year , i said , look , i 'm going to switch my concept .
you are going to take the photos .
you 're going to send them to me .
i 'm going to print them and send them back to you .
then you 're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement .
this is inside out .
one hundred thousand posters have been printed this year .
those are the kind of posters , let me show you .
and we keep sending more every day .
this is the size .
just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it .
this one was from haiti .
when i launched my wish last year , hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us .
but i say it has to be under the conditions i 've always worked : no credit , no logos , no sponsoring .
a week later , a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world .
these are the people i want to talk about to you today .
two weeks after my speech , in tunisia , hundreds of portraits were made .
and they pasted -lsb- over -rsb- every single portrait of the dictator -lsb- with -rsb- their own photos .
boom ! this is what happened .
slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country .
they really make inside out their own project .
actually , that photo was pasted in a police station , and what you see on the ground are id cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police .
russia . chad wanted to fight against homophobia in russia .
he went with his friends in front of every russian embassy in europe and stood there with the photos to say , " we have rights . "
they used inside out as a platform for protest .
karachi , pakistan .
sharmeen is actually here .
she organized a tedx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town .
and i want to thank her today .
north dakota . standing rock nation , in this turtle island , -lsb- unclear name -rsb- from the dakota lakota tribe wanted to show that the native americans are still here .
the seventh generation are still fighting for their rights .
he pasted up portraits all over his reservation .
and he 's here also today .
each time i get a wall in new york , i use his photos to continue spreading the project .
juarez : you 've heard of the border - one of the most dangerous borders in the world .
monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border .
do you know what it takes to do this ?
people , energy , make the glue , organize the team .
it was amazing .
while in iran at the same time abololo - of course a nickname - has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government .
i do n't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action .
there are tons of school projects .
twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools .
education is so essential .
kids just make photos in a class , the teacher receives them , they paste them on the school .
here they even got the help of the firemen .
there should be even more schools doing this kind of project .
of course we wanted to go back to israel and palestine .
so we went there with a truck . this is a photobooth truck .
you go on the back of that truck , it takes your photo , 30 seconds later take it from the side , you 're ready to rock .
thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street .
this is march , the 450,000 march - beginning of september .
they were all holding their photo as a statement .
on the other side , people were wrapping up streets , buildings .
it 's everywhere .
come on , do n't tell me that people are n't ready for peace out there .
these projects took thousands of actions in one year , making hundreds of thousands of people participating , creating millions of views .
this is the biggest global art participatory project that 's going on .
so back to the question , " can art change the world ? "
maybe not in one year . that 's the beginning .
but maybe we should change the question .
can art change people 's lives ?
from what i 've seen this year , yes .
and you know what ? it 's just the beginning .
let 's turn the world inside out together .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you to imagine that you 're a student in my lab .
what i want you to do is to create a biologically inspired design .
and so here 's the challenge : i want you to help me create a fully 3d , dynamic , parameterized contact model .
the translation of that is , could you help me build a foot ?
and it is a true challenge , and i do want you to help me .
of course , in the challenge there is a prize .
it 's not quite the ted prize , but it is an exclusive t-shirt from our lab .
so please send me your ideas about how to design a foot .
now if we want to design a foot , what do we have to do ?
we have to first know what a foot is .
if we go to the dictionary , it says , " it 's the lower extremity of a leg that is in direct contact with the ground in standing or walking " that 's the traditional definition .
but if you wanted to really do research , what do you have to do ?
you have to go to the literature and look up what 's known about feet .
so you go to the literature . -lrb- laughter -rrb- maybe you 're familiar with this literature .
the problem is , there are many , many feet .
how do you do this ?
you need to survey all feet and extract the principles of how they work .
and i want you to help me do that in this next clip .
as you see this clip , look for principles , and also think about experiments that you might design in order to understand how a foot works .
see any common themes ? principles ?
what would you do ?
what experiments would you run ?
wow . -lrb- applause -rrb- our research on the biomechanics of animal locomotion has allowed us to make a blueprint for a foot .
it 's a design inspired by nature , but it 's not a copy of any specific foot you just looked at , but it 's a synthesis of the secrets of many , many feet .
now it turns out that animals can go anywhere .
they can locomote on substrates that vary as you saw - in the probability of contact , the movement of that surface and the type of footholds that are present .
if you want to study how a foot works , we 're going to have to simulate those surfaces , or simulate that debris .
when we did that , here 's a new experiment that we did : we put an animal and had it run - this grass spider - on a surface with 99 percent of the contact area removed .
but it did n't even slow down the animal .
it 's still running at the human equivalent of 300 miles per hour .
now how could it do that ? well , look more carefully .
when we slow it down 50 times we see how the leg is hitting that simulated debris .
the leg is acting as a foot .
and in fact , the animal contacts other parts of its leg more frequently than the traditionally defined foot .
the foot is distributed along the whole leg .
you can do another experiment where you can take a cockroach with a foot , and you can remove its foot .
i 'm passing some cockroaches around . take a look at their feet .
without a foot , here 's what it does . it does n't even slow down .
it can run the same speed without even that segment .
no problem for the cockroach - they can grow them back , if you care .
how do they do it ?
look carefully : this is slowed down 100 times , and watch what it 's doing with the rest of its leg .
it 's acting , again , as a distributed foot - very effective .
now , the question we had is , how general is a distributed foot ?
and the next behavior i 'll show you of this animal just stunned us the first time that we saw it .
journalists , this is off the record ; it 's embargoed .
take a look at what that is !
that 's a bipedal octopus that 's disguised as a rolling coconut .
it was discovered by christina huffard and filmed by sea studios , right here from monterey .
we 've also described another species of bipedal octopus .
this one disguises itself as floating algae .
it walks on two legs and it holds the other arms up in the air so that it ca n't be seen .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and look what it does with its foot to get over challenging terrain .
it uses that beautiful distributed foot to make it as if those obstacles are not even there - truly extraordinary .
in 1951 , escher made this drawing . he thought he created an animal fantasy .
but we know that art imitates life , and it turns out nature , three million years ago , evolved the next animal .
it 's a shrimp-like animal called the stomatopod , and here 's how it moves on the beaches of panama : it actually rolls , and it can even roll uphill .
it 's the ultimate distributed foot : its whole body in this case is acting like its foot .
so , if we want to then , to our blueprint , add the first important feature , we want to add distributed foot contact .
not just with the traditional foot , but also the leg , and even of the body .
can this help us inspire the design of novel robots ?
we biologically inspired this robot , named rhex , built by these extraordinary engineers over the last few years .
rhex 's foot started off to be quite simple , then it got tuned over time , and ultimately resulted in this half circle .
why is that ? the video will show you .
watch where the robot , now , contacts its leg in order to deal with this very difficult terrain .
what you 'll see , in fact , is that it 's using that half circle leg as a distributed foot .
watch it go over this .
you can see it here well on this debris .
extraordinary . no sensing , all the control is built right into the tuned legs .
really simple , but beautiful .
now , you might have noticed something else about the animals when they were running over the rough terrain .
and my assistant 's going to help me here .
when you touched the cockroach leg - can you get the microphone for him ?
when you touched the cockroach leg , what did it feel like ?
did you notice something ?
boy : spiny .
robert full : it 's spiny , right ? it 's really spiny , is n't it ? it sort of hurts .
maybe we could give it to our curator and see if he 'd be brave enough to touch the cockroach .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- chris anderson : did you touch it ?
rf : so if you look carefully at this , what you see is that they have spines and until a few weeks ago , no one knew what they did .
they assumed that they were for protection and for sensory structures .
we found that they 're for something else - here 's a segment of that spine .
they 're tuned such that they easily collapse in one direction to pull the leg out from debris , but they 're stiff in the other direction so they capture disparities in the surface .
now crabs do n't miss footholds , because they normally move on sand - until they come to our lab .
and where they have a problem with this kind of mesh , because they do n't have spines .
the crabs are missing spines , so they have a problem in this kind of rough terrain .
but of course , we can deal with that because we can produce artificial spines .
we can make spines that catch on simulated debris and collapse on removal to easily pull them out .
we did that by putting these artificial spines on crabs , as you see here , and then we tested them .
do we really understand that principle of tuning ? the answer is , yes !
this is slowed down 20-fold , and the crab just zooms across that simulated debris .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- a little better than nature .
so to our blueprint , we need to add tuned spines .
now will this help us think about the design of more effective climbing robots ?
well , here 's rhex : rhex has trouble on rails - on smooth rails , as you see here .
so why not add a spine ? my colleagues did this at u. penn .
dan koditschek put some steel nails - very simple version - on the robot , and here 's rhex , now , going over those steel - those rails . no problem !
how does it do it ?
let 's slow it down and you can see the spines in action .
watch the leg come around , and you 'll see it grab on right there .
it could n't do that before ; it would just slip and get stuck and tip over .
and watch again , right there - successful .
now just because we have a distributed foot and spines does n't mean you can climb vertical surfaces .
this is really , really difficult .
but look at this animal do it !
one of the ones i 'm passing around is climbing up this vertical surface that 's a smooth metal plate .
it 's extraordinary how fast it can do it - but if you slow it down , you see something that 's quite extraordinary .
it 's a secret . the animal effectively climbs by slipping and look - and doing , actually , terribly , with respect to grabbing on the surface .
it looks , in fact , like it 's swimming up the surface .
we can actually model that behavior better as a fluid , if you look at it .
the distributed foot , actually , is working more like a paddle .
the same is true when we looked at this lizard running on fluidized sand .
watch its feet .
it 's actually functioning as a paddle even though it 's interacting with a surface that we normally think of as a solid .
this is not different from what my former undergraduate discovered when she figured out how lizards can run on water itself .
can you use this to make a better robot ?
martin buehler did - who 's now at boston dynamics - he took this idea and made rhex to be aqua rhex .
so here 's rhex with paddles , now converted into an incredibly maneuverable swimming robot .
for rough surfaces , though , animals add claws .
and you probably feel them if you grabbed it .
did you touch it ?
ca : i did .
rf : and they do really well at grabbing onto surfaces with these claws .
mark cutkosky at stanford university , one of my collaborators , is an extraordinary engineer who developed this technique called shape deposition manufacturing , where he can imbed claws right into an artificial foot .
and here 's the simple version of a foot for a new robot that i 'll show you in a bit .
so to our blueprint , let 's attach claws .
now if we look at animals , though , to be really maneuverable in all surfaces , the animals use hybrid mechanisms that include claws , and spines , and hairs , and pads , and glue , and capillary adhesion and a whole bunch of other things .
these are all from different insects .
there 's an ant crawling up a vertical surface .
let 's look at that ant .
this is the foot of an ant . you see the hairs and the claws and this thing here .
this is when its foot 's in the air .
watch what happens when the foot goes onto your sandwich .
you see what happens ?
that pad comes out . and that 's where the glue is .
here from underneath is an ant foot , and when the claws do n't dig in , that pad automatically comes out without the ant doing anything .
it just extrudes .
and this was a hard shot to get - i think this is the shot of the ant foot on the superstrings .
so it 's pretty tough to do .
this is what it looks like close up - here 's the ant foot , and there 's the glue .
and we discovered this glue may be an interesting two-phase mixture .
it certainly helps it to hold on .
so to our blueprint , we stick on some sticky pads .
now you might think for smooth surfaces we get inspiration here .
now we have something better here .
the gecko 's a really great example of nanotechnology in nature .
these are its feet .
they 're - almost look alien . and the secret , which they stick on with , involves their hairy toes .
they can run up a surface at a meter per second , take 30 steps in that one second - you can hardly see them .
if we slow it down , they attach their feet at eight milliseconds , and detach them in 16 milliseconds .
and when you watch how they detach it , it is bizarre .
they peel away from the surface like you 'd peel away a piece of tape .
very strange . how do they stick ?
if you look at their feet , they have leaf-like structures called linalae with millions of hairs .
and each hair has the worst case of split ends possible .
it has a hundred to a thousand split ends , and that 's the secret , because it allows intimate contact .
the gecko has a billion of these 200-nanometer-sized split ends .
and they do n't stick by glue , or they do n't work like velcro , or they do n't work with suction .
we discovered they work by intermolecular forces alone .
so to our blueprint , we split some hairs .
this has inspired the design of the first self-cleaning dry adhesive - the patent issued , we 're happy to say .
and here 's the simplest version in nature , and here 's my collaborator ron fearing 's attempt at an artificial version of this dry adhesive made from polyurethane .
and here 's the first attempt to have it work on some load .
there 's enormous interest in this in a variety of different fields .
you could think of a thousand possible uses , i 'm sure .
lots of people have , and we 're excited about realizing this as a product .
we have imagined products ; for example , this one : we imagined a bio-inspired band-aid , where we took the glue off the band-aid .
we took some hairs from a molting gecko ; put three rolls of them on here , and then made this band-aid .
this is an undergraduate volunteer - we have 30,000 undergraduates so we can choose among them - that 's actually just a red pen mark .
but it makes an incredible band-aid .
it 's aerated , it can be peeled off easily , it does n't cause any irritation , it works underwater .
i think this is an extraordinary example of how curiosity-based research - we just wondered how they climbed up something - can lead to things that you could never imagine .
it 's just an example of why we need to support curiosity-based research .
here you are , pulling off the band-aid .
so we 've redefined , now , what a foot is .
the question is , can we use these secrets , then , to inspire the design of a better foot , better than one that we see in nature ?
here 's the new project : we 're trying to create the first climbing search-and-rescue robot - no suction or magnets - that can only move on limited kinds of surfaces .
i call the new robot rise , for " robot in scansorial environment " - that 's a climbing environment - and we have an extraordinary team of biologists and engineers creating this robot .
and here is rise .
it 's six-legged and has a tail . here it is on a fence and a tree .
and here are rise 's first steps on an incline .
you have the audio ? you can hear it go up .
and here it is coming up at you , in its first steps up a wall .
now it 's only using its simplest feet here , so this is very new .
but we think we got the dynamics right of the robot .
mark cutkosky , though , is taking it a step further .
he 's the one able to build this shape-deposition manufactured feet and toes .
the next step is to make compliant toes , and try to add spines and claws and set it for dry adhesives .
so the idea is to first get the toes and a foot right , attempt to make that climb , and ultimately put it on the robot .
and that 's exactly what he 's done .
he 's built , in fact , a climbing foot-bot inspired by nature .
and here 's cutkosky 's and his amazing students ' design .
so these are tuned toes - there are six of them , and they use the principles that i just talked about collectively for the blueprint .
so this is not using any suction , any glue , and it will ultimately , when it 's attached to the robot - it 's as biologically inspired as the animal - hopefully be able to climb any kind of a surface .
here you see it , next , going up the side of a building at stanford .
it 's sped up - again , it 's a foot climbing .
it 's not the whole robot yet , we 're working on it - now you can see how it 's attaching .
these tuned structures allow the spines , friction pads and ultimately the adhesive hairs to grab onto very challenging , difficult surfaces .
and so they were able to get this thing - this is now sped up 20 times - can you imagine it trying to go up and rescue somebody at that upper floor ? ok ?
you can visualize this now ; it 's not impossible .
it 's a very challenging task . but more to come later .
to finish : we 've gotten design secrets from nature by looking at how feet are built .
we 've learned we should distribute control to smart parts .
do n't put it all in the brain , but put some of the control in tuned feet , legs and even body .
that nature uses hybrid solutions , not a single solution , to these problems , and they 're integrated and beautifully robust .
and third , we believe strongly that we do not want to mimic nature but instead be inspired by biology , and use these novel principles with the best engineering solutions that are out there to make - potentially - something better than nature .
so there 's a clear message : whether you care about a fundamental , basic research of really interesting , bizarre , wonderful animals , or you want to build a search-and-rescue robot that can help you in an earthquake , or to save someone in a fire , or you care about medicine , we must preserve nature 's designs .
otherwise these secrets will be lost forever .
thank you .
i became an inventor by accident .
i was out of the air force in 1956 . no , no , that 's not true : i went in in 1956 , came out in 1959 , was working at the university of washington , and i came up with an idea , from reading a magazine article , for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm .
now , that was before cassette tapes , c.d.s , dvds - any of the cool stuff we 've got now .
and it was an arm that , instead of hinging and pivoting as it went across the record , went straight : a radial , linear tracking tone arm .
and it was the hardest invention i ever made , but it got me started , and i got really lucky after that .
and without giving you too much of a tirade , i want to talk to you about an invention i brought with me today : my 44th invention . no , that 's not true either .
golly , i 'm just totally losing it .
my 44th patent ; about the 15th invention .
i call this hypersonic sound .
i 'm going to play it for you in a couple minutes , but i want to make an analogy before i do to this .
i usually show this hypersonic sound and people will say , that 's really cool , but what 's it good for ?
and i say , what is the light bulb good for ?
sound , light : i 'm going to draw the analogy .
when edison invented the light bulb , pretty much looked like this .
has n't changed that much .
light came out of it in every direction .
before the light bulb was invented , people had figured out how to put a reflector behind it , focus it a little bit ; put lenses in front of it , focus it a little bit better .
ultimately we figured out how to make things like lasers that were totally focused .
now , think about where the world would be today if we had the light bulb , but you could n't focus light ; if when you turned one on it just went wherever it wanted to .
that 's the way loudspeakers pretty much are .
you turn on the loudspeaker , and after almost 80 years of having those gadgets , the sound just kind of goes where it wants .
even when you 're standing in front of a megaphone , it 's pretty much every direction .
a little bit of differential , but not much .
if the light bulb was the way the speaker is , and you could n't focus or sharpen the edges or define it , we would n't have that , or movies in general , or computers , or t.v. sets , or c.d.s , or dvds - and just go down the list of what the importance is of being able to focus light .
now , after almost 80 years of having sound , i thought it was about time that we figure out a way to put sound where you want to .
i have a couple of units .
that guy there was made for a demo i did yesterday early in the day for a big car maker in detroit who wants to put them in a car - small version , over your head - so that you can actually get binaural sound in a car .
what if i could aim sound the way i aim light ?
i got this waterfall i recorded in my back yard .
now , you 're not going to hear a thing unless it hits you .
maybe if i hit the side wall it will bounce around the room .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the sound is being made right next to your ears . is that cool ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- because i have some limited time , i 'll cut it off for a second , and tell you about how it works and what it 's good for .
course , like light , it 's great to be able to put sound to highlight a clothing rack , or the cornflakes , or the toothpaste , or a talking plaque in a movie theater lobby .
sony 's got an idea - sony 's our biggest customers right now .
they tried this back in the ' 60s and were too smart , and so they gave up .
but they want to use it - seriously .
there 's a mix an inventor has to have .
you have to be kind of smart , and though i did not graduate from college does n't mean i 'm stupid , because you can not be stupid and do very much in the world today .
too many other smart people out there . so .
i just happened to get my education in a little different way .
i 'm not at all against education .
i think it 's wonderful ; i think sometimes people , when they get educated , lose it : they get so smart they 're unwilling to look at things that they know better than .
and we 're living in a great time right now , because almost everything 's being explored anew .
i have this little slogan that i use a lot , which is : virtually nothing - and i mean this honestly - has been invented yet .
we 're just starting .
we 're just starting to really discover the laws of nature and science and physics .
and this is , i hope , a little piece of it .
sony 's got this vision back - to get myself on track - that when you stand in the checkout line in the supermarket , you 're going to watch a new t.v. channel .
they know that when you watch t.v. at home , because there are so many choices you can change channels , miss their commercials .
a hundred and fifty-one million people every day stand in the line at the supermarket .
now , they 've tried this a couple years ago and it failed , because the checker gets tired of hearing the same message every 20 minutes , and reaches out , turns off the sound .
and , you know , if the sound is n't there , the sale typically is n't made .
for instance , like , when you 're on an airplane , they show the movie , you get to watch it for free ; when you want to hear the sound , you pay .
and so abc and sony have devised this new thing where when you step in the line in the supermarket - initially it 'll be safeways . it is safeways ; they 're trying this in three parts of the country right now - you 'll be watching tv .
and hopefully they 'll be sensitive that they do n't want to offend you with just one more outlet .
but what 's great about it , from the tests that have been done , is , if you do n't want to hear it , you take about one step to the side and you do n't hear it .
so , we create silence as much as we create sound .
atms that talk to you ; nobody else hears it .
sit in bed , two in the morning , watch tv ; your spouse , or someone , is next to you , asleep ; does n't hear it , does n't wake up .
we 're also working on noise canceling things like snoring , noise from automobiles .
i have been really lucky with this technology : all of a sudden as it is ready , the world is ready to accept it .
they have literally beat a path to our door .
we 've been selling it since about last september , october , and it 's been immensely gratifying .
if you 're interested in what it costs - i 'm not selling them today - but this unit , with the electronics and everything , if you buy one , is around a thousand bucks .
we expect by this time next year , it 'll be hundreds , a few hundred bucks , to buy it .
it 's not any more pricey than regular electronics .
now , when i played it for you , you did n't hear the thunderous bass .
this unit that i played goes from about 200 hertz to above the range of hearing .
it 's actually emitting ultrasound - low-level ultrasound - that 's about 100,000 vibrations per second .
and the sound that you 're hearing , unlike a regular speaker on which all the sound is made on the face , is made out in front of it , in the air .
the air is not linear , as we 've always been taught .
you turn up the volume just a little bit - i 'm talking about a little over 80 decibels - and all of a sudden the air begins to corrupt signals you propagate .
here 's why : the speed of sound is not a constant . it 's fairly slow .
it changes with temperature and with barometric pressure .
now , imagine , if you will , without getting too technical , i 'm making a little sine wave here in the air .
well , if i turn up the amplitude too much , i 'm having an effect on the pressure , which means during the making of that sine wave , the speed at which it is propagating is shifting .
all of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear .
linearity means higher quality sound .
hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite : it 's 100 percent based on non-linearity .
an effect happens in the air , it 's a corrupting effect of the sound - the ultrasound in this case - that 's emitted , but it 's so predictable that you can produce very precise audio out of that effect .
now , the question is , where 's the sound made ?
instead of being made on the face of the cone , it 's made at literally billions of little independent points along this narrow column in the air , and so when i aim it towards you , what you hear is made right next to your ears .
i said we can shorten the column , we can spread it out to cover the couch .
i can put it so that one ear hears one speaker , the other ear hears the other . that 's true binaural sound .
when you listen to stereo on your home system , your both ears hear both speakers .
turn on the left speaker sometime and notice you 're hearing it also in your right ear .
so , the stage is more restricted - the sound stage that 's supposed to spread out in front of you .
because the sound is made in the air along this column , it does not follow the inverse square law , which says it drops off about two thirds every time you double the distance : 6db every time you go from one meter , for instance , to two meters .
that means you go to a rock concert or a symphony , and the guy in the front row gets the same level as the guy in the back row , now , all of a sudden .
is n't that terrific ?
so , we 've been , as i say , very successful , very lucky , in having companies catch the vision of this , from cars - car makers who want to put a stereo system in the front for the kids , and a separate system in the back - oh , no , the kids are n't driving today .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was seeing if you were listening .
actually , i have n't had breakfast yet .
a stereo system in the front for mom and dad , and maybe there 's a little dvd player in the back for the kids , and the parents do n't want to be bothered with that , or their rap music or whatever .
so , again , this idea of being able to put sound anywhere you want to is really starting to catch on .
it also works for transmitting and communicating data .
it also works five times better underwater .
we 've got the military - have just deployed some of these into iraq , where you can put fake troop movements quarter of a mile away on a hillside .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist some biblical verse .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm serious . and they have these infrared devices that can look at their countenance , and see a fraction of a degree kelvin in temperature shift from 100 yards away when they play this thing .
and so , another way of hopefully determining who 's friendly and who is n't .
we make a version with this which puts out 155 decibels .
pain is 120 .
so it allows you to go nearly a mile away and communicate with people , and there can be a public beach just off to the side , and they do n't even know it 's turned on .
we sell those to the military presently for about 70,000 dollars , and they 're buying them as fast as we can make them .
we put it on a turret with a camera , so that when they shoot at you , you 're over there , and it 's there .
i have a bunch of other inventions .
i invented a plasma antenna , to shift gears .
looked up at the ceiling of my office one day - i was working on a ground-penetrating radar project - and my physicist ceo came in and said , " we have a real problem .
we 're using very short wavelengths .
we 've got a problem with the antenna ringing .
when you run very short wavelengths , like a tuning fork the antenna resonates , and there 's more energy coming out of the antenna than there is the backscatter from the ground that we 're trying to analyze , taking too much processing . "
i says , " why do n't we make an antenna that only exists when you want it ?
turn it on ; turn it off .
that 's a fluorescent tube refined . "
i just sold that for a million and a half dollars , cash .
i took it back to the pentagon after it got declassified , when the patent issued , and told the people back there about it , and they laughed , and then i took them back a demo and they bought .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- any of you ever wore a jabber headphone - the little cell headphones ?
that 's my invention . i sold that for seven million dollars .
big mistake : it just sold for 80 million dollars two years ago .
i actually drew that up on a little crummy mac computer in my attic at my house , and one of the many designs which they have now is still the same design i drew way back when .
so , i 've been really lucky as an inventor .
i 'm the happiest guy you 're ever going to meet .
and my dad died before he realized anybody in the family would maybe , hopefully , make something out of themselves .
you 've been a great audience . i know i 've jumped all over the place .
i usually figure out what my talk is when i get up in front of a group .
let me give you , in the last minute , one more quick demo of this guy , for those of you that have n't heard it .
can never tell if it 's on .
if you have n't heard it , raise your hand .
getting it over there ?
get the cameraman .
yeah , there you go .
i 've got a coke can opening that 's right in your head ; that 's really cool .
thank you once again .
appreciate it very much .
in half a century of trying to help prevent wars , there 's one question that never leaves me : how do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return ?
when you 're faced with brutality , whether it 's a child facing a bully on a playground or domestic violence - or , on the streets of syria today , facing tanks and shrapnel , what 's the most effective thing to do ?
fight back ? give in ?
use more force ?
this question : " how do i deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return ? "
has been with me ever since i was a child .
i remember i was about 13 , glued to a grainy black and white television in my parents ' living room as soviet tanks rolled into budapest , and kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting mown down .
and i rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase .
and my mother came up and said , " what on earth are you doing ? "
and i said , " i 'm going to budapest . "
and she said , " what on earth for ? "
and i said , " kids are getting killed there .
there 's something terrible happening . "
and she said , " do n't be so silly . "
and i started to cry .
and she got it , she said , " okay , i see it 's serious .
you 're much too young to help .
you need training . i 'll help you .
but just unpack your suitcase . "
and so i got some training and went and worked in africa during most of my 20s .
but i realized that what i really needed to know i could n't get from training courses .
i wanted to understand how violence , how oppression , works .
and what i 've discovered since is this : bullies use violence in three ways .
they use political violence to intimidate , physical violence to terrorize and mental or emotional violence to undermine .
and only very rarely in very few cases does it work to use more violence .
nelson mandela went to jail believing in violence , and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills , the incredible skills , that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy .
and they did it in a total devotion to non-violence .
they realized that using force against force does n't work .
so what does work ?
over time i 've collected about a half-dozen methods that do work - of course there are many more - that do work and that are effective .
and the first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here , inside me .
it 's my response , my attitude , to oppression that i 've got control over , and that i can do something about .
and what i need to develop is self-knowledge to do that .
that means i need to know how i tick , when i collapse , where my formidable points are , where my weaker points are .
when do i give in ?
what will i stand up for ?
and meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways - again it 's not the only one - it 's one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power .
and my heroine here - like satish 's - is aung san suu kyi in burma .
she was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of rangoon .
they came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns .
and she realized straight away that the soldiers with their fingers shaking on the triggers were more scared than the student protesters behind her .
but she told the students to sit down .
and she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun , put her hand on it and lower it .
and no one got killed .
so that 's what the mastery of fear can do - not only faced with machine guns , but if you meet a knife fight in the street .
but we have to practice .
so what about our fear ?
i have a little mantra .
my fear grows fat on the energy i feed it .
and if it grows very big it probably happens .
so we all know the three o 'clock in the morning syndrome , when something you 've been worrying about wakes you up - i see a lot of people - and for an hour you toss and turn , it gets worse and worse , and by four o 'clock you 're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big .
the only thing to do is to get up , make a cup of tea and sit down with the fear like a child beside you .
you 're the adult .
the fear is the child .
and you talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants , what it needs .
how can this be made better ?
how can the child feel stronger ?
and you make a plan .
and you say , " okay , now we 're going back to sleep .
half-past seven , we 're getting up and that 's what we 're going to do . "
i had one of these 3 a.m. episodes on sunday - paralyzed with fear at coming to talk to you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i did the thing .
i got up , made the cup of tea , sat down with it , did it all and i 'm here - still partly paralyzed , but i 'm here .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so that 's fear . what about anger ?
wherever there is injustice there 's anger .
but anger is like gasoline , and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match , you 've got an inferno .
but anger as an engine - in an engine - is powerful .
if we can put our anger inside an engine , it can drive us forward , it can get us through the dreadful moments and it can give us real inner power .
and i learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers .
because at the beginning i was so outraged at the dangers they were exposing us to that i just wanted to argue and blame and make them wrong .
totally ineffective .
in order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger .
it 's okay to be angry with the thing - the nuclear weapons in this case - but it is hopeless to be angry with the people .
they are human beings just like us .
and they 're doing what they think is best .
and that 's the basis on which we have to talk with them .
so that 's the third one , anger .
and it brings me to the crux of what 's going on , or what i perceive as going on , in the world today , which is that last century was top-down power .
it was still governments telling people what to do .
this century there 's a shift .
it 's bottom-up or grassroots power .
it 's like mushrooms coming through concrete .
it 's people joining up with people , as bundy just said , miles away to bring about change .
and peace direct spotted quite early on that local people in areas of very hot conflict know what to do .
they know best what to do .
so peace direct gets behind them to do that .
and the kind of thing they 're doing is demobilizing militias , rebuilding economies , resettling refugees , even liberating child soldiers .
and they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this .
and what they 've realized is that using violence in the situations they operate in is not only less humane , but it 's less effective than using methods that connect people with people , that rebuild .
and i think that the u.s. military is finally beginning to get this .
up to now their counter-terrorism policy has been to kill insurgents at almost any cost , and if civilians get in the way , that 's written as " collateral damage . "
and this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of afghanistan , that it makes the recruitment for al-qaeda very easy , when people are so disgusted by , for example , the burning of the koran .
so the training of the troops has to change .
and i think there are signs that it is beginning to change .
the british military have always been much better at this .
but there is one magnificent example for them to take their cue from , and that 's a brilliant u.s. lieutenant colonel called chris hughes .
and he was leading his men down the streets of najaf - in iraq actually - and suddenly people were pouring out of the houses on either side of the road , screaming , yelling , furiously angry , and surrounded these very young troops who were completely terrified , did n't know what was going on , could n't speak arabic .
and chris hughes strode into the middle of the throng with his weapon above his head , pointing at the ground , and he said , " kneel . "
and these huge soldiers with their backpacks and their body armor , wobbled to the ground .
and complete silence fell .
and after about two minutes , everybody moved aside and went home .
now that to me is wisdom in action .
in the moment , that 's what he did .
and it 's happening everywhere now .
you do n't believe me ?
have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years ?
dictatorships in czechoslovakia , east germany , estonia , latvia , lithuania , mali , madagascar , poland , the philippines , serbia , slovenia , i could go on , and now tunisia and egypt .
and this has n't just happened .
a lot of it is due to a book written by an 80-year-old man in boston , gene sharp .
he wrote a book called " from dictatorship to democracy " with 81 methodologies for non-violent resistance .
and it 's been translated into 26 languages .
it 's flown around the world .
and it 's being used by young people and older people everywhere , because it works and it 's effective .
so this is what gives me hope - not just hope , this is what makes me feel very positive right now .
because finally human beings are getting it .
we 're getting practical , doable methodologies to answer my question : how do we deal with a bully without becoming a thug ?
we 're using the kind of skills that i 've outlined : inner power - the development of inner power - through self-knowledge , recognizing and working with our fear , using anger as a fuel , cooperating with others , banding together with others , courage , and most importantly , commitment to active non-violence .
now i do n't just believe in non-violence .
i do n't have to believe in it .
i see evidence everywhere of how it works .
and i see that we , ordinary people , can do what aung san suu kyi and ghandi and mandela did .
we can bring to an end the bloodiest century that humanity has ever known .
and we can organize to overcome oppression by opening our hearts as well as strengthening this incredible resolve .
and this open-heartedness is exactly what i 've experienced in the entire organization of this gathering since i got here yesterday .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it was an incredible surprise to me to find out that there was actually an organization that cared about both parts of my life .
because , basically , i work as a theoretical physicist .
i develop and test models of the big bang , using observational data .
and i 've been moonlighting for the last five years helping with a project in africa .
and , i get a lot of flak for this at cambridge .
people wonder , you know , " how do you have time to do this ? " and so on .
and so it was simply astonishing to me to find an organization that actually appreciated both those sides .
so i thought i 'd start off by just telling you a little bit about myself and why i lead this schizophrenic life .
well , i was born in south africa and my parents were imprisoned for resisting the racist regime .
when they were released , we left and we went as refugees to kenya and tanzania .
both were very young countries then , and full of hope for the future .
we had an amazing childhood . we did n't have any money , but we were outdoors most of the time .
we had fantastic friends and we saw the wonders of the world , like kilimanjaro , serengeti and the olduvai gorge .
well , then we moved to london for high school .
and after that - there 's nothing much to say about that .
it was rather dull . but i came back to africa at the age of 17 , as a volunteer teacher to lesotho , which is a tiny country , surrounded at that time by apartheid south africa .
well , 80 percent of the men in lesotho worked in the mines over the border , in brutal conditions .
nevertheless , i - as i 'm sure - as a rather irritating young , white man coming into their village , i was welcomed with incredible hospitality and warmth .
but the kids were the best part .
the kids were amazing : extremely eager and often very bright .
and i 'm just going to tell you one story , which got through to me .
i used to try to take the kids outside as often as possible , to try to connect the academic stuff with the real world .
and they were n't used to that .
but i took them outside one day and i said , " i want you to estimate the height of the building . "
and i expected them to put a ruler next to the wall , size it up with a finger , and make an estimate of the height .
but there was one little boy , very small for his age .
he was the son of one of the poorest families in the village .
and he was n't doing that . he was scribbling with chalk on the pavement .
and so , i said - i was annoyed - i said , " what are you doing ?
i want you to estimate the height of the building . "
he said , " ok . i measured the height of a brick .
i counted the number of bricks and now i 'm multiplying . "
well - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i had n't thought of that one .
and many experiences like this happened to me .
another one is that i met a miner . he was home on his three-month leave from the mines .
sitting next to him one day , he said , " there 's only one thing that i really loved at school .
and you know what it was ? shakespeare . " and he recited some to me .
and these and many similar experiences convinced me that there are just tons of bright kids in africa - inventive kids , intellectual kids - and starved of opportunity .
and if africa is going to get fixed , it 's by them , not by us .
well , after - -lrb- applause -rrb- - that 's the truth .
well , after lesotho , i traveled across africa before returning to england - so gray and depressing , in comparison .
and i went to cambridge . and there , i fell for theoretical physics .
well , i 'm not going to explain this equation , but theoretical physics is really an amazing subject .
we can write down all the laws of physics we know in one line .
and , admittedly , it 's in a very shorthand notation .
and it contains 18 free parameters , ok , which we have to fit to the data .
so it 's not the final story , but it 's an incredibly powerful summary of everything we know about nature at the most basic level .
and apart from a few very important loose ends , which you 've heard about here - like dark energy and dark matter - this equation describes , seems to describe everything about the universe and what 's in it .
but there 's one big puzzle remaining , and this was most succinctly put to me by my primary school math teacher in tanzania , who 's a wonderful scottish lady who i still stay in touch with .
and she 's now in her 80s .
and when i try to explain my work to her , she waved away all the details , and she said , " neil , there 's only one question that really matters .
what banged ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " everyone talks about the big bang . what banged ? "
and she 's right . it 's a question we 've all been avoiding .
the standard explanation is that the universe somehow sprang into existence , full of a strange kind of energy - inflationary energy - which blew it up .
but the puzzle of why the universe emerged in that peculiar state is completely unsolved .
now , i worked on that theory for a while , with stephen hawking and others .
but then i began to explore another alternative .
the alternative is that the big bang was n't the beginning .
perhaps the universe existed before the bang , and the bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe .
well , this possibility is actually suggested by the latest theories , the unified theories , which try to explain all those 18 free parameters in a single framework , which will hopefully predict all of them .
and i 'll just share a cartoon of this idea here .
it 's all i can convey . according to these theories , there are extra dimensions of space , not just the three we 're familiar with , but at every point in the room there are more dimensions .
and in particular , there 's one rather strange one , in the most elegant unified theories we have .
the strange one looks likes this : that we live in a three-dimensional world .
we live in one of these worlds , and i can only show it as a sheet , but it 's really three-dimensional .
and a tiny distance away , there 's another sheet , also three-dimensional , and they 're separated by a gap .
the gap is very tiny , and i 've blown it up so you can see it .
but it 's really a tiny fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus .
i wo n't go into the details of why we think the universe is like this , but it comes out of the math and trying to explain the physics that we know .
well , i got interested in this because it seemed to me that it was an obvious question .
which is , what happens if these two , three-dimensional worlds should actually collide ?
and if they collide , it would look a lot like the big bang .
but it 's slightly different than in the conventional picture .
the conventional picture of the big bang is a point .
everything comes out of a point ; you have infinite density . and all the equations break down .
no hope of describing that .
in this picture , you 'll notice , the bang is extended . it 's not a point .
the density of matter is finite , and we have a chance of a consistent set of equations that can describe the whole process .
so , to cut a long story short , we 've explored this alternative .
we 've shown that it can fit all of the data that we have about the formation of galaxies , the fluctuations in the microwave background .
furthermore , there 's an experimental way to tell this theory , apart from the inflationary explanation that i told you before .
it involves gravitational waves .
and in this scenario , not only was the big bang not the beginning , as you can see from the picture , it can happen over and over again .
it may be that we live in an endless universe , both in space and in time .
and there 've been bangs in the past , and there will be bangs in the future .
and maybe we live in an endless universe .
well , making and testing models of the universe is , for me , the best way i have of enjoying and appreciating the universe .
we need to make the best mathematical models we can , the most consistent ones .
and then we scrutinize them , logically and with data .
and we try to convince ourselves - we really try to convince ourselves they 're wrong .
that 's progress : when we prove things wrong .
and gradually , we hopefully move closer and closer to understanding the world .
as i pursued my career , something was always gnawing away inside me .
what about africa ?
what about those kids i 'd left behind ?
instead of developing , as we 'd all hoped in the ' 60s , things had gotten worse .
africa was gripped by poverty , disease and war .
this is very graphically shown by the worldmapper website and project .
and so the idea is to represent each country on a map , but scale the area according to some quantity .
so here 's just the standard area map of the world .
by the way , africa is very large .
and the next map now shows africa 's gdp in 1960 , around the time of independence for many african states .
now , this is 1990 , and then 2002 . and here 's a projection for 2015 .
big changes are happening in the world , but they 're not helping africa .
what about africa 's population ? the population is n't out of proportion to its area , but africa leads the world in deaths from often preventable causes : malnutrition , simple infections and birth complications .
then there 's hiv / aids . and then there are deaths from war .
ok , currently there are 45,000 people a month dying in the congo , as a consequence of the war there over coltan and diamonds and other things .
it 's still going on .
what about africa 's capacity to do something about these problems ?
well , here 's the number of physicians in africa .
here 's the number of people in higher education .
and here - most shocking to me - the number of scientific research papers coming out of africa .
it just does n't exist scientifically .
and this was very eloquently argued at ted africa : that all of the aid that 's been given has completely failed to put africa onto its own two feet .
well , the transition to democracy in south africa in 1994 was literally a dream come true for many of us .
my parents were both elected to the first parliament , alongside nelson and winnie mandela . they were the only other couple .
and in 2001 , i took a research leave to visit them .
and while i was busy working - i was working on these colliding worlds , in the day .
but i learned that there was a desperate shortage of skills , especially mathematical skills , in industry , in government , in education .
the ability to make and test models has become essential , not only to every single area of science today , but also to modern society itself .
and if you do n't have math , you 're not going to enter the modern age .
so i had an idea . and the idea was very simple .
the idea was to set up an african institute for mathematical sciences , or aims .
and let 's recruit students from the whole of africa , bring them together with lecturers from all over the world , and we 'll try to give them a fantastic education .
well , as a cambridge professor , i had many contacts .
and to my astonishment , they backed me 100 percent .
they said , " go and do it , and we 'll come and lecture . "
and i knew it would be amazing fun to bring brilliant students from these countries - where they do n't have any opportunities - together with the best lecturers in the world - who i knew would come , because of the interest in africa - and put them together and just let the sparks fly .
so we bought a derelict hotel near cape town .
it 's an 80-room art deco hotel from the 1920s .
the area was kind of seedy , so we got an 80-room hotel for 100,000 dollars .
it 's a beautiful building . we decided we would refurbish it and then put out the word : we 're going to start the best math institute in africa in this hotel .
well , the new south africa is a very exciting country .
and those of you who have n't been there , you should go .
it 's very , very interesting what 's happening .
and we recruited wonderful staff , highly motivated staff .
the other thing that 's happened , which was good for us , is the internet .
even though the internet is very expensive all over africa , there are internet cafes everywhere .
and bright young africans are desperate to join the global community , to be successful - and they 're very ambitious .
they want to be the next einstein .
and so when word came out that aims was opening , it spread very quickly via e-mail and our website .
and we got lots of applicants .
well , we designed aims as a 24-hour learning environment , and it was fantastic to start a university from the beginning .
you have to rethink , what is the university for ?
and that 's really exciting .
so we designed it to have interactive teaching .
no droning on at the chalkboard .
we emphasize problem-solving , working in groups , every student discovering and maximizing their own potential and not chasing grades .
everyone lives together in this hotel - lecturers and students - and it 's not surprising at all to find an impromptu tutorial at 1 a.m.
the students do n't usually leave the computer lab till 2 or 3 a.m.
and then they 're up again at eight in the morning .
lectures , problem-solving and so on . it 's an extraordinary place .
we especially emphasize areas of great relevance to africa 's development , because , in those areas , scientists working in africa will have a competitive advantage .
they 'll publish , be invited to conferences .
they 'll do well . they 'll have successful careers .
and aims has done extremely well .
here is a list of last year 's graduates , graduated in june , and what they 're currently doing - 48 of them .
and where they are is indicated over here .
and where they 've gone . so these are all postgraduate students .
and they 've all gone on to master 's and ph.d. degrees in excellent places .
five students can be educated at aims for the cost of educating one in the u.s. or europe .
but more important , the pan-african student body is a continual source of strength , pride and commitment to africa .
we illustrate aims ' progress by coloring in the countries of africa .
so here you can see behind this list .
when a county is colored yellow , we 've received an application ; orange , we 've accepted an application ; and green , a student has graduated .
so here is where we were after the first graduation in 2004 .
and we set ourselves a goal of turning the continent green .
so there 's 2005 , -6 , -7 , -8 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 're well on the way to achieving our initial goal .
we had some of the students filmed at home before they came to aims .
and i 'll just show you one .
tendai mugwagwa : my name is tendai mugwagwa .
i have a bachelor of science with an education degree .
i will be attending aims .
my understanding of the course is that it covers quite a lot .
you know , from physics to medicine , in particular , epidemiology and also mathematical modeling .
neil turok : so tendai came to aims and did very well .
and i 'll let her take it from there .
tm : my name is tendai mugwagwa and i was a student at aims in 2003 and 2004 .
after leaving aims , i went on to do a master 's in applied mathematics at the university of cape town in south africa .
after that , i came to the netherlands where i 'm now doing a ph.d. in theoretical immunology .
professor : tendai is working very independently .
she communicates well with the immunologists at the hospital .
so all in all i have a very good ph.d. student from south africa .
so i 'm happy she 's here .
nt : another student in the first year of aims was shehu .
and he 's shown here with his favorite high school teacher .
and then entering university in northern nigeria .
and after aims , shehu wanted to do high-energy physics , and he came to cambridge .
he 's about to finish his ph.d. , and he was filmed recently with someone you all know .
shehu : and from there we will be able to , hopefully , make better predictions and then we compare it to the graph and also make some predictions .
stephen hawking : that is nice .
nt : here are the current students at aims . there are 53 of them from 20 different countries , including 20 women .
so now i 'm going to get to my ted business .
well , we had a party . this is africa - we have good parties in africa . and last month , they threw a surprise party for me .
here 's somebody you 've seen already .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to point out a few other exceptional people in this picture .
so , we were having a party , as you can see they 're completely eclipsing me at this point .
this is ezra . she 's from darfur .
she 's a physicist , and somehow stays smiling , in spite of everything going on back home .
but she wants to continue in physics , and she 's doing extremely well .
this is lydia . lydia is the first ever woman to graduate in mathematics in the central african republic .
and she 's now at aims . -lrb- applause -rrb- so now let me get to our ted wish .
well , it 's not my ted wish ; it 's our wish , as you 've already gathered .
and our wish has two parts : one is a dream and the other 's a plan . ok .
our ted dream is that the next einstein will be african . -lrb- applause -rrb- in striving for the heights of creative genius , we want to give thousands of people the motivation , the encouragement and the courage to obtain the high-level skills they need to help africa .
among them will be not only brilliant scientists - i 'm sure of that from what we 've seen at aims - they 'll also be the african gates , brins and pages of the future .
well , i said we also have a plan . and our plan is quite simple .
aims is now a proven model .
and what we need to do is to replicate it .
we want to roll out 15 aims centers in the next five years , all over africa .
each will have a pan-african student body , but specialize in a different area of science .
we want to use science to overcome the national and cultural barriers , as it does at aims .
and we want to add elements to the curriculum .
we want to add entrepreneurship and policy skills .
the expanded aims will be a coherent pan-african institution , and its graduates will form a powerful network , working together for peace and progress across the continent .
over the last year , we 've been visiting sites in africa , looking at potential sites for new aims centers .
and here are the ones we 've selected .
and each of these centers has a strong local team , each is in a beautiful place , an interesting place , which international lecturers will be happy to visit .
and our partners across africa are extremely enthusiastic about this .
everyone wants an aims center in their country .
and last november , the conference of all the african ministers of science and technology , held in mombasa , called for a comprehensive plan to roll out aims .
so we have political support right across the continent .
it wo n't be easy .
at every site there will be huge challenges .
local scientists must play leading roles and governments must be persuaded to buy in .
conditions are very difficult , but we can not afford to compromise on those principles which made aims work .
and we summarize them this way : the institutes have got to be relevant , innovative , cost-effective and high quality . why ?
because we want africa to be rich .
easy to remember the basic rules we need .
so , just in ending , let me say the only people who can fix africa are talented young africans .
by unlocking and nurturing their creative potential , we can create a step change in africa 's future .
over time , they will contribute to african development and to science in ways we can only imagine .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so for the past year and a half , my team at push pop press and charlie melcher and melcher media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book .
it 's called " our choice " and the author is al gore .
it 's the sequel to " an inconvenient truth , " and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis .
the book starts like this . this is the cover .
as the globe spins , we can see our location , and we can open the book and swipe through the chapters to browse the book .
or , we can scroll through the pages at the bottom .
and if we wanted to zoom into a page , we can just open it up .
and anything you see in the book , you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up .
and if you want to go back and read the book again , you just fold it back up and put it back on the page .
and so this works the same way ; you pick it up and pop it open .
-lrb- audio -rrb- al gore : i consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they 're a beautiful addition to the landscape .
mike matas : and so throughout the whole book , al gore will walk you through and explain the photos .
this photo , you can you can even see on an interactive map .
zoom into it and see where it was taken .
and throughout the book , there 's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations .
so you can open this one .
-lrb- audio -rrb- ag : most modern wind turbines consist of a large ...
mm : it starts playing immediately .
and while it 's playing , we can pinch and peak back at the page , and the movie keeps playing .
or we can zoom out to the table of contents , and the video keeps playing .
but one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics .
this one shows the wind potential all around the united states .
but instead of just showing us the information , we can take our finger and explore , and see , state by state , exactly how much wind potential there is .
we can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power .
this is one of my favorites .
so this shows ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- when the wind is blowing , any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery .
and as the wind starts dying down , any excess energy will be diverted back into the house - the lights never go out .
and this whole book , it does n't just run on the ipad .
it also runs on the iphone .
and so you can start reading on your ipad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iphone .
and it works the exact same way .
you can pinch into any page .
open it up .
so that 's push pop press ' first title , al gore 's " our choice . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that 's spectacular .
do you want to be a publisher , a technology licenser ?
what is the business here ?
is this something that other people can do ?
mm : yeah , we 're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content .
so melcher media 's team , who 's on the east coast - and we 're on the west coast , building the software - takes our tool and , every day , drags in images and text .
ca : so you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that ? -lrb- mm : yes . -rrb- all right . mike , thanks so much .
mm : thank you . -lrb- ca : good luck . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- how can we investigate this flora of viruses that surround us , and aid medicine ?
how can we turn our cumulative knowledge of virology into a simple , hand-held , single diagnostic assay ?
i want to turn everything we know right now about detecting viruses and the spectrum of viruses that are out there into , let 's say , a small chip .
when we started thinking about this project - how we would make a single diagnostic assay to screen for all pathogens simultaneously - well , there 's some problems with this idea .
first of all , viruses are pretty complex , but they 're also evolving very fast .
this is a picornavirus .
picornaviruses - these are things that include the common cold and polio , things like this .
you 're looking at the outside shell of the virus , and the yellow color here are those parts of the virus that are evolving very , very fast , and the blue parts are not evolving very fast .
when people think about making pan-viral detection reagents , usually it 's the fast-evolving problem that 's an issue , because how can we detect things if they 're always changing ?
but evolution is a balance : where you have fast change , you also have ultra-conservation - things that almost never change .
and so we looked into this a little more carefully , and i 'm going to show you data now .
this is just some stuff you can do on the computer from the desktop .
i took a bunch of these small picornaviruses , like the common cold , like polio and so on , and i just broke them down into small segments .
and so took this first example , which is called coxsackievirus , and just break it into small windows .
and i 'm coloring these small windows blue if another virus shares an identical sequence in its genome to that virus .
these sequences right up here - which do n't even code for protein , by the way - are almost absolutely identical across all of these , so i could use this sequence as a marker to detect a wide spectrum of viruses , without having to make something individual .
now , over here there 's great diversity : that 's where things are evolving fast .
down here you can see slower evolution : less diversity .
now , by the time we get out here to , let 's say , acute bee paralysis virus - probably a bad one to have if you 're a bee - this virus shares almost no similarity to coxsackievirus , but i can guarantee you that the sequences that are most conserved among these viruses on the right-hand of the screen are in identical regions right up here .
and so we can encapsulate these regions of ultra-conservation through evolution - how these viruses evolved - by just choosing dna elements or rna elements in these regions to represent on our chip as detection reagents .
ok , so that 's what we did , but how are we going to do that ?
well , for a long time , since i was in graduate school , i 've been messing around making dna chips - that is , printing dna on glass .
and that 's what you see here : these little salt spots are just dna tacked onto glass , and so i can put thousands of these on our glass chip and use them as a detection reagent .
we took our chip over to hewlett-packard and used their atomic force microscope on one of these spots , and this is what you see : you can actually see the strands of dna lying flat on the glass here .
so , what we 're doing is just printing dna on glass - little flat things - and these are going to be markers for pathogens .
ok , i make little robots in lab to make these chips , and i 'm really big on disseminating technology .
if you 've got enough money to buy just a camry , you can build one of these too , and so we put a deep how-to guide on the web , totally free , with basically order-off-the-shelf parts .
you can build a dna array machine in your garage .
here 's the section on the all-important emergency stop switch .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- every important machine 's got to have a big red button .
but really , it 's pretty robust .
you can actually be making dna chips in your garage and decoding some genetic programs pretty rapidly . it 's a lot of fun .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so what we did - and this is a really cool project - we just started by making a respiratory virus chip .
i talked about that - you know , that situation where you go into the clinic and you do n't get diagnosed ?
well , we just put basically all the human respiratory viruses on one chip , and we threw in herpes virus for good measure - i mean , why not ?
the first thing you do as a scientist is , you make sure stuff works .
and so what we did is , we take tissue culture cells and infect them with various viruses , and we take the stuff and fluorescently label the nucleic acid , the genetic material that comes out of these tissue culture cells - mostly viral stuff - and stick it on the array to see where it sticks .
now , if the dna sequences match , they 'll stick together , and so we can look at spots .
and if spots light up , we know there 's a certain virus in there .
that 's what one of these chips really looks like , and these red spots are , in fact , signals coming from the virus .
and each spot represents a different family of virus or species of virus .
and so , that 's a hard way to look at things , so i 'm just going to encode things as a little barcode , grouped by family , so you can see the results in a very intuitive way .
what we did is , we took tissue culture cells and infected them with adenovirus , and you can see this little yellow barcode next to adenovirus .
and , likewise , we infected them with parainfluenza-3 - that 's a paramyxovirus - and you see a little barcode here .
and then we did respiratory syncytial virus .
that 's the scourge of daycare centers everywhere - it 's like boogeremia , basically .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can see that this barcode is the same family , but it 's distinct from parainfluenza-3 , which gives you a very bad cold .
and so we 're getting unique signatures , a fingerprint for each virus .
polio and rhino : they 're in the same family , very close to each other .
rhino 's the common cold , and you all know what polio is , and you can see that these signatures are distinct .
and kaposi 's sarcoma-associated herpes virus gives a nice signature down here .
and so it is not any one stripe or something that tells me i have a virus of a particular type here ; it 's the barcode that in bulk represents the whole thing .
all right , i can see a rhinovirus - and here 's the blow-up of the rhinovirus 's little barcode - but what about different rhinoviruses ?
how do i know which rhinovirus i have ?
and there 're only 102 because people got bored collecting them : there are just new ones every year .
and so , here are four different rhinoviruses , and you can see , even with your eye , without any fancy computer pattern-matching recognition software algorithms , now , this is kind of a cheap shot , because i know what the genetic sequence of all these rhinoviruses is , and i in fact designed the chip expressly to be able to tell them apart , but what about rhinoviruses that have never seen a genetic sequencer ?
we do n't know what the sequence is ; just pull them out of the field .
so , here are four rhinoviruses we never knew anything about - no one 's ever sequenced them - and you can also see that you get unique and distinguishable patterns .
you can imagine building up some library , whether real or virtual , of fingerprints of essentially every virus .
but that 's , again , shooting fish in a barrel , you know , right ?
you have tissue culture cells . there are a ton of viruses .
what about real people ?
you ca n't control real people , as you probably know .
you have no idea what someone 's going to cough into a cup , and it 's probably really complex , right ?
it could have lots of bacteria , it could have more than one virus , and it certainly has host genetic material .
so how do we deal with this ?
and how do we do the positive control here ?
well , it 's pretty simple .
that 's me , getting a nasal lavage .
and the idea is , let 's experimentally inoculate people with virus .
this is all irb-approved , by the way ; they got paid .
and basically we experimentally inoculate people with the common cold virus .
or , even better , let 's just take people right out of the emergency room - undefined , community-acquired respiratory tract infections .
you have no idea what walks in through the door .
so , let 's start off with the positive control first , where we know the person was healthy .
they got a shot of virus up the nose , let 's see what happens .
day zero : nothing happening .
they 're healthy ; they 're clean - it 's amazing .
actually , we thought the nasal tract might be full of viruses even when you 're walking around healthy .
it 's pretty clean . if you 're healthy , you 're pretty healthy .
day two : we get a very robust rhinovirus pattern , and it 's very similar to what we get in the lab doing our tissue culture experiment .
so that 's great , but again , cheap shot , right ?
we put a ton of virus up this guy 's nose . so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i mean , we wanted it to work . he really had a cold .
so , how about the people who walk in off the street ?
here are two individuals represented by their anonymous id codes .
they both have rhinoviruses ; we 've never seen this pattern in lab .
we sequenced part of their viruses ; they 're new rhinoviruses no one 's actually even seen .
remember , our evolutionary-conserved sequences we 're using on this array allow us to detect even novel or uncharacterized viruses , because we pick what is conserved throughout evolution .
here 's another guy . you can play the diagnosis game yourself here .
these different blocks represent the different viruses in this paramyxovirus family , so you can kind of go down the blocks and see where the signal is .
well , does n't have canine distemper ; that 's probably good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but by the time you get to block nine , you see that respiratory syncytial virus .
maybe they have kids . and then you can see , also , the family member that 's related : rsvb is showing up here .
here 's another individual , sampled on two separate days - repeat visits to the clinic .
this individual has parainfluenza-1 , and you can see that there 's a little stripe over here for sendai virus : that 's mouse parainfluenza .
the genetic relationships are very close there . that 's a lot of fun .
so , we built out the chip .
we made a chip that has every known virus ever discovered on it .
why not ? every plant virus , every insect virus , every marine virus .
everything that we could get out of genbank - that is , the national repository of sequences .
now we 're using this chip . and what are we using it for ?
well , first of all , when you have a big chip like this , you need a little bit more informatics , so we designed the system to do automatic diagnosis .
and the idea is that we simply have virtual patterns , because we 're never going to get samples of every virus - it would be virtually impossible . but we can get virtual patterns , and compare them to our observed result - which is a very complex mixture - and come up with some sort of score of how likely it is this is a rhinovirus or something .
and this is what this looks like .
if , for example , you used a cell culture that 's chronically infected with papilloma , you get a little computer readout here , and our algorithm says it 's probably papilloma type 18 .
and that is , in fact , what these particular cell cultures are chronically infected with .
so let 's do something a little bit harder .
we put the beeper in the clinic .
when somebody shows up , and the hospital does n't know what to do because they ca n't diagnose it , they call us .
that 's the idea , and we 're setting this up in the bay area .
and so , this case report happened three weeks ago .
we have a 28-year-old healthy woman , no travel history , -lsb- unclear -rsb- , does n't smoke , does n't drink .
10-day history of fevers , night sweats , bloody sputum - she 's coughing up blood - muscle pain .
she went to the clinic , and they gave her antibiotics and then sent her home .
she came back after ten days of fever , right ? still has the fever , and she 's hypoxic - she does n't have much oxygen in her lungs .
they did a ct scan .
a normal lung is all sort of dark and black here .
all this white stuff - it 's not good .
this sort of tree and bud formation indicates there 's inflammation ; there 's likely to be infection .
ok . so , the patient was treated then with a third-generation cephalosporin antibiotic and doxycycline , and on day three , it did n't help : she had progressed to acute failure .
they had to intubate her , so they put a tube down her throat and they began to mechanically ventilate her .
she could no longer breathe for herself .
what to do next ? do n't know .
switch antibiotics : so they switched to another antibiotic , tamiflu .
it 's not clear why they thought she had the flu , but they switched to tamiflu .
and on day six , they basically threw in the towel .
you do an open lung biopsy when you 've got no other options .
there 's an eight percent mortality rate with just doing this procedure , and so basically - and what do they learn from it ?
you 're looking at her open lung biopsy .
and i 'm no pathologist , but you ca n't tell much from this .
all you can tell is , there 's a lot of swelling : bronchiolitis .
it was " unrevealing " : that 's the pathologist 's report .
and so , what did they test her for ?
they have their own tests , of course , and so they tested her for over 70 different assays , for every sort of bacteria and fungus and viral assay you can buy off the shelf : sars , metapneumovirus , hiv , rsv - all these .
everything came back negative , over 100,000 dollars worth of tests .
i mean , they went to the max for this woman .
and basically on hospital day eight , that 's when they called us .
they gave us endotracheal aspirate - you know , a little fluid from the throat , from this tube that they got down there - and they gave us this .
we put it on the chip ; what do we see ? well , we saw parainfluenza-4 .
well , what the hell 's parainfluenza-4 ?
no one tests for parainfluenza-4 . no one cares about it .
in fact , it 's not even really sequenced that much .
there 's just a little bit of it sequenced .
there 's almost no epidemiology or studies on it .
no one would even consider it , because no one had a clue that it could cause respiratory failure .
and why is that ? just lore . there 's no data - no data to support whether it causes severe or mild disease .
clearly , we have a case of a healthy person that 's going down .
ok , that 's one case report .
i 'm going to tell you one last thing in the last two minutes that 's unpublished - it 's going to come out tomorrow - and it 's an interesting case of how you might use this chip to find something new and open a new door .
prostate cancer . i do n't need to give you many statistics about prostate cancer . most of you already know it : third leading cause of cancer deaths in the u.s.
lots of risk factors , but there is a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer .
for maybe about 10 percent of prostate cancer , there are folks that are predisposed to it .
and the first gene that was mapped in association studies for this , early-onset prostate cancer , was this gene called rnasel .
what is that ? it 's an antiviral defense enzyme .
so , we 're sitting around and thinking , " why would men who have the mutation - a defect in an antiviral defense system - get prostate cancer ?
it does n't make sense - unless , maybe , there 's a virus ? "
so , we put tumors - and now we have over 100 tumors - on our array .
and we know who 's got defects in rnasel and who does n't .
and i 'm showing you the signal from the chip here , and i 'm showing you for the block of retroviral oligos .
and what i 'm telling you here from the signal , is that men who have a mutation in this antiviral defense enzyme , and have a tumor , often have - 40 percent of the time - a signature which reveals a new retrovirus .
ok , that 's pretty wild . what is it ?
so , we clone the whole virus .
first of all , i 'll tell you that a little automated prediction told us it was very similar to a mouse virus .
but that does n't tell us too much , so we actually clone the whole thing .
and the viral genome i 'm showing you right here ?
it 's a classic gamma retrovirus , but it 's totally new ; no one 's ever seen it before .
its closest relative is , in fact , from mice , and so we would call this a xenotropic retrovirus , because it 's infecting a species other than mice .
and this is a little phylogenetic tree to see how it 's related to other viruses .
we 've done it for many patients now , and we can say that they 're all independent infections .
they all have the same virus , but they 're different enough that there 's reason to believe that they 've been independently acquired .
is it really in the tissue ? and i 'll end up with this : yes .
we take slices of these biopsies of tumor tissue and use material to actually locate the virus , and we find cells here with viral particles in them .
these guys really do have this virus .
does this virus cause prostate cancer ?
nothing i 'm saying here implies causality . i do n't know .
is it a link to oncogenesis ? i do n't know .
is it the case that these guys are just more susceptible to viruses ?
could be . and it might have nothing to do with cancer .
but now it 's a door .
we have a strong association between the presence of this virus and a genetic mutation that 's been linked to cancer .
that 's where we 're at .
so , it opens up more questions than it answers , i 'm afraid , but that 's what , you know , science is really good at .
this was all done by folks in the lab - i can not take credit for most of this .
this is a collaboration between myself and don .
this is the guy who started the project in my lab , and this is the guy who 's been doing prostate stuff .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- on my desk in my office , i keep a small clay pot that i made in college . it 's raku , which is a kind of pottery that began in japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the japanese tea ceremony .
this one is more than 400 years old .
each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay , and it was the imperfections that people cherished .
everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire .
i just took this out of the kiln last week , and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down , but raku is really fast . you do it outside , and you take the kiln up to temperature . in 15 minutes , it goes to 1,500 degrees , and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside , you can see that faint sheen , you turn the kiln off , and you reach in with these long metal tongs , you grab the pot , and in japan , this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea , and you can imagine what that steam would smell like .
but here in the united states , we ramp up the drama a little bit , and we drop our pots into sawdust , which catches on fire , and you take a garbage pail , and you put it on top , and smoke starts pouring out .
i would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke .
i love raku because it allows me to play with the elements .
i can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze , but then i have to let it go to the fire and the smoke , and what 's wonderful is the surprises that happen , like this crackle pattern , because it 's really stressful on these pots . they go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute .
raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity .
i find in so many things that tension between what i can control and what i have to let go happens all the time , whether i 'm creating a new radio show or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons .
when i sat down to write a book about creativity , i realized that the steps were reversed .
i had to let go at the very beginning , and i had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers , and as i listened to these stories , i realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think , including letting go .
it was supposed to break , but that 's okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughs -rrb- that 's part of the letting go , is sometimes it happens and sometimes it does n't , because creativity also grows from the broken places .
the best way to learn about anything is through stories , and so i want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish .
the first embrace is something that we think , " oh , this is very easy , " but it 's actually getting harder , and that 's paying attention to the world around us .
so many artists speak about needing to be open , to embrace experience , and that 's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus .
the filmmaker mira nair speaks about growing up in a small town in india . its name is bhubaneswar , and here 's a picture of one of the temples in her town .
mira nair : in this little town , there were like 2,000 temples .
we played cricket all the time . we kind of grew up in the rubble . the major thing that inspired me , that led me on this path , that made me a filmmaker eventually , was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and i would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of , you know , passion , and hashish as well , and it was amazing .
you know , the folk tales of mahabharata and ramayana , the two holy books , the epics that everything comes out of in india , they say . after seeing that jatra , the folk theater , i knew i wanted to get on , you know , and perform .
julie burstein : is n't that a wonderful story ?
you can see the sort of break in the everyday .
there they are in the school fields , but it 's good and evil , and passion and hashish . and mira nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance , but she was ready . she was ready to open up to what it sparked in her , and it led her , as she said , down this path to become an award-winning filmmaker .
so being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace .
artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult .
the novelist richard ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today . he 's severely dyslexic .
richard ford : i was slow to learn to read , went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum , and still to this day ca n't read silently much faster than i can read aloud , but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when i finally did reconcile myself to how slow i was going to have to do it , then i think i came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language : the syncopations , the sounds of words ,
what words look like , where paragraphs break , where lines break . i mean , i was n't so badly dyslexic that i was disabled from reading . i just had to do it really slowly , and as i did , lingering on those sentences as i had to linger , i fell heir to language 's other qualities , which i think has helped me write sentences .
jb : it 's so powerful . richard ford , who 's won the pulitzer prize , says that dyslexia helped him write sentences .
he had to embrace this challenge , and i use that word intentionally . he did n't have to overcome dyslexia .
he had to learn from it . he had to learn to hear the music in language .
artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do , sometimes pushing into what they ca n't do , helps them focus on finding their own voice .
the sculptor richard serra talks about how , as a young artist , he thought he was a painter , and he lived in florence after graduate school .
while he was there , he traveled to madrid , where he went to the prado to see this picture by the spanish painter diego velázquez .
it 's from 1656 , and it 's called " las meninas , " and it 's the picture of a little princess and her ladies-in-waiting , and if you look over that little blonde princess 's shoulder , you 'll see a mirror , and reflected in it are her parents , the king and queen of spain , who would be standing where you might stand to look at the picture .
as he often did , velázquez put himself in this painting too .
he 's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other .
richard serra : i was standing there looking at it , and i realized that velázquez was looking at me , and i thought , " oh . i 'm the subject of the painting . "
and i thought , " i 'm not going to be able to do that painting . "
i was to the point where i was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness , and i was n't getting anywhere . so i went back and dumped all my paintings in the arno , and i thought , i 'm going to just start playing around .
jb : richard serra says that so nonchalantly , you might have missed it . he went and saw this painting by a guy who 'd been dead for 300 years , and realized , " i ca n't do that , " and so richard serra went back to his studio in florence , picked up all of his work up to that point , and threw it in a river .
richard serra let go of painting at that moment , but he did n't let go of art . he moved to new york city , and he put together a list of verbs - to roll , to crease , to fold - more than a hundred of them , and as he said , he just started playing around . he did these things to all kinds of material . he would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it . he would do the same thing to rubber , and when he got to the direction " to lift , " he created this , which is in the museum of modern art .
richard serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he 's known for today : huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience . in sculpture , richard serra is able to do what he could n't do in painting .
he makes us the subject of his art .
so experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish .
there 's a fourth embrace , and it 's the hardest .
it 's the embrace of loss , the oldest and most constant of human experiences .
in order to create , we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for , looking squarely at rejection , at heartbreak , at war , at death .
that 's a tough space to stand in .
the educator parker palmer calls it " the tragic gap , " tragic not because it 's sad but because it 's inevitable , and my friend dick nodel likes to say , " you can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful . "
that tension resonates in the work of the photographer joel meyerowitz , who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography , for capturing a moment on the street , and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes - of tuscany , of cape cod , of light .
joel is a new yorker , and his studio for many years was in chelsea , with a straight view downtown to the world trade center , and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light .
you know where this story goes .
on 9/11 , joel was n't in new york . he was out of town , but he raced back to the city , and raced down to the site of the destruction .
joel meyerowitz : and like all the other passersby , i stood outside the chain link fence on chambers and greenwich , and all i could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble , and i raised my camera to take a peek , just to see if there was something to see , and some cop , a lady cop , hit me on my shoulder , and said , " hey , no pictures ! "
and it was such a blow that it woke me up , in the way that it was meant to be , i guess .
and when i asked her why no pictures , she said , " it 's a crime scene . no photographs allowed . "
and i asked her , " what would happen if i was a member of the press ? " and she told me , " oh , look back there , " and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area , and i said , " well , when do they go in ? "
and she said , " probably never . "
and as i walked away from that , i had this crystallization , probably from the blow , because it was an insult in a way .
i thought , " oh , if there 's no pictures , then there 'll be no record . we need a record . "
and i thought , " i 'm gonna make that record .
i 'll find a way to get in , because i do n't want to see this history disappear . "
jb : he did . he pulled in every favor he could , and got a pass into the world trade center site , where he photographed for nine months almost every day .
looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when i went home to my family at night .
my office was just a few blocks away .
but some of these photographs are beautiful , and we wondered , was it difficult for joel meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation ?
jm : well , you know , ugly , i mean , powerful and tragic and horrific and everything , but it was also as , in nature , an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue , and like many other ruins - you go to the ruins of the colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace - and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather .
i mean , there were afternoons i was down there , and the light goes pink and there 's a mist in the air and you 're standing in the rubble , and i found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature , as time , is erasing this wound .
time is unstoppable , and it transforms the event .
it gets further and further away from the day , and light and seasons temper it in some way , and it 's not that i 'm a romantic . i 'm really a realist .
the reality is , there 's the woolworth building in a veil of smoke from the site , but it 's now like a scrim across a theater , and it 's turning pink , you know , and down below there are hoses spraying , and the lights have come on for the evening , and the water is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on , and i 'm thinking , " my god , who could dream this up ? "
but the fact is , i 'm there , it looks like that , you have to take a picture .
jb : you have to take a picture . that sense of urgency , of the need to get to work , is so powerful in joel 's story .
when i saw joel meyerowitz recently , i told him how much i admired his passionate obstinacy , his determination to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work , and he laughed , and he said , " i 'm stubborn , but i think what 's more important is my passionate optimism . "
the first time i told these stories , a man in the audience raised his hand and said , " all these artists talk about their work , not their art , which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there , and i 'm not an artist . " he 's right . we all wrestle with experience and challenge , limits and loss .
creativity is essential to all of us , whether we 're scientists or teachers , parents or entrepreneurs .
i want to leave you with another image of a japanese tea bowl . this one is at the freer gallery in washington , d.c.
it 's more than a hundred years old and you can still see the fingermarks where the potter pinched it .
but as you can also see , this one did break at some point in its hundred years .
but the person who put it back together , instead of hiding the cracks , decided to emphasize them , using gold lacquer to repair it .
this bowl is more beautiful now , having been broken , than it was when it was first made , and we can look at those cracks , because they tell the story that we all live , of the cycle of creation and destruction , of control and letting go , of picking up the pieces and making something new .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- you know for me , the interest in contemporary forms of slavery started with a leaflet that i picked up in london .
it was the early ' 90s , and i was at a public event .
i saw this leaflet and it said , " there are millions of slaves in the world today . "
and i thought , " no way , no way . "
and i 'm going to admit to hubris .
because i also , i 'm going to admit to you , i also thought , " how can i be like a hot-shot young full professor who teaches human rights and not know this ?
so it ca n't be true . "
well , if you teach , if you worship in the temple of learning , do not mock the gods , because they will take you , fill you with curiosity and desire , and drive you . drive you with a passion to change things .
i went out and did a lit review , 3,000 articles on the key word " slavery . "
two turned out to be about contemporary - only two .
all the rest were historical .
they were press pieces and they were full of outrage , they were full of speculation , they were anecdotal - no solid information .
so , i began to do a research project of my own .
i went to five countries around the world .
i looked at slaves . i met slaveholders , and i looked very deeply into slave-based businesses because this is an economic crime .
people do not enslave people to be mean to them .
they do it to make a profit .
in four different continents , was depressingly familiar .
like this : agricultural workers in africa , whipped and beaten , showing us how they were beaten in the fields before they escaped from slavery and met up with our film crew .
it was mind-blowing .
and i want to be very clear .
i 'm talking about real slavery .
this is not about lousy marriages , this is not about jobs that suck .
this is about people who can not walk away , people who are forced to work without pay , people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay .
it 's real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history .
now , where is it ?
well , this map in the sort of redder , yellower colors are the places with the highest densities of slavery .
but in fact that kind of bluey color are the countries where we ca n't find any cases of slavery .
and you might notice that it 's only iceland and greenland where we ca n't find any cases of enslavement around the world .
we 're also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction .
around the world , slaves are used to destroy the environment , cutting down trees in the amazon ; destroying forest areas in west africa ; mining and spreading mercury around in places like ghana and the congo ; destroying the coastal ecosystems in south asia .
it 's a pretty harrowing linkage between what 's happening to our environment and what 's happening to our human rights .
now , how on earth did we get to a situation like this , where we have 27 million people in slavery in the year 2010 ?
that 's double the number that came out of africa in the entire transatlantic slave trade .
well , it builds up with these factors .
they are not causal , they are actually supporting factors .
one we all know about , the population explosion : the world goes from two billion people to almost seven billion people in the last 50 years .
being numerous does not make you a slave .
add in the increased vulnerability of very large numbers of people in the developing world , caused by civil wars , ethnic conflicts , kleptocratic governments , disease ... you name it , you know it .
we understand how that works . in some countries all of those things happen at once , like sierra leone a few years ago , and push enormous parts ... about a billion people in the world , in fact , as we know , live on the edge , live in situations where they do n't have any opportunity and are usually even destitute .
but that does n't make you a slave either .
what it takes to turn a person who is destitute and vulnerable into a slave , is the absence of the rule of law .
if the rule of law is sound , it protects the poor and it protects the vulnerable .
but if corruption creeps in and people do n't have the opportunity to have that protection of the rule of law , then if you can use violence , if you can use violence with impunity , you can reach out and harvest the vulnerable into slavery .
well , that is precisely what has happened around the world .
though , for a lot of people , the people who step into slavery today do n't usually get kidnapped or knocked over the head .
they come into slavery because someone has asked them this question .
all around the world i 've been told an almost identical story .
people say , " i was home , someone came into our village , they stood up in the back of a truck , they said , ' i 've got jobs , who needs a job ? " ' and they did exactly what you or i would do in the same situation .
they said , " that guy looked sketchy . i was suspicious , but my children were hungry .
we needed medicine .
i knew i had to do anything i could to earn some money to support the people i care about . "
they climb into the back of the truck . they go off with the person who recruits them .
ten miles , 100 miles , 1,000 miles later , they find themselves in dirty , dangerous , demeaning work .
they take it for a little while , but when they try to leave , bang ! , the hammer comes down , and they discover they 're enslaved .
now , that kind of slavery is , again , pretty much what slavery has been all through human history .
but there is one thing that is particularly remarkable and novel about slavery today , and that is a complete collapse in the price of human beings - expensive in the past , dirt cheap now .
even the business programs have started picking up on this .
i just want to share a little clip for you .
daphne : ok . llively discussion guaranteed here , as always , as we get macro and talk commodities .
continuing here in the studio with our guest michael o 'donohue , head of commodities at four continents capital management .
and we 're also joined by brent lawson from lawson frisk securities .
brent lawson : happy to be here .
d : good to have you with us , brent .
now , gentlemen ... brent , where is your money going this year ?
bl : well daphne , we 've been going short on gas and oil recently and casting our net just a little bit wider .
we really like the human being story a lot .
if you look at a long-term chart , prices are at historical lows and yet global demand for forced labor is still real strong .
so , that 's a scenario that we think we should be capitalizing on .
d : michael , what 's your take on the people story ? are you interested ?
michael o 'donoghue : oh definitely . non-voluntary labor 's greatest advantage as an asset is the endless supply .
we 're not about to run out of people . no other commodity has that .
bl : daphne , if i may draw your attention to one thing .
that is that private equity has been sniffing around , and that tells me that this market is about to explode .
africans and indians , as usual , south americans , and eastern europeans in particular are on our buy list .
d : interesting . micheal , bottom line , what do you recommend ?
mo : we 're recommending to our clients a buy and hold strategy .
there 's no need to play the market .
there 's a lot of vulnerable people out there . it 's very exciting .
d : exciting stuff indeed . gentlemen , thank you very much .
kevin bales : okay , you figured it out . that 's a spoof .
though i enjoyed watching your jaws drop , drop , drop , until you got it .
mtv europe worked with us and made that spoof , and they 've been slipping it in between music videos without any introduction , which i think is kind of fun .
here 's the reality .
the price of human beings across the last 4,000 years in today 's money has averaged about 40,000 dollars .
capital purchase items .
you can see that the lines cross when the population explodes .
the average price of a human being today , around the world , is about 90 dollars .
they are more expensive in places like north america .
slaves cost between 3,000 to 8,000 dollars in north america , but i could take you places in india or nepal where human beings can be acquired for five or 10 dollars .
they key here is that people have ceased to be that capital purchase item and become like styrofoam cups .
you buy them cheaply , you use them , you crumple them up , and then when you 're done with them you just throw them away .
these young boys are in nepal .
they are basically the transport system on a quarry run by a slaveholder .
there are no roads there , so they carry loads of stone on their backs , often of their own weight , up and down the himalaya mountains .
one of their mothers said to us , " you know , we ca n't survive here , but we ca n't even seem to die either . "
it 's a horrible situation .
and if there is anything that makes me feel very positive about this , it 's that there are also - in addition to young men like this who are still enslaved - there are ex-slaves who are now working to free others .
or , we say , frederick douglass is in the house .
i do n't know if you 've ever had a daydream about , " wow . what would it be like to meet harriet tubman ?
what would it be like to meet frederick douglass ? "
i 've got to say , one of the most exciting parts about my job is that i get to , and i want to introduce you to one of those .
his name is james kofi annan . he was a slave child in ghana enslaved in the fishing industry , and he now , after escape and building a new life , has formed an organization that we work closely with to go back and get people out of slavery .
this is not james , this is one of the kids that he works with .
james kofi annan -lrb- video -rrb- : he was hit with a paddle in the head . and this reminds me of my childhood when i used to work here .
kb : james and our country director in ghana , emmanuel otoo are now receiving regular death threats because the two of them managed to get convictions and imprisonment for three human traffickers for the very first time in ghana for enslaving people , from the fishing industry , for enslaving children .
now , everything i 've been telling you , i admit , is pretty disheartening .
but there is actually a very positive side to this , and that is this : the 27 million people who are in slavery today , that 's a lot of people , but it 's also the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery .
and likewise , the 40 billion dollars that they generate into the global economy each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labor .
slavery , illegal in every country has been pushed to the edges of our global society .
and in a way , without us even noticing , has ended up standing on the precipice of its own extinction , waiting for us to give it a big boot and knock it over . and get rid of it .
and it can be done .
now , if we do that , if we put the resources and the focus to it , what does it actually cost to get people out of slavery ?
well , first , before i even tell you the cost i 've got to be absolutely clear .
we do not buy people out of slavery .
buying people out of slavery is like paying a burglar to get your television back ; it 's abetting a crime .
liberation , however , costs some money .
liberation , and more importantly all the work that comes after liberation .
it 's not an event , it 's a process .
it 's about helping people to build lives of dignity , stability , economic autonomy , citizenship .
well , amazingly , in places like india where costs are very low , that family , that three-generation family that you see there who were in hereditary slavery - so , that granddad there , was born a baby into slavery - but the total cost , amortized across the rest of the work , was about 150 dollars to bring that family out of slavery and then take them through a two year process to build a stable life of citizenship and education .
a boy in ghana rescued from fishing slavery , about 400 dollars .
in the united states , north america , much more expensive . legal costs , medical costs ...
we understand that it 's expensive here : about 30,000 dollars .
but most of the people in the world in slavery live in those places where the costs are lowest .
and in fact , the global average is about what it is for ghana .
and that means , when you multiply it up , the estimated cost of not just freedom but sustainable freedom for the entire 27 million people on the planet in slavery is something like 10.8 billion dollars - what americans spend on potato chips and pretzels , what seattle is going to spend on its light rail system : usually the annual expenditure in this country on blue jeans , or in the last holiday period when we bought gameboys and ipods and other tech gifts for people , we spent 10.8 billion dollars .
intel 's fourth quarter earnings : 10.8 billion .
it 's not a lot of money at the global level .
in fact , it 's peanuts .
and the great thing about it is that it 's not money down a hole , there is a freedom dividend . when you let people out of slavery to work for themselves , are they motivated ?
they take their kids out of the workplace , they build a school , they say , " we 're going to have stuff we 've never had before like three squares , medicine when we 're sick , clothing when we 're cold . "
they become consumers and producers and local economies begin to spiral up very rapidly .
that 's important , all of that about how we rebuild sustainable freedom , because we 'd never want to repeat what happened in this country in 1865 .
four million people were lifted up out of slavery and then dumped .
dumped without political participation , decent education , any kind of real opportunity in terms of economic lives , and then sentenced to generations of violence and prejudice and discrimination .
and america is still paying the price for the botched emancipation of 1865 .
we have made a commitment that we will never let people come out of slavery on our watch , and end up as second class citizens .
it 's just not going to happen .
this is what liberation really looks like .
children rescued from slavery in the fishing industry in ghana , reunited with their parents , and then taken with their parents back to their villages to rebuild their economic well-being so that they become slave-proof - absolutely unenslaveable .
now , this woman lived in a village in nepal .
we 'd been working there about a month .
they had just begun to come out of a hereditary kind of slavery .
they 'd just begun to light up a little bit , open up a little bit .
but when we went to speak with her , when we took this photograph , the slaveholders were still menacing us from the sidelines . they had n't been really pushed back .
i was frightened . we were frightened .
we said to her , " are you worried ? are you upset ? "
she said , " no , because we 've got hope now .
how could we not succeed , " she said , " when people like you from the other side of the world are coming here to stand beside us ? "
okay , we have to ask ourselves , are we willing to live in a world with slavery ?
if we do n't take action , we just leave ourselves open to have someone else jerk the strings that tie us to slavery in the products we buy , and in our government policies .
and yet , if there 's one thing that every human being can agree on , i think it 's that slavery should end .
and if there is a fundamental violation of our human dignity that we would all say is horrific , it 's slavery .
and we 've got to say , what good is all of our intellectual and political and economic power - and i 'm really thinking intellectual power in this room - if we ca n't use it to bring slavery to an end ?
i think there is enough intellectual power in this room to bring slavery to an end .
and you know what ? if we ca n't do that , if we ca n't use our intellectual power to end slavery , there is one last question : are we truly free ?
okay , thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it is a thrill to be here at a conference that 's devoted to " inspired by nature " - you can imagine .
and i 'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section .
did you notice this section is foreplay ?
because i get to talk about one of my favorite critters , which is the western grebe . you have n't lived until you 've seen these guys do their courtship dance .
i was on bowman lake in glacier national park , which is a long , skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it , and my partner and i have a rowing shell .
and so we were rowing , and one of these western grebes came along .
and what they do for their courtship dance is , they go together , the two of them , the two mates , and they begin to run underwater .
they paddle faster , and faster , and faster , until they 're going so fast that they literally lift up out of the water , and they 're standing upright , sort of paddling the top of the water .
and one of these grebes came along while we were rowing .
and so we 're in a skull , and we 're moving really , really quickly .
and this grebe , i think , sort of , mistaked us for a prospect , and started to run along the water next to us , in a courtship dance - for miles .
it would stop , and then start , and then stop , and then start .
now that is foreplay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i came this close to changing species at that moment .
obviously , life can teach us something in the entertainment section . life has a lot to teach us .
but what i 'd like to talk about today is what life might teach us in technology and in design .
what 's happened since the book came out - the book was mainly about research in biomimicry - and what 's happened since then is architects , designers , engineers - people who make our world - have started to call and say , we want a biologist to sit at the design table to help us , in real time , become inspired .
or - and this is the fun part for me - we want you to take us out into the natural world . we 'll come with a design challenge and we find the champion adapters in the natural world , who might inspire us .
so this is a picture from a galapagos trip that we took with some wastewater treatment engineers ; they purify wastewater .
and some of them were very resistant , actually , to being there .
what they said to us at first was , you know , we already do biomimicry .
we use bacteria to clean our water . and we said , well , that 's not exactly being inspired by nature .
that 's bioprocessing , you know ; that 's bio-assisted technology : using an organism to do your wastewater treatment is an old , old technology called " domestication . "
this is learning something , learning an idea , from an organism and then applying it .
and so they still were n't getting it .
so we went for a walk on the beach and i said , well , give me one of your big problems . give me a design challenge , sustainability speed bump , that 's keeping you from being sustainable .
and they said scaling , which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes .
and they said , you know what happens is , mineral - just like at your house - mineral builds up .
and then the aperture closes , and we have to flush the pipes with toxins , or we have to dig them up .
so if we had some way to stop this scaling - and so i picked up some shells on the beach . and i asked them , what is scaling ? what 's inside your pipes ?
and they said , calcium carbonate .
and i said , that 's what this is ; this is calcium carbonate .
and they did n't know that .
they did n't know that what a seashell is , it 's templated by proteins , and then ions from the seawater crystallize in place to create a shell .
so the same sort of a process , without the proteins , is happening on the inside of their pipes . they did n't know .
this is not for lack of information ; it 's a lack of integration .
you know , it 's a silo , people in silos . they did n't know that the same thing was happening . so one of them thought about it and said , ok , well , if this is just crystallization that happens automatically out of seawater - self-assembly - then why are n't shells infinite in size ? what stops the scaling ?
why do n't they just keep on going ?
and i said , well , in the same way that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization - and then they all sort of leaned in - they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization .
it literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal .
and , in fact , there is a product called tpa that 's mimicked that protein - that stop-protein - and it 's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes .
that changed everything . from then on , you could not get these engineers back in the boat .
the first day they would take a hike , and it was , click , click , click , click . five minutes later they were back in the boat .
we 're done . you know , i 've seen that island .
after this , they were crawling all over . they would snorkel for as long as we would let them snorkel .
what had happened was that they realized that there were organisms out there that had already solved the problems that they had spent their careers trying to solve .
learning about the natural world is one thing ; learning from the natural world - that 's the switch .
that 's the profound switch .
what they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere ; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world .
3.8 billion years of field-testing .
10 to 30 - craig venter will probably tell you ; i think there 's a lot more than 30 million - well-adapted solutions .
the important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context .
and the context is the earth - the same context that we 're trying to solve our problems in .
so it 's the conscious emulation of life 's genius .
it 's not slavishly mimicking - although al is trying to get the hairdo going - it 's not a slavish mimicry ; it 's taking the design principles , the genius of the natural world , and learning something from it .
now , in a group with so many it people , i do have to mention what i 'm not going to talk about , and that is that your field is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things , on the software side . so there 's computers that protect themselves , like an immune system , and we 're learning from gene regulation and biological development . and we 're learning from neural nets , genetic algorithms , evolutionary computing .
that 's on the software side . but what 's interesting to me is that we have n't looked at this , as much . i mean , these machines are really not very high tech in my estimation in the sense that there 's dozens and dozens of carcinogens in the water in silicon valley .
so the hardware is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success .
so what can we learn about making - not just computers , but everything ?
the plane you came in , cars , the seats that you 're sitting on .
how do we redesign the world that we make , the human-made world ?
more importantly , what should we ask in the next 10 years ?
and there 's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has .
what 's the syllabus ?
three questions , for me , are key .
how does life make things ?
this is the opposite ; this is how we make things .
it 's called heat , beat and treat - that 's what material scientists call it .
and it 's carving things down from the top , with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product . you heat it up ; you beat it with high pressures ; you use chemicals . ok . heat , beat and treat .
life ca n't afford to do that . how does life make things ?
how does life make the most of things ?
that 's a geranium pollen .
and its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily . look at that shape .
life adds information to matter .
in other words : structure .
it gives it information . by adding information to matter , it gives it a function that 's different than without that structure .
and thirdly , how does life make things disappear into systems ?
because life does n't really deal in things ; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems .
really quick syllabus .
as i 'm reading more and more now , and following the story , there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences .
and at the same time , i 'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are .
the two groups are not talking to each other .
at all .
what in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture , to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we 're in ?
i 'm going to try to go through 12 , really quickly .
one that 's exciting to me is self-assembly .
now , you 've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology .
back to that shell : the shell is a self-assembling material .
on the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl forming out of seawater . it 's a layered structure that 's mineral and then polymer , and it makes it very , very tough .
it 's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics .
but what 's really interesting : unlike our ceramics that are in kilns , it happens in seawater . it happens near , in and near , the organism 's body .
this is sandia national labs .
a guy named jeff brinker has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process .
imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature by simply dipping something into a liquid , lifting it out of the liquid , and having evaporation force the molecules in the liquid together , so that they jigsaw together in the same way as this crystallization works .
imagine making all of our hard materials that way .
imagine spraying the precursors to a pv cell , to a solar cell , onto a roof , and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light .
here 's an interesting one for the it world : bio-silicon . this is a diatom , which is made of silicates .
and so silicon , which we make right now - it 's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips - this is a bio-mineralization process that 's now being mimicked .
this is at uc santa barbara . look at these diatoms .
this is from ernst haeckel 's work .
imagine being able to - and , again , it 's a templated process , and it solidifies out of a liquid process - imagine being able to have that sort of structure coming out at room temperature .
imagine being able to make perfect lenses .
on the left , this is a brittle star ; it 's covered with lenses that the people at lucent technologies have found have no distortion whatsoever .
it 's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of .
and there 's many of them , all over its entire body .
what 's interesting , again , is that it self-assembles .
a woman named joanna aizenberg , at lucent , is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create these sort of lenses . she 's also looking at fiber optics .
that 's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic .
down at the very base of it , there 's fiber optics that work better than ours , actually , to move light , but you can tie them in a knot ; they 're incredibly flexible .
here 's another big idea : co2 as a feedstock .
a guy named geoff coates , at cornell , said to himself , you know , plants do not see co2 as the biggest poison of our time .
we see it that way . plants are busy making long chains of starches and glucose , right , out of co2 . he 's found a way - he 's found a catalyst - and he 's found a way to take co2 and make it into polycarbonates . biodegradable plastics out of co2 - how plant-like .
solar transformations : the most exciting one .
there are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device inside of purple bacterium , the people at asu . even more interesting , lately , in the last couple of weeks , people have seen that there 's an enzyme called hydrogenase that 's able to evolve hydrogen from proton and electrons , and is able to take hydrogen up - basically what 's happening in a fuel cell , in the anode of a fuel cell and in a reversible fuel cell .
in our fuel cells , we do it with platinum ; life does it with a very , very common iron .
and a team has now just been able to mimic that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase .
that 's very exciting for fuel cells - to be able to do that without platinum .
power of shape : here 's a whale . we 've seen that the fins of this whale have tubercles on them . and those little bumps actually increase efficiency in , for instance , the edge of an airplane - increase efficiency by about 32 percent .
which is an amazing fossil fuel savings , if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing .
color without pigments : this peacock is creating color with shape .
light comes through , it bounces back off the layers ; it 's called thin-film interference . imagine being able to self-assemble products with the last few layers playing with light to create color .
imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface , so that it 's self-cleaning with just water . that 's what a leaf does .
see that up-close picture ?
that 's a ball of water , and those are dirt particles .
and that 's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf .
there 's a company making a product called lotusan , which mimics - when the building facade paint dries , it mimics the bumps in a self-cleaning leaf , and rainwater cleans the building .
water is going to be our big , grand challenge : quenching thirst .
here are two organisms that pull water .
the one on the left is the namibian beetle pulling water out of fog .
the one on the right is a pill bug - pulls water out of air , does not drink fresh water .
pulling water out of monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in atlanta , before it gets into a building , are key technologies .
separation technologies are going to be extremely important .
what if we were to say , no more hard rock mining ?
what if we were to separate out metals from waste streams , small amounts of metals in water ? that 's what microbes do ; they chelate metals out of water .
there 's a company here in san francisco called mr3 that is embedding mimics of the microbes ' molecules on filters to mine waste streams .
green chemistry is chemistry in water .
we do chemistry in organic solvents .
this is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider and the silk being formed from a spider . is n't that beautiful ?
green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature 's recipe book .
it 's not easy , because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table .
and we use all of them , even the toxic ones .
to figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset of the periodic table , and create miracle materials like that cell , is the task of green chemistry .
timed degradation : packaging that is good until you do n't want it to be good anymore , and dissolves on cue .
that 's a mussel you can find in the waters out here , and the threads holding it to a rock are timed ; at exactly two years , they begin to dissolve .
healing : this is a good one .
that little guy over there is a tardigrade .
there is a problem with vaccines around the world not getting to patients . and the reason is that the refrigeration somehow gets broken ; what 's called the " cold chain " gets broken .
a guy named bruce rosner looked at the tardigrade - which dries out completely , and yet stays alive for months and months and months , and is able to regenerate itself .
and he found a way to dry out vaccines - encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules as the tardigrade has within its cells - meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated .
they can be put in a glove compartment , ok .
learning from organisms . this is a session about water - learning about organisms that can do without water , in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration .
i 'm not going to get to 12 .
but what i am going to do is tell you that the most important thing , besides all of these adaptations , is the fact that these organisms have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do while taking care of the place that 's going to take care of their offspring .
when they 're involved in foreplay , they 're thinking about something very , very important - and that 's having their genetic material remain , 10,000 generations from now .
and that means finding a way to do what they do without destroying the place that 'll take care of their offspring .
that 's the biggest design challenge .
luckily , there are millions and millions of geniuses willing to gift us with their best ideas .
good luck having a conversation with them .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : talk about foreplay , i - we need to get to 12 , but really quickly .
janine benyus : oh really ?
ca : yeah . just like , you know , like the 10-second version of 10 , 11 and 12 . because we just - your slides are so gorgeous , and the ideas are so big , i ca n't stand to let you go down without seeing 10 , 11 and 12 .
jb : ok , put this - ok , i 'll just hold this thing . ok , great .
ok , so that 's the healing one .
sensing and responding : feedback is a huge thing .
this is a locust . there can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer , and yet they do n't collide with one another .
and yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right . there 's a person at newcastle who has figured out that it 's a very large neuron .
and she 's actually figuring out how to make a collision-avoidance circuitry based on this very large neuron in the locust .
this is a huge and important one , number 11 .
and that 's the growing fertility .
that means , you know , net fertility farming .
we should be growing fertility . and , oh yes - we get food , too .
because we have to grow the capacity of this planet to create more and more opportunities for life .
and really , that 's what other organisms do as well .
in ensemble , that 's what whole ecosystems do : they create more and more opportunities for life .
our farming has done the opposite .
so , farming based on how a prairie builds soil , ranching based on how a native ungulate herd actually increases the health of the range , even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh not only cleans the water , but creates incredibly sparkling productivity .
this is the simple design brief . i mean , it looks simple because the system , over 3.8 billion years , has worked this out .
that is , those organisms that have not been able to figure out how to enhance or sweeten their places , are not around to tell us about it .
that 's the twelfth one .
life - and this is the secret trick ; this is the magic trick - life creates conditions conducive to life .
it builds soil ; it cleans air ; it cleans water ; it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and i need to live .
and it does that in the middle of having great foreplay and meeting their needs . so it 's not mutually exclusive .
we have to find a way to meet our needs , while making of this place an eden .
ca : janine , thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- why ca n't we solve these problems ?
we know what they are .
something always seems to stop us .
why ?
i remember march the 15th , 2000 .
the b15 iceberg broke off the ross ice shelf .
in the newspaper it said " it was all part of a normal process . "
a little bit further on in the article it said " a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace . "
that same word , " normal , " had two different , almost opposite meanings .
if we walk into the b15 iceberg when we leave here today , we 're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall , 76 miles long , 17 miles wide , and it 's going to weigh two gigatons .
i 'm sorry , there 's nothing normal about this .
and yet i think it 's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions .
only 90 days after this , arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred .
it was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome .
this is the code that 's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are .
and if we just take one cell 's worth of this code and unwind it , it 's a meter long , two nanometers thick .
two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness .
and i wondered , what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places , where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms ?
and what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy , the electron ?
so i started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists i could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there , and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas .
six and a half years later , a hundred and eighty researchers , they have some amazing developments in the lab , and i will show you three of those today , such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead , we can generate all the energy we need right where we are , cleanly , safely , and cheaply .
think of the space that we spend most of our time .
a tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun .
we like the light that comes into the room , but in the middle of summer , all that heat is coming into the room that we 're trying to keep cool .
in winter , exactly the opposite is happening .
we 're trying to heat up the space that we 're in , and all that is trying to get out through the window .
would n't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in ?
one of the materials that can do this is a remarkable material , carbon , that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction where graphite is blasted by a vapor , and when the vaporized carbon condenses , it condenses back into a different form : chickenwire rolled up .
but this chickenwire carbon , called a carbon nanotube , is a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of one of your hairs .
it 's a thousand times more conductive than copper .
how is that possible ?
one of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently .
you think of carbon as black .
carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible .
and when it 's in this form , if i combine it with a polymer and affix it to your window when it 's in its colored state , it will reflect away all heat and light , and when it 's in its bleached state it will let all the light and heat through and any combination in between .
to change its state , by the way , takes two volts from a millisecond pulse .
and once you 've changed its state , it stays there until you change its state again .
as we were working on this incredible discovery at university of florida , we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist , and he was working on a pretty incredible thing .
imagine if we did n't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night .
we 'd have to see at night , right ?
this lets you do it .
it 's a nanomaterial , two nanomaterials , a detector and an imager .
the total width of it is 600 times smaller than the width of a decimal place .
and it takes all the infrared available at night , converts it into an electron in the space of two small films , and is enabling you to play an image which you can see through .
i 'm going to show to tedsters , the first time , this operating .
firstly i 'm going to show you the transparency .
transparency is key .
it 's a film that you can look through .
and then i 'm going to turn the lights out .
and you can see , off a tiny film , incredible clarity .
as we were working on this , it dawned on us : this is taking infrared radiation , wavelengths , and converting it into electrons .
what if we combined it with this ?
suddenly you 've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window .
but because it 's flexible , it can be on any surface whatsoever .
the power plant of tomorrow is no power plant .
we talked about generating and using .
we want to talk about storing energy , and unfortunately the best thing we 've got going is something that was developed in france a hundred and fifty years ago , the lead acid battery .
in terms of dollars per what 's stored , it 's simply the best .
knowing that we 're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power , we went to a group at university of texas at dallas , and we gave them this diagram .
it was in actually a diner outside of dallas / fort worth airport .
we said , " could you build this ? "
and these scientists , instead of laughing at us , said , " yeah . "
and what they built was ebox .
ebox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside , hold it until you need it , and then be able to release it and pass it off .
being able to do that means that i can generate energy cleanly , efficiently and cheaply right where i am .
it 's my energy .
and if i do n't need it , i can convert it back up on the window to energy , light , and beam it , line of site , to your place .
and for that i do not need an electric grid between us .
the grid of tomorrow is no grid , and energy , clean efficient energy , will one day be free .
if you do this , you get the last puzzle piece , which is water .
each of us , every day , need just eight glasses of this , because we 're human .
when we run out of water , as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world , we 're going to have to get this from the sea , and that 's going to require us to build desalination plants .
19 trillion dollars is what we 're going to have to spend .
these also require tremendous amounts of energy .
in fact , it 's going to require twice the world 's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water .
we 're simply not going to do that .
but in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply , we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need .
i 'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists , no kinder than many of the people in the world , but they have a magic look at the world .
and i 'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world .
it 's been a long time in coming for me .
18 years ago , i saw a photograph in the paper .
it was taken by kevin carter who went to the sudan to document their famine there .
i 've carried this photograph with me every day since then .
it 's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst .
by any standard this is wrong .
it 's just wrong .
we can do better than this .
we should do better than this .
and whenever i go round to somebody who says , " you know what , you 're working on something that 's too difficult .
it 'll never happen . you do n't have enough money .
you do n't have enough time .
there 's something much more interesting around the corner , " i say , " try saying that to her . "
that 's what i say in my mind . and i just say " thank you , " and i go on to the next one .
this is why we have to solve our problems , and i know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature , the stuff of life : the simple electron .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's the fifth time i stand on this shore , the cuban shore , looking out at that distant horizon , believing , again , that i 'm going to make it all the way across that vast , dangerous wilderness of an ocean .
not only have i tried four times , but the greatest swimmers in the world have been trying since 1950 , and it 's still never been done .
the team is proud of our four attempts .
it 's an expedition of some 30 people .
bonnie is my best friend and head handler , who somehow summons will , that last drop of will within me , when i think it 's gone , after many , many hours and days out there .
the shark experts are the best in the world - large predators below .
the box jellyfish , the deadliest venom in all of the ocean , is in these waters , and i have come close to dying from them on a previous attempt .
the conditions themselves , besides the sheer distance of over 100 miles in the open ocean - the currents and whirling eddies and the gulf stream itself , the most unpredictable of all of the planet earth .
and by the way , it 's amusing to me that journalists and people before these attempts often ask me , " well , are you going to go with any boats or any people or anything ? "
and i 'm thinking , what are they imagining ?
that i 'll just sort of do some celestial navigation , and carry a bowie knife in my mouth , and i 'll hunt fish and skin them alive and eat them , and maybe drag a desalinization plant behind me for fresh water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes , i have a team . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the team is expert , and the team is courageous , and brimming with innovation and scientific discovery , as is true with any major expedition on the planet .
and we 've been on a journey .
and the debate has raged , has n't it , since the greeks , of is n't it what it 's all about ?
is n't life about the journey , not really the destination ?
and here we 've been on this journey , and the truth is , it 's been thrilling .
we have n't reached that other shore , and still our sense of pride and commitment , unwavering commitment .
when i turned 60 , the dream was still alive from having tried this in my 20s , and dreamed it and imagined it .
the most famous body of water on the earth today , i imagine , cuba to florida .
and it was deep . it was deep in my soul .
and when i turned 60 , it was n't so much about the athletic accomplishment , it was n't the ego of " i want to be the first . "
that 's always there and it 's undeniable .
but it was deeper . it was , how much life is there left ?
let 's face it , we 're all on a one-way street , are n't we , and what are we going to do ?
what are we going to do as we go forward to have no regrets looking back ?
and all this past year in training , i had that teddy roosevelt quote to paraphrase it , floating around in my brain , and it says , " you go ahead , you go ahead and sit back in your comfortable chair and you be the critic , you be the observer , while the brave one gets in the ring and engages and gets bloody and gets dirty and fails over and over and over again , but yet is n't afraid and is n't timid and lives life in a bold way . "
and so of course i want to make it across .
it is the goal , and i should be so shallow to say that this year , the destination was even sweeter than the journey .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but the journey itself was worthwhile taking .
and at this point , by this summer , everybody - scientists , sports scientists , endurance experts , neurologists , my own team , bonnie - said it 's impossible .
it just simply ca n't be done , and bonnie said to me , " but if you 're going to take the journey , i 'm going to see you through to the end of it , so i 'll be there . "
and now we 're there .
and as we 're looking out , kind of a surreal moment before the first stroke , standing on the rocks at marina hemingway , the cuban flag is flying above , all my team 's out in their boats , hands up in the air , " we 're here , we 're here for you , " bonnie and i look at each other , and we say , this year , the mantra is - and i 've been using it in training - find a way .
you have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you , as we all do .
none of us ever get through this life without heartache , without turmoil , and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality , you find your way , and bonnie grabbed my shoulders , and she said , " let 's find our way to florida . "
and we started , and for the next 53 hours , it was an intense , unforgettable life experience .
the highs were high , the awe , i 'm not a religious person , but i 'll tell you , to be in the azure blue of the gulf stream as if , as you 're breathing , you 're looking down miles and miles and miles , to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on , it 's awe-inspiring .
i have a playlist of about 85 songs , and especially in the middle of the night , and that night , because we use no lights - lights attract jellyfish , lights attract sharks , lights attract baitfish that attract sharks , so we go in the pitch black of the night .
you 've never seen black this black .
you ca n't see the front of your hand , and the people on the boat , bonnie and my team on the boat , they just hear the slapping of the arms , and they know where i am , because there 's no visual at all .
and i 'm out there kind of tripping out on my little playlist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've got a tight rubber cap , so i do n't hear a thing .
i 've got goggles and i 'm turning my head 50 times a minute , and i 'm singing , ♪ imagine there 's no heaven ♪ ♪ doo doo doo doo doo ♪ ♪ it 's easy if you try ♪ ♪ doo doo doo doo doo ♪ and i can sing that song a thousand times in a row .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now there 's a talent unto itself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and each time i get done with ♪ ooh , you may say i 'm a dreamer but i 'm not the only one ♪ 222 .
♪ imagine there 's no heaven ♪ and when i get through the end of a thousand of john lennon 's " imagine , " i have swum nine hours and 45 minutes , exactly .
and then there are the crises . of course there are .
and the vomiting starts , the seawater , you 're not well , you 're wearing a jellyfish mask for the ultimate protection .
it 's difficult to swim in .
it 's causing abrasions on the inside of the mouth , but the tentacles ca n't get you .
and the hypothermia sets in .
the water 's 85 degrees , and yet you 're losing weight and using calories , and as you come over toward the side of the boat , not allowed to touch it , not allowed to get out , but bonnie and her team hand me nutrition and asks me what i 'm doing , am i all right , i am seeing the taj mahal over here .
i 'm in a very different state , and i 'm thinking , wow , i never thought i 'd be running into the taj mahal out here .
it 's gorgeous .
i mean , how long did it take them to build that ?
it 's just - so , uh , wooo . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we kind of have a cardinal rule that i 'm never told , really , how far it is , because we do n't know how far it is .
what 's going to happen to you between this point and that point ?
what 's going to happen to the weather and the currents and , god forbid , you 're stung when you do n't think you could be stung in all this armor , and bonnie made a decision coming into that third morning that i was suffering and i was hanging on by a thread and she said , " come here , " and i came close to the boat , and she said , " look , look out there , " and i saw light , because the day 's easier than the night , and i thought we were coming into day , and i saw a stream of white light along the horizon , and i said , " it 's going to be morning soon . "
and she said , " no , those are the lights of key west . "
it was 15 more hours , which for most swimmers would be a long time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you have no idea how many 15-hour training swims i had done .
so here we go , and i somehow , without a decision , went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting stephen hawking and the parameters of the universe , i just went into thinking about this dream , and why , and how .
and as i said , when i turned 60 , it was n't about that concrete " can you do it ? "
that 's the everyday machinations .
that 's the discipline , and it 's the preparation , and there 's a pride in that .
but i decided to think , as i went along , about , the phrase usually is reaching for the stars , and in my case , it 's reaching for the horizon .
and when you reach for the horizon , as i 've proven , you may not get there , but what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down .
what a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons .
and now the shore is coming , and there 's just a little part of me that 's sad .
the epic journey is going to be over .
so many people come up to me now and say , " what 's next ? we love that !
that little tracker that was on the computer ?
when are you going to do the next one ? we just ca n't wait to follow the next one . "
well , they were just there for 53 hours , and i was there for years .
and so there wo n't be another epic journey in the ocean .
but the point is , and the point was that every day of our lives is epic , and i 'll tell you , when i walked up onto that beach , staggered up onto that beach , and i had so many times in a very puffed up ego way , rehearsed what i would say on the beach .
when bonnie thought that the back of my throat was swelling up , and she brought the medical team over to our boat to say that she 's really beginning to have trouble breathing .
another 12 , 24 hours in the saltwater , the whole thing - and i just thought in my hallucinatory moment , that i heard the word tracheotomy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and bonnie said to the doctor , " i 'm not worried about her not breathing .
if she ca n't talk when she gets to the shore , she 's gonna be pissed off . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the truth is , all those orations that i had practiced just to get myself through some training swims as motivation , it was n't like that .
it was a very real moment , with that crowd , with my team .
we did it . i did n't do it . we did it .
and we 'll never forget it . it 'll always be part of us .
and the three things that i did sort of blurt out when we got there , was first , " never , ever give up . "
i live it . what 's the phrase from today from socrates ?
to be is to do .
so i do n't stand up and say , do n't ever give up .
i did n't give up , and there was action behind these words .
the second is , " you can chase your dreams at any age ; you 're never too old . "
sixty-four , that no one at any age , any gender , could ever do , has done it , and there 's no doubt in my mind that i am at the prime of my life today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah .
thank you .
and the third thing i said on that beach was , " it looks like the most solitary endeavor in the world , and in many ways , of course , it is , and in other ways , and the most important ways , it 's a team , and if you think i 'm a badass , you want to meet bonnie . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bonnie , where are you ?
where are you ?
there 's bonnie stoll . -lrb- applause -rrb- my buddy .
the henry david thoreau quote goes , when you achieve your dreams , it 's not so much what you get as who you have become in achieving them .
and yeah , i stand before you now .
in the three months since that swim ended , i 've sat down with oprah and i 've been in president obama 's oval office .
i 've been invited to speak in front of esteemed groups such as yourselves .
i 've signed a wonderful major book contract .
all of that 's great , and i do n't denigrate it .
i 'm proud of it all , but the truth is , i 'm walking around tall because i am that bold , fearless person , and i will be , every day , until it 's time for these days to be done .
thank you very much and enjoy the conference .
thank you . thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . thank you . thank you .
thank you .
find a way ! -lrb- applause -rrb- power .
that is the word that comes to mind .
we 're the new technologists .
we have a lot of data , so we have a lot of power .
how much power do we have ?
scene from a movie : " apocalypse now " - great movie .
we 've got to get our hero , captain willard , to the mouth of the nung river so he can go pursue colonel kurtz .
the way we 're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off .
so the scene : the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in .
and there 's this loud , thrilling music in the background , this wild music .
♫ dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ da ta da da ♫ that 's a lot of power .
that 's the kind of power i feel in this room .
that 's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have .
let 's take an example .
what can we do with just one person 's data ?
what can we do with that guy 's data ?
i can look at your financial records .
i can tell if you pay your bills on time .
i know if you 're good to give a loan to .
i can look at your medical records ; i can see if your pump is still pumping - see if you 're good to offer insurance to .
i can look at your clicking patterns .
when you come to my website , i actually know what you 're going to do already because i 've seen you visit millions of websites before .
and i 'm sorry to tell you , you 're like a poker player , you have a tell .
i can tell with data analysis what you 're going to do before you even do it .
i know what you like . i know who you are , and that 's even before i look at your mail or your phone .
those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have .
but i 'm not actually here to talk about what we can do .
i 'm here to talk about what we should do .
what 's the right thing to do ?
now i see some puzzled looks like , " why are you asking us what 's the right thing to do ?
we 're just building this stuff . somebody else is using it . "
fair enough .
but it brings me back .
i think about world war ii - some of our great technologists then , some of our great physicists , studying nuclear fission and fusion - just nuclear stuff .
we gather together these physicists in los alamos to see what they 'll build .
we want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology .
so what should we be doing with that guy 's data ?
should we be collecting it , gathering it , so we can make his online experience better ?
so we can make money ?
so we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good ?
or should we respect his privacy , protect his dignity and leave him alone ?
which one is it ?
how should we figure it out ?
i know : crowdsource . let 's crowdsource this .
so to get people warmed up , let 's start with an easy question - something i 'm sure everybody here has an opinion about : iphone versus android .
let 's do a show of hands - iphone .
uh huh .
android .
you 'd think with a bunch of smart people we would n't be such suckers just for the pretty phones .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- next question , a little bit harder .
should we be collecting all of that guy 's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he 's up to no good ?
or should we leave him alone ?
collect his data .
leave him alone .
you 're safe . it 's fine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , last question - harder question - when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case , should we use a kantian deontological moral framework , or should we use a millian consequentialist one ?
kant .
mill .
not as many votes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , that 's a terrifying result .
terrifying , because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions .
how do we know what to do with all the power we have if we do n't have a moral framework ?
we know more about mobile operating systems , but what we really need is a moral operating system .
what 's a moral operating system ?
we all know right and wrong , right ?
you feel good when you do something right , you feel bad when you do something wrong .
our parents teach us that : praise with the good , scold with the bad .
but how do we figure out what 's right and wrong ?
and from day to day , we have the techniques that we use .
maybe we just follow our gut .
maybe we take a vote - we crowdsource .
or maybe we punt - ask the legal department , see what they say .
in other words , it 's kind of random , kind of ad hoc , how we figure out what we should do .
and maybe , if we want to be on surer footing , what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there , that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place , and how would we know in a given situation what to do .
so let 's get a moral framework .
we 're numbers people , living by numbers .
how can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework ?
i know a guy who did exactly that .
a brilliant guy - he 's been dead 2,500 years .
plato , that 's right .
remember him - old philosopher ?
you were sleeping during that class .
and plato , he had a lot of the same concerns that we did .
he was worried about right and wrong .
he wanted to know what is just .
but he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this .
he says something 's just . she says something else is just .
it 's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too .
i 'm just going back and forth ; i 'm not getting anywhere .
i do n't want opinions ; i want knowledge .
i want to know the truth about justice - like we have truths in math .
in math , we know the objective facts .
take a number , any number - two .
favorite number . i love that number .
there are truths about two .
if you 've got two of something , you add two more , you get four .
that 's true no matter what thing you 're talking about .
it 's an objective truth about the form of two , the abstract form .
when you have two of anything - two eyes , two ears , two noses , just two protrusions - those all partake of the form of two .
they all participate in the truths that two has .
they all have two-ness in them .
and therefore , it 's not a matter of opinion .
what if , plato thought , ethics was like math ?
what if there were a pure form of justice ?
what if there are truths about justice , and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated , partook of that form of justice ?
then you would know what was really just and what was n't .
it would n't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances .
that 's a stunning vision .
i mean , think about that . how grand . how ambitious .
that 's as ambitious as we are .
he wants to solve ethics .
he wants objective truths .
if you think that way , you have a platonist moral framework .
if you do n't think that way , well , you have a lot of company in the history of western philosophy , because the tidy idea , you know , people criticized it .
aristotle , in particular , he was not amused .
he thought it was impractical .
aristotle said , " we should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows . "
aristotle thought ethics was n't a lot like math .
he thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path .
if you think that , plato 's not your guy .
but do n't give up .
maybe there 's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework .
how about this : what if in any situation you could just calculate , look at the choices , measure out which one 's better and know what to do ?
that sound familiar ?
that 's a utilitarian moral framework .
john stuart mill was a great advocate of this - nice guy besides - and only been dead 200 years .
so basis of utilitarianism - i 'm sure you 're familiar at least .
the three people who voted for mill before are familiar with this .
but here 's the way it works .
what if morals , what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain ?
it does something intrinsic to the act .
it 's not like its relation to some abstract form .
it 's just a matter of the consequences .
you just look at the consequences and see if , overall , it 's for the good or for the worse .
that would be simple . then we know what to do .
let 's take an example .
suppose i go up and i say , " i 'm going to take your phone . "
not just because it rang earlier , but i 'm going to take it because i made a little calculation .
i thought , that guy looks suspicious .
and what if he 's been sending little messages to bin laden 's hideout - or whoever took over after bin laden - and he 's actually like a terrorist , a sleeper cell .
i 'm going to find that out , and when i find that out , i 'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause .
that has a very high utility to prevent that damage .
and compared to the little pain that it 's going to cause - because it 's going to be embarrassing when i 'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a farmville problem and that whole bit - that 's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone .
if you feel that way , that 's a utilitarian choice .
but maybe you do n't feel that way either .
maybe you think , it 's his phone .
it 's wrong to take his phone because he 's a person and he has rights and he has dignity , and we ca n't just interfere with that .
he has autonomy .
it does n't matter what the calculations are .
there are things that are intrinsically wrong - like lying is wrong , like torturing innocent children is wrong .
kant was very good on this point , and he said it a little better than i 'll say it .
he said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct , and then it is our duty to follow those rules .
it 's not a matter of calculation .
so let 's stop .
we 're right in the thick of it , this philosophical thicket .
and this goes on for thousands of years , because these are hard questions , and i 've only got 15 minutes .
so let 's cut to the chase .
how should we be making our decisions ?
is it plato , is it aristotle , is it kant , is it mill ?
what should we be doing ? what 's the answer ?
what 's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do , whether we should use that guy 's data or not ?
what 's the formula ?
there 's not a formula .
there 's not a simple answer .
ethics is hard .
ethics requires thinking .
and that 's uncomfortable .
i know ; i spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence , trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us , that could give us answers .
but they ca n't .
you ca n't just take human thinking and put it into a machine .
we 're the ones who have to do it .
happily , we 're not machines , and we can do it .
not only can we think , we must .
hannah arendt said , " the sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil .
it arises from not thinking . "
that 's what she called the " banality of evil . "
and the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person .
so let 's do that . let 's think .
in fact , let 's start right now .
every person in this room do this : think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing , where you wondered , " what should i be doing ? "
bring that to mind , and now reflect on that and say , " how did i come up that decision ?
what did i do ? did i follow my gut ?
did i have somebody vote on it ? or did i punt to legal ? "
or now we have a few more choices .
" did i evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like mill would ?
or like kant , did i use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right ? "
think about it . really bring it to mind . this is important .
it is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable tedtalk time doing nothing but thinking about this .
are you ready ? go .
stop . good work .
what you just did , that 's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power .
now the next step - try this .
go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision .
not right now . wait till i finish talking .
do it over lunch .
and do n't just find another technologist friend ; find somebody different than you .
find an artist or a writer - or , heaven forbid , find a philosopher and talk to them .
in fact , find somebody from the humanities .
why ? because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists .
just a few days ago , right across the street from here , there was hundreds of people gathered together .
it was technologists and humanists at that big bibliotech conference .
and they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective .
you have someone from google talking to someone who does comparative literature .
you 're thinking about the relevance of 17th century french theater - how does that bear upon venture capital ?
well that 's interesting . that 's a different way of thinking .
and when you think in that way , you become more sensitive to the human considerations , which are crucial to making ethical decisions .
so imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend .
and you 're telling him what we 're talking about , about our whole data revolution and all this - maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music .
♫ dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ well , your musician friend will stop you and say , " you know , the theme music for your data revolution , that 's an opera , that 's wagner .
it 's based on norse legend .
it 's gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry . "
that 's interesting .
now it 's also a beautiful opera , and we 're moved by that opera .
we 're moved because it 's about the battle between good and evil , about right and wrong .
and we care about right and wrong .
we care what happens in that opera .
we care what happens in " apocalypse now . "
and we certainly care what happens with our technologies .
we have so much power today , it is up to us to figure out what to do , and that 's the good news .
we 're the ones writing this opera .
this is our movie .
we figure out what will happen with this technology .
we determine how this will all end .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- herbie hancock : thank you .
marcus miller . -lrb- applause -rrb- harvey mason . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- if i could reveal anything that is hidden from us , at least in modern cultures , it would be to reveal something that we 've forgotten , that we used to know as well as we knew our own names .
and that is that we live in a competent universe , that we are part of a brilliant planet , and that we are surrounded by genius .
biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses , and take advice from them , design advice .
that 's where i live , and it 's my university as well .
i 'm surrounded by genius . i can not help but remember the organisms and the ecosystems that know how to live here gracefully on this planet .
this is what i would tell you to remember if you ever forget this again .
remember this .
this is what happens every year .
this is what keeps its promise .
while we 're doing bailouts , this is what happened .
spring .
imagine designing spring .
imagine that orchestration .
you think ted is hard to organize . -lrb- laughter -rrb- right ?
imagine , and if you have n't done this in a while , do .
imagine the timing , the coordination , all without top-down laws , or policies , or climate change protocols .
this happens every year .
there is lots of showing off .
there is lots of love in the air .
there 's lots of grand openings .
and the organisms , i promise you , have all of their priorities in order .
i have this neighbor that keeps me in touch with this , because he 's living , usually on his back , looking up at those grasses .
and one time he came up to me - he was about seven or eight years old - he came up to me .
and there was a wasp 's nest that i had let grow in my yard , right outside my door .
and most people knock them down when they 're small .
but it was fascinating to me , because i was looking at this sort of fine italian end papers .
and he came up to me and he knocked .
he would come every day with something to show me .
and like , knock like a woodpecker on my door until i opened it up .
and he asked me how i had made the house for those wasps , because he had never seen one this big .
and i told him , " you know , cody , the wasps actually made that . "
and we looked at it together .
and i could see why he thought , you know - it was so beautifully done .
it was so architectural . it was so precise .
but it occurred to me , how in his small life had he already believed the myth that if something was that well done , that we must have done it .
how did he not know - it 's what we 've all forgotten - that we 're not the first ones to build .
we 're not the first ones to process cellulose .
we 're not the first ones to make paper . we 're not the first ones to try to optimize packing space , or to waterproof , or to try to heat and cool a structure .
we 're not the first ones to build houses for our young .
what 's happening now , in this field called biomimicry , is that people are beginning to remember that organisms , other organisms , the rest of the natural world , are doing things very similar to what we need to do .
but in fact they are doing them in a way that have allowed them to live gracefully on this planet for billions of years .
so these people , biomimics , are nature 's apprentices .
and they 're focusing on function .
what i 'd like to do is show you a few of the things that they 're learning .
they have asked themselves , " what if , every time i started to invent something , i asked , ' how would nature solve this ? " ' and here is what they 're learning .
this is an amazing picture from a czech photographer named jack hedley .
this is a story about an engineer at j.r. west .
they 're the people who make the bullet train .
it was called the bullet train because it was rounded in front , but every time it went into a tunnel it would build up a pressure wave , and then it would create like a sonic boom when it exited .
so the engineer 's boss said , " find a way to quiet this train . "
he happened to be a birder .
he went to the equivalent of an audubon society meeting .
and he studied - there was a film about king fishers .
and he thought to himself , " they go from one density of medium , the air , into another density of medium , water , without a splash . look at this picture .
without a splash , so they can see the fish .
and he thought , " what if we do this ? "
quieted the train .
made it go 10 percent faster on 15 percent less electricity .
how does nature repel bacteria ?
we 're not the first ones to have to protect ourselves from some bacteria .
turns out that - this is a galapagos shark .
it has no bacteria on its surface , no fouling on its surface , no barnacles .
and it 's not because it goes fast .
it actually basks . it 's a slow-moving shark .
so how does it keep its body free of bacteria build-up ?
it does n't do it with a chemical .
it does it , it turns out , with the same denticles that you had on speedo bathing suits , that broke all those records in the olympics , but it 's a particular kind of pattern .
and that pattern , the architecture of that pattern on its skin denticles keep bacteria from being able to land and adhere .
there is a company called sharklet technologies that 's now putting this on the surfaces in hospitals to keep bacteria from landing , which is better than dousing it with anti-bacterials or harsh cleansers that many , many organisms are now becoming drug resistant .
hospital-acquired infections are now killing more people every year in the united states than die from aids or cancer or car accidents combined - about 100,000 .
this is a little critter that 's in the namibian desert .
it has no fresh water that it 's able to drink , but it drinks water out of fog .
it 's got bumps on the back of its wing covers .
and those bumps act like a magnet for water .
they have water-loving tips , and waxy sides .
and the fog comes in and it builds up on the tips .
and it goes down the sides and goes into the critter 's mouth .
there is actually a scientist here at oxford who studied this , andrew parker .
and now kinetic and architectural firms like grimshaw are starting to look at this as a way of coating buildings so that they gather water from the fog .
10 times better than our fog-catching nets .
co2 as a building block .
organisms do n't think of co2 as a poison .
plants and organisms that make shells , coral , think of it as a building block .
there is now a cement manufacturing company starting in the united states called calera .
they 've borrowed the recipe from the coral reef , and they 're using co2 as a building block in cement , in concrete .
instead of - cement usually emits a ton of co2 for every ton of cement .
now it 's reversing that equation , and actually sequestering half a ton of co2 thanks to the recipe from the coral .
none of these are using the organisms .
they 're really only using the blueprints or the recipes from the organisms .
how does nature gather the sun 's energy ?
this is a new kind of solar cell that 's based on how a leaf works .
it 's self-assembling .
it can be put down on any substrate whatsoever .
it 's extremely inexpensive and rechargeable every five years .
it 's actually a company a company that i 'm involved in called onesun , with paul hawken .
there are many many ways that nature filters water that takes salt out of water .
we take water and push it against a membrane .
and then we wonder why the membrane clogs and why it takes so much electricity .
nature does something much more elegant .
and it 's in every cell .
every red blood cell of your body right now has these hourglass-shaped pores called aquaporins .
they actually export water molecules through .
it 's kind of a forward osmosis .
they export water molecules through , and leave solutes on the other side .
a company called aquaporin is starting to make desalination membranes mimicking this technology .
trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress .
this algorithm has been put into a software program that 's now being used to make bridges lightweight , to make building beams lightweight .
actually g.m. opel used it to create that skeleton you see , it lightweighted that skeleton using a minimum amount of material , as an organism must , for the maximum amount of strength .
this beetle , unlike this chip bag here , this beetle uses one material , chitin .
and it finds many many ways to put many functions into it .
it 's waterproof .
it 's strong and resilient .
it 's breathable . it creates color through structure .
whereas that chip bag has about seven layers to do all of those things .
one of our major inventions that we need to be able to do to come even close to what these organisms can do is to find a way to minimize the amount of material , the kind of material we use , and to add design to it .
we use five polymers in the natural world to do everything that you see .
in our world we use about 350 polymers to make all this .
nature is nano .
nanotechnology , nanoparticles , you hear a lot of worry about this .
loose nanoparticles . what is really interesting to me is that not many people have been asking , " how can we consult nature about how to make nanotechnology safe ? "
nature has been doing that for a long time .
embedding nanoparticles in a material for instance , always .
in fact , sulfur-reducing bacteria , as part of their synthesis , they will emit , as a byproduct , nanoparticles into the water .
but then right after that , they emit a protein that actually gathers and aggregates those nanoparticles so that they fall out of solution .
energy use . organisms sip energy , because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get .
and one of the largest fields right now , in the world of energy grids , you hear about the smart grid .
one of the largest consultants are the social insects .
swarm technology . there is a company called regen .
they are looking at how ants and bees find their food and their flowers in the most effective way as a whole hive .
and they 're having appliances in your home talk to one another through that algorithm , and determine how to minimize peak power use .
there 's a group of scientists in cornell that are making what they call a synthetic tree , because they are saying , " there is no pump at the bottom of a tree . "
it 's capillary action and transpiration pulls water up , a drop at a time , pulling it , releasing it from a leaf and pulling it up through the roots .
and they 're creating - you can think of it as a kind of wallpaper .
they 're thinking about putting it on the insides of buildings to move water up without pumps .
amazon electric eel - incredibly endangered , some of these species - create 600 volts of electricity with the chemicals that are in your body .
even more interesting to me is that 600 volts does n't fry it .
you know we use pvc , and we sheath wires with pvc for insulation .
these organisms , how are they insulating against their own electric charge ?
these are some questions that we 've yet to ask .
here 's a wind turbine manufacturer that went to a whale .
humpback whale has scalloped edges on its flippers .
and those scalloped edges play with flow in such a way that is reduces drag by 32 percent .
these wind turbines can rotate in incredibly slow windspeeds , as a result .
mit just has a new radio chip that uses far less power than our chips .
and it 's based on the cochlear of your ear , able to pick up internet , wireless , television signals finally , on an ecosystem scale .
at biomimicry guild , which is my consulting company , we work with hok architects .
we 're looking at building whole cities in their planning department .
and what we 're saying is that , should n't our cities do at least as well , in terms of ecosystem services , as the native systems that they replace ?
so we 're creating something called ecological performance standards that hold cities to this higher bar .
the question is - biomimicry is an incredibly powerful way to innovate .
the question i would ask is , " what 's worth solving ? "
if you have n't seen this , it 's pretty amazing .
dr. adam neiman .
this is a depiction of all of the water on earth in relation to the volume of the earth - all the ice , all the fresh water , all the sea water - and all the atmosphere that we can breathe , in relation to the volume of the earth .
and inside those balls life , over 3.8 billion years , has made a lush , livable place for us .
and we are in a long , long line of organisms to come to this planet and ask ourselves , " how can we live here gracefully over the long haul ? "
how can we do what life has learned to do ?
which is to create conditions conducive to life .
now in order to do this , the design challenge of our century , i think , we need a way to remind ourselves of those geniuses , and to somehow meet them again .
one of the big ideas , one of the big projects i 've been honored to work on is a new website . and i would encourage you all to please go to it .
it 's called asknature.org.
and what we 're trying to do , in a tedesque way , is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function .
and we 're working with eol , encyclopedia of life , ed wilson 's ted wish .
and he 's gathering all biological information on one website .
and the scientists who are contributing to eol are answering a question , " what can we learn from this organism ? "
and that information will go into asknature.org.
and hopefully , any inventor , anywhere in the world , will be able , in the moment of creation , to type in , " how does nature remove salt from water ? "
and up will come mangroves , and sea turtles and your own kidneys .
and we 'll begin to be able to do as cody does , and actually be in touch with these incredible models , these elders that have been here far , far longer than we have .
and hopefully , with their help , we 'll learn how to live on this earth , and on this home that is ours , but not ours alone .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ here we stand ♫ ♫ like an adam and an eve ♫ ♫ waterfalls ♫ ♫ the garden of eden ♫ ♫ two fools in love ♫ ♫ so beautiful and strong ♫ ♫ birds in the trees ♫ ♫ are smiling upon them ♫ ♫ from the age of the dinosaurs ♫ ♫ cars would run on gasoline ♫ ♫ where ? where have they gone ? ♫ ♫ now , there 's nothing but flowers ♫ ♫ this was a factory ♫ ♫ now there are mountains and rivers ♫ ♫ you got it , you got it ♫ ♫ we caught a rattlesnake ♫
♫ now we 've got something for dinner ♫ ♫ you got it , you got it ♫ ♫ this was a parking lot ♫ ♫ now it 's all covered with flowers ♫ ♫ you got it , you got it ♫ ♫ if this is paradise ♫ ♫ i wish i had a lawnmower ♫ ♫ you got it , you got it ♫ ♫ this was a shopping mall ♫ ♫ now it 's turned into corn field ♫ ♫ you got it , you got it ♫ ♫ do n't leave me stranded here ♫ ♫ i ca n't get used to this lifestyle ♫
-lrb- applause -rrb- thomas dolby : david byrne .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what 's image got do with it ?
and i must say , i think emeka is trying to send a lot of subliminal messages , because i 'm going to keep harping on some of the issues that have come up .
but i 'm going to try and do something different , and try and just close the loop with some of my personal stories , and try and put a face to a lot of the issues that we 've been talking about .
so , africa is a complex continent full of contradictions , as you can see .
we 're not the only ones .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and you know , it 's amazing .
i mean , we need a whole conference just devoted to telling the good stories about the continent .
just think about that , you know ?
and this is typically what we 've been talking about , the role that the media plays in focusing just on the negative stuff .
now , why is that a problem ?
a typical disaster story : disease , corruption , poverty .
and some of you might be standing here thinking , saying , " ok , you know , ory , you 're harvard-educated , and all you privileged people come here , saying , ' forget the poor people .
let 's focus on business and the markets , and whatever . ' " and they 're all , " there 's the 80 percent of africans who really need help . "
and i want to tell you that this is my story , ok ?
and it 's the story of many of the africans who are here .
we start with poverty .
i did n't grow up in the slums or anything that dire , but i know what it is to grow up without having money , or being able to support family .
euvin was talking about bellwether signs .
the bellwether for whether our family was broke or not was breakfast .
you know , when things were good , we had eggs and sausages .
when things were bad , we had porridge .
and like many african families , my parents could never save because they supported siblings , cousins , you know , their parents , and things were always dicey .
now , when i was born , they realized they had a pretty smart kid , and they did n't want me to go to the neighborhood school , which was free .
and they adopted a very interesting approach to education , which was they were going to take me to a school that they can barely afford .
so they took me to a private , catholic , elementary school , which set the foundation for what ended up being my career .
and what happened was , because they could afford it sometimes , sometimes not , i got kicked out pretty much every term .
you know , someone would come in with a list of the people who have n't paid school fees , and when they started getting pretty strict , you had to leave , until your school fees could be paid .
and i remember thinking , i mean , why do n't these guys just take me to a cheap school ?
because you know , as a kid you 're embarrassed and you 're sensitive , and everyone knows you guys do n't have money .
but they kept at it , and i now understand why they did what they did .
they talk about corruption .
in kenya , we have an entrance exam to go into high school .
and there 's national schools , which are like the best schools , and provincial schools .
my dream school at that time was kenya high school , a national school .
i missed the cutoff by one point .
and i was so disappointed , and i was like , " oh my god , you know , what am i going to do ? "
and my father said , " ok , listen .
let 's go and try and talk to the headmistress .
you know , it 's just one point . i mean , maybe she 'll let you in if that slot 's still there . "
so we went to the school , and because we were nobodies , and because we did n't have privilege , and because my father did n't have the right last name , he was treated like dirt .
and i sat and listened to the headmistress talk to him , saying , you know , who do you think you are ?
and , you know , you must be joking if you think you can get a slot .
and i had gone to school with other girls , who were kids of politicians , and who had done much , much worse than i did , and they had slots there .
and there 's nothing worse than seeing your parent being humiliated in front of you , you know ?
and we left , and i swore to myself , and i was like , " i 'm never , ever going to have to beg for anything in my life . "
they called me two weeks later , they 're like , oh , yeah , you can come now . and i told them to stuff it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- final story , and i sort of have to speak quickly .
disease .
my father , who i 've been talking about , died of aids in 1999 .
he never told anyone that he had aids , his fear of the stigma was so strong .
and i 'm pretty much the one who figured it out , because i was a nerd .
and i was in the states at the time , and they called me . he was very sick , the first time he got sick .
and he had cryptococcal meningitis .
and so i went on to google , cryptococcal meningitis , you know .
because of doctor-patient privilege , they could n't really tell us what was going on .
but they were like , you know , this is a long-term thing .
and when i went online and looked at the infectious - read about the disease , i pretty much realized what was going on .
the first time he got sick , he recovered .
but what happened was that he had to be on medication that , at that time - diflucan , which in the states is used for yeast infections - cost 30 dollars a pill .
he had to be on that pill for the rest of his life .
you know , so money ran out .
he got sick again .
and up until that time , he had a friend who used to travel to india , and he used to import , bring him , could get him a generic version of it .
and that kept him going .
but the money ran out .
he got sick again . he got sick on a friday .
at that time , there was only one bank that had atms in kenya , and we could not get cash . the family could n't get cash for him to start the treatment until monday .
the hospital put him on a water drip for three days .
and finally , we figured , well , ok , we 'd better just try and take him to a public hospital .
at least he 'll get treated while we try to figure out the money situation .
and he died when the ambulance was coming to the hospital to take him .
and , you know , now , imagine if - and i could go on and on - imagine if this is all you know about me .
how would you look at me ?
with pity , you know . sadness .
and this is how you look at africa .
this is the damage it causes .
you do n't see the other side of me .
you do n't see the blogger , you do n't see the harvard-educated lawyer , the vibrant person , you know ?
and i just wanted to personalize that .
because we talk about it in big terms , and you wonder , you know , so what ?
but it 's damaging .
and i 'm not unique , right ?
imagine if all you knew about william was the fact that he grew up in a poor village .
and you did n't know about the windmill , you know ?
and i was just moved .
i was actually crying during his presentation .
he was like , i try and i make .
i was like nike should hire him , you know , " just do it ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is , again , the point i 'm trying to make .
when you focus just on the disasters - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - we 're ignoring the potential .
so , what is to be done ?
first of all , africans , we need to get better at telling our stories .
we heard about that yesterday .
we had some of them this morning .
blogging is one way of doing that .
afrigator is an aggregator of african blogs that was developed in south africa .
so we need to start getting better .
if no one else will tell our stories , let 's do it .
and going back to the point i was trying to make , this is the swahili wikipedia .
swahili is spoken by about 50 million people in east africa .
it only has five contributors .
four of them are white males - non-native speakers .
the other person is - ndesanjo , if you 're here , stand up - is a tanzanian , -lsb- the -rsb- first swahili blogger .
he 's the only african who 's contributing to this .
people , please . we ca n't whine and complain the west is doing this .
what are we doing ?
where are the rest of the swahili speakers ?
why are we not generating our own content ?
you know , it 's not enough to complain . we need to act .
reuters now integrates african blogs into their coverage of africa .
so , that 's a start , and we 've heard of all their other initiatives .
the cheetah generation .
the aid approach , you know , is flawed .
and after all the hoopla of live 8 , we 're still not anywhere in the picture .
no , you 're not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the point i 'm trying to make , though , is that it 's not enough for us to criticize .
and for those of you in the diaspora who are struggling with where should i be , should i move back , should i stay ?
you know , just jump .
the continent needs you .
and i ca n't emphasize that enough , you know .
i walked away from a job with one of the top firms in d.c. , covington and burling , six figures .
with two paychecks , or three paychecks , i could solve a lot of my family 's problems .
but i walked away from that , because my passion was here , and because i wanted to do things that were fulfilling .
and because i 'm needed here , you know ?
i probably can win a prize for the most ways to use a harvard law school degree because of all the things i 'm doing .
one is because i 'm pretty aggressive , and i try and find , you know , opportunities .
but there is such a need , you know ?
i 'm a corporate lawyer most of the time for an organization called enablis that supports entrepreneurs in south africa .
we 're now moving into east africa .
and we give them business development services , as well as financing loan and equity .
i 've also set up a project in kenya , and what we do is we track the performance of kenyan mps .
my partner , m , who 's a tech guru , hacked wordpress .
it costs us , like , 20 dollars a month just for hosting .
everything else on there is a labor of love .
we 've manually entered all the data there .
and you can get profiles of each mp , questions they 've asked in parliament .
we have a comment function , where people can ask their mps questions .
there are some mps who participate , and come back and ask .
and basically , we started this because we were tired of complaining about our politicians .
you know , i believe that accountability stems from demand .
you 're not just going to be accountable out of the goodness of your heart .
and we as africans need to start challenging our leaders .
what are they doing ?
you know , they 're not going to change just out of nowhere .
so we need new policies , we need - where 's that coming from , you know ?
another thing is that these leaders are a reflection of our society .
we talk about african governments like they 've been dropped from mars , you know ?
they come from us .
and what is it about our society that is generating leaders that we do n't like ?
and how can we change that ?
so mzalendo was one small way we thought we could start inspiring people to start holding their leaders accountable .
where do we go from here ?
i believe in the power of ideas .
i believe in the power of sharing knowledge .
and i 'd ask all of you , when you leave here , please just share , and keep the ideas that you 've gotten out of here going , because it can make a difference .
the other thing i want to urge you to do is take an interest in the individual .
i 've had lots of conversations about things i think need to be happening in africa .
people are like , " ok , if you do n't do aid , i 'm a bleeding heart liberal , what can i do ? "
and when i talk about my ideas , they 're like , " bbut it 's not scalable , you know .
give me something i can do with paypal . "
it 's not that easy , you know ?
and sometimes just taking an interest in the individual , in the fellows you 've met , and the businesspeople you 've met , it can make a huge difference , especially in africa , because usually the individual in africa carries a lot of people behind them .
practically . i mean , when i was a first-year student in law school , my mom 's business had collapsed , so i was supporting her .
my sister was struggling to get through undergrad .
i was helping her pay her tuition .
my cousin ran out of school fees , and she 's really smart .
i was paying her school fees .
a cousin of mine died of aids , left an orphan , so we said , well , what are we going to do with her ?
you know , she 's now my baby sister .
and because of the opportunities that were afforded to me , i am able to lift all those people .
so , do n't underestimate that .
an example . this man changed my life .
he 's a professor . he 's now at vanderbilt .
he 's an undergrad professor , mitchell seligson .
and because of him , i got into harvard law school , because he took an interest .
i was taking a class of his , and he was just like , this is an overeager student , which we do n't normally get in the united states , because everyone else is cynical and jaded .
he called me to his office and said , " what do you want to do when you grow up ? "
i said , " i want to be a lawyer . "
and he was like , " why ? you know , we do n't need another lawyer in the united states . "
and he tried to talk me out of it , but it was like , " ok , i know nothing about applying to law school , i 'm poli-sci ph.d.
but , you know , let 's figure out what i need you to do , what i need to do to help you out . "
it was like , " where do you want to go ? "
and to me at that time university - i was at university of pitts for undergrad , and that was like heaven , ok , because compared to what could have been in kenya .
so i 'm like , " yeah , i 'm just applying to pitt for law school . "
he was like , " why ? you know , you 're smart , you have all these things going for you . "
and i 'm like , " because i 'm here and it 's cheap , and you know , i kind of like pittsburgh . "
like , that 's the dumbest reason i 've ever heard for applying to law school .
and , you know , so he took me under his wing , and he encouraged me .
and he said , " look , you can get into harvard , you 're that good , ok ?
and if they do n't admit you , they 're the ones who are messed up . "
and he built me up , you know ?
and this is just an illustration .
you can meet other individuals here .
we just need a push .
that 's all i needed was a push to go to the next level .
basically , i want to end with my vision for africa , you know ?
a gentleman spoke yesterday about the indignity of us having to leave the continent so that we can fulfill our potential .
you know , my vision is that my daughter , and any other african child being born today , can be whoever they want to be here , without having to leave .
and they can have the possibility of transcending the circumstances under which they were born .
that 's one thing you americans take for granted , you know ?
that you can grow up , you know , not so good circumstances , and you can move .
just because you are born in rural arkansas , whatever , that does n't define who you are .
for most africans today , where you live , or where you were born , and the circumstances under which you were born , determine the rest of your life .
i would like to see that change , and the change starts with us .
and as africans , we need to take responsibility for our continent .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- usually i like working in my shop , but when it 's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river , then i just love it .
and i 'll cut some wood and drill some holes and watch the water , and maybe i 'll have to walk around and look for washers .
you have no idea how much time i spend .
this is the " double raindrop . "
of all my sculptures , it 's the most talkative .
it adds together the interference pattern from two raindrops that land near each other .
instead of expanding circles , they 're expanding hexagons .
all the sculptures move by mechanical means .
do you see how there 's three peaks to the yellow sine wave ?
right here i 'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on .
eight hundred two-liter soda bottles - oh yea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- four hundred aluminum cans .
tule is a reed that 's native to california , and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious .
a single drop of rain increasing amplitude .
the spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip .
this adds together four different waves .
and here i 'm going to pull out the double wavelengths and increase the single .
the mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys .
four hundred and forty-five strings in a three-dimensional weave .
transferred to a larger scale - actually a lot larger , with a lot of help - 14,064 bicycle reflectors - a 20-day install .
" connected " is a collaboration with choreographer gideon obarzanek .
strings attached to dancers .
this is very early rehearsal footage , but the finished work 's on tour and is actually coming through l.a. in a couple weeks .
a pair of helices and 40 wooden slats .
take your finger and draw this line .
summer , fall , winter , spring , noon , dusk , dark , dawn .
have you ever seen those stratus clouds that go in parallel stripes across the sky ?
did you know that 's a continuous sheet of cloud that 's dipping in and out of the condensation layer ?
what if every seemingly isolated object was actually just where the continuous wave of that object poked through into our world ?
the earth is neither flat nor round .
it 's wavy .
it sounds good , but i 'll bet you know in your gut that it 's not the whole truth , and i 'll tell you why .
i have a two-year-old daughter who 's the best thing ever .
and i 'm just going to come out and say it : my daughter is not a wave .
and you might say , " surely , rueben , if you took even just the slightest step back , the cycles of hunger and eating , waking and sleeping , laughing and crying would emerge as pattern . "
but i would say , " if i did that , too much would be lost . "
this tension between the need to look deeper and the beauty and immediacy of the world , where if you even try to look deeper you 've already missed what you 're looking for , this tension is what makes the sculptures move .
and for me , the path between these two extremes takes the shape of a wave .
let me show you one more .
thank you very much . thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- june cohen : looking at each of your sculptures , they evoke so many different images .
some of them are like the wind and some are like waves , and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math .
is there an actual inspiration behind each one ?
are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it ?
rm : well some of them definitely have a direct observation - like literally two raindrops falling , and just watching that pattern is so stunning .
and then just trying to figure out how to make that using stuff .
i like working with my hands .
there 's nothing better than cutting a piece of wood and trying to make it move .
jc : and does it ever change ?
do you think you 're designing one thing , and then when it 's produced it looks like something else ?
rm : the " double raindrop " i worked on for nine months , and when i finally turned it on , i actually hated it .
the very moment i turned it on , i hated it .
it was like a really deep-down gut reaction , and i wanted to throw it out .
and i happened to have a friend who was over , and he said , " why do n't you just wait . "
and i waited , and the next day i liked it a bit better , the next day i liked it a bit better , and now i really love it .
and so i guess , one , the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes , and two , it does not look like as expected .
jc : the relationship evolves over time .
well thank you so much . that was a gorgeous treat for us .
rm : thanks . -lrb- jc : thank you , reuben . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- on the 30th of may , 1832 , a gunshot was heard ringing out across the 13th arrondissement in paris .
-lrb- gunshot -rrb- a peasant , who was walking to market that morning , ran towards where the gunshot had come from , and found a young man writhing in agony on the floor , clearly shot by a dueling wound .
the young man 's name was evariste galois .
he was a well-known revolutionary in paris at the time .
galois was taken to the local hospital where he died the next day in the arms of his brother .
and the last words he said to his brother were , " do n't cry for me , alfred .
i need all the courage i can muster to die at the age of 20 . "
it was n't , in fact , revolutionary politics for which galois was famous .
but a few years earlier , while still at school , he 'd actually cracked one of the big mathematical problems at the time .
and he wrote to the academicians in paris , trying to explain his theory .
but the academicians could n't understand anything that he wrote .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is how he wrote most of his mathematics .
so , the night before that duel , he realized this possibly is his last chance to try and explain his great breakthrough .
so he stayed up the whole night , writing away , trying to explain his ideas .
and as the dawn came up and he went to meet his destiny , he left this pile of papers on the table for the next generation .
maybe the fact that he stayed up all night doing mathematics was the fact that he was such a bad shot that morning and got killed .
but contained inside those documents was a new language , a language to understand one of the most fundamental concepts of science - namely symmetry .
now , symmetry is almost nature 's language .
it helps us to understand so many different bits of the scientific world .
for example , molecular structure .
what crystals are possible , we can understand through the mathematics of symmetry .
in microbiology you really do n't want to get a symmetrical object , because they are generally rather nasty .
the swine flu virus , at the moment , is a symmetrical object .
and it uses the efficiency of symmetry to be able to propagate itself so well .
but on a larger scale of biology , actually symmetry is very important , because it actually communicates genetic information .
i 've taken two pictures here and i 've made them artificially symmetrical .
and if i ask you which of these you find more beautiful , you 're probably drawn to the lower two .
because it is hard to make symmetry .
and if you can make yourself symmetrical , you 're sending out a sign that you 've got good genes , you 've got a good upbringing and therefore you 'll make a good mate .
so symmetry is a language which can help to communicate genetic information .
symmetry can also help us to explain what 's happening in the large hadron collider in cern .
or what 's not happening in the large hadron collider in cern .
to be able to make predictions about the fundamental particles we might see there , it seems that they are all facets of some strange symmetrical shape in a higher dimensional space .
and i think galileo summed up , very nicely , the power of mathematics to understand the scientific world around us .
he wrote , " the universe can not be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written .
it is written in mathematical language , and the letters are triangles , circles and other geometric figures , without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word . "
but it 's not just scientists who are interested in symmetry .
artists too love to play around with symmetry .
they also have a slightly more ambiguous relationship with it .
here is thomas mann talking about symmetry in " the magic mountain . "
he has a character describing the snowflake , and he says he " shuddered at its perfect precision , found it deathly , the very marrow of death . "
but what artists like to do is to set up expectations of symmetry and then break them .
and a beautiful example of this i found , actually , when i visited a colleague of mine in japan , professor kurokawa .
and he took me up to the temples in nikko .
and just after this photo was taken we walked up the stairs .
and the gateway you see behind has eight columns , with beautiful symmetrical designs on them .
seven of them are exactly the same , and the eighth one is turned upside down .
and i said to professor kurokawa , " wow , the architects must have really been kicking themselves when they realized that they 'd made a mistake and put this one upside down . "
and he said , " no , no , no . it was a very deliberate act . "
and he referred me to this lovely quote from the japanese " essays in idleness " from the 14th century , in which the essayist wrote , " in everything , uniformity is undesirable .
leaving something incomplete makes it interesting , and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth . "
even when building the imperial palace , they always leave one place unfinished .
but if i had to choose one building in the world to be cast out on a desert island , to live the rest of my life , being an addict of symmetry , i would probably choose the alhambra in granada .
this is a palace celebrating symmetry .
recently i took my family - we do these rather kind of nerdy mathematical trips , which my family love .
this is my son tamer . you can see he 's really enjoying our mathematical trip to the alhambra .
but i wanted to try and enrich him .
i think one of the problems about school mathematics is it does n't look at how mathematics is embedded in the world we live in .
so , i wanted to open his eyes up to how much symmetry is running through the alhambra .
you see it already . immediately you go in , the reflective symmetry in the water .
but it 's on the walls where all the exciting things are happening .
the moorish artists were denied the possibility to draw things with souls .
so they explored a more geometric art .
and so what is symmetry ?
the alhambra somehow asks all of these questions .
what is symmetry ? when -lsb- there -rsb- are two of these walls , do they have the same symmetries ?
can we say whether they discovered all of the symmetries in the alhambra ?
and it was galois who produced a language to be able to answer some of these questions .
for galois , symmetry - unlike for thomas mann , which was something still and deathly - for galois , symmetry was all about motion .
what can you do to a symmetrical object , move it in some way , so it looks the same as before you moved it ?
i like to describe it as the magic trick moves .
what can you do to something ? you close your eyes .
i do something , put it back down again .
it looks like it did before it started .
so , for example , the walls in the alhambra - i can take all of these tiles , and fix them at the yellow place , rotate them by 90 degrees , put them all back down again and they fit perfectly down there .
and if you open your eyes again , you would n't know that they 'd moved .
but it 's the motion that really characterizes the symmetry inside the alhambra .
but it 's also about producing a language to describe this .
and the power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another , to change geometry into language .
so i 'm going to take you through , perhaps push you a little bit mathematically - so brace yourselves - push you a little bit to understand how this language works , which enables us to capture what is symmetry .
so , let 's take these two symmetrical objects here .
let 's take the twisted six-pointed starfish .
what can i do to the starfish which makes it look the same ?
well , there i rotated it by a sixth of a turn , and still it looks like it did before i started .
i could rotate it by a third of a turn , or a half a turn , or put it back down on its image , or two thirds of a turn .
and a fifth symmetry , i can rotate it by five sixths of a turn .
and those are things that i can do to the symmetrical object that make it look like it did before i started .
now , for galois , there was actually a sixth symmetry .
can anybody think what else i could do to this which would leave it like i did before i started ?
i ca n't flip it because i 've put a little twist on it , have n't i ?
it 's got no reflective symmetry .
but what i could do is just leave it where it is , pick it up , and put it down again .
and for galois this was like the zeroth symmetry .
actually , the invention of the number zero was a very modern concept , seventh century a.d. , by the indians .
it seems mad to talk about nothing .
and this is the same idea . this is a symmetrical - so everything has symmetry , where you just leave it where it is .
so , this object has six symmetries .
and what about the triangle ?
well , i can rotate by a third of a turn clockwise or a third of a turn anticlockwise .
but now this has some reflectional symmetry .
i can reflect it in the line through x , or the line through y , or the line through z.
five symmetries and then of course the zeroth symmetry where i just pick it up and leave it where it is .
so both of these objects have six symmetries .
now , i 'm a great believer that mathematics is not a spectator sport , and you have to do some mathematics in order to really understand it .
so here is a little question for you .
and i 'm going to give a prize at the end of my talk for the person who gets closest to the answer .
the rubik 's cube .
how many symmetries does a rubik 's cube have ?
how many things can i do to this object and put it down so it still looks like a cube ?
okay ? so i want you to think about that problem as we go on , and count how many symmetries there are .
and there will be a prize for the person who gets closest at the end .
but let 's go back down to symmetries that i got for these two objects .
what galois realized : it is n't just the individual symmetries , but how they interact with each other which really characterizes the symmetry of an object .
if i do one magic trick move followed by another , the combination is a third magic trick move .
and here we see galois starting to develop a language to see the substance of the things unseen , the sort of abstract idea of the symmetry underlying this physical object .
for example , what if i turn the starfish by a sixth of a turn , and then a third of a turn ?
so i 've given names . the capital letters , a , b , c , d , e , f , are the names for the rotations .
b , for example , rotates the little yellow dot to the b on the starfish . and so on .
so what if i do b , which is a sixth of a turn , followed by c , which is a third of a turn ?
well let 's do that . a sixth of a turn , followed by a third of a turn , the combined effect is as if i had just rotated it by half a turn in one go .
so the little table here records how the algebra of these symmetries work .
i do one followed by another , the answer is it 's rotation d , half a turn .
what i if i did it in the other order ? would it make any difference ?
let 's see . let 's do the third of the turn first , and then the sixth of a turn .
of course , it does n't make any difference .
it still ends up at half a turn .
and there is some symmetry here in the way the symmetries interact with each other .
but this is completely different to the symmetries of the triangle .
let 's see what happens if we do two symmetries with the triangle , one after the other .
let 's do a rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise , and reflect in the line through x.
well , the combined effect is as if i had just done the reflection in the line through z to start with .
now , let 's do it in a different order .
let 's do the reflection in x first , followed by the rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise .
the combined effect , the triangle ends up somewhere completely different .
it 's as if it was reflected in the line through y.
now it matters what order you do the operations in .
and this enables us to distinguish why the symmetries of these objects - they both have six symmetries . so why should n't we say they have the same symmetries ?
but the way the symmetries interact enable us - we 've now got a language to distinguish why these symmetries are fundamentally different .
and you can try this when you go down to the pub , later on .
take a beer mat and rotate it by a quarter of a turn , then flip it . and then do it in the other order , and the picture will be facing in the opposite direction .
now , galois produced some laws for how these tables - how symmetries interact .
it 's almost like little sudoku tables .
you do n't see any symmetry twice in any row or column .
and , using those rules , he was able to say that there are in fact only two objects with six symmetries .
and they 'll be the same as the symmetries of the triangle , or the symmetries of the six-pointed starfish .
i think this is an amazing development .
it 's almost like the concept of number being developed for symmetry .
in the front here , i 've got one , two , three people sitting on one , two , three chairs .
the people and the chairs are very different , but the number , the abstract idea of the number , is the same .
and we can see this now : we go back to the walls in the alhambra .
here are two very different walls , very different geometric pictures .
but , using the language of galois , we can understand that the underlying abstract symmetries of these things are actually the same .
for example , let 's take this beautiful wall with the triangles with a little twist on them .
you can rotate them by a sixth of a turn if you ignore the colors . we 're not matching up the colors .
but the shapes match up if i rotate by a sixth of a turn around the point where all the triangles meet .
what about the center of a triangle ? i can rotate by a third of a turn around the center of the triangle , and everything matches up .
and then there is an interesting place halfway along an edge , where i can rotate by 180 degrees .
and all the tiles match up again .
so rotate along halfway along the edge , and they all match up .
now , let 's move to the very different-looking wall in the alhambra .
and we find the same symmetries here , and the same interaction .
so , there was a sixth of a turn . a third of a turn where the z pieces meet .
and the half a turn is halfway between the six pointed stars .
and although these walls look very different , galois has produced a language to say that in fact the symmetries underlying these are exactly the same .
and it 's a symmetry we call 6-3-2 .
here is another example in the alhambra .
this is a wall , a ceiling , and a floor .
they all look very different . but this language allows us to say that they are representations of the same symmetrical abstract object , which we call 4-4-2 . nothing to do with football , but because of the fact that there are two places where you can rotate by a quarter of a turn , and one by half a turn .
now , this power of the language is even more , because galois can say , " did the moorish artists discover all of the possible symmetries on the walls in the alhambra ? "
and it turns out they almost did .
you can prove , using galois ' language , there are actually only 17 different symmetries that you can do in the walls in the alhambra .
and they , if you try to produce a different wall with this 18th one , it will have to have the same symmetries as one of these 17 .
but these are things that we can see .
and the power of galois ' mathematical language is it also allows us to create symmetrical objects in the unseen world , beyond the two-dimensional , three-dimensional , all the way through to the four- or five- or infinite-dimensional space .
and that 's where i work . i create mathematical objects , symmetrical objects , using galois ' language , in very high dimensional spaces .
so i think it 's a great example of things unseen , which the power of mathematical language allows you to create .
so , like galois , i stayed up all last night creating a new mathematical symmetrical object for you , and i 've got a picture of it here .
well , unfortunately it is n't really a picture . if i could have my board at the side here , great , excellent .
here we are . unfortunately , i ca n't show you a picture of this symmetrical object .
but here is the language which describes how the symmetries interact .
now , this new symmetrical object does not have a name yet .
now , people like getting their names on things , on craters on the moon or new species of animals .
so i 'm going to give you the chance to get your name on a new symmetrical object which has n't been named before .
and this thing - species die away , and moons kind of get hit by meteors and explode - but this mathematical object will live forever .
it will make you immortal .
in order to win this symmetrical object , what you have to do is to answer the question i asked you at the beginning .
how many symmetries does a rubik 's cube have ?
okay , i 'm going to sort you out .
rather than you all shouting out , i want you to count how many digits there are in that number . okay ?
if you 've got it as a factorial , you 've got to expand the factorials .
okay , now if you want to play , i want you to stand up , okay ?
if you think you 've got an estimate for how many digits , right - we 've already got one competitor here .
if you all stay down he wins it automatically .
okay . excellent . so we 've got four here , five , six .
great . excellent . that should get us going . all right .
anybody with five or less digits , you 've got to sit down , because you 've underestimated .
five or less digits . so , if you 're in the tens of thousands you 've got to sit down .
60 digits or more , you 've got to sit down .
you 've overestimated .
20 digits or less , sit down .
how many digits are there in your number ?
two ? so you should have sat down earlier .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's have the other ones , who sat down during the 20 , up again . okay ?
if i told you 20 or less , stand up .
because this one . i think there were a few here .
the people who just last sat down .
okay , how many digits do you have in your number ?
-lrb- laughs -rrb- 21 . okay good . how many do you have in yours ?
18 . so it goes to this lady here .
21 is the closest .
it actually has - the number of symmetries in the rubik 's cube has 25 digits .
so now i need to name this object .
so , what is your name ?
i need your surname . symmetrical objects generally - spell it for me .
g-h-e-z no , so2 has already been used , actually , in the mathematical language . so you ca n't have that one .
so ghez , there we go . that 's your new symmetrical object .
you are now immortal .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and if you 'd like your own symmetrical object , i have a project raising money for a charity in guatemala , where i will stay up all night and devise an object for you , for a donation to this charity to help kids get into education in guatemala .
and i think what drives me , as a mathematician , are those things which are not seen , the things that we have n't discovered .
it 's all the unanswered questions which make mathematics a living subject .
and i will always come back to this quote from the japanese " essays in idleness " : " in everything , uniformity is undesirable .
leaving something incomplete makes it interesting , and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth . " thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , we used to solve big problems .
on july 21st , 1969 , buzz aldrin climbed out of apollo 11 's lunar module and descended onto the sea of tranquility .
armstrong and aldrin were alone , but their presence on the moon 's gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive , collective effort .
the apollo program was the greatest peacetime mobilization in the history of the united states .
to get to the moon , nasa spent around 180 billion dollars in today 's money , or four percent of the federal budget .
apollo employed around 400,000 people and demanded the collaboration of 20,000 companies , universities and government agencies .
people died , including the crew of apollo 1 .
but before the apollo program ended , 24 men flew to the moon .
twelve walked on its surface , of whom aldrin , following the death of armstrong last year , is now the most senior .
so why did they go ?
they did n't bring much back : 841 pounds of old rocks , and something all 24 later emphasized - a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home .
why did they go ? the cynical answer is they went because president kennedy wanted to show the soviets that his nation had the better rockets .
but kennedy 's own words at rice university in 1962 provide a better clue .
-lrb- video -rrb- john f. kennedy : but why , some say , the moon ?
why choose this as our goal ?
and they may well ask , why climb the highest mountain ?
why , 35 years ago , fly the atlantic ?
why does rice play texas ?
we choose to go to the moon .
we choose to go to the moon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we choose to go to the moon in this decade , and do the other things , not because they are easy , but because they are hard .
jason pontin : to contemporaries , apollo was n't only a victory of west over east in the cold war .
at the time , the strongest emotion was of wonder at the transcendent powers of technology .
they went because it was a big thing to do .
landing on the moon occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs .
the first half of the 20th century produced the assembly line and the airplane , penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis .
in the middle years of the century , polio was eradicated and smallpox eliminated .
technology itself seemed to possess what alvin toffler in 1970 called " accelerative thrust . "
for most of human history , we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail , but in 1969 , the crew of apollo 10 flew at 25,000 miles an hour .
since 1970 , no human beings have been back to the moon .
no one has traveled faster than the crew of apollo 10 , and blithe optimism about technology 's powers has evaporated as big problems we had imagined technology would solve , such as going to mars , creating clean energy , curing cancer , or feeding the world have come to seem intractably hard .
i remember watching the liftoff of apollo 17 .
i was five years old , and my mother told me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of a saturn v rocket .
i vaguely knew this was to be the last of the moon missions , but i was absolutely certain there would be mars colonies in my lifetime .
so " something happened to our capacity to solve big problems with technology " has become a commonplace .
you hear it all the time .
we 've heard it over the last two days here at ted .
it feels as if technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys , with things like iphones and apps and social media , or algorithms that speed automated trading .
there 's nothing wrong with most of these things .
they 've expanded and enriched our lives .
but they do n't solve humanity 's big problems .
what happened ?
so there is a parochial explanation in silicon valley , which admits that it has been funding less ambitious companies than it did in the years when it financed intel , microsoft , apple and genentech .
silicon valley says the markets are to blame , in particular the incentives that venture capitalists offer to entrepreneurs .
silicon valley says that venture investing shifted away from funding transformational ideas and towards funding incremental problems or even fake problems .
but i do n't think that explanation is good enough .
it mostly explains what 's wrong with silicon valley .
even when venture capitalists were at their most risk-happy , they preferred small investments , tiny investments that offered an exit within 10 years .
v.c.s have always struggled to invest profitably in technologies such as energy whose capital requirements are huge and whose development is long and lengthy , and v.c.s have never , never funded the development of technologies meant to solve big problems that possess no immediate commercial value .
no , the reasons we ca n't solve big problems are more complicated and more profound .
sometimes we choose not to solve big problems .
we could go to mars if we want .
nasa even has the outline of a plan .
but going to mars would follow a political decision with popular appeal , and that will never happen .
we wo n't go to mars , because everyone thinks there are more important things to do here on earth .
sometimes , we ca n't solve big problems because our political systems fail .
today , less than two percent of the world 's energy consumption derives from advanced , renewable sources such as solar , wind and biofuels , less than two percent , and the reason is purely economic .
coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind , and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels .
we want alternative energy sources that can compete on price . none exist .
now , technologists , business leaders and economists all basically agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development of alternative energy : mostly , a significant increase in energy research and development , and some kind of price on carbon .
but there 's no hope in the present political climate that we will see u.s. energy policy or international treaties that reflect that consensus .
sometimes , big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so .
famines were long understood to be caused by failures in food supply .
but 30 years of research have taught us that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution .
technology can improve things like crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food , but there will be famines so long as there are bad governments .
finally , big problems sometimes elude solution because we do n't really understand the problem .
president nixon declared war on cancer in 1971 , but we soon discovered there are many kinds of cancer , most of them fiendishly resistant to therapy , and it is only in the last 10 years that effective , viable therapies have come to seem real .
hard problems are hard .
it 's not true that we ca n't solve big problems through technology .
we can , we must , but these four elements must all be present : political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem ; institutions must support its solution ; it must really be a technological problem ; and we must understand it .
the apollo mission , which has become a kind of metaphor for technology 's capacity to solve big problems , met these criteria .
but it is an irreproducible model for the future .
it is not 1961 .
there is no galvanizing contest like the cold war , no politician like john kennedy who can heroize the difficult and the dangerous , and no popular science fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system .
most of all , going to the moon turned out to be easy .
it was just three days away .
and arguably it was n't even solving much of a problem .
we are left alone with our day , and the solutions of the future will be harder won .
god knows , we do n't lack for the challenges .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you might be wondering why i 'm wearing sunglasses , and one answer to that is , because i 'm here to talk about glamour .
so , we all think we know what glamour is . here it is .
it 's glamorous movie stars , like marlene dietrich .
and it comes in a male form , too - very glamorous .
not only can he shoot , drive , drink - you know , he drinks wine , there actually is a little wine in there - and of course , always wears a tuxedo .
but i think that glamour actually has a much broader meaning - one that is true for the movie stars and the fictional characters , but also comes in other forms .
a magazine ?
well , it 's certainly not this one .
this is the least glamorous magazine on the newsstand - it 's all about sex tips .
sex tips are not glamorous .
and drew barrymore , for all her wonderful charm , is not glamorous either .
but there is a glamour of industry .
this is margaret bourke-white 's - one of her pictures she did .
fantastic , glamorous pictures of steel mills and paper mills and all kinds of glamorous industrial places .
and there 's the mythic glamour of the garage entrepreneur .
this is the hewlett-packard garage .
we know everyone who starts a business in a garage ends up founding hewlett-packard .
there 's the glamour of physics .
what could be more glamorous than understanding the entire universe , grand unification ? and , by the way , it helps if you 're brian greene - he has other kinds of glamour .
and there is , of course , this glamour .
this is very , very glamorous : the glamour of outer space - and not the alien-style glamour , but the nice , clean , early ' 60s version .
so what do we mean by glamour ?
well , one thing you can do if you want to know what glamour means is you can look in the dictionary .
and it actually helps a lot more if you look in a very old dictionary , in this case the 1913 dictionary .
because for centuries , glamour had a very particular meaning , and the word was actually used differently from the way we think of it .
you had " a " glamour .
it was n't glamour as a quality - you " cast a glamour . "
glamour was a literal magic spell .
not a metaphorical one , the way we use it today , but a literal magic spell associated with witches and gypsies and to some extent , celtic magic .
and over the years , around the turn of the 20th century , it started to take on this other kind of deception - this definition for any artificial interest in , or association with , an object through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified .
but still , glamour is an illusion .
glamour is a magic spell .
and there 's something dangerous about glamour throughout most of history . when the witches cast a magic spell on you , it was not in your self-interest - it was to get you to act against your interest .
well of course , in the 20th century , glamour came to have this different meaning associated with hollywood .
and this is hedy lamarr .
hedy lamarr said , " anyone can look glamorous , all you have to do is sit there and look stupid . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- but in fact , with all due respect to hedy - about whom we 'll hear more later - there 's a lot more to it .
there was a tremendous amount of technical achievement associated with creating this hollywood glamour .
there were scores of retouchers and lighting experts and make-up experts .
you can go to the museum of hollywood history in hollywood and see max factor 's special rooms that he painted different colors depending on the complexion of the star he was going to make up .
so you 've got this highly stylized portrait of something that was not entirely of this earth - it was a portrait of a star .
and actually , we see glamorized photos of stars all the time - they call them false color .
glamour is a form of falsification , but falsification to achieve a particular purpose .
it may be to illuminate the star ; it may be to sell a film .
and it involves a great deal of technique .
it 's not - glamour is not something - you do n't wake up in the morning glamorous . i do n't care who you are .
even nicole kidman does n't wake up in the morning glamorous .
there is a process of " idealization , glorification and dramatization , " and it 's not just the case for people .
glamour does n't have to be people .
architectural photography - julius schulman , who has talked about transfiguration , took this fabulous , famous picture of the kauffman house .
architectural photography is extremely glamorous .
it puts you into this special , special world .
this is alex ross 's comic book art , which appears to be extremely realistic , as part of his style is he gives you a kind of realism in his comic art .
except that light does n't work this way in the real world .
when you stack people in rows , the ones in the background look smaller than the ones in the foreground - but not in the world of glamour .
what glamour is all about - i took this from a blurb in the table of contents of new york magazine , which was telling us that glamour is back - glamour is all about transcending the everyday .
and i think that that 's starting to get at what the core that combines all sorts of glamour is .
this is filippino lippi 's 1543 portrait of saint apollonia .
and i do n't know who she is either , but this is the -lsb- 16th -rsb- century equivalent of a supermodel .
it 's a very glamorous portrait .
why is it glamorous ?
it 's glamorous , first , because she is beautiful - but that does not make you glamorous , that only makes you beautiful .
she is graceful , she is mysterious and she is transcendent , and those are the central qualities of glamour .
you do n't see her eyes ; they 're looking downward .
she 's not looking away from you exactly , but you have to mentally imagine her world .
she 's encouraging you to contemplate this higher world to which she belongs , where she can be completely tranquil while holding the iron instruments of her death by torture .
mel gibson 's " passion of the christ " - not glamorous .
that 's glamour : that 's michelangelo 's " pieta , " where mary is the same age as jesus and they 're both awfully happy and pleasant .
glamour invites us to live in a different world .
it has to simultaneously be mysterious , a little bit distant - that 's why , often in these glamour shots , the person is not looking at the audience , it 's why sunglasses are glamorous - but also not so far above us that we ca n't identify with the person .
in some sense , there has to be something like us .
so as i say , in religious art , you know , god is not glamorous .
god can not be glamorous because god is omnipotent , omniscient - too far above us .
and yet you will see in religious art , saints or the virgin mary will often be portrayed - not always - in glamorous forms .
as i said earlier , glamour does not have to be about people , but it has to have this transcendent quality .
what is it about superman ?
aside from alex ross 's style , which is very glamorous , one thing about superman is he makes you believe that a man can fly .
glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized , perfect place .
and this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous .
the less experience we have with them , the more glamorous they are .
so you can do a glamorized picture of a car , but you ca n't do a glamorized picture of traffic .
you can do a glamorized picture of an airplane , but not the inside .
the notion is that it 's going to transport you , and the story is not about , you know , the guy in front of you in the airplane , who has this nasty little kid , or the big cough .
the story is about where you 're arriving , or thinking about where you 're arriving .
and this sense of being transported is one reason that we have glamour styling .
this sort of streamlining styling is not just glamorous because we associate it with movies of that period , but because , in it 's streamlining , it transports us from the everyday .
the same thing - arches are very glamorous .
arches with stained glass - even more glamorous .
staircases that curve away from you are glamorous .
i happen to find that particular staircase picture very glamorous because , to me , it captures the whole promise of the academic contemplative life - but maybe that 's because i went to princeton .
anyway , skylines are super glamorous , city streets - not so glamorous .
you know , when you get , actually to this town it has reality .
the horizon , the open road , is very , very glamorous .
there are few things more glamorous than the horizon - except , possibly , multiple horizons .
of course , here you do n't feel the cold , or the heat - you just see the possibilities .
in order to pull glamour off , you need this renaissance quality of sprezzatura , which is a term coined by castiglione in his book , " the book of the courtier . "
there 's the not-glamorous version of what it looks like today , after a few centuries .
and sprezzatura is the art that conceals art .
it makes things look effortless .
you do n't think about how nicole kidman is maneuvering that dress - she just looks completely natural .
and i remember reading , after the lara croft movies , how angelina jolie would go home completely black and blue .
of course , they covered that with make-up , because lara croft did all those same stunts - but she does n't get black and blue , because she has sprezzatura .
" to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort " : and this is one of the critical aspects of glamour .
glamour is about editing .
how do you create the sense of transcendence , the sense of evoking a perfect world ?
the sense of , you know , life could be better , i could join this - i could be a perfect person , i could join this perfect world .
we do n't tell you all the grubby details .
now , this was kindly lent to me by jeff bezos , from last year .
this is underneath jeff 's desk .
this is what the real world of computers , lamps , electrical appliances of all kinds , looks like .
but if you look in a catalog - particularly a catalog of modern , beautiful objects for your home - it looks like this .
there are no cords .
look next time you get these catalogs in your mail - you can usually figure out where they hid the cord .
but there 's always this illusion that if you buy this lamp , you will live in a world without cords . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the same thing is true of , if you buy this laptop or you buy this computer - and even in these wireless eras , you do n't get to live in the world without cords .
you have to have mystery and you have to have grace .
and there she is - grace .
this is the most glamorous picture , i think , ever .
part of the thing is that , in " rear window , " the question is , is she too glamorous to live in his world ?
and the answer is no , but of course it 's really just a movie .
here 's hedy lamarr again .
and , you know , this kind of head covering is extremely glamorous because , like sunglasses , it conceals and reveals at the same time .
translucence is glamorous - that 's why all these people wear pearls .
it 's why barware is glamorous . glamour is translucent - not transparent , not opaque .
it invites us into the world but it does n't give us a completely clear picture .
and i think if grace kelly is the most glamorous person , maybe a spiral staircase with glass block may be the most glamorous interior shot , because a spiral staircase is incredibly glamorous .
it has that sense of going up and away , and yet you never think about how you would really trip if you were - particularly going down .
and of course glass block has that sense of translucence .
so , this session 's supposed to be about pure pleasure but glamour 's really partly about meaning .
all individuals and all cultures have ideals that can not possibly be realized in reality .
they have contradictions , they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other - whatever it is - and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals .
and the way we deal with that is we displace them - we put them into a golden world , an imagined world , an age of heroes , the world to come .
and in the life of an individual , we often associate that with some object .
the white picket fence , the perfect house .
the perfect kitchen - no bills on the counter in the perfect kitchen .
you know , you buy that viking range , this is what your kitchen will look like .
the perfect love life - symbolized by the perfect necklace , the perfect diamond ring .
the perfect getaway in your perfect car .
this is an interior design firm that is literally called utopia .
the perfect office - again , no cords , as far as i can tell .
and certainly , no , it does n't look a thing like my office .
i mean , there 's no paper on the desk .
we want this golden world .
and some people get rich enough , and if they have their ideals - in a sort of domestic sense , they get to acquire their perfect world .
dean koontz built this fabulous home theater , which is - i do n't think accidentally - in art deco style .
that symbolizes this sense of being safe and at home .
this is not always good , because what is your perfect world ?
what is your ideal , and also , what has been edited out ?
is it something important ?
" the matrix " is a movie that is all about glamour .
i could do a whole talk on " the matrix " and glamour .
it was criticized for glamorizing violence , because , look - sunglasses and those long coats , and , of course , they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world .
this is another margaret bourke-white photo .
this is from soviet union . attractive .
i mean , look how happy the people are , and good-looking too .
you know , we 're marching toward utopia .
i 'm not a fan of peta , but i think this is a great ad .
because what they 're doing is they 're saying , your coat 's not so glamorous , what 's been edited out is something important .
but actually , what 's even more important than remembering what 's been edited out is thinking , are the ideals good ?
because glamour can be very totalitarian and deceptive .
and it 's not just a matter of glamorizing cleaning your floor .
this is from " triumph of the will " - brilliant editing to cut together things .
there 's a glamour shot .
national socialism is all about glamour .
it was a very aesthetic ideology .
it was all about cleaning up germany , and the west , and the world , and ridding it of anything unglamorous .
so glamour can be dangerous .
i think glamour has a genuine appeal , has a genuine value .
i 'm not against glamour .
but there 's a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life .
and there is both a way to avoid the dangers of glamour and a way to broaden your appreciation of it .
and that 's to take isaac mizrahi 's advice and confront the manipulation of it all , and sort of admit that manipulation is something that we enjoy , but also enjoy how it happens .
and here 's hedy lamarr .
she 's very glamorous but , you know , she invented spread-spectrum technology .
so she 's even more glamorous if you know that she really was n't stupid , even though she thought she could look stupid .
david hockney talks about how the appreciation of this very glamorous painting is heightened if you think about the fact that it takes two weeks to paint this splash , which only took a fraction of a second to happen .
there is a book out in the bookstore - it 's called " symphony in steel , " and it 's about the stuff that 's hidden under the skin of the disney center .
and that has a fascination .
it 's not necessarily glamorous , but unveiling the glamour has an appeal .
there 's a wonderful book called " crowns " that 's all these glamour pictures of black women in their church hats .
and there 's a quote from one of these women , and she talks about , " as a little girl , i 'd admire women at church with beautiful hats .
they looked like beautiful dolls , like they 'd just stepped out of a magazine .
but i also knew how hard they worked all week .
sometimes under those hats there 's a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow . "
and , actually , you get more appreciation for glamour when you realize what went into creating it .
thank you .
this technology made a very important impact on us .
it changed the way our history developed .
but it 's a technology so pervasive , so invisible , that we , for a long time , forgot to take it into account when we talked about human evolution .
but we see the results of this technology , still .
so let 's make a little test .
so everyone of you turns to their neighbor please .
turn and face your neighbors .
please , also on the balcony .
smile . smile . open the mouths .
smile , friendly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do you - do you see any canine teeth ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- count dracula teeth in the mouths of your neighbors ?
of course not .
because our dental anatomy is actually made , not for tearing down raw meat from bones or chewing fibrous leaves for hours .
it is made for a diet which is soft , mushy , which is reduced in fibers , which is very easily chewable and digestible .
sounds like fast food , does n't it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's for cooked food .
we carry in our face the proof that cooking , food transformation , made us what we are .
so i would suggest that we change how we classify ourselves .
we talk about ourselves as omnivores .
i would say , we should call ourselves coctivors - -lrb- laughter -rrb- from coquere , to cook .
we are the animals who eat cooked food .
no , no , no , no . better - to live of cooked food .
so cooking is a very important technology .
it 's technology .
i do n't know how you feel , but i like to cook for entertainment .
and you need some design to be successful .
so , cooking is a very important technology , because it allowed us to acquire what brought you all here : the big brain , this wonderful cerebral cortex we have .
because brains are expensive .
those have to pay tuition fees know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's also , metabolically speaking , expensive .
you now , our brain is two to three percent of the body mass , but actually it uses 25 percent of the total energy we use .
it 's very expensive .
where does the energy come from . of course , from food .
if we eat raw food , we can not release really the energy .
so this ingenuity of our ancestors , to invent this most marvelous technology .
invisible - everyone of us does it every day , so to speak .
cooking made it possible that mutations , natural selections , our environment , could develop us .
so if we think about this unleashing human potential , which was possible by cooking and food , why do we talk so badly about food ?
why is it always do and do n'ts and it 's good for you , it 's not good for you ?
i think the good news for me would be if we could go back and talk about the unleashing , the continuation of the unleashing of human potential .
now , cooking allowed also that we became a migrant species .
we walked out of africa two times .
we populated all the ecologies .
if you can cook , nothing can happen to you , because whatever you find , you will try to transform it .
it keeps also your brain working .
now the very easy and simple technology which was developed actually runs after this formula .
take something which looks like food , transform it , and it gives you a good , very easy , accessible energy .
this technology affected two organs , the brain and the gut , which it actually affected .
the brain could grow , but the gut actually shrunk .
okay , it 's not obvious to be honest .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it shrunk to 60 percent of primate gut of my body mass .
so because of having cooked food , it 's easier to digest .
now having a large brain , as you know , is a big advantage , because you can actually influence your environment .
you can influence your own technologies you have invented .
you can continue to innovate and invent .
now the big brain did this also with cooking .
but how did it actually run this show ?
how did it actually interfere ?
what kind of criteria did it use ?
and this is actually taste reward and energy .
you know we have up to five tastes , three of them sustain us .
sweet - energy .
umami - this is a meaty taste .
you need proteins for muscles , recovery .
salty , because you need salt , otherwise your electric body will not work .
and two tastes which protect you - bitter and sour , which are against poisonous and rotten material .
but of course , they are hard-wired but we use them still in a sophisticated way .
think about bittersweet chocolate ; or think about the acidity of yogurt - wonderful - mixed with strawberry fruits .
so we can make mixtures of all this kind of thing because we know that , in cooking , we can transform it to the form .
reward : this is a more complex and especially integrative form of our brain with various different elements - the external states , our internal states , how do we feel , and so on are put together .
and something which maybe you do n't like but you are so hungry that you really will be satisfied to eat .
so satisfaction was a very important part .
and as i say , energy was necessary .
now how did the gut actually participate in this development ?
and the gut is a silent voice - it 's going more for feelings .
i use the euphemism digestive comfort - actually - it 's a digestive discomfort , which the gut is concerned with .
if you get a stomach ache , if you get a little bit bloated , was not the right food , was not the right cooking manipulation or maybe other things went wrong .
so my story is a tale of two brains , because it might surprise you , our gut has a full-fledged brain .
all the managers in the room say , " you do n't tell me something new , because we know , gut feeling .
this is what we are using . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and actually you use it and it 's actually useful .
because our gut is connected to our emotional limbic system , they do speak with each other and make decisions .
but what it means to have a brain there is that , not only the big brain has to talk with the food , the food has to talk with the brain , because we have to learn actually how to talk to the brains .
now if there 's a gut brain , we should also learn to talk with this brain .
now 150 years ago , anatomists described very , very carefully - here is a model of a wall of a gut .
i took the three elements - stomach , small intestine and colon .
and within this structure , you see these two pinkish layers , which are actually the muscle .
and between this muscle , they found nervous tissues , a lot of nervous tissues , which penetrate actually the muscle - penetrate the submucosa , where you have all the elements for the immune system .
the gut is actually the largest immune system , defending your body .
it penetrates the mucosa .
this is the layer which actually touches the food you are swallowing and you digest , which is actually the lumen .
now if you think about the gut , the gut is - if you could stretch it - 40 meters long , the length of a tennis court .
if we could unroll it , get out all the folds and so on , it would have 400 sq. meters of surface .
and now this brain takes care over this , to move it with the muscles and to do defend the surface and , of course , digest our food we cook .
so if we give you a specification , this brain , which is autonomous , have 500 million nerve cells , 100 million neurons - so around the size of a cat brain , so there sleeps a little cat - thinks for itself , optimizes whatever it digests .
it has 20 different neuron types .
it 's got the same diversity you find actually in a pig brain , where you have 100 billion neurons .
it has autonomous organized microcircuits , has these programs which run .
it senses the food ; it knows exactly what to do .
it senses it by chemical means and very importantly by mechanical means , because it has to move the food - it has to mix all the various elements which we need for digestion .
this control of muscle is very , very important , because , you know , there can be reflexes .
if you do n't like a food , especially if you 're a child , you gag .
it 's this brain which makes this reflex .
and then finally , it controls also the secretion of this molecular machinery , which actually digests the food we cook .
now how do the two brains work with each other ?
i took here a model from robotics - it 's called the subsumption architecture .
what it means is that we have a layered control system .
the lower layer , our gut brain , has its own goals - digestion defense - and we have the higher brain with the goal of integration and generating behaviors .
now both look - and this is the blue arrows - both look to the same food , which is in the lumen and in the area of your intestine .
the big brain integrates signals , which come from the running programs of the lower brain , but subsumption means that the higher brain can interfere with the lower .
it can replace , or it can inhibit actually , signals .
so if we take two types of signals - a hunger signal for example .
if you have an empty stomach , your stomach produces a hormone called ghrelin .
it 's a very big signal ; it 's sent to the brain says , " go and eat . "
you have stop signals - we have up to eight stop signals .
at least in my case , they are not listened to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what happens if the big brain in the integration overrides the signal ?
so if you override the hunger signal , you can have a disorder , which is called anorexia .
despite generating a healthy hunger signal , the big brain ignores it and activates different programs in the gut .
the more usual case is overeating .
it actually takes the signal and changes it , and we continue , even -lsb- though -rsb- our eight signals would say , " stop , enough .
we have transferred enough energy . "
now the interesting thing is that , along this lower layer - this gut - the signal becomes stronger and stronger if undigested , but digestible , material could penetrate .
this we found from bariatric surgery .
that then the signal would be very , very high .
so now back to the cooking question and back to the design .
we have learned to talk to the big brain - taste and reward , as you know .
now what would be the language we have to talk to the gut brain that its signals are so strong that the big brain can not ignore it ?
then we would generate something all of us would like to have - a balance between the hunger and the satiation .
now i give you , from our research , a very short claim .
this is fat digestion .
you have on your left an olive oil droplet , and this olive oil droplet gets attacked by enzymes .
this is an in vitro experiment .
it 's very difficult to work in the intestine .
now everyone would expect that when the degradation of the oil happens , when the constituents are liberated , they disappear , they go away because they -lsb- were -rsb- absorbed .
actually , what happens is that a very intricate structure appears .
and i hope you can see that there are some ring-like structures in the middle image , which is water .
this whole system generates a huge surface to allow more enzymes to attack the remaining oil .
and finally , on your right side , you see a bubbly , cell-like structure appearing , from which the body will absorb the fat .
now if we could take this language - and this is a language of structures - and make it longer-lasting , that it can go through the passage of the intestine , it would generate stronger signals .
so our research - and i think the research also at the universities - are now fixing on these points to say : how can we actually - and this might sound trivial now to you - how can we change cooking ?
how can we cook that we have this language developed ?
so what we have actually , it 's not an omnivore 's dilemma .
we have a coctivor 's opportunity , because we have learned over the last two million years which taste and reward - quite sophisticated to cook - to please ourselves , to satisfy ourselves .
if we add the matrix , if we add the structure language , which we have to learn , when we learn it , then we can put it back ; and around energy , we could generate a balance , which comes out from our really primordial operation : cooking .
so , to make cooking really a very important element , i would say even philosophers have to change and have to finally recognize that cooking is what made us .
so i would say , coquo ergo sum : i cook , therefore i am .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one thing i wanted to say about film making is - about this film - in thinking about some of the wonderful talks we 've heard here , michael moschen , and some of the talks about music , this idea that there is a narrative line , and that music exists in time .
a film also exists in time ; it 's an experience that you should go through emotionally .
and in making this film i felt that so many of the documentaries i 've seen were all about learning something , or knowledge , or driven by talking heads , and driven by ideas .
and i wanted this film to be driven by emotions , and really to follow my journey .
so instead of doing the talking head thing , instead it 's composed of scenes , and we meet people along the way .
we only meet them once .
they do n't come back several times , so it really chronicles a journey .
it 's something like life , that once you get in it you ca n't get out .
there are two clips i want to show you , the first one is a kind of hodgepodge , its just three little moments , four little moments with three of the people who are here tonight .
it 's not the way they occur in the film , because they are part of much larger scenes .
they play off each other in a wonderful way .
and that ends with a little clip of my father , of lou , talking about something that is very dear to him , which is the accidents of life .
i think he felt that the greatest things in life were accidental , and perhaps not planned at all .
and those three clips will be followed by a scene of perhaps what , to me , is really his greatest building which is a building in dhaka , bangladesh .
he built the capital over there .
and i think you 'll enjoy this building , it 's never been seen - it 's been still photographed , but never photographed by a film crew .
we were the first film crew in there .
so you 'll see images of this remarkable building .
a couple of things to keep in mind when you see it , it was built entirely by hand , i think they got a crane the last year .
it was built entirely by hand off bamboo scaffolding , people carrying these baskets of concrete on their heads , dumping them in the forms .
it is the capital of the country , and it took 23 years to build , which is something they seem to be very proud of over there .
it took as long as the taj mahal .
unfortunately it took so long that lou never saw it finished .
he died in 1974 .
the building was finished in 1983 .
so it continued on for many years after he died .
think about that when you see that building , that sometimes the things we strive for so hard in life we never get to see finished .
and that really struck me about my father , in the sense that he had such belief that somehow , doing these things giving in the way that he gave , that something good would come out of it , even in the middle of a war , there was a war with pakistan at one point , and the construction stopped totally and he kept working , because he felt , " well when the war is done they 'll need this building . "
so , those are the two clips i 'm going to show .
roll that tape .
-lrb- applause -rrb- richard saul wurman : i remember hearing him talk at penn .
and i came home and i said to my father and mother , " i just met this man : does n't have much work , and he 's sort of ugly , funny voice , and he 's a teacher at school .
i know you 've never heard of him , but just mark this day that someday you will hear of him , because he 's really an amazing man . "
frank gehry : i heard he had some kind of a fling with ingrid bergman . is that true ?
nathaniel kahn : if he did he was a very lucky man .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nk : did you hear that , really ?
fg : yeah , when he was in rome .
moshe safdie : he was a real nomad .
and you know , when i knew him when i was in the office , he would come in from a trip , and he would be in the office for two or three days intensely , and he would pack up and go .
you know he 'd be in the office till three in the morning working with us and there was this kind of sense of the nomad in him .
i mean as tragic as his death was in a railway station , it was so consistent with his life , you know ?
i mean i often think i 'm going to die in a plane , or i 'm going to die in an airport , or die jogging without an identification on me .
i do n't know why i sort of carry that from that memory of the way he died .
but he was a sort of a nomad at heart .
louis kahn : how accidental our existences are really and how full of influence by circumstance .
man : we are the morning workers who come , all the time , here and enjoy the walking , city 's beauty and the atmosphere and this is the nicest place of bangladesh .
we are proud of it .
nk : you 're proud of it ?
man : yes , it is the national image of bangladesh .
nk : do you know anything about the architect ?
man : architect ? i 've heard about him ; he 's a top-ranking architect .
nk : well actually i 'm here because i 'm the architect 's son , he was my father .
man : oh ! dad is louis farrakhan ?
nk : yeah . no not louis farrakhan , louis kahn .
man : louis kahn , yes !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- man : your father , is he alive ?
nk : no , he 's been dead for 25 years .
man : very pleased to welcome you back .
nk : thank you .
nk : he never saw it finished , pop .
no , he never saw this .
shamsul wares : it was almost impossible , building for a country like ours .
in 30 , 50 years back , it was nothing , only paddy fields , and since we invited him here , he felt that he has got a responsibility .
he wanted to be a moses here , he gave us democracy .
he is not a political man , but in this guise he has given us the institution for democracy , from where we can rise .
in that way it is so relevant .
he did n't care for how much money this country has , or whether he would be able to ever finish this building , but somehow he has been able to do it , build it , here .
and this is the largest project he has got in here , the poorest country in the world .
nk : it cost him his life .
sw : yeah , he paid . he paid his life for this , and that is why he is great and we 'll remember him .
but he was also human .
now his failure to satisfy the family life , is an inevitable association of great people .
but i think his son will understand this , and will have no sense of grudge , or sense of being neglected , i think .
he cared in a very different manner , but it takes a lot of time to understand that .
in social aspect of his life he was just like a child , he was not at all matured .
he could not say no to anything , and that is why , that he can not say no to things , we got this building today .
you see , only that way you can be able to understand him .
there is no other shortcut , no other way to really understand him .
but i think he has given us this building and we feel all the time for him , that 's why , he has given love for us .
he could not probably give the right kind of love for you , but for us , he has given the people the right kind of love , that is important .
you have to understand that .
he had an enormous amount of love , he loved everybody .
to love everybody , he sometimes did not see the very closest ones , and that is inevitable for men of his stature .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this strange-looking plant is called the llareta .
what looks like moss covering rocks is actually a shrub comprised of thousands of branches , each containing clusters of tiny green leaves at the end and so densely packed together that you could actually stand on top of it .
this individual lives in the atacama desert in chile , and it happens to be 3,000 years old .
it also happens to be a relative of parsley .
for the past five years , i 've been researching , working with biologists and traveling all over the world to find continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older .
the project is part art and part science .
there 's an environmental component .
and i 'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale .
i selected 2,000 years as my minimum age because i wanted to start at what we consider to be year zero and work backward from there .
what you 're looking at now is a tree called jomon sugi , living on the remote island of yakushima .
the tree was in part a catalyst for the project .
i 'd been traveling in japan without an agenda other than to photograph , and then i heard about this tree that is 2,180 years old and knew that i had to go visit it .
it was n't until later , when i was actually back home in new york that i got the idea for the project .
so it was the slow churn , if you will .
i think it was my longstanding desire to bring together my interest in art , science and philosophy that allowed me to be ready when the proverbial light bulb went on .
so i started researching , and to my surprise , this project had never been done before in the arts or the sciences .
and - perhaps naively - i was surprised to find that there is n't even an area in the sciences that deals with this idea of global species longevity .
so what you 're looking at here is the rhizocarpon geographicum , or map lichen , and this is around 3,000 years old and lives in greenland , which is a long way to go for some lichens .
visiting greenland was more like traveling back in time than just traveling very far north .
it was very primal and more remote than anything i 'd ever experienced before .
and this is heightened by a couple of particular experiences .
one was when i had been dropped off by boat on a remote fjord , only to find that the archeologists i was supposed to meet were nowhere to be found .
and it 's not like you could send them a text or shoot them an e-mail , so i was literally left to my own devices .
but luckily , it worked out obviously , but it was a humbling experience to feel so disconnected .
and then a few days later , we had the opportunity to go fishing in a glacial stream near our campsite , where the fish were so abundant that you could literally reach into the stream and grab out a foot-long trout with your bare hands .
it was like visiting a more innocent time on the planet .
and then , of course , there 's the lichens .
these lichens grow only one centimeter every hundred years .
i think that really puts human lifespans into a different perspective .
and what you 're looking at here and if the title " searching for armillaria death rings , " sounds ominous , it is .
the armillaria is actually a predatory fungus , killing certain species of trees in the forest .
it 's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the " humongous fungus " because it happens to be one of the world 's largest organisms as well .
so with the help of some biologists studying the fungus , i got some maps and some gps coordinates and chartered a plane and started looking for the death rings , the circular patterns in which the fungus kills the trees .
so i 'm not sure if there are any in this photo , but i do know the fungus is down there .
and then this back down on the ground and you can see that the fungus is actually invading this tree .
so that white material that you see in between the bark and the wood is the mycelial felt of the fungus , slowly strangling the tree to death by preventing the flow of water and nutrients .
so this strategy has served it pretty well - it 's 2,400 years old .
and then from underground to underwater .
this is a brain coral living in tobago that 's around 2,000 years old .
and i had to overcome my fear of deep water to find this one .
this is at about 60 feet or 18 meters , depth .
and you 'll see , there 's some damage to the surface of the coral .
that was actually caused by a school of parrot fish that had started eating it , though luckily , they lost interest before killing it .
luckily still , it seems to be out of harm 's way of the recent oil spill .
but that being said , we just as easily could have lost one of the oldest living things on the planet , and the full impact of that disaster is still yet to be seen .
now this is something that i think is one of the most quietly resilient things on the planet .
this is clonal colony of quaking aspen trees , living in utah , that is literally 80,000 years old .
what looks like a forest is actually only one tree .
imagine that it 's one giant root system and each tree is a stem coming up from that system .
so what you have is one giant , interconnected , genetically identical individual that 's been living for 80,000 years .
it also happens to be male and , in theory immortal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a clonal tree as well .
this is the spruce gran picea , which at 9,550 years is a mere babe in the woods .
the location of this tree is actually kept secret for its own protection .
i spoke to the biologist who discovered this tree , and he told me that that spindly growth you see there in the center is most likely a product of climate change .
as it 's gotten warmer on the top of the mountain , the vegetation zone is actually changing .
so we do n't even necessarily have to have direct contact with these organisms to have a very real impact on them .
this is the fortingall yew - no , i 'm just kidding - this is the fortingall yew .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i put that slide in there because i 'm often asked if there are any animals in the project .
and aside from coral , the answer is no .
does anybody know how old the oldest tortoise is - any guesses ?
-lrb- audience : 300 . -rrb- rachel sussman : 300 ? no , 175 is the oldest living tortoise , so nowhere near 2,000 .
and then , you might have heard of this giant clam that was discovered off the coast of northern iceland that reached 405 years old .
however , it died in the lab as they were determining its age .
the most interesting discovery of late , i think is the so-called immortal jellyfish , which has actually been observed in the lab to be able to be able to revert back to the polyp state after reaching full maturity .
so that being said , it 's highly unlikely that any jellyfish would survive that long in the wild .
and back to the yew here .
so as you can see , it 's in a churchyard ; it 's in scotland . it 's behind a protective wall .
and there are actually a number or ancient yews in churchyards around the u.k. , but if you do the math , you 'll remember it 's actually the yew trees that were there first , then the churches .
and now down to another part of the world .
i had the opportunity to travel around the limpopo province in south africa with an expert in baobab trees .
and we saw a number of them , and this is most likely the oldest .
it 's around 2,000 , and it 's called the sagole baobab .
and you know , i think of all of these organisms as palimpsests .
they contain thousands of years of their own histories within themselves , and they also contain records of natural and human events .
and the baobabs in particular are a great example of this .
you can see that this one has names carved into its trunk , but it also records some natural events .
so the baobabs , as they get older , tend to get pulpy in their centers and hollow out .
and this can create great natural shelters for animals , but they 've also been appropriated for some rather dubious human uses , including a bar , a prison and even a toilet inside of a tree .
and this brings me to another favorite of mine - i think , because it is just so unusual .
this plant is called the welwitschia , and it lives only in parts of coastal namibia and angola , where it 's uniquely adapted to collect moisture from mist coming off the sea .
and what 's more , it 's actually a tree .
it 's a primitive conifer .
you 'll notice that it 's bearing cones down the center .
and what looks like two big heaps of leaves , is actually two single leaves that get shredded up by the harsh desert conditions over time .
and it actually never sheds those leaves , so it also bears the distinction of having the longest leaves in the plant kingdom .
i spoke to a biologist at the kirstenbosch botanical garden in capetown to ask him where he thought this remarkable plant came from , and his thought was that if you travel around namibia , you see that there are a number of petrified forests , and the logs are all - the logs are all giant coniferous trees , and yet there 's no sign of where they might have come from .
so his thought was that flooding in the north of africa actually brought those coniferous trees down tens of thousands of years ago , and what resulted was this remarkable adaptation to this unique desert environment .
this is what i think is the most poetic of the oldest living things .
this is something called an underground forest .
so , i spoke to a botanist at the pretoria botanical garden , who explained that certain species of trees have adapted to this region .
it 's bushfelt region , which is dry and prone to a lot of fires , as so what these trees have done is , if you can imagine that this is the crown of the tree , and that this is ground level , imagine that the whole thing , that whole bulk of the tree , migrated underground , and you just have those leaves peeping up above the surface .
that way , when a fire roars through , it 's the equivalent of getting your eyebrows singed .
the tree can easily recover .
these also tend to grow clonally , the oldest of which is 13,000 years old .
back in the u.s. , there 's a couple plants of similar age .
this is the clonal creosote bush , which is around 12,000 years old .
if you 've been in the american west , you know the creosote bush is pretty ubiquitous , but that being said , you see that this has and what 's happening is it 's expanding slowly outwards from that original shape .
and it 's one - again , that interconnected root system , making it one genetically identical individual .
it also has a friend nearby - well , i think they 're friends .
this is the clonal mojave yucca , it 's about a mile away , and it 's a little bit older than 12,000 years .
and you see it has that similar circular form .
and there 's some younger clones dotting the landscape behind it .
and both of these , the yucca and the creosote bush , live on bureau of land management land , and that 's very different from being protected in a national park .
in fact , this land is designated for recreational all-terrain vehicle use .
so , now i want to show what very well might be the oldest living thing on the planet .
this is siberian actinobacteria , which is between 400,000 and 600,000 years old .
this bacteria was discovered several years ago by a team of planetary biologists hoping to find clues to life on other planets by looking at one of the harshest conditions on ours .
and what they found , by doing research into the permafrost , was this bacteria .
but what 's unique about it is that it 's doing dna repair below freezing .
and what that means is that it 's not dormant - it 's actually been living and growing for half a million years .
it 's also probably one the most vulnerable of the oldest living things , because if the permafrost melts , it wo n't survive .
this is a map that i 've put together of the oldest living things , so you can get a sense of where they are ; you see they 're all over the world .
the blue flags represent things that i 've already photographed , and the reds are places that i 'm still trying to get to .
you 'll see also , there 's a flag on antarctica .
i 'm trying to travel there to find 5,000 year-old moss , which lives on the antarctic peninsula .
so , i probably have about two more years left on this project - on this phase of the project , but after five years , i really feel like i know what 's at the heart of this work .
the oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past , a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future .
they 've survived for millennia in desert , in the permafrost , at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean .
they 've withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments , but now some of them are in jeopardy , and they ca n't just get up and get out of the way .
it 's my hope that , by going to find these organisms , that i can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hello . i would like to start my talk with actually two questions , and the first one is : how many people here actually eat pig meat ?
please raise your hand - oh , that 's a lot .
and how many people have actually seen a live pig producing this meat ?
in the last year ?
in the netherlands - where i come from - you actually never see a pig , which is really strange , because , on a population of 16 million people , we have 12 million pigs .
and well , of course , the dutch ca n't eat all these pigs .
they eat about one-third , and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in europe and the rest of the world .
a lot goes to the u.k. , germany .
and what i was curious about - because historically , the whole pig would be used up until the last bit so nothing would be wasted - and i was curious to find out if this was actually still the case .
and i spent about three years researching .
and i followed this one pig with number " 05049 , " all the way up until the end and to what products it 's made of .
and in these years , i met all kinds people like , for instance , farmers and butchers , which seems logical .
but i also met aluminum mold makers , ammunition producers and all kinds of people .
and what was striking to me is that the farmers actually had no clue what was made of their pigs , but the consumers - as in us - had also no idea of the pigs being in all these products .
so what i did is , i took all this research and i made it into a - well , basically it 's a product catalog of this one pig , and it carries a duplicate of his ear tag on the back .
and it consists of seven chapters - the chapters are skin , bones , meat , internal organs , blood , fat and miscellaneous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in total , they weigh 103.7 kilograms .
and to show you how often you actually meet part of this pig in a regular day , i want to show you some images of the book .
you probably start the day with a shower .
so , in soap , fatty acids made from boiling pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent , but also for giving it a pearl-like effect .
then if you look around you in the bathroom , you see lots more products like shampoo , conditioner , anti-wrinkle cream , body lotion , but also toothpaste .
then , so , before breakfast , you 've already met the pig so many times .
then , at breakfast , the pig that i followed , the hairs off the pig or proteins from the hairs off the pig were used as an improver of dough .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , that 's what the producer says : it 's " improving the dough , of course . "
in low-fat butter , or actually in many low-fat products , when you take the fat out , you actually take the taste and the texture out .
so what they do is they put gelatin back in , in order to retain the texture .
well , when you 're off to work , under the road or under the buildings that you see , which is a very light kind of concrete that 's actually got proteins from bones inside and it 's also fully reusable .
in the train brakes - at least in the german train brakes - there 's this part of the brake that 's made of bone ash .
and in cheesecake and all kinds of desserts , like chocolate mousse , tiramisu , vanilla pudding , everything that 's cooled in the supermarket , there 's gelatin to make it look good .
fine bone china - this is a real classic .
of course , the bone in fine-bone china gives it its translucency and also its strength , in order to make these really fine shapes , like this deer .
in interior decorating , the pig 's actually quite there .
it 's used in paint for the texture , but also for the glossiness .
in sandpaper , bone glue is actually the glue between the sand and the paper .
and then in paintbrushes , hairs are used because , apparently , they 're very suitable for making paintbrushes because of their hard-wearing nature .
i was not planning on showing you any meat because , of course , half the book 's meat and you probably all know what meats they are .
but i did n't want you to miss out on this one , because this , well , it 's called " portion-controlled meat cuts . "
and this is actually sold in the frozen area of the supermarket .
and what it is - it 's actually steak .
so , this is sold as cow , but what happens when you slaughter a cow - at least in industrial factory farming - they have all these little bits of steak left that they ca n't actually sell as steak , so what they do is they glue them all together with fibrin from pig blood into this really large sausage , then freeze the sausage , cut it in little slices and sell those as steak again .
and this also actually happens with tuna and scallops .
so , with the steak , you might drink a beer .
in the brewing process , there 's lots of cloudy elements in the beer , so to get rid of these cloudy elements , what some companies do is they pour the beer through a sort of gelatin sieve in order to get rid of that cloudiness .
this actually also goes for wine as well as fruit juice .
there 's actually a company in greece that produces these cigarettes that actually contain hemoglobin from pigs in the filter .
and according to them , this creates an artificial lung in the filter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this is actually a healthier cigarette .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- injectable collagen - or , since the ' 70s , collagen from pigs - has been used for injecting into wrinkles .
and the reason for this is that pigs are actually quite close to human beings , so the collagen is as well .
well , this must be the strangest thing i found .
this is a bullet coming from a very large ammunition company in the united states .
and while i was making the book , i contacted all the producers of products because i wanted them to send me the real samples and the real specimens .
so i sent this company an email saying , " hello . i 'm christien . i 'm doing this research .
and can you send me a bullet ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and well , i did n't expect them to even answer my email .
but they answered and they said , " why , thank you for your email . what an interesting story .
are you in anyway related to the dutch government ? "
i thought that was really weird , as if the dutch government sends emails to anyone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the most beautiful thing i found - at least what i think is the most beautiful - in the book , is this heart valve .
it 's actually a very low-tech and very high-tech product at the same time .
the low-tech bit is that it 's literally a pig 's heart valve mounted in the high-tech bit , which is a memory metal casing .
and what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart without open heart surgery .
and once it 's in the right spot , they remove the outer shell , and the heart valve , well , it gets this shape and at that moment it starts beating , instantly .
it 's really a sort of magical moment .
so this is actually a dutch company , so i called them up , and i asked , " can i borrow a heart valve from you ? "
and the makers of this thing were really enthusiastic .
so they were like , " okay , we 'll put it in a jar for you with formalin , and you can borrow it . "
great - and then i did n't hear from them for weeks , so i called , and i asked , " what 's going on with the heart valve ? "
and they said , " well the director of the company decided not to let you borrow this heart valve , because want his product to be associated with pigs . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , the last product from the book that i 'm showing you is renewable energy - actually , to show that my first question , if pigs are still used up until the last bit , was still true .
well it is , because everything that ca n't be used for anything else is made into a fuel that can be used as renewable energy source .
in total , i found 185 products .
and what they showed me is that , well , firstly , that we do n't treat these pigs as absolute kings and queens .
and the second , is that we actually do n't have a clue of what all these products that surround us are made of .
and you might think i 'm very fond of pigs , but actually - well , i am a little bit - but i 'm more fond of raw materials in general .
and i think that , in order to take better care of what 's behind our products - so , the livestock , the crops , the plants , the non-renewable materials , but also the people that produce these products - the first step would actually be to know that they are there .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so little billy goes to school , and he sits down and the teacher says , " what does your father do ? "
and little billy says , " my father plays the piano in an opium den . "
so the teacher rings up the parents , and says , " very shocking story from little billy today .
just heard that he claimed that you play the piano in an opium den . "
and the father says , " i 'm very sorry . yes , it 's true , i lied .
but how can i tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is a politician ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , as a politician myself , standing in front of you , or indeed , meeting any stranger anywhere in the world , when i eventually reveal the nature of my profession , they look at me as though i 'm somewhere between a snake , a monkey and an iguana , and through all of this , i feel , strongly , that something is going wrong .
four hundred years of maturing democracy , colleagues in parliament who seem to me , as individuals , reasonably impressive , an increasingly educated , energetic , informed population , and yet a deep , deep sense of disappointment .
my colleagues in parliament include , in my new intake , family doctors , businesspeople , professors , distinguished economists , historians , writers , army officers ranging from colonels down to regimental sergeant majors .
all of them , however , including myself , as we walk underneath those strange stone gargoyles just down the road , feel that we 've become less than the sum of our parts , feel as though we have become profoundly diminished .
and this is n't just a problem in britain .
it 's a problem across the developing world , and in middle income countries too . in jamaica , for example - look at jamaican members of parliament , you meet them , and they 're often people who are rhodes scholars , who 've studied at harvard or at princeton , and yet , you go down to downtown kingston , and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world : a dismal , depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings .
and this has been true for 30 years , and the handover in 1979 , 1980 , between one jamaican leader who was the son of a rhodes scholar and a q.c. to another who 'd done an economics doctorate at harvard , over 800 people were killed in the streets in drug-related violence .
ten years ago , however , the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary . george w. bush stood up in his state of the union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world . he said , because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors , freedom will bring peace .
distinguished academics at the same time argued that democracies had this incredible range of side benefits .
they would bring prosperity , security , overcome sectarian violence , ensure that states would never again harbor terrorists .
since then , what 's happened ?
well , what we 've seen is the creation , in places like iraq and afghanistan , of democratic systems of government which have n't had any of those side benefits .
in afghanistan , for example , we have n't just had one election or two elections . we 've gone through three elections , presidential and parliamentary . and what do we find ?
do we find a flourishing civil society , a vigorous rule of law and good security ? no . what we find in afghanistan is a judiciary that is weak and corrupt , a very limited civil society which is largely ineffective , a media which is beginning to get onto its feet but a government that 's deeply unpopular , perceived as being deeply corrupt , and security that is shocking , security that 's terrible .
in pakistan , in lots of sub-saharan africa , again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments , with states that are unstable and dangerous .
and when i have conversations with people , i remember having a conversation , for example , in iraq , with a community that asked me whether the riot we were seeing in front of us , this was a huge mob ransacking a provincial council building , was a sign of the new democracy .
the same , i felt , was true in almost every single one of the middle and developing countries that i went to , and to some extent the same is true of us .
well , what is the answer to this ? is the answer to just give up on the idea of democracy ?
well , obviously not . it would be absurd if we were to engage again in the kind of operations we were engaged in , in iraq and afghanistan if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which we were imposing anything other than a democratic system .
anything else would run contrary to our values , it would run contrary to the wishes of the people on the ground , it would run contrary to our interests .
i remember in iraq , for example , that we went through a period of feeling that we should delay democracy .
we went through a period of feeling that the lesson learned from bosnia was that elections held too early enshrined sectarian violence , enshrined extremist parties , so in iraq in 2003 the decision was made , let 's not have elections for two years . let 's invest in voter education . let 's invest in democratization .
the result was that i found stuck outside my office a huge crowd of people , this is actually a photograph taken in libya but i saw the same scene in iraq of people standing outside screaming for the elections , and when i went out and said , " what is wrong with the interim provincial council ?
what is wrong with the people that we have chosen ?
there is a sunni sheikh , there 's a shiite sheikh , there 's the seven - leaders of the seven major tribes , there 's a christian , there 's a sabian , there are female representatives , there 's every political party in this council , what 's wrong with the people that we chose ? "
the answer came , " the problem is n't the people that you chose . the problem is that you chose them . "
i have not met , in afghanistan , in even the most remote community , anybody who does not want a say in who governs them .
most remote community , i have never met a villager who does not want a vote .
so we need to acknowledge that despite the dubious statistics , despite the fact that 84 percent of people in britain feel politics is broken , despite the fact that when i was in iraq , we did an opinion poll in 2003 and asked people what political systems they preferred , and the answer came back that seven percent wanted the united states , five percent wanted france , three percent wanted britain , and nearly 40 percent wanted dubai , which is , after all , not a democratic state at all but a relatively prosperous minor monarchy , democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting . but in order to do so
we need to get away from instrumental arguments .
we need to get away from saying democracy matters because of the other things it brings .
we need to get away from feeling , in the same way , human rights matters because of the other things it brings , or women 's rights matters for the other things it brings .
why should we get away from those arguments ?
because they 're very dangerous . if we set about saying , for example , torture is wrong because it does n't extract good information , or we say , you need women 's rights because it stimulates economic growth by doubling the size of the work force , you leave yourself open to the position where the government of north korea can turn around and say , " well actually , we 're having a lot of success extracting good information with our torture at the moment , " or the government of saudi arabia to say , " well , our economic growth 's okay , thank you very much , considerably better than yours , so maybe we do n't need to go ahead with this program on women 's rights . "
the point about democracy is not instrumental .
it 's not about the things that it brings .
the point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate , effective , prosperous rule of law .
it 's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors .
the point about democracy is intrinsic .
democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty . it reflects an idea of dignity , the dignity of the individual , the idea that each individual should have an equal vote , an equal say , in the formation of their government .
but if we 're really to make democracy vigorous again , if we 're ready to revivify it , we need to get involved in a new project of the citizens and the politicians .
democracy is not simply a question of structures .
it is a state of mind . it is an activity .
and part of that activity is honesty .
after i speak to you today , i 'm going on a radio program called " any questions , " and the thing you will have noticed about politicians on these kinds of radio programs is that they never , ever say that they do n't know the answer to a question . it does n't matter what it is .
if you ask about child tax credits , the future of the penguins in the south antarctic , asked to hold forth on whether or not the developments in chongqing contribute to sustainable development in carbon capture , and we will have an answer for you .
we need to stop that , to stop pretending to be omniscient beings .
politicians also need to learn , occasionally , to say that certain things that voters want , certain things that voters have been promised , may be things that we can not deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver .
and the second thing we should do is understand the genius of our societies .
our societies have never been so educated , have never been so energized , have never been so healthy , have never known so much , cared so much , or wanted to do so much , and it is a genius of the local .
one of the reasons why we 're moving away from banqueting halls such as the one in which we stand , banqueting halls with extraordinary images on the ceiling of kings enthroned , the entire drama played out here on this space , where the king of england had his head lopped off , why we 've moved from spaces like this , thrones like that , towards the town hall , is we 're moving more and more towards the energies of our people , and we need to tap that .
that can mean different things in different countries .
in britain , it could mean looking to the french , learning from the french , getting directly elected mayors in place in a french commune system .
in afghanistan , it could have meant instead of concentrating on the big presidential and parliamentary elections , we should have done what was in the afghan constitution from the very beginning , which is to get direct local elections going at a district level and elect people 's provincial governors .
but for any of these things to work , the honesty in language , the local democracy , it 's not just a question of what politicians do .
it 's a question of what the citizens do .
for politicians to be honest , the public needs to allow them to be honest , and the media , which mediates between the politicians and the public , needs to allow those politicians to be honest .
if local democracy is to flourish , it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen .
in other words , if democracy is to be rebuilt , is to become again vigorous and vibrant , it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians , but for the politicians to learn to trust the public .
thank you very much indeed . -lrb- applause -rrb- good afternoon , good evening , whatever .
we can go , jambo , guten abend , bonsoir , but we can also ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh .
that is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening .
you hear it going from one side of the valley to the other , from one group of nests to the next .
and i want to pick up with my talk this evening from where zeray left off yesterday .
he was talking about this amazing , three-year-old australopithecine child , selam .
and we 've also been hearing about the history , the family tree , of mankind through dna genetic profiling .
and it was a paleontologist , the late louis leakey , who actually set me on the path for studying chimpanzees .
and it was pretty extraordinary , way back then .
it 's kind of commonplace now , but his argument was - because he 'd been searching for the fossilized remains of early humans in africa .
and you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils , from the shape of the muscle attachments , something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them .
but what about how they behaved ? that 's what he wanted to know .
and of course , behavior does n't fossilize .
he argued - and it 's now a fairly common theory - that if we found behavior patterns similar or the same in our closest living relatives , the great apes , and humans today , then maybe those behaviors were present in the ape-like , human-like ancestor some seven million years ago .
and therefore , perhaps we had brought those characteristics with us from that ancient , ancient past .
well , if you look in textbooks today that deal with human evolution , you very often find people speculating about how early humans may have behaved , based on the behavior of chimpanzees .
they are more like us than any other living creature , and we 've heard about that during this ted conference .
so it remains for me to comment on the ways in which chimpanzees are so like us , in certain aspects of their behavior .
every chimpanzee has his or her own personality .
of course , i gave them names . they can live to be 60 years or more , although we think most of them probably do n't make it to 60 in the wild .
mr. wurzel . the female has her first baby when she 's 11 or 12 .
thereafter , she has one baby only every five or six years , a long period of childhood dependency when the child is nursing , sleeping with the mother at night , and riding on her back .
and we believe that this long period of childhood is important for chimpanzees , just as it is for us , in relation to learning .
as the brain becomes ever more complex during evolution in different forms of animals , so we find that learning plays an ever more important role in an individual 's life history .
and young chimpanzees spend a lot of time watching what their elders do .
we know now that they 're capable of imitating behaviors that they see .
and we believe that it 's in this way that the different tool-using behaviors - that have now been seen in all the different chimpanzee populations studied in africa - how these are passed from one generation to the next , through observation , imitation and practice , so that we can describe these tool-using behaviors as primitive culture .
chimpanzees do n't have a spoken language . we 've talked about that .
they do have a very rich repertoire of postures and gestures , many of which are similar , or even identical , to ours and formed in the same context . greeting chimpanzees embracing .
they also kiss , hold hands , pat one another on the back .
and they swagger and they throw rocks .
in chimpanzee society , we find many , many examples of compassion , precursors to love and true altruism .
unfortunately , they , like us , have a dark side to their nature .
they 're capable of extreme brutality , even a kind of primitive war .
and these really aggressive behaviors , for the most part , are directed against individuals of the neighboring social group .
they are very territorially aggressive .
chimpanzees , i believe , more than any other living creature , have helped us to understand that , after all , there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom .
it 's a very blurry line , and it 's getting more blurry all the time as we make even more observations .
the study that i began in 1960 is still continuing to this day .
and these chimpanzees , living their complex social lives in the wild , have helped - more than anything else - to make us realize we are part of , and not separated from , the amazing animals with whom we share the planet .
so it 's pretty sad to find that chimpanzees , like so many other creatures around the world , are losing their habitats .
this is just one photograph from the air , and it shows you the forested highlands of gombe .
and it was when i flew over the whole area , about 16 years ago , and realized that outside the park , this forest , which in 1960 had stretched almost unbroken along the eastern shore of lake tanganyika , which is where the tiny , 30-square-mile gombe national park lies , that a question came to my mind .
" how can we even try to save these famous chimpanzees , when the people living around the national park are struggling to survive ? "
more people are living there than the land could possibly support .
the numbers increased by refugees pouring in from burundi and over the lake from congo .
and very poor people - they could n't afford to buy food from elsewhere .
this led to a program , which we call tacare .
it 's a very holistic way of improving the lives of the people living in the villages around the park .
it started small with 12 villages . it 's now in 24 .
there is n't time to go into it , but it 's including things like tree nurseries , methods of farming most suitable to this now very degraded , almost desert-like land up in these mountains .
ways of controlling , preventing soil erosion .
ways of reclaiming overused farmland , so that within two years they can again be productive .
working to help the villagers obtain fresh water from wells .
perhaps build some schoolrooms .
most important of all , i believe , is working with small groups of women , providing them with opportunities for micro-credit loans .
and we 've got , as is the case around the world , about 95 percent of all loans returned .
empowering women , working with education , providing scholarships for girls so they can finish secondary school , in the clear understanding that , all around the world , as women 's education improves , family size drops .
we provide information about family planning and about hiv / aids .
and as a result of this program , something 's happening for conservation .
what 's happening for conservation is that the farmers living in these 24 villages , instead of looking on us as a bunch of white people coming to study a whole bunch of monkeys - and by the way , many of the staff are now tanzanian - but when we began the tacare program , it was a tanzanian team going into the villages .
it was a tanzanian team talking to the villagers , asking what they were interested in .
were they interested in conservation ? absolutely not .
they were interested in health ; they were interested in education .
and as time went on , and as their situation began to improve , they began to understand ever more about the need for conservation .
they began to understand that as the upper levels of the hills were denuded of trees , so you 've got this terrible soil erosion and mudslides .
today , we are developing what we call the greater gombe ecosystem .
this is an area way outside the national park , stretching out into all these very degraded lands .
and as these villages have a better standard of life , they are actually agreeing to put between 10 percent and 20 percent of their land in the highlands aside , so that once again , as the trees grow back , the chimpanzees will have leafy corridors through which they can travel to interact - as they must for genetic viability - with other remnant groups outside the national park .
so tacare is a success .
we 're replicating it in other parts of africa , around other wilderness areas which are faced with extreme population pressure .
the problems in africa , however , as we 've been discussing for the whole of these first couple of days of ted , are major problems .
there is a great deal of poverty .
and when you get large numbers of people living in land that is not that fertile , particularly when you cut down trees , and you leave the soil open to the wind for erosion , as desperate populations cut down more and more trees , so that they can try and grow food for themselves and their families , what 's going to happen ? something 's got to give .
and the other problems - in not only africa , but the rest of the developing world and , indeed , everywhere - what are we doing to our planet ?
you know , the famous scientist , e. o. wilson said that if every person on this planet attains the standard of living of the average european or american , we need three new planets .
today , they are saying four . but we do n't have them . we 've got one .
and what 's happened ? i mean , the question here is , here we are , arguably the most intelligent being that 's ever walked planet earth , with this extraordinary brain , capable of the kind of technology that is so well illustrated by these ted conferences , and yet we 're destroying the only home we have .
the indigenous people around the world , before they made a major decision , used to sit around and ask themselves , " how does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead ? "
today , major decisions - and i 'm not particularly talking about africa here , but the developed world - major decisions involving millions of dollars , and millions of people , are often based on , " how will this affect the next shareholders ' meeting ? "
and these decisions affect africa .
as i began traveling around africa talking about the problems faced by chimpanzees and their vanishing forests , i realized more and more how so many of africa 's problems could be laid at the door of previous colonial exploitation .
so i began traveling outside africa , talking in europe , talking in the united states , going to asia .
and everywhere there were these terrible problems .
and you know the kind i 'm talking about . i 'm talking about pollution .
the air that we breathe that often poisons us .
the earth is poisoning our foods .
the water - water is perhaps one of the most crucial issues that we 're going to face in this century - and everywhere water is being polluted by agricultural , industrial and household chemicals that still are being sprayed around the world , seemingly with the inability to profit from past experience .
the mangroves are being cut down ; the effects of things like the tsunami get worse .
we 've talked about the soil erosion .
we have the reckless burning of fossil fuels along with other greenhouse gasses , so called , leading to climate change .
finally , all around the world , people have begun to believe that there is something going on very wrong with our climate .
all around the world climates are mixed up .
and it 's the poor people who are affected worse .
it 's africa that already is affected .
in many parts of sub-saharan africa , the droughts are so much worse .
and when the rain does come , it so often leads to flooding and added distress , and the cycle of poverty and hunger and disease .
and the numbers of people living in an area that the land can not support , who are too poor to buy food , who ca n't move away because the whole land is degraded .
and so you get desertification - creeping , creeping , creeping - as the last of the trees are cut down .
and this kind of thing is not just in africa . it 's all over the world .
so it was n't surprising to me that as i was traveling around the world i met so many young people who seemed to have lost hope .
we seem to have lost wisdom , the wisdom of the indigenous people .
i asked a question . " why ? "
well , do you think there could be some kind of disconnect between this extraordinarily clever brain , the kind of brain that the ted technologies exemplify , and the human heart ? talking about it in the non-scientific term , in terms of love and compassion . is there some disconnect ?
and these young people , when i talk to them , basically they were either depressed or apathetic , or bitter and angry . and they said more or less the same thing , " we feel this way because we feel you 've compromised our future and there 's nothing we can do about it . "
we have compromised their future .
i 've got three little grandchildren , and every time i look at them and i think how we 've harmed this beautiful planet since i was their age , i feel this desperation .
and that led to this program we call roots and shoots , which began right here in tanzania and has now spread to 97 countries around the world .
it 's symbolic . roots make a firm foundation .
shoots seem tiny ; to reach the sun they can break through a brick wall .
see the brick wall as all these problems we 've inflicted on the planet , environmental and social . it 's a message of hope .
hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through and can make this a better world for all living things .
the most important message of roots and shoots : every single one of us makes a difference , every single day .
we have a choice . every one of us in this room , we have a choice as to what kind of difference we want to make .
the very poor have no choice . it 's up to us to change things so that the poor have choice as well .
the roots and shoots groups all choose three projects .
it depends on how old they are , and which country , whether they 're in a city or rural , as to what kinds of projects .
but basically , we have programs now from preschool right through university , with more and more adults starting their own roots and shoots groups .
and every group chooses , between them , three different kinds of project to make this a better world , recognizing that all these different problems are interconnected and impinge on each other .
so one of their projects will be to help their own human community .
and then , if they 're able , they may raise money to help communities in other parts of the world .
one of their projects will be to help animals - not just wildlife , domestic animals as well .
and one of their projects will be to help the environment that we all share .
and woven throughout all of this is a message of learning to live in peace and harmony within ourselves , in our families , in our communities , between nations , between cultures , between religions and between us and the natural world .
we need the natural world . we can not go on destroying it at the rate we are .
we not do have more than this one planet .
just picking one or two of the projects right here in africa that the roots and shoots groups are doing , one or two projects only - in tanzania , in uganda , kenya , south africa , congo-brazzaville , sierra leone , cameroon and other groups . and as i say , it 's in 97 countries around the world .
of course , they 're planting trees . they 're growing organic vegetables .
they 're working in the refugee camps , with chickens and selling the eggs for a little amount of money , or just using them to feed their families , and feeling a sense of pride and empowerment , because they 're no longer helpless and depending on others with their vegetables and their chickens .
it 's being used in uganda to give some psychological help to ex-child soldiers .
doing projects like this is bringing them out of themselves .
once again , they 're useful members of society .
we have this program in prisons as well .
so , there 's no time for more roots and shoots now .
but - oh , they 're also working on hiv / aids .
that 's a very important component of roots and shoots , with older kids talking to younger ones .
and unwanted pregnancies and things like that , which young people listen to better from other youth , rather than adults .
hope . that 's the question i get asked as i 'm going around the world : " jane , you 've seen so many terrible things , you 've seen your chimpanzees decrease in number from about one million , at the turn of the century , to no more than 150,000 now , and the same with so many other animals .
forests disappearing , deserts where once there was forest .
do you really have hope ? " well , yes .
you ca n't come to a conference like ted and not have hope , can you ?
and of course , there 's hope . one is this amazing human brain .
and i mean , think of the technologies .
and i 've just been so thrilled , finally , to come to people talking about compost latrines .
it 's one of my hobbyhorses .
we just flush all this water down the lavatory , it 's terrible .
and then talking about renewable energy - desperately important .
do we care about the planet for our children ?
how many of us have children or grandchildren , nieces , nephews ?
do we care about their future ?
and if we care about their future , we , as the elite around the world , we can do something about it . we can make choices as to how we live each day .
what we buy . what we wear .
and choose to make these choices with the question , how will this affect the environment around me ?
how will it affect the life of my child when he or she grows up ?
or my grandchild , or whatever it is .
so the human brain , coupled with the human heart , and we join hands around the world .
and that 's what ted is helping so well with , and google who help us , and esri are helping us with mapping in gombe national park .
all of these technologies we can use .
now let 's link them , and it 's beginning to happen , is n't it ?
you 've heard about it this afternoon . it 's beginning to happen .
this change , this change . to see change that we must have if we care about the future .
and the next reason for hope - nature is amazingly resilient .
you can take an area that 's absolutely destroyed , with time and perhaps some help it can regenerate .
and an example is the tacare program .
i told you , where a seemingly dead tree stump - if you stop hacking them for firewood , which you do n't need to because you have wood lots , then in five years you can have a 30-foot tree .
and animals , almost on the brink of extinction , can be given a second chance . that 's my next book .
it 's inspiring . and it brings me to my last category of hope , and we 've heard about this so much in the last two days : this indomitable human spirit . this determination of people , the resilience of the human spirit , so that people who you would think would be battered by poverty , or disease , or whatever , can pull themselves up out of it , sometimes with a helping hand , and take their part in society , and take their part in changing the world .
and just to think of one or two people out of africa who are just really inspiring .
we could make a very long list , but obviously nelson mandela , emerging from 17 years of hard physical labor , 23 years of imprisonment , with this amazing ability to forgive , so that he could lead his nation out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath .
ken saro-wiwa , in nigeria , who took on the giant oil companies , and although people around the world tried their best , was executed .
people like this are so inspirational .
people like this are the role models we need for young africans .
and we need some environmental role models as well , and i 've been hearing some of them today .
so i 'm really grateful for this opportunity to share this message again , with everyone at ted .
and i hope that some of us can get together and talk about some of these things , especially the roots and shoots program .
and just a last word on that - the young woman who 's running this entire conference center , i met her today .
she came up so excited , with her certificate . she was -lsb- in -rsb- roots and shoots .
she was in the leadership in dar es salaam .
she said it 's helped her to do what she 's doing .
and it was very , very exciting for me to meet her and see just one example of how young people , when they are empowered , given the opportunity to take action , to make the world a better place , truly are our hope for tomorrow .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
it 's a real pleasure to be here .
i last did a ted talk i think about seven years ago or so .
i talked about spaghetti sauce .
and so many people , i guess , watch those videos .
people have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce , which is a wonderful thing in the short term - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's proven to be less than ideal over seven years .
and so i though i would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the theme of this morning 's session is things we make .
and so i thought i would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era .
and the man 's name is carl norden .
carl norden was born in 1880 .
and he was swiss .
and of course , the swiss can be divided into two general categories : those who make small , exquisite , expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small , exquisite , expensive objects .
and carl norden is very firmly in the former camp .
he 's an engineer .
he goes to the federal polytech in zurich .
in fact , one of his classmates is a young man named lenin who would go on to break small , expensive , exquisite objects .
and he 's a swiss engineer , carl .
and i mean that in its fullest sense of the word .
he wears three-piece suits ; and he has a very , very small , important mustache ; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego ; and he works 16-hour days ; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current ; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness ; and he drinks lots of coffee ; and he does his best work sitting in his mother 's kitchen in zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule .
in any case , carl norden emigrates to the united states just before the first world war and sets up shop on lafayette street in downtown manhattan .
and he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane .
now if you think about it , in the age before gps and radar , that was obviously a really difficult problem .
it 's a complicated physics problem .
you 've got a plane that 's thousands of feet up in the air , going at hundreds of miles an hour , and you 're trying to drop an object , a bomb , towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover and all kinds of other impediments .
and all sorts of people , moving up to the first world war and between the wars , tried to solve this problem , and nearly everybody came up short .
the bombsights that were available were incredibly crude .
but carl norden is really the one who cracks the code .
and he comes up with this incredibly complicated device .
it weighs about 50 lbs .
it 's called the norden mark 15 bombsight .
and it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges .
and he makes this complicated thing .
and what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this particular object , visually sight the target , because they 're in the plexiglas cone of the bomber , and then they plug in the altitude of the plane , the speed of the plane , the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target .
and the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb .
and as norden famously says , " before that bombsight came along , bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more . "
but he said , with the mark 15 norden bombsight , he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft .
now i can not tell you how incredibly excited the u.s. military was by the news of the norden bombsight .
it was like manna from heaven .
here was an army that had just had experience in the first world war , where millions of men fought each other in the trenches , getting nowhere , making no progress , and here someone had come up with a device that allowed them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy .
and the u.s. military spends 1.5 billion dollars - billion dollars in 1940 dollars - developing the norden bombsight .
and to put that in perspective , the total cost of the manhattan project was three billion dollars .
half as much money was spent on this norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era .
and there were people , strategists , within the u.s. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the nazis and against the japanese .
and for norden as well , this device had incredible moral importance , because norden was a committed christian .
in fact , he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention , because in his eyes , only god could invent things .
he was simply the instrument of god 's will .
and what was god 's will ?
well god 's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible .
and what did the norden bombsight do ?
well it allowed you to do that .
it allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb .
so in the years leading up to the second world war , the u.s. military buys 90,000 of these norden bombsights at a cost of $ 14,000 each - again , in 1940 dollars , that 's a lot of money .
and they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them - long extensive , months-long training sessions - because these things are essentially analog computers ; they 're not easy to use .
and they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath , to swear that if they 're ever captured , they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy , because it 's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology .
and whenever the norden bombsight is taken onto a plane , it 's escorted there by a series of armed guards .
and it 's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it .
and the box is handcuffed to one of the guards .
it 's never allowed to be photographed .
and there 's a little incendiary device inside of it , so that , if the plane ever crashes , it will be destroyed and there 's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it .
the norden bombsight is the holy grail .
so what happens during the second world war ?
well , it turns out it 's not the holy grail .
in practice , the norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft . , but that 's under perfect conditions .
and of course , in wartime , conditions are n't perfect .
first of all , it 's really hard to use - really hard to use .
and not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog computer .
secondly , it breaks down a lot .
it 's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings , and they do n't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle .
thirdly , when norden was making his calculations , he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes .
well in a real war , you ca n't do that ; you 'll get shot down .
so they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds .
and the norden bombsight does n't work as well under those conditions .
but most of all , the norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target .
but of course , what happens in real life ?
there are clouds , right .
it needs cloudless sky to be really accurate .
well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above central europe between 1940 and 1945 ?
not a lot .
and then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the norden bombsight was , there was a famous case in 1944 where the allies bombed a chemical plant in leuna , germany .
and the chemical plant comprised 757 acres .
and over the course of 22 bombing missions , the allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant , using the norden bombsight .
well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant ?
10 percent . 10 percent .
and of those 10 percent that landed , 16 percent did n't even go off ; they were duds .
the leuna chemical plant , after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war , was up and running within weeks .
and by the way , all those precautions to keep the norden bombsight out of the hands of the nazis ?
well it turns out that carl norden , as a proper swiss , was very enamored of german engineers .
so in the 1930s , he hired a whole bunch of them , including a man named hermann long who , in 1938 , gave a complete set of the plans for the norden bombsight to the nazis .
so they had their own norden bombsight throughout the entire war - which also , by the way , did n't work very well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so why do we talk about the norden bombsight ?
well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of norden bombsights .
we live in a time where there are all kinds of really , really smart people running around , saying that they 've invented gadgets that will forever change our world .
they 've invented websites that will allow people to be free .
they 've invented some kind of this thing , or this thing , or this thing that will make our world forever better .
if you go into the military , you 'll find lots of carl nordens as well .
if you go to the pentagon , they will say , " you know what , now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft . "
and you know what , it 's true ; they actually can do that now .
but we need to be very clear about how little that means .
in the iraq war , at the beginning of the first iraq war , the u.s. military , the air force , sent two squadrons of f-15e fighter eagles to the iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor .
and their mission was to find and to destroy - remember the scud missile launchers , those surface-to-air missiles that the iraqis were launching at the israelis ?
the mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the scud missile launchers .
and so they flew missions day and night , and they dropped thousands of bombs , and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge .
and after the war was over , there was an audit done - as the army always does , the air force always does - and they asked the question : how many scuds did we actually destroy ?
you know what the answer was ?
zero , not a single one .
now why is that ?
is it because their weapons were n't accurate ?
oh no , they were brilliantly accurate .
they could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft .
the issue was they did n't know where the scud launchers were .
the problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel , it 's knowing how to find the pickle barrel .
that 's always been the harder problem when it comes to fighting wars .
or take the battle in afghanistan .
what is the signature weapon of the cia 's war in northwest pakistan ?
it 's the drone . what is the drone ?
well it is the grandson of the norden mark 15 bombsight .
it is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision .
and over the course of the last six years in northwest pakistan , the cia has flown hundreds of drone missiles , and it 's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected pakistani and taliban militants .
now what is the accuracy of those drones ?
well it 's extraordinary .
we think we 're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes .
95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed , right ?
that is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare .
but do you know what the crucial thing is ?
in that exact same period that we 've been using these drones with devastating accuracy , the number of attacks , of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks , against american forces in afghanistan has increased tenfold .
as we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them , they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us .
i have not described to you a success story .
i 've described to you the opposite of a success story .
and this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make .
we think the things we make can solve our problems , but our problems are much more complex than that .
the issue is n't the accuracy of the bombs you have , it 's how you use the bombs you have , and more importantly , whether you ought to use bombs at all .
there 's a postscript to the norden story of carl norden and his fabulous bombsight .
and that is , on august 6 , 1945 , a b-29 bomber called the enola gay flew over japan and , using a norden bombsight , dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of hiroshima .
and as was typical with the norden bombsight , the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft .
but of course , it did n't matter .
and that 's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the norden bombsight .
the air force 's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb , which did n't need a bombsight at all .
meanwhile , back in new york , no one told carl norden that his bombsight was used over hiroshima .
he was a committed christian .
he thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war .
it would have broken his heart .
-lrb- applause -rrb- photography has been my passion ever since i was old enough to pick up a camera , but today i want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine , and i did n't take any of them .
there were no art directors , no stylists , no chance for reshoots , not even any regard for lighting .
in fact , most of them were taken by random tourists .
my story begins when i was in new york city for a speaking engagement , and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday . we 're on the corner of 57th and 5th .
we happened to be back in new york exactly a year later , so we decided to take the same picture .
well you can see where this is going .
approaching my daughter 's third birthday , my wife said , " hey , why do n't you take sabina back to new york and make it a father-daughter trip , and continue the ritual ? "
this is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture .
you know , it 's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger .
no one 's ever refused , and luckily no one 's ever run off with our camera .
back then , we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives .
it 's really become sacred to us .
this one was taken just weeks after 9/11 , and i found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand .
so these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment , or even a specific trip .
they 're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in october and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year , and not just physically , but in every way .
because while we take the same photo , our perspectives change , and she reaches new milestones , and i get to see life through her eyes , and how she interacts with and sees everything .
this very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year .
recently , on one trip , we were walking , and she stops dead in her tracks , and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips .
and she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot .
she said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier .
and now what she 's looking at in new york are colleges , because she 's determined to go to school in new york .
and it hit me : one of the most important things we all make are memories .
so i want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories .
i do n't know about you , but aside from these 15 shots , i 'm not in many of the family photos .
i 'm always the one taking the picture .
so i want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot , and do n't hesitate to go up to someone and ask , " will you take our picture ? "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- fifteen years ago , it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life .
back then , 15 years ago , we did n't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan .
in the past decade or so , mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging , or mri , neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages , and to track changes in brain structure and brain function , so we use structural mri if you 'd like to take a snapshot , a photograph , at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain , and we can ask questions like , how much gray matter does the brain contain , and how does that change with age ?
and we also use functional mri , called fmri , to take a video , a movie , of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something .
so many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research , and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops , and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it 's not all over in early childhood , and instead , the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the ' 20s and ' 30s .
so adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological , hormonal , physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable , independent role in society .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it can go on a long time . -lrb- laughter -rrb- one of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex .
so this is a model of the human brain , and this is prefrontal cortex , right at the front .
prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area .
it 's proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species , and it 's involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions , things like decision-making , planning , planning what you 're going to do tomorrow or next week or next year , inhibiting inappropriate behavior , so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid .
it 's also involved in social interaction , understanding other people , and self-awareness .
so mri studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence .
so if you look at gray matter volume , for example , gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 years increases during childhood , which is what you can see on this graph . it peaks in early adolescence .
the arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex . you can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls , and that 's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average , and then during adolescence , there 's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex .
now that might sound bad , but actually this is a really important developmental process , because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells , the synapses , and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning , the elimination of unwanted synapses .
this is a really important process . it 's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in , and the synapses that are being used are strengthened , and synapses that are n't being used in that particular environment are pruned away .
you can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush .
you prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining , important branches , can grow stronger , and this process , which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment , is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regions during the period of human adolescence .
so a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional mri to look at changes in brain activity across age .
so i 'll just give you an example from my lab .
so in my lab , we 're interested in the social brain , that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people .
so i like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work .
so this is a soccer game . -lrb- laughter -rrb- michael owen has just missed a goal , and he 's lying on the ground , and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are , so within a split second of michael owen missing this goal , everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face , even michael owen as he slides along the grass , is doing the same thing with his arms , and presumably has a similar facial expression , and the only people who do n't are the guys in yellow at the back - -lrb- laughs -rrb- -
and i think they 're on the wrong end of the stadium , and they 're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize , and that 's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates , how good we are at reading other people 's behavior , their actions , their gestures , their facial expressions , in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states .
so you do n't have to ask any of these guys .
you have a pretty good idea of what they 're feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time .
so that 's what we 're interested in looking at in my lab .
so in my lab , we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan , we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people , their minds , their mental states , their emotions , and one of the findings that we 've found several times now , as have other labs around the world , is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex , which is shown in blue on the slide , and it 's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head .
this region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults , and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world , and they all show the same thing , that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence .
and we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach , a different cognitive strategy , to make social decisions , and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task , and i 'll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab .
so imagine that you 're the participant in one of our experiments . you come into the lab , you see this computerized task .
in this task , you see a set of shelves .
now , there are objects on these shelves , on some of them , and you 'll notice there 's a guy standing behind the set of shelves , and there are some objects that he ca n't see .
they 're occluded , from his point of view , with a kind of gray piece of wood .
this is the same set of shelves from his point of view .
notice that there are only some objects that he can see , whereas there are many more objects that you can see .
now your task is to move objects around .
the director , standing behind the set of shelves , is going to direct you to move objects around , but remember , he 's not going to ask you to move objects that he ca n't see . this introduces a really interesting condition whereby there 's a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director 's perspective .
so imagine he tells you to move the top truck left .
there are three trucks there . you 're going to instinctively go for the white truck , because that 's the top truck from your perspective , but then you have to remember , " oh , he ca n't see that truck , so he must mean me to move the blue truck , " which is the top truck from his perspective . now believe it or not , normal , healthy , intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial .
they move the white truck instead of the blue truck .
so we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults , and we also have a control condition where there 's no director and instead we give people a rule .
we tell them , okay , we 're going to do exactly the same thing but this time there 's no director . instead you 've got to ignore objects with the dark gray background .
you 'll see that this is exactly the same condition , only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule , whereas in the director condition , they have to remember to take into account the director 's perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior .
okay , so if i just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did , this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood , in the adult group in both conditions , so the gray is the director condition , and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time , whereas they make far fewer errors when there 's no director present , when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background .
developmentally , these two conditions develop in exactly the same way . between late childhood and mid-adolescence , there 's an improvement , in other words a reduction of errors , in both of these trials , in both of these conditions .
but it 's when you compare the last two groups , the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting , because there , there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition .
in other words , everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence , whereas in contrast , if you look at the last two gray bars , there 's still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood , and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else 's perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior , which is something , by the way , that we do in everyday life all the time , is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence .
so if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people 's perspectives , you 're right . they do . and this is why .
so we sometimes laugh about teenagers .
they 're parodied , sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior . they take risks , they 're sometimes moody , they 're very self-conscious .
i have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after puberty was their level of embarrassment in front of him .
so , he said , " before puberty , if my two daughters were messing around in a shop , i 'd say , ' hey , stop messing around and i 'll sing your favorite song , ' and instantly they 'd stop messing around and he 'd sing their favorite song . after puberty , that became the threat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave .
so people often ask , " well , is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon ?
is it something we 've invented recently in the west ? "
and actually , the answer is probably not . there are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today .
so there 's a famous quote by shakespeare from " the winter 's tale " where he describes adolescence as follows : " i would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty , or that youth would sleep out the rest ; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child , wronging the ancientry , stealing , fighting . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- he then goes on to say , " having said that , would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so almost 400 years ago , shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today , but today we try to understand
their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain .
so for example , take risk-taking . we know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks . they do .
they take more risks than children or adults , and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they 're with their friends . there 's an important drive to become independent from one 's parents and to impress one 's friends in adolescence .
but now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system , so i 'm going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me , and also on this brain .
so the limbic system is right deep inside the brain , and it 's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing . it gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things , including taking risks .
it gives you the kick out of taking risks .
and this region , the regions within the limbic system , have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults , and at the very same time , the prefrontal cortex , which you can see in blue in the slide here , which stops us taking excessive risks , is still very much in development in adolescents .
so brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development , and this has implications for education , for rehabilitation , and intervention . the environment , including teaching , can and does shape the developing adolescent brain , and yet it 's only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the west .
all four of my grandparents , for example , left school in their early adolescence . they had no choice .
and that 's still the case for many , many teenagers around the world today . forty percent of teenagers do n't have access to secondary school education .
and yet , this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable .
it 's a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity .
so what 's sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents - heightened risk-taking , poor impulse control , self-consciousness - should n't be stigmatized .
it actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there 's an ancient and universal concept that words have power , that spells exist , and that if we could only pronounce the right words , then - whooosh - you know , an avalanche would come and wipe out the hobbits , right ? so this is a very attractive idea because we 're very lazy , like the sorcerer 's apprentice , or the world 's greatest computer programmer .
and so this idea has a lot of traction with us .
we love the idea that words , when pronounced - they 're just little more than pure information , but they evoke some physical action in the real world that helps us do work .
and so , of course , with lots of programmable computers and robots around this is an easy thing to picture .
so how many of you know what i 'm talking about ?
raise your right hand . ok . how many of you do n't know what i 'm talking about ? raise your left hand .
so that 's great . so that was too easy .
you guys have very insecure computers , ok ?
so now , the thing is that this is a different kind of spell .
this is a computer program made of zeros and ones .
it can be pronounced on a computer . it does something like this .
the important thing is we can write it in a high-level language .
a computer magician can write this thing .
it can be compiled into this - into zeros and ones - and pronounced by a computer .
and that 's what makes computers powerful : these high-level languages that can be compiled .
and so , i 'm here to tell you , you do n't need a computer to actually have a spell . in fact , what you can do at the molecular level is that if you encode information - you encode a spell or program as molecules - then physics can actually directly interpret that information and run a program . that 's what happens in proteins .
when this amino acid sequence gets pronounced as atoms , these little letters are sticky for each other .
it collapses into a three-dimensional shape that turns it into a nanomachine that actually cuts dna .
and the interesting thing is that if you change the sequence , you change the three-dimensional folding .
you get now a dna stapler instead . these are the kind of molecular programs that we want to be able to write , but the problem is , we do n't know the machine language of proteins . we do n't have a compiler for proteins .
so i 've joined a growing band of people that try to make molecular spells using dna . we use dna because it 's cheaper .
it 's easier to handle . it 's something that we understand really well .
we understand it so well , in fact , that we think we can actually write programming languages for dna and have molecular compilers .
so then , we think we can do that . and my first question doing this - or one of my questions doing this - was how can you make an arbitrary shape or pattern out of dna ? and i decided to use a type of dna origami , where you take a long strand of dna and fold it into whatever shape or pattern you might want .
so here 's a shape . i actually spent about a year in my home , in my underwear , coding , like linus -lsb- torvalds -rsb- , in that picture before .
and this program takes a shape , spits out 250 dna sequences .
these short dna sequences are what are going to fold the long strand into this shape that we want to make . so you send an e-mail with these sequences in it to a company , and what it does - the company pronounces them on a dna synthesizer .
it 's a machine about the size of a photocopier . and what happens is , they take your e-mail and every letter in your e-mail , they replace with 30-atom cluster - one for each letter , a , t , c , and g in dna . they string them up in the right sequence , and then they send them back to you via fedex .
so you get 250 of these in the mail in little tubes .
i mix them together , add a little bit of salt water , and then add this long strand i was telling you about , that i 've stolen from a virus . and then what happens is , you heat this whole thing up to about boiling . you cool it down to room temperature , and as you do , what happens is those short strands , they do the following thing : each one of them binds that long strand in one place , and then has a second half that binds that long strand in a distant place , and brings those two parts of the long strand close together so that they stick together .
and so the net effect of all 250 of these strands is to fold the long strand into the shape that you 're looking for .
it 'll approximate that shape . we do this for real in the test tube .
in each little drop of water you get 50 billion of these guys .
you can look with a microscope and see them on a surface .
and the neat thing is that if you change the sequence and change the spell , you just change the sequence of the staples .
you can make a molecule that looks like this , and , you know , he likes to hang out with his buddies , right .
and a lot of them are actually pretty good .
if you change the spell again , you change the sequence again .
you get really nice 130 nanometer triangles . if you do it again , you can get arbitrary patterns . so on a rectangle you can paint patterns of north and south america , or the words , " dna . "
so that 's dna origami . that 's one way . there are many ways of casting molecular spells using dna .
what we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly so that we can build anything , right ?
we want to be able to build technological artifacts that are maybe good for the world . we want to learn how to build biological artifacts , like people and whales and trees .
and if it 's the case that we can reach that level of complexity , if our ability to program molecules gets to be that good , then that will truly be magic . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my travels to afghanistan began many , many years ago on the eastern border of my country , my homeland , poland .
i was walking through the forests of my grandmother 's tales .
a land where every field hides a grave , where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century .
behind the destruction , i found a soul of places .
i met humble people .
i heard their prayer and ate their bread .
then i have been walking east for 20 years - from eastern europe to central asia - through the caucasus mountains , middle east , north africa , russia .
and i ever met more humble people .
and i shared their bread and their prayer .
this is why i went to afghanistan .
one day , i crossed the bridge over the oxus river .
i was alone on foot .
and the afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport .
but he gave me a cup of tea .
and i understood that his surprise was my protection .
so i have been walking and traveling , by horses , by yak , by truck , by hitchhiking , from iran 's border to the bottom , to the edge of the wakhan corridor .
and in this way i could find noor , the hidden light of afghanistan .
my only weapon was my notebook and my leica .
i heard prayers of the sufi - humble muslims , hated by the taliban .
hidden river , interconnected with the mysticism from gibraltar to india .
the mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears , and welcomed as a gift .
what do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect , about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium ?
these are opium-addicted people on the roofs of kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war .
these are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for afghan businessmen .
what do we know about the women 10 years after the war ?
clothed in this nylon bag , made in china , with the name of burqa .
i saw one day , the largest school in afghanistan , a girls ' school .
13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground , full of scorpions .
and their love -lsb- for studying -rsb- was so big that i cried .
what do we know about the death threats by the taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in balkh ?
the region is not secure , but full of the taliban , and they did it .
my aim is to give a voice to the silent people , to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game , the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in october 2010 , the justice league of america will be teaming up with the 99 .
icons like batman , superman , wonder woman and their colleagues will be teaming up with icons jabbar , noora , jami and their colleagues .
it 's a story of intercultural intersections , and what better group to have this conversation than those that grew out of fighting fascism in their respective histories and geographies ?
as fascism took over europe in the 1930s , an unlikely reaction came out of north america .
as christian iconography got changed , and swastikas were created out of crucifixes , batman and superman were created by jewish young men in the united states and canada , also going back to the bible .
consider this : like the prophets , all the superheroes are missing parents .
superman 's parents die on krypton before the age of one .
bruce wayne , who becomes batman , loses his parents at the age of six in gotham city .
spiderman is raised and all of them , just like the prophets who get their message from god through gabriel , get their message from above .
peter parker is in a library in manhattan when the spider descends from above and gives him his message through a bite .
bruce wayne is in his bedroom when a big bat flies over his head , and he sees it as an omen to become batman .
superman is not only sent to earth from the heavens , or krypton , but he 's sent in a pod , much like moses was on the nile .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you hear the voice of his father , jor-el , saying to earth , " i have sent to you my only son . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- these are clearly biblical archetypes , and the thinking behind that was to create positive , globally-resonating storylines that could be tied to the same things that other people were pulling mean messages out of because then the person that 's using religion for the wrong purpose just becomes a bad man with a bad message .
and it 's only by linking positive things that the negative can be delinked .
this is the kind of thinking that went into creating the 99 .
the 99 references the 99 attributes of allah in the koran , things like generosity and mercy and foresight and wisdom and dozens of others that no two people in the world would disagree about .
it does n't matter what your religion is ; even if you 're an atheist , you do n't raise your kid telling him , you know , " make sure you lie three times a day . "
those are basic human values .
and so the backstory of the 99 takes place in 1258 , which history tells us the mongols invaded baghdad and destroyed it .
all the books from bait al-hikma library , the most famous library in its day , were thrown in the tigris river , and the tigris changes color with ink .
it 's a story passed on generation after generation .
i rewrote that story , and in my version , the librarians find out that this is going to happen - and here 's a side note : if you want a comic book to do well , make the librarians the hero . it always works well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so the librarians find out and they get together a special solution , a chemical solution called king 's water , that when mixed with 99 stones would be able to save all that culture and history in the books .
but the mongols get there first .
the books and the solution get thrown in the tigris river .
some librarians escape , and over the course of days and weeks , they dip the stones into the tigris and suck up that collective wisdom that we all think is lost to civilization .
those stones have been smuggled as three prayer beads of 33 stones each through arabia into andalusia in spain , where they 're safe for 200 years .
but in 1492 , two important things happen .
the first is the fall of granada , the last muslim enclave in europe .
the second is columbus finally gets funded to go to india , but he gets lost .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so 33 of the stones are smuggled onto the nina , the pinta and the santa maria and are spread in the new world .
thirty-three go on the silk road to china , south asia and southeast asia .
and 33 are spread between europe , the middle east and africa .
and now it 's 2010 , and there are 99 heroes from 99 different countries .
now it 's very easy to assume that those books , because they were from a library called bait al-hikma , were muslim books , but that 's not the case because the caliph that built that library , his name was al-ma 'mun - he was harun al-rashid 's son .
he had told his advisers , " get me all the scholars to translate any book they can get their hands onto into arabic , and i will pay them its weight in gold . "
after a while , his advisers complained .
they said , " your highness , the scholars are cheating .
they 're writing in big handwriting to take more gold . "
to which he said , " let them be , because what they 're giving us is worth a lot more than what we 're paying them . "
so the idea of an open architecture , an open knowledge , is not new to my neck of the desert .
the concept centers on something called the noor stones .
noor is arabic for light .
so these 99 stones , a few kind of rules in the game : number one , you do n't choose the stone ; the stone chooses you .
there 's a king arthur element to the storyline , okay .
number two , all of the 99 , when they first get their stone , or their power , abuse it ; they use it for self-interest .
and there 's a very strong message in there that when you start abusing your stone , you get taken advantage of by people who will exploit your powers , okay .
number three , the 99 stones all have within them a mechanism that self-updates .
now there are two groups that exist within the muslim world .
everybody believes the koran is for all time and all place .
some believe that means that the original interpretation from a couple thousand years ago is what 's relevant today .
i do n't belong there .
then there 's a group that believes the koran is a living , breathing document , and i captured that idea within these stones that self-update .
now the main bad guy , rughal , does not want these stones to update , so he 's trying to get them to stop updating .
he ca n't use the stones , but he can stop them .
and by stopping them , he has more of a fascist agenda , where he gets some of the 99 to work for him - they 're all wearing cookie-cutter , same color uniforms they 're not allowed to individually express who they are and what they are .
and he controls them from the top down - whereas when they work for the other side , eventually , when they find out this is the wrong person , they 've been manipulated , they actually , each one has a different , colorful kind of dress .
and the last point about the 99 noor stones is this .
so the 99 work in teams of three .
why three ? a couple of reasons .
number one , we have a thing within islam that you do n't leave a boy and a girl alone together , because the third person is temptation or the devil , right ?
i think that 's there in all cultures , right ?
but this is not about religion , it 's not about proselytizing .
there 's this very strong social message the deepest crevices of intolerance , and the only way to get there is to kind of play the game .
and so this is the way i dealt with it .
they work in teams of three : two boys and a girl , two girls and a boy , three boys , three girls , no problem .
and the swiss psychoanalyst , carl jung , also spoke about the importance of the number three in all cultures , so i figure i 'm covered .
well ...
i got accused in a few blogs that i was actually sent by the pope to preach the trinity and catholicism in the middle east , so you - -lrb- laughter -rrb- you believe who you want . i gave you my version of the story .
so here 's some of the characters that we have .
mujiba , from malaysia : her main power is she 's able to answer any question .
she 's the trivial pursuit queen , if you want , but when she first gets her power , she starts going on game shows and making money .
we have jabbar from saudi who starts breaking things when he has the power .
now , mumita was a fun one to name . mumita is the destroyer .
so the 99 attributes of allah have the yin and the yang ; there 's the powerful , the hegemonous , the strong , and there 's also the kind , the generous .
i 'm like , are all the girls going to be kind and merciful and the guys all strong ?
i 'm like , you know what , i 've met a few girls who were destroyers in my lifetime , so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have jami from hungary , who first starts making weapons : he 's the technology wiz .
musawwira from ghana , hadya from pakistan , jaleel from iran who uses fire .
and this is one of my favorites , al-batina from yemen .
al-batina is the hidden .
so al-batina is hidden , but she 's a superhero .
i came home to my wife and i said , " i created a character after you . "
my wife is a saudi from yemeni roots .
and she said , " show me . " so i showed this .
she said , " that 's not me . "
i said , " look at the eyes . they 're your eyes . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i promised my investors this would not be another made-in-fifth-world-country production .
this was going to be superman , or it was n't worth my time or their money .
so from day one , the people involved in the project , bottom left is fabian nicieza , writer for x-men and power rangers .
next to him is dan panosian , one of the character creators for the modern-day x-men .
top right is stuart moore , a writer for iron man .
next to him is john mccrea , who was an inker for spiderman .
and we entered western consciousness with a tagline : " next ramadan , the world will have new heroes , " back in 2005 .
now i went to dubai , to an arab thought foundation conference , and i was waiting by the coffee for the right journalist .
did n't have a product , but had energy .
and i found somebody from the new york times , and i cornered him , and i pitched him .
and i think i scared him - -lrb- laughter -rrb- because he basically promised me - we had no product - but he said , " we 'll give you a paragraph in the arts section if you 'll just go away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i said , " great . " so i called him up a few weeks afterward .
i said , " hi , hesa . " and he said , " hi . " i said , " happy new year . "
he said , " thank you . we had a baby . " i said , " congratulations . "
like i care , right ?
" so when 's the article coming out ? "
he said , " naif , islam and cartoon ?
that 's not timely .
you know , maybe next week , next month , next year , but , you know , it 'll come out . "
so a few days after that , what happens ?
what happens is the world erupts in the danish cartoon controversy .
i became timely .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so flurry of phone calls and emails from the new york times .
next thing you knew , there 's a full page covering us positively , january 22nd , 2006 , which changed our lives forever , because anybody googling islam and cartoon or islam and comic , guess what they got ; they got me .
and the 99 were like superheroes kind of flying out of what was happening around the world .
and that led to all kinds of things , from being in curricula in universities and schools to - one of my favorite pictures i have from south asia , it was a couple of men with long beards and a lot of girls wearing the hijab - it looked like a school .
the good news is they 're all holding copies of the 99 , smiling , and they found me to sign the picture .
the bad news is they were all photocopies , so we did n't make a dime in revenue .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've been able to license the 99 comic books into eight languages so far - chinese , indonesian , hindi , urdu , turkish .
opened a theme park through a license in kuwait a year and a half ago called the 99 village theme park - 300,000 square feet , 20 rides , all with our characters : a couple back-to-school licenses in spain and turkey .
but the biggest thing we 've done to date , which is just amazing , is that we 've done a 26-episode animated series , which is done for global audiences : in fact , we 're already going to be in the u.s. and turkey , we know .
it 's 3d cgi , which is going to be very high-quality , written in hollywood by the writers behind ben 10 and spiderman and star wars : clone wars .
in this clip i 'm about to show you , which has never been seen in the public before , there is a struggle .
two of the characters , jabbar , the one with the muscles , and noora , the one that can use light , are actually wearing the cookie-cutter fascist gray uniform because they 're being manipulated .
they do n't know , ok , and they 're trying to get another member of the 99 to join them .
so there 's a struggle within the team .
so if we can get the lights ...
-lsb- " the 99 " -rsb- jabbar : dana , i ca n't see where to grab hold .
i need more light .
what 's happening ?
dana : there 's too much darkness .
rughal : there must be something we can do .
man : i wo n't send any more commandos in until i know it 's safe .
dr. razem : it 's time to go , miklos .
miklos : must download file contents .
i ca n't forget auntie .
jabbar : dana , i ca n't do this without you .
dana : but i ca n't help .
jabbar : you can , even if you do n't believe in yourself right now .
i believe in you .
you are noora the light .
dana : no .
i do n't deserve it . i do n't deserve anything .
jabbar : then what about the rest of us ?
do n't we deserve to be saved ? do n't i ?
now , tell me which way to go .
dana : that way .
alarm : threat imminent .
jabbar : aaaahhh !
miklos : stay away from me .
jabbar : we 're here to help you .
dr. razem : do n't listen to them .
dana : miklos , that man is not your friend .
miklos : no . he gave me access , and you want to reboot the -lsb- unclear -rsb- . no more -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
-lsb- " the 99 " -rsb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so " the 99 " is technology ; it 's entertainment ; it 's design .
but that 's only half the story .
as the father of five sons , i worry about who they 're going to be using as role models .
i worry because all around me , even within my extended family , i see religion being manipulated .
as a psychologist , i worry for the world in general , but worry about the perception of how people see themselves in my part of the world .
now , i 'm a clinical psychologist . i 'm licensed in new york state .
i trained at bellevue hospital survivors of political torture program , and i heard one too many stories of people growing up to idolize their leadership , only to end up being tortured by their heroes .
and torture 's a terrible enough thing as it is , but when it 's done by your hero , that just breaks you in so many ways .
i left bellevue , went to business school and started this .
now , one of the things that i refer to when i - about the importance of this message - is that i gave a lecture at the medical school at kuwait university , where i lecture on the biological basis of behavior , and i gave the students two articles , one from the new york times and one from new york magazine .
and i took away the name of the writer , the name of the -lsb- unclear -rsb- - everything was gone except the facts .
and the first one was about a group called the party of god , who wanted to ban valentine 's day . red was made illegal .
any boys and girls caught flirting would get married off immediately , okay .
the second one was about a woman complaining because three minivans with six bearded men pulled up and started interrogating her on the spot for talking to a man who was n't related to her .
and i asked the students in kuwait where they thought these incidents took place .
the first one , they said saudi arabia . there was no debate .
the second one , they were actually split between saudi and afghanistan .
what blew their mind was the first one took place in india , it was the party of a hindu god .
the second one took place in upstate new york .
it was an orthodox jewish community .
but what breaks my heart and what 's alarming is that in those two interviews , the people around , who were interviewed as well , refer to that behavior as talibanization .
in other words , good hindus and good jews do n't act this way .
this is islam 's influence on hinduism and judaism .
but what do the students in kuwait say ? they said it 's us - and this is dangerous .
it 's dangerous when a group self-identifies itself as extreme .
this is one of my sons , rayan , who 's a scooby doo addict .
you can tell by the glasses there .
he actually called me a meddling kid the other day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i borrow a lesson that i learned from him .
last summer when we were in our home in new york , he was out in the yard playing in his playhouse . and i was in my office working , and he came in , " baba , i want you to come with me . i want my toy . "
" yes , rayan , just go away . " he left his scooby doo in his house .
i said , " go away . i 'm working . i 'm busy . "
and what rayan did then is he sat there , he tapped his foot on the floor , at three and a half , and he looked at me and he said , " baba , i want you to come with me to my office in my house .
i have work to do . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- rayan reframed the situation and brought himself down to my level .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and with the 99 , that is what we aim to do .
you know , i think that there 's a big parallel between bending the crucifix out of shape and creating swastikas .
and when i see pictures like this , of parents or uncles who think it 's cute to have a little child holding a koran and having a suicide bomber belt around them to protest something , the hope is by linking enough positive things to the koran , that one day we can move this child from being proud in the way they 're proud there , to that .
and i think - i think the 99 can and will achieve its mission .
as an undergrad at tufts university , we were giving away free falafel one day and , you know , it was middle east day or something .
and people came up and picked up the culturally resonant image of the falafel , ate it and , you know , talked and left .
and no two people could disagree about what the word free was and what the word falafel was , behind us , " free falafel . " you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or so we thought , until a woman came rushing across the campus and dropped her bag on the floor , pointed up to the sign and said , " who 's falafel ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- true story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she was actually coming out of an amnesty international meeting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just today , d.c. comics announced the cover of our upcoming crossover .
on that cover you see batman , superman and a fully-clothed wonder woman with our saudi member of the 99 , our emirati member and our libyan member .
on april 26 , 2010 , president barack obama said that of all the initiatives since his now famous cairo speech - in which he reached out to the muslim world - the most innovative was that the 99 reach back out to the justice league of america .
we live in a world in which the most culturally innocuous symbols , like the falafel , can be misunderstood because of baggage , and where religion can be twisted and purposefully made where it 's not supposed to be by others .
in a world like that , they 'll always be a job for superman and the 99 .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi everyone .
i 'm an artist and a dad - second time around .
thank you .
and i want to share with you my latest art project .
it 's a children 's book for the ipad .
it 's a little quirky and silly .
it 's called " pop-it , " and it 's about the things little kids do with their parents .
-lrb- music -rrb- so this is about potty training - as most of you , i hope , know .
you can tickle the rug .
you can make the baby poop .
you can do all those fun things .
you can burst bubbles .
you can draw , as everyone should .
but you know , i have a problem with children 's books : i think they 're full of propaganda .
at least an indian trying to get one of these american books in park slope , forget it .
it 's not the way i was brought up .
so i said , " i 'm going to counter this with my own propaganda . "
if you notice carefully , it 's a homosexual couple bringing up a child .
you do n't like it ?
shake it , and you have a lesbian couple .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- shake it , and you have a heterosexual couple .
you know , i do n't even believe in the concept of an ideal family .
i have to tell you about my childhood .
i went to this very proper christian school taught by nuns , fathers , brothers , sisters .
basically , i was brought up to be a good samaritan , and i am .
and i 'd go at the end of the day to a traditional hindu house , which was probably the only hindu house in a predominantly islamic neighborhood .
basically , i celebrated every religious function .
in fact , when there was a wedding in our neighborhood , all of us would paint our houses for the wedding .
i remember we cried profusely when the little goats we played with in the summer became biriani .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we all had to fast during ramadan .
it was a very beautiful time .
but i must say , i 'll never forget , when i was 13 years old , this happened .
babri masjid - one of the most beautiful mosques in india , built by king babur , i think , in the 16th century - was demolished by hindu activists .
this caused major riots in my city .
and for the first time , i was affected by this communal unrest .
my little five-year-old kid neighbor comes running in , and he says , " rags , rags .
you know the hindus are killing us muslims . be careful . "
i 'm like , " dude , i 'm hindu . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he 's like , " huh ! "
you know , my work is inspired by events such as this .
even in my gallery shows , i try and revisit historic events like babri masjid , distill only its emotional residue and image my own life .
imagine history being taught differently .
remember that children 's book where you shake and the sexuality of the parents change ?
i have another idea .
it 's a children 's book about indian independence - very patriotic .
but when you shake it , you get pakistan 's perspective .
shake it again , and you get the british perspective .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you have to separate fact from bias , right .
even my books on children have cute , fuzzy animals .
but they 're playing geopolitics .
they 're playing out israel-palestine , india-pakistan .
you know , i 'm making a very important argument .
and my argument -lsb- is -rsb- that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage .
after all , children 's books are manuals on parenting , so you better give them children 's books that teach them perspectives .
and conversely , only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them .
i 'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy .
you know , i ca n't promise my child a life without bias - we 're all biased - but i promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in oxford in the 1950s , there was a fantastic doctor , who was very unusual , named alice stewart .
and alice was unusual partly because , of course , she was a woman , which was pretty rare in the 1950s .
and she was brilliant , she was one of the , at the time , the youngest fellow to be elected to the royal college of physicians .
she was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married , after she had kids , and even after she got divorced and was a single parent , she continued her medical work .
and she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science , the emerging field of epidemiology , the study of patterns in disease .
but like every scientist , she appreciated that to make her mark , what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it .
the hard problem that alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers .
most disease is correlated with poverty , but in the case of childhood cancers , the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families .
so , what , she wanted to know , could explain this anomaly ?
now , alice had trouble getting funding for her research .
in the end , she got just 1,000 pounds from the lady tata memorial prize .
and that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data .
now , she had no idea what to look for .
this really was a needle in a haystack sort of search , so she asked everything she could think of .
had the children eaten boiled sweets ?
had they consumed colored drinks ?
did they eat fish and chips ?
did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing ?
what time of life had they started school ?
and when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back , one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of .
by a rate of two to one , the children who had died had had mothers who had been x-rayed when pregnant .
now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom .
conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point , a threshold .
it flew in the face of conventional wisdom , which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age , which was the x-ray machine .
and it flew in the face of doctors ' idea of themselves , which was as people who helped patients , they did n't harm them .
nevertheless , alice stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in the lancet in 1956 .
people got very excited , there was talk of the nobel prize , and alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared .
in fact , she need not have hurried .
it was fully 25 years before the british and medical - british and american medical establishments abandoned the practice of x-raying pregnant women .
the data was out there , it was open , it was freely available , but nobody wanted to know .
a child a week was dying , but nothing changed .
openness alone ca n't drive change .
so for 25 years alice stewart had a very big fight on her hands .
so , how did she know that she was right ?
well , she had a fantastic model for thinking .
she worked with a statistician named george kneale , and george was pretty much everything that alice was n't .
so , alice was very outgoing and sociable , and george was a recluse .
alice was very warm , very empathetic with her patients .
george frankly preferred numbers to people .
but he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship .
he said , " my job is to prove dr. stewart wrong . "
he actively sought disconfirmation .
different ways of looking at her models , at her statistics , different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her .
he saw his job as creating conflict around her theories .
because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong , that george could give alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right .
it 's a fantastic model of collaboration - thinking partners who are n't echo chambers .
i wonder how many of us have , or dare to have , such collaborators .
alice and george were very good at conflict .
they saw it as thinking .
so what does that kind of constructive conflict require ?
well , first of all , it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves .
that means we have to resist the neurobiological drive , which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves , and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds , different disciplines , different ways of thinking and different experience , and find ways to engage with them .
that requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy .
and the more i 've thought about this , the more i think , really , that that 's a kind of love .
because you simply wo n't commit that kind of energy and time if you do n't really care .
and it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds .
alice 's daughter told me that every time alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist , they made her think and think and think again .
" my mother , " she said , " my mother did n't enjoy a fight , but she was really good at them . "
so it 's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship .
but it strikes me that the biggest problems we face , many of the biggest disasters that we 've experienced , mostly have n't come from individuals , they 've come from organizations , some of them bigger than countries , many of them capable of affecting hundreds , thousands , even millions of lives .
so how do organizations think ?
well , for the most part , they do n't .
and that is n't because they do n't want to , it 's really because they ca n't .
and they ca n't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict .
in surveys of european and american executives , fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise .
afraid of the conflict that that would provoke , afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage , and felt that they were bound to lose .
eighty-five percent is a really big number .
it means that organizations mostly ca n't do what george and alice so triumphantly did .
they ca n't think together .
and it means that people like many of us , who have run organizations , and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can , mostly fail to get the best out of them .
so how do we develop the skills that we need ?
because it does take skill and practice , too .
if we are n't going to be afraid of conflict , we have to see it as thinking , and then we have to get really good at it .
so , recently , i worked with an executive named joe , and joe worked for a medical device company .
and joe was very worried about the device that he was working on .
he thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people .
he was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help .
but when he looked around his organization , nobody else seemed to be at all worried .
so , he did n't really want to say anything .
after all , maybe they knew something he did n't .
maybe he 'd look stupid .
but he kept worrying about it , and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved .
in the end , joe and i found a way for him to raise his concerns .
and what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation .
it turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts .
so now joe had allies . they could think together .
and yes , there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument , but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative , to solve the problem , and to change the device .
joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower , except that like almost all whistle-blowers , he was n't a crank at all , he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served .
but he had been so afraid of conflict , until finally he became more afraid of the silence .
and when he dared to speak , he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined .
and his colleagues do n't think of him as a crank .
they think of him as a leader .
so , how do we have these conversations more easily and more often ?
well , the university of delft requires that its phd students have to submit five statements that they 're prepared to defend .
it does n't really matter what the statements are about , what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority .
i think it 's a fantastic system , but i think leaving it to phd candidates is far too few people , and way too late in life .
i think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development , if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society .
the fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we 've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden .
it comes from information that is freely available and out there , but that we are willfully blind to , because we ca n't handle , do n't want to handle , the conflict that it provokes .
but when we dare to break that silence , or when we dare to see , and we create conflict , we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking .
open information is fantastic , open networks are essential .
but the truth wo n't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it .
openness is n't the end .
it 's the beginning .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a very lucky person .
i 've been privileged to see so much of our beautiful earth and the people and creatures that live on it .
and my passion was inspired at the age of seven , when my parents first took me to morocco , at the edge of the sahara desert .
now imagine a little brit somewhere that was n't cold and damp like home .
what an amazing experience .
and it made me want to explore more .
so as a filmmaker , i 've been from one end of the earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before .
and what 's more , i 'm really lucky , because i get to share that with millions of people worldwide .
now the idea of having new perspectives of our planet and actually being able to get that message out gets me out of bed every day with a spring in my step .
you might think that it 's quite hard to find new stories and new subjects , but new technology is changing the way we can film .
it 's enabling us to get fresh , new images and tell brand new stories .
in nature 's great events , a series for the bbc that i did with david attenborough , we wanted to do just that .
images of grizzly bears are pretty familiar .
you see them all the time , you think .
but there 's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed .
so what we did , we went to alaska , which is where the grizzlies rely on really high , almost inaccessible , mountain slopes for their denning .
and the only way to film that is a shoot from the air .
-lrb- video -rrb- david attenborough : throughout alaska and british columbia , thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep .
there is nothing to eat up here , but the conditions were ideal for hibernation .
lots of snow in which to dig a den .
to find food , mothers must lead their cubs down to the coast , where the snow will already be melting .
but getting down can be a challenge for small cubs .
these mountains are dangerous places , but ultimately the fate of these bear families , and indeed that of all bears around the north pacific , depends on the salmon .
kb : i love that shot .
i always get goosebumps every time i see it .
that was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera .
and it 's a wonderful bit of gear , because it 's like having a flying tripod , crane and dolly all rolled into one .
but technology alone is n't enough .
to really get the money shots , it 's down to being in the right place at the right time .
and that sequence was especially difficult .
the first year we got nothing .
we had to go back the following year , all the way back to the remote parts of alaska .
and we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks .
and eventually we got lucky .
the cloud lifted , the wind was still , and even the bear showed up .
and we managed to get that magic moment .
for a filmmaker , new technology is an amazing tool , but the other thing that really , really excites me is when new species are discovered .
now , when i heard about one animal , i knew we had to get it for my next series , untamed americas , for national geographic .
in 2005 , a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of ecuador .
and what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower .
it depends solely on the bat .
now , the series has n't even aired yet , so you 're the very first to see this .
see what you think .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : the tube-lipped nectar bat .
a pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower 's long flute .
but how to reach it ?
necessity is the mother of evolution .
-lrb- music -rrb- this two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue , the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world .
if human , he 'd have a nine-foot tongue .
-lrb- applause -rrb- kb : what a tongue .
we filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times .
so imagine how quick that thing is in real life .
now people often ask me , " where 's your favorite place on the planet ? "
and the truth is i just do n't have one .
there are so many wonderful places .
but some locations draw you back time and time again .
and one remote location - i first went there as a backpacker ; i 've been back several times for filming , most recently for untamed americas - it 's the altiplano in the high andes of south america , and it 's the most otherworldly place i know .
but at 15,000 feet , it 's tough .
it 's freezing cold , and that thin air really gets you .
sometimes it 's hard to breathe , especially carrying all the heavy filming equipment .
and that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover .
but the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity .
have a look .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : some 1,500 miles south of the tropics , between chile and bolivia , the andes completely change .
it 's called the altiplano , or " high plains " - a place of extremes and extreme contrasts .
where deserts freeze and waters boil .
more like mars than earth , it seems just as hostile to life .
the stars themselves - at 12,000 feet , the dry , thin air makes for perfect stargazing .
some of the world 's astronomers have telescopes nearby .
but just looking up with the naked eye , you really do n't need one .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- kb : thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent , wonderful earth .
thank you for letting me share that with you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everything i do , and everything i do professionally - my life - has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in africa .
from 1971 to 1977 - i look young , but i 'm not - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i worked in zambia , kenya , ivory coast , algeria , somalia , in projects of technical cooperation with african countries .
i worked for an italian ngo , and every single project that we set up in africa failed .
and i was distraught .
i thought , age 21 , that we italians were good people and we were doing good work in africa .
instead , everything we touched we killed .
our first project , the one that has inspired my first book , " ripples from the zambezi , " was a project where we italians decided to teach zambian people how to grow food .
so we arrived there with italian seeds in southern zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the zambezi river , and we taught the local people how to grow italian tomatoes and zucchini and ...
and of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that , so we paid them to come and work , and sometimes they would show up . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we were amazed that the local people , in such a fertile valley , would not have any agriculture .
but instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything , we simply said , " thank god we 're here . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " just in the nick of time to save the zambian people from starvation . "
and of course , everything in africa grew beautifully .
we had these magnificent tomatoes . in italy , a tomato would grow to this size . in zambia , to this size .
and we could not believe , and we were telling the zambians , " look how easy agriculture is . "
when the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red , overnight , some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we said to the zambians , " my god , the hippos ! "
and the zambians said , " yes , that 's why we have no agriculture here . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " why did n't you tell us ? " " you never asked . "
i thought it was only us italians blundering around africa , but then i saw what the americans were doing , what the english were doing , what the french were doing , and after seeing what they were doing , i became quite proud of our project in zambia .
because , you see , at least we fed the hippos .
you should see the rubbish - -lrb- applause -rrb- - you should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting african people .
you want to read the book , read " dead aid , " by dambisa moyo , zambian woman economist .
the book was published in 2009 .
we western donor countries have given the african continent two trillion american dollars in the last 50 years .
i 'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done .
just go and read her book .
read it from an african woman , the damage that we have done .
we western people are imperialist , colonialist missionaries , and there are only two ways we deal with people : we either patronize them , or we are paternalistic .
the two words come from the latin root " pater , " which means " father . "
but they mean two different things .
paternalistic , i treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children . " i love you so much . "
patronizing , i treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants .
that 's why the white people in africa are called " bwana , " boss .
i was given a slap in the face reading a book , " small is beautiful , " written by schumacher , who said , above all in economic development , if people do not wish to be helped , leave them alone .
this should be the first principle of aid .
the first principle of aid is respect .
this morning , the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor , and said , " can we - can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial ? "
i decided when i was 27 years old to only respond to people , and i invented a system called enterprise facilitation , where you never initiate anything , you never motivate anybody , but you become a servant of the local passion , the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person .
so what you do - you shut up .
you never arrive in a community with any ideas , and you sit with the local people .
we do n't work from offices .
we meet at the cafe . we meet at the pub .
we have zero infrastructure .
and what we do , we become friends , and we find out what that person wants to do .
the most important thing is passion .
you can give somebody an idea .
if that person does n't want to do it , what are you going to do ?
the passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing .
the passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing .
and then we help them to go and find the knowledge , because nobody in the world can succeed alone .
the person with the idea may not have the knowledge , but the knowledge is available .
so years and years ago , i had this idea : why do n't we , for once , instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do , why do n't , for once , listen to them ? but not in community meetings .
let me tell you a secret .
there is a problem with community meetings .
entrepreneurs never come , and they never tell you , in a public meeting , what they want to do with their own money , what opportunity they have identified .
so planning has this blind spot .
the smartest people in your community you do n't even know , because they do n't come to your public meetings .
what we do , we work one-on-one , and to work one-on-one , you have to create a social infrastructure that does n't exist .
you have to create a new profession .
the profession is the family doctor of enterprise , the family doctor of business , who sits with you in your house , at your kitchen table , at the cafe , and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living .
i started this as a tryout in esperance , in western australia .
i was a doing a ph.d. at the time , trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do .
and so what i did in esperance that first year was to just walk the streets , and in three days i had my first client , and i helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage , was a maori guy , and i helped him to sell to the restaurant in perth , to get organized , and then the fishermen came to me to say , " you the guy who helped maori ? can you help us ? "
and i helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in albany for 60 cents a kilo , but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to japan for 15 dollars a kilo , and the farmers came to talk to me , said , " hey , you helped them . can you help us ? "
in a year , i had 27 projects going on , and the government came to see me to say , " how can you do that ?
how can you do - ? " and i said , " i do something very , very , very difficult .
i shut up , and listen to them . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so - -lrb- applause -rrb- - so the government says , " do it again . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've done it in 300 communities around the world .
we have helped to start 40,000 businesses .
there is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude .
peter drucker , one of the greatest management consultants in history , died age 96 , a few years ago .
peter drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business , and this is what peter drucker says : " planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy . "
planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship .
so now you 're rebuilding christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy .
you have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you .
you have to offer them confidentiality , privacy , you have to be fantastic at helping them , and then they will come , and they will come in droves .
in a community of 10,000 people , we get 200 clients .
can you imagine a community of 400,000 people , the intelligence and the passion ?
which presentation have you applauded the most this morning ?
local , passionate people . that 's who you have applauded .
so what i 'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it 's at .
we are at the end of the first industrial revolution - nonrenewable fossil fuels , manufacturing - and all of a sudden , we have systems which are not sustainable .
the internal combustion engine is not sustainable .
freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable .
what we have to look at is at how we feed , cure , educate , transport , communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way .
the technologies do not exist to do that .
who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution ? universities ? forget about it !
government ? forget about it !
it will be entrepreneurs , and they 're doing it now .
there 's a lovely story that i read in a futurist magazine many , many years ago .
there was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of new york in 1860 .
and in 1860 , this group of people came together , and they all speculated about what would happen and the conclusion was unanimous : the city of new york would not exist in 100 years .
why ? because they looked at the curve and said , if the population keeps growing at this rate , to move the population of new york around , they would have needed six million horses , and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with .
they were already drowning in manure . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so 1860 , they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of new york .
so what happens ? in 40 years ' time , in the year 1900 , in the united states of america , there were 1,001 the idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over , and there were tiny , tiny little factories in backwaters .
dearborn , michigan . henry ford .
however , there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs .
first , you have to offer them confidentiality .
otherwise they do n't come and talk to you .
then you have to offer them absolute , dedicated , passionate service to them .
and then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship .
the smallest company , the biggest company , has to be capable of doing three things beautifully : the product that you want to sell has to be fantastic , you have to have fantastic marketing , and you have to have tremendous financial management .
guess what ?
we have never met a single human being in the world who can make it , sell it and look after the money .
it does n't exist .
this person has never been born .
we 've done the research , and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world - carnegie , westinghouse , edison , ford , all the new companies , google , yahoo .
there 's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common , only one : none were started by one person .
now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in northumberland , and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of richard branson 's autobiography , and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline , in the first two pages of richard branson 's autobiography how many times richard uses the word " i " and how many times he uses the word " we . "
never the word " i , " and the word " we " 32 times .
he was n't alone when he started .
nobody started a company alone . no one .
so we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes , in bars , and your dedicated buddies who will do to you , what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic , somebody who will say to you , " what do you need ?
what can you do ? can you make it ?
okay , can you sell it ? can you look after the money ? "
" oh , no , i can not do this . " " would you like me to find you somebody ? "
we activate communities .
we have groups of volunteers supporting the enterprise facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion , the energy and imagination of your own people .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- something called the danish twin study established that only about 10 percent of how long the average person lives , within certain biological limits , is dictated by our genes .
the other 90 percent is dictated by our lifestyle .
so the premise of blue zones : if we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity we can come up with a de facto formula for longevity .
but if you ask the average american what the optimal formula of longevity is , they probably could n't tell you .
they 've probably heard of the south beach diet , or the atkins diet .
you have the usda food pyramid .
there is what oprah tells us .
there is what doctor oz tells us .
the fact of the matter is there is a lot of confusion around what really helps us live longer better .
should you be running marathons or doing yoga ?
should you eat organic meats or should you be eating tofu ?
when it comes to supplements , should you be taking them ?
how about these hormones or resveratrol ?
and does purpose play into it ?
spirituality ? and how about how we socialize ?
well , our approach to finding longevity was to team up with national geographic , and the national institute on aging , to find the four demographically confirmed areas that are geographically defined .
and then bring a team of experts in there to methodically go through exactly what these people do , to distill down the cross-cultural distillation .
and at the end of this i 'm going to tell you what that distillation is .
but first i 'd like to debunk some common myths when it comes to longevity .
and the first myth is if you try really hard you can live to be 100 .
false .
the problem is , only about one out of 5,000 people in america live to be 100 .
your chances are very low .
even though it 's the fastest growing demographic in america , it 's hard to reach 100 .
the problem is that we 're not programmed for longevity .
we are programmed for something called procreative success .
i love that word .
it reminds me of my college days .
biologists term procreative success to mean the age where you have children and then another generation , the age when your children have children .
after that the effect of evolution completely dissipates .
if you 're a mammal , if you 're a rat or an elephant , or a human , in between , it 's the same story .
so to make it to age 100 , you not only have to have had a very good lifestyle , you also have to have won the genetic lottery .
the second myth is , there are treatments that can help slow , reverse , or even stop aging .
false .
when you think of it , there is 99 things that can age us .
deprive your brain of oxygen for just a few minutes , those brain cells die , they never come back .
play tennis too hard , on your knees , ruin your cartilage , the cartilage never comes back .
our arteries can clog . our brains can gunk up with plaque , and we can get alzheimer 's .
there is just too many things to go wrong .
our bodies have 35 trillion cells , trillion with a " t. " we 're talking national debt numbers here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- those cells turn themselves over once every eight years .
and every time they turn themselves over there is some damage . and that damage builds up .
and it builds up exponentially .
it 's a little bit like the days when we all had beatles albums or eagles albums and we 'd make a copy of that on a cassette tape , and let our friends copy that cassette tape , and pretty soon , with successive generations that tape sounds like garbage .
well , the same things happen to our cells .
that 's why a 65-year-old person is aging at a rate of about 125 times faster than a 12-year-old person .
so , if there is nothing you can do to slow your aging or stop your aging , what am i doing here ?
well , the fact of the matter is the best science tells us that the capacity of the human body , my body , your body , is about 90 years , a little bit more for women .
but life expectancy in this country is only 78 .
so somewhere along the line , we 're leaving about 12 good years on the table .
these are years that we could get .
and research shows that they would be years largely free of chronic disease , heart disease , cancer and diabetes .
we think the best way to get these missing years is to look at the cultures around the world that are actually experiencing them , areas where people are living to age 100 at rates up to 10 times greater than we are , areas where the life expectancy is an extra dozen years , the rate of middle age mortality is a fraction of what it is in this country .
we found our first blue zone about 125 miles off the coast of italy , on the island of sardinia .
and not the entire island , the island is about 1.4 million people , but only up in the highlands , an area called the nuoro province .
and here we have this area where men live the longest , about 10 times more centenarians than we have here in america .
and this is a place where people not only reach age 100 , they do so with extraordinary vigor .
places where 102 year olds still ride their bike to work , chop wood , and can beat a guy 60 years younger than them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- their history actually goes back to about the time of christ .
it 's actually a bronze age culture that 's been isolated .
because the land is so infertile , they largely are shepherds , which occasions regular , low-intensity physical activity .
their diet is mostly plant-based , accentuated with foods that they can carry into the fields .
they came up with an unleavened whole wheat bread called carta musica made out of durum wheat , a type of cheese made from grass-fed animals so the cheese is high in omega-3 fatty acids instead of omega-6 fatty acids from corn-fed animals , and a type of wine that has three times the level of polyphenols than any known wine in the world .
it 's called cannonau .
but the real secret i think lies more in the way that they organize their society .
and one of the most salient elements of the sardinian society is how they treat older people .
you ever notice here in america , social equity seems to peak at about age 24 ?
just look at the advertisements .
here in sardinia , the older you get the more equity you have , the more wisdom you 're celebrated for .
you go into the bars in sardinia , instead of seeing the sports illustrated swimsuit calendar , you see the centenarian of the month calendar .
this , as it turns out , is not only good for your aging parents to keep them close to the family - it imparts about four to six years of extra life expectancy - research shows it 's also good for the children of those families , who have lower rates of mortality and lower rates of disease .
that 's called the grandmother effect .
we found our second blue zone on the other side of the planet , about 800 miles south of tokyo , on the archipelago of okinawa .
okinawa is actually 161 small islands .
and in the northern part of the main island , this is ground zero for world longevity .
this is a place where the oldest living female population is found .
it 's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world .
they have what we want .
they live a long time , and tend to die in their sleep , very quickly , and often , i can tell you , after sex .
they live about seven good years longer than the average american .
five times as many centenarians as we have in america .
one fifth the rate of colon and breast cancer , big killers here in america .
and one sixth the rate of cardiovascular disease .
and the fact that this culture has yielded these numbers suggests strongly they have something to teach us .
what do they do ?
once again , a plant-based diet , full of vegetables with lots of color in them .
and they eat about eight times as much tofu as americans do .
more significant than what they eat is how they eat it .
they have all kinds of little strategies to keep from overeating , which , as you know , is a big problem here in america .
a few of the strategies we observed : they eat off of smaller plates , so they tend to eat fewer calories at every sitting .
instead of serving family style , where you can sort of mindlessly eat as you 're talking , they serve at the counter , put the food away , and then bring it to the table .
they also have a 3,000-year-old adage , which i think is the greatest sort of diet suggestion ever invented .
it was invented by confucius .
and that diet is known as the hara , hatchi , bu diet .
it 's simply a little saying these people say before their meal to remind them to stop eating when their stomach is -lsb- 80 -rsb- percent full .
it takes about a half hour for that full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain .
and by remembering to stop at 80 percent it helps keep you from doing that very thing .
but , like sardinia , okinawa has a few social constructs that we can associate with longevity .
we know that isolation kills .
fifteen years ago , the average american had three good friends .
we 're down to one and half right now .
if you were lucky enough to be born in okinawa , you were born into a system where you automatically have a half a dozen friends with whom you travel through life .
they call it a moai . and if you 're in a moai you 're expected to share the bounty if you encounter luck , and if things go bad , child gets sick , parent dies , you always have somebody who has your back .
this particular moai , these five ladies have been together for 97 years .
their average age is 102 .
typically in america we 've divided our adult life up into two sections .
there is our work life , where we 're productive .
and then one day , boom , we retire .
and typically that has meant retiring to the easy chair , or going down to arizona to play golf .
in the okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement .
instead there is one word that imbues your entire life , and that word is " ikigai . "
and , roughly translated , it means " the reason for which you wake up in the morning . "
for this 102-year-old karate master , his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art .
for this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week .
and this is a question . the national institute on aging actually gave us a questionnaire to give these centenarians .
and one of the questions , they were very culturally astute , the people who put the questionnaire .
one of the questions was , " what is your ikigai ? "
they instantly knew why they woke up in the morning .
for this 102 year old woman , her ikigai was simply her great-great-great-granddaughter .
two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years .
and i asked her what it felt like to hold a great-great-great-granddaughter .
and she put her head back and she said , " it feels like leaping into heaven . "
i thought that was a wonderful thought .
my editor at geographic wanted me to find america 's blue zone .
and for a while we looked on the prairies of minnesota , where actually there is a very high proportion of centenarians .
but that 's because all the young people left .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , we turned to the data again .
and we found america 's longest-lived population among the seventh-day adventists concentrated in and around loma linda , california .
adventists are conservative methodists .
they celebrate their sabbath from sunset on friday till sunset on saturday .
a " 24-hour sanctuary in time , " they call it .
and they follow five little habits that conveys to them extraordinary longevity , comparatively speaking .
in america here , life expectancy for the average woman is 80 .
but for an adventist woman , their life expectancy is 89 .
and the difference is even more pronounced among men , who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their american counterparts .
now , this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years .
sterling study . and i think it supremely illustrates the premise of this blue zone project .
this is a heterogeneous community .
it 's white , black , hispanic , asian .
the only thing that they have in common are a set of very small lifestyle habits that they follow ritualistically for most of their lives .
they take their diet directly from the bible .
genesis : chapter one , verse -lsb- 29 -rsb- , where god talks about legumes and seeds , and on one more stanza about green plants , ostensibly missing is meat .
they take this sanctuary in time very serious .
for 24 hours every week , no matter how busy they are , how stressed out they are at work , where the kids need to be driven , they stop everything and they focus on their god , their social network , and then , hardwired right in the religion , are nature walks .
and the power of this is not that it 's done occasionally , the power is it 's done every week for a lifetime .
none of it 's hard . none of it costs money .
adventists also tend to hang out with other adventists .
so , if you go to an adventist 's party you do n't see people swilling jim beam or rolling a joint .
instead they 're talking about their next nature walk , exchanging recipes , and yes , they pray .
but they influence each other in profound and measurable ways .
this is a culture that has yielded ellsworth whareham .
ellsworth whareham is 97 years old .
he 's a multimillionaire , yet when a contractor wanted 6,000 dollars to build a privacy fence , he said , " for that kind of money i 'll do it myself . "
so for the next three days he was out shoveling cement , and hauling poles around .
and predictably , perhaps , on the fourth day he ended up in the operating room .
but not as the guy on the table ; the guy doing open-heart surgery .
at 97 he still does 20 open-heart surgeries every month .
ed rawlings , 103 years old now , an active cowboy , starts his morning with a swim .
and on weekends he likes to put on the boards , throw up rooster tails .
and then marge deton .
marge is 104 .
her grandson actually lives in the twin cities here .
she starts her day with lifting weights .
she rides her bicycle .
and then she gets in her root-beer colored 1994 cadillac seville , and tears down the san bernardino freeway , where she still volunteers for seven different organizations .
i 've been on 19 hardcore expeditions .
i 'm probably the only person you 'll ever meet who rode his bicycle across the sahara desert without sunscreen .
but i 'll tell you , there is no adventure more harrowing than riding shotgun with marge deton .
" a stranger is a friend i have n't met yet ! " she 'd say to me .
so , what are the common denominators in these three cultures ?
what are the things that they all do ?
and we managed to boil it down to nine .
in fact we 've done two more blue zone expeditions since this and these common denominators hold true .
and the first one , and i 'm about to utter a heresy here , none of them exercise , at least the way we think of exercise .
instead , they set up their lives so that they are constantly nudged into physical activity .
these 100-year-old okinawan women are getting up and down off the ground , they sit on the floor , 30 or 40 times a day .
sardinians live in vertical houses , up and down the stairs .
every trip to the store , or to church or to a friend 's house occasions a walk .
they do n't have any conveniences .
there is not a button to push to do yard work or house work .
if they want to mix up a cake , they 're doing it by hand .
that 's physical activity .
that burns calories just as much as going on the treadmill does .
when they do do intentional physical activity , it 's the things they enjoy . they tend to walk , the only proven way to stave off cognitive decline , and they all tend to have a garden .
they know how to set up their life in the right way so they have the right outlook .
each of these cultures take time to downshift .
the sardinians pray . the seventh-day adventists pray .
the okinawans have this ancestor veneration .
but when you 're in a hurry or stressed out , that triggers something called the inflammatory response , which is associated with everything from alzheimer 's disease to cardiovascular disease .
when you slow down for 15 minutes a day you turn that inflammatory state into a more anti-inflammatory state .
they have vocabulary for sense of purpose , ikigai , like the okinawans .
you know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you 're born , because of infant mortality , and the year you retire .
these people know their sense of purpose , and they activate in their life , that 's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy .
there 's no longevity diet .
instead , these people drink a little bit every day , not a hard sell to the american population .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they tend to eat a plant-based diet .
does n't mean they do n't eat meat , but lots of beans and nuts .
and they have strategies to keep from overeating , little things that nudge them away from the table at the right time .
and then the foundation of all this is how they connect .
they put their families first , take care of their children and their aging parents .
they all tend to belong to a faith-based community , which is worth between four and 14 extra years of life expectancy if you do it four times a month .
and the biggest thing here is they also belong to the right tribe .
they were either born into or they proactively surrounded themselves with the right people .
we know from the framingham studies , that if your three best friends are obese there is a 50 percent better chance that you 'll be overweight .
so , if you hang out with unhealthy people , that 's going to have a measurable impact over time .
instead , if your friend 's idea of recreation is physical activity , bowling , or playing hockey , biking or gardening , if your friends drink a little , but not too much , and they eat right , and they 're engaged , and they 're trusting and trustworthy , that is going to have the biggest impact over time .
diets do n't work . no diet in the history of the world has ever worked for more than two percent of the population .
exercise programs usually start in january ; they 're usually done by october .
when it comes to longevity there is no short term fix in a pill or anything else .
but when you think about it , your friends are long-term adventures , and therefore , perhaps the most significant thing you can do to add more years to your life , and life to your years . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
imagining a solo cello concert , one would most likely think of johann sebastian bach unaccompanied cello suites .
as a child studying these eternal masterpieces , bach 's music would intermingle with the singing voices of muslim prayers from the neighboring arab village of the northern kibbutz in israel where i grew up .
late at night , after hours of practicing , i would listen to janis joplin and billie holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents ' stereo .
it all became music to me .
i did n't hear the boundaries .
i still start every day practicing playing bach .
his music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me .
but as i was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression , i realized that with today 's technological resources , there 's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument .
the power and coherency that comes from one person hearing , perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience .
the excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept .
the excitement from using multi-tracking , the way i did in the piece you will hear next , comes from the attempt to build and create a whole universe with many diverse layers , all generated from a single source .
my cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas .
when composers write music for me , i ask them to forget what they know about the cello .
i hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds i have never heard before .
i want to create endless possibilities with this cello .
i become the medium through which the music is being channeled , and in the process , when all is right , the music is transformed and so am i.
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is me building a prototype for six hours straight .
this is slave labor to my own project .
this is what the diy and maker movements really look like .
and this is an analogy for today 's construction and manufacturing world with brute-force assembly techniques .
and this is exactly why i started studying how to program physical materials to build themselves .
but there is another world .
today at the micro- and nanoscales , there 's an unprecedented revolution happening .
and this is the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape , change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter .
there 's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use dna to self-assemble those functional structures .
but if we look at the human scale , there 's massive problems that are n't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies .
if we look at construction and manufacturing , there 's major inefficiencies , energy consumption and excessive labor techniques .
in infrastructure , let 's just take one example .
take piping .
in water pipes , we have fixed-capacity water pipes that have fixed flow rates , except for expensive pumps and valves .
we bury them in the ground .
if anything changes - if the environment changes , the ground moves , or demand changes - we have to start from scratch and take them out and replace them .
so i 'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds , that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment .
and i do n't mean automated machines .
i do n't just mean smart machines that replace humans .
but i mean programmable materials that build themselves .
and that 's called self-assembly , which is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction .
so what do we need if we want to do this at the human scale ?
we need a few simple ingredients .
the first ingredient is materials and geometry , and that needs to be tightly coupled with the energy source .
and you can use passive energy - so heat , shaking , pneumatics , gravity , magnetics .
and then you need smartly designed interactions .
and those interactions allow for error correction , and they allow the shapes to go from one state to another state .
so now i 'm going to show you a number of projects that we 've built , from one-dimensional , two-dimensional , three-dimensional and even four-dimensional systems .
so in one-dimensional systems - this is a project called the self-folding proteins .
and the idea is that you take the three-dimensional structure of a protein - in this case it 's the crambin protein - you take the backbone - so no cross-linking , no environmental interactions - and you break that down into a series of components .
and then we embed elastic .
and when i throw this up into the air and catch it , it has the full three-dimensional structure of the protein , all of the intricacies .
and this gives us a tangible model of the three-dimensional protein and how it folds and all of the intricacies of the geometry .
so we can study this as a physical , intuitive model .
and we 're also translating that into two-dimensional systems - so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures .
in three dimensions , we did a project last year at tedglobal with autodesk and arthur olson where we looked at autonomous parts - so individual parts not pre-connected that can come together on their own .
and we built 500 of these glass beakers .
they had different molecular structures inside and different colors that could be mixed and matched .
and we gave them away to all the tedsters .
and so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale .
this is the polio virus .
you shake it hard and it breaks apart .
and then you shake it randomly and it starts to error correct and built the structure on its own .
and this is demonstrating that through random energy , we can build non-random shapes .
we even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale .
last year at ted long beach , we built an installation that builds installations .
the idea was , could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects ?
so we built a large rotating chamber , and people would come up and spin the chamber faster or slower , adding energy to the system and getting an intuitive understanding of how self-assembly works and how we could use this as a macroscale construction or manufacturing technique for products .
so remember , i said 4d .
so today for the first time , we 're unveiling a new project , which is a collaboration with stratasys , and it 's called 4d printing .
the idea behind 4d printing is that you take multi-material 3d printing - so you can deposit multiple materials - and you add a new capability , which is transformation , that right off the bed , the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own .
and this is like robotics without wires or motors .
so you completely print this part , and it can transform into something else .
we also worked with autodesk on a software they 're developing called project cyborg .
and this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when .
but most importantly , we can use this same software for the design of nanoscale self-assembly systems and human scale self-assembly systems .
these are parts being printed with multi-material properties .
here 's the first demonstration .
a single strand dipped in water that completely self-folds on its own into the letters m i t.
i 'm biased .
this is another part , single strand , dipped in a bigger tank that self-folds into a cube , a three-dimensional structure , on its own .
so no human interaction .
and we think this is the first time that a program and transformation has been embedded directly into the materials themselves .
and it also might just be the manufacturing technique that allows us to produce more adaptive infrastructure in the future .
so i know you 're probably thinking , okay , that 's cool , but how do we use any of this stuff for the built environment ?
so i 've started a lab at mit , and it 's called the self-assembly lab .
and we 're dedicated to trying to develop programmable materials for the built environment .
and we think there 's a few key sectors that have fairly near-term applications .
one of those is in extreme environments .
these are scenarios where it 's difficult to build , our current construction techniques do n't work , it 's too large , it 's too dangerous , it 's expensive , too many parts .
and space is a great example of that .
we 're trying to design new scenarios for space that have fully reconfigurable and self-assembly structures that can go from highly functional systems from one to another .
let 's go back to infrastructure .
in infrastructure , we 're working with a company out of boston called geosyntec .
and we 're developing a new paradigm for piping .
imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate , or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves .
so this is n't expensive pumps or valves .
this is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own .
so i want to remind you today of the harsh realities of assembly in our world .
these are complex things built with complex parts that come together in complex ways .
so i would like to invite you from whatever industry you 're from to join us in reinventing and reimagining the world , how things come together from the nanoscale to the human scale , so that we can go from a world like this to a world that 's more like this .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a story , a story that i would like to share with you .
and it 's an african story .
it is a story of hope , resilience and glamour .
there was hollywood .
then came bollywood .
today we have nollywood , the third-largest film industry in the world .
in 2006 alone , almost 2,000 films were made in nigeria .
now , try to imagine 40 , 50 films wrapped , distributed , every week in the streets of lagos , nigeria and west africa .
some estimates put the value of this industry at 250 million dollars .
it has created thousands , if not tens of thousands of jobs .
and it 's expanding .
but keep in mind that this was a grassroots movement .
this is something that happened without foreign investment , without government aid , and actually , it happened against all odds , in one of the most difficult moments in nigerian economy .
the industry is 15 years old .
and so maybe you 're thinking now , why , how , an italian filmmaker based in boston is so interested in this story ?
and so i think i have to tell you just a few words , a few things about my personal life , because i think there is a connection .
my grandfather lived most of his life and is buried in zambia .
my father also lived most of his adult life in east africa .
and i was born in zambia .
even though i left when i was only three years old , i really felt that africa was this big part of my life .
and it really was a place where i learned to walk .
i think i uttered the first words , and my family bought their first home .
so when we came back to italy , and one of the things that i remember the most is my family having this hard time to share stories .
it seemed that for our neighbors and friends , africa was either this exotic place , this imaginary land that probably exists only in their imagination , or the place of horror , famine .
and so we were always caught in this stereotype .
and i remember really this desire to talk about africa as a place where we lived and people live and go about their lives , and have dreams like we all have .
so when i read in a newspaper in the business page the story of nollywood , i really felt this is an incredible opportunity to tell a story that goes against all these preconceived notions .
here i can tell a story of africans making movies like i do , and actually i felt this was an inspiration for me .
i have the good fortune of being a filmmaker-in-residence at the center of digital imaging arts at boston university .
and we really look how digital technology is changing , and how young , independent filmmakers can make movies at a fraction of the cost .
so when i proposed the story , i really had all the support to make this film .
and not only had the support , i found two wonderful partners in crime in this adventure .
aimee corrigan , a very talented and young photographer , and robert caputo , a friend and a mentor , who is a veteran of national geographic , and told me , " you know , franco , in 25 years of covering africa , i do n't know if i have come across a story that is so full of hope and so fun . "
so we went to lagos in october 2005 .
and we went to lagos to meet bond emeruwa , a wonderful , talented film director who is with us tonight .
the plan was to give you a portrait of nollywood , of this incredible film industry , following bond in his quest to make an action movie that deals with the issue of corruption , called " checkpoint . "
police corruption .
and he had nine days to make it .
we thought this was a good story .
in the meantime , we had to cover nollywood , and we talked to a lot of filmmakers .
but i do n't want to create too many expectations .
i would like to show you six minutes .
and these are six minutes they really prepared for the ted audience .
there are several themes from the documentary , but they are re-edited and made for you , ok ?
so i guess it 's a world premier .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : action .
milverton nwokedi : you cut a nice movie with just 10,000 dollars in nigeria here .
and you shoot in seven days .
peace piberesima : we 're doing films for the masses .
we 're not doing films for the elite and the people in their glass houses .
they can afford to watch their " robocop " and whatever .
mahmood ali balogun : i think filmmaking in nigeria , for those who work in it , is a kind of subsistence filmmaking - what they do to make a living .
it 's not the fancy filmmaking where you say , oh , you want to put all the razzmatazz of hollywood , and where you have big budgets .
here is that you make these films , it sells , you jump onto the location again to make another film , because if you do n't make the next film , you 're not going to feed .
bond emeruwa : so while we 're entertaining , we should be able to educate .
i believe in the power of audiovisuals .
i mean , 90 percent of the population will watch nollywood .
i think it 's the most viable vehicle right now to pass information across a dedicated cable .
so if you 're making a movie , no matter what your topic is , put in a message in there .
woman : you still have to report the incident .
he needs proper medical attention .
pp : i keep trying to explain to people , it 's not about the quality at the moment - the quality is coming .
i mean , there are those films that people are making for quality , but the first thing you have to remember about this society is that africa still has people that live on one dollar a day , and these are the people that really watch these films .
sonny mcdon w : nollywood is a fantastic industry that has just been born in this part of the world .
because nobody believed that nollywood can come out of africa .
lancelot imasen : but our films , they are stories that our people can relate to themselves .
they are stories about our people , for our people .
and consistently , they are glued to their screen whenever they see the story .
narrator : suspense , fun and intrigue .
it 's the blockbuster comedy .
you 'll crack your ribs .
bernard pinayon agbaosi : we have been so deep into the foreign movies .
it 's all about the foreign movies .
but we can do something too .
we can do something , something that when the world sees it , they say , wow , this is nigeria .
man : just arrest yourself , sergeant .
do n't embarrass yourself .
come on . do n't run away . come back . come back .
smw : you can now walk the street and see a role model .
it 's not just what you see in picture .
you see the person live .
you see how he talks . you see how he lives .
he influences you really good , you know .
it 's not just what you see in the picture .
it is not what you hear , you know , from the western press .
man : see you . bye .
action .
saint obi : i was so fascinated , you know , with those cowboy movies .
but then when i discovered the situation in my country , at that time there was so much corruption .
for a young man to really make it out here , you got to think of some negative things and all that , or some kind of vices .
and i did n't want that , you know .
and i discovered that i could be successful in life as an actor , without doing crime , without cheating nobody , without telling no lies .
just me and god-given talent .
man : let 's go .
ok , it 's time to kick some ass .
cover this . it 's your own .
move it .
roboger animadu : in big countries , when they do the movies , they have all these things in place .
but here , we improvise these items , like the gunshots .
like they go , here , now , now , you see the gun there , but you wo n't see any guns shot , we use knock-out .
kevin books ikeduba : what i 'm scared of is just the explosion will come up in my face .
woman : that 's why i use enough masking tape .
the masking tape will hold it .
wat , wait . just hold this for me .
kbi : i 'm just telling her to make sure she places it well so that it wo n't affect my face - the explosion , you know .
but she 's a professional . she knows what she 's doing .
i 'm trying to protect my face too .
this ai n't going to be my last movie .
you know , this is nollywood , where the magic lives .
ra : so now you 're about to see how we do our own movies here , with or without any assistance from anybody .
man : action .
cut .
-lrb- applause -rrb- franco sacchi : so many things to say , so little time .
so many themes in this story .
i just ca n't tell you - there 's one thing i want to tell you .
i spent , you know , several weeks with all these actors , producers , and the problems they have to go through are unimaginable for , you know , a westerner , a filmmaker who works in america or in europe .
but always with a smile , always with an enthusiasm , that is incredible .
werner herzog , the german filmmaker said , " i need to make movies like you need oxygen . "
and i think they 're breathing .
the nigerian filmmakers really , really , are doing what they like .
and so it 's a very , very important thing for them , and for their audiences .
a woman told me , " when i see a nollywood film , i can relax , i really - i can breathe better . "
there is also another very important thing that i hope will resonate with this audience .
it 's technology . i 'm very interested in it and i really think that the digital non-linear editing has slashed , you know , the cost now is a fraction of what it used to be .
incredible cameras cost under 5,000 dollars .
and this has unleashed tremendous energy .
and guess what ?
we did n't have to tell to the nigerian filmmakers .
they understood it , they embraced the technology and they run with it , and they 're successful .
i hope that the nollywood phenomenon will go both ways .
i hope it will inspire other african nations to embrace the technology , look at the nigerian model , make their films , create jobs , create a narrative for the population , something to identify , something positive , something that really is psychological relief and it 's part of the culture .
but i really think this is a phenomenon that can inspire us .
i really think it goes both ways .
filmmakers , friends of mine , they look at nollywood and they say , " wow , they are doing what we really want to do , and make a buck and live with this job . "
so i really think it 's a lesson that we 're actually learning from them .
and there 's one thing , one small challenge that i have for you , and should make us reflect on the importance of storytelling .
and i think this is really the theme of this session .
try to imagine a world where the only goal is food and a shelter , but no stories .
no stories around the campfire .
no legends , no fairytales .
nothing .
no novels .
difficult , eh ? it 's meaningless .
so this is what i really think .
i think that the key to a healthy society is a thriving community of storytellers , and i think that the nigerian filmmakers really have proved this .
i would like you to hear their voices .
just a few moments .
it 's not an added sequence , just some voices from nollywood .
-lrb- video -rrb- toyin alousa : nollywood is the best thing that can happen to them .
if you have an industry that puts a smile on people 's face , that 's nollywood .
so : i believe very soon , we 're not only going to have better movies , we 'll have that original nigerian movie .
be : it 's still the same basic themes .
love , action .
but we 're telling it our own way , our own nigerian way , african way .
we have diverse cultures , diverse cultures , there are so many , that in the natal lifetimes , i do n't see us exhausting the stories we have .
fs : my job ends here , and the nollywood filmmakers really have now to work .
and i really hope that there will be many , many collaborations , where we teach each other things .
and i really hope that this will happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : stop . i 've got two questions .
franco , you described this as the world 's third largest film industry .
what does that translate to in terms of numbers of films , really ?
fs : oh , yes . i think i mentioned briefly - it 's close to 2,000 films .
there is scientific data on this .
ca : 2,000 films a year ?
fs : 2,000 films a year . 2005 or 6 , the censor board has censored 1,600 films alone .
and we know that there are more .
so it 's safe to say that there are 2,000 films .
so imagine 45 films per week .
there are challenges . there are challenges .
there is a glut of film , the quality has to be raised , they need to go to the next level , but i 'm optimistic .
ca : and these are n't films that are primarily seen in cinemas ?
fs : oh yes , of course . this is very important .
maybe , you know , for you to try to imagine this , these are films that are distributed directly in markets .
they are bought in video shops .
they can be rented for pennies .
ca : on what format ?
fs : oh , the format - thank you for the question . yes , it 's vcds .
it 's a cd , it 's a little bit more compressed image .
they started with vhs .
they actually did n't wait for , you know , the latest technology .
they started in ' 92 , ' 94 .
so there are 57 million vcrs in nigeria that play , you know , vhs and these vcds .
it 's a cd basically . it 's a compact disc .
ca : so on the streets , are film casts ... ?
fs : you can be in a lagos traffic jam and you can buy a movie or some bananas or some water . yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i have to say , this really proves that storytelling , it 's a commodity , it 's a staple .
there is no life without stories .
ca : franco , thank you so much .
a few words about how i got started , and it has a lot to do with happiness , actually .
when i was a very young child , i was extremely introverted and very much to myself .
and , kind of as a way of surviving , i would go into my own very personal space , and i would make things .
i would make things for people as a way of , you know , giving , showing them my love .
i would go into these private places , and i would put my ideas and my passions into objects - and sort of learning how to speak with my hands .
so , the whole activity of working with my hands and creating objects is very much connected with not only the idea realm , but also with very much the feeling realm .
and the ideas are very disparate .
i 'm going to show you many different kinds of pieces , and there 's no real connection between one or the other , except that they sort of come out of my brain , and they 're all different sort of thoughts that are triggered by looking at life , and seeing nature and seeing objects , and just having kind of playful random thoughts about things .
when i was a child , i started to explore motion .
i fell in love with the way things moved , so i started to explore motion by making little flipbooks .
and this is one that i did , probably like when i was around seventh grade , and i remember when i was doing this , i was thinking about that little rock there , and the pathway of the vehicles as they would fly through the air , and how the characters - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - would come shooting out of the car , so , on my mind , i was thinking about the trajectory of the vehicles .
and of course , when you 're a little kid , there 's always destruction .
so , it has to end with this - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - gratuitous violence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that was how i first started to explore the way things moved , and expressed it .
now , when i went to college , i found myself making fairly complicated , fragile machines .
and this really came about from having many different kinds of interests .
when i was in high school , i loved to program computers , so i sort of liked the logical flow of events .
i was also very interested in perhaps going into surgery and becoming a surgeon , because it meant working with my hands in a very focused , intense way .
so , i started taking art courses , and i found a way to make sculpture that brought together my love for being very precise with my hands , with coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system .
and also , working with wire - everything that i did was both a visual and a mechanical engineering decision so , i was able to sort of exercise all of that .
now , this kind of machine is as close as i can get to painting .
and it 's full of many little trivial end points , like there 's a little foot here that just drags around in circles and it does n't really mean anything .
it 's really just for the sort of joy of its own triviality .
the connection i have with engineering is the same as any other engineer , in that i love to solve problems .
i love to figure things out , but the end result of what i 'm doing is really completely ambiguous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's pretty ambiguous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next piece that is going to come up is an example of a kind of machine that is fairly complex .
i gave myself the problem .
since i 'm always liking to solve problems , i gave myself the problem of turning a crank in one direction , and solving all of the mechanical problems for getting this little man to walk back and forth .
so , when i started this , i did n't have an overall plan for the machine , but i did have a sense of the gesture , and a sense of the shape and how it would occupy space .
and then it was a matter of starting from one point and sort of building to that final point .
that little gear there switches back and forth to change direction .
and that 's a little found object .
so a lot of the pieces that i 've made , they involve found objects .
and it really - it 's almost like doing visual puns all the time .
when i see objects , i imagine them in motion .
i imagine what can be said with them .
this next one here , " machine with wishbone , " it came about from playing with this wishbone after dinner .
you know , they say , never play with your food - but i always play with things .
so , i had this wishbone , and i thought , it 's kind of like a cowboy who 's been on his horse for too long .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i started to make him walk across the table , and i thought , " oh , i can make a little machine that will do that . "
so , i made this device , linked it up , and the wishbone walks .
and because the wishbone is bone - it 's animal - it 's sort of a point where i think we can enter into it .
and that 's the whole piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's about that big .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this kind of work is also very much like puppetry , where the found object is , in a sense , the puppet , and i 'm the puppeteer at first , because i 'm playing with an object .
but then i make the machine , which is sort of the stand-in for me , and it is able to achieve the action that i want .
the next piece i 'll show you is a much more conceptual thought , and it 's a little piece called " cory 's yellow chair . "
i had this image in my mind , when i saw my son 's little chair , and i saw it explode up and out .
and - so the way i saw this in my mind at first , was that the pieces would explode up and out with infinite speed , and the pieces would move far out , and then they would begin to be pulled back with a kind of a gravitational feel , to the point where they would approach infinite speed back to the center .
and they would coalesce for just a moment , so you could perceive that there was a chair there .
for me , it 's kind of a feeling about the fleetingness of the present moment , and i wanted to express that .
now , the machine is - in this case , it 's a real approximation of that , because obviously you ca n't move physical matter infinitely with infinite speed and have it stop instantaneously .
this whole thing is about four feet wide , and the chair itself is only about a few inches .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , this is a funny sort of conceptual thing , and yesterday we were talking about danny hillis ' " 10,000 year clock . "
so , we have a motor here on the left , and it goes through a gear train .
there are 12 pairs of 50:1 reductions , so that means that the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take two trillion years to turn once .
so i 've invented it in concrete , because it does n't really matter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because it could run all the time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , a completely different thought .
i 'm always imagining myself in different situations .
i 'm imagining myself as a machine .
what would i love ?
i would love to be bathed in oil .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this machine does nothing but just bathe itself in oil .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and it 's really , just sort of - for me , it was just really about the lusciousness of oil .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then , i got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art , and i did n't have any pieces .
but when she suggested to be in the show , this piece came to mind .
so , it 's sort of related , but you can see it 's much more overtly erotic .
and this one i call " machine with grease . "
it 's just continually ejaculating , and it 's - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - this is a happy machine , i 'll tell you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's definitely happy .
from an engineering point of view , this is just a little four-bar linkage .
and then again , this is a found object , a little fan that i found .
and i thought , what about the gesture of opening the fan , and how simply could i state something .
and , in a case like this , i 'm trying to make something which is clear but also not suggestive of any particular kind of animal or plant .
for me , the process is very important , because i 'm inventing machines , but i 'm also inventing tools to make machines , and the whole thing is all sort of wrapped up from the beginning .
so this is a little wire-bending tool .
after many years of bending gears with a pair of pliers , i made that tool , and then i made this other tool for sort of centering gears very quickly - sort of developing my own little world of technology .
my life completely changed when i found a spot welder .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that was that tool .
it completely changed what i could do .
now here , i 'm going to do a very poor job of silver soldering .
this is not the way they teach you to silver solder when you 're in school .
i just like , throw it in .
i mean , real jewelers put little bits of solder in .
so , that 's a finished gear .
when i moved to boston , i joined a group called the world sculpture racing society .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the idea , their premise was that we wanted to show pieces of sculpture on the street , and there 'd be no subjective decision about what was the best .
it would be - whatever came across the finish line first would be the winner .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i made - this is my first racing sculpture , and i thought , " oh , i 'm going to make a cart , and i 'm going to have it - i 'm going to have my hand writing ' faster , ' so as i run down the street , the cart 's going to talk to me and it 's going to go , ' faster , faster ! ' " so , that 's what it does .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then in the end , what i decided was every time you finish writing the word , i would stop and i would give the card to somebody on the side of the road .
so i would never win the race because i 'm always stopping .
but i had a lot of fun .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , i only have two and a half minutes - i 'm going to play this .
this is a piece that , for me , is in some ways the most complete kind of piece .
because when i was a kid , i also played a lot of guitar .
and when i had this thought , i was imagining that i would make - i would have a whole machine theater evening , where i would - you would have an audience , the curtain would open , and you 'd be entertained by machines on stage .
so , i imagined a very simple gestural dance that would be between a machine and just a very simple chair , and ...
when i 'm making these pieces , i 'm always trying to find a point where i 'm saying something very clearly and it 's very simple , but also at the same time it 's very ambiguous .
and i think there 's a point between simplicity and ambiguity which can allow a viewer to perhaps take something from it .
and that leads me to the thought that all of these pieces start off in my own mind , in my heart , and i do my best at finding ways to express them with materials , and it always feels really crude .
it 's always a struggle , but somehow i manage to sort of get this thought out into an object , and then it 's there , ok .
it means nothing at all .
the object itself just means nothing .
once it 's perceived , and someone brings it into their own mind , then there 's a cycle that has been completed .
and to me , that 's the most important thing because , ever since being a kid , i 've wanted to communicate my passion and love .
and that means the complete cycle of coming from inside , out to the physical , to someone perceiving it .
so i 'll just let this chair come down .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a tough job to do .
you know , when i looked at the profile of the audience here , with their connotations and design , in all its forms , and with so much and so many people working on collaborative and networks , and so on , that i wanted to tell you , i wanted to build an argument for primary education in a very specific context .
in order to do that in 20 minutes , i have to bring out four ideas - it 's like four pieces of a puzzle .
and if i succeed in doing that , maybe you would go back with the thought that you could build on , and perhaps help me do my work .
the first piece of the puzzle is remoteness and the quality of education .
now , by remoteness , i mean two or three different kinds of things .
of course , remoteness in its normal sense , which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center , you get to remoter areas .
what happens to education ?
the second , or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world , you have pockets , like slums , or shantytowns , or poorer areas , which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city , so it 's us and them .
what happens to education in that context ?
so keep both of those ideas of remoteness .
we made a guess . the guess was that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers .
if they do have , they can not retain those teachers .
they do not have good enough infrastructure .
and if they had some infrastructure , they have difficulty maintaining it .
but i wanted to check if this is true . so what i did last year was we hired a car , looked up on google , found a route into northern india from new delhi which , you know , which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers . drove out about 300 kilometers , and wherever we found a school , administered a set of standard tests , and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph .
the graph was interesting , although you need to consider it carefully .
i mean , this is a very small sample ; you should not generalize from it .
but it was quite obvious , quite clear , that for this particular route that i had taken , the remoter the school was , the worse its results seemed to be .
that seemed a little damning , and i tried to correlate it with things like infrastructure , or with the availability of electricity , and things like that .
to my surprise , it did not correlate .
it did not correlate with the size of classrooms .
it did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure .
it did not correlate with the poverty levels . it did not correlate .
but what happened was that when i administered a questionnaire to each of these schools , with one single question for the teachers - which was , " would you like to move to an urban , metropolitan area ? " - 69 percent of them said yes . and as you can see from that , they say yes just a little bit out of delhi , and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of delhi - because , you know , those are relatively better off areas - and then from 200 kilometers out of delhi , the answer is consistently yes .
i would imagine that a teacher who comes or walks into class every day thinking that , i wish i was in some other school , probably has a deep impact on what happens to the results .
so it looked as though teacher motivation and teacher migration was a powerfully correlated thing with what was happening in primary schools , as opposed to whether the children have enough to eat , and whether they are packed tightly into classrooms and that sort of thing . it appears that way .
when you take education and technology , then i find in the literature that , you know , things like websites , collaborative environments - you 've been listening to all that in the morning - it 's always piloted first in the best schools , the best urban schools , and , according to me , biases the result .
the literature - one part of it , the scientific literature - consistently blames et as being over-hyped and under-performing .
the teachers always say , well , it 's fine , but it 's too expensive for what it does .
because it 's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting , let 's say , 80 percent of whatever they could do .
you put in this new super-duper technology , and now they get 83 percent .
so the principal looks at it and says , 3 percent for 300,000 dollars ? forget it .
if you took the same technology and piloted it into one of those remote schools , where the score was 30 percent , and , let 's say , took that up to 40 percent - that will be a completely different thing .
so the relative change that et , educational technology , would make , would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top , but we seem to be doing it the other way about .
so i came to this conclusion that et should reach the underprivileged first , not the other way about .
and finally came the question of , how do you tackle teacher perception ?
whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology , the teacher 's first reaction is , you can not replace a teacher with a machine - it 's impossible .
i do n't know why it 's impossible , but , even for a moment , if you did assume that it 's impossible - i have a quotation from sir arthur c. clarke , the science fiction writer whom i met in colombo , and he said something which completely solves this problem .
he said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine , should be .
so , you know , it puts the teacher into a tough bind , you have to think .
anyway , so i 'm proposing that an alternative primary education , whatever alternative you want , is required where schools do n't exist , where schools are not good enough , where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough , for whatever reason .
if you happen to live in a part of the world where none of this applies , then you do n't need an alternative education .
so far i have n't come across such an area , except for one case . i wo n't name the area , but somewhere in the world people said , we do n't have this problem , because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools .
there are such areas , but - anyway , i 'd never heard that anywhere else .
i 'm going to talk about children and self-organization , and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like .
they 're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments .
i 'll have to really rush through this . they 're a set of experiments .
the first one was done in new delhi in 1999 .
and what we did over there was pretty much simple .
i had an office in those days which bordered a slum , an urban slum , so there was a dividing wall between our office and the urban slum .
they cut a hole inside that wall - which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall - and put a pretty powerful pc into that hole , sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end , a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall , put it on high-speed internet , put the internet explorer there , put it on altavista.com - in those days - and just left it there .
and this is what we saw .
so that was my office in iit . here 's the hole-in-the-wall .
about eight hours later , we found this kid .
to the right is this eight-year-old child who - and to his left is a six-year-old girl , who is not very tall .
and what he was doing was , he was teaching her to browse .
so it sort of raised more questions than it answered .
is this real ? does the language matter , because he 's not supposed to know english ?
will the computer last , or will they break it and steal it - and did anyone teach them ?
the last question is what everybody said , but you know , i mean , they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office , can you show me how to do it , and then somebody taught him .
so i took the experiment out of delhi and repeated it , this time in a city called shivpuri in the center of india , where i was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it was a warm day , and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building . this is the first kid who came there ; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout .
he came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad .
very quickly , he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen - and later on he told me , " i have never seen a television where you can do something . "
so he figured that out . it took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television .
and then , as he was doing that , he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad - you 'll see him do that .
he did that , and the internet explorer changed page .
eight minutes later , he looked from his hand to the screen , and he was browsing : he was going back and forth .
when that happened , he started calling all the neighborhood children , like , children would come and see what 's happening over here .
and by the evening of that day , 70 children were all browsing .
so eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there .
so we thought that this is what was happening : that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the internet . but under what circumstances ?
at this time there was a - the main question was about english .
people said , you know , you really ought to have this in indian languages .
so i said , have what , shall i translate the internet into some indian language ? that 's not possible .
so , it has to be the other way about .
but let 's see , how do the children tackle the english language ?
i took the experiment out to northeastern india , to a village called madantusi , where , for some reason , there was no english teacher , so the children had not learned english at all .
and i built a similar hole-in-the-wall .
one big difference in the villages , as opposed to the urban slums : there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk .
in the urban slums , the girls tend to stay away .
i left the computer there with lots of cds - i did n't have any internet - and came back three months later .
so when i came back there , i found these two kids , eight- and 12-year-olds , who were playing a game on the computer .
and as soon as they saw me they said , " we need a faster processor and a better mouse . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was real surprised .
you know , how on earth did they know all this ?
and they said , " well , we 've picked it up from the cds . "
so i said , " but how did you understand what 's going on over there ? "
so they said , " well , you 've left this machine which talks only in english , so we had to learn english . "
so then i measured , and they were using 200 english words with each other - mispronounced , but correct usage - words like exit , stop , find , save , that kind of thing , not only to do with the computer but in their day-to-day conversations .
so , madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier ; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to .
finally , i got some funding to try this experiment out to see if these results are replicable , if they happen everywhere else .
india is a good place to do such an experiment in , because we have all the ethnic diversities , all the - you know , the genetic diversity , all the racial diversities , and also all the socio-economic diversities .
so , i could actually choose samples to cover a cross section that would cover practically the whole world .
so i did this for almost five years , and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of india .
this is the himalayas . up in the north , very cold .
i also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors , and i was using regular , normal pcs , so i needed different climates , for which india is also great , because we have very cold , very hot , and so on .
this is the desert to the west . near the pakistan border .
and you see here a little clip of - one of these villages - the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the english alphabet .
then to central india - very warm , moist , fishing villages , where humidity is a very big killer of electronics .
so we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power , so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running .
i want to just cut this short . we did this over and over again .
this sequence is also nice . this is a small child , a six-year-old , telling his eldest sister what to do .
and this happens very often with these computers , that the younger children are found teaching the older ones .
what did we find ? we found that six- to 13-year-olds can self-instruct in a connected environment , irrespective of anything that we could measure .
so if they have access to the computer , they will teach themselves , including intelligence .
i could n't find a single correlation with anything , but it had to be in groups .
and that may be of great , you know , interest to this group , because all of you are talking about groups .
so here was the power of what a group of children can do , if you lift the adult intervention .
just a quick idea of the measurements .
we took standard statistical techniques , so i 'm going to not talk about that .
but we got a clean learning curve , almost exactly the same as what you would get in a school .
i 'll leave it at that , because , i mean , it sort of says it all , does n't it ?
what could they learn to do ?
basic windows functions , browsing , painting , chatting and email , games and educational material , music downloads , playing video .
in short , what all of us do .
and over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer .
so , how do they do that ?
if you calculated the actual time of access , it would work out to minutes per day , so that 's not how it 's happening .
what you have , actually , is there is one child operating the computer .
and surrounding him are usually three other children , who are advising him on what they should do .
if you test them , all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them .
around these four are usually a group of about 16 children , who are also advising , usually wrongly , about everything that 's going on on the computer .
and all of them also will clear a test given on that subject .
so they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing .
it seems counter-intuitive to adult learning , but remember , eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told , do n't do this , you know , do n't touch the whiskey bottle .
so what does the eight-year-old do ?
he observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched .
and if you tested him , he would answer every question correctly on that topic .
so , they seem to be able to acquire very quickly .
so what was the conclusion over the six years of work ?
it was that primary education can happen on its own , or parts of it can happen on its own .
it does not have to be imposed from the top downwards .
it could perhaps be a self-organizing system , so that was the second bit that i wanted to tell you , that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective .
the third piece was on values , and again , to put it very briefly , i conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over india , and asked them - i gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions .
we got all sorts of opinions . yes , no or i do n't know .
i simply took those questions where i got 50 percent yeses and 50 percent noes - so i was able to get a collection of 16 such statements .
these were areas where the children were clearly confused , because half said yes and half said no .
a typical example being , " sometimes it is necessary to tell lies . "
they do n't have a way to determine which way to answer this question ; perhaps none of us do .
so i leave you with this third question .
can technology alter the acquisition of values ?
finally , self-organizing systems , about which , again , i wo n't say too much because you 've been hearing all about it .
natural systems are all self-organizing : galaxies , molecules , cells , organisms , societies - except for the debate about an intelligent designer .
but at this point in time , as far as science goes , it 's self-organization .
but other examples are traffic jams , stock market , society and disaster recovery , terrorism and insurgency .
and you know about the internet-based self-organizing systems .
so here are my four sentences then .
remoteness affects the quality of education .
educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first , and other areas later .
values are acquired ; doctrine and dogma are imposed - the two opposing mechanisms .
and learning is most likely a self-organizing system .
if you put all the four together , then it gives - according to me - it gives us a goal , a vision , for educational technology .
an educational technology and pedagogy that is digital , automatic , fault-tolerant , minimally invasive , connected and self-organized .
as educationists , we have never asked for technology ; we keep borrowing it .
powerpoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology , but it was not meant for education , it was meant for making boardroom presentations .
we borrowed it . video conferencing . the personal computer itself .
i think it 's time that the educationists made their own specs , and i have such a set of specs . this is a brief look at that .
and such a set of specs should produce the technology to address remoteness , values and violence .
so i thought i 'd give it a name - why do n't we call it " outdoctrination . "
and could this be a goal for educational technology in the future ?
so i want to leave that as a thought with you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- companies are losing control .
what happens on wall street no longer stays on wall street .
what happens in vegas ends up on youtube . -lrb- laughter -rrb- reputations are volatile . loyalties are fickle .
management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff . -lrb- laughter -rrb- a recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm .
however , in the same survey , only four percent of employees agreed .
companies are losing control of their customers and their employees .
but are they really ?
i 'm a marketer , and as a marketer , i know that i 've never really been in control .
your brand is what other people say about you when you 're not in the room , the saying goes .
hyperconnectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now , 24/7 .
they can listen and join the conversation .
in fact , they have more control over the loss of control than ever before .
they can design for it . but how ?
first of all , they can give employees and customers more control .
they can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas , knowledge , content , designs and product .
they can give them more control over pricing , which is what the band radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album " in rainbows . " buyers could determine the price , but the offer was exclusive , and only stood for a limited period of time .
the album sold more copies than previous releases of the band .
the danish chocolate company anthon berg opened a so-called " generous store " in copenhagen .
it asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones .
it turned transactions into interactions , and generosity into a currency .
companies can even give control to hackers .
when microsoft kinect came out , the motion-controlled add-on to its xbox gaming console , it immediately drew the attention of hackers .
microsoft first fought off the hacks , but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits .
the sense of co-ownership , the free publicity , the added value , all helped drive sales .
the ultimate empowerment of customers is to ask them not to buy .
outdoor clothier patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out ebay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones .
in an even more radical stance against consumerism , the company placed a " do n't buy this jacket " advertisement during the peak of shopping season .
it may have jeopardized short-term sales , but it builds lasting , long-term loyalty based on shared values .
research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive .
the brazilian company semco group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries .
hulu and netflix , among other companies , have open vacation policies .
companies can give people more control , but they can also give them less control .
traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior , but when everything is consistent and standardized , how do you create meaningful experiences ?
giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier .
take the travel service nextpedition .
nextpedition turns the trip into a game , with surprising twists and turns along the way .
it does not tell the traveler where she 's going until the very last minute , and information is provided just in time . similarly , dutch airline klm launched a surprise campaign , seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination .
u.k.-based interflora monitored twitter for users who were having a bad day , and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers .
is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time ? yes .
force them to help others .
a recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity .
at frog , the company i work for , we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees , helping them get to know each other fast .
by applying a strict process , we give them less control , less choice , but we enable more and richer social interactions .
companies are the makers of their fortunes , and like all of us , they are utterly exposed to serendipity .
that should make them more humble , more vulnerable and more human .
at the end of the day , as hyperconnectivity and transparency expose companies ' behavior in broad daylight , staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition .
or as the ballet dancer alonzo king said , " what 's interesting about you is you . "
for the true selves of companies to come through , openness is paramount , but radical openness is not a solution , because when everything is open , nothing is open .
" a smile is a door that is half open and half closed , " the author jennifer egan wrote .
companies can give their employees and customers more control or less . they can worry about how much openness is good for them , and what needs to stay closed .
or they can simply smile , and remain open to all possibilities .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days , talking to groups of students and professionals , and everywhere i 'm finding that i hear similar themes .
on the one hand , people say , " the time for change is now . "
they want to be part of it .
they talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning .
but on the other hand , i hear people talking about fear , a sense of risk-aversion .
they say , " i really want to follow a life of purpose , but i do n't know where to start .
i do n't want to disappoint my family or friends . "
i work in global poverty .
and they say , " i want to work in global poverty , but what will it mean about my career ?
will i be marginalized ?
will i not make enough money ?
will i never get married or have children ? "
and as a woman who did n't get married until i was a lot older - and i 'm glad i waited - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and has no children , i look at these young people and i say , " your job is not to be perfect .
your job is only to be human .
and nothing important happens in life without a cost . "
these conversations really reflect what 's happening at the national and international level .
our leaders and ourselves want everything , but we do n't talk about the costs .
we do n't talk about the sacrifice .
one of my favorite quotes from literature was written by tillie olsen , the great american writer from the south .
in a short story called " oh yes , " she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little african american girl , and she looks at her child with a sense of pride , but she also wonders , what price will she pay ?
" better immersion than to live untouched . "
but the real question is , what is the cost of not daring ?
what is the cost of not trying ?
i 've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion .
one woman i knew who was a fellow at a program that i ran at the rockefeller foundation was named ingrid washinawatok .
she was a leader of the menominee tribe , a native american peoples .
and when we would gather as fellows , she would push us to think about how the elders in native american culture make decisions .
and she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future , looking at them from the earth , and they would look at them , holding them as stewards for that future .
ingrid understood that we are connected to each other , not only as human beings , but to every living thing on the planet .
and tragically , in 1999 , when she was in colombia working with the u 'wa people , focused on preserving their culture and language , she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the farc .
and whenever we would gather the fellows after that , we would leave a chair empty for her spirit .
and more than a decade later , when i talk to ngo fellows , whether in trenton , new jersey or the office of the white house , and we talk about ingrid , they all say that they 're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life 's mission .
and when we think about legacy , i can think of no more powerful one , despite how short her life was .
and i 've been touched by cambodian women - beautiful women , women who held the tradition of the classical dance in cambodia .
and i met them in the early ' 90s .
in the 1970s , under the pol pot regime , the khmer rouge killed over a million people , and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals , the artists , the dancers .
and at the end of the war , there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living .
and the women , who i was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors , told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps .
they said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance , hoping that others were alive and doing the same .
and one woman stood there with this perfect carriage , her hands at her side , and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was .
and these big tears fell down her face , but she never lifted her hands to move them .
and the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls , because they had grown too old already , but the next generation .
and i sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands - beautiful rhythms - as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them , wearing these beautiful silk colors .
and i thought , after all this atrocity , this is how human beings really pray .
because they 're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future .
and what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we can not measure .
i also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership .
and i have learned that power , particularly in its absolute form , is an equal opportunity provider .
in 1986 , i moved to rwanda , and i worked with a very small group of rwandan women to start that country 's first microfinance bank .
and one of the women was agnes - there on your extreme left - she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in rwanda , and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of rwanda .
we built this institution based on social justice , gender equity , this idea of empowering women .
but agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end .
and though she had been part of building a liberal party , a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance , about three months before the genocide , she switched parties and joined the extremist party , hutu power , and she became the minister of justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women .
she was convicted of category one crimes of genocide .
and i would visit her in the prisons , sitting side-by-side , knees touching , and i would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us , but that maybe it 's not monsters so much , but the broken parts of ourselves , sadnesses , secret shame , and that ultimately it 's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts , those fragments , if you will , and to make us look at other beings , human beings , as lesser than ourselves - and in the extreme , to do terrible things .
and there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men .
i 've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male .
and so in a gathering where we 're focused on women , while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them , we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered , unable to provide .
and that , when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job , no education , no possibility , well then it 's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun .
sometimes very small investments can release enormous , infinite potential that exists in all of us .
one of the acumen fund fellows at my organization , suraj sudhakar , has what we call moral imagination - the ability to put yourself in another person 's shoes and lead from that perspective .
and he 's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world , kibera .
and they 're incredible guys .
and together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums , and they 're reading many ted authors and liking it .
and then they created a business plan competition .
then they decided that they would do tedx 's .
and i have learned so much from chris and kevin and alex and herbert and all of these young men .
alex , in some ways , said it best .
he said , " we used to feel like nobodies , but now we feel like somebodies . "
and i think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link .
what we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other .
and the reason these young guys told me that they 're doing these tedx 's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on hiv , or at best , microfinance .
and they wanted to celebrate what 's beautiful about kibera and mathare - the photojournalists and the creatives , the graffiti artists , the teachers and the entrepreneurs .
and they 're doing it .
and my hat 's off to you in kibera .
my own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive .
at acumen fund , we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital - money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity , but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions .
we leave our money for 10 to 15 years , and when we get it back , we invest in other innovations that focus on change .
i know it works .
we 've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies , and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets .
this year alone , they 've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing , emergency services , solar energy , so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems .
patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions , easy categories , because we do n't see profit as a blunt instrument .
but we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit .
and ultimately , we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact , measuring what is most important to us .
and my dream is we 'll have a world one day where we do n't just honor those who take money and make more money from it , but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways .
and it 's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change .
last may i had this extraordinary 24-hour period where i saw two visions of the world living side-by-side - one based on violence and the other on transcendence .
i happened to be in lahore , pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers .
and the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of islam who fundamentalists do n't believe are fully muslim .
and not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives , but they did more , because they created more hatred , more rage , more fear and certainly despair .
but less than 24 hours , i was 13 miles away from those mosques , visiting one of our acumen investees , an incredible man , jawad aslam , who dares to live a life of immersion .
born and raised in baltimore , he studied real estate , worked in commercial real estate , and after 9/11 decided he was going to pakistan to make a difference .
for two years , he hardly made any money , a tiny stipend , but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named tasneem saddiqui .
and he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital , but he continued to pay a price .
he stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes .
it took almost two years just to register the land .
but i saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person 's action .
today , 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community .
and there 's schools and clinics and shops .
but there 's only one mosque .
and so i asked jawad , " how do you guys navigate ? this is a really diverse community .
who gets to use the mosque on fridays ? "
he said , " long story .
it was hard , it was a difficult road , but ultimately the leaders of the community came together , realizing we only have each other .
and we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams , and those imams would take turns , they would rotate who would say friday prayer .
but the whole community , all the different sects , including shi 'a and sunni , would sit together and pray . "
we need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds .
we face huge issues as a world - the financial crisis , global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness .
and every day we have a choice .
we can take the easier road , the more cynical road , which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was , a fear of each other , distancing and blame .
or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation , transcendence , compassion and love , but also accountability and justice .
i had the great honor of working with the child psychologist dr. robert coles , who stood up for change during the civil rights movement in the united states .
and he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named ruby bridges , the first child to desegregate schools in the south - in this case , new orleans .
and he said that every day this six-year-old , dressed in her beautiful dress , would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily , calling her a monster , threatening to poison her - distorted faces .
and every day he would watch her , and it looked like she was talking to the people .
and he would say , " ruby , what are you saying ? "
and she 'd say , " i 'm not talking . "
and finally he said , " ruby , i see that you 're talking .
what are you saying ? "
and she said , " dr. coles , i am not talking ; i 'm praying . "
and he said , " well , what are you praying ? "
and she said , " i 'm praying , ' father , forgive them , for they know not what they are doing . " ' at age six , this child was living a life of immersion , and her family paid a price for it .
but she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education .
my final story is about a young , beautiful man named josephat byaruhanga , who was another acumen fund fellow , who hails from uganda , a farming community .
and we placed him in a company in western kenya , just 200 miles away .
and he said to me at the end of his year , " jacqueline , it was so humbling , because i thought as a farmer and as an african i would understand how to transcend culture .
but especially when i was talking to the african women , i sometimes made these mistakes - it was so hard for me to learn how to listen . "
and he said , " so i conclude that , in many ways , leadership is like a panicle of rice .
because at the height of the season , at the height of its powers , it 's beautiful , it 's green , it nourishes the world , it reaches to the heavens . "
and he said , " but right before the harvest , it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came . "
we need leaders .
we ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can , ourselves , extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man , woman and child on this planet .
and we need to have the humility to recognize that we can not do it alone .
robert kennedy once said that " few of us have the greatness to bend history itself , but each of us can work to change a small portion of events . "
and it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written .
our lives are so short , and our time on this planet is so precious , and all we have is each other .
so may each of you live lives of immersion .
they wo n't necessarily be easy lives , but in the end , it is all that will sustain us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , i do n't usually like cartoons , i do n't think many of them are funny , i find them weird . but i love this cartoon from the new yorker .
-lrb- text : never , ever think outside the box . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the guy is telling the cat , do n't you dare think outside the box .
well , i 'm afraid i used to be the cat .
i always wanted to be outside the box .
and it 's partly because i came to this field from a different background , chemist and a bacterial geneticist .
so , what people were saying to me about the cause of cancer , sources of cancer , or , for that matter , why you are who you are , did n't make sense .
so , let me quickly try and tell you why i thought that and how i went about it .
so , to begin with , however , i have to give you a very , very quick lesson in developmental biology , with apologies to those of you who know some biology .
so , when your mom and dad met , there is a fertilized egg , that round thing with that little blip .
it grows and then it grows , and then it makes this handsome man .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this guy , with all the cells in his body , all have the same genetic information .
so how did his nose become his nose , his elbow his elbow , and why does n't he get up one morning and have his nose turn into his foot ?
it could . it has the genetic information .
you all remember , dolly , it came from a single mammary cell .
so , why does n't it do it ?
so , have a guess of how many cells he has in his body .
somewhere between 10 trillion to 70 trillion cells in his body .
trillion !
now , how did these cells , all with the same genetic material , make all those tissues ?
and so , the question i raised before becomes even more interesting if you thought about the enormity of this in every one of your bodies .
now , the dominant cancer theory would say that there is a single oncogene in a single cancer cell , and it would make you a cancer victim .
well , this did not make sense to me .
do you even know how a trillion looks ?
now , let 's look at it .
there it comes , these zeroes after zeroes after zeroes .
now , if .0001 of these cells got mutated , and .00001 got cancer , you will be a lump of cancer .
you will have cancer all over you . and you 're not .
why not ?
so , i decided over the years , because of a series of experiments that this is because of context and architecture .
and let me quickly tell you some crucial experiment that was able to actually show this .
to begin with , i came to work with this virus that causes that ugly tumor in the chicken .
rous discovered this in 1911 .
it was the first cancer virus discovered , and when i call it " oncogene , " meaning " cancer gene . "
so , he made a filtrate , he took this filter which was the liquid after he passed the tumor through a filter , and he injected it to another chicken , and he got another tumor .
so , scientists were very excited , and they said , a single oncogene can do it .
all you need is a single oncogene .
so , they put the cells in cultures , chicken cells , dumped the virus on it , and it would pile up , and they would say , this is malignant and this is normal .
and again this did n't make sense to me .
so for various reasons , we took this oncogene , attached it to a blue marker , and we injected it into the embryos .
now look at that . there is that beautiful feather in the embryo .
every one of those blue cells are a cancer gene inside a cancer cell , and they 're part of the feather .
so , when we dissociated the feather and put it in a dish , we got a mass of blue cells .
so , in the chicken you get a tumor , in the embryo you do n't , you dissociate , you put it in a dish , you get another tumor .
what does that mean ?
that means that microenvironment and the context which surrounds those cells actually are telling the cancer gene and the cancer cell what to do .
now , let 's take a normal example .
the normal example , let 's take the human mammary gland .
i work on breast cancer .
so , here is a lovely human breast .
and many of you know how it looks , except that inside that breast , there are all these pretty , developing , tree-like structures .
so , we decided that what we like to do is take just a bit of that mammary gland , which is called an " acinus , " where there are all these little things inside the breast where the milk goes , and the end of the nipple comes through that little tube when the baby sucks .
and we said , wonderful ! look at this pretty structure .
we want to make this a structure , and ask the question , how do the cells do that ?
so , we took the red cells - you see the red cells are surrounded by blue , other cells that squeeze them , and behind it is material that people thought was mainly inert , and it was just having a structure to keep the shape , and so we first photographed it with the electron microscope years and years ago , and you see this cell is actually quite pretty .
it has a bottom , it has a top , it is secreting gobs and gobs of milk , because it just came from an early pregnant mouse .
you take these cells , you put them in a dish , and within three days , they look like that .
they completely forget .
so you take them out , you put them in a dish , they do n't make milk . they completely forget .
for example , here is a lovely yellow droplet of milk on the left , there is nothing on the right .
look at the nuclei . the nuclei in the cell on the left is in the animal , the one on the right is in a dish .
they are completely different from each other .
so , what does this tell you ?
this tells you that here also , context overrides .
in different contexts , cells do different things .
but how does context signal ?
so , einstein said that " for an idea that does not first seem insane , there is no hope . "
so , you can imagine the amount of skepticism i received - could n't get money , could n't do a whole lot of other things , but i 'm so glad it all worked out .
so , we made a section of the mammary gland of the mouse , and all those lovely acini are there , every one of those with the red around them are an acinus , and we said okay , we are going to try and make this , and i said , maybe that red stuff around the acinus that people think there 's just a structural scaffold , maybe it has information , maybe it tells the cells what to do , maybe it tells the nucleus what to do .
so i said , extracellular matrix , which is this stuff called ecm , signals and actually tells the cells what to do .
so , we decided to make things that would look like that .
we found some gooey material that had the right extracellular matrix in it , we put the cells in it , and lo and behold , in about four days , they got reorganized and on the right , is what we can make in culture .
on the left is what 's inside the animal , we call it in vivo , and the one in culture was full of milk , the lovely red there is full of milk .
so , we got milk , for the american audience .
all right . and here is this beautiful human cell , and you can imagine that here also , context goes .
so , what do we do now ?
i made a radical hypothesis .
i said , if it 's true that architecture is dominant , architecture restored to a cancer cell should make the cancer cell think it 's normal .
could this be done ?
so , we tried it .
in order to do that , however , we needed to have a method of distinguishing normal from malignant , and on the left is the single normal cell , human breast , put in three-dimensional gooey gel that has extracellular matrix , it makes all these beautiful structures .
on the right , you see it looks very ugly , the cells continue to grow , the normal ones stop .
and you see here in higher magnification the normal acinus and the ugly tumor .
so we said , what is on the surface of these ugly tumors ?
could we calm them down - they were signaling like crazy and they have pathways all messed up - and make them to the level of the normal ?
well , it was wonderful . boggles my mind .
this is what we got .
we can revert the malignant phenotype .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and in order to show you that the malignant phenotype i did n't just choose one , here are little movies , sort of fuzzy , but you see that on the left are the malignant cells , all of them are malignant , we add one single inhibitor in the beginning , and look what happens , they all look like that .
we inject them into the mouse , the ones on the right , and none of them would make tumors .
we inject the other ones in the mouse , 100 percent tumors .
so , it 's a new way of thinking about cancer , it 's a hopeful way of thinking about cancer .
we should be able to be dealing with these things at this level , and these conclusions say that growth and malignant behavior is regulated at the level of tissue organization and that the tissue organization is dependent on the extracellular matrix and the microenvironment .
all right , thus form and function interact dynamically and reciprocally .
and here is another five seconds of repose , is my mantra . form and function .
and of course , we now ask , where do we go now ?
we 'd like to take this kind of thinking into the clinic .
but before we do that , i 'd like you to think that at any given time when you 're sitting there , in your 70 trillion cells , the extracellular matrix signaling to your nucleus , the nucleus is signaling to your extracellular matrix and this is how your balance is kept and restored .
we have made a lot of discoveries , we have shown that extracellular matrix talks to chromatin .
we have shown that there 's little pieces of dna on the specific genes of the mammary gland that actually respond to extracellular matrix .
it has taken many years , but it has been very rewarding .
and before i get to the next slide , i have to tell you that there are so many additional discoveries to be made .
there is so much mystery we do n't know .
and i always say to the students and post-docs i lecture to , do n't be arrogant , because arrogance kills curiosity .
curiosity and passion .
you need to always think , what else needs to be discovered ?
and maybe my discovery needs to be added to or maybe it needs to be changed .
so , we have now made an amazing discovery , a post-doc in the lab who is a physicist asked me , what do the cells do when you put them in ?
what do they do in the beginning when they do ?
i said , i do n't know , we could n't look at them .
we did n't have high images in the old days .
so she , being an imager and a physicist , did this incredible thing .
this is a single human breast cell in three dimensions .
look at it . it 's constantly doing this .
has a coherent movement .
you put the cancer cells there , and they do go all over , they do this . they do n't do this .
and when we revert the cancer cell , it again does this .
absolutely boggles my mind .
so the cell acts like an embryo . what an exciting thing .
so i 'd like to finish with a poem .
well i used to love english literature , and i debated in college , which one should i do ?
and unfortunately or fortunately , chemistry won .
but here is a poem from yeats . i 'll just read you the last two lines .
it 's called " among the school children . "
" o body swayed to music / o brightening glance / how -lsb- can we know -rsb- the dancer from the dance ? "
and here is merce cunningham , i was fortunate to dance with him when i was younger , and here he is a dancer , and while he is dancing , he is both the dancer and the dance .
the minute he stops , we have neither .
so it 's like form and function .
now , i 'd like to show you a current picture of my group .
i have been fortunate to have had these magnificant students and post-docs who have taught me so much , and i have had many of these groups come and go .
they are the future and i try to make them not be afraid of being the cat and being told , do n't think outside the box .
and i 'd like to leave you with this thought .
on the left is water coming through the shore , taken from a nasa satellite .
on the right , there is a coral .
now if you take the mammary gland and spread it and take the fat away , on a dish it looks like that .
do they look the same ? do they have the same patterns ?
why is it that nature keeps doing that over and over again ?
and i 'd like to submit to you that we have sequenced the human genome , we know everything about the sequence of the gene , the language of the gene , the alphabet of the gene , but we know nothing , but nothing , about the language and alphabet of form .
so , it 's a wonderful new horizon , it 's a wonderful thing to discover for the young and the passionate old , and that 's me .
so go to it !
-lrb- applause -rrb- sheryl shade : hi , aimee . aimee mullins : hi .
ss : aimee and i thought we 'd just talk a little bit , and i wanted her to tell all of you what makes her a distinctive athlete .
am : well , for those of you who have seen the picture in the little bio - it might have given it away - i 'm a double amputee , and i was born without fibulas in both legs .
i was amputated at age one , and i 've been running like hell ever since , all over the place .
ss : well , why do n't you tell them how you got to georgetown - why do n't we start there ?
why do n't we start there ?
am : i 'm a senior in georgetown in the foreign service program .
i won a full academic scholarship out of high school .
they pick three students out of the nation every year to get involved in international affairs , and so i won a full ride to georgetown and i 've been there for four years . love it .
ss : when aimee got there , she decided that she 's , kind of , curious about track and field , so she decided to call someone and start asking about it .
so , why do n't you tell that story ?
am : yeah . well , i guess i 've always been involved in sports .
i played softball for five years growing up .
i skied competitively throughout high school , and i got a little restless in college because i was n't doing anything for about a year or two sports-wise .
and i 'd never competed on a disabled level , you know - i 'd always competed against other able-bodied athletes .
that 's all i 'd ever known .
in fact , i 'd never even met another amputee until i was 17 .
and i heard that they do these track meets with all disabled runners , and i figured , " oh , i do n't know about this , but before i judge it , let me go see what it 's all about . "
so , i booked myself a flight to boston in ' 95 , 19 years old and definitely the dark horse candidate at this race . i 'd never done it before .
i went out on a gravel track a couple of weeks before this meet to see how far i could run , and about 50 meters was enough for me , panting and heaving .
and i had these legs that were made of a wood and plastic compound , attached with velcro straps - big , thick , five-ply wool socks on - you know , not the most comfortable things , but all i 'd ever known .
and i 'm up there in boston against people wearing legs made of all things - carbon graphite and , you know , shock absorbers in them and all sorts of things - and they 're all looking at me like , ok , we know who 's not going to win this race .
and , i mean , i went up there expecting - i do n't know what i was expecting - but , you know , when i saw a man who was missing an entire leg go up to the high jump , hop on one leg to the high jump and clear it at six feet , two inches ...
dan o 'brien jumped 5 ' 11 " in ' 96 in atlanta , i mean , if it just gives you a comparison of - these are truly accomplished athletes , without qualifying that word " athlete . "
and so i decided to give this a shot : heart pounding , i ran my first race and i beat the national record-holder by three hundredths of a second , and became the new national record-holder on my first try out .
and , you know , people said , " aimee , you know , you 've got speed - you 've got natural speed - but you do n't have any skill or finesse going down that track .
you were all over the place .
we all saw how hard you were working . "
and so i decided to call the track coach at georgetown .
and i thank god i did n't know just how huge this man is in the track and field world .
he 's coached five olympians , and the man 's office is lined from floor to ceiling with all america certificates of all these athletes he 's coached .
he 's just a rather intimidating figure .
and i called him up and said , " listen , i ran one race and i won ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i want to see if i can , you know - i need to just see if i can sit in on some of your practices , see what drills you do and whatever . "
that 's all i wanted - just two practices .
" can i just sit in and see what you do ? "
and he said , " well , we should meet first , before we decide anything . "
you know , he 's thinking , " what am i getting myself into ? "
so , i met the man , walked in his office , and saw these posters and magazine covers of people he has coached .
and we got to talking , and it turned out to be a great partnership because he 'd never coached a disabled athlete , so therefore he had no preconceived notions of what i was or was n't capable of , and i 'd never been coached before .
so this was like , " here we go - let 's start on this trip . "
so he started giving me four days a week of his lunch break , his free time , and i would come up to the track and train with him .
so that 's how i met frank .
that was fall of ' 95 . but then , by the time that winter was rolling around , he said , " you know , you 're good enough .
you can run on our women 's track team here . "
and i said , " no , come on . "
and he said , " no , no , really . you can .
you can run with our women 's track team . "
in the spring of 1996 , with my goal of making the u.s. paralympic team that may coming up full speed , i joined the women 's track team .
and no disabled person had ever done that - run at a collegiate level .
so i do n't know , it started to become an interesting mix .
ss : well , on your way to the olympics , a couple of memorable events happened at georgetown .
why do n't you just tell them ?
am : yes , well , you know , i 'd won everything as far as the disabled meets - everything i competed in - and , you know , training in georgetown and knowing that i was going to have to get used to seeing the backs of all these women 's shirts - you know , i 'm running against the next flo-jo - and they 're all looking at me like , " hmm , what 's , you know , what 's going on here ? "
and putting on my georgetown uniform and going out there and knowing that , you know , in order to become better - and i 'm already the best in the country - you know , you have to train with people who are inherently better than you .
and i went out there and made it to the big east , which was sort of the championship race at the end of the season .
it was really , really hot .
and it 's the first - i had just gotten these new sprinting legs that you see in that bio , and i did n't realize at that time that the amount of sweating i would be doing in the sock - it actually acted like a lubricant and i 'd be , kind of , pistoning in the socket .
and at about 85 meters of my 100 meters sprint , in all my glory , i came out of my leg .
like , i almost came out of it , in front of , like , 5,000 people .
and i , i mean , was just mortified - because i was signed up for the 200 , you know , which went off in a half hour .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i went to my coach : " please , do n't make me do this . "
i ca n't do this in front of all those people . my legs will come off .
and if it came off at 85 there 's no way i 'm going 200 meters .
and he just sat there like this .
my pleas fell on deaf ears , thank god .
because you know , the man is from brooklyn ; he 's a big man . he says , " aimee , so what if your leg falls off ?
you pick it up , you put the damn thing back on , and finish the goddamn race ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and i did . so , he kept me in line .
he kept me on the right track .
ss : so , then aimee makes it to the 1996 paralympics , and she 's all excited . her family 's coming down - it 's a big deal .
it 's now two years that you 've been running ?
am : no , a year .
ss : a year . and why do n't you tell them what happened right before you go run your race ?
am : okay , well , atlanta .
the paralympics , just for a little bit of clarification , are the olympics for people with physical disabilities - amputees , persons with cerebral palsy , and wheelchair athletes - as opposed to the special olympics , which deals with people with mental disabilities .
so , here we are , a week after the olympics and down at atlanta , and i 'm just blown away by the fact that just a year ago , i got out on a gravel track and could n't run 50 meters .
and so , here i am - never lost .
i set new records at the u.s. nationals - the olympic trials - that may , and was sure that i was coming home with the gold .
i was also the only , what they call " bilateral bk " - below the knee .
i was the only woman who would be doing the long jump .
i had just done the long jump , and a guy who was missing two legs came up to me and says , " how do you do that ? you know , we 're supposed to have a planar foot , so we ca n't get off on the springboard . "
i said , " well , i just did it . no one told me that . "
so , it 's funny - i 'm three inches within the world record - and kept on from that point , you know , so i 'm signed up in the long jump - signed up ?
no , i made it for the long jump and the 100-meter .
and i 'm sure of it , you know ?
i made the front page of my hometown paper that i delivered for six years , you know ?
it was , like , this is my time for shine .
and we 're at the trainee warm-up track , which is a few blocks away from the olympic stadium .
these legs that i was on , which i 'll take out right now - i was the first person in the world on these legs .
i was the guinea pig . , i 'm telling you , this was , like - talk about a tourist attraction .
everyone was taking pictures - " what is this girl running on ? "
and i 'm always looking around , like , where is my competition ?
it 's my first international meet .
i tried to get it out of anybody i could , you know , " who am i running against here ? "
" oh , aimee , we 'll have to get back to you on that one . "
i wanted to find out times .
" do n't worry , you 're doing great . "
this is 20 minutes before my race in the olympic stadium , and they post the heat sheets . and i go over and look .
and my fastest time , which was the world record , was 15.77 .
then i 'm looking : the next lane , lane two , is 12.8 .
lane three is 12.5 . lane four is 12.2 . i said , " what 's going on ? "
and they shove us all into the shuttle bus , and all the women there are missing a hand .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'm just , like - they 're all looking at me like ' which one of these is not like the other , ' you know ?
i 'm sitting there , like , " oh , my god . oh , my god . "
you know , i 'd never lost anything , like , whether it would be the scholarship or , you know , i 'd won five golds when i skied . in everything , i came in first .
and georgetown - that was great .
i was losing , but it was the best training because this was atlanta .
here we are , like , crème de la crème , and there is no doubt about it , that i 'm going to lose big .
and , you know , i 'm just thinking , " oh , my god , my whole family got in a van and drove down here from pennsylvania . "
and , you know , i was the only female u.s. sprinter .
so they call us out and , you know - " ladies , you have one minute . "
and i remember putting my blocks in and just feeling horrified because there was just this murmur coming over the crowd , like , the ones who are close enough to the starting line to see .
and i 'm like , " i know ! look ! this is n't right . "
and i 'm thinking that 's my last card to play here ; if i 'm not going to beat these girls , i 'm going to mess their heads a little , you know ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , it was definitely the " rocky iv " sensation of me versus germany , and everyone else - estonia and poland - was in this heat .
and the gun went off , and all i remember was finishing last and fighting back tears of frustration and incredible - incredible - this feeling of just being overwhelmed .
and i had to think , " why did i do this ? "
if i had won everything - but it was like , what was the point ?
all this training - i had transformed my life .
i became a collegiate athlete , you know . i became an olympic athlete .
and it made me really think about how the achievement was getting there .
i mean , the fact that i set my sights , just a year and three months before , on becoming an olympic athlete and saying , " here 's my life going in this direction - and i want to take it here for a while , and just seeing how far i could push it . "
and the fact that i asked for help - how many people jumped on board ?
how many people gave of their time and their expertise , and their patience , to deal with me ?
and that was this collective glory - that there was , you know , 50 people behind me that had joined in this incredible experience of going to atlanta .
so , i apply this sort of philosophy now to everything i do : sitting back and realizing the progression , how far you 've come at this day to this goal , you know .
it 's important to focus on a goal , i think , but also recognize the progression on the way there and how you 've grown as a person .
that 's the achievement , i think . that 's the real achievement .
ss : why do n't you show them your legs ?
am : oh , sure .
ss : you know , show us more than one set of legs .
am : well , these are my pretty legs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , these are my cosmetic legs , actually , and they 're absolutely beautiful .
you 've got to come up and see them .
there are hair follicles on them , and i can paint my toenails .
and , seriously , like , i can wear heels .
like , you guys do n't understand what that 's like to be able to just go into a shoe store and buy whatever you want .
ss : you got to pick your height ?
am : i got to pick my height , exactly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- patrick ewing , who played for georgetown in the ' 80s , comes back every summer .
and i had incessant fun making fun of him in the training room because he 'd come in with foot injuries .
i 'm like , " get it off ! do n't worry about it , you know .
you can be eight feet tall . just take them off . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he did n't find it as humorous as i did , anyway .
ok , now , these are my sprinting legs , made of carbon graphite , like i said , and i 've got to make sure i 've got the right socket .
no , i 've got so many legs in here .
these are - do you want to hold that actually ?
that 's another leg i have for , like , tennis and softball .
it has a shock absorber in it so it , like , " shhhh , " makes this neat sound when you jump around on it . all right .
and then this is the silicon sheath i roll over , to keep it on . which , when i sweat , you know , i 'm pistoning out of it .
ss : are you a different height ?
am : in these ?
ss : in these .
am : i do n't know . i do n't think so .
i may be a little taller . i actually can put both of them on .
ss : she ca n't really stand on these legs . she has to be moving , so ...
am : yeah , i definitely have to be moving , and balance is a little bit of an art in them .
but without having the silicon sock , i 'm just going to try slip in it .
and so , i run on these , and have shocked half the world on these .
-lrb- applause -rrb- these are supposed to simulate the actual form of a sprinter when they run .
if you ever watch a sprinter , the ball of their foot is the only thing that ever hits the track .
so when i stand in these legs , my hamstring and my glutes are contracted , as they would be had i had feet and were standing on the ball of my feet .
-lrb- audience : who made them ? -rrb- am : it 's a company in san diego called flex-foot .
and i was a guinea pig , as i hope to continue to be in every new form of prosthetic limbs that come out .
but actually these , like i said , are still the actual prototype .
i need to get some new ones because the last meet i was at , they were everywhere . you know , it 's like a big - it 's come full circle .
moderator : aimee and the designer of them will be at tedmed 2 , and we 'll talk about the design of them .
am : yes , we 'll do that .
ss : yes , there you go .
am : so , these are the sprint legs , and i can put my other ...
ss : can you tell about who designed your other legs ?
am : yes . these i got in a place called bournemouth , england , about two hours south of london , and i 'm the only person in the united states with these , which is a crime because they are so beautiful .
and i do n't even mean , like , because of the toes and everything .
for me , while i 'm such a serious athlete on the track , i want to be feminine off the track , and i think it 's so important not to be limited in any capacity , whether it 's , you know , your mobility or even fashion .
i mean , i love the fact that i can go in anywhere and pick out what i want - the shoes i want , the skirts i want - and i 'm hoping to try to bring these over here and make them accessible to a lot of people .
they 're also silicon .
this is a really basic , basic prosthetic limb under here .
it 's like a barbie foot under this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is . it 's just stuck in this position , so i have to wear a two-inch heel .
and , i mean , it 's really - let me take this off so you can see it .
i do n't know how good you can see it , but , like , it really is .
there 're veins on the feet , and then my heel is pink , and my achilles ' tendon - that moves a little bit .
and it 's really an amazing store . i got them a year and two weeks ago .
and this is just a silicon piece of skin .
i mean , what happened was , two years ago this man in belgium was saying , " god , if i can go to madame tussauds ' wax museum and see jerry hall replicated down to the color of her eyes , looking so real as if she breathed , why ca n't they build a limb for someone that looks like a leg , or an arm , or a hand ? "
i mean , they make ears for burn victims .
they do amazing stuff with silicon .
ss : two weeks ago , aimee was up for the arthur ashe award at the espys .
and she came into town and she rushed around and she said , " i have to buy some new shoes ! "
we 're an hour before the espys , and she thought she 'd gotten a two-inch heel but she 'd actually bought a three-inch heel .
am : and this poses a problem for me , because it means i 'm walking like that all night long .
ss : for 45 minutes . luckily , the hotel was terrific .
they got someone to come in and saw off the shoes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- am : i said to the receptionist - i mean , i am just harried , and sheryl 's at my side - i said , " look , do you have anybody here who could help me ?
because i have this problem ... " you know , at first they were just going to write me off , like , " if you do n't like your shoes , sorry . it 's too late . "
" no , no , no , no . i 've got these special feet that need a two-inch heel . i have a three-inch heel .
i need a little bit off . "
they did n't even want to go there .
they did n't even want to touch that one . they just did it .
no , these legs are great .
i 'm actually going back in a couple of weeks to get some improvements .
i want to get legs like these made for flat feet so i can wear sneakers , because i ca n't with these ones .
so ... moderator : that 's it .
ss : that 's aimee mullins .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is joshua walters .
i 'm a performer .
-lrb- beatboxing -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but as far as being a performer , i 'm also diagnosed bipolar .
i reframe that as a positive because the crazier i get onstage , the more entertaining i become .
when i was 16 in san francisco , i had my breakthrough manic episode in which i thought i was jesus christ .
maybe you thought that was scary , but actually there 's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you 're jesus christ .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was sent to a place , a psych ward , and in the psych ward , everyone is doing their own one-man show .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time .
they 're just practicing .
one day they 'll get here .
now when i got out , i was diagnosed and i was given medications by a psychiatrist .
" okay , josh , why do n't we give you some - why do n't we give you some zyprexa .
okay ? mmhmm ?
at least that 's what it says on my pen . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some of you are in the field , i can see .
i can feel your noise .
the first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode , and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs , where i was sleeping through high school .
the second half was just one big nap , pretty much , in class .
when i got out i had a choice .
i could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness .
-lrb- bugle sound -rrb- there 's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive - at least the hypomanic edge part of it .
now if you do n't know what hypomania is , it 's like an engine that 's out of control , maybe a ferrari engine , with no breaks .
many of the speakers here , many of you in the audience , have that creative edge , if you know what i 'm talking about .
you 're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible .
and there 's a book - john gartner .
john gartner wrote this book called " the hypomanic edge " in which christopher columbus and ted turner and steve jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete .
a different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called " touched with fire " by kay redfield jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which mozart and beethoven and van gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with .
some of them committed suicide .
so it was n't all the good side of the illness .
now recently , there 's been development in this field .
and there was an article written in the new york times , september 2010 , that stated : " just manic enough . "
just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum - you know what i 'm talking about - not maybe full bipolar , but they 're in the bipolar spectrum - where on one side , maybe you think you 're jesus , and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- your call . your call .
and everyone 's somewhere in the middle .
everyone 's somewhere in the middle .
so maybe , you know , there 's no such thing as crazy , and being diagnosed with a mental illness does n't mean you 're crazy .
but maybe it just means you 're more sensitive to what most people ca n't see or feel .
maybe no one 's really crazy .
everyone is just a little bit mad .
how much depends on where you fall in the spectrum .
how much depends on how lucky you are .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in america is entropy made visible .
we ca n't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this .
and mostly , i want to persuade you that we have to do better if we 're going to continue the project of civilization in america .
by the way , this does n't help .
nobody 's having a better day down here because of that .
there are a lot of ways you can describe this .
you know , i like to call it " the national automobile slum . "
you can call it suburban sprawl .
i think it 's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world .
you can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck .
and it 's a tremendous problem for us .
the outstanding - the salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about .
we 're going to talk about that some more .
a sense of place : your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings , and to employ the vocabularies , grammars , syntaxes , rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are .
the public realm in america has two roles : it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life , and it is the physical manifestation of the common good .
and when you degrade the public realm , you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there .
the public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in america because we do n't have the 1,000-year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures .
and your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design .
this is a body of knowledge , method , skill and principle that we threw in the garbage after world war ii and decided we do n't need that anymore ; we 're not going to use it .
and consequently , we can see the result all around us .
the public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically , but it has to inform us where we are in our culture .
where we 've come from , what kind of people we are , and it needs to , by doing that , it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we 're going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present .
and if there is one tremendous - if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we 've built , the human environments we 've made for ourselves in the last 50 years , it is that it has deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present .
the environments we are living in , more typically , are like these .
you know , this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town .
and remember , to create a place of character and quality , you have to be able to define space .
so how is that being accomplished here ?
if you stand on the apron of the wal-mart over here and try to look at the target store over here , you ca n't see it because of the curvature of the earth . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's nature 's way of telling you that you 're doing a poor job of defining space .
consequently , these will be places that nobody wants to be in .
these will be places that are not worth caring about .
we have about , you know , 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the united states today .
when we have enough of them , we 're going to have a nation that 's not worth defending .
and i want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like iraq , spilling their blood in the sand , and ask yourself , " what is their last thought of home ? "
i hope it 's not the curb cut between the chuck e. cheese and the target store because that 's not good enough for americans to be spilling their blood for . -lrb- applause -rrb- we need better places in this country .
public space . this is a good public space .
it 's a place worth caring about . it 's well defined .
it is emphatically an outdoor public room .
it has something that is terribly important - it has what 's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge .
that 's a fancy way of saying it 's got shops , bars , bistros , destinations - things go in and out of it . it 's permeable .
the beer goes in and out , the waitresses go in and out , and that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in .
you know , in these places in other cultures , people just go there voluntarily because they like them .
we do n't have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , you do n't have to have a kwanzaa festival .
people just go because it 's pleasurable to be there .
but this is how we do it in the united states .
probably the most significant public space failure in america , designed by the leading architects of the day , harry cobb and i.m. pei : boston city hall plaza .
a public place so dismal that the winos do n't even want to go there . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and we ca n't fix it because i.m. pei 's still alive , and every year harvard and m.i.t. have a joint committee to repair it .
and every year they fail to because they do n't want to hurt i.m. pei 's feelings .
this is the other side of the building .
this was the winner of an international design award in , i think , 1966 , something like that .
it was n't pei and cobb , another firm designed this , but there 's not enough prozac in the world to make people feel ok about going down this block .
this is the back of boston city hall , the most important , you know , significant civic building in albany - excuse me - in boston .
and what is the message that is coming , what are the vocabularies and grammars that are coming , from this building and how is it informing us about who we are ?
this , in fact , would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of josef stalin , pol pot , saddam hussein , and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building , because then we 'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us .
you know , that it 's a despotic building ; it wants us to feel like termites . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is it on a smaller scale : the back of the civic center in my town , saratoga springs , new york .
by the way , when i showed this slide to a group of kiwanians in my town , they all rose in indignation from their creamed chicken , -lrb- laughter -rrb- " it was raining that day when you took that picture ! "
because this was perceived to be a weather problem . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , this is a building designed like a dvd player . -lrb- laughter -rrb- audio jack , power supply - and look , you know these things are important architectural jobs for firms , right ?
you know , we hire firms to design these things .
you can see exactly what went on , three o 'clock in the morning at the design meeting .
you know , eight hours before deadline , four architects trying to get this building in on time , right ?
and they 're sitting there at the long boardroom table with all the drawings , and the renderings , and all the chinese food caskets are lying on the table , and - i mean , what was the conversation that was going on there ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- because you know what the last word was , what the last sentence was of that meeting .
it was : " fuck it . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- that - that is the message of this form of architecture .
the message is : we do n't give a fuck ! we do n't give a fuck .
so i went back on the nicest day of the year , just to - you know - do some reality testing , and in fact , he will not even go down there because -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's not interesting enough for his clients , you know , the burglars , the muggers .
it 's not civically rich enough for them to go down there .
ok .
the pattern of main street usa - in fact , this pattern of building downtown blocks , all over the world , is fairly universal .
it 's not that complicated : buildings more than one story high , built out to the sidewalk edge , so that people who are , you know , all kinds of people can get into the building .
other activities are allowed to occur upstairs , you know , apartments , offices , and so on .
you make provision for this activity called shopping on the ground floor .
they have n't learned that in monterey .
if you go out to the corner right at the main intersection right in front of this conference center , you 'll see an intersection with four blank walls on every corner .
it 's really incredible .
anyway , this is how you compose and assemble a downtown business building , and this is what happened when in glens falls , new york , when we tried to do it again , where it was missing , right ?
so the first thing they do is they pop up the retail a half a story above grade to make it sporty .
ok . that completely destroys the relationship between the business and the sidewalk , where the theoretical pedestrians are . -lrb- laughter -rrb- of course , they 'll never be there , as long as this is in that condition .
then because the relationship between the retail is destroyed , we pop a handicapped ramp on that , and then to make ourselves feel better , we put a nature band-aid in front of it .
and that 's how we do it .
i call them " nature band-aids " because there 's a general idea in america that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature .
and in fact , the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism , good buildings .
not just flower beds , not just cartoons of the sierra nevada mountains .
you know , that 's not good enough .
we have to do good buildings .
the street trees have really four jobs to do and that 's it : to spatially denote the pedestrian realm , to protect the pedestrians from the vehicles in the carriageway , to filter the sunlight onto the sidewalk , and to soften the hardscape of the buildings and to create a ceiling - a vaulted ceiling - over the street , at its best .
and that 's it . those are the four jobs of the street trees .
they 're not supposed to be a cartoon of the north woods ; they 're not supposed to be a set for " the last of the mohicans . "
you know , one of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town , between the urban and the rural .
they 're not the same thing .
and we 're not going to cure the problems of the urban by dragging the country into the city , which is what a lot of us are trying to do all the time .
here you see it on a small scale - the mothership has landed , r2-d2 and c-3po have stepped out to test the bark mulch to see if they can inhabit this planet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- a lot of this comes from the fact that the industrial city in america was such a trauma that we developed this tremendous aversion for the whole idea of the city , city life , and everything connected with it .
and so what you see fairly early , in the mid-19th century , is this idea that we now have to have an antidote to the industrial city , which is going to be life in the country for everybody .
and that starts to be delivered in the form of the railroad suburb : the country villa along the railroad line , which allows people to enjoy the amenity of the city , but to return to the countryside every night .
and believe me , there were no wal-marts or convenience stores out there then , so it really was a form of country living .
but what happens is , of course , it mutates over the next 80 years and it turns into something rather insidious .
it becomes a cartoon of a country house , in a cartoon of the country .
and that 's the great non-articulated agony of suburbia and one of the reasons that it lends itself to ridicule .
because it has n't delivered what it 's been promising for half a century now .
and these are typically the kind of dwellings we find there , you know .
basically , a house with nothing on the side because this house wants to state , emphatically , " i 'm a little cabin in the woods . there 's nothing on either side of me .
i do n't have any eyes on the side of my head . i ca n't see . "
so you have this one last facade of the house , the front , which is really a cartoon of a facade of a house .
because - notice the porch here .
unless the people that live here are munchkins , nobody 's going to be using that .
this is really , in fact , a television broadcasting a show 24/7 called " we 're normal . "
we 're normal , we 're normal , we 're normal , we 're normal , we 're normal .
please respect us , we 're normal , we 're normal , we 're normal .
but we know what 's going on in these houses , you know .
we know that little skippy is loading his uzi down here , getting ready for homeroom . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we know that heather , his sister heather , 14 years old , is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit .
because these places , these habitats , are inducing immense amounts of anxiety and depression in children , and they do n't have a lot of experience with medication .
so they take the first one that comes along , often .
these are not good enough for americans .
these are the schools we are sending them to : the hannibal lecter central school , las vegas , nevada .
this is a real school !
you know , but there 's obviously a notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out , that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver .
so every effort is made to keep them within the building .
notice that nature is present . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're going to have to change this behavior whether we like it or not .
we are entering an epochal period of change in the world , and - certainly in america - the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era .
it is going to change absolutely everything .
chris asked me not to go on too long about this , and i wo n't , except to say there 's not going to be a hydrogen economy .
forget it . it 's not going to happen .
we 're going to have to do something else instead .
we 're going to have to down-scale , re-scale , and re-size virtually everything we do in this country and we ca n't start soon enough to do it .
we 're going to have - -lrb- applause -rrb- - we 're going to have to live closer to where we work .
we 're going to have to live closer to each other .
we 're going have to grow more food closer to where we live .
the age of the 3,000 mile caesar salad is coming to an end .
we 're going to have to - we have a railroad system that the bulgarians would be ashamed of !
we gotta do better than that !
and we should have started two days before yesterday .
we are fortunate that the new urbanists were there , for the last 10 years , excavating all that information that was thrown in the garbage by our parents ' generation after world war ii .
because we 're going to need it if we 're going to learn how to reconstruct towns .
we 're going to need to get back this body of methodology and principle and skill in order to re-learn how to compose meaningful places , places that are integral , that allow - that are living organisms in the sense that they contain all the organs of our civic life and our communal life , deployed in an integral fashion .
so that , you know , the residences make sense deployed in relation to the places of business , of culture and of governance .
we 're going to have to re-learn what the building blocks of these things are : the street , the block , how to compose public space that 's both large and small , the courtyard , the civic square and how to really make use of this property .
we can see some of the first ideas for retro-fitting some of the catastrophic property that we have in america .
the dead malls : what are we going to do with them ?
well , in point of fact , most of them are not going to make it .
they 're not going to be retro-fitted ; they 're going to be the salvage yards of the future .
some of them we 're going to fix , though .
and we 're going to fix them by imposing back on them street and block systems and returning to the building lot as the normal increment of development .
and if we 're lucky , the result will be revivified town centers and neighborhood centers in our existing towns and cities .
and by the way , our towns and cities are where they are , and grew where they were because they occupy all the important sites .
and most of them are still going to be there , although the scale of them is probably going to be diminished .
we 've got a lot of work to do .
we 're not going to be rescued by the hyper-car ; we 're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels .
no amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we 're running , the way we 're running it .
we 're going to have to do everything very differently .
and america 's not prepared .
we are sleepwalking into the future .
we 're not ready for what 's coming at us .
so i urge you all to do what you can .
life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally .
be prepared to be good neighbors .
be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens .
one final thing - i 've been very disturbed about this for years , but i think it 's particularly important for this audience .
please , please , stop referring to yourselves as " consumers . " ok ?
consumers are different than citizens .
consumers do not have obligations , responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings .
and as long as you 're using that word consumer in the public discussion , you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we 're having .
and we 're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face .
so thank you very much .
please go out and do what you can to make this a land full of places that are worth caring about and a nation that will be worth defending . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i begin with an advertisement inspired by george orwell that apple ran in 1984 .
-lrb- video -rrb- big brother : we are one people with one will , one resolve , one cause .
our enemies shall talk themselves to death , and we will fight them with their own confusion .
we shall prevail .
narrator : on january 24th , apple computer will introduce macintosh .
and you 'll see why 1984 wo n't be like " 1984 . "
rebecca mackinnon : so the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today .
technology created by innovative companies will set us all free .
fast-forward more than two decades : apple launches the iphone in china and censors the dalai lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the chinese government for its chinese app store .
the american political cartoonist mark fiore also had his satire application censored in the united states because some of apple 's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups .
his app was n't reinstated until he won the pulitzer prize .
the german magazine stern , a news magazine , had its app censored because the apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users , and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout germany .
and more controversially , recently , apple censored a palestinian protest app after the israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks .
so here 's the thing .
we have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies .
or they 're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed .
or they 're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many , or most , of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question .
so here 's the situation .
in a pre-internet world , sovereignty over our physical freedoms , or lack thereof , was controlled almost entirely by nation-states .
but now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace .
and their decisions about software coding , engineering , design , terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and can not do with our digital lives .
and their sovereignties , cross-cutting , globally interlinked , can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation-states in very exciting ways , but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and can not do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world .
after all , even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year .
and these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in tunisia and egypt this past spring and beyond .
as wael ghonim , the google-egyptian-executive by day , secret-facebook-activist by night , famously said to cnn after mubarak stepped down , " if you want to liberate a society , just give them the internet . "
but overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated .
on the left there 's a photo taken by an egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the egyptian state security offices in march .
and many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles .
but some of the files were left behind intact , and activists , some of them , found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges , their cellphone text message exchanges , even skype conversations .
and one activist actually found a contract from a western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the egyptian security forces .
and egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there .
and in tunisia , censorship actually began to return in may - not nearly as extensively as under president ben ali .
but you 'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence .
in protest over this , blogger slim amamou , who had been jailed under ben ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution , he resigned in protest from the cabinet .
but there 's been a lot of debate in tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem .
in fact , on twitter , there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said , " well actually , we do want democracy and free expression , but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it 's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy .
but the problem is , how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power ?
as riadh guerfali , the veteran digital activist from tunisia , remarked over this incident , " before , things were simple : you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other .
today , things are a lot more subtle . "
welcome to democracy , our tunisian and egyptian friends .
the reality is that even in democratic societies today , we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks .
in fact , in the united states , whatever you may think of julian assange , even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the united states government and some companies have handled wikileaks .
amazon webhosting dropped wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from u.s. senator joe lieberman , despite the fact that wikileaks had not been charged , let alone convicted , of any crime .
so we assume that the internet is a border-busting technology .
this is a map of social networks worldwide , and certainly facebook has conquered much of the world - which is either a good or a bad thing , depending on how you like the way facebook manages its service .
but borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace .
in brazil and japan , it 's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons .
but if you look at china , vietnam and a number of the former soviet states , what 's happening there is more troubling .
you have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where , effectively , the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government .
now in china , you have the " great firewall , " as it 's well-known , that blocks facebook and twitter and now google + and many of the other overseas websites .
and that 's done in part with the help from western technology .
but that 's only half of the story .
the other part of the story are requirements that the chinese government places on all companies operating on the chinese internet , known as a system of self-discipline .
in plain english , that means censorship and surveillance of their users .
and this is a ceremony i actually attended in 2009 where the internet society of china presented awards to the top 20 chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline - i.e. policing their content .
and robin li , ceo of baidu , china 's dominant search engine , was one of the recipients .
in russia , they do not generally block the internet and directly censor websites .
but this is a website called rospil that 's an anti-corruption site .
and earlier this year , there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to rospil through a payments processing system called yandex money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at yandex money .
this has a chilling effect on people 's ability to use the internet to hold government accountable .
so we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the internet , which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services .
so the important question , i think , is not this debate over whether the internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys .
of course , it 's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is .
the most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner .
because i think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens , and i would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives , not to manipulate or enslave us .
so the question is , we know how to hold government accountable .
we do n't necessarily always do it very well , but we have a sense of what the models are , politically and institutionally , to do that .
how do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most ceo 's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit ?
and government regulation often is n't helping all that much .
you have situations , for instance , in france where president sarkozy tells the ceo 's of internet companies , " we 're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest . "
but then he goes and champions laws like the infamous " three-strikes " law that would disconnect citizens from the internet for file sharing , which has been condemned by the u.n. special rapporteur on freedom of expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens ' right to communications , and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens .
and here in the united kingdom there 's also concern over a law called the digital economy act that 's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior .
so what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric internet in the future , we need a broader and more sustained internet freedom movement .
after all , companies did n't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course , or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course , just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do .
it was the result of decades of sustained activism , shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy .
similarly , governments do n't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day .
it 's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations , and that you get the right corporate behavior .
we need to make the same approach with the internet .
we also are going to need political innovation .
eight hundred years ago , approximately , the barons of england decided that the divine right of kings was no longer working for them so well , and they forced king john to sign the magna carta , which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules .
this set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation , which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed - which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in america across the pond .
so now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked .
and what does that look like ?
at the moment , we still do n't know .
but it 's going to require innovation that 's not only going to need to focus on politics , on geopolitics , but it 's also going to need to deal with questions consumer choice and even software design and engineering .
each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world 's people and not the other way around .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when the industrial revolution started , the amount of carbon sitting underneath britain in the form of coal was as big as the amount of carbon sitting under saudi arabia in the form of oil , and this carbon powered the industrial revolution , it put the " great " in great britain , and led to britain 's temporary world domination .
and then , in 1918 , coal production in britain peaked , and has declined ever since .
in due course , britain started using oil and gas from the north sea , and in the year 2000 , oil and gas production from the north sea also peaked , and they 're now on the decline .
these observations about the finiteness of easily accessible , local , secure fossil fuels , this is a motivation for saying , " well , what 's next ?
what is life after fossil fuels going to be like ?
should n't we be thinking hard about how to get off fossil fuels ? "
another motivation , of course , is climate change .
and when people talk about life after fossil fuels and climate change action , i think there 's a lot of fluff , a lot of greenwash , a lot of misleading advertising , and i feel a duty as a physicist to try to guide people around the claptrap and help people understand the actions that really make a difference and to focus on ideas that do add up .
let me illustrate this with what physicists call a back-of-envelope calculation .
we love back-of-envelope calculations .
you ask a question , you write down some numbers , and you get yourself an answer .
it may not be very accurate , but it may make you say , " hmm . "
so here 's a question : imagine if we said , " oh yes , we can get off fossil fuels .
we 'll use biofuels . problem solved .
transport , we do n't need oil anymore . "
well , what if we grew the biofuels for a road on the grass verge at the edge of the road ?
how wide would the verge have to be for that to work out ?
okay , so let 's put in some numbers .
let 's have our cars go at 60 miles per hour .
let 's say they do 30 miles per gallon .
that 's the european average for new cars .
let 's say the productivity of biofuel plantations is 1,200 litres of biofuel per hectare per year .
that 's true of european biofuels .
and let 's imagine the cars are spaced 80 meters apart from each other , and they 're just perpetually going along this road .
the length of the road does n't matter , because the longer the road , the more biofuel plantation we 've got .
what do we do with these numbers ?
well , you take the first number , and you divide by the other three , and you get eight kilometers .
and that 's the answer .
that 's how wide the plantation would have to be , given these assumptions .
and maybe that makes you say , " hmm .
maybe this is n't going to be quite so easy . "
and it might make you think , perhaps there 's an issue to do with areas , and in this talk , i 'd like to talk about land areas , and ask , is there an issue about areas ? the answer is going to be yes but it depends which country you are in .
so let 's start in the united kingdom , since that 's where we are today .
the energy consumption of the united kingdom , the total energy consumption , not just transport , but everything , i like to quantify it in light bulbs .
it 's as if we 've all got 125 light bulbs on all the time , 125 kilowatt-hours per day per person is the energy consumption of the u.k.
so there 's 40 light bulbs ' worth for transport , 40 light bulbs ' worth for heating , and 40 light bulbs ' worth for making electricity , and other things are relatively small compared to those three big fish .
it 's actually a bigger footprint if we take into account the embodied energy in the stuff we import into our country as well , and 90 percent of this energy today still comes from fossil fuels , and 10 percent only from other , greener - possibly greener - sources like nuclear power and renewables .
so , that 's the u.k. , and the population density of the u.k.
is 250 people per square kilometer , and i 'm now going to show you other countries by these same two measures .
on the vertical axis , i 'm going to show you how much light bulbs - what our energy consumption per person is , and we 're at 125 light bulbs per person , and that little blue dot there is showing you the land area of the united kingdom , and the population density is on the horizontal axis , and we 're 250 people per square kilometer .
let 's add european countries in blue , and you can see there 's quite a variety .
i should emphasize , both of these axes are logarithmic . as you go from one gray bar to the next gray bar you 're going up a factor of 10 .
next , let 's add asia in red , the middle east and north africa in green , sub-saharan africa in blue , black is south america , purple is central america , and then in pukey-yellow , we have north america , australia and new zealand .
and you can see the great diversity of population densities and of per capita consumptions .
countries are different from each other .
top left , we have canada and australia , with enormous land areas , very high per capita consumption , 200 or 300 light bulbs per person , and very low population densities .
top right , bahrain has the same energy consumption per person , roughly , as canada , over 300 light bulbs per person , but their population density is a factor of 300 times greater , 1,000 people per square kilometer .
bottom right , bangladesh has the same population density as bahrain but consumes 100 times less per person .
bottom left , well , there 's no one .
but there used to be a whole load of people .
here 's another message from this diagram .
i 've added on little blue tails behind sudan , libya , china , india , bangladesh .
that 's 15 years of progress .
where were they 15 years ago , and where are they now ?
and the message is , most countries are going to the right , and they 're going up , up and to the right - bigger population density and higher per capita consumption .
so , we may be off in the top right-hand corner , slightly unusual , the united kingdom accompanied by germany , japan , south korea , the netherlands , and a bunch of other slightly odd countries , but many other countries are coming up and to the right to come and join us , so we 're a picture , if you like , of what the future energy consumption might be looking like in other countries too .
and i 've also added in this diagram now some pink lines that go down and to the right .
those are lines of equal power consumption per unit area , which i measure in watts per square meter .
so , for example , the middle line there , 0.1 watts per square meter , is the energy consumption per unit area of saudi arabia , norway , mexico in purple , and bangladesh 15 years ago , and half of the world 's population lives in countries that are already above that line .
the united kingdom is consuming 1.25 watts per square meter .
so 's germany , and japan is consuming a bit more .
so , let 's now say why this is relevant . why is it relevant ?
well , we can measure renewables in the same units and other forms of power production in the same units , and renewables is one of the leading ideas for how we could get off our 90 percent fossil fuel habit .
so here come some renewables .
energy crops deliver half a watt per square meter in european climates .
what does that mean ? and you might have anticipated that result , given what i told you about the biofuel plantation a moment ago .
well , we consume 1.25 watts per square meter .
what this means is , even if you covered the whole of the united kingdom with energy crops , you could n't match today 's energy consumption .
wind power produces a bit more , 2.5 watts per square meter , but that 's only twice as big as 1.25 watts per square meter , so that means if you wanted literally to produce total energy consumption in all forms on average from wind farms , you need wind farms half the area of the u.k.
i 've got data to back up all these assertions , by the way .
next , let 's look at solar power .
solar panels , when you put them on a roof , deliver about 20 watts per square meter in england .
if you really want to get a lot from solar panels , you need to adopt the traditional bavarian farming method where you leap off the roof and coat the countryside with solar panels too .
solar parks , because of the gaps between the panels , deliver less . they deliver about 5 watts per square meter of land area .
and here 's a solar park in vermont with real data delivering 4.2 watts per square meter .
remember where we are , 1.25 watts per square meter , wind farms 2.5 , solar parks about five .
so , whatever , whichever of those renewables you pick , the message is , whatever mix of those renewables you 're using , if you want to power the u.k. on them , you 're going to need to cover something like 20 percent or 25 percent of the country with those renewables .
and i 'm not saying that 's a bad idea .
we just need to understand the numbers .
i 'm absolutely not anti-renewables . i love renewables .
but i 'm also pro-arithmetic . -lrb- laughter -rrb- concentrating solar power in deserts delivers larger powers per unit area , because you do n't have the problem of clouds , and so this facility delivers 14 watts per square meter , this one 10 watts per square meter , and this one in spain 5 watts per square meter .
being generous to concentrating solar power , i think it 's perfect credible it could deliver 20 watts per square meter . so that 's nice .
of course , britain does n't have any deserts .
yet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so here 's a summary so far .
all renewables , much as i love them , are diffuse .
they all have a small power per unit area , and we have to live with that fact .
and that means , if you do want renewables to make a substantial difference for a country like the united kingdom on the scale of today 's consumption , you need to be imagining renewable facilities that are country-sized , not the entire country but a fraction of the country , a substantial fraction .
there are other options for generating power as well which do n't involve fossil fuels .
so there 's nuclear power , and on this ordnance survey map , you can see there 's a sizewell b inside a blue square kilometer .
that 's one gigawatt in a square kilometer , which works out to 1,000 watts per square meter .
so by this particular metric , nuclear power is n't as intrusive as renewables .
of course , other metrics matter too , and nuclear power has all sorts of popularity problems .
but the same goes for renewables as well .
here 's a photograph of a consultation exercise in full swing in the little town of penicuik just outside edinburgh , and you can see the children of penicuik celebrating the burning of the effigy of the windmill .
so people are anti-everything , and we 've got to keep all the options on the table .
what can a country like the u.k. do on the supply side ?
well , the options are , i 'd say , these three : power renewables , and recognizing that they need to be close to country-sized ; other people 's renewables , in the top left-hand side of the diagram and say , " uh , we do n't want renewables in our backyard , but , um , please could we put them in yours instead ? "
and that 's a serious option .
it 's a way for the world to handle this issue .
so countries like australia , russia , libya , kazakhstan , could be our best friends for renewable production .
and a third option is nuclear power .
so that 's some supply side options .
in addition to the supply levers that we can push , and remember , we need large amounts , because at the moment , we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels .
in addition to those levers , we could talk about other ways of solving this issue , namely , we could reduce demand , and that means reducing population - i 'm not sure how to do that - or reducing per capita consumption .
so let 's talk about three more big levers that could really help on the consumption side .
first , transport . here are the physics principles that tell you how to reduce the energy consumption of transport , and people often say , " oh , yes , technology can answer everything .
we can make vehicles that are a hundred times more efficient . " and that 's almost true . let me show you .
the energy consumption of this typical tank here is 80 kilowatt-hours per hundred person kilometers .
that 's the average european car .
eighty kilowatt-hours . can we make something a hundred times better by applying those physics principles i just listed ?
yes . here it is . it 's the bicycle . it 's 80 times better in energy consumption , and it 's powered by biofuel , by weetabix .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there are other options in between , because maybe the lady in the tank would say , " no , no , no , that 's a lifestyle change . do n't change my lifestyle , please . "
so , well , we could persuade her to get into a train , and that 's still a lot more efficient than a car , but that might be a lifestyle change , or there 's the eco-car , top-left .
it comfortably accommodates one teenager and it 's shorter than a traffic cone , and it 's almost as efficient as a bicycle as long as you drive it at 15 miles per hour .
in between , perhaps some more realistic options on this lever , transport lever , are electric vehicles , so electric bikes and electric cars in the middle , perhaps four times as energy efficient as the standard petrol-powered tank .
next , there 's the heating lever .
heating is a third of our energy consumption in britain , and quite a lot of that is going into homes and other buildings doing space heating and water heating .
so here 's a typical crappy british house .
it 's my house , with the ferrari out front .
what can we do to it ?
well , the laws of physics are written up there , which describe what - how the power consumption for heating is driven by the things you can control .
the things you can control are the temperature difference between the inside and the outside , and there 's this remarkable technology called a thermostat .
you grasp it , you rotate it to the left , and your energy consumption in the home will decrease .
i 've tried it . it works . some people call it a lifestyle change .
you can also get the fluff men in to reduce the leakiness of your building - put fluff in the walls , fluff in the roof , and a new front door and so forth , and the sad truth is , this will save you money .
that 's not sad , that 's good , but the sad truth is , it 'll only get about 25 percent of the leakiness of your building , if you do these things , which are good ideas .
if you really want to get a bit closer to swedish building standards with a crappy house like this , you need to be putting external insulation on the building as shown by this block of flats in london .
you can also deliver heat more efficiently using heat pumps which use a smaller bit of high grade energy like electricity to move heat from your garden into your house .
the third demand side option i want to talk about , the third way to reduce energy consumption is , read your meters .
and people talk a lot about smart meters , but you can do it yourself .
use your own eyes and be smart , read your meter , and if you 're anything like me , it 'll change your life .
here 's a graph i made .
i was writing a book about sustainable energy , and a friend asked me , " well how much energy do you use at home ? " and i was embarrassed . i did n't actually know .
and so i started reading the meter every week , and the old meter readings are shown in the top half of the graph , and then 2007 is shown in green at the bottom , and that was when i was reading the meter every week , and my life changed , because i started doing experiments and seeing what made a difference , and my gas consumption plummeted because i started tinkering with the thermostat and the timing on the heating system , and i knocked more than a half off my gas bills .
there 's a similar story for my electricity consumption , where switching off the dvd players , the stereos , the computer peripherals that were on all the time , and just switching them on when i needed them , knocked another third off my electricity bills too .
so we need a plan that adds up , and i 've described for you six big levers , and we need big action because we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels , and so you need to push hard on most if not all of these levers .
and most of these levers have popularity problems , and if there is a lever you do n't like the use of , well please do bear in mind that means you need even stronger effort on the other levers .
so i 'm a strong advocate of having grown-up conversations that are based on numbers and facts , and i want to close with this map that just visualizes for you the requirement of land and so forth in order to get just 16 light bulbs per person from four of the big possible sources .
so , if you wanted to get 16 light bulbs , remember , today our total energy consumption is 125 light bulbs ' worth .
if you wanted 16 from wind , this map visualizes a solution for the u.k. it 's got 160 wind farms , each 100 square kilometers in size , and that would be a twentyfold increase over today 's amount of wind .
nuclear power , to get 16 light bulbs per person , you 'd need two gigawatts at each of the purple dots on the map .
that 's a fourfold increase over today 's levels of nuclear power .
biomass , to get 16 light bulbs per person , you 'd need a land area something like three and a half wales ' worth , either in our country , or in someone else 's country , possibly ireland , possibly somewhere else . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and a fourth supply side option , concentrating solar power in other people 's deserts , if you wanted to get 16 light bulbs ' worth , then we 're talking about these eight hexagons down at the bottom right .
the total area of those hexagons is two greater london 's worth of someone else 's sahara , and you 'll need power lines all the way across spain and france to bring the power from the sahara to surrey .
we need a plan that adds up .
we need to stop shouting and start talking , and if we can have a grown-up conversation , make a plan that adds up and get building , maybe this low-carbon revolution will actually be fun . thank you very much for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what is going to be the future of learning ?
i do have a plan , but in order for me to tell you what that plan is , i need to tell you a little story , which kind of sets the stage .
i tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools , where did it come from ?
and you can look far back into the past , but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is , it 's quite easy to figure out where it came from .
it came from about 300 years ago , and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet . -lsb- " the british empire " -rsb- imagine trying to run the show , trying to run the entire planet , without computers , without telephones , with data handwritten on pieces of paper , and traveling by ships .
but the victorians actually did it .
what they did was amazing .
they created a global computer made up of people .
it 's still with us today .
it 's called the bureaucratic administrative machine .
in order to have that machine running , you need lots and lots of people .
they made another machine to produce those people : the school .
the schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine .
they must be identical to each other .
they must know three things : they must have good handwriting , because the data is handwritten ; they must be able to read ; and they must be able to do multiplication , division , addition and subtraction in their head .
they must be so identical that you could pick one up from new zealand and ship them to canada and he would be instantly functional .
the victorians were great engineers .
they engineered a system that was so robust that it 's still with us today , continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists .
the empire is gone , so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people , and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it ?
-lsb- " schools as we know them are obsolete " -rsb- so that 's a pretty strong comment there .
i said schools as we know them now , they 're obsolete .
i 'm not saying they 're broken .
it 's quite fashionable to say that the education system 's broken .
it 's not broken . it 's wonderfully constructed .
it 's just that we do n't need it anymore . it 's outdated .
what are the kind of jobs that we have today ?
well , the clerks are the computers .
they 're there in thousands in every office .
and you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs .
those people do n't need to be able to write beautifully by hand .
they do n't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads .
they do need to be able to read .
in fact , they need to be able to read discerningly .
well , that 's today , but we do n't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like .
we know that people will work from wherever they want , whenever they want , in whatever way they want .
how is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world ?
well , i bumped into this whole thing completely by accident .
i used to teach people how to write computer programs in new delhi , 14 years ago .
and right next to where i used to work , there was a slum .
and i used to think , how on earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs ?
or should they not ?
at the same time , we also had lots of parents , rich people , who had computers , and who used to tell me , " you know , my son , i think he 's gifted , because he does wonderful things with computers .
and my daughter - oh , surely she is extra-intelligent . "
and so on . so i suddenly figured that , how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what did the poor do wrong ?
i made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office , and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if i gave a computer to children who never would have one , did n't know any english , did n't know what the internet was .
the children came running in .
it was three feet off the ground , and they said , " what is this ? "
and i said , " yeah , it 's , i do n't know . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they said , " why have you put it there ? "
i said , " just like that . "
and they said , " can we touch it ? " i said , " if you wish to . "
and i went away .
about eight hours later , we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse .
so i said , " well that 's impossible , because - how is it possible ? they do n't know anything . "
my colleagues said , " no , it 's a simple solution .
one of your students must have been passing by , showed them how to use the mouse . "
so i said , " yeah , that 's possible . "
so i repeated the experiment . i went 300 miles out of delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i repeated the experiment there .
there was no place to stay , so i stuck my computer in , i went away , came back after a couple of months , found kids playing games on it .
when they saw me , they said , " we want a faster processor and a better mouse . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i said , " how on earth do you know all this ? "
and they said something very interesting to me .
in an irritated voice , they said , " you 've given us a machine that works only in english , so we had to teach ourselves english in order to use it . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the first time , as a teacher , that i had heard the word " teach ourselves " said so casually .
here 's a short glimpse from those years .
that 's the first day at the hole in the wall .
on your right is an eight-year-old .
to his left is his student . she 's six .
and he 's teaching her how to browse .
then onto other parts of the country , i repeated this over and over again , getting exactly the same results that we were .
-lsb- " hole in the wall film - 1999 " -rsb- an eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do .
and finally a girl explaining in marathi what it is , and said , " there 's a processor inside . "
so i started publishing .
i published everywhere . i wrote down and measured everything , and i said , in nine months , a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the west .
i 'd seen it happen over and over and over again .
but i was curious to know , what else would they do if they could do this much ?
i started experimenting with other subjects , among them , for example , pronunciation .
there 's one community of children in southern india whose english pronunciation is really bad , and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs .
i gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer , and i said , " keep talking into it until it types what you say . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they did that , and watch a little bit of this .
computer : nice to meet you.child : nice to meet you .
sugata mitra : the reason i ended with the face of this young lady over there is because i suspect many of you know her .
she has now joined a call center in hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear english accent .
so then people said , well , how far will it go ?
where does it stop ?
i decided i would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition .
i made a hypothesis , a ridiculous hypothesis .
tamil is a south indian language , and i said , can tamil-speaking children in a south indian village learn the biotechnology of dna replication in english from a streetside computer ?
and i said , i 'll measure them . they 'll get a zero .
i 'll spend a couple of months , i 'll leave it for a couple of months , i 'll go back , they 'll get another zero .
i 'll go back to the lab and say , we need teachers .
i found a village . it was called kallikuppam in southern india .
i put in hole in the wall computers there , downloaded all kinds of stuff from the internet about dna replication , most of which i did n't understand .
the children came rushing , said , " what 's all this ? "
so i said , " it 's very topical , very important . but it 's all in english . "
so they said , " how can we understand such big english words and diagrams and chemistry ? "
so by now , i had developed a new pedagogical method , so i applied that . i said , " i have n't the foggiest idea . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and anyway , i am going away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i left them for a couple of months .
they 'd got a zero . i gave them a test .
i came back after two months and the children trooped in and said , " we 've understood nothing . "
so i said , " well , what did i expect ? "
so i said , " okay , but how long did it take you before you decided that you ca n't understand anything ? "
so they said , " we have n't given up .
we look at it every single day . "
so i said , " what ? you do n't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months ? what for ? "
so a little girl who you see just now , she raised her hand , and she says to me in broken tamil and english , she said , " well , apart from the fact that improper replication of the dna molecule causes disease , we have n't understood anything else . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i tested them .
i got an educational impossibility , zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they did n't know doing something that 's a decade ahead of their time .
absurd . but i had to follow the victorian norm .
thirty percent is a fail .
how do i get them to pass ? i have to get them 20 more marks .
i could n't find a teacher . what i did find was a friend that they had , a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time .
so i asked this girl , " can you help them ? "
so she says , " absolutely not .
i did n't have science in school . i have no idea what they 're doing under that tree all day long . i ca n't help you . "
i said , " i 'll tell you what . use the method of the grandmother . "
so she says , " what 's that ? "
i said , " stand behind them .
whenever they do anything , you just say , ' well , wow , i mean , how did you do that ?
what 's the next page ? gosh , when i was your age , i could have never done that . ' you know what grannies do . "
so she did that for two more months .
the scores jumped to 50 percent .
kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in new delhi , a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher .
when i saw that graph i knew there is a way to level the playing field .
here 's kallikuppam .
-lrb- children speaking -rrb- neurons ... communication .
i got the camera angle wrong . that one is just amateur stuff , but what she was saying , as you could make out , was about neurons , with her hands were like that , and she was saying neurons communicate .
at 12 .
so what are jobs going to be like ?
well , we know what they 're like today .
what 's learning going to be like ? we know what it 's like today , children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand .
what will it be tomorrow ?
could it be that we do n't need to go to school at all ?
could it be that , at the point in time when you need to know something , you can find out in two minutes ?
could it be - a devastating question , a question that was framed for me by nicholas negroponte - could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete ?
but that 's terrible . we are homo sapiens .
knowing , that 's what distinguishes us from the apes .
but look at it this way .
it took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become homo sapiens .
it took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete .
what an achievement that is .
but we have to integrate that into our own future .
encouragement seems to be the key .
if you look at kuppam , if you look at all of the experiments that i did , it was simply saying , " wow , " saluting learning .
there is evidence from neuroscience .
the reptilian part of our brain , which sits in the center of our brain , when it 's threatened , it shuts down everything else , it shuts down the prefrontal cortex , the parts which learn , it shuts all of that down .
punishment and examinations are seen as threats .
we take our children , we make them shut their brains down , and then we say , " perform . "
why did they create a system like that ?
because it was needed .
there was an age in the age of empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat .
when you 're standing in a trench all alone , if you could have survived , you 're okay , you 've passed .
if you did n't , you failed .
but the age of empires is gone .
what happens to creativity in our age ?
we need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure .
i came back to england looking for british grandmothers .
i put out notices in papers saying , if you are a british grandmother , if you have broadband and a web camera , can you give me one hour of your time per week for free ?
i got 200 in the first two weeks .
i know more british grandmothers than anyone in the universe . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they 're called the granny cloud .
the granny cloud sits on the internet .
if there 's a child in trouble , we beam a gran .
she goes on over skype and she sorts things out .
i 've seen them do it from a village called diggles in northwestern england , deep inside a village in tamil nadu , india , 6,000 miles away .
she does it with only one age-old gesture .
" shhh . "
okay ?
watch this .
grandmother : you ca n't catch me . you say it .
you ca n't catch me .
children : you ca n't catch me .
grandmother : i 'm the gingerbread man.children : i 'm the gingerbread man .
grandmother : well done ! very good .
sm : so what 's happening here ?
i think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization .
if you allow the educational process to self-organize , then learning emerges .
it 's not about making learning happen .
it 's about letting it happen .
the teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens .
i think that 's what all this is pointing at .
but how will we know ? how will we come to know ?
well , i intend to build these self-organized learning environments .
they are basically broadband , collaboration and encouragement put together .
i 've tried this in many , many schools .
it 's been tried all over the world , and teachers sort of stand back and say , " it just happens by itself ? "
and i said , " yeah , it happens by itself . " " how did you know that ? "
i said , " you wo n't believe the children who told me and where they 're from . "
here 's a sole in action .
-lrb- children talking -rrb- this one is in england .
he maintains law and order , because remember , there 's no teacher around .
girl : the total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons - sm : australia girl : - giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge .
the net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons .
sm : a decade ahead of her time .
so soles , i think we need a curriculum of big questions .
you already heard about that . you know what that means .
there was a time when stone age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say , " what are those twinkling lights ? "
they built the first curriculum , but we 've lost sight of those wondrous questions .
we 've brought it down to the tangent of an angle .
but that 's not sexy enough .
the way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say , " if a meteorite was coming to hit the earth , how would you figure out if it was going to or not ? "
and if he says , " well , what ? how ? "
you say , " there 's a magic word . it 's called the tangent of an angle , " and leave him alone . he 'll figure it out .
so here are a couple of images from soles .
i 've tried incredible , incredible questions - " when did the world begin ? how will it end ? " - to nine-year-olds .
this one is about what happens to the air we breathe .
this is done by children without the help of any teacher .
the teacher only raises the question , and then stands back and admires the answer .
so what 's my wish ?
my wish is that we design the future of learning .
we do n't want to be spare parts for a great human computer , do we ?
so we need to design a future for learning .
and i 've got to - hang on , i 've got to get this wording exactly right , because , you know , it 's very important .
my wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together .
help me build this school .
it will be called the school in the cloud .
it will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in .
the way i want to do this is to build a facility where i can study this .
it 's a facility which is practically unmanned .
there 's only one granny who manages health and safety .
the rest of it 's from the cloud .
the lights are turned on and off by the cloud , etc . , etc . , everything 's done from the cloud .
but i want you for another purpose .
you can do self-organized learning environments at home , in the school , outside of school , in clubs .
it 's very easy to do . there 's a great document produced by ted which tells you how to do it .
if you would please , please do it across all five continents and send me the data , then i 'll put it all together , move it into the school of clouds , and create the future of learning .
that 's my wish .
and just one last thing .
i 'll take you to the top of the himalayas .
at 12,000 feet , where the air is thin , i once built two hole in the wall computers , and the children flocked there .
and there was this little girl who was following me around .
and i said to her , " you know , i want to give a computer to everybody , every child .
i do n't know , what should i do ? "
and i was trying to take a picture of her quietly .
she suddenly raised her hand like this , and said to me , " get on with it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i think it was good advice .
i 'll follow her advice . i 'll stop talking .
thank you . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . wow . -lrb- applause -rrb- recently i visited beloit , wisconsin .
and i was there to honor a great 20th century explorer , roy chapman andrews .
during his time at the american museum of natural history , andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions , like here in the gobi desert .
he was quite a figure .
he was later , it 's said , the basis of the indiana jones character .
and when i was in beloit , wisconsin , i gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students .
and i 'm here to tell you , if there 's anything more intimidating than talking here at ted , it 'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture .
do n't try that one .
at the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions , but there was one that 's really stuck with me since then .
there was a young girl who stood up , and she asked the question : " where should we explore ? "
i think there 's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on earth is over , that for the next generation they 're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore .
but is that really the case ?
is there really nowhere significant for us to explore left here on earth ?
it sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology .
this is an explorer of the unseen world , martinus beijerinck .
so beijerinck set out to discover the cause of tobacco mosaic disease .
what he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters .
and he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known - bacteria , at the time .
he came up with a name for his mystery agent .
he called it the virus - latin for " poison . "
and in uncovering viruses , beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us .
we now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet , more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined .
and obviously there 's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world - things like the eradication of smallpox , the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer , which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus .
and beijerinck 's discovery , this was not something that occurred 500 years ago .
it was a little over 100 years ago that beijerinck discovered viruses .
so basically we had automobiles , but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet .
we now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world - things like deep sequencing , which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species , but to look at entire metagenomes , the communities of teeming microorganisms in , on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species .
we can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between .
in my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them .
and just to give you a sense of how this works , imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you .
and this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza .
the first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information .
and if we started looking into that genetic information , we 'd see a number of usual suspects out there - of course , a lot of human genetic information , but also bacterial and viral information , mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose .
but we 'd also see something very , very surprising .
as we started to look at this information , we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose does n't match anything that we 've ever seen before - no plant , animal , fungus , virus or bacteria .
basically we have no clue what this is .
and for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data , a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter .
we know it 's not anything that we 've seen before ; it 's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information .
and there 's a lot of it .
if you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter , if we looked at your gut , up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter .
and even in the relatively sterile blood , around one to two percent of this information is dark matter - ca n't be classified , ca n't be typed or matched with anything we 've seen before .
at first we thought that perhaps this was artifact .
these deep sequencing tools are relatively new .
but as they become more and more accurate , we 've determined that this information is a form of life , or at least some of it is a form of life .
and while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy , there 's a very , very exciting possibility that exists : that buried in this life , in this genetic information , are signatures of as of yet unidentified life .
that as we explore these strings of a 's , t 's , c 's and g 's , we may uncover a completely new class of life that , like beijerinck , will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of biology .
that perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we are n't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology .
i 'm pleased to announce that , along with colleagues at stanford and caltech and ucsf , we 're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life .
a little over a hundred years ago , people were unaware of viruses , the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet .
a hundred years from now , people may marvel that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life that literally was right under our noses .
it 's true , we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there , but that does n't mean that there 's nothing left to explore on earth .
beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers - people like that young girl from beloit , wisconsin .
and i think if we phrase that lesson , it 's something like this : do n't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story .
go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore .
there are unknowns all around us and they 're just waiting to be discovered .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a savant , or more precisely , a high-functioning autistic savant .
it 's a rare condition .
and rarer still when accompanied , as in my case , by self-awareness and a mastery of language .
very often when i meet someone and they learn this about me , there 's a certain kind of awkwardness .
i can see it in their eyes .
they want to ask me something .
and in the end , quite often , the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out : " if i give you my date of birth , can you tell me what day of the week i was born on ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text .
i hope you 'll forgive me if i do n't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today .
i 'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots - a little deeper and a lot closer , to my mind , than work .
i want to talk to you briefly about perception .
when he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name , anton chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him - little details that other people seem to miss .
every time i read chekhov and his unique vision of human life , i 'm reminded of why i too became a writer .
in my books , i explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding .
here are three questions drawn from my work .
rather than try to figure them out , i 'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them .
for example , the calculation : can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall ?
or look at the foreign word and the sounds : can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it 's pointing you towards ?
and in terms of the line of poetry , why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit ?
i 'm asking you to do this because i believe our personal perceptions , you see , are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge .
aesthetic judgments , rather than abstract reasoning , guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know .
i 'm an extreme example of this .
my worlds of words and numbers blur with color , emotion and personality .
as juan said , it 's the condition that scientists call synesthesia , an unusual cross-talk between the senses .
here are the numbers one to 12 as i see them - every number with its own shape and character .
one is a flash of white light .
six is a tiny and very sad black hole .
the sketches are in black and white here , but in my mind they have colors .
three is green .
four is blue .
five is yellow .
i paint as well .
and here is one of my paintings .
it 's a multiplication of two prime numbers .
three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape , the answer to the sum .
what about bigger numbers ?
well you ca n't get much bigger than pi , the mathematical constant .
it 's an infinite number - literally goes on forever .
in this painting that i made of the first 20 decimals of pi , i take the colors and the emotions and the textures and i pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape .
but it 's not only numbers that i see in colors .
words too , for me , have colors and emotions and textures .
and this is an opening phrase from the novel " lolita . "
and nabokov was himself synesthetic .
and you can see here how my perception of the sound l helps the alliteration another example : a little bit more mathematical .
and i wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from " the great gatsby . "
there is a procession of syllables - wheat , one ; prairies , two ; lost swede towns , three - one , two , three .
and this effect is very pleasant on the mind , and it helps the sentence to feel right .
let 's go back to the questions i posed you a moment ago .
64 multiplied by 75 .
if some of you play chess , you 'll know that 64 is a square number , and that 's why chessboards , eight by eight , have 64 squares .
so that gives us a form that we can picture , that we can perceive .
what about 75 ?
well if 100 , if we think of 100 as being like a square , 75 would look like this .
so what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind - something like this .
64 becomes 6,400 .
and in the right-hand corner , you do n't have to calculate anything .
four across , four up and down - it 's 16 .
so what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16 , 16 , 16 .
that 's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math , i 'm sure .
it 's 16 , 16 , 16 , 48 , 4,800 - 4,800 , the answer to the sum .
easy when you know how .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the second question was an icelandic word .
i 'm assuming there are not many people here who speak icelandic .
so let me narrow the choices down to two .
hnugginn : is it a happy word , or a sad word ?
what do you say ?
okay .
some people say it 's happy .
most people , a majority of people , say sad .
and it actually means sad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- why do , statistically , a majority of people say that a word is sad , in this case , heavy in other cases ?
in my theory , language evolves in such a way that sounds match , correspond with , the subjective , with the personal , intuitive experience of the listener .
let 's have a look at the third question .
it 's a line from a poem by john keats .
words , like numbers , express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world .
it stands to reason that we , existing in this world , should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships .
and poets , like other artists , play with those intuitive understandings .
in the case of hare , it 's an ambiguous sound in english .
it can also mean the fibers that grow from a head .
and if we think of that - let me put the picture up - the fibers represent vulnerability .
they yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion .
so what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension .
the hare itself , the animal - not a cat , not a dog , a hare - why a hare ?
because think of the picture - not the word , the picture .
the overlong ears , the overlarge feet , helps us to picture , to feel intuitively , what it means to limp and to tremble .
so in these few minutes , i hope i 've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions , numbers , shapes and personalities .
the world is richer , vaster than it too often seems to be .
i hope that i 've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you for putting up these pictures of my colleagues over here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 'll be talking about them .
now , i 'm going try an experiment . i do n't do experiments , normally . i 'm a theorist .
but i 'm going see what happens if i press this button .
sure enough . ok . i used to work in this field of elementary particles .
what happens to matter if you chop it up very fine ?
what is it made of ?
and the laws of these particles are valid throughout the universe , and they 're very much connected with the history of the universe .
we know a lot about four forces . there must be a lot more , but those are at very , very small distances , and we have n't really interacted with them very much yet .
the main thing i want to talk about is this : that we have this remarkable experience in this field of fundamental physics that beauty is a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory .
and why on earth could that be so ?
well , here 's an example from my own experience .
it 's fairly dramatic , actually , to have this happen .
three or four of us , in 1957 , put forward a partially complete theory of one of these forces , this weak force .
and it was in disagreement with seven - seven , count them , seven experiments .
experiments were all wrong .
and we published before knowing that , because we figured it was so beautiful , it 's gotta be right !
the experiments had to be wrong , and they were .
now our friend over there , albert einstein , used to pay very little attention when people said , " you know , there 's a man with an experiment that seems to disagree with special relativity .
dc miller . what about that ? " and he would say , " aw , that 'll go away . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , why does stuff like that work ? that 's the question .
now , yeah , what do we mean by beautiful ? that 's one thing .
i 'll try to make that clear - partially clear .
why should it work , and is this something to do with human beings ?
i 'll let you in on the answer to the last one that i offer , and that is , it has nothing to do with human beings .
somewhere in some other planet , orbiting some very distant star , maybe in a another galaxy , there could well be entities that are at least as intelligent as we are , and are interested in science . it 's not impossible ; i think there probably are lots .
very likely , none is close enough to interact with us .
but they could be out there , very easily .
and suppose they have , you know , very different sensory apparatus , and so on .
they have seven tentacles , and they have 14 little funny-looking compound eyes , and a brain shaped like a pretzel .
would they really have different laws ?
there are lots of people who believe that , and i think it is utter baloney .
i think there are laws out there , and we of course do n't understand them at any given time very well - but we try . and we try to get closer and closer .
and someday , we may actually figure out the fundamental unified theory of the particles and forces , what i call the " fundamental law . "
we may not even be terribly far from it .
but even if we do n't run across it in our lifetimes , we can still think there is one out there , and we 're just trying to get closer and closer to it .
i think that 's the main point to be made .
we express these things mathematically .
and when the mathematics is very simple - when in terms of some mathematical notation , you can write the theory in a very brief space , without a lot of complication - that 's essentially what we mean by beauty or elegance .
here 's what i was saying about the laws . they 're really there .
newton certainly believed that .
and he said , here , " it is the business of natural philosophy to find out those laws . "
the basic law , let 's say - here 's an assumption .
the assumption is that the basic law really takes the form of a unified theory of all the particles .
now , some people call that a theory of everything .
that 's wrong because the theory is quantum mechanical .
and i wo n't go into a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and what it 's like , and so on .
you 've heard a lot of wrong things about it anyway . -lrb- laughter -rrb- there are even movies about it with a lot of wrong stuff .
but the main thing here is that it predicts probabilities .
now , sometimes those probabilities are near certainties .
and in a lot of familiar cases , they of course are .
but other times they 're not , and you have only probabilities for different outcomes .
so what that means is that the history of the universe is not determined just by the fundamental law .
it 's the fundamental law and this incredibly long series of accidents , or chance outcomes , that are there in addition .
and the fundamental theory does n't include those chance outcomes ; they are in addition .
so it 's not a theory of everything . and in fact , a huge amount of the information in the universe around us comes from those accidents , and not just from the fundamental laws .
now , it 's often said that getting closer and closer to the fundamental laws by examining phenomena at low energies , and then higher energies , and then higher energies , or short distances , and then shorter distances , and then still shorter distances , and so on , is like peeling the skin of an onion .
and we keep doing that , and build more powerful machines , accelerators for particles .
we look deeper and deeper into the structure of particles , and in that way we get probably closer and closer to this fundamental law .
now , what happens is that as we do that , as we peel these skins of the onion , and we get closer and closer to the underlying law , we see that each skin has something in common with the previous one , and with the next one . we write them out mathematically , and we see they use very similar mathematics .
they require very similar mathematics .
that is absolutely remarkable , and that is a central feature of what i 'm trying to say today .
newton called it - that 's newton , by the way - that one .
this one is albert einstein . hi , al ! and anyway , he said , " nature conformable to herself " - personifying nature as a female .
and so what happens is that the new phenomena , the new skins , the inner skins of the slightly smaller skins of the onion that we get to , resemble the slightly larger ones .
and the kind of mathematics that we had for the previous skin is almost the same as what we need for the next skin .
and that 's why the equations look so simple .
because they use mathematics we already have .
a trivial example is this : newton found the law of gravity , which goes like one over the square of the distance between the things gravitated .
coulomb , in france , found the same law for electric charges .
here 's an example of this similarity .
you look at gravity , you see a certain law .
then you look at electricity . sure enough . the same rule .
it 's a very simple example .
there are lots of more sophisticated examples .
symmetry is very important in this discussion .
you know what it means . a circle , for example , is symmetric under rotations about the center of the circle .
you rotate around the center of the circle , the circle remains unchanged .
you take a sphere , in three dimensions , you rotate around the center of the sphere , and all those rotations leave the sphere alone .
they are symmetries of the sphere .
so we say , in general , that there 's a symmetry under certain operations if those operations leave the phenomenon , or its description , unchanged .
maxwell 's equations are of course symmetrical under rotations of all of space .
does n't matter if we turn the whole of space around by some angle , it does n't leave the - does n't change the phenomenon of electricity or magnetism .
there 's a new notation in the 19th century that expressed this , and if you use that notation , the equations get a lot simpler .
then einstein , with his special theory of relativity , looked at a whole set of symmetries of maxwell 's equations , which are called special relativity .
and those symmetries , then , make the equations even shorter , and even prettier , therefore .
let 's look . you do n't have to know what these things mean , does n't make any difference .
but you can just look at the form . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you can look at the form .
you see above , at the top , a long list of equations with three components for the three directions of space : x , y and z .
then , using vector analysis , you use rotational symmetry , and you get this next set .
then you use the symmetry of special relativity and you get an even simpler set down here , showing that symmetry exhibits better and better .
the more and more symmetry you have , the better you exhibit the simplicity and elegance of the theory .
the last two , the first equation says that electric charges and currents give rise to all the electric and magnetic fields .
the next - second - equation says that there is no magnetism other than that .
the only magnetism comes from electric charges and currents .
someday we may find some slight hole in that argument .
but for the moment , that 's the case .
now , here is a very exciting development that many people have not heard of .
they should have heard of it , but it 's a little tricky to explain in technical detail , so i wo n't do it . i 'll just mention it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but chen ning yang , called by us " frank " yang - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and bob mills put forward , 50 years ago , this generalization of maxwell 's equations , with a new symmetry .
a whole new symmetry .
mathematics very similar , but there was a whole new symmetry .
they hoped that this would contribute somehow to particle physics - did n't . it did n't , by itself , contribute to particle physics .
but then some of us generalized it further . and then it did !
and it gave a very beautiful description of the strong force and of the weak force .
so here we say , again , what we said before : that each skin of the onion shows a similarity to the adjoining skins .
so the mathematics for the adjoining skins is very similar to what we need for the new one .
and therefore it looks beautiful because we already know how to write it in a lovely , concise way .
so here are the themes . we believe there is a unified theory underlying all the regularities .
steps toward unification exhibit the simplicity .
symmetry exhibits the simplicity .
and then there is self-similarity across the scales - in other words , from one skin of the onion to another one .
proximate self-similarity . and that accounts for this phenomenon .
that will account for why beauty is a successful criterion for selecting the right theory .
here 's what newton himself said : " nature is very consonant and conformable to her self . "
one thing he was thinking of is something that most of us take for granted today , but in his day it was n't taken for granted .
there 's the story , which is not absolutely certain to be right , but a lot of people told it .
four sources told it . that when they had the plague in cambridge , and he went down to his mother 's farm - because the university was closed - he saw an apple fall from a tree , or on his head or something .
and he realized suddenly that the force that drew the apple down to the earth could be the same as the force regulating the motions of the planets and the moon .
that was a big unification for those days , although today we take it for granted .
it 's the same theory of gravity .
so he said that this principle of nature , consonance : " this principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of philosophers , i forbore to describe it in that book , lest i should be accounted an extravagant freak ... " that 's what we all have to watch out for , -lrb- laughter -rrb- especially at this meeting .
" ... and so prejudice my readers against all those things which were the main design of the book . "
now , who today would claim that as a mere conceit of the human mind ?
that the force that causes the apple to fall to the ground is the same force that causes the planets and the moon to move around , and so on ? everybody knows that . it 's a property of gravitation .
it 's not something in the human mind . the human mind can , of course , appreciate it and enjoy it , use it , but it 's not - it does n't stem from the human mind .
it stems from the character of gravity .
and that 's true of all the things we 're talking about .
they are properties of the fundamental law .
the fundamental law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another , and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin .
i say here that newton did a lot of things that year : gravity , the laws of motion , the calculus , white light composed of all the colors of the rainbow .
and he could have written quite an essay on " what i did over my summer vacation . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we do n't have to assume these principles as separate metaphysical postulates .
they follow from the fundamental theory .
they are what we call emergent properties .
you do n't need - you do n't need something more to get something more .
that 's what emergence means .
life can emerge from physics and chemistry , plus a lot of accidents .
the human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents , the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents .
it does n't diminish the importance of these subjects to know that they follow from more fundamental things , plus accidents .
that 's a general rule , and it 's critically important to realize that .
you do n't need something more in order to get something more .
people keep asking that when they read my book , " the quark and the jaguar , " and they say , " is n't there something more beyond what you have there ? "
presumably , they mean something supernatural .
anyway , there is n't . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you do n't need something more to explain something more .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- this is the natural history museum in rotterdam , where i work as a curator .
it 's my job to make sure the collection stays okay , and that it grows , and basically it means i collect dead animals .
back in 1995 , we got a new wing next to the museum .
it was made of glass , and this building really helped me to do my job good .
the building was a true bird-killer .
you may know that birds do n't understand the concept of glass . they do n't see it , so they fly into the windows and get killed .
the only thing i had to do was go out , pick them up , and have them stuffed for the collection .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass .
and it was on june 5 , 1995 , that i heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck .
and this is what i saw when i looked out of the window .
this is the dead duck . it flew against the window .
it 's laying dead on its belly .
but next to the dead duck is a live duck , and please pay attention .
both are of the male sex .
and then this happened .
the live duck mounted the dead duck , and started to copulate .
well , i 'm a biologist . i 'm an ornithologist .
i said , " something 's wrong here . "
one is dead , one is alive . that must be necrophilia .
i look . both are of the male sex .
homosexual necrophilia .
so i - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i took my camera , i took my notebook , took a chair , and started to observe this behavior .
after 75 minutes - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i had seen enough , and i got hungry , and i wanted to go home .
so i went out , collected the duck , and before i put it in the freezer , i checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex .
and here 's a rare picture of a duck 's penis , so it was indeed of the male sex .
it 's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis .
-lsb- the first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos -lrb- aves : anatidae -rrb- -rsb- i knew i 'd seen something special , but it took me six years to decide to publish it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , it 's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine , but to share this among your peers is something different .
i did n't have the framework .
so after six years , my friends and colleagues urged me to publish , so i published " the first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard . "
and here 's the situation again .
a is my office , b is the place where the duck hit the glass , and c is from where i watched it .
and here are the ducks again .
as you probably know , in science , when you write a kind of special paper , only six or seven people read it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then something good happened .
i got a phone call from a person called marc abrahams , and he told me , " you 've won a prize with your duck paper : the ig nobel prize . "
and the ig nobel prize - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - the ig nobel prize honors research that first makes people laugh , and then makes them think , with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science .
that 's a good thing , so i accepted the prize .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i went - let me remind you that marc abrahams did n't call me from stockholm .
he called me from cambridge , massachusetts .
so i traveled to boston , to cambridge , and i went to this wonderful ig nobel prize ceremony held at harvard university , and this ceremony is a very nice experience .
real nobel laureates hand you the prize .
that 's the first thing .
and there are nine other winners who get prizes .
here 's one of my fellow winners . that 's charles paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper , " courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in britain . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think there are one or two more ig nobel prize winners in this room .
dan , where are you ? dan ariely ?
applause for dan .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dan won his prize in medicine for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine works better than low-priced fake medicine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here 's my one minute of fame , my acceptance speech , and here 's the duck .
this is its first time on the u.s. west coast .
i 'm going to pass it around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah ?
you can pass it around .
please note it 's a museum specimen , but there 's no chance you 'll get the avian flu .
after winning this prize , my life changed .
in the first place , people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things , and i got a real nice collection .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- more importantly , people started to send me their observations of remarkable animal behavior , and believe me , if there 's an animal misbehaving on this planet , i know about it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a moose .
it 's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison .
this is in montana , 2008 .
this is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish .
this is the netherlands , 2011 .
these are cane toads in australia .
this is roadkill .
please note that this is necrophilia .
it 's remarkable : the position .
the missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom .
these are pigeons in rotterdam .
barn swallows in hong kong , 2004 .
this is a turkey in wisconsin on the premises of the ethan allen juvenile correctional institution .
it took all day , and the prisoners had a great time .
so what does this mean ?
i mean , the question i ask myself , why does this happen in nature ?
well , what i concluded from reviewing all these cases is that it is important that this happens only when death is instant and in a dramatic way and in the right position for copulation .
at least , i thought it was till i got these slides .
and here you see a dead duck .
it 's been there for three days , and it 's laying on its back .
so there goes my theory of necrophilia .
another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds .
this is mad max , a blackbird who lives in rotterdam .
the only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008 , day in and day out .
here he goes , and here 's a short video .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- clunk -rrb- -lrb- clunk -rrb- -lrb- clunk -rrb- -lrb- clunk -rrb- so what this bird does is fight his own image .
he sees an intruder in his territory , and it 's coming all the time and he 's there , so there is no end to it .
and i thought , in the beginning - i studied this bird for a couple of years - that , well , should n't the brain of this bird be damaged ?
it 's not . i show you here some slides , some frames from the video , and at the last moment before he hits the glass , he puts his feet in front , and then he bangs against the glass .
so i 'll conclude to invite you all to dead duck day .
that 's on june 5 every year .
at five minutes to six in the afternoon , we come together at the natural history museum in rotterdam , the duck comes out of the museum , and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows .
and as you know , or as you may not know , this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world .
in the u.s. alone , a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings .
and when it 's over , we go to a chinese restaurant and we have a six-course duck dinner .
so i hope to see you next year in rotterdam , the netherlands , for dead duck day .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , sorry .
may i have my duck back , please ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
many believe driving is an activity solely reserved for those who can see .
a blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task , until now .
hello , my name is dennis hong , and we 're bringing freedom and independence to the blind by building a vehicle for the visually impaired .
so before i talk about this car for the blind , let me briefly tell you about another project that i worked on called the darpa urban challenge .
now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself .
you press start , nobody touches anything , and it can reach its destination fully autonomously .
so in 2007 , our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition .
so about that time , the national federation of the blind , or nfb , challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently .
we decided to give it a try , because we thought , " hey , how hard could it be ? "
we have already an autonomous vehicle .
we just put a blind person in it and we 're done , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we could n't have been more wrong .
what nfb wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around , but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive .
so we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch .
so to test this crazy idea , we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility .
and in the summer of 2009 , we invited dozens of blind youth from all over the country and gave them a chance to take it for a spin .
it was an absolutely amazing experience .
but the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment , in a flat , closed-off parking lot - even the lanes defined by red traffic cones .
so with this success , we decided to take the next big step , to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads .
so how does it work ?
well , it 's a rather complex system , but let me try to explain it , maybe simplify it .
so we have three steps .
we have perception , computation and non-visual interfaces .
now obviously the driver can not see , so the system needs to perceive the environment and gather information for the driver .
for that , we use an initial measurement unit .
so it measures acceleration , angular acceleration - like a human ear , inner ear .
we fuse that information with a gps unit to get an estimate of the location of the car .
we also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road .
and we also use three laser range finders .
the lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles - a car approaching from the front , the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads , any obstacles around the vehicle .
so all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer , and the computer can do two things .
one is , first of all , process this information to have an understanding of the environment - these are the lanes of the road , there 's the obstacles - and convey this information to the driver .
the system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car .
so we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle .
but the problem is this : how do we convey this information and instructions to a person who can not see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive ?
so for this , we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology .
so starting from a three-dimensional ping sound system , a vibrating vest , a click wheel with voice commands , a leg strip , even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot .
but today we 're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces .
now the first interface is called a drivegrip .
so these are a pair of gloves , and it has vibrating elements on the knuckle part so you can convey instructions about how to steer - the direction and the intensity .
another device is called speedstrip .
so this is a chair - as a matter of fact , it 's actually a massage chair .
we gut it out , and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns , and we actuate them to convey information about the speed , and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal .
so over here , you can see how the computer understands the environment , and because you can not see the vibration , we actually put red led 's on the driver so that you can see what 's happening .
this is the sensory data , and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer .
so these two devices , drivegrip and speedstrip , are very effective .
but the problem is these are instructional cue devices .
so this is not really freedom , right ?
the computer tells you how to drive - turn left , turn right , speed up , stop .
we call this the " backseat-driver problem . "
so we 're moving away from the instructional cue devices , and we 're now focusing more on the informational devices .
a good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called airpix .
so think of it as a monitor for the blind .
so it 's a small tablet , has many holes in it , and compressed air comes out , so it can actually draw images .
so even though you are blind , you can put your hand over it , you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles .
actually , you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature .
so it 's actually a multi-dimensional user interface .
so here you can see the left camera , the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the airpix .
for this , we 're showing a simulator , a blind person driving using the airpix .
this simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces .
so basically that 's how it works .
so just a month ago , on january 29th , we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous daytona international speedway during the rolex 24 racing event .
we also had some surprises . let 's take a look .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- announcer : this is an historic day in january .
he 's coming up to the grandstand , fellow federationists .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- -lrb- honking -rrb- there 's the grandstand now .
and he 's -lsb- unclear -rsb- following that van that 's out in front of him .
well there comes the first box .
now let 's see if mark avoids it .
he does . he passes it on the right .
third box is out . the fourth box is out .
and he 's perfectly making his way between the two .
he 's closing in on the van to make the moving pass .
well this is what it 's all about , this kind of dynamic display of audacity and ingenuity .
he 's approaching the end of the run , makes his way between the barrels that are set up there .
-lrb- honking -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dennis hong : i 'm so happy for you .
mark 's going to give me a ride back to the hotel .
mark riccobono : yes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : so since we started this project , we 've been getting hundreds of letters , emails , phone calls from people from all around the world .
letters thanking us , but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one : " now i understand why there is braille on a drive-up atm machine . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but sometimes - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but sometimes i also do get - i would n't call it hate mail - but letters of really strong concern : " dr. hong , are you insane , trying to put blind people on the road ?
you must be out of your mind . "
but this vehicle is a prototype vehicle , and it 's not going to be on the road until it 's proven as safe as , or safer than , today 's vehicle .
and i truly believe that this can happen .
but still , will the society , would they accept such a radical idea ?
how are we going to handle insurance ?
how are we going to issue driver 's licenses ?
there 's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality .
of course , the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind .
but potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project .
the sensors that are used can see through the dark , the fog and rain .
and together with this new type of interfaces , we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people .
or for the blind , everyday home appliances - in the educational setting , in the office setting .
just imagine , in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what 's written and read using these non-visual interfaces .
this is priceless .
so today , the things i 've showed you today , is just the beginning .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i heard this amazing story about miuccia prada .
she 's an italian fashion designer .
she goes to this vintage store in paris with a friend of hers .
she 's rooting around , she finds this one jacket by balenciaga - she loves it .
she 's turning it inside out .
she 's looking at the seams . she 's looking at the construction .
her friend says , " buy it already . "
she said , " i 'll buy it , but i 'm also going to replicate it . "
now , the academics in this audience may think , " well , that sounds like plagiarism . "
but to a fashionista , what it really is is a sign of prada 's genius : that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that does n't need to be changed by one iota , and to be current and to be now .
you might also be asking whether it 's possible that this is illegal for her to do this .
well , it turns out that it 's actually not illegal .
in the fashion industry , there 's very little intellectual property protection .
they have trademark protection , but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of .
all they have , really , is trademark protection , and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design .
the only thing that they ca n't copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel .
that 's one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products .
it 's because it 's a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they ca n't knock off the logo .
but if you go to santee alley , yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , yeah .
canal street , i know .
and sometimes these are fun , right ?
now , the reason for this , the reason that the fashion industry does n't have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection .
they did n't want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing .
and then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because joe blow owns it .
but too utilitarian ? i mean is that the way you think of fashion ?
this is vivienne westwood . no !
we think of it as maybe too silly , too unnecessary .
now , those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection - which is that without ownership , there is no incentive to innovate - might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry .
what i 'm going to argue today is that because there 's no copyright protection in the fashion industry , fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design , things to cover our naked bodies , into something that we consider art .
because there 's no copyright protection in this industry , there 's a very open and creative ecology of creativity .
unlike their creative brothers and sisters , who are sculptors or photographers or filmmakers or musicians , fashion designers can sample from all their peers ' designs .
they can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design .
they 're also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist .
and here , i suspect , they were influenced by the costumes in avatar .
maybe just a little .
ca n't copyright a costume either .
now , fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry .
this wedding dress here is actually made of sporks , and this dress is actually made of aluminum .
i 've heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through .
so , one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying , which is really what it is , is the establishment of trends .
people think this is a magical thing . how does it happen ?
well , it 's because it 's legal for people to copy one another .
some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we 're all going to wear , but if you talk to any designer at any level , including these high-end designers , they always say their main inspiration comes from the street : where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks .
and that 's where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration , so it 's both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry .
now , the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry .
they are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices .
and they 've been faced with a lot of lawsuits , but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers .
the courts have said over and over again , " you do n't need any more intellectual property protection . "
when you look at copies like this , you wonder : how do the luxury high-end brands remain in business ?
if you can get it for 200 bucks , why pay a thousand ?
well , that 's one reason we had a conference here at usc a few years ago .
we invited tom ford to come - the conference was called , " ready to share : fashion and the ownership of creativity " - and we asked him exactly this question .
here 's what he had to say .
he had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at gucci , in case you did n't know .
tom ford : and we found after much research that - actually not much research , quite simple research - that the counterfeit customer was not our customer .
johanna blakley : imagine that .
the people on santee alley are not the ones who shop at gucci .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a very different demographic .
and , you know , a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design , at least in terms of the materials ; they 're always made of cheaper materials .
but even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects , can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend .
there 's lots of virtues of copying .
one that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before , and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry , actually .
and this is a good thing . we need lots of options .
fashion , whether you like it or not , helps you project who you are to the world .
because of fast fashion , global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to .
and this , actually , is good news to trendsetters ; they want trends to be set so that they can move product .
for fashionistas , they want to stay ahead of the curve .
they do n't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing .
and so , they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible .
i tell you , there is no rest for the fashionable .
every season , these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody 's going to love .
and this , let me tell you , is very good for the bottom line .
now of course , there 's a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process .
and stuart weitzman is a very successful shoe designer .
he has complained a lot about people copying him , but in one interview i read , he said it has really forced him to up his game .
he had to come up with new ideas , new things that would be hard to copy .
he came up with this bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium ; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material , it 'll actually crack in two .
it forced him to be a little more innovative . -lrb- music -rrb- and that actually reminded me of jazz great , charlie parker .
i do n't know if you 've heard this anecdote , but i have .
he said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians would n't be able to replicate the sound . -lrb- laughter -rrb- he wanted to make it too difficult to copy , and that 's what fashion designers are doing all the time .
they 're trying to put together a signature look , an aesthetic that reflects who they are .
when people knock it off , everybody knows because they 've put that look out on the runway , and it 's a coherent aesthetic .
i love these gallianos .
okay , we 'll move on . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is not unlike the world of comedy .
i do n't know if you know that jokes also ca n't be copyright protected .
so when one-liners were really popular , everybody stole them from one another .
but now , we have a different kind of comic .
they develop a persona , a signature style , much like fashion designers .
and their jokes , much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer , really only work within that aesthetic .
if somebody steals a joke from larry david , for instance , it 's not as funny .
now , the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they 've learned how to copy themselves .
they knock themselves off .
they make deals with the fast fashion giants to a whole new demographic : the santee alley demographic .
now , some fashion designers will say , " it 's only in the united states that we do n't have any respect .
in other countries there is protection for our artful designs . "
but if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world , it turns out that the protection that 's offered is really ineffectual .
in japan , for instance , which i think is the third largest market , they have a design law ; it protects apparel , but the novelty standard is so high , you have to prove that your garment has never existed before , it 's totally unique .
and that 's sort of like the novelty standard for a u.s. patent , which fashion designers never get - rarely get here in the states .
in the european union , they went in the other direction .
very low novelty standard , anybody can register anything .
but even though it 's the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there , they do n't register their garments , generally , and there 's not a lot of litigation .
it turns out it 's because the novelty standard is too low .
a person can come in and take somebody else 's gown , cut off three inches from the bottom , go to the e.u. and register it as a new , original design .
so , that does not stop the knock-off artists .
if you look at the registry , actually , a lot of the registered things in the e.u.
are nike t-shirts that are almost identical to one another .
but this has not stopped diane von furstenberg .
she is the head of the council of fashion designers of america , and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs .
the retailers have kind of quashed this notion though .
i do n't think the legislation is going anywhere , because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between a pirated design and something that 's just part of a global trend .
who owns a look ?
that is a very difficult question to answer .
it takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time , and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive .
you know , it 's not just the fashion industry that does n't have copyright protection .
there 's a bunch of other industries that do n't have copyright protection , including the food industry .
you can not copyright a recipe because it 's a set of instructions , it 's fact , and you can not copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish .
same with automobiles .
it does n't matter how wacky they look or how cool they look , you can not copyright the sculptural design .
it 's a utilitarian article , that 's why .
same with furniture , it 's too utilitarian .
magic tricks , i think they 're instructions , sort of like recipes : no copyright protection .
hairdos , no copyright protection .
open source software , these guys decided they did n't want copyright protection .
they thought it 'd be more innovative without it .
it 's really hard to get copyright for databases .
tattoo artists , they do n't want it ; it 's not cool .
they share their designs .
jokes , no copyright protection .
fireworks displays , the smell of perfume : no .
and some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you , but these are the gross sales for low i.p. industries , industries with very little copyright protection , and there 's the gross sales of films and books .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it ai n't pretty .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so you talk to people in the fashion industry and they 're like , " shhh !
do n't tell anybody we can actually steal from each other 's designs .
it 's embarrassing . "
but you know what ? it 's revolutionary , and it 's a model that a lot of other industries - like the ones we just saw with the really small bars - because right now , those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it 's as if they do n't have any protection , and they do n't know what to do .
when i found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that did n't have copyright protection , i thought , " what exactly is the underlying logic ?
i want a picture . " and the lawyers do not provide a picture , so i made one .
these are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law .
it is more complex than this , but this will do .
first : is something an artistic object ?
then it deserves protection .
is it a utilitarian object ?
then no , it does not deserve protection .
this is a difficult , unstable binary .
the other one is : is it an idea ?
is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society ?
no protection .
or is it a physically fixed expression of an idea : something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it ?
the problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed , expression versus idea concept .
nowadays , we do n't really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold .
it 's a digital file .
it is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds .
and these things , because we can copy and transmit them so easily , actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects .
now , the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and , let me tell you , we do n't want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out .
they 're smart .
i 'm with one . he 's my boyfriend , he 's okay .
he 's smart , he 's smart .
but you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out , trying to figure out : what is the kind of ownership model , in a digital world , that 's going to lead to the most innovation ?
and my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future .
if you want more information about this research project , please visit our website : it 's readytoshare.org.
and i really want to thank veronica jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation .
thank you so much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you about one of the biggest myths in medicine , and that is the idea that all we need are more medical breakthroughs and then all of our problems will be solved .
our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single , solo inventor who , working late in the lab one night , makes an earthshaking discovery , and voila , overnight everything 's changed .
that 's a very appealing picture , however , it 's just not true .
in fact , medicine today is a team sport .
and in many ways , it always has been .
i 'd like to share with you a story about how i 've experienced this very dramatically in my own work .
i 'm a surgeon , and we surgeons have always had this special relationship with light .
when i make an incision inside a patient 's body , it 's dark .
we need to shine light to see what we 're doing .
and this is why , traditionally , surgeries have always started so early in the morning - to take advantage of daylight hours .
and if you look at historical pictures of the early operating rooms , they have been on top of buildings .
for example , this is the oldest operating room in the western world , in london , where the operating room is actually on top of a church with a skylight coming in .
and then this is a picture of one of the most famous hospitals in america .
this is mass general in boston .
and do you know where the operating room is ?
here it is on the top of the building with plenty of windows to let light in .
so nowadays in the operating room , we no longer need to use sunlight .
and because we no longer need to use sunlight , we have very specialized lights that are made for the operating room .
we have an opportunity to bring in other kinds of lights - lights that can allow us to see what we currently do n't see .
and this is what i think is the magic of fluorescence .
so let me back up a little bit .
when we are in medical school , we learn our anatomy from illustrations such as this where everything 's color-coded .
nerves are yellow , arteries are red , veins are blue .
that 's so easy anybody could become a surgeon , right ?
however , when we have a real patient on the table , this is the same neck dissection - not so easy to tell the difference between different structures .
we heard over the last couple days what an urgent problem cancer still is in our society , what a pressing need it is for us to not have one person die every minute .
well if cancer can be caught early , enough such that someone can have their cancer taken out , excised with surgery , i do n't care if it has this gene or that gene , or if it has this protein or that protein , it 's in the jar .
it 's done , it 's out , you 're cured of cancer .
this is how we excise cancers .
we do our best , based upon our training and the way the cancer looks and the way it feels and its relationship to other structures and all of our experience , we say , you know what , the cancer 's gone .
we 've made a good job . we 've taken it out .
that 's what the surgeon is saying in the operating room when the patient 's on the table .
but then we actually do n't know that it 's all out .
we actually have to take samples from the surgical bed , what 's left behind in the patient , and then send those bits to the pathology lab .
in the meanwhile , the patient 's on the operating room table .
the nurses , anesthesiologist , the surgeon , all the assistants are waiting around .
and we wait .
the pathologist takes that sample , freezes it , cuts it , looks in the microscope one by one and then calls back into the room .
and that may be 20 minutes later per piece .
so if you 've sent three specimens , it 's an hour later .
and very often they say , " you know what , points a and b are okay , but point c , you still have some residual cancer there .
please go cut that piece out . "
so we go back and we do that again , and again .
and this whole process : " okay you 're done .
we think the entire tumor is out . "
but very often several days later , the patient 's gone home , we get a phone call : " i 'm sorry , once we looked at the final pathology , once we looked at the final specimen , we actually found that there 's a couple other spots where the margins are positive .
there 's still cancer in your patient . "
so now you 're faced with telling your patient , first of all , that they may need another surgery , or that they need additional therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy .
so would n't it be better if we could really tell , if the surgeon could really tell , whether or not there 's still cancer on the surgical field ?
i mean , in many ways , the way that we 're doing it , we 're still operating in the dark .
so in 2004 , during my surgical residency , i had the great fortune to meet dr. roger tsien , who went on to win the nobel prize for chemistry in 2008 .
roger and his team were working on a way to detect cancer , and they had a very clever molecule that they had come up with .
the molecule they had developed had three parts .
the main part of it is the blue part , polycation , and it 's basically very sticky to every tissue in your body .
so imagine that you make a solution full of this sticky material and inject it into the veins of someone who has cancer , everything 's going to get lit up .
nothing will be specific .
there 's no specificity there .
so they added two additional components .
the first one is a polyanionic segment , which basically acts as a non-stick backing like the back of a sticker .
so when those two are together , the molecule is neutral and nothing gets stuck down .
and the two pieces are then linked by something that can only be cut if you have the right molecular scissors - for example , the kind of protease enzymes that tumors make .
so here in this situation , if you make a solution full of this three-part molecule along with the dye , which is shown in green , and you inject it into the vein of someone who has cancer , normal tissue ca n't cut it .
the molecule passes through and gets excreted .
however , in the presence of the tumor , now there are molecular scissors that can break this molecule apart right there at the cleavable site .
and now , boom , the tumor labels itself and it gets fluorescent .
so here 's an example of a nerve that has tumor surrounding it .
can you tell where the tumor is ?
i could n't when i was working on this .
but here it is . it 's fluorescent .
now it 's green .
see , so every single one in the audience now can tell where the cancer is .
we can tell in the operating room , in the field , at a molecular level , where is the cancer and what the surgeon needs to do and how much more work they need to do to cut that out .
and the cool thing about fluorescence is that it 's not only bright , it actually can shine through tissue .
the light that the fluorescence emits can go through tissue .
so even if the tumor is not right on the surface , you 'll still be able to see it .
in this movie , you can see that the tumor is green .
there 's actually normal muscle on top of it . see that ?
and i 'm peeling that muscle away .
but even before i peel that muscle away , you saw that there was a tumor underneath .
so that 's the beauty of having a tumor that 's labeled with fluorescent molecules .
that you can , not only see the margins right there on a molecular level , but you can see it even if it 's not right on the top - even if it 's beyond your field of view .
and this works for metastatic lymph nodes also .
sentinel lymph node dissection has really changed the way that we manage breast cancer , melanoma .
women used to get really debilitating surgeries to excise all of the axillary lymph nodes .
but when sentinel lymph node came into our treatment protocol , the surgeon basically looks for the single node that is the first draining lymph node of the cancer .
and then if that node has cancer , the woman would go on to get the axillary lymph node dissection .
so what that means is if the lymph node did not have cancer , the woman would be saved from having unnecessary surgery .
but sentinel lymph node , the way that we do it today , is kind of like having a road map just to know where to go .
so if you 're driving on the freeway and you want to know where 's the next gas station , you have a map to tell you that that gas station is down the road .
it does n't tell you whether or not the gas station has gas .
you have to cut it out , bring it back home , cut it up , look inside and say , " oh yes , it does have gas . "
so that takes more time .
patients are still on the operating room table .
anesthesiologists , surgeons are waiting around .
that takes time .
so with our technology , we can tell right away .
you see a lot of little , roundish bumps there .
some of these are swollen lymph nodes that look a little larger than others .
who amongst us has n't had swollen lymph nodes with a cold ?
that does n't mean that there 's cancer inside .
well with our technology , the surgeon is able to tell immediately which nodes have cancer .
i wo n't go into this very much , but our technology , besides being able to tag tumor and metastatic lymph nodes with fluorescence , we can also use the same smart three-part molecule to tag gadolinium onto the system so you can do this noninvasively .
the patient has cancer , you want to know if the lymph nodes have cancer even before you go in .
well you can see this on an mri .
so in surgery , it 's important to know what to cut out .
but equally important is to preserve things that are important for function .
so it 's very important to avoid inadvertent injury .
and what i 'm talking about are nerves .
nerves , if they are injured , can cause paralysis , can cause pain .
in the setting of prostate cancer , up to 60 percent of men after prostate cancer surgery may have urinary incontinence and erectile disfunction .
that 's a lot of people to have a lot of problems - and this is even in so-called nerve-sparing surgery , which means that the surgeon is aware of the problem , and they are trying to avoid the nerves .
but you know what , these little nerves are so small , in the context of prostate cancer , that they are actually never seen .
they are traced just by their known anatomical path along vasculature .
and they 're known because somebody has decided to study them , which means that we 're still learning about where they are .
crazy to think that we 're having surgery , we 're trying to excise cancer , we do n't know where the cancer is .
we 're trying to preserve nerves ; we ca n't see where they are .
so i said , would n't it be great if we could find a way to see nerves with fluorescence ?
and at first this did n't get a lot of support .
people said , " we 've been doing it this way for all these years .
what 's the problem ?
we have n't had that many complications . "
but i went ahead anyway .
and roger helped me .
and he brought his whole team with him .
so there 's that teamwork thing again .
and we eventually discovered molecules that were specifically labeling nerves .
and when we made a solution of this , tagged with the fluorescence and injected in the body of a mouse , their nerves literally glowed .
you can see where they are .
here you 're looking at a sciatic nerve of a mouse , and you can see that that big , fat portion you can see very easily .
but in fact , at the tip of that where i 'm dissecting now , there 's actually very fine arborizations that ca n't really be seen .
you see what looks like little medusa heads coming out .
we have been able to see nerves for facial expression , for facial movement , for breathing - every single nerve - nerves for urinary function around the prostate .
we 've been able to see every single nerve .
when we put these two probes together ...
so here 's a tumor .
do you guys know where the margins of this tumor is ?
now you do .
what about the nerve that 's going into this tumor ?
that white portion there is easy to see .
but what about the part that goes into the tumor ?
do you know where it 's going ?
now you do .
basically , we 've come up with a way to stain tissue and color-code the surgical field .
this was a bit of a breakthrough .
i think that it 'll change the way that we do surgery .
we published our results in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences and in nature biotechnology .
we received commentary in discover magazine , in the economist .
and we showed it to a lot of my surgical colleagues .
they said , " wow !
i have patients who would benefit from this .
i think that this will result in my surgeries with a better outcome and fewer complications . "
what needs to happen now is further development of our technology along with development of the instrumentation that allows us to see this sort of fluorescence in the operating room .
the eventual goal is that we 'll get this into patients .
however , we 've discovered that there 's actually no straightforward mechanism to develop a molecule for one-time use .
understandably , the majority of the medical industry is focused on multiple-use drugs , such as long-term daily medications .
we are focused on making this technology better .
we 're focused on adding drugs , adding growth factors , killing nerves that are causing problems and not the surrounding tissue .
we know that this can be done and we 're committed to doing it .
i 'd like to leave you with this final thought .
successful innovation is not a single breakthrough .
it is not a sprint .
it is not an event for the solo runner .
successful innovation is a team sport , it 's a relay race .
it requires one team for the breakthrough and another team to get the breakthrough accepted and adopted .
and this takes the long-term steady courage of the day-in day-out struggle to educate , to persuade and to win acceptance .
and that is the light that i want to shine on health and medicine today .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for years i 've been feeling frustrated , because as a religious historian , i 've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths .
every single one of them has evolved their own version of what 's been called the golden rule .
sometimes it comes in a positive version - " always treat all others as you 'd like to be treated yourself . "
and equally important is the negative version - " do n't do to others what you would not like them to do to you . "
look into your own heart , discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse , under any circumstance whatsoever , to inflict that pain on anybody else .
and people have emphasized the importance of compassion , not just because it sounds good , but because it works .
people have found that when they have implemented the golden rule as confucius said , " all day and every day , " not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism , but to do it all day and every day , you dethrone yourself from the center of your world , put another there , and you transcend yourself .
and it brings you into the presence of what 's been called god , nirvana , rama , tao .
something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence .
but you know you 'd never know it a lot of the time , that this was so central to the religious life .
because with a few wonderful exceptions , very often when religious people come together , religious leaders come together , they 're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort .
often people do n't really want to be compassionate .
i sometimes see when i 'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead .
and that of course defeats the object of the exercise .
now why was i so grateful to ted ?
because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century , enabling me to speak to a much , much wider audience than i could have ever conceived .
because i feel an urgency about this .
if we do n't manage to implement the golden rule globally , so that we treat all peoples , wherever and whoever they may be , as though they were as important as ourselves , i doubt that we 'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation .
the task of our time , one of the great tasks of our time , is to build a global society , as i said , where people can live together in peace .
and the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem .
and of course it 's not just religious people who believe in the golden rule .
this is the source of all morality , this imaginative act of empathy , putting yourself in the place of another .
and so we have a choice , it seems to me .
we can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith , or we can go back to the rabbis . rabbi hillel , the older contemporary of jesus , who , when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of jewish teaching while he stood on one leg , said , " that which is hateful to you , do not do to your neighbor .
that is the torah and everything else is only commentary . "
and the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate .
and we need to revive that spirit .
and it 's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down .
we have to make this happen , and we can do it with the modern communications that ted has introduced .
already i 've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners .
in singapore , we have a group going to use the charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in singaporean society , and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically .
in malaysia , there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people , young people , and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art .
throughout europe , the muslim communities are holding events and discussions , are discussing the centrality of compassion in islam and in all faiths .
but it ca n't stop there . it ca n't stop with the launch .
religious teaching , this is where we 've gone so wrong , concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines .
religious teaching must always lead to action .
and i intend to work on this till my dying day .
and i want to continue with our partners to do two things - educate and stimulate compassionate thinking .
education because we 've so dropped out of compassion .
people often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody .
but of course you do n't understand compassion if you 're just going to think about it .
you also have to do it .
i want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people , which are dividing us from one another .
the same applies to educators .
i 'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism , the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle .
and also see that it demands acute intelligence , not just a gooey feeling .
i 'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people 's traditions .
and perhaps above all , to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking , so that because people have this charter , whatever their beliefs or lack of them , they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech , disdainful remarks from their religious leaders , their political leaders , from the captains of industry .
because we can change the world , we have the ability .
i would never have thought of putting the charter online .
i was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement .
and ted introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas .
because that is what is so wonderful about ted .
in this room , all this expertise , if we joined it all together , we could change the world .
and of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable .
but i 'd just like to quote , finish at the end with a reference to a british author , an oxford author whom i do n't quote very often , c.s. lewis .
but he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since i read it when i was a schoolgirl .
it 's in his book " the four loves . "
he said that he distinguished between erotic love , when two people gaze , spellbound , into each other 's eyes .
and then he compared that to friendship , when two people stand side by side , as it were , shoulder to shoulder , with their eyes fixed on a common goal .
we do n't have to fall in love with each other , but we can become friends .
and i am convinced .
i felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at vevey , that when people of all different persuasions come together , working side by side for a common goal , differences melt away .
and we learn amity .
and we learn to live together and to get to know one another .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me show you some images of what i consider to be the cities of tomorrow .
so , that 's kibera , the largest squatter community in nairobi .
this is the squatter community in sanjay gandhi national park in bombay , india , what 's called mumbai these days .
this is hosinia , the largest and most urbanized favela in rio de janeiro .
and this is sultanbelyi , which is one of the largest squatter communities in istanbul .
they are what i consider to be the cities of tomorrow , the new urban world .
now , why do i say that ?
to tell you about that i have to talk about this fellow here , his name is julius .
and i met julius the last week that i was living in kibera .
so , i had been there almost three months , and i was touring around the city going to different squatter areas and julius was tagging along , and he was bug eyed and at certain points we were walking around , he grabbed my hand for support , which is something most kenyans would never consider doing .
they 're very polite and they do n't get so forward so quickly .
and i found out later that it was julius ' first day in nairobi , and he 's one of many .
so , close to 200,000 people a day migrate from the rural to the urban areas .
that 's , and i 'm going to be fair to the statisticians who talked this morning , not almost 1.5 million people a week , but almost 1.4 million people a week but i 'm a journalist , and we exaggerate , so almost 1.5 million people a week , close to 70 million people a year .
and if you do the math , that 's 130 people every minute .
so , that 'll be - in the 18 minutes that i 'm given to talk here , between two and three thousand people will have journeyed to the cities .
and here are the statistics .
today - a billion squatters , one in six people on the planet .
2030 - two billion squatters , one in four people on the planet .
and the estimate is that in 2050 , there 'll be three billion squatters , better than one in three people on earth .
so , these are the cities of the future , and we have to engage them .
and i was thinking this morning of the good life , and before i show you the rest of my presentation , i 'm going to violate ted rules here , and i 'm going to read you something from my book as quickly as i can .
because i think it says something about reversing our perception of what we think the good life is .
so - " the hut was made of corrugated metal , set on a concrete pad .
it was a 10 by 10 cell .
armstrong o 'brian , jr. shared it with three other men .
armstrong and his friends had no water - they bought it from a nearby tap owner - no toilet - the families in this compound shared a single pit-latrine - and no sewers or sanitation .
they did have electricity , but it was illegal service tapped from someone else 's wires , and could only power one feeble bulb .
this was southland , a small shanty community on the western side of nairobi , kenya .
but it could 've been anywhere in the city , because more than half the city of nairobi lives like this .
1.5 million people stuffed into mud or metal huts with no services , no toilets , no rights .
" armstrong explained the brutal reality of their situation : they paid 1,500 shillings in rent , about 20 bucks a month , a relatively high price for a kenyan shantytown , and they could not afford to be late with the money .
' in case you owe one month , the landlord will come with his henchmen and bundle you out . he will confiscate your things , ' armstrong said .
' not one month , one day , ' his roommate hilary kibagendi onsomu , who was cooking ugali , the spongy white cornmeal concoction that is the staple food in the country , cut into the conversation .
they called their landlord a wabenzi , meaning that he is a person who has enough money to drive a mercedes-benz .
hilary served the ugali with a fry of meat and tomatoes ; the sun slammed down on the thin steel roof ; and we perspired as we ate .
" after we finished , armstrong straightened his tie , put on a wool sports jacket , and we headed out into the glare .
outside a mound of garbage formed the border between southland and the adjacent legal neighborhood of langata .
it was perhaps eight feet tall , 40 feet long , and 10 feet wide .
and it was set in a wider watery ooze .
as we passed , two boys were climbing the mount kenya of trash .
they could n't have been more than five or six years old .
they were barefoot , and with each step their toes sank into the muck sending hundreds of flies scattering from the rancid pile .
i thought they might be playing king of the hill , but i was wrong .
once atop the pile , one of the boys lowered his shorts , squatted , and defecated .
the flies buzzed hungrily around his legs .
when 20 families - 100 people or so - share a single latrine , a boy pooping on a garbage pile is perhaps no big thing .
but it stood in jarring contrast to something armstrong had said as we were eating - that he treasured the quality of life in his neighborhood .
" for armstrong , southland was n't constrained by its material conditions .
instead , the human spirit radiated out from the metal walls and garbage heaps to offer something no legal neighborhood could : freedom .
' this place is very addictive , ' he had said .
' it 's a simple life , but nobody is restricting you .
nobody is controlling what you do .
once you have stayed here , you can not go back . ' he meant back beyond that mountain of trash , back in the legal city , of legal buildings , with legal leases and legal rights .
' once you have stayed here , ' he said , ' you can stay for the rest of your life . " ' so , he has hope , and this is where these communities start .
this is perhaps the most primitive shanty that you can find in kibera , little more than a stick-and-mud hut next to a garbage heap .
this is getting ready for the monsoon in bombay , india .
this is home improvement : putting plastic tarps on your roof .
this is in rio de janeiro , and it 's getting a bit better , right ?
we 're seeing scavenged terra cotta tile and little pieces of signs , and plaster over the brick , some color , and this is sulay montakaya 's house in sultanbelyi , and it 's getting even better .
he 's got a fence ; he scavenged a door ; he 's got new tile on the roof .
and then you get rocinha and you can see that it 's getting even better .
the buildings here are multi-story .
they develop - you can see on the far right one where it seems to just stack on top of each other , room , after room , after room .
and what people do is they develop their home on one or two stories , and they sell their loggia or roof rights , and someone else builds on top of their building , and then that person sells the roof rights , and someone else builds on top of their building .
all of these buildings are made out of reinforced concrete and brick .
and then you get sultanbelyi , in turkey , where it 's even built to a higher level of design .
the crud in the front is mattress stuffing , and you see that all over turkey .
people dry out or air out their mattress stuffing on their roofs .
but the green building , on behind , you can see that the top floor is not occupied , so people are building with the possibility of expansion .
and it 's built to a pretty high standard of design .
and then you finally get squatter homes like this , which is built on the suburban model .
hey , that 's a single family home in the squatter community .
that 's also in istanbul , turkey .
they 're quite vital places , these communities .
this is the main drag of rocinha , the estrada da gavea , and there 's a bus route that runs through it , lots of people out on the street .
these communities in these cities are actually more vital than the illegal communities .
they have more things going on in them .
this is a typical pathway in rocinha called a " beco " - these are how you get around the community .
it 's on very steep ground .
they 're built on the hills , inland from the beaches in rio , and you can see that the houses are just cantilevered over the natural obstructions .
so , that 's just a rock in the hillside .
and these becos are normally very crowded , and people hump furniture up them , or refrigerators up them , all sorts of things .
beer is all carried in on your shoulders .
beer is a very important thing in brazil .
this is commerce in kenya , right along the train tracks , so close to the train tracks that the merchants sometimes have to pull the merchandise out of the way .
this is a marketplace , also in kenya , toi market , lots of dealers , in almost everything you want to buy .
those green things in the foreground are mangoes .
this is a shopping street in kibera , and you can see that there 's a soda dealer , a health clinic , two beauty salons , a bar , two grocery stores , and a church , and more .
it 's a typical downtown street ; it just happens to be self-built .
this here , on the right-hand side , is what 's called a - if you look at the fine print under the awning - it 's a hotel .
and what hotel means , in kenya and india , is an eating-place .
so , that 's a restaurant .
people steal electrical power - this is rio .
people tap in and they have thieves who are called " grillos " or " crickets , " and they steal the electrical power and wire the neighborhood .
people burn trash to get rid of the garbage , and they dig their own sewer channels .
talk about more plastic bags than plankton .
and sometimes they have natural trash-disposal .
and when they have more money they cement their streets , and they put in sewers and good water pipes , and stuff like that .
this is water going to rio . people run their water pipes all over the place , and that little hut right there has a pump in it , and that 's what people do : they steal electricity ; they install a pump and they tap into the water main , and pump water up to their houses .
so , the question is how do you go from the mud-hut village , to the more developed city , to the even highly developed sultanbelyi ?
i say there are two things .
one is people need a guarantee they wo n't be evicted .
that does not necessarily mean property rights , and i would disagree with hernando de soto on that question , because property rights create a lot of complications .
they 're most often sold to people , and people then wind up in debt and have to pay back the debt , and sometimes have to sell their property in order to pay back the debt .
there 's a whole variety of other reasons why property rights sometimes do n't work in these cases , but they do need security of tenure .
and they need access to politics , and that can mean two things .
that can mean community organizing from below , but it can also mean possibilities from above .
and i say that because the system in turkey is notable .
turkey has two great laws that protect squatters .
one is that - it 's called " gecekondu " in turkish , which means " built overnight , " and if you build your house overnight in turkey , you ca n't be evicted without due process of law , if they do n't catch you during the night .
and the second aspect is that once you have 2,000 people in the community , you can petition the government to be recognized as a legal sub-municipality .
and when you 're a legal sub-municipality , you suddenly have politics .
you 're allowed to have an elected government , collect taxes , provide municipal services , and that 's exactly what they do .
so , these are the civic leaders of the future .
the woman in the center is geeta jiwa .
she lives in one of those tents on the highway median in mumbai .
that 's sureka gundi ; she also lives with her family on the tent along the same highway median .
they 're very outspoken . they 're very active .
they can be community leaders .
this woman is nine , which means " grandma " in turkish .
and there were three old ladies who lived in - that 's her self-built house behind her - and they 've lived there for 30 or 40 years , and they are the backbone of the community there .
this is richard muthama peter , and he is an itinerant street photographer in kibera .
he makes money taking pictures of the neighborhood , and the people in the neighborhood , and is a great resource in the community .
and finally my choice to run for mayor of rio is cezinio , the fruit merchant with his two kids here , and a more honest and giving and caring man i do n't know .
the future of these communities is in the people and in our ability to work with those people .
so , i think the message i take , from what i read from the book , from what armstrong said , and from all these people , is that these are neighborhoods .
the issue is not urban poverty .
the issue is not the larger , over-arching thing .
the issue is for us to recognize that these are neighborhoods - this is a legitimate form of urban development - and that cities have to engage these residents , because they are building the cities of the future .
thank you very much .
this is my first time at ted . normally , as an advertising man , i actually speak at ted evil , which is ted 's secret sister that pays all the bills .
it 's held every two years in burma .
and i particularly remember a really good speech by kim jong il on how to get teens smoking again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , actually , it 's suddenly come to me after years working in the business , that what we create in advertising , which is intangible value - you might call it perceived value , you might call it badge value , subjective value , intangible value of some kind - gets rather a bad rap .
if you think about it , if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods , you basically have two choices .
you can either live in a world which is poorer , which people in general do n't like .
or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value , that actually intangible value , in many ways is a very , very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things .
here is one example . this is a train which goes from london to paris .
the question was given to a bunch of engineers , about 15 years ago , " how do we make the journey to paris better ? "
and they came up with a very good engineering solution , which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from london to the coast , and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time .
now , call me mister picky . i 'm just an ad man ...
... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter .
now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks ?
here is my naive advertising man 's suggestion .
what you should in fact do is employ all of the world 's top male and female supermodels , pay them to walk the length of the train , handing out free chateau petrus for the entire duration of the journey .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , you 'll still have about three billion pounds left in change , and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , here is another naive advertising man 's question again .
and this shows that engineers , medical people , scientific people , have an obsession with solving the problems of reality , when actually most problems , once you reach a basic level of wealth in society , most problems are actually problems of perception .
so i 'll ask you another question .
what on earth is wrong with placebos ?
they seem fantastic to me . they cost very little to develop .
they work extraordinarily well .
they have no side effects , or if they do , they 're imaginary , so you can safely ignore them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was discussing this . and i actually went to the marginal revolution blog by tyler cowen . i do n't know if anybody knows it .
someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further , and actually produce placebo education .
the point is that education does n't actually work by teaching you things .
it actually works by giving you the impression that you 've had a very good education , which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence , which then makes you very , very successful in later life .
so , welcome to oxford , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but , actually , the point of placebo education is interesting .
how many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception , rather than that tedious , hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality ?
here 's a great example from history . i 've heard this attributed to several other kings , but doing a bit of historical research , it seems to be fredrick the great .
fredrick the great of prussia was very , very keen for the germans to adopt the potato and to eat it , because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate , wheat and potatoes , you get less price volatility in bread .
and you get a far lower risk of famine , because you actually had two crops to fall back on , not one .
the only problem is : potatoes , if you think about it , look pretty disgusting .
and also , 18th century prussians ate very , very few vegetables - rather like contemporary scottish people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , actually , he tried making it compulsory .
the prussian peasantry said , " we ca n't even get the dogs to eat these damn things .
they are absolutely disgusting and they 're good for nothing . "
there are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes .
so he tried plan b.
he tried the marketing solution , which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable , and none but the royal family could consume it .
and he planted it in a royal potato patch , with guards who had instructions to guard over it , night and day , but with secret instructions not to guard it very well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life , which is if something is worth guarding , it 's worth stealing .
before long , there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in germany .
what he 'd effectively done is he 'd re-branded the potato .
it was an absolute masterpiece .
i told this story and a gentleman from turkey came up to me and said , " very , very good marketer , fredrick the great . but not a patch on ataturk . "
ataturk , rather like nicolas sarkozy , was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil , in turkey , to modernize it .
now , boring people would have just simply banned the veil .
but that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance .
ataturk was a lateral thinker .
he made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i ca n't verify that fully , but it does not matter .
there is your environmental problem solved , by the way , guys : all convicted child molesters have to drive a porsche cayenne .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things .
which is that , actually , first one , all value is actually relative .
all value is perceived value .
for those of you who do n't speak spanish , jugo de naranja - it 's actually the spanish for " orange juice . "
because actually it 's not the dollar . it 's actually the peso in buenos aires . very clever buenos aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists .
as an advertising man , i have to admire that .
but the first thing is that all value is subjective .
second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion .
these funny signs that flash your speed at you , some of the new ones , on the bottom right , now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face , to act as an emotional trigger .
what 's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera , but they prevent twice as many accidents .
so , the bizarre thing , which is baffling to conventional , classically trained economists , is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £ 60 fine and three penalty points .
tiny little behavioral economics detail : in italy , penalty points go backwards .
you start with 12 and they take them away .
because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people 's behavior .
in britain we tend to feel , " whoa ! got another three ! "
not so in italy .
another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value , which remember , is what , after all , the environmental movement needs to be about : this again is from prussia , from , i think , about 1812 , 1813 .
the wealthy prussians , to help in the war against the french , were encouraged to give in all their jewelry .
and it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron .
here 's one : " gold gab ich für eisen , 1813 . "
the interesting thing is that for 50 years hence , the highest status jewelry you could wear in prussia was n't made of gold or diamonds .
it was made of cast iron .
because actually , never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry . this actually had symbolic value , badge value .
it said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past .
so , the modern equivalent would of course be this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , actually , there is a thing , just as there are veblen goods , where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare - there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous , classless and minimalistic .
if you think about it , shakerism was a proto-environmental movement .
adam smith talks about 18th century america , where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great , it was almost a block in the economy in new england , because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors .
it 's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies .
what 's also interesting , if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value , a high component of intangible value , versus their intrinsic value : they are often quite egalitarian .
in terms of dress , denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value .
coca-cola . a bunch of you may be a load of pinkos , and you may not like the coca-cola company , but it 's worth remembering andy warhol 's point about coke .
what warhol said about coke is , he said , " what i really like about coca-cola is the president of the united states ca n't get a better coke than the bum on the corner of the street . "
now , that is , actually , when you think about it - we take it for granted - it 's actually a remarkable achievement , to produce something that 's that democratic .
now , we basically have to change our views slightly .
there is a basic view that real value involves making things , involves labor . it involves engineering .
it involves limited raw materials .
and that what we add on top is kind of false . it 's a fake version .
and there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it .
it patently veers toward propaganda .
however , what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value , and it 's much fairer .
when i grew up , this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food .
you had a monopoly supplier . on the left , you have rupert murdoch , or the bbc .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nowadays , the user is actually involved .
this is actually what 's called , in the digital world , " user-generated content . "
although it 's called agriculture in the world of food .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is actually called a mash-up , where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it .
in the world of food we call it cooking .
this is food 2.0 , which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people .
this is mobile food . british are very good at that .
fish and chips in newspaper , the cornish pasty , the pie , the sandwich .
we invented the whole lot of them .
we 're not very good at food in general . italians do great food , but it 's not very portable , generally .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i only learned this the other day . the earl of sandwich did n't invent the sandwich .
he actually invented the toasty . but then , the earl of toasty would be a ridiculous name .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- finally , we have contextual communication .
now , the reason i show you pernod - it 's only one example .
every country has a contextual alcoholic drink . in france it 's pernod .
it tastes great within the borders of that country , but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unicum in hungary , for example .
the greeks have actually managed to produce something called retsina , which even tastes shite when you 're in greece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people , for giving them better information - b.j. fogg , at the university of stanford , makes the point that actually the mobile phone is - he 's invented the phrase , " persuasive technologies . "
he believes the mobile phone , by being location-specific , contextual , timely and immediate , is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented .
now , if we have all these tools at our disposal , we simply have to ask the question , and thaler and sunstein have , of how we can use these more intelligently .
i 'll give you one example .
if you had a large red button of this kind , on the wall of your home , and every time you pressed it , it saved 50 dollars for you , put 50 dollars into your pension , you would save a lot more .
the reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior . okay ?
now , marketing has done a very , very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying .
yet we 've never created the opportunity for impulse saving .
if you did this , more people would save more .
it 's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions , and the very nature of the decisions changes .
obviously , i do n't want people to do this , because as an advertising man i tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if anybody did want to do that , that 's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about , actually : fundamental opportunities to change human behavior .
now , i 've got an example here from canada .
there was a young intern at ogilvy canada called hunter somerville , who was working in improv in toronto , and got a part-time job in advertising , and was given the job of advertising shreddies .
now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible , added value , without changing the product in the slightest .
shreddies is a strange , square , whole-grain cereal , only available in new zealand , canada and britain .
it 's kraft 's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in working out how you could re-launch shreddies , he came up with this .
video : -lrb- buzzer -rrb- man : shreddies is supposed to be square .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- woman : have any of these diamond shapes gone out ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- voiceover : new diamond shreddies cereal .
same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape .
-lrb- applause -rrb- rory sutherland : i 'm not sure this is n't the most perfect example of intangible value creation . all it requires is photons , neurons , and a great idea to create this thing .
i would say it 's a work of genius .
but , naturally , you ca n't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research .
man : so , shreddies is actually producing a new product , which is something very exciting for them .
so they are introducing new diamond shreddies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i just want to get your first impressions when you see that , when you see the diamond shreddies box there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- woman : were n't they square ?
woman # 2 : i 'm a little bit confused . woman # 3 : they look like the squares to me .
man : they - yeah , it 's all in the appearance .
but it 's kind of like flipping a six or a nine . like a six , if you flip it over it looks like a nine .
but a six is very different from a nine .
woman # 3 : or an " m " and a " w. " man : an " m " and a " w , " exactly .
man # 2 : -lsb- unclear -rsb- you just looked like you turned it on its end . but when you see it like that it 's more interesting looking .
man : just try both of them .
take a square one there , first .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- man : which one did you prefer ? man # 2 : the first one .
man : the first one ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rory sutherland : now , naturally , a debate raged .
there were conservative elements in canada , unsurprisingly , who actually resented this intrusion .
so , eventually , the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise , which was the combo pack .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- if you think it 's funny , bear in mind there is an organization called the american institute of wine economics , which actually does extensive research into perception of things , and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people , there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine , except when you tell the people how expensive it is , in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more .
so drink your wine blind in the future .
but this is both hysterically funny - but i think an important philosophical point , which is , going forward , we need more of this kind of value .
we need to spend more time appreciating what already exists , and less time agonizing over what else we can do .
two quotations to more or less end with .
one of them is , " poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new . "
which is n't a bad definition of what our job is , to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar , but also to gain a greater appreciation , and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing .
there is some evidence , by the way , that things like social networking help do that .
because they help people share news .
they give badge value to everyday little trivial activities .
so they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display , and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest , simplest things in life . which is magic .
the second one is the second g.k. chesterton quote of this session , which is , " we are perishing for want of wonder , not for want of wonders , " which i think for anybody involved in technology , is perfectly true .
and a final thing : when you place a value on things like health , love , sex and other things , and learn to place a material value on what you 've previously discounted for being merely intangible , a thing not seen , you realize you 're much , much wealthier than you ever imagined .
thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my journey to coming here today started in 1974 .
that 's me with the funny gloves .
i was 17 and going on a peace walk .
what i did n't know though , was most of those people , standing there with me , were moonies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and within a week i had come to believe that the second coming of christ had occurred , that it was sun myung moon , and that i had been specially chosen and prepared by god to be his disciple .
now as cool as that sounds , my family was not that thrilled with this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they tried everything they could to get me out of there .
there was an underground railroad of sorts that was going on during those years . maybe some of you remember it .
they were called deprogrammers .
and after about five long years my family had me deprogrammed .
and i then became a deprogrammer .
i started going out on cases .
and after about five years of doing this , i was arrested for kidnapping .
most of the cases i went out on were called involuntary .
what happened was that the family had to get their loved ones some safe place somehow .
and so they took them to some safe place .
and we would come in and talk to them , usually for about a week .
and so after this happened , i decided it was a good time to turn my back on this work .
and about 20 years went by .
there was a burning question though that would not leave me .
and that was , " how did this happen to me ? "
and in fact , what did happen to my brain ?
because something did .
and so i decided to write a book , a memoir , about this decade of my life .
and toward the end of writing that book there was a documentary that came out .
it was on jonestown .
and it had a chilling effect on me .
these are the dead in jonestown .
about 900 people died that day , most of them taking their own lives .
women gave poison to their babies , and watched foam come from their mouths as they died .
the top picture is a group of moonies that have been blessed by their messiah .
their mates were chosen for them .
the bottom picture is hitler youth .
this is the leg of a suicide bomber .
the thing i had to admit to myself , with great repulsion , was that i get it .
i understand how this could happen .
i understand how someone 's brain , how someone 's mind can come to the place where it makes sense - in fact it would be wrong , when your brain is working like that - not to try to save the world through genocide .
and so what is this ? how does this work ?
and how i 've come to view what happened to me is a viral , memetic infection .
for those of you who are n't familiar with memetics , a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus , much like a virus . the way a virus works is - it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system .
in 1974 , i was young , i was naive , and i was pretty lost in my world .
i was really idealistic .
these easy ideas to complex questions are very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable .
what happens is that circular logic takes over .
" moon is one with god .
god is going to fix all the problems in the world .
all i have to do is humbly follow .
because god is going to stop war and hunger - all these things i wanted to do - all i have to do is humbly follow .
because after all , god is -lsb- working through -rsb- the messiah . he 's going to fix all this . "
it becomes impenetrable .
and the most dangerous part of this is that is creates " us " and " them , " " right " and " wrong , " " good " and " evil . "
and it makes anything possible , makes anything rationalizable .
and the thing is , though , if you looked at my brain during those years in the moonies - neuroscience is expanding exponentially , as ray kurzweil said yesterday . science is expanding .
we 're beginning to look inside the brain .
and so if you looked at my brain , or any brain that 's infected with a viral memetic infection like this , and compared it to anyone in this room , or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis , i am convinced it would look very , very different .
and that , strange as it may sound , gives me hope .
and the reason that gives me hope is that the first thing is to admit that we have a problem .
but it 's a human problem . it 's a scientific problem , if you will .
it happens in the human brain . there is no evil force out there to get us .
and so this is something that , through research and education , i believe that we can solve .
and so the first step is to realize that we can do this together , and that there is no " us " and " them . "
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm actually going to share something with you i have n't talked about probably in more than 10 years .
so bear with me as i take you through this journey .
when i was 22 years old , i came home from work , put a leash on my dog and went for my usual run .
i had no idea that at that moment my life was going to change forever .
while i was preparing my dog for the run , a man was finishing drinking at a bar , picked up his car keys , got into a car and headed south , or wherever he was .
i was running across the street , and the only thing that i actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head .
and i remember putting my hands on the ground and feeling my life 's blood emptying out of my neck and my mouth .
what had happened is he ran a red light and hit me and my dog .
she ended up underneath the car .
i flew out in front of the car , and then he ran over my legs .
my left leg got caught up in the wheel well - spun it around .
the bumper of the car hit my throat , slicing it open .
i ended up with blunt chest trauma .
your aorta comes up behind your heart .
it 's your major artery , and it was severed , so my blood was gurgling out of my mouth .
it foamed , and horrible things were happening to me .
i had no idea what was going on , but strangers intervened , kept my heart moving , beating .
i say moving because it was quivering and they were trying to put a beat back into it .
somebody was smart and put a bic pen in my neck to open up my airway so that i could get some air in there .
and my lung collapsed , so somebody cut me open and put a pin in there as well to stop that catastrophic event from happening .
somehow i ended up at the hospital .
i was wrapped in ice and then eventually put into a drug-induced coma .
18 months later i woke up .
i was blind , i could n't speak , and i could n't walk .
i was 64 lbs .
the hospital really has no idea what to do with people like that .
and in fact , they started to call me a gomer .
that 's another story we wo n't even get into .
i had so many surgeries to put my neck back together , to repair my heart a few times .
some things worked , some things did n't .
i had lots of titanium put in me , cadaver bones to try to get my feet moving the right way .
and i ended up with a plastic nose , porcelain teeth and all kinds of other things .
but eventually i started to look human again .
but it 's hard sometimes to talk about these things , so bear with me .
i had more than 50 surgeries .
but who 's counting ?
so eventually , the hospital decided it was time for me to go .
they needed to open up space for somebody else that they thought could come back from whatever they were going through .
everybody lost faith in me being able to recover .
so they basically put a map up on the wall , threw a dart , and it landed at a senior home here in colorado .
and i know all of you are scratching your head : " a senior citizens ' home ? what in the world are you going to do there ? "
but if you think about all of the skills and talent that are in this room right now , that 's what a senior home has .
so there were all these skills and talents that these seniors had .
the one advantage that they had over most of you is wisdom , because they had a long life .
and i needed that wisdom at that moment in my life .
but imagine what it was like for them when i showed up at their doorstep ?
at that point , i had gained four pounds , so i was 68 lbs .
i was bald .
i was wearing hospital scrubs .
and somebody donated tennis shoes for me .
and i had a white cane in one hand and a suitcase full of medical records in another hand .
and so the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they pulled back and they were looking at each other , and they were going , " okay , what skills do we have in this room ?
this kid needs a lot of work . "
so they eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs .
but one of the first things they needed to do was assess what i needed right away .
i needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being , since i 'd been eating through a tube in my chest and through my veins .
so i had to go through trying to eat again .
and they went through that process .
and then they had to figure out : " well she needs furniture .
she is sleeping in the corner of this apartment . "
so they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture - gave me pots and pans , blankets , everything .
and then the next thing that i needed was a makeover .
so out went the green scrubs and in came the polyester and floral prints .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're not going to talk about the hairstyles that they tried to force on me once my hair grew back .
but i did say no to the blue hair .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so eventually what went on is they decided that , well i need to learn to speak .
so you ca n't be an independent person if you 're not able to speak and ca n't see .
so they figured not being able to see is one thing , but they need to get me to talk .
so while sally , the office manager , was teaching me to speak in the day - it 's hard , because when you 're a kid , you take things for granted .
you learn things unconsciously .
but for me , i was an adult and it was embarrassing , and i had to learn how to coordinate my new throat with my tongue and my new teeth and my lips , and capture the air and get the word out .
so i acted like a two-year-old and refused to work .
but the men had a better idea .
they were going to make it fun for me .
so they were teaching me cuss word scrabble at night , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then , secretly , how to swear like a sailor .
so i 'm going to just leave it to your imagination as to what my first words were when sally finally got my confidence built .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i moved on from there .
and a former teacher who happened to have alzheimer 's took on the task of teaching me to write .
the redundancy was actually good for me .
so we 'll just keep moving on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one of the pivotal times for me was actually learning to cross a street again as a blind person .
so close your eyes .
now imagine you have to cross a street .
you do n't know how far that street is and you do n't know if you 're going straight and you hear cars whizzing back and forth , and you had a horrible accident that landed you in this situation .
so there were two obstacles i had to get through .
one was post-traumatic stress disorder .
and every time i approached the corner or the curb i would panic .
and the second one was actually trying to figure out how to cross that street .
so one of the seniors just came up to me , and she pushed me up to the corner and she said , " when you think it 's time to go , just stick the cane out there .
if it 's hit , do n't cross the street . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- made perfect sense .
but by the third cane that went whizzing across the road , they realized that they needed to put the resources together , and they raised funds so that i could go to the braille institute and actually gain the skills to be a blind person , and also to go get a guide dog who transformed my life .
and i was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me , and also the guide dog and skill set i had gained .
10 years later i gained my sight back .
not magically .
i opted in for three surgeries , and one of them was experimental .
it was actually robotic surgery .
they removed a hematoma from behind my eye .
the biggest change for me was that the world moved forward , that there were innovations and all kinds of new things - cellphones , laptops , all these things that i had never seen before .
and as a blind person , your visual memory fades and is replaced with how you feel about things and how things sound and how things smell .
so one day i was in my room and i saw this thing sitting in my room and i thought it was a monster .
so i was walking around it .
and i go , " i 'm just going to touch it . "
and i touched it and i went , " oh my god , it 's a laundry basket . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so everything is different when you 're a sighted person because you take that for granted .
but when you 're blind , you have the tactile memory for things .
the biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that i 'd lost 10 years of my life .
i thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends .
but when i looked down , i realized that time marched on for me too and that i needed to get caught up , so i got going on it .
we did n't have words like crowd-sourcing and radical collaboration when i had my accident .
but the concept held true - people working with people to rebuild me ; people working with people to re-educate me .
i would n't be standing here today if it was n't for extreme radical collaboration .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i just want to tell you my story .
i spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace .
and naturally , i encounter a lot of resistance , because it 's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning .
but i have a problem with that belief , because i know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems .
so i was curious about why there was a disconnect between the way our society perceives doodling and the way that the reality is .
so i discovered some very interesting things .
for example , there 's no such thing as a flattering definition of a doodle .
in the 17th century , a doodle was a simpleton or a fool - as in yankee doodle .
in the 18th century , it became a verb , and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone .
in the 19th century , it was a corrupt politician .
and today , we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition , at least to me , which is the following : to doodle officially means to dawdle , to dilly dally , to monkey around , to make meaningless marks , to do something of little value , substance or import , and - my personal favorite - to do nothing .
no wonder people are averse to doodling at work .
doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work ; it 's totally inappropriate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- additionally , i 've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them , of course , for doodling in classrooms .
and they have bosses who scold them for doodling in the boardroom .
there is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something .
and unfortunately , the press tends to reinforce this norm when they 're reporting on a doodling scene - of an important person at a confirmation hearing and the like - they typically use words like " discovered " or " caught " or " found out , " as if there 's some sort of criminal act being committed .
and additionally , there is a psychological aversion to doodling - thank you , freud .
in the 1930s , freud told us all that you could analyze people 's psyches based on their doodles .
this is not accurate , but it did happen to tony blair at the davos forum in 2005 , when his doodles were , of course , " discovered " and he was labeled the following things .
now it turned out to be bill gates ' doodle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and bill , if you 're here , nobody thinks you 're megalomaniacal .
but that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles .
and here is the real deal . here 's what i believe .
i think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we 're almost blinded to the value of doodling .
and i 'm not comfortable with that .
and so because of that belief that i think needs to be burst , i 'm here to send us all hurtling back to the truth .
and here 's the truth : doodling is an incredibly powerful tool , and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn .
so here 's a new definition for doodling .
and i hope there 's someone in here from the oxford english dictionary , because i want to talk to you later .
here 's the real definition : doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think .
that is why millions of people doodle .
here 's another interesting truth about the doodle : people who doodle when they 're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts .
we think doodling is something you do when you lose focus , but in reality , it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus .
additionally , it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing .
there are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions .
they are visual , auditory , reading and writing and kinesthetic .
now in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it , we have to engage at least two of those modalities , or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience .
the incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience .
that is a pretty solid contribution for a behavior equated with doing nothing .
this is so nerdy , but this made me cry when i discovered this .
so they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children , and they found that , across space and time , all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow .
in other words , they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order .
and i think that is incredible .
i think that means doodling is native to us and we simply are denying ourselves that instinct .
and finally , a lot a people are n't privy to this , but the doodle is a precursor to some of our greatest cultural assets .
this is but one : this is frank gehry the architect 's precursor to the guggenheim in abu dhabi .
so here is my point : under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room .
on the contrary , doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high .
and i will go you one further .
because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form , it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy .
my friends , the doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought .
in reality , it is one of its greatest allies .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was born in switzerland and raised in ghana , west africa .
ghana felt safe to me as a child .
i was free , i was happy .
the early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in ghana .
but then by the end of the decade , the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement .
in 1979 , i witnessed my first military coup .
we the children had gathered at a friend 's house .
it was a dimly lit shack .
there was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background , and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole .
the firing squad aimed , fired - the general was dead .
now this was being broadcast live .
and shortly after , we left the country , and we returned to switzerland .
now europe came as a shock to me , and i think i started feeling the need to shed my skin in order to fit in .
i wanted to blend in like a chameleon .
i think it was a tactic of survival .
and it worked , or so i believed .
so here i was in 2008 wondering where i was in my life .
and i felt i was being typecast as an actor .
i was always playing the exotic african .
i was playing the violent african , the african terrorist .
and i was thinking , how many terrorists could i possibly play before turning into one myself ?
and i had become ashamed of the other , the african in me .
and fortunately i decided in 2008 to return to ghana , after 28 years of absence .
i wanted to document on film the 2008 presidential elections .
and there , i started by searching for the footprints in my childhood .
and before i even knew it , i was suddenly on a stage surrounded by thousands of cheering people during a political rally .
and i realized that , when i 'd left the country , free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream .
and now that i 'd returned , that dream had become reality , though a fragile reality .
and i was thinking , was ghana searching for its identity like i was looking for my identity ?
was what was happening in ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me ?
and it was as if through the standards of my western life , i had n't lived up to my full potential .
i mean , nor had ghana , even though we had been trying very hard .
now in 1957 , ghana was the first sub-saharan country to gain its independence .
in the late 50s , ghana and singapore had the same gdp .
i mean , today , singapore is a first world country and ghana is not .
but maybe it was time to prove to myself , yes , it 's important to understand the past , it is important to look at it in a different light , but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present .
so here i was , december 7th , 2008 .
the polling stations opened to the voters at 7:00 am , but voters , eager to take their own political fate into their hands , were starting to line up at 4:00 am in the morning .
and they had traveled from near , they had traveled from far , because they wanted to make their voices heard .
and i asked one of the voters , i said , " whom are you going to vote for ? "
and he said , " i 'm sorry , i ca n't tell you . "
he said that his vote was in his heart .
and i understood , this was their election , and they were n't going to let anyone take it away from them .
now the first round of the voting did n't bring forth a clear winner - so nobody had achieved the absolute majority - so voting went into a second round three weeks later .
the candidates were back on the road ; they were campaigning .
the rhetoric of the candidates , of course , changed .
the heat was on .
and then the cliche came to haunt us .
there were claims of intimidation at the polling stations , of ballot boxes being stolen .
inflated results started coming in and the mob was starting to get out of control .
we witnessed the eruption of violence in the streets .
people were being beaten brutally .
the army started firing their guns . people were scrambling .
it was complete chaos .
and my heart sank , because i thought , here we are again .
here is another proof that the african is not capable of governing himself .
and not only that , i am documenting it - documenting my own cultural shortcomings .
so when the echo of the gunshots had lingered , it was soon drowned by the chanting of the mob , and i did n't believe what i was hearing .
they were chanting , " we want peace .
we want peace . "
and i realized it had to come from the people .
after all , they decide , and they did .
so the sounds that were before distorted and loud , were suddenly a melody .
the sounds of the voices were harmonious .
so it could happen .
a democracy could be upheld peacefully .
it could be , by the will of the masses who were now urgently pressing with all their heart and all their will for peace .
now here 's an interesting comparison .
we in the west , we preach the values , the golden light of democracy , that we are the shining example of how it 's done .
ghana found itself in the same place in which the u.s. election stalled in the 2000 presidential elections - bush versus gore .
but instead of the unwillingness of the candidates to allow the system to proceed and the people to decide , ghana honored democracy and its people .
it did n't leave it up to the supreme court to decide ; the people did .
now the second round of voting did not bring forth a clear winner either .
i mean , it was so incredibly close .
the electoral commissioner declared , with the consent of the parties , to run an unprecedented second re-run .
so the people went back to the polls to determine their own president , not the legal system .
and guess what , it worked .
the defeated candidate gave up power and made way for ghana to move into a new democratic cycle .
i mean , at the absolute time for the absolute need of democracy , they did not abuse their power .
the belief in true democracy and in the people runs deep , proving that the african is capable of governing himself .
now the uphill battle for ghana and for africa is not over , but i have proof that the other side of democracy exists , and that we must not take it for granted .
now i have learned that my place is not just in the west or in africa , and i 'm still searching for my identity , but i saw ghana create democracy better .
ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently .
and yes , we africans can .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as someone who has spent his entire career trying to be invisible , standing in front of an audience is a cross between an out-of-body experience and a deer caught in the headlights , so please forgive me for violating one of the ted commandments by relying on words on paper , and i only hope i 'm not struck by lightning bolts before i 'm done .
i 'd like to begin by talking about some of the ideas that motivated me to become a documentary photographer .
i was a student in the ' 60s , a time of social upheaval and questioning , and on a personal level , an awakening sense of idealism .
the war in vietnam was raging ; the civil rights movement was under way ; and pictures had a powerful influence on me .
our political and military leaders were telling us one thing , and photographers were telling us another .
i believed the photographers , and so did millions of other americans .
their images fueled resistance to the war and to racism .
they not only recorded history ; they helped change the course of history .
their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and , as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience , change became not only possible , but inevitable .
i saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism , specifically visual journalism , can bring into focus both the benefits and the cost of political policies .
it can give credit to sound decision-making , adding momentum to success .
in the face of poor political judgment or political inaction , it becomes a kind of intervention , assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior .
it puts a human face on issues which from afar can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact .
what happens at ground level , far from the halls of power , happens to ordinary citizens one by one .
and i understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view .
it gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice .
and as a reaction , it stimulates public opinion and gives impetus to public debate , thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda , much as they would like to .
coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly .
the press is certainly a business , and in order to survive it must be a successful business , but the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibility .
society 's problems ca n't be solved until they 're identified .
on a higher plane , the press is a service industry , and the service it provides is awareness .
every story does not have to sell something .
there 's also a time to give .
that was a tradition i wanted to follow .
seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved and that visual journalism could actually become a factor in conflict resolution - i wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer .
but i was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph .
i 'd like to take you on a visual journey through some of the events and issues i 've been involved in over the past 25 years .
in 1981 , i went to northern ireland .
10 ira prisoners were in the process of starving themselves to death in protest against conditions in jail .
the reaction on the streets was violent confrontation .
i saw that the front lines of contemporary wars are not on isolated battlefields , but right where people live .
during the early ' 80s , i spent a lot of time in central america , which was engulfed by civil wars that straddled the ideological divide of the cold war .
in guatemala , the central government - controlled by a oligarchy of european decent - was waging a scorched earth campaign against an indigenous rebellion , and i saw an image that reflected the history of latin america : conquest through a combination of the bible and the sword .
an anti-sandinista guerrilla was mortally wounded as commander zero attacked a town in southern nicaragua .
a destroyed tank belonging to somoza 's national guard was left as a monument in a park in managua , and was transformed by the energy and spirit of a child .
at the same time , a civil war was taking place in el salvador , and again , the civilian population was caught up in the conflict .
i 've been covering the palestinian-israeli conflict since 1981 .
this is a moment from the beginning of the second intifada , in 2000 , when it was still stones and molotovs against an army .
in 2001 , the uprising escalated into an armed conflict , and one of the major incidents was the destruction of the palestinian refugee camp in the west bank town of jenin .
without the political will to find common ground , the continual friction of tactic and counter-tactic only creates suspicion and hatred and vengeance , and perpetuates the cycle of violence .
in the ' 90s , after the breakup of the soviet union , yugoslavia fractured along ethnic fault lines , and civil war broke out between bosnia , croatia and serbia .
this is a scene of house-to-house fighting in mostar , neighbor against neighbor .
a bedroom , the place where people share intimacy , where life itself is conceived , became a battlefield .
a mosque in northern bosnia was destroyed by serbian artillery and was used as a makeshift morgue .
dead serbian soldiers were collected after a battle and used as barter for the return of prisoners or bosnian soldiers killed in action .
this was once a park .
the bosnian soldier who guided me told me that all of his friends were there now .
at the same time in south africa , after nelson mandela had been released from prison , the black population commenced the final phase of liberation from apartheid .
one of the things i had to learn as a journalist was what to do with my anger .
i had to use it , channel its energy , turn it into something that would clarify my vision , instead of clouding it .
in transkei , i witnessed a rite of passage into manhood , of the xhosa tribe .
teenage boys lived in isolation , their bodies covered with white clay .
after several weeks , they washed off the white and took on the full responsibilities of men .
it was a very old ritual that seemed symbolic of the political struggle that was changing the face of south africa .
children in soweto playing on a trampoline .
elsewhere in africa there was famine .
in somalia , the central government collapsed and clan warfare broke out .
farmers were driven off their land , and crops and livestock were destroyed or stolen .
starvation was being used as a weapon of mass destruction - primitive but extremely effective .
hundreds of thousands of people were exterminated , slowly and painfully .
the international community responded with massive humanitarian relief , and hundreds of thousands of more lives were saved .
american troops were sent to protect the relief shipments , but they were eventually drawn into the conflict , and after the tragic battle in mogadishu , they were withdrawn .
in southern sudan , another civil war saw similar use of starvation as a means of genocide .
again , international ngos , united under the umbrella of the u.n. , staged a massive relief operation and thousands of lives were saved .
i 'm a witness , and i want my testimony to be honest and uncensored .
i also want it to be powerful and eloquent , and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people i 'm photographing .
this man was in an ngo feeding center , being helped as much as he could be helped .
he literally had nothing . he was a virtual skeleton , yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move .
he had not given up , and if he did n't give up , how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope ?
in 1994 , after three months of covering the south african election , i saw the inauguration of nelson mandela , and it was the most uplifting thing i 've ever seen .
it exemplified the best that humanity has to offer .
the next day i left for rwanda , and it was like taking the express elevator to hell .
this man had just been liberated from a hutu death camp .
he allowed me to photograph him for quite a long time , and he even turned his face toward the light , as if he wanted me to see him better .
i think he knew what the scars on his face would say to the rest of the world .
this time , maybe confused or discouraged by the military disaster in somalia , the international community remained silent , and somewhere around 800,000 people were slaughtered by their own countrymen - sometimes their own neighbors - using farm implements as weapons .
perhaps because a lesson had been learned by the weak response to the war in bosnia and the failure in rwanda , when serbia attacked kosovo , international action was taken much more decisively .
nato forces went in , and the serbian army withdrew .
ethnic albanians had been murdered , their farms destroyed and a huge number of people forcibly deported .
they were received in refugee camps set up by ngos in albania and macedonia .
the imprint of a man who had been burned inside his own home .
the image reminded me of a cave painting , and echoed how primitive we still are in so many ways .
between 1995 and ' 96 , i covered the first two wars in chechnya from inside grozny .
this is a chechen rebel on the front line against the russian army .
the russians bombarded grozny constantly for weeks , killing mainly the civilians who were still trapped inside .
i found a boy from the local orphanage wandering around the front line .
my work has evolved from being concerned mainly with war to a focus on critical social issues as well .
after the fall of ceausescu , i went to romania and discovered a kind of gulag of children , where thousands of orphans were being kept in medieval conditions .
ceausescu had imposed a quota on the number of children to be produced by each family , thereby making women 's bodies an instrument of state economic policy .
children who could n't be supported by their families were raised in government orphanages .
children with birth defects were labeled incurables , and confined for life to inhuman conditions .
as reports began to surface , again international aid went in .
going deeper into the legacy of the eastern european regimes , i worked for several months on a story about the effects of industrial pollution , where there had been no regard for the environment or the health of either workers or the general population .
an aluminum factory in czechoslovakia was filled with carcinogenic smoke and dust , and four out of five workers came down with cancer .
after the fall of suharto in indonesia , i began to explore conditions of poverty in a country that was on its way towards modernization .
i spent a good deal of time with a man who lived with his family on a railway embankment and had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident .
when the story was published , unsolicited donations poured in .
a trust fund was established , and the family now lives in a house in the countryside and all their basic necessities are taken care of .
it was a story that was n't trying to sell anything .
journalism had provided a channel for people 's natural sense of generosity , and the readers responded .
i met a band of homeless children who 'd come to jakarta from the countryside , and ended up living in a train station .
by the age of 12 or 14 , they 'd become beggars and drug addicts .
the rural poor had become the urban poor , and in the process , they 'd become invisible .
these heroin addicts in detox in pakistan reminded me of figures in a play by beckett : isolated , waiting in the dark , but drawn to the light .
agent orange was a defoliant used during the vietnam war to deny cover to the vietcong and the north vietnamese army .
the active ingredient was dioxin , an extremely toxic chemical that was sprayed in vast quantities , and whose effects passed through the genes to the next generation .
in 2000 , i began documenting global health issues , concentrating first on aids in africa .
i tried to tell the story through the work of caregivers .
i thought it was important to emphasize that people were being helped , whether by international ngos or by local grassroots organizations .
so many children have been orphaned by the epidemic that grandmothers have taken the place of parents , and a lot of children had been born with hiv .
a hospital in zambia .
i began documenting the close connection between hiv / aids and tuberculosis .
this is an msf hospital in cambodia .
my pictures can play a supporting role to the work of ngos by shedding light on the critical social problems they 're trying to deal with .
i went to congo with msf , and contributed to a book and an exhibition that focused attention on a forgotten war in which millions of people have died , and exposure to disease without treatment is used as a weapon .
a malnourished child being measured as part of the supplemental feeding program .
in the fall of 2004 i went to darfur .
this time i was on assignment for a magazine , but again worked closely with msf .
the international community still has n't found a way to create the pressure necessary to stop this genocide .
an msf hospital in a camp for displaced people .
i 've been working on a long project on crime and punishment in america .
this is a scene from new orleans .
a prisoner on a chain gang in alabama was punished by being handcuffed to a post in the midday sun .
this experience raised a lot of questions , among them questions about race and equality and for whom in our country opportunities and options are available .
in the yard of a chain gang in alabama .
i did n't see either of the planes hit , and when i glanced out my window , i saw the first tower burning , and i thought it might have been an accident .
a few minutes later when i looked again and saw the second tower burning , i knew we were at war .
in the midst of the wreckage at ground zero , i had a realization .
i 'd been photographing in the islamic world since 1981 - not only in the middle east , but also in africa , asia and europe .
at the time i was photographing in these different places , i thought i was covering separate stories , but on 9/11 history crystallized , and i understood i 'd actually been covering a single story for more than 20 years , and the attack on new york was its latest manifestation .
the central commercial district of kabul , afghanistan at the end of the civil war , shortly before the city fell to the taliban .
land mine victims being helped at the red cross rehab center being run by alberto cairo .
a boy who lost a leg to a leftover mine .
i 'd witnessed immense suffering in the islamic world from political oppression , civil war , foreign invasions , poverty , famine .
i understood that in its suffering , the islamic world had been crying out . why were n't we listening ?
a taliban fighter shot during a battle as the northern alliance entered the city of kunduz .
when war with iraq was imminent , i realized the american troops would be very well covered , so i decided to cover the invasion from inside baghdad .
a marketplace was hit by a mortar shell that killed several members of a single family .
a day after american forces entered baghdad , a company of marines began rounding up bank robbers and were cheered on by the crowds - a hopeful moment that was short lived .
for the first time in years , shi 'ites were allowed to make the pilgrimage to karbala to observe ashura , and i was amazed by the sheer number of people and how fervently they practiced their religion .
a group of men march through the streets cutting themselves with knives .
it was obvious that the shi 'ites were a force to be reckoned with , and we would do well to understand them and learn how to deal with them .
last year i spent several months documenting our wounded troops , from the battlefield in iraq all the way home .
this is a helicopter medic giving cpr to a soldier who had been shot in the head .
military medicine has become so efficient that the percentage of troops who survive after being wounded is much higher in this war than in any other war in our history .
the signature weapon of the war is the ied , and the signature wound is severe leg damage .
after enduring extreme pain and trauma , the wounded face a grueling physical and psychological struggle in rehab .
the spirit they displayed was absolutely remarkable .
i tried to imagine myself in their place , and i was totally humbled by their courage and determination in the face of such catastrophic loss .
good people had been put in a very bad situation for questionable results .
one day in rehab someone , started talking about surfing and all these guys who 'd never surfed before said , " hey , let 's go . "
and they went surfing .
photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what 's going on .
sometimes they put their lives on the line , because they believe your opinions and your influence matter .
they aim their pictures at your best instincts , generosity , a sense of right and wrong , the ability and the willingness to identify with others , the refusal to accept the unacceptable .
my ted wish : there 's a vital story that needs to be told , and i wish for ted to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hey guys .
it 's funny , someone just mentioned macgyver , because that was , like , i loved it , and when i was seven , i taped a fork to a drill and i was like , " hey , mom , i 'm going to olive garden . "
and - -lrb- drilling noise -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it worked really well there .
and you know , it had a profound effect on me .
it sounds silly , but i thought , okay , the way the world works can be changed , and it can be changed by me in these small ways .
and my relationship to especially human-made objects which someone else said they work like this , well , i can say they work a different way , a little bit .
and so , about 20 years later , i did n't realize the full effect of this , but i went to costa rica and i stayed with these guaymí natives there , and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them , and they could make beds out of trees , and they could - i watched this woman for three days .
i was there . she was peeling this palm frond apart , these little threads off of it , and she 'd roll the threads together and make little thicker threads , like strings , and she would weave the strings together , and as the materiality of this exact very bag formed before my eyes over those three days , the materiality of the way the world works , of reality , kind of started to unravel in my mind , because i realized that this bag and these clothes and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener , everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock
or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to , maybe a more complicated one , but still , everything was made that way .
and so i had to start studying , who is it that 's making these decisions ?
who 's making these things ? how did they make them ?
what stops us from making them ?
because this is how reality is created .
so i started right away . i was at mit media lab , and i was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity .
and i started in nature , because i saw these guaymís doing it in nature , and there just seems to be less barriers .
so i went to vermont to not back to school camp , where there 's unschoolers who are just kind of hanging out and willing to try anything .
so i said , " let 's go into the woods near this stream and just put stuff together , you know , make something , i do n't care , geometrical shapes , just grab some junk from around you .
we wo n't bring anything with us .
and , like , within minutes , this is very easy for adults and teens to do .
here 's a triangle that was being formed underneath a flowing stream , and the shape of an oak leaf being made by other small oak leaves being put together .
a leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass .
the materiality and fleshiness and meat of the mushroom being explored by how it can hold up different objects being stuck into it .
and after about 45 minutes , you get really intricate projects like leaves sorted by hue , so you get a color fade and put in a circle like a wreath .
and the creator of this , he said , " this is fire . i call this fire . "
and someone asked him , " how do you get those sticks to stay on that tree ? "
and he 's like , " i do n't know , but i can show you . "
and i 'm like , " wow , that 's really amazing .
he does n't know , but he can show you . "
so his hands know and his intuition knows , but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be , especially when it comes to the human-made , human-built world .
we think we already know how something works , so we ca n't imagine how it could work .
we know how it 's supposed to work , so we ca n't suppose all the things that could be possible .
so kids do n't have as hard of a time with this , and i saw in my own son , i gave him this book .
i 'm a good hippie dad , so i 'm like , " okay , you 're going to learn to love the moon .
i 'm going to give you some building blocks and they 're nonrectilinear cactus building blocks , so it 's totally legit . "
but he does n't really know what to do with these .
i did n't show him .
and so he 's like , " okay , i 'll just mess around with this . "
this is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest .
just going to try to put them in shapes and push on them and stuff .
and before long , he 's kind of got this mechanism where you can almost launch and catapult objects around , and he enlists us in helping him .
and at this point , i 'm starting to wonder , what kind of tools can we give people , especially adults , who know too much , so that they can see the world as malleable , so they see themselves as agents of change in their everyday lives .
because the most advanced scientists are really just kind of pushing the way the world itself works , pushing what matter can do , the most advanced artists are just pushing the medium , and any sufficiently complicated task , whether you 're a cook or a carpenter or you 're raising a child - anything that 's complicated - comes up with problems that are n't solved in the middle of it , and you ca n't do a good job getting it done unless you can say , " okay , well we 're just going to have to refigure this .
i do n't care that pencils are supposed to be for writing .
i 'm going to use them a different way . "
so let me show you a little demo .
this is a little piano circuit right in here , and this is an ordinary paintbrush that i smashed it together with . -lrb- beeping -rrb- and so , with some ketchup , - -lrb- musical notes -rrb- - and then i can kind of - -lrb- musical notes -rrb- - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's awesome , right ?
but this is not what 's awesome .
what 's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people .
a pencil is not just a pencil .
look what it has in the middle of it .
that 's a wire running down the middle , and not only is it a wire , if you take that piano circuit , you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil , and you can lay out wire on the page , too , and get electrical current to run through it .
and so you can kind of hack a pencil , just by thumbtacking into it with a little piano electrical circuit .
and the electricity runs through your body too .
and then you can take the little piano circuit off the pencil .
you can make one of these brushes just on the fly .
all you do is connect to the bristles , and the bristles are wet , so they conduct , and the person 's body conducts , and leather is great to paint on , and then you can start hooking to everything , even the kitchen sink .
the metal in the sink is conductive .
flowing water acts like a theremin or a violin .
-lrb- musical notes -rrb- and you can even hook to the trees .
anything in the world is either conductive or not conductive , and you can use those together .
so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i took this to those same teens , because those teens are really awesome , and they 'll try things that i wo n't try .
i do n't even have access to a facial piercing if i wanted to .
and this young woman , she made what she called a hula-looper , and as the hula hoop traveled around her body , she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there .
you can see her pointing to it in the picture .
and every time the hula hoop would smush against her body , it would connect two little pieces of copper tape , and it would make a sound , and the next sound , and it would loop the same sounds over and over again .
i ran these workshops everywhere .
in taiwan , at an art museum , this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue .
and professional designers were making artifacts with this thing strapped onto it .
and big companies like intel or smaller design firms like ideo or startups like bump , were inviting me to give workshops , just to practice this idea of smashing electronics and everyday objects together .
and then we came up with this idea to not just use electronics , but let 's just smash computers with everyday objects and see how that goes over .
and so i just want to do a quick demo .
so this is the makey makey circuit , and i 'm just going to set it up from the beginning in front of you .
so i 'll just plug it in , and now it 's on by usb .
and i 'll just hook up the forward arrow .
you guys are facing that way , so i 'll hook it to this one .
and i 'll just hook up a little ground wire to it .
and now , if i touch this piece of pizza , the slides that i showed you before should go forward .
and now if i hook up this wire just by connecting it to the left arrow , i 'm kind of programming it by where i hook it up , now i have a left arrow and a right arrow , so i should be able to go forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards . awesome .
and so we 're like , " we gotta put a video out about this . "
because no one really believed that this was important or meaningful except me and , like , one other guy .
so we made a video to prove that there 's lots of stuff you can do .
you can kind of sketch with play-doh and just google for game controllers .
just ordinary play-doh , nothing special .
and you can literally draw joysticks and just find pacman on your computer and then just hook it up . -lrb- video game noises -rrb- and you know the little plastic drawers you can get at target ?
well , if you take those out , they hold water great , but you can totally cut your toes , so yeah , just be careful .
you know the happiness project , where the experts are setting up the piano stairs , and how cool that is ?
well , i think it 's cool , but we should be doing that stuff ourselves .
it should n't be a set of experts engineering the way the world works .
we should all be participating in changing the way the world works together .
aluminum foil . everybody has a cat .
get a bowl of water . this is just photo booth on your mac os .
hover the mouse over the " take a photo " button , and you 've got a little cat photo booth .
and so we needed hundreds of people to buy this .
if hundreds of people did n't buy this , we could n't put it on the market .
and so we put it up on kickstarter , and hundreds of people bought it in the first day .
and then 30 days later , 11,000 people had backed the project .
and then what the best part is , we started getting a flood of videos in of people doing crazy things with it .
so this is " the star-spangled banner " by eating lunch , including drinking listerine .
and we actually sent this guy materials .
we 're like , " we 're sponsoring you , man .
you 're , like , a pro maker . "
okay , just wait for this one . this is good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and these guys at the exploratorium are playing house plants as if they were drums .
and dads and daughters are completing circuits in special ways .
and then this brother - look at this diagram .
see where it says " sister " ?
i love when people put humans on the diagram .
i always add humans to any technical - if you 're drawing a technical diagram , put a human in it .
and this kid is so sweet . he made this trampoline slideshow advancer for his sister so that on her birthday , she could be the star of the show , jumping on the trampoline to advance the slides .
and this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano .
and this is fun , and what could be more useful than feeling alive and fun ?
but it 's also very serious because all this accessibility stuff started coming up , where people ca n't use computers , necessarily .
like this dad who wrote us , his son has cerebral palsy and he ca n't use a normal keyboard .
and so his dad could n't necessarily afford to buy all these custom controllers .
and so , with the makey makey , he planned to make these gloves to allow him to navigate the web .
and a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came , and we 're really excited about that .
we did n't plan for that at all .
and then all these professional musicians started using it , like at coachella , just this weekend jurassic 5 was using this onstage , and this d.j. is just from brooklyn , right around here , and he put this up last month .
and i love the carrot on the turntable .
-lrb- music : massive attack - " teardrop " -rrb- most people can not play them that way . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and when this started to get serious , i thought , i 'd better put a really serious warning label on the box that this comes in , because otherwise people are going to be getting this and they 're going to be turning into agents of creative change , and governments will be crumbling , and i would n't have told people , so i thought i 'd better warn them .
and i also put this little surprise . when you open the lid of the box , it says , " the world is a construction kit . "
and as you start to mess around this way , i think that , in some small ways , you do start to see the landscape of your everyday life a little bit more like something you could express yourself with , and a little bit more like you could participate in designing the future of the way the world works .
and so next time you 're on an escalator and you drop an m & m by accident , you know , maybe that 's an m & m surfboard , not an escalator , so do n't pick it up right away .
maybe take some more stuff out of your pockets and throw it down , and maybe some chapstick , whatever .
i used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that .
but as i 'm kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff , i 'm realizing that my idea of a perfect world really ca n't be designed by one person or even by a million experts .
it 's really going to be seven billion pairs of hands , each following their own passions , and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens .
and that 's the world i really want to live in .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , how many of you have ever gotten behind the wheel of a car when you really should n't have been driving ?
maybe you 're out on the road for a long day , and you just wanted to get home .
you were tired , but you felt you could drive a few more miles .
maybe you thought , i 've had less to drink than everybody else , i should be the one to go home .
or maybe your mind was just entirely elsewhere .
does this sound familiar to you ?
now , in those situations , would n't it be great if there was a button on your dashboard that you could push , and the car would get you home safely ?
now , that 's been the promise of the self-driving car , the autonomous vehicle , and it 's been the dream since at least 1939 , when general motors showcased this idea at their futurama booth at the world 's fair .
now , it 's been one of those dreams that 's always seemed about 20 years in the future .
now , two weeks ago , that dream took a step forward , when the state of nevada granted google 's self-driving car the very first license for an autonomous vehicle , clearly establishing that it 's legal for them to test it on the roads in nevada .
now , california 's considering similar legislation , and this would make sure that the autonomous car is not one of those things that has to stay in vegas .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , in my lab at stanford , we 've been working on autonomous cars too , but with a slightly different spin on things . you see , we 've been developing robotic race cars , cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance .
now , why would we want to do such a thing ?
well , there 's two really good reasons for this .
first , we believe that before people turn over control to an autonomous car , that autonomous car should be at least as good as the very best human drivers .
now , if you 're like me , and the other 70 percent of the population who know that we are above-average drivers , you understand that 's a very high bar .
there 's another reason as well .
just like race car drivers can use all of the friction between the tire and the road , all of the car 's capabilities to go as fast as possible , we want to use all of those capabilities to avoid any accident we can .
now , you may push the car to the limits not because you 're driving too fast , but because you 've hit an icy patch of road , conditions have changed .
in those situations , we want a car that is capable enough to avoid any accident that can physically be avoided .
i must confess , there 's kind of a third motivation as well .
you see , i have a passion for racing .
in the past , i 've been a race car owner , a crew chief and a driving coach , although maybe not at the level that you 're currently expecting .
one of the things that we 've developed in the lab - we 've developed several vehicles - is what we believe is the world 's first autonomously drifting car .
it 's another one of those categories where maybe there 's not a lot of competition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this is p1 . it 's an entirely student-built electric vehicle , which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners .
it can get sideways like a rally car driver , always able to take the tightest curve , even on slippery , changing surfaces , never spinning out .
we 've also worked with volkswagen oracle , on shelley , an autonomous race car that has raced at 150 miles an hour through the bonneville salt flats , gone around thunderhill raceway park in the sun , the wind and the rain , and navigated the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the pikes peak hill climb route in colorado with nobody at the wheel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i guess it goes without saying that we 've had a lot of fun doing this .
but in fact , there 's something else that we 've developed in the process of developing these autonomous cars .
we have developed a tremendous appreciation for the capabilities of human race car drivers .
as we 've looked at the question of how well do these cars perform , we wanted to compare them to our human counterparts .
and we discovered their human counterparts are amazing .
now , we can take a map of a race track , we can take a mathematical model of a car , and with some iteration , we can actually find the fastest way around that track .
we line that up with data that we record from a professional driver , and the resemblance is absolutely remarkable .
yes , there are subtle differences here , but the human race car driver is able to go out and drive an amazingly fast line , without the benefit of an algorithm that compares the trade-off between going as fast as possible in this corner , and shaving a little bit of time off of the straight over here .
not only that , they 're able to do it lap after lap after lap .
they 're able to go out and consistently do this , pushing the car to the limits every single time .
it 's extraordinary to watch .
you put them in a new car , and after a few laps , they 've found the fastest line in that car , and they 're off to the races .
it really makes you think , we 'd love to know what 's going on inside their brain .
so as researchers , that 's what we decided to find out .
we decided to instrument not only the car , but also the race car driver , to try to get a glimpse into what was going on in their head as they were doing this .
now , this is dr. lene harbott applying electrodes to the head of john morton .
john morton is a former can-am and imsa driver , who 's also a class champion at le mans .
fantastic driver , and very willing to put up with graduate students and this sort of research .
she 's putting electrodes on his head so that we can monitor the electrical activity in john 's brain as he races around the track .
now , clearly we 're not going to put a couple of electrodes on his head and understand exactly what all of his thoughts are on the track .
however , neuroscientists have identified certain patterns that let us tease out some very important aspects of this .
for instance , the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves .
in contrast , theta waves are associated with a lot of cognitive activity , like visual processing , things where the driver is thinking quite a bit .
now , we can measure this , and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves .
this gives us a measure of mental workload , how much the driver is actually challenged cognitively at any point along the track .
now , we wanted to see if we could actually record this on the track , so we headed down south to laguna seca .
laguna seca is a legendary raceway about halfway between salinas and monterey .
it has a curve there called the corkscrew .
now , the corkscrew is a chicane , followed by a quick right-handed turn as the road drops three stories .
now , the strategy for driving this as explained to me was , you aim for the bush in the distance , and as the road falls away , you realize it was actually the top of a tree .
all right , so thanks to the revs program at stanford , we were able to take john there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 porsche abarth carrera .
life is way too short for boring cars .
so , here you see john on the track , he 's going up the hill - oh ! somebody liked that - and you can see , actually , his mental workload - measuring here in the red bar - you can see his actions as he approaches .
now watch , he has to downshift .
and then he has to turn left .
look for the tree , and down .
not surprisingly , you can see this is a pretty challenging task .
you can see his mental workload spike as he goes through this , as you would expect with something that requires this level of complexity .
but what 's really interesting is to look at areas of the track where his mental workload does n't increase .
i 'm going to take you around now to the other side of the track .
turn three . and john 's going to go into that corner and the rear end of the car is going to begin to slide out .
he 's going to have to correct for that with steering .
so watch as john does this here .
watch the mental workload , and watch the steering .
the car begins to slide out , dramatic maneuver to correct it , and no change whatsoever in the mental workload .
not a challenging task .
in fact , entirely reflexive .
now , our data processing on this is still preliminary , but it really seems that these phenomenal feats that the race car drivers are performing are instinctive .
they are things that they have simply learned to do .
it requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats .
and their actions are fantastic .
this is exactly what you want to do on the steering wheel to catch the car in this situation .
now , this has given us tremendous insight and inspiration for our own autonomous vehicles .
we 've started to ask the question : can we make them a little less algorithmic and a little more intuitive ?
can we take this reflexive action that we see from the very best race car drivers , introduce it to our cars , and maybe even into a system that could get onto your car in the future ?
that would take us a long step along the road to autonomous vehicles that drive as well as the best humans .
but it 's made us think a little bit more deeply as well .
do we want something more from our car than to simply be a chauffeur ?
do we want our car to perhaps be a partner , a coach , someone that can use their understanding of the situation to help us reach our potential ?
can , in fact , the technology not simply replace humans , but allow us to reach the level of reflex and intuition that we 're all capable of ?
so , as we move forward into this technological future , i want you to just pause and think of that for a moment .
what is the ideal balance of human and machine ?
and as we think about that , let 's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side , and living systems on the other side .
so we go from , say , this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life , and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side .
over the last hundred and fifty years or so , science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems , and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two .
we 'll just take one example here : a virus is a natural system , right ?
but it 's very simple . it 's very simplistic .
it does n't really satisfy all the requirements , it does n't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to , say , reproduce and evolve .
but what we 're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum - so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory , mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures , and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems .
really what i 'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life .
so what are these characteristics that i 'm talking about ? these are them .
we consider first that life has a body .
now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment .
life also has a metabolism . now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself .
life also has a kind of inheritable information .
now we , as humans , we store our information as dna in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring .
if we couple the first two - the body and the metabolism - we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate , and if we coupled these now to inheritable information , we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike , and would perhaps evolve .
and so these are the things we will try to do in the lab , make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life .
so how do we do this ? well , we use a model system that we term a protocell .
you might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell . it is a simple chemical model of a living cell , and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together , play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive .
in the laboratory what we want to do is much the same , but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules - so a drastic reduction in complexity , but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike .
and so what we do is , we start simple and we work our way up to living systems .
consider for a moment this quote by leduc , a hundred years ago , considering a kind of synthetic biology : " the synthesis of life , should it ever occur , will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea . "
that 's his first statement . so if we actually create life in the laboratories , it 's probably not going to impact our lives at all .
" if we accept the theory of evolution , then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world , or between the non-living and living world , forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life " - so , the ones i just discussed - " to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment . "
so we start simple , we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life , and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike .
this is how we can start to make a protocell .
we use this idea called self-assembly .
what that means is , i can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab , and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures .
so say on the order of tens of thousands , hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that did n't exist before .
and in this particular example , what i took is some membrane molecules , mixed those together in the right environment , and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here .
these membranes are also quite similar , morphologically and functionally , to the membranes in your body , and we can use these , as they say , to form the body of our protocell .
likewise , we can work with oil and water systems .
as you know , when you put oil and water together , they do n't mix , but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form , and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell , as you will see later .
so that 's just forming some body stuff , right ?
some architectures .
what about the other aspects of living systems ?
so we came up with this protocell model here that i 'm showing .
we started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite .
this is natural from the environment , this clay .
it forms a surface that is , say , chemically active .
it could run a metabolism on it .
certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay . for example , in this case , rna , shown in red - this is a relative of dna , it 's an informational molecule - it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay .
this structure , then , can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself , so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself , and that 's shown in green here on this micrograph .
so just through self-assembly , mixing things together in the lab , we can come up with , say , a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body , right ?
so we 're on a road towards living systems .
but if you saw this protocell , you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive .
it 's actually quite lifeless . once it forms , it does n't really do anything .
so , something is missing .
some things are missing .
so some things that are missing is , for example , if you had a flow of energy through a system , what we 'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself , much like living systems do .
so we came up with a different protocell model , and this is actually simpler than the previous one .
in this protocell model , it 's just an oil droplet , but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something , to actually become dynamic , as we 'll see here .
you add the droplet to the system .
it 's a pool of water , and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system .
okay ? oil droplet forms through self-assembly , has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy , and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment .
as we heard earlier , movement is very important in these kinds of living systems .
it is moving around , exploring its environment , and remodeling its environment , as you see , by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell .
so it 's acting , in a sense , like a living system trying to preserve itself .
we take this same moving protocell here , and we put it in another experiment , get it moving . then i 'm going to add some food to the system , and you 'll see that in blue here , right ?
so i add some food source to the system .
the protocell moves . it encounters the food .
it reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there .
alright ? so not only do we have this system that has a body , it has a metabolism , it can use energy , it moves around .
it can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself .
now , this does n't have a brain , it does n't have a neural system . this is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior .
if we count the number of chemicals in that system , actually , including the water that 's in the dish , we have five chemicals that can do this .
so then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do , and depending on the conditions , we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment .
on the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other , and they form a kind of a dance , a complex dance with each other .
right ? so not only do individual protocells have behavior , what we 've interpreted as behavior in this system , but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have .
so now that you 're all experts on protocells , we 're going to play a game with these protocells .
we 're going to make two different kinds .
protocell a has a certain kind of chemistry inside that , when activated , the protocell starts to vibrate around , just dancing .
so remember , these are primitive things , so dancing protocells , that 's very interesting to us . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the second protocell has a different chemistry inside , and when activated , the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one . right ?
and we just put these two together in the same system .
so there 's population a , there 's population b , and then we activate the system , and protocell bs , they 're the blue ones , they all come together . they fuse together to form one big blob , and the other protocell just dances around . and this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up , and then , game over .
so then i repeated this experiment a bunch of times , and one time something very interesting happened .
so , i added these protocells together to the system , and protocell a and protocell b fused together to form a hybrid protocell ab .
that did n't happen before . there it goes .
there 's a protocell ab now in this system .
protocell ab likes to dance around for a bit , while protocell b does the fusing , okay ?
but then something even more interesting happens .
watch when these two large protocells , the hybrid ones , fuse together .
now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event . right . -lrb- laughter -rrb- just with blobs of chemicals , again .
so the way this works is , you have a simple system of five chemicals here , a simple system here . when they hybridize , you then form something that 's different than before , it 's more complex than before , and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication .
so since we can make some interesting protocells that we like , interesting colors and interesting behaviors , and they 're very easy to make , and they have interesting lifelike properties , perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the earth . perhaps these represent an easily accessible step , one of the first steps by which life got started on the early earth .
certainly , there were molecules present on the early earth , but they would n't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and i showed in these experiments .
rather , they 'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff , because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds .
think of it like a primordial ooze , okay ?
and it 's a pool that 's too difficult to fully characterize , even by modern methods , and the product looks brown , like this tar here on the left . a pure compound is shown on the right , for contrast .
so this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen , you put them in a pan , and you apply energy .
you turn up the heat , you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar , forming a brownish caramel , right ?
if you let that go unregulated , you 'll continue to make and break chemical bonds , forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan , right , that 's difficult to wash out . so that 's what the origin of life would have looked like .
you needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early earth , four , 4.5 billion years ago .
so the challenge then is , throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab , and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze .
so we 're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we 've seen previously , and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar - this diverse , very complex , organic black tar .
and we put them into one of these experiments , as you 've seen earlier , and then we watch lively movement that comes out .
they look really good , very nice movement , and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other , similar to what we 've seen before - but again , working with just primordial conditions , no pure chemicals .
these are also , these tar-fueled protocells , are also able to locate resources in their environment .
i 'm going to add some resource from the left , here , that defuses into the system , and you can see , they really like that .
they become very energetic , and able to find the resource in the environment , similar to what we saw before .
but again , these are done in these primordial conditions , really messy conditions , not sort of sterile laboratory conditions .
these are very dirty little protocells , as a matter of fact . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but they have lifelike properties , is the point .
so , doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems .
and not only that , but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there - life that could be very different from life that we find here on earth .
and that leads me to the next term , which is " weird life . "
this is a term by steve benner .
this is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the national research council in the united states , wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe , okay , especially if that life is very different from life on earth . if we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there , how could we even recognize it as life ?
well , they came up with three very general criteria . first is - and they 're listed here .
the first is , the system has to be in non-equilibrium . that means the system can not be dead , in a matter of fact .
basically what that means is , you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself .
this is similar to having the sun shining on the earth , driving photosynthesis , driving the ecosystem .
without the sun , there 's likely to be no life on this planet .
secondly , life needs to be in liquid form , so that means even if we had some interesting structures , interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid , then this is not a good place for life .
and thirdly , we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds . and again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself .
now today , i told you about very strange and weird protocells - some that contain clay , some that have primordial ooze in them , some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them .
most of these do n't contain dna , but yet they have lifelike properties .
but these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems .
so by making these chemical , artificial life experiments , we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet , but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the " dirty jobs " crew and i were called to a little town in colorado , called craig .
it 's only a couple dozen square miles . it 's in the rockies .
and the job in question was sheep rancher .
my role on the show , for those of you who have n't seen it - it 's pretty simple .
i 'm an apprentice , and i work with the people who actually do the jobs in question .
and my responsibilities are to simply try and keep up and give an honest account of what it 's like to be these people , for one day in their life .
the job in question : herding sheep . great .
we go to craig and we check in to a hotel and i realize the next day that castration is going to be an absolute part of this work .
so , normally , i never do any research at all .
but , this is a touchy subject , and i work for the discovery channel , and we want to portray accurately whatever it is we do , and we certainly want to do it with a lot of respect for the animals .
so i called the humane society and i say , " look , i 'm going to be castrating some lambs , can you tell me the deal ? "
and they 're like , " yeah , it 's pretty straightforward . "
they use a band - basically a rubber band , like this , only a little smaller .
this one was actually around the playing cards i got yesterday , but it had a certain familiarity to it .
and i said , " well , what exactly is the process ? "
and they said , " the band is applied to the tail , tightly .
and then another band is applied to the scrotum , tightly .
blood flow is slowly retarded ; a week later the parts in question fall off .
" great - got it . "
ok , i call the spca to confirm this - they confirm it .
i also call peta , just for fun , and they do n't like it - but they confirm it .
ok , that 's basically how you do it .
so the next day i go out .
and i 'm given a horse and we go get the lambs and we take them to a pen that we built , and we go about the business of animal husbandry .
melanie is the wife of albert .
albert is the shepherd in question .
melanie picks up the lamb - two hands - one hand on both legs on the right , likewise on the left .
lamb goes on the post , she opens it up .
alright . great .
albert goes in , i follow albert , the crew is around .
i always watch the process done the first time before i try it .
being an apprentice , you know , you do that .
albert reaches in his pocket to pull out , you know , this black rubber band but what comes out instead is a knife .
and i 'm like that 's not rubber at all , you know .
and he kind of flicked it open in a way that caught the sun that was just coming over the rockies , it was very - it was , it was impressive .
in the space of about two seconds , albert had the knife between the cartilage of the tail , right next to the butt of the lamb , and very quickly the tail was gone and in the bucket that i was holding .
a second later , with a big thumb and a well calloused forefinger , he had the scrotum firmly in his grasp .
and he pulled it toward him , like so , and he took the knife and he put it on the tip .
now you think you know what 's coming , michael - you do n't , ok ?
he snips it , throws the tip over his shoulder , and then grabs the scrotum and pushes it upward , and then his head dips down , obscuring my view , but what i hear is a slurping sound , and a noise that sounds like velcro being yanked off a sticky wall and i am not even kidding .
can we roll the video ?
no i 'm kidding - we do n't - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought it best to talk in pictures .
so , i do something now i 've never ever done on a " dirty jobs " shoot , ever .
i say , " time out . stop . "
you guys know the show , we use take one , we do n't do take two .
there 's no writing , there 's no scripting , there 's no nonsense .
we do n't fool around , we do n't rehearse - we shoot what we get !
i said , " stop . this is nuts . "
i mean , you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " this is crazy .
we ca n't do this . "
and albert 's like , " what ? "
and i 'm like , " i do n't know what just happened , but there are testicles in this bucket and that 's not how we do it . "
and he said " well , that 's how we do it . "
and i said , " why would you do it this way ? "
and before i even let him explain , i said , " i want to do it the right way , with the rubber bands . "
and he says , " like the humane society ? "
and i said , " yes , like the humane society .
let 's do something that does n't make the lamb squeal and bleed - we 're on in five continents , dude .
we 're on twice a day on the discovery channel - we ca n't do this . "
he says , " ok . "
he goes to his box and he pulls out a bag of these little rubber bands .
melanie picks up another lamb , puts it on the post , band goes on the tail , band goes on the scrotum .
lamb goes on the ground , lamb takes two steps , falls down , gets up , shakes a little , takes another couple steps , falls down .
i 'm like , this is not a good sign for this lamb , at all .
gets up , walks to the corner , it 's quivering , and it lies down and it 's in obvious distress .
and i 'm looking at the lamb and i say , " albert , how long ?
when does he get up ? "
he 's like , " a day . "
i said , " a day ! how long does it take them to fall off ? "
" a week . "
meanwhile , the lamb that he had just did his little procedure on is , you know , he 's just prancing around , bleeding stopped .
he 's , you know , nibbling on some grass , frolicking .
and i was just so blown away at how wrong i was , in that second .
and i was reminded how utterly wrong i am , so much of the time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was especially reminded of what an ridiculously short straw i had that day because now i had to do what albert had just done , and there are like 100 of these lambs in the pen , and suddenly this whole thing 's starting to feel like a german porno , and i 'm like ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- melanie picks up the lamb , puts it on the post , opens it up .
albert hands me the knife .
i go in , tail comes off .
i go in , i grab the scrotum , tip comes off .
albert instructs , " push it way up there . "
i do .
" push it further . "
i do .
the testicles emerge - they look like thumbs , coming right at you - and he says , " bite ' em .
just bite ' em off . "
and i heard him , i heard all the words .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like , how did - how did i get here ?
how did - you know - i mean - how did i get here ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's just - it 's one of those moments where the brain goes off on it 's own : and suddenly , i 'm standing there , in the rockies , and all i can think of is the aristotelian definition of a tragedy .
you know , aristotle says a tragedy is that moment when the hero comes face to face with his true identity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm like , " what is this jacked-up metaphor ?
i do n't like what i 'm thinking right now . "
and i ca n't get this thought out of my head , and i ca n't get that vision out of my sight , so i did what i had to do .
i went in and i took them .
i took them like this , and i yanked my face back .
and i 'm standing there with two testicles on my chin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now i ca n't get - i ca n't shake the metaphor .
ok , i 'm still in " poetics , " in aristotle , and i 'm thinking - out of nowhere , two terms come crashing into my head that i have n't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there .
and they are anagnorisis and peripeteia .
anagnorisis and peripeteia .
anagnorisis is the greek word for discovery .
literally , the transition from ignorance to knowledge is anagnorisis .
it 's what our network does ; it 's what " dirty jobs " is .
and i 'm up to my neck in anagnorises every single day .
great .
the other word , peripeteia , that 's the moment in the great tragedies , you know - euripides and sophocles - the moment where oedipus has his moment , where he suddenly realizes that hot chick he 's been sleeping with and having babies with is his mother . ok .
that 's peripety or peripeteia .
and this metaphor in my head - i got anagnorisis and peripetia on my chin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i got to tell you , it 's such a great device though .
when you start to look for peripetia , you find it everywhere .
i mean , bruce willis in " the sixth sense , " right ?
spends the whole movie trying to help the little kid who sees dead people , and then , boom - " oh , i 'm dead " - peripetia .
you know ?
it 's crushing when the audience sees it the right way .
neo in " the matrix , " you know ?
" oh , i 'm living in a computer program " - that 's weird .
these discoveries that lead to sudden realizations ; and i 've been having them , over 200 dirty jobs , i have them all the time , but that one - that one drilled something home in a way that i just was n't prepared for .
and , as i stood there , looking at the happy lamb that i had just defiled - but it looked ok .
looking at that poor other little thing that i 'd done it the right way on , and i just was struck by if i 'm wrong about that and if i 'm wrong so often , in a literal way , what other peripatetic misconceptions might i be able to comment upon ?
because , look , i 'm not a social anthropologist but i have a friend who is .
and i talk to him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he says , " hey mike .
look , i do n't know if your brain is interested in this sort of thing or not , but do you realize you 've shot in every state ?
you 've worked in mining , you 've worked in fishing , you 've worked in steel , you 've worked in every major industry .
you 've had your back shoulder to shoulder with these guys that our politicians are desperate to relate to every four years , right ? "
i can still see hillary doing the shots of rye , dribbling down her chin , with the steel workers .
i mean , these are the people that i work with every single day .
" and if you have something to say about their thoughts , collectively , it might be time to think about it .
because , dude , you know , four years . "
you know , that 's in my head , testicles are on my chin , thoughts are bouncing around .
and , after that shoot , dirty jobs really did n't change , in terms of what the show is , but it changed for me , personally .
and now , when i talk about the show , i no longer just tell the story you heard and 190 like it .
i do , but i also start to talk about some of the other things i got wrong , some of the other notions of work that i 've just been assuming are sacrosanct , and they 're not .
people with dirty jobs are happier than you think .
as a group , they 're the happiest people i know .
and i do n't want to start whistling " look for the union label , " and all that happy worker crap .
i 'm just telling you that these are balanced people who do unthinkable work .
roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work . i swear to god - i did it with them .
they 've got this amazing sort of symmetry to their life .
and i see it over and over and over again .
so i started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows .
follow your passion - we 've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours .
follow your passion - what could possibly be wrong with that ?
probably the worst advice i ever got .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , follow your dreams and go broke , right ?
i mean , that 's all i heard growing up .
i did n't know what to do with my life , but i was told if you follow your passion , it 's going to work out .
i can give you 30 examples , right now - bob combs , the pig farmer in las vegas who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them them to his swine .
why ? because there 's so much protein in the stuff we do n't eat his pigs grow at twice the normal speed , and he is one rich pig farmer , and he is good for the environment , and he spends his days doing this incredible service , and he smells like hell , but god bless him .
he 's making a great living .
you ask him , " did you follow your passion here ? "
and he 'd laugh at you .
the guy 's worth - he just got offered like 60 million dollars for his farm and turned it down , outside of vegas .
he did n't follow his passion .
he stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way .
and i hear that story over and over .
matt froind , a dairy farmer in new canaan , connecticut , who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk , if he could use it to make these biodegradable flower pots .
now , he 's selling them to walmart .
follow his passion ? the guy 's - come on .
so i started to look at passion , i started to look at efficiency versus effectiveness - as tim talked about earlier , that 's a huge distinction .
i started to look at teamwork and determination , and basically all those platitudes they call " successories " that hang with that schmaltzy art in boardrooms around the world right now .
that stuff - it 's suddenly all been turned on its head .
safety - safety first ?
going back to , you know , osha and peta and the humane society : what if osha got it wrong ?
i mean - this is heresy , what i 'm about to say - but what if it 's really safety third ?
right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , i mean really .
what i mean to say is i value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that i 'm working with , but the ones who really get it done , they 're not out there talking about safety first .
they know that other things come first - the business of doing the work comes first , the business of getting it done .
and i 'll never forget , up in the bering sea , i was on a crab boat with the " deadliest catch " guys - which i also work on - in the first season .
we 're about 100 miles off the coast of russia : 50-foot seas , big waves , green water coming over the wheelhouse , right ?
most hazardous environment i 'd ever seen , and i was back with a guy , lashing the pots down .
so , i 'm 40 feet off the deck , which is like looking down at the top of your shoe , you know , and it 's doing this in the ocean .
unspeakably dangerous .
i scamper down , i go into the wheelhouse and i say , with some level of incredulity , " captain , osha . "
and he says , " osha ? ocean . "
and he points out there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in that moment , what he said next ca n't be repeated in the lower 48 .
it ca n't be repeated on any factory floor or any construction site .
but he looked at me , and he said , " son " - he 's my age , by the way , he calls me son , i love that - he says , " son , i 'm a captain of a crab boat .
my responsibility is not to get you home alive .
my responsibility is to get you home rich . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you want to get home alive , that 's on you .
and for the rest of that day , safety first .
i was like - so , the idea that we create this false - this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else 's responsibility as though it 's our own , and vice versa .
anyhow , a whole lot of things .
i could talk at length about the many little distinctions we made and the endless list of ways that i got it wrong .
but , what it all comes down to is this .
i formed a theory , and i 'm going to share it now in my remaining two minutes and 30 seconds .
it goes like this - we 've declared war on work , as a society , all of us .
it 's a civil war .
it 's a cold war , really .
we did n't set out to do it and we did n't twist our mustache in some machiavellian way , but we 've done it .
and we 've waged this war on at least four fronts , certainly in hollywood .
the way we portray working people on tv - it 's laughable .
if there 's a plumber , he 's 300 pounds and he 's got a giant butt crack . admit it .
you see him all the time .
that 's what plumbers look like , right ?
we turn them into heroes , or we turn them into punch lines .
that 's what tv does .
we try hard on " dirty jobs " not to do that , which is why i do the work and i do n't cheat .
but , we 've waged this war on madison avenue .
i mean , so many of the commercials that come out there - in the way of a message , what 's really being said ?
your life would be better if you could work a little less , if you did n't have to work so hard , if you could get home a little earlier , if you could retire a little faster , if you could punch out a little sooner - it 's all in there , over and over , again and again .
washington ? i ca n't even begin to talk about the deals and policies in place that affect the bottom line reality of the available jobs because i do n't really know .
i just know that that 's a front in this war .
and right here guys , silicon valley , i mean - how many people have an iphone on them right now ?
how many people have their blackberries ?
we 're plugged in ; we 're connected .
i would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution .
good grief , not to this crowd .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i would suggest that innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time .
and nobody celebrates imitation the way " dirty jobs " guys know it has to be done .
your iphone without those people making the same interface , the same circuitry , the same board , over and over ?
all of that ? that 's what makes it equally as possible as the genius that goes inside of it .
so , we 've got this new toolbox , you know .
our tools today do n't look like shovels and picks .
they look like the stuff we walk around with .
and so the collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs .
and i realized , probably too late in this game - i hope not , because i do n't know if i can do 200 more of these things - but we 're going to do as many as we can .
and to me the most important thing to know and to really come face to face with , is that fact that i got it wrong about a lot of things , not just the testicles on my chin .
i got a lot wrong .
so , we 're thinking - by we , i mean me - that the thing to do is to talk about a pr campaign for work , manual labor , skilled labor .
somebody needs to be out there talking about the forgotten benefits .
i 'm talking about grandfather stuff , the stuff a lot us probably grew up with but we 've kind of - you know , kind of lost a little .
barack wants to create two and a half million jobs .
the infrastructure is a huge deal .
this war on work , that i suppose exists , has casualties like any other war .
the infrastructure 's the first one ; declining trade-school enrollments are the second one .
every single year : fewer electricians , fewer carpenters , fewer plumbers , fewer welders , fewer pipefitters , fewer steamfitters .
the infrastructure jobs that everybody is talking about creating are those guys - the ones that have been in decline , over and over .
meanwhile , we 've got two trillion dollars - at a minimum , according to the american society of civil engineers - that we need to expend to even make a dent in the infrastructure , which is currently rated at a d minus .
so , if i were running for anything , and i 'm not , i would simply say that the jobs we hope to make and the jobs we hope to create are n't going to stick unless they 're jobs that people want .
and i know the point of this conference is to celebrate things that are near and dear to us , but i also know that clean and dirty are n't opposites .
they 're two sides of the same coin , just like innovation and imitation , like risk and responsibility , like peripetia and anagnorisis , like that poor little lamb , who i hope is n't quivering anymore , and like my time that 's gone .
it 's been great talking to you and get back to work , will you ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a medical illustrator , and i come from a slightly different point of view .
i 've been watching , since i grew up , the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences .
and while these are both wonderful things in their own right - they both have very wonderful things going for them - truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are expressions of truth as awe-full things , by meaning they are things you can worship .
they are ideals that are powerful . they are irreducible .
they are unique . they are useful - sometimes , often a long time after the fact .
and you can actually roll some of the pictures now , because i do n't want to look at me on the screen .
truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences .
they are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed .
if you look at the math , e = mc squared , if you look at the cosmological constant , where there 's an anthropic ideal , where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe - these are things that are really difficult to understand .
and what i 've tried to do since i had my training as a medical illustrator - since i was taught animation by my father , who was a sculptor and my visual mentor - i wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation , by using pictures , by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth , and can be taught , and can be understood .
students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them , but the way they 're taught is compartmentalized and it 's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident .
it 's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone .
we do n't want to do that to our students .
so we have an opportunity to really open up education .
and i had a telephone call from robert lue at harvard , in the molecular and cellular biology department , a couple of years ago . he asked me if my team and i would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at harvard .
so we embarked on a project that would explore the cell - that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on .
they could have a mental image of the cell as a large , bustling , hugely complicated city that 's occupied by micro-machines .
and these micro-machines really are at the heart of life .
these micro-machines , which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over , are self-directed , powerful , precise , accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids .
and these micro-machines power how a cell moves .
they power how a cell replicates . they power our hearts .
they power our minds .
how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of biovisions at harvard , which is a website that harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will - in addition to all the textual information , in addition to all the didactic stuff - put everything together visually , so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty , and be able to study with this view in mind , so that their imaginations would be sparked , so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on
and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out , really , how life works .
so we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together .
we worked with a theme , which is , you 've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary , and they 're touching the surface of the capillary wall , and they 're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall , and they are given this information that there 's an inflammation somewhere outside , where they ca n't see and sense .
but they get the information that causes them to stop , causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape , and try to get out of this capillary and find out what 's going on .
so these molecular motors - we had to work with the harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved , and figure out what they did .
and figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on , but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening .
and so what i 'm going to show you is a three-minute reader 's digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced . it 's an ongoing project that 's going to go another four or five years .
and i want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures - these little walking machines , they 're called kinesins - that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size .
run the movie , please .
but these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing , and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other .
they pass information to each other .
they cause different things to happen inside the cell .
and the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly , from information that 's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes .
no life , from the smallest life to everybody here , would be possible without these little micro-machines .
in fact , it would really , in the absence of these machines , have made the attendance here , chris , really quite sparse .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- this is the fedex delivery guy of the cell .
this little guy is called the kinesin , and he pulls a sack that 's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it 's needed in the cell - whether it 's to a membrane , whether it 's to an organelle , whether it 's to build something or repair something .
and each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around , right now , inside each one of your 100 trillion cells .
so no matter how lazy you feel , you 're not really intrinsically doing nothing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what i want you to do when you go home is think about this , and think about how powerful our cells are .
and think about some of the things that we 're learning about cellular mechanics .
once we figure out all that 's going on - and believe me , we know almost a percent of what 's going on - once we figure out what 's going on , we 're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health , with what we do with future generations , and how long we 're going to live .
and hopefully we 'll be able to use this to discover more truth , and more beauty .
-lrb- music -rrb- but it 's really quite amazing that these cells , these micro-machines , are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding .
they work together . they make the cell do what it needs to do .
and their working together helps our bodies - huge entities that they will never see - function properly .
enjoy the rest of the show . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i graduated ucla , i moved to northern california , and i lived in a little town called elk on the mendocino coast , and i did n't have a phone or tv , but i had u.s. mail , and life was good back then , if you could remember it .
i 'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie , and i 'd ship my film to san francisco , and lo and behold , two days later , it would end up on my front door , which was way better than having to fight the traffic of hollywood . -lrb- music -rrb- i did n't have much money , but i had time and a sense of wonder . -lrb- music -rrb- so i started shooting time-lapse photography .
it would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film , because that 's all i could afford .
i 've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously , non-stop , 24 hours a day , seven days a week , for over 30 years , and to see them move is a dance i 'll never get tired of .
their beauty immerses us with color , taste , touch .
it also provides a third of the food we eat .
-lrb- music -rrb- beauty and seduction is nature 's tools for survival , because we protect what we fall in love with .
it opens our hearts , and makes us realize we are a part of nature and we 're not separate from it .
when we see ourselves in nature , it also connects us to every one of us , because it 's clear that it 's all connected in one .
when people see my images , a lot of times they 'll say , " oh my god . " have you ever wondered what that meant ?
the " oh " means it caught your attention , makes you present , makes you mindful .
the " my " means it connects with something deep inside your soul .
it creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard . and " god " ?
god is that personal journey we all want to be on , to be inspired , to feel like we 're connected to a universe that celebrates life .
did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes ?
and if you compare light energy to musical scales , it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see , which is right in the middle ?
and are n't we grateful for our brains that can , you know , take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world ?
and are n't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature ?
-lrb- music -rrb- nature 's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude .
-lrb- music -rrb- so i have a gift i want to share with you today , a project i 'm working on called happiness revealed , and it 'll give us a glimpse into that perspective from the point of view of a child and an elderly man of that world .
child : when i watch tv , it 's just some shows that you just - that are pretend , and when you explore , you get more imagination than you already had , and when you get more imagination , it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things , like the path , if it 's a path , it could lead you to a beach , or something , and it could be beautiful .
-lrb- music -rrb- elderly man : you think this is just another day in your life ?
it 's not just another day . it 's the one day that is given to you today .
it 's given to you . it 's a gift .
it 's the only gift that you have right now , and the only appropriate response is gratefulness .
if you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is , if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day , then you will have spent this day very well .
begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open , that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment .
look at the sky .
we so rarely look at the sky .
we so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment , with clouds coming and going .
we just think of the weather , and even with the weather , we do n't think of all the many nuances of weather .
we just think of good weather and bad weather .
this day , right now , has unique weather , maybe a kind that will never exactly in that form come again .
that formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now .
open your eyes . look at that .
look at the faces of people whom you meet .
each one has an incredible story behind their face , a story that you could never fully fathom , not only their own story , but the story of their ancestors .
we all go back so far , and in this present moment , on this day , all the people you meet , all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here like a life-giving water , if you only open your heart and drink .
-lrb- music -rrb- open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us .
you flip a switch and there is electric light .
you turn a faucet and there is warm water and cold water , and drinkable water .
it 's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience .
so these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart .
and so i wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings , and let them flow through you , that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you , just by your eyes , by your smile , by your touch , just by your presence .
let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you , and then it will really be a good day . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i work in marketing , which i love , but my first passion was physics , a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher , when i had a little less gray hair .
so he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us .
and i 'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing .
so quick show of hands - who studied some marketing in university ?
who studied some physics in university ?
pretty good . and at school ?
okay , lots of you .
so , hopefully this will bring back some happy , or possibly some slightly disturbing memories .
so , physics and marketing .
we 'll start with something very simple - newton 's law : " the force equals mass times acceleration . "
this is something that perhaps turkish airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if we rearrange this formula quickly , we can get to acceleration equals force over mass , which means that for a larger particle - a larger mass - it requires more force to change its direction .
it 's the same with brands : the more massive a brand , the more baggage it has , the more force is needed to change its positioning .
and that 's one of the reasons why arthur andersen chose to launch accenture rather than try to persuade the world that andersen 's could stand for something other than accountancy .
it explains why hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners , and why companies like unilever and p & g keep brands separate , like ariel and pringles and dove rather than having one giant parent brand .
so the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction .
the marketing is , the bigger a brand , the more difficult it is to reposition it .
so think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures .
now , who remembers heisenberg 's uncertainty principle ?
getting a little more technical now .
so this says that it 's impossible , by definition , to measure exactly the state - i.e. , the position - and the momentum of a particle , because the act of measuring it , by definition , changes it .
so to explain that - if you 've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it , then the photon of light has momentum , which knocks the particle , so you do n't know where it was before you looked at it .
by measuring it , the act of measurement changes it .
the act of observation changes it .
it 's the same in marketing .
so with the act of observing consumers , changes their behavior .
think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group , and almost none of them buy lots of junk food .
and yet , mcdonald 's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year .
think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets , who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit , but do n't shop like that any other day .
and if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the web , it 's very few .
yet , at google , we know it 's the number-one searched for category .
so luckily , the science - no , sorry - the marketing is getting easier .
luckily , with now better point-of-sale tracking , more digital media consumption , you can measure more what consumers actually do , rather than what they say they do .
so the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle , because the observation changes it .
the marketing is - the message for marketing is - that try to measure what consumers actually do , rather than what they say they 'll do or anticipate they 'll do .
so next , the scientific method - an axiom of physics , of all science - says you can not prove a hypothesis through observation , you can only disprove it .
what this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning , and it will strengthen it , but it will not conclusively prove it .
and only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water .
so if we take an example - ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the earth .
it only took one robust observation from copernicus to blow that idea out of the water .
and there are parallels for marketing - you can invest for a long time in a brand , but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers ' belief .
take bp - they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand , but then one little accident .
think about toyota .
it was , for a long time , revered as the most reliable of cars , and then they had the big recall incident .
and tiger woods , for a long time , the perfect brand ambassador .
well , you know the story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the physics is that you can not prove a hypothesis , but it 's easy to disprove it - any hypothesis is shaky .
and the marketing is that not matter how much you 've invested in your brand , one bad week can undermine decades of good work .
so be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand .
and lastly , to the slightly obscure world of entropy - the second law of thermodynamics .
this says that entropy , which is a measure of the disorder of a system , will always increase .
the same is true of marketing .
if we go back 20 years , the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand .
but where we are today , things have changed .
you can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the conservative party did earlier this year with their election poster .
but then you lose control of it .
with the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer , it 's impossible to control where it goes .
your brand starts being dispersed , -lrb- laughter -rrb- it gets more chaotic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's out of your control .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i actually saw him speak - he did a good job .
but while this may be unsettling for marketers , it 's actually a good thing .
this distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people , more in with the people .
it makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force , which is ultimately good for your brand .
so , the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase ; it 's a fundamental law .
the message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed .
you ca n't fight it , so embrace it and find a way to work with it .
so to close , my teacher , mr. vutter , told me that physics is cool , and hopefully , i 've convinced you that physics can teach all of us , even in the world of marketing , something special .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hello . my name is birke baehr , and i 'm 11 years old .
i came here today to talk about what 's wrong with our food system .
first of all , i would like to say that i 'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on tv , at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look .
it seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids , like me , to get their parents to buy stuff that really is n't good for us or the planet .
little kids , especially , are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys .
i must admit , i used to be one of them .
i also used to think that all of our food came from these happy , little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day .
what i discovered was this is not true .
i began to look into this stuff on the internet , in books and in documentary films , in my travels with my family .
i discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system .
first , there 's genetically engineered seeds and organisms .
that is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature - like taking the dna of a fish and putting it into the dna of a tomato . yuck .
do n't get me wrong , i like fish and tomatoes , but this is just creepy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the seeds are then planted , then grown .
the food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals , and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s .
and most folks do n't even know they exist .
did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity ?
these include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight .
yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way .
and let me tell you , corn is in everything .
and do n't even get me started on the confined animal feeding operations called cafos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow .
they do this because they 've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again .
next , more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables , like pesticides and herbicides , to kill weeds and bugs .
when it rains , these chemicals seep into the ground , or run off into our waterways , poisoning our water too .
then they irradiate our food , trying to make it last longer , so it can travel thousands of miles from where it 's grown to the supermarkets .
so i ask myself , how can i change ? how can i change these things ?
this is what i found out .
i discovered that there 's a movement for a better way .
now a while back , i wanted to be an nfl football player .
i decided that i 'd rather be an organic farmer instead .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and that way i can have a greater impact on the world .
this man , joel salatin , they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system .
since i 'm home-schooled , i went to go hear him speak one day .
this man , this " lunatic farmer , " does n't use any pesticides , herbicides , or genetically modified seeds .
and so for that , he 's called crazy by the system .
i want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices , by buying our food directly from local farmers , or our neighbors who we know in real life .
some people say organic or local food is more expensive , with all these things i 've been learning about the food system , it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer , or we can pay the hospital .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now i know definitely which one i would choose .
i want you to know that there are farms out there - like bill keener in sequatchie cove farm in tennessee - whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud , just like i thought .
sometimes i go to bill 's farm and volunteer , so i can see up close and personal where the meat i eat comes from .
i want you to know that i believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from .
i want you to know that there are farmers ' markets in every community popping up .
i want you to know that me , my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips .
i try to share this everywhere i go .
not too long ago , my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal .
he asked him if he wanted organic toasted o 's or the sugarcoated flakes - you know , the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front .
my little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic toasted o 's cereal because birke said he should n't eat sparkly cereal .
and that , my friends , is how we can make a difference one kid at a time .
so next time you 're at the grocery store , think local , choose organic , know your farmer and know your food .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so today , i would like to talk with you about bionics , which is the popular term for the science of replacing part of a living organism with a mechatronic device , or a robot .
it is essentially the stuff of life meets machine .
and specifically , i 'd like to talk with you about how bionics is evolving for people with arm amputations .
this is our motivation .
arm amputation causes a huge disability .
i mean , the functional impairment is clear .
our hands are amazing instruments .
and when you lose one , far less both , it 's a lot harder to do the things we physically need to do .
there 's also a huge emotional impact .
and actually , i spend as much of my time in clinic dealing with the emotional adjustment of patients as with the physical disability .
and finally , there 's a profound social impact .
we talk with our hands .
we greet with our hands .
and we interact with the physical world with our hands .
and when they 're missing , it 's a barrier .
arm amputation is usually caused by trauma , with things like industrial accidents , motor vehicle collisions or , very poignantly , war .
there are also some children who are born without arms , called congenital limb deficiency .
unfortunately , we do n't do great with upper-limb prosthetics .
there are two general types .
they 're called body-powered prostheses , which were invented just after the civil war , refined in world war i and world war ii .
here you see a patent for an arm in 1912 .
it 's not a lot different than the one you see on my patient .
they work by harnessing shoulder power .
so when you squish your shoulders , they pull on a bicycle cable .
and that bicycle cable can open or close a hand or a hook or bend an elbow .
and we still use them commonly , because they 're very robust and relatively simple devices .
the state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses .
these are motorized devices that are controlled by little electrical signals from your muscle .
every time you contract a muscle , it emits a little electricity that you can record with antennae or electrodes and use that to operate the motorized prosthesis .
they work pretty well for people who have just lost their hand , because your hand muscles are still there .
you squeeze your hand , these muscles contract .
you open it , these muscles contract .
so it 's intuitive , and it works pretty well .
well how about with higher levels of amputation ?
now you 've lost your arm above the elbow .
you 're missing not only these muscles , but your hand and your elbow too .
what do you do ?
well our patients have to use very code-y systems of using just their arm muscles to operate robotic limbs .
we have robotic limbs .
there are several available on the market , and here you see a few .
they contain just a hand that will open and close , a wrist rotator and an elbow .
there 's no other functions .
if they did , how would we tell them what to do ?
we built our own arm at the rehab institute of chicago where we 've added some wrist flexion and shoulder joints to get up to six motors , or six degrees of freedom .
and we 've had the opportunity to work with some very advanced arms that were funded by the u.s. military , using these prototypes , that had up to 10 different degrees of freedom including movable hands .
how do we tell these robotic arms what to do ?
how do we control them ?
well we need a neural interface , a way to connect to our nervous system or our thought processes so that it 's intuitive , it 's natural , like for you and i.
well the body works by starting a motor command in your brain , going down your spinal cord , out the nerves and to your periphery .
and your sensation 's the exact opposite .
you touch yourself , there 's a stimulus that comes up those very same nerves back up to your brain .
when you lose your arm , that nervous system still works .
those nerves can put out command signals .
and if i tap the nerve ending on a world war ii vet , he 'll still feel his missing hand .
so you might say , let 's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals , or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there .
and these are very exciting research areas , but it 's really , really hard .
you have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons - ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts .
and it 's just too hard to use now and for my patients today .
so we developed a different approach .
we 're using a biological amplifier to amplify these nerve signals - muscles .
muscles will amplify the nerve signals about a thousand-fold , so that we can record them from on top of the skin , like you saw earlier .
so our approach is something we call targeted reinnervation .
imagine , with somebody who 's lost their whole arm , we still have four major nerves that go down your arm .
and we take the nerve away from your chest muscle and let these nerves grow into it .
now you think , " close hand , " and a little section of your chest contracts .
you think , " bend elbow , " a different section contracts .
and we can use electrodes or antennae to pick that up and tell the arm to move .
that 's the idea .
so this is the first man that we tried it on .
his name is jesse sullivan .
he 's just a saint of a man - 54-year-old lineman who touched the wrong wire and had both of his arms burnt so badly they had to be amputated at the shoulder .
jesse came to us at the ric to be fit with these state-of-the-art devices , and here you see them .
i 'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side .
and he picks which joint he wants to move with those chin switches .
on the left side he 's got a modern motorized prosthesis with those three joints , and he operates little pads in his shoulder that he touches to make the arm go .
and jesse 's a good crane operator , and he did okay by our standards .
he also required a revision surgery on his chest .
and that gave us the opportunity to do targeted reinnervation .
so my colleague , dr. greg dumanian , did the surgery .
first , we cut away the nerve to his own muscle , then we took the arm nerves and just kind of had them shift down onto his chest and closed him up .
and after about three months , the nerves grew in a little bit and we could get a twitch .
and after six months , the nerves grew in well , and you could see strong contractions .
and this is what it looks like .
this is what happens when jesse thinks open and close his hand , or bend or straighten your elbow .
you can see the movements on his chest , and those little hash marks are where we put our antennae , or electrodes .
and i challenge anybody in the room to make their chest go like this .
his brain is thinking about his arm .
he has not learned how to do this with the chest .
there is not a learning process .
that 's why it 's intuitive .
so here 's jesse in our first little test with him .
on the left-hand side , you see his original prosthesis , and he 's using those switches to move little blocks from one box to the other .
he 's had that arm for about 20 months , so he 's pretty good with it .
on the right side , two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis - which , by the way , is the same physical arm , just programmed a little different - you can see that he 's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks .
and we 're only able to use three of the signals at this time .
then we had one of those little surprises in science .
so we 're all motivated to get motor commands to drive robotic arms .
and after a few months , you touch jesse on his chest , and he felt his missing hand .
his hand sensation grew into his chest again probably because we had also taken away a lot of fat , so the skin was right down to the muscle and deinnervated , if you would , his skin .
so you touch jesse here , he feels his thumb ; you touch it here , he feels his pinky .
he feels light touch down to one gram of force .
he feels hot , cold , sharp , dull , all in his missing hand , or both his hand and his chest , but he can attend to either .
so this is really exciting for us , because now we have a portal , a portal , or a way to potentially give back sensation , so that he might feel what he touches with his prosthetic hand .
imagine sensors in the hand coming up and pressing on this new hand skin .
so it was very exciting .
we 've also gone on with what was initially our primary population of people with above-the-elbow amputations .
and here we deinnervate , or cut the nerve away , just from little segments of muscle and leave others alone that give us our up-down signals and two others that will give us a hand open and close signal .
this was one of our first patients , chris .
you see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use , and on the right , it is two months .
he 's about four or five times as fast with this simple little performance metric .
all right .
so one of the best parts of my job is working with really great patients who are also our research collaborators .
and we 're fortunate today to have amanda kitts come and join us .
please welcome amanda kitts .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so amanda , would you please tell us how you lost your arm ?
amanda kitts : sure . in 2006 , i had a car accident .
and i was driving home from work , and a truck was coming the opposite direction , came over into my lane , ran over the top of my car and his axle tore my arm off .
todd kuiken : okay , so after your amputation , you healed up .
and you 've got one of these conventional arms .
can you tell us how it worked ?
ak : well , it was a little difficult , because all i had to work with was a bicep and a tricep .
so for the simple little things like picking something up , i would have to bend my elbow , and then i would have to cocontract to get it to change modes .
when i did that , i had to use my bicep to get the hand to close , use my tricep to get it to open , cocontract again to get the elbow to work again .
tk : so it was a little slow ?
ak : a little slow , and it was just hard to work .
you had to concentrate a whole lot .
tk : okay , so i think about nine months later that you had the targeted reinnervation surgery , took six more months to have all the reinnervation .
then we fit her with a prosthesis .
and how did that work for you ?
ak : it works good .
i was able to use my elbow and my hand simultaneously .
i could work them just by my thoughts .
so i did n't have to do any of the cocontracting and all that .
tk : a little faster ?
ak : a little faster . and much more easy , much more natural .
tk : okay , this was my goal .
for 20 years , my goal was to let somebody -lsb- be -rsb- able to use their elbow and hand in an intuitive way and at the same time .
and we now have over 50 patients around the world who have had this surgery , including over a dozen of our wounded warriors in the u.s. armed services .
the success rate of the nerve transfers is very high .
it 's like 96 percent .
because we 're putting a big fat nerve onto a little piece of muscle .
and it provides intuitive control .
our functional testing , those little tests , all show that they 're a lot quicker and a lot easier .
and the most important thing is our patients have appreciated it .
so that was all very exciting .
but we want to do better .
there 's a lot of information in those nerve signals , and we wanted to get more .
you can move each finger . you can move your thumb , your wrist .
can we get more out of it ?
so we did some experiments where we saturated our poor patients with zillions of electrodes and then had them try to do two dozen different tasks - from wiggling a finger to moving a whole arm to reaching for something - and recorded this data .
and then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms , called pattern recognition .
see .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and here you can see , on jesse 's chest , when he just tried to do three different things , you can see three different patterns .
but i ca n't put in an electrode and say , " go there . "
so we collaborated with our colleagues in university of new brunswick , came up with this algorithm control , which amanda can now demonstrate .
ak : so i have the elbow that goes up and down .
i have the wrist rotation that goes - and it can go all the way around .
and i have the wrist flexion and extension .
and i also have the hand closed and open .
tk : thank you , amanda .
now this is a research arm , but it 's made out of commercial components from here down and a few that i 've borrowed from around the world .
it 's about seven pounds , which is probably about what my arm would weigh if i lost it right here .
obviously , that 's heavy for amanda .
and in fact , it feels even heavier , because it 's not glued on the same .
she 's carrying all the weight through harnesses .
so the exciting part is n't so much the mechatronics , but the control .
so we 've developed a small microcomputer that is blinking somewhere behind her back and is operating this all by the way she trains it to use her individual muscle signals .
so amanda , when you first started using this arm , how long did it take to use it ?
ak : it took just about probably three to four hours to get it to train .
i had to hook it up to a computer , so i could n't just train it anywhere .
so if it stopped working , i just had to take it off .
so now it 's able to train with just this little piece on the back .
i can wear it around .
if it stops working for some reason , i can retrain it .
takes about a minute .
tk : so we 're really excited , because now we 're getting to a clinically practical device .
and that 's where our goal is - to have something clinically pragmatic to wear .
we 've also had amanda able to use some of our more advanced arms that i showed you earlier .
here 's amanda using an arm made by deka research corporation .
and i believe dean kamen presented it at ted a few years ago .
so amanda , you can see , has really good control .
it 's all the pattern recognition .
and it now has a hand that can do different grasps .
what we do is have the patient go all the way open and think , " what hand grasp pattern do i want ? "
it goes into that mode , and then you can do up to five or six different hand grasps with this hand .
amanda , how many were you able to do with the deka arm ?
ak : i was able to get four .
i had the key grip , i had a chuck grip , i had a power grasp and i had a fine pinch .
but my favorite one was just when the hand was open , because i work with kids , and so all the time you 're clapping and singing , so i was able to do that again , which was really good .
tk : that hand 's not so good for clapping .
ak : ca n't clap with this one .
tk : all right . so that 's exciting on where we may go with the better mechatronics , if we make them good enough to put out on the market and use in a field trial .
i want you to watch closely .
-lrb- video -rrb- claudia : oooooh !
tk : that 's claudia , and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic .
she had a little sensor at the end of her prosthesis that then she rubbed over different surfaces , and she could feel different textures of sandpaper , different grits , ribbon cable , as it pushed on her reinnervated hand skin .
she said that when she just ran it across the table , it felt like her finger was rocking .
so that 's an exciting laboratory experiment on how to give back , potentially , some skin sensation .
but here 's another video that shows some of our challenges .
this is jesse , and he 's squeezing a foam toy .
and the harder he squeezes - you see a little black thing in the middle that 's pushing on his skin proportional to how hard he squeezes .
but look at all the electrodes around it .
i 've got a real estate problem .
you 're supposed to put a bunch of these things on there , but our little motor 's making all kinds of noise right next to my electrodes .
so we 're really challenged on what we 're doing there .
the future is bright .
we 're excited about where we are and a lot of things we want to do .
so for example , one is to get rid of my real estate problem and get better signals .
we want to develop these little tiny capsules about the size of a piece of risotto that we can put into the muscles and telemeter out the emg signals , so that it 's not worrying about electrode contact .
and we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback .
we want to build a better arm .
this arm - they 're always made for the 50th percentile male - which means they 're too big for five-eighths of the world .
so rather than a super strong or super fast arm , we 're making an arm that is - we 're starting with , the 25th percentile female - that will have a hand that wraps around , opens all the way , two degrees of freedom in the wrist and an elbow .
so it 'll be the smallest and lightest and the smartest arm ever made .
once we can do it that small , it 's a lot easier making them bigger .
so those are just some of our goals .
and we really appreciate you all being here today .
i 'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side , with yesterday 's theme .
so amanda came jet-lagged , she 's using the arm , and everything goes wrong .
there was a computer spook , a broken wire , a converter that sparked .
we took out a whole circuit in the hotel and just about put on the fire alarm .
and none of those problems could i have dealt with , but i have a really bright research team .
and thankfully dr. annie simon was with us and worked really hard yesterday to fix it .
that 's science .
and fortunately , it worked today .
so thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- back in 1992 , i started working for a company called interval research , which was just then being founded by david lidell and paul allen as a for-profit research enterprise in silicon valley .
i met with david to talk about what i might do in his company .
i was just coming out of a failed virtual reality business and supporting myself by being on the speaking circuit and writing books - after twenty years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people did n't think they could sell .
and david and i discovered that we had a question in common , that we really wanted the answer to , and that was , " why has n't anybody built any computer games for little girls ? "
why is that ?
it ca n't just be a giant sexist conspiracy .
these people are n't that smart .
there 's six billion dollars on the table .
they would go for it if they could figure out how .
so , what is the deal here ?
and as we thought about our goals - i should say that interval is really a humanistic institution , in the classical sense that humanism , at its best , finds a way to combine clear-eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people .
the basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life ; that we can do good things , that there are things worth doing because they 're good things to do , and that clear-eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them .
so , contrary to popular belief , there is not a conflict of interest between empiricism and values .
and interval research is kind of the living example of how that can be true .
so david and i decided to go find out , through the best research we could muster , what it would take to get a little girl to put her hands on a computer , to achieve the level of comfort and ease with the technology that little boys have because they play video games .
we spent two and a half years conducting research ; we spent another year and a half in advance development .
then we formed a spin-off company .
in the research phase of the project at interval , we partnered with a company called cheskin research , and these people - davis masten and christopher ireland - changed my mind entirely about what market research was and what it could be .
they taught me how to look and see , and they did not do the incredibly stupid thing of saying to a child , " of all these things we already make you , which do you like best ? " - which gives you zero answers that are usable .
so , what we did for the first two and a half years was four things : we did an extensive review of the literature in related fields , like cognitive psychology , spatial cognition , gender studies , play theory , sociology , primatology .
thank you frans de waal , wherever you are , i love you and i 'd give anything to meet you .
after we had done that with a pretty large team of people and discovered what we thought the salient issues were with girls and boys and playing - because , after all , that 's really what this is about - we moved to the second phase of our work , where we interviewed adult experts in academia , some of the people who 'd produced the literature that we found relevant .
also , we did focus groups with people who were on the ground with kids every day , like playground supervisors . we talked to them , confirmed some hypotheses and identified some serious questions about gender difference and play .
then we did what i consider to be the heart of the work : interviewed 1,100 children , boys and girls , ages seven to 12 , all over the united states - except for silicon valley , boston and austin because we knew that their little families would have millions of computers in them and they would n't be a representative sample .
and at the end of those remarkable conversations with kids and their best friends across the united states , after two years , we pulled together some survey data from another 10,000 children , drew up a set up of what we thought were the key findings of our research , and spent another year transforming them into design heuristics , for designing computer-based products - and , in fact , any kind of products - for little girls , ages eight to 12 .
and we spent that time designing interactive prototypes for computer software and testing them with little girls .
in 1996 , in november , we formed the company purple moon which was a spinoff of interval research , and our chief investors were interval research , vulcan northwest , institutional venture partners and allen and company .
we launched a website on september 2nd that has now served 25 million pages , and has 42,000 registered young girl users .
they visit an average of one and a half times a day , spend an average of 35 minutes a visit , and look at 50 pages a visit .
so we feel that we 've formed a successful online community with girls .
we launched two titles in october - " rockett 's new school " - the first of a series of products - is about a character called rockett beginning her first day of school in eighth grade at a brand new place , with a blank slate , which allows girls to play with the question of , " what will i be like when i 'm older ? "
" what 's it going to be like to be in high school or junior high school ?
who are my friends ? " ; to exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior ; and which embeds in it values about noticing that we have lots of choices in our lives and the ways that we conduct ourselves .
the other title that we launched is called " secret paths in the forest , " which addresses the more fantasy-oriented , inner lives of girls .
these two titles both showed up in the top 50 entertainment titles in pc data - entertainment titles in pc data in december , right up there with " john madden football , " which thrills me to death .
so , we 're real , and we 've touched several hundreds of thousands of little girls .
we 've made half-a-billion impressions with marketing and pr for this brand , purple moon .
ninety-six percent of them , roughly , have been positive ; four percent of them have been " other . "
i want to talk about the other , because the politics of this enterprise , in a way , have been the most fascinating part of it , for me .
there are really two kinds of negative reviews that we 've received .
one kind of reviewer is a male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be , and wo n't show the product to little girls .
the other kind of reviewer is a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be .
and so it 's funny to me that these interesting , odd bedfellows have one thing in common : they do n't listen to little girls .
they have n't looked at children and they 're certainly not demonstrating any love for them .
i 'd like to play you some voices of little girls from the two-and-a-half years of research that we did - actually , some of the voices are more recent .
and these voices will be accompanied by photographs that they took for us of their lives , of the things that they value and care about .
these are pictures the girls themselves never saw , but they gave to us this is the stuff those reviewers do n't know about and are n't listening to and this is the kind of research i recommend to those who want to do humanistic work .
girl 1 : yeah , my character is usually a tomboy .
hers is more into boys .
girl 2 : uh , yeah .
girl 1 : we have - in the very beginning of the whole game , always we do this : we each have a piece of paper ; we write down our name , our age - are we rich , very rich , not rich , poor , medium , wealthy , boyfriends , dogs , pets - what else - sisters , brothers , and all those .
girl 2 : divorced - parents divorced , maybe .
girl 3 : this is my pretend -lsb- unclear -rsb- one .
girl 4 : we make a school newspaper on the computer .
girl 5 : for a girl 's game also usually they 'll have really pretty scenery with clouds and flowers .
girl 6 : like , if you were a girl and you were really adventurous and a real big tomboy , you would think that girls ' games were kinda sissy .
girl 7 : i run track , i played soccer , i play basketball , and i love a lot of things to do .
and sometimes i feel like i ca n't really enjoy myself unless it 's like a vacation , like when i get mondays and all those days off .
girl 8 : well , sometimes there is a lot of stuff going on because i have music lessons and i 'm on swim team - all this different stuff that i have to do , and sometimes it gets overwhelming .
girl 9 : my friend justine kinda took my friend kelly , and now they 're being mean to me .
girl 10 : well , sometimes it gets annoying when your brothers and sisters , or brother or sister , when they copy you and you get your idea first and they take your idea and they do it themselves .
girl 11 : because my older sister , she gets everything and , like , when i ask my mom for something , she 'll say , " no " - all the time .
but she gives my sister everything .
brenda laurel : i want to show you , real quickly , just a minute of " rockett 's tricky decision , " which went gold two days ago .
let 's hope it 's really stable .
this is the second day in rockett 's life .
the reason i 'm showing you this is i 'm hoping that the scene that i 'm going to show you will look familiar and sound familiar , now that you 've listened to some girls ' voices .
and you can see how we 've tried to incorporate the issues that matter to them in the game that we 've created .
miko : hey rockett ! c 'mere !
rockett : hi miko ! what 's going on ?
miko : did you hear about nakilia 's big halloween party this weekend ?
she asked me to make sure you knew about it .
nakilia invited reuben too , but - rockett : but what ? is n't he coming ?
miko : i do n't think so .
i mean , i heard his band is playing at another party the same night .
rockett : really ? what other party ?
girl : max 's party is going to be so cool , whitney .
he 's invited all the best people .
bl : i 'm going to fast-forward to the decision point because i know i do n't have a lot of time .
after this awful event occurs , rocket gets to decide how she feels about it .
rockett : who 'd want to show up at that party anyway ?
i could get invited to that party any day if i wanted to .
gee , i doubt i 'll make max 's best people list .
bl : ok , so we 're going to emotionally navigate .
if we were playing the game , that 's what we 'd do .
if at any time during the game we want to learn more about the characters , we can go into this hidden hallway , and i 'll quickly just show you the interface .
we can , for example , go find miko 's locker and get some more information about her .
oops , i turned the wrong way .
but you get the general idea of the product .
i wanted to show you the ways , innocuous as they seem , in which we 're incorporating what we 've learned about girls - their desires to experience greater emotional flexibility , and to play around with the social complexity of their lives .
i want to make the point that what we 're giving girls , i think , through this effort , is a kind of validation , a sense of being seen .
and a sense of the choices that are available in their lives .
we love them .
we see them .
we 're not trying to tell them who they ought to be .
but we 're really , really happy about who they are .
it turns out they 're really great .
i want to close by showing you a videotape that 's a version of a future game in the rockett series that our graphic artists and design people put together , that we feel would please that four percent of reviewers .
" rockett 28 ! "
rockett : it 's like i 'm just waking up , you know ?
bl : thanks .
it 's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey , to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me .
i started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way i could access the world .
when i started using the wheelchair , it was a tremendous new freedom .
i 'd seen my life slip away and become restricted .
it was like having an enormous new toy .
i could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again .
just being out on the street was exhilarating .
but even though i had this newfound joy and freedom , people 's reaction completely changed towards me .
it was as if they could n't see me anymore , as if an invisibility cloak had descended .
they seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair .
when i asked people their associations with the wheelchair , they used words like " limitation , " " fear , " " pity " and " restriction . "
i realized i 'd internalized these responses and it had changed who i was on a core level .
a part of me had become alienated from myself .
i was seeing myself not from my perspective , but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people 's responses to me .
as a result , i knew i needed to make my own stories about this experience , new narratives to reclaim my identity .
-lsb- " finding freedom : ' by creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do ' official ' narratives . ' - davis 2009 , tedx women " -rsb- i started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom i felt when using a wheelchair - a power chair - to negotiate the world .
i was working to transform these internalized responses , to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when i started using a wheelchair , by creating unexpected images .
the wheelchair became an object to paint and play with .
when i literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom , it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people .
it seemed to open up new perspectives , and therein lay the paradigm shift .
it showed that an arts practice can remake one 's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar .
so when i began to dive , in 2005 , i realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does , but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure , completely different to people 's responses to the wheelchair .
so i thought , " i wonder what 'll happen if i put the two together ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years .
so to give you an idea of what that 's like , i 'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle , and show you what an amazing journey it 's taken me on .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it is the most amazing experience , beyond most other things i 've experienced in life .
i literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom .
and the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too .
their eyes literally light up , and they say things like , " i want one of those , " or , " if you can do that , i can do anything . "
and i 'm thinking , it 's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for , or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair , they have to think in a completely new way .
and i think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people 's lives .
for me , this means that they 're seeing the value of difference , the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation , we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives .
for me , the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation .
in fact , i now call the underwater wheelchair " portal , " because it 's literally pushed me through into a new way of being , into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness .
and the other thing is , that because nobody 's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before , and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing , being and knowing , now you have this concept in your mind .
you 're all part of the artwork too .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one day a one-eyed monkey came into the forest .
under a tree she saw a woman meditating furiously .
the one-eyed monkey recognized the woman , a sekhri .
she was the wife of an even more famous brahmin .
to watch her better , the one-eyed monkey climbed onto the tree .
just then , with a loud bang , the heavens opened . -lrb- claps -rrb- and the god indra jumped into the clearing .
indra saw the woman , a sekhri .
ah-hah .
the woman paid him no heed .
so , indra , attracted , threw her onto the floor , and proceeded to rape her .
then indra disappeared . -lrb- clap ! clap ! -rrb- and the woman 's husband , the brahmin , appeared .
he realized at once what had happened .
so , he petitioned the higher gods so that he may have justice .
so , the god vishnu arrived .
" are there any witnesses ? "
" just a one-eyed monkey , " said the brahmin .
now , the one-eyed monkey really wanted for the woman , a sekhri , to get justice , so she retold events exactly as they had happened .
vishnu gave his judgment .
" the god indra has sinned , in that he has sinned against ... a brahmin .
may he be called to wash away his sins . "
so , indra arrived , and performed the sacrifice of the horse .
and so it transpired that a horse was killed , a god was made sin-free , a brahmin 's ego was appeased , a woman ... was ruined , and a one-eyed monkey was left ...
very confused at what we humans call justice .
in india there is a rape every three minutes .
in india , only 25 percent of rapes come to a police station , and of these 25 percent that come to a police station , convictions are only in four percent of the cases .
that 's a lot of women who do n't get justice .
and it 's not only about women .
look around you , look at your own countries .
there is a certain pattern in who gets charged with crimes .
if you 're in australia , it 's mostly aboriginals who are in jail .
if you 're in india , it 's either muslims or adivasis , our tribals , the naxalites .
if you 're in the u.s. , it 's mostly the blacks .
there is a trend here .
and the brahmins and the gods , like in my story , always get to tell their truth as the truth .
so , have we all become one-eyed - two-eyed instead of one-eyed - monkeys ?
have we stopped seeing injustice ?
good morning .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , i have told this story close to 550 times , in audiences in 40 countries , to school students , to black-tie dinners at the smithsonian , and so on and so forth , and every time it hits something .
now , if i were to go into the same crowd and say , " i want to lecture you about justice and injustice , " they would say , " thank you very much , we have other things to do . "
and that is the astonishing power of art .
art can go through where other things ca n't .
you ca n't have barriers , because it breaks through your prejudices , breaks through everything that you have as your mask , that says , " i am this , i am that , i am that . "
no . it breaks through those .
and it reaches somewhere where other things do n't .
and in a world where attitudes are so difficult to change , we need a language that reaches through .
hitler knew it ; he used wagner to make all the nazis feel wonderful and aryan .
and mr. berlusconi knows it , as he sits atop this huge empire of media and television and so on and so forth .
and all of the wonderful creative minds who are in all the advertising agencies , and who help corporate sell us things we absolutely do n't require , they also know the power of the arts .
for me it came very early .
when i was a young child , my mother , who was a choreographer , came upon a phenomenon that worried her .
it was a phenomenon where young brides were committing suicide in rural gujarat , because they were being forced to bring more and more money for their in-laws ' families .
and she created a dance piece which then prime minister nehru saw .
he came to talk to her and said , " what is this about ? "
she told him and he set out the first inquiry into what today we call dowry dance .
imagine a dance piece for the first inquiry into something that even today kills thousands of women .
many years later , when i was working with the director peter brook in " the mahabharata " playing this feisty feminine feminist called draupadi , i had similar experiences .
big fat black mamas in the bronx used to come and say , " hey girl , that 's it ! "
and then these trendy young things in the sorbonne would say , " madame draupadi , on n 'est pas feministe , mais ça ? ça ! "
and then aboriginal women in africa would come and say , " this is it ! "
and i thought , " this is what we need , as a language . "
we had somebody from public health . and devdutt also mentioned public health .
well , millions of people around the world die of waterborne disease every year .
and that 's because there is no clean water to drink , or in countries like india , people do n't know that they need to soap their hands before defecation .
so , what do they do ?
they drink the water they know is dirty , they get cholera , they get diarrhea , they get jaundice and they die .
and governments have not been able to provide clean water .
they try and build it . they try and build pipelines ; it does n't happen .
and the mncs give them machines that they can not afford .
so what do you do ? do you let them die ?
well , somebody had a great idea .
and it was a simple idea . it was an idea that could not profit anybody but would help health in every field .
most houses in asia and india have a cotton garment .
and it was discovered , and who endorses this , that a clean cotton garment folded eight times over , can reduce bacteria up to 80 percent from water sieved through .
so , why are n't governments blaring this on television ?
why is n't it on every poster across the third world ?
because there is no profit in it .
because nobody can get a kickback .
but it still needs to get to people .
and here is one of the ways we get it to people .
-lsb- video -rsb- woman : then get me one of those fancy water purifiers .
man : you know how expensive those are .
i have a solution that requires neither machine , nor wood , nor cooking gas .
woman : what solution ?
man : listen , go fetch that cotton sari you have .
boy : grand-dad , tell me the solution please .
man : i will tell all of you . just wait .
woman : here father . -lrb- man : is it clean ? -rrb- woman : yes , of course .
man : then do as i tell you . fold the sari into eight folds .
woman : all right , father .
man : and you , you count that she does it right . -lrb- boy : all right , grand-dad . -rrb- man : one , two , three , four folds we make .
all the germs from the water we take .
chorus : one , two , three , four folds we make .
all the germs from the water we take .
five , six , seven , eight folds we make .
our drinking water safe we make .
five , six , seven , eight folds we make .
our drinking water safe we make .
woman : here , father , your eight-times folded cotton sari .
man : so this is the cotton sari .
and through this we will have clean water .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think it 's safe to say that all of us here are deeply concerned about the escalating violence in our daily lives .
while universities are trying to devise courses in conflict resolution , and governments are trying to stop skirmishes at borders , we are surrounded by violence , whether it 's road rage , or whether it 's domestic violence , whether it 's a teacher beating up a student and killing her because she has n't done her homework , it 's everywhere .
so , why are we not doing something to actually attend that problem on a day to day basis ?
what are we doing to try and make children and young people realize that violence is something that we indulge in , that we can stop , and that there are other ways of actually taking violence , taking anger , taking frustrations into different things that do not harm other people .
well , here is one such way .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- laughs -rrb- you are peaceful people .
your parents were peaceful people .
your grandparents were peaceful people .
so much peace in one place ?
how could it be otherwise ?
-lrb- music -rrb- but , what if ...
yes . what if ...
one little gene in you has been trying to get through ?
from your beginnings in africa , through each generation , may be passed on to you , in your creation . it 's a secret urge , hiding deep in you .
and if it 's in you , then it 's in me too . oh , dear .
it 's what made you smack your baby brother , stamp on a cockroach , scratch your mother .
it 's the feeling that wells up from deep inside , when your husband comes home drunk and you wanna tan his hide .
want to kill that cyclist on the way to work , and string up your cousin ' cause she 's such a jerk . oh , dear .
and as for outsiders , white , black or brown , tar and feather them , and whip them out of town .
it 's that little gene . it 's small and it 's mean .
too small for detection , it 's your built-in protection .
adrenaline , kill . it 'll give you the will .
yes , you 'd better face it ' cause you ca n't displace it .
you 're v-i-o-l-e-n-t .
cause you 're either a victim , or on top , like me .
goodbye , abraham lincoln .
goodbye , mahatma gandhi .
goodbye , martin luther king .
hello , gangs from this neighborhood killing gangs from that neighborhood .
hello governments of rich countries selling arms to governments of poor countries who ca n't even afford to give them food .
hello civilization . hello , 21st century .
look what we 've ...
look what they 've done .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mainstream art , cinema , has been used across the world to talk about social issues .
a few years ago we had a film called rang de basanti , which suddenly spawned thousands of young people wanting to volunteer for social change .
in venezuela , one of the most popular soap operas has a heroine called crystal .
and when , onscreen , crystal got breast cancer , 75,000 more young women went to have mammographies done .
and of course , " the vagina monologues " we know about .
and there are stand-up comics who are talking about racial issues , about ethnic issues .
so , why is it , that if we think that we all agree that we need a better world , we need a more just world , why is it that we are not using the one language that has consistently showed us that we can break down barriers , that we can reach people ?
what i need to say to the planners of the world , the governments , the strategists is , " you have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake .
it needs to be the yeast . "
because , any future planning , if 2048 is when we want to get there , unless the arts are put with the scientists , with the economists , with all those who prepare for the future , badly , we 're not going to get there .
and unless this is actually internalized , it wo n't happen .
so , what is it that we require ? what is it that we need ?
we need to break down our vision of what planners are , of what the correct way of a path is .
and to say all these years of trying to make a better world , and we have failed .
there are more people being raped . there are more wars .
there are more people dying of simple things .
so , something has got to give . and that is what i want .
can i have my last audio track please ?
once there was a princess who whistled beautifully .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- her father the king said , " do n't whistle . "
her mother the queen said , " hai , do n't whistle . "
but the princess continued whistling .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- the years went by and the princess grew up into a beautiful young woman , who whistled even more beautifully .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- her father the king said , " who will marry a whistling princess ? "
her mother the queen said , " who will marry a whistling princess ? "
but the king had an idea .
he announced a swayamvara .
he invited all the princes to come and defeat his daughter at whistling .
" whoever defeats my daughter shall have half my kingdom and her hand in marriage ! "
soon the palace filled with princes whistling .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- some whistled badly .
some whistled well .
but nobody could defeat the princess .
" now what shall we do ? " said the king .
" now what shall we do ? " said the queen .
but the princess said , " father , mother , do n't worry .
i have an idea . i am going to go to each of these young men and i am going to ask them if they defeated correctly .
and if somebody answers , that shall be my wish . "
so she went up to each and said , " do you accept that i have defeated you ? "
and they said , " me ? defeated by a woman ?
no way , that 's impossible ! no no no no no ! that 's not possible . "
till finally one prince said , " princess , i accept , you have defeated me . "
" uh-huh ... " she said .
" father , mother , this man shall be my wife . "
-lrb- whistling -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , what i 'd like to talk about is something that was very dear to kahn 's heart , which is : how do we discover what is really particular about a project ?
how do you discover the uniqueness of a project as unique as a person ?
because it seems to me that finding this uniqueness has to do with dealing with the whole force of globalization ; that the particular is central to finding the uniqueness of place and the uniqueness of a program in a building .
and so i 'll take you to wichita , kansas , where i was asked some years ago to do a science museum on a site , right downtown by the river .
and i thought the secret of the site was to make the building of the river , part of the river .
unfortunately , though , the site was separated from the river by mclean boulevard so i suggested , " let 's reroute mclean , " and that gave birth instantly to friends of mclean boulevard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it took six months to reroute it .
the first image i showed the building committee was this astronomic observatory of jantar mantar in jaipur because i talked about what makes a building a building of science .
and it seemed to me that this structure - complex , rich and yet totally rational : it 's an instrument - had something to do with science , and somehow a building for science should be different and unique and speak of that .
and so my first sketch after i left was to say , " let 's cut the channel and make an island and make an island building . "
and i got all excited and came back , and they sort of looked at me in dismay and said , " an island ?
this used to be an island - ackerman island - and we filled in the channel during the depression to create jobs . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so the process began and they said , " you ca n't put it all on an island ; some of it has to be on the mainland because we do n't want to turn our back to the community . "
and there emerged a design : the galleries sort of forming an island and you could walk through them or on the roof .
and there were all kinds of exciting features : you could come in through the landside buildings , walk through the galleries into playgrounds in the landscape .
if you were cheap you could walk on top of a bridge to the roof , peek in the exhibits and then get totally seduced , come back and pay the five dollars admission .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the client was happy - well , sort of happy because we were four million dollars over the budget , but essentially happy .
but i was still troubled , and i was troubled because i felt this was capricious .
it was complex , but there was something capricious about its complexity .
it was , what i would say , compositional complexity , and i felt that if i had to fulfill what i talked about - a building for science - there had to be some kind of a generating idea , some kind of a generating geometry .
and this gave birth to the idea of having toroidal generating geometry , one with its center deep in the earth for the landside building and a toroid with its center in the sky for the island building .
a toroid , for those who do n't know , is the surface of a doughnut or , for some of us , a bagel .
and out of this idea started spinning off many , many kinds of variations of different plans and possibilities , and then the plan itself evolved in relationship to the exhibits , and you see the intersection of the plan with the toroidal geometry .
and finally the building - this is the model .
and when there were complaints about budget , i said , " well , it 's worth doing the island because you get twice for your money : reflections . "
and here 's the building as it opened , with a channel overlooking downtown , and as seen from downtown .
and the bike route 's going right through the building , so those traveling the river would see the exhibits and be drawn to the building .
the toroidal geometry made for a very efficient building : every beam in this building is the same radius , all laminated wood .
every wall , every concrete wall is resisting the stresses and supporting the building .
every piece of the building works .
these are the galleries with the light coming in through the skylights , and at night , and on opening day .
going back to 1976 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1976 , i was asked to design a children 's memorial museum in a holocaust museum in yad vashem in jerusalem , which you see here the campus .
i was asked to do a building , and i was given all the artifacts of clothing and drawings .
and i felt very troubled .
i worked on it for months and i could n't deal with it because i felt people were coming out of the historic museum , they are totally saturated with information and to see yet another museum with information , it would make them just unable to digest .
and so i made a counter-proposal : i said , " no building . " there was a cave on the site ; we tunnel into the hill , descend through the rock into an underground chamber .
there 's an anteroom with photographs of children who perished and then you come into a large space .
there is a single candle flickering in the center ; by an arrangement of reflective glasses , it reflects into infinity in all directions .
you walk through the space , a voice reads the names , ages and place of birth of the children .
this voice does not repeat for six months .
and then you descend to light and to the north and to life .
well , they said , " people wo n't understand , they 'll think it 's a discotheque . you ca n't do that . "
and they shelved the project . and it sat there for 10 years , and then one day abe spiegel from los angeles , who had lost his three-year-old son at auschwitz , came , saw the model , wrote the check and it got built 10 years later .
so , many years after that in 1998 , i was on one of my monthly trips to jerusalem and i got a call from the foreign ministry saying , " we 've got the chief minister of the punjab here .
he is on a state visit . we took him on a visit to yad vashem , we took him to the children 's memorial ; he was extremely moved .
he 's demanding to meet the architect . could you come down and meet him in tel aviv ? "
and i went down and chief minister badal said to me , " we sikhs have suffered a great deal , as you have jews .
i was very moved by what i saw today .
we are going to build our national museum to tell the story of our people ; we 're about to embark on that .
i 'd like you to come and design it . "
and so , you know , it 's one of those things that you do n't take too seriously .
but two weeks later , i was in this little town , anandpur sahib , outside chandigarh , the capital of the punjab , and the temple and also next to it the fortress that the last guru of the sikhs , guru gobind , died in as he wrote the khalsa , which is their holy scripture .
and i got to work and they took me somewhere down there , nine kilometers away from the town and the temple , and said , " that 's where we have chosen the location . "
and i said , " this just does n't make any sense .
the pilgrims come here by the hundreds of thousands - they 're not going to get in trucks and buses and go down there .
let 's get back to the town and walk to the site . "
and i recommended they do it right there , on that hill and this hill , and bridge all the way into the town .
and , as things are a little easier in india , the site was purchased within a week and we were working .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and my proposal was to split the museum into two - the permanent exhibits at one end , the auditorium , library , and changing exhibitions on the other - to flood the valley into a series of water gardens and to link it all to the fort and to the downtown .
and the structures rise from the sand cliffs - they 're built in concrete and sandstones ; the roofs are stainless steel - they are facing south and reflecting light towards the temple itself , pedestrians crisscross from one side to the other .
and as you come from the north , it is all masonry growing out of the sand cliffs as you come from the himalayas and evoking the tradition of the fortress .
and then i went away for four months and there was going to be groundbreaking .
and i came back and , lo and behold , the little model i 'd left behind had been built ten times bigger for public display on site and ... the bridge was built !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- within the working drawings !
and half a million people gathered for the celebrations ; you can see them on the site itself as the foundations are beginning .
i was renamed safdie singh . and there it is under construction ; there are 1,800 workers at work and it will be finished in two years .
back to yad vashem three years ago . after all this episode began , yad vashem decided to rebuild completely the historic museum because now washington was built - the holocaust museum in washington - and that museum is so much more comprehensive in terms of information .
and yad vashem needs to deal with three million visitors a year at this point .
they said , " let 's rebuild the museum . "
but of course , the sikhs might give you a job on a platter - the jews make it hard : international competition , phase one , phase two , phase three .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and again , i felt kind of uncomfortable with the notion that a building the size of the washington building - 50,000 square feet - will sit on that fragile hill and that we will go into galleries - rooms with doors and sort of familiar rooms - to tell the story of the holocaust .
and i proposed that we cut through the mountain . that was my first sketch .
just cut the whole museum through the mountain - enter from one side of the mountain , come out on the other side of the mountain - and then bring light through the mountain into the chambers .
and here you see the model : a reception building and some underground parking .
you cross a bridge , you enter this triangular room , 60 feet high , which cuts right into the hill and extends right through as you go towards the north .
and all of it , then , all the galleries are underground , and you see the openings for the light .
and at night , just one line of light cuts through the mountain , which is a skylight on top of that triangle .
and all the galleries , as you move through them and so on , are below grade .
and there are chambers carved in the rock - concrete walls , stone , the natural rock when possible - with the light shafts .
this is actually a spanish quarry , which sort of inspired the kind of spaces that these galleries could be .
and then , coming towards the north , it opens up : it bursts out of the mountain into , again , a view of light and of the city and of the jerusalem hills .
i 'd like to conclude with a project i 've been working on for two months .
it 's the headquarters for the institute of peace in washington , the u.s. institute of peace .
the site chosen is across from the lincoln memorial ; you see it there directly on the mall . it 's the last building on the mall , on access of the roosevelt bridge that comes in from virginia .
that too was a competition , and it is something i 'm just beginning to work on .
but one recognized the kind of uniqueness of the site .
if it were to be anywhere in washington , it would be an office building , a conference center , a place for negotiating peace and so on - all of which the building is - but by virtue of the choice of putting it on the mall and by the lincoln memorial , this becomes the structure that is the symbol of peace on the mall .
and that was a lot of heat to deal with .
the first sketch recognizes that the building is many spaces - spaces where research goes on , conference centers , a public building because it will be a museum devoted to peacemaking - and these are the drawings that we submitted for the competition , the plans showing the spaces which radiate outwards from the entry .
you see the structure as , in the sequence of structures on the mall , very transparent and inviting and looking in .
and then as you enter it again , looking in all directions towards the city .
and what i felt about that building is that it really was a building that had to do with a lightness of being - to quote kundera - that it had to do with whiteness , it had to do with a certain dynamic quality and it had to do with optimism .
and this is where it is ; it 's sort of evolving .
studies for the structure of the roof , which demands maybe new materials : how to make it white , how to make it translucent , how to make it glowing , how to make it not capricious .
and here studying , in three dimensions , how to give some kind , again , of order , a structure ; not something you feel you could just change because you stop the design of that particular process .
and so it goes .
i 'd like to conclude by saying something ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to conclude by relating all of what i 've said to the term " beauty . "
and i know it is not a fashionable term these days , and certainly not fashionable in the discourse of architectural schools , but it seems to me that all this , in one way or the other , is a search for beauty .
beauty in the most profound sense of fit .
i have a quote that i like by a morphologist , 1917 , theodore cook , who said , " beauty connotes humanity .
we call a natural object beautiful because we see that its form expresses fitness , the perfect fulfillment of function . "
well , i would have said the perfect fulfillment of purpose .
nevertheless , beauty as the kind of fit ; something that tells us that all the forces that have to do with our natural environment have been fulfilled - and our human environment - for that .
twenty years ago , in a conference richard and i were at together , i wrote a poem , which seems to me to still hold for me today .
" he who seeks truth shall find beauty . he who seeks beauty shall find vanity .
he who seeks order shall find gratification .
he who seeks gratification shall be disappointed .
he who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression . he who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance .
arrogance is incompatible with nature .
through nature , the nature of the universe and the nature of man , we shall seek truth . if we seek truth , we shall find beauty . "
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- so yeah , i 'm a newspaper cartoonist - political cartoonist .
i do n't know if you 've heard about it - newspapers ?
it 's a sort of paper-based reader .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's lighter than an ipad , it 's a bit cheaper .
you know what they say ?
they say the print media is dying - who says that ? well , the media .
but this is no news , right ?
you 've read about it already .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , the world has gotten smaller .
i know it 's a cliche , but look , look how small , how tiny it has gotten .
and you know the reason why , of course .
this is because of technology - yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- any computer designers in the room ?
yeah well , you guys are making my life miserable because track pads used to be round , a nice round shape .
that makes a good cartoon .
but what are you going to do with a flat track pad , those square things ?
there 's nothing i can do as a cartoonist .
well , i know the world is flat now .
that 's true .
and the internet has reached every corner of the world , the poorest , the remotest places .
every village in africa now has a cyber cafe .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do n't go asking for a frappuccino there .
so we are bridging the digital divide .
the third world is connected , we are connected .
and what happens next ?
well , you 've got mail .
yeah .
well , the internet has empowered us .
it has empowered you , it has empowered me and it has empowered some other guys as well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , these last two cartoons - i did them live during a conference in hanoi .
and they were not used to that in communist 2.0 vietnam .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was cartooning live on a wide screen - it was quite a sensation - and then this guy came to me .
he was taking pictures of me and of my sketches , and i thought , " this is great , a vietnamese fan . "
and as he came the second day , i thought , " wow , that 's really a cartoon lover . "
and on the third day , i finally understood , the guy was actually on duty .
so by now , there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the vietnamese police .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , but it 's true : the internet has changed the world .
it has rocked the music industry ; it has changed the way we consume music .
for those of you old enough to remember , we used to have to go to the store to steal it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application .
so be careful with that facebook account - your momma told you , be careful .
and technology has set us free - this is free wifi .
but yeah , it has liberated us from the office desk .
this is your life , enjoy it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in short , technology , the internet , they have changed our lifestyle .
tech guru , like this man - that a german magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century - they are shaping the way we do things .
they are shaping the way we consume .
they are shaping our very desires .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you will not like it .
and technology has even changed our relationship to god .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i should n't get into this .
religion and political cartoons , as you may have heard , make a difficult couple , ever since that day of 2005 , when a bunch of cartoonists in denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world - demonstrations , fatwa , they provoked violence . people died in the violence .
this was so sickening ; people died because of cartoons .
i mean - i had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides , actually .
they were used first by a danish newspaper , which wanted to make a point on islam .
a danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet - 12 of them refused . did you know that ?
he told me , " nobody has to tell me what i should draw .
this is not how it works . "
and then , of course , they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side .
they wanted to stir up controversy .
you know the story .
we know that cartoons can be used as weapons .
history tells us , they 've been used by the nazis to attack the jews .
and here we are now .
in the united nations , half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion - they call it the defamation of religion - while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech .
so the clash of civilizations is here , and cartoons are at the middle of it ?
this got me thinking .
now you see me thinking at my kitchen table , and since you 're in my kitchen , please meet my wife .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in 2006 , a few months after , i went ivory coast - western africa .
now , talk of a divided place - the country was cut in two .
you had a rebellion in the north , the government in the south - the capital , abidjan - and in the middle , the french army .
this looks like a giant hamburger .
you do n't want to be the ham in the middle .
i was there to report on that story in cartoons .
i 've been doing this for the last 15 years ; it 's my side job , if you want .
so you see the style is different .
this is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning .
i went to places like gaza during the war in 2009 .
so this is really journalism in cartoons .
you 'll hear more and more about it .
this is the future of journalism , i think .
and of course , i went to see the rebels in the north .
those were poor guys fighting for their rights .
there was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in africa .
and i went to see the dozo .
the dozo , they are the traditional hunters of west africa .
people fear them - they help the rebellion a lot .
they are believed to have magical powers .
they can disappear and escape bullets .
i went to see a dozo chief ; he told me about his magical powers .
he said , " i can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life . "
i said , " well , maybe we do n't have time for this right now . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " another time . "
so back in abidjan , i was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there and i thought , yes , in a context like this , cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side .
i mean , the press in ivory coast was bitterly divided - it was compared to the media in rwanda before the genocide - so imagine .
and what can a cartoonist do ?
sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see , and the guy has to feed his family , right ?
so the idea was pretty simple .
we brought together cartoonists from all sides in ivory coast .
we took them away from their newspaper for three days .
and i asked them to do a project together , tackle the issues affecting their country in cartoons , yes , in cartoons .
show the positive power of cartoons .
it 's a great tool of communication for bad or for good .
and cartoons can cross boundaries , as you have seen .
and humor is a good way , i think , to address serious issues .
and i 'm very proud of what they did .
i mean , they did n't agree with each other - that was not the point .
and i did n't ask them to do nice cartoons .
the first day , they were even shouting at each other .
but they came up with a book , looking back at 13 years of political crisis in ivory coast .
so the idea was there .
and i 've been doing projects like this , in 2009 in lebanon , this year in kenya , back in january .
in lebanon , it was not a book .
the idea was to have - the same principal , a divided country - take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together .
so in lebanon , we enrolled the newspaper editors , and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page , addressing the issue affecting lebanon , like religion in politics and everyday life .
and it worked .
for three days , almost all the newspapers of beirut published all those cartoonists together - anti-government , pro-government , christian , muslim , of course , english-speaking , well , you name it .
so this was a great project .
and then in kenya , what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity , which is a poison in a lot of places in africa .
and we did video clips - you can see them if you go to youtube / kenyatoons .
so , preaching for freedom of speech is easy here , but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division , again , what can a cartoonist do ?
he has to keep his job .
well i believe that in any context anywhere , he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred .
and that 's the message i try to convey to them .
i think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing .
but we need to support these -lsb- unclear -rsb- , critical and responsible voices in africa , in lebanon , in your local newspaper , in the apple store .
today , tech companies are the world 's largest editors .
they decide what is too offensive or too provocative for you to see .
so really , it 's not about the freedom of cartoonists ; it 's about your freedoms .
and for dictators all over the world , the good news is when cartoonists , journalists and activists shut up .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival .
it 's a place where women run the show , have sex to say hello , and play rules the day - where fun is serious business .
and no , this is n't burning man or san francisco .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , meet your cousins .
this is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of congo .
bonobos are , together with chimpanzees , your living closest relative .
that means we all share a common ancestor , an evolutionary grandmother , who lived around six million years ago .
now , chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but unfortunately , we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution .
but bonobos show us the other side of the coin .
while chimpanzees are dominated by big , scary guys , bonobo society is run by empowered females .
these guys have really worked something out , since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet .
but unfortunately , bonobos are the least understood of the great apes .
they live in the depths of the congolese jungle , and it has been very difficult to study them .
the congo is a paradox - a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty , but also the heart of darkness itself - the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the first world war .
not surprisingly , this destruction also endangers bonobo survival .
bushmeat trades and forest loss means we could n't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world - and we 're not even sure of that to be honest .
yet , in this land of violence and chaos , you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees .
who are these cousins ?
we know them as the " make love , not war " apes since they have frequent , promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues .
now , i 'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity 's problems - since there 's more to bonobo life than the kama sutra .
bonobos , like humans , love to play throughout their entire lives .
play is not just child 's games .
for us and them , play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance .
it 's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game .
play increases creativity and resilience , and it 's all about the generation of diversity - diversity of interactions , diversity of behaviors , diversity of connections .
and when you watch bonobo play , you 're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter , dance and ritual .
play is the glue that binds us together .
now , i do n't know how you play , but i want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild .
first , it 's a ball game bonobo-style - and i do not mean football .
so here , we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game .
have a look what she 's doing .
it might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase , " she 's got him by the balls . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- only i think that he 's rather loving it here , right ?
yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so sex play is common in both bonobos and humans .
and this video is really interesting because it shows - this video 's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play - such as testicles - and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust - while at the same time being tremendous fun .
but play 's a shapeshifter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- play 's a shapeshifter , and it can take many forms , some of which are more quiet , imaginative , curious - maybe where wonder is discovered anew .
and i want you to see , this is fuku , a young female , and she is quietly playing with water .
i think , like her , we sometimes play alone , and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds .
and it 's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore , drives us to interact , and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity .
so these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present .
but they also hold a secret for our future , a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation .
the secret is that play is the key to these capacities .
in other words , play is our adaptive wildcard .
in order to adapt successfully to a changing world , we need to play .
but will we make the most of our playfulness ?
play is not frivolous .
play 's essential .
for bonobos and humans alike , life is not just red in tooth and claw .
in times when it seems least appropriate to play , it might be the times when it is most urgent .
and so , my fellow primates , let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together , as we rediscover creativity , fellowship and wonder .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to tell you two things today : one is what we have lost , and two , a way to bring it back .
and let me start with this .
this is my baseline : this is the mediterranean coast with no fish , bare rock and lots of sea urchins that like to eat the algae .
something like this is what i first saw when i jumped in the water for the first time in the mediterranean coast off spain .
now , if an alien came to earth - let 's call him joe - what would joe see ?
if joe jumped in a coral reef , there are many things the alien could see .
very unlikely , joe would jump on a pristine coral reef , a virgin coral reef with lots of coral , sharks , crocodiles , manatees , groupers , turtles , etc .
so , probably , what joe would see would be in this part , in the greenish part of the picture .
here we have the extreme with dead corals , microbial soup and jellyfish .
and where the diver is , this is probably where most of the reefs of the world are now , with very few corals , algae overgrowing the corals , lots of bacteria , and where the large animals are gone .
and this is what most marine scientists have seen too .
this is their baseline . this is what they think is natural because we started modern science with scuba diving long after we started degrading marine ecosystems .
so i 'm going to get us all on a time machine , and we 're going to the left ; we 're going to go back to the past to see what the ocean was like .
and let 's start with this time machine , the line islands , where we have conducted a series of national geographic expeditions .
this sea is an archipelago belonging to kiribati that spans across the equator and it has several uninhabited , unfished , pristine islands and a few inhabited islands .
so let 's start with the first one : christmas island , over 5,000 people .
most of the reefs are dead , most of the corals are dead - overgrown by algae - and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them .
we did 250 hours of diving here in 2005 .
we did n't see a single shark .
this is the place that captain cook discovered in 1777 and he described a huge abundance of sharks biting the rudders and the oars of their small boats while they were going ashore .
let 's move the dial a little bit to the past .
fanning island , 2,500 people .
the corals are doing better here . lots of small fish .
this is what many divers would consider paradise .
this is where you can see most of the florida keys national marine sanctuary .
and many people think this is really , really beautiful , if this is your baseline .
if we go back to a place like palmyra atoll , where i was with jeremy jackson a few years ago , the corals are doing better and there are sharks .
you can see sharks in every single dive .
and this is something that is very unusual in today 's coral reefs .
but then , if we shift the dial 200 , 500 years back , then we get to the places where the corals are absolutely healthy and gorgeous , forming spectacular structures , and where the predators are the most conspicuous thing , where you see between 25 and 50 sharks per dive .
what have we learned from these places ?
this is what we thought was natural .
this is what we call the biomass pyramid .
if we get all of the fish of a coral reef together and weigh them , this is what we would expect .
most of the biomass is low on the food chain , the herbivores , the parrotfish , the surgeonfish that eat the algae .
then the plankton feeders , these little damselfish , the little animals floating in the water .
and then we have a lower biomass of carnivores , and a lower biomass of top head , or the sharks , the large snappers , the large groupers .
but this is a consequence .
this view of the world is a consequence of having studied degraded reefs .
when we went to pristine reefs , we realized that the natural world was upside down ; this pyramid was inverted .
the top head does account for most of the biomass , in some places up to 85 percent , like kingman reef , which is now protected .
the good news is that , in addition to having more predators , there 's more of everything .
the size of these boxes is bigger .
we have more sharks , more biomass of snappers , more biomass of herbivores , too , like these parrot fish that are like marine goats .
they clean the reef ; everything that grows enough to be seen , they eat , and they keep the reef clean and allow the corals to replenish .
not only do these places - these ancient , pristine places - have lots of fish , but they also have other important components of the ecosystem like the giant clams ; pavements of giant clams in the lagoons , up to 20 , 25 per square meter .
these have disappeared from every inhabited reef in the world , and they filter the water ; they keep the water clean from microbes and pathogens .
but still , now we have global warming .
if we do n't have fishing because these reefs are protected by law or their remoteness , this is great .
but the water gets warmer for too long and the corals die .
so how are these fish , these predators going to help ?
well , what we have seen is that in this particular area during el nino , year ' 97 , ' 98 , the water was too warm for too long , and many corals bleached and many died .
in christmas , where the food web is really trimmed down , where the large animals are gone , the corals have not recovered .
in fanning island , the corals are not recovered .
but you see here a big table coral that died and collapsed .
and the fish have grazed the algae , so the turf of algae is a little lower .
then you go to palmyra atoll that has more biomass of herbivores , and the dead corals are clean , and the corals are coming back .
and when you go to the pristine side , did this ever bleach ?
these places bleached too , but they recovered faster .
the more intact , the more complete , -lsb- and -rsb- the more complex your food web , the higher the resilience , -lsb- and -rsb- the more likely that the system is going to recover from the short-term impacts of warming events .
and that 's good news , so we need to recover that structure .
we need to make sure that all of the pieces of the ecosystem are there so the ecosystem can adapt to the effects of global warming .
so if we have to reset the baseline , if we have to push the ecosystem back to the left , how can we do it ?
well , there are several ways .
one very clear way is the marine protected areas , especially no-take reserves that we set aside to allow for the recovery for marine life .
and let me go back to that image of the mediterranean .
this was my baseline . this is what i saw when i was a kid .
and at the same time i was watching jacques cousteau 's shows on tv , with all this richness and abundance and diversity .
and i thought that this richness belonged to tropical seas , and that the mediterranean was a naturally poor sea .
but , little did i know , until i jumped for the first time in a marine reserve .
and this is what i saw , lots of fish .
after a few years , between five and seven years , fish come back , they eat the urchins , and then the algae grow again .
so you have this little algal forest , and in the size of a laptop you can find more than 100 species of algae , mostly microscopic fit hundreds of species of little animals that then feed the fish , so that the system recovers .
and this particular place , the medes islands marine reserve , is only 94 hectares , and it brings 6 million euros to the local economy , 20 times more than fishing , and it represents 88 percent of all the tourist revenue .
so these places not only help the ecosystem but also help the people who can benefit from the ecosystem .
so let me just give you a summary of what no-take reserves do .
these places , when we protect them , if we compare them to unprotected areas nearby , this is what happens .
the number of species increases 21 percent ; so if you have 1,000 species you would expect 200 more in a marine reserve .
this is very substantial .
the size of organisms increases a third , so your fish are now this big .
the abundance , how many fish you have per square meter , increases almost 170 percent .
and the biomass - this is the most spectacular change - 4.5 times greater biomass on average , just after five to seven years .
in some places up to 10 times larger biomass inside the reserves .
so we have all these things inside the reserve that grow , and what do they do ?
they reproduce . that 's population biology 101 .
if you do n't kill the fish , they take a longer time to die , they grow larger and they reproduce a lot .
and same thing for invertebrates . this is the example .
these are egg cases laid by a snail off the coast of chile , and this is how many eggs they lay on the bottom .
outside the reserve , you can not even detect this .
one point three million eggs per square meter inside the marine reserve where these snails are very abundant .
so these organisms reproduce , the little larvae juveniles spill over , they all spill over , and then people can benefit from them outside too .
this is in the bahamas : nassau grouper .
huge abundance of groupers inside the reserve , and the closer you get to the reserve , the more fish you have .
so the fishermen are catching more .
you can see where the limits of the reserve are because you see the boats lined up .
so there is spill over ; there are benefits beyond the boundaries of these reserves that help people around them , while at the same time the reserve is protecting the entire habitat . it is building resilience .
so what we have now - or a world without reserves - is like a debit account where we withdraw all the time and we never make any deposit .
reserves are like savings accounts .
we have this principal that we do n't touch ; that produces returns , social , economic and ecological .
and if we think about the increase of biomass inside the reserves , this is like compound interest .
two examples , again , of how these reserves can benefit people .
this is how much fishermen get everyday in kenya , fishing over a series of years , in a place where there is no protection ; it 's a free-for-all .
once the most degrading fishing gear , seine nets , were removed , the fishermen were catching more .
if you fish less , you 're actually catching more .
but if we add the no-take reserve on top of that , the fishermen are still making more money by fishing less around an area that is protected .
another example : nassau groupers in belize in the mesoamerican reef .
this is grouper sex , and the groupers aggregate around the full moons of december and january for a week .
they used to aggregate up to the tens of thousands , 30,000 groupers about this big in one hectare , in one aggregation .
fishermen knew about these things ; they caught them , and they depleted them .
when i went there for the first time in 2000 , there were only 3,000 groupers left .
and the fishermen were authorized to catch 30 percent of the entire spawning population every year .
so we did a simple analysis , and it does n't take rocket science to figure out that , if you take 30 percent every year , your fishery is going to collapse very quickly .
and with the fishery , the entire reproductive ability of the species goes extinct .
it happened in many places around the caribbean .
and they would make 4,000 dollars per year , total , for the entire fishery , several fishing boats .
now , if you do an economic analysis and project what would happen if the fish were not cut , if we brought just 20 divers one month per year , the revenue would be more than 20 times higher and that would be sustainable over time .
so how much of this do we have ?
if this is so good , if this is such a no-brainer , how much of this do we have ?
and you already heard that less than one percent of the ocean 's protected .
we 're getting closer to one percent now , thanks to the protections of the chagos archipelago , and only a fraction of this is fully protected from fishing .
scientific studies recommend that at least 20 percent of the ocean should be protected .
the estimated range is between 20 and 50 percent for a series of goals of biodiversity and fishery enhancement and resilience .
now , is this possible ? people would ask : how much would that cost ?
well , let 's think about how much we are paying now to subsidize fishing : 35 billion dollars per year .
many of these subsidies go to destructive fishing practices .
well , there are a couple estimates of how much it would cost to create a network of protected areas covering 20 percent of the ocean that would be only a fraction of what we are now paying ; the government hands out to a fishery that is collapsing .
people are losing their jobs because the fisheries are collapsing .
a creation of a network of reserves would provide direct employment for more than a million people plus all the secondary jobs and all the secondary benefits .
so how can we do that ?
if it 's so clear that these savings accounts are good for the environment and for people , why do n't we have 20 , 50 percent of the ocean ?
and how can we reach that goal ?
well , there are two ways of getting there .
the trivial solution is to create really large protected areas like the chagos archipelago .
the problem is that we can create these large reserves only in places where there are no people , where there is no social conflict , where the political cost is really low and the economic cost is also low .
and a few of us , a few organizations in this room and elsewhere are working on this .
but what about the rest of the coast of the world , where people live and make a living out of fishing ?
well , there are three main reasons why we do n't have tens of thousands of small reserves : the first one is that people have no idea what marine reserves do , and fishermen tend to be really , really defensive when it comes to regulating or closing an area , even if it 's small .
second , the governance is not right because most coastal communities around the world do n't have the authority to monitor the resources to create the reserve and enforce it .
it 's a top down hierarchical structure where people wait for government agents to come and this is not effective . and the government does n't have enough resources .
which takes us to the third reason , why we do n't have many more reserves , is that the funding models have been wrong .
ngos and governments spend a lot of time and energy and resources in a few small areas , usually .
so marine conservation and coastal protection has become a sink for government or philanthropic money , and this is not sustainable .
so the solutions are just fixing these three issues .
first , we need to develop a global awareness campaign to inspire local communities and governments to create no-take reserves that are better than what we have now .
it 's the savings accounts versus the debit accounts with no deposits .
second , we need to redesign our governance so conservation efforts can be decentralized , so conservation efforts do n't depend on work from ngos or from government agencies and can be created by the local communities , like it happens in the philippines and a few other places .
and third , and very important , we need to develop new business models .
the philanthropy sink as the only way to create reserves is not sustainable .
we really need to develop models , business models , where coastal conservation is an investment , because we already know that these marine reserves provide social , ecological and economic benefits .
and i 'd like to finish with one thought , which is that no one organization alone is going to save the ocean .
there has been a lot of competition in the past , and we need to develop a new model of partnership , truly collaborative , where we are looking for complementing , not substituting .
the stakes are just too high to continue the way we are going .
so let 's do that . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you enric .
enric sala : thank you .
ca : that was a masterful job of pulling things together .
first of all , your pyramid , your inverted pyramid , showing 85 percent biomass in the predators , that seems impossible .
how could 85 percent survive on 15 percent ?
es : well , imagine that you have two gears of a watch , a big one and a small one .
the big one is moving very slowly , and the small one is moving fast .
that 's basically it .
the animals at the lower parts of the food chain , they reproduce very fast ; they grow really fast ; they produce millions of eggs .
up there , you have sharks and large fish that live 25 , 30 years .
they reproduce very slowly ; they have a slow metabolism ; and , basically , they just maintain their biomass .
so , basically , the production surplus of these guys down there is enough to maintain this biomass that is not moving .
they are like capacitors of the system .
ca : that 's very fascinating .
so , really , our picture of a food pyramid is just - we have to change that completely .
es : at least in the seas .
what we found in coral reefs is that the inverted pyramid is the equivalent of the serengeti , with five lions per wildebeest .
and on land , this can not work .
but at least on coral reefs are systems where there is a bottom component with structure .
we think this is universal .
but we have started studying pristine reefs only very recently .
ca : so the numbers you presented really are astonishing .
you 're saying we 're spending 35 billion dollars now on subsidies .
it would only cost 16 billion to set up 20 percent of the ocean as marine protected areas that actually give new living choices to the fishermen as well .
if the world was a smarter place , we could solve this problem for negative 19 billion dollars .
we 've got 19 billion to spend on health care or something .
es : and then we have the under-performance of fisheries that is 50 billion dollars .
so again , one of the big solutions is have the world trade organization shifting the subsidies to sustainable practices .
ca : okay , so there 's a lot of examples that i 'm hearing out there about ending this subsidies madness .
so thank you for those numbers .
the last one 's a personal question .
a lot of the experience of people here who 've been in the oceans for a long time has just been seeing this degradation , the places they saw that were beautiful getting worse , depressing .
talk to me about the feeling that you must have experienced of going to these pristine areas and seeing things coming back .
es : it is a spiritual experience .
we go there to try to understand the ecosystems , to try to measure or count fish and sharks and see how these places are different from the places we know .
but the best feeling is this biophilia that e.o. wilson talks about , where humans have this sense of awe and wonder in front of untamed nature , of raw nature .
and there , only there , you really feel that you are part of a larger thing or of a larger global ecosystem .
and if it were not for these places that show hope , i do n't think i could continue doing this job .
it would be just too depressing .
ca : well , enric , thank you so much for sharing some of that spiritual experience with us all . thank you .
es : thank you very much .
once upon a time , the world was a big , dysfunctional family .
it was run by the great and powerful parents , and the people were helpless and hopeless naughty children .
if any of the more rowdier children questioned the authority of the parents , they were scolded .
if they went exploring into the parents ' rooms , or even into the secret filing cabinets , they were punished , and told that for their own good they must never go in there again .
then one day , a man came to town with boxes and boxes of secret documents stolen from the parents ' rooms .
" look what they 've been hiding from you , " he said .
the children looked and were amazed .
there were maps and minutes from meetings where the parents were slagging each other off .
they behaved just like the children .
and they made mistakes , too , just like the children .
the only difference was , their mistakes were in the secret filing cabinets .
well , there was a girl in the town , and she did n't think they should be in the secret filing cabinets , or if they were , there ought to be a law to allow the children access .
and so she set about to make it so .
well , i 'm the girl in that story , and the secret documents that i was interested in were located in this building , the british parliament , and the data that i wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of parliament .
i thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy . -lrb- applause -rrb- it was n't like i was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker , or anything like that , but the amount of resistance i got from this freedom of information request , you would have thought i 'd asked something like this .
so i fought for about five years doing this , and it was one of many hundreds of requests that i made , not - i did n't - hey , look , i did n't set out , honestly , to revolutionize the british parliament .
that was not my intention . i was just making these requests as part of research for my first book .
but it ended up in this very long , protracted legal battle and there i was after five years fighting against parliament in front of three of britain 's most eminent high court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not parliament had to release this data .
and i 've got to tell you , i was n't that hopeful , because i 'd seen the establishment . i thought , it always sticks together . i am out of luck .
well , guess what ? i won . hooray . -lrb- applause -rrb- well , that 's not exactly the story , because the problem was that parliament delayed and delayed releasing that data , and then they tried to retrospectively change the law so that it would no longer apply to them .
the transparency law they 'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else , they tried to keep it so it did n't apply to them .
what they had n't counted on was digitization , because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically , and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database , put it on a disk , and then just saunter outside of parliament , which they did , and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder , which was the daily telegraph , and then , you all remember , there was weeks and weeks of revelations , everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off .
the end result was six ministers resigned , the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign , a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency , 120 mps stepped down at that election , and so far , four mps and two lords have done jail time for fraud .
so , thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- well , i tell you that story because it was n't unique to britain .
it was an example of a culture clash that 's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us without very much prying from the public , and then suddenly confronted with a public who is no longer content with that arrangement , and not only not content with it , now , more often , armed with official data itself .
so we are moving to this democratization of information , and i 've been in this field for quite a while .
slightly embarrassing admission : even when i was a kid , i used to have these little spy books , and i would , like , see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down .
i think that was a pretty good indication about my future career as an investigative journalist , and what i 've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest , and it 's gone mainstream . everybody , increasingly , around the world , wants to know about what people in power are doing .
they want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money . it 's this democratization of information that i think is an information enlightenment , and it has many of the same principles of the first enlightenment .
it 's about searching for the truth , not because somebody says it 's true , " because i say so . "
no , it 's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested .
that , in the first enlightenment , led to questions about the right of kings , the divine right of kings to rule over people , or that women should be subordinate to men , or that the church was the official word of god .
obviously the church were n't very happy about this , and they tried to suppress it , but what they had n't counted on was technology , and then they had the printing press , which suddenly enabled these ideas to spread cheaply , far and fast , and people would come together in coffee houses , discuss the ideas , plot revolution .
in our day , we have digitization . that strips all the physical mass out of information , so now it 's almost zero cost to copy and share information .
our printing press is the internet . our coffee houses are social networks .
we 're moving to what i would think of as a fully connected system , and we have global decisions to make in this system , decisions about climate , about finance systems , about resources . and think about it - if we want to make an important decision about buying a house , we do n't just go off . i mean , i do n't know about you , but i want to see a lot of houses before i put that much money into it .
and if we 're thinking about a finance system , we need a lot of information to take in . it 's just not possible for one person to take in the amount , the volume of information , and analyze it to make good decisions .
so that 's why we 're seeing increasingly this demand for access to information .
that 's why we 're starting to see more disclosure laws come out , so for example , on the environment , there 's the aarhus convention , which is a european directive that gives people a very strong right to know , so if your water company is dumping water into your river , sewage water into your river , you have a right to know about it .
in the finance industry , you now have more of a right to know about what 's going on , so we have different anti-bribery laws , money regulations , increased corporate disclosure , so you can now track assets across borders .
and it 's getting harder to hide assets , tax avoidance , pay inequality . so that 's great . we 're starting to find out more and more about these systems .
and they 're all moving to this central system , this fully connected system , all of them except one . can you guess which one ?
it 's the system which underpins all these other systems .
it 's the system by which we organize and exercise power , and there i 'm talking about politics , because in politics , we 're back to this system , this top-down hierarchy .
and how is it possible that the volume of information can be processed that needs to in this system ?
well , it just ca n't . that 's it .
and i think this is largely what 's behind the crisis of legitimacy in our different governments right now .
so i 've told you a bit about what i did to try and drag parliament , kicking and screaming , into the 21st century , and i 'm just going to give you a couple of examples of what a few other people i know are doing .
so this is a guy called seb bacon . he 's a computer programmer , and he built a site called alaveteli , it 's open-source , with documentation , and it allows you to make a freedom of information request , to ask your public body a question , so it takes all the hassle out of it , and i can tell you that there is a lot of hassle making these requests , so it takes all of that hassle out , and you just type in your question , for example , how many police officers have a criminal record ?
it zooms it off to the appropriate person , it tells you when the time limit is coming to an end , it keeps track of all the correspondence , it posts it up there , and it becomes an archive of public knowledge .
so that 's open-source and it can be used in any country where there is some kind of freedom of information law .
so there 's a list there of the different countries that have it , and then there 's a few more coming on board .
so if any of you out there like the sound of that and have a law like that in your country , i know that seb would love to hear from you about collaborating and getting that into your country .
this is birgitta jónsdóttir . she 's an icelandic mp .
and quite an unusual mp . in iceland , she was one of the protesters who was outside of parliament when the country 's economy collapsed , and then she was elected on a reform mandate , and she 's now spearheading this project .
it 's the icelandic modern media initiative , and they 've just got funding to make it an international modern media project , and this is taking all of the best laws around the world about freedom of expression , protection of whistleblowers , protection from libel , source protection , and trying to make iceland a publishing haven .
it 's a place where your data can be free , so when we think about , increasingly , how governments want to access user data , what they 're trying to do in iceland is make this safe haven where it can happen .
in my own field of investigative journalism , we 're also having to start thinking globally , so this is a site called investigative dashboard . and if you 're trying to track a dictator 's assets , for example , hosni mubarak , you know , he 's just funneling out cash from his country when he knows he 's in trouble , and what you want to do to investigate that is , you need to have access to all of the world 's , as many as you can , companies ' house registrations databases .
so this is a website that tries to agglomerate all of those databases into one place so you can start searching for , you know , his relatives , his friends , the head of his security services .
you can try and find out how he 's moving out assets from that country .
but again , when it comes to the decisions which are impacting us the most , perhaps , the most important decisions that are being made about war and so forth , it 's really difficult . so we 're still having to rely on illegitimate ways of getting information , through leaks .
so when the guardian did this investigation about the afghan war , you know , they ca n't walk into the department of defense and ask for all the information .
you know , they 're just not going to get it .
so this came from leaks of tens of thousands of dispatches that were written by american soldiers about the afghan war , and leaked , and then they 're able to do this investigation .
another rather large investigation is around world diplomacy .
again , this is all based around leaks , 251,000 u.s. diplomatic cables , and i was involved in this investigation because i got this leak through a leak from a disgruntled wikileaker and ended up going to work at the guardian .
so i can tell you firsthand what it was like to have access to this leak . it was amazing . i mean , it was amazing .
it reminded me of that scene in " the wizard of oz . "
do you know the one i mean ? where the little dog toto runs across to where the wizard -lsb- is -rsb- , and he pulls back , the dog 's pulling back the curtain , and - " do n't look behind the screen . do n't look at the man behind the screen . "
it was just like that , because what you started to see is that all of these grand statesmen , these very pompous politicians , they were just like us .
they all bitched about each other . i mean , quite gossipy , those cables . okay , but i thought it was a very important point for all of us to grasp , these are human beings just like us . they do n't have special powers .
they 're not magic . they are not our parents .
beyond that , what i found most fascinating was the level of endemic corruption that i saw across all different countries , and particularly centered around the heart of power , around public officials who were embezzling the public 's money for their own personal enrichment , and allowed to do that because of official secrecy .
so i 've mentioned wikileaks , because surely what could be more open than publishing all the material ?
because that is what julian assange did .
he was n't content with the way the newspapers published it to be safe and legal . he threw it all out there .
that did end up with vulnerable people in afghanistan being exposed . it also meant that the belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the u.s. government .
is that radical openness ? i say it 's not , because for me , what it means , it does n't mean abdicating power , responsibility , accountability , it 's actually being a partner with power . it 's about sharing responsibility , sharing accountability . also , the fact that he threatened to sue me because i got a leak of his leaks , i thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology , to be honest , as well . -lrb- laughs -rrb- the other thing is that power is incredibly seductive , and you must have two real qualities , i think , when you come to the table , when you 're dealing with power , talking about power , because of its seductive capacity .
you 've got to have skepticism and humility .
skepticism , because you must always be challenging .
i want to see why do you - you just say so ? that 's not good enough .
i want to see the evidence behind why that 's so .
and humility because we are all human . we all make mistakes .
and if you do n't have skepticism and humility , then it 's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat , and i think you only have to read " animal farm " to get that message about how power corrupts people .
so what is the solution ? it is , i believe , to embody within the rule of law rights to information .
at the moment our rights are incredibly weak .
in a lot of countries , we have official secrets acts , with no public interest test . so that means it 's a crime , people are punished , quite severely in a lot of cases , for publishing or giving away official information .
now would n't it be amazing , and really , this is what i want all of you to think about , if we had an official disclosure act where officials were punished if they were found to have suppressed or hidden information that was in the public interest ?
so that - yes . yes ! my power pose . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughs -rrb- i would like us to work towards that .
so it 's not all bad news . i mean , there definitely is progress on the line , but i think what we find is that the closer that we get right into the heart of power , the more opaque , closed it becomes .
so it was only just the other week that i heard london 's metropolitan police commissioner talking about why the police need access to all of our communications , spying on us without any judicial oversight , and he said it was a matter of life and death .
he actually said that , it was a matter of life and death .
there was no evidence . he presented no evidence of that .
it was just , " because i say so .
you have to trust me . take it on faith . "
well , i 'm sorry , people , but we are back to the pre-enlightenment church , and we need to fight against that .
so he was talking about the law in britain which is the communications data bill , an absolutely outrageous piece of legislation .
in america , you have the cyber intelligence sharing and protection act .
you 've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance .
you have the national security agency building the world 's giantest spy center . it 's just this colossal - it 's five times bigger than the u.s. capitol , in which they 're going to intercept and analyze communications , traffic and personal data to try and figure out who 's the troublemaker in society .
well , to go back to our original story , the parents have panicked . they 've locked all the doors .
they 've kidded out the house with cctv cameras .
they 're watching all of us . they 've dug a basement , and they 've built a spy center to try and run algorithms and figure out which ones of us are troublesome , and if any of us complain about that , we 're arrested for terrorism .
well , is that a fairy tale or a living nightmare ?
some fairy tales have happy endings . some do n't .
i think we 've all read the grimms ' fairy tales , which are , indeed , very grim .
but the world is n't a fairy tale , and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge .
equally , it could be better than we 've been led to believe , but either way , we have to start seeing it exactly as it is , with all of its problems , because it 's only by seeing it with all of its problems that we 'll be able to fix them and live in a world in which we can all be happily ever after . -lrb- laughs -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'd like to show you the future of the way we make things .
i believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling , replicating and repairing themselves .
so i 'm going to show you what i believe is the current state of manufacturing , and then compare that to some natural systems .
so in the current state of manufacturing , we have skyscrapers - two and a half years -lsb- of assembly time -rsb- , 500,000 to a million parts , fairly complex , new , exciting technologies in steel , concrete , glass .
we have exciting machines that can take us into space - five years -lsb- of assembly time -rsb- , 2.5 million parts .
but on the other side , if you look at the natural systems , we have proteins that have two million types , can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds , or dna with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour .
so there 's all of this complexity in our natural systems , but they 're extremely efficient , far more efficient than anything we can build , far more complex than anything we can build .
they 're far more efficient in terms of energy .
they hardly ever make mistakes .
and they can repair themselves for longevity .
so there 's something super interesting about natural systems .
and if we can translate that into our built environment , then there 's some exciting potential for the way that we build things .
and i think the key to that is self-assembly .
so if we want to utilize self-assembly in our physical environment , i think there 's four key factors .
the first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build - so our buildings and machines .
and we need to decode that into simple sequences - basically the dna of how our buildings work .
then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up , or reconfigure .
we need some energy that 's going to allow that to activate , allow our parts to be able to fold up from the program .
and we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want .
so i 'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and i at mit are working on to achieve this self-assembling future .
the first two are the macrobot and decibot .
so these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots - 8 ft . , 12 ft. long proteins .
they 're embedded with mechanical electrical devices , sensors .
you decode what you want to fold up into , into a sequence of angles - so negative 120 , negative 120 , 0 , 0 , 120 , negative 120 - something like that ; so a sequence of angles , or turns , and you send that sequence through the string .
each unit takes its message - so negative 120 - it rotates to that , checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor .
so these are the brilliant scientists , engineers , designers that worked on this project .
and i think it really brings to light : is this really scalable ?
i mean , thousands of dollars , lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot .
can we really scale this up ? can we really embed robotics into every part ?
the next one questions that and looks at passive nature , or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability .
but it goes a step further , and it tries to have actual computation .
it basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing , the digital logic gate , directly into your parts .
so this is a nand gate .
you have one tetrahedron which is the gate that 's going to do your computing , and you have two input tetrahedrons .
one of them is the input from the user , as you 're building your bricks .
the other one is from the previous brick that was placed .
and then it gives you an output in 3d space .
so what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do .
it computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do .
and now it starts moving in three-dimensional space - so up or down .
so on the left-hand side , -lsb- 1,1 -rsb- input equals 0 output , which goes down .
on the right-hand side , -lsb- 0,0 -rsb- input is a 1 output , which goes up .
and so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build .
so they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed .
so that means that we can have some form of self-replication .
in this case i call it self-guided replication , because your structure contains the exact blueprints .
if you have errors , you can replace a part .
all the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it .
so you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one .
it 's directly embedded ; there 's no external instructions .
so the last project i 'll show is called biased chains , and it 's probably the most exciting example that we have right now of passive self-assembly systems .
so it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system .
so basically you have a chain of elements .
each element is completely identical , and they 're biased .
so each chain , or each element , wants to turn right or left .
so as you assemble the chain , you 're basically programming it .
you 're telling each unit if it should turn right or left .
so when you shake the chain , it then folds up into any configuration that you 've programmed in - so in this case , a spiral , or in this case , two cubes next to each other .
so you can basically program any three-dimensional shape - or one-dimensional , two-dimensional - up into this chain completely passively .
so what does this tell us about the future ?
i think that it 's telling us that there 's new possibilities for self-assembly , replication , repair in our physical structures , our buildings , machines .
there 's new programmability in these parts .
and from that you have new possibilities for computing .
we 'll have spatial computing .
imagine if our buildings , our bridges , machines , all of our bricks could actually compute .
that 's amazing parallel and distributed computing power , new design possibilities .
so it 's exciting potential for this .
so i think these projects i 've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future , if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so let 's start with some good news , and the good news has to do with what do we know based on biomedical research that actually has changed the outcomes for many very serious diseases ?
let 's start with leukemia , acute lymphoblastic leukemia , all , the most common cancer of children .
when i was a student , the mortality rate was about 95 percent .
today , some 25 , 30 years later , we 're talking about a mortality rate that 's reduced by 85 percent .
six thousand children each year who would have previously died of this disease are cured .
if you want the really big numbers , look at these numbers for heart disease .
heart disease used to be the biggest killer , particularly for men in their 40s .
today , we 've seen a 63-percent reduction in mortality from heart disease - remarkably , 1.1 million deaths averted every year .
aids , incredibly , has just been named , in the past month , a chronic disease , meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with hiv is expected not to live weeks , months , or a couple of years , as we said only a decade ago , but is thought to live decades , probably to die in his ' 60s or ' 70s from other causes altogether .
these are just remarkable , remarkable changes in the outlook for some of the biggest killers .
and one in particular that you probably would n't know about , stroke , which has been , along with heart disease , one of the biggest killers in this country , is a disease in which now we know that if you can get people into the emergency room within three hours of the onset , some 30 percent of them will be able to leave the hospital without any disability whatsoever .
remarkable stories , good-news stories , all of which boil down to understanding something about the diseases that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early .
early detection , early intervention , that 's the story for these successes .
unfortunately , the news is not all good .
let 's talk about one other story which has to do with suicide .
now this is , of course , not a disease , per se .
it 's a condition , or it 's a situation that leads to mortality .
what you may not realize is just how prevalent it is .
there are 38,000 suicides each year in the united states .
that means one about every 15 minutes .
third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25 .
it 's kind of an extraordinary story when you realize that this is twice as common as homicide and actually more common as a source of death than traffic fatalities in this country .
now , when we talk about suicide , there is also a medical contribution here , because 90 percent of suicides are related to a mental illness : depression , bipolar disorder , schizophrenia , anorexia , borderline personality . there 's a long list of disorders that contribute , and as i mentioned before , often early in life .
but it 's not just the mortality from these disorders .
it 's also morbidity .
if you look at disability , as measured by the world health organization with something they call the disability adjusted life years , it 's kind of a metric that nobody would think of except an economist , except it 's one way of trying to capture what is lost in terms of disability from medical causes , and as you can see , virtually 30 percent of all disability from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders , neuropsychiatric syndromes .
you 're probably thinking that does n't make any sense .
i mean , cancer seems far more serious .
heart disease seems far more serious .
but you can see actually they are further down this list , and that 's because we 're talking here about disability .
what drives the disability for these disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar and depression ?
why are they number one here ?
well , there are probably three reasons .
one is that they 're highly prevalent .
about one in five people will suffer from one of these disorders in the course of their lifetime .
a second , of course , is that , for some people , these become truly disabling , and it 's about four to five percent , perhaps one in 20 .
but what really drives these numbers , this high morbidity , and to some extent the high mortality , is the fact that these start very early in life .
fifty percent will have onset by age 14 , 75 percent by age 24 , a picture that is very different than what one would see if you 're talking about cancer or heart disease , diabetes , hypertension - most of the major illnesses that we think about as being sources of morbidity and mortality .
these are , indeed , the chronic disorders of young people .
now , i started by telling you that there were some good-news stories .
this is obviously not one of them .
this is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult , and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me .
my job is to actually make sure that we make progress on all of these disorders .
i work for the federal government .
actually , i work for you . you pay my salary .
and maybe at this point , when you know what i do , or maybe what i 've failed to do , you 'll think that i probably ought to be fired , and i could certainly understand that .
but what i want to suggest , and the reason i 'm here is to tell you that i think we 're about to be in a very different world as we think about these illnesses .
what i 've been talking to you about so far is mental disorders , diseases of the mind .
that 's actually becoming a rather unpopular term these days , and people feel that , for whatever reason , it 's politically better to use the term behavioral disorders and to talk about these as disorders of behavior .
fair enough . they are disorders of behavior , and they are disorders of the mind .
but what i want to suggest to you is that both of those terms , which have been in play for a century or more , are actually now impediments to progress , that what we need conceptually to make progress here is to rethink these disorders as brain disorders .
now , for some of you , you 're going to say , " oh my goodness , here we go again .
we 're going to hear about a biochemical imbalance or we 're going to hear about drugs or we 're going to hear about some very simplistic notion that will take our subjective experience and turn it into molecules , or maybe into some sort of very flat , unidimensional understanding of what it is to have depression or schizophrenia .
when we talk about the brain , it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic .
it depends , of course , on what scale or what scope you want to think about , but this is an organ of surreal complexity , and we are just beginning to understand how to even study it , whether you 're thinking about the 100 billion neurons that are in the cortex or the 100 trillion synapses that make up all the connections .
we have just begun to try to figure out how do we take this very complex machine that does extraordinary kinds of information processing and use our own minds to understand this very complex brain that supports our own minds .
it 's actually a kind of cruel trick of evolution that we simply do n't have a brain that seems to be wired well enough to understand itself .
in a sense , it actually makes you feel that when you 're in the safe zone of studying behavior or cognition , something you can observe , that in a way feels more simplistic and reductionistic than trying to engage this very complex , mysterious organ that we 're beginning to try to understand .
now , already in the case of the brain disorders that i 've been talking to you about , depression , obsessive compulsive disorder , post-traumatic stress disorder , while we do n't have an in-depth understanding of how they are abnormally processed or what the brain is doing in these illnesses , we have been able to already identify some of the connectional differences , or some of the ways in which the circuitry is different for people who have these disorders .
we call this the human connectome , and you can think about the connectome sort of as the wiring diagram of the brain .
you 'll hear more about this in a few minutes .
the important piece here is that as you begin to look at people who have these disorders , the one in five of us who struggle in some way , you find that there 's a lot of variation in the way that the brain is wired , but there are some predictable patterns , and those patterns are risk factors for developing one of these disorders .
it 's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like huntington 's or parkinson 's or alzheimer 's disease where you have a bombed-out part of your cortex .
here we 're talking about traffic jams , or sometimes detours , or sometimes problems with just the way that things are connected and the way that the brain functions .
you could , if you want , compare this to , on the one hand , a myocardial infarction , a heart attack , where you have dead tissue in the heart , versus an arrhythmia , where the organ simply is n't functioning because of the communication problems within it .
either one would kill you ; in only one of them will you find a major lesion .
as we think about this , probably it 's better to actually go a little deeper into one particular disorder , and that would be schizophrenia , because i think that 's a good case for helping to understand why thinking of this as a brain disorder matters .
these are scans from judy rapoport and her colleagues at the national institute of mental health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia , and you can see already in the top there 's areas that are red or orange , yellow , are places where there 's less gray matter , and as they followed them over five years , comparing them to age match controls , you can see that , particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus , there 's a profound loss of gray matter .
and it 's important , if you try to model this , you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass , loss of cortical gray matter , and what 's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark , and at some point , when you overshoot , you cross a threshold , and it 's that threshold where we say , this is a person who has this disease , because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions .
that 's something we can observe .
but look at this closely and you can see that actually they 've crossed a different threshold .
they 've crossed a brain threshold much earlier , that perhaps not at age 22 or 20 , but even by age 15 or 16 you can begin to see the trajectory for development is quite different at the level of the brain , not at the level of behavior .
why does this matter ? well first because , for brain disorders , behavior is the last thing to change .
we know that for alzheimer 's , for parkinson 's , for huntington 's .
there are changes in the brain a decade or more before you see the first signs of a behavioral change .
the tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier , long before the symptoms emerge .
but most important , go back to where we started .
the good-news stories in medicine are early detection , early intervention .
if we waited until the heart attack , we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease .
that is precisely what we do today when we decide that everybody with one of these brain disorders , brain circuit disorders , has a behavioral disorder .
we wait until the behavior becomes manifest .
that 's not early detection . that 's not early intervention .
now to be clear , we 're not quite ready to do this .
we do n't have all the facts . we do n't actually even know what the tools will be , nor what to precisely look for in every case to be able to get there before the behavior emerges as different .
but this tells us how we need to think about it , and where we need to go .
are we going to be there soon ?
i think that this is something that will happen over the course of the next few years , but i 'd like to finish with a quote about trying to predict how this will happen by somebody who 's thought a lot about changes in concepts and changes in technology .
" we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10 . " - bill gates .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's very , very difficult to speak at the end of a conference like this , because everyone has spoken . everything has been said .
so i thought that what may be useful is to remind us of some of the things that have gone on here , and then maybe offer some ideas which we can take away , and take forward and work on .
that 's what i 'd like to try and do .
we came here saying we want to talk about " africa : the next chapter . "
but we are talking about " africa : the next chapter " because we are looking at the old and the present chapter - that we 're looking at , and saying it 's not such a good thing .
the picture i showed you before , and this picture , of drought , death and disease is what we usually see .
what we want to look at is " africa : the next chapter , " and that 's this : a healthy , smiling , beautiful african .
and i think it 's worth remembering what we 've heard through the conference right from the first day , where i heard that all the important statistics have been given - about where we are now , about how the continent is doing much better .
and the importance of that is that we have a platform to build on .
so i 'm not going to spend too much time - just to show you , refresh your memories that we are here for " africa : the next chapter " because for the first time there really is a platform to build on .
we really do have it going right that the continent is growing at rates that people had thought would not happen .
after decades of 2 percent , we are now at 5 percent , and it 's going to - projected - 6 and 7 percent even .
and inflation has come down .
external debt - something that i can tell you a long story about because i personally worked on one of the biggest debts on the continent - has come down dramatically .
you know , as you can see , from almost 50 billion down to about 12 or 13 billion .
now this is a huge achievement .
you know , we 've built up reserves . why is that important ?
it 's because it shows off our economies , shows off our currencies and gives a platform on which people can plan and build , including businesses .
we 've also seen some evidence that all this is making a difference because private investment flows have increased .
i want to remind you again - i know you saw these statistics before - from almost 6 billion we are now at about 18 billion .
in 2005 , remittances - i just took one country , nigeria skyrocketing - skyrocketing is too dramatic , but increasing dramatically .
and in many other countries this is happening .
why is this important ? because it shows confidence .
people are now confident to bring - if your people in the diaspora bring their money back , it shows other people that , look , there is emerging confidence in your country .
and instead of an outflow , you are now getting a net inflow .
now , why is all this important , to have to go really fast ?
it 's important that we build this platform , that we have the president , kikwete , and others of our leaders who are saying , " look , we must do something different . "
because we are confronted with a challenge .
62 percent of our population is below the age of 24 .
what does this mean ?
this means that we have to focus on how our youth are going to be engaged in productive endeavor in their lives .
you have to focus on how to create jobs , make sure they do n't fall into disease , and that they get an education .
but most of all that they are productively engaged in life , and that they are creating the kind of productive environment in our countries that will make things happen .
and to support this , i just recently - one of the things i 've done since leaving government is to start an opinion research organization in nigeria .
most of our countries do n't even have any opinion research .
people do n't have voice .
there is no way you can know what people want .
one of the things we asked them recently was what 's their top issue .
like in every other country where this has been done , jobs is the top issue .
i want to leave this up here and come back to it .
but before i get to this slide , i just wanted to run you through this .
and to say that for me , the next stage of building this platform that now enables us to move forward - and we must n't make light of it .
it was only 5 , 6 , 7 years ago we could n't even talk about the next chapter , because we were in the old chapter .
we were going nowhere .
the economies were not growing .
we were having negative per capita growth .
the microeconomic framework and foundation for moving forward was not even there .
so let 's not forget that it 's taken a lot to build this , including all those things that we tried to do in nigeria that dele referred to .
creating our own program to solve problems , like fighting corruption , building institutions , stabilizing the micro economy .
so now we have this platform we can build on .
and it brings us to the debate that has been going on here : aid versus private sector , aid versus trade , etc .
and someone stood up to say that one of the frustrating things is that it 's been a simplistic debate .
and that 's not what the debate should be about .
that 's engaging in the wrong debate .
the issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors , the private sector and ordinary african people taking charge of their own lives ?
how do we combine all this ?
to move our continent forward , to do the things that need doing that i talked about - getting young people employed .
getting the creative juices flowing on this continent , much of what you have seen here .
so i 'm afraid we 've been engaging a little bit in the wrong debate .
we need to bring it back to say , what is the combination of all these factors that is going to yield what we want ? -lrb- applause -rrb- and i want to tell you something .
for me , the issue about aid - i do n't think that africans need to now go all the way over to the other side and feel bad about aid .
africa has been giving the other countries aid .
mo ibrahim said at a debate we were at that he dreams one day when africa will be giving aid .
and i said , " mo , you 're right . we have - no , but we 've already been doing it !
the u.k. and the u.s. could not have been built today without africa 's aid . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- it is all the resources that were taken from africa , including human , that built these countries today !
so when they try to give back , we should n't be on the defensive .
the issue is not that .
the issue is how are we using what has been given back .
how are we using it ?
is it being directed effectively ?
i want to tell you a little story .
why i do n't mind if we get aid , but we use it well .
from 1967 to ' 70 , nigeria fought a war - the nigeria-biafra war .
and in the middle of that war , i was 14 years old .
we spent much of our time with my mother cooking .
for the army - my father joined the army as a brigadier - the biafran army .
we were on the biafran side .
and we were down to eating one meal a day , running from place to place , but wherever we could help we did .
at a certain point in time , in 1969 , things were really bad .
we were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day .
people , children were dying of kwashiorkor .
i 'm sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures .
well , i was in the middle of it .
in the midst of all this , my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days .
we thought she was going to die .
my father was not there .
he was in the army .
so i was the oldest person in the house .
my sister fell very ill with malaria .
she was three years old and i was 15 .
and she had such a high fever . we tried everything .
it did n't look like it was going to work .
until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor , who was looking at people and giving them meds .
now i put my sister on my back - burning - and i walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back .
it was really hot . i was very hungry .
i was scared because i knew her life depended on my getting to this woman .
we heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people .
i walked 10 kilometers , putting one foot in front of the other .
i got there and i saw huge crowds .
almost a thousand people were there , trying to break down the door .
she was doing this in a church . how was i going to get in ?
i had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back , find a way to a window .
and while they were trying to break down the door , i climbed in through the window , and jumped in .
this woman told me it was in the nick of time .
by the time we jumped into that hall , she was barely moving .
she gave a shot of her chloroquine - what i learned was the chloroquine then - gave her some - it must have been a re-hydration - and some other therapies , and put us in a corner .
in about two to three hours , she started to move .
and then they toweled her down because she started sweating , which was a good sign .
and then my sister woke up .
and about five or six hours later , she said we could go home .
i strapped her on my back .
i walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk i ever had .
i was so happy - -lrb- applause -rrb- - that my sister was alive !
today she 's 41 years old , a mother of three , and she 's a physician saving other lives .
why am i telling that ? i 'm telling you that because - when it is you or your person involved - you do n't care where - whether it 's aid .
you do n't care what it is ! -lrb- applause -rrb- you just want the person to be alive !
and now let me become less sentimental , and say that saving lives - which some of the aid we get does on this continent - when you save the life of anyone , a farmer , a teacher , a mother , they are contributing productively into the economy .
and as an economist , we can also look at that side of the story .
these are people who are productive agents in the economy .
so if we save people from hiv / aids , if we save them from malaria , it means they can form the base of production for our economy .
and by the same token - as someone said yesterday - if we do n't and they die , their children will become a burden on the economy .
so even from an economic standpoint , if we leave the social and the humanitarian , we need to save lives now .
so that 's one of the reasons , from a personal experience , that i say let 's channel these resources we get into something productive .
however , i will also tell you that i 'm one of those who does n't believe that this is the sole answer .
that 's why i said the debate has to get more sophisticated .
you know , we have to use it well .
what has happened in europe ?
do you all know that spain - part of the eu - got 10 billion dollars in aid from the rest of the eu ?
resources that were transferred to them - and were the spanish ashamed of this ? no !
the eu transferred 10 billion . where did they use it ?
have you been to southern spain lately ? there are roads everywhere .
infrastructure everywhere .
it is on the back of this that the whole of southern spain has developed into a services economy .
did you know that ireland got 3 billion dollars in aid ?
ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the european union today .
for which many people , even from other parts of the world , are going there to find jobs .
what did they do with the 3 billion dollars in aid ?
they used it to build an information superhighway , gain infrastructure that enables them to participate in the information technology revolution , and to create jobs in their economy .
they did n't say , " no , you know , we 're not going to take this . "
today , the european union is busy transferring aid .
my frustration is if they can build infrastructure in spain - which is roads , highways , other things that they can build - i say then , why do they refuse to use the same aid to build the same infrastructure in our countries ? -lrb- applause -rrb- when we ask them and tell them what we need , one of my worries today is that we have many foundations now .
now we talk about the world bank , imf , and accountability , all that and the eu .
we also have private citizens now who have a lot of money - some of them in this audience , with private foundations .
and one day , these foundations have so much money , they will overtake the official aid that is being given .
but i fear - and i 'm very grateful to all of them for what they are trying to do on the continent - but i 'm also worried . i wake up with a gnawing in my belly because i see a new set of aid entrepreneurs on the continent .
and they 're also going from country to country , and many times trying to find what to do .
but i 'm not really sure that their assistance is also being channeled in the right way .
and many of them are not really familiar with the continent .
they are just discovering .
and many times i do n't see africans working with them .
they are just going alone ! -lrb- applause -rrb- and many times i get the impression that they are not really even interested in hearing from africans who might know .
they want to visit us , see what 's happening on the ground and make a decision .
and now i 'm maybe being harsh .
but i worry because this money is so important .
now , who are they accountable to ?
are we on their boards when they make decisions about where to channel money ? are we there ?
will we make the same mistake that we made before ?
have our presidents and our leaders - everyone is talking about - have they ever called these people together and said , " look , your foundation and your foundation - you have so much money , we are grateful .
let 's sit down and really tell you where the money should be channeled and where this aid should go . "
have we done that ? the answer is no .
and each one is making their own individual effort .
and then 10 years from now , billions will again have gone into africa , and we would still have the same problems .
this is what gives us the hopeless image .
our inability to take charge and say to all these people bringing their money , " sit down . "
and we do n't do it because there are so many of us . we do n't coordinate .
we 've not called the bill gates , and the soros , and everybody else who is helping and say , " sit down . let 's have a conference with you .
as a continent , here are our priorities .
here is where we want you to channel this money . "
each one should not be an entrepreneur going out and finding what is best .
we 're not trying to stop them at all ! but to help them help us better .
and what is disappointing me is that we are not doing this .
ten years from now we will have the same story , and we will be repeating the same things .
so our problem right now is , how can we leverage all this good will that is coming towards our way ?
how can we get government to combine properly with these private foundations , with the international organizations , and with our private sector .
i firmly believe in that private sector thing too .
but it can not do it alone .
so there might be a few ideas we could think of that could work .
they said this is about proliferating and sharing ideas .
so why do n't we think of using some of this aid ?
well , why do n't we first say to those helping us out , " do n't be shy about infrastructure .
that health that you 're working on can not be sustainable without infrastructure .
that education will work better if we 've got electricity and railroads , and so on .
that agriculture will work better if there are railroads to get the goods to market .
do n't be shy of it .
invest some of your resources in that , too . "
and then we can see that this is one combination of private , international , multilateral money , private sector and the african that we can put together as a partnership , so that aid can be a facilitator .
that is all aid can be .
aid can not solve our problems , i 'm firmly convinced about that .
but it can be catalytic . and if we fail to use it as catalytic , we would have failed .
one of the reasons why china is a bit popular with africans now - one of the reasons is not only just that , you know , these people are stupid and china is coming to take resources .
it 's because there 's a little more leverage in terms of the chinese .
if you tell them , " we need a road here , " they will help you build it .
they do n't shy away from infrastructure .
in fact , the chinese minister of finance said to me , when i asked him what are we doing wrong in nigeria .
he said , " there are two things you need only .
infrastructure , infrastructure , infrastructure and discipline .
you are undisciplined . " -lrb- applause -rrb- and i repeat it for the continent .
it 's the same . we need infrastructure , infrastructure and discipline .
so we can make a catalytic to help us provide some of that .
now i realize - i 'm not saying - health and education - no , you can also provide that as well .
but i 'm saying it 's not either or .
let 's see how aid can be a facilitator in partnership .
one idea .
second thing , for the private sector , people are afraid to take risks on the continent .
why ca n't some of this aid be used as a kind of guarantee mechanisms , to enable people to take risk ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- and finally , because they are both standing at my - i 'm out of time .
am i out of time ?
ok , so let me not forget my punchline .
one of the things i want everybody to collaborate on is to support women , to create jobs . -lrb- applause -rrb- a lot has been said here about women , i do n't need to repeat it .
but there are people - women - creating jobs .
and we know , studies have shown that when you put resources in the hand of the woman - in fact , there 's an econometric study , the world bank review , done in 2000 , showing that transfers into the hands of women result in healthier children , more for the household , more for the economy and all that .
so i 'm saying that one of the takeaways from here - i 'm not saying the men are not important - obviously , if you leave the husbands out , what will they do ?
they 'll come back home and get disgruntled , and it will result in difficulties we do n't want .
we do n't want men beating their wives because they do n't have a job , and so on .
but at the margin , we also - i want to push this , because the reason is the men automatically - they get - not automatically , but they tend to get more support .
but i want you to realize that resources in the hands of african women is a powerful tool .
there are people creating jobs .
beatrice gakuba has created 200 jobs from her flower business in rwanda .
we have ibukun awosika in nigeria , with the chair company .
she wants to expand .
she needs another 20 million .
she will create another 100 , 200 more jobs .
so take away from here is how are you going to put together the resources to put money in the hands of women in the middle who are ready - business people who want to expand and create more jobs .
and lastly , what are you going to do to be part of this partnership of aid , government , private sector and the african as an individual ?
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
please excuse me for sitting ; i 'm very old .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , the topic i 'm going to discuss is one which is , in a certain sense , very peculiar because it 's very old .
roughness is part of human life forever and forever , and ancient authors have written about it .
it was very much uncontrollable , and in a certain sense , it seemed to be the extreme of complexity , just a mess , a mess and a mess .
there are many different kinds of mess .
now , in fact , by a complete fluke , i got involved many years ago in a study of this form of complexity , and to my utter amazement , i found traces - very strong traces , i must say - of order in that roughness .
and so today , i would like to present to you a few examples of what this represents .
i prefer the word roughness to the word irregularity because irregularity - to someone who had latin in my long-past youth - means the contrary of regularity .
but it is not so .
regularity is the contrary of roughness because the basic aspect of the world is very rough .
so let me show you a few objects .
some of them are artificial .
others of them are very real , in a certain sense .
now this is the real . it 's a cauliflower .
now why do i show a cauliflower , a very ordinary and ancient vegetable ?
because old and ancient as it may be , it 's very complicated and it 's very simple , both at the same time .
if you try to weigh it - of course it 's very easy to weigh it , and when you eat it , the weight matters - but suppose you try to measure its surface .
well , it 's very interesting .
if you cut , with a sharp knife , one of the florets of a cauliflower and look at it separately , you think of a whole cauliflower , but smaller .
and then you cut again , again , again , again , again , again , again , again , again , and you still get small cauliflowers .
so the experience of humanity has always been that there are some shapes which have this peculiar property , that each part is like the whole , but smaller .
now , what did humanity do with that ?
very , very little .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what i did actually is to study this problem , and i found something quite surprising .
that one can measure roughness by a number , a number , 2.3 , 1.2 and sometimes much more .
one day , a friend of mine , to bug me , brought a picture and said , " what is the roughness of this curve ? "
i said , " well , just short of 1.5 . "
it was 1.48 .
now , it did n't take me any time .
i 've been looking at these things for so long .
so these numbers are the numbers which denote the roughness of these surfaces .
i hasten to say that these surfaces are completely artificial .
they were done on a computer , and the only input is a number , and that number is roughness .
so on the left , i took the roughness copied from many landscapes .
to the right , i took a higher roughness .
so the eye , after a while , can distinguish these two very well .
humanity had to learn about measuring roughness .
this is very rough , and this is sort of smooth , and this perfectly smooth .
very few things are very smooth .
so then if you try to ask questions : " what 's the surface of a cauliflower ? "
well , you measure and measure and measure .
each time you 're closer , it gets bigger , down to very , very small distances .
what 's the length of the coastline of these lakes ?
the closer you measure , the longer it is .
the concept of length of coastline , which seems to be so natural because it 's given in many cases , is , in fact , complete fallacy ; there 's no such thing .
you must do it differently .
what good is that , to know these things ?
well , surprisingly enough , it 's good in many ways .
to begin with , artificial landscapes , which i invented sort of , are used in cinema all the time .
we see mountains in the distance .
they may be mountains , but they may be just formulae , just cranked on .
now it 's very easy to do .
it used to be very time-consuming , but now it 's nothing .
now look at that . that 's a real lung .
now a lung is something very strange .
if you take this thing , you know very well it weighs very little .
the volume of a lung is very small , but what about the area of the lung ?
anatomists were arguing very much about that .
some say that a normal male 's lung has an area of the inside of a basketball -lsb- court -rsb- .
and the others say , no , five basketball -lsb- courts -rsb- .
enormous disagreements .
why so ? because , in fact , the area of the lung is something very ill-defined .
the bronchi branch , branch , branch and they stop branching , not because of any matter of principle , but because of physical considerations : the mucus , which is in the lung .
so what happens is that in a way you have a much bigger lung , but it branches and branches down to distances about the same for a whale , for a man and for a little rodent .
now , what good is it to have that ?
well , surprisingly enough , amazingly enough , the anatomists had a very poor idea of the structure of the lung until very recently .
and i think that my mathematics , surprisingly enough , has been of great help to the surgeons studying lung illnesses and also kidney illnesses , all these branching systems , for which there was no geometry .
so i found myself , in other words , constructing a geometry , a geometry of things which had no geometry .
and a surprising aspect of it is that very often , the rules of this geometry are extremely short .
you have formulas that long .
and you crank it several times .
sometimes repeatedly : again , again , again , the same repetition .
and at the end , you get things like that .
this cloud is completely , 100 percent artificial .
well , 99.9 .
and the only part which is natural is a number , the roughness of the cloud , which is taken from nature .
something so complicated like a cloud , so unstable , so varying , should have a simple rule behind it .
now this simple rule is not an explanation of clouds .
the seer of clouds had to take account of it .
i do n't know how much advanced these pictures are . they 're old .
i was very much involved in it , but then turned my attention to other phenomena .
now , here is another thing which is rather interesting .
one of the shattering events in the history of mathematics , which is not appreciated by many people , occurred about 130 years ago , 145 years ago .
mathematicians began to create shapes that did n't exist .
mathematicians got into self-praise to an extent which was absolutely amazing , that man can invent things that nature did not know .
in particular , it could invent things like a curve which fills the plane .
a curve 's a curve , a plane 's a plane , and the two wo n't mix .
well , they do mix .
a man named peano did define such curves , and it became an object of extraordinary interest .
it was very important , but mostly interesting because a kind of break , a separation between the mathematics coming from reality , on the one hand , and new mathematics coming from pure man 's mind .
well , i was very sorry to point out that the pure man 's mind has , in fact , seen at long last what had been seen for a long time .
and so here i introduce something , the set of rivers of a plane-filling curve .
and well , it 's a story unto itself .
so it was in 1875 to 1925 , an extraordinary period in which mathematics prepared itself to break out from the world .
and the objects which were used as examples , when i was a child and a student , as examples of the break between mathematics and visible reality - those objects , i turned them completely around .
i used them for describing some of the aspects of the complexity of nature .
well , a man named hausdorff in 1919 introduced a number which was just a mathematical joke , and i found that this number was a good measurement of roughness .
when i first told it to my friends in mathematics they said , " do n't be silly . it 's just something -lsb- silly -rsb- . "
well actually , i was not silly .
the great painter hokusai knew it very well .
the things on the ground are algae .
he did not know the mathematics ; it did n't yet exist .
and he was japanese who had no contact with the west .
but painting for a long time had a fractal side .
i could speak of that for a long time .
the eiffel tower has a fractal aspect .
i read the book that mr. eiffel wrote about his tower , and indeed it was astonishing how much he understood .
this is a mess , mess , mess , brownian loop .
one day i decided - halfway through my career , i was held by so many things in my work - i decided to test myself .
could i just look at something which everybody had been looking at for a long time and find something dramatically new ?
well , so i looked at these things called brownian motion - just goes around .
i played with it for a while , and i made it return to the origin .
then i was telling my assistant , " i do n't see anything . can you paint it ? "
so he painted it , which means he put inside everything . he said : " well , this thing came out ... " and i said , " stop ! stop ! stop !
i see ; it 's an island . "
and amazing .
so brownian motion , which happens to have a roughness number of two , goes around .
i measured it , 1.33 .
again , again , again .
long measurements , big brownian motions , 1.33 .
mathematical problem : how to prove it ?
it took my friends 20 years .
three of them were having incomplete proofs .
they got together , and together they had the proof .
so they got the big -lsb- fields -rsb- medal in mathematics , one of the three medals that people have received for proving things which i 've seen without being able to prove them .
now everybody asks me at one point or another , " how did it all start ?
what got you in that strange business ? "
what got you to be , at the same time , a mechanical engineer , a geographer and a mathematician and so on , a physicist ?
well actually i started , oddly enough , studying stock market prices .
and so here i had this theory , and i wrote books about it - financial prices increments .
to the left you see data over a long period .
to the right , on top , you see a theory which is very , very fashionable .
it was very easy , and you can write many books very fast about it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are thousands of books on that .
now compare that with real price increments .
where are real price increments ?
well , these other lines include some real price increments and some forgery which i did .
so the idea there was that one must be able to - how do you say ? - model price variation .
and it went really well 50 years ago .
for 50 years , people were sort of pooh-poohing me because they could do it much , much easier .
but i tell you , at this point , people listened to me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these two curves are averages : standard & poor , the blue one ; and the red one is standard & poor 's from which the five biggest discontinuities are taken out .
now discontinuities are a nuisance , so in many studies of prices , one puts them aside .
" well , acts of god .
and you have the little nonsense which is left .
acts of god . " in this picture , five acts of god are as important as everything else .
in other words , it is not acts of god that we should put aside .
that is the meat , the problem .
if you master these , you master price , and if you do n't master these , you can master the little noise as well as you can , but it 's not important .
well , here are the curves for it .
now , i get to the final thing , which is the set of which my name is attached .
in a way , it 's the story of my life .
my adolescence was spent during the german occupation of france .
since i thought that i might vanish within a day or a week , i had very big dreams .
and after the war , i saw an uncle again .
my uncle was a very prominent mathematician , and he told me , " look , there 's a problem which i could not solve 25 years ago , and which nobody can solve .
this is a construction of a man named -lsb- gaston -rsb- julia and -lsb- pierre -rsb- fatou .
if you could find something new , anything , you will get your career made . "
very simple .
so i looked , and like the thousands of people that had tried before , i found nothing .
but then the computer came , and i decided to apply the computer , not to new problems in mathematics - like this wiggle wiggle , that 's a new problem - but to old problems .
and i went from what 's called real numbers , which are points on a line , to imaginary , complex numbers , which are points on a plane , which is what one should do there , and this shape came out .
this shape is of an extraordinary complication .
the equation is hidden there , z goes into z squared , plus c .
it 's so simple , so dry .
it 's so uninteresting .
now you turn the crank once , twice : twice , marvels come out .
i mean this comes out .
i do n't want to explain these things .
this comes out . this comes out .
shapes which are of such complication , such harmony and such beauty .
this comes out repeatedly , again , again , again .
and that was one of my major discoveries , to find that these islands were the same as the whole big thing , more or less .
and then you get these extraordinary baroque decorations all over the place .
all that from this little formula , which has whatever , five symbols in it .
and then this one .
the color was added for two reasons .
first of all , because these shapes are so complicated that one could n't make any sense of the numbers .
and if you plot them , you must choose some system .
and so my principle has been to always present the shapes with different colorings because some colorings emphasize that , and others it is that or that .
it 's so complicated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in 1990 , i was in cambridge , u.k.
to receive a prize from the university , and three days later , a pilot was flying over the landscape and found this thing .
so where did this come from ?
obviously , from extraterrestrials .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , so the newspaper in cambridge published an article about that " discovery " and received the next day 5,000 letters from people saying , " but that 's simply a mandelbrot set very big . "
well , let me finish .
this shape here just came out of an exercise in pure mathematics .
bottomless wonders spring from simple rules , which are repeated without end .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my passions are music , technology and making things .
and it 's the combination of these things that has led me to the hobby of sound visualization , and , on occasion , has led me to play with fire .
this is a rubens ' tube . it 's one of many i 've made over the years , and i have one here tonight .
it 's about an 8-foot-long tube of metal , it 's got a hundred or so holes on top , on that side is the speaker , and here is some lab tubing , and it 's connected to this tank of propane .
so , let 's fire it up and see what it does .
so let 's play a 550-herz frequency and watch what happens .
-lrb- frequency -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's okay to applaud the laws of physics , but essentially what 's happening here - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - is the energy from the sound via the air and gas molecules is influencing the combustion properties of propane , creating a visible waveform , and we can see the alternating regions of compression and rarefaction that we call frequency , and the height is showing us amplitude .
so let 's change the frequency of the sound , and watch what happens to the fire .
-lrb- higher frequency -rrb- so every time we hit a resonant frequency we get a standing wave and that emergent sine curve of fire .
so let 's turn that off . we 're indoors .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i also have with me a flame table .
it 's very similar to a rubens ' tube , and it 's also used for visualizing the physical properties of sound , such as eigenmodes , so let 's fire it up and see what it does .
ooh . -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . now , while the table comes up to pressure , let me note here that the sound is not traveling in perfect lines . it 's actually traveling in all directions , and the rubens ' tube 's a little like bisecting those waves with a line , and the flame table 's a little like bisecting those waves with a plane , and it can show a little more subtle complexity , which is why i like to use it to watch geoff farina play guitar .
-lrb- music -rrb- all right , so it 's a delicate dance .
if you watch closely - -lrb- applause -rrb- if you watch closely , you may have seen some of the eigenmodes , but also you may have seen that jazz music is better with fire .
actually , a lot of things are better with fire in my world , but the fire 's just a foundation .
it shows very well that eyes can hear , and this is interesting to me because technology allows us to present sound to the eyes in ways that accentuate the strength of the eyes for seeing sound , such as the removal of time .
so here , i 'm using a rendering algorithm to paint the frequencies of the song " smells like teen spirit " in a way that the eyes can take them in as a single visual impression , and the technique will also show the strengths of the visual cortex for pattern recognition .
so if i show you another song off this album , and another , your eyes will easily pick out the use of repetition by the band nirvana , and in the frequency distribution , the colors , you can see the clean-dirty-clean sound that they are famous for , and here is the entire album as a single visual impression , and i think this impression is pretty powerful .
at least , it 's powerful enough that if i show you these four songs , and i remind you that this is " smells like teen spirit , " you can probably correctly guess , without listening to any music at all , that the song a die hard nirvana fan would enjoy is this song , " i 'll stick around " by the foo fighters , whose lead singer is dave grohl , who was the drummer in nirvana .
the songs are a little similar , but mostly i 'm just interested in the idea that someday maybe we 'll buy a song because we like the way it looks .
all right , now for some more sound data .
this is data from a skate park , and this is mabel davis skate park in austin , texas . -lrb- skateboard sounds -rrb- and the sounds you 're hearing came from eight microphones attached to obstacles around the park , and it sounds like chaos , but actually all the tricks start with a very distinct slap , but successful tricks end with a pop , whereas unsuccessful tricks more of a scratch and a tumble , and tricks on the rail will ring out like a gong , and voices occupy very unique frequencies in the skate park .
so if we were to render these sounds visually , we might end up with something like this .
this is all 40 minutes of the recording , and right away the algorithm tells us a lot more tricks are missed than are made , and also a trick on the rails is a lot more likely to produce a cheer , and if you look really closely , we can tease out traffic patterns .
you see the skaters often trick in this direction . the obstacles are easier .
and in the middle of the recording , the mics pick this up , but later in the recording , this kid shows up , and he starts using a line at the top of the park to do some very advanced tricks on something called the tall rail .
and it 's fascinating . at this moment in time , all the rest of the skaters turn their lines 90 degrees to stay out of his way .
you see , there 's a subtle etiquette in the skate park , and it 's led by key influencers , and they tend to be the kids who can do the best tricks , or wear red pants , and on this day the mics picked that up .
all right , from skate physics to theoretical physics .
i 'm a big fan of stephen hawking , and i wanted to use all eight hours of his cambridge lecture series to create an homage .
now , in this series he 's speaking with the aid of a computer , which actually makes identifying the ends of sentences fairly easy . so i wrote a steering algorithm .
it listens to the lecture , and then it uses the amplitude of each word to move a point on the x-axis , and it uses the inflection of sentences to move a same point up and down on the y-axis .
and these trend lines , you can see , there 's more questions than answers in the laws of physics , and when we reach the end of a sentence , we place a star at that location .
so there 's a lot of sentences , so a lot of stars , and after rendering all of the audio , this is what we get .
this is stephen hawking 's universe .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's all eight hours of the cambridge lecture series taken in as a single visual impression , and i really like this image , but a lot of people think it 's fake .
so i made a more interactive version , and the way i did that is i used their position in time in the lecture to place these stars into 3d space , and with some custom software and a kinect , i can walk right into the lecture .
i 'm going to wave through the kinect here and take control , and now i 'm going to reach out and i 'm going to touch a star , and when i do , it will play the sentence that generated that star .
stephen hawking : there is one , and only one , arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture .
jared ficklin : thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- there are 1,400 stars .
it 's a really fun way to explore the lecture , and , i hope , a fitting homage .
all right . let me close with a work in progress .
i think , after 30 years , the opportunity exists to create an enhanced version of closed captioning .
now , we 've all seen a lot of tedtalks online , so let 's watch one now with the sound turned off and the closed captioning turned on .
there 's no closed captioning for the ted theme song , and we 're missing it , but if you 've watched enough of these , you hear it in your mind 's ear , and then applause starts .
it usually begins here , and it grows and then it falls .
sometimes you get a little star applause , and then i think even bill gates takes a nervous breath , and the talk begins .
all right , so let 's watch this clip again .
this time , i 'm not going to talk at all .
there 's still going to be no audio , but what i am going to do is i 'm going to render the sound visually in real time at the bottom of the screen .
so watch closely and see what your eyes can hear .
this is fairly amazing to me .
even on the first view , your eyes will successfully pick out patterns , but on repeated views , your brain actually gets better at turning these patterns into information .
you can get the tone and the timbre and the pace of the speech , things that you ca n't get out of closed captioning .
that famous scene in horror movies where someone is walking up from behind is something you can see , and i believe this information would be something that is useful at times when the audio is turned off or not heard at all , and i speculate that deaf audiences might actually even be better at seeing sound than hearing audiences .
i do n't know . it 's a theory right now .
actually , it 's all just an idea .
and let me end by saying that sound moves in all directions , and so do ideas .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- well , it 's great to be here .
we 've heard a lot about the promise of technology , and the peril .
i 've been quite interested in both .
if we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy , we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030 .
we ca n't do that today because solar panels are heavy , expensive and very inefficient .
there are nano-engineered designs , which at least have been analyzed theoretically , that show the potential to be very lightweight , very inexpensive , very efficient , and we 'd be able to actually provide all of our energy needs in this renewable way .
nano-engineered fuel cells could provide the energy where it 's needed .
that 's a key trend , which is decentralization , moving from centralized nuclear power plants and liquid natural gas tankers to decentralized resources that are environmentally more friendly , a lot more efficient and capable and safe from disruption .
bono spoke very eloquently , that we have the tools , for the first time , to address age-old problems of disease and poverty .
most regions of the world are moving in that direction .
in 1990 , in east asia and the pacific region , there were 500 million people living in poverty - that number now is under 200 million .
the world bank projects by 2011 , it will be under 20 million , which is a reduction of 95 percent .
i did enjoy bono 's comment linking haight-ashbury to silicon valley .
being from the massachusetts high-tech community myself , i 'd point out that we were hippies also in the 1960s , although we hung around harvard square .
but we do have the potential to overcome disease and poverty , and i 'm going to talk about those issues , if we have the will .
kevin kelly talked about the acceleration of technology .
that 's been a strong interest of mine , and a theme that i 've developed for some 30 years .
i realized that my technologies had to make sense when i finished a project .
that invariably , the world was a different place when i would introduce a technology .
and , i noticed that most inventions fail , not because the r & d department ca n't get it to work - if you look at most business plans , they will actually succeed if given the opportunity to build what they say they 're going to build - and 90 percent of those projects or more will fail , because the timing is wrong - not all the enabling factors will be in place when they 're needed .
so i began to be an ardent student of technology trends , and track where technology would be at different points in time , and began to build the mathematical models of that .
it 's kind of taken on a life of its own .
i 've got a group of 10 people that work with me to gather data on key measures of technology in many different areas , and we build models .
and you 'll hear people say , well , we ca n't predict the future .
and if you ask me , will the price of google be higher or lower than it is today three years from now , that 's very hard to say .
will wimax cdma g3 be the wireless standard three years from now ? that 's hard to say .
but if you ask me , what will it cost for one mips of computing in 2010 , or the cost to sequence a base pair of dna in 2012 , or the cost of sending a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2014 , it turns out that those are very predictable .
there are remarkably smooth exponential curves that govern price performance , capacity , bandwidth .
and i 'm going to show you a small sample of this , but there 's really a theoretical reason why technology develops in an exponential fashion .
and a lot of people , when they think about the future , think about it linearly .
they think they 're going to continue to develop a problem or address a problem using today 's tools , at today 's pace of progress , and fail to take into consideration this exponential growth .
the genome project was a controversial project in 1990 .
we had our best ph.d. students , our most advanced equipment around the world , we got 1/10,000th of the project done , so how 're we going to get this done in 15 years ?
and 10 years into the project , the skeptics were still going strong - says , " you 're two-thirds through this project , and you 've managed to only sequence a very tiny percentage of the whole genome . "
but it 's the nature of exponential growth that once it reaches the knee of the curve , it explodes .
most of the project was done in the last few years of the project .
it took us 15 years to sequence hiv - we sequenced sars in 31 days .
so we are gaining the potential to overcome these problems .
i 'm going to show you just a few examples of how pervasive this phenomena is .
the actual paradigm-shift rate , the rate of adopting new ideas , is doubling every decade , according to our models .
these are all logarithmic graphs , so as you go up the levels it represents , generally multiplying by factor of 10 or 100 .
it took us half a century to adopt the telephone , the first virtual-reality technology .
cell phones were adopted in about eight years .
if you put different communication technologies on this logarithmic graph , television , radio , telephone were adopted in decades .
recent technologies - like the pc , the web , cell phones - were under a decade .
now this is an interesting chart , and this really gets at the fundamental reason why an evolutionary process - and both biology and technology are evolutionary processes - accelerate .
they work through interaction - they create a capability , and then it uses that capability to bring on the next stage .
so the first step in biological evolution , the evolution of dna - actually it was rna came first - took billions of years , but then evolution used that information-processing backbone to bring on the next stage .
so the cambrian explosion , when all the body plans of the animals were evolved , took only 10 million years . it was 200 times faster .
and then evolution used those body plans to evolve higher cognitive functions , and biological evolution kept accelerating .
it 's an inherent nature of an evolutionary process .
so homo sapiens , the first technology-creating species , the species that combined a cognitive function with an opposable appendage - and by the way , chimpanzees do n't really have a very good opposable thumb - so we could actually manipulate our environment with a power grip and fine motor coordination , and use our mental models to actually change the world and bring on technology .
but anyway , the evolution of our species took hundreds of thousands of years , and then working through interaction , evolution used , essentially , the technology-creating species to bring on the next stage , which were the first steps in technological evolution .
and the first step took tens of thousands of years - stone tools , fire , the wheel - kept accelerating .
we always used then the latest generation of technology to create the next generation .
printing press took a century to be adopted ; the first computers were designed pen-on-paper - now we use computers .
and we 've had a continual acceleration of this process .
now by the way , if you look at this on a linear graph , it looks like everything has just happened , but some observer says , " well , kurzweil just put points on this graph that fall on that straight line . "
so , i took 15 different lists from key thinkers , like the encyclopedia britannica , the museum of natural history , carl sagan 's cosmic calendar on the same - and these people were not trying to make my point ; these were just lists in reference works , and i think that 's what they thought the key events were in biological evolution and technological evolution .
and again , it forms the same straight line . you have a little bit of thickening in the line because people do have disagreements , what the key points are , there 's differences of opinion when agriculture started , or how long the cambrian explosion took .
but you see a very clear trend .
there 's a basic , profound acceleration of this evolutionary process .
information technologies double their capacity , price performance , bandwidth , every year .
and that 's a very profound explosion of exponential growth .
a personal experience , when i was at mit - computer taking up about the size of this room , less powerful than the computer in your cell phone .
but moore 's law , which is very often identified with this exponential growth , is just one example of many , because it 's basically a property of the evolutionary process of technology .
i put 49 famous computers on this logarithmic graph - by the way , a straight line on a logarithmic graph is exponential growth - that 's another exponential .
it took us three years to double our price performance of computing in 1900 , two years in the middle ; we 're now doubling it every one year .
and that 's exponential growth through five different paradigms .
moore 's law was just the last part of that , where we were shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit , but we had electro-mechanical calculators , relay-based computers that cracked the german enigma code , vacuum tubes in the 1950s predicted the election of eisenhower , discreet transistors used in the first space flights and then moore 's law .
every time one paradigm ran out of steam , another paradigm came out of left field to continue the exponential growth .
they were shrinking vacuum tubes , making them smaller and smaller .
that hit a wall . they could n't shrink them and keep the vacuum .
whole different paradigm - transistors came out of the woodwork .
in fact , when we see the end of the line for a particular paradigm , it creates research pressure to create the next paradigm .
and because we 've been predicting the end of moore 's law for quite a long time - the first prediction said 2002 , until now it says 2022 .
but by the teen years , the features of transistors will be a few atoms in width , and we wo n't be able to shrink them any more .
that 'll be the end of moore 's law , but it wo n't be the end of the exponential growth of computing , because chips are flat .
we live in a three-dimensional world ; we might as well use the third dimension .
we will go into the third dimension and there 's been tremendous progress , just in the last few years , of getting three-dimensional , self-organizing molecular circuits to work .
we 'll have those ready well before moore 's law runs out of steam .
supercomputers - same thing .
processor performance on intel chips , the average price of a transistor - 1968 , you could buy one transistor for a dollar .
you could buy 10 million in 2002 .
it 's pretty remarkable how smooth an exponential process that is .
i mean , you 'd think this is the result of some tabletop experiment , but this is the result of worldwide chaotic behavior - countries accusing each other of dumping products , ipos , bankruptcies , marketing programs .
you would think it would be a very erratic process , and you have a very smooth outcome of this chaotic process .
just as we ca n't predict what one molecule in a gas will do - it 's hopeless to predict a single molecule - yet we can predict the properties of the whole gas , using thermodynamics , very accurately .
it 's the same thing here . we ca n't predict any particular project , but the result of this whole worldwide , chaotic , unpredictable activity of competition and the evolutionary process of technology is very predictable .
and we can predict these trends far into the future .
unlike gertrude stein 's roses , it 's not the case that a transistor is a transistor .
as we make them smaller and less expensive , the electrons have less distance to travel .
they 're faster , so you 've got exponential growth in the speed of transistors , so the cost of a cycle of one transistor has been coming down with a halving rate of 1.1 years .
you add other forms of innovation and processor design , you get a doubling of price performance of computing every one year .
and that 's basically deflation - 50 percent deflation .
and it 's not just computers . i mean , it 's true of dna sequencing ; it 's true of brain scanning ; it 's true of the world wide web . i mean , anything that we can quantify , we have hundreds of different measurements of different , information-related measurements - capacity , adoption rates - and they basically double every 12 , 13 , 15 months , depending on what you 're looking at .
in terms of price performance , that 's a 40 to 50 percent deflation rate .
and economists have actually started worrying about that .
we had deflation during the depression , but that was collapse of the money supply , collapse of consumer confidence , a completely different phenomena .
this is due to greater productivity , but the economist says , " but there 's no way you 're going to be able to keep up with that .
if you have 50 percent deflation , people may increase their volume 30 , 40 percent , but they wo n't keep up with it . "
but what we 're actually seeing is that we actually more than keep up with it .
we 've had 28 percent per year compounded growth in dollars in information technology over the last 50 years .
i mean , people did n't build ipods for 10,000 dollars 10 years ago .
as the price performance makes new applications feasible , new applications come to the market .
and this is a very widespread phenomena .
magnetic data storage - that 's not moore 's law , it 's shrinking magnetic spots , different engineers , different companies , same exponential process .
a key revolution is that we 're understanding our own biology in these information terms .
we 're understanding the software programs that make our body run .
these were evolved in very different times - we 'd like to actually change those programs .
one little software program , called the fat insulin receptor gene , basically says , " hold onto every calorie , because the next hunting season may not work out so well . "
that was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago .
we 'd like to actually turn that program off .
they tried that in animals , and these mice ate ravenously and remained slim and got the health benefits of being slim .
they did n't get diabetes ; they did n't get heart disease ; they lived 20 percent longer ; they got the health benefits of caloric restriction without the restriction .
four or five pharmaceutical companies have noticed this , felt that would be interesting drug for the human market , and that 's just one of the 30,000 genes that affect our biochemistry .
we were evolved in an era where it was n't in the interests of people at the age of most people at this conference , like myself , to live much longer , because we were using up the precious resources which were better deployed towards the children and those caring for them .
so , life - long lifespans - like , that is to say , much more than 30 - were n't selected for , but we are learning to actually manipulate and change these software programs through the biotechnology revolution .
for example , we can inhibit genes now with rna interference .
there are exciting new forms of gene therapy that overcome the problem of placing the genetic material in the right place on the chromosome .
there 's actually a - for the first time now , something going to human trials , that actually cures pulmonary hypertension - a fatal disease - using gene therapy .
so we 'll have not just designer babies , but designer baby boomers .
and this technology is also accelerating .
it cost 10 dollars per base pair in 1990 , then a penny in 2000 .
it 's now under a 10th of a cent .
the amount of genetic data - basically this shows that smooth exponential growth doubled every year , enabling the genome project to be completed .
another major revolution : the communications revolution .
the price performance , bandwidth , capacity of communications measured many different ways ; wired , wireless is growing exponentially .
the internet has been doubling in power and continues to , measured many different ways .
this is based on the number of hosts .
miniaturization - we 're shrinking the size of technology at an exponential rate , both wired and wireless .
these are some designs from eric drexler 's book - which we 're now showing are feasible with super-computing simulations , where actually there are scientists building molecule-scale robots .
one has one that actually walks with a surprisingly human-like gait , that 's built out of molecules .
there are little machines doing things in experimental bases .
the most exciting opportunity is actually to go inside the human body and perform therapeutic and diagnostic functions .
and this is less futuristic than it may sound .
these things have already been done in animals .
there 's one nano-engineered device that cures type 1 diabetes . it 's blood cell-sized .
they put tens of thousands of these in the blood cell - they tried this in rats - it lets insulin out in a controlled fashion , and actually cures type 1 diabetes .
what you 're watching is a design of a robotic red blood cell , and it does bring up the issue that our biology is actually very sub-optimal , even though it 's remarkable in its intricacy .
once we understand its principles of operation , and the pace with which we are reverse-engineering biology is accelerating , we can actually design these things to be thousands of times more capable .
an analysis of this respirocyte , designed by rob freitas , indicates if you replace 10 percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions , you could do an olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath .
you could sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours - so , " honey , i 'm in the pool , " will take on a whole new meaning .
it will be interesting to see what we do in our olympic trials .
presumably we 'll ban them , but then we 'll have the specter of teenagers in their high schools gyms routinely out-performing the olympic athletes .
freitas has a design for a robotic white blood cell .
these are 2020-circa scenarios , but they 're not as futuristic as it may sound .
there are four major conferences on building blood cell-sized devices ; there are many experiments in animals .
there 's actually one going into human trial , so this is feasible technology .
if we come back to our exponential growth of computing , 1,000 dollars of computing is now somewhere between an insect and a mouse brain .
it will intersect human intelligence in terms of capacity in the 2020s , but that 'll be the hardware side of the equation .
where will we get the software ?
well , it turns out we can see inside the human brain , and in fact not surprisingly , the spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year .
and with the new generation of scanning tools , for the first time we can actually see individual inter-neural fibers and see them processing and signaling in real time - but then the question is , ok , we can get this data now , but can we understand it ?
doug hofstadter wonders , well , maybe our intelligence just is n't great enough to understand our intelligence , and if we were smarter , well , then our brains would be that much more complicated , and we 'd never catch up to it .
it turns out that we can understand it .
this is a block diagram of a model and simulation of the human auditory cortex that actually works quite well - in applying psychoacoustic tests , gets very similar results to human auditory perception .
there 's another simulation of the cerebellum - that 's more than half the neurons in the brain - again , works very similarly to human skill formation .
this is at an early stage , but you can show with the exponential growth of the amount of information about the brain and the exponential improvement in the resolution of brain scanning , we will succeed in reverse-engineering the human brain by the 2020s .
we 've already had very good models and simulation of about 15 regions out of the several hundred .
all of this is driving exponentially growing economic progress .
we 've had productivity go from 30 dollars to 150 dollars per hour of labor in the last 50 years .
e-commerce has been growing exponentially . it 's now a trillion dollars .
you might wonder , well , was n't there a boom and a bust ?
that was strictly a capital-markets phenomena .
wall street noticed that this was a revolutionary technology , which it was , but then six months later , when it had n't revolutionized all business models , they figured , well , that was wrong , and then we had this bust .
all right , this is a technology that we put together using some of the technologies we 're involved in .
this will be a routine feature in a cell phone .
it would be able to translate from one language to another .
so let me just end with a couple of scenarios .
by 2010 computers will disappear .
they 'll be so small , they 'll be embedded in our clothing , in our environment .
images will be written directly to our retina , providing full-immersion virtual reality , augmented real reality . we 'll be interacting with virtual personalities .
but if we go to 2029 , we really have the full maturity of these trends , and you have to appreciate how many turns of the screw in terms of generations of technology , which are getting faster and faster , we 'll have at that point .
i mean , we will have two-to-the-25th-power greater price performance , capacity and bandwidth of these technologies , which is pretty phenomenal .
it 'll be millions of times more powerful than it is today .
we 'll have completed the reverse-engineering of the human brain , 1,000 dollars of computing will be far more powerful than the human brain in terms of basic raw capacity .
computers will combine the subtle pan-recognition powers of human intelligence with ways in which machines are already superior , in terms of doing analytic thinking , remembering billions of facts accurately .
machines can share their knowledge very quickly .
but it 's not just an alien invasion of intelligent machines .
we are going to merge with our technology .
these nano-bots i mentioned will first be used for medical and health applications : cleaning up the environment , providing powerful fuel cells and widely distributed decentralized solar panels and so on in the environment .
but they 'll also go inside our brain , interact with our biological neurons .
we 've demonstrated the key principles of being able to do this .
so , for example , full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system , the nano-bots shut down the signals coming from your real senses , replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment , and then it 'll feel like you 're in that virtual environment .
you can go there with other people , have any kind of experience with anyone involving all of the senses .
" experience beamers , " i call them , will put their whole flow of sensory experiences in the neurological correlates of their emotions out on the internet .
you can plug in and experience what it 's like to be someone else .
but most importantly , it 'll be a tremendous expansion of human intelligence through this direct merger with our technology , which in some sense we 're doing already .
we routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without our technology .
human life expectancy is expanding . it was 37 in 1800 , and with this sort of biotechnology , nano-technology revolutions , this will move up very rapidly in the years ahead .
my main message is that progress in technology is exponential , not linear .
many - even scientists - assume a linear model , so they 'll say , " oh , it 'll be hundreds of years before we have self-replicating nano-technology assembly or artificial intelligence . "
if you really look at the power of exponential growth , you 'll see that these things are pretty soon at hand .
and information technology is increasingly encompassing all of our lives , from our music to our manufacturing to our biology to our energy to materials .
we 'll be able to manufacture almost anything we need in the 2020s , from information , in very inexpensive raw materials , using nano-technology .
these are very powerful technologies .
they both empower our promise and our peril .
so we have to have the will to apply them to the right problems .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think it was in my second grade that i was caught drawing the bust of a nude by michelangelo .
i was sent straight away to my school principal , and my school principal , a sweet nun , looked at my book with disgust , flipped through the pages , saw all the nudes - you know , i 'd been seeing my mother draw nudes and i 'd copy her - and the nun slapped me on my face and said , " sweet jesus , this kid has already begun . "
i had no clue what she was talking about , but it was convincing enough for me never to draw again until the ninth grade .
thanks to a really boring lecture , i started caricaturing my teachers in school .
and , you know , i got a lot of popularity .
i do n't play sports . i 'm really bad at sports .
i do n't have the fanciest gadgets at home .
i 'm not on top of the class .
so for me , cartooning gave me a sense of identity .
i got popular , but i was scared i 'd get caught again .
so what i did was i quickly put together a collage of all the teachers i had drawn , glorified my school principal , put him right on top , and gifted it to him .
he had a good laugh at the other teachers and put it up on the notice board .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a part of that .
and i became a school hero .
all my seniors knew me . i felt really special .
i have to tell you a little bit about my family .
that 's my mother . i love her to bits .
she 's the one who taught me how to draw and , more importantly , how to love .
she 's a bit of a hippie .
she said , " do n't say that , " but i 'm saying it anyway .
the rest of my family are boring academics , busy collecting ivy league decals for our classic ambassador car .
my father 's a little different .
my father believed in a holistic approach to living , and , you know , every time he taught us , he 'd say , " i hate these books , because these books are hijacked by industrial revolution . "
while he still held that worldview , i was 16 , i got the best lawyer in town , my older brother karthik , and i sat him down , and i said , " pa , from today onwards i 've decided i 'm going to be disciplined , i 'm going to be curious , i 'm going to learn something new every day , i 'm going to be very hard working , and i 'm not going to depend on you emotionally or financially . "
and he was very impressed . he was all tearing up . ready to hug me .
and i said , " hold that thought . "
i said , " can i quit school then ? "
but , to cut a long story short , i quit school to pursue a career as a cartoonist .
i must have done about 30,000 caricatures .
i would do birthday parties , weddings , divorces , anything for anyone who wanted to use my services .
but , most importantly , while i was traveling , i taught children cartooning , and in exchange , i learned how to be spontaneous .
and mad and crazy and fun .
when i started teaching them , i said let me start doing this professionally .
when i was 18 i started my own school .
however , an 18 year-old trying to start a school is not easy unless you have a big patron or a big supporter .
so i was flipping through the pages of the times of india when i saw that the prime minister of india was visiting my home town , bangalore .
and , you know , just like how every cartoonist knows bush here , and if you had to meet bush , it would be the funnest thing because his face was a cartoonist 's delight .
i had to meet my prime minister .
i went to the place where his helicopter was about to land .
i saw layers of security .
i caricatured my way through three layers by just impressing the guards , but i got stuck . i got stuck at the third .
and what happened was , to my luck , i saw a nuclear scientist at whose party i had done cartoons .
i ran up to him , and said , " hello , sir . how do you do ? "
he said , " what are you doing here , raghava ? "
i said , " i 'm here to meet the prime minister . "
he said , " oh , so am i. "
i hopped into his car , and off we went through the remaining layers of security .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i sat him down , i caricatured him , and since then i 've caricatured hundreds of celebrities .
this is one i remember fondly .
salman rushdie was pissed-off i think because i altered the map of new york , if you notice .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , the next slide i 'm about to show you - -lrb- laughter -rrb- should i just turn that off ?
the next slide i 'm about to show you , is a little more serious .
i was hesitant to include this in my presentation because this cartoon was published soon after 9/11 .
what was , for me , a very naive observation , turned out to be a disaster .
that evening , i came home to hundreds of hate mails , hundreds of people telling me how they could have lived another day without seeing this .
i was also asked to leave the organization , a cartoonists ' organization in america , that for me was my lifeline .
that 's when i realized , you know , cartoons are really powerful , art comes with responsibility .
anyway , what i did was i decided that i need to take a break .
i quit my job at the papers , i closed my school , and i wrapped up my pencils and my brushes and inks , and i decided to go traveling .
when i went traveling , i remember , i met this fabulous old man , who i met when i was caricaturing , who turned out to be an artist , in italy .
he invited me to his studio . he said , " come and visit . "
when i went , i saw the ghastliest thing ever .
i saw this dead , naked effigy of himself hanging from the ceiling .
i said , " oh , my god . what is that ? "
and i asked him , and he said , " oh , that thing ? in the night , i die .
in the morning , i am born again . "
i thought he was koo koo , but something about that really stuck .
i loved it . i thought there was something really beautiful about that .
so i said , " i am dead , so i need to be born again . "
so , i wanted to be a painter like him , except , i do n't know how to paint .
so , i tried going to the art store .
you know , there are a hundred types of brushes .
forget it , they will confuse you even if you know how to draw .
so i decided , i 'm going to learn to paint by myself .
i 'm going to show you a very quick clip to show you how i painted and a little bit about my city , bangalore .
-lrb- music -rrb- they had to be larger than life .
everything had to be larger . the next painting was even bigger .
and even bigger .
and for me it was , i had to dance while i painted .
it was so exciting .
except , i even started painting dancers .
here for example is a flamenco dancer , except there was one problem .
i did n't know the dance form , so i started following them , and i made some money , sold my paintings and would rush off to france or spain and work with them .
that 's pepe linares , the renowned flamenco singer .
but i had one problem , my paintings never danced .
as much energy as i put into them while making them , they never danced .
so i decided - i had this crazy epiphany at two in the morning .
i called my friends , painted on their bodies , and had them dance in front of a painting .
and , all of a sudden , my paintings came alive .
and then i was fortunate enough to actually perform this in california with velocity circus .
and i sat like you guys there in the audience .
and i saw my work come alive .
you know , normally you work in isolation , and you show at a gallery , but here , the work was coming alive , and it had some other artists working with me .
the collaborative effort was fabulous .
i said , i 'm going to collaborate with anybody and everybody i meet .
i started doing fashion .
this is a fashion show we held in london .
the best collaboration , of course , is with children .
they are ruthless , they are honest , but they 're full of energy and fun .
this is a work , a library i designed for the robin hood foundation .
and i must say , i spent time in the bronx working with these kids .
and , in exchange for me working with them , they taught me how to be cool .
i do n't think i 've succeeded , but they 've taught me .
they said , " stop saying sorry . say , my bad . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then i said , all this is good , but i want to paint like a real painter .
american education is so expensive .
i was in india , and i was walking down the streets , and i saw a billboard painter .
and these guys paint humongous paintings , and they look really good .
and i wondered how they did it from so close .
so , one day i had the opportunity to meet one of these guys , and i said , " how do you paint like that ? who taught you ? "
and he said , " oh , it 's very easy . i can teach you , but we 're leaving the city , because billboard painters are a dying , extinct bunch of artists , because digital printing has totally replaced them and hijacked them . "
i said , in exchange for education in how to paint , i will support them , and i started a company .
and since then , i 've been painting all over the place .
this is a painting i did of my wife in my apartment .
this is another painting .
and , in fact , i started painting on anything , and started sending them around town .
since i mentioned my wife , the most important collaboration has been with her , netra .
netra and i met when she was 18 .
i must have been 19 and a half then , and it was love at first sight .
i lived in india . she lived in america .
she 'd come every two months to visit me , and then i said i 'm the man , i 'm the man , and i have to reciprocate .
i have to travel seven oceans , and i have to come and see you .
i did that twice , and i went broke .
so then i said , " nets , what do i do ? "
she said , " why do n't you send me your paintings ?
my dad knows a bunch of rich guys .
we 'll try and con them into buying it , and then ... "
but it turned out , after i sent the works to her , that her dad 's friends , like most of you , are geeks .
i 'm joking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , they were really big geeks , and they did n't know much about art .
so netra was stuck with 30 paintings of mine .
so what we did was we rented a little van and we drove all over the east coast trying to sell it .
she contacted anyone and everyone who was willing to buy my work .
she made enough money , she sold off the whole collection and made enough money to move me for four years with lawyers , a company , everything , and she became my manager .
that 's us in new york .
notice one thing , we 're equal here .
something happened along the line .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this brought me - with netra managing my career - it brought me a lot of success .
i was really happy . i thought of myself as a bit of a rockstar .
i loved the attention .
this is all the press we got , and we said , it 's time to celebrate .
and i said that the best way to celebrate is to marry netra .
i said , " let 's get married . "
and i said , " not just married . let 's invite everyone who 's helped us , all the people who bought our work . "
and you wo n't believe it , we put together a list of 7,000 people , who had made a difference - a ridiculous list , but i was determined to bring them to india , so - a lot of them were in india .
150 artists volunteered to help me with my wedding .
we had fashion designers , installation artists , models , we had makeup artists , jewelry designers , all kinds of people working with me to make my wedding an art installation .
and i had a special installation in tribute to my in-laws .
i had the vegetable carvers work on that for me .
but all this excitement led to the press writing about us .
we were in the papers , we 're still in the news three years later , but , unfortunately , something tragic happened right after .
my mother fell very ill .
i love my mother and i was told all of a sudden that she was going to die .
and they said you have to say bye to her , you have to do what you have to do .
and i was devastated .
i had shows booked up for another year .
i was on a high .
and i could n't . i could not .
my life was not exuberant .
i could not live this larger than life person .
i started exploring the darker abscesses of the human mind .
of course , my work turned ugly , but another thing happened .
i lost all my audiences .
the bollywood stars who i would party with and buy my work disappeared .
the collectors , the friends , the press , everyone said , " nice , but thank you . "
" no thank you , " was more like it .
but i wanted people to actually feel my work from their gut , because i was painting it from my gut .
if they wanted beauty , i said , this is the beauty i 'm willing to give you . it 's politicized .
of course , none of them liked it .
my works also turned autobiographical .
at this point , something else happened .
a very , very dear friend of mine came out of the closet , and in india at that time , it was illegal to be gay , and it 's disgusting to see how people respond to a gay person .
i was very upset .
i remember the time when my mother used to dress me up as a little girl - that 's me there - because she wanted a girl , and she has only boys .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i do n't know what my friends are going to say after this talk .
it 's a secret .
so , after this , my works turned a little violent .
i talked about this masculinity that one need not perform .
and i talked about the weakness of male sexuality .
this time , not only did my collectors disappear , the political activists decided to ban me and to threaten me and to forbid me from showing .
it turned nasty , and i 'm a bit of a chicken .
i ca n't deal with any threat . this was a big threat .
so , i decided it was time to end and go back home .
this time i said let 's try something different .
i need to be reborn again .
and i thought the best way , as most of you know who have children , the best way to have a new lease on life , is to have a child .
i decided to have a child , and before i did that , i quickly studied what can go wrong .
how can a family get dysfunctional ?
and rudra was born .
that 's my little son .
and two magical things happened after he was born .
my mother miraculously recovered after a serious operation , and this man was elected president of this country .
you know i sat at home and i watched .
i teared up and i said that 's where i want to be .
so netra and i wound up our life , closed up everything we had , and we decided to move to new york .
and this was just eight months ago .
i moved back to new york , my work has changed .
everything about my work has become more whimsical .
this one is called " what the fuck was i thinking ? "
it talks about mental incest .
you know , i may appear to be a very nice , clean , sweet boy .
but i 'm not . i 'm capable of thinking anything .
but i 'm very civil in my action , i assure you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are just different cartoons .
and , before i go , i want to tell you a little story .
i was talking to mother and father this morning , and my dad said , " i know you have so much you want to say , but you have to talk about your work with children . "
so i said , okay .
i work with children all over the world , and that 's an entirely different talk , but i want to leave you with one story that really , really inspired me .
i met belinda when she was 16 .
i was 17 .
i was in australia , and belinda had cancer , and i was told she 's not going to live very long .
they , in fact , told me three weeks .
i walk into her room , and there was a shy girl , and she was bald , and she was trying to hide her baldness .
i whipped out my pen , and i started drawing on her head and i drew a crown for her .
and then , we started talking , and we spent a lovely time - i told her how i ended up in australia , how i backpacked and who i conned , and how i got a ticket , and all the stories .
and i drew it out for her .
and then i left .
belinda died and within a few days of her death , they published a book for her , and she used my cartoon on the cover .
and she wrote a little note , she said , " hey rags , thank you for the magic carpet ride around the world . "
for me , my art is my magic carpet ride .
i hope you will join me in this magic carpet ride , and touch children and be honest .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- two years ago , after having served four years in the united states marine corps and deployments to both iraq and afghanistan , i found myself in port-au-prince , leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city , three days after the earthquake .
we were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go , the places nobody else could go , and after three weeks , we realized something . military veterans are very , very good at disaster response .
and coming home , my cofounder and i , we looked at it , and we said , there are two problems .
the first problem is there 's inadequate disaster response .
it 's slow . it 's antiquated . it 's not using the best technology , and it 's not using the best people .
the second problem that we became aware of was a very inadequate veteran reintegration , and this is a topic that is front page news right now as veterans are coming home from iraq and afghanistan , and they 're struggling to reintegrate into civilian life .
and we sat here and we looked at these two problems , and finally we came to a realization . these are n't problems .
these are actually solutions . and what do i mean by that ?
well , we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home .
recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform .
and we can use veterans to improve disaster response .
now on the surface , this makes a lot of sense , and in 2010 , we responded to the tsunami in chile , the floods in pakistan , we sent training teams to the thai-burma border .
but it was earlier this year , when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization .
this is clay hunt . clay was a marine with me .
we served together in iraq and afghanistan .
clay was with us in port-au-prince . he was also with us in chile .
earlier this year , in march , clay took his own life .
this was a tragedy , but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing .
you know , clay did n't kill himself because of what happened in iraq and afghanistan . clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home .
he lost purpose . he lost his community .
and perhaps most tragically , he lost his self-worth .
and so , as we evaluated , and as the dust settled from this tragedy , we realized that , of those two problems - in the initial iteration of our organization , we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service . we had a lot of success , and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm .
but after clay , we shifted that focus , and suddenly , now moving forward , we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that 's using disaster response .
because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran .
and tornadoes in tuscaloosa and joplin , and then later hurricane irene , gave us an opportunity to look at that .
now i want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in kansas city , missouri .
he joins the army . the army gives him a rifle .
they send him to iraq .
every day he leaves the wire with a mission .
that mission is to defend the freedom of the family that he left at home .
it 's to keep the men around him alive .
it 's to pacify the village that he works in .
he 's got a purpose . but he comes home -lsb- to -rsb- kansas city , missouri , maybe he goes to college , maybe he 's got a job , but he does n't have that same sense of purpose .
you give him a chainsaw . you send him to joplin , missouri after a tornado , he regains that .
going back , that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in kansas city , missouri , joins the army , the army gives him a rifle , they send him to iraq .
every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him .
he leaves the wire . he knows that those people have his back .
he 's slept in the same sand . they 've lived together .
they 've eaten together . they 've bled together .
he goes home to kansas city , missouri .
he gets out of the military . he takes his uniform off .
he does n't have that community anymore .
but you drop 25 of those veterans in joplin , missouri , they get that sense of community back .
again , you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in kansas city .
he joins the army . the army gives him a rifle .
they send him to iraq .
they pin a medal on his chest . he goes home to a ticker tape parade .
he takes the uniform off . he 's no longer sergeant jones in his community . he 's now dave from kansas city .
he does n't have that same self-worth .
but you send him to joplin after a tornado , and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service , now they have self-worth again .
i think it 's very important , because right now somebody needs to step up , and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- life is about opportunities , creating them and embracing them , and for me , that was the olympic dream .
that 's what defined me . that was my bliss .
as a cross-country skier and member of the australian ski team , headed towards the winter olympics , i was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates .
as we made our way up towards the spectacular blue mountains west of sydney , it was the perfect autumn day : sunshine , the smell of eucalypt and a dream .
life was good .
we 'd been on our bikes for around five and half hours when we got to the part of the ride that i loved , and that was the hills , because i loved the hills .
and i got up off the seat of my bike , and i started pumping my legs , and as i sucked in the cold mountain air , i could feel it burning my lungs , and i looked up to see the sun shining in my face .
and then everything went black .
where was i ? what was happening ?
my body was consumed by pain .
i 'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride .
i was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in sydney .
i had extensive and life-threatening injuries .
i 'd broken my neck and my back in six places .
i broke five ribs on my left side .
i broke my right arm . i broke my collarbone .
i broke some bones in my feet .
my whole right side was ripped open , filled with gravel .
my head was cut open across the front , lifted back , exposing the skull underneath .
i had head injures . i had internal injuries .
i had massive blood loss . in fact , i lost about five liters of blood , which is all someone my size would actually hold .
by the time the helicopter arrived at prince henry hospital in sydney , my blood pressure was 40 over nothing .
i was having a really bad day . -lrb- laughter -rrb- for over 10 days , i drifted between two dimensions .
i had an awareness of being in my body , but also being out of my body , somewhere else , watching from above as if it was happening to someone else .
why would i want to go back to a body that was so broken ?
but this voice kept calling me : " come on , stay with me . "
" no . it 's too hard . "
" come on . this is our opportunity . "
" no . that body is broken . it can no longer serve me . "
" come on . stay with me . we can do it . we can do it together . "
i was at a crossroads .
i knew if i did n't return to my body , i 'd have to leave this world forever .
it was the fight of my life .
after 10 days , i made the decision to return to my body , and the internal bleeding stopped .
the next concern was whether i would walk again , because i was paralyzed from the waist down .
they said to my parents , the neck break was a stable fracture , but the back was completely crushed .
the vertebra at l1 was like you 'd dropped a peanut , stepped on it , smashed it into thousands of pieces .
they 'd have to operate .
they went in . they put me on a beanbag . they cut me , literally cut me in half , i have a scar that wraps around my entire body .
they picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord .
they took out two of my broken ribs , and they rebuilt my back , l1 , they rebuilt it , they took out another broken rib , they fused t12 , l1 and l2 together .
then they stitched me up . they took an entire hour to stitch me up .
i woke up in intensive care , and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success because at that stage i had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes , and i thought , " great , because i 'm going to the olympics ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i had no idea . that 's the sort of thing that happens to someone else , not me , surely .
but then the doctor came over to me , and she said , " janine , the operation was a success , and we 've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could , but the damage is permanent .
the central nervous system nerves , there is no cure .
you 're what we call a partial paraplegic , and you 'll have all of the injuries that go along with that .
you have no feeling from the waist down , and at most , you might get 10- or 20-percent return .
you 'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life .
you 'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life .
and if you walk again , it will be with calipers and a walking frame . "
and then she said , " janine , you 'll have to rethink everything you do in your life , because you 're never going to be able to do the things you did before . "
i tried to grasp what she was saying .
i was an athlete . that 's all i knew . that 's all i 'd done .
if i could n't do that , then what could i do ?
and the question i asked myself is , if i could n't do that , then who was i ?
they moved me from intensive care to acute spinal .
i was lying on a thin , hard spinal bed .
i had no movement in my legs . i had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots .
i had one arm in plaster , one arm tied down by drips .
i had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and i saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head .
i shared the ward with five other people , and the amazing thing is that because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward , we did n't know what each other looked like .
how amazing is that ? how often in life do you get to make friendships , judgment-free , purely based on spirit ?
and there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts , our fears , and our hopes for life after the spinal ward .
i remember one night , one of the nurses came in , jonathan , with a whole lot of plastic straws .
he put a pile on top of each of us , and he said , " start threading them together . "
well , there was n't much else to do in the spinal ward , so we did .
and when we 'd finished , he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward , and then he said , " okay , everybody , hold on to your straws . "
and we did . and he said , " right . now we 're all connected . "
and as we held on , and we breathed as one , we knew we were n't on this journey alone .
and even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward , there were moments of incredible depth and richness , of authenticity and connection that i had never experienced before .
and each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward we would never be the same .
after six months , it was time to go home .
i remember dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair , wrapped in a plaster body cast , and feeling the sun on my face for the first time .
i soaked it up and i thought , how could i ever have taken this for granted ?
i felt so incredibly grateful for my life .
but before i left the hospital , the head nurse had said to me , " janine , i want you to be ready , because when you get home , something 's going to happen . "
and i said , " what ? " and she said , " you 're going to get depressed . "
and i said , " not me , not janine the machine , " which was my nickname .
she said , " you are , because , see , it happens to everyone .
in the spinal ward , that 's normal .
you 're in a wheelchair . that 's normal .
but you 're going to get home and realize how different life is . "
and i got home and something happened .
i realized sister sam was right .
i did get depressed .
i was in my wheelchair . i had no feeling from the waist down , attached to a catheter bottle . i could n't walk .
i 'd lost so much weight in the hospital i now weighed about 80 pounds .
and i wanted to give up .
all i wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door .
i wanted my old life back . i wanted my body back .
and i can remember mom sitting on the end of my bed , and saying , " i wonder if life will ever be good again . "
and i thought , " how could it ? because i 've lost everything that i valued , everything that i 'd worked towards .
gone . "
and the question i asked was , " why me ? why me ? "
and then i remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward , particularly maria .
maria was in a car accident , and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic , had no movement from the neck down , had damage to her vocal chords , and she could n't talk .
they told me , " we 're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her . "
i was worried . i did n't know how i 'd react to being next to her .
i knew it would be challenging , but it was actually a blessing , because maria always smiled .
she was always happy , and even when she began to talk again , albeit difficult to understand , she never complained , not once .
and i wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance .
and i realized that this was n't just my life .
it was life itself . i realized that this was n't just my pain .
it was everybody 's pain . and then i knew , just like before , that i had a choice . i could keep fighting this or i could let go and accept not only my body but the circumstances of my life .
and then i stopped asking , " why me ? "
and i started to ask , " why not me ? "
and then i thought to myself , maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start .
i had never before thought of myself as a creative person .
i was an athlete . my body was a machine .
but now i was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do : that of rebuilding a life .
and even though i had absolutely no idea what i was going to do , in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom .
i was no longer tied to a set path .
i was free to explore life 's infinite possibilities .
and that realization was about to change my life .
sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast , an airplane flew overhead , and i looked up , and i thought to myself , " that 's it !
if i ca n't walk , then i might as well fly . "
i said , " mom , i 'm going to learn how to fly . "
she said , " that 's nice , dear . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " pass me the yellow pages . "
she passed me the phone book , i rang up the flying school , i made a booking , said i 'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight .
they said , " you know , when do you want to come out ? "
i said , " well , i have to get a friend to drive me out because i ca n't drive . sort of ca n't walk either .
is that a problem ? "
i made a booking , and weeks later my friend chris and my mom drove me out to the airport , all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i can tell you , i did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot 's license . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm holding on to the counter because i ca n't stand .
i said , " hi , i 'm here for a flying lesson . "
and they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws .
" you get her . " " no , no , you take her . "
finally this guy comes out . he goes , " hi , i 'm andrew , and i 'm going to take you flying . "
i go , " great . " and so they drive me down , they get me out on the tarmac , and there was this red , white and blue airplane .
it was beautiful . they lifted me into the cockpit .
they had to slide me up on the wing , put me in the cockpit .
they sat me down . there are buttons and dials everywhere .
i 'm going , " wow , how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do ? "
andrew the instructor got in the front , started the airplane up .
he said , " would you like to have a go at taxiing ? "
that 's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground .
i said , " no , i ca n't use my legs . "
he went , " oh . "
i said , " but i can use my hands , " and he said , " okay . "
so he got over to the runway , and he applied the power .
and as we took off down the runway , and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac , and we became airborne , i had the most incredible sense of freedom .
and andrew said to me , as we got over the training area , " you see that mountain over there ? "
and i said , " yeah . "
and he said , " well , you take the controls , and you fly towards that mountain . "
and as i looked up , i realized that he was pointing towards the blue mountains where the journey had begun .
and i took the controls , and i was flying .
and i was a long , long way from that spinal ward , and i knew right then that i was going to be a pilot .
did n't know how on earth i 'd ever pass a medical .
but i 'd worry about that later , because right now i had a dream .
so i went home , i got a training diary out , and i had a plan .
and i practiced my walking as much as i could , and i went from the point of two people holding me up to one person holding me up to the point where i could walk around the furniture as long as it was n't too far apart .
and then i made great progression to the point where i could walk around the house , holding onto the walls , like this , and mom said she was forever following me , wiping off my fingerprints . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but at least she always knew where i was .
so while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again , i went on with my theory study , and then eventually , and amazingly , i passed my pilot 's medical , and that was my green light to fly .
and i spent every moment i could out at that flying school , way out of my comfort zone , all these young guys that wanted to be qantas pilots , you know , and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast , and then my steel brace , my baggy overalls , my bag of medication and catheters and my limp , and they used to look at me and think , " oh , who is she kidding ? she 's never going to be able to do this . "
and sometimes i thought that too .
but that did n't matter , because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries .
and little goals kept me going along the way , and eventually i got my private pilot 's license , and then i learned to navigate , and i flew my friends around australia .
and then i learned to fly an airplane with two engines and i got my twin engine rating .
and then i learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather and got my instrument rating .
and then i got my commercial pilot 's license .
and then i got my instructor rating .
and then i found myself back at that same school where i 'd gone for that very first flight , teaching other people how to fly , just under 18 months after i 'd left the spinal ward .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and then i thought , " why stop there ?
why not learn to fly upside down ? "
and i did , and i learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor .
and mom and dad ? never been up .
but then i knew for certain that although my body might be limited , it was my spirit that was unstoppable .
the philosopher lao tzu once said , " when you let go of what you are , you become what you might be . "
i now know that it was n't until i let go of who i thought i was that i was able to create a completely new life .
it was n't until i let go of the life i thought i should have that i was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me .
i now know that my real strength never came from my body , and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically , who i am is unchanged .
the pilot light inside of me was still a light , just as it is in each and every one of us .
i know that i 'm not my body , and i also know that you 're not yours .
and then it no longer matters what you look like , where you come from , or what you do for a living .
all that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are , because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws , and it 's time to join those up and to hang on .
and if we are to move towards our collective bliss , it 's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart .
so raise your straws if you 'll join me .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
there 's a poem written by a very famous english poet at the end of the 19th century .
it was said to echo in churchill 's brain in the 1930s .
and the poem goes : " on the idle hill of summer , lazy with the flow of streams , hark i hear a distant drummer , drumming like a sound in dreams , far and near and low and louder on the roads of earth go by , dear to friend and food to powder , soldiers marching , soon to die . "
those who are interested in poetry , the poem is " a shropshire lad " written by a.e. housman .
but what housman understood , and you hear it in the symphonies of nielsen too , was that the long , hot , silvan summers of stability of the 19th century were coming to a close , and that we were about to move into one of those terrifying periods of history when power changes .
and these are always periods , ladies and gentlemen , accompanied by turbulence , and all too often by blood .
and my message for you is that i believe we are condemned , if you like , to live at just one of those moments in history when the gimbals upon which the established order of power is beginning to change and the new look of the world , the new powers that exist in the world , are beginning to take form .
and these are - and we see it very clearly today - nearly always highly turbulent times , highly difficult times , and all too often very bloody times .
by the way , it happens about once every century .
you might argue that the last time it happened - and that 's what housman felt coming and what churchill felt too - was that when power passed from the old nations , the old powers of europe , across the atlantic to the new emerging power of the united states of america - the beginning of the american century .
and of course , into the vacuum where the too-old european powers used to be were played the two bloody catastrophes of the last century - the one in the first part and the one in the second part : the two great world wars .
mao zedong used to refer to them as the european civil wars , and it 's probably a more accurate way of describing them .
well , ladies and gentlemen , we live at one of those times .
but for us , i want to talk about three factors today .
and the first of these , the first two of these , is about a shift in power .
and the second is about some new dimension which i want to refer to , which has never quite happened in the way it 's happening now .
but let 's talk about the shifts of power that are occurring to the world .
and what is happening today is , in one sense , frightening because it 's never happened before .
we have seen lateral shifts of power - the power of greece passed to rome and the power shifts that occurred during the european civilizations - but we are seeing something slightly different .
for power is not just moving laterally from nation to nation .
it 's also moving vertically .
what 's happening today is that the power that was encased , held to accountability , held to the rule of law , within the institution of the nation state has now migrated in very large measure onto the global stage .
the globalization of power - we talk about the globalization of markets , but actually it 's the globalization of real power .
and where , at the nation state level that power is held to accountability subject to the rule of law , on the international stage it is not .
the international stage and the global stage where power now resides : the power of the internet , the power of the satellite broadcasters , the power of the money changers - this vast money-go-round that circulates now 32 times the amount of money necessary for the trade it 's supposed to be there to finance - the money changers , if you like , the financial speculators that have brought us all to our knees quite recently , the power of the multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries .
these live in a global space which is largely unregulated , not subject to the rule of law , and in which people may act free of constraint .
now that suits the powerful up to a moment .
it 's always suitable for those who have the most power to operate in spaces without constraint , but the lesson of history is that , sooner or later , unregulated space - space not subject to the rule of law - becomes populated , not just by the things you wanted - international trade , the internet , etc . - but also by the things you do n't want - international criminality , international terrorism .
the revelation of 9/11 is that even if you are the most powerful nation on earth , nevertheless , those who inhabit that space can attack you even in your most iconic of cities one bright september morning .
it 's said that something like 60 percent of the four million dollars that was taken to fund 9/11 actually passed through the institutions of the twin towers which 9/11 destroyed .
you see , our enemies also use this space - the space of mass travel , the internet , satellite broadcasters - to be able to get around their poison , which is about destroying our systems and our ways .
sooner or later , sooner or later , the rule of history is that where power goes governance must follow .
and if it is therefore the case , as i believe it is , that one of the phenomenon of our time is the globalization of power , then it follows that one of the challenges of our time is to bring governance to the global space .
and i believe that the decades ahead of us now will be to a greater or lesser extent turbulent the more or less we are able to achieve that aim : to bring governance to the global space .
now notice , i 'm not talking about government .
i 'm not talking about setting up some global democratic institution .
my own view , by the way , ladies and gentlemen , is that this is unlikely to be done by spawning more u.n. institutions .
if we did n't have the u.n. , we 'd have to invent it .
the world needs an international forum .
it needs a means by which you can legitimize international action .
but when it comes to governance of the global space , my guess is this wo n't happen through the creation of more u.n. institutions .
it will actually happen by the powerful coming together and making treaty-based systems , treaty-based agreements , to govern that global space .
and if you look , you can see them happening , already beginning to emerge .
the world trade organization : treaty-based organization , entirely treaty-based , and yet , powerful enough to hold even the most powerful , the united states , to account if necessary .
kyoto : the beginnings of struggling to create a treaty-based organization .
the g20 : we know now that we have to put together an institution which is capable of bringing governance to that financial space for financial speculation .
and that 's what the g20 is , a treaty-based institution .
now there 's a problem there , and we 'll come back to it in a minute , which is that if you bring the most powerful together to make the rules in treaty-based institutions , to fill that governance space , then what happens to the weak who are left out ?
and that 's a big problem , and we 'll return to it in just a second .
so there 's my first message , that if you are to pass through these turbulent times more or less turbulently , then our success in doing that will in large measure depend on our capacity to bring sensible governance to the global space .
and watch that beginning to happen .
my second point is , and i know i do n't have to talk to an audience like this about such a thing , but power is not just shifting vertically , it 's also shifting horizontally .
you might argue that the story , the history of civilizations , has been civilizations gathered around seas - with the first ones around the mediterranean , the more recent ones in the ascendents of western power around the atlantic .
well it seems to me that we 're now seeing a fundamental shift of power , broadly speaking , away from nations gathered around the atlantic -lsb- seaboard -rsb- to the nations gathered around the pacific rim .
now that begins with economic power , but that 's the way it always begins .
you already begin to see the development of foreign policies , the augmentation of military budgets occurring in the other growing powers in the world .
i think actually this is not so much a shift from the west to the east ; something different is happening .
my guess is , for what it 's worth , is that the united states will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 10 years , 15 , but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered ; it has radically changed .
we are coming out of 50 years , most unusual years , of history in which we have had a totally mono-polar world , in which every compass needle for or against has to be referenced by its position to washington - a world bestrode by a single colossus .
but that 's not a usual case in history .
in fact , what 's now emerging is the much more normal case of history .
you 're beginning to see the emergence of a multi-polar world .
up until now , the united states has been the dominant feature of our world .
they will remain the most powerful nation , but they will be the most powerful nation in an increasingly multi-polar world .
and you begin to see the alternative centers of power building up - in china , of course , though my own guess is that china 's ascent to greatness is not smooth .
it 's going to be quite grumpy as china begins to democratize her society after liberalizing her economy .
but that 's a subject of a different discussion .
you see india , you see brazil .
you see increasingly that the world now looks actually , for us europeans , much more like europe in the 19th century .
europe in the 19th century : a great british foreign secretary , lord canning , used to describe it as the " european concert of powers . "
there was a balance , a five-sided balance .
britain always played to the balance .
if paris got together with berlin , britain got together with vienna and rome to provide a counterbalance .
now notice , in a period which is dominated by a mono-polar world , you have fixed alliances - nato , the warsaw pact .
a fixed polarity of power means fixed alliances .
but a multiple polarity of power means shifting and changing alliances .
and that 's the world we 're coming into , in which we will increasingly see that our alliances are not fixed .
canning , the great british foreign secretary once said , " britain has a common interest , but no common allies . "
and we will see increasingly that even we in the west will reach out , have to reach out , beyond the cozy circle of the atlantic powers to make alliances with others if we want to get things done in the world .
note , that when we went into libya , it was not good enough for the west to do it alone ; we had to bring others in .
we had to bring , in this case , the arab league in .
my guess is iraq and afghanistan are the last times when the west has tried to do it themselves , and we have n't succeeded .
my guess is that we 're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years - i say 400 years because it 's the end of the ottoman empire - of the hegemony of western power , western institutions and western values .
you know , up until now , if the west got its act together , it could propose and dispose in every corner of the world .
but that 's no longer true .
take the last financial crisis after the second world war .
the west got together - the bretton woods institution , world bank , international monetary fund - the problem solved .
now we have to call in others .
now we have to create the g20 .
now we have to reach beyond the cozy circle of our western friends .
let me make a prediction for you , which is probably even more startling .
i suspect we are now reaching the end of 400 years when western power was enough .
people say to me , " the chinese , of course , they 'll never get themselves involved in peace-making , multilateral peace-making around the world . "
oh yes ? why not ?
how many chinese troops are serving under the blue beret , serving under the blue flag , serving under the u.n. command in the world today ?
3,700 .
how many americans ? 11 .
what is the largest naval contingent tackling the issue of somali pirates ?
the chinese naval contingent .
of course they are , they are a mercantilist nation .
they want to keep the sea lanes open .
increasingly , we are going to have to do business with people with whom we do not share values , but with whom , for the moment , we share common interests .
it 's a whole new different way of looking at the world that is now emerging .
and here 's the third factor , which is totally different .
today in our modern world , because of the internet , because of the kinds of things people have been talking about here , everything is connected to everything .
we are now interdependent .
we are now interlocked , as nations , as individuals , in a way which has never been the case before , never been the case before .
the interrelationship of nations , well it 's always existed .
diplomacy is about managing the interrelationship of nations .
but now we are intimately locked together .
you get swine flu in mexico , it 's a problem for charles de gaulle airport 24 hours later .
lehman brothers goes down , the whole lot collapses .
there are fires in the steppes of russia , food riots in africa .
we are all now deeply , deeply , deeply interconnected .
and what that means is the idea of a nation state acting alone , not connected with others , not working with others , is no longer a viable proposition .
because the actions of a nation state are neither confined to itself , nor is it sufficient for the nation state itself to control its own territory , because the effects outside the nation state are now beginning to affect what happens inside them .
i was a young soldier in the last of the small empire wars of britain .
at that time , the defense of my country was about one thing and one thing only : how strong was our army , how strong was our air force , how strong was our navy and how strong were our allies .
that was when the enemy was outside the walls .
now the enemy is inside the walls .
now if i want to talk about the defense of my country , i have to speak to the minister of health because pandemic disease is a threat to my security , i have to speak to the minister of agriculture because food security is a threat to my security , i have to speak to the minister of industry because the fragility of our hi-tech infrastructure is now a point of attack for our enemies - as we see from cyber warfare - i have to speak to the minister of home affairs because who has entered my country , who lives in that terraced house in that inner city
has a direct effect on what happens in my country - as we in london saw in the 7/7 bombings .
it 's no longer the case that the security of a country is simply a matter for its soldiers and its ministry of defense .
it 's its capacity to lock together its institutions .
and this tells you something very important .
it tells you that , in fact , our governments , vertically constructed , constructed on the economic model of the industrial revolution - vertical hierarchy , specialization of tasks , command structures - have got the wrong structures completely .
you in business know that the paradigm structure of our time , ladies and gentlemen , is the network .
it 's your capacity to network that matters , both within your governments and externally .
so here is ashdown 's third law .
by the way , do n't ask me about ashdown 's first law and second law because i have n't invented those yet ; it always sounds better if there 's a third law , does n't it ?
ashdown 's third law is that in the modern age , where everything is connected to everything , the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others .
the most important bit about your structure - whether you 're a government , whether you 're an army regiment , whether you 're a business - is your docking points , your interconnectors , your capacity to network with others .
you understand that in industry ; governments do n't .
but now one final thing .
if it is the case , ladies and gentlemen - and it is - that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before , then it 's also the case that we share a destiny with each other .
suddenly and for the very first time , collective defense , the thing that has dominated us as the concept of securing our nations , is no longer enough .
it used to be the case that if my tribe was more powerful than their tribe , i was safe ; if my country was more powerful than their country , i was safe ; my alliance , like nato , was more powerful than their alliance , i was safe .
it is no longer the case .
the advent of the interconnectedness and of the weapons of mass destruction means that , increasingly , i share a destiny with my enemy .
when i was a diplomat negotiating the disarmament treaties with the soviet union in geneva in the 1970s , we succeeded because we understood we shared a destiny with them .
collective security is not enough .
peace has come to northern ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game could n't work .
they shared a destiny with their enemies .
one of the great barriers to peace in the middle east is that both sides , both israel and , i think , the palestinians , do not understand that they share a collective destiny .
and so suddenly , ladies and gentlemen , what has been the proposition of visionaries and poets down the ages becomes something we have to take seriously as a matter of public policy .
i started with a poem , i 'll end with one .
the great poem of john donne 's .
" send not for whom the bell tolls . "
the poem is called " no man is an island . "
and it goes : " every man 's death affected me , for i am involved in mankind , send not to ask for whom the bell tolls , it tolls for thee . "
for john donne , a recommendation of morality .
for us , i think , part of the equation for our survival .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as other speakers have said , it 's a rather daunting experience - a particularly daunting experience - to be speaking in front of this audience .
but unlike the other speakers , i 'm not going to tell you about the mysteries of the universe , or the wonders of evolution , or the really clever , innovative ways people are attacking the major inequalities in our world .
or even the challenges of nation-states in the modern global economy .
my brief , as you 've just heard , is to tell you about statistics - and , to be more precise , to tell you some exciting things about statistics .
and that 's - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that 's rather more challenging than all the speakers before me and all the ones coming after me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one of my senior colleagues told me , when i was a youngster in this profession , rather proudly , that statisticians were people who liked figures but did n't have the personality skills to become accountants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's another in-joke among statisticians , and that 's , " how do you tell the introverted statistician from the extroverted statistician ? "
to which the answer is , " the extroverted statistician 's the one who looks at the other person 's shoes . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i want to tell you something useful - and here it is , so concentrate now .
this evening , there 's a reception in the university 's museum of natural history .
and it 's a wonderful setting , as i hope you 'll find , and a great icon to the best of the victorian tradition .
it 's very unlikely - in this special setting , and this collection of people - but you might just find yourself talking to someone you 'd rather wish that you were n't .
so here 's what you do .
when they say to you , " what do you do ? " - you say , " i 'm a statistician . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , except they 've been pre-warned now , and they 'll know you 're making it up .
and then one of two things will happen .
they 'll either discover their long-lost cousin in the other corner of the room and run over and talk to them .
or they 'll suddenly become parched and / or hungry - and often both - and sprint off for a drink and some food .
and you 'll be left in peace to talk to the person you really want to talk to .
it 's one of the challenges in our profession to try and explain what we do .
we 're not top on people 's lists for dinner party guests and conversations and so on .
and it 's something i 've never really found a good way of doing .
but my wife - who was then my girlfriend - managed it much better than i 've ever been able to .
many years ago , when we first started going out , she was working for the bbc in britain , and i was , at that stage , working in america .
i was coming back to visit her .
she told this to one of her colleagues , who said , " well , what does your boyfriend do ? "
sarah thought quite hard about the things i 'd explained - and she concentrated , in those days , on listening .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do n't tell her i said that .
and she was thinking about the work i did developing mathematical models for understanding evolution and modern genetics .
so when her colleague said , " what does he do ? "
she paused and said , " he models things . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , her colleague suddenly got much more interested than i had any right to expect and went on and said , " what does he model ? "
well , sarah thought a little bit more about my work and said , " genes . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " he models genes . "
that is my first love , and that 's what i 'll tell you a little bit about .
what i want to do more generally is to get you thinking about the place of uncertainty and randomness and chance in our world , and how we react to that , and how well we do or do n't think about it .
so you 've had a pretty easy time up till now - a few laughs , and all that kind of thing - in the talks to date .
you 've got to think , and i 'm going to ask you some questions .
so here 's the scene for the first question i 'm going to ask you .
can you imagine tossing a coin successively ?
and for some reason - which shall remain rather vague - we 're interested in a particular pattern .
here 's one - a head , followed by a tail , followed by a tail .
so suppose we toss a coin repeatedly .
then the pattern , head-tail-tail , that we 've suddenly become fixated with happens here .
and you can count : one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 - it happens after the 10th toss .
so you might think there are more interesting things to do , but humor me for the moment .
imagine this half of the audience each get out coins , and they toss them until they first see the pattern head-tail-tail .
the first time they do it , maybe it happens after the 10th toss , as here .
the second time , maybe it 's after the fourth toss .
the next time , after the 15th toss .
so you do that lots and lots of times , and you average those numbers .
that 's what i want this side to think about .
the other half of the audience does n't like head-tail-tail - they think , for deep cultural reasons , that 's boring - and they 're much more interested in a different pattern - head-tail-head .
so , on this side , you get out your coins , and you toss and toss and toss .
and you count the number of times until the pattern head-tail-head appears and you average them . ok ?
so on this side , you 've got a number - you 've done it lots of times , so you get it accurately - which is the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail .
on this side , you 've got a number - the average number of tosses until head-tail-head .
so here 's a deep mathematical fact - if you 've got two numbers , one of three things must be true .
either they 're the same , or this one 's bigger than this one , or this one 's bigger than that one .
so what 's going on here ?
so you 've all got to think about this , and you 've all got to vote - and we 're not moving on .
and i do n't want to end up in the two-minute silence to give you more time to think about it , until everyone 's expressed a view . ok .
so what you want to do is compare the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-head with the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-tail .
who thinks that a is true - that , on average , it 'll take longer to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail ?
who thinks that b is true - that on average , they 're the same ?
who thinks that c is true - that , on average , it 'll take less time to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail ?
ok , who has n't voted yet ? because that 's really naughty - i said you had to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . so most people think b is true .
and you might be relieved to know even rather distinguished mathematicians think that .
it 's not . a is true here .
it takes longer , on average .
in fact , the average number of tosses till head-tail-head is 10 and the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail is eight .
how could that be ?
anything different about the two patterns ?
there is . head-tail-head overlaps itself .
if you went head-tail-head-tail-head , you can cunningly get two occurrences of the pattern in only five tosses .
you ca n't do that with head-tail-tail .
that turns out to be important .
there are two ways of thinking about this .
i 'll give you one of them .
so imagine - let 's suppose we 're doing it .
on this side - remember , you 're excited about head-tail-tail ; you 're excited about head-tail-head .
we start tossing a coin , and we get a head - and you start sitting on the edge of your seat because something great and wonderful , or awesome , might be about to happen .
the next toss is a tail - you get really excited .
the champagne 's on ice just next to you ; you 've got the glasses chilled to celebrate .
you 're waiting with bated breath for the final toss .
and if it comes down a head , that 's great .
you 're done , and you celebrate .
if it 's a tail - well , rather disappointedly , you put the glasses away and put the champagne back .
and you keep tossing , to wait for the next head , to get excited .
on this side , there 's a different experience .
it 's the same for the first two parts of the sequence .
you 're a little bit excited with the first head - you get rather more excited with the next tail .
then you toss the coin .
if it 's a tail , you crack open the champagne .
if it 's a head you 're disappointed , but you 're still a third of the way to your pattern again .
and that 's an informal way of presenting it - that 's why there 's a difference .
another way of thinking about it - if we tossed a coin eight million times , then we 'd expect a million head-tail-heads and a million head-tail-tails - but the head-tail-heads could occur in clumps .
so if you want to put a million things down amongst eight million positions and you can have some of them overlapping , the clumps will be further apart .
it 's another way of getting the intuition .
what 's the point i want to make ?
it 's a very , very simple example , an easily stated question in probability , which every - you 're in good company - everybody gets wrong .
this is my little diversion into my real passion , which is genetics .
there 's a connection between head-tail-heads and head-tail-tails in genetics , and it 's the following .
when you toss a coin , you get a sequence of heads and tails .
when you look at dna , there 's a sequence of not two things - heads and tails - but four letters - as , gs , cs and ts .
and there are little chemical scissors , called restriction enzymes which cut dna whenever they see particular patterns .
and they 're an enormously useful tool in modern molecular biology .
and instead of asking the question , " how long until i see a head-tail-head ? " - you can ask , " how big will the chunks be when i use a restriction enzyme which cuts whenever it sees g-a-a-g , for example ?
how long will those chunks be ? "
that 's a rather trivial connection between probability and genetics .
there 's a much deeper connection , which i do n't have time to go into and that is that modern genetics is a really exciting area of science .
and we 'll hear some talks later in the conference specifically about that .
but it turns out that unlocking the secrets in the information generated by modern experimental technologies , a key part of that has to do with fairly sophisticated - you 'll be relieved to know that i do something useful in my day job , rather more sophisticated than the head-tail-head story - but quite sophisticated computer modelings and mathematical modelings and modern statistical techniques .
and i will give you two little snippets - two examples - of projects we 're involved in in my group in oxford , both of which i think are rather exciting .
you know about the human genome project .
that was a project which aimed to read one copy of the human genome .
the natural thing to do after you 've done that - and that 's what this project , the international hapmap project , which is a collaboration between labs in five or six different countries .
think of the human genome project as learning what we 've got in common , and the hapmap project is trying to understand where there are differences between different people .
why do we care about that ?
well , there are lots of reasons .
the most pressing one is that we want to understand how some differences make some people susceptible to one disease - type-2 diabetes , for example - and other differences make people more susceptible to heart disease , or stroke , or autism and so on .
that 's one big project .
there 's a second big project , recently funded by the wellcome trust in this country , involving very large studies - thousands of individuals , with each of eight different diseases , common diseases like type-1 and type-2 diabetes , and coronary heart disease , bipolar disease and so on - to try and understand the genetics .
to try and understand what it is about genetic differences that causes the diseases .
why do we want to do that ?
because we understand very little about most human diseases .
we do n't know what causes them .
and if we can get in at the bottom and understand the genetics , we 'll have a window on the way the disease works , and a whole new way about thinking about disease therapies and preventative treatment and so on .
so that 's , as i said , the little diversion on my main love .
back to some of the more mundane issues of thinking about uncertainty .
here 's another quiz for you - now suppose we 've got a test for a disease which is n't infallible , but it 's pretty good .
it gets it right 99 percent of the time .
and i take one of you , or i take someone off the street , and i test them for the disease in question .
let 's suppose there 's a test for hiv - the virus that causes aids - and the test says the person has the disease .
what 's the chance that they do ?
the test gets it right 99 percent of the time .
so a natural answer is 99 percent .
who likes that answer ?
come on - everyone 's got to get involved .
do n't think you do n't trust me anymore .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , you 're right to be a bit skeptical , because that 's not the answer .
that 's what you might think .
it 's not the answer , and it 's not because it 's only part of the story .
it actually depends on how common or how rare the disease is .
so let me try and illustrate that .
here 's a little caricature of a million individuals .
so let 's think about a disease that affects - it 's pretty rare , it affects one person in 10,000 .
amongst these million individuals , most of them are healthy and some of them will have the disease .
and in fact , if this is the prevalence of the disease , about 100 will have the disease and the rest wo n't .
so now suppose we test them all .
what happens ?
well , amongst the 100 who do have the disease , the test will get it right 99 percent of the time , and 99 will test positive .
amongst all these other people who do n't have the disease , the test will get it right 99 percent of the time .
it 'll only get it wrong one percent of the time .
but there are so many of them that there 'll be an enormous number of false positives .
put that another way - of all of them who test positive - so here they are , the individuals involved - less than one in 100 actually have the disease .
so even though we think the test is accurate , the important part of the story is there 's another bit of information we need .
here 's the key intuition .
what we have to do , once we know the test is positive , is to weigh up the plausibility , or the likelihood , of two competing explanations .
each of those explanations has a likely bit and an unlikely bit .
one explanation is that the person does n't have the disease - that 's overwhelmingly likely , if you pick someone at random - but the test gets it wrong , which is unlikely .
the other explanation is that the person does have the disease - that 's unlikely - but the test gets it right , which is likely .
and the number we end up with - that number which is a little bit less than one in 100 - is to do with how likely one of those explanations is relative to the other .
each of them taken together is unlikely .
here 's a more topical example of exactly the same thing .
those of you in britain will know about what 's become rather a celebrated case of a woman called sally clark , who had two babies who died suddenly .
and initially , it was thought that they died of what 's known informally as " cot death , " and more formally as " sudden infant death syndrome . "
for various reasons , she was later charged with murder .
and at the trial , her trial , a very distinguished pediatrician gave evidence that the chance of two cot deaths , innocent deaths , in a family like hers - which was professional and non-smoking - was one in 73 million .
to cut a long story short , she was convicted at the time .
later , and fairly recently , acquitted on appeal - in fact , on the second appeal .
and just to set it in context , you can imagine how awful it is for someone to have lost one child , and then two , if they 're innocent , to be convicted of murdering them .
to be put through the stress of the trial , convicted of murdering them - and to spend time in a women 's prison , where all the other prisoners think you killed your children - is a really awful thing to happen to someone .
and it happened in large part here because the expert got the statistics horribly wrong , in two different ways .
so where did he get the one in 73 million number ?
he looked at some research , which said the chance of one cot death in a family like sally clark 's is about one in 8,500 .
so he said , " i 'll assume that if you have one cot death in a family , the chance of a second child dying from cot death are n't changed . "
so that 's what statisticians would call an assumption of independence .
it 's like saying , " if you toss a coin and get a head the first time , that wo n't affect the chance of getting a head the second time . "
so if you toss a coin twice , the chance of getting a head twice are a half - that 's the chance the first time - times a half - the chance a second time .
so he said , " here , i 'll assume that these events are independent .
when you multiply 8,500 together twice , you get about 73 million . "
and none of this was stated to the court as an assumption or presented to the jury that way .
unfortunately here - and , really , regrettably - first of all , in a situation like this you 'd have to verify it empirically .
and secondly , it 's palpably false .
there are lots and lots of things that we do n't know about sudden infant deaths .
it might well be that there are environmental factors that we 're not aware of , and it 's pretty likely to be the case that there are genetic factors we 're not aware of .
so if a family suffers from one cot death , you 'd put them in a high-risk group .
they 've probably got these environmental risk factors and / or genetic risk factors we do n't know about .
and to argue , then , that the chance of a second death is as if you did n't know that information is really silly .
it 's worse than silly - it 's really bad science .
nonetheless , that 's how it was presented , and at trial nobody even argued it .
that 's the first problem .
the second problem is , what does the number of one in 73 million mean ?
so after sally clark was convicted - you can imagine , it made rather a splash in the press - one of the journalists from one of britain 's more reputable newspapers wrote that what the expert had said was , " the chance that she was innocent was one in 73 million . "
now , that 's a logical error .
it 's exactly the same logical error as the logical error of thinking that after the disease test , which is 99 percent accurate , the chance of having the disease is 99 percent .
in the disease example , we had to bear in mind two things , one of which was the possibility that the test got it right or not .
and the other one was the chance , a priori , that the person had the disease or not .
it 's exactly the same in this context .
there are two things involved - two parts to the explanation .
we want to know how likely , or relatively how likely , two different explanations are .
one of them is that sally clark was innocent - which is , a priori , overwhelmingly likely - most mothers do n't kill their children .
and the second part of the explanation is that she suffered an incredibly unlikely event .
not as unlikely as one in 73 million , but nonetheless rather unlikely .
the other explanation is that she was guilty .
now , we probably think a priori that 's unlikely .
and we certainly should think in the context of a criminal trial that that 's unlikely , because of the presumption of innocence .
and then if she were trying to kill the children , she succeeded .
so the chance that she 's innocent is n't one in 73 million .
we do n't know what it is .
it has to do with weighing up the strength of the other evidence against her and the statistical evidence .
we know the children died .
what matters is how likely or unlikely , relative to each other , the two explanations are .
and they 're both implausible .
there 's a situation where errors in statistics had really profound and really unfortunate consequences .
in fact , there are two other women who were convicted on the basis of the evidence of this pediatrician , who have subsequently been released on appeal .
many cases were reviewed .
and it 's particularly topical because he 's currently facing a disrepute charge at britain 's general medical council .
so just to conclude - what are the take-home messages from this ?
well , we know that randomness and uncertainty and chance are very much a part of our everyday life .
it 's also true - and , although , you , as a collective , are very special in many ways , you 're completely typical in not getting the examples i gave right .
it 's very well documented that people get things wrong .
they make errors of logic in reasoning with uncertainty .
we can cope with the subtleties of language brilliantly - and there are interesting evolutionary questions about how we got here .
we are not good at reasoning with uncertainty .
that 's an issue in our everyday lives .
as you 've heard from many of the talks , statistics underpins an enormous amount of research in science - in social science , in medicine and indeed , quite a lot of industry .
all of quality control , which has had a major impact on industrial processing , is underpinned by statistics .
it 's something we 're bad at doing .
at the very least , we should recognize that , and we tend not to .
to go back to the legal context , at the sally clark trial all of the lawyers just accepted what the expert said .
so if a pediatrician had come out and said to a jury , " i know how to build bridges . i 've built one down the road .
please drive your car home over it , " they would have said , " well , pediatricians do n't know how to build bridges .
that 's what engineers do . "
on the other hand , he came out and effectively said , or implied , " i know how to reason with uncertainty . i know how to do statistics . "
and everyone said , " well , that 's fine . he 's an expert . "
so we need to understand where our competence is and is n't .
exactly the same kinds of issues arose in the early days of dna profiling , when scientists , and lawyers and in some cases judges , routinely misrepresented evidence .
usually - one hopes - innocently , but misrepresented evidence .
forensic scientists said , " the chance that this guy 's innocent is one in three million . "
even if you believe the number , just like the 73 million to one , that 's not what it meant .
and there have been celebrated appeal cases and just to finish in the context of the legal system .
it 's all very well to say , " let 's do our best to present the evidence . "
but more and more , in cases of dna profiling - this is another one - we expect juries , who are ordinary people - and it 's documented they 're very bad at this - we expect juries to be able to cope with the sorts of reasoning that goes on .
in other spheres of life , if people argued - well , except possibly for politics - but in other spheres of life , if people argued illogically , we 'd say that 's not a good thing .
we sort of expect it of politicians and do n't hope for much more .
in the case of uncertainty , we get it wrong all the time - and at the very least , we should be aware of that , and ideally , we might try and do something about it .
thanks very much .
i 'm a cancer doctor , and i walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago , and this was the cover of fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy .
and so , as a cancer doctor , you look at this , and you get a little bit downhearted .
but when you start to read the article by cliff , who himself is a cancer survivor , who was saved by a clinical trial where his parents drove him from new york city to upstate new york to get an experimental therapy for - at the time - hodgkin 's disease , which saved his life , he makes remarkable points here .
and the point of the article was that we have gotten reductionist in our view of biology , in our view of cancer .
for the last 50 years , we have focused on treating the individual gene in understanding cancer , not in controlling cancer .
so , this is an astounding table .
and this is something that sobers us in our field everyday in that , obviously , we 've made remarkable impacts on cardiovascular disease , but look at cancer . the death rate in cancer in over 50 years has n't changed .
we 've made small wins in diseases like chronic myelogenous leukemia , where we have a pill that can put 100 percent of people in remission , but in general , we have n't made an impact at all in the war on cancer .
so , what i 'm going to tell you today , is a little bit of why i think that 's the case , and then go out of my comfort zone and tell you where i think it 's going , where a new approach - that we hope to push forward in terms of treating cancer .
because this is wrong .
so , what is cancer , first of all ?
well , if one has a mass or an abnormal blood value , you go to a doctor , they stick a needle in .
they way we make the diagnosis today is by pattern recognition : does it look normal ? does it look abnormal ?
so , that pathologist is just like looking at this plastic bottle .
this is a normal cell . this is a cancer cell .
that is the state-of-the-art today in diagnosing cancer .
there 's no molecular test , there 's no sequencing of genes that was referred to yesterday , there 's no fancy looking at the chromosomes .
this is the state-of-the-art and how we do it .
you know , i know very well , as a cancer doctor , i ca n't treat advanced cancer .
so , as an aside , i firmly believe in the field of trying to identify cancer early .
it is the only way you can start to fight cancer , is by catching it early .
we can prevent most cancers .
you know , the previous talk alluded to preventing heart disease .
we could do the same in cancer .
i co-founded a company called navigenics , where , if you spit into a tube - and we can look look at 35 or 40 genetic markers for disease , all of which are delayable in many of the cancers - you start to identify what you could get , and then we can start to work to prevent them .
because the problem is , when you have advanced cancer , we ca n't do that much today about it , as the statistics allude to .
so , the thing about cancer is that it 's a disease of the aged .
why is it a disease of the aged ?
because evolution does n't care about us after we 've had our children .
see , evolution protected us during our childbearing years and then , after age 35 or 40 or 45 , it said " it does n't matter anymore , because they 've had their progeny . "
so if you look at cancers , it is very rare - extremely rare - to have cancer in a child , on the order of thousands of cases a year .
as one gets older ? very , very common .
why is it hard to treat ?
because it 's heterogeneous , and that 's the perfect substrate for evolution within the cancer .
it starts to select out for those bad , aggressive cells , what we call clonal selection .
but , if we start to understand that cancer is n't just a molecular defect , it 's something more , then we 'll get to new ways of treating it , as i 'll show you .
so , one of the fundamental problems we have in cancer is that , right now , we describe it by a number of adjectives , symptoms : " i 'm tired , i 'm bloated , i have pain , etc . "
you then have some anatomic descriptions , you get that ct scan : " there 's a three centimeter mass in the liver . "
you then have some body part descriptions : " it 's in the liver , in the breast , in the prostate . "
and that 's about it .
so , our dictionary for describing cancer is very , very poor .
it 's basically symptoms .
it 's manifestations of a disease .
what 's exciting is that over the last two or three years , the government has spent 400 million dollars , and they 've allocated another billion dollars , to what we call the cancer genome atlas project .
so , it is the idea of sequencing all of the genes in the cancer , and giving us a new lexicon , a new dictionary to describe it .
you know , in the mid-1850 's in france , they started to describe cancer by body part .
that has n't changed in over 150 years .
it is absolutely archaic that we call cancer by prostate , by breast , by muscle .
it makes no sense , if you think about it .
so , obviously , the technology is here today , and , over the next several years , that will change .
you will no longer go to a breast cancer clinic .
you will go to a her2 amplified clinic , or an egfr activated clinic , and they will go to some of the pathogenic lesions that were involved in causing this individual cancer .
so , hopefully , we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine , and be able to do what they do in infectious disease , which is look at that organism , that bacteria , and then say , " this antibiotic makes sense , because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it . "
when one is exposed to h1n1 , you take tamiflu , and you can remarkably decrease the severity of symptoms and prevent many of the manifestations of the disease .
why ? because we know what you have , and we know how to treat it - although we ca n't make vaccine in this country , but that 's a different story .
the cancer genome atlas is coming out now .
the first cancer was done , which was brain cancer .
in the next month , the end of december , you 'll see ovarian cancer , and then lung cancer will come several months after .
there 's also a field of proteomics that i 'll talk about in a few minutes , which i think is going to be the next level in terms of understanding and classifying disease .
but remember , i 'm not pushing genomics , proteomics , to be a reductionist .
i 'm doing it so we can identify what we 're up against .
and there 's a very important distinction there that we 'll get to .
in health care today , we spend most of the dollars - in terms of treating disease - most of the dollars in the last two years of a person 's life .
we spend very little , if any , dollars in terms of identifying what we 're up against .
if you could start to move that , to identify what you 're up against , you 're going to do things a hell of a lot better .
if we could even take it one step further and prevent disease , we can take it enormously the other direction , and obviously , that 's where we need to go , going forward .
so , this is the website of the national cancer institute .
and i 'm here to tell you , it 's wrong .
so , the website of the national cancer institute says that cancer is a genetic disease .
the website says , " if you look , there 's an individual mutation , and maybe a second , and maybe a third , and that is cancer . "
but , as a cancer doc , this is what i see .
this is n't a genetic disease .
so , there you see , it 's a liver with colon cancer in it , and you see into the microscope a lymph node where cancer has invaded .
you see a ct scan where cancer is in the liver .
cancer is an interaction of a cell that no longer is under growth control with the environment .
it 's not in the abstract ; it 's the interaction with the environment .
it 's what we call a system .
the goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer .
and i think that 's been the fundamental problem over the last five decades , is that we have strived to understand cancer .
the goal is to control cancer .
and that is a very different optimization scheme , a very different strategy for all of us .
i got up at the american association of cancer research , one of the big cancer research meetings , with 20,000 people there , and i said , " we 've made a mistake .
we 've all made a mistake , myself included , by focusing down , by being a reductionist .
we need to take a step back . "
and , believe it or not , there were hisses in the audience .
people got upset , but this is the only way we 're going to go forward .
you know , i was very fortunate to meet danny hillis a few years ago .
we were pushed together , and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other .
i said , " do i really want to meet a guy from disney , who designed computers ? "
and he was saying : does he really want to meet another doctor ?
but people prevailed on us , and we got together , and it 's been transformative in what i do , absolutely transformative .
we have designed , and we have worked on the modeling - and much of these ideas came from danny and from his team - the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system .
and i 'll show you some data there where i really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it .
the key is , when you look at these variables and you look at this data , you have to understand the data inputs .
you know , if i measured your temperature over 30 days , and i asked , " what was the average temperature ? "
and it came back at 98.7 , i would say , " great . "
but if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours , and you took tylenol and got better , etc . , i would totally miss it .
so , one of the problems , the fundamental problems in medicine is that you and i , and all of us , we go to our doctor once a year .
we have discrete data elements ; we do n't have a time function on them .
earlier it was referred to this direct life device .
you know , i 've been using it for two and a half months .
it 's a staggering device , not because it tells me how many kilocalories i do every day , but because it looks , over 24 hours , what i 've done in a day .
and i did n't realize that for three hours i 'm sitting at my desk , and i 'm not moving at all .
and a lot of the functions in the data that we have as input systems here are really different than we understand them , because we 're not measuring them dynamically .
and so , if you think of cancer as a system , there 's an input and an output and a state in the middle .
so , the states , are equivalent classes of history , and the cancer patient , the input , is the environment , the diet , the treatment , the genetic mutations .
the output are our symptoms : do we have pain ? is the cancer growing ? do we feel bloated , etc . ?
most of that state is hidden .
so what we do in our field is we change and input , we give aggressive chemotherapy , and we say , " did that output get better ? did that pain improve , etc . ? "
and so , the problem is that it 's not just one system , it 's multiple systems on multiple scales .
it 's a system of systems .
and so , when you start to look at emergent systems , you can look at a neuron under a microscope .
a neuron under the microscope is very elegant with little things sticking out and little things over here , but when you start to put them together in a complex system , and you start to see that it becomes a brain , and that brain can create intelligence , what we 're talking about in the body , and cancer is starting to model it like a complex system .
well , the bad news is that these robust - and robust is a key word - emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail .
the good news is you can manipulate them .
you can try to control them without that fundamental understanding of every component .
one of the most fundamental clinical trials in cancer came out in february in the new england journal of medicine , where they took women who were pre-menopausal with breast cancer .
so , about the worst kind of breast cancer you can get .
they had gotten their chemotherapy , and then they randomized them , where half got placebo , and half got a drug called zoledronic acid that builds bone .
it 's used to treat osteoporosis , and they got that twice a year .
they looked and , in these 1,800 women , given twice a year a drug that builds bone , you reduce the recurrence of cancer by 35 percent .
reduce occurrence of cancer by a drug that does n't even touch the cancer .
so the notion , you change the soil , the seed does n't grow as well .
you change that system , and you could have a marked effect on the cancer .
nobody has ever shown - and this will be shocking - nobody has ever shown that most chemotherapy actually touches a cancer cell .
it 's never been shown .
there 's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes , that if you give this cancer drug , you can do this effect to the cell , but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body .
if i give a woman with breast cancer a drug called taxol every three weeks , which is the standard , about 40 percent of women with metastatic cancer have a great response to that drug .
and a response is 50 percent shrinkage .
well , remember that 's not even an order of magnitude , but that 's a different story .
they then recur , i give them that same drug every week .
another 30 percent will respond .
they then recur , i give them that same drug over 96 hours by continuous infusion , another 20 or 30 percent will respond .
so , you ca n't tell me it 's working by the same mechanism in all three size .
it 's not . we have no idea the mechanism .
so the idea that chemotherapy may just be disrupting that complex system , just like building bone disrupted that system and reduced recurrence , chemotherapy may work by that same exact way .
the wild thing about that trial also , was that it reduced new primaries , so new cancers , by 30 percent also .
so , the problem is , yours and mine , all of our systems are changing .
they 're dynamic .
i mean , this is a scary slide , not to take an aside , but it looks at obesity in the world .
and i 'm sorry if you ca n't read the numbers , they 're kind of small .
but , if you start to look at it , that red , that dark color there , more than 75 percent of the population of those countries are obese .
look a decade ago , look two decades ago : markedly different .
so , our systems today are dramatically different than our systems a decade or two ago .
so the diseases we have today , which reflect patterns in the system over the last several decades , are going to change dramatically over the next decade or so based on things like this .
so , this picture , although it is beautiful , is a 40-gigabyte picture of the whole proteome .
so this is a drop of blood that has gone through a superconducting magnet , and we 're able to get resolution where we can start to see all of the proteins in the body .
we can start to see that system .
each of the red dots are where a protein has actually been identified .
the power of these magnets , the power of what we can do here , is that we can see an individual neutron with this technology .
so , again , this is stuff we 're doing with danny hillis and a group called applied proteomics , where we can start to see individual neutron differences , and we can start to look at that system like we never have before .
so , instead of a reductionist view , we 're taking a step back .
so this is a woman , 46 years old , who had recurrent lung cancer .
it was in her brain , in her lungs , in her liver .
she had gotten carboplatin taxol , carboplatin taxotere , gemcitabine , navelbine : every drug we have she had gotten , and that disease continued to grow .
she had three kids under the age of 12 , and this is her ct scan .
and so what this is , is we 're taking a cross-section of her body here , and you can see in the middle there is her heart , and to the side of her heart on the left there is this large tumor that will invade and will kill her , untreated , in a matter of weeks .
she goes on a pill a day that targets a pathway , and again , i 'm not sure if this pathway was in the system , in the cancer , but it targeted a pathway , and a month later , pow , that cancer 's gone .
six months later it 's still gone .
that cancer recurred , and she passed away three years later from lung cancer , but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne .
that 's about it .
so , the problem is that the clinical trial was done , and we were a part of it , and in the fundamental clinical trial - the pivotal clinical trial we call the phase three , we refused to use a placebo .
would you want your mother , your brother , your sister to get a placebo if they had advanced lung cancer and had weeks to live ?
and the answer , obviously , is not .
so , it was done on this group of patients .
ten percent of people in the trial had this dramatic response that was shown here , and the drug went to the fda , and the fda said , " without a placebo , how do i know patients actually benefited from the drug ? "
so the morning the fda was going to meet , this was the editorial in the wall street journal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , what do you know , that drug was approved .
the amazing thing is another company did the right scientific trial , where they gave half placebo and half the drug .
and we learned something important there .
what 's interesting is they did it in south america and canada , where it 's " more ethical to give placebos . "
they had to give it also in the u.s. to get approval , so i think there were three u.s. patients in upstate new york who were part of the trial .
but they did that , and what they found is that 70 percent of the non-responders lived much longer and did better than people who got placebo .
so it challenged everything we knew in cancer , is that you do n't need to get a response .
you do n't need to shrink the disease .
if we slow the disease , we may have more of a benefit on patient survival , patient outcome , how they feel , than if we shrink the disease .
the problem is that , if i 'm this doc , and i get your ct scan today and you 've got a two centimeter mass in your liver , and you come back to me in three months and it 's three centimeters , did that drug help you or not ?
how do i know ?
would it have been 10 centimeters , or am i giving you a drug with no benefit and significant cost ?
so , it 's a fundamental problem .
and , again , that 's where these new technologies can come in .
and so , the goal obviously is that you go into your doctor 's office - well , the ultimate goal is that you prevent disease , right ?
the ultimate goal is that you prevent any of these things from happening .
that is the most effective , cost-effective , best way we can do things today .
but if one is unfortunate to get a disease , you 'll go into your doctor 's office , he or she will take a drop of blood , and we will start to know how to treat your disease .
the way we 've approached it is the field of proteomics , again , this looking at the system .
it 's taking a big picture .
the problem with technologies like this is that if one looks at proteins in the body , there are 11 orders of magnitude difference between the high-abundant and the low-abundant proteins .
so , there 's no technology in the world that can span 11 orders of magnitude .
and so , a lot of what has been done with people like danny hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles , try to bring the software .
we can start to look at different components along this spectrum .
and so , earlier was talked about cross-discipline , about collaboration .
and i think one of the exciting things that is starting to happen now is that people from those fields are coming in .
yesterday , the national cancer institute announced a new program called the physical sciences and oncology , where physicists , mathematicians , are brought in to think about cancer , people who never approached it before .
danny and i got 16 million dollars , they announced yesterday , to try to attach this problem .
a whole new approach , instead of giving high doses of chemotherapy by different mechanisms , to try to bring technology to get a picture of what 's actually happening in the body .
so , just for two seconds , how these technologies work - because i think it 's important to understand it .
what happens is every protein in your body is charged , so the proteins are sprayed in , the magnet spins them around , and then there 's a detector at the end .
when it hit that detector is dependent on the mass and the charge .
and so we can accurately - if the magnet is big enough , and your resolution is high enough - you can actually detect all of the proteins in the body and start to get an understanding of the individual system .
and so , as a cancer doctor , instead of having paper in my chart , in your chart , and it being this thick , this is what data flow is starting to look like in our offices , where that drop of blood is creating gigabytes of data .
electronic data elements are describing every aspect of the disease .
and certainly the goal is we can start to learn from every encounter and actually move forward , instead of just having encounter and encounter , without fundamental learning .
so , to conclude , we need to get away from reductionist thinking .
we need to start to think differently and radically .
and so , i implore everyone here : think differently . come up with new ideas .
tell them to me or anyone else in our field , because over the last 59 years , nothing has changed .
we need a radically different approach .
you know , andy grove stepped down as chairman of the board at intel - and andy was one of my mentors , tough individual .
when andy stepped down , he said , " no technology will win . technology itself will win . "
and i 'm a firm believer , in the field of medicine and especially cancer , that it 's going to be a broad platform of technologies that will help us move forward and hopefully help patients in the near-term .
thank you very much .
i should tell you that when i was asked to be here , i thought to myself that well , it 's ted .
and these tedsters are - you know , as innocent as that name sounds - these are the philanthropists and artists and scientists who sort of shape our world .
and what could i possibly have to say that would be distinguished enough to justify my participation in something like that ?
and so i thought perhaps a really civilized-sounding british accent might help things a bit .
and then i thought no , no . i should just get up there and be myself and just talk the way i really talk because , after all , this is the great unveiling .
and so i thought i 'd come up here and unveil my real voice to you .
although many of you already know that i do speak the queen 's english because i am from queens , new york .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the theme of this session , of course , is invention .
and while i do n't have any patents that i 'm aware of , you will be meeting a few of my inventions today .
i suppose it 's fair to say that i am interested in the invention of self or selves .
we 're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits , unique developmental experiences , geographical and historical contexts .
but then what ?
to what extent do we self-construct , do we self-invent ?
how do we self-identify and how mutable is that identity ?
like , what if one could be anyone at any time ?
well my characters , like the ones in my shows , allow me to play with the spaces between those questions .
and so i 've brought a couple of them with me .
and well , they 're very excited .
what i should tell you - what i should tell you is that they 've each prepared their own little ted talks .
so feel free to think of this as sarah university .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . okay . oh , well .
oh , wonderful .
good evening everybody .
thank you so very much for having me here today .
ah , thank you very much . my name is lorraine levine .
oh my ! there 's so many of you .
hi sweetheart . okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i am here because of a young girl , sarah jones .
she 's a very nice , young black girl .
well you know , she calls herself black - she 's really more like a caramel color if you look at her .
but anyway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she has me here because she puts me in her show , what she calls her one-woman show .
and you know what that means , of course .
that means she takes the credit and then makes us come out here and do all the work .
but i do n't mind .
frankly , i 'm kvelling just to be here with all the luminaries you have attending something like this , you know .
really , it 's amazing .
not only , of course , the scientists and all the wonderful giants of the industries but the celebrities .
there are so many celebrities running around here .
i saw - glenn close i saw earlier . i love her .
and she was getting a yogurt in the google cafe .
is n't that adorable ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so many others you see , they 're just wonderful .
it 's lovely to know they 're concerned , you know .
and - oh , i saw goldie hawn .
oh , goldie hawn . i love her , too ; she 's wonderful . yeah .
you know , she 's only half jewish .
did you know that about her ?
yeah . but even so , a wonderful talent . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i - you know , when i saw her , such a wonderful feeling .
yeah , she 's lovely .
but anyway , i should have started by saying just how lucky i feel .
it 's such an eye-opening experience to be here .
you 're all so responsible for this world that we live in today .
you know , i could n't have dreamed of such a thing as a young girl .
and you 've all made these advancements happen in such a short time - you 're all so young .
you know , your parents must be very proud .
but i - i also appreciate the diversity that you have here .
i noticed it 's very multicultural .
you know , when you 're standing up here , you can see all the different people .
it 's like a rainbow .
it 's okay to say rainbow . yeah .
i just - i ca n't keep up with whether you can say , you know , the different things .
what are you allowed to say or not say ?
i just - i do n't want to offend anybody . you know .
but anyway , you know , i just think that to be here with all of you accomplished young people - literally , some of you , the architects building our brighter future .
you know , it 's heartening to me .
even though , quite frankly , some of your presentations are horrifying , absolutely horrifying .
it 's true . it 's true .
you know , between the environmental degradation and the crashing of the world markets you 're talking about .
and of course , we know it 's all because of the - all the ...
well , i do n't know how else to say it to you , so i 'll just say it my way : the ganeyvish schticklich coming from the governments and the , you know , the bankers and the wall street . you know it .
anyway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the point is , i 'm happy somebody has practical ideas to get us out of this mess .
so i salute each of you and your stellar achievements .
thank you for all that you do .
and congratulations on being such big makhers that you 've become ted meisters .
so , happy continued success .
congratulations . mazel tov .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . hi .
thank you everybody .
sorry , this is such a wonderful opportunity and everything , to be here right now .
my name is noraida . and i 'm just - i 'm so thrilled to be part of like your ted conference that you 're doing and everything like that .
i am dominican-american .
actually , you could say i grew up in the capital of dominican republic , otherwise known as washington heights in new york city .
but i do n't know if there 's any other dominican people here , but i know that juan enriquez , he was here yesterday .
and i think he 's mexican , so that 's - honestly , that 's close enough for me right now . so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i just - i 'm sorry .
i 'm just trying not to be nervous because this is a very wonderful experience for me and everything .
and i just - you know i 'm not used to doing the public speaking .
and whenever i get nervous i start to talk really fast .
nobody can understand nothing i 'm saying , which is very frustrating for me , as you can imagine .
i usually have to just like try to calm down and take a deep breath .
but then on top of that , you know , sarah jones told me we only have 18 minutes .
so then i 'm like , should i be nervous , you know , because maybe it 's better .
and i 'm just trying not to panic and freak out . so i like , take a deep breath .
okay . sorry . so anyway , what i was trying to say is that i really love ted .
like , i love everything about this . it 's amazing .
like , it 's - i ca n't get over this right now .
and , like , people would not believe , seriously , where i 'm from , that this even exists .
you know , like even , i mean i love like the name , the - ted .
i mean i know it 's a real person and everything , but i 'm just saying that like , you know , i think it 's very cool how it 's also an acronym , you know , which is like , you know , is like very high concept and everything like that .
i like that .
and actually , i can relate to the whole like acronym thing and everything .
because , actually , i 'm a sophomore at college right now .
at my school - actually i was part of co-founding an organization , which is like a leadership thing , you know , like you guys , you would really like it and everything .
and the organization is called da bomb , a \ and da bomb - not like what you guys can build and everything - it 's like , da bomb , it means like dominican - it 's an acronym - dominican-american benevolent organization for mothers and babies .
so , i know , see , like the name is like a little bit long , but with the war on terror and everything , the dean of student activities has asked us to stop saying da bomb and use the whole thing so nobody would get the wrong idea , whatever .
so , basically like da bomb - what dominican-american benevolent organization for mothers and babies does is , basically , we try to advocate for students who show a lot of academic promise and who also happen to be mothers like me .
i am a working mother , and i also go to school full-time .
and , you know , it 's like - it 's so important to have like role models out there .
i mean , i know sometimes our lifestyles are very different , whatever .
but like even at my job - like , i just got promoted .
right now it 's very exciting actually for me because i 'm the junior assistant to the associate director under the senior vice president for business development - that 's my new title .
so , but i think whether you own your own company or you 're just starting out like me , like something like this is so vital for people to just continue expanding their minds and learning .
and if everybody , like all people really had access to that , it would be a very different world out there , as i know you know .
so , i think all people , we need that , but especially , i look at people like me , you know like , i mean , latinos - we 're about to be the majority , in like two weeks .
so , we deserve just as much to be part of the exchange of ideas as everybody else .
so , i 'm very happy that you 're , you know , doing this kind of thing , making the talks available online .
that 's very good . i love that .
and i just - i love you guys . i love ted .
and if you do n't mind , privately now , in the future , i 'm going to think of ted as an acronym for technology , entertainment and dominicans .
thank you very much .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , that was noraida , and just like lorraine and everybody else you 're meeting today , these are folks who are based on real people from my real life : friends , neighbors , family members .
i come from a multicultural family .
in fact , the older lady you just met : very , very loosely based on a great aunt on my mother 's side .
it 's a long story , believe me .
but on top of my family background , my parents also sent me to the united nations school , where i encountered a plethora of new characters , including alexandre , my french teacher , okay .
well , you know , it was beginner french , that i am taking with her , you know .
and it was madame bousson , you know , she was very -lsb- french -rsb- .
it was like , you know , she was there in the class , you know , she was kind of typically french .
you know , she was very chic , but she was very filled with ennui , you know .
and she would be there , you know , kind of talking with the class , you know , talking about the , you know , the existential futility of life , you know .
and we were only 11 years old , so it was not appropriate . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but -lsb- german -rsb- .
yes , i took german for three years , -lsb- german -rsb- , and it was quite the experience because i was the only black girl in the class , even in the un school .
although , you know , it was wonderful .
the teacher , herr schtopf , he never discriminated .
never . he always , always treated each of us , you know , equally unbearably during the class .
so , there were the teachers and then there were my friends , classmates from everywhere , many of whom are still dear friends to this day .
and they 've inspired many characters as well .
for example , a friend of mine .
well , i just wanted to quickly say good evening .
my name is praveen manvi and thank you very much for this opportunity .
of course , ted , the reputation precedes itself all over the world .
but , you know , i am originally from india , and i wanted to start by telling you that once sarah jones told me that we will be having the opportunity to come here to ted in california , originally , i was very pleased and , frankly , relieved because , you know , i am a human rights advocate .
and usually my work , it takes me to washington d.c.
and there , i must attend these meetings , mingling with some tiresome politicians , trying to make me feel comfortable by telling how often they are eating the curry in georgetown . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , you can just imagine - right .
so , but i 'm thrilled to be joining all of you here .
i wish we had more time together , but that 's for another time . okay ? great .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and , sadly , i do n't think we 'll have time for you to meet everybody i brought , but - i 'm trying to behave myself , it 's my first time here .
but i do want to introduce you to a couple of folks you may recognize , if you saw " bridge and tunnel . "
uh , well , thank you .
good evening .
my name is pauline ning , and first i want to tell you that i 'm - of course i am a member of the chinese community in new york .
but when sarah jones asked me to please come to ted , i said , well , you know , first , i do n't know that , you know - before two years ago , you would not find me in front of an audience of people , much less like this because i did not like to give speeches because i feel that , as an immigrant , i do not have good english skills for speaking .
but then , i decided , just like governor arnold schwarzenegger , i try anyway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my daughter - my daughter wrote that , she told me , " always start your speech with humor . "
but my background - i want to tell you story only briefly .
my husband and i , we brought our son and daughter here in 1980s to have the freedom we can not have in china at that time .
and we tried to teach our kids to be proud of their tradition , but it 's very hard .
you know , as immigrant , i would speak chinese to them , and they would always answer me back in english .
they love rock music , pop culture , american culture .
but when they got older , when the time comes for them to start think about getting married , that 's when we expect them to realize , a little bit more , their own culture .
but that 's where we had some problems .
my son , he says he is not ready to get married .
and he has a sweetheart , but she is american woman , not chinese .
it 's not that it 's bad , but i told him , " what 's wrong with a chinese woman ? "
but i think he will change his mind soon .
so , then i decide instead , i will concentrate on my daughter .
the daughter 's marriage is very special to the mom .
but first , she said she 's not interested .
she only wants to spend time with her friends .
and then at college , it 's like she never came home .
and she does n't want me to come and visit .
so i said , " what 's wrong in this picture ? "
so , i accused my daughter to have like a secret boyfriend .
but she told me , " mom , you do n't have to worry about boys because i do n't like them . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , " yes , men can be difficult , but all women have to get used to that . "
she said , " no mom . i mean , i do n't like boys . i like girls .
i am lesbian . "
so , i always teach my kids to respect american ideas , but i told my daughter that this is one exception - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that she is not gay , she is just confused by this american problem .
but she told me , " mom , it 's not american . "
she said she is in love - in love with a nice chinese girl .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , these are the words i am waiting to hear , but from my son , not my daughter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but at first i did not know what to do .
but then , over time , i have come to understand that this is who she is .
so , even though sometimes it 's still hard , i will share with you that it helps me to realize society is more tolerant , usually because of places like this , because of ideas like this , and people like you , with an open mind .
so i think maybe ted , you impact people 's lives in the ways maybe even you do n't realize .
so , for my daughter 's sake , i thank you for your ideas worth spreading .
thank you . xie xie .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good evening . my name is habbi belahal .
and i would like to first of all thank sarah jones for putting all of the pressure on the only arab who she brought with her to be last today .
i am originally from jordan .
and i teach comparative literature at queens college .
it is not harvard .
but i feel a bit like a fish out of water .
but i am very proud of my students .
and i see that a few of them did make it here to the conference .
so you will get the extra credit i promised you .
but , while i know that i may not look like the typical ted-izen , as you would say , i do like to make the point that we in global society , we are never as different as the appearances may suggest .
so , if you will indulge me , i will share quickly with you a bit of verse , which i memorized as a young girl at 16 years of age .
so , back in the ancient times .
-lsb- arabic -rsb- and this roughly translates : " please , let me hold your hand .
i want to hold your hand .
i want to hold your hand .
and when i touch you , i feel happy inside .
it 's such a feeling that my love , i ca n't hide , i ca n't hide , i ca n't hide . "
well , so okay , but please , please , but please .
if it is sounding familiar , it is because i was at the same time in my life listening to the beatles .
on the radio -lsb- unclear -rsb- , they were very popular .
so , all of that is to say that i like to believe that for every word intended as to render us deaf to one another , there is always a lyric connecting ears and hearts across the continents in rhyme .
and i pray that this is the way that we will self-invent , in time .
that 's all , shukran . thank you very much for the opportunity .
okay ? great .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you all very much . it was lovely .
thank you for having me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very , very much . i love you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , you have to let me say this .
i just - thank you .
i want to thank chris and jacqueline , and just everyone for having me here .
it 's been a long time coming , and i feel like i 'm home .
and i know i 've performed for some of your companies or some of you have seen me elsewhere , but this is honestly one of the best audiences i 've ever experienced .
the whole thing is amazing , and so do n't you all go reinventing yourselves any time soon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- because i usually take the role of trying to explain to people how wonderful the new technologies that are coming along are going to be , and i thought that , since i was among friends here , i would tell you what i really think and try to look back and try to understand what is really going on here with these amazing jumps in technology that seem so fast that we can barely keep on top of it .
so i 'm going to start out by showing just one very boring technology slide .
and then , so if you can just turn on the slide that 's on .
this is just a random slide that i picked out of my file .
what i want to show you is not so much the details of the slide , but the general form of it .
this happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of risc microprocessors versus the power of local area networks .
and the interesting thing about it is that this slide , like so many technology slides that we 're used to , is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve .
in other words , every step here represents an order of magnitude in performance scale .
and this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves .
something really weird is going on here .
and that 's basically what i 'm going to be talking about .
so , if you could bring up the lights .
if you could bring up the lights higher , because i 'm just going to use a piece of paper here .
now why do we draw technology curves in semi-log curves ?
well the answer is , if i drew it on a normal curve where , let 's say , this is years , this is time of some sort , and this is whatever measure of the technology that i 'm trying to graph , the graphs look sort of silly .
they sort of go like this .
and they do n't tell us much .
now if i graph , for instance , some other technology , say transportation technology , on a semi-log curve , it would look very stupid , it would look like a flat line .
but when something like this happens , things are qualitatively changing .
so if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology , then the day after tomorrow , i would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in tokyo in 30 seconds .
it 's not moving like that .
and there 's nothing precedented in the history of technology development of this kind of self-feeding growth where you go by orders of magnitude every few years .
now the question that i 'd like to ask is , if you look at these exponential curves , they do n't go on forever .
things just ca n't possibly keep changing as fast as they are .
one of two things is going to happen .
either it 's going to turn into a sort of classical s-curve like this , until something totally different comes along , or maybe it 's going to do this .
that 's about all it can do .
now i 'm an optimist , so i sort of think it 's probably going to do something like that .
if so , that means that what we 're in the middle of right now is a transition .
we 're sort of on this line in a transition from the way the world used to be to some new way that the world is .
and so what i 'm trying to ask , what i 've been asking myself , is what 's this new way that the world is ?
what 's that new state that the world is heading toward ?
because the transition seems very , very confusing when we 're right in the middle of it .
now when i was a kid growing up , the future was kind of the year 2000 , and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000 .
now here 's a conference in which people talk about the future , and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000 .
it 's about as far as we go out .
so in other words , the future has kind of been shrinking one year per year for my whole lifetime .
now i think that the reason is because we all feel that something 's happening there .
that transition is happening . we can all sense it .
and we know that it just does n't make too much sense to think out 30 , 50 years because everything 's going to be so different that a simple extrapolation of what we 're doing just does n't make any sense at all .
so what i would like to talk about is what that could be , what that transition could be that we 're going through .
now in order to do that i 'm going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff that really has nothing to do with technology and computers .
because i think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things .
so the time scale that i would like to look at this on is the time scale of life on earth .
so i think this picture makes sense if you look at it a few billion years at a time .
so if you go back about two and a half billion years , the earth was this big , sterile hunk of rock with a lot of chemicals floating around on it .
and if you look at the way that the chemicals got organized , we begin to get a pretty good idea of how they do it .
and i think that there 's theories that are beginning to understand about how it started with rna , but i 'm going to tell a sort of simple story of it , which is that , at that time , there were little drops of oil floating around with all kinds of different recipes of chemicals in them .
and some of those drops of oil had a particular combination of chemicals in them which caused them to incorporate chemicals from the outside and grow the drops of oil .
and those that were like that started to split and divide .
and those were the most primitive forms of cells in a sense , those little drops of oil .
but now those drops of oil were n't really alive , as we say it now , because every one of them was a little random recipe of chemicals .
and every time it divided , they got sort of unequal division of the chemicals within them .
and so every drop was a little bit different .
in fact , the drops that were different in a way that caused them to be better at incorporating chemicals around them , grew more and incorporated more chemicals and divided more .
so those tended to live longer , get expressed more .
now that 's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life , but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction .
somehow by ways that we do n't quite understand , these little drops learned to write down information .
they learned to record the information that was the recipe of the cell onto a particular kind of chemical called dna .
so in other words , they worked out , in this mindless sort of evolutionary way , a form of writing that let them write down what they were , so that that way of writing it down could get copied .
the amazing thing is that that way of writing seems to have stayed steady since it evolved two and a half billion years ago .
in fact the recipe for us , our genes , is exactly that same code and that same way of writing .
in fact , every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code .
in fact , one of the things that i did just for amusement purposes is we can now write things in this code .
and i 've got here a little 100 micrograms of white powder , which i try not to let the security people see at airports .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this has in it - what i did is i took this code - the code has standard letters that we use for symbolizing it - and i wrote my business card onto a piece of dna and amplified it 10 to the 22 times .
so if anyone would like a hundred million copies of my business card , i have plenty for everyone in the room , and , in fact , everyone in the world , and it 's right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if i had really been a egotist , i would have put it into a virus and released it in the room .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what was the next step ?
writing down the dna was an interesting step .
and that caused these cells - that kept them happy for another billion years .
but then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different , which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information , so that they began to get communities of cells .
i do n't know if you know this , but bacteria can actually exchange dna .
now that 's why , for instance , antibiotic resistance has evolved .
some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin , and it went around sort of creating its little dna information with other bacteria , and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin , because bacteria communicate .
now what this communication allowed was communities to form that , in some sense , were in the same boat together ; they were synergistic .
so they survived or they failed together , which means that if a community was very successful , all the individuals in that community were repeated more and they were favored by evolution .
now the transition point happened when these communities got so close that , in fact , they got together and decided to write down the whole recipe for the community together on one string of dna .
and so the next stage that 's interesting in life took about another billion years .
and at that stage , we have multi-cellular communities , communities of lots of different types of cells , working together as a single organism .
and in fact , we 're such a multi-cellular community .
we have lots of cells that are not out for themselves anymore .
your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell , muscle cell , a brain cell and so on .
so these communities began to evolve so that the interesting level on which evolution was taking place was no longer a cell , but a community which we call an organism .
now the next step that happened is within these communities .
these communities of cells , again , began to abstract information .
and they began building very special structures that did nothing but process information within the community .
and those are the neural structures .
so neurons are the information processing apparatus that those communities of cells built up .
and in fact , they began to get specialists in the community and special structures that were responsible for recording , understanding , learning information .
and that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities .
and that gave them an evolutionary advantage .
because at that point , an individual - learning could happen within the time span of a single organism , instead of over this evolutionary time span .
so an organism could , for instance , learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it .
that could happen within the lifetime of a single organism , whereas before they 'd built these special information processing structures , that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of thousands of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit .
so that nervous system , the fact that they built these special information structures , because evolution could now happen within an individual .
it could happen in learning time scales .
but then what happened was the individuals worked out , of course , tricks of communicating .
and for example , the most sophisticated version that we 're aware of is human language .
it 's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it .
here i have a very complicated , messy , confused idea in my head .
i 'm sitting here making grunting sounds basically , and hopefully constructing a similar messy , confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it .
but we 're taking something very complicated , turning it into sound , sequences of sounds , and producing something very complicated in your brain .
so this allows us now to begin to start functioning as a single organism .
and so , in fact , what we 've done is we , humanity , have started abstracting out .
we 're going through the same levels that multi-cellular organisms have gone through - abstracting out our methods of recording , presenting , processing information .
so for example , the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction .
telephony , computers , videotapes , cd-roms and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we 've now built within our society for handling that information .
and it all connects us together into something that is much bigger and much faster and able to evolve than what we were before .
so now , evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds .
and you saw ty 's little evolutionary example where he sort of did a little bit of evolution on the convolution program right before your eyes .
so now we 've speeded up the time scales once again .
so the first steps of the story that i told you about took a billion years a piece .
and the next steps , like nervous systems and brains , took a few hundred million years .
then the next steps , like language and so on , took less than a million years .
and these next steps , like electronics , seem to be taking only a few decades .
the process is feeding on itself and becoming , i guess , autocatalytic is the word for it - when something reinforces its rate of change .
the more it changes , the faster it changes .
and i think that that 's what we 're seeing here in this explosion of curve .
we 're seeing this process feeding back on itself .
now i design computers for a living , and i know that the mechanisms that i use to design computers would be impossible without recent advances in computers .
so right now , what i do is i design objects at such complexity that it 's really impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense .
i do n't know what every transistor in the connection machine does .
there are billions of them .
instead , what i do and what the designers at thinking machines do is we think at some level of abstraction and then we hand it to the machine and the machine takes it beyond what we could ever do , much farther and faster than we could ever do .
and in fact , sometimes it takes it by methods that we do n't quite even understand .
one method that 's particularly interesting that i 've been using a lot lately is evolution itself .
so what we do is we put inside the machine a process of evolution that takes place on the microsecond time scale .
so for example , in the most extreme cases , we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions .
say , " computer , would you please make a hundred million random sequences of instructions .
now would you please run all of those random sequences of instructions , run all of those programs , and pick out the ones that came closest to doing what i wanted . "
so in other words , i define what i wanted .
let 's say i want to sort numbers , as a simple example i 've done it with .
so find the programs that come closest to sorting numbers .
so of course , random sequences of instructions are very unlikely to sort numbers , so none of them will really do it .
but one of them , by luck , may put two numbers in the right order .
and i say , " computer , would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job .
save those . kill off the rest .
and now let 's reproduce the ones that sorted numbers the best .
and let 's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex . "
take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines , and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs .
so i 've got now a new generation of programs that are produced by combinations of the programs that did a little bit better job .
say , " please repeat that process . "
score them again .
introduce some mutations perhaps .
and try that again and do that for another generation .
well every one of those generations just takes a few milliseconds .
so i can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes , or in the complicated cases , in a few hours .
at the end of that , i end up with programs that are absolutely perfect at sorting numbers .
in fact , they are programs that are much more efficient than programs i could have ever written by hand .
now if i look at those programs , i ca n't tell you how they work .
i 've tried looking at them and telling you how they work .
they 're obscure , weird programs .
but they do the job .
and in fact , i know , i 'm very confident that they do the job because they come from a line of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job .
in fact , their life depended on doing the job .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was riding in a 747 with marvin minsky once , and he pulls out this card and says , " oh look . look at this .
it says , ' this plane has hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working together to make you a safe flight . ' does n't that make you feel confident ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , we know that the engineering process does n't work very well when it gets complicated .
so we 're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that 's very different than engineering .
and it lets us produce things of much more complexity than normal engineering lets us produce .
and yet , we do n't quite understand the options of it .
so in a sense , it 's getting ahead of us .
we 're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we 'll be able to run this process much faster .
so it 's feeding back on itself .
the thing is becoming faster and that 's why i think it seems so confusing .
because all of these technologies are feeding back on themselves .
we 're taking off .
and what we are is we 're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms .
so we 're the amoebas and we ca n't quite figure out what the hell this thing is we 're creating .
we 're right at that point of transition .
but i think that there really is something coming along after us .
i think it 's very haughty of us to think that we 're the end product of evolution .
and i think all of us here are a part of producing whatever that next thing is .
so lunch is coming along , and i think i will stop at that point , before i get selected out .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to go off script and make chris quite nervous here by making this audience participation .
all right . are you with me ? yeah . yeah . all right .
so what i 'd like to do is have you raise your hand if you 've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex .
could be the neighbors , hotel room , your parents . sorry .
okay . pretty much everybody .
now raise your hand if the man was making more noise than the woman .
i see one guy there .
it does n't count if it was you , sir .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so his hand 's down . and one woman . okay .
sitting next to a loud guy .
now what does this tell us ?
it tells us that human beings make noise when they have sex , and it 's generally the woman who makes more noise .
this is known as female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard crowd .
i was n't even going to mention this , but somebody told me that meg ryan might be here , and she is the world 's most famous female copulatory vocalizer .
so i thought , got to talk about that .
we 'll get back to that a little bit later .
let me start by saying human beings are not descended from apes , despite what you may have heard . we are apes .
we are more closely related to the chimp and the bonobo than the african elephant is to the indian elephant , as jared diamond pointed out in one of his early books .
we 're more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos are related to any other primate - gorillas , orangutans , what have you .
so we 're extremely closely related to them , and as you 'll see in terms of our behavior , we 've got some relationship as well .
so what i 'm asking today , the question i want to explore with you today is , what kind of ape are we in terms of our sexuality ?
now , since darwin 's day there 's been what cacilda and i have called the standard narrative of human sexual evolution , and you 're all familiar with it , even if you have n't read this stuff .
the idea is that , as part of human nature , from the beginning of our species ' time , men have sort of leased women 's reproductive potential by providing them with certain goods and services .
generally we 're talking about meat , shelter , status , protection , things like that .
and in exchange , women have offered fidelity , or at least a promise of fidelity .
now this sets men and women up in an oppositional relationship .
the war between the sexes is built right into our dna , according to this vision . right ?
what cacilda and i have argued is that no , this economic relationship , this oppositional relationship , is actually an artifact of agriculture , which only arose about 10,000 years ago at the earliest .
anatomically modern human beings have been around for about 200,000 years , so we 're talking about five percent , at most , of our time as a modern , distinct species .
so before agriculture , before the agricultural revolution , it 's important to understand that human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that are characterized wherever they 're found in the world by what anthropologists called fierce egalitarianism .
they not only share things , they demand that things be shared : meat , shelter , protection , all these things that were supposedly being traded to women for their sexual fidelity , it turns out , are shared widely among these societies .
now i 'm not saying that our ancestors were noble savages , and i 'm not saying modern day hunter-gatherers are noble savages either .
what i 'm saying is that this is simply the best way to mitigate risk in a foraging context .
and there 's really no argument about this among anthropologists .
all cacilda and i have done is extend this sharing behavior to sexuality .
so we 've argued that human sexuality has essentially evolved , until agriculture , as a way of establishing and maintaining the complex , flexible social systems , networks , that our ancestors were very good at , and that 's why our species has survived so well .
now , this makes some people uncomfortable , and so i always need to take a moment in these talks to say , listen , i 'm saying our ancestors were promiscuous , but i 'm not saying they were having sex with strangers .
there were no strangers . right ?
in a hunter-gatherer band , there are no strangers .
you 've known these people your entire life .
so i 'm saying , yes , there were overlapping sexual relationships , that our ancestors probably had several different sexual relationships going on at any given moment in their adult lives .
but i 'm not saying they were having sex with strangers .
i 'm not saying that they did n't love the people they were having sex with .
and i 'm not saying there was no pair-bonding going on .
i 'm just saying it was n't sexually exclusive .
and those of us who have chosen to be monogamous - my parents , for example , have been married for 52 years monogamously , and if it was n't monogamously , mom and dad , i do n't want to hear about it - i 'm not criticizing this and i 'm not saying there 's anything wrong with this .
what i 'm saying is that to argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism .
you can choose to be a vegetarian , but do n't think that just because you 've made that decision , bacon suddenly stops smelling good .
okay ? so this is my point .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that one took a minute to sink in , huh ?
now , in addition to being a great genius , a wonderful man , a wonderful husband , a wonderful father , charles darwin was also a world-class victorian prude .
all right ? he was perplexed by the sexual swellings of certain primates , including chimps and bonobos , because these sexual swellings tend to provoke many males to mate with the females .
so he could n't understand why on earth would the female have developed this thing if all they were supposed to be doing is forming their pair bond , right ?
chimps and bonobos , darwin did n't really know this , but chimps and bonobos mate one to four times per hour with up to a dozen males per day when they have their sexual swellings .
interestingly , chimps have sexual swellings through 40 percent , roughly , of their menstrual cycle , bonobos 90 percent , and humans are among the only species on the planet where the female is available for sex throughout the menstrual cycle , whether she 's menstruating , whether she 's post-menopausal , whether she 's already pregnant .
this is vanishingly rare among mammals .
so it 's a very interesting aspect of human sexuality .
now , darwin ignored the reflections of the sexual swelling in his own day , as scientists tend to do sometimes .
so what we 're talking about is sperm competition .
now the average human ejaculate has about 300 million sperm cells , so it 's already a competitive environment .
the question is whether these sperm are competing against other men 's sperm or just their own .
there 's a lot to talk about in this chart .
the one thing i 'll call your attention to right away is the little musical note above the female chimp and bonobo and human .
that indicates female copulatory vocalization .
just look at the numbers .
the average human has sex about 1,000 times per birth .
if that number seems high for some of you , i assure you it seems low for others in the room .
we share that ratio with chimps and bonobos .
we do n't share it with the other three apes , the gorilla , the orangutan and the gibbon , who are more typical of mammals , having sex only about a dozen times per birth .
humans and bonobos are the only animals that have sex face-to-face when both of them are alive .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you 'll see that the human , chimp and bonobo all have external testicles , which in our book we equate to a special fridge you have in the garage just for beer .
if you 're the kind of guy who has a beer fridge in the garage , you expect a party to happen at any moment , and you need to be ready .
that 's what the external testicles are .
they keep the sperm cells cool so you can have frequent ejaculations .
i 'm sorry . it 's true .
the human , some of you will be happy to hear , has the largest , thickest penis of any primate .
now , this evidence goes way beyond anatomy .
it goes into anthropology as well .
historical records are full of accounts of people around the world who have sexual practices that should be impossible given what we have assumed about human sexual evolution .
these women are the mosuo from southwestern china .
in their society , everyone , men and women , are completely sexually autonomous .
there 's no shame associated with sexual behavior .
women have hundreds of partners .
it does n't matter . nobody cares . nobody gossips . it 's not an issue .
when the woman becomes pregnant , the child is cared for by her , her sisters , and her brothers .
the biological father is a nonissue .
on the other side of the planet , in the amazon , we 've got many tribes which practice what anthropologists call partible paternity .
these people actually believe - and they have no contact among them , no common language or anything , so it 's not an idea that spread , it 's an idea that 's arisen around the world - they believe that a fetus is literally made of accumulated semen .
so a woman who wants to have a child who 's smart and funny and strong makes sure she has lots of sex with the smart guy , the funny guy and the strong guy , to get the essence of each of these men into the baby , and then when the child is born , these different men will come forward and acknowledge their paternity of the child .
so paternity is actually sort of a team endeavor in this society .
so there are all sorts of examples like this that we go through in the book .
now , why does this matter ?
edward wilson says we need to understand that human sexuality is first a bonding device and only secondarily procreation .
i think that 's true . this matters because our evolved sexuality is in direct conflict with many aspects of the modern world .
the contradictions between what we 're told we should feel and what we actually do feel generates a huge amount of unnecessary suffering .
my hope is that a more accurate , updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves , for each other , greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions , and that we 'll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate , instinctive right to monitor and control women 's sexual behavior .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and we 'll see that it 's not only gay people that have to come out of the closet .
we all have closets we have to come out of . right ?
and when we do come out of those closets , we 'll recognize that our fight is not with each other , our fight is with an outdated , victorian sense of human sexuality that conflates desire with property rights , generates shame and confusion in place of understanding and empathy .
it 's time we moved beyond mars and venus , because the truth is that men are from africa and women are from africa .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you . christopher ryan : thank you .
ca : so a question .
it 's so perplexing , trying to use arguments about evolutionary history to turn that into what we ought to do today .
someone could give a talk and say , look at us , we 've got these really sharp teeth and muscles and a brain that 's really good at throwing weapons , and if you look at lots of societies around the world , you 'll see very high rates of violence .
nonviolence is a choice like vegetarianism , but it 's not who you are .
how is that different from the talk you gave ?
cr : well first of all , the evidence for high levels of violence in prehistory is very debatable .
but that 's just an example .
certainly , you know , lots of people say to me , just because we lived a certain way in the past does n't mean we should live that way now , and i agree with that .
everyone has to respond to the modern world .
but the body does have its inherent evolved trajectories .
and so you could live on mcdonald 's and milkshakes , but your body will rebel against that . we have appetites .
i think it was schopenhauer who said , a person can do what they want but not want what they want .
and so what i 'm arguing against is the shame that 's associated with desires .
it 's the idea that if you love your husband or wife but you still are attracted to other people , there 's something wrong with you , there 's something wrong with your marriage , something wrong with your partner .
i think a lot of families are fractured by unrealistic expectations that are based upon this false vision of human sexuality .
that 's what i 'm trying to get at .
ca : thank you . communicated powerfully . thanks a lot .
cr : thank you , chris . -lrb- applause -rrb- embracing otherness .
when i first heard this theme , i thought , well , embracing otherness is embracing myself .
and the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me , and it 's given me an insight into the whole notion of self , which i think is worth sharing with you today .
we each have a self , but i do n't think that we 're born with one .
you know how newborn babies believe they 're part of everything ; they 're not separate ?
well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly .
it 's like that initial stage is over - oneness : infancy , unformed , primitive .
it 's no longer valid or real .
what is real is separateness , and at some point in early babyhood , the idea of self starts to form .
our little portion of oneness is given a name , is told all kinds of things about itself , and these details , opinions and ideas become facts , which go towards building ourselves , our identity .
and that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world .
but the self is a projection based on other people 's projections .
is it who we really are ?
or who we really want to be , or should be ?
so this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up .
the self that i attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again .
and my panic at not having a self that fit , and the confusion that came from my self being rejected , created anxiety , shame and hopelessness , which kind of defined me for a long time .
but in retrospect , the destruction of my self was so repetitive that i started to see a pattern .
the self changed , got affected , broken , destroyed , but another one would evolve - sometimes stronger , sometimes hateful , sometimes not wanting to be there at all .
the self was not constant .
and how many times would my self have to die before i realized that it was never alive in the first place ?
i grew up on the coast of england in the ' 70s .
my dad is white from cornwall , and my mom is black from zimbabwe .
even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people .
but nature had its wicked way , and brown babies were born .
but from about the age of five , i was aware that i did n't fit .
i was the black atheist kid in the all-white catholic school run by nuns .
i was an anomaly , and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug in .
because the self likes to fit , to see itself replicated , to belong .
that confirms its existence and its importance .
and it is important .
it has an extremely important function .
without it , we literally ca n't interface with others .
we ca n't hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity , of success .
but my skin color was n't right .
my hair was n't right .
my history was n't right .
my self became defined by otherness , which meant that , in that social world , i did n't really exist .
and i was " other " before being anything else - even before being a girl .
i was a noticeable nobody .
another world was opening up around this time : performance and dancing .
that nagging dread of self-hood did n't exist when i was dancing .
i 'd literally lose myself .
and i was a really good dancer .
i would put all my emotional expression into my dancing .
i could be in the movement in a way that i was n't able to be in my real life , in myself .
and at 16 , i stumbled across another opportunity , and i earned my first acting role in a film .
i can hardly find the words to describe the peace i felt when i was acting .
my dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self , not my own , and it felt so good .
it was the first time that i existed inside a fully-functioning self - one that i controlled , that i steered , that i gave life to .
but the shooting day would end , and i 'd return to my gnarly , awkward self .
by 19 , i was a fully-fledged movie actor , but still searching for definition .
i applied to read anthropology at university .
dr. phyllis lee gave me my interview , and she asked me , " how would you define race ? "
well , i thought i had the answer to that one , and i said , " skin color . "
" so biology , genetics ? " she said .
" because , thandie , that 's not accurate .
because there 's actually more genetic difference between a black kenyan and a black ugandan than there is between a black kenyan and , say , a white norwegian .
because we all stem from africa .
so in africa , there 's been more time to create genetic diversity . "
in other words , race has no basis in biological or scientific fact .
on the one hand , result .
right ?
on the other hand , my definition of self just lost a huge chunk of its credibility .
but what was credible , what is biological and scientific fact , is that we all stem from africa - in fact , from a woman called mitochondrial eve who lived 160,000 years ago .
and race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance .
strangely , these revelations did n't cure my low self-esteem , that feeling of otherness .
my desire to disappear was still very powerful .
i had a degree from cambridge ; i had a thriving career , but my self was a car crash , and i wound up with bulimia and on a therapist 's couch .
and of course i did .
i still believed my self was all i was .
i still valued self-worth above all other worth , and what was there to suggest otherwise ?
we 've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self .
look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates , the revenue it turns over .
we 'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing .
but it 's not . it 's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death .
but there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection - and that thing is oneness , our essence .
the self 's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it 's connected to its creator - to you and to me .
and that can happen with awareness - awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood .
for a start , we can think about all the times when we do lose ourselves .
it happens when i dance , when i 'm acting .
i 'm earthed in my essence , and my self is suspended .
in those moments , i 'm connected to everything - the ground , the air , the sounds , the energy from the audience .
all my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel - that feeling of oneness .
and when i 'm acting a role , i inhabit another self , and i give it life for awhile , because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment .
and i 've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to secretary of state in 2004 .
and no matter how other these selves might be , they 're all related in me .
and i honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure .
i always wondered why i could feel others ' pain so deeply , why i could recognize the somebody in the nobody .
it 's because i did n't have a self to get in the way .
i thought i lacked substance , and the fact that i could feel others ' meant that i had nothing of myself to feel .
the thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment .
and when i realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function , a funny thing happened .
i stopped giving it so much authority .
i give it its due .
i take it to therapy .
i 've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior .
but i 'm not ashamed of my self .
in fact , i respect my self and its function .
and over time and with practice , i 've tried to live more and more from my essence .
and if you can do that , incredible things happen .
i was in congo in february , dancing and celebrating with women who 've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways - destroyed because other brutalized , psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves ' addiction to ipods , pads , and bling , which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain , their suffering , their death .
because , hey , if we 're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life , then we 're devaluing and desensitizing life .
and in that disconnected state , yeah , we can build factory farms with no windows , destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war .
so here 's a note to self : the cracks have started to show in our constructed world , and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks , and oil and blood , rivers of it .
crucially , we have n't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the earth and every other living thing .
we 've just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other - billions of each other .
only we 're not living with each other ; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection .
let 's live with each other and take it a breath at a time .
if we can get under that heavy self , light a torch of awareness , and find our essence , our connection to the infinite and every other living thing .
we knew it from the day we were born .
let 's not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness .
it 's more a reality than the ones our selves have created .
imagine what kind of existence we can have if we honor inevitable death of self , appreciate the privilege of life and marvel at what comes next .
simple awareness is where it begins .
thank you for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was thinking about my place in the universe , and about my first thought about what infinity might mean , when i was a child .
and i thought that if time could reach forwards and backwards infinitely , does n't that mean that every point in time is really infinitely small , and therefore somewhat meaningless .
so we do n't really have a place in the universe , as far as on a time line .
but nothing else does either .
therefore every moment really is the most important moment that 's ever happened , including this moment right now .
and so therefore this music you 're about to hear is maybe the most important music you 'll ever hear in your life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- for those of you who i 'll be fortunate enough to meet afterwards , you could please refrain from saying , " oh my god , you 're so much shorter in real life . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because it 's like the stage is an optical illusion , for some reason .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- somewhat like the curving of the universe .
i do n't know what it is . i get asked in interviews a lot , " my god , you 're guitars are so gigantic ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you must get them custom made - special , humongous guitars . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i was just asked to go and shoot this film called " elizabeth . "
and we 're all talking about this great english icon and saying , " she 's a fantastic woman , she does everything .
how are we going to introduce her ? "
so we went around the table with the studio and the producers and the writer , and they came to me and said , " shekhar , what do you think ? "
and i said , " i think she 's dancing . "
and i could see everybody looked at me , somebody said , " bollywood . "
the other said , " how much did we hire him for ? "
and the third said , " let 's find another director . "
i thought i had better change .
so we had a lot of discussion on how to introduce elizabeth , and i said , " ok , maybe i am too bollywood .
maybe elizabeth , this great icon , dancing ?
what are you talking about ? "
so i rethought the whole thing , and then we all came to a consensus .
and here was the introduction of this great british icon called " elizabeth . "
leicester : may i join you , my lady ?
elizabeth : if it please you , sir .
-lrb- music -rrb- shekhar kapur : so she was dancing .
so how many people who saw the film did not get that here was a woman in love , that she was completely innocent and saw great joy in her life , and she was youthful ?
and how many of you did not get that ?
that 's the power of visual storytelling , that 's the power of dance , that 's the power of music : the power of not knowing .
when i go out to direct a film , every day we prepare too much , we think too much .
knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom .
you know , simple words lost in the quicksand of experience .
so i come up , and i say , " what am i going to do today ? " i 'm not going to do what i planned to do , and i put myself into absolute panic .
it 's my one way of getting rid of my mind , getting rid of this mind that says , " hey , you know what you 're doing . you know exactly what you 're doing .
you 're a director , you 've done it for years . "
so i 've got to get there and be in complete panic .
it 's a symbolic gesture . i tear up the script , i go and i panic myself , i get scared .
i 'm doing it right now ; you can watch me . i 'm getting nervous , i do n't know what to say , i do n't know what i 'm doing , i do n't want to go there .
and as i go there , of course , my a.d. says , " you know what you 're going to do , sir . " i say , " of course i do . "
and the studio executives , they would say , " hey , look at shekhar . he 's so prepared . "
and inside i 've just been listening to nusrat fateh ali khan because he 's chaotic .
i 'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos , i 'm hoping some moments of truth will come .
all preparation is preparation .
i do n't even know if it 's honest .
i do n't even know if it 's truthful .
the truth of it all comes on the moment , organically , and if you get five great moments of great , organic stuff in your storytelling , in your film , your film , audiences will get it .
so i 'm looking for those moments , and i 'm standing there and saying , " i do n't know what to say . "
so , ultimately , everybody 's looking at you , 200 people at seven in the morning who got there at quarter to seven , and you arrived at seven , and everybody 's saying , " hey . what 's the first thing ? what 's going to happen ? "
and you put yourself into a state of panic where you do n't know , and so you do n't know .
and so , because you do n't know , you 're praying to the universe because you 're praying to the universe that something - i 'm going to try and access the universe the way einstein - say a prayer - accessed his equations , the same source . i 'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself , outside the universe .
you 're looking for something that comes and hits you .
until that hits you , you 're not going to do the first shot .
so what do you do ?
so cate says , " shekhar , what do you want me to do ? "
and i say , " cate , what do you want to do ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " you 're a great actor , and i like to give to my actors - why do n't you show me what you want to do ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what am i doing ? i 'm trying to buy time .
i 'm trying to buy time .
so the first thing about storytelling that i learned , and i follow all the time is : panic .
panic is the great access of creativity because that 's the only way to get rid of your mind .
get rid of your mind .
get out of it , get it out .
and let 's go to the universe because there 's something out there that is more truthful than your mind , that is more truthful than your universe .
-lsb- unclear -rsb- , you said that yesterday . i 'm just repeating it because that 's what i follow constantly to find the shunyata somewhere , the emptiness .
out of the emptiness comes a moment of creativity .
so that 's what i do .
when i was a kid - i was about eight years old .
you remember how india was . there was no pollution .
in delhi , we used to live - we used to call it a chhat or the khota .
khota 's now become a bad word . it means their terrace - and we used to sleep out at night .
at school i was being just taught about physics , and i was told that if there is something that exists , then it is measurable .
if it is not measurable , it does not exist .
and at night i would lie out , looking at the unpolluted sky , as delhi used to be at that time when i was a kid , and i used to stare at the universe and say , " how far does this universe go ? "
my father was a doctor .
and i would think , " daddy , how far does the universe go ? "
and he said , " son , it goes on forever . "
so i said , " please measure forever because in school they 're teaching me that if i can not measure it , it does not exist .
it does n't come into my frame of reference . "
so , how far does eternity go ?
what does forever mean ?
and i would lie there crying at night because my imagination could not touch creativity .
so what did i do ?
at that time , at the tender age of seven , i created a story .
what was my story ?
and i do n't know why , but i remember the story .
there was a woodcutter who 's about to take his ax and chop a piece of wood , and the whole galaxy is one atom of that ax .
and when that ax hits that piece of wood , that 's when everything will destroy and the big bang will happen again .
but all before that there was a woodcutter .
and then when i would run out of that story , i would imagine that woodcutter 's universe is one atom in the ax of another woodcutter .
so every time , i could tell my story again and again and get over this problem , and so i got over the problem .
how did i do it ? tell a story .
so what is a story ?
a story is our - all of us - we are the stories we tell ourselves .
in this universe , and this existence , where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we , the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence .
we are the stories we tell ourselves .
so that 's as wide as we look at stories .
a story is the relationship that you develop between who you are , or who you potentially are , and the infinite world , and that 's our mythology .
we tell our stories , and a person without a story does not exist .
so einstein told a story and followed his stories and came up with theories and came up with theories and then came up with his equations .
alexander had a story that his mother used to tell him , and he went out to conquer the world .
we all , everybody , has a story that they follow .
we tell ourselves stories .
so , i will go further , and i say , " i tell a story , and therefore i exist . "
i exist because there are stories , and if there are no stories , we do n't exist .
we create stories to define our existence .
if we do not create the stories , we probably go mad .
i do n't know ; i 'm not sure , but that 's what i 've done all the time .
now , a film .
a film tells a story .
i often wonder when i make a film - i 'm thinking of making a film of the buddha - and i often wonder : if buddha had all the elements that are given to a director - if he had music , if he had visuals , if he had a video camera - would we get buddhism better ?
but that puts some kind of burden on me .
i have to tell a story in a much more elaborate way , but i have the potential .
it 's called subtext .
when i first went to hollywood , they said - i used to talk about subtext , and my agent came to me , " would you kindly not talk about subtext ? "
and i said , " why ? " he said , " because nobody is going to give you a film if you talk about subtext .
just talk about plot and say how wonderful you 'll shoot the film , what the visuals will be . "
so when i look at a film , here 's what we look for : we look for a story on the plot level , then we look for a story on the psychological level , then we look for a story on the political level , then we look at a story on a mythological level .
and i look for stories on each level .
now , it is not necessary that these stories agree with each other .
what is wonderful is , at many times , the stories will contradict with each other .
so when i work with rahman who 's a great musician , i often tell him , " do n't follow what the script already says .
find that which is not .
find the truth for yourself , and when you find the truth for yourself , there will be a truth in it , but it may contradict the plot , but do n't worry about it . "
so , the sequel to " elizabeth , " " golden age . "
when i made the sequel to " elizabeth , " here was a story that the writer was telling : a woman who was threatened by philip ii and was going to war , and was going to war , fell in love with walter raleigh .
because she fell in love with walter raleigh , she was giving up the reasons she was a queen , and then walter raleigh fell in love with her lady in waiting , and she had to decide whether she was a queen going to war or she wanted ...
here 's the story i was telling : the gods up there , there were two people .
there was philip ii , who was divine because he was always praying , and there was elizabeth , who was divine , but not quite divine because she thought she was divine , but the blood of being mortal flowed in her .
but the divine one was unjust , so the gods said , help the just one . "
and so they helped the just one .
and what they did was , they sent walter raleigh down to physically separate her mortal self from her spirit self .
and the mortal self was the girl that walter raleigh was sent , and gradually he separated her so she was free to be divine .
and the two divine people fought , and the gods were on the side of divinity .
of course , all the british press got really upset .
they said , " we won the armada . "
but i said , " but the storm won the armada .
the gods sent the storm . "
so what was i doing ?
i was trying to find a mythic reason to make the film .
of course , when i asked cate blanchett , i said , " what 's the film about ? "
she said , " the film 's about a woman coming to terms with growing older . "
psychological .
the writer said " it 's about history , plot . "
i said " it 's about mythology , the gods . "
so let me show you a film - a piece from that film - and how a camera also - so this is a scene , where in my mind , she was at the depths of mortality .
she was discovering what mortality actually means , and if she is at the depths of mortality , what really happens .
and she 's recognizing the dangers of mortality and why she should break away from mortality .
remember , in the film , to me , both her and her lady in waiting were parts of the same body , one the mortal self and one the spirit self .
so can we have that second ?
-lrb- music -rrb- elizabeth : bess ?
bess ?
bess throckmorton ?
bess : here , my lady .
elizabeth : tell me , is it true ?
are you with child ?
are you with child ?
bess : yes , my lady .
elizabeth : traitorous .
you dare to keep secrets from me ?
you ask my permission before you rut , before you breed .
my bitches wear my collars .
do you hear me ? do you hear me ?
walsingham : majesty . please , dignity . mercy .
elizabeth : this is no time for mercy , walsingham .
you go to your traitor brother and leave me to my business .
is it his ?
tell me . say it . is the child his ? is it his ?
bess : yes .
my lady , it is my husband 's child .
elizabeth : bitch ! -lrb- cries -rrb- raleigh : majesty .
this is not the queen i love and serve .
elizabeth : this man has seduced a ward of the queen , and she has married without royal consent .
these offenses are punishable by law . arrest him .
go .
you no longer have the queen 's protection .
bess : as you wish , majesty .
elizabeth : get out ! get out ! get out !
get out .
-lrb- music -rrb- shekhar kapur : so , what am i trying to do here ?
elizabeth has realized , and she 's coming face-to-face with her own sense of jealousy , her own sense of mortality .
what am i doing with the architecture ?
the architecture is telling a story .
the architecture is telling a story about how , even though she 's the most powerful woman in the world at that time , there is the other , the architecture 's bigger .
the stone is bigger than her because stone is an organic .
it 'll survive her .
so it 's telling you , to me , stone is part of her destiny .
not only that , why is the camera looking down ?
the camera 's looking down at her because she 's in the well .
she 's in the absolute well of her own sense of being mortal .
that 's where she has to pull herself out from the depths of mortality , come in , release her spirit .
and that 's the moment where , in my mind , both elizabeth and bess are the same person .
but that 's the moment she 's surgically removing herself from that .
so the film is operating on many many levels in that scene .
and how we tell stories visually , with music , with actors , and at each level it 's a different sense and sometimes contradictory to each other .
so how do i start all this ?
what 's the process of telling a story ?
about ten years ago , i heard this little thing from a politician , not a politician that was very well respected in india .
and he said that these people in the cities , in one flush , expend as much water as you people in the rural areas do n't get for your family for two days .
that struck a chord , and i said , " that 's true . "
i went to see a friend of mine , and he made me wait in his apartment in malabar hill on the twentieth floor , which is a really , really upmarket area in mumbai .
and he was having a shower for 20 minutes .
i got bored and left , and as i drove out , i drove past the slums of bombay , as you always do , and i saw lines and lines in the hot midday sun of women and children with buckets waiting for a tanker to come and give them water .
and an idea started to develop .
so how does that become a story ?
i suddenly realized that we are heading towards disaster .
so my next film is called " paani " which means water .
and now , out of the mythology of that , i 'm starting to create a world .
what kind of world do i create , and where does the idea , the design of that come ?
so , in my mind , in the future , they started to build flyovers .
you understand flyovers ? yeah ?
they started to build flyovers to get from a to b faster , but they effectively went from one area of relative wealth to another area of relative wealth .
and then what they did was they created a city above the flyovers .
and the rich people moved to the upper city and left the poorer people in the lower cities , about 10 to 12 percent of the people have moved to the upper city .
now , where does this upper city and lower city come ?
there 's a mythology in india about - where they say , and i 'll say it in hindi , -lsb- hindi -rsb- right . what does that mean ?
it says that the rich are always sitting on the shoulders and survive on the shoulders of the poor .
so , from that mythology , the upper city and lower city come .
so the design has a story .
and now , what happens is that the people of the upper city , they suck up all the water .
remember the word i said , suck up .
they suck up all the water , keep to themselves , and they drip feed the lower city .
and if there 's any revolution , they cut off the water .
and , because democracy still exists , there 's a democratic way in which you say " well , if you give us what -lsb- we want -rsb- , we 'll give you water . "
so , okay my time is up .
but i can go on about telling you how we evolve stories , and how stories effectively are who we are and how these get translated into the particular discipline that i am in , which is film .
but ultimately , what is a story ? it 's a contradiction .
everything 's a contradiction .
the universe is a contradiction .
and all of us are constantly looking for harmony .
when you get up , the night and day is a contradiction .
but you get up at 4 a.m.
that first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other .
harmony is the notes that mozart did n't give you , but somehow the contradiction of his notes suggest that .
all contradictions of his notes suggest the harmony .
it 's the effect of looking for harmony in the contradiction that exists in a poet 's mind , a contradiction that exists in a storyteller 's mind .
in a storyteller 's mind , it 's a contradiction of moralities .
in a poet 's mind , it 's a conflict of words , in the universe 's mind , between day and night .
in the mind of a man and a woman , we 're looking constantly at the contradiction between male and female , we 're looking for harmony within each other .
the whole idea of contradiction , but the acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story , not the resolution .
the problem with a lot of the storytelling in hollywood and many films , and as -lsb- unclear -rsb- was saying in his , that we try to resolve the contradiction .
harmony is not resolution .
harmony is the suggestion of a thing that is much larger than resolution .
harmony is the suggestion of something that is embracing and universal and of eternity and of the moment .
resolution is something that is far more limited .
it is finite ; harmony is infinite .
so that storytelling , like all other contradictions in the universe , is looking for harmony and infinity in moral resolutions , resolving one , but letting another go , letting another go and creating a question that is really important .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i admit that i 'm a little bit nervous here because i 'm going to say some radical things , about how we should think about cancer differently , to an audience that contains a lot of people who know a lot more about cancer than i do .
but i will also contest that i 'm not as nervous as i should be because i 'm pretty sure i 'm right about this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that this , in fact , will be the way that we treat cancer in the future .
in order to talk about cancer , i 'm going to actually have to - let me get the big slide here .
first , i 'm going to try to give you a different perspective of genomics .
i want to put it in perspective of the bigger picture of all the other things that are going on - and then talk about something you have n't heard so much about , which is proteomics .
having explained those , that will set up for what i think will be a different idea about how to go about treating cancer .
so let me start with genomics .
it is the hot topic .
it is the place where we 're learning the most .
this is the great frontier .
but it has its limitations .
and in particular , you 've probably all heard the analogy that the genome is like the blueprint of your body , and if that were only true , it would be great , but it 's not .
it 's like the parts list of your body .
it does n't say how things are connected , what causes what and so on .
so if i can make an analogy , let 's say that you were trying to tell the difference between a good restaurant , a healthy restaurant and a sick restaurant , and all you had was the list of ingredients that they had in their larder .
so it might be that , if you went to a french restaurant and you looked through it and you found they only had margarine and they did n't have butter , you could say , " ah , i see what 's wrong with them .
i can make them healthy . "
and there probably are special cases of that .
you could certainly tell the difference between a chinese restaurant and a french restaurant by what they had in a larder .
so the list of ingredients does tell you something , and sometimes it tells you something that 's wrong .
if they have tons of salt , you might guess they 're using too much salt , or something like that .
but it 's limited , because really to know if it 's a healthy restaurant , you need to taste the food , you need to know what goes on in the kitchen , you need the product of all of those ingredients .
so if i look at a person and i look at a person 's genome , it 's the same thing .
the part of the genome that we can read is the list of ingredients .
and so indeed , there are times when we can find ingredients that -lsb- are -rsb- bad .
cystic fibrosis is an example of a disease where you just have a bad ingredient and you have a disease , and we can actually make a direct correspondence between the ingredient and the disease .
but most things , you really have to know what 's going on in the kitchen , because , mostly , sick people used to be healthy people - they have the same genome .
so the genome really tells you much more about predisposition .
so what you can tell is you can tell the difference between an asian person and a european person by looking at their ingredients list .
but you really for the most part ca n't tell the difference between a healthy person and a sick person - except in some of these special cases .
so why all the big deal about genetics ?
well first of all , it 's because we can read it , which is fantastic .
it is very useful in certain circumstances .
it 's also the great theoretical triumph of biology .
it 's the one theory that the biologists ever really got right .
it 's fundamental to darwin and mendel and so on .
and so it 's the one thing where they predicted a theoretical construct .
so mendel had this idea of a gene as an abstract thing , and darwin built a whole theory that depended on them existing , and then watson and crick actually looked and found one .
so this happens in physics all the time .
you predict a black hole , and you look out the telescope and there it is , just like you said .
but it rarely happens in biology .
so this great triumph - it 's so good , there 's almost a religious experience in biology .
and darwinian evolution is really the core theory .
so the other reason it 's been very popular is because we can measure it , it 's digital .
and in fact , thanks to kary mullis , you can basically measure your genome in your kitchen with a few extra ingredients .
so for instance , by measuring the genome , we 've learned a lot about how we 're related to other kinds of animals by the closeness of our genome , or how we 're related to each other - the family tree , or the tree of life .
there 's a huge amount of information about the genetics just by comparing the genetic similarity .
now of course , in medical application , that is very useful because it 's the same kind of information that the doctor gets from your family medical history - except probably , your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do .
and so by reading the genome , we can find out much more about your family than you probably know .
and so we can discover things that probably you could have found by looking at enough of your relatives , but they may be surprising .
i did the 23andme thing and was very surprised to discover that i am fat and bald .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but sometimes you can learn much more useful things about that .
but mostly what you need to know , to find out if you 're sick , is not your predispositions , but it 's actually what 's going on in your body right now .
so to do that , what you really need to do , you need to look at the things that the genes are producing and what 's happening after the genetics , and that 's what proteomics is about .
just like genome mixes the study of all the genes , proteomics is the study of all the proteins .
and the proteins are all of the little things in your body that are signaling between the cells - actually , the machines that are operating - that 's where the action is .
basically , a human body is a conversation going on , both within the cells and between the cells , and they 're telling each other to grow and to die , and when you 're sick , something 's gone wrong with that conversation .
and so the trick is - unfortunately , we do n't have an easy way to measure these like we can measure the genome .
so the problem is that measuring - if you try to measure all the proteins , it 's a very elaborate process .
it requires hundreds of steps , and it takes a long , long time .
and it matters how much of the protein it is .
it could be very significant that a protein changed by 10 percent , so it 's not a nice digital thing like dna .
and basically our problem is somebody 's in the middle of this very long stage , they pause for just a moment , and they leave something in an enzyme for a second , and all of a sudden all the measurements from then on do n't work .
and so then people get very inconsistent results when they do it this way .
people have tried very hard to do this .
i tried this a couple of times and looked at this problem and gave up on it .
i kept getting this call from this oncologist named david agus .
and applied minds gets a lot of calls from people who want help with their problems , and i did n't think this was a very likely one to call back , so i kept on giving him to the delay list .
and then one day , i get a call from john doerr , bill berkman and al gore on the same day saying return david agus 's phone call .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was like , " okay . this guy 's at least resourceful . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we started talking , and he said , " i really need a better way to measure proteins . "
i 'm like , " looked at that . been there .
not going to be easy . "
he 's like , " no , no . i really need it .
i mean , i see patients dying every day because we do n't know what 's going on inside of them .
we have to have a window into this . "
and he took me through specific examples of when he really needed it .
and i realized , wow , this would really make a big difference , if we could do it , and so i said , " well , let 's look at it . "
applied minds has enough play money that we can go and just work on something without getting anybody 's funding or permission or anything .
so we started playing around with this .
and as we did it , we realized this was the basic problem - that taking the sip of coffee - that there were humans doing this complicated process and that what really needed to be done was to automate this process like an assembly line and build robots that would measure proteomics .
and so we did that , and working with david , we made a little company called applied proteomics eventually , which makes this robotic assembly line , which , in a very consistent way , measures the protein .
and i 'll show you what that protein measurement looks like .
basically , what we do is we take a drop of blood out of a patient , and we sort out the proteins in the drop of blood according to how much they weigh , how slippery they are , and we arrange them in an image .
and so we can look at literally hundreds of thousands of features at once out of that drop of blood .
and we can take a different one tomorrow , and you will see your proteins tomorrow will be different - they 'll be different after you eat or after you sleep .
they really tell us what 's going on there .
and so this picture , which looks like a big smudge to you , is actually the thing that got me really thrilled about this and made me feel like we were on the right track .
so if i zoom into that picture , i can just show you what it means .
we sort out the proteins - from left to right is the weight of the fragments that we 're getting , and from top to bottom is how slippery they are .
so we 're zooming in here just to show you a little bit of it .
and so each of these lines represents some signal that we 're getting out of a piece of a protein .
and you can see how the lines occur in these little groups of bump , bump , bump , bump , bump .
and that 's because we 're measuring the weight so precisely that - carbon comes in different isotopes , so if it has an extra neutron on it , we actually measure it as a different chemical .
so we 're actually measuring each isotope as a different one .
and so that gives you an idea of how exquisitely sensitive this is .
so seeing this picture is sort of like getting to be galileo and looking at the stars and looking through the telescope for the first time , and suddenly you say , " wow , it 's way more complicated than we thought it was . "
but we can see that stuff out there and actually see features of it .
so this is the signature out of which we 're trying to get patterns .
so what we do with this is , for example , we can look at two patients , one that responded to a drug and one that did n't respond to a drug , and ask , " what 's going on differently inside of them ? "
and so we can make these measurements precisely enough that we can overlay two patients and look at the differences .
so here we have alice in green and bob in red .
we overlay them . this is actual data .
and you can see , mostly it overlaps and it 's yellow , but there 's some things that just alice has and some things that just bob has .
and if we find a pattern of things of the responders to the drug , we see that in the blood , they have the condition that allows them to respond to this drug .
we might not even know what this protein is , but we can see it 's a marker for the response to the disease .
so this already , i think , is tremendously useful in all kinds of medicine .
but i think this is actually just the beginning of how we 're going to treat cancer .
so let me move to cancer .
the thing about cancer - when i got into this , i really knew nothing about it , but working with david agus , i started watching how cancer was actually being treated and went to operations where it was being cut out .
and as i looked at it , to me it did n't make sense how we were approaching cancer , and in order to make sense of it , i had to learn where did this come from .
we 're treating cancer almost like it 's an infectious disease .
we 're treating it as something that got inside of you that we have to kill .
so this is the great paradigm .
this is another case where a theoretical paradigm in biology really worked - was the germ theory of disease .
so what doctors are mostly trained to do is diagnose - that is , put you into a category and apply a scientifically proven treatment for that diagnosis - and that works great for infectious diseases .
so if we put you in the category of you 've got syphilis , we can give you penicillin .
we know that that works .
if you 've got malaria , we give you quinine or some derivative of it .
and so that 's the basic thing doctors are trained to do , and it 's miraculous in the case of infectious disease - how well it works .
and many people in this audience probably would n't be alive if doctors did n't do this .
but now let 's apply that to systems diseases like cancer .
the problem is that , in cancer , there is n't something else that 's inside of you .
it 's you ; you 're broken .
that conversation inside of you got mixed up in some way .
so how do we diagnose that conversation ?
well , right now what we do is we divide it by part of the body - you know , where did it appear ? - and we put you in different categories according to the part of the body .
and then we do a clinical trial for a drug for lung cancer and one for prostate cancer and one for breast cancer , and we treat these as if they 're separate diseases and that this way of dividing them had something to do with what actually went wrong .
and of course , it really does n't have that much to do with what went wrong because cancer is a failure of the system .
and in fact , i think we 're even wrong when we talk about cancer as a thing .
i think this is the big mistake .
i think cancer should not be a noun .
we should talk about cancering as something we do , not something we have .
and so those tumors , those are symptoms of cancer .
and so your body is probably cancering all the time , but there are lots of systems in your body that keep it under control .
and so to give you an idea of an analogy of what i mean by thinking of cancering as a verb , imagine we did n't know anything about plumbing , and the way that we talked about it , we 'd come home and we 'd find a leak in our kitchen and we 'd say , " oh , my house has water . "
we might divide it - the plumber would say , " well , where 's the water ? "
" well , it 's in the kitchen . " " oh , you must have kitchen water . "
that 's kind of the level at which it is .
" kitchen water , well , first of all , we 'll go in there and we 'll mop out a lot of it .
and then we know that if we sprinkle drano around the kitchen , that helps .
whereas living room water , it 's better to do tar on the roof . "
and it sounds silly , but that 's basically what we do .
and i 'm not saying you should n't mop up your water if you have cancer , but i 'm saying that 's not really the problem ; that 's the symptom of the problem .
what we really need to get at is the process that 's going on , and that 's happening at the level of the proteonomic actions , happening at the level of why is your body not healing itself in the way that it normally does ?
because normally , your body is dealing with this problem all the time .
so your house is dealing with leaks all the time , but it 's fixing them . it 's draining them out and so on .
so what we need is to have a causative model of what 's actually going on , and proteomics actually gives us the ability to build a model like that .
david got me invited to give a talk at national cancer institute and anna barker was there .
and so i gave this talk and said , " why do n't you guys do this ? "
and anna said , " because nobody within cancer would look at it this way .
but what we 're going to do , is we 're going to create a program for people outside the field of cancer to get together with doctors who really know about cancer and work out different programs of research . "
so david and i applied to this program and created a consortium at usc where we 've got some of the best oncologists in the world and some of the best biologists in the world , from cold spring harbor , stanford , austin - i wo n't even go through and name all the places - to have a research project that will last for five years where we 're really going to try to build a model of cancer like this .
we 're doing it in mice first , and we will kill a lot of mice in the process of doing this , but they will die for a good cause .
and we will actually try to get to the point where we have a predictive model where we can understand , when cancer happens , what 's actually happening in there and which treatment will treat that cancer .
so let me just end with giving you a little picture of what i think cancer treatment will be like in the future .
so i think eventually , once we have one of these models for people , which we 'll get eventually - i mean , our group wo n't get all the way there - but eventually we 'll have a very good computer model - sort of like a global climate model for weather .
it has lots of different information about what 's the process going on in this proteomic conversation on many different scales .
and so we will simulate in that model for your particular cancer - and this also will be for als , or any kind of system neurodegenerative diseases , things like that - we will simulate specifically you , not just a generic person , but what 's actually going on inside you .
and in that simulation , what we could do is design for you specifically a sequence of treatments , and it might be very gentle treatments , very small amounts of drugs .
it might be things like , do n't eat that day , or give them a little chemotherapy , maybe a little radiation .
of course , we 'll do surgery sometimes and so on .
but design a program of treatments specifically for you and help your body guide back to health - guide your body back to health .
because your body will do most of the work of fixing it if we just sort of prop it up in the ways that are wrong .
we put it in the equivalent of splints .
and so your body basically has lots and lots of mechanisms for fixing cancer , and we just have to prop those up in the right way and get them to do the job .
and so i believe that this will be the way that cancer will be treated in the future .
it 's going to require a lot of work , a lot of research .
there will be many teams like our team that work on this .
but i think eventually , we will design for everybody a custom treatment for cancer .
so thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- walk around for four months with three wishes , and all the ideas will start to percolate up .
i think everybody should do it - think that you 've got three wishes .
and what would you do ? it 's actually a great exercise to really drill down to the things that you feel are important , and really reflect on the world around us .
and thinking that , can an individual actually do something , or come up with something , that may actually get some traction out there and make a difference ?
inspired by nature - that 's the theme here .
and i think , quite frankly , that 's where i started .
i became very interested in the landscape as a canadian .
we have this great north . and there was a pretty small population , and my father was an avid outdoorsman .
so i really had a chance to experience that .
and i could never really understand exactly what it was , or how it was informing me .
but what i think it was telling me is that we are this transient thing that 's happening , and that the nature that you see out there - the untouched shorelines , the untouched forest that i was able to see - really bring in a sense of that geological time , that this has gone on for a long time , and we 're experiencing it in a different way .
and that , to me , was a reference point that i think i needed to have to be able to make the work that i did .
and i did go out , and i did this picture of grasses coming through in the spring , along a roadside .
this rebirth of grass . and then i went out for years trying to photograph the pristine landscape .
but as a fine-art photographer i somehow felt that it would n't catch on out there , that there would be a problem with trying to make this as a fine-art career .
and i kept being sucked into this genre of the calendar picture , or something of that nature , and i could n't get away from it .
so i started to think of , how can i rethink the landscape ?
i decided to rethink the landscape as the landscape that we 've transformed .
i had a bit of an epiphany being lost in pennsylvania , and i took a left turn trying to get back to the highway .
and i ended up in a town called frackville .
i got out of the car , and i stood up , and it was a coal-mining town . i did a 360 turnaround , and that became one of the most surreal landscapes i 've ever seen .
totally transformed by man .
and that got me to go out and look at mines like this , and go out and look at the largest industrial incursions in the landscape that i could find .
and that became the baseline of what i was doing .
and it also became the theme that i felt that i could hold onto , and not have to re-invent myself - that this theme was large enough to become a life 's work , to become something that i could sink my teeth into and just research and find out where these industries are .
and i think one of the things i also wanted to say in my thanks , which i kind of missed , was to thank all the corporations who helped me get in .
because it took negotiation for almost every one of these photographs - to get into that place to make those photographs , and if it was n't for those people letting me in at the heads of those corporations , i would have never made this body of work .
so in that respect , to me , i 'm not against the corporation .
i own a corporation . i work with them , and i feel that we all need them and they 're important .
but i am also for sustainability .
so there 's this thing that is pulling me in both directions .
and i 'm not making an indictment towards what 's happening here , but it is a slow progression .
so i started thinking , well , we live in all these ages of man : the stone age , and the iron age , and the copper age .
and these ages of man are still at work today .
but we 've become totally disconnected from them .
there 's something that we 're not seeing there .
and it 's a scary thing as well . because when we start looking at the collective appetite for our lifestyles , and what we 're doing to that landscape - that , to me , is something that is a very sobering moment for me to contemplate .
and through my photographs , i 'm hoping to be able to engage the audiences of my work , and to come up to it and not immediately be rejected by the image .
not to say , " oh my god , what is it ? " but to be challenged by it - to say , " wow , this is beautiful , " on one level , but on the other level , " this is scary . i should n't be enjoying it . "
like a forbidden pleasure . and it 's that forbidden pleasure that i think is what resonates out there , and it gets people to look at these things , and it gets people to enter it . and it also , in a way , defines kind of what i feel , too - that i 'm drawn to have a good life .
i want a house , and i want a car .
but there 's this consequence out there .
and how do i begin to have that attraction , repulsion ?
it 's even in my own conscience i 'm having it , and here in my work , i 'm trying to build that same toggle .
these things that i photographed - this tire pile here had 45 million tires in it . it was the largest one .
it was only about an hour-and-a-half away from me , and it caught fire about four years ago . it 's around westley , california , around modesto .
and i decided to start looking at something that , to me , had - if the earlier work of looking at the landscape had a sense of lament to what we were doing to nature , in the recycling work that you 're seeing here was starting to point to a direction . to me , it was our redemption .
that in the recycling work that i was doing , i 'm looking for a practice , a human activity that is sustainable .
that if we keep putting things , through industrial and urban existence , back into the system - if we keep doing that - we can continue on .
of course , listening at the conference , there 's many , many things that are coming . bio-mimicry , and there 's many other things that are coming on stream - nanotechnology that may also prevent us from having to go into that landscape and tear it apart .
and we all look forward to those things .
but in the meantime , these things are scaling up .
these things are continuing to happen .
what you 're looking at here - i went to bangladesh , so i started to move away from north america ; i started to look at our world globally .
these images of bangladesh came out of a radio program i was listening to .
they were talking about exxon valdez , and that there was going to be a glut of oil tankers because of the insurance industries .
and that those oil tankers needed to be decommissioned , and 2004 was going to be the pinnacle .
and i thought , " my god , would n't that be something ? "
to see the largest vessels of man being deconstructed by hand , literally , in third-world countries .
so originally i was going to go to india .
and i was shut out of india because of a greenpeace situation there , and then i was able to get into bangladesh , and saw for the first time a third world , a view of it , that i had never actually thought was possible .
130 million people living in an area the size of wisconsin - people everywhere - the pollution was intense , and the working conditions were horrible .
here you 're looking at some oil fields in california , some of the biggest oil fields . and again , i started to think that - there was another epiphany - that the whole world i was living in was a result of having plentiful oil .
and that , to me , was again something that i started building on , and i continued to build on .
so this is a series i 'm hoping to have ready in about two or three years , under the heading of " the oil party . "
because i think everything that we 're involved in - our clothing , our cars , our roads , and everything - are directly a result .
i 'm going to move to some pictures of china .
and for me china - i started photographing it four years ago , and china truly is a question of sustainability in my mind , not to mention that china , as well , has a great effect on the industries that i grew up around .
i came out of a blue-collar town , a gm town , and my father worked at gm , so i was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work . but you know , to see china and the scale at which it 's evolving , is quite something .
so what you see here is the three gorges dam , and this is the largest dam by 50 percent ever attempted by man .
most of the engineers around the world left the project because they said , " it 's just too big . "
in fact , when it did actually fill with water a year and a half ago , they were able to measure a wobble within the earth as it was spinning .
it took fifteen days to fill it .
so this created a reservoir 600 kilometers long , one of the largest reservoirs ever created .
and what was also one of the bigger projects around that was moving 13 full-size cities up out of the reservoir , and flattening all the buildings so they could make way for the ships .
this is a " before and after . " so that was before .
and this is like 10 weeks later , demolished by hand .
i think 11 of the buildings they used dynamite , everything else was by hand . that was 10 weeks later .
and this gives you an idea .
and it was all the people who lived in those homes , were the ones that were actually taking it apart and working , and getting paid per brick to take their cities apart .
and these are some of the images from that .
so i spent about three trips to the three gorges dam , looking at that massive transformation of a landscape .
and it looks like a bombed-out landscape , but it is n't .
what it is , it 's a landscape that is an intentional one .
this is a need for power , and they 're willing to go through this massive transformation , on this scale , to get that power .
and again , it 's actually a relief for what 's going on in china because i think on the table right now , there 's 27 nuclear power stations to be built .
there has n't been one built in north america for 20 years because of the " nimby " problem - " not in my backyard . "
but in china they 're saying , " no , we 're putting in 27 in the next 10 years . "
and coal-burning furnaces are going in there for hydroelectric power literally weekly .
so coal itself is probably one of the largest problems .
and one of the other things that happened in the three gorges - a lot of the agricultural land that you see there on the left was also lost ; some of the most fertile agricultural land was lost in that .
and 1.2 to 2 million people were relocated , depending on whose statistics you 're looking at .
and this is what they were building .
this is wushan , one of the largest cities that was relocated .
this is the town hall for the city .
and again , the rebuilding of the city - to me , it was sad to see that they did n't really grab a lot of , i guess , what we know here , in terms of urban planning .
there were no parks ; there were no green spaces .
very high-density living on the side of a hill .
and here they had a chance to rebuild cities from the bottom up , but somehow were not connecting with them .
here is a sign that , translated , says , " obey the birth control law .
build our science , civilized and advanced idea of marriage and giving birth . "
so here , if you look at this poster , it has all the trappings of western culture .
you 're seeing the tuxedos , the bouquets .
but what 's really , to me , frightening about the picture and about this billboard is the refinery in the background .
so it 's like marrying up all the things that we have and it 's an adaptation of our way of life , full stop .
and again , when you start seeing that kind of embrace , and you start looking at them leading their rural lifestyle with a very , very small footprint and moving into an urban lifestyle with a much higher footprint , it starts to become very sobering .
this is a shot in one of the biggest squares in guangdong - and this is where a lot of migrant workers are coming in from the country .
and there 's about 130 million people in migration trying to get into urban centers at all times , and in the next 10 to 15 years , are expecting another 400 to 500 million people to migrate into the urban centers like shanghai and the manufacturing centers .
the manufacturers are - the domestics are usually - you can tell a domestic factory by the fact that they all use the same color uniforms .
so this is a pink uniform at this factory . it 's a shoe factory .
and they have dorms for the workers .
so they bring them in from the country and put them up in the dorms .
this is one of the biggest shoe factories , the yuyuan shoe factory near shenzhen . it has 90,000 employees making shoes .
this is a shift change , one of three .
there 's two factories of this scale in the same town .
this is one with 45,000 , so every lunch , there 's about 12,000 coming through for lunch .
they sit down ; they have about 20 minutes .
the next round comes in . it 's an incredible workforce that 's building there . shanghai - i 'm looking at the urban renewal in shanghai , and this is a whole area that will be flattened and turned into skyscrapers in the next five years .
what 's also happening in shanghai is - china is changing because this would n't have happened five years ago , for instance . this is a holdout .
they 're called dengzahoos - they 're like pin tacks to the ground .
they wo n't move . they 're not negotiating .
they 're not getting enough , so they 're not going to move .
and so they 're holding off until they get a deal with them .
and they 've been actually quite successful in getting better deals because most of them are getting a raw deal .
they 're being put out about two hours - the communities that have been around for literally hundreds of years , or maybe even thousands of years , are being broken up and spread across in the suburban areas outside of shanghai . but these are a whole series of guys holding out in this reconstruction of shanghai .
probably the largest urban-renewal project , i think , ever attempted on the planet .
and then the embrace of the things that they 're replacing it with - again , one of my wishes , and i never ended up going there , was to somehow tell them that there were better ways to build a house .
the kinds of collisions of styles and things were quite something , and these are called the villas .
and also , like right now , they 're just moving .
the scaffolding is still on , and this is an e-waste area , and if you looked in the foreground on the big print , you 'd see that the industry - their industry - they 're all recycling .
so the industry 's already growing around these new developments .
this is a five-level bridge in shanghai .
shanghai was a very intriguing city - it 's exploding on a level that i do n't think any city has experienced .
in fact , even shenzhen , the economic zone - one of the first ones - 15 years ago was about 100,000 people , and today it boasts about 10 to 11 million .
so that gives you an idea of the kinds of migrations and the speed with which - this is just the taxis being built by volkswagen .
there 's 9,000 of them here , and they 're being built for most of the big cities , beijing and shanghai , shenzhen .
and this is n't even the domestic car market ; this is the taxi market .
and what we would see here as a suburban development - a similar thing , but they 're all high-rises .
so they 'll put 20 or 40 up at a time , and they just go up in the same way as a single-family dwelling would go up here in an area .
and the density is quite incredible .
and one of the things in this picture that i wanted to point out is that when i saw these kinds of buildings , i was shocked to see that they 're not using a central air-conditioning system ; every window has an air conditioner in it .
and i 'm sure there are people here who probably know better than i do about efficiencies , but i ca n't imagine that every apartment having its own air conditioner is a very efficient way to cool a building on this scale .
and when you start looking at that , and then you start factoring up into a city the size of shanghai , it 's literally a forest of skyscrapers .
it 's breathtaking , in terms of the speed at which this city is transforming .
and you can see in the foreground of this picture , it 's still one of the last areas that was being held up .
right now that 's all cleared out - this was done about eight months ago - and high-rises are now going up into that central spot .
so a skyscraper is built , literally , overnight in shanghai .
most recently i went in , and i started looking at some of the biggest industries in china .
and this is baosteel , right outside of shanghai .
this is the coal supply for the steel factory - 18 square kilometers .
it 's an incredibly massive operation , i think 15,000 workers , five cupolas , and the sixth one 's coming in here .
so they 're building very large blast furnaces to try to deal with the demand for steel in china .
so this is three of the visible blast furnaces within that shot .
and again , looking at these images , there 's this constant , like , haze that you 're seeing .
this is going to show you , real time , an assembler . it 's a circuit breaker .
10 hours a day at this speed .
i think one of the issues that we here are facing with china , is that they 're using a lot of the latest production technology .
in that one , there were 400 people that worked on the floor .
and i asked the manager to point out five of your fastest producers , and then i went and looked at each one of them for about 15 or 20 minutes , and picked this one woman .
and it was just lightning fast ; the way she was working was almost unbelievable .
but that is the trick that they 've got right now , that they 're winning with , is that they 're using all the latest technologies and extrusion machines , and bringing all the components into play , but the assembly is where they 're actually bringing in - the country workers are very willing to work . they want to work .
there 's a massive backlog of people wanting their jobs .
that condition 's going to be there for the next 10 to 15 years if they realize what they want , which is , you know , 400 to 500 million more people coming into the cities .
in this particular case - this is the assembly line that you saw ; this is a shot of it .
i had to use a very small aperture to get the depth of field .
i had to have them freeze for 10 seconds to get this shot .
it took me five fake tries because they were just going . to slow them down was literally impossible .
they were just wound up doing these things all day long , until the manager had to , with a stern voice , say , " okay , everybody freeze . "
it was n't too bad , but they 're driven to produce these things at an incredible rate .
this is a textile mill doing synthetic silk , an oil byproduct .
and what you 're seeing here is , again , one of the most state-of-the-art textile mills .
there are 500 of these machines ; they 're worth about 200,000 dollars each .
so you have about 12 people running this , and they 're just inspecting it - and they 're just walking the lines .
the machines are all running , absolutely incredible to see what the scale of industries are .
and i started getting in further and further into the factories .
and that 's a diptych . i do a lot of pairings to try and get the sense of scale in these places .
this is a line where they get the threads and they wind the threads together , pre-going into the textile mills .
here 's something that 's far more labor-intensive , which is the making of shoes .
this floor has about 1,500 workers on this floor .
the company itself had about 10,000 employees , and they 're doing domestic shoes .
it was very hard to get into the international companies because i had to get permission from companies like nike and adidas , and that 's very hard to get .
and they do n't want to let me in .
but the domestic was much easier to do .
it just gives you a sense of , again - and that 's where , really , the whole migration of jobs started going over to china and making the shoes . nike was one of the early ones .
it was such a high labor component to it that it made a lot of sense to go after that labor market .
this is a high-tech mobile phone : bird mobile phone , one of the largest mobile makers in china .
i think mobile phone companies are popping up , literally , on a weekly basis , and they have an explosive growth in mobile phones .
this is a textile where they 're doing shirts - youngor , the biggest shirt factory and clothing factory in china .
and this next shot here is one of the lunchrooms .
everything is very efficient .
while setting up this shot , people on average would spend eight to 10 minutes having a lunch .
this was one of the biggest factories i 've ever seen .
they make coffeemakers here , the biggest coffeemaker and the biggest iron makers - they make 20 million of them in the world .
there 's 21,000 employees . this one factory - and they had several of them - is half a kilometer long .
these are just recently shot - i just came back about a month ago , so you 're the first ones to be seeing these , these new factory pictures i 've taken .
so it 's taken me almost a year to gain access into these places .
the other aspect of what 's happening in china is that there 's a real need for materials there .
so a lot of the recycled materials that are collected here are being recycled and taken to china by ships .
that 's cubed metal . this is armatures , electrical armatures , where they 're getting the copper and the high-end steel from electrical motors out , and recycling them .
this is certainly connected to california and silicon valley .
but this is what happens to most of the computers .
fifty percent of the world 's computers end up in china to be recycled .
it 's referred to as " e-waste " there .
and it is a bit of a problem . the way they recycle the boards is that they actually use the coal briquettes , which are used all through china , but they heat up the boards , and with pairs of pliers they pull off all the components .
they 're trying to get all the valued metals out of those components .
but the toxic smells - when you come into a town that 's actually doing this kind of burning of the boards , you can smell it a good five or 10 kilometers before you get there .
here 's another operation . it 's all cottage industries , so it 's not big places - it 's all in people 's front porches , in their backyards , even in their homes they 're burning boards , if there 's a concern for somebody coming by - because it is considered in china to be illegal , doing it , but they ca n't stop the product from coming in .
this portrait - i 'm not usually known for portraits , but i could n't resist this one , where she 's been through mao , and she 's been through the great leap forward , and the cultural revolution , and now she 's sitting on her porch with this e-waste beside her . it 's quite something .
this is a road where it 's been shored up by computer boards in one of the biggest towns where they 're recycling .
so that 's the photographs that i wanted to show you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to dedicate my wishes to my two girls .
they 've been sitting on my shoulder the whole time while i 've been thinking .
one 's megan , the one of the right , and katja there .
and to me the whole notion - the things i 'm photographing are out of a great concern about the scale of our progress and what we call progress .
and as much as there are great things around the corner - and it 's palpable in this room - of all of the things that are just about to break that can solve so many problems , i 'm really hoping that those things will spread around the world and will start to have a positive effect .
and it is n't something that is n't just affecting our world , but it starts to go up - because i think we can start correcting our footprint and bring it down - but there 's a growing footprint that 's happening in asia , and is growing at a rapid , rapid rate , and so i do n't think we can equalize it . so ultimately the strategy , i think , here is that we have to be very concerned about their evolution , because it is going to be connected to our evolution as well .
so part of my thinking , and part of my wishes , is sitting with these thoughts in mind , and thinking about , " how is their life going to be when they want to have children , or when they 're ready to get married 20 years from now - or whatever , 15 years from now ? "
and to me that has been the core behind most of my thinking - in my work , and also for this incredible chance to have some wishes .
wish one : world-changing . i want to use my images to persuade millions of people to join in the global conversation on sustainability .
and it is through communications today that i believe that that is not an unreal idea .
oh , and i went in search - i wanted to put what i had in mind , hitch it onto something . i did n't want a wish just to start from nowhere .
one of them i 'm starting from almost nothing , but the other one , i wanted to find out what 's going on that 's working right now .
and worldchanging.com is a fantastic blog , and that blog is now being visited by close to half-a-million people a month .
and it just started about 14 months ago .
and the beauty of what 's going on there is that the tone of the conversation is the tone that i like .
what they 're doing there is that they 're not - i think the environmental movement has failed in that it 's used the stick too much ; it 's used the apocalyptic tone too much ; it has n't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out .
whereas this conversation that is going on in this blog is about positive movements , about how to change our world in a better way , quickly .
and it 's looking at technology , and it 's looking at new energy-saving devices , and it 's looking at how to rethink and how to re-strategize the movement towards sustainability .
and so for me , one of the things that i thought would be to put some of my work in the service of promoting the worldchanging.com website .
some of you might know , he 's a tedster - stephen sagmeister and i are working on some layouts . and this is still in preliminary stages ; these are n't the finals . but these images , with worldchanging.com , can be placed into any kind of media .
they could be posted through the web ; they could be used as a billboard or a bus shelter , or anything of that nature .
so we 're looking at this as trying to build out .
and what we ended up discussing was that in most media you get mostly an image with a lot of text , and the text is blasted all over .
what was unusual , according to stephen , is less than five percent of ads are actually leading with image .
and so in this case , because it 's about a lot of these images and what they represent , and the kinds of questions they bring up , that we thought letting the images play out and bring someone to say , " well , what 's worldchanging.com , with these images , have to do ? "
and hopefully inspire people to go to that website .
so worldchanging.com , and building that blog , and it is a blog , and i 'm hoping that it is n't - i do n't see it as the kind of blog where we 're all going to follow each other to death .
this one is one that will spoke out , and will go out , and to start reaching . because right now there 's conversations in india , in china , in south america - there 's entries coming from all around the world .
i think there 's a chance to have a dialogue , a conversation about sustainability at worldchanging.com.
and anything that you can do to promote that would be fantastic .
wish two is more of the bottom-up , ground-up one that i 'm trying to work with .
and this one is : i wish to launch a groundbreaking competition that motivates kids to invest ideas on , and invent ideas on , sustainability .
and one of the things that came out - allison , who actually nominated me , said something earlier on in a brainstorming . she said that recycling in canada had a fantastic entry into our psyche through kids between grade four and six .
and you think about it , you know , grade four - my wife and i , we say age seven is the age of reason , so they 're into the age of reason . and they 're pre-puberty .
so it 's this great window where they actually are - you can influence them . you know what happens at puberty ?
you know , we know that from earlier presentations .
so my thinking here is that we try to motivate those kids to start driving home ideas . let them understand what sustainability is , and that they have a vested interest in it to happen .
and one of the ways i thought of doing it is to use my prize , so i would take 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of the winnings , and the rest is going to be to manage this project , but to use that as prizes for kids to get into their hands .
but the other thing that i thought would be fantastic was to create these - call them " prize targets . "
and so one could be for the best sustainable idea for an in-school project , the best one for a household project , or it could be the best community project for sustainability .
and i also thought there should be a nice prize for the best artwork for " in my world . " and what would happen - it 's a scalable thing . and if we can get people to put in things - whether it 's equipment , like a media lab , or money to make the prize significant enough - and to open it up to all the schools that are public schools , or schools that are with kids that age , and make it a wide-open competition for them to go after those prizes and to submit them .
and the prize has to be a verifiable thing , so it 's not about just ideas .
the art pieces are about the ideas and how they present them and do them , but the actual things have to be verifiable .
in that way , what 's happening is that we 're motivating a certain age group to start thinking .
and they 're going to push that up , from the bottom - up into , i believe , into the households . and parents will be reacting to it , and trying to help them with the projects .
and i think it starts to motivate the whole idea towards sustainability in a very positive way , and starts to teach them . they know about recycling now , but they do n't really , i think , get sustainability in all the things , and the energy footprint , and how that matters .
and to teach them , to me , would be a fantastic wish , and it would be something that i would certainly put my shoulder into .
and again , in " in my world , " the competition - we would use the artwork that comes in from that competition to promote it .
and i like the words , " in my world , " because it gives possession of the world to the person who 's doing it .
it is my world ; it 's not someone else 's . i want to help it ; i want to do something with it . so i think it has a great opportunity to engage the imaginations - and great ideas , i think , come from kids - and engage their imagination into a project , and do something for schools .
i think all schools could use extra equipment , extra cash - it 's going to be an incentive for them to do that .
and these are some of the ideas in terms of where we could possibly put in some promotion for " in my world . "
and wish three is : imax film . so i was told i should do one for myself , and i 've always wanted to actually get involved with doing something .
and the scale of my work , and the kinds of ideas i 'm playing with - when i first saw an imax film , i almost immediately thought , " there 's a real resonance between what i 'm trying to do and the scale of what i try to do as a photographer . "
and i think there 's a real possibility to reach new audiences if i had a chance .
so i 'm looking , really , for a mentor , because i just had my birthday .
i 'm 50 , and i do n't have time to go back to school right now - i 'm too busy . so i need somebody who can put me on a quick catch-up course on how to do something like that , and lead me through the maze of how one does something like this .
that would be fantastic . so those are my three wishes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security , because we 've got to get better at security in this 21st century .
let me start by saying , let 's look back to the 20th century , and kind of get a sense of how that style of security worked for us .
this is verdun , a battlefield in france just north of the nato headquarters in belgium .
at verdun , in 1916 , over a 300-day period , 700,000 people were killed , so about 2,000 a day .
if you roll it forward - 20th-century security - into the second world war , you see the battle of stalingrad , 300 days , 2 million people killed .
we go into the cold war , and we continue to try and build walls .
we go from the trench warfare of the first world war to the maginot line of the second world war , and then we go into the cold war , the iron curtain , the berlin wall .
walls do n't work .
my thesis for us today is , instead of building walls to create security , we need to build bridges .
this is a famous bridge in europe .
it 's in bosnia-herzegovina .
it 's the bridge over the drina river , the subject of a novel by ivo andrić , and it talks about how , in that very troubled part of europe and the balkans , over time there 's been enormous building of walls .
more recently , in the last decade , we begin to see these communities start , hesitatingly , to come together .
i would argue , again , open-source security is about connecting the international , the interagency , the private-public , and lashing it together with strategic communication , largely in social networks .
so let me talk a little bit about why we need to do that , because our global commons is under attack in a variety of ways , will be solved by building walls .
now , i 'm a sailor , obviously .
this is a ship , a liner , clipping through the indian ocean .
what 's wrong with this picture ?
it 's got concertina wire along the sides of it .
that 's to prevent pirates from attacking it .
piracy is a very active threat today around the world . this is in the indian ocean .
piracy is also very active in the strait of malacca .
it 's active in the gulf of guinea .
we see it in the caribbean .
it 's a $ 10-billion-a-year discontinuity in the global transport system .
last year , at this time , there were 20 vessels , 500 mariners held hostage .
this is an attack on the global commons .
we need to think about how to address it .
let 's shift to a different kind of sea , the cyber sea .
here are photographs of two young men .
at the moment , they 're incarcerated .
they conducted a credit card fraud that netted them over 10 billion dollars .
this is part of cybercrime which is a $ 2-trillion-a-year discontinuity in the global economy .
two trillion a year .
that 's just under the gdp of great britain .
so this cyber sea , which we know endlessly is the fundamental piece of radical openness , is very much under threat as well .
another thing i worry about in the global commons is the threat posed by trafficking , by the movement of narcotics , opium , here coming out of afghanistan through europe over to the united states .
we worry about cocaine coming from the andean ridge north .
we worry about the movement of illegal weapons and trafficking . above all , perhaps , we worry about human trafficking , and the awful cost of it .
trafficking moves largely at sea but in other parts of the global commons .
this is a photograph , and i wish i could tell you that this is a very high-tech piece of us navy gear that we 're using to stop the trafficking .
the bad news is , this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels .
it was built in the jungles of south america .
we caught it with that low-tech raft - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and it was carrying six tons of cocaine .
crew of four . sophisticated communications sweep .
this kind of trafficking , in narcotics , in humans , in weapons , god forbid , in weapons of mass destruction , is part of the threat to the global commons .
and let 's pull it together in afghanistan today .
this is a field of poppies in afghanistan .
eighty to 90 percent of the world 's poppy , opium and heroin , comes out of afghanistan .
we also see there , of course , terrorism .
this is where al qaeda is staged from .
we also see a very strong insurgency embedded there .
so this terrorism concern is also part of the global commons , and what we must address .
so here we are , 21st century .
we know our 20th-century tools are not going to work .
what should we do ?
i would argue that we will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun .
we will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun .
we will need the application of military force .
when we do it , we must do it well , and competently .
but my thesis is , open-source security is about international , interagency , private-public connection pulled together by this idea of strategic communication on the internet .
let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way .
this is afghanistan . these are afghan soldiers .
they are all holding books .
you should say , " that 's odd . i thought i read that this demographic , young men and women in their 20s and 30s , is largely illiterate in afghanistan . "
you would be correct .
eighty-five percent can not read when they enter the security forces of afghanistan .
why ? because the taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read .
so the question is , so , why are they all standing there holding books ?
the answer is , we are teaching them to read in literacy courses by nato in partnership with private sector entities , in partnership with development agencies .
we 've taught well over 200,000 afghan security forces to read and write at a basic level .
when you can read and write in afghanistan , you will typically put a pen in your pocket .
at the ceremonies , when these young men and women graduate , they take that pen with great pride , and put it in their pocket .
this is bringing together international - there are 50 nations involved in this mission - interagency - these development agencies - and private-public , to take on this kind of security .
now , we are also teaching them combat skills , of course , but i would argue , open-source security means connecting in ways that create longer lasting security effect .
here 's another example .
this is a us navy warship .
it 's called the comfort .
there 's a sister ship called the mercy .
they are hospital ships .
this one , the comfort , operates throughout the caribbean and the coast of south america conducting patient treatments .
on a typical cruise , they 'll do 400,000 patient treatments .
it is crewed not strictly by military but by a combination of humanitarian organizations : operation hope , project smile .
other organizations send volunteers .
interagency physicians come out .
they 're all part of this .
to give you one example of the impact this can have , this little boy , eight years old , walked with his mother two days to come to the eye clinic put on by the comfort .
when he was fitted , over his extremely myopic eyes , he suddenly looked up and said , " mama , veo el mundo . "
" mom , i see the world . "
multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments , this private-public collaboration with security forces , and you begin to see the power of creating security in a very different way .
here you see baseball players .
can you pick out the two us army soldiers in this photograph ?
they are the two young men on either side of these young boys . this is part of a series of baseball clinics , where we have explored collaboration between major league baseball , the department of state , who sets up the diplomatic piece of this , military baseball players , who are real soldiers and they put on clinics throughout latin america and the caribbean , in honduras , in nicaragua , in all of the central american and caribbean nations where baseball is so popular , and it creates security .
it shows role models to young men and women about fitness and about life that i would argue help create security for us .
another aspect of this partnership is in disaster relief .
this is a us air force helicopter participating after the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people .
in each of these major disasters - the tsunami in 2004 , 250,000 dead , the kashmiri earthquake in pakistan , 2005 , 85,000 dead , the haitian earthquake , about 300,000 dead , more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combination which struck japan and its nuclear industry - in all of these instances , we see partnerships between international actors , interagency , private-public working with security forces to respond to this kind of natural disaster .
so these are examples of this idea of open-source security .
we tie it together , increasingly , by doing things like this .
now , you 're looking at this thinking , " ah , admiral , these must be sea lanes of communication , or these might be fiber optic cables . "
no . this is a graphic of the world according to twitter .
purple are tweets . green are geolocation .
white is the synthesis .
it 's a perfect evocation of that great population survey , the six largest nations in the world in descending order : china , india , facebook , the united states , twitter and indonesia . -lrb- laughter -rrb- why do we want to get in these nets ?
why do we want to be involved ?
we talked earlier about the arab spring , and the power of all this .
i 'll give you another example , and it 's how you move this message .
i gave a talk like this in london a while back about this point . i said , as i say to all of you , i 'm on facebook . friend me .
got a little laugh from the audience .
there was an article which was run by ap , on the wire .
got picked up in two places in the world : finland and indonesia .
the headline was : nato admiral needs friends .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- which i do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the story was a catalyst , and the next morning i had hundreds of facebook friend requests from indonesians and finns , mostly saying , " admiral , we heard you need a friend , and oh , by the way , what is nato ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , we laugh , but this is how we move the message , and moving that message is how we connect international , interagency , private-public , and these social nets to help create security .
now , let me hit a somber note .
this is a photograph of a brave british soldier .
he 's in the scots guards .
he 's standing the watch in helmand , in southern afghanistan .
i put him here to remind us , i would not want anyone to leave the room thinking that we do not need capable , competent militaries who can create real military effect .
that is the core of who we are and what we do , and we do it to protect freedom , freedom of speech , all the things we treasure in our societies .
but , you know , life is not an on-and-off switch .
you do n't have to have a military that is either in hard combat or is in the barracks .
i would argue life is a rheostat .
you have to dial it in , and as i think about how we create security in this 21st century , there will be times when we will apply hard power in true war and crisis , but there will be many instances , as we 've talked about today , where our militaries can be part of creating 21st-century security , international , interagency , private-public , connected with competent communication .
i would close by saying that we heard earlier today about wikipedia . i use wikipedia all the time to look up facts , and as all of you appreciate , wikipedia is not created by 12 brilliant people locked in a room writing articles .
wikipedia , every day , is tens of thousands of people inputting information , and every day millions of people withdrawing that information .
it 's a perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together .
no one person , no one alliance , no one nation , no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together .
the vision statement of wikipedia is very simple : a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge .
my thesis for you is that by combining international , interagency , private-public , strategic communication , together , in this 21st century , we can create the sum of all security .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the filmmaker georges méliès was first a magician .
now movies proved to be the ultimate medium for magic .
with complete control of everything the audience can see , moviemakers had developed an arsenal of techniques to further their deceptions .
motion pictures are themselves an illusion of life , produced by the sequential projection of still frames , and they astonished the lumière brothers ' early audiences .
even today 's sophisticated moviegoers still lose themselves to the screen , and filmmakers leverage this separation from reality to great effect .
now imaginative people have been having fun with this for over 400 years .
giambattista della porta , a neapolitan scholar in the 16th century , examined and studied the natural world and saw how it could be manipulated .
playing with the world , and our perception of it , really is the essence of visual effects .
so digging deeper into this with the science and technology council of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences reveals some truth behind the trickery .
visual effects are based on the principles of all illusions : assumption , things are as we know them ; presumption , things will behave as we expect ; and context in reality , our knowledge of the world as we know it , such as scale .
now a fourth factor really becomes an obsession , which is , never betray the illusion .
and that last point has made visual effects a constant quest for perfection .
so from the hand-cranked jump cut early days of cinema to last sunday 's oscar winner , what follows are some steps and a few repeats in the evolution of visual effects .
i hope you will enjoy .
isabelle : " the filmmaker georges méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams . "
-lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- " ' a trip to the moon ' -lrb- 1902 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " 2011 restoration of the original hand-tinted color " -rsb- -lsb- " ' 2001 : a space odyssey ' -lrb- 1968 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award winner for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' avatar ' -lrb- 2009 -rrb- " -rsb- first doctor : how are you feeling , jake ?
jake : hey guys .
-lsb- " academy award winner for visual effects " -rsb- second doctor : welcome to your new body , jake.first doctor : good .
second doctor : we 're gonna take this nice and easy , jake.first doctor : well , do you want to sit up ? that 's fine .
second doctor : and good , just take it nice and slow , jake .
well , no truncal ataxia , that 's good.first doctor : you feeling light-headed or dizzy at all ?
oh , you 're wiggling your toes .
-lsb- " ' alice 's adventures in wonderland ' -lrb- 1972 -rrb- " -rsb- alice : what 's happening to me ?
-lsb- " ' alice in wonderland ' -lrb- 2010 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award nominee for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' the lost world ' -lrb- 1925 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " stop motion animation " -rsb- -lsb- " ' jurassic park ' -lrb- 1993 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- dinosaur roars -rsb- -lsb- " cg animation " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award winner for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' the smurfs ' -lrb- 2011 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " autodesk maya software - key frame animation " -rsb- -lsb- " ' rise of the planet of the apes ' -lrb- 2011 -rrb- " -rsb- chimpanzee : no ! -lsb- " academy award nominee for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' metropolis ' -lrb- 1927 -rrb- " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- " ' blade runner ' -lrb- 1982 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award nominee for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' the rains came ' -lrb- 1939 -rrb- " -rsb- rama safti : well , it 's all over .
maharaja : nothing to worry about , not a thing .
-lsb- ' academy award for special effects - -lrb- first year of category -rrb- " -rsb- -lrb- explosion -rrb- -lsb- " ' 2012 ' -lrb- 2009 -rrb- " -rsb- governor : it seems to me that the worst is over .
-lsb- " cg destruction " -rsb- -lsb- " ' lord of the rings : the return of the king ' -lrb- 2003 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " massive software - crowd generation " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award winner for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' ben hur : a tale of the christ ' -lrb- 1925 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " miniatures and puppets bring the crowd to life " -rsb- -lsb- " ' gladiator ' -lrb- 2000 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " cg coliseum and digital crowds " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award winner for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " ' harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2 ' -lrb- 2011 -rrb- " -rsb- -lsb- " academy award nominee for visual effects " -rsb- -lsb- " produced in conjunction with the academy 's science and technology council . " -rsb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- " ' it is today possible to realize the most impossible and improbable things . ' - georges méliès " -rsb- don levy : thank you .
i would like to talk to you about a very special group of animals .
there are 10,000 species of birds in the world .
vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds .
when you see a vulture like this , the first thing that comes to your mind is , these are disgusting , ugly , greedy creatures that are just after your flesh , associated with politicians . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to change that perception . i want to change those feelings you have for these birds , because they need our sympathy . they really do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'll tell you why .
first of all , why do they have such a bad press ?
when charles darwin went across the atlantic in 1832 on the beagle , he saw the turkey vulture , and he said , " these are disgusting birds with bald scarlet heads that are formed to revel in putridity . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- you could not get a worse insult , and that from charles darwin . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , he changed his mind when he came back , and i 'll tell you why .
they 've also be associated with disney - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - personified as goofy , dumb , stupid characters .
more recently , if you 've been following the kenyan press - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- cheers -rrb- - these are the attributes that they associated the kenyan mps with . but i want to challenge that .
i want to challenge that . do you know why ?
because mps do not keep the environment clean . -lrb- laughter -rrb- mps do not help to prevent the spread of diseases .
they are hardly monogamous . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- they are far from being extinct . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and , my favorite is , vultures are better looking . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so there 's two types of vultures in this planet .
there are the new world vultures that are mainly found in the americas , like the condors and the caracaras , and then the old world vultures , where we have 16 species . from these 16 , 11 of them are facing a high risk of extinction .
so why are vultures important ? first of all , they provide vital ecological services . they clean up .
they 're our natural garbage collectors .
they clean up carcasses right to the bone .
they help to kill all the bacteria . they help absorb anthrax that would otherwise spread and cause huge livestock losses and diseases in other animals .
recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures , carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose , and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases .
vultures also have tremendous historical significance .
they have been associated in ancient egyptian culture .
nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood , and together with the cobra , symbolized the unity between upper and lower egypt .
in hindu mythology , jatayu was the vulture god , and he risked his life in order to save the goddess sita from the 10-headed demon ravana .
in tibetan culture , they are performing very important sky burials . in places like tibet , there are no places to bury the dead , or wood to cremate them , so these vultures provide a natural disposal system .
so what is the problem with vultures ?
we have eight species of vultures that occur in kenya , of which six are highly threatened with extinction .
the reason is that they 're getting poisoned , and the reason that they 're getting poisoned is because there 's human-wildlife conflicts . the pastoral communities are using this poison to target predators , and in return , the vultures are falling victim to this .
in south asia , in countries like india and pakistan , four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered , which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct , and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like diclofenac .
this drug has now been banned for veterinary use in india , and they have taken a stand .
because there are no vultures , there 's been a spread in the numbers of feral dogs at carcass dump sites , and when you have feral dogs , you have a huge time bomb of rabies . the number of cases of rabies has increased tremendously in india .
kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in africa : 353 wind turbines are going to be up at lake turkana .
i am not against wind energy , but we need to work with the governments , because wind turbines do this to birds . they slice them in half .
they are bird-blending machines .
in west africa , there 's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market .
so what 's being done ? well , we 're conducting research on these birds . we 're putting transmitters on them .
we 're trying to determine their basic ecology , and see where they go .
we can see that they travel different countries , so if you focus on a problem locally , it 's not going to help you .
we need to work with governments in regional levels .
we 're working with local communities .
we 're talking to them about appreciating vultures , about the need from within to appreciate these wonderful creatures and the services that they provide .
how can you help ? you can become active , make noise . you can write a letter to your government and tell them that we need to focus on these very misunderstood creatures . volunteer your time to spread the word . spread the word .
when you walk out of this room , you will be informed about vultures , but speak to your families , to your children , to your neighbors about vultures .
they are very graceful . charles darwin said he changed his mind because he watched them fly effortlessly without energy in the skies .
kenya , this world , will be much poorer without these wonderful species .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ where do we go from here ? ♫ ♫ how do we carry on ? ♫ ♫ i ca n't get beyond the questions ♫ ♫ clambering for the scraps ♫ ♫ in the shatter of us , collapsed ♫ ♫ it cuts me with every could have been ♫ ♫ pain on pain on play , repeating ♫ ♫ with the backup , makeshift life in waiting ♫ ♫ everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ what of the wretched hollow ? ♫ ♫ the endless in between ? ♫ ♫ are we just going to wait it out ? ♫
♫ there is nothing to see here now ♫ ♫ turning the sign around ♫ ♫ we 're closed to the earth ' til further notice ♫ ♫ a crumbling cliche case ♫ ♫ crumpled and puffy faced ♫ ♫ caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles ♫ ♫ all i want , only one street level miracle ♫ ♫ i 'll be an out and out born again ♫ ♫ from none more cynical ♫ ♫ everybody says ♫ ♫ that time heals everything ♫ ♫ but what of the wretched hollow ? ♫ ♫ the endless in between ? ♫ ♫ are we just going to wait it out ? ♫
♫ and sit here cold ? ♫ ♫ we will be long gone by then ♫ ♫ in lackluster ♫ ♫ in dust we lay around old magazines ♫ ♫ fluorescent lighting sets the scene ♫ ♫ for all we could and should be being ♫ ♫ in the one life that we 've got ♫ ♫ everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ and what of the wretched hollow ? ♫ ♫ the endless in between ? ♫ ♫ are we just going to wait it out ? ♫ ♫ just going to sweat it out ? ♫ ♫ just going to sweat it out ? ♫
♫ wait it out ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the p.o. box at the end of the day , and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email , in facebook , in texting or cell phones in general .
and so while other kids were bbm-ing their parents , i was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone , which was a little frustrating when grandma was in the hospital , but i was just looking for some sort of scribble , some unkempt cursive from my mother .
and so when i moved to new york city after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression , i did the only thing i could think of at the time .
i wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers , and tucked them all throughout the city , dozens and dozens of them . i left them everywhere , in cafes and in libraries , at the u.n. , everywhere .
i blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary , and i posed a kind of crazy promise to the internet : that if you asked me for a hand-written letter , i would write you one , no questions asked .
overnight , my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak - a single mother in sacramento , a girl being bullied in rural kansas , all asking me , a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order , to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox .
well , today i fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox , fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most , but most of all , fueled by crates of mail like this one , my trusty mail crate , filled with the scriptings of ordinary people , strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they 're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee , but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing .
but , you know , the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper .
they could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters .
they 're the ones from my generation , the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless , and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen .
we have learned to diary our pain onto facebook , and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less .
but what if it 's not about efficiency this time ?
i was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate , which is a conversation starter , let me tell you .
if you ever need one , just carry one of these . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and a man just stared at me , and he was like , " well , why do n't you use the internet ? "
and i thought , " well , sir , i am not a strategist , nor am i specialist . i am merely a storyteller . "
and so i could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from afghanistan , and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation , and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say , " come back to me .
find me when you can . "
or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in dubuque , iowa , only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees , tucked in the bushes and the benches .
or the man who decides that he is going to take his life , uses facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family .
well , tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow , scripted by strangers who were there for him when .
these are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency , because she is an art form now , all the parts of her , the signing , the scripting , the mailing , the doodles in the margins .
the mere fact that somebody would even just sit down , pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through , with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iphone is pinging and we 've got six conversations rolling in at once , that is an art form that does not fall down to the goliath of " get faster , " no matter how many social networks we might join .
we still clutch close these letters to our chest , to the words that speak louder than loud , when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say , the words that we have needed to write , to sisters and brothers and even to strangers , for far too long .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm delighted to be here .
i 'm honored by the invitation , and thanks .
i would love to talk about stuff that i 'm interested in , but unfortunately , i suspect that what i 'm interested in wo n't interest many other people .
first off , my badge says i 'm an astronomer .
i would love to talk about my astronomy , but i suspect that the number of people who are interested in radiative transfer in non-gray atmospheres and polarization of light in jupiter 's upper atmosphere are the number of people who 'd fit in a bus shelter .
so i 'm not going to talk about that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it would be just as much fun to talk about some stuff that happened in 1986 and 1987 , when a computer hacker is breaking into our systems over at lawrence berkeley labs .
and i caught the guys , and they turned out to be working for what was then the soviet kgb , and stealing information and selling it .
and i 'd love to talk about that - and it 'd be fun - but , 20 years later ...
i find computer security , frankly , to be kind of boring .
it 's tedious .
i 'm - the first time you do something , it 's science .
the second time , it 's engineering .
a third time , it 's just being a technician .
i 'm a scientist . once i do something , i do something else .
so , i 'm not going to talk about that .
nor am i going to talk about what i think are obvious statements from my first book , " silicon snake oil , " or my second book , nor am i going to talk about why i believe computers do n't belong in schools .
i feel that there 's a massive and bizarre idea going around that we have to bring more computers into schools .
my idea is : no ! no !
get them out of schools , and keep them out of schools .
and i 'd love to talk about this , but i think the argument is so obvious to anyone who 's hung around a fourth grade classroom that it does n't need much talking about - but i guess i may be very wrong about that , and everything else that i 've said .
so do n't go back and read my dissertation .
it probably has lies in it as well .
having said that , i outlined my talk about five minutes ago .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you look at it over here , the main thing i wrote on my thumb was the future .
i 'm supposed to talk about the future , yes ?
oh , right . and my feeling is , asking me to talk about the future is bizarre , because i 've got gray hair , and so , it 's kind of silly for me to talk about the future .
in fact , i think that if you really want to know what the future 's going to be , if you really want to know about the future , do n't ask a technologist , a scientist , a physicist .
no ! do n't ask somebody who 's writing code .
no , if you want to know what society 's going to be like in 20 years , ask a kindergarten teacher .
they know .
in fact , do n't ask just any kindergarten teacher , ask an experienced one .
they 're the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation .
i do n't . nor , i suspect , do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring .
certainly , all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there .
but to me , things are n't the future .
what i ask myself is , what 's society is going to be like , when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time , but have never gone bowling together ?
change is happening , and the change that is happening is not one that is in software .
but that 's not what i 'm going to talk about .
i 'd love to talk about it , it 'd be fun , but i want to talk about what i 'm doing now . what am i doing now ?
oh - the other thing that i think i 'd like to talk about is right over here . right over here .
is that visible ? what i 'd like to talk about is one-sided things .
i would dearly love to talk about things that have one side .
because i love mobius loops . i not only love mobius loops , but i 'm one of the very few people , if not the only person in the world , that makes klein bottles .
right away , i hope that all of your eyes glaze over .
this is a klein bottle .
for those of you in the audience who know , you roll your eyes and say , yup , i know all about it .
it 's one sided . it 's a bottle whose inside is its outside .
it has zero volume . and it 's non-orientable .
it has wonderful properties .
if you take two mobius loops and sew their common edge together , you get one of these , and i make them out of glass .
and i 'd love to talk to you about this , but i do n't have much in the way of ... things to say because - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- chris anderson : i 've got a cold . -rrb- however , the " d " in ted of course stands for design .
just two weeks ago i made - you know , i 've been making small , medium and big klein bottles for the trade .
but what i 've just made - and i 'm delighted to show you , first time in public here .
this is a klein bottle wine bottle , which , although in four dimensions it should n't be able to hold any fluid at all , it 's perfectly capable of doing so because our universe has only three spatial dimensions .
and because our universe is only three spatial dimensions , it can hold fluids .
so it 's highly - that one 's the cool one .
that was a month of my life .
but although i would love to talk about topology with you , i 'm not going to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- instead , i 'm going to mention my mom , who passed away last summer .
had collected photographs of me , as mothers will do .
could somebody put this guy up ?
and i looked over her album and she had collected a picture of me , standing - well , sitting - in 1969 , in front of a bunch of dials .
and i looked at it , and said , oh my god , that was me , when i was working at the electronic music studio !
as a technician , repairing and maintaining the electronic music studio at suny buffalo . and wow !
way back machine . and i said to myself , oh yeah !
and it sent me back .
soon after that , i found in another picture that she had , a picture of me .
this guy over here of course is me .
this man is robert moog , the inventor of the moog synthesizer , who passed away this past august .
robert moog was a generous , kind person , extraordinarily competent engineer .
a musician who took time from his life to teach me , a sophomore , a freshman at suny buffalo .
he 'd come up from trumansburg to teach me not just about the moog synthesizer , but we 'd be sitting there - i 'm studying physics at the time . this is 1969 , 70 , 71 .
we 're studying physics , i 'm studying physics , and he 's saying , " that 's a good thing to do .
do n't get caught up in electronic music if you 're doing physics . "
mentoring me . he 'd come up and spend hours and hours with me .
he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to get into graduate school .
in the background , my bicycle .
i realize that this picture was taken at a friend 's living room .
bob moog came by and hauled a whole pile of equipment to show greg flint and i things about this .
we sat around talking about fourier transforms , bessel functions , modulation transfer functions , stuff like this .
bob 's passing this past summer has been a loss to all of us .
anyone who 's a musician has been profoundly influenced by robert moog .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i 'll just say what i 'm about to do . what i 'm about to do - i hope you can recognize that there 's a distorted sine wave , almost a triangular wave upon this hewlett-packard oscilloscope .
oh , cool . i can get to this place over here , right ?
kids . kids is what i 'm going to talk about - is that okay ?
it says kids over here , that 's what i 'd like to talk about .
i 've decided that , for me at least , i do n't have a big enough head .
so i think locally and i act locally .
i feel that the best way i can help out anything is to help out very , very locally .
so ph.d. this , and degree there , and the yadda yadda .
i was talking about this stuff to some schoolteachers about a year ago .
and one of them , several of them would come up to me and say , " well , how come you ai n't teaching ? "
and i said , " well , i 've taught graduate - i 've had graduate students , i 've taught undergraduate classes . "
no , they said , " if you 're so into kids and all this stuff , how come you ai n't over here on the front lines ?
put your money where you mouth is . "
is true . is true . i teach eighth-grade science four days a week .
not just showing up every now and then .
no , no , no , no , no . i take attendance .
i take lunch hour . -lrb- applause -rrb- this is not - no , no , no , this is not claps .
i strongly suggest that this is a good thing for each of you to do .
not just show up to class every now and then .
teach a solid week . okay , i 'm teaching three-quarters time , but good enough .
one of the things that i 've done for my science students is to tell them , " look , i 'm going to teach you college-level physics .
no calculus , i 'll cut out that .
you wo n't need to know trig .
but you will need to know eighth-grade algebra , and we 're going to do serious experiments .
none of this open-to-chapter-seven-and-do-all-the-odd-problem-sets .
we 're going to be doing genuine physics . "
and that 's one of the things i thought i 'd do right now .
-lrb- high-pitched tone -rrb- oh , before i even turn that on , one of the things that we did about three weeks ago in my class - this is through the lens , and one of the things we used a lens for was to measure the speed of light .
my students in el cerrito - with my help , of course , and with the help of a very beat up oscilloscope - measured the speed of light .
we were off by 25 percent . how many eighth graders do you know of who have measured the speed of light ?
in addition to that , we 've measured the speed of sound .
i 'd love to measure the speed of light here .
i was all set to do it and i was thinking , " aw man , " i was just going to impose upon the powers that be , and measure the speed of light .
and i 'm all set to do it . i 'm all set to do it , but then it turns out that to set up here , you have like 10 minutes to set up !
and there 's no time to do it .
so , next time , maybe , i 'll measure the speed of light !
but meanwhile , let 's measure the speed of sound !
well , the obvious way to measure the speed of sound is to bounce sound off something and look at the echo .
but , probably - one of my students , ariel -lsb- unclear -rsb- , said , " could we measure the speed of light using the wave equation ? "
and all of you know the wave equation is the frequency times the wavelength of any wave ...
is a constant . when the frequency goes up , the wavelength comes down . wavelength goes up , frequency goes down . so , if we have a wave here - over here , that 's what 's interesting - as the pitch goes up , things get closer , pitch goes down , things stretch out .
right ? this is simple physics .
all of you know this from eighth grade , remember ?
what they did n't tell you in physics - in eighth-grade physics - but they should have , and i wish they had , was that if you multiply the frequency times the wavelength of sound or light , you get a constant .
and that constant is the speed of sound .
so , in order to measure the speed of sound , all i 've got to do is know its frequency . well , that 's easy .
i 've got a frequency counter right here .
set it up to around a , above a , above a. there 's an a , more or less .
now , so i know the frequency .
it 's 1.76 kilohertz . i measure its wavelength .
all i need now is to flip on another beam , and the bottom beam is me talking , right ?
so anytime i talk , you 'd see it on the screen .
i 'll put it over here , and as i move this away from the source , you 'll notice the spiral .
the slinky moves . we 're going through different nodes of the wave , coming out this way .
those of you who are physicists , i hear you rolling your eyes , but bear with me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- to measure the wavelength , all i need to do is measure the distance from here - one full wave - over to here .
from here to here is the wavelength of sound .
so , i 'll put a measuring tape here , measuring tape here , move it back over to here .
i 've moved the microphone 20 centimeters .
0.2 meters from here , back to here , 20 centimeters .
ok , let 's go back to mr. elmo .
and we 'll say the frequency is 1.76 kilohertz , or 1760 .
the wavelength was 0.2 meters .
let 's figure out what this is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- 1.76 times 0.2 over here is 352 meters per second .
if you look it up in the book , it 's really 343 .
but , here with kludgy material , and lousy drink - we 've been able to measure the speed of sound to - not bad . pretty good .
all of which comes to what i wanted to say .
go back to this picture of me a million years ago .
it was 1971 , the vietnam war was going on , and i 'm like , " oh my god ! "
i 'm studying physics : landau , lipschitz , resnick and halliday .
i 'm going home for a midterm . a riot 's going on on campus .
there 's a riot ! hey , elmo 's done : off .
there 's a riot going on on campus , and the police are chasing me , right ?
i 'm walking across campus . cop comes and looks at me and says , " you ! you 're a student . "
pulls out a gun . goes boom !
and a tear gas canister the size of a pepsi can goes by my head . whoosh !
i get a breath of tear gas and i ca n't breathe .
this cop comes after me with a rifle .
he wants to clunk me over the head !
i 'm saying , " i got to clear out of here ! "
i go running across campus quick as i can . i duck into hayes hall .
it 's one of these bell-tower buildings .
the cop 's chasing me .
chasing me up the first floor , second floor , third floor .
chases me into this room .
the entranceway to the bell tower .
i slam the door behind me , climb up , go past this place where i see a pendulum ticking .
and i 'm thinking , " oh yeah , the square root of the length is proportional to its period . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i keep climbing up , go back .
i go to a place where a dowel splits off .
there 's a clock , clock , clock , clock .
the time 's going backwards because i 'm inside of it .
i 'm thinking of lorenz contractions and einsteinian relativity .
i climb up , and there 's this place , way in the back , that you climb up this wooden ladder .
i pop up the top , and there 's a cupola .
a dome , one of these ten-foot domes .
i 'm looking out and i 'm seeing the cops bashing students ' heads , shooting tear gas , and watching students throwing bricks .
and i 'm asking , " what am i doing here ? why am i here ? "
then i remember what my english teacher in high school said .
namely , that when they cast bells , they write inscriptions on them .
so , i wipe the pigeon manure off one of the bells , and i look at it .
i 'm asking myself , " why am i here ? "
so , at this time , i 'd like to tell you the words inscribed upon the hayes hall tower bells : " all truth is one .
in this light , may science and religion endeavor here for the steady evolution of mankind , from darkness to light , from narrowness to broad-mindedness , from prejudice to tolerance .
it is the voice of life , which calls us to come and learn . "
thank you very much .
so i 'd like to start by focusing on the world 's most dangerous animal .
now , when you talk about dangerous animals , most people might think of lions or tigers or sharks .
but of course the most dangerous animal is the mosquito .
the mosquito has killed more humans than any other creature in human history .
in fact , probably adding them all together , the mosquito has killed more humans .
and the mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague .
and you would think , would you not , that with all our science , with all our advances in society , with better towns , better civilizations , better sanitation , wealth , that we would get better at controlling mosquitos , and hence reduce this disease .
and that 's not really the case .
if it was the case , we would n't have between 200 and 300 million cases of malaria every year , and we would n't have a million and a half deaths from malaria , and we would n't have a disease that was relatively unknown 50 years ago now suddenly turned into the largest mosquito-borne virus threat that we have , and that 's called dengue fever .
so 50 years ago , pretty much no one had heard of it , no one certainly in the european environment .
but dengue fever now , according to the world health organization , infects between 50 and 100 million people every year , so that 's equivalent to the whole of the population of the u.k. being infected every year .
other estimates put that number at roughly double that number of infections .
and dengue fever has grown in speed quite phenomenally .
in the last 50 years , the incidence of dengue has grown thirtyfold .
now let me tell you a little bit about what dengue fever is , for those who do n't know .
now let 's assume you go on holiday .
let 's assume you go to the caribbean , or you might go to mexico . you might go to latin america , asia , africa , anywhere in saudi arabia .
you might go to india , the far east .
it does n't really matter . it 's the same mosquito , and it 's the same disease . you 're at risk .
and let 's assume you 're bitten by a mosquito that 's carrying that virus .
well , you could develop flu-like symptoms .
they could be quite mild .
you could develop nausea , headache , your muscles could feel like they 're contracting , and you could actually feel like your bones are breaking .
and that 's the nickname given to this disease .
it 's called breakbone fever , because that 's how you can feel .
now the odd thing is , is that once you 've been bitten by this mosquito , and you 've had this disease , your body develops antibodies , so if you 're bitten again with that strain , it does n't affect you .
but it 's not one virus , it 's four , and the same protection that gives you the antibodies and protects you from the same virus that you had before actually makes you much more susceptible to the other three .
so the next time you get dengue fever , if it 's a different strain , you 're more susceptible , you 're likely to get worse symptoms , and you 're more likely to get the more severe forms , hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome .
so you do n't want dengue once , and you certainly do n't want it again .
so why is it spreading so fast ?
and the answer is this thing .
this is aedes aegypti .
now this is a mosquito that came , like its name suggests , out of north africa , and it 's spread round the world .
now , in fact , a single mosquito will only travel about 200 yards in its entire life . they do n't travel very far .
what they 're very good at doing is hitchhiking , particularly the eggs .
they will lay their eggs in clear water , any pool , any puddle , any birdbath , any flower pot , anywhere there 's clear water , they 'll lay their eggs , and if that clear water is near freight , it 's near a port , if it 's anywhere near transport , those eggs will then get transported around the world .
and that 's what 's happened . mankind has transported these eggs all the way around the world , and these insects have infested over 100 countries , and there 's now 2.5 billion people living in countries where this mosquito resides .
to give you just a couple of examples how fast this has happened , in the mid- ' 70s , brazil declared , " we have no aedes aegypti , " and currently they spend about a billion dollars now a year trying to get rid of it , trying to control it , just one species of mosquito .
two days ago , or yesterday , i ca n't remember which , i saw a reuters report that said madeira had had their first cases of dengue , about 52 cases , with about 400 probable cases .
that 's two days ago .
interestingly , madeira first got the insect in 2005 , and here we are , a few years later , first cases of dengue .
so the one thing you 'll find is that where the mosquito goes , dengue will follow .
once you 've got the mosquito in your area , anyone coming into that area with dengue , mosquito will bite them , mosquito will bite somewhere else , somewhere else , somewhere else , and you 'll get an epidemic .
so we must be good at killing mosquitos .
i mean , that ca n't be very difficult .
well , there 's two principle ways .
the first way is that you use larvicides .
you use chemicals . you put them into water where they breed .
now in an urban environment , that 's extraordinarily difficult .
you 've got to get your chemical into every puddle , every birdbath , every tree trunk .
it 's just not practical .
the second way you can do it is actually trying to kill the insects as they fly around .
this is a picture of fogging .
here what someone is doing is mixing up chemical in a smoke and basically spreading that through the environment .
you could do the same with a space spray .
this is really unpleasant stuff , and if it was any good , we would n't have this massive increase in mosquitos and we would n't have this massive increase in dengue fever .
so it 's not very effective , but it 's probably the best thing we 've got at the moment .
having said that , actually , your best form of protection and my best form of protection is a long-sleeve shirt and a little bit of deet to go with it .
so let 's start again . let 's design a product , right from the word go , and decide what we want .
well we clearly need something that is effective at reducing the mosquito population .
there 's no point in just killing the odd mosquito here and there .
we want something that gets that population right the way down so it ca n't get the disease transmission .
clearly the product you 've got has got to be safe to humans .
we are going to use it in and around humans .
it has to be safe .
we do n't want to have a lasting impact on the environment .
we do n't want to do anything that you ca n't undo .
maybe a better product comes along in 20 , 30 years .
fine . we do n't want a lasting environmental impact .
we want something that 's relatively cheap , or cost-effective , because there 's an awful lot of countries involved , and some of them are emerging markets , some of them emerging countries , low-income .
and finally , you want something that 's species-specific .
you want to get rid of this mosquito that spreads dengue , but you do n't really want to get all the other insects .
some are quite beneficial . some are important to your ecosystem .
this one 's not . it 's invaded you .
but you do n't want to get all of the insects .
you just want to get this one .
and most of the time , you 'll find this insect lives in and around your home , so this - whatever we do has got to get to that insect .
it 's got to get into people 's houses , into the bedrooms , into the kitchens .
now there are two features of mosquito biology that really help us in this project , and that is , firstly , males do n't bite .
it 's only the female mosquito that will actually bite you .
the male ca n't bite you , wo n't bite you , does n't have the mouth parts to bite you .
it 's just the female .
and the second is a phenomenon that males are very , very good at finding females .
if there 's a male mosquito that you release , and if there 's a female around , that male will find the female .
so basically , we 've used those two factors .
so here 's a typical situation , male meets female , lots of offspring .
a single female will lay about up to 100 eggs at a time , up to about 500 in her lifetime .
now if that male is carrying a gene which causes the death of the offspring , then the offspring do n't survive , and instead of having 500 mosquitos running around , you have none .
and if you can put more , i 'll call them sterile , that the offspring will actually die at different stages , but i 'll call them sterile for now .
if you put more sterile males out into the environment , then the females are more likely to find a sterile male than a fertile one , and you will bring that population down .
so the males will go out , they 'll look for females , they 'll mate . if they mate successfully , then no offspring .
if they do n't find a female , then they 'll die anyway .
they only live a few days .
and that 's exactly where we are .
so this is technology that was developed in oxford university a few years ago .
the company itself , oxitec , we 've been working for the last 10 years , very much on a sort of similar development pathway that you 'd get with a pharmaceutical company .
so about 10 years of internal evaluation , testing , to get this to a state where we think it 's actually ready .
and then we 've gone out into the big outdoors , always with local community consent , always with the necessary permits .
so we 've done field trials now in the cayman islands , a small one in malaysia , and two more now in brazil .
and what 's the result ?
well , the result has been very good .
in about four months of release , we 've brought that population of mosquitos - in most cases we 're dealing with villages here of about 2,000 , 3,000 people , that sort of size , starting small - we 've taken that mosquito population down by about 85 percent in about four months .
and in fact , the numbers after that get , those get very difficult to count , because there just are n't any left .
so that 's been what we 've seen in cayman , it 's been what we 've seen in brazil in those trials .
and now what we 're doing is we 're going through a process to scale up to a town of about 50,000 , so we can see this work at big scale .
and we 've got a production unit in oxford , or just south of oxford , where we actually produce these mosquitos .
we can produce them , in a space a bit more than this red carpet , i can produce about 20 million a week .
we can transport them around the world .
it 's not very expensive , because it 's a coffee cup - will hold about three million eggs .
so freight costs are n't our biggest problem . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 've got that . you could call it a mosquito factory .
and for brazil , where we 've been doing some trials , the brazilian government themselves have now built their own mosquito factory , far bigger than ours , and we 'll use that for scaling up in brazil .
there you are . we 've sent mosquito eggs .
we 've separated the males from the females .
the males have been put in little pots and the truck is going down the road and they are releasing males as they go .
it 's actually a little bit more precise than that .
you want to release them so that you get good coverage of your area .
so you take a google map , you divide it up , work out how far they can fly , and make sure you 're releasing such that you get coverage of the area , and then you go back , and within a very short space of time , you 're bringing that population right the way down .
we 've also done this in agriculture .
we 've got several different species of agriculture coming along , and i 'm hoping that soon we 'll be able to get some funding together so we can get back and start looking at malaria .
so that 's where we stand at the moment , and i 've just got a few final thoughts , which is that this is another way in which biology is now coming in to supplement chemistry in some of our societal advances in this area , and these biological approaches are coming in in very different forms , and when you think about genetic engineering , we 've now got enzymes for industrial processing , enzymes , genetically engineered enzymes in food .
we have g.m. crops , we have pharmaceuticals , we have new vaccines , all using roughly the same technology , but with very different outcomes .
and i 'm in favor , actually . of course i am .
i 'm in favor of particularly where the older technologies do n't work well or have become unacceptable .
and although the techniques are similar , the outcomes are very , very different , and if you take our approach , for example , and you compare it to , say , g.m. crops , both techniques are trying to produce a massive benefit .
both have a side benefit , which is that we reduce pesticide use tremendously .
but whereas a g.m. crop is trying to protect the plant , for example , and give it an advantage , what we 're actually doing is taking the mosquito and giving it the biggest disadvantage it can possibly have , rendering it unable to reproduce effectively .
so for the mosquito , it 's a dead end .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i have a doppelganger .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dr. gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the " dragonball z : android saga . "
if you look very carefully , you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light .
that 's exactly what i do - optical mind control .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in contrast to my evil twin who lusts after world domination , my motives are not sinister .
i control the brain in order to understand how it works .
now wait a minute , you may say , how can you go straight to controlling the brain without understanding it first ?
is n't that putting the cart before the horse ?
many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis .
they say , " if we could record the activity of our neurons , we would understand the brain . "
but think for a moment what that means .
even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times , we would still have to make sense of the recorded activity patterns , and that 's so difficult , chances are we 'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them .
take a look at what brain activity might look like .
in this simulation , each black dot is one nerve cell .
the dot is visible whenever a cell fires an electrical impulse .
there 's 10,000 neurons here .
so you 're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach .
your brains are about 100 million times more complicated .
somewhere , in a pattern like this , is you , your perceptions , your emotions , your memories , your plans for the future .
but we do n't know where , since we do n't know how to read the pattern .
we do n't understand the code used by the brain .
to make progress , we need to break the code .
but how ?
an experienced code-breaker will tell you that in order to figure out what the symbols in a code mean , it 's essential to be able to play with them , to rearrange them at will .
so in this situation too , to decode the information contained in patterns like this , watching alone wo n't do .
we need to rearrange the pattern .
in other words , instead of recording the activity of neurons , we need to control it .
it 's not essential that we can control the activity of all neurons in the brain , just some .
the more targeted our interventions , the better .
and i 'll show you in a moment how we can achieve the necessary precision .
and since i 'm realistic , rather than grandiose , i do n't claim that the ability to control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries .
but we 'll certainly learn a lot .
now , i 'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is .
the history of attempts to tinker with the function of the nervous system is long and illustrious .
it dates back at least 200 years , to galvani 's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond .
galvani showed that a frog 's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve to a source of electrical current .
this experiment revealed the first , and perhaps most fundamental , nugget of the neural code : that information is written in the form of electrical impulses .
galvani 's approach of probing the nervous system with electrodes has remained state-of-the-art until today , despite a number of drawbacks .
sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude .
it 's hard to do in animals that run around , and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously .
so around the turn of the last century , i started to think , " would n't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down ? "
so instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain , re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive to diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light .
such an approach would literally , in a flash of light , overcome many of the obstacles to discovery .
first , it 's clearly a non-invasive , wireless form of communication .
and second , just as in a radio broadcast , you can communicate with many receivers at once .
you do n't need to know where these receivers are , and it does n't matter if these receivers move - just think of the stereo in your car .
it gets even better , for it turns out that we can fabricate the receivers out of materials that are encoded in dna .
so each nerve cell with the right genetic makeup will spontaneously produce a receiver that allows us to control its function .
i hope you 'll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of this concept .
there 's no high-tech gizmos here , just biology revealed through biology .
now let 's take a look at these miraculous receivers up close .
as we zoom in on one of these purple neurons , we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores .
pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system .
but these pores here are special .
they are coupled to light receptors similar to the ones in your eyes .
whenever a flash of light hits the receptor , the pore opens , an electrical current is switched on , and the neuron fires electrical impulses .
because the light-activated pore is encoded in dna , we can achieve incredible precision .
this is because , although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes , different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells .
you can exploit this to make sure that only some neurons contain our light-activated pore and others do n't .
so in this cartoon , the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore .
the approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain .
in this example , each electrical impulse , each deflection on the trace , is caused by a brief pulse of light .
and the approach , of course , also works in moving , behaving animals .
this is the first ever such experiment , sort of the optical equivalent of galvani 's .
it was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student , susana lima .
susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore .
you 're familiar with these cells because they are the ones that frustrate you when you try to swat the fly .
they trained the escape reflex that makes the fly jump into the air and fly away whenever you move your hand in position .
and you can see here that the flash of light has exactly the same effect .
the animal jumps , it spreads its wings , it vibrates them , but it ca n't actually take off because the fly is sandwiched between two glass plates .
now to make sure that this was no reaction of the fly to a flash it could see , susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment .
she cut the heads off of her flies .
these headless bodies can live for about a day , but they do n't do much .
they just stand around and groom excessively .
so it seems that the only trait that survives decapitation is vanity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , as you 'll see in a moment , susana was able to turn on the flight motor of what 's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies to actually take off and fly away .
they did n't get very far , obviously .
since we took these first steps , the field of optogenetics has exploded .
and there are now hundreds of labs using these approaches .
and we 've come a long way since galvani 's and susana 's first successes in making animals twitch or jump .
we can now actually interfere with their psychology in rather profound ways , as i 'll show you in my last example , which is directed at a familiar question .
life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure to decide what to do next .
we cope with this pressure by having brains , and within our brains , decision-making centers that i 've called here the " actor . "
the actor implements a policy that takes into account the state of the environment and the context in which we operate .
our actions change the environment , or context , and these changes are then fed back into the decision loop .
now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model , we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject , fruit flies .
each chamber in these two vertical stacks contains one fly .
the left and the right halves of the chamber are filled with two different odors , and a security camera watches as the flies pace up and down between them .
here 's some such cctv footage .
whenever a fly reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odor streams meet , it has to make a decision .
it has to decide whether to turn around and stay in the same odor , or whether to cross the midline and try something new .
these decisions are clearly a reflection of the actor 's policy .
now for an intelligent being like our fly , this policy is not written in stone but rather changes as the animal learns from experience .
we can incorporate such an element of adaptive intelligence into our model by assuming that the fly 's brain contains not only an actor , but a different group of cells , a " critic , " that provides a running commentary on the actor 's choices .
you can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain 's equivalent of the catholic church , if you 're an austrian like me , or the super-ego , if you 're freudian , or your mother , if you 're jewish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now obviously , the critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent .
so we set out to identify the cells in the fly 's brain that played the role of the critic .
and the logic of our experiment was simple .
we thought if we could use our optical remote control to activate the cells of the critic , we should be able , artificially , to nag the actor into changing its policy .
in other words , the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but , in reality , it had not made .
so we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable .
and then we took these flies and allowed them to make choices .
and whenever they made one of the two choices , chose one odor , in this case the blue one over the orange one , we switched on the lights .
if the critic was among the optically activated cells , the result of this intervention should be a change in policy .
the fly should learn to avoid the optically reinforced odor .
here 's what happened in two instances : we 're comparing two strains of flies , each of them having about 100 light-addressable cells in their brains , shown here in green on the left and on the right .
what 's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine .
but the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right .
optically activating these hundred or so cells into two strains of flies has dramatically different consequences .
if you look first at the behavior of the fly on the right , you can see that whenever it reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odors meet , it marches straight through , as it did before .
its behavior is completely unchanged .
but the behavior of the fly on the left is very different .
whenever it comes up to the midpoint , it pauses , it carefully scans the odor interface as if it was sniffing out its environment , and then it turns around .
this means that the policy that the actor implements now includes an instruction to avoid the odor that 's in the right half of the chamber .
this means that the critic must have spoken in that animal , and that the critic must be contained among the dopamine-producing neurons on the left , but not among the dopamine producing neurons on the right .
through many such experiments , we were able to narrow down the identity of the critic to just 12 cells .
these 12 cells , as shown here in green , send the output to a brain structure called the " mushroom body , " which is shown here in gray .
we know from our formal model that the brain structure at the receiving end of the critic 's commentary is the actor .
so this anatomy suggests that the mushroom bodies have something to do with action choice .
based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies , this makes perfect sense .
in fact , it makes so much sense that we can construct an electronic toy circuit that simulates the behavior of the fly .
in this electronic toy circuit , the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue leds in the center of the board .
these led 's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air .
each odor activates a different combination of sensors , which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body .
so the pilot in the cockpit of the fly , the actor , can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue leds lights up .
what the actor does with this information depends on its policy , which is stored in the strengths of the connection , between the odor detectors and the motors that power the fly 's evasive actions .
if the connection is weak , the motors will stay off and the fly will continue straight on its course .
if the connection is strong , the motors will turn on and the fly will initiate a turn .
now consider a situation in which the motors stay off , the fly continues on its path and it suffers some painful consequence such as getting zapped .
in a situation like this , we would expect the critic to speak up and to tell the actor to change its policy .
we have created such a situation , artificially , by turning on the critic with a flash of light .
that caused a strengthening of the connections between the currently active odor detector and the motors .
so the next time the fly finds itself facing the same odor again , the connection is strong enough to turn on the motors and to trigger an evasive maneuver .
i do n't know about you , but i find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical , mechanistic understanding of the mind , even if it 's the mind of the fly .
this is one piece of good news .
the other piece of good news , for a scientist at least , is that much remains to be discovered .
in the experiments i told you about , we have lifted the identity of the critic , but we still have no idea how the critic does its job .
come to think of it , knowing when you 're wrong without a teacher , or your mother , telling you , is a very hard problem .
there are some ideas in computer science and in artificial intelligence as to how this might be done , but we still have n't solved a single example of how intelligent behavior springs from the physical interactions in living matter .
i think we 'll get there in the not too distant future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : welcome to ted .
richard branson : thank you very much . the first ted has been great .
ca : have you met anyone interesting ?
rb : well , the nice thing about ted is everybody 's interesting .
i was very glad to see goldie hawn , because i had an apology to make to her .
i 'd had dinner with her about two years ago and i 'd - she had this big wedding ring and i put it on my finger and i could n't get it off .
and i went home to my wife that night and she wanted to know why i had another woman 's big , massive , big wedding ring on my finger .
and , anyway , the next morning we had to go along to the jeweler and get it cut off .
so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so apologies to goldie .
ca : that 's pretty good .
so , we 're going to put up some slides of some of your companies here .
you 've started one or two in your time .
so , you know , virgin atlantic , virgin records - i guess it all started with a magazine called student .
and then , yes , all these other ones as well . i mean , how do you do this ?
rb : i read all these sort of ted instructions : you must not talk about your own business , and this , and now you ask me .
so i suppose you 're not going to be able to kick me off the stage , since you asked the question .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : it depends what the answer is though .
rb : no , i mean , i think i learned early on that if you can run one company , you can really run any companies .
i mean , companies are all about finding the right people , inspiring those people , you know , drawing out the best in people .
and i just love learning and i 'm incredibly inquisitive and i love taking on , you know , the status quo and trying to turn it upside down .
so i 've seen life as one long learning process .
and if i see - you know , if i fly on somebody else 's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one , which it was n't , 21 years ago , then i 'd think , well , you know , maybe i can create the kind of airline that i 'd like to fly on .
and so , you know , so got one secondhand 747 from boeing and gave it a go .
ca : well , that was a bizarre thing , because you made this move that a lot of people advised you was crazy .
and in fact , in a way , it almost took down your empire at one point .
i had a conversation with one of the investment bankers who , at the time when you basically sold virgin records and invested heavily in virgin atlantic , and his view was that you were trading , you know , the world 's fourth biggest record company for the twenty-fifth biggest airline and that you were out of your mind .
why did you do that ?
rb : well , i think that there 's a very thin dividing line between success and failure .
and i think if you start a business without financial backing , you 're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line .
we had - we were being attacked by british airways .
they were trying to put our airline out of business , and they launched what 's become known as the dirty tricks campaign .
and i realized that the whole empire was likely to come crashing down unless i chipped in a chip .
and in order to protect the jobs of the people who worked for the airline , and protect the jobs of the people who worked for the record company , i had to sell the family jewelry to protect the airline .
ca : post-napster , you 're looking like a bit of a genius , actually , for that as well .
rb : yeah , as it turned out , it proved to be the right move .
but , yeah , it was sad at the time , but we moved on .
ca : now , you use the virgin brand a lot and it seems like you 're getting synergy from one thing to the other .
what does the brand stand for in your head ?
rb : well , i like to think it stands for quality , that you know , if somebody comes across a virgin company , they - ca : they are quality , richard . come on now , everyone says quality . spirit ?
rb : no , but i was going to move on this .
we have a lot of fun and i think the people who work for it enjoy it .
as i say , we go in and shake up other industries , and i think , you know , we do it differently and i think that industries are not quite the same as a result of virgin attacking the market .
ca : i mean , there are a few launches you 've done where the brand maybe has n't worked quite as well .
i mean , virgin brides - what happened there ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rb : we could n't find any customers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : i was actually also curious why - i think you missed an opportunity with your condoms launch . you called it mates .
i mean , could n't you have used the virgin brand for that as well ?
ai n't virgin no longer , or something .
rb : again , we may have had problems finding customers .
i mean , we had - often , when you launch a company and you get customer complaints , you know , you can deal with them .
but about three months after the launch of the condom company , i had a letter , a complaint , and i sat down and wrote a long letter back to this lady apologizing profusely .
but obviously , there was n't a lot i could do about it .
and then six months later , or nine months after the problem had taken , i got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if i 'd be godfather , which i became .
so , it all worked out well .
ca : really ? you should have brought a picture . that 's wonderful .
rb : i should have .
ca : so , just help us with some of the numbers .
i mean , what are the numbers on this ?
i mean , how big is the group overall ?
how much - what 's the total revenue ?
rb : it 's about 25 billion dollars now , in total .
ca : and how many employees ?
rb : about 55,000 .
ca : so , you 've been photographed in various ways at various times and never worrying about putting your dignity on the line or anything like that .
what was that ? was that real ?
rb : yeah . we were launching a megastore in los angeles , i think .
no , i mean , i think - ca : but is that your hair ?
rb : no .
ca : what was that one ?
rb : dropping in for tea .
ca : ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rb : ah , that was quite fun . that was a wonderful car-boat in which - ca : oh , that car that we - actually we - it was a tedster event there , i think .
is that - could you still pause on that one actually , for a minute ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rb : it 's a tough job , is n't it ?
ca : i mean , it is a tough job .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i first came to america , i used to try this with employees as well and they kind of - they have these different rules over here , it 's very strange .
rb : i know , i have - the lawyers say you must n't do things like that , but - ca : i mean , speaking of which , tell us about - rb : " pammy " we launched , you know - mistakenly thought we could take on coca-cola , and we launched a cola bottle called " the pammy " and it was shaped a bit like pamela anderson .
but the trouble is , it kept on tipping over , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : designed by philippe starck perhaps ?
rb : of course .
ca : so , we 'll just run a couple more pictures here . virgin brides . very nice .
and , ok , so stop there . this was - you had some award i think ?
rb : yeah , well , 25 years earlier , we 'd launched the sex pistols ' " god save the queen , " and i 'd certainly never expected that 25 years later - that she 'd actually knight us .
but somehow , she must have had a forgetful memory , i think .
ca : well , god saved her and you got your just reward .
do you like to be called sir richard , or how ?
rb : nobody 's ever called me sir richard .
occasionally in america , i hear people saying sir richard and think there 's some shakespearean play taking place .
but nowhere else anyway .
ca : ok . so can you use your knighthood for anything or is it just ...
rb : no . i suppose if you 're having problems getting a booking in a restaurant or something , that might be worth using it .
ca : you know , it 's not richard branson . it 's sir richard branson .
rb : i 'll go get the secretary to use it .
ca : ok . so let 's look at the space thing .
i think , with us , we 've got a video that shows what you 're up to , and virgin galactic up in the air . -lrb- video -rrb- so that 's the bert rutan designed spaceship ?
rb : yeah , it 'll be ready in - well , ready in 12 months and then we do 12 months extensive testing .
and then 24 months from now , people will be able to take a ride into space .
ca : so this interior is philippe starcke designed ?
rb : philippe has done the - yeah , quite a bit of it : the logos and he 's building the space station in new mexico .
and basically , he 's just taken an eye and the space station will be one giant eye , so when you 're in space , you ought to be able to see this massive eye looking up at you .
and when you land , you 'll be able to go back into this giant eye .
but he 's an absolute genius when it comes to design .
ca : but you did n't have him design the engine ?
rb : philippe is quite erratic , so i think that he would n't be the best person to design the engine , no .
ca : he gave a wonderful talk here two days ago .
rb : yeah ? no , he is a - ca : well , some people found it wonderful , some people found it completely bizarre .
but , i personally found it wonderful .
rb : he 's a wonderful enthusiast , which is why i love him . but ...
ca : so , now , you 've always had this exploration bug in you .
have you ever regretted that ?
rb : many times .
i mean , i think with the ballooning and boating expeditions we 've done in the past .
well , i got pulled out of the sea i think six times by helicopters , so - and each time , i did n't expect to come home to tell the tale .
so in those moments , you certainly wonder what you 're doing up there or - ca : what was the closest you got to - when did you think , this is it , i might be on my way out ?
rb : well , i think the balloon adventures were - each one was , each one , actually , i think we came close .
and , i mean , first of all we - nobody had actually crossed the atlantic in a hot air balloon before , so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream , and we were n't quite sure , when a balloon actually got into the jet stream , whether it would actually survive the 200 , 220 miles an hour winds that you can find up there .
and so , just the initial lift off from sugarloaf to cross the atlantic , as we were pushing into the jet stream , this enormous balloon - the top of the balloon ended up going at a couple of hundred miles an hour , the capsule that we were in at the bottom was going at maybe two miles an hour , and it just took off .
and it was like holding onto a thousand horses .
and we were just crossing every finger , praying that the balloon would hold together , which , fortunately , it did .
but the ends of all those balloon trips were , you know - something seemed to go wrong every time , and on that particular occasion , the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped , and left me holding on for dear life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : did he tell you to jump , or he just said , " i 'm out of here ! " and ...
rb : no , he told me jump , but once his weight had gone , the balloon just shot up to 12,000 feet and i ...
ca : and you inspired an ian mcewan novel i think with that .
rb : yeah . no , i put on my oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon , with my parachute , looking at the swirling clouds below , trying to pluck up my courage to jump into the north sea , which - and it was a very , very , very lonely few moments .
but , anyway , we managed to survive it .
ca : did you jump ? or it came down in the end ?
rb : well , i knew i had about half an hour 's fuel left , and i also knew that the chances were that if i jumped , i would only have a couple of minutes of life left .
so i climbed back into the capsule and just desperately tried to make sure that i was making the right decision .
and wrote some notes to my family . and then climbed back up again , looked down at those clouds again , climbed back into the capsule again .
and then finally , just thought , there 's a better way .
i 've got , you know , this enormous balloon above me , it 's the biggest parachute ever , why not use it ?
and so i managed to fly the balloon down through the clouds , and about 50 feet , before i hit the sea , threw myself over .
and the balloon hit the sea and went shooting back up to 10,000 feet without me .
but it was a wonderful feeling being in that water and - ca : what did you write to your family ?
rb : just what you would do in a situation like that : just i love you very much . and i 'd already written them a letter before going on this trip , which - just in case anything had happened .
but fortunately , they never had to use it .
ca : your companies have had incredible pr value out of these heroics .
the years - and until i stopped looking at the polls , you were sort of regarded as this great hero in the u.k. and elsewhere .
and cynics might say , you know , this is just a smart business guy doing what it takes to execute his particular style of marketing .
how much was the pr value part of this ?
rb : well , of course , the pr experts said that as an airline owner , the last thing you should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats , and crashing into the seas .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : they have a point , richard .
rb : in fact , i think our airline took a full page ad at the time saying , you know , come on , richard , there are better ways of crossing the atlantic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : to do all this , you must have been a genius from the get-go , right ?
rb : well , i wo n't contradict that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : ok , this is n't exactly hardball . ok .
did n't - were n't you just terrible at school ?
rb : i was dyslexic . i had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever .
i certainly would have failed iq tests .
and it was one of the reasons i left school when i was 15 years old .
and if i - if i 'm not interested in something , i do n't grasp it .
as somebody who 's dyslexic , you also have some quite bizarre situations .
i mean , for instance , i 've had to - you know , i 've been running the largest group of private companies in europe , but have n't been able to know the difference between net and gross .
and so the board meetings have been fascinating .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , it 's like , good news or bad news ?
and generally , the people would say , oh , well that 's bad news .
ca : but just to clarify , the 25 billion dollars is gross , right ? that 's gross ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rb : well , i hope it 's net actually , having - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i 've got it right .
ca : no , trust me , it 's gross .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rb : so , when i turned 50 , somebody took me outside the boardroom and said , " look richard , here 's a - let me draw on a diagram .
here 's a net in the sea , and the fish have been pulled from the sea into this net .
and that 's the profits you 've got left over in this little net , everything else is eaten . "
and i finally worked it all out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : but , i mean , at school - so as well as being , you know , doing pretty miserably academically , but you were also the captain of the cricket and football teams .
so you were kind of a - you were a natural leader , but just a bit of a ... were you a rebel then , or how would you ...
rb : yeah , i think i was a bit of a maverick and - but i ... and i was , yeah , i was fortunately good at sport , and so at least i had something to excel at , at school .
ca : and some bizarre things happened just earlier in your life .
i mean , there 's the story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field , aged four , and saying " ok , walk home . "
did this really happen ?
rb : she was , you know , she felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet from an early age .
so she did things to us , which now she 'd be arrested for , such as pushing us out of the car , and telling us to find our own way to granny 's , about five miles before we actually got there .
and making us go on wonderful , long bike rides .
and we were never allowed to watch television and the like .
ca : but is there a risk here ?
i mean , there 's a lot of people in the room who are wealthy , and they 've got kids , and we 've got this dilemma about how you bring them up .
do you look at the current generation of kids coming up and think they 're too coddled , they do n't know what they 've got , we 're going to raise a generation of privileged ...
rb : no , i think if you 're bringing up kids , you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm .
so i do n't think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really .
ca : you did n't turn out too bad , i have to say , i 'm ...
your headmaster said to you - i mean he found you kind of an enigma at your school - he said , you 're either going to be a millionaire or go to prison , and i 'm not sure which .
which of those happened first ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rb : well , i 've done both . i think i went to prison first .
i was actually prosecuted under two quite ancient acts in the u.k.
i was prosecuted under the 1889 venereal diseases act and the 1916 indecent advertisements act .
on the first occasion , for mentioning the word venereal disease in public , which - we had a center where we would help young people who had problems .
and one of the problems young people have is venereal disease .
and there 's an ancient law that says you ca n't actually mention the word venereal disease or print it in public .
so the police knocked on the door , and told us they were going to arrest us if we carried on mentioning the word venereal disease .
we changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots , but nobody came with vd any more .
so , we put it back to vd and promptly got arrested .
and then subsequently , " never mind the bollocks , here 's the sex pistols , " the word bollocks , the police decided was a rude word and so we were arrested for using the word bollocks on the sex pistols ' album .
and john mortimer , the playwright , defended us .
and he asked if i could find a linguistics expert to come up with a different definition of the word bollocks .
and so i rang up nottingham university , and i asked to talk to the professor of linguistics .
and he said , " look , bollocks is not a - has nothing to do with balls whatsoever .
it 's actually a nickname given to priests in the eighteenth century . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he went , " furthermore , i 'm a priest myself . "
and so i said , " would you mind coming to the court ? "
and he said he 'd be delighted . and i said - and he said , " would you like me to wear my dog collar ? "
and i said , " yes , definitely . please . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : that 's great .
rb : so our key witness argued that it was actually " never mind the priest , here 's the sex pistols . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the judge found us - reluctantly found us not guilty , so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : that is outrageous .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so seriously , is there a dark side ?
a lot of people would say there 's no way that someone could put together this incredible collection of businesses without knifing a few people in the back , you know , doing some ugly things .
you 've been accused of being ruthless .
there was a nasty biography written about you by someone .
is any of it true ? is there an element of truth in it ?
rb : i do n't actually think that the stereotype of a businessperson treading all over people to get to the top , generally speaking , works .
i think if you treat people well , people will come back and come back for more .
and i think all you have in life is your reputation and it 's a very small world .
and i actually think that the best way of becoming a successful business leader is dealing with people fairly and well , and i like to think that 's how we run virgin .
ca : and what about the people who love you and who see you spending - you keep getting caught up in these new projects , but it almost feels like you 're addicted to launching new stuff .
you get excited by an idea and , kapow !
i mean , do you think about life balance ?
how do your family feel about each time you step into something big and new ?
rb : i also believe that being a father 's incredibly important , so from the time the kids were very young , and so we spend a very good sort of three months away together .
yes , i 'll , you know , be in touch . we 're very lucky , we have this tiny little island in the caribbean and we can - so i can take them there and we can bring friends , and we can play together , but i can also keep in touch with what 's going on .
ca : you started talking in recent years about this term capitalist philanthropy .
what is that ?
rb : capitalism has been proven to be a system that works .
you know , the alternative , communism , has not worked .
but the problem with capitalism is extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people , and therefore extreme responsibility , i think , goes with that wealth .
and i think it 's important that the individuals , who are in that fortunate position , do not end up competing for bigger and bigger boats , and bigger and bigger cars , but , you know , use that money to either create new jobs or to tackle issues around the world .
ca : and what are the issues that you worry about most , care most about , want to turn your resources toward ?
rb : well , there 's - i mean there 's a lot of issues .
i mean global warming certainly is a massive threat to mankind and we are putting a lot of time and energy into , a , trying to come up with alternative fuels and , b , you know , we just launched this prize , which is really a prize in case we do n't get an answer on alternative fuels , in case we do n't actually manage to get the carbon emissions cut down quickly , and in case we go through the tipping point .
we need to try to encourage people to come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the earth 's atmosphere .
and we just - you know , there were n't really people working on that before , so we wanted people to try to - all the best brains in the world to start thinking about that , and also to try to extract the methane and actually , we 've had about 15,000 people fill in the forms saying they want to give it a go .
and so we only need one , so we 're hopeful .
ca : and you 're also working in africa on a couple of projects ?
rb : yes , i mean , we 've got - we 're setting up something called the war room , which is maybe the wrong word .
to try to coordinate all the attack that 's going on in africa , all the different social problems in africa , and try to look at best practices .
so , for instance , there 's a doctor in africa that 's found that if you give a mother antiretroviral drugs at 24 weeks , when she 's pregnant , that the baby will not have hiv when it 's born .
and so disseminating that information to ca : the war room sounds , it sounds powerful and dramatic .
and is there a risk that the kind of the business heroes of the west get so excited about - i mean , they 're used to having an idea , getting stuff done , and they believe profoundly in their ability to make a difference in the world .
is there a risk that we go to places like africa and say , we 've got to fix this problem and we can do it , i 've got all these billions of dollars , you know , da , da , da - here 's the big idea . and kind of take a much more complex situation and actually end up making a mess of it . do you worry about that ?
rb : well , first of all , on this particular situation , we 're actually - we 're working with the government on it .
i mean , thabo mbeki 's had his problems with accepting hiv and aids are related , but this is a way , i think , of him tackling this problem and instead of the world criticizing him , it 's a way of working with him , with his government .
it 's important that if people do go to africa and do try to help , they do n't just go in there and then leave after a few years .
it 's got to be consistent .
but i think business leaders can bring their entrepreneurial know-how and help governments approach things slightly differently .
for instance , we 're setting up clinics in africa where we 're going to be giving free antiretroviral drugs , free tb treatment and free malaria treatment .
but we 're also trying to make them self-sustaining clinics , so that people pay for some other aspects .
ca : i mean a lot of cynics say about someone like yourself , or bill gates , or whatever , that this is really being - it 's almost driven by for guilt avoidance and not like a real philanthropic instinct .
what would you say to them ?
rb : well , i think that everybody - people do things for a whole variety of different reasons and i think that , you know , when i 'm on me deathbed , i will want to feel that i 've made a difference to other people 's lives .
and that may be a selfish thing to think , but it 's the way i 've been brought up .
i think if i 'm in a position to radically change other people 's lives for the better , i should do so .
ca : how old are you ?
rb : i 'm 56 .
ca : i mean , the psychologist erik erikson says that - as i understand him and i 'm a total amateur - but that during 30s , 40s people are driven by this desire to grow and that 's where they get their fulfillment .
50s , 60s , the mode of operation shifts more to the quest for wisdom and a search for legacy .
i mean , it seems like you 're still a little bit in the growth phases , you 're still doing these incredible new plans .
how much do you think about legacy , and what would you like your legacy to be ?
rb : i do n't think i think too much about legacy .
i mean , i like to - you know , my grandmother lived to 101 , so hopefully i 've got another 30 or 40 years to go .
no , i just want to live life to its full .
you know , if i can make a difference , i hope to be able to make a difference .
and i think one of the positive things at the moment is you 've got sergey and larry from google , for instance , who are good friends .
and , thank god , you 've got two people who genuinely care about the world and with that kind of wealth .
if they had that kind of wealth and they did n't care about the world , it would be very worrying .
and you know they 're going to make a hell of a difference to the world .
and i think it 's important that people in that kind of position do make a difference .
ca : well , richard , when i was starting off in business , i knew nothing about it and i also was sort of - and that that was the only way you could have a chance of succeeding .
and you actually did inspire me . i looked at you , i thought , well , he 's made it . maybe there is a different way .
so i would like to thank you for that inspiration , and for coming to ted today . thank you .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i teach chemistry .
-lrb- explosion -rrb- all right , all right .
so more than just explosions , chemistry is everywhere .
have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over ?
some people nodding yes .
recently , i showed this to my students , and i just asked them to try and explain why it happened .
the questions and conversations that followed were fascinating .
check out this video that maddie from my period three class sent me that evening .
-lrb- clang -rrb- -lrb- laughs -rrb- now obviously , as maddie 's chemistry teacher , i love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class .
but what fascinated me more is that maddie 's curiosity took her to a new level .
if you look inside that beaker , you might see a candle .
maddie 's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario .
you know , questions and curiosity like maddie 's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers , and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education .
but if we place these technologies before student inquiry , we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers : our students ' questions .
for example , flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time , but if it is the focus of our students ' experience , it 's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing .
but if instead we have the guts to confuse our students , perplex them , and evoke real questions , through those questions , we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction .
so , 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside , the truth is , i 've been teaching for 13 years now , and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning , not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information .
in may of 2010 , at 35 years old , with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way , i was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta .
this led to open-heart surgery . this is the actual real email from my doctor right there .
now , when i got this , i was - press caps lock - absolutely freaked out , okay ?
but i found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied .
where did this guy get this confidence , the audacity of it ?
so when i asked him , he told me three things .
he said first , his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure , about what worked and what did n't work .
second , he embraced , and did n't fear , the messy process of trial and error , the inevitable process of trial and error .
and third , through intense reflection , he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure , and then , with a steady hand , he saved my life .
now i absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom , and before i went back into the classroom that fall , i wrote down three rules of my own that i bring to my lesson planning still today .
rule number one : curiosity comes first .
questions can be windows to great instruction , but not the other way around .
rule number two : embrace the mess .
we 're all teachers . we know learning is ugly .
and just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip , okay , trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at sacred heart cathedral in room 206 .
and rule number three : practice reflection .
what we do is important . it deserves our care , but it also deserves our revision .
can we be the surgeons of our classrooms ?
as if what we are doing one day will save lives .
our students our worth it .
and each case is different .
-lrb- explosion -rrb- all right . sorry .
the chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on .
so these are my daughters .
on the right we have little emmalou - southern family .
and , on the left , riley .
now riley 's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here .
she 's going to be four years old , and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask , " why ? "
yeah . why .
i could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything .
we all were at that age .
but the challenge is really for riley 's future teachers , the ones she has yet to meet .
how will they grow this curiosity ?
you see , i would argue that riley is a metaphor for all kids , and i think dropping out of school comes in many different forms - to the senior who 's checked out before the year 's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school 's classroom .
but if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry , we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day , and spark their imagination .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a bit funny to be at a conference dedicated to things not seen , and present my proposal to build a 6,000-kilometer-long wall across the entire african continent .
about the size of the great wall of china , this would hardly be an invisible structure .
and yet it 's made from parts that are invisible , or near-invisible , to the naked eye : bacteria and grains of sand .
now , as architects we 're trained to solve problems .
but i do n't really believe in architectural problems ; i only believe in opportunities .
which is why i 'll show you a threat , and an architectural response .
the threat is desertification .
my response is a sandstone wall made from bacteria and solidified sand , stretching across the desert .
now , sand is a magical material of beautiful contradictions .
it is simple and complex .
it is peaceful and violent .
it is always the same , never the same , endlessly fascinating .
one billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second .
that 's a cyclical process .
as rocks and mountains die , grains of sand are born .
some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone .
and as the sandstone weathers , new grains break free .
some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale , into a sand dune .
in a way , the static , stone mountain becomes a moving mountain of sand .
but , moving mountains can be dangerous . let me try and explain why .
dry areas cover more than one third of the earth 's land surfaces .
some are already deserts ; others are being seriously degraded by the sand .
just south of the sahara we find the sahel .
the name means " edge of the desert . "
and this is the region most closely associated with desertification .
it was here in the late ' 60s and early ' 70s that major droughts brought three million people to become dependent upon emergency food aid , with about up to 250,000 dying .
this is a catastrophe waiting to happen again .
and it 's one that gets very little attention .
in our accelerated media culture , desertification is simply too slow to reach the headlines .
it 's nothing like a tsunami or a katrina : too few crying children and smashed up houses .
and yet desertification is a major threat on all continents , affecting some 110 countries and about 70 percent of the world 's agricultural drylands .
it seriously threatens the livelihoods of millions of people , and especially in africa and china .
and it is largely an issue that we 've created for ourselves through unsustainable use of scarce resources .
so , we get climate change .
we get droughts , increased desertification , crashing food systems , water scarcity , famine , forced migration , political instability , warfare , crisis .
that 's a potential scenario if we fail to take this seriously .
but , how far away is it ?
i went to sokoto in northern nigeria to try and find out how far away it is .
the dunes here move southward at a pace of around 600 meters a year .
that 's the sahara eating up almost -lsb- two meters -rsb- a day of the arable land , physically pushing people away from their homes .
here i am - i 'm the second person on the left - -lrb- laughter -rrb- with the elders in gidan-kara , a tiny village outside of sokoto .
they had to move this village in 1987 as a huge dune threatened to swallow it .
so , they moved the entire village , hut by hut .
this is where the village used to be .
it took us about 10 minutes to climb up to the top of that dune , which goes to show why they had to move to a safer location .
that 's the kind of forced migration that desertification can lead to .
if you happen to live close to the desert border , you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away , and abandon your home and your life as you know it .
now , sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts .
and still , those extreme environments are very good places if we want to stop the shifting sands .
four years ago , 23 african countries came together to create the great green wall sahara .
a fantastic project , the initial plan called for a shelter belt of trees to be planted right across the african continent , from mauritania in the west , all the way to djibouti in the east .
if you want to stop a sand dune from moving , what you need to make sure to do is to stop the grains from avalanching over its crest .
and a good way of doing that , the most efficient way , is to use some kind of sand catcher .
trees or cacti are good for this .
but , one of the problems with planting trees is that the people in these regions are so poor that they chop them down for firewood .
now there is an alternative to just planting trees and hoping that they wo n't get chopped down .
this sandstone wall that i 'm proposing essentially does three things .
it adds roughness to the dune 's surface , to the texture of the dune 's surface , binding the grains .
it provides a physical support structure for the trees , and it creates physical spaces , habitable spaces inside of the sand dunes .
if people live inside of the green barrier they can help support the trees , protect them from humans , and from some of the forces of nature .
inside of the dunes we find shade .
we can start harvesting condensation , and start greening the desert from within .
sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way .
all we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid , and then excavate the sand , and we have our architecture .
we can either excavate it by hand or we can have the wind excavate it for us .
so , the wind carries the sand onto the site and then it carries the redundant sand away from the structure for us .
but , by now , you 're probably asking , how am i planning to solidify a sand dune ?
how do we glue those grains of sand together ?
and the answer is , perhaps , that you use these guys , bacillus pasteurii , a micro-organism that is readily available in wetlands and marshes , and does precisely that .
it takes a pile of loose sand and it creates sandstone out of it .
these images from the american society for microbiology show us the process .
what happens is , you pour bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand , and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains .
a chemical process produces calcite , which is a kind of natural cement that binds the grains together .
the whole cementation process takes about 24 hours .
i learned about this from a professor at u.c. davis called jason dejong .
he managed to do it in a mere 1,400 minutes .
here i am , playing the part of the mad scientist , working with the bugs at ucl in london , trying to solidify them .
so , how much would this cost ?
i 'm not an economist , very much not , but i did , quite literally , a back of the envelope calculation - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and it seems that for a cubic meter of concrete we would have to pay in the region of 90 dollars .
and , after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria , which you 'll never have to pay again , one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars .
how do we construct something like this ?
well , i 'll quickly show you two options .
the first is to create a kind of balloon structure , fill it with bacteria , then allow the sand to wash over the balloon , pop the balloon , as it were , disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it .
then , a few years afterwards , using permacultural strategies , we green that part of the desert .
the second alternative would be to use injection piles .
so , we pushed the piles down through the dune , and we create an initial bacterial surface .
we then pull the piles up through the dune and we 're able to create almost any conceivable shape inside of the sand with the sand acting as a mold as we go up .
so , we have a way of turning sand into sandstone , and then creating these habitable spaces inside of the desert dunes .
but , what should they look like ?
well , i was inspired , for my architectural form , by tafoni , which look a little bit like this , this is a model representation of it .
these are cavernous rock structures that i found on the site in sokoto .
and i realized that if i scaled them up , they would provide me with good spatial qualities , for ventilation , for thermal comfort , and for other things .
now , part of the formal control over this structure would be lost to nature , obviously , as the bacteria do their work .
and i think this creates a kind of boundless beauty actually .
i think there is really something in that articulation that is quite nice .
we see the result , the traces , if you like , of the bacillus pasteurii being harnessed to sculpt the desert into these habitable environments .
some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably , and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way .
that 's not true at all .
it 's a natural process . it goes on in nature today , and the bacteria die as soon as we stop feeding them .
so , there it is - architectural anti-desertification structures made from the desert itself .
sand-stopping devices , made from sand .
the world is likely to lose one third of its arable land by the end of the century .
in a period of unprecedented population growth and increased food demands , this could prove disastrous .
and quite frankly , we 're putting our heads in the sand .
if nothing else , i would like for this scheme to initiate a discussion .
but , if i had something like a ted wish , it would be to actually get it built , to start building this habitable wall , this very , very long , but very narrow city in the desert , built into the dunescape itself .
it 's not only something that supports trees , but something that connects people and countries together .
i would like to conclude by showing you an animation of the structure , and leave you with a sentence by jorge luis borges .
borges said that " nothing is built on stone , everything is built on sand , but we must build as if the sand were stone . "
now , there are many details left to explore in this scheme - political , practical , ethical , financial .
my design , as it takes you down the rabbit hole , is fraught with many challenges and difficulties in the real world .
but , it 's a beginning , it 's a vision .
as borges would have it , it 's the sand .
and i think now is really the time to turn it into stone . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how would you like to be better than you are ?
suppose i said that , with just a few changes in your genes , you could get a better memory - more precise , more accurate and quicker .
or maybe you 'd like to be more fit , stronger , with more stamina .
would you like to be more attractive and self-confident ?
how about living longer with good health ?
or perhaps you 're one of those who 's always yearned for more creativity .
which one would you like the most ?
which would you like , if you could have just one ?
-lrb- audience member : creativity . -rrb- creativity .
how many people would choose creativity ?
raise your hands . let me see .
a few . probably about as many as there are creative people here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's very good .
how many would opt for memory ?
quite a few more .
how about fitness ?
a few less .
what about longevity ?
ah , the majority . that makes me feel very good as a doctor .
if you could have any one of these , it would be a very different world .
is it just imaginary ?
or , is it , perhaps , possible ?
evolution has been a perennial topic here at the ted conference , but i want to give you today one doctor 's take on the subject .
the great 20th-century geneticist , t.g. dobzhansky , who was also a communicant in the russian orthodox church , once wrote an essay that he titled " nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution . "
now if you are one of those who does not accept the evidence for biological evolution , this would be a very good time to turn off your hearing aid , take out your personal communications device - i give you permission - and perhaps take another look at kathryn schultz 's book on being wrong , because nothing in the rest of this talk is going to make any sense whatsoever to you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if you do accept biological evolution , consider this : is it just about the past , or is it about the future ?
does it apply to others , or does it apply to us ?
this is another look at the tree of life .
in this picture , i 've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions , because if you look at the edges of the tree of life , every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms : it has survived ; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment .
the human part of this branch , way out on one end , is , of course , the one that we are most interested in .
we branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago .
in the interval , there have been perhaps 20 or 25 different species of hominids .
some have come and gone .
we have been here for about 130,000 years .
it may seem like we 're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life , but actually , for the most part , the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same .
do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics ?
this is not like human insulin ; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas .
and speaking of bacteria , do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body ?
maybe 10 times more .
i mean think of it , when antonio damasio asks about your self-image , do you think about the bacteria ?
our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria .
it 's warm , it 's dark , it 's moist , it 's very cozy .
and you 're going to provide all the nutrition that they could possibly want with no effort on their part .
it 's really like an easy street for bacteria , with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit .
but otherwise , you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria , just as they are essential to your life .
they help in the digestion of essential nutrients , and they protect you against certain diseases .
but what will come in the future ?
are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species ?
or , are we destined to become something different - something , perhaps , even better adapted to the environment ?
now let 's take a step back in time to the big bang , 14 billion years ago - the earth , the solar system , about four and a half billion years - the first signs of proto-life , maybe three to four billion years ago on earth - the first multi-celled organisms , perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago - and then the human species , finally emerging in the last 130,000 years .
in this vast unfinished symphony of the universe , life on earth is like a brief measure ; the animal kingdom , like a single measure ; and human life , a small grace note .
that was us .
that also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk , so i hope you enjoyed it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now when i was a freshman in college , i took my first biology class .
i was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology .
i became enamored of the power of evolution , and i realized something very fundamental : in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms , each cell simply divides , and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells .
but at the time multi-celled organisms come online , things start to change .
sexual reproduction enters the picture .
and very importantly , with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome , the rest of the body becomes expendable .
in fact , you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction .
now i have to confess , when i was a college undergraduate , i thought , okay , sex / death , sex / death , death for sex - it seemed pretty reasonable at the time , but with each passing year , i 've come to have increasing doubts .
i 've come to understand the sentiments of george burns , who was performing still in las vegas well into his 90s .
and one night , there 's a knock at his hotel room door .
he answers the door .
standing before him is a gorgeous , scantily clad showgirl .
she looks at him and says , " i 'm here for super sex . "
" that 's fine , " says george , " i 'll take the soup . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i came to realize , as a physician , that i was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution - not necessarily contradictory , just different .
i was trying to preserve the body .
i wanted to keep us healthy .
i wanted to restore health from disease .
i wanted us to live long and healthy lives .
evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation , adapting and surviving through generation after generation .
from an evolutionary point of view , you and i are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea .
i think we would all understand the sentiment that woody allen expressed when he said , " i do n't want to achieve immortality through my work .
i want to achieve it through not dying . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived .
it does n't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest , and not even the smartest .
evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment .
that is the sole test of survival and success .
at the bottom of the ocean , bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce , if fish were there , sous-vide cooked fish , nevertheless , have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them .
so what does this mean , as we look back at what has happened in evolution , and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution , and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase , i would say that there are a number of possibilities .
the first is that we will not evolve .
we have reached a kind of equipoise .
and the reasoning behind that would be , first , we have , through medicine , managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population .
and secondly , we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it .
and by the way , we immigrate and circulate and intermix so much that you ca n't any longer have the isolation that is necessary for evolution to take place .
a second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind , natural , imposed by the forces of nature .
and the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly , but they are inexorable .
and as far as isolation goes , when we as a species do colonize distant planets , there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way .
but there 's a third possibility , an enticing , intriguing and frightening possibility .
i call it neo-evolution - the new evolution that is not simply natural , but guided and chosen by us as individuals in the choices that we will make .
now how could this come about ?
how could it be possible that we would do this ?
consider , first , the reality that people today , in some cultures , are making choices about their offspring .
they 're , in some cultures , choosing to have more males than females .
it 's not necessarily good for the society , but it 's what the individual and the family are choosing .
think also , if it were possible ever for you to choose , not simply to choose the sex of your child , but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases .
what if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or alzheimer 's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke ?
would n't you want to make those changes in your genes ?
if we look ahead , these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible .
the human genome project started in 1990 , and it took 13 years .
it cost 2.7 billion dollars .
the year after it was finished in 2004 , you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months .
today , you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week .
it wo n't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome , and it will be increasingly available for everyone .
just a week ago , the national academy of engineering awarded its draper prize to francis arnold and willem stemmer , two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way - what frances arnold calls " directed evolution . "
a couple of years ago , the lasker prize was awarded to the scientist shinya yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell , a fibroblast , and by manipulating just four genes , he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell - a cell potentially capable of becoming any cell in your body .
these changes are coming .
the same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves , but induce immunity against other viruses .
believe it or not , there 's an experimental trial going on with vaccine against influenza that has been grown in the cells of a tobacco plant .
can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco ?
these are all reality today , and -lsb- in -rsb- the future , will be evermore possible .
imagine then just two other little changes .
you can change the cells in your body , but what if you could change the cells in your offspring ?
what if you could change the sperm and the ova , or change the newly fertilized egg , and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life - eliminate the diabetes , eliminate the hemophilia , reduce the risk of cancer ?
who does n't want healthier children ?
and then , that same analytic technology , that same engine of science that can produce the changes to prevent disease , will also enable us to adopt super-attributes , hyper-capacities - that better memory .
why not have the quick wit of a ken jennings , especially if you can augment it with the next generation of the watson machine ?
why not have the quick twitch muscle that will enable you to run faster and longer ?
why not live longer ?
these will be irresistible .
and when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation , and we can adopt the attributes we want , we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution .
we 'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years , and we can compress it down to a thousand years - and maybe even in the next 100 years .
these are choices that your grandchildren , or their grandchildren , are going to have before them .
will we use these choices to make a society that is better , that is more successful , that is kinder ?
or , will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others of us ?
will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform , or more robust and more versatile ?
these are the kinds of questions that we will have to face .
and most profoundly of all , will we ever be able to develop the wisdom , and to inherit the wisdom , that we 'll need to make these choices wisely ?
for better or worse , and sooner than you may think , these choices will be up to us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you think about the phone - and intel has tested a lot of the things i 'm going to show you , over the last 10 years , in about 600 elderly households - 300 in ireland , and 300 in portland - trying to understand : how do we measure and monitor behavior in a medically meaningful way ?
and if you think about the phone , right , it 's something that we can use for some incredible ways to help people actually take the right medication at the right time .
we 're testing these kinds of simple sensor-network technologies in the home so that any phone that a senior is already comfortable with can help them deal with their medications .
and a lot of what they do is they pick up the phone , and it 's our system whispering to them which pill they need to take , and they fake like they 're having a conversation with a friend .
and they 're not embarrassed by a meds caddy that 's ugly , that sits on their kitchen table and says , " i 'm old . i 'm frail . "
it 's surreptitious technology that 's helping them do a simple task of taking the right pill at the right time .
now , we also do some pretty amazing things with these phones .
because that moment when you answer the phone is a cognitive test every time that you do it .
think about it , all right ? i 'm going to answer the phone three different times .
" hello ? hey . "
all right ? that 's the first time .
" hello ? uh , hey . "
" hello ? uh , who ?
oh , hey . "
all right ? very big differences between the way i answered the phone the three times .
and as we monitor phone usage by seniors over a long period of time , down to the tenths of a microsecond , that recognition moment of whether they can figure out that person on the other end is a friend and we start talking to them immediately , or they do a lot of what 's called trouble talk , where they 're like , " wait , who is this ? oh . " right ?
waiting for that recognition moment may be the best early indicator of the onset of dementia than anything that shows up clinically today .
we call these behavioral markers .
there 's lots of others . is the person going to the phone as quickly , when it rings , as they used to ?
is it a hearing problem or is it a physicality problem ?
has their voice gotten more quiet ? we 're doing a lot of work with people with alzheimer 's and particularly with parkinson 's , where that quiet voice that sometimes shows up with parkinson 's patients may be the best early indicator of parkinson 's five to 10 years before it shows up clinically .
but those subtle changes in your voice over a long period of time are hard for you or your spouse to notice until it becomes so extreme and your voice has become so quiet .
so , sensors are looking at that kind of voice .
when you pick up the phone , how much tremor are you having , and what is that like , and what is that trend like over a period of time ?
are you having more trouble dialing the phone than you used to ?
is it a dexterity problem ? is it the onset of arthritis ?
are you using the phone ? are you socializing less than you used to ?
and looking at that pattern . and what does that decline in social health mean , as a kind of a vital sign of the future ?
and then wow , what a radical idea , we - except in the united states - might be able to use this newfangled technology to actually interact with a nurse or a doctor on the other end of the line .
wow , what a great day that will be once we 're allowed to actually do those kinds of things .
so , these are what i would call behavioral markers .
and it 's the whole field that we 've been trying to work on for the last 10 years at intel .
how do you put simple disruptive technologies , and the first of five phrases that i 'm going to talk about in this talk ?
behavioral markers matter .
how do we change behavior ?
how do we measure changes in behavior in a meaningful way that 's going to help us with prevention of disease , early onset of disease , and tracking the progression of disease over a long period of time ?
now , why would intel let me spend a lot of time and money , over the last 10 years , trying to understand the needs of seniors and start thinking about these kinds of behavioral markers ?
this is some of the field work that we 've done .
we have now lived with 1,000 elderly households in 20 countries over the last 10 years .
we study people in rochester , new york .
we go live with them in the winter because what they do in the winter , and their access to healthcare , and how much they socialize , is very different than in the summer .
if they have a hip fracture we go with them and we study their entire discharge experience .
if they have a family member who is a key part of their care network , we fly and study them as well .
so , we study the holistic health experience of 1,000 seniors over the last 10 years in 20 different countries .
why is intel willing to fund that ?
it 's because of the second slogan that i want to talk about .
ten years ago , when i started trying to convince intel to let me go start looking at disruptive technologies that could help with independent living , this is what i called it : " y2k + 10 . "
you know , back in 2000 , we were all so obsessed with paying attention to the aging of our computers , and whether or not they were going to survive the tick of the clock from 1999 to 2000 , that we missed a moment that only demographers were paying attention to .
it was right around new years .
and that switchover , when we had the larger number of older people on the planet , for the first time than younger people .
for the first time in human history - and barring aliens landing or some major other pandemic , that 's the expectation from demographers , going forward .
and 10 years ago it seemed like i had a lot of time to convince intel to work on this . right ?
y2k + 10 was coming , the baby boomers starting to retire .
well folks , it 's like we know these demographics here .
this is a map of the entire world .
it 's like the lights are on , but nobody 's home on this demographic y2k + 10 problem . right ?
i mean we sort of get it here , but we do n't get it here , and we 're not doing anything about it .
the health reform bill is largely ignoring the realities of the age wave that 's coming , and the implications for what we need to do to change not only how we pay for care , but deliver care in some radically different ways .
and in fact , it 's upon us .
i mean you probably saw these headlines . this is catherine casey who is the first boomer to actually get social security .
that actually occurred this year . she took early retirement .
she was born one second after midnight in 1946 .
a retired school teacher , there she is with a social security administrator .
the first boomer actually , we did n't even wait till 2011 , next year .
we 're already starting to see early retirement occur this year .
all right , so it 's here . this y2k + 10 problem is at our door .
this is 50 tsunamis scheduled on the calendar , but somehow we ca n't sort of marshal our government and innovative forces to sort of get out in front of it and do something about it . we 'll wait until it 's more of a catastrophe , and react , as opposed to prepare for it .
so , one of the reasons it 's so challenging to prepare for this y2k problem is , i want to argue , we have what i would call mainframe poisoning .
andy grove , about six or seven years ago , he does n't even know or remember this , in a fortune magazine article he used the phrase " mainframe healthcare , " and i 've been extending and expanding this .
he saw it written down somewhere . he 's like , " eric that 's a really cool concept . "
i was like , " actually it was your idea . you said it in a fortune magazine article .
i just extended it . "
you know , this is the mainframe .
this mentality of traveling to and timesharing large , expensive healthcare systems actually began in 1787 .
this is the first general hospital in vienna .
and actually the second general hospital in vienna , in about 1850 , was where we started to build out an entire curriculum for teaching med students specialties .
and it 's a place in which we started developing architecture that literally divided the body , and divided care into departments and compartments .
and it was reflected in our architecture , it was reflected in the way that we taught students , and this mainframe mentality persists today .
now , i 'm not anti-hospital .
with my own healthcare problems , i 've taken drug therapies , i 've traveled to this hospital and others , many , many times .
but we worship the high hospital on a hill . right ?
and this is mainframe healthcare .
and just as 30 years ago we could n't conceive that we would have the power of a mainframe computer that took up a room this size in our purses and on our belts , that we 're carrying around in our cell phone today , and suddenly , computing , that used to be an expert driven system , it was a personal system that we all owned as part of our daily lives - that shift from mainframe to personal computing is what we have to do for healthcare .
we have to shift from this mainframe mentality of healthcare to a personal model of healthcare .
we are obsessed with this way of thinking .
when intel does surveys all around the world and we say , " quick response : healthcare . "
the first word that comes up is " doctor . "
the second that comes up is " hospital . " and the third is " illness " or " sickness . " right ?
we are wired , in our imagination , to think about healthcare and healthcare innovation as something that goes into that place .
our entire health reform discussion right now , health i.t. , when we talk with policy makers , equals " how are we going to get doctors using electronic medical records in the mainframe ? "
we 're not thinking about how do we shift from the mainframe to the home .
and the problem with this is the way we conceive healthcare . right ?
this is a very reactive , crisis-driven system .
we 're doing 15-minute exams with patients .
it 's population-based .
we collect a bunch of biological information in this artificial setting , and we fix them up , like humpty-dumpty all over again , and send them home , and hope - we might hand them a brochure , maybe an interactive website - that they do as asked and do n't come back into the mainframe .
and the problem is we ca n't afford it today , folks .
we ca n't afford mainframe healthcare today to include the uninsured .
and now we want to do a double-double of the age wave coming through ?
business as usual in healthcare is broken and we 've got to do something different .
we 've got to focus on the home .
we 've got to focus on a personal healthcare paradigm that moves care to the home . how do we be more proactive , prevention-driven ?
how do we collect vital signs and other kinds of information 24 by 7 ?
how do we get a personal baseline about what 's going to work for you ?
how do we collect not just biological data but behavioral data , psychological data , relational data , in and on and around the home ?
and how do we drive compliance to be a customized care plan that uses all this great technology that 's around us to change our behavior ?
that 's what we need to do for our personal health model .
i want to give you a couple of examples . this is mimi from one of our studies - in her 90s , had to move out of her home because her family was worried about falls .
raise your hand if you had a serious fall in your household , or any of your loved ones , your parents or so forth . right ?
classic . hip fracture often leads to institutionalization of a senior .
this is what was happening to mimi ; the family was worried about it , moved her out of her own home into an assisted living facility .
she tripped over her oxygen tank .
many people in this generation wo n't press the button , even if they have an alert call system , because they do n't want to bother anybody , even though they 've been paying 30 dollars a month .
boomers will press the button . trust me .
they 're going to be pressing that button non-stop . right ?
mimi broke her pelvis , lay all night , all morning , finally somebody came in and found her , sent her to the hospital .
they fixed her back up . she was never going to be able to move back into the assisted living . they put her into the nursing home unit .
first night in the nursing home unit where she had been in the same assisted living facility , moved her from one bed to another , kind of threw her , rebroke her pelvis , sent her back to the hospital that she had just come from , no one read the chart , put her on tylenol , which she is allergic to , broke out , got bedsores , basically , had heart problems , and died from the fall and the complications and the errors that were there .
now , the most frightening thing about this is this is my wife 's grandmother .
now , i 'm eric dishman . i speak english , i work for intel , i make a good salary , i 'm smart about falls and fall-related injuries - it 's an area of research that i work on .
i have access to senators and ceos .
i ca n't stop this from happening .
what happens if you do n't have money , you do n't speak english or do n't have the kind of access to deal with these kinds of problems that inevitably occur ?
how do we actually prevent the vast majority of falls from ever occurring in the first place ?
let me give you a quick example of work that we 're doing to try to do exactly that .
i 've been wearing a little technology that we call shimmer .
it 's a research platform .
it has accelerometry . you can plug in a three-lead ecg .
there is all kinds of sort of plug-and-play kind of legos that you can do to capture , in the wild , in the real world , things like tremor , gait , stride length and those kinds of things .
the problem is , our understanding of falls today , like mimi , is get a survey in the mail three months after you fell , from the state , saying , " what were you doing when you fell ? "
that 's sort of the state of the art .
but with something like shimmer , or we have something called the magic carpet , embedded sensors in carpet , or camera-based systems that we borrowed from sports medicine , we 're starting for the first time in those 600 elderly households to collect actual kinematic motion data to understand : what are the subtle changes that are occurring that can show us that mom has become risk at falls ?
and most often we can do two interventions , fix the meds mix .
i 'm a qualitative researcher , but when i look at these data streams coming in from these homes , i can look at the data and tell you the day that some doctor prescribed them something that nobody else knew that they were on , because we see the changes in their patterns in the household . right ?
these discoveries of behavioral markers , and behavioral changes are game changing , and like the discovery of the microscope because of our collecting data streams that we 've actually never done before .
this is an example in our tril clinic in ireland of - actually what you 're seeing is she 's looking at data , in this picture , from the magic carpet .
so , we have a little carpet that you can look at your amount of postural sway , and look at the changes in your postural sway over many months .
here 's what some of this data might look like .
this is actually sensor firings .
these are two different subjects in our study .
it 's about a year 's worth of data .
the color represents different rooms they are in the house .
this person on the left is living in their own home .
this person on the right is actually living in an assisted living facility .
i know this because look at how punctuated meal time is when they are no longer in their particular rooms here . right ?
now , this does n't mean that much to you .
but when we look at these cycles of data over a longer period of time - and we 're looking at everything from motion around different rooms in the house , to sort of micro-motions that shimmer picks up , about gait and stride length - these streams of data are starting to tell us things about behavioral patterns that we 've never understood before .
you can go to orcatech.org - it has nothing to do with whales , it 's the oregon center for aging and technology - to see more about that .
the problem is , intel is still one of the largest funders in the world of independent living technology research .
i 'm not bragging about how much we fund ; it 's how little anyone else actually pays attention to aging and funds innovation on aging , chronic disease management and independent living in the home .
so , my mantra here , my fourth slogan is : 10,000 households or bust .
we need to drive a national , if not international , framingham-type heart study of independent living technologies , where we have 10,000 elderly connected households with broadband , full medical characterization , and a platform by which we can start to experiment and turn these from 20-household anecdotal studies that the universities fund , to large clinical trials that prove out the value of these technologies .
so , 10,000 households or bust .
these are just some of the households that we 've done in the intel studies .
my fifth and final phrase : i have tried for two years , and there were moments when we were quite close , to make this healthcare reform bill be about reform from something and to something , from a mainframe model to a personal health model , or to mean something more than just a debate about the public option and how we 're going to finance .
it does n't matter how we finance healthcare .
we 're going to figure something out for the next 10 years , and try it .
no matter who pays for it , we better start doing care in a fundamentally different way and treating the home and the patient and the family member and the caregivers as part of these coordinated care teams and using disruptive technologies that are already here to do care in some pretty fundamental different ways .
the president needs to stand up and say , at the end of a healthcare reform debate , " our goal as a country is to move 50 percent of care out of institutions , clinics , hospitals and nursing homes , to the home , in 10 years . "
it 's achievable . we should do it economically , we should do it morally , and we should do it for quality of life .
but there is no goal within this health reform .
it 's just a mess today .
so , you know , that 's my last message to you .
how do we set a going-to-the-moon goal of dealing with the y2k + 10 problem that 's coming ?
it 's not that innovation and technology is going to be the magic pill that cures all , but it 's going to be part of the solution .
and if we do n't create a personal health movement , something that we 're all aiming towards in reform , then we 're going to move nowhere .
so , i hope you 'll turn this conference into that kind of movement forward .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a river .
this is a stream .
this is a river .
this is happening all over the country .
there are tens of thousands of miles of dewatered streams in the united states .
on this map , the colored areas represent water conflicts .
similar problems are emerging in the east as well .
the reasons vary state to state , but mostly in the details .
there are 4,000 miles of dewatered streams in montana alone .
they would ordinarily support fish and other wildlife .
they 're the veins of the ecosystem , and they 're often empty veins .
i want to tell you the story of just one of these streams because it 's an archetype for the larger story .
this is prickly pear creek .
it runs through a populated area from east helena to lake helena .
it supports wild fish including cutthroat , brown and rainbow trout .
nearly every year for more than a hundred years , it 's looked like this in the summer .
how did we get here ?
well , it started back in the late 1800s when people started settling in places like montana .
in short , there was a lot of water and there were n't very many people .
but as more people showed up wanting water , the folks who were there first got a little concerned , and in 1865 , montana passed its first water law .
it basically said , everybody near the stream can share in the stream .
oddly , a lot of people showed up wanting to share the stream , and the folks who were there first got concerned enough to bring out their lawyers .
there were precedent-setting suits in 1870 and 1872 , both involving prickly pear creek .
and in 1921 , the montana supreme court ruled in a case involving prickly pear that the folks who were there first had the first , or " senior water rights . "
these senior water rights are key .
the problem is that all over the west now it looks like this .
some of these creeks have claims for 50 to 100 times more water than is actually in the stream .
and the senior water rights holders , if they do n't use their water right , they risk losing their water right , along with the economic value that goes with it .
so they have no incentive to conserve .
so it 's not just about the number of people ; the system itself creates a disincentive to conserve because you can lose your water right if you do n't use it .
so after decades of lawsuits and 140 years , now , of experience , we still have this .
it 's a broken system .
there 's a disincentive to conserve , because , if you do n't use your water right , you can lose your water right .
and i 'm sure you all know , this has created significant conflicts between the agricultural and environmental communities .
okay . now i 'm going to change gears here .
most of you will be happy to know that the rest of the presentation 's free , and some of you 'll be happy to know that it involves beer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's another thing happening around the country , which is that companies are starting to get concerned about their water footprint .
they 're concerned about securing an adequate supply of water , they 're trying to be really efficient with their water use , and they 're concerned about how their water use affects the image of their brand .
well , it 's a national problem , but i 'm going to tell you another story from montana , and it involves beer .
i bet you did n't know , it takes about 5 pints of water to make a pint of beer .
if you include all the drain , it takes more than a hundred pints of water to make a pint of beer .
now the brewers in montana have already done a lot to reduce their water consumption , but they still use millions of gallons of water .
i mean , there 's water in beer .
so what can they do about this remaining water footprint that can have serious effects on the ecosystem ?
these ecosystems are really important to the montana brewers and their customers .
after all , there 's a strong correlation between water and fishing , and for some , there 's a strong correlation between fishing and beer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the montana brewers and their customers are concerned , and they 're looking for some way to address the problem .
so how can they address this remaining water footprint ?
remember prickly pear .
up until now , business water stewardship has been limited to measuring and reducing , and we 're suggesting that the next step is to restore .
remember prickly pear .
it 's a broken system .
you 've got a disincentive to conserve , because if you do n't use your water right , you risk losing your water right .
well , we decided to connect these two worlds - the world of the companies with their water footprints and the world of the farmers with their senior water rights on these creeks .
in some states , senior water rights holders can leave their water in-stream while legally protecting it from others and maintaining their water right .
after all , it is their water right , and if they want to use that water right to help the fish grow in the stream , it 's their right to do so .
but they have no incentive to do so .
so , working with local water trusts , we created an incentive to do so .
we pay them to leave their water in-stream .
that 's what 's happening here .
this individual has made the choice and is closing this water diversion , leaving the water in the stream .
he does n't lose the water right , he just chooses to apply that right , or some portion of it , to the stream , instead of to the land .
because he 's the senior water rights holder , he can protect the water from other users in the stream .
okay ?
he gets paid to leave the water in the stream .
this guy 's measuring the water that this leaves in the stream .
we then take the measured water , we divide it into thousand-gallon increments .
each increment gets a serial number and a certificate , and then the brewers and others buy those certificates as a way to return water to these degraded ecosystems .
the brewers pay to restore water to the stream .
it provides a simple , inexpensive and measurable way to return water to these degraded ecosystems , while giving farmers an economic choice and giving businesses concerned about their water footprints an easy way to deal with them .
after 140 years of conflict and 100 years of dry streams , a circumstance that litigation and regulation has not solved , we put together a market-based , willing buyer , willing seller solution - it 's about giving folks concerned about their water footprints a real opportunity to put water where it 's critically needed , into these degraded ecosystems , while at the same time providing farmers a meaningful economic choice about how their water is used .
these transactions create allies , not enemies .
they connect people rather than dividing them .
and they provide needed economic support for rural communities .
and most importantly , it 's working .
we 've returned more than four billion gallons of water to degraded ecosystems .
we 've connected senior water rights holders with brewers in montana , with hotels and tea companies in oregon and with high-tech companies that use a lot of water in the southwest .
and when we make these connections , we can and we do turn this into this .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my talk is " flapping birds and space telescopes . "
and you would think that should have nothing to do with one another , but i hope by the end of these 18 minutes , you 'll see a little bit of a relation .
it ties to origami . so let me start .
what is origami ?
most people think they know what origami is . it 's this : flapping birds , toys , cootie catchers , that sort of thing .
and that is what origami used to be .
but it 's become something else .
it 's become an art form , a form of sculpture .
the common theme - what makes it origami - is folding is how we create the form .
you know , it 's very old . this is a plate from 1797 .
it shows these women playing with these toys .
if you look close , it 's this shape , called a crane .
every japanese kid learns how to fold that crane .
so this art has been around for hundreds of years , and you would think something that 's been around that long - so restrictive , folding only - everything that could be done has been done a long time ago .
and that might have been the case .
but in the twentieth century , a japanese folder named yoshizawa came along , and he created tens of thousands of new designs .
but even more importantly , he created a language , a way we could communicate , a code of dots , dashes and arrows .
harkening back to susan blackmore 's talk , we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection , and we know where that leads .
and where it has led in origami is to things like this .
this is an origami figure - one sheet , no cuts , folding only , hundreds of folds .
this , too , is origami , and this shows where we 've gone in the modern world .
naturalism . detail .
you can get horns , antlers - even , if you look close , cloven hooves .
and it raises a question : what changed ?
and what changed is something you might not have expected in an art , which is math .
that is , people applied mathematical principles to the art , to discover the underlying laws .
and that leads to a very powerful tool .
the secret to productivity in so many fields - and in origami - is letting dead people do your work for you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because what you can do is take your problem , and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved , and use their solutions .
and i want to tell you how we did that in origami .
origami revolves around crease patterns .
the crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure .
and you ca n't just draw them arbitrarily .
they have to obey four simple laws .
and they 're very simple , easy to understand .
the first law is two-colorability . you can color any crease pattern with just two colors without ever having the same color meeting .
the directions of the folds at any vertex - the number of mountain folds , the number of valley folds - always differs by two . two more or two less .
nothing else .
if you look at the angles around the fold , you find that if you number the angles in a circle , all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line , all the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line .
and if you look at how the layers stack , you 'll find that no matter how you stack folds and sheets , a sheet can never penetrate a fold .
so that 's four simple laws . that 's all you need in origami .
all of origami comes from that .
and you 'd think , " can four simple laws give rise to that kind of complexity ? "
but indeed , the laws of quantum mechanics can be written down on a napkin , and yet they govern all of chemistry , all of life , all of history .
if we obey these laws , we can do amazing things .
so in origami , to obey these laws , we can take simple patterns - like this repeating pattern of folds , called textures - and by itself it 's nothing .
but if we follow the laws of origami , we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very , very simple , but when we put it together , we get something a little different .
this fish , 400 scales - again , it is one uncut square , only folding .
and if you do n't want to fold 400 scales , you can back off and just do a few things , and add plates to the back of a turtle , or toes .
or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag , with 13 stripes .
and if you want to go really crazy , 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake .
and this guy 's on display downstairs , so take a look if you get a chance .
the most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures .
and i can put it in this simple equation .
we take an idea , combine it with a square , and you get an origami figure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what matters is what we mean by those symbols .
and you might say , " can you really be that specific ?
i mean , a stag beetle - it 's got two points for jaws , it 's got antennae . can you be that specific in the detail ? "
and yeah , you really can .
so how do we do that ? well , we break it down into a few smaller steps .
so let me stretch out that equation .
i start with my idea . i abstract it .
what 's the most abstract form ? it 's a stick figure .
and from that stick figure , i somehow have to get to a folded shape that has a part for every bit of the subject , a flap for every leg .
and then once i have that folded shape that we call the base , you can make the legs narrower , you can bend them , you can turn it into the finished shape .
now the first step , pretty easy .
take an idea , draw a stick figure .
the last step is not so hard , but that middle step - going from the abstract description to the folded shape - that 's hard .
but that 's the place where the mathematical ideas can get us over the hump .
and i 'm going to show you all how to do that so you can go out of here and fold something .
but we 're going to start small .
this base has a lot of flaps in it .
we 're going to learn how to make one flap .
how would you make a single flap ?
take a square . fold it in half , fold it in half , fold it again , until it gets long and narrow , and then we 'll say at the end of that , that 's a flap .
i could use that for a leg , an arm , anything like that .
what paper went into that flap ?
well , if i unfold it and go back to the crease pattern , you can see that the upper left corner of that shape is the paper that went into the flap .
so that 's the flap , and all the rest of the paper 's left over .
i can use it for something else .
well , there are other ways of making a flap .
there are other dimensions for flaps .
if i make the flaps skinnier , i can use a bit less paper .
if i make the flap as skinny as possible , i get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed .
and you can see there , it needs a quarter-circle of paper to make a flap .
there 's other ways of making flaps .
if i put the flap on the edge , it uses a half circle of paper .
and if i make the flap from the middle , it uses a full circle .
so , no matter how i make a flap , it needs some part of a circular region of paper .
so now we 're ready to scale up .
what if i want to make something that has a lot of flaps ?
what do i need ? i need a lot of circles .
and in the 1990s , origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles .
and here 's where the dead people start to help us out , because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles .
i can rely on that vast history of mathematicians and artists looking at disc packings and arrangements .
and i can use those patterns now to create origami shapes .
so we figured out these rules whereby you pack circles , you decorate the patterns of circles with lines according to more rules . that gives you the folds .
those folds fold into a base . you shape the base .
you get a folded shape - in this case , a cockroach .
and it 's so simple .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's so simple that a computer could do it .
and you say , " well , you know , how simple is that ? "
but computers - you need to be able to describe things in very basic terms , and with this , we could .
so i wrote a computer program a bunch of years ago called treemaker , and you can download it from my website .
it 's free . it runs on all the major platforms - even windows .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you just draw a stick figure , and it calculates the crease pattern .
it does the circle packing , calculates the crease pattern , and if you use that stick figure that i just showed - which you can kind of tell , it 's a deer , it 's got antlers - you 'll get this crease pattern .
and if you take this crease pattern , you fold on the dotted lines , you 'll get a base that you can then shape into a deer , with exactly the crease pattern that you wanted .
and if you want a different deer , you change the packing , and you can do an elk .
or you could do a moose .
or , really , any other kind of deer .
these techniques revolutionized this art .
we found we could do insects , spiders , which are close , things with legs , things with legs and wings , things with legs and antennae .
and if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square was n't interesting enough , then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square .
she 's eating him .
i call it " snack time . "
and you can do more than just insects .
this - you can put details , toes and claws . a grizzly bear has claws .
this tree frog has toes .
actually , lots of people in origami now put toes into their models .
toes have become an origami meme , because everyone 's doing it .
you can make multiple subjects .
so these are a couple of instrumentalists .
the guitar player from a single square , the bass player from a single square .
and if you say , " well , but the guitar , bass - that 's not so hot .
do a little more complicated instrument . "
well , then you could do an organ .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- of origami-on-demand .
so now people can say , " i want exactly this and this and this , " and you can go out and fold it .
and sometimes you create high art , and sometimes you pay the bills by doing some commercial work .
but i want to show you some examples .
everything you 'll see here , except the car , is origami .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- just to show you , this really was folded paper .
computers made things move , but these were all real , folded objects that we made .
and we can use this not just for visuals , but it turns out to be useful even in the real world .
surprisingly , origami and the structures that we 've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine , in science , in space , in the body , consumer electronics and more .
and i want to show you some of these examples .
one of the earliest was this pattern , this folded pattern , studied by koryo miura , a japanese engineer .
he studied a folding pattern , and realized this could fold down into an extremely compact package that had a very simple opening and closing structure .
and he used it to design this solar array .
it 's an artist 's rendition , but it flew in a japanese telescope in 1995 .
now , there is actually a little origami in the james webb space telescope , but it 's very simple .
the telescope , going up in space , it unfolds in two places .
it folds in thirds . it 's a very simple pattern - you would n't even call that origami .
they certainly did n't need to talk to origami artists .
but if you want to go higher and go larger than this , then you might need some origami .
engineers at lawrence livermore national lab had an idea for a telescope much larger .
they called it the eyeglass .
the design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up , 100-meter diameter lens .
so , imagine a lens the size of a football field .
there were two groups of people who were interested in this : planetary scientists , who want to look up , and then other people , who wanted to look down .
whether you look up or look down , how do you get it up in space ? you 've got to get it up there in a rocket .
and rockets are small . so you have to make it smaller .
how do you make a large sheet of glass smaller ?
well , about the only way is to fold it up somehow .
so you have to do something like this .
this was a small model .
folded lens , you divide up the panels , you add flexures .
but this pattern 's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters .
so the livermore engineers , wanting to make use of the work of dead people , or perhaps live origamists , said , " let 's see if someone else is doing this sort of thing . "
so they looked into the origami community , we got in touch with them , and i started working with them .
and we developed a pattern together that scales to arbitrarily large size , but that allows any flat ring or disc to fold down into a very neat , compact cylinder .
and they adopted that for their first generation , which was not 100 meters - it was a five-meter .
but this is a five-meter telescope - has about a quarter-mile focal length .
and it works perfectly on its test range , and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle .
now , there is other origami in space .
japan aerospace -lsb- exploration -rsb- agency flew a solar sail , and you can see here that the sail expands out , and you can still see the fold lines .
the problem that 's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination , but needs to be small for the journey .
and that works whether you 're going into space , or whether you 're just going into a body .
and this example is the latter .
this is a heart stent developed by zhong you at oxford university .
it holds open a blocked artery when it gets to its destination , but it needs to be much smaller for the trip there , through your blood vessels .
and this stent folds down using an origami pattern , based on a model called the water bomb base .
airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space .
and they want to do their design by simulation .
so they need to figure out how , in a computer , to flatten an airbag .
and the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation .
and so they can do a simulation like this .
those are the origami creases forming , and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out , does it work ?
and that leads to a really interesting idea .
you know , where did these things come from ?
well , the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school .
it 's the same pattern , called the water bomb base .
the airbag-flattening algorithm came from all the developments of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really developed just to create insects - things with legs .
the thing is , that this often happens in math and science .
when you get math involved , problems that you solve for aesthetic value only , or to create something beautiful , to have an application in the real world .
and as weird and surprising as it may sound , origami may someday even save a life .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , i 'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of ted is compassion , these very moving demonstrations we 've just seen : hiv in africa , president clinton last night .
and i 'd like to do a little collateral thinking , if you will , about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal .
i 'm a psychologist , but rest assured , i will not bring it to the scrotal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there was a very important study done a while ago at princeton theological seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help , we do sometimes , and we do n't other times .
a group of divinity students at the princeton theological seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic .
half of those students were given , as a topic , the parable of the good samaritan : the man who stopped the stranger in - to help the stranger in need by the side of the road .
half were given random bible topics .
then one by one , they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon .
as they went from the first building to the second , each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning , clearly in need . the question is : did they stop to help ?
the more interesting question is : did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the good samaritan ? answer : no , not at all .
what turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in - were they feeling they were late , or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about .
and this is , i think , the predicament of our lives : that we do n't take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction .
there 's a new field in brain science , social neuroscience .
this studies the circuitry in two people 's brains that activates while they interact .
and the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help .
that is to say , if we attend to the other person , we automatically empathize , we automatically feel with them .
there are these newly identified neurons , mirror neurons , that act like a neuro wi-fi , activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs . we feel " with " automatically .
and if that person is in need , if that person is suffering , we 're automatically prepared to help . at least that 's the argument .
but then the question is : why do n't we ?
and i think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption , to noticing , to empathy and to compassion .
and the simple fact is , if we are focused on ourselves , if we 're preoccupied , as we so often are throughout the day , we do n't really fully notice the other .
and this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle .
i was doing my taxes the other day , and i got to the point where i was listing all of the donations i gave , and i had an epiphany , it was - i came to my check to the seva foundation and i noticed that i thought , boy , my friend larry brilliant would really be happy that i gave money to seva .
then i realized that what i was getting from giving was a narcissistic hit - that i felt good about myself .
then i started to think about the people in the himalayas whose cataracts would be helped , and i realized that i went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus to altruistic joy , to feeling good for the people that were being helped . i think that 's a motivator .
but this distinction between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is one that i encourage us all to pay attention to .
you can see it at a gross level in the world of dating .
i was at a sushi restaurant a while back and i overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman , who was in the singles scene . and this woman says , " my brother is having trouble getting dates , so he 's trying speed dating . " i do n't know if you know speed dating ?
women sit at tables and men go from table to table , and there 's a clock and a bell , and at five minutes , bingo , the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up . and this woman says , " my brother 's never gotten a card , and i know exactly why .
the moment he sits down , he starts talking non-stop about himself ; he never asks about the woman . "
and i was doing some research in the sunday styles section of the new york times , looking at the back stories of marriages - because they 're very interesting - and i came to the marriage of alice charney epstein . and she said that when she was in the dating scene , she had a simple test she put people to .
the test was : from the moment they got together , how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word " you " in it .
and apparently epstein aced the test , therefore the article .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this is a - it 's a little test i encourage you to try out at a party .
here at ted there are great opportunities .
the harvard business review recently had an article called " the human moment , " about how to make real contact with a person at work . and they said , well , the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your blackberry , close your laptop , end your daydream and pay full attention to the person .
there is a newly coined word in the english language for the moment when the person we 're with whips out their blackberry or answers that cell phone , and all of a sudden we do n't exist .
the word is " pizzled " : it 's a combination of puzzled and pissed off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think it 's quite apt . it 's our empathy , it 's our tuning in which separates us from machiavellians or sociopaths .
i have a brother-in-law who 's an expert on horror and terror - he wrote the annotated dracula , the essential frankenstein - he was trained as a chaucer scholar , but he was born in transylvania and i think it affected him a little bit .
at any rate , at one point my brother-in-law , leonard , decided to write a book about a serial killer .
this is a man who terrorized the very vicinity we 're in many years ago . he was known as the santa cruz strangler .
and before he was arrested , he had murdered his grandparents , his mother and five co-eds at uc santa cruz .
so my brother-in-law goes to interview this killer and he realizes when he meets him that this guy is absolutely terrifying .
for one thing , he 's almost seven feet tall .
but that 's not the most terrifying thing about him .
the scariest thing is that his iq is 160 : a certified genius .
but there is zero correlation between iq and emotional empathy , feeling with the other person .
they 're controlled by different parts of the brain .
so at one point , my brother-in-law gets up the courage to ask the one question he really wants to know the answer to , and that is : how could you have done it ?
did n't you feel any pity for your victims ?
these were very intimate murders - he strangled his victims .
and the strangler says very matter-of-factly , " oh no . if i 'd felt the distress , i could not have done it .
i had to turn that part of me off . i had to turn that part of me off . "
and i think that that is very troubling , and in a sense , i 've been reflecting on turning that part of us off .
when we focus on ourselves in any activity , we do turn that part of ourselves off if there 's another person .
think about going shopping and think about the possibilities of a compassionate consumerism .
right now , as bill mcdonough has pointed out , the objects that we buy and use have hidden consequences .
we 're all unwitting victims of a collective blind spot .
we do n't notice and do n't notice that we do n't notice the toxic molecules emitted by a carpet or by the fabric on the seats .
or we do n't know if that fabric is a technological or manufacturing nutrient ; it can be reused or does it just end up at landfill ? in other words , we 're oblivious to the ecological and public health and social and economic justice consequences of the things we buy and use .
in a sense , the room itself is the elephant in the room , but we do n't see it . and we 've become victims of a system that points us elsewhere . consider this .
there 's a wonderful book called stuff : the hidden life of everyday objects .
and it talks about the back story of something like a t-shirt .
and it talks about where the cotton was grown and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences for soil of that fertilizer . and it mentions , for instance , that cotton is very resistant to textile dye ; about 60 percent washes off into wastewater .
and it 's well known by epidemiologists that kids who live near textile works tend to have high rates of leukemia .
there 's a company , bennett and company , that supplies polo.com , victoria 's secret - they , because of their ceo , who 's aware of this , in china formed a joint venture with their dye works to make sure that the wastewater would be properly taken care of before it returned to the groundwater .
right now , we do n't have the option to choose the virtuous t-shirt over the non-virtuous one . so what would it take to do that ?
well , i 've been thinking . for one thing , there 's a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store .
you can track it back to the factory . once you can track it back to the factory , you can look at the manufacturing processes that were used to make it , and if it 's virtuous , you can label it that way . or if it 's not so virtuous , you can go into - today , go into any store , put your scanner on a palm onto a barcode , which will take you to a website .
they have it for people with allergies to peanuts .
that website could tell you things about that object .
in other words , at point of purchase , we might be able to make a compassionate choice .
there 's a saying in the world of information science : ultimately everybody will know everything .
and the question is : will it make a difference ?
some time ago when i was working for the new york times , it was in the ' 80s , i did an article on what was then a new problem in new york - it was homeless people on the streets .
and i spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless . and i realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go . they had a diagnosis . it made me - what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where , when we see , when we 're passing someone who 's homeless in the periphery of our vision , it stays on the periphery .
we do n't notice and therefore we do n't act .
one day soon after that - it was a friday - at the end of the day , i went down - i was going down to the subway . it was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs .
and all of a sudden as i was going down the stairs i noticed that there was a man slumped to the side , shirtless , not moving , and people were just stepping over him - hundreds and hundreds of people .
and because my urban trance had been somehow weakened , i found myself stopping to find out what was wrong .
the moment i stopped , half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy .
and we found out that he was hispanic , he did n't speak any english , he had no money , he 'd been wandering the streets for days , starving , and he 'd fainted from hunger .
immediately someone went to get orange juice , someone brought a hotdog , someone brought a subway cop .
this guy was back on his feet immediately .
but all it took was that simple act of noticing , and so i 'm optimistic .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the first thing i want to do is say thank you to all of you .
the second thing i want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher .
ken and i have been working together for almost 40 years .
that 's ken sharpe over there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so there is among many people - certainly me and most of the people i talk to - a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working , with the way our institutions run .
our kids ' teachers seem to be failing them .
our doctors do n't know who the hell we are , and they do n't have enough time for us .
we certainly ca n't trust the bankers , and we certainly ca n't trust the brokers .
they almost brought the entire financial system down .
and even as we do our own work , all too often , we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing , or the required thing , or the profitable thing .
so everywhere we look , pretty much across the board , we worry that the people we depend on do n't really have our interests at heart .
or if they do have our interests at heart , we worry that they do n't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests .
they do n't understand us .
they do n't have the time to get to know us .
there are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction .
if things are n't going right , the first response is : let 's make more rules , let 's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing .
give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom , so even if they do n't know what they 're doing and do n't care about the welfare of our kids , as long as they follow the scripts , our kids will get educated .
give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes , so that you do n't need to rely on judges using their judgment .
instead , all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime .
impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees .
more and more rules to protect us against an indifferent , uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with .
or - or maybe and - in addition to rules , let 's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that , even if the people we deal with do n't particularly want to serve our interests , it is in their interest to serve our interest - the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness .
so we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems .
rules and incentives - " sticks " and " carrots . "
we passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse .
there 's the dodd-frank act , there 's the new consumer financial protection agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by elizabeth warren .
maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave .
we 'll see .
in addition , we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies , rather than securing short-term profits .
so if we find just the right incentives , they 'll do the right thing - as i said - selfishly , and if we come up with the right rules and regulations , they wo n't drive us all over a cliff .
and ken -lsb- sharpe -rsb- and i certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers .
if there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that .
but what we believe , and what we argue in the book , is that there is no set of rules , no matter how detailed , no matter how specific , no matter how carefully monitored and enforced , there is no set of rules that will get us what we need .
why ? because bankers are smart people .
and , like water , they will find cracks in any set of rules .
you design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system " almost-collapse " ca n't happen again .
it is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse , you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse .
so it 's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that .
what we desperately need , beyond , or along with , better rules and reasonably smart incentives , is we need virtue .
we need character .
we need people who want to do the right thing .
and in particular , the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that aristotle called " practical wisdom . "
practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is .
so aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked .
and he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems - problems that they had n't anticipated .
so one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the isle of lesbos , and they need to measure out round columns .
well if you think about it , it 's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler .
so what do they do ?
they fashion a novel solution to the problem .
they created a ruler that bends , what we would call these days a tape measure - a flexible rule , a rule that bends .
and aristotle said , " hah , they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns , you need to bend the rule . "
and aristotle said often in dealing with other people , we need to bend the rules .
dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass .
wise people know when and how to bend the rules .
wise people know how to improvise .
the way my co-author , ken , and i talk about it , they are kind of like jazz musicians .
the rules are like the notes on the page , and that gets you started , but then you dance around the notes on the page , coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players .
so for aristotle , the kind of rule-bending , rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman .
and in interactions with people , almost all the time , it is this kind of flexibility that is required .
a wise person knows when to bend the rules .
a wise person knows when to improvise .
and most important , a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims .
if you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself , what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people .
so it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself .
and so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding .
together they comprise practical wisdom , which aristotle thought was the master virtue .
so i 'll give you an example of wise practice in action .
it 's the case of michael .
michael 's a young guy .
he had a pretty low-wage job .
he was supporting his wife and a child , and the child was going to parochial school .
then he lost his job .
he panicked about being able to support his family .
one night , he drank a little too much , and he robbed a cab driver - stole 50 dollars .
he robbed him at gunpoint .
it was a toy gun .
he got caught . he got tried .
he got convicted .
the pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years , 24 months .
the judge on the case , judge lois forer thought that this made no sense .
he had never committed a crime before .
he was a responsible husband and father .
he had been faced with desperate circumstances .
all this would do is wreck a family .
and so she improvised a sentence - 11 months , and not only that , but release every day to go to work .
spend your night in jail , spend your day holding down a job .
he did . he served out his sentence .
he made restitution and found himself a new job .
and the family was united .
and it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life - a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge .
but it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that judge forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own , and so he appealed .
and he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery .
he did after all have a toy gun .
the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years .
he won the appeal .
michael was sentenced to five years in prison .
judge forer had to follow the law .
and by the way , this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence , so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail .
judge forer did what she was required to do , and then she quit the bench .
and michael disappeared .
so that is an example , both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant , of course , to make things better .
now consider ms. dewey .
ms. dewey 's a teacher in a texas elementary school .
she found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids , so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests .
all these schools in texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones , and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools .
so here was the consultant 's advice : first , do n't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do .
second , do n't waste your time on kids who ca n't pass the test no matter what you do .
third , do n't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted .
focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble , the so-called " bubble kids " - kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing .
so ms. dewey heard this , and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly .
it 's like they were about to go play a football game .
for ms. dewey , this is n't why she became a teacher .
now ken and i are not naive , and we understand that you need to have rules .
you need to have incentives .
people have to make a living .
but the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity , and they demoralize professional activity in two senses .
first , they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity .
judge forer quits , and ms. dewey in completely disheartened .
and second , they demoralize the activity itself .
the very practice is demoralized , and the practitioners are demoralized .
it creates people - when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing - it creates people who are addicted to incentives .
that is to say , it creates people who only do things for incentives .
now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years .
psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years .
we know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures , they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward .
if you reward kids for reading books , they stop caring about what 's in the books and only care about how long they are .
if you reward teachers for kids ' test scores , they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation .
if you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures - which is the current system - they would do more .
if instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures , they will do fewer .
what we want , of course , is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason - namely , to serve the welfare of their patients .
psychologists have known this for decades , and it 's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit , instead of economists .
and it does n't have to be this way .
we think , ken and i , that there are real sources of hope .
we identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws .
these are people who , being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives , find away around the rules , find a way to subvert the rules .
so there are teachers who have these scripts to follow , and they know that if they follow these scripts , the kids will learn nothing .
and so what they do is they follow the scripts , but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective .
so these are little ordinary , everyday heroes , and they 're incredibly admirable , but there 's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down .
so canny outlaws are better than nothing , but it 's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time .
more hopeful are people we call system-changers .
these are people who are looking not to dodge the system 's rules and regulations , but to transform the system , and we talk about several .
one in particular is a judge named robert russell .
and one day he was faced with the case of gary pettengill .
pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career , but then he got a severe back injury in iraq , and that forced him to take a medical discharge .
he was married , he had a third kid on the way , he suffered from ptsd , in addition to the bad back , and recurrent nightmares , and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms .
he was only able to get part-time work because of his back , and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family .
so he started selling marijuana .
he was busted in a drug sweep .
his family was kicked out of their apartment , and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids .
under normal sentencing procedures , judge russell would have had little choice but to sentence pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon .
but judge russell did have an alternative .
and that 's because he was in a special court .
he was in a court called the veterans ' court .
in the veterans ' court - this was the first of its kind in the united states .
judge russell created the veterans ' court .
it was a court only for veterans who had broken the law .
and he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging .
no one wanted non-violent offenders - and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot - to be thrown into prison .
they wanted to do something about what we all know , namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system .
and what the veterans ' court did , was it treated each criminal as an individual , tried to get inside their problems , tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves , and did n't forget about them once the judgment was made .
stayed with them , followed up on them , made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump .
there are now 22 cities that have veterans ' courts like this .
why has the idea spread ?
well , one reason is that judge russell has now seen 108 vets in his veterans ' court as of february of this year , and out of 108 , guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison .
none . none .
anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record .
so here 's is a system-changer , and it seems to be catching .
there 's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers - i know this is hard to believe - encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients .
the bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community .
though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards , the default rate was extremely low .
the bank was profitable .
the bankers stayed with their loan recipients .
they did n't make loans and then sell the loans .
they serviced the loans .
they made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments .
banking has n't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers .
even goldman sachs once used to serve clients , before it turned into an institution that serves only itself .
banking was n't always this way , and it does n't have to be this way .
so there are examples like this in medicine - doctors at harvard who are trying to transform medical education , so that you do n't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy , which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training .
and the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year .
so the patients are not organ systems , and they 're not diseases ; they 're people , people with lives .
and in order to be an effective doctor , you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease .
in addition to which there 's an enormous amount of back and forth , mentoring of one student by another , of all the students by the doctors , and the result is a generation - we hope - of doctors who do have time for the people they treat .
we 'll see .
so there are lots of examples like this that we talk about .
each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission - what aristotle would have called its proper telos .
and ken and i believe that this is what practitioners actually want .
people want to be allowed to be virtuous .
they want to have permission to do the right thing .
they do n't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work .
aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness , and he was right .
there 's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy , and the two things that jump out in study after study - i know this will come as a shock to all of you - the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work .
love : managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part .
work : engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying .
if you have that , good close relations with other people , work that 's meaningful and fulfilling , you do n't much need anything else .
well , to love well and to work well , you need wisdom .
rules and incentives do n't tell you how to be a good friend , how to be a good parent , how to be a good spouse , or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher .
rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom .
indeed , we argue , there is no substitute for wisdom .
does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners .
in giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing - to do right by others - practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the year 1919 , a virtually unknown german mathematician , named theodor kaluza suggested a very bold and , in some ways , a very bizarre idea .
he proposed that our universe might actually have more than the three dimensions that we are all aware of .
that is in addition to left , right , back , forth and up , down , kaluza proposed that there might be additional dimensions of space that for some reason we do n't yet see .
now , when someone makes a bold and bizarre idea , sometimes that 's all it is - bold and bizarre , but it has nothing to do with the world around us .
this particular idea , however - although we do n't yet know whether it 's right or wrong , and at the end i 'll discuss experiments which , in the next few years , may tell us whether it 's right or wrong - this idea has had a major impact on physics in the last century and continues to inform a lot of cutting-edge research .
so , i 'd like to tell you something about the story of these extra dimensions .
so where do we go ?
to begin we need a little bit of back story . go to 1907 .
this is a year when einstein is basking in the glow of having discovered the special theory of relativity and decides to take on a new project , to try to understand fully the grand , pervasive force of gravity .
and in that moment , there are many people around who thought that that project had already been resolved .
newton had given the world a theory of gravity in the late 1600s that works well , describes the motion of planets , the motion of the moon and so forth , the motion of apocryphal of apples falling from trees , hitting people on the head .
all of that could be described using newton 's work .
but einstein realized that newton had left something out of the story , because even newton had written that although he understood how to calculate the effect of gravity , he 'd been unable to figure out how it really works .
how is it that the sun , 93 million miles away , -lsb- that -rsb- somehow it affects the motion of the earth ?
how does the sun reach out across empty inert space and exert influence ?
and that is a task to which einstein set himself - to figure out how gravity works .
and let me show you what it is that he found .
so einstein found that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself .
the idea goes like this : imagine space is a substrate of all there is .
einstein said space is nice and flat , if there 's no matter present .
but if there is matter in the environment , such as the sun , it causes the fabric of space to warp , to curve .
and that communicates the force of gravity .
even the earth warps space around it .
now look at the moon .
the moon is kept in orbit , according to these ideas , because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that the sun and the moon and the earth can all create by virtue of their presence .
we go to a full-frame view of this .
the earth itself is kept in orbit because it rolls along a valley in the environment that 's curved because of the sun 's presence .
that is this new idea about how gravity actually works .
now , this idea was tested in 1919 through astronomical observations .
it really works . it describes the data .
and this gained einstein prominence around the world .
and that is what got kaluza thinking .
he , like einstein , was in search of what we call a unified theory .
that 's one theory that might be able to describe all of nature 's forces from one set of ideas , one set of principles , one master equation , if you will .
so kaluza said to himself , einstein has been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space - in fact , space and time , to be more precise .
maybe i can play the same game with the other known force , which was , at that time , known as the electromagnetic force - we know of others today , but at that time that was the only other one people were thinking about .
you know , the force responsible for electricity and magnetic attraction and so forth .
so kaluza says , maybe i can play the same game and describe electromagnetic force in terms of warps and curves .
that raised a question : warps and curves in what ?
einstein had already used up space and time , warps and curves , to describe gravity .
there did n't seem to be anything else to warp or curve .
so kaluza said , well , maybe there are more dimensions of space .
he said , if i want to describe one more force , maybe i need one more dimension .
so he imagined that the world had four dimensions of space , not three , and imagined that electromagnetism was warps and curves in that fourth dimension . now here 's the thing : when he wrote down the equations describing warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions , not three , he found the old equations that einstein had already derived in three dimensions - those were for gravity - but he found one more equation because of the one more dimension .
and when he looked at that equation , it was none other than the equation that scientists had long known to describe the electromagnetic force .
amazing - it just popped out .
he was so excited by this realization that he ran around his house screaming , " victory ! " - that he had found the unified theory .
now clearly , kaluza was a man who took theory very seriously .
he , in fact - there is a story that when he wanted to learn how to swim , he read a book , a treatise on swimming - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - then dove into the ocean .
this is a man who would risk his life on theory .
now , but for those of us who are a little bit more practically minded , two questions immediately arise from his observation .
number one : if there are more dimensions in space , where are they ?
we do n't seem to see them .
and number two : does this theory really work in detail , when you try to apply it to the world around us ?
now , the first question was answered in 1926 by a fellow named oskar klein .
he suggested that dimensions might come in two varieties - there might be big , easy-to-see dimensions , but there might also be tiny , curled-up dimensions , curled up so small , even though they 're all around us , that we do n't see them .
let me show you that one visually .
so , imagine you 're looking at something like a cable supporting a traffic light .
it 's in manhattan . you 're in central park - it 's kind of irrelevant - but the cable looks one-dimensional from a distant viewpoint , but you and i all know that it does have some thickness .
it 's very hard to see it , though , from far away .
but if we zoom in and take the perspective of , say , a little ant walking around - little ants are so small that they can access all of the dimensions - the long dimension , but also this clockwise , counter-clockwise direction .
and i hope you appreciate this .
it took so long to get these ants to do this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this illustrates the fact that dimensions can be of two sorts : big and small . and the idea that maybe the big dimensions around us are the ones that we can easily see , but there might be additional dimensions curled up , sort of like the circular part of that cable , so small that they have so far remained invisible .
let me show you what that would look like .
so , if we take a look , say , at space itself - i can only show , of course , two dimensions on a screen .
some of you guys will fix that one day , but anything that 's not flat on a screen is a new dimension , goes smaller , smaller , smaller , and way down in the microscopic depths of space itself , this is the idea , you could have additional curled up dimensions - here is a little shape of a circle - so small that we do n't see them .
but if you were a little ultra microscopic ant walking around , you could walk in the big dimensions that we all know about - that 's like the grid part - but you could also access the tiny curled-up dimension that 's so small that we ca n't see it with the naked eye or even with any of our most refined equipment .
but deeply tucked into the fabric of space itself , the idea is there could be more dimensions , as we see there .
now that 's an explanation about how the universe could have more dimensions than the ones that we see .
but what about the second question that i asked : does the theory actually work when you try to apply it to the real world ?
well , it turns out that einstein and kaluza and many others worked on trying to refine this framework and apply it to the physics of the universe as was understood at the time , and , in detail , it did n't work .
in detail , for instance , they could n't get the mass of the electron to work out correctly in this theory .
so many people worked on it , but by the ' 40s , certainly by the ' 50s , this strange but very compelling idea of how to unify the laws of physics had gone away .
until something wonderful happened in our age .
in our era , a new approach to unify the laws of physics is being pursued by physicists such as myself , many others around the world , it 's called superstring theory , as you were indicating .
and the wonderful thing is that superstring theory has nothing to do at first sight with this idea of extra dimensions , but when we study superstring theory , we find that it resurrects the idea in a sparkling , new form .
so , let me just tell you how that goes .
superstring theory - what is it ?
well , it 's a theory that tries to answer the question : what are the basic , fundamental , indivisible , uncuttable constituents making up everything in the world around us ?
the idea is like this .
so , imagine we look at a familiar object , just a candle in a holder , and imagine that we want to figure out what it is made of .
so we go on a journey deep inside the object and examine the constituents .
so deep inside - we all know , you go sufficiently far down , you have atoms .
we also all know that atoms are not the end of the story .
they have little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus with neutrons and protons .
even the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them known as quarks .
that is where conventional ideas stop .
here is the new idea of string theory .
deep inside any of these particles , there is something else .
this something else is this dancing filament of energy .
it looks like a vibrating string - that 's where the idea , string theory comes from .
and just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns , these can also vibrate in different patterns .
they do n't produce different musical notes .
rather , they produce the different particles making up the world around us .
so if these ideas are correct , this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like .
it 's built up of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy , vibrating in different frequencies .
the different frequencies produce the different particles .
the different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us .
and there you see unification , because matter particles , electrons and quarks , radiation particles , photons , gravitons , are all built up from one entity .
so matter and the forces of nature all are put together under the rubric of vibrating strings .
and that 's what we mean by a unified theory .
now here is the catch .
when you study the mathematics of string theory , you find that it does n't work in a universe that just has three dimensions of space .
it does n't work in a universe with four dimensions of space , nor five , nor six .
finally , you can study the equations , and show that it works only in a universe that has 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time .
it leads us right back to this idea of kaluza and klein - that our world , when appropriately described , has more dimensions than the ones that we see .
now you might think about that and say , well , ok , you know , if you have extra dimensions , and they 're really tightly curled up , yeah , perhaps we wo n't see them , if they 're small enough .
but if there 's a little tiny civilization of green people walking around down there , and you make them small enough , and we wo n't see them either . that is true .
one of the other predictions of string theory - no , that 's not one of the other predictions of string theory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it raises the question : are we just trying to hide away these extra dimensions , or do they tell us something about the world ?
in the remaining time , i 'd like to tell you two features of them .
first is , many of us believe that these extra dimensions hold the answer to what perhaps is the deepest question in theoretical physics , theoretical science .
and that question is this : when we look around the world , as scientists have done for the last hundred years , there appear to be about 20 numbers that really describe our universe .
these are numbers like the mass of the particles , like electrons and quarks , the strength of gravity , the strength of the electromagnetic force - a list of about 20 numbers that have been measured with incredible precision , but nobody has an explanation for why the numbers have the particular values that they do .
now , does string theory offer an answer ?
not yet .
but we believe the answer for why those numbers have the values they do may rely on the form of the extra dimensions .
and the wonderful thing is , if those numbers had any other values than the known ones , the universe , as we know it , would n't exist .
this is a deep question .
why are those numbers so finely tuned to allow stars to shine and planets to form , when we recognize that if you fiddle with those numbers - if i had 20 dials up here and i let you come up and fiddle with those numbers , almost any fiddling makes the universe disappear .
so can we explain those 20 numbers ?
and string theory suggests that those 20 numbers have to do with the extra dimensions .
let me show you how .
so when we talk about the extra dimensions in string theory , it 's not one extra dimension , as in the older ideas of kaluza and klein .
this is what string theory says about the extra dimensions .
they have a very rich , intertwined geometry .
this is an example of something known as a calabi-yau shape - name is n't all that important .
but , as you can see , the extra dimensions fold in on themselves and intertwine in a very interesting shape , interesting structure .
and the idea is that if this is what the extra dimensions look like , then the microscopic landscape of our universe all around us would look like this on the tiniest of scales .
when you swing your hand , you 'd be moving around these extra dimensions over and over again , but they 're so small that we would n't know it .
so what is the physical implication , though , relevant to those 20 numbers ?
consider this . if you look at the instrument , a french horn , notice that the vibrations of the airstreams are affected by the shape of the instrument .
now in string theory , all the numbers are reflections of the way strings can vibrate .
so just as those airstreams are affected by the twists and turns in the instrument , strings themselves will be affected by the vibrational patterns in the geometry within which they are moving .
so let me bring some strings into the story .
and if you watch these little fellows vibrating around - they 'll be there in a second - right there , notice that they way they vibrate is affected by the geometry of the extra dimensions .
so , if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions look like - we do n't yet , but if we did - we should be able to calculate the allowed notes , the allowed vibrational patterns .
and if we could calculate the allowed vibrational patterns , we should be able to calculate those 20 numbers .
and if the answer that we get from our calculations agrees with the values of those numbers that have been determined through detailed and precise experimentation , this in many ways would be the first fundamental explanation for why the structure of the universe is the way it is .
now , the second issue that i want to finish up with is : how might we test for these extra dimensions more directly ?
is this just an interesting mathematical structure that might be able to explain some previously unexplained features of the world , or can we actually test for these extra dimensions ?
and we think - and this is , i think , very exciting - that in the next five years or so we may be able to test for the existence of these extra dimensions .
here 's how it goes . in cern , geneva , switzerland , a machine is being built called the large hadron collider .
it 's a machine that will send particles around a tunnel , opposite directions , near the speed of light .
every so often those particles will be aimed at each other , so there 's a head-on collision .
the hope is that if the collision has enough energy , it may eject some of the debris from the collision from our dimensions , forcing it to enter into the other dimensions .
how would we know it ?
well , we 'll measure the amount of energy after the collision , compare it to the amount of energy before , and if there 's less energy after the collision than before , this will be evidence that the energy has drifted away .
and if it drifts away in the right pattern that we can calculate , this will be evidence that the extra dimensions are there .
let me show you that idea visually .
so , imagine we have a certain kind of particle called a graviton - that 's the kind of debris we expect to be ejected out , if the extra dimensions are real .
but here 's how the experiment will go .
you take these particles . you slam them together .
you slam them together , and if we are right , some of the energy of that collision will go into debris that flies off into these extra dimensions .
so this is the kind of experiment that we 'll be looking at in the next five , seven to 10 years or so .
and if this experiment bears fruit , if we see that kind of particle ejected by noticing that there 's less energy in our dimensions than when we began , this will show that the extra dimensions are real .
and to me this is a really remarkable story , and a remarkable opportunity . going back to newton with absolute space - did n't provide anything but an arena , a stage in which the events of the universe take place .
einstein comes along and says , well , space and time can warp and curve - that 's what gravity is .
and now string theory comes along and says , yes , gravity , quantum mechanics , electromagnetism , all together in one package , but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see .
and this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime .
amazing possibility .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good afternoon , everybody .
i 've got something to show you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- think about this as a pixel , a flying pixel .
this is what we call , in our lab , sensible design .
let me tell you a bit about it .
now if you take this picture - i 'm italian originally , and every boy in italy grows up with this picture on the wall of his bedroom - but the reason i 'm showing you this is that something very interesting happened in formula 1 racing over the past couple of decades .
now some time ago , if you wanted to win a formula 1 race , you take a budget , and you bet your budget on a good driver and a good car .
and if the car and the driver were good enough , then you 'd win the race .
now today , if you want to win the race , actually you need also something like this - something that monitors the car in real time , has a few thousand sensors collecting information from the car , transmitting this information into the system , and then processing it and using it in order to go back to the car with decisions and changing things in real time as information is collected .
this is what , in engineering terms , you would call a real time control system .
and basically , it 's a system made of two components - a sensing and an actuating component .
what is interesting today is that real time control systems are starting to enter into our lives .
our cities , over the past few years , just have been blanketed with networks , electronics .
they 're becoming like computers in open air .
and , as computers in open air , they 're starting to respond in a different way to be able to be sensed and to be actuated .
if we fix cities , actually it 's a big deal .
just as an aside , i wanted to mention , cities are only two percent of the earth 's crust , but they are 50 percent of the world 's population .
they are 75 percent of the energy consumption - up to 80 percent of co2 emissions .
so if we 're able to do something with cities , that 's a big deal .
beyond cities , all of this sensing and actuating is entering our everyday objects .
that 's from an exhibition that paola antonelli is organizing at moma later this year , during the summer .
it 's called " talk to me . "
well our objects , our environment is starting to talk back to us .
in a certain sense , it 's almost as if every atom out there were becoming both a sensor and an actuator .
and that is radically changing the interaction we have as humans with the environment out there .
in a certain sense , it 's almost as if the old dream of michelangelo ...
you know , when michelangelo sculpted the moses , at the end it said that he took the hammer , threw it at the moses - actually you can still see a small chip underneath - and said , shouted , " perché non parli ? why do n't you talk ? "
well today , for the first time , our environment is starting to talk back to us .
and i 'll show just a few examples - again , with this idea of sensing our environment and actuating it .
let 's starting with sensing .
well , the first project i wanted to share with you is actually one of the first projects by our lab .
it was four and a half years ago in italy .
and what we did there was actually use a new type of network at the time that had been deployed all across the world - that 's a cellphone network - and use anonymous and aggregated information from that network , that 's collected anyway by the operator , in order to understand how the city works .
the summer was a lucky summer - 2006 .
it 's when italy won the soccer world cup .
some of you might remember , it was italy and france playing , and then zidane at the end , the headbutt .
and anyway , italy won at the end .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now look at what happened that day just by monitoring activity happening on the network .
here you see the city .
you see the colosseum in the middle , the river tiber .
it 's morning , before the match .
you see the timeline on the top .
early afternoon , people here and there , making calls and moving .
the match begins - silence .
france scores . italy scores .
halftime , people make a quick call and go to the bathroom .
second half . end of normal time .
first overtime , second .
zidane , the headbutt in a moment .
italy wins . yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well , that night , everybody went to celebrate in the center .
you saw the big peak .
the following day , again everybody went to the center to meet the winning team and the prime minister at the time .
and then everybody moved down .
you see the image of the place called circo massimo , where , since roman times , people go to celebrate , to have a big party , and you see the peak at the end of the day .
well , that 's just one example of how we can sense the city today in a way that we could n't have done just a few years ago .
another quick example about sensing : it 's not about people , but about things we use and consume .
well today , we know everything about where our objects come from .
this is a map that shows you all the chips that form a mac computer , how they came together .
but we know very little about where things go .
so in this project , we actually developed some small tags to track trash as it moves through the system .
so we actually started with a number of volunteers who helped us in seattle , just over a year ago , to tag what they were throwing away - different types of things , as you can see here - things they would throw away anyway .
then we put a little chip , little tag , onto the trash and then started following it .
here are the results we just obtained .
-lrb- music -rrb- from seattle ...
after one week .
with this information we realized there 's a lot of inefficiencies in the system .
we can actually do the same thing with much less energy .
this data was not available before .
but there 's a lot of wasted transportation and convoluted things happening .
but the other thing is that we believe that if we see every day that the cup we 're throwing away , it does n't disappear , it 's still somewhere on the planet .
and the plastic bottle we 're throwing away every day still stays there .
and if we show that to people , then we can also promote some behavioral change .
so that was the reason for the project .
my colleague at mit , assaf biderman , he could tell you much more about sensing and many other wonderful things we can do with sensing , but i wanted to go to the second part we discussed at the beginning , and that 's actuating our environment .
and the first project is something we did a couple of years ago in zaragoza , spain .
it started with a question by the mayor of the city , who came to us saying that spain and southern europe have a beautiful tradition of using water in public space , in architecture .
and the question was : how could technology , new technology , be added to that ?
and one of the ideas that was developed at mit in a workshop was , imagine this pipe , and you 've got valves , solenoid valves , taps , opening and closing .
you create like a water curtain with pixels made of water .
if those pixels fall , you can write on it , you can show patterns , images , text .
and even you can approach it , and it will open up to let you jump through , as you see in this image .
well , we presented this to mayor belloch .
he liked it very much .
and we got a commission to design a building at the entrance of the expo .
we called it digital water pavilion .
the whole building is made of water .
there 's no doors or windows , but when you approach it , it will open up to let you in .
-lrb- music -rrb- the roof also is covered with water .
and if there 's a bit of wind , if you want to minimize splashing , you can actually lower the roof .
or you could close the building , and the whole architecture will disappear , you know , these days , you always get images during the winter , when they take the roof down , of people who have been there and said , " they demolished the building . "
no , they did n't demolish it , just when it goes down , the architecture almost disappears .
here 's the building working .
you see the person puzzled about what was going on inside .
and here was myself trying not to get wet , testing the sensors that open the water .
well , i should tell you now what happened one night when all of the sensors stopped working .
but actually that night , it was even more fun .
all the kids from zaragoza came to the building , because the way of engaging with the building became something different .
not anymore a building that would open up to let you in , but a building that would still make cuts and holes through the water , and you had to jump without getting wet .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- crowd noise -rrb- and that was , for us , was very interesting , because , as architects , as engineers , as designers , we always think about how people will use the things we design .
but then reality 's always unpredictable .
and that 's the beauty of doing things that are used and interact with people .
here is an image then of the building with the physical pixels , the pixels made of water , and then projections on them .
and this is what led us to think about the following project i 'll show you now .
that 's , imagine those pixels could actually start flying .
imagine you could have small helicopters that move in the air , and then each of them with a small pixel in changing lights - almost as a cloud that can move in space .
here is the video .
-lrb- music -rrb- so imagine one helicopter , like the one we saw before , moving with others , in synchrony .
so you can have this cloud .
you can have a kind of flexible screen or display , like this - a regular configuration in two dimensions .
or in regular , but in three dimensions , where the thing that changes is the light , not the pixels ' position .
you can play with a different type .
imagine your screen could just appear in different scales or sizes , different types of resolution .
but then the whole thing can be just a 3d cloud of pixels that you can approach and move through it and see from many , many directions .
here is the real flyfire control and going down to form the regular grid as before .
when you turn on the light , actually you see this . so the same as we saw before .
and imagine each of them then controlled by people .
you can have each pixel having an input that comes from people , from people 's movement , or so and so .
i want to show you something here for the first time .
we 've been working with roberto bolle , one of today 's top ballet dancers - the étoile at metropolitan in new york and la scala in milan - and actually captured his movement in 3d in order to use it as an input for flyfire .
and here you can see roberto dancing .
you see on the left the pixels , the different resolutions being captured .
it 's both 3d scanning in real time and motion capture .
so you can reconstruct a whole movement .
you can go all the way through .
but then , once we have the pixels , then you can play with them and play with color and movement and gravity and rotation .
so we want to use this as one of the possible inputs for flyfire .
i wanted to show you the last project we are working on .
it 's something we 're working on for the london olympics .
it 's called the cloud .
and the idea here is , imagine , again , we can involve people in doing something and changing our environment - almost to impart what we call cloud raising - like barn raising , but with a cloud .
imagine you can have everybody make a small donation for one pixel .
and i think what is remarkable that has happened over the past couple of years is that , over the past couple of decades , we went from the physical world to the digital one .
this has been digitizing everything , knowledge , and making that accessible through the internet .
now today , for the first time - and the obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world , from the self-organizing power of networks , to the physical one .
this can be , in our case , we want to use it for designing and doing a symbol .
that means something built in a city .
but tomorrow it can be , in order to tackle today 's pressing challenges - think about climate change or co2 emissions - how we can go from the digital world to the physical one .
so the idea that we can actually involve people in doing this thing together , collectively .
the cloud is a cloud , again , made of pixels , in the same way as the real cloud is a cloud made of particles .
and those particles are water , where our cloud is a cloud of pixels .
it 's a physical structure in london , but covered with pixels .
you can move inside , have different types of experiences .
you can actually see from underneath , sharing the main moments for the olympics in 2012 and beyond , and really using it as a way to connect with the community .
so both the physical cloud in the sky and something you can go to the top -lsb- of -rsb- , like london 's new mountaintop .
you can enter inside it .
and a kind of new digital beacon for the night - but most importantly , a new type of experience for anybody who will go to the top .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i thought i 'd tell you a little about what i like to write .
and i like to immerse myself in my topics .
i just like to dive right in and become sort of a human guinea pig .
and i see my life as a series of experiments .
so , i work for esquire magazine , and a couple of years ago , i wrote an article called " my outsourced life , " where i hired a team of people in bangalore , india , to live my life for me .
so , they answered my emails .
they answered my phone .
they argued with my wife for me , and they read my son bedtime stories .
it was the best month of my life , because i just sat back and i read books and watched movies .
it was a wonderful experience .
more recently , i wrote an article for esquire called - about radical honesty .
and this is a movement where - this is started by a psychologist in virginia , who says that you should never , ever lie , except maybe during poker and golf , his only exceptions .
and , more than that , whatever is on your brain should come out of your mouth .
so , i decided i would try this for a month .
this was the worst month of my life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do not recommend this at all .
to give you a sense of the experience , the article was called , " i think you 're fat . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , that was hard .
my most recent book - my previous book was called " the know-it-all , " and it was about the year i spent reading the encyclopedia britannica from a to z in my quest to learn everything in the world , or more precisely from aak , which is a type of east asian music , all the way to zwyiec , which is - well , i do n't want to ruin the ending .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a very exciting twist ending , like an o. henry novel , so i wo n't ruin it .
but i love that one , because that was an experiment about how much information one human brain could absorb .
although , listening to kevin kelly , you do n't have to remember anything .
you can just google it .
so , i wasted some time there .
i love those experiments , but i think that the most profound and life-changing experiment that i 've done is my most recent experiment , where i spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the bible , " the year of living biblically . "
and i undertook this for two reasons .
the first was that i grew up with no religion at all .
as i say in my book , i 'm jewish in the same way the olive garden is italian .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , not very .
but i 've become increasingly interested in religion .
i do think it 's the defining issue of our time , or one of the main ones .
and i have a son . i want to know what to teach him .
so , i decided to dive in head first , and try to live the bible .
the second reason i undertook this is because i 'm concerned about the rise of fundamentalism , religious fundamentalism , and people who say they take the bible literally , which is , according to some polls , as high as 45 or 50 percent of america .
so i decided , what if you really did take the bible literally ?
i decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the bible literally , without picking and choosing .
the first thing i did was i got a stack of bibles .
i had christian bibles .
i had jewish bibles .
a friend of mine sent me something called a hip-hop bible , where the twenty-third psalm is rendered as , " the lord is all that , " as opposed to what i knew it as , " the lord is my shepherd . "
then i went down and i read several versions , and i wrote down every single law that i could find .
and this was a very long list - over 700 rules .
and they range from the famous ones that i had heard of - the ten commandments , love your neighbor , be fruitful and multiply .
so i wanted to follow those .
and actually , i take my projects very seriously , because i had twins during my year , so i definitely take my projects seriously .
but i also wanted to follow the hundreds of arcane and obscure laws that are in the bible .
there is the law in leviticus , " you can not shave the corners of your beard . "
i did n't know where my corners were , so i decided to let the whole thing grow , and this is what i looked like by the end .
as you can imagine , i spent a lot of time at airport security .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my wife would n't kiss me for the last two months .
so , certainly the challenge was there .
the bible says you can not wear clothes made of mixed fibers , so i thought , " sounds strange , but i 'll try it . "
you only know if you try it .
i got rid of all my poly-cotton t-shirts .
the bible says that if two men are in a fight , and the wife of one of those men grabs the testicles of the other man , then her hand shall be cut off .
so , i wanted to follow that rule .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that one i followed by default , by not getting in a fight with a man whose wife was standing nearby , looking like she had a strong grip .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so - oh , there 's another shot of my beard .
i will say it was an amazing year because it really was life changing , and incredibly challenging .
and there were two types of laws that were particularly challenging .
the first was avoiding the little sins that we all commit every day .
you know , i could spend a year not killing , but spending a year not gossiping , not coveting , not lying - you know , i live in new york , and i work as a journalist , so this was 75 , 80 percent of my day i had to do it .
but it was really interesting , because i was able to make some progress , because i could n't believe how much my behavior changed my thoughts .
this was one of the huge lessons of the year , is that i almost pretended to be a better person , and i became a little bit of a better person .
so i had always thought , you know , " you change your mind , and you change your behavior , " but it 's often the other way around .
you change your behavior , and you change your mind .
so , you know , if you want to become more compassionate , you visit sick people in the hospital , and you will become more compassionate .
you donate money to a cause , and you become emotionally involved in that cause .
so , it really was cognitive psychology - you know , cognitive dissonance - that i was experiencing .
the bible actually talks about cognitive psychology , very primitive cognitive psychology .
in the proverbs , it says that if you smile , you will become happier , which , as we know , is actually true .
the second type of rule that was difficult to obey was the rules that will get you into a little trouble in twenty-first-century america .
and perhaps the clearest example of this is stoning adulterers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's a big part of the bible , so i figured i had to address it .
so , i was able to stone one adulterer .
it happened - i was in the park , and i was dressed in my biblical clothing , so sandals and sort of a white robe , you know , because again , the outer affects the inner .
i wanted to see how dressing biblically affected my mind .
and this man came up to me and he said , " why are you dressed like that ? "
and i explained my project , and he said , " well , i am an adulterer , are you going to stone me ? "
and i said , " well , that would be great ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i actually took out a handful of stones from my pocket that i had been carrying around for weeks , hoping for just this interaction - and , you know , they were pebbles - but he grabbed them out of my hand .
he was actually an elderly man , mid-70s , just so you know .
but he 's still an adulterer , and still quite angry .
he grabbed them out of my hand and threw them at my face , and i felt that i could - eye for an eye - i could retaliate , and throw one back at him .
so that was my experience stoning , and it did allow me to talk about , in a more serious way , these big issues .
how can the bible be so barbaric in some places , and yet so incredibly wise in others ?
how should we view the bible ?
should we view it , you know , as original intent , like a sort of a scalia version of the bible ?
how was the bible written ?
and actually , since this is a tech crowd , i talk in the book about how the bible actually reminds me of the wikipedia , because it has all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years .
and it 's sort of evolved .
it 's not a book that was written and came down from on high .
so i thought i would end by telling you just a couple of the take-aways , the bigger lessons that i learned from my year .
the first is , thou shalt not take the bible literally .
this became very , very clear , early on .
because if you do , then you end up acting like a crazy person , and stoning adulterers , or - here 's another example .
well , that 's another . i did spend some time shepherding .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a very relaxing vocation . i recommend it .
but this one is - the bible says that you can not touch women during certain times of the month , and more than that , you can not sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat .
and my wife thought this was very offensive , so she sat in every seat in our apartment , and i had to spend much of the year standing until i bought my own seat and carried it around .
so , you know , i met with creationists .
i went to the creationists ' museum .
and these are the ultimate literalists .
and it was fascinating , because they were not stupid people at all .
i would wager that their iq is exactly the same as the average evolutionist .
it 's just that their faith is so strong in this literal interpretation of the bible that they distort all the data to fit their model .
and they go through these amazing mental gymnastics to accomplish this .
and i will say , though , the museum is gorgeous .
they really did a fantastic job .
if you 're ever in kentucky , there 's , you can see a movie of the flood , and they have sprinklers in the ceiling that will sprinkle on you during the flood scenes .
so , whatever you think of creationism - and i think it 's crazy - they did a great job .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks .
and this one was a big lesson because i was praying , giving these prayers of thanksgiving , which was odd for an agnostic .
but i was saying thanks all the time , every day , and i started to change my perspective .
and i started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day , that i did n't even notice , that i took for granted , as opposed to focusing on the three or four that went wrong .
so , this is actually a key to happiness for me , is to just remember when i came over here , the car did n't flip over , and i did n't trip coming up the stairs .
it 's a remarkable thing .
third , that thou shall have reverence .
this one was unexpected because i started the year as an agnostic , and by the end of the year , i became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic , which i love .
and i 'm trying to start it as a movement .
so , if anyone wants to join , the basic idea is , whether or not there is a god , there 's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness , and that our rituals can be sacred .
the sabbath can be sacred .
this was one of the great things about my year , doing the sabbath , because i am a workaholic , so having this one day where you can not work , it really , that changed my life .
so , this idea of sacredness , whether or not there is a god .
thou shall not stereotype .
this one happened because i spent a lot of time with various religious communities throughout america because i wanted it to be more than about my journey .
i wanted it to be about religion in america .
so , i spent time with evangelical christians , and hasidic jews , and the amish .
i 'm very proud because i think i 'm the only person in america to out bible-talk a jehovah 's witness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after three and a half hours , he looked at his watch , he 's like , " i gotta go . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , thank you very much .
thank you . bless you , bless you .
but it was interesting because i had some very preconceived notions about , for instance , evangelical christianity , and i found that it 's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it .
there 's a group i met with called the red letter christians , and they focus on the red words in the bible , which are the ones that jesus spoke .
that 's how they printed them in the old bibles .
and their argument is that jesus never talked about homosexuality .
they have a pamphlet that says , " here 's what jesus said about homosexuality , " and you open it up , and there 's nothing in it .
so , they say jesus did talk a lot about helping the outcasts , helping poor people .
so , this was very inspiring to me .
i recommend jim wallis and tony campolo .
they 're very inspiring leaders , even though i disagree with much of what they say .
also , thou shalt not disregard the irrational .
this one was very unexpected because , you know , i grew up with the scientific worldview , and i was shocked learning how much of my life is governed by irrational forces .
and the thing is , if they 're not harmful , they 're not to be completely dismissed .
because i learned that - i was thinking , i was doing all these rituals , these biblical rituals , separating my wool and linen , and i would ask these religious people " why would the bible possibly tell us to do this ? why would god care ? "
and they said , " we do n't know , but it 's just rituals that give us meaning . "
and i would say , " but that 's crazy . "
and they would say , " well , what about you ?
you blow out candles on top of a birthday cake .
if a guy from mars came down and saw , here 's one guy blowing out the fire on top of a cake versus another guy not wearing clothes of mixed fabrics , would the martians say , ' well , that guy , he makes sense , but that guy 's crazy ? " ' so no , i think that rituals are , by nature , irrational .
so the key is to choose the right rituals , the ones that are not harmful - but rituals by themselves are not to be dismissed .
and finally i learned that thou shall pick and choose .
and this one i learned because i tried to follow everything in the bible .
and i failed miserably .
because you ca n't .
you have to pick and choose . and anyone who follows the bible is going to be picking and choosing .
the key is to pick and choose the right parts .
there 's the phrase called cafeteria religion , and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way , and they 'll say , " oh , it 's just cafeteria religion .
you 're just picking and choosing . "
but my argument is , " what 's wrong with cafeterias ? "
i 've had some great meals at cafeterias .
i 've also had some meals that make me want to dry heave .
so , it 's about choosing the parts of the bible about compassion , about tolerance , about loving your neighbor , as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin , or intolerance , or violence , which are very much in the bible as well .
so if we are to find any meaning in this book , then we have to really engage it , and wrestle with it .
and i thought i 'd end with just a couple more .
there 's me reading the bible .
that 's how i hailed taxicabs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- seriously , and it worked . and yes , that was actually a rented sheep , so i had to return that in the morning , but it served well for a day .
so , anyway , thank you so much for letting me speak .
the highline is an old , elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through manhattan .
and it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th ave .
and it became known as " death avenue " because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front , and he became known as the " west side cowboy . "
but even with a cowboy , about one person a month was killed and run over .
so they elevated it .
they built it 30 ft. in the air , right through the middle of the city .
but with the rise of interstate trucking , it was used less and less .
and by 1980 , the last train rode .
it was a train loaded with frozen turkeys - they say , at thanksgiving - from the meatpacking district .
and then it was abandoned .
and i live in the neighborhood , and i first read about it in the new york times , in an article that said it was going to be demolished .
and i assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and i could volunteer , but i realized no one was doing anything .
i went to my first community board meeting - which i 'd never been to one before - and sat next to another guy named joshua david , who 's a travel writer .
and at the end of the meeting , we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project ; most people wanted to tear it down .
so we exchanged business cards , and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization , friends of the high line .
and the goal at first was just saving it from demolition , but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it .
and what first attracted me , or interested me , was this view from the street - which is this steel structure , sort of rusty , this industrial relic .
but when i went up on top , it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of manhattan with views of the empire state building and the statue of liberty and the hudson river .
and that 's really where we started , the idea coalesced around , let 's make this a park , and let 's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape .
at the time , there was a lot of opposition .
mayor giuliani wanted to tear it down .
i 'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement .
mayor bloomberg came in office , he was very supportive , but we still had to make the economic case .
this was after 9/11 ; the city was in tough times .
so we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case .
and it turns out , we got those numbers wrong .
we thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build .
so far it 's cost about 150 million .
and the main case was , this is going to make good economic sense for the city .
so we said over a 20-year time period , the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million .
that was enough . it really got the city behind it .
it turns out we were wrong on that .
now people estimate it 's created about a half a billion dollars , or will create about a half a billion dollars , in tax revenues for the city .
we did a design competition , selected a design team .
we worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape .
there 's three sections .
we opened the fist section in 2009 .
it 's been successful beyond our dreams .
last year we had about two million people , which is about 10 times what we ever estimated .
this is one of my favorite features in section one .
it 's this amphitheater right over 10th ave .
and the first section ends at 20th st. right now .
the other thing , it 's generated , obviously , a lot of economic value ; it 's also inspired , i think , a lot of great architecture .
there 's a point , you can stand here and see buildings by frank gehry , jean nouvel , shigeru ban , neil denari .
and the whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the high line .
and this has been designed by renzo piano .
and they 're going to break ground in may .
and we 've already started construction on section two .
this is one of my favorite features , this flyover where you 're eight feet off the surface of the high line , running through a canopy of trees .
the high line used to be covered in billboards , and so we 've taken a playful take where , instead of framing advertisements , it 's going to frame people in views of the city .
this was just installed last month .
and then the last section was going to go around the rail yards , which is the largest undeveloped site in manhattan .
and the city has planned - for better or for worse - 12 million square-feet of development that the high line is going to ring around .
but what really , i think , makes the high line special is the people .
and honestly , even though i love the designs that we were building , i was always frightened that i would n't really love it , because i fell in love with that wildscape - and how could you recreate that magic ?
but what i found is it 's in the people and how they use it that , to me , makes it so special .
just one quick example is i realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the high line .
and i realized new yorkers do n't hold hands ; we just do n't do that outside .
but you see that happening on the high line , and i think that 's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- these are grim economic times , fellow tedsters , grim economic times indeed .
and so , i would like to cheer you up with one of the great , albeit largely unknown , commercial success stories of the past 20 years .
comparable , in its own very peculiar way , to the achievements of microsoft or google .
and it 's an industry which has bucked the current recession with equanimity .
i refer to organized crime .
now organized crime has been around for a very long time , i hear you say , and these would be wise words , indeed .
but in the last two decades , it has experienced an unprecedented expansion , now accounting for roughly 15 percent of the world 's gdp .
i like to call it the global shadow economy , or mcmafia , for short .
so what triggered this extraordinary growth in cross-border crime ?
well , of course , there is globalization , technology , communications , all that stuff , which we 'll talk about a little bit later .
but first , i would like to take you back to this event : the collapse of communism .
all across eastern europe , a most momentous episode in our post-war history .
now it 's time for full disclosure .
this event meant a great deal to me personally .
i had started smuggling books across the iron curtain to democratic opposition groups in eastern europe , like solidarity in poland , when i was in my teens .
i then started writing about eastern europe , and eventually i became the bbc 's chief correspondent for the region , which is what i was doing in 1989 .
and so when 425 million people finally won the right to choose their own governments , i was ecstatic , but i was also a touch worried about some of the nastier things lurking behind the wall .
it was n't long , for example , before ethnic nationalism reared its bloody head in yugoslavia .
and amongst the chaos , amidst the euphoria , it took me a little while to understand that some of the people who had wielded power before 1989 , in eastern europe , continued to do so after the revolutions there .
obviously there were characters like this .
but there were also some more unexpected people who played a critical role in what was going on in eastern europe .
like this character . remember these guys ?
they used to win the gold medals in weightlifting and wrestling , every four years in the olympics , and they were the great celebrities of communism , with a fabulous lifestyle to go with it .
they used to get great apartments in the center of town , casual sex on tap , and they could travel to the west very freely , which was a great luxury at the time .
it may come as a surprise , but they played a critical role in the emergence of the market economy in eastern europe .
or as i like to call them , they are the midwives of capitalism .
here are some of those same weightlifters after their 1989 makeover .
now in bulgaria - this photograph was taken in bulgaria - when communism collapsed all over eastern europe , it was n't just communism ; it was the state that collapsed as well .
that means your police force was n't working .
the court system was n't functioning properly .
so what was a business man in the brave new world of east european capitalism going to do to make sure that his contracts would be honored ?
well , he would turn to people who were called , rather prosaically by sociologists , privatized law enforcement agencies .
we prefer to know them as the mafia .
and in bulgaria , the mafia was soon joined with 14,000 people who were sacked from their jobs in the security services between 1989 and 1991 .
now , when your state is collapsing , your economy is heading south at a rate of knots , the last people you want coming on to the labor market are 14,000 men and women whose chief skills are surveillance , are smuggling , building underground networks and killing people .
but that 's what happened all over eastern europe .
now , when i was working in the 1990s , i spent most of the time covering the appalling conflict in yugoslavia .
and i could n't help notice that the people who were perpetrating the appalling atrocities , the paramilitary organizations , were actually the same people running the organized criminal syndicates .
and i came to think that behind the violence lay a sinister criminal enterprise .
and so i resolved to travel around the world examining this global criminal underworld by talking to policemen , by talking to victims , by talking to consumers of illicit goods and services .
but above all else , by talking to the gangsters themselves .
and the balkans was a fabulous place to start .
why ? well of course there was the issue of law and order collapsing , but also , as they say in the retail trade , it 's location , location , location .
and what i noticed at the beginning of my research that the balkans had turned into a vast transit zone for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world .
heroin , cocaine , women being trafficked into prostitution and precious minerals .
and where were they heading ?
the european union , which by now was beginning to reap the benefits of globalization , transforming it into the most affluent consumer market in history , eventually comprising some 500 million people .
and a significant minority of those 500 million people like to spend some of their leisure time and spare cash sleeping with prostitutes , sticking 50 euro notes up their nose and employing illegal migrant laborers .
now , organized crime in a globalizing world operates in the same way as any other business .
it has zones of production , like afghanistan and columbia .
it has zones of distribution , like mexico and the balkans .
and then , of course , it has zones of consumption , like the european union , japan and of course , the united states .
the zones of production and distribution tend to lie in the developing world , and they are often threatened by appalling violence and bloodshed .
take mexico , for example .
six thousand people killed there in the last 18 months as a direct consequence of the cocaine trade .
but what about the democratic republic of congo ?
since 1998 , five million people have died there .
it 's not a conflict you read about much in the newspapers , but it 's the biggest conflict on this planet since the second world war .
and why is it ? because mafias from all around the world cooperate with local paramilitaries in order to seize the supplies of the rich mineral resources of the region .
in the year 2000 , 80 percent of the world 's coltan was sourced to the killing fields of the eastern democratic republic of congo .
now , coltan you will find in almost every mobile phone , in almost every laptop and games console .
the congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia in exchange for weapons , and the mafia would then sell it on to western markets .
and it is this western desire to consume that is the primary driver of international organized crime .
now , let me show you some of my friends in action , caught conveniently on film by the italian police , and smuggling duty-not-paid cigarettes .
now , cigarettes out the factory gate are very cheap .
the european union then imposes the highest taxes on them in the world .
so if you can smuggle them into the e.u. , there are very handsome profits to be made , and i want to show you this to demonstrate the type of resources available to these groups .
this boat is worth one million euros when it 's new .
and it 's the fastest thing on european waters .
from 1994 , for seven years , 20 of these boats made the trip across the adriatic , from montenegro to italy , every single night .
and as a consequence of this trade , britain alone lost eight billion dollars in revenue .
and instead that money went to underwrite the wars in yugoslavia and line the pockets of unscrupulous individuals .
now italian police , when this trade started , had just two boats which could go at the same speed .
and this is very important , because the only way you can catch these guys is if they run out of gas .
sometimes the gangsters would bring with them women being trafficked into prostitution , and if the police intervened , they would hurl the women into the sea so that the police had to go and save them from drowning , rather than chasing the bad guys .
so i have shown you this to demonstrate how many boats , how many vessels it takes to catch one of these guys .
and the answer is six vessels .
and remember , 20 of these speed boats were coming across the adriatic every single night .
so what were these guys doing with all the money they were making ?
well , this is where we come to globalization , because that was not just the deregulation of global trade .
it was the liberalization of international financial markets .
and boy , did that make it easy for the money launderers .
the last two decades have been the champagne era for dirty lucre .
in the 1990s , we saw financial centers around the world competing for their business , and there was simply no effective mechanism to prevent money laundering .
and a lot of licit banks were also happy to accept deposits from very dubious sources without questions being asked .
but at the heart of this , is the offshore banking network .
now these things are an essential part of the money laundering parade , and if you want to do something about illegal tax evasion and transnational organized crime , money laundering , you have to get rid of them .
on a positive note , we at last have someone in the white house who has consistently spoken out against these corrosive entities .
and if anyone is concerned about what i believe is the necessity for new legislation , regulation , effective regulation , i say , let 's take a look at bernie madoff , who is now going to be spending the rest of his life in jail .
bernie madoff stole 65 billion dollars .
that puts him up there on the olympus of gangsters with the colombian cartels and the major russian crime syndicates , but he did this for decades in the very heart of wall street , and no regulator picked up on it .
so how many other madoffs are there on wall street or in the city of london , fleecing ordinary folk and money laundering ?
well i can tell you , it 's quite a few of them .
let me go on to the 101 of international organized crime now .
and that is narcotics . our second marijuana farm photograph for the morning .
this one , however , is in central british columbia where i photographed it .
it 's one of the tens of thousands of mom-and-pop grow-ops in b.c.
which ensure that over five percent of the province 's gdp is accounted for by this trade .
now , i was taken by inspector brian cantera , of the royal canadian mounted police , to a cavernous warehouse east of vancouver to see some of the goods which are regularly confiscated by the rcmp from the smugglers who are sending it , of course , down south to the united states where there is an insatiable market for b.c. bud , as it 's called , in part because it 's marketed as organic , which of course goes down very well in california .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , even by the police 's admission , this makes not a dent in the profits , really , of the major exporters .
since the beginning of globalization , the global narcotics market has expanded enormously .
there has , however , been no concomitant increase in the resources available to police forces .
this , however , may all be about to change , because something very strange is going on .
the united nations recognized earlier this - it was last month actually - that canada has become a key area of distribution and production of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs .
interestingly , the market share of heroin and cocaine is going down , because the pills are getting ever better at reproducing their highs .
now that is a game changer , because it shifts production away from the developing world and into the western world .
when that happens , it is a trend which is set to overwhelm our policing capacity in the west .
the drugs policy which we 've had in place for 40 years is long overdue for a very serious rethink , in my opinion .
now , the recession .
well , organized crime has already adapted very well to the recession .
not surprising , the most opportunistic industry in the whole world .
and it has no rules to its regulatory system .
except , of course , it has two business risks : arrest by law enforcement , which is , frankly , the least of their worries , and competition from other groups , i.e. a bullet in the back of the head .
what they 've done is they 've shifted their operations .
people do n't smoke as much dope , or visit prostitutes quite so frequently during a recession .
and so instead , they have invaded financial and corporate crime in a big way , but above all , two sectors , and that is counterfeit goods and cybercrime .
and it 's been terribly successful .
i would like to introduce you to mr. pringle .
or perhaps i should say , more accurately , señor pringle .
i was introduced to this bit of kit by a brazilian cybercriminal .
we sat in a car on the avenue paulista in são paulo , together .
hooked it up to my laptop , and within about five minutes he had penetrated the computer security system of a major brazilian bank .
it 's really not that difficult .
and it 's actually much easier because the fascinating thing about cybercrime is that it 's not so much the technology .
the key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering .
or to use the technical term for it , there 's one born every minute .
you would not believe how easy it is to persuade people to do things with their computers which are objectively not in their interest .
and it was very soon when the cybercriminals learned that the quickest way to do this , of course , the quickest way to a person 's wallet is through the promise of sex and love .
i expect some of you remember the iloveyou virus , one of the very great worldwide viruses that came .
i was very fortunate when the iloveyou virus came out , because the first person i received it from was an ex-girlfriend of mine .
now , she harbored all sorts of sentiments and emotions towards me at the time , but love was not amongst them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so as soon as i saw this drop into my inbox , i dispatched it hastily to the recycle bin and spared myself a very nasty infection .
so , cybercrime , do watch out for it .
one thing that we do know that the internet is doing is the internet is assisting these guys .
these are mosquitos who carry the malarial parasite which infests our blood when the mosy has had a free meal at our expense .
now , artesunate is a very effective drug at destroying the parasite in the early days of infection .
but over the past year or so , researchers in cambodia have discovered that what 's happening is the malarial parasite is developing a resistance .
and they fear that the reason why it 's developing a resistance is because cambodians ca n't afford the drugs on the commercial market , and so they buy it from the internet .
and these pills contain only low doses of the active ingredient .
which is why the parasite is beginning to develop a resistance .
the reason i say this is because we have to know that organized crime impacts all sorts of areas of our lives .
you do n't have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime .
they affect our bank accounts .
they affect our communications , our pension funds .
they even affect the food that we eat and our governments .
this is no longer an issue of sicilians from palermo and new york .
there is no romance involved with gangsters in the 21st century .
this is a mighty industry , and it creates instability and violence wherever it goes .
it is a major economic force and we need to take it very , very seriously .
it 's been a privilege talking to you .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- people love their automobiles .
they allow us to go where we want to when we want to .
they 're a form of entertainment , they 're a form of art , a pride of ownership .
songs are written about cars .
prince wrote a great song : " little red corvette . "
he did n't write " little red laptop computer " or " little red dirt devil . "
he wrote about a car .
and one of my favorites has always been , " make love to your man in a chevy van , " because that was my vehicle when i was in college .
the fact is , when we do our market research around the world , we see that there 's nearly a universal aspiration on the part of people to own an automobile .
and 750 million people in the world today own a car .
and you say , boy , that 's a lot .
but you know what ?
that 's just 12 percent of the population .
we really have to ask the question : can the world sustain that number of automobiles ?
and if you look at projections over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years , it looks like the world car park could grow to on the order of 1.1 billion vehicles .
now , if you parked those end to end and wrapped them around the earth , that would stretch around the earth 125 times .
now , we 've made great progress with automobile technology over the last 100 years .
cars are dramatically cleaner , dramatically safer , more efficient and radically more affordable than they were 100 years ago .
but the fact remains : the fundamental dna of the automobile has stayed pretty much the same .
if we are going to reinvent the automobile today , rather than 100 years ago , knowing what we know about the issues associated with our product and about the technologies that exist today , what would we do ?
we wanted something that was really affordable .
the fuel cell looked great : one-tenth as many moving parts and a fuel-cell propulsion system as an internal combustion engine - and it emits just water .
and we wanted to take advantage of moore 's law with electronic controls and software , and we absolutely wanted our car to be connected .
so we embarked upon the reinvention around an electrochemical engine , the fuel cell , hydrogen as the energy carrier .
first was autonomy .
autonomy really set the vision for where we wanted to head .
we embodied all of the key components of a fuel cell propulsion system .
we then had autonomy drivable with hy-wire , and we showed hy-wire here at this conference last year .
hy-wire is the world 's first drivable fuel cell , and we have followed up that now with sequel .
and sequel truly is a real car .
so if we would run the video - but the real key question i 'm sure that 's on your mind : where 's the hydrogen going to come from ?
and secondly , when are these kinds of cars going to be available ?
so let me talk about hydrogen first .
the beauty of hydrogen is it can come from so many different sources : it can come from fossil fuels , it can come from any way that you can create electricity , including renewables .
and it can come from biofuels .
and that 's quite exciting .
the vision here is to have each local community play to its natural strength in creating the hydrogen .
a lot of hydrogen 's produced today in the world .
it 's produced to get sulfur out of gasoline - which i find is somewhat ironic .
it 's produced in the fertilizer industry ; it 's produced in the chemical manufacturing industry .
that hydrogen 's being made because there 's a good business reason for its use .
but it tells us that we know how to create it , we know how to create it cost effectively , we know how to handle it safely .
we did an analysis where you would have a station in each city with each of the 100 largest cities in the united states , and located the stations so you 'd be no more than two miles from a station at any time .
we put one every 25 miles on the freeway , and it turns out that translates into about 12,000 stations .
and at a million dollars each , that would be about 12 billion dollars .
now that 's a lot of money .
but if you built the alaskan pipeline today , that 's half of what the alaskan pipeline would cost .
but the real exciting vision that we see truly is home refueling , much like recharging your laptop or recharging your cellphone .
so we 're pretty excited about the future of hydrogen .
we think it 's a question of not whether , but a question of when .
what we 've targeted for ourselves - and we 're making great progress for this goal - is to have a propulsion system based on hydrogen and fuel cells , designed and validated , that can go head-to-head with the internal combustion engine - we 're talking about obsoleting the internal combustion engine - and do it in terms of its affordability , add skill volumes , its performance and its durability .
so that 's what we 're driving to for 2010 .
we have n't seen anything yet in our development work that says that is n't possible .
we actually think the future 's going to be event-driven .
so since we ca n't predict the future , we want to spend a lot of our time trying to create that future .
i 'm very , very intrigued by the fact that our cars and trucks sit idle 90 percent of the time : they 're parked , they 're parked all around us .
they 're usually parked within 100 feet of the people that own them .
now , if you take the power-generating capability of an automobile and you compare that to the electric grid in the united states , it turns out that four percent of the automobiles , the power in four percent of the automobiles , equals that of the electric grid of the us .
that 's a huge power-generating capability , a mobile power-generating capability .
and hydrogen and fuel cells give us that opportunity to actually use our cars and trucks when they 're parked to generate electricity for the grid .
and we talked about swarm networks earlier .
and talking about the ultimate swarm , about having all of the processors and all of the cars when they 're sitting idle being part of a global grid for computing capability .
we find that premise quite exciting .
the automobile becomes , then , an appliance , not in a commodity sense , but an appliance , mobile power , mobile platform for information and computing and communication , as well as a form of transportation .
and the key to all of this is to make it affordable , to make it exciting , to get it on a pathway where there 's a way to make money doing it .
and again , this is a pretty big march to take here .
and a lot of people say , how do you sleep at night when you 're rustling with a problem of that magnitude ?
and i tell them i sleep like a baby : i wake up crying every two hours .
actually the theme of this conference , i think , has hit on really one of the major keys to pull that off - and that 's relationships and working together .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
chris anderson : larry , larry , wait , wait , wait , wait , larry , wait , wait one sec .
just - i 've got so many questions i could ask you .
i just want to ask one .
you know , i could be wrong about this , but my sense is that in the public mind , today , that gm is not viewed as serious about some of these environmental ideas as some of your japanese competitors , maybe even as ford .
are you serious about it , and not just , you know , when the consumers want it , when the regulators force us to do it we will go there ?
are you guys going to really try and show leadership on this ?
larry burns : yeah , we 're absolutely serious .
we 're into this over a billion dollars already , so i would hope people would think we 're serious when we 're spending that kind of money .
and secondly , it 's a fundamental business proposition .
i 'll be honest with you : we 're into it because of business growth opportunities .
we ca n't grow our business unless we solve these problems .
the growth of the auto industry will be capped by sustainability issues if we do n't solve the problems .
and there 's a simple principle of strategy that says : do unto yourself before others do unto you .
if we can see this possible future , others can too .
and we want to be the first one to create it , chris .
welcome to thailand .
now , when i was a young man - 40 years ago , the country was very , very poor with lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty .
we decided to do something about it , but we did n't begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program .
but we began with a family-planning program , following a very successful maternal child health activity , sets of activities .
so basically , no one would accept family planning if their children did n't survive .
so the first step : get to the children , get to the mothers , and then follow up with family planning .
not just child mortality alone , you need also family planning .
now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it .
in my country , that was the case in 1974 .
seven children per family - tremendous growth at 3.3 percent .
there was just no future .
we needed to reduce the population growth rate .
so we said , " let 's do it . "
the women said , " we agree . we 'll use pills , but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills , " and we had very , very few doctors .
we did n't take no as an answer ; we took no as a question .
we went to the nurses and the midwives , who were also women , and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill .
that was wonderful , but it covered only 20 percent of the country .
what do we do for the other 80 percent - leave them alone and say , " well , they 're not medical personnel . "
no , we decided to do a bit more .
so we went to the ordinary people that you saw .
actually , below that yellow sign - i wish they had n't wiped that , because there was " coca-cola " there .
we were so much bigger than coca-cola in those days .
and no difference , the people they chose were the people we chose .
they were well-known in the community , they knew that customers were always right , and they were terrific , and they practiced their family planning themselves .
so they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country , in every village of the country .
so there we are . we went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution .
wherever there were people - and you can see boats with the women , selling things - here 's the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives - wherever you find people , you 'll find contraceptives in thailand .
and then we decided , why not get to religion because in the philippines , the catholic church was pretty strong , and thai people were buddhist .
we went to them and they said , " look , could you help us ? "
i 'm there - the one in blue , not the yellow - holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family .
and this picture was sent throughout the country .
so some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves .
and the women were saying , " no wonder we have no side-effects .
it 's been blessed . "
that was their perception .
and then we went to teachers .
you need everybody to be involved in trying to provide whatever it is that make humanity a better place .
so we went to the teachers .
over a quarter of a million were taught about family planning with a new alphabet - a , b for birth , c for condom , i for iud , v for vasectomy .
and then we had a snakes and ladders game , where you throw dice .
if you land on anything pro-family planning , you move ahead .
like , " mother takes the pill every night .
very good , mother . move ahead .
uncle buys a condom . very good , uncle . move ahead .
uncle gets drunk , does n't use condom . come back , start again . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- again , education , class entertainment .
and the kids were doing it in school too .
we had relay races with condoms , we had children 's condom-blowing championship .
and before long , the condom was know as the girl 's best friend .
in thailand , for poor people , diamonds do n't make it - so the condom is the girl 's best friend .
we introduced our first microcredit program in 1975 , and the women who organized it said , " we only want to lend to women who practice family planning .
if you 're pregnant , take care of your pregnancy .
if you 're not pregnant , you can take a loan out from us . "
and that was run by them .
and after 35/36 years , it 's still going on .
it 's a part of the village development bank ; it 's not a real bank , but it 's a fund - microcredit .
and we did n't need a big organization to run it - it was run by the villagers themselves .
and you probably hardly see a thai man there , it 's always women , women , women , women .
and then we thought we 'd help america , because america 's been helping everyone , whether they want help or not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is on the fourth of july .
we decided to provide vasectomy to all men , but in particular , american men to the front of the queue , right up to the ambassador 's residence during his -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and the hotel gave us the ballroom for it - very appropriate room .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and since it was near lunch time , they said , " all right , we 'll give you some lunch .
of course , it must be american cola .
you get two brands , coke and pepsi .
and then the food is either hamburger or hotdog . "
and i thought a hotdog will be more symbolic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and here is this , then , young man called willy bohm who worked for the usaid .
obviously , he 's had his vasectomy because his hotdog is half eaten , and he was very happy .
it made a lot of news in america , and it angered some people also .
i said , " do n't worry . come over and i 'll do the whole lot of you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what happened ?
in all this thing , from seven children to 1.5 children , population growth rate of 3.3 to 0.5 .
you could call it the coca-cola approach if you like - it was exactly the same thing .
i 'm not sure whether coca-cola followed us , or we followed coca-cola , but we 're good friends .
and so that 's the case of everyone joining in .
we did n't have a strong government . we did n't have lots of doctors .
but it 's everybody 's job who can change attitude and behavior .
then aids came along and hit thailand , and we had to stop doing a lot of good things to fight aids .
but unfortunately , the government was in denial , denial , denial .
so our work was n't affected .
so i thought , " well , if you ca n't go to the government , go to the military . "
so i went to the military and asked to borrow 300 radio stations .
they have more than the government , and they 've got more guns than the government .
so i asked them , could they help us in our fight against hiv .
and after i gave them statistics , they said , " yes . okay . you can use all the radio stations , television stations . "
and that 's when we went onto the airwaves .
and then we got a new prime minister soon after that .
and he said , " mechai , could you come and join ? "
he asked me in because he liked my wife a lot .
so i said , " okay . "
he became the chairman of the national aids committee and increased the budget fifty-fold .
every ministry , even judges , had to be involved in aids education - everyone - and we said the public , institutions , religious institutions , schools - everyone was involved .
and here , every media person had to be trained for hiv .
and we gave every station half a minute extra for advertising to earn more money .
so they were happy with that .
and then aids education in all schools , starting from university .
and these are high school kids teaching high school kids .
and the best teachers were the girls , not the boys , and they were terrific .
and these girls who go around teaching about safe sex and hiv were known as mother theresa .
and then we went down one more step .
these are primary school kids - third , fourth grade - going to every household in the village , every household in the whole of thailand , giving aids information and a condom to every household , given by these young kids .
and no parents objected , because we were trying to save lives , and this was a lifesaver .
and we said , " everyone needs to be involved . "
so you have the companies also realizing that sick staff do n't work , and dead customers do n't buy .
so they all trained .
and then we have this captain condom , with his harvard mba , going to schools and night spots .
and they loved him . you need a symbol of something .
in every country , every program , you need a symbol , and this is probably the best thing he 's ever done with his mba .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we gave condoms out everywhere on the streets - everywhere , everywhere .
in taxis , you get condoms .
and also , in traffic , the policemen give you condoms - our " cops and rubbers " programs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , can you imagine new york policemen giving out condoms ?
of course i can . and they 'd enjoy it immensely ; i see them standing around right now , everywhere .
imagine if they had condoms , giving out to all sorts of people .
and then , new change , we had hair bands , clothing and the condom for your mobile phone during the rainy season .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and these were the condoms that we introduced .
one says , " weapon of mass protection . "
we found - you know - somebody here was searching for the weapon of mass destruction , but we have found the weapon of mass protection : the condom .
and then it says here , with the american flag , " do n't leave home without it . "
but i have some to give out afterward .
but let me warn you , these are thai-sized , so be very careful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so you can see that condoms can do so many things .
look at this - i gave this to al gore and to bill senior also .
stop global warming ; use condoms .
and then this is the picture i mentioned to you - the weapon of mass protection .
and let the next olympics save some lives .
why just run around ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then finally , in thailand we 're buddhist , we do n't have a god , so instead , we say , " in rubber we trust . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so you can see that we added everything to our endeavor to make life better for the people .
we had condoms in all the refrigerators in the hotels and the schools , because alcohol impairs judgment .
and then what happened ?
after all this time , everybody joined in .
according to the u.n. , new cases of hiv declined by 90 percent , and according to the world bank , 7.7 million lives were saved .
otherwise there would n't be many thais walking around today .
so it just showed you , you could do something about it .
90 percent of the funding came from thailand .
there was political commitment , some financial commitment , and everybody joined in the fight .
so just do n't leave it to the specialists and doctors and nurses .
we all need to help .
and then we decided to help people out of poverty , now that we got aids somewhat out of the way - this time , not with government alone , but in cooperation with the business community .
because poor people are business people who lack business skills and access to credit .
those are the things to be provided by the business community .
we 're trying to turn them into barefoot entrepreneurs , little business people .
the only way out of poverty is through business enterprise .
so , that was done .
the money goes from the company into the village via tree-planting .
it 's not a free gift .
they plant the trees , and the money goes into their microcredit fund , which we call the village development bank .
everybody joins in , and they feel they own the bank , because they have brought the money in .
and before you can borrow the money , you need to be trained .
and we believe if you want to help the poor , those who are living in poverty , access to credit must be a human right .
access to credit must be a human right .
otherwise they 'll never get out of poverty .
and then before getting a loan , you must be trained .
here 's what we call a " barefoot mba , " teaching people how to do business so that , when they borrow money , they 'll succeed with the business .
these are some of the businesses : mushrooms , crabs , vegetables , trees , fruits , and this is very interesting - nike ice cream and nike biscuits ; this is a village sponsored by nike .
they said , " they should stop making shoes and clothes .
make these better , because we can afford them . "
and then we have silk , thai silk .
now we 're making scottish tartans , as you can see on the left , to sell to all people of scottish ancestors .
so anyone sitting in and watching tv , get in touch with me .
and then this is our answer to starbucks in thailand - " coffee and condoms . "
see , starbucks you awake , we keep you awake and alive .
that 's the difference .
can you imagine , at every starbucks that you can also get condoms ?
you can order your condoms with your with your cappuccino .
and then now , finally in education , we want to change the school as being underutilized into a place where it 's a lifelong learning center for everyone .
we call this our school-based integrated rural development .
and it 's a center , a focal point for economic and social development .
re-do the school , make it serve the community needs .
and here is a bamboo building - all of them are bamboo .
this is a geodesic dome made of bamboo .
and i 'm sure buckminster fuller would be very , very proud to see a bamboo geodesic dome .
and we use vegetables around the school ground , so they raise their own vegetables .
and then , finally , i firmly believe , if we want the mdgs to work - the millennium development goals - we need to add family planning to it .
of course , child mortality first and then family planning - everyone needs family planning service - it 's underutilized .
so we have now found the weapon of mass protection .
and we also ask the next olympics to be involved in saving lives .
and then , finally , that is our network .
and these are our thai tulips .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm going to show you are the astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of your body .
now molecules are really , really tiny .
and by tiny , i mean really .
they 're smaller than a wavelength of light , so we have no way to directly observe them .
but through science , we do have a fairly good idea of what 's going on down at the molecular scale .
so what we can do is actually tell you about the molecules , but we do n't really have a direct way of showing you the molecules .
one way around this is to draw pictures .
and this idea is actually nothing new .
scientists have always created pictures as part of their thinking and discovery process .
they draw pictures of what they 're observing with their eyes , through technology like telescopes and microscopes , and also what they 're thinking about in their minds .
i picked two well-known examples , because they 're very well-known for expressing science through art .
and i start with galileo who used the world 's first telescope to look at the moon .
and he transformed our understanding of the moon .
the perception in the 17th century was the moon was a perfect heavenly sphere .
but what galileo saw was a rocky , barren world , which he expressed through his watercolor painting .
another scientist with very big ideas , the superstar of biology , is charles darwin .
and with this famous entry in his notebook , he begins in the top left-hand corner with , " i think , " and then sketches out the first tree of life , which is his perception of how all the species , all living things on earth , are connected through evolutionary history - the origin of species through natural selection and divergence from an ancestral population .
even as a scientist , i used to go to lectures by molecular biologists and find them completely incomprehensible , with all the fancy technical language and jargon that they would use in describing their work , until i encountered the artworks of david goodsell , who is a molecular biologist at the scripps institute .
and his pictures , everything 's accurate and it 's all to scale .
and his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like .
so this is a transection through blood .
in the top left-hand corner , you 've got this yellow-green area .
the yellow-green area is the fluids of blood , which is mostly water , but it 's also antibodies , sugars , hormones , that kind of thing .
and the red region is a slice into a red blood cell .
and those red molecules are hemoglobin .
they are actually red ; that 's what gives blood its color .
and hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and then carry it to other parts of the body .
i was very much inspired by this image many years ago , and i wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world .
what would it look like ?
and that 's how i really began . so let 's begin .
this is dna in its classic double helix form .
and it 's from x-ray crystallography , so it 's an accurate model of dna .
if we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands , you see these things that look like teeth .
those are the letters of genetic code , the 25,000 genes you 've got written in your dna .
this is what they typically talk about - the genetic code - this is what they 're talking about .
but i want to talk about a different aspect of dna science , and that is the physical nature of dna .
it 's these two strands that run in opposite directions for reasons i ca n't go into right now .
but they physically run in opposite directions , which creates a number of complications for your living cells , as you 're about to see , most particularly when dna is being copied .
and so what i 'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual dna replication machine that 's occurring right now inside your body , at least 2002 biology .
so dna 's entering the production line from the left-hand side , and it hits this collection , these miniature biochemical machines , that are pulling apart the dna strand and making an exact copy .
so dna comes in and hits this blue , doughnut-shaped structure and it 's ripped apart into its two strands .
one strand can be copied directly , and you can see these things spooling off to the bottom there .
but things are n't so simple for the other strand because it must be copied backwards .
so it 's thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time , creating two new dna molecules .
now you have billions of this machine right now working away inside you , copying your dna with exquisite fidelity .
it 's an accurate representation , and it 's pretty much at the correct speed for what is occurring inside you .
i 've left out error correction and a bunch of other things .
this was work from a number of years ago .
thank you .
this is work from a number of years ago , but what i 'll show you next is updated science , it 's updated technology .
so again , we begin with dna .
and it 's jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding soup of molecules , which i 've stripped away so you can see something .
dna is about two nanometers across , which is really quite tiny .
but in each one of your cells , each strand of dna is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long .
so to keep the dna organized and regulate access to the genetic code , it 's wrapped around these purple proteins - or i 've labeled them purple here .
it 's packaged up and bundled up .
all this field of view is a single strand of dna .
this huge package of dna is called a chromosome .
and we 'll come back to chromosomes in a minute .
we 're pulling out , we 're zooming out , out through a nuclear pore , which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the dna called the nucleus .
all of this field of view is about a semester 's worth of biology , and i 've got seven minutes .
so we 're not going to be able to do that today ?
no , i 'm being told , " no . "
this is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope .
and it 's been filmed under time-lapse , which is why you can see it moving .
the nuclear envelope breaks down .
these sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes , and we 'll focus on them .
they go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots .
when the cell feels it 's ready to go , it rips apart the chromosome .
one set of dna goes to one side , the other side gets the other set of dna - identical copies of dna .
and then the cell splits down the middle .
and again , you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you .
now we 're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes and look at its structure and describe it .
so again , here we are at that equator moment .
the chromosomes line up .
and if we isolate just one chromosome , we 're going to pull it out and have a look at its structure .
so this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have , at least as far as we 've discovered so far inside of us .
so this is a single chromosome .
and you have two strands of dna in each chromosome .
one is bundled up into one sausage .
the other strand is bundled up into the other sausage .
these things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell .
they 're called mircrotubules . that name 's not important .
but what we 're going to focus on is this red region - i 've labeled it red here - and it 's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes .
it is obviously central to the movement of the chromosomes .
we have no idea really as to how it 's achieving that movement .
we 've been studying this thing they call the kinetochore for over a hundred years with intense study , and we 're still just beginning to discover what it 's all about .
it is made up of about 200 different types of proteins , thousands of proteins in total .
it is a signal broadcasting system .
it broadcasts through chemical signals telling the rest of the cell when it 's ready , when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes .
it is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules .
it 's involved with the growing of the microtubules , and it 's able to transiently couple onto them .
it 's also an attention sensing system .
it 's able to feel when the cell is ready , when the chromosome is correctly positioned .
it 's turning green here because it feels that everything is just right .
and you 'll see , there 's this one little last bit that 's still remaining red .
and it 's walked away down the microtubules .
that is the signal broadcasting system sending out the stop signal .
and it 's walked away . i mean , it 's that mechanical .
it 's molecular clockwork .
this is how you work at the molecular scale .
so with a little bit of molecular eye candy , we 've got kinesins , which are the orange ones .
they 're little molecular courier molecules walking one way .
and here are the dynein . they 're carrying that broadcasting system .
and they 've got their long legs so they can step around obstacles and so on .
so again , this is all derived accurately from the science .
the problem is we ca n't show it to you any other way .
exploring at the frontier of science , at the frontier of human understanding , is mind-blowing .
discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science .
but most medical researchers - discovering the stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals , which are to eradicate disease , to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes and to lift people out of poverty .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 're here to celebrate compassion .
but compassion , from my vantage point , has a problem .
as essential as it is across our traditions , as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives , the word " compassion " is hollowed out in our culture , and it is suspect in my field of journalism .
it 's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing , or it 's seen as potentially depressing .
karen armstrong has told what i think is an iconic story of giving a speech in holland and , after the fact , the word " compassion " was translated as " pity . "
now compassion , when it enters the news , too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time .
our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images .
and so what i 'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection .
and i hope you 'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter , that they shape the way we understand ourselves , the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others .
when this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s , we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that .
now the word " tolerance , " if you look at it in the dictionary , connotes " allowing , " " indulging " and " enduring . "
in the medical context that it comes from , it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment .
tolerance is not really a lived virtue ; it 's more of a cerebral ascent .
and it 's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough .
and the going is pretty rough right now .
i think that without perhaps being able to name it , we are collectively experiencing that we 've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue .
compassion is a worthy successor .
it is organic , across our religious , spiritual and ethical traditions , and yet it transcends them .
compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others , both in our private and in our civic spaces .
so what is it , three-dimensionally ?
what are its kindred and component parts ?
what 's in its universe of attendant virtues ?
to start simply , i want to say that compassion is kind .
now " kindness " might sound like a very mild word , and it 's prone to its own abundant cliche .
but kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues .
and it is a most edifying form of instant gratification .
compassion is also curious .
compassion cultivates and practices curiosity .
i love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in los angeles , aziza hasan and malka fenyvesi .
they are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young jews and muslims , and as they do that , they cultivate what they call " curiosity without assumptions . "
well that 's going to be a breeding ground for compassion .
compassion can be synonymous with empathy .
it can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation , but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence .
it 's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there , just showing up .
i think that compassion also is often linked to beauty - and by that i mean a willingness to see beauty in the other , not just what it is about them that might need helping .
i love it that my muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value .
and in that light , for the religious , compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery - encouraging us not just to see beauty , but perhaps also to look for the face of god in the moment of suffering , in the face of a stranger , in the face of the vibrant religious other .
i 'm not sure if i can show you what tolerance looks like , but i can show you what compassion looks like - because it is visible .
when we see it , we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable , what is possible .
it is so important when we 're communicating big ideas - but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion - to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood - the color and complexity of life .
and compassion does seek physicality .
i first started to learn this most vividly from matthew sanford .
and i do n't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him , but he 's paraplegic .
he 's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13 , in a car crash that killed his father and his sister .
matthew 's legs do n't work , and he 'll never walk again , and - and he does experience this as an " and " rather than a " but " - and he experiences himself to be healed and whole .
and as a teacher of yoga , he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability , health , illness and aging .
he says that he 's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we 're all on .
he 's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from iraq and afghanistan .
and matthew has made this remarkable observation that i 'm just going to offer you and let it sit .
i ca n't quite explain it , and he ca n't either .
but he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body , in all its frailty and its grace , without , at the same time , becoming more compassionate towards all of life .
compassion also looks like this .
this is jean vanier .
jean vanier helped found the l 'arche communities , which you can now find all over the world , communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities - mostly down syndrome .
the communities that jean vanier founded , like jean vanier himself , exude tenderness .
" tender " is another word i would love to spend some time resurrecting .
we spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive , and i spend a lot of time being those things too .
and compassion can also have those qualities .
but again and again , lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness .
jean vanier says that his work , like the work of other people - his great , beloved , late friend mother teresa - is never in the first instance about changing the world ; it 's in the first instance about changing ourselves .
he 's says that what they do with l 'arche is not a solution , but a sign .
compassion is rarely a solution , but it is always a sign of a deeper reality , of deeper human possibilities .
and compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories , never by statistics and strategies .
we need those things too , but we 're also bumping up against their limits .
and at the same time that we are doing that , i think we are rediscovering the power of story - that as human beings , we need stories to survive , to flourish , to change .
our traditions have always known this , and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us .
there is , of course , a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of judaism to repair the world - tikkun olam .
and i 'll never forget hearing that story from dr. rachel naomi remen , who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her , that in the beginning of the creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces .
it lodged as shards inside every aspect of the creation .
and that the highest human calling is to look for this light , to point at it when we see it , to gather it up , and in so doing , to repair the world .
now this might sound like a fanciful tale .
some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way .
rachel naomi remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time , because this story insists that each and every one of us , frail and flawed as we may be , inadequate as we may feel , has exactly what 's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch .
stories like this , signs like this , are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us .
rachel naomi remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors .
and this trend of what rachel naomi remen is doing , how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine - the work fred luskin is doing - i think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century - that science , in fact , is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism .
this is going to change science , i believe , and it will change religion .
but here 's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion .
we all know about the albert einstein who came up with e = mc2 .
we do n't hear so much about the einstein who invited the african american opera singer , marian anderson , to stay in his home when she came to sing in princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and would n't have her .
we do n't hear about the einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in europe or the scottsboro boys in the american south .
einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions .
but he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century .
he once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old .
and einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced , we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more , not less .
he liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages .
some of his favorites were moses , jesus , buddha , st. francis of assisi , gandhi - he adored his contemporary , gandhi .
and einstein said - and i think this is a quote , again , that has not been passed down in his legacy - that " these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living , more necessary to the dignity , security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge . "
now invoking einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us , but actually it is .
i want to show you the rest of this photograph , because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word " compassion " in our culture - we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life , which is messy .
so in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral - it 's not .
this is the full photograph , and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket , smoking a cigar .
and by the look of that paunch , he has n't been doing enough yoga .
we put these two photographs side-by-side on our website , and someone said , " when i look at the first photo , i ask myself , what was he thinking ?
and when i look at the second , i ask , what kind of person was he ? what kind of man is this ? "
well , he was complicated .
he was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others .
and it is much harder , often , to be compassionate towards those closest to us , which is another quality in the universe of compassion , on its dark side , that also deserves our serious attention and illumination .
gandhi , too , was a real flawed human being .
so was martin luther king , jr . so was dorothy day .
so was mother teresa .
so are we all .
and i want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion - following on what fred luskin says - that these flaws just make us human .
our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems .
but what a liberating thing to realize that our problems , in fact , are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion , towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others .
rachel naomi remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with crohn 's disease .
einstein became a humanitarian , not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter , but because he was a jew as germany grew fascist .
and karen armstrong , i think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that , with a zigzag , have led to the charter for compassion .
compassion ca n't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity .
so i want to propose a final definition of compassion - this is einstein with paul robeson by the way - and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology .
now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this , and we need them to mine it for us now .
but compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious .
so i will paraphrase einstein in closing and say that humanity , the future of humanity , needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'm going to start off with kind of the buzzkill a little bit .
forty-two million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2010 .
now , there was nothing particularly special about 2010 , because , on average , 31 and a half million people are displaced by natural disasters every single year .
now , usually when people hear statistics or stats like that , you start thinking about places like haiti or other kind of exotic or maybe even impoverished areas , but it happens right here in the united states every single year .
last year alone , 99 federally declared disasters were on file with fema , from joplin , missouri , and tuscaloosa , alabama , to the central texas wildfires that just happened recently .
now , how does the most powerful country in the world handle these displaced people ?
they cram them onto cots , put all your personal belongings in a plastic garbage bag , stick it underneath , and put you on the floor of an entire sports arena , or a gymnasium .
so obviously there 's a massive housing gap , and this really upset me , because academia tells you after a major disaster , there 's typically about an 18-month time frame to - we kinda recover , start the recovery process , but what most people do n't realize is that on average it takes 45 to 60 days or more for the infamous fema trailers to even begin to show up .
before that time , people are left to their own devices .
so i became obsessed with trying to figure out a way to actually fill this gap .
this actually became my creative obsession .
i put aside all my freelance work after hours and started just focusing particularly on this problem .
so i started sketching .
two days after katrina , i started sketching and sketching and trying to brainstorm up ideas or solutions for this , and as things started to congeal or ideas started to form , i started sketching digitally on the computer , but it was an obsession , so i could n't just stop there .
i started experimenting , making models , talking to experts in the field , taking their feedback , and refining , and i kept on refining and refining for nights and weekends for over five years .
now , my obsession ended up driving me to create full-size prototypes in my own backyard - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and actually spending my own personal savings on everything from tooling to patents and a variety of other costs , but in the end i ended up with this modular housing system that can react to any situation or disaster .
it can be put up in any environment , from an asphalt parking lot to pastures or fields , because it does n't require any special setup or specialty tools .
now , at the foundation and kind of the core of this whole system is the exo housing unit , which is just the individual shelter module .
and though it 's light , light enough that you can actually lift it by hand and move it around , and it actually sleeps four people .
and you can arrange these things as kind of more for encampments and more of a city grid type layout , or you can circle the wagons , essentially , and form these circular pods out of them , which give you this semi-private communal area for people to actually spill out into so they 're not actually trapped inside these units .
now this fundamentally changes the way we respond to disasters , because gone are the horrid conditions inside a sports arena or a gymnasium , where people are crammed on these cots inside .
now we have instant neighborhoods outside .
so the exo is designed to be simply , basically like a coffee cup . they can actually stack together so we get extremely efficient transportation and storage out of them .
in fact , 15 exos can fit on a single semi truck by itself .
this means the exo can actually be transported and set up faster than any other housing option available today .
but i 'm obsessive , so i could n't just stop there , so i actually started modifying the bunks where you could actually slide out the bunks and slide in desks or shelving , so the same unit can now be used for an office or storage location .
the doors can actually swap out , so you can actually put on a rigid panel with a window unit in it for climate control , or a connector module that would allow you to actually connect multiple units together , which gives you larger and kind of compartmentalized living spaces , so now this same kit of parts , this same unit can actually serve as a living room , bedroom or bathroom , or an office , a living space and secure storage .
sounds like a great idea , but how do you make it real ?
so the first idea i had , initially , was just to go the federal and state governments and go , " here , take it , for free . "
but i was quickly told that , " boy , our government does n't really work like that . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . okay . so maybe i would start a nonprofit to kind of help consult and get this idea going along with the government , but then i was told , " son , our government looks to private sector for things like this . "
okay . so maybe i would take this whole idea and go to private corporations that would have this mutually shared benefit to it , but i was quickly told by some corporations that my personal passion project was not a brand fit because they did n't want their logos stamped across the ghettos of haiti .
now , i was n't just obsessed . i was outraged . -lrb- laughter . -rrb- so i decided , kind of told myself , " oh yeah ? watch this . i 'll do it myself . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this quickly , my day job sent me to work out of our milan office for a few months , so i was like , what will i do ? so i actually scheduled sleep on my calendar , and spent the 8-hour time difference on conference calls with material suppliers , manufacturers and potential customers .
and we found through this whole process , we found this great little manufacturer in virginia , and if his body language is any indication , that 's the owner - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - of what it 's like for a manufacturer to work directly with a designer , you 've got to see what happens here . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but g.s. industries was fantastic .
they actually built three prototypes for us by hand .
so now we have prototypes that can show that four people can actually sleep securely and much more comfortably than a tent could ever provide .
and they actually shipped them here to texas for us .
now , a funny thing started happening .
other people started to believe in what we were doing , and actually offered us hangar space , donated hangar space to us . and then the georgetown airport authority was bent over backwards to help us with anything we needed .
so now we had a hangar space to work in , and prototypes to demo with .
so in one year , we 've negotiated manufacturing agreements , been awarded one patent , filed our second patent , talked to multiple people , demoed this to fema and its consultants to rave reviews , and then started talking to some other people who requested information , this little group called the united nations .
and on top of that , now we have a whole plethora of other individuals that have come up and started to talk to us from doing it for mining camps , mobile youth hostels , right down to the world cup and the olympics .
so , in closing , on this whole thing here is hopefully very soon we will not have to respond to these painful phone calls that we get after disasters where we do n't really have anything to sell or give you yet .
hopefully very soon we will be there , because we are destined , obsessed with making it real .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i had requested slides , kind of adamantly , up till the - pretty much , last few days , but was denied access to a slide projector .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i actually find them a lot more emotional - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and personal , and the neat thing about a slide projector is you can actually focus the work , unlike powerpoint and some other programs .
now , i agree that you have to - yeah , there are certain concessions and , you know , if you use a slide projector , you 're not able to have the bad type swing in from the back or the side , or up or down , but maybe that 's an o.k. trade-off , to trade that off for a focus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a thought . just a thought .
and there 's something nice about slides getting stuck .
and the thing you really hope for is occasionally they burn up , which we wo n't see tonight . so .
with that , let 's get the first slide up here .
this , as many of you have probably guessed , is a recently emptied beer can in portugal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this - i had just arrived in barcelona for the first time , and i thought - you know , fly all night , i looked up , and i thought , wow , how clean .
you come into this major airport , and they simply have a b.
i mean , how nice is that ?
everything 's gotten simpler in design , and here 's this mega airport , and god , i just - i took a picture .
i thought , god , that is the coolest thing i 've ever seen at an airport .
till a couple months later , i went back to the same airport - same plane , i think - and looked up , and it said c.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was only then that i realized it was simply a gate that i was coming into .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm a big believer in the emotion of design , and the message that 's sent before somebody begins to read , before they get the rest of the information ; what is the emotional response they get to the product , to the story , to the painting - whatever it is .
that area of design interests me the most , and i think this for me is a real clear , very simplified version of what i 'm talking about .
these are a couple of garage doors painted identical , situated next to each other .
so , here 's the first door . you know , you get the message .
you know , it 's pretty clear .
take a look at the second door and see if there 's any different message .
o.k. , which one would you park in front of ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- same color , same message , same words .
the only thing that 's different is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece - and , again , which is the psycho-killer here ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yet it does n't say that ; it does n't need to say that .
i would probably park in front of the other one .
i 'm sure a lot of you are aware that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last five years or so .
it 's gotten so simple that it 's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive .
but i was in milan and saw this street sign , and was very happy to see that apparently this idea of minimalism has even been translated by the graffiti artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this graffiti artist has come along , made this sign a little bit better , and then moved on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he did n't overpower it like they have a tendency to do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is for a book by " metropolis . "
i took some photos , and this is a billboard in florida , and either they had n't paid their rent , or they did n't want to pay their rent again on the sign , and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down , so they just teared out sections of it .
and i would argue that it 's possibly more effective than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention , getting you to look over that way .
and hopefully you do n't stop and buy those awful pecan things - stuckey 's .
this is from my second book .
the first book is called , " the end of print , " and it was done along with a film , working with william burroughs .
and " the end of print " is now in its fifth printing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i first contacted william burroughs about being part of it , he said no ; he said he did n't believe it was the end of print .
and i said , well , that 's fine ; i just would love to have your input on this film and this book , and he finally agreed to it .
and at the end of the film , he says in this great voice that i ca n't mimic but i 'll kind of try , but not really , he says , " i remember attending an exhibition called , ' photography : the end of painting . " ' and then he says , " and , of course , it was n't at all . "
so , apparently when photography was perfected , there were people going around saying , that 's it : you 've just ruined painting .
people are just going to take pictures now .
and of course , that was n't the case .
so , this is from " 2nd sight , " a book i did on intuition .
i think it 's not the only ingredient in design , but possibly the most important .
it 's something everybody has .
it 's not a matter of teaching it ; in fact , most of the schools tend to discount intuition as an ingredient of your working process because they ca n't quantify it : it 's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design , but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card or a newsletter .
so it tends to get discounted .
this is a quote from albert einstein , who says , " the intellect has little to do on the road to discovery .
there comes a leap in consciousness - call it intuition or what you will - and the solution just comes to you , and you do n't know from where or why . "
so , it 's kind of like when somebody says , who did that song ?
and the more you try to think about it , the further the answer gets from you , and the minute you stop thinking about it , your intuition gives you that answer , in a sense .
i like this for a couple of reasons .
if you 've had any design courses , they would teach you you ca n't read this .
i think you eventually can and , more importantly , i think it 's true .
" do n't mistake legibility for communication . "
just because something 's legible does n't means it communicates .
more importantly , it does n't mean it communicates the right thing .
so , what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material ?
and i think that 's sometimes an overlooked area .
this is working with marshall mcluhan .
i stayed and worked with his wife and son , eric , and we came up with close to 600 quotes from marshall that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times , predicting so much of what has happened in the advertising , television , media world .
and so this book is called " probes . " it 's another word for quotes .
and it 's - a lot of them are never - have never been published before , and basically , i 've interpreted the different quotes .
so , this was the contents page originally .
when i got done it was 540 pages , and then the publisher , gingko press , ended up cutting it down considerably : it 's just under 400 pages now .
but i decided i liked this contents page - i liked the way it looks - so i kept it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it now has no relevance to the book whatsoever , but it 's a nice spread , i think , in there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , a couple spreads from the book : here mcluhan says , " the new media are not bridges between man and nature ; they are nature . "
" the invention of printing did away with anonymity , fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property , " which had never been done before printing .
" when new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies , anxieties of all kinds result . "
" while people are engaged in creating a totally different world , they always form vivid images of the preceding world . "
i hate this stuff . it 's hard to read .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " people in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe , and no possible occupation except information gathering . "
that was it . that 's all he saw as the options . and not too far off .
so , this is a project for nine inch nails .
and i only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden , and it was done right after 9/11 .
and i had recently discovered a bomb shelter in the backyard of a house i had bought in la that the real estate person had n't pointed out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there was some bomb shelter built , apparently in the ' 60s cuban missile crisis .
and i asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by , and he goes , " it 's something to do with the sewage system . "
i was , o.k. ; that 's fine .
i finally went down there , and it was this old rusted circular thing , and two beds , and very kind of creepy and weird .
and also , surprisingly , it was done in kind of a cheap metal , and it had completely rusted through , and water everywhere , and spiders .
and i thought , you know , what were they thinking ?
you 'd think maybe cement , possibly , or something .
but anyway , i used this for a cover for the nine inch nails dvd , and i 've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape , and it 's ready . i think i 'm ready . so .
this is an experiment , really , for a client , quicksilver , where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the web .
so , this is a six-shot sequence .
i 've taken one shot ; i cropped it a few different ways .
and then the tiny line of copy says , if you want to see this entire sequence - how this whole ride was - go to the website .
and my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site to get this entire picture .
got no way of tracking it , so i could be totally wrong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't have the site . it 's just the piece itself .
this is a group in new york called the coalition for a smoke-free environment - asked me to do these posters .
they were wild-posted around new york city .
you ca n't really - well , you ca n't see it at all - but the second line is really the more kind of payoff , in a sense .
it says , " if the cigarette companies can lie , then so can we . " but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - but i did .
these were literally wild-posted all over new york one night , and there were definitely some heads turning , you know , people smoking and , " huh ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it was purposely done to look fairly serious .
it was n't some , you know , weird grunge type or something ; it looked like they might be real . anyway .
poster for atlantic center for the arts , a school in florida .
this amazes me . this is a product i just found out .
i was in the caribbean at christmas , and i 'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell - not that they will sell - that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin .
this was either an old product with new packaging , or a brand-new package , and i just thought , yikes ! how 's that still happening ?
i do a lot of workshops all over the world , really , and this particular assignment was to come up with new symbols for the restroom doors .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i felt this was one of the more successful solutions .
the students actually cut them up and put them up around bars and restaurants that night , and i just always have this vision of this elderly couple going to use the restroom ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did some work for microsoft a few years back .
it was a worldwide branding campaign .
and it was interesting to me - my background is in sociology ; i had no design training , and sometimes people say , well , that explains it - but it was a very interesting experiment because there 's no product that i had to sell ; it was simply the image of microsoft they were trying to improve .
they thought some people did n't like them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i found out that 's very true , working on this campaign worldwide .
and our goal was to try to humanize them a bit , and what i did was add type and people to the ad , which the previous campaign had not had , and nobody remembered them , and nobody referenced them .
and we were trying to say that , hey , some of these guys that work there are actually ok ; some of them actually have friends and family , and they 're not all awful people .
and the umbrella campaign was " thank god it 's monday . "
so , we tried to take this - what was perceived as a negative : their over-competitiveness , their , you know , long working hours - and turn it into a positive and not run from it .
you know : thank god it 's monday - i get to go back to that little cubicle , those fake gray walls , and hear everybody else 's conversations f or 10 hours and then go home .
but anyway , this is one of the ads i was most pleased with , because they were all elaborately art-directed , and this one i thought actually felt like the girl was looking at the computer .
it says , " wonder around . " and then it 's a piece of the software .
and this is how the ad ran around the world .
in germany , they made one small change without checking with me - nor did they have to , because it was done through agencies - but see if you can tell the difference .
this is how the ad ran throughout the world ; germany made one slight change in the ad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there 's kind of two issues here .
if you 're going to put a kid in the ad , pick one that looks alive .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just have a feeling this kid 's been there for a week , you know .
he 's just really hoping that boots up and , you know ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then as the agency explained to me , they said , " look , we do n't have little green people in our country ; why would we put little green people in our ads , for instance ? "
so , i understand their logic . i totally disagree with it ; i think it 's a very small-minded approach , the world is certainly much more global , and i certainly think the people of germany could have handled a little black girl sitting in front of a computer , though we 'll never know .
this is some work from ray gun .
and the point of this magazine was to read the articles , listen to the music , and try to interpret it .
there 's no grid , there 's no system , there 's nothing set up in advance .
this is an opener for brian eno , and it 's just kind of my personal interpretation of the music .
this is rockstars talking about teachers they had lusted after in school .
there 's a lot of great writing in " ray gun . "
and i was fortunate to find a photograph of a teacher sitting on some books .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- article on bryan ferry - just really boring article - so i set the whole article in dingbat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you could - you could highlight it ; you could make it helvetica or something : it is the actual article .
i suppose you could eventually decode it , but it 's really not very well written ; it really would n't be worthwhile .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- having done a lot of magazines , i 'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories , and i was very curious to see how time and newsweek would handle 9/11 .
and i was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we 'd already seen a million times , which was basically the moment of impact .
and people magazine , i thought , got probably the best shot .
it 's kind of horsey type , but the texture - the second plane not quite hitting : there was something more enticing , if that 's the right - it 's not the right word - but in this cover than time or newsweek .
but when i got into this magazine , there 's something kind of disturbing , and this continued .
on the left we see people dying ; we see people running for their lives .
and on the right we learn that there 's a new way to support your breast .
the coveted right-hand page was not given up to the whole issue .
look at the image of this lady - who knows what she 's going through ? - and the copy says : " he knows just how to give me goosebumps . "
yeah , he jumps out of buildings . it 's - unfortunately , this one works , kind of , as a spread .
and this continued through the entire magazine .
it did not let up .
this says : " one clean fits all . " .
there were a lot of orphans made this day , and here 's a dead body being brought out .
it just seems to me possibly even a blank page would have been more appropriate .
and this one i think is possibly the worst : two ladies , both facing the same way , both wearing jeans .
one - who knows what she 's going through ; the other one is worried about model behavior and milk .
and - i gave a talk in new york a couple months after this , and afterwards somebody came up to me and they said that - they actually emailed me - and they said that they appreciated the talk , and when they got back to their car , they found a note on their car that made them think maybe new york was getting back to being new york again after this event - it had been a few months .
this was what they found on their car .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's very few times you 'd be happy to find this on your car , but it did seem to indicate that we were coming back .
this is my desktop .
somebody told me today there was this thing called folders , but i do n't know what they are .
these are my notes for the talk - there might be a correlation here .
we are wrapping up .
this i saw on the plane , flying in , for hot new products .
i 'm not sure this is an improvement , or a good idea , because , like , if you do n't spend quite enough time in front of your computer , you can now get a plate in the keyboard , so there 's no more faking it - that you do n't really sit at your desk all day and eat and work anyway .
now there 's a plate , and it would be really , really convenient to get a piece of pizza , then type a little bit , then ...
i 'm just not sure this is improvement .
if you ever doubt the power of graphic design , this is a very generic sign that literally says , " vote for hitler . " it says nothing else .
and this to me is an extreme case of the power of emotion , of graphic design , even though , in fact , was a very generic poster at the time .
what 's next ? what 's next is going to be people .
as we get more technically driven , the importance of people becomes more than it 's ever been before .
you have to utilize who you are in your work .
nobody else can do that : nobody else can pull from your background , from your parents , your upbringing , your whole life experience .
if you allow that to happen , it 's really the only way you can do some unique work , and you 're going to enjoy the work a lot more as well .
this is - i like found art ; hand lettering 's coming back in a big way , and i thought this was a great example of both .
this lady 's advertising for her lost pit bull .
it 's friendly - she 's underlined friendly - that 's probably why she calls it hercules or hercles . she ca n't spell .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but more importantly , she 's willing to give you 20 bucks to go find this lost pit bull .
and i 'm thinking , yeah , right , i 'll go look for a lost pit bill for 20 bucks .
i have visions of people going down alleyways yelling out for hercles , and you get charged by this thing and you go , oh , please be hercles ; please be the friendly one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm sure she never found the dog , because i took the sign .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i was asked to give a talk at a conference in sacramento a few years back .
and the theme was courage , and they asked me to talk about how courageous it is to be a graphic designer .
and i remembered seeing this photograph of my father , who was a test pilot , and he told me that when you signed up to become a test pilot , they told you that there was a 40 to 50 percent chance of death on the job .
that 's pretty high for most occupations .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , you know , the government would make a plane ; they 'd say , go see if that one flies , would you ?
some of them did ; some of them did n't .
and i started thinking about some of these decisions i have to make between , like , serif versus san-serif .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and for the most part , they 're not real life-threatening .
why not experiment ? why not have some fun ?
why not put some of yourself into the work ?
and when i was teaching , i used to always ask the students , what 's the definition of a good job ?
and as teachers , after you get all the answers , you like to give them the correct answer .
and the best one i 've heard - i 'm sure some of you have heard this - the definition of a good job is : if you could afford to - if money was n't an issue - would you be doing that same work ?
and if you would , you 've got a great job .
and if you would n't , what the heck are you doing ?
you 're going to be dead a really long time .
thank you very much .
i hope you 'll understand my english .
in the mornings it is terrible , and the afternoon is worst .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- during many years , i made some speeches starting with this saying : " city is not a problem , it 's a solution . "
and more and more , i 'm convinced that it 's not only a solution for a country , but it 's a solution for the problem of climate change .
but we have a very pessimistic approach about the cities .
i 'm working in cities for almost 40 years , and where every mayor is trying to tell me his city is so big , or the other mayors say , " we do n't have financial resources , " i would like to say from the experience i had : every city in the world can be improved in less than three years .
there 's no matter of scale . it 's not a question of scale , it 's not a question of financial resources .
every problem in a city has to have its own equation of co-responsibility and also a design .
so to start , i want to introduce some characters from a book i made for teenagers .
the best example of quality of life is the turtle because the turtle is an example of living and working together .
and when you realize that the casque of the turtle looks like an urban tessitura , and can we imagine , if we cut the casque of the turtle , how sad she 's going to be ?
and that 's what we 're doing in our cities : living here , working here , having leisure here .
and most of the people are leaving the city and living outside of the city .
so , the other character is otto , the automobile .
he is invited for a party - he never wants to leave .
the chairs are on the tables and still drinking , and he drinks a lot . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he coughs a lot . very egotistical : he carries only one or two people and he asks always for more infrastructure .
freeways .
he 's a very demanding person .
and on the other hand , accordion , the friendly bus , he carries 300 people - 275 in sweden ; 300 brazilians . -lrb- laughter -rrb- speaking about the design : every city has its own design .
curitiba , my city : three million in the metropolitan area , 1,800,000 people in the city itself .
curitiba , rio : it 's like two birds kissing themselves .
oaxaca , san francisco - it 's very easy : market street , van ness and the waterfront .
and every city has its own design .
but to make it happen , sometimes you have to propose a scenario and to propose a design - an idea that everyone , or the large majority , and that 's the structure of the city of curitiba .
and it 's an example of living and working together .
and this is where we have more density ; it 's where we have more public transport .
so , this system started in ' 74 . we started with 25,000 passengers a day , now it 's 2,200,000 passengers a day .
and it took 25 years until another city ...
which is bogota , and they did a very good job .
and now there 's 83 cities all over the world that they are doing what they call the brt of curitiba .
and one thing : it 's important not for only your own city ; every city , besides its normal problems , they have a very important role in being with the whole humanity .
that means mostly two main issues - mobility and sustainability - are becoming very important for the cities .
and this is an articulated bus , double-articulated .
and we are very close to my house .
you can come when you are in curitiba and have a coffee there .
and that 's the evolution of the system .
what in the design that made the difference is the boarding tubes : the boarding tube gives to the bus the same performance as a subway .
that 's why , i 'm trying to say , it 's like metro-nizing the bus .
this is the design of the bus , and you can pay before entering the bus you 're boarding .
and for handicapped , they can use this as a normal system .
what i 'm trying to say is the major contribution on carbon emissions are from the cars - more than 50 percent - so when we depend only on cars , it 's ...
- that 's why when we 're talking about sustainability , it 's not enough , green buildings .
it 's not enough , new sources of energy .
it 's the concept of the city , the design of the city , that 's also important , too . and also , how to teach the children .
i 'll speak on this later on .
our idea of mobility is trying to make the connections between all the systems .
we started in ' 83 , proposing for the city of rio how to connect the subway with the bus .
the subway was against , of course .
and 23 years after , they called us to develop - we 're developing this idea .
and you can understand how different it 's going to be , the image of rio with the system - one-minute frequency .
and it 's not shanghai , it 's not being colored during the day , only at night it will look this way .
and before you say it 's a norman foster design , we designed this in ' 83 .
and this is the model , how it 's going to work . so , it 's the same system ; the vehicle is different . and that 's the model .
what i 'm trying to say is , i 'm not trying to prove which system of transport is better .
i 'm trying to say we have to combine all the systems , and with one condition : never - if you have a subway , if you have surface systems , if you have any kind of system - never compete in the same space .
and coming back to the car , i always used to say that the car is like your mother-in-law : you have to have good relationship with her , but she can not command your life .
so , when the only woman in your life is your mother-in-law , you have a problem . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , all the ideas about how to transform through design - old quarries and open universities and botanic garden - all of it 's related to how we teach the children .
and the children , we teach during six months how to separate their garbage .
and after , the children teach their parents .
and now we have 70 percent - since 20 years , it 's the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world .
seven zero .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so teach the children .
i would like to say , if we want to have a sustainable world we have to work with everything what 's said , but do n't forget the cities and the children .
i 'm working in a museum and also a multi-use city , because you can not have empty places during 18 hours a day .
you should have always a structure of living and working together .
try to understand the sectors in the city that could play different roles during the 24 hours .
another issue is , a city 's like our family portrait .
we do n't rip our family portrait , even if we do n't like the nose of our uncle , because this portrait is you .
and these are the references that we have in any city .
this is the main pedestrian mall ; we did it in 72 hours . yes , you have to be fast .
and these are the references from our ethnic contribution .
this is the italian portal , the ukrainian park , the polish park , the japanese square , the german park .
all of a sudden , the soviet union , they split .
and since we have people from uzbekistan , kazakhstan , tajikistan , -lsb- unclear -rsb- , we have to stop the program .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do n't forget : creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget .
if you cut two zeros , it 's much better .
and this is the wire opera theater . we did it in two months .
parks - old quarries that they were transformed into parks .
quarries once made the nature , and sometimes we took this and we transformed .
and every part can be transformed ; every frog can be transformed in a prince .
so , in a city , you have to work fast .
planning takes time . and i 'm proposing urban acupuncture .
that means me , with some focal ideas to help the normal process of planning .
and this is an acupuncture note - or i.m. pei 's . some small ones can make the city better .
the smallest park in new york , the most beautiful : 32 meters .
so , i want just to end saying that you can always propose new materials - new sustainable materials - but keep in mind that we have to work fast to the end , because we do n't have the whole time to plan .
and i think creativity , innovation is starting .
and we can not have all the answers .
so when you start - and we can not be so prepotent on having all the answers - it 's important starting and having the contribution from people , and they could teach you if you 're not in the right track .
at the end , i would like if you can help me to sing the sustainable song .
ok ?
please , allow me just two minutes .
you 're going to make the music and the rhythm .
♫ toonchi-too ! toonchi-too ! toonchi-too ! ♫ ♫ toonchi-too ! toonchi-too ! toonchi-too ! ♫ ♫ it 's possible ! it 's possible ! you can do it ! you can do it ! ♫ ♫ use less your car ! make this decision ! ♫ ♫ avoid carbon emission ! it 's possible ! it 's possible ! ♫ ♫ you can do it ! you can do it ! ♫ ♫ live closer to work ! ♫ ♫ work closer to home ! save energy in your home ! ♫ ♫ it 's possible ! it 's possible ! you can do it ! ♫ ♫ you can do it ! separate your garbage ! ♫ ♫ organic , schmorganic ! save more ! waste less ! it 's possible ! ♫ ♫ you can do it ! please , do it now ! ♫
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been fascinated with crop diversity for about 35 years from now , ever since i stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named jack harlan .
and he described the diversity within crops - all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such - as a genetic resource .
and he said , " this genetic resource , " - and i 'll never forget the words - " stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we can not imagine . "
i figured he was either really on to something , or he was one of these academic nutcases .
so , i looked a little further , and what i figured out was that he was n't a nutcase .
he was the most respected scientist in the field .
what he understood was that biological diversity - crop diversity - is the biological foundation of agriculture .
it 's the raw material , the stuff , of evolution in our agricultural crops .
not a trivial matter .
and he also understood that that foundation was crumbling , literally crumbling .
that indeed , a mass extinction was underway in our fields , in our agricultural system .
and that this mass extinction was taking place with very few people noticing and even fewer caring .
now , i know that many of you do n't stop to think about diversity in agricultural systems and , let 's face it , that 's logical .
you do n't see it in the newspaper every day .
and when you go into the supermarket , you certainly do n't see a lot of choices there .
you see apples that are red , yellow , and green and that 's about it .
so , let me show you a picture of one form of diversity .
here 's some beans , and there are about 35 or 40 different varieties of beans on this picture .
now , imagine each one of these varieties as being distinct from another about the same way as a poodle from a great dane .
if i wanted to show you a picture of all the dog breeds in the world , and i put 30 or 40 of them on a slide , it would take about 10 slides because there about 400 breeds of dogs in the world .
but there are 35 to 40,000 different varieties of beans .
so if i were to going to show you all the beans in the world , and i had a slide like this , and i switched it every second , it would take up my entire ted talk , and i would n't have to say anything .
but the interesting thing is that this diversity - and the tragic thing is - that this diversity is being lost .
we have about 200,000 different varieties of wheat , and we have about 2 to 400,000 different varieties of rice , but it 's being lost .
and i want to give you an example of that .
it 's a bit of a personal example , in fact .
in the united states , in the 1800s - that 's where we have the best data - farmers and gardeners were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples .
imagine that . 7,100 apples with names .
today , 6,800 of those are extinct , no longer to be seen again .
i used to have a list of these extinct apples , and when i would go out and give a presentation , i would pass the list out in the audience .
i would n't tell them what it was , but it was in alphabetical order , and i would tell them to look for their names , their family names , their mother 's maiden name .
and at the end of the speech , i would ask , " how many people have found a name ? "
and i never had fewer than two-thirds of an audience hold up their hand .
and i said , " you know what ? these apples come from your ancestors , and your ancestors gave them the greatest honor they could give them .
they gave them their name .
the bad news is they 're extinct .
the good news is a third of you did n't hold up your hand . your apple 's still out there .
find it . make sure it does n't join the list . "
so , i want to tell you that the piece of the good news is that the fowler apple is still out there .
and there 's an old book back here , and i want to read a piece from it .
this book was published in 1904 .
it 's called " the apples of new york " and this is the second volume .
see , we used to have a lot of apples .
and the fowler apple is described in here - i hope this does n't surprise you - as , " a beautiful fruit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know if we named the apple or if the apple named us , but ...
but , to be honest , the description goes on and it says that it " does n't rank high in quality , however . "
and then he has to go even further .
it sounds like it was written by an old school teacher of mine .
" as grown in new york , the fruit usually fails to develop properly in size and quality and is , on the whole , unsatisfactory . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i guess there 's a lesson to be learned here , and the lesson is : so why save it ?
i get this question all the time . why do n't we just save the best one ?
and there are a couple of answers to that question .
one thing is that there is no such thing as a best one .
today 's best variety is tomorrow 's lunch for insects or pests or disease .
the other thing is that maybe that fowler apple or maybe a variety of wheat that 's not economical right now has disease or pest resistance or some quality that we 're going to need for climate change that the others do n't .
so it 's not necessary , thank god , that the fowler apple is the best apple in the world .
it 's just necessary or interesting that it might have one good , unique trait .
and for that reason , we ought to be saving it .
why ? as a raw material , as a trait we can use in the future .
think of diversity as giving us options .
and options , of course , are exactly what we need in an era of climate change .
i want to show you two slides , but first , i want to tell you that we 've been working at the global crop diversity trust with a number of scientists - particularly at stanford and university of washington - to ask the question : what 's going to happen to agriculture in an era of climate change and what kind of traits and characteristics do we need in our agricultural crops to be able to adapt to this ?
in short , the answer is that in the future , in many countries , the coldest growing seasons are going to be hotter than anything those crops have seen in the past .
the coldest growing seasons of the future , hotter than the hottest of the past .
is agriculture adapted to that ?
i do n't know . can fish play the piano ?
if agriculture has n't experienced that , how could it be adapted ?
now , the highest concentration of poor and hungry people in the world , and the place where climate change , ironically , is going to be the worst is in south asia and sub-saharan africa .
so i 've picked two examples here , and i want to show you .
in the histogram before you now , the blue bars represent the historical range of temperatures , going back about far as we have temperature data .
and you can see that there 's some difference between one growing season and another .
some are colder , some are hotter and it 's a bell shaped curve .
the tallest bar is the average temperature for the most number of growing seasons .
in the future , later this century , it 's going to look like the red , totally out of bounds .
the agricultural system and , more importantly , the crops in the field in india have never experienced this before .
here 's south africa . the same story .
but the most interesting thing about south africa is we do n't have to wait for 2070 for there to be trouble .
by 2030 , if the maize , or corn , varieties , which is the dominant crop - 50 percent of the nutrition in southern africa are still in the field - in 2030 , we 'll have a 30 percent decrease in production of maize because of the climate change already in 2030 .
30 percent decrease of production in the context of increasing population , that 's a food crisis . it 's global in nature .
we will watch children starve to death on tv .
now , you may say that 20 years is a long way off .
it 's two breeding cycles for maize .
we have two rolls of the dice to get this right .
we have to get climate-ready crops in the field , and we have to do that rather quickly .
now , the good news is that we have conserved .
we have collected and conserved a great deal of biological diversity , agricultural diversity , mostly in the form of seed , and we put it in seed banks , which is a fancy way of saying a freezer .
if you want to conserve seed for a long term and you want to make it available to plant breeders and researchers , you dry it and then you freeze it .
unfortunately , these seed banks are located around the world in buildings and they 're vulnerable .
disasters have happened . in recent years we lost the gene bank , the seed bank in iraq and afghanistan . you can guess why .
in rwanda , in the solomon islands .
and then there are just daily disasters that take place in these buildings , financial problems and mismanagement and equipment failures , and all kinds of things , and every time something like this happens , it means extinction . we lose diversity .
and i 'm not talking about losing diversity in the same way that you lose your car keys .
i 'm talking about losing it in the same way that we lost the dinosaurs : actually losing it , never to be seen again .
so , a number of us got together and decided that , you know , enough is enough and we need to do something about that and we need to have a facility that can really offer protection for our biological diversity of - maybe not the most charismatic diversity .
you do n't look in the eyes of a carrot seed quite in the way you do a panda bear , but it 's very important diversity .
so we needed a really safe place , and we went quite far north to find it .
to svalbard , in fact .
this is above mainland norway . you can see greenland there .
that 's at 78 degrees north .
it 's as far as you can fly on a regularly scheduled airplane .
it 's a remarkably beautiful landscape . i ca n't even begin to describe it to you .
it 's otherworldly , beautiful .
we worked with the norwegian government and with the norgen , the norwegian genetic resources program , to design this facility .
what you see is an artist 's conception of this facility , which is built in a mountain in svalbard .
the idea of svalbard was that it 's cold , so we get natural freezing temperatures .
but it 's remote . it 's remote and accessible so it 's safe and we do n't depend on mechanical refrigeration .
this is more than just an artist 's dream , it 's now a reality .
and this next picture shows it in context , in svalbard .
and here 's the front door of this facility .
when you open up the front door , this is what you 're looking at . it 's pretty simple . it 's a hole in the ground .
it 's a tunnel , and you go into the tunnel , chiseled in solid rock , about 130 meters .
there are now a couple of security doors , so you wo n't see it quite like this .
again , when you get to the back , you get into an area that 's really my favorite place .
i think of it as sort of a cathedral .
and i know that this tags me as a bit of a nerd , but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some of the happiest days of my life have been spent ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in this place there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you were to walk into one of these rooms , you would see this .
it 's not very exciting , but if you know what 's there , it 's pretty emotional .
we have now about 425,000 samples of unique crop varieties .
there 's 70,000 samples of different varieties of rice in this facility right now .
about a year from now , we 'll have over half a million samples .
we 're going up to over a million , and someday we 'll basically have samples - about 500 seeds - of every variety of agricultural crop that can be stored in a frozen state in this facility .
this is a backup system for world agriculture .
it 's a backup system for all the seed banks . storage is free .
it operates like a safety deposit box .
norway owns the mountain and the facility , but the depositors own the seed .
and if anything happens , then they can come back and get it .
this particular picture that you see shows the national collection of the united states , of canada , and an international institution from syria .
i think it 's interesting in that this facility , i think , is almost the only thing i can think of these days where countries , literally , every country in the world - because we have seeds from every country in the world - all the countries of the world have gotten together to do something that 's both long term , sustainable and positive .
i ca n't think of anything else that 's happened in my lifetime that way .
i ca n't look you in the eyes and tell you that i have a solution for climate change , for the water crisis .
agriculture takes 70 percent of fresh water supplies on earth .
i ca n't look you in the eyes and tell you that there is such a solution for those things , or the energy crisis , or world hunger , or peace in conflict .
i ca n't look you in the eyes and tell you that i have a simple solution for that , but i can look you in the eyes and tell you that we ca n't solve any of those problems if we do n't have crop diversity .
because i challenge you to think of an effective , efficient , sustainable solution to climate change if we do n't have crop diversity .
because , quite literally , if agriculture does n't adapt to climate change , neither will we .
and if crops do n't adapt to climate change , neither will agriculture , neither will we .
so , this is not something pretty and nice to do .
there are a lot of people who would love to have this diversity exist just for the existence value of it .
it is , i agree , a nice thing to do .
but it 's a necessary thing to do .
so , in a very real sense , i believe that we , as an international community , should get organized to complete the task .
the svalbard global seed vault is a wonderful gift that norway and others have given us , but it 's not the complete answer .
we need to collect the remaining diversity that 's out there .
we need to put it into good seed banks that can offer those seeds to researchers in the future .
we need to catalog it . it 's a library of life , but right now i would say we do n't have a card catalog for it .
and we need to support it financially .
my big idea would be that while we think of it as commonplace to endow an art museum or endow a chair at a university , we really ought to be thinking about endowing wheat .
30 million dollars in an endowment would take care of preserving all the diversity in wheat forever .
so we need to be thinking a little bit in those terms .
and my final thought is that we , of course , by conserving wheat , rice , potatoes , and the other crops , we may , quite simply , end up saving ourselves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good morning .
happy to see so many fine folks out here and so many smiling faces .
i have a very peculiar background , attitude and approach to the real world because i am a conjurer .
now , i prefer that term over magician , because if i were a magician , that would mean that i use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real magic .
no , i do n't do that ; i 'm a conjurer , who is someone who pretends to be a real magician . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , how do we go about that sort of thing ?
we depend on the fact that audiences , such as yourselves , will make assumptions .
for example , when i walked up here and i took the microphone from the stand and switched it on , you assumed this was a microphone , which it is not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as a matter of fact , this is something that about half of you , more than half of you will not be familiar with .
it 's a beard trimmer , you see ?
and it makes a very bad microphone ; i 've tried it many times . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the other assumption that you made - and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions .
not only that you can , but that you will when they are properly suggested to you .
you believe i 'm looking at you .
wrong . i 'm not looking at you . i ca n't see you .
i know you 're out there , they told me backstage , it 's a full house and such .
i know you 're there because i can hear you , but i ca n't see you because i normally wear glasses .
these are not glasses , these are empty frames . -lrb- laughter -rrb- quite empty frames .
now why would a grown man appear before you wearing empty frames on his face ?
to fool you , ladies and gentlemen , to deceive you , to show that you , too , can make assumptions .
do n't you ever forget that .
now , i have to do something - first of all , switch to real glasses so i can actually see you , which would probably be a convenience . i do n't know .
i have n't had a good look . well , it 's not that great a convenience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have to do something now , which seems a little bit strange for a magician .
but i 'm going to take some medication .
this is a full bottle of calms forte .
i 'll explain that in just a moment .
ignore the instructions , that 's what the government has to put in there to confuse you , i 'm sure .
i will take enough of these . mm .
indeed , the whole container .
thirty-two tablets of calms forte .
now that i 've done that - i 'll explain it in a moment - i must tell you that i am an actor .
i 'm an actor who plays a specific part .
i play the part of a magician , a wizard , if you will , a real wizard .
if someone were to appear on this stage in front of me and actually claim to be an ancient prince of denmark named hamlet , you would be insulted and rightly so .
why would a man assume that you would believe something bizarre like this ?
but there exists out there a very large population of people who will tell you that they have psychic , magical powers that they can predict the future , that they can make contact with the deceased .
oh , they also say they will sell you astrology or other fortunetelling methods .
oh , they gladly sell you that , yes .
and they also say that they can give you perpetual motion machines and free energy systems .
they claim to be psychics , or sensitives , whatever they can .
but the one thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead .
now , to my innocent mind , dead implies incapable of communicating . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you might agree with me on that .
but these people , they tend to tell you that not only can they communicate with the dead - " hi , there " - but they can hear the dead as well , and they can relay this information back to the living .
i wonder if that 's true .
i do n't think so , because this subculture of people use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do , exactly the same - the same physical methods , the same psychological methods - and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth , to their detriment .
they deceive these people , costs them a lot of money , cost them a lot of emotional anguish .
billions of dollars are spent every year , all over the globe , on these charlatans .
now , i have two questions i would like to ask these people if i had the opportunity to do so .
first question : if i want to ask them to call up - because they do hear them through the ear .
they listen to the spirits like this - i 'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother because , when she died , she had the family will , and she secreted it someplace . we do n't know where it is , so we ask granny , " where is the will , granny ? "
what does granny say ? she says , " i 'm in heaven and it 's wonderful .
i 'm here with all my old friends , my deceased friends , and my family and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that i used to have when i was a little girl .
and i love you , and i 'll always be with you .
good bye . "
and she did n't answer the damn question !
where is the will ?
now , she could easily have said , " oh , it 's in the library on the second shelf , behind the encyclopedia , " but she does n't say that . no , she does n't .
she does n't bring any useful information to us .
we paid a lot of money for that information , be we did n't get it .
the second question that i 'd like to ask , rather simple : suppose i ask them to contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law , as an example .
why do they insist on saying - remember , they speak into this ear - why do they say , " my name starts with j or m ? "
is this a hunting game ?
hunting and fishing ? what is it ?
is it 20 questions ? no , it 's more like 120 questions .
but it is a cruel , vicious , absolutely conscienceless - i 'll be all right , keep your seats -lrb- laughter -rrb- - game that these people play .
and they take advantage of the innocent , the naive , the grieving , the needy people out there .
now , this is a process that is called cold reading .
there 's one fellow out there , van praagh is his name , james van praagh .
he 's one of the big practitioners of this sort of thing .
john edward , sylvia browne and rosemary altea , they are other operators .
there are hundreds of them all over the earth , but in this country , james van praagh is very big .
and what does he do ? he likes to tell you how the deceased got deceased , the people he 's talking to through his ear , you see ?
so what he says is , very often , is like this : he says , " he tells me , he tells me , before he passed , that he had trouble breathing . "
folks , that 's what dying is all about !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you stop breathing , and then you 're dead .
it 's that simple .
and that 's the kind of information they 're going to bring back to you ?
i do n't think so .
now , these people will make guesses , they 'll say things like , " why am i getting electricity ?
he 's saying to me , ' electricity . ' was he an electrician ? " " no . "
" did he ever have an electric razor ? " " no . "
it was a game of hunting questions like this .
this is what they go through .
now , folks often ask us at the james randi educational foundation , they call me , they say , " why are you so concerned about this , mr. randi ?
is n't it just a lot of fun ? "
no , it is not fun . it is a cruel farce .
now , it may bring a certain amount of comfort , but that comfort lasts only about 20 minutes or so .
and then the people look in the mirror , and they say , i just paid a lot of money for that reading .
and what did she say to me ? ' i love you ! " ' they always say that .
they do n't get any information , they do n't get any value for what they spend .
now , sylvia browne is the big operator .
we call her " the talons . "
sylvia browne - thank you - sylvia browne is the big operator in this field at this very moment .
now , sylvia browne - just to show you - she actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone , she does n't even go there in person , and you have to wait up to two years because she 's booked ahead that amount of time .
you pay by credit card or whatever , and then she will call you sometime in the next two years .
you can tell it 's her . " hello , this is sylvia browne . "
that 's her , you can tell right away .
now , montel williams is an intelligent man .
we all know who he is on television .
he 's well educated , he 's smart , he knows what sylvia browne is doing but he does n't give a damn .
he just does n't care .
because , the bottom line is , the sponsors love it , and he will expose her to television publicity all the time .
now , what does sylvia browne give you for that 700 dollars ?
she gives you the names of your guardian angels , that 's first .
now , without that , how could we possibly function ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- she gives you the names of previous lives , who you were in previous lives .
duh .
it turns out that the women that she gives readings for were all babylonian princesses , or something like that .
and the men were all grecian warriors fighting with agamemnon .
nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of london who died of consumption .
he is n't worth bringing back , obviously .
and the strange thing - folks , you may have noticed this too .
you see these folks on television - they never call anybody back from hell . -lrb- laughter -rrb- everyone comes back from heaven , but never from hell .
if they call back any of my friends , they 're not going to ... well , you see the story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , sylvia browne is an exception , an exception in one way , because the james randi educational foundation , my foundation , offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds .
very simply won .
all you have to do is prove any paranormal , occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions .
it 's very easy , win the million dollars .
sylvia browne is an exception in that she 's the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted our challenge .
she did this on the " larry king live " show on cnn six and a half years ago .
and we have n't heard from her since . strange .
she said that , first of all , that she did n't know how to contact me .
duh .
a professional psychic who speaks to dead people , she ca n't reach me ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm alive , you may have noticed .
well , pretty well anyway .
she could n't reach me . now she says she does n't want to reach me because i 'm a godless person .
all the more reason to take the million dollars , would n't you think , sylvia ?
now these people need to be stopped , seriously now .
they need to be stopped because this is a cruel farce .
we get people coming to the foundation all the time .
they 're ruined financially and emotionally because they 've given their money and their faith to these people .
now , i popped some pills earlier .
i have to explain that to you .
homeopathy , let 's find out what that 's all about .
hmm . you 've heard of it .
it 's an alternative form of healing , right ?
homeopathy actually consists - and that 's what this is .
this is calms forte , 32 caplets of sleeping pills ! i forgot to tell you that .
i just ingested six and a half days worth of sleeping pills .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- six and a half days , that certainly is a fatal dose .
it says right on the back here , " in case of overdose , contact your poison control center immediately , " and it gives an 800 number .
keep your seats - it 's going to be okay .
i do n't really need it because i 've been doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10 years , taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills .
why do n't they affect me ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the answer may surprise you .
what is homeopathy ?
it 's taking a medicine that really works and diluting it down well beyond avogadro 's limit .
diluting it down to the point where there 's none of it left . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now folks , this is not just a metaphor i 'm going to give you now , it 's true .
it 's exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet , throwing it into the middle of lake tahoe , and then stirring it up , obviously with a very big stick , and waiting two years or so until the solution is homogeneous .
then , when you get a headache , you take a sip of this water , and - voila ! - it is gone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now that is true . that is what homeopathy is all about .
and another claim that they make - you 'll love this one - the more dilute the medicine is , they say , the more powerful it is .
now wait a minute , we heard about a guy in florida .
the poor man , he was on homeopathic medicine .
he died of an overdose .
he forgot to take his pill .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- work on it . work on it .
it 's a ridiculous thing . it is absolutely ridiculous .
i do n't know what we 're doing , believing in all this nonsense over all these years .
now , let me tell you , the james randi educational foundation is waving this very big carrot , but i must say , the fact that nobody has taken us up on this offer does n't mean that the powers do n't exist .
they might , some place out there .
maybe these people are just independently wealthy .
well , with sylvia browne i would think so .
you know , 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone - that 's more than lawyers make !
i mean that 's a fabulous amount of money .
these people do n't need the million dollars perhaps , but would n't you think they 'd like to take it just to make me look silly ?
just to get rid of this godless person out there that sylvia browne talks about all the time ?
i think that something needs to be done about this .
we really would love to have suggestions from you folks on how to contact federal , state and local authorities to get them to do something .
if you find out - now i understand .
we 've seen people , even today , speaking to us about aids epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water supplies that people have to suffer with .
those are very important , critically important to us .
and we must do something about those problems .
but at the same time , as arthur c. clarke said , the rotting of the human mind , the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult and the supernatural - all of this total nonsense , this medieval thinking - i think something should be done about that , and it all lies in education .
largely , it 's the media who are to blame for this sort of thing .
they shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense of this sort because it pleases the sponsors .
it 's the bottom line , the dollar line .
that 's what they 're looking at .
we really must do something about this .
i 'm willing to take your suggestions , and i 'm willing to have you tune in to our webpage .
it 's www.randi.org.
go in there and look at the archives , and you will begin to understand much more of what i 've been talking about today .
you will see the records that we have .
there 's nothing like sitting in that library and having a family appear there and say that mum gave away all the family fortune .
she cashed in the cds , she gave away the stocks and the certificates .
that 's really sad to hear , and it has n't helped them one bit , has n't solved any of their problems .
yes , there could be a rotting of the american mind , and of the minds all the way around the earth , if we do n't start to think sensibly about these things .
now , we 've offered this carrot , as i say , we 've dangled the carrot .
we 're waiting for the psychics to come forth and snap at it .
oh , we get lots of them , hundreds of them every year come by .
these are dowsers and people who think that they can talk to the dead as well , but they 're amateurs ; they do n't know how to evaluate their own so-called powers .
the professionals never come near us , except in that case of sylvia browne that i told you about a moment ago .
she did accept and then backed away .
ladies and gentlemen , i 'm james randi , and i 'm waiting .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to spread the word about the magnificence of spiders and how much we can learn from them .
spiders are truly global citizens .
you can find spiders in nearly every terrestrial habitat .
this red dot marks the great basin of north america , and i 'm involved with an alpine biodiversity project there with some collaborators .
here 's one of our field sites , and just to give you a sense of perspective , this little blue smudge here , that 's one of my collaborators .
this is a rugged and barren landscape , yet there are quite a few spiders here .
turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle .
spiders are not just everywhere , but they 're extremely diverse .
there are over 40,000 described species of spiders .
to put that number into perspective , here 's a graph comparing the 40,000 species of spiders to the 400 species of primates .
there are two orders of magnitude more spiders than primates .
spiders are also extremely old .
on the bottom here , this is the geologic timescale , and the numbers on it indicate millions of years from the present , so the zero here , that would be today .
so what this figure shows is that spiders date back to almost 380 million years .
to put that into perspective , this red vertical bar here marks the divergence time of humans from chimpanzees , a mere seven million years ago .
all spiders make silk at some point in their life .
most spiders use copious amounts of silk , and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction .
even fossil spiders can make silk , as we can see from this impression of a spinneret on this fossil spider .
so this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years .
it does n't take long from working with spiders to start noticing how essential silk is to just about every aspect of their life .
spiders use silk for many purposes , including the trailing safety dragline , wrapping eggs for reproduction , protective retreats and catching prey .
there are many kinds of spider silk .
for example , this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks .
when you look at this orb web , you 're actually seeing many types of silk fibers .
the frame and radii of this web is made up of one type of silk , while the capture spiral is a composite of two different silks : the filament and the sticky droplet .
how does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk ?
to answer that , you have to look a lot closer at the spinneret region of a spider .
so silk comes out of the spinnerets , and for those of us spider silk biologists , this is what we call the " business end " of the spider . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we spend long days ...
hey ! do n't laugh . that 's my life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider .
and this is what we see .
you can see multiple fibers coming out of the spinnerets , because each spinneret has many spigots on it .
each of these silk fibers exits from the spigot , and if you were to trace the fiber back into the spider , what you would find is that each spigot connects to its own individual silk gland . a silk gland kind of looks like a sac with a lot of silk proteins stuck inside .
so if you ever have the opportunity to dissect an orb-web-weaving spider , and i hope you do , what you would find is a bounty of beautiful , translucent silk glands .
inside each spider , there are hundreds of silk glands , sometimes thousands .
these can be grouped into seven categories .
they differ by size , shape , and sometimes even color .
in an orb-web-weaving spider , you can find seven types of silk glands , and what i have depicted here in this picture , let 's start at the one o 'clock position , there 's tubuliform silk glands , which are used to make the outer silk of an egg sac .
there 's the aggregate and flagelliform silk glands which combine to make the sticky capture spiral of an orb web .
pyriform silk glands make the attachment cement - that 's the silk that 's used to adhere silk lines to a substrate .
there 's also aciniform silk , which is used to wrap prey .
minor ampullate silk is used in web construction .
and the most studied silk line of them all : major ampullate silk .
this is the silk that 's used to make the frame and radii of an orb web , and also the safety trailing dragline .
but what , exactly , is spider silk ?
spider silk is almost entirely protein .
nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family , so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family , so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk , and over the last 380 million years , that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged , specialized , over and over and over again , to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today .
there are several features that all these silks have in common . they all have a common design , such as they 're all very long - they 're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins .
they 're very repetitive , and they 're very rich in the amino acids glycine and alanine .
to give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like , this is a dragline silk protein , it 's just a portion of it , from the black widow spider .
this is the kind of sequence that i love looking at day and night . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so what you 're seeing here is the one letter abbreviation for amino acids , and i 've colored in the glycines with green , and the alanines in red , and so you can see it 's just a lot of g 's and a 's .
you can also see that there 's a lot of short sequence motifs that repeat over and over and over again , so for example there 's a lot of what we call polyalanines , or iterated a 's , aaaaa . there 's ggq . there 's ggy .
you can think of these short motifs that repeat over and over again as words , and these words occur in sentences .
so for example this would be one sentence , and you would get this sort of green region and the red polyalanine , that repeats over and over and over again , and you can have that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times within an individual silk molecule .
silks made by the same spider can have dramatically different repeat sequences .
at the top of the screen , you 're seeing the repeat unit from the dragline silk of a garden argiope spider .
it 's short . and on the bottom , this is the repeat sequence for the egg case , or tubuliform silk protein , for the exact same spider . and you can see how dramatically different these silk proteins are - so this is sort of the beauty of the diversification of the spider silk gene family .
you can see that the repeat units differ in length . they also differ in sequence .
so i 've colored in the glycines again in green , alanine in red , and the serines , the letter s , in purple . and you can see that the top repeat unit can be explained almost entirely by green and red , and the bottom repeat unit has a substantial amount of purple .
what silk biologists do is we try to relate these sequences , these amino acid sequences , to the mechanical properties of the silk fibers .
now , it 's really convenient that spiders use their silk completely outside their body .
this makes testing spider silk really , really easy to do in the laboratory , because we 're actually , you know , testing it in air that 's exactly the environment that spiders are using their silk proteins .
so this makes quantifying silk properties by methods such as tensile testing , which is basically , you know , tugging on one end of the fiber , very amenable .
here are stress-strain curves generated by tensile testing five fibers made by the same spider .
so what you can see here is that the five fibers have different behaviors .
specifically , if you look on the vertical axis , that 's stress . if you look at the maximum stress value for each of these fibers , you can see that there 's a lot of variation , and in fact dragline , or major ampullate silk , is the strongest of these fibers .
we think that 's because the dragline silk , which is used to make the frame and radii for a web , needs to be very strong .
on the other hand , if you were to look at strain - this is how much a fiber can be extended - if you look at the maximum value here , again , there 's a lot of variation and the clear winner is flagelliform , or the capture spiral filament .
in fact , this flagelliform fiber can actually stretch over twice its original length .
so silk fibers vary in their strength and also their extensibility .
in the case of the capture spiral , it needs to be so stretchy to absorb the impact of flying prey .
if it was n't able to stretch so much , then basically when an insect hit the web , it would just trampoline right off of it .
so if the web was made entirely out of dragline silk , an insect is very likely to just bounce right off . but by having really , really stretchy capture spiral silk , the web is actually able to absorb the impact of that intercepted prey .
there 's quite a bit of variation within the fibers that an individual spider can make .
we call that the tool kit of a spider .
that 's what the spider has to interact with their environment .
but how about variation among spider species , so looking at one type of silk and looking at different species of spiders ?
this is an area that 's largely unexplored but here 's a little bit of data i can show you .
this is the comparison of the toughness of the dragline spilk spun by 21 species of spiders .
some of them are orb-weaving spiders and some of them are non-orb-weaving spiders .
it 's been hypothesized that orb-weaving spiders , like this argiope here , should have the toughest dragline silks because they must intercept flying prey .
what you see here on this toughness graph is the higher the black dot is on the graph , the higher the toughness .
the 21 species are indicated here by this phylogeny , this evolutionary tree , that shows their genetic relationships , and i 've colored in yellow the orb-web-weaving spiders .
if you look right here at the two red arrows , they point to the toughness values for the draglines of nephila clavipes and araneus diadematus .
these are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins .
yet , their draglines are not the toughest .
in fact , the toughest dragline in this survey is this one right here in this white region , a non orb-web-weaving spider .
this is the dragline spun by scytodes , the spitting spider .
scytodes does n't use a web at all to catch prey . instead , scytodes sort of lurks around and waits for prey to get close to it , and then immobilizes prey by spraying a silk-like venom onto that insect .
think of hunting with silly string .
that 's how scytodes forages .
we do n't really know why scytodes needs such a tough dragline , but it 's unexpected results like this that make bio-prospecting so exciting and worthwhile .
it frees us from the constraints of our imagination .
now i 'm going to mark on the toughness values for nylon fiber , bombyx - or domesticated silkworm silk - wool , kevlar , and carbon fibers .
and what you can see is that nearly all the spider draglines surpass them .
it 's the combination of strength , extensibility and toughness that makes spider silk so special , and that has attracted the attention of biomimeticists , so people that turn to nature to try to find new solutions .
and the strength , extensibility and toughness of spider silks combined with the fact that silks do not elicit an immune response , have attracted a lot of interest in the use of spider silks in biomedical applications , for example , as a component of artificial tendons , for serving as guides to regrow nerves , and for scaffolds for tissue growth .
spider silks also have a lot of potential for their anti-ballistic capabilities .
silks could be incorporated into body and equipment armor that would be more lightweight and flexible than any armor available today .
in addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks , personally , i find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself .
i love when i 'm in the laboratory , a new spider silk sequence comes in .
that 's just the best . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me , and that 's why i 'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk .
the next time you see a spider web , please , pause and look a little closer .
you 'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man .
to borrow from the writings of a spider named charlotte , silk is terrific .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- when i saw a piece of technology called kinect - it was called natal - i was inspired , and i thought for a moment , maybe it 's possible to address that one problem of storytelling , to create a character which seemed alive , which noticed me , that could look me in the eyes and feel real , and sculpt a story about our relationship .
and so a year ago , i showed this off at a computer show called e3 .
and this was a piece of technology with someone called claire interacting with this boy .
and there was a huge row online about , " hey , this ca n't be real . "
and so i waited till now to have an actual demo of the real tech .
now , this tech incorporates three big elements .
the first is a kinect camera , which will be out in november , some incredible ai that was hidden in the dusty vaults , collecting dust in microsoft , plus our quite crude attempts at ai at a company called lionhead , mixing all those things together just to get to this one simple idea : to create a real , living being in a computer .
now , i 'll be honest with you and say that most of it is just a trick , but it 's a trick that actually works .
so why do n't we go over and have a look at the demo now .
this is dimitri .
dimitri , just waggle your arm around .
now , you notice he 's sitting .
there are no controllers , no keyboards , or mice , or joysticks , or joypads .
he is just going to use his hand , his body and his voice , just like humans interact with their hands , body and voice .
so let 's move forward .
you 're going to meet milo for the first time .
we had to give him a problem because when we first created milo , we realized that he came across as a little bit of a brat , to be honest with you .
he was quite a know-it-all , and he wanted to kind of make you laugh .
so the problem we introduced to him was this : he 's just moved house .
he 's moved from london to new england , over in america .
his parents are too busy to listen to his problems , and that 's when he starts almost conjuring you up .
so here he is walking through the grass .
and you 're able to interact with his world .
the cool thing is , what we 're doing is we 're changing the mind of milo constantly .
that means no two people 's milos can be the same .
you 're actually sculpting a human being here .
so , he 's discovering the garden .
you 're helping him discover the garden by just pointing out these snails .
very simple at the start .
by the way , if you are a boy , it 's snails ; if you 're a girl , it 's butterflies because what we found was that girls hate snails .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so remember , this is the first time you 've met him , and we really want to draw you in and make you more curious .
his face , by the way , is fully ai-driven .
we have complete control over his blush responses , the diameter of his nostrils to denote stress .
we actually do something called body matching .
if you 're leaning forward , he will try and slightly change the neuro-linguistic nature of his face , because we went out with this strong idea : how can we make you believe that something 's real ?
now we 've used the hand .
the other thing to use is your body .
why not just , instead of pushing left and right with a mouse or with a joypad , why not use your body just to lean on the chair - again , relaxed ?
you can lean back , but the camera will change its perspective depending on which way you 're looking .
so dimitri 's now going to use - he 's used his hand ; he 's used his body .
he 's now going to use the other thing which is essential , and that 's his voice .
now , the thing about voice is , our experience with voice recognition is pretty awful , is n't it ?
it never works .
you order an airline ticket ; you end up in timbuktu .
so we 've tackled that problem , and we 've come up with a solution , which we 'll see in a second .
milo : i could just squish it .
peter molyneux : what are you going to do , dimitri ?
female voice : squashing a snail may not seem important , but remember , even this choice will affect how milo develops .
do you want milo to squash it ?
when you see the microphone , say ... -lrb- pm : squash . -rrb- ... yes to decide .
dimitri : go on , milo . squash it .
pm : no . that 's the wrong thing to do .
now look at his response .
he said , " go on , milo . squash it . "
what we 're using there is , we 're using something , a piece of technology called tellme .
it 's a company that microsoft acquired some years ago .
we 've got a database of words which we recognize .
we pick those words out .
we also reference that with the tonation database that we build up of dimitri 's voice , or the user 's voice .
now we need to have a bit more engagement , and again , what we can do is we can look at the body .
and we 'll do that in a second .
milo : i wonder how deep it is .
deep .
pm : okay . so what we 're going to do now is teach milo to skim stones .
we 're actually teaching him .
it 's very , very interesting that men , more than women , tend to be more competitive here .
they 're fine with teaching milo for the first few throws , but then they want to beat milo , where women , they 're more nurturing about this .
okay , this is skimming stones .
how do you skim stones ?
you stand up , and you skim the stone .
it 's that simple .
just recognizing your body , recognizing the body 's motions , the tech , understanding that you 've gone from sitting down to standing up .
again , all of this is done in the way us humans do things , and that 's crucially important if we want milo to appear real .
female voice : see if you can inspire him to do any better .
try hitting the boat .
milo : ahhh . so close .
pm : that 's dimitri at his most competitive .
now beaten an 11-year-old child . well done .
milo : okay .
pm : so , milo 's being called back in by his parents , giving us time to be alone and to help him out .
basically - the bit that we missed at the start - his parents had asked him to clean up his room .
and we 're going to help him with this now .
but this is going to be an introduction , and this is all about the deep psychology that we 're trying to use .
we 're trying to introduce you to what i believe is the most wonderful part , you being able to talk in your natural voice to milo .
now , to do that , we needed a set up , like a magician 's trick .
and what we did was , we needed to give milo this big problem .
so as dimitri starts tidying up , you can overhear a conversation that milo 's having with his parents .
milo 's mom : oh , you 've got gravy all over the floor . -lrb- milo : i did n't mean to ! -rrb- milo 's mom : that carpet is brand new .
pm : so he 's just spilled a plate of sausages on the floor , on the brand-new carpet .
we 've all done it as parents ; we 've all done it as children .
now 's a chance for dimitri to kind of reassure and calm milo down .
it 's all been too much for him .
he 's just moved house . he 's got no friends .
now is the time when we open that portal and allow you to talk to milo .
female voice : why do n't you try saying something encouraging to cheer milo up .
dimitri : come on , milo . you know what parents are like .
they 're always getting stressed .
milo : what do they want to come here for anyway ?
we do n't know anyone .
dimitri : well , you 've got a new school to go to .
you 're going to meet loads of cool , new friends .
milo : i just really miss my old house , that 's all .
dimitri : well , this is a pretty awesome house , milo .
you 've got a cool garden to play in and a pond .
milo : it was good skimming stones .
this looks nice .
you cleaned up my room .
thanks .
pm : so after three-quarters of an hour , he recognizes you .
and i promise you , if you 're sitting in front of this screen , that is a truly wonderful moment .
and we 're ready now to tell a story about his childhood and his life , and it goes on , and he has , you know , many adventures .
some of those adventures are a little bit dark or on the darker side .
some of those adventures are wonderfully encouraging - he 's got to go to school .
the cool thing is that we 're doing as well : as you interact with him , you 're able to put things into his world ; he recognizes objects .
his mind is based in a cloud .
that means milo 's mind , as millions of people use it , will get smarter and cleverer .
he 'll recognize more objects and thus understand more words .
but for me , this is a wonderful opportunity where technology , at last , can be connected with , where i am no longer restrained by the finger i hold in my hand - as far as a computer game 's concerned - or by the blandness of not being noticed if you 're watching a film or a book .
and i love those revolutions , and i love the future that milo brings .
thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- imagine if you could record your life - everything you said , everything you did , available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips , so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them , or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered .
well that 's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago .
this is my wife and collaborator , rupal .
and on this day , at this moment , we walked into the house with our first child , our beautiful baby boy .
and we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : okay .
deb roy : this moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house , if you looked up , you 'd see a camera and a microphone , and if you looked down , you 'd get this bird 's-eye view of the room .
here 's our living room , the baby bedroom , kitchen , dining room and the rest of the house .
and all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture .
so here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and , finally , lights out for the day .
over the course of three years , we recorded eight to 10 hours a day , amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video .
so you 're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what this data represents for our family at a personal level , the impact has already been immense , and we 're still learning its value .
countless moments of unsolicited natural moments , not posed moments , are captured there , and we 're starting to learn how to discover them and find them .
but there 's also a scientific reason that drove this project , which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language - that child being my son .
and so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data , we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at mit so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set , trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition .
so we 're looking here at one of the first things we started to do .
this is my wife and i cooking breakfast in the kitchen , and as we move through space and through time , a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen .
in order to convert this opaque , 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see , we use motion analysis to pull out , as we move through space and through time , what we call space-time worms .
and this has become part of our toolkit where the activities are in the data , and with it , trace the pattern of , in particular , where my son moved throughout the home , so that we could focus our transcription efforts , all of the speech environment around my son - all of the words that he heard from myself , my wife , our nanny , and over time , the words he began to produce .
so with that technology and that data and the ability to , with machine assistance , transcribe speech , we 've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts .
and with that , let me take you now for a first tour into the data .
so you 've all , i 'm sure , seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time .
i 'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form .
my son , soon after his first birthday , would say " gaga " to mean water .
and over the course of the next half-year , he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form , " water . "
so we 're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds .
no video here , so you can focus on the sound , the acoustics , of a new kind of trajectory : gaga to water .
-lrb- audio -rrb- baby : gagagagagaga gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water .
dr : he sure nailed it , did n't he .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so he did n't just learn water .
over the course of the 24 months , the first two years that we really focused on , this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order .
and because we have full transcripts , we 've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday .
he was an early talker .
and so we started to analyze why .
why were certain words born before others ?
this is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us .
the way to interpret this apparently simple graph is , on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances .
and the -lsb- horizontal -rsb- axis is time .
and all of the data , we aligned based on the following idea : every time my son would learn a word , we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word .
and we would plot the relative length of the utterances .
and what we found was this curious phenomena , that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum , making language as simple as possible , and then slowly ascend back up in complexity .
and the amazing thing was that bounce , that dip , lined up almost precisely with when each word was born - word after word , systematically .
so it appears that all three primary caregivers - myself , my wife and our nanny - were systematically and , i would think , subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language .
and the implications of this - there are many , but one i just want to point out , is that there must be amazing feedback loops .
of course , my son is learning from his linguistic environment , but the environment is learning from him .
that environment , people , are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now .
but that 's looking at the speech context .
what about the visual context ?
we 're not looking at - think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house .
we 've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras , and we 've done some optical correction , and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life .
so welcome to my home .
this is a moment , one moment captured across multiple cameras .
the reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine , where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system .
what i 'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes , again , of just life in the living room .
that 's me and my son on the floor .
and there 's video analytics that are tracking our movements .
my son is leaving red ink . i am leaving green ink .
we 're now on the couch , looking out through the window at cars passing by .
and finally , my son playing in a walking toy by himself .
now we freeze the action , 30 minutes , we turn time into the vertical axis , and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we 've just left behind .
and we see these amazing structures - these little knots of two colors of thread we call " social hot spots . "
the spiral thread we call a " solo hot spot . "
and we think that these affect the way language is learned .
what we 'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they 're learned - so in other words , the relationship between words and what they 're about in the world .
so here 's how we 're approaching this .
in this video , again , my son is being traced out .
he 's leaving red ink behind .
and there 's our nanny by the door .
-lrb- video -rrb- nanny : you want water ? -lrb- baby : aaaa . -rrb- nanny : all right . -lrb- baby : aaaa . -rrb- dr : she offers water , and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water .
and what we 've done is use the word " water " to tag that moment , that bit of activity .
and now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in , and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water .
and what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape .
we call these wordscapes .
this is the wordscape for the word water , and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen .
that 's where those big peaks are over to the left .
and just for contrast , we can do this with any word .
we can take the word " bye " as in " good bye . "
and we 're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house .
and we look , and we find , as you would expect , a contrast in the landscape where the word " bye " occurs much more in a structured way .
so we 're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition , and that 's ongoing work now .
in my lab , which we 're peering into now , at mit - this is at the media lab .
this has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space .
three of the key people in this project , philip decamp , rony kubat and brandon roy are pictured here .
philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you 're seeing .
and michael fleischman was another ph.d. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis , and he made the following observation : that " just the way that we 're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language , that same idea we can take out of your home , deb , and we can apply it to the world of public media . "
and so our effort took an unexpected turn .
think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place .
we 've started analyzing television content using the same principles - analyzing event structure of a tv signal - episodes of shows , commercials , all of the components that make up the event structure .
and we 're now , with satellite dishes , pulling and analyzing a good part of all the tv being watched in the united states .
and you do n't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people 's conversations , you just tune into publicly available social media feeds .
so we 're pulling in about three billion comments a month , and then the magic happens .
you have the event structure , the common ground that the words are about , coming out of the television feeds ; you 've got the conversations that are about those topics ; and through semantic analysis - and this is actually real data you 're looking at from our data processing - each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal .
and the same idea now can be built up .
and we get this wordscape , except now words are not assembled in my living room .
instead , the context , the common ground activities , are the content on television that 's driving the conversations .
and what we 're seeing here , these skyscrapers now , are commentary that are linked to content on television .
same concept , but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere .
and so fundamentally , rather than , for example , measuring content based on how many people are watching , this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content .
and just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family , we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people .
this is a subset of data from our database - just 50,000 out of several million - and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources .
and if you put them on one plain , a second plain is where the content lives .
so we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials , and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph .
and then the important third dimension .
each of the links that you 're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content .
and there are , again , now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content .
and we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways .
so if we , for example , trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it , and then we follow where that comment goes , and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content , a very interesting structure becomes visible .
we call this a co-viewing clique , a virtual living room if you will .
and there are fascinating dynamics at play .
it 's not one way .
a piece of content , an event , causes someone to talk .
they talk to other people .
that drives tune-in behavior back into mass media , and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior .
another example - very different - another actual person in our database - and we 're finding at least hundreds , if not thousands , of these .
we 've given this person a name .
this is a pro-amateur , or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate .
so a lot of people are following this person - very influential - and they have a propensity to talk about what 's on tv .
so this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together .
one last example from this data : sometimes it 's actually a piece of content that is special .
so if we go and look at this piece of content , president obama 's state of the union address from just a few weeks ago , and look at what we find in this same data set , at the same scale , the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable .
a nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what 's on the broadcast .
and of course , through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language .
we can x-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation , real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content .
so , to summarize , the idea is this : as our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they 're saying it in , what 's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen .
it 's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication .
and i think the implications here are profound , whether it 's for science , for commerce , for government , or perhaps most of all , for us as individuals .
and so just to return to my son , when i was preparing this talk , he was looking over my shoulder , and i showed him the clips i was going to show to you today , and i asked him for permission - granted .
and then i went on to reflect , " is n't it amazing , this entire database , all these recordings , i 'm going to hand off to you and to your sister " - who arrived two years later - " and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never , with your biological memory , possibly remember the way you can now ? "
and he was quiet for a moment .
and i thought , " what am i thinking ?
he 's five years old . he 's not going to understand this . "
and just as i was having that thought , he looked up at me and said , " so that when i grow up , i can show this to my kids ? "
and i thought , " wow , this is powerful stuff . "
so i want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family .
this is the first time our son took more than two steps at once - captured on film .
and i really want you to focus on something as i take you through .
it 's a cluttered environment ; it 's natural life .
my mother 's in the kitchen , cooking , and , of all places , in the hallway , i realize he 's about to do it , about to take more than two steps .
and so you hear me encouraging him , realizing what 's happening , and then the magic happens .
listen very carefully .
about three steps in , he realizes something magic is happening , and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in , and he takes a breath in , and he whispers " wow " and instinctively i echo back the same .
and so let 's fly back in time to that memorable moment .
-lrb- video -rrb- dr : hey .
come here .
can you do it ?
oh , boy .
can you do it ?
baby : yeah .
dr : ma , he 's walking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dr : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ jill sobule : at a conference in monterey by the big , big jellyfish tank , ♫ ♫ i first saw you and i got so shy . ♫ ♫ you see , i was a little paranoid ' cause i might have been high . ♫ ♫ and i had n't done that in ages and i wo n't do that again . ♫ ♫ but that 's another story . ♫ ♫ loved you forever and i 've been a big fan , ♫ ♫ the one-woman shows , i even rented " pat . " ♫ ♫ i got enough nerve to come up to you , ♫ ♫ but little did i know one year later we 'd be doing this show . ♫
♫ i sing . julia sweeney : i tell stories . together : the jill and julia show . ♫ ♫ sobule : sometimes it works . sweeney : sometimes it does n't . ♫ ♫ together : the jill and julia show . ♫ ♫ sweeney : at a conference in monterey next to the big , big jellyfish tank , ♫ ♫ i first saw you and i was n't so shy . ♫ i made a beeline for you and told you what a huge fan i was ever since i was writing that pilot for fox , and wendy and i wanted you to do the theme song .
and then the pilot did n't go and i was so sad , but i kept remaining a fan of yours .
and then when i went through that big , horrible breakup with carl and i could n't get off the couch , i listened to your song , ♫ " now that i do n't have you , " ♫ over and over and over and over again .
and i ca n't believe you 're here and that i 'm meeting you here at ted .
and also , i ca n't believe that we 're eating sushi in front of the fish tank , which , personally , i think is really inappropriate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and little did i know that one year later ... ♫ we 'd be doing this show . ♫ ♫ sobule : i sing . sweeney : i tell stories . together : the jill and julia show . ♫ sobule : hey , they asked us back ! sweeney : can you stand it ? !
♫ together : the jill and julia , the jill and julia , the jill and julia show . ♫ ♫ sobule : why are all our heroes so imperfect ? ♫ ♫ why do they always bring me down ? ♫ ♫ why are all our heroes so imperfect ? ♫ ♫ statue in the park has lost his crown . ♫ ♫ william faulkner , drunk and depressed . ♫ sweeney : mmm .
♫ dorothy parker , mean , drunk and depressed . ♫ sweeney : i know .
♫ and that guy , " seven years in tibet , " turned out to be a nazi . ♫ sweeney : yeah .
♫ founding fathers all had slaves . ♫ sweeney : i know .
♫ the explorers slaughtered the braves . ♫ sweeney : horribly .
♫ sobule : the old testament god can be so petty . ♫ sweeney : do n't get me started on that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ♫ sobule : paul mccartney , jealous of john , even more so now that he 's gone . ♫ ♫ dylan was so mean to donovan in that movie . ♫ ♫ pablo picasso , cruel to his wives . ♫ sweeney : horrible .
♫ sobule : my favorite poets took their own lives . ♫ ♫ orson welles peaked at twenty-five , below before our eyes . ♫ ♫ and he sold bad wine . ♫ ♫ together : why are all our heroes so imperfect ? yeah ♫ ♫ why do they always bring me down ? ♫ ♫ sobule : heard babe ruth was full of malice . ♫ sweeney : oh .
♫ lewis carroll i 'm sure did alice . ♫ sweeney : what ? !
♫ plato in the cave with those very young boys . ♫ sweeney : ooh ...
♫ sobule : hillary supported the war . ♫ ♫ sweeney : even thomas friedman supported the war . ♫ -lrb- laughter -rrb- ♫ sobule : colin powell turned out to be ... together : ... such a pussy . ♫ -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ sobule : william faulkner , drunk and depressed , ♫ ♫ tennessee williams , drunk and depressed . ♫ sweeney : yeah .
♫ sobule : take it , julia . ♫ sweeney : okay . oprah was never necessarily a big hero of mine .
i mean , i watch oprah mostly when i 'm home in spokane visiting my mother . and to my mother , oprah is a greater moral authority than the pope , which is actually saying something because she 's a devout catholic .
anyway , i like oprah - i like her girlfriendy-ness , i like her weight issues , i like how she 's transformed talk television , i like how she 's brought reading back to america - but there was something that happened the last two weeks that was ... i call it the soon-yi moment : it is the moment when i can not continue supporting someone .
and that was that she did two entire shows promoting that movie " the secret . "
do you guys know about that movie " the secret " ?
it makes " what the bleep do we know " seem like a doctoral dissertation from harvard on quantum mechanics - that 's how bad it is .
it makes " the davinci code " seem like " war and peace . "
that movie is so horrible . it promotes such awful pseudoscience .
and the basic idea is that there 's this law of attraction , and your thoughts have this vibrating energy that goes out into the universe and then you attract good things to happen to you .
on a scientific basis , it 's more than just " power of positive thinking " - it has a horrible , horrible dark side . like if you get ill , it 's because you 've just been thinking negative thoughts .
yeah , stuff like that was in the movie and she 's promoting it .
and all i 'm saying is that i really wish that murray gell-mann would go on oprah and just explain to her that the law of attraction is , in fact , not a law .
so that 's what i have to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ sobule : i sing . sweeney : i tell stories . together : the jill and julia show . ♫ ♫ sobule : sometimes it works . sweeney : sometimes it does n't . ♫ ♫ together : the jill and julia , the jill and julia , the jill and julia show . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to begin by reciting a poem .
" oh beloved dentist : your rubber fingers in my mouth ...
your voice so soft and muffled ...
lower the mask , dear dentist , lower the mask . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , in this presentation , i 'm going to be putting the right side of your brains through a fairly serious workout .
you 're going to see a lot of imagery , and it 's not always connected to what i 'm talking about , so i need you to kind of split your brains in half and let the images flow over one side and listen to me on the other .
so i am one of those people with a transformative personal story .
six years ago , after 20 years in graphic design and typography , i changed the way i was working and the way most graphic designers work to pursue a more personal approach to my work , with only the humble attempt to simply make a living doing something that i loved .
but something weird happened .
i became bizarrely popular .
my current work seems to resonate with people in a way that has so taken me by surprise that i still frequently wonder what in the hell is going on .
and i 'm slowly coming to understand that the appeal of what i do may be connected to why i do it .
these days , i call myself a graphic artist .
so where my work as a graphic designer was to follow strategy , my work now follows my heart and my interests with the guidance of my ego to create work that is mutually beneficial to myself and a client .
now , this is heresy in the design world .
the ego is not supposed to be involved in graphic design .
but i find that for myself , without exception , the more i deal with the work as something of my own , as something that is personal , the more successful it is as something that 's compelling , interesting and sustaining .
so i exist somewhat outside of the mainstream of design thinking .
where others might look at measurable results , i tend to be interested in more ethereal qualities , like " does it bring joy ? "
" is there a sense of wonder ? "
and " does it invoke curiosity ? "
this is a scientific diagram , by the way .
i do n't have time to explain it , but it has to do with dna and rna .
so i have a particular imaginative approach to visual work .
the things that interest me when i 'm working are visual structure , surprise and anything that requires figuring things out .
so for this reason , i 'm particularly drawn to systems and patterns .
i 'm going to give you a couple of examples of how my brain works .
this is a piece that i did for the guardian newspaper in the u.k.
they have a magazine that they call g2 .
and this is for their puzzle special in 2007 .
and puzzling it is .
i started by creating a series of tiling units .
and these tiling units , i designed specifically so that they would contain parts of letterforms within their shapes so that i could then join those pieces together to create letters and then words within the abstract patterning .
but then as well , i was able to just flip them , rotate them and combine them in different ways to create either regular patterns or abstract patterns .
so here 's the word puzzle again .
and here it is with the abstract surrounding .
and as you can see , it 's extremely difficult to read .
but all i have to do is fill certain areas of those letterforms and i can bring those words out of the background pattern .
but maybe that 's a little too obvious .
so then i can add some color in with the background and add a bit more color in with the words themselves , and this way , working with the art director , i 'm able to bring it to just the right point that it 's puzzling for the audience - they can figure out that there 's something they have to read - but it 's not impossible for them to read .
i 'm also interested in working with unusual materials and common materials in unusual ways .
so this requires figuring out how to get the most out of something 's innate properties and also how to bend it to my will .
so ultimately , my goal is to create something unexpected .
to this end , i have worked in sugar for stefan sagmeister , three-time ted speaker .
and this project began essentially on my kitchen table .
i 've been eating cereal for breakfast all of my life .
and for that same amount of time , i 've been spilling sugar on the table and just kind of playing with it with my fingers .
and eventually i used this technique to create a piece of artwork .
and then i used it again to create six pieces for stefan 's book , " things in my life i 've learned so far . "
and these were created without sketches , just freehand , by putting the sugar down on a white surface and then manipulating it to get the words and designs out of it .
recently , i 've also made some rather highbrow baroque borders out of lowbrow pasta .
and this is for a chapter that i 'm doing in a book , and the chapter is on honor .
so it 's a little bit unexpected , but , in a way , it refers to the macaroni art that children make for their parents or they make in school and give to their parents , which is in itself a form of honor .
this is what you can do with some household tinfoil .
okay , well , it 's what i can do with some household tinfoil .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm very interested in wonder , in design as an impetus to inquiring .
to say i wonder is to say i question , i ask .
and to experience wonder is to experience awe .
so i 'm currently working on a book , which plays with both senses of the word , as i explore some of my own ideas and inquiries in a visual display of rather peacock-like grandeur .
the world is full of wonder .
but the world of graphic design , for the most part , is not .
so i 'm using my own writings as a kind of testing ground for a book that has an interdependency between word and image as a kind of seductive force .
i think that one of the things that religions got right was the use of visual wonder to deliver a message .
i think this true marriage of art and information is woefully underused in adult literature , and i 'm mystified as to why visual wealth is not more commonly used to enhance intellectual wealth .
when we look at works like this , we tend to associate them with children 's literature .
there 's an implication that ornamental graphics detract from the seriousness of the content .
but i really hope to have the opportunity to change that perception .
this book is taking rather a long time , but i 'm nearly done .
for some reason , i thought it would be a good idea to put an intermission in my talk .
and this is it - just to give you and me a moment to catch up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i do these valentines .
i 've been sending out valentines these are my valentines from 2005 and 2006 .
and i started by doing just a single image like this and sending them out to each person .
but in 2007 , i got the cockamamie idea to hand-draw each valentine for everyone on my mailing list .
i reduced my mailing list to 150 people .
and i drew each person their own unique valentine and put their name on it and numbered it and signed it and sent it out .
believe it or not , i devised this as a timesaving method .
i was very busy in the beginning of that year , and i did n't know when i was going to find time to design and print a single valentine .
and i thought that i could kind of do this piecemeal as i was traveling .
it did n't exactly work out that way .
there 's a longer story to this , but i did get them all done in time , and they were extremely well received .
i got an almost 100 percent response rate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and those who did n't respond will never receive anything from me ever again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- last year , i took a more conceptual approach to the valentine .
i had this idea that i wanted people to receive a kind of mysterious love letter , like a found fragment in their mailbox .
i wanted it to be something that was not addressed to them or signed by me , something that caused them to wonder what on earth this thing was .
and i specifically wrote four pages that do n't connect .
there were four different versions of this .
and i wrote them so that they begin in the middle of a sentence , end in the middle of a sentence .
and they 're on the one hand , universal , so i avoid specific names or places , but on the other hand , they 're personal .
so i wanted people to really get the sense that they had received something that could have been a love letter to them .
and i 'm just going to read one of them to you .
" you 've never really been sure of this , but i can assure you that this quirk you 're so self-conscious of is intensely endearing .
just please accept that this piece of you escapes with your smile , and those of us who notice are happy to catch it in passing .
time spent with you is like chasing and catching small birds , but without the scratches and bird shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " that is to say , your thoughts and words flit and dart , disconcertedly elusive at times , but when caught and examined - ahh , such a wonder , such a delightful reward .
there 's no passing time with you , only collecting - the collecting of moments with the hope for preservation and at the same time release .
impossible ? i do n't think so .
i know this makes you embarrassed .
i 'm certain i can see you blushing .
but i just have to tell you because sometimes i hear your self-doubt , and it 's so crushing to think that you may not know how truly wonderful you are , how inspiring and delightful and really , truly the most completely ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so valentine 's day is coming up in a couple of days , and these are currently arriving in mailboxes all around the world .
this year , i got , what i really have to say is a rather brilliant idea , to laser cut my valentines out of used christmas cards .
so i solicited friends to send me their used christmas cards , and i made 500 of these .
each one of them is completely different .
i 'm just really , really thrilled with them .
i do n't have that much else to say , but they turned out really well .
i do spend a lot of time on my work .
and one of the things that i 've been thinking about recently is what is worth while .
what is it that 's worth spending my time on and my life on in this way ?
working in the commercial world , this is something that i do have to struggle with at times .
and yes , sometimes i 'm swayed by money .
but ultimately , i do n't consider that a worthy goal .
what makes something worthwhile for me is the people i work for or with , the conditions i work under and the audience that i 'm able to reach .
so i might ask : " who is it for ? "
" what does it say ? "
and " what does it do ? "
you know , i have to tell you , it 's really difficult for someone like me to come up on stage at this conference with these unbelievably brilliant minds , who are thinking these really big-picture , world-changing , life-changing ideas and technologies .
and it 's very , very common for designers and people in the visual arts to feel that we 're not contributing enough , or worse , that all we 're doing is contributing to landfill .
here i am ; i 'm showing you some pretty visuals and talking about aesthetics .
but i 've come to believe that truly imaginative visual work is extremely important in society .
just in the way that i 'm inspired by books and magazines of all kinds , conversations i have , movies , so i also think , when i put visual work out there into the mass media , work that is interesting , unusual , intriguing , work that maybe opens up that sense of inquiry in the mind , that i 'm seeding the imagination of the populace .
and you just never know who is going to take something from that and turn it into something else , because inspiration is cross-pollinating .
so a piece of mine may inspire a playwright or a novelist or a scientist , and that in turn may be the seed that inspires a doctor or a philanthropist or a babysitter .
and this is n't something that you can quantify or track or measure , and we tend to undervalue things in society that we ca n't measure .
but i really believe that a fully operating , rich society needs these seeds coming from all directions and all disciplines in order to keep the gears of inspiration and imagination flowing and cycling and growing .
so that 's why i do what i do , and why i spend so much time and effort on it , and why i work in the commercial , public sphere , as opposed to the isolated , private sphere of fine art : because i want as many people as possible to see my work , notice it , be drawn into it , and be able to take something from it .
and i actually really feel that it 's worthwhile to spend my valuable and limited time on this earth in this way .
and i thank you for allowing me to show it to you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to talk today about a powerful and fundamental aspect of who we are : our voice .
each one of us has a unique voiceprint that reflects our age , our size , even our lifestyle and personality .
in the words of the poet longfellow , " the human voice is the organ of the soul . "
as a speech scientist , i 'm fascinated by how the voice is produced , and i have an idea for how it can be engineered .
that 's what i 'd like to share with you .
i 'm going to start by playing you a sample of a voice that you may recognize .
-lrb- recording -rrb- stephen hawking : " i would have thought it was fairly obvious what i meant . "
rupal patel : that was the voice of professor stephen hawking .
what you may not know is that same voice may also be used by this little girl who is unable to speak because of a neurological condition .
in fact , all of these individuals may be using the same voice , and that 's because there 's only a few options available .
in the u.s. alone , there are 2.5 million americans who are unable to speak , and many of whom use computerized devices to communicate .
now that 's millions of people worldwide who are using generic voices , including professor hawking , who uses an american-accented voice .
this lack of individuation of the synthetic voice really hit home when i was at an assistive technology conference a few years ago , and i recall walking into an exhibit hall and seeing a little girl and a grown man having a conversation using their devices , different devices , but the same voice .
and i looked around and i saw this happening all around me , literally hundreds of individuals using a handful of voices , voices that did n't fit their bodies or their personalities .
we would n't dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man .
so why then the same prosthetic voice ?
it really struck me , and i wanted to do something about this .
i 'm going to play you now a sample of someone who has , two people actually , who have severe speech disorders .
i want you to take a listen to how they sound .
they 're saying the same utterance .
-lrb- first voice -rrb- -lrb- second voice -rrb- you probably did n't understand what they said , but i hope that you heard their unique vocal identities .
so what i wanted to do next is , i wanted to find out how we could harness these residual vocal abilities and build a technology that could be customized for them , voices that could be customized for them .
so i reached out to my collaborator , tim bunnell .
dr. bunnell is an expert in speech synthesis , and what he 'd been doing is building personalized voices for people by putting together pre-recorded samples of their voice and reconstructing a voice for them .
these are people who had lost their voice later in life .
we did n't have the luxury of pre-recorded samples of speech for those born with speech disorder .
but i thought , there had to be a way to reverse engineer a voice from whatever little is left over .
so we decided to do exactly that .
we set out with a little bit of funding from the national science foundation , to create custom-crafted voices that captured their unique vocal identities .
we call this project vocalid , or vocal i.d. , for vocal identity .
now before i get into the details of how the voice is made and let you listen to it , i need to give you a real quick speech science lesson . okay ?
so first , we know that the voice is changing dramatically over the course of development .
children sound different from teens who sound different from adults .
we 've all experienced this .
fact number two is that speech is a combination of the source , which is the vibrations generated by your voice box , which are then pushed through the rest of the vocal tract .
these are the chambers of your head and neck that vibrate , and they actually filter that source sound to produce consonants and vowels .
so the combination of source and filter is how we produce speech .
and that happens in one individual .
now i told you earlier that i 'd spent a good part of my career understanding and studying the source characteristics of people with severe speech disorder , and what i 've found is that even though their filters were impaired , they were able to modulate their source : the pitch , the loudness , the tempo of their voice .
these are called prosody , and i 've been documenting for years that the prosodic abilities of these individuals are preserved .
so when i realized that those same cues are also important for speaker identity , i had this idea .
why do n't we take the source from the person we want the voice to sound like , because it 's preserved , and borrow the filter from someone about the same age and size , because they can articulate speech , and then mix them ?
because when we mix them , we can get a voice that 's as clear as our surrogate talker - that 's the person we borrowed the filter from - and is similar in identity to our target talker .
it 's that simple .
that 's the science behind what we 're doing .
so once you have that in mind , how do you go about building this voice ?
well , you have to find someone who is willing to be a surrogate .
it 's not such an ominous thing .
being a surrogate donor only requires you to say a few hundred to a few thousand utterances .
the process goes something like this .
-lrb- video -rrb- voice : things happen in pairs .
i love to sleep .
the sky is blue without clouds .
rp : now she 's going to go on like this for about three to four hours , and the idea is not for her to say everything that the target is going to want to say , but the idea is to cover all the different combinations of the sounds that occur in the language .
the more speech you have , the better sounding voice you 're going to have .
once you have those recordings , what we need to do into little snippets of speech , one- or two-sound combinations , sometimes even whole words that start populating a dataset or a database .
we 're going to call this database a voice bank .
now the power of the voice bank is that from this voice bank , we can now say any new utterance , like , " i love chocolate " - everyone needs to be able to say that - fish through that database and find all the segments necessary to say that utterance .
-lrb- video -rrb- voice : i love chocolate .
rp : so that 's speech synthesis .
it 's called concatenative synthesis , and that 's what we 're using .
that 's not the novel part .
what 's novel is how we make it sound like this young woman .
this is samantha .
i met her when she was nine , and since then , my team and i have been trying to build her a personalized voice .
we first had to find a surrogate donor , and then we had to have samantha produce some utterances .
what she can produce are mostly vowel-like sounds , but that 's enough for us to extract her source characteristics .
what happens next is best described by my daughter 's analogy . she 's six .
she calls it mixing colors to paint voices .
it 's beautiful . it 's exactly that .
samantha 's voice is like a concentrated sample of red food dye which we can infuse into the recordings of her surrogate to get a pink voice just like this .
-lrb- video -rrb- samantha : aaaaaah .
rp : so now , samantha can say this .
-lrb- video -rrb- samantha : this voice is only for me .
i ca n't wait to use my new voice with my friends .
rp : thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'll never forget the gentle smile that spread across her face when she heard that voice for the first time .
now there 's millions of people around the world like samantha , millions , and we 've only begun to scratch the surface .
what we 've done so far is we have a few surrogate talkers from around the u.s.
who have donated their voices , and we have been using those to build our first few personalized voices .
but there 's so much more work to be done .
for samantha , her surrogate came from somewhere in the midwest , a stranger who gave her the gift of voice .
and as a scientist , i 'm so excited to take this work out of the laboratory and finally into the real world so it can have real-world impact .
what i want to share with you next is how i envision taking this work to that next level .
i imagine a whole world of surrogate donors from all walks of life , different sizes , different ages , coming together in this voice drive to give people voices that are as colorful as their personalities .
to do that as a first step , we 've put together this website , vocalid.org , as a way to bring together those who want to join us as voice donors , as expertise donors , in whatever way to make this vision a reality .
they say that giving blood can save lives .
well , giving your voice can change lives .
all we need is a few hours of speech from our surrogate talker , and as little as a vowel from our target talker , to create a unique vocal identity .
so that 's the science behind what we 're doing .
i want to end by circling back to the human side that is really the inspiration for this work .
about five years ago , we built our very first voice for a little boy named william .
when his mom first heard this voice , she said , " this is what william would have sounded like had he been able to speak . "
and then i saw william typing a message on his device .
i wondered , what was he thinking ?
imagine carrying around someone else 's voice for nine years and finally finding your own voice .
imagine that .
this is what william said : " never heard me before . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- nine years ago , i worked for the u.s. government in iraq , helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure .
and i was there , and i worked in that job because i believe that technology can improve people 's lives .
one afternoon , i had tea with a storekeeper at the al rasheed hotel in baghdad , and he said to me , " you americans , you can put a man on the moon , but when i get home tonight , i wo n't be able to turn on my lights . "
at the time , the u.s. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction .
how do you ensure technology reaches users ?
how do you put it in their hands so that it is useful ?
so those are the questions that my colleagues and i at d-rev ask ourselves .
and d-rev is short for design revolution .
and i took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users , and not just any users , but customers who live on less than four dollars a day .
one of the key areas we 've been working on recently is medical devices , and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with iraq 's electricity grid then , there are some commonalities .
despite the advanced technology , it 's not reaching the people who need it most .
so i 'm going to tell you about one of the projects we 've been working on , the remotion knee , and it 's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees .
and this project started when the jaipur foot organization , the largest fitter of prosthetic limbs in the world , came to the bay area and they said , " we need a better knee . "
chances are , if you 're living on less than four dollars a day , and you 're an amputee , you 've lost your limb in a vehicle accident .
most people think it 's land mines , but it 's a vehicle accident .
you 're walking by the side of the road and you 're hit by a truck , or you 're trying to to jump on a moving train , you 're late for work , and your pant leg gets caught .
and the reality is that if you do n't have much money , like this young named kamal right here , the option you really have and how big a problem is this ?
there 's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee .
and what are their options ?
this is a high-end . this is what we 'd call a " smart knee . "
it 's got a microprocessor inside .
it can pretty much do anything , but it 's 20,000 dollars , and to give you a sense of who wears this , veterans , american veterans coming back from afghanistan or iraq would be fit with something like this .
this is a low-end titanium knee .
it 's a polycentric knee , and all that that means is the mechanism , is a four-bar mechanism , that mimics a natural human knee .
but at 1,400 dollars , it 's still too expensive for people like kamal .
and lastly , here you see a low-end knee .
this is a knee that 's been designed specifically for poor people .
and while you have affordability , you 've lost on functionality .
the mechanism here is a single axis , and a single axis is like a door hinge .
so you can think about how unstable that would be .
and this is the type of mechanism that the jaipur foot organization was using when they were looking for a better knee , and i just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like , because i 'm showing you all these knees and i imagine it 's hard to think how it all fits together .
so at the top you have a socket , and this fits over someone 's residual limb , and everyone 's residual limb is a little bit different .
and then you have the knee , and here i 've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates , and then a pylon , and then a foot .
and we 've been able to develop a knee , a polycentric knee , so that type of knee that acts like a human knee , mimics human gait , for 80 dollars retail .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but the key is , you can have this great invention , you can have this great design , but how do you get it to the people who most need it ?
how do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives ?
so at d-rev , we 've done some other projects , and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers , to users , to people who need it .
and the first thing is that the product needs to be world class .
it needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market .
regardless of your income level , you want the most beautiful , the best product that there is .
i 'm going to show you a video now of a man named ash . you can see him walking .
he 's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee .
and he 's doing a 10-meter walk test .
and you 'll notice that he 's struggling with stability as he 's walking .
and something that 's not obvious , that you ca n't see , is that it 's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling .
now this is a video of kamal .
you remember kamal earlier , holding the bamboo staff .
he 's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee , and he 's doing that same 10-meter walk test .
and you can see his stability is much better .
so world class is n't just about technical performance .
it 's also about human performance .
and most medical devices , we 've learned , as we 've dug in , are really designed for westerners , for wealthier economies .
but the reality is our users , our customers , they do different things . they sit cross-legged more .
we see that they squat . they kneel in prayer .
and we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market .
so the second thing we learned , and this leads into my second point , which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric .
and at d-rev , we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed .
so it 's not just the end user that you 're thinking about , but everyone who interacts with the product , so , for example , the prosthetist who fits the knee , but also the context in which the knee is being fit .
what is the local market like ?
how do all these components get to the clinic ?
do they all get there on time ? the supply chain .
everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user , and it goes in as part of the system , and it 's used .
so i wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version , the jaipur knee , so this is it right here .
-lrb- clicking -rrb- notice anything about it ?
it clicks .
we 'd seen that users had actually modified it .
so do you see that black strip right there ?
that 's a homemade noise dampener .
we also saw that our users had modified it in other ways .
you can see there that that particular amputee , he had wrapped bandages around the knee .
he 'd made a cosmesis .
and if you look at the knee , it 's got those pointy edges , right ?
so if you 're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari , it 's really obvious that you 're wearing a prosthetic limb , and in societies where there 's social stigma around being disabled , people are particularly acute about this .
so i 'm going to show you some of the modifications we did .
we did a lot of iterations , not just around this , but some other things .
but here we have the version three , the remotion knee , but if you look in here , you can see the noise dampener . it 's quieter .
the other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile .
we made it thinner .
and something that 's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production .
and this goes into my last point .
we really , truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it 's needed , it needs to be market-driven , and market-driven means that products are sold .
they 're not donated . they 're not heavily subsidized .
our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user .
it also has to be designed to be very affordable .
but a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer , and use is what creates impact .
and we believe that as designers , it holds us accountable to our customers .
and with centralized manufacturing , you can control the quality control , and you can hit that $ 80 price point with profit margins built in .
and now , those profit margins are critical , because if you want to scale , if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee , it needs to be economically sustainable .
so i want to give you a sense of where we are at .
we have fit over 5,000 amputees , and one of the big indicators we 're looking at , of course , is , does it improve lives ?
well , the standard is , is someone still wearing their knee six months later ?
the industry average is about 65 percent .
ours is 79 percent , and we 're hoping to get that higher .
right now , our knees are worn in 12 countries .
this is where we want to get , though , in the next three years .
we 'll double the impact in 2015 , and we 'll double it each of the following years after that .
but then we hit a new challenge , and that 's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees .
so i want to end with a story of pournima .
pournima was 18 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg , and she traveled 12 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee , and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers , she 's particularly meaningful to me as an engineer and as a woman , because she was in school , she had just started school to study engineering .
and she said , " well , now that i can walk again , i can go back and complete my studies . "
and to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users .
so thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , i am so bad at tech that my daughter - who is now 41 - when she was five , was overheard by me to say to a friend of hers , if it does n't bleed when you cut it , my daddy does n't understand it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the assignment i 've been given may be an insuperable obstacle for me , but i 'm certainly going to try .
what have i heard during these last four days ?
this is my third visit to ted .
one was to tedmed , and one , as you 've heard , was a regular ted two years ago .
i 've heard what i consider an extraordinary thing that i 've only heard a little bit in the two previous teds , and what that is is an interweaving and an interlarding , an intermixing , of a sense of social responsibility in so many of the talks - global responsibility , in fact , appealing to enlightened self-interest , but it goes far beyond enlightened self-interest .
one of the most impressive things about what some , perhaps 10 , of the speakers have been talking about is the realization , as you listen to them carefully , that they 're not saying : well , this is what we should do ; this is what i would like you to do .
it 's : this is what i have done because i 'm excited by it , because it 's a wonderful thing , and it 's done something for me and , of course , it 's accomplished a great deal .
it 's the old concept , the real greek concept , of philanthropy in its original sense : phil-anthropy , the love of humankind .
and the only explanation i can have for some of what you 've been hearing in the last four days is that it arises , in fact , out of a form of love .
and this gives me enormous hope .
and hope , of course , is the topic that i 'm supposed to be speaking about , which i 'd completely forgotten about until i arrived .
and when i did , i thought , well , i 'd better look this word up in the dictionary .
so , sarah and i - my wife - walked over to the public library , which is four blocks away , on pacific street , and we got the oed , and we looked in there , and there are 14 definitions of hope , none of which really hits you between the eyes as being the appropriate one .
and , of course , that makes sense , because hope is an abstract phenomenon ; it 's an abstract idea , it 's not a concrete word .
well , it reminds me a little bit of surgery .
if there 's one operation for a disease , you know it works .
if there are 15 operations , you know that none of them work .
and that 's the way it is with definitions of words .
if you have appendicitis , they take your appendix out , and you 're cured .
if you 've got reflux oesophagitis , there are 15 procedures , and joe schmo does it one way and will blow does it another way , and none of them work , and that 's the way it is with this word , hope .
they all come down to the idea of an expectation of something good that is due to happen .
and you know what i found out ?
the indo-european root of the word hope is a stem , k-e-u - we would spell it k-e-u ; it 's pronounced koy - and it is the same root from which the word curve comes from .
but what it means in the original indo-european is a change in direction , going in a different way .
and i find that very interesting and very provocative , because what you 've been hearing in the last couple of days is the sense of going in different directions : directions that are specific and unique to problems .
there are different paradigms .
you 've heard that word several times in the last four days , and everyone 's familiar with kuhnian paradigms .
so , when we think of hope now , we have to think of looking in other directions than we have been looking .
there 's another - not definition , but description , of hope that has always appealed to me , and it was one by václav havel in his perfectly spectacular book " breaking the peace , " in which he says that hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right , but the expectation that they will make sense regardless of how they come out .
i ca n't tell you how reassured i was by the very last sentence in that glorious presentation by dean kamen a few days ago .
i was n't sure i heard it right , so i found him in one of the inter-sessions .
he was talking to a very large man , but i did n't care .
i interrupted , and i said , " did you say this ? "
he said , " i think so . "
so , here 's what it is : i 'll repeat it .
" the world will not be saved by the internet . "
it 's wonderful . do you know what the world will be saved by ?
i 'll tell you . it 'll be saved by the human spirit .
and by the human spirit , i do n't mean anything divine , i do n't mean anything supernatural - certainly not coming from this skeptic .
what i mean is this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself or himself ; to arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something that at the beginning we thought perhaps we were not capable of .
on an elemental level , we have all felt that spirituality at the time of childbirth .
some of you have felt it in laboratories ; some of you have felt it at the workbench .
we feel it at concerts .
i 've felt it in the operating room , at the bedside .
it is an elevation of us beyond ourselves .
and i think that it 's going to be , in time , the elements of the human spirit that we 've been hearing about bit by bit by bit from so many of the speakers in the last few days .
and if there 's anything that has permeated this room , it is precisely that .
i 'm intrigued by a concept that was brought to life in the early part of the 19th century - actually , in the second decade of the 19th century - by a 27-year-old poet whose name was percy shelley .
now , we all think that shelley obviously is the great romantic poet that he was ; many of us tend to forget that he wrote some perfectly wonderful essays , too , and the most well-remembered essay is one called " a defence of poetry . "
now , it 's about five , six , seven , eight pages long , and it gets kind of deep and difficult after about the third page , but somewhere on the second page he begins talking about the notion that he calls " moral imagination . "
and here 's what he says , roughly translated : a man - generic man - a man , to be greatly good , must imagine clearly .
he must see himself and the world through the eyes of another , and of many others .
see himself and the world - not just the world , but see himself .
what is it that is expected of us by the billions of people who live in what laurie garrett the other day so appropriately called despair and disparity ?
what is it that they have every right to ask of us ?
what is it that we have every right to ask of ourselves , out of our shared humanity and out of the human spirit ?
well , you know precisely what it is .
there 's a great deal of argument about whether we , as the great nation that we are , should be the policeman of the world , the world 's constabulary , but there should be virtually no argument about whether we should be the world 's healer .
there has certainly been no argument about that in this room in the past four days .
so , if we are to be the world 's healer , every disadvantaged person in this world - including in the united states - becomes our patient .
every disadvantaged nation , and perhaps our own nation , becomes our patient .
so , it 's fun to think about the etymology of the word " patient . "
it comes initially from the latin patior , to endure , or to suffer .
so , you go back to the old indo-european root again , and what do you find ? the indo-european stem is pronounced payen - we would spell it p-a-e-n - and , lo and behold , mirabile dictu , it is the same root as the word compassion comes from , p-a-e-n .
so , the lesson is very clear . the lesson is that our patient - the world , and the disadvantaged of the world - that patient deserves our compassion .
but beyond our compassion , and far greater than compassion , is our moral imagination and our identification with each individual who lives in that world , not to think of them as a huge forest , but as individual trees .
of course , in this day and age , the trick is not to let each tree be obscured by that bush in washington that can get - can get in the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , here we are .
we are , should be , morally committed to being the healer of the world .
and we have had examples over and over and over again - you 've just heard one in the last 15 minutes - of people who have not only had that commitment , but had the charisma , the brilliance - and i think in this room it 's easy to use the word brilliant , my god - the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning of their quest , and who no doubt will continue to succeed , as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves in their cause .
now , if we 're talking about medicine , and we 're talking about healing , i 'd like to quote someone who has n't been quoted .
it seems to me everybody in the world 's been quoted here : pogo 's been quoted ; shakespeare 's been quoted backwards , forwards , inside out .
i would like to quote one of my own household gods .
i suspect he never really said this , because we do n't know what hippocrates really said , but we do know for sure that one of the great greek physicians said the following , and it has been recorded in one of the books attributed to hippocrates , and the book is called " precepts . "
and i 'll read you what it is .
remember , i have been talking about , essentially philanthropy : the love of humankind , the individual humankind and the individual humankind that can bring that kind of love translated into action , translated , in some cases , into enlightened self-interest .
and here he is , 2,400 years ago : " where there is love of humankind , there is love of healing . "
we have seen that here today with the sense , with the sensitivity - and in the last three days , and with the power of the indomitable human spirit .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , if you 're in the audience today , or maybe you 're watching this talk in some other time or place , you are a participant in the digital rights ecosystem .
whether you 're an artist , a technologist , a lawyer or a fan , the handling of copyright directly impacts your life .
rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership , it 's a complex web of relationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape .
youtube cares deeply about the rights of content owners , but in order to give them choices about what they can do with copies , mashups and more , we need to first identify when copyrighted material is uploaded to our site .
let 's look at a specific video so you can see how it works .
two years ago , recording artist chris brown released the official video of his single " forever . "
a fan saw it on tv , recorded it with her camera phone , and uploaded it to youtube .
because sony music had registered chris brown 's video in our content id system , within seconds of attempting to upload the video , the copy was detected , giving sony the choice of what to do next .
but how do we know that the user 's video was a copy ?
well , it starts with content owners delivering assets into our database , along with a usage policy that tells us what to do when we find a match .
we compare each upload against all of the reference files in our database .
this heat map is going to show you how the brain of the system works .
here we can see the original reference file being compared to the user generated content .
the system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there 's a match .
this means that we can identify a match even if the copy used is just a portion of the original file , plays it in slow motion and has degraded audio and video quality .
and we do this every time that a video is uploaded to youtube .
and that 's over 20 hours of video every minute .
when we find a match , we apply the policy that the rights owner has set down .
and the scale and the speed of this system is truly breathtaking .
we 're not just talking about a few videos , we 're talking about over 100 years of video every day , between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site .
when we compare those hundred years of video , we 're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database .
it would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day , without so much as a coffee break .
now , what do we do when we find a match ?
well , most rights owners , instead of blocking , will allow the copy to be published .
and then they benefit through the exposure , advertising and linked sales .
remember chris brown 's video " forever " ?
well , it had its day in the sun and then it dropped off the charts , and that looked like the end of the story , but sometime last year , a young couple got married .
this is their wedding video .
you may have seen it .
-lrb- music -rrb- what 's amazing about this is , if the processional of the wedding was this much fun , can you imagine how much fun the reception must have been ?
i mean , who are these people ?
i totally want to go to that wedding .
so their little wedding video went on to get over 40 million views .
and instead of sony blocking , they allowed the upload to occur .
and they put advertising against it and linked from it to itunes .
and the song , 18 months old , went back to number four on the itunes charts .
so sony is generating revenue from both of these .
and jill and kevin , the happy couple , they came back from their honeymoon and found that their video had gone crazy viral .
and they 've ended up on a bunch of talk shows , and they 've used it as an opportunity to make a difference .
the video 's inspired over 26,000 dollars in donations to end domestic violence .
the " jk wedding -lsb- entrance -rsb- dance " became so popular that nbc parodied it on the season finale of " the office , " which just goes to show , it 's truly an ecosystem of culture .
because it 's not just amateurs borrowing from big studios , but sometimes big studios borrowing back .
by empowering choice , we can create a culture of opportunity .
and all it took to change things around was to allow for choice through rights identification .
so why has no one ever solved this problem before ?
it 's because it 's a big problem , and it 's complicated and messy .
it 's not uncommon for a single video to have multiple rights owners .
there 's musical labels .
there 's multiple music publishers .
and each of these can vary by country .
there 's lots of cases where we have more than one work mashed together .
so we have to manage many claims to the same video .
youtube 's content id system addresses all of these cases .
but the system only works through the participation of rights owners .
if you have content that others are uploading to youtube , you should register in the content id system , and then you 'll have the choice about how your content is used .
and think carefully about the policies that you attach to that content .
by simply blocking all reuse , you 'll miss out on new art forms , new audiences , new distribution channels and new revenue streams .
but it 's not just about dollars and impressions .
just look at all the joy that was spread through progressive rights management and new technology .
and i think we can all agree that joy is definitely an idea worth spreading .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this is my grandfather , salman schocken , who was born into a poor and uneducated family with six children to feed , and when he was 14 years old , he was forced to drop out of school in order to help put bread on the table .
he never went back to school .
instead , he went on to build a glittering empire of department stores .
salman was the consummate perfectionist , and every one of his stores was a jewel of bauhaus architecture .
he was also the ultimate self-learner , and like everything else , he did it in grand style .
he surrounded himself with an entourage of young , unknown scholars like martin buber and shai agnon and franz kafka , and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace .
and yet , in the late ' 30s , salman saw what 's coming .
he fled germany , together with his family , leaving everything else behind .
his department stores confiscated , he spent the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture .
this high school dropout died at the age of 82 , a formidable intellectual , cofounder and first ceo of the hebrew university of jerusalem , and founder of schocken books , an acclaimed imprint that was later acquired by random house .
such is the power of self-study .
and these are my parents .
they too did not enjoy the privilege of college education .
they were too busy building a family and a country .
and yet , just like salman , they were lifelong , tenacious self-learners , and our home was stacked with thousands of books , records and artwork .
i remember quite vividly my father telling me that when everyone in the neighborhood will have a tv set , then we 'll buy a normal f.m. radio . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's me , i was going to say holding my first abacus , but actually holding what my father would consider an ample substitute to an ipad . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so one thing that i took from home is this notion that educators do n't necessarily have to teach .
instead , they can provide an environment and resources that tease out your natural ability to learn on your own .
self-study , self-exploration , self-empowerment : these are the virtues of a great education .
so i 'd like to share with you a story about a self-study , self-empowering computer science course that i built , together with my brilliant colleague noam nisan .
as you can see from the pictures , both noam and i had an early fascination with first principles , and over the years , as our knowledge of science and technology became more sophisticated , this early awe with the basics has only intensified .
so it 's not surprising that , about 12 years ago , when noam and i were already computer science professors , we were equally frustrated by the same phenomenon .
as computers became increasingly more complex , our students were losing the forest for the trees , and indeed , it is impossible to connect with the soul of the machine if you interact with a black box p.c. or a mac which is shrouded by numerous layers of closed , proprietary software .
so noam and i had this insight that if we want our students to understand how computers work , and understand it in the marrow of their bones , then perhaps the best way to go about it is to have them build a complete , working , general-purpose , useful computer , hardware and software , from the ground up , from first principles .
now , we had to start somewhere , and so noam and i decided to base our cathedral , so to speak , on the simplest possible building block , which is something called nand .
it is nothing more than a trivial logic gate with four input-output states .
so we now start this journey by telling our students that god gave us nand - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and told us to build a computer , and when we asked how , god said , " one step at a time . "
and then , following this advice , we start with this lowly , humble nand gate , and we walk our students through an elaborate sequence of projects in which they gradually build a chip set , a hardware platform , an assembler , a virtual machine , a basic operating system and a compiler for a simple , java-like language that we call " jack . "
the students celebrate the end of this tour de force by using jack to write all sorts of cool games like pong , snake and tetris .
you can imagine the tremendous joy of playing with a tetris game that you wrote in jack and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also , and then seeing the result running on a machine that you built starting with nothing more than a few thousand nand gates .
it 's a tremendous personal triumph of going from first principles all the way to a fantastically complex and useful system .
noam and i worked five years to facilitate this ascent and to create the tools and infrastructure that will enable students to build it in one semester .
and this is the great team that helped us make it happen .
the trick was to decompose the computer 's construction into numerous stand-alone modules , each of which could be individually specified , built and unit-tested in isolation from the rest of the project .
and from day one , noam and i decided to put all these building blocks freely available in open source on the web .
so chip specifications , apis , project descriptions , software tools , hardware simulators , cpu emulators , stacks of hundreds of slides , lectures - we laid out everything on the web and invited the world to come over , take whatever they need , and do whatever they want with it .
and then something fascinating happened .
the world came .
and in short order , thousands of people were building our machine .
and nand2tetris became one of the first massive , open , online courses , although seven years ago we had no idea that what we were doing is called moocs .
we just observed how self-organized courses were kind of spontaneously spawning out of our materials .
for example , pramode c.e. , an engineer from kerala , india , has organized groups of self-learners who build our computer under his good guidance .
and parag shah , another engineer , from mumbai , has unbundled our projects into smaller , more manageable bites that he now serves in his pioneering do-it-yourself computer science program .
the people who are attracted to these courses typically have a hacker mentality .
they want to figure out how things work , and they want to do it in groups , like this hackers club in washington , d.c. , that uses our materials to offer community courses .
and because these materials are widely available and open-source , different people take them to very different and unpredictable directions .
for example , yu fangmin , from guangzhou , has used fpga technology to build our computer and show others how to do the same using a video clip , and ben craddock developed a very nice computer game that unfolds inside our cpu architecture , which is quite a complex 3d maze that ben developed using the minecraft 3d simulator engine .
the minecraft community went bananas over this project , and ben became an instant media celebrity .
and indeed , for quite a few people , taking this nand2tetris pilgrimage , if you will , has turned into a life-changing experience .
for example , take dan rounds , who is a music and math major from east lansing , michigan .
a few weeks ago , dan posted a victorious post on our website , and i 'd like to read it to you .
so here 's what dan said .
" i did the coursework because understanding computers is important to me , just like literacy and numeracy , and i made it through . i never worked harder on anything , never been challenged to this degree .
but given what i now feel capable of doing , i would certainly do it again .
to anyone considering nand2tetris , it 's a tough journey , but you 'll be profoundly changed . "
so dan demonstrates the many self-learners who take this course off the web , on their own traction , on their own initiative , and it 's quite amazing because these people can not care less about grades .
they are doing it because of one motivation only .
they have a tremendous passion to learn .
and with that in mind , i 'd like to say a few words about traditional college grading .
i 'm sick of it .
we are obsessed with grades because we are obsessed with data , and yet grading takes away all the fun from failing , and a huge part of education is about failing .
courage , according to churchill , is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and -lsb- joyce -rsb- said that mistakes are the portals of discovery .
and yet we do n't tolerate mistakes , and we worship grades .
so we collect your b pluses and your a minuses and we aggregate them into a number like 3.4 , which is stamped on your forehead and sums up who you are .
well , in my opinion , we went too far with this nonsense , and grading became degrading .
so with that , i 'd like to say a few words about upgrading , and share with you a glimpse from my current project , which is different from the previous one , but it shares exactly the same characteristics of self-learning , learning by doing , self-exploration and community-building , and this project deals with k-12 math education , beginning with early age math , and we do it on tablets because we believe that math , like anything else , should be taught hands on .
so here 's what we do . basically , we developed numerous mobile apps , every one of them explaining a particular concept in math .
so for example , let 's take area .
when you deal with a concept like area - well , we also provide a set of tools that the child is invited to experiment with in order to learn .
so if area is what interests us , then one thing which is natural to do is to tile the area of this particular shape and simply count how many tiles it takes to cover it completely .
and this little exercise here gives you a first good insight of the notion of area .
moving along , what about the area of this figure ?
well , if you try to tile it , it does n't work too well , does it .
so instead , you can experiment with these different tools here by some process of guided trial and error , and at some point you will discover that one thing that you can do among several legitimate transformations is the following one . you can cut the figure , you can rearrange the parts , you can glue them and then proceed to tile just like we did before .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now this particular transformation did not change the area of the original figure , so a six-year-old who plays with this has just discovered a clever algorithm to compute the area of any given parallelogram .
we do n't replace teachers , by the way .
we believe that teachers should be empowered , not replaced .
moving along , what about the area of a triangle ?
so after some guided trial and error , the child will discover , with or without help , that he or she can duplicate the original figure and then take the result , transpose it , glue it to the original and then proceed -lsb- with -rsb- what we did before : cut , rearrange , paste - oops - paste and glue , and tile .
now this transformation has doubled the area of the original figure , and therefore we have just learned that the area of the triangle equals the area of this rectangle divided by two .
but we discovered it by self-exploration .
so , in addition to learning some useful geometry , the child has been exposed to some pretty sophisticated science strategies , like reduction , which is the art of transforming a complex problem into a simple one , or generalization , which is at the heart of any scientific discipline , or the fact that some properties are invariant under some transformations .
and all this is something that a very young child can pick up using such mobile apps .
so presently , we are doing the following : first of all , we are decomposing the k-12 math curriculum into numerous such apps .
and because we can not do it on our own , we 've developed a very fancy authoring tool that any author , any parent or actually anyone who has an interest in math education , can use this authoring tool to develop similar apps on tablets without programming .
and finally , we are putting together an adaptive ecosystem that will match different learners with different apps according to their evolving learning style .
the driving force behind this project is my colleague shmulik london , and , you see , just like salman did about 90 years ago , the trick is to surround yourself with brilliant people , because at the end , it 's all about people .
and a few years ago , i was walking in tel aviv and i saw this graffiti on a wall , and i found it so compelling that by now i preach it to my students , and i 'd like to try to preach it to you .
now , i do n't know how many people here are familiar with the term " mensch . "
it basically means to be human and to do the right thing .
and with that , what this graffiti says is , " high-tech schmigh-tech .
the most important thing is to be a mensch . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i first became fascinated with octopus at an early age .
i grew up in mobile , alabama - somebody 's got to be from mobile , right ? - and mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers , forming this beautiful delta .
and the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes , birds of every flavor .
it 's an absolute magical wonderland to live in - if you 're a kid interested in animals , to grow up in .
and this delta water flows to mobile bay , and finally into the gulf of mexico .
and i remember my first real contact with octopus was probably at age five or six .
i was in the gulf , and i was swimming around and saw a little octopus on the bottom .
and i reached down and picked him up , and immediately became fascinated and impressed by its speed and its strength and agility .
it was prying my fingers apart and moving to the back of my hand .
it was all i could do to hold onto this amazing creature .
then it sort of calmed down in the palms of my hands and started flashing colors , just pulsing all of these colors .
and as i looked at it , it kind of tucked its arms under it , raised into a spherical shape and turned chocolate brown with two white stripes .
i 'm going , " my gosh ! " i had never seen anything like this in my life !
so i marveled for a moment , and then decided it was time to release him , so i put him down .
the octopus left my hands and then did the damnedest thing : it landed on the bottom in the rubble and - fwoosh ! - vanished right before my eyes .
and i knew , right then , at age six , that is an animal that i want to learn more about . so i did .
and i went off to college and got a degree in marine zoology , and then moved to hawaii and entered graduate school at the university of hawaii .
and while a student at hawaii , i worked at the waikiki aquarium .
and the aquarium had a lot of big fish tanks but not a lot of invertebrate displays , and being the spineless guy , i thought , well i 'll just go out in the field and collect these wonderful animals i had been learning about as a student and bring them in , and i built these elaborate sets and put them on display .
now , the fish in the tanks were gorgeous to look at , but they did n't really interact with people .
but the octopus did .
if you walked up to an octopus tank , especially early in the morning before anyone arrived , the octopus would rise up and look at you and you 're thinking , " is that guy really looking at me ? he is looking at me ! "
and you walk up to the front of the tank . then you realize that these animals all have different personalities : some of them would hold their ground , others would slink into the back of the tank and disappear in the rocks , and one in particular , this amazing animal ...
i went up to the front of the tank , and he 's just staring at me , and he had little horns come up above his eyes .
so i went right up to the front of the tank - i was three or four inches from the front glass - and the octopus was sitting on a perch , a little rock , and he came off the rock and he also came down right to the front of the glass .
so i was staring at this animal about six or seven inches away , and at that time i could actually focus that close ; now as i look at my fuzzy fingers i realize those days are long gone .
anyway , there we were , staring at each other , and he reaches down and grabs an armful of gravel and releases it in the jet of water entering the tank from the filtration system , and - chk chk chk chk chk ! - this gravel hits the front of the glass and falls down .
he reaches up , takes another armful of gravel , releases it - chk chk chk chk chk ! - same thing .
then he lifts another arm and i lift an arm .
then he lifts another arm and i lift another arm .
and then i realize the octopus won the arms race , because i was out and he had six left . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but the only way i can describe what i was seeing that day was that this octopus was playing , which is a pretty sophisticated behavior for a mere invertebrate .
so , about three years into my degree , a funny thing happened on the way to the office , which actually changed the course of my life .
a man came into the aquarium . it 's a long story , but essentially he sent me and a couple of friends of mine to the south pacific to collect animals for him , and as we left , he gave us two 16-millimeter movie cameras .
he said , " make a movie about this expedition . "
" ok , a couple of biologists making a movie - this 'll be interesting , " and off we went . and we did , we made a movie , which had to be the worst movie ever made in the history of movie making , but it was a blast . i had so much fun .
and i remember that proverbial light going off in my head , thinking , " wait a minute .
maybe i can do this all the time .
yeah , i 'll be a filmmaker . "
so i literally came back from that job , quit school , hung my filmmaking shingle and just never told anyone that i did n't know what i was doing .
it 's been a good ride .
and what i learned in school though was really beneficial .
if you 're a wildlife filmmaker and you 're going out into the field to film animals , especially behavior , it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are , how they work and , you know , a bit about their behaviors .
but where i really learned about octopus was in the field , as a filmmaker making films with them , where you 're allowed to spend large periods of time with the animals , seeing octopus being octopus in their ocean homes .
i remember i took a trip to australia , went to an island called one tree island .
and apparently , evolution had occurred at a pretty rapid rate on one tree , between the time they named it and the time i arrived , because i 'm sure there were at least three trees on that island when we were there .
anyway , one tree is situated right next to a beautiful coral reef .
in fact , there 's a surge channel where the tide is moving back and forth , twice a day , pretty rapidly .
and there 's a beautiful reef , very complex reef , with lots of animals , including a lot of octopus .
and not uniquely but certainly , the octopus in australia are masters at camouflage .
there 's one right there .
so our first challenge was to find these things , and that was a challenge , indeed .
but the idea is , we were there for a month and i wanted to acclimate the animals to us so that we could see behaviors without disturbing them .
so the first week was pretty much spent just getting as close as we could , every day a little closer , a little closer , a little closer .
and you knew what the limit was : they would start getting twitchy and you 'd back up , come back in a few hours .
and after the first week , they ignored us .
it was like , " i do n't know what that thing is , but he 's no threat to me . "
so they went on about their business and from a foot away , we 're watching mating and courting and fighting and it is just an unbelievable experience .
and one of the most fantastic displays that i remember , or at least visually , was a foraging behavior .
and they had a lot of different techniques that they would use for foraging , but this particular one used vision .
and they would see a coral head , maybe 10 feet away , and start moving over toward that coral head .
and i do n't know whether they actually saw crab in it , or imagined that one might be , but whatever the case , they would leap off the bottom and go through the water and land right on top of this coral head , and then the web between the arms would completely engulf the coral head , and they would fish out , swim for crabs .
and as soon as the crabs touched the arm , it was lights out .
and i always wondered what happened under that web .
so we created a way to find out , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i got my first look at that famous beak in action .
it was fantastic .
if you 're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals , you might as well pick one that 's fairly common .
and octopus are , they live in all the oceans .
they also live deep .
and i ca n't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep , but whatever the case , i like that .
it 's like nothing you 've ever done .
if you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen , and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen , get in a sub .
you climb in , seal the hatch , turn on a little oxygen , turn on the scrubber , which removes the co2 in the air you breathe , and they chuck you overboard .
down you go . there 's no connection to the surface apart from a pretty funky radio .
and as you go down , the washing machine at the surface calms down .
and it gets quiet .
and it starts getting really nice .
and as you go deeper , that lovely , blue water you were launched in gives way to darker and darker blue .
and finally , it 's a rich lavender , and after a couple of thousand feet , it 's ink black .
and now you 've entered the realm of the mid-water community .
you could give an entire talk about the creatures that live in the mid-water .
suffice to say though , as far as i 'm concerned , without question , the most bizarre designs and outrageous behaviors are in the animals that live in the mid-water community .
but we 're just going to zip right past this area , this area that includes about 95 percent of the living space on our planet and go to the mid-ocean ridge , which i think is even more extraordinary .
the mid-ocean ridge is a huge mountain range , 40,000 miles long , snaking around the entire globe .
and they 're big mountains , thousands of feet tall , some of which are tens of thousands of feet and bust through the surface , creating islands like hawaii .
and the top of this mountain range is splitting apart , creating a rift valley .
and when you dive into that rift valley , that 's where the action is because literally thousands of active volcanoes are going off at any point in time all along this 40,000 mile range .
and as these tectonic plates are spreading apart , magma , lava is coming up and filling those gaps , and you 're looking land - new land - being created right before your eyes .
and over the tops of them is 3,000 to 4,000 meters of water creating enormous pressure , forcing water down through the cracks toward the center of the earth , until it hits a magma chamber where it becomes superheated and supersaturated with minerals , reverses its flow and starts shooting back to the surface and is ejected out of the earth like a geyser at yellowstone .
in fact , this whole area is like a yellowstone national park with all of the trimmings .
and this vent fluid is about 600 or 700 degrees f.
the surrounding water is just a couple of degrees above freezing .
so it immediately cools , and it can no longer hold in suspension all of the material that it 's dissolved , and it precipitates out , forming black smoke .
and it forms these towers , these chimneys that are 10 , 20 , 30 feet tall .
and all along the sides of these chimneys is shimmering with heat and loaded with life .
you 've got black smokers going all over the place and chimneys that have tube worms that might be eight to 10 feet long .
and out of the tops of these tube worms are these beautiful red plumes .
and living amongst the tangle of tube worms is an entire community of animals : shrimp , fish , lobsters , crab , clams and swarms of arthropods that are playing that dangerous game between over here is scalding hot and freezing cold .
and this whole ecosystem was n't even known about until 33 years ago .
and it completely threw science on its head .
it made scientists rethink where life on earth might have actually begun .
and before the discovery of these vents , all life on earth , the key to life on earth , was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis .
but down there , there is no sun , there is no photosynthesis ; it 's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it , and it 's all so ephemeral .
you might film this unbelievable hydrothermal vent , which you think at the time has to be on another planet .
it 's amazing to think that this is actually on earth ; it looks like aliens in an alien environment .
but you go back to the same vent eight years later and it can be completely dead .
there 's no hot water .
all of the animals are gone , they 're dead , and the chimneys are still there creating a really nice ghost town , an eerie , spooky ghost town , but essentially devoid of animals , of course .
but 10 miles down the ridge ...
pshhh ! there 's another volcano going .
and there 's a whole new hydrothermal vent community that has been formed .
and this kind of life and death of hydrothermal vent communities is going on every 30 or 40 years all along the ridge .
and that ephemeral nature of the hydrothermal vent community is n't really different from some of the areas that i 've seen in 35 years of traveling around , making films .
where you go and film a really nice sequence at a bay .
and you go back , and i 'm at home , and i 'm thinking , " okay , what can i shoot ...
ah ! i know where i can shoot that .
there 's this beautiful bay , lots of soft corals and stomatopods . "
and you show up , and it 's dead .
there 's no coral , algae growing on it , and the water 's pea soup .
you think , " well , what happened ? "
and you turn around , and there 's a hillside behind you with a neighborhood going in , and bulldozers are pushing piles of soil back and forth .
and over here there 's a golf course going in .
and this is the tropics .
it 's raining like crazy here .
so this rainwater is flooding down the hillside , carrying with it sediments from the construction site , smothering the coral and killing it .
and fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course - the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals , fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom - and there 's your pea soup .
but , encouragingly , i 've seen just the opposite .
i 've been to a place that was a pretty trashed bay .
and i looked at it , just said , " yuck , " and go and work on the other side of the island .
five years later , come back , and that same bay is now gorgeous . it 's beautiful .
it 's got living coral , fish all over the place , crystal clear water , and you go , " how did that happen ? "
well , how it happened is the local community galvanized .
they recognized what was happening on the hillside and put a stop to it ; enacted laws and made permits required to do responsible construction and golf course maintenance and stopped the sediments flowing into the bay , and stopped the chemicals flowing into the bay , and the bay recovered .
the ocean has an amazing ability to recover , if we 'll just leave it alone .
i think margaret mead said it best .
she said that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world .
indeed , it 's the only thing that ever has .
and a small group of thoughtful people changed that bay .
i 'm a big fan of grassroots organizations .
i 've been to a lot of lectures where , at the end of it , inevitably , one of the first questions that comes up is , " but , but what can i do ?
i 'm an individual . i 'm one person .
and these problems are so large and global , and it 's just overwhelming . "
fair enough question .
my answer to that is do n't look at the big , overwhelming issues of the world .
look in your own backyard .
look in your heart , actually .
what do you really care about that is n't right where you live ?
and fix it .
create a healing zone in your neighborhood and encourage others to do the same .
and maybe these healing zones can sprinkle a map , little dots on a map .
and in fact , the way that we can communicate today - where alaska is instantly knowing what 's going on in china , and the kiwis did this , and then over in england they tried to ...
and everybody is talking to everyone else - it 's not isolated points on a map anymore , it 's a network we 've created .
and maybe these healing zones can start growing , and possibly even overlap , and good things can happen .
so that 's how i answer that question .
look in your own backyard , in fact , look in the mirror .
what can you do that is more responsible than what you 're doing now ?
and do that , and spread the word .
the vent community animals ca n't really do much about the life and death that 's going on where they live , but up here we can .
in theory , we 're thinking , rational human beings .
and we can make changes to our behavior that will influence and affect the environment , like those people changed the health of that bay .
now , sylvia 's ted prize wish was to beseech us to do anything we could , everything we could , to set aside not pin pricks , but significant expanses of the ocean for preservation , " hope spots , " she calls them .
and i applaud that . i loudly applaud that .
and it 's my hope that some of these " hope spots " can be in the deep ocean , an area that has historically been seriously neglected , if not abused .
the term " deep six " comes to mind : " if it 's too big or too toxic for a landfill , deep six it ! "
so , i hope that we can also keep some of these " hope spots " in the deep sea .
now , i do n't get a wish , but i certainly can say that i will do anything i can to support sylvia earle 's wish .
and that i do .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to do pretty much what i did the first time , which is to choose a light-hearted theme .
last time , i talked about death and dying .
this time , i 'm going to talk about mental illness .
but it has to be technological , so i 'll talk about electroshock therapy . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , ever since man had any notion that some of his other people , his colleagues , could be different , could be strange , could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia , he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body .
so , the way of treating these diseases in early times was to , in some way or other , exorcise those evil spirits , and this is still going on , as you know .
but it was n't enough to use the priests .
when medicine became somewhat scientific , in about 450 bc , with hippocrates and those boys , they tried to look for herbs , plants that would literally shake the bad spirits out .
so , they found certain plants that could cause convulsions .
and the herbals , the botanical books of up to the late middle ages , the renaissance are filled with prescriptions for causing convulsions to shake the evil spirits out .
finally , in about the sixteenth century , a physician whose name was theophrastus bombastus aureolus von hohenheim , called paracelsus , a name probably familiar to some people here - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - good , old paracelsus found that he could predict the degree of convulsion by using a measured amount of camphor to produce the convulsion .
can you imagine going to your closet , pulling out a mothball , and chewing on it if you 're feeling depressed ?
it 's better than prozac , but i would n't recommend it .
so what we see in the seventeenth , eighteenth century is the continued search for medications other than camphor that 'll do the trick .
well , along comes benjamin franklin , and he comes close to convulsing himself with a bolt of electricity off the end of his kite .
and so people begin thinking in terms of electricity to produce convulsions .
and then , we fast-forward to about 1932 , when three italian psychiatrists , who were largely treating depression , began to notice among their patients , who were also epileptics , that if they had an epileptic - a series of epileptic fits , a lot of them in a row - the depression would very frequently lift .
not only would it lift , but it might never return .
so they got very interested in producing convulsions , measured types of convulsions .
and they thought , " well , we 've got electricity , we 'll plug somebody into the wall .
that always makes hair stand up and people shake a lot . "
so , they tried it on a few pigs , and none of the pigs were killed .
so , they went to the police and they said , " we know that at the rome railroad station , there are all these lost souls wandering around , muttering gibberish . can you bring one of them to us ? "
someone who is , as the italians say , " cagoots . "
so they found this " cagoots " guy , a 39-year-old man who was really hopelessly schizophrenic , who was known , had been known for months , to be literally defecating on himself , talking nothing that made any sense , and they brought him into the hospital .
so these three psychiatrists , after about two or three weeks of observation , laid him down on a table , connected his temples to a very small source of current .
they thought , " well , we 'll try 55 volts , two-tenths of a second .
that 's not going to do anything terrible to him . "
so they did that .
well , i have the following from a firsthand observer , who told me this about 35 years ago , when i was thinking about these things for some research project of mine .
he said , " this fellow " - remember , he was n't even put to sleep - " after this major grand mal convulsion , sat right up , looked at these three fellas and said , ' what the fuck are you assholes trying to do ? ' " -lrb- laughter -rrb- if i could only say that in italian .
well , they were happy as could be , because he had n't said a rational word in the weeks of observation .
so they plugged him in again , and this time they used 110 volts for half a second .
and to their amazement , after it was over , he began speaking like he was perfectly well .
he relapsed a little bit , they gave him a series of treatments , and he was essentially cured .
but of course , having schizophrenia , within a few months , it returned .
but they wrote a paper about this , and everybody in the western world began using electricity to convulse people who were either schizophrenic or severely depressed .
it did n't work very well on the schizophrenics , but it was pretty clear in the ' 30s and by the middle of the ' 40s that electroconvulsive therapy was very , very effective in the treatment of depression .
and of course , in those days , there were no antidepressant drugs , and it became very , very popular .
they would anesthetize people , convulse them , but the real difficulty was that there was no way to paralyze muscles .
so people would have a real grand mal seizure .
bones were broken . especially in old , fragile people , you could n't use it .
and then in the 1950s , late 1950s , the so-called muscle relaxants were developed by pharmacologists , and it got so that you could induce a complete convulsion , an electroencephalographic convulsion - you could see it on the brain waves - without causing any convulsion in the body except a little bit of twitching of the toes .
so again , it was very , very popular and very , very useful .
well , you know , in the middle ' 60s , the first antidepressants came out . tofranil was the first .
in the late ' 70s , early ' 80s , there were others , and they were very effective .
and patients ' rights groups seemed to get very upset about the kinds of things that they would witness .
and so the whole idea of electroconvulsive , electroshock therapy disappeared , but has had a renaissance in the last 10 years .
and the reason that it has had a renaissance is that probably about 10 percent of the people , severe depressives , do not respond , regardless of what is done for them .
now , why am i telling you this story at this meeting ?
i 'm telling you this story , because actually ever since richard called me and asked me to talk about - as he asked all of his speakers - to talk about something that would be new to this audience , that we had never talked about , never written about , i 've been planning this moment .
this reason really is that i am a man who , almost 30 years ago , had his life saved by two long courses of electroshock therapy .
and let me tell you this story .
i was , in the 1960s , in a marriage . to use the word bad would be perhaps the understatement of the year .
it was dreadful .
there are , i 'm sure , enough divorced people in this room to know about the hostility , the anger , who knows what .
being someone who had had a very difficult childhood , a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty but close .
it had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke english , no one could read or write english .
it had to do with death and disease and lots of other things .
i was a little prone to depression .
so , as things got worse , as we really began to hate each other , i became progressively depressed over a period of a couple of years , trying to save this marriage , which was inevitably not to be saved .
finally , i would schedule - all my major surgical cases , i was scheduling them for 12 , one o 'clock in the afternoon , because i could n't get out of bed before about 11 o 'clock .
and anybody who 's been depressed here knows what that 's like .
i could n't even pull the covers off myself .
well , you 're in a university medical center , where everybody knows everybody , and it 's perfectly clear to my colleagues , so my referrals began to decrease .
as my referrals began to decrease , i clearly became increasingly depressed until i thought , my god , i ca n't work anymore .
and , in fact , it did n't make any difference because i did n't have any patients anymore .
so , with the advice of my physician , i had myself admitted to the acute care psychiatric unit of our university hospital .
and my colleagues , who had known me since medical school in that place , said , " do n't worry , chap . six weeks , you 're back in the operating room . everything 's going to be great . "
well , you know what bovine stercus is ?
that proved to be a lot of bovine stercus .
i know some people who got tenure in that place with lies like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was one of their failures .
but it was n't that simple . because by the time i got out of that unit , i was not functional at all .
i could hardly see five feet in front of myself .
i shuffled when i walked . i was bowed over .
i rarely bathed . i sometimes did n't shave . it was dreadful .
and it was clear - not to me , because nothing was clear to me at that time anymore - that i would need long-term hospitalization in that awful place called a mental hospital .
so i was admitted , in 1973 , in the spring of 1973 , to the institute of living , which used to be called the hartford retreat .
it was founded in the eighteenth century , the largest psychiatric hospital in the state of connecticut , other than the huge public hospitals that existed at that time .
and they tried everything they had .
they tried the usual psychotherapy .
they tried every medication available in those days .
and they did have tofranil and other things - mellaril , who knows what .
nothing happened except that i got jaundiced from one of these things .
and finally , because i was well known in connecticut , they decided they better have a meeting of the senior staff .
all the senior staff got together , and i later found out what happened .
they put all their heads together and they decided that there was nothing that could be done for this surgeon who had essentially separated himself from the world , who by that time had become so overwhelmed , not just with depression and feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy , but with obsessional thinking , obsessional thinking about coincidences .
and there were particular numbers that every time i saw them , just got me dreadfully upset - all kinds of ritualistic observances , just awful , awful stuff .
remember when you were a kid , and you had to step on every line ?
well , i was a grown man who had all of these rituals , and it got so there was a throbbing , there was a ferocious fear in my head .
you 've seen this painting by edvard munch , the scream . every moment was a scream .
it was impossible . so they decided there was no therapy , there was no treatment . but there was one treatment , which actually had been pioneered at the hartford hospital in the early 1940s , and you can imagine what it was . it was pre-frontal lobotomy .
so they decided - i did n't know this , again , i found this out later - that the only thing that could be done was for this 43-year-old man to have a pre-frontal lobotomy .
well , as in all hospitals , there was a resident assigned to my case . he was 27 years old , and he would meet with me two or three times a week .
and of course , i had been there , what , three or four months at the time .
and he asked to meet with the senior staff , and they agreed to meet with him because he was very well thought of in that place .
they thought he had a really extraordinary future .
and he dug in his heels and said , " no . i know this man better than any of you . i have met with him over and over again .
you 've just seen him from time to time . you 've read reports and so forth .
i really honestly believe that the basic problem here is pure depression , and all of the obsessional thinking comes out of it .
and you know , of course , what 'll happen if you do a pre-frontal lobotomy .
any of the results along the spectrum , from pretty bad to terrible , terrible , terrible is going to happen . if he does the best he can , he will have no further obsessions , probably no depression , but his affect will be dulled , he will never go back to surgery , he will never be the loving father that he was to his two children , his life will be changed . if he has the usual result , he will end up like ' one flew over the cuckoo 's nest . ' and you know about that , just essentially in a stupor the rest of his life . "
well , he said , " ca n't we try a course of electroshock therapy ? "
and you know why they agreed ? they agreed to humor him .
they just thought , " well , we 'll give a course of 10 .
and so we 'll lose a little time . big deal . it does n't make any difference . "
so they gave the course of 10 , and the first - the usual course , incidentally , was six to eight and still is six to eight .
plugged me into the wires , put me to sleep , gave me the muscle relaxant .
six did n't work . seven did n't work .
eight did n't work . at nine , i noticed - and it 's wonderful that i could notice anything - i noticed a change . and at 10 , i noticed a real change .
and he went back to them , and they agreed to do another 10 .
again , not a single one of them - i think there are about seven or eight of them - thought this would do any good . they thought this was a temporary change .
but , lo and behold , by 16 , by 17 , there were demonstrable differences in the way i felt .
by 18 and 19 , i was sleeping through the night .
and by 20 , i had the sense , i really had the sense that i could overcome this , that i was now strong enough that by an act of will , i could blow the obsessional thinking away .
i could blow the depression away .
and i 've never forgotten - i never will forget - standing in the kitchen of the unit , it was a sunday morning in january of 1974 , standing in the kitchen by myself and thinking , " i 've got the strength now to do this . "
it was as though those tightly coiled wires in my head had been disconnected and i could think clearly .
but i need a formula . i need some thing to say to myself when i begin thinking obsessionally , obsessively .
well , the gilbert and sullivan fans in this room will remember " ruddigore , " and they will remember mad margaret , and they will remember that she was married to a fellow named sir despard murgatroyd .
and she used to go nuts , every five minutes or so in the play , and he said to her , " we must have a word to bring you back to reality , and the word , my dear , will be ' basingstoke . " ' so every time she got a little nuts , he would say , " basingstoke ! " and she would say , " basingstoke , it is . " and she would be fine for a little while .
well , you know , i 'm from the bronx . i ca n't say " basingstoke . "
but i had something better . and it was very simple .
it was , " ah , fuck it ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- much better than " basingstoke , " at least for me . and it worked - my god , it worked .
every time i would begin thinking obsessionally - again , once more , after 20 shock treatments - i would say , " ah , fuck it . "
and things got better and better , and within three or four months , i was discharged from that hospital , and i joined a group of surgeons where i could work with other people in the community , not in new haven , but fairly close by .
i stayed there for three years .
at the end of three years , i went back to new haven , had remarried by that time .
i brought my wife with me , actually , to make sure i could get through this .
my children came back to live with us .
we had two more children after that .
resuscitated the career , even better than it had been before .
went right back into the university and began to write books .
well , you know , it 's been a wonderful life .
it 's been , as i said , close to 30 years .
i stopped doing surgery about six years ago and became a full-time writer , as many people know .
but it 's been very exciting . it 's been very happy .
every once in a while , i have to say , " ah , fuck it . "
every once in a while , i get somewhat depressed and a little obsessional .
so , i 'm not free of all of this . but it 's worked . it 's always worked .
why have i chosen , after never , ever talking about this , to talk about it now ?
well , those of you who know some of these books know that one is about death and dying , one is about the human body and the human spirit , one is about the way mystical thoughts are constantly in our minds , and they have always to do with my own personal experiences .
one might think reading these books - and i 've gotten thousands of letters about them by people who do think this - that based on my life 's history as i 've portrayed in the books , my early life 's history , i am someone who has overcome adversity .
that i am someone who has drunk , drank , drunk of the bitter dregs of near-disaster in childhood and emerged not just unscathed but strengthened .
i really have it figured out , so that i can advise people about death and dying , so that i can talk about mysticism and the human spirit .
and i 've always felt guilty about that .
i 've always felt that somehow i was an impostor because my readers do n't know what i have just told you .
it 's known by some people in new haven , obviously , but it is not generally known .
so one of the reasons that i have come here to talk about this today is to - frankly , selfishly - unburden myself and let it be known that this is not an untroubled mind that has written all of these books .
but more importantly , i think , is the fact that a very significant proportion of people in this audience are under 30 , and there are many , of course , who are well over 30 .
for people under 30 , and it looks to me like almost all of you - i would say all of you - are either on the cusp of a magnificent and exciting career or right into a magnificent and exciting career : anything can happen to you . things change .
accidents happen . something from childhood comes back to haunt you .
you can be thrown off the track .
i hope it happens to none of you , but it will probably happen to a small percentage of you .
to those to whom it does n't happen , there will be adversities .
if i , with the bleakness of spirit , with no spirit , that i had in the 1970s and no possibility of recovery , as far as that group of very experienced psychiatrists thought , if i can find my way back from this , believe me , anybody can find their way back from any adversity that exists in their lives .
and for those who are older , who have lived through perhaps not something as bad as this , but who have lived through difficult times , perhaps where they lost everything , as i did , and started out all over again , some of these things will seem very familiar .
there is recovery .
there is redemption . and there is resurrection .
there are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied , and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery , but it actually happens . and it happens a lot .
perhaps the most popular resurrection theme , outside of specifically religious ones , is the one about the phoenix , the ancient story of the phoenix , who , every 500 years , resurrects itself from its own ashes to go on to live a life that is even more beautiful than it was before . richard , thanks very much .
great creativity . in times of need , we need great creativity .
discuss . great creativity is astonishingly , absurdly , rationally , irrationally powerful .
great creativity can spread tolerance , champion freedom , make education seem like a bright idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- great creativity can turn a spotlight on deprivation , or show that deprivation ai n't necessarily so .
great creativity can make politicians electable , or parties unelectable .
it can make war seem like tragedy or farce .
creativity is the meme-maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips .
it 's the pathfinder that shows us a simple road through an impenetrable moral maze .
science is clever , but great creativity is something less knowable , more magical . and now we need that magic .
this is a time of need .
our climate is changing quickly , too quickly .
and great creativity is needed to do what it does so well : to provoke us to think differently with dramatic creative statements .
to tempt us to act differently with delightful creative scraps .
here is one such scrap from an initiative i 'm involved in using creativity to inspire people to be greener .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : you know , rather than drive today , i 'm going to walk .
narrator : and so he walked , and as he walked he saw things .
strange and wonderful things he would not otherwise have seen .
a deer with an itchy leg . a flying motorcycle .
a father and daughter separated from a bicycle by a mysterious wall .
and then he stopped . walking in front of him was her .
the woman who as a child had skipped with him through fields and broken his heart .
sure , she had aged a little .
in fact , she had aged a lot .
but he felt all his old passion for her return .
" ford , " he called softly . for that was her name .
" do n't say another word , gusty , " she said , for that was his name .
" i know a tent next to a caravan , exactly 300 yards from here .
let 's go there and make love . in the tent . "
ford undressed . she spread one leg , and then the other .
gusty entered her boldly and made love to her rhythmically while she filmed him , because she was a keen amateur pornographer .
the earth moved for both of them .
and they lived together happily ever after .
and all because he decided to walk that day .
-lrb- applause -rrb- andy hobsbawm : we 've got the science , we 've had the debate .
the moral imperative is on the table .
great creativity is needed to take it all , make it simple and sharp .
to make it connect . to make it make people want to act .
so this is a call , a plea , to the incredibly talented ted community .
let 's get creative against climate change .
and let 's do it soon . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hawa abdi : many people - 20 years for somalia - -lsb- were -rsb- fighting .
so there was no job , no food .
children , most of them , became very malnourished , like this .
deqo mohamed : so as you know , always in a civil war , the ones affected most -lsb- are -rsb- the women and children .
so our patients are women and children .
and they are in our backyard .
it 's our home . we welcome them .
that 's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people , where 75 percent of them are women and children .
pat mitchell : and this is your hospital . this is the inside .
ha : we are doing c-sections and different operations because people need some help .
there is no government to protect them .
dm : every morning we have about 400 patients , maybe more or less .
but sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses , and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them .
but we take the severe ones , and we reschedule the other ones the next day .
it is very tough .
and as you can see , it 's the women who are carrying the children ; it 's the women who come into the hospitals ; it 's the women -lsb- are -rsb- building the houses .
that 's their house .
and we have a school . this is our bright - we opened -lsb- in the -rsb- last two years -lsb- an -rsb- elementary school where we have 850 children , and the majority are women and girls .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : and the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic .
would you explain the rules for admission ?
ha : the people who are coming to us , we are welcoming .
we are sharing with them whatever we have .
but there are only two rules .
first rule : there is no clan distinguished and political division in somali society .
-lsb- whomever -rsb- makes those things we throw out .
the second : no man can beat his wife .
if he beat , we will put -lsb- him -rsb- in jail , and we will call the eldest people .
until they identify this case , we 'll never release him .
that 's our two rules .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the other thing that i have realized , that the woman is the most strong person all over the world .
because the last 20 years , the somali woman has stood up .
they were the leaders , and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations .
we are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war .
we can reconcile .
we can do everything .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dm : as my mother said , we are the future hope , and the men are only killing in somalia .
so we came up with these two rules .
in a camp with 90,000 people , you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights .
so there is no clan division , and no man can beat his wife .
and we have a little storage room where we converted a jail .
so if you beat your wife , you 're going to be there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so empowering the women and giving the opportunity - we are there for them . they are not alone for this .
pm : you 're running a medical clinic .
it brought much , much needed medical care to people who would n't get it .
you 're also running a civil society .
you 've created your own rules , in which women and children are getting a different sense of security .
talk to me about your decision , dr. abdi , and your decision , dr. mohamed , to work together - for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances .
ha : my age - because i was born in 1947 - we were having , at that time , government , law and order .
but one day , i went to the hospital - my mother was sick - and i saw the hospital , how they -lsb- were -rsb- treating the doctors , how they -lsb- are -rsb- committed to help the sick people .
i admired them , and i decided to become a doctor .
my mother died , unfortunately , when i was 12 years -lsb- old -rsb- .
then my father allowed me to proceed -lsb- with -rsb- my hope .
my mother died in -lsb- a -rsb- gynecology complication , so i decided to become a gynecology specialist .
that 's why i became a doctor .
so dr. deqo has to explain .
dm : for me , my mother was preparing -lsb- me -rsb- when i was a child to become a doctor , but i really did n't want to .
maybe i should become an historian , or maybe a reporter .
i loved it , but it did n't work .
when the war broke out - civil war - i saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help , and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in somalia and help the women and children .
and i thought , maybe i can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i went to russia , and my mother also , -lsb- during the -rsb- time of -lsb- the -rsb- soviet union .
so some of our character , maybe we will come with a strong soviet background of training .
so that 's how i decided -lsb- to do -rsb- the same .
my sister was different .
she 's here . she 's also a doctor .
she graduated in russia also .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war - when i was 16 , and my sister was 11 , when the civil war broke out .
so it was the need and the people we saw in the early ' 90s - that 's what made us go back and work for them .
pm : so what is the biggest challenge working , mother and daughter , in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations ?
ha : yes , i was working in a tough situation , very dangerous .
and when i saw the people who needed me , i was staying with them to help , because i -lsb- could -rsb- do something for them .
most people fled abroad .
but i remained with those people , and i was trying to do something - -lsb- any -rsb- little thing i -lsb- could -rsb- do .
i succeeded in my place .
now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other , who are not fighting .
but we try to stand on our feet , to do something , little things , we can for our people .
and i 'm thankful for my daughters .
when they come to me , they help me to treat the people , to help .
they do everything for them .
they have done what i desire to do for them .
pm : what 's the best part of working with your mother , and the most challenging part for you ?
dm : she 's very tough ; it 's most challenging .
she always expects us to do more .
and really when you think -lsb- you -rsb- can not do it , she will push you , and i can do it .
that 's the best part .
she shows us , trains us how to do and how to be better -lsb- people -rsb- and how to do long hours in surgery - 300 patients per day , 10 , 20 surgeries , and still you have to manage the camp - that 's how she trains us .
it is not like beautiful offices here , 20 patients , you 're tired .
you see 300 patients , 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage .
pm : but you do it for good reasons .
-lrb- applause -rrb- wait . wait .
ha : thank you .
dm : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ha : thank you very much . dm : thank you very much .
i thought i would read poems i have that relate to the subject of youth and age .
i was sort of astonished to find out how many i have actually .
the first one is dedicated to spencer , and his grandmother , who was shocked by his work .
my poem is called " dirt . "
my grandmother is washing my mouth out with soap ; half a long century gone and still she comes at me with that thick cruel yellow bar .
all because of a word i said , not even said really , only repeated .
but " open , " she says , " open up ! "
her hand clawing at my head .
i know now her life was hard ; she lost three children as babies , then her husband died too , leaving young sons , and no money .
she 'd stand me in the sink to pee because there was never room in the toilet .
but oh , her soap !
might its bitter burning have been what made me a poet ?
the street she lived on was unpaved , her flat , two cramped rooms and a fetid kitchen where she stalked and caught me .
dare i admit that after she did it i never really loved her again ?
she lived to a hundred , even then . all along it was the sadness , the squalor , but i never , until now loved her again .
when that was published in a magazine i got an irate letter from my uncle .
" you have maligned a great woman . "
it took some diplomacy .
this is called " the dress . "
it 's a longer poem .
in those days , those days which exist for me only as the most elusive memory now , when often the first sound you 'd hear in the morning would be a storm of birdsong , then the soft clop of the hooves of the horse hauling a milk wagon down your block , and the last sound at night as likely as not would be your father pulling up in his car , having worked late again , always late , and going heavily down to the cellar , to the furnace , to shake out the ashes and damp the draft before he came upstairs to fall into bed -
in those long-ago days , women , my mother , my friends ' mothers , our neighbors , all the women i knew - wore , often much of the day , what were called housedresses , cheap , printed , pulpy , seemingly purposefully shapeless light cotton shifts that you wore over your nightgown and , when you had to go look for a child , hang wash on the line , or run down to the grocery store on the corner , under a coat , the twisted hem of the nightgown always lank and yellowed , dangling beneath .
more than the curlers some of the women seemed constantly to have in their hair in preparation for some great event - a ball , one would think - that never came to pass ; more than the way most women 's faces not only were never made up during the day , but seemed scraped , bleached , and , with their plucked eyebrows , scarily masklike ; more than all that it was those dresses that made women so unknowable and forbidding , adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access , and boys no conception .
only later would i see the dresses also as a proclamation : that in your dim kitchen , your laundry , your bleak concrete yard , what you revealed of yourself was a fabulation ; your real sensual nature , veiled in those sexless vestments , was utterly your dominion .
in those days , one hid much else as well : grown men did n't embrace one another , unless someone had died , and not always then ; you shook hands or , at a ball game , thumped your friend 's back and exchanged blows meant to be codes for affection ; once out of childhood you 'd never again know the shock of your father 's whiskers on your cheek , not until mores at last had evolved , and you could hug another man , then hold on for a moment , then even kiss -lrb- your fathers bristles white and stiff now -rrb- .
what release finally , the embrace : though we were wary - it seemed so audacious - how much unspoken joy there was in that affirmation of equality and communion , no matter how much misunderstanding and pain had passed between you by then .
we knew so little in those days , as little as now , i suppose about healing those hurts : even the women , in their best dresses , with beads and sequins sewn on the bodices , even in lipstick and mascara , their hair aflow , could only stand wringing their hands , begging for peace , while father and son , like thugs , like thieves , like romans , simmered and hissed and hated , inflicting sorrows that endured , the worst anyway , through the kiss and embrace , bleeding from brother to brother , into the generations .
in those days there was still countryside close to the city , farms , cornfields , cows ; even not far from our building with its blurred brick and long shadowy hallway you could find tracts with hills and trees you could pretend were mountains and forests .
or you could go out by yourself even to a half-block-long empty lot , into the bushes : like a creature of leaves you 'd lurk , crouched , crawling , simplified , savage , alone ; already there was wanting to be simpler , wanting , when they called you , never to go back .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is another longish one , about the old and the young .
it actually happened right at the time we met .
part of the poem takes place in space we shared and time we shared .
it 's called " the neighbor . "
her five horrid , deformed little dogs who incessantly yap on the roof under my window .
her cats , god knows how many , who must piss on her rugs - her landing 's a sickening reek .
her shadow once , fumbling the chain on her door , then the door slamming fearfully shut , only the barking and the music - jazz - filtering as it does , day and night into the hall .
the time it was chris connor singing " lush life " - how it brought back my college sweetheart , my first real love , who - till i left her - played the same record .
and head on my shoulder , hand on my thigh , sang sweetly along , of regrets and depletions she was too young for , as i was too young , later , to believe in her pain .
it startled , then bored , then repelled me .
my starting to fancy she 'd ended up in this fire-trap in the village , that my neighbor was her .
my thinking we 'd meet , recognize one another , become friends , that i 'd accomplish a penance .
my seeing her , it was n't her , at the mailbox .
gray-yellow hair , army pants under a nightgown , her turning away , hiding her ravaged face in her hands , muttering an inappropriate " hi . "
sometimes there are frightening goings-on in the stairwell .
a man shouting , " shut up ! " the dogs frantically snarling , claws scrabbling , then her - her voice hoarse , harsh , hollow , almost only a tone , incoherent , a note , a squawk , bone on metal , metal gone molten , calling them back , " come back darlings , come back dear ones .
my sweet angels , come back . "
medea she was , next time i saw her .
sorceress , tranced , ecstatic , stock-still on the sidewalk ragged coat hanging agape , passersby flowing around her , her mouth torn suddenly open as though in a scream , silently though , as though only in her brain or breast had it erupted .
a cry so pure , practiced , detached , it had no need of a voice , or could no longer bear one .
these invisible links that allure , these transfigurations , even of anguish , that hold us .
the girl , my old love , the last lost time i saw her when she came to find me at a party , her drunkenly stumbling , falling , sprawling , skirt hiked , eyes veined red , swollen with tears , her shame , her dishonor .
my ignorant , arrogant coarseness , my secret pride , my turning away .
still life on a rooftop , dead trees in barrels , a bench broken , dogs , excrement , sky .
what pathways through pain , what junctures of vulnerability , what crossings and counterings ?
too many lives in our lives already , too many chances for sorrow , too many unaccounted-for pasts .
" behold me , " the god of frenzied , inexhaustible love says , rising in bloody splendor , " behold me . "
her making her way down the littered vestibule stairs , one agonized step at a time .
my holding the door .
her crossing the fragmented tiles , faltering at the step to the street , droning , not looking at me , " can you help me ? "
taking my arm , leaning lightly against me .
her wavering step into the world .
her whispering , " thanks love . " lightly , lightly against me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think i 'll lighten up a little .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another , different kind of poem of youth and age .
it 's called " gas . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- would n't it be nice , i think , when the blue-haired lady in the doctor 's waiting room bends over the magazine table and farts , just a little , and violently blushes .
would n't it be nice if intestinal gas came embodied in visible clouds , so she could see that her really quite inoffensive pop had only barely grazed my face before it drifted away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- besides , for this to have happened now is a nice coincidence . because not an hour ago , while we were on our walk , my dog was startled by a backfire and jumped straight up like a horse bucking .
and that brought back to me the stable i worked on weekends when i was 12 , and a splendid piebald stallion , who whenever he was mounted would buck just like that , though more hugely of course , enormous , gleaming , resplendent .
and the woman , her face abashedly buried in her " elle " now , reminded me - i 'd forgotten that not the least part of my awe consisted of the fact that with every jump he took the horse would powerfully fart .
phwap ! phwap ! phwap !
something never mentioned in the dozens of books about horses and their riders i devoured in those days .
all that savage grandeur , the steely glinting hooves , the eruptions driven from the creature 's mighty innards , breath stopped , heart stopped , nostrils madly flared , i did n't know if i wanted to break him , or be him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is called " thirst . "
many - most of my poems actually are urban poems . i happen to be reading a bunch that are n't .
" thirst . "
here was my relation with the woman who lived all last autumn and winter , day and night , on a bench in the 103rd street subway station , until finally one day she vanished .
we regarded each other , scrutinized one another .
me shyly , obliquely , trying not to be furtive .
she boldly , unblinkingly , even pugnaciously , wrathfully even , when her bottle was empty .
i was frightened of her . i felt like a child .
i was afraid some repressed part of myself would go out of control , and i 'd be forever entrapped in the shocking seethe of her stench .
not excrement merely , not merely surface and orifice going unwashed , rediffusion of rum , there was will in it , and intention , power and purpose - a social , ethical rage and rebellion - despair too , though , grief , loss .
sometimes i 'd think i should take her home with me , bathe her , comfort her , dress her .
she would n't have wanted me to , i would think .
instead , i 'd step into my train .
how rich i would think , is the lexicon of our self-absolving .
how enduring , our bland fatal assurance that reflection is righteousness being accomplished .
the dance of our glances , the clash , pulling each other through our perceptual punctures , then holocaust , holocaust , host on host of ill , injured presences , squandered , consumed .
her vigil somewhere i know continues .
her occupancy , her absolute , faithful attendance .
the dance of our glances , challenge , abdication , effacement , the perfume of our consternation .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a newer poem , a brand new poem .
the title is " this happened . "
a student , a young woman in a fourth-floor hallway of her lycee , perched on the ledge of an open window chatting with friends between classes ; a teacher passes and chides her , " be careful , you might fall , " almost banteringly chides her , " you might fall , " and the young woman , 18 , a girl really , though she would n't think that , as brilliant as she is , first in her class , and " beautiful , too , " she 's often told , smiles back , and leans into the open window , which would n't even be open if it were winter - if it were winter someone would have closed it -lrb- " close it ! " -rrb- -
leans into the window , farther , still smiling , farther and farther , though it takes less time than this , really an instant , and lets herself fall .
herself fall .
a casual impulse , a fancy , never thought of until now , hardly thought of even now ...
no , more than impulse or fancy , the girl knows what she 's doing , the girl means something , the girl means to mean , because it occurs to her in that instant , that beautiful or not , bright yes or no , she 's not who she is , she 's not the person she is , and the reason , she suddenly knows , is that there 's been so much premeditation where she is , so much plotting and planning , there 's hardly a person where she is , or if there is , it 's not her , or not wholly her , it 's a self inhabited , lived in by her ,
and seemingly even as she thinks it she knows what 's been missing : grace , not premeditation but grace , a kind of being in the world spontaneously , with grace .
weightfully upon me was the world .
weightfully this self which graced the world yet never wholly itself .
weightfully this self which weighed upon me , the release from which is what i desire and what i achieve .
and the girl remembers , in this infinite instant already now so many times divided , the sadness she felt once , hardly knowing she felt it , to merely inhabit herself .
yes , the girl falls , absurd to fall , even the earth with its compulsion to take unto itself all that falls must know that falling is absurd , yet the girl falling is n't myself , or she is myself , but a self i took of my own volition unto myself .
forever . with grace .
this happened .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'll read just one more . i do n't usually say that .
i like to just end .
but i 'm afraid that ricky will come out here and shake his fist at me .
this is called " old man , " appropriately enough .
" special : big tits , " says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our neighborhood newsstand .
but forget her breasts .
a lush , fresh-lipped blond , skin glowing gold , sprawls there , resplendent .
60 nearly , yet these hardly tangible , hardly better than harlots , can still stir me .
maybe a coming of age in the american sensual darkness , never seeing an unsmudged nipple , an uncensored vagina , has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the eye .
always that erotic murmur , i 'm hardly myself if i 'm not in a state of incipient desire .
god knows though , there are worse twists your obsessions can take .
last year in israel , a young ultra-orthodox rabbi guiding some teenage girls through the shrine of the shoah forbade them to look in one room .
because there were images in it he said were licentious .
the display was a photo . men and women stripped naked , some trying to cover their genitals , others too frightened to bother , lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown into a ditch .
the girls , to my horror , averted their gaze .
what carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them .
even that though . another confession : once in a book on pre-war poland , a studio portrait , an absolute angel , an absolute angel with tormented , tormenting eyes .
i kept finding myself at her page .
that she died in the camps made her - i did n't dare wonder why - more present , more precious .
died in the camps , that too people - or jews anyway - kept from their children back then .
but it was like sex , you did n't have to be told .
sex and death , how close they can seem .
so constantly conscious now of death moving towards me , sometimes i think i confound them .
my wife 's loveliness almost consumes me .
my passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds .
when we make love , her holding me everywhere all around me , i 'm there and not there .
my mind teems , jumbles of faces , voices , impressions , i live my life over , as though i were drowning .
then i am drowning , in despair at having to leave her , this , everything , all , unbearable , awful .
still , to be able to die with no special contrition , not having been slaughtered , or enslaved .
and not having to know history 's next mad rage or regression , it might be a relief .
no . again , no .
i do n't mean that for a moment .
what i mean is the world holds me so tightly - the good and the bad - my own follies and weakness that even this counterfeit venus with her sham heat , and her bosom probably plumped with gel , so moves me my breath catches .
vamp . siren . seductress .
how much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows .
how she incarnates our desperate human need for regard , our passion to live in beauty , to be beauty , to be cherished by glances , if by no more , of something like love , or love .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great honor to be here .
it 's a great honor to be here talking about cities , talking about the future of cities .
it 's great to be here as a mayor .
i really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people 's lives .
that 's the place to be .
and it 's great to be here as the mayor of rio .
rio 's a beautiful city , a vibrant place , special place .
actually , you 're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world .
and i really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of rio .
-lrb- video -rrb- announcer : and now , ladies and gentlemen , the envelope containing the result .
jacques rogge : i have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st olympiad are awarded to the city of rio de janeiro .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- ep : okay , that 's very touching , very emotional , but it was not easy to get there .
actually it was a very hard challenge .
we had to beat the european monarchy .
this is juan carlos , king of spain .
we had to beat the powerful japanese with all of their technology .
we had to beat the most powerful man in the world defending his own city .
so it was not easy at all .
and actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that i think fits perfectly to the situation of rio winning the olympic bid .
we really showed that , yes , we can .
and really , this is the reason i came here tonight .
i came here tonight to tell you that things can be done , that you do n't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way , that cities are a great challenge .
it 's a difficult task to deal with cities .
but with some original ways of getting things done , with some basic commandments , you can really get cities to be a great , great place to live .
i want you all to imagine rio .
you probably think about a city full of energy , a vibrant city full of green .
and nobody showed that better than carlos saldanha in last year 's " rio . "
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- bird : this is incredible .
-lrb- music -rrb- ep : okay , some parts of rio are pretty much like that , but it 's not like that everywhere .
we 're like every big city in the world .
we 've got lots of people , pollution , cars , concrete , lots of concrete .
these pictures i 'm showing here , they are some pictures from madureira .
it 's like the heart of the suburb in rio .
and i want to use an example of rio that we 're doing in madureira , in this region , to see what we should think as our first commandment .
so every time you see a concrete jungle like that , what you 've got to do is find open spaces .
if you do n't have open spaces , you 've got to go there and open spaces .
so go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces .
this is going to be the third largest park in rio by june this year .
it 's going to be a place where people can meet , where you can put nature .
the temperature 's going to drop two , three degrees centigrade .
so the first commandment i want to leave you tonight is , a city of the future has to be environmentally friendly .
every time you think of a city , you 've got to think green .
you 've got to think green and green .
so moving to our second commandment that i wanted to show you .
let 's think that cities are made of people , lots of people together .
cities are packed with people .
so how do you move these people around ?
when you have 3.5 billion people living in cities - by 2050 , it 's going to be 6 billion people .
so every time you think about moving these people around , you think about high-capacity transportation .
but there is a problem .
high-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money .
so what i 'm going to show here is something that was already presented in ted by the former mayor of curitiba who created that , a city in brazil , jaime lerner .
and it 's something that we 're doing , again , lots in rio .
it 's the brt , the bus rapid transit .
so you get a bus . it 's a simple bus that everybody knows .
you transform it inside as a train car .
you use separate lanes , dedicated lanes .
the contractors , they do n't like that .
you do n't have to dig deep down underground .
you can build nice stations .
this is actually a station that we 're doing in rio .
again , you do n't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that .
this station has the same comfort , the same features as a subway station .
a kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway .
so spending much less money and doing it much faster , you can really change the way people move .
this is a map of rio .
all the lines , the colored lines you see there , it 's our high-capacity transportation network .
in this present time today , we only carry 18 percent of our population in high-capacity transportation .
with the brts we 're doing , again , the cheapest and fastest way , we 're going to move to 63 percent of the population being carried by high-capacity transportation .
so remember what i said : you do n't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done .
you can find original ways to get things done .
so the second commandment i want to leave you tonight is , a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people .
moving to the third commandment .
and this is the most controversial one .
it has to do with the favelas , the slums - whatever you call it , there are different names all over the world .
but the point we want to make here tonight is , favelas are not always a problem .
i mean , favelas can sometimes really be a solution , if you deal with them , if you put public policy inside the favelas .
let me just show a map of rio again .
rio has 6.3 million inhabitants - more than 20 percent , 1.4 million , live in the favelas .
all these red parts are favelas .
so you see , they are spread all over the city .
this is a typical view of a favela in rio .
you see the contrast between the rich and poor .
so i want to make two points here tonight about favelas .
the first one is , you can change from what i call a -lsb- vicious -rsb- circle to a virtual circle .
but what you 've got to do to get that is you 've got to go inside the favelas , bring in the basic services - mainly education and health - with high quality .
i 'm going to give a fast example here .
this was an old building in a favela in rio - -lsb- unclear favela name -rsb- - that we just transformed into a primary school , with high quality .
this is primary assistance in health that we built inside a favela , again , with high quality .
we call it a family clinic .
so the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality .
the second point i want to make about the favelas is , you 've got to open spaces in the favela .
bring infrastructure to the favelas , to the slums , wherever you are .
rio has the aim , by 2020 , to have all its favelas completely urbanized .
another example , this was completely packed with houses , and then we built this , what we call , a knowledge square .
this is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology .
we even built a theater there - 3d movie .
and this is the kind of change you can get for that .
and by the end of the day you get something better than a ted prize , which is this great laugh from a kid that lives in the favela .
so the third commandment i want to leave here tonight is , a city of the future has to be socially integrated .
you can not deal with a city if it 's not socially integrated .
but moving to our fourth commandment , i really would n't be here tonight .
between november and may , rio 's completely packed .
we just had last week carnivale .
it was great . it was lots of fun .
we have new year 's eve .
there 's like two million people on copacabana beach .
we have problems .
we fight floods , tropical rains at this time of the year .
you can imagine how people get happy with me watching these kinds of scenes .
we have problems with the tropical rains .
almost every year we have these landslides , which are terrible .
but the reason i could come here is because of that .
this was something we did with ibm that 's a little bit more than a year old .
it 's what we call the operations center of rio .
and i wanted to show that i can govern my city , using technology , from here , from long beach , so i got here last night and i know everything .
we 're going to speak now to the operations center .
this is osorio , he 's our secretary of urban affairs .
so osorio , good to be there with you .
i 've already told the people that we have tropical rain this time of year .
so how 's the weather in rio now ?
osorio : the weather is fine . we have fair weather today .
let me get you our weather satellite radar .
you see just a little bit of moisture around the city .
absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather , today and in the next few days .
ep : okay , how 's the traffic ?
we , at this time of year , get lots of traffic jams .
people get mad at the mayor . so how 's the traffic tonight ?
osario : well traffic tonight is fine .
let me get you one of our 8,000 buses .
a live transmission in downtown rio for you , mr. mayor .
you see , the streets are clear .
now it 's 11:00 pm in rio .
nothing of concern in terms of traffic .
i 'll get to you now the incidents of the day .
we had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon , but nothing of big concern .
we are below average in terms of traffic incidents in the city .
ep : okay , so you 're showing now some public services .
these are the cars .
osorio : absolutely , mr. mayor .
let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks .
this is live transmission .
we have gps 's in all of our trucks .
and you can see them working in all parts of the city .
waste collection on time .
public services working well .
ep : okay , osorio , thank you very much .
it was great to have you here .
we 're going to move so that i can make a conclusion .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , so no files , this place , no paperwork , no distance , 24/7 working .
so the fourth commandment i want to share with you here tonight is , a city of the future has to use technology to be present .
i do n't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city .
but everything that i said here tonight , or the commandments , are means , are ways , for us to govern cities - invest in infrastructure , invest in the green , open parks , open spaces , integrate socially , use technology .
but at the end of the day , when we talk about cities , we talk about a gathering of people .
and we can not see that as a problem .
that is fantastic .
if there 's 3.5 billion now , it 's going to be six billion then it 's going to be 10 billion .
that is great , that means we 're going to have 10 billion minds working together , 10 billion talents together .
so a city of the future , i really do believe that it 's a city that cares about its citizens , integrates socially its citizens .
a city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party , which are cities .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a photograph by the artist michael najjar , and it 's real , in the sense that he went there to argentina to take the photo .
but it 's also a fiction . there 's a lot of work that went into it after that .
and what he 's done is he 's actually reshaped , digitally , all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the dow jones index .
so what you see , that precipice , that high precipice with the valley , is the 2008 financial crisis .
the photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there .
i do n't know where we are now .
this is the hang seng index for hong kong .
and similar topography .
i wonder why .
and this is art . this is metaphor .
but i think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth , and it 's with those teeth that i want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math - not just financial math , but math in general .
that its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it - the world around us and the world inside us .
and it 's specifically algorithms , which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff .
they acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again , and they ossify and calcify , and they become real .
and i was thinking about this , of all places , on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago , because i happened to be seated next to a hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the cold war for physicists in hungary .
and i said , " so what were you doing ? "
and he said , " well we were mostly breaking stealth . "
and i said , " that 's a good job . that 's interesting .
how does that work ? "
and to understand that , you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works .
and so - this is an over-simplification - but basically , it 's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky .
it 's not just going to disappear .
but if you can take this big , massive thing , and you could turn it into a million little things - something like a flock of birds - well then the radar that 's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky .
and if you 're a radar , that 's a really bad job .
and he said , " yeah . " he said , " but that 's if you 're a radar .
so we did n't use a radar ; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals , electronic communication .
and whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication , we thought , ' probably has something to do with the americans . " ' and i said , " yeah .
that 's good .
so you 've effectively negated 60 years of aeronautic research .
what 's your act two ?
what do you do when you grow up ? "
and he said , " well , financial services . "
and i said , " oh . "
because those had been in the news lately .
and i said , " how does that work ? "
and he said , " well there 's 2,000 physicists on wall street now , and i 'm one of them . "
and i said , " what 's the black box for wall street ? "
and he said , " it 's funny you ask that , because it 's actually called black box trading .
and it 's also sometimes called algo trading , algorithmic trading . "
and algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the united states air force had , which is that they 're moving these positions - whether it 's proctor & gamble or accenture , whatever - they 're moving a million shares of something through the market .
and if they do that all at once , it 's like playing poker and going all in right away .
you just tip your hand .
and so they have to find a way - and they use algorithms to do this - to break up that big thing into a million little transactions .
and the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what 's actually happening in the market .
so if you need to have some image of what 's happening in the stock market right now , what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide , and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act .
and all of that 's great , and it 's fine .
and that 's 70 percent of the united states stock market , 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension , your mortgage .
and what could go wrong ?
what could go wrong is that a year ago , nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes , and they called it the flash crash of 2:45 .
all of a sudden , nine percent just goes away , and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it , nobody asked for it .
nobody had any control over what was actually happening .
all they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said , " stop . "
and that 's the thing , is that we 're writing things , we 're writing these things that we can no longer read .
and we 've rendered something illegible , and we 've lost the sense of what 's actually happening in this world that we 've made .
and we 're starting to make our way .
there 's a company in boston called nanex , and they use math and magic and i do n't know what , and they reach into all the market data and they find , actually sometimes , some of these algorithms .
and when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies .
and they do what we 've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we do n't understand - which is that they give them a name and a story .
so this is one that they found , they called the knife , the carnival , the boston shuffler , twilight .
and the gag is that , of course , these are n't just running through the market .
you can find these kinds of things wherever you look , once you learn how to look for them .
you can find it here : this book about flies that you may have been looking at on amazon .
you may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars .
it 's out of print - still ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you had bought it at 1.7 , it would have been a bargain .
a few hours later , it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars , plus shipping and handling .
and the question is : nobody was buying or selling anything ; what was happening ?
and you see this behavior on amazon as surely as you see it on wall street .
and when you see this kind of behavior , what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict , algorithms locked in loops with each other , without any human oversight , without any adult supervision to say , " actually , 1.7 million is plenty . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as with amazon , so it is with netflix .
and so netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years .
they started with cinematch , and they 've tried a bunch of others - there 's dinosaur planet ; there 's gravity .
they 're using pragmatic chaos now .
pragmatic chaos is , like all of netflix algorithms , trying to do the same thing .
it 's trying to get a grasp on you , on the firmware inside the human skull , so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next - which is a very , very difficult problem .
but the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we do n't really quite have it down , it does n't take away from the effects pragmatic chaos has .
pragmatic chaos , like all netflix algorithms , 60 percent of what movies end up being rented .
so one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies .
but what if you could rate those movies before they get made ?
would n't that be handy ?
well , a few data scientists from the u.k. are in hollywood , and they have " story algorithms " - a company called epagogix .
and you can run your script through there , and they can tell you , quantifiably , that that 's a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie .
and the thing is , is that this is n't google .
this is n't information .
these are n't financial stats ; this is culture .
and what you see here , or what you do n't really see normally , is that these are the physics of culture .
and if these algorithms , like the algorithms on wall street , just crashed one day and went awry , how would we know ?
what would it look like ?
and they 're in your house . they 're in your house .
these are two algorithms competing for your living room .
these are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means .
and you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them , and they 're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom .
and the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched .
it 's super-real and it 's happening around you .
you feel it most when you 're in a sealed metal box , a new-style elevator ; they 're called destination-control elevators .
these are the ones where you have to press what floor you 're going to go to before you get in the elevator .
and it uses what 's called a bin-packing algorithm .
so none of this mishegas of letting everybody go into whatever car they want .
everybody who wants to go to the 10th floor goes into car two , and everybody who wants to go to the third floor goes into car five .
and the problem with that is that people freak out .
people panic .
and you see why . you see why .
it 's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation , like the buttons .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like the things that people use .
all it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says , " stop . "
and this is what we 're designing for .
we 're designing for this machine dialect .
and how far can you take that ? how far can you take it ?
you can take it really , really far .
so let me take it back to wall street .
because the algorithms of wall street are dependent on one quality above all else , which is speed .
and they operate on milliseconds and microseconds .
and just to give you a sense of what microseconds are , it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse .
but if you 're a wall street algorithm and you 're five microseconds behind , you 're a loser .
so if you were an algorithm , you 'd look for an architect like the one that i met in frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper - throwing out all the furniture , all the infrastructure for human use , and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in - all so an algorithm could get close to the internet .
and you think of the internet as this kind of distributed system .
and of course , it is , but it 's distributed from places .
in new york , this is where it 's distributed from : the carrier hotel located on hudson street .
and this is really where the wires come right up into the city .
and the reality is that the further away you are from that , you 're a few microseconds behind every time .
these guys down on wall street , marco polo and cherokee nation , they 're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the carrier hotel .
and that 's going to keep happening .
we 're going to keep hollowing them out , because you , inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar , none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the boston shuffler could .
but if you zoom out , if you zoom out , you would see an 825-mile trench between new york city and chicago that 's been built over the last few years by a company called spread networks .
this is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse - just for these algorithms , just for the carnival and the knife .
and when you think about this , that we 're running through the united states with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster , all for a communications framework that no human will ever know , that 's a kind of manifest destiny ; and we 'll always look for a new frontier .
unfortunately , we have our work cut out for us .
this is just theoretical .
this is some mathematicians at mit .
and the truth is i do n't really understand a lot of what they 're talking about .
it involves light cones and quantum entanglement , and i do n't really understand any of that .
but i can read this map , and what this map says is that , if you 're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are , that 's where people are , where the cities are , you 're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively .
and the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean .
so that 's what we 'll do : we 'll build bubbles or something , or platforms .
we 'll actually part the water to pull money out of the air , because it 's a bright future if you 're an algorithm .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's not the money that 's so interesting actually .
it 's what the money motivates , that we 're actually terraforming the earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency .
and in that light , you go back and you look at michael najjar 's photographs , and you realize that they 're not metaphor , they 're prophecy .
they 're prophecy for the kind of seismic , terrestrial effects of the math that we 're making .
and the landscape was always made by this sort of weird , uneasy collaboration between nature and man .
but now there 's this third co-evolutionary force : algorithms - the boston shuffler , the carnival .
and we will have to understand those as nature , and in a way , they are .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love my food .
and i love information .
my children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed , the point in my life when the two passions merged , the journey of learning that took place from that point .
and one idea i want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food ?
i was born in calcutta - a family where my father and his father before him were journalists , and they wrote magazines in the english language .
that was the family business .
and as a result of that , i grew up with books everywhere around the house .
and i mean books everywhere around the house .
and that 's actually a shop in calcutta , but it 's a place where we like our books .
in fact , i 've got 38,000 of them now and no kindle in sight .
but growing up as a child with the books around everywhere , with people to talk to about those books , this was n't a sort of slightly learned thing .
by the time i was 18 , i had a deep passion for books .
it was n't the only passion i had .
i was a south indian brought up in bengal .
and two of the things about bengal : they like their savory dishes and they like their sweets .
so by the time i grew up , again , i had a well-established passion for food .
now i was growing up in the late ' 60s and early ' 70s , and there were a number of other passions i was also interested in , but these two were the ones that differentiated me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then life was fine , dandy .
everything was okay , until i got to about the age of 26 , and i went to a movie called " short circuit . "
oh , some of you have seen it .
and apparently it 's being remade right now and it 's going to be coming out next year .
it 's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life .
and as it ran , this thing was saying , " give me input . give me input . "
and i suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing .
energy came to it in some form or shape , data came to it in some form or shape .
and i began to think , i wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things i had as input - as if food and information were similar in some form or shape .
i started doing some research then , and this was the 25-year journey , and started finding out that actually human beings as primates have far smaller stomachs than should be the size for our body weight and far larger brains .
and as i went to research that even further , i got to a point where i discovered something called the expensive tissue hypothesis .
that actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static .
what changed was the balance of the tissues available .
and two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue .
and what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995 .
it 's a lady named leslie aiello .
and the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other .
if you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large , you had to live with a smaller gut .
that then set me off completely to say , okay , these two are connected .
so i looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said , so we were hunter-gathers of information .
we moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information .
does that really explain what we 're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays ?
because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted , and those that were in the business of farming information wanted to build fences around it , create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement .
so there was always going to be a tension within that .
and everything i saw in the cultivation said there were huge fights amongst the foodies between the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers .
and this is happening here .
when i moved to preparation , this same thing was true , expect that there were two schools .
one group of people said you can distill your information , you can extract value , separate it and serve it up , while another group turned around and said no , no you can ferment it .
you bring it all together and mash it up and the value emerges that way .
the same is again true with information .
but consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable .
because what i began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this .
they 'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients .
do you cook it ? do you have it served to you ?
do you go to a restaurant ?
the same is true every time as i started thinking about information .
the analogies were getting crazy - that information had sell-by dates , that people had misused information that was n't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market , on corporate values , etc .
and by this time i was hooked .
and this is about 23 years into this process .
and i began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction , docu-dramas , mockumentaries , whatever you call it .
are we going to reach the stage where information has a percentage for fact associated with it ?
we start labeling information for the fact percentage ?
are we going to start looking at what happens when your information source is turned off , as a famine ?
which brings me to the final element of this .
clay shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload , there is only filter failure .
i put it to you that information , if viewed from the point of food , is never a production issue ; you never speak of food overload .
fundamentally it 's a consumption issue .
and we have to start thinking about how we create diets within ourselves , exercise within ourselves , to have the faculties to be able to deal with information , to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly .
in fact , when i saw " supersize me , " i starting thinking of saying , what would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop fox news ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- would there be time to be able to work with it ?
so you start really understanding that you can have diseases , toxins , a need to balance your diet , and once you start looking , and from that point on , everything i have done in terms of the consumption of information , the production of information , the preparation of information , i 've looked at from the viewpoint of food .
it has probably not helped my waistline any because i like practicing on both sides .
but i 'd like to leave you with just that question : if you began to think of all the information that you consume the way you think of food , what would you do differently ?
thank you very much for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm working a lot with motion and animation , and also i 'm an old dj and a musician .
so , music videos are something that i always found interesting , but they always seem to be so reactive .
so i was thinking , can you remove us as creators and try to make the music be the voice and have the animation following it ?
so with two designers , tolga and christina , at my office , we took a track - many of you probably know it . it 's about 25 years old , and it 's david byrne and brian eno - and we did this little animation .
and i think that it 's maybe interesting , also , that it deals with two problematic issues , which are rising waters and religion .
song : before god destroyed the people on the earth , he warned noah to build an ark .
and after noah built his ark , i believe he told noah to warn the people that they must change all their wicked ways before he come upon them and destroy them .
and when noah had done built his ark , i understand that somebody began to rend a song .
and the song began to move on i understand like this .
and when noah had done built his ark ...
move on ... in fact ... concern ...
so they get tired , has come dark and rain ; they get weary and tired .
and then he went and knocked an old lady house .
and old lady ran to the door and say , " who is it ? "
jack say , " me , mama-san , could we spend the night here ?
because we 're far from home , we 're very tired . "
and the old lady said , " oh yes , come on in . "
it was come dark and rain , will make you weary and tired .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up on a small farm in missouri .
we lived on less than a dollar a day for about 15 years .
i got a scholarship , went to university , studied international agriculture , studied anthropology , and decided i was going to give back .
i was going to work with small farmers .
i was going to help alleviate poverty .
i was going to work on international development , and then i took a turn and ended up here .
now , if you get a ph.d. , and you decide not to teach , you do n't always end up in a place like this .
it 's a choice . you might end up driving a taxicab .
you could be in new york .
what i found was , i started working with refugees and famine victims - small farmers , all , or nearly all - who had been dispossessed and displaced .
now , what i 'd been trained to do was methodological research on such people .
so i did it : i found out how many women had been raped en route to these camps .
i found out how many people had been put in jail , how many family members had been killed .
i assessed how long they were going to stay and how much it would take to feed them .
and i got really good at predicting how many body bags you would need for the people who were going to die in these camps .
now this is god 's work , but it 's not my work .
it 's not the work i set out to do .
so i was at a grateful dead benefit concert on the rainforests in 1988 .
i met a guy - the guy on the left .
his name was ben .
he said , " what can i do to save the rainforests ? "
i said , " well , ben , what do you do ? "
" i make ice cream . "
so i said , " well , you 've got to make a rainforest ice cream .
and you 've got to use nuts from the rainforests to show that forests are worth more as forests than they are as pasture . "
he said , " okay . "
within a year , rainforest crunch was on the shelves .
it was a great success .
we did our first million-dollars-worth of trade by buying on 30 days and selling on 21 .
that gets your adrenaline going .
then we had a four and a half million-dollar line of credit because we were credit-worthy at that point .
we had 15 to 20 , maybe 22 percent of the global brazil-nut market .
we paid two to three times more than anybody else .
everybody else raised their prices to the gatherers of brazil nuts because we would buy it otherwise .
a great success .
50 companies signed up , 200 products came out , generated 100 million in sales .
it failed .
why did it fail ?
because the people who were gathering brazil nuts were n't the same people who were cutting the forests .
and the people who made money from brazil nuts were not the people who made money from cutting the forests .
we were attacking the wrong driver .
we needed to be working on beef .
we needed to be working on lumber .
we needed to be working on soy - things that we were not focused on .
so let 's go back to sudan .
i often talk to refugees : " why was it that the west did n't realize that famines are caused by policies and politics , not by weather ? "
and this farmer said to me , one day , something that was very profound .
he said , " you ca n't wake a person who 's pretending to sleep . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . fast forward .
we live on a planet .
there 's just one of them .
we 've got to wake up to the fact that we do n't have any more and that this is a finite planet .
we know the limits of the resources we have .
we may be able to use them differently .
we may have some innovative , new ideas .
but in general , this is what we 've got .
there 's no more of it .
there 's a basic equation that we ca n't get away from .
population times consumption has got to have some kind of relationship to the planet , and right now , it 's a simple " not equal . "
our work shows that we 're living at about 1.3 planets .
since 1990 , we crossed the line of being in a sustainable relationship to the planet .
now we 're at 1.3 .
if we were farmers , we 'd be eating our seed .
for bankers , we 'd be living off the principal , not the interest .
this is where we stand today .
a lot of people like to point to some place else as the cause of the problem .
it 's always population growth .
population growth 's important , but it 's also about how much each person consumes .
so when the average american consumes 43 times as much as the average african , we 've got to think that consumption is an issue .
it 's not just about population , and it 's not just about them ; it 's about us .
but it 's not just about people ; it 's about lifestyles .
there 's very good evidence - again , we do n't necessarily have a peer-reviewed methodology that 's bulletproof yet - but there 's very good evidence that the average cat in europe has a larger environmental footprint in its lifetime than the average african .
you think that 's not an issue going forward ?
you think that 's not a question as to how we should be using the earth 's resources ?
let 's go back and visit our equation .
in 2000 , we had six billion people on the planet .
they were consuming what they were consuming - let 's say one unit of consumption each .
we have six billion units of consumption .
by 2050 , we 're going to have nine billion people - all the scientists agree .
they 're all going to consume twice as much as they currently do - scientists , again , agree - because income is going to grow in developing countries five times what it is today - on global average , about -lsb- 2.9 -rsb- .
so we 're going to have 18 billion units of consumption .
who have you heard talking lately that 's said we have to triple production of goods and services ?
but that 's what the math says .
we 're not going to be able to do that .
we can get productivity up .
we can get efficiency up .
but we 've also got to get consumption down .
we need to use less to make more .
and then we need to use less again .
and then we need to consume less .
all of those things are part of that equation .
but it basically raises a fundamental question : should consumers have a choice about sustainability , about sustainable products ?
should you be able to buy a product that 's sustainable sitting next to one that is n't , or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable ?
if they should all be sustainable on a finite planet , how do you make that happen ?
the average consumer takes 1.8 seconds in the u.s.
okay , so let 's be generous .
let 's say it 's 3.5 seconds in europe .
how do you evaluate all the scientific data around a product , the data that 's changing on a weekly , if not a daily , basis ?
how do you get informed ?
you do n't .
here 's a little question .
from a greenhouse gas perspective , is lamb produced in the u.k.
better than lamb produced in new zealand , frozen and shipped to the u.k. ?
is a bad feeder lot operation for beef better or worse than a bad grazing operation for beef ?
do organic potatoes actually have fewer toxic chemicals than conventional potatoes ?
in every single case , the answer is " it depends . "
it depends on who produced it and how , in every single instance .
and there are many others .
how is a consumer going to walk through this minefield ?
they 're not .
they may have a lot of opinions about it , but they 're not going to be terribly informed .
sustainability has got to be a pre-competitive issue .
it 's got to be something we all care about .
and we need collusion .
we need groups to work together that never have .
we need cargill to work with bunge .
we need coke to work with pepsi .
we need oxford to work with cambridge .
we need greenpeace to work with wwf .
everybody 's got to work together - china and the u.s.
we need to begin to manage this planet as if our life depended on it , because it does , it fundamentally does .
but we ca n't do everything .
even if we get everybody working on it , we 've got to be strategic .
we need to focus on the where , the what and the who .
so , the where : we 've identified 35 places globally that we need to work .
these are the places that are the richest in biodiversity and the most important from an ecosystem function point-of-view .
we have to work in these places .
we have to save these places if we want a chance in hell of preserving biodiversity as we know it .
we looked at the threats to these places .
these are the 15 commodities that fundamentally pose the biggest threats to these places because of deforestation , soil loss , water use , pesticide use , over-fishing , etc .
so we 've got 35 places , we 've got 15 priority commodities , who do we work with to change the way those commodities are produced ?
are we going to work with 6.9 billion consumers ?
let 's see , that 's about 7,000 languages , 350 major languages - a lot of work there .
i do n't see anybody actually being able to do that very effectively .
are we going to work with 1.5 billion producers ?
again , a daunting task .
there must be a better way .
300 to 500 companies control 70 percent or more of the trade of each of the 15 commodities that we 've identified as the most significant .
if we work with those , if we change those companies and the way they do business , then the rest will happen automatically .
so , we went through our 15 commodities .
this is nine of them .
we lined them up side-by-side , and we put the names of the companies that work on each of those .
and if you go through the first 25 or 30 names of each of the commodities , what you begin to see is , gosh , there 's cargill here , there 's cargill there , there 's cargill everywhere .
in fact , these names start coming up over and over again .
so we did the analysis again a slightly different way .
we said : if we take the top hundred companies , what percentage of all 15 commodities do they touch , buy or sell ?
and what we found is it 's 25 percent .
so 100 companies control 25 percent of the trade of all 15 of the most significant commodities on the planet .
we can get our arms around a hundred companies .
a hundred companies , we can work with .
why is 25 percent important ?
because if these companies demand sustainable products , they 'll pull 40 to 50 percent of production .
companies can push producers faster than consumers can .
by companies asking for this , we can leverage production so much faster than by waiting for consumers to do it .
after 40 years , the global organic movement has achieved 0.7 of one percent of global food .
we ca n't wait that long .
we do n't have that kind of time .
we need change even working with individual companies is not probably going to get us there .
we need to begin to work with industries .
so we 've started roundtables where we bring together the entire value chain , from producers all the way to the retailers and brands .
we bring in civil society , we bring in ngos , we bring in researchers and scientists to have an informed discussion - sometimes a battle royale - to figure out what are the key impacts of these products , what is a global benchmark , what 's an acceptable impact , and design standards around that .
it 's not all fun and games .
in salmon aquaculture , we kicked off a roundtable almost six years ago .
eight entities came to the table .
we eventually got , i think , 60 percent of global production at the table and 25 percent of demand at the table .
three of the original eight entities were suing each other .
and yet , next week , we launch globally verified , vetted and certified standards for salmon aquaculture .
it can happen .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what brings the different entities to the table ?
it 's risk and demand .
for the big companies , it 's reputational risk , but more importantly , they do n't care what the price of commodities is .
if they do n't have commodities , they do n't have a business .
they care about availability , so the big risk for them is not having product at all .
for the producers , if a buyer wants to buy something produced a certain way , that 's what brings them to the table .
so it 's the demand that brings them to the table .
the good news is we identified a hundred companies two years ago .
in the last 18 months , we 've signed agreements with 40 of those hundred companies to begin to work with them on their supply chain .
and in the next 18 months , we will have signed up to work with another 40 , and we think we 'll get those signed as well .
now what we 're doing is bringing the ceos of these 80 companies together to help twist the arms of the final 20 , to bring them to the table , because they do n't like ngos , they 've never worked with ngos , they 're concerned about this , they 're concerned about that , but we all need to be in this together .
so we 're pulling out all the stops .
we 're using whatever leverage we have to bring them to the table .
one company we 're working with that 's begun - in baby steps , perhaps - but has begun this journey on sustainability is cargill .
they 've funded research that shows that we can double global palm oil production without cutting a single tree in the next 20 years , and do it all in borneo alone by planting on land that 's already degraded .
the study shows that the highest net present value for palm oil is on land that 's been degraded .
they 're also undertaking a study to look at all of their supplies of palm oil to see if they could be certified and what they would need to change in order to become third-party certified under a credible certification program .
why is cargill important ?
because cargill has 20 to 25 percent of global palm oil .
if cargill makes a decision , the entire palm oil industry moves , or at least 40 or 50 percent of it .
that 's not insignificant .
more importantly , cargill and one other company ship 50 percent of the palm oil that goes to china .
we do n't have to change the way a single chinese company works if we get cargill to only send sustainable palm oil to china .
it 's a pre-competitive issue .
all the palm oil going there is good .
buy it .
mars is also on a similar journey .
now most people understand that mars is a chocolate company , but mars has made sustainability pledges to buy only certified product for all of its seafood .
it turns out mars buys more seafood than walmart because of pet food .
but they 're doing some really interesting things around chocolate , and it all comes from the fact that mars wants to be in business in the future .
and what they see is that they need to improve chocolate production .
on any given plantation , 20 percent of the trees produce 80 percent of the crop , so mars is looking at the genome , they 're sequencing the genome of the cocoa plant .
they 're doing it with ibm and the usda , and they 're putting it in the public domain because they want everybody to have access to this data , because they want everybody to help them make cocoa more productive and more sustainable .
what they 've realized is that if they can identify the traits on productivity and drought tolerance , they can produce 320 percent as much cocoa on 40 percent of the land .
the rest of the land can be used for something else .
it 's more with less and less again .
that 's what the future has got to be , and putting it in the public domain is smart .
they do n't want to be an i.p. company ; they want to be a chocolate company , but they want to be a chocolate company forever .
now , the price of food , many people complain about , but in fact , the price of food is going down , and that 's odd because in fact , consumers are not paying for the true cost of food .
if you take a look just at water , what we see is that , with four very common products , you look at how much a farmer produced to make those products , and then you look at how much water input was put into them , and then you look at what the farmer was paid .
if you divide the amount of water into what the farmer was paid , the farmer did n't receive enough money to pay a decent price for water in any of those commodities .
that is an externality by definition .
this is the subsidy from nature .
coca-cola , they 've worked a lot on water , but right now , they 're entering into 17-year contracts with growers in turkey to sell juice into europe , and they 're doing that because they want to have a product that 's closer to the european market .
but they 're not just buying the juice ; they 're also buying the carbon in the trees to offset the shipment costs associated with carbon to get the product into europe .
there 's carbon that 's being bought with sugar , with coffee , with beef .
this is called bundling . it 's bringing those externalities back into the price of the commodity .
we need to take what we 've learned in private , voluntary standards of what the best producers in the world are doing and use that to inform government regulation , so we can shift the entire performance curve .
we ca n't just focus on identifying the best ; we 've got to move the rest .
the issue is n't what to think , it 's how to think .
these companies have begun to think differently .
they 're on a journey ; there 's no turning back .
we 're all on that same journey with them .
we have to really begin to change the way we think about everything .
whatever was sustainable on a planet of six billion is not going to be sustainable on a planet with nine .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the magical moment , the magical moment of conducting .
which is , you go onto a stage . there is an orchestra sitting .
they are all , you know , warming up and doing stuff .
and i go on the podium .
you know , this little office of the conductor .
or rather a cubicle , an open-space cubicle , with a lot of space .
and in front of all that noise , you do a very small gesture .
something like this , not very pomp , not very sophisticated , this .
and suddenly , out of the chaos , order .
noise becomes music .
and this is fantastic . and it 's so tempting to think that it 's all about me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all those great people here , virtuosos , they make noise , they need me to do that .
not really . if it were that , i would just save you the talk , and teach you the gesture .
so you could go out to the world and do this thing in whatever company or whatever you want , and you have perfect harmony . it does n't work .
let 's look at the first video .
i hope you 'll think it 's a good example of harmony .
and then speak a little bit about how it comes about .
-lrb- music -rrb- was that nice ?
so that was a sort of a success .
now , who should we thank for the success ?
i mean , obviously the orchestra musicians playing beautifully , the vienna philharmonic orchestra .
they do n't often even look at the conductor .
then you have the clapping audience , yeah , actually taking part in doing the music .
you know viennese audiences usually do n't interfere with the music .
this is the closest to an oriental bellydancing feast that you will ever get in vienna .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unlike , for example israel , where audiences cough all the time .
you know , arthur rubinstein , the pianist , used to say that , " anywhere in the world , people that have the flu , they go to the doctor .
in tel aviv they come to my concerts . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's a sort of a tradition .
but viennese audiences do not do that .
here they go out of their regular , just to be part of that , to become part of the orchestra , and that 's great .
you know , audiences like you , yeah , make the event .
but what about the conductor ? what can you say the conductor was doing , actually ?
um , he was happy .
and i often show this to senior management .
people get annoyed .
" you come to work . how come you 're so happy ? "
something must be wrong there , yeah ? but he 's spreading happiness .
and i think the happiness , the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music .
the joy is about enabling other people 's stories to be heard at the same time .
you have the story of the orchestra as a professional body .
you have the story of the audience as a community . yeah .
you have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience .
and then you have other stories , unseen .
people who build this wonderful concert hall .
people who made those stradivarius , amati , all those beautiful instruments .
and all those stories are being heard at the same time .
this is the true experience of a live concert .
that 's a reason to go out of home . yeah ?
and not all conductors do just that .
let 's see somebody else , a great conductor .
riccardo muti , please .
-lrb- music -rrb- yeah , that was very short , but you could see it 's a completely different figure . right ?
he 's awesome . he 's so commanding . yeah ?
so clear . maybe a little bit over-clear .
can we have a little demonstration ? would you be my orchestra for a second ?
can you sing , please , the first note of don giovanni ?
you have to sing " aaaaaah , " and i 'll stop you .
okay ? ready ?
audience : ♫ aaaaaaah ... ♫ itay talgam : come on , with me . if you do it without me i feel even more redundant than i already feel .
so please , wait for the conductor .
now look at me . " aaaaaah , " and i stop you . let 's go .
audience : ♫ ... aaaaaaaah ... ♫ -lrb- laughter -rrb- itay talgam : so we 'll have a little chat later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but ... there is a vacancy for a ...
but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you could see that you could stop an orchestra with a finger .
now what does riccardo muti do ? he does something like this ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then - sort of - -lrb- laughter -rrb- so not only the instruction is clear , but also the sanction , what will happen if you do n't do what i tell you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , does it work ? yes , it works - to a certain point .
when muti is asked , " why do you conduct like this ? "
he says , " i 'm responsible . "
responsible in front of him .
no he does n't really mean him . he means mozart , which is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - like a third seat from the center .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he says , " if i 'm - -lrb- applause -rrb- if i 'm responsible for mozart , this is going to be the only story to be told .
it 's mozart as i , riccardo muti , understand it . "
and you know what happened to muti ?
three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of la scala , musical employees , i mean the musicians , saying , " you 're a great conductor . we do n't want to work with you . please resign . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " why ? because you do n't let us develop .
you 're using us as instruments , not as partners .
and our joy of music , etc . , etc . ... "
so he had to resign . is n't that nice ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he 's a nice guy . he 's a really nice guy .
well , can you do it with less control , or with a different kind of control ?
let 's look at the next conductor , richard strauss .
-lrb- music -rrb- i 'm afraid you 'll get the feeling that i really picked on him because he 's old .
it 's not true . when he was a young man of about 30 , he wrote what he called " the ten commandments for conductors . "
the first one was : if you sweat by the end of the concert it means that you must have done something wrong .
that 's the first one . the fourth one you 'll like better .
it says : never look at the trombones - it only encourages them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the whole idea is really to let it happen by itself .
do not interfere .
but how does it happen ? did you see him turning pages in the score ?
now , either he is senile , and does n't remember his own music , because he wrote the music .
or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them , saying , " come on guys . you have to play by the book .
so it 's not about my story . it 's not about your story .
it 's only the execution of the written music , no interpretation . "
interpretation is the real story of the performer .
so , no , he does n't want that . that 's a different kind of control .
let 's see another super-conductor , a german super-conductor . herbert von karajan , please .
-lrb- music -rrb- what 's different ? did you see the eyes ? closed .
did you see the hands ?
did you see this kind of movement ? let me conduct you . twice .
once like a muti , and you 'll - -lrb- claps -rrb- - clap , just once .
and then like karajan . let 's see what happens . okay ?
like muti . you ready ? because muti ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay ? ready ? let 's do it .
audience : -lrb- claps -rrb- itay talgam : hmm ... again .
audience : -lrb- claps -rrb- itay talgam : good . now like a karajan . since you 're already trained , let me concentrate , close my eyes . come , come .
audience : -lrb- claps -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- itay talgam : why not together ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- because you did n't know when to play .
now i can tell you , even the berlin philharmonic does n't know when to play .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'll tell you how they do it . no cynicism .
this is a german orchestra , yes ?
they look at karajan . and then they look at each other .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " do you understand what this guy wants ? "
and after doing that , they really look at each other , and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together .
and when karajan is asked about it he actually says , " yes , the worst damage i can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction .
because that would prevent the ensemble , the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra . "
now that 's great . what about the eyes ?
why are the eyes closed ?
there is a wonderful story about karajan conducting in london .
and he cues in a flute player like this .
the guy has no idea what to do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " maestro , with all due respect , when should i start ? "
what do you think karajan 's reply was ? when should i start ?
oh yeah . he says , " you start when you ca n't stand it anymore . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything .
it 's my music . the real music is only in karajan 's head .
and you have to guess my mind . so you are under tremendous pressure because i do n't give you instruction , and yet , you have to guess my mind .
so it 's a different kind of , a very spiritual but yet very firm control .
can we do it in another way ? of course we can . let 's go back to the first conductor we 've seen : carlos kleiber , his name . next video , please .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah .
well , it is different . but is n't that controlling in the same way ?
no , it 's not , because he is not telling them what to do .
when he does this , it 's not , " take your stradivarius and like jimi hendrix , smash it on the floor . " it 's not that .
he says , " this is the gesture of the music .
i 'm opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation . "
that is another story .
but how does it really work together if it does n't give them instructions ?
it 's like being on a rollercoaster . yeah ?
you 're not really given any instructions , but the forces of the process itself keep you in place .
that 's what he does .
the interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist .
it 's not a physical thing . it 's in the players ' heads .
and that 's what makes them into partners .
you have the plan in your head .
you know what to do , even though kleiber is not conducting you .
but here and there and that . you know what to do .
and you become a partner building the rollercoaster , yeah , with sound , as you actually take the ride .
this is very exciting for those players .
they do need to go to a sanatorium for two weeks , later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is very tiring . yeah ?
but it 's the best music making , like this .
but of course it 's not only about motivation and giving them a lot of physical energy .
you also have to be very professional .
and look again at this kleiber .
can we have the next video , quickly ?
you 'll see what happens when there is a mistake .
-lrb- music -rrb- again you see the beautiful body language .
-lrb- music -rrb- and now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done .
go along with the video . look .
see , second time for the same player .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now the third time for the same player .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " wait for me after the concert .
i have a short notice to give you . "
you know , when it 's needed , the authority is there . it 's very important .
but authority is not enough to make people your partners .
let 's see the next video , please . see what happens here .
you might be surprised having seen kleiber as such a hyperactive guy .
he 's conducting mozart .
-lrb- music -rrb- the whole orchestra is playing .
-lrb- music -rrb- now something else .
-lrb- music -rrb- see ? he is there 100 percent , but not commanding , not telling what to do .
rather enjoying what the soloist is doing .
-lrb- music -rrb- another solo now . see what you can pick up from this .
-lrb- music -rrb- look at the eyes .
okay . you see that ?
first of all , it 's a kind of a compliment we all like to get .
it 's not feedback . it 's an " mmmm ... " yeah , it comes from here .
so that 's a good thing .
and the second thing is it 's about actually being in control , but in a very special way .
when kleiber does - did you see the eyes , going from here ? -lrb- singing -rrb- you know what happens ? gravitation is no more .
kleiber not only creates a process , but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place .
so again , the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work , and creative and all of that .
and the level in which kleiber is in control is in a different level .
so control is no longer a zero-sum game .
you have this control . you have this control . and all you put together , in partnership , brings about the best music .
so kleiber is about process .
kleiber is about conditions in the world .
but you need to have process and content to create the meaning .
lenny bernstein , my own personal maestro .
since he was a great teacher , lenny bernstein always started from the meaning . look at this , please .
-lrb- music -rrb- do you remember the face of muti , at the beginning ?
well he had a wonderful expression , but only one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- did you see lenny 's face ?
you know why ? because the meaning of the music is pain .
and you 're playing a painful sound .
and you look at lenny and he 's suffering .
but not in a way that you want to stop .
it 's suffering , like , enjoying himself in a jewish way , as they say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you can see the music on his face .
you can see the baton left his hand . no more baton .
now it 's about you , the player , telling the story .
now it 's a reversed thing . you 're telling the story . and you 're telling the story .
and even briefly , you become the storyteller to which the community , the whole community , listens to .
and bernstein enables that . is n't that wonderful ?
now , if you are doing all the things we talked about , together , and maybe some others , you can get to this wonderful point of doing without doing .
and for the last video , i think this is simply the best title .
my friend peter says , " if you love something , give it away . " so , please .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in system d , this is a store , and what i mean by that is that this is a photograph i took in makoko , shantytown in lagos , nigeria .
it 's built over the lagoon , and there are no streets where there can be stores to shop , and so the store comes to you .
and in the same community , this is business synergy .
this is the boat that that lady was paddling around in , and this artisan makes the boat and the paddles and sells directly to the people who need the boat and the paddles .
and this is a global business .
ogandiro smokes fish in makoko in lagos , and i asked her , " where does the fish come from ? "
and i thought she 'd say , " oh , you know , up the lagoon somewhere , or maybe across africa , " but you 'll be happy to know she said it came from here , it comes from the north sea .
it 's caught here , frozen , shipped down to lagos , smoked , and sold for a tiny increment of profit on the streets of lagos .
and this is a business incubator .
this is olusosun dump , the largest garbage dump in lagos , and 2,000 people work here , and i found this out from this fellow , andrew saboru .
andrew spent 16 years scavenging materials on the dump , earned enough money to turn himself into a contract scaler , which meant he carried a scale and went around and weighed all the materials that people had scavenged from the dump . now he 's a scrap dealer .
that 's his little depot behind him , and he earns twice the nigerian minimum wage .
this is a shopping mall .
this is oshodi market in lagos .
jorge luis borges had a story called " the aleph , " and the aleph is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists , and for me , this image is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists .
so , what am i talking about when i talk about system d ?
it 's traditionally called the informal economy , the underground economy , the black market .
i do n't conceive of it that way .
i think it 's really important to understand that something like this is totally open . it 's right there for you to find .
all of this is happening openly , and aboveboard .
there 's nothing underground about it .
it 's our prejudgment that it 's underground .
i 've pirated the term system d from the former french colonies .
there 's a word in french that is débrouillardise , that means to be self-reliant , and the former french colonies have turned that into system d for the economy of self-reliance , or the diy economy .
but governments hate the diy economy , and that 's why - i took this picture in 2007 , and this is the same market in 2009 - and i think , when the organizers of this conference were talking about radical openness , they did n't mean that the streets should be open and the people should be gone .
i think what we have is a pickle problem .
i had a friend who worked at a pickle factory , and the cucumbers would come flying down this conveyer belt , and his job was to pick off the ones that did n't look so good and throw them in the bin labeled " relish " where they 'd be crushed and mixed with vinegar and used for other kinds of profit .
this is the pickle economy .
we 're all focusing on - this is a statistic from earlier this month in the financial times - we 're all focusing on the luxury economy .
it 's worth 1.5 trillion dollars every year , and that 's a vast amount of money , right ?
that 's three times the gross domestic product of switzerland .
so it 's vast . but it should come with an asterisk , and the asterisk is that it excludes two thirds of the workers of the world .
1.8 billion people around the world work in the economy that is unregulated and informal .
that 's a huge number , and what does that mean ?
well , it means if it were united in a single political system , one country , call it " the united street sellers republic , " the u.s.s.r. , or " bazaaristan , " it would be worth 10 trillion dollars every year , and that would make it the second largest economy in the world , after the united states .
and given that projections are that the bulk of economic growth over the next 15 years will come from emerging economies in the developing world , it could easily overtake the united states and become the largest economy in the world .
so the implications of that are vast , because it means that this is where employment is - 1.8 billion people - and this is where we can create a more egalitarian world , because people are actually able to earn money and live and thrive , as andrew saboru did .
big businesses have recognized this , and what 's fascinating about this slide , it 's not that the guys can carry boxes on their heads and run around without dropping them off .
it 's that the gala sausage roll is a product that 's made by a global company called uac foods that 's active throughout africa and the middle east , but the gala sausage roll is not sold in stores .
uac foods has recognized that it wo n't sell if it 's in stores .
it 's only sold by a phalanx of street hawkers who run around the streets of lagos at bus stations and in traffic jams and sell it as a snack , and it 's been sold that way for 40 years .
it 's a business plan for a corporation .
and it 's not just in africa .
here 's mr. clean looking amorously at all the other procter & gamble products , and procter & gamble , you know , the statistic always cited is that wal-mart is their largest customer , and it 's true , as one store , wal-mart buys 15 percent , thus 15 percent of procter & gamble 's business is with wal-mart , but their largest market segment is something that they call " high frequency stores , " which is all these tiny kiosks and the lady in the canoe and all these other businesses that exist in system d , the informal economy , and procter & gamble makes 20 percent of its money from that market segment ,
and it 's the only market segment that 's growing .
so procter & gamble says , " we do n't care whether a store is incorporated or registered or anything like that .
we want our products in that store . "
and then there 's mobile phones .
this is an ad for mtn , which is a south african multinational active in about 25 countries , and when they came into nigeria - nigeria is the big dog in africa .
one in seven africans is a nigerian , and so everyone wants in to the mobile phone market in nigeria . and when mtn came in , they wanted to sell the mobile service like i get in the united states or like people get here in the u.k. or in europe - expensive monthly plans , you get a phone , you pay overages , you 're killed with fees - and their plan crashed and burned .
and they went back to the drawing board , and they retooled , and they came up with another plan : we do n't sell you the phone , we do n't sell you the monthly plan .
we only sell you airtime .
and where 's the airtime sold ?
it 's sold at umbrella stands all over the streets , where people are unregistered , unlicensed , but mtn makes most of its profits , perhaps 90 percent of its profits , from selling through system d , the informal economy .
and where do the phones come from ?
well , they come from here . this is in guangzhou , china , and if you go upstairs in this rather sleepy looking electronics mall , you find the guangzhou dashatou second-hand trade center , and if you go in there , you follow the guys with the muscles who are carrying the boxes , and where are they going ?
they 're going to eddy in lagos .
now , most of the phones there are not second-hand at all .
the name is a misnomer .
most of them are pirated . they have the name brand on them , but they 're not manufactured by the name brand .
now , are there downsides to that ?
well , i guess . you know , china has no - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - no intellectual property , right ?
versace without the vowels .
zhuomani instead of armani .
s. guuuci , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- all around the world this is how products are being distributed , so , for instance , in one street market on rua 25 de março in são paulo , brazil , you can buy fake designer glasses .
you can buy cloned cologne .
you can buy pirated dvds , of course .
you can buy new york yankees caps in all sorts of unauthorized patterns .
you can buy cuecas baratas , designer underwear that is n't really manufactured by a designer , and even pirated evangelical mixtapes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , businesses tend to complain about this , and their , they , i do n't want to take away from their entire validity of complaining about it , but i did ask a major sneaker manufacturer earlier this year what they thought about piracy , and they told me , " well , you ca n't quote me on this , because if you quote me on this , i have to kill you , " but they use piracy as market research .
the sneaker manufacturer told me that if they find that pumas are being pirated , or adidas are being pirated and their sneakers are n't being pirated , they know they 've done something wrong . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's very important to them to track piracy exactly because of this , and the people who are buying , the pirates , are not their customers anyway , because their customers want the real deal .
now , there 's another problem .
this is a real street sign in lagos , nigeria .
all of system d really does n't pay taxes , right ?
and when i think about that , first of all i think that government is a social contract between the people and the government , and if the government is n't transparent , then the people are n't going to be transparent either , but also that we 're blaming the little guy who does n't pay his taxes , and we 're not recognizing that everyone 's fudging things all over the world , including some extremely respected businesses , and i 'll give you one example .
there was one company that paid 4,000 bribes in the first decade of this millennium , and a million dollars in bribes every business day , right ?
all over the world . and that company was the big german electronics giant siemens .
so this goes on in the formal economy as well as the informal economy , siemens , i 'm saying everyone does it . okay ?
i just want to end by saying that if adam smith had framed out a theory of the flea market instead of the free market , what would be some of the principles ?
first , it would be to understand that it could be considered a cooperative , and this is a thought from the brazilian legal scholar roberto mangabeira unger .
cooperative development is a way forward .
secondly , from the -lsb- austrian -rsb- anarchist philosopher paul feyerabend , facts are relative , and what is a massive right of self-reliance to a nigerian businessperson is considered unauthorized and horrible to other people , and we have to recognize that there are differences in how people define things and what their facts are .
and third is , and i 'm taking this from the great american beat poet allen ginsberg , that alternate economies barter and different kinds of currency , alternate currencies are also very important , and he talked about buying what he needed just with his good looks .
and so i just want to leave you there , and say that this economy is a tremendous force for global development and we need to think about it that way .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm sure that , throughout the hundred-thousand-odd years of our species ' existence , and even before , our ancestors looked up at the night sky , and wondered what stars are .
wondering , therefore , how to explain what they saw in terms of things unseen .
okay , so , most people only wondered that occasionally , like today , in breaks from whatever normally preoccupied them .
but what normally preoccupied them also involved yearning to know .
they wished they knew how to prevent their food supply from sometimes failing , and how they could rest when they were tired without risking starvation , be warmer , cooler , safer , in less pain .
i bet those prehistoric cave artists would have loved to know how to draw better .
in every aspect of their lives , they wished for progress , just as we do .
but they failed , almost completely , to make any .
they did n't know how to .
discoveries like fire happened so rarely , that from an individual 's point of view , the world never improved .
nothing new was learned .
the first clue to the origin of starlight happened as recently as 1899 : radioactivity .
within 40 years , physicists discovered the whole explanation , expressed , as usual , in elegant symbols .
but never mind the symbols .
think how many discoveries they represent .
nuclei and nuclear reactions , of course .
but isotopes , particles of electricity , antimatter , neutrinos , the conversion of mass to energy - that 's e = mc ^ 2 - gamma rays , transmutation .
that ancient dream that had always eluded the alchemists was achieved through these same theories that explained starlight and other ancient mysteries , and new , unexpected phenomena .
that all that , discovered in 40 years , had not been in the previous hundred thousand , was not for lack of thinking about stars , and all those other urgent problems they had .
they even arrived at answers , such as myths , that dominated their lives , yet bore almost no resemblance to the truth .
the tragedy of that protracted stagnation is n't sufficiently recognized , i think .
these were people with brains of essentially the same design that eventually did discover all those things .
but that ability to make progress remained almost unused , until the event that revolutionized the human condition and changed the universe .
or so we should hope .
because that event was the scientific revolution , ever since which our knowledge of the physical world , and of how to adapt it to our wishes , has been growing relentlessly .
now , what had changed ?
what were people now doing for the first time that made that difference between stagnation and rapid , open-ended discovery ?
how to make that difference is surely the most important universal truth that it is possible to know .
worryingly , there is no consensus about what it is .
so , i 'll tell you .
but i 'll have to backtrack a little first .
before the scientific revolution , they believed that everything important , knowable , was already known , enshrined in ancient writings , institutions , and in some genuinely useful rules of thumb - which were , however , entrenched as dogmas , along with many falsehoods .
so they believed that knowledge came from authorities that actually knew very little .
and therefore progress depended on learning how to reject the authority of learned men , priests , traditions and rulers .
which is why the scientific revolution had to have a wider context .
the enlightenment , a revolution in how people sought knowledge , trying not to rely on authority .
" take no one 's word for it . "
but that ca n't be what made the difference .
authorities had been rejected before , many times .
and that rarely , if ever , caused anything like the scientific revolution .
at the time , what they thought distinguished science was a radical idea about things unseen , known as empiricism .
all knowledge derives from the senses .
well , we 've seen that that ca n't be true .
it did help by promoting observation and experiment .
but , from the outset , it was obvious that there was something horribly wrong with it .
knowledge comes from the senses .
in what language ? certainly not the language of mathematics , in which , galileo rightly said , the book of nature is written .
look at the world . you do n't see equations carved on to the mountainsides .
if you did , it would be because people had carved them .
by the way , why do n't we do that ?
what 's wrong with us ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- empiricism is inadequate because , well , scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen .
and the unseen , you have to admit , does n't come to us through the senses .
we do n't see those nuclear reactions in stars .
we do n't see the origin of species .
we do n't see the curvature of space-time , and other universes .
but we know about those things .
how ?
well , the classic empiricist answer is induction .
the unseen resembles the seen .
but it does n't .
you know what the clinching evidence was that space-time is curved ?
it was a photograph , not of space-time , but of an eclipse , with a dot there rather than there .
and the evidence for evolution ?
some rocks and some finches .
and parallel universes ? again : dots there , rather than there , on a screen .
what we see , in all these cases , bears no resemblance to the reality that we conclude is responsible - only a long chain of theoretical reasoning and interpretation connects them .
" ah ! " say creationists .
" so you admit it 's all interpretation .
no one has ever seen evolution .
we see rocks .
you have your interpretation . we have ours .
yours comes from guesswork , ours from the bible . "
but what creationist and empiricists both ignore is that , in that sense , no one has ever seen a bible either , that the eye only detects light , which we do n't perceive .
brains only detect nerve impulses .
and they do n't perceive even those as what they really are , namely electrical crackles .
so we perceive nothing as what it really is .
our connection to reality is never just perception .
it 's always , as karl popper put it , theory-laden .
scientific knowledge is n't derived from anything .
it 's like all knowledge . it 's conjectural , guesswork , tested by observation , not derived from it .
so , were testable conjectures the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates ?
no . contrary to what 's usually said , testability is common , in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking .
any crank claiming the sun will go out next tuesday has got a testable prediction .
consider the ancient greek myth explaining seasons .
hades , god of the underworld , kidnaps persephone , the goddess of spring , and negotiates a forced marriage contract , requiring her to return regularly , and lets her go .
and each year , she is magically compelled to return .
and her mother , demeter , goddess of the earth , is sad , and makes it cold and barren .
that myth is testable .
if winter is caused by demeter 's sadness , then it must happen everywhere on earth simultaneously .
so if the ancient greeks had only known that australia is at its warmest when demeter is at her saddest , they 'd have known that their theory is false .
so what was wrong with that myth , and with all pre-scientific thinking , and what , then , made that momentous difference ?
i think there is one thing you have to care about .
and that implies testability , the scientific method , the enlightenment , and everything .
and here is the crucial thing .
there is such a thing as a defect in a story .
i do n't just mean a logical defect . i mean a bad explanation .
what does that mean ? well , explanation is an assertion about what 's there , unseen , that accounts for what 's seen .
because the explanatory role of persephone 's marriage contract could be played equally well by infinitely many other ad hoc entities .
why a marriage contract and not any other reason for regular annual action ?
here is one . persephone was n't released .
she escaped , and returns every spring to take revenge on hades , with her spring powers .
she cools his domain with spring air , venting heat up to the surface , creating summer .
that accounts for the same phenomena as the original myth .
it 's equally testable .
yet what it asserts about reality is , in many ways , the opposite .
and that is possible because the details of the original myth are unrelated to seasons , except via the myth itself .
this easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation , because , without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants , advocating one of them , in preference to the others , is irrational .
so , for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress , seek good explanations , the ones that ca n't be easily varied , while still explaining the phenomena .
now , our current explanation of seasons is that the earth 's axis is tilted like that , so each hemisphere tilts toward the sun for half the year , and away for the other half .
better put that up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a good explanation : hard to vary , because every detail plays a functional role .
for instance , we know , independently of seasons , that surfaces tilted away from radiant heat are heated less , and that a spinning sphere , in space , points in a constant direction .
and the tilt also explains the sun 's angle of elevation at different times of year , and predicts that the seasons will be out of phase in the two hemispheres .
if they 'd been observed in phase , the theory would have been refuted .
but now , the fact that it 's also a good explanation , hard to vary , makes the crucial difference .
if the ancient greeks had found out about seasons in australia , they could have easily varied their myth to predict that .
for instance , when demeter is upset , she banishes heat from her vicinity , into the other hemisphere , where it makes summer .
so , being proved wrong by observation , and changing their theory accordingly , still would n't have got the ancient greeks one jot closer to understanding seasons , because their explanation was bad : easy to vary .
and it 's only when an explanation is good that it even matters whether it 's testable .
if the axis-tilt theory had been refuted , its defenders would have had nowhere to go .
no easily implemented change could make that tilt cause the same seasons in both hemispheres .
the search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress .
it 's the basic regulating principle of the enlightenment .
so , in science , two false approaches blight progress .
one is well known : untestable theories .
but the more important one is explanationless theories .
whenever you 're told that some existing statistical trend will continue , but you are n't given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend , you 're being told a wizard did it .
when you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes - but not how gene percentages confer rights - wizard .
when someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited , but they do n't explain how genes cause opinions , they 've settled nothing . they are saying that our opinions are caused by wizards , and presumably so are their own .
that the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world .
it 's a fact that is , itself , unseen , yet impossible to vary . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sustainability represents the what , the where and the how of what is caught .
the who and the why are what 's important to me .
i want to know the people behind my dinner choices .
i want to know how i impact them .
i want to know how they impact me .
i want to know why they fish .
i want to know how they rely on the water 's bounty for their living .
understanding all of this enables us to shift our perception of seafood away from a commodity to an opportunity to restore our ecosystem .
it allows for us to celebrate the seafood that we 're also so fortunate to eat .
so what do we call this ?
i think we call it restorative seafood .
where sustainability is the capacity to endure and maintain , restorative is the ability to replenish and progress .
restorative seafood allows for an evolving and dynamic system and acknowledges our relationship with the ocean as a resource , suggesting that we engage to replenish the ocean and to encourage its resiliency .
it is a more hopeful , it is a more human , and is a more useful way of understanding our environment .
wallet guides - standard issue by lots in the marine conservation world - are very handy ; they 're a wonderful tool .
green , yellow and red lists -lsb- of -rsb- seafood species .
the association is very easy : buy green , do n't buy red , think twice about yellow .
but in my mind , it 's really not enough to just eat green list .
we ca n't sustain this without the measure of our success really changing the fate of the species in the yellow and the red .
but what if we eat only in the green list ?
you 've got pole-caught yellowfin tuna here - comes from sustainable stocks .
pole caught - no bycatch .
great for fishermen . lots of money . supporting local economies .
but it 's a lion of the sea . it 's a top predator .
what 's the context of this meal ?
am i sitting down in a steakhouse to a 16-ounce portion of this ?
do i do this three times a week ?
i might still be in the green list , but i 'm not doing myself , or you , or the oceans any favors .
the point is that we have to have a context , a gauge for our actions in all this .
example : i 've heard that red wine is great for my health - antioxidants and minerals - heart healthy .
that 's great ! i love red wine !
i 'm going to drink so much of it . i 'm going to be so healthy .
well , how many bottles is it before you tell me that i have a problem ?
well folks , we have a protein problem .
we have lost this sensibility when it regards our food , and we are paying a cost .
the problem is we are hiding that cost beneath the waves .
we are hiding that cost behind the social acceptance of expanding waistlines .
and we are hiding that cost behind monster profits .
so the first thing about this idea of restorative seafood is that it really takes into account our needs .
restorative seafood might best be represented not by jaws , or by flipper , or the gordon 's fisherman , but rather , by the jolly green giant .
vegetables : they might yet save the oceans .
sylvia likes to say that blue is the new green .
well i 'd like to respectfully submit that broccoli green might then be the new blue .
we must continue to eat the best seafood possible , if at all .
but we also must eat it with a ton of vegetables .
the best part about restorative seafood though is that it comes on the half-shell with a bottle of tabasco and lemon wedges .
it comes in a five-ounce portion of tilapia breaded with dijon mustard and crispy , broiled breadcrumbs and a steaming pile of pecan quinoa pilaf with crunchy , grilled broccoli so soft and sweet and charred and smoky on the outside with just a hint of chili flake .
whooo !
this is an easy sell .
and the best part is all of those ingredients are available to every family at the neighborhood walmart .
jamie oliver is campaigning to save america from the way we eat .
sylvia is campaigning to save the oceans from the way we eat .
there 's a pattern here .
forget nuclear holocaust ; it 's the fork that we have to worry about .
we have ravaged our earth and then used the food that we 've sourced to handicap ourselves in more ways than one .
so i think we have this whole eating thing wrong .
and so i think it 's time we change what we expect from our food .
sustainability is complicated but dinner is a reality that we all very much understand .
so let 's start there .
there 's been a lot of movement recently in greening our food systems .
dan barber and alice waters are leading passionately the green food delicious revolution .
but green foods often represent a way for us to disregard the responsibility as eaters .
just because it comes from a green source does n't mean we can treat it with disregard on the plate .
we have eco-friendly shrimp .
we can make them ; we have that technology .
but we can never have any eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet .
it does n't work .
heart-healthy dinner is a very important part of restorative seafood .
while we try to manage declining marine populations , the media 's recommending increased consumption of seafood .
studies say that tens of thousands of american grandmothers , grandfathers , mothers and fathers might be around for another birthday if we included more seafood .
that 's a reward i am not willing to pass up .
but it 's not all about the seafood .
it 's about the way that we look at our plates .
as a chef , i realize the easiest thing for me to do is reduce the portion sizes on my plate .
a couple things happened .
i made more money .
people started buying appetizers and salads , because they knew they were n't going to fill up on the entrees alone .
people spent more time engaging in their meals , engaging with each other over their meals .
people got , in short , more of what they came there for even though they got less protein .
they got more calories over the course of a diversified meal .
they got healthier . i made more money .
this is great .
environmental consideration was served with every plate , but it was served with a heaping mound of consideration for human interests at the same time .
one of the other things we did was begin to diversify the species that we served - small silverfish , anchovies , mackerel , sardines were uncommon .
shellfish , mussels , oysters , clams , tilapia , char - these were the common species .
we were directing tastes towards more resilience , more restorative options .
this is what we need to favor .
this is what the green list says .
but this is also how we can actually begin to restore our environment .
but what of those big predators , those fashionable species , that green list tuna that i was talking about earlier ?
well , if you must , i have a recipe for you .
it pretty much works with any big fish in the ocean , so here we go .
start with a 16-ounce portion of big fish .
get a knife . cut it into four portions .
put it on four plates .
mound up those four plates with vegetables and then open up the very best bottle of burgundy you have , light the candles and celebrate it .
celebrate the opportunity you have to eat this .
invite your friends and neighbors over and repeat once a year , maybe .
i expect a lot from food .
i expect health and joy and family and community .
i expect that producing ingredients , preparing dishes and eating meals is all part of the communion of human interests .
i was lucky enough that my father was a fantastic cook .
and he taught me very early on about the privilege that eating represents .
i remember well the meals of my childhood .
they were reasonable portions of protein served with copious quantities of vegetables and small amounts of starch , usually rice .
this is still how i largely eat today .
i get sick when i go to steakhouses .
i get the meat sweats .
it 's like a hangover from protein .
it 's disgusting .
but of all the dire news that you 'll hear and that you have heard about the state of our oceans , i have the unfortunate burden of delivering to you possibly the very worst of it and that is this whole time your mother was right .
eat your vegetables .
it 's pretty straightforward .
so what are we looking for in a meal ?
well for health , i 'm looking for wholesome ingredients that are good for my body .
for joy , i 'm looking for butter and salt and sexy things that make things taste less like penance .
for family , i 'm looking for recipes that genuflect to my own personal histories .
for community though , we start at the very beginning .
there 's no escaping the fact that everything we eat has a global impact .
so try and learn as best you can what that impact is and then take the first step to minimize it .
we 've seen an image of our blue planet , our world bank .
but it is more than just a repository of our resources ; it 's also the global geography of the communion we call dinner .
so if we all take only what we need , then we can begin to share the rest , we can begin to celebrate , we can begin to restore .
we need to savor vegetables .
we need to savor smaller portions of seafood .
and we need to save dinner .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a child , i was raised by native hawaiian elders - three old women who took care of me while my parents worked .
the year is 1963 .
we 're at the ocean .
it 's twilight .
we 're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides .
it 's a stretch of beach we know so well .
the smooth stones on the sand are familiar to us .
if you saw these women on the street in their faded clothes , you might dismiss them as poor and simple .
that would be a mistake .
these women are descendants of polynesian navigators , trained in the old ways by their elders , and now they 're passing it on to me .
they teach me the names of the winds and the rains , of astronomy according to a genealogy of stars .
there 's a new moon on the horizon .
hawaiians say it 's a good night for fishing .
they begin to chant .
-lsb- hawaiian chant -rsb- when they finish , they sit in a circle and ask me to come to join them .
they want to teach me about my destiny .
i thought every seven-year-old went through this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " baby girl , someday the world will be in trouble .
people will forget their wisdom .
it will take elders ' voices from the far corners of the world to call the world into balance .
you will go far away .
it will sometimes be a lonely road .
we will not be there .
but you will look into the eyes of seeming strangers , and you will recognize your ohana , your family .
and it will take all of you .
it will take all of you . "
these words , i hold onto all my life .
because the idea of doing it alone terrifies me .
the year is 2007 .
i 'm on a remote island in micronesia .
satawal is one half-mile long by one mile wide .
it 's the home of my mentor .
his name is pius mau piailug .
mau is a palu , a navigator priest .
he 's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world .
there are fewer than a handful of palu left on this island .
their tradition is so extraordinary that these mariners sailed three million square miles across the pacific without the use of instruments .
they could synthesize patterns in nature using the rising and setting of stars , the sequence and direction of waves , the flight patterns of certain birds .
even the slightest hint of color on the underbelly of a cloud would inform them and help them navigate with the keenest accuracy .
when western scientists would join mau on the canoe and watch him go into the hull , it appeared that an old man was going to rest .
in fact , the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel .
it is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves .
mau was , in fact , gathering explicit data using his entire body .
it 's what he had been trained to do since he was five years old .
now science may dismiss this methodology , but polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel .
the palu also had an uncanny ability to forecast weather conditions days in advance .
sometimes i 'd be with mau on a cloud-covered night and we 'd sit at the easternmost coast of the island , and he would look out , and then he would say , " okay , we go . "
he saw that first glint of light - he knew what the weather was going to be three days from now .
their achievements , intellectually and scientifically , are extraordinary , and they are so relevant for these times that we are in when we are riding out storms .
we are in such a critical moment of our collective history .
they have been compared to astronauts - these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island .
their canoes , our rockets ; their sea , our space .
the wisdom of these elders is not a mere collection of stories about old people in some remote spot .
this is part of our collective narrative .
it 's humanity 's dna .
we can not afford to lose it .
the year is 2010 .
just as the women in hawaii that raised me predicted , the world is in trouble .
we live in a society bloated with data , yet starved for wisdom .
we 're connected 24/7 , yet anxiety , fear , depression and loneliness is at an all-time high .
we must course-correct .
an african shaman said , " your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes . "
the link between the past and the future is fragile .
this i know intimately , because even as i travel throughout the world to listen to these stories and record them , i struggle .
i am haunted by the fact that i no longer remember the names of the winds and the rains .
mau passed away five months ago , but his legacy and lessons live on .
and i am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them , as potent as the micronesian navigators , that are going dismissed , that this is a testament to brilliant , brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly .
because when an elder dies a library is burned , and throughout the world , libraries are ablaze .
i am grateful for the fact that i had a mentor like mau who taught me how to navigate .
and i realize through a lesson that he shared that we continue to find our way .
and this is what he said : " the island is the canoe ; the canoe , the island . "
and what he meant was , if you are voyaging and far from home , your very survival depends on everyone aboard .
you can not make the voyage alone , you were never meant to .
this whole notion of every man for himself is completely unsustainable .
it always was .
so in closing i would offer you this : the planet is our canoe , and we are the voyagers .
true navigation begins in the human heart .
it 's the most important map of all .
together , may we journey well .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mockingbirds are badass .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they are .
mockingbirds - that 's mimus polyglottos - are the emcees of the animal kingdom .
they listen and mimic and remix what they like .
they rock the mic outside my window every morning .
i can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring .
i mean , if you can talk it , a mockingbird can squawk it .
so check it , i 'm gonna to catch mockingbirds .
i 'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird molotov cocktails .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . and as i drive through a neighborhood , say , where people got-a-lotta , i 'll take a mockingbird i caught in a neighborhood where folks ai n't got nada and just let it go , you know .
up goes the bird , out come the words , " juanito , juanito , vente a comer mi hijo ! "
oh , i 'm going to be the johnny appleseed of sound .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- cruising random city streets , rocking a drop-top cadillac with a big backseat , packing like 13 brown paper walmart bags full of loaded mockingbirds , and i 'll get everybody .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll get the nitwit on the network news saying , " we 'll be back in a moment with more on the crisis . "
i 'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the ice is .
i 'll get that lady at the laundromat who always seems to know what being nice is .
i 'll get your postman making dinner plans .
i 'll get the last time you lied .
i 'll get , " baby , just give me the frickin ' tv guide . "
i 'll get a lonely , little sentence with real error in it , " yeah , i guess i could come inside , but only for a minute . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll get an esl class in chinatown learning " it 's raining , it 's pouring . "
i 'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring .
i 'll get your ex-lover telling someone else , " good morning . "
i 'll get everyone 's good mornings .
i do n't care how you make ' em .
aloha . konichiwa . shalom . ah-salam alaikum .
everybody means everybody , means everybody here .
and so maybe i 'll build a gilded cage .
i 'll line the bottom with old notebook pages .
inside it , i will place a mockingbird for - short explanation , hippie parents .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what does a violin have to do with technology ?
where in the world is this world heading ?
on one end , gold bars - on the other , an entire planet .
we are 12 billion light years from the edge .
space is length and breadth continued indefinitely , but you can not buy a ticket to travel commercially to space in america because countries are beginning to eat like us , live like us and die like us .
you might wanna avert your gaze , because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb , and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing .
there 's about 10 million phage per job .
it 's a very strange world inside a nanotube .
women can talk ; black men ski ; white men build strong buildings ; we build strong suns .
the surface of the earth is absolutely riddled with holes , and here we are , right in the middle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn .
when all the little mockingbirds fly away , they 're going to sound like the last four days .
i will get uptown gurus , downtown teachers , broke-ass artists and dealers , and filipino preachers , leaf blowers , bartenders , boob-job doctors , hooligans , garbage men , your local congressmen in the spotlight , guys in the overhead helicopters .
everybody gets heard .
everybody gets this one , honest mockingbird as a witness .
and i 'm on this .
i 'm on this ' til the whole thing spreads , with chat rooms and copycats and moms maybe tucking kids into bed singing , " hush , little baby , do n't say a word .
wait for the man with the mockingbird . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . and then come the news crews , and the man-in-the-street interviews , and the letters to the editor .
everybody asking , just who is responsible for this citywide , nationwide mockingbird cacophony , and somebody finally is going to tip the city council of monterey , california off to me , and they 'll offer me a key to the city .
a gold-plated , oversized key to the city and that is all i need , ' cause if i get that , i can unlock the air .
i 'll listen for what 's missing , and i 'll put it there .
thank you , ted .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : wow .
-lrb- applause -rrb- wow .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hello ! my name is golan levin .
i 'm an artist and an engineer , which is , increasingly , a more common kind of hybrid .
but i still fall into this weird crack where people do n't seem to understand me .
and i was looking around and i found this wonderful picture .
it 's a letter from " artforum " in 1967 saying " we ca n't imagine ever doing a special issue on electronics or computers in art . " and they still have n't .
and lest you think that you all , as the digerati , are more enlightened , i went to the apple iphone app store the other day .
where 's art ? i got productivity . i got sports .
and somehow the idea that one would want to make art for the iphone , which my friends and i are doing now , is still not reflected in our understanding of what computers are for .
so , from both directions , there is kind of , i think , a lack of understanding about what it could mean to be an artist who uses the materials of his own day , or her own day , which i think artists are obliged to do , is to really explore the expressive potential of the new tools that we have .
in my own case , i 'm an artist , and i 'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action , and basically empowering people through interactivity .
i want people to discover themselves as actors , as creative actors , by having interactive experiences .
a lot of my work is about trying to get away from this .
this a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine .
and when i say desktop , i do n't just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk .
if you look carefully , you can even see a hint of the apple menu , up here in the upper left , where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical .
so this is , as joy mountford once said , " the mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the thing i 'm really trying to do is enabling people to have more rich kinds of interactive experiences .
how can we get away from the mouse and use our full bodies as a way of exploring aesthetic experiences , not necessarily utilitarian ones .
so i write software . and that 's how i do it .
and a lot of my experiences resemble mirrors in some way .
because this is , in some sense , the first way , that people discover their own potential as actors , and discover their own agency .
by saying " who is that person in the mirror ? oh it 's actually me . "
and so , to give an example , this is a project from last year , which is called the interstitial fragment processor .
and it allows people to explore the negative shapes that they create when they 're just going about their everyday business .
so as people make shapes with their hands or their heads and so forth , or with each other , these shapes literally produce sounds and drop out of thin air - basically taking what 's often this , kind of , unseen space , or this undetected space , and making it something real , that people then can appreciate and become creative with .
so again , people discover their creative agency in this way .
and their own personalities come out in totally unique ways .
so in addition to using full-body input , something that i 've explored now , for a while , has been the use of the voice , which is an immensely expressive system for us , vocalizing .
song is one of our oldest ways of making ourselves heard and understood .
and i came across this fantastic research by wolfgang köhler , the so-called father of gestalt psychology , from 1927 , who submitted to an audience like yourselves the following two shapes .
and he said one of them is called maluma .
and one of them is called taketa . which is which ?
anyone want to hazard a guess ?
maluma is on top . yeah . so .
as he says here , most people answer without any hesitation .
so what we 're really seeing here is a phenomenon called phonaesthesia , which is a kind of synesthesia that all of you have .
and so , whereas dr. oliver sacks has talked about how perhaps one person in a million actually has true synesthesia , where they hear colors or taste shapes , and things like this , phonaesthesia is something we can all experience to some extent .
it 's about mappings between different perceptual domains , like hardness , sharpness , brightness and darkness , and the phonemes that we 're able to speak with .
so 70 years on , there 's been some research where cognitive psychologists have actually sussed out the extent to which , you know , l , m and b are more associated with shapes that look like this , and p , t and k are perhaps more associated with shapes like this .
and here we suddenly begin to have a mapping between curvature that we can exploit numerically , a relative mapping between curvature and shape .
so it occurred to me , what happens if we could run these backwards ?
and thus was born the project called remark , which is a collaboration with zachary lieberman and the ars electronica futurelab .
and this is an interactive installation which presents the fiction that speech casts visible shadows .
so the idea is you step into a kind of a magic light .
and as you do , you see the shadows of your own speech .
and they sort of fly away , out of your head .
if a computer speech recognition system is able to recognize what you 're saying , then it spells it out .
and if it is n't then it produces a shape which is very phonaesthetically tightly coupled to the sounds you made .
so let 's bring up a video of that .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . so . and this project here , i was working with the great abstract vocalist , jaap blonk .
and he is a world expert in performing " the ursonate , " which is a half-an-hour nonsense poem by kurt schwitters , written in the 1920s , which is half an hour of very highly patterned nonsense .
and it 's almost impossible to perform .
but jaap is one of the world experts in performing it .
and in this project we 've developed a form of intelligent real-time subtitles .
so these are our live subtitles , that are being produced by a computer that knows the text of " the ursonate " - fortunately jaap does too , very well - and it is delivering that text at the same time as jaap is .
so all the text you 're going to see is real-time generated by the computer , visualizing what he 's doing with his voice .
here you can see the set-up where there is a screen with the subtitles behind him .
okay . so ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- the full videos are online if you are interested .
i got a split reaction to that during the live performance , because there is some people who understand live subtitles are a kind of an oxymoron , because usually there is someone making them afterwards .
and then a bunch of people who were like , " what 's the big deal ?
i see subtitles all the time on television . "
you know ? they do n't imagine the person in the booth , typing it all .
so in addition to the full body , and in addition to the voice , another thing that i 've been really interested in , most recently , is the use of the eyes , or the gaze , in terms of how people relate to each other .
it 's a really profound amount of nonverbal information that 's communicated with the eyes .
and it 's one of the most interesting technical challenges that 's very currently active in the computer sciences : being able to have a camera that can understand , from a fairly big distance away , how these little tiny balls are actually pointing in one way or another to reveal what you 're interested in , and where your attention is directed .
so there is a lot of emotional communication that happens there .
and so i 've been beginning , with a variety of different projects , to understand how people can relate to machines with their eyes .
and basically to ask the questions : what if art was aware that we were looking at it ?
how could it respond , in a way , to acknowledge or subvert the fact that we 're looking at it ?
and what could it do if it could look back at us ?
and so those are the questions that are happening in the next projects .
in the first one which i 'm going to show you , called eyecode , it 's a piece of interactive software in which , if we read this little circle , " the trace left by the looking of the previous observer looks at the trace left by the looking of previous observer . "
the idea is that it 's an image wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed by different people in an installation .
so let me just switch over so we can do the live demo .
so let 's run this and see if it works .
okay . ah , there is lots of nice bright video .
there is just a little test screen that shows that it 's working .
and what i 'm just going to do is - i 'm going to hide that .
and you can see here that what it 's doing is it 's recording my eyes every time i blink .
hello ? and i can ... hello ... okay .
and no matter where i am , what 's really going on here is that it 's an eye-tracking system that tries to locate my eyes .
and if i get really far away i 'm blurry .
you know , you 're going to have these kind of blurry spots like this that maybe only resemble eyes in a very very abstract way .
but if i come up really close and stare directly at the camera on this laptop then you 'll see these nice crisp eyes .
you can think of it as a way of , sort of , typing , with your eyes .
and what you 're typing are recordings of your eyes as you 're looking at other peoples ' eyes .
so each person is looking at the looking of everyone else before them .
and this exists in larger installations where there are thousands and thousands of eyes that people could be staring at , as you see who 's looking at the people looking at the people looking before them .
so i 'll just add a couple more . blink . blink .
and you can see , just once again , how it 's sort of finding my eyes and doing its best to estimate when it 's blinking .
alright . let 's leave that .
so that 's this kind of recursive observation system .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
the last couple pieces i 'm going to show are basically in the new realm of robotics - for me , new for me .
it 's called opto-isolator .
and i 'm going to show a video of the older version of it , which is just a minute long . okay .
in this case , the opto-isolator is blinking in response to one 's own blinks .
so it blinks one second after you do .
this is a device which is intended to reduce the phenomenon of gaze down to the simplest possible materials .
just one eye , looking at you , and eliminating everything else about a face , but just to consider gaze in an isolated way as a kind of , as an element .
and at the same time , it attempts to engage in what you might call familiar psycho-social gaze behaviors .
like looking away if you look at it too long because it gets shy , or things like that .
okay . so the last project i 'm going to show is this new one called snout .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's an eight-foot snout , with a googly eye .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and inside it 's got an 800-pound robot arm that i borrowed , -lrb- laughter -rrb- from a friend .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it helps to have good friends .
i 'm at carnegie mellon ; we 've got a great robotics institute there .
i 'd like to show you thing called snout , which is - the idea behind this project is to make a robot that appears as if it 's continually surprised to see you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the idea is that basically - if it 's constantly like " huh ? ... huh ? "
that 's why its other name is doubletaker , taker of doubles .
it 's always kind of doing a double take : " what ? "
and the idea is basically , can it look at you and make you feel as if like , " what ? is it my shoes ? "
" got something on my hair ? " here we go . alright .
checking him out ...
for you nerds , here 's a little behind-the-scenes .
it 's got a computer vision system , and it tries to look at the people who are moving around the most .
those are its targets .
up there is the skeleton , which is actually what it 's trying to do .
it 's really about trying to create a novel body language for a new creature .
hollywood does this all the time , of course .
but also have the body language communicate something to the person who is looking at it .
this language is communicating that it is surprised to see you , and it 's interested in looking at you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . that 's all i 've got for today .
and i 'm really happy to be here . thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- three years ago , i was standing about a hundred yards from chernobyl nuclear reactor number four .
my geiger counter dosimeter , which measures radiation , was going berserk , and the closer i got , the more frenetic it became , and frantic . my god .
i was there covering the 25th anniversary of the world 's worst nuclear accident , as you can see by the look on my face , reluctantly so , but with good reason , because the nuclear fire that burned for 11 days back in 1986 released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on hiroshima , and the sarcophagus , which is the covering over reactor number four , which was hastily built 27 years ago , now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation .
so i was filming .
i just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast .
but then , i looked into the distance , and i saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse , and i 'm thinking , who could be living here ?
i mean , after all , chernobyl 's soil , water and air , are among the most highly contaminated on earth , and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone , or dead zone , and it 's a nuclear police state , complete with border guards .
you have to have dosimeter at all times , clicking away , you have to have a government minder , and there 's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring .
the point being , no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone .
but they are .
it turns out an unlikely community of some 200 people are living inside the zone .
they 're called self-settlers .
and almost all of them are women , the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol , cigarettes , if not radiation .
at the time of the accident , but not everybody accepted that fate .
the women in the zone , now in their 70s and 80s , are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and , it would seem , common sense , and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone .
they did so illegally .
as one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time , " shoot me and dig the grave .
otherwise , i 'm going home . "
now why would they return to such deadly soil ?
i mean , were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them , or both ?
the thing is , they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently .
now around chernobyl , there are scattered ghost villages , eerily silent , strangely charming , bucolic , totally contaminated .
many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident , but a few are left like this , kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy .
others have a few residents in them , one or two " babushkas , " or " babas , " which are the russian and ukrainian words for grandmother .
another village might have six or seven residents .
so this is the strange demographic of the zone - isolated alone together .
and when i made my way to that piping chimney i 'd seen in the distance , i saw hanna zavorotnya , and i met her .
she 's the self-declared mayor of kapavati village , population eight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she said to me , when i asked her the obvious , " radiation does n't scare me . starvation does . "
and you have to remember , these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century .
stalin 's enforced famines of the 1930s , the holodomor , killed millions of ukrainians , and they faced the nazis in the ' 40s , who came through slashing , burning , raping , and in fact many of these women were shipped to germany as forced labor .
so when a couple decades into soviet rule , chernobyl happened , they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible .
so they returned to their villages and are told they 're going to get sick and die soon , but five happy years , their logic goes , is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of kiev , separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies , the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon .
for them , environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation .
it turns out this holds true for other species as well .
wild boar , lynx , moose , they 've all returned to the region in force , the very real , very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans .
the dead zone , it turns out , is full of life .
and there is a kind of heroic resilience , a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 5 a.m.
pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes , their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka .
and there 's a patina of simple defiance among them .
" they told us our legs would hurt , and they do . so what ? "
i mean , what about their health ?
the benefits of hardy , physical living , but an environment made toxic by a complicated , little-understood enemy , radiation .
it 's incredibly difficult to parse .
health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught .
the world health organization puts the number of chernobyl-related deaths at 4,000 , eventually .
greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands .
now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high , and that chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere : higher levels of anxiety , depression , alcoholism , unemployment and , importantly , disrupted social networks .
now , like many of you , i have moved maybe 20 , 25 times in my life .
home is a transient concept .
i have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil .
so it 's hard for us to understand , but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka , and connection to the land is palpable .
and perhaps because these ukrainian women were schooled under the soviets and versed in the russian poets , aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time .
" if you leave , you die . "
" those who left are worse off now .
they are dying of sadness . "
" motherland is motherland . i will never leave . "
what sounds like faith , soft faith , may actually be fact , because the surprising truth - i mean , there are no studies , but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on earth for the last 27 years , have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation , by some estimates up to 10 years .
how could this be ?
here 's a theory : could it be that those ties to ancestral soil , the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms , actually affect longevity ?
the power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative .
home and community are forces that rival even radiation .
now radiation or not , these women are at the end of their lives .
in the next decade , the zone 's human residents will be gone , and it will revert to a wild , radioactive place , full only of animals and occasionally daring , flummoxed scientists .
but the spirit and existence of the babushkas , whose numbers have been halved in the three years i 've known them , will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with , about the relative nature of risk , about transformative connections to home , and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi , my name is marcin - farmer , technologist .
i was born in poland , now in the u.s.
i started a group called open source ecology .
we 've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist - things from tractors , bread ovens , circuit makers .
then we set out to create an open source , diy , do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost .
we call this the global village construction set .
so let me tell you a story .
so i finished my 20s with a ph.d. in fusion energy , and i discovered i was useless .
i had no practical skills .
the world presented me with options , and i took them .
i guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle .
so i started a farm in missouri and learned about the economics of farming .
i bought a tractor - then it broke .
i paid to get it repaired - then it broke again .
then pretty soon , i was broke too .
i realized that the truly appropriate , low-cost tools that i needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just did n't exist yet .
i needed tools that were robust , modular , highly efficient and optimized , low-cost , made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime , not designed for obsolescence .
i found that i would have to build them myself .
so i did just that .
and i tested them .
and i found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale .
so then i published the 3d designs , schematics , instructional videos and budgets on a wiki .
then contributors from all over the world began showing up , prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits .
so far , we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines .
and now the project is beginning to grow on its own .
we know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity .
and the same is starting to happen with hardware too .
we 're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people 's lives in such tangible material ways .
if we can lower the barriers to farming , building , manufacturing , then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential .
that 's not only in the developing world .
our tools are being made for the american farmer , builder , entrepreneur , maker .
we 've seen lots of excitement from these people , who can now start a construction business , parts manufacturing , organic csa or just selling power back to the grid .
our goal is a repository of published designs so clear , so complete , that a single burned dvd is effectively a civilization starter kit .
i 've planted a hundred trees in a day .
i 've pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days .
from what i 've seen , this is only the beginning .
if this idea is truly sound , then the implications are significant .
a greater distribution of the means of production , environmentally sound supply chains , and a newly relevant diy maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity .
we 're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , i was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia , which is total color blindness , so i 've never seen color , and i do n't know what color looks like , because i come from a grayscale world .
to me , the sky is always gray , flowers are always gray , and television is still in black and white .
but , since the age of 21 , instead of seeing color , i can hear color .
in 2003 , i started a project with computer scientist adam montandon , and the result , with further collaborations with peter kese from slovenia and matias lizana from barcelona , is this electronic eye .
it 's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me - -lrb- frequency sounds -rrb- - and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head , and i hear the color in front of me through the bone , through bone conduction .
-lrb- frequency sounds -rrb- so , for example , if i have , like - this is the sound of purple . -lrb- frequency sounds -rrb- for example , this is the sound of grass . -lrb- frequency sounds -rrb- this is red , like ted . -lrb- frequency sounds -rrb- this is the sound of a dirty sock . -lrb- laughter -rrb- which is like yellow , this one .
so i 've been hearing color all the time for eight years , since 2004 , so i find it completely normal now to hear color all the time .
at the start , though , i had to memorize the names you give for each color , so i had to memorize the notes , but after some time , all this information became a perception .
i did n't have to think about the notes .
and after some time , this perception became a feeling .
i started to have favorite colors , and i started to dream in colors .
so , when i started to dream in color is when i felt that the software and my brain had united , because in my dreams , it was my brain creating electronic sounds . it was n't the software , so that 's when i started to feel like a cyborg .
it 's when i started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device .
it had become a part of my body , an extension of my senses , and after some time , it even became a part of my official image .
this is my passport from 2004 .
you 're not allowed to appear on u.k. passports with electronic equipment , but i insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body , an extension of my brain , and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo .
so , life has changed dramatically since i hear color , because color is almost everywhere , so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery , i can listen to a picasso , for example . so it 's like i 'm going to a concert hall , because i can listen to the paintings .
and supermarkets , i find this is very shocking , it 's very , very attractive to walk along a supermarket .
it 's like going to a nightclub .
it 's full of different melodies . -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah .
especially the aisle with cleaning products .
it 's just fabulous . -lrb- laughter -rrb- also , the way i dress has changed .
before , i used to dress in a way that it looked good .
now i dress in a way that it sounds good . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so today i 'm dressed in c major , so it 's quite a happy chord . -lrb- laughter -rrb- if i had to go to a funeral , though , i would dress in b minor , which would be turquoise , purple and orange . -lrb- laughter -rrb- also , food , the way i look at food has changed , because now i can display the food on a plate , so i can eat my favorite song . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so depending on how i display it , i can hear and i can compose music with food .
so imagine a restaurant where we can have , like , lady gaga salads as starters . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables , probably .
and also , some rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes , and some bjork or madonna desserts , that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs .
also , the way i perceive beauty has changed , because when i look at someone , i hear their face , so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it might happen the opposite , the other way around . so i really enjoy creating , like , sound portraits of people .
instead of drawing someone 's face , like drawing the shape , i point at them with the eye and i write down the different notes i hear , and then i create sound portraits .
here 's some faces .
-lrb- musical chords -rrb- yeah , nicole kidman sounds good . -lrb- laughter -rrb- some people , i would never relate , but they sound similar .
prince charles has some similarities with nicole kidman .
they have similar sound of eyes .
so you relate people that you would n't relate , and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces .
so i connect the eye , and then i play the audience 's faces .
the good thing about this is , if the concert does n't sound good , it 's their fault .
it 's not my fault , because - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so another thing that happens is that i started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color .
i heard a telephone tone , and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green .
the bbc beeps , they sound turquoise , and listening to mozart became a yellow experience , so i started to paint music and paint people 's voices , because people 's voices have frequencies that i relate to color .
and here 's some music translated into color .
for example , mozart , " queen of the night , " looks like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- very yellow and very colorful , because there 's many different frequencies .
-lrb- music -rrb- and this is a completely different song .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's justin bieber 's " baby . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- it is very pink and very yellow .
so , also voices , i can transform speeches into color , for example , these are two very well-known speeches .
one of them is martin luther king 's " i have a dream , " and the other one is hitler .
and i like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels , and then i ask people , " which one do you prefer ? "
and most people change their preference when i tell them that the one on the left is hitler and the one on the right is martin luther king .
so i got to a point when i was able to perceive 360 colors , just like human vision .
i was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel .
but then , i just thought that this human vision was n't good enough .
there 's many , many more colors around us that we can not perceive , but that electronic eyes can perceive .
so i decided to continue extending my color senses , and i added infrared and i added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale , so now i can hear colors that the human eye can not perceive .
for example , perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there 's movement detectors in a room .
i can hear if someone points at me with a remote control .
and the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it 's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe , because ultraviolet is a dangerous color , a color that can actually kill us , so i think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we can not perceive .
that 's why , two years ago , i created the cyborg foundation , which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg , tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body .
we should all think that knowledge comes from our senses , so if we extend our senses , we will consequently extend our knowledge .
i think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body .
i think this will be a big , big change that we will see during this century .
so i do encourage you all to think about which senses you 'd like to extend .
i would encourage you to become a cyborg .
you wo n't be alone . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the story starts in kenya in december of 2007 , when there was a disputed presidential election , and in the immediate aftermath of that election , there was an outbreak of ethnic violence .
and there was a lawyer in nairobi , ory okolloh - who some of you may know from her tedtalk - who began blogging about it on her site , kenyan pundit .
and shortly after the election and the outbreak of violence , the government suddenly imposed a significant media blackout .
and so weblogs went from being commentary as part of the media landscape to being a critical part of the media landscape in trying to understand where the violence was .
and okolloh solicited from her commenters more information about what was going on .
the comments began pouring in , and okolloh would collate them . she would post them .
and she quickly said , " it 's too much .
i could do this all day every day and i ca n't keep up .
there is more information about what 's going on in kenya right now than any one person can manage .
if only there was a way to automate this . "
and two programmers who read her blog held their hands up and said , " we could do that , " and in 72 hours , they launched ushahidi .
ushahidi - the name means " witness " or " testimony " in swahili - is a very simple way of taking reports from the field , whether it 's from the web or , critically , via mobile phones and sms , aggregating it and putting it on a map .
that 's all it is , but that 's all that 's needed because what it does is it takes the tacit information available to the whole population - everybody knows where the violence is , but no one person knows what everyone knows - and it takes that tacit information and it aggregates it , and it maps it and it makes it public .
and that , that maneuver called " crisis mapping , " was kicked off in kenya in january of 2008 .
and enough people looked at it and found it valuable enough that the programmers who created ushahidi decided they were going to make it open source and turn it into a platform .
it 's since been deployed in mexico to track electoral fraud .
it 's been deployed in washington d.c. to track snow cleanup .
and it 's been used most famously in haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake .
and when you look at the map now posted on the ushahidi front page , you can see that the number of deployments in ushahidi has gone worldwide , all right ?
this went from a single idea and a single implementation in east africa in the beginning of 2008 to a global deployment in less than three years .
now what okolloh did would not have been possible without digital technology .
what okolloh did would not have been possible without human generosity .
and the interesting moment now , the number of environments where the social design challenge relies on both of those things being true .
that is the resource that i 'm talking about .
i call it cognitive surplus .
and it represents the ability of the world 's population on large , sometimes global , projects .
cognitive surplus is made up of two things .
the first , obviously , is the world 's free time and talents .
the world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects .
now , that free time existed in the 20th century , but we did n't get ushahidi in the 20th century .
that 's the second half of cognitive surplus .
the media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume , and we got , as a result , very good at consuming .
but now that we 've been given media tools - the internet , mobile phones - that let us do more than consume , what we 're seeing is that people were n't couch potatoes because we liked to be .
we were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us .
we still like to consume , of course .
but it turns out we also like to create , and we like to share .
and it 's those two things together - ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts - that are the new design resource .
and using cognitive surplus , we 're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific , literary , artistic , political efforts .
designing .
we 're also getting , of course , a lot of lolcats .
lolcats are cute pictures of cats made cuter with the addition of cute captions .
and they are also part of the abundant media landscape we 're getting now .
this is one of the participatory - one of the participatory models we see coming out of that , along with ushahidi .
now i want to stipulate , as the lawyers say , that lolcats are the stupidest possible creative act .
there are other candidates of course , but lolcats will do as a general case .
but here 's the thing : the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act .
someone who has done something like this , however mediocre and throwaway , has tried something , has put something forward in public .
and once they 've done it , they can do it again , and they could work on getting it better .
there is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work , and as anybody who 's worked as an artist or a creator knows , it 's a spectrum you 're constantly struggling to get on top of .
the gap is between doing anything and doing nothing .
and someone who makes a lolcat has already crossed over that gap .
now it 's tempting to want to get the ushahidis without the lolcats , right , to get the serious stuff without the throwaway stuff .
but media abundance never works that way .
freedom to experiment means freedom to experiment with anything .
even with the sacred printing press , we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals .
so before i talk about what is , i think , the critical difference between lolcats and ushahidi , i want to talk about their shared source .
and that source is design for generosity .
it is one of the curiosities of our historical era that even as cognitive surplus is becoming a resource we can design around , social sciences are also starting to explain how important our intrinsic motivations are to us , how much we do things because we like to do them rather than because our boss told us to do them , or because we 're being paid to do them .
this is a graph from a paper by uri gneezy and aldo rustichini , who set out to test , at the beginning of this decade , what they called " deterrence theory . "
and deterrence theory is a very simple theory of human behavior : if you want somebody to do less of something , add a punishment and they 'll do less of it .
simple , straightforward , commonsensical - also , largely untested .
and so they went and studied 10 daycare centers in haifa , israel .
they studied those daycare centers at the time of highest tension , which is pick-up time .
at pick-up time the teachers , who have been with your children all day , would like you to be there at the appointed hour to take your children back .
meanwhile , the parents - perhaps a little busy at work , running late , running errands - want a little slack to pick the kids up late .
so gneezy and rustichini said , " how many instances of late pick-ups are there at these 10 daycare centers ? "
now they saw - and this is what the graph is , these are the number of weeks and these are the number of late arrivals - that there were between six and 10 instances of late pick-ups on average in these 10 daycare centers .
so they divided the daycare centers into two groups .
the white group there is the control group ; they change nothing .
but the group of daycare centers represented by the black line , they said , " we are changing this bargain as of right now .
if you pick your kid up more than 10 minutes late , we 're going to add a 10 shekel fine to your bill .
boom . no ifs , ands or buts . "
and the minute they did that , the behavior in those daycare centers changed .
late pick-ups went up every week for the next four weeks until they topped out at triple the pre-fine average , and then they fluctuated at between double and triple the pre-fine average for the life of the fine .
and you can see immediately what happened , right ?
the fine broke the culture of the daycare center .
by adding a fine , what they did was communicate to the parents that their entire debt to the teachers had been discharged with the payment of 10 shekels , and that there was no residue of guilt or social concern that the parents owed the teachers .
and so the parents , quite sensibly , said , " 10 shekels to pick my kid up late ?
what could be bad ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the explanation of human behavior that we inherited in the 20th century was that we are all rational , self-maximizing actors , and in that explanation - the daycare center had no contract - should have been operating without any constraints .
but that 's not right .
they were operating with social constraints rather than contractual ones .
and critically , the social constraints created a culture that was more generous than the contractual constraints did .
so gneezy and rustichini run this experiment for a dozen weeks - run the fine for a dozen weeks - and then they say , " okay , that 's it . all done ; fine . "
and then a really interesting thing happens : nothing changes .
the culture that got broken by the fine stayed broken when the fine was removed .
not only are economic motivations and intrinsic motivations incompatible , that incompatibility can persist over long periods .
so the trick in designing these kinds of situations is to understand where you 're relying on the economic part of the bargain - as with the parents paying the teachers - and when you 're relying on the social part of the bargain , when you 're really designing for generosity .
this brings me back to the lolcats and to ushahidi .
this is , i think , the range that matters .
both of these rely on cognitive surplus .
both of these design for the assumption that people like to create and we want to share .
here is the critical difference between these : lolcats is communal value .
it 's value created by the participants for each other .
communal value on the networks we have is everywhere - every time you see a large aggregate of shared , publicly available data , whether it 's photos on flickr or videos on youtube or whatever .
this is good . i like lolcats as much as the next guy , maybe a little more even , but this is also a largely solved problem .
i have a hard time envisioning a future in which someone is saying , " where , oh where , can i find a picture of a cute cat ? "
ushahidi , by contrast , is civic value .
it 's value created by the participants but enjoyed by society as a whole .
the goals set out by ushahidi are not just to make life better for the participants , but to make life better for everyone in the society in which ushahidi is operating .
and that kind of civic value is not just a side effect of opening up to human motivation .
it really is going to be a side effect of what we , collectively , make of these kinds of efforts .
there are a trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs .
that will be true year-in and year-out .
the number of people who are going to be able to participate in these kinds of projects is going to grow , and we can see that organizations designed around a culture of generosity can achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of contractual overhead - a very different model than our default model for large-scale group action in the 20th century .
what 's going to make the difference here is what dean kamen said , the inventor and entrepreneur .
kamen said , " free cultures get what they celebrate . "
we 've got a choice before us .
we 've got this trillion hours a year .
we can use it to crack each other up , and we 're going to do that .
that , we get for free .
but we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value .
and to the degree we 're going to do that , to the degree we 're able to do that , we 'll be able to change society .
thank you very much .
so today , i 'm going to tell you about some people who did n't move out of their neighborhoods .
the first one is happening right here in chicago .
brenda palms-farber was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison .
currently , taxpayers spend about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail .
we know that two-thirds of them are going to go back .
i find it interesting that , for every one dollar we spend , however , on early childhood education , like head start , we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future .
or - think about it - that 60,000 dollars is more than what it costs to send one person to harvard as well .
but brenda , not being phased by stuff like that , took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution : create a business that produces skin care products from honey .
okay , it might be obvious to some of you ; it was n't to me .
it 's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential .
she hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees , harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves , and that were later sold at whole foods .
she combined employment experience and training with life skills they needed , like anger-management and teamwork , and also how to talk to future employers about how their experiences actually demonstrated the lessons that they had learned and their eagerness to learn more .
less than four percent actually go back to jail .
so these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills through bee keeping and became productive citizens in the process .
talk about a sweet beginning .
now , i 'm going to take you to los angeles , and lots of people know that l.a. has its issues .
but i 'm going to talk about l.a. 's water issues right now .
they have not enough water on most days and too much to handle when it rains .
currently , 20 percent of california 's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly southern california .
their spending loads , loads , to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well .
now andy lipkis is working to help l.a. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island - linking trees , people and technology to create a more livable city .
all that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water , also helps cool our cities .
because , come to think about it , do you really want air-conditioning , or is it a cooler room that you want ?
how you get it should n't make that much of a difference .
so a few years ago , l.a. county decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools .
and andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves .
and by presenting a really strong economic case , they convinced the l.a. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery , that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure .
so ultimately , 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided , and electrical consumption for air-conditioning went down , while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up , resulting in a net-savings to the system , but also healthier students and schools system employees as well .
now judy bonds is a coal miner 's daughter .
her family has eight generations in a town called whitesville , west virginia .
and if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history , and of the town , it should be judy .
but the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father 's father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people .
now , two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months , and only for about a few years ' worth of coal .
that kind of technology is called " mountaintop removal . "
it can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months .
just imagine that the air surrounding these places - it 's filled with the residue of explosives and coal .
when we visited , it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so - not just miners , but everybody .
and judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned .
and the coal companies just move on after the mountain was emptied , leaving even more unemployment in their wake .
but she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain , and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet .
three years of dirty energy with not many jobs , or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills , and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region 's wind .
she calculated the up-front cost and the payback over time , and it 's a net-plus on so many levels for the local , national and global economy .
it 's a longer payback than mountaintop removal , but the wind energy actually pays back forever .
now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals , and it gives them a lot of misery .
the water is turned into goo .
most people are still unemployed , leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience - drug and alcohol abuse , domestic abuse , teen pregnancy and poor heath , as well .
now judy and i - i have to say - totally related to each other .
not quite an obvious alliance .
i mean , literally , her hometown is called whitesville , west virginia .
i mean , they are not - they ai n't competing for the birthplace of hip hop title or anything like that .
but the back of my t-shirt , the one that she gave me , says , " save the endangered hillbillies . "
so homegirls and hillbillies we got it together and totally understand that this is what it 's all about .
but just a few months ago , judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer .
yeah .
and it has since moved to her bones and her brain .
and i just find it so bizarre that she 's suffering from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from .
but her dream of coal river mountain wind is her legacy .
and she might not get to see that mountaintop .
but rather than writing yet some kind of manifesto or something , she 's leaving behind a business plan to make it happen .
that 's what my homegirl is doing .
so i 'm so proud of that .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but these three people do n't know each other , but they do have an awful lot in common .
they 're all problem solvers , and they 're just some of the many examples that i really am privileged to see , meet and learn from in the examples of the work that i do now .
i was really lucky to have them all featured on my corporation for public radio radio show called thepromisedland.org.
now they 're all very practical visionaries .
they take a look at the demands that are out there - beauty products , healthy schools , electricity - and how the money 's flowing to meet those demands .
and when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs , you 're left with unemployed people , and those people are n't cheap .
in fact , they make up some of what i call the most expensive citizens , and they include generationally impoverished , traumatized vets returning from the middle east , people coming out of jail .
and for the veterans in particular , the v.a. said there 's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003 .
i think that number 's probably going to go up .
they 're not the largest number of people , but they are some of the most expensive - and in terms of the likelihood for domestic abuse , drug and alcohol abuse , poor performance by their kids in schools and also poor health as a result of stress .
so these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands , reduce the social problems that we have now and prevent new problems in the future .
and there are plenty of other examples like that .
one problem : waste handling and unemployment .
even when we think or talk about recycling , lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or in landfills and leaving many municipalities , diversion rates - they leave much to be recycled .
and where is this waste handled ? usually in poor communities .
and we know that eco-industrial business , these kinds of business models - there 's a model in europe called the eco-industrial park , where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another , or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell .
we can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing .
and in my hometown , we actually tried to do one of these in the bronx , but our mayor decided what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot .
fortunately - because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs - but after many years , the city wanted to build a jail .
they 've since abandoned that project , thank goodness .
another problem : unhealthy food systems and unemployment .
working-class and poor urban americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system .
it relies too much on transportation , chemical fertilization , big use of water and also refrigeration .
mega agricultural operations often are responsible for poisoning our waterways and our land , and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity .
and so we know " urban ag " is a big buzz topic this time of the year , but it 's mostly gardening , which has some value in community building - lots of it - but it 's not in terms of creating jobs or for food production .
the numbers just are n't there .
part of my work now is really laying the groundwork to integrate urban ag and rural food systems to hasten the demise of the 3,000-mile salad by creating a national brand of urban-grown produce in every city , that uses regional growing power and augments it with indoor growing facilities , owned and operated by small growers , where now there are only consumers .
this can support seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really ca n't meet the year-round demand for produce .
it 's not a competition with rural farm ; it 's actually reinforcements .
it allies in a really positive and economically viable food system .
the goal is to meet the cities ' institutional demands for hospitals , senior centers , schools , daycare centers , and produce a network of regional jobs , as well .
this is smart infrastructure .
and how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day .
our municipalities , rural and urban , play the operational course of infrastructure - things like waste disposal , energy demand , as well as social costs of unemployment , drop-out rates , incarceration rates and the impacts of various public health costs .
smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs .
and we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base .
and imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability .
so i 'm hoping you can see a little theme here .
these examples indicate a trend .
i have n't created it , and it 's not happening by accident .
i 'm noticing that it 's happening all over the country , and the good news is that it 's growing .
and we all need to be invested in it .
it is an essential pillar to this country 's recovery .
and i call it " hometown security . "
the recession has us reeling and fearful , and there 's something in the air these days that is also very empowering .
it 's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery .
now is the time for us to act in our own communities where we think local and we act local .
and when we do that , our neighbors - be they next-door , or in the next state , or in the next country - the sum of the local is the global .
hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses , putting people to work , restoring our natural systems .
hometown security means creating wealth here at home , instead of destroying it overseas .
tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings , wealth generation and national security .
many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across america .
the challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more .
now , hometown security is about taking care of your own , but it 's not like the old saying , " charity begins at home . "
i recently read a book called " love leadership " by john hope bryant .
and it 's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear .
and reading that book made me reexamine that theory because i need to explain what i mean by that .
see , my dad was a great , great man in many ways .
he grew up in the segregated south , escaped lynching and all that during some really hard times , and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times .
but , like all of us , he had some problems .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and his was gambling , compulsively .
to him that phrase , " charity begins at home , " meant that my payday - or someone else 's - would just happen to coincide with his lucky day .
so you need to help him out .
and sometimes i would loan him money from my after-school or summer jobs , and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest , of course , after he hit it big .
and he did sometimes , believe it or not , at a racetrack in los angeles - one reason to love l.a. - back in the 1940s .
he made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that i grew up in .
so i 'm not that unhappy about that .
but listen , i did feel obligated to him , and i grew up - then i grew up .
and i 'm a grown woman now , and i have learned a few things along the way .
to me , charity often is just about giving , because you 're supposed to , or because it 's what you 've always done , or it 's about giving until it hurts .
i 'm about providing the means to build something that will grow and intensify its original investment and not just require greater giving next year - i 'm not trying to feed the habit .
i spent some years watching how good intentions for community empowerment , that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it , actually left people in the same , if not worse , position that they were in before .
and over the past 20 years , we 've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars on social problems , yet educational outcomes , malnutrition , incarceration , obesity , diabetes , income disparity , they 've all gone up with some exceptions - in particular , infant mortality among people in poverty - but it 's a great world that we 're bringing them into as well .
and i know a little bit about these issues , because , for many years , i spent a long time in the non-profit industrial complex , and i 'm a recovering executive director , two years clean .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but during that time , i realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities .
but i really did struggle for financial support .
the greater our success , the less money came in from foundations .
and i tell you , being on the ted stage and winning a macarthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that i had arrived .
and by the time i 'd moved on , i was actually covering a third of my agency 's budget deficit with speaking fees .
and i think because early on , frankly , my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time .
but since then , the park that was just a dump and was featured at a ted2006 talk became this little thing .
but i did in fact get married in it .
over here .
there goes my dog who led me to the park in my wedding .
the south bronx greenway was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006 .
since then , we got about 50 million dollars in stimulus package money to come and get here .
and we love this , because i love construction now , because we 're watching these things actually happen .
so i want everyone to understand the critical importance of shifting charity into enterprise .
i started my firm to help communities across the country realize their own potential to improve everything about the quality of life for their people .
hometown security is next on my to-do list .
what we need are people who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises , who will partner with folks like me to identify the growth trends and climate adaptation as well as understand the growing social costs of business as usual .
we need to work together to embrace and repair our land , repair our power systems and repair ourselves .
it 's time to stop building the shopping malls , the prisons , the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures .
it is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to talk a little bit this morning about what happens if we move from design to design thinking .
now this rather old photo up there is actually the first project i was ever hired to do , something like 25 years ago .
it 's a woodworking machine , or at least a piece of one , and my task was to make this thing a little bit more modern , a little bit easier to use .
i thought , at the time , i did a pretty good job .
unfortunately , not very long afterwards the company went out of business .
this is the second project that i did . it 's a fax machine .
i put an attractive shell around some new technology .
again , 18 months later , the product was obsolete .
and now , of course , the whole technology is obsolete .
now , i 'm a fairly slow learner , but eventually it occurred to me that maybe what passed for design was n't all that important - making things more attractive , making them a bit easier to use , making them more marketable .
by focusing on a design , maybe just a single product , i was being incremental and not having much of an impact .
but i think this small view of design is a relatively recent phenomenon , and in fact really emerged in the latter half of the 20th century as design became a tool of consumerism .
so when we talk about design today , and particularly when we read about it in the popular press , we 're often talking about products like these .
amusing ? yes . desirable ? maybe .
important ? not so very .
but this was n't always the way .
and i 'd like to suggest that if we take a different view of design , and focus less on the object and more on design thinking as an approach , that we actually might see the result in a bigger impact .
now this gentleman , isambard kingdom brunel , designed many great things in his career in the 19th century , including the clifton suspension bridge in bristol and the thames tunnel at rotherhithe .
both great designs and actually very innovative too .
his greatest creation runs actually right through here in oxford .
it 's called the great western railway .
and as a kid i grew up very close to here , and one of my favorite things to do was to cycle along by the side of the railway waiting for the great big express trains to roar past .
you can see it represented here in j.m.w. turner 's painting , " rain , steam and speed . "
now , what brunel said that he wanted to achieve for his passengers was the experience of floating across the countryside .
now , this was back in the 19th century .
and to do that meant creating the flattest gradients that had ever yet been made , which meant building long viaducts across river valleys - this is actually the viaduct across the thames at maidenhead - and long tunnels such as the one at box , in wiltshire .
but he did n't stop there . he did n't stop with just trying to design the best railway journey .
he imagined an integrated transportation system in which it would be possible for a passenger to embark on a train in london and disembark from a ship in new york .
one journey from london to new york .
this is the s.s. great western that he built to take care of the second half of that journey .
now , brunel was working 100 years before the emergence of the design profession , but i think he was using design thinking to solve problems and to create world-changing innovations .
now , design thinking begins with what roger martin , the business school professor at the university of toronto , calls integrative thinking .
and that 's the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions .
in the case of design , that means balancing desirability , what humans need , with technical feasibility , and economic viability .
with innovations like the great western , we can stretch that balance to the absolute limit .
so somehow , we went from this to this .
systems thinkers who were reinventing the world , to a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things .
as our industrial society matured , so design became a profession and it focused on an ever smaller canvas until it came to stand for aesthetics , image and fashion .
now i 'm not trying to throw stones here .
i 'm a fully paid-up member of that priesthood , and somewhere in here i have my designer glasses .
there we go .
but i do think that perhaps design is getting big again .
and that 's happening through the application of design thinking to new kinds of problems - to global warming , to education , healthcare , security , clean water , whatever .
and as we see this reemergence of design thinking and we see it beginning to tackle new kinds of problems , there are some basic ideas that i think we can observe that are useful .
and i 'd like to talk about some of those just for the next few minutes .
the first of those is that design is human-centered .
it may integrate technology and economics , but it starts with what humans need , or might need .
what makes life easier , more enjoyable ?
what makes technology useful and usable ?
but that is more than simply good ergonomics , putting the buttons in the right place .
it 's often about understanding culture and context before we even know where to start to have ideas .
so when a team was working on a new vision screening program in india , they wanted to understand what the aspirations and motivations were of these school children to understand how they might play a role in screening their parents .
conversion sound has developed a high quality , ultra-low-cost digital hearing aid for the developing world .
now , in the west we rely on highly trained technicians to fit these hearing aids .
in places like india , those technicians simply do n't exist .
so it took a team working in india with patients and community health workers to understand how a pda and an application on a pda might replace those technicians in a fitting and diagnostic service .
instead of starting with technology , the team started with people and culture .
so if human need is the place to start , then design thinking rapidly moves on to learning by making .
instead of thinking about what to build , building in order to think .
now , prototypes speed up the process of innovation , because it is only when we put our ideas out into the world that we really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses .
and the faster we do that , the faster our ideas evolve .
now , much has been said and written about the aravind eye institute in madurai , india .
they do an incredible job of serving very poor patients by taking the revenues from those who can afford to pay to cross-subsidize those who can not .
now , they are very efficient , but they are also very innovative .
when i visited them a few years ago , what really impressed me was their willingness to prototype their ideas very early .
this is the manufacturing facility for one of their biggest cost breakthroughs .
they make their own intraocular lenses .
these are the lenses that replace those that are damaged by cataracts .
and i think it 's partly their prototyping mentality that really allowed them to achieve the breakthrough .
because they brought the cost down from $ 200 a pair , down to just $ 4 a pair .
partly they did this by instead of building a fancy new factory , they used the basement of one of their hospitals .
and instead of installing the large-scale machines used by western producers , they used low-cost cad / cam prototyping technology .
they are now the biggest manufacturer of these lenses in the developing world and have recently moved into a custom factory .
so if human need is the place to start , and prototyping , a vehicle for progress , then there are also some questions to ask about the destination .
instead of seeing its primary objective as consumption , design thinking is beginning to explore the potential of participation - the shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer to the active engagement of everyone in experiences that are meaningful , productive and profitable .
so i 'd like to take the idea that rory sutherland talked about , this notion that intangible things are worth perhaps more than physical things , and take that a little bit further and say that i think the design of participatory systems , in which many more forms of value beyond simply cash are both created and measured , is going to be the major theme , not only for design , but also for our economy as we go forward .
so william beveridge , when he wrote the first of his famous reports in 1942 , created what became britain 's welfare state in which he hoped that every citizen would be an active participant in their own social well-being .
by the time he wrote his third report , he confessed that he had failed and instead had created a society of welfare consumers .
hilary cottam , charlie leadbeater , and hugo manassei of participle have taken this idea of participation , and in their manifesto entitled beveridge 4.0 , they are suggesting a framework for reinventing the welfare state .
so in one of their projects called southwark circle , they worked with residents in southwark , south london and a small team of designers to develop a new membership organization to help the elderly with household tasks .
designs were refined and developed with 150 older people and their families before the service was launched earlier this year .
we can take this idea of participation perhaps to its logical conclusion and say that design may have its greatest impact when it 's taken out of the hands of designers and put into the hands of everyone .
nurses and practitioners at u.s. healthcare system kaiser permanente study the topic of improving the patient experience , and particularly focused on the way that they exchange knowledge and change shift .
through a program of observational research , brainstorming new solutions and rapid prototyping , they 've developed a completely new way to change shift .
they went from retreating to the nurse 's station to discuss the various states and needs of patients , to developing a system that happened on the ward in front of patients , using a simple software tool .
by doing this they brought the time that they were away from patients down from 40 minutes to 12 minutes , on average .
they increased patient confidence and nurse happiness .
when you multiply that by all the nurses in all the wards in 40 hospitals in the system , it resulted , actually , in a pretty big impact .
and this is just one of thousands of opportunities in healthcare alone .
so these are just some of the kind of basic ideas around design thinking and some of the new kinds of projects that they 're being applied to .
but i 'd like to go back to brunel here , and suggest a connection that might explain why this is happening now , and maybe why design thinking is a useful tool .
and that connection is change .
in times of change we need new alternatives , new ideas .
now , brunel worked at the height of the industrial revolution , when all of life and our economy was being reinvented .
now the industrial systems of brunel 's time have run their course , and indeed they are part of the problem today .
but , again , we are in the midst of massive change .
and that change is forcing us to question quite fundamental aspects of our society - how we keep ourselves healthy , how we govern ourselves , how we educate ourselves , how we keep ourselves secure .
and in these times of change , we need these new choices because our existing solutions are simply becoming obsolete .
so why design thinking ?
because it gives us a new way of tackling problems .
instead of defaulting to our normal convergent approach where we make the best choice out of available alternatives , it encourages us to take a divergent approach , to explore new alternatives , new solutions , new ideas that have not existed before .
but before we go through that process of divergence , there is actually quite an important first step .
and that is , what is the question that we 're trying to answer ?
what 's the design brief ?
now brunel may have asked a question like this , " how do i take a train from london to new york ? "
but what are the kinds of questions that we might ask today ?
so these are some that we 've been asked to think about recently .
and one in particular , is one that we 're working on with the acumen fund , in a project that 's been funded by the bill and melinda gates foundation .
how might we improve access to safe drinking water for the world 's poorest people , and at the same time stimulate innovation amongst local water providers ?
so instead of having a bunch of american designers come up with new ideas that may or may not have been appropriate , we took a sort of more open , collaborative and participative approach .
we teamed designers and investment experts up with 11 water organizations across india .
and through workshops they developed innovative new products , services , and business models .
we hosted a competition and then funded five of those organizations to develop their ideas .
so they developed and iterated these ideas .
and then ideo and acumen spent several weeks working with them to help design new social marketing campaigns , community outreach strategies , business models , new water vessels for storing water and carts for delivering water .
some of those ideas are just getting launched into the market .
and the same process is just getting underway with ngos in east africa .
so for me , this project shows kind of how far we can go from some of those sort of small things that i was working on at the beginning of my career .
that by focusing on the needs of humans and by using prototypes to move ideas along quickly , by getting the process out of the hands of designers , and by getting the active participation of the community , we can tackle bigger and more interesting questions .
and just like brunel , by focusing on systems , we can have a bigger impact .
so that 's one thing that we 've been working on .
i 'm actually really quite interested , and perhaps more interested to know what this community thinks we could work on .
what kinds of questions do we think design thinking could be used to tackle ?
and if you 've got any ideas then feel free , you can post them to twitter .
there is a hash tag there that you can use , # cbdq .
and the list looked something like this a little while ago .
and of course you can search to find the questions that you 're interested in by using the same hash code .
so i 'd like to believe that design thinking actually can make a difference , that it can help create new ideas and new innovations , beyond the latest high street products .
to do that i think we have to take a more expansive view of design , more like brunel , less a domain of a professional priesthood .
and the first step is to start asking the right questions .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it is actually a reality today that you can download products from the web - product data , i should say , from the web - perhaps tweak it and personalize it to your own preference or your own taste , and have that information sent to a desktop machine that will fabricate it for you on the spot .
we can actually build for you , very rapidly , a physical object .
and the reason we can do this is through an emerging technology called additive manufacturing , or 3d printing .
this is a 3d printer .
they have been around for almost 30 years now , which is quite amazing to think of , but they 're only just starting to filter into the public arena .
and typically , you would take data , like the data of a pen here , which would be a geometric representation of that product in 3d , and we would pass that data with material into a machine .
and a process that would happen in the machine would mean layer by layer that product would be built .
and we can take out the physical product , and ready to use , or to , perhaps , assemble into something else .
but if these machines have been around for almost 30 years , why do n't we know about them ?
because typically they 've been too inefficient , inaccessible , they 've not been fast enough , they 've been quite expensive .
but today , it is becoming a reality that they are now becoming successful .
many barriers are breaking down .
that means that you guys will soon be able to access one of these machines , if not this minute .
and it will change and disrupt the landscape of manufacturing , and most certainly our lives , our businesses and the lives of our children .
so how does it work ?
it typically reads cad data , which is a product design data created on professional product design programs .
and here you can see an engineer - it could be an architect or it could be a professional product designer - create a product in 3d .
and this data gets sent to a machine that slices the data into two-dimensional representations of that product all the way through - almost like slicing it like salami .
and that data , layer by layer , gets passed through the machine , starting at the base of the product and depositing material , layer upon layer , infusing the new layer of materials to the old layer in an additive process .
and this material that 's deposited either starts as a liquid form or a material powder form .
and the bonding process can happen by either melting and depositing or depositing then melting .
in this case , we can see a laser sintering machine developed by eos .
it 's actually using a laser to fuse the new layer of material to the old layer .
and over time - quite rapidly actually , in a number of hours - we can build a physical product , ready to take out of the machine and use .
and this is quite an extraordinary idea , but it is reality today .
so all these products that you can see on the screen were made in the same way .
they were all 3d printed .
and you can see , they 're ranging from shoes , rings that were made out of stainless steal , phone covers out of plastic , all the way through to spinal implants , for example , that were created out of medical-grade titanium , and engine parts .
but what you 'll notice about all of these products is they 're very , very intricate .
the design is quite extraordinary .
because we 're taking this data in 3d form , slicing it up before it gets past the machine , we can actually create structures that are more intricate than any other manufacturing technology - or , in fact , are impossible to build in any other way .
and you can create parts with moving components , hinges , parts within parts .
so in some cases , we can abolish totally the need for manual labor .
it sounds great .
it is great .
we can have 3d printers today that build structures like these .
this is almost three meters high .
and this was built by depositing artificial sandstone layer upon layer in layers of about five millimeters to 10 mm in thickness - slowly growing this structure .
this was created by an architectural firm called shiro .
and you can actually walk into it .
and on the other end of the spectrum , this is a microstructure .
it 's created depositing layers of about four microns .
so really the resolution is quite incredible .
the detail that you can get today is quite amazing .
so who 's using it ?
typically , because we can create products very rapidly , it 's been used by product designers , or anyone who wanted to prototype a product and very quickly create or reiterate a design .
and actually what 's quite amazing about this technology as well is that you can create bespoke products en masse .
there 's very little economies of scale .
so you can now create one-offs very easily .
architects , for example , they want to create prototypes of buildings .
again you can see , this is a building of the free university in berlin and it was designed by foster and partners .
again , not buildable in any other way .
and very hard to even create this by hand .
now this is an engine component .
it was developed by a company called within technologies and 3t rpd .
it 's very , very , very detailed inside with the design .
now 3d printing can break away barriers in design which challenge the constraints of mass production .
if we slice into this product which is actually sitting here , you can see that it has a number of cooling channels pass through it , which means it 's a more efficient product .
you ca n't create this with standard manufacturing techniques even if you tried to do it manually .
it 's more efficient because we can now create all these cavities within the object that cool fluid .
and it 's used by aerospace and automotive .
it 's a lighter part and it uses less material waste .
so it 's overall performance and efficiency just exceeds standard mass produced products .
and then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure , we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants .
typically an implant is more effective within the body if it 's more porous , because our body tissue will grow into it .
there 's a lower chance of rejection .
but it 's very hard to create that in standard ways .
with 3d printing , we 're seeing today that we can create much better implants .
and in fact , because we can create bespoke products en masse , one-offs , we can create implants that are specific to individuals .
so as you can see , this technology and the quality of what comes out of the machines is fantastic .
and we 're starting to see it being used for final end products .
and in fact , as the detail is improving , the quality is improving , the price of the machines are falling and they 're becoming quicker .
they 're also now small enough to sit on a desktop .
you can buy a machine today for about $ 300 that you can create yourself , which is quite incredible .
but then it begs the question , why do n't we all have one in our home ?
because , simply , most of us here today do n't know how to create the data that a 3d printer reads .
if i gave you a 3d printer , you would n't know how to direct it to make what you want it to .
but there are more and more technologies , software and processes today that are breaking down those barriers .
i believe we 're at a tipping point where this is now something this technology is really going to disrupt the landscape of manufacturing and , i believe , cause a revolution in manufacturing .
so today , you can download products from the web - anything you would have on your desktop , like pens , whistles , lemon squeezers .
you can use software like google sketchup to create products from scratch very easily .
3d printing can be also used to download spare parts from the web .
so imagine you have , say , a hoover in your home and it has broken down . you need a spare part , but you realize that hoover 's been discontinued .
can you imagine going online - this is a reality - and finding that spare part from a database of geometries of that discontinued product and downloading that information , that data , and having the product made for you at home , ready to use , on your demand ?
and in fact , because we can create spare parts with things the machines are quite literally making themselves .
you 're having machines fabricate themselves .
these are parts of a reprap machine , which is a kind of desktop printer .
but what interests my company the most is the fact that you can create individual unique products en masse .
there 's no need to do a run of thousands of millions or send that product to be injection molded in china .
you can just make it physically on the spot .
which means that we can now present to the public the next generation of customization .
this is something that is now possible today , that you can direct personally how you want your products to look .
we 're all familiar with the idea of customization or personalization .
brands like nike are doing it .
it 's all over the web .
in fact , every major household name is allowing you to interact with their products on a daily basis - all the way from smart cars to prada to ray ban , for example .
but this is not really mass customization ; it 's known as variant production , variations of the same product .
what you could do is really influence your product now and shape-manipulate your product .
i 'm not sure about you guys , but i 've had experiences when i 've walked into a store and i 've know exactly what i 've wanted and i 've searched everywhere for that perfect lamp that i know where i want to sit in my house and i just ca n't find the right thing , or that perfect piece of jewelry as a gift or for myself .
imagine that you can now engage with a brand and interact , so that you can pass your personal attributes to the products that you 're about to buy .
you can today download a product with software like this , view the product in 3d .
this is the sort of 3d data that a machine will read .
this is a lamp .
and you can start iterating the design .
you can direct what color that product will be , perhaps what material .
and also , you can engage in shape manipulation of that product , but within boundaries that are safe .
because obviously the public are not professional product designers .
the piece of software will keep an individual within the bounds of the possible .
and when somebody is ready to purchase the product in their personalized design , they click " enter " and this data gets converted into the data that a 3d printer reads and gets passed to a 3d printer , perhaps on someone 's desktop .
but i do n't think that that 's immediate .
i do n't think that will happen soon .
what 's more likely , and we 're seeing it today , is that data gets sent to a local manufacturing center .
this means lower carbon footprint .
we 're now , instead of shipping a product across the world , we 're sending data across the internet .
here 's the product being built .
you can see , this came out of the machine in one piece and the electronics were inserted later .
it 's this lamp , as you can see here .
so as long as you have the data , you can create the part on demand .
and you do n't necessarily need to use this for just aesthetic customization , you can use it for functional customization , scanning parts of the body and creating things that are made to fit .
so we can run this through to something like prosthetics , which is highly specialized to an individual 's handicap .
or we can create very specific prosthetics for that individual .
scanning teeth today , you can have your teeth scanned and dental coatings made in this way to fit you .
while you wait at the dentist , a machine will quietly be creating this for you ready to insert in the teeth .
and the idea of now creating implants , scanning data , an mri scan of somebody can now be converted into 3d data and we can create very specific implants for them .
and applying this to the idea of building up what 's in our bodies .
you know , this is pair of lungs and the bronchial tree .
it 's very intricate .
you could n't really create this or simulate it in any other way .
but with mri data , we can just build the product , as you can see , very intricately .
using this process , pioneers in the industry are layering up cells today .
so one of the pioneers , for example , is dr. anthony atala , and he has been working on layering cells to create body parts - bladders , valves , kidneys .
now this is not something that 's ready for the public , but it is in working progress .
so just to finalize , we 're all individual .
we all have different preferences , different needs .
we like different things .
we 're all different sizes and our companies the same .
businesses want different things .
without a doubt in my mind , i believe that this technology is going to cause a manufacturing revolution and will change the landscape of manufacturing as we know it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ben roche : so i 'm ben , by the way .
homaro cantu : and i 'm homaro .
br : and we 're chefs . so when moto opened in 2004 , people did n't really know what to expect . a lot of people thought that it was a japanese restaurant , and maybe it was the name , maybe it was the logo , which was like a japanese character , but anyway , we had all these requests for japanese food , which is really not what we did . and after about the ten thousandth request for a maki roll , we decided to give the people what they wanted . so this picture is an example of printed food , and this was the first foray into what we like to call
flavor transformation . so this is all the ingredients , all the flavor of , you know , a standard maki roll , printed onto a little piece of paper .
hc : so our diners started to get bored with this idea , and we decided to give them the same course twice , so here we actually took an element from the maki roll and and took a picture of a dish and then basically served that picture with the dish .
so this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood .
the champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes . a little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish . -lrb- laughter -rrb- br : but it 's not all just edible pictures .
we decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar - so in this case , so we take a carrot cake , put it in a blender , and we have kind of like a carrot cake juice , and then that went into a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create this hollow shell of carrot cake ice cream , i guess , and it comes off looking like , you know , jupiter 's floating around your plate .
so yeah , we 're transforming things into something that you have absolutely no reference for .
hc : and here 's something we have no reference to eat . this is a cigar , and basically it 's a cuban cigar made out of a cuban pork sandwich , so we take these spices that go into the pork shoulder , we fashion that into ash . we take the sandwich and wrap it up in a collard green , put an edible label that bears no similarity to a cohiba cigar label , and we put it in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge you about twenty bucks for it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- hc : delicious .
br : that 's not it , though .
instead of making foods that look like things that you would n't eat , we decided to make ingredients look like dishes that you know .
so this is a plate of nachos .
the difference between our nachos and the other guy 's nachos , is that this is actually a dessert .
so the chips are candied , the ground beef is made from chocolate , and the cheese is made from a shredded mango sorbet that gets shredded into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese .
and after doing all of this dematerialization and reconfiguring of this , of these ingredients , we realized that it was pretty cool , because as we served it , we learned that the dish actually behaves like the real thing , where the cheese begins to melt .
so when you 're looking at this thing in the dining room , you have this sensation that this is actually a plate of nachos , and it 's not really until you begin tasting it that you realize this is a dessert , and it 's just kind of like a mind-ripper .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hc : so we had been creating all of these dishes out of a kitchen that was more like a mechanic 's shop than a kitchen , and the next logical step for us was to install a state-of-the-art laboratory , and that 's what we have here .
so we put this in the basement , and we got really serious about food , like serious experimentation .
br : one of the really cool things about the lab , besides that we have a new science lab in the kitchen , is that , you know , with this new equipment , and this new approach , all these different doors to creativity that we never knew were there began to open , and so the experiments and the food and the dishes that we created , they just kept going further and further out there .
hc : let 's talk about flavor transformation , and let 's actually make some cool stuff .
you see a cow with its tongue hanging out .
what i see is a cow about to eat something delicious . what is that cow eating ?
and why is it delicious ?
so the cow , basically , eats three basic things in their feed : corn , beets , and barley , and so what i do is i actually challenge my staff with these crazy , wild ideas . can we take what the cow eats , remove the cow , and then make some hamburgers out of that ?
and basically the reaction tends to be kind of like this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- br : yeah , that 's our chef de cuisine , chris jones . this is not the only guy that just flips out when we assign a ridiculous task , but a lot of these ideas , they 're hard to understand .
they 're hard to just get automatically .
there 's a lot of research and a lot of failure , trial and error - i guess , more error - that goes into each and every dish , so we do n't always get it right , and it takes a while for us to be able to explain that to people .
hc : so , after about a day of chris and i staring at each other , we came up with something that was pretty close to the hamburger patty , and as you can see it basically forms like hamburger meat .
this is made from three ingredients : beets , barley , corn , and so it actually cooks up like hamburger meat , looks and tastes like hamburger meat , and not only that , but it 's basically removing the cow from the equation .
so replicating food , taking it into that next level is where we 're going .
-lrb- applause -rrb- br : and it 's definitely the world 's first bleeding veggie burger , which is a cool side effect .
and a miracle berry , if you 're not familiar with it , is a natural ingredient , and it contains a special property .
it 's a glycoprotein called miraculin , a naturally occurring thing . it still freaks me out every time i eat it , but it has a unique ability to mask certain taste receptors on your tongue , so that primarily sour taste receptors , so normally things that would taste very sour or tart , somehow begin to taste very sweet .
hc : you 're about to eat a lemon , and now it tastes like lemonade .
let 's just stop and think about the economic benefits of something like that .
we could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas , and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit .
br : so you see us here cutting up some watermelon . the idea with this is that we 're going to eliminate tons of food miles , wasted energy , and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna , or any exotic produce or item from a very far-away place , with local , organic produce ; so we have a watermelon from wisconsin .
hc : so if miracle berries take sour things and turn them into sweet things , we have this other pixie dust that we put on the watermelon , and it makes it go from sweet to savory .
so after we do that , we put it into a vacuum bag , add a little bit of seaweed , some spices , and we roll it , and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna .
so the key now is to make it behave like tuna .
br : and then after a quick dip into some liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear , we really have something that looks , tastes and behaves like the real thing .
hc : so the key thing to remember here is , we do n't really care what this tuna really is .
as long as it 's good for you and good for the environment , it does n't matter .
but where is this going ?
how can we take this idea of tricking your tastebuds and leapfrog it into something that we can do today that could be a disruptive food technology ?
so here 's the next challenge .
i told the staff , let 's just take a bunch of wild plants , think of them as food ingredients . as long as they 're non-poisonous to the human body , go out around chicago sidewalks , take it , blend it , cook it and then have everybody flavor-trip on it at moto .
let 's charge them a boatload of cash for this and see what they think . -lrb- laughter -rrb- br : yeah , so you can imagine , a task like this - this is another one of those assignments that the kitchen staff hated us for . but we really had to almost relearn how to cook in general , because these are ingredients , you know , plant life that we 're , one , unfamiliar with , and two , we have no reference for how to cook these things because people do n't eat them .
so we really had to think about new , creative ways to flavor , new ways to cook and to change texture - and that was the main issue with this challenge .
hc : so this is where we step into the future and we leapfrog ahead .
so developing nations and first-world nations , imagine if you could take these wild plants and consume them , food miles would basically turn into food feet .
this disruptive mentality of what food is would essentially open up the encyclopedia of what raw ingredients are , even if we just swapped out , say , one of these for flour , that would eliminate so much energy and so much waste .
and to give you a simple example here as to what we actually fed these customers , there 's a bale of hay there and some crab apples .
and basically we took hay and crab apples and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients .
people swore they were eating barbecue sauce , and this is free food .
br : thanks , guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- four years ago today , exactly , actually , i started a fashion blog called style rookie .
last september of 2011 , i started an online magazine for teenage girls called rookiemag.com.
my name 's tavi gevinson , and the title of my talk is " still figuring it out , " and the ms paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today 's theme , and has nothing to do with my inability to use powerpoint . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i edit this site for teenage girls . i 'm a feminist .
i am kind of a pop culture nerd , and i think a lot about what makes a strong female character , and , you know , movies and tv shows , these things have influence . my own website .
so i think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted , and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that 's played up a lot , like a catwoman type , or she plays her sexuality up a lot , and it 's seen as power .
but they 're not strong characters who happen to be female .
they 're completely flat , and they 're basically cardboard characters .
the problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand , and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple , when , in actuality , women are complicated , women are multifaceted - not because women are crazy , but because people are crazy , and women happen to be people . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so the flaws are the key .
i 'm not the first person to say this .
what makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses , who has flaws , who is maybe not immediately likable , but eventually relatable .
i do n't like to acknowledge a problem without also acknowledging those who work to fix it , so just wanted to acknowledge shows like " mad men , " movies like " bridesmaids , " whose female characters or protagonists are complex , multifaceted .
lena dunham , who 's on here , her show on hbo that premiers next month , " girls , " she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions , and that feels accurate for all people , but you do n't see women represented like that as much .
congrats , guys . -lrb- laughs -rrb- but i do n't feel that - i still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way , and one group that we 'll focus on today are teens , because i think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out , and in the ' 90s there was " freaks and geeks " and " my so-called life , " and their characters , lindsay weir and angela chase , i mean , the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out , basically , but those shows only lasted a season each , and i have n't really seen anything like that on tv since .
so this is a scientific diagram of my brain - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - around the time when i was , when i started watching those tv shows .
i was ending middle school , starting high school - i 'm a sophomore now - and i was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you 're told you ca n't be when you 're growing up as a girl .
you ca n't be smart and pretty .
you ca n't be a feminist who 's also interested in fashion .
you ca n't care about clothes if it 's not for the sake of what other people , usually men , will think of you .
so i was trying to figure all that out , and i felt a little confused , and i said so on my blog , and i said that i wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because i think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist , they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs , never being insecure , never having doubts , having all of the answers . and this is not true , and , actually , reconciling all the contradictions i was feeling
became easier once i understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion , a conversation , a process , and this is a spread from a zine that i made last year when i - i mean , i think i 've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since .
but , yeah .
so i said on my blog that i wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing , their photography , whatever , to be a member of our staff .
i got about 3,000 emails .
my editorial director and i went through them and put together a staff of people , and we launched last september .
and this is an excerpt from my first editor 's letter , where i say that rookie , we do n't have all the answers , we 're still figuring it out too , but the point is not to give girls the answers , and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves , but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission , they can ask their own questions , find their own answers , all of that , and rookie , i think we 've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out .
so i 'm not saying , " be like us , " and " we 're perfect role models , " because we 're not , but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions .
i mean , we have articles called " on taking yourself seriously : how to not care what people think of you , " but we also have articles like , oops - i 'm figuring it out !
ha ha . -lrb- laughter -rrb- if you use that , you can get away with anything .
we also have articles called " how to look like you were n't just crying in less than five minutes . "
so all of that being said , i still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site , that are n't just about being totally powerful , maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those .
so what i you to take away from my talk , the lesson of all of this , is to just be stevie nicks .
like , that 's all you have to do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because my favorite thing about her , other than , like , everything , is that she is very - has always been unapologetically present on stage , and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them , and yeah , so please be stevie nicks .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the recent debate over copyright laws like sopa in the united states and the acta agreement in europe has been very emotional .
and i think some dispassionate , quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate .
i 'd therefore like to propose that we employ , we enlist , the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject .
for instance , just recently the motion picture association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft .
now rather than just argue about this number , a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he 'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across ocean boulevard to the westin , and then to mars ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ... if we use pennies .
now this is obviously a powerful , some might say dangerously powerful , insight .
but it 's also a morally important one .
because this is n't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we 're talking about , but this is actual economic losses .
this is the equivalent to the entire american corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops , as well as wheat , tobacco , rice , sorghum - whatever sorghum is - losing sorghum .
but identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math .
now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since napster first came on the scene .
so that 's a chunk of what we 're looking for .
but total movie revenues across theaters , home video and pay-per-view are up .
and tv , satellite and cable revenues are way up .
other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up .
so this small missing chunk here is puzzling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms , it 's not additional growth that piracy has prevented , but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms - one that did n't exist in the 90 's .
what we 're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 50 billion dollars of it a year , which is enough , at 30 seconds a ringtone , that could stretch from here to neanderthal times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's true .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have excel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft , which is quite a lot when you consider that , back in ' 98 , the bureau of labor statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people .
other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people .
and so the job losses that came with the internet and all that content theft , have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries .
and this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day .
and some people think that string theory is tough .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians ' toolkit .
it 's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated .
hollywood and congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law .
some people think this number 's a little bit large , but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it does n't get compounded for inflation every year .
now when this law first passed , the world 's hottest mp3 player could hold just 10 songs .
and it was a big christmas hit .
because what little hoodlum would n't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- these days an ipod classic can hold 40,000 songs , which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media .
-lrb- applause -rrb- or about 75,000 jobs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now you might find copyright math strange , but that 's because it 's a field that 's best left to experts .
so that 's it for now .
i hope you 'll join me next time when i will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he american economy .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm ellen , and i 'm totally obsessed with food .
but i did n't start out obsessed with food .
i started out obsessed with global security policy because i lived in new york during 9/11 , and it was obviously a very relevant thing .
and i got from global security policy to food because i realized when i 'm hungry , i 'm really pissed off , and i 'm assuming that the rest of the world is too .
especially if you 're hungry and your kids are hungry and your neighbor 's kids are hungry and your whole neighborhood is hungry , you 're pretty angry .
and actually , lo and behold , it looks pretty much like the areas of the world that are hungry are also the areas of the world that are pretty insecure .
so i took a job at the united nations world food programme as a way to try to address these security issues through food security issues .
and while i was there , i came across what i think is the most brilliant of their programs .
it 's called school feeding , and it 's a really simple idea to sort of get in the middle of the cycle of poverty and hunger that continues for a lot of people around the world , and stop it .
by giving kids a free school meal , it gets them into school , which is obviously education , the first step out of poverty , but it also gives them the micronutrients and the macronutrients they need to really develop both mentally and physically .
while i was working at the u.n. , i met this girl . her name is lauren bush .
and she had this really awesome idea to sell the bag called the " feed bag " - which is really beautifully ironic because you can strap on the feed bag .
but each bag we 'd sell would provide a year 's worth of school meals for one kid .
it 's so simple , and we thought , you know , okay , it costs between 20 and 50 bucks to provide school feeding for a year .
we could sell these bags and raise a ton of money and a ton of awareness for the world food programme .
but of course , you know at the u.n. , sometimes things move slowly , and they basically said no .
and we thought , god , this is such a good idea and it 's going to raise so much money .
so we said screw it , we 'll just start our own company , which we did three years ago .
so that was kind of my first dream , was to start this company called feed , and here 's a screenshot of our website .
we did this bag for haiti , and we launched it just a month after the earthquake to provide school meals for kids in haiti .
so feed 's doing great . we 've so far provided 55 million meals to kids around the world by selling now 550,000 bags , a ton of bags , a lot of bags .
all this time you 're - when you think about hunger , it 's a hard thing to think about , because what we think about is eating .
i think about eating a lot , and i really love it .
and the thing that 's a little strange about international hunger and talking about international issues is that most people kind of want to know : " what are you doing in america ? "
" what are you doing for america 's kids ? "
there 's definitely hunger in america : 49 million people and almost 16.7 million children .
i mean that 's pretty dramatic for our own country .
hunger definitely means something a little bit different in america than it does internationally , but it 's incredibly important to address hunger in our own country .
but obviously the bigger problem that we all know about is obesity , and it 's dramatic .
the other thing that 's dramatic is that both hunger and obesity have really risen in the last 30 years .
unfortunately , obesity 's not only an american problem .
it 's actually been spreading all around the world and mainly through our kind of food systems that we 're exporting .
the numbers are pretty crazy .
there 's a billion people obese or overweight and a billion people hungry .
so those seem like two bifurcated problems , but i kind of started to think about , you know , what is obesity and hunger ? what are both those things about ?
well , they 're both about food .
and when you think about food , the underpinning of food in both cases is potentially problematic agriculture .
and agriculture is where food comes from .
well , agriculture in america 's very interesting .
it 's very consolidated , and the foods that are produced lead to the foods that we eat .
well , the foods that are produced are , more or less , corn , soy and wheat .
and as you can see , that 's three-quarters of the food that we 're eating for the most part : processed foods and fast foods .
unfortunately , in our agricultural system , we have n't done a good job in the last three decades of exporting those technologies around the world .
so african agriculture , which is the place of most hunger in the world , has actually fallen precipitously as hunger has risen .
so somehow we 're not making the connect between exporting a good agricultural system that will help feed people all around the world .
who is farming them ? that 's what i was wondering .
so i went and stood on a big grain bin in the midwest , and that really did n't help me understand farming , but i think it 's a really cool picture .
and you know , the reality is that between farmers in america , who actually , quite frankly , when i spend time in the midwest , are pretty large in general .
and their farms are also large .
but farmers in the rest of the world are actually quite skinny , and that 's because they 're starving .
most hungry people in the world are subsistence farmers .
and most of those people are women - which is a totally other topic that i wo n't get on right now , but i 'd love to do the feminist thing at some point .
i think it 's really interesting to look at agriculture from these two sides .
there 's this large , consolidated farming that 's led to what we eat in america , and it 's really been since around 1980 , after the oil crisis , when , you know , mass consolidation , mass exodus of small farmers in this country .
and then in the same time period , you know , we 've kind of left africa 's farmers to do their own thing .
unfortunately , what is farmed ends up as what we eat .
and in america , a lot of what we eat has led to obesity and has led to a real change in sort of what our diet is in the last 30 years .
it 's crazy .
a fifth of kids under two drinks soda .
hello . you do n't put soda in bottles .
but people do because it 's so cheap , and so our whole food system in the last 30 years has really shifted .
i think , you know , it 's not just in our own country , but really we 're exporting the system around the world , and when you look at the data of least developed countries - especially in cities , which are growing really rapidly - people are eating american processed foods .
and in one generation , they 're going from hunger , and all of the detrimental health effects of hunger , to obesity and things like diabetes and heart disease in one generation .
so the problematic food system is affecting both hunger and obesity .
not to beat a dead horse , but this is a global food system where there 's a billion people hungry and billion people obese .
i think that 's the only way to look at it .
and instead of taking these two things as bifurcated problems that are very separate , it 's really important to look at them as one system .
we get a lot of our food from all around the world , and people from all around the world are importing our food system , so it 's incredibly relevant to start a new way of looking at it .
the thing is , i 've learned - and the technology people that are here , which i 'm totally not one of them - but apparently , it really takes 30 years for a lot of technologies to become really endemic to us , like the mouse and the internet and windows .
you know , there 's 30-year cycles .
i think 2010 can be a really interesting year because it is the end of the 30-year cycle , and it 's the birthday of the global food system .
so that 's the first birthday i want to talk about .
you know , i think if we really think that this is something that 's happened in the last 30 years , there 's hope in that .
it 's the thirtieth anniversary of gmo crops and the big gulp , chicken mcnuggets , high fructose corn syrup , the farm crisis in america and the change in how we 've addressed agriculture internationally .
so there 's a lot of reasons to take this 30-year time period as sort of the creation of this new food system .
i 'm not the only one who 's obsessed with this whole 30-year thing .
the icons like michael pollan and jamie oliver in his ted prize wish both addressed this last three-decade time period as incredibly relevant for food system change .
well , i really care about 1980 because it 's also the thirtieth anniversary of me this year .
and so in my lifetime , a lot of what 's happened in the world - and being a person obsessed with food - a lot of this has really changed .
so my second dream is that i think we can look to the next 30 years as a time to change the food system again .
and we know what 's happened in the past , so if we start now , and we look at technologies and improvements to the food system long term , we might be able to recreate the food system so when i give my next talk and i 'm 60 years old , i 'll be able to say that it 's been a success .
so i 'm announcing today the start of a new organization , or a new fund within the feed foundation , called the 30 project .
and the 30 project is really focused on these long-term ideas for food system change .
and i think by aligning international advocates that are addressing hunger and domestic advocates that are addressing obesity , we might actually look for long-term solutions that will make the food system better for everyone .
we all tend to think that these systems are quite different , and people argue whether or not organic can feed the world , but if we take a 30-year view , there 's more hope in collaborative ideas .
so i 'm hoping that by connecting really disparate organizations like the one campaign and slow food , which do n't seem right now to have much in common , we can talk about holistic , long-term , systemic solutions that will improve food for everyone .
some ideas i 've had is like , look , the reality is - kids in the south bronx need apples and carrots and so do kids in botswana .
and how are we going to get those kids those nutritious foods ?
another thing that 's become incredibly global is production of meat and fish .
understanding how to produce protein in a way that 's healthy for the environment and healthy for people will be incredibly important to address things like climate change and how we use petrochemical fertilizers .
and you know , these are really relevant topics that are long term and important for both people in africa who are small farmers and people in america who are farmers and eaters .
and i also think that thinking about processed foods in a new way , where we actually price the negative externalities like petrochemicals and like fertilizer runoff into the price of a bag of chips .
well , if that bag of chips then becomes inherently more expensive than an apple , then maybe it 's time for a different sense of personal responsibility in food choice because the choices are actually choices instead of three-quarters of the products being made just from corn , soy and wheat .
the 30project.org is launched , and i 've gathered a coalition of a few organizations to start .
and it 'll be growing over the next few months .
but i really hope that you will all think of ways that you can look long term at things like the food system and make change .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i want to start out with this beautiful picture from my childhood .
i love the science fiction movies .
here it is : " this island earth . "
and leave it to hollywood to get it just right .
two-and-a-half years in the making .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , even the creationists give us 6,000 , but hollywood goes to the chase .
and in this movie , we see what we think is out there : flying saucers and aliens .
every world has an alien , and every alien world has a flying saucer , and they move about with great speed . aliens .
well , don brownlee , my friend , and i finally got to the point where we got tired of turning on the tv and seeing the spaceships and seeing the aliens every night , and tried to write a counter-argument to it , and put out what does it really take for an earth to be habitable , for a planet to be an earth , to have a place where you could probably get not just life , but complexity , which requires a huge amount of evolution , and therefore constancy of conditions .
so , in 2000 we wrote " rare earth . " in 2003 , we then asked , let 's not think about where earths are in space , but how long has earth been earth ?
if you go back two billion years , you 're not on an earth-like planet any more .
what we call an earth-like planet is actually a very short interval of time .
well , " rare earth " actually taught me an awful lot about meeting the public .
right after , i got an invitation to go to a science fiction convention , and with all great earnestness walked in .
david brin was going to debate me on this , and as i walked in , the crowd of a hundred started booing lustily .
i had a girl who came up who said , " my dad says you 're the devil . "
you can not take people 's aliens away from them and expect to be anybody 's friends .
well , the second part of that , soon after - and i was talking to paul allen ; i saw him in the audience , and i handed him a copy of " rare earth . "
and jill tarter was there , and she turned to me , and she looked at me just like that girl in " the exorcist . "
it was , " it burns ! it burns ! "
because seti does n't want to hear this .
seti wants there to be stuff out there .
i really applaud the seti efforts , but we have not heard anything yet .
and i really do think we have to start thinking about what 's a good planet and what is n't .
now , i throw this slide up because it indicates to me that , even if seti does hear something , can we figure out what they said ?
because this was a slide that was passed between the two major intelligences on earth - a mac to a pc - and it ca n't even get the letters right - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so how are we going to talk to the aliens ?
and if they 're 50 light years away , and we call them up , and you blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , and then 50 years later it comes back and they say , please repeat ?
i mean , there we are .
our planet is a good planet because it can keep water .
mars is a bad planet , but it 's still good enough for us to go there and to live on its surface if we 're protected .
but venus is a very bad - the worst - planet .
even though it 's earth-like , and even though early in its history it may very well have harbored earth-like life , it soon succumbed to runaway greenhouse - that 's an 800 degrees -lsb- fahrenheit -rsb- surface - because of rampant carbon dioxide .
well , we know from astrobiology that we can really now predict what 's going to happen to our particular planet .
we are right now in the beautiful oreo of existence - of at least life on planet earth - following the first horrible microbial age .
in the cambrian explosion , life emerged from the swamps , complexity arose , and from what we can tell , we 're halfway through .
we have as much time for animals to exist on this planet as they have been here now , till we hit the second microbial age .
and that will happen , paradoxically - everything you hear about global warming - when we hit co2 down to 10 parts per million , we are no longer going to have to have plants that are allowed to have any photosynthesis , and there go animals .
so , after that we probably have seven billion years .
the sun increases in its intensity , in its brightness , and finally , at about 12 billion years after it first started , the earth is consumed by a large sun , and this is what 's left .
so , a planet like us is going to have an age and an old age , and we are in its golden summer age right now .
but there 's two fates to everything , is n't there ?
now , a lot of you are going to die of old age , but some of you , horribly enough , are going to die in an accident .
and that 's the fate of a planet , too .
earth , if we 're lucky enough - if it does n't get hit by a hale-bopp , or gets blasted by some supernova nearby in the next seven billion years - we 'll find under your feet .
but what about accidental death ?
well , paleontologists for the last 200 years have been charting death . it 's strange - extinction as a concept was n't even thought about until baron cuvier in france found this first mastodon .
he could n't match it up to any bones on the planet , and he said , aha ! it 's extinct .
and very soon after , the fossil record started yielding a very good idea of how many plants and animals there have been since complex life really began to leave a very interesting fossil record .
in that complex record of fossils , there were times when lots of stuff seemed to be dying out very quickly , and the father / mother geologists called these " mass extinctions . "
all along it was thought to be either an act of god or perhaps long , slow climate change , and that really changed in 1980 , in this rocky outcrop near gubbio , where walter alvarez , trying to figure out what was the time difference between these white rocks , which held creatures of the cretaceous period , and the pink rocks above , which held tertiary fossils .
how long did it take to go from one system to the next ?
and what they found was something unexpected .
they found in this gap , in between , a very thin clay layer , and that clay layer - this very thin red layer here - is filled with iridium .
and not just iridium ; it 's filled with glassy spherules , that have been subjected to enormous pressure : shock quartz .
now , in this slide the white is chalk , and this chalk was deposited in a warm ocean .
the chalk itself 's composed by plankton which has fallen down from the sea surface onto the sea floor , so that 90 percent of the sediment here is skeleton of living stuff , and then you have that millimeter-thick red layer , and then you have black rock .
and the black rock is the sediment on the sea bottom in the absence of plankton .
and that 's what happens in an asteroid catastrophe , because that 's what this was , of course . this is the famous k-t .
a 10-kilometer body hit the planet .
the effects of it spread this very thin impact layer all over the planet , and we had very quickly the death of the dinosaurs , the death of these beautiful ammonites , leconteiceras here , and celaeceras over here , and so much else .
i mean , it must be true , because we 've had two hollywood blockbusters since that time , and this paradigm , from 1980 to about 2000 , totally changed how we geologists thought about catastrophes .
prior to that , uniformitarianism was the dominant paradigm : the fact that if anything happens on the planet in the past , there are present-day processes that will explain it .
but we have n't witnessed a big asteroid impact , so this is a type of neo-catastrophism , and it took about 20 years for the scientific establishment to finally come to grips : yes , we were hit ; and yes , the effects of that hit caused a major mass extinction .
well , there are five major mass extinctions over the last 500 million years , called the big five .
they range from 450 million years ago to the last , the k-t , number four , but the biggest of all was the p , or the permian extinction , sometimes called the mother of all mass extinctions .
and every one of these has been subsequently blamed on large-body impact .
but is this true ?
the most recent , the permian , was thought to have been an impact because of this beautiful structure on the right .
this is a buckminsterfullerene , a carbon-60 .
because it looks like those terrible geodesic domes of my late beloved ' 60s , they 're called " buckyballs . "
this evidence was used to suggest that at the end of the permian , 250 million years ago , a comet hit us .
and when the comet hits , the pressure produces the buckyballs , and it captures bits of the comet .
helium-3 : very rare on the surface of the earth , very common in space .
but is this true ?
in 1990 , working on the k-t extinction for 10 years , i moved to south africa to begin work twice a year in the great karoo desert .
i was so lucky to watch the change of that south africa into the new south africa as i went year by year .
and i worked on this permian extinction , camping by this boer graveyard for months at a time .
and the fossils are extraordinary .
you know , you 're gazing upon your very distant ancestors .
these are mammal-like reptiles .
they are culturally invisible . we do not make movies about these .
this is a gorgonopsian , or a gorgon .
that 's an 18-inch long skull of an animal that was probably seven or eight feet , sprawled like a lizard , probably had a head like a lion .
this is the top carnivore , the t-rex of its time .
but there 's lots of stuff .
this is my poor son , patrick .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is called paleontological child abuse .
hold still , you 're the scale .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there was big stuff back then .
fifty-five species of mammal-like reptiles .
the age of mammals had well and truly started 250 million years ago ...
... and then a catastrophe happened .
and what happens next is the age of dinosaurs .
it was all a mistake ; it should have never happened . but it did .
now , luckily , this thrinaxodon , the size of a robin egg here : this is a skull i 've discovered just before taking this picture - there 's a pen for scale ; it 's really tiny - this is in the lower triassic , after the mass extinction has finished .
you can see the eye socket and you can see the little teeth in the front .
if that does not survive , i 'm not the thing giving this talk .
something else is , because if that does n't survive , we are not here ; there are no mammals . it 's that close ; one species ekes through .
well , can we say anything about the pattern of who survives and who does n't ?
here 's sort of the end of that 10 years of work .
the ranges of stuff - the red line is the mass extinction .
but we 've got survivors and things that get through , and it turns out the things that get through preferentially are cold bloods .
warm-blooded animals take a huge hit at this time .
the survivors that do get through produce this world of crocodile-like creatures .
there 's no dinosaurs yet ; just this slow , saurian , scaly , nasty , swampy place with a couple of tiny mammals hiding in the fringes .
and there they would hide for 160 million years , until liberated by that k-t asteroid .
so , if not impact , what ?
and the what , i think , is that we returned , over and over again , to the pre-cambrian world , that first microbial age , and the microbes are still out there .
they hate we animals .
they really want their world back .
and they 've tried over and over and over again .
this suggests to me that life causing these mass extinctions because it did is inherently anti-gaian .
this whole gaia idea , that life makes the world better for itself - anybody been on a freeway on a friday afternoon in los angeles believing in the gaia theory ? no .
so , i really suspect there 's an alternative , and that life does actually try to do itself in - not consciously , but just because it does .
and here 's the weapon , it seems , that it did so over the last 500 million years .
there are microbes which , through their metabolism , produce hydrogen sulfide , and they do so in large amounts .
hydrogen sulfide is very fatal to we humans .
as small as 200 parts per million will kill you .
you only have to go to the black sea and a few other places - some lakes - and get down , and you 'll find that the water itself turns purple .
it turns purple from the presence of numerous microbes which have to have sunlight and have to have hydrogen sulfide , and we can detect their presence today - we can see them - but we can also detect their presence in the past .
and the last three years have seen an enormous breakthrough in a brand-new field .
i am almost extinct - i 'm a paleontologist who collects fossils .
but the new wave of paleontologists - my graduate students - collect biomarkers .
they take the sediment itself , they extract the oil from it , and from that they can produce compounds which turn out to be very specific to particular microbial groups .
it 's because lipids are so tough , they can get preserved in sediment and last the hundreds of millions of years necessary , and be extracted and tell us who was there .
and we know who was there . at the end of the permian , at many of these mass extinction boundaries , this is what we find : isorenieratene . it 's very specific .
it can only occur if the surface of the ocean has no oxygen , and is totally saturated with hydrogen sulfide - enough , for instance , to come out of solution .
this led lee kump , and others from penn state and my group , to propose what i call the kump hypothesis : many of the mass extinctions were caused by lowering oxygen , by high co2 . and the worst effect of global warming , it turns out : hydrogen sulfide being produced out of the oceans .
well , what 's the source of this ?
in this particular case , the source over and over has been flood basalts .
this is a view of the earth now , if we extract a lot of it .
and each of these looks like a hydrogen bomb ; actually , the effects are even worse .
this is when deep-earth material comes to the surface , spreads out over the surface of the planet .
well , it 's not the lava that kills anything , it 's the carbon dioxide that comes out with it .
this is n't volvos ; this is volcanoes .
but carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide .
so , these are new data rob berner and i - from yale - put together , and what we try to do now is track the amount of carbon dioxide in the entire rock record - and we can do this from a variety of means - and put all the red lines here , when these - what i call greenhouse mass extinctions - took place .
and there 's two things that are really evident here to me , is that these extinctions take place when co2 is going up .
but the second thing that 's not shown on here : the earth has never had any ice on it when we 've had 1,000 parts per million co2 .
we are at 380 and climbing .
we should be up to a thousand in three centuries at the most , but my friend david battisti in seattle says he thinks a 100 years .
so , there goes the ice caps , and there comes 240 feet of sea level rise .
i live in a view house now ; i 'm going to have waterfront .
all right , what 's the consequence ? the oceans probably turn purple .
and we think this is the reason that complexity took so long to take place on planet earth .
we had these hydrogen sulfide oceans for a very great long period .
they stop complex life from existing .
we know hydrogen sulfide is erupting presently a few places on the planet .
and i throw this slide in - this is me , actually , two months ago - and i throw this slide in because here is my favorite animal , chambered nautilus .
it 's been on this planet since the animals first started - 500 million years .
this is a tracking experiment , and any of you scuba divers , if you want to get involved in one of the coolest projects ever , this is off the great barrier reef .
and as we speak now , these nautilus are tracking out their behaviors to us .
but the thing about this is that every once in a while we divers can run into trouble , so i 'm going to do a little thought experiment here .
this is a great white shark that ate some of my traps .
we pulled it up ; up it comes . so , it 's out there with me at night .
so , i 'm swimming along , and it takes off my leg .
i 'm 80 miles from shore , what 's going to happen to me ?
well now , i die .
five years from now , this is what i hope happens to me : i 'm taken back to the boat , i 'm given a gas mask : 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide .
i 'm then thrown in an ice pond , i 'm cooled 15 degrees lower and i could be taken to a critical care hospital .
and the reason i could do that is because we mammals have gone through a series of these hydrogen sulfide events , and our bodies have adapted .
and we can now use this as what i think will be a major medical breakthrough .
this is mark roth . he was funded by darpa .
tried to figure out how to save americans after battlefield injuries .
he bleeds out pigs .
he puts in 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide - the same stuff that survived these past mass extinctions - and he turns a mammal into a reptile .
" i believe we are seeing in this response the result of mammals and reptiles having undergone a series of exposures to h2s . "
i got this email from him two years ago ; he said , " i think i 've got an answer to some of your questions . "
so , he now has taken mice down for as many as four hours , sometimes six hours , and these are brand-new data he sent me on the way over here .
on the top , now , that is a temperature record of a mouse who has gone through - the dotted line , the temperatures .
so , the temperature starts at 25 centigrade , and down it goes , down it goes .
six hours later , up goes the temperature .
now , the same mouse is given 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide in this solid graph , and look what happens to its temperature .
its temperature drops .
it goes down to 15 degrees centigrade from 35 , and comes out of this perfectly fine .
here is a way we can get people to critical care .
here 's how we can bring people cold enough to last till we get critical care .
now , you 're all thinking , yeah , what about the brain tissue ?
and so this is one of the great challenges that is going to happen .
you 're in an accident . you 've got two choices : you 're going to die , or you 're going to take the hydrogen sulfide and , say , 75 percent of you is saved , mentally .
what are you going to do ?
do we all have to have a little button saying , let me die ?
this is coming towards us , and i think this is going to be a revolution .
we 're going to save lives , but there 's going to be a cost to it .
the new view of mass extinctions is , yes , we were hit , and , yes , we have to think about the long term , because we will get hit again .
but there 's a far worse danger confronting us .
we can easily go back to the hydrogen sulfide world .
give us a few millennia - and we humans should last those few millennia - will it happen again ? if we continue , it 'll happen again .
how many of us flew here ?
how many of us have gone through our entire kyoto quota just for flying this year ?
how many of you have exceeded it ? yeah , i 've certainly exceeded it .
we have a huge problem facing us as a species .
we have to beat this .
i want to be able to go back to this reef . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i 've just got one question for you , peter .
am i understanding you right , that what you 're saying here is that we have in our own bodies a biochemical response to hydrogen sulfide that in your mind proves that there have been past mass extinctions due to climate change ?
peter ward : yeah , every single cell in us can produce minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide in great crises .
this is what roth has found out .
so , what we 're looking at now : does it leave a signal ?
does it leave a signal in bone or in plant ?
and we go back to the fossil record and we could try to detect how many of these have happened in the past .
ca : it 's simultaneously an incredible medical technique , but also a terrifying ...
pw : blessing and curse .
on simplicity . what a great way to start .
first of all , i 've been watching this trend where we have these books like such and such " for dummies . "
do you know these books , these such and such " for dummies ? "
my daughters pointed out that i 'm very similar looking , so this is a bit of a problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i was looking online at amazon.com for other books like this .
you know , there 's also something called the " complete idiot 's guide ? "
there 's a sort of business model around being stupid in some sense .
we like to have technology make us feel bad , for some strange reason .
but i really like that , so i wrote a book called " the laws of simplicity . "
i was in milan last week , for the italian launch .
it 's kind of a book about questions , questions about simplicity .
very few answers . i 'm also wondering myself , what is simplicity ?
is it good ? is it bad ? is complexity better ? i 'm not sure .
after i wrote " the laws of simplicity , " i was very tired of simplicity , as you can imagine .
and so in my life , i 've discovered that vacation is the most important skill for any kind of over-achiever .
because your companies will always take away your life , but they can never take away your vacation - in theory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i went to the cape last summer to hide from simplicity , and i went to the gap , because i only have black pants .
so i went and bought khaki shorts or whatever , and unfortunately , their branding was all about " keep it simple . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i opened up a magazine , and visa 's branding was , " business takes simplicity . "
i develop photographs , and kodak said , " keep it simple . "
so , i felt kind of weird that simplicity was sort of following me around .
so , i turned on the tv , and i do n't watch tv very much , but you know this person ? this is paris hilton , apparently .
and she has this show , " the simple life . "
so i watched this . it 's not very simple , a little bit confusing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i looked for a different show to watch .
so , i opened up this tv guide thing , and on the e ! channel , this " simple life " show is very popular .
they 'll play it over , and over , and over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it was traumatizing , actually .
so , i wanted to escape again , so i went out to my car .
and cape cod , there are idyllic roads , and all of us can drive in this room .
and when you drive , these signs are very important .
it 's a very simple sign , it says , " road " and " road approaching . "
so i 'm mostly driving along , okay , and then i saw this sign .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i thought complexity was attacking me suddenly , so i thought , " ah , simplicity . very important . "
but then i thought , " oh , simplicity . what would that be like on a beach ?
what if the sky was 41 percent gray ? would n't that be the perfect sky ? "
i mean that simplicity sky .
but in reality , the sky looked like this . it was a beautiful , complex sky .
you know , with the pinks and blues . we ca n't help but love complexity .
we 're human beings : we love complex things .
we love relationships - very complex . so we love this kind of stuff .
i 'm at this place called the media lab .
maybe some of you guys have heard of this place .
it 's designed by i. m. pei , one of the premier modernist architects .
modernism means white box , and it 's a perfect white box .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and some of you guys are entrepreneurs , etc . , whatever .
last month , i was at google , and , boy , that cafeteria , man .
you guys have things here in silicon valley like stock options .
see , in academia , we get titles , lots of titles .
last year at ted , these were all my titles . i had a lot of titles .
i have a default title as a father of a bunch of daughters .
this year at ted , i 'm happy to report that i have new titles , in addition to my previous titles .
another " associate director of research . "
and this also happened , so i have five daughters now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's my baby reina . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and so , my life is much more complex because of the baby , actually , but that 's okay . we will still stay married , i think .
but looking way back , when i was a child - you see , i grew up in a tofu factory in seattle .
many of you may not like tofu because you have n't had good tofu , but tofu 's a good food . it 's a very simple kind of food .
it 's very hard work to make tofu .
as a child , we used to wake up at 1 a.m. and work till 6 p.m. , six days a week .
my father was kind of like andy grove , paranoid of the competition .
so often , seven days a week . family business equals child labor .
we were a great model . so , i loved going to school .
school was great , and maybe going to school helped me get to this media lab place , i 'm not sure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you .
but the media lab is an interesting place , and it 's important to me because as a student , i was a computer science undergrad , and i discovered design later on in my life .
and there was this person , muriel cooper .
who knows muriel cooper ? muriel cooper ?
was n't she amazing ? muriel cooper . she was wacky .
and she was a tedster , exactly , and she showed us , she showed the world how to make the computer beautiful again .
and she 's very important in my life , because she 's the one that told me to leave mit and go to art school .
it was the best advice i ever got . so i went to art school , because of her .
she passed away in 1994 , and i was hired back to mit to try to fill her shoes , but it 's so hard .
this amazing person , muriel cooper .
when i was in japan - i went to an art school in japan - i had a nice sort of situation , because somehow i was connected to paul rand .
some of you guys know paul rand , the greatest graphic designer - i 'm sorry - out there .
the great graphic designer paul rand designed the ibm logo , the westinghouse logo .
he basically said , " i 've designed everything . "
and also ikko tanaka was a very important mentor in my life - the paul rand of japan . he designed most of the major icons of japan , like issey miyake 's brand and also muji .
when you have mentors - and yesterday , kareem abdul-jabbar talked about mentors , these people in your life - the problem with mentors is that they all die .
this is a sad thing , but it 's actually a happy thing in a way , because you can remember them in their pure form .
i think that the mentors that we all meet sort of humanize us .
when you get older , and you 're all freaked out , whatever , the mentors calm us down .
and i 'm grateful for my mentors , and i 'm sure all of you are too .
because the human thing is very hard when you 're at mit .
the t does n't stand for " human , " it stands for " technology . "
and because of that , i always wondered about this human thing .
so , i 've always been googling this word , " human , " to find out how many hits i get .
and in 2001 , i had 26 million hits , and for " computer , " because computers are against humans a bit , i have 42 million hits . let me do an al gore here .
so , if you sort of compare that , like this , you 'll see that computer versus human - i 've been tracking this for the last year - computer versus human over the last year has changed .
it used to be kind of two to one . now , humans are catching up .
very good , us humans ! we 're catching up with the computers .
in the simplicity realm , it 's also interesting .
so if you compare complexities to simplicity , it 's also catching up in a way , too .
so , somehow humans and simplicity are intertwined , i think .
i have a confession : i 'm not a man of simplicity .
i spent my entire early career making complex stuff .
lots of complex stuff .
i wrote computer programs to make complex graphics like this .
i had clients in japan to make really complex stuff like this .
and i 've always felt bad about it , in a sense .
so , i hid in a time dimension .
i built things in a time-graphics dimension .
i did this series of calendars for shiseido .
this is a floral theme calendar in 1997 , and this is a firework calendar . so , you launch the number into space , because the japanese believe that when you see fireworks , you 're cooler for some reason .
this is why they have fireworks in the summer .
a very extreme culture .
lastly , this is a fall-based calendar , because i have so many leaves in my yard .
so this is the leaves in my yard , essentially .
and so i made a lot of these types of things .
i 've been lucky to have been there before people made these kind of things , and so i made all this kind of stuff that messes with your eyes .
i feel kind of bad about that .
tomorrow , paola antonelli is speaking . i love paola .
she has this show right now at moma , where some of these early works are here on display at moma , on the walls .
if you 're in new york , please go and see that .
but i 've had a problem , because i make all this flying stuff and people say , " oh , i know your work .
you 're the guy that makes eye candy . "
and when you 're told this , you feel kind of weird .
" eye candy " - sort of pejorative , do n't you think ?
so , i say , " no , i make eye meat , " instead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and eye meat is something different , something more fibrous , something more powerful , perhaps . but what could that be , eye meat ?
i 've been interested in computer programs all my life , actually .
computer programs are essentially trees , and when you make art with a computer program , there 's kind of a problem .
whenever you make art with a computer program , you 're always on the tree , and the paradox is that for excellent art , you want to be off the tree .
so , this is sort of a complication i 've found .
so , to get off the tree , i began to use my old computers .
i took these to tokyo in 2001 to make computer objects .
this is a new way to type , on my old , color classic .
you ca n't type very much on this .
i also discovered that an ir mouse responds to crt emissions and starts to move by itself , so this is a self-drawing machine .
and also , one year , the g3 bondi blue thing - that caddy would come out , like , dangerous , like , " whack , " like that .
but i thought , " this is very interesting . what if i make like a car crash test ? "
so i have a crash test .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and sort of measure the impact . stuff like this are things i made , just to sort of understand what these things are .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- shortly after this , 9/11 happened , and i was very depressed .
i was concerned with contemporary art that was all about piss , and sort of really sad things , and so i wanted to think about something happy .
so i focused on food as my area - these sort of clementine peel things .
in japan , it 's a wonderful thing to remove the clementine peel just in one piece . who 's done that before ? one-piece clementine ?
oh , you guys are missing out , if you have n't done it yet .
it was very good , and i discovered i can make sculptures out of this , actually , in different forms .
if you dry them quick , you can make , like , elephants and steers and stuff , and my wife did n't like these , because they mold , so i had to stop that .
so , i went back to the computer , and i bought five large fries , and scanned them all . and i was looking for some kind of food theme , and i wrote some software to automatically lay out french-fry images .
and as a child , i 'd hear that song , you know , " oh , beautiful , for spacious skies , for amber waves of grain , " so i made this amber waves image .
it 's sort of a midwest cornfield out of french fries .
and also , as a child , i was the fattest kid in class , so i used to love cheetos . oh , i love cheetos , yummy .
so , i wanted to play with cheetos in some way .
i was n't sure where to go with this . i invented cheeto paint .
cheeto paint is a very simple way to paint with cheetos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i discovered that cheetos are good , expressive material .
and with these cheetos , i began to think , " what can i make with these cheetos ? "
and so , i began to crinkle up potato chip flecks , and also pretzels .
i was looking for some kind of form , and in the end , i made 100 butter-fries . do you get it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and each butter-fry is composed of different pieces .
people ask me how they make the antenna .
sometimes , they find a hair in the food . that 's my hair .
my hair 's clean - it 's okay .
i 'm a tenured professor , which means , basically , i do n't have to work anymore .
it 's a strange business model . i can come into work everyday and staple five pieces of paper and just stare at it with my latte .
end of story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i realized that life could be very boring , so i 've been thinking about life , and i notice that my camera - my digital camera versus my car , a very strange thing .
the car is so big , the camera is so small , yet the manual for the camera is so much bigger than the car manual .
it does n't make any sense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i was in the cape one time , and i typed the word " simplicity , " and i discovered , in this weird , m. night shyamalan way , that i discovered -lsb- the -rsb- letters , m , i , t. you know the word ?
in the words " simplicity " and " complexity , " m , i , t occur in perfect sequence .
it 's a bit eerie , is n't it ?
so , i thought , maybe i 'll do this for the next twenty years or something .
and i wrote this book , " the laws of simplicity . "
it 's a very short , simple book . there are ten laws and three keys .
the ten laws and three keys - i wo n't go over them because that 's why i have a book , and also that 's why it 's on the web for free .
but the laws are kind of like sushi in a way : there are all kinds .
in japan , they say that sushi is challenging .
you know the uni is the most challenging , so number ten is challenging .
people hate number ten like they hate uni , actually .
the three keys are easy to eat , so this is anago , cooked already , so easy to eat .
so enjoy your sushi meal later , with the laws of simplicity .
because i want to simplify them for you .
because that 's what this is about . i have to simplify this thing .
so , if i simplify the laws of simplicity , i have what 's called the cookie versus laundry thing .
anyone who has kids knows that if you offer a kid a big cookie or a small cookie , which cookie are they going to take ? the big cookie .
you can say the small cookie has godiva chocolate bits in it , but it does n't work . they want the big cookie .
but if you offer kids two piles of laundry to fold , the small pile or the big pile , which will they choose ?
strangely , not the big pile . so , i think it 's as simple as this .
you know , when you want more , it 's because you want to enjoy it .
when you want less , it 's because it 's about work .
and so , to boil it all down , simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain .
i think this is sort of simple more versus less .
basically , it always depends .
this book i wrote because i want to figure out life .
i love life . i love being alive . i like to see things .
and so life is a big question , i think , in simplicity , because you 're trying to simplify your life .
and i just love to see the world . the world is an amazing place .
by being at ted , we see so many things at one time .
and i ca n't help but enjoy looking at everything in the world .
like everything you see , every time you wake up .
it 's such a joy to sort of experience everything in the world .
from everything from a weird hotel lobby , to saran wrap placed over your window , to this moment where i had my road in front of my house paved dark black , and this white moth was sitting there dying in the sun .
and so , this whole thing has struck me as exciting to be here , because life is finite .
this was given to me by the chairman of shiseido .
he 's an expert in aging . this horizontal axis is how old you are - twelve years old , twenty-four years old , seventy-four , ninety-six years old - and this is some medical data . so , brain strength increases up to 60 , and then after 60 , it sort of goes down . kind of depressing in a way .
also , if you look at your physical strength .
you know , i have a lot of cocky freshmen at mit , so i tell them , " oh , your bodies are really getting stronger and stronger , but in your late twenties and mid-thirties , cells , they die . "
ok . it gets them to work harder , sometimes .
and if you have your vision , vision is interesting .
as you age from infant age , your vision gets better , and maybe in your late teens , early twenties , you 're looking for a mate , and your vision goes after that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- your social responsibility is very interesting .
so , as you get older , you may , like , have kids , whatever .
and then the kids graduate , and you have no responsibility any more - that 's very good , too .
but if any of you people ask , " what actually goes up ? does anything go up ?
what 's the positive part of this , you know ? " i think wisdom always goes up .
i love these eighty-year-old , ninety-year-old guys and women .
they have so many thoughts , and they have so much wisdom , and i think - you know , this ted thing , i 've come here .
and this is the fourth time , and i come here for this wisdom , i think .
this whole ted effect , it sort of ups your wisdom , somehow .
and i 'm so glad to be here , and i 'm very grateful to be here , chris .
and this is an amazing experience for me as well .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ my age is three hundred ♫ ♫ and seventy-two ♫ ♫ i think with the deepest regret ♫ ♫ how i used to pick up and voraciously chew ♫ ♫ the dear little boys that i met ♫ ♫ i 've eaten them raw in their holiday suits , ♫ ♫ eaten them curried with rice , ♫ ♫ i 've eaten them baked in their jackets and boots , ♫ ♫ and found them exceedingly nice . ♫ ♫ but now that my jaws are too weak for such fare , ♫ ♫ i think it 's increasingly rude ♫
♫ to do such a thing when i 'm quite well aware ♫ ♫ little boys do not like being chewed . ♫ ♫ little boys do not like being chewed . ♫ -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ so now i contentedly live upon eels , ♫ ♫ and try to do nothing amiss ♫ ♫ and pass all the time i can spare from my meals ♫ ♫ in innocent slumber like this , ♫ ♫ innocent slumber like this . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i suppose i owe you an explanation .
i 've been working on a project for the last six years adapting children 's poetry to music .
and that 's a poem by charles edward carryl , who was a stockbroker in new york city for 45 years , but in the evenings , he wrote nonsense for his children .
and this book was one of the most famous books in america for about 35 years .
" the sleepy giant , " which is the song that i just sang , is one of his poems .
now , we 're going to do other poems for you , and here 's a preview of some of the poets .
this is rachel field , robert graves - a very young robert graves - christina rossetti .
ghosts , right ?
have nothing to say to us , obsolete , gone - not so .
what i really enjoyed about this project is reviving these people 's words .
taking them off the dead , flat pages .
bringing them to life , bringing them to light .
so , what we 're going to do next is a poem that was written by nathalia crane .
nathalia crane was a little girl from brooklyn .
when she was 10 years old in 1927 , she published her first book of poems called " the janitor 's boy . "
here she is .
and here 's her poem .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ oh , i 'm in love with the janitor 's boy , ♫ ♫ and the janitor 's boy is in love with me . ♫ ♫ oh , i 'm in love with the janitor 's boy , ♫ ♫ and the janitor 's boy is in love with me . ♫ ♫ he 's going to hunt for a desert isle ♫ ♫ in our geography . ♫ ♫ a desert isle with spicy trees ♫ ♫ somewhere in sheepshead bay ; ♫ ♫ a right nice place , just fit for two ♫ ♫ where we can live always . ♫
♫ oh , i 'm in love with the janitor 's boy , ♫ ♫ and the janitor 's boy , ♫ he 's busy as can be ; ♫ ♫ down in the cellar he 's making a raft ♫ ♫ out of an old settee . ♫ ♫ he 'll carry me off , i know that he will , ♫ ♫ for his hair is exceedingly red ; ♫ ♫ and the only thing that occurs to me ♫ ♫ is to dutifully shiver in bed . ♫ ♫ and on the day that we sail , i will leave a little note ♫ ♫ for my parents i hate to annoy : ♫
♫ " i have flown to an island in the bay ♫ ♫ with my janitor 's red haired-boy . " ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ i 'm going to sail away ♫ ♫ gone to sheepshead bay ♫ ♫ with my janitor 's red-haired boy . ♫ ♫ on an old settee ♫ ♫ my red-haired boy and me ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy . ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫
♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ the janitor 's red-haired boy ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- the next poem is by e.e. cummings , " maggie and milly and molly and may . "
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ maggie and milly , molly and may ♫ ♫ they went down to the beach one day to play ♫ ♫ and maggie discovered a shell that sang ♫ ♫ so sweetly she could n't remember her troubles ♫ ♫ maggie and milly , molly and may ♫ ♫ maggie and milly , molly and may ♫ ♫ milly befriended a stranded star ♫ ♫ whose rays , whose rays ♫ ♫ five languid fingers were ♫ -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ maggie and milly ,
molly and may ♫ ♫ maggie and milly , molly and may ♫ -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ molly was chased by a horrible thing ♫ ♫ which raced sideways blowing ♫ ♫ blowing ♫ ♫ blowing ♫ ♫ may came home with a smooth , round stone ♫ ♫ small as a world and as large as alone ♫ -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ for whatever we lose like a you or a me ♫ ♫ always ourselves that we find at the sea ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the next poem is " if no one ever marries me . "
it was written by laurence alma-tadema .
she was the daughter of a very , very famous dutch painter who had made his fame in england .
he went there after the death of his wife of smallpox and brought his two young children .
one was his daughter , laurence .
she wrote this poem when she was 18 years old in 1888 , and i look at it as kind of a very sweet feminist manifesto tinged with a little bit of defiance and a little bit of resignation and regret .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ well , if no one ever marries me ♫ ♫ and i do n't see why they should , ♫ ♫ nurse says i 'm not pretty , ♫ ♫ and you know i 'm seldom good , seldom good - ♫ ♫ well , if no one ever marries me ♫ ♫ i sha n't mind very much ; ♫ ♫ buy a squirrel in a cage ♫ ♫ and a little rabbit-hutch . ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫
♫ i 'll have a cottage near a wood ♫ ♫ and a pony all my own ♫ ♫ a little lamb quite clean and tame ♫ ♫ that i can take to town . ♫ ♫ and when i 'm really getting old - ♫ ♫ and 28 or nine - ♫ ♫ buy myself a little orphan girl ♫ ♫ and bring her up as mine . ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ if no one marries me ♫ ♫ well , if no one marries me ♫
♫ marries me ♫ ♫ well , if no one marries me ♫ ♫ marries me ♫ ♫ well , if no one marries me ♫ thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i became very curious about the poets after spending six years with them , and started to research their lives , and then decided to write a book about it .
and the burning question about alma-tadema was : did she marry ?
and the answer was no , which i found in the london times archive .
she died alone in 1940 in the company of her books and her dear friends .
gerard manley hopkins , a saintly man .
he became a jesuit .
he converted from his anglican faith .
he was moved to by the tractarian movement , the oxford movement , otherwise known as - and he became a jesuit priest .
he burned all his poetry at the age of 24 and then did not write another poem for at least seven years because he could n't rectify the life of a poet with the life of a priest .
he died typhoid fever at the age of 44 , i believe , 43 or 44 .
at the time , he was teaching classics at trinity college in dublin .
a few years before he died , after he had resumed writing poetry , but in secret , he confessed to a friend in a letter that i found when i was doing my research : " i 've written a verse .
it is to explain death to a child , and it deserves a piece of plain-song music . "
and my blood froze when i read that because i had written the plain-song music 130 years after he 'd written the letter .
and the poem is called , " spring and fall . "
♫ margaret , are you grieving ♫ ♫ over goldengrove unleaving , by and by ? ♫ ♫ leaves , like the things of man , you ♫ ♫ with your fresh thoughts care for , can you ? ♫ ♫ but as the heart grows older ♫ ♫ it will come to such sights much colder ♫ ♫ by and by , nor spare a sigh ♫ ♫ though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie ; ♫ ♫ and yet you will weep and you 'll know why . ♫ ♫ no matter child , the name : ♫
♫ sorrow 's springs are all the same ♫ ♫ they 're all the same . ♫ ♫ nor mouth had nor no mind expressed ♫ ♫ what heart heard of , ghost had guessed : ♫ ♫ it 's the blight man was born for , ♫ ♫ it is margaret that you mourn for ♫ thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- i 'd like to thank everybody , all the scientists , the philosophers , the architects , the inventors , the biologists , the botanists , the artists ...
everyone that blew my mind this week .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ oh , a li la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la li la la la la la la ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la la la la la ♫ ♫ la la la li la la la la la ♫ ♫ you 've been so kind and generous ♫ ♫ i do n't know how you keep on giving . ♫ ♫ and for your kindness , i 'm in debt to you . ♫ ♫ and for your selflessness , my admiration . ♫
♫ and for everything you 've done , you know i 'm bound ; ♫ ♫ i 'm bound to thank for it ♫ ♫ la li la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la li la li la la la ♫ -lrb- clapping -rrb- ♫ la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la la la ♫ ♫ la li la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la li la li la la ♫ ♫ and you ♫ ♫ now you 've been so kind and ... ♫ curb the enthusiasm , just a little bit .
just bring it down a little . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's my turn .
i still have two minutes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , we 're going to start that verse again .
♫ well , you 've been so ... ♫ that 's innovative , do n't you think ?
calming the audience down ; i 'm supposed to be whipping you into a frenzy , and i , " that 's enough . sh . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- ♫ now , you 've been kind and ... ♫ i 'm going to sing this to bill gates . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i have so much admiration for him .
♫ now , you 've been so kind and generous , ♫ ♫ i do n't know how you keep on giving . ♫ ♫ and for your kindness i 'm in debt to you . ♫ ♫ and i never could have come this far without you . ♫ ♫ so for everything you 've done , you know i 'm bound ♫ ♫ i 'm bound to thank you for it ♫ -lrb- clapping -rrb- ♫ la li la la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la la la ♫
♫ la li la la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la li la li la la la ♫ ♫ la li la la la ♫ ♫ oh , i want to thank you for so many gifts ♫ ♫ you gave in love with tenderness ♫ ♫ thank you ♫ ♫ i want to thank you for your generosity ♫ ♫ the love and the honesty that you gave me ♫ ♫ i want to thank you show my gratitude , ♫ my love and my respect for you ♫ ♫ i want to thank you , thank you ♫
♫ thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ i want to thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ thank you , thank you ♫ you know what ?
i 'll show you how to clap to this song . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- clapping -rrb- ♫ i want to thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ i want to thank you , thank you ♫ it works better , right ?
♫ i want to thank you , thank you ♫ ♫ i want to thank you ♫ ♫ ooh hoo ♫ ♫ ooh hoo ♫ ♫ ooh hoo ♫ ♫ ooh hoo ♫ let 's bring it down .
decrescendo .
gradually , bringing it down , bringing it down .
♫ i want to thank you , thank you ♫ finger popping , ai n't no stopping .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 1980s .
they would come into the emergency room with what the police would call " a lovers ' quarrel , " and i would see a woman who was beaten , i would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes .
and as activists , we would take our polaroid camera , we would take her picture , we would wait 90 seconds , and we would give her the photograph .
and she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court .
we were making what was invisible visible .
i 've been doing this for 30 years .
i 've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children .
and for all those years , i 've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable , that it is learned , and if it 's learned , it can be un-learned , and it can be prevented .
-lrb- applause -rrb- why do i believe this ?
because it 's true .
it is absolutely true .
between 1993 and 2010 , domestic violence among adult women in the united states has gone down by 64 percent , and that is great news .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sixty-four percent . now , how did we get there ?
our eyes were wide open .
thirty years ago , women were beaten , they were stalked , they were raped , and no one talked about it .
there was no justice .
and as an activist , that was not good enough .
and so step one on this journey is we organized , and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters , and if they did n't open a shelter , they opened their home so that women and children could be safe .
and you know what else we did ?
we had bake sales , we had car washes , and we did everything we could do to fundraise , and then at one point we said , you know , it 's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people 's lives .
right ? -lrb- applause -rrb- and so , step number two , we knew we needed to change the laws .
and so we went to washington , and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation .
and i remember walking through the halls of the u.s. capitol , and i was in my 30s , and my life had purpose , and i could n't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation .
i was probably 30 and naive .
but i heard about a congressman who had a very , very different point of view .
do you know what he called this important piece of legislation ?
he called it the take the fun out of marriage act .
the take the fun out of marriage act .
ladies and gentlemen , that was in 1984 in the united states , and i wish i had twitter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ten years later , after lots of hard work , we finally passed the violence against women act , which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i was proud to be part of that work , and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities .
and you know what else it did ? it collected data .
and i have to tell you , i 'm passionate about data .
in fact , i am a data nerd .
i 'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here .
i am a data nerd , and the reason for that is i want to make sure that if we spend a dollar , that the program works , and if it does n't work , we should change the plan .
and i also want to say one other thing : we are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters .
it is about economic empowerment for women , it is about healing kids who are hurt , and it is about prevention with a capital p.
and so , step number three on this journey : we know , if we 're going to keep making this progress , we 're going to have to turn up the volume , we 're going to have to increase the visibility , and we 're going to have to engage the public .
and so knowing that , we went to the advertising council , and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign .
and we looked around the world to canada and australia and brazil and parts of africa , and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called there 's no excuse for domestic violence .
take a look at one of our spots .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : where 's dinner ?
woman : well , i thought you 'd be home a couple hours ago , and i put everything away , so - man : what is this ? pizza . woman : if you had just called me , i would have known - man : dinner ? dinner ready is a pizza ? woman : honey , please do n't be so loud .
please do n't - let go of me !
man : get in the kitchen ! woman : no ! help !
man : you want to see what hurts ? -lrb- slaps woman -rrb- that 's what hurts ! that 's what hurts ! -lrb- breaking glass -rrb- woman : help me !
-lsb- " children have to sit by and watch . what 's your excuse ? " -rsb- esta soler : as we were in the process of releasing this campaign , o.j. simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend .
we learned that he had a long history of domestic violence .
the media became fixated .
the story of domestic violence went from the back page , but actually from the no-page , to the front page .
our ads blanketed the airwaves , and women , for the first time , started to tell their stories .
movements are about moments , and we seized this moment .
and let me just put this in context .
before 1980 , do you have any idea how many articles were in the new york times on domestic violence ?
i 'll tell you : 158 .
and in the 2000s , over 7,000 .
we were obviously making a difference .
but we were still missing a critical element .
so , step four : we needed to engage men .
we could n't solve this problem with 50 percent of the population on the sidelines .
and i already told you i 'm a data nerd .
national polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation .
so we wondered , how can we include men ?
how can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls ?
and a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said , " you want men to talk about violence against women and girls . men do n't talk . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i apologize to the men in the audience .
i know you do .
but he said , " do you know what they do do ?
they do talk to their kids .
they talk to their kids as parents , as coaches . "
and that 's what we did .
we met men where they were at and we built a program .
and then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life .
and he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships .
and all of a sudden , he looked at the back of the room , and he saw his daughter , and he called out his daughter 's name , michaela , and he said , " michaela , come up here . "
and she 's nine years old , and she was kind of shy , and she got up there , and he said , " sit down next to me . "
she sat right down next to him .
he gave her this big hug , and he said , " people ask me why i do this work .
i do this work because i 'm her dad , and i do n't want anyone ever to hurt her . "
and as a parent , i get it .
i get it , knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported .
we 've done a lot for adult women .
we 've got to do a better job for our kids .
we just do . we have to . -lrb- applause -rrb- we 've come a long way since the days of the polaroid .
technology has been our friend .
the mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women , and facebook and twitter and google and youtube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way .
and so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms , as an organizer , i say , thank you very much .
really . i clap for you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life , the optimist club .
you ca n't make that one up .
and it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my dna .
i have been doing this work for over 30 years , and i am convinced , now more than ever , in the capacity of human beings to change .
i believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality , and i also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition .
and i ask you , stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tonight , i want to have a conversation about this incredible global issue that 's at the intersection of land use , food and environment , something we can all relate to , and what i 've been calling the other inconvenient truth .
but first , i want to take you on a little journey .
let 's first visit our planet , but at night , and from space .
this is what our planet looks like from outer space at nighttime , if you were to take a satellite and travel around the planet . and the thing you would notice first , of course , is how dominant the human presence on our planet is .
we see cities , we see oil fields , you can even make out fishing fleets in the sea , that we are dominating much of our planet , and mostly through the use of energy that we see here at night .
but let 's go back and drop it a little deeper and look during the daytime .
what we see during the day is our landscapes .
this is part of the amazon basin , a place called rondônia in the south-center part of the brazilian amazon .
if you look really carefully in the upper right-hand corner , you 're going to see a thin white line , which is a road that was built in the 1970s .
if we come back to the same place in 2001 , what we 're going to find is that these roads spurt off more roads , and more roads after that , at the end of which is a small clearing in the rainforest where there are going to be a few cows .
these cows are used for beef . we 're going to eat these cows .
and these cows are eaten basically in south america , in brazil and argentina . they 're not being shipped up here .
but this kind of fishbone pattern of deforestation is something we notice a lot of around the tropics , especially in this part of the world .
if we go a little bit further south in our little tour of the world , we can go to the bolivian edge of the amazon , here also in 1975 , and if you look really carefully , there 's a thin white line through that kind of seam , and there 's a lone farmer out there in the middle of the primeval jungle .
let 's come back again a few years later , here in 2003 , and we 'll see that that landscape actually looks a lot more like iowa than it does like a rainforest .
in fact , what you 're seeing here are soybean fields .
these soybeans are being shipped to europe and to china as animal feed , especially after the mad cow disease scare about a decade ago , where we do n't want to feed animals animal protein anymore , because that can transmit disease .
instead , we want to feed them more vegetable proteins .
so soybeans have really exploded , showing how trade and globalization are really responsible for the connections to rainforests and the amazon - an incredibly strange and interconnected world that we have today .
well , again and again , what we find as we look around the world in our little tour of the world is that landscape after landscape after landscape have been cleared and altered for growing food and other crops .
so one of the questions we 've been asking is , how much of the world is used to grow food , and where is it exactly , and how can we change that into the future , and what does it mean ?
well , our team has been looking at this on a global scale , using satellite data and ground-based data kind of to track farming on a global scale .
and this is what we found , and it 's startling .
this map shows the presence of agriculture on planet earth .
the green areas are the areas we use to grow crops , like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever .
that 's 16 million square kilometers ' worth of land .
if you put it all together in one place , it 'd be the size of south america .
the second area , in brown , is the world 's pastures and rangelands , where our animals live .
that area 's about 30 million square kilometers , or about an africa 's worth of land , a huge amount of land , and it 's the best land , of course , is what you see . and what 's left is , like , the middle of the sahara desert , or siberia , or the middle of a rain forest .
we 're using a planet 's worth of land already .
if we look at this carefully , we find it 's about 40 percent of the earth 's land surface is devoted to agriculture , and it 's 60 times larger than all the areas we complain about , our suburban sprawl and our cities where we mostly live .
half of humanity lives in cities today , but a 60-times-larger area is used to grow food .
so this is an amazing kind of result , and it really shocked us when we looked at that .
so we 're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture , but also we 're using a lot of water .
this is a photograph flying into arizona , and when you look at it , you 're like , " what are they growing here ? " it turns out they 're growing lettuce in the middle of the desert using water sprayed on top .
now , the irony is , it 's probably sold in our supermarket shelves in the twin cities .
but what 's really interesting is , this water 's got to come from some place , and it comes from here , the colorado river in north america .
well , the colorado on a typical day in the 1950s , this is just , you know , not a flood , not a drought , kind of an average day , it looks something like this .
but if we come back today , during a normal condition to the exact same location , this is what 's left .
the difference is mainly irrigating the desert for food , or maybe golf courses in scottsdale , you take your pick .
well , this is a lot of water , and again , we 're mining water and using it to grow food , and today , if you travel down further down the colorado , it dries up completely and no longer flows into the ocean .
we 've literally consumed an entire river in north america for irrigation .
well , that 's not even the worst example in the world .
this probably is : the aral sea .
now , a lot you will remember this from your geography classes .
this is in the former soviet union in between kazakhstan and uzbekistan , one of the great inland seas of the world .
but there 's kind of a paradox here , because it looks like it 's surrounded by desert . why is this sea here ?
the reason it 's here is because , on the right-hand side , you see two little rivers kind of coming down through the sand , feeding this basin with water .
those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains far to the east , where snow melts , it travels down the river through the desert , and forms the great aral sea .
well , in the 1950s , the soviets decided to divert that water to irrigate the desert to grow cotton , believe it or not , in kazakhstan , to sell cotton to the international markets to bring foreign currency into the soviet union .
they really needed the money .
well , you can imagine what happens . you turn off the water supply to the aral sea , what 's going to happen ?
here it is in 1973 , 1986 , 1999 , 2004 , and about 11 months ago .
it 's pretty extraordinary .
now a lot of us in the audience here live in the midwest .
imagine that was lake superior .
imagine that was lake huron .
it 's an extraordinary change .
this is not only a change in water and where the shoreline is , this is a change in the fundamentals of the environment of this region .
let 's start with this .
the soviet union did n't really have a sierra club .
let 's put it that way .
so what you find in the bottom of the aral sea ai n't pretty .
there 's a lot of toxic waste , a lot of things that were dumped there that are now becoming airborne .
one of those small islands that was remote and impossible to get to was a site of soviet biological weapons testing .
you can walk there today .
weather patterns have changed .
nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only in the aral sea are now wiped off the face of the earth .
this is an environmental disaster writ large .
but let 's bring it home .
this is a picture that al gore gave me a few years ago that he took when he was in the soviet union a long , long time ago , showing the fishing fleets of the aral sea .
you see the canal they dug ?
they were so desperate to try to , kind of , float the boats into the remaining pools of water , but they finally had to give up because the piers and the moorings simply could n't keep up with the retreating shoreline .
i do n't know about you , but i 'm terrified that future archaeologists will dig this up and write stories about our time in history , and wonder , " what were you thinking ? "
well , that 's the future we have to look forward to .
we already use about 50 percent of the earth 's fresh water that 's sustainable , and agriculture alone is 70 percent of that .
so we use a lot of water , a lot of land for agriculture .
we also use a lot of the atmosphere for agriculture .
usually when we think about the atmosphere , we think about climate change and greenhouse gases , and mostly around energy , but it turns out agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases too .
if you look at carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforest , or methane coming from cows and rice , or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers , it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere from human activity .
that 's more than all our transportation .
it 's more than all our electricity .
it 's more than all other manufacturing , in fact .
it 's the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any human activity in the world .
and yet , we do n't talk about it very much .
so we have this incredible presence today of agriculture dominating our planet , whether it 's 40 percent of our land surface , 70 percent of the water we use , 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions .
we 've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world simply by using fertilizers , causing huge problems of water quality from rivers , lakes , and even oceans , and it 's also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss .
so without a doubt , agriculture is the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet since the end of the ice age . no question .
and it rivals climate change in importance .
and they 're both happening at the same time .
but what 's really important here to remember is that it 's not all bad . it 's not that agriculture 's a bad thing .
in fact , we completely depend on it .
it 's not optional . it 's not a luxury . it 's an absolute necessity .
we have to provide food and feed and , yeah , fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people in the world today , and if anything , we 're going to have the demands on agriculture increase into the future . it 's not going to go away .
it 's going to get a lot bigger , mainly because of growing population . we 're seven billion people today heading towards at least nine , probably nine and a half before we 're done .
more importantly , changing diets .
as the world becomes wealthier as well as more populous , we 're seeing increases in dietary consumption of meat , which take a lot more resources than a vegetarian diet does .
so more people , eating more stuff , and richer stuff , and of course having an energy crisis at the same time , where we have to replace oil with other energy sources that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels and bio-energy sources .
so you put these together . it 's really hard to see how we 're going to get to the rest of the century without at least doubling global agricultural production .
well , how are we going to do this ? how are going to double global ag production around the world ?
well , we could try to farm more land .
this is an analysis we 've done , where on the left is where the crops are today , on the right is where they could be based on soils and climate , assuming climate change does n't disrupt too much of this , which is not a good assumption .
we could farm more land , but the problem is the remaining lands are in sensitive areas .
they have a lot of biodiversity , a lot of carbon , things we want to protect .
so we could grow more food by expanding farmland , but we 'd better not , because it 's ecologically a very , very dangerous thing to do .
instead , we maybe want to freeze the footprint of agriculture and farm the lands we have better .
this is work that we 're doing to try to highlight places in the world where we could improve yields without harming the environment .
the green areas here show where corn yields , just showing corn as an example , are already really high , probably the maximum you could find on earth today for that climate and soil , but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where we 're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield you should be able to get .
you see a lot of this in africa , even latin america , but interestingly , eastern europe , where soviet union and eastern bloc countries used to be , is still a mess agriculturally .
now , this would require nutrients and water .
it 's going to either be organic or conventional or some mix of the two to deliver that .
plants need water and nutrients .
but we can do this , and there are opportunities to make this work .
but we have to do it in a way that is sensitive to meeting the food security needs of the future and the environmental security needs of the future .
we have to figure out how to make this tradeoff between growing food and having a healthy environment work better .
right now , it 's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition .
we can grow food in the background - that 's a soybean field - and in this flower diagram , it shows we grow a lot of food , but we do n't have a lot clean water , we 're not storing a lot of carbon , we do n't have a lot of biodiversity .
in the foreground , we have this prairie that 's wonderful from the environmental side , but you ca n't eat anything . what 's there to eat ?
we need to figure out how to bring both of those together into a new kind of agriculture that brings them all together .
now , when i talk about this , people often tell me , " well , is n't blank the answer ? " - organic food , local food , gmos , new trade subsidies , new farm bills - and yeah , we have a lot of good ideas here , but not any one of these is a silver bullet .
in fact , what i think they are is more like silver buckshot .
and i love silver buckshot . you put it together and you 've got something really powerful , but we need to put them together .
so what we have to do , i think , is invent a new kind of agriculture that blends the best ideas of commercial agriculture and the green revolution with the best ideas of organic farming and local food and the best ideas of environmental conservation , not to have them fighting each other but to have them collaborating together to form a new kind of agriculture , something i call " terraculture , " or farming for a whole planet .
now , having this conversation has been really hard , and we 've been trying very hard to bring these key points to people to reduce the controversy , to increase the collaboration .
i want to show you a short video that does kind of show our efforts right now to bring these sides together into a single conversation . so let me show you that .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- " institute on the environment , university of minnesota : driven to discover " -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- " the world population is growing by 75 million people each year .
that 's almost the size of germany .
today , we 're nearing 7 billion people .
at this rate , we 'll reach 9 billion people by 2040 .
and we all need food .
but how ?
how do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet ?
we already know climate change is a big problem .
but it 's not the only problem .
we need to face ' the other inconvenient truth . ' a global crisis in agriculture .
population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources .
more than 40 % of earth 's land has been cleared for agriculture .
global croplands cover 16 million km ² .
that 's almost the size of south america .
global pastures cover 30 million km ² .
that 's the size of africa .
agriculture uses 60 times more land than urban and suburban areas combined .
irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet .
we use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year .
that 's enough to fill 7,305 empire state buildings every day .
today , many large rivers have reduced flows .
some dry up altogether .
look at the aral sea , now turned to desert .
or the colorado river , which no longer flows to the ocean .
fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment .
the consequence ?
widespread water pollution and massive degradation of lakes and rivers .
surprisingly , agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change .
it generates 30 % of greenhouse gas emissions .
that 's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry , or from all the world 's planes , trains and automobiles .
most agricultural emissions come from tropical deforestation , methane from animals and rice fields , and nitrous oxide from over-fertilizing .
there is nothing we do that transforms the world more than agriculture .
and there 's nothing we do that is more crucial to our survival .
here 's the dilemma ...
as the world grows by several billion more people , we 'll need to double , maybe even triple , global food production .
so where do we go from here ?
we need a bigger conversation , an international dialogue .
we need to invest in real solutions : incentives for farmers , precision agriculture , new crop varieties , drip irrigation , gray water recycling , better tillage practices , smarter diets .
we need everyone at the table .
advocates of commercial agriculture , environmental conservation , and organic farming ...
must work together .
there is no single solution .
we need collaboration , imagination , determination , because failure is not an option .
how do we feed the world without destroying it ?
yeah , so we face one of the greatest grand challenges in all of human history today : the need to feed nine billion people and do so sustainably and equitably and justly , at the same time protecting our planet for this and future generations .
this is going to be one of the hardest things we ever have done in human history , and we absolutely have to get it right , and we have to get it right on our first and only try .
so thanks very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- our mission is to build a detailed , realistic computer model of the human brain .
and we 've done , in the past four years , a proof of concept on a small part of the rodent brain , and with this proof of concept we are now scaling the project up to reach the human brain .
why are we doing this ?
there are three important reasons .
the first is , it 's essential for us to understand the human brain if we do want to get along in society , and i think that it is a key step in evolution .
the second reason is , we can not keep doing animal experimentation forever , and we have to embody all our data and all our knowledge into a working model .
it 's like a noah 's ark . it 's like an archive .
and the third reason is that there are two billion people on the planet that are affected by mental disorder , and the drugs that are used today are largely empirical .
i think that we can come up with very concrete solutions on how to treat disorders .
now , even at this stage , we can use the brain model to explore some fundamental questions about how the brain works .
and here , at ted , for the first time , i 'd like to share with you how we 're addressing one theory - there are many theories - one theory of how the brain works .
so , this theory is that the brain creates , builds , a version of the universe , and projects this version of the universe , like a bubble , all around us .
now , this is of course a topic of philosophical debate for centuries .
but , for the first time , we can actually address this , with brain simulation , and ask very systematic and rigorous questions , whether this theory could possibly be true .
the reason why the moon is huge on the horizon is simply because our perceptual bubble does not stretch out 380,000 kilometers .
it runs out of space .
and so what we do is we compare the buildings within our perceptual bubble , and we make a decision .
we make a decision it 's that big , even though it 's not that big .
and what that illustrates is that decisions are the key things that support our perceptual bubble . it keeps it alive .
without decisions you can not see , you can not think , you can not feel .
and you may think that anesthetics work by sending you into some deep sleep , or by blocking your receptors so that you do n't feel pain , but in fact most anesthetics do n't work that way .
what they do is they introduce a noise into the brain so that the neurons can not understand each other .
they are confused , and you can not make a decision .
so , while you 're trying to make up your mind what the doctor , the surgeon , is doing while he 's hacking away at your body , he 's long gone .
he 's at home having tea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , when you walk up to a door and you open it , what you compulsively have to do to perceive is to make decisions , thousands of decisions about the size of the room , the walls , the height , the objects in this room .
99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes .
it is what you infer about that room .
so i can say , with some certainty , " i think , therefore i am . "
but i can not say , " you think , therefore you are , " because " you " are within my perceptual bubble .
now , we can speculate and philosophize this , but we do n't actually have to for the next hundred years .
we can ask a very concrete question .
" can the brain build such a perception ? "
is it capable of doing it ?
does it have the substance to do it ?
and that 's what i 'm going to describe to you today .
so , it took the universe 11 billion years to build the brain .
it had to improve it a little bit .
it had to add to the frontal part , so that you would have instincts , because they had to cope on land .
but the real big step was the neocortex .
it 's a new brain . you needed it .
the mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood , social interactions , complex cognitive functions .
so , you can think of the neocortex actually as the ultimate solution today , of the universe as we know it .
it 's the pinnacle , it 's the final product that the universe has produced .
it was so successful in evolution that from mouse to man it expanded about a thousandfold in terms of the numbers of neurons , to produce this almost frightening organ , structure .
and it has not stopped its evolutionary path .
in fact , the neocortex in the human brain is evolving at an enormous speed .
if you zoom into the surface of the neocortex , you discover that it 's made up of little modules , g5 processors , like in a computer .
but there are about a million of them .
they were so successful in evolution that what we did was to duplicate them over and over and add more and more of them to the brain until we ran out of space in the skull .
and the brain started to fold in on itself , and that 's why the neocortex is so highly convoluted .
we 're just packing in columns , so that we 'd have more neocortical columns to perform more complex functions .
so you can think of the neocortex actually as a massive grand piano , a million-key grand piano .
each of these neocortical columns would produce a note .
you stimulate it ; it produces a symphony .
but it 's not just a symphony of perception .
it 's a symphony of your universe , your reality .
now , of course it takes years to learn how to master a grand piano with a million keys .
that 's why you have to send your kids to good schools , hopefully eventually to oxford .
but it 's not only education .
it 's also genetics .
you may be born lucky , where you know how to master your neocortical column , and you can play a fantastic symphony .
in fact , there is a new theory of autism called the " intense world " theory , which suggests that the neocortical columns are super-columns .
they are highly reactive , and they are super-plastic , and so the autists are probably capable of building and learning a symphony which is unthinkable for us .
but you can also understand that if you have a disease within one of these columns , the note is going to be off .
the perception , the symphony that you create is going to be corrupted , and you will have symptoms of disease .
so , the holy grail for neuroscience is really to understand the design of the neocoritical column - and it 's not just for neuroscience ; it 's perhaps to understand perception , to understand reality , and perhaps to even also understand physical reality .
so , what we did was , for the past 15 years , was to dissect out the neocortex , systematically .
it 's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rainforest .
how many trees does it have ?
what shapes are the trees ?
how many of each type of tree do you have ? where are they positioned ?
but it 's a bit more than cataloging because you actually have to describe and discover all the rules of communication , the rules of connectivity , because the neurons do n't just like to connect with any neuron .
they choose very carefully who they connect with .
it 's also more than cataloging because you actually have to build three-dimensional digital models of them .
and we did that for tens of thousands of neurons , built digital models of all the different types of neurons we came across .
and once you have that , you can actually begin to build the neocortical column .
and here we 're coiling them up .
but as you do this , what you see is that the branches intersect actually in millions of locations , and at each of these intersections they can form a synapse .
and a synapse is a chemical location where they communicate with each other .
and these synapses together form the network or the circuit of the brain .
now , the circuit , you could also think of as the fabric of the brain .
and when you think of the fabric of the brain , the structure , how is it built ? what is the pattern of the carpet ?
you realize that this poses a fundamental challenge to any theory of the brain , and especially to a theory that says that there is some reality that emerges out of this carpet , out of this particular carpet with a particular pattern .
the reason is because the most important design secret of the brain is diversity .
every neuron is different .
it 's the same in the forest . every pine tree is different .
you may have many different types of trees , but every pine tree is different . and in the brain it 's the same .
so there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as another , and there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as in yours .
and your neurons are not going to be oriented and positioned in exactly the same way .
and you may have more or less neurons .
so it 's very unlikely that you got the same fabric , the same circuitry .
so , how could we possibly create a reality that we can even understand each other ?
well , we do n't have to speculate .
we can look at all 10 million synapses now .
we can look at the fabric . and we can change neurons .
we can use different neurons with different variations .
we can position them in different places , orient them in different places .
we can use less or more of them .
and when we do that what we discovered is that the circuitry does change .
but the pattern of how the circuitry is designed does not .
so , the fabric of the brain , even though your brain may be smaller , bigger , it may have different types of neurons , different morphologies of neurons , we actually do share the same fabric .
and we think this is species-specific , which means that that could explain why we ca n't communicate across species .
so , let 's switch it on . but to do it , what you have to do is you have to make this come alive .
we make it come alive with equations , a lot of mathematics .
and , in fact , the equations that make neurons into electrical generators were discovered by two cambridge nobel laureates .
so , we have the mathematics to make neurons come alive .
we also have the mathematics to describe how neurons collect information , and how they create a little lightning bolt to communicate with each other .
and when they get to the synapse , what they do is they effectively , literally , shock the synapse .
it 's like electrical shock that releases the chemicals from these synapses .
and we 've got the mathematics to describe this process .
so we can describe the communication between the neurons .
there literally are only a handful of equations that you need to simulate the activity of the neocortex .
but what you do need is a very big computer .
and in fact you need one laptop to do all the calculations just for one neuron .
so you need 10,000 laptops .
so where do you go ? you go to ibm , and you get a supercomputer , because they know how to take 10,000 laptops and put it into the size of a refrigerator .
so now we have this blue gene supercomputer .
we can load up all the neurons , each one on to its processor , and fire it up , and see what happens .
take the magic carpet for a ride .
here we activate it . and this gives the first glimpse of what is happening in your brain when there is a stimulation .
it 's the first view .
now , when you look at that the first time , you think , " my god . how is reality coming out of that ? "
but , in fact , you can start , even though we have n't trained this neocortical column to create a specific reality .
but we can ask , " where is the rose ? "
we can ask , " where is it inside , if we stimulate it with a picture ? "
where is it inside the neocortex ?
ultimately it 's got to be there if we stimulated it with it .
so , the way that we can look at that is to ignore the neurons , ignore the synapses , and look just at the raw electrical activity .
because that is what it 's creating .
it 's creating electrical patterns .
so when we did this , we indeed , for the first time , saw these ghost-like structures : electrical objects appearing within the neocortical column .
and it 's these electrical objects that are holding all the information about whatever stimulated it .
and then when we zoomed into this , it 's like a veritable universe .
so the next step is just to take these brain coordinates and to project them into perceptual space .
and if you do that , you will be able to step inside the reality that is created by this machine , by this piece of the brain .
so , in summary , i think that the universe may have - it 's possible - evolved a brain to see itself , which may be a first step in becoming aware of itself .
there is a lot more to do to test these theories , and to test any other theories .
but i hope that you are at least partly convinced that it is not impossible to build a brain .
we can do it within 10 years , and if we do succeed , we will send to ted , in 10 years , a hologram to talk to you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds .
the wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind .
we recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence , yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder .
we should , in fact , because without having this possibility of conscious minds , we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity ; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world .
we would have no pains , but also no joys .
we would have no access to love or to the ability to create .
and of course , scott fitzgerald said famously that " he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for . "
but he also forgot that without consciousness , he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence .
so much for the wonder , now for the mystery .
this is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate .
all the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience , this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation , has got major controversies .
and there are actually many people that think we should not even touch it ; we should just leave it alone , it 's not to be solved .
i do n't believe that , and i think the situation is changing .
it would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains , but we certainly can begin to approach the question , and we can begin to see the shape of a solution .
and one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do , for example , what you 're seeing right now .
these are images that come from hanna damasio 's lab , and which show you , in a living brain , the reconstruction of that brain .
and this is a person who is alive .
this is not a person that is being studied at autopsy .
and even more - and this is something that one can be really amazed about - is what i 'm going to show you next , which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections , real pathways .
so all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons , the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses .
and i 'm sorry to disappoint you , they do n't come in color .
but at any rate , they are there .
the colors are codes for the direction , from whether it is back to front or vice versa .
at any rate , what is consciousness ?
what is a conscious mind ?
and we could take a very simple view and say , well , it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams , or when we go under anesthesia , and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia .
but what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia , or when we are in deep , dreamless sleep ?
well first of all , it is a mind , which is a flow of mental images .
and of course consider images that can be sensory patterns , visual , such as you 're having right now in relation to the stage and me , or auditory images , as you are having now in relation to my words .
that flow of mental images is mind .
but there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room .
we are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images .
we have selves .
we have a me that is automatically present in our minds right now .
we own our minds .
and we have a sense that it 's everyone of us that is experiencing this - not the person who is sitting next to you .
so in order to have a conscious mind , you have a self within the conscious mind .
so a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it .
the self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind , and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind .
so what we need to know to even address this mystery is , number one , how are minds are put together in the brain , and , number two , how selves are constructed .
now the first part , the first problem , is relatively easy - it 's not easy at all - but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience .
and it 's quite clear that , in order to make minds , we need to construct neural maps .
so imagine a grid , like the one i 'm showing you right now , and now imagine , within that grid , that two-dimensional sheet , imagine neurons .
and picture , if you will , a billboard , a digital billboard , where you have elements that can be either lit or not .
and depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting , the digital elements , or , for that matter , the neurons in the sheet , you 're going to be able to construct a map .
this , of course , is a visual map that i 'm showing you , but this applies to any kind of map - auditory , for example , in relation to sound frequencies , or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate .
now to bring home the point of how close it is - the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience - i 'm going to tell you a personal story .
so if i cover my left eye - i 'm talking about me personally , not all of you - if i cover my left eye , i look at the grid - pretty much like the one i 'm showing you .
everything is nice and fine and perpendicular .
but sometime ago , i discovered that if i cover my left eye , instead what i get is this .
i look at the grid and i see a warping at the edge of my central-left field .
very odd - i 've analyzed this for a while .
but sometime ago , through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine , carmen puliafito , who developed a laser scanner of the retina , i found out the the following .
if i scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner , what i get is the following .
on the right side , my retina is perfectly symmetrical .
you see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins .
but on my left retina there is a bump , which is marked there by the red arrow .
and it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below .
and that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image .
so just think of this : you have a grid of neurons , and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid , and you get a warping of your mental experience .
so this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina , which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball , or , for that matter , a sheet of visual cortex .
so from the retina you go onto visual cortex .
and of course , the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina .
and in that image there , you see a variety of islands of what i call image-making regions in the brain .
you have the green for example , that corresponds to tactile information , or the blue that corresponds to auditory information .
and something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps , can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around , which is the association cortex , where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making .
and the great beauty is that you can then go from memory , out of those association cortices , and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception .
so think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is .
so it provides certain areas for perception and image-making .
and those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information .
so far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images .
but what about the self ?
the self is really the elusive problem .
and for a long time , people did not even want to touch it , because they 'd say , " how can you have this reference point , this stability , that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day ? "
and i thought about a solution to this problem .
it 's the following .
we generate brain maps of the body 's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps .
so let me tell you just a little bit about how i came to this .
i came to this because , if you 're going to have a reference that we know as self - the me , the i in our own processing - we need to have something that is stable , something that does not deviate much well it so happens that we have a singular body .
we have one body , not two , not three .
and so that is a beginning .
there is just one reference point , which is the body .
but then , of course , the body has many parts , and things grow at different rates , and they have different sizes and different people ; however , not so with the interior .
the things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu - for example , the whole management of the chemistries within our body are , in fact , extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason .
if you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range , you go into disease or death .
so we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity .
i like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day .
because if you do n't have that sameness , physiologically , you 're going to be sick or you 're going to die .
so that 's one more element for this continuity .
and the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself , unlike any other coupling .
so for example , i 'm making images of you , but there 's no physiological bond between the images i have of you as an audience and my brain .
however , there is a close , permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body .
so here 's how it looks . look at the region there .
there is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord .
and it is within that region that i 'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body .
this is so specific that , for example , if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem , if you damage that as a result of a stroke , for example , what you get is coma or vegetative state , which is a state , of course , in which your mind disappears , your consciousness disappears .
what happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self , you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence , and , in fact , there can be images going on , being formed in the cerebral cortex , except you do n't know they 're there .
you have , in effect , lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem .
but if you consider the green part of the brain stem , nothing like that happens .
it is that specific .
so in that green component of the brain stem , if you damage it , and often it happens , what you get is complete paralysis , but your conscious mind is maintained .
you feel , you know , you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly .
this is a horrific condition . you do n't want to see it .
and people are , in fact , imprisoned within their own bodies , but they do have a mind .
there was a very interesting film , one of the rare good films done about a situation like this , by julian schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition .
so now i 'm going to show you a picture .
i promise not to say anything about this , except this is to frighten you .
it 's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem , there are , to make it simple , all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior , different aspects of our body .
they are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern .
and it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that i believe - and i could be wrong , but i do n't think i am - that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings - primordial feelings , by the way .
so what is the picture that we get here ?
look at " cerebral cortex , " look at " brain stem , " look at " body , " and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body .
and you have the cerebral cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are , in fact , the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to , as we should , because that 's really the film that is rolling in our minds .
but look at the arrows .
they 're not there for looks .
they 're there because there 's this very close interaction .
you can not have a conscious mind if you do n't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem .
you can not have a conscious mind if you do n't have the interaction between the brain stem and the body .
another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species .
so throughout vertebrates , the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours , which is one of the reasons why i think those other species have conscious minds like we do .
except that they 're not as rich as ours , because they do n't have a cerebral cortex like we do .
that 's where the difference is .
and i strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex .
only the wealth of our minds is , not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence , and that we have any sense of person .
now there are three levels of self to consider - the proto , the core and the autobiographical .
the first two are shared with many , many other species , and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species .
it 's the autobiographical self which some species have , i think .
cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree .
and everybody 's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree .
but the novelty is here .
the autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made ; it 's the lived past and the anticipated future .
and the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory , reasoning , imagination , creativity and language .
and out of that came the instruments of culture - religions , justice , trade , the arts , science , technology .
and it is within that culture that we really can get - and this is the novelty - something that is not entirely set by our biology .
it is developed in the cultures .
it developed in collectives of human beings .
and this is , of course , the culture where we have developed something that i like to call socio-cultural regulation .
and finally , you could rightly ask , why care about this ?
why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made ?
three reasons . first , curiosity .
primates are extremely curious - and humans most of all .
and if we are interested , for example , in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the earth , why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings ?
second , understanding society and culture .
we should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress .
and finally , medicine .
let 's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression , alzheimer 's disease , drug addiction .
think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious .
you have no prayer of treating those diseases effectively and in a non-serendipitous way if you do not know how this works .
so that 's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we 're doing , and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains .
thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hello . actually , that 's " hello " in bauer bodoni for the typographically hysterical amongst us .
one of the threads that seems to have come through loud and clear in the last couple of days is this need to reconcile what the big wants - the " big " being the organization , the system , the country - and what the " small " wants - the individual , the person .
and how do you bring those two things together ?
charlie ledbetter , yesterday , i thought , talked very articulately about this need to bring consumers , to bring people into the process of creating things .
and that 's what i want to talk about today .
so , bringing together the small to help facilitate and create the big , i think , is something that we believe in - something i believe in , and something that we kind of bring to life through what we do at ideo .
i call this first chapter - for the brits in the room - the " blinding glimpse of the bleeding obvious . "
often , the good ideas are so staring-at-you-right-in-the-face that you kind of miss them . and i think , a lot of times , what we do is just , sort of , hold the mirror up to our clients , and sort of go , " duh ! you know , look what 's really going on . "
and rather than talk about it in the theory , i think i 'm just going to show you an example .
we were asked by a large healthcare system in minnesota to describe to them what their patient experience was .
and i think they were expecting - they 'd worked with lots of consultants before - i think they were expecting some kind of hideous org chart with thousands of bubbles and systemic this , that and the other , and all kinds of mappy stuff .
or even worse , some kind of ghastly death-by-powerpoint thing with wowcharts and all kinds of , you know , god knows , whatever .
the first thing we actually shared with them was this .
i 'll play this until your eyeballs completely dissolve .
this is 59 seconds into the film .
this is a minute 59 .
3:19 .
i think something happens . i think a head may appear in a second .
5:10 .
5:58 .
6:20 .
we showed them the whole cut , and they were all completely , what is this ?
and the point is when you lie in a hospital bed all day , all you do is look at the roof , and it 's a really shitty experience .
and just putting yourself in the position of the patient - this is christian , who works with us at ideo .
he just lay in the hospital bed , and , kind of , stared at the polystyrene ceiling tiles for a really long time .
that 's what it 's like to be a patient in the hospital .
and they were sort , you know , blinding glimpse of bleeding obvious .
oh , my goodness . so , looking at the situation from the point of view of the person out - as opposed to the traditional position of the organization in - was , for these guys , quite a revelation .
and so , that was a really catalytic thing for them .
so they snapped into action .
they said , ok , it 's not about systemic change .
it 's not about huge , ridiculous things that we need to do .
it 's about tiny things that can make a huge amount of difference .
so we started with them prototyping some really little things that we could do to have a huge amount of impact .
the first thing we did was we took a little bicycle mirror and we band-aided it here , onto a gurney , a hospital trolley , so that when you were wheeled around by a nurse or by a doctor , you could actually have a conversation with them .
you could , kind of , see them in your rear-view mirror , so it created a tiny human interaction .
very small example of something that they could do .
interestingly , the nurses themselves , sort of , snapped into action - said , ok , we embrace this . what can we do ?
the first thing they do is they decorated the ceiling .
which i thought was really - i showed this to my mother recently .
i think my mother now thinks that i 'm some sort of interior decorator .
it 's what i do for a living , sort of laurence llewelyn-bowen .
not particularly the world 's best design solution for those of us who are real , sort of , hard-core designers , but nonetheless , a fabulous empathic solution for people .
things that they started doing themselves - like changing the floor going into the patient 's room so that it signified , " this is my room . this is my personal space " - was a really interesting sort of design solution to the problem .
so you went from public space to private space .
and another idea , again , that came from one of the nurses - which i love - was they took traditional , sort of , corporate white boards , then they put them on one wall of the patient 's room , and they put this sticker there .
so that what you could actually do was go into the room and write messages to the person who was sick in that room , which was lovely .
so , tiny , tiny , tiny solutions that made a huge amount of impact .
i thought that was a really , really nice example .
so this is not particularly a new idea , kind of , seeing opportunities in things that are around you and snapping and turning them into a solution .
it 's a history of invention based around this .
i 'm going to read this because i want to get these names right .
joan ganz cooney saw her daughter - came down on a saturday morning , saw her daughter watching the test card , waiting for programs to come on one morning and from that came sesame street .
malcolm mclean was moving from one country to another and was wondering why it took these guys so long to get the boxes onto the ship .
and he invented the shipping container .
george de mestral - this is not bugs all over a birkenstock - was walking his dog in a field and got covered in burrs , sort of little prickly things , and from that came velcro .
and finally , for the brits , percy shaw - this is a big british invention - saw the cat 's eyes at the side of the road , when he was driving home one night and from that came the catseye .
so there 's a whole series of just using your eyes , seeing things for the first time , seeing things afresh and using them as an opportunity to create new possibilities .
second one , without sounding overly zen , and this is a quote from the buddha : " finding yourself in the margins , looking to the edges of things , is often a really interesting place to start . "
blinkered vision tends to produce , i think , blinkered solutions .
so , looking wide , using your peripheral vision , is a really interesting place to look for opportunity .
again , another medical example here .
we were asked by a device producer - we did the palm pilot and the treo .
we did a lot of sexy tech at ideo - they 'd seen this and they wanted a sexy piece of technology for medical diagnostics .
this was a device that a nurse uses when they 're doing a spinal procedure in hospital .
they 'll ask the nurses to input data .
and they had this vision of the nurse , kind of , clicking away on this aluminum device and it all being incredibly , sort of , gadget-lustish .
when we actually went and watched this procedure taking place - and i 'll explain this in a second - it became very obvious that there was a human dimension to this that they really were n't recognizing .
when you 're having a four-inch needle inserted into your spine - which was the procedure that this device 's data was about ; it was for pain management - you 're shit scared ; you 're freaking out .
and so the first thing that pretty much every nurse did , was hold the patient 's hand to comfort them . human gesture - which made the fabulous two-handed data input completely impossible .
so , the thing that we designed , much less sexy but much more human and practical , was this .
so , it 's not a palm pilot by any stretch of the imagination , but it has a thumb-scroll so you can do everything with one hand .
so , again , going back to this - the idea that a tiny human gesture dictated the design of this product .
and i think that 's really , really important .
so , again , this idea of workarounds .
we use this phrase " workarounds " a lot , sort of , looking around us . i was actually looking around the ted and just watching all of these kind of things happen while i 've been here .
this idea of the way that people cobble together solutions in our life - and the things we kind of do in our environment that are somewhat subconscious but have huge potential - is something that we look at a lot .
we wrote a book recently , i think you might have received it , called " thoughtless acts ? "
it 's been all about these kind of thoughtless things that people do , which have huge intention and huge opportunity .
why do we all follow the line in the street ?
this is a picture in a japanese subway .
people consciously follow things even though , why , we do n't know .
why do we line up the square milk carton with the square fence ?
because we kind of have to - we 're just compelled to .
we do n't know why , but we do .
why do we wrap the teabag string around the cup handle ?
again , we 're sort of using the world around us to create our own design solutions .
and we 're always saying to our clients : " you should look at this stuff .
this stuff is really important . this stuff is really vital . "
this is people designing their own experiences .
you can draw from this .
we sort of assume that because there 's a pole in the street , that it 's okay to use it , so we park our shopping cart there .
it 's there for our use , on some level .
so , again , we sort of co-opt our environment to do all these different things .
we co-opt other experiences - we take one item and transfer it to another .
and this is my favorite one . my mother used to say to me , " just because your sister jumps in the lake does n't mean you have to . "
but , of course , we all do . we all follow each other every day .
so somebody assumes that because somebody else has done something , that 's permission for them to do the same thing .
and there 's almost this sort of semaphore around us all the time .
i mean , shopping bag equals " parking meter out of order . "
and we all , kind of , know how to read these signals now .
we all talk to one another in this highly visual way without realizing what we 're doing .
third section is this idea of not knowing , of consciously putting yourself backwards .
i talk about unthinking situations all the time .
sort of having beginner 's mind , scraping your mind clean and looking at things afresh .
a friend of mine was a designer at ikea , and he was asked by his boss to help design a storage system for children .
this is the billy bookcase - it 's ikea 's biggest selling product .
hammer it together . hammer it together with a shoe , if you 're me , because they 're impossible to assemble .
but big selling bookcase . how do we replicate this for children ?
the reality is when you actually watch children , children do n't think about things like storage in linear terms .
children assume permission in a very different way .
children live on things . they live under things .
they live around things , and so their spatial awareness relationship , and their thinking around storage is totally different .
so the first thing you have to do - this is graham , the designer - is , sort of , put yourself in their shoes . and so , here he is sitting under the table .
so , what came out of this ?
this is the storage system that he designed .
so what is this ? i hear you all ask . no , i do n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's this , and i think this is a particularly lovely solution .
so , you know , it 's a totally different way of looking at the situation .
it 's a completely empathic solution - apart from the fact that teddy 's probably not loving it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but a really nice way of re-framing the ordinary , and i think that 's one of the things .
and putting yourself in the position of the person , and i think that 's one of the threads that i 've heard again from this conference is how do we put ourselves in other peoples ' shoes and really feel what they feel ?
and then use that information to fuel solutions ?
and i think that 's what this is very much about .
last section : green armband . we 've all got them .
it 's about this really .
i mean , it 's about picking battles big enough to matter but small enough to win .
again , that 's one of the themes that i think has come through loud and clear in this conference is : where do we start ? how do we start ? what do we do to start ?
so , again , we were asked to design a water pump for a company called approtec , in kenya .
they 're now called kickstart .
and , again , as designers , we wanted to make this thing incredibly beautiful and spend a lot of time thinking of the form .
and that was completely irrelevant .
when you put yourself in the position of these people , things like the fact that this has to be able to fold up and fit on a bicycle , become much more relevant than the form of it . the way it 's produced , it has to be produced with indigenous manufacturing methods and indigenous materials .
so it had to be looked at completely from the point of view of the user .
we had to completely transfer ourselves over to their world .
so what seems like a very clunky product is , in fact , incredibly useful .
it 's powered a bit like a stairmaster - you pump up and down on it .
children can use it . adults can use it . everybody uses it .
it 's turning these guys - again , one of the themes - it 's turning them into entrepreneurs .
these guys are using this very successfully .
and for us , it 's been great because it 's won loads of design awards .
so we actually managed to reconcile the needs of the design company , the needs of the individuals in the company , to feel good about a product we were actually designing , and the needs of the individuals we were designing it for .
there it is , pumping water from 30 feet .
so as a final gesture we handed out these bracelets to all of you this morning .
we 've made a donation on everybody 's behalf here to kick start , no pun intended , their next project .
because , again , i think , sort of , putting our money where our mouth is , here .
we feel that this is an important gesture .
so we 've handed out bracelets . small is the new big .
i hope you 'll all wear them .
so that 's it . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , where are the robots ?
we 've been told for 40 years already that they 're coming soon .
very soon they 'll be doing everything for us .
they 'll be cooking , cleaning , buying things , shopping , building . but they are n't here .
meanwhile , we have illegal immigrants doing all the work , but we do n't have any robots .
so what can we do about that ? what can we say ?
so i want to give a little bit of a different perspective of how we can perhaps look at these things in a little bit of a different way .
and this is an x-ray picture of a real beetle , and a swiss watch , back from ' 88 . you look at that - what was true then is certainly true today .
we can still make the pieces . we can make the right pieces .
we can make the circuitry of the right computational power , but we ca n't actually put them together to make something that will actually work and be as adaptive as these systems .
so let 's try to look at it from a different perspective .
let 's summon the best designer , the mother of all designers .
let 's see what evolution can do for us .
so we threw in - we created a primordial soup with lots of pieces of robots - with bars , with motors , with neurons .
put them all together , and put all this under kind of natural selection , under mutation , and rewarded things for how well they can move forward .
a very simple task , and it 's interesting to see what kind of things came out of that .
so if you look , you can see a lot of different machines come out of this . they all move around .
they all crawl in different ways , and you can see on the right , that we actually made a couple of these things , and they work in reality . these are not very fantastic robots , but they evolved to do exactly what we reward them for : for moving forward . so that was all done in simulation , but we can also do that on a real machine .
here 's a physical robot that we actually have a population of brains , competing , or evolving on the machine .
it 's like a rodeo show . they all get a ride on the machine , and they get rewarded for how fast or how far they can make the machine move forward .
and you can see these robots are not ready to take over the world yet , but they gradually learn how to move forward , and they do this autonomously .
so in these two examples , we had basically machines that learned how to walk in simulation , and also machines that learned how to walk in reality .
but i want to show you a different approach , and this is this robot over here , which has four legs .
it has eight motors , four on the knees and four on the hip .
it has also two tilt sensors that tell the machine which way it 's tilting .
but this machine does n't know what it looks like .
you look at it and you see it has four legs , the machine does n't know if it 's a snake , if it 's a tree , it does n't have any idea what it looks like , but it 's going to try to find that out .
initially , it does some random motion , and then it tries to figure out what it might look like .
and you 're seeing a lot of things passing through its minds , a lot of self-models that try to explain the relationship between actuation and sensing . it then tries to do a second action that creates the most disagreement among predictions of these alternative models , like a scientist in a lab . then it does that and tries to explain that , and prune out its self-models .
this is the last cycle , and you can see it 's pretty much figured out what its self looks like . and once it has a self-model , it can use that to derive a pattern of locomotion .
so what you 're seeing here are a couple of machines - a pattern of locomotion .
we were hoping that it wass going to have a kind of evil , spidery walk , but instead it created this pretty lame way of moving forward .
but when you look at that , you have to remember that this machine did not do any physical trials on how to move forward , nor did it have a model of itself .
it kind of figured out what it looks like , and how to move forward , and then actually tried that out .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , we 'll move forward to a different idea .
so that was what happened when we had a couple of - that 's what happened when you had a couple of - ok , ok , ok - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - they do n't like each other . so there 's a different robot .
that 's what happened when the robots actually are rewarded for doing something .
what happens if you do n't reward them for anything , you just throw them in ?
so we have these cubes , like the diagram showed here .
the cube can swivel , or flip on its side , and we just throw 1,000 of these cubes into a soup - this is in simulation - and do n't reward them for anything , we just let them flip . we pump energy into this and see what happens in a couple of mutations .
so , initially nothing happens , they 're just flipping around there .
but after a very short while , you can see these blue things on the right there begin to take over .
they begin to self-replicate . so in absence of any reward , the intrinsic reward is self-replication .
and we 've actually built a couple of these , and this is part of a larger robot made out of these cubes .
it 's an accelerated view , where you can see the robot actually carrying out some of its replication process .
so you 're feeding it with more material - cubes in this case - and more energy , and it can make another robot .
so of course , this is a very crude machine , but we 're working on a micro-scale version of these , and hopefully the cubes will be like a powder that you pour in .
ok , so what can we learn ? these robots are of course not very useful in themselves , but they might teach us something about how we can build better robots , and perhaps how humans , animals , create self-models and learn .
and one of the things that i think is important is that we have to get away from this idea of designing the machines manually , but actually let them evolve and learn , like children , and perhaps that 's the way we 'll get there . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris has been so nice .
i do n't know how you keep it up , chris , i really do n't .
so nice , all week . he 's the kind of man you could say to , " chris , i 'm really sorry , i 've crashed your car .
and it gets worse , i crashed it into your house .
your house has caught fire .
and what 's more , your wife has just run off with your best friend . "
and you know that chris would say , " thank you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " thank you for sharing , that 's really interesting . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " thank you for taking me to a place that i did n't know existed . thank you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one of the - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you for inviting us .
one of the things about appearing later on in the ted week is that , gradually , as the days go by , all the other speakers cover most of what you were going to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nuclear fusion , i had about 10 minutes on that .
spectroscopy , that was another one .
parallel universes .
and so this morning i thought , " oh well , i 'll just do a card trick . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that one 's gone as well .
and today is emmanuel 's day , i think we 've agreed that , already , have n't we ?
emmanuel ? absolutely . -lrb- applause -rrb- i was planning on finishing on a dance ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , that 's going to look pretty shabby now .
so , what i thought i 'd do is - in honor of emmanuel - is , what i can do is to launch today the first ted global auction .
if i could start , this is the enigma decoding machine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- who will start me with $ 1,000 ? anyone ?
thank you . bruno 's face , just then , he said , " no , do n't go through this . do n't , please do n't .
do n't go through this . do n't do it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm worried . when i first got the invitation , they said somewhere in the thing , they said , " 15 minutes to change the world , your moment onstage . " 15 minutes to change the world .
i do n't know about you , it takes me 15 minutes to change a plug .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the idea of changing the world is really quite an extraordinary one .
well , of course now we know we do n't have to change a plug , now we 've seen that wonderful demonstration of the wireless electric - fantastic . you know , it inspires us .
300 years ago he 'd have been burnt at the stake for that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now it 's an idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's great . it 's fantastic .
but you do meet some fantastic people , people who look at the world in a totally different way .
yesterday , david deutsch , another one who covered most of what i was going to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but when you think of the world in that way , it does make going to starbucks a whole new experience , do n't you think ?
i mean , he must walk in and they will say , " would you like a macchiato , or a latte , or an americano , or a cappuccino ? "
and he 'll say , " you 're offering me things that are infinitely variable . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " how can your coffee be true ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they will say , " would you mind if i serve the next customer ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and elaine morgan yesterday , was n't she wonderful ?
fantastic . really good .
her talk about the aquatic ape , and the link , of course , the link between darwinism and the fact that we are all naked beneath this - we 're not hirsute and we can swim rather well .
and she said , you know , she 's 90 . she 's running out of time , she said .
and she 's desperate to find more evidence for the link .
and i think , " i 'm sitting next to lewis pugh . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this man has swum around the north pole , what more evidence do you want ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there he is .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's how ted brings these connections together .
i was n't here on tuesday . i did n't actually see gordon brown 's job application - um , sorry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm so sorry . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm so sorry . no , no . -lrb- applause -rrb- no , no , ahh ... -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- as brown -rrb- : " global problems require scottish solutions . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the problem i have is because gordon brown , he comes onstage and he looks for all the world like a man who 's just taken the head off a bear suit .
-lrb- as brown -rrb- : " hello , can i tell you what happened in the woods back there ?
uh , no . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm sorry . i 've only got 18 minutes , 18 minutes to talk about saving the world , saving the planet , global institutions .
our work on climate change , i 've only got 18 minutes , unfortunately i 'm not able to tell you about all the wonderful things we 're doing to promote the climate change agenda in great britain , like the third runway we 're planning at heathrow airport ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " the large coal-fired power station we 're building at king 's north , and of course the exciting news that only today , only this week , britain 's only manufacturer of wind turbines has been forced to close .
no time , unfortunately , to mention those . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- " british jobs for scottish people ...
no . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " christian principles , christian values .
thou shalt not kill , thou shalt not steal , thou shalt not covet thy neighbor 's wife . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " although to be honest , when i was at number 11 that was never going to be a problem . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- as tony blair -rrb- : " yeah , alright , come on , eh .
alright gordon , come on , eh .
i just , can i just say a few things about , first about cherie , because she 's a wonderful lady , my wife , with a wonderful smile .
that reminds me , i must post that letter . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i just think , you know , what people forget , gordon and i , we always got on perfectly well .
alright , it was never exactly ' brokeback mountain . " ' -lrb- laughter -rrb- " you know , i wrote to him , just before i left office . i said , ' can i rely on your support for the next month ? ' and he wrote back . he said , ' no , you ca n't . ' which kind of surprised me , because i 'd never seen ' ca n't ' spelled that way before . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another thing gordon could have mentioned in his speech to the mansion house in 2002 - that was to the building ; the people were n't listening .
but the people , when talking about the finance industry , he said , " what you as the city of london have done for financial services , we , as a government , hope to do for the economy as a whole . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when you think what 's happened to financial services , and you see what 's happened to the economy , you think , " well , there is a man who delivers on his promises . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we 're in a new world now . we 're in a completely new world .
this is the first time that i can remember , where if you get a letter from the bank manager about a loan , you do n't know if you 're borrowing money from him , or if he 's borrowing money from you .
am i right ?
these extraordinary things , icelandic internet accounts .
did anyone here have an icelandic internet account ?
why would you do that ? why would - it 's like one step up from replying to one of those emails from nigeria , is n't it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- asking for your bank details .
and , you know , iceland , it was never going to cut it .
it did n't have that kind of collateral .
what does it have ? it has fish , that 's all .
that 's why the prime minister went on television . he said , " this has left us all with a very big haddock . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a lot of what i do - i have to try and make sense of things before i can make nonsense of them .
and making sense of the financial crisis is very , very difficult .
luckily , somebody like george bush was really helpful .
he summed it up , really , at a dinner .
he was speaking at a dinner , he said , " wall street got drunk . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and now it 's got a hangover . "
and that 's , you know , that 's something - -lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's something we can relate to .
it 's certainly something he can relate to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the other one , of course , is donald rumsfeld , who said , " there are the known knowns , the things we know we know .
and then you got the known unknowns , the things we know we do n't know .
and then you got the unknown unknowns , those are the things we do n't know we do n't know . "
and being english , when i first heard that i thought , " what a load of cock . "
and then , you 're now , well , actually , that 's what this is about .
this whole , what ben bernanke has said , the chaotic unwinding of the world 's financial system , it 's about - they do n't know , they did n't know what they were doing .
in 2006 , the head of the american mortgage bankers association said , quote , " as we can clearly see , no seismic occurrence is about to overwhelm the u.s. economy . "
now , there is a man on top of his job .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when the crisis was happening , the head of quantitative equities at lehman brothers said , " events which models predicted would happen once every 10,000 years happened every day for three days . "
so , it 's extraordinary . it 's a new world that 's very , very difficult to make sense of .
but we have a new hope . we have a new man .
america has now elected its first openly black president .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- wonderful news .
not only that , he 's left-handed . have you noticed this ?
how many people here are left-handed ?
you see , a lot of the people that i most admire , they 're great artists , great designers , great thinkers , they 're left-handed .
and somebody said to me last night , you know , being left-handed , you have to learn to write without smudging the ink .
and somebody was talking about metaphors on monday .
and i thought , what a wonderful metaphor , is n't it ? an american president who has to write without smudging the ink .
you like that one ? as opposed to you could see george bush , well , what 's the metaphor there ?
i think it would be something out of the aquatic ape thing , would n't it ?
" well , you know i 'm sorry about that .
i 'm right-handed but i seem to have smudged that ink as well . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , you know , he 's gone . now he 's gone .
that 's eight years of american history , eight minutes of my act , just gone like that .
" you know , it 's the end of an error -lsb- sic -rsb- .
i happen to believe it was a great error .
i know folks said to me they believe it was one of the greatest errors in the history of the united states .
but we proved them wrong in iraq .
they said there was no link between iraq and al qaeda .
there is now . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " but i have a message for the suicide bombers , for those people who 've blown themselves up . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we 're going to find you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we 're going to make sure you do n't do it again . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but now he 's gone , and it 's great to see one of the - arguably one of the worst speech makers in american history , now given way to one of the greatest , in obama .
you were there , maybe , on the night of his victory .
and he spoke to the crowd in chicago , he said , " if there is anyone out there who still doubts that america is a place where all things are possible ... "
i ca n't do the whole thing because it would take too long , it really would .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you get the picture . and then it goes to the inauguration .
and he and the chief justice , they trip over each other , they get their words wrong and they screw the thing up .
and there is george bush sitting there going , " heh heh heh heh ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " not so easy is it ? heh heh heh . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the interesting thing is , gordon brown was talking about cicero , who said , people would listen to a speech , they said , " great speech . "
and then they 'd listen to demosthenes , and they 'd say , " let 's march . "
and we all want to believe in president obama .
it 's rather like that line in the film " as good as it gets . "
do you remember that film with helen hunt and jack nicholson , and helen hunt says to jack nicholson , " what do you see in me ? "
and jack nicholson just says , " you make me want to be a better man . "
and you want a leader who inspires and challenges and makes you want to be a better citizen . right ?
but at the moment , it 's a cicero thing .
we like what barack obama says , but we do n't do anything about it .
so he comes over to this country , and he says , " we need a big fiscal stimulus . "
and everyone goes , " great ! " he leaves the country and the french and the germans go , " no , no , forget about that , absolutely not . " nothing happens . he goes to strasburg .
he says , " we need more boots on the ground in afghanistan . "
and everyone goes , " great idea . "
he leaves , people go , " no no no , we 're not going to do that .
5,000 maximum , and no rockets . no , no , not going to do it . "
he goes to prague , he says , " we believe in a nuclear-free world . "
and it 's great to have an american president who can say the word " nuclear , " let 's just point that out first .
do you remember that ? george bush , " a nu-ca-ler . "
sorry , what ? " a nu-ca-ler . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- could you say " avuncular " ? " avunclear . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
but he says , " we want a nuclear-free world . "
and that day , north korea , that very day , north korea is just seeing if it can just get one over japan - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and land it before ...
so , where do we look for inspiration ? we 've still got bill clinton .
" travels the world . " -lrb- laughs -rrb- " i believe , i believe it was president dwight d. eisenhower who said ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " tell a lie ; it was diana ross ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ... " who said , reach out and touch ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ... " somebody 's gla - hand . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " make this world a better place , if you can .
i just think that 's important . i really do .
and i was hoping hillary would get to the white house , because she 'd have been out of our home for four years .
and i , you know . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " so , when that did n't work out i had to make a few arrangements , let me tell you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , there 's him . in britain we have prince charles : " and the environment is so important , all we can do .
my wife gets fed up with me constantly trying to push emissions up her agenda . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or , any south africans , we have mandela to inspire .
mandela , the great man mandela .
he 's been honored with a statue now .
the previous highest honor he had in britain was a visit from the team from ground force , a gardening program .
" so , nelson , how would you like a nice water feature ? "
" ahh , listen to me mr. titchmarsh . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i was held in prison for nearly 30 years on an island in the middle of the ocean .
why would i need a bloody water feature ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- very quickly : i was n't quite sure how to end this talk and then yesterday that man came up with a wonderful quote from the " japanese essays on idleness " which said it 's nice to have something which is unfinished because it implies there is still room for growth .
thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about penguins today .
but first , i want to start by saying that we need a new operating system , for the oceans and for the earth .
when i came to the galapagos 40 years ago , there were 3,000 people that lived in the galapagos .
now there are over 30,000 .
there were two jeeps on santa cruz .
now , there are around a thousand trucks and buses and cars there .
so the fundamental problems that we face are overconsumption and too many people .
it 's the same problems in the galapagos , except , obviously , it 's worse here , in some ways , than other places .
because we 've only doubled the population of the earth since the 1960s - a little more than doubled - but we have 6.7 billion people in the world , and we all like to consume .
and one of the major problems that we have is our operating system is not giving us the proper feedback .
we 're not paying the true environmental costs of our actions .
and when i came at age 22 to live on fernandina , let me just say , that i had never camped before .
i had never lived alone for any period of time , and i 'd never slept with sea lions snoring next to me all night .
but moreover , i 'd never lived on an uninhabited island .
punta espinosa is where i lived for over a year , and we call it uninhabited because there are no people there .
but it 's alive with life ; it 's hardly uninhabited .
so a lot has happened in the last 40 years , and what i learned when i came to the galapagos is the importance of wild places , wild things , certainly wildlife , and the amazing qualities that penguins have .
penguins are real athletes : they can swim 173 kilometers in a day .
they can swim at the same speed day and night - that 's faster than any olympic swimmer .
i mean , they can do like seven kilometers an hour and sustain it .
but what is really amazing , because of this deepness here , emperor penguins can go down more than 500 meters and they can hold their breath for 23 minutes .
magellanic penguins , the ones that i work on , they can dive to about 90 meters and they can stay down for about 4.6 minutes .
humans , without fins : 90 meters , 3.5 minutes .
and i doubt anybody in this room could really hold their breath for 3.5 minutes .
you have to train to be able to do that .
so penguins are amazing athletes .
the other thing is , i 've never met anybody that really does n't say that they like penguins .
they 're comical , they walk upright , and , of course , they 're diligent .
and , more importantly , they 're well-dressed .
so they have all the criteria that people normally like .
but scientifically , they 're amazing because they 're sentinels .
they tell us about our world in a lot of different ways , and particularly the ocean .
this is a picture of a galapagos penguin that 's on the front of a little zodiac here in the galapagos .
and that 's what i came to study .
i thought i was going to study the social behavior of galapagos penguins , but you already know penguins are rare .
these are the rarest penguins in the world .
why i thought i was going to be able to do that , i do n't know .
but the population has changed dramatically since i was first here .
when i counted penguins for the first time and tried to do a census , we just counted all the individual beaks that we could around all these islands .
we counted around 2,000 , so i do n't know how many penguins there really are , but i know i can count 2,000 .
if you go and do it now , the national parks count about 500 .
so we have a quarter of the penguins that we did 40 years ago .
and this is true of most of our living systems .
we have less than we had before , and most of them are in fairly steep decline .
and i want to just show you a little bit about why .
-lrb- braying -rrb- that 's a penguin braying to tell you that it 's important to pay attention to penguins .
most important of all , i did n't know what that was the first time i heard it .
and you can imagine sleeping on fernandina your first night there and you hear this lonesome , plaintful call .
i fell in love with penguins , and it certainly has changed the rest of my life .
what i found out i was studying is really the difference in how the galapagos changes , the most extreme variation .
you 've heard about these el ninos , but this is the extreme that penguins all over the world have to adapt to .
this is a cold-water event called la nina .
where it 's blue and it 's green , it means the water is really cold .
and so you can see this current coming up - in this case , the humboldt current - that comes all the way out to the galapagos islands , and this deep undersea current , the cromwell current , that upwells around the galapagos .
that brings all the nutrients : when this is cold in the galapagos , it 's rich , and there 's plenty of food for everyone .
when we have extreme el nino events , you see all this red , and you see no green out here around the galapagos .
that means that there 's no upwelling , and there 's basically no food .
so it 's a real desert for not only for the penguins and the sea lions and the marine iguanas ...
things die when there 's no food .
but we did n't even know that that affected the galapagos when i went to study penguins .
and you can imagine being on an island hoping you 're going to see penguins , and you 're in the middle of an el nino event and there are no penguins .
they 're not breeding ; they 're not even around .
i studied marine iguanas at that point .
but this is a global phenomenon , we know that .
and if you look along the coast of argentina , where i work now , at a place called punta tombo - the largest magellanic penguin colony in the world down here about 44 degrees south latitude - you see that there 's great variation here .
some years , the cold water goes all the way up to brazil , and other years , in these la nina years , it does n't .
so the oceans do n't always act together ; they act differently , but that is the kind of variation that penguins have to live with , and it 's not easy .
so when i went to study the magellanic penguins , i did n't have any problems .
there were plenty of them .
this is a picture at punta tombo in february showing all the penguins along the beach .
i went there because the japanese wanted to start harvesting them and turning them into high fashion golf gloves , protein and oil .
fortunately , nobody has harvested any penguins and we 're getting over 100,000 tourists a year to see them .
but the population is declining and it 's declined fairly substantially , about 21 percent since 1987 , when i started these surveys , in terms of number of active nests .
here , you can see where punta tombo is , and they breed in incredibly dense colonies .
we know this because of long-term science , because we have long-term studies there .
and science is important in informing decision makers , and also in changing how we do and knowing the direction of change that we 're going in .
and so we have this penguin project . the wildlife conservation society has funded me along with a lot of individuals over the last 27 years to be able to produce these kinds of maps .
and also , we know that it 's not only galapagos penguins that are in trouble , but magellanics and many other species of penguins .
and so we have started a global penguin society to try to focus on the real plight of penguins .
this is one of the plights of penguins : oil pollution .
penguins do n't like oil and they do n't like to swim through oil .
the nice thing is , if you look down here in argentina , there 's no surface oil pollution from this composite map .
but , in fact , when we went to argentina , penguins were often found totally covered in oil .
so they were just minding their own business .
they ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it .
because when tankers carry oil they have to have ballast at some point , so when they 're empty , they have the ballast water in there .
when they come back , they actually dump this oily ballast water into the ocean .
why do they do that ? because it 's cheaper , because they do n't pay the real environmental costs .
we usually do n't , and we want to start getting the accounting system right so we can pay the real cost .
at first , the argentine government said , " no , there 's no way .
you ca n't find oiled penguins in argentina .
we have laws , and we ca n't have illegal dumping ; it 's against the law . "
so we ended up spending nine years convincing the government that there were lots of oiled penguins .
in some years , like this year , we found more than 80 percent of the adult penguins dead on the beach were covered in oil .
these little blue dots are the fledglings - we do this survey every march - which means that they 're only in the environment from january until march , so maybe three months at the most that they could get covered in oil .
and you can see , in some years over 60 percent of the fledglings were oiled .
eventually , the government listened and , amazingly , they changed their laws .
they moved the tanker lanes 40 kilometers farther off shore , and people are not doing as much illegal dumping .
so what we 're seeing now is very few penguins are oiled .
why are there even these penguins oiled ?
because we 've solved the problem in chubut province , which is like a state in argentina where punta tombo is - so that 's about 1,000 kilometers of coastline - but we have n't solved the problem in northern argentina , uruguay and brazil .
so now i want to show you that penguins are affected .
i 'm just going to talk about two things .
this is climate change . now this has really been a fun study because i put satellite tags on the back of these magellanic penguins .
try to convince donors to give you a couple thousand dollars to glue a satellite tag on the back of penguins .
but we 've been doing this now for more than a decade to learn where they go .
we thought we needed a marine protected area of about 30 kilometers , and then we put a satellite tag on the back of a penguin .
and what the penguins show us - and these are all the little dots from where the penguins ' positions were for penguins in incubation in 2003 - and what you see is some of these individuals are going 800 kilometers away from their nests .
so that means as their mate is sitting on the nest incubating the eggs , the other one is out there foraging , and the longer they have to stay gone , the worse condition the mate is in when the mate comes back .
and , of course , all of this then leads to a vicious cycle and you ca n't raise a lot of chicks .
here you see in 2003 - these are all the dots of where the penguins are - they were raising a little over a half of a chick .
here , you can see in 2006 , they raised almost three quarters of a chick per nest , and you can see that they 're closer to punta tombo ; they 're not going as far away .
this past year , in 2009 , you can see that they 're now raising about a fourth of a chick , and some of these individuals are going more than 900 kilometers away from their nests .
so it 's kind of like you having a job in chicago , and then you get transferred to st. louis , and your mate is not happy about this because you 've got to pay airfare , because you 're gone longer .
the same thing 's true for penguins as well .
and they 're going about , on average now , 40 kilometers farther than they did a decade ago .
we need to be able to get information out to the general public .
and so we started a publication with the society for conservation that we think presents cutting-edge science in a new , novel way , because we have reporters that are good writers that actually can distill the information and make it accessible to the general public .
so if you 're interested in cutting-edge science and smarter conservation , you should join with our 11 partners - some of them here in this room , like the nature conservancy - and look at this magazine because we need to get information out about conservation to the general public .
lastly i want to say that all of you , probably , have had some relationship at some time in your life with a dog , a cat , some sort of pet , and you recognized that those are individuals .
and some of you consider them almost part of your family .
if you had a relationship with a penguin , you 'd see it in the same sort of way .
they 're amazing creatures that really change how you view the world because they 're not that different from us : they 're trying to make a living , they 're trying to raise their offspring , they 're trying to get on and survive in the world .
this is turbo the penguin .
turbo 's never been fed .
he met us and got his name because he started standing under my diesel truck : a turbo truck , so we named him turbo .
turbo has taken to knocking on the door with his beak , we let him in and he comes in here .
and i just wanted to show you what happened one day when turbo brought in a friend .
so this is turbo .
he 's coming up to one of my graduate students and flipper patting , which he would do to a female penguin .
and you can see , he 's not trying to bite .
this guy has never been in before and he 's trying to figure out , " what is going on ?
what is this guy doing ?
this is really pretty weird . "
and you 'll see soon that my graduate student ...
and you see , turbo 's pretty intent on his flipper patting .
and now he 's looking at the other guy , saying , " you are really weird . "
and now look at this : not friendly .
so penguins really differ in their personalities just like our dogs and our cats .
we 're also trying to collect our information and become more technologically literate .
so we 're trying to put that in computers in the field .
and penguins are always involved in helping us or not helping us in one way or another .
this is a radio frequency id system .
you put a little piece of rice in the foot of a penguin that has a barcode , so it tells you who it is .
it walks over the pad , and you know who it is .
okay , so here are a few penguins coming in .
see , this one 's coming back to its nest .
they 're all coming in at this time , walking across there , just kind of leisurely coming in .
here 's a female that 's in a hurry . she 's got food .
she 's really rushing back , because it 's hot , to try to feed her chicks .
and then there 's another fellow that will leisurely come by .
look how fat he is . he 's walking back to feed his chicks .
then i realize that they 're playing king of the box .
this is my box up here , and this is the system that works .
you can see this penguin , he goes over , he looks at those wires , does not like that wire .
he unplugs the wire ; we have no data .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , they really are pretty amazing creatures .
ok .
most important thing is : only you can change yourself , and only you can change the world and make it better , for people as well as penguins .
so , thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- the stories we tell about each other matter very much .
the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter .
and most of all , i think the way that we participate in each other 's stories is of deep importance .
i was six years old when i first heard stories about the poor .
now i did n't hear those stories from the poor themselves , i heard them from my sunday school teacher and jesus , kind of via my sunday school teacher .
i remember learning that people who were poor needed something material - food , clothing , shelter - that they did n't have .
and i also was taught , coupled with that , that it was my job - this classroom full of five and six year-old children - it was our job , apparently , to help .
this is what jesus asked of us .
and then he said , " what you do for the least of these , you do for me . "
now i was pretty psyched .
i was very eager to be useful in the world - i think we all have that feeling .
and also , it was kind of interesting that god needed help .
that was news to me , and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in .
but i also learned very soon thereafter that jesus also said , and i 'm paraphrasing , the poor would always be with us .
this frustrated and confused me ; i felt like i had been just given a homework assignment that i had to do , and i was excited to do , but no matter what i would do , i would fail .
so i felt confused , a little bit frustrated and angry , like maybe i 'd misunderstood something here .
and i felt overwhelmed .
and for the first time , i began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people .
i imagined in my head , a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away , that would always be with us .
they were always going to ask me to help them and give them things , which i was excited to do , but i did n't know how it was going to work .
and i did n't know what would happen when i ran out of things to give , especially if the problem was never going away .
in the years following , the other stories i heard about the poor growing up were no more positive .
for example , i saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering .
i heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor .
i heard about disease , i heard about war - they always seemed to be kind of related .
and in general , i got this sort of idea that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness , devastation , hopelessness .
and after a while , i developed what i think many of us do , is this predictable response , where i started to feel bad every time i heard about them .
i started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth , because i was n't doing more , apparently , to make things better .
and i even felt a sense of shame because of that .
and so naturally , i started to distance myself .
i stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as i had before .
and i stopped expecting things to really change .
now i still gave - on the outside it looked like i was still quite involved .
i gave of my time and my money , i gave when solutions were on sale .
the cost of a cup of coffee can save a child 's life , right .
i mean who can argue with that ?
i gave when i was cornered , when it was difficult to avoid and i gave , in general , when the negative emotions built up enough that i gave to relieve my own suffering , not someone else 's .
the truth be told , i was giving out of that place , not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity .
it became a transaction for me , became sort of a trade .
i was purchasing something - i was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news .
and i think the way that we go through that sometimes can , first of all , disembody a group of people , individuals out there in the world .
and it can also turn into a commodity , which is a very scary thing .
so as i did this , and as i think many of us do this , we kind of buy our distance , we kind of buy our right to go on with our day .
i think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most .
it can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person 's life and , in short to love .
thankfully , a few years ago , things shifted for me because i heard this gentleman speak , dr. muhammad yunus .
i know many in the room probably know exactly who he is , but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak , dr. yunus won the nobel peace prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance .
when i heard him speak , it was three years before that .
but basically , microfinance - if this is new to you as well - think of that as financial services for the poor .
think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day .
dr. yunus shared his story , explaining what that was , and what he had done with his grameen bank .
he also talked about , in particular , microlending , which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business .
now , when i heard him speak , it was exciting for a number of reasons .
first and foremost , i learned about this new method of change in the world that , for once , showed me , maybe , a way to interact with someone and to give , to share of a resource in a way that was n't weird and did n't make me feel bad - that was exciting .
but more importantly , he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories i had heard before .
in fact , those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note .
he was talking about strong , smart , hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family 's lives better .
all they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital .
it was an amazing sort of insight for me .
and i , in fact , was so deeply moved by this - it 's hard to express now how much that affected me - but i was so moved that i actually quit my job a few weeks later , and i moved to east africa to try to see for myself what this was about .
for the first time , actually , in a long time i wanted to meet those individuals , i wanted to meet these entrepreneurs , and see for myself what their lives were actually about .
so i spent three months in kenya , uganda and tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business .
and in fact , through those interactions , for the first time , i was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away .
i was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories .
and over and over again , as i interviewed them and spent my days with them , i did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change .
so i would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats .
their business trajectory would change .
they would make a little bit more money ; their standard of living would shift and would get better .
and they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives , like they would start to send their children to school .
they might be able to buy mosquito nets .
maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure .
maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when i came as their guest and that made them feel proud .
but there were these beautiful details , even if i talked to 20 goat herders in a row , and some days that 's what happened - these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them .
that was another thing that really touched me .
it was really humbling to see for the first time , to really understand that even if i could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything , i probably would have gotten a lot wrong .
because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them .
so i saw that and it was very humbling .
anyway , another interesting thing happened while i was there .
i never once was asked for a donation , which had kind of been my mode , right .
there 's poverty , you give money to help - no one asked me for a donation .
in fact , no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all .
if anything , they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities .
so what i did hear , once in a while , was that people wanted a loan - i thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting .
and by the way , i was a philosophy and poetry major in school , so i did n't know the difference between profit and revenue when i went to east africa .
i just got this impression that the money would work .
and my introduction to business was in these $ 100 little infuses of capital .
and i learned about profit and revenue , about leverage , all sorts of things , from farmers , from seamstresses , from goat herders .
so this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family , and through that , maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans , that 's this little idea that turned into kiva .
a few months later , i went back to uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner , matthew , and i had kind of built , and took pictures of seven of my new friends , posted their stories , these stories of entrepreneurship , up on the website , spammed friends and family and said , " we think this is legal .
have n't heard back yet from sec on all the details , but do you say , do you want to help participate in this , provide the money that they need ? "
the money came in basically overnight .
we sent it over to uganda .
and over the next six months , a beautiful thing happened ; the entrepreneurs received the money , they were paid , and their businesses , in fact , grew , and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives .
in october of ' 05 , after those first seven loans were paid , matt and i took the word beta off of the site .
we said , " our little experiment has been a success .
let 's start for real . " that was our official launch .
and then that first year , october ' 05 through ' 06 , kiva facilitated $ 500,000 in loans .
the second year , it was a total of 15 million .
the third year , the total was up to around 40 .
the fourth year , we were just short of 100 .
and today , less than five years in , kiva 's facilitated more than 150 million dollars , in little 25-dollar bits , from lenders and entrepreneurs - more than a million of those , collectively in 200 countries .
so that 's where kiva is today , just to bring you right up to the present .
and while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they 're interesting , to me , kiva 's really about stories .
it 's about retelling the story of the poor , and it 's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity , validates a partnership relationship , not a relationship that 's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen .
but instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward .
so what i hope is that , not only can the money keep flowing forth through kiva - that 's a very positive and meaningful thing - but i hope kiva can blur those lines , like i said , between the traditional rich and poor categories that we 're taught to see in the world , this false dichotomy of us and them , have and have not .
i hope that kiva can blur those lines .
because as that happens , i think we can feel free to interact in a way that 's more open , more just and more creative , to engage with each other and to help each other .
imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you 're about to approach them .
imagine how you feel ; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business .
maybe they 're smiling , and they want to talk to you about what they 've done .
imagine if you 're speaking with somebody who 's growing things and making them flourish , somebody who 's using their talents to do something productive , somebody who 's built their own business from scratch , someone who is surrounded by abundance , not scarcity , who 's in fact creating abundance , somebody with full hands with something to offer , not empty hands asking for you to give them something .
imagine if you could hear a story you did n't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very , very hard to make their life better .
these stories can really change the way that we think about each other .
and if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money , i think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other 's potential .
now for me , kiva is just the beginning .
and as i look forward to what is next , it 's been helpful to reflect on the things i 've learned so far .
the first one is , as i mentioned , entrepreneurship was a new idea to me .
kiva borrowers , as i interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years , have taught me what entrepreneurship is .
and i think , at its core , it 's deciding that you want your life to be better .
you see an opportunity and you decide what you 're going to do to try to seize that .
in short , it 's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that .
second thing that i 've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity .
so they 're not a donation .
yeah , maybe it does n't sound that much different .
but in fact , when you give something to someone and they say , " thanks , " and let you know how things go , that 's one thing .
when you lend them money , and they slowly pay you back over time , you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue .
this continued attention - this ongoing attention - is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us .
and then third , from what i 've heard from the entrepreneurs i 've gotten to know , when all else is equal , given the option to have just money to do what you need to do , or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community , people choose the community plus the money .
that 's a much more meaningful combination , a more powerful combination .
so with that in mind , this particular incident has led to the things that i 'm working on now .
i see entrepreneurs everywhere now , now that i 'm tuned into this .
and one thing that i 've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world .
with social networks , it 's an amazing way , growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities , rapidly .
and so , as i have been thinking about this , i 've been wondering : how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today ?
as i 've researched what 's going on in the united states , a few interesting little insights have come up .
so one is that , of course , as we all might expect , many small businesses in the u.s. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month .
but there 's always a need for resources close by .
another thing is , it turns out , those resources do n't usually come from the places you might expect - banks , venture capitalists , other organizations and support structures - they come from friends and family .
some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family .
that 's around 130 billion dollars a year - it 's a lot .
and third , so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process , it 's very awkward , people do n't know exactly what to ask for , how to ask , what to promise in return , even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them .
so to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like , exactly what fits them and the people around them , this week actually , we 're quietly doing a launch of profounder , which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family .
and it 's investments , not donations , not loans , but investments that have a dynamic return .
so the mapping of participating in the story , it actually flows with the up and down .
so in short , it 's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds .
and what you can do is go onto the site , create a profile , create investment terms in a really easy way .
we make it really , really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site .
and we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues .
they can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited , unsophisticated investors - everyday people , heaven forbid - and they can share those returns over time - again , whatever terms they set .
as investors choose to become involved based on those terms , they can either take their rewards back as cash , or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit .
so they can be a cash , or a cause , investor .
it 's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea a path to go do what they want to do in the world and to gather the people around them that they already have , the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them , to gather them to make this happen .
so that 's what i 'm working on now .
and to close , i just want to say , look these are tools .
right now , profounder 's right at the very beginning , and it 's very palpable ; it 's very clear to me , that it 's just a vessel , it 's just a tool .
what we need are for people to care , to actually go use it , just like they 've cared enough to use kiva to make those connections .
but the good news is i do n't think i need to stand here and convince you to care - i 'm not even going to try .
i do n't think , even though we often hear , you know , hear the ethical and moral reasons , the religious reasons , " here 's why caring and giving will make you happier . "
i do n't think we need to be convinced of that . i think we know ; in fact , i think we know so much , and it 's such a reality that we care so deeply , that in fact , what usually stops us is that we 're afraid to try and to mess up , because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other 's lives .
so what i think i can do today , that best thing i can give you - i 've given you my story , which is the best i can do .
and i think i can remind us that we do care .
i think we all already know that .
and i think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try .
just a sec .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for me , the best way to be inspired to try is to stop and to listen and i 'm grateful that i 've gotten to do that here at ted .
and i 'm grateful that whenever i do that , guaranteed , i am inspired - i am inspired by the person i am listening to .
and i believe more and more every time i listen in that that person 's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help .
and that - forget the tools , forget the moving around of resources - that stuff 's easy .
believing in each other , really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world , that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us .
so that , this belief in each other , knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do , that 's what i believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all buildings today have something in common .
they 're made using victorian technologies .
this involves blueprints , industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers .
all of this effort results in an inert object .
and that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities .
this is not sustainable .
i believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature , not insulating them from it .
now , in order to do this , we need the right kind of language .
living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world , through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism .
and this is the conversion of one group of substances into another , either through the production or the absorption of energy .
and this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way .
so , i 'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture .
but they do n't exist . so i 'm having to make them .
i 'm working with architect neil spiller at the bartlett school of architecture , and we 're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach .
that means we 're generating them from scratch .
one of our collaborators is chemist martin hanczyc , and he 's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter .
now , that 's exactly the kind of process that i 'm interested in , when we 're thinking about sustainable materials .
so , martin , he works with a system called the protocell .
now all this is - and it 's magic - is a little fatty bag . and it 's got a chemical battery in it .
and it has no dna .
this little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living .
it is able to move around its environment .
it can follow chemical gradients .
it can undergo complex reactions , some of which are happily architectural .
so here we are . these are protocells , patterning their environment .
we do n't know how they do that yet .
here , this is a protocell , and it 's vigorously shedding this skin .
now , this looks like a chemical kind of birth .
this is a violent process .
here , we 've got a protocell to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate .
and that 's the shell around that globular fat .
they are quite brittle . so you 've only got a part of one there .
so what we 're trying to do is , we 're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom-up construction approaches for architecture , which contrast the current , victorian , top-down methods which impose structure upon matter .
that ca n't be energetically sensible .
so , bottom-up materials actually exist today .
they 've been in use , in architecture , since ancient times .
if you walk around the city of oxford , where we are today , and have a look at the brickwork , which i 've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days , you 'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone .
and if you look even closer , you 'll see , in that limestone , there are little shells and little skeletons that are piled upon each other .
and then they are fossilized over millions of years .
now a block of limestone , in itself , is n't particularly that interesting .
it looks beautiful .
but imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere .
maybe they could extract carbon dioxide .
would it give this block of limestone new properties ?
well , most likely it would . it might be able to grow .
it might be able to self-repair , and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment .
so , architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material .
they think big . okay ?
so when we think about scaling up metabolic materials , we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls , or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water .
so , one of these examples would of course be the historic city of venice .
now , venice , as you know , has a tempestuous relationship with the sea , and is built upon wooden piles .
so we 've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we 're working with to sustainably reclaim venice .
and architect christian kerrigan has come up with a series of designs that show us how it may be possible to actually grow a limestone reef underneath the city .
so , here is the technology we have today .
this is our protocell technology , effectively making a shell , like its limestone forefathers , and depositing it in a very complex environment , against natural materials .
we 're looking at crystal lattices to see the bonding process in this .
now , this is the very interesting part .
we do n't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals .
what we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles .
so , you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light , toward the dark foundations .
we 've observed this in the laboratory .
the protocells can actually move away from the light .
they can actually also move towards the light . you have to just choose your species .
so that these do n't just exist as one entity , we kind of chemically engineer them .
and so here the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically , around the foundations of venice , effectively petrifying it .
now , this is n't going to happen tomorrow . it 's going to take a while .
it 's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case-by-case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of venice .
but gradually , as the buildings are repaired , we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city .
an accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide .
also it will attract the local marine ecology , who will find their own ecological niches within this architecture .
so , this is really interesting . now we have an architecture that connects a city to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way .
but perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere .
this is terrestrial chemistry . we 've all got it , which means that this technology is just as appropriate for developing countries as it is for first world countries .
so , in summary , i 'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to victorian technologies , and building architectures from a bottom-up approach .
secondly , these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems , which means they can perform in similar ways .
they can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture .
and finally , an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war .
these are not normally the most cheerful of topics , nor do they generally generate the kind of good news that this conference is about .
yet , not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago , but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict .
three things stand out : leadership , diplomacy and institutional design .
what i will focus on in my talk is why they matter , how they matter , and what we can all do to make sure that they continue to matter in the right ways , that is , how all of us can contribute to developing and honing the skills of local and global leaders to make peace and to make it last .
but let 's start at the beginning .
civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now , and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat .
for nearly two decades now , the news has been bad and the images have been haunting .
in georgia , after years of stalemate , we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in august , 2008 .
this quickly escalated into a five-day war between russia and georgia , leaving georgia ever more divided .
in kenya , contested presidential elections in 2007 - we just heard about them - quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people .
in sri lanka , a decades-long civil war between the tamil minority and the sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009 , after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983 .
in kyrgyzstan , just over the last few weeks , unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic kyrgyz and ethnic uzbeks .
hundreds have been killed , and more than 100,000 displaced , including many ethnic uzbeks who fled to neighboring uzbekistan .
in the middle east , conflict between israelis and palestinians continues unabated , and it becomes ever more difficult to see how , just how a possible , sustainable solution can be achieved .
darfur may have slipped from the news headlines , but the killing and displacement there continues as well , and the sheer human misery that it creates is very hard to fathom .
and in iraq , finally , violence is on the rise again , and the country has yet to form a government four months after its last parliamentary elections .
but hang on , this talk is to be about the good news .
so are these now the images of the past ?
well , notwithstanding the gloomy pictures from the middle east , darfur , iraq , elsewhere , there is a longer-term trend that does represent some good news .
over the past two decades , since the end of the cold war , there has been an overall decline in the number of civil wars .
since the high in the early 1990s , with about 50 such civil wars ongoing , we now have 30 percent fewer such conflicts today .
the number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two .
but this trend is less unambiguous .
the highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001 , with about 80,000 soldiers , policemen and rebels killed every year .
the lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003 , with just 20,000 killed .
despite the up and down since then , the overall trend - and this is the important bit - clearly points downward for the past two decades .
the news about civilian casualties is also less bad than it used to be .
from over 12,000 civilians deliberately killed in civil wars in 1997 and 1998 , a decade later , this figure stands at 4,000 .
this is a decrease by two-thirds .
this decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in rwanda in 1994 .
but then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months .
this certainly is an accomplishment that must never be surpassed .
what is also important is to note that these figures only tell part of the story .
they exclude people that died as a consequence of civil war , from hunger or disease , for example .
and they also do not properly account for civilian suffering more generally .
torture , rape and ethnic cleansing have become highly effective , if often non-lethal , weapons in civil war .
to put it differently , for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war , there is no good war and there is no bad peace .
thus , even though every civilian killed , maimed , raped , or tortured is one too many , the fact that the number of civilian casualties is clearly lower today than it was a decade ago , is good news .
so , we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed .
and the big question , of course , is why ?
in some cases , there is a military victory of one side .
this is a solution of sorts , but rarely is it one that comes without human costs or humanitarian consequences .
the defeat of the tamil tigers in sri lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this , but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the balkans , in the south caucasus and across most of africa .
at times , they are complimented by negotiated settlements , or at least cease-fire agreements , and peacekeepers are deployed .
but hardly ever do they represent a resounding success - bosnia and herzegovina perhaps more so than georgia .
but for many parts of africa , a colleague of mine once put it this way , " the cease-fire on tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on wednesday morning . "
but let 's look at the good news again .
if there 's no solution on the battlefield , three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war , or for sustainable peace afterwards : leadership , diplomacy and institutional design .
take the example of northern ireland .
despite centuries of animosity , decades of violence and thousands of people killed , 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement .
its initial version was skillfully mediated by senator george mitchell .
crucially , for the long-term success of the peace process in northern ireland , he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations .
central among them , a commitment to exclusively peaceful means .
subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the british and irish governments , who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to northern ireland .
the core institutions that were put in place in 1998 and their modifications in 2006 and 2008 were highly innovative and allowed all conflict parties to see their core concerns and demands addressed .
the agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in northern ireland with cross-border institutions that link belfast and dublin and thus recognizes the so-called irish dimension of the conflict .
and significantly , there 's also a clear focus on both the rights of individuals and the rights of communities .
the provisions in the agreement may be complex , but so is the underlying conflict .
perhaps most importantly , local leaders repeatedly rose to the challenge of compromise , not always fast and not always enthusiastically , but rise in the end they did .
who ever could have imagined ian paisley and martin mcguinness jointly governing northern ireland as first and deputy first minister ?
but then , is northern ireland a unique example , or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries ?
by no means .
the ending of liberia 's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership , diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in macedonia in 2001 , or the successful ending of the conflict in aceh in indonesia in 2005 .
in all three cases , local leaders were willing and able to make peace , the international community stood ready to help them negotiate and implement an agreement , and the institutions have lived up to the promise that they held on the day they were agreed .
focusing on leadership , diplomacy and institutional design also helps explain failures to achieve peace , or to make it last .
the hopes that were vested in the oslo accords did not lead to an end of the israeli / palestinian conflict .
not all the issues that needed to be resolved were actually covered in the agreements .
rather , local leaders committed to revisiting them later on .
yet instead of grasping this opportunity , local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second intifada , the events of 9/11 and the wars in afghanistan and iraq .
the comprehensive peace agreement for sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged , and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south .
changes and shortcomings in leadership , more off than on international diplomacy and institutional failures account for this in almost equal measure .
unresolved boundary issues , squabbles over oil revenues , the ongoing conflict in darfur , escalating tribal violence in the south and generally weak state capacity across all of sudan complete a very depressing picture of the state of affairs in africa 's largest country .
a final example : kosovo .
the failure to achieve a negotiated solution for kosovo and the violence , tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many , many different factors .
central among them are three .
first , the intransigence of local leaders to settle for nothing less than their maximum demands .
second , an international diplomatic effort that was hampered from the beginning by western support for kosovo 's independence .
and third , a lack of imagination when it came to designing institutions that could have addressed the concerns of serbs and albanians alike .
and here we have some good news again - the very fact that there is a high-level , well-resourced international presence in kosovo and the balkans region more generally and the fact that local leaders on both sides have showed relative restraint , explains why things have not been worse over the past two years since 2008 .
so even in situations where outcomes are less than optimal , local leaders and international leaders have a choice , and they can make a difference for the better .
a cold war is not as good as a cold peace , but a cold peace is still better than a hot war .
good news is also about learning the right lesson .
so what then distinguishes the israeli / palestinian conflict from that in northern ireland , or the civil war in sudan from that in liberia ?
both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue .
first , leadership .
in the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters , their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either .
leadership needs to be capable , determined and visionary in its commitment to peace .
leaders need to connect to each other and to their followers , and they need to bring them along on what is an often arduous journey into a peaceful future .
second , diplomacy .
diplomacy needs to be well resourced , sustained , and apply the right mix of incentives and pressures on leaders and followers .
it needs to help them reach an equitable compromise , and it needs to ensure that a broad coalition of local , regional and international supporters help them implement their agreement .
third , institutional design .
institutional design requires a keen focus on issues , innovative thinking and flexible and well-funded implementation .
conflict parties need to move away from maximum demands and towards a compromise that recognizes each other 's needs .
and they need to think about the substance of their agreement much more than about the labels they want to attach to them .
conflict parties also need to be prepared to return to the negotiation table if the agreement implementation stalls .
for me personally , the most critical lesson of all is this : local commitment to peace is all-important , but it is often not enough to prevent or end violence .
yet , no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have .
therefore , we must invest in developing leaders , leaders that have the skills , vision and determination to make peace .
leaders , in other words , that people will trust and that they will want to follow even if that means making hard choices .
a final thought : ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers , frustrations and setbacks .
it often takes a generation to accomplish , but it also requires us , today 's generation , to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership , diplomacy and institutional design , so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children .
if we do n't do that , we 're going to get the generation we deserve .
they 're going to learn from whatever it is they have around them .
and we , as now the elite , parents , librarians , professionals , whatever it is , a bunch of our activities are , in fact , in trying to get the best we have to offer within reach of those around us , or as broadly as we can .
i 'm going to start and end this talk with a couple things that are carved in stone .
one is what 's on the boston public library .
carved above their door is , " free to all . "
it 's kind of an inspiring statement , and i 'll go back at the end of this .
i 'm a librarian , and what i 'm trying to do is bring all of the works of knowledge to as many people as want to read it .
and the idea of using technology is perfect for us .
i think we have the opportunity to one-up the greeks .
it 's not easy to one-up the greeks . but with the industriousness of the egyptians , they were able to build the library of alexandria - the idea of a copy of every book of all the peoples of the world .
the problem was you actually had to go to alexandria to go to it .
on the other hand , if you did , then great things happened .
i think we can one-up the greeks and achieve something .
and i 'm going to try to argue only one point today : that universal access to all knowledge is within our grasp .
so if i 'm successful , then you 'll actually come away thinking , yeah , we could actually achieve the great vision of everything ever published , everything that was ever meant for distribution , available to anybody in the world that 's ever wanted to have access to it .
yes , there 's issues about how money should be distributed , and that 's still being refigured out .
but i 'd say there 's plenty of money , and there 's plenty of demand , so we can actually achieve that .
but i 'm going to go over the technological , social and sort of where are we as a whole , trying to get to that particular vision .
and the way i 'm going to try to do this is do it like the amazon.com website , the books , music , video and just go step - media type by media type , just go and say , all right , how 're we doing on this ?
so if we start with books , you know , sort of where are we ?
well , first you have to , as an engineer , scope the problem . how big is it ?
if you wanted to put all of the published works online so that anybody could have it available , well , how big a problem is it ?
well , we do n't really know , but the largest print library in the world is the library of congress . it 's 26 million volumes , 26 million volumes .
it is , by far and away , the largest print library in the world .
and a book , if you had a book , is about a megabyte , so - you know , if you had it in microsoft word .
so a megabyte , 26 million megabytes is 26 terabytes - it goes mega- , giga- , tera- . 26 terabytes .
26 terabytes fits in a computer system that 's about this big , on spinning linux drives , and it costs about 60,000 dollars .
so for the cost of a house - or around here , a garage - you can put , you can have spinning all of the words in the library of congress .
that 's pretty neat .
then the question is , what do you get ?
you know , is it worth trying to get there ?
do you actually want it online ?
some of the first things that people do is they make book readers that allow you to search inside the books , and that 's kind of fun .
and you can download these things , and look around them in new and different ways .
and you can get at them remotely , if you happen to have a laptop .
there 's starting to be some of these sort of page turn-y interfaces that look a whole lot like books in certain ways , and you can search them , make little tabs , and it 's kind of cute - still very book-like - on your laptop .
but i do n't know , reading things on a laptop - whenever i pull up my laptop , it always feels like work .
i think that 's one of the reasons why the kindle is so great .
i do n't have to feel like i 'm at work to read a kindle .
it 's starting to be a little bit more specified .
but i have to say that there 's older technologies that i tend to like .
i like the physical book .
and i think we can go and use our technology to go and digitize things , put them on the net , and then download , print them and bind them , and end up with books again .
and we sort of said , well , how hard is this ?
and it turns out to not be very hard .
we actually went off to make a bookmobile .
and a bookmobile - the size of a van with a satellite dish , a printer , binder and cutter , and kids make their own books .
it costs about three dollars to download , print and bind a normal , old book .
and they actually come out kind of nice looking .
you can actually get really good-looking books for on the order of one penny per page , sort of the parts cost for doing this .
so the idea of - this technology actually may end up putting books back in people 's hands again .
there are some other bookmobiles running around .
this is eric eldred making books at walden pond - thoreau 's works .
this is just before he got kicked out by the parks services , for competing with the bookstore there .
in india , they 've got another couple bookmobiles running around .
and this is the opening day at the library of alexandria , the new library of alexandria , in egypt .
it was quite popularly attended .
and kids starting to make their own books , and a happy kid with the first book that he 's ever owned .
so the idea of being able to use this technology to end up with paper where i can handle sort of sounds a little retro , but i think it still has its place .
and being from the silicon valley , sort of utopian sort of world , we thought , if we can make this technology work in rural uganda , we might have something .
so we actually got some funding from the world bank to try it out .
and we found in about 30 days we could go and take a couple folks from silicon valley , fly them to uganda , buy a car , set up the first internet connection at the national library of uganda , figure out what they wanted , and get a program going making books in rural uganda .
and it actually - so technologically , it works .
what we found out of this is we did n't have the right books .
so the books were in the library . we could get it to people , if they 're digitized , but we did n't know how to quite get them digitized .
everybody thought the answer is , send things to india and china .
and so we 've tried that , and i 'll go over that in a moment .
there are some newer technologies for delivering that have happened that are actually quite exciting as well .
one is a print-on-demand machine that looks like a rube goldberg machine .
we have one of these things now . it 's completely cool .
it 's all conveyor belt , and it makes a book .
and it 's called the " espresso book machine , " and in about 10 minutes , you can press a button and make a book .
something else i 'm quite excited about in this particular domain , beyond these sort of kiosk-y things where you can get books on demand , is some of these new little screens that are coming out .
and one of my favorites in this is the $ 100 laptop .
and i do n't mean to steal any thunder here , but we 've gone and used one of these things to be an e-book reader .
so here 's one of the beta units and you can - it actually turns out to be a really good-looking e-book reader .
and we have a quick hack that we did to try to put one of our books on it , and it turns out that 200 dots per inch means that you can put scanned books on them that look really good .
at 200 dots per inch , it 's kind of the equivalent of a 300 dot print laser printer .
we 're in good enough shape .
you actually can go and read scanned books quite easily .
so the idea of electronic books is starting to come about .
but how do you go about doing all this scanning ?
so we thought , okay , well , let 's try out this send books to india thing .
and there was a project with , funded by the national science foundation - sent a bunch of scanners , and the american libraries were supposed to send books .
well , they did n't . they did n't want to send their books .
so we bought 100,000 books and sent them to india .
and then we learned why you do n't want to send books to india .
the lesson we learned out of this is , scan your own books .
if you really care about books , you 're going to scan them better , especially if they 're valuable books .
if they 're new books and you can just , you know , butcher them , because you could just buy another one , that 's not such a big deal in terms of doing high-quality scanning .
but do things that you love .
but the indians have been scanning a lot of their own books - about 300,000 now - doing very well .
the chinese did over a million , and the egyptians are about 30,000 .
but we sent - thought , ok , if we 're going to need to do this , let 's do it in-library .
how do we go and do this , and how do we get it down so that it 's a cost point that we could afford ?
and we sort of picked the price point of 10 cents a page .
if it 's basically the cost of xeroxing to basically digitize , ocr , package it up , make it so that you could download , print and bind it - the whole shebang - we would have achieved something .
so we started out trying to figure out . how do we get to 10 cents ?
and we tried these robot things , and they worked pretty well - sort of these auto-page-turning things .
if we can have mars rovers , you 'd think you could turn pages .
but it actually turns out to be pretty hard to turn pages , and the volume is n't there .
so anyway - so we ended up making our own book scanner , and with two digital , high-grade , professional digital cameras , controlled museum lighting , so even if it 's a black and white book , you can go and get the proper intonation .
so you basically do a beautiful , respectful job .
this is not a fax , this is - the idea is to do a beautiful job as you 're going through these libraries .
and we 've been able to achieve 10 cents a page if we run things in volume .
this is what it looks like at the university of toronto .
and actually , it turns out to , you know , pay a living wage .
people seem to love it .
yes , it 's a little boring , but some people kind of get into the zen of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and especially if it 's kind of interesting books that you care about , in languages that you can read .
we actually have been able to do a pretty good job of this , at getting 10 cents a page .
so 10 cents a page , 300 pages in your average book , 30 dollars a book .
the library of congress , if you did the whole darn thing - 26 million books - is about 750 million dollars , right ?
but a million books , i think , actually would be a pretty good start , and that would cost 30 million dollars . that 's not that big a bill .
and what we 've been able to do is get into libraries .
we 've now got eight of these scanning centers in three countries , and libraries are up for having their books scanned .
the getty here is moving their books to the ucla , which is where we have one these scanning centers , and scanning their out-of-copyright books , which is fabulous .
so we 're starting to get the institutional responsibility .
the thing we 're missing is the 10 cents .
if we can get the 10 cents , all the rest of it flows .
we 've scanned about 200,000 books .
now we 're scanning about 15,000 books a month , and it 's starting to gear up another factor of two from there .
so all in all , that 's going very well .
and we 're starting to move out of the just out-of-copyright into the out-of-print world .
so i think of - we 're kind of going from the out-of-copyright , library stuff , and amazon.com is coming from the in-print world .
and i think we 'll meet in the middle some place , and have the classic thing that you have , which is a publishing system and a library system working in parallel .
and so we 're starting up a program to do out-of-print works , but loaning them .
exactly what loaning means , i 'm not quite sure .
but anyway , loaning out-of-print works from the boston public library , the woods hole oceanographic institute and a few other libraries that are starting to participate in this program , to try out this model of where does a library stop and where does the bookstore take over .
so all in all , it 's possible to do this in large scale .
we 're also going back over microfilm and getting that online .
so , we can do 10 cents a page , we 're going 15,000 books a month and we 've got about 250,000 books online , counting all the other projects that are starting to add in .
so what i wanted to argue is , books are within our grasp .
the idea of taking on the whole ball of wax is not that big a deal .
yes , it costs tens of millions , low hundreds of millions , but one time shot and we 've got basically the history of printed literature online .
and then , there 's business model issues about how to try to effectively market it and get it to people .
but it is within our grasp , technologically and law-wise , at least for the out of print and out of copyright , we suggest , to be able to get the whole darn thing online .
now let 's go for audio , and i 'm going to go through these .
so how much is there ?
well , as best we can tell , there are about two to three million disks having been published - so 78s , long-playing records and cds - or at least that 's the largest archives of published materials we 've been able to sort of point at .
it costs about 10 dollars a piece to go and take a disk and put it online , if you 're doing things in volume .
but we 've found that the rights issues are really quite thorny .
this is a fairly heavily litigated area , so we 've found that there are niches in the music world that are n't served terribly well by the classic commercial publishing system .
and we 've been starting to make these available by going and offering shelf space on the net .
in the united states , it does n't cost you to give something away . right ?
if you give something to a charity or to the public , you get a pat on the back and a tax donation - except on the net , where you can go broke .
if you put up a video of your garage band , and it starts getting heavily accessed , you can lose your guitars or your house .
this does n't make any sense .
so we 've offered unlimited storage , unlimited bandwidth , forever , for free , to anybody that has something to share that belongs in a library .
and we 've been getting a lot of takers . one is the rock ' n ' rollers .
the rock ' n ' rollers had a tradition of sharing , as long as nobody made any money . you could - concert recordings , it 's not the commercial recordings , but concert recordings , started by the grateful dead .
and we get about two or three bands a day signing up .
they give permission , and we get about 40 or 50 concerts a day .
we have about 40,000 concerts , everything the grateful dead ever did , up on the net , so that people can see it and listen to this material .
so audio is possible to put up , but the rights issues are really pretty thorny .
we 've got a lot of collections now - a couple hundred thousand items - and it 's growing over time .
moving images : if you think of theatrical releases , there are not that many of them .
as best we can tell , there are about 150,000 to 200,000 movies ever that are really meant for a large-scale theatrical distribution . it 's just not that many .
but half of those were indian .
but anyway , it 's doable , but we 've only found about a thousand of these things that - to be out of copyright .
so we 've digitized those and made those available .
but we 've found that there 's lots of other types of movies that have n't really seen the light of day - archival films .
we 've found , also , a lot of political films , a lot of amateur films , all sorts of things that are basically needing a home , a permanent home .
so we 've been starting to make these available and it 's grown to be very popular .
we 're not quite a youtube .
we tended towards longer-term things and also things that people can reuse and make into new movies , which has just been great fun .
television comes quite a bit larger .
we started recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day .
it 's sort of the biggest tivo box you 've ever seen .
it 's about a petabyte , so far , of worldwide television - russian , chinese , japanese , iraqi , al jazeera , bbc , cnn , abc , cbs , nbc - 24 hours a day .
we only put one week up , which is mostly for cost reasons , which is the 9/11 , sort of from 9/11/2001 . for one week , what did the world see ?
cnn was saying that palestinians were dancing in the streets .
were they ? let 's look at the palestinian television and find out .
how can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past ?
and television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable , except by jon stewart , who does a fabulous job .
so anyway , television is , i would suggest , within our grasp .
so 15 dollars per video hour , and also about 100 dollars to 150 dollars per celluloid hour , we 're able to go and get materials online very inexpensively and have them up on the net .
and we 've got , now , a lot of these materials .
so we 've got about 100,000 pieces up there .
so books , music , video , software . there 's only 50,000 titles of it .
mostly the issues there are legal issues and breaking copy protections .
but we 've worked through some of those , but we 've still got real problems in washington .
well , we 're best known as the world wide web .
we 've been archiving the world wide web since 1996 .
we take a snapshot of every website and all of the pages on it , every two months .
and actually , it 's really been pioneered by alexa internet , which donates this collection to the internet archive .
and it 's been growing along for the last 11 years , and it 's a fantastic resource .
and we 've made a wayback machine that you can then go and see old websites kind of the way they were .
if you go and search on something - this is google.com , the different versions of it that we have , this is what it looks like when it was an alpha release , and this is what it looked like at stanford .
so anyway , you 've got basically an idea of where things came from .
mostly , people want to see their old stuff out of this .
if there 's one thing that we want to learn from the library of alexandria version one , which is probably best known for burning , is , do n't just have one copy .
so we 've started to - we 've made another copy of all of this and we actually put it back in the library of alexandria .
so this is a picture of the internet archive at the library of alexandria .
and we now have also another copy building up in amsterdam .
so , we should put it in the san andreas fault line in san francisco , flood zone in amsterdam and in the middle east . right , so anyway ...
so we 're hedging our bets here .
if we go and put it in a couple more places , i think we 'll be in good shape .
there 's a political and social question out of this .
is all of this , as we go digital , is it going to be public or private ?
there 's some large companies that have seen this vision , that are doing large-scale digitization , but they 're locking up the public domain .
the question is , is that the world that we really want to live in ?
what 's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward ?
how do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future , just as we basically benefited as we were growing up ?
so universal access to all knowledge - i think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind , like the man on the moon , or the gutenberg bible , or the library of alexandria .
it could be something that we 're remembered for , for millennia , for having achieved .
and as i said before , i 'll end with something that 's carved above the door of the carnegie library .
carnegie - one of the great capitalists of this country - carved above his legacy , " free to the people . "
thank you very much .
i have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous .
i went to prison - difficult .
i worked in a coal mine - dangerous .
i filmed in war zones - difficult and dangerous .
and i spent 30 days eating nothing but this - fun in the beginning , little difficult in the middle , very dangerous in the end .
in fact , most of my career , i 've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging , that make them interesting , that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience .
so when i knew i was coming here to do a ted talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship , i knew i would want to do something a little different .
so as some of you may or may not have heard , a couple weeks ago , i took out an ad on ebay .
i sent out some facebook messages , some twitter messages , and i gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 ted talk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's right , some lucky individual , corporation , for-profit or non-profit , was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - because i 'm sure chris anderson will never let it happen again - -lrb- laughter -rrb- to buy the naming rights to the talk you 're watching right now , that at the time did n't have a title , did n't really have a lot of content and did n't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be .
so what you were getting was this : your name here presents : my ted talk that you have no idea what the subject is and , depending on the content , could ultimately blow up in your face , especially if i make you or your company look stupid for doing it .
but that being said , it 's a very good media opportunity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know how many people watch these ted talks ?
it 's a lot .
that 's just a working title , by the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so even with that caveat , i knew that someone would buy the naming rights .
now if you 'd have asked me that a year ago , i would n't have been able to tell you that with any certainty .
but in the new project that i 'm working on , my new film , we examine the world of marketing , advertising .
and as i said earlier , i put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years , but nothing could prepare me , nothing could ready me , for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you see , i had this idea for a movie .
-lrb- video -rrb- morgan spurlock : what i want to do is make a film all about product placement , marketing and advertising , where the entire film is funded by product placement , marketing and advertising .
so the movie will be called " the greatest movie ever sold . "
so what happens in " the greatest movie ever sold , " is that everything from top to bottom , from start to finish , is branded from beginning to end - from the above-the-title sponsor that you 'll see in the movie , which is brand x.
now this brand , the qualcomm stadium , the staples center ...
these people will be married to the film in perpetuity - forever .
and so the film explores this whole idea - -lrb- michael kassan : it 's redundant . -rrb- it 's what ? -lrb- mk : it 's redundant . -rrb- in perpetuity , forever ?
i 'm a redundant person . -lrb- mk : i 'm just saying . -rrb- that was more for emphasis .
it was , " in perpetuity . forever . "
but not only are we going to have the brand x title sponsor , but we 're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film .
so maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ...
the greatest car you ever drove from " the greatest movie ever sold , " the greatest drink you 've ever had , courtesy of " the greatest movie ever sold . "
xavier kochhar : so the idea is , beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life , but actually get them to finance the film ? -lrb- ms : get them to finance the film . -rrb- ms : and actually we show the whole process of how does it work .
the goal of this whole film is transparency .
you 're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie .
so that 's the whole concept , the whole film , start to finish .
and i would love for ceg to help make it happen .
robert friedman : you know it 's funny , because when i first hear it , it is the ultimate respect for an audience .
guy : i do n't know how receptive people are going to be to it , though .
xk : do you have a perspective - i do n't want to use " angle " because that has a negative connotation - but do you know how this is going to play out ? -lrb- ms : no idea . -rrb- david cohn : how much money does it take to do this ?
ms : 1.5 million . -lrb- dc : okay . -rrb- john kamen : i think that you 're going to have a hard time meeting with them , but i think it 's certainly worth pursuing a couple big , really obvious brands .
xk : who knows , maybe by the time your film comes out , we look like a bunch of blithering idiots .
ms : what do you think the response is going to be ?
stuart ruderfer : the responses mostly will be " no . "
ms : but is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me ?
jk : both .
ms : ... meaning not so optimistic .
so , sir , can you help me ? i need help .
mk : i can help you .
ms : okay . -lrb- mk : good . -rrb- awesome .
mk : we 've gotta figure out which brands .
ms : yeah . -lrb- mk : that 's the challenge . -rrb- when you look at the people you deal with ..
mk : we 've got some places we can go . -lrb- ms : okay . -rrb- turn the camera off .
ms : i thought " turn the camera off " meant , " let 's have an off-the-record conversation . "
turns out it really means , " we want nothing to do with your movie . "
ms : and just like that , one by one , all of these companies suddenly disappeared .
none of them wanted anything to do with this movie .
i was amazed .
they wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project .
and i was blown away , because i thought the whole concept , the idea of advertising , was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible , to get as many people to see it as possible .
especially in today 's world , this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape , is n't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that 's going to get that message to the masses ?
no , that 's what i thought .
but the problem was , you see , my idea had one fatal flaw , and that flaw was this .
actually no , that was not the flaw whatsoever .
that would n't have been a problem at all .
this would have been fine .
but what this image represents was the problem .
see , when you do a google image search for transparency , this is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is one of the first images that comes up .
so i like the way you roll , sergey brin . no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is was the problem : transparency - free from pretense or deceit ; easily detected or seen through ; readily understood ; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information , especially concerning business practices - that last line being probably the biggest problem .
you see , we hear a lot about transparency these days .
our politicians say it , our president says it , even our ceo 's say it .
but suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality , something suddenly changes .
but why ? well , transparency is scary - -lrb- roar -rrb- like that odd , still-screaming bear .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's unpredictable - -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- like this odd country road .
and it 's also very risky .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what else is risky ?
eating an entire bowl of cool whip .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's very risky .
now when i started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story , and they said , " no , we want you to tell a story .
we want you to tell a story , but we just want to tell our story . "
see , when i was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie - and there he is giving me the look he often gave me - he would say , " son , there 's three sides to every story .
there 's your story , there 's my story and there 's the real story . "
now you see , with this film , we wanted to tell the real story .
but with only one company , one agency willing to help me - and that 's only because i knew john bond and richard kirshenbaum for years - i realized that i would have to go on my own , i 'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team .
so what you suddenly started to realize - or what i started to realize - is that when you started having conversations with these companies , the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem .
-lrb- video -rrb- ms : i have friends who make great big , giant hollywood films , and i have friends who make little independent films like i make .
and the friends of mine who make big , giant hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have .
and then my friends who make small independent films say , " well , how are we supposed to compete with these big , giant hollywood movies ? "
and the movie is called " the greatest movie ever sold . "
so how specifically will we see ban in the film ?
any time i 'm ready to go , any time i open up my medicine cabinet , you will see ban deodorant .
while anytime i do an interview with someone , i can say , " are you fresh enough for this interview ?
are you ready ? you look a little nervous .
i want to help you calm down .
so maybe you should put some one before the interview . "
so we 'll offer one of these fabulous scents .
whether it 's a " floral fusion " or a " paradise winds , " they 'll have their chance .
we will have them geared for both male or female - solid , roll-on or stick , whatever it may be .
that 's the two-cent tour .
so now i can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour .
karen frank : we are a smaller brand .
much like you talked about being a smaller movie , we 're very much a challenger brand .
so we do n't have the budgets that other brands have .
so doing things like this - you know , remind people about ban - is kind of why were interested in it .
ms : what are the words that you would use to describe ban ?
ban is blank .
kf : that 's a great question .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- woman : superior technology .
ms : technology 's not the way you want to describe something somebody 's putting in their armpit .
man : we talk about bold , fresh .
i think " fresh " is a great word that really spins this category into the positive , versus " fights odor and wetness . "
it keeps you fresh .
how do we keep you fresher longer - better freshness , more freshness , three times fresher .
things like that that are more of that positive benefit .
ms : and that 's a multi-million dollar corporation .
what about me ? what about a regular guy ?
i need to go talk to the man on the street , the people who are like me , the regular joes .
they need to tell me about my brand .
-lrb- video -rrb- ms : how would you guys describe your brand ?
man : um , my brand ?
i do n't know .
i like really nice clothes .
woman : 80 's revival meets skater-punk , unless it 's laundry day .
ms : all right , what is brand gerry ?
gerry : unique . -lrb- ms : unique . -rrb- man : i guess what kind of genre , style i am would be like dark glamor .
i like a lot of black colors , a lot of grays and stuff like that .
but usually i have an accessory , like sunglasses , or i like crystal and things like that too .
woman : if dan were a brand , he might be a classic convertible mercedes benz .
man 2 : the brand that i am is , i would call it casual fly .
woman 2 : part hippie , part yogi , part brooklyn girl - i do n't know .
man 3 : i 'm the pet guy .
i sell pet toys all over the country , all over the world .
so i guess that 's my brand .
in my warped little industry , that 's my brand .
man 4 : my brand is fedex because i deliver the goods .
man 5 : failed writer-alcoholic brand .
is that something ?
lawyer : i 'm a lawyer brand .
tom : i 'm tom .
ms : well we ca n't all be brand tom , but i do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what i realized is i needed an expert .
i needed somebody who could get inside my head , somebody who could really help me understand what they call your " brand personality . "
and so i found a company called olson zaltman in pittsburg .
they 've helped companies like nestle , febreze , hallmark discover that brand personality .
if they could do it for them , surely they could do it for me .
-lrb- video -rrb- abigail : you brought your pictures , right ?
ms : i did . the very first picture is a picture of my family .
a : so tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are .
ms : these are the people who shape the way i look at the world .
a : tell me about this world .
ms : this world ? i think your world is the world that you live in - like people who are around you , your friends , your family , the way you live your life , the job you do .
all those things stemmed and started from one place , and for me they stemmed and started with my family in west virginia .
a : what 's the next one you want to talk about ?
ms : the next one : this was the best day ever .
a : how does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are ?
ms : it 's like , who do i want to be ?
i like things that are different .
i like things that are weird . i like weird things .
a : tell me about the " why " phase - what does that do for us ?
what is the machete ? what pupa stage are you in now ?
why is it important to reboot ? what does the red represent ?
tell me a little bit about that part .
... a little more about you that is not who you are .
what are some other metamorphoses that you 've had ?
... does n't have to be fear . what kind of roller coaster are you on ?
ms : eeeeee ! -lrb- a : thank you . -rrb- no , thank you .
a : thanks for you patience . -lrb- ms : great job . -rrb- a : yeah . -lrb- ms : thanks a lot . -rrb- all right .
ms : yeah , i do n't know what 's going to come of this .
there was a whole lot of crazy going on in there .
lindsay zaltman : the first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct , but complementary sides to your brand personality - the morgan spurlock brand is a mindful / play brand .
those are juxtaposed very nicely together .
and i think there 's almost a paradox with those .
and i think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both .
most companies tend to - and it 's human nature - to avoid things that they 're not sure of , avoid fear , those elements , and you really embrace those , and you actually turn them into positives for you , and it 's a neat thing to see .
what other brands are like that ?
the first on here is the classic , apple .
and you can see here too , target , wii , mini from the mini coopers , and jetblue .
now there 's playful brands and mindful brands , those things that have come and gone , but a playful , mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing .
ms : a playful , mindful brand . what is your brand ?
if somebody asked you to describe your brand identity , your brand personality , what would you be ?
are you an up attribute ? are you something that gets the blood flowing ?
or are you more of a down attribute ?
are you something that 's a little more calm , reserved , conservative ?
up attributes are things like being playful , being fresh like the fresh prince , contemporary , adventurous , edgy or daring like errol flynn , nimble or agile , profane , domineering , magical or mystical like gandalf .
or are you more of a down attribute ?
are you mindful , sophisticated like 007 ?
are you established , traditional , nurturing , protective , empathetic like the oprah ?
are you reliable , stable , familiar , safe , secure , sacred , contemplative or wise like the dalai lama or yoda ?
over the course of this film , we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying , " no , " they did n't want any part of this project .
they wanted nothing to do with this film , mainly because they would have no control , they would have no control over the final product .
but we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control , who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we would n't be able to tell - stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind .
they enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing , as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they 're using mri 's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing .
we went to san paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising .
in the entire city for the past five years , there 's no billboards , there 's no posters , there 's no flyers , nothing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across america .
what 's incredible for me is the projects that i 've gotten the most feedback out of , or i 've had the most success in , are ones where i 've interacted with things directly .
and that 's what these brands did .
they cut out the middleman , they cut out their agencies and said , " maybe these agencies do n't have my best interest in mind .
i 'm going to deal directly with the artist .
i 'm going to work with him to create something different , something that 's going to get people thinking , that 's going to challenge the way we look at the world . "
and how has that been for them ? has it been successful ?
well , since the film premiered at the sundance film festival , let 's take a look .
according to burrelles , the movie premiered in january , and since then - and this is n't even the whole thing - we 've had 900 million media impressions for this film .
that 's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period .
that 's only online - no print , no tv .
the film has n't even been distributed yet .
it 's not even online . it 's not even streaming .
it 's not even been out into other foreign countries yet .
so ultimately , this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum .
and not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part .
what i always believe is that if you take chances , if you take risks , that in those risks will come opportunity .
i believe that when you push people away from that , you 're pushing them more towards failure .
i believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse , then you 're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged .
i feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks .
we need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them .
ultimately , moving forward , i think we have to embrace fear .
we 've got to put that bear in a cage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- embrace fear . embrace risk .
one big spoonful at a time , we have to embrace risk .
and ultimately , we have to embrace transparency .
today , more than ever , a little honesty is going to go a long way .
and that being said , through honesty and transparency , my entire talk , " embrace transparency , " has been brought to you by my good friends at emc , who for $ 7,100 bought the naming rights on ebay .
-lrb- applause -rrb- emc : turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world .
emc presents : " embrace transparency . "
thank you very much , guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- june cohen : so , morgan , in the name of transparency , what exactly happened to that $ 7,100 ?
ms : that is a fantastic question .
i have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the ted organization , the sapling foundation - a check for $ 7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year 's ted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : let 's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago .
-lrb- music -rrb- jose antonio abreu : my dear friends , ladies and gentlemen , i am overjoyed today at being awarded the ted prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers , artists and educators from venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding , growing and developing in venezuela the national system of youth and children 's orchestras and choirs .
since i was a boy , in my early childhood , i always wanted to be a musician , and , thank god , i made it .
from my teachers , my family and my community , i had all the necessary support to become a musician .
all my life i 've dreamed that all venezuelan children have the same opportunity that i had .
stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country .
from the very first rehearsal , i saw the bright future ahead .
because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me .
i had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal .
when i arrived at the rehearsal , only 11 kids had shown up , and i said to myself , " do i close the program or multiply these kids ? "
i decided to face the challenge , and on that same night , i promised those 11 children i 'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world .
two months ago , i remembered that promise i made , when a distinguished english critic published an article in the london times , asking who could be the winner of the orchestra world cup .
he mentioned four great world orchestras , and the fifth one was venezuela 's youth symphony orchestra .
today we can say that art in latin america is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right , a right for all the people .
child : there is no difference here between classes , nor white or black , nor if you have money or not .
simply , if you are talented , if you have the vocation and the will to be here , you get in . you share with us and make music .
ja : during the recent tour by the simon bolivar youth orchestra of venezuela of u.s. and europe , we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls , how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians , how the standing ovations , sometimes 30 minutes long , seemed to last forever , and how the public , after the concert was over , went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph .
this meant not only an artistic triumph , but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of latin america , as seen in venezuela , giving these audiences a message of music , vitality , energy , enthusiasm and strength .
in its essence , the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures .
they are examples and schools of social life , because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence , following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments .
that 's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them , develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses .
this is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility , in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids .
child : after all this time here , music is life .
nothing else .
music is life .
ja : each teenager and child in el sistema has his own story , and they are all important and of great significance to me .
let me mention the case of edicson ruiz .
he is a boy from a parish in caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the san agustin 's junior orchestra .
with his effort , and the support of his mother , his family and his community , he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the berlin philharmonic orchestra .
we have another well-known case - gustavo dudamel .
he started as a boy member of the children 's orchestra in his hometown , barquisimeto .
there , he grew as a violinist and as a conductor .
he became the conductor of venezuela 's junior orchestras , and today conducts the world 's greatest orchestras .
he is the musical director of los angeles philharmonic , and is still the overall leader of venezuela 's junior orchestras .
he was the conductor of the gothenburg symphony orchestra , and he 's an unbeatable example for young musicians in latin america and the world .
the structure of el sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region , and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over venezuela .
it 's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed for the whole venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever , but emphasizing the vulnerable and endangered social groups .
the effect of el sistema is felt in three fundamental circles : in the personal / social circle , in the family circle and in the community .
in the personal / social circle , the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side .
the music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being , thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality .
so , the emotional and intellectual profits are huge - the acquisition of leadership , teaching and training principles , the sense of commitment , responsibility , generosity and dedication to others , and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals .
all this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence .
mother teresa of calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me : the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof , but the feeling of being no-one - the feeling of not being anyone , the lack of identification , the lack of public esteem .
that 's why the child 's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community .
it makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility , perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school .
within the family , the parents ' support is unconditional .
the child becomes a role model for both his parents , and this is very important for a poor child .
once the child discovers he is important to his family , he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community .
also , he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family .
all this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic .
the large majority of our children belong , as i already mentioned , to the most vulnerable strata of the venezuelan population .
that encourages them to embrace new dreams , new goals , and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer .
finally , in the circle of the community , the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings .
the spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society .
it 's what makes a child play a violin at home , while his father works in his carpentry .
it 's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home , while her mother does the housework .
the idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs that their children belong to .
the huge spiritual world that music produces in itself , which also lies within itself , ends up overcoming material poverty .
from the minute a child 's taught how to play an instrument , he 's no longer poor .
he becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level , who 'll later become a full citizen .
needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution , violence , bad habits , and everything degrading in the life of a child .
a few years ago , historian arnold toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis .
not an economic or social crisis , but a spiritual one .
i believe that to confront such a crisis , only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity , to mankind 's deepest aspirations , and to the historic demands of our times .
education - the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge - is the means to strive for a more perfect , more aware , more noble and more just society .
with passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to ted for its outstanding humanism , the scope of its principles , for its open and generous promotion of young values .
we hope that ted can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music , in which the social , communal , spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission .
no longer putting society at the service of art , and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite , but instead art at the service of society , at the service of the weakest , at the service of the children , at the service of the sick , at the service of the vulnerable , and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : we are going live now to caracas .
we are going live to caracas to hear maestro abreu 's ted prize wish .
ja : here is my ted prize wish : i wish that you 'll help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians , passionate about their art and social justice , and dedicated to bringing el sistema to the united states and other countries .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how often do we hear that people just do n't care ?
how many times have you been told that real , substantial change is n't possible because most people are too selfish , too stupid or too lazy to try to make a difference in their community ?
i propose to you today that apathy as we think we know it does n't actually exist , but rather , that people do care , but that we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way .
and i 'll give you some examples of what i mean .
let 's start with city hall .
you ever see one of these before ?
this is a newspaper ad .
it 's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what 's happening .
as you can see , it 's impossible to read .
you need to get halfway down to even find out which address they 're talking about , and then farther down , in tiny 10-point font , to find out how to actually get involved .
imagine if the private sector advertised in the same way - if nike wanted to sell a pair of shoes and put an ad in the paper like that .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now that would never happen .
you 'll never see an ad like that because nike actually wants you to buy their shoes .
whereas the city of toronto clearly does n't want you involved with the planning process , otherwise their ads would look something like this - with all the information basically laid out clearly .
as long as the city 's putting out notices like this to try to get people engaged , then of course people are n't going to be engaged .
but that 's not apathy ; that 's intentional exclusion .
public space .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the manner in which we mistreat our public spaces is a huge obstacle towards any type of progressive political change because we 've essentially put a price tag on freedom of expression .
whoever has the most money gets the loudest voice , dominating the visual and mental environment .
the problem with this model is that there are some amazing messages that need to be said that are n't profitable to say .
so you 're never going to see them on a billboard .
the media plays an important role in developing our relationship with political change , mainly by ignoring politics and focusing on celebrities and scandals , but even when they do talk about important political issues , they do it in a way that i feel discourages engagement .
and i 'll give you an example : the now magazine from last week - progressive , downtown weekly in toronto .
this is the cover story .
it 's an article about a theater performance , and it starts with basic information about where it is , in case you actually want to go and see it after you 've read the article - where , the time , the website .
same with this - it 's a movie review , an art review , a book review - where the reading is in case you want to go .
a restaurant - you might not want to just read about it , maybe you want to go to the restaurant .
so they tell you where it is , what the prices are , the address , the phone number , etc .
then you get to their political articles .
here 's a great article about an important election race that 's happening .
it talks about the candidates - written very well - but no information , no follow-up , no websites for the campaigns , no information about when the debates are , where the campaign offices are .
here 's another good article about a new campaign opposing privatization of transit without any contact information for the campaign .
the message seems to be that the readers are most likely to want to eat , maybe read a book , maybe see a movie , but not be engaged in their community .
and you might think this is a small thing , but i think it 's important because it sets a tone and it reinforces the dangerous idea that politics is a spectator sport .
heroes : how do we view leadership ?
look at these 10 movies . what do they have in common ?
anyone ?
they all have heroes who were chosen .
someone came up to them and said , " you 're the chosen one .
there 's a prophesy . you have to save the world . "
and then someone goes off and saves the world because they 've been told to , with a few people tagging along .
this helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about .
a heroic effort is a collective effort , number one .
number two , it 's imperfect ; it 's not very glamorous , and it does n't suddenly start and suddenly end .
it 's an ongoing process your whole life .
but most importantly , it 's voluntary .
it 's voluntary .
as long as we 're teaching our kids that heroism starts when someone scratches a mark on your forehead , or someone tells you that you 're part of a prophecy , they 're missing the most important characteristic of leadership , which is that it comes from within .
it 's about following your own dreams - uninvited , uninvited - and then working with others to make those dreams come true .
political parties : oh boy .
political parties could and should be one of the basic entry points for people to get engaged in politics .
instead , they 've become , sadly , uninspiring and uncreative organizations that rely so heavily on market research and polling and focus groups that they end up all saying the same thing , pretty much regurgitating back to us what we already want to hear at the expense of putting forward bold and creative ideas .
and people can smell that , and it feeds cynicism .
-lrb- applause -rrb- charitable status : groups who have charitable status in canada are n't allowed to do advocacy .
this is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced , especially during election time .
which leads us to the last one , which is our elections .
as you may have noticed , our elections in canada are a complete joke .
we use out-of-date systems that are unfair and create random results .
canada 's currently led by a party that most canadians did n't actually want .
how can we honestly and genuinely encourage more people to vote when votes do n't count in canada ?
you add all this up together and of course people are apathetic .
it 's like trying to run into a brick wall .
now i 'm not trying to be negative by throwing all these obstacles out and explaining what 's in our way .
quite the opposite : i actually think people are amazing and smart and that they do care .
but that , as i said , we live in this environment where all these obstacles are being put in our way .
as long as we believe that people , our own neighbors , are selfish , stupid or lazy , then there 's no hope .
but we can change all those things i mentioned .
we can open up city hall .
we can reform our electoral systems .
we can democratize our public spaces .
my main message is , if we can redefine apathy , not as some kind of internal syndrome , but as a complex web of cultural barriers that reinforces disengagement , and if we can clearly define , we can clearly identify , what those obstacles are , and then if we can work together collectively to dismantle those obstacles , then anything is possible .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a talk about surgical robots is also a talk about surgery .
and while i 've tried to make my images not too graphic , keep in mind that surgeons have a different relationship with blood than normal people do , because , after all , what a surgeon does to a patient , if it were done without consent , would be a felony .
surgeons are the tailors , the plumbers , the carpenters - some would say the butchers - of the medical world : cutting , reshaping , reforming , bypassing , fixing .
but you need to talk about surgical instruments and the evolution of surgical technology together .
so in order to give you some kind of a perspective of where we are right now with surgical robots , and where we 're going to be going in the future , i want to give you a little bit of perspective of how we got to this point , how we even came to believe that surgery was ok , that this was something that was possible to do , that this kind of cutting and reforming was ok .
so , a little bit of perspective - about 10,000 years of perspective .
this is a trephinated skull .
and trephination is simply just cutting a hole in the skull .
and many , many hundreds of skulls like this have been found in archaeological sites all over the world , dating back five to 10 thousand years .
five to 10 thousand years ! now imagine this .
you are a healer in a stone age village .
and you have some guy that you 're not quite sure what 's wrong with him - oliver sacks is going to be born way in the future .
he 's got some seizure disorder . and you do n't understand this .
but you think to yourself , " i 'm not quite sure what 's wrong with this guy .
but maybe if i cut a hole in his head i can fix it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now that is surgical thinking .
now we 've got the dawn of interventional surgery here .
what is astonishing about this is , even though we do n't know really how much of this was intended to be religious , or how much of it was intended to be therapeutic , what we can tell is that these patients lived !
judging by the healing on the borders of these holes , they lived days , months , years following trephination .
and so what we are seeing is evidence of a refined technique that was being handed down over thousands and thousands of years , all over the world .
this arose independently at sites everywhere that had no communication to one another .
we really are seeing the dawn of interventional surgery .
now we can fast forward many thousands of years into the bronze age and beyond .
and we see new refined tools coming out .
but surgeons in these eras are a little bit more conservative than their bold , trephinating ancestors .
these guys confined their surgery to fairly superficial injuries .
and surgeons were tradesmen , rather than physicians .
this persisted all the way into and through the renaissance .
that may have saved the writers , but it did n't really save the surgeons terribly much .
they were still a mistrusted lot .
surgeons still had a bit of a pr problem , because the landscape was dominated by the itinerant barber surgeon .
these were folks that traveled from village to village , town to town , doing surgery sort of as a form of performance art .
because we were in the age before anesthesia , the agony of the patient is really as much of the public spectacle as the surgery itself .
one of the most famous of these guys , frere jacques , shown here doing a lithotomy - which is the removal of the bladder stone , one of the most invasive surgeries they did at the time - had to take less than two minutes .
you had to have quite a flair for the dramatic , and be really , really quick .
and so here you see him doing a lithotomy .
and he is credited with doing over 4,000 of these public surgeries , wandering around in europe , which is an astonishing number , when you think that surgery must have been a last resort .
i mean who would put themselves through that ?
until anesthesia , the absence of sensation .
with the demonstration of the morton ether inhaler at the mass . general in 1847 , a whole new era of surgery was ushered in .
anesthesia gave surgeons the freedom to operate .
anesthesia gave them the freedom to experiment , to start to delve deeper into the body .
this was truly a revolution in surgery .
but there was a pretty big problem with this .
after these very long , painstaking operations , attempting to cure things they 'd never been able to touch before , the patients died .
they died of massive infection .
surgery did n't hurt anymore , but it killed you pretty quickly .
and infection would continue to claim a majority of surgical patients until the next big revolution in surgery , which was aseptic technique .
joseph lister was aepsis 's , or sterility 's , biggest advocate , to a very very skeptical bunch of surgeons .
but eventually they did come around .
the mayo brothers came out to visit lister in europe .
and they came back to their american clinic and they said they had learned it was as important to wash your hands before doing surgery something so simple .
and yet , operative mortality dropped profoundly .
these surgeries were actually now being effective .
with the patient insensitive to pain , and a sterile operating field all bets were off , the sky was the limit .
you could now start doing surgery everywhere , on the gut , on the liver , on the heart , on the brain .
transplantation : you could take an organ out of one person , you could put it in another person , and it would work .
surgeons did n't have a problem with respectability anymore ; they had become gods .
the era of the " big surgeon , big incision " had arrived , but at quite a cost , because they are saving lives , but not necessarily quality of life , because healthy people do n't usually need surgery , and unhealthy people have a very hard time recovering from a cut like that .
the question had to be asked , " well , can we do these same surgeries but through little incisions ? "
laparoscopy is doing this kind of surgery : surgery with long instruments through small incisions .
and it really changed the landscape of surgery .
some of the tools for this had been around for a hundred years , but it had only been used as a diagnostic technique until the 1980s , when there was changes in camera technologies and things like that , that allowed this to be done for real operations .
so what you see - this is now the first surgical image - as we 're coming down the tube , this is a new entry into the body .
it looks very different from what you 're expecting surgery to look like .
we bring instruments in , from two separate cuts in the side , and then you can start manipulating tissue .
within 10 years of the first gallbladder surgeries being done laparoscopically , a majority of gallbladder surgeries were being done laparoscopically - truly a pretty big revolution .
but there were casualties of this revolution .
these techniques were a lot harder to learn than people had anticipated .
the learning curve was very long .
and during that learning curve the complications went quite a bit higher .
surgeons had to give up their 3d vision .
they had to give up their wrists .
they had to give up intuitive motion in the instruments .
this surgeon has over 3,000 hours of laparoscopic experience .
now this is a particularly frustrating placement of the needle .
but this is hard .
and one of the reasons why it is so hard is because the external ergonomics are terrible .
you 've got these long instruments , and you 're working off your centerline .
and the instruments are essentially working backwards .
so what you need to do , to take the capability of your hand , and put it on the other side of that small incision , is you need to put a wrist on that instrument .
and so - i get to talk about robots - the da vinci robot put just that wrist on the other side of that incision .
and so here you 're seeing the operation of this wrist .
and now , in contrast to the laparoscopy , you can precisely place the needle in your instruments , and you can pass it all the way through and follow it in a trajectory .
and the reason why this becomes so much easier is - you can see on the bottom - the hands are making the motions , and the instruments are following those motions exactly .
now , what you put between those instruments and those hands , is a large , fairly complicated robot .
the surgeon is sitting at a console , and controlling the robot with these controllers .
and the robot is moving these instruments around , and powering them , down inside the body .
you have a 3d camera , so you get a 3d view .
and since this was introduced in 1999 , a lot of these robots have been out and being used for surgical procedures like a prostatectomy , which is a prostate deep in the pelvis , and it requires fine dissection and delicate manipulation to be able to get a good surgical outcome .
you can also sew bypass vessels directly onto a beating heart without cracking the chest .
this is all done in between the ribs .
and you can go inside the heart itself and repair the valves from the inside .
you 've got these technologies - thank you - -lrb- applause -rrb- and so you might say , " wow this is really cool !
so , smartypants , why is n't all surgery being done this way ? "
and there are some reasons , some good reasons .
and cost is one of them .
i talked about the large , complicated robot .
with all its bells and whistles , one of those robots will cost you about as much as a solid gold surgeon .
more useful than a solid gold surgeon , but , still , it 's a fairly big capital investment .
but once you 've got it , your procedure costs do come down .
but there are other barriers .
so something like a prostatectomy - the prostate is small , and it 's in one spot , and you can set your robot up very precisely to work in that one spot .
and so it 's perfect for something like that .
and in fact if you , or anyone you know , had their prostate taken out in the last couple of years , chances are it was done with one of these systems .
but if you need to reach more places than just one , you need to move the robot .
and you need to put some new incisions in there .
and you need to re-set it up .
and then you need to add some more ports , and more .
and the problem is it gets time-consuming , and cumbersome .
and for that reason there are many surgeries that just are n't being done with the da vinci .
so we had to ask the question , " well how do we fix that ? "
what if we could change it so that we did n't have to re-set up each time we wanted to move somewhere different ?
what if we could bring all the instruments in together in one place ?
how would that change the capabilities of the surgeon ?
and how would that change the experience for the patient ?
now , to do that , we need to be able to bring a camera and instruments in together through one small tube , like that tube you saw in the laparoscopy video .
or , not so coincidentally , like a tube like this .
so what 's going to come out of that tube is the debut of this new technology , this new robot that is going to be able to reach anywhere .
ready ? so here it comes .
this is the camera , and three instruments .
and as you see it come out , in order to actually be able to do anything useful , it ca n't all stay clustered up like this .
it has to be able to come off of the centerline and then be able to work back toward that centerline .
he 's a cheeky little devil .
but what this lets you do is gives you that all-important traction , and counter-traction , so that you can dissect , so that you can sew , so that you can do all the things that you need to do , all the surgical tasks .
but it 's all coming in through one incision .
it 's not so simple .
but it 's worth it for the freedom that this gives us as we 're going around .
for the patient , however , it 's transparent . this is all they 're going to see .
it 's very exciting to think where we get to go with this .
we get to write the script of the next revolution in surgery .
as we take these capabilities , and we get to go to the next places , we get to decide what our new surgeries are going to be .
and i think to really get the rest of the way in that revolution , we need to not just take our hands in in new ways , we also need to take our eyes in in new ways .
we need to see beyond the surface .
we need to be able to guide what we 're cutting in a much better way .
this is a cancer surgery .
one of the problems with this , even for surgeons who 've been looking at this a lot , is you ca n't see the cancer , especially when it 's hidden below the surface .
and so what we 're starting to do is we 're starting to inject specially designed markers into the bloodstream that will target the cancer .
it will go , bind to the cancer .
and we can make those markers glow .
and we can take special cameras , and we can look at it .
now we know where we need to cut , even when it 's below the surface .
we can take these markers and we can inject them in a tumor site .
and we can follow where they flow out from that tumor site , so we can see the first places where that cancer might travel .
we can inject these dyes into the bloodstream , so that when we do a new vessel and we bypass a blockage on the heart , we can see if we actually made the connection , before we close that patient back up again - something that we have n't been able to do without radiation before .
we can light up tumors like this kidney tumor , so that you can exactly see where the boundary is between the kidney tumor and the kidney you want to leave behind , or the liver tumor and the liver you want to leave behind .
and we do n't even need to confine ourselves to this macro vision .
we have flexible microscopic probes that we can bring down into the body .
and we can look at cells directly .
i 'm looking at nerves here . so these are nerves you see , down on the bottom , and the microscope probe that 's being held by the robotic hand , up at the top .
so this is all very prototypey at this point .
but you care about nerves , if you are a surgical patient .
because they let you keep continence , bladder control , and sexual function after surgery , all of which is generally fairly important to the patient .
so , with the combination of these technologies we can reach it all , and we can see it all .
we can heal the disease .
and we can leave the patient whole and intact and functional afterwards .
now , i 've talked about the patient as if the patient is , somehow , someone abstract outside this room .
and that is not the case .
many of you , all of you maybe , will at some point , or have already , faced a diagnosis of cancer , or heart disease , or some organ dysfunction that 's going to buy you a date with a surgeon .
and when you get to that point - i mean , these maladies do n't care how many books you 've written , how many companies you 've started , that nobel prize you have yet to win , how much time you planned to spend with your children .
these maladies come for us all .
and the prospect i 'm offering you , of an easier surgery ...
is that going to make that diagnosis any less terrifying ?
i 'm not sure i really even want it to .
because facing your own mortality causes a re-evaluation of priorities , and a realignment of what your goals are in life , unlike anything else .
and i would never want to deprive you of that epiphany .
what i want instead , is for you to be whole , intact , and functional enough to go out and save the world , after you 've decided you need to do it .
and that is my vision for your future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in africa we say , " god gave the white man a watch and gave the black man time . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think , how is it possible for a man with so much time to tell his story in 18 minutes ?
i think it will be quite a challenge for me .
most african stories these days , they talk about famine , hiv and aids , poverty or war .
but my story that i would like to share with you today is the one about success .
it is about a country in the southwest of africa called namibia .
namibia has got 2.1 million people , but it is only twice the size of california .
i come from a region in the remote northwest part of the country .
it 's called kunene region .
and in the center of kunene region is the village of sesfontein . this is where i was born .
this is where i 'm coming from .
most people that are following the story of angelina jolie and brad pitt will know where namibia is .
they love namibia for its beautiful dunes , that are even taller than the empire state building .
wind and time have twisted our landscape into very strange shapes , and these shapes are speckled with wildlife that has become so adapted to this harsh and strange land .
i 'm a himba .
you might wonder , why are you wearing these western clothes ?
i 'm a himba and namibian .
a himba is one of the 29 ethnic groups in namibia .
we live a very traditional lifestyle .
i grew up herding , looking after our livestock - goats , sheep and cattle .
and one day , my father actually took me into the bush .
he said , " john , i want you to become a good herder .
boy , if you are looking after our livestock and you see a cheetah eating our goat - cheetah is very nervous - just walk up to it .
walk up to it and smack it on the backside . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and he will let go of the goat and run off . "
but then he said , " boy , if you run into a lion , do n't move .
do n't move . stand your ground .
puff up and just look it in the eye and it may not want to fight you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then , he said , " if you see a leopard , boy , you better run like hell . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " imagine you run faster than those goats you are looking after . "
in this way - -lrb- laughter -rrb- in this way , i actually started to learn about nature .
in addition to being an ordinary namibian and in addition to being a himba i 'm also a trained conservationist .
and it is very important if you are in the field to know what to confront and what to run from .
i was born in 1971 .
we lived under apartheid regime .
the whites could farm , graze and hunt as they wished , but we black , we were not regarded as responsible to use wildlife .
whenever we tried to hunt , we were called poachers .
and as a result , we were fined and locked up in jail .
between 1966 and 1990 , the u.s. and soviet interests fought for control over my country .
and you know , during war time , there are militaries , armies , that are moving around .
and the army hunted for valuable rhino horns and tusks .
they could sell these things for anything between $ 5,000 a kilo .
during the same year almost every himba had a rifle .
because it was wartime , the british .303 rifle was just all over the whole country .
then in the same time , around 1980 , we had a very big drought .
it killed almost everything that was left .
our livestock was almost at the brink of extinction , protected as well .
we were hungry .
i remember a night when a hungry leopard went into the house of one of our neighbors and took a sleeping child out of the bed .
it 's a very sad story .
but even today , that memory is still in people 's minds .
they can pinpoint the exact location where this all happened .
and then , in the same year , we almost lost everything .
and my father said , " why do n't you just go to school ? "
and they sent me off to school , just to get busy somewhere there .
and the year i went to school , my father actually got a job with a non-governmental organization called irdnc , integrated rural development and nature conservation .
they actually spend a lot of time a year in the communities .
they were trusted by the local communities like our leader , joshua kangombe .
joshua kangombe saw what was happening : wildlife disappearing , poaching was skyrocketing , and the situation seemed very hopeless .
death and despair surrounded joshua and our entire communities .
but then , the people from irdnc proposed to joshua : what if we pay people that you trust to look after wildlife ?
do you have anybody in your communities , or people , that know the bush very well and that know wildlife very well ?
the headman said : " yes . our poachers . "
" eh ? the poachers ? "
" yes . our poachers . "
and that was my father .
my father has been a poacher for quite a long time .
instead of shooting poachers dead like they were doing elsewhere in africa , irdnc has helped men reclaim their abilities to manage their peoples and their rights to own and manage wildlife .
and thus , as people started feeling ownership over wildlife , wildlife numbers started coming back , and that 's actually becoming a foundation for conservation in namibia .
with independence , the whole approach of community getting involved was embraced by our new government .
three things that actually help to build on this foundation : the very first one is honoring of tradition and being open to new ideas .
here is our tradition : at every himba village , there is a sacred fire .
and at this sacred fire , the spirit of our ancestors speak through the headman and advise us where to get water , where to get grazings , and where to go and hunt .
and i think this is the best way of regulating ourselves on the environment .
and here are the new ideas .
transporting rhinos using helicopters i think is much easier than talking through a spirit that you ca n't see , is n't it ?
and these things we were taught by outsiders .
we learned these things from outsiders .
we needed new boundaries to describe our traditional lands ; we needed to learn more things like gps just to see whether - can gps really reflect the true reflection of the land or is this just a thing made somewhere in the west ?
and we then wanted to see whether we can match our ancestral maps with digital maps made somewhere in the world .
and through this , we actually started realizing our dreams , and we maintained honoring our traditions but we were still open to new ideas .
the second element is that we wanted to have a life , a better life where we can benefit through many things .
most poachers , like my father , were people from our own community .
they were not people from outside .
these were our own people .
and sometimes , once they were caught , they were treated with respect , brought back into the communities and they were made part of the bigger dreams .
the best one , like my father - i 'm not campaigning for my father - -lrb- laughter -rrb- they were put in charge to stop others from poaching .
and when this thing started going on , we started becoming one community , renewing our connection to nature .
and that was a very strong thing in namibia .
the last element that actually helped develop these things was the partnerships .
our government has given legal status over our traditional lands .
the other partners that we have got is business communities .
business communities helped bring namibia onto the world map and they have also helped make wildlife a very valuable land use like any other land uses such as agriculture .
and most of my conservation colleagues today that you find in namibia have been trained through the initiative , through the involvement of world wildlife fund in the most up-to-date conservation practices .
they have also given funding for two decades to this whole program .
and so far , with the support of world wildlife fund , we 've been able to scale up the very small programs to national programs today .
namibia ... or sesfontein was no more an isolated village somewhere , hidden away in namibia .
with these assets we are now part of the global village .
thirty years have passed since my father 's first job as a community game guard .
it 's very unfortunate that he passed away and he can not see the success as i and my children see it today .
when i finished school in 1995 , there were only 20 lions in the entire northwest - in our area .
but today , there are more than 130 lions .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so please , if you go to namibia , make sure that you stay in the tents .
do n't walk out at night !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the black rhino - they were almost extinct in 1982 .
but today , kunene has the largest concentration of black rhino - free-roaming black rhinos - in the world .
this is outside the protected area .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the leopard - they are now in big numbers but they are now far away from our village , because the natural plain has multiplied , like zebras , springboks and everything .
they stay very much far away because this other thing has multiplied from less than a thousand to tens of thousands of animals .
what started as very small , community rangers getting community involved , has now grown into something that we call conservancies .
conservancies are legally instituted institutions by the government , and these are run by the communities themselves , for their benefit .
today , we have got 60 conservancies that manage and protect over 13 million hectares of land in namibia .
we have already reshaped conservation in the entire country .
nowhere else in the world has community-adopted conservation at this scale .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 2008 , conservancy generated 5.7 million dollars .
this is our new economy - an economy based on the respect of our natural resources .
and we are able to use this money for many things : very importantly , we put it in education .
secondly , we put it for infrastructure . food .
very important as well - we invest this money in aids and hiv education .
you know that africa is being affected by these viruses .
and this is the good news from africa that we have to shout from the rooftops .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and now , what the world really needs is for you to help me and our partners take some of what we have learned in namibia to other places with similar problems : places like mongolia , or even in your own backyards , the northern great plains , where buffalo and other animals have suffered and many communities are in decline .
i like that one : namibia serving as a model to africa , and africa serving as a model to the united states .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we were successful in namibia because we dreamed of a future that was much more than just a healthy wildlife .
we knew conservation would fail if it does n't work to improve the lives of the local communities .
so , come and talk to me about namibia , and better yet , come to namibia and see for yourself how we have done it .
and please , do visit our website to learn more and see how you can help cbnrm in africa and across the world .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the work of a transportation commissioner is n't just about stop signs and traffic signals .
it involves the design of cities and the design of city streets .
streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has , and yet it 's an asset that 's largely hidden in plain sight .
and the lesson from new york over the past six years is that you can update this asset .
you can remake your streets quickly , inexpensively , it can provide immediate benefits , and it can be quite popular .
you just need to look at them a little differently .
this is important because we live in an urban age .
for the first time in history , most people live in cities , and the u.n. estimates that over the next 40 years , the population is going to double on the planet .
so the design of cities is a key issue for our future .
mayor bloomberg recognized this when he launched planyc in 2007 .
the plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace , and that if we 're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here , we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure .
for many cities , our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations .
this is a picture of times square in the ' 50s , and despite all of the technological innovation , cultural changes , political changes , this is times square in 2008 .
not much has changed in those 50 years .
so we worked hard to refocus our agenda , to maximize efficient mobility , providing more room for buses , more room for bikes , more room for people to enjoy the city , and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them .
we set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks .
having goals is important , because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction , you need to know where you 're going and why .
the design of a street can tell you everything about what 's expected on it .
in this case , it 's expected that you shelter in place .
the design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point a to point b , and it misses all the other ways that a street is used .
when we started out , we did some early surveys about how our streets were used , and we found that new york city was largely a city without seats .
pictures like this , people perched on a fire hydrant , not the mark of a world-class city .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's not great for parents with kids .
it 's not great for seniors . it 's not great for retailers .
it 's probably not good for the fire hydrants .
certainly not good for the police department .
so we worked hard to change that balance , and probably the best example of our new approach is in times square .
three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through times square , and people had tried for years to make changes .
they changed signals , they changed lanes , everything they could do to make times square work better .
it was dangerous , hard to cross the street .
it was chaotic .
and so , none of those approaches worked , so we took a different approach , a bigger approach , looked at our street differently .
and so we did a six-month pilot .
we closed broadway from 42nd street to 47th street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space .
and the temporary materials are an important part of the program , because we were able to show how it worked .
and i work for a data-driven mayor , as you probably know .
so it was all about the data .
so if it worked better for traffic , if it was better for mobility , if it was safer , better for business , we would keep it , and if it did n't work , no harm , no foul , we could put it back the way that it was , because these were temporary materials .
and that was a very big part of the buy-in , much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back .
but the results were overwhelming .
traffic moved better . it was much safer .
five new flagship stores opened .
it 's been a total home run .
times square is now one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet .
and this is an important lesson , because it does n't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space .
every project has its surprises , and one of the big surprises with times square was how quickly people flocked to the space .
we put out the orange barrels , and people just materialized immediately into the street .
it was like a star trek episode , you know ?
they were n't there before , and then zzzzzt !
all the people arrived .
where they 'd been , i do n't know , but they were there .
and this actually posed an immediate challenge for us , because the street furniture had not yet arrived .
so we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs , and we put those lawn chairs out on the street .
and the lawn chairs became the talk of the town .
it was n't about that we 'd closed broadway to cars .
it was about those lawn chairs .
" what did you think about the lawn chairs ? "
" do you like the color of the lawn chairs ? "
so if you 've got a big , controversial project , think about lawn chairs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the final design for times square , and it will create a level surface , sidewalk to sidewalk , beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards , creating a great new energy on the street , and we think it 's going to really create a great place , a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name .
and we will be cutting the ribbon on this , the first phase , this december .
with all of our projects , our public space projects , we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces , move the furniture , take care of the plants .
this is in front of macy 's , and they were a big supporter of this new approach , because they understood that more people on foot is better for business .
and we 've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods .
this is in bed-stuy , brooklyn , and you can see the short leg that was there , used for cars , that 's not really needed .
so what we did is we painted over the street , put down epoxy gravel , and connected the triangle to the storefronts on grand avenue , created a great new public space , and it 's been great for businesses along grand avenue .
we did the same thing in dumbo , in brooklyn , and this is one of our first projects that we did , and we took an underutilized , pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend .
and in the three years since we 've implemented the project , retail sales have increased 172 percent .
and that 's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood .
we 've moved very , very quickly with paint and temporary materials .
instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done , we 've done it with paint and temporary materials .
and the proof is not in a computer model .
it is in the real-world performance of the street .
you can have fun with paint .
all told , we 've created over 50 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city .
we 've repurposed 26 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space .
i think one of the successes is in its emulation .
you 're seeing this kind of approach , since we 've painted times square , you 've seen this approach in boston , in chicago , in san francisco , in mexico city , buenos aires , you name it .
this is actually in los angeles , and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets .
but i ca n't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods .
we also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program , and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in new york .
i think it 's fair to say - -lrb- applause -rrb- - it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike , and now new york has become one of the cycling capitals in the united states .
and we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes .
you can see the map in 2007 .
this is how it looked in 2013 after we built out 350 miles of on-street bike lanes .
i love this because it looks so easy .
you just click it , and they 're there .
we also brought new designs to the street .
we created the first parking-protected bike lane in the united states .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we protected bikers by floating parking lanes , and it 's been great .
bike volumes have spiked .
injuries to all users , pedestrians , cyclists , drivers , are all down 50 percent .
and we 've built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes , and now you 're seeing them pop up all over the country .
and you can see here that this strategy has worked .
the blue line is the number of cyclists , soaring .
the green line is the number of bike lanes .
and the yellow line is the number of injuries , which has remained essentially flat .
after this big expansion , you 've seen no net increase in injuries , and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers .
not everybody liked the new bike lanes , and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago .
one brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on prospect park west " the most contested piece of land outside of the gaza strip . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is what we had done .
so if you dig below the headlines , though , you 'll see that the people were far ahead of the press , far ahead of the politicians .
in fact , i think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers .
sixty-four percent of new yorkers support these bike lanes .
this summer , we launched citi bike , the largest bike share program in the united states , with 6,000 bikes and 330 stations located next to one another .
since we 've launched the program , three million trips have been taken .
people have ridden seven million miles .
that 's 280 times around the globe .
and so with this little blue key , you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option .
and daily usage just continues to soar .
what has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of new york is 36,000 people .
the high that we 've had so far is 44,000 in august .
yesterday , 40,000 people used citi bike in new york city .
the bikes are being used six times a day .
and i think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets .
in the past , it looked like the guy on the left , ninja-clad bike messenger .
and today , cyclists look like new york city looks .
it 's diverse - young , old , black , white , women , kids , all getting on a bike .
it 's an affordable , safe , convenient way to get around .
quite radical .
we 've also brought this approach to our buses , and new york city has the largest bus fleet in north america , the slowest bus speeds .
as everybody knows , you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus .
and so we focused on the most congested areas of new york city , built out six bus rapid transit lines , 57 miles of new speedy bus lanes .
you pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus .
we 've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane , and it 's been a huge success .
i think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched citi bike , and i was riding citi bike up first avenue in my protected bike lane , and i looked over and i saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands , and the traffic was flowing , birds were singing - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes .
it was just fantastic .
and this is how it looked six years ago .
and so , i think that the lesson that we have from new york is that it 's possible to change your streets quickly , it 's not expensive , it can provide immediate benefits , and it can be quite popular .
you just need to reimagine your streets .
they 're hidden in plain sight .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk to you about optimism - or more precisely , the optimism bias .
it 's a cognitive illusion that we 've been studying in my lab for the past few years , and 80 percent of us have it .
it 's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events .
so we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer , being in a car accident .
we overestimate our longevity , our career prospects .
in short , we 're more optimistic than realistic , but we are oblivious to the fact .
take marriage for example .
in the western world , divorce rates are about 40 percent .
that means that out of five married couples , two will end up splitting their assets .
but when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce , they estimate it at zero percent .
and even divorce lawyers , who should really know better , hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce .
so it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce , but they are more likely to remarry .
in the words of samuel johnson , " remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so if we 're married , we 're more likely to have kids .
and we all think our kids will be especially talented .
this , by the way , is my two-year-old nephew , guy .
and i just want to make it absolutely clear that he 's a really bad example of the optimism bias , because he is in fact uniquely talented .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm not alone .
out of four british people , three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families .
that 's 75 percent .
but only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago .
and this is a really important point , because we 're optimistic about ourselves , we 're optimistic about our kids , we 're optimistic about our families , but we 're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us , and we 're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country .
but private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent .
and it does n't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay , but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so .
now i 'm a scientist , i do experiments .
so to show you what i mean , i 'm going to do an experiment here with you .
so i 'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics , and i want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population .
the first one is getting along well with others .
who here believes they 're at the bottom 25 percent ?
okay , that 's about 10 people out of 1,500 .
who believes they 're at the top 25 percent ?
that 's most of us here .
okay , now do the same for your driving ability .
how interesting are you ?
how attractive are you ?
how honest are you ?
and finally , how modest are you ?
so most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities .
now this is statistically impossible .
we ca n't all be better than everyone else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if we believe we 're better than the other guy , well that means that we 're more likely to get that promotion , to remain married , because we 're more social , more interesting .
and it 's a global phenomenon .
the optimism bias has been observed in many different countries - in western cultures , in non-western cultures , in females and males , in kids , in the elderly .
it 's quite widespread .
but the question is , is it good for us ?
so some people say no .
some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations .
i think the logic goes something like this : if we do n't expect greatness , if we do n't expect to find love and be healthy and successful , well we 're not going to be disappointed when these things do n't happen .
and if we 're not disappointed when good things do n't happen , and we 're pleasantly surprised when they do , we will be happy .
so it 's a very good theory , but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons .
number one : whatever happens , whether you succeed or you fail , people with high expectations always feel better .
because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event .
the psychologists margaret marshall and john brown studied students with high and low expectations .
and they found that when people with high expectations succeed , they attribute that success to their own traits .
" i 'm a genius , therefore i got an a , therefore i 'll get an a again and again in the future . "
when they failed , it was n't because they were dumb , but because the exam just happened to be unfair .
next time they will do better .
people with low expectations do the opposite .
so when they failed it was because they were dumb , and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy .
next time reality would catch up with them .
so they felt worse .
number two : regardless of the outcome , the pure act of anticipation makes us happy .
the behavioral economist george lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity , any celebrity .
then he said , " how much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a celebrity if the kiss was delivered immediately , in three hours , in 24 hours , in three days , in one year , in 10 years ?
he found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately , but to get a kiss in three days .
they were willing to pay extra in order to wait .
now they were n't willing to wait a year or 10 years ; no one wants an aging celebrity .
but three days seemed to be the optimum amount .
so why is that ?
well if you get the kiss now , it 's over and done with .
but if you get the kiss in three days , well that 's three days of jittery anticipation , the thrill of the wait .
the students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen , how is it going to happen .
anticipation made them happy .
this is , by the way , why people prefer friday to sunday .
it 's a really curious fact , because friday is a day of work and sunday is a day of pleasure , so you 'd assume that people will prefer sunday , but they do n't .
it 's not because they really , really like being in the office and they ca n't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch .
we know that , because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week , surprise , surprise , saturday comes in at first , then friday , then sunday .
people prefer friday because friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead , all the plans that you have .
on sunday , the only thing you can look forward to is the work week .
so optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future , more strolls in the park .
and that anticipation enhances their wellbeing .
in fact , without the optimism bias , we would all be slightly depressed .
people with mild depression , they do n't have a bias when they look into the future .
they 're actually more realistic than healthy individuals .
but individuals with severe depression , they have a pessimistic bias .
so they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being .
so optimism changes subjective reality .
the way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it .
but it also changes objective reality .
it acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy .
and that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy .
controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success , it leads to success .
optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics .
and maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health .
if we expect the future to be bright , stress and anxiety are reduced .
so all in all , optimism has lots of benefits .
but the question that was really confusing to me was , how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality ?
as an neuroscientist , this was especially confusing , because according to all the theories out there , when your expectations are not met , you should alter them .
but this is not what we find .
we asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on .
we asked them to estimate their likelihood of experiencing different terrible events in their lives .
so , for example , what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer ?
and then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes .
so cancer , for example , is about 30 percent .
and then we asked them again , " how likely are you to suffer from cancer ? "
what we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs .
and indeed they did - but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected .
so for example , if someone said , " my likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent , " and we said , " hey , good news .
the average likelihood is only 30 percent , " the next time around they would say , " well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent . "
so they learned quickly and efficiently .
but if someone started off saying , " my average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent , " and we said , " hey , bad news .
the average likelihood is about 30 percent , " the next time around they would say , " yep . still think it 's about 11 percent . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's not that they did n't learn at all - they did - but much , much less than when we gave them positive information about the future .
and it 's not that they did n't remember the numbers that we gave them ; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent .
but they did n't think that those numbers were related to them .
what this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact .
yes , smoking kills , but mostly it kills the other guy .
what i wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally .
but at the same time , when we hear that the housing market is hopeful , we think , " oh , my house is definitely going to double in price . "
to try and figure that out , i asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner .
it looks like this .
and using a method called functional mri , we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information .
one of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus .
so if someone said , " my likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent , " and we said , " hey , good news .
average likelihood is 30 percent , " the left inferior frontal gyrus would respond fiercely .
and it did n't matter if you 're an extreme optimist , a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic , everyone 's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well , whether you 're barack obama or woody allen .
on the other side of the brain , the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news .
and here 's the thing : it was n't doing a very good job .
the more optimistic you were , the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information .
and if your brain is failing at integrating bad news about the future , you will constantly leave your rose-tinted spectacles on .
so we wanted to know , could we change this ?
could we alter people 's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions ?
and there 's a way for us to do that .
this is my collaborator ryota kanai .
and what he 's doing is he 's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus .
and by doing that , he 's interfering with the activity of this brain region for about half an hour .
after that everything goes back to normal , i assure you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so let 's see what happens .
first of all , i 'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see .
so if i was to test all of you now , this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news .
now we interfere with the region that we found to integrate negative information in this task , and the optimism bias grew even larger .
we made people more biased in the way that they process information .
then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task , and the optimism bias disappeared .
we were quite amazed by these results because we were able to eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans .
and at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves , would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits ?
if we could do that , would we want to take people 's optimism bias away ?
well i 've already told you about all of the benefits of the optimism bias , which probably makes you want to hold onto it for dear life .
but there are , of course , pitfalls , and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them .
take for example this email i recieved from a firefighter here in california .
he says , " fatality investigations for firefighters often include ' we did n't think the fire was going to do that , ' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions . "
this captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do , to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans .
so unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior , to financial collapse , to faulty planning .
the british government , for example , has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects .
so they have adjusted the 2012 olympic budget for the optimism bias .
my friend who 's getting married in a few weeks has done the same for his wedding budget .
and by the way , when i asked him about his own likelihood of divorce , he said he was quite sure it was zero percent .
so what we would really like to do , is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism , but at the same time remain hopeful , benefiting from the many fruits of optimism .
and i believe there 's a way for us to do that .
the key here really is knowledge .
we 're not born with an innate understanding of our biases .
these have to be identified by scientific investigation .
but the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion .
it 's like visual illusions , in which understanding them does not make them go away .
and this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance , to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism , but at the same time remain hopeful .
i think this cartoon portrays it nicely .
because if you 're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly , you certainly never will .
because to make any kind of progress , we need to be able to imagine a different reality , and then we need to believe that that reality is possible .
but if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best , you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground .
but if you 're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly , but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things do n't work out exactly as you had planned , you will soar like an eagle , even if you 're just a penguin .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- two years ago , i was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of islamic art in europe .
the curator had only one condition : i had to use the arabic script for my artwork .
now , as an artist , a woman , an arab , or a human being living in the world in 2010 , i only had one thing to say : i wanted to say no .
and in arabic , to say " no , " we say " no , and a thousand times no . "
so i decided to look for a thousand different noes .
on everything ever produced under islamic or arab patronage in the past 1,400 years , from spain to the borders of china .
i collected my findings in a book , placed them chronologically , stating the name , the patron , the medium and the date .
now , the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation , which stood three by seven meters , in munich , germany , in september of 2010 .
now , in january , 2011 , the revolution started , and life stopped for 18 days , and on the 12th of february , we naively celebrated on the streets of cairo , believing that the revolution had succeeded .
nine months later i found myself spraying messages in tahrir square . the reason for this act was this image that i saw in my newsfeed .
i did not feel that i could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street .
so i took one " no " off a tombstone from the islamic museum in cairo , and i added a message to it : " no to military rule . "
and i started spraying that on the streets in cairo .
but that led to a series of no , coming out of the book like ammunition , and adding messages to them , and i started spraying them on the walls .
so i 'll be sharing some of these noes with you .
no to a new pharaoh , because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator .
no to violence : ramy essam came to tahrir on the second day of the revolution , one month after mubarak stepped down , this was his reward .
no to blinding heroes . ahmed harara lost his right eye on the 28th of january , and he lost his left eye on the 19th of november , by two different snipers .
no to killing , in this case no to killing men of religion , because sheikh ahmed adina refaat was shot on december 16th , during a demonstration , leaving behind three orphans and a widow .
no to burning books . the institute of egypt was burned on december 17th , a huge cultural loss .
no to stripping the people , and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street , and the footprint reads , " long live a peaceful revolution , " because we will never retaliate with violence .
no to barrier walls . on february 5th , concrete roadblocks were set up in cairo to protect the ministry of defense from protesters .
now , speaking of walls , i want to share with you the story of one wall in cairo .
a group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall . it 's one to one .
in front of this tank there 's a man on a bicycle with a breadbasket on his head . to any passerby , there 's no problem with this visual .
after acts of violence , another artist came , painted blood , protesters being run over by the tank , demonstrators , and a message that read , " starting tomorrow , i wear the new face , the face of every martyr . i exist . "
authority comes , paints the wall white , leaves the tank and adds a message : " army and people , one hand . egypt for egyptians . "
another artist comes , paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank .
authority comes , paints the wall white , leaves the tank , leaves the suit , and throws a bucket of black paint just to hide the face of the monster .
so i come with my stencils , and i spray them on the suit , on the tank , and on the whole wall , and this is how it stands today until further notice . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i want to leave you with a final no .
i found neruda scribbled on a piece of paper in a field hospital in tahrir , and i decided to take a no of mamluk mausoleum in cairo .
the message reads , -lsb- arabic -rsb- " you can crush the flowers , but you ca n't delay spring . "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . shukran . -lrb- applause -rrb- for me , this story begins about 15 years ago , when i was a hospice doctor at the university of chicago .
and i was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the south side of chicago .
and i was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness .
and in my lab , i was studying the widower effect , which is a very old idea in the social sciences , going back 150 years , known as " dying of a broken heart . "
so , when i die , my wife 's risk of death can double , for instance , in the first year .
and i had gone to take care of one particular patient , a woman who was dying of dementia .
and in this case , unlike this couple , she was being cared for by her daughter .
and the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother .
and the daughter 's husband , he also was sick from his wife 's exhaustion .
and i was driving home one day , and i get a phone call from the husband 's friend , calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend .
so here i get this call from this random guy that 's having an experience that 's being influenced by people at some social distance .
and so i suddenly realized two very simple things : first , the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives .
and second , it was not restricted to pairs of people .
and i started to see the world in a whole new way , like pairs of people connected to each other .
and then i realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby .
and then , in fact , these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships : marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties .
and that , in fact , these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other .
so i started to see the world in a completely new way and i became obsessed with this .
i became obsessed with how it might be that we 're embedded in these social networks , and how they affect our lives .
so , social networks are these intricate things of beauty , and they 're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous , in fact , that one has to ask what purpose they serve .
why are we embedded in social networks ?
i mean , how do they form ? how do they operate ?
and how do they effect us ?
so my first topic with respect to this , was not death , but obesity .
it had become trendy to speak about the " obesity epidemic . "
and , along with my collaborator , james fowler , we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people i discussed earlier .
so this is a slide of some of our initial results .
it 's 2,200 people in the year 2000 .
every dot is a person . we make the dot size proportional to people 's body size ; so bigger dots are bigger people .
in addition , if your body size , if your bmi , your body mass index , is above 30 - if you 're clinically obese - we also colored the dots yellow .
so , if you look at this image , right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image .
but the visual complexity is still very high .
it 's not obvious exactly what 's going on .
in addition , some questions are immediately raised : how much clustering is there ?
is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone ?
how big are the clusters ? how far do they reach ?
and , most importantly , what causes the clusters ?
so we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters .
this here shows , on the y-axis , the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and , on the x-axis , the degrees of separation between the two people .
on the far left , you see the purple line .
it says that , if your friends are obese , your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher .
and the next bar over , the -lsb- red -rsb- line , says if your friend 's friends are obese , your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher .
and then the next line over says if your friend 's friend 's friend , someone you probably do n't even know , is obese , your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher .
and it 's only when you get to your friend 's friend 's friend 's friends that there 's no longer a relationship between that person 's body size and your own body size .
well , what might be causing this clustering ?
there are at least three possibilities : one possibility is that , as i gain weight , it causes you to gain weight .
a kind of induction , a kind of spread from person to person .
another possibility , very obvious , is homophily , or , birds of a feather flock together ; here , i form my tie to you because you and i share a similar body size .
and the last possibility is what is known as confounding , because it confounds our ability to figure out what 's going on .
and here , the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain , nor that i preferentially form a tie with you because you and i share the same body size , but rather that we share a common exposure to something , like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time .
when we studied these data , we found evidence for all of these things , including for induction .
and we found that if your friend becomes obese , it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period .
there can be many mechanisms for this effect : one possibility is that your friends say to you something like - you know , they adopt a behavior that spreads to you - like , they say , " let 's go have muffins and beer , " which is a terrible combination . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but you adopt that combination , and then you start gaining weight like them .
another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight , and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is .
here , what 's spreading from person to person is not a behavior , but rather a norm : an idea is spreading .
now , headline writers had a field day with our studies .
i think the headline in the new york times was , " are you packing it on ?
blame your fat friends . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- what was interesting to us is that the european headline writers had a different take : they said , " are your friends gaining weight ? perhaps you are to blame . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we thought this was a very interesting comment on america , and a kind of self-serving , " not my responsibility " kind of phenomenon .
now , i want to be very clear : we do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all .
our next questions was : could we actually visualize this spread ?
was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person ?
and this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure , the architecture of the ties , was changing across time .
in addition , because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic , there 's not a patient zero of the obesity epidemic - if we find that guy , there was a spread of obesity out from him - it 's a multicentric epidemic .
lots of people are doing things at the same time .
and i 'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and james five years of our lives to do .
so , again , every dot is a person .
every tie between them is a relationship .
we 're going to put this into motion now , taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years .
the dot sizes are going to grow , you 're going to see a sea of yellow take over .
you 're going to see people be born and die - dots will appear and disappear - ties will form and break , marriages and divorces , friendings and defriendings .
a lot of complexity , a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic .
and , by the end , you 're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network .
now , when looked at this , it changed the way i see things , because this thing , this network that 's changing across time , it has a memory , it moves , things flow within it , it has a kind of consistency - people can die , but it does n't die ; it still persists - and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time .
and so , i came to see these kinds of social networks as living things , as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand .
and we used a variety of techniques to do this .
and we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena .
we looked at smoking and drinking behavior , and voting behavior , and divorce - which can spread - and altruism .
and , eventually , we became interested in emotions .
now , when we have emotions , we show them .
why do we show our emotions ?
i mean , there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside , you know , anger or happiness .
but we do n't just experience them , we show them .
and not only do we show them , but others can read them .
and , not only can they read them , but they copy them .
there 's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations .
and so this function of emotions suggests that , in addition to any other purpose they serve , they 're a kind of primitive form of communication .
and that , in fact , if we really want to understand human emotions , we need to think about them in this way .
now , we 're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way , in simple , sort of , brief periods of time .
so , for example , i was giving this talk recently in new york city , and i said , " you know when you 're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you , and you just instinctively smile back ? "
and they looked at me and said , " we do n't do that in new york city . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , " everywhere else in the world , that 's normal human behavior . "
and so there 's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other .
and , in fact , emotional contagion can be broader still .
like we could have punctuated expressions of anger , as in riots .
the question that we wanted to ask was : could emotion spread , in a more sustained way than riots , across time and involve large numbers of people , not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car ?
maybe there 's a kind of below the surface , quiet riot that animates us all the time .
maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks .
maybe , in fact , emotions have a collective existence , not just an individual existence .
and this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon .
again , a social network , but now we color the people yellow if they 're happy and blue if they 're sad and green in between .
and if you look at this image , you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people , again , spreading to three degrees of separation .
and you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network .
there 's a middle and an edge to this network , and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges .
so to invoke another metaphor , if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity - i 'm connected to you and you to her , on out endlessly into the distance - this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned american quilt , and it has patches on it : happy and unhappy patches .
and whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this work with emotions , which are so fundamental , then got us to thinking about : maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes .
because human social networks , whenever they are mapped , always kind of look like this : the picture of the network .
but they never look like this .
why do they not look like this ?
why do n't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice ?
well , the striking patterns of human social networks , their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place , and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure .
and notice first of all - so , to understand this , though , we need to dissect network structure a little bit first - and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person .
but that 's not the case with real networks .
so , for example , here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university .
and now i 'm highlighting a few dots .
if you look here at the dots , compare node b in the upper left to node d in the far right ; b has four friends coming out from him and d has six friends coming out from him .
and so , those two individuals have different numbers of friends .
that 's very obvious , we all know that .
but certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious .
compare node b in the upper left to node a in the lower left .
now , those people both have four friends , but a 's friends all know each other , and b 's friends do not .
so the friend of a friend of a 's is , back again , a friend of a 's , whereas the friend of a friend of b 's is not a friend of b 's , but is farther away in the network .
this is known as transitivity in networks .
and , finally , compare nodes c and d : c and d both have six friends .
if you talk to them , and you said , " what is your social life like ? "
they would say , " i 've got six friends .
that 's my social experience . "
but now we , with a bird 's eye view looking at this network , can see that they occupy very different social worlds .
and i can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you : who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network ?
would you rather be c or d ?
you 'd rather be d , on the edge of the network .
and now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip - not about you - was spreading through the network ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you would rather be c.
so different structural locations have different implications for your life .
and , in fact , when we did some experiments looking at this , what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes .
and this is not surprising . we know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious . that 's obvious .
but we also found some non-obvious things .
for instance , 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes .
whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes , but with yours .
and we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other - you know who you are - and others of you keep them apart and do n't introduce your friends to each other .
and so some people knit together the networks around them , creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they 're comfortably embedded .
and finally , we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes .
so whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable .
now , what is the point of this ?
how does this help us understand ?
how does this help us figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days ?
well , the argument i 'd like to make is that networks have value .
they are a kind of social capital .
new properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks , and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks , not just in the individuals within them .
so think about these two common objects .
they 're both made of carbon , and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way - on the left - and you get graphite , which is soft and dark .
but if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way , you get diamond , which is clear and hard .
and those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms ; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms , or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms .
so , similarly , the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties .
it is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts .
and so it is not just what 's happening to these people - whether they 're losing weight or gaining weight , or becoming rich or becoming poor , or becoming happy or not becoming happy - that affects us ; it 's also the actual architecture of the ties around us .
our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we 're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network .
now , the reason , i think , that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism .
now , a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to , and by studying , the collective .
like , for example , a hive of bees that 's finding a new nesting site , or a flock of birds that 's evading a predator , or a flock of birds that 's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the pacific , or a pack of wolves that 's able to bring down larger prey .
superorganisms have properties that can not be understood just by studying the individuals .
i think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena - like crime , and warfare , and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption .
now , look at this .
i think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs .
if i was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs , you would cut the ties to me , and the network would disintegrate .
so the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks .
similarly , social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things , like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas .
i think , in fact , that if we realized how valuable social networks are , we 'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them , because i think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness .
and what i think the world needs now is more connections .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am a ph.d. student and that means i have a question : how can we make digital content graspable ?
because you see , on the one hand , there is the digital world and no question , many things are happening there right now .
and for us humans , it 's not quite material , it 's not really there - it 's virtual .
on the other hand , we humans , we live in a physical world .
it 's rich , it tastes good , it feels good , it smells good .
so the question is : how do we get the stuff over from the digital into the physical ?
that 's my question .
if you look at the iphone with its touch and the wii with its bodily activity , you can see the tendency ; it 's getting physical .
the question is : what 's next ?
now , i have three options that i would like to show you .
the first one is mass .
as humans , we are sensitive to where an object in our hand is heavy .
so , could we use that in mobile phones ?
let me show you the weight-shifting mobile .
it is a mobile phone-shaped box that has an iron weight inside , which we can move around , and you can feel where it 's heavy .
we shift the gravitational center of it .
for example , we can augment digital content with physical mass .
so you move around the content on a display , but you can also feel where it is just from the weight of the device .
another thing it 's good for is navigation - it can guide you around in a city .
it can tell you by its weight , " okay , move right . walk ahead . make a left here . "
and the good thing about that is you do n't have to look at the device all the time ; you have your eyes free to see the city .
now , mass is the first thing ; the second thing , that 's shape .
we 're also sensitive to the shape of objects we have in -lsb- our -rsb- hands .
so if i download an e-book and it has 20 pages - well , they could be thin , right - but if it has 500 pages , i want to feel that " harry potter " - it 's thick . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so let me show you the shape-changing mobile .
again , it 's a mobile phone-shaped box , and this one can change its shape .
we can play with the shape itself .
for example , it can be thin in your pocket , which we of course want it to be ; but then if you hold it in your hand , it can lean towards you , be thick .
it 's like tapered to the downside .
if you change the grasp , it can adjust to that .
it 's also useful if you want to put it down on your nightstand to watch a movie or use as an alarm clock , it stands .
it 's fairly simple .
another thing is , sometimes we watch things on a mobile phone , they are bigger than the phone itself .
so in that case - like here , there 's an app that 's bigger than the phone 's screen - the shape of the phone could tell you , " okay , off the screen right here , there is more content .
you ca n't see it , but it 's there . "
and you can feel that because it 's thicker at that edge .
the shape is the second thing .
the third thing operates on a different level .
as humans , we are social , we are empathic , and that 's great .
would n't that be a way to make mobile phones more intuitive ?
think of a hamster in the pocket .
well , i can feel it , it 's doing all right - i do n't have to check it .
let me show you the living mobile phone .
so , once again , mobile phone-shaped box , but this one , it has a breath and a heartbeat , and it feels very organic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you can tell , it 's relaxed right now .
oh now , missed call , a new call , new girlfriend maybe - very exciting . -lrb- laughter -rrb- how do we calm it down ?
you give it a pat behind the ears , and everything is all right again .
so , that 's very intuitive , and that 's what we want .
so , what we have seen are three ways to make the digital graspable for us .
and i think making it physical is a good way to do that .
what 's behind that is a postulation , namely that not humans should get much more technical in the future ; rather than that , technology , a bit more human .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm mckenna pope . i 'm 14 years old , and when i was 13 , i convinced one of the largest toy companies , toymakers , in the world , hasbro , to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products .
so allow me to tell you about it .
so i have a brother , gavin .
when this whole shebang happened , he was four .
he loved to cook .
he was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these , needless to say , uneatable concoctions , or making invisible macaroni and cheese .
he wanted to be a chef really badly .
and so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an easy-bake oven . right ?
i mean , we all had those when we were little .
and he wanted one so badly .
but then he started to realize something .
in the commercials , and on the boxes for the easy-bake ovens , hasbro marketed them specifically to girls .
and the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials , and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple , very gender-specific colors to females , right ?
so it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook ; boys are n't .
and this discouraged my brother a lot .
he thought that he was n't supposed to want to be a chef , because that was something that girls did .
girls cooked ; boys did n't , or so was the message that hasbro was sending .
and this got me thinking , god , i wish there was a way that i could change this , that could i have my voice heard by hasbro so i could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it .
and that got me thinking about a website that i had learned about a few months prior called change.org.
change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks , through facebook , through twitter , through youtube , through reddit , through tumblr , through whatever you can think of .
and so i created a petition along with the youtube video that i added to the petition basically asking hasbro to change the way that they marketed it , in featuring boys in the commercials , on the boxes , and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors .
so this petition started to take off - humongously fast , you have no idea .
i was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets , and it was amazing .
in three weeks , maybe three and a half , i had 46,000 signatures on this petition .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , needless to say , it was crazy .
eventually , hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new easy-bake oven product to me in black , silver and blue .
it was literally one of the best moments of my life .
it was like & quot ; willy wonka and the chocolate factory . & quot ; that thing was amazing .
what i did n't realize at the time , however , was that i had become an activist , i could change something , that even as a kid , or maybe even especially as a kid , my voice mattered , and your voice matters too .
i want to let you know it 's not going to be easy , and it was n't easy for me , because i faced a lot of obstacles .
people online , and sometimes even in real life , were disrespectful to me and my family , and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time , and it really discouraged me .
and actually , i have some examples , because what 's better revenge than displaying their idiocy ?
so , let 's see .
from user name liquidsore29 - interesting user names we have here - & quot ; disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay . & quot ; liquidsore29 , really ? really ? okay .
how about from whiteboy77ags : " people always need something to -lrb- female dog -rrb- about . "
from jeffrey gutierrez : & quot ; omg , shut up . you just want money and attention . & quot ; so it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because i thought , people do n't care , people think it 's a waste of time , and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family .
it hurt me , and it made me think , what 's the point of making change in the future ?
but then i started to realize something .
haters gonna hate .
come on , say it with me . one , two , three : haters gonna hate .
so let your haters hate , you know what , and make your change , because i know you can .
i look out into this crowd , and i see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change , and i know that you can , and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in , and you can trade it across all these social media , through facebook , through twitter , through youtube , through reddit , through tumblr , through whatever else you can think of .
and you can make that change .
you can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it .
and that spark that you 've been hearing about all day today , you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you to put off your preconceptions , your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles .
because that is the only way i 'm going to get my story across to you .
and by the way , if i come across as a sort of rabid , hippie conservationist , it 's purely a figment of your imagination .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . we are actually the first species on earth to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival .
and i know we 've all seen images enough to make us numb , of the tragedies that we 're perpetrating on the planet .
we 're kind of like greedy kids , using it all up , are n't we ?
and today is a time for me to talk to you about water .
it 's not only because we like to drink lots of it , and its marvelous derivatives , beer , wine , etc .
and , of course , watch it fall from the sky and flow in our wonderful rivers , but for several other reasons as well .
when i was a kid , growing up in new york , i was smitten by snakes , the same way most kids are smitten by tops , marbles , cars , trains , cricket balls .
and my mother , brave lady , was partly to blame , taking me to the new york natural history museum , buying me books on snakes , and then starting this infamous career of mine , which has culminated in of course , arriving in india 60 years ago , brought by my mother , doris norden , and my stepfather , rama chattopadhyaya .
it 's been a roller coaster ride .
two animals , two iconic reptiles really captivated me very early on .
one of them was the remarkable gharial .
this crocodile , which grows to almost 20 feet long in the northern rivers , and this charismatic snake , the king cobra .
what my purpose of the talk today really is , is to sort of indelibly scar your minds with these charismatic and majestic creatures .
because this is what you will take away from here , a reconnection with nature , i hope .
the king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons .
what you 're seeing here is very recently shot images in a forest nearby here , of a female king cobra making her nest .
here is a limbless animal , capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves , and then laying her eggs inside , to withstand 5 to 10 -lsb- meters of rainfall -rsb- , in order that the eggs can incubate over the next 90 days , and hatch into little baby king cobras .
so , she protects her eggs , and after three months , the babies finally do hatch out .
a majority of them will die , of course . there is very high mortality in little baby reptiles who are just 10 to 12 inches long .
my first experience with king cobras was in ' 72 at a magical place called agumbe , in karnataka , this state .
and it is a marvelous rain forest .
this first encounter was kind of like the maasai boy who kills the lion to become a warrior .
it really changed my life totally .
and it brought me straight into the conservation fray .
i ended up starting this research and education station in agumbe , which you are all of course invited to visit .
this is basically a base wherein we are trying to gather and learn virtually everything about the biodiversity of this incredibly complex forest system , and try to hang on to what 's there , make sure the water sources are protected and kept clean , and of course , having a good time too .
you can almost hear the drums throbbing back in that little cottage where we stay when we 're there .
it was very important for us to get through to the people .
and through the children is usually the way to go .
they are fascinated with snakes . they have n't got that steely thing that you end up either fearing or hating or despising or loathing them in some way .
they are interested .
and it really works to start with them .
this gives you an idea of the size of some of these snakes .
this is an average size king cobra , about 12 feet long .
and it actually crawled into somebody 's bathroom , and was hanging around there for two or three days .
the people of this part of india worship the king cobra .
and they did n't kill it . they called us to catch it .
now we 've caught more than 100 king cobras over the last three years , and relocated them in nearby forests .
but in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures -lsb- it was necessary -rsb- for us to actually insert a small radio transmitter inside -lsb- each -rsb- snake .
now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets , where the babies go after they hatch , and remarkable things like this you 're about to see .
this was just a few days ago in agumbe .
i had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra who had caught a venomous pit viper .
and it does it in such a way that it does n't get bitten itself .
and king cobras feed only on snakes .
this -lsb- little snake -rsb- was kind of a tid-bit for it , what we 'd call a " vadai " or a donut or something like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- usually they eat something a bit larger .
in this case a rather strange and inexplicable activity happened over the last breeding season , wherein a large male king cobra actually grabbed a female king cobra , did n't mate with it , actually killed it and swallowed it .
we 're still trying to explain and come to terms with what is the evolutionary advantage of this .
but they do also a lot of other remarkable things .
this is again , something -lsb- we were able to see -rsb- by virtue of the fact that we had a radio transmitter in one of the snakes .
this male snake , 12 feet long , met another male king cobra .
and they did this incredible ritual combat dance .
it 's very much like the rutting of mammals , including humans , you know , sorting out our differences , but gentler , no biting allowed .
it 's just a wresting match , but a remarkable activity .
now , what are we doing with all this information ?
what 's the point of all this ?
well , the king cobra is literally a keystone species in these rainforests .
and our job is to convince the authorities that these forests have to be protected .
and this is one of the ways we do it , by learning as much as we can about something so remarkable and so iconic in the rainforests there , in order to help protect trees , animals and of course the water sources .
you 've all heard , perhaps , of project tiger which started back in the early ' 70s , which was , in fact , a very dynamic time for conservation .
we were piloted , i could say , by a highly autocratic stateswoman , but who also had an incredible passion for environment .
and this is the time when project tiger emerged .
and , just like project tiger , our activities with the king cobra so that we protect its habitat and everything within it .
so , the tiger is the icon .
and now the king cobra is a new one .
all the major rivers in south india are sourced in the western ghats , the chain of hills running along the west coast of india .
it pours out millions of gallons every hour , and supplies drinking water to at least 300 million people , and washes many , many babies , and of course feeds many , many animals , both domestic and wild , produces thousands of tons of rice .
and what do we do ? how do we respond to this ?
well , basically , we dam it , we pollute it , we pour in pesticides , weedicides , fungicides .
you drink it in peril of your life .
and the thing is , it 's not just big industry .
it 's not misguided river engineers who are doing all this ; it 's us .
it seems that our citizens find the best way to dispose of garbage are in water sources .
okay . now we 're going north , very far north .
north central india , the chambal river is where we have our base .
this is the home of the gharial , this incredible crocodile .
it is an animal which has been on the earth for just about 100 million years .
it survived even during the time that the dinosaurs died off .
it has remarkable features .
even though it grows to 20 feet long , since it eats only fish it 's not dangerous to human beings .
it does have big teeth , however , and it 's kind of hard to convince people if an animal has big teeth , that it 's a harmless creature .
but we , actually , back in the early ' 70s , did surveys , and found that gharial were extremely rare .
in fact , if you see the map , the range of their original habitat was all the way from the indus in pakistan to the irrawaddy in burma .
and now it 's just limited to a couple of spots in nepal and india .
so , in fact at this point there are only 200 breeding gharial left in the wild .
so , starting in the mid- ' 70s when conservation was at the fore , we were actually able to start projects which were basically government supported to collect eggs from the wild from the few remaining nests and release 5,000 baby gharial back to the wild .
and pretty soon we were seeing sights like this .
i mean , just incredible to see bunches of gharial basking on the river again .
but complacency does have a tendency to breed contempt .
and , sure enough , with all the other pressures on the river , like sand mining , for example , very , very heavy cultivation all the way down to the river 's edge , not allowing the animals to breed anymore , we 're looking at even more problems building up for the gharial , despite the early good intentions .
their nests hatching along the riverside producing hundreds of hatchlings . it 's just an amazing sight .
this was actually just taken last year .
but then the monsoon arrives , and unfortunately downriver there is always a dam or there is always a barrage , and , shoop , they get washed down to their doom .
luckily there is still a lot of interest .
my pals in the crocodile specialist group of the iucn , the -lsb- madras crocodile bank -rsb- , an ngo , the world wildlife fund , the wildlife institute of india , state forest departments , and the ministry of environment , we all work together on stuff .
but it 's possibly , and definitely not enough .
for example , in the winter of 2007 and 2008 , there was this incredible die-off of gharial , in the chambal river .
suddenly dozens of gharial appearing on the river , dead .
why ? how could it happen ?
this is a relatively clean river .
the chambal , if you look at it , has clear water .
people scoop water out of the chambal and drink it , something you would n't do in most north indian rivers .
so , in order to try to find out the answer to this , we got veterinarians from all over the world working with indian vets to try to figure out what was happening .
i was there for a lot of the necropsies on the riverside .
and we actually looked through all their organs and tried to figure out what was going on .
and it came down to something called gout , which , as a result of kidney breakdown is actually uric acid crystals throughout the body , and worse in the joints , which made the gharial unable to swim .
and it 's a horribly painful death .
just downriver from the chambal is the filthy yamuna river , the sacred yamuna river .
and i hate to be so ironic and sarcastic about it but it 's the truth . it 's just one of the filthiest cesspools you can imagine .
it flows down through delhi , mathura , agra , and gets just about every bit of effluent you can imagine .
so , it seemed that the toxin that was killing the gharial was something in the food chain , something in the fish they were eating .
and , you know , once a toxin is in the food chain everything is affected , including us .
because these rivers are the lifeblood of people all along their course .
in order to try to answer some of these questions , we again turn to technology , to biological technology , in this case , again , telemetry , putting radios on 10 gharial , and actually following their movements . they 're being watched everyday as we speak , to try to find out what this mysterious toxin is .
the chambal river is an absolutely incredible place .
it 's a place that 's famous to a lot of you who know about the bandits , the dacoits who used to work up there . and there still are quite a few around .
but poolan devi was one -lsb- of them -rsb- . which actually shekhar kapur made an incredible movie , " the bandit queen , " which i urge you to see .
you 'll get to see the incredible -lsb- chambal -rsb- landscape as well .
but , again , heavy fishing pressures .
this is one of the last repositories of the ganges river dolphin , various species of turtles , thousands of migratory birds , and fishing is causing problems like this .
and now -lsb- these -rsb- new elements of human intolerance for river creatures like the gharial means that if they do n't drown in the net , then they simply cut their beaks off .
animals like the ganges river dolphin which is just down to a few left , and it is also critically endangered .
so , who is next ? us ?
because we are all dependent on these water sources .
so , we all know about the narmada river , the tragedies of dams , the tragedies of huge projects which displace people and wreck river systems without providing livelihoods .
and development just basically going berserk , for a double figure growth index , basically .
so , we 're not sure where this story is going to end , whether it 's got a happy or sad ending .
and climate change is certainly going to turn all of our theories and predictions on their heads .
we 're still working hard at it .
we 've got a lot of a good team of people working up there .
and the thing is , you know , the decision makers , the folks in power , they 're up in their bungalows and so on in delhi , in the city capitals . they are all supplied with plenty of water . it 's cool .
but out on the rivers there are still millions of people who are in really bad shape .
and it 's a bleak future for them .
so , we have our ganges and yamuna cleanup project .
we 've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it , and nothing to show for it . incredible .
so , people talk about political will .
during the die-off of the gharial we did galvanize a lot of action .
government cut through all the red tape , we got foreign vets on it . it was great .
so , we can do it .
but if you stroll down to the yamuna or to the gomati in lucknow , or to the adyar river in chennai , or the mula-mutha river in pune , just see what we 're capable of doing to a river . it 's sad .
but i think the final note really is that we can do it .
the corporates , the artists , the wildlife nuts , the good old everyday folks can actually bring these rivers back .
and the final word is that there is a king cobra looking over our shoulders .
and there is a gharial looking at us from the river .
and these are powerful water totems .
and they are going to disturb our dreams until we do the right thing .
namaste .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thanks , rom . thanks a lot .
you know , most people are terrified of snakes .
and there might be quite a few people here who would be very glad to see the last king cobra bite the dust .
do you have those conversations with people ?
how do you really get them to care ?
romulus whitaker : i take the sort of humble approach , i guess you could say . i do n't say that snakes are huggable exactly .
it 's not like the teddy bear .
but i sort of - there is an innocence in these animals .
and when the average person looks at a cobra going " ssssss ! " like that , they say , " my god , look at that angry , dangerous creature . "
i look at it as a creature who is totally frightened of something so dangerous as a human being .
and that is the truth . and that 's what i try to get out .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : now , incredible footage you showed of the viper being killed .
you were saying that that has n't been filmed before .
rw : yes , this is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it , for one thing .
as i said , it 's just like a little snack for him , you know ?
usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes , or even cobras .
but this guy who we 're following right now is in the deep jungle .
whereas other king cobras very often come into the human interface , you know , the plantations , to find big rat snakes and stuff .
this guy specializes in pit vipers .
and the guy who is working there with them , he 's from maharashtra , he said , " i think he 's after the nusha . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the nusha means the high .
whenever he eats the pit viper he gets this little venom rush .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : thanks rom . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am sorry i can not show you my face , because if i do , the bad guys will come for me .
my journey started 14 years ago .
i was a young reporter . i had just come out of college .
then i got a scoop .
the scoop was quite a very simple story .
police officers were taking bribes from hawkers who were hawking on the streets .
as a young reporter , i thought that i should do it in a different way , so that it has a maximum impact , since everybody knew that it was happening , and yet there was nothing that was keeping it out of the system .
so i decided to go there and act as a seller .
as part of selling , i was able to document the hard core evidence .
the impact was great .
it was fantastic .
this was what many call immersion journalism , or undercover journalism .
i am an undercover journalist .
my journalism is hinged on three basic principles : naming , shaming and jailing .
journalism is about results .
it 's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way .
i have worked on this for over 14 years , and i can tell you , the results are very good .
one story that comes to mind in my undercover pieces is " spirit child . "
it was about children who were born with deformities , and their parents felt that once they were born with those deformities , they were not good enough to live in the society , so they were given some concoction to take and as a result they died .
so i built a prosthetic baby , and i went into the village , pretended as though this baby had been born with a deformity , and here was the guys who do the killing .
they got themselves ready .
in their bids to kill , i got the police on standby , and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child .
i recall how they were seriously boiling the concoction .
they put it on fire . it was boiling hot , getting ready to give to the kids .
whilst this was going on , the police i had alerted , they were on standby , and just as the concoction was ready , and they were about to give it to the kids , i phoned the police , and fortunately they came and busted them .
as i speak now , they are before the courts .
do n't forget the key principles : naming , shaming and jailing .
the court process is taking place , and i 'm very sure at the end of the day we will find them , and we will put them where they belong too .
another key story that comes to mind , which relates to this spirit child phenomenon , is " the spell of the albinos . "
i 'm sure most of you may have heard , in tanzania , children who are born with albinism are sometimes considered as being unfit to live in society .
their bodies are chopped up with machetes and are supposed to be used for some concoctions or some potions for people to get money - or so many , many stories people would tell about it .
it was time to go undercover again .
so i went undercover as a man who was interested in this particular business , of course .
again , a prosthetic arm was built .
for the first time , i filmed on hidden camera the guys who do this , and they were ready to buy the arm and they were ready to use it to prepare those potions for people .
i am glad today the tanzanian government has taken action , but the key issue is that the tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available .
my journalism is about hard core evidence .
if i say you have stolen , i show you the evidence that you have stolen .
i show you how you stole it and when , or what you used what you had stolen to do .
what is the essence of journalism if it does n't benefit society ?
my kind of journalism is a product of my society .
i know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism .
-lrb- video -rrb- official : he brought out some money from his pockets and put it on the table , so that we should not be afraid .
he wants to bring the cocoa and send it to cote d 'ivoire .
so with my hidden intention , i kept quiet .
i did n't utter a word .
but my colleagues did n't know .
so after collecting the money , when he left , we were waiting for him to bring the goods .
immediately after he left , i told my colleagues that since i was the leader of the group , i told my colleagues that if they come , we will arrest them .
second official : i do n't even know the place called -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
i 've never stepped there before .
so i 'm surprised .
you see a hand counting money just in front of me .
the next moment , you see the money in my hands , counting , whereas i have not come into contact with anybody .
i have not done any business with anybody .
reporter : when metro news contacted investigative reporter anas aremeyaw anas for his reaction , he just smiled and gave this video extract he did not use in the documentary recently shown onscreen .
the officer who earlier denied involvement pecks a calculator to compute the amount of money they will charge on the cocoa to be smuggled .
anas aremeyaw anas : this was another story on anticorruption .
and here was him , denying .
but you see , when you have the hard core evidence , you are able to affect society .
sometimes these are some of the headlines that come . -lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- i will curse anas to death -rsb- -lsb- anas lies -rsb- -lsb- alarm blows over anas ' news for cash video -rsb- -lsb- agenda against top ceps officials exposed -rsb- -lsb- anas operates with invisible powers ? -rsb- -lsb- gov 't wobbles over anas video -rsb- -lsb- hunting the hunter -rsb- -lsb- anas ' bribe ' men in court -rsb- -lsb- 15 heads roll over anas tape -rsb- -lsb- finance minister backs anas -rsb- -lsb- 11 given queries over anas ' story -rsb- -lsb- gja stands by anas -rsb- -lsb- prez . mills storms tema harbour over anas video -rsb- -lsb- " late prof. john evans atta mills : former president of ghana " -rsb- john evans atta mills : what anas says is not something which is unknown to many of us ,
but please , those of you who are agents , and who are leading the customs officers into temptation , i 'm telling you , ghana is not going to say any good things to you about this .
aaa : that was my president .
i thought that i could n't come here without giving you something special .
i have a piece , and i 'm excited that i 'm sharing it for the first time with you here .
i have been undercover in the prisons .
i have been there for a long time .
and i can tell you , what i saw is not nice .
but again , i can only affect society and affect government if i bring out the hard core evidence .
many times , the prison authorities have denied ever having issues of drug abuse , issues of sodomy , so many issues they would deny that it ever happens .
how can you obtain the hard core evidence ?
so i was in the prison . -lsb- " nsawan prison " -rsb- now , what you are seeing is a pile of dead bodies .
now , i happen to have followed one of my inmates , one of my friends , from his sick bed till death , and i can tell you it was not a nice thing at all .
there were issues of bad food being served as i recall that some of the food i ate is just not good for a human being .
toilet facilities : very bad .
i mean , you had to queue to get proper toilets to attend - and that 's what i call proper , when four of us are on a manhole .
it is something that if you narrate it to somebody , the person would n't believe it .
the only way that you can let the person believe is when you show hard core evidence .
of course , drugs were abundant .
it was easier to get cannabis , heroin and cocaine , faster even , in the prison than outside the prison .
evil in the society is an extreme disease .
if you have extreme diseases , you need to get extreme remedies .
my kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries , but i can tell you , it works in my part of the continent of africa , because usually , when people talk about corruption , they ask , " where is the evidence ?
show me the evidence . "
i say , " this is the evidence . "
and that has aided in me putting a lot of people behind bars .
you see , we on the continent are able to tell the story better because we face the conditions and we see the conditions .
that is why i was particularly excited when we launched our " africa investigates " series where we investigated a lot of african countries .
as a result of the success of the " africa investigates " series , we are moving on to world investigates .
by the end of it , a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars .
this will not stop .
i 'm going to carry on with this kind of journalism , because i know that when evil men destroy , good men must build and bind .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you . thank you .
i have some questions for you .
how did you end up in jail ? this was just a few weeks ago , i believe , yeah ?
aaa : sure . you know , undercover is all about setting the priorities right , so we got people to take me to court .
so i went through the very legal process , because at the end of the day , the prison authorities want to check whether indeed you have been there or not , and that 's how i got in there .
ca : so someone sued you in court , and they took you there , and you were in remand custody for part of it , and you did that deliberately .
aaa : yes , yes .
ca : talk to me just about fear and how you manage that , because you 're regularly putting your life at risk .
how do you do that ?
aaa : you see , undercover is always a last resort .
before we go undercover , we follow the rules .
and i 'm only comfortable and i 'm purged of fear whenever i am sure that all the steps have been taken . i do n't do it alone . i have a backup team who help ensure that the safety and all the systems are put in place , but you 've got to take very intelligent decisions whenever they are happening .
if you do n't , you will end up losing your life .
so yes , when the backup systems are put in place , i 'm okay , i go in . risky , yes , but it 's a hazard of a profession .
i mean , everybody has their hazard .
and once you say that is yours , you 've got to take it , as and when it comes .
ca : well , you 're an amazing human and you 've done amazing work and you 've taught us a story like no story i think any of us have heard before .
and we 're appreciative . we salute you . thank you so much , anas .
aaa : thank you .
ca : thank you . stay safe . -lrb- applause -rrb- i love to collect things .
ever since i was a kid , i 've had massive collections of random stuff , everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that i 've captured and put in jars .
now , it 's no secret , because i like collecting things , that i love the natural history museum and the collections of animals at the natural history museum in dioramas .
these , to me , are like living sculptures , right , that you can go and look at , and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal 's life .
so i was thinking about my own life , and how i 'd like to memorialize my life , you know , for the ages , and also - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the lives of my friends , but the problem with this is that my friends are n't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so instead , i turned to video , and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time .
so what i did was , i filmed six of my friends and then , using video mapping and video projection , i created a video sculpture , which was these six friends projected into jars . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i have this collection of my friends i can take around with me whenever i go , and this is called animalia chordata , from the latin nomenclature for human being , classification system .
so this piece memorializes my friends in these jars , and they actually move around . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this is interesting to me , but it lacked a certain human element . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a digital sculpture , so i wanted to add an interaction system . so what i did was , i added a proximity sensor , so that when you get close to the people in jars , they react to you in different ways .
you know , just like people on the street when you get too close to them .
some people reacted in terror . -lrb- laughter -rrb- others reacted in asking you for help , and some people hide from you .
so this was really interesting to me , this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life , and also adding interactivity to sculpture .
so over the next year , i documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as garden , which is literally a garden of humanity .
but something about the first piece , the animali chordata piece , kept coming back to me , this idea of interaction with art , and i really liked the idea of people being able to interact , and also being challenged by interacting with art .
so i wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something , and the way i did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a piece called blend , and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art .
you may never experience the entire thing yourself .
you can walk away , you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you , or you can actually choose to interact with it .
so if you do choose to interact with the piece , and you press the blender button , it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment .
by doing that , you are now part of my piece .
you , like the people that are trapped in my work - -lrb- blender noises , laughter -rrb- - have become part of my work as well . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but , but this seems a bit unfair , right ?
i put my friends in jars , i put this character , this sort of endangered species character in a blender .
but i 'd never done anything about myself .
i 'd never really memorialized myself .
so i decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece .
this is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called a point just passed , in which i project myself on top of a time card punch clock , and it 's up to you .
if you want to choose to punch that punch card clock , you actually age me .
so i start as a baby , and then if you punch the clock , you 'll actually transform the baby into a toddler , and then from a toddler i 'm transformed into a teenager .
from a teenager , i 'm transformed into my current self .
from my current self , i 'm turned into a middle-aged man , and then , from there , into an elderly man .
and if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day , the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day .
so , in doing so , you 're erasing time .
you 're actually implicit in this work and you 're erasing my life .
so i like this about interactive video sculpture , that you can actually interact with it , that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves , and hopefully , one day , i 'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars . -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- well after many years working in trade and economics , four years ago , i found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability .
and i found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and ca n't even obtain a meal .
this red cup comes from rwanda from a child named fabian .
and i carry this around as a symbol , really , of the challenge and also the hope .
because one cup of food a day changes fabian 's life completely .
but what i 'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning , about a billion people on earth - or one out of every seven - woke up and did n't even know how to fill this cup .
one out of every seven people .
first , i 'll ask you : why should you care ?
why should we care ?
for most people , if they think about hunger , they do n't have to go far back on their own family history - maybe in their own lives , or their parents ' lives , or their grandparents ' lives - to remember an experience of hunger .
i rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience .
some are driven by compassion , feel it 's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity .
as gandhi said , " to a hungry man , a piece of bread is the face of god . "
others worry about peace and security , stability in the world .
we saw the food riots in 2008 , after what i call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight .
the destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history .
one of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food .
others think about malthusian nightmares .
will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades ?
this is not a negotiable thing , hunger .
people have to eat .
there 's going to be a lot of people .
this is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain .
but i actually came to this issue in a different way .
this is a picture of me and my three children .
in 1987 , i was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television .
and this was yet another famine in ethiopia .
one two years earlier had killed more than a million people .
but it never struck me as it did that moment , because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby , and she had no milk to nurse .
and the baby 's cry really penetrated me , as a mother .
and i thought , there 's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that can not be returned with food - the most fundamental expectation of every human being .
and it was at that moment that i just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem .
this is n't one of those rare diseases that we do n't have the solution for .
we know how to fix hunger .
a hundred years ago , we did n't .
we actually have the technology and systems .
and i was just struck that this is out of place .
at our time in history , these images are out of place .
well guess what ?
this is last week in northern kenya .
yet again , the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day .
in fact , what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger .
this is more than hiv / aids , malaria and tuberculosis combined .
and we know that the issue is not just production of food .
one of my mentors in life was norman borlaug , my hero .
but today i 'm going to talk about access to food , because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis , there was enough food on earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories .
so why is it that we have a billion people who ca n't find food ?
and i also want to talk about what i call our new burden of knowledge .
in 2008 , lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days - from conception to two years old - does not have adequate nutrition , the damage is irreversible .
their brains and bodies will be stunted .
and here you see a brain scan of two children - one who had adequate nutrition , another , neglected and who was deeply malnourished .
and we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children .
and in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain do n't form .
and what we know now is this has huge impact on economies , which i 'll talk about later .
but also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years .
so this burden of knowledge drives me .
because actually we know how to fix it very simply .
and yet , in many places , a third of the children , by the time they 're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this .
i 'd like to talk about some of the things i 've seen on the front lines of hunger , some of the things i 've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector .
i 'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is .
well first , i 'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on earth , breastfeeding .
you may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life .
but in niger , for example , less than seven percent of the children are breastfed in mauritania , less than three percent .
this is something that can be transformed with knowledge .
this message , this word , can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business ; it 's a brilliant way of saving your child 's life .
and so today we focus on not just passing out food , but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment , and teaching them about breastfeeding .
the second thing i 'd like to talk about : if you were living in a remote village somewhere , your child was limp , and you were in a drought , or you were in floods , or you were in a situation where there was n't adequate diversity of diet , what would you do ?
do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars , like we can , and pick the right one to match ?
well i find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count .
and i go to those shops , if there are any , or out to the fields to see what they can get , and they can not obtain the nutrition .
even if they know what they need to do , it 's not available .
and i 'm very excited about this , because one thing we 're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops .
and this is made with chickpeas , dried milk and a host of vitamins , matched to exactly what the brain needs .
it costs 17 cents for us to produce this as , what i call , food for humanity .
we did this with food technologists in india and pakistan - really about three of them .
but this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this .
one package , 17 cents a day - their malnutrition is overcome .
so i am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods .
and this is climate-proof .
it does n't need to be refrigerated , it does n't need water , which is often lacking .
and these types of technologies , i see , have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition , malnutrition out on the front lines .
the next thing i want to talk about is school feeding .
eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net .
when disaster strikes - the economy gets blown , people lose a job , floods , war , conflict , bad governance , all of those things - there is nothing to fall back on .
and usually the institutions - churches , temples , other things - do not have the resources to provide a safety net .
what we have found working with the world bank is that the poor man 's safety net , the best investment , is school feeding .
and if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers , you have a transformative effect .
many kids in the world ca n't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal .
but when that food is there , it 's transformative .
it costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid 's life .
but what is most amazing is the effect on girls .
in countries where girls do n't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school , we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys .
we see a transformation in attendance by girls .
and there was no argument , because it 's incentive .
families need the help .
and we find that if we keep girls in school later , they 'll stay in school until they 're 16 , and wo n't get married if there 's food in school .
or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week - it costs about 50 cents - will keep a girl in school , and they 'll give birth to a healthier child , because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation .
we know this .
right now on the horn of africa , we 've been through this before .
so is this a hopeless cause ?
absolutely not .
i 'd like to talk about what i call our warehouses for hope .
cameroon , northern cameroon , boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades .
food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons .
well two years ago , we decided , let 's transform the model of fighting hunger , and instead of giving out the food aid , we put it into food banks .
and we said , listen , during the lean season , take the food out .
you manage , the village manages these warehouses .
and during harvest , put it back with interest , food interest .
so add in five percent , 10 percent more food .
for the past two years , 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid - they 're self-sufficient .
and the food banks are growing .
and they 're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village .
but they 've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources .
i love this idea that came from the village level : three keys to unlock that warehouse .
food is gold there .
and simple ideas can transform the face , not of small areas , of big areas of the world .
i 'd like to talk about what i call digital food .
technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine .
amartya sen won his nobel prize for saying , " guess what , famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it . "
we certainly saw that in 2008 .
we 're seeing that now in the horn of africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year .
food can be there and people ca n't buy it .
well this picture - i was in hebron in a small shop , this shop , where instead of bringing in food , we provide digital food , a card .
it says " bon appetit " in arabic .
and the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items .
they have to be nutritious , and they have to be locally produced .
and what 's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry - where this card 's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus - the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent .
the shopkeepers are hiring more people .
it is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving .
we now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones , transforming even the presence of refugees in countries , and other ways .
perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that bill gates , howard buffett and others have supported boldly , which is to ask the question : what if , instead of looking at the hungry as victims - and most of them are small farmers who can not raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families - what if we view them as the solution , as the value chain to fight hunger ?
what if from the women in africa who can not sell any food - there 's no roads , there 's no warehouses , there 's not even a tarp to pick the food up with - what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere ?
and purchasing for progress today is in 21 countries .
and guess what ?
in virtually every case , when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market - if you say , " we will buy 300 metric tons of this .
we 'll pick it up . we 'll make sure it 's stored properly . " - their yields have gone up two- , three- , fourfold and they figure it out , because it 's the first guaranteed opportunity they 've had in their life .
and we 're seeing people transform their lives .
today , food aid , our food aid - huge engine - 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world .
total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food .
now you 'd ask , can this be done at scale ?
these are great ideas , village-level ideas .
well i 'd like to talk about brazil , because i 've taken a journey to brazil over the past couple of years , when i read that brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on earth right now .
and what i 've found is , rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things , they invested in a school feeding program .
and they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity .
and they 're doing this at huge scale after president lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day .
and this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of gdp and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty .
it is transforming the face of hunger in brazil , and it 's at scale , and it 's creating opportunities .
i 've gone out there ; i 've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this .
now if we look at the economic imperative here , this is n't just about compassion .
the fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger - the cost to society , the burden it has to bear - is on average six percent , and in some countries up to 11 percent , of gdp a year .
and if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition , that 's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year .
well , the world bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars - 10.3 - to address malnutrition in those countries .
you look at the cost-benefit analysis , and my dream is to take this issue , not just from the compassion argument , but to the finance ministers of the world , and say we can not afford to not invest in the access to adequate , affordable nutrition for all of humanity .
the amazing thing i 've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader .
when a leader says , " not under my watch , " everything begins to change .
and the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this .
and the fact that france has put food at the center of the g20 is really important .
because food is one issue that can not be solved person by person , nation by nation .
we have to stand together .
and we 're seeing nations in africa .
wfp 's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations .
what i would like to offer here is a challenge .
i believe we 're living at a time in human history where it 's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and do n't know where to find a cup of food .
not only that , transforming hunger is an opportunity , but i think we have to change our mindsets .
i am so honored to be here with some of the world 's top innovators and thinkers .
and i would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say , " no more .
no more are we going to accept this . "
and we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted , but that exists no more .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dogs have interests .
they have interest sniffing each other , chasing squirrels .
and if we do n't make that a reward in training , that will be a distraction .
it 's always sort of struck me as really a scary thought that if you see a dog in a park , and the owner is calling it , and the owner says , you know , " puppy , come here , come here , " and the dog thinks , " hmm , interesting .
i 'm sniffing this other dog 's rear end , the owner 's calling . "
it 's a difficult choice , right ?
rear end , owner . rear end wins .
i mean , you lose .
you can not compete with the environment , if you have an adolescent dog 's brain .
so , when we train , we 're always trying to take into account the dog 's point of view .
now , i 'm here largely because there 's kind of a rift in dog training at the moment that - on one side , we have people who think that you train a dog , number one , by making up rules , human rules .
we do n't take the dog 's point of view into account .
so the human says , " you 're going to act this way , damn it .
we 're going to force you to act against your will , to bend to our will . "
then , number two , we keep these rules a secret from the dog .
and then number three , now we can punish the dog for breaking rules he did n't even know existed .
so you get a little puppy , he comes . his only crime is he grew .
when he was a little puppy , he puts his paws on your leg - you know , is n't that nice ?
and you go , " oh , there 's a good boy . "
you bend down , you pat him - you reward him for jumping up .
his one mistake is he 's a tibetan mastiff , and a few months later , he weighs , you know , 80 pounds .
every time he jumps up , he gets all sorts of abuse .
i mean , it is really very , very scary the abuse that dogs get .
so , this whole dominance issue - number one , what we get in dog training is this mickey-mouse interpretation of a very complicated social system .
and they take this stuff seriously .
male dogs are very serious about a hierarchy , because it prevents physical fights .
of course , female dogs , bitches , on the other hand , have several bitch amendments to male hierarchical rule .
the number one is , " i have it , you do n't . "
and what you will find is a very , very low-ranking bitch will quite easily keep a bone away from a high-ranking male .
so , we get in dog training this notion of dominances , or of the alpha dog . i 'm sure that you 've heard this .
dogs get so abused .
dogs , horses and humans - these are the three species which are so abused in life .
and the reason is built into their behavior - is to always come back and apologize .
like , " oh , i 'm sorry you had to beat me . i 'm really sorry , yes , it 's my fault . "
they are just so beatable , and that 's why they get beaten .
the poor puppy jumps up , you open the dog book , what does it say ?
" hold his front paws , squeeze his front paws , stamp on his hind feet , squirt him in the face with lemon juice , hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper , knee him in the chest , flip him over backwards . "
because he grew ?
and because he 's performing a behavior you 've trained him to do ?
this is insanity .
i ask owners , " well , how would you like the dog to greet you ? "
and people say , " well , i do n't know , to sit , i guess . "
i said , " let 's teach him to sit . "
and then we give him a reason for sitting .
because the first stage is basically teaching a dog esl .
i could speak to you and say , " laytay-chai , paisey , paisey . "
go on , something should happen now .
why are n't you responding ? oh , you do n't speak swahili .
well , i 've got news for you .
the dog does n't speak english , or american , or spanish , or french .
so the first stage in training is to teach the dog esl , english as a second language .
and that 's how we use the food lure in the hand , and we use food because we 're dealing with owners .
my wife does n't need food - she 's a great trainer , much better than i am .
i do n't need food , but the average owner says , " puppy , sit . "
or they go , " sit , sit , sit . "
they 're making a hand signal in front of the dog 's rectum for some reason , like the dog has a third eye there - it 's insane .
you know , " sit , sit . "
no , we go , " puppy , sit " - boom , it 's got it in six to 10 trials .
then we phase out the food as a lure , and now the dog knows that " sit " means sit , and you can actually communicate to a dog in a perfectly constructed english sentence .
" phoenix , come here , take this , and go to jamie , please . "
and i 've taught her " phoenix , " " come here , " " take this , " " go to " and the name of my son , " jamie . "
and the dog can take a note , and i 've got my own little search-and-rescue dog .
he 'll find jamie wherever he is , you know , wherever kids are , crushing rocks by a stream or something , and take him a little message that says , " hey , dinner 's ready . come in for dinner . "
so , at this point , the dog knows what we want it to do .
will it do it ?
not necessarily , no .
as i said , if he 's in the park and there 's a rear end to sniff , why come to the owner ?
the dog lives with you , the dog can get you any time .
the dog can sniff your butt , if you like , when he wants to .
at the moment , he 's in the park , and you are competing with smells , and other dogs , and squirrels .
so the second stage in training is to teach the dog to want to do what we want him to do , and this is very easy .
we use the premack principle .
basically , we follow a low-frequency behavior - one the dog does n't want to do - by a high-frequency behavior , commonly known as a behavior problem , or a dog hobby - something the dog does like to do .
that will then become a reward for the lower-frequency behavior .
so we go , " sit , " on the couch ; " sit , " tummy-rub ; " sit , " look , i throw a tennis ball ; " sit , " say hello to that other dog .
yes , we put " sniff butt " on queue .
" sit , " sniff butt .
so now all of these distractions that worked against training now become rewards that work for training .
and what we 're doing , in essence , is we 're teaching the dog , kind of like - we 're letting the dog think that the dog is training us .
and i can imagine this dog , you know , speaking through the fence to , say , an akita , saying , " wow , my owners , they are so incredibly easy to train .
they 're like golden retrievers .
all i have to do is sit , and they do everything .
they open doors , they drive my car , they massage me , they will throw tennis balls , they will cook for me and serve the food .
it 's like , if i just sit , that 's my command .
then i have my own personal doorman , chauffeur , masseuse , chef and waiter . "
and now the dog 's really happy .
and this , to me , is always what training is .
so we really motivate the dog to want to do it , such that the need for punishment seldom comes up .
now we move to phase three , when now - there 's times , you know , when daddy knows best .
and i have a little sign on my fridge , and it says , " because i 'm the daddy , that 's why . "
sorry , no more explanation . " i 'm the daddy , you 're not . sit . "
and there 's times , for example , if my son 's friends leave the door open , the dogs have to know you do n't step across this line .
this is a life-or-death thing .
you leave this , the sanctity of your house , and you could be hit on the street .
so some things we have to let the dog know , " you must n't do this . "
and so we have to enforce , but without force .
people here get very confused about what a punishment is .
they think a punishment is something nasty .
i bet a lot of you do , right ?
you think it 's something painful , or scary , or nasty .
it does n't have to be .
there 's several definitions of what a punishment is , but one definition , the most popular , is : a punishment is a stimulus that reduces the immediately preceding behavior , such that it 's less likely to occur in the future .
it does not have to be nasty , scary or painful .
and i would say , if it does n't have to be , then maybe it should n't be .
i was working with a very dangerous dog about a year ago .
and this was a dog that put both his owners in hospital , plus the brother-in-law , plus the child .
and i only agreed to work with it if they promised it would stay in their house , and they never took it outside .
the dog is actually euthanized now , but this was a dog i worked with for a while .
a lot of the aggression happened around the kitchen , so while i was there - this was on the fourth visit - we did a four and a half hour down-stay , with the dog on his mat .
and he was kept there by the owner 's calm insistence .
when the dog would try to leave the mat , she would say , " rover , on the mat , on the mat , on the mat . "
the dog broke his down-stay 22 times in four and a half hours , while she cooked dinner , because we had a lot of aggression related towards food .
the breaks got fewer and fewer .
you see , the punishment was working .
the behavior problem was going away .
she never raised her voice .
if she did , she would have got bitten .
it 's not a good dog you shout at .
and a lot of my friends train really neat animals , grizzly bears - if you 've ever seen a grizzly bear on the telly or in film , then it 's a friend of mine who 's trained it - killer whales . i love it because it wires you up .
how are you going to reprimand a grizzly bear ?
" bad bear , bad bear ! " voom !
your head now is 100 yards away , sailing through the air , ok ?
this is crazy .
so , where do we go from here ?
we want a better way .
dogs deserve better .
but for me , the reason for this actually has to do with dogs .
it has to do with watching people train puppies , and realizing they have horrendous interaction skills , horrendous relationship skills .
not just with their puppy , but with the rest of the family at class .
i mean , my all-time classic is another " come here " one .
you see someone in the park - and i 'll cover my mic when i say this , because i do n't want to wake you up - and there 's the owner in the park , and their dog 's over here , and they say , " rover , come here .
rover , come here . rover , come here , you son of a bitch . "
the dog says , " i do n't think so . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , who in their right mind would think that a dog would want to approach them when they 're screaming like that ?
instead , the dog says , " i know that tone . i know that tone .
previously , when i 've approached , i 've gotten punished there . "
i was walking onto a plane - this , for me , was a pivotal moment in my career , and it really cemented what i wanted to do with this whole puppy-training thing , the notion of how to teach puppies in a dog-friendly way to want to do what we want to do , so we do n't have to force them .
you know , i puppy-train my child .
and the seminal moment was , i was getting on a plane in dallas , and in row two was a father , i presume , and a young boy about five , kicking the back of the chair .
" johnny , do n't do that . "
kick , kick , kick .
" johnny , do n't do that . " kick , kick , kick .
i 'm standing right here with my bag .
the father leans over , grabs him like this and gives him ugly face .
and ugly face is this - when you go face-to-face with a puppy or a child , you say , " what are you doing ! now stop it , stop it , stop it ! "
and i went , " oh my god , do i do something ? "
that child has lost everything - that one of the two people he can trust in this world has absolutely pulled the rug from under his feet .
and i thought , " do i tell this jerk to quit it ? "
i thought , " ian , stay out of it , stay out of it , you know , walk on . "
i walked to the back of the plane , i sat down , and a thought came to me .
if that had been a dog , i would have laid him out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if he had kicked a dog , i would have punched him out .
he kicked a child , grabs the child like this and i let it go .
and this is what it 's all about .
these relationship skills are so easy .
i mean , we as humans , our shallowness when we choose a life-mate based on the three cs - coat color , conformation , cuteness .
you know , kind of like a little robot .
this is how we go into a relationship , and it 's hunky-dory for a year .
and then , a little behavior problem comes up .
no different from the dog barking .
the husband wo n't clear up his clothes , or the wife 's always late for meetings , whatever it is , ok ?
and it then starts , and we get into this thing , and our personal feedback - there 's two things about it .
when you watch people interacting with animals or other people , there is very little feedback , it 's too infrequent .
and when it happens , it 's bad , it 's nasty .
you see it 's especially in families , especially with spouses , especially with children , especially with parents .
you see it especially in the workplace , especially from boss to employee .
it 's as if there 's some schadenfreude there , that we actually take delight in people getting things wrong , so that we can then moan and groan and bitch at them .
and this , i would say , is the biggest human foible that we have .
it really is .
we take the good for granted , and we moan and groan at the bad .
and i think this whole notion of these skills should be taught .
you know , calculus is wonderful .
when i was a kid , i was a calculus whiz .
i do n't understand a thing about it now , but i could do it as a kid .
geometry , fantastic . you know , quantum mechanics - these are cool things .
but they do n't save marriages and they do n't raise children .
and my look to the future is , and what i want to do with this doggy stuff , is to teach people that you know , your husband 's just as easy to train .
probably easier - if you got a rottie - much easier to train .
your kids are easy to train .
all you 've got to do is to watch them , to time-sample the behavior , and say , every five minutes , you ask the question , " is it good , or is it bad ? "
if it 's good , say , " that was really neat , thank you . "
that is such a powerful training technique .
this should be taught in schools .
relationships - how do you negotiate ?
how you do negotiate with your friend who wants your toy ?
you know , how to prepare you for your first relationship ?
how on earth about raising children ?
we think how we do it - one night in bed , we 're pregnant , and then we 're raising the most important thing in life , a child .
no , this is what should be taught - the good living , the good habits , which are just as hard to break as bad habits .
so , that would be my wish to the future .
ah , damn , i wanted to end exactly on time , but i got eight , seven , six , five , four , three , two - so thank you very much . that 's my talk , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's face it : driving is dangerous .
it 's one of the things that we do n't like to think about , but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true .
car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the united states - leading cause of death - and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol .
so what happens ?
no one can say for sure , but i remember my first accident .
i was a young driver out on the highway , and the car in front of me , i saw the brake lights go on .
i 'm like , " okay , all right , this guy is slowing down , i 'll slow down too . "
i step on the brake .
but no , this guy is n't slowing down .
this guy is stopping , dead stop , dead stop on the highway .
it was just going 65 - to zero ?
i slammed on the brakes .
i felt the abs kick in , and the car is still going , and it 's not going to stop , and i know it 's not going to stop , and the air bag deploys , the car is totaled , and fortunately , no one was hurt .
but i had no idea that car was stopping , and i think we can do a lot better than that .
i think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other .
i just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now .
get into your car . close the door . you 're in a glass bubble .
you ca n't really directly sense the world around you .
you 're in this extended body .
you 're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways , in and amongst other metal giants , at super-human speeds .
okay ? and all you have to guide you are your two eyes .
okay , so that 's all you have , eyes that were n't really designed for this task , but then people ask you to do things like , you want to make a lane change , take your eyes off the road . that 's right .
stop looking where you 're going , turn , check your blind spot , and drive down the road without looking where you 're going .
you and everyone else . this is the safe way to drive .
why do we do this ? because we have to , we have to make a choice , do i look here or do i look here ?
what 's more important ?
and usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road .
but occasionally we miss something .
occasionally we sense something wrong or too late .
in countless accidents , the driver says , " i did n't see it coming . "
and i believe that . i believe that .
we can only watch so much .
but the technology exists now that can help us improve that .
in the future , with cars exchanging data with each other , we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind , to the right and left , all at the same time , bird 's eye view , we will actually be able to see into those cars .
we will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us , to see how fast that guy 's going or stopping .
if that guy 's going down to zero , i 'll know .
and with computation and algorithms and predictive models , we will be able to see the future .
you may think that 's impossible .
how can you predict the future ? that 's really hard .
actually , no . with cars , it 's not impossible .
cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity .
they travel down roads .
often they travel on pre-published routes .
it 's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car 's going to be in the near future .
even if , when you 're in your car and some motorcyclist comes - bshoom ! - 85 miles an hour down , lane-splitting - i know you 've had this experience - that guy did n't " just come out of nowhere . "
that guy 's been on the road probably for the last half hour .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right ? i mean , somebody 's seen him .
ten , 20 , 30 miles back , someone 's seen that guy , and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map , he 's on the map - position , velocity , good estimate he 'll continue going 85 miles an hour .
you 'll know , because your car will know , because that other car will have whispered something in his ear , like , " by the way , five minutes , motorcyclist , watch out . "
you can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave .
i mean , they 're newtonian objects .
that 's very nice about them .
so how do we get there ?
we can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars , just sharing gps .
if i have a gps and a camera in my car , i have a pretty precise idea of where i am and how fast i 'm going .
with computer vision , i can estimate where the cars around me are , sort of , and where they 're going .
and same with the other cars .
they can have a precise idea of where they are , and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are .
what happens if two cars share that data , if they talk to each other ?
i can tell you exactly what happens .
both models improve .
everybody wins .
professor bob wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine , even in light traffic , when cars just share gps data , and we 've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots : stereo cameras , gps , and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems .
we also attach a discrete short-range communication radio , and the robots talk to each other .
when these robots come at each other , they track each other 's position precisely , and they can avoid each other .
we 're now adding more and more robots into the mix , and we encountered some problems .
one of the problems , when you get too much chatter , it 's hard to process all the packets , so you have to prioritize , and that 's where the predictive model helps you .
if your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories , you do n't pay as much attention to those packets .
you prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course .
that guy could be a problem .
and you can predict the new trajectory .
so you do n't only know that he 's going off course , you know how .
and you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way .
and we wanted to do - how can we best alert everyone ?
how can these cars whisper , " you need to get out of the way ? "
well , it depends on two things : one , the ability of the car , and second the ability of the driver .
if one guy has a really great car , they 're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency .
so we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling .
and now , using a series of three cameras , we can detect if a driver is looking forward , looking away , looking down , on the phone , or having a cup of coffee .
we can predict the accident and we can predict who , which cars , are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone .
fundamentally , these technologies exist today .
i think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data .
i think it 's a very disconcerting notion , this idea that our cars will be watching us , talking about us to other cars , that we 'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip .
but i believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy , just like right now , when i look at your car from the outside , i do n't really know about you .
i do n't really know who you are .
i believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think it 's going to be a great thing .
i want you to consider for a moment if you really do n't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you 're braking , that you 're coming to a dead stop .
by sharing our data willingly , we can do what 's best for everyone .
so let your car gossip about you .
it 's going to make the roads a lot safer .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today representing a team of artists and technologists and filmmakers that worked together on a remarkable film project for the last four years .
and along the way they created a breakthrough in computer visualization .
so i want to show you a clip of the film now .
hopefully it wo n't stutter .
and if we did our jobs well , you wo n't know that we were even involved .
voice -lrb- video -rrb- : i do n't know how it 's possible ...
but you seem to have more hair .
brad pitt : what if i told you that i was n't getting older ...
but i was getting younger than everybody else ?
i was born with some form of disease .
voice : what kind of disease ?
bp : i was born old .
man : i 'm sorry .
bp : no need to be . there 's nothing wrong with old age .
girl : are you sick ?
bp : i heard momma and tizzy whisper , and they said i was gonna die soon .
but ... maybe not .
girl : you 're different than anybody i 've ever met .
bb : there were many changes ...
some you could see , some you could n't .
hair started growing in all sorts of places , along with other things .
i felt pretty good , considering .
ed ulbrich : that was a clip from " the curious case of benjamin button . "
many of you , maybe you 've seen it or you 've heard of the story , but what you might not know is that for nearly the first hour of the film , the main character , benjamin button , who 's played by brad pitt , is completely computer-generated from the neck up .
now , there 's no use of prosthetic makeup or photography of brad superimposed over another actor 's body .
we 've created a completely digital human head .
so i 'd like to start with a little bit of history on the project .
this is based on an f. scott fitzgerald short story .
it 's about a man who 's born old and lives his life in reverse .
now , this movie has floated around hollywood for well over half a century , and we first got involved with the project in the early ' 90s , with ron howard as the director .
we took a lot of meetings and we seriously considered it .
but at the time we had to throw in the towel .
it was deemed impossible .
it was beyond the technology of the day to depict a man aging backwards .
the human form , in particular the human head , has been considered the holy grail of our industry .
the project came back to us about a decade later , and this time with a director named david fincher .
now , fincher is an interesting guy .
david is fearless of technology , and he is absolutely tenacious .
and david wo n't take " no . "
and david believed , like we do in the visual effects industry , that anything is possible as long as you have enough time , resources and , of course , money .
and so david had an interesting take on the film , and he threw a challenge at us .
he wanted the main character of the film to be played from the cradle to the grave by one actor .
it happened to be this guy .
we went through a process of elimination and a process of discovery with david , and we ruled out , of course , swapping actors .
that was one idea : that we would have different actors , and we would hand off from actor to actor .
we even ruled out the idea of using makeup .
we realized that prosthetic makeup just would n't hold up , particularly in close-up .
and makeup is an additive process . you have to build the face up .
and david wanted to carve deeply into brad 's face to bring the aging to this character .
he needed to be a very sympathetic character .
so we decided to cast a series of little people that would play the different bodies of benjamin at the different increments of his life and that we would in fact create a computer-generated version of brad 's head , aged to appear as benjamin , and attach that to the body of the real actor .
sounded great .
of course , this was the holy grail of our industry , and the fact that this guy is a global icon did n't help either , because i 'm sure if any of you ever stand in line at the grocery store , you know - we see his face constantly .
so there really was no tolerable margin of error .
there were two studios involved : warner brothers and paramount .
and they both believed this would make an amazing film , of course , but it was a very high-risk proposition .
there was lots of money and reputations at stake .
but we believed that we had a very solid methodology that might work ...
but despite our verbal assurances , they wanted some proof .
and so , in 2004 , they commissioned us to do a screen test of benjamin .
and we did it in about five weeks .
but we used lots of cheats and shortcuts .
we basically put something together to get through the meeting .
i 'll roll that for you now . this was the first test for benjamin button .
and in here , you can see , that 's a computer-generated head - pretty good - attached to the body of an actor .
and it worked . and it gave the studio great relief .
after many years of starts and stops on this project , and making that tough decision , they finally decided to greenlight the movie .
and i can remember , actually , when i got the phone call to congratulate us , to say the movie was a go , i actually threw up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , this is some tough stuff .
so we started to have early team meetings , and we got everybody together , and it was really more like therapy in the beginning , convincing each other and reassuring each other that we could actually undertake this .
we had to hold up an hour of a movie with a character .
and it 's not a special effects film ; it has to be a man .
we really felt like we were in a - kind of a 12-step program .
and of course , the first step is : admit you 've got a problem . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we had a big problem : we did n't know how we were going to do this .
but we did know one thing .
being from the visual effects industry , we , with david , believed that we now had enough time , enough resources , and , god , we hoped we had enough money .
and we had enough passion to will the processes and technology into existence .
so , when you 're faced with something like that , of course you 've got to break it down .
you take the big problem and you break it down into smaller pieces and you start to attack that .
so we had three main areas that we had to focus on .
we needed to make brad look a lot older - needed to age him 45 years or so .
and we also needed to make sure that we could take brad 's idiosyncrasies , his little tics , the little subtleties that make him who he is and have that translate through our process so that it appears in benjamin on the screen .
and we also needed to create a character that could hold up under , really , all conditions .
he needed to be able to walk in broad daylight , at nighttime , under candlelight , he had to hold an extreme close-up , he had to deliver dialogue , he had to be able to run , he had to be able to sweat , he had to be able to take a bath , to cry , he even had to throw up .
not all at the same time - but he had to , you know , do all of those things .
and the work had to hold up for almost the first hour of the movie .
we did about 325 shots .
so we needed a system that would allow benjamin to do everything a human being can do .
and we realized that there was a giant chasm between the state of the art of technology in 2004 and where we needed it to be .
so we focused on motion capture .
i 'm sure many of you have seen motion capture .
the state of the art at the time was something called marker-based motion capture .
i 'll give you an example here .
it 's basically the idea of , you wear a leotard , and they put some reflective markers on your body , and instead of using cameras , there 're infrared sensors around a volume , and those infrared sensors track the three-dimensional position of those markers in real time .
and then animators can take the data of the motion of those markers and apply them to a computer-generated character .
you can see the computer characters on the right are having the same complex motion as the dancers .
but we also looked at numbers of other films at the time that were using facial marker tracking , and that 's the idea of putting markers on the human face and doing the same process .
and as you can see , it gives you a pretty crappy performance .
that 's not terribly compelling .
and what we realized was that what we needed was the information that was going on between the markers .
we needed the subtleties of the skin .
we needed to see skin moving over muscle moving over bone .
we needed creases and dimples and wrinkles and all of those things .
our first revelation was to completely abort and walk away from the technology of the day , the status quo , the state of the art .
so we aborted using motion capture .
and we were now well out of our comfort zone , and in uncharted territory .
so we were left with this idea that we ended up calling " technology stew . "
we started to look out in other fields .
the idea was that we were going to find nuggets or gems of technology that come from other industries like medical imaging , the video game space , and re-appropriate them .
and we had to create kind of a sauce .
that we 'd written to allow these disparate pieces of technology to come together and work as one .
initially , we came across some remarkable research done by a gentleman named dr. paul ekman in the early ' 70s .
he believed that he could , in fact , catalog the human face .
and he came up with this idea of facial action coding system , or facs .
he believed that there were 70 basic poses or shapes of the human face , and that those basic poses or shapes of the face can be combined to create infinite possibilities of everything the human face is capable of doing .
and of course , these transcend age , race , culture , gender .
so this became the foundation of our research as we went forward .
and then we came across some remarkable technology called contour .
and here you can see a subject having phosphorus makeup stippled on her face .
and now what we 're looking at is really creating a surface capture as opposed to a marker capture .
the subject stands in front of a computer array of cameras , and those cameras can , frame-by-frame , reconstruct the geometry of exactly what the subject 's doing at the moment .
so , effectively , you get 3d data in real time of the subject .
and if you look in a comparison , on the left , we see what volumetric data gives us and on the right you see what markers give us .
so , clearly , we were in a substantially better place for this .
but these were the early days of this technology , and it was n't really proven yet .
we measure complexity and fidelity of data in terms of polygonal count .
and so , on the left , we were seeing 100,000 polygons .
we could go up into the millions of polygons .
it seemed to be infinite .
this was when we had our " aha ! "
this was the breakthrough .
this is when we 're like , " ok , we 're going to be ok , this is actually going to work . "
and the " aha ! " was , what if we could take brad pitt , and we could put brad in this device , and use this contour process , and we could stipple on this phosphorescent makeup and put him under the black lights , and we could , in fact , scan him in real time performing ekman 's facs poses .
right ? so , effectively , we ended up with a 3d database of everything brad pitt 's face is capable of doing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- from there , we actually carved up those faces into smaller pieces and components of his face .
so we ended up with literally thousands and thousands and thousands of shapes , a complete database of all possibilities that his face is capable of doing .
now , that 's great , except we had him at age 44 .
we need to put another 40 years on him at this point .
we brought in rick baker , and rick is one of the great makeup and special effects gurus of our industry .
and we also brought in a gentleman named kazu tsuji , and kazu tsuji is one of the great photorealist sculptors of our time .
and we commissioned them to make a maquette , or a bust , of benjamin .
so , in the spirit of " the great unveiling " - i had to do this - i had to unveil something .
so this is ben 80 .
we created three of these : there 's ben 80 , there 's ben 70 , there 's ben 60 .
and this really became the template for moving forward .
now , this was made from a life cast of brad .
so , in fact , anatomically , it is correct .
the eyes , the jaw , the teeth : everything is in perfect alignment with what the real guy has .
we have these maquettes scanned into the computer at very high resolution - enormous polygonal count .
and so now we had three age increments of benjamin in the computer .
but we needed to get a database of him doing more than that .
we went through this process , then , called retargeting .
this is brad doing one of the ekman facs poses .
and here 's the resulting data that comes from that , the model that comes from that .
retargeting is the process of transposing that data onto another model .
and because the life cast , or the bust - the maquette - of benjamin was made from brad , we could transpose the data of brad at 44 onto brad at 87 .
so now , we had a 3d database of everything brad pitt 's face can do at age 87 , in his 70s and in his 60s .
next we had to go into the shooting process .
so while all that 's going on , we 're down in new orleans and locations around the world .
and we shot our body actors , and we shot them wearing blue hoods .
so these are the gentleman who played benjamin .
and the blue hoods helped us with two things : one , we could easily erase their heads ; and we also put tracking markers on their heads so we could recreate the camera motion and the lens optics from the set .
but now we needed to get brad 's performance to drive our virtual benjamin .
and so we edited the footage that was shot on location with the rest of the cast and the body actors and about six months later we brought brad onto a sound stage in los angeles and he watched on the screen .
his job , then , was to become benjamin .
and so we looped the scenes .
he watched again and again .
we encouraged him to improvise .
and he took benjamin into interesting and unusual places that we did n't think he was going to go .
we shot him with four hd cameras so we 'd get multiple views of him and then david would choose the take of brad being benjamin that he thought best matched the footage with the rest of the cast .
from there we went into a process called image analysis .
and so here , you can see again , the chosen take .
and you are seeing , now , that data being transposed on to ben 87 .
and so , what 's interesting about this is we used something called image analysis , which is taking timings from different components of benjamin 's face .
and so we could choose , say , his left eyebrow .
and the software would tell us that , well , in frame 14 the left eyebrow begins to move from here to here , and it concludes moving in frame 32 .
and so we could choose numbers of positions on the face to pull that data from .
and then , the sauce i talked about with our technology stew - that secret sauce was , effectively , software that allowed us to match the performance footage of brad in live action with our database of aged benjamin , the facs shapes that we had .
on a frame-by-frame basis , we could actually reconstruct a 3d head that exactly matched the performance of brad .
so this was how the finished shot appeared in the film .
and here you can see the body actor .
and then this is what we called the " dead head , " no reference to jerry garcia .
and then here 's the reconstructed performance now with the timings of the performance .
and then , again , the final shot .
it was a long process .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the next section here , i 'm going to just blast through this , because we could do a whole tedtalk on the next several slides .
we had to create a lighting system .
so really , a big part of our processes was creating a lighting environment for every single location that benjamin had to appear so that we could put ben 's head into any scene and it would exactly match the lighting that 's on the other actors in the real world .
we also had to create an eye system .
we found the old adage , you know , " the eyes are the window to the soul , " absolutely true .
so the key here was to keep everybody looking in ben 's eyes .
and if you could feel the warmth , and feel the humanity , and feel his intent coming through the eyes , then we would succeed .
so we had one person focused on the eye system for almost two full years .
we also had to create a mouth system .
we worked from dental molds of brad .
we had to age the teeth over time .
we also had to create an articulating tongue that allowed him to enunciate his words .
there was a whole system written in software to articulate the tongue .
we had one person devoted to the tongue for about nine months .
he was very popular .
skin displacement : another big deal .
the skin had to be absolutely accurate .
he 's also in an old age home , he 's in a nursing home around other old people , so he had to look exactly the same as the others .
so , lots of work on skin deformation , you can see in some of these cases it works , in some cases it looks bad .
this is a very , very , very early test in our process .
so , effectively we created a digital puppet that brad pitt could operate with his own face .
there were no animators necessary to come in and interpret behavior or enhance his performance .
there was something that we encountered , though , that we ended up calling " the digital botox effect . "
so , as things went through this process , fincher would always say , " it sandblasts the edges off of the performance . "
and thing our process and the technology could n't do , is they could n't understand intent , the intent of the actor .
so it sees a smile as a smile .
it does n't recognize an ironic smile , or a happy smile , or a frustrated smile .
so it did take humans to kind of push it one way or another .
but we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology " emotion capture , " as opposed to just motion capture .
take another look .
brad pitt : well , i heard momma and tizzy whisper , and they said i was gonna die soon , but ... maybe not .
eu : that 's how to create a digital human in 18 minutes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a couple of quick factoids ; it really took 155 people over two years , and we did n't even talk about 60 hairstyles and an all-digital haircut .
but , that is benjamin . thank you .
it 's the second world war .
a german prison camp .
and this man , archie cochrane , is a prisoner of war and a doctor , and he has a problem .
the problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that archie does n't really understand .
the symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin .
but he does n't know whether it 's an infection , whether it 's to do with malnutrition .
he does n't know how to cure it .
and he 's operating in a hostile environment .
and people do terrible things in wars .
the german camp guards , they 've got bored .
they 've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun .
on one particular occasion , one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners ' lavatory while it was full of prisoners .
he said he heard suspicious laughter .
and archie cochrane , as the camp doctor , was one of the first men in to clear up the mess .
and one more thing : archie was suffering from this illness himself .
so the situation seemed pretty desperate .
but archie cochrane was a resourceful person .
he 'd already smuggled vitamin c into the camp , and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market .
now some of you will be wondering what marmite is .
marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the british .
it looks like crude oil .
it tastes ...
zesty .
and importantly , it 's a rich source of vitamin b12 .
so archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups .
he gives half of them vitamin c.
he gives half of them vitamin b12 .
he very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book .
and after just a few days , it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness , marmite is the cure .
so cochrane then goes to the germans who are running the prison camp .
now you 've got to imagine at the moment - forget this photo , imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair .
he has n't been able to shave - a sort of billy connolly figure .
cochrane , he starts ranting at these germans in this scottish accent - in fluent german , by the way , but in a scottish accent - and explains to them how german culture was the culture that gave schiller and goethe to the world .
and he ca n't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated , and he vents his frustrations .
and then he goes back to his quarters , breaks down and weeps because he 's convinced that the situation is hopeless .
but a young german doctor picks up archie cochrane 's exercise book and says to his colleagues , " this evidence is incontrovertible .
if we do n't supply vitamins to the prisoners , it 's a war crime . "
and the next morning , supplies of vitamin b12 are delivered to the camp , and the prisoners begin to recover .
now i 'm not telling you this story because i think archie cochrane is a dude , although archie cochrane is a dude .
i 'm not even telling you the story because i think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy , although i think that would also be completely awesome .
i 'm telling you this story because archie cochrane , all his life , fought against a terrible affliction , and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies .
and he had a name for it .
he called it the god complex .
now i can describe the symptoms of the god complex very , very easily .
so the symptoms of the complex are , no matter how complicated the problem , you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution .
now archie was a doctor , so he hung around with doctors a lot .
and doctors suffer from the god complex a lot .
now i 'm an economist , i 'm not a doctor , but i see the god complex around me all the time in my fellow economists .
i see it in our business leaders .
i see it in the politicians we vote for - people who , in the face of an incredibly complicated world , are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works .
and you know , with the future billions that we 've been hearing about , the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way .
well let me give you an example .
imagine for a moment that , instead of tim harford in front of you , there was hans rosling presenting his graphs .
you know hans : the mick jagger of ted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he 'd be showing you these amazing statistics , these amazing animations .
and they are brilliant ; it 's wonderful work .
but a typical hans rosling graph : think for a moment , not what it shows , but think instead about what it leaves out .
so it 'll show you gdp per capita , population , longevity , that 's about it .
so three pieces of data for each country - three pieces of data .
three pieces of data is nothing .
i mean , have a look at this graph .
this is produced by the physicist cesar hidalgo .
he 's at mit .
now you wo n't be able to understand a word of it , but this is what it looks like .
cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products , and he 's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products .
and it 's wonderful , wonderful work .
you show all these interconnections , all these interrelations .
and i think it 'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow .
brilliant work .
cesar and i tried to write a piece for the new york times magazine explaining how this works .
and what we learned is cesar 's work is far too good to explain in the new york times magazine .
five thousand products - that 's still nothing .
five thousand products - imagine counting every product category in cesar hidalgo 's data .
imagine you had one second per product category .
in about the length of this session , you would have counted all 5,000 .
now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in walmart .
there are 100,000 there . it would take you all day .
now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as tokyo , london or new york .
it 's even more difficult in edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan .
if you wanted to count every product and service on offer in new york - there are 10 billion of them - it would take you 317 years .
this is how complex the economy we 've created is .
and i 'm just counting toasters here .
i 'm not trying to solve the middle east problem .
the complexity here is unbelievable .
and just a piece of context - the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services .
you could count them in five minutes .
so this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us .
this perhaps is why we find the god complex so tempting .
we tend to retreat and say , " we can draw a picture , we can post some graphs , we get it , we understand how this works . "
and we do n't .
we never do .
now i 'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here .
i 'm not trying to say we ca n't solve complicated problems in a complicated world .
we clearly can .
but the way we solve them is with humility - to abandon the god complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works .
and we have a problem-solving technique that works .
now you show me a successful complex system , and i will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error .
here 's an example .
this baby was produced through trial and error .
i realize that 's an ambiguous statement .
maybe i should clarify it .
this baby is a human body : it evolved .
what is evolution ?
over millions of years , variation and selection , variation and selection - trial and error , trial and error .
and it 's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error .
you could use it in an industrial context .
so let 's say you wanted to make detergent .
let 's say you 're unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near liverpool .
how do you do it ?
well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent .
you pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle .
you create a spray of detergent .
then the spray dries . it turns into powder .
it falls to the floor .
you scoop it up . you put it in cardboard boxes .
you sell it at a supermarket .
you make lots of money .
how do you design that nozzle ?
it turns out to be very important .
now if you ascribe to the god complex , what you do is you find yourself a little god .
you find yourself a mathematician ; you find yourself a physicist - somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid .
and he will , or she will , calculate the optimal design of the nozzle .
now unilever did this and it did n't work - too complicated .
even this problem , too complicated .
but the geneticist professor steve jones describes how unilever actually did solve this problem - trial and error , variation and selection .
you take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle .
you try out all 10 ; you keep the one that works best .
you create 10 variations on that one .
you try out all 10 . you keep the one that works best .
you try out 10 variations on that one .
you see how this works , right ?
and after 45 generations , you have this incredible nozzle .
it looks a bit like a chess piece - functions absolutely brilliantly .
we have no idea why it works , no idea at all .
and the moment you step back from the god complex - let 's just try to have a bunch of stuff ; let 's have a systematic way of determining what 's working and what 's not - you can solve your problem .
now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize .
and we 've heard a lot about how economies function .
the u.s. economy is still the world 's greatest economy .
how did it become the world 's greatest economy ?
i could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the u.s. economy , but i think the most salient one is this : ten percent of american businesses disappear every year .
that is a huge failure rate .
it 's far higher than the failure rate of , say , americans .
ten percent of americans do n't disappear every year .
which leads us to conclude american businesses fail faster than americans , and therefore american businesses are evolving faster than americans .
and eventually , they 'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets - -lrb- laughter -rrb- if , of course , they have n't already done so .
i sometimes wonder .
but it 's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence , this incredible performance of western economies .
it did n't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge .
it 's come through trial and error .
now i 've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months , and people sometimes say to me , " well tim , it 's kind of obvious .
obviously trial and error is very important .
obviously experimentation is very important .
now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing ? "
so i say , okay , fine .
you think it 's obvious ?
i will admit it 's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that do n't have a correct answer .
stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer .
and there 's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher 's desk who knows all the answers .
and if you ca n't find the answers , you must be lazy or stupid .
when schools stop doing that all the time , i will admit that , yes , it 's obvious that trial and error is a good thing .
when a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says , " i want to fix our health system .
i want to fix our education system .
i have no idea how to do it .
i have half a dozen ideas .
we 're going to test them out . they 'll probably all fail .
then we 'll test some other ideas out .
we 'll find some that work . we 'll build on those .
we 'll get rid of the ones that do n't . " - when a politician campaigns on that platform , and more importantly , when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician , then i will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works , and that - thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- until then , until then i 'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the god complex .
because it 's so hard to admit our own fallibility .
it 's so uncomfortable .
and archie cochrane understood this as well as anybody .
there 's this one trial he ran many years after world war ii .
he wanted to test out the question of , where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks ?
should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital , or should they recover at home ?
all the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down .
they had the god complex in spades .
they knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients , and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment .
nevertheless , archie managed to get permission to do this .
he ran his trial .
and after the trial had been running for a little while , he gathered together all his colleagues around his table , and he said , " well , gentlemen , we have some preliminary results .
they 're not statistically significant .
but we have something .
and it turns out that you 're right and i 'm wrong .
it is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home .
they should be in hospital . "
and there 's this uproar , and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying , " we always said you were unethical , archie .
you 're killing people with your clinical trials . you need to shut it down now .
shut it down at once . "
and there 's this huge hubbub .
archie lets it die down .
and then he says , " well that 's very interesting , gentlemen , because when i gave you the table of results , i swapped the two columns around .
it turns out your hospitals are killing people , and they should be at home .
would you like to close down the trial now , or should we wait until we have robust results ? "
tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room .
but cochrane would do that kind of thing .
and the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say , " here in my own little world , i am a god , i understand everything .
i do not want to have my opinions challenged .
i do not want to have my conclusions tested . "
it feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law .
cochrane understood that uncertainty , that fallibility , that being challenged , they hurt .
and you sometimes need to be shocked out of that .
now i 'm not going to pretend that this is easy .
it is n't easy .
it 's incredibly painful .
and since i started talking about this subject and researching this subject , i 've been really haunted by something a japanese mathematician said on the subject .
so shortly after the war , this young man , yutaka taniyama , developed this amazing conjecture called the taniyama-shimura conjecture .
it turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving fermat 's last theorem .
in fact , it turns out it 's equivalent to proving fermat 's last theorem .
you prove one , you prove the other .
but it was always a conjecture .
taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true .
and shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958 , yutaka taniyama killed himself .
his friend , goro shimura - who worked on the mathematics with him - many decades later , reflected on taniyama 's life .
he said , " he was not a very careful person as a mathematician .
he made a lot of mistakes .
but he made mistakes in a good direction .
i tried to emulate him , but i realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hello . my name is jarrett krosoczka , and i write and illustrate books for children for a living .
so i use my imagination as my full-time job .
but well before my imagination was my vocation , my imagination saved my life .
when i was a kid , i loved to draw , and the most talented artist i knew was my mother , but my mother was addicted to heroin .
and when your parent is a drug addict , it 's kind of like charlie brown trying to kick the football , because as much as you want to love on that person , as much as you want to receive love from that person , every time you open your heart , you end up on your back .
so throughout my childhood , my mother was incarcerated and i did n't have my father because i did n't even learn his first name until i was in the sixth grade .
but i had my grandparents , my maternal grandparents joseph and shirley , who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own , after they had already raised five children .
so two people who grew up in the great depression , there in the very , very early ' 80s took on a new kid .
i was the cousin oliver of the sitcom of the krosoczka family , the new kid who came out of nowhere .
and i would like to say that life was totally easy with them .
they each smoked two packs a day , each , nonfiltered , and by the time i was six , i could order a southern comfort manhattan , dry with a twist , rocks on the side , the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink .
but they loved the hell out of me . they loved me so much .
and they supported my creative efforts , because my grandfather was a self-made man .
he ran and worked in a factory .
my grandmother was a homemaker .
but here was this kid who loved transformers and snoopy and the ninja turtles , and the characters that i read about , i fell in love with , and they became my friends .
so my best friends in life were the characters i read about in books .
i went to gates lane elementary school in worcester , massachusetts , and i had wonderful teachers there , most notably in first grade mrs. alisch .
and i just , i can just remember the love that she offered us as her students .
when i was in the third grade , a monumental event happened .
an author visited our school , jack gantos .
a published author of books came to talk to us about what he did for a living .
and afterwards , we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character , rotten ralph .
and suddenly the author appeared in our doorway , and i remember him sort of sauntering down the aisles , going from kid to kid looking at the desks , not saying a word .
but he stopped next to my desk , and he tapped on my desk , and he said , " nice cat . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he wandered away .
two words that made a colossal difference in my life .
when i was in the third grade , i wrote a book for the first time , " the owl who thought he was the best flyer . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- we had to write our own greek myth , our own creation story , so i wrote a story about an owl who challenged hermes to a flying race , and the owl cheated , and hermes , being a greek god , grew angry and bitter , and turned the owl into a moon , so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night .
yeah . -lrb- laughter -rrb- my book had a title page .
i was clearly worried about my intellectual property when i was eight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it was a story that was told with words and pictures , exactly what i do now for a living , and i sometimes let the words have the stage on their own , and sometimes i allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story .
my favorite page is the " about the author " page .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i learned to write about myself in third person at a young age .
so i love that last sentence : " he liked making this book . "
and i liked making that book because i loved using my imagination , and that 's what writing is .
writing is using your imagination on paper , and i do get so scared because i travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids , that writing would be using your imagination on paper , if they 're allowed to even write now within the school hours .
so i loved writing so much that i 'd come home from school , and i would take out pieces of paper , and i would staple them together , and i would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because i loved using my imagination .
and so these characters would become my friends .
there was an egg , a tomato , a head of lettuce and a pumpkin , and they all lived in this refrigerator city , and in one of their adventures they went to a haunted house that was filled with so many dangers like an evil blender who tried to chop them up , an evil toaster who tried to kidnap the bread couple , and an evil microwave who tried to melt their friend who was a stick of butter . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'd make my own comics too , and this was another way for me to tell stories , through words and through pictures .
now when i was in sixth grade , the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the worcester public school system .
i went from having art once a week to twice a month to once a month to not at all .
and my grandfather , he was a wise man , and he saw that as a problem , because he knew that was , like , the one thing i had . i did n't play sports .
i had art .
so he walked into my room one evening , and he sat on the edge of my bed , and he said , " jarrett , it 's up to you , but if you 'd like to , we 'd like to send you to the classes at the worcester art museum . "
and i was so thrilled .
so from sixth through 12th grade , once , twice , sometimes three times a week , i would take classes at the art museum , and i was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw , other kids who shared a similar passion .
now my publishing career began when i designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook , and if you 're wondering about the style of dress i put our mascot in , i was really into bell biv devoe and mc hammer and vanilla ice at the time . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and to this day , i still can do karaoke to " ice , ice baby " without looking at the screen .
do n't tempt me , because i will do it .
so i get shipped off to private school , k through eight , public schools , but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed , so he did n't want me to go there .
he wanted me to go to a private school , and he gave me an option .
you can go to holy name , which is coed , or st. john 's , which is all boys .
very wise man , because he knew i would , i felt like i was making the decision on my own , and he knew i would n't choose st. john 's , so i went to holy name high school , which was a tough transition because , like i said , i did n't play sports , and it was very focused on sports , but i took solace in mr. shilale 's art room .
and i just flourished here .
i just could n't wait to get to that classroom every day .
so how did i make friends ?
i drew funny pictures of my teachers - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and i passed them around .
well , in english class , in ninth grade , my friend john , who was sitting next to me , laughed a little bit too hard .
mr. greenwood was not pleased .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he instantly saw that i was the cause of the commotion , and for the first time in my life , i was sent to the hall , and i thought , " oh no , i 'm doomed .
my grandfather 's just going to kill me . "
and he came out to the hallway and he said , " let me see the paper . "
and i thought , " oh no . he thinks it 's a note . "
and so i took this picture , and i handed it to him .
and we sat in silence for that brief moment , and he said to me , " you 're really talented . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " you 're really good . you know , the school newspaper needs a new cartoonist , and you should be the cartoonist .
just stop drawing in my class . "
so my parents never found out about it .
i did n't get in trouble . i was introduced to mrs. casey , who ran the school newspaper , and i was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper , handling such heavy issues as , seniors are mean , freshmen are nerds , the prom bill is so expensive . i ca n't believe how much it costs to go to the prom .
and i took the headmaster to task and then i also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named wesley who was unlucky in love , and i just swore up and down that this was n't about me , but all these years later it was totally me .
but it was so cool because i could write these stories , i could come up with these ideas , and they 'd be published in the school paper , and people who i did n't know could read them .
and i loved that thought , of being able to share my ideas through the printed page .
on my 14th birthday , my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever : a drafting table that i have worked on ever since .
here i am , 20 years later , and i still work on this table every day .
on the evening of my 14th birthday , i was given this table , and we had chinese food .
and this was my fortune : " you will be successful in your work . "
i taped it to the top left hand of my table , and as you can see , it 's still there .
now i never really asked my grandparents for anything .
well , two things : rusty , who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when i was in fourth grade .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and a video camera .
i just wanted a video camera .
and after begging and pleading for christmas , i got a second-hand video camera , and i instantly started making my own animations on my own , and all throughout high school i made my own animations .
i convinced my 10th grade english teacher to allow me to do my book report on stephen king 's " misery " as an animated short . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i kept making comics .
i kept making comics , and at the worcester art museum , i was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator i was ever given .
mark lynch , he 's an amazing teacher and he 's still a dear friend of mine , and i was 14 or 15 , and i walked into his comic book class halfway through the course , and i was so excited , i was beaming .
i had this book that was how to draw comics in the marvel way , and it taught me how to draw superheroes , how to draw a woman , how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if i were to ever draw for x-men or spiderman .
and all the color just drained from his face , and he looked at me , and he said , " forget everything you learned . "
and i did n't understand . he said , " you have a great style .
celebrate your own style . do n't draw the way you 're being told to draw .
draw the way you 're drawing and keep at it , because you 're really good . "
now when i was a teenager , i was angsty as any teenager was , but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless , i was angry .
and when i was 17 , i met my father for the first time , upon which i learned i had a brother and sister i had never known about .
and on the day i met my father for the first time , i was rejected from the rhode island school of design , my one and only choice for college .
but it was around this time i went to camp sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids , kids with leukemia , and this kid eric changed my life .
eric did n't live to see his sixth birthday , and eric lives with me every day .
so after this experience , my art teacher , mr. shilale , he brought in these picture books , and i thought , " picture books for kids ! "
and i started writing books for young readers when i was a senior in high school .
well , i eventually got to the rhode island school of design .
i transferred to risd as a sophomore , and it was there that i took every course that i could on writing , and it was there that i wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid .
the kid had no patience for him .
and i sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time , but i was also involved with the hole in the wall gang camp , an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses , and it 's those kids at the camp that read my stories , and i read to them , and i saw that they responded to my work .
i graduated from risd . my grandparents were very proud , and i moved to boston , and i set up shop .
i set up a studio and i tried to get published .
i would send out my books . i would send out hundreds of postcards to editors and art directors , but they would go unanswered .
and my grandfather would call me every week , and he would say , " jarrett , how 's it going ? do you have a job yet ? "
because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education .
and i said , " yes , i have a job . i write and illustrate children 's books . "
and he said , " well , who pays you for that ? "
and i said , " no one , no one , no one just yet .
but i know it 's going to happen . "
now , i used to work the weekends at the hole in the wall off-season programming to make some extra money as i was trying to get my feet off the ground , and this kid who was just this really hyper kid , i started calling him " monkey boy , " and i went home and wrote a book called " good night , monkey boy . "
and i sent out one last batch of postcards .
and i received an email from an editor at random house with a subject line , " nice work ! " exclamation point .
" dear jarrett , i received your postcard .
i liked your art , so i went to your website and i 'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories , because i really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them .
please let me know if you 're ever in new york city . "
and this was from an editor at random house children 's books .
so the next week i " happened " to be in new york .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i met with this editor , and i left new york for a contract for my first book , " good night , monkey boy , " which was published on june 12 , 2001 .
and my local paper celebrated the news .
the local bookstore made a big deal of it .
they sold out of all of their books .
my friend described it as a wake , but happy , because everyone i ever knew was there in line to see me , but i was n't dead . i was just signing books .
my grandparents , they were in the middle of it .
they were so happy . they could n't have been more proud .
mrs. alisch was there . mr. shilale was there . mrs. casey was there .
mrs. alisch cut in front of the line and said , " i taught him how to read . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then something happened that changed my life .
i got my first piece of significant fan mail , where this kid loved monkey boy so much that he wanted to have a monkey boy birthday cake .
for a two-year-old , that is like a tattoo . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know ? you only get one birthday per year .
and for him , it 's only his second .
and i got this picture , and i thought , " this picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life . he will forever have this photo in his family photo albums . "
so that photo , since that moment , is framed in front of me while i 've worked on all of my books .
i have 10 picture books out .
" punk farm , " " baghead , " " ollie the purple elephant . "
i just finished the ninth book in the " lunch lady " series , which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime .
i 'm expecting the release of a chapter book called " platypus police squad : the frog who croaked . "
and i travel the country visiting countless schools , letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats .
and i meet bagheads .
lunch ladies treat me really well .
and i got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights .
twice now , the " lunch lady " series has won the children 's choice book of the year in the third or fourth grade category , and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in times square .
" punk farm " and " lunch lady " are in development to be movies , so i am a movie producer and i really do think , thanks to that video camera i was given in ninth grade .
i 've seen people have " punk farm " birthday parties , people have dressed up as " punk farm " for halloween , a " punk farm " baby room , which makes me a little nervous for the child 's well-being in the long term .
and i get the most amazing fan mail , and i get the most amazing projects , and the biggest moment for me came last halloween .
the doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character . it was so cool .
now my grandparents are no longer living , so to honor them , i started a scholarship at the worcester art museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers ca n't afford the classes .
and it displayed the work from my first 10 years of publishing , and you know who was there to celebrate ? mrs. alisch .
i said , " mrs. alisch , how are you ? "
and she responded with , " i 'm here . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's true . you are alive , and that 's pretty good right now .
so the biggest moment for me , though , my most important job now is i am a dad myself , and i have two beautiful daughters , and my goal is to surround them by inspiration , by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals i painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find , in quiet times , by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that i 've sat in for the past 20 years .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence .
i 'm going to start way back in the third grade at oakdale school in barberton , ohio .
i remember one day my best friend brian was working on a project .
he was making a horse out of the clay that our teacher kept under the sink .
and at one point , one of the girls who was sitting at his table , seeing what he was doing , leaned over and said to him , " that 's terrible . that does n't look anything like a horse . "
and brian 's shoulders sank .
and he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin .
i never saw brian do a project like that ever again .
and i wonder how often that happens .
it seems like when i tell that story of brian to my class , a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience , how a teacher shut them down or how a student was particularly cruel to them .
and some opt out thinking of themselves as creative at that point .
and i see that opting out that happens in childhood , and it moves in and becomes more ingrained , even by the time you get to adult life .
so we see a lot of this .
when we have a workshop or when we have clients in to work with us side-by-side , eventually we get to the point in the process that 's fuzzy or unconventional .
and eventually these bigshot executives whip out their blackberries and they say they have to make really important phone calls , and they head for the exits .
and they 're just so uncomfortable .
when we track them down and ask them what 's going on , they say something like , " i 'm just not the creative type . "
but we know that 's not true .
if they stick with the process , if they stick with it , they end up doing amazing things and they surprise themselves just how innovative they and their teams really are .
so i 've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have .
that you do n't do things , you 're afraid you 're going to be judged .
if you do n't say the right creative thing , you 're going to be judged .
and i had a major breakthrough when i met the psychologist albert bandura .
i do n't know if you know albert bandura .
but if you go to wikipedia , it says that he 's the fourth most important psychologist in history - like freud , skinner , somebody and bandura .
bandura 's 86 and he still works at stanford .
and he 's just a lovely guy .
and so i went to see him because he has just worked on phobias for a long time , which i 'm very interested in .
he had developed this way , this kind of methodology , that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time .
in four hours he had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias .
we talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia .
and it was really enjoyable , really interesting .
he told me that he 'd invite the test subject in , and he 'd say , " you know , there 's a snake in the next room and we 're going to go in there . "
to which , he reported , most of them replied , " hell no , i 'm not going in there , certainly if there 's a snake in there . "
but bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful .
so he 'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was , and he 'd get them comfortable with that .
and then through a series of steps , he 'd move them and they 'd be standing in the doorway with the door open and they 'd be looking in there .
and he 'd get them comfortable with that .
and then many more steps later , baby steps , they 'd be in the room , they 'd have a leather glove like a welder 's glove on , and they 'd eventually touch the snake .
and when they touched the snake everything was fine . they were cured .
in fact , everything was better than fine .
these people who had life-long fears of snakes were saying things like , " look how beautiful that snake is . "
and they were holding it in their laps .
bandura calls this process " guided mastery . "
i love that term : guided mastery .
and something else happened , these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives .
they tried harder , they persevered longer , and they were more resilient in the face of failure .
they just gained a new confidence .
and bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy - the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do .
well meeting bandura was really cathartic for me because i realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we 've seen happen for the last 30 years .
that we could take people who had the fear that they were n't creative , and we could take them through a series of steps , kind of like a series of small successes , and they turn fear into familiarity , and they surprise themselves .
that transformation is amazing .
we see it at the d.school all the time .
people from all different kinds of disciplines , they think of themselves as only analytical .
and they come in and they go through the process , our process , they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently .
and they 're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person .
so i thought one of the things i 'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like .
to me , that journey looks like doug dietz .
doug dietz is a technical person .
he designs medical imaging equipment , large medical imaging equipment .
he 's worked for ge , and he 's had a fantastic career .
but at one point he had a moment of crisis .
he was in the hospital looking at one of his mri machines in use when he saw a young family .
there was a little girl , and that little girl was crying and was terrified .
and doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his mri machine .
and this was really disappointing to doug , because before this time he was proud of what he did .
he was saving lives with this machine .
but it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids .
about that time he was at the d.school at stanford taking classes .
he was learning about our process about design thinking , about empathy , about iterative prototyping .
and he would take this new knowledge and do something quite extraordinary .
he would redesign the entire experience of being scanned .
and this is what he came up with .
he turned it into an adventure for the kids .
he painted the walls and he painted the machine , and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids , like children 's museum people .
and now when the kid comes , it 's an experience .
and they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship .
and when they come , they say , " okay , you 're going to go into the pirate ship , but be very still because we do n't want the pirates to find you . "
and the results were super dramatic .
so from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated , to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated .
and the hospital and ge were happy too .
because you did n't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time , they could put more kids through the machine in a day .
so the quantitative results were great .
but doug 's results that he cared about were much more qualitative .
he was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan .
and when the little girl came out of her scan , she ran up to her mother and said , " mommy , can we come back tomorrow ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i 've heard doug tell the story many times , of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it , but i 've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye .
doug 's story takes place in a hospital .
i know a thing or two about hospitals .
a few years ago i felt a lump on the side of my neck , and it was my turn in the mri machine .
it was cancer . it was the bad kind .
i was told i had a 40 percent chance of survival .
so while you 're sitting around with the other patients in your pajamas and everybody 's pale and thin and you 're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays , you think of a lot of things .
mostly you think about , am i going to survive ?
and i thought a lot about , what was my daughter 's life going to be like without me ?
but you think about other things .
i thought a lot about , what was i put on earth to do ?
what was my calling ? what should i do ?
and i was lucky because i had lots of options .
we 'd been working in health and wellness , and k through 12 , and the developing world .
and so there were lots of projects that i could work on .
but i decided and i committed to at this point to the thing i most wanted to do - was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way .
and if i was going to survive , that 's what i wanted to do .
i survived , just so you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i really believe that when people gain this confidence - and we see it all the time at the d.school and at ideo - they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives .
we see people quit what they 're doing and go in new directions .
we see them come up with more interesting , and just more , ideas so they can choose from better ideas .
and they just make better decisions .
so i know at ted you 're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing .
everybody has a change-the-world thing .
if there is one for me , this is it . to help this happen .
so i hope you 'll join me on my quest - you as thought leaders .
it would be really great if you did n't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives , like it 's some god-given thing , and to have people realize that they 're naturally creative .
and those natural people should let their ideas fly .
that they should achieve what bandura calls self-efficacy , that you can do what you set out to do , and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i really am honored to be here , and as chris said , it 's been over 20 years since i started working in africa .
my first introduction was at the abidjan airport on a sweaty , ivory coast morning .
i had just left wall street , cut my hair to look like margaret mead , given away most everything that i owned , and arrived with all the essentials - some poetry , a few clothes , and , of course , a guitar - because i was going to save the world , and i thought i would just start with the african continent .
but literally within days of arriving i was told , in no uncertain terms , by a number of west african women , that africans did n't want saving , thank you very much , least of all not by me .
i was too young , unmarried , i had no children , did n't really know africa , and besides , my french was pitiful .
and so , it was an incredibly painful time in my life , and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening .
i think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well , so i moved to kenya and worked in uganda , and i met a group of rwandan women , who asked me , in 1986 , to move to kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there .
and i did , and we ended up naming it duterimbere , meaning " to go forward with enthusiasm . " and while we were doing it , i realized that there were n't a lot of businesses that were viable and started by women , and so maybe i should try to run a business , too .
and so i started looking around , and i heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes .
and , being a little intrigued , i went to go meet this group , and what i found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive .
and it was really the beginning of my understanding the power of language , and how what we call people so often distances us from them , and makes them little .
i also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business , that , in fact , it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person , who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods , and living on 50 cents a day , still in poverty .
so , i made a deal with the women . i said , " look , we get rid of the charity side , and we run this as a business and i 'll help you . "
they nervously agreed . i nervously started , and , of course , things are always harder than you think they 're going to be .
first of all , i thought , well , we need a sales team , and we clearly are n't the a-team here , so let 's - i did all this training .
and the epitome was when i literally marched into the streets of nyamirambo , which is the popular quarter of kigali , with a bucket , and i sold all these little doughnuts to people , and i came back , and i was like , " you see ? "
and the women said , " you know , jacqueline , who in nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall american woman ? " and like - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it 's a good point .
so then i went the whole american way , with competitions , team and individual . completely failed , but over time , the women learnt to sell on their own way .
and they started listening to the marketplace , and they came back with ideas for cassava chips , and banana chips , and sorghum bread , and before you knew it , we had cornered the kigali market , and the women were earning three to four times the national average .
and with that confidence surge , i thought , " well , it 's time to create a real bakery , so let 's paint it . " and the women said , " that 's a really great idea . "
and i said , " well , what color do you want to paint it ? " and they said , " well , you choose . " and i said , " no , no , i 'm learning to listen .
you choose . it 's your bakery , your street , your country - not mine . "
but they would n't give me an answer .
so , one week , two weeks , three weeks went by , and finally i said , " well , how about blue ? "
and they said , " blue , blue , we love blue . let 's do it blue . "
so , i went to the store , i brought gaudence , the recalcitrant one of all , and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains , and on painting day , we all gathered in nyamirambo , and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim , like a little french bakery . but that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky .
so , blue , blue , everything became blue .
the walls were blue , the windows were blue , the sidewalk out front was painted blue .
and aretha franklin was shouting " r-e-s-p-e-c-t , " the women 's hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes , but it was their day .
and at the end of it , we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done , and i said , " it is so beautiful . "
and the women said , " it really is . "
and i said , " and i think the color is perfect , " and they all nodded their head , except for gaudence , and i said , " what ? "
and she said , " nothing . " and i said , " what ? "
and she said , " well , it is pretty , but , you know , our color , really , it is green . " and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i learned then that listening is n't just about patience , but that when you 've lived on charity and dependent your whole life long , it 's really hard to say what you mean .
and , mostly because people never really ask you , and when they do , you do n't really think they want to know the truth .
and so then i learned that listening is not only about waiting , but it 's also learning how better to ask questions .
and so , i lived in kigali for about two and a half years , doing these two things , and it was an extraordinary time in my life .
and it taught me three lessons that i think are so important for us today , and certainly in the work that i do .
the first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth .
as eleni has said , when people gain income , they gain choice , and that is fundamental to dignity .
but as human beings , we also want to see each other , and we want to be heard by each other , and we should never forget that .
the second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty .
i think andrew pretty well covered that , so i will move to the third point , which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty .
yes , we ran this as a business , but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training , and the management support , the strategic advice and , maybe most important of all , the access to new contacts , networks and new markets .
and so , on a micro level , there 's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy .
and on a macro level - some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized .
but , having had a father with heart disease , and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten , and having a good friend step in to help , i really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford .
i think the market can help us figure that out , but there 's got to be a charitable component , or i do n't think we 're going to create the kind of societies we want to live in .
and so , it was really those lessons that made me decide to build acumen fund about six years ago .
it 's a nonprofit , venture capital fund for the poor , a few oxymorons in one sentence .
it essentially raises charitable funds from individuals , foundations and corporations , and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health , housing , energy , clean water to low income people in south asia and africa , so that they can make their own choices .
we 've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises , and have , in so doing , created nearly 20,000 jobs , and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them .
i want to tell you two stories . both of them are in africa .
both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service , and who really know the markets .
both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise , and both of them , because they 're manufacturers , create jobs directly , and create incomes indirectly , because they 're in the malaria sector , and africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria .
and so as people get healthier , they also get wealthier .
the first one is called advanced bio-extracts limited .
it 's a company built in kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named patrick henfrey and his three colleagues .
these are old-hand farmers who 've gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in kenya over the last 30 years .
now , this plant is an artemisia plant ; it 's the basic component for artemisinin , which is the best-known treatment for malaria .
it 's indigenous to china and the far east , but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in africa , patrick and his colleagues said , " let 's bring it here , because it 's a high value-add product . "
the farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize .
and so , using patient capital - money that they could raise early on , that actually got below market returns and was willing to go the long haul and be combined with management assistance , strategic assistance - they 've now created a company where they purchase from 7,500 farmers .
so that 's about 50,000 people affected .
and i think some of you may have visited - these farmers are helped by kickstart and technoserve , who help them become more self-sufficient .
they buy it , they dry it and they bring it to this factory , which was purchased in part by , again , patient capital from novartis , who has a real interest in getting the powder so that they can make coartem .
acumen 's been working with abe for the past year , year and a half , both on looking at a new business plan , and what does expansion look like , helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital .
and i really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so . because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make coartem , when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history .
and we called all of the social investors we know .
now , some of these same social investors are really interested in africa and understand the importance of agriculture , and they even helped the farmers .
and even when we explained that if abe goes away , all those 7,500 jobs go away too , we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social .
and it 's really time we start thinking more creatively about how they can be fused .
so acumen made not one , but two bridge loans , and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20-million-dollar round , to move it to the next level , and i think that this will be one of the more important companies in east africa .
this is samuel . he 's a farmer .
he was actually living in the kibera slums when his father called him and told him about artemisia and the value-add potential .
so he moved back to the farm , and , long story short , they now have seven acres under cultivation .
samuel 's kids are in private school , and he 's starting to help other farmers in the area also go into artemisia production - dignity being more important than wealth .
the next one , many of you know .
i talked about it a little at oxford two years ago , and some of you visited a to z manufacturing , which is one of the great , real companies in east africa .
it 's another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise .
and this is really a story about a public-private solution that has really worked .
it started in japan . sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide , so you could create a bed net , a malaria bed net , that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped .
it could alter the vector , but like artemisia , it had been produced only in east asia . and as part of its social responsibility , sumitomo said , " why do n't we experiment with whether we can produce it in africa , for africans ? "
unicef came forward and said , " we 'll buy most of the nets , and then we 'll give them away , as part of the global fund 's and the u.n. 's commitment to pregnant women and children , for free . "
acumen came in with the patient capital , and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in africa , and exxon provided the initial resin .
well , in looking around for entrepreneurs , there was none better that we could find on earth than anuj shah , in a to z manufacturing company .
it 's a 40-year-old company , it understands manufacturing .
it 's gone from socialist tanzania into capitalist tanzania , and continued to flourish . it had about 1,000 employees when we first found it .
and so , anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria .
and , long story short , again , they 've been so successful .
in our first year , the first net went off the line in october of 2003 .
we thought the hitting-it-out-of-the-box number was 150,000 nets a year .
this year , they are now producing eight million nets a year , and they employ 5,000 people , 90 percent of whom are women , mostly unskilled .
they 're in a joint venture with sumitomo .
and so , from an enterprise perspective for africa , and from a public health perspective , these are real successes .
but it 's only half the story if we 're really looking at solving problems of poverty , because it 's not long-term sustainable .
it 's a company with one big customer .
and if avian flu hits , or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority , everybody loses .
and so , anuj and acumen have been talking about testing the private sector , because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that , look , in a country like tanzania , 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day .
it costs , at manufacturing point , six dollars to produce these , and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it , so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net .
most people ca n't afford that , so let 's give it away free .
and we said , " well , there 's another option .
let 's use the market as the best listening device we have , and understand at what price people would pay for this , so they get the dignity of choice .
we can start building local distribution , and actually , it can cost the public sector much less . "
and so we came in with a second round of patient capital to a to z , a loan as well as a grant , so that a to z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace , and found a number of things .
one , that people will pay different prices , but the overwhelming number of people will come forth at one dollar per net and make a decision to buy it .
and when you listen to them , they 'll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they do n't like .
and that some of the channels we thought would work did n't work .
but because of this experimentation and iteration that was allowed because of the patient capital , we 've now found that it costs about a dollar in the private sector to distribute , and a dollar to buy the net .
so then , from a policy perspective , when you start with the market , we have a choice .
we can continue going along at 12 dollars a net , and the customer pays zero , or we could at least experiment with some of it , to charge one dollar a net , costing the public sector another six dollars a net , give the people the dignity of choice , and have a distribution system that might , over time , start sustaining itself .
we 've got to start having conversations like this , and i do n't think there 's any better way to start than using the market , but also to bring other people to the table around it .
whenever i go to visit a to z , i think of my grandmother , stella .
she was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines .
she grew up on a farm in austria , very poor , did n't have very much education .
she moved to the united states , where she met my grandfather , who was a cement hauler , and they had nine children . three of them died as babies .
my grandmother had tuberculosis , and she worked in a sewing machine shop , making shirts for about 10 cents an hour .
she , like so many of the women i see at a to z , worked hard every day , understood what suffering was , had a deep faith in god , loved her children and would never have accepted a handout .
but because she had the opportunity of the marketplace , and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education , her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams .
i look around at my siblings and my cousins - and as i said , there are a lot of us - and i see teachers and musicians , hedge fund managers , designers .
one sister who makes other people 's wishes come true .
and my wish , when i see those women , i meet those farmers , and i think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day , is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility , and that they also can believe and get access to services , so that their children , too , can live those lives of great purpose .
it should n't be that difficult .
but what it takes is a commitment from all of us to essentially refuse trite assumptions , get out of our ideological boxes .
it takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success .
it takes opening your arms , both , wide , and expecting very little love in return , but demanding accountability , and bringing the accountability to the table as well .
and most of all , most of all , it requires that all of us have the courage and the patience , whether we are rich or poor , african or non-african , local or diaspora , left or right , to really start listening to each other .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the anger in me against corruption made me to make a big career change last year , becoming a full-time practicing lawyer .
my experiences over the last 18 months , as a lawyer , has seeded in me a new entrepreneurial idea , which i believe is indeed worth spreading .
so , i share it with all of you here today , though the idea itself is getting crystallized and i 'm still writing up the business plan .
of course it helps that fear of public failure diminishes as the number of ideas which have failed increases .
i 've been a huge fan of enterprise and entrepreneurship since 1993 .
i 've explored , experienced , and experimented enterprise and capitalism to my heart 's content .
i built , along with my two brothers , the leading real estate company in my home state , kerala , and then worked professionally with two of india 's biggest businessmen , but in their startup enterprises .
in 2003 , when i stepped out of the pure play capitalistic sector to work on so-called social sector issues , i definitely did not have any grand strategy or plan to pursue and find for-profit solutions to addressing pressing public issues .
when life brought about a series of death and near-death experiences within my close circle , which highlighted the need for an emergency medical response service in india , similar to 911 in usa .
to address this , i , along with four friends , founded ambulance access for all , to promote life-support ambulance services in india .
for those from the developing world , there is nothing , absolutely nothing new in this idea .
but as we envisioned it , we had three key goals : providing world-class life support ambulance service which is fully self-sustainable from its own revenue streams , and universally accessible to anyone in a medical emergency , irrespective of the capability to pay .
the service which grew out of this , dial 1298 for ambulance , with one ambulance in 2004 , now has a hundred-plus ambulances in three states , and has transported over 100,000 patients and victims since inception .
the service is - -lrb- applause -rrb- fully self-sustainable from its own revenues , without accessing any public funds , and the cross-subsidy model actually works , where the rich pays higher , poor pays lower , and the accident victim is getting the service free of charge .
the service responded effectively and efficiently , during the unfortunate 26/11 mumbai terror attacks .
and as you can see from the visuals , the service was responding and rescuing victims from the incident locations even before the police could cordon off the incident locations and formally confirm it as a terror strike .
we ended up being the first medical response team in every incident location and transported 125 victims , saving life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in tribute and remembrance of 26/11 attacks over the last one year , we have actually helped a pakistani ngo , aman foundation , to set up a self-sustainable life support ambulance service in karachi , facilitated by acumen fund .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a small message from us , in our own small way to the enemies of humanity , of islam , of south asia , of india , and of pakistan , that humanity will continue to bloom , irrespective of such dastardly attacks .
since then i 've also co-founded two other social enterprises .
one is education access for all , setting up schools in small-town india .
and the other is moksha-yug access , which is integrating rural supply chain on the foundations of self-help group-based microfinance .
i guess we seem to be doing at least a few things right .
because diligent investors and venture funds have committed over 7.5 million dollars in funding .
with the significance being these funds have come in as a qt capital , not as grant or as philanthropy .
now i come back to the idea of the new social enterprise that i 'm exploring .
corruption , bribes , and lack of transparency .
you may be surprised to know that eight speakers yesterday actually mentioned these terms in their talks .
bribes and corruption have both a demand and a supply side , with the supply side being mostly of greedy corporate unethical businesses and hapless common man .
and the demand side being mostly politicians , bureaucrats and those who have discretionary power vested with them .
according to world bank estimate , one trillion dollars is paid in bribes every year , worsening the condition of the already worse off .
yet , if you analyze the common man , he or she does not wake up every day and say , " hmm , let me see who i can pay a bribe to today . "
or , " let me see who i can corrupt today . "
often it is the constraining or the back-to-the-wall situation that the hapless common man finds himself or herself in that leads him to pay a bribe .
in the modern day world , where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough , the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life .
now , let me ask you another question .
imagine you are being asked to pay a bribe in your day-to-day life to get something done .
what do you do ? of course you can call the police .
but what is the use if the police department is in itself steeped in corruption ?
most definitely you do n't want to pay the bribe .
but you also do n't have the time , resources , expertise or wherewithal to fight this .
unfortunately , many of us in this room are supporters of capitalist policies and market forces .
yet the market forces around the world have not yet thrown up a service where you can call in , pay a fee , and fight the demand for a bribe .
like a bribe buster service , or 1-800-fight-bribes , or www.stopbribes.org or www.preventcorruption.org.
such a service simply do not exist .
one image that has haunted me from my early business days is of a grandmother , 70 plus years , being harassed by the bureaucrats in the town planning office .
all she needed was permission to build three steps to her house , from ground level , making it easier for her to enter and exit her house .
yet the officer in charge would not simply give her the permit for want of a bribe .
even though it pricked my conscience then , i could not , or rather i did not tend to her or assist her , because i was busy building my real estate company .
i do n't want to be haunted by such images any more .
a group of us have been working on a pilot basis to address individual instances of demands for bribes for common services or entitlement .
and in all 42 cases where we have pushed back such demands using existing and legitimate tools like the right to information act , video , audio , or peer pressure , we have successfully obtained whatever our clients set out to achieve without actually paying a bribe .
and with the cost of these tools being substantially lower than the bribe demanded .
i believe that these tools that worked in these 42 pilot cases can be consolidated in standard processes in a bpo kind of environment , and made available on web , call-center and franchise physical offices , for a fee , to serve anyone confronted with a demand for a bribe .
the target market is as tempting as it can get .
it can be worth up to one trillion dollars , being paid in bribes every year , or equal to india 's gdp .
and it is an absolutely virgin market .
i propose to explore this idea further , to examine the potential of creating kind of service to stop bribes and prevent corruption .
i do realize that the fight for justice against corruption is never easy .
it never has been and it never will be .
in my last 18 months as a lawyer , battling small- and large-scale corruption , including the one perpetrated by india 's biggest corporate scamster .
through his charities i have had three police cases filed against me alleging trespass , impersonation and intimidation .
the battle against corruption exacts a toll on ourselves , our families , our friends , and even our kids .
yet i believe the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity and making the world a fairer place .
what gives us the courage ?
as my close friend replied , when told during the seeding days of the ambulance project that it is an impossible task and the founders are insane to chalk up their blue-chip jobs , i quote : " of course we can not fail in this , at least in our own minds .
for we are insane people , trying to do an impossible task .
and an insane person does not know what an impossible task is . " thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : shaffi , that is a really exciting business idea .
shaffi mather : i just have to get through the initial days where i do n't get eliminated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : what 's on your mind ?
i mean , give us a sense of the numbers here - a typical bribe and a typical fee . i mean , what 's in your head ?
sm : so let me ... let me give you an example .
somebody who had applied for the passport .
the officer was just sitting on it and was demanding around 3,000 rupees in bribes .
and he did not want to pay .
so we actually used the right to information act , which is equal to the freedom of information act in the united states , and pushed back the officers in this particular case .
and in all these 42 cases , when we kept pushing them back , there was three kinds of reaction .
a set of people actually say , " oh , let me just grant it to them , and run away from it . "
some people actually come back and say , " oh , you want to screw me . let me show you what i can do . "
and he will push us back .
so you take the next step , or use the next tool available in what we are putting together , and then he relents .
by the third time , in all 42 cases , we have achieved success .
ca : but if it 's a 3,000-rupee , 70-dollar bribe , what fee would you have to charge , and can you actually make the business work ?
sm : well , actually the cost that we incurred was less than 200 rupees .
so , it actually works .
ca : that 's a high gross margin business . i like it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sm : i actually did not want to answer this on the ted stage .
ca : ok , so these are provisional numbers , no pricing guarantee .
if you can pull this off , you will be a global hero .
i mean , this could be huge .
thank you so much for sharing this idea at ted .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think it 's safe to say that all humans will be intimate with death at least once in their lives .
but what if that intimacy began long before you faced your own transition from life into death ?
what would life be like if the dead literally lived alongside you ?
in my husband 's homeland in the highlands of sulawesi island in eastern indonesia , there is a community of people that experience death not as a singular event but as a gradual social process .
in tana toraja , the most important social moments in people 's lives , the focal points of social and cultural interaction are not weddings or births or even family dinners , but funerals .
so these funerals are characterized by elaborate rituals that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt based on the amount of animals - pigs , chickens and , most importantly , water buffalo - that are sacrificed and distributed in the name of the deceased .
so this cultural complex surrounding death , the ritual enactment of the end of life , has made death the most visible and remarkable aspect of toraja 's landscape .
lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks , funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair , where commemorating someone who 's died is not so much a private sadness but more of a publicly shared transition .
and it 's a transition that 's just as much about the identity of the living as it is about remembrance of the dead .
so every year , thousands of visitors come to tana toraja to see , as it were , this culture of death , and for many people these grandiose ceremonies and the length of the ceremonies are somehow incommensurable with the way that we face our own mortality in the west .
so even as we share death as a universal experience , it 's not experienced the same way the world over .
and as an anthropologist , i see these differences in experience being rooted in the cultural and social world through which we define the phenomena around us .
so where we see an unquestionable reality , death as an irrefutable biological condition , torajans see the expired corporeal form as part of a larger social genesis .
so again , the physical cessation of life is not the same as death .
in fact , a member of society is only truly dead when the extended family can agree upon and marshal the resources necessary to hold a funeral ceremony that is considered appropriate in terms of resources for the status of the deceased .
and this ceremony has to take place in front of the eyes of the whole community with everyone 's participation .
so after a person 's physical death , their body is placed in a special room in the traditional residence , which is called the tongkonan .
and the tongkonan is symbolic not only of the family 's identity but also of the human life cycle from birth to death .
so essentially , the shape of the building that you 're born into is the shape of the structure which carries you to your ancestral resting place .
until the funeral ceremony , which can be held years after a person 's physical death , the deceased is referred to as " to makala , " a sick person , or " to mama , " a person who is asleep , and they continue to be a member of the household .
they are symbolically fed and cared for , and the family at this time will begin a number of ritual injunctions , which communicates to the wider community around them that one of their members is undergoing the transition from this life into the afterlife known as puya .
so i know what some of you must be thinking right now .
is she really saying that these people live with the bodies of their dead relatives ?
and that 's exactly what i 'm saying .
but instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction we have to this idea of proximity to bodies , proximity to death , or how this notion just does not fit into our very biological or medical sort of definition of death , i like to think about what the torajan way of viewing death encompasses of the human experience that the medical definition leaves out .
i think that torajans socially recognize and culturally express what many of us feel to be true despite the widespread acceptance of the biomedical definition of death , and that is that our relationships with other humans , their impact on our social reality , does n't cease with the termination of the physical processes of the body , that there 's a period of transition as the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed but not ended .
so torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship by lavishing love and attention on the most visible symbol of that relationship , the human body .
so my husband has fond memories of talking to and playing with and generally being around his deceased grandfather , and for him there is nothing unnatural about this .
this is a natural part of the process as the family comes to terms with the transition in their relationship to the deceased , and this is the transition from relating to the deceased as a person who 's living to relating to the deceased as a person who 's an ancestor .
and here you can see these wooden effigies of the ancestors , so these are people who have already been buried , already had a funeral ceremony .
these are called tau tau .
so the funeral ceremony itself embodies this relational perspective on death .
it ritualizes the impact of death on families and communities .
and it 's also a moment of self-awareness .
it 's a moment when people think about who they are , their place in society , and their role in the life cycle in accordance with torajan cosmology .
there 's a saying in toraja that all people will become grandparents , and what this means is that after death , we all become part of the ancestral line that anchors us between the past and the present and will define who our loved ones are into the future .
so essentially , we all become grandparents to the generations of human children that come after us .
and this metaphor of membership in the greater human family is the way that children also describe the money that they invest in these sacrificial buffaloes that are thought to carry people 's soul from here to the afterlife , and children will explain that they will invest the money in this because they want to repay their parents the debt for all of the years their parents spent investing and caring for them .
but the sacrifice of buffalo and the ritual display of wealth also exhibits the status of the deceased , and , by extension , the deceased 's family .
so at funerals , relationships are reconfirmed but also transformed in a ritual drama that highlights the most salient feature about death in this place : its impact on life and the relationships of the living .
so all of this focus on death does n't mean that torajans do n't aspire to the ideal of a long life .
they engage in many practices thought to confer good health and survival to an advanced age .
but they do n't put much stock in efforts to prolong life in the face of debilitating illness or in old age .
it 's said in toraja that everybody has sort of a predetermined amount of life .
it 's called the sunga ' .
and like a thread , it should be allowed to unspool to its natural end .
so by having death as a part of the cultural and social fabric of life , people 's everyday decisions about their health and healthcare are affected .
the patriarch of my husband 's maternal clan , nenet katcha , is now approaching the age of 100 , as far as we can tell .
and there are increasing signs that he is about to depart on his own journey for puya .
and his death will be greatly mourned .
but i know that my husband 's family looks forward to the moment when they can ritually display what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives , when they can ritually recount his life 's narrative , weaving his story into the history of their community .
his story is their story .
his funeral songs will sing them a song about themselves .
and it 's a story that has no discernible beginning , no foreseeable end .
it 's a story that goes on long after his body no longer does .
people ask me if i 'm frightened or repulsed by participating in a culture where the physical manifestations of death greet us at every turn .
but i see something profoundly transformative in experiencing death as a social process and not just a biological one .
in reality , the relationship between the living and the dead has its own drama in the u.s. healthcare system , where decisions about how long to stretch the thread of life are made based on our emotional and social ties with the people around us , not just on medicine 's ability to prolong life .
we , like the torajans , base our decisions about life on the meanings and the definitions that we ascribe to death .
so i 'm not suggesting that anyone in this audience should run out and adopt the traditions of the torajans .
it might be a little bit difficult to put into play in the united states .
but i want to ask what we can gain from seeing physical death not only as a biological process but as part of the greater human story .
what would it be like to look on the expired human form with love because it 's so intimately a part of who we all are ?
if we could expand our definition of death to encompass life , we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear .
perhaps one of the answers to the challenges that are facing the u.s. healthcare system , particularly in the end-of-life care , is as simple as a shift in perspective , and the shift in perspective in this case would be to look at the social life of every death .
it might help us recognize that the way we limit our conversation about death to something that 's medical or biological is reflective of a larger culture that we all share of avoiding death , being afraid of talking about it .
if we could entertain and value other kinds of knowledge about life , including other definitions of death , it has the potential to change the discussions that we have about the end of life .
it could change the way that we die , but more importantly , it could transform the way that we live .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm speaking to you about what i call the " mesh . "
it 's essentially a fundamental shift in our relationship with stuff , with the things in our lives .
and it 's starting to look at - not always and not for everything - but in certain moments of time , access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them .
and so it 's the pursuit of better things , easily shared .
and we come from a long tradition of sharing .
we 've shared transportation .
we 've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in amsterdam .
we 've also shared other sorts of entertainment - sports arenas , public parks , concert halls , libraries , universities .
all these things are share-platforms , but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what i refer to as the " mother of all share-platforms . "
and as i think about the mesh and i think about , well , what 's driving it , how come it 's happening now , i think there 's a number of vectors that i want to give you as background .
one is the recession - that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value - so starting to align the value with the true cost .
secondly , population growth and density into cities .
more people , smaller spaces , less stuff .
climate change : we 're trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet .
also , there 's been this recent distrust of big brands , global big brands , in a bunch of different industries , and that 's created an opening .
research is showing here , in the states , and in canada and western europe , that most of us are much more open to local companies , whereas before , we went with the big brands that we were sure we trusted .
and last is that we 're more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before - except for if you 're sitting next to someone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the other thing that 's worth considering is that we 've made a huge investment over decades and decades , and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance .
it 's a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point a to point b and move things that way .
it 's also - web and mobile allow us to be connected and create all kinds of platforms and systems , and the investment of those technologies and that infrastructure is really our inheritance .
it allows us to engage in really new and interesting ways .
and so for me , a mesh company , the " classic " mesh company , brings together these three things : our ability to connect to each other - most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are gps-enabled and web-enabled - allows us to find each other and find things in time and space .
and third is that physical things are readable on a map - so restaurants , a variety of venues , but also with gps and other technology like rfid and it continues to expand beyond that , we can also track things that are moving , like a car , a taxicab , a transit system , a box that 's moving through time and space .
and so that sets up for making access to get goods and services more convenient and less costly in many cases than owning them .
for example , i want to use zipcar .
how many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing ?
wow , that 's great . okay , thank you .
basically zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world .
they did not invent car-sharing .
car-sharing was actually invented in europe .
one of the founders went to switzerland , saw it implemented someplace , said , " wow , that looks really cool .
i think we can do that in cambridge , " brought it to cambridge and they started - two women - robin chase being the other person who started it .
zipcar got some really important things right .
first , they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir .
and so they were very clever about the way that they packaged car-sharing .
they made it sexy . they made it fresh .
they made it aspirational .
when you 're a member of a club , you 're a zipster .
the cars they picked did n't look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something .
they picked these sexy cars .
they targeted to universities .
they made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching .
it was a very nice experience , and the cars were clean and reliable , and it all worked .
and so from a branding perspective , they got a lot right .
but they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company .
they understand that they are an information company .
because when we buy a car we go to the dealer once , we have an interaction , and we 're chow - usually as quickly as possible .
but when you 're sharing a car and you have a car-share service , you might use an e.v. to commute , you get a truck because you 're doing a home project .
when you pick your aunt up at the airport , you get a sedan .
and you 're going to the mountains to ski , you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing .
meanwhile , these guys are sitting back , collecting all sorts of data about our behavior and how we interact with the service .
and so it 's not only an option for them , but i believe it 's an imperative for zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us , to be like a concierge service .
because we give them so much information , and they are entitled to really see how it is that we 're moving .
they 're in really good shape to anticipate what we 're going to want next .
and so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car ?
what percentage of the time ?
any guesses ?
those are really very good .
i was imagining it was like 20 percent when i first started .
the number across the u.s. and western europe is eight percent .
and so basically even if you think it 's 10 percent , 90 percent of the time , something that costs us a lot of money - personally , and also we organize our cities around it and all sorts of things - 90 percent of the time it 's sitting around .
so for this reason , i think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that , if we squeeze hard on things that we 've thrown away , there 's a lot of value in those things .
what set up with zipcar - zipcar started in 2000 .
in the last year , 2010 , two car companies started , one that 's in the u.k. called whipcar , and the other one , relayrides , in the u.s.
they 're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services , because the two things that really work for car-sharing is , one , the car has to be available , and two , it 's within one or two blocks of where you stand .
well the car that 's one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor 's car , and it 's probably also available .
so people have created this business .
zipcar started a decade earlier , in 2000 .
it took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service .
whipcar , which started april of last year , it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service .
so , really interesting .
people are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they 're not using it .
so it 's like vacation rentals for cars .
since i 'm here - and i hope some people in the audience are in the car business - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i 'm thinking that , coming from the technology side of things - we saw cable-ready tvs and wifi-ready notebooks - it would be really great if , any minute now , you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off .
because it just creates more flexibility .
it allows us as owners to have other options .
and i think we 're going there anyway .
the opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses - and those are businesses like zipcar or netflix that are full mesh businesses , or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies , car manufacturers , who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand , or as really a test , i think - is to make sharing irresistible .
we have experiences in our lives , certainly , when sharing has been irresistible .
it 's just , how do we make that recurrent and scale it ?
we know also , because we 're connected in social networks , that it 's easy to create delight in one little place .
it 's contagious because we 're all connected to each other .
so if i have a terrific experience and i tweet it , or i tell five people standing next to me , news travels .
the opposite , as we know , is also true , often more true .
so here we have ludotruck , which is in l.a. , doing the things that gourmet food trucks do , and they 've gathered quite a following .
in general , and maybe , again , it 's because i 'm a tech entrepreneur , i look at things as platforms .
platforms are invitations .
so creating craigslist or itunes and the iphone developer network , there are all these networks - facebook as well .
these platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience .
and honestly , it 's full of surprises .
because i do n't think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at facebook , around facebook , for example , two years ago , when mark announced that they were going to go with a platform .
so in this way , i think that cities are platforms , and certainly detroit is a platform .
the invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs - it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive .
it 's inviting participation , and cities have , historically , invited all sorts of participation .
now we 're saying that there 's other options as well .
so , for example , city departments can open up transit data .
google has made available transit data api .
and so there 's about seven or eight cities already in the u.s.
that have provided the transit data , and different developers are building applications .
so i was having a coffee in portland , and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes .
and so it 's reliable , real data that 's right in my face , where i am , so i can finish the latte .
there 's this fabulous opportunity we have across the u.s. now : about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space .
that space is not vital .
the areas around it lack vitality and vibrancy and engagement .
there 's this thing - how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops ?
oh , great . so i 'm a big fan of this .
and this is a very mesh-y thing .
essentially , there are all sorts of restaurants in oakland , near where i live .
there 's a pop-up general store every three weeks , and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies .
super fun , and it happens in a very transitional neighborhood .
subsequent to that , after it 's been going for about a year now , they actually started to lease and create and extend .
an area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people .
so this is an example .
the crafty fox is this woman who 's into crafts , and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around london .
but these sorts of things are happening in many different environments .
from my perspective , one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency .
it creates two of the favorite words of any businessperson : sold out .
and the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing .
so a lot of what we see in the mesh , and a lot of what we have in the platform that we built allows us to define , refine and scale .
it allows us to test things as an entrepreneur , to go to market , to be in conversation with people , listen , refine something and go back .
it 's very cost-effective , and it 's very mesh-y .
the infrastructure enables that .
in closing , and as we 're moving towards the end , i just also want to encourage - and i 'm willing to share my failures as well , though not from the stage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i would just like to say that one of the big things , when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other , but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation , is by sharing failures .
and one quick example is velib , in 2007 , came forward in paris with a very bold proposition , a very big bike-sharing service .
they made a lot of mistakes .
they had some number of big successes .
but they were very transparent , or they had to be , in the way that they exposed what worked and did n't work .
and so b.c. in barcelona and b-cycle and boris bikes in london - no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises so the opportunity when we 're connected is also to share failures and successes .
we 're at the very beginning of something that , what we 're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward , is inviting , it 's engaging , but it 's very early .
i have a website - it 's a directory - and it started with about 1,200 companies , and in the last two-and-a-half months it 's up to about 3,300 companies .
and it grows on a very regular daily basis .
but it 's very much at the beginning .
so i just want to welcome all of you onto the ride .
and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- cultural evolution is a dangerous child for any species to let loose on its planet .
by the time you realize what 's happening , the child is a toddler , up and causing havoc , and it 's too late to put it back .
we humans are earth 's pandoran species .
we 're the ones who let the second replicator out of its box , and we ca n't push it back in .
we 're seeing the consequences all around us .
now that , i suggest , is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously .
and it gives us a new way of thinking about not only what 's going on on our planet , but what might be going on elsewhere in the cosmos .
so first of all , i 'd like to say something about memetics and the theory of memes , and secondly , how this might answer questions about who 's out there , if indeed anyone is .
so , memetics : memetics is founded on the principle of universal darwinism .
darwin had this amazing idea .
indeed , some people say it 's the best idea anybody ever had .
is n't that a wonderful thought , that there could be such a thing as a best idea anybody ever had ?
do you think there could ?
audience : no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- susan blackmore : someone says no , very loudly , from over there .
well , i say yes , and if there is , i give the prize to darwin .
why ?
because the idea was so simple , and yet it explains all design in the universe .
i would say not just biological design , but all of the design that we think of as human design .
it 's all just the same thing happening .
what did darwin say ?
i know you know the idea , natural selection , but let me just paraphrase " the origin of species , " 1859 , in a few sentences .
what darwin said was something like this : if you have creatures that vary , and that ca n't be doubted - i 've been to the galapagos , and i 've measured the size of the beaks and the size of the turtle shells and so on , and so on .
and 100 pages later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if there is a struggle for life , such that nearly all of these creatures die - and this ca n't be doubted , i 've read malthus and i 've calculated how long it would take for elephants to cover the whole world if they bred unrestricted , and so on and so on .
and another 100 pages later .
and if the very few that survive pass onto their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive , then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all this happened than their parents were .
you see the idea ?
if , if , if , then .
he had no concept of the idea of an algorithm , but that 's what he described in that book , and this is what we now know as the evolutionary algorithm .
the principle is you just need those three things - variation , selection and heredity .
and as dan dennett puts it , if you have those , then you must get evolution .
or design out of chaos , without the aid of mind .
there 's one word i love on that slide .
what do you think my favorite word is ?
audience : chaos .
sb : chaos ? no . what ? mind ? no .
audience : without .
sb : no , not without .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you try them all in order : mmm ... ?
audience : must .
sb : must , at must . must , must .
this is what makes it so amazing .
you do n't need a designer , or a plan , or foresight , or anything else .
if there 's something that is copied with variation and it 's selected , then you must get design appearing out of nowhere .
you ca n't stop it .
must is my favorite word there .
now , what 's this to do with memes ?
well , the principle here applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection .
we 're so used to thinking in terms of biology , we think about genes this way .
darwin did n't , of course ; he did n't know about genes .
he talked mostly about animals and plants , but also about languages evolving and becoming extinct .
but the principle of universal darwinism is that any information that is varied and selected will produce design .
and this is what richard dawkins was on about in his 1976 bestseller , " the selfish gene . "
the information that is copied , he called the replicator .
it selfishly copies .
not meaning it kind of sits around inside cells going , " i want to get copied . "
but that it will get copied if it can , regardless of the consequences .
it does n't care about the consequences because it ca n't , because it 's just information being copied .
and he wanted to get away from everybody thinking all the time about genes , and so he said , " is there another replicator out there on the planet ? "
ah , yes , there is .
look around you - here will do , in this room .
all around us , still clumsily drifting about in its primeval soup of culture , is another replicator .
information that we copy from person to person , by imitation , by language , by talking , by telling stories , by wearing clothes , by doing things .
this is information copied with variation and selection .
this is design process going on .
he wanted a name for the new replicator .
so , he took the greek word " mimeme , " which means that which is imitated .
remember that , that 's the core definition : that which is imitated .
and abbreviated it to meme , just because it sounds good and made a good meme , an effective spreading meme .
so that 's how the idea came about .
it 's important to stick with that definition .
the whole science of memetics is much maligned , much misunderstood , much feared .
but a lot of these problems can be avoided by remembering the definition .
a meme is not equivalent to an idea .
it 's not an idea . it 's not equivalent to anything else , really .
stick with the definition .
it 's that which is imitated , or information which is copied from person to person .
so , let 's see some memes .
well , you sir , you 've got those glasses hung around your neck in that particularly fetching way .
i wonder whether you invented that idea for yourself , or copied it from someone else ?
if you copied it from someone else , it 's a meme .
and what about , oh , i ca n't see any interesting memes here .
all right everyone , who 's got some interesting memes for me ?
oh , well , your earrings , i do n't suppose you invented the idea of earrings .
you probably went out and bought them .
there are plenty more in the shops .
that 's something that 's passed on from person to person .
all the stories that we 're telling - well , of course , ted is a great meme-fest , masses of memes .
the way to think about memes , though , is to think , why do they spread ?
they 're selfish information , they will get copied , if they can .
but some of them will be copied because they 're good , or true , or useful , or beautiful .
some of them will be copied even though they 're not .
some , it 's quite hard to tell why .
there 's one particular curious meme which i rather enjoy .
and i 'm glad to say , as i expected , i found it when i came here , and i 'm sure all of you found it , too .
you go to your nice , posh , international hotel somewhere , and you come in and you put down your clothes and you go to the bathroom , and what do you see ?
audience : bathroom soap .
sb : pardon ?
audience : soap .
sb : soap , yeah . what else do you see ?
audience : -lrb- inaudible -rrb- sb : mmm mmm .
audience : sink , toilet !
sb : sink , toilet , yes , these are all memes , they 're all memes , but they 're sort of useful ones , and then there 's this one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is this one doing ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this has spread all over the world .
it 's not surprising that you all found it when you arrived in your bathrooms here .
but i took this photograph in a toilet at the back of a tent in the eco-camp in the jungle in assam .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- who folded that thing up there , and why ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some people get carried away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- other people are just lazy and make mistakes .
some hotels exploit the opportunity to put even more memes with a little sticker .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is this all about ?
i suppose it 's there to tell you that somebody 's cleaned the place , and it 's all lovely .
and you know , actually , all it tells you is that another person has potentially spread germs from place to place .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , think of it this way .
imagine a world full of brains and far more memes than can possibly find homes .
the memes are all trying to get copied - trying , in inverted commas - i.e. , that 's the shorthand for , if they can get copied , they will .
they 're using you and me as their propagating , copying machinery , and we are the meme machines .
now , why is this important ?
why is this useful , or what does it tell us ?
it gives us a completely new view of human origins and what it means to be human , all conventional theories of cultural evolution , of the origin of humans , and what makes us so different from other species .
all other theories explaining the big brain , and language , and tool use and all these things that make us unique , are based upon genes .
language must have been useful for the genes .
tool use must have enhanced our survival , mating and so on .
it always comes back , as richard dawkins complained all that long time ago , it always comes back to genes .
the point of memetics is to say , " oh no , it does n't . "
there are two replicators now on this planet .
from the moment that our ancestors , perhaps two and a half million years ago or so , began imitating , there was a new copying process .
copying with variation and selection .
a new replicator was let loose , and it could never be - right from the start - it could never be that human beings who let loose this new creature , could just copy the useful , beautiful , true things , and not copy the other things .
while their brains were having an advantage from being able to copy - lighting fires , keeping fires going , new techniques of hunting , these kinds of things - inevitably they were also copying putting feathers in their hair , or wearing strange clothes , or painting their faces , or whatever .
so , you get an arms race between the genes which are trying to get the humans to have small economical brains and not waste their time copying all this stuff , and the memes themselves , like the sounds that people made and copied - in other words , what turned out to be language - competing to get the brains to get bigger and bigger .
so , the big brain , on this theory , is driven by the memes .
this is why , in " the meme machine , " i called it memetic drive .
as the memes evolve , as they inevitably must , they drive a bigger brain that is better at copying the memes that are doing the driving .
this is why we 've ended up with such peculiar brains , that we like religion , and music , and art .
language is a parasite that we 've adapted to , not something that was there originally for our genes , on this view .
and like most parasites , it can begin dangerous , but then it coevolves and adapts , and we end up with a symbiotic relationship with this new parasite .
and so , from our perspective , we do n't realize that that 's how it began .
so , this is a view of what humans are .
all other species on this planet are gene machines only , they do n't imitate at all well , hardly at all .
we alone are gene machines and meme machines as well .
the memes took a gene machine and turned it into a meme machine .
but that 's not all .
we have a new kind of memes now .
i 've been wondering for a long time , since i 've been thinking about memes a lot , is there a difference between the memes that we copy - the words we speak to each other , the gestures we copy , the human things - and all these technological things around us ?
i have always , until now , called them all memes , but i do honestly think now we need a new word for technological memes .
let 's call them techno-memes or temes .
because the processes are getting different .
we began , perhaps 5,000 years ago , with writing .
we put the storage of memes out there on a clay tablet , but in order to get true temes and true teme machines , you need to get the variation , the selection and the copying , all done outside of humans .
and we 're getting there .
we 're at this extraordinary point where we 're nearly there , that there are machines like that .
and indeed , in the short time i 've already been at ted , i see we 're even closer than i thought we were before .
so actually , now the temes are forcing our brains to become more like teme machines .
our children are growing up very quickly learning to read , learning to use machinery .
we 're going to have all kinds of implants , drugs that force us to stay awake all the time .
we 'll think we 're choosing these things , but the temes are making us do it .
so , we 're at this cusp now of having a third replicator on our planet .
now , what about what else is going on out there in the universe ?
is there anyone else out there ?
people have been asking this question for a long time .
we 've been asking it here at ted already .
in 1961 , frank drake made his famous equation , but i think he concentrated on the wrong things .
it 's been very productive , that equation .
he wanted to estimate n , the number of communicative civilizations out there in our galaxy , and he included in there the rate of star formation , the rate of planets , but crucially , intelligence .
i think that 's the wrong way to think about it .
intelligence appears all over the place , in all kinds of guises .
human intelligence is only one kind of a thing .
but what 's really important is the replicators you have and the levels of replicators , one feeding on the one before .
so , i would suggest that we do n't think intelligence , we think replicators .
and on that basis , i 've suggested a different kind of equation .
a very simple equation .
n , the same thing , the number of communicative civilizations out there -lsb- that -rsb- we might expect in our galaxy .
just start with the number of planets there are in our galaxy .
the fraction of those which get a first replicator .
the fraction of those that get the second replicator .
the fraction of those that get the third replicator .
because it 's only the third replicator that 's going to reach out - sending information , sending probes , getting out there , and communicating with anywhere else .
ok , so if we take that equation , why have n't we heard from anybody out there ?
because every step is dangerous .
getting a new replicator is dangerous .
you can pull through , we have pulled through , but it 's dangerous .
take the first step , as soon as life appeared on this earth .
we may take the gaian view .
i loved peter ward 's talk yesterday - it 's not gaian all the time .
actually , life forms produce things that kill themselves .
well , we did pull through on this planet .
but then , a long time later , billions of years later , we got the second replicator , the memes .
that was dangerous , all right .
think of the big brain .
how many mothers do we have here ?
you know all about big brains .
they are dangerous to give birth to , are agonizing to give birth to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my cat gave birth to four kittens , purring all the time .
ah , mm - slightly different .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but not only is it painful , it kills lots of babies , it kills lots of mothers , and it 's very expensive to produce .
the genes are forced into producing all this myelin , all the fat to myelinate the brain .
do you know , sitting here , your brain is using about 20 percent of your body 's energy output for two percent of your body weight ?
it 's a really expensive organ to run .
why ? because it 's producing the memes .
now , it could have killed us off . it could have killed us off , and maybe it nearly did , but you see , we do n't know .
but maybe it nearly did .
has it been tried before ?
what about all those other species ?
louise leakey talked yesterday about how we 're the only one in this branch left .
what happened to the others ?
could it be that this experiment in imitation , this experiment in a second replicator , is dangerous enough to kill people off ?
well , we did pull through , and we adapted .
but now , we 're hitting , as i 've just described , we 're hitting the third replicator point .
and this is even more dangerous - well , it 's dangerous again .
why ? because the temes are selfish replicators and they do n't care about us , or our planet , or anything else .
they 're just information , why would they ?
they are using us to suck up the planet 's resources to produce more computers , and more of all these amazing things we 're hearing about here at ted .
do n't think , " oh , we created the internet for our own benefit . "
that 's how it seems to us .
think , temes spreading because they must .
we are the old machines .
now , are we going to pull through ?
what 's going to happen ?
what does it mean to pull through ?
well , there are kind of two ways of pulling through .
one that is obviously happening all around us now , is that the temes turn us into teme machines , with these implants , with the drugs , with us merging with the technology .
and why would they do that ?
because we are self-replicating .
we have babies .
we make new ones , and so it 's convenient to piggyback on us , because we 're not yet at the stage on this planet where the other option is viable .
although it 's closer , i heard this morning , it 's closer than i thought it was .
where the teme machines themselves will replicate themselves .
that way , it would n't matter if the planet 's climate was utterly destabilized , and it was no longer possible for humans to live here .
because those teme machines , they would n't need - they 're not squishy , wet , oxygen-breathing , warmth-requiring creatures .
they could carry on without us .
so , those are the two possibilities .
the second , i do n't think we 're that close .
it 's coming , but we 're not there yet .
the first , it 's coming too .
but the damage that is already being done to the planet is showing us how dangerous the third point is , that third danger point , getting a third replicator .
and will we get through this third danger point , like we got through the second and like we got through the first ?
maybe we will , maybe we wo n't .
i have no idea .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that was an incredible talk .
sb : thank you . i scared myself .
ca : -lrb- laughter -rrb- does anybody know when the stethoscope was invented ?
any guesses ? 1816 .
and what i can say is , in 2016 , doctors are n't going to be walking around with stethoscopes .
there 's a whole lot better technology coming , and that 's part of the change in medicine .
what has changed our society has been wireless devices .
but the future are digital medical wireless devices , ok ?
so , let me give you some examples of this to kind of make this much more concrete .
this is the first one . this is an electrocardiogram .
and , as a cardiologist , to think that you could see in real time a patient , an individual , anywhere in the world on your smartphone , watching your rhythm - that 's incredible , and it 's with us today .
but that 's just the beginning .
you check your email while you 're sitting here .
in the future you 're going to be checking all your vital signs , all your vital signs : your heart rhythm , your blood pressure , your oxygen , your temperature , etc .
this is already available today .
this is airstrip technologies .
it 's now wired - or i should say , wireless - by taking the aggregate of these signals in the hospital , in the intensive care unit , and putting it on a smartphone for physicians .
if you 're an expectant parent , what about the ability to monitor , continuously , fetal heart rate , or intrauterine contractions , and not having to worry so much that things are fine as the pregnancy , and moving over into the time of delivery ?
and then as we go further , today we have continuous glucose sensors .
right now , they are under the skin , but in the future , they wo n't have to be implanted .
and of course , the desired range - trying to keep glucose between 75 and less than 200 , checking it every five minutes in a continuous glucose sensor - you 'll see how that can impact diabetes .
and what about sleep ?
we 're going to zoom in on that a little bit .
we 're supposed to spend a third of our life in sleep .
what if , on your phone , which will be available in the next few weeks , you had every minute of your sleep displayed ?
and this is , of course , as you can see , the awake is the orange .
the rem sleep , rapid eye movement , dream state , is in light green ; and light is gray , light sleep ; and deep sleep , the best restorative sleep , is that dark green .
how about counting every calorie ?
and this is ability , in real time , to actually take measurements of caloric intake as well as expenditure , through a band-aid .
now , what i 've talked about are physiologic metrics .
but what i want to get to , the next frontier , very quickly , and why the stethoscope is on its way out , is because we can transcend listening to the valve sounds , and the breath sounds , because now , introduced by g.e. is a handheld ultra-sound .
why is this important ? because this is so much more sensitive .
here is an example of an abdominal ultrasound , and also a cardiac echo , which can be sent wireless , and then there 's an example of fetal monitoring on your smartphone .
so , we 're not just talking about physiologic metrics - the key measurements of vital signs , and all those things in physiology - but also all the imaging that one could look at in your smartphone .
now , this is an example of another obsolete technology , soon to be buried : the holter monitor .
twenty-four hour recording , lots of wires .
this is now a little tiny patch .
you can put it on for two weeks and send it in the mail .
now , how does this work ? well , there is these smart band-aids or these sensors that one would put on , on a shoe or on the wrist .
and this sends a signal and it creates a body area network to a gateway .
gateway could be a smartphone or it could be a dedicated gateway , as today many of these things are dedicated gateways , because they are not so well integrated .
that signal goes to the web , the cloud , and then it can be processed and sent anywhere : to a caregiver , to a physician , back to the patient , etc .
so , that 's basically very simplistic technology of how this works .
now , i have this device on .
i did n't want to take my shirt off to show you , but i can tell you it 's on .
this is a device that not only measures cardiac rhythm , as you saw already , but it also goes well beyond that .
this is me now . and you can see the ecg .
below that 's the actual heart rate and the trend ; to the right of that is a bioconductant .
that 's the fluid status , fluid status , that 's really important if you 're monitoring somebody with heart failure .
and below that 's temperature , and respiration , and oxygen , and then the position activity .
so , this is really striking , because this device measures seven things that are very much vital signs for monitoring someone with heart failure . ok ?
and why is this important ? well , this is the most expensive bed .
what if we could reduce the need for hospital beds ?
well , we can . first of all , heart failure is the number one reason for hospital admissions and readmissions in this country .
the cost of heart failure is 37 billion dollars a year , which is 80 percent related to hospitalization .
and in the course of 30 days after a hospital stay for a medicare greater than 65 years or older , is - 27 percent are readmitted in 30 days , and by six months , over 56 percent are readmitted .
so , can we improve that ? well the idea is we take this device that i 'm wearing , and we put it on 600 patients with heart failure , randomly assigned , versus 600 patients who do n't have active monitoring , and see whether we can reduce heart failure readmissions , and that 's exciting . and we 'll start that trial , and you 'll hear more about how we 're going to do that , but that 's a type of wireless device trial that could change medicine in the years ahead .
why now ? why has this all of a sudden become a reality , an exciting direction in the future of medicine ?
what we have is , in a way , a perfect positive storm .
this sets up consumer-driven healthcare .
that 's where this is all starting .
let me just give you specifics about why this is a big movement if you 're not aware of it : 1.2 million americans have gotten a nike shoe , which is a body-area network that connects the shoe , the sole of the shoe to the iphone , or an ipod .
and this wired magazine cover article really captured a lot of this ; it talked a lot about the nike shoe and how quickly that 's been adopted to monitor exercise physiology and energy expenditure .
here are some things , the principles that are guiding principles to keep in mind : " a data-driven health revolution promises to make us all better , faster , and stronger . living by numbers . "
and this one , which is really telling , this was from july , this cover article : " the personal metrics movement goes way beyond diet and exercise . it 's about tracking every facet of life , from sleep to mood to pain , 24/7 / 365 . "
well , i tried this device .
a lot of you have gotten that phillips direct life .
i did n't have one of those , but i got the fitbit .
that looks like this .
it 's like a wireless accelerometer , pedometer .
and i want to just give you the results of that testing , because i wanted to understand about the consumer movement .
i hope the , by the way , the phillips direct life works better - i hope so .
but this monitors food , it monitors activity and tracks weight .
however you have to put in most of this stuff .
the only thing it really tracks by itself is activity , and even then , it 's not complete .
so , you exercise and it picks up the exercise .
you put in your height and weight , it calculates bmi , and of course it tells you how many calories you 're expending from the exercise , and how many you took in , if you go in and enter all the foods .
but it really wants you to enter all your activity .
and so i went to this , and of course i was gratified that it picked up the 42 minutes of exercise , elliptical exercise i did , but then it wants more information .
so , it says , " you want to log sexual activity .
how long did you do it for ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it says , " how hard was it ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- furthermore it says , " start time . "
now , this does n't appear - this just does n't work , i mean , this just does n't work .
so , now i want to move to sleep .
who would ever have thought you could have your own eeg at your home , tagged to a very nice alarm clock , by the way ?
this is the headband that goes with this alarm clock .
it monitors your brainwaves continuously , when you 're sleeping .
so , i did this thing for seven days getting ready for tedmed .
this is an important part of our life , one-third you 're supposed to be sleeping .
of course how many here have any problems with sleeping ?
it 's usually 90 percent . so , you tell me you sleep better than expected .
okay , well this was a week of my life in sleeping , and you get a z.q. score . instead of an i.q. score , you get a z.q. score when you wake up .
you say , " oh , ok . " and a z.q. score is adjusted to age , and you want to get as high as you possibly can .
so this is the moment-by-moment , or minute-by-minute sleep .
and you see that z.q. there was 80-odd .
and the wake time is in orange .
and this can be a problem , as i learned .
because it not only helps you with quantifying your sleep , but also tells others you 're awake .
so , when my wife came in and she could tell you 're awake .
" eric , i want to talk . i want to talk . "
and i 'm trying to play possum .
this thing is very , very impressive .
ok . so , that 's the first night .
and this one is now 67 , and that 's not a good score .
and this tells you , of course , how much you had in rem sleep , in deep sleep , and all this sort of thing .
this was really fascinating because this gave that quantitation about all the different phases of sleep .
so , it also then tells you how you do compared to your age group .
it 's like a managed competition of sleep .
and really interesting stuff .
look at this thing and say , " well , i did n't think i was a very good sleeper , but actually i did better than average in 50 to 60 year olds . " ok ?
and the key thing was , what i did n't know , was that i was a really good dreamer .
ok . now let 's move from sleep to diseases .
eighty percent of americans have chronic disease , or 80 percent of age greater than 65 have two or more chronic disease , 140 million americans have one or more chronic disease , and 80 percent of our 1.5 , whatever , trillion expenditures are related to chronic disease .
now , diabetes is one of the big ones .
almost 24 million people have diabetes .
and here is the latest map . it was published just a little more than a week ago in the new york times , and it is n't looking good .
that is , for men , 29 percent in the country over 60 have type ii diabetes , and women , although it 's less , it 's terribly high .
but of course we have a way to measure that now on a continuous basis , with a sensor that detects blood glucose , and it 's important because we could detect hyperglycemia that otherwise would n't be known , and also hypoglycemia .
and you can see the red dots , in this particular patient 's case , were finger sticks , which would have missed both ends .
but by continuous monitoring , it captures all that vital information .
the future of this though , is being able to move this to a band-aid type phenomenon , and that 's not so far away .
so , let me just give you , very quickly , 10 top targets for wireless medicine .
all these things are possible - some of them are very close , or already , as you heard , are available today , in some way or form .
alzheimer 's disease : there 's five million people affected , and you can check vital signs , activity , balance .
asthma : large number , we could detect things like pollen count , air quality , respiratory rate . breast cancer , i 'll show you an example of that real quickly .
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease .
depression , there 's a great approach to that in mood disorders .
diabetes i 've just mentioned . heart failure we already talked about . hypertension : 74 million people could have continuous blood-pressure monitoring to come up with much better management and prevention .
and obesity we already talked about , the ways to get to that .
and sleep disorders .
this is effective around the world . the access to smartphones and cell phones today is extraordinary .
and this article from the economist summed it up beautifully about the opportunities in health across the developing world : " mobile phones made a bigger difference to the lives of more people , more quickly , than any previous technology . "
and that 's before we got going on the m-health world .
aging : the problem is enormous , 300,000 broken hips per year ; but the solutions are extraordinary , and they include so many different things .
one of the ones i just wanted to mention : the ishoe is another example of a sensor that improves proprioception among the elderly to prevent falling .
one of many different techniques using wireless sensors .
so , we can change medicine across the continuum of care , across the ages from premies or unborn children to seniors ; the pharmaceutical arena changes ; the full spectrum of disease - i hope i 've given you a sense of that - across the globe .
there are two things that can really accelerate this whole process .
one of them - we 're very fortunate - is to develop a dedicated institute and that 's work that started with the work that scripps with qualcomm ...
and then the great fortune of meeting up with gary and mary west , to get behind this wireless health institute .
san diego is an extraordinary place for this .
there 's over 650 wireless companies , 100 of which or more are working in wireless health .
it 's the number one source of commerce , and interestingly it dovetails beautifully with over 500 life science companies .
the wireless institute , the west wireless health institute , is really the outgrowth of two extraordinary people who are here this evening : gary and mary west . and i 'd like to give it up for them for getting behind this .
-lrb- applause -rrb- their fantastic philanthropic investment made this possible , and this is really a nonprofit education center which is just about to open . it looks like this , this whole building dedicated .
and what it 's trying to do is accelerate this era : to take unmet medical needs , to work and innovate - and we just appointed the chief engineer , mehran mehregany , it was announced on monday - then to move up with development , clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice , the most challenging thing of all , requiring attention to reimbursement , healthcare policy , healthcare economics .
the other big thing , besides having this fantastic institute to catalyze this process is guidance , and that 's of course relying on the fact that medicine goes digital .
if we understand biology from genomics and omics and wireless through physiologic phenotyping , that 's big .
because what it does is allow a convergence like we 've never had before .
over 80 major diseases have been cracked at the genomic level , but this is quite extraordinary : more has been learned about the underpinnings of disease in the last two and a half years than in the history of man .
and when you put that together with , for example , now an app for the iphone with your genotype to guide drug therapy ...
but , the future - we can now tell who 's going to get type ii diabetes from all the common variants , and that 's going to get filled in more with low-frequency variants in the future .
we can tell who 's going to get breast cancer from the various genes .
we can also know who 's likely to get atrial fibrillation .
and finally , another example : sudden cardiac death .
each of these has a sensor .
we can give glucose a sensor for diabetes to prevent it .
we can prevent , or have the earliest detection possible , for breast cancer with an ultrasound device given to the patient .
an ipatch , irhythm , for atrial fibrillation .
and vital-signs monitoring to prevent sudden cardiac death .
we lose 700,000 people a year in the u.s. from sudden cardiac death .
so , i hope i 've convinced you of this , of the impact on hospital clinic resources is profound and then the impact on diseases is equally impressive across all these different diseases and more .
it 's really taking individualized medicine to a new height and it 's hyper-innovative , and i think it represents the black swan of medicine .
thanks for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much . i 'm going to try to take you on a journey of the underwater acoustic world of whales and dolphins .
since we are such a visual species , it 's hard for us to really understand this , so i 'll use a mixture of figures and sounds and hope this can communicate it .
but let 's also think , as a visual species , what it 's like when we go snorkeling or diving and try to look underwater .
we really ca n't see very far .
our vision , which works so well in air , all of a sudden is very restricted and claustrophobic .
and what marine mammals have evolved over the last tens of millions of years is ways to depend on sound to both explore their world and also to stay in touch with one another .
dolphins and toothed whales use echolocation .
they can produce loud clicks and listen for echoes from the sea floor in order to orient .
they can listen for echoes from prey in order to decide where food is and to decide which one they want to eat .
all marine mammals use sound for communication to stay in touch .
so the large baleen whales will produce long , beautiful songs , which are used in reproductive advertisement for male and females , both to find one another and to select a mate .
and mother and young and closely bonded animals use calls to stay in touch with one another , so sound is really critical for their lives .
the first thing that got me interested in the sounds of these underwater animals , was evidence from captive dolphins that captive dolphins could imitate human sounds .
and i mentioned i 'll use some visual representations of sounds .
here 's the first example .
this is a plot of frequency against time - sort of like musical notation , where the higher notes are up higher and the lower notes are lower , and time goes this way .
this is a picture of a trainer 's whistle , a whistle a trainer will blow to tell a dolphin it 's done the right thing and can come get a fish .
it sounds sort of like " tweeeeeet . " like that .
this is a calf in captivity making an imitation if you hummed this tune to your dog or cat and it hummed it back to you , you ought to be pretty surprised .
very few nonhuman mammals can imitate sounds .
it 's really important for our music and our language .
so it 's a puzzle : the few other mammal groups that do this , why do they do it ?
a lot of my career has been devoted to trying to understand how these animals use their learning , use the ability to change what you say based on what you hear in their own communication systems .
so let 's start with calls of a nonhuman primate .
many mammals have to produce contact calls when , say , a mother and calf are apart .
this is an example of a call produced by squirrel monkeys when they 're isolated from another one .
and you can see , there 's not much variability in these calls .
by contrast , the signature whistle which dolphins use to stay in touch , each individual here has a radically different call .
they can use this ability to learn calls in order to develop more complicated and more distinctive calls to identify individuals .
how about the setting in which animals need to use this call ?
well let 's look at mothers and calves .
in normal life for mother and calf dolphin , they 'll often drift apart or swim apart if mom is chasing a fish , and when they separate they have to get back together again .
what this figure shows is the percentage of the separations in which dolphins whistle , against the maximum distance .
so when dolphins are separating by less than 20 meters , less than half the time they need to use whistles .
most of the time they can just find each other just by swimming around .
but all of the time when they separate by more than 100 meters , they need to use these individually distinctive whistles to come back together again .
most of these distinctive signature whistles are quite stereotyped and stable through the life of a dolphin .
but there are some exceptions .
when a male dolphin leaves mom , it will often join up with another male and form an alliance , which may last for decades .
as these two animals form a social bond , their distinctive whistles actually converge and become very similar .
this plot shows two members of a pair .
as you can see at the top here , they share an up-sweep , like " woop , woop , woop . "
they both have that kind of up-sweep .
whereas these members of a pair go " wo-ot , wo-ot , wo-ot . "
and what 's happened is they 've used this learning process to develop a new sign that identifies this new social group .
it 's a very interesting way that they can form a new identifier for the new social group that they 've had .
let 's now take a step back and see what this message can tell us about protecting dolphins from human disturbance .
anybody looking at this picture will know this dolphin is surrounded , and clearly his behavior is being disrupted .
this is a bad situation .
but it turns out that when just a single boat is approaching a group of dolphins at a couple hundred meters away , the dolphins will start whistling , they 'll change what they 're doing , they 'll have a more cohesive group , wait for the boat to go by , and then they 'll get back to normal business .
well , in a place like sarasota , florida , the average interval between times that a boat is passing within a hundred meters of a dolphin group is six minutes .
so even in the situation that does n't look as bad as this , it 's still affecting the amount of time these animals have to do their normal work .
and if we look at a very pristine environment like western australia , lars bider has done work comparing dolphin behavior and distribution before there were dolphin-watching boats .
when there was one boat , not much of an impact .
and two boats : when the second boat was added , what happened was that some of the dolphins left the area completely .
of the ones that stayed , their reproductive rate declined .
so it could have a negative impact on the whole population .
when we think of marine-protected areas for animals like dolphins , this means that we have to be quite conscious about activities that we thought were benign .
we may need to regulate the intensity of recreational boating and actual whale watching in order to prevent these kinds of problems .
i 'd also like to point out that sound does n't obey boundaries .
so you can draw a line to try to protect an area , but chemical pollution and noise pollution will continue to move through the area .
and i 'd like to switch now from this local , familiar , coastal environment to a much broader world of the baleen whales and the open ocean .
this is a kind of map we 've all been looking at .
the world is mostly blue .
but i 'd also like to point out that the oceans are much more connected than we think .
notice how few barriers there are to movement across all of the oceans compared to land .
to me , the most mind-bending example of the interconnectedness of the ocean comes from an acoustic experiment where oceanographers took a ship to the southern indian ocean , deployed an underwater loudspeaker and played back a sound .
that same sound traveled to the west , and could be heard in bermuda , and traveled to the east , and could be heard in monterey - the same sound .
so we live in a world of satellite communication , are used to global communication , but it 's still amazing to me .
the ocean has properties that allow low-frequency sound to basically move globally .
the acoustic transit time for each of these paths is about three hours .
it 's nearly halfway around the globe .
in the early ' 70s , roger payne and an ocean acoustician published a theoretical paper pointing out that it was possible that sound could transmit over these large areas , but very few biologists believed it .
it actually turns out , though , even though we 've only known of long-range propagation for a few decades , the whales clearly have evolved , over tens of millions of years , a way to exploit this amazing property of the ocean .
so blue whales and fin whales produce very low-frequency sounds that can travel over very long ranges .
the top plot here shows a complicated series of calls that are repeated by males .
they form songs , and they appear to play a role in reproduction , sort of like that of song birds .
down below here , we see calls made by both males and females that also carry over very long ranges .
the biologists continued to be skeptical of the long-range communication issue well past the ' 70s , until the end of the cold war .
what happened was , during the cold war , the u.s. navy had a system that was secret at the time , that they used to track russian submarines .
it had deep underwater microphones , or hydrophones , cabled to shore , all wired back to a central place that could listen to sounds over the whole north atlantic .
and after the berlin wall fell , the navy made these systems available to whale bio-acousticians to see what they could hear .
this is a plot from christopher clark who tracked one individual blue whale as it passed by bermuda , went down to the latitude of miami and came back again .
it was tracked for 43 days , swimming 1,700 kilometers , or more than 1,000 miles .
this shows us both that the calls are detectable over hundreds of miles and that whales routinely swim hundreds of miles .
they 're ocean-based and scale animals who are communicating over much longer ranges than we had anticipated .
unlike fins and blues , which disperse into the temperate and tropical oceans , the humpbacked whales congregate in local traditional breeding grounds , so they can make a sound that 's a little higher in frequency , broader-band and more complicated .
so you 're listening to the complicated song produced by humpbacks here .
humpbacks , when they develop the ability to sing this song , they 're listening to other whales and modifying what they sing based on what they 're hearing , just like song birds or the dolphin whistles i described .
this means that humpback song is a form of animal culture , just like music for humans would be .
i think one of the most interesting examples of this comes from australia .
biologists on the east coast of australia were recording the songs of humpbacks in that area .
and this orange line here marks the typical songs of east coast humpbacks .
in ' 95 they all sang the normal song .
but in ' 96 they heard a few weird songs , and it turned out that these strange songs were typical of west coast whales .
the west coast calls became more and more popular , until by 1998 , none of the whales sang the east coast song ; it was completely gone .
they just sang the cool new west coast song .
it 's as if some new hit style had completely wiped out the old-fashioned style before , and with no golden oldies stations .
nobody sang the old ones .
i 'd like to briefly just show what the ocean does to these calls .
now you are listening to a recording made by chris clark , 0.2 miles away from a humpback .
you can hear the full frequency range . it 's quite loud .
you sound very nearby .
the next recording you 're going to hear was made of the same humpback song 50 miles away .
that 's shown down here .
you only hear the low frequencies .
you hear the reverberation as the sound travels over long-range in the ocean and is not quite as loud .
now after i play back these humpback calls , i 'll play blue whale calls , but they have to be sped up because they 're so low in frequency that you would n't be able to hear it otherwise .
here 's a blue whale call at 50 miles , which was distant for the humpback .
it 's loud , clear - you can hear it very clearly .
here 's the same call recorded from a hydrophone 500 miles away .
there 's a lot of noise , which is mostly other whales .
but you can still hear that faint call .
let 's now switch and think about a potential for human impacts .
the most dominant sound that humans put into the ocean comes from shipping .
this is the sound of a ship , and i 'm having to talk a little louder to talk over it .
imagine that whale listening from 500 miles .
there 's a potential problem that maybe this kind of shipping noise would prevent whales from being able to hear each other .
now this is something that 's been known for quite a while .
this is a figure from a textbook on underwater sound .
and on the y-axis is the loudness of average ambient noise in the deep ocean by frequency .
in the low frequencies , this line indicates sound that comes from seismic activity of the earth .
up high , these variable lines indicate increasing noise in this frequency range from higher wind and wave .
but right in the middle here where there 's a sweet spot , the noise is dominated by human ships .
now think about it . this is an amazing thing : that in this frequency range where whales communicate , the main source globally , on our planet , for the noise comes from human ships , thousands of human ships , distant , far away , just all aggregating .
the next slide will show what the impact this may have on the range at which whales can communicate .
so here we have the loudness of a call at the whale .
and as we get farther away , the sound gets fainter and fainter .
now in the pre-industrial ocean , as we were mentioning , this whale call could be easily detected .
it 's louder than noise at a range of a thousand kilometers .
let 's now take that additional increase in noise that we saw comes from shipping .
all of a sudden , the effective range of communication goes from a thousand kilometers to 10 kilometers .
now if this signal is used for males and females to find each other for mating and they 're dispersed , imagine the impact this could have on the recovery of endangered populations .
whales also have contact calls like i described for the dolphins .
i 'll play the sound of a contact call used by right whales to stay in touch .
say , right whale mothers and calves as they separate to come back again .
now imagine - let 's put the ship noise in the picture .
what 's a mother to do if the ship comes by and her calf is n't there ?
i 'll describe a couple strategies .
one strategy is if your call 's down here , and the noise is in this band , you could shift the frequency of your call out of the noise band and communicate better .
susan parks of penn state has actually studied this .
she 's looked in the atlantic . here 's data from the south atlantic .
here 's a typical south atlantic contact call from the ' 70s .
look what happened by 2000 to the average call .
same thing in the north atlantic , in the ' 50s versus 2000 .
over the last 50 years , as we 've put more noise into the oceans , these whales have had to shift .
it 's as if the whole population had to shift from being basses to singing as a tenor .
it 's an amazing shift , induced by humans over this large scale , in both time and space .
and we now know that whales can compensate for noise by calling louder , like i did when that ship was playing , by waiting for silence and by shifting their call out of the noise band .
now there 's probably costs to calling louder or shifting the frequency away from where you want to be , and there 's probably lost opportunities .
if we also have to wait for silence , they may miss a critical opportunity to communicate .
so we have to be very concerned about when the noise in habitats degrades the habitat enough that the animals either have to pay too much to be able to communicate , or are not able to perform critical functions .
it 's a really important problem .
and i 'm happy to say that there are several very promising developments in this area , looking at the impact of shipping on whales .
in terms of the shipping noise , the international maritime organization of the united nations has formed a group whose job is to establish guidelines for quieting ships , to tell the industry how you could quiet ships .
and they 've already found that by being more intelligent about better propeller design , you can reduce that noise by 90 percent .
if you actually insulate and isolate the machinery of the ship from the hull , you can reduce that noise by 99 percent .
so at this point , it 's primarily an issue of cost and standards .
if this group can establish standards , and if the shipbuilding industry adopts them for building new ships , we can now see a gradual decline in this potential problem .
but there 's also another problem from ships that i 'm illustrating here , and that 's the problem of collision .
this is a whale that just squeaked by a rapidly moving container ship and avoided collision .
but collision is a serious problem .
endangered whales are killed every year by ship collision , and it 's very important to try to reduce this .
i 'll discuss two very promising approaches .
the first case comes from the bay of fundy .
these black lines mark shipping lanes in and out of the bay of fundy .
the colorized area shows the risk of collision for endangered right whales because of the ships moving in this lane .
it turns out that this lane here goes right through a major feeding area of right whales in the summer time , and it makes an area of a significant risk of collision .
well , biologists who could n't take no for an answer went to the international maritime organization and petitioned them to say , " ca n't you move that lane ? those are just lines on the ground .
ca n't you move them over to a place where there 's less of a risk ? "
and the international maritime organization responded very strongly , " these are the new lanes . "
the shipping lanes have been moved .
and as you can see , the risk of collision is much lower .
so it 's very promising , actually .
we can be very creative about thinking of different ways to reduce these risks .
another action which was just taken independently by a shipping company itself was initiated because of concerns the shipping company had the maersk line looked at their competition and saw that everybody who is in shipping thinks time is money .
they rush as fast as they can to get to their port .
but then they often wait there .
what maersk did is they worked ways to slow down .
they could slow down by about 50 percent .
this reduced their fuel consumption by about 30 percent , which saved them money , and at the same time , it had a significant benefit for whales .
it you slow down , you reduce the amount of noise you make and you reduce the risk of collision .
so to conclude , i 'd just like to point out , you know , the whales live in an amazing acoustic environment .
they 've evolved over tens of millions of years to take advantage of this .
and we need to be very attentive and vigilant to thinking about where things that we do may unintentionally prevent them from being able to achieve their important activities .
at the same time , we need to be really creative in thinking of solutions to be able to help reduce these problems .
i hope these examples have shown some of the different directions we can take in addition to protected areas to be able to keep the ocean safe for whales to be able to continue to communicate .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , my question : are we alone ?
the story of humans is the story of ideas - scientific ideas that shine light into dark corners , ideas that we embrace rationally and irrationally , ideas for which we 've lived and died and killed and been killed , ideas that have vanished in history , and ideas that have been set in dogma .
it 's a story of nations , of ideologies , of territories , and of conflicts among them .
but , every moment of human history , from the stone age to the information age , from sumer and babylon to the ipod and celebrity gossip , they 've all been carried out - every book that you 've read , every poem , every laugh , every tear - they 've all happened here .
here .
here .
here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- perspective is a very powerful thing .
perspectives can change .
perspectives can be altered .
from my perspective , we live on a fragile island of life , in a universe of possibilities .
for many millennia , humans have been on a journey to find answers , answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence , about who we are and why we are , and of course , who else might be out there .
is it really just us ?
are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics ?
well , if we are , it 's an awful waste of space .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , what if we 're not ?
what if , out there , others are asking and answering similar questions ?
what if they look up at the night sky , at the same stars , but from the opposite side ?
would the discovery of an older cultural civilization out there inspire us to find ways to survive our increasingly uncertain technological adolescence ?
might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans ?
whether we 're born in san francisco , or sudan , or close to the heart of the milky way galaxy , we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust .
we , all of us , are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from .
fifty years ago , the journey to find answers took a different path and seti , the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence , began .
so , what exactly is seti ?
well , seti uses the tools of astronomy to try and find evidence of someone else 's technology out there .
our own technologies are visible over interstellar distances , and theirs might be as well .
it might be that some massive network of communications , or some shield against asteroidal impact , or some huge astro-engineering project that we ca n't even begin to conceive of , could generate signals at radio or optical frequencies that a determined program of searching might detect .
for millennia , we 've actually turned to the priests and the philosophers for guidance and instruction on this question of whether there 's intelligent life out there .
now , we can use the tools of the 21st century to try and observe what is , rather than ask what should be , believed .
seti does n't presume the existence of extra terrestrial intelligence ; it merely notes the possibility , if not the probability in this vast universe , which seems fairly uniform .
the numbers suggest a universe of possibilities .
our sun is one of 400 billion stars in our galaxy , and we know that many other stars have planetary systems .
we 've discovered over 350 in the last 14 years , including the small planet , announced earlier this week , which has a radius just twice the size of the earth .
and , if even all of the planetary systems in our galaxy were devoid of life , there are still 100 billion other galaxies out there , altogether 10 ^ 22 stars .
now , i 'm going to try a trick , and recreate an experiment from this morning .
remember , one billion ?
but , this time not one billion dollars , one billion stars .
alright , one billion stars .
now , up there , 20 feet above the stage , that 's 10 trillion .
well , what about 10 ^ 22 ?
where 's the line that marks that ?
that line would have to be 3.8 million miles above this stage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 16 times farther away than the moon , or four percent of the distance to the sun .
so , there are many possibilities .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and much of this vast universe , much more may be habitable than we once thought , as we study extremophiles on earth - organisms that can live in conditions totally inhospitable for us , in the hot , high pressure thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean , frozen in ice , in boiling battery acid , in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors .
these extremophiles tell us that life may exist in many other environments .
but those environments are going to be widely spaced in this universe .
even our nearest star , the sun - its emissions suffer the tyranny of light speed .
it takes a full eight minutes for its radiation to reach us .
and the nearest star is 4.2 light years away , which means its light takes 4.2 years to get here .
and the edge of our galaxy is 75,000 light years away , and the nearest galaxy to us , 2.5 million light years .
that means any signal we detect would have started its journey a long time ago .
and a signal would give us a glimpse of their past , not their present .
which is why phil morrison calls seti , " the archaeology of the future . "
it tells us about their past , but detection of a signal tells us it 's possible for us to have a long future .
i think this is what david deutsch meant in 2005 , when he ended his oxford tedtalk by saying he had two principles he 'd like to share for living , and he would like to carve them on stone tablets .
the first is that problems are inevitable .
the second is that problems are soluble .
so , ultimately what 's going to determine the success or failure of seti is the longevity of technologies , and the mean distance between technologies in the cosmos - distance over space and distance over time .
if technologies do n't last and persist , we will not succeed .
and we 're a very young technology in an old galaxy , and we do n't yet know whether it 's possible for technologies to persist .
so , up until now i 've been talking to you about really large numbers .
let me talk about a relatively small number .
and that 's the length of time that the earth was lifeless .
zircons that are mined in the jack hills of western australia , zircons taken from the jack hills of western australia tell us that within a few hundred million years of the origin of the planet there was abundant water and perhaps even life .
so , our planet has spent the vast majority of its 4.56 billion year history developing life , not anticipating its emergence .
life happened very quickly , and that bodes well for the potential of life elsewhere in the cosmos .
and the other thing that one should take away from this chart is the very narrow range of time over which humans can claim to be the dominant intelligence on the planet .
it 's only the last few hundred thousand years modern humans have been pursuing technology and civilization .
so , one needs a very deep appreciation of the diversity and incredible scale of life on this planet as the first step in preparing to make contact with life elsewhere in the cosmos .
we are not the pinnacle of evolution .
we are not the determined product of billions of years of evolutionary plotting and planning .
we are one outcome of a continuing adaptational process .
we are residents of one small planet in a corner of the milky way galaxy .
and homo sapiens are one small leaf on a very extensive tree of life , which is densely populated by organisms that have been honed for survival over millions of years .
we misuse language , and talk about the " ascent " of man .
we understand the scientific basis for the interrelatedness of life but our ego has n't caught up yet .
so this " ascent " of man , pinnacle of evolution , has got to go .
it 's a sense of privilege that the natural universe does n't share .
loren eiseley has said , " one does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human . "
one day that eye may be that of an intelligent alien , and the sooner we eschew our narrow view of evolution the sooner we can truly explore our ultimate origins and destinations .
we are a small part of the story of cosmic evolution , and we are going to be responsible for our continued participation in that story , and perhaps seti will help as well .
occasionally , throughout history , this concept of this very large cosmic perspective comes to the surface , and as a result we see transformative and profound discoveries .
so in 1543 , nicholas copernicus published " the revolutions of heavenly spheres , " and by taking the earth out of the center , and putting the sun in the center of the solar system , he opened our eyes to a much larger universe , of which we are just a small part .
and that copernican revolution continues today to influence science and philosophy and technology and theology .
so , in 1959 , giuseppe coccone and philip morrison published the first seti article in a refereed journal , and brought seti into the scientific mainstream .
and in 1960 , frank drake conducted the first seti observation looking at two stars , tau ceti and epsilon eridani , for about 150 hours .
now drake did not discover extraterrestrial intelligence , but he learned a very valuable lesson from a passing aircraft , and that 's that terrestrial technology can interfere with the search for extraterrestrial technology .
we 've been searching ever since , but it 's impossible to overstate the magnitude of the search that remains .
all of the concerted seti efforts , over the last 40-some years , are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the oceans .
and no one would decide that the ocean was without fish on the basis of one glass of water .
the 21st century now allows us to build bigger glasses - much bigger glasses .
in northern california , we 're beginning to take observations with the first 42 telescopes of the allen telescope array - and i 've got to take a moment right now to publicly thank paul allen and nathan myhrvold and all the teamseti members in the ted community who have so generously supported this research .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the ata is the first telescope built from a large number of small dishes , and hooked together with computers .
it 's making silicon as important as aluminum , and we 'll grow it in the future by adding more antennas to reach 350 for more sensitivity and leveraging moore 's law for more processing capability .
today , our signal detection algorithms can find very simple artifacts and noise .
if you look very hard here you can see the signal from the voyager 1 spacecraft , the most distant human object in the universe , 106 times as far away from us as the sun is .
and over those long distances , its signal is very faint when it reaches us .
it may be hard for your eye to see it , but it 's easily found with our efficient algorithms .
but this is a simple signal , and tomorrow we want to be able to find more complex signals .
this is a very good year .
2009 is the 400th anniversary of galileo 's first use of the telescope , darwin 's 200th birthday , the 150th anniversary of the publication of " on the origin of species , " the 50th anniversary of seti as a science , the 25th anniversary of the incorporation of the seti institute as a non-profit , and of course , the 25th anniversary of ted .
and next month , the kepler spacecraft will launch and will begin to tell us just how frequent earth-like planets are , the targets for seti 's searches .
in 2009 , the u.n. has declared it to be the international year of astronomy , a global festival to help us residents of earth rediscover our cosmic origins and our place in the universe .
and in 2009 , change has come to washington , with a promise to put science in its rightful position .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , what would change everything ?
well , this is the question the edge foundation asked this year , and four of the respondents said , " seti . "
why ?
well , to quote : " the discovery of intelligent life beyond earth would eradicate the loneliness and solipsism that has plagued our species since its inception .
and it would n't simply change everything , it would change everything all at once . "
so , if that 's right , why did we only capture four out of those 151 minds ?
i think it 's a problem of completion and delivery , because the fine print said , " what game-changing ideas and scientific developments would you expect to live to see ? "
so , we have a fulfillment problem .
we need bigger glasses and more hands in the water , and then working together , maybe we can all live to see the detection of the first extraterrestrial signal .
that brings me to my wish .
i wish that you would empower earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company .
the first step would be to tap into the global brain trust , to build an environment where raw data could be stored , and where it could be accessed and manipulated , where new algorithms could be developed and old algorithms made more efficient .
and this is a technically creative challenge , and it would change the perspective of people who worked on it .
and then , we 'd like to augment the automated search with human insight .
we 'd like to use the pattern recognition capability of the human eye to find faint , complex signals that our current algorithms miss .
and , of course , we 'd like to inspire and engage the next generation .
we 'd like to take the materials that we have built for education , and get them out to students everywhere , students that ca n't come and visit us at the ata .
we 'd like to tell our story better , and engage young people , and thereby change their perspective .
i 'm sorry seth godin , but over the millennia , we 've seen where tribalism leads .
we 've seen what happens when we divide an already small planet into smaller islands .
and , ultimately , we actually all belong to only one tribe , to earthlings .
and seti is a mirror - a mirror that can show us ourselves from an extraordinary perspective , and can help to trivialize the differences among us .
if seti does nothing but change the perspective of humans on this planet , then it will be one of the most profound endeavors in history .
so , in the opening days of 2009 , a visionary president stood on the steps of the u.s. capitol and said , " we can not help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass , that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve , that , as the world grows smaller , our common humanity shall reveal itself . "
so , i look forward to working with the ted community to hear about your ideas about how to fulfill this wish , and in collaborating with you , hasten the day that that visionary statement can become a reality .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- throughout my career , i 've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects , documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit .
i think of new cities like dubai or ancient cities like rome with zaha hadid 's incredible maxxi museum , or like right here in new york with the high line , a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this .
but what i find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people , like here in chandigarh , india , the city which has been completely designed by the architect le corbusier .
now 60 years later , the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for , like here , where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall .
but over the course of several years , i 've been documenting rem koolhaas 's cctv building in beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects herzog and de meuron .
at these large-scale construction sites in china , you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process .
as the length of the construction takes years , workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city , making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they 're building .
over the past seven years , i 've been following my fascination with the built environment , and for those of you who know me , you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 365 days a year .
being constantly on the move means that sometimes i am able to catch life 's most unpredictable moments , like here in new york the day after the sandy storm hit the city .
just over three years ago , i was for the first time in caracas , venezuela , and while flying over the city , i was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city , a place where nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums , draped literally all over the mountains .
during a conversation with local architects urban-think tank , i learned about the torre david , a 45-story office building which sits right in the center of caracas .
the building was under construction until the collapse of the venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early ' 90s .
about eight years ago , people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower .
there 's only one little entrance to the entire building , and the 3,000 residents come in and out through that single door .
together , the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower .
in the lobby , they painted the walls and planted trees .
they also made a basketball court .
but when you look up closely , you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through .
within the tower , people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower .
with no elevators , the tower is like a 45-story walkup .
designed in very specific ways by this group of people who have n't had any education in architecture or design .
and with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by , this tower becomes like a living city , a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses .
the inventive inhabitants , for instance , find opportunities in the most unexpected cases , like the adjacent parking garage , which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments .
a walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls , how to make an air flow , how to create transparency , circulation throughout the tower , essentially creating a home that 's completely adapted to the conditions of the site .
when a new inhabitant moves into the tower , they already have a roof over their head , so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets .
slowly , from found materials , walls rise , and people create a space out of any found objects or materials .
it 's remarkable to see the design decisions that they 're making , like when everything is made out of red bricks , some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish .
the inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands , and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower .
they typically make the best out of their conditions , and try to make their spaces look nice and homey , or at least up until as far as they can reach .
throughout the tower , you come across all kinds of services , like the barber , small factories , and every floor has a little grocery store or shop .
and you even find a church .
and on the 30th floor , there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed .
from the outside , behind this always-changing facade , you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic , intuitive way that responds directly to their needs .
let 's go now to africa , to nigeria , to a community called makoko , a slum where 150,000 people live just meters above the lagos lagoon .
while it may appear to be a completely chaotic place , when you see it from above , there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home .
from the main dock , people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area .
when out on the water , it 's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living .
even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house , selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits .
behind every window and door frame , you 'll see a small child peering back at you , and while makoko seems to be packed with people , what 's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building .
the population growth in nigeria , and especially in these areas like makoko , are painful reminders of how out of control things really are .
in makoko , very few systems and infrastructures exist .
electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area .
this entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water , so fishing and boat-making are common professions .
you 'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area , like barbershops , cd and dvd stores , movie theaters , tailors , everything is there .
there is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place , like that hotel in sweden .
on this particular evening , i came across this live band dressed to the t in their coordinating outfits .
they were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy .
by nightfall , the area becomes almost pitch black , save for a small lightbulb or a fire .
what originally brought me to makoko was this project from a friend of mine , kunlé adeyemi , who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in makoko .
with this entire village existing on the water , public space is very limited , so now that the school is finished , the ground floor is a playground for the kids , but when classes are out , the platform is just like a town square , where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats .
another place i 'd like to share with you is the zabbaleen in cairo .
they 're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper egypt in the ' 40s , and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over cairo .
for years , the zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities , but in the early 1980s , they settled on the mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city .
today , they live in this area , approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people , who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure .
while these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid , each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space .
i find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there , like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him , or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage .
while to most of us , living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable , to those in the zabbaleen , this is just a different type of normal .
in all these places i 've talked about today , what i do find fascinating is that there 's really no such thing as normal , and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation .
throughout the day , it 's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets , just like this engagement party .
in this tradition , the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings , which they soon bring to their new husband .
a gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories .
like makoko and the torre david , throughout the zabbaleen you 'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood .
there are the retail shops , the cafes and the restaurants , and the community is this community of coptic christians , so you 'll also find a church , along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area , and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops , the barbers , everything .
visiting the homes of the zabbaleen is also full of surprises .
while from the outside , these homes look like any other informal structure in the city , when you step inside , you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration .
despite having limited access to space and money , the homes in the area are designed with care and detail .
every apartment is unique , and this individuality tells a story about each family 's circumstances and values .
many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously , putting a lot of work and care into the details .
the shared spaces are also treated in the same manner , where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns .
but despite this elaborate decor , sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways , like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door .
when i was let in , it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm , where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room .
but then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area .
the attention to this detail astonished me , and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment , from floor to ceiling , every part was decorated .
but if it were n't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment , it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill .
what moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions , i was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love , care , and unreserved passion .
let 's move across the map to china , to an area called shanxi , henan and gansu .
in a region famous for the soft , porous loess plateau soil , there lived until recently an estimated 40 million people in these houses underground .
these dwellings are called the yaodongs .
through this architecture by subtraction , these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil .
in these villages , you see an entirely altered landscape , and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square , rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground .
when i asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground , they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who did n't have the money to buy materials , and this digging out was their most logical form of living .
from makoko to zabbaleen , these communities have approached the tasks of planning , design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances .
created by these very people who live , work and play in these particular spaces , these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances .
in most of these places , the government is completely absent , leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials , and while these communities are highly disadvantaged , they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity , and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances .
what makes places like the torre david particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into .
now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves , and how highly particular their solutions would be , if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into .
today , you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people .
from china to brazil , these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible , but they 're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people .
i would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration , zita cobb , the founder of the wonderful shorefast foundation , based out of fogo island , newfoundland .
she says that " there 's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy , " and i could n't agree with her more .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
now , i 've got a story for you .
when i arrived off the plane , after a very long journey from the west of england , my computer , my beloved laptop , had gone mad , and had - oh ! - a bit like that ! - and the display on it - anyway , the whole thing had burst .
and i went to the it guys here and a gentleman mended my computer , and then he said , " what are you doing here ? "
and i said " i 'm playing the cello and i 'm doing a bit of singing , " and he said , " oh , i sort of play the cello as well . "
and i said , " do you really ? "
anyway , so you 're in for a treat , because he 's fantastic , and his name 's mark .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am also joined by my partner in crime , thomas dolby .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this song is called " farther than the sun . "
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ strung in the wind i called you ♫ ♫ but you did not hear ... ♫ ♫ and you 're a plant that needs poor soil ♫ ♫ and i have treated you too well ♫ ♫ to give up flowers ... ♫ ♫ oh , i have been too rich for you ... ♫ ♫ farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ farther than i 'd have you be ♫ ♫ and i go north , i get so cold ♫ ♫ my heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ you are not worthy ♫
♫ you are not worthy ... ♫ ♫ with your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ spinning figures ♫ ♫ you can not see me ♫ ♫ you can not see me ... ♫ ♫ and if i tell myself enough ♫ ♫ i 'll believe it ♫ ♫ you are not worthy ♫ ♫ the sea , it freezes over ... ♫ ♫ to trap the light ♫ ♫ and i 'm in love with being in love ♫ ♫ and you were never quite the one ♫ ♫ in gerda 's eyes ♫ ♫ fragments of what you 've become ♫ ♫ and all the moths that fly at night ♫
♫ believe electric light is bright ♫ ♫ you are not worthy ♫ ♫ you are not worthy ♫ ♫ with your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ spinning figures ♫ ♫ you can not see me , no ♫ ♫ and if i tell myself enough ♫ ♫ i 'll believe it ♫ ♫ you are not worthy ♫ ♫ farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ farther than i 'd have you be ♫ ♫ and i go north , i get so cold ♫ ♫ my heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ you are not worthy ♫
♫ you are not worthy ♫ ♫ with your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ spinning figures ♫ ♫ you can not see me , no ... ♫ ♫ and if i tell myself enough , i 'll believe it ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
it was a saturday afternoon in may , and i suddenly realized that the next day was mother 's day , and i had n't gotten anything for my mom , so i started thinking about what should i get my mom for mother 's day ?
i thought , why do n't i make her an interactive mother 's day card using the scratch software that i 'd been developing with my research group at the mit media lab ?
we developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations , and then share their creations with one another .
so i thought , this would be an opportunity to use scratch to make an interactive card for my mom .
before making my own mother 's day card , i thought i would take a look at the scratch website .
so over the last several years , kids around the world ages 8 and up , have shared their projects , and i thought , i wonder if , of those three million projects , whether anyone else has thought to put up mother 's day cards .
so in the search box i typed in " mother 's day , " and i was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of mother 's day cards that showed up on the scratch website , many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself .
so i started taking a look at them . -lrb- music -rrb- i saw one of them that featured a kitten and her mom and wishing her mom a happy mother 's day .
and the creator very considerately offered a replay for her mom .
another one was an interactive project where , when you moved the mouse over the letters of " happy mom day , " it reveals a special happy mother 's day slogan .
-lrb- music -rrb- in this one , the creator told a narrative about how she had googled to find out when mother 's day was happening .
-lrb- typing -rrb- and then once she found out when mother 's day was happening , she delivered a special mother 's day greeting of how much she loved her mom .
so i really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects .
in fact , i liked it so much that , instead of making my own project , i sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and actually , she reacted exactly the way that i hoped that she would .
she wrote back to me and she said , " i 'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make mother 's day cards for their mothers . "
so my mom was happy , and that made me happy , but actually i was even happier for another reason .
i was happy because these kids were using scratch just in the way that we had hoped that they would .
as they created their interactive mother 's day cards , you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies .
what do i mean by fluent ?
i mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas .
when you become fluent with language , it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend .
and it 's similar with new technologies .
by writing , be creating these interactive mother 's day cards , these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies .
now maybe you wo n't be so surprised by this , because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology .
i mean , all of us have heard young people referred to as " digital natives . "
but actually i 'm sort of skeptical about this term .
i 'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives .
when you really look at it , how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies ?
you often see them in situations like this , or like this , and there 's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming .
but that does n't really make you fluent .
so young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies , but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies .
it 's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies .
and i 'm really interested in seeing , how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies ?
and that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs , or code .
so , increasingly , people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code .
you know , in recent years , there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code .
you look online , you 'll see places like codecademy and events like coderdojo and sites like girls who code , or black girls code .
it seems that everybody is getting into the act .
you know , just at the beginning of this year , at the turn of the new year , new york city mayor michael bloomberg made a new year 's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012 .
a few months later , the country of estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code .
and that triggered a debate in the u.k.
about whether all the children there should learn to code .
now , for some of you , when you hear about this , it might seem sort of strange about everybody learning to code .
when many people think of coding , they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing , and they think of coding looking like this .
and in fact , if this is what coding is like , it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code .
but coding does n't have to be like this .
let me show you about what it 's like to code in scratch .
so in scratch , to code , you just snap blocks together .
in this case , you take a move block , snap it into a stack , and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story , in this case controlling the big fish .
after you 've created your program , you can click on " share , " and then share your project with other people , so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well .
so , of course , making a fish game is n't the only thing you can do with scratch .
of the millions of projects on the scratch website , there 's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork , and , yes , interactive mother 's day cards .
so i think there 's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this , to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world .
and it does n't just stay on the screen .
you can also code to interact with the physical world around you .
here 's an example from hong kong , where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor , so the light sensor detects the hole in the board , so as they move the physical saw , the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree .
we 're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us .
this is an example from a new version of scratch that we 'll be releasing in the next few months , and we 're looking again to be able to push you in new directions .
here 's an example .
it uses the webcam .
and as i move my hand , i can pop the balloons or i can move the bug .
so it 's a little bit like microsoft kinect , where you interact with gestures in the world .
but instead of just playing someone else 's game , you get to create the games , and if you see someone else 's game , you can just say " see inside , " and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it .
so there 's a new block that says how much video motion there is , and then , if there 's so much video motion , it will then tell the balloon to pop .
the same way that this uses the camera to get information into scratch , you can also use the microphone .
here 's an example of a project using the microphone .
so i 'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices .
-lrb- crickets chirping -rrb- -lrb- shouts -rrb- -lrb- chomping -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- as kids are creating projects like this , they 're learning to code , but even more importantly , they 're coding to learn .
because as they learn to code , it enables them to learn many other things , opens up many new opportunities for learning .
again , it 's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing .
when you learn to read and write , it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things .
when you learn to read , you can then read to learn .
and it 's the same thing with coding .
if you learn to code , you can code to learn .
now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious .
you learn more about how computers work .
but that 's just where it starts .
when you learn to code , it opens up for you to learn many other things .
let me show you an example .
here 's another project , and i saw this when i was visiting one of the computer clubhouses .
these are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies .
and when i went to one of the clubhouses a couple years ago , i saw a 13-year-old boy who was using our scratch software to create a game somewhat like this one , and he was very happy with his game and proud of his game , but also he wanted to do more .
he wanted to keep score .
so this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish , but he wanted to keep score , so that each time the big fish eats the little fish , the score would go up and it would keep track , and he did n't know how to do that .
so i showed him .
in scratch , you can create something called a variable .
i 'll call it score .
and that creates some new blocks for you , and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score , so each time i click on " change score , " it increments the score .
so i showed this to the clubhouse member - let 's call him victor - and victor , when he saw that this block would let him increment the score , he knew exactly what to do .
he took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish .
so then , each time the big fish eats the little fish , he will increment the score , and the score will go up by one .
and it 's in fact working .
and he saw this , and he was so excited , he reached his hand out to me , and he said , " thank you , thank you , thank you . "
and what went through my mind was , how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- it does n't happen in most classrooms , but that 's because in most classrooms , when kids learn about variables , they do n't know why they 're learning it .
it 's nothing that , really , they can make use of .
when you learn ideas like this in scratch , you can learn it in a way that 's really meaningful and motivating for you , that you can understand the reason for learning variables , and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better .
victor had , i 'm sure , been taught about variables in schools , but he really did n't - he was n't paying attention .
now he had a reason for learning variables .
so when you learn through coding , and coding to learn , you 're learning it in a meaningful context , and that 's the best way of learning things .
so as kids like victor are creating projects like this , they 're learning important concepts like variables , but that 's just the start .
as victor worked on this project and created the scripts , he was also learning about the process of design , how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged , functioning project like you see here .
so he was learning many different core principles of design , about how to experiment with new ideas , how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts , how to collaborate with other people on your projects , about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong , how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things are n't working well .
now those are important skills that are n't just relevant for coding .
they 're relevant for all sorts of different activities .
now , who knows if victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist ?
it 's probably not so likely , but regardless of what he does , he 'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned .
regardless of whether he grows up to be a marketing manager or a mechanic or a community organizer , that these ideas are useful for everybody .
again , it 's useful to think about this analogy with language .
when you become fluent with reading and writing , it 's not something that you 're doing just to become a professional writer .
very few people become professional writers .
but it 's useful for everybody to learn how to read and write .
again , the same thing with coding .
most people wo n't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers , but those skills of thinking creatively , reasoning systematically , working collaboratively - skills you develop when you code in scratch - are things that people can use no matter what they 're doing in their work lives .
and it 's not just about your work life .
coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life .
let me end with just one more example .
so this is an example that came from after i had sent the mother 's day cards to my mom , she decided that she wanted to learn scratch .
so she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday scratch card .
now this project is not going to win any prizes for design , and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist .
but working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself .
so as we take a look and we see that michael bloomberg is learning to code , all of the children of estonia learn to code , even my mom has learned to code , do n't you think it 's about time that you might be thinking about learning to code ?
if you 're interested in giving it a try , i 'd encourage you to go to the scratch website .
it 's scratch.mit.edu , and give a try at coding .
thanks very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i have a question for you : are you religious ?
please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person .
let 's see , i 'd say about three or four percent .
i had no idea there were so many believers at a ted conference .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , here 's another question : do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way , shape or form ? raise your hand .
okay , that 's the majority .
my talk today is about the main reason , or one of the main reasons , why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way , shape or form .
my talk today is about self-transcendence .
it 's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away .
and when that happens , the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings .
we talk about being uplifted or elevated .
now it 's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor .
so here 's the metaphor i 'm offering today .
think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms , most of which we 're very familiar with .
but sometimes it 's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase .
we climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness .
in 1902 , the great american psychologist william james wrote about the many varieties of religious experience .
he collected all kinds of case studies .
he quoted the words of all kinds of people who 'd had a variety of these experiences .
one of the most exciting to me is this young man , stephen bradley , had an encounter , he thought , with jesus in 1820 .
and here 's what bradley said about it .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- stephen bradley : i thought i saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room , with arms extended , appearing to say to me , " come . "
the next day i rejoiced with trembling .
my happiness was so great that i said i wanted to die .
this world had no place in my affections .
previous to this time , i was very selfish and self-righteous .
but now i desired the welfare of all mankind and could , with a feeling heart , forgive my worst enemies .
jh : so note how bradley 's petty , moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase .
and on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving .
the world 's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase .
some shut down the self using meditation .
others use psychedelic drugs .
this is from a 16th century aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god .
others use dancing , spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence .
but you do n't need a religion to get you through the staircase .
lots of people find self-transcendence in nature .
others overcome their self at raves .
but here 's the weirdest place of all : war .
so many books about war say the same thing , that nothing brings people together like war .
and that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences .
i 'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by glenn gray .
gray was a soldier in the american army in world war ii .
and after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle .
here 's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase .
-lrb- video -rrb- glenn gray : many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives .
" i " passes insensibly into a " we , " " my " becomes " our " and individual faith loses its central importance .
i believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy .
i may fall , but i do not die , for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom i gave up my life .
jh : so what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out , or melt away , and it feels good , it feels really good , in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives .
it feels somehow uplifting .
this idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great french sociologist emile durkheim .
durkheim even called us homo duplex , or two-level man .
the lower level he called the level of the profane .
now profane is the opposite of sacred .
it just means ordinary or common .
and in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals .
we want to satisfy our individual desires .
we pursue our individual goals .
but sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change .
individuals unite into a team , a movement or a nation , which is far more than the sum of its parts .
durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group , into a moral community .
durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness .
and once people circle around some sacred object or value , they 'll then work as a team and fight to defend it .
durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of e pluribus unum , of making a group out of individuals .
think of the collective joy in britain on the day world war ii ended .
think of the collective anger in tahrir square , which brought down a dictator .
and think of the collective grief in the united states that we all felt , that brought us all together , after 9/11 .
so let me summarize where we are .
i 'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human .
i 'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind .
i 'm saying we are homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred .
when we climb that staircase , self-interest fades away , we become just much less self-interested , and we feel as though we are better , nobler and somehow uplifted .
so here 's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me : is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design ?
is it a product of natural selection , like our hands ?
or is it a bug , a mistake in the system - this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain - jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience , it 's just a mistake ?
well many scientists who study religion take this view .
the new atheists , for example , argue that religion is a set of memes , sort of parasitic memes , that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff , self-destructive stuff , like suicide bombing .
and after all , how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves ?
how could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest ?
well let me show you .
in " the descent of man , " charles darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality - where did it come from , why do we have it .
darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves , but they 're of great use to our groups .
he wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition .
he said , " if the one tribe included a great number of courageous , sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other , this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other . "
he went on to say that " selfish and contentious people will not cohere , and without coherence nothing can be effected . "
in other words , charles darwin believed in group selection .
now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years , but it 's about to make a major comeback this year , especially after e.o. wilson 's book comes out in april , making a very strong case that we , and several other species , are products of group selection .
but really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection .
so look at it this way : you 've got competition going on within groups and across groups .
so here 's a group of guys on a college crew team .
within this team there 's competition .
there are guys competing with each other .
the slowest rowers , the weakest rowers , are going to get cut from the team .
and only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport .
maybe one of them will make it to the olympics .
so within the team , their interests are actually pitted against each other .
and sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys .
maybe he 'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach .
but while that competition is going on within the boat , this competition is going on across boats .
and once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat , now they 've got no choice but to cooperate because they 're all in the same boat .
they can only win if they all pull together as a team .
i mean , these things sound trite , but they are deep evolutionary truths .
the main argument against group selection has always been that , well sure , it would be nice to have a group of cooperators , but as soon as you have a group of cooperators , they 're just going to get taken over by free-riders , individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others .
let me illustrate this for you .
suppose we 've got a group of little organisms - they can be bacteria , they can be hamsters ; it does n't matter what - and let 's suppose that this little group here , they evolved to be cooperative .
well that 's great . they graze , they defend each other , they work together , they generate wealth .
and as you 'll see in this simulation , as they interact they gain points , as it were , they grow , and when they 've doubled in size , you 'll see them split , and that 's how they reproduce and the population grows .
but suppose then that one of them mutates .
there 's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy .
it takes advantage of the others .
and so when a green interacts with a blue , you 'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller .
so here 's how things play out .
we start with just one green , and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food .
and in short order , the cooperators are done for .
the free-riders have taken over .
if a group can not solve the free-rider problem then it can not reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection can not get started .
but there are solutions to the free-rider problem .
it 's not that hard a problem .
in fact , nature has solved it many , many times .
and nature 's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat .
for example , why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own dna , totally separate from the dna in the nucleus ?
it 's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism .
somehow or other - maybe one swallowed another ; we 'll never know exactly why - but once they got a membrane around them , they were all in the same membrane , now all the wealth-created division of labor , all the greatness created by cooperation , stays locked inside the membrane and we 've got a superorganism .
and now let 's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders , of defectors , of cheaters and look what happens .
a superorganism can basically take what it wants .
it 's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens , from the defectors , the cheaters .
and pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms .
what i 've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history .
darwin 's laws do n't change , but now there 's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different .
now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria .
it happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple , primitive nests , or hives .
once several wasps were all together in the same hive , they had no choice but to cooperate , because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives .
and the most cohesive hives won , just as darwin said .
these early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere .
and it happened again , even more spectacularly , in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures , they came together around a hearth or a campfire , they divided labor , they began painting their bodies , they spoke their own dialects , and eventually they worshiped their own gods .
once they were all in the same tribe , they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside .
and they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet , which is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction .
of course , human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives .
human groups may look like hives for brief moments , but they tend to then break apart .
we 're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are .
in fact , often , as we 've seen happen in a lot of the arab spring revolts , often those divisions are along religious lines .
nonetheless , when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement , they can move mountains .
look at the people in these photos i 've been showing you .
do you think they 're there pursuing their self-interest ?
or are they pursuing communal interest , which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole ?
okay , so that was my talk delivered in the standard ted way .
and now i 'm going to give the whole talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- jonathan haidt : we humans have many varieties of religious experience , as william james explained .
one of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves .
the staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred , or deeply interconnected .
we are homo duplex , as durkheim explained .
and we are homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection , as darwin explained .
i ca n't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug , but if it is an adaptation , then the implications are profound .
if it is an adaptation , then we evolved to be religious .
i do n't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions .
those things came along too recently .
i mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects , people and ideas .
this is why politics is so tribal .
politics is partly profane , it 's partly about self-interest , but politics is also about sacredness .
it 's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas .
it 's about the eternal struggle between good and evil , and we all believe we 're on the good team .
and most importantly , if the staircase is real , it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life .
because human beings are , to some extent , hivish creatures like bees .
we 're bees . we busted out of the hive during the enlightenment .
we broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed .
we unleashed earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort .
nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom .
but sometimes we wonder : is this all there is ?
what should i do with my life ?
what 's missing ?
what 's missing is that we are homo duplex , but modern , secular society was built to satisfy our lower , profane selves .
it 's really comfortable down here on the lower level .
come , have a seat in my home entertainment center .
one great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top .
i see this desire in my students at the university of virginia .
they all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into .
they 're all searching for their staircase .
and that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish .
most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger .
and this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago .
" no man is an island entire of itself .
every man is a piece of the continent , a part of the main . "
jh : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging ?
this is a dream of the ages .
but scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible .
they thought you just wear out , there 's nothing you can do about it - kind of like an old shoe .
but if you look in nature , you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans .
now these animals are different from one another , because they have different genes .
so that suggests that somewhere in these genes , somewhere in the dna , are genes for aging , genes that allow them to have different lifespans .
so if there are genes like that , then you can imagine that , if you could change one of the genes in an experiment , an aging gene , maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan .
and if you could do that , then you could find the genes for aging .
and if they exist and you can find them , then maybe one could eventually do something about it .
so we 've set out to look for genes that control aging .
and we did n't study any of these animals .
instead , we studied a little , tiny , round worm called c. elegans , which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence .
and we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant .
so we started to change genes at random , looking for long-lived animals .
and we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm .
so you can see in black , after a month - they 're very short-lived ; that 's why we like to study them for studies of aging - in black , after a month , the normal worms are all dead .
but at that time , most of the mutant worms are still alive .
and it is n't until twice as long that they 're all dead .
and now i want to show what they actually look like in this movie here .
so the first thing you 're going to see is the normal worm when it 's about college student age - a young adult .
it 's quite a cute little fellow .
and next you 're going to see the long-lived mutant when it 's young .
so this animal is going to live twice as long .
is it miserable ? it does n't seem to be .
it 's active . you ca n't tell the difference really .
and they can be completely fertile - have the same number of progeny as the normal worms do .
now get out your handkerchiefs here .
you 're going to see , in just two weeks , the normal worms are old .
you can see the little head moving down at the bottom there .
but everything else is just lying there .
the animal 's clearly in the nursing home .
and if you look at the tissues of the animal , they 're starting to deteriorate .
you know , even if you 've never seen one of these little c. elegans - which probably most of you have n't seen one - you can tell they 're old - is n't that interesting ?
so there 's something about aging that 's kind of universal .
and now here is the daf-2 mutant .
one gene is changed out of 20,000 , and look at it .
it 's the same age , but it 's not in the nursing home ; it 's going skiing .
this is what 's really cool : it 's aging more slowly .
it takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day .
and when i tell people about this , they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80 .
but it 's really more like this : let 's say you 're a 30 year-old guy - or in your 30s - and you 're a bachelor and you 're dating people .
and you meet someone you really like , you get to know her .
and you 're in a restaurant , and you say , " well how old are you ? "
she says , " i 'm 60 . "
that 's what it 's like . and you would never know .
you would never know , until she told you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
so what is the daf-2 gene ?
well as you know , genes , which are part of the dna , they 're instructions to make a protein that does something .
and the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor .
so what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell .
so part of it is like a baseball glove .
part of it 's on the outside , and it 's catching the hormone as it comes by in green .
and the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell .
okay , so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell ?
i just told you that , if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell , that you get a receptor that does n't work as well ; the animal lives longer .
so that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging .
that 's what that arrow means .
it speeds up aging . it makes it go faster .
so it 's like the animal has the grim reaper inside of itself , speeding up aging .
so this is altogether really , really interesting .
it says that aging is subject to control by the genes , and specifically by hormones .
so what kind of hormones are these ?
there 's lots of hormones . there 's testosterone , adrenalin .
you know about a lot of them .
these hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies .
the daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and igf-1 .
now you 've all heard of at least insulin .
insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal .
and the hormone igf-1 promotes growth .
so these functions were known for these hormones for a long time , but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about - maybe they also affect aging .
and it 's looking like that 's the case .
so after we made our discoveries with little c. elegans , people who worked on other kinds of animals started asking , if we made the same daf-2 mutation , the hormone receptor mutation , in other animals , will they live longer ?
and that is the case in flies .
if you change this hormone pathway in flies , they live longer .
and also in mice - and mice are mammals like us .
so it 's an ancient pathway , because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals .
and also , the common precursor also gave rise to people .
so maybe it 's working in people the same way .
and there are hints of this .
so for example , there was one study that was done in a population of ashkenazi jews in new york city .
and just like any population , most of the people live to be about 70 or 80 , but some live to be 90 or 100 .
and what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations - that is , changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for igf-1 .
and these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted .
it damaged the gene .
so those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging .
so the next question , of course , is : is there any effect on age-related disease ?
as you age , you 're much more likely to get cancer , alzheimer 's disease , heart disease , all sorts of diseases .
it turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases .
they hardly get cancer , and when they do it 's not as severe .
so it 's really interesting , and it makes sense in a way , that they 're still young , so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old ?
so it suggests that , if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to take to replicate some of these effects in humans , maybe we would have a way of combating lots of different age-related diseases all at once .
so how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging ?
how could that work ?
well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants , a whole lot of genes are switched on in the dna that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues , and repair damage .
and the way that they 're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called foxo .
so in a daf-2 mutant - you see that i have the x drawn here through the receptor .
the receptor is n't working as well .
under those conditions , the foxo protein in blue has gone into the nucleus - that little compartment there in the middle of the cell - and it 's sitting down on a gene binding to it .
you see one gene . there are lots of genes actually that bind on foxo .
and it 's just sitting on one of them .
so foxo turns on a lot of genes .
and the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes , genes i call carrot-giver genes , whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well - to fold correctly and function correctly .
and it can also escort them to the garbage cans of the cell and recycle them if they 're damaged .
dna repair genes are more active in these animals .
and the immune system is more active .
and many of these different genes , we 've shown , actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant .
so it 's really interesting .
these animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do .
they have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage , which we think makes them live longer .
so what about the normal worm ?
well when the daf-2 receptor is active , then it triggers a series of events that prevent foxo from getting into the nucleus where the dna is .
so it ca n't turn the genes on .
that 's how it works . that 's why we do n't see the long lifespan , until we have the daf-2 mutant .
but what good is this for the worm ?
well we think that insulin and igf-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions - in the good times - when food is plentiful and there 's not a lot of stress in the environment .
then they promote the uptake of nutrients .
you can store the food , use it for energy , grow , etc .
but what we think is that , under conditions of stress , the levels of these hormones drop - for example , having limited food supply .
and that , we think , is registered by the animal as a danger signal , a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity .
so it activates foxo , foxo goes to the dna , that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself .
and that 's why we think the animals live longer .
so you can think of foxo as being like a building superintendent .
so maybe he 's a little bit lazy , but he 's there , he 's taking care of the building .
but it 's deteriorating .
and then suddenly , he learns that there 's going to be a hurricane .
so he does n't actually do anything himself .
he gets on the telephone - just like foxo gets on the dna - and he calls up the roofer , the window person , the painter , the floor person .
and they all come and they fortify the house .
and then the hurricane comes through , and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in .
and not only that , it can also just last longer , even if there is n't a hurricane .
so that 's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists .
now the really cool thing about foxo is that there are different forms of it .
we all have foxo genes , but we do n't all have exactly the same form of the foxo gene .
just like we all have eyes , but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes .
and there are certain forms of the foxo gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100 .
and that 's the case all over the world , as you can see from these stars .
and each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked , " okay , are there differences in the type of foxo genes among people who live a really long time ? " and there are .
we do n't know the details of how this works , but we do know then that foxo genes can impact the lifespan of people .
and that means that , maybe if we tweak it a little bit , we can increase the health and longevity of people .
so this is really exciting to me .
a foxo is a protein that we found in these little , round worms to affect lifespan , and here it affects lifespan in people .
so we 've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this foxo cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases .
and i 'm really optimistic that this is going to work .
there are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging .
and for at least one of them , there is a drug .
there 's one called tor , which is another nutrient sensor , like the insulin pathway .
and mutations that damage the tor gene - just like the daf-2 mutations - extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice .
but in this case , there 's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the tor protein and inhibits its activity .
and you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse - even when it 's pretty old , like age 60 for a human , that old for a mouse - if you give the mouse rapamycin , it will live longer .
now i do n't want you all to go out taking rapamycin .
it is a drug for people , but the reason is it suppresses the immune system .
so people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected .
so this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer .
but still , here in the year 2011 , there 's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan , which comes out of this science that 's been done in all these different animals .
so i 'm really optimistic , and i think it wo n't be too long , i hope , before this age-old dream begins to come true .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- matt ridley : thank you , cynthia .
let me get this straight .
although you 're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me , what you could do now pretty well in the lab , if you were allowed ethically , is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer ?
ck : ah , so the kinds of drugs i was talking about would not change the genes , they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity .
so if you stop taking the drug , the protein would go back to normal .
you could change the genes in principle .
there is n't the technology to do that .
but i do n't think that 's a good idea .
and the reason is that these hormones , like the insulin and the igf hormones and the tor pathway , they 're essential .
if you knock them out completely , then you 're very sick .
so it might be that you would just have to fine tune it very carefully to get the benefits without getting any problems .
and i think that 's much better , that kind of control would be much better as a drug .
and also , there are other ways of activating foxo that do n't even involve insulin or igf-1 that might even be safer .
mr : i was n't suggesting that i was going to go and do it , but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a phenomenon which you have written about and spoken about , which is a negligible senescence .
there are some creatures on this planet already that do n't really do aging .
just move to one side for us , if you would .
ck : there are . there are some animals that do n't seem to age .
for example , there are some tortoises called blanding 's turtles .
and they grow to be about this size .
and they 've been tagged , and they 've been found to be 70 years old .
and when you look at these 70 year-old turtles , you ca n't tell the difference , just by looking , between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles .
and the 70 year-old ones , actually they 're better at scouting out the good nesting places , and they also have more progeny every year .
and there are other examples of these kinds of animals , like turns , certain kinds of birds are like this .
and nobody knows if they really can live forever , or what keeps them from aging .
it 's not clear .
if you look at birds , which live a long time , cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide , things like that .
and our long-lived mutants are too .
they 're more resistant to these kinds of stresses .
so it could be that the pathways that i 've been talking about , which are set to run really quickly in the worm , have a different normal set point in something like a bird , so that a bird can live a lot longer .
and maybe they 're even set really differently in animals with no senescence at all - but we do n't know .
mr : but what you 're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death , so much as extending human youthspan .
ck : yes , that 's right .
it 's more like , say , if you were a dog .
you notice that you 're getting old , and you look at your human and you think , " why is n't this human getting old ? "
they 're not getting old in the dog 's lifespan .
it 's more like that .
but now we 're the human looking out and imagining a different human .
mr : thank you very much indeed , cynthia kenyon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
i have a few pictures , and i 'll talk a little bit about how i 'm able to do what i do .
all these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material , stuff that was headed to the mulcher , the landfill , the burn pile .
it was all just gone .
this is the first house i built .
this double front door here with the three-light transom that was headed to the landfill .
have a little turret there .
and then these buttons on the corbels here .
right there - those are hickory nuts .
and these buttons there - those are chicken eggs .
of course , first you have breakfast , and then you fill the shell full of bondo and paint it and nail it up , and you have an architectural button in just a fraction of the time .
then , this is a look at the inside .
you can see the three-light transom there with the eyebrow windows - certainly an architectural antique headed to the landfill .
even the lockset is probably worth 200 dollars .
everything in the kitchen was salvaged .
there 's a 1952 o 'keefe & merritt stove , if you like to cook - cool stove .
this is going up into the turret .
i got that staircase for 20 dollars , including delivery to my lot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then , looking up in the turret , you see there are bulges and pokes and sags and so forth .
well , if that ruins your life , well then you should n't live there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a laundry chute , and this right here is a shoe last .
and those are those cast-iron things you see at antique shops .
so i had one of those , so i made some low-tech gadgetry , there , where you just stomp on the shoe last and then the door flies open , you throw your laundry down .
and then if you 're smart enough , it goes on a basket on top of the washer .
if not , it goes into the toilet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a bathtub i made , made out of scrap two-by-four here .
started with a rim there and then glued and nailed it up into a flat , corbelled it up and flipped it over , then did the two profiles on this side .
it 's a two-person tub .
after all , it 's not just a question of hygiene , but there 's a possibility of recreation as well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then , this faucet here is just a piece of osage orange .
it looks a little phallic , but after all , it 's a bathroom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then , this is a house based on a budweiser can .
it does n't look like a can of beer , but the design take-offs are absolutely unmistakable .
the barley hops design worked up into the eaves , then the dentil work comes directly off the can 's red , white , blue and silver .
then , these corbeles going down underneath the eaves are that little design that comes off the can .
i just put a can on a copier and kept enlarging it until i got the size i want .
then , on the can it says , " this is the famous budweiser beer , we know of no other beer , blah , blah , blah . "
so we changed that and put , " this is the famous budweiser house .
we do n't know of any other house , " and so forth and so on .
then , this is a deadbolt . it 's a fence from a 1930s shaper , which is a very angry woodworking machine .
and they gave me the fence , but they did n't give me the shaper , so we made a deadbolt out of it .
that 'll keep bull elephants out , i promise .
and sure enough , we 've had no problems with bull elephants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer .
we 've got bubbles going up there , then suds at the top with lumpy tiles .
where do you get lumpy tiles ? well , of course , you do n't .
but i get a lot of toilets , and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer , and then you have lumpy tiles .
and then the faucet , there , is a beer tap .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then , this panel of glass is the same panel of glass that occurs in every middle-class front door in america .
we 're getting tired of it . it 's kind of cliched now .
so if you put it in the front door , your design fails .
so do n't put it in the front door ; put it somewhere else .
it 's a pretty panel of glass .
but then if you put it in the front door , people say , " oh , you 're trying to be like those guys , and you did n't make it . "
so do n't put it there .
then , another bathroom upstairs .
this light up here is the same light that occurs in every middle-class foyer in america .
do n't put it in the foyer .
put it in the shower , or in the closet , but not in the foyer .
then , somebody gave me a bidet , so it got a bidet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this little house here , those branches there are made out of bois d 'arc or osage orange , and these pictures will keep scrolling as i talk a little bit .
in order to do what i do , you have to understand what causes waste in the building industry .
our housing has become a commodity , and i 'll talk a little bit about that .
but the first cause of waste is probably even buried in our dna .
human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass .
what does that mean ?
what it means is , for every perception we have , it needs to tally with the one like it before , or we do n't have continuity , and we become a little bit disoriented .
so i can show you an object you 've never seen before .
oh , that 's a cell phone .
but you 've never seen this one before .
what you 're doing is sizing up the pattern of structural features here , and then you go through your databanks - brrrr , cell phone .
oh , that 's a cell phone .
if i took a bite out of it , you 'd go , " wait a second .
that 's not a cell phone .
that 's one of those new chocolate cell phones . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you 'd have to start a new category , right between cell phones and chocolate .
that 's how we process information .
so you translate that to the building industry , if we have a wall of windowpanes and one pane is cracked , we go , " oh , dear . that 's cracked . let 's repair it .
let 's take it out . throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in . "
because that 's what you do with a cracked pane .
never mind that it does n't affect our lives at all .
it only rattles that expected pattern and unity of structural features .
however , if we took a small hammer , and we added cracks to all the other windows , then we have a pattern .
because gestalt psychology emphasizes recognition of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern .
we 'll go , " ooh , that 's nice . "
so , that serves me every day .
repetition creates pattern .
if i have a hundred of these , a hundred of those , it does n't make any difference what these and those are .
if i can repeat anything , i have the possibility of a pattern from hickory nuts and chicken eggs , shards of glass , branches .
it does n't make any difference .
that causes a lot of waste in the building industry .
second is , friedrich nietzsche along about 1885 wrote a book titled " the birth of tragedy . "
and in there he said that cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives .
on the one hand , we have an apollonian perspective , which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect .
on the other end of the spectrum , we have a dionysian perspective , which is more given to the passions and intuition , tolerant of organic texture and human gesture .
so the way the apollonian personality takes a picture , or hangs a picture , is they 'll get out a transit and a laser level and a micrometer .
" okay , honey . a thousandth of an inch to the left .
that 's where we want the picture . right . perfect . "
predicated on plumb level , square and centered .
the dionysian personality takes the picture and goes ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the difference .
i feature blemish .
i feature organic process .
dead-center john dewey .
apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste .
if something is n't perfect , if it does n't line up with that premeditated model , dumpster .
" oops , scratch , dumpster . "
" oops " this , " oops " that . " landfill . landfill . landfill . "
the third thing is arguably - the industrial revolution started in the renaissance with the rise of humanism , then got a little jump-start along about the french revolution .
by the middle of the 19th century , it 's in full flower .
and we have dumaflages and gizmos and contraptions that will do anything that we , up to that point , had to do my hand .
so now we have standardized materials .
well , trees do n't grow two inches by four inches , eight , ten and twelve feet tall .
we create mountains of waste .
and they 're doing a pretty good job there in the forest , working all the byproduct of their industry - with osb and particle board and so forth and so on - but it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption , and that 's what 's happening .
and so if something is n't standard , " oops , dumpster . " " oops " this . " oops , warped . "
if you buy a two-by-four and it 's not straight , you can take it back .
" oh , i 'm so sorry , sir . we 'll get you a straight one . "
well i feature all those warped things because repetition creates pattern , and it 's from a dionysian perspective .
the fourth thing is labor is disproportionately more expensive than materials .
well , that 's just a myth .
and here 's a story : jim tulles , one of the guys i trained , i said , " jim , it 's time now .
i got a job for you as a foreman on a framing crew . it 's time for you to go . "
" dan , i just do n't think i 'm ready . "
" jim , now it 's time . you 're the down , oh . "
so we hired on .
and he was out there with his tape measure going through the trash heap , looking for header material , which is the board that goes over a door , thinking he 'd impress his boss - that 's how we taught him to do it .
and the superintendent walked up and said , " what are you doing ? "
" oh , just looking for some header material , " waiting for that kudos .
he said , " no , no . i 'm not paying you to go through the trash . get back to work . "
and he had the wherewithal to say , he said , " you know , if you were paying me 300 dollars an hour , i can see how you might say that , but right now , i 'm saving you five dollars a minute .
do the math . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " good call , tulles . from now on , you guys hit this pile first . "
and the irony is that he was n't very good at math .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but once in a while you get access to the control room , and then you can kind of mess with the dials .
and that 's what happened there .
the fifth thing is that maybe , after 2,500 years , plato is still having his way with us in his notion of perfect forms .
he said that we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want , and we force environmental resources to accommodate that .
so we all have in our head the perfect house , the american dream , which is a house , the dream house .
the problem is we ca n't afford it .
so we have the american dream look-alike , which is a mobile home .
now there 's a blight on the planet .
it 's a chattel mortgage , just like furniture , just like a car .
you write the check , and instantly it depreciates 30 percent .
after a year , you ca n't get insurance on everything you have in it , only on 70 percent .
wired with 14-gauge wire typically .
nothing wrong with that , unless you ask it to do what 12-gauge wire 's supposed to do , and that 's what happens .
it out-gasses formaldehyde so much so that there is a federal law in place to warn new mobile home buyers of the formaldehyde atmosphere danger .
are we just being numbingly stupid ?
the walls are this thick .
the whole thing has the structural value of corn .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " so i thought palm harbor village was over there . "
" no , no . we had a wind last night .
it 's gone now . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then when they degrade , what do you do with them ?
now , all that , that apollonian , platonic model , is what the building industry is predicated on , and there are a number of things that exacerbate that .
one is that all the professionals , all the tradesmen , vendors , inspectors , engineers , architects all think like this .
and then it works its way back to the consumer , who demands the same model .
it 's a self-fulfilling prophecy . we ca n't get out of it .
then here come the marketeers and the advertisers .
" woo . woohooo . "
we buy stuff we did n't know we needed .
all we have to do is look at what one company did with carbonated prune juice .
how disgusting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you know what they did ? they hooked a metaphor into it and said , " i drink dr. pepper ... "
and pretty soon , we 're swilling that stuff by the lake-ful , by the billions of gallons .
it does n't even have real prunes . does n't even keep you regular .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my oh my , that makes it worse .
and we get sucked into that faster than anything .
then a man named jean-paul sartre wrote a book titled " being and nothingness . "
it 's a pretty quick read .
you can snap through it in maybe two years if you read eight hours a day .
in there he talked about the divided self .
he said human beings act differently when they know they 're alone than when they know somebody else is around .
so if i 'm eating spaghetti , and i know i 'm alone , i can eat like a backhoe .
i can wipe my mouth on my sleeve , napkin on the table , chew with my mouth open , make little noises , scratch wherever i want .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but as soon as you walk in , i go , " ooh . spaghetti sauce there . "
napkin in my lap , half bites , chew with my mouth closed , no scratching .
now what i 'm doing is fulfilling your expectations of how i should live my life .
i feel that expectation , and so i accommodate it , and i 'm living my life according to what you expect me to do .
that happens in the building industry as well .
that 's why all of our subdivisions look the same .
sometimes we even have these formalized cultural expectations .
i 'll bet all your shoes match .
sure enough , we all buy into that , and with gated communities , we have a formalized expectation with a homeowners association .
sometimes those guys are nazis , my oh my .
that exacerbates and continues this model .
the last thing is gregariousness .
human beings are a social species .
we like to hang together in groups , just like wildebeests , just like lions .
wildebeests do n't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests .
human beings are like that .
we do what that group does that we 're trying to identify with .
and so you see this in junior high a lot .
those kids , they 'll work all summer long , kill themselves , so that they can afford one pair of designer jeans .
so along about september they can stride in and go , " i 'm important today .
see , look , do n't touch my designer jeans .
i see you do n't have designer jeans .
you 're not one of the beautiful people .
see , i 'm one of the beautiful people . see my jeans ? "
right there is reason enough to have uniforms .
and so that happens in the building industry as well .
we have confused maslow 's hierarchy of needs just a little bit .
on the bottom tier we have basic needs - shelter , clothing , food , water , mating and so forth .
second , security . third , relationships .
fourth , status , self-esteem - that is , vanity .
and we 're taking vanity and shoving it down here .
and so we end up with vain decisions and we ca n't even afford our mortgage .
we ca n't even afford to eat anything except beans .
that is , our housing has become a commodity .
and it takes a little bit of nerve to dive into those primal , terrifying parts of ourselves and make our own decisions and not make our housing a commodity , but make it something that bubbles up from seminal sources .
that takes a little bit of nerve , and , darn it , once in a while you fail .
but that 's okay .
if failure destroys you , then you ca n't do this .
i fail all the time , every day , and i 've had some whopping failures , i promise , big , public , humiliating , embarrassing failures .
everybody points and laughs , and they say , " he tried it a fifth time and it still did n't work .
what a moron . "
early on , contractors come by and say , " dan , you 're a cute little bunny , but you know , this just is n't going to work .
what do n't you do this , and why do n't you do that ? "
and your instinct is to say , " why do n't you suck an egg ? "
but you do n't say that , because they 're the guys you 're targeting .
and so what we 've done - and this is n't just in housing .
it 's in clothing and food and our transportation needs , our energy - we sprawl just a little bit .
and when i get a little bit of press , i hear from people all over the world .
and we may have invented excess , but the problem of waste is worldwide .
we 're in trouble .
and i do n't wear ammo belts crisscrossing my chest and a red bandana , but we 're clearly in trouble .
and what we need to do is reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves and make some decisions and say , " you know , i think i would like to put cds across the wall there .
what do you think , honey ? "
if it does n't work , take it down .
what we need to do is reconnect with who we really are , and that 's thrilling indeed .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm here to tell you that we have a problem with boys , and it 's a serious problem with boys .
their culture is n't working in schools , and i 'm going to share with you ways that we can think about overcoming that problem .
first , i want to start by saying , this is a boy , and this is a girl , and this is probably stereotypically what you think of as a boy and a girl .
if i essentialize gender for you today , then you can dismiss what i have to say .
so i 'm not going to do that . i 'm not interested in doing that .
this is a different kind of boy and a different kind of girl .
so the point here is that not all boys exist within these rigid boundaries of what we think of as boys and girls , and not all girls exist within those rigid boundaries of what we think of as girls .
but , in fact , most boys tend to be a certain way , and most girls tend to be a certain way .
and the point is that , for boys , the way that they exist and the culture that they embrace is n't working well in schools now .
how do we know that ?
the hundred girls project tells us some really nice statistics .
for example , for every 100 girls that are suspended from school , there are 250 boys that are suspended from school .
for every 100 girls who are expelled from school , there are 335 boys who are expelled from school .
for every 100 girls in special education , there are 217 boys .
for every 100 girls with a learning disability , there are 276 boys .
for every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed , we have 324 boys .
and by the way , all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black , if you happen to be poor , if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school .
and if you are a boy , you 're four times as likely to be diagnosed with adhd - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder .
now there is another side to this .
and it is important that we recognize that women still need help in school , that salaries are still significantly lower , even when controlled for job types , and that girls have continued to struggle in math and science for years .
that 's all true .
nothing about that prevents us from paying attention to the literacy needs of our boys between ages three and 13 .
and so we should .
in fact , what we ought to do is take a page from their playbook , because the initiatives and programs that have been set in place for women in science and engineering and mathematics are fantastic .
they 've done a lot of good for girls in these situations , and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years .
even in their older years , what we find is that there 's still a problem .
when we look at the universities , 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees are going to women now , which is a significant shift .
and in fact , university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities .
this makes university administrators very nervous , because girls do n't want to go to schools that do n't have boys .
and so we 're starting to see the establishment of men centers and men studies to think about how do we engage men in their experiences in the university .
if you talk to faculty , they may say , " ugh . yeah , well , they 're playing video games , and they 're gambling online all night long , and they 're playing world of warcraft , and that 's affecting their academic achievement . "
guess what ?
video games are not the cause .
video games are a symptom .
they were turned off a long time before they got here .
so let 's talk about why they got turned off when they were between the ages of three and 13 .
there are three reasons that i believe that boys are out of sync with the culture of schools today .
the first is zero tolerance .
a kindergarten teacher i know , her son donated all of his toys to her , and when he did , she had to go through and pull out all the little plastic guns .
you ca n't have plastic knives and swords and axes and all that kind of thing in a kindergarten classroom .
what is it that we 're afraid that this young man is going to do with this gun ?
i mean , really .
but here he stands as testament to the fact that you ca n't roughhouse on the playground today .
now i 'm not advocating for bullies .
i 'm not suggesting that we need to be allowing guns and knives into school .
but when we say that an eagle scout in a high school classroom who has a locked parked car in the parking lot and a penknife in it has to be suspended from school , i think we may have gone a little too far with zero tolerance .
another way that zero tolerance lives itself out is in the writing of boys .
in a lot of classrooms today you 're not allowed to write about anything that 's violent .
you 're not allowed to write about anything that has to do with video games - these topics are banned .
boy comes home from school , and he says , " i hate writing . "
" why do you hate writing , son ? what 's wrong with writing ? "
" now i have to write what she tells me to write . "
" okay , what is she telling you to write ? "
" poems . i have to write poems .
and little moments in my life .
i do n't want to write that stuff . "
" all right . well , what do you want to write ? what do you want to write about ? "
" i want to write about video games . i want to write about leveling-up .
i want to write about this really interesting world .
i want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody . "
" all right . okay . "
you tell a teacher that , and they 'll ask you , in all seriousness , " should we send this child to the psychologist ? "
and the answer is no , he 's just a boy .
he 's just a little boy .
it 's not okay to write these kinds of things in classrooms today .
so that 's the first reason : zero tolerance policies and the way they 're lived out .
the next reason that boys ' cultures are out of sync with school cultures : there are fewer male teachers .
anybody who 's over 15 does n't know what this means , because in the last 10 years , the number of elementary school classroom teachers has been cut in half .
we went from 14 percent to seven percent .
that means that 93 percent of the teachers that our young men get in elementary classrooms are women .
now what 's the problem with this ?
women are great . yep , absolutely .
but male role models for boys that say it 's all right to be smart - they 've got dads , they 've got pastors , they 've got cub scout leaders , but ultimately , six hours a day , five days a week they 're spending in a classroom , and most of those classrooms are not places where men exist .
and so they say , i guess this really is n't a place for boys .
this is a place for girls .
and i 'm not very good at this , so i guess i 'd better go play video games or get into sports , or something like that , because i obviously do n't belong here .
men do n't belong here , that 's pretty obvious .
so that may be a very direct way that we see it happen .
but less directly , the lack of male presence in the culture - you 've got a teachers ' lounge , and they 're having a conversation about joey and johnny who beat each other up on the playground .
" what are we going to do with these boys ? "
the answer to that question changes depending on who 's sitting around that table .
are there men around that table ?
are there moms who 've raised boys around that table ?
you 'll see , the conversation changes depending upon who 's sitting around the table .
third reason that boys are out of sync with school today : kindergarten is the old second grade , folks .
we have a serious compression of the curriculum happening out there .
when you 're three , you better be able to write your name legibly , or else we 'll consider it a developmental delay .
by the time you 're in first grade , you should be able to read paragraphs of text with maybe a picture , maybe not , in a book of maybe 25 to 30 pages .
if you do n't , we 're probably going to be putting you into a title 1 special reading program .
and if you ask title 1 teachers , they 'll tell you they 've got about four or five boys for every girl that 's in their program , in the elementary grades .
the reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is " you need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time . "
the teacher 's salary depends on " no child left behind " and " race to the top " and accountability and testing and all of this .
so she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum - and girls .
this compressed curriculum is bad for all active kids .
and what happens is , she says , " please , sit down , be quiet , do what you 're told , follow the rules , manage your time , focus , be a girl . "
that 's what she tells them .
and so this is a very serious problem . where is it coming from ?
it 's coming from us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we want our babies to read when they are six months old .
have you seen the ads ?
we want to live in lake wobegon where every child is above average , but what this does to our children is really not healthy .
it 's not developmentally appropriate , and it 's particularly bad for boys .
so what do we do ?
we need to meet them where they are .
we need to put ourselves into boy culture .
we need to change the mindset of acceptance in boys in elementary schools .
more specifically , we can do some very specific things .
we can design better games .
most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards .
they 're glorified drill and practice .
they do n't have the depth , the rich narrative that really engaging video games have , that the boys are really interested in .
so we need to design better games .
we need to talk to teachers and parents and school board members and politicians .
we need to make sure that people see that we need more men in the classroom .
we need to look carefully at our zero tolerance policies .
do they make sense ?
we need to think about how to uncompress this curriculum if we can , trying to bring boys back into a space that is comfortable for them .
all of those conversations need to be happening .
there are some great examples out there of schools - the new york times just talked about a school recently .
a game designer from the new school put together a wonderful video gaming school .
but it only treats a few kids , and so this is n't very scalable .
we have to change the culture and the feelings that politicians and school board members and parents have about the way we accept and what we accept in our schools today .
we need to find more money for game design .
because good games , really good games , cost money , and world of warcraft has quite a budget .
most of the educational games do not .
where we started : my colleagues - mike petner , shawn vashaw , myself - we started by trying to look at the teachers ' attitudes and find out how do they really feel about gaming , what do they say about it .
and we discovered that they talk about the kids in their school , who talk about gaming , in pretty demeaning ways .
they say , " oh , yeah . they 're always talking about that stuff .
they 're talking about their little action figures and their little achievements or merit badges , or whatever it is that they get .
and they 're always talking about this stuff . "
and they say these things as if it 's okay .
but if it were your culture , think of how that might feel .
it 's very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of that kind of language .
they 're nervous about anything that has anything to do with violence because of the zero tolerance policies .
they are sure that parents and administrators will never accept anything .
so we really need to think about looking at teacher attitudes and finding ways to change the attitudes so that teachers are much more open and accepting of boy cultures in their classrooms .
because , ultimately , if we do n't , then we 're going to have boys who leave elementary school saying , " well i guess that was just a place for girls .
it was n't for me .
so i 've got to do gaming , or i 've got to do sports . "
if we change these things , if we pay attention to these things , and we re-engage boys in their learning , they will leave the elementary schools saying , " i 'm smart . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields .
so tonight i 'd like to tell you about the intersection that i 'm most excited about at this very moment , which is entertainment and robotics .
so if we 're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society , maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts .
i 'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology .
some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology .
with my new venture , marilyn monrobot , i would like to use art to create tech .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 're based in new york city .
and if you 're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot , or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation , please contact me , the bot-agent .
the bot , our rising celebrity , also has his own twitter account : @ robotinthewild .
i 'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots , data .
he 's named after the star trek character .
i think he 's going to be super popular .
we 've got the robot - in his head is a database of a lot of jokes .
now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes .
so it knows something about the subject ; it knows about the length .
it knows how much it 's moving .
and so it 's going to try to watch your response .
i actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things , sort of like netflix-style , over longer-term to different communities or audiences , children versus adults , different cultures .
you can learn something from the robot about the community that you 're in .
and also i can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions .
some of you in this middle section - you have red / green paddles .
if you like what 's going on , show the green .
if you do n't like the subject or the performance , you can hold the red .
now do n't be shy .
it 's just a robot .
it does n't have feelings ... yet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the rest of you , you still count , you still matter .
there 's also a microphone that 's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing - i hope not - to help make some of its next decisions .
right , so , let the robot stand-up comedy begin .
data : hello tedwomen .
it 's an honor to be here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you guys are looking good out there .
ready for some jokes ?
audience : yeah .
data : here 's the first one .
right , so , a doctor says to his patient , " i have bad news and worse news .
the bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live . "
" that 's terrible , " said the patient .
" how can the news possibly be worse ? "
" i 've been trying to contact you since yesterday . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the swiss have an interesting army . five hundred years without a war .
heather knight : he 's talking about the swiss .
data : pretty lucky for them .
ever see that little swiss army knife they have to fight with ?
" come on buddy , i have the toe clippers right here .
you get past me , the guy behind me has a spoon . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hk : he 's a french robot .
data : a couple of new jersey hunters are out in the woods .
one of them falls to the ground .
he does not seem to be breathing .
the other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911 .
he gasps to the operator , " my friend is dead .
what can i do ? "
the operator says , " just take it easy .
i can help .
first , let 's make sure he 's dead . "
there is a silence , and the operator hears a shot .
the guy 's voice comes back on the line , " okay , now what ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- question : why is television called a medium ?
anyone ?
because it 's neither rare nor well done .
but to be completely honest with you , i kind of love television .
any of you like television ? audience : yes .
data : i find it incredibly educational .
actually , as soon as someone turns it on , i go into the other room and read .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's all for now .
was that okay for my first time ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- you 've been a great audience .
thank you .
hk : yay .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so this is actually the first time we 've ever done live audience feedback to a performance .
so thank you all for being a part of it .
there 's a lot more to come .
and we hope to learn a lot about robot expression .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i will start by posing a little bit of a challenge : the challenge of dealing with data , data that we have to deal with in medical situations .
it 's really a huge challenge for us .
and this is our beast of burden - this is a computer tomography machine , a ct machine .
it 's a fantastic device .
it uses x-rays , x-ray beams , that are rotating very fast around the human body .
it takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine .
so this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care , but as i said , it 's also a challenge for us .
and the challenge is really found in this picture here .
it 's the medical data explosion that we 're having right now .
we 're facing this problem .
and let me step back in time .
let 's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then .
these machines that came out - they started coming in the 1970s - they would scan human bodies , and they would generate about 100 images of the human body .
and i 've taken the liberty , just for clarity , to translate that to data slices .
that would correspond to about 50 megabytes of data , which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices .
if you translate that to phone books , it 's about one meter of phone books in the pile .
looking at what we 're doing today with these machines that we have , we can , just in a few seconds , get 24,000 images out of a body , and that would correspond to about 20 gigabytes of data , or 800 phone books , and the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books .
what 's about to happen - and we 're seeing this ; it 's beginning - a technology trend that 's happening right now is that we 're starting to look at time-resolved situations as well .
so we 're getting the dynamics out of the body as well .
and just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds , and that would correspond to one terabyte of data - that 's 800,000 books and 16 kilometers of phone books .
that 's one patient , one data set .
and this is what we have to deal with .
so this is really the enormous challenge that we have .
and already today - this is 25,000 images .
imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this .
they would put up 25,000 images , they would go like this , " 25,0000 , okay , okay .
there is the problem . "
they ca n't do that anymore . that 's impossible .
so we have to do something that 's a little bit more intelligent than doing this .
so what we do is that we put all these slices together .
imagine that you slice your body in all these directions , and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data , into a block of data .
so this is really what we 're doing .
so this gigabyte or terabyte of data , we 're putting it into this block .
but of course , the block of data just contains the amount of x-ray that 's been absorbed in each point in the human body .
so what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we do n't want to look at .
so transforming the data set into something that looks like this .
and this is a challenge .
this is a huge challenge for us to do that .
using computers , even though they 're getting faster and better all the time , it 's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data , terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information .
i want to look at the heart .
i want to look at the blood vessels . i want to look at the liver .
maybe even find a tumor , in some cases .
so this is where this little dear comes into play .
this is my daughter .
this is as of 9 a.m. this morning .
she 's playing a computer game .
she 's only two years old , and she 's having a blast .
so she 's really the driving force behind the development of graphics-processing units .
as long as kids are playing computer games , graphics is getting better and better and better .
so please go back home , tell your kids to play more games , because that 's what i need .
so what 's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that i 'm doing with the medical data .
so really what i 'm doing is using these fantastic little devices .
and you know , going back maybe 10 years in time when i got the funding to buy my first graphics computer - it was a huge machine .
it was cabinets of processors and storage and everything .
i paid about one million dollars for that machine .
that machine is , today , about as fast as my iphone .
so every month there are new graphics cards coming out , and here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors - nvidia , ati , intel is out there as well .
and you know , for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer , and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards .
so this is really what 's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine , together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms - compressing data , extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on .
so i 'm going to show you a few examples of what we can do .
this is a data set that was captured using a ct scanner .
you can see that this is a full data -lsb- set -rsb- .
it 's a woman . you can see the hair .
you can see the individual structures of the woman .
you can see that there is -lsb- a -rsb- scattering of x-rays on the teeth , the metal in the teeth .
that 's where those artifacts are coming from .
but fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer , i can just put in a clip plane .
and of course all the data is inside , so i can start rotating , i can look at it from different angles , and i can see that this woman had a problem .
she had a bleeding up in the brain , and that 's been fixed with a little stent , a metal clamp that 's tightening up the vessel .
and just by changing the functions , then i can decide what 's going to be transparent and what 's going to be visible .
i can look at the skull structure , and i can see that , okay , this is where they opened up the skull on this woman , and that 's where they went in .
so these are fantastic images .
they 're really high resolution , and they 're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today .
now we have really made use of this , and we have tried to squeeze a lot of data into the system .
and one of the applications that we 've been working on - and this has gotten a little bit of traction worldwide - is the application of virtual autopsies .
so again , looking at very , very large data sets , and you saw those full-body scans that we can do .
we 're just pushing the body through the whole ct scanner , and just in a few seconds we can get a full-body data set .
so this is from a virtual autopsy .
and you can see how i 'm gradually peeling off .
first you saw the body bag that the body came in , then i 'm peeling off the skin - you can see the muscles - and eventually you can see the bone structure of this woman .
now at this point , i would also like to emphasize that , with the greatest respect for the people that i 'm now going to show - i 'm going to show you a few cases of virtual autopsies - so it 's with great respect for the people that have died under violent circumstances that i 'm showing these pictures to you .
in the forensic case - and this is something that ... there 's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of sweden that i come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years .
so this will be the typical workflow situation .
the police will decide - in the evening , when there 's a case coming in - they will decide , okay , is this a case where we need to do an autopsy ?
so in the morning , in between six and seven in the morning , the body is then transported inside of the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one of the ct scanners .
and then the radiologist , together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist , looks at the data that 's coming out , and they have a joint session .
and then they decide what to do in the real physical autopsy after that .
now looking at a few cases , here 's one of the first cases that we had .
you can really see the details of the data set .
it 's very high-resolution , and it 's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details .
and again , it 's fully interactive , so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here .
without saying too much about this case , this is a traffic accident , a drunk driver hit a woman .
and it 's very , very easy to see the damages on the bone structure .
and the cause of death is the broken neck .
and this women also ended up under the car , so she 's quite badly beaten up by this injury .
here 's another case , a knifing .
and this is also again showing us what we can do .
that we can show inside of the body .
you can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth - that 's actually the filling of the teeth - but because i 've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent .
here 's another violent case . this really did n't kill the person .
the person was killed by stabs in the heart , but they just deposited the knife by putting it through one of the eyeballs .
here 's another case .
it 's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings .
here you can see that knife went through the heart .
it 's very easy to see how air has been leaking from one part to another part , which is difficult to do in a normal , standard , physical autopsy .
so it really , really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death , and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was .
here 's another case that i think is interesting .
here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person .
and what we 've done is that we 've turned the bullet into a light source , so that bullet is actually shining , and it makes it really easy to find these fragments .
during a physical autopsy , if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments , that 's actually quite hard to do .
one of the things that i 'm really , really happy to be able to show you here today is our virtual autopsy table .
it 's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms , using standard graphics gpus .
it actually looks like this , just to give you a feeling for what it looks like .
it really just works like a huge iphone .
so we 've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table , and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface .
so if you were thinking of buying an ipad , forget about it . this is what you want instead .
steve , i hope you 're listening to this , all right .
so it 's a very nice little device .
so if you have the opportunity , please try it out .
it 's really a hands-on experience .
so it gained some traction , and we 're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes , but also , perhaps in the future , in a more clinical situation .
there 's a youtube video that you can download and look at this , if you want to convey the information to other people about virtual autopsies .
okay , now that we 're talking about touch , let me move on to really " touching " data .
and this is a bit of science fiction now , so we 're moving into really the future .
this is not really what the medical doctors are using right now , but i hope they will in the future .
so what you 're seeing on the left is a touch device .
it 's a little mechanical pen that has very , very fast step motors inside of the pen .
and so i can generate a force feedback .
so when i virtually touch data , it will generate forces in the pen , so i get a feedback .
so in this particular situation , it 's a scan of a living person .
i have this pen , and i look at the data , and i move the pen towards the head , and all of a sudden i feel resistance .
so i can feel the skin .
if i push a little bit harder , i 'll go through the skin , and i can feel the bone structure inside .
if i push even harder , i 'll go through the bone structure , especially close to the ear where the bone is very soft .
and then i can feel the brain inside , and this will be the slushy like this .
so this is really nice .
and to take that even further , this is a heart .
and this is also due to these fantastic new scanners , that just in 0.3 seconds , i can scan the whole heart , and i can do that with time resolution .
so just looking at this heart , i can play back a video here .
and this is karljohan , one of my graduate students who 's been working on this project .
and he 's sitting there in front of the haptic device , the force feedback system , and he 's moving his pen towards the heart , and the heart is now beating in front of him , so he can see how the heart is beating .
he 's taken the pen , and he 's moving it towards the heart , and he 's putting it on the heart , and then he feels the heartbeats from the real living patient .
then he can examine how the heart is moving .
he can go inside , push inside of the heart , and really feel how the valves are moving .
and this , i think , is really the future for heart surgeons .
i mean it 's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient 's heart before you actually do surgery , and do that with high-quality resolution data .
so this is really neat .
now we 're going even further into science fiction .
and we heard a little bit about functional mri .
now this is really an interesting project .
mri is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain , or any part of the body .
so what we 're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain , but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that 's oxygenated and blood that 's depleted of oxygen .
that means that it 's possible to map out the activity of the brain .
so this is something that we 've been working on .
and you just saw motts the research engineer , there , going into the mri system , and he was wearing goggles .
so he could actually see things in the goggles .
so i could present things to him while he 's in the scanner .
and this is a little bit freaky , because what motts is seeing is actually this .
he 's seeing his own brain .
so motts is doing something here , and probably he is going like this with his right hand , because the left side is activated on the motor cortex .
and then he can see that at the same time .
these visualizations are brand new .
and this is something that we 've been researching for a little while .
this is another sequence of motts ' brain .
and here we asked motts to calculate backwards from 100 .
so he 's going " 100 , 97 , 94 . "
and then he 's going backwards .
and you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain .
well this is fantastic . we can do this in real time .
we can investigate things . we can tell him to do things .
you can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head , because that 's where he 's seeing , he 's seeing his own brain .
and he 's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things .
the signal is really deep inside of the brain as well , and it 's shining through , because all of the data is inside this volume .
and in just a second here you will see - okay , here . motts , now move your left foot .
so he 's going like this .
for 20 seconds he 's going like that , and all of a sudden it lights up up here .
so we 've got motor cortex activation up there .
so this is really , really nice , and i think this is a great tool .
and connecting also with the previous talk here , this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working , how the brain is working , and we can do this with very , very high visual quality and very fast resolution .
now we 're also having a bit of fun at the center .
so this is a cat scan - computer aided tomography .
so this is a lion from the local zoo outside of norrkoping in kolmarden , elsa .
so she came to the center , and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner .
and then , of course , i get the whole data set from the lion .
and i can do very nice images like this .
i can peel off the layer of the lion .
i can look inside of it .
and we 've been experimenting with this .
and i think this is a great application for the future of this technology , because there 's very little known about the animal anatomy .
what 's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information .
we can scan all sorts of things , all sorts of animals .
the only problem is to fit it into the machine .
so here 's a bear .
it was kind of hard to get it in .
and the bear is a cuddly , friendly animal .
and here it is . here is the nose of the bear .
and you might want to cuddle this one , until you change the functions and look at this .
so be aware of the bear .
so with that , i 'd like to thank all the people who have helped me to generate these images .
it 's a huge effort that goes into doing this , gathering the data and developing the algorithms , writing all the software .
so , some very talented people .
my motto is always , i only hire people that are smarter than i am and most of these are smarter than i am .
so thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is your conference , and i think you have a right to know a little bit right now , in this transition period , about this guy who 's going to be looking after it for you for a bit .
so , i 'm just going to grab a chair here .
two years ago at ted , i think - i 've come to this conclusion - i think i may have been suffering from a strange delusion .
i think that i may have believed unconsciously , then , that i was kind of a business hero .
i had this company that i 'd spent 15 years building . it 's called future ; it was a magazine publishing company .
it had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars , a number i did n't really understand .
a magazine i 'd recently launched called business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory , busy pumping hot air into the bubble .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more .
and all this had come from nothing .
fifteen years earlier , i was a science journalist who people just laughed at when i said , " i really would like to start my own computer magazine . "
and 15 years later , there are 100 of them and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times .
the date was february 2000 .
i thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like moore 's law - ever upward and to the right - it was going to go on forever .
i mean , it had to . right ? i was in for quite a surprise .
the dotcom , ironically called snowball , was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before nasdaq exploded , and i entered 18 months of business hell .
i watched everything that i 'd built crumbling , and it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing .
and it was gut wrenching .
it took eight years of blood , sweat and tears to reach 350 employees , something which i was very proud of in the business .
february 2001 - in one day we laid off 350 people , and before the bloodshed was finished , 1,000 people had lost their jobs from my companies . i felt sick .
i watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day , every day , for 18 months .
and worse than that , far worse than that , my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating .
i was going around with this big sign on my forehead : " loser . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think what disgusts me more than anything , looking back , is how the hell did i let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing ?
well , in the end , we were able to save future and snowball , but i was , at that point , ready to move on .
and to cut a long story short , here 's where i came to .
and the reason i 'm telling this story is that i believe , from many conversations , that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster - emotional rollercoaster - in the last couple years .
this has been a big , big transition time , and i believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever 's next .
the theme next year is re-birth .
it was at the same ted two years ago when richard and i reached an agreement on the future of ted .
and at about the same time , and i think partly because of that , i started doing something that i 'd forgotten about in my business focus : i started to read again .
and i discovered that while i 'd been busy playing business games , there 'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest : cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology to ... all this stuff had changed .
and the way in which you could think about us as a species and us as a planet had just changed so much , and it was incredibly exciting .
and what was really most exciting - and i think richard wurman discovered this at least 20 years before i did - was that all this stuff is connected .
it 's connected ; it all hooks into each other .
we talk about this a lot , and i thought about trying to give an example of this . so , just one example : madame de gaulle , the wife of the french president , was famously asked once , " what do you most desire ? "
and she answered , " a penis . "
and when you think about it , it 's very true : what we all most desire is a penis - or " happiness " as we say in english .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and something ... good luck with that one in the japanese translation room .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but something as basic as happiness , which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue , today it turns out that there 's dozens of ted-like questions that you can ask about it , which are really interesting .
you can ask about what causes it biochemically : neuroscience , serotonin , all that stuff .
you can ask what are the psychological causes of it : nature ? nurture ? current circumstance ?
turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing .
you can view it as a computing problem , an artificial intelligence problem : do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly ?
you can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say , why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness , and whereas almost all the rest of them , regardless of how much money they have - whether it 's two dollars a day or whatever - are almost equally happy on average ?
or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing : did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways ? the ant 's brain , parasitized , to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate ?
are we the victims of a mass delusion ?
and so on , and so on .
to understand even something as important to us as happiness , you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions , and there 's nowhere that i 've discovered - other than ted - where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions .
and so , it 's the profound thing that richard talks about : to understand anything , you just need to understand the little bits ; a little bit about everything that surrounds it .
and so , gradually over these three days , you start off kind of trying to figure out , " why am i listening to all this irrelevant stuff ? "
and at the end of the four days , your brain is humming and you feel energized , alive and excited , and it 's because all these different bits have been put together .
it 's the total brain experience , we 're going to ...
it 's the mental equivalent of the full body massage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- every mental organ addressed . it really is .
enough of the theory , chris . tell us what you 're actually going to do , all right ?
so , i will . here 's the vision for ted .
number one : do nothing . this thing ai n't broke , so i ai n't gonna fix it .
jeff bezos kindly remarked to me , " chris , ted is a really great conference .
you 're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i gave myself the job title of ted custodian for a reason , and i will promise you right here and now that the core values that make ted special are not going to be interfered with .
truth , curiosity , diversity , no selling , no corporate bullshit , no bandwagoning , no platforms .
just the pursuit of interest , wherever it lies , across all the disciplines that are represented here .
that 's not going to be changed at all .
number two : i am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year .
the time scale on which ted operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines .
there 's a year to do this , and already - i hope to show you a bit later - there 's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year .
and i 'm getting fantastic help from the community ; this is just such a great community . and combined , our contacts reach pretty much everyone who 's interesting in the country , if not the planet .
it 's true .
number three : i do want to , if i can , find a way of extending the ted experience throughout the year a little bit .
and one key way that we 're going to do this is to introduce this book club .
books kind of saved me in the last couple years , and that 's a gift that i would like to pass on .
so , when you sign up for ted2003 , every six weeks you 'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they 're linked to ted .
they may well be by a ted speaker , and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual , emotional journey .
i think it will be great .
and then , fourthly : i want to mention the sapling foundation , which is the new owner of ted .
what sapling 's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of ted will go towards the causes that sapling stands for .
and more important , i think , the ideas that are exhibited and realized here are ideas that the foundation can use , because there 's fantastic synergy .
already , just in the last few days , we 've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about , that they 're passionate about , that can make a difference in the world , and the idea of getting this group of people together - some of the causes that we believe in , the money that this conference can raise and the ideas - i really believe that that combination will , over time , make a difference .
i 'm incredibly excited about that .
in fact , i do n't think , overall , that i 've been as excited by anything ever in my life .
i 'm in this for the long run , and i would be greatly honored and excited if you 'll come on this journey with me .
so , can we dare to be optimistic ?
well , the thesis of " the bottom billion " is that a billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stagnant for 40 years , and hence diverging from the rest of mankind .
and so , the real question to pose is not , " can we be optimistic ? "
it 's , " how can we give credible hope to that billion people ? "
that , to my mind , is the fundamental challenge now of development .
what i 'm going to offer you is a recipe , a combination of the two forces that changed the world for good , which is the alliance of compassion and enlightened self-interest .
compassion , because a billion people are living in societies that have not offered credible hope .
that is a human tragedy .
enlightened self-interest , because if that economic divergence continues for another 40 years , combined with social integration globally , it will build a nightmare for our children .
we need compassion to get ourselves started , and enlightened self-interest to get ourselves serious .
that 's the alliance that changes the world .
so , what does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion ?
what can we actually do ?
well , a good guide is to think , " what did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the world ? "
that gives us , it turns out , quite a good clue , except you have to go back quite a long time .
the last time the rich world got serious about developing another region was in the late 1940s .
the rich world was you , america , and the region that needed to be developed was my world , europe .
that was post-war europe .
why did america get serious ?
it was n't just compassion for europe , though there was that .
it was that you knew you had to , because , in the late 1940s , country after country in central europe was falling into the soviet bloc , and so you knew you 'd no choice .
europe had to be dragged into economic development .
so , what did you do , last time you got serious ?
well , yes , you had a big aid program . thank you very much .
that was marshall aid : we need to do it again . aid is part of the solution .
but what else did you do ?
well , you tore up your trade policy , and totally reversed it .
before the war , america had been highly protectionist .
after the war , you opened your markets to europe , you dragged europe into the then-global economy , which was your economy , and you institutionalized that trade liberalization through founding the general agreement on tariffs and trade .
so , total reversal of trade policy .
did you do anything else ?
yes , you totally reversed your security policy .
before the war , your security policy had been isolationist .
after the war , you tear that up , you put 100,000 troops in europe for over 40 years .
so , total reversal of security policy . anything else ?
yes , you tear up the " eleventh commandment " - national sovereignty .
before the war , you treated national sovereignty as so sacrosanct that you were n't even willing to join the league of nations .
after the war , you found the united nations , you found the organization for economic cooperation and development , you found the imf , you encouraged europe to create the european community - all systems for mutual government support .
that is still the waterfront of effective policies : aid , trade , security , governments .
of course , the details of policy are going to be different , because the challenge is different .
it 's not rebuilding europe , it 's reversing the divergence for the bottom billion , so that they actually catch up .
is that easier or harder ?
we need to be at least as serious as we were then .
now , today i 'm going to take just one of those four .
i 'm going to take the one that sounds the weakest , the one that 's just motherhood and apple pie - governments , mutual systems of support for governments - and i 'm going to show you one idea in how we could do something to strengthen governance , and i 'm going to show you that that is enormously important now .
the opportunity we 're going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion , and that is the commodity booms .
the commodity booms are pumping unprecedented amounts of money into many , though not all , of the countries of the bottom billion .
partly , they 're pumping money in because commodity prices are high , but it 's not just that . there 's also a range of new discoveries .
uganda has just discovered oil , in about the most disastrous location on earth ; ghana has discovered oil ; guinea has got a huge new exploitation of iron ore coming out of the ground .
so , a mass of new discoveries .
between them , these new revenue flows dwarf aid .
just to give you one example : angola alone is getting 50 billion dollars a year in oil revenue .
the entire aid flows to the 60 countries of the bottom billion last year were 34 billion .
so , the flow of resources from the commodity booms to the bottom billion are without precedent .
so there 's the optimism .
the question is , how is it going to help their development ?
it 's a huge opportunity for transformational development .
will it be taken ?
so , here comes a bit of science , and this is a bit of science i 've done since " the bottom billion , " so it 's new .
i 've looked to see what is the relationship between higher commodity prices of exports , and the growth of commodity-exporting countries .
and i 've looked globally , i 've taken all the countries in the world for the last 40 years , and looked to see what the relationship is .
and the short run - say , the first five to seven years - is just great .
in fact , it 's hunky dory : everything goes up .
you get more money because your terms of trade have improved , but also that drives up output across the board .
so gdp goes up a lot - fantastic ! that 's the short run .
and how about the long run ?
come back 15 years later .
well , the short run , it 's hunky dory , but the long run , it 's humpty dumpty .
you go up in the short run , but then most societies historically have ended up worse than if they 'd had no booms at all .
that is not a forecast about how commodity prices go ; it 's a forecast of the consequences , the long-term consequences , for growth of an increase in prices .
so , what goes wrong ? why is there this " resource curse , " as it 's called ?
and again , i 've looked at that , and it turns out that the critical issue is the level of governance , the initial level of economic governance , when the resource booms accrue .
in fact , if you 've got good enough governance , there is no resource boom .
you go up in the short term , and then you go up even more in the long term .
that 's norway , the richest country in europe . it 's australia . it 's canada .
the resource curse is entirely confined to countries below a threshold of governance .
they still go up in the short run .
that 's what we 're seeing across the bottom billion at the moment .
the best growth rates they 've had - ever .
and the question is whether the short run will persist .
and with bad governance historically , over the last 40 years , it has n't .
it 's countries like nigeria , which are worse off than if they 'd never had oil .
so , there 's a threshold level above which you go up in the long term , and below which you go down .
just to benchmark that threshold , it 's about the governance level of portugal in the mid 1980s .
so , the question is , are the bottom billion above or below that threshold ?
now , there 's one big change since the commodity booms of the 1970s , and that is the spread of democracy .
so i thought , well , maybe that is the thing which has transformed governance in the bottom billion .
maybe we can be more optimistic because of the spread of democracy .
so , i looked . democracy does have significant effects - and unfortunately , they 're adverse .
democracies make even more of a mess of these resource booms than autocracies .
at that stage i just wanted to abandon the research , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it turns out that democracy is a little bit more complicated than that .
because there are two distinct aspects of democracy : there 's electoral competition , which determines how you acquire power , and there are checks and balances , which determine how you use power .
it turns out that electoral competition is the thing that 's doing the damage with democracy , whereas strong checks and balances make resource booms good .
and so , what the countries of the bottom billion need is very strong checks and balances .
they have n't got them .
they got instant democracy in the 1990s : elections without checks and balances .
how can we help improve governance and introduce checks and balances ?
in all the societies of the bottom billion , there are intense struggles to do just that .
the simple proposal is that we should have some international standards , which will be voluntary , but which would spell out the key decision points that need to be taken in order to harness these resource revenues .
we know these international standards work because we 've already got one .
it 's called the extractive industries transparency initiative .
that is the very simple idea that governments should report to their citizens what revenues they have .
no sooner was it proposed than reformers in nigeria adopted it , pushed it and published the revenues in the paper .
nigerian newspapers circulations spiked .
people wanted to know what their government was getting in terms of revenue .
so , we know it works . what would the content be of these international standards ?
i ca n't go through all of them , but i 'll give you an example .
the first is how to take the resources out of the ground - the economic processes , taking the resources out of the ground and putting assets on top of the ground .
and the first step in that is selling the rights to resource extraction .
you know how rights to resource extraction are being sold at the moment , how they 've been sold over the last 40 years ?
a company flies in , does a deal with a minister .
and that 's great for the company , and it 's quite often great for the minister - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and it 's not great for their country .
there 's a very simple institutional technology which can transform that , and it 's called verified auctions .
the public agency with the greatest expertise on earth is of course the treasury - that is , the british treasury .
and the british treasury decided that it would sell the rights to third-generation mobile phones by working out what those rights were worth .
they worked out they were worth two billion pounds .
just in time , a set of economists got there and said , " why not try an auction ? it 'll reveal the value . "
it went for 20 billion pounds through auction .
if the british treasury can be out by a factor of 10 , think what the ministry of finance in sierra leone is going to be like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i put that to the president of sierra leone , the next day he asked the world bank to send him a team to give expertise on how to conduct auctions .
there are five such decision points ; each one needs an international standard .
if we could do it , we would change the world .
we would be helping the reformers in these societies , who are struggling for change .
that 's our modest role . we can not change these societies , but we can help the people in these societies who are struggling and usually failing , because the odds are so stacked against them .
and yet , we 've not got these rules .
if you think about it , the cost of promulgating international rules is zilch - nothing .
why on earth are they not there ?
i realized that the reason they 're not there is that until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies , politicians will get away with gestures .
that unless we have an informed society , what politicians do , especially in relation to africa , is gestures : things that look good , but do n't work .
and so i realized we had to go through the business of building an informed citizenry .
that 's why i broke all the professional rules of conduct for an economist , and i wrote an economics book that you could read on a beach .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
however , i have to say , the process of communication does not come naturally to me .
this is why i 'm on this stage , but it 's alarming .
i grew up in a culture of self-effacement .
my wife showed me a blog comment on one of my last talks , and the blog comment said , " collier is not charismatic - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but his arguments are compelling . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- if you agree with that sentiment , and if you agree that we need a critical mass of informed citizenry , you will realize that i need you .
please , become ambassadors .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i spent the best part of last year working on a documentary about my own happiness - trying to see if i can actually train my mind in a particular way , like i can train my body , so i can end up with an improved feeling of overall well-being .
then this january , my mother died , and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me .
so in a very typical , silly designer fashion , after years worth of work , pretty much all i have to show for it are the titles for the film .
-lrb- music -rrb- they were still done when i was on sabbatical with my company in indonesia .
we can see the first part here was designed here by pigs .
it was a little bit too funky , and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way - fashion .
my studio in bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest , and monkeys , of course , are supposed to be the happiest of all animals .
so we trained them to be able to do three separate words , to lay out them properly .
you can see , there still is a little bit of a legibility problem there .
the serif is not really in place .
so of course , what you do n't do properly yourself is never deemed done really .
so this is us climbing onto the trees and putting it up over the sayan valley in indonesia .
in that year , what i did do a lot was look at all sorts of surveys , looking at a lot of data on this subject .
and it turns out that men and women report very , very similar levels of happiness .
this is a very quick overview of all the studies that i looked at .
that climate plays no role .
that if you live in the best climate , in san diego in the united states , or in the shittiest climate , in buffalo , new york , you are going to be just as happy in either place .
if you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the u.s. , any salary increase you 're going to experience will have only a tiny , tiny influence on your overall well-being .
black people are just as happy as white people are .
if you 're old or young it does n't really make a difference .
if you 're ugly or if you 're really , really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever .
you will adapt to it and get used to it .
if you have manageable health problems it does n't really matter .
now this does matter .
so now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left - meaning that , if you have a lot of friends , and you have meaningful friendships , that does make a lot of difference .
as well as being married - you are likely to be much happier than if you are single .
a fellow ted speaker , jonathan haidt , came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind .
he says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant , the unconscious .
and the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do , but the elephant really has his own ideas .
if i look at my own life , i 'm born in 1962 in austria .
if i would have been born a hundred years earlier , the big decisions in my life would have been made for me - meaning i would have stayed in the town that i was born in ; i would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did ; and i would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected .
i , of course , and all of us , are very much in charge of these big decisions in our lives .
we live where we want to be - at least in the west .
we become what we really are interested in .
we choose our own profession , and we choose our own partners .
and so it 's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of .
if you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called george , when he decides on where he wants to live - is it florida or north dakota ? - he goes and lives in georgia .
and if you look at a guy called dennis , when he decides what to become - is it a lawyer , or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher ? - best chance is that he wants to become a dentist .
and if paula decides should she marry joe or jack , somehow paul sounds the most interesting .
and so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons , it remains statistically true that there are more georges living in georgia and there are more dennises becoming dentists and there are more paulas who are married to paul than statistically viable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i , of course , thought , " well this is american data , " and i thought , " well , those silly americans .
they get influenced by things that they 're not aware of .
this is just completely ridiculous . "
then , of course , i looked at my mom and my dad - -lrb- laughter -rrb- karolina and karl , and grandmom and granddad , josefine and josef .
so i am looking still for a stephanie .
i 'll figure something out .
if i make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer , the easiest answer , of course , is do more of the stuff that i like to do and much less of the stuff that i do n't like to do - for which it would be helpful to know what it is that i actually do like to do .
i 'm a big list maker , so i came up with a list .
one of them is to think without pressure .
this is a project we 're working on right now with a very healthy deadline .
it 's a book on culture , and , as you can see , culture is rapidly drifting around .
doing things like i 'm doing right now - traveling to cannes .
the example i have here is a chair that came out of the year in bali - clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture , not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there .
quite consciously , design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques , just basically to fight straightforward adaptation .
being close to the content - that 's the content really is close to my heart .
this is a bus , or vehicle , for a charity , for an ngo that wants to double the education budget in the united states - carefully designed , so , by two inches , it still clears highway overpasses .
having end results - things that come back from the printer well , like this little business card for an animation company called sideshow on lenticular foils .
working on projects that actually have visible impacts , like a book for a deceased german artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous .
it just came out six months ago , and it 's getting unbelievable traction right now in germany .
and i think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest .
and lately , to be involved in projects where i know about 50 percent of the project technique-wise and the other 50 percent would be new .
so in this case , it 's an outside projection for singapore on these giant times square-like screens .
and i of course knew stuff , as a designer , about typography , even though we worked with those animals not so successfully .
but i did n't quite know all that much about movement or film .
and from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project .
but also because the content was very close .
in this case , " keeping a diary supports personal development " - i 've been keeping a diary since i was 12 .
and i 've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way .
in this case also because it 's part of one of the many sentiments that we build the whole series on - that all the sentiments originally had come out of the diary .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we look around the media , as we see on the news from iraq , afghanistan , sierra leone , and the conflict seems incomprehensible to us .
and that 's certainly how it seemed to me when i started this project .
but as a physicist , i thought , well if you give me some data , i could maybe understand this . you know , give us a go .
so as a naive new zealander i thought , well i 'll go to the pentagon .
can you get me some information ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no . so i had to think a little harder .
and i was watching the news one night in oxford .
and i looked down at the chattering heads on my channel of choice .
and i saw that there was information there .
there was data within the streams of news that we consume .
all this noise around us actually has information .
so what i started thinking was , perhaps there is something like open source intelligence here .
if we can get enough of these streams of information together , we can perhaps start to understand the war .
so this is exactly what i did . we started bringing a team together , an interdisciplinary team of scientists , of economists , mathematicians .
we brought these guys together and we started to try and solve this .
we did it in three steps .
the first step we did was to collect . we did 130 different sources of information - from ngo reports to newspapers and cable news .
we brought this raw data in and we filtered it .
we extracted the key bits on information to build the database .
that database contained the timing of attacks , the location , the size and the weapons used .
it 's all in the streams of information we consume daily , we just have to know how to pull it out .
and once we had this we could start doing some cool stuff .
what if we were to look at the distribution of the sizes of attacks ?
what would that tell us ?
so we started doing this . and you can see here on the horizontal axis you 've got the number of people killed in an attack or the size of the attack .
and on the vertical axis you 've got the number of attacks .
so we plot data for sample on this .
you see some sort of random distribution - perhaps 67 attacks , one person was killed , or 47 attacks where seven people were killed .
we did this exact same thing for iraq .
and we did n't know , for iraq what we were going to find .
it turns out what we found was pretty surprising .
you take all of the conflict , all of the chaos , all of the noise , and out of that comes this precise mathematical distribution of the way attacks are ordered in this conflict .
this blew our mind .
why should a conflict like iraq have this as its fundamental signature ?
why should there be order in war ?
we did n't really understand that .
we thought maybe there is something special about iraq .
so we looked at a few more conflicts .
we looked at colombia , we looked at afghanistan , and we looked at senegal .
and the same pattern emerged in each conflict .
this was n't supposed to happen .
these are different wars , with different religious factions , different political factions , and different socioeconomic problems .
and yet the fundamental patterns underlying them are the same .
so we went a little wider .
we looked around the world at all the data we could get our hands on .
from peru to indonesia , we studied this same pattern again .
and we found that not only were the distributions these straight lines , but the slope of these lines , they clustered around this value of alpha equals 2.5 .
and we could generate an equation that could predict the likelihood of an attack .
what we 're saying here is the probability of an attack killing x number of people in a country like iraq is equal to a constant , times the size of that attack , raised to the power of negative alpha .
and negative alpha is the slope of that line i showed you before .
so what ?
this is data , statistics . what does it tell us about these conflicts ?
that was a challenge we had to face as physicists .
how do we explain this ?
and what we really found was that alpha , if we think about it , is the organizational structure of the insurgency .
alpha is the distribution of the sizes of attacks , which is really the distribution of the group strength carrying out the attacks .
so we look at a process of group dynamics : coalescence and fragmentation , groups coming together , groups breaking apart .
and we start running the numbers on this . can we simulate it ?
can we create the kind of patterns that we 're seeing in places like iraq ?
turns out we kind of do a reasonable job .
we can run these simulations .
we can recreate this using a process of group dynamics to explain the patterns that we see all around the conflicts around the world .
so what 's going on ?
why should these different - seemingly different conflicts have the same patterns ?
now what i believe is going on is that the insurgent forces , they evolve over time . they adapt .
and it turns out there is only one solution to fight a much stronger enemy .
and if you do n't find that solution as an insurgent force , you do n't exist .
so every insurgent force that is ongoing , every conflict that is ongoing , it 's going to look something like this .
and that is what we think is happening .
taking it forward , how do we change it ?
how do we end a war like iraq ?
what does it look like ?
alpha is the structure . it 's got a stable state at 2.5 .
this is what wars look like when they continue .
we 've got to change that .
we can push it up : the forces become more fragmented ; there is more of them , but they are weaker .
or we push it down : they 're more robust ; there is less groups ; but perhaps you can sit and talk to them .
so this graph here , i 'm going to show you now .
no one has seen this before . this is literally stuff that we 've come through last week .
and we see the evolution of alpha through time .
we see it start . and we see it grow up to the stable state the wars around the world look like .
and it stays there through the invasion of fallujah until the samarra bombings in the iraqi elections of ' 06 .
and the system gets perturbed . it moves upwards to a fragmented state .
this is when the surge happens .
and depending on who you ask , the surge was supposed to push it up even further .
the opposite happened .
the groups became stronger .
they became more robust .
and so i 'm thinking , right , great , it 's going to keep going down .
we can talk to them . we can get a solution . the opposite happened .
it 's moved up again . the groups are more fragmented .
and this tells me one of two things .
either we 're back where we started and the surge has had no effect ; or finally the groups have been fragmented to the extent that we can start to think about maybe moving out .
i do n't know what the answer is to that .
but i know that we should be looking at the structure of the insurgency to answer that question .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- to understand the world that live in , we tell stories .
and while remixing and sharing have come to define the web as we know it , all of us can now be part of that story through simple tools that allow us to make things online .
but video has been left out . it arrived on the web in a small box , and there it has remained , completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it .
in fact , in over a decade on the web , the only thing that has changed about video is the size of the box and the quality of the picture .
popcorn changes all of that .
it 's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web .
videos created with popcorn behave like the web itself : dynamic , full of links , and completely remixable , and finally allowed to break free from the frame .
i want to give you a demo of a prototype that we 're working on that we 'll launch later this fall .
it will be completely free , and it will work in any browser .
so , every popcorn production begins with the video , and so i 've made a short , 20-second clip using a newscaster template that we use in workshops .
so let 's watch it . we 'll go back , and i 'll show you how we made it .
hi , and welcome to my newscast .
i 've added my location with a google map , and it 's live , so try moving it around .
you can add pop-ups with live links and custom icons , or pull in content from any web service , like flickr , or add articles and blog posts with links out to the full content .
so let 's go back , and i 'll show you what you saw . there was a lot there .
so this is the timeline , and if you 've ever edited video , you 're familiar with this , but instead of clips in the timeline , what you 're looking at is web events pulled into the video .
now in this popcorn production we 've got the title card , we 've got a google map that shows up picture-in-picture , then popcorn lets it push outside the frame and take over the whole screen .
there are two pop-ups bringing you some other information , and a final article with a link out to the original article .
let 's go to this google map , and i 'll show you how you can edit it .
all you do , go into the timeline , double-click the item , and i 've set it to toronto , because that 's where i 'm from .
let 's set it to something else .
popcorn immediately goes out onto the web , talks to google , grabs the map , and puts it in the display .
and it 's exactly the same for the people who watch your production .
and it 's live . it 's not an image . so you click on it , you zoom in , right down to street view if you want to .
now in the video , i mentioned adding a live feed , which we can do right now , so let 's add a live feed from flickr . go over to the right-hand side , grab flickr from the list of options , drag it into the timeline , and put it where you 'd like it to go , and it immediately goes out to flickr and starts pulling in images based on the tags . now , my developers really like ponies , and so they 've set that as the default tag .
let 's try something else , maybe something a bit more relevant to today .
now here are live images being pulled straight from the feed .
if you come and watch this a week from now , this will be completely different , dynamic , just like the web , and just like the web , everything is sourced , so click your link , and you go straight to flickr and see the source image .
everything you 've seen today is built with the basic building blocks of the web : html , css and javascript .
that means it 's completely remixable . it also means there 's no proprietary software . all you need is a web browser .
so imagine if every video that we watched on the web worked like the web , completely remixable , linked to its source content , and interactive for everyone who views it .
i think popcorn could change the way that we tell stories on the web , and the way we understand the world we live in .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to tell you about why i became a sculptor , and you may think that sculptors , well , they deal with meta , they deal with objects , they deal with bodies , but i think , really , what i care about most is making space , and that 's what i 've called this talk : making space .
space that exists within us , and without us .
so , when i was a child , i do n't know how many of you grew up in the ' 50s , but i was sent upstairs for an enforced rest . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a really bad idea . i mean , after lunch , you 're , you know , you 're six , and you want to go and climb a tree .
but i had to go upstairs , this tiny little room that was actually made out of an old balcony , so it was incredibly hot , small and light , and i had to lie there . it was ridiculous .
but anyway , for some reason , i promised myself that i was n't going to move , that i was going to do this thing that mummy wanted me to do .
and there i was , lying there in this tiny space , hot , dark , claustrophobic , matchbox-sized , behind my eyes , but it was really weird , like , after this went on for days , weeks , months , that space would get bigger and darker and cooler until i really looked forward to that half an hour of enforced immobility and rest , and i really looked forward to going to that place of darkness .
do you mind if we do something completely different ?
can we all just close our eyes for a minute ?
now , this is n't going to be freaky .
it is n't some cultic thing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's just , it 's just , i just would like us all to go there .
so i 'm going to do it too . we 'll all be there together .
so close your eyes for a minute .
here we are , in a space , the subjective , collective space of the darkness of the body .
i think of this as the place of imagination , of potential , but what are its qualities ?
it is objectless . there are no things in it .
it is dimensionless . it is limitless .
it is endless .
okay , open your eyes .
that 's the space that i think sculpture - which is a bit of a paradox , sculpture that is about making material propositions - but i think that 's the space that sculpture can connect us with .
so , imagine we 're in the middle of america .
you 're asleep . you wake up , and without lifting your head from the earth on your sleeping bag , you can see for 70 miles .
this is a dry lake bed .
i was young . i 'd just finished art school .
i wanted to do something that was working directly with the world , directly with place .
this was a wonderful place , because it was a place where you could imagine that you were the first person to be there .
it was a place where nothing very much had happened .
anyway , bear with me .
i picked up a hand-sized stone , threw it as far as i was able , it was about 22 meters .
i then cleared all the stones within that radius and made a pile .
and that was the pile , by the way .
and then , i stood on the pile , and threw all of those rocks out again , and here is rearranged desert .
you could say , well , it does n't look very different from when he started .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what 's all the fuss about ?
in fact , chris was worried and said , " look , do n't show them that slide , because they 're just going to think you 're another one of those crazy modern artists who does n't do much .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the fact is , this is evidence of a living body on other bodies , rocks that have been the subject of geological formation , erosion , the action of time on objects .
this is a place , in a way , that i just would like you to , in a way , look at differently because of this event that has happened in it , a human event , and in general , it just asks us to look again at this world , so different from , in a way , the world that we have been sharing with each other , the technological world , to look again at the elemental world .
the elemental world that we all live in is that space that we all visited together , the darkness of the body .
i wanted to start again with that environment , the environment of the intimate , subjective space that each of us lives in , but from the other side of appearance .
so here is a daily activity of the studio .
you can see i do n't do much . i 'm just standing there , again with my eyes closed , and other people are molding me , evidential .
this is an indexical register of a lived moment of a body in time .
can we map that space , using the language of neutrinos or cosmic rays , taking the bounding condition of the body as its limit , but in complete reversal of , in a way , the most traditional greek idea of pointing ?
in the old days they used to take a lump of pentelic marble and drill from the surface in order to identify the skin , the appearance , what aristotle defined as the distinction between substance and appearance , the thing that makes things visible , but here we 're working from the other side .
or can we do it as an exclusive membrane ?
this is a lead case made around the space that my body occupied , but it 's now void .
this is a work called " learning to see . "
it 's a bit of , well , we could call it night , we could call it the 96 percent of gravity that we do n't know about , dark matter , placed in space , anyway , another version of a human space in space at large , but i do n't know if you can see , the eyes are indicated , they 're closed .
it 's called " learning to see " because it 's about an object that hopefully works reflexively and talks about that vision or connection with the darkness of the body that i see as a space of potential .
can we do it another way , using the language of particles around a nucleus , and talk about the body as an energy center ?
no longer about statues , no longer having to take that duty of standing , the standing of a human body , or the standing of a statue , release it , allow it to be an energy field , a space in space that talks about human life , between becoming an entropy as a sort of concentration of attention , a human place of possibility in space at large .
is there another way ?
dark matter now placed against a horizon .
if minds live in bodies , if bodies live in clothes , and then in rooms , and then in buildings , and then in cities , do they also have a final skin , and is that skin perceptual ?
the horizon .
and is art about trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon ?
can we use , in a way , a body as an empty catalyst for a kind of empathy with the experience of space-time as it is lived , as i am standing here in front of you trying to feel and make a connection in this space-time that we are sharing , can we use , at it were , the memory of a body , of a human space in space to catalyze an experience , again , firsthand experience , of elemental time .
human time , industrial time , tested against the time of the tides , in which these memories of a particular body , that could be any body , multiplied as in the time of mechanical reproduction , many times , placed over three square miles , a mile out to sea , disappearing , in different conditions of day and night .
you can see this work . it 's on the mouth of the mersey , just outside liverpool .
and there you can see what a liverpool sea looks like on a typical afternoon .
the pieces appear and disappear , but maybe more importantly - this is just looking north from the center of the installation - they create a field , a field that involves living and the surrogate bodies in a kind of relation , a relation with each other and a relation with that limit , the edge , the horizon .
just moving on , is it possible , taking that idea of mind , body , body-building , to supplant the first body , the biological body , with the second , the body of architecture and the built environment .
this is a work called " room for the great australian desert . "
it 's in an undefined location and i 've never published where it is .
it 's an object for the mind .
i think of it as a 21st-century buddha .
again , the darkness of the body , now held within this bunker shape of the minimum position that a body needs to occupy , a crouching body .
there 's a hole at the anus , penis level .
there are holes at ears . there are no holes at the eyes .
there 's a slot for the mouth . it 's two and a half inches thick , concrete with a void interior .
again , a site found with a completely flat 360-degree horizon .
this is just simply asking , again , as if we had arrived for the first time , what is the relationship of the human project to time and space ?
taking that idiom of , as it were , the darkness of the body transferred to architecture , can you use architectural space not for living but as a metaphor , and use its systolic , diastolic smaller and larger spaces to provide a kind of firsthand somatic narrative for a journey through space , light and darkness ?
this is a work of some proportion and some weight that makes the body into a city , an aggregation of cells that are all interconnected and that allow certain visual access at certain places .
the last work that i just wanted to share with you is " blind light , " which is perhaps the most open work , and in a conference of radical openness , i think maybe this is as radical as i get , using light and water vapor as my materials .
here is a box filled at one and a half atmospheres of atmospheric pressure , with a cloud and with very bright light .
as you walk towards the ever-open threshold , you disappear , both to yourselves and to others .
if you hold your hand out in front of you , you ca n't see it .
if you look down , you ca n't see your feet .
you are now consciousness without an object , freed from the dimensionful and measured way in which life links us to the obligatory .
but this is a space that is actually filled with people , disembodied voices , and out of that ambient environment , when people come close to your own body zone , very close , they appear to you as representations .
when they appear close to the edge , they are representations , representations in which the viewers have become the viewed .
for me , art is not about objects of high monetary exchange .
it 's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time .
as john cage said , " we are not moving towards some kind of goal .
we are at the goal , and it is changing with us .
if art has any purpose , it is to open our eyes to that fact . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- contagious is a good word .
even in the times of h1n1 , i like the word .
laughter is contagious . passion is contagious .
inspiration is contagious .
we 've heard some remarkable stories from some remarkable speakers .
but for me , what was contagious about all of them was that they were infected by something i call the " i can " bug .
so , the question is , why only them ?
in a country of a billion people and some , why so few ?
is it luck ? is it chance ?
can we all not systematically and consciously get infected ?
so , in the next eight minutes i would like to share with you my story .
i got infected when i was 17 , when , as a student of the design college , i encountered adults who actually believed in my ideas , challenged me and had lots of cups of chai with me .
and i was struck by just how wonderful it felt , and how contagious that feeling was .
i also realized i should have got infected when i was seven .
so , when i started riverside school 10 years ago it became a lab , a lab to prototype and refine a design process that could consciously infect the mind with the " i can " bug .
and i uncovered that if learning is embedded in real-world context , that if you blur the boundaries between school and life , then children go through a journey of " aware , " where they can see the change , " enable , " be changed , and then " empower , " lead the change .
and that directly increased student wellbeing .
children became more competent , and less helpless .
but this was all common sense .
so , i 'd like to show you a little glimpse of what common practice looks like at riverside .
a little background : when my grade five was learning about child rights , they were made to roll incense sticks , agarbattis , for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer .
it transformed them . what you will see is their journey , and then their utter conviction that they could go out and change the world .
-lrb- music -rrb- that 's them rolling .
and in two hours , after their backs were broke , they were changed .
and once that happened , they were out in the city convincing everybody that child labor just had to be abolished .
and look at ragav , that moment when his face changes because he 's been able to understand that he has shifted that man 's mindset .
and that ca n't happen in a classroom .
so , when ragav experienced that he went from " teacher told me , " to " i am doing it . " and that 's the " i can " mindshift .
and it is a process that can be energized and nurtured .
but we had parents who said , " okay , making our children good human beings is all very well , but what about math and science and english ?
show us the grades . "
and we did . the data was conclusive .
when children are empowered , not only do they do good , they do well , in fact very well , as you can see in this national benchmarking assessment taken by over 2,000 schools in india , riverside children were outperforming the top 10 schools in india in math , english and science .
so , it worked . it was now time to take it outside riverside .
so , on august 15th , independence day , 2007 , the children of riverside set out to infect ahmedabad .
now it was not about riverside school .
it was about all children . so , we were shameless .
we walked into the offices of the municipal corporation , the police , the press , businesses , and basically said , " when are you going to wake up and recognize the potential that resides in every child ?
when will you include the child in the city ?
basically , open your hearts and your minds to the child . "
so , how did the city respond ?
since 2007 every other month the city closes down the busiest streets for traffic and converts it into a playground for children and childhood .
here was a city telling its child , " you can . "
a glimpse of infection in ahmedabad .
video : -lsb- unclear -rsb- so , the busiest streets closed down .
we have the traffic police and municipal corporation helping us .
it gets taken over by children .
they are skating . they are doing street plays .
they are playing , all free , for all children .
-lrb- music -rrb- atul karwal : aproch is an organization which has been doing things for kids earlier .
and we plan to extend this to other parts of the city .
-lrb- music -rrb- kiran bir sethi : and the city will give free time .
and ahmedabad got the first child-friendly zebra crossing in the world .
geet sethi : when a city gives to the children , in the future the children will give back to the city .
-lrb- music -rrb- kbs : and because of that , ahmedabad is known as india 's first child-friendly city .
so , you 're getting the pattern . first 200 children at riverside .
then 30,000 children in ahmedabad , and growing .
it was time now to infect india .
so , on august 15th , again , independence day , 2009 , empowered with the same process , we empowered 100,000 children to say , " i can . "
how ? we designed a simple toolkit , converted it into eight languages , and reached 32,000 schools .
we basically gave children a very simple challenge .
we said , take one idea , anything that bothers you , choose one week , and change a billion lives .
and they did . stories of change poured in from all over india , from nagaland in the east , to jhunjhunu in the west , from sikkim in the north , to krishnagiri in the south .
children were designing solutions for a diverse range of problems .
right from loneliness to filling potholes in the street to alcoholism , and 32 children who stopped 16 child marriages in rajasthan .
i mean , it was incredible .
basically again reaffirming that when adults believe in children and say , " you can , " then they will .
infection in india .
this is in rajasthan , a rural village .
child : our parents are illiterate and we want to teach them how to read and write .
kbs : first time , a rally and a street play in a rural school - unheard of - to tell their parents why literacy is important .
look at what their parents says .
man : this program is wonderful .
we feel so nice that our children can teach us how to read and write .
woman : i am so happy that my students did this campaign .
in the future , i will never doubt my students ' abilities .
see ? they have done it .
kbs : an inner city school in hyderabad .
girl : 581 . this house is 581 ...
we have to start collecting from 555 .
kbs : girls and boys in hyderabad , going out , pretty difficult , but they did it .
woman : even though they are so young , they have done such good work .
first they have cleaned the society , then it will be hyderabad , and soon india .
woman : it was a revelation for me . it does n't strike me that they had so much inside them .
girl : thank you , ladies and gentlemen .
for our auction we have some wonderful paintings for you , for a very good cause , the money you give us will be used to buy hearing aids .
are you ready , ladies and gentlemen ? audience : yes !
girl : are you ready ? audience : yes !
girl : are you ready ? audience : yes !
kbs : so , the charter of compassion starts right here .
street plays , auctions , petitions .
i mean , they were changing lives .
it was incredible .
so , how can we still stay immune ?
how can we stay immune to that passion , that energy , that excitement ?
i know it 's obvious , but i have to end with the most powerful symbol of change , gandhiji .
70 years ago , it took one man to infect an entire nation with the power of " we can . "
so , today who is it going to take to spread the infection from 100,000 children to the 200 million children in india ?
last i heard , the preamble still said , " we , the people of india , " right ?
so , if not us , then who ?
if not now , then when ?
like i said , contagious is a good word .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- living in africa is to be on the edge , metaphorically , and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008 .
though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in europe and the rest of the world , but africa was sort of cut off .
and that changed , first with ships when we had the renaissance , the scientific revolution and also the industrial revolution .
and now we 've got the digital revolution .
these revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations .
never have been .
now , this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect africa to the rest of the world .
what i find amazing is that africa is transcending its geography problem .
africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself .
the connectivity situation has improved greatly , but some barriers remain .
it is with this context that ushahidi came to be .
in 2008 , one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow .
there was a media blackout in 2008 , when there was post-election violence in kenya .
it was a very tragic time . it was a very difficult time .
so we came together and we created software called ushahidi .
and ushahidi means " testimony " or " witness " in swahili .
i 'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators .
this is david and erik .
i call them brothers from another mother .
clearly i have a german mother somewhere .
and we worked together first with building and growing ushahidi .
and the idea of the software was to gather information from sms , email and web , and put a map so that you could see what was happening where , and you could visualize that data .
and after that initial prototype , we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did .
all the while , we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow ushahidi and supported us in those early days .
and that 's why we set up the ihub in nairobi , an actual physical space where we could collaborate , and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in kenya .
we did that with the support of different organizations like the macarthur foundation and omidyar network .
and we were able to grow this software footprint , and a few years later it became very useful software , and we were quite humbled when it was used in haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were , and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in japan .
now , this year the internet turns 20 , and ushahidi turned five .
ushahidi is not only the software that we made .
it is the team , and it 's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee .
we did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world .
there are crisis maps , election maps , corruption maps , and even environmental monitoring crowd maps .
we are humbled that this has roots in kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they 're dealing with .
there is more that we 're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence , that i , as a citizen , if i share the information with whatever device that i have , could inform you about what is going on , and that if you do the same , we can have a bigger picture of what 's going on .
i moved back to kenya in 2011 .
erik moved in 2010 .
very different reality . i used to live in chicago where there was abundant internet access .
i had never had to deal with a blackout .
and in kenya , it 's a very different reality , and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem .
the day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be , let 's just say very annoying .
blackouts are not fun .
imagine sitting down to start working , and all of a sudden the power goes out , your internet connection goes down with it , so you have to figure out , okay , now , where 's the modem , how do i switch back ?
and then , guess what ? you have to deal with it again .
now , this is the reality of kenya , where we live now , and other parts of africa .
the other problem that we 're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge .
it costs me five kenyan shillings , or .06 usd to call the u.s. , canada or china .
guess how much it costs to call rwanda , ghana , nigeria ?
thirty kenyan shillings . that 's six times the cost to connect within africa .
and also , when traveling within africa , you 've got different settings for different mobile providers .
this is the reality that we deal with .
so we 've got a joke in ushahidi where we say , " if it works in africa , it 'll work anywhere . "
-lsb- most use technology to define the function . we use function to drive the technology . -rsb- what if we could overcome the problem of unreliable internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection ?
could we leverage the cloud ?
we 've built a crowd map , we 've built ushahidi .
could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country ?
so we looked at the modem , an important part of the infrastructure of the internet , and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context , where you 've got ubiquitous internet , you 've got ubiquitous electricity , yet we sit here in nairobi and we do not have that luxury .
we wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world , for our context , and for our reality .
what if we could have connectivity with less friction ?
this is the brck .
it acts as a backup to the internet so that , when the power goes out , it fails over and connects to the nearest gsm network .
mobile connectivity in africa is pervasive .
it 's actually everywhere .
most towns at least have a 3g connection .
so why do n't we leverage that ? and that 's why we built this .
the other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down , this has eight hours of battery left , so you can continue working , you can continue being productive , and let 's just say you are less stressed .
and for rural areas , it can be the primary means of connection .
the software sensibility at ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks , and whenever you switch on the backup , you pick on the fastest network , so we 'll have multi-sim capability so that you can put multiple sims , and if one network is faster , that 's the one you hop on , and if the up time on that is not very good , then you hop onto the next one .
the idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere .
with load balancing , this can be possible .
the other interesting thing for us - we like sensors - is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the internet of things .
imagine a weather station that can be attached to this .
it 's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have internet connectivity even in very remote areas .
out of adversity can come innovation , and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure ?
and for us , we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in kenya .
it is not without challenge .
our team has basically been mules carrying components from the u.s. to kenya . we 've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents .
" what are you carrying ? "
and the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects .
so we put it on kickstarter , and i 'm happy to say that , through the support of many people , not only here but online , the brck has been kickstarted , and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins .
i will close by saying that , if we solve this for the local market , it could be impactful not only for the coders in nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity , and it can reduce the cost of connecting , and hopefully collaboration within african countries .
the idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship .
the brck is our part to keep africans connected , and to help them drive the global digital revolution .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to talk to you about today is some of the problems that the military of the western world - australia , united states , u.k. and so on - face in some of the deployments that they 're dealing with in the modern world at this time .
if you think about the sorts of things that we 've sent australian military personnel to in recent years , we 've got obvious things like iraq and afghanistan , but you 've also got things like east timor and the solomon islands and so on .
and a lot of these deployments that we 're actually sending military personnel to these days are n't traditional wars .
in fact , a lot of the jobs that we 're asking the military personnel to do in these situations are ones that , in their own countries , in australia , the united states and so on , would actually be done by police officers .
and so there 's a bunch of problems that come up for military personnel in these situations , because they 're doing things that they have n't really been trained for , and they 're doing things that those who do them in their own countries are trained very differently for and equipped very differently for .
now there 's a bunch of reasons why we actually do send military personnel rather than police to do these jobs .
if australia had to send a thousand people tomorrow to west papua for example , we do n't have a thousand police officers hanging around that could just go tomorrow and we do have a thousand soldiers that could go .
so when we have to send someone , we send the military - because they 're there , they 're available and , heck , they 're used to going off and doing these things and living by themselves and not having all this extra support .
so they are able to do it in that sense .
but they are n't trained in the same way that police officers are and they 're certainly not equipped in the same way police officers are .
and so this has raised a bunch of problems for them when dealing with these sorts of issues .
one particular thing that 's come up that i am especially interested in is the question of whether , when we 're sending military personnel to do these sorts of jobs , we ought to be equipping them differently , and in particular , whether we ought to be giving them access to some of the sorts of non-lethal weapons that police have .
since they 're doing some of these same jobs , maybe they should have some of those things .
and of course , there 's a range of places where you 'd think those things would be really useful .
so for example , when you 've got military checkpoints .
if people are approaching these checkpoints and the military personnel there are unsure whether this person 's hostile or not .
say this person approaching here , and they say , " well is this a suicide bomber or not ?
have they got something hidden under their clothing ? what 's going to happen ? "
they do n't know whether this person 's hostile or not .
if this person does n't follow directions , then they may end up shooting them and then find out afterward either , yes , we shot the right person , or , no , this was just an innocent person who did n't understand what was going on .
so if they had non-lethal weapons then they would say , " well we can use them in that sort of situation .
if we shoot someone who was n't hostile , at least we have n't killed them . "
another situation .
this photo is actually from one of the missions in the balkans in the late 1990s .
situation 's a little bit different where perhaps they know someone who 's hostile , where they 've got someone shooting at them or doing something else that 's clearly hostile , throwing rocks , whatever .
but if they respond , there 's a range of other people around , who are innocent people who might also get hurt - be collateral damage that the military often does n't want to talk about .
so again , they would say , " well if we have access to non-lethal weapons , if we 've got someone we know is hostile , we can do something to deal with them and know that if we hit anyone else around the place , at least , again , we 're not going to kill them . "
another suggestion has been , since we 're putting so many robots in the field , we can see the time coming where they 're actually going to be sending robots out in the field that are autonomous .
they 're going to make their own decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot without a human in the loop .
and so the suggestion is , well hey , if we 're going to send robots out and allow them to do this , maybe it would be a good idea , again , with these things if they were armed with non-lethal weapons so that if the robot makes a bad decision and shoots the wrong person , again , they have n't actually killed them .
now there 's a whole range of different sorts of non-lethal weapons , some of which are obviously available now , some of which they 're developing .
so you 've got traditional things like pepper spray , o.c. spray up at the top there , or tasers over here .
the one on the top right here is actually a dazzling laser intended to just blind the person momentarily and disorient them .
you 've got non-lethal shotgun rounds that contain rubber pellets instead of the traditional metal ones .
and this one in the middle here , the large truck , is actually called the active denial system - something the u.s. military is working on at the moment .
it 's essentially a big microwave transmitter .
it 's sort of your classic idea of a heat ray .
it goes out to a really long distance , compared to any of these other sorts of things .
and anybody who is hit with this feels this sudden burst of heat and just wants to get out of the way .
it is a lot more sophisticated than a microwave oven , but it is basically boiling the water molecules in the very surface level of your skin .
so you feel this massive heat , and you go , " i want to get out of the way . "
and they 're thinking , well this will be really useful in places like where we need to clear a crowd out of a particular area , if the crowd is being hostile .
if we need to keep people away from a particular place , we can do that with these sorts of things .
so obviously there 's a whole range of different sorts of non-lethal weapons we could give military personnel and there 's a whole range of situations where they 're looking a them and saying , " hey , these things could be really useful . "
but as i said , the military and the police are very different .
yes , you do n't have to look very hard at this to recognize the fact that they might be very different .
in particular , the attitude to the use of force and the way they 're trained to use force is especially different .
the police - and knowing because i 've actually helped to train police - police , in particular western jurisdictions at least , are trained to de-escalate force , to try and avoid using force wherever possible , and to use lethal force only as an absolute last resort .
military personnel are being trained for war , so they 're trained that , as soon as things go bad , their first response is lethal force .
the moment the fecal matter hits the rotating turbine , you can start shooting at people .
so their attitudes to the use of lethal force are very different , and i think it 's fairly obvious that their attitude to the use of non-lethal weapons would also be very different from what it is with the police .
and since we 've already had so many problems with police use of non-lethal weapons in various ways , i thought it would be a really good idea to look at some of those things and try to relate it to the military context .
and i was really surprised when i started to do this , to see that , in fact , even those people who were advocating the use of non-lethal weapons by the military had n't actually done that .
they generally seem to think , " well , why would we care what 's happened with the police ?
we 're looking at something different , " and did n't seem to recognize , in fact , they were looking at pretty much the same stuff .
so i actually started to investigate some of those issues and have a look at the way that police use non-lethal weapons when they 're introduced and some of the problems that might arise out of those sorts of things when they actually do introduce them .
and of course , being australian , i started looking at stuff in australia , knowing , again , from my own experience about various times when non-lethal weapons have been introduced in australia .
so one of the things i particularly looked at was the use of o.c. spray , oleoresin capsicum spray , pepper spray , by australian police and seeing when that had been introduced , what had happened and those sorts of issues .
and one study that i found , a particularly interesting one , was actually in queensland , because they had a trial period for the use of pepper spray before they actually introduced it more broadly .
and i went and had a look at some of the figures here .
now when they introduced o.c. spray in queensland , they were really explicit .
the police minister had a whole heap of public statements made about it .
they were saying , " this is explicitly intended to give police an option between shouting and shooting .
this is something they can use instead of a firearm in those situations where they would have previously had to shoot someone . "
so i went and looked at all of these police shooting figures .
and you ca n't actually find them very easily for individual australian states .
i could only find these ones .
this is from a australian institute of criminology report .
as you can see from the fine print , if you can read it at the top : " police shooting deaths " means not just people who have been shot by police , but people who have shot themselves in the presence of police .
but this is the figures across the entire country .
and the red arrow represents the point where queensland actually said , " yes , this is where we 're going to give all police officers across the entire state access to o.c. spray . "
so you can see there were six deaths sort of leading up to it every year for a number of years .
there was a spike , of course , a few years before , but that was n't actually queensland .
anyone know where that was ? was n't port arthur , no .
victoria ? yes , correct .
that spike was all victoria .
so it was n't that queensland had a particular problem with deaths from police shootings and so on .
so six shootings across the whole country , fairly consistently over the years before .
so the next two years were the years they studied - 2001 , 2002 .
anyone want to take a stab at the number of times , given how they 've introduced this , the number of times police in queensland used o.c. spray in that period ?
hundreds ? one , three .
thousand is getting better .
explicitly introduced as an alternative to the use of lethal force - an alternative between shouting and shooting .
i 'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if queensland police did n't have o.c. spray , they would n't have shot 2,226 people in those two years .
in fact , if you have a look at the studies that they were looking at , the material they were collecting and examining , you can see the suspects were only armed in about 15 percent of cases where o.c. spray was used .
it was routinely being used in this period , and , of course , still is routinely used - because there were no complaints about it , not within the context of this study anyway - it was routinely being used to deal with people who were violent , who were potentially violent , and also quite frequently used to deal with people who were simply passively non-compliant .
this person is not doing anything violent , but they just wo n't do what we want them to .
they 're not obeying the directions that we 're giving them , so we 'll give them a shot of the o.c. spray .
that 'll speed them up . everything will work out better that way .
this was something explicitly introduced to be an alternative to firearms , but it 's being routinely used to deal with a whole range of other sorts of problems .
now one of the particular issues that comes up with military use of non-lethal weapons - and people when they 're actually saying , " well hey , there might be some problems " - there 's a couple of particular problems that get focused on .
one of those problems is that non-lethal weapons may be used indiscriminately .
one of the fundamental principles of military use of force is that you have to be discriminate .
you have to be careful about who you 're shooting at .
so one of the problems that 's been suggested with non-lethal weapons is that they might be used indiscriminately - that you use them against a whole range of people because you do n't have to worry so much anymore .
and in fact , one particular instance where i think that actually happens where you can look at it was the dubrovka theatre siege in moscow in 2002 , which probably a lot of you , unlike most of my students at adfa , are actually old enough to remember .
so chechens had come in and taken control of the theater .
they were holding something like 700 people hostage .
they 'd released a bunch of people , but they still had about 700 people hostage .
and the russian special military police , special forces , spetsnaz , came in and actually stormed the theater .
and the way they did it was to pump the whole thing full of anesthetic gas .
and it turned out that lots of these hostages actually died as a result of inhaling the gas .
it was used indiscriminately .
they pumped the whole theater full of the gas .
and it 's no surprise that people died , because you do n't know how much of this gas each person is going to inhale , what position they 're going to fall in when they become unconscious and so on .
there were , in fact , only a couple of people who got shot in this episode .
so when they had a look at it afterward , there were only a couple of people who 'd apparently been shot by the hostage takers or shot by the police forces coming in and trying to deal with the situation .
virtually everybody that got killed got killed from inhaling the gas .
the final toll of hostages is a little unclear , but it 's certainly a few more than that , because there were other people who died over the next few days .
so this was one particular problem they talked about , that it might be used indiscriminately .
second problem that people sometimes talk about with military use of non-lethal weapons , and it 's actually the reason why in the chemical weapons convention , it 's very clear that you ca n't use riot control agents as a weapon of warfare , the problem with that is that it 's seen that sometimes non-lethal weapons might actually be used , not as an alternative to lethal force , but as a lethal force multiplier - that you use non-lethal weapons first so that your lethal weapons will actually be more effective .
the people you 're going to be shooting at are n't going to be able to get out of the way .
they 're not going to be aware of what 's happening and you can kill them better .
and in fact , that 's exactly what happened here .
the hostage takers who had been rendered unconscious by the gas were not taken into custody , they were simply shot in the head .
so this non-lethal weapon was being used , in fact , in this case as a lethal force multiplier to make killing more effective in this particular situation .
another problem that i just want to quickly mention is that there 's a whole heap of problems with the way that people actually get taught to use non-lethal weapons and get trained about them and then get tested and so on .
because they get tested in nice , safe environments .
and people get taught to use them in nice , safe environments like this , where you can see exactly what 's going on .
the person who 's spraying the o.c. spray is wearing a rubber glove to make sure they do n't get contaminated and so on .
but they do n't ever get used like that .
they get used out in the real world , like in texas , like this .
i confess , this particular case was actually one that piqued my interest in this .
it happened while i was working as a research fellow at the u.s. naval academy .
and news reports started coming up about this situation where this woman was arguing with the police officer .
she was n't violent .
in fact , he was probably six inches taller than me , and she was about this tall .
and eventually she said to him " well i 'm going to get back in my car . "
and he says , " if you get back into your car , i 'm going to tase you . "
and she says , " oh , go ahead . tase me . " and so he does .
and it 's all captured by the video camera running in the front of the police car .
so she 's 72 , and it 's seen that this is the most appropriate way of dealing with her .
and other examples of the same sorts of things with other people where you think where you think , " is this really an appropriate way to use non-lethal weapons ? "
" police chief fires taser into 14 year-old girl 's head . "
" she was running away . what else was i suppose to do ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or florida : " police taser six year-old boy at elementary school . "
and they clearly learned a lot from it because in the same district , " police review policy after children shocked : 2nd child shocked by taser stun gun within weeks . "
same police district .
another child within weeks of tasering the six year-old boy .
just in case you think it 's only going to happen in the united states , it happened in canada as well .
and a colleague of mine sent me this one from london .
but my personal favorite of these ones , i have to confess , does actually come from the united states : " officers taser 86 year-old disabled woman in her bed . "
i checked the reports on this one .
i looked at it . i was really surprised .
apparently she took up a more threatening position in her bed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i kid you not . that 's exactly what it said .
" she took up a more threatening position in her bed . "
okay .
but i 'd remind you what i 'm talking about , i 'm talking about military uses of non-lethal weapons .
so why is this relevant ?
because police are actually more restrained in the use of force than the military are .
they 're trained to be more restrained in the use of force than the military are .
they 're trained to think more , to try and de-escalate .
so if you have these problems with police officers with non-lethal weapons , what on earth would make you think it 's going to be better with military personnel ?
the last thing that i would just like to say , when i 'm talking to the police about what a perfect non-lethal weapon would look like , they almost inevitably say the same thing .
they say , " well , it 's got to be something that 's nasty enough that people do n't want to be hit with this weapon .
so if you threaten to use it , people are going to comply with it , but it 's also going to be something that does n't leave any lasting effects . "
in other words , your perfect non-lethal weapon is something that 's perfect for abuse .
what would these guys have done if they 'd had access to tasers or to a manned , portable version of the active denial system - a small heat ray that you can use on people and not worry about it .
so i think , yes , there may be ways that non-lethal weapons are going to be great in these situations , but there 's also a whole heap of problems that need to be considered as well .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century .
in the 21st century , we need to actually look at - and what i 'm actually going to encourage you to consider today - is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count .
but i think it 's time for us to think about what we count .
because what we actually count truly counts .
let me start by telling you a little story .
this is van quach .
she came to this country in 1986 from vietnam .
she changed her name to vivian because she wanted to fit in here in america .
her first job was at an inner-city motel in san francisco as a maid .
i happened to buy that motel about three months after vivian started working there .
so vivian and i have been working together for 23 years .
with the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old , in 1987 , i started my company and i called it joie de vivre , a very impractical name , because i actually was looking to create joy of life .
and this first hotel that i bought , motel , was a pay-by-the-hour , no-tell motel in the inner-city of san francisco .
as i spent time with vivian , i saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work .
it made me question and curious : how could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living ?
so i spent time with vivian , and i saw that she did n't find joy in cleaning toilets .
her job , her goal and her calling was not to become the world 's greatest toilet scrubber .
what counts for vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests .
and what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home .
because vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home .
that very human lesson , more than 20 years ago , served me well during the last economic downturn we had .
in the wake of the dotcom crash and 9/11 , san francisco bay area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of american hotels .
we were the largest operator of hotels in the bay area , so we were particularly vulnerable .
but also back then , remember we stopped eating french fries in this country .
well , not exactly , of course not .
we started eating " freedom fries , " and we started boycotting anything that was french .
well , my name of my company , joie de vivre - so i started getting these letters from places like alabama and orange county saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a french company .
and i 'd write them back , and i 'd say , " what a minute . we 're not french .
we 're an american company . we 're based in san francisco . "
and i 'd get a terse response : " oh , that 's worse . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so one particular day when i was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre , i ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices .
and i initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution .
but given my befuddled state of mind , i ended up in the self-help section very quickly .
that 's where i got reacquainted with abraham maslow 's " hierarchy of needs . "
i took one psychology class in college , and i learned about this guy , abraham maslow , as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs .
but as i sat there for four hours , the full afternoon , reading maslow , i recognized something that is true of most leaders .
one of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect , and that is that we 're all human .
each of us , no matter what our role is in business , has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace .
so as i started reading more maslow , what i started to realize is that maslow , later in his life , wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective , to organizations and specifically to business .
but unfortunately , he died prematurely in 1970 , and so he was n't really able to live that dream completely .
so i realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel abe maslow .
and that 's what i did a few years ago when i took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what i call the transformation pyramid , which is survival , success and transformation .
it 's not just fundamental in business , it 's fundamental in life .
and we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs , these transformational needs for our key employees in the company .
these three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of maslow 's hierarchy of needs .
but as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers , i realized we had no metrics .
we had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right .
so we started asking ourselves : what kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees ' sense of meaning , or our customers ' sense of emotional connection with us ?
for example , we actually started asking our employees , do they understand the mission of our company , and do they feel like they believe in it , can they actually influence it , and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it ?
we started asking our customers , did they feel an emotional connection with us , in one of seven different kinds of ways .
miraculously , as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid , what we found is we created more loyalty .
our customer loyalty skyrocketed .
our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average , and during that five year dotcom bust , we tripled in size .
as i went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time , what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure .
what we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid .
they did n't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid .
so i started asking myself the question : how can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible ?
if we 're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure , and all we can measure is the tangible in life , we 're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid .
so i went out and studied a bunch of things , and i found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business , things like intellectual property , their corporate culture , their brand loyalty , and yet , only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business .
so as leaders , we understand that intangibles are important , but we do n't have a clue how to measure them .
so here 's another einstein quote : " not everything that can be counted counts , and not everything that counts can be counted . "
i hate to argue with einstein , but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually ca n't be counted or valued , are n't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane ?
it was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my ceo hat off for a week and fly off to the himalayan peaks .
i flew off to a place that 's been shrouded in mystery for centuries , a place some folks call shangri-la .
it 's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world .
i went to bhutan .
the teenage king of bhutan was also a curious man , but this was back in 1972 , when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away .
at age 17 , he started asking the kinds of questions that you 'd expect of someone with a beginner 's mind .
on a trip through india , early in his reign as king , he was asked by an indian journalist about the bhutanese gdp , the size of the bhutanese gdp .
the king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later .
he said the following , he said : " why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product ?
why do n't we care more about gross national happiness ? "
now , in essence , the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success , what has come to be known as gnh , or gross national happiness .
most world leaders did n't take notice , and those that did thought this was just " buddhist economics . "
but the king was serious .
this was a notable moment , because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness - that leader 200 years ago , thomas jefferson with the declaration of independence - 200 years later , this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure , and it 's something we should actually value as government officials .
for the next three dozen years as king , this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in bhutan - including , just recently , taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed , no coup .
bhutan , for those of you who do n't know it , is the newest democracy in the world , just two years ago .
so as i spent time with leaders in the gnh movement , i got to really understand what they 're doing .
and i got to spend some time with the prime minister .
over dinner , i asked him an impertinent question .
i asked him , " how can you create and measure something which evaporates - in other words , happiness ? "
and he 's a very wise man , and he said , " listen , bhutan 's goal is not to create happiness .
we create the conditions for happiness to occur .
in other words , we create a habitat of happiness . "
wow , that 's interesting .
he said that they have a science behind that art , and they 've actually created four essential pillars , nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their gnh .
one of those key indicators is : how do the bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day ?
it 's a good question . how do you feel about how you spend your time each day ?
time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world .
and yet , of course , that little intangible piece of data does n't factor into our gdp calculations .
as i spent my week up in the himalayas , i started to imagine what i call an emotional equation .
and it focuses on something i read long ago from a guy named rabbi hyman schachtel .
how many know him ? anybody ?
1954 , he wrote a book called " the real enjoyment of living , " and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want ; instead , it 's about wanting what you have .
or in other words , i think the bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have - imagine gratitude - divided by having what you want - gratification .
the bhutanese are n't on some aspirational treadmill , constantly focused on what they do n't have .
their religion , their isolation , their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their gnh movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have .
how many of us here , as tedsters in the audience , spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation , in the denominator ?
we are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the reality is , in western countries , quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out - an object that we 're supposed to get , or maybe many objects .
actually , in fact , if you look in the dictionary , many dictionaries define pursuit as to " chase with hostility . "
do we pursue happiness with hostility ?
good question . but back to bhutan .
bhutan 's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world 's population .
could this little country , like a startup in a mature industry , be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in china and india ?
bhutan 's created the ultimate export , a new global currency of well-being , and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own gnh .
you may have heard , this last fall nicolas sarkozy in france announcing the results of an 18-month study by two nobel economists , focusing on happiness and wellness in france .
sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on gdp and consider a new index , what some french are calling a " joie de vivre index . "
i like it .
co-branding opportunities .
just three days ago , three days ago here at ted , we had a simulcast of david cameron , potentially the next prime minister of the uk , quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time , robert kennedy 's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we 're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that gdp is a misplaced metric .
so it suggests that the momentum is shifting .
i 've taken that robert kennedy quote , and i 've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here .
this is a collection of things that robert kennedy said in that quote .
gdp counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods .
but it does n't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials .
as you look at these two columns here , does n't it make you feel like it 's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count , a new way to imagine what 's important to us in life ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- certainly robert kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that .
he said gdp " measures everything in short , except that which makes life worthwhile . "
wow .
so how do we do that ?
let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now , at least in this country .
why in the heck in america are we doing a census in 2010 ?
we 're spending 10 billion dollars on the census .
we 're asking 10 simple questions - it is simplicity .
but all of those questions are tangible .
they 're about demographics .
they 're about where you live , how many people you live with , and whether you own your home or not .
that 's about it .
we 're not asking meaningful metrics .
we 're not asking important questions .
we 're not asking anything that 's intangible .
abe maslow said long ago something you 've heard before , but you did n't realize it was him .
he said , " if the only tool you have is a hammer , everything starts to look like a nail . "
we 've been fooled by our tool .
excuse that expression .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've been fooled by our tool .
gdp has been our hammer .
and our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success .
and yet , 64 percent of the world 's gdp today is in that intangible industry we call service , the service industry , the industry i 'm in .
and only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture .
so maybe it 's time that we get a bigger toolbox , right ?
maybe it 's time we get a toolbox that does n't just count what 's easily counted , the tangible in life , but actually counts what we most value , the things that are intangible .
i guess i 'm sort of a curious ceo .
i was also a curious economics major as an undergrad .
i learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same .
they are n't the same .
in fact , as leaders , what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling .
in vivian 's case , her unit of production is n't the tangible hours she works , it 's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work .
this is dave arringdale who 's actually been a longtime guest at vivian 's motel .
he stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years , and he 's loyal to the property because of the relationship that vivian and her fellow employees have created with him .
they 've created a habitat of happiness for dave .
he tells me that he can always count on vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home .
why is it that business leaders and investors quite often do n't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business ?
we do n't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits , we can have both .
in fact , inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits , right ?
so what the world needs now , in my opinion , is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count .
we count numbers .
we count on people .
what really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people .
i learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country .
what can you start counting today ?
what one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life , whether it 's your work life or your business life ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about a very fundamental change that is going on in the very fabric of the modern economy .
and to talk about that , i 'm going to go back to the beginning , because in the beginning were commodities .
commodities are things that you grow in the ground , raise on the ground or pull out of the ground : basically , animal , mineral , vegetable .
and then you extract them out of the ground , and sell them on the open marketplace .
commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy that lasted for millennia .
but then along came the industrial revolution , and then goods became the predominant economic offering , where we used commodities as a raw material to be able to make or manufacture goods .
so , we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy .
well , what then happened over the last 50 or 60 years , is that goods have become commoditized .
commoditized : where they 're treated like a commodity , where people do n't care who makes them .
they just care about three things and three things only : price , price and price .
now , there 's an antidote to commoditization , and that is customization .
my first book was called " mass customization " - it came up a couple of times yesterday - and how i discovered this progression of economic value was realizing that customizing a good automatically turned it into a service , because it was done just for a particular person , because it was n't inventoried , it was delivered on demand to that individual person .
so , we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy .
but over the past 10 or 20 years , what 's happened is that services are being commoditized as well .
long-distance telephone service sold on price , price , price ; fast-food restaurants with all their value pricing ; and even the internet is commoditizing not just goods , but services as well .
what that means is that it 's time to move to a new level of economic value .
time to go beyond the goods and the services , and use , in that same heuristic , what happens when you customize a service ?
what happens when you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person - that 's exactly what they need at this moment in time ?
then you ca n't help but make them go " wow " ; you ca n't help but turn it into a memorable event - you ca n't help but turn it into an experience .
so we 're shifting to an experience economy , where experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering .
now most places that i talk to , when i talk about experience , i talk about disney - the world 's premier experience-stager .
i talk about theme restaurants , and experiential retail , and boutique hotels , and las vegas - the experience capital of the world .
but here , when you think about experiences , think about thomas dolby and his group , playing music .
think about meaningful places .
think about drinking wine , about a journey to the clock of the long now .
those are all experiences . think about ted itself .
the experience capital in the world of conferences .
all of these are experiences .
now , over the last several years i spent a lot of time in europe , and particularly in the netherlands , and whenever i talk about the experience economy there , i 'm always greeted at the end with one particular question , almost invariably .
and the question is n't really so much a question as an accusation .
and the dutch , when they usually put it , it always starts with the same two words .
you know the words i mean ?
you americans .
they say , you americans .
you like your fantasy environments , your fake , your disneyland experiences .
they say , we dutch , we like real , natural , authentic experiences .
so much has that happened that i 've developed a fairly praticed response , which is : i point out that first of all , you have to understand that there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience .
why ? because the experience happens inside of us .
it 's our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us .
so , as long as we are in any sense authentic human beings , then every experience we have is authentic .
now , there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience , but even that is a matter of degree , not kind .
and there 's no such thing as a 100 percent natural experience .
even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods , there is a company that manufactured the car that delivered you to the edge of the woods ; there 's a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods .
there 's a company that provides a cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods .
right ? all of those are man-made , artificiality brought into the woods by you , and by the very nature of being there .
and then i always finish off by talking about - the thing that amazes me the most about this question , particularly coming from the dutch , is that the netherlands is every bit as manufactured as disneyland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the dutch , they always go ...
and they realize , i 'm right !
there is n't a square meter of ground in the entire country that has n't been reclaimed from the sea , or otherwise moved , modified and manicured to look as if it had always been there .
it 's the only place you ever go for a walk in the woods and all the trees are lined up in rows .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but nonetheless , not just the dutch , but everyone has this desire for the authentic .
and authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility - the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who are they going to buy from , becoming the basis of the economy .
in fact , you can look at how each of these economies developed , that each one has their own business imperative , matched with a consumer sensibility .
we 're the agrarian economy , and we 're supplying commodities .
it 's about supply and availability .
getting the commodities to market .
with the industrial economy , it is about controlling costs - getting the costs down as low as possible so we can offer them to the masses .
with the service economy , it is about improving quality .
that has - the whole quality movement has risen with the service economy over the past 20 or 30 years .
and now , with the experience economy , it 's about rendering authenticity .
rendering authenticity - and the keyword is " rendering . "
right ? rendering , because you have to get your consumers - as business people - to percieve your offerings as authentic .
because there is a basic paradox : no one can have an inauthentic experience , but no business can supply one .
because all businesses are man-made objects ; all business is involved with money ; all business is a matter of using machinery , and all those things make something inauthentic .
so , how do you render authenticity , is the question .
are you rendering authenticity ?
when you think about that , let me go back to what lionel trilling , in his seminal book on authenticity , " sincerity and authenticity " - came out in 1960 - points to as the seminal point at which authenticity entered the lexicon , if you will .
and that is , to no surprise , in shakespeare , and in his play , hamlet .
and there is one part in this play , hamlet , where the most fake of all the characters in hamlet , polonius , says something profoundly real .
at the end of a laundry list of advice he 's giving to his son , laertes , he says this : and this above all : to thine own self be true .
and it doth follow , as night the day , that thou canst not then be false to any man .
and those three verses are the core of authenticity .
there are two dimensions to authenticity : one , being true to yourself , which is very self-directed .
two , is other-directed : being what you say you are to others .
and i do n't know about you , but whenever i encounter two dimensions , i immediately go , ahh , two-by-two !
all right ? anybody else like that , no ?
well , if you think about that , you do , in fact , get a two-by-two .
where , on one dimension it 's a matter of being true to yourself .
as businesses , are the economic offerings you are providing - are they true to themselves ?
and the other dimension is : are they what they say they are to others ?
if not , you have , " is not true to itself , " and " is not what it says it is , " yielding a two-by-two matrix .
and of course , if you are both true to yourself , and are what you say you are , then you 're real real !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the opposite , of course , is - fake fake .
all right , now , there is value for fake .
there will always be companies around to supply the fake , because there will always be desire for the fake .
fact is , there 's a general rule : if you do n't like it , it 's fake ; if you do like it , it 's faux .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the other two sides of the coin are : being a real fake - is what it says it is , but is not true to itself , or being a fake real : is true to itself , but not what it says it is .
you can think about those two - you know , both of these better than being fake fake - not quite as good as being real real .
universal city walk versus disney world , or disneyland .
universal city walk is a real fake - in fact , we got this very term from ada louise huxtable 's book , " the unreal america . "
a wonderful book , where she talks about universal city walk as - you know , she decries the fake , but she says , at least that 's a real fake , right , because you can see behind the facade , right ?
it is what it says it is : it 's universal studio ; it 's in the city of los angeles ; you 're going to walk a lot .
right ? you do n't tend to walk a lot in los angeles , well , here 's a place where you are going to walk a lot , outside in this city .
but is it really true to itself ?
right ? is it really in the city ?
is it - you can see behind all of it , and see what is going on in the facades of it .
so she calls it a real fake .
disney world , on the other hand , is a fake real , or a fake reality .
right ? it 's not what it says it is . it 's not really the magic kingdom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it is - oh , i 'm sorry , i did n't mean to - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sorry .
we wo n't talk about santa claus then .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but disney world is wonderfully true to itself .
right ? just wonderfully true to itself .
when you are there you are just immersed in this wonderful environment .
so , it 's a fake real .
now the easiest way to fall down in this , and not be real real , right , the easiest way not to be true to yourself is not to understand your heritage , and thereby repudiate that heritage .
right , the key of being true to yourself is knowing who you are as a business .
knowing where your heritage is : what you have done in the past .
and what you have done in the past limits what you can do , what you can get away with , essentially , in the future .
so , you have to understand that past .
think about disney again .
disney , 10 or 15 years ago , right , the disney - the company that is probably disney bought the abc network .
the abc network , affectionately known in the trade as the t & a network , right - that 's not too much jargon , is it ?
right , the t & a network . then it bought miramax , known for its nc-17 fare , and all of a sudden , families everywhere could n't really trust what they were getting from disney .
it was no longer true to its heritage ; no longer true to walt disney .
that 's one of the reasons why they 're having such trouble today , and why roy disney is out to get michael eisner .
because it is no longer true to itself .
so , understand what - your past limits what you can do in the future .
when it comes to being what you say you are , the easiest mistake that companies make is that they advertise things that they are not .
that 's when you 're perceived as fake , as a phony company - advertizing things that you 're not .
think about any hotel , any airline , any hospital .
right , if you could check into the ads , you 'd have a great experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but unfortunately , you have to experience the actual hotel , airline and hospital , and then you have that disconnect .
then you have that perception that you are phony .
so , the number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are , is to provide places for people to experience who you are .
for people to experience who you are .
right , it 's not advertising does it .
that 's why you have companies like starbucks , right , that does n't advertise at all .
they said , you want to know who we are , you have to come experience us .
and think about the economic value they have provided by that experience .
right ? coffee , at its core , is what ?
right ? it 's beans ; right ? it 's coffee beans .
you know how much coffee is worth , when treated as a commodity as a bean ?
two or three cents per cup - that 's what coffee is worth .
but grind it , roast it , package it , put it on a grocery store shelf , and now it 'll cost five , 10 , 15 cents , take that same good , and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer , in a corner diner , in a bodega , a kiosk somewhere , you get 50 cents , maybe a buck per cup of coffee .
but surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of a starbucks , with the authentic cedar that goes inside of there , and now , because of that authentic experience , you can charge two , three , four , five dollars for a cup of coffee .
so , authenticity is becoming the new consumer sensibility .
let me summarize it , for the business people in the audience , with three rules , three basic rules .
one , do n't say you 're authentic unless you really are authentic .
two , it 's easier to be authentic if you do n't say you 're authentic .
and three , if you say you 're authentic , you better be authentic .
and then for the consumers , for everyone else in the audience , let me simply summarize it by saying , increasingly , what we - what will make us happy , is spending our time and our money satisfying the desire for authenticity .
thank you .
you know , my favorite part of being a dad is the movies i get to watch .
i love sharing my favorite movies with my kids , and when my daughter was four , we got to watch " the wizard of oz " together .
it totally dominated her imagination for months .
her favorite character was glinda , of course .
it gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand .
but you watch that movie enough times , and you start to realize how unusual it is .
now we live today , and are raising our children , in a kind of children 's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex .
but " the wizard of oz " stood alone .
it did not start that trend .
forty years later was when the trend really caught on , with , interestingly , another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy 's guards .
do you know what i 'm talking about ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah .
now , there 's a big difference between these two movies , a couple of really big differences between " the wizard of oz " and all the movies we watch today .
one is there 's very little violence in " the wizard of oz . "
the monkeys are rather aggressive , as are the apple trees .
but i think if " the wizard of oz " were made today , the wizard would say , " dorothy , you are the savior of oz that the prophecy foretold .
use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the wicked witch . "
but that 's not how it happens .
another thing that 's really unique about " the wizard of oz " to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female .
now i started to notice this when i actually showed " star wars " to my daughter , which was years later , and the situation was different .
at that point i also had a son .
he was only three at the time .
he was not invited to the screening . he was too young for that .
but he was the second child , and the level of supervision had plummeted . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so he wandered in , and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling , and i do n't think he understands what 's going on , but he is sure soaking in it .
and i wonder what he 's soaking in .
is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty ?
is he picking up on the fact that luke joins an army to overthrow the government ?
is he picking up on the fact that there are only boys in the universe except for aunt beru , and of course this princess , who 's really cool , but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe , which he does by the magic that he was born with ?
compare this to 1939 with " the wizard of oz . "
how does dorothy win her movie ?
by making friends with everybody and being a leader .
that 's kind of the world i 'd rather raise my kids in - oz , right ? - and not the world of dudes fighting , which is where we kind of have to be .
why is there so much force - capital f , force - in the movies we have for our kids , and so little yellow brick road ?
there is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls , and you should do that reading . it 's very good .
i have n't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe .
i know from my own experience that princess leia did not provide the adequate context that i could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think there was a first-kiss moment when i really expected the credits to start rolling because that 's the end of the movie , right ?
i finished my quest , i got the girl .
why are you still standing there ?
i do n't know what i 'm supposed to do .
the movies are very , very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward , and there 's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys .
it 's almost as though if you 're a boy , you are a dopey animal , and if you are a girl , you should bring your warrior costume .
there are plenty of exceptions , and i will defend the disney princesses in front of any you .
but they do send a message to boys , that they are not , the boys are not really the target audience .
they are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy , but they are not necessarily showing boys how they 're supposed to defend against the patriarchy .
there 's no models for them .
and we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids , and as three-dimensional and delightful as hermione and katniss are , these are still war movies .
and , of course , the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic , every single one of them about the journey of a boy , or a man , or two men who are friends , or a man and his son , or two men who are raising a little girl .
until , as many of you are thinking , this year , when they finally came out with " brave . "
i recommend it to all of you . it 's on demand now .
do you remember what the critics said when " brave " came out ?
" aw , i ca n't believe pixar made a princess movie . "
it 's very good . do n't let that stop you .
now , almost none of these movies pass the bechdel test .
i do n't know if you 've heard of this .
it has not yet caught on and caught fire , but maybe today we will start a movement .
alison bechdel is a comic book artist , and back in the mid- ' 80s , she recorded this conversation she 'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw .
and it 's very simple . there 's just three questions you should ask : is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines ?
so try to meet that bar .
and do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie ?
and is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- right ? thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff .
it does happen . i 've seen it , and yet i very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love .
in fact , this week i went to see a very high-quality movie , " argo . "
right ? oscar buzz , doing great at the box office , a consensus idea of what a quality hollywood film is .
it pretty much flunks the bechdel test .
and i do n't think it should , because a lot of the movie , i do n't know if you 've seen it , but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis .
we 've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep , angst-ridden conversations in this hideout , and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say , " are you coming to bed , honey ? "
that 's hollywood for you .
so let 's look at the numbers .
2011 , of the 100 most popular movies , how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists ?
eleven . it 's not bad .
it 's not as many percent as the number of women we 've just elected to congress , so that 's good .
but there is a number that is greater than this that 's going to bring this room down .
last year , the new york times published a study that the government had done .
here 's what it said .
one out of five women in america say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life .
now , i do n't think that 's the fault of popular entertainment .
i do n't think kids ' movies have anything to do with that .
i do n't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that , but something is going wrong , and when i hear that statistic , one of the things i think of is that 's a lot of sexual assailants .
who are these guys ? what are they learning ?
what are they failing to learn ?
are they absorbing the story that a male hero 's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward , which is a woman who has no friends and does n't speak ?
are we soaking up that story ?
you know , as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing , we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them .
we have tools at our disposal like " girl power , " and we hope that that will help , but i gotta wonder , is girl power going to protect them if , at the same time , actively or passively , we are training our sons to maintain their boy power ?
i mean , i think the netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important , and i 'm talking mainly to the dads here .
i think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood .
the definition of manhood is already turning upside down .
you 've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner .
they 're throwing it up in the air .
so our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this , some new relationship with each other , and i think we really have to show them , and model for them , how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them , and wants to be on their team , and stands up against the real bad guys , who are the men who want to abuse the women .
and i think our job in the netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the bechdel test , if we can find them , and to seek out the heroines who are there , who show real courage , who bring people together , and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say , " i want to be on their team , " because they 're going to be on their team .
when i asked my daughter who her favorite character was in " star wars , " do you know what she said ?
obi-wan .
obi-wan kenobi and glinda .
what do these two have in common ?
maybe it 's not just the sparkly dress .
i think these people are experts .
i think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else , and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential .
now , they are leaders .
i like that kind of quest for my daughter , and i like that kind of quest for my son .
i want more quests like that .
i want fewer quests where my son is told , " go out and fight it alone , " and more quests where he sees that it 's his job to join a team , maybe a team led by women , to help other people become better and be better people , like the wizard of oz .
thank you .
the phenomenon you saw here for a brief moment is called quantum levitation and quantum locking .
and the object that was levitating here is called a superconductor .
superconductivity is a quantum state of matter , and it occurs only below a certain critical temperature .
now , it 's quite an old phenomenon ; it was discovered 100 years ago .
however , only recently , due to several technological advancements , we are now able to demonstrate to you quantum levitation and quantum locking .
so , a superconductor is defined by two properties .
the first is zero electrical resistance , and the second is the expulsion of a magnetic field from the interior of the superconductor .
that sounds complicated , right ?
but what is electrical resistance ?
so , electricity is the flow of electrons inside a material .
and these electrons , while flowing , they collide with the atoms , and in these collisions they lose a certain amount of energy .
and they dissipate this energy in the form of heat , and you know that effect .
however , inside a superconductor there are no collisions , so there is no energy dissipation .
it 's quite remarkable . think about it .
in classical physics , there is always some friction , some energy loss .
but not here , because it is a quantum effect .
but that 's not all , because superconductors do n't like magnetic fields .
so a superconductor will try to expel magnetic field from the inside , and it has the means to do that by circulating currents .
now , the combination of both effects - the expulsion of magnetic fields and zero electrical resistance - is exactly a superconductor .
but the picture is n't always perfect , as we all know , and sometimes strands of magnetic field remain inside the superconductor .
now , under proper conditions , which we have here , these strands of magnetic field can be trapped inside the superconductor .
and these strands of magnetic field inside the superconductor , they come in discrete quantities .
why ? because it is a quantum phenomenon . it 's quantum physics .
and it turns out that they behave like quantum particles .
in this movie here , you can see how they flow one by one discretely .
this is strands of magnetic field . these are not particles , but they behave like particles .
so , this is why we call this effect quantum levitation and quantum locking .
but what happens to the superconductor when we put it inside a magnetic field ?
well , first there are strands of magnetic field left inside , but now the superconductor does n't like them moving around , because their movements dissipate energy , which breaks the superconductivity state .
so what it actually does , it locks these strands , which are called fluxons , and it locks these fluxons in place .
and by doing that , what it actually does is locking itself in place .
why ? because any movement of the superconductor will change their place , will change their configuration .
so we get quantum locking . and let me show you how this works .
i have here a superconductor , which i wrapped up so it 'd stay cold long enough .
and when i place it on top of a regular magnet , it just stays locked in midair .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , this is not just levitation . it 's not just repulsion .
i can rearrange the fluxons , and it will be locked in this new configuration .
like this , or move it slightly to the right or to the left .
so , this is quantum locking - actually locking - three-dimensional locking of the superconductor .
of course , i can turn it upside down , and it will remain locked .
now , now that we understand that this so-called levitation is actually locking , yeah , we understand that .
you wo n't be surprised to hear that if i take this circular magnet , in which the magnetic field is the same all around , the superconductor will be able to freely rotate around the axis of the magnet .
why ? because as long as it rotates , the locking is maintained .
you see ? i can adjust and i can rotate the superconductor .
we have frictionless motion . it is still levitating , but can move freely all around .
so , we have quantum locking and we can levitate it on top of this magnet .
but how many fluxons , how many magnetic strands are there in a single disk like this ?
well , we can calculate it , and it turns out , quite a lot .
one hundred billion strands of magnetic field inside this three-inch disk .
but that 's not the amazing part yet , because there is something i have n't told you yet .
and , yeah , the amazing part is that this superconductor that you see here is only half a micron thick . it 's extremely thin .
and this extremely thin layer is able to levitate more than 70,000 times its own weight .
it 's a remarkable effect . it 's very strong .
now , i can extend this circular magnet , and make whatever track i want .
for example , i can make a large circular rail here .
and when i place the superconducting disk on top of this rail , it moves freely .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and again , that 's not all . i can adjust its position like this , and rotate , and it freely moves in this new position .
and i can even try a new thing ; let 's try it for the first time .
i can take this disk and put it here , and while it stays here - do n't move - i will try to rotate the track , and hopefully , if i did it correctly , it stays suspended .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you see , it 's quantum locking , not levitation .
now , while i 'll let it circulate for a little more , let me tell you a little bit about superconductors .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so we now know that we are able to transfer enormous amount of currents inside superconductors , so we can use them to produce strong magnetic fields , such as needed in mri machines , particle accelerators and so on .
but we can also store energy using superconductors , because we have no dissipation .
and we could also produce power cables , to transfer enormous amounts of current between power stations .
imagine you could back up a single power station with a single superconducting cable .
but what is the future of quantum levitation and quantum locking ?
well , let me answer this simple question by giving you an example .
imagine you would have a disk similar to the one i have here in my hand , three-inch diameter , with a single difference .
the superconducting layer , instead of being half a micron thin , being two millimeters thin , quite thin .
this two-millimeter-thin superconducting layer could hold 1,000 kilograms , a small car , in my hand .
amazing . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am the daughter of a forger , not just any forger ...
when you hear the word " forger , " you often understand " mercenary . "
you understand " forged currency , " " forged pictures . "
my father is no such man .
for 30 years of his life , he made false papers - never for himself , always for other people , and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed .
let me introduce him .
here is my father at age 19 .
it all began for him during world war ii , when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop .
he quickly became the false papers expert of the resistance .
and it 's not a banal story - after the liberation he continued to make false papers until the ' 70s .
when i was a child i knew nothing about this , of course .
this is me in the middle making faces .
i grew up in the paris suburbs and i was the youngest of three children .
i had a " normal " dad like everybody else , apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ...
well , he was basically old enough to be my grandfather .
anyway , he was a photographer and a street educator , and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly .
and , of course , he never talked about his past life when he was a forger .
there was , however , an incident i 'm going to tell you about , that perhaps could have led me suspect something .
i was in high school and got a bad grade , a rare event for me , so i decided to hide it from my parents .
in order to do that , i set out to forge their signature .
i started working on my mother 's signature , because my father 's is absolutely impossible to forge .
so , i got working . i took some sheets of paper and started practicing , practicing , practicing , until i reached what i thought was a steady hand , and went into action .
later , while checking my school bag , my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged .
she yelled at me like she never had before .
i went to hide in my bedroom , under the blankets , and then i waited for my father to come back from work with , one could say , much apprehension .
i heard him come in .
i remained under the blankets . he entered my room , sat on the corner of the bed , and he was silent , so i pulled the blanket from my head , and when he saw me he started laughing .
he was laughing so hard , he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand .
then he said , " but really , sarah , you could have worked harder ! ca n't you see it 's really too small ? "
indeed , it 's rather small .
i was born in algeria .
there i would hear people say my father was a " moudjahid " and that means " fighter . "
later on , in france , i loved eavesdropping on grownups ' conversations , and i would hear all sorts of stories about my father 's previous life , especially that he had " done " world war ii , that he had " done " the algerian war .
and in my head i would be thinking that " doing " a war meant being a soldier .
but knowing my father , and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent , i found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun .
and indeed , i was very far from the mark .
one day , while my father was working on a file for us to obtain french nationality , i happened to see some documents that caught my attention .
these are real !
these are mine , i was born an argentinean .
but the document i happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services .
and then , suddenly , i went " wow ! "
my father , a secret agent ?
it was very james bond .
i wanted to ask him questions , which he did n't answer .
and later , i told myself that one day i would have to question him .
and then i became a mother and had a son , and finally decided it was time - that he absolutely had to talk to us .
i had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday , and suddenly i was very , very afraid .
i feared he 'd go and take his silences with him , and take his secrets with him .
i managed to convince him that it was important for us , but possibly also for other people that he shared his story .
he decided to tell it to me and i made a book , from which i 'm going to read you some excerpts later .
so , his story . my father was born in argentina .
his parents were of russian descent .
the whole family came to settle in france in the ' 30s .
his parents were jewish , russian and above all , very poor .
so at the age of 14 my father had to work .
and with his only diploma , his primary education certificate , he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner .
that 's where he discovered something totally magical , and when he talks about it , it 's fascinating - it 's the magic of dyeing chemistry .
during that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15 .
this coincided with the time when he threw himself body and soul into chemistry because it was the only consolation for his sadness .
all day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn , to accumulate more and more knowledge , and at night , when no one was looking , he 'd put his experience to practice .
he was mostly interested in ink bleaching .
all this to tell you that if my father became a forger , actually , it was almost by accident .
his family was jewish , so they were hounded .
finally they were all arrested and taken to the drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their argentinean papers .
well , they were out , but they were always in danger . the big " jew " stamp was still on their papers .
it was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents .
my father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted , he 'd never thought of false papers .
but it was he who went to meet a man from the resistance .
in those times documents had hard covers , they were filled in by hand , and they stated your job .
in order to survive , he needed to be working . he asked the man to write " dyer . "
suddenly the man looked very , very interested .
as a " dyer , " do you know how to bleach ink marks ?
of course he knew .
and suddenly the man started explaining that actually the whole resistance had a huge problem : even the top experts could not manage to bleach an ink , called " indelible , " the " waterman " blue ink .
and my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it .
now , of course , the man was very impressed with this young man of 17 who could immediately give him the formula , so he recruited him .
and actually , without knowing it , my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild 's pencil case : the so-called " correction pen . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- but it was only the beginning .
that 's my father .
as soon as he got to the lab , even though he was the youngest , he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents .
all the movements stopped at falsifying .
but demand was ever-growing and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents .
he told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch .
he started a press . he started photoengraving .
he started making rubber stamps .
he started inventing all kind of things - with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel .
anyway , he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output .
he had made a simple calculation : in one hour he could make 30 forged documents .
if he slept one hour , 30 people would die .
this sense of responsibility for other people 's lives when he was just 17 - and also his guilt for being a survivor , since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not - stayed with him all his life .
and this is maybe what explains why , for 30 years , he continued to make false papers at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices .
i 'd like to talk about those sacrifices , because there were many .
there were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid .
to him , being paid would have meant being a mercenary .
if he had accepted payment , he would n't be able to say " yes " or " no " depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause .
so he was a photographer by day , and a forger by night for 30 years .
he was broke all of the time .
then there were the emotional sacrifices : how can one live with a woman while having so many secrets ?
how can one explain what one does at night in the lab , every single night ?
of course , there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that i understood much later .
one day my father introduced me to my sister .
he also explained to me that i had a brother , too , and the first time i saw them i must have been three or four , and they were 30 years older than me .
they are both in their sixties now .
in order to write the book , i asked my sister questions . i wanted to know who my father was , who was the father she had known .
she explained that the father that she 'd had would tell them he 'd come and pick them up on sunday to go for a walk .
they would get all dressed up and wait for him , but he would almost never come .
he 'd say , " i 'll call . " he would n't call .
and then he would not come .
then one day he totally disappeared .
time passed , and they thought he had surely forgotten them , at first .
then as time passed , at the end of almost two years , they thought , " well , perhaps our father has died . "
and then i understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably did n't feel like talking about because it was painful .
and while my half brother and sister thought they 'd been abandoned , orphaned , my father was making false papers .
and if he did not tell them , it was of course to protect them .
after the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to palestine before the creation of israel .
and then , as he was a staunch anti-colonialist , he made false papers for algerians during the algerian war .
after the algerian war , at the heart of the international resistance movements , his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door .
in africa there were countries fighting for their independence : guinea , guinea-bissau , angola .
and then my father connected with nelson mandela 's anti-apartheid party .
he made false papers for persecuted black south africans .
there was also latin america .
my father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the dominican republic , haiti , and then it was the turn of brazil , argentina , venezuela , el salvador , nicaragua , colombia , peru , uruguay , chile and mexico .
then there was the vietnam war .
my father made false papers for the american deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the vietnamese .
europe was not spared either .
my father made false papers for the dissidents against franco in spain , salazar in portugal , against the colonels ' dictatorship in greece , and even in france .
there , just once , it happened in may of 1968 .
my father watched , benevolently , of course , the demonstrations of the month of may , but his heart was elsewhere , and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve .
once , though , he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was much younger in those days , and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting .
he told me that those false papers were the most media-relevant and the least useful he 'd had to make in all his life .
but , he agreed to do it , even though daniel cohn-bendit 's life was not in danger , just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities , and to show them that there 's nothing more porous than borders - and that ideas have no borders .
all my childhood , while my friends ' dads would tell them grimm 's fairy tales , my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles .
and those heroes did not need an army behind them .
anyhow , nobody would have followed them , except for a handful -lsb- of -rsb- men and women of conviction and courage .
i understood much later that actually it was his own story my father would tell me to get me to sleep .
i asked him whether , considering the sacrifices he had to make , he ever had any regrets .
he said no .
he told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything .
he was persuaded , and he 's still convinced that another world is possible - a world where no one would ever need a forger .
he 's still dreaming about it .
my father is here in the room today .
his name is adolfo kaminsky and i 'm going to ask him to stand up .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
well , indeed , i 'm very , very lucky .
my talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months - seemingly unrelated , but as you will see , actually all having to do with the story i want to tell you today .
the first one was actually a funeral - to be more precise , a reburial .
on may 22nd , there was a hero 's reburial in frombork , poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world .
he did that , literally , by replacing the earth with the sun in the center of the solar system , and then with this simple-looking act , he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution , which many call the copernican revolution .
now that was , ironically , and very befittingly , the way we found his grave .
as it was the custom of the time , copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave , together with 14 others in that cathedral .
dna analysis , one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started , was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was copernicus ' hair - obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on .
that match was unambiguous .
the dna matched , and we know that this was indeed nicolaus copernicus .
now , the connection between biology and dna and life is very tantalizing when you talk about copernicus because , even back then , his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask : if the earth is just a planet , then what about planets around other stars ?
what about the idea of the plurality of the worlds , about life on other planets ?
in fact , i 'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time .
and at the time , people actually answered that question positively : " yes . "
but there was no evidence .
and here begins 400 years of frustration , of unfulfilled dreams - the dreams of galileo , giordano bruno , many others - which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time .
" what is life ? what is the origin of life ?
are we alone ? "
and that especially happened in the last 10 years , at the end of the 20th century , when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology , understanding the code of life , dna , all of that seemed to actually put us , not closer , but further apart from answering those basic questions .
now , the good news .
a lot has happened in the last few years , and let 's start with the planets .
let 's start with the old copernican question : are there earths around other stars ?
and as we already heard , there is a way in which we are trying , and now able , to answer that question .
it 's a new telescope .
our team , befittingly i think , named it after one of those dreamers of the copernican time , johannes kepler , and that telescope 's sole purpose is to go out , find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy , and tell us how often do planets like our own earth happen to be out there .
the telescope is actually built similarly to the , well-known to you , hubble space telescope , except it does have an additional lens - a wide-field lens , as you would call it as a photographer .
and if , in the next couple of months , you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this , you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night , without any interruption , for the next four years .
the way we do that , actually , is with a method , which we call the transit method .
it 's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star .
not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that , but if you have a million stars , you 'll find enough planets .
and as you see on this animation , what kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star .
we are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this .
all the stars for kepler are just points of light .
but we learn a lot from that : not only that there is a planet there , but we also learn its size .
how much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is .
we learn about its orbit , the period of its orbit and so on .
so , what have we learned ?
well , let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that i 'm here to tell you today .
what kepler does is discover a lot of candidates , which we then follow up and find as planets , confirm as planets .
it basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size .
there are small planets , there are bigger planets , there are big planets , okay .
so we count many , many such planets , and they have different sizes .
we do that in our solar system .
in fact , even back during the ancients , the solar system in that sense would look on a diagram like this .
there will be the smaller planets , and there will be the big planets , even back to the time of epicurus and then of course copernicus and his followers .
up until recently , that was the solar system - four earth-like planets with small radius , smaller than about two times the size of the earth - and that was of course mercury , venus , mars , and of course the earth , and then the two big , giant planets .
then the copernican revolution brought in telescopes , and of course three more planets were discovered .
now the total planet number in our solar system was nine .
the small planets dominated , and there was a certain harmony to that , which actually copernicus was very happy to note , and kepler was one of the big proponents of .
so now we have pluto to join the numbers of small planets .
but up until , literally , 15 years ago , that was all we knew about planets .
and that 's what the frustration was .
the copernican dream was unfulfilled .
finally , 15 years ago , the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star , and we actually did pretty well .
in the next 15 years , almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars , with different methods .
unfortunately , as you can see , there was a very different picture .
there was of course an explanation for it : we only see the big planets , so that 's why most of those planets are really in the category of " like jupiter . "
but you see , we have n't gone very far .
we were still back where copernicus was .
we did n't have any evidence whether planets like the earth are out there .
and we do care about planets like the earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate , to emerge , to survive .
and we did n't have the evidence for that .
so today , i 'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope , kepler , has been able to tell us in the last few weeks , and , lo and behold , we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of copernicus .
you can see here , the small planets dominate the picture .
the planets which are marked " like earth , " -lsb- are -rsb- definitely more than any other planets that we see .
and now for the first time , we can say that .
there is a lot more work we need to do with this .
most of these are candidates .
in the next few years we will confirm them .
but the statistical result is loud and clear .
and the statistical result is that planets like our own earth are out there .
our own milky way galaxy is rich in this kind of planets .
so the question is : what do we do next ?
well , first of all , we can study them now that we know where they are .
and we can find those that we would call habitable , meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen .
so , we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own milky way galaxy harbors .
and the number , as you might expect , is pretty staggering .
it 's about 100 million such planets .
that 's great news . why ?
because with our own little telescope , just in the next two years , we 'll be able to identify at least 60 of them .
so that 's great because then we can go and study them - remotely , of course - with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years .
we can find what they 're made of , would their atmospheres have water , carbon dioxide , methane .
we know and expect that we 'll see that .
that 's great , but that is not the whole news .
that 's not why i 'm here .
why i 'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part .
the one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next .
and here comes biology - biology , with its basic question , which still stands unanswered , which is essentially : " if there is life on other planets , do we expect it to be like life on earth ? "
and let me immediately tell you here , when i say life , i do n't mean " dolce vita , " good life , human life .
i really mean life on earth , past and present , from microbes to us humans , in its rich molecular diversity , the way we now understand life on earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions - and we call that , collectively , biochemistry , life as a chemical process , as a chemical phenomenon .
so the question is : is that chemical phenomenon universal , or is it something which depends on the planet ?
is it like gravity , which is the same everywhere in the universe , or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them ?
we need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that .
and that 's a very basic question , which we do n't know the answer to , but which we can try - and we are trying - to answer in the lab .
we do n't need to go to space to answer that question .
and so , that 's what we are trying to do .
and that 's what many people now are trying to do .
and a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well .
so this is one example that i want to show you here .
when we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life , we think of compartmentalization , keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane , isolated from the rest of the environment , but yet , in an environment in which they actually could originate together .
and in one of our labs , jack szostak 's labs , it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments - which are very common on planets , on certain types of planets like the earth , where you have some liquid water and some clays - you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles .
but those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on earth looks like , like this .
and they really help molecules , like nucleic acids , like rna and dna , stay inside , develop , change , divide and do some of the processes that we call life .
now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon .
and in a sense , you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge , building a bridge from two sides of the river .
on one hand , on the left bank of the river , are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments .
we do n't want to go blind because there 's too many possibilities , and there is not too much lab , and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments .
so that 's what we are building from the left side of the river .
from the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that i just showed you , where we actually tried that , and it feeds back and forth , and we hope to meet in the middle one day .
so why should you care about that ?
why am i trying to sell you a half-built bridge ?
am i that charming ?
well , there are many reasons , and you heard some of them in the short talk today .
this understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives .
but there is something more profound here , something deeper .
and that deeper , underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it .
and that is going to change our worldview in a profound way - not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago , copernicus ' act did , by changing the way we view space and time .
now it 's about something else , but it 's equally profound .
and half the time , what 's happened is it 's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind , to the earth in a bigger space .
and the more we learn , the more that was reinforced .
you 've all learned that in school - how small the earth is compared to the immense universe .
and the bigger the telescope , the bigger that universe becomes .
and look at this image of the tiny , blue dot .
this pixel is the earth .
it is the earth as we know it .
it is seen from , in this case , from outside the orbit of saturn .
but it 's really tiny .
we know that .
let 's think of life as that entire planet because , in a sense , it is .
the biosphere is the size of the earth .
life on earth is the size of the earth .
and let 's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms .
what if that copernican insignificance was actually all wrong ?
would that make us more responsible for what is happening today ?
let 's actually try that .
so in space , the earth is very small .
can you imagine how small it is ?
let me try it .
okay , let 's say this is the size of the observable universe , with all the galaxies , with all the stars , okay , from here to here .
do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be ?
it will be the size of a single , small atom .
it is unimaginably small .
we ca n't imagine it .
i mean look , you can see the necktie , but you ca n't even imagine seeing the size of a little , small atom .
but that 's not the whole story , you see .
the universe and life are both in space and time .
if that was the age of the universe , then this is the age of life on earth .
think about those oldest living things on earth , but in a cosmic proportion .
this is not insignificant .
this is very significant .
so life might be insignificant in size , but it is not insignificant in time .
life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent , parent and offspring .
so what does this tell us ?
this tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the copernican principle , it 's all wrong .
there is immense , powerful potential in life in this universe - especially now that we know that places like the earth are common .
and that potential , that powerful potential , is also our potential , of you and me .
and if we are to be stewards of our planet earth and its biosphere , we 'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it .
and the good news is we can actually , indeed do it .
and let 's do it .
let 's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one , with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future .
and let 's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , good morning .
you know , the computer and television both recently turned 60 , and today i 'd like to talk about their relationship .
despite their middle age , if you 've been following the themes of this conference or the entertainment industry , it 's pretty clear that one has been picking on the other .
so it 's about time that we talked about how the computer ambushed television , or why the invention of the atomic bomb unleashed forces that lead to the writers ' strike .
and it 's not just what these are doing to each other , but it 's what the audience thinks that really frames this matter .
to get a sense of this , and it 's been a theme we 've talked about all week , i recently talked to a bunch of tweeners .
i wrote on cards : " television , " " radio , " " myspace , " " internet , " " pc . "
and i said , just arrange these , from what 's important to you and what 's not , and then tell me why .
let 's listen to what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television .
-lrb- video -rrb- girl 1 : well , i think it 's important but , like , not necessary because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time than watch programs .
peter hirshberg : which is more fun , internet or tv ?
girls : internet .
girl 2 : i think we - the reasons , one of the reasons we put computer before tv is because nowadays , like , we have tv shows on the computer .
-lrb- girl 3 : oh , yeah . -rrb- girl 2 : and then you can download onto your ipod .
ph : would you like to be the president of a tv network ?
girl 4 : i would n't like it .
girl 2 : that would be so stressful .
girl 5 : no .
ph : how come ?
girl 5 : because they 're going to lose all their money eventually .
girl 3 : like the stock market , it goes up and down and stuff .
i think right now the computers will be at the top and everything will be kind of going down and stuff .
ph : there 's been an uneasy relationship between the tv business and the tech business , really ever since they both turned about 30 .
we go through periods of enthrallment , followed by reactions in boardrooms , in the finance community best characterized as , what 's the finance term ? ick pooey .
let me give you an example of this . the year is 1976 , and warner buys atari because video games are on the rise .
the next year they march forward and they introduce qube , the first interactive cable tv system , and the new york times heralds this as telecommunications moving to the home , convergence , great things are happening .
everybody in the east coast gets in the pictures - citicorp , penney , rca - all getting into this big vision .
by the way , this is about when i enter the picture .
i 'm going to do a summer internship at time warner .
that summer i 'm all - i 'm at warner that summer - i 'm all excited to work on convergence , and then the bottom falls out .
does n't work out too well for them , they lose money .
and i had a happy brush with convergence until , kind of , warner basically has to liquidate the whole thing .
that 's when i leave graduate school , and i ca n't work in new york on kind of entertainment and technology because i have to be exiled to california , where the remaining jobs are , almost to the sea , to go to work for apple computer .
warner , of course , writes off more than 400 million dollars .
four hundred million dollars , which was real money back in the ' 70s .
but they were onto something and they got better at it .
by the year 2000 , the process was perfected . they merged with aol , and in just four years , managed to shed about 200 billion dollars of market capitalization , showing that they 'd actually mastered the art of applying moore 's law of successive miniaturization to their balance sheet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i think that one reason that the media and the entertainment communities , or the media community , is driven so crazy by the tech community is that tech folks talk differently .
you know , for 50 years , we 've talked about changing the world , about total transformation .
for 50 years , it 's been about hopes and fears and promises of a better world . and i got to thinking , you know , who else talks that way ?
and the answer is pretty clearly - it 's people in religion and in politics .
and so i realized that actually the tech world is best understood , not as a business cycle , but as a messianic movement .
we promise something great , we evangelize it , we 're going to change the world . it does n't work out too well , and so we actually go back to the well and start all over again , as the people in new york and l.a. look on in absolute , morbid astonishment .
but it 's this irrational view of things that drives us on to the next thing .
so , what i 'd like to ask is , if the computer is becoming a principal tool of media and entertainment , how did we get here ?
i mean , how did a machine that was built for accounting and artillery morph into media ?
of course , the first computer was built just after world war ii to solve military problems , but things got really interesting just a couple of years later - 1949 with whirlwind , built at mit 's lincoln lab . jay forrester was building this for the navy , but you ca n't help but see that the creator of this machine had in mind a machine that might actually be a potential media star .
so take a look at what happens when the foremost journalist of early television meets one of the foremost computer pioneers , and the computer begins to express itself .
-lrb- video -rrb- journalist : it 's a whirlwind electronic computer .
with considerable trepidation , we undertake to interview this new machine .
jay forrester : hello new york , this is cambridge .
and this is the oscilloscope of the whirlwind electronic computer .
would you like if i used the machine ?
journalist : yes , of course . but i have an idea , mr. forrester .
since this computer was made in conjunction with the office of naval research , why do n't we switch down to the pentagon in washington and let the navy 's research chief , admiral bolster , give whirlwind the workout ?
calvin bolster : well , ed , this problem concerns the navy 's viking rocket .
this rocket goes up 135 miles into the sky .
now , at the standard rate of fuel consumption , i would like to see the computer trace the flight path of this rocket and see how it can determine , at any instant , say at the end of 40 seconds , the amount of fuel remaining , and the velocity at that set instant .
jf : over on the left-hand side , you will notice fuel consumption decreasing as the rocket takes off .
and on the right-hand side , there 's a scale that shows the rocket 's velocity .
the rocket 's position is shown by the trajectory that we 're now looking at .
and as it reaches the peak of its trajectory , the velocity , you will notice , has dropped off to a minimum .
then , as the rocket dives down , velocity picks up again toward a maximum velocity and the rocket hits the ground .
how 's that ?
journalist : what about that , admiral ?
cb : looks very good to me .
jf : and before leaving , we would like to show you another kind of mathematical problem that some of the boys have worked out in their spare time , in a less serious vein , for a sunday afternoon . -lrb- music -rrb- journalist : thank you very much indeed , mr. forrester and the mit lab .
ph : you know , so much was worked out : the first real-time interaction , the video display , pointing a gun . it lead to the microcomputer , but unfortunately , it was too pricey for the navy , and all of this would have been lost if it were n't for a happy coincidence .
enter the atomic bomb .
we 're threatened by the greatest weapon ever , and knowing a good thing when it sees it , the air force decides it needs the biggest computer ever to protect us .
they adapt whirlwind to a massive air defense system , deploy it all across the frozen north , and spend nearly three times as much on this computer as was spent on the manhattan project building the a-bomb in the first place .
talk about a shot in the arm for the computer industry .
and you can imagine that the air force became a pretty good salesman .
here 's their marketing video .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : in a mass raid , high-speed bombers could be in on us before we could determine their tracks .
and then it would be too late to act .
we can not afford to take that chance .
it is to meet this threat that the air force has been developing sage , the semi-automatic ground environment system , to strengthen our air defenses .
this new computer , built to become the nerve center of a defense network , is able to perform all the complex mathematical problems involved in countering a mass enemy raid .
it is provided with its own powerhouse containing large diesel-driven generators , air-conditioning equipment , and cooling towers required to cool the thousands of vacuum tubes in the computer .
ph : you know , that one computer was huge .
there 's an interesting marketing lesson from it , which is basically , when you market a product , you can either say , this is going to be wonderful , it will make you feel better and enliven you .
or there 's one other marketing proposition : if you do n't use our product , you 'll die .
this is a really good example of that .
this had the first pointing device . it was distributed , so it worked out - distributed computing and modems - so all these things could talk to each other .
about 20 percent of all the nation 's programmers were wrapped up in this thing , and it led to an awful lot of what we have today . it also used vacuum tubes .
you saw how huge it was , and to give you a sense for this - because we 've talked a lot about moore 's law and making things small at this conference , so let 's talk about making things large .
if we took whirlwind and put it in a place that you all know , say , century city , it would fit beautifully .
you 'd kind of have to take century city out , but it could fit in there .
but like , let 's imagine we took the latest pentium processor , the latest core 2 extreme , which is a four-core processor that intel 's working on , it will be our laptop tomorrow .
to build that , what we 'd do with whirlwind technology is we 'd have to take up roughly from the 10 to mulholland , and from the 405 to la cienega just with those whirlwinds .
and then , the 92 nuclear power plants that it would take to provide the power would fill up the rest of los angeles .
that 's roughly a third more nuclear power than all of france creates .
so , the next time they tell you they 're on to something , clearly they 're not .
so - and we have n't even worked out the cooling needs .
but it gives you the kind of power that people have , that the audience has , and the reasons these transformations are happening .
all of this stuff starts moving into industry .
dec kind of reduces all this and makes the first mini-computer .
it shows up at places like mit , and then a mutation happens .
spacewar ! is built , the first computer game , and all of a sudden , interactivity and involvement and passion is worked out .
actually , many mit students stayed up all night long working on this thing , and many of the principles of gaming today were worked out .
dec knew a good thing about wasting time .
it shipped every one of its computers with that game .
meanwhile , as all of this is happening , by the mid- ' 50s , the business model of traditional broadcasting and cinema has been busted completely .
a new technology has confounded radio men and movie moguls and they 're quite certain that television is about to do them in .
in fact , despair is in the air .
and a quote that sounds largely reminiscent from everything i 've been reading all week .
rca had david sarnoff , who basically commercialized radio , said this , " i do n't say that radio networks must die .
every effort has been made and will continue to be made to find a new pattern , new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest the declining revenues .
it may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio , but i do n't know how . "
and of course , as the computer industry develops interactively , producers in the emerging tv business actually hit on the same idea .
and they fake it .
-lrb- video -rrb- jack berry : boys and girls , i think you all know how to get your magic windows up on the set , you just get them out .
first of all , get your winky dink kits out .
put out your magic window and your erasing glove , and rub it like this .
that 's the way we get some of the magic into it , boys and girls .
then take it and put it right up against the screen of your own television set , and rub it out from the center to the corners , like this .
make sure you keep your magic crayons handy , your winky dink crayons and your erasing glove , because you 'll be using them during the show to draw like that .
you all set ? ok , let 's get right to the first story about dusty man .
come on into the secret lab .
ph : it was the dawn of interactive tv , and you may have noticed they wanted to sell you the winky dink kits .
those are the winky dink crayons . i know what you 're saying .
" pete , i could use any ordinary open-source crayon , why do i have to buy theirs ? "
i assure you , that 's not the case .
turns out they told us directly that these are the only crayons you should ever use with your winky dink magic window , other crayons may discolor or hurt the window .
this proprietary principle of vendor lock-in would go on to be perfected with great success as one of the enduring principles of windowing systems everywhere .
it led to lawsuits - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - federal investigations , and lots of repercussions , and that 's a scandal we wo n't discuss today .
but we will discuss this scandal , because this man , jack berry , the host of " winky dink , " went on to become the host of " twenty one , " one of the most important quiz shows ever .
and it was rigged , and it became unraveled when this man , charles van doren , was outed after an unnatural winning streak , ending berry 's career .
and actually , ending the career of a lot of people at cbs .
it turns out there was a lot to learn about how this new medium worked .
and 50 years ago , if you 'd been at a meeting like this and were trying to understand the media , there was one prophet and only but one you wanted to hear from , professor marshall mcluhan .
he actually understood something about a theme that we 've been discussing all week . it 's the role of the audience in an era of pervasive electronic communications .
here he is talking from the 1960s .
-lrb- video -rrb- marshall mcluhan : if the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad , then it 's happy . it 's like the old quiz shows .
they were great tv because it gave the audience a role , something to do .
they were horrified when they discovered they 'd really been left out all the time because the shows were rigged .
now , then , this was a horrible misunderstanding of tv on the part of the programmers .
ph : you know , mcluhan talked about the global village .
if you substitute the word blogosphere , of the internet today , it is very true that his understanding is probably very enlightening now . let 's listen in to him .
-lrb- video -rrb- mm : the global village is a world in which you do n't necessarily have harmony .
you have extreme concern with everybody else 's business and much involvement in everybody else 's life .
it 's a sort of ann landers ' column writ large .
and it does n't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet , but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else 's affairs .
and so the global village is as big as a planet , and as small as a village post office .
ph : we 'll talk a little bit more about him later .
we 're now right into the 1960s .
it 's the era of big business and data centers for computing .
but all that was about to change .
you know , the expression of technology reflects the people and the time of the culture it was built in .
and when i say that code expresses our hopes and aspirations , it 's not just a joke about messianism , it 's actually what we do .
but for this part of the story , i 'd actually like to throw it to america 's leading technology correspondent , john markoff .
-lrb- video -rrb- john markoff : do you want to know what the counterculture in drugs , sex , rock ' n ' roll and the anti-war movement had to do with computing ? everything .
it all happened within five miles of where i 'm standing , at stanford university , between 1960 and 1975 .
in the midst of revolution in the streets and rock and roll concerts in the parks , a group of researchers led by people like john mccarthy , a computer scientist at the stanford artificial intelligence lab , and doug engelbart , a computer scientist at sri , changed the world .
engelbart came out of a pretty dry engineering culture , but while he was beginning to do his work , all of this stuff was bubbling on the mid-peninsula .
there was lsd leaking out of kesey 's veterans ' hospital experiments and other areas around the campus , and there was music literally in the streets .
the grateful dead was playing in the pizza parlors .
people were leaving to go back to the land .
there was the vietnam war . there was black liberation .
there was women 's liberation .
this was a remarkable place , at a remarkable time .
and into that ferment came the microprocessor .
i think it was that interaction that led to personal computing .
they saw these tools that were controlled by the establishment as ones that could actually be liberated and put to use by these communities that they were trying to build .
and most importantly , they had this ethos of sharing information .
i think these ideas are difficult to understand , because when you 're trapped in one paradigm , the next paradigm is always like a science fiction universe - it makes no sense .
the stories were so compelling that i decided to write a book about them .
the title of the book is , " what the dormouse said : how the ' 60s counterculture shaped the personal computer industry . "
the title was taken from the lyrics to a jefferson airplane song . the lyrics go , " remember what the dormouse said .
feed your head , feed your head , feed your head . " -lrb- music -rrb- ph : by this time , computing had kind of leapt into media territory , and in short order much of what we 're doing today was imagined in cambridge and silicon valley .
here 's the architecture machine group , the predecessor of the media lab , in 1981 .
meanwhile , in california , we were trying to commercialize a lot of this stuff .
hypercard was the first program to introduce the public to hyperlinks , where you could randomly hook to any kind of picture , or piece of text , or data across a file system , and we had no way of explaining it .
there was no metaphor . was it a database ?
a prototyping tool ? a scripted language ?
heck , it was everything . so we ended up writing a marketing brochure .
we asked a question about how the mind works , and we let our customers play the role of so many blind men filling out the elephant .
a few years later , we then hit on the idea of explaining to people the secret of , how do you get the content you want , the way you want it and the easy way ?
here 's the apple marketing video .
-lrb- video -rrb- james burke : you 'll be pleased to know , i 'm sure , that there are several ways to create a hypercard interactive video .
the most involved method is to go ahead and produce your own videodisc as well as build your own hypercard stacks .
by far the simplest method is to buy a pre-made videodisc and hypercard stacks from a commercial supplier .
the method we illustrate in this video uses a pre-made videodisc but creates custom hypercard stacks .
this method allows you to use existing videodisc materials in ways which suit your specific needs and interests .
ph : i hope you realize how subversive that is .
that 's like a dick cheney speech .
you think he 's a nice balding guy , but he 's just declared war on the content business . find the commercial stuff , mash it up , tell the story your way .
now , as long as we confine this to the education market , and a personal matter between the computer and the file system , that 's fine , but as you can see , it was about to leap out and upset jack valenti and a lot of other people .
by the way , speaking of the filing system , it never occurred to us that these hyperlinks could go beyond the local area network .
a few years later , tim berners-lee worked that out .
it became a killer app of links , and today , of course , we call that the world wide web .
now , not only was i instrumental in helping apple miss the internet , but a couple of years later , i helped bill gates do the same thing .
the year is 1993 and he was working on a book and i was working on a video to help him kind of explain where we were all heading and how to popularize all this .
we were plenty aware that we were messing with media , and on the surface , it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things , but we also missed an awful lot . let 's take a look .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : the pyramids , the colosseum , the new york subway system and tv dinners , ancient and modern wonders of the man-made world all .
yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty-first-century technology , the digital superhighway .
once it was only a dream of technoids and a few long-forgotten politicians .
the digital highway arrived in america 's living rooms late in the twentieth century .
let us recall the pioneers who made this technical marvel possible .
the digital highway would follow the rutted trail first blazed by alexander graham bell .
though some were incredulous ... man 1 : the phone company !
narrator : stirred by the prospects of mass communication and making big bucks on advertising , david sarnoff commercializes radio .
man 2 : never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand .
narrator : the medium introduced america to new products .
voice 1 : say , mom , windows for radio means more enjoyment and greater ease of use for the whole family .
be sure to enjoy windows for radio at home and at work .
narrator : in 1939 , the radio corporation of america introduced television .
man 2 : never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand .
narrator : eventually , the race to the future took on added momentum with the breakup of the telephone company .
and further stimulus came with the deregulation of the cable television industry , and the re-regulation of the cable television industry .
ted turner : we did the work to build this , this cable industry , now the broadcasters want some of our money . i mean , it 's ridiculous .
narrator : computers , once the unwieldy tools of accountants and other geeks , escaped the backrooms to enter the media fracas .
the world and all its culture reduced to bits , the lingua franca of all media .
and the forces of convergence exploded .
finally , four great industrial sectors combined .
telecommunications , entertainment , computing and everything else .
man 3 : we 'll see channels for the gourmet and we 'll see channels for the pet lover .
voice 2 : next on the gourmet pet channel , decorating birthday cakes for your schnauzer .
narrator : all of industry was in play , as investors flocked to place their bets .
at stake : the battle for you , the consumer , and the right to spend billions to send a lot of information into the parlors of america . -lrb- music -rrb- ph : we missed a lot . you know , you missed , we missed the internet , the long tail , the role of the audience , open systems , social networks .
it just goes to show how tough it is to come up with the right uses of media .
thomas edison had the same problem .
he wrote a list of what the phonograph might be good for when he invented it , and kind of only one of his ideas turned out to have been the right early idea .
well , you know where we 're going on from here .
we come into the era of the dotcom , the world wide web , and i do n't need to tell you about that because we all went through that bubble together .
but when we emerge from this and what we call web 2.0 , things actually are quite different .
and i think it 's the reason that tv 's so challenged .
if internet one was about pages , now it 's about people .
it 's a customer , it 's an audience , it 's a person who 's participating .
it 's the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now .
-lrb- video -rrb- mm : because it gave the audience a role , something to do .
ph : in my own company , technorati , we see something like 67,000 blog posts an hour come in .
that 's about 2,700 fresh , connective links across about 112 million blogs that are out there .
and it 's no wonder that as we head into the writers ' strike , odd things happen .
you know , it reminds me of that old saw in hollywood , that a producer is anyone who knows a writer .
i now think a network boss is anyone who has a cable modem .
but it 's not a joke . this is a real headline .
" websites attract striking writers : operators of sites like mydamnchannel.com could benefit from labor disputes . "
meanwhile , you have the tv bloggers going out on strike , in sympathy with the television writers .
and then you have tv guide , a fox property , which is about to sponsor the online video awards - but cancels it out of sympathy with traditional television , not appearing to gloat .
to show you how schizophrenic this all is , here 's the head of myspace , or fox interactive , a news corp company , being asked , well , with the writers ' strike , is n't this going to hurt news corp and help you online ?
-lrb- video -rrb- man : but i , yeah , i think there 's an opportunity . as the strike continues , there 's an opportunity for more people to experience video on places like myspace tv .
ph : oh , but then he remembers he works for rupert murdoch .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : yes , well , first , you know , i 'm part of news corporation as part of fox entertainment group .
obviously , we hope that the strike is - that the issues are resolved as quickly as possible .
ph : one of the great things that 's going on here is the globalization of content really is happening .
here is a clip from a video , from a piece of animation that was written by a writer in hollywood , animation worked out in israel , farmed out to croatia and india , and it 's now an international series .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : the following takes place between the minutes of 2:15 p.m. and 2:18 p.m. , in the months preceding the presidential primaries .
voice 1 : you 'll have to stay here in the safe house until we get word the terrorist threat is over .
voice 2 : you mean we 'll have to live here , together ?
voices 2 , 3 and 4 : with her ?
voice 2 : well , there goes the neighborhood .
ph : the company that created this , aniboom , is an interesting example of where this is headed . traditional tv animation costs , say , between 80,000 and 10,000 dollars a minute .
they 're producing things for between 1,500 and 800 dollars a minute .
and they 're offering their creators 30 percent of the back end , in a much more entrepreneurial manner . so , it 's a different model .
what the entertainment business is struggling with , the world of brands is figuring out .
for example , nike now understands that nike plus is not just a device in its shoe , it 's a network to hook its customers together .
and the head of marketing at nike says , " people are coming to our site an average of three times a week . we do n't have to go to them . "
which means television advertising is down 57 percent for nike .
or , as nike 's head of marketing says , " we 're not in the business of keeping media companies alive .
we 're in the business of connecting with consumers . "
and media companies realize the audience is important also .
here 's a man announcing the new market watch from dow jones , powered 100 percent by the user experience on the home page - user-generated content married up with traditional content .
it turns out you have a bigger audience and more interest if you hook up with them .
or , as geoffrey moore once told me , it 's intellectual curiosity that 's the trade that brands need in the age of the blogosphere .
and i think this is beginning to happen in the entertainment business .
one of my heroes is songwriter , ally willis , who just wrote " the color purple " and has been an r and - rhythm and blues writer , and this is what she said about where songwriting 's going .
ally willis : where millions of collaborators wanted the song , because to look at them strictly as spam is missing what this medium is about .
ph : so , to wrap up , i 'd love to throw it back to marshall mcluhan , who , 40 years ago , was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change , and i think that , today , traditional hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way that it was being framed before .
but i do n't need to tell you this , let 's throw it back to him .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : we are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new .
mm : the medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this .
they do n't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up .
they think of the old medium , because the old medium is always the content of the new medium , as movies tend to be the content of tv , and as books used to be the content , novels used to be the content of movies .
and so every time a new medium arrives , the old medium is the content , and it is highly observable , highly noticeable , but the real , real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium , and it is ignored .
ph : i think it 's a great time of enthrallment .
there 's been more raw dna of communications and media thrown out there . content is moving from shows to particles that are batted back and forth , and part of social communications , and i think this is going to be a time of great renaissance and opportunity .
and whereas television may have gotten beat up , what 's getting built is a really exciting new form of communication , and we kind of have the merger of the two industries and a new way of thinking to look at it .
thanks very much .
pat mitchell : you have brought us images from the yemen times .
and take us through those , and introduce us to another yemen .
nadia al-sakkaf : well , i 'm glad to be here .
and i would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in yemen .
this picture shows a revolution started by women , and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest .
the other picture is the popularity of the real need for change .
so many people are there .
the intensity of the upspring .
this picture shows that the revolution for education .
these women are learning about first aid and their rights according to the constitution .
i love this picture .
i just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the yemeni population are 15 years and below .
and they were excluded from decision-making , and now they are in the forefront of the news , raising the flag .
english - you will see , this is jeans and tights , and an english expression - the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country .
and expression also , it has brought talents .
yemenis are using cartoons and art , paintings , comics , to tell the world and each other about what 's going on .
obviously , there 's always the dark side of it .
and this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay .
the solidarity of millions of yemenis across the country just demanding the one thing .
and finally , lots of people are saying that yemen 's revolution is going to break the country .
is it going to be so many different countries ?
is it going to be another somalia ?
but we want to tell the world that , no , under the one flag , we 'll still remain as yemeni people .
pm : thank you for those images , nadia .
and they do , in many ways , tell a different story than the story of yemen , the one that is often in the news .
and yet , you yourself defy all those characterizations .
so let 's talk about the personal story for a moment .
your father is murdered .
the yemen times already has a strong reputation in yemen as an independent english language newspaper .
how did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper , especially in such times of conflict ?
na : well , let me first warn you that i 'm not the traditional yemeni girl .
i 've guessed you 've already noticed this by now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in yemen , most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life .
but there 's so much potential .
i wish i could show you my yemen .
i wish you could see yemen through my eyes .
then you would know that there 's so much to it .
and i was privileged because i was born into a family , my father would always encourage the boys and the girls .
he would say we are equal .
and he was such an extraordinary man .
and even my mother - i owe it to my family .
a story : i studied in india .
and in my third year , i started becoming confused because i was yemeni , but i was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college .
and i went back home and i said , " daddy , i do n't know who i am .
i 'm not a yemeni ; i 'm not an indian . "
and he said , " you are the bridge . "
and that is something i will keep in my heart forever .
so since then i 've been the bridge , and a lot of people have walked over me .
pm : i do n't think so . -lrb- laughter -rrb- na : but it just helps tell that some people are change agents in the society .
and when i became editor-in-chief after my brother actually - my father passed away in 1999 , and then my brother until 2005 - and everybody was betting that i will not be able to do it .
" what 's this young girl coming in and showing off because it 's her family business , " or something .
it was very hard at first .
i did n't want to clash with people .
but with all due respect to all the men , and the older men especially , they did not want me around .
it was very hard , you know , to impose my authority .
but a woman 's got to do what a woman 's got to do .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and in the first year , i had to fire half of the men .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- brought in more women .
brought in younger men .
and we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today .
the other thing is that it 's about professionalism .
it 's about proving who you are and what you can do .
and i do n't know if i 'm going to be boasting now , but in 2006 alone , we won three international awards .
one of them is the ipi free media pioneer award .
so that was the answer to all the yemeni people .
and i want to score a point here , because my husband is in the room over there .
if you could please stand up , -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
he has been very supportive of me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : and we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper .
but in assuming this responsibility and going about it as you have , you have become a bridge between an older and traditional society and the one that you are now creating at the paper .
and so along with changing who worked there , you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into , in particular with women , and it has to do with outside image , dress , the veiled woman .
so how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you ?
na : as you know , the image of a lot of yemeni women is a lot of black and covered , veiled women .
and this is true .
and a lot of it is because women are not able , are not free , to show their face to their self .
it 's a lot of traditional imposing coming by authority figures such as the men , the grandparents and so on .
and it 's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say , " i am as much contributing to this family , or more , than you are . "
and the more empowered the women become , the more they are able to remove the veil , for example , or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel .
so the other face of yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil , and it 's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it .
and i have done this throughout my work .
i 've tried to encourage young girls .
we started with , you can take it off in the office .
and then after that , you can take it off on assignments .
because i did n't believe a journalist can be a journalist with - how can you talk to people if you have your face covered ? - and so on ; it 's just a movement .
and i am a role model in yemen .
a lot of people look up to me .
a lot of young girls look up to me .
and i need to prove to them that , yes , you can still be married , you can still be a mother , and you can still be respected within the society , but at the same time , that does n't mean you -lsb- should -rsb- just be one of the crowd .
you can be yourself and have your face .
pm : but by putting yourself personally out there - both projecting a different image of yemeni women , but also what you have made possible for the women who work at the paper - has this put you in personal danger ?
na : well the yemen times , across 20 years , has been through so much .
we 've suffered prosecution ; the paper was closed down more than three times .
it 's an independent newspaper , but tell that to the people in charge .
they think that if there 's anything against them , then we are being an opposition newspaper .
and very , very difficult times .
some of my reporters were arrested .
we had some court cases .
my father was assassinated .
today , we are in a much better situation .
we 've created the credibility .
and in times of revolution or change like today , it is very important for independent media to have a voice .
it 's very important for you to go to yementimes.com , and it 's very important to listen to our voice .
and this is probably something i 'm going to share with you in western media probably - and how there 's a lot of stereotypes - thinking of yemen in one single frame : this is what yemen is all about .
and that 's not fair .
it 's not fair for me ; it 's not fair for my country .
a lot of reporters come to yemen and they want to write a story on al-qaeda or terrorism .
and i just wanted to share with you : there 's one reporter that came .
he wanted to do a documentary on what his editors wanted .
and he ended up writing about a story that even surprised me - hip hop - that there are young yemeni men who express themselves through dancing and puchu puchu .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that thing . -lrb- pm : rap . break dancing . -rrb- yeah , break dancing .
i 'm not so old .
i 'm just not in touch .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- pm : yes , you are .
actually , that 's a documentary that 's available online ; the video 's online .
na : shakethedust.org.
pm : " shake the dust . " -lrb- na : " shake the dust . " -rrb- pm : shakethedust.org.
and it definitely does give a different image of yemen .
you spoke about the responsibility of the press .
and certainly , when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we 've created fear and danger , often from lack of knowledge , lack of real understanding , how do you see the way that the western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region , but in particular , in your country ?
na : well there is a saying that says , " you fear what you do n't know , and you hate what you fear . "
so it 's about the lack of research , basically .
it 's almost , " do your homework , " - some involvement .
and you can not do parachute reporting - just jump into a country for two days and think that you 've done your homework and a story .
so i wish that the world would know my yemen , my country , my people .
i am an example , and there are others like me .
we may not be that many , but if we are promoted as a good , positive example , there will be others - men and women - who can eventually bridge the gap - again , coming to the bridge - between yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion .
i think yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years .
it 's natural .
but after the two years , which is a price we are willing to pay , we are going to stand up again on our feet , but in the new yemen with a younger and more empowered people - democratic .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : nadia , i think you 've just given us a very different view of yemen .
and certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for .
and the very best of luck to you .
yementimes.com.
na : on twitter also .
pm : so you are plugged in .
-lrb- applause -rrb- nature 's my muse and it 's been my passion .
as a photographer for national geographic , i 've portrayed it for many .
but five years ago , i went on a personal journey .
i wanted to visualize the story of life .
it 's the hardest thing i 've ever attempted , and there have been plenty of times when i felt like backing out .
but there were also revelations .
and one of those i 'd like to share with you today .
i went down to a remote lagoon in australia , hoping to see the earth the way it was three billion years ago , back before the sky turned blue .
there 's stromatolites down there - the first living things to capture photosynthesis - and it 's the only place they still occur today .
going down there was like entering a time capsule , and i came out with a different sense of myself in time .
the oxygen exhaled by those stromatolites is what we all breathe today .
stromatolites are the heroes in my story .
i hope it 's a story that has some resonance for our time .
it 's a story about you and me , nature and science .
and with that said , i 'd like to invite you for a short , brief journey of life through time .
our journey starts in space , where matter condenses into spheres over time ...
solidifying into surface , molded by fire .
the fire gave way , earth emerged - but this was an alien planet .
the moon was closer ; things were different .
heat from within made geysers erupt - that is how the oceans were born .
water froze around the poles and shaped the edges of the earth .
water is the key to life , but in frozen form , it is a latent force .
and when it vanishes , earth becomes mars .
but this planet is different - it 's roiling inside .
and where that energy touches water , something new emerges : life .
it arises around cracks in the earth .
mud and minerals become substrate ; there are bacteria .
learn to multiply , thickening in places ...
growing living structures under an alien sky ...
stromatolites were the first to exhale oxygen .
and they changed the atmosphere .
a breath that 's fossilized now as iron .
meteorites delivered chemistry , and perhaps membranes , too .
life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate .
these are diatoms , single-celled phytoplankton with skeletons of silicon ...
circuit boards of the future .
shallow seas nurtured life early on , and that 's where it morphed into more complex forms .
it grew as light and oxygen increased .
life hardened and became defensive .
it learned to move and began to see . the first eyes grew on trilobites .
vision was refined in horseshoe crabs , among the first to leave the sea .
they still do what they 've done for ages , their enemies long gone .
scorpions follow prey out of the sea . slugs became snails .
fish tried amphibian life . frogs adapted to deserts .
lichens arose as a co-op . fungi married algae ...
clinging to rock , and eating it too ... transforming barren land .
true land plants arose , leafless at first .
once they learn how to stay upright , they grew in size and shape .
the fundamental forms of ferns followed , to bear spores that foreshadowed seeds .
life flourished in swamps .
on land , life turned a corner . jaws formed first ; teeth came later .
leatherbacks and tuataras are echoes from that era .
it took time for life to break away from water , and it still beckons all the time .
life turned hard so it could venture inland .
and the dragons that arose are still among us today .
jurassic park still shimmers in part of madagascar , and the center of brazil , where plants called " cycads " remain rock hard .
forests arose and nurtured things with wings .
one early form left an imprint , like it died only yesterday .
and others fly today like echoes of the past .
in birds , life gained new mobility .
flamingos covered continents . migrations got underway .
birds witnessed the emergence of flowering plants .
water lilies were among the first .
plants began to diversify and grew , turning into trees .
in australia , a lily turned into a grass tree , and in hawaii , a daisy became a silver sword .
in africa , gondwana molded proteas .
but when that ancient continent broke up , life got lusher .
tropical rainforests arose , sparking new layers of interdependence .
fungi multiplied . orchids emerged , genitalia shaped to lure insects ...
a trick shared by the largest flower on earth .
co-evolution entwined insects and birds and plants forever .
when birds ca n't fly , they become vulnerable .
kiwis are , and so are these hawks trapped near antarctica .
extinction can come slowly , but sometimes it arrives fast .
an asteroid hits , and the world went down in flames .
but there were witnesses , survivors in the dark .
when the skies cleared , a new world was born .
a world fit for mammals . from tiny shrews -lsb- came -rsb- tenrecs , accustomed to the dark .
new forms became bats . civets .
new predators , hyenas , getting faster and faster still .
grasslands created opportunities .
herd safety came with sharpened senses .
growing big was another answer , but size always comes at a price .
some mammals turned back to water .
walruses adapted with layers of fat . sea lions got sleek .
and cetaceans moved into a world without bounds .
there are many ways to be a mammal . a ' roo hops in oz ; a horse runs in asia ; and a wolf evolves stilt legs in brazil .
primates emerge from jungles , as tarsiers first , becoming lemurs not much later .
learning became reinforced . bands of apes ventured into the open .
and forests dried out once more . going upright became a lifestyle .
so who are we ? brothers of masculine chimps , sisters of feminine bonobos ? we are all of them , and more .
we 're molded by the same life force .
the blood veins in our hands echoed a course of water traces on the earth .
and our brains - our celebrated brains - reflect a drainage of a tidal marsh .
life is a force in its own right . it is a new element .
and it has altered the earth . it covers earth like a skin .
and where it does n't , as in greenland in winter , mars is still not very far .
but that likelihood fades as long as ice melts again .
and where water is liquid , it becomes a womb for cells green with chlorophyll - and that molecular marvel is what 's made a difference - it powers everything .
the whole animal world today lives on a stockpile of bacterial oxygen that is cycled constantly through plants and algae , and their waste is our breath , and vice versa .
this earth is alive , and it 's made its own membrane .
we call it " atmosphere . " this is the icon of our journey .
and you all here today can imagine and will shape where we go next .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
in the 17th century , a woman named giulia tofana had a very successful perfume business .
for over 50 years she ran it .
it sort of ended abruptly when she was executed - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - for murdering 600 men . you see , it was n't a very good perfume .
in fact , it was completely odorless and tasteless and colorless , but as a poison , it was the best money could buy , so women flocked to her in order to murder their husbands .
it turns out that poisoners were a valued and feared group , because poisoning a human being is a quite difficult thing .
the reason is , we have sort of a built-in poison detector .
you can see this as early as even in newborn infants .
if you are willing to do this , you can take a couple of drops of a bitter substance or a sour substance , and you 'll see that face , the tongue stick out , the wrinkled nose , as if they 're trying to get rid of what 's in their mouth .
this reaction expands into adulthood and becomes sort of a full-blown disgust response , no longer just about whether or not we 're about to be poisoned , but whenever there 's a threat of physical contamination from some source . but the face remains strikingly similar .
it has expanded more , though , than just keeping us away from physical contaminants , and there 's a growing body of evidence to suggest that , in fact , this emotion of disgust now influences our moral beliefs and even our deeply held political intuitions .
why this might be the case ?
we can understand this process by understanding a little bit about emotions in general . so the basic human emotions , those kinds of emotions that we share with all other human beings , exist because they motivate us to do good things and they keep us away from doing bad things .
so by and large , they are good for our survival .
take the emotion of fear , for instance . it keeps us away from doing things that are really , really risky .
this photo taken just before his death - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - is actually a - no , one reason this photo is interesting is because most people would not do this , and if they did , they would not live to tell it , because fear would have kicked in a long time ago to a natural predator .
just like fear offers us protective benefits , disgust seems to do the same thing , except for what disgust does is keeps us away from not things that might eat us , or heights , but rather things that might poison us , or give us disease and make us sick .
so one of the features of disgust that makes it such an interesting emotion is that it 's very , very easy to elicit , in fact more so than probably any of the other basic emotions , and so i 'm going to show you that with a couple of images i can probably make you feel disgust .
so turn away . i 'll tell you when you can turn back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , you see it every day , right ? i mean , come on . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- audience : ewww . -rrb- okay , turn back , if you did n't look .
those probably made a lot of you in the audience feel very , very disgusted , but if you did n't look , i can tell you about some of the other things that have been shown sort of across the world to make people disgusted , things like feces , urine , blood , rotten flesh .
these are the sorts of things that it makes sense for us to stay away from , because they might actually contaminate us .
in fact , just having a diseased appearance or odd sexual acts , these things are also things that give us a lot of disgust .
darwin was probably one of the first scientists to systematically investigate the human emotions , and he pointed to the universal nature and the strength of the disgust response .
this is an anecdote from his travels in south america .
" in tierro del fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat while i was eating ...
and plainly showed disgust at its softness , whilst i felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - though his hands did not appear dirty . "
he later wrote , " it 's okay , some of my best friends are naked savages . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- well it turns out it 's not only old-timey british scientists who are this squeamish . i recently got a chance to talk to richard dawkins for a documentary , and i was able to disgust him a bunch of times . here 's my favorite .
richard dawkins : " we 've evolved around courtship and sex , are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions that are hard to jettison overnight . "
david pizarro : so my favorite part of this clip is that professor dawkins actually gagged .
he jumps back , and he gags , and we had to do it three times , and all three times he gagged . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he was really gagging . i thought he might throw up on me , actually .
one of the features , though , of disgust , is not just its universality and its strength , but the way that it works through association .
so when one disgusting thing touches a clean thing , that clean thing becomes disgusting , not the other way around .
this makes it very useful as a strategy if you want to convince somebody that an object or an individual or an entire social group is disgusting and should be avoided .
the philosopher martha nussbaum points this out in this quote : " thus throughout history , certain disgust properties - sliminess , bad smell , stickiness , decay , foulness - have been repeatedly and monotonously been associated with ...
jews , women , homosexuals , untouchables , lower-class people - all of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body . "
let me give you just some examples of how , some powerful examples of how this has been used historically .
this comes from a nazi children 's book published in 1938 : " just look at these guys ! the louse-infested beards , the filthy , protruding ears , those stained , fatty clothes ...
jews often have an unpleasant sweetish odor .
if you have a good nose , you can smell the jews . "
a more modern example comes from people who try to convince us that homosexuality is immoral .
this is from an anti-gay website , where they said gays are " worthy of death for their vile ... sex practices . "
they 're like " dogs eating their own vomit and sows wallowing in their own feces . "
these are disgust properties that are trying to be directly linked to the social group that you should not like .
when we were first investigating the role of disgust in moral judgment , one of the things we became interested in was whether or not these sorts of appeals are more likely to work in individuals who are more easily disgusted .
so while disgust , along with the other basic emotions , are universal phenomena , it just really is true that some people are easier to disgust than others .
you could probably see it in the audience members when i showed you those disgusting images .
the way that we measured this was by a scale that was constructed by some other psychologists that simply asked people across a wide variety of situations how likely they are to feel disgust .
so here are a couple of examples .
" even if i were hungry , i would not drink a bowl of my favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed fly-swatter . "
" do you agree or disagree ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " while you are walking through a tunnel under a railroad track , you smell urine . would you be very disgusted or not at all disgusted ? "
if you ask enough of these , you can get a general overall score of disgust sensitivity .
it turns out that this score is actually meaningful .
when you bring people into the laboratory and you ask them if they 're willing to engage in safe but disgusting behaviors like eating chocolate that 's been baked to look like dog poop , or in this case eating some mealworms that are perfectly healthy but pretty gross , your score on that scale actually predicts whether or not you 'll be willing to engage in those behaviors .
the first time that we set out to collect data on this and associate it with political or moral beliefs , we found a general pattern - this is with the psychologists yoel inbar and paul bloom - that in fact , across three studies we kept finding that people who reported that they were easily disgusted also reported that they were more politically conservative .
another way to say this , though , is that people who are very liberal are very hard to disgust . -lrb- laughter -rrb- in a more recent follow-up study , we were able to look at a much greater sample , a much larger sample . in this case , this is nearly 30,000 u.s. respondents , and we find the same pattern . as you can see , people who are on the very conservative side of answering the political orientation scale are also much more likely to report that they 're easily disgusted .
this data set also allowed us to statistically control for a number of things that we knew were both related to political orientation and to disgust sensitivity .
so we were able to control for gender , age , income , education , even basic personality variables , and the result stays the same .
when we actually looked at not just self-reported political orientation , but voting behavior , we were able to look geographically across the nation . what we found was that in regions in which people reported high levels of disgust sensitivity , mccain got more votes .
so it not only predicted self-reported political orientation , but actual voting behavior . and also we were able , with this sample , to look across the world , in 121 different countries we asked the same questions , and as you can see , this is 121 countries collapsed into 10 different geographical regions .
no matter where you look , what this is plotting is the size of the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political orientation , and no matter where we looked , we saw a very similar effect .
other labs have actually looked at this as well using different measures of disgust sensitivity , so rather than asking people how easily disgusted they are , they hook people up to physiological measures , in this case skin conductance .
and what they 've demonstrated is that people who report being more politically conservative are also more physiologically aroused when you show them disgusting images like the ones that i showed you .
interestingly , what they also showed in a finding that we kept getting in our previous studies as well was that one of the strongest influences here is that individuals who are very disgust-sensitive not only are more likely to report being politically conservative , but they 're also very much more opposed to gay marriage and homosexuality and pretty much a lot of the socio-moral issues in the sexual domain .
so physiological arousal predicted , in this study , attitudes toward gay marriage .
but even with all these data linking disgust sensitivity and political orientation , one of the questions that remains is what is the causal link here ? is it the case that disgust really is shaping political and moral beliefs ?
we have to resort to experimental methods to answer this , and so what we can do is actually bring people into the lab and disgust them and compare them to a control group that has n't been disgusted . it turns out that over the past five years a number of researchers have done this , and by and large the results have all been the same , that when people are feeling disgust , their attitudes shift towards the right of the political spectrum , toward more moral conservatism as well .
so this is whether you use a foul odor , a bad taste , from film clips , from post-hypnotic suggestions of disgust , images like the ones i 've shown you , even just reminding people that disease is prevalent and they should be wary of it and wash up , right , to keep clean , these all have similar effects on judgment .
let me just give you an example from a recent study that we conducted . we asked participants to just simply give us their opinion of a variety of social groups , and we either made the room smell gross or not .
when the room smelled gross , what we saw was that individuals actually reported more negative attitudes toward gay men .
disgust did n't influence attitudes toward all the other social groups that we asked , including african-americans , the elderly . it really came down to the attitudes they had toward gay men .
in another set of studies we actually simply reminded people - this was at a time when the swine flu was going around - we reminded people that in order to prevent the spread of the flu that they ought to wash their hands .
for some participants , we actually had them take questionnaires next to a sign that reminded them to wash their hands .
and what we found was that just taking a questionnaire next to this hand-sanitizing reminder made individuals report being more politically conservative .
and when we asked them a variety of questions about the rightness or wrongness of certain acts , what we also found was that simply being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them more morally conservative .
in particular , when we asked them questions about sort of taboo but fairly harmless sexual practices , just being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them think that they were more morally wrong .
let me give you an example of what i mean by harmless but taboo sexual practice . we gave them scenarios .
one of them said a man is house-sitting for his grandmother .
when his grandmother 's away , he has sex with his girlfriend on his grandma 's bed .
in another one , we said a woman enjoys masturbating with her favorite teddy bear cuddled next to her . -lrb- laughter -rrb- people find these to be more morally abhorrent if they 've been reminded to wash their hands . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . the fact that emotions influence our judgment should come as no surprise . i mean , that 's part of how emotions work .
they not only motivate you to behave in certain ways , but they change the way you think .
in the case of disgust , what is a little bit more surprising is the scope of this influence . it makes perfect sense , and it 's a very good emotion for us to have , that disgust would make me change the way that i perceive the physical world whenever contamination is possible .
it makes less sense that an emotion that was built to prevent me from ingesting poison should predict who i 'm going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election .
the question of whether disgust ought to influence our moral and political judgments certainly has to be complex , and might depend on exactly what judgments we 're talking about , and as a scientist , we have to conclude sometimes that the scientific method is just ill-equipped to answer these sorts of questions .
but one thing that i am fairly certain about is , at the very least , what we can do with this research is point to what questions we ought to ask in the first place .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the advances that have taken place in astronomy , cosmology and biology , in the last 10 years , are really extraordinary - to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine .
but there was something else that i 've noticed as those changes were taking place , as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah , there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy .
the science writers and editors - i should n't say science writers , i should say people who write about science - and editors would sit down over a couple of beers , after a hard day of work , and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works .
and they would inevitably end up in what i thought was a very bizarre place , which is ways the world could end very suddenly .
and that 's what i want to talk about today . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ah , you laugh , you fools . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- voice : can we finish up a little early ? -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , we need the time !
stephen petranek : at first , it all seemed a little fantastical to me , but after challenging a lot of these ideas , i began to take a lot of them seriously . and then september 11 happened , and i thought , ah , god , i ca n't go to the ted conference and talk about how the world is going to end .
nobody wants to hear that . not after this !
and that got me into a discussion with some other people , other scientists , about maybe some other subjects , and one of the guys i talked to , who was a neuroscientist , said , " you know , i think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up , " and reminds me of michael 's talk yesterday and his mother saying you ca n't have a solution if you do n't have a problem .
so , we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow , and lo and behold , we found them .
which leads me to a videotape of a president bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago .
can we run that , andrew ?
president george w. bush : whatever it costs to defend our security , and whatever it costs to defend our freedom , we must pay it .
sp : i agree with the president .
he wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year , a two-trillion-dollar federal budget , which will land us back into deficit spending real fast .
but terrorists are n't the only threat we face .
there are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we 're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism , and what could 've happened on september 11 .
i would propose , therefore , that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget - which is two one hundredths of that budget - and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems i 'm going to talk to you about , the vast majority could be solved , and the rest we could deal with . so , i hope you find this both fascinating - i 'm fascinated by this kind of stuff , i gotta admit - to me these are richard 's cockroaches .
but i also hope , because i think the people in this room can literally change the world , i hope you take some of this stuff away with you , and when you have an opportunity to be influential , that you try to get some heavy-duty money spent on some of these ideas .
so let 's start . number 10 : we lose the will to survive .
we live in an incredible age of modern medicine .
we are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago .
people around the world are getting better medicine - but mentally , we 're falling apart .
the world health organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed .
and the world health organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced .
soon , genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan .
a female child born tomorrow , on average - median - will live to age 83 .
our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes .
now the problem with all of this , getting older , is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide .
so , what are the solutions ?
we do n't really have mental health insurance in this country , and it 's - -lrb- applause -rrb- - it 's really a crime .
something like 98 percent of all people with depression , and i mean really severe depression - i have a friend with stunningly severe depression - this is a curable disease , with present medicine and present technology .
but it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills .
pills alone do n't do it , especially in clinically depressed people .
you ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist , and put down your 10-dollar copay , and get treated , just like you do when you got a cut on your arm . it 's ridiculous .
secondly , drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs . we know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with .
and we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago . we need a pump-push from the federal government , through nih and national science - nsf - and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs .
moving on . number nine - do n't laugh - aliens invade earth .
ten years ago , you could n't have found an astronomer - well , very few astronomers - in the world who would 've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system .
1995 , we found three . the count now is up to 80 - we 're finding about two or three a month .
all of the ones we 've found , by the way , are in this little , teeny , tiny corner where we live , in the milky way . there must be millions of planets in the milky way , and as carl sagan insisted for many years , and was laughed at for it , there must be billions and billions in the universe .
in a few years , nasa is going to launch four or five telescopes out to jupiter , where there 's less dust , and start looking for earth-like planets , which we can not see with present technology , nor detect .
it 's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe , and probably fairly close to us , is a fairly remote idea .
and the chance that some of it is n't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea .
remember , we 've only been an advanced civilization - an industrial civilization , if you would - for 200 years .
although every time i go to pompeii , i 'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a mcdonald 's on every street corner , too .
so , i do n't know how much civilization really has progressed since ad 79 , but there 's a great likelihood . i really believe this , and i do n't believe in aliens , and i do n't believe there are any aliens on the earth or anything like that . but there 's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own .
now , what will happen ? what if they come to , you know , suck up our oceans for the hydrogen ?
and swat us away like flies , the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it .
we can look at our own history . the late physicist gerard o 'neill said , " advanced western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with , even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization . "
if the aliens come visiting , we 're the primitive civilization .
so , what are the solutions to this ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank god you can all read !
it may seem ridiculous , but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them .
how much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species ?
secondly - and you 're going to hear more from me about this - we have to become an outward-looking , space-faring nation .
we have got to develop the idea that the earth does n't last forever , our sun does n't last forever .
if we want humanity to last forever , we have to colonize the milky way .
and that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 'll also help us a lot , if we meet an advanced civilization along the way , if we 're trying to be an advanced civilization . number eight - -lrb- voice : steve , that 's what i 'm doing after ted . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- sp : you 've got it ! you 've got the job .
number eight : the ecosystem collapses .
last july , in science , the journal science , 19 oceanographers published a very , very unusual article .
it was n't really a research report ; it was a screed .
they said , we 've been looking at the oceans for a long time now , and we want to tell you they 're not in trouble , they 're near collapse .
many other ecosystems on earth are in real , real danger .
we 're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000 .
we have lost 25 percent of the unique species in hawaii in the last 20 years .
california is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years .
somewhere in the amazon forest is the marginal tree .
you cut down that tree , the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem .
there 's really a tree like that out there . that 's really what it comes to .
and when that ecosystem collapses , it could take a major ecosystem with it , like our atmosphere . so , what do we do about this ? what are the solutions ?
there is some modeling of ecosystems going on now .
the problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly , that we do n't know they 're really in trouble until it 's almost too late .
we need to know earlier that they 're getting in trouble , and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models .
and with the kind of computing power we have now , there is , as i say , some of this going on , but it needs money .
national science foundation needs to say - you know , almost all the money that 's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government , one way or another .
and they get to prioritize , you know ?
there are people at the national science foundation who get to say , this is the most important thing .
this is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about .
secondly , we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet , and start moving them around .
there 's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the georges bank , or the grand banks off of newfoundland . it 's a no-take fishing zone .
they ca n't fish there for a radius of 200 miles .
and an amazing thing has happened : almost all the fish have come back , and they 're reproducing like crazy . we 're going to have to start doing this around the globe . we 're going to have to have no-take zones .
we 're going to have to say , no more logging in the amazon for 20 years .
let it recover , before we start logging again .
-lrb- applause -rrb- number seven : particle accelerator mishap .
you all remember ted kaczynski , the unabomber ?
one of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world .
a lot of very sober-minded physicists , believe it or not , have had exactly the same thought .
this spring - there 's a collider at brookhaven , on long island - this spring , it 's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes .
they are expecting to create little , tiny black holes .
they expect them to evaporate . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i hope they 're right . -lrb- laughter -rrb- other collider experiments - there 's one that 's going to take place next summer at cern - have the possibility of creating something called strangelets , which are kind of like antimatter . whenever they hit other matter , they destroy it and obliterate it . most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about , and they 're probably right .
but , all around the world , in japan , in canada , there 's talk about this , of reviving this in the united states .
we shut one down that was going to be big .
but there 's talk of building very big accelerators .
what can we do about this ? what are the solutions ?
we 've got the fox watching the henhouse here .
we need to - we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics , but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what 's going on with these experiments .
secondly , we have a natural laboratory surrounding the earth .
we have an electromagnetic field around the earth , and it 's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles , like protons .
and in my opinion , we do n't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what 's safe to do on earth .
number six : biotech disaster .
it 's one of my favorite ones , because we 've done several stories on bt corn .
bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer .
you may of heard of it - heard it called starlink , especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets this stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the united states , and it got into the human food supply , and somebody should 've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily .
but the thing that 's alarming is a couple of months ago , in mexico , where bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal , they found bt corn genes in wild corn plants .
now , corn originated , we think , in mexico .
this is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn .
this brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently , that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world , from biotechnology , that literally could destroy the world 's food supply in very short order .
so , what do we do about that ?
we treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants .
it 's that simple . this is an amazingly unregulated field .
when the starlink disaster happened , there was a battle between the epa and the fda over who really had authority , and over what parts of this , and they did n't get it straightened out for months . that 's kind of crazy .
number five , one of my favorites : reversal of the earth 's magnetic field .
believe it or not , this happens every few hundred thousand years , and has happened many times in our history .
north pole goes to the south , south pole goes to the north , and vice versa .
but what happens , as this occurs , is that we lose our magnetic field around the earth over the period of about 100 years , and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun , that this field protects us from , are - well , basically , we 're gonna fry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- voice : steve , i have some additional hats downstairs . -rrb- sp : so , what can we do about this ? oh , by the way , we 're overdue .
it 's been 780,000 years since this happened .
so , it should have happened about 480,000 years ago .
oh , and here 's one other thing .
scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent .
so , maybe we 're in the throes of it .
one of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the earth is , is that we have - you know , we do n't have good weather data from 60 years ago , much less data on things like the ozone layer .
so , there 's a fairly simple solution to this .
there 's going to be a lot of cheap rocketry that 's going to come online in about six or seven years that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply .
you know , we can make ozone from car tailpipes .
it 's not hard : it 's just three oxygen atoms .
if you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the earth , it would be the thickness of two pennies , at 14 pounds per square inch .
you do n't need that much up there .
we need to learn how to repair and replenish the earth 's ozone layer .
-lrb- applause -rrb- number four : giant solar flares .
solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the sun that bombard the earth with high-speed subatomic particles .
so far , our atmosphere has done , and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this .
occasionally , we get a flare from the sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth , and electricity .
but the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our sun , and they 've found that a number of them , when they 're about the age of our sun , brighten by a factor of as much as 20 . does n't last for very long .
and they think these are super-flares , millions of times more powerful than any flares we 've had from our sun so far .
obviously , we do n't want one of those . -lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a flip side to it . in studying stars like our sun , we 've found that they go through periods of diminishment , when their total amount of energy that 's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent .
one percent does n't sound like a lot , but it would cause one hell of an ice age here .
so , what can we do about this ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- start terraforming mars . this is one of my favorite subjects .
i wrote a story about this in life magazine in 1993 .
this is rocket science , but it 's not hard rocket science .
everything that we need to make an atmosphere on mars , and to make a livable planet on mars , is probably there .
and you just , literally , have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of mars and spit out the oxygen .
the problem is it takes 300 years to terraform mars , minimum .
really more like 500 years to do it right .
there 's no reason why we should n't start now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- number three - is n't this stuff cool ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- a new global epidemic . people have been at war with germs ever since there have been people , and from time to time , the germs sure get the upper hand .
in 1918 , we had a flu epidemic in the united states that killed 20 million people .
that was back when the population was around 100 million people .
the bubonic plague in europe , in the middle ages , killed one out of four europeans .
aids is coming back . ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency , and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics .
we 've all learned what - the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head , like anthrax .
the worst possibility is that a very simple germ , like staph , for which we have one antibiotic that still works , mutates .
and we know staph can do amazing things .
a staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it when antibiotics come , and change and mutate .
the danger is that some germ like staph will be - will mutate into something that 's really virulent , very contagious , and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it .
that 's happened before . about 12,000 years ago , there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the americas , and that is thought to have been a virulent disease .
so , what can we do about it ?
it is nuts . we give antibiotics - -lrb- applause -rrb- - every cow , every lamb , every chicken , they get antibiotics every day , all .
you know , you go to a restaurant , you eat fish , i got news for you , it 's all farmed . you know , you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it 's a wild fish , cause they 're not going to tell you . we 're giving away the code .
this is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code .
we 're telling the germs out there how to fight us .
we gotta fix that . we gotta outlaw that right away .
secondly , our public health system , as we saw with anthrax , is a real disaster .
we have a real , major outbreak of disease in the united states , we are not prepared to cope with it .
now , there is money in the federal budget , next year , to build up the public health service .
but i do n't think to any extent that it really needs to be done .
number two - my favorite - we meet a rogue black hole .
you know , 10 years ago , or 15 years ago , really , you walk into an astronomy convention , and you say , " you know , there 's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy , " and they 're going to hoot you off the stage .
and now , if you went into one of those conventions and you said , " well , i do n't think black holes are out there , " they 'd hoot you off the stage .
our comprehension of the way the universe works is really - has just gained unbelievably in recent years .
we think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the milky way alone , our galaxy .
and these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12 , 15 miles wide , and they are black holes . and they are gobbling up everything around them , including light , which is why we ca n't see them .
most of them should be in orbit around something .
but galaxies are very violent places , and things can be spun out of orbit .
and also , space is incredibly vast .
so even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit , the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote .
but it only has to get close , about a billion miles away , one of these things .
about a billion miles away , here 's what happens to earth 's orbit : it becomes elliptical instead of circular .
and for three months out of the year , the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180 .
for three months out of the year , they go to 50 below zero .
that wo n't work too well . what can we do about this ?
and this is my scariest . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't have a good answer for this one .
again , we gotta think about being a colonizing race .
and finally , number one : biggest danger to life as we know it , i think , a really big asteroid heads for earth .
the important thing to remember here - this is not a question of if , this is a question of when , and how big .
in 1908 , just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles .
it had the effect of about 1,000 hiroshima bombs .
astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years .
in 1989 , a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from earth .
nothing to worry about , right ?
it passed directly through earth 's orbit . we were in that that spot six hours earlier .
a small asteroid , say a half mile wide , would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up - carl sagan 's nuclear winter thing .
an asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions .
we think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide .
where are they ? there 's something called the kuiper belt , which - some people think pluto 's not a planet , that 's where pluto is , it 's in the kuiper belt .
there 's also something a little farther out , called the oort cloud .
there are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock - comets , really - out there , that are 50 miles in diameter or more , and they regularly take a little spin , in towards the sun and pass reasonably close to us .
of more concern , i think , is the asteroids that exist between mars and jupiter .
the folks at the sloan digital sky survey told us last fall - they 're making the first map of the universe , three-dimensional map of the universe - that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between mars and jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger .
so you say , yeah , well , what are really the chances of this happening ?
andrew , can you put that chart up ?
this is a chart that dr. clark chapman at the southwest research institute presented to congress a few years ago .
you 'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000 , according to the work they 've done .
now look at the one right below that .
passenger aircraft crash , one in 20,000 .
we spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we do n't die in airplane accidents , and we 're not spending hardly anything on this . and yet , this is completely preventable .
we finally have , just in the last year , the technology to stop this cold .
could we have the solutions ?
nasa 's spending three million dollars a year , three million bucks - that is like pocket change - to search for asteroids .
because we can actually figure out every asteroid that 's out there , and if it might hit earth , and when it might hit earth .
and they 're trying to do that .
but it 's going to take them 10 years , at spending three million dollars a year , and even then , they claim they 'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued .
comets are a tougher act .
we do n't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories , or when one with our name on it might arrive .
but we would have lots of time , if we see it coming .
we really need a dedicated observatory .
you 'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of , amateur astronomers ? that 's because nobody 's looking for them , except amateurs .
we need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets .
part two of the solutions : we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid , or alter its trajectory . now , a year ago , we did an amazing thing .
we sent a probe out to this asteroid belt , called near , near earth asteroid rendezvous .
and these guys orbited a 30 - or no , about a 22-mile long asteroid called eros .
and then , of course , you know , they pulled one of those sneaky nasa things , where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything , and then , at the last minute , they landed .
when the mission was over , they actually landed on the thing .
we have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid . it 's not a big deal .
now , the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you do n't have anything to push against in space , because there 's no air .
a nuclear explosion is just as hot , but we do n't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid , or vaporize it , would be more like it .
but we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it , which would gently , slowly , after a period of time , push it into a different trajectory , which , if we 've done our math right , would keep it from hitting earth .
this is just a matter of finding ' em , going there , and doing something about it .
i know your head is spinning from all this stuff .
yikes ! so many big threats !
the thing , i think , to remember , is september 11 .
we do n't want to get caught flat-footed again .
we know about this stuff .
science has the power to predict the future in many cases now .
knowledge is power .
the worst thing we can do is say , jeez , i got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a mistake that could literally cost us our future .
thank you .
this is actually a painting that hangs at the countway library at harvard medical school .
and it shows the first time an organ was ever transplanted .
in the front , you see , actually , joe murray getting the patient ready for the transplant , while in the back room you see hartwell harrison , the chief of urology at harvard , actually harvesting the kidney .
the kidney was indeed the first organ ever to be transplanted to the human .
that was back in 1954 , 55 years ago .
yet we 're still dealing with a lot of the same challenges as many decades ago .
certainly many advances , many lives saved .
but we have a major shortage of organs .
in the last decade the number of patients waiting for a transplant has doubled .
while , at the same time , the actual number of transplants has remained almost entirely flat .
that really has to do with our aging population .
we 're just getting older .
medicine is doing a better job of keeping us alive .
but as we age , our organs tend to fail more .
so , that 's a challenge , not just for organs but also for tissues .
trying to replace pancreas , trying to replace nerves that can help us with parkinson 's .
these are major issues .
this is actually a very stunning statistic .
every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue regeneration or replacement .
so , what can we do about it ?
we 've talked about stem cells tonight .
that 's a way to do it .
but still ways to go to get stem cells into patients , in terms of actual therapies for organs .
would n't it be great if our bodies could regenerate ?
would n't it be great if we could actually harness the power of our bodies , to actually heal ourselves ?
it 's not really that foreign of a concept , actually ; it happens on the earth every day .
this is actually a picture of a salamander .
salamanders have this amazing capacity to regenerate .
you see here a little video .
this is actually a limb injury in this salamander .
and this is actually real photography , timed photography , showing how that limb regenerates in a period of days .
you see the scar form .
and that scar actually grows out a new limb .
so , salamanders can do it .
why ca n't we ? why ca n't humans regenerate ?
actually , we can regenerate .
your body has many organs and every single organ in your body has a cell population that 's ready to take over at the time of injury . it happens every day .
as you age , as you get older .
your bones regenerate every 10 years .
your skin regenerates every two weeks .
so , your body is constantly regenerating .
the challenge occurs when there is an injury .
at the time of injury or disease , the body 's first reaction is to seal itself off from the rest of the body .
it basically wants to fight off infection , and seal itself , whether it 's organs inside your body , or your skin , the first reaction is for scar tissue to move in , so , how can we harness that power ?
one of the ways that we do that is actually by using smart biomaterials .
how does this work ? well , on the left side here you see a urethra which was injured .
this is the channel that connects the bladder to the outside of the body .
and you see that it is injured .
we basically found out that you can use these smart biomaterials that you can actually use as a bridge .
if you build that bridge , and you close off from the outside environment , then you can create that bridge , and cells that regenerate in your body , can then cross that bridge , and take that path .
that 's exactly what you see here .
it 's actually a smart biomaterial that we used , to actually treat this patient .
this was an injured urethra on the left side .
we used that biomaterial in the middle .
and then , six months later on the right-hand side you see this reengineered urethra .
turns out your body can regenerate , but only for small distances .
the maximum efficient distance for regeneration is only about one centimeter .
so , we can use these smart biomaterials but only for about one centimeter to bridge those gaps .
so , we do regenerate , but for limited distances .
what do we do now , if you have injury for larger organs ?
what do we do when we have injuries for structures which are much larger than one centimeter ?
then we can start to use cells .
the strategy here , is if a patient comes in to us with a diseased or injured organ , you can take a very small piece of tissue from that organ , less than half the size of a postage stamp , you can then tease that tissue apart , and look at its basic components , the patient 's own cells , you take those cells out , grow and expand those cells outside the body in large quantities , and then we then use scaffold materials .
to the naked eye they look like a piece of your blouse , or your shirt , but actually these materials are fairly complex and they are designed to degrade once inside the body .
it disintegrates a few months later .
it 's acting only as a cell delivery vehicle .
it 's bringing the cells into the body . it 's allowing the cells to regenerate new tissue , and once the tissue is regenerated the scaffold goes away .
and that 's what we did for this piece of muscle .
this is actually showing a piece of muscle and how we go through the structures to actually engineer the muscle .
we take the cells , we expand them , we place the cells on the scaffold , and we then place the scaffold back into the patient .
but actually , before placing the scaffold into the patient , we actually exercise it .
we want to make sure that we condition this muscle , so that it knows what to do once we put it into the patient .
that 's what you 're seeing here . you 're seeing this muscle bio-reactor actually exercising the muscle back and forth .
okay . these are flat structures that we see here , the muscle .
what about other structures ?
this is actually an engineered blood vessel .
very similar to what we just did , but a little bit more complex .
here we take a scaffold , and we basically - scaffold can be like a piece of paper here .
and we can then tubularize this scaffold .
and what we do is we , to make a blood vessel , same strategy .
a blood vessel is made up of two different cell types .
we take muscle cells , we paste , or coat the outside with these muscle cells , very much like baking a layer cake , if you will .
you place the muscle cells on the outside .
you place the vascular blood vessel lining cells on the inside .
you now have your fully seeded scaffold .
you 're going to place this in an oven-like device .
it has the same conditions as a human body , 37 degrees centigrade , 95 percent oxygen .
you then exercise it , as what you saw on that tape .
and on the right you actually see a carotid artery that was engineered .
this is actually the artery that goes from your neck to your brain .
and this is an x-ray showing you the patent , functional blood vessel .
more complex structures such as blood vessels , urethras , which i showed you , they 're definitely more complex because you 're introducing two different cell types .
but they are really acting mostly as conduits .
you 're allowing fluid or air to go through at steady states .
they are not nearly as complex as hollow organs .
hollow organs have a much higher degree of complexity , because you 're asking these organs to act on demand .
so , the bladder is one such organ .
same strategy , we take a very small piece of the bladder , less than half the size of a postage stamp .
we then tease the tissue apart into its two individual cell components , muscle , and these bladder specialized cells .
we grow the cells outside the body in large quantities .
it takes about four weeks to grow these cells from the organ .
we then take a scaffold that we shape like a bladder .
we coat the inside with these bladder lining cells .
we coat the outside with these muscle cells .
we place it back into this oven-like device .
from the time you take that piece of tissue , six to eight weeks later you can put the organ right back into the patient .
this actually shows the scaffold .
the material is actually being coated with the cells .
when we did the first clinical trial for these patients we actually created the scaffold specifically for each patient .
we brought patients in , six to eight weeks prior to their scheduled surgery , did x-rays , and we then composed a scaffold specifically for that patient 's size pelvic cavity .
for the second phase of the trials we just had different sizes , small , medium , large and extra-large .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's true .
and i 'm sure everyone here wanted an extra-large . right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , bladders are definitely a little bit more complex than the other structures .
but there are other hollow organs that have added complexity to it .
this is actually a heart valve , which we engineered .
and the way you engineer this heart valve is the same strategy .
we take the scaffold , we seed it with cells , and you can now see here , the valve leaflets opening and closing .
we exercise these prior to implantation .
same strategy .
and then the most complex are the solid organs .
for solid organs , they 're more complex because you 're using a lot more cells per centimeter .
this is actually a simple solid organ like the ear .
it 's now being seeded with cartilage .
that 's the oven-like device ; once it 's coated it gets placed there .
and then a few weeks later we can take out the cartilage scaffold .
this is actually digits that we 're engineering .
these are being layered , one layer at a time , first the bone , we fill in the gaps with cartilage .
we then start adding the muscle on top .
and you start layering these solid structures .
again , fairly more complex organs , but by far , the most complex solid organs are actually the vascularized , highly vascularized , a lot of blood vessel supply , organs such as the heart , the liver , the kidneys .
this is actually an example - several strategies to engineer solid organs .
this is actually one of the strategies . we use a printer .
and instead of using ink , we use - you just saw an inkjet cartridge - we just use cells .
this is actually your typical desktop printer .
it 's actually printing this two chamber heart , one layer at a time .
you see the heart coming out there . it takes about 40 minutes to print , and about four to six hours later you see the muscle cells contract .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this technology was developed by tao ju , who worked at our institute .
and this is actually still , of course , experimental , not for use in patients .
another strategy that we have followed is actually to use decellularized organs .
we actually take donor organs , organs that are discarded , and we then can use very mild detergents to take all the cell elements out of these organs .
so , for example on the left panel , top panel , you see a liver .
we actually take the donor liver , we use very mild detergents , and we , by using these mild detergents , we take all the cells out of the liver .
two weeks later , we basically can lift this organ up , it feels like a liver , we can hold it like a liver , it looks like a liver , but it has no cells .
all we are left with is the skeleton , if you will , of the liver , all made up of collagen , a material that 's in our bodies , that will not reject .
we can use it from one patient to the next .
we then take this vascular structure and we can prove that we retain the blood vessel supply .
you can see , actually that 's a fluoroscopy .
we 're actually injecting contrast into the organ .
now you can see it start . we 're injecting the contrast into the organ into this decellularized liver .
and you can see the vascular tree that remains intact .
we then take the cells , the vascular cells , blood vessel cells , we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient 's own cells .
we perfuse the outside of the liver with the patient 's own liver cells .
and we can then create functional livers .
and that 's actually what you 're seeing .
this is still experimental . but we are able to actually reproduce the functionality of the liver structure , experimentally .
for the kidney , as i talked to you about the first painting that you saw , the first slide i showed you , 90 percent of the patients on the transplant wait list are waiting for a kidney , 90 percent .
so , another strategy we 're following is actually to create wafers that we stack together , like an accordion , if you will .
so , we stack these wafers together , using the kidney cells .
and then you can see these miniature kidneys that we 've engineered .
they are actually making urine .
again , small structures , our challenge is how to make them larger , and that is something we 're working on right now at the institute .
one of the things that i wanted to summarize for you then is what is a strategy that we 're going for in regenerative medicine .
if at all possible , we really would like to use smart biomaterials that we can just take off the shelf and regenerate your organs .
we are limited with distances right now , but our goal is actually to increase those distances over time .
if we can not use smart biomaterials , then we 'd rather use your very own cells .
why ? because they will not reject .
we can take cells from you , create the structure , put it right back into you , they will not reject .
and if possible , we 'd rather use the cells from your very specific organ .
if you present with a diseased wind pipe we 'd like to take cells from your windpipe .
if you present with a diseased pancreas we 'd like to take cells from that organ .
why ? because we 'd rather take those cells which already know that those are the cell types you want .
a windpipe cell already knows it 's a windpipe cell .
we do n't need to teach it to become another cell type .
so , we prefer organ-specific cells .
and today we can obtain cells from most every organ in your body , except for several which we still need stem cells for , like heart , liver , nerve and pancreas .
and for those we still need stem cells .
if we can not use stem cells from your body then we 'd like to use donor stem cells .
and we prefer cells that will not reject and will not form tumors .
and we 're working a lot with the stem cells that we published on two years ago , stem cells from the amniotic fluid , and the placenta , which have those properties .
so , at this point , i do want to tell you that some of the major challenges we have .
you know , i just showed you this presentation , everything looks so good , everything works . actually no , these technologies really are not that easy .
some of the work you saw today was performed by over 700 researchers at our institute across a 20-year time span .
so , these are very tough technologies .
once you get the formula right you can replicate it .
but it takes a lot to get there .
so , i always like to show this cartoon .
this is how to stop a runaway stage .
and there you see the stagecoach driver , and he goes , on the top panel , he goes a , b , c , d , e , f.
he finally stops the runaway stage .
and those are usually the basic scientists , the bottom is usually the surgeons .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm a surgeon so that 's not that funny .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually method a is the correct approach .
and what i mean by that is that anytime we 've launched one of these technologies to the clinic , we 've made absolutely sure that we do everything we can in the laboratory before we ever launch these technologies to patients .
and when we launch these technologies to patients we want to make sure that we ask ourselves a very tough question .
are you ready to place this in your own loved one , your own child , your own family member , and then we proceed .
because our main goal , of course , is first , to do no harm .
i 'm going to show you now , a very short clip , it 's a five second clip of a patient who received one of the engineered organs .
we started implanting some of these structures over 14 years ago .
so , we have patients now walking around with organs , engineered organs , for over 10 years , as well .
i 'm going to show a clip of one young lady .
she had a spina bifida defect , a spinal cord abnormality .
she did not have a normal bladder . this is a segment from cnn .
we are just taking five seconds .
this is a segment that sanjay gupta actually took care of .
video : kaitlyn m : i 'm happy . i was always afraid that i was going to have like , an accident or something .
and now i can just go and go out with my friends , go do whatever i want .
anthony atala : see , at the end of the day , the promise of regenerative medicine is a single promise .
and that is really very simple , to make our patients better .
thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque ?
probably not , but people like me do .
i 'm an archeological geneticist at the center for evolutionary medicine at the university of zurich , and i study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans .
and through this work , i hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies , so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future .
there are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine , and one way is to extract human dna from ancient bones .
and from these extracts , we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations , risk factors and inherited diseases .
but this is only one half of the story .
the most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome , but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation , diet , microbes and parasites and our immune response .
all of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved .
and in order to understand these diseases , we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past .
but there are a lot of challenges for this .
and first of all , what do we even study ?
skeletons are ubiquitous ; they 're found all over the place .
but of course , all of the soft tissue has decomposed , and the skeleton itself has limited health information .
mummies are a great source of information , except that they 're really geographically limited and limited in time as well .
coprolites are fossilized human feces , and they 're actually extremely interesting .
you can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease , but they are very rare .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so to address this problem , i put together a team of international researchers in switzerland , denmark and the u.k.
to study a very poorly studied , little known material that 's found on people everywhere .
it 's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus .
many of you may know it by the term tartar .
it 's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit .
and in a typical dentistry visit , you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed .
but in ancient times before tooth brushing , up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime .
and what 's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton , it 's abundant in quantity before the present day and it 's ubiquitous worldwide .
we find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years .
and we even find it in neanderthals and animals .
and so previous studies had only focused on microscopy .
they 'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope , and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches , and they 'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria .
and so what my team of researchers , what we wanted to do , is say , can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after dna and proteins , and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what 's going on ?
and what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth .
we also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and dna related to diet .
but what was surprising to us , and also quite exciting , is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems .
so it gives us virtual access to the lungs , which is where many important diseases reside .
and we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut .
and so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that , from the skeleton alone , has long decomposed .
and so by applying ancient dna sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus , we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet , infection and immunity thousands of years ago .
so what started out as an idea , is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease , right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens .
and from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick .
and i hope i have convinced you of the value of dental calculus .
and as a final parting thought , on behalf of future archeologists , i would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a neuroscientist , and i study decision-making .
i do experiments to test how different chemicals in the brain influence the choices we make .
i 'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making : a cheese sandwich .
that 's right . according to scientists , a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions .
how do i know ? i 'm the scientist who did the study .
a few years ago , my colleagues and i were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people 's decisions in social situations .
specifically , we wanted to know how serotonin would affect the way people react when they 're treated unfairly .
so we did an experiment .
we manipulated people 's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain .
this is the amino acid tryptophan .
so what we found was , when tryptophan was low , people were more likely to take revenge when they 're treated unfairly .
that 's the study we did , and here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards .
-lrb- " a cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision-making " -rrb- -lrb- " what a friend we have in cheeses " -rrb- -lrb- " eating cheese and meat may boost self-control " -rrb- at this point , you might be wondering , did i miss something ?
-lrb- " official ! chocolate stops you being grumpy " -rrb- cheese ? chocolate ? where did that come from ?
and i thought the same thing myself when these came out , because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate .
we gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels .
but it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate .
and of course when science says cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions , well , that 's sure to grab people 's attention .
so there you have it : the evolution of a headline .
when this happened , a part of me thought , well , what 's the big deal ?
so the media oversimplified a few things , but in the end , it 's just a news story .
and i think a lot of scientists have this attitude .
but the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time , and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves .
when the headlines rolled , what happened was , the marketers came calling .
would i be willing to provide a scientific endorsement of a mood-boosting bottled water ?
or would i go on television to demonstrate , in front of a live audience , that comfort foods really do make you feel better ?
i think these folks meant well , but had i taken them up on their offers , i would have been going beyond the science , and good scientists are careful not to do this .
but nevertheless , neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing .
here 's one example : neuro drinks , a line of products , including nuero bliss here , which according to its label helps reduce stress , enhances mood , provides focused concentration , and promotes a positive outlook .
i have to say , this sounds awesome . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i could totally have used this 10 minutes ago .
so when this came up in my local shop , naturally i was curious about some of the research backing these claims .
so i went to the company 's website looking to find some controlled trials of their products .
but i did n't find any .
trial or no trial , these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain .
and it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties .
a couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article .
for half the people , the article included a brain image , and for the other half , it was the same article but it did n't have a brain image .
at the end - you see where this is going - people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article .
so this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image .
and this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image .
so the take-home message here is , do you want to sell it ? put a brain on it .
now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades , and we 're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain .
like , just a couple of weeks ago , neuroscientists at mit figured out how to break habits in rats just by controlling neural activity in a specific part of their brain .
really cool stuff .
but the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown , unproven claims .
so what i 'm going to do is show you how to spot a couple of classic moves , dead giveaways , really , for what 's variously been called neuro-bunk , neuro-bollocks , or , my personal favorite , neuro-flapdoodle .
so the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people 's thoughts and emotions .
here 's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in the new york times .
the headline ? " you love your iphone . literally . "
it quickly became the most emailed article on the site .
so how 'd they figure this out ?
they put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iphones .
the brain scans showed activation in a part of the brain called the insula , a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion .
so they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula , this meant the subjects loved their iphones .
now there 's just one problem with this line of reasoning , and that 's that the insula does a lot .
sure , it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion , but it 's also involved in tons of other processes , like memory , language , attention , even anger , disgust and pain .
so based on the same logic , i could equally conclude you hate your iphone .
the point here is , when you see activation in the insula , you ca n't just pick and choose your favorite explanation from off this list , and it 's a really long list .
my colleagues tal yarkoni and russ poldrack have shown that the insula pops up in almost a third of all brain imaging studies that have ever been published .
so chances are really , really good that your insula is going off right now , but i wo n't kid myself to think this means you love me .
so speaking of love and the brain , there 's a researcher , known to some as dr. love , who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together , the source of love and prosperity .
this time it 's not a cheese sandwich .
no , it 's a hormone called oxytocin .
you 've probably heard of it .
so , dr. love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people 's oxytocin , this increases their trust , empathy and cooperation .
so he 's calling oxytocin " the moral molecule . "
now these studies are scientifically valid , and they 've been replicated , but they 're not the whole story .
other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy . it increases gloating .
oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups .
and in some cases , oxytocin can even decrease cooperation .
so based on these studies , i could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule , and call myself dr. strangelove .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 've seen neuro-flapdoodle all over the headlines .
we see it in supermarkets , on book covers .
what about the clinic ?
spect imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain .
for the bargain price of a few thousand dollars , there are clinics in the u.s. that will give you one of these spect scans and use the image to help diagnose your problems .
these scans , the clinics say , can help prevent alzheimer 's disease , solve weight and addiction issues , overcome marital conflicts , and treat , of course , a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to adhd .
this sounds great . a lot of people agree .
some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in business .
there 's just one problem .
the broad consensus in neuroscience is that we ca n't yet diagnose mental illness from a single brain scan .
but these clinics have treated tens of thousands of patients to date , many of them children , and spect imaging involves a radioactive injection , so exposing people to radiation , potentially harmful .
i am more excited than most people , as a neuroscientist , about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter .
and if one day we can say that cheese and chocolate help us make better decisions , count me in .
but we 're not there yet .
we have n't found a " buy " button inside the brain , we ca n't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans , and we ca n't turn sinners into saints with hormones .
maybe someday we will , but until then , we have to be careful that we do n't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that 's playing a much longer game .
so here 's where you come in .
if someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it , do n't just take them at their word .
ask the tough questions . ask to see the evidence .
ask for the part of the story that 's not being told .
the answers should n't be simple , because the brain is n't simple .
but that 's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- my mission in life since i was a kid was , and is , to take the rest of you into space .
it 's during our lifetime that we 're going to take the earth , take the people of earth and transition off , permanently . and that 's exciting .
in fact , i think it is a moral imperative that we open the space frontier .
you know , it 's the first time that we 're going to have a chance to have planetary redundancy , a chance to , if you would , back up the biosphere .
and if you think about space , everything we hold of value on this planet - metals and minerals and real estate and energy - is in infinite quantities in space .
in fact , the earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources .
the analogy for me is alaska . you know , we bought alaska .
we americans bought alaska in the 1850s . it 's called seward 's folly .
we valued it as the number of seal pelts we could kill .
and then we discovered these things - gold and oil and fishing and timber - and it became , you know , a trillion-dollar economy , and now we take our honeymoons there . the same thing will happen in space .
we are on the verge of the greatest exploration that the human race has ever known .
we explore for three reasons , the weakest of which is curiosity .
you know , it 's funded nasa 's budget up until now .
some images from mars , 1997 .
in fact , i think in the next decade , without any question , we will discover life on mars and find that it is literally ubiquitous under the soils and different parts of that planet .
the stronger motivator , the much stronger motivator , is fear .
it drove us to the moon . we - literally in fear - with the soviet union raced to the moon . and we have these huge rocks , you know , killer-sized rocks in the hundreds of thousands or millions out there , and while the probability is very small , the impact , figured in literally , of one of these hitting the earth is so huge that to spend a small fraction looking , searching , preparing to defend , is not unreasonable .
and of course , the third motivator , one near and dear to my heart as an entrepreneur , is wealth .
in fact , the greatest wealth . if you think about these other asteroids , there 's a class of the nickel iron , which in platinum-group metal markets alone are worth something like 20 trillion dollars , if you can go out and grab one of these rocks .
my plan is to actually buy puts on the precious metal market , and then actually claim that i 'm going to go out and get one .
and that will fund the actual mission to go and get one .
but fear , curiosity and greed have driven us .
and for me , this is - i 'm the short kid on the right .
this was - my motivation was actually during apollo .
and apollo was one of the greatest motivators ever .
if you think about what happened at the turn of - early 1960s , on may 25 , jfk said , " we 're going to go to the moon . "
and people left their jobs and they went to obscure locations to go and be part of this amazing mission .
and we knew nothing about going to space .
we went from having literally put alan shepard in suborbital flight to going to the moon in eight years , and the average age of the people that got us there was 26 years old .
they did n't know what could n't be done .
they had to make up everything .
and that , my friend , is amazing motivation .
this is gene cernan , a good friend of mine , saying , " if i can go to the moon " - this is the last human on the moon so far - " nothing , nothing is impossible . " but of course , we 've thought about the government always as the person taking us there .
but i put forward here , the government is not going to get us there .
the government is unable to take the risks required to open up this precious frontier .
the shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch .
that 's a pathetic number . it 's unreasonable .
we should n't be happy in standing for that .
one of the things that we did with the ansari x prize was take the challenge on that risk is ok , you know .
as we are going out there and taking on a new frontier , we should be allowed to risk .
in fact , anyone who says we should n't , you know , just needs to be put aside , because , as we go forward , in fact , the greatest discoveries we will ever know is ahead of us .
the entrepreneurs in the space business are the furry mammals , and clearly the industrial-military complex - with boeing and lockheed and nasa - are the dinosaurs .
the ability for us to access these resources to gain planetary redundancy - we can now gather all the information , the genetic codes , you know , everything stored on our databases , and back them up off the planet , in case there would be one of those disastrous situations .
the difficulty is getting there , and clearly , the cost to orbit is key .
once you 're in orbit , you are two thirds of the way , energetically , to anywhere - the moon , to mars . and today , there 's only three vehicles - the u.s. shuttle , the russian soyuz and the chinese vehicle - that gets you there .
arguably , it 's about 100 million dollars a person on the space shuttle .
one of the companies i started , space adventures , will sell you a ticket .
we 've done two so far . we 'll be announcing two more on the soyuz to go up to the space station for 20 million dollars .
but that 's expensive and to understand what the potential is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it is expensive . but people are willing to pay that !
you know , one - we have a very unique period in time today .
for the first time ever , we have enough wealth concentrated in the hands of few individuals and the technology accessible that will allow us to really drive space exploration .
but how cheap could it get ? i want to give you the end point .
we know - 20 million dollars today , you can go and buy a ticket , but how cheap could it get ?
let 's go back to high school physics here .
if you calculate the amount of potential energy , mgh , to take you and your spacesuit up to a couple hundred miles , and then you accelerate yourself to 17,500 miles per hour - remember , that one half mv squared - and you figure it out .
it 's about 5.7 gigajoules of energy .
if you expended that over an hour , it 's about 1.6 megawatts .
if you go to one of vijay 's micro-power sources , and they sell it to you for seven cents a kilowatt hour - anybody here fast in math ?
how much will it cost you and your spacesuit to go to orbit ?
100 bucks . that 's the price-improvement curve that - we need some breakthroughs in physics along the way , i 'll grant you that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but guys , if history has taught us anything , it 's that if you can imagine it , you will get there eventually .
i have no question that the physics , the engineering to get us down to the point where all of us can afford orbital space flight is around the corner .
the difficulty is that there needs to be a real marketplace to drive the investment .
today , the boeings and the lockheeds do n't spend a dollar of their own money in r & d.
it 's all government research dollars , and very few of those .
and in fact , the large corporations , the governments , ca n't take the risk .
so we need what i call an exothermic economic reaction in space .
today 's commercial markets worldwide , global commercial launch market ?
12 to 15 launches per year .
number of commercial companies out there ? 12 to 15 companies .
one per company . that 's not it . there 's only one marketplace , and i call them self-loading carbon payloads .
they come with their own money . they 're easy to make .
it 's people . the ansari x prize was my solution , reading about lindbergh for creating the vehicles to get us there .
we offered 10 million dollars in cash for the first reusable ship , carry three people up to 100 kilometers , come back down , and within two weeks , make the trip again .
twenty-six teams from seven countries entered the competition , spending between one to 25 million dollars each .
and of course , we had beautiful spaceshipone , which made those two flights and won the competition .
and i 'd like to take you there , to that morning , for just a quick video .
-lrb- video -rrb- pilot : release our fire .
richard searfoss : good luck .
-lrb- applause -rrb- rs : we 've got an altitude call of 368,000 feet .
-lrb- applause -rrb- rs : so in my official capacity as the chief judge of the ansari x prize competition , i declare that mojave aerospace ventures has indeed earned the ansari x prize .
-lrb- applause -rrb- peter diamandis : probably the most difficult thing that i had to do was raise the capital for this . it was literally impossible .
we went - i went to 100 , 200 ceos , cmos .
no one believed it was done . everyone said , " oh , what does nasa think ?
well , people are going to die , how can you possibly going to put this forward ? "
i found a visionary family , the ansari family , and champ car , and raised part of the money , but not the full 10 million .
and what i ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry and buying a hole-in-one insurance policy .
see , the insurance companies went to boeing and lockheed , and said , " are you going to compete ? " no .
" are you going to compete ? " no . " no one 's going to win this thing . "
so , they took a bet that no one would win by january of ' 05 , and i took a bet that someone would win .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so - and the best thing is they paid off and the check did n't bounce .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've had a lot of accomplishments and it 's been a tremendous success .
one of the things i 'm most happy about is that the spaceshipone is going to hang in air and space museum , next to the spirit of st. louis and the wright flyer .
is n't that great ? -lrb- applause -rrb- so a little bit about the future , steps to space , what 's available for you .
today , you can go and experience weightless flights .
by ' 08 , suborbital flights , the price tag for that , you know , on virgin , is going to be about 200,000 .
there are three or four other serious efforts that will bring the price down very rapidly , i think , to about 25,000 dollars for a suborbital flight .
orbital flights - we can take you to the space station .
and then i truly believe , once a group is in orbit around the earth - i know if they do n't do it , i am - we 're going to stockpile some fuel , make a beeline for the moon and grab some real estate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- quick moment for the designers in the audience .
we spent 11 years getting faa approval to do zero gravity flights .
here are some fun images . here 's burt rutan and my good friend greg meronek inside a zero gravity - people think a zero gravity room , there 's a switch on there that turns it off - but it 's actually parabolic flight of an airplane .
and turns out 7-up has just done a little commercial that 's airing this month .
if we can get the audio up ?
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : for a chance to win the first free ticket to space , look for specially marked packages of diet 7-up .
when you want the taste that wo n't weigh you down , the only way to go is up .
pd : that was filmed inside our airplane , and so , you can now do this .
we 're based down in florida .
let me talk about the other thing i 'm excited about .
the future of prizes . you know , prizes are a very old idea .
i had the pleasure of borrowing from the longitude prize and the orteig prize that put lindbergh forward .
and we have made a decision in the x prize foundation to actually carry that concept forward into other technology areas , and we just took on a new mission statement : " to bring about radical breakthroughs in space and other technologies for the benefit of humanity . "
and this is something that we 're very excited about .
i showed this slide to larry page , who just joined our board .
and you know , when you give to a nonprofit , you might have 50 cents on the dollar .
if you have a matching grant , it 's typically two or three to one .
if you put up a prize , you can get literally a 50 to one leverage on your dollars .
and that 's huge . and then he turned around and said , " well , if you back a prize institute that runs a 10 prize , you get 500 to one . "
i said , " well , that 's great . "
so , we have actually - are looking to turn the x prize into a world-class prize institute .
this is what happens when you put up a prize , when you announce it and teams start to begin doing trials .
you get publicity increase , and when it 's won , publicity shoots through the roof - if it 's properly managed - and that 's part of the benefits to a sponsor .
then , when the prize is actually won , after it 's moving , you get societal benefits , you know , new technology , new capability .
and the benefit to the sponsors is the sum of the publicity and societal benefits over the long term .
that 's our value proposition in a prize .
if you were going to go and try to create spaceshipone , or any kind of a new technology , you have to fund that from the beginning and maintain that funding with an uncertain outcome .
it may or may not happen . but if you put up a prize , the beautiful thing is , you know , it 's a very small maintenance fee , and you pay on success .
orteig did n't pay a dime out to the nine teams that went across - tried to go across the atlantic , and we did n't pay a dime until someone won the ansari x prize .
so , prizes work great .
you know , innovators , the entrepreneurs out there , you know that when you 're going for a goal , the first thing you have to do is believe that you can do it yourself .
then , you 've got to , you know , face potential public ridicule of - that 's a crazy idea , it 'll never work .
and then you have to convince others , so that they can , in fact , help you raise the funds , and then you 've got to deal with the fact that you 've got government bureaucracies and institutions that do n't want you to move those things forward , and you have to deal with failures . what a prize does , what we 've experienced a prize doing , is literally help to short-circuit or support all of these things , because a prize credentials the idea that this is a good idea .
well , it must be a good idea .
someone 's offering 10 million dollars to go and do this thing .
and each of these areas was something that we found the ansari x prize helped short-circuit these for innovation .
so , as an organization , we put together a prize discovery process of how to come up with prizes and write the rules , and we 're actually looking at creating prizes in a number of different categories .
we 're looking at attacking energy , environment , nanotechnology - and i 'll talk about those more in a moment .
and the way we 're doing that is we 're creating prize teams within the x prize . we have a space prize team .
we 're going after an orbital prize .
we are looking at a number of energy prizes .
craig venter has just joined our board and we 're doing a rapid genome sequencing prize with him , we 'll be announcing later this fall , about - imagine being able to sequence anybody 's dna for under 1,000 dollars , revolutionize medicine .
and clean water , education , medicine and even looking at social entrepreneurship .
so my final slide here is , the most critical tool for solving humanity 's grand challenges - it is n't technology , it is n't money , it 's only one thing - it 's the committed , passionate human mind .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is aunt zip from sodom , north carolina .
she was 105 years old when i took this picture .
she was always saying things that made me stop and think , like , " time may be a great healer , but it ai n't no beauty specialist . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she said , " be good to your friends .
why , without them , you 'd be a total stranger . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is one of her songs .
let 's see if we can get into the flow here and all do this one together .
and i 'm going to have michael manring play bass with me .
give him a big old hand .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one , two , three , four .
-lrb- music -rrb- well , my true love 's a black-eyed daisy ; if i do n't see her , i go crazy .
my true love lives up the river ; a few more jumps and i 'll be with her .
hey , hey , black-eyed susie ! hey , hey , black-eyed susie !
hey , hey black-eyed susie , hey .
now you 've got to picture aunt zip at 105 years old in sodom , north carolina .
i 'd go up and learn these old songs from her .
she could n't sing much , could n't play anymore .
and i 'd pull her out on the front porch .
down below , there was her grandson plowing the tobacco field with a mule .
a double outhouse over here on the side .
and we 'd sing this old song . she did n't have a whole lot of energy , so i 'd sing , " hey , hey ! " and she 'd just answer back with , " black-eyed susie . "
oh , hey , hey , black-eyed susie ! hey , hey , black-eyed susie !
hey , hey , black-eyed susie , hey .
well , she and i went blackberry picking .
she got mad ; i took a licking .
ducks on the millpond , geese in the ocean , devil in the pretty girl when she takes a notion .
hey , hey , black-eyed susie ! hey , hey , black-eyed susie !
hey , hey black-eyed susie , hey .
let 's have the banjo .
well , we 'll get married next thanksgiving .
i 'll lay around ; she 'll make a living .
she 'll cook blackjacks , i 'll cook gravy ; we 'll have chicken someday , maybe .
hey , hey , hey , hey . hey , hey , black-eyed susie , hey !
one more time now .
oh , hey , hey , black-eyed susie ! hey , hey , black-eyed susie !
hey , hey , black-eyed susie , hey .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you , michael .
this is ralph stanley .
when i was going to college at university of california at santa barbara in the college of creative studies , taking majors in biology and art , he came to the campus .
this was in 1968 , i guess it was .
and he played his bluegrass style of music , but near the end of the concert , he played the old timing style of banjo picking that came from africa , along with the banjo .
it 's called claw-hammer style , that he had learned from his mother and grandmother .
i fell in love with that .
i went up to him and said , how can i learn that ?
he said , well , you can go back to clinch mountain , where i 'm from , or asheville or mount airy , north carolina - some place that has a lot of music .
because there 's a lot of old people still living that play that old style .
so i went back that very summer .
i just fell in love with the culture and the people .
and you know , i came back to school , i finished my degrees and told my parents i wanted to be a banjo player .
you can imagine how excited they were .
so i thought i would just like to show you some of the pictures i 've taken of some of my mentors .
just a few of them , but maybe you 'll get just a little hint of some of these folks .
and play a little banjo . let 's do a little medley .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- those last few pictures were of ray hicks , who just passed away last year .
he was one of the great american folk tale-tellers .
the old jack tales that he had learned - he talked like this , you could hardly understand him . but it was really wonderful .
and he lived in that house that his great-grandfather had built .
no running water , no electricity . a wonderful , wonderful guy .
and you can look at more pictures .
i 've actually got a website that 's got a bunch of photos that i 've done of some of the other folks i did n't get a chance to show you .
this instrument came up in those pictures . it 's called the mouth bow .
it is definitely the first stringed instrument ever in the world , and still played in the southern mountains .
now , the old timers did n't take a fancy guitar string and make anything like this .
they would just take a stick and a catgut and string it up .
it was hard on the cats , but it made a great little instrument .
it sounds something like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- well , have you heard the many stories told by young and old with joy about the many deeds of daring that were done by the johnson boys ?
you take kate , i 'll take sal ; we 'll both have a johnson gal .
you take kate , i 'll take sal ; we 'll both have a johnson gal .
now , they were scouts in the rebels ' army , they were known both far and wide .
when the yankees saw them coming , they 'd lay down their guns and hide .
you take kate , i 'll take sal ; we 'll both have a johnson gal .
you take kate , i 'll take sal ; we 'll both have a johnson gal .
ai n't that a sound ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , it was 1954 , i guess it was .
we were driving in the car outside of gatesville , texas , where i grew up in the early part of my life .
outside of gatesville we were coming back from the grocery store .
my mom was driving ; my brother and i were in the back seat .
we were really mad at my mom . we looked out the window .
we were surrounded by thousands of acres of cotton fields .
you see , we 'd just been to the grocery store , and my mom refused to buy us the jar of ovaltine that had the coupon for the captain midnight decoder ring in it .
and , buddy , that made us mad .
well , my mom did n't put up with much either , and she was driving , and she said , " you boys ! you think you can have anything you want .
you do n't know how hard it is to earn money . your dad works so hard .
you think money grows on trees . you 've never worked a day in your lives .
you boys make me so mad . you 're going to get a job this summer . "
she pulled the car over ; she said , " get out of the car . "
my brother and i stepped out of the car .
we were standing on the edge of thousands of acres of cotton .
there were about a hundred black folks out there picking .
my mom grabbed us by the shoulders . she marched us out in the field .
she went up to the foreman ; she said , " i 've got these two little boys never worked a day in their lives . "
of course , we were just eight and 10 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she said , " would you put them to work ? "
well , that must have seemed like a funny idea to that foreman : put these two middle-class little white boys out in a cotton field in august in texas - it 's hot .
so he gave us each a cotton sack , about 10 feet long , about that big around , and we started picking .
now , cotton is soft but the outside of the plant is just full of stickers .
and if you do n't know what you 're doing , your hands are bleeding in no time .
and my brother and i started to pick it , and our hands were startin ' to bleed , and then - " mom ! "
and mom was just sitting by the car like this .
she was n't going to give up .
well , the foreman could see he was in over his head , i guess .
he kind of just snuck up behind us and he sang out in a low voice .
he just sang : " well , there 's a long white robe in heaven , i know .
do n't want it to leave me behind .
well , there 's a long white robe in heaven , i know .
do n't want it to leave me behind . "
and from all around as people started singing and answering back , he sang : " good news , good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
and i do n't want it to leave me behind . "
now , my brother and i had never heard anything like that in our whole lives . it was so beautiful .
we sat there all day picking cotton , without complaining , without crying , while they sang things like : " oh , mary , do n't you weep , do n't you moan " and " wade in the water , " and " i done done , " " this little light of mine . "
finally , by the end of the day , we 'd each picked about a quarter of a bag of cotton .
but the foreman was kind enough to give us each a check for a dollar , but my mother would never let us cash it .
i 'm 57 ; still have the check .
now , my mother hoped that we learned from that the value of hard work .
but if you have children , you know it does n't often work that way .
no , we learned something else .
the first thing i learned that day was that i never ever wanted to work that hard again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and pretty much never did .
but i also learned that some people in this world do have to work that hard every day , and that was an eye-opener .
and i also learned that a great song can make hard work go a little easier .
and it also can bring the group together in a way that nothing else can .
now , i was just a little eight-year-old boy that day when my mama put me out of the car in that hot texas cotton field .
i was n't even aware of music - not even aware of it .
but that day in the cotton field out there picking , when those people started singing , i realized i was in the very heart of real music , and that 's where i 've wanted to be ever since .
try this old song with me . i sing : well , there 's a long white robe in heaven , i know .
you sing : do n't want it to leave me behind .
well , there 's a long white robe in heaven , i know .
do n't want it to leave me behind .
good news , good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
and i do n't want it to leave me - it 's been a while since you guys have been picking your last bale of cotton , is n't it ?
let 's try it one more time .
there 's a starry crown in heaven , i know .
do n't want it to leave me behind .
there 's a starry crown in heaven , i know .
do n't want it to leave me behind .
good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
and i do n't want it to leave me behind .
it was a few years ago , but i sort of remembered this story , and i told it at a concert .
my mom was in the audience .
after the - she was glad to have a story about herself , of course , but after the concert she came up and she said , " david , i 've got to tell you something .
i set that whole thing up .
i set it up with the foreman . i set it up with the owner of the land .
i just wanted you boys to learn the value of hard work .
i did n't know it was going to make you fall in love with music though . "
let 's try . good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
good news : chariot 's coming .
and i do n't want it to leave me behind .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , this is the steel guitar . it 's an american-made instrument .
it was originally made by the dopyera brothers , who later on made the dobro , which is a wood-bodied instrument with a metal cone for - where the sound comes from .
it 's usually played flat on your lap .
it was made to play hawaiian music back in the 1920s , before they had electric guitars , trying to make a loud guitar .
and then african-american folks figured out you could take a broken bottle neck , just like that - a nice merlot works very well .
that wine we had yesterday would have been perfect .
break it off , put it on your finger , and slide into the notes .
this instrument pretty much saved my life .
fifteen years ago , 14 years ago , i guess , this year , my wife and i lost our daughter , sarah jane , in a car accident , and it was the most - it almost took me out - it almost took me out of this world .
and i think i learned a lot about what happiness was by going through such unbelievable grief , just standing on the edge of that abyss and just wanting to jump in .
i had to make lists of reasons to stay alive .
i had to sit down and make lists , because i was ready to go ; i was ready to check out of this world .
and you know , at the top of the list , of course , were jenny , and my son , zeb , my parents - i did n't want to hurt them .
but then , when i thought about it beyond that , it was very simple things .
i did n't care about - i had a radio show , i have a radio show on public radio , " riverwalk , " i did n't care about that . i did n't care about awards or money or anything .
nothing . nothing .
on the list it would be stuff like , seeing the daffodils bloom in the spring , the smell of new-mown hay , catching a wave and bodysurfing , the touch of a baby 's hand , the sound of doc watson playing the guitar , listening to old records of muddy waters and uncle dave macon .
and for me , the sound of a steel guitar , because one of my parents ' neighbors just gave me one of these things .
and i would sit around with it , and i did n't know how to play it , but i would just play stuff as sad as i could play .
and it was the only instrument that , of all the ones that i play , that would really make that connection .
this is a song that came out of that .
-lrb- music -rrb- well , i hear you 're having trouble .
lord , i hate to hear that news .
if you want to talk about it , you know , i will listen to you through .
words no longer say it ; let me tell you what i always do .
i just break off another bottleneck and play these steel guitar blues .
people say , " oh , snap out of it ! "
oh yeah , that 's easier said than done .
while you can hardly move , they 're running around having all kinds of fun .
sometimes i think it 's better just to sink way down in your funky mood ' til you can rise up humming these steel guitar blues .
now , you can try to keep it all inside with drink and drugs and cigarettes , but you know that 's not going to get you where you want to get .
but i got some medicine here that just might shake things loose .
call me in the morning after a dose of these steel guitar blues .
open up now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , i think i 've got time to tell you about this . my dad was an inventor .
we moved to california when sputnik went up , in 1957 .
and he was working on gyroscopes ; he has a number of patents for that kind of thing .
and we moved across the street from michael and john whitney .
they were about my age .
john went on , and michael did too , to become some of the inventors of computer animation .
michael 's dad was working on something called the computer .
this was 1957 , i was a little 10-year-old kid ; i did n't know what that was . but he took me down to see one , you know , what they were making . it was like a library , just full of vacuum tubes as far as you could see , just floors and floors of these things , and one of the engineers said , some day you 're going to be able to put this thing in your pocket .
i thought , damn , those are going to be some big pants !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that christmas - maybe i 've got time for this - that christmas i got the mister wizard fun-o-rama chemistry set .
well , i wanted to be an inventor just like my dad ; so did michael .
his great-granddad had been eli whitney , the inventor of the cotton gin .
so we looked in that - this was a commercial chemistry set .
it had three chemicals we were really surprised to see : sulfur , potassium nitrate and charcoal .
man , we were only 10 , but we knew that made gunpowder .
we made up a little batch and we put it on the driveway and we threw a match and phew , it flared up . ah , it was great .
well , obviously the next thing to do was build a cannon .
so we went over into michael 's garage - his dad had all kinds of stuff , and we put a pipe in the vice there , and screwed a cap on the end of the pipe , drilled a hole in the back of the pipe , took some of our firecrackers , pulled out the fuses , tied them together , put them in the back there , and - down in that hole - and then stuffed some of our gunpowder down that pipe and put three ball bearings on the top , in the garage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we were n't stupid : we put up a sheet of plywood about five feet in front of it .
we stood back , we lit that thing , and they flew out of there - they went through that plywood like it was paper .
through the garage .
two of them landed in the side door of his new citroen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we tore everything down and buried it in his backyard .
that was pacific palisades ; it probably is still there , back there .
well , my brother heard that we had made gunpowder .
he and his buddies , they were older , and they were pretty mean .
they said they were going to beat us up if we did n't make some gunpowder for them .
we said , well , what are you going to do with it ?
they said , we 're going to melt it down and make rocket fuel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sure . we 'll make you a big batch .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we made them a big batch , and it was in my - now , we 'd just moved here . we 'd just moved to california .
mom had redone the kitchen ; mom was gone that day . we had a pie tin .
it became chris berquist 's job to do the melting down .
michael and i were standing way at the side of the kitchen .
he said , " yeah , hey , it 's melting . yeah , the sulfur 's melting .
no problem . yeah , you know . "
it just flared up , and he turned around , and he looked like this .
no hair , no eyelashes , no nothing .
there were big welts all over my mom 's kitchen cabinet ; the air was the just full of black smoke .
she came home , she took that chemistry set away , and we never saw it again .
but we thought of it often , because every time she 'd cook tuna surprise it made - tasted faintly of gunpowder .
so i like to invent things too , and i think i 'll close out my set with something i invented a good while back .
when drum machines were new , i got to thinking , why could n't you take the oldest form of music , the hambone rhythms , and combine it with the newest technology ?
i call this thunderwear .
at that time , drum triggers were new .
and so i put them all together and sewed 12 of them in this suit .
i showed you some of the hambone rhythms yesterday ; i 'm going to be doing some of the same ones .
i have a trigger here , trigger here , here , here . right there .
it 's going to really hurt if i do n't take that off . okay .
now , the drum triggers go out my tail here , into the drum machine , and they can make various sounds , like drums .
so let me put them all together . and also , i can change the sounds by stepping on this pedal right here , and - let me just close out here by doing you a little hambone solo or something like this .
thank you , folks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's an amazing thing that we 're here to talk about the year of patients rising .
you heard stories earlier today about patients who are taking control of their cases , patients who are saying , " you know what , i know what the odds are , but i 'm going to go look for more information .
i 'm going to define what the terms of my success are . "
i 'm going to be sharing with you how four years ago i almost died - found out i was , in fact , already almost dead .
and what i then found out about what 's called the e-patient movement - i 'll explain what that term means .
i had been blogging under the name patient dave , and when i discovered this , i just renamed myself e-patient dave .
regarding the word " patient , " when i first started a few years ago getting involved in health care and attending meetings as just a casual observer , i noticed that people would talk about patients as if it was somebody who 's not in the room here , somebody out there .
some of our talks today , we still act like that .
but i 'm here to tell you , " patient " is not a third-person word .
you , yourself , will find yourself in a hospital bed - or your mother , your child - there are heads nodding , people who say , " yes , i know exactly what you mean . "
so when you hear what i 'm going to talk about here today , first of all , i want to say that i am here on behalf of all the patients that i have ever met , all the ones i have n't met .
this is about letting patients play a more active role in helping health care , in fixing health care .
one of the senior doctors at my hospital , charlie safran , and his colleague , warner slack , have been saying for decades that the most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient .
they have been saying that since the 1970s .
now i 'm going to step back in history .
this is from july , 1969 .
i was a freshman in college , and this was when we first landed on the moon .
and it was the first time we had ever seen from another surface - that 's the place where you and i are right now , where we live .
the world was changing .
it was about to change in ways that nobody could foresee .
a few weeks later , woodstock happened .
three days of fun and music .
here , just for historical authenticity , is a picture of me in that year .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , the wavy hair , the blue eyes - it was really something .
that fall of 1969 , the whole earth catalog came out .
it was a hippie journal of self-sufficiency .
we think of hippies of being just hedonists , but there 's a very strong component - i was in that movement - a very strong component of being responsible for yourself .
this book 's title 's subtitle is : " access to tools . "
and it talked about how to build your own house , how to grow your own food , all kinds of things .
in the 1980s , this young doctor , tom ferguson , was the medical editor of the whole earth catalog .
and he saw that the great majority of what we do in medicine and health care is taking care of ourselves .
in fact , he said it was 70 to 80 percent of how we actually take care of our bodies .
well he also saw that when health care turns to medical care because of a more serious disease , the key thing that holds us back is access to information .
and when the web came along , that changed everything , because not only could we find information , we could find other people like ourselves who could gather , who could bring us information .
and he coined this term e-patients - equipped , engaged , empowered , enabled .
obviously at this stage of life he was in a somewhat more dignified form than he was back then .
now i was an engaged patient long before i ever heard of the term .
in 2006 , i went to my doctor for a regular physical , and i had said , " i have a sore shoulder . "
well , i got an x-ray , and the next morning - you may have noticed , those of you who have been through a medical crisis will understand this .
this morning , some of the speakers named the date when they found out about their condition .
for me , it was 9:00 am on january 3 , 2007 .
i was at the office ; my desk was clean ; i had the blue partition carpet on the walls .
the phone rang and it was my doctor .
he said , " dave , i pulled up the x-ray image on the screen on the computer at home . "
he said , " your shoulder 's going to be fine , but dave , there 's something in your lung . "
and if you look in that red oval , that shadow was not supposed to be there .
to make a long story short , i said , " so you need me to get back in there ? "
he said , " yeah , we 're going to need to do a ct scan of your chest . "
and in parting i said , " is there anything i should do ? "
he said - think about this one .
this is the advice your doctor gives you : " just go home and have a glass of wine with your wife . "
i went in for the cat scan , and it turns out there were five of these things in both my lungs .
so at that point we knew that it was cancer .
we knew it was n't lung cancer .
that meant it was metastasized from somewhere .
the question was , where from ?
so i went in for an ultrasound .
i got to do what many women have - the jelly on the belly and bzzzz .
my wife came with me .
she 's a veterinarian , so she 's seen lots of ultrasounds .
i mean , she knows i 'm not a dog .
but what we saw - this is an mri image .
this is much sharper than an ultrasound would be .
what we saw in that kidney was that big blob there .
and there were actually two of these .
one was growing out the front and it had already erupted , and it latched onto the bowel .
one was growing out the back , and it attached to the soleus muscle , which is a big muscle in the back that i 'd never heard of , but all of a sudden i cared about it .
i went home .
now i 've been googling - i 've been online since 1989 on compuserve .
i went home , and i know you ca n't read the details here ; that 's not important .
my point is i went to a respected medical website , webmd , because i know how to filter out junk .
i also found my wife online .
before i met her , i went through some suboptimal search results .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i looked for quality information .
there 's so much about trust - what sources of information can we trust ?
where does my body end and an invader start ?
and cancer , a tumor , is something you grow out of your own tissue .
how does that happen ?
where does medical ability end and start ?
well , so what i read on webmd : " the prognosis is poor for progressing renal cell cancer .
almost all patients are incurable . "
i 've been online long enough to know if i do n't like the first results i get , i go look for more .
and what i found was on other websites , even by the third page of google results , " outlook is bleak , " " prognosis is grim . "
and i 'm thinking , " what the heck ? "
i did n't feel sick at all .
i mean , i 'd been getting tired in the evening , but i was 56 years old .
i was slowly losing weight , but for me , that was what the doctor told me to do .
it was really something .
and this is the diagram of stage four kidney cancer from the drug i eventually got .
totally by coincidence , there 's that thing in my lung .
in the left femur , the left thigh bone , there 's another one .
i had one . my leg eventually snapped .
i fainted and landed on it , and it broke .
there 's one in the skull , and then just for good measure , i had these other tumors - including , by the time my treatment started , one was growing out of my tongue .
i had kidney cancer growing out of my tongue .
and what i read was that my median survival was 24 weeks .
this was bad .
i was facing the grave .
i thought , " what 's my mother 's face going to look like on the day of my funeral ? "
i had to sit down with my daughter and say , " here 's the situation . "
her boyfriend was with her .
i said , " i do n't want you guys to get married prematurely just so you can do it while dad 's still alive . "
it 's really serious .
because if you wonder why patients are motivated and want to help , think about this .
well , my doctor prescribed a patient community , acor.org , a network of cancer patients , of all amazing things .
very quickly they told me , " kidney cancer is an uncommon disease .
get yourself to a specialist center .
there is no cure , but there 's something that sometimes works - it usually does n't - called high-dosage interleukin .
most hospitals do n't offer it , so they wo n't even tell you it exists .
and do n't let them give you anything else first .
and by the way , here are four doctors in your part of the united states who offer it and their phone numbers . "
how amazing is that ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- here 's the thing .
here we are , four years later : you ca n't find a website that gives patients that information .
government-approved , american cancer society , but patients know what patients want to know .
it 's the power of patient networks .
this amazing substance - again i mentioned , where does my body end ?
my oncologist and i talk a lot these days because i try to keep my talks technically accurate .
and he said , " you know , the immune system is good at detecting invaders - bacteria coming from outside - but when it 's your own tissue that you 've grown , it 's a whole different thing . "
and i went through a mental exercise actually , because i started a patient support community of my own on a website , and one of my friends , one of my relatives actually , said , " look , dave , who grew this thing ?
are you going to set yourself up as mentally attacking yourself ? "
so we went into it .
and the story of how all that happens is in this book .
anyway , this is the way the numbers unfolded .
me being me , i put the numbers from my hospital 's website from my tumor sizes into a spreadsheet .
do n't worry about the numbers .
you see , that 's the immune system .
amazing thing , those two yellow lines are where i got the two doses of interleukin two months apart .
and look at how the tumor sizes plummeted in between .
just incredible .
who knows what we 'll be able to do when we learn to make more use of it .
the punch line is that a year and a half later , i was there when this magnificent young woman , my daughter , got married .
and when she came down those steps , and it was just her and me for that moment , i was so glad that she did n't have to say to her mother , " i wish dad could have been here . "
and this is what we 're doing when we make health care better .
now i want to talk briefly about a couple of other patients who are doing everything in their power to improve health care .
this is regina holliday , a painter in washington d.c. , whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease .
she 's painting here a mural of his horrible final weeks in the hospital .
one of the things that she discovered was that her husband 's medical record in this paper folder was just disorganized .
and she thought , " you know , if i have a nutrition facts label on the side of a cereal box , why ca n't there be something that simple telling every new nurse who comes on duty , every new doctor , the basics about my husband 's condition ? "
so she painted this medical facts mural with a nutrition label , something like that , in a diagram of him .
she then , last year , painted this diagram .
she studied health care like me .
she came to realize that there were a lot of people who 'd written patient advocate books that you just do n't hear about at medical conferences .
patients are such an underutilized resource .
well as it says in my introduction , i 've gotten somewhat known for saying that patients should have access to their data .
and i actually said at one conference a couple of years ago , " give me my damn data , because you people ca n't be trusted to keep it clean . "
and here she has our damned data - it 's a pun - which is starting to break out , starting to break through - the water symbolizes our data .
and in fact , i want to do a little something improvisational for you here .
there 's a guy on twitter that i know , a health it guy outside boston , and he wrote the e-patient rap .
and it goes like this .
♫ gimme my damn data ♫ ♫ i want to be an e-patient just like dave ♫ ♫ gimme my damn data , cuz it 's my life to save ♫ now i 'm not going to go any further .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well thank you . that shot the timing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- think about the possibility , why is it that iphones and ipads advance far faster than the health tools that are available to you to help take care of your family ?
here 's a website , visiblebody.com , that i stumbled across .
and i thought , " you know , i wonder what my soleus muscle is ? "
so you can click on things and remove it .
and i saw , " aha , that 's the kidney and the soleus muscle . "
and i was rotating it in 3d and saying , " i understand now . "
and then i realized it reminded me of google earth , where you can fly to any address .
and i thought , " why not take this and connect it to my digital scan data and have google earth for my body ? "
what did google come out with this year ?
now there 's google body browser .
but you see , it 's still generic .
it 's not my data .
but if we can get that data out from behind the dam so software innovators can pounce on it , the way software innovators like to do , who knows what we 'll be able to come up with .
one final story : this is kelly young , a rheumatoid arthritis patient from florida .
this is a live story unfolding just in the last few weeks .
ra patients , as they call themselves - her blog is ra warrior - have a big problem because 40 percent of them have no visible symptoms .
and that makes it just really hard to tell how the disease is going .
and some doctors think , " yeah right , you 're really in pain . "
well she found , through her online research , a nuclear bone scan that 's usually used for cancer , but it can also reveal inflammation .
and she saw that if there is no inflammation then the scan is a uniform gray .
so she took it .
and the radiologist report said , " no cancer found . "
well that 's not what he was supposed to do with it .
so she had it read again , she wanted to have it read again , and her doctor fired her .
she pulled up the cd .
he said , " if you do n't want to follow my instructions , go away . "
so she pulled up the cd of the scan images , and look at all those hot spots .
and she 's now actively engaged on her blog in looking for assistance in getting better care .
see , that is an empowered patient - no medical training .
we are , you are , the most underused resource in health care .
what she was able to do was because she had access to the raw data .
how big a deal was this ?
well at ted2009 , tim berners-lee himself , inventor of the web , gave a talk where he said the next big thing is not to have your browser go out and find other people 's articles about the data , but the raw data .
and he got them chanting by the end of the talk , " raw data now .
raw data now . "
and i ask you , three words , please , to improve health care : let patients help .
let patients help .
let patients help .
let patients help .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for all the patients around the world watching this on the webcast , god bless you , everyone - let patients help .
host : and bless yourself . thank you very much .
aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space , architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses .
our work is across media . the work comes in all shapes and sizes .
it 's small and large . this is an ashtray , a water glass .
from urban planning and master planning to theater and all sorts of stuff .
the thing that all the work has in common is that it challenges the assumptions about conventions of space .
and these are everyday conventions , conventions that are so obvious that we are blinded by their familiarity .
and i 've assembled a sampling of work that all share a kind of productive nihilism that 's used in the service of creating a particular special effect .
and that is something like nothing , or something next to nothing .
it 's done through a form of subtraction or obstruction or interference in a world that we naturally sleepwalk through .
this is an image that won us a competition for an exhibition pavilion for the swiss expo 2002 on lake neuchatel , near geneva .
and we wanted to use the water not only as a context , but as a primary building material .
we wanted to make an architecture of atmosphere .
so , no walls , no roof , no purpose - just a mass of atomized water , a big cloud .
and this proposal was a reaction to the over-saturation of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions , which feeds , or has been feeding , our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity .
high definition , in our opinion , has become the new orthodoxy .
and we ask the question , can we use technology , high technology , to make an expo pavilion that 's decidedly low definition , that also challenges the conventions of space and skin , and rethinks our dependence on vision ?
so this is how we sought to do it .
water 's pumped from the lake and is filtered and shot as a fine mist through an array of high-pressure fog nozzles , 35,000 of them . and a weather station is on the structure .
it reads the shifting conditions of temperature , humidity , wind direction , wind speed , dew point , and it processes this data in a central computer that calibrates the degree of water pressure and distribution of water throughout .
and it 's a responsive system that 's trained on actual weather .
so , this is just in construction , and there 's a tensegrity structure .
it 's about 300 feet wide , the size of a football field , and it sits on just four very delicate columns .
these are the fog nozzles , the interface , and basically the system is kind of reading the real weather , and producing kind of semi-artificial and real weather .
so , we 're very interested in creating weather . i do n't know why .
now , here we go , one side , the outside and then from the inside of the space you can see what the quality of the space was .
unlike entering any normal space , entering blur is like stepping into a habitable medium .
it 's formless , featureless , depthless , scaleless , massless , purposeless and dimensionless .
all references are erased , leaving only an optical whiteout and white noise of the pulsing nozzles .
so , this is an exhibition pavilion where there is absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do .
and we pride ourselves - it 's a spectacular anti-spectacle in which all the conventions of spectacle are turned on their head .
so , the audience is dispersed , focused attention and dramatic build-up and climax are all replaced by a kind of attenuated attention that 's sustained by a sense of apprehension caused by the fog .
and this is very much like how the victorian novel used fog in this way .
so here the world is put out of focus , while our visual dependence is put into focus .
the public , you know , once disoriented can actually ascend to the angel deck above and then just come down under those lips into the water bar .
so , all the waters of the world are served there , so we thought that , you know , after being at the water and moving through the water and breathing the water , you could also drink this building .
and so it is sort of a theme , but it goes a little bit , you know , deeper than that .
we really wanted to bring out our absolute dependence on this master sense , and maybe share our kind of sensibility with our other senses .
you know , when we did this project it was a kind of tough sell , because the swiss said , " well , why are we going to spend , you know , 10 million dollars producing an effect that we already have in natural abundance that we hate ? "
and , you know , we thought - well , we tried to convince them .
and in the end , you know , they adapted this as a national icon that came to represent swiss doubt , which we - you know , it was kind of a meaning machine that everybody kind of laid on their own meanings off of .
anyway , it 's a temporary structure that was ultimately destroyed , and so it 's now a memory of an apparition , actually , but it continues to live in edible form .
and this is the highest honor to be bestowed upon an architect in switzerland - to have a chocolate bar .
anyway , moving along .
so in the ' 80s and ' 90s , we were mostly known for independent work , such as installation artist , architect , commissioned projects by museums and non-for-profit organizations .
and we did a lot of media work , also a lot of experimental theater projects .
in 2003 , the whitney mounted a retrospective of our work that featured a lot of this work from the ' 80s and ' 90s .
however , the work itself resisted the very nature of a retrospective , and this is just some of the stuff that was in the show .
this was a piece on tourism in the united states .
this is " soft sell " for 42nd street .
this was something done at the cartier foundation .
" master / slave " at the moma , the project series , a piece called " parasite . "
and so there were many , many of these kinds of projects .
anyway , they gave us the whole fourth floor , and , you know , the problem of the retrospective was something we were very uncomfortable with .
it 's a kind of invention of the museum that 's supposed to bring a kind of cohesive understanding to the public of a body of work .
and our work does n't really resolve itself into a body in any way at all .
and one of the recurring themes , by the way , that in the work was a kind of hostility toward the museum itself , and asking about the conventions of the museum , like the wall , the white wall .
so , what you see here is basically a plan of many installations that were put there .
and we actually had to install white walls to separate these pieces , which did n't belong together .
but these white walls became a kind of target and weapon at the same time .
we used the wall to partition the 13 installations of the project and produce a kind of acoustic and visual separation .
and what you see is - actually , the red dotted line shows the track of this performing element , which was a new piece that created - that we created for the - which was a robotic drill , basically , that went all the way around , cruised the museum , went all around the walls and did a lot of damage .
so , the drill was mounted on this robotic arm .
we worked with , by the way , honeybee robotics . this is the brain .
honeybee robotics designed the mars driller , and it was really very much fun to work with them .
they were n't doing their primary work , which was for the government , while they were helping us with this .
in any case , the way it works is that an intelligent navigator basically maps the entire surface of these walls .
so , unfolded it 's about 300 linear feet .
and it randomly generates points within a three-dimensional matrix .
it selects a point , it guides the drill to that point , it pierces the dry wall , leaving a half-inch hole before traveling to the next location .
initially these holes were lone blemishes , and as the exhibition continued the walls became increasingly perforated .
so eventually holes on both sides of the wall aligned , opening views from gallery to gallery .
clusters of holes randomly opened up sections of wall .
and so this was a three-month performance piece in which the wall was made into kind of an increasingly unstable element .
and also the acoustic separation was destroyed .
also the visual separation .
and there was also this constant background groan , which was very annoying .
and this is one of the blackout spaces where there 's a video piece that became totally not useful .
so rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display , the wall now actively competed for attention .
and this acoustical nuisance and visual nuisance basically exposed the discomfort of the work to this encompassing nature of the retrospective .
it was really great when it started to break up all of the curatorial text .
moving along to a project that we finished about a year ago .
it 's the ica - the institute of contemporary art - in boston , which is on the waterfront .
and there 's not enough time to really introduce the building , but i 'll simply say that the building negotiates between this outwardly focused nature of the site - you know , it 's a really great waterfront site in boston - and this contradictory other desire to have an inwardly focused museum .
so , the nature of the building is that it looks at looking - i mean that 's its primary objective , both its program and its architectural conceit .
the building incorporates the site , but it dispenses it in very small doses in the way that the museum is choreographed .
so , you come in and you 're basically squeezed by the theater , by the belly of the theater , into this very compressed space where the view is turned off .
then you come up in this glass elevator right near the curtain wall .
this elevator 's about the size of a new york city studio apartment .
and then , this is a view going up , and then you could come into the theater , which can actually deny the view or open it up and become a backdrop .
and many musicians choose to use the theater glass walls totally open .
the view is denied in the galleries where we receive just natural light , and then exposed again in the north gallery with a panoramic view .
the original intention of this space , which was unfortunately never realized , was to use lenticular glass which allowed only a kind of perpendicular view out .
in this very narrow space that connects east and west galleries the intention was really to not get a climax , but to have the view stalk you , so the view would open up as you walked from one end to the other .
this was eliminated because the view was too good , and the mayor said , " no , we just want this open . "
the architect lost here .
but culminating - and that 's where this hooks into the theme of my little talk - is this mediatheque , which is suspended from the cantilevered portion of the building .
so this is an 80-foot cantilever - it 's quite substantial .
so , it 's already sticking out into space enough , and then from that is this , is this small area called the mediatheque .
the mediatheque has something like 16 stations where the public can get onto the server and look at digital artworks or also curated artworks off the web .
and this was really a kind of very important part of this building , and here is a point where architecture - this is like technology-free - architecture is only a framing device , it only edits the harbor view , the industrial harbor just through its walls , its floors and its ceiling , to only expose the water itself , the texture of water , much like a hypnotic effect created by electronic snow or a lava lamp or something like that .
and here is where we really felt that there was a great convergence of the technological and the natural in the project .
but there is just no information , it 's just - it 's just hypnosis .
moving along to lincoln center .
these are the guys that did the project in the first place , 50 years ago .
we 're taking over now , doing work that ranges in scale from small-scale repairs to major renovations and major facility expansions .
but we 're doing it with a lot less testosterone .
this is the extent of the work that 's to be completed by 2010 .
and for the purposes of this talk , i wanted to isolate just a part of a project that 's even a part of a project that touches a little bit on this theme of architectural special effects , and it happens to be our current obsession , and it plays a little bit with the purging and adding of distraction .
it 's alice tully hall , and it 's tucked under the juilliard building and descends several levels under the street .
so , this is the entrance to tully hall as it used to be , before the renovation , which we just started .
and we asked ourselves , why could n't it be exhibitionistic , like the met , or like some of the other buildings at lincoln center ?
and one of the things that we were asked to do was give it a street identity , expand the lobbies and make it visually accessible .
and this building , which is just naturally hermetic , we stripped .
we basically did a striptease , architectural striptease , where we 're framing with this kind of canopy - the underside of three levels of expansion of juilliard , about 45,000 square feet - cutting it to the angle of broadway , and then exposing , using that canopy to frame tully hall .
before and after shot . -lrb- applause -rrb- wait a minute , it 's just in that state , we have a long way to go .
but what i wanted to do was take a couple of seconds that i have left to just talk about the hall itself , which is kind of where we 're really doing a massive amount of work .
so , the hall is a multi-purpose hall .
the clients have asked us to produce a great chamber music hall .
now , that 's really tough to do with a hall that has 1,100 seats .
chamber and the notion of chamber has to do with salons and small-scale performances . they asked us to bring an intimacy .
how do you bring an intimacy into a hall ?
intimacy for us means a lot of different things .
it means acoustic intimacy and it means visual intimacy .
one thing is that the subway is running and rumbling right under the hall .
another thing that could be fixed is the shape of the hall .
it 's like a coffin , it basically sends all the sound , like a gutter-ball effect , down the aisles .
the walls are made of absorptive surface , half absorptive , half reflective , which is not very good for concert sound .
this is avery fisher hall , but the notion of junk - visual junk - was very , very important to us , to get rid of visual noise .
because we ca n't eliminate a single seat , the architecture is restricted to 18 inches .
so it 's a very , very thin architecture .
first we do a kind of partial box and box separation , to take away the distraction of the subway noise .
next we wrap the entire hall - almost like this olivetti keyboard - with a material , with a wood material that basically covers all the surfaces : wall , ceiling , floor , stage , steps , everything , boxes .
but it 's acoustically engineered to focus the sound into the house and back to the stage . and here 's an acoustic shelf .
looking up the hall . just a section of the stage .
just everything is lined , it incorporates - every single thing that you could possibly imagine is tucked into this high-performance skin .
but one more added feature .
so now that we 've stripped the hall of all visual distraction , everything that prevents this intimacy which is supposed to connect the house , the audience , with the performers , we add one little detail , one piece of architectural excess , a special effect : lighting .
we very strongly believe that the theatrics of a concert hall is as much in the space of intermission and the space of arrival as it is when the concert starts .
so what we wanted to do was produce this effect , this lighting effect , which made us have to bioengineer the wood walls .
and what it entails is the use of resin , of this very thick resin with a veneer of the same kind of wood that 's used throughout the hall , in a kind of seamless continuity that wraps the hall in light , like a belt of light : rather than separating , like a proscenium would separate the audience from performers , it connects audience with players .
and this is a mockup that is in salt lake city that gives you a sense of what this is going to look like in full-scale .
and this is a guy from salt lake city , this is what they look like out there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and for us , i mean it 's really kind of a very strange thing , but the moments in the hall that the buzz kind of dies down when the audience is waiting for the performance to begin , very similar to the parting of curtains or the raising of a chandelier , the walls will just exude this glow , temporarily stealing attention from the stage .
and this is tully in construction now .
i have no ending to say , except that i 'm a couple of minutes over .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to talk to you about two things tonight .
number one : teaching surgery and doing surgery is really hard .
and second , that language is one of the most profound things that separate us all over the world .
and in my little corner of the world , these two things are actually related , and i want to tell you how tonight .
now , nobody wants an operation .
who here has had surgery ?
did you want it ?
keep your hands up if you wanted an operation .
nobody wants an operation .
in particular , nobody wants an operation with tools like these through large incisions that cause a lot of pain , that cause a lot of time out of work or out of school , that leave a big scar .
but if you have to have an operation , what you really want is a minimally invasive operation .
that 's what i want to talk to you about tonight - how doing and teaching this type of surgery led us on a search for a better universal translator .
now , this type of surgery is hard , and it starts by putting people to sleep , putting carbon dioxide in their abdomen , blowing them up like a balloon , sticking one of these sharp pointy things into their abdomen - it 's dangerous stuff - and taking instruments and watching it on a tv screen .
so let 's see what it looks like .
so this is gallbladder surgery .
we perform a million of these a year in the united states alone .
this is the real thing . there 's no blood .
and you can see how focused the surgeons are , how much concentration it takes .
you can see it in their faces .
it 's hard to teach , and it 's not all that easy to learn .
we do about five million of these in the united states and maybe 20 million of these worldwide .
all right , you 've all heard the term : " he 's a born surgeon . "
let me tell you , surgeons are not born .
surgeons are not made either .
there are no little tanks where we 're making surgeons .
surgeons are trained one step at a time .
it starts with a foundation , basic skills .
we build on that and we take people , hopefully , to the operating room where they learn to be an assistant .
then we teach them to be a surgeon in training .
and when they do all of that for about five years , they get the coveted board certification .
if you need surgery , you want to be operated on by a board-certified surgeon .
you get your board certificate , and you can go out into practice .
and eventually , if you 're lucky , you achieve mastery .
now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the united states , sages , started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures .
now the science behind this is so potent that it became required by the american board of surgery in order for a young surgeon to become board certified .
it 's not a lecture , it 's not a course , it 's all of that plus a high-stakes assessment .
it 's hard .
now just this past year , one of our partners , the american college of surgeons , teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be fls -lrb- fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery -rrb- -certified before they do minimally invasive surgery .
and are we talking about just people here in the u.s. and canada ?
no , we just said all surgeons .
so to lift this education and training worldwide is a very large task , something i 'm very personally excited about as we travel around the world .
sages does surgery all over the world , teaching and educating surgeons .
so we have a problem , and one of the problems is distance .
we ca n't travel everywhere .
we need to make the world a smaller place .
and i think that we can develop some tools to do so .
and one of the tools i like personally is using video .
so i was inspired by a friend .
this is allan okrainec from toronto .
and he proved that you could actually teach people to do surgery using video conferencing .
so here 's allan teaching an english-speaking surgeon in africa these basic fundamental skills necessary to do minimally invasive surgery .
very inspiring .
but for this examination , which is really hard , we have a problem .
even people who say they speak english , only 14 percent pass .
because for them it 's not a surgery test , it 's an english test .
let me bring it to you locally .
i work at the cambridge hospital .
it 's the primary harvard medical school teaching facility .
we have more than 100 translators covering 63 languages , and we spend millions of dollars just in our little hospital .
it 's a big labor-intensive effort .
if you think about the worldwide burden of trying to talk to your patients - not just teaching surgeons , just trying to talk to your patients - there are n't enough translators in the world .
we need to employ technology to assist us in this quest .
at our hospital we see everybody from harvard professors to people who just got here last week .
and you have no idea how hard it is to talk to somebody or take care of somebody you ca n't talk to .
and there is n't always a translator available .
so we need tools .
we need a universal translator .
one of the things that i want to leave you with as you think about this talk is that this talk is not just about us preaching to the world .
it 's really about setting up a dialogue .
we have a lot to learn .
here in the united states we spend more money per person for outcomes that are not better than many countries in the world .
maybe we have something to learn as well .
so i 'm passionate about teaching these fls skills all over the world .
this past year i 've been in latin america , i 've been in china , talking about the fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery .
and everywhere i go the barrier is : " we want this , but we need it in our language . "
so here 's what we think we want to do : imagine giving a lecture and being able to talk to people in their own native language simultaneously .
i want to talk to the people in asia , latin america , africa , europe seamlessly , accurately and in a cost-effective fashion using technology .
and it has to be bi-directional .
they have to be able to teach us something as well .
it 's a big task .
so we looked for a universal translator ; i thought there would be one out there .
your webpage has translation , your cellphone has translation , but nothing that 's good enough to teach surgery .
because we need a lexicon . what is a lexicon ?
a lexicon is a body of words that describes a domain .
i need to have a health care lexicon .
and in that i need a surgery lexicon .
that 's a tall order . we have to work at it .
so let me show you what we 're doing .
this is research - ca n't buy it .
we 're working with the folks at ibm research from the accessibility center to string together technologies to work towards the universal translator .
it starts with a framework system where when the surgeon delivers the lecture using a framework of captioning technology , we then add another technology to do video conferencing .
but we do n't have the words yet , so we add a third technology .
and now we 've got the words , and we can apply the special sauce : the translation .
we get the words up in a window and then apply the magic .
we work with a fourth technology .
and we currently have access to eleven language pairs .
more to come as we think about trying to make the world a smaller place .
and i 'd like to show you our prototype of stringing all of these technologies that do n't necessarily always talk to each other to become something useful .
narrator : fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery .
module five : manual skills practice .
students may display captions in their native language .
steven schwaitzberg : if you 're in latin america , you click the " i want it in spanish " button and out it comes in real time in spanish .
but if you happen to be sitting in beijing at the same time , by using technology in a constructive fashion , you could get it in mandarin or you could get it in russian - on and on and on , simultaneously without the use of human translators .
but that 's the lectures .
if you remember what i told you about fls at the beginning , it 's knowledge and skills .
the difference in an operation between doing something successfully and not may be moving your hand this much .
so we 're going to take it one step further ; we 've brought my friend allan back .
allan okrainec : today we 're going to practice suturing .
this is how you hold the needle .
grab the needle at the tip .
it 's important to be accurate .
aim for the black dots .
orient your loop this way .
now go ahead and cut .
very good oscar . i 'll see you next week .
ss : so that 's what we 're working on in our quest for the universal translator .
we want it to be bi-directional .
we have a need to learn as well as to teach .
i can think of a million uses for a tool like this .
as we think about intersecting technologies - everybody has a cell phone with a camera - we could use this everywhere , whether it be health care , patient care , engineering , law , conferencing , translating videos .
this is a ubiquitous tool .
in order to break down our barriers , we have to learn to talk to people , to demand that people work on translation .
we need it for our everyday life , in order to make the world a smaller place .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i did n't always love unintended consequences , but i 've really learned to appreciate them .
i 've learned that they 're really the essence of what makes for progress , even when they seem to be terrible .
and i 'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do .
let 's go to 40,000 years before the present , to the time of the cultural explosion , when music , art , technology , so many of the things that we 're enjoying today , so many of the things that are being demonstrated at ted were born .
and the anthropologist randall white has made a very interesting observation : that if our ancestors 40,000 years ago had been able to see what they had done , they would n't have really understood it .
they were responding to immediate concerns .
they were making it possible for us to do what they do , and yet , they did n't really understand how they did it .
now let 's advance to 10,000 years before the present .
and this is when it really gets interesting .
what about the domestication of grains ?
what about the origins of agriculture ?
what would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment ?
and i could just imagine the committees reporting back to them on where agriculture was going to take humanity , at least in the next few hundred years .
it was really bad news .
first of all , worse nutrition , maybe shorter life spans .
it was simply awful for women .
the skeletal remains from that period have shown that they were grinding grain morning , noon and night .
and politically , it was awful .
it was the beginning of a much higher degree of inequality among people .
if there had been rational technology assessment then , i think they very well might have said , " let 's call the whole thing off . "
even now , our choices are having unintended effects .
historically , for example , chopsticks - according to one japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the university of michigan - resulted in long-term changes in the dentition , in the teeth , of the japanese public .
and we are also changing our teeth right now .
there is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time .
that 's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence .
but i think from the point of view of a neanderthal , there would have been a lot of disapproval of the wimpish choppers that we now have .
so these things are kind of relative to where you or your ancestors happen to stand .
in the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences , and there was a very healthy sense of caution , reflected in the tree of knowledge , in pandora 's box , and especially in the myth of prometheus that 's been so important in recent metaphors about technology .
and that 's all very true .
the physicians of the ancient world - especially the egyptians , who started medicine as we know it - were very conscious of what they could and could n't treat .
and the translations of the surviving texts say , " this i will not treat . this i can not treat . "
they were very conscious .
so were the followers of hippocrates .
the hippocratic manuscripts also - repeatedly , according to recent studies - show how important it is not to do harm .
more recently , harvey cushing , who really developed neurosurgery as we know it , who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook , he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing .
but he did his best , and he kept meticulous records that let him transform that branch of medicine .
now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century , we find a new style of technology .
what we find is , no longer simple tools , but systems .
we find more and more complex arrangements of machines that make it harder and harder to diagnose what 's going on .
and the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century , who were the original hackers .
thomas edison would have been very , very comfortable in the atmosphere of a software firm today .
and these hackers had a word for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems that they called bugs .
that was the origin of the word " bug . "
this consciousness , though , was a little slow to seep through the general population , even people who were very , very well informed .
samuel clemens , mark twain , was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times - at least until 1918 - registered with the u.s. patent office .
that was the paige typesetter .
the paige typesetter had 18,000 parts .
the patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures .
it was such a beautiful machine because it did everything that a human being did in setting type - including returning the type to its place , which was a very difficult thing .
and mark twain , who knew all about typesetting , really was smitten by this machine .
unfortunately , he was smitten in more ways than one , because it made him bankrupt , and he had to tour the world speaking to recoup his money .
and this was an important thing about 19th century technology , that all these relationships among parts could make the most brilliant idea fall apart , even when judged by the most expert people .
now there is something else , though , in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated .
and that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger .
the lesson of the titanic , for a lot of the contemporaries , was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship .
and this was the result of the tragic loss of lives of people who could not get into them .
however , there was another case , the eastland , a ship that capsized in chicago harbor in 1915 , and it killed 841 people - that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the titanic .
the reason for it , in part , was the extra life boats that were added that made this already unstable ship even more unstable .
and that again proves that when you 're talking about unintended consequences , it 's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw .
it 's really a question of the system , how the ship was loaded , the ballast and many other things .
so the 20th century , then , saw how much more complex reality was , but it also saw a positive side .
it saw that invention could actually benefit from emergencies .
it could benefit from tragedies .
and my favorite example of that - which is not really widely known as a technological miracle , but it may be one of the greatest of all times , was the scaling up of penicillin in the second world war .
penicillin was discovered in 1928 , but even by 1940 , no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced .
a number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it .
they were working on it independently , and they were n't getting anywhere .
and the government research bureau brought representatives together and told them that this is something that has to be done .
and not only did they do it , but within two years , they scaled up penicillin from preparation in one-liter flasks to 10,000-gallon vats .
that was how quickly penicillin was produced and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time .
in the second world war , too , the existence of solar radiation was demonstrated by studies of interference that was detected by the radar stations of great britain .
so there were benefits in calamities - benefits to pure science , as well as to applied science and medicine .
now when we come to the period after the second world war , unintended consequences get even more interesting .
and my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976 , when it was discovered that the bacteria causing legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters , but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating , ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of legionella bacillus .
well , technology to the rescue .
so chemists got to work , and they developed a bactericide that became widely used in those systems .
but something else happened in the early 1980s , and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic of failures of tape drives and ibm , which made them , just did n't know what to do .
they commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate , and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts .
what happened was the bactericide was formulated with minute traces of tin .
and these tin particles were deposited on the tape heads and were crashing the tape heads .
so they reformulated the bactericide .
but what 's interesting to me is that this was the first case of a mechanical device suffering , at least indirectly , from a human disease .
so it shows that we 're really all in this together .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , it also shows something interesting , that although our capabilities and technology have been expanding geometrically , unfortunately , our ability to model their long-term behavior , which has also been increasing , has been increasing only arithmetically .
so one of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight .
one other very positive consequence of 20th century technology , though , was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances .
there are two historians of business at the university of maryland , brent goldfarb and david kirsch , who have done some extremely interesting work , much of it still unpublished , on the history of major innovations .
they have combined the list of major innovations , and they 've discovered that the greatest number , the greatest decade , for fundamental innovations , as reflected in all of the lists that others have made - was the great depression .
and nobody knows just why this was so , but one story can reflect something of it .
it was the origin of the xerox copier , which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year .
and chester carlson , the inventor , was a patent attorney .
he really was not intending to work in patent research , but he could n't really find an alternative technical job .
so this was the best job he could get .
he was upset by the low quality and high cost of existing patent reproductions , and so he started to develop a system of dry photocopying , which he patented in the late 1930s - and which became the first dry photocopier that was commercially practical in 1960 .
so we see that sometimes , leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference , that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity .
what does this mean ?
it means , i think , that we 're living in a time of unexpected possibilities .
think of the financial world , for example .
the mentor of warren buffett , benjamin graham , developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash .
and he published that book in the early 1930s , and the book still exists in further editions and is still a fundamental textbook .
so many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters .
now think of the large and small plagues that we have now - bed bugs , killer bees , spam - and it 's very possible that the solutions to those will really extend well beyond the immediate question .
if we think , for example , of louis pasteur , who in the 1860s was asked to study the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry , and his discoveries were really the beginning of the germ theory of disease .
so very often , some kind of disaster - sometimes the consequence , for example , of over-cultivation of silk worms , which was a problem in europe at the time - can be the key to something much bigger .
so this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences .
we need to take a really positive view .
we need to see what they can do for us .
we need to learn from those figures that i mentioned .
we need to learn , for example , from dr. cushing , who killed patients he had to have some errors . he had to have some mistakes .
and he learned meticulously from his mistakes .
and as a result , when we say , " this is n't brain surgery , " that pays tribute to how difficult it was for anyone to learn from their mistakes in a field of medicine that was considered so discouraging in its prospects .
and we can also remember how the pharmaceutical companies were willing to pool their knowledge , to share their knowledge , in the face of an emergency , which they had n't really been for years and years .
they might have been able to do it earlier .
the message , then , for me , about unintended consequences is chaos happens ; let 's make better use of it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- natalie macmaster : i 'm going to just quickly start out with a little bit of music here . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you ! -lrb- applause -rrb- i took my shoes off to dance , but maybe i 'll get at that later .
anyways , i ... where to start ?
well , i 'm really excited to talk a bit about my own upbringing in music and family and all of that , but i 'm even more excited for you people to hear about donnell 's amazing family and maybe even a little bit about how we met , and all that sort of thing , but for those of you that may not be familiar with my upbringing , i 'm from cape breton island , nova scotia , eastern canada , which is a very , very musical island , and its origins come from scotland with the music and all the traditions , the dancing , the language , which unfortunately is dying out
in cape breton .
the traditional language is gaelic , but a lot of the music came from the gaelic language , and the dancing and the singing and everything , and my bloodline is scottish through and through , but my mother and father are two very , very musical people .
my mom taught me to dance when i was five , and my dad taught me to play fiddle when i was nine .
my uncle is a very well-known cape breton fiddler .
his name 's buddy macmaster , and just a wonderful guy , and we have a great tradition at home called square dancing , and we had parties , great parties at our house and the neighbors ' houses , and you talk about kitchen cèilidhs .
well , cèilidh first of all is gaelic for party , but kitchen party in cape breton is very common , and basically somebody drops into the house , and no matter what house you go to in cape breton , there 's a fiddle there , guaranteed , and i 'd say , well there 's first of all more fiddlers per capita in cape breton than anywhere in the world , so ten chances to one , the fellow who walked in the door could play it , so you 'd have someone come into the house , you 'd invite them to play a tune , and lo and behold a little party would start up and somebody would dance ,
and somebody would sing , and all that sort of thing , so it was a wonderful , wonderful way to grow up , and that is where my beginnings in music come from : my surroundings , my family , just my bloodline in itself , and , oh , i 've done lots of things with my music .
i 've recorded lots of cds .
i was nominated for a grammy and i 've won some awards and stuff like that , so that 's awesome , but the best part was meeting my husband , and i 've actually known donnell for probably 12 years now , and i 'm going to get into a little bit of , i guess , how music brought us together , but i 'm going to introduce you right now to my new husband as of october 5 , donnell leahy . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- donnell leahy : thank you . i 'm kind of new to the ted experience and i 'm glad to be here , but i 'm just trying to put it all together , trying to figure all you people out , and i 've
been here for a short while , and i 'm starting to understand a little bit better .
so i asked natalie , what do i do ?
and she said , just talk about yourself .
it 's kind of boring , but i 'll just tell you a little bit about my family . i 'm one of 11 brothers and sisters from lakefield , ontario , an hour and a half northeast of toronto , and we grew up on a farm .
mom and dad raised beef cattle , and i 'm the oldest boy .
there are four girls a little bit older than me .
we grew up without a television .
people find that strange , but i think it was a great blessing for us .
we had a television for a few years , but of course we wasted so much time and the work was n't getting done , so out went the television .
we grew up playing - mom 's from cape breton , coincidentally .
mom and natalie 's mother knew each other . we grew up playing , and used to dance together , right , yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we grew up playing a bunch of , we played by ear and i think that 's important for us because we were not really exposed to a lot of different styles of music .
we learned to play the instruments , but we kind of had to come from within or go from within , because we did n't watch television , we did n't listen to a lot of radio . we went to church and to school sometimes , and farmed and played music , so we were able , i think , at a very critical age to develop our own style , our own self , and my mother plays , my father plays , and the style that came from the ottawa valley in ontario , we call it french-canadian style but it originated in logging camps .
years ago , hundreds of men would go up for the winter to the camps in northern ontario and in quebec , and they were all different cultures , and the irish , the french , scottish , german , they 'd all meet , and of course at night , they 'd play cards and step dance and play fiddles , and over the course of many years , the ottawa valley fiddling kind of evolved and the ottawa valley step dancing evolved , so that 's , i kind of started out with that style and i quickly started doing my own thing , and then i met natalie , and i was exposed to the great cape breton fiddling .
that 's how we met . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you tell them . -lrb- laughter -rrb- nm : you want to or no ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- well i guess i have to now .
well , it 's just so interesting that donnell 's upbringing was very similar to mine , and i actually saw donnell play when i was about 12 years old , and he and his family came to inverness , which is about 45 minutes from where i lived , and i was just blown away , like , it was just amazing , and you 'll find out why pretty soon here , but i could n't believe the fiddling and mom was there with me , and she was saying - donnell 's mother came up on stage and danced with her children , and mom was saying , " that 's julie macdonnell , i used to dance with her when we
were kids . little did i think our children would be playing instruments , you know , playing music , yeah . "
twelve years , er , 20 years later little did she think her kids would be getting married , but anyway , so , then i got a phone call about , i dunno , seven years later . i was 19 , first or second year of college , and it was donnell , and he said " hi , you probably do n't know me but my name is donnell leahy . "
and i said , " i know you .
i have a tape of yours at home . "
and he said , " well , i 'm in truro , " which is where i was , and he asked me out for supper .
that 's it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- then - will i keep going ? -lrb- laughs -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- then we dated for two years , broke up for 10 , got back together and got married . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dl : so anyway , we 're running out of time , so i 'll just get to it .
i 'm going to play a piece of music for you .
it 's actually a scottish piece i 've chosen .
i starts out with a slow air .
airs were played in europe at burials , as a body was carried out from the wake site to the burial site , the procession was led by a piper or a fiddle player .
i 'll quickly play a short part of the air , and then i 'm going to get into kind of a crazy tune that is very difficult to play when you 're not warmed up , so , if i mess it up , pretend you like it anyway . it 's called the banks .
-lrb- tuning -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- nm : well , we 're gonna play one together now . -lrb- applause -rrb- we 're laughing , like , because our styles are totally different , as you can hear .
and so , you know , donnell and i are actually in the process of writing new pieces of music together that we can play , but we do n't have any of those ready .
we just started yesterday . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 're gonna play something together anyway .
dl : with one minute .
nm : with one minute .
-lrb- audience reaction -rrb- dl : you start . nm : no , you have to start , because you 've got to do your thing .
-lrb- music -rrb- nm : i 'm not tuned . hold on .
-lrb- tuning -rrb- nm : i feel like i 'm in the duck or the bird pose right now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- audience claps along -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- announcer : great news , they 're running late downstairs .
we 've got another 10 minutes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- nm : okay . sure .
all right , okay .
let 's get her going . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- tuning -rrb- dl : what do you want to play ?
nm : well , um ...
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- nm : uh , sure .
dl : how fast ?
nm : not too fast .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- audience claps along -rrb- -lrb- cheering -rrb- -lrb- audience claps along -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dl : we 're going to play a tune and natalie 's going to accompany me on the piano .
the cape breton piano playing is just awesome . it 's very rhythmic and , you 'll see it .
my mom plays piano , and she learned to play before they had a piano at home in cape breton . before mom 's family had a piano in cape breton , she learned to play the rhythms on a piece of board , and the fiddlers would all congregate to play on the cold winter 's evenings and mom would be banging on this board , so when they bought a piano , they bought it in toronto and had it taken by train and brought in on a horse , a horse and sleigh to the house .
it became the only piano in the region , and mom said she could basically play as soon as the piano arrived , she could play it because she had learned all these rhythms . anyway , we found the piano last year and were able to bring it back home . we purchased it .
it had gone through , like , five or six families , and it was just a big thing for us , and we found actually an old picture of somebody and their family years ago .
anyway , i 'm blabbering on here .
nm : no , i want you to tell them about leahy .
dl : what about leahy ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- nm : just tell them what - dl : she wants me to talk about - we have a band named leahy .
there 's 11 siblings . we , um - what will i tell them ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- we opened - nm : no surgeries .
dl : no surgeries , oh yeah .
we had a great opportunity .
we opened for shania twain for two years on her international tour .
it was a big thing for us , and now all my sisters are off having babies and the boys are all getting married , so we 're staying close to home for , i guess , another couple of weeks .
what can i say ? i do n't know what to say , natalie . we , uh ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- nm : is this what marriage is about ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- i like it . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- dl : oh yeah , okay , in my family we had seven girls , four boys , we had two fiddles and one piano , and of course we were all fighting to play on the instruments , so dad and mom set a rule that you could n't kick anyone off the instrument . you had to wait until they were finished , so of course , what we would do is we 'd get on the piano and you would n't even get off to eat , because you would n't want to give it up to your brother or sister , and they 'd wait and wait and wait , and it 'd be midnight
and you 'd be still sitting there on the piano , but it was their way to get us to practice .
will we play a tune ?
nm : it worked . dl : it worked .
sorry , i hate to carry on ...
so this is our last number , and we 'll feature nat on piano .
okay , play in , how about a ?
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there 's a great big elephant in the room called the economy .
so let 's start talking about that .
i wanted to give you a current picture of the economy .
that 's what i have behind myself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but of course what we have to remember is this .
and what you have to think about is , when you 're dancing in the flames , what 's next ?
so what i 'm going to try to do in the next 17 and a half minutes is i 'm going to talk first about the flames - where we are in the economy - and then i 'm going to take three trends that have taken place at ted over the last 25 years and that will take place in this conference and i will try and bring them together .
and i will try and give you a sense of what the ultimate reboot looks like .
those three trends are the ability to engineer cells , the ability to engineer tissues , and robots .
and somehow it will all make sense .
but anyway , let 's start with the economy .
there 's a couple of really big problems that are still sitting there .
one is leverage .
and the problem with leverage is it makes the u.s. financial system look like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , a normal commercial bank has nine to 10 times leverage .
that means for every dollar you deposit , it loans out about nine or 10 .
a normal investment bank is not a deposit bank , it 's an investment bank ; it has 15 to 20 times .
it turns out that b of a in september had 32 times .
and your friendly citibank had 47 times .
oops .
that means every bad loan goes bad 47 times over .
and that , of course , is the reason why all of you are making such generous and wonderful donations to these nice folks .
and as you think about that , you 've got to wonder : so what do banks have in store for you now ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it ai n't pretty .
the government , meanwhile , has been acting like santa claus .
we all love santa claus , right ?
but the problem with santa clause is , if you look at the mandatory spending of what these folks have been doing and promising folks , it turned out that in 1967 , 38 percent was mandatory spending on what we call " entitlements . "
and then by 2007 it was 68 percent .
and we were n't supposed to run into 100 percent until about 2030 .
except we 've been so busy giving away a trillion here , a trillion there , that we 've brought that date of reckoning forward to about 2017 .
and we thought we were going to be able to lay these debts off on our kids , but , guess what ?
we 're going to start to pay them .
and the problem with this stuff is , now that the bill 's come due , it turns out santa is n't quite as cute when it 's summertime .
right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here 's some advice from one of the largest investors in the united states .
this guy runs the china investment corporation .
he is the main buyer of u.s. treasury bonds .
and he gave an interview in december .
here 's his first bit of advice .
and here 's his second bit of advice .
and , by the way , the chinese prime minister reiterated this at davos last sunday .
this stuff is getting serious enough that if we do n't start paying attention to the deficit , we 're going to end up losing the dollar .
and then all bets are off .
let me show you what it looks like .
i think i can safely say that i 'm the only trillionaire in this room .
this is an actual bill .
and it 's 10 triliion dollars .
the only problem with this bill is it 's not really worth very much .
that was eight bucks last week , four bucks this week , a buck next week .
and that 's what happens to currencies when you do n't stand behind them .
so the next time somebody as cute as this shows up on your doorstep , and sometimes this creature 's called chrysler and sometimes ford and sometimes ... whatever you want - you 've just got to say no .
and you 've got to start banishing a word that 's called " entitlement . "
and the reason we have to do that in the short term is because we have just run out of cash .
if you look at the federal budget , this is what it looks like .
the orange slice is what 's discretionary .
everything else is mandated .
it makes no difference if we cut out the bridges to alaska in the overall scheme of things .
so what we have to start thinking about doing is capping our medical spending because that 's a monster that 's simply going to eat the entire budget .
we 've got to start thinking about asking people to retire a little bit later .
if you 're 60 to 65 you retire on time .
your 401 -lrb- k -rrb- just got nailed .
if you 're 50 to 60 we want you to work two years more .
if you 're under 50 we want you to work four more years .
the reason why that 's reasonable is , when your grandparents were given social security , they got it at 65 and were expected to check out at 68 .
sixty-eight is young today .
we 've also got to cut the military about three percent a year .
we 've got to limit other mandatory spending .
we 've got to quit borrowing as much , because otherwise the interest is going to eat that whole pie .
and we 've got to end up with a smaller government .
and if we do n't start changing this trend line , we are going to lose the dollar and start to look like iceland .
i got what you 're thinking .
this is going to happen when hell freezes over .
but let me remind you this december it did snow in vegas .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here 's what happens if you do n't address this stuff .
so , japan had a fiscal real estate crisis back in the late ' 80s .
and its 225 largest companies today are worth one quarter of what they were 18 years ago .
we do n't fix this now , how would you like to see a dow 3,500 in 2026 ?
because that 's the consequence of not dealing with this stuff .
and unless you want this person to not just become the cfo of florida , but the united states , we 'd better deal with this stuff .
that 's the short term . that 's the flame part .
that 's the financial crisis .
now , right behind the financial crisis there 's a second and bigger wave that we need to talk about .
that wave is much larger , much more powerful , and that 's of course the wave of technology .
and what 's really important in this stuff is , as we cut , we also have to grow .
among other things , because startup companies are .02 percent of u.s. gdp investmentm and they 're about 17.8 percent of output .
it 's groups like that in this room that generate the future of the u.s. economy .
and that 's what we 've got to keep growing .
we do n't have to keep growing these bridges to nowhere .
so let 's bring a romance novelist into this conversation .
and that 's where these three trends come together .
that 's where the ability to engineer microbes , the ability to engineer tissues , and the ability to engineer robots begin to lead to a reboot .
and let me recap some of the stuff you 've seen .
craig venter showed up last year and showed you the first fully programmable cell that acts like hardware where you can insert dna and have it boot up as a different species .
in parallel , the folks at mit have been building a standard registry of biological parts .
so think of it as a radio shack for biology .
you can go out and get your proteins , your rna , your dna , whatever .
and start building stuff .
in 2006 they brought together high school students and college students and started to build these little odd creatures .
they just happened to be alive instead of circuit boards .
here was one of the first things they built .
so , cells have this cycle .
first they do n't grow .
then they grow exponentially .
then they stop growing .
graduate students wanted a way of telling which stage they were in .
so they engineered these cells so that when they 're growing in the exponential phase , they would smell like wintergreen .
and when they stopped growing they would smell like bananas .
and you could tell very easily when your experiment was working and was n't , and where it was in the phase .
this got a bit more complicated two years later .
twenty-one countries came together . dozens of teams .
they started competing .
the team from rice university started to engineer the substance in red wine that makes red wine good for you into beer .
so you take resveratrol and you put it into beer .
of course , one of the judges is wandering by , and he goes , " wow ! cancer-fighting beer ! there is a god . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the team from taiwan was a little bit more ambitious .
they tried to engineer bacterias in such a way that they would act as your kidneys .
four years ago , i showed you this picture .
and people oohed and ahhed , because cliff tabin had been able to grow an extra wing on a chicken .
and that was very cool stuff back then .
but now moving from bacterial engineering to tissue engineering , let me show you what 's happened in that period of time .
two years ago , you saw this creature .
an almost-extinct animal from xochimilco , mexico called an axolotl that can re-generate its limbs .
you can freeze half its heart . it regrows .
you can freeze half the brain . it regrows .
it 's almost like leaving congress .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but now , you do n't have to have the animal itself to regenerate , because you can build cloned mice molars in petri dishes .
and , of course if you can build mice molars in petri dishes , you can grow human molars in petri dishes .
this should not surprise you , right ?
i mean , you 're born with no teeth .
you give away all your teeth to the tooth fairy .
you re-grow a set of teeth .
but then if you lose one of those second set of teeth , they do n't regrow , unless , if you 're a lawyer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , of course , for most of us , we know how to grow teeth , and therefore we can take adult stem teeth , put them on a biodegradable mold , re-grow a tooth , and simply implant it .
and we can do it with other things .
so , a spanish woman who was dying of t.b. had a donor trachea , they took all the cells off the trachea , they spraypainted her stem cells onto that cartilage .
she regrew her own trachea , and 72 hours later it was implanted .
she 's now running around with her kids .
this is going on in tony atala 's lab in wake forest where he is re-growing ears for injured soldiers , and he 's also re-growing bladders .
so there are now nine women walking around boston with re-grown bladders , which is much more pleasant than walking around with a whole bunch of plastic bags for the rest of your life .
this is kind of getting boring , right ?
i mean , you understand where this story 's going .
but , i mean it gets more interesting .
last year , this group was able to take all the cells off a heart , leaving just the cartilage .
then , they sprayed stem cells onto that heart , from a mouse .
those stem cells self-organized , and that heart started to beat .
life happens .
this may be one of the ultimate papers .
this was done in japan and in the u.s. , published at the same time , and it rebooted skin cells into stem cells , last year .
that meant that you can take the stuff right here , and turn it into almost anything in your body .
and this is becoming common , it 's moving very quickly , it 's moving in a whole series of places .
third trend : robots .
those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have rosie the robot from " the jetsons " in our house .
and all we 've got is a roomba .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we also thought we 'd have this robot to warn us of danger .
did n't happen .
and these were robots engineered for a flat world , right ?
so , rosie runs around on skates and the other one ran on flat threads .
if you do n't have a flat world , that 's not good , which is why the robot 's we 're designing today are a little different .
this is boston dynamics ' " bigdog . "
and this is about as close as you can get to a physical turing test .
o.k. , so let me remind you , a turing test is where you 've got a wall , you 're talking to somebody on the other side of the wall , and when you do n't know if that thing is human or animal - that 's when computers have reached human intelligence .
this is not an intelligence turing rest , but this is as close as you can get to a physical turing test .
and this stuff is moving very quickly , and by the way , that thing can carry about 350 pounds of weight .
these are not the only interesting robots .
you 've also got flies , the size of flies , that are being made by robert wood at harvard .
you 've got stickybots that are being made at stanford .
and as you bring these things together , as you bring cells , biological tissue engineering and mechanics together , you begin to get some really odd questions .
in the last olympics , this gentleman , who had several world records in the special olympics , tried to run in the normal olympics .
the only issue with oscar pistorius is he was born without bones in the lower part of his legs .
he came within about a second of qualifying .
he sued to be allowed to run , and he won the suit , but did n't qualify by time .
next olympics , you can bet that oscar , or one of oscar 's successors , is going to make the time .
and two or three olympics after that , they are going to be unbeatable .
and as you bring these trends together , and as you think of what it means to take people who are profoundly deaf , who can now begin to hear - i mean , remember the evolution of hearing aids , right ?
i mean , your grandparents had these great big cones , and then your parents had these odd boxes that would squawk at odd times during dinner , and now we have these little buds that nobody sees .
and now you have cochlear implants that go into people 's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear .
now , they ca n't hear as well as you and i can .
but , in 10 or 15 machine generations they will , and these are machine generations , not human generations .
and about two or three years after they can hear as well as you and i can , they 'll be able to hear maybe how bats sing , or how whales talk , or how dogs talk , and other types of tonal scales .
they 'll be able to focus their hearing , they 'll be able to increase the sensitivity , decrease the sensitivity , do a series of things that we ca n't do .
and the same thing is happening in eyes .
this is a group in germany that 's beginning to engineer eyes so that people who are blind can begin to see light and dark .
very primitive .
and then they 'll be able to see shape .
and then they 'll be able to see color , and then they 'll be able to see in definition , and one day , they 'll see as well as you and i can .
and a couple of years after that , they 'll be able to see in ultraviolet , they 'll be able to see in infrared , they 'll be able to focus their eyes , they 'll be able to come into a microfocus .
they 'll do stuff you and i ca n't do .
all of these things are coming together , and it 's a particularly important thing to understand , as we worry about the flames of the present , to keep an eye on the future .
and , of course , the future is looking back 200 years , because next week is the 200th anniversary of darwin 's birth .
and it 's the 150th anniversary of the publication of " the origin of species . "
and darwin , of course , argued that evolution is a natural state .
it is a natural state in everything that is alive , including hominids .
there have actually been 22 species of hominids that have been around , have evolved , have wandered in different places , have gone extinct .
it is common for hominids to evolve .
and that 's the reason why , as you look at the hominid fossil record , erectus , and heidelbergensis , and floresiensis , and neanderthals , and homo sapiens , all overlap .
the common state of affairs is to have overlapping versions of hominids , not one .
and as you think of the implications of that , here 's a brief history of the universe .
the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago , and then you created all the stars , and all the planets , and all the galaxies , and all the milky ways .
and then you created earth about 4.5 billion years ago , and then you got life about four billion years ago , and then you got hominids about 0.006 billion years ago , and then you got our version of hominids about 0.0015 billion years ago .
ta-dah !
maybe the reason for thr creation of the universe , and all the galaxies , and all the planets , and all the energy , and all the dark energy , and all the rest of stuff is to create what 's in this room .
maybe not .
that would be a mildly arrogant viewpoint .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , if that 's not the purpose of the universe , then what 's next ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think what we 're going to see is we 're going to see a different species of hominid .
i think we 're going to move from a homo sapiens into a homo evolutis .
and i think this is n't 1,000 years out .
i think most of us are going to glance at it , and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it .
and a homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species , her species and other species .
and that , of course , would be the ultimate reboot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you 'd like to learn how to play the lobster , we have some here .
and that 's not a joke , we really do .
so come up afterwards and i 'll show you how to play a lobster .
so , actually , i started working on what 's called the mantis shrimp a few years ago because they make sound .
this is a recording i made of a mantis shrimp that 's found off the coast of california .
and while that 's an absolutely fascinating sound , it actually turns out to be a very difficult project .
and while i was struggling to figure out how and why mantis shrimp , or stomatopods , make sound , i started to think about their appendages .
and mantis shrimp are called " mantis shrimp " after the praying mantises , which also have a fast feeding appendage . and i started to think , well , maybe it will be interesting , while listening to their sounds , to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes .
and so today i 'll talk about the extreme stomatopod strike , work that i 've done in collaboration with wyatt korff and roy caldwell .
so , mantis shrimp come in two varieties : there are spearers and smashers .
and this is a spearing mantis shrimp , or stomatopod .
and he lives in the sand , and he catches things that go by overhead .
so , a quick strike like that . and if we slow it down a bit , this is the mantis shrimp - the same species - recorded at 1,000 frames a second , played back at 15 frames per second .
and you can see it 's just a really spectacular extension of the limbs , exploding upward to actually just catch a dead piece of shrimp that i had offered it .
now , the other type of mantis shrimp is the smasher stomatopod , and these guys open up snails for a living .
and so this guy gets the snail all set up and gives it a good whack .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'll play it one more time .
he wiggles it in place , tugs it with his nose , and smash .
and a few smashes later , the snail is broken open , and he 's got a good dinner .
so , the smasher raptorial appendage can stab with a point at the end , or it can smash with the heel .
and today i 'll talk about the smashing type of strike .
and so the first question that came to mind was , well , how fast does this limb move ?
because it 's moving pretty darn fast on that video .
and i immediately came upon a problem .
every single high-speed video system in the biology department at berkeley was n't fast enough to catch this movement .
we simply could n't capture it on video .
and so this had me stymied for quite a long period of time .
and then a bbc crew came cruising through the biology department , looking for a story to do about new technologies in biology .
and so we struck up a deal .
i said , " well , if you guys rent the high-speed video system that could capture these movements , you guys can film us collecting the data . "
and believe it or not , they went for it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we got this incredible video system . it 's very new technology - it just came out about a year ago - that allows you to film at extremely high speeds in low light .
and low light is a critical issue with filming animals , because if it 's too high , you fry them . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is a mantis shrimp . there are the eyes up here , and there 's that raptorial appendage , and there 's the heel .
and that thing 's going to swing around and smash the snail .
and the snail 's wired to a stick , so he 's a little bit easier to set up the shot . and - yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i hope there are n't any snail rights activists around here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was filmed at 5,000 frames per second , and i 'm playing it back at 15 . and so this is slowed down 333 times .
and as you 'll notice , it 's still pretty gosh darn fast slowed down 333 times . it 's an incredibly powerful movement .
the whole limb extends out . the body flexes backwards - just a spectacular movement .
and so what we did is , we took a look at these videos , and we measured how fast the limb was moving to get back to that original question .
and we were in for our first surprise .
so what we calculated was that the limbs were moving at the peak speed ranging from 10 meters per second all the way up to 23 meters per second .
and for those of you who prefer miles per hour , that 's over 45 miles per hour in water . and this is really darn fast .
in fact , it 's so fast we were able to add a new point on the extreme animal movement spectrum .
and mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system . so our first surprise .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so that was really cool and very unexpected .
so , you might be wondering , well , how do they do it ?
and actually , this work was done in the 1960s by a famous biologist named malcolm burrows .
and what he showed in mantis shrimp is that they use what 's called a " catch mechanism , " or " click mechanism . "
and what this basically consists of is a large muscle that takes a good long time to contract , and a latch that prevents anything from moving .
so the muscle contracts , and nothing happens .
and once the muscle 's contracted completely , everything 's stored up - the latch flies upward , and you 've got the movement .
and that 's basically what 's called a " power amplification system . "
it takes a long time for the muscle to contract , and a very short time for the limb to fly out .
and so i thought that this was sort of the end of the story .
this was how mantis shrimps make these very fast strikes .
but then i took a trip to the national museum of natural history .
and if any of you ever have a chance , backstage of the national museum of natural history is one of the world 's best collections of preserved mantis shrimp . and what - -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is serious business for me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this - what i saw , on every single mantis shrimp limb , whether it 's a spearer or a smasher , is a beautiful saddle-shaped structure right on the top surface of the limb . and you can see it right here .
it just looks like a saddle you 'd put on a horse .
it 's a very beautiful structure .
and it 's surrounded by membranous areas . and those membranous areas suggested to me that maybe this is some kind of dynamically flexible structure .
and this really sort of had me scratching my head for a while .
and then we did a series of calculations , and what we were able to show is that these mantis shrimp have to have a spring .
there needs to be some kind of spring-loaded mechanism in order to generate the amount of force that we observe , and the speed that we observe , and the output of the system .
so we thought , ok , this must be a spring - the saddle could very well be a spring .
and we went back to those high-speed videos again , and we could actually visualize the saddle compressing and extending .
and i 'll just do that one more time .
and then if you take a look at the video - it 's a little bit hard to see - it 's outlined in yellow .
the saddle is outlined in yellow . you can actually see it extending over the course of the strike , and actually hyperextending .
so , we 've had very solid evidence showing that that saddle-shaped structure actually compresses and extends , and does , in fact , function as a spring .
the saddle-shaped structure is also known as a " hyperbolic paraboloid surface , " or an " anticlastic surface . "
and this is very well known to engineers and architects , because it 's a very strong surface in compression .
it has curves in two directions , one curve upward and opposite transverse curve down the other , so any kind of perturbation spreads the forces over the surface of this type of shape .
so it 's very well known to engineers , not as well known to biologists .
it 's also known to quite a few people who make jewelry , because it requires very little material to build this type of surface , and it 's very strong .
so if you 're going to build a thin gold structure , it 's very nice to have it in a shape that 's strong .
now , it 's also known to architects . one of the most famous architects is eduardo catalano , who popularized this structure .
and what 's shown here is a saddle-shaped roof that he built that 's 87 and a half feet spanwise .
it 's two and a half inches thick , and supported at two points .
and one of the reasons why he designed roofs this way is because it 's - he found it fascinating that you could build such a strong structure that 's made of so few materials and can be supported by so few points .
and all of these are the same principles that apply to the saddle-shaped spring in stomatopods .
in biological systems it 's important not to have a whole lot of extra material requirements for building it .
so , very interesting parallels between the biological and the engineering worlds . and interestingly , this turns out - the stomatopod saddle turns out to be the first described biological hyperbolic paraboloid spring .
that 's a bit long , but it is sort of interesting .
so the next and final question was , well , how much force does a mantis shrimp produce if they 're able to break open snails ?
and so i wired up what 's called a load cell .
a load cell measures forces , and this is actually a piezoelectronic load cell that has a little crystal in it .
and when this crystal is squeezed , the electrical properties change and it - which - in proportion to the forces that go in .
so these animals are wonderfully aggressive , and are really hungry all the time . and so all i had to do was actually put a little shrimp paste on the front of the load cell , and they 'd smash away at it .
and so this is just a regular video of the animal just smashing the heck out of this load cell .
and we were able to get some force measurements out .
and again , we were in for a surprise .
i purchased a 100-pound load cell , thinking , no animal could produce more than 100 pounds at this size of an animal .
and what do you know ? they immediately overloaded the load cell .
so these are actually some old data where i had to find the smallest animals in the lab , and we were able to measure forces of well over 100 pounds generated by an animal about this big .
and actually , just last week i got a 300-pound load cell up and running , and i 've clocked these animals generating well over 200 pounds of force .
and again , i think this will be a world record .
i have to do a little bit more background reading , but i think this will be the largest amount of force produced by an animal of a given - per body mass . so , really incredible forces .
and again , that brings us back to the importance of that spring in storing up and releasing so much energy in this system .
but that was not the end of the story .
now , things - i 'm making this sound very easy , this is actually a lot of work .
and i got all these force measurements , and then i went and looked at the force output of the system .
and this is just very simple - time is on the x-axis and the force is on the y-axis . and you can see two peaks .
and that was what really got me puzzled .
the first peak , obviously , is the limb hitting the load cell .
but there 's a really large second peak half a millisecond later , and i did n't know what that was .
so now , you 'd expect a second peak for other reasons , but not half a millisecond later .
again , going back to those high-speed videos , there 's a pretty good hint of what might be going on .
here 's that same orientation that we saw earlier .
there 's that raptorial appendage - there 's the heel , and it 's going to swing around and hit the load cell .
and what i 'd like you to do in this shot is keep your eye on this , on the surface of the load cell , as the limb comes flying through .
and i hope what you are able to see is actually a flash of light .
audience : wow .
sheila patek : and so if we just take that one frame , what you can actually see there at the end of that yellow arrow is a vapor bubble .
and what that is , is cavitation .
and cavitation is an extremely potent fluid dynamic phenomenon which occurs when you have areas of water moving at extremely different speeds .
and when this happens , it can cause areas of very low pressure , which results in the water literally vaporizing .
and when that vapor bubble collapses , it emits sound , light and heat , and it 's a very destructive process .
and so here it is in the stomatopod . and again , this is a situation where engineers are very familiar with this phenomenon , because it destroys boat propellers .
people have been struggling for years to try and design a very fast rotating boat propeller that does n't cavitate and literally wear away the metal and put holes in it , just like these pictures show .
so this is a potent force in fluid systems , and just to sort of take it one step further , i 'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail .
this is taken at 20,000 frames per second , and i have to give full credit to the bbc cameraman , tim green , for setting this shot up , because i could never have done this in a million years - one of the benefits of working with professional cameramen .
you can see it coming in , and an incredible flash of light , and all this cavitation spreading over the surface of the snail .
so really , just an amazing image , slowed down extremely , to extremely slow speeds .
and again , we can see it in slightly different form there , with the bubble forming and collapsing between those two surfaces .
in fact , you might have even seen some cavitation going up the edge of the limb .
so to solve this quandary of the two force peaks : what i think was going on is : that first impact is actually the limb hitting the load cell , and the second impact is actually the collapse of the cavitation bubble .
and these animals may very well be making use of not only the force and the energy stored with that specialized spring , but the extremes of the fluid dynamics . and they might actually be making use of fluid dynamics as a second force for breaking the snail .
so , really fascinating double whammy , so to speak , from these animals .
so , one question i often get after this talk - so i figured i 'd answer it now - is , well , what happens to the animal ?
because obviously , if it 's breaking snails , the poor limb must be disintegrating . and indeed it does .
that 's the smashing part of the heel on both these images , and it gets worn away . in fact , i 've seen them wear away their heel all the way to the flesh .
but one of the convenient things about being an arthropod is that you have to molt . and every three months or so these animals molt , and they build a new limb and it 's no problem .
very , very convenient solution to that particular problem .
so , i 'd like to end on sort of a wacky note .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- maybe this is all wacky to folks like you , i do n't know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the saddles - that saddle-shaped spring - has actually been well known to biologists for a long time , not as a spring but as a visual signal .
and there 's actually a spectacular colored dot in the center of the saddles of many species of stomatopods .
and this is quite interesting , to find evolutionary origins of visual signals on what 's really , in all species , their spring .
and i think one explanation for this could be going back to the molting phenomenon .
so these animals go into a molting period where they 're unable to strike - their bodies become very soft .
and they 're literally unable to strike or they will self-destruct .
this is for real . and what they do is , up until that time period when they ca n't strike , they become really obnoxious and awful , and they strike everything in sight ; it does n't matter who or what .
and the second they get into that time point when they ca n't strike any more , they just signal . they wave their legs around .
and it 's one of the classic examples in animal behavior of bluffing .
it 's a well-established fact of these animals that they actually bluff . they ca n't actually strike , but they pretend to .
and so i 'm very curious about whether those colored dots in the center of the saddles are conveying some kind of information about their ability to strike , or their strike force , and something about the time period in the molting cycle .
so sort of an interesting strange fact to find a visual structure right in the middle of their spring .
so to conclude , i mostly want to acknowledge my two collaborators , wyatt korff and roy caldwell , who worked closely with me on this .
and also the miller institute for basic research in science , which gave me three years of funding to just do science all the time , and for that i 'm very grateful . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great honor to be here with you .
the good news is i 'm very aware of my responsibilities to get you out of here because i 'm the only thing standing between you and the bar .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the good news is i do n't have a prepared speech , but i have a box of slides .
i have some pictures that represent my life and what i do for a living .
i 've learned through experience that people remember pictures long after they 've forgotten words , and so i hope you 'll remember some of the pictures i 'm going to share with you for just a few minutes .
the whole story really starts with me as a high school kid in pittsburgh , pennsylvania , in a tough neighborhood that everybody gave up on for dead .
and on a wednesday afternoon , i was walking down the corridor of my high school kind of minding my own business . and there was this artist teaching , who made a great big old ceramic vessel , and i happened to be looking in the door of the art room - and if you 've ever seen clay done , it 's magic - and i 'd never seen anything like that before in my life .
so , i walked in the art room and i said , " what is that ? "
and he said , " ceramics . and who are you ? "
and i said , " i 'm bill strickland . i want you to teach me that . "
and he said , " well , get your homeroom teacher to sign a piece of paper that says you can come here , and i 'll teach it to you . "
and so for the remaining two years of my high school , i cut all my classes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i had the presence of mind to give the teachers ' classes that i cut the pottery that i made , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they gave me passing grades .
and that 's how i got out of high school .
and mr. ross said , " you 're too smart to die and i do n't want it on my conscience , so i 'm leaving this school and i 'm taking you with me . "
and he drove me out to the university of pittsburgh where i filled out a college application and got in on probation .
well , i 'm now a trustee of the university , and at my installation ceremony i said , " i 'm the guy who came from the neighborhood who got into the place on probation .
do n't give up on the poor kids , because you never know what 's going to happen to those children in life . "
what i 'm going to show you for a couple of minutes is a facility that i built in the toughest neighborhood in pittsburgh with the highest crime rate .
one is called bidwell training center ; it is a vocational school for ex-steel workers and single parents and welfare mothers .
you remember we used to make steel in pittsburgh ?
well , we do n't make any steel anymore , and the people who used to make the steel are having a very tough time of it .
and i rebuild them and give them new life .
manchester craftsmen 's guild is named after my neighborhood .
i was adopted by the bishop of the episcopal diocese during the riots , and he donated a row house . and in that row house i started manchester craftsmen 's guild , and i learned very quickly that wherever there are episcopalians , there 's money in very close proximity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the bishop adopted me as his kid .
and last year i spoke at his memorial service and wished him well in this life .
i went out and hired a student of frank lloyd wright , the architect , and i asked him to build me a world class center in the worst neighborhood in pittsburgh .
and my building was a scale model for the pittsburgh airport .
and when you come to pittsburgh - and you 're all invited - you 'll be flying into the blown-up version of my building .
that 's the building .
built in a tough neighborhood where people have been given up for dead .
my view is that if you want to involve yourself in the life of people who have been given up on , you have to look like the solution and not the problem .
as you can see , it has a fountain in the courtyard .
and the reason it has a fountain in the courtyard is i wanted one and i had the checkbook , so i bought one and put it there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now that i 'm giving speeches at conferences like ted , i got put on the board of the carnegie museum .
at a reception in their courtyard , i noticed that they had a fountain because they think that the people who go to the museum deserve a fountain .
well , i think that welfare mothers and at-risk kids and ex-steel workers deserve a fountain in their life .
and so the first thing that you see in my center in the springtime is water that greets you - water is life and water of human possibility - and it sets an attitude and expectation about how you feel about people before you ever give them a speech .
so , from that fountain i built this building .
as you can see , it has world class art , and it 's all my taste because i raised all the money .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said to my boy , " when you raise the money , we 'll put your taste on the wall . "
that we have quilts and clay and calligraphy and everywhere your eye turns , there 's something beautiful looking back at you , that 's deliberate .
that 's intentional .
in my view , it is this kind of world that can redeem the soul of poor people .
we also created a boardroom , and i hired a japanese cabinetmaker from kyoto , japan , and commissioned him to do 60 pieces of furniture for our building .
we have since spun him off into his own business .
he 's making a ton of money doing custom furniture for rich people .
and i got 60 pieces out of it for my school because i felt that welfare moms and ex-steel workers and single parents deserved to come to a school where there was handcrafted furniture that greeted them every day .
because it sets a tone and an attitude about how you feel about people long before you give them the speech .
we even have flowers in the hallway , and they 're not plastic .
those are real and they 're in my building every day .
and now that i 've given lots of speeches , we had a bunch of high school principals come and see me , and they said , " mr. strickland , what an extraordinary story and what a great school .
and we were particularly touched by the flowers and we were curious as to how the flowers got there . "
i said , " well , i got in my car and i went out to the greenhouse and i bought them and i brought them back and i put them there . "
you do n't need a task force or a study group to buy flowers for your kids .
what you need to know is that the children and the adults deserve flowers in their life .
the cost is incidental but the gesture is huge .
and so in my building , which is full of sunlight and full of flowers , we believe in hope and human possibilities .
that happens to be at christmas time .
and so the next thing you 'll see is a million dollar kitchen that was built by the heinz company - you 've heard of them ?
they did all right in the ketchup business .
and i happen to know that company pretty well because john heinz , who was our u.s. senator - who was tragically killed in a plane accident - he had heard about my desire to build a new building , because i had a cardboard box and i put it in a garbage bag and i walking all over pittsburgh trying to raise money for this site .
and he called me into his office - which is the equivalent of going to see the wizard of oz -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and john heinz had 600 million dollars , and at the time i had about 60 cents .
and he said , " but we 've heard about you .
we 've heard about your work with the kids and the ex-steel workers , and we 're inclined to want to support your desire to build a new building .
and you could do us a great service if you would add a culinary program to your program . "
because back then , we were building a trades program .
he said , " that way we could fulfill our affirmative action goals for the heinz company . "
i said , " senator , i 'm reluctant to go into a field that i do n't know much about , but i promise you that if you 'll support my school , i 'll get it built and in a couple of years , i 'll come back and weigh out that program that you desire . "
and senator heinz sat very quietly and he said , " well , what would your reaction be if i said i 'd give you a million dollars ? "
i said , " senator , it appears that we 're going into the food training business . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and john heinz did give me a million bucks .
and most importantly , he loaned me the head of research for the heinz company .
and we kind of borrowed the curriculum from the culinary institute of america , which in their mind is kind of the harvard of cooking schools , and we created a gourmet cooks program for welfare mothers in this million dollar kitchen in the middle of the inner city .
and we 've never looked back .
i would like to show you now some of the food that these welfare mothers do in this million dollar kitchen .
that happens to be our cafeteria line .
that 's puff pastry day . why ?
because the students made puff pastry and that 's what the school ate every day .
but the concept was that i wanted to take the stigma out of food .
that good food 's not for rich people - good food 's for everybody on the planet , and there 's no excuse why we all ca n't be eating it .
so at my school , we subsidize a gourmet lunch program for welfare mothers in the middle of the inner city because we 've discovered that it 's good for their stomachs , but it 's better for their heads .
because i wanted to let them know every day of their life that they have value at this place i call my center .
we have students who sit together , black kids and white kids , and what we 've discovered is you can solve the race problem by creating a world class environment , because people will have a tendency to show you world class behavior if you treat them in that way .
these are examples of the food that welfare mothers are doing after six months in the training program .
no sophistication , no class , no dignity , no history .
what we 've discovered is the only thing wrong with poor people is they do n't have any money , which happens to be a curable condition .
it 's all in the way that you think about people that often determines their behavior .
that was done by a student after seven months in the program , done by a very brilliant young woman who was taught by our pastry chef .
i 've actually eaten seven of those baskets and they 're very good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they have no calories .
that 's our dining room .
it looks like your average high school cafeteria in your average town in america .
but this is my view of how students ought to be treated , particularly once they have been pushed aside .
we train pharmaceutical technicians for the pharmacy industry , we train medical technicians for the medical industry , and we train chemical technicians for companies like bayer and calgon carbon and fisher scientific and exxon .
and i will guarantee you that if you come to my center in pittsburgh - and you 're all invited - you 'll see welfare mothers doing analytical chemistry with logarithmic calculators 10 months from enrolling in the program .
there is absolutely no reason why poor people ca n't learn world class technology .
what we 've discovered is you have to give them flowers and sunlight and food and expectations and herbie 's music , and you can cure a spiritual cancer every time .
we train corporate travel agents for the travel industry .
we even teach people how to read .
the kid with the red stripe was in the program two years ago - he 's now an instructor .
and i have children with high school diplomas that they ca n't read .
and so you must ask yourself the question : how is it possible in the 21st century that we graduate children from schools who ca n't read the diplomas that they have in their hands ?
the reason is that the system gets reimbursed for the kids they spit out the other end , not the children who read .
i can take these children and in 20 weeks , demonstrated aptitude ; i can get them high school equivalent .
no big deal .
that 's our library with more handcrafted furniture .
and this is the arts program i started in 1968 .
remember i 'm the black kid from the ' 60s who got his life saved with ceramics .
well , i went out and decided to reproduce my experience with other kids in the neighborhood , the theory being if you get kids flowers and you give them food and you give them sunshine and enthusiasm , you can bring them right back to life .
i have 400 kids from the pittsburgh public school system that come to me every day of the week for arts education .
and these are children who are flunking out of public school .
and last year i put 88 percent of those kids in college and i 've averaged over 80 percent for 15 years .
we 've made a fascinating discovery : there 's nothing wrong with the kids that affection and sunshine and food and enthusiasm and herbie 's music ca n't cure .
for that i won a big old plaque - man of the year in education .
i beat out all the ph.d. 's because i figured that if you treat children like human beings , it increases the likelihood they 're going to behave that way .
and why we ca n't institute that policy in every school and in every city and every town remains a mystery to me .
let me show you what these people do .
we have ceramics and photography and computer imaging .
and these are all kids with no artistic ability , no talent , no imagination . and we bring in the world 's greatest artists - gordon parks has been there , chester higgins has been there - and what we 've learned is that the children will become like the people who teach them .
in fact , i brought in a mosaic artist from the vatican , an african-american woman who had studied the old vatican mosaic techniques , and let me show you what they did with the work .
these were children who the whole world had given up on , who were flunking out of public school , and that 's what they 're capable of doing with affection and sunlight and food and good music and confidence .
we teach photography .
and these are examples of some of the kids ' work .
that boy won a four-year scholarship on the strength of that photograph .
this is our gallery .
we have a world class gallery because we believe that poor kids need a world class gallery , so i designed this thing .
we have smoked salmon at the art openings , we have a formal printed invitation , and i even have figured out a way to get their parents to come .
i could n't buy a parent 15 years ago so i hired a guy who got off on the jesus big time .
he was dragging guys out of bars and saving those lives for the lord .
and i said , " bill , i want to hire you , man .
you have to tone down the jesus stuff a little bit , but keep the enthusiasm .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i ca n't get these parents to come to the school . "
he said , " i 'll get them to come to the school . "
so , he jumped in the van , he went to miss jones ' house and said , " miss jones , i knew you wanted to come to your kid 's art opening but you probably did n't have a ride .
so , i came to give you a ride . "
and he got 10 parents and then 20 parents .
at the last show that we did , 200 parents showed up and we did n't pick up one parent .
because now it 's become socially not acceptable not to show up to support your children at the manchester craftsmen 's guild because people think you 're bad parents .
and there is no statistical difference between the white parents and the black parents .
mothers will go where their children are being celebrated , every time , every town , every city .
i wanted you to see this gallery because it 's as good as it gets .
and by the time i cut these kids loose from high school , they 've got four shows on their resume before they apply to college because it 's all up here .
you have to change the way that people see themselves before you can change their behavior .
and it 's worked out pretty good up to this day .
i even stuck another room on the building , which i 'd like to show you .
this is brand new .
we just got this slide done in time for the ted conference .
i gave this little slide show at a place called the silicon valley and i did all right .
and the woman came out of the audience , she said , " that was a great story and i was very impressed with your presentation .
my only criticism is your computers are getting a little bit old . "
and i said , " well , what do you do for a living ? "
she said , " well , i work for a company called hewlett-packard . "
and i said , " you 're in the computer business , is that right ? "
she said , " yes , sir . "
and i said , " well , there 's an easy solution to that problem . "
well , i 'm very pleased to announce to you that hp and a furniture company called steelcase have adopted us as a demonstration model for all of their technology and all their furniture for the united states of america .
and that 's the room that 's initiating the relationship .
we got it just done in time to show you , so it 's kind of the world debut of our digital imaging center .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- i only have a couple more slides , and this is where the story gets kind of interesting .
so , i just want you to listen up for a couple more minutes and you 'll understand why he 's there and i 'm here .
in 1986 , i had the presence of mind to stick a music hall on the north end of the building while i was building it .
and a guy named dizzy gillespie showed up to play there because he knew this man over here , marty ashby .
and i stood on that stage with dizzy gillespie on sound check on a wednesday afternoon , and i said , " dizzy , why would you come to a black-run center in the middle of an industrial park with a high crime rate that does n't even have a reputation in music ? "
he said , " because i heard you built the center and i did n't believe that you did it , and i wanted to see for myself .
and now that i have , i want to give you a gift . "
i said , " you 're the gift . "
he said , " no , sir . you 're the gift .
and i 'm going to allow you to record the concert and i 'm going to give you the music , and if you ever choose to sell it , you must sign an agreement that says the money will come back and support the school . "
and i recorded dizzy . and he died a year later , but not before telling a fellow named mccoy tyner what we were doing .
and he showed up and said , " dizzy talking about you all over the country , man , and i want to help you . "
and then a guy named wynton marsalis showed up .
then a bass player named ray brown , and a fellow named stanley turrentine , and a piano player named herbie hancock , and a band called the count basie orchestra , and a fellow named tito puente , and a guy named gary burton , and shirley horn , and betty carter , and dakota staton and nancy wilson all have come to this center in the middle of an industrial park to sold out audiences in the middle of the inner city .
and i 'm very pleased to tell you that , with their permission , i have now accumulated 600 recordings of the greatest artists in the world , including joe williams , who died , but not before his last recording was done at my school .
and joe williams came up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said , " god 's picked you , man , to do this work .
and i want my music to be with you . "
and that worked out all right .
when the basie band came , the band got so excited about the school they voted to give me the rights to the music .
and i recorded it and we won something called a grammy .
and like a fool , i did n't go to the ceremony because i did n't think we were going to win .
well , we did win , and our name was literally in lights over madison square garden .
then the u.n. jazz orchestra dropped by and we recorded them and got nominated for a second grammy back to back .
so , we 've become one of the hot , young jazz recording studios in the united states of america -lrb- laughter -rrb- in the middle of the inner city with a high crime rate .
that 's the place all filled up with republicans .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- if you 'd have dropped a bomb on that room , you 'd have wiped out all the money in pennsylvania because it was all sitting there .
including my mother and father , who lived long enough to see their kid build that building .
and there 's dizzy , just like i told you . he was there .
and he was there , tito puente .
and pat metheny and jim hall were there and they recorded with us .
and that was our first recording studio , which was the broom closet .
we put the mops in the hallway and re-engineered the thing and that 's where we recorded the first grammy .
and this is our new facility , which is all video technology .
and that is a room that was built for a woman named nancy wilson , who recorded that album at our school last christmas .
and any of you who happened to have been watching oprah winfrey on christmas day , he was there and nancy was there singing excerpts from this album , the rights to which she donated to our school .
and i can now tell you with absolute certainty that an appearance on oprah winfrey will sell 10,000 cds .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we are currently number four on the billboard charts , right behind tony bennett .
and i think we 're going to be fine .
this was burned out during the riots - this is next to my building - and so i had another cardboard box built and i walked back out in the streets again .
and that 's the building , and that 's the model , and on the right 's a high-tech greenhouse and in the middle 's the medical technology building .
and i 'm very pleased to tell you that the building 's done .
it 's also full of anchor tenants at 20 dollars a foot - triple that in the middle of the inner city .
and there 's the fountain .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- every building has a fountain .
and the university of pittsburgh medical center are anchor tenants and they took half the building , and we now train medical technicians through all their system .
and mellon bank 's a tenant .
and i love them because they pay the rent on time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as a result of the association , i 'm now a director of the mellon financial corporation that bought dreyfus .
and this is in the process of being built as we speak .
multiply that picture times four and you will see the greenhouse that 's going to open in october this year because we 're going to grow those flowers in the middle of the inner city .
and we 're going to have high school kids growing phalaenopsis orchids in the middle of the inner city .
and we have a handshake with one of the large retail grocers to sell our orchids in all 240 stores in six states .
and our partners are zuma canyon orchids of malibu , california , who are hispanic .
so , the hispanics and the black folks have formed a partnership to grow high technology orchids in the middle of the inner city .
and i told my united states senator that there was a very high probability that if he could find some funding for this , we would become a left-hand column in the wall street journal , to which he readily agreed .
and we got the funding and we open in the fall .
and you ought to come and see it - it 's going to be a hell of a story .
and this is what i want to do when i grow up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the brown building is the one you guys have been looking at and i 'll tell you where i made my big mistake .
i had a chance to buy this whole industrial park - which is less than 1,000 feet from the riverfront - for four million dollars and i did n't do it .
and i built the first building , and guess what happened ?
i appreciated the real estate values beyond everybody 's expectations and the owners of the park turned me down for eight million dollars last year , and said , " mr. strickland , you ought to get the civic leader of the year award because you 've appreciated our property values beyond our wildest expectations .
thank you very much for that . "
the moral of the story is you must be prepared to act on your dreams , just in case they do come true .
and finally , there 's this picture .
this is in a place called san francisco .
and the reason this picture 's in here is i did this slide show a couple years ago at a big economics summit , and there was a fellow in the audience who came up to me .
he said , " man , that 's a great story .
i want one of those . "
i said , " well , i 'm very flattered . what do you do for a living ? "
he says , " i run the city of san francisco .
my name 's willie brown . "
and so i kind of accepted the flattery and the praise and put it out of my mind .
and that weekend , i was going back home and herbie hancock was playing our center that night - first time i 'd met him .
and he walked in and he says , " what is this ? "
and i said , " herbie , this is my concept of a training center for poor people . "
and he said , " as god as my witness , i 've had a center like this in my mind for 25 years and you 've built it .
and now i really want to build one . "
i said , " well , where would you build this thing ? "
he said , " san francisco . "
i said , " any chance you know willie brown ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as a matter of fact he did know willie brown , and willie brown and herbie and i had dinner four years ago , and we started drawing out that center on the tablecloth .
and willie brown said , " as sure as i 'm the mayor of san francisco , i 'm going to build this thing as a legacy to the poor people of this city . "
and he got me five acres of land on san francisco bay and we got an architect and we got a general contractor and we got herbie on the board , and our friends from hp , and our friends from steelcase , and our friends from cisco , and our friends from wells fargo and genentech .
and along the way , i met this real short guy at my slide show in the silicon valley .
he came up to me afterwards , he said , " man , that 's a fabulous story .
i want to help you . "
and i said , " well , thank you very much for that .
what do you do for a living ? "
he said , " well , i built a company called ebay . "
i said , " well , that 's very nice .
thanks very much , and give me your card and sometime we 'll talk . "
i did n't know ebay from that jar of water sitting on that piano , but i had the presence of mind to go back and talk to one of the techie kids at my center .
i said , " hey man , what is ebay ? "
he said , " well , that 's the electronic commerce network . "
i said , " well , i met the guy who built the thing and he left me his card . "
so , i called him up on the phone and i said , " mr. skoll , i 've come to have a much deeper appreciation of who you are -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'd like to become your friend . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and jeff and i did become friends , and he 's organized a team of people and we 're going to build this center .
and i went down into the neighborhood called bayview-hunters point , and i said , " the mayor sent me down here to work with you and i want to build a center with you , but i 'm not going to build you anything if you do n't want it .
and all i 've got is a box of slides . "
and so i stood up in front of 200 very angry , very disappointed people on a summer night , and the air conditioner had broken and it was 100 degrees outside , and i started showing these pictures .
and after about 10 pictures they all settled down .
and i ran the story and i said , " what do you think ? "
and in the back of the room , a woman stood up and she said , " in 35 years of living in this god forsaken place , you 're the only person that 's come down here and treated us with dignity .
i 'm going with you , man . "
and she turned that audience around on a pin .
and i promised these people that i was going to build this thing , and we 're going to build it all right .
and i think we can get in the ground this year as the first replication of the center in pittsburgh .
but i met a guy named quincy jones along the way and i showed him the box of slides .
and quincy said , " i want to help you , man .
let 's do one in l.a. "
and so he 's assembled a group of people .
and i 've fallen in love with him , as i have with herbie and with his music .
and quincy said , " where did the idea for centers like this come from ? "
and i said , " it came from your music , man .
because mr. ross used to bring in your albums when i was 16 years old in the pottery class , when the world was all dark , and your music got me to the sunlight . "
and i said , " if i can follow that music , i 'll get out into the sunlight and i 'll be ok .
and if that 's not true , how did i get here ? "
i want you all to know that i think the world is a place that 's worth living .
i believe in you .
i believe in your hopes and your dreams , i believe in your intelligence and i believe in your enthusiasm .
and i 'm tired of living like this , going into town after town with people standing around on corners with holes where eyes used to be , their spirits damaged .
we wo n't make it as a country unless we can turn this thing around .
in pennsylvania it costs 60,000 dollars to keep people in jail , most of whom look like me .
it 's 40,000 dollars to build the university of pittsburgh medical school .
it 's 20,000 dollars cheaper to build a medical school than to keep people in jail .
do the math - it will never work .
i am banking on you and i 'm banking on guys like herbie and quincy and hackett and richard and very decent people who still believe in something .
and i want to do this in my lifetime , in every city and in every town .
and i do n't think i 'm crazy .
i think we can get home on this thing and i think we can build these all over the country for less money than we 're spending on prisons .
and i believe we can turn this whole story around to one of celebration and one of hope .
in my business it 's very difficult work .
you 're always fighting upstream like a salmon - never enough money , too much need - and so there is a tendency to have an occupational depression that accompanies my work .
and so i 've figured out , over time , the solution to the depression : you make a friend in every town and you 'll never be lonely .
and my hope is that i 've made a few here tonight .
and thanks for listening to what i had to say .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you to take a look at this baby .
what you 're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch .
but today i 'm going to talk to you about something you ca n't see - what 's going on up in that little brain of hers .
the modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what 's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science .
and what we 're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the " celestial openness " of the child 's mind .
what we see here is a mother in india , and she 's speaking koro , which is a newly discovered language .
and she 's talking to her baby .
what this mother - and the 800 people who speak koro in the world - understands -lsb- is -rsb- that , to preserve this language , they need to speak it to the babies .
and therein lies a critical puzzle .
why is it that you ca n't preserve a language by speaking to you and i , to the adults ?
well , it 's got to do with your brain .
what we see here is that language has a critical period for learning .
the way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you 'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language .
babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven , and then there 's a systematic decline .
after puberty , we fall off the map .
no scientists dispute this curve , but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way .
work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development - and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language .
we think , by studying how the sounds are learned , we 'll have a model for the rest of language , and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social , emotional and cognitive development .
so we 've been studying the babies using a technique that we 're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages .
the baby sits on a parent 's lap , and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes - like from " ah " to " ee . "
if they do so at the appropriate time , the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum .
a six-monther adores the task .
what have we learned ?
well , babies all over the world are what i like to describe as " citizens of the world . "
they can discriminate all the sounds of all languages , no matter what country we 're testing and what language we 're using , and that 's remarkable because you and i ca n't do that .
we 're culture-bound listeners .
we can discriminate the sounds of our own language , but not those of foreign languages .
so the question arises : when do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are ?
and the answer : before their first birthdays .
what you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in tokyo and the united states , here in seattle , as they listened to " ra " and " la " - sounds important to english , but not to japanese .
so at six to eight months the babies are totally equivalent .
two months later something incredible occurs .
the babies in the united states are getting a lot better , babies in japan are getting a lot worse , but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn .
so the question is : what 's happening during this critical two-month period ?
this is the critical period for sound development , but what 's going on up there ?
so there are two things going on .
the first is that the babies are listening intently to us , and they 're taking statistics as they listen to us talk - they 're taking statistics .
so listen to two mothers speaking motherese - the universal language we use when we talk to kids - first in english and then in japanese .
-lrb- video -rrb- english mother : ah , i love your big blue eyes - so pretty and nice .
japanese mother : -lsb- japanese -rsb- patricia kuhl : during the production of speech , when babies listen , what they 're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear .
and those distributions grow .
and what we 've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics , and the statistics of japanese and english are very , very different .
english has a lot of rs and ls .
the distribution shows .
and the distribution of japanese is totally different , where we see a group of intermediate sounds , which is known as the japanese " r. "
so babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains ; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are .
but we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics .
we 're governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development .
so what we 're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about .
we 're arguing from a mathematical standpoint that the learning of language material may slow down when our distributions stabilize .
it 's raising lots of questions about bilingual people .
bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once and flip between them , one after the other , depending on who they 're speaking to .
so we asked ourselves , can the babies take statistics on a brand new language ?
and we tested this by exposing american babies who 'd never heard a second language to mandarin for the first time during the critical period .
we knew that , when monolinguals were tested in taipei and seattle on the mandarin sounds , they showed the same pattern .
six to eight months , they 're totally equivalent .
two months later , something incredible happens .
but the taiwanese babies are getting better , not the american babies .
what we did was expose american babies during this period to mandarin .
it was like having mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions .
here 's what it looked like in the laboratory .
-lrb- video -rrb- mandarin speaker : -lsb- mandarin -rsb- pk : so what have we done to their little brains ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we had to run a control group to make sure that just coming into the laboratory did n't improve your mandarin skills .
so a group of babies came in and listened to english .
and we can see from the graph that exposure to english did n't improve their mandarin .
but look at what happened to the babies exposed to mandarin for 12 sessions .
they were as good as the babies in taiwan who 'd been listening for 10-and-a-half months .
what it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language .
whatever you put in front of them , they 'll take statistics on .
but we wondered what role the human being played in this learning exercise .
so we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage , the same 12 sessions , but over a television set and another group of babies who had just audio exposure and looked at a teddy bear on the screen .
what did we do to their brains ?
what you see here is the audio result - no learning whatsoever - and the video result - no learning whatsoever .
it takes a human being for babies to take their statistics .
the social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics .
we want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions , as opposed to in front of human beings .
thankfully , we have a new machine , magnetoencephalography , that allows us to do this .
it looks like a hair dryer from mars .
but it 's completely safe , completely non-invasive and silent .
we 're looking at millimeter accuracy with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy using 306 squids - these are superconducting quantum interference devices - to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking .
we 're the first in the world to record babies in an meg machine while they are learning .
so this is little emma .
she 's a six-monther .
and she 's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears .
you can see , she can move around .
we 're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap , so she 's free to move completely unconstrained .
it 's a technical tour de force .
what are we seeing ?
we 're seeing the baby brain .
as the baby hears a word in her language the auditory areas light up , and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence , getting the brain coordinated with its different areas , and causality , we are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child 's brain development .
we 're going to be able to see a child 's brain as they experience an emotion , as they learn to speak and read , as they solve a math problem , as they have an idea .
and we 're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning .
just as the poets and writers described , we 're going to be able to see , i think , that wondrous openness , utter and complete openness , of the mind of a child .
in investigating the child 's brain , we 're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human , and in the process , we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : julian , welcome .
it 's been reported that wikileaks , your baby , has , in the last few years has released more classified documents than the rest of the world 's media combined .
can that possibly be true ?
julian assange : yeah , can it possibly be true ?
it 's a worry - is n't it ? - that the rest of the world 's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined .
ca : how does it work ?
how do people release the documents ?
and how do you secure their privacy ?
ja : so these are - as far as we can tell - classical whistleblowers , and we have a number of ways for them to get information to us .
so we use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet , to hide trails , pass it through legal jurisdictions like sweden and belgium to enact those legal protections .
we get information in the mail , the regular postal mail , encrypted or not , vet it like a regular news organization , format it - which is sometimes something that 's quite hard to do , when you 're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks .
ca : so you make an effort to ensure the documents are legitimate , but you actually almost never know who the identity of the source is ?
ja : that 's right , yeah . very rarely do we ever know , and if we find out at some stage then we destroy that information as soon as possible .
-lrb- phone ring -rrb- god damn it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : i think that 's the cia asking what the code is for a ted membership .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so let 's take -lsb- an -rsb- example , actually .
this is something you leaked a few years ago .
if we can have this document up ...
so this was a story in kenya a few years ago .
can you tell us what you leaked and what happened ?
ja : so this is the kroll report .
this was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the kenyan government after its election in 2004 .
prior to 2004 , kenya was ruled by daniel arap moi for about 18 years .
he was a soft dictator of kenya .
and when kibaki got into power - through a coalition of forces that were trying to clean up corruption in kenya - they commissioned this report , spent about two million pounds on this and an associated report .
and then the government sat on it and used it for political leverage on moi , who was the richest man - still is the richest man - in kenya .
it 's the holy grail of kenyan journalism .
so i went there in 2007 , and we managed to get hold of this just prior to the election - the national election , december 28 .
when we released that report , we did so three days after the new president , kibaki , had decided to pal up with the man that he was going to clean out , daniel arap moi , so this report then became a dead albatross around president kibaki 's neck .
ca : and - i mean , to cut a long story short - word of the report leaked into kenya , not from the official media , but indirectly , and in your opinion , it actually shifted the election .
ja : yeah . so this became front page of the guardian and was then printed in all the surrounding countries of kenya , in tanzanian and south african press .
and so it came in from the outside .
and that , after a couple of days , made the kenyan press feel safe to talk about it .
and it ran for 20 nights straight on kenyan tv , shifted the vote by 10 percent , according to a kenyan intelligence report , which changed the result of the election .
ca : wow , so your leak really substantially changed the world ?
ja : yep .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : here 's - we 're going to just show a short clip from this baghdad airstrike video .
the video itself is longer , but here 's a short clip .
this is - this is intense material , i should warn you .
radio : ... just fuckin ' , once you get on ' em just open ' em up .
i see your element , uh , got about four humvees , uh , out along ...
you 're clear . all right . firing .
let me know when you 've got them . let 's shoot .
light ' em all up .
c 'mon , fire !
-lrb- machine gun fire -rrb- keep shoot ' n . keep shoot ' n .
-lrb- machine gun fire -rrb- keep shoot ' n .
hotel ... bushmaster two-six , bushmaster two-six , we need to move , time now !
all right , we just engaged all eight individuals .
yeah , we see two birds -lsb- helicopters -rsb- , and we 're still firing .
roger . i got ' em .
two-six , this is two-six , we 're mobile .
oops , i 'm sorry . what was going on ?
god damn it , kyle . all right , hahaha . i hit ' em .
ca : so , what was the impact of that ?
ja : the impact on the people who worked on it was severe .
we ended up sending two people to baghdad to further research that story .
so this is just the first of three attacks that occurred in that scene .
ca : so , i mean , 11 people died in that attack , right , including two reuters employees ?
ja : yeah . two reuters employees , two young children were wounded .
there were between 18 and 26 people killed all together .
ca : and releasing this caused widespread outrage .
what was the key element of this that actually caused the outrage , do you think ?
ja : i do n't know . i guess people can see the gross disparity in force .
you have guys walking in a relaxed way down the street , and then an apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometer firing 30-millimeter cannon shells on everyone - looking for any excuse to do so - and killing people rescuing the wounded .
and there was two journalists involved that clearly were n't insurgents because that 's their full-time job .
ca : i mean , there 's been this u.s. intelligence analyst , bradley manning , arrested , and it 's alleged that he confessed in a chat room to have leaked this video to you , along with 280,000 classified u.s. embassy cables .
i mean , did he ?
ja : we have denied receiving those cables .
he has been charged , about five days ago , with obtaining 150,000 cables and releasing 50 .
now , we had released , early in the year , a cable from the reykjavik u.s. embassy , but this is not necessarily connected .
i mean , i was a known visitor of that embassy .
ca : i mean , if you did receive thousands of u.s. embassy diplomatic cables ...
ja : we would have released them . -lrb- ca : you would ? -rrb- ja : yeah . -lrb- ca : because ? -rrb- ja : well , because these sort of things reveal what the true state of , say , arab governments are like , the true human-rights abuses in those governments .
if you look at declassified cables , that 's the sort of material that 's there .
ca : so let 's talk a little more broadly about this .
i mean , in general , what 's your philosophy ?
why is it right to encourage leaking of secret information ?
ja : well , there 's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world , what sort of information can achieve reform .
and there 's a lot of information .
so information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing , that 's a really good signal that when the information gets out , there 's a hope of it doing some good - because the organizations that know it best , that know it from the inside out , are spending work to conceal it .
and that 's what we 've found in practice , and that 's what the history of journalism is .
ca : but are there risks with that , either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large , where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence ?
ja : not that we have seen with anything we have released .
i mean , we have a harm immunization policy .
we have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it .
but there are legitimate secrets - you know , your records with your doctor ; that 's a legitimate secret - but we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated .
ca : so they are well-motivated .
and what would you say to , for example , the , you know , the parent of someone whose son is out serving the u.s. military , and he says , " you know what , you 've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out .
it shows a u.s. soldier laughing at people dying .
that gives the impression , has given the impression , to millions of people around the world that u.s. soldiers are inhuman people .
actually , they 're not . my son is n't . how dare you ? "
what would you say to that ?
ja : yeah , we do get a lot of that .
but remember , the people in baghdad , the people in iraq , the people in afghanistan - they do n't need to see the video ; they see it every day .
so it 's not going to change their opinion . it 's not going to change their perception .
that 's what they see every day .
it will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all , and that 's our hope .
ca : so you found a way to shine light into what you see as these sort of dark secrets in companies and in government .
light is good .
but do you see any irony in the fact that , in order for you to shine that light , you have to , yourself , create secrecy around your sources ?
ja : not really . i mean , we do n't have any wikileaks dissidents yet .
we do n't have sources who are dissidents on other sources .
should they come forward , that would be a tricky situation for us , but we 're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission , not to screw it up .
ca : i 'd actually be interested , just based on what we 've heard so far - i 'm curious as to the opinion in the ted audience .
you know , there might be a couple of views of wikileaks and of julian .
you know , hero - people 's hero - bringing this important light .
dangerous troublemaker .
who 's got the hero view ?
who 's got the dangerous troublemaker view ?
ja : oh , come on . there must be some .
ca : it 's a soft crowd , julian , a soft crowd .
we have to try better . let 's show them another example .
now here 's something that you have n't yet leaked , but i think for ted you are .
i mean it 's an intriguing story that 's just happened , right ?
what is this ?
ja : so this is a sample of what we do sort of every day .
so late last year - in november last year - there was a series of well blowouts in albania , like the well blowout in the gulf of mexico , but not quite as big .
and we got a report - a sort of engineering analysis into what happened - saying that , in fact , security guards from some rival , various competing oil firms had , in fact , parked trucks there and blown them up .
and part of the albanian government was in this , etc . , etc .
and the engineering report had nothing on the top of it , so it was an extremely difficult document for us .
we could n't verify it because we did n't know who wrote it and knew what it was about .
so we were kind of skeptical that maybe it was a competing oil firm just sort of playing the issue up .
so under that basis , we put it out and said , " look , we 're skeptical about this thing .
we do n't know , but what can we do ?
the material looks good , it feels right , but we just ca n't verify it . "
and we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it , wanting to track down the source - -lrb- laughter -rrb- saying , " hey , we want to track down the source . "
and we were like , " oh , tell us more .
what document is it , precisely , you 're talking about ?
can you show that you had legal authority over that document ?
is it really yours ? "
so they sent us this screen shot with the author in the microsoft word id .
yeah .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's happened quite a lot though .
this is like one of our methods of identifying , of verifying , what a material is , is to try and get these guys to write letters .
ca : yeah . have you had information from inside bp ?
ja : yeah , we have a lot , but i mean , at the moment , we are undergoing a sort of serious fundraising and engineering effort .
so our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we 're re-engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have .
that 's a problem .
i mean , like any sort of growing startup organization , we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth , and that means we 're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but do n't have enough people to actually process and vet this information .
ca : so that 's the key bottleneck , basically journalistic volunteers and / or the funding of journalistic salaries ?
ja : yep . yeah , and trusted people .
i mean , we 're an organization that is hard to grow very quickly because of the sort of material we deal with , so we have to restructure in order to have people who will deal with the highest national security stuff , and then lower security cases .
ca : so help us understand a bit about you personally and how you came to do this .
and i think i read that as a kid you went to 37 different schools .
can that be right ?
ja : well , my parents were in the movie business and then on the run from a cult , so the combination between the two ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : i mean , a psychologist might say that 's a recipe for breeding paranoia .
ja : what , the movie business ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : and you were also - i mean , you were also a hacker at an early age and ran into the authorities early on .
ja : well , i was a journalist .
you know , i was a very young journalist activist at an early age .
i wrote a magazine , was prosecuted for it when i was a teenager .
so you have to be careful with hacker .
i mean there 's like - there 's a method that can be deployed for various things .
unfortunately , at the moment , it 's mostly deployed by the russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother 's bank accounts .
so this phrase is not , not as nice as it used to be .
ca : yeah , well , i certainly do n't think you 're stealing anyone 's grandmother 's bank account , but what about your core values ?
can you give us a sense of what they are and maybe some incident in your life that helped determine them ?
ja : i 'm not sure about the incident .
but the core values : well , capable , generous men do not create victims ; they nurture victims .
and that 's something from my father and something from other capable , generous men that have been in my life .
ca : capable , generous men do not create victims ; they nurture victims ?
ja : yeah . and you know , i 'm a combative person , so i 'm not actually so big on the nurture , but some way - there is another way of nurturing victims , which is to police perpetrators of crime .
and so that is something that has been in my character for a long time .
ca : so just tell us , very quickly in the last minute , the story : what happened in iceland ?
you basically published something there , ran into trouble with a bank , then the news service there was injuncted from running the story .
instead , they publicized your side .
that made you very high-profile in iceland . what happened next ?
ja : yeah , this is a great case , you know .
iceland went through this financial crisis .
it was the hardest hit of any country in the world .
its banking sector was 10 times the gdp of the rest of the economy .
anyway , so we release this report in july last year .
and the national tv station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air , like out of a movie : injunction landed on the news desk , and the news reader was like , " this has never happened before . what do we do ? "
well , we just show the website instead , for all that time , as a filler , and we became very famous in iceland , went to iceland and spoke about this issue .
and there was a feeling in the community that that should never happen again , and as a result , working with icelandic politicians and some other international legal experts , we put together a new sort of package of legislation for iceland to sort of become an offshore haven for the free press , with the strongest journalistic protections in the world , with a new nobel prize for freedom of speech .
iceland 's a nordic country , so , like norway , it 's able to tap into the system .
and just a month ago , this was passed by the icelandic parliament unanimously .
ca : wow .
-lrb- applause -rrb- last question , julian .
when you think of the future then , do you think it 's more likely to be big brother exerting more control , more secrecy , or us watching big brother , or it 's just all to be played for either way ?
ja : i 'm not sure which way it 's going to go .
i mean , there 's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the e.u. , between china and the united states .
which way is it going to go ? it 's hard to see .
that 's why it 's a very interesting time to be in - because with just a little bit of effort , we can shift it one way or the other .
ca : well , it looks like i 'm reflecting the audience 's opinion to say , julian , be careful , and all power to you .
ja : thank you , chris . -lrb- ca : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well , there 's lots to talk about , but i think i 'm just going to play to start off .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ when i wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ i pour the coffee ♫ ♫ i read the paper ♫ ♫ and then i slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ so feed the fishes ♫ ♫ you sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ like it 's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on earth ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- all right .
so , i wanted to do something special today .
i want to debut a new song that i 've been working on in the last five or six months .
and there 's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience , especially when it 's half-finished .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm kind of hoping some conversations here might help me finish it .
because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms .
and so this is basically a song about loops , but not the kind of loops that i make up here .
they 're feedback loops .
and in the audio world that 's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source , and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound .
and i 'm going to demonstrate for you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm not going to hurt you . do n't worry .
♫ this is a loop , feedback loop ♫ ♫ this is a loop , feedback loop ♫ ♫ this is a loop , feedback loop ♫ ♫ this is a loop , feedback loop ♫ ♫ this is a loop , feedback loop ♫ ♫ this is a loop , feedback loop ♫ ♫ this is a - -lrb- feedback -rrb- all right . i do n't know if that was necessary to demonstrate - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but my point is it 's the sound of self-destruction .
and i 've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms , from , say , the ecological , okay .
there seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from , it gets ugly .
so like , you ca n't feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease , and inbreeding and incest and , let 's see , what 's the other one ?
biological - there 's autoimmune diseases , where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host , or the person .
and then - okay , this is where we get to the song - kind of bridges the gap to the emotional .
because although i 've used scientific terms in songs , it 's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical .
and there 's some things you just do n't need to have in songs .
so i 'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody .
and so , i do n't know if you 've ever had this , but when i close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep , i ca n't stop thinking about my own eyes .
and it 's like your eyes start straining to see themselves .
that 's what it feels like to me .
it 's not pleasant .
i 'm sorry if i put that idea in your head .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's impossible , of course , for your eyes to see themselves , but they seem to be trying .
so that 's getting a little more closer to a personal experience .
or ears being able to hear themselves - it 's just impossible .
that 's the thing .
so , i 've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who 's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they 're left to do the deed themselves , if that 's possible .
and that 's what the song is asking .
all right .
it does n't have a name yet .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ give yourself a hand , the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ and the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ and the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ ' cause it 's your ear , oh oh ♫ ♫ you 've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ took yourself apart ♫ ♫ you made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ no one can break your heart ♫ ♫ so you wear it out ♫ ♫ and you wring it out ♫ ♫ and you wear it out ♫
♫ and you break it yourself ♫ ♫ breaking your own , break it yourself ♫ ♫ breaking your own , break it yourself ♫ ♫ breaking your own ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right .
it 's kind of cool . songwriters can sort of get away with murder .
you can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research .
but , you know , i think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now , just a little bit .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to finish up with a song of mine called " weather systems . "
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ quiet ♫ ♫ quiet down , she said ♫ ♫ speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ on the edge of the bed , i can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ i can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ hold still awhile ♫ ♫ do n't spill the wine ♫ ♫ i can see it all from here ♫ ♫ i can see ♫ ♫ oh , i ♫ ♫ i can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ some things you say ♫
♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ i would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ hold still a while ♫ ♫ do n't spill the wine ♫ ♫ i can see it all from here ♫ ♫ i can see ♫ ♫ oh , i ♫ ♫ i can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i am a surgeon who studies creativity , and i have never had a patient tell me that " i really want you to be creative during surgery , " and so i guess there 's a little bit of irony to it .
i will say though that , after having done surgery a lot , it 's somewhat similar to playing a musical instrument .
and for me , this sort of deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and also to study the science of sound , particularly music .
and so i 'm going to try to talk to you over the next few minutes about my career in terms of how i 'm able to actually try to study music and really try to grapple with all these questions of how the brain is able to be creative .
i 've done most of this work at johns hopkins university , but also at the national institute of health where i was previously .
i 'm going to go over some science experiments and try to cover three musical experiments .
i 'm going to start off by playing a video for you .
and this video is a video of keith jarrett , who 's a well-known jazz improviser and probably the most well-known , iconic example of someone who takes improvisation to a really higher level .
and he 'll improvise entire concerts and he 'll never play it exactly the same way again , and so , as a form of intense creativity , i think this is a great example .
and so why do n't we go and click the video .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's really a remarkable , awesome thing that happens there .
i 've always - just as a listener , as just a fan - i listen to that , and i 'm just astounded .
i think - how can this possibly be ?
how can the brain generate that much information , that much music , spontaneously ?
and so i set out with this concept , scientifically , that artistic creativity , it 's magical , but it 's not magic , meaning that it 's a product of the brain .
there 's not too many brain-dead people creating art .
and so with this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product , i took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process .
and i think there 's some sub-questions there that i put there .
is it truly possible to study creativity scientifically ?
and i think that 's a good question .
and i 'll tell you that most scientific studies of music , they 're very dense , and when you actually go through them , it 's very hard to recognize the music in it .
in fact , they seem to be very unmusical entirely and to miss the whole point of the music .
and so it brings the second question : why should scientists study creativity ?
maybe we 're not the right people to do it .
well it may be , but i will say that , from a scientific perspective - we talked a lot about innovation today - the science of innovation , how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy , and truly , we know very little about how we are able to be creative .
and so i think that we 're going to see over the next 10 , 20 , 30 years a real science of creativity that 's burgeoning and is going to flourish .
because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process of something like this , complex jazz improvisation , and study it rigorously .
and so it gets down to the brain .
and so all of us have this remarkable brain , which is poorly understood to say the least .
i think that neuroscientists have many more questions than answers , and i myself , i 'm not going to give you many answers today , just ask a lot of questions .
and fundamentally that 's what i do in my lab .
i ask questions about what is this brain doing to enable us to do this .
this is the main method that i use . this is called functional mri .
if you 've been in an mri scanner , it 's very much the same , but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain , but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain .
now the way that 's done is by the following .
there 's something called bold imaging , which is blood oxygen level dependent imaging .
now when you 're in an fmri scanner , you 're in a big magnet that 's aligning your molecules in certain areas .
when an area of the brain is active , meaning a neural area is active , it gets blood flow shunted to that area .
that blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration .
deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by mri , whereas oxyhemoglobin ca n't .
so through this method of inference - and we 're measuring blood flow , not neural activity - we say that an area of the brain that 's getting more blood was active during a particular task , and that 's the crux of how fmri works .
and it 's been used since the ' 90s to study really complex processes .
now i 'm going to review a study that i did , which was jazz in an fmri scanner .
and this was done with a colleague of mine , alan braun , at the nih .
this is a short video of how we did this project .
-lrb- video -rrb- charles limb : this is a plastic midi piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments .
and it 's a 35-key keyboard that is designed to fit both inside the scanner , be magnetically safe , have minimal interference that would contribute to any artifact and have this cushion so that it can rest on the players ' legs while they 're lying down in the scanner , playing on their back .
and it works like this - this does n't actually produce any sound .
it sends out what 's called a midi signal - or a musical instrument digital interface - through these wires into the box and then the computer , which then trigger high-quality piano samples like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- cl : okay , so it works .
and so through this piano keyboard , we now have the means to take a musical process and study it .
so what do you do now that you have this cool piano keyboard ?
you ca n't just sort of - " it 's great we 've got this keyboard . "
we actually have to come up with a scientific experiment .
and so the experiment really rests on the following : what happens in the brain during something that 's memorized and over-learned , and what happens in the brain during something that is spontaneously generated , or improvised , in a way that 's matched motorically and in terms of lower-level sensory motor features ?
and so , i have here what we call the " paradigms . "
there 's a scale paradigm , which is just playing a scale up and down , memorized .
and then there 's improvising on a scale - quarter notes , metronome , right hand - scientifically very safe , but musically really boring .
and then there 's the bottom one , which is called the jazz paradigm .
and so what we did was we brought professional jazz players to the nih , and we had them memorize this piece of music on the left , the lower-left - which is what you heard me playing - and then we had them improvise to the same exact chord changes .
and if you can hit that lower-right sound icon , that 's an example of what was recorded in the scanner .
-lrb- music -rrb- so in the end , it 's not the most natural environment , but they 're able to play real music .
and i 've listened to that solo 200 times , and i still like it .
and the musicians , they were comfortable in the end .
and so we first measured the number of notes .
were they in fact just playing a lot more notes when they were improvising ?
that was not what was going on .
and then we looked at the brain activity .
i 'm going to try to condense this for you .
these are contrast maps that are showing subtractions between what changes when you 're improvising versus when you 're doing something memorized .
in red is an area that active in the prefrontal cortex , the frontal lobe of the brain , and in blue is this area that was deactivated .
and so we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity .
we had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity , and i 'll summarize that for you here .
now these are multifunctional areas of the brain .
as i like to say , these are not the " jazz areas " of the brain .
they do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection , introspection , working memory and so forth .
really , consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe .
but we have this combination of an area that 's thought to be involved in self-monitoring , turning off , and this area that 's thought to be autobiographical , or self-expressive , turning on .
and we think , at least in this preliminary - it 's one study ; it 's probably wrong , but it 's one study - we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that , to be creative , you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe .
one area turns on , and a big area shuts off , so that you 're not inhibited , so that you 're willing to make mistakes , so that you 're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses .
now a lot of people know that music is not always a solo activity - sometimes it 's done communicatively .
and so the next question was : what happens when musicians are trading back and forth , something called " trading fours , " which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment ?
so this is a twelve-bar blues .
and i 've broken it down into four-bar groups here , so you would know how you would trade .
now what we did was we brought a musician into the scanner - same way - had them memorize this melody and then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively .
so this is a musician , mike pope , one of the world 's best bassists and a fantastic piano player .
so he 's now playing the piece that we just saw just a little better than i wrote it .
-lrb- video -rrb- cl : mike , come on in . mike pope : may the force be with you .
nurse : nothing 's in your pockets , right mike ?
mp : nope . nothing 's in my pockets . nurse : okay .
cl : you have to have the right attitude to agree to it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's kind of fun actually .
and so now we 're playing back and forth .
he 's in there . you can see his legs up there .
and then i 'm in the control room here , playing back and forth .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- mike pope : this is a pretty good representation of what it 's like .
and it 's good that it 's not too quick .
the fact that we do it over and over again lets you acclimate to your surroundings .
so the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing , of looking at my hands through two mirrors , laying on my back and not able to move at all except for my hand .
that was challenging .
but again , there were moments , for sure , there were moments of real , honest-to-god musical interplay , for sure .
cl : at this point , i 'll take a few moments .
and so what you 're seeing here - and i 'm doing a cardinal sin in science , which is to show you preliminary data .
this is one subject 's data .
this is , in fact , mike pope 's data .
so what am i showing you here ?
when he was trading fours with me , improvising versus memorized , his language areas lit up , his broca 's area , which is inferior frontal gyrus on the left .
he actually had it also homologous on the right .
this is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication .
this whole notion that music is a language - well maybe there 's a neurologic basis to it in fact after all , and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation .
and so we 've done this actually on eight subjects now , and we 're just getting all the data together , so hopefully we 'll have something to say about it meaningfully .
now when i think about improvisation and the language , well what 's next ?
rap , of course , rap - free-style .
and so i 've always been fascinated by free-style .
and let 's go ahead and play this video here .
-lrb- video -rrb- mos def : ♫ ... brown skin i be , standing five-ten i be ♫ ♫ rockin ' it when i be , in your vicinity ♫ ♫ whole-style synergy , recognize symmetry ♫ ♫ go and try to injure me , broke ' em down chemically ♫ ♫ ai n't the number 10 mc , talk about how been i be ♫ ♫ styled it like kennedy , late like a 10 to three ♫ ♫ when i say when i be , girls say bend that key cut ♫ cl : and so there 's a lot of analogy between what takes place in free-style rap and jazz .
there are , in fact , a lot of correlations between the two forms of music i think in different time periods .
in a lot a ways , rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve .
so how do you study rap scientifically ?
and my colleagues kind of think i 'm crazy , but i think it 's very viable .
and so this is what you do : you have a free-style artist come in and memorize a rap that you write for them , that they 've never heard before , and then you have them free-style .
so i told my lab members that i would rap for ted , and they said , " no , you wo n't . "
and then i thought - -lrb- applause -rrb- but here 's the thing .
with this big screen , you can all rap with me . okay ?
so what we had them do was memorize this lower-left sound icon , please .
this is the control condition . this is what they memorized .
computer : ♫ memory , thump . ♫ cl : ♫ thump of the beat in a known repeat ♫ ♫ rhythm and rhyme , they make me complete ♫ ♫ the climb is sublime when i 'm on the mic ♫ ♫ spittin ' rhymes that hit you like a lightning strike ♫ ♫ i search for the truth in this eternal quest ♫ ♫ my passion 's not fashion , you can see how i 'm dressed ♫ ♫ psychopathic words in my head appear ♫ ♫ whisper these lyrics only i can hear ♫ ♫ the art of discovering and that which is hovering ♫ ♫ inside the mind of those unconfined ♫
♫ all of these words keep pouring out like rain ♫ ♫ i need a mad scientist to check my brain ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i guarantee you that will never happen again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now , what 's great about these free-stylers , they will get cued different words .
they do n't know what 's coming , but they 'll hear something off the cuff .
go ahead and hit that right sound icon .
they are going to be cued these three square words : " like , " " not " and " head . "
he does n't know what 's coming .
free-styler : ♫ i 'm like some kind of -lsb- unclear -rsb- ♫ ♫ -lsb- unclear -rsb- extraterrestrial , celestial scene ♫ ♫ back in the days , i used to sit in pyramids and meditate ♫ ♫ with two microphones hovering over my head ♫ ♫ see if i could still listen , spittin ' off the sound ♫ ♫ see what you grinning ♫ ♫ i teach the children in the back of the classroom ♫ ♫ about the message of apocalyptical ♫ ♫ not really though , ' cause i 've got to keep it simple ♫ ♫ -lsb- unclear -rsb- instrumental ♫ ♫ detrimental playing super mario ♫ ♫ -lsb- unclear -rsb- boxes -lsb- unclear -rsb- hip hop ♫
cl : so again , it 's an incredible thing that 's taking place .
it 's doing something that , neurologically , is remarkable .
whether or not you like the music is irrelevant .
creatively speaking , it 's just a phenomenal thing .
this is a short video of how we actually do this in a scanner .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- cl : we 're here with emmanuel .
cl : that was recorded in the scanner , by the way .
-lrb- video -rrb- cl : that 's emmanuel in the scanner .
he 's just memorized a rhyme for us .
emmanuel : ♫ top of the beat with no repeat ♫ ♫ rhythm and rhyme make me complete ♫ ♫ climb is sublime when i 'm on the mic ♫ ♫ spittin ' rhymes that 'll hit you like a lightning strike ♫ ♫ i search for the truth in this eternal quest ♫ ♫ i 'm passing on fashion ; you can see how i 'm dressed ♫ cl : okay . so i 'm going to stop that there . so what do we see in his brain ?
well , this is actually four rappers ' brains .
and what we see , we do see language areas lighting up , but then - eyes closed - when you are free-styling versus memorizing , you 've got major visual areas lighting up .
you 've got major cerebellar activity , which is involved in motor coordination .
you have heightened brain activity when you 're doing a comparable task , when that one task is creative and the other task is memorized .
it 's very preliminary , but i think it 's kind of cool .
so just to conclude , we 've got a lot of questions to ask , and like i said , we 'll ask questions here , not answer them .
but we want to get at the root of what is creative genius , neurologically , and i think , with these methods , we 're getting close to being there .
and i think hopefully in the next 10 , 20 years you 'll actually see real , meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art , and maybe we 're starting now to get there .
and so i want to thank you for your time . i appreciate it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a couple of years ago when i was attending the ted conference in long beach , i met harriet .
we 'd actually met online before - not the way you 're thinking .
we were actually introduced because we both knew linda avey , one of the founders of the first online personal genomic companies .
and because we shared our genetic information with linda , she could see that harriet and i shared a very rare type of mitochondrial dna - haplotype k1a1b1a - which meant that we were distantly related .
we actually share the same genealogy with ozzie the iceman .
so ozzie , harriet and me .
and being the current day , of course , we started our own facebook group .
you 're all welcome to join .
and when i met harriet in person the next year at the ted conference , she 'd gone online and ordered our own happy haplotype t-shirts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now why am i telling you this story , and what does this have to do with the future of health ?
well the way i met harriet is actually an example of how leveraging cross-disciplinary , exponentially-growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness - from low-cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bio-informatics to the connection of the internet and social networking .
what i 'd like to talk about today is understanding these exponential technologies .
we often think linearly .
but if you think about it , if you have a lily pad and it just divided every single day - two , four , eight , 16 - in 15 days you have 32,000 .
what do you think you have in a month ? we 're at a billion .
so if we start to think exponentially , we can see how this is starting to affect all the technologies around us .
and many of these technologies - speaking as a physician and innovator - we can really start to leverage to impact the future of our own health and of health care , and to address many of the major challenges that we have in health care today , ranging from the really exponential costs to the aging population , the way we really do n't use information very well today , the fragmentation of care and often the very difficult course of adoption of innovation .
and one of the major things we can do we 've talked a bit about here today is moving the curve to the left .
we spend most of our money on the last 20 percent of life .
what if we could spend and incentivize positions in the health care system and our own self to move the curve to the left and improve our health , leveraging technology as well ?
now my favorite technology , example of exponential technology , we all have in our pocket .
so if you think about it , these are really dramatically improving .
i mean this is the iphone 4 .
imagine what the iphone 8 will be able to do .
now , i 've gained some insight into this .
i 've been the track share for the medicine portion of a new institution called singularity university based in silicon valley .
and we bring together every summer about 100 very talented students from around the world .
and we look at these exponential technologies from medicine , biotech , artificial intelligence , robotics , nanotechnology , space , and address how can we cross-train and leverage these to impact major unmet goals .
we also have seven-day executive programs .
and coming up next month is actually future med , a program to help cross-train and leverage technologies into medicine .
now i mentioned the phone .
these mobile phones have over 20,000 different mobile apps available - to the point where there 's one out of the u.k.
where you can pee on a little chip connected to your iphone and check yourself for an std .
i do n't know if i 'd try that yet , but that 's available .
there are all other sorts of applications , merging your phone and diagnostics , for example - measuring your blood glucose on your iphone and sending that , potentially , to your physician so they can better understand and you can better understand your blood sugars as a diabetic .
so let 's see now how exponential technologies are taking health care .
let 's start with faster .
well it 's no secret that computers , through moore 's law , are speeding up faster and faster .
we have the ability to do more powerful things with them .
they 're really approaching , in many cases surpassing , the ability of the human mind .
but where i think computational speed is most applicable is in that of imaging .
the ability now to look inside the body in real time with very high resolution is really becoming incredible .
and we 're layering multiple technologies - pet scans , ct scans and molecular diagnostics - to find and to seek things at different levels .
here you 're going to see the very highest resolution mri scan done today , reconstructed of marc hodosh , the curator of tedmed .
and now we can see inside of the brain with a resolution and ability that was never before available , and essentially learn how to reconstruct , and maybe even re-engineer , or backwards engineer , the brain so we can better understand pathology , disease and therapy .
we can look inside with real time fmri - in the brain at real time .
and by understanding these sorts of processes and these sorts of connections , we 're going to understand the effects of medication or meditation and better personalize and make effective , for example , psychoactive drugs .
the scanners for these are getting small , less expensive and more portable .
and this sort of data explosion available from these is really almost becoming a challenge .
the scan of today takes up about 800 books , or 20 gigabytes .
the scan in a couple of years will be one terabyte , or 800,000 books .
how do you leverage that information ?
let 's get personal . i wo n't ask who here 's had a colonoscopy , but if you 're over age 50 , it 's time for your screening colonoscopy .
how would you like to avoid the pointy end of the stick ?
well now there 's essentially a virtual colonoscopy .
compare those two pictures , and now as a radiologist , you can essentially fly through your patient 's colon and , augmenting that with artificial intelligence , identify potentially , as you see here , a lesion .
oh , we might have missed it , but using a.i. on top of radiology , we can find lesions that were missed before .
and maybe this will encourage people to get colonoscopies that would n't have otherwise .
and this is an example of this paradigm shift .
we 're moving to this integration of biomedicine , information technology , wireless and , i would say , mobile now - this era of digital medicine .
so even my stethoscope is now digital .
and of course , there 's an app for that .
we 're moving , obviously , to the era of the tricorder .
so the handheld ultrasound is basically surpassing and supplanting the stethoscope .
these are now at a price point of - what used to be 100,000 euros or a couple of hundred-thousand dollars - for about 5,000 dollars , i can have the power of a very powerful diagnostic device in my hand .
and merging this now with the advent of electronic medical records - in the united states , we 're still less than 20 percent electronic .
here in the netherlands , i think it 's more than 80 percent .
but now that we 're switching to merging medical data , making it available electronically , we can crowd source that information , and now as a physician , i can access my patients ' data from wherever i am just through my mobile device .
and now , of course , we 're in the era of the ipad , even the ipad 2 .
and just last month the first fda-approved application was approved to allow radiologists to do actual reading on these sorts of devices .
so certainly , the physicians of today , including myself , are completely reliable on these devices .
and as you saw just about a month ago , watson from ibm beat the two champions in " jeopardy . "
so i want you to imagine when in a couple of years , when we 've started to apply this cloud-based information , when we really have the a.i. physician and leverage our brains to connectivity to make decisions and diagnostics at a level never done .
already today , you do n't need to go to your physician in many cases .
only for about 20 percent of actual visits do you have to lay hands on the patient .
we 're now in the era of virtual visits - from sort of the skype-type visits you can do with american well , to cisco that 's developed a very complex health presence system .
the ability to interact with your health care provider is different .
and these are being augmented even by our devices again today .
here my friend jessica sent me a picture of her head laceration so i can save her a trip to the emergency room - i can do some diagnostics that way .
or might we be able to leverage today 's gaming technology , like the microsoft kinect , and hack that to enable diagnostics , for example , in diagnosing stroke , using simple motion detection , using hundred-dollar devices .
we can actually now visit our patients robotically - this is the rp7 ; if i 'm a hematologist , visit another clinic , visit a hospital .
these will be augmented by a whole suite of tools actually in the home now .
so imagine we already have wireless scales .
you can step on the scale .
you can tweet your weight to your friends , and they can keep you in line .
we have wireless blood pressure cuffs .
a whole gamut of these technologies are being put together .
so instead of wearing these kludgy devices , we can put on a simple patch .
this was developed by colleagues at stanford , called the irhythm - completely supplants the prior technology at a much lower price point with much more effectivity .
now we 're also in the era , today , of quantified self .
consumers now can buy basically hundred-dollar devices , like this little fitbit .
i can measure my steps , my caloric outtake .
i can get insight into that on a daily basis .
i can share that with my friends , with my physician .
there 's watches coming out that will measure your heart rate , the zeo sleep monitors , a whole suite of tools that can enable you to leverage and have insight into your own health .
and as we start to integrate this information , we 're going to know better what to do with it and how better to have insight into our own pathologies , health and wellness .
there 's even mirrors today that can pick up your pulse rate .
and i would argue , in the future , we 'll have wearable devices in our clothes , monitoring ourselves 24/7 .
and just like we have the onstar system in cars , your red light might go on - it wo n't say " check engine " though .
it 's going to be " check your body " light , and go in and get it taken care of .
probably in a few years , you 'll check into your mirror and it 's going to be diagnosing you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for those of you with kiddos at home , how would you like to have the wireless diaper that supports your ...
too much information , i think , than you might need .
but it 's going to be here .
now we 've heard a lot today about new technology and connection .
and i think some of these technologies will enable us to be more connected with our patients , and take more time and actually do the important human touch elements of medicine , as augmented by these sorts of technologies .
now we 've talked about augmenting the patient , to some degree .
how about augmenting the physician ?
we 're now in the era of super-enabling the surgeon who can now go inside the body and do things with robotic surgery , which is here today , at a level that was not really possible even five years ago .
now this is being augmented with further layers of technology like augmented reality .
so the surgeon can see inside the patient , through their lens , where the tumor is , where the blood vessels are .
this can be integrated with decisions support .
a surgeon in new york can be helping a surgeon in amsterdam , for example .
and we 're entering an era of really , truly scarless surgery called notes , where the robotic endoscope can come out the stomach and pull out that gallbladder all in a scarless way and robotically .
and this is called notes , and this is coming - basically scarless surgery , as mediated by robotic surgery .
now how about controlling other elements ?
for those who have disabilities - the paraplegic - there 's the era of brain-computer interface , or bci , where chips have been put on the motor cortex of completely quadriplegic patients and they can control a curser or a wheelchair or , eventually , a robotic arm .
and these devices are getting smaller and going into more and more of these patients .
still in clinical trials , but imagine when we can connect these , for example , to the amazing bionic limb , such as the deka arm built by dean kamen and colleagues , which has 17 degrees of motion and freedom and can allow the person who 's lost a limb to have much higher levels of dexterity or control than they 've had in the past .
so we 're really entering the era of wearable robotics actually .
if you have n't lost a limb - you 've had a stroke , for example - you can wear these augmented limbs .
or if you 're a paraplegic - like i 've visited the folks at berkley bionics - they 've developed elegs .
i took this video last week . here 's a paraplegic patient actually walking by strapping on these exoskeletons .
he 's otherwise completely wheelchair-bound .
and now this is the early era of wearable robotics .
and i think by leveraging these sorts of technologies , we 're going to change the definition of disability to in some cases be superability , or super-enabling .
this is aimee mullins , who lost her lower limbs as a young child , and hugh herr , who 's a professor at mit who lost his limbs in a climbing accident .
and now both of these can climb better , move faster , swim differently with their prosthetics than us normal-abled persons .
now how about other exponentials ?
clearly the obesity trend is exponentially going in the wrong direction , including with huge costs .
but the trend in medicine actually is to get exponentially smaller .
so a few examples : we 're now in the era of " fantastic voyage , " the ipill .
you can swallow this completely integrated device .
it can take pictures of your gi system , help diagnose and treat as it moves through your gi tract .
we get into even smaller micro-robots that will eventually autonomously move through your system again and be able to do things that surgeons ca n't do in a much less invasive manner .
sometimes these might self-assemble in your gi system and be augmented in that reality .
on the cardiac side , pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place so you do n't need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them .
and they 're going to be wirelessly telemetered again to your mobile devices so you can go places and be monitored remotely .
these are shrinking even further .
here 's one that 's in prototyping by medtronic that 's smaller than a penny .
artificial retinas , the ability to put these arrays on the back of the eyeball and allow the blind to see .
again , in early trials , but moving into the future .
these are going to be game changing .
or for those of us who are sighted , how about having the assisted-living contact lens ?
bluetooth , wifi available - beams back images to your eye .
now if you have trouble maintaining your diet , it might help to have some extra imagery to remind you how many calories are going to be coming at you .
how about enabling the pathologist to use their cell phone again to see at a microscopic level and to lumber that data back to the cloud and make better diagnostics ?
in fact , the whole era of laboratory medicine is completely changing .
we can now leverage microfluidics , like this chip made by steve quake at stanford .
microfluidics can replace an entire lab of technicians .
put it on a chip , enable thousands of tests to be done at the point of care , anywhere in the world .
and this is really going to leverage technology to the rural and the under-served and enable what used to be thousand-dollar tests to be done at pennies and at the point of care .
if we go down the small pathway a little bit farther , we 're entering the era of nanomedicine , the ability to make devices super small to the point where we can design red blood cells or microrobots that will monitor our blood system or immune system , or even those that might clear out the clots from our arteries .
now how about exponentially cheaper ?
not something we usually think about in the era of medicine , but hard disks used to be 3,400 dollars for 10 megabytes - exponentially cheaper .
in genomics now , the genome cost about a billion dollars about 10 years ago when the first one came out .
we 're now approaching essentially a thousand-dollar genome - probably next year to two years , probably a hundred-dollar genome .
what are we going to do with hundred-dollar genomes ?
and soon we 'll have millions of these tests available .
and that 's when it gets interesting , when we start to crowdsource that information .
and we enter the era of true personalized medicine - the right drug for the right person at the right time - instead of what we 're doing today , which is the same drug for everybody - sort of blockbuster drug medications , medications which do n't work for you , the individual .
and many , many different companies are working on leveraging these approaches .
and i 'll also show you a simple example , from 23andme again .
my data indicates that i 've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration , a kind of blindness .
but if i take that same data , upload it to decodeme , i can look at my risk for sample type 2 diabetes .
i 'm at almost twice the risk for type 2 diabetes .
i might want to watch how much dessert i have at the lunch break for example .
it might change my behavior .
leveraging my knowledge of my pharmacogenomics - how my genes modulate , what my drugs do and what doses i need are going to become increasingly important , and once in the hands of the individual and the patient , will make better drug dosing and selection available .
so again , it 's not just genes , it 's multiple details - our habits , our environmental exposure .
when was the last time your physician asked you where you 've lived ?
geomedicine : where you 've lived , what you 've been exposed to , can dramatically affect your health .
we can capture that information .
so genomics , proteomics , the environment , all this data streaming at us individually and us , as poor physicians , how do we manage it ?
well we 're now entering the era of systems medicine , or systems biology , where we can start to integrate all of this information .
and by looking at the patterns , for example , in our blood of 10,000 biomarkers in a single test , we can start to look at these little patterns and detect disease at a much earlier stage .
this has been called by lee hood , the father of the field , p4 medicine .
we 're going to be predictive ; we 're going to know what you 're likely to have .
we can be preventative ; that prevention can be personalized ; and more importantly , it 's going to become increasingly participatory .
through websites like patients like me or managing your data on microsoft healthvault or google health , leveraging this together in participatory ways is going to become increasingly important .
so i 'll finish up with exponentially better .
we 'd like to get therapies better and more effective .
now today we treat high blood pressure mostly with pills .
what if we take a new device and knock out the nerve vessels that help mediate blood pressure and in a single therapy to cure hypertension ?
this is a new device that is essentially doing that .
it should be on the market within a year or two .
how about more targeted therapies for cancer ?
right , i 'm an oncologist and i have to say most of what we give is actually poison .
we 've learned at stanford and other places that we can discover cancer stem cells , the ones that seem to be really responsible for disease relapse .
so if you think of cancer as a weed , we often can whack the weed away .
it seems to shrink , but it often comes back .
so we 're attacking the wrong target .
the cancer stem cells remain , and the tumor can return months or years later .
we 're now learning to identify the cancer stem cells and identify those as targets and go for the long-term cure .
and we 're entering the era of personalized oncology , the ability to leverage all of this data together , analyze the tumor and come up with a real , specific cocktail for the individual patient .
now i 'll close with regenerative medicine .
so i 've studied a lot about stem cells - embryonic stem cells are particularly powerful .
we also have adult stem cells throughout our body .
we use those in my field of bone marrow transplantation .
geron , just last year , started the first trial using human embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries .
still a phase i trial , but evolving .
we 've been actually using adult stem cells now in clinical trials for about 15 years to approach a whole range of topics , particularly in cardiovascular disease .
we take our own bone marrow cells and treat a patient with a heart attack , we can see much improved heart function and actually better survival using our own bone marrow drive cells after a heart attack .
i invented a device called the marrowminer , a much less invasive way for harvesting bone marrow .
it 's now been fda approved , and it 'll hopefully be on the market in the next year or so .
hopefully you can appreciate the device there curving through the patient 's body and removing the patient 's bone marrow , instead of with 200 punctures , with just a single puncture under local anesthesia .
but where is stem cell therapy really going ?
if you think about it , every cell in your body has the same dna as you had when you were an embryo .
we can now reprogram your skin cells to actually act like a pluripotent embryonic stem cell and to utilize those potentially to treat multiple organs in that same patient - making your own personalized stem cell lines .
and i think they 'll be a new era of your own stem cell banking to have in the freezer your own cardiac cells , myocytes and neural cells to use them in the future , should you need them .
and we 're integrating this now with a whole era of cellular engineering , and integrating exponential technologies for essentially 3d organ printing - replacing the ink with cells and essentially building and reconstructing a 3d organ .
that 's where things are going to head - still very early days .
but i think , as integration of exponential technologies , this is the example .
so in close , as you think about technology trends and how to impact health and medicine , we 're entering an era of miniaturization , decentralization and personalization .
and i think by pulling these things together , if we can start to think about how to understand and leverage these , we 're going to empower the patient , enable the doctor , enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick .
because i know as a doctor , if someone comes to me with stage i disease , i 'm thrilled - we can often cure them .
but often it 's too late and it 's stage iii or iv cancer , for example .
so by leveraging these technologies together , i think we 'll enter a new era that i like to call stage 0 medicine .
and as a cancer doctor , i 'm looking forward to being out of a job .
thanks very much .
host : thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- take a bow . take a bow .
information technology grows in an exponential manner .
it 's not linear . and our intuition is linear .
when we walked through the savanna a thousand years ago we made linear predictions where that animal would be , and that worked fine . it 's hardwired in our brains .
but the pace of exponential growth is really what describes information technologies .
and it 's not just computation .
there is a big difference between linear and exponential growth .
if i take 30 steps linearly - one , two , three , four , five - i get to 30 .
if i take 30 steps exponentially - two , four , eight , 16 - i get to a billion .
it makes a huge difference .
and that really describes information technology .
when i was a student at mit , we all shared one computer that took up a whole building .
the computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper , a million times smaller , a thousand times more powerful .
that 's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar that we 've actually experienced since i was a student .
and we 're going to do it again in the next 25 years .
information technology progresses through a series of s-curves where each one is a different paradigm .
so people say , " what 's going to happen when moore 's law comes to an end ? "
which will happen around 2020 .
we 'll then go to the next paradigm .
and moore 's law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing .
the exponential growth of computing started decades before gordon moore was even born .
and it does n't just apply to computation .
it 's really any technology where we can measure the underlying information properties .
here we have 49 famous computers . i put them in a logarithmic graph .
the logarithmic scale hides the scale of the increase , because this represents trillions-fold increase since the 1890 census .
in 1950s they were shrinking vacuum tubes , making them smaller and smaller . they finally hit a wall ; they could n't shrink the vacuum tube any more and keep the vacuum .
and that was the end of the shrinking of vacuum tubes , but it was not the end of the exponential growth of computing .
we went to the fourth paradigm , transistors , and finally integrated circuits .
when that comes to an end we 'll go to the sixth paradigm ; three-dimensional self-organizing molecular circuits .
but what 's even more amazing , really , than this fantastic scale of progress , is that - look at how predictable this is .
i mean this went through thick and thin , through war and peace , through boom times and recessions .
the great depression made not a dent in this exponential progression .
we 'll see the same thing in the economic recession we 're having now .
at least the exponential growth of information technology capability will continue unabated .
and i just updated these graphs .
because i had them through 2002 in my book , " the singularity is near . "
so we updated them , so i could present it here , to 2007 .
and i was asked , " well are n't you nervous ?
maybe it kind of did n't stay on this exponential progression . "
i was a little nervous because maybe the data would n't be right , but i 've done this now for 30 years , and it has stayed on this exponential progression .
look at this graph here.you could buy one transistor for a dollar in 1968 .
you can buy half a billion today , and they are actually better , because they are faster .
but look at how predictable this is .
and i 'd say this knowledge is over-fitting to past data .
i 've been making these forward-looking predictions for about 30 years .
and the cost of a transistor cycle , which is a measure of the price performance of electronics , comes down about every year .
that 's a 50 percent deflation rate .
and it 's also true of other examples , like dna data or brain data .
but we more than make up for that .
we actually ship more than twice as much of every form of information technology .
we 've had 18 percent growth in constant dollars in every form of information technology for the last half-century , despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it each year .
this is a completely different example .
this is not moore 's law .
the amount of dna data we 've sequenced has doubled every year .
the cost has come down by half every year .
and this has been a smooth progression since the beginning of the genome project .
and halfway through the project , skeptics said , " well , this is not working out . you 're halfway through the genome project and you 've finished one percent of the project . "
but that was really right on schedule .
because if you double one percent seven more times , which is exactly what happened , you get 100 percent . and the project was finished on time .
communication technologies : 50 different ways to measure this , the number of bits being moved around , the size of the internet .
but this has progressed at an exponential pace .
this is deeply democratizing .
i wrote , over 20 years ago in " the age of intelligent machines , " when the soviet union was going strong , that it would be swept away by this growth of decentralized communication .
and we will have plenty of computation as we go through the 21st century to do things like simulate regions of the human brain .
but where will we get the software ?
some critics say , " oh , well software is stuck in the mud . "
but we are learning more and more about the human brain .
spatial resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year .
the amount of data we 're getting about the brain is doubling every year .
and we 're showing that we can actually turn this data into working models and simulations of brain regions .
there is about 20 regions of the brain that have been modeled , simulated and tested : the auditory cortex , regions of the visual cortex ; cerebellum , where we do our skill formation ; slices of the cerebral cortex , where we do our rational thinking .
and all of this has fueled an increase , very smooth and predictable , of productivity .
we 've gone from 30 dollars to 130 dollars in constant dollars in the value of an average hour of human labor , fueled by this information technology .
and we 're all concerned about energy and the environment .
well this is a logarithmic graph .
this represents a smooth doubling , every two years , of the amount of solar energy we 're creating , particularly as we 're now applying nanotechnology , a form of information technology , to solar panels .
and we 're only eight doublings away from it meeting 100 percent of our energy needs .
and there is 10 thousand times more sunlight than we need .
we ultimately will merge with this technology . it 's already very close to us .
when i was a student it was across campus , now it 's in our pockets .
what used to take up a building now fits in our pockets .
what now fits in our pockets would fit in a blood cell in 25 years .
and we will begin to actually deeply influence our health and our intelligence , as we get closer and closer to this technology .
based on that we are announcing , here at ted , in true ted tradition , singularity university .
it 's a new university that 's founded by peter diamandis , who is here in the audience , and myself .
it 's backed by nasa and google , and other leaders in the high-tech and science community .
and our goal was to assemble the leaders , both teachers and students , in these exponentially growing information technologies , and their application .
but larry page made an impassioned speech at our organizing meeting , saying we should devote this study to actually addressing some of the major challenges facing humanity .
and if we did that , then google would back this .
and so that 's what we 've done .
the last third of the nine-week intensive summer session will be devoted to a group project to address some major challenge of humanity .
like for example , applying the internet , which is now ubiquitous , in the rural areas of china or in africa , to bringing health information to developing areas of the world .
and these projects will continue past these sessions , using collaborative interactive communication .
all the intellectual property that is created and taught will be online and available , and developed online in a collaborative fashion .
here is our founding meeting .
but this is being announced today .
it will be permanently headquartered in silicon valley , at the nasa ames research center .
there are different programs for graduate students , for executives at different companies .
the first six tracks here - artificial intelligence , advanced computing technologies , biotechnology , nanotechnology - are the different core areas of information technology .
then we are going to apply them to the other areas , like energy , ecology , policy law and ethics , entrepreneurship , so that people can bring these new technologies to the world .
so we 're very appreciative of the support we 've gotten from both the intellectual leaders , the high-tech leaders , particularly google and nasa .
this is an exciting new venture .
and we invite you to participate . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , this morning i 'm speaking on the question of corruption .
and corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself - or , in the case of our context , your friends , your family or your financiers .
okay ? friends , family and financiers .
but we need to understand what we understand about corruption , and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it , and we have to admit that .
we have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it .
the first thing is that the big myth , number one , is that in fact it 's not really a crime .
when we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country , crime in belmont or crime in diego or crime in marabella , nobody 's speaking about corruption .
that 's the honest truth .
when the commissioner of police comes on tv to talk about crime , he is n't speaking about corruption .
and we know for sure when the minister of national security is speaking about crime , he 's not talking about corruption either .
the point i 'm making is that it is a crime .
it is an economic crime , because we 're involving the looting of taxpayers ' money .
public and private corruption is a reality .
as somebody who comes from the private sector , i can tell you there 's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government .
the same bribes and backhanders and things that take place under the table , it all takes place in the private sector .
today , i 'm focusing on public sector corruption , which the private sector also participates in .
the second important myth to understand - because we have to destroy these myths , dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them - the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem - if it is a problem , it 's only a small problem , that in fact it 's only a little 10 or 15 percent , it 's been going on forever , it probably will continue forever , and there 's no point passing any laws , because there 's little we can do about it .
and i want to demonstrate that that , too , is a dangerous myth , very dangerous .
it 's a piece of public mischief .
and i want to speak a little bit , take us back about 30 years .
we 're coming out today from trinidad and tobago , a resource-rich , small caribbean country , and in the early 1970s we had a massive increase in the country 's wealth , and that increase was caused by the increase in world oil prices .
we call them petrodollars . the treasury was bursting with money .
and it 's ironic , because we 're standing today in the central bank .
you see , history 's rich in irony .
we 're standing today in the central bank , and the central bank is responsible for a lot of the things i 'm going to be speaking about .
okay ? we 're talking about irresponsibility in public office .
we 're speaking about the fact that across the terrace , the next tower is the ministry of finance , and there 's a lot of connection with us today , so we 're speaking within your temple today . okay ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- the first thing i want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago , we embarked , the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country .
and some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world , the united states and britain and france and so on and so on .
as i said , even this building we 're standing in - that 's one of the ironies - this building was part of that series of complexes , what they called the twin towers .
it became so outrageous , the whole situation , that in fact a commission of inquiry was appointed , and it reported in 1982 , 30 years ago it reported - the ballah report - 30 years ago , and immediately the government-to-government arrangements were stopped .
the then-prime minister went to parliament to give a budget speech , and he said some things that i 'll never forget .
they went right in here . i was a young man at the time .
it went right into my heart .
and he said that , in fact - let me see if this thing works .
are we getting a , yeah ? - that 's what he told us .
he told us that , in fact , two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent , the taxpayers ' money , was wasted or stolen .
so the 10 or 15 percent is pure mischief .
as we say , it 's a nancy-story . forget it .
that 's for little children . we are big people , and we 're trying to deal with what 's happening in our society .
okay ? this is the size of the problem .
okay ? two thirds of the money stolen or wasted .
that was 30 years ago . 1982 was ballah .
so what has changed ?
i do n't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience , but i have to .
four months ago , we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country .
we call it the section 34 fiasco , the section 34 fiasco , a suspicious piece of law , and i 'm going to say it like it is , a suspicious piece of law was passed at a suspicious time to free some suspects . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it was called , those people are called the piarco airport accused .
i 'm going to have my own lexicon speaking here today .
they are the piarco airport accused .
it was a constitutional outrage of the first order , and i have labeled it the plot to pervert parliament .
our highest institution in our country was perverted .
we are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature .
do you get how serious this problem is ?
there was massive protest . a lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms .
most importantly , the american embassy complained , so parliament was swiftly reconvened , and the law was reversed , it was repealed .
that 's the word lawyers use . it was repealed .
but the point is that parliament was outwitted in the whole course of events , because what really happened is that , because of the suspicious passage of that law , the law was actually passed into effect on the weekend we celebrated our 50th anniversary of independence , our jubilee of independence .
so that is the kind of outrage of the thing .
it was kind of a nasty way to get maturation , but we got it , because we all understood it , and for the first time that i could remember , there were mass protests against this corruption .
and that gave me a lot of hope . okay ?
those of us who are , sometimes you feel like you 're a little bit on your own doing some of this work .
that passage of the law and the repeal of the law fortified the case of the piarco airport accused .
so it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place .
but what were they accused of ?
what was it that they were accused of ?
i 'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there . what were they accused of ?
we were trying to build , or reconstruct largely , an airport that had grown outdated .
the entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars , trinidad and tobago dollars , and in fact , we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity , corrupt activity took place .
and to get an idea of what it consisted of , and to put it in context in relationship to this whole second myth about it being no big thing , we can look at this second slide here .
and what we have here - i am not saying so , this is the director of public prosecutions in a written statement . he said so .
and he 's telling us that for the $ 1.6 billion cost of the project , one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts .
one billion dollars of our taxpayers ' money has been located in offshore bank accounts .
being the kind of suspicious person i am , i am outraged at that , and i 'm going to pause here , i 'm going to pause now and again and bring in different things .
i 'm going to pause here and bring in something i saw in november last year at wall street . i was at zuccotti park .
it was autumn . it was cool . it was damp . it was getting dark .
and i was walking around with the protesters looking at the one wall street , occupy wall street movement walking around .
and there was a lady with a sign , a very simple sign , a kind of battered-looking blonde lady , and the sign was made out of bristol board , as we say in these parts , and it was made with a marker .
and what it said on that sign hit me right in the center .
it said , " if you 're not outraged , you have n't been paying attention . "
if you 're not outraged by all of this , you have n't been paying attention .
so listen up , because we 're getting into even deeper waters .
my brain started thinking .
well , what if - because i 'm suspicious like that . i read a lot of spy novels and stuff .
what if - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but to make it in these wrongs , you have to read a lot of spy novels and follow some of that stuff , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- but what if this was n't the first time ?
what if this is just the first time that the so-and-sos had been caught ?
what if it had happened before ? how would i find out ?
now , the previous two examples i gave were to do with construction sector corruption , okay ?
and i have the privilege at this time to lead the joint consultative council , which is a not-for-profit .
we 're at jcc.org.tt , and we have the - we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted .
so those of you interested in finding out more about it , or joining us or signing up on any of our petitions , please get involved .
but i 'm going to segue to another thing that relates , because one of my private campaigns i 've been conducting for over three and a half years is for transparency and accountability around the bailout of cl financial .
cl financial is the caribbean 's largest ever conglomerate , okay ?
and without getting into all of the details , it is said to have collapsed - i 'm using my words very carefully - it 's said to have collapsed in january of ' 09 , which is just coming up to nearly four years .
in an unprecedented fit of generosity - and you have to be very suspicious about these people - in an unprecedented - and i 'm using that word carefully - unprecedented fit of generosity , the government of the day signed , made a written commitment , to repay all of the creditors .
and i can tell you without fear of contradiction that has n't happened anywhere else on the planet .
let 's understand , because we lack context .
people are telling us it 's just like wall street . it 's not just like wall street .
trinidad and tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something .
it 's not just like anywhere . -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not just like anywhere . it 's not just like anywhere .
here is here , and out there is out there . okay ?
i 'm serious now .
listen . they 've had bailouts on wall street .
they 've had bailouts in london .
they 've had bailouts in europe .
in africa , they 've had bailouts . in nigeria , six of the major commercial banks collapsed at the same time as ours , eh ?
it 's interesting to parallel how the nigerian experience has - how they 've treated it , and they 've treated it very well compared to us .
nowhere on the planet have all the creditors been bailed out in excess of what their statutory entitlements were .
only here . so what was the reason for the generosity ?
is our government that generous ? and maybe they are .
let 's look at it . let 's look into it .
so i started digging and writing and so and so on , and that work can be found , my personal work can be found at afraraymond.com , which is my name .
it 's a not-for-profit blog that i run .
not as popular as some of the other people , but there you go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the point is that the bitter experience of section 34 , that plot to pervert parliament , that bitter experience that took place in august , when we were supposed to be celebrating our independence , going into september , forced me to check myself and recalculate my bearings , and to go back into some of the work , some of the stuff i 'd written and some of the exchanges i 'd had with the officials to see what was really what .
as we say in trinidad and tobago , who is who and what is what ?
okay ? we want to try to recalculate .
and i made a freedom of information application in may this year to the ministry of finance .
the ministry of finance is the next tower over .
this is the other context .
the ministry of finance , we are told , is subject to the provisions of the freedom of information act .
i 'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that 's really so .
the central bank in which we stand this morning is immune from the provisions of the freedom of information act .
so in fact , you ca n't ask them anything , and they do n't have to answer anything .
that is the law since 1999 .
so i plunged into this struggle , and i asked four questions .
and i 'll relate the questions to you in the short form with the reply , so you could understand , as i said , where we are .
here is not like anywhere else .
question number one : i asked to see the accounts of cl financial , and if you ca n't show me the accounts - the minister of finance is making statements , passing new laws and giving speeches and so on .
what are the figures he 's relying on ?
it 's like that joke : i want whatever he 's drinking .
and they wrote back and said to me , well what do you really mean ?
so they hit my question with a question .
second point : i want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid ?
let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this .
that is about three and a half billion u.s. dollars coming out of a small - we used to be resource-rich - caribbean country . okay ?
and i asked the question , who was getting that three and a half billion dollars ?
and i want to pause again to bring up context , because context helps us to get clarity understanding this thing .
there 's a particular individual who is in the government now .
the name of the person does n't matter .
and that person made a career out of using the freedom of information act to advance his political cause .
okay ? his name is n't important .
i would n't dignify it . i 'm on a point .
the point is , that person made a career out of using the freedom of information act to advance his cause .
and the most famous case was what we came to call the secret scholarship scandal , where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships , and the scholarships had n't been advertised , and so and so on and so on .
and he was able to get the court , using that act of parliament , freedom of information act , to release the information , and i thought that was excellent .
fantastic .
but you see , the question is this : if it 's right and proper for us to use the freedom of information act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money , it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars .
you see ? but the ministry of finance , the permanent secretary of the ministry of finance , wrote me and said to me , that information is exempt too .
you see ? this is what we 're dealing with , okay ?
the third thing i will tell you is that i also asked for the directors of cl financial , whether in fact they were making filings under our integrity in public life act .
we have an integrity in public life act as part of our framework supposed to safeguard the nation 's interest .
and public officials are supposed to file to say what it is they have in terms of assets and liabilities .
and of course i 've since discovered that they 're not filing , and in fact the minister of finance has not even asked them to file .
so here we have it . we have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded .
i 've asked the question in the legal and required fashion .
it 's been ignored .
the sort of thing that motivated us around section 34 , we need to continue to work on that . we ca n't forget it .
i have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country 's history .
it 's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation .
and this is my reality check .
where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it 's without transparency , it will always be equal to corruption , whether you 're in russia or nigeria or alaska , it will always be equal to corruption , and that is what we are dealing with here .
i 'm going to continue the work to press on , to get some resolution of those matters at the ministry of finance .
if it is i have to go to court personally , i will do that .
we will continue to press on .
we will continue to work within jcc .
but i want to step back from the trinidad and tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example .
we had the journalist -lsb- heather -rsb- brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption , and she introduced me to this website , alaveteli.com.
and alaveteli.com is a way for us to have an open database for freedom of information applications , and speak with each other .
i could see what you 're applying for .
you could see what i applied for and what replies i got .
we can work on it together . we need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point .
we need to increase the consciousness .
the final thing i want to say is in relation to this one , which is a lovely website from india called ipaidabribe.com.
they have international branches , and it 's important for us to tune into this one .
ipaidabribe.com is really important , a good one to log on to and see .
i 'm going to pause there . i 'm going to ask you for your courage .
discard the first myth ; it is a crime .
discard the second myth ; it is a big thing .
it 's a huge problem . it 's an economic crime .
and let us continue working together to betterment in this situation , stability and sustainability in our society . thank you .
okay .
♫ strolling along in central park ♫ ♫ everyone 's out today ♫ ♫ the daisies and dogwoods are all in bloom ♫ ♫ oh , what a glorious day ♫ ♫ for picnics and frisbees and roller skaters , ♫ ♫ friends and lovers and lonely sunbathers ♫ ♫ everyone 's out in merry manhattan in january ♫ -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ i brought the iced tea ; ♫ ♫ did you bring the bug spray ? ♫ ♫ the flies are the size of your head ♫ ♫ next to the palm tree , ♫ ♫ did you see the ' gators ♫ ♫ looking happy and well fed ? ♫
♫ everyone 's out in merry manhattan in january ♫ -lrb- whistling -rrb- everyone !
-lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- ♫ my preacher said , ♫ ♫ do n't you worry ♫ ♫ the scientists have it all wrong ♫ ♫ and so , who cares it 's winter here ? ♫ ♫ and i have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ i have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ everyone 's out in merry manhattan in january . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : jill sobule !
i 'm a creative technologist and the focus of my work is on public installations .
one of my driving passions is this idea of exploring nature , and trying to find hidden data within nature .
it seems to me that there is this latent potential everywhere , all around us .
everything gives out some kind of data , whether it 's sound or smell or vibration .
through my work , i 've been trying to find ways to harness and unveil this .
and so this basically led me to a subject called cymatics .
now , cymatics is the process of visualizing sound by basically vibrating a medium such as sand or water , as you can see there .
so , if we have a quick look at the history of cymatics beginning with the observations of resonance , by da vinci , galileo , the english scientist robert hook and then ernest chladni .
he created an experiment using a metal plate , covering it with sand and then bowing it to create the chladni patterns that you see here on the right .
moving on from this , the next person to explore this field was a gentleman called hans jenny in the 1970s .
he actually coined the term cymatics .
then bringing us into the present day is a fellow collaborator of mine and cymatics expert , john stewart reed .
he 's kindly recreated for us the chladni experiment .
what we can see here is the metal sheet , this time connected to a sound driver and being fed by a frequency generator .
as the frequencies increase , so do the complexities of the patterns that appear on the plate .
as you can see with your own eyes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , what excites me about cymatics ?
well , for me cymatics is an almost magical tool .
it 's like a looking glass into a hidden world .
through the numerous ways that we can apply cymatics , we can actually start to unveil the substance of things not seen .
devices like the cymascope , which you can see here , have been used to scientifically observe cymatic patterns .
and the list of scientific applications is growing every day .
for example , in oceanography , a lexicon of dolphin language is actually being created by basically visualizing the sonar beams that the dolphins emit .
and hopefully in the future we 'll be able to gain some deeper understanding of how they communicate .
we can also use cymatics for healing and education .
this is an installation developed with school children , where their hands are tracked . it allows them to control and position cymatic patterns and the reflections that are caused by them .
we can also use cymatics as a beautiful natural art form .
this image here is created from a snippet of beethoven 's ninth symphony playing through a cymatic device .
so it kind of flips things on its head a little bit .
this is pink floyd 's " machine " playing in real time through the cymascope .
we can also use cymatics as a looking glass into nature .
and we can actually recreate the archetypal forms of nature .
so , for example , here on the left we can see a snowflake as it would appear in nature .
then on the right we can see a cymatically created snowflake .
and here is a starfish and a cymatic starfish .
and there is thousands of these .
so what does this all mean ?
well , there is still a lot to explore in its early days . and there 's not many people working in this field .
but consider for a moment that sound does have form .
we 've seen that it can affect matter and cause form within matter .
then sort of take a leap and think about the universe forming .
and think about the immense sound of the universe forming .
and if we kind of ponder on that , then perhaps cymatics had an influence on the formation of the universe itself .
and here is some eye candy for you , from a range of diy scientists and artists from all over the globe .
cymatics is accessible to everybody .
i want to urge everybody here to apply your passion , your knowledge and your skills to areas like cymatics .
i think collectively we can build a global community .
we can inspire each other .
and we can evolve this exploration of the substance of things not seen . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . so , this chap here , he thinks he can tell you the future .
his name is nostradamus , although here the sun have made him look a little bit like sean connery . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and like most of you , i suspect , i do n't really believe that people can see into the future .
i do n't believe in precognition , and every now and then , you hear that somebody has been able to predict something that happened in the future , and that 's probably because it was a fluke , and we only hear about the flukes and about the freaks .
we do n't hear about all the times that people got stuff wrong .
now we expect that to happen with silly stories about precognition , but the problem is , we have exactly the same problem in academia and in medicine , and in this environment , it costs lives .
so firstly , thinking just about precognition , as it turns out , just last year a researcher called daryl bem conducted a piece of research where he found evidence of precognitive powers in undergraduate students , and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and most of the people who read this just said , " okay , well , fair enough , but i think that 's a fluke , that 's a freak , because i know that if i did a study where i found no evidence that undergraduate students had precognitive powers , it probably would n't get published in a journal .
and in fact , we know that that 's true , because several different groups of research scientists tried to replicate the findings of this precognition study , and when they submitted it to the exact same journal , the journal said , " no , we 're not interested in publishing replication . we 're not interested in your negative data . "
so this is already evidence of how , in the academic literature , we will see a biased sample of the true picture of all of the scientific studies that have been conducted .
but it does n't just happen in the dry academic field of psychology .
it also happens in , for example , cancer research .
so in march , 2012 , just one month ago , some researchers reported in the journal nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer , and out of those 53 studies , they were only able to successfully replicate six .
forty-seven out of those 53 were unreplicable .
and they say in their discussion that this is very likely because freaks get published .
people will do lots and lots and lots of different studies , and the occasions when it works they will publish , and the ones where it does n't work they wo n't .
and their first recommendation of how to fix this problem , because it is a problem , because it sends us all down blind alleys , their first recommendation of how to fix this problem is to make it easier to publish negative results in science , and to change the incentives so that scientists are encouraged to post more of their negative results in public .
but it does n't just happen in the very dry world of preclinical basic science cancer research .
it also happens in the very real , flesh and blood of academic medicine . so in 1980 , some researchers did a study on a drug called lorcainide , and this was an anti-arrhythmic drug , a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms , and the idea was , after people have had a heart attack , they 're quite likely to have abnormal heart rhythms , so if we give them a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms , this will increase the chances of them surviving .
early on its development , they did a very small trial , just under a hundred patients .
fifty patients got lorcainide , and of those patients , 10 died .
another 50 patients got a dummy placebo sugar pill with no active ingredient , and only one of them died .
so they rightly regarded this drug as a failure , and its commercial development was stopped , and because its commercial development was stopped , this trial was never published .
unfortunately , over the course of the next five , 10 years , other companies had the same idea about drugs that would prevent arrhythmias in people who have had heart attacks .
these drugs were brought to market . they were prescribed very widely because heart attacks are a very common thing , and it took so long for us to find out that these drugs also caused an increased rate of death that before we detected that safety signal , over 100,000 people died unnecessarily in america from the prescription of anti-arrhythmic drugs .
now actually , in 1993 , the researchers who did that 1980 study , that early study , published a mea culpa , an apology to the scientific community , in which they said , " when we carried out our study in 1980 , we thought that the increased death rate that occurred in the lorcainide group was an effect of chance . "
the development of lorcainide was abandoned for commercial reasons , and this study was never published ; it 's now a good example of publication bias .
that 's the technical term for the phenomenon where unflattering data gets lost , gets unpublished , is left missing in action , and they say the results described here " might have provided an early warning of trouble ahead . "
now these are stories from basic science .
these are stories from 20 , 30 years ago .
the academic publishing environment is very different now .
there are academic journals like " trials , " the open access journal , which will publish any trial conducted in humans regardless of whether it has a positive or a negative result .
but this problem of negative results that go missing in action is still very prevalent . in fact it 's so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine .
so this is a drug called reboxetine , and this is a drug that i myself have prescribed . it 's an antidepressant .
and i 'm a very nerdy doctor , so i read all of the studies that i could on this drug . i read the one study that was published that showed that reboxetine was better than placebo , and i read the other three studies that were published that showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant , and because this patient had n't done well on those other antidepressants , i thought , well , reboxetine is just as good . it 's one to try .
but it turned out that i was misled . in fact , seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill . one of them was positive and that was published , but six of them were negative and they were left unpublished .
three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good , and they were published , but three times as many patients ' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments , and those trials were not published .
i felt misled .
now you might say , well , that 's an extremely unusual example , and i would n't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that i 'm accusing other people of .
but it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very , very well studied .
so here is one example of how you approach it .
the classic model is , you get a bunch of studies where you know that they 've been conducted and completed , and then you go and see if they 've been published anywhere in the academic literature . so this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the fda .
they took all of the trials which were submitted to the fda as part of the approval package .
so that 's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs , because we can never know if we have those , but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization .
and then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature . and this is what they found .
it was pretty much a 50-50 split . half of these trials were positive , half of them were negative , in reality .
but when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature , what they found was a very different picture .
only three of the negative trials were published , but all but one of the positive trials were published .
now if we just flick back and forth between those two , you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors , patients , commissioners of health services , and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature .
we were misled , and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine .
in fact , there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now , over a hundred , that they 've been collected in a systematic review , published in 2010 , that took every single study on publication bias that they could find .
publication bias affects every field of medicine .
about half of all trials , on average , go missing in action , and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings .
this is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine .
if i flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses , i could make it look as if i had a coin that always came up heads .
but that would n't mean that i had a two-headed coin .
that would mean that i was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine .
and to me , this is research misconduct .
if i conducted one study and i withheld half of the data points from that one study , you would rightly accuse me , essentially , of research fraud .
and yet , for some reason , if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want , we do n't consider that to be research misconduct .
and when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers , academics , industry sponsors , journal editors , for some reason we find it more acceptable , but the effect on patients is damning .
and this is happening right now , today .
this is a drug called tamiflu . tamiflu is a drug which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on stockpiling , and we 've stockpiled tamiflu in panic , in the belief that it will reduce the rate of complications of influenza .
complications is a medical euphemism for pneumonia and death . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now when the cochrane systematic reviewers were trying to collect together all of the data from all of the trials that had ever been conducted on whether tamiflu actually did this or not , they found that several of those trials were unpublished .
the results were unavailable to them .
and when they started obtaining the writeups of those trials through various different means , through freedom of information act requests , through harassing various different organizations , what they found was inconsistent .
and when they tried to get a hold of the clinical study reports , the 10,000-page long documents that have the best possible rendition of the information , they were told they were n't allowed to have them .
and if you want to read the full correspondence and the excuses and the explanations given by the drug company , you can see that written up in this week 's edition of plos medicine .
and the most staggering thing of all of this , to me , is that not only is this a problem , not only do we recognize that this is a problem , but we 've had to suffer fake fixes .
we 've had people pretend that this is a problem that 's been fixed .
first of all , we had trials registers , and everybody said , oh , it 's okay . we 'll get everyone to register their trials , they 'll post the protocol , they 'll say what they 're going to do before they do it , and then afterwards we 'll be able to check and see if all the trials which have been conducted and completed have been published .
but people did n't bother to use those registers .
and so then the international committee of medical journal editors came along , and they said , oh , well , we will hold the line .
we wo n't publish any journals , we wo n't publish any trials , unless they 've been registered before they began .
but they did n't hold the line . in 2008 , a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the icmje were n't properly registered , and a quarter of them were n't registered at all .
and then finally , the fda amendment act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year .
and in the bmj , in the first edition of january , 2012 , you can see a study which looks to see if people kept to that ruling , and it turns out that only one in five have done so .
this is a disaster .
we can not know the true effects of the medicines that we prescribe if we do not have access to all of the information .
and this is not a difficult problem to fix .
we need to force people to publish all trials conducted in humans , including the older trials , because the fda amendment act only asks that you publish the trials conducted after 2008 , and i do n't know what world it is in which we 're only practicing medicine on the basis of trials that completed in the past two years .
we need to publish all trials in humans , including the older trials , for all drugs in current use , and you need to tell everyone you know that this is a problem and that it has not been fixed .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm jon m. chu . and i 'm not a dancer , i 'm not a choreographer - i 'm actually a filmmaker , a storyteller .
i directed a movie two years ago called " step up 2 : the streets . "
anybody ? anybody ? yeah !
during that movie i got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers - amazing , the best in the world - and they brought me into a society , the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind .
i mean , this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities .
they could fly in the air . they could bend their elbow all the way back .
they could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row .
i 'd never seen anything like that .
when i was growing up , my heroes were people like fred astaire , gene kelly , michael jackson .
i grew up in a musical family .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and those guys , those were like , ultimate heroes .
being a shy , little , skinny asian kid growing up in the silicon valley with low self-esteem , those guys made me believe in something bigger .
those guys made me want to , like , " i 'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- and it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared , sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos .
but after seeing what i 've seen , the truth is , they have not disappeared at all .
they 're here , getting better and better every day .
and dance has progressed .
it is insane what dance is right now .
dance has never had a better friend than technology .
online videos and social networking ...
dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance , where kids in japan are taking moves from a youtube video created in detroit , building on it within days and releasing a new video , while teenagers in california are taking the japanese video and remixing it with a philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself .
and this is happening every day .
and from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages , with cheap webcams , lies the world 's great dancers of tomorrow .
our fred astaires , our gene kellys our michael jacksons are right at our fingertips , and may not have that opportunity , except for us .
so , we created the lxd , sort of a - the legion of extraordinary dancers , a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world .
a living , breathing comic book series , but unlike spiderman and iron man , these guys can actually do it .
and we 're going to show you some today . so , let me introduce to you , some of our heroes right now .
we got madd chadd , lil ' c , kid david and j smooth .
please be excited , have fun , yell , scream .
ladies and gentlemen : the lxd .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- : madd chadd : when people first see me , i get a lot of different reactions actually .
sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it , but sometimes they get a little freaked out .
and , i do n't know , i kind of get a kick out of that a little bit .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- j smooth : when i 'm in the zone - i 'm dancing and free styling it - i actually visually kind of picture lines , and moving them .
i think of like , transformers , like how panels open and then they fold , they fold in , and then you close that panel .
and then another thing opens , you close that .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- kid david : it 's kind of like , honestly a lot of times i do n't really know what 's going on when i 'm dancing .
because at that point it 's just really like , it 's my body and the music .
it 's not really a conscious decision , " i 'm going to do this next , i 'm going to do this . "
it 's kind of like this other level where you ca n't make choices anymore , and it 's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music .
i got my name just because i was so young .
i was young when i started . i was younger than a lot of the people i was dancing with .
so , it was always like , they called me kid david , because i was the kid .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- l 'il c : i tell them to create a ball , and then you just use that ball of energy .
and instead of throwing it out , people would think that 's a krump move , that 's a krump move .
that 's not a krump move . you 're going to throw it out , you throw it out , and you hold it .
and you let it go , and then right when you see the tail , you grab it by the tail , then you bring it back in .
and you just got this piece of energy and you just , you 're manipulating it .
you know , you create power , then you tame it .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to show you a video of some of the models i work with .
they 're all the perfect size , and they do n't have an ounce of fat .
did i mention they 're gorgeous ?
and they 're scientific models ? -lrb- laughs -rrb- as you might have guessed , i 'm a tissue engineer , and this is a video of some of the beating heart that i 've engineered in the lab .
and one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body .
but what i 'm going to tell you about today is how these tissues make awesome models .
well , let 's think about the drug screening process for a moment .
you go from drug formulation , lab testing , animal testing , and then clinical trials , which you might call human testing , before the drugs get to market .
it costs a lot of money , a lot of time , and sometimes , even when a drug hits the market , it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people .
and the later it fails , the worse the consequences .
it all boils down to two issues . one , humans are not rats , and two , despite our incredible similarities to one another , actually those tiny differences between you and i have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us .
so what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity ?
let 's see how we can do it with tissue engineering .
one of the key technologies that 's really important is what 's called induced pluripotent stem cells .
they were developed in japan pretty recently .
okay , induced pluripotent stem cells .
they 're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy .
we induce cells , okay , say , skin cells , by adding a few genes to them , culturing them , and then harvesting them .
so they 're skin cells that can be tricked , kind of like cellular amnesia , into an embryonic state .
so without the controversy , that 's cool thing number one .
cool thing number two , you can grow any type of tissue out of them : brain , heart , liver , you get the picture , but out of your cells .
so we can make a model of your heart , your brain on a chip .
generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece , and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery .
and this is a schematic of a bioreactor we 're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular , scalable way .
going forward , imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue .
it would be like having a clinical trial on a chip .
but another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells , let 's say , from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them , we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab .
here 's an example from kevin eggan 's lab at harvard .
he generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have lou gehrig 's disease , and he differentiated them into neurons , and what 's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease .
so with disease models like these , we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before , and maybe discover drugs even faster .
this is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa .
this is a degeneration of the retina .
it 's a disease that runs in my family , and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure .
so some people think that these models sound well and good , but ask , " well , are these really as good as the rat ? "
the rat is an entire organism , after all , with interacting networks of organs .
a drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver , and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat .
do n't you miss all that with these tissue-engineered models ?
well , this is another trend in the field .
by combining tissue engineering techniques with microfluidics , the field is actually evolving towards just that , a model of the entire ecosystem of the body , complete with multiple organ systems to be able to test how a drug you might take for your blood pressure might affect your liver or an antidepressant might affect your heart .
these systems are really hard to build , but we 're just starting to be able to get there , and so , watch out .
but that 's not even all of it , because once a drug is approved , tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments .
this is an example that you might care about someday , and i hope you never do , because imagine if you ever get that call that gives you that bad news that you might have cancer .
would n't you rather test to see if those cancer drugs you 're going to take are going to work on your cancer ?
this is an example from karen burg 's lab , where they 're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments .
and some of our colleagues at tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next , and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies .
and so thinking about the models that we 've just discussed , you can see , going forward , that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path : disease models making for better drug formulations , massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing , reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials , and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all .
essentially , we 're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body .
our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology , helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster , more cheaply and more effectively .
it gives new meaning to models against animal testing , does n't it ?
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've got apparently 18 minutes to convince you that history has a direction , an arrow ; that in some fundamental sense , it 's good ; that the arrow points to something positive .
now , when the ted people first approached me about giving this upbeat talk - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that was before the cartoon of muhammad had triggered global rioting .
it was before the avian flu had reached europe .
it was before hamas had won the palestinian election , eliciting various counter-measures by israel .
and to be honest , if i had known when i was asked to give this upbeat talk that even as i was giving the upbeat talk , the apocalypse would be unfolding - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i might have said , " is it okay if i talk about something else ? "
but i did n't , ok . so we 're here . i 'll do what i can . i 'll do what i can .
i 've got to warn you : the sense in which my worldview is upbeat has always been kind of subtle , sometimes even elusive .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the sense in which i can be uplifting and inspiring - i mean , there 's always been a kind of a certain grim dimension to the way i try to uplift , so if grim inspiration - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - if grim inspiration is not a contradiction in terms , that is , i 'm afraid , the most you can hope for . ok , today - that 's if i succeed .
i 'll see what i can do . ok ?
now , in one sense , the claim that history has a direction is not that controversial .
if you 're just talking about social structure , ok , clearly that 's gotten more complex a little over the last 10,000 years - has reached higher and higher levels .
and in fact , that 's actually sustaining a long-standing trend that predates human beings , ok , that biological evolution was doing for us .
because what happened in the beginning , this stuff encases itself in a cell , then cells start hanging out together in societies .
eventually they get so close , they form multicellular organisms , then you get complex multicellular organisms ; they form societies .
but then at some point , one of these multicellular organisms does something completely amazing with this stuff , which is it launches a whole second kind of evolution : cultural evolution .
and amazingly , that evolution sustains the trajectory that biological evolution had established toward greater complexity .
by cultural evolution we mean the evolution of ideas .
a lot of you have heard the term " memes . " the evolution of technology , i pay a lot of attention to , so , you know , one of the first things you got was a little hand axe .
generations go by , somebody says , hey , why do n't we put it on a stick ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just absolutely delights the little ones .
next best thing to a video game .
this may not seem to impress , but technological evolution is progressive , so another 10 , 20,000 years , and armaments technology takes you here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- impressive . and the rate of technological evolution speeds up , so a mere quarter of a century after this , you get this , ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm sorry - it was a cheap laugh , but i wanted to find a way to transition back to this idea of the unfolding apocalypse , and i thought that might do it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , what threatens to happen with this unfolding apocalypse is the collapse of global social organization .
now , first let me remind you how much work it took to get us where we are , to be on the brink of true global social organization .
originally , you had the most complex societies , the hunter-gatherer village .
stonehenge is the remnant of a chiefdom , which is what you get with the invention of agriculture : multi-village polity with centralized rule .
with the invention of writing , you start getting cities . this is blurry . i kind of like that because it makes it look like a one-celled organism and reminds you how many levels organic organization has already moved through to get to this point . and then you get to , you know , you get empires .
i want to stress , you know , social organization can transcend political bounds .
this is the silk road connecting the chinese empire and the roman empire .
so you had social complexity spanning the whole continent , even if no polity did similarly . today , you 've got nation states .
point is : there 's obviously collaboration and organization going on beyond national bounds .
this is actually just a picture of the earth at night , and i 'm just putting it up because i think it 's pretty .
does kind of convey the sense that this is an integrated system .
now , i explained this growth of complexity by reference to something called " non-zero sumness . "
assuming that a few of you did not do the assigned reading , very quickly , the key idea is the distinction between zero-sum games , in which correlations are inverse : always a winner and a loser .
non-zero-sum games in which correlations can be positive , ok .
so like in tennis , usually it 's win-lose ; it always adds up to zero-zero-sum . but if you 're playing doubles , the person on your side of the net , they 're in the same boat as you , so you 're playing a non-zero-sum game with them .
it 's either for the better or for the worse , ok .
a lot of forms of non-zero-sum behavior in the realm of economics and so on in everyday life often leads to cooperation .
the argument i make is basically that , well , non-zero-sum games have always been part of life .
you have them in hunter-gatherer societies , but then through technological evolution , new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games , involving more people over larger territory .
social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential , so you get cities , you know , and you get all the non-zero-sum games you do n't think about that are being played across the world .
like , have you ever thought when you buy a car , how many people on how many different continents contributed to the manufacture of that car ? those are people in effect you 're playing a non-zero-sum game with .
i mean , there are certainly plenty of them around .
now , this sounds like an intrinsically upbeat worldview in a way , because when you think of non-zero , you think win-win , you know , that 's good . well , there are a few reasons that actually it 's not intrinsically upbeat .
first of all , it can accommodate ; it does n't deny the existence of inequality exploitation war .
but there 's a more fundamental reason that it 's not intrinsically upbeat , because a non-zero-sum game , all it tells you for sure is that the fortunes will be correlated for better or worse .
it does n't necessarily predict a win-win outcome .
so , in a way , the question is : on what grounds am i upbeat at all about history ? and the answer is , first of all , on balance i would say people have played their games to more win-win outcomes than lose-lose outcomes . on balance , i think history is a net positive in the non-zero-sum game department .
and a testament to this is the thing that most amazes me , most impresses me , and most uplifts me , which is that there is a moral dimension to history ; there is a moral arrow . we have seen moral progress over time .
2,500 years ago , members of one greek city-state considered members of another greek city-state subhuman and treated them that way . and then this moral revolution arrived , and they decided that actually , no , greeks are human beings .
it 's just the persians who are n't fully human and do n't deserve to be treated very nicely .
but this was progress - you know , give them credit . and now today , we 've seen more progress . i think - i hope - most people here would say that all people everywhere are human beings , deserve to be treated decently , unless they do something horrendous , regardless of race or religion .
and you have to read your ancient history to realize what a revolution that has been , ok . this was not a prevalent view , few thousand years ago , and i attribute it to this non-zero-sum dynamic .
i think that 's the reason there is as much tolerance toward nationalities , ethnicities , religions as there is today . if you asked me , you know , why am i not in favor of bombing japan , well , i 'm only half-joking when i say they built my car .
we have this non-zero-sum relationship , and i think that does lead to a kind of a tolerance to the extent that you realize that someone else 's welfare is positively correlated with yours - you 're more likely to cut them a break .
i kind of think this is a kind of a business-class morality .
unfortunately , i do n't fly trans-atlantic business class often enough to know , or any other kind of business class really , but i assume that in business class , you do n't hear many expressions of , you know , bigotry about racial groups or ethnic groups , because the people who are flying trans-atlantic business class are doing business with all these people ; they 're making money off all these people . and i really do think that , in that sense at least , capitalism has been a constructive force , and more fundamentally , it 's a non-zero-sumness that has been a constructive force in expanding people 's realm of moral awareness . i think the non-zero-sum dynamic ,
which is not only economic by any means - it 's not always commerce - but it has driven us to the verge of a moral truth , which is the fundamental equality of everyone . it has done that .
as it has moved global , moved us toward a global level of social organization , it has driven us toward moral truth .
i think that 's wonderful .
now , back to the unfolding apocalypse .
and you may wonder , ok , that 's all fine , sounds great - moral direction in history - but what about this so-called clash of civilizations ? well , first of all , i would emphasize that it fits into the non-zero-sum framework , ok . if you look at the relationship between the so-called muslim world and western world - two terms i do n't like , but ca n't really avoid ; in such a short span of time , they 're efficient if nothing else - it is non-zero-sum . and by that i mean , if people in the muslim world get more hateful , more resentful ,
less happy with their place in the world , it 'll be bad for the west . if they get more happy , it 'll be good for the west .
so that is a non-zero-sum dynamic .
and i would say the non-zero-sum dynamic is only going to grow more intense over time because of technological trends , but more intense in a kind of negative way .
it 's the downside correlation of their fortunes that will become more and more possible .
and one reason is because of something i call the " growing lethality of hatred . "
more and more , it 's possible for grassroots hatred abroad to manifest itself in the form of organized violence on american soil .
and that 's pretty new , and i think it 's probably going to get a lot worse - this capacity - because of trends in information technology , in technologies that can be used for purposes of munitions like biotechnology and nanotechnology .
we may be hearing more about that today .
and there 's something i worry about especially , which is that this dynamic will lead to a kind of a feedback cycle that puts us on a slippery slope .
what i have in mind is : terrorism happens here ; we overreact to it .
that , you know , we 're not sufficiently surgical in our retaliation leads to more hatred abroad , more terrorism .
we overreact because being human , we feel like retaliating , and it gets worse and worse and worse .
you could call this the positive feedback of negative vibes , but i think in something so spooky , we really should n't have the word positive there at all , even in a technical sense .
so let 's call it the death spiral of negativity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i assure you if it happens , at the end , both the west and the muslim world will have suffered .
so , what do we do ? well , first of all , we can do a lot more with arms control , the international regulation of dangerous technologies .
i have a whole global governance sermon that i will spare you right now , because i do n't think that 's going to be enough anyway , although it 's essential .
i think we 're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world .
i think you 're just going to have to see less hatred among groups , less bigotry , and , you know , racial groups , religious groups , whatever .
i 've got to admit i feel silly saying that .
it sounds so kind of pollyannaish . i feel like rodney king , you know , saying , why ca n't we all just get along ?
but hey , i do n't really see any alternative , given the way i read the situation .
there 's going to have to be moral progress .
there 's going to have to be a lessening of the amount of hatred in the world , given how dangerous it 's becoming .
in my defense , i 'd say , as naive as this may sound , it 's ultimately grounded in cynicism .
that is to say - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - thank you , thank you . that is to say , remember : my whole view of morality is that it boils down to self-interest .
it 's when people 's fortunes are correlated .
it 's when your welfare conduces to mine , that i decide , oh yeah , i 'm all in favor of your welfare . that 's what 's responsible for this growth of this moral progress so far , and i 'm saying we once again have a correlation of fortunes , and if people respond to it intelligently , we will see the development of tolerance and so on - the norms that we need , you know .
we will see the further evolution of this kind of business-class morality .
so , these two things , you know , if they get people 's attention and drive home the positive correlation and people do what 's in their self-interests , which is further the moral evolution , then they could actually have a constructive effect .
and that 's why i lump growing lethality of hatred and death spiral of negativity under the general rubric , reasons to be cheerful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- doing the best i can , ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i never called myself mr. uplift .
i 'm just doing what i can here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , launching a moral revolution has got to be hard , right ?
i mean , what do you do ?
and i think the answer is a lot of different people are going to have to do a lot of different things .
we all start where we are . speaking as an american who has children whose security 10 , 20 , 30 years down the road i worry about - what i personally want to start out doing is figuring out why so many people around the world hate us , ok .
i think that 's a worthy research project myself .
i also like it because it 's an intrinsically kind of morally redeeming exercise .
because to understand why somebody in a very different culture does something - somebody you 're kind of viewing as alien , who 's doing things you consider strange in a culture you consider strange - to really understand why they do the things they do is a morally redeeming accomplishment , because you 've got to relate their experience to yours .
to really understand it , you 've got to say , " oh , i get it .
so when they feel resentful , it 's kind of like the way i feel resentful when this happens , and for somewhat the same reasons . " that 's true understanding .
and i think that is an expansion of your moral compass when you manage to do that .
it 's especially hard to do when people hate you , ok , because you do n't really , in a sense , want to completely understand why people hate you .
i mean , you want to hear the reason , but you do n't want to be able to relate to it .
you do n't want it to make sense , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- you do n't want to say , " well , yeah , i can kind of understand how a human being in those circumstances would hate the country i live in . " that 's not a pleasant thing , but i think it 's something that we 're going to have to get used to and work on . now , i want to stress that to understand , you know - there are people who do n't like this whole business of understanding the grassroots , the root causes of things ; they do n't want to know why people hate us . i want to understand it .
the reason you 're trying to understand why they hate us , is to get them to quit hating us . the idea when you go through this moral exercise of really coming to appreciate their humanity and better understand them , is part of an effort to get them to appreciate your humanity in the long run .
i think it 's the first step toward that . that 's the long-term goal .
there are people who worry about this , and in fact , i , myself , apparently , was denounced on national tv a couple of nights ago because of an op-ed i 'd written .
it was kind of along these lines , and the allegation was that i have , quote , " affection for terrorists . "
now , the good news is that the person who said it was ann coulter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i mean , if you 've got to have an enemy , do make it ann coulter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's not a crazy concern , ok , because understanding behavior can lead to a kind of empathy , and it can make it a little harder to deliver tough love , and so on .
but i think we 're a lot closer to erring on the side of not comprehending the situation clearly enough , than in comprehending it so clearly that we just ca n't , you know , get the army out to kill terrorists .
so i 'm not really worried about it . so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i mean , we 're going to have to work on a lot of fronts , but if we succeed - if we succeed - then once again , non-zero-sumness and the recognition of non-zero-sum dynamics will have forced us to a higher moral level .
and a kind of saving higher moral level , something that kind of literally saves the world .
if you look at the word " salvation " in the bible - the christian usage that we 're familiar with - saving souls , that people go to heaven - that 's actually a latecomer .
the original meaning of the word " salvation " in the bible is about saving the social system .
" yahweh is our savior " means " he has saved the nation of israel , " which at the time , was a pretty high-level social organization .
now , social organization has reached the global level , and i guess , if there 's good news i can say i 'm bringing you , it 's just that all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interests in a disciplined and careful way .
it 's going to be hard . i say we give it a shot anyway because we 've just come too far to screw it up now .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans .
but before doing that , i just briefly want to remind you about what you already know : that our genomes , our genetic material , are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of dna , which is this famous double-helical molecule .
and the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters a , t , c and g.
and the information is there twice - one on each strand - which is important , because when new cells are formed , these strands come apart , new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process .
but nothing , of course , in nature is totally perfect , so sometimes an error is made and a wrong letter is built in .
and we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare dna sequences among us here in the room , for example .
if we compare my genome to the genome of you , approximately every 1,200 , 1,300 letters will differ between us .
and these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time .
so if we add in a chimpanzee here , we will see more differences .
approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee .
and if you 're then interested in the history of a piece of dna , or the whole genome , you can reconstruct the history of the dna with those differences you observe .
and generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this .
in this case , it 's very simple .
the two human dna sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently .
farther back is there one shared with chimpanzees .
and because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time , you can transform these differences to estimates of time , where the two humans , typically , will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago , and with the chimpanzees , it will be in the order of five million years ago .
so what has now happened in the last few years is that there are account technologies around that allow you to see many , many pieces of dna very quickly .
so we can now , in a matter of hours , determine a whole human genome .
each of us , of course , contains two human genomes - one from our mothers and one from our fathers .
and they are around three billion such letters long .
and we will find that the two genomes in me , or one genome of mine we want to use , will have about three million differences in the order of that .
and what you can then also begin to do is to say , " how are these genetic differences distributed across the world ? "
and if you do that , you find a certain amount of genetic variation in africa .
and if you look outside africa , you actually find less genetic variation .
this is surprising , of course , because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in africa than outside africa .
yet the people inside africa have more genetic variation .
moreover , almost all these genetic variants we see outside africa have closely related dna sequences that you find inside africa .
but if you look in africa , there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside .
so a model to explain this is that a part of the african variation , but not all of it , -lsb- has -rsb- gone out and colonized the rest of the world .
and together with the methods to date these genetic differences , this has led to the insight that modern humans - humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me - evolved in africa , quite recently , between 100 and 200,000 years ago .
and later , between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so , went out of africa to colonize the rest of the world .
so what i often like to say is that , from a genomic perspective , we are all africans .
we either live inside africa today , or in quite recent exile .
another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world , in many places , and they tend to vary as gradients , from a bird 's-eye perspective at least .
and since there are many genetic variants , and they have different such gradients , this means that if we determine a dna sequence - a genome from one individual - we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from , provided that its parents or grandparents have n't moved around too much .
but does this then mean , as many people tend to think , that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people - on different continents , for example ?
well we can begin to ask those questions also .
there is , for example , a project that 's underway to sequence a thousand individuals - their genomes - from different parts of the world .
they 've sequenced 185 africans from two populations in africa .
-lsb- they 've -rsb- sequenced approximately equally -lsb- as -rsb- many people in europe and in china .
and we can begin to say how much variance do we find , how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences .
and it 's a lot : 38 million variable positions .
but we can then ask : are there any absolute differences between africans and non-africans ?
perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed .
and with absolute difference - and i mean a difference where people inside africa at a certain position , where all individuals - 100 percent - have one letter , and everybody outside africa has another letter .
and the answer to that , among those millions of differences , is that there is not a single such position .
this may be surprising .
maybe a single individual is misclassified or so .
so we can relax the criterion a bit and say : how many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in africa have one variant , 95 percent another variant , and the number of that is 12 .
so this is very surprising .
it means that when we look at people and see a person from africa and a person from europe or asia , we can not , for a single position in the genome with 100 percent accuracy , predict what the person would carry .
and only for 12 positions can we hope to be 95 percent right .
this may be surprising , because we can , of course , look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from .
so what this means now is that those traits we then look at and so readily see - facial features , skin color , hair structure - are not determined by single genes with big effects , but are determined by many different genetic variants that seem to vary in frequency between different parts of the world .
there is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that i think is worthwhile to consider , and that is that , in a very literal sense , they 're really on the surface of our bodies .
they are what we just said - facial features , hair structure , skin color .
there are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest , or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies .
but so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment , in a direct confrontation , if you like .
it 's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them .
but if we look on other parts of our bodies where we do n't directly interact with the environment - our kidneys , our livers , our hearts - there is no way to say , by just looking at these organs , where in the world they would come from .
so there 's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in africa , and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so , they were not alone on the planet .
there were other forms of humans around , most famously perhaps , neanderthals - these robust forms of humans , compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right - that existed in western asia and europe since several hundreds of thousands of years .
so an interesting question is , what happened when we met ?
what happened to the neanderthals ?
and to begin to answer such questions , my research group - since over 25 years now - works on methods to extract dna from remains of neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old .
so this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the dna , how you convert it to a form you can sequence .
you have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with dna from yourself .
and this then , in conjunction with these methods that allow very many dna molecules to be sequenced very rapidly , allowed us last year to present the first version of the neanderthal genome , so that any one of you can now look on the internet , on the neanderthal genome , or at least on the 55 percent of it that we 've been able to reconstruct so far .
and you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today .
and one question that you may then want to ask is , what happened when we met ?
did we mix or not ?
and the way to ask that question is to look at the neanderthal that comes from southern europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today .
so we then look starting with two africans , looking at the two african genomes , finding places where they differ from each other , and in each case ask : what is a neanderthal like ?
does it match one african or the other african ?
we would expect there to be no difference , because neanderthals were never in africa .
they should be equal , have no reason to be closer to one african than another african .
and that 's indeed the case .
statistically speaking , there is no difference in how often the neanderthal matches one african or the other .
but this is different if we now look at the european individual and an african .
then , significantly more often , does a neanderthal match the european rather than the african .
the same is true if we look at a chinese individual versus an african , the neanderthal will match the chinese individual more often .
this may also be surprising because the neanderthals were never in china .
so the model we 've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of africa sometime after 100,000 years ago , they met neanderthals .
presumably , they did so first in the middle east , where there were neanderthals living .
if they then mixed with each other there , then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside africa carried with them this neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world .
so that today , the people living outside africa have about two and a half percent of their dna from neanderthals .
so having now a neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the dna , we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world .
and the first place we 've done that is in southern siberia in the altai mountains at a place called denisova , a cave site in this mountain here , where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone - this is a copy of it - that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human .
and it was well enough preserved so we could determine the dna from this individual , even to a greater extent than for the neanderthals actually , and start relating it to the neanderthal genome and to people today .
and we found that this individual shared a common origin for his dna sequences with neanderthals around 640,000 years ago .
and further back , 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans .
so this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with neanderthals , but far back and then have a long independent history .
we call this group of humans , that we then described for the first time from this tiny , tiny little piece of bone , the denisovans , after this place where they were first described .
so we can then ask for denisovans the same things as for the neanderthals : did they mix with ancestors of present day people ?
if we ask that question , and compare the denisovan genome to people around the world , we surprisingly find no evidence of denisovan dna in any people living even close to siberia today .
but we do find it in papua new guinea and in other islands in melanesia and the pacific .
so this presumably means that these denisovans had been more widespread in the past , since we do n't think that the ancestors of melanesians were ever in siberia .
so from studying these genomes of extinct humans , we 're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of africa .
in the west , there were neanderthals ; in the east , there were denisovans - maybe other forms of humans too that we 've not yet described .
we do n't know quite where the borders between these people were , but we know that in southern siberia , there were both neanderthals and denisovans at least at some time in the past .
then modern humans emerged somewhere in africa , came out of africa , presumably in the middle east .
they meet neanderthals , mix with them , continue to spread over the world , and somewhere in southeast asia , they meet denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the pacific .
and then these earlier forms of humans disappear , but they live on a little bit today in some of us - in that people outside of africa have two and a half percent of their dna from neanderthals , and people in melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the denisovans .
does this then mean that there is after all some absolute difference between people outside africa and inside africa in that people outside africa have this old component in their genome from these extinct forms of humans , whereas africans do not ?
well i do n't think that is the case .
presumably , modern humans emerged somewhere in africa .
they spread across africa also , of course , and there were older , earlier forms of humans there .
and since we mixed elsewhere , i 'm pretty sure that one day , when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in africa , we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in africa .
what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans ?
we learn perhaps many things , but one thing that i find sort of important to mention is that i think the lesson is that we have always mixed .
we mixed with these earlier forms of humans , wherever we met them , and we mixed with each other ever since .
thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i get asked a lot what the difference between my work is and typical pentagon long-range strategic planners .
and the answer i like to offer is what they typically do is they think about the future of wars in the context of war .
and what i 've spent 15 years doing in this business - and it 's taken me almost 14 to figure it out - is i think about the future of wars in the context of everything else .
so i tend to specialize on the scene between war and peace .
with a lot of ideas .
it 's the one that takes me around the world right now interacting with foreign militaries quite a bit .
the material was generated in two years of work i did for the secretary of defense , thinking about a new national grand strategy for the united states .
i 'm going to present a problem and try to give you an answer .
here 's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the pentagon : the theory of anti-access , area-denial asymmetrical strategies .
why do we call it that ?
because it 's got all those a 's lined up i guess .
this is gobbledygook for if the united states fights somebody we 're going to be huge .
they 're going to be small .
we 're going to kick their ass , which is why people do n't try to do that any more .
i met the last air force general who had actually shot down an enemy plane in combat .
he 's now a one star general .
that 's how distant we are from even meeting an air force willing to fly against ours .
so that overmatched capability creates problems - catastrophic successes the white house calls them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we 're trying to figure that out , because it is an amazing capability .
the question is , what 's the good you can do with it ?
ok ?
the theory of anti-access , area-denial asymmetrical strategies - gobbledygook that we sell to congress , because if we just told them we can kick anybody 's asses they would n't buy us all the stuff we want .
so we say , area-denial , anti-access asymmetrical strategies and their eyes glaze over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they say , " will you build it in my district ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- here 's my parody and it ai n't much of one .
let 's talk about a battle space .
i do n't know , taiwan straits 2025 .
let 's talk about an enemy embedded within that battle space .
i do n't know , the million man swim .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the united states has to access that battle space instantaneously .
they throw up anti-access , area-denial asymmetrical strategies .
a banana peel on the tarmac .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- trojan horses on our computer networks reveal all our achilles ' heels instantly .
we say , " china , it 's yours . "
prometheus approach , largely a geographic definition , focuses almost exclusively on the start of conflict .
we field the first-half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game .
that 's the problem .
we can run the score up against anybody , and then get our asses kicked in the second half - what they call fourth generation warfare .
here 's the way i like to describe it instead .
there is no battle space the u.s. military can not access .
they said we could n't do afghanistan . we did it with ease .
they said we could n't do iraq .
we did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks .
we did it so fast we were n't prepared for their collapse .
there is nobody we ca n't take down .
the question is , what do you do with the power ?
so there 's no trouble accessing battle spaces .
what we have trouble accessing is the transition space that must naturally follow , and creating the peace space that allows us to move on .
problem is , the defense department over here beats the hell out of you .
the state department over here says , " come on boy , i know you can make it . "
and that poor country runs off that ledge , does that cartoon thing and then drops .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is not about overwhelming force , but proportional force .
it 's about non-lethal technologies , because if you fire real ammo into a crowd of women and children rioting you 're going to lose friends very quickly .
this is not about projecting power , but about staying power , which is about legitimacy with the locals .
who do you access in this transition space ?
you have to create internal partners . you have to access coalition partners .
we asked the indians for 17,000 peace keepers .
i know their senior leadership , they wanted to give it to us .
but they said to us , " you know what ?
in that transition space you 're mostly hat not enough cattle .
we do n't think you can pull it off , we 're not going to give you our 17,000 peace keepers for fodder . "
we asked the russians for 40,000 .
they said no .
i was in china in august , i said , " you should have 50,000 peace keepers in iraq .
it 's your oil , not ours . "
which is the truth . it 's their oil .
and the chinese said to me , " dr. barnett , you 're absolutely right .
in a perfect world we 'd have 50,000 there .
but it 's not a perfect world , and your administration is n't getting us any closer . "
but we have trouble accessing our outcomes .
we lucked out , frankly , on the selection .
we face different opponents across these three .
and it 's time to start admitting you ca n't ask the same 19-year-old to do it all , day in and day out .
it 's just too damn hard .
we have an unparalleled capacity to wage war .
we do n't do the everything else so well .
frankly , we do it better than anybody and we still suck at it .
we have a brilliant secretary of war .
we do n't have a secretary of everything else .
because if we did , that guy would be in front of the senate , still testifying over abu ghraib .
the problem is he does n't exist .
there is no secretary of everything else .
i think we have an unparalleled capacity to wage war .
i call that the leviathan force .
what we need to build is a force for the everything else .
i call them the system administrators .
what i think this really represents is lack of an a to z rule set for the world as a whole for processing politically bankrupt states .
we have one for processing economically bankrupt states .
it 's the imf sovereign bankruptcy plan , ok ?
we argue about it every time we use it .
argentina just went through it , broke a lot of rules .
they got out on the far end , we said , " fine , do n't worry about it . "
it 's transparent . a certain amount of certainty gives the sense of a non-zero outcome .
we do n't have one for processing politically bankrupt states that , frankly , everybody wants gone .
like saddam , like mugabe , like kim jong-il - people who kill in hundreds of thousands or millions .
like the 250,000 dead so far in sudan .
what would an a to z system look like ?
i 'm going to distinguish between what i call front half and back half .
and let 's call this red line , i do n't know , mission accomplished .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what we have extant right now , at the beginning of this system , is the u.n. security council as a grand jury .
what can they do ?
they can indict your ass .
they can debate it . they can write it on a piece of paper .
they can put it in an envelope and mail it to you , and then say in no uncertain terms , " please cut that out . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that gets you about four million dead in central africa over the 1990s .
that gets you 250,000 dead in the sudan in the last 15 months .
everybody 's got to answer their grandchildren some day what you did about the holocaust in africa , and you better have an answer .
we do n't have anything to translate that will into action .
what we do have is the u.s.-enabled leviathan force that says , " you want me to take that guy down ? i 'll take that guy down .
i 'll do it on tuesday . it will cost you 20 billion dollars . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but here 's the deal .
i leave the scene immediately .
that 's called the powell doctrine .
way downstream we have the international criminal court .
they love to put them on trial . they 've got milosevic right now .
what are we missing ?
a functioning executive that will translate will into action , because we do n't have it .
every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this imminent threat thing .
we have n't faced an imminent threat since the cuban missile crisis in 1962 .
but we use this language from a bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we 're a democracy and that 's what it takes .
and if that does n't work we scream , " he 's got a gun ! "
just as we rush in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we look over the body and we find an old cigarette lighter and we say , " jesus , it was dark . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- do you want to do it , france ?
france says , " no , but i do like to criticize you after the fact . "
what we need downstream is a great power enabled - what i call that sys admin force .
we should have had 250,000 troops streaming into iraq on the heels of that leviathan sweeping towards baghdad .
what do you get then ?
no looting , no military disappearing , no arms disappearing , no ammo disappearing , no muqtada al-sadr - i 'm wrecking his bones - no insurgency .
talk to anybody who was over there in the first six months .
we had six months to feel the lob , to get the job done , and we dicked around for six months .
and then they turned on us .
why ? because they just got fed up .
they saw what we did to saddam .
they said , " you 're that powerful , you can resurrect this country .
you 're america . "
what we need is an international reconstruction fund - sebastian mallaby , washington post , great idea .
model on the imf .
instead of passing the hat each time , ok ?
where are we going to find this guy ? g20 , that 's easy .
check out their agenda since 9/11 .
all security dominated .
they 're going to decide up front how the money gets spent just like in the imf .
you vote according to how much money you put in the kitty .
here 's my challenge to the defense department .
you 've got to build this force . you 've got to seed this force .
you 've got to track coalition partners . create a record of success .
you will get this model .
you tell me it 's too hard to do .
i 'll walk this dog right through that six part series on the balkans .
we did it just like that .
i 'm talking about regularizing it , making it transparent .
would you like mugabe gone ?
would you like kim jong-il , who 's killed about two million people , would you like him gone ?
would you like a better system ?
this is why it matters to the military .
they 've been experiencing an identity crisis since the end of the cold war .
i 'm not talking about the difference between reality and desire , which i can do because i 'm not inside the beltway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm talking about the 1990s .
the berlin wall falls . we do desert storm .
the split starts to emerge between those in the military who see a future they can live with , and those who see a future that starts to scare them , like the u.s. submarine community , which watches the soviet navy disappear overnight .
ah !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they start moving from reality towards desire and they create their own special language to describe their voyage of self-discovery and self-actualization .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the problem is you need a big , sexy opponent to fight against .
and if you ca n't find one you 've got to make one up .
china , all grown up , going to be a looker !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the rest of the military got dragged down into the muck across the 1990s and they developed this very derisive term to describe it : military operations other than war .
i ask you , who joins the military to do things other than war ?
actually , most of them .
jessica lynch never planned on shooting back .
most of them do n't pick up a rifle .
i maintain this is code inside the army for , " we do n't want to do this . "
they spent the 1990s working the messy scene between globalized parts of the world what i call the core and the gap .
the clinton administration was n't interested in running this .
for eight years , after screwing up the relationship on day one - inauguration day with gays in the military - which was deft .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we were home alone for eight years .
and what did we do home alone ?
we bought one military and we operated another .
it 's like the guy who goes to the doctor and says , " doctor , it hurts when i do this . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the doctor says , " stop doing that you idiot . "
i used to give this brief inside the pentagon in the early 1990s .
i 'd say , " you 're buying one military and you 're operating another , and eventually it 's going to hurt . it 's wrong .
bad pentagon , bad ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they 'd say , " dr. barnett , you are so right .
can you come back next year and remind us again ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some people say 9/11 heals the rift - jerks the long-term transformation gurus out of their 30,000 foot view of history , drags them down in to the muck and says , " you want a networked opponent ?
i 've got one , he 's everywhere , go find him . "
it elevates mootw - how we pronounce that acronym - from crap to grand strategy , because that 's how you 're going to shrink that gap .
some people put these two things together and they call it empire , which i think is a boneheaded concept .
empire is about the enforcement of not just minimal rule sets , which you can not do , but maximum rule sets which you must do .
it 's not our system of governance .
never how we 've sought to interact with the outside world .
i prefer that phrase system administration .
we enforce the minimal rule sets for maintaining connectivity to the global economy .
certain bad things you can not do .
how this impacts the way we think about the future of war .
this is a concept which gets me vilified throughout the pentagon .
it makes me very popular as well .
everybody 's got an opinion .
going back to the beginning of our country - historically , defenses meant protection of the homeland .
security has meant everything else .
written into our constitution , two different forces , two different functions .
raise an army when you need it , and maintain a navy for day-to-day connectivity .
a department of war , a department of everything else .
a big stick , a baton stick .
can of whup ass , the networking force .
in 1947 we merged these two things together in the defense department .
our long-term rationale becomes , we 're involved in a hair trigger stand off with the soviets .
to attack america is to risk blowing up the world .
we connected national security to international security with about a seven minute time delay .
that 's not our problem now .
they can kill three million in chicago tomorrow and we do n't go to the mattresses with nukes .
that 's the scary part .
the question is how do we reconnect american national security with global security to make the world a lot more comfortable , and to embed and contextualize our employment of force around the planet ?
what 's happened since is that bifurcation i described .
we talked about this going all the way back to the end of the cold war .
let 's have a department of war , and a department of something else .
some people say , " hell , 9/11 did it for you . "
now we 've got a home game and an away game .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the department of homeland security is a strategic feel good measure .
it 's going to be the department of agriculture for the 21st century .
tsa - thousands standing around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just be grateful robert reed did n't shove that bomb up his ass .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because we 'd all be gay then .
i supported the war in iraq .
he was a bad guy with multiple priors .
it 's not like we had to find him actually killing somebody live to arrest him .
i knew we 'd kick ass in the war with the leviathan force .
i knew we 'd have a hard time with what followed .
but i know this organization does n't change until it experiences failure .
what do i mean by these two different forces ?
this is the hobbesian force .
i love this force . i do n't want to see it go .
that plus nukes rules out great power war .
this is the military the rest of the world wants us to build .
it 's why i travel all over the world talking to foreign militaries .
what does this mean ?
it means you 've got to stop pretending you can do these two very disparate skill sets with the same 19-year-old .
switching back , morning , afternoon , evening , morning , afternoon , evening .
handing out aid , shooting back , it 's too much .
the 19-year-olds get tired from the switching , ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that force on the left , you can train a 19-year-old to do that .
that force on the right is more like a 40-year-old cop .
you need the experience .
the rule is going to be this .
that sys admin force is the force that never comes home , does most of your work .
you break out that leviathan force only every so often .
but here 's the promise you make to the american public , to your own people , to the world .
you break out that leviathan force , you promise , you guarantee that you 're going to mount one hell of a - immediately - follow-on sys admin effort .
do n't plan for the war unless you plan to win the peace .
-lrb- applause -rrb- other differences . leviathan traditional partners , they all look like the brits and their former colonies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- including us , i would remind you .
the rest - wider array of partners .
international organizations , non-governmental organizations , private voluntary organizations , contractors .
you 're not going to get away from that .
leviathan force , it 's all about joint operations between the military services .
we 're done with that .
what we need to do is inter-agency operations , which frankly condi rice was in charge of .
and i 'm amazed nobody asked her that question when she was confirmed .
i call the leviathan force your dad 's military .
i like them young , male , unmarried , slightly pissed off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i call the sys admin force your mom 's military .
it 's everything the man 's military hates .
gender balanced much more , older , educated , married with children .
the force on the left , up or out .
the force on the right , in and out .
the force on the left respects posse comitatus restrictions the force on the right 's going to obliterate it .
that 's where the national guard 's going to be .
the force on the left is never coming under the purview of the international criminal court .
sys admin force has to .
different definitions of network centricity .
one takes down networks , one puts them up .
and you 've got to wage war here in such a way to facilitate that .
do we need a bigger budget ?
do we need a draft to pull this off ?
absolutely not .
i 've been told by the revolution of military affairs crowd for years , we can do it faster , cheaper , smaller , just as lethal .
i say , " great , i 'm going to take the sys admin budget out of your hide . "
here 's the larger point .
you 're going to build the sys admin force inside the u.s. military first .
but ultimately you 're going to civilianize it , probably two thirds .
inter agency-ize it , internationalize it .
so yes , it begins inside the pentagon , but over time it 's going to cross that river .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have been to the mountain top . i can see the future .
i may not live long enough to get you there , but it 's going to happen .
we 're going to have a department of something else between war and peace .
last slide .
who gets custody of the kids ?
this is where the marines in the audience get kind of tense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is when they think about beating the crap out of me after the talk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- read max boon .
this is the history of the marines - small wars , small arms .
the marines are like my west highland terrier .
they get up every morning , they want to dig a hole and they want to kill something .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't want my marines handing out aid .
i want them to be marines .
that 's what keeps the sys admin force from being a pussy force .
it keeps it from being the u.n.
you shoot at these people the marines are going to come over and kill you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- department of navy , strategic subs go this way , surface combatants are over there , and the news is they may actually be that small .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i call it the smart dust navy .
i tell young officers , " you may command 500 ships in your career .
bad news is they may not have anybody on them . "
carriers go both ways because they 're a swing asset .
you 'll see the pattern - airborne , just like carriers .
armor goes this way .
here 's the dirty secret of the air force , you can win by bombing .
but you need lots of these guys on the ground to win the peace .
shinseki was right with the argument .
air force , strategic airlift goes both ways .
bombers , fighters go over here .
trigger-pullers go this way .
civil affairs , that bastard child , comes over here .
return to the army .
the point about the trigger-pullers and special operations command .
no off season , these guys are always active .
they drop in , do their business , disappear .
see me now . do n't talk about it later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was never here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the world is my playground .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to keep trigger-pullers trigger-happy .
i want the rules to be as loose as possible .
because when the thing gets prevented in chicago with the three million dead that perverts our political system beyond all recognition , these are the guys who are going to kill them first .
so it 's better off to have them make some mistakes along the way than to see that .
reserve component - national guard reserves overwhelmingly sys admin .
how are you going to get them to work for this force ?
most firemen in this country do it for free .
this is not about money .
this is about being up front with these guys and gals .
last point , intelligence community - the muscle and the defense agencies go this way .
what should be the cia , open , analytical , open source should come over here .
the information you need to do this is not secret .
it 's not secret .
read that great piece in the new yorker about how our echo boomers , 19 to 25 , over in iraq taught each other how to do sys admin work , over the internet in chat rooms .
they said , " al qaeda could be listening . "
they said , " well , jesus , they already know this stuff . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- take a gift in the left hand .
these are the sunglasses that do n't scare people , simple stuff .
censors and transparency , the overheads go in both directions .
thanks .
the career that i started early on in my life was looking for exotic life forms in exotic places , and at that time i was working in the antarctic and the arctic , and high deserts and low deserts .
until about a dozen years ago , when i was really captured by caves , and i really re-focused most of my research in that direction .
so i have a really cool day job - i get to do some really amazing stuff .
i work in some of the most extreme cave environments on the planet .
many of them are trying to kill us from the minute we go into them , but nevertheless , they 're absolutely gripping , and contain unbelievable biological wonders that are very , very different from those that we have on the planet .
apart from the intrinsic value of the biology and mineralogy and geo-microbiology that we do there , we 're also using these as templates for figuring out how to go look for life on other planets .
particularly mars , but also europa , the small , icy moon around jupiter .
and perhaps , someday , far beyond our solar system itself .
i 'm very passionately interested in the human future , on the moon and mars particularly , and elsewhere in the solar system .
i think it 's time that we transitioned to a solar system-going civilization and species .
and , as an outgrowth of all of this then , i wonder about whether we can , and whether we even should , think about transporting earth-type life to other planets .
notably mars , as a first example .
something i never talk about in scientific meetings is how i actually got to this state and why i do the work that i do .
why do n't i have a normal job , a sensible job ?
and then of course , i blame the soviet union .
because in the mid-1950s , when i was a tiny child , they had the audacity to launch a very primitive little satellite called sputnik , which sent the western world into a hysterical tailspin .
and a tremendous amount of money went into the funding of science and mathematics skills for kids .
and i 'm a product of that generation , like so many other of my peers .
it really caught hold of us , and caught fire , and it would be lovely if we could reproduce that again now .
of course , refusing to grow up - - even though i impersonate a grown-up in daily life , but i do a fairly good job of that - but really retaining that childlike quality of not caring what other people think about what you 're interested in , is really critical .
the next element is the fact that i have applied a value judgment and my value judgment is that the presence of life is better than no life .
and so , life is more valuable than no life .
and so i think that that holds together a great deal of the work that people in this audience approach .
i 'm very interested in mars , of course , and that was a product of my being a young undergraduate when the viking landers landed on mars .
and that took what had been a tiny little astronomical object in the sky , that you would see as a dot , and turned it completely into a landscape , as that very first primitive picture came rastering across the screen .
and when it became a landscape , it also became a destination , and altered , really , the course of my life .
in my graduate years i worked with my colleague and mentor and friend , steve schneider , at the national center for atmospheric research , working on global change issues .
we 've written a number of things on the role of gaia hypothesis - whether or not you could consider earth as a single entity in any meaningful scientific sense , and then , as an outgrowth of that , i worked on the environmental consequences of nuclear war .
so , wonderful things and grim things .
but what it taught me was to look at earth as a planet with external eyes , not just as our home .
and that is a wonderful stepping away in perspective , to try to then think about the way our planet behaves , as a planet , and with the life that 's on it .
and all of this seems to me to be a salient point in history .
we 're getting ready to begin to go through the process of leaving our planet of origin and out into the wider solar system and beyond .
so , back to mars .
how hard is it going to be to find life on mars ?
well , sometimes it 's really very hard for us to find each other , even on this planet .
so , finding life on another planet is a non-trivial occupation and we spend a lot of time trying to think about that .
whether or not you think it 's likely to be successful sort of depends on what you think about the chances of life in the universe .
i think , myself , that life is a natural outgrowth of the increasing complexification of matter over time .
so , you start with the big bang and you get hydrogen , and then you get helium , and then you get more complicated stuff , and you get planets forming - and life is a common , planetary-based phenomenon , in my view .
certainly , in the last 15 years , we 've seen increasing numbers of planets outside of our solar system being confirmed , and just last month , a couple of weeks ago , a planet in the size-class of earth has actually been found .
and so this is very exciting news .
so , my first bold prediction is that , is that in the universe , life is going to be everywhere .
it 's going to be everywhere we look - where there are planetary systems that can possibly support it .
and those planetary systems are going to be very common .
so , what about life on mars ?
well , if somebody had asked me about a dozen years ago what i thought the chances of life on mars would be , i would 've probably said , a couple of percent .
and even that was considered outrageous at the time .
i was once sneeringly introduced by a former nasa official , as the only person on the planet who still thought there was life on mars .
of course , that official is now dead , and i 'm not , so there 's a certain amount of glory in outliving your adversaries .
but things have changed greatly over the last dozen years .
and the reason that they have changed is because we now have new information .
the amazing pathfinder mission that went in ' 97 , and the mer rover missions that are on mars as we speak now and the european space agency 's mars express , has taught us a number of amazing things .
there is sub-surface ice on that planet .
and so where there is water , there is a very high chance of our kind of life .
there 's clearly sedimentary rocks all over the place - one of the landers is sitting in the middle of an ancient seabed , and there are these amazing structures called blueberries , which are these little , rocky concretions that we are busy making biologically in my lab right now .
so , with all of these things put together , i think that the chances of life are much greater than i would 've ever thought .
i think that the chance of life having arisen on mars , sometime in its past , is maybe one in four to maybe even half and half .
so this is a very bold statement .
i think it 's there , and i think we need to go look for it , and i think it 's underground .
so the game 's afoot , and this is the game that we play in astro-biology .
how do you try to get a handle on extraterrestrial life ?
how do you plan to look for it ?
how do you know it when you find it ?
because if it 's big and obvious , we would 've already found it - it would 've already bitten us on the foot , and it has n't .
so , we know that it 's probably quite cryptic .
very critically , how do we protect it , if we find it , and not contaminate it ?
and also , even perhaps more critically , because this is the only home planet we have , how do we protect us from it , while we study it ?
so why might it be hard to find ?
well , it 's probably microscopic , and it 's never easy to study microscopic things , although the amazing tools that we now have to do that allow us to study things in much greater depth , at much smaller scales than ever before .
but it 's probably hiding , because if you are out sequestering resources from your environment , that makes you yummy , and other things might want to eat you , or consume you .
and so , there 's a game of predator-prey that 's going to be , essentially , universal , really , in any kind of biological system .
it also may be very , very different in its fundamental properties - its chemistry , or its size .
we say small , but what does that mean ?
is it virus-sized ? is it smaller than that ?
is it bigger than the biggest bacterium ? we do n't know .
and speed of activity , which is something that we face in our work with sub-surface organisms , because they grow very , very slowly .
if i were to take a swab off your teeth and plate it on a petri plate , within about four or five hours , i would have to see growth .
but the organisms that we work with , from the sub-surface of earth , very often it 's months - and in many cases , years - before we see any growth whatsoever .
so they are , intrinsically , a slower life-form .
but the real issue is that we are guided by our limited experience , and until we can think out of the box of our cranium and what we know , then we ca n't recognize what to look for , or how to plan for it .
so , perspective is everything and , because of the history that i 've just briefly talked to you about , i have learned to think about earth as an extraterrestrial planet .
and this has been invaluable in our approach to try to study these things .
this is my favorite game on airplanes : where you 're in an airplane and you look out the window , you see the horizon .
i always turn my head on the side , and that simple change makes me go from seeing this planet as home , to seeing it as a planet .
it 's a very simple trick , and i never fail to do it when i 'm sitting in a window seat .
well , this is what we apply to our work .
this shows one of the most extreme caves that we work in .
this is cueva de villa luz in tabasco , in mexico , and this cave is saturated with sulfuric acid .
there is tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfide coming into this cave from volcanic sources and from the breakdown of evaporite - minerals below the carbonates in which this cave is formed - and it is a completely hostile environment for us .
we have to go in with protective suits and breathing gear , and 30 parts per million of h2s will kill you .
this is regularly several hundred parts per million .
so , it 's a very hazardous environment , with co as well , and many other gases .
these extreme physical and chemical parameters make the biology that grows in these places very special .
because contrary to what you might think , this is not devoid of life .
this is one of the richest caves that we have found on the planet , anywhere .
it 's bursting with life .
the extremes on earth are interesting in their own right , but one of the reasons that we 're interested in them is because they represent , really , the average conditions that we may expect on other planets .
so , this is part of the ability that we have , to try to stretch our imagination , in terms of what we may find in the future .
there 's so much life in this cave , and i ca n't even begin to scratch the surface of it with you .
but one of the most famous objects out of this are what we call snottites , for obvious reasons .
this stuff looks like what comes out of your two-year-old 's nose when he has a cold .
and this is produced by bacteria who are actually making more sulfuric acid , and living at phs right around zero .
and so , this stuff is like battery acid .
and yet , everything in this cave has adapted to it .
in fact , there 's so much energy available for biology in this cave , that there 's actually a huge number of cavefish .
and the local zoque indians harvest this twice a year , as part of their easter week celebration and holy week celebration .
this is very unusual for caves .
in some of the other amazing caves that we work in - this is in lechuguilla cave in new mexico near carlsbad , and this is one of the most famous caves in the world .
it 's 115 miles of mapped passage , it 's pristine , it has no natural opening and it 's a gigantic biological , geo-microbiological laboratory .
in this cave , great areas are covered by this reddish material that you see here , and also these enormous crystals of selenite that you can see dangling down .
this stuff is produced biologically .
this is the breakdown product of the bedrock , that organisms are busy munching their way through .
they take iron and manganese minerals within the bedrock and they oxidize them .
and every time they do that , they get a tiny little packet of energy .
and that tiny little packet of energy is what they use , then , to run their life processes .
interestingly enough , they also do this with uranium and chromium , and various other toxic metals .
and so , the obvious avenue for bio-remediation comes from organisms like this .
these organisms we now bring into the lab , and you can see some of them growing on petri plates , and get them to reproduce the precise biominerals that we find on the walls of these caves .
so , these are signals that they leave in the rock record .
well , even in basalt surfaces in lava-tube caves , which are a by-product of volcanic activity , we find these walls totally covered , in many cases , by these beautiful , glistening silver walls , or shiny pink or shiny red or shiny gold .
and these are mineral deposits that are also made by bacteria .
and you can see in these central images here , scanning electron micrographs of some of these guys - these are gardens of these bacteria .
one of the interesting things about these particular guys is that they 're in the actinomycete and streptomycete groups of the bacteria , which is where we get most of our antibiotics .
the sub-surface of earth contains a vast biodiversity .
and these organisms , because they 're very separate from the surface , make a vast array of novel compounds .
and so , the potential for exploiting this for pharmaceutical and industrial chemical uses is completely untapped , but probably exceeds most of the rest of the biodiversity of the planet .
so , lava-tube caves - i 've just told you about organisms that live here on this planet .
we know that on mars and the moon there are tons of these structures .
we can see them .
on the left you can see a lava tube forming at a recent eruption - mount etna in sicily - and this is the way these tubes form .
and when they hollow out , then they become habitats for organisms .
these are all over the planet mars , and we 're busy cataloguing them now .
and so , there 's very interesting cave real estate on mars , at least of that type .
in order to access these sub-surface environments that we 're interested in , we 're very interested in developing the tools to do this .
you know , it 's not easy to get into these caves .
it requires crawling , climbing , rope-work , technical rope-work and many other complex human motions in order to access these .
we face the problem of , how can we do this robotically ?
why would we want to do it robotically ?
well , we 're going to be sending robotic missions to mars long in advance of human missions .
and then , secondly , getting back to that earlier point that i made about the preciousness of any life that we may find on mars , we do n't want to contaminate it .
and one of the best ways to study something without contaminating it is to have an intermediary .
and in this case , we 're imagining intermediary robotic devices that can actually do some of that front-end work for us , to protect any potential life that we find .
i 'm not going to go through all of these projects now , but we 're involved in about half-a-dozen robotic development projects , in collaboration with a number of different groups .
i want to talk specifically about the array that you see on the top .
these are hopping microbot swarms .
i 'm working on this with the field and space robotics laboratory and my friend steve dubowsky at mit , and we have come up with the idea of having little , jumping bean-like robots that are propelled by artificial muscle , which is one of the dubowsky lab 's specialties - are the epams , or artificial muscles .
and these allow them to hop .
they behave with a swarm behavior , where they relate to each other , modeled after insect swarm behavior , and they could be made very numerous .
and so , one can send a thousand of them , as you can see in this upper left-hand picture , a thousand of them could fit into the payload bay that was used for one of the current mer rovers .
and these little guys - you could lose many of them .
if you send a thousand of them , you could probably get rid of 90 percent of them and still have a mission .
and so , that allows you the flexibility to go into very challenging terrain and actually make your way where you want to go .
now , to wrap this up , i want to talk for two seconds about caves and the human expansion beyond earth as a natural outgrowth of the work that we do in caves .
it occurred to us a number of years ago that caves have many properties that people have used and other organisms have used as habitat in the past .
and perhaps it 's time we started to explore those , in the context of future mars and the moon exploration .
so , we have just finished a nasa institute for advanced concepts phase ii study , looking at the irreducible set of technologies that you would need in order to actually allow people to inhabit lava tubes on the moon or mars .
it turns out to be a fairly simple and small list , and we have gone in the relatively primitive technology direction .
so , we 're talking about things like inflatable liners that can conform to the complex topological shape on the inside of a cave , foamed-in-place airlocks to deal with this complex topology , various ways of getting breathing gases made from the intrinsic materials of these bodies .
and the future is there for us to use these lava-tube caves on mars .
and right now we 're in caves , and we 're doing science and recreation , but i think in the future we 'll be using them for habitat and science on these other bodies .
now , my view of what the current status of potential life on mars is that it 's probably been on the planet , maybe one in two chances .
the question as to whether there is life on mars that is related to life on earth has now been very muddied , because we now know , from mars meteorites that have made it to earth , that there 's material that can be exchanged between those two planets .
one of the burning questions , of course , is if we go there and find life in the sub-surface , as i fully expect that we will , is that a second genesis of life ?
did life start here and was it transported there ?
did it start there and get transported here ?
this will be a fascinating puzzle as we go into the next half-century , and where i expect that we will have more and more mars missions to answer these questions .
thank you .
i 'm going to talk today about saving more , but not today , tomorrow .
i 'm going to talk about save more tomorrow .
it 's a program that richard thaler from the university of chicago and i devised maybe 15 years ago .
the program , in a sense , is an example of behavioral finance on steroids - how we could really use behavioral finance .
now you might ask , what is behavioral finance ?
so let 's think about how we manage our money .
let 's start with mortgages .
it 's kind of a recent topic , at least in the u.s.
a lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford , and actually slightly bigger than that .
and then they foreclose .
and then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages .
let 's also think about how we manage risks - for example , investing in the stock market .
two years ago , three years ago , about four years ago , markets did well .
we were risk takers , of course .
then market stocks seize and we 're like , " wow .
these losses , they feel , emotionally , they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up . "
so we 're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking .
how many of you have iphones ?
anyone ? wonderful .
i would bet many more of you insure your iphone - you 're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty .
what if you lose your iphone ?
what if you do this ?
how many of you have kids ?
anyone ?
keep your hands up if you have sufficient life insurance .
i see a lot of hands coming down .
i would predict , if you 're a representative sample , that many more of you insure your iphones than your lives , even when you have kids .
we 're not doing that well when it comes to insurance .
the average american household spends 1,000 dollars a year on lotteries .
and i know it sounds crazy .
how many of you spend a thousand dollars a year on lotteries ?
no one .
so that tells us that the people not in this room are spending more than a thousand to get the average to a thousand .
low-income people spend a lot more than a thousand on lotteries .
so where does it take us ?
we 're not doing a great job managing money .
behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics , trying to understand the money mistakes people make .
and i can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that i have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money , and at the end you 're going to ask , " how can we help people ? "
and that 's what i really want to focus on today .
how do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make , and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions ?
and what i 'm going to talk about today is save more tomorrow .
i want to address the issue of savings .
we have on the screen a representative sample of 100 americans .
and we 're going to look at their saving behavior .
first thing to notice is , half of them do not even have access to a 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan .
they can not make savings easy .
they can not have money go away from their paycheck into a 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan before they see it , before they can touch it .
what about the remaining half of the people ?
some of them elect not to save .
they 're just too lazy .
they never get around to logging into a complicated website and doing 17 clicks to join the 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan .
and then they have to decide how they 're going to invest in their 52 choices , and they never heard about what is a money market fund .
and they get overwhelmed and the just do n't join .
how many people end up saving to a 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan ?
one third of americans .
two thirds are not saving now .
are they saving enough ?
take out those who say they save too little .
one out of 10 are saving enough .
nine out of 10 either can not save through their 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan , decide not to save - or do n't decide - or save too little .
we think we have a problem of people saving too much .
let 's look at that .
we have one person - well , actually we 're going to slice him in half because it 's less than one percent .
roughly half a percent of americans feel that they save too much .
what are we going to do about it ?
that 's what i really want to focus on .
we have to understand why people are not saving , and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions , and then see how powerful it might be .
so let me divert for a second as we 're going to identify the problems , the challenges , the behavioral challenges , that prevent people from saving .
i 'm going to divert and talk about bananas and chocolate .
suppose we had another wonderful ted event next week .
and during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate .
how many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical ted event next week ?
who would go for bananas ?
wonderful .
i predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas .
well that 's at least what one wonderful study predicted .
and then count down the days and see what people ended up eating .
the same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later .
self-control is not a problem in the future .
it 's only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us .
what does it have to do with time and savings , this issue of immediate gratification ?
or as some economists call it , present bias .
we think about saving . we know we should be saving .
we know we 'll do it next year , but today let us go and spend .
christmas is coming , we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know .
so this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving , but end up spending .
let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia .
but again , a little diversion to the topic of organ donation .
wonderful study comparing different countries .
we 're going to look at two similar countries , germany and austria .
and in germany , if you would like to donate your organs - god forbid something really bad happens to you - when you get your driving license or an i.d. , you check the box saying , " i would like to donate my organs . "
not many people like checking boxes .
it takes effort . you need to think .
twelve percent do .
austria , a neighboring country , slightly similar , slightly different .
what 's the difference ?
well , you still have choice .
you will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not .
but when you get your driving license , you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ .
nobody checks boxes .
that 's kind of too much effort .
one percent check the box . the rest do nothing .
doing nothing is very common .
not many people check boxes .
what are the implications to saving lives and having organs available ?
in germany , 12 percent check the box .
twelve percent are organ donors .
huge shortage of organs , god forbid , if you need one .
in austria , again , nobody checks the box .
therefore , 99 percent of people are organ donors .
inertia , lack of action .
what is the default setting if people do nothing , if they keep procrastinating , if they do n't check the boxes ?
very powerful .
we 're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401 -lrb- k -rrb- choices .
are we going to make them automatically join the plan , or are they going to be left out ?
in too many 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plans , if people do nothing , it means they 're not saving for retirement , if they do n't check the box .
and checking the box takes effort .
so we 've chatted about a couple of behavioral challenges .
one more before we flip the challenges into solutions , having to do with monkeys and apples .
no , no , no , this is a real study and it 's got a lot to do with behavioral economics .
one group of monkeys gets an apple , they 're pretty happy .
the other group gets two apples , one is taken away .
they still have an apple left .
they 're really mad .
why have you taken our apple ?
this is the notion of loss aversion .
we hate losing stuff , even if it does n't mean a lot of risk .
you would hate to go to the atm , take out 100 dollars and notice that you lost one of those $ 20 bills .
it 's very painful , even though it does n't mean anything .
those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch .
so this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too , because people , mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because i have to cut my spending .
so we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually .
whether you think about immediate gratification , and the chocolates versus bananas , it 's just painful to save now .
it 's a lot more fun to spend now .
we talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box .
if people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan , they 're going to keep procrastinating and not join .
and last , we talked about loss aversion , and the monkeys and the apples .
if people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss , they 're not going to be saving for retirement .
so we 've got these challenges , and what richard thaler and i were always fascinated by - take behavioral finance , make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action - flip the challenges into solutions .
and we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called save more , not today , tomorrow .
how is it going to solve the challenges we chatted about ?
if you think about the problem of bananas versus chocolates , we think we 're going to eat bananas next week .
we think we 're going to save more next year .
save more tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year - sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas , volunteering more in the community , exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet .
now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action .
save more tomorrow makes it easy .
it 's an autopilot .
once you tell me you would like to save more in the future , let 's say every january you 're going to be saving more automatically and it 's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan before you see it , before you touch it , before you get the issue of immediate gratification .
but what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion ?
next january comes and people might feel that if they save more , they have to spend less , and that 's painful .
well , maybe it should n't be just january .
maybe we should make people save more when they make more money .
that way , when they make more money , when they get a pay raise , they do n't have to cut their spending .
they take a little bit of the increase in the paycheck home and spend more - take a little bit of the increase and put it in a 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan .
so that is the program , embarrassingly simple , but as we 're going to see , extremely powerful .
we first implemented it , richard thaler and i , back in 1998 .
mid-sized company in the midwest , blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they can not save more right away .
saving more today is not an option .
we invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise .
and here are the results .
we 're seeing here a three and a half-year period , four pay raises , people who were struggling to save , were saving three percent of their paycheck , three and a half years later saving almost four times as much , almost 14 percent .
and there 's shoes and bicycles and things on this chart because i do n't want to just throw numbers in a vacuum .
i want , really , to think about the fact that saving four times more is a huge difference in terms of the lifestyle that people will be able to afford .
it 's real .
it 's not just numbers on a piece of paper .
whereas with saving three percent , people might have to add nice sneakers so they can walk , because they wo n't be able to afford anything else , when they save 14 percent they might be able to maybe have nice dress shoes to walk to the car to drive .
this is a real difference .
by now , about 60 percent of the large companies it 's been part of the pension protection act .
and needless to say that thaler and i have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference .
let me wrap with two key messages .
one is behavioral finance is extremely powerful .
this is just one example .
message two is there 's still a lot to do .
this is really the tip of the iceberg .
if you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it , we need to think about that .
if you 're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they 're taking or taking too little risk , we need to think about that .
if you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets , we need to think about that .
the average actually , the record is in singapore .
the average household spends $ 4,000 a year on lottery tickets .
we 've got a lot to do , a lot to solve , also in the retirement area when it comes to what people do with their money after retirement .
one last question : how many of you feel comfortable that as you 're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you 're going to retire , when you 're going to claim social security benefits , what lifestyle to expect , how much to spend every month so you 're not going to run out of money ?
how many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions .
one , two , three , four .
less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience .
behavioral finance has a long way .
there 's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm almost like a crazy evangelical .
i 've always known that the age of design is upon us , almost like a rapture .
if the day is sunny , i think , " oh , the gods have had a good design day . "
or , i go to a show and i see a beautiful piece by an artist , particularly beautiful , i say he 's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do .
so i really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression .
that 's why i 'm talking to you today about the age of design , and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture , is still posters , is still fast cars , what you see at moma today .
but in truth , what i really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of moma is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot , like this beautiful chair by dirk vander kooij , where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts , as if he were a big candy , and makes a chair out of it .
or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity .
i want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs , that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life .
and it 's interesting how so much of what we 're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design .
and in fact , interaction design is what i 've been trying to insert in the collection of the museum of modern art for a few years , starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works , for instance , by martin wattenberg - the way a machine plays chess with itself , that you see here , or lisa strausfeld and her partners , the sugar interface for one laptop per child , toshio iwai 's tenori-on musical instruments , and philip worthington 's shadow monsters , and john maeda 's reactive books , and also jonathan harris and sep kamvar 's i want you to want me .
these were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public .
but more recently , i 've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable .
the wind map , by wattenberg and fernanda viégas , i do n't know if you 've ever seen it - it 's really fantastic .
it looks at the territory of the united states as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what 's going on with the winds in the united states .
but also , more recently , we started acquiring video games , and that 's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way . -lrb- laughter -rrb- there are still people that believe that there 's a high and there 's a low .
and that 's really what i find so intriguing about the reactions that we 've had to the anointment of video games in the moma collection .
we 've - no , first of all , new york magazine always gets it .
i love them . so we are in the right quadrant .
we are in the highbrow - that 's daring , that 's courageous - and brilliant , which is great .
timidly , we 've been higher on the diagonal in other situations , but it 's okay . it 's good . it 's good . it 's good . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but here comes the art critic . oh , that was fantastic .
so the first was jonathan jones from the guardian .
" sorry , moma , video games are not art . "
did i ever say they were art ? i was talking about interaction design . excuse me .
" exhibiting pac-man and tetris alongside picasso and van gogh " - they 're two floors away . -lrb- laughter -rrb- - " will mean game over for any real understanding of art . "
i 'm bringing in the end of the world . you know ?
we were talking about the rapture ? it 's coming .
and jonathan jones is making it happen .
so the same guardian rebuts , " are video games art : the debate that should n't be .
last week , guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games can not qualify as art . but is he right ?
and does it matter ? " thank you . does it matter ?
you know , it 's like once again there 's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art , or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to , would like to be called , artists .
no . designers aspire to be really great designers .
thank you very much . and that 's more than enough .
so my knight in shining armor , john maeda , without any prompt , came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the moma .
and that was fantastic . and i thought that was it .
but then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in the new republic , so pretentious , by liel leibovitz , and it said , " moma has mistaken video games for art . " again .
" the museum is putting pac-man alongside picasso . " again .
" that misses the point . "
excuse me . you 're missing the point .
and here , look , the above question is put bluntly : " are video games art ? no . video games are n't art because they are quite thoroughly something else : code . "
oh , so picasso is not art because it 's oil paint . right ?
so it 's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled , and these reactions , were so vehement .
and you know what ?
the international cat video film festival did n't have that much of a reaction . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think this was truly fantastic .
we were talking about dancing ponies , but i was really jealous of the walker arts center for putting up this festival , because it 's very , very wonderful .
and there 's this flaubert quote that i love : " i have always tried to live in an ivory tower , but a tide of shit is beating at its walls , threatening to undermine it . "
i consider myself the tide of shit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you know , we have to go through that .
even in the 1930s , my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art .
so it 's happened before , and it will happen in the future , but right now i can tell you that i am so , so proud to be able to call pac-man part of the moma collection .
and the same with , for instance , tetris , original version , the soviet one .
and you know , the amount of work - yeah , alexey pajitnov was working for the soviet government and that 's how he developed tetris , and alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed .
and it 's fantastic .
so behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work , because we 're still the museum of modern art , so even when we tackle popular culture , we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at moma , therefore , has to be researched .
so to get to choosing eric chahi 's wonderful another world , amongst others , we put together a panel of experts , and we worked on this acquisition , and it 's mostly myself and kate carmody and paul galloway .
we worked on it for a year and a half .
so many people helped us - designers of games , you might know jamin warren and his collaborators at kill screen magazine , and you know , kevin slavin . you name it .
we bugged everybody , because we knew that we were ignorant .
we were not real gamers enough , so we had to really talk to them .
and so we decided , of course , to have sim city 2000 , not the other sim city , that one in particular , so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong , and were not only criteria of selection .
they were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation .
that 's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke . it 's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future .
we live today , as you know very well , not in the digital , not in the physical , but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two .
and that 's really where interaction lies , and that 's the importance of interaction .
and in order to explain interaction , we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives .
so when i talk about it , i do n't talk only about video games , which are in a way the purest form of interaction , unadulterated by any kind of function or finality .
i also talk about the metrocard vending machine , which i consider a masterpiece of interaction .
i mean , that interface is beautiful .
it looks like a burly mta guy coming out of the tunnel .
you know , with your mitt you can actually paw the metrocard , and i talk about how bad atm machines usually are .
so i let people understand that it 's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it 's good or when it 's bad .
so when i show the sims , i try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with the sims , not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the tamagotchi .
you know , video games can be truly deep even when they 're completely mindless .
i 'm sure that all of you know katamari damacy .
it 's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you 'll be able to make it into a planet .
i 've never made it into a planet , but that 's it .
or , you know , vib-ribbon was not distributed here in the united states .
it was a playstation game , but mostly for japan .
and it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music .
so you would put into the playstation , you would put your own cd , and then the game would change alongside your music . so really fantastic .
not to mention eve online .
eve online is an artificial universe , if you wish , but one of the diplomats that was killed in benghazi , not ambassador stevens , but one of his collaborators , was a really big shot in eve online , so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in eve online to kind of test , maybe , all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building , and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on eve online , and after his death , several parts of the universe were named after him .
and i was just recently at the eve online fan festival in reykjavík that was quite amazing .
i mean , we 're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many , but that is very educational .
of course , there are games that are even more educational .
dwarf fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game , and in fact the two adams brothers were in reykjavík , and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the eve online fans .
it was amazing to see . and it 's a beautiful game .
so you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like moma 's are kept alive also by the selection of these games .
and you know , valve - you know , portal - is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games , what to do with violence .
right ? we had to make decisions .
at moma , interestingly , there 's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection , but when i came to moma 19 years ago , and as an italian , i said , " you know what , we need a beretta . "
and i was told , " no . no guns in the design collection . "
and i was like , " why ? "
interestingly , i learned that it 's considered that in design and in the design collection , what you see is what you get .
so when you see a gun , it 's an instrument for killing in the design collection .
if it 's in the art collection , it might be a critique of the killing instrument .
so it 's very interesting .
but we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design , so maybe one day we 'll be able to acquire also the guns .
but here , in this particular case , we decided , you know , with kate and paul , that we would have no gratuitous violence .
so we have portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces .
we have street fighter ii , because martial arts are good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we do n't have gta because , maybe it 's my own reflection , i 've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps .
so it was not very constructive . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'm making fun of it , but we discussed this for so many days . you have no idea .
and to this day , i am ambivalent , but when you have instead games like flow , there 's no doubt .
it 's like , it 's about serenity and it 's about sublime .
it 's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature .
then we have a few also side-scrollers - classical ones .
so it 's quite a hefty collection .
and right now , we started with the first 14 , but we have several that are coming up , and the reason why we have n't acquired them yet is because you do n't acquire just the game .
you acquire the relationship with the company .
what we want , what we aspire to , is the code .
it 's very hard to get , of course .
but that 's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time , and that 's what museums do .
they also preserve artifacts for posterity .
in absence of the code , because , you know , video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases , in absence of that , we acquire the relationship with the company .
we 're going to stay with them forever .
they 're not going to get rid of us .
and one day , we 'll get that code . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but i want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design . aesthetics are really important .
and i 'm showing you core war here , which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor .
so the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor 's limitedness , which is fantastic . so aesthetics is always important .
and so is space , the spatial aspect of games .
you know , i feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them , and if they 're not architects , bona fide trained in architecture , they have that feeling .
but the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important .
time . the way we experience time in video games , as in other forms of interaction design , is really quite amazing .
it can be real time or it can be the time within the game , as is in animal crossing , where seasons follow each other at their own pace .
so time , space , aesthetics , and then , most important , behavior .
the real core issue of interaction design is behavior .
designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives .
they 're not just limited to our interaction with the screen .
in this case , i 'm showing you marble madness , which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you , so you have a sphere that 's moving in this landscape , and the sphere , the controller itself , gives you a sense of the movement .
in a way , you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is .
we do n't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia . no arcade nostalgia .
if anything , we want to show the code , and here you see ben fry 's distellamap of pac-man , of the pac-man code .
so the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox . you see them here displayed alongside other examples of design , furniture and other parts , but there 's no paraphernalia , no nostalagia , only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers .
the controllers are , of course , part of the experience , so you can not do away with it .
but interestingly , this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers .
i was afraid that they would kill us , and instead they understood , especially when i told them that i was trying to apply the same stratagem that philip johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design , and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the moma galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls , as if they were brancusi sculptures .
he created this strange distance , this shock , that made people realize how gorgeous formally , and also important functionally , design pieces were .
i would like to do the same with video games .
by getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood , i want people to understand that those are important forms of design .
and in a way , the video games , the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design .
one of my dream acquisitions , which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner , is a 747 .
i would like to acquire it , but without owning it .
i do n't want it to be at moma and possessed by moma .
i want it to keep flying .
so it 's an acquisition where moma makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the boeing 747 flying .
and the same with the " @ " sign that we acquired a few years ago .
it was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain .
and what i say to people , it 's almost as if a butterfly were flying by and we captured the shadow on the wall , and just we 're showing the shadow .
so in a way , we 're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have .
and it 's too long to explain the acquisition , but if you want to go on the moma blog , there 's a long post where i explain why it 's such a great example of design .
along the way , i 've had to burn a few chairs . you know ?
i 've had to do away with a few concepts of design past .
but i see that people are coming along , that the audiences , paradoxically , are much more responsive and much more understanding of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are .
design is truly everywhere , and design is as important as anything , and i 'm so glad that , because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives , many more people are coming to it as a profession , as a passion , and as , very simply , part of their own culture .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a representation of your brain , and your brain can be broken into two parts .
there 's the left half , which is the logical side , and then the right half , which is the intuitive .
and so if we had a scale to measure the aptitude of each hemisphere , then we can plot our brain .
and for example , this would be somebody who 's completely logical .
this would be someone who 's entirely intuitive .
so where would you put your brain on this scale ?
some of us may have opted for one of these extremes , but i think for most people in the audience , your brain is something like this - with a high aptitude in both hemispheres at the same time .
it 's not like they 're mutually exclusive or anything .
you can be logical and intuitive .
and so i consider myself one of these people , along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists , who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas .
but at the same time , we need a good deal of intuition to actually make the experiments work .
how do we develop this intuition ? well we like to play with stuff .
so we go out and play with it , and then we see how it acts , and then we develop our intuition from there .
and really you do the same thing .
so some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time .
i mean , it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time , but you were n't born with this notion , you developed it .
and i remember watching a kid playing on a car stop .
he was just a toddler and he was n't very good at it , and he kept falling over .
but i bet playing with this car stop taught him a really valuable lesson , and that 's that large things do n't let you get right past them , and that they stay in one place .
and so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world , unless you 're a particle physicist .
it 'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist , because they do n't play with car stops , they play with these little weird particles .
and when they play with their particles , they find they do all sorts of really weird things - like they can fly right through walls , or they can be in two different places at the same time .
and so they wrote down all these observations , and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics .
and so that 's where physics was at a few years ago ; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little , tiny particles .
but you did n't need it to describe the large , everyday objects around us .
this did n't really sit well with my intuition , and maybe it 's just because i do n't play with particles very often .
well , i play with them sometimes , but not very often .
and i 've never seen them .
i mean , nobody 's ever seen a particle .
but it did n't sit well with my logical side either .
because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics , then should n't everything just follow quantum mechanics ?
i do n't see any reason why it should n't .
and so i 'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics .
so a few years ago , i set off to do just that .
so i made one .
this is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition .
so what we 're looking at here is a tiny computer chip .
and you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle .
and that 's this piece of metal i 'm going to be talking about in a minute .
this is a photograph of the object .
and here i 'll zoom in a little bit . we 're looking right there in the center .
and then here 's a really , really big close-up of the little piece of metal .
so what we 're looking at is a little chunk of metal , and it 's shaped like a diving board , and it 's sticking out over a ledge .
and so i made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip .
i went into a clean room with a fresh silicon wafer , and then i just cranked away at all the big machines for about 100 hours .
for the last stuff , i had to build my own machine - to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device .
this device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition , but it needs a little help to do it .
here , let me give you an analogy .
you know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator ?
i mean , when i 'm in an elevator all alone , i do all sorts of weird things , but then other people get on board and i stop doing those things because i do n't want to bother them , or , frankly , scare them .
so quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way .
the fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people , but it 's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room .
and so we knew , if we wanted to see this piece of metal behave quantum mechanically , we 're going to have to kick out all the other passengers .
and so that 's what we did .
we turned off the lights , and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air , and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero .
now , all alone in the elevator , the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted .
and so we measured its motion .
we found it was moving in really weird ways .
instead of just sitting perfectly still , it was vibrating , and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this - like expanding and contracting bellows .
and by giving it a gentle nudge , we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time - something that 's only allowed with quantum mechanics .
so what i 'm telling you here is something truly fantastic .
what does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time ?
so let 's think about the atoms .
so in one case : all the trillions of atoms that make up that chunk of metal are sitting still and at the same time those same atoms are moving up and down .
now it 's only at precise times when they align .
the rest of the time they 're delocalized .
that means that every atom is in two different places at the same time , which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places .
i think this is really cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- really .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because , check this out , the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you .
so if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time , that chunk of metal can be in two different places , then why not you ?
i mean , this is just my logical side talking .
so imagine if you 're in multiple places at the same time , what would that be like ?
how would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space ?
there 's one more part to the story .
it 's when we warmed it up , and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box , we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece .
and so i had to develop this new intuition , that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space .
you hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected .
well , that 's not quite right .
it 's more than that ; it 's deeper .
it 's that those connections , your connections to all the things around you , literally define who you are , and that 's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one morning , in the year 1957 , the neurosurgeon wilder penfield saw himself like this , a weird freak with huge hands , huge mouth , and a tiny bottom .
actually this creature is the result of the penfield research .
he named it homunculus .
basically the homunculus is the visualization of a human being where each part of the body is proportional to the surface it takes in the brain .
so , of course , homunculus is definitely not a freak .
it 's you . it 's me .
it 's our invisible reality .
this visualization could explain , for example , why newborns , or smokers , put , instinctively , their fingers in the mouth .
unfortunately it does n't explain why so many designers remain mainly interested in designing chairs .
so anyway , even if i do not understand science entirely , for my design i essentially refer to it .
i 'm fascinated by its ability to deeply investigate the human being , its way of working , its way of feeling .
and it really helps me to understand how we see , how we hear , how we breathe , how our brain can inform or mislead us .
it 's a great tool for me to understand what could be our real needs .
marketing people have never been able to do that .
marketing reduces things . marketing simplifies .
marketing creates user groups .
and scientists , amidst complexity , amidst fluctuation and uniqueness .
what could be our real needs ?
maybe the silence .
in our daily life we are continuously disturbed by aggressive sounds .
and you know all those kind of sound puts us in a kind of stressful state , and prevent us from being quiet and focused .
so i wanted to create a kind of sound filter , able to preserve ourselves from noise pollution .
but i did n't want it to make it by isolating people , without any earmuffs or those kind of things .
or neither with including complex technology .
i just wanted to , using the complexity and the technology of the brain , of the human brain .
so i worked with white noise .
db is basically - db is the name of the product , basically a white noise diffuser .
this is white noise .
the white noise is the sum of all frequencies that are audible by the human being , brought to the same intensity .
and this noise is like a " shhhhhhhhhhhhh , " like that .
and this noise is the most neutral .
it is the perfect sound for our ears and our brain .
so when you hear this sound you feel like a kind of shelter , preserved from noise pollution .
and when you hear the white noise , your brain is immediately focused on it .
and do not be disturbed any more by the other aggressive sound .
it seems to be magic .
but it is just physiology . it 's just in your brain .
and in mine , i hope .
so in order to make this white noise a little bit active and reactive , i create a ball , a rolling ball able to analyze and find where does aggressive sound come from , and roll , at home or at work , towards aggressive noise , and emits white noise in order to neutralize it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it works .
you feel the effect of the white noise ?
it 's too in silence .
if you make some noise you can feel the effect .
so even if this object , even if this product includes some technology , it includes some speakers , it includes some microphones and some electronic devices , this object is not a very smart object .
and i do n't want to make a very smart object .
i do n't want to create a perfect object like a perfect robot .
i want to create an object like you and me .
so , definitely not perfect .
so imagine , for instance , you are at home .
a loving dispute with your girl or boyfriend .
you shout . you say , " blah blah blah , blah blah blah . who is this guy ? "
and db will probably roll toward you .
and turning around you is " shhhhhhh , " like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- definitely not perfect . so you would probably shut it , at this point .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , in this same kind of approach , i designed k.
k is a daylight receiver transmitter .
so this object is supposed to be displayed on your desk , or on your piano , where you are supposed to spend most of your time in the day .
and this object will be able to know exactly the quantity of light you receive during the day , and able to give you the quantity of light you need .
this object is completely covered by fiber opticals .
and the idea of those fiber opticals is to inform the object , for sure , but creates the idea of an eye sensibility of the object .
i want , by this design feel , when you see it , you see , instinctively , this object seems to be very sensitive , very reactive .
and this object knows , better than you and probably before you , what you really need .
you have to know that the lack of daylight can provoke some problem of energy , or problem of libido .
so , a huge problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- most of the projects i work on - i live in collaboration with scientists .
i 'm just a designer . so i need them .
so there can be some biologists , psychiatrists , mathematicians , and so on .
and i submit them , my intuitions , my hypothesis , my first ideas .
and they react . they told me what is possible , what is impossible .
and together we improve the original concept .
and we build the project to the end .
and this kind of relationship between designer and scientist started when i was at school .
indeed in my studies i was a guinea pig for a pharmaceutical industry .
and the irony for me was of course , i did n't do that for the sake of science progress .
i just do that to make money .
anyway , this project , or this experience , make me start a new project on the design of medicine .
you have to know that today , roughly one or two every drug pills is not taken correctly .
so even if the active constituents in pharmaceuticals made constant progress in terms of chemistry , target of stability , the behavior of the patients goes more and more unstable .
so we took too many of them .
we took irregular dosage .
we do not follow instructions . and so on .
so i wanted to create a new kind of medicine , in order to create a new kind of relationship between the patient and the treatment .
so i turned traditional pills into this .
i 'm going to give you some example .
this one is an antibiotic .
and its purpose is to help patient to go to the end of the treatment .
and the concept is to create a kind of onion , a kind of structure in layers .
so , you start with the darkest one .
and you are helped to visualize the duration of the treatment .
and you are helped to visualize the decrease of the infection .
so the first day , this is the big one .
and you have to peel and eat one layer a day .
and your antibiotic goes smaller and clearer .
and you 're waiting for recovery as you were waiting for the christmas day .
and you follow the treatment like that , to the end of the treatment .
and here you can get the white core .
and it means , right , you are in the recovery .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
this one is a " third lung , " a pharmaceutical device for long-term asthma treatment .
i designed it to help kids to follow the treatment .
so the idea of this one is to create a relationship between the patient of the treatment but a relationship of dependency .
but in this case it is not the medication that is dependent on the patient .
this is , the kids will feel the therapeutic object needs him .
so the idea is , all night long the elastic skin of the third lung will slowly inflate itself , including air and molecules , for sure .
and when the kids wake up , he can see the object needs him . and he take him to his mouth , and breathe the air it contains .
so by this way , the kid , to take care of himself , is to take care of this living object .
and he does not feel anymore it 's relies on asthma treatment , as the asthma treatment needs him .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in this guise of living object approach , i like the idea of a kind of invisible design , as if the function of the object exists in a kind of invisible field just around the objects themselves .
we could talk about a kind of soul , of a ghost accompanying them .
and almost a kind of poltergeist effect .
so when a passive object like this one seems to be alive , because it is - woosh - starting to move .
and i remember an exhibition design i made for john maeda , and for the fondation cartier in paris .
and john maeda was supposed to show several graphic animations in this exhibition .
and my idea for this exhibition design was to create a real pong game , like this one .
and the idea was to create some self-moving benches in the main exhibition room .
so the living benches would be exactly like the ball .
and john was so excited by this idea . he said to me , " okay let 's go . "
i remember the day of the opening .
i was a little bit late .
when i bring the 10 living and self-moving benches in the exhibition room , john was just beside me , and was like , " hmm . hmm . "
and he told me , after a long silence , " i wonder , mathieu , if people wo n't be more fascinated by your benches than by my videos . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it would be a great honor , a great compliment for me , if he had n't decided to take all them off two hours before the opening .
so , huge tragedy .
i guess you wo n't be surprised if i tell you that pinocchio is one of my great influences .
pinocchio is probably one of my best design products , my favorite one .
because it is a kind of object with a conscience , able to be modified by its surroundings , and able to modify it as well .
the other great influence is the mine 's canary .
in coal mines , this canary was supposed to be close to the miners .
and it was singing all day long . and when it stops it means that it just died .
so this canary was a living alarm , and a very efficient one .
a very natural technology , in order to say to the miners , " the air is too bad . you have to go . it 's an emergency . "
so it 's , for me , a great product .
and i tried to design a kind of canary .
andrea is one .
andrea is a living air filter that absorbs toxic gasses from air , contaminated indoor air .
so it uses some plants to do this job , selected for their gas-filtering ability .
you have to know , or you probably already know , that indoor air pollution is more toxic than outdoor one .
so while i 'm talking to you , the seats you are sitting on are currently emitting some invisible and odorless toxic gas . sorry for that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so you are currently breathing formaldehyde .
it 's the same for me with the carpet .
and this is exactly the same at home .
because all the product we get constantly give away the volatile component of which they 're made of .
so let 's have a look at your home .
so your sofa , your plastic chair , your kid 's toys give their own invisible reality . and this one is very toxic .
this is the reason why i created , with david edward , a scientist of harvard university , an object able to absorb the toxic elements using those kind of plants .
but the idea is to force the air to go in the effective part of the plants .
because the roots of the plant are not very effective .
bill wolverton from nasa analyzed it cleverly in the ' 70s .
so the idea is to create an object able to force the air , and to be in contact at the right speed at the right place , in all the effective parts of the plant .
so this is the final object .
it will be launched next september .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this one is kind of the same approach because i include , in a product like andrea , some plants .
and in this one , plants are used for the water filtration ability .
and it includes some fishes as well .
but here , unlike andrea , here are supposed to be eaten .
indeed , this object is a domestic farm , for fishes and green .
so the idea of this object is to be able to get at home very local food .
the locavores used to get food taken in a radius of 100 miles .
local river is able to provide you food directly in your living room .
so the principle of this object is to create an ecosystem called aquaponics .
and the aquaponics is the dirty water of the fish , by a water pump , feeds the plants above .
and the plants will filter , by the roots , the dirty water of the fish .
after , it goes back into the fish tank .
after that you have two options .
or you sit down in front of it like you would do in front your tv set .
amazing channel .
or you start fishing .
and you make some sushis with a fish and the aromatic plants above .
because you can grow some potatoes .
no , not potatoes , but tomatoes , aromatic plants and so on .
so now we can breathe safely .
now we can eat local food .
now we can be treated by smart medicine .
now we can be well-balanced in our biorhythm with daylight .
but it was important to create a perfect place , so i tried to , in order to work and create .
so i designed , for an american scientist based in paris , a very stimulative , brain-stimulative office .
i wanted to create a perfect place where you can work and play , and where your body and your brain can work together .
so , in this office , you do not work anymore at your desk , like a politician .
your seat , your sleep and your play on a big geodesic island made of leather .
see , like this one ?
in this office you do not work and write and draw on a sheet of paper , but you draw directly on a kind of huge whiteboard cave , like a prehistoric scientist .
so you , like that , can make some sport during your work .
in this office you do not need to go out in order to be in contact with nature .
you include , directly , the nature in the floor of the office .
you can see it there .
this is an inspiration image to lead this project of the office .
it really helped me to design it .
i never show it to my client . he would be so afraid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just for my workshop .
i guess it may be the revenge of the guinea pig i was .
but it 's maybe the conviction as monkey and homunculus we are .
all of us need to be considered according to our real nature .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : we 're having a debate .
the debate is over the proposition : " what the world needs now is nuclear energy . " true or false ?
and before we have the debate , i 'd like to actually take a show of hands - on balance , right now , are you for or against this ?
so those who are " yes , " raise your hand . " for . "
okay , hands down .
those who are against , raise your hands .
okay , i 'm reading that at about 75 to 25 in favor at the start .
which means we 're going to take a vote at the end and see how that shifts , if at all .
so here 's the format : they 're going to have six minutes each , and then after one little , quick exchange between them , i want two people on each side of this debate in the audience to have 30 seconds to make one short , crisp , pungent , powerful point .
so , in favor of the proposition , possibly shockingly , is one of , truly , the founders of the environmental movement , a long-standing tedster , the founder of the whole earth catalog , someone we all know and love , stewart brand .
stewart brand : whoa .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the saying is that with climate , those who know the most are the most worried .
with nuclear , those who know the most are the least worried .
a classic example is james hansen , a nasa climatologist pushing for 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere .
he came out with a wonderful book recently called " storms of my grandchildren . "
and hansen is hard over for nuclear power , as are most climatologists who are engaging this issue seriously .
this is the design situation : a planet that is facing climate change and is now half urban .
look at the client base for this .
five out of six of us live in the developing world .
we are moving to cities . we are moving up in the world .
and we are educating our kids , having fewer kids , basically good news all around .
but we move to cities , toward the bright lights , and one of the things that is there that we want , besides jobs , is electricity .
and if it is n't easily gotten , we 'll go ahead and steal it .
this is one of the most desired things by poor people all over the world , in the cities and in the countryside .
electricity for cities , at its best , is what 's called baseload electricity .
that 's where it is on all the time .
and so far there are only three major sources of that - coal and gas , hydro-electric , which in most places is maxed-out - and nuclear .
i would love to have something in the fourth place here , but in terms of constant , clean , scalable energy , -lsb- solar -rsb- and wind and the other renewables are n't there yet because they 're inconstant .
nuclear is and has been for 40 years .
now , from an environmental standpoint , the main thing you want to look at is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal , the two major sources of electricity .
if all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear , the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a coke can - a pretty heavy coke can , about two pounds .
but one day of coal adds up to one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant .
then what happens to the waste ?
the nuclear waste typically goes into a dry cask storage out back of the parking lot at the reactor site because most places do n't have underground storage yet .
it 's just as well , because it can stay where it is .
while the carbon dioxide , vast quantities of it , gigatons , goes into the atmosphere where we ca n't get it back - yet - and where it is causing the problems that we 're most concerned about .
so when you add up the greenhouse gases in the lifetime of these various energy sources , nuclear is down there with wind and hydro , below solar and way below , obviously , all the fossil fuels .
wind is wonderful ; i love wind .
i love being around these big wind generators .
but one of the things we 're discovering is that wind , like solar , is an actually relatively dilute source of energy .
and so it takes a very large footprint on the land , a very large footprint in terms of materials , five to 10 times what you 'd use for nuclear , and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm .
in places like denmark and germany , they 've maxed out on wind already .
they 've run out of good sites .
the power lines are getting overloaded .
and you peak out .
likewise , with solar , especially here in california , we 're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 square miles of southern california desert .
well , as an environmentalist , we would rather that did n't happen .
it 's okay on frapped-out agricultural land .
solar 's wonderful on rooftops .
but out in the landscape , one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert .
when you add all these things up - saul griffith did the numbers and figured out what would it take to get 13 clean terawatts of energy from wind , solar and biofuels , and that area would be roughly the size of the united states , an area he refers to as " renewistan . "
a guy who 's added it up all this very well is david mackay , a physicist in england , and in his wonderful book , " sustainable energy , " among other things , he says , " i 'm not trying to be pro-nuclear . i 'm just pro-arithmetic . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in terms of weapons , the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy .
we have been taking down the russian warheads , turning it into electricity .
ten percent of american electricity comes from decommissioned warheads .
we have n't even started the american stockpile .
i think of most interest to a ted audience would be the new generation of reactors that are very small , down around 10 to 125 megawatts .
this is one from toshiba .
here 's one the russians are already building that floats on a barge .
and that would be very interesting in the developing world .
typically , these things are put in the ground .
they 're referred to as nuclear batteries .
they 're incredibly safe , weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it .
here is a commercial version from new mexico called the hyperion , and another one from oregon called nuscale .
babcock & wilcox that make nuclear reactors , here 's an integral fast reactor .
thorium reactor that nathan myhrvold 's involved in .
the governments of the world are going to have to decide that coals need to be made expensive , and these will go ahead .
and here 's the future .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : okay . okay .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so arguing against , a man who 's been at the nitty , gritty heart of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years .
in 2000 , he discovered that soot was probably the second leading cause of global warming , after co2 .
his team have been making detailed calculations of the relative impacts of different energy sources .
his first time at ted , possibly a disadvantage - we shall see - from stanford , professor mark jacobson . good luck .
mark jacobson : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so my premise here is that nuclear energy puts out more carbon dioxide , puts out more air pollutants , enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems , namely wind , solar , geothermal power , hydro-tidal wave power .
and it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation .
so let 's start just by looking at the co2 emissions from the life cycle .
co2e emissions are equivalent emissions of all the greenhouse gases and particles that cause warming and converted to co2 .
and if you look , wind and concentrated solar have the lowest co2 emissions , if you look at the graph .
nuclear - there are two bars here .
one is a low estimate , and one is a high estimate .
the low estimate is the nuclear energy industry estimate of nuclear .
the high is the average of 103 scientific , peer-reviewed studies .
and this is just the co2 from the life cycle .
if we look at the delays , it takes between 10 and 19 years to put up a nuclear power plant from planning to operation .
this includes about three and a half to six years for a site permit .
and another two and a half to four years for a construction permit and issue , and then four to nine years for actual construction .
and in china , right now , they 're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear .
and the average , just for the construction time of these , is 7.1 years on top of any planning times .
while you 're waiting around for your nuclear , you have to run the regular electric power grid , which is mostly coal in the united states and around the world .
and the chart here shows the difference between the emissions from the regular grid , resulting if you use nuclear , or anything else , versus wind , csp or photovoltaics .
wind takes about two to five years on average , same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics .
so the difference is the opportunity cost of using nuclear versus wind , or something else .
so if you add these two together , alone , you can see a separation that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times more co2 equivalent emissions than wind energy .
and this does n't even account for the footprint on the ground .
if you look at the air pollution health effects , this is the number of deaths per year in 2020 just from vehicle exhaust .
let 's say we converted all the vehicles in the united states to battery electric vehicles , hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or flex fuel vehicles run on e85 .
well , right now in the united states , 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution , and vehicles are about 25,000 of those .
in 2020 , the number will go down to 15,000 due to improvements .
and so , on the right , you see gasoline emissions , the death rates of 2020 .
if you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol , you 'd actually increase the death rate slightly .
if you go to nuclear , you do get a big reduction , but it 's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar .
now if you consider the fact that nuclear weapons proliferation is associated with nuclear energy proliferation , because we know for example , india and pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly by enriching uranium in nuclear energy facilities .
north korea did that to some extent .
iran is doing that right now .
and venezuela would be doing it if they started with their nuclear energy facilities .
if you do a large scale expansion of nuclear energy across the world , and as a result there was just one nuclear bomb created that was used to destroy a city such as mumbai or some other big city , megacity , the additional death rates due to this averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the u.s.
would be this .
so , do we need this ?
the next thing is : what about the footprint ? stewart mentioned the footprint .
actually , the footprint on the ground for wind is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world .
that , because the footprint , as you can see , is just the pole touching the ground .
and you can power the entire u.s. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines .
that would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground , entirely .
the spacing is something else .
that 's the footprint that is always being confused .
people confuse footprint with spacing .
as you can see from these pictures , the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes including agricultural land , range land or open space .
over the ocean , it 's not even land .
now if we look at nuclear - -lrb- laughter -rrb- with nuclear , what do we have ?
we have facilities around there . you also have a buffer zone that 's 17 square kilometers .
and you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with .
now if we go to the area , lots is worse than nuclear or wind .
for example , cellulosic ethanol , to power the entire u.s. vehicle fleet , this is how much land you would need .
that 's cellulosic , second generation biofuels from prairie grass .
here 's corn ethanol . it 's smaller .
this is based on ranges from data , but if you look at nuclear , it would be the size of rhode island to power the u.s. vehicle fleet .
for wind , there 's a larger area , but much smaller footprint .
and of course , with wind , you could put it all over the east coast , offshore theoretically , or you can split it up .
and now , if you go back to looking at geothermal , it 's even smaller than both , and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing , but it 's still pretty small .
and this is to power the entire u.s. vehicle fleet .
to power the entire world with 50 percent wind , you would need about one percent of world land .
matching the reliability , base load is actually irrelevant .
we want to match the hour-by-hour power supply .
you can do that by combining renewables .
this is from real data in california , looking at wind data and solar data .
and it considers just using existing hydro to match the hour-by-hour power demand .
here are the world wind resources .
there 's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide than we need for all the world .
so then here 's the final ranking .
and one last slide i just want to show . this is the choice : you can either have wind or nuclear .
if you use wind , you guarantee ice will last .
nuclear , the time lag alone will allow the arctic to melt and other places to melt more .
and we can guarantee a clean , blue sky or an uncertain future with nuclear power .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : all right .
so while they 're having their comebacks on each other - and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran - i need two people from either side .
so if you 're for this , if you 're for nuclear power , put up two hands .
if you 're against , put up one .
and i want two of each for the mics .
now then , you guys have - you have a minute comeback on him to pick up a point he said , challenge it , whatever .
sb : i think a point of difference we 're having , mark , has to do with weapons and energy .
these diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow putting out a lot of greenhouse gases - a lot of those studies include , " well of course war will be inevitable and therefore we 'll have cities burning and stuff like that , " which is kind of finessing it a little bit , i think .
the reality is that there 's , what , 21 nations that have nuclear power ?
of those , seven have nuclear weapons .
in every case , they got the weapons before they got the nuclear power .
there are two nations , north korea and israel , that have nuclear weapons and do n't have nuclear power at all .
the places that we would most like to have really clean energy occur are china , india , europe , north america , all of which have sorted out their situation in relation to nuclear weapons .
so that leaves a couple of places like iran , maybe venezuela , that you would like to have very close surveillance of anything that goes on with fissile stuff .
pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we really know where all of the fissile material is , and we can move toward zero weapons left , once we know all that .
ca : mark , 30 seconds , either on that or on anything stewart said .
mj : well we know india and pakistan had nuclear energy first , and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories .
so the other thing is , we do n't need nuclear energy .
there 's plenty of solar and wind .
you can make it reliable , as i showed with that diagram .
that 's from real data .
and this is an ongoing research . this is not rocket science .
solving the world 's problems can be done , if you really put your mind to it and use clean , renewable energy .
there 's absolutely no need for nuclear power .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : we need someone for .
rod beckstrom : thank you chris . i 'm rod beckstrom , ceo of icann .
i 've been involved in global warming policy since 1994 , when i joined the board of environmental defense fund that was one of the crafters of the kyoto protocol .
and i want to support stewart brand 's position .
i 've come around in the last 10 years .
i used to be against nuclear power .
i 'm now supporting stewart 's position , softly , from a risk-management standpoint , agreeing that the risks of overheating the planet outweigh the risk of nuclear incident , which certainly is possible and is a very real problem .
however , i think there may be a win-win solution here where both parties can win this debate , and that is , we face a situation where it 's carbon caps on this planet or die .
and in the united states senate , we need bipartisan support - only one or two votes are needed - to move global warming through the senate , and this room can help .
so if we get that through , then mark will solve these problems . thanks chris .
ca : thank you rod beckstrom . against .
david fanton : hi , i 'm david fanton . i just want to say a couple quick things .
the first is : be aware of the propaganda .
the propaganda from the industry has been very , very strong .
and we have not had the other side of the argument fully aired so that people can draw their own conclusions .
be very aware of the propaganda .
secondly , think about this .
if we build all these nuclear power plants , all that waste is going to be on hundreds , if not thousands , of trucks and trains , moving through this country every day .
tell me they 're not going to have accidents .
tell me that those accidents are n't going to put material into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years .
and then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains is n't a potential terrorist target .
ca : thank you .
for .
anyone else for ? go .
alex : hi , i 'm alex . i just wanted to say , i 'm , first of all , renewable energy 's biggest fan .
i 've got solar pv on my roof .
i 've got a hydro conversion at a watermill that i own .
and i 'm , you know , very much " pro " that kind of stuff .
however , there 's a basic arithmetic problem here .
the capability of the sun shining , the wind blowing and the rain falling , simply is n't enough to add up .
so if we want to keep the lights on , we actually need a solution which is going to keep generating all of the time .
i campaigned against nuclear weapons in the ' 80s , and i continue to do so now .
but we 've got an opportunity to recycle them into something more useful that enables us to get energy all of the time .
and , ultimately , the arithmetic problem is n't going to go away .
we 're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone .
we need a solution that generates all of the time .
if we 're going to keep the lights on , nuclear is that solution .
ca : thank you .
anyone else against ?
man : the last person who was in favor made the premise that we do n't have enough alternative renewable resources .
and our " against " proponent up here made it very clear that we actually do .
and so the fallacy that we need this resource and we can actually make it in a time frame that is meaningful is not possible .
i will also add one other thing .
ray kurzweil and all the other talks - we know that the stick is going up exponentially .
so you ca n't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables and say , " that 's all we have . "
because five years from now , it will blow you away what we 'll actually have as alternatives to this horrible , disastrous nuclear power .
ca : point well made . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so each of you has really just a couple sentences - 30 seconds each to sum up .
your final pitch , stewart .
sb : i loved your " it all balances out " chart that you had there .
it was a sunny day and a windy night .
and just now in england they had a cold spell .
all of the wind in the entire country shut down for a week .
none of those things were stirring .
and as usual , they had to buy nuclear power from france .
two gigawatts comes through the chunnel .
this keeps happening .
i used to worry about the 10,000 year factor .
and the fact is , we 're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along .
and especially the small reactors need to go forward .
i heard from nathan myhrvold - and i think here 's the action point - it 'll take an act of congress to make the nuclear regulatory commission start moving quickly on these small reactors , which we need very much , here and in the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mj : so we 've analyzed the hour-by-hour power demand and supply , looking at solar , wind , using data for california .
and you can match that demand , hour-by-hour , for the whole year almost .
now , with regard to the resources , we 've developed the first wind map of the world , from data alone , at 80 meters .
we know what the wind resources are . you can cover 15 percent .
fifteen percent of the entire u.s.
has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive .
and there 's much more solar than there is wind .
there 's plenty of resource . you can make it reliable .
ca : okay . so , thank you , mark .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if you were in palm springs ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- shameless . shameless . shameless .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , people of the ted community , i put it to you that what the world needs now is nuclear energy .
all those in favor , raise your hands .
-lrb- shouts -rrb- and all those against .
ooooh .
now that is - my take on that ...
just put up ... hands up , people who changed their minds during the debate , who voted differently .
those of you who changed your mind in favor of " for " put your hands up .
okay . so here 's the read on it .
both people won supporters , but on my count , the mood of the ted community shifted from about 75 to 25 to about 65 to 35 in favor , in favor .
you both won . i congratulate both of you .
thank you for that .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about the transformed media landscape , and what it means for anybody who has a message that they want to get out to anywhere in the world .
and i want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation .
i 'll start here . last november there was a presidential election .
you probably read something about it in the papers .
and there was some concern that in some parts of the country there might be voter suppression .
and so a plan came up to video the vote .
and the idea was that individual citizens with phones capable of taking photos or making video would document their polling places , on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques , and would upload this to a central place .
and that this would operate as a kind of citizen observation - that citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes , but also to help ensure the sanctity of the vote overall .
so this is a pattern that assumes we 're all in this together .
what matters here is n't technical capital , it 's social capital .
these tools do n't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring .
it is n't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society .
it 's when everybody is able to take them for granted .
because now that media is increasingly social , innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we 're all in this together .
and so we 're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere , and moving from one spot to another .
that is a huge transformation .
not to put too fine a point on it , the moment we 're living through - the moment our historical generation is living through - is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history .
now that 's a big claim . i 'm going to try to back it up .
there are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label " revolution . "
the first one is the famous one , the printing press : movable type , oil-based inks , that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned europe upside-down , starting in the middle of the 1400s .
then , a couple of hundred years ago , there was innovation in two-way communication , conversational media : first the telegraph , then the telephone .
slow , text-based conversations , then real-time voice based conversations .
then , about 150 years ago , there was a revolution in recorded media other than print : first photos , then recorded sound , then movies , all encoded onto physical objects .
and finally , about 100 years ago , the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air - radio and television .
this is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century .
this is what those of us of a certain age grew up with , and are used to .
but there is a curious asymmetry here .
the media that is good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups .
and the media that 's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations .
if you want to have a conversation in this world , you have it with one other person .
if you want to address a group , you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group , whether you 're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press .
that was the media landscape as we had it in the twentieth century .
and this is what changed .
this thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is bill cheswick 's map of the internet .
he traces the edges of the individual networks and then color codes them .
the internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time .
whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern , and television , radio , magazines , books , gave us the one-to-many pattern , the internet gives us the many-to-many pattern .
for the first time , media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations .
that 's one of the big changes .
the second big change is that , as all media gets digitized , the internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media , meaning that phone calls migrate to the internet , magazines migrate to the internet , movies migrate to the internet .
and that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium .
put another way , media is increasingly less just a source of information , and it is increasingly more a site of coordination , because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well .
and the third big change is that members of the former audience , as dan gilmore calls them , can now also be producers and not consumers .
every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well , because the same equipment - phones , computers - let you consume and produce .
it 's as if , when you bought a book , they threw in the printing press for free ; it 's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons .
that is a huge change in the media landscape we 're used to .
and it 's not just internet or no internet .
we 've had the internet in its public form for almost 20 years now , and it 's still changing as the media becomes more social .
it 's still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the internet well .
second story .
last may , china in the sichuan province had a terrible earthquake , 7.9 magnitude , massive destruction in a wide area , as the richter scale has it .
and the earthquake was reported as it was happening .
people were texting from their phones . they were taking photos of buildings .
they were taking videos of buildings shaking .
they were uploading it to qq , china 's largest internet service .
they were twittering it .
and so as the quake was happening the news was reported .
and because of the social connections , chinese students coming elsewhere , and going to school , or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in china - there were people listening all over the world , hearing this news .
the bbc got their first wind of the chinese quake from twitter .
twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes before the us geological survey had anything up online for anybody to read .
the last time china had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now they might have liked to have done that here , rather than seeing these pictures go up online .
but they were n't given that choice , because their own citizens beat them to the punch .
even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens , rather than from the xinhua news agency .
and this stuff rippled like wildfire .
for a while there the top 10 most clicked links on twitter , the global short messaging service - nine of the top 10 links were about the quake .
people collating information , pointing people to news sources , pointing people to the us geological survey .
the 10th one was kittens on a treadmill , but that 's the internet for you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but nine of the 10 in those first hours .
and within half a day donation sites were up , and donations were pouring in from all around the world .
this was an incredible , coordinated global response .
and the chinese then , in one of their periods of media openness , decided that they were going to let it go , that they were going to let this citizen reporting fly .
and then this happened .
people began to figure out , in the sichuan provence , that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed - because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day - the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those building to be built to less than code .
and so they started , the citizen journalists started reporting that as well . and there was an incredible picture .
you may have seen in on the front page of the new york times .
a local official literally prostrated himself in the street , in front of these protesters , in order to get them to go away .
essentially to say , " we will do anything to placate you , just please stop protesting in public . "
but these are people who have been radicalized , because , thanks to the one child policy , they have lost everyone in their next generation .
someone who has seen the death of a single child now has nothing to lose .
and so the protest kept going .
and finally the chinese cracked down .
that was enough of citizen media .
and so they began to arrest the protesters .
they began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on .
china is probably the most successful manager of internet censorship in the world , using something that is widely described as the great firewall of china .
and the great firewall of china is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals , it mostly comes in from the outside world , it comes in relatively sparse chunks , and it comes in relatively slowly .
and because of those four characteristics they are able to filter it as it comes into the country .
but like the maginot line , the great firewall of china was facing in the wrong direction for this challenge , because not one of those four things was true in this environment .
the media was produced locally . it was produced by amateurs .
it was produced quickly . and it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared .
and so now the chinese government , who for a dozen years , has quite successfully filtered the web , is now in the position of having to decide whether to allow or shut down entire services , because the transformation to amateur media is so enormous that they ca n't deal with it any other way .
and in fact that is happening this week .
on the 20th anniversary of tiananmen they just , two days ago , announced that they were simply shutting down access to twitter , because there was no way to filter it other than that .
they had to turn the spigot entirely off .
now these changes do n't just affect people who want to censor messages .
they also affect people who want to send messages , because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole , not just a particular strategy .
the classic media problem , from the 20th century is , how does an organization have a message that they want to get out to a group of people distributed at the edges of a network .
and here is the twentieth century answer .
bundle up the message . send the same message to everybody .
national message . targeted individuals .
relatively sparse number of producers .
very expensive to do , so there is not a lot of competition .
this is how you reach people .
all of that is over .
we are increasingly in a landscape where media is global , social , ubiquitous and cheap .
now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world , to the distributed collection of the audience , are now used to this change .
the audience can talk back .
and that 's a little freaky . but you can get used to it after a while , as people do .
but that 's not the really crazy change that we 're living in the middle of .
the really crazy change is here : it 's the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other , the fact that former consumers are now producers , the fact that the audience can talk directly to one another ; because there is a lot more amateurs than professionals , and because the size of the network , the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants , meaning that the network , when it grows large , grows very , very large .
as recently at last decade , most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals .
those days are over , never to return .
it is the green lines now , that are the source of the free content , which brings me to my last story .
we saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the obama campaign .
and i do n't mean most imaginative use in politics - i mean most imaginative use ever .
and one of the things obama did , was they famously , the obama campaign did , was they famously put up mybarackobama.com , mybo.com and millions of citizens rushed in to participate , and to try and figure out how to help .
an incredible conversation sprung up there .
and then , this time last year , obama announced that he was going to change his vote on fisa , the foreign intelligence surveillance act .
he had said , in january , that he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly warrantless spying on american persons .
by the summer , in the middle of the general campaign , he said , " i 've thought about the issue more . i 've changed my mind .
i 'm going to vote for this bill . "
and many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk .
it was senator obama when they created it . they changed the name later .
" please get fisa right . "
within days of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on mybo.com ; within weeks of its being created it was the largest group .
obama had to issue a press release .
he had to issue a reply .
and he said essentially , " i have considered the issue .
i understand where you are coming from .
but having considered it all , i 'm still going to vote the way i 'm going to vote .
but i wanted to reach out to you and say , i understand that you disagree with me , and i 'm going to take my lumps on this one . "
this did n't please anybody . but then a funny thing happened in the conversation .
people in that group realized that obama had never shut them down .
nobody in the obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join , to deny its existence , to delete it , to take to off the site .
they had understood that their role with mybo.com was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters .
and that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media .
media , the media landscape that we knew , as familiar as it was , as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs , is increasingly slipping away .
in a world where media is global , social , ubiquitous and cheap , in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants , in that world , media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals .
it is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups .
and the choice we face , i mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world , is n't whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in .
that 's the media environment we 've got .
the question we all face now is , " how can we make best use of this media ?
even though it means changing the way we 've always done it . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 've known a lot of fish in my life .
i 've loved only two .
that first one , it was more like a passionate affair .
it was a beautiful fish : flavorful , textured , meaty , a bestseller on the menu .
what a fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even better , it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability .
so you could feel good about selling it .
i was in a relationship with this beauty for several months .
one day , the head of the company called and asked if i 'd speak at an event about the farm 's sustainability .
" absolutely , " i said .
here was a company trying to solve what 's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs : how do we keep fish on our menus ?
for the past 50 years , we 've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests .
it 's hard to overstate the destruction .
ninety percent of large fish , the ones we love - the tunas , the halibuts , the salmons , swordfish - they 've collapsed .
there 's almost nothing left .
so , for better or for worse , aquaculture , fish farming , is going to be a part of our future .
a lot of arguments against it : fish farms pollute - most of them do anyway - and they 're inefficient . take tuna , a major drawback .
it 's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one .
that means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna .
not very sustainable .
it does n't taste very good either .
so here , finally , was a company trying to do it right .
i wanted to support them .
the day before the event , i called the head of p.r. for the company .
let 's call him don .
" don , " i said , " just to get the facts straight , you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea , you do n't pollute . "
" that 's right , " he said . " we 're so far out , the waste from our fish gets distributed , not concentrated . "
and then he added , " we 're basically a world unto ourselves .
that feed conversion ratio ? 2.5 to one , " he said .
" best in the business . "
2.5 to one , great .
" 2.5 what ? what are you feeding ? "
" sustainable proteins , " he said .
" great , " i said . got off the phone .
and that night , i was lying in bed , and i thought : what the hell is a sustainable protein ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the next day , just before the event , i called don .
i said , " don , what are some examples of sustainable proteins ? "
he said he did n't know . he would ask around .
well , i got on the phone with a few people in the company ; no one could give me a straight answer until finally , i got on the phone with the head biologist .
let 's call him don too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " don , " i said , " what are some examples of sustainable proteins ? "
well , he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals , and then he said chicken pellets .
i said , " chicken pellets ? "
he said , " yeah , feathers , skin , bone meal , scraps , dried and processed into feed . "
i said , " what percentage of your feed is chicken ? "
thinking , you know , two percent .
" well , it 's about 30 percent , " he said .
i said , " don , what 's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there was a long pause on the line , and he said , " there 's just too much chicken in the world . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i fell out of love with this fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , not because i 'm some self-righteous , goody-two shoes foodie .
i actually am .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , i actually fell out of love with this fish because , i swear to god , after that conversation , the fish tasted like chicken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this second fish , it 's a different kind of love story .
it 's the romantic kind , the kind where the more you get to know your fish , you love the fish .
i first ate it at a restaurant in southern spain .
a journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time .
she kind of set us up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it came to the table a bright , almost shimmering , white color .
the chef had overcooked it .
like twice over .
amazingly , it was still delicious .
who can make a fish taste good after it 's been overcooked ?
i ca n't , but this guy can .
let 's call him miguel - actually his name is miguel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and no , he did n't cook the fish , and he 's not a chef , at least in the way that you and i understand it .
he 's a biologist at veta la palma .
it 's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of spain .
it 's at the tip of the guadalquivir river .
until the 1980s , the farm was in the hands of the argentinians .
they raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands .
they did it by draining the land .
they built this intricate series of canals , and they pushed water off the land and out into the river .
well , they could n't make it work , not economically .
and ecologically , it was a disaster .
it killed like 90 percent of the birds , which , for this place , is a lot of birds .
and so in 1982 , a spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land .
what did they do ?
they reversed the flow of water .
they literally flipped the switch .
instead of pushing water out , they used the channels to pull water back in .
they flooded the canals .
they created a 27,000-acre fish farm - bass , mullet , shrimp , eel - and in the process , miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction .
the farm 's incredible .
i mean , you 've never seen anything like this .
you stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away , and all you see are flooded canals and this thick , rich marshland .
i was there not long ago with miguel .
he 's an amazing guy , like three parts charles darwin and one part crocodile dundee .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay ? there we are slogging through the wetlands , and i 'm panting and sweating , got mud up to my knees , and miguel 's calmly conducting a biology lecture .
here , he 's pointing out a rare black-shouldered kite .
now , he 's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton .
and here , here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the tanzanian giraffe .
it turns out , miguel spent the better part of his career in the mikumi national park in africa .
i asked him how he became such an expert on fish .
he said , " fish ? i did n't know anything about fish .
i 'm an expert in relationships . "
and then he 's off , launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants .
and do n't get me wrong , that was really fascinating , you know , the biotic community unplugged , kind of thing .
it 's great , but i was in love .
and my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish i had the night before .
so i interrupted him . i said , " miguel , what makes your fish taste so good ? "
he pointed at the algae .
" i know , dude , the algae , the phytoplankton , the relationships : it 's amazing .
but what are your fish eating ?
what 's the feed conversion ratio ? "
well , he goes on to tell me it 's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they 'd be eating in the wild .
the plant biomass , the phytoplankton , the zooplankton , it 's what feeds the fish .
the system is so healthy , it 's totally self-renewing .
there is no feed .
ever heard of a farm that does n't feed its animals ?
later that day , i was driving around this property with miguel , and i asked him , i said , " for a place that seems so natural , unlike like any farm i 'd ever been at , how do you measure success ? "
at that moment , it was as if a film director called for a set change .
and we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight : thousands and thousands of pink flamingos , a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see .
" that 's success , " he said .
" look at their bellies , pink .
they 're feasting . "
feasting ? i was totally confused .
i said , " miguel , are n't they feasting on your fish ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " yes , " he said .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds .
well , last year , this property had 600,000 birds on it , more than 250 different species .
it 's become , today , the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of europe . "
i said , " miguel , is n't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he shook his head , no .
he said , " we farm extensively , not intensively .
this is an ecological network .
the flamingos eat the shrimp .
the shrimp eat the phytoplankton .
so the pinker the belly , the better the system . "
okay , so let 's review : a farm that does n't feed its animals , and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators .
a fish farm , but also a bird sanctuary .
oh , and by the way , those flamingos , they should n't even be there in the first place .
they brood in a town 150 miles away , where the soil conditions are better for building nests .
every morning , they fly 150 miles into the farm .
and every evening , they fly 150 miles back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they do that because they 're able to follow the broken white line of highway a92 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no kidding .
i was imagining a " march of the penguins " thing , so i looked at miguel .
i said , " miguel , do they fly 150 miles to the farm , and then do they fly 150 miles back at night ?
do they do that for the children ? "
he looked at me like i had just quoted a whitney houston song .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " no ; they do it because the food 's better . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't mention the skin of my beloved fish , which was delicious - and i do n't like fish skin ; i do n't like it seared , i do n't like it crispy .
it 's that acrid , tar-like flavor .
i almost never cook with it .
yet , when i tasted it at that restaurant in southern spain , it tasted not at all like fish skin .
it tasted sweet and clean , like you were taking a bite of the ocean .
i mentioned that to miguel , and he nodded .
he said , " the skin acts like a sponge .
it 's the last defense before anything enters the body .
it evolved to soak up impurities . "
and then he added , " but our water has no impurities . "
ok . a farm that does n't feed its fish , a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators .
and then i realized when he says , " a farm that has no impurities , " he made a big understatement , because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the guadalquivir river .
it 's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days : chemical contaminants , pesticide runoff .
and when it works its way through the system and leaves , the water is cleaner than when it entered .
the system is so healthy , it purifies the water .
so , not just a farm that does n't feed its animals , not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators , but a farm that 's literally a water purification plant - and not just for those fish , but for you and me as well .
because when that water leaves , it dumps out into the atlantic .
a drop in the ocean , i know , but i 'll take it , and so should you , because this love story , however romantic , is also instructive .
you might say it 's a recipe for the future of good food , whether we 're talking about bass or beef cattle .
what we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture , one in which the food actually tastes good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but for a lot people , that 's a bit too radical .
we 're not realists , us foodies ; we 're lovers .
we love farmers ' markets , we love small family farms , we talk about local food , we eat organic .
and when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food , someone , somewhere stands up and says , " hey guy , i love pink flamingos , but how are you going to feed the world ? "
how are you going to feed the world ?
can i be honest ?
i do n't love that question .
no , not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world .
one billion people will go hungry today .
one billion - that 's more than ever before - because of gross inequalities in distribution , not tonnage .
now , i do n't love this question because it 's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years .
feed grain to herbivores , pesticides to monocultures , chemicals to soil , chicken to fish , and all along agribusiness has simply asked , " if we 're feeding more people more cheaply , how terrible could that be ? "
that 's been the motivation , it 's been the justification : it 's been the business plan of american agriculture .
we should call it what it is : a business in liquidation , a business that 's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible .
that 's not a business , and it is n't agriculture .
our breadbasket is threatened today , not because of diminishing supply , but because of diminishing resources .
not by the latest combine and tractor invention , but by fertile land ; not by pumps , but by fresh water ; not by chainsaws , but by forests ; and not by fishing boats and nets , but by fish in the sea .
want to feed the world ?
let 's start by asking : how are we going to feed ourselves ?
or better : how can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- to do that , do n't look at the agribusiness model for the future .
it 's really old , and it 's tired .
it 's high on capital , chemistry and machines , and it 's never produced anything really good to eat .
instead , let 's look to the ecological model .
that 's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience .
look to miguel , farmers like miguel .
farms that are n't worlds unto themselves ; farms that restore instead of deplete ; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively ; farmers that are not just producers , but experts in relationships .
because they 're the ones that are experts in flavor , too .
and if i 'm going to be really honest , they 're a better chef than i 'll ever be .
you know , i 'm okay with that , because if that 's the future of good food , it 's going to be delicious .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to make an argument today that may seem a little bit crazy : social media and the end of gender .
let me connect the dots .
i 'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love , or love to hate , are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender .
i think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender .
if you had n't noticed , our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender , and i think that 's going to change .
now most media companies - television , radio , publishing , games , you name it - they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences .
it 's old-school demographics .
they come up with these very restrictive labels to define us .
now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways - you have certain taste , that you like certain things .
and so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics .
age demographics : the 18 to 49 demo has had a huge impact on all mass media programming in this country since the 1960s , when the baby boomers were still young .
now they 've aged out of that demographic , but it 's still the case that powerful ratings companies like nielson do n't even take into account viewers of television shows over age 54 .
in our media environment , it 's as if they do n't even exist .
now , if you watch " mad men , " like i do - it 's a popular tv show in the states - dr. faye miller does something called psychographics , which first came about in the 1960s , where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers .
but psychographics really have n't had a huge impact on the media business .
it 's really just been basic demographics .
so i 'm at the norman lear center at usc , and we 've done a lot of research over the last seven , eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad .
and in the last three years , we 've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed , and we 've discovered some very interesting things .
all the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them .
but those categories mean even less now than they did before , because with online networking tools , it 's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes .
we 're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online .
and we can lie about our age online , too , pretty easily .
we can also connect with people based on our very specific interests .
we do n't need a media company to help do this for us .
so the traditional media companies , of course , are paying very close attention to these online communities .
they know this is the mass audience of the future ; they need to figure it out .
but they 're having a hard time doing it because they 're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them , because that 's how ad rates are still determined .
when they 're monitoring your clickstream - and you know they are - they have a really hard time figuring out your age , your gender and your income .
they can make some educated guesses .
but they get a lot more information about what you do online , what you like , what interests you .
that 's easier for them to find out than who you are .
and even though that 's still sort of creepy , there is an upside to having your taste monitored .
suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it has n't been before .
it had been presumed before .
so when you look online at the way people aggregate , they do n't aggregate around age , gender and income .
they aggregate around the things they love , the things that they like , and if you think about it , shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories .
i 'd much rather know whether you like " buffy the vampire slayer " rather than how old you are .
that would tell me something more substantial about you .
now there 's something else that we 've discovered about social media that 's actually quite surprising .
it turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution .
if you look at the statistics - these are worldwide statistics - in every single age category , women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies .
and then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites , they truly dominate the social media space , which is a space that 's having a huge impact on old media .
the question is : what sort of impact is this going to have on our culture , and what 's it going to mean for women ?
if the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media , then does that mean that women are going to take over global media ?
are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on tv shows ?
will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks ?
could this be possible , that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape ?
well , i actually do n't think that 's going to be the case .
i think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women , because they realize this is important for their business , and i think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere .
but i think women are actually going to be - ironically enough - responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the " chick flick " and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things - that hispanics like certain things , that young people like certain things .
this is far too simplistic .
the future entertainment media that we 're going to see is going to be very data-driven , and it 's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online , where women are really driving the action .
so you may be asking , well why is it important that i know what entertains people ?
why should i know this ?
of course , old media companies and advertisers need to know this .
but my argument is that , if you want to understand the global village , it 's probably a good idea that you figure out what they 're passionate about , what amuses them , what they choose to do in their free time .
this is a very important thing to know about people .
i 've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people 's lives .
and i do it not just because it 's fun - though actually , it is really fun - but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people 's lives - for instance , on their political beliefs and on their health .
and so , if you have any interest in understanding the world , looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start .
so imagine a media atmosphere that is n't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics .
can you even imagine what that looks like ?
i ca n't wait to find out what it looks like .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- lauren hodge : if you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option , which would you choose , grilled or fried chicken ?
now most people would answer grilled , and it 's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories .
however , grilled chicken poses a hidden danger .
the hidden danger is heterocyclic amines - specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine , or phip - -lrb- laughter -rrb- which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound .
a carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells , which can also cause them to metastasize or spread .
they are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group .
studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines .
however , no studies exist yet that show how or why .
these here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens .
and as you can see , none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe , which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet .
now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea .
and i was led to it through a series of events .
i first learned about it through a lawsuit i read about in my doctor 's office - -lrb- laughter -rrb- which was between the physician 's committee for responsible medicine and seven different fast food restaurants .
they were n't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken , but they were sued because of california 's proposition 65 , which stated that if there 's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning .
so i was very surprised about this .
and i was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken , which does n't seem very harmful .
but then one night , my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner , and i noticed that the edges of the chicken , which had been marinated in lemon juice , turned white .
and later in biology class , i learned that it 's due to a process called denaturing , which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function .
so i combined these two ideas and i formulated a hypothesis , saying that , could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in ph ?
so my idea was born , and i had the project set up and a hypothesis , so what was my next step ?
well obviously i had to find a lab to work at because i did n't have the equipment in my school .
i thought this would be easy , but i emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where i lived , and i got one positive response that said that they could work with me .
most of the others either never responded back , said they did n't have the time or did n't have the equipment and could n't help me .
so it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times .
however , it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab - so i could finally start my project .
the first stage was completed at home , which consisted of marinating the chicken , grilling the chicken , amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab .
the second stage was completed at the penn state university main campus lab , which is where i extracted the chemicals , changed the ph so i could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds i needed from the rest of the chicken .
the final stages , when i ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer , which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens i had in my chicken .
so when i went through the data , i had very surprising results , because i found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation .
when compared with the unmarinated chicken , which is what i used as my control , i found that lemon juice worked by far the best , which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent .
the saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well , decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent .
olive oil slightly decreased the phip formation , but it was nearly negligible .
and the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range , but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens .
another important factor that i did n't take into account initially was the time cooked .
and i found that if you increase the time cooked , the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases .
so the best way to marinate chicken , based on this , is to , not under-cook , but definitely do n't over-cook and char the chicken , and marinate in either lemon juice , brown sugar or saltwater .
-lrb- applause -rrb- based on these findings , i have a question for you .
would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life ?
now i 'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that 's not marinated , you 're definitely going to catch cancer and die .
however , anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle .
is it worth it to you ?
how will you cook your chicken now ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- shree bose : hi everyone . i 'm shree bose .
i was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner .
and i want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant .
and she 's standing in front of you and she 's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they 're different colors .
sounds ridiculous , right .
but that was me years ago .
and that was my first science fair project .
it got a bit more complicated from there .
my older brother panaki bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when i barely understood basic algebra .
my parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects , including a remote controlled garbage can .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then came the summer after my freshman year , when my grandfather passed away due to cancer .
and i remember watching my family go through that and thinking that i never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss .
so , armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology , i decided i wanted to do cancer research at 15 .
good plan .
so i started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab .
got rejected by all except one .
and then went on , my next summer , to work under dr. basu at the unt health center at fort worth , texas .
and that is where the research began .
so ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people do n't know about , or at least do n't pay that much attention to .
but yet , it 's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the united states .
in fact , one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer .
one in 100 will die from it .
chemotherapy , one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today , involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells .
cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug - a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the dna of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves .
sounds great , right ?
but here 's the problem : sometimes patients become resistant to the drug , and then years after they 've been declared to be cancer free , they come back .
and this time , they no longer respond to the drug .
it 's a huge problem .
in fact , it 's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today .
so we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called cisplatin .
and we wanted to figure this out , because if we could figure that out , then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening .
so that 's what we set out to do .
and we thought it had something to do with this protein called amp kinase , an energy protein .
so we ran all of these tests blocking the protein , and we saw this huge shift .
i mean , on the slide , you can see that on our sensitive side , these cells that are responding to the drug , when we start blocking the protein , the number of dying cells - those colored dots - they 're going down .
but then on this side , with the same treatment , they 're going up - interesting .
but those are dots on a screen for you ; what exactly does that mean ?
well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell .
and in fact , it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant .
and that 's huge .
in fact , it means that if a patient comes in and they 're resistant to this drug , then if we give them a chemical to block this protein , then we can treat them again with the same drug .
and that 's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness - possibly for many different types of cancer .
so that was my work , and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research , with figuring out exactly what this protein does , but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness - so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren .
but my work was n't just about the research .
it was about finding my passion .
that 's why being the grand prize winner of the google global science fair - cute picture , right - it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor .
and ever since then , i 've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff - from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys .
but like i said , my journey was n't just about the research , it was about finding my passion , and it was about making my own opportunities when i did n't even know what i was doing .
it was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing .
after all , my story begins with a dried , withered spinach plant and it 's only getting better from there .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- naomi shah : hi everyone . i 'm naomi shah , and today i 'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients .
1.6 million deaths worldwide .
one death every 20 seconds .
people spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors .
and the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of hiv and tuberculosis combined .
now these statistics had a huge impact on me , but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round .
it confused me ; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season ?
with this question in mind , i started researching , and i soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit .
as soon as i realized this , i investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients .
at first , i just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients .
but soon after , i developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients .
and it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health , because that relationship seems so important .
so with that in mind , i started researching more , i started investigating more , and i became very passionate .
because i realized that if we could find a way to target remediation , we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively .
for example , volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools , homes and workplaces .
they 're everywhere .
these chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant , as defined by the u.s. clean air act .
which is surprising to me , because these chemical pollutants , through my research , i show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated .
so today i want to show you my interactive software model that i created .
i 'm going to show it to you on my laptop .
and i have a volunteer subject in the audience today , julie .
and all of julie 's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model .
and this can be used by anyone .
so i want you to imagine that you 're in julie 's shoes , or someone who 's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder .
so julie 's going to her doctor 's office to get treated for her asthma .
and the doctor has her sit down , and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate - which is essentially her exhalation rate , or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath .
so that peak expiratory flow rate , i 've entered it up into the interactive software model .
i 've also entered in her age , her gender and her height .
i 've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels .
so any user can come in here and click on " lung function report " and it 'll take them to this report that i created .
and this report really drives home the crux of my research .
so what it shows - if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner - it shows julie 's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar .
this is the measurement that she took in her doctor 's office .
in the blue bar at the bottom of the graph , it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate , what her exhalation rate or lung health , should be based on her age , gender and height .
so the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar , and he says , " wow , we need to give her steroids , medication and inhalers . "
but i want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids , inhalers and medication , the doctor turns to julie and says , " why do n't you go home and clean out your air filters .
clean out the air ducts in your home , in your workplace , in your school .
stop the use of incense and candles .
and if you 're remodeling your house , take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring . "
because these solutions are natural , these solutions are sustainable , and these solutions are long-term investments - long-term investments that we 're making for our generation and for future generations .
because these environmental solutions that julie can make in her home , her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her .
so i 'm very passionate about this research and i really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma , more respiratory disorders , as well as more pollutants .
but before i end my talk today , i want to leave you with one saying .
and that saying is that genetics loads the gun , but the environment pulls the trigger .
and that made a huge impact on me when i was doing this research .
because what i feel , is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level , that we ca n't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything .
but if each one of us takes initiative in our own home , in our own school and in our own workplace , we can make a huge difference in air quality .
because remember , we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors .
and air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients , anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general .
so i want you to reimagine a world with better air quality , better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- lisa ling : right .
can i have shree and lauren come up really quickly ?
your google science fair champions .
your winners .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the night before i was heading for scotland , i was invited to host the final of " china 's got talent " show in shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium .
guess who was the performing guest ?
susan boyle .
and i told her , " i 'm going to scotland the next day . "
she sang beautifully , and she even managed to say a few words in chinese : 送你葱 so it 's not like " hello " or " thank you , " that ordinary stuff .
it means " green onion for free . "
why did she say that ?
because it was a line from our chinese parallel susan boyle - a 50-some year-old woman , a vegetable vendor in shanghai , who loves singing western opera , but she did n't understand any english or french or italian , so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in chinese .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the last sentence of nessun dorma that she was singing in the stadium was " green onion for free . "
so -lsb- as -rsb- susan boyle was saying that , 80,000 live audience sang together .
that was hilarious .
so i guess both susan boyle and this vegetable vendor in shanghai belonged to otherness .
they were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment , yet their courage and talent brought them through .
and a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams .
well , being different is not that difficult .
we are all different from different perspectives .
but i think being different is good , because you present a different point of view .
you may have the chance to make a difference .
my generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of china that has made so many changes in the past 20 , 30 years .
i remember that in the year of 1990 , when i was graduating from college , i was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in beijing , great wall sheraton - it 's still there .
so after being interrogated by this japanese manager for a half an hour , he finally said , " so , miss yang , do you have any questions to ask me ? "
i summoned my courage and poise and said , " yes , but could you let me know , what actually do you sell ? "
i did n't have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel .
that was the first day i set my foot in a five-star hotel .
around the same time , i was going through an audition - the first ever open audition by national television in china - with another thousand college girls .
the producer told us they were looking for some sweet , innocent and beautiful fresh face .
so when it was my turn , i stood up and said , " why -lsb- do -rsb- women 's personalities on television always have to be beautiful , sweet , innocent and , you know , supportive ?
why ca n't they have their own ideas and their own voice ? "
i thought i kind of offended them .
but actually , they were impressed by my words .
and so i was in the second round of competition , and then the third and the fourth .
after seven rounds of competition , i was the last one to survive it .
so i was on a national television prime-time show .
and believe it or not , that was the first show on chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people .
well after a few years , i decided to go to the u.s. and columbia university to pursue my postgraduate studies , and then started my own media company , which was unthought of during the years that i started my career .
so we do a lot of things .
i 've interviewed more than a thousand people in the past .
and sometimes i have young people approaching me say , " lan , you changed my life , " and i feel proud of that .
but then we are also so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country .
i was in beijing 's bidding for the olympic games .
i was representing the shanghai expo .
i saw china embracing the world and vice versa .
but then sometimes i 'm thinking , what are today 's young generation up to ?
how are they different , and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of china , or at large , the world ?
so today i want to talk about young people through the platform of social media .
first of all , who are they ? -lsb- what -rsb- do they look like ?
well this is a girl called guo meimei - 20 years old , beautiful .
she showed off her expensive bags , clothes and car on her microblog , which is the chinese version of twitter .
and she claimed to be the general manager of red cross at the chamber of commerce .
she did n't realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning , almost a turmoil , against the credibility of red cross .
the controversy was so heated that the red cross had to open a press conference to clarify it , and the investigation is going on .
so far , as of today , we know that she herself made up that title - probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity .
all those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend , who used to be a board member in a subdivision of red cross at chamber of commerce .
it 's very complicated to explain .
but anyway , the public still does n't buy it .
it is still boiling .
it shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions , which lacked transparency in the past .
and also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog .
microblog boomed in the year of 2010 , with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled .
sina.com , a major news portal , alone has more than 140 million microbloggers .
on tencent , 200 million .
the most popular blogger - it 's not me - it 's a movie star , and she has more than 9.5 million followers , or fans .
about 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people , under 30 years old .
and because , as you know , the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government , social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit .
but because you do n't have many other openings , the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong , active and even violent .
so through microblogging , we are able to understand chinese youth even better .
so how are they different ?
first of all , most of them were born in the 80s and 90s , under the one-child policy .
and because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls , now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women .
that could pose a potential danger to the society , but who knows ; we 're in a globalized world , so they can look for girlfriends from other countries .
most of them have fairly good education .
the illiteracy rate in china among this generation is under one percent .
in cities , 80 percent of kids go to college .
but they are facing an aging china with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent this year , and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030 .
and you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially , and taking care of them when they 're sick .
so it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old .
so making a living is not that easy for young people .
college graduates are not in short supply .
in urban areas , college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 u.s. dollars a month , while the average rent is above $ 500 .
so what do they do ? they have to share space - squeezed in very limited space to save money - and they call themselves " tribe of ants . "
and for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment , they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment .
that ratio in america would only cost a couple five years to earn , but in china it 's 30 to 40 years with the skyrocketing real estate price .
among the 200 million migrant workers , 60 percent of them are young people .
they find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas .
most of them do n't want to go back to the countryside , but they do n't have the sense of belonging .
they work for longer hours with less income , less social welfare .
and they 're more vulnerable to job losses , subject to inflation , tightening loans from banks , appreciation of the renminbi , or decline of demand from europe or america for the products they produce .
last year , though , an appalling incident in a southern oem manufacturing compound in china : 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide , just one by one like causing a contagious disease .
but they died because of all different personal reasons .
but this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation , both physical and mental , of these migrant workers .
for those who do return back to the countryside , they find themselves very welcome locally , because with the knowledge , skills and networks they have learned in the cities , with the assistance of the internet , they 're able to create more jobs , upgrade local agriculture and create new business in the less developed market .
so for the past few years , the coastal areas , they found themselves in a shortage of labor .
these diagrams show a more general social background .
the first one is the engels coefficient , which explains that the cost of daily necessities has dropped its percentage all through the past decade , in terms of family income , to about 37-some percent .
but then in the last two years , it goes up again to 39 percent , indicating a rising living cost .
the gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4 .
now it 's 0.5 - even worse than that in america - showing us the income inequality .
and so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility .
and also , the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful is quite widespread .
so any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even unrest .
so through some of the hottest topics on microblogging , we can see what young people care most about .
social justice and government accountability runs the first in what they demand .
for the past decade or so , a massive urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports of private property .
and it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation .
sometimes people get killed , and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest .
so when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the internet , people cry for the government to take actions to stop this .
so the good news is that earlier this year , the state council passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passed the right to order forced demolition from local governments to the court .
similarly , many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the internet .
we heard about polluted air , polluted water , poisoned food .
and guess what , we have faked beef .
they have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or fish , and it turns it to look like beef .
and then lately , people are very concerned about cooking oil , because thousands of people have been found -lsb- refining -rsb- cooking oil from restaurant slop .
so all these things have aroused a huge outcry from the internet .
and fortunately , we have seen the government responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns .
while young people seem to be very sure about their participation in public policy-making , but sometimes they 're a little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life .
china is soon to pass the u.s.
as the number one market for luxury brands - that 's not including the chinese expenditures in europe and elsewhere .
but you know what , half of those consumers are earning a salary below 2,000 u.s. dollars .
they 're not rich at all .
they 're taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status .
and this is a girl explicitly saying on a tv dating show that she would rather cry in a bmw than smile on a bicycle .
but of course , we do have young people who would still prefer to smile , whether in a bmw or -lsb- on -rsb- a bicycle .
so in the next picture , you see a very popular phenomenon called " naked " wedding , or " naked " marriage .
it does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding , but it shows that these young couples are ready to get married without a house , without a car , without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet , to show their commitment to true love .
and also , people are doing good through social media .
and the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped dogs for food processing was spotted and stopped on the highway with the whole country watching through microblogging .
people were donating money , dog food and offering volunteer work to stop that truck .
and after hours of negotiation , 500 dogs were rescued .
and here also people are helping to find missing children .
a father posted his son 's picture onto the internet .
after thousands of resends in relay , the child was found , and we witnessed the reunion of the family through microblogging .
so happiness is the most popular word we have heard through the past two years .
happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values , but also , it 's about the environment .
people are thinking about the following questions : are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher gdp ?
how are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth , to keep sustainability and stability ?
and also , how capable is the system of self-correctness to keep more people content with all sorts of friction going on at the same time ?
i guess these are the questions people are going to answer .
and our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- mechanical noises -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it is interesting that in the united states , the most significant health-care budget goes to cardiovascular disease care , whether it 's private or public .
there 's no comparison at all .
in africa - where it is a major killer - it is totally ignored .
and that situation can not be right . we must do something about it .
a health status of a nation parallels development of that nation .
17 million people die every year from heart disease .
32 million heart attacks and strokes occur .
most of this is in developing countries , and the majority is in africa .
85 percent of global disease burden for cardiovascular disease is in developing countries - not in the west - and yet 90 percent of the resources are in the west .
who is at risk ? people like you .
it 's not just the africans that should be concerned about that .
all friends of africa , that will have reason to be in africa at some point in time , should be very concerned about this deplorable situation .
has anyone here wondered what will happen if you go back to your room at night , and you start getting chest pains , shortness of breath , sweating ?
you 're having a heart attack . what are you going to do ?
will you fly back to the u.s. , germany , europe ?
no , you will die . 50 percent will die within 24 hours , if not treated .
this is what 's going on .
in a look at the map of the u.s. - the graph here , 10 million people here , 10 million here .
by the time you get to 50 , it 's almost no one left in nigeria - life expectancy is 47 .
it 's not because some people do n't survive childhood illnesses - they do - but they do not survive after the time that they reach about 45 years old and 50 years old .
and those are the times they 're most productive .
those are the times that they should be contributing to africa 's development . but they 're not there .
the best way to spiral into a cycle of poverty is to kill the parents .
if you can not secure the parents , you can not guarantee the security of the african child .
what are the risk factors ?
it 's very well known . i 'm not going to spend a lot of time on those .
these are just for information : hypertension , diabetes , obesity , lack of exercise . the usual suspects .
right here in tanzania , 30 percent of individuals have hypertension .
20 percent are getting treated .
only less than one percent are adequately treated .
if we can treat hypertension alone in africa , we 'll save 250,000 lives a year . that 's quite significant !
easy to treat . look at the situation in mauritius .
in eight short years - we 're here talking about hiv , malaria , which is all good .
we can not make the mistakes we 've made with malaria and hiv .
in eight short years , non-communicable diseases will become the leading causes of death in africa .
that is something to keep in mind . we ca n't deal with it with situations like this .
this is a typical african hospital . we ca n't depend on the elites - they go to usa , germany , u.k. for treatment . unbelievable .
you ca n't depend on foreign aid alone .
here is the situation : countries are turning inwards .
post-9/11 , -lsb- the -rsb- united states has had a lot of trouble to deal with , their own internal issues .
so , they spend their money trying to fix those problems .
you ca n't rightly - it 's not their responsibility , it is my responsibility . i have to take care of my own problems .
if they help , that 's good ! but that is not my expectation .
these worsening indices of health care or health studies in africa demand a new look . we can not keep on doing things the way we 've always done them .
if they have not worked , we have to look for alternative solutions .
i 'm here to talk to you about solutions .
this has been - what has been a difficult sign to some of us .
several years ago , we started thinking about it .
everyone knows the problem . no one knows what the solutions are .
we decided that we needed to put our money where our mouth is .
everyone is ready to throw in money , in terms of free money aid to developing countries .
talk about sustainable investment , no one is interested .
you ca n't raise money .
i have done businesses in healthcare in the united states - i live in nashville , tennessee , health care capital of america .
-lsb- it 's -rsb- very easy to raise money for health-care ventures .
but start telling them , you know , we 're going to try to do it in nigeria - everyone runs away .
that is totally wrong . those of you in the audience here , if you want to help africa , invest money in sustainable development .
let me lead you through a day in the life of the heart institute , so you get a glimpse of what we do , and i 'll talk a little bit more about it .
what we have done is to show that high-quality health care , comparable to the best anywhere in the world , can be done in a developing country environment .
we have 25 positions right now - all of them trained , board certified in the usa , canada or britain .
we have every modality that can be done in vanderbilt , cleveland clinic - everywhere in the u.s. - and we do it for about 10 percent of the cost that you will need to do those things in the united states .
-lrb- applause -rrb- additionally , we have a policy that no one is ever turned away because of ability to pay .
we take care of everyone .
-lrb- applause -rrb- whether you have one dollar , two dollars - it does n't matter .
and i will tell you how we 're able to do it .
we make sure that we select our equipment properly .
we go for modular units . units that have multi-modality functions have modular components . easy to repair , and because of that , we do not take things that are not durable and can not last .
we emphasize training , and we make sure that this process is regenerative .
very soon we will all be dead and gone , but the problems will stay , unless we have people taking over from where we stopped .
we made sure that we produced some things ourselves .
we do not buy unit doses of radiopharmaceuticals .
we get the generators from the companies .
we manufacture them in-house , ourselves . that keeps the costs down .
so , for a radiopharmaceutical in the u.s. - that you 'll get a unit dose for 250 dollars - when we 're finished manufacturing it in-house , we come at a price of about two dollars .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we recognize that the only way to bridge the gap between the rich and poor countries is through education and technology .
all these problems we 're talking about - if we bring development , they will all disappear .
technology is a great equalizer . how do we make it work ?
it 's been proved : self-care is cost-effective .
it extends opportunity to the rural centers , and we can use expertise in a very smart way .
this is the way our centers are set up .
we currently have three locations in the caribbean , and we 're planning a fourth one .
and we have now decided to go into africa .
we will be doing the west african heart institute in port harcourt , nigeria . that project will be starting within the next few months . we hope to open in 2008-09 .
and we will do other centers .
this model can be adapted to every disease process .
all the units , all the centers , are linked through a switched hub to a central server , and all the images are populated to review stations .
and we designed this telemedicine solution . it 's proprietary to us , and we are happy to share what we have learned with anyone who is interested in doing it . you can still be profitable .
we make sure that the telemedicine platform gives access to expert medical specialists anywhere in the world , just by a click of the button .
i 'll lead you through , to see how this happens .
this is at the heart institute . the doctors from anywhere can log in .
i can call you in switzerland and say , " listen , go into our system .
look at mrs. jones . look at the study , tell me what you think . "
they 'll give me that information , and we 'll make the care of the patient better .
the patient does n't have to travel .
he does n't have to experience the anxiety of not knowing because of limited expertise .
we also use -lsb- an -rsb- electronic medical record system .
i 'm happy to say that the things we have implemented - 80 percent of u.s. practices do not have them , and yet the technology is there .
but you know , they have that luxury .
because if you ca n't get it in nashville , you can travel to birmingham , two hours away , and you 'll get it . if you ca n't get it in cleveland , you can go to cincinnati . we do n't have that luxury , so we have to make it happen .
when we do it , we will put the cost of care down .
and we 'll extend it to the rural centers and make it affordable .
and everyone will get the care they deserve .
it can not just be technology , we recognize that .
prevention must be part of the solution - we emphasize that .
but , you know , you have to tell people what can be done .
it 's not possible to tell people to do what is going to be expensive , and they go home and ca n't do it .
they need to be alive , they need to feed .
we recommend exercise as the most effective , simple , easy thing to do .
we have had walks every year - every march , april .
we form people into groups and make them go into challenges .
which group loses the most weight , we give them prizes .
which groups record more walking distance by pedometer , we give them prizes . we do this constantly .
we encourage them to bring children .
that way we start exposing the children from very early on , on what these issues are . because once they learn it , they will stay with it . in doing this we have created at least 100 skilled jobs in jamaica alone , and these are physicians with expertise and special training .
we have taken care of over 1,000 indigent patients that could have died , including four free pacemakers in patients with complete heart block . for those that understand cardiology , complete heart block means certain death .
if you do n't get this pacemaker , you will be dead .
so we are pleased with that .
indirectly , we have saved the government of jamaica five million dollars from people that would have gone to miami or atlanta for care .
and we 've hopefully saved a lot of lives .
by the end of this year , we would have contributed over one million dollars in indigent care . in the first four months , it 's been 340,000 dollars , averaging 85,000 dollars a month . the government will not do that , because they have competing needs .
they need to put resources elsewhere . but we can still do it .
people say , " how can you do that ? " this is how we can do that .
at least 4,000 rich jamaicans that were heading to miami for treatment have self-confessed that they did not go to miami because of the heart institute of the caribbean .
and , if they went to miami , they will spend significantly more - eight to 10 times more . and they feel happy spending it at home , getting the same quality of care .
and for that money - for every one patient that has the money to pay , it gives us an opportunity to take care of at least four people that do not have the resources to pay .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for this to work , this progress must be sustainable .
so , we emphasize training . training is critical .
we have gone further : we have formed a relationship with the university of technology , jamaica , where i now have an appointment .
and we are starting a biomedical engineering program , so that we will train people locally , who can repair that equipment .
that way we 're not going to deal with obsolescence and all those kinds of issues .
we 're also starting ancillary health-care technology training programs - training people in echocardiography , cardiac ultrasound , those kinds of things . now , with that kind of training , it gives people motivation .
because now they will get a bachelors degree in medical imaging and all that kind of stuff . in the process , i want you to just hear from the trainees themselves what it has meant for them .
-lrb- video -rrb- dr. jason topping : my name is jason topping .
i 'm a senior resident in anesthesia in intensive care at the university hospital of the west indies .
i came to the heart institute in 2006 , as part of my elective in my anesthesia and intensive care program .
i spent three months at the heart institute .
there 's been no doubt around my colleagues about the utility of the training i received here , and i think there 's been an increased interest now in - particularly in echocardiography and its use in our setting .
sharon lazarus : i am an echocardiographer at the heart institute of the caribbean , since the past two years . i received training at this institution .
i think this aspect of training in cardiology that the heart institute of the caribbean has introduced in jamaica is very important in terms of diagnosing cardiac diseases .
ernest madu : the lesson in this is that it can be done , and it can be sustained , and you can make it possible for everyone .
who are we to decide that poor people can not get the best care ?
when have you been appointed to play god ?
it is not my decision . my job is to make sure that every person , no matter what fate has assigned to you , will have the opportunity to get the best quality health care in life .
next stop is west african heart institute , that we are going to be doing in port harcourt , nigeria , as i said before . we will do other centers across west africa .
we will extend the same system into other areas , like dialysis treatment .
and anyone who is interested in doing it in any health care situation , we will be happy to assist you and tell you how we 've done it , and how you can do it . if we do this , we can change the face of health care in africa .
africa has been good to us ; it is time for us to give back to africa .
i am going . those who want to come , i welcome you to come along with me .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i run a design studio in new york .
every seven years , i close it for one year to pursue some little experiments , things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year .
in that year , we are not available for any of our clients .
we are totally closed .
and as you can imagine , it is a lovely and very energetic time .
i originally had opened the studio in new york to combine my two loves , music and design .
and we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know , and for even more that you 've never heard of .
as i realized , just like with many many things in my life that i actually love , i adapt to it .
and i get , over time , bored by them .
and for sure , in our case , our work started to look the same .
you see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book .
quite the similar idea , then , a perfume packaged in a book , in a die cut .
so i decided to close it down for one year .
also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning , then there is another 40 years that 's really reserved for working .
and then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement .
and i thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's clearly enjoyable for myself .
but probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large , rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two .
there is a fellow tedster who spoke two years ago , jonathan haidt , who defined his work into three different levels .
and they rang very true for me .
i can see my work as a job . i do it for money .
i likely already look forward to the weekend on thursdays .
and i probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism .
in a career i 'm definitely more engaged .
but at the same time , there will be periods when i think is all that really hard work really worth my while ?
while in the third one , in the calling , very much likely i would do it also if i would n't be financially compensated for it .
i am not a religious person myself , but i did look for nature .
i had spent my first sabbatical in new york city .
looked for something different for the second one .
europe and the u.s. did n't really feel enticing because i knew them too well . so asia it was .
the most beautiful landscapes i had seen in asia were sri lanka and bali .
sri lanka still had the civil war going on , so bali it was .
it 's a wonderful , very craft-oriented society .
i arrived there in september 2008 , and pretty much started to work right away .
there is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself .
however the first thing that i needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily .
and then i needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house , and attacked me during my morning walks .
so we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts .
every single dog on one tee shirt .
as a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message -lrb- laughter -rrb- on the back of the shirt .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just before i left new york i decided i could actually renovate my studio .
and then just leave it all to them .
and i do n't have to do anything .
so i looked for furniture .
and it turned out that all the furniture that i really liked , i could n't afford .
and all the stuff i could afford , i did n't like .
so one of the things that we pursued in bali was pieces of furniture .
this one , of course , still works with the wild dogs .
it 's not quite finished yet .
and i think by the time this lamp came about , -lrb- laughter -rrb- i had finally made peace with those dogs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then there is a coffee table . i also did a coffee table .
it 's called be here now .
it includes 330 compasses .
and we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside , and make those compasses go crazy , always centering on them .
then this is a fairly talkative , verbose kind of chair .
i also started meditating for the first time in my life in bali .
and at the same time , i 'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people 's happinesses .
so i will not really go too far into it .
many of you will know this tedster , danny gilbert , whose book , actually , i got it through the ted book club .
i think it took me four years to finally read it , while on sabbatical .
and i was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical .
and i 'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals .
this is ferran adria . many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of barcelona , el bulli .
his restaurant is open seven months every year .
he closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff .
his latest numbers are fairly impressive .
he can seat , throughout the year , he can seat 8,000 people .
and he has 2.2 million requests for reservations .
if i look at my cycle , seven years , one year sabbatical , it 's 12.5 percent of my time .
and if i look at companies that are actually more successful than mine , 3m since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want .
there is some good successes .
scotch tape came out of this program , as well as art fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3m .
google , of course , very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects .
anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical ?
that 's about five percent of everybody .
so i 'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up .
talk to them about if it was successful or not .
i 've found that finding out about what i 'm going to like in the future , my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it .
when i had the idea of doing one , the process was i made the decision and i put it into my daily planner book .
and then i told as many , many people as i possibly could about it so that there was no way that i could chicken out later on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in the beginning , on the first sabbatical , it was rather disastrous .
i had thought that i should do this without any plan , that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation . it was not .
i just , without a plan , i just reacted to little requests , not work requests , those i all said no to , but other little requests .
sending mail to japanese design magazines and things like that .
so i became my own intern .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i very quickly made a list of the things i was interested in , put them in a hierarchy , divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan , very much like in grade school .
what does it say here ? monday , 8 to 9 : story writing ; 9 to 10 : future thinking .
was not very successful . and so on and so forth .
and that actually , specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical , worked really well for me .
what came out of it ?
i really got close to design again .
i had fun .
financially , seen over the long term , it was actually successful .
because of the improved quality , we could ask for higher prices .
and probably most importantly , basically everything we 've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year .
and i 'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical .
one of the strands of thinking i was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated .
this whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies , and not for everybody else .
we were asked to design an identity for casa da musica , the rem koolhaas-built music center in porto , in portugal .
and even though i desired to do an identity that does n't use the architecture , i failed at that .
and mostly also because i realized out of a rem koolhaas presentation to the city of porto , where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning .
which i understood after i translated it from architecture speech in to regular english , basically as logo making .
and i understood that the building itself was a logo .
so then it became quite easy .
we put a mask on it , looked at it deep down in the ground , checked it out from all sides , west , north , south , east , top and bottom .
colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software , the casa da musica logo generator .
that 's connected to a scanner .
you put any image in there , like that beethoven image .
and the software , in a second , will give you the casa da musica beethoven logo .
which , when you actually have to design a beethoven poster , comes in handy , because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is exactly the same .
so it will always fit together , conceptually , of course .
if zappa 's music is performed , it gets its own logo .
or philip glass or lou reed or the chemical brothers , who all performed there , get their own casa da musica logo .
it works the same internally with the president or the musical director , whose casa da musica portraits wind up on their business cards .
there is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building .
it has a more transparent identity .
the truck they go on tour with .
or there 's a smaller contemporary orchestra , 12 people that remixes its own title .
and one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it .
like this donna toney poster , or chopin , or mozart , or la monte young .
you can take the shape and make typography out of it .
you can grow it underneath the skin .
you can have a poster for a family event in front of the house , or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program , as well as educational services .
second insight . so far , until that point i had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes , which was fine with me .
on one hand i have nothing against selling .
my parents are both salespeople .
but i did feel that i spent so much time learning this language , why do i only promote with it ?
there must be something else .
and the whole series of work came out of it .
some of you might have seen it .
i showed some of it at earlier teds before , under the title " things i 've learned in my life so far . "
i 'll just show two now .
this is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in new york .
it says , " self-confidence produces fine results . "
this is after a week .
after two weeks , three weeks , four weeks , five weeks .
and you see the self confidence almost comes back , but not quite .
these are some pictures visitors sent to me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then the city of amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something .
we used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece .
we got 250,000 coins from the central bank , at different darknesses .
so we got brand new ones , shiny ones , medium ones , and very old , dark ones .
and with the help of 100 volunteers , over a week , created this fairly floral typography that spelled , " obsessions make my life worse and my work better . "
and the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between , " should i really take as much money as i can ?
or should i leave the piece intact as it is right now ? "
while we built all this up during that week , with the 100 volunteers , a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it .
so when it was finally done , and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry , one of the neighbors called the police .
and the amsterdam police in all their wisdom , came , saw , and they wanted to protect the artwork .
and they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think you see , you see them sweeping . you see them sweeping right here .
that 's the police , getting rid of it all .
so after eight hours that 's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we are also working on the start of a bigger project in bali .
it 's a movie about happiness .
and here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us .
they were n't quite slick enough .
so we asked the goose to do it again , and hoped she would do somehow , a more elegant or pretty job .
and i think she overdid it .
just a bit too ornamental .
and my studio is very close to the monkey forest .
and the monkeys in that monkey forest looked , actually , fairly happy .
so we asked those guys to do it again .
they did a fine job , but had a couple of readability problems .
so of course whatever you do n't really do yourself does n't really get done properly .
that film we 'll be working on for the next two years .
so it 's going to be a while .
and of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile .
then you can of course always go and see this guy .
video : -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm happy i 'm alive .
i 'm happy i 'm alive . i 'm happy i 'm alive .
stefan sagmeister : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there 's a group of people in kenya .
people cross oceans to go see them .
these people are tall .
they jump high . they wear red .
and they kill lions .
you might be wondering , who are these people ?
these are the maasais .
and you know what 's cool ? i 'm actually one of them .
the maasais , the boys are brought up to be warriors .
the girls are brought up to be mothers .
when i was five years old , i found out that i was engaged to be married as soon as i reached puberty .
my mother , my grandmother , my aunties , they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- cool , yeah ?
and everything i had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12 .
my day started at 5 in the morning , milking the cows , sweeping the house , cooking for my siblings , collecting water , firewood .
i did everything that i needed to do to become a perfect wife .
i went to school not because the maasais ' women or girls were going to school .
it 's because my mother was denied an education , and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living .
why did she say that ?
my father worked as a policeman in the city .
he came home once a year .
we did n't see him for sometimes even two years .
and whenever he came home , it was a different case .
my mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat .
she reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us .
but when my father came , he would sell the cows , he would sell the products we had , and he went and drank with his friends in the bars .
because my mother was a woman , she was not allowed to own any property , and by default , everything in my family anyway belongs to my father , so he had the right .
and if my mother ever questioned him , he beat her , abused her , and really it was difficult .
when i went to school , i had a dream .
i wanted to become a teacher .
teachers looked nice .
they wear nice dresses , high-heeled shoes .
i found out later that they are uncomfortable , but i admired it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but most of all , the teacher was just writing on the board - not hard work , that 's what i thought , compared to what i was doing in the farm .
so i wanted to become a teacher .
i worked hard in school , but when i was in eighth grade , it was a determining factor .
in our tradition , there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women , and it 's a rite of passage to womanhood .
and then i was just finishing my eighth grade , and that was a transition for me to go to high school .
this was the crossroad .
once i go through this tradition , i was going to become a wife .
well , my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass .
so i talked - i had to come up with a plan to figure these things out .
i talked to my father . i did something that most girls have never done .
i told my father , " i will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school . "
the reason why , if i ran away , my father will have a stigma , people will be calling him the father of that girl who did n't go through the ceremony .
it was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life .
so he figured out . " well , " he said , " okay , you 'll go to school after the ceremony . "
i did . the ceremony happened .
it 's a whole week long of excitement .
it 's a ceremony . people are enjoying it .
and the day before the actual ceremony happens , we were dancing , having excitement , and through all the night we did not sleep .
the actual day came , and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in . yes , we danced and danced .
we walked out to the courtyard , and there were a bunch of people waiting .
they were all in a circle .
and as we danced and danced , and we approached this circle of women , men , women , children , everybody was there .
there was a woman sitting in the middle of it , and this woman was waiting to hold us .
i was the first . there were my sisters and a couple of other girls , and as i approached her , she looked at me , and i sat down .
and i sat down , and i opened my legs .
as i opened my leg , another woman came , and this woman was carrying a knife .
and as she carried the knife , she walked toward me and she held the clitoris , and she cut it off .
as you can imagine , i bled . i bled .
after bleeding for a while , i fainted thereafter .
it 's something that so many girls - i 'm lucky , i never died - but many die .
it 's practiced , it 's no anesthesia , it 's a rusty old knife , and it was difficult .
i was lucky because one , also , my mom did something that most women do n't do .
three days later , after everybody has left the home , my mom went and brought a nurse .
we were taken care of .
three weeks later , i was healed , and i was back in high school .
i was so determined to be a teacher now so that i could make a difference in my family .
well , while i was in high school , something happened .
i met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the university of oregon .
this man was wearing a white t-shirt , jeans , camera , white sneakers - and i 'm talking about white sneakers .
there is something about clothes , i think , and shoes .
they were sneakers , and this is in a village that does n't even have paved roads . it was quite attractive .
i told him , " well , i want to go to where you are , " because this man looked very happy , and i admired that .
and he told me , " well , what do you mean , you want to go ?
do n't you have a husband waiting for you ? "
and i told him , " do n't worry about that part .
just tell me how to get there . "
this gentleman , he helped me .
while i was in high school also , my dad was sick .
he got a stroke , and he was really , really sick , so he really could n't tell me what to do next .
but the problem is , my father is not the only father i have .
everybody who is my dad 's age , male in the community , is my father by default - my uncles , all of them - and they dictate what my future is .
so the news came , i applied to school and i was accepted to randolph-macon woman 's college in lynchburg , virginia , and i could n't come without the support of the village , because i needed to raise money to buy the air ticket .
i got a scholarship but i needed to get myself here .
but i needed the support of the village , and here again , when the men heard , and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school , they said , " what a lost opportunity .
this should have been given to a boy . we ca n't do this . "
so i went back and i had to go back to the tradition .
there 's a belief among our people that morning brings good news .
so i had to come up with something to do with the morning , because there 's good news in the morning .
and in the village also , there is one chief , an elder , who if he says yes , everybody will follow him .
so i went to him very early in the morning , as the sun rose .
the first thing he sees when he opens his door is , it 's me .
" my child , what are you doing here ? "
" well , dad , i need help . can you support me to go to america ? "
i promised him that i would be the best girl , i will come back , anything they wanted after that , i will do it for them .
he said , " well , but i ca n't do it alone . "
he gave me a list of another 15 men that i went - 16 more men - every single morning i went and visited them .
they all came together .
the village , the women , the men , everybody came together to support me to come to get an education .
i arrived in america . as you can imagine , what did i find ?
i found snow !
i found wal-marts , vacuum cleaners , and lots of food in the cafeteria .
i was in a land of plenty .
i enjoyed myself , but during that moment while i was here , i discovered a lot of things .
i learned that that ceremony that i went through when i was 13 years old , it was called female genital mutilation .
i learned that it was against the law in kenya .
i learned that i did not have to trade part of my body to get an education . i had a right .
and as we speak right now , three million girls in africa are at risk of going through this mutilation .
i learned that my mom had a right to own property .
i learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman .
those things made me angry .
i wanted to do something .
as i went back , every time i went , i found that my neighbors ' girls were getting married .
they were getting mutilated , and here , after i graduated from here , i worked at the u.n. , i went back to school to get my graduate work , the constant cry of these girls was in my face .
i had to do something .
as i went back , i started talking to the men , to the village , and mothers , and i said , " i want to give back the way i had promised you that i would come back and help you . what do you need ? "
as i spoke to the women , they told me , " you know what we need ? we really need a school for girls . "
because there had not been any school for girls .
and the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she 's walking to school , the mother is blamed for that .
if she got pregnant before she got married , the mother is blamed for that , and she 's punished .
she 's beaten .
they said , " we wanted to put our girls in a safe place . "
as we moved , and i went to talk to the fathers , the fathers , of course , you can imagine what they said : " we want a school for boys . "
and i said , " well , there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education .
why ca n't they build a school for boys , and i 'll build a school for girls ? "
that made sense . and they agreed .
and i told them , i wanted them to show me a sign of commitment .
and they did . they donated land where we built the girls ' school .
we have .
i want you to meet one of the girls in that school .
angeline came to apply for the school , and she did not meet any criteria that we had .
she 's an orphan . yes , we could have taken her for that .
but she was older . she was 12 years old , and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade .
angeline had been moving from one place - because she 's an orphan , she has no mother , she has no father - moving from one grandmother 's house to another one , from aunties to aunties . she had no stability in her life .
and i looked at her , i remember that day , and i saw something beyond what i was seeing in angeline .
and yes , she was older to be in fourth grade .
we gave her the opportunity to come to the class .
five months later , that is angeline .
a transformation had begun in her life .
angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference .
she was not the top student when we took her .
now she 's the best student , not just in our school , but in the entire division that we are in .
that 's sharon . that 's five years later .
that 's evelyn . five months later , that is the difference that we are making .
as a new dawn is happening in my school , a new beginning is happening .
as we speak right now , 125 girls will never be mutilated .
one hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they 're 12 years old .
one hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams .
this is the thing that we are doing , giving them opportunities where they can rise .
as we speak right now , women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we 've started in our community .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to challenge you today .
you are listening to me because you are here , very optimistic .
you are somebody who is so passionate .
you are somebody who wants to see a better world .
you are somebody who wants to see that war ends , no poverty .
you are somebody who wants to make a difference .
you are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better .
i want to challenge you today that to be the first , because people will follow you .
be the first . people will follow you .
be bold . stand up . be fearless . be confident .
move out , because as you change your world , as you change your community , as we believe that we are impacting one girl , one family , one village , one country at a time .
we are making a difference , so if you change your world , you are going to change your community , you are going to change your country , and think about that . if you do that , and i do that , are n't we going to create a better future for our children , for your children , for our grandchildren ?
and we will live in a very peaceful world . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- right now is the most exciting time to see new indian art .
contemporary artists in india are having a conversation with the world like never before .
i thought it might be interesting , even for the many long-time collectors here with us at ted , local collectors , to have an outside view of 10 young indian artists i wish everyone at ted to know .
the first is bharti kher .
the central motif of bharti 's practice is the ready-made store-bought bindi that untold millions of indian women apply to their foreheads , every day , in an act closely associated with the institution of marriage .
but originally the significance of the bindi is to symbolize the third eye between the spiritual world and the religious world .
bharti seeks to liberate this everyday cliche , as she calls it , by exploding it into something spectacular .
she also creates life-size fiberglass sculptures , often of animals , which she then completely covers in bindis , often with potent symbolism .
she says she first got started with 10 packets of bindis , and then wondered what she could do with 10 thousand .
our next artist , balasubramaniam , really stands at the crossroads of sculpture , painting and installation , working wonders with fiberglass .
since bala himself will be speaking at ted i wo n't spend too much time on him here today , except to say that he really succeeds at making the invisible visible .
brooklyn-based chitra ganesh is known for her digital collages , using indian comic books called amar chitra kathas as her primary source material .
these comics are a fundamental way that children , especially in the diaspora , learn their religious and mythological folk tales .
i , for one , was steeped in these .
chitra basically remixes and re-titles these iconic images to tease out some of the sexual and gender politics embedded in these deeply influential comics .
and she uses this vocabulary in her installation work as well .
jitish kallat successfully practices across photography , sculpture , painting and installation .
as you can see , he 's heavily influenced by graffiti and street art , and his home city of mumbai is an ever-present element in his work .
he really captures that sense of density and energy which really characterizes modern urban bombay .
he also creates phantasmagoric sculptures made of bones from cast resin .
here he envisions the carcass of an autorickshaw he once witnessed burning in a riot .
this next artist , n.s. harsha , actually has a studio right here in mysore .
he 's putting a contemporary spin on the miniature tradition .
he creates these fine , delicate images which he then repeats on a massive scale .
he uses scale to more and more spectacular effect , whether on the roof of a temple in singapore , or in his increasingly ambitious installation work , here with 192 functioning sewing machines , fabricating the flags of every member of the united nations .
mumbai-based dhruvi acharya builds on her love of comic books and street art to comment on the roles and expectations of modern indian women .
she too mines the rich source material of amar chitra kathas , but in a very different way than chitra ganesh .
in this particular work , she actually strips out the images and leaves the actual text to reveal something previously unseen , and provocative .
raqib shaw is kolkata-born , kashmir-raised , and london-trained .
he too is reinventing the miniature tradition .
he creates these opulent tableaus inspired by hieronymus bosch , but also by the kashmiri textiles of his youth .
he actually applies metallic industrial paints to his work using porcupine quills to get this rich detailed effect .
i 'm kind of cheating with this next artist since raqs media collective are really three artists working together .
raqs are probably the foremost practitioners of multimedia art in india today , working across photography , video and installation .
they frequently explore themes of globalization and urbanization , and their home of delhi is a frequent element in their work .
here , they invite the viewer to analyze a crime looking at evidence and clues embedded in five narratives on these five different screens , in which the city itself may have been the culprit .
this next artist is probably the alpha male of contemporary indian art , subodh gupta .
he was first known for creating giant photo-realistic canvases , paintings of everyday objects , the stainless steel kitchen vessels and tiffin containers known to every indian .
he celebrates these local and mundane objects globally , and on a grander and grander scale , by incorporating them into ever more colossal sculptures and installations .
and finally number 10 , last and certainly not least , ranjani shettar , who lives and works here in the state of karnataka , creates ethereal sculptures and installations that really marry the organic to the industrial , and brings , like subodh , the local global .
these are actually wires wrapped in muslin and steeped in vegetable dye .
and she arranges them so that the viewer actually has to navigate through the space , and interact with the objects .
and light and shadow are a very important part of her work .
she also explores themes of consumerism , and the environment , such as in this work , where these basket-like objects look organic and woven , and are woven , but with the strips of steel , salvaged from cars that she found in a bangalore junkyard .
10 artists , six minutes , i know that was a lot to take in .
but i can only hope i 've whet your appetite to go out and see and learn more about the amazing things that are happening in art in india today .
thank you very much for looking and listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so when the white house was built in the early 19th century , it was an open house .
neighbors came and went . under president adams , a local dentist happened by .
he wanted to shake the president 's hand .
the president dismissed the secretary of state , whom he was conferring with , and asked the dentist if he would remove a tooth .
later , in the 1850s , under president pierce , he was known to have remarked - probably the only thing he 's known for - when a neighbor passed by and said , " i 'd love to see the beautiful house , " and pierce said to him , " why my dear sir , of course you may come in .
this is n't my house . it is the people 's house . "
well , when i got to the white house in the beginning of 2009 , at the start of the obama administration , the white house was anything but open .
bomb blast curtains covered my windows .
we were running windows 2000 .
social media were blocked at the firewall .
we did n't have a blog , let alone a dozen twitter accounts like we have today .
i came in to become the head of open government , to take the values and the practices of transparency , participation and collaboration , and instill them into the way that we work , to open up government , to work with people .
now one of the things that we know is that companies are very good at getting people to work together in teams and in networks to make very complex products , like cars and computers , and the more complex the products are a society creates , the more successful the society is over time .
companies make goods , but governments , they make public goods . they work on the cure for cancer and educating our children and making roads , but we do n't have institutions that are particularly good at this kind of complexity . we do n't have institutions that are good at bringing our talents to bear , at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way .
so when we wanted to create our open government policy , what did we do ? we wanted , naturally , to ask public sector employees how we should open up government .
turns out that had never been done before .
we wanted to ask members of the public to help us come up with a policy , not after the fact , commenting on a rule after it 's written , the way is typically the case , but in advance . there was no legal precedent , no cultural precedent , no technical way of doing this .
in fact , many people told us it was illegal .
here 's the crux of the obstacle .
governments exist to channel the flow of two things , really , values and expertise to and from government and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions .
but the way that our institutions are designed , in our rather 18th-century , centralized model , is to channel the flow of values through voting , once every four years , once every two years , at best , once a year . this is a rather anemic and thin way , in this era of social media , for us to actually express our values .
today we have technology that lets us express ourselves a great deal , perhaps a little too much .
then in the 19th century , we layer on the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state to help us govern complex and large societies .
but we 've centralized these bureaucracies .
we 've entrenched them . and we know that the smartest person always works for someone else .
we need to only look around this room to know that expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society , and not limited simply to our institutions .
scientists have been studying in recent years the phenomenon that they often describe as flow , that the design of our systems , whether natural or social , channel the flow of whatever runs through them .
so a river is designed to channel the flow of water , and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels the flow of electricity , and a leaf is designed to channel the flow of nutrients to the tree , sometimes even having to route around an obstacle , but to get that nutrition flowing .
the same can be said for our social systems , for our systems of government , where , at the very least , flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding what the problem is , what 's really broken , and the urgent need that we have , that we all feel today , to redesign the flow of our institutions .
we live in a cambrian era of big data , of social networks , and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions that are actually quite recent .
think about it : what other business do you know , what other sector of the economy , and especially one as big as the public sector , that does n't seek to reinvent its business model on a regular basis ?
sure , we invest plenty in innovation . we invest in broadband and science education and science grants , but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning the institutions that we have .
now , it 's very easy to complain , of course , about partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy , and we love to complain about government . it 's a perennial pastime , especially around election time , but the world is complex . we soon will have 10 billion people , many of whom will lack basic resources .
so complain as we might , what actually can replace what we have today ?
what comes the day after the arab spring ?
well , one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself to us is that of networks . right ? networks like facebook and twitter . they 're lean . they 're mean .
you 've got 3,000 employees at facebook governing 900 million inhabitants .
we might even call them citizens , because they 've recently risen up to fight against legislative incursion , and the citizens of these networks work together to serve each other in great ways .
but private communities , private , corporate , privatizing communities , are not bottom-up democracies .
they can not replace government .
friending someone on facebook is not complex enough to do the hard work of you and i collaborating with each other and doing the hard work of governance .
but social media do teach us something .
why is twitter so successful ? because it opens up its platform .
it opens up the api to allow hundreds of thousands of new applications to be built on top of it , so that we can read and process information in new and exciting ways .
we need to think about how to open up the api of government , and the way that we 're going to do that , the next great superpower is going to be the one who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution - because we have to maintain those public values , we have to coordinate the flow - but with the diversity and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement of networks , all of us working together to build these new innovations on top of our institutions , to engage in the practice of governance .
we have a precedent for this . good old henry ii here , in the 12th century , invented the jury .
powerful , practical , palpable model for handing power from government to citizens .
today we have the opportunity , and we have the imperative , to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions , thousands of new kinds of juries : the citizen jury , the carrotmob , the hackathon , we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance .
now , we do n't fully have a picture of what this will look like yet , but we 're seeing pockets of evolution emerging all around us - maybe not even evolution , i 'd even start to call it a revolution - in the way that we govern .
some of it 's very high-tech , and some of it is extremely low-tech , such as the project that mkss is running in rajasthan , india , where they take the spending data of the state and paint it on 100,000 village walls , and then invite the villagers to come and comment who is on the government payroll , who 's actually died , what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere , and to work together through civic engagement to save real money and participate and have access to that budget .
but it 's not just about policing government .
it 's also about creating government .
spacehive in the u.k. is engaging in crowd-funding , getting you and me to raise the money to build the goalposts and the park benches that will actually allow us to deliver better services in our communities .
no one is better at this activity of actually getting us to engage in delivering services , sometimes where none exist , than ushahidi .
created after the post-election riots in kenya in 2008 , this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able to crowdsource and target the delivery of better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble , whether it 's after the earthquakes in haiti , or more recently in italy .
and the red cross too is training volunteers and twitter is certifying them , not simply to supplement existing government institutions , but in many cases , to replace them .
now what we 're seeing lots of examples of , obviously , is the opening up of government data , not enough examples of this yet , but we 're starting to see this practice of people creating and generating innovative applications on top of government data .
there 's so many examples i could have picked , and i selected this one of jon bon jovi . some of you may or may not know that he runs a soup kitchen in new jersey , where he caters to and serves the homeless and particularly homeless veterans .
in february , he approached the white house , and said , " i would like to fund a prize to create scalable national applications , apps , that will help not only the homeless but those who deliver services -lsb- to -rsb- them to do so better . "
february 2012 to june of 2012 , the finalists are announced in the competition .
can you imagine , in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear , getting anything done in a four-month period of time ?
you can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time , let alone generate real , palpable innovations that improve people 's lives .
and i want to be clear to mention that this open government revolution is not about privatizing government , because in many cases what it can do when we have the will to do so is to deliver more progressive and better policy than the regulations and the legislative and litigation-oriented strategies by which we make policy today .
in the state of texas , they regulate 515 professions , from well-driller to florist .
now , you can carry a gun into a church in dallas , but do not make a flower arrangement without a license , because that will land you in jail .
so what is texas doing ? they 're asking you and me , using online policy wikis , to help not simply get rid of burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship , but to replace those regulations with more innovative alternatives , sometimes using transparency in the creation of new iphone apps that will allows us both to protect consumers and the public and to encourage economic development .
that is a nice sideline of open government .
it 's not only the benefits that we 've talked about with regard to development . it 's the economic benefits and the job creation that 's coming from this open innovation work .
sberbank , the largest and oldest bank in russia , largely owned by the russian government , has started practicing crowdsourcing , engaging its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations .
last year they saved a billion dollars , 30 billion rubles , from open innovation , and they 're pushing radically the extension of crowdsourcing , not only from banking , but into the public sector .
and we see lots of examples of these innovators using open government data , not simply to make apps , but then to make companies and to hire people to build them working with the government .
so a lot of these innovations are local .
in san ramon , california , they published an iphone app in which they allow you or me to say we are certified cpr-trained , and then when someone has a heart attack , a notification goes out so that you can rush over to the person over here and deliver cpr .
the victim who receives bystander cpr is more than twice as likely to survive .
" there is a hero in all of us , " is their slogan .
but it 's not limited to the local .
british columbia , canada , is publishing a catalogue of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage with the state in the cocreation of governance .
let me be very clear , and perhaps controversial , that open government is not about transparent government .
simply throwing data over the transom does n't change how government works .
it does n't get anybody to do anything with that data to change lives , to solve problems , and it does n't change government .
what it does is it creates an adversarial relationship between civil society and government over the control and ownership of information .
and transparency , by itself , is not reducing the flow of money into politics , and arguably , it 's not even producing accountability as well as it might if we took the next step of combining participation and collaboration with transparency to transform how we work .
we 're going to see this evolution really in two phases , i think . the first phase of the open government revolution is delivering better information from the crowd into the center .
starting in 2005 , and this is how this open government work in the u.s. really got started , i was teaching a patent law class to my students and explaining to them how a single person in the bureaucracy has the power to make a decision about which patent application becomes the next patent , and therefore monopolizes for 20 years the rights over an entire field of inventive activity .
well , what did we do ? we said , we can make a website , we can make an expert network , a social network , that would connect the network to the institution to allow scientists and technologists to get better information to the patent office to aid in making those decisions .
we piloted the work in the u.s. and the u.k. and japan and australia , and now i 'm pleased to report that the united states patent office will be rolling out universal , complete , and total openness , so that all patent applications will now be open for citizen participation , beginning this year .
the second phase of this evolution - yeah . -lrb- applause -rrb- they deserve a hand . -lrb- applause -rrb- the first phase is in getting better information in .
the second phase is in getting decision-making power out .
participatory budgeting has long been practiced in porto alegre , brazil .
they 're just starting it in the 49th ward in chicago .
russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together , as is lithuania . when we start to see power over the core functions of government - spending , legislation , decision-making - then we 're well on our way to an open government revolution .
there are many things that we can do to get us there .
obviously opening up the data is one , but the important thing is to create lots more - create and curate - lots more participatory opportunities .
hackathons and mashathons and working with data to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage and participate , like the jury is , but we 're going to need lots more things like it .
and that 's why we need to start with our youngest people .
we 've heard talk here at ted about people biohacking and hacking their plants with arduino , and mozilla is doing work around the world in getting young people to build websites and make videos .
when we start by teaching young people that we live , not in a passive society , a read-only society , but in a writable society , where we have the power to change our communities , to change our institutions , that 's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards this open government innovation , towards this open government movement , towards this open government revolution .
so let me close by saying that i think the important thing for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution .
we do n't have words , really , to describe it yet .
words like equality and fairness and the traditional elections , democracy , these are not really great terms yet .
they 're not fun enough . they 're not exciting enough to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity that awaits us . but i would argue that if we want to see the kinds of innovations , the hopeful and exciting innovations that we hear talked about here at ted , in clean energy , in clean education , in development , if we want to see those adopted and we want to see those scaled , we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow , then we must all participate , then we must get involved .
we must open up our institutions , and like the leaf , we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic , throughout our culture , to create open institutions to create a stronger democracy , a better tomorrow .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- for as long as i can remember , i have felt a very deep connection to animals and to the ocean .
and at this age , my personal idol was flipper the dolphin .
and when i first learned about endangered species , i was truly distressed to know that every day animals were being wiped off the face of this earth forever .
and i wanted to do something to help , but i always wondered , what could one person possibly do to make a difference ?
and it would be 30 years , but i would eventually get the answer to that question .
when these heartbreaking images of oiled birds finally began to emerge from the gulf of mexico last year during the horrific bp oil spill , a german biologist by the name of silvia gaus was quoted as saying , " we should just euthanize all oiled birds because studies have shown that fewer than one percent of them survive after being released . "
and i could not disagree more .
and in addition , i believe that every oiled animal deserves a second chance at life .
and i want to tell you why i feel so strongly about this .
on june 23rd , 2000 , a ship named the treasure sank off the coast of cape town , south africa , spilling 1,300 tons of fuel , which polluted the habitats of nearly half the entire world population of african penguins .
now the ship sank between robben island to the south and dassen island to the north .
and these are two of the penguins ' main breeding islands .
and exactly six years and three days earlier , on june 20th , 1994 , a ship named the apollo sea sank near dassen island , oiling 10,000 penguins - half of which died .
now when the treasure sank in 2000 , it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the african penguin - which at the time , was listed as a threatened species .
and soon , nearly 20,000 penguins were covered with this toxic oil .
and the local seabird rescue center , named sanccob , immediately launched a massive rescue operation - and this soon would become the largest animal rescue ever undertaken .
now at the time , i was working down the street .
i was a penguin aquarist at the new england aquarium .
and exactly 11 years ago yesterday , the phone rang in the penguin office .
and with that call , my life would change forever .
it was estelle van der meer calling from sanccob , saying , " please come help .
we have thousands of oiled penguins and thousands of willing , but completely inexperienced , volunteers .
and we need penguin experts to come train and supervise them . "
so two days later , i was on a plane headed for cape town with a team of penguin specialists .
and the scene inside of this building was devastating and surreal .
in fact , many people compared it to a war zone .
and last week , a 10 year-old girl asked me , " what did it feel like when you first walked into that building and saw so many oiled penguins ? "
and this is what happened .
i was instantly transported back to that moment in time .
penguins are very vocal birds and really , really noisy .
and so i expected to walk into this building and be met with this cacophony of honking and braying and squawking , but instead , when we stepped through those doors and into the building , it was eerily silent .
so it was very clear these were stressed , sick , traumatized birds .
the other thing that was so striking was the sheer number of volunteers .
up to 1,000 people a day came to the rescue center , and eventually , over the course of this rescue , more than 12 and a half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to cape town to help save these birds .
and the amazing thing was that not one of them had to be there - yet they were .
so for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity , this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring .
so the day after we arrived , two of us from the aquarium were put in charge of room two , and room two had more than 4,000 oiled penguins in it .
now mind you , three days earlier , we had 60 penguins under our care , so we were definitely overwhelmed and just a bit terrified - at least i was .
personally , i really did n't know if i was capable of handling such a monstrous task .
and collectively , we really did n't know if we could pull this off .
because we all knew that just six years earlier , half as many penguins had been oiled and rescued and only half of them had survived .
so would it be humanly possible to save this many oiled penguins ?
we just did not know .
but what gave us hope were these incredibly dedicated and brave volunteers - three of whom here are force-feeding penguins .
and you may notice they 're wearing very thick gloves .
and what you should know about african penguins is that they have razor-sharp beaks .
and before long , our bodies were covered head to toe with these nasty wounds inflicted by the terrified penguins .
now the day after we arrived , a new crisis began to unfold .
the oil slick was now moving north towards dassen island , and the rescuers despaired , because they knew if the oil hit , it would not be possible to rescue any more oiled birds .
and there really were no good solutions .
but then finally , one of the researchers threw out this crazy idea .
he said , " okay , why do n't we try and collect the birds at the greatest risk of getting oiled " - they collected 20,000 - " and we 'll ship them 500 miles up the coast to port elizabeth in these open air trucks and release them into the clean waters there and let them swim back home . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so three of those penguins - peter , pamela and percy - wore satellite tags , and the researchers crossed their fingers and hoped that by the time they got back home , the oil would be cleaned up from their islands .
and luckily , the day they arrived , it was .
so it had been a huge gamble , but it had paid off .
and so they know now that they can use this strategy in future oil spills .
so in wildlife rescue , as in life , we learn from each previous experience , and we learn from both our successes and our failures .
and the main thing learned during the apollo sea rescue in ' 94 was that most of those penguins had died due to the unwitting use of poorly ventilated transport boxes and trucks - because they just had not been prepared to deal with so many oiled penguins at once .
so in these six years between these two oil spills , they built thousands of these well-ventilated boxes , and as a result , during the treasure rescue , just 160 penguins died during the transport process , as opposed to 5,000 .
so this alone was a huge victory .
something else learned during the apollo rescue was how to train the penguins to take fish freely from their hands , using these training boxes .
and we used this technique again during the treasure rescue .
but an interesting thing was noted during the training process .
the first penguins to make that transition to free feeding were the ones that had a metal band on their wing from the apollo sea spill six years earlier .
so penguins learn from previous experience , too .
so all of those penguins had to have the oil meticulously cleaned from their bodies .
and it would take two people at least an hour just to clean one penguin .
and when you clean a penguin , you first have to spray it with a degreaser .
and this brings me to my favorite story from the treasure rescue .
about a year prior to this oil spill , a 17 year-old student had invented a degreaser .
and they 'd been using it at sanccob with great success , so they began using it during the treasure rescue .
but part way through , they ran out .
so in a panic , estelle from sanccob called the student and said , " please , you have to make more . "
so he raced to the lab and made enough to clean the rest of the birds .
so i just think it is the coolest thing that a teenager invented a product that helped save the lives of thousands of animals .
so what happened to those 20,000 oiled penguins ?
and was silvia gaus right ?
should we routinely euthanize all oiled birds because most of them are going to die anyway ?
well she could not be more wrong .
after half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor , more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild .
and we know from follow-up studies that they have lived just as long as never-oiled penguins , and bred nearly as successfully .
and in addition , about 3,000 penguin chicks were rescued and hand-raised .
and again , we know from long-term monitoring that more of these hand-raised chicks survive to adulthood and breeding age than do parent-raised chicks .
so , armed with this knowledge , sanccob has a chick-bolstering project .
and every year they rescue and raise abandoned chicks , and they have a very impressive 80 percent success rate .
and this is critically important because , one year ago , the african penguin was declared endangered .
and they could be extinct in less than 10 years , if we do n't do something now to protect them .
so what did i learn from this intense and unforgettable experience ?
personally , i learned that i am capable of handling so much more than i ever dreamed possible .
and i learned that one person can make a huge difference .
just look at that 17 year-old .
and when we come together and work as one , we can achieve extraordinary things .
and truly , to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is the most rewarding experience you can possibly have .
so i 'd like to leave you with one final thought and a challenge , if you will .
my mission as the penguin lady is to raise awareness and funding to protect penguins , but why should any of you care about penguins ?
well , you should care because they 're an indicator species .
and simply put , if penguins are dying , it means our oceans are dying , and we ultimately will be affected , because , as sylvia earle says , " the oceans are our life-support system . "
and the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming .
and these are two things that each one of us actually has the power to do something about .
so if we each do our part , together , we can make a difference , and we can help keep penguins from going extinct .
humans have always been the greatest threat to penguins , but we are now their only hope .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds .
and the problem i 'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy , which is , " how can we know whether other people have minds ? "
that is , maybe you have a mind , and everyone else is just a really convincing robot .
so that 's a problem in philosophy , but for today 's purposes i 'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind , and that i do n't have to worry about this .
there is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists , which is , " why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes ? "
or perhaps , more relevantly , " why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes ? "
i think novelists put this best .
like philip roth , who said , " and yet , what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people ?
so ill equipped are we all , to envision one another 's interior workings and invisible aims . "
so as a teacher and as a spouse , this is , of course , a problem i confront every day .
but as a scientist , i 'm interested in a different problem of other minds , and that is the one i 'm going to introduce to you today .
and that problem is , " how is it so easy to know other minds ? "
so to start with an illustration , you need almost no information , one snapshot of a stranger , to guess what this woman is thinking , or what this man is .
and put another way , the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds , our brain , is made up of pieces , brain cells , that we share with all other animals , with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs .
and yet , you put them together in a particular network , and what you get is the capacity to write romeo and juliet .
or to say , as alan greenspan did , " i know you think you understand what you thought i said , but i 'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what i meant . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas , one in each hand .
and to try to understand how you can put together simple units , simple messages over space and time , in a network , and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds .
so i 'm going to tell you three things about this today .
obviously the whole project here is huge .
and i 'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people 's thoughts .
some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job .
and then finally , to show that some of the differences between people , in how we judge others , can be explained by differences in this brain system .
so first , the first thing i want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain , in your brains , whose job it is to think about other people 's thoughts .
this is a picture of it .
it 's called the right temporo-parietal junction .
it 's above and behind your right ear .
and this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures i showed you , or when you read romeo and juliet or when you tried to understand alan greenspan .
and you do n't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems .
so this brain region is called the right tpj .
and this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults .
they 're mit undergraduates .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the second thing i want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds , we were n't always that way .
it takes children a long time to break into the system .
i 'm going to show you a little bit of that long , extended process .
the first thing i 'm going to show you is a change between age three and five , as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own .
so i 'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task .
rebecca saxe -lrb- video -rrb- : this is the first pirate . his name is ivan .
and you know what pirates really like ?
child : what ? rs : pirates really like cheese sandwiches .
child : cheese ? i love cheese !
rs : yeah . so ivan has this cheese sandwich , and he says , " yum yum yum yum yum !
i really love cheese sandwiches . "
and ivan puts his sandwich over here , on top of the pirate chest .
and ivan says , " you know what ? i need a drink with my lunch . "
and so ivan goes to get a drink .
and while ivan is away the wind comes , and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass .
and now , here comes the other pirate .
this pirate is called joshua .
and joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches .
so joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says , " yum yum yum yum yum ! i love cheese sandwiches . "
and he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest .
child : so , that one is his .
rs : that one is joshua 's . that 's right .
child : and then his went on the ground .
rs : that 's exactly right .
child : so he wo n't know which one is his .
rs : oh . so now joshua goes off to get a drink .
ivan comes back and he says , " i want my cheese sandwich . "
so which one do you think ivan is going to take ?
child : i think he is going to take that one .
rs : yeah , you think he 's going to take that one ? all right . let 's see .
oh yeah , you were right . he took that one .
so that 's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions .
now i 'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle .
rs : and ivan says , " i want my cheese sandwich . "
which sandwich is he going to take ?
do you think he 's going to take that one ? let 's see what happens .
let 's see what he does . here comes ivan .
and he says , " i want my cheese sandwich . "
and he takes this one .
uh-oh . why did he take that one ?
child : his was on the grass .
so the three-year-old does two things differently .
first , he predicts ivan will take the sandwich that 's really his .
and second , when he sees ivan taking the sandwich where he left his , where we would say he 's taking that one because he thinks it 's his , the three-year-old comes up with another explanation : he 's not taking his own sandwich because he does n't want it , because now it 's dirty , on the ground .
so that 's why he 's taking the other sandwich .
now of course , development does n't end at five .
and we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people 's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now , not for an action prediction , but for a moral judgment .
so first i 'm going to show you the three-year-old again .
rs . : so is ivan being mean and naughty for taking joshua 's sandwich ?
child : yeah .
rs : should ivan get in trouble for taking joshua 's sandwich ?
child : yeah .
so it 's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of ivan to take joshua 's sandwich , since he thinks ivan only took joshua 's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich .
but now i 'm going to show you the five-year-old .
remember the five-year-old completely understood why ivan took joshua 's sandwich .
rs : was ivan being mean and naughty for taking joshua 's sandwich ?
child : um , yeah .
and so , it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response .
rs : should ivan get in trouble for taking joshua 's sandwich ?
child : no , because the wind should get in trouble .
he says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now what we 've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what 's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people 's thoughts .
so the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region , the right tpj , being used while children are thinking about other people .
but it 's not quite like the adult brain .
so whereas in the adults , as i told you , this brain region is almost completely specialized - it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people 's thoughts - in children it 's much less so , when they are age five to eight , the age range of the children i just showed you .
and actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds , getting into early adolescence , they still do n't have quite an adult-like brain region .
and so , what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence , both the cognitive system , our mind 's ability to think about other minds , and the brain system that supports it are continuing , slowly , to develop .
but of course , as you 're probably aware , even in adulthood , people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds , how often they do it and how accurately .
and so what we wanted to know was , could differences among adults in how they think about other people 's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region ?
so , the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids .
and i 'm going to give that to you now .
so grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory , and they take a break for coffee .
and grace 's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee .
grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder , which is sugar .
but the powder is labeled " deadly poison , " so grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison .
and she puts it in her friend 's coffee .
and her friend drinks the coffee , and is fine .
how many people think it was morally permissible for grace to put the powder in the coffee ?
okay . good . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we ask people , how much should grace be blamed in this case , which we call a failed attempt to harm ?
and we can compare that to another case , where everything in the real world is the same .
the powder is still sugar , but what 's different is what grace thinks .
now she thinks the powder is sugar .
and perhaps unsurprisingly , if grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend 's coffee , people say she deserves no blame at all .
whereas if she thinks the powder was poison , even though it 's really sugar , now people say she deserves a lot of blame , even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same .
and in fact , they say she deserves more blame in this case , the failed attempt to harm , than in another case , which we call an accident .
where grace thought the powder was sugar , because it was labeled " sugar " and by the coffee machine , but actually the powder was poison .
so even though when the powder was poison , the friend drank the coffee and died , people say grace deserves less blame in that case , when she innocently thought it was sugar , than in the other case , where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred .
people , though , disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame grace should get in the accident case .
some people think she should deserve more blame , and other people less .
and what i 'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they 're making that judgment .
so what i 'm showing you , from left to right , is how much activity there was in this brain region , and from top to bottom , how much blame people said that grace deserved .
and what you can see is , on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region , people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident .
whereas on the right , where there was a lot of activity , people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief , and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident .
so that 's good , but of course what we 'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region , and see if we could change people 's moral judgment .
and we do have such a tool .
it 's called trans-cranial magnetic stimulation , or tms .
this is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody 's skull , into a small region of their brain , and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region .
so i 'm going to show you a demo of this .
first , i 'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse .
i 'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine .
when you hear clicks , we 're turning the machine on .
so now i 'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain , to the part of my brain that controls my hand .
so there is no physical force , just a magnetic pulse .
woman -lrb- video -rrb- : ready , rebecca ? rs : yes .
okay , so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain .
and we can use that same pulse , now applied to the rtpj , to ask if we can change people 's moral judgments .
so these are the judgments i showed you before , people 's normal moral judgments .
and then we can apply tms to the rtpj and ask how people 's judgments change .
and the first thing is , people can still do this task overall .
so their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same . they say she deserves no blame .
but in the case of a failed attempt to harm , where grace thought that it was poison , although it was really sugar , people now say it was more okay , she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee .
and in the case of the accident , where she thought that it was sugar , but it was really poison and so she caused a death , people say that it was less okay , she deserves more blame .
so what i 've told you today is that people come , actually , especially well equipped to think about other people 's thoughts .
we have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking .
this system takes a long time to develop , slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence .
and even in adulthood , differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people .
but i want to give the last word back to the novelists , and to philip roth , who ended by saying , " the fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway .
it 's getting them wrong that is living .
getting them wrong and wrong and wrong , and then on careful reconsideration , getting them wrong again . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so , i have a question . when you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people 's moral judgments , that sounds alarming .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- please tell me that you 're not taking phone calls from the pentagon , say .
rs : i 'm not .
i mean , they 're calling , but i 'm not taking the call .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : they really are calling ?
so then seriously , you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads .
i mean , you 're clearly an incredible human being , but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber , do acts that people here might be worried about .
rs : yeah , we worry about this .
so , there 's a couple of things to say about tms .
one is that you ca n't be tmsed without knowing it .
so it 's not a surreptitious technology .
it 's quite hard , actually , to get those very small changes .
the changes i showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain , but they 're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make .
and what we changed was not people 's moral judgments when they 're deciding what to do , when they 're making action choices .
we changed their ability to judge other people 's actions .
and so , i think of what i 'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial , but studying the jury .
ca : is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education , to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments ?
rs : that 's one of the idealistic hopes .
the whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new .
until recently , what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal 's brain could do too , so we could study it in animal models .
we knew how brains see , and how they control the body and how they hear and sense .
and the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things - learn language and abstract concepts , and thinking about other people 's thoughts - that 's brand new .
and we do n't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it .
ca : so i 've got one last question . there is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness , that puzzles a lot of people .
the notion that you can understand why a brain works , perhaps .
but why does anyone have to feel anything ?
why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate ?
you 're a brilliant young neuroscientist .
i mean , what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career , someone , you or someone else , is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem ?
rs : i hope they do . and i think they probably wo n't .
ca : why ?
rs : it 's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : that 's a great answer . rebecca saxe , thank you very much . that was fantastic .
-lrb- applause -rrb- is there anything unique about human beings ?
there is .
we 're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments .
we 're obsessed with morality as social creatures .
we need to know why people are doing what they 're doing .
and i personally am obsessed with morality .
it was all due to this woman , sister mary marastela , also known as my mom .
as an altar boy , i breathed in a lot of incense , and i learned to say phrases in latin , but i also had time to think about whether my mother 's top-down morality applied to everybody .
i saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality .
i thought , maybe there 's some earthly basis for moral decisions .
but i wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral .
i want to know if there 's a chemistry of morality .
i want to know if there was a moral molecule .
after 10 years of experiments , i found it .
would you like to see it ? i brought some with me .
this little syringe contains the moral molecule .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's called oxytocin .
so oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals .
in rodents , it was known to make mothers care for their offspring , and in some creatures , allowed for toleration of burrowmates .
but in humans , it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women , and is released by both sexes during sex .
so i had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule .
i did what most of us do - i tried it on some colleagues .
one of them told me , " paul , that is the world 's stupidist idea .
it is , " he said , " only a female molecule .
it ca n't be that important . "
but i countered , " well men 's brains make this too .
there must be a reason why . "
but he was right , it was a stupid idea .
but it was testably stupid .
in other words , i thought i could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral .
turns out it was n't so easy .
first of all , oxytocin is a shy molecule .
baseline levels are near zero , without some stimulus to cause its release .
and when it 's produced , it has a three-minute half-life , and degrades rapidly at room temperature .
so this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin , have to grab it fast and keep it cold .
i think i can do that .
now luckily , oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood , so i could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery .
then i had to measure morality .
so taking on morality with a capital m is a huge project .
so i started smaller .
i studied one single virtue : trustworthiness .
why ? i had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous .
so in these countries , more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created , alleviating poverty .
so poor countries are by and large low trust countries .
so if i understood the chemistry of trustworthiness , i might help alleviate poverty .
but i 'm also a skeptic .
i do n't want to just ask people , " are you trustworthy ? "
so instead i use the jerry maguire approach to research .
if you 're so virtuous , show me the money .
so what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money .
let me show you how we do that .
so we recruit some people for an experiment .
they all get $ 10 if they agree to show up .
we give them lots of instruction , and we never ever deceive them .
then we match them in pairs by computer .
and in that pair , one person gets a message saying , " do you want to give up some of your $ 10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab ? "
the trick is you ca n't see them , you ca n't talk to them .
you only do it one time .
now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person 's account .
you 're going to make them a lot wealthier .
and they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money .
do you want to keep it all , or do you want to send some amount back ?
so think about this experiment for minute .
you 're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half .
some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood .
and now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger ?
so this was the birth of vampire economics .
make a decision and give me some blood .
so in fact , experimental economists had run this test around the world , and for much higher stakes , and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust , and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness .
but in fact , economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money .
they assumed money is good , why not keep it all ?
that 's not what we found .
we found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money , and of those who received money , 95 percent returned some of it .
but why ?
well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received , the more their brain produced oxytocin , and the more oxytocin on board , the more money they returned .
so we have a biology of trustworthiness .
but wait . what 's wrong with this experiment ?
two things .
one is that nothing in the body happens in isolation .
so we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin , but they did n't have any effect .
but the second is that i still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness .
i did n't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness .
so to make the experiment , i knew i 'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly .
i used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain .
and i found i could do it with a nasal inhaler .
so along with colleagues in zurich , we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo , had that same trust test with money , and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust , we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger - all without altering mood or cognition .
so oxytocin is the trust molecule , but is it the moral molecule ?
using the oxytocin inhaler , we ran more studies .
we showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent .
we showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent .
we 've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin .
these include massage , dancing and praying .
yes , my mom was happy about that last one .
and whenever we raise oxytocin , people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers .
but why do they do this ?
what does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin ?
to investigate this question , we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son , and his son has terminal brain cancer .
after they watched the video , we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin .
the change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy .
so it 's empathy that makes us connect to other people .
it 's empathy that makes us help other people .
it 's empathy that makes us moral .
now this idea is not new .
a then unknown philosopher named adam smith wrote a book in 1759 called " the theory of moral sentiments . "
in this book , smith argued that we are moral creatures , not because of a top-down reason , but for a bottom-up reason .
he said we 're social creatures , so we share the emotions of others .
so if i do something that hurts you , i feel that pain .
so i tend to avoid that .
if i do something that makes you happy , i get to share your joy .
so i tend to do those things .
now this is the same adam smith who , 17 years later , would write a little book called " the wealth of nations " - the founding document of economics .
but he was , in fact , a moral philosopher , and he was right on why we 're moral .
i just found the molecule behind it .
but knowing that molecule is valuable , because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off .
in particular , it tells us why we see immorality .
so to investigate immorality , let me bring you back now to 1980 .
i 'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of santa barbara , california .
you sit in a gas station all day , you see lots of morality and immorality , let me tell you .
so one sunday afternoon , a man walks into my cashier 's booth with this beautiful jewelry box .
opens it up and there 's a pearl necklace inside .
and he said , " hey , i was in the men 's room .
i just found this . what do you think we should do with it ? "
" well this is very valuable .
we have to find the owner for this . " i said , " yea . "
so we 're trying to decide what to do with this , and the phone rings .
and a man says very excitedly , " i was in your gas station a while ago , and i bought this jewelry for my wife , and i ca n't find it . "
i said , " pearl necklace ? " " yeah . "
" hey , a guy just found it . "
" oh , you 're saving my life . here 's my phone number .
tell that guy to wait half an hour .
i 'll be there and i 'll give him a $ 200 reward . "
great , so i tell the guy , " look , relax .
get yourself a fat reward . life 's good . "
he said , " i ca n't do it .
i have this job interview in galena in 15 minutes , and i need this job , i 've got to go . "
again he asked me , " what do you think we should do ? "
i 'm in high school . i have no idea .
so i said , " i 'll hold it for you . "
he said , " you know , you 've been so nice , let 's split the reward . "
i 'll give you the jewelry , you give me a hundred dollars , and when the guy comes ... " you see it . i was conned .
so this is a classic con called the pigeon drop , and i was the pigeon .
so the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him , it 's that he shows he trusts the victim .
now we know what happens .
the victim 's brain releases oxytocin , and you 're opening up your wallet or purse , giving away the money .
so who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems ?
we found , testing thousands of individuals , that five percent of the population do n't release oxytocin on stimulus .
so if you trust them , their brains do n't release oxytocin .
if there 's money on the table , they keep it all .
so there 's a technical word for these people in my lab .
we call them bastards .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are not people you want to have a beer with .
they have many of the attributes of psychopaths .
now there are other ways the system can be inhibited .
one is through improper nurturing .
so we 've studied sexually abused women , and about half those do n't release oxytocin on stimulus .
you need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly .
also , high stress inhibits oxytocin .
so we all know this , when we 're really stressed out , we 're not acting our best .
there 's another way oxytocin is inhibited , which is interesting - through the action of testosterone .
so we , in experiments , have administered testosterone to men .
and instead of sharing money , they become selfish .
but interestingly , high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now think about this . it means , within our own biology , we have the yin and yang of morality .
we have oxytocin that connects us to others , makes us feel what they feel .
and we have testosterone .
and men have 10 times the testosterone as women , so men do this more than women - we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally .
we do n't need god or government telling us what to do .
it 's all inside of us .
so you may be wondering : these are beautiful laboratory experiments , do they really apply to real life ?
yeah , i 've been worrying about that too .
so i 've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives .
so last summer , i attended a wedding in southern england .
200 people in this beautiful victorian mansion .
i did n't know a single person .
and i drove up in my rented vauxhall .
and i took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes .
and i took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and guess what ?
weddings cause a release of oxytocin , but they do so in a very particular way .
who is the center of the wedding solar system ?
the bride .
she had the biggest increase in oxytocin .
who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride ?
her mother , that 's right .
her mother was number two .
then the groom 's father , then the groom , then the family , then the friends - arrayed around the bride like planets around the sun .
so i think it tells us that we 've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple , connect us emotionally .
why ? because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species .
i also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money did n't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers .
so even though i have a fear of heights , i recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft .
i took my blood before and after , and i had a huge spike of oxytocin .
and there are so many ways we can connect to people .
for example , through social media .
many people are tweeting right now .
so we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin .
so i ran this experiment recently for the korean broadcasting system .
and they had the reporters and their producers participate .
and one of these guys , he must have been 22 , he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin .
i mean , astounding ; no one has this .
so he was using social media in private .
when i wrote my report to the koreans , i said , " look , i do n't know what this guy was doing , " but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend .
they checked .
he was interacting on his girlfriend 's facebook page .
there you go . that 's connection .
so there 's tons of ways that we can connect to other people , and it seems to be universal .
two weeks ago , i just got back from papua new guinea where i went up to the highlands - very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia .
there are 800 different languages in the highlands .
these are the most primitive people in the world .
and they indeed also release oxytocin .
so oxytocin connects us to other people .
oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel .
and it 's so easy to cause people 's brains to release oxytocin .
i know how to do it , and my favorite way to do it is , in fact , the easiest .
let me show it to you .
come here . give me a hug .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there you go .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname dr. love .
i 'm happy to share a little more love in the world , it 's great , but here 's your prescription from dr. love : eight hugs a day .
we have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier .
and they 're happier because they have better relationships of all types .
dr. love says eight hugs a day .
eight hugs a day - you 'll be happier and the world will be a better place .
of course , if you do n't like to touch people , i can always shove this up your nose .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the murder happened a little over 21 years ago , january the 18th , 1991 , in a small bedroom community of lynwood , california , just a few miles southeast of los angeles .
a father came out of his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk , to get home , finish their schoolwork , and prepare themselves for bed .
and as the father was administering these instructions , a car drove by , slowly , and just after it passed the father and the teenagers , a hand went out from the front passenger window , and - " bam , bam ! " - killing the father .
and the car sped off .
the police , investigating officers , were amazingly efficient .
they considered all the usual culprits , and in less than 24 hours , they had selected their suspect : francisco carrillo , a 17-year-old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred .
they found photos of him . they prepared a photo array , and the day after the shooting , they showed it to one of the teenagers , and he said , " that 's the picture .
that 's the shooter i saw that killed the father . "
that was all a preliminary hearing judge had to listen to , to bind mr. carrillo over to stand trial for a first-degree murder .
in the investigation that followed before the actual trial , each of the other five teenagers was shown photographs , the same photo array .
the picture that we best can determine was probably the one that they were shown in the photo array is in your bottom left hand corner of these mug shots .
the reason we 're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system , but that 's another whole tedx talk for later . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so at the actual trial , all six of the teenagers testified , and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array .
he was convicted . he was sentenced to life imprisonment , and transported to folsom prison .
so what 's wrong ?
straightforward , fair trial , full investigation .
oh yes , no gun was ever found .
no vehicle was ever identified as being the one in which the shooter had extended his arm , and no person was ever charged with being the driver of the shooter 's vehicle .
and mr. carrillo 's alibi ?
which of those parents here in the room might not lie concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter in an investigation of a killing ?
sent to prison , adamantly insisting on his innocence , which he has consistently for 21 years .
so what 's the problem ?
the problems , actually , for this kind of case come manyfold from decades of scientific research involving human memory .
first of all , we have all the statistical analyses from the innocence project work , where we know that we have , what , 250 , 280 documented cases now where people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated , some from death row , on the basis of later dna analysis , and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involved only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them .
we know that eyewitness identifications are fallible .
the other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that 's related to various brain functions but i can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line : the brain abhors a vacuum .
under the best of observation conditions , the absolute best , we only detect , encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us , and they 're stored in different parts of the brain .
so now , when it 's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced , we have an incomplete , we have a partial store , and what happens ?
below awareness , with no requirement for any kind of motivated processing , the brain fills in information that was not there , not originally stored , from inference , from speculation , from sources of information that came to you , as the observer , after the observation .
but it happens without awareness such that you do n't , are n't even cognizant of it occurring .
it 's called reconstructed memories .
it happens to us in all the aspects of our life , all the time .
it was those two considerations , among others - reconstructed memory , the fact about the eyewitness fallibility - that was part of the instigation for a group of appeal attorneys led by an amazing lawyer named ellen eggers to pool their experience and their talents together and petition a superior court for a retrial for francisco carrillo .
they retained me , as a forensic neurophysiologist , because i had expertise in eyewitness memory identification , which obviously makes sense for this case , right ?
but also because i have expertise and testify about the nature of human night vision .
well , what 's that got to do with this ?
well , when you read through the case materials in this carrillo case , one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good at the crime scene , at the shooting .
all the teenagers testified during the trial that they could see very well .
but this occurred in mid-january , in the northern hemisphere , at 7 p.m. at night .
so when i did the calculations for the lunar data and the solar data at that location on earth at the time of the incident of the shooting , all right , it was well past the end of civil twilight and there was no moon up that night .
so all the light in this area from the sun and the moon is what you see on the screen right here .
the only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources , and that 's where i go out and i do the actual reconstruction of the scene with photometers , with various measures of illumination and various other measures of color perception , along with special cameras and high-speed film , right ?
take all the measurements and record them , right ?
and then take photographs , and this is what the scene looked like at the time of the shooting from the position of the teenagers looking at the car going by and shooting .
this is looking directly across the street from where they were standing .
remember , the investigating officers ' report said the lighting was good .
the teenagers said they could see very well .
this is looking down to the east , where the shooting vehicle sped off , and this is the lighting directly behind the father and the teenagers .
as you can see , it is at best poor .
no one 's going to call this well-lit , good lighting , and in fact , as nice as these pictures are , and the reason we take them is i knew i was going to have to testify in court , and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you 're trying to communicate numbers , abstract concepts like lux , the international measurement of illumination , the ishihara color perception test values .
when you present those to people who are not well-versed in those aspects of science and that , they become salamanders in the noonday sun . it 's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle , all right ?
their eyes just glaze over , all right ?
a good forensic expert also has to be a good educator , a good communicator , and that 's part of the reason why we take the pictures , to show not only where the light sources are , and what we call the spill , the distribution , but also so that it 's easier for the trier of fact to understand the circumstances .
so these are some of the pictures that , in fact , i used when i testified , but more importantly were , to me as a scientist , are those readings , the photometer readings , which i can then convert into actual predictions of the visual capability of the human eye under those circumstances , and from my readings that i recorded at the scene under the same solar and lunar conditions at the same time , so on and so forth , right , i could predict that there would be no reliable color perception , which is crucial for face recognition , and that there would be only scotopic vision ,
which means there would be very little resolution , what we call boundary or edge detection , and that furthermore , because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light , the depth of field , the distance at which you can focus and see details , would have been less than 18 inches away .
i testified to that to the court , and while the judge was very attentive , it had been a very , very long hearing for this petition for a retrial , and as a result , i noticed out of the corner of my eye that i thought that maybe the judge was going to need a little more of a nudge than just more numbers .
and here i became a bit audacious , and i turned and i asked the judge , i said , " your honor , i think you should go out and look at the scene yourself . "
now i may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but nonetheless , it 's to this man 's credit and his courage that he said , " yes , i will . "
a shocker in american jurisprudence .
so in fact , we found the same identical conditions , we reconstructed the entire thing again , he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff 's officers to protect him in this community , all right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- we had him stand actually slightly in the street , so closer to the suspect vehicle , the shooter vehicle , than the actual teenagers were , so he stood a few feet from the curb toward the middle of the street .
we had a car that came by , same identical car as described by the teenagers , right ?
it had a driver and a passenger , and after the car had passed the judge by , the passenger extended his hand , pointed it back to the judge as the car continued on , just as the teenagers had described it , right ?
now , he did n't use a real gun in his hand , so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described .
he pointed by , and this is what the judge saw .
this is the car 30 feet away from the judge .
there 's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you .
that 's 30 feet away .
some of the teenagers said that in fact the car was 15 feet away when it shot .
okay . there 's 15 feet .
at this point , i became a little concerned .
this judge is someone you 'd never want to play poker with .
he was totally stoic . i could n't see a twitch of his eyebrow .
i could n't see the slightest bend of his head .
i had no sense of how he was reacting to this , and after he looked at this reenactment , he turned to me and he says , " is there anything else you want me to look at ? "
i said , " your honor , " and i do n't know whether i was emboldened by the scientific measurements that i had in my pocket and my knowledge that they are accurate , or whether it was just sheer stupidity , which is what the defense lawyers thought - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - when they heard me say , " yes , your honor , i want you stand right there and i want the car to go around the block again and i want it to come and i want it to stop right in front of you , three to four feet away , and i want the passenger to extend his hand
with a black object and point it right at you , and you can look at it as long as you want . "
and that 's what he saw . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you 'll notice , which was also in my test report , all the dominant lighting is coming from the north side , which means that the shooter 's face would have been photo-occluded . it would have been backlit .
furthermore , the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker .
and this is three to four feet away .
why did i take the risk ?
i knew that the depth of field was 18 inches or less .
three to four feet , it might as well have been a football field away .
this is what he saw .
he went back , there was a few more days of evidence that was heard . at the end of it , he made the judgment that he was going to grant the petition for a retrial .
and furthermore , he released mr. carrillo so that he could aid in the preparation of his own defense if the prosecution decided to retry him .
which they decided not to .
he is now a freed man . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is him embracing his grandmother-in-law .
he - his girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial , right ? and she had a little baby boy .
he and his son are both attending cal state , long beach right now taking classes . -lrb- applause -rrb- and what does this example - what 's important to keep in mind for ourselves ?
first of all , there 's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in american jurisprudence .
i could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom .
the opposing council always fight it and oppose it .
one suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity , through policy , through procedures , to get more science in the courtroom , and i think one large step toward that is more requirements , with all due respect to the law schools , of science , technology , engineering , mathematics for anyone going into the law , because they become the judges .
think about how we select our judges in this country .
it 's very different than most other cultures . all right ?
the other one that i want to suggest , the caution that all of us have to have , i constantly have to remind myself , about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true , that we believe in ?
there is decades of research , examples and examples of cases like this , where individuals really , really believe . none of those teenagers who identified him thought that they were picking the wrong person .
none of them thought they could n't see the person 's face .
we all have to be very careful .
all our memories are reconstructed memories .
they are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that 's happened afterwards .
they 're dynamic .
they 're malleable . they 're volatile , and as a result , we all need to remember to be cautious , that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they 're correct .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i was one of those kids that , every time i got in the car , i basically had to roll down the window .
it was usually too hot , too stuffy or just too smelly , and my father would not let us use the air conditioner .
he said that it would overheat the engine .
and you might remember , some of you , how the cars were back then , and it was a common problem of overheating .
but it was also the signal that capped the use , or overuse , of energy-consuming devices .
things have changed now . we have cars that we take across country .
we blast the air conditioning the entire way , and we never experience overheating .
so there 's no more signal for us to tell us to stop .
great , right ? well , we have similar problems in buildings .
in the past , before air conditioning , we had thick walls .
the thick walls are great for insulation . it keeps the interior very cool during the summertime , and warm during the wintertime , and the small windows were also very good because between the interior and exterior .
then in about the 1930s , with the advent of plate glass , rolled steel and mass production , we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views , and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces .
over time , the buildings got taller and bigger , our engineering even better , so that the mechanical systems were massive . they require a huge amount of energy .
they give off a lot of heat into the atmosphere , and for some of you may understand the heat island effect in cities , where the urban areas are much more warm than the adjacent rural areas , but we also have problems that , when we lose power , we ca n't open a window here , and so the buildings are uninhabitable and have to be made vacant until that air conditioning system can start up again .
even worse , with our intention of trying to make buildings move towards a net-zero energy state , we ca n't do it just by making mechanical systems more and more efficient .
we need to look for something else , and we 've gotten ourselves a little bit into a rut .
so what do we do here ? how do we pull ourselves and dig us out of this hole that we 've dug ?
if we look at biology , and many of you probably do n't know , i was a biology major before i went into architecture , the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body , and it 's a fantastic thing .
that 's the first line of defense for the body .
it has pores , it has sweat glands , it has all these things that work together very dynamically and very efficiently , and so what i propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin , and by doing so can be much more dynamic , responsive and differentiated , depending on where it is .
and this gets me back to my research .
what i proposed first doing is looking at a different material palette to do that .
i presently , or currently , work with smart materials , and a smart thermo-bimetal .
first of all , i guess we call it smart because it requires no controls and it requires no energy , and that 's a very big deal for architecture .
what it is , it 's a lamination of two different metals together .
you can see that here by the different reflection on this side .
and because it has two different coefficients of expansion , when heated , one side will expand faster than the other and result in a curling action .
so in early prototypes i built these surfaces to try to see how the curl would react to temperature and possibly allow air to ventilate through the system , and in other prototypes did surfaces where the multiplicity of having these strips together can try to make bigger movement happen when also heated , and currently have this installation at the materials & applications gallery in silver lake , close by , and it 's there until august , if you want to see it .
it 's called " bloom , " and the surface is made completely out of thermo-bimetal , and its intention is to make this canopy that does two things . one , it 's a sun-shading device , so that and in other areas , it 's a ventilating system , so that hot , trapped air underneath can actually move through and out when necessary .
you can see here in this time-lapse video that the sun , as it moves across the surface , as well as the shade , each of the tiles moves individually .
keep in mind , with the digital technology that we have today , this thing was made out of about 14,000 pieces and there 's no two pieces alike at all . every single one is different .
and the great thing with that is the fact that we can calibrate each one to be very , very specific to its location , to the angle of the sun , and also how the thing actually curls .
so this kind of proof of concept project has a lot of implications to actual future application in architecture , and in this case , here you see a house , that 's for a developer in china , and it 's actually a four-story glass box .
it 's still with that glass box because we still want that visual access , but now it 's sheathed with this thermo-bimetal layer , it 's a screen that goes around it , and that layer can actually open and close as that sun moves around on that surface .
in addition to that , it can also screen areas for privacy , so that it can differentiate from some of the public areas in the space during different times of day .
and what it basically implies is that , in houses now , we do n't need drapes or shutters or blinds anymore because we can sheath the building with these things , as well as control the amount of air conditioning you need inside that building .
i 'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market , and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel , and in that panel , between those two pieces of glass , that double-glazing , i 'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity , that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl , and what actually will happen then is it 'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building , and totally , if necessary .
and so you can imagine , even in this application , that in a high-rise building where the panel systems go from floor to floor up to 30 , 40 floors , the entire surface could be differentiated at different times of day depending on how that sun moves across and hits that surface .
and these are some later studies that i 'm working on right now that are on the boards , where you can see , in the bottom right-hand corner , with the red , it 's actually smaller pieces of thermometal , and it 's actually going to , we 're trying to make it move like cilia or eyelashes .
this last project is also of components .
the influence - and if you have noticed , one of my spheres of influence is biology - is from a grasshopper .
and grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system .
they breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles , and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down , and so in this project , i 'm trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too , how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building .
and so you see here some early studies of blocks , where those holes are actually coming through , and this is before the thermo-bimetal is applied , and this is after the bimetal is applied . sorry , it 's a little hard to see , but on the surfaces , you can see these red arrows .
on the left , it 's when it 's cold and the thermo-bimetal is flat so it will constrict air from passing through the blocks , and on the right , the thermo-bimetal curls and allows that air to pass through , so those are two different components that i 'm working on , and again , it 's a completely different thing , because you can imagine that air could potentially be coming through the walls instead of opening windows .
so i want to leave you with one last impression about the project , or this kind of work and using smart materials .
when you 're tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day , when you 're on vacation and there 's no one there on the weekends to be turning off and on the controls , or when there 's a power outage , and you have no electricity to rely on , these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly , efficiently and endlessly . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- when i was 11 , i remember waking up one morning to the sound of joy in my house .
my father was listening to bbc news on his small , gray radio .
there was a big smile on his face which was unusual then , because the news mostly depressed him .
" the taliban are gone ! " my father shouted .
i did n't know what it meant , but i could see that my father was very , very happy .
" you can go to a real school now , " he said .
a morning that i will never forget .
a real school .
you see , i was six when the taliban took over afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school .
so for the next five years , i dressed as a boy to escort my older sister , who was no longer allowed to be outside alone , to a secret school .
it was the only way we both could be educated .
each day , we took a different route so that no one would suspect where we were going .
we would cover our books in grocery bags so it would seem we were just out shopping .
the school was in a house , more than 100 of us packed in one small living room .
it was cozy in winter but extremely hot in summer .
we all knew we were risking our lives - the teacher , the students and our parents .
from time to time , the school would suddenly be canceled for a week because taliban were suspicious .
we always wondered what they knew about us .
were we being followed ?
do they know where we live ?
we were scared , but still , school was where we wanted to be .
i was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured .
my grandfather was an extraordinary man for his time .
a total maverick from a remote province of afghanistan , he insisted that his daughter , my mom , go to school , and for that he was disowned by his father .
but my educated mother became a teacher .
there she is .
she retired two years ago , only to turn our house into a school for girls and women in our neighborhood .
and my father - that 's him - he was the first ever in his family to receive an education .
there was no question that his children would receive an education , including his daughters , despite the taliban , despite the risks .
to him , there was greater risk in not educating his children .
during taliban years , i remember there were times i would get so frustrated by our life and always being scared and not seeing a future .
i would want to quit , but my father , he would say , " listen , my daughter , you can lose everything you own in your life .
your money can be stolen . you can be forced to leave your home during a war .
but the one thing that will always remain with you is what is here , and if we have to sell our blood to pay your school fees , we will .
so do you still not want to continue ? "
today i am 22 .
i was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war .
fewer than six percent of women my age have made it beyond high school , and had my family not been so committed to my education , i would be one of them .
instead , i stand here a proud graduate of middlebury college .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i returned to afghanistan , my grandfather , the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters , was among the first to congratulate me .
he not only brags about my college degree , but also that i was the first woman , to drive him through the streets of kabul .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my family believes in me .
i dream big , but my family dreams even bigger for me .
that 's why i am a global ambassador for 10x10 , a global campaign to educate women .
that 's why i cofounded sola , the first and perhaps only boarding school for girls in afghanistan , a country where it 's still risky for girls to go to school .
the exciting thing is that i see students at my school with ambition grabbing at opportunity .
and i see their parents and their fathers who , like my own , advocate for them , despite and even in the face of daunting opposition .
like ahmed . that 's not his real name , and i can not show you his face , but ahmed is the father of one of my students .
less than a month ago , he and his daughter were on their way from sola to their village , and they literally missed being killed by a roadside bomb by minutes .
as he arrived home , the phone rang , a voice warning him that if he sent his daughter back to school , they would try again .
" kill me now , if you wish , " he said , " but i will not ruin my daughter 's future because of your old and backward ideas . "
what i 've come to realize about afghanistan , and this is something that is often dismissed in the west , that behind most of us who succeed is a father who recognizes the value in his daughter and who sees that her success is his success .
it 's not to say that our mothers are n't key in our success .
in fact , they 're often the initial and convincing negotiators of a bright future for their daughters , but in the context of a society like in afghanistan , we must have the support of men .
under the taliban , girls who went to school numbered in the hundreds - remember , it was illegal .
but today , more than three million girls are in school in afghanistan .
-lrb- applause -rrb- afghanistan looks so different from here in america .
i find that americans see the fragility in changes .
i fear that these changes will not last much beyond the u.s. troops ' withdrawal .
but when i am back in afghanistan , when i see the students in my school and their parents who advocate for them , who encourage them , i see a promising future and lasting change .
to me , afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities , and every single day the girls of sola remind me of that .
like me , they are dreaming big .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i study how the brain processes information . that is , how it takes information in from the outside world , and converts it into patterns of electrical activity , and then how it uses those patterns to allow you to do things - to see , hear , to reach for an object .
so i 'm really a basic scientist , not a clinician , but in the last year and a half i 've started to switch over , to use what we 've been learning about these patterns of activity to develop prosthetic devices , and what i wanted to do today is show you an example of this .
it 's really our first foray into this .
it 's the development of a prosthetic device for treating blindness .
so let me start in on that problem .
there are 10 million people in the u.s.
and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina , diseases like macular degeneration , and there 's little that can be done for them .
there are some drug treatments , but they 're only effective on a small fraction of the population . and so , for the vast majority of patients , their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices .
the problem is that current prosthetics do n't work very well . they 're still very limited in the vision that they can provide .
and so , you know , for example , with these devices , patients can see simple things like bright lights and high contrast edges , not very much more , so nothing close to normal vision has been possible .
so what i 'm going to tell you about today is a device that we 've been working on that i think has the potential to make a difference , to be much more effective , and what i wanted to do is show you how it works . okay , so let me back up a little bit and show you how a normal retina works first so you can see the problem that we were trying to solve .
here you have a retina .
so you have an image , a retina , and a brain .
so when you look at something , like this image of this baby 's face , it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina , on the front-end cells here , the photoreceptors .
then what happens is the retinal circuitry , the middle part , goes to work on it , and what it does is it performs operations on it , it extracts information from it , and it converts that information into a code .
and the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent up to the brain , and so the key thing is that the image ultimately gets converted into a code . and when i say code , i do literally mean code .
like this pattern of pulses here actually means " baby 's face , " and so when the brain gets this pattern of pulses , it knows that what was out there was a baby 's face , and if it got a different pattern it would know that what was out there was , say , a dog , or another pattern would be a house .
anyway , you get the idea .
and , of course , in real life , it 's all dynamic , meaning that it 's changing all the time , so the patterns of pulses are changing all the time because the world you 're looking at is changing all the time too .
so , you know , it 's sort of a complicated thing . you have these patterns of pulses coming out of your eye every millisecond telling your brain what it is that you 're seeing .
so what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration ? what happens is is that , the front-end cells die , the photoreceptors die , and over time , all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them , they die too .
until the only things that you have left are these cells here , the output cells , the ones that send the signals to the brain , but because of all that degeneration they are n't sending any signals anymore .
they are n't getting any input , so the person 's brain no longer gets any visual information - that is , he or she is blind .
so , a solution to the problem , then , would be to build a device that could mimic the actions of that front-end circuitry and send signals to the retina 's output cells , and they can go back to doing their normal job of sending signals to the brain .
so this is what we 've been working on , and this is what our prosthetic does .
so it consists of two parts , what we call an encoder and a transducer .
and so the encoder does just what i was saying : it mimics the actions of the front-end circuitry - so it takes images in and converts them into the retina 's code .
and then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain , and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output .
so a completely blind retina , even one with no front-end circuitry at all , no photoreceptors , can now send out normal signals , signals that the brain can understand .
so no other device has been able to do this .
okay , so i just want to take a sentence or two to say something about the encoder and what it 's doing , because it 's really the key part and it 's sort of interesting and kind of cool .
i 'm not sure " cool " is really the right word , but you know what i mean .
so what it 's doing is , it 's replacing the retinal circuitry , really the guts of the retinal circuitry , with a set of equations , a set of equations that we can implement on a chip . so it 's just math .
in other words , we 're not literally replacing the components of the retina .
it 's not like we 're making a little mini-device for each of the different cell types .
we 've just abstracted what the retina 's doing with a set of equations .
and so , in a way , the equations are serving as sort of a codebook . an image comes in , goes through the set of equations , and out comes streams of electrical pulses , just like a normal retina would produce .
now let me put my money where my mouth is and show you that we can actually produce normal output , and what the implications of this are .
here are three sets of firing patterns . the top one is from a normal animal , the middle one is from a blind animal that 's been treated with this encoder-transducer device , and the bottom one is from a blind animal treated with a standard prosthetic .
so the bottom one is the state-of-the-art device that 's out there right now , which is basically made up of light detectors , but no encoder . so what we did was we presented movies of everyday things - people , babies , park benches , you know , regular things happening - and we recorded the responses from the retinas of these three groups of animals .
now just to orient you , each box is showing the firing patterns of several cells , and just as in the previous slides , each row is a different cell , and i just made the pulses a little bit smaller and thinner so i could show you a long stretch of data .
so as you can see , the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder-transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns - and it 's not perfect , but it 's pretty good - and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic , the responses really do n't .
and so with the standard method , the cells do fire , they just do n't fire in the normal firing patterns because they do n't have the right code .
how important is this ?
what 's the potential impact on a patient 's ability to see ?
so i 'm just going to show you one bottom-line experiment that answers this , and of course i 've got a lot of other data , so if you 're interested i 'm happy to show more . so the experiment is called a reconstruction experiment .
so what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked , what was the retina seeing at that moment ?
can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns ?
so , when we did this for responses from the standard method and from our encoder and transducer .
so let me show you , and i 'm going to start with the standard method first .
so you can see that it 's pretty limited , and because the firing patterns are n't in the right code , they 're very limited in what they can tell you about what 's out there . so you can see that there 's something there , but it 's not so clear what that something is , and this just sort of circles back to what i was saying in the beginning , that with the standard method , patients can see high-contrast edges , they can see light , but it does n't easily go further than that . so what was the image ? it was a baby 's face .
so what about with our approach , adding the code ? and you can see that it 's much better . not only can you tell that it 's a baby 's face , but you can tell that it 's this baby 's face , which is a really challenging task .
so on the left is the encoder alone , and on the right is from an actual blind retina , so the encoder and the transducer .
but the key one really is the encoder alone , because we can team up the encoder with the different transducer .
this is just actually the first one that we tried .
i just wanted to say something about the standard method .
when this first came out , it was just a really exciting thing , the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all .
but there was this limiting factor , the issue of the code , and how to make the cells respond better , produce normal responses , and so this was our contribution .
now i just want to wrap up , and as i was mentioning earlier of course i have a lot of other data if you 're interested , but i just wanted to give this sort of basic idea of being able to communicate with the brain in its language , and the potential power of being able to do that .
so it 's different from the motor prosthetics where you 're communicating from the brain to a device . here we have to communicate from the outside world into the brain and be understood , and be understood by the brain .
and then the last thing i wanted to say , really , is to emphasize that the idea generalizes .
so the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas , for example , the auditory system and the motor system , so for treating deafness and for motor disorders .
so just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina 's output cells , we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve , or jump over damaged areas in the cortex , in the motor cortex , to bridge the gap produced by a stroke .
i just want to end with a simple message that understanding the code is really , really important , and if we can understand the code , the language of the brain , things become possible that did n't seem obviously possible before . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways .
this is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life .
you might enjoy the awkwardly tight , cut-off pajama bottoms with balloons .
anyway , it was a time when i was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories .
so this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings i ever made .
and recently i 've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality - so , real stories .
and specifically , i 'm interested in collecting my own stories , stories from the internet , and then recently , stories from life , which is kind of a new area of work that i 've been doing recently .
so i 'll be talking about each of those today .
so , first of all , my own stories . these are two of my sketchbooks .
i have many of these books , and i 've been keeping them for about the last eight or nine years .
they accompany me wherever i go in my life , and i fill them with all sorts of things , records of my lived experience : so watercolor paintings , drawings of what i see , dead flowers , dead insects , pasted ticket stubs , rusting coins , business cards , writings .
and in these books , you can find these short , little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that i meet .
and , you know , after keeping these books for a number of years , i started to become very interested in collecting not only my own personal artifacts , but also the artifacts of other people .
so , i started collecting found objects .
this is a photograph i found lying in a gutter in new york city about 10 years ago .
on the front , you can see the tattered black-and-white photo of a woman 's face , and on the back it says , " to judy , the girl with the bill bailey voice .
have fun in whatever you do . "
and i really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody 's life .
as opposed to knowing the whole story , just knowing a little bit of the story , and then letting your own mind fill in the rest .
and that idea of a partial glimpse is something that will come back in a lot of the work i 'll be showing later today .
so , around this time i was studying computer science at princeton university , and i noticed that it was suddenly possible to collect these sorts of personal artifacts , not just from street corners , but also from the internet .
and that suddenly , people , en masse , were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives .
blog posts , photographs , thoughts , feelings , opinions , all of these things were being expressed by people online , and leaving behind trails .
so , i started to write computer programs that study very , very large sets of these online footprints .
one such project is about a year and a half old .
it 's called " we feel fine . "
this is a project that scans the world 's newly posted blog entries every two or three minutes , searching for occurrences of the phrases " i feel " and " i am feeling . " and when it finds one of those phrases , it grabs the full sentence up to the period and also tries to identify demographic information about the author .
so , their gender , their age , their geographic location and what the weather conditions were like when they wrote that sentence .
it collects about 20,000 such sentences a day and it 's been running for about a year and a half , having collected over 10 and a half million feelings now .
this is , then , how they 're presented .
these dots here represent some of the english-speaking world 's feelings from the last few hours , each dot being a single sentence stated by a single blogger .
and the color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling inside , so the bright ones are happy , and the dark ones are sad .
and the diameter of each dot corresponds to the length of the sentence inside .
so the small ones are short , and the bigger ones are longer .
" i feel fine with the body i 'm in , there 'll be no easy excuse for why i still feel uncomfortable being close to my boyfriend , " from a twenty-two-year-old in japan .
" i got this on some trading locally , but really do n't feel like screwing with wiring and crap . "
also , some of the feelings contain photographs in the blog posts .
and when that happens , these montage compositions are automatically created , which consist of the sentence and images being combined .
and any of these can be opened up to reveal the sentence inside .
" i feel good . "
" i feel rough now , and i probably gained 100,000 pounds , but it was worth it . "
" i love how they were able to preserve most in everything that makes you feel close to nature - butterflies , man-made forests , limestone caves and hey , even a huge python . "
so the next movement is called mobs .
this provides a slightly more statistical look at things .
this is showing the world 's most common feelings overall right now , dominated by better , then bad , then good , then guilty , and so on .
weather causes the feelings to assume the physical traits of the weather they represent . so the sunny ones swirl around , the cloudy ones float along , the rainy ones fall down , and the snowy ones flutter to the ground .
you can also stop a raindrop and open the feeling inside .
finally , location causes the feelings to move to their spots on a world map , giving you a sense of their geographic distribution .
so i 'll show you now some of my favorite montages from " we feel fine . "
these are the images that are automatically constructed .
" i feel like i 'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 've kissed numerous other boys and it has n't felt good , the kisses felt messy and wrong , but kissing lucas feels beautiful and almost spiritual . "
" i can feel my cancer grow . "
" i feel pretty . "
" i feel skinny , but i 'm not . "
" i 'm 23 , and a recovering meth and heroin addict , and feel absolutely blessed to still be alive . "
" i ca n't wait to see them racing for the first time at daytona next month , because i feel the need for speed . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i feel sassy . "
" i feel so sexy in this new wig . "
as you can see , " we feel fine " collects very , very small-scale personal stories .
sometimes , stories as short as two or three words .
so , really even challenging the notion of what can be considered a story .
and recently , i 've become interested in diving much more deeply into a single story .
and that 's led me to doing some work with the physical world , not with the internet , and only using the internet at the very last moment , as a presentation medium .
so these are some newer projects that actually are n't even launched publicly yet .
the first such one is called " the whale hunt . "
last may , i spent nine days living up in barrow , alaska , the northernmost settlement in the united states , with a family of inupiat eskimos , documenting their annual spring whale hunt .
this is the whaling camp here , we 're about six miles from shore , camping on five and a half feet of thick , frozen pack ice .
and that water that you see there is the open lead , and through that lead , bowhead whales migrate north each springtime .
and the eskimo community basically camps out on the edge of the ice here , waits for a whale to come close enough to attack . and when it does , it throws a harpoon at it , and then hauls the whale up under the ice , and cuts it up .
and that would provide the community 's food supply for a long time .
so i went up there , and i lived with these guys out in their whaling camp here , and photographed the entire experience , beginning with the taxi ride to newark airport in new york , and ending with the butchering of the second whale , seven and a half days later .
i photographed that entire experience at five-minute intervals .
so every five minutes , i took a photograph .
when i was awake , with the camera around my neck .
when i was sleeping , with a tripod and a timer .
and then in moments of high adrenaline , like when something exciting was happening , i would up that photographic frequency to as many as 37 photographs in five minutes .
so what this created was a photographic heartbeat that sped up and slowed down , more or less matching the changing pace of my own heartbeat .
that was the first concept here .
the second concept was to use this experience to think about the fundamental components of any story .
what are the things that make up a story ?
so , stories have characters . stories have concepts .
stories take place in a certain area . they have contexts .
they have colors . what do they look like ?
they have time . when did it take place ? dates - when did it occur ?
and in the case of the whale hunt , also this idea of an excitement level .
the thing about stories , though , in most of the existing mediums that we 're accustomed to - things like novels , radio , photographs , movies , even lectures like this one - we 're very accustomed to this idea of the narrator or the camera position , some kind of omniscient , external body through whose eyes you see the story .
we 're very used to this .
but if you think about real life , it 's not like that at all .
i mean , in real life , things are much more nuanced and complex , and there 's all of these overlapping stories intersecting and touching each other .
and so i thought it would be interesting to build a framework to surface those types of stories . so , in the case of " the whale hunt , " how could we extract something like the story of simeon and crawford , involving the concepts of wildlife , tools and blood , taking place on the arctic ocean , dominated by the color red , happening around 10 a.m. on may 3 , with an excitement level of high ?
so , how to extract this order of narrative from this larger story ?
i built a web interface for viewing " the whale hunt " that attempts to do just this .
so these are all 3,214 pictures taken up there .
this is my studio in brooklyn . this is the arctic ocean , and the butchering of the second whale , seven days later .
you can start to see some of the story here , told by color .
so this red strip signifies the color of the wallpaper in the basement apartment where i was staying .
and things go white as we move out onto the arctic ocean .
introduction of red down here , when whales are being cut up .
you can see a timeline , showing you the exciting moments throughout the story .
these are organized chronologically .
wheel provides a slightly more playful version of the same , so these are also all the photographs organized chronologically .
and any of these can be clicked , and then the narrative is entered at that position .
so here i am sleeping on the airplane heading up to alaska .
that 's " moby dick . "
this is the food we ate .
this is in the patkotak 's family living room in their house in barrow . the boxed wine they served us .
cigarette break outside - i do n't smoke .
this is a really exciting sequence of me sleeping .
this is out at whale camp , on the arctic ocean .
this graph that i 'm clicking down here is meant to be reminiscent of a medical heartbeat graph , showing the exciting moments of adrenaline .
this is the ice starting to freeze over . the snow fence they built .
and so what i 'll show you now is the ability to pull out sub-stories .
so , here you see the cast . these are all of the people in " the whale hunt " and the two whales that were killed down here .
and we could do something as arbitrary as , say , extract the story of rony , involving the concepts of blood and whales and tools , taking place on the arctic ocean , at ahkivgaq camp , with the heartbeat level of fast .
and now we 've whittled down that whole story to just 29 matching photographs , and then we can enter the narrative at that position .
and you can see rony cutting up the whale here .
these whales are about 40 feet long , and weighing over 40 tons . and they provide the food source for the community for much of the year .
skipping ahead a bit more here , this is rony on the whale carcass .
they use no chainsaws or anything ; it 's entirely just blades , and an incredibly efficient process .
this is the guys on the rope , pulling open the carcass .
this is the muktuk , or the blubber , all lined up for community distribution .
it 's baleen . moving on .
so what i 'm going to tell you about next is a very new thing . it 's not even a project yet .
so , just yesterday , i flew in here from singapore , and before that , i was spending two weeks in bhutan , the small himalayan kingdom nestled between tibet and india .
and i was doing a project there about happiness , interviewing a lot of local people .
so bhutan has this really wacky thing where they base most of their high-level governmental decisions around the concept of gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product , and they 've been doing this since the ' 70s .
and it leads to just a completely different value system .
it 's an incredibly non-materialistic culture , where people do n't have a lot , but they 're incredibly happy .
so i went around and i talked to people about some of these ideas .
so , i did a number of things . i asked people a number of set questions , and took a number of set photographs , and interviewed them with audio , and also took pictures .
i would start by asking people to rate their happiness between one and 10 , which is kind of inherently absurd .
and then when they answered , i would inflate that number of balloons and give them that number of balloons to hold .
so , you have some really happy person holding 10 balloons , and some really sad soul holding one balloon .
but you know , even holding one balloon is like , kind of happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i would ask them a number of questions like what was the happiest day in their life , what makes them happy .
and then finally , i would ask them to make a wish .
and when they made a wish , i would write their wish onto one of the balloons and take a picture of them holding it .
so i 'm going to show you now just a few brief snippets of some of the interviews that i did , some of the people i spoke with .
this is an 11-year-old student .
he was playing cops and robbers with his friends , running around town , his wish was to become a police officer .
he was getting started early . those were his hands .
i took pictures of everybody 's hands , because i think you can often tell a lot about somebody from how their hands look . i took a portrait of everybody , and asked everybody to make a funny face .
a 17-year-old student . her wish was to have been born a boy .
she thinks that women have a pretty tough go of things in bhutan , and it 's a lot easier if you 're a boy .
a 28-year-old cell phone shop owner .
if you knew what paro looked like , you 'd understand how amazing it is that there 's a cell phone shop there .
he wanted to help poor people .
a 53-year-old farmer . she was chaffing wheat , and that pile of wheat behind her had taken her about a week to make .
she wanted to keep farming until she dies .
you can really start to see the stories told by the hands here .
she was wearing this silver ring that had the word " love " engraved on it , and she 'd found it in the road somewhere .
a 16-year-old quarry worker .
this guy was breaking rocks with a hammer in the hot sunlight , but he just wanted to spend his life as a farmer .
a 21-year-old monk . he was very happy .
he wanted to live a long life at the monastery .
he had this amazing series of hairs growing out of a mole on the left side of his face , which i 'm told is very good luck .
he was kind of too shy to make a funny face .
a 16-year-old student .
she wanted to become an independent woman .
i asked her about that , and she said she meant that she does n't want to be married , because , in her opinion , when you get married in bhutan as a woman , your chances to live an independent life kind of end , and so she had no interest in that .
a 24-year-old truck driver .
there are these terrifyingly huge indian trucks that come careening around one-lane roads with two-lane traffic , with 3,000-foot drop-offs right next to the road , and he was driving one of these trucks .
but all he wanted was to just live a comfortable life , like other people .
a 24-year-old road sweeper . i caught her on her lunch break .
she 'd built a little fire to keep warm , right next to the road .
her wish was to marry someone with a car .
she wanted a change in her life .
she lives in a little worker 's camp right next to the road , and she wanted a different lot on things .
an 81-year-old itinerant farmer .
i saw this guy on the side of the road , and he actually does n't have a home .
he travels from farm to farm each day trying to find work , and then he tries to sleep at whatever farm he gets work at .
so his wish was to come with me , so that he had somewhere to live .
he had this amazing knife that he pulled out of his gho and started brandishing when i asked him to make a funny face .
it was all good-natured .
a 10-year-old .
he wanted to join a school and learn to read , but his parents did n't have enough money to send him to school .
he was eating this orange , sugary candy that he kept dipping his fingers into , and since there was so much saliva on his hands , this orange paste started to form on his palms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a 37-year-old road worker .
one of the more touchy political subjects in bhutan is the use of indian cheap labor that they import from india to build the roads , and then they send these people home once the roads are built .
so these guys were in a worker 's gang mixing up asphalt one morning on the side of the highway .
his wish was to make some money and open a store .
a 75-year-old farmer . she was selling oranges on the side of the road .
i asked her about her wish , and she said , " you know , maybe i 'll live , maybe i 'll die , but i do n't have a wish . "
she was chewing betel nut , which caused her teeth over the years to turn very red .
finally , this is a 26-year-old nun i spoke to .
her wish was to make a pilgrimage to tibet .
i asked her how long she planned to live in the nunnery and she said , " well , you know , of course , it 's impermanent , but my plan is to live here until i 'm 30 , and then enter a hermitage . "
and i said , " you mean , like a cave ? " and she said , " yeah , like a cave . "
and i said , " wow , and how long will you live in the cave ? "
and she said , " well , you know , i think i 'd kind of like to live my whole life in the cave . "
i just thought that was amazing . i mean , she spoke in a way - with amazing english , and amazing humor , and amazing laughter - that made her seem like somebody i could have bumped into on the streets of new york , or in vermont , where i 'm from .
but here she had been living in a nunnery for the last seven years .
i asked her a little bit more about the cave and what she planned would happen once she went there , you know .
what if she saw the truth after just one year , what would she do for the next 35 years in her life ?
and this is what she said .
woman : i think i 'm going to stay for 35 . maybe - maybe i 'll die .
jonathan harris : maybe you 'll die ? woman : yes .
jh : 10 years ? woman : yes , yes . jh : 10 years , that 's a long time .
woman : yes , not maybe one , 10 years , maybe i can die within one year , or something like that .
jh : are you hoping to ?
woman : ah , because you know , it 's impermanent .
jh : yeah , but - yeah , ok . do you hope - would you prefer to live in the cave for 40 years , or to live for one year ?
woman : but i prefer for maybe 40 to 50 .
jh : 40 to 50 ? yeah .
woman : yes . from then , i 'm going to the heaven .
jh : well , i wish you the best of luck with it .
woman : thank you .
jh : i hope it 's everything that you hope it will be .
so thank you again , so much .
woman : you 're most welcome .
jh : so if you caught that , she said she hoped to die when she was around 40 . that was enough life for her .
so , the last thing we did , very quickly , is i took all those wish balloons - there were 117 interviews , 117 wishes - and i brought them up to a place called dochula , which is a mountain pass in bhutan , at 10,300 feet , one of the more sacred places in bhutan .
and up there , there are thousands of prayer flags that people have spread out over the years .
and we re-inflated all of the balloons , put them up on a string , and hung them up there among the prayer flags .
and they 're actually still flying up there today .
so if any of you have any bhutan travel plans in the near future , you can go check these out . here are some images from that .
we said a buddhist prayer so that all these wishes could come true .
you can start to see some familiar balloons here .
" to make some money and to open a store " was the indian road worker .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a friend in portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family .
he did it because he could n't afford a car , but also because he knew how to build one .
there was a time when we understood how things worked and how they were made , so we could build and repair them , or at the very least make informed decisions about what to buy .
many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century .
but now , the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they 're made of back into our lives , and i believe we need to take them to the next level , to the components things are made of .
for the most part , we still know what traditional materials like paper and textiles are made of and how they are produced .
but now we have these amazing , futuristic composites - plastics that change shape , paints that conduct electricity , pigments that change color , fabrics that light up .
let me show you some examples .
so conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires .
in the case of this little example i 'm holding , we used it to create a touch sensor that reacts to my skin by turning on this little light .
conductive ink has been used by artists , but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens .
and this is a sheet of acrylic infused with colorless light-diffusing particles .
what this means is that , while regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges , this one illuminates across the entire surface when i turn on the lights around it .
two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems .
and thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature .
so i 'm going to place this on a hot plate that is set to a temperature only slightly higher than ambient and you can see what happens .
so one of the principle applications for this material is , amongst other things , in baby bottles , so it indicates when the contents are cool enough to drink .
so these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials .
in a few years , they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis .
we may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us , but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature , keyboards that roll up , and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch .
so i 'm a social scientist by training , so why am i here today talking about smart materials ?
well first of all , because i am a maker .
i 'm curious about how things work and how they are made , but also because i believe we should have a deeper understanding of the components that make up our world , and right now , we do n't know enough about these high-tech composites our future will be made of .
smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities .
there 's barely any information available on how to use them , and very little is said about how they are produced .
so for now , they exist mostly in this realm of trade secrets and patents only universities and corporations have access to .
so a little over three years ago , kirsty boyle and i started a project we called open materials .
it 's a website where we , and anyone else who wants to join us , share experiments , publish information , encourage others to contribute whenever they can , and aggregate resources such as research papers and tutorials by other makers like ourselves .
we would like it to become a large , collectively generated database of do-it-yourself information on smart materials .
but why should we care how smart materials work and what they are made of ?
first of all , because we ca n't shape what we do n't understand , and what we do n't understand and use ends up shaping us .
the objects we use , the clothes we wear , the houses we live in , all have a profound impact on our behavior , health and quality of life .
so if we are to live in a world made of smart materials , we should know and understand them .
secondly , and just as important , innovation has always been fueled by tinkerers .
so many times , amateurs , not experts , have been the inventors and improvers of things ranging from mountain bikes to semiconductors , personal computers , airplanes .
the biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment .
but that 's not always the case .
two scientists at university of illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink .
jordan bunker , who had had no experience with chemistry until then , read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools .
he used a toaster oven , and he even made his own vortex mixer , based on a tutorial by another scientist / maker .
jordan then published his results online , including all the things he had tried and did n't work , so others could study and reproduce it .
so jordan 's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself .
and now that he published this work , others can pick up where he left and devise even simpler processes and improvements .
another example i 'd like to mention is hannah perner-wilson 's kit-of-no-parts .
her project 's goal is to highlight the expressive qualities of materials while focusing on the creativity and skills of the builder .
electronics kits are very powerful in that they teach us how things work , but the constraints inherent in their design influence the way we learn .
so hannah 's approach , on the other hand , is to formulate a series of techniques for creating unusual objects that free us from pre-designed constraints by teaching us about the materials themselves .
so amongst hannah 's many impressive experiments , this is one of my favorites .
-lsb- " paper speakers " -rsb- what we 're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet .
-lrb- music : " happy together " -rrb- so based on the research by marcelo coelho from mit , hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink .
just like jordan and so many other makers , hannah published her recipes and allows anyone to copy and reproduce them .
but paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics .
so hannah 's artisanal work , and the fact that she shared her findings , opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative .
so the interesting thing about makers is that we create out of passion and curiosity , and we are not afraid to fail .
we often tackle problems from unconventional angles , and , in the process , end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things .
so the more people experiment with materials , the more researchers are willing to share their research , and manufacturers their knowledge , the better chances we have to create technologies that truly serve us all .
so i feel a bit as ted nelson must have when , in the early 1970s , he wrote , " you must understand computers now . "
back then , computers were these large mainframes only scientists cared about , and no one dreamed of even having one at home .
so it 's a little strange that i 'm standing here and saying , " you must understand smart materials now . "
just keep in mind that acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- beau lotto : so , this game is very simple .
all you have to do is read what you see . right ?
so , i 'm going to count to you , so we do n't all do it together .
okay , one , two , three.audience : can you read this ?
bl : amazing . what about this one ? one , two , three.audience : you are not reading this .
bl : all right . one , two , three . -lrb- laughter -rrb- if you were portuguese , right ? how about this one ? one , two , three .
audience : what are you reading ?
bl : what are you reading ? there are no words there .
i said , read what you 're seeing . right ?
it literally says , " wat ar ou rea in ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- right ?
that 's what you should have said . right ? why is this ?
it 's because perception is grounded in our experience .
right ? the brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning out of it , which means we never see what 's there , we never see information , we only ever see what was useful to see in the past .
all right ? which means , when it comes to perception , we 're all like this frog .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right ? it 's getting information . it 's generating behavior that 's useful . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- man : ow ! ow ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- bl : and sometimes , when things do n't go our way , we get a little bit annoyed , right ?
but we 're talking about perception here , right ?
and perception underpins everything we think , we know , we believe , our hopes , our dreams , the clothes we wear , falling in love , everything begins with perception .
now if perception is grounded in our history , it means we 're only ever responding according to what we 've done before .
but actually , it 's a tremendous problem , because how can we ever see differently ?
now , i want to tell you a story about seeing differently , and all new perceptions begin in the same way .
they begin with a question .
the problem with questions is they create uncertainty .
now , uncertainty is a very bad thing . it 's evolutionarily a bad thing . if you 're not sure that 's a predator , it 's too late .
okay ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- even seasickness is a consequence of uncertainty .
right ? if you go down below on a boat , your inner ears are you telling you you 're moving . your eyes , because it 's moving in register with the boat , say i 'm standing still .
your brain can not deal with the uncertainty of that information , and it gets ill .
the question " why ? " is one of the most dangerous things you can do , because it takes you into uncertainty .
and yet , the irony is , the only way we can ever do anything new is to step into that space .
so how can we ever do anything new ? well fortunately , evolution has given us an answer , right ?
and it enables us to address even the most difficult of questions . the best questions are the ones that create the most uncertainty .
they 're the ones that question the things we think to be true already . right ?
it 's easy to ask questions about how did life begin , or what extends beyond the universe , but to question what you think to be true already is really stepping into that space .
so what is evolution 's answer to the problem of uncertainty ?
it 's play .
now play is not simply a process . experts in play will tell you that actually it 's a way of being .
play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is actually celebrated . uncertainty is what makes play fun .
right ? it 's adaptable to change . right ? it opens possibility , and it 's cooperative . it 's actually how we do our social bonding , and it 's intrinsically motivated . what that means is that we play to play . play is its own reward .
now if you look at these five ways of being , these are the exact same ways of being you need in order to be a good scientist .
science is not defined by the method section of a paper .
it 's actually a way of being , which is here , and this is true for anything that is creative .
so if you add rules to play , you have a game .
that 's actually what an experiment is .
so armed with these two ideas , that science is a way of being and experiments are play , we asked , can anyone become a scientist ?
and who better to ask than 25 eight- to 10-year-old children ?
because they 're experts in play . so i took my bee arena down to a small school in devon , and the aim of this was to not just get the kids to see science differently , but , through the process of science , to see themselves differently . right ?
the first step was to ask a question .
now , i should say that we did n't get funding for this study because the scientists said small children could n't make a useful contribution to science , and the teachers said kids could n't do it .
so we did it anyway . right ? of course .
so , here are some of the questions . i put them in small print so you would n't bother reading it . point is that five of the questions that the kids came up with were actually the basis of science publication the last five to 15 years . right ?
so they were asking questions that were significant to expert scientists .
now here , i want to share the stage with someone quite special . right ?
she was one of the young people who was involved in this study , and she 's now one of the youngest published scientists in the world . right ? she will now , once she comes onto stage , will be the youngest person to ever speak at ted . right ?
now , science and asking questions is about courage .
now she is the personification of courage , because she 's going to stand up here and talk to you all .
so amy , would you please come up ? -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so amy 's going to help me tell the story of what we call the blackawton bees project , and first she 's going to tell you the question that they came up with . so go ahead , amy .
amy o 'toole : thank you , beau . we thought that it was easy to see the link between humans and apes in the way that we think , because we look alike .
but we wondered if there 's a possible link with other animals . it 'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar , since they seem so different from us .
so we asked if humans and bees might solve complex problems in the same way .
really , we wanted to know if bees can also adapt themselves to new situations using previously learned rules and conditions . so what if bees can think like us ?
well , it 'd be amazing , since we 're talking about an insect with only one million brain cells .
but it actually makes a lot of sense they should , because bees , like us , can recognize a good flower regardless of the time of day , the light , the weather , or from any angle they approach it from . -lrb- applause -rrb- bl : so the next step was to design an experiment , which is a game . so the kids went off and they designed this experiment , and so - well , game - and so , amy , can you tell us what the game was , and the puzzle that you set the bees ?
ao : the puzzle we came up with was an if-then rule .
we asked the bees to learn not just to go to a certain color , but to a certain color flower only when it 's in a certain pattern .
they were only rewarded if they went to the yellow flowers if the yellow flowers were surrounded by the blue , or if the blue flowers were surrounded by the yellow .
now there 's a number of different rules the bees can learn to solve this puzzle . the interesting question is , which ?
what was really exciting about this project was we , and beau , had no idea whether it would work .
it was completely new , and no one had done it before , including adults . -lrb- laughter -rrb- bl : including the teachers , and that was really hard for the teachers .
it 's easy for a scientist to go in and not have a clue what he 's doing , because that 's what we do in the lab , but for a teacher not to know what 's going to happen at the end of the day - so much of the credit goes to dave strudwick , who was the collaborator on this project . okay ?
so i 'm not going to go through the whole details of the study because actually you can read about it , but the next step is observation . so here are some of the students doing the observations . they 're recording the data of where the bees fly .
-lrb- video -rrb- dave strudwick : so what we 're going to do - student : 5c .
dave strudwick : is she still going up here ? student : yeah .
dave strudwick : so you keep track of each.student : henry , can you help me here ?
bl : " can you help me , henry ? " what good scientist says that , right ?
student : there 's two up there .
and three in here .
bl : right ? so we 've got our observations . we 've got our data .
they do the simple mathematics , averaging , etc . , etc .
and now we want to share . that 's the next step .
so we 're going to write this up and try to submit this for publication . right ? so we have to write it up .
so we go , of course , to the pub . all right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- the one on the left is mine , okay ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i tell them , a paper has four different sections : an introduction , a methods , a results , a discussion .
the introduction says , what 's the question and why ?
methods , what did you do ? results , what was the observation ?
and the discussion is , who cares ? right ?
that 's a science paper , basically . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so the kids give me the words , right ? i put it into a narrative , which means that this paper is written in kidspeak .
it 's not written by me . it 's written by amy and the other students in the class . as a consequence , this science paper begins , " once upon a time ... " -lrb- laughter -rrb- the results section , it says : " training phase , the puzzle ... duh duh duuuuuhhh . " right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the methods , it says , " then we put the bees into the fridge -lrb- and made bee pie -rrb- , " smiley face . right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a science paper . we 're going to try to get it published .
so here 's the title page . we have a number of authors there .
all the ones in bold are eight to 10 years old .
the first author is blackawton primary school , because if it were ever referenced , it would be " blackawton et al , " and not one individual . so we submit it to a public access journal , and it says this . it said many things , but it said this .
" i 'm afraid the paper fails our initial quality control checks in several different ways . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- in other words , it starts off " once upon a time , " the figures are in crayon , etc . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we said , we 'll get it reviewed . so i sent it to dale purves , who is at the national academy of science , one of the leading neuroscientists in the world , and he says , " this is the most original science paper i have ever read " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - " and it certainly deserves wide exposure . "
larry maloney , expert in vision , says , " the paper is magnificent .
the work would be publishable if done by adults . "
so what did we do ? we send it back to the editor .
they say no .
so we asked larry and natalie hempel to write a commentary situating the findings for scientists , right , putting in the references , and we submit it to biology letters .
and there , it was reviewed by five independent referees , and it was published . okay ? -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it took four months to do the science , two years to get it published . -lrb- laughter -rrb- typical science , actually , right ? so this makes amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world .
what was the feedback like ?
well , it was published two days before christmas , downloaded 30,000 times in the first day , right ?
it was the editors ' choice in science , which is a top science magazine .
it 's forever freely accessible by biology letters .
it 's the only paper that will ever be freely accessible by this journal .
last year , it was the second-most downloaded paper by biology letters , and the feedback from not just scientists and teachers but the public as well .
and i 'll just read one .
" i have read ' blackawton bees ' recently . i do n't have words to explain exactly how i am feeling right now .
what you guys have done is real , true and amazing .
curiosity , interest , innocence and zeal are the most basic and most important things to do science .
who else can have these qualities more than children ?
please congratulate your children 's team from my side . "
so i 'd like to conclude with a physical metaphor .
can i do it on you ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- oh yeah , yeah , yeah , come on . yeah yeah . okay .
now , science is about taking risks , so this is an incredible risk , right ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- for me , not for him . right ? because we 've only done this once before . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and you like technology , right ?
shimon schocken : right , but i like myself .
bl : this is the epitome of technology . right . okay .
now ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , we 're going to do a little demonstration , right ?
you have to close your eyes , and you have to point where you hear me clapping . all right ?
-lrb- clapping -rrb- -lrb- clapping -rrb- okay , how about if everyone over there shouts . one , two , three ?
audience : -lrb- shouts -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- shouts -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- brilliant . now , open your eyes . we 'll do it one more time .
everyone over there shout . -lrb- shouts -rrb- where 's the sound coming from ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- what 's the point ? the point is what science does for us .
right ? we normally walk through life responding , but if we ever want to do anything different , we have to step into uncertainty . when he opened his eyes , he was able to see the world in a new way .
that 's what science offers us . it offers the possibility to step on uncertainty through the process of play , right ?
now , true science education i think should be about giving people a voice and enabling to express that voice , so i 've asked amy to be the last voice in this short story .
so , amy ?
ao : this project was really exciting for me , because it brought the process of discovery to life , and it showed me that anyone , and i mean anyone , has the potential to discover something new , and that a small question can lead into a big discovery .
changing the way a person thinks about something can be easy or hard . it all depends on the way the person feels about change .
but changing the way i thought about science was surprisingly easy . once we played the games and then started to think about the puzzle , i then realized that science is n't just a boring subject , and that anyone can discover something new .
you just need an opportunity . my opportunity came in the form of beau , and the blackawton bee project .
thank you.bl : thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ten years ago exactly , i was in afghanistan .
i was covering the war in afghanistan , and i witnessed , as a reporter for al jazeera , the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that .
then , two years later , i covered another war - the war in iraq .
i was placed at the center of that war because i was covering the war from the northern part of iraq .
and the war ended with a regime change , like the one in afghanistan .
and that regime that we got rid of was actually a dictatorship , an authoritarian regime , that for decades created a great sense of paralysis within the nation , within the people themselves .
however , the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world .
for decades , we have lived under authoritarian regimes - in the arab world , in the middle east .
these regimes created something within us during this period .
i 'm 43 years old right now .
for the last 40 years , i have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us - old , aged , authoritarian , corrupt situations - regimes that we have seen around us .
and for a moment i was wondering , are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground , a change that does not come through foreign intervention , through the misery of occupation , through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes ?
the iraqis : yes , they got rid of saddam hussein , but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad , they felt that their dignity had suffered .
and this is why they revolted .
this is why they did not accept .
and actually other regimes , they told their citizens , " would you like to see the situation of iraq ?
would you like to see civil war , sectarian killing ?
would you like to see destruction ?
would you like to see foreign troops on your land ? "
and the people thought for themselves , " maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in , instead of having the second scenario . "
that was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen .
for 10 years , unfortunately we have found ourselves reporting images of destruction , images of killing , of sectarian conflicts , images of violence , emerging from a magnificent piece of land , a region that one day was the source of civilizations and art and culture for thousands of years .
now i am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived .
a new generation , well-educated , connected , inspired by universal values and a global understanding , has created a new reality for us .
we have found a new way to express our feelings and to express our dreams : these young people who have restored self-confidence in our nations in that part of the world , who have given us new meaning for freedom and empowered us to go down to the streets .
nothing happened . no violence . nothing .
just step out of your house , raise your voice and say , " we would like to see the end of the regime . "
this is what happened in tunisia .
over a few days , the tunisian regime that invested billions of dollars in the security agencies , billions of dollars in maintaining , trying to maintain , its prisons , collapsed , disappeared , because of the voices of the public .
people who were inspired to go down to the streets and to raise their voices , they tried to kill .
the intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people .
they found something called facebook .
they found something called twitter .
they were surprised by all of these kinds of issues .
and they said , " these kids are misled . "
therefore , they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them , bring them back home .
this is what they were telling . this is their propaganda .
" bring these kids home because they are misled . "
but yes , these youth who have been inspired by universal values , who are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and , at the same time , realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it - not using violence , not trying to create chaos - these young people , they did not go home .
parents actually went to the streets and they supported them .
and this is how the revolution was born in tunisia .
we in al jazeera were banned from tunisia for years , and the government did not allow any al jazeera reporter to be there .
but we found that these people in the street , all of them are our reporters , feeding our newsroom with pictures , with videos and with news .
and suddenly that newsroom in doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people - people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority .
and then we took that decision : we are unrolling the news .
we are going to be the voice for these voiceless people .
we are going to spread the message .
yes , some of these young people are connected to the internet , but the connectivity in the arab world is very little , is very small , because of many problems that we are suffering from .
but al jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified -lsb- it -rsb- .
we put it in every sitting room in the arab world - and internationally , globally , through our english channel .
and then people started to feel that there 's something new happening .
and then zine al-abidine ben ali decided to leave .
and then egypt started , and hosni mubarak decided to leave .
and now libya as you see it .
and then you have yemen .
and you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of , " how do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant ? "
i want to tell you something , that the internet and connectivity has created -lsb- a -rsb- new mindset .
but this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from .
and while this was the major difference between many initiatives before to create change , before we thought , and governments told us - and even sometimes it was true - that change was imposed on us , and people rejected that , because they thought that it is alien to their culture .
always , we believed that change will spring from within , that change should be a reconciliation with culture , cultural diversity , with our faith in our tradition and in our history , but at the same time , open to universal values , connected with the world , tolerant to the outside .
and this is the moment that is happening right now in the arab world .
this is the right moment , and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region .
how did the elite deal with that - the so-called political elite ?
in front of facebook , they brought the camels in tahrir square .
in front of al jazeera , they started creating tribalism .
and then when they failed , they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from tel aviv and washington in order to divide the arab world .
they started telling the west , " be aware of al-qaeda .
al-qaeda is taking over our territories .
these are islamists trying to create new imaras .
be aware of these people who -lsb- are -rsb- coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization . "
fortunately , people right now can not be deceived .
because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception .
they could not , and they can not , imagine how they could really deal with this reality .
they have lost .
they have been detached from their people , from the masses , and now we are seeing them collapsing one after the other .
al jazeera is not a tool of revolution .
we do not create revolutions .
however , when something of that magnitude happens , we are at the center of the coverage .
we were banned from egypt , and our correspondents , some of them were arrested .
but most of our camera people and our journalists , they went underground in egypt - voluntarily - to report what happened in tahrir square .
for 18 days , our cameras were broadcasting , live , the voices of the people in tahrir square .
i remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone - ordinary person who i do n't know - from tahrir square .
he told me , " we appeal to you not to switch off the cameras .
if you switch off the cameras tonight , there will be a genocide .
you are protecting us by showing what is happening at tahrir square . "
i felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them , " make your best not to switch off the cameras at night , because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story - and they feel protected as well . "
so we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world .
we have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world .
let us not repeat the mistake of iran , of -lsb- the -rsb- mosaddeq revolution .
let us free ourselves - especially in the west - from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest , or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security .
the stability and security of authoritarian regimes can not create but terrorism and violence and destruction .
let us accept the choice of the people .
let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future .
the future should be ruled by people themselves , even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us .
but the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the middle east at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world , for the west and the east , to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the arab world , rather than the images of violence and terrorism .
let us support these people .
let us stand for them .
and let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change , and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance .
the future has arrived , and the future is now .
i thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i just have a couple of questions for you .
thank you for coming here .
how would you characterize the historical significance of what 's happened ?
is this a story-of-the-year , a story-of-the-decade or something more ?
wadah khanfar : actually , this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered .
we have covered many wars .
we have covered a lot of tragedies , a lot of problems , a lot of conflict zones , a lot of hot spots in the region , because we were centered at the middle of it .
but this is a story - it is a great story ; it is beautiful .
it is not something that you only cover because you have to cover a great incident .
you are witnessing change in history .
you are witnessing the birth of a new era .
and this is what the story 's all about .
ca : there are a lot of people in the west who are still skeptical , or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos .
you really believe that if there are democratic elections in egypt now , that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you 've spoken about so inspiringly ?
wk : and people actually , after the collapse of the hosni mubarak regime , the youth who have organized themselves in certain groups and councils , they are guarding the transformation and they are trying to put it on a track in order to satisfy the values of democracy , but at the same time also to make it reasonable and to make it rational , not to go out of order .
in my opinion , these people are much more wiser than , not only the political elite , even the intellectual elite , even opposition leaders including political parties .
at this moment in time , the youth in the arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old - including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : we are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way .
what should people here at ted , here in the west , do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what 's happening here ?
wk : i think we have discovered a very important issue in the arab world - that people care , people care about this great transformation .
mohamed nanabhay who 's sitting with us , the head of aljazeera.net , he told me that a 2,500 percent increase of accessing our website from various parts of the world .
fifty percent of it is coming from america .
because we discovered that people care , and people would like to know - they are receiving the stream through our internet .
unfortunately in the united states , we are not covering but washington d.c. at this moment in time for al jazeera english .
but i can tell you , this is the moment to celebrate through connecting ourselves with those people in the street and expressing our support to them and expressing this kind of feeling , universal feeling , of supporting the weak and the oppressed to create a much better future for all of us .
ca : well wadah , a group of members of the ted community , tedxcairo , are meeting as we speak .
they 've had some speakers there .
i believe they 've heard your talk .
thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures .
i want to start to show just a few pictures to you , and after i 'll speak .
i must speak to you a little bit of my history , because we 'll be speaking on this during my speech here .
i was born in 1944 in brazil , in the times that brazil was not yet a market economy .
i was born on a farm , a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest -lsb- still -rsb- .
a marvelous place .
i lived with incredible birds , incredible animals , i swam in our small rivers with our caimans .
it was about 35 families that lived on this farm , and everything that we produced on this farm , we consumed .
very few things went to the market .
once a year , the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced , and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse , bringing thousands of head of cattle , and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again .
when i was 15 years old , it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger - much bigger - where i did the second part of secondary school .
there i learned different things .
brazil was starting to urbanize , industrialize , and i knew the politics . i became a little bit radical , i was a member of leftist parties , and i became an activist .
i -lsb- went to -rsb- university to become an economist .
i -lsb- did -rsb- a master 's degree in economics .
and the most important thing in my life also happened in this time .
i met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend , and my associate in everything that i have done till now , my wife , lélia wanick salgado .
brazil radicalized very strongly .
we fought very hard against the dictatorship , in a moment it was necessary to us : either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand , or leave brazil . we were too young , and our organization thought it was better for us to go out , and we went to france , where i did a phd in economics , léila became an architect .
i worked after for an investment bank .
we made a lot of trips , financed development , economic projects in africa with the world bank .
and one day photography made a total invasion in my life .
i became a photographer , abandoned everything and became a photographer , and i started to do the photography that was important for me .
many people tell me that you are a photojournalist , that you are an anthropologist photographer , that you are an activist photographer .
but i did much more than that .
i put photography as my life .
i lived totally inside photography doing long term projects , and i want to show you just a few pictures of - again , you 'll see inside the social projects , that i went to , i published many books on these photographs , but i 'll just show you a few ones now .
in the ' 90s , from 1994 to 2000 , i photographed a story called migrations .
it became a book . it became a show .
but during the time that i was photographing this , i lived through a very hard moment in my life , mostly in rwanda .
i saw in rwanda total brutality .
i saw deaths by thousands per day .
i lost my faith in our species .
i did n't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer , and i started to be attacked by my own staphylococcus .
i started to have infection everywhere .
when i made love with my wife , i had no sperm that came out of me ; i had blood .
i went to see a friend 's doctor in paris , told him that i was completely sick .
he made a long examination , and told me , " sebastian , you are not sick , your prostate is perfect .
what happened is , you saw so many deaths that you are dying .
you must stop . stop .
you must stop because on the contrary , you will be dead . "
and i made the decision to stop .
i was really upset with photography , with everything in the world , and i made the decision to go back to where i was born .
it was a big coincidence .
it was the moment that my parents became very old .
i have seven sisters . i 'm one of the only men in my family , and they made together the decision to transfer this land to léila and myself .
when we received this land , this land was as dead as i was .
when i was a kid , it was more than 50 percent rainforest .
when we received the land , it was less than half a percent rainforest , as in all my region .
to build development , brazilian development , we destroyed a lot of our forest .
as you did here in the united states , or you did in india , everywhere in this planet .
to build our development , we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything .
this farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds , and we did n't know how to deal with these .
and léila came up with an incredible idea , a crazy idea .
she said , why do n't you put back the rainforest that was here before ?
you say that you were born in paradise .
let 's build the paradise again .
and i went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us , and we started . we started to plant , and this first year we lost a lot of trees , second year less , and slowly , slowly this dead land started to be born again .
we started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees , only local species , only native species , where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed , and the life started to come back in an incredible way .
it was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park .
we transformed . we gave this land back to nature .
it became a national park .
we created an institution called instituto terra , and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere .
here in los angeles , in the bay area in san francisco , it became tax deductible in the united states .
we raised money in spain , in italy , a lot in brazil .
we worked with a lot of companies in brazil that put money into this project , the government .
and the life started to come , and i had a big wish to come back to photography , to photograph again .
and this time , my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that i had photographed all my life : us .
i wished to photograph the other animals , to photograph the landscapes , to photograph us , but us from the beginning , the time we lived in equilibrium with nature .
and i went . i started in the beginning of 2004 , and i finished at the end of 2011 .
we created an incredible amount of pictures , and the result - lélia did the design of all my books , the design of all my shows . she is the creator of the shows .
and what we want with these pictures is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet and what we must hold on this planet if we want to live , to have some equilibrium in our life .
and i wanted to see us when we used , yes , our instruments in stone .
we exist yet . i was last week at the brazilian national indian foundation , and only in the amazon we have about 110 groups of indians that are not contacted yet .
we must protect the forest in this sense .
and with these pictures , i hope that we can create information , a system of information .
we tried to do a new presentation of the planet , and i want to show you now just a few pictures of this project , please .
well , this - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you . thank you very much .
this is what we must fight hard to hold like it is now .
but there is another part that we must together rebuild , to build our societies , our modern family of societies , we are at a point where we can not go back .
but we create an incredible contradiction .
to build all this , we destroy a lot .
our forest in brazil , that antique forest that was the size of california , is destroyed today 93 percent .
here , on the west coast , you 've destroyed your forest .
around here , no ? the redwood forests are gone .
gone very fast , disappeared .
coming the other day from atlanta , here , two days ago , i was flying over deserts that we made , we provoked with our own hands .
india has no more trees . spain has no more trees .
and we must rebuild these forests .
that is the essence of our life , these forests .
we need to breathe . the only factory capable to transform co2 into oxygen , are the forests .
the only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing , always , are the trees .
i put the question - three or four weeks ago , we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in norway .
a lack of oxygen in the water .
i put to myself the question , if for a moment , we will not lack oxygen for all animal species , ours included - that would be very complicated for us .
for the water system , the trees are essential .
i 'll give you a small example that you 'll understand very easily .
you happy people that have a lot of hair on your head , if you take a shower , it takes you two or three hours to dry your hair if you do n't use a dryer machine .
me , one minute , it 's dry . the same with the trees .
the trees are the hair of our planet .
when you have rain in a place that has no trees , in just a few minutes , the water arrives in the stream , brings soil , destroying our water source , destroying the rivers , and no humidity to retain .
when you have trees , the root system holds the water .
all the branches of the trees , the leaves that come down and they take months and months under the water , go to the rivers , and maintain our source , maintain our rivers .
this is the most important thing , when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life .
i want to show you now , to finish , just a few pictures that for me are very important in that direction .
you remember that i told you , when i received the farm from my parents that was my paradise , that was the farm .
land completely destroyed , the erosion there , the land had dried .
but you can see in this picture , we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in brazil .
but you see a lot of small spots in this picture .
in each point of those spots , we had planted a tree .
there are thousands of trees .
now i 'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point two months ago .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem .
and i 'll show you the last picture .
we are with two million trees in the ground now .
we are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees .
my friends , it 's very easy to do . we did it , no ?
by an accident that happened to me , we went back , we built an ecosystem .
we here inside the room , i believe that we have the same concern , and the model that we created in brazil , we can transplant it here .
we can apply it everywhere around the world , no ?
and i believe that we can do it together .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have never , ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile : " son , resist gaddafi . fight him .
but do n't you ever turn into a gaddafi-like revolutionary . "
almost two years have passed since the libyan revolution broke out , inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the tunisian and the egyptian revolutions .
i joined forces with many other libyans inside and outside libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of gaddafi .
and there it was , a great revolution .
young libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime , raising slogans of freedom , dignity , social justice .
they have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of gaddafi .
they have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south .
eventually , after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead , we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant .
-lrb- applause -rrb- however , gaddafi left behind a heavy burden , a legacy of tyranny , corruption and seeds of diversions .
for four decades gaddafi 's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of libyan society .
aware of the devastation and the challenges , i was keen among many other women to rebuild the libyan civil society , calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation .
almost 200 organizations were established in benghazi during and immediately after the fall of gaddafi - almost 300 in tripoli .
after a period of 33 years in exile , i went back to libya , and with unique enthusiasm , i started organizing workshops on capacity building , on human development of leadership skills .
with an amazing group of women , i co-founded the libyan women 's platform for peace , a movement of women , leaders , from different walks of life , to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace .
i met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections , an environment which was increasingly polarized , an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion .
i led an initiative by the libyan women 's platform for peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law , a law that would give every citizen , no matter what your background , the right to vote and run , and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists , creating the zipper list .
eventually , our initiative was adopted and successful .
women won 17.5 percent of the national congress in the first elections ever in 52 years .
-lrb- applause -rrb- however , bit by bit , the euphoria of the elections , and of the revolution as a whole , was fading out - for every day we were waking up to the news of violence .
one day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and sufi tombs .
on another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the american ambassador and the attack on the consulate .
on another day we wake up to the news of the assassination of army officers .
and every day , every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law .
our society , shaped by a revolutionary mindset , became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles - freedom , dignity , social justice - that we first held .
intolerance , exclusion and revenge became the icons of the -lsb- aftermath -rsb- of the revolution .
i am here today not at all to inspire you with our success story of the zipper list and the elections .
i 'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice , made the wrong decision .
we did not prioritize right .
for elections did not bring peace and stability and security in libya .
did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation ?
no , it did n't .
what is it , then ?
why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion , by both men and women ?
maybe what was missing was not the women only , but the feminine values of compassion , mercy and inclusion .
our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections , which only reinforced polarization and division .
our society needs the qualitative representation of the feminine more than it needs the numerical , quantitative representation of the feminine .
we need to stop acting as agents of rage and calling for days of rage .
we need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy .
we need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge , collaboration instead of competition , inclusion instead of exclusion .
these are the ideals that a war-torn libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace .
for peace has an alchemy , and this alchemy is about the intertwining , the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives .
that 's the real zipper .
and we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically .
according to a quranic verse " salam " - peace - " is the word of the all-merciful god , raheem . "
in turn , the word " raheem , " which is known in all abrahamic traditions , has the same root in arabic as the word " rahem " - womb - symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female , from which all tribes , all peoples , have emanated from .
and so just as the womb entirely envelopes the embryo , which grows within it , the divine matrix of compassion nourishes the entire existence .
thus we are told that " my mercy encompasses all things . "
thus we are told that " my mercy takes precedence over my anger . "
may we all be granted a grace of mercy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , well , i do applied math , and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math , is that we are like management consultants .
no one knows what the hell we do .
so i am going to give you some - attempt today to try and explain to you what i do .
so , dancing is one of the most human of activities .
we delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on .
now , ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill , and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it .
now , sadly , neurological disorders such as parkinson 's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability , as it is doing to my friend jan stripling , who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time .
so great progress and treatment has been made over the years .
however , there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease , and they have to live with incurable weakness , tremor , rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease , so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it 's too late .
we need to be able to measure progression objectively , and ultimately , the only way we 're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure .
but frustratingly , with parkinson 's disease and other movement disorders , there are no biomarkers , so there 's no simple blood test that you can do , and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test .
you have to go to the clinic to do it . it 's very , very costly , and that means that , outside the clinical trials , it 's just never done . it 's never done .
but what if patients could do this test at home ?
now , that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic , and what if patients could do that test themselves , right ?
no expensive staff time required .
takes about $ 300 , by the way , in the neurologist 's clinic to do it .
so what i want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this , because , you see , in one sense , at least , we are all virtuosos like my friend jan stripling .
so here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds .
now , this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds , and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers , because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds , and we all actually have the genes for it . foxp2 , for example .
and like ballet , it takes an extraordinary level of training .
i mean , just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak .
from the sound , we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates , and just as the limbs are affected in parkinson 's , so too are the vocal organs .
so on the bottom trace , you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor .
we see all the same symptoms .
we see vocal tremor , weakness and rigidity .
the speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while , and that 's one of the example symptoms of it .
so these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle , in some cases , but with any digital microphone , and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning , which is very advanced by now , we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone .
so these voice-based tests , how do they stack up against expert clinical tests ? we 'll , they 're both non-invasive .
the neurologist 's test is non-invasive . they both use existing infrastructure .
you do n't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it .
and they 're both accurate . okay , but in addition , voice-based tests are non-expert .
that means they can be self-administered .
they 're high-speed , take about 30 seconds at most .
they 're ultra-low cost , and we all know what happens .
when something becomes ultra-low cost , it becomes massively scalable .
so here are some amazing goals that i think we can deal with now .
we can reduce logistical difficulties with patients .
no need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup .
we can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data .
we can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials , and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time .
we have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it 's too late .
so , taking the first steps towards this today , we 're launching the parkinson 's voice initiative .
with aculab and patientslikeme , we 're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals .
we have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet .
anyone healthy or with parkinson 's can call in , cheaply , and leave recordings , a few cents each , and i 'm really happy to announce that we 've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- tom rielly : so max , by taking all these samples of , let 's say , 10,000 people , you 'll be able to tell who 's healthy and who 's not ?
what are you going to get out of those samples ?
max little : yeah . yeah . so what will happen is that , during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not , you see . tr : right .
ml : you see , some people may not do it . they may not get through it .
but we 'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances , and it 's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors , and looking for the actual markers of the disease .
tr : so you 're 86 percent accurate right now ?
ml : it 's much better than that .
actually , my student thanasis , i have to plug him , because he 's done some fantastic work , and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well , which enables this project , and we 're getting 99 percent accuracy .
tr : ninety-nine . well , that 's an improvement .
so what that means is that people will be able to - ml : -lrb- laughs -rrb- tr : people will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test , and people with parkinson 's could call in , record their voice , and then their doctor can check up on their progress , see where they 're doing in this course of the disease .
ml : absolutely .
tr : thanks so much . max little , everybody .
ml : thanks , tom . -lrb- applause -rrb- i study the future of crime and terrorism , and frankly , i 'm afraid .
i 'm afraid by what i see .
i sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we 've been promised , but , you see , i 've spent a career in law enforcement , and that 's informed my perspective on things .
i 've been a street police officer , an undercover investigator , a counter-terrorism strategist , and i 've worked in more than 70 countries around the world .
i 've had to see more than my fair share of violence and the darker underbelly of society , and that 's informed my opinions .
my work with criminals and terrorists has actually been highly educational .
they have taught me a lot , and i 'd like to be able to share some of these observations with you .
today i 'm going to show you the flip side of all those technologies that we marvel at , the ones that we love .
in the hands of the ted community , these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world , but in the hands of suicide bombers , the future can look quite different .
i started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer .
in those days , this was the height of technology .
laugh though you will , all the drug dealers and gang members with whom i dealt had one of these long before any police officer i knew did .
twenty years later , criminals are still using mobile phones , but they 're also building their own mobile phone networks , like this one , which has been deployed in all 31 states of mexico by the narcos .
they have a national encrypted radio communications system .
think about that .
think about the innovation that went into that .
think about the infrastructure to build it .
and then think about this : why ca n't i get a cell phone signal in san francisco ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- how is this possible ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- it makes no sense . -lrb- applause -rrb- we consistently underestimate what criminals and terrorists can do .
technology has made our world increasingly open , and for the most part , that 's great , but all of this openness may have unintended consequences .
consider the 2008 terrorist attack on mumbai .
the men that carried that attack out were armed with ak-47s , explosives and hand grenades .
they threw these hand grenades at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes and waited to catch trains on their way home from work .
but heavy artillery is nothing new in terrorist operations .
guns and bombs are nothing new .
what was different this time is the way that the terrorists used modern information communications technologies to locate additional victims and slaughter them .
they were armed with mobile phones .
they had blackberries .
they had access to satellite imagery .
they had satellite phones , and they even had night vision goggles .
but perhaps their greatest innovation was this .
we 've all seen pictures like this on television and in the news . this is an operations center .
and the terrorists built their very own op center across the border in pakistan , where they monitored the bbc , al jazeera , cnn and indian local stations .
they also monitored the internet and social media to monitor the progress of their attacks and how many people they had killed .
they did all of this in real time .
the innovation of the terrorist operations center gave terrorists unparalleled situational awareness and tactical advantage over the police and over the government .
what did they do with this ?
they used it to great effect .
at one point during the 60-hour siege , the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims .
they came upon a suite on the top floor of the hotel , and they kicked down the door and they found a man hiding by his bed .
and they said to him , " who are you , and what are you doing here ? "
and the man replied , " i 'm just an innocent schoolteacher . "
of course , the terrorists knew that no indian schoolteacher stays at a suite in the taj .
they picked up his identification , and they phoned his name in to the terrorist war room , where the terrorist war room googled him , and found a picture and called their operatives on the ground and said , " your hostage , is he heavyset ?
is he bald in front ? does he wear glasses ? "
" yes , yes , yes , " came the answers .
the op center had found him and they had a match .
he was not a schoolteacher .
he was the second-wealthiest businessman in india , and after discovering this information , the terrorist war room gave the order to the terrorists on the ground in mumbai .
-lrb- " kill him . " -rrb- we all worry about our privacy settings on facebook , but the fact of the matter is , our openness can be used against us .
terrorists are doing this .
a search engine can determine who shall live and who shall die .
this is the world that we live in .
during the mumbai siege , terrorists were so dependent on technology that several witnesses reported that as the terrorists were shooting hostages with one hand , they were checking their mobile phone messages in the very other hand .
in the end , 300 people were gravely wounded and over 172 men , women and children lost their lives that day .
think about what happened .
during this 60-hour siege on mumbai , 10 men armed not just with weapons , but with technology , were able to bring a city of 20 million people to a standstill .
ten people brought 20 million people to a standstill , and this traveled around the world .
this is what radicals can do with openness .
this was done nearly four years ago .
what could terrorists do today with the technologies available that we have ?
what will they do tomorrow ?
the ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially , and it 's scaling for good and it 's scaling for evil .
it 's not just about terrorism , though .
there 's also been a big paradigm shift in crime .
you see , you can now commit more crime as well .
in the old days , it was a knife and a gun .
then criminals moved to robbing trains .
you could rob 200 people on a train , a great innovation .
moving forward , the internet allowed things to scale even more .
in fact , many of you will remember the recent sony playstation hack .
in that incident , over 100 million people were robbed .
think about that .
when in the history of humanity has it ever been possible for one person to rob 100 million ?
of course , it 's not just about stealing things .
there are other avenues of technology that criminals can exploit .
many of you will remember this super cute video from the last ted , but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute .
they do n't all have drumsticks .
some can be armed with hd cameras and do countersurveillance on protesters , or , as in this little bit of movie magic , quadcopters can be loaded with firearms and automatic weapons .
little robots are cute when they play music to you .
when they swarm and chase you down the block to shoot you , a little bit less so .
of course , criminals and terrorists were n't the first to give guns to robots . we know where that started .
but they 're adapting quickly .
recently , the fbi arrested an al qaeda affiliate in the united states , who was planning on using these remote-controlled drone aircraft to fly c4 explosives into government buildings in the united states .
by the way , these travel at over 600 miles an hour .
every time a new technology is being introduced , criminals are there to exploit it .
we 've all seen 3d printers .
we know with them that you can print in many materials ranging from plastic to chocolate to metal and even concrete .
with great precision i actually was able to make this just the other day , a very cute little ducky .
but i wonder to myself , for those people that strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up , how might they use 3d printers ?
perhaps like this .
you see , if you can print in metal , you can print one of these , and in fact you can also print one of these too .
the uk i know has some very strict firearms laws .
you need n't bring the gun into the uk anymore .
you just bring the 3d printer and print the gun while you 're here , and , of course , the magazines for your bullets .
but as these get bigger in the future , what other items will you be able to print ?
the technologies are allowing bigger printers .
as we move forward , we 'll see new technologies also , like the internet of things .
every day we 're connecting more and more of our lives to the internet , which means that the internet of things will soon be the internet of things to be hacked .
all of the physical objects in our space are being transformed into information technologies , and that has a radical implication for our security , because more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities .
criminals understand this .
terrorists understand this . hackers understand this .
if you control the code , you control the world .
this is the future that awaits us .
there has not yet been an operating system or a technology that has n't been hacked .
that 's troubling , since the human body itself is now becoming an information technology .
as we 've seen here , we 're transforming ourselves into cyborgs .
every year , thousands of cochlear implants , diabetic pumps , pacemakers and defibrillators are being implanted in people .
in the united states , there are 60,000 people who have a pacemaker that connects to the internet .
the defibrillators allow a physician at a distance to give a shock to a heart in case a patient needs it .
but if you do n't need it , and somebody else gives you the shock , it 's not a good thing .
of course , we 're going to go even deeper than the human body .
we 're going down to the cellular level these days .
up until this point , all the technologies i 've been talking about have been silicon-based , ones and zeroes , but there 's another operating system out there : the original operating system , dna .
and to hackers , dna is just another operating system waiting to be hacked .
it 's a great challenge for them .
there are people already working on hacking the software of life , and while most of them are doing this to great good and to help us all , some wo n't be .
so how will criminals abuse this ?
well , with synthetic biology you can do some pretty neat things .
for example , i predict that we will move away from a plant-based narcotics world to a synthetic one . why do you need the plants anymore ?
you can just take the dna code from marijuana or poppies or coca leaves and cut and past that gene and put it into yeast , and you can take those yeast and make them make the cocaine for you , or the marijuana , or any other drug .
so how we use yeast in the future is going to be really interesting .
in fact , we may have some really interesting bread and beer as we go into this next century .
the cost of sequencing the human genome is dropping precipitously .
it was proceeding at moore 's law pace , but then in 2008 , something changed .
the technologies got better , and now dna sequencing is proceeding at a pace five times that of moore 's law .
that has significant implications for us .
it took us 30 years to get from the introduction of the personal computer to the level of cybercrime we have today , but looking at how biology is proceeding so rapidly , and knowing criminals and terrorists as i do , we may get there a lot faster with biocrime in the future .
it will be easy for anybody to go ahead and print their own bio-virus , enhanced versions of ebola or anthrax , weaponized flu .
we recently saw a case where some researchers made the h5n1 avian influenza virus more potent .
it already has a 70 percent mortality rate if you get it , but it 's hard to get .
engineers , by moving around a small number of genetic changes , were able to weaponize it and make it much more easy for human beings to catch , so that not thousands of people would die , but tens of millions .
you see , you can go ahead and create new pandemics , and the researchers who did this were so proud of their accomplishments , they wanted to publish it openly so that everybody could see this and get access to this information .
but it goes deeper than that .
dna researcher andrew hessel has pointed out quite rightly that if you can use cancer treatments , modern cancer treatments , to go after one cell while leaving all the other cells around it intact , then you can also go after any one person 's cell .
personalized cancer treatments are the flip side of personalized bioweapons , which means you can attack any one individual , including all the people in this picture .
how will we protect them in the future ?
what to do ? what to do about all this ?
that 's what i get asked all the time .
for those of you who follow me on twitter , i will be tweeting out the answer later on today . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , it 's a bit more complex than that , and there are no magic bullets .
i do n't have all the answers , but i know a few things .
in the wake of 9/11 , the best security minds put together all their innovation and this is what they created for security .
if you 're expecting the people who built this to protect you from the coming robopocalypse - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - uh , you may want to have a backup plan . -lrb- laughter -rrb- just saying . just think about that . -lrb- applause -rrb- law enforcement is currently a closed system .
it 's nation-based , while the threat is international .
policing does n't scale globally . at least , it has n't , and our current system of guns , border guards , big gates and fences are outdated in the new world into which we 're moving .
so how might we prepare for some of these specific threats , like attacking a president or a prime minister ?
this would be the natural government response , to hide away all our government leaders in hermetically sealed bubbles .
but this is not going to work .
the cost of doing a dna sequence is going to be trivial .
anybody will have it and we will all have them in the future .
so maybe there 's a more radical way that we can look at this .
what happens if we were to take the president 's dna , or a king or queen 's , and put it out to a group of a few hundred trusted researchers so they could study that dna and do penetration testing against it as a means of helping our leaders ?
or what if we sent it out to a few thousand ?
or , controversially , and not without its risks , what happens if we just gave it to the whole public ?
then we could all be engaged in helping .
we 've already seen examples of this working well .
the organized crime and corruption reporting project is staffed by journalists and citizens where they are crowd-sourcing what dictators and terrorists are doing with public funds around the world , and , in a more dramatic case , we 've seen in mexico , a country that has been racked by 50,000 narcotics-related murders in the past six years .
they 're killing so many people they ca n't even afford to bury them all in anything but these unmarked graves like this one outside of ciudad juarez .
what can we do about this ? the government has proven ineffective .
so in mexico , citizens , at great risk to themselves , are fighting back to build an effective solution .
they 're crowd-mapping the activities of the drug dealers .
whether or not you realize it , we are at the dawn of a technological arms race , an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill .
the threat is serious , and the time to prepare for it is now .
i can assure you that the terrorists and criminals are .
my personal belief is that , rather than having a small , elite force of highly trained government agents here to protect us all , we 're much better off having average and ordinary citizens approaching this problem as a group and seeing what we can do .
if we all do our part , i think we 'll be in a much better space .
the tools to change the world are in everybody 's hands .
how we use them is not just up to me , it 's up to all of us .
this was a technology i would frequently deploy as a police officer .
this technology has become outdated in our current world .
it does n't scale , it does n't work globally , and it surely does n't work virtually .
we 've seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism .
they call for a shift to a more open form and a more participatory form of law enforcement .
so i invite you to join me .
after all , public safety is too important to leave to the professionals .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i think it 'll be a relief to some people and a disappointment to others that i 'm not going to talk about vaginas today .
i began " the vagina monologues " because i was worried about vaginas .
i 'm very worried today about this notion , this world , this prevailing kind of force of security .
i see this word , hear this word , feel this word everywhere .
real security , security checks , security watch , security clearance .
why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure ?
what does anyone mean when they talk about real security ?
and why have we , as americans particularly , become a nation that strives for security above all else ?
in fact , i think that security is elusive . it 's impossible .
we all die . we all get old . we all get sick . people leave us .
people change us . nothing is secure .
and that 's actually the good news .
this is , of course , unless your whole life is about being secure .
i think that when that is the focus of your life , these are the things that happen .
you ca n't travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle .
you ca n't allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time , as they might confuse you or challenge you .
you ca n't open yourself to new experiences , new people , new ways of doing things - they might take you off course .
you ca n't not know who you are , so you cling to hard-matter identity .
you become a christian , muslim , jew .
you 're an indian , egyptian , italian , american .
you 're a heterosexual or a homosexual , or you never have sex .
or at least , that 's what you say when you identify yourself .
you become part of an " us . "
in order to be secure , you defend against " them . "
you cling to your land because it is your secure place .
you must fight anyone who encroaches upon it .
you become your nation . you become your religion .
you become whatever it is that will freeze you , numb you and protect you from doubt or change .
but all this does , actually , is shut down your mind .
in reality , it does not really make you safer .
i was in sri lanka , for example , three days after the tsunami , and i was standing on the beaches and it was absolutely clear that , in a matter of five minutes , a 30-foot wave could rise up and desecrate a people , a population and lives .
all this striving for security , in fact , has made you much more insecure because now you have to watch out all the time .
there are people not like you - people who you now call enemies .
you have places you can not go , thoughts you can not think , worlds that you can no longer inhabit .
and so you spend your days fighting things off , defending your territory and becoming more entrenched in your fundamental thinking .
your days become devoted to protecting yourself .
this becomes your mission . that is all you do .
ideas get shorter . they become sound bytes .
there are evildoers and saints , criminals and victims .
there are those who , if they 're not with us , are against us .
it gets easier to hurt people because you do not feel what 's inside them .
it gets easier to lock them up , force them to be naked , humiliate them , occupy them , invade them and kill them , because they are only obstacles now to your security .
in six years , i 've had the extraordinary privilege through v-day , a global movement against -lsb- violence against -rsb- women , to travel probably to 60 countries , and spend a great deal of time in different portions .
i 've met women and men all over this planet , who through various circumstances - war , poverty , racism , multiple forms of violence - have never known security , or have had their illusion of security forever devastated .
i 've spent time with women in afghanistan under the taliban , who were essentially brutalized and censored .
i 've been in bosnian refugee camps .
i was with women in pakistan who have had their faces melted off with acid .
i 've been with girls all across america who were date-raped , or raped by their best friends when they were drugged one night .
one of the amazing things that i 've discovered in my travels is that there is this emerging species .
i loved when he was talking about this other world that 's right next to this world .
i 've discovered these people , who , in v-day world , we call vagina warriors .
these particular people , rather than getting ak-47s , or weapons of mass destruction , or machetes , in the spirit of the warrior , have gone into the center , the heart of pain , of loss .
they have grieved it , they have died into it , and allowed and encouraged poison to turn into medicine .
they have used the fuel of their pain to begin to redirect that energy towards another mission and another trajectory .
these warriors now devote themselves and their lives to making sure what happened to them does n't happen to anyone else .
there are thousands if not millions of them on the planet .
i venture there are many in this room .
they have a fierceness and a freedom that i believe is the bedrock of a new paradigm .
they have broken out of the existing frame of victim and perpetrator .
their own personal security is not their end goal , and because of that , because , rather than worrying about security , because the transformation of suffering is their end goal , i actually believe they are creating real safety and a whole new idea of security .
i want to talk about a few of these people that i 've met .
tomorrow , i am going to cairo , and i 'm so moved that i will be with women in cairo who are v-day women , who are opening the first safe house for battered women in the middle east .
that will happen because women in cairo made a decision to stand up and put themselves on the line , and talk about the degree of violence that is happening in egypt , and were willing to be attacked and criticized .
and through their work over the last years , this is not only happening that this house is opening , but it 's being supported by many factions of the society who never would have supported it .
women in uganda this year , who put on " the vagina monologues " during v-day , actually evoked the wrath of the government .
and , i love this story so much .
there was a cabinet meeting and a meeting of the presidents to talk about whether " vaginas " could come to uganda .
and in this meeting - it went on for weeks in the press , two weeks where there was huge discussion .
the government finally made a decision that " the vagina monologues " could not be performed in uganda .
but the amazing news was that because they had stood up , these women , and because they had been willing to risk their security , it began a discussion that not only happened in uganda , but all of africa .
as a result , this production , which had already sold out , every single person in that 800-seat audience , except for 10 people , made a decision to keep the money .
they raised 10,000 dollars on a production that never occurred .
there 's a young woman named carrie rethlefsen in minnesota .
she 's a high school student .
she had seen " the vagina monologues " and she was really moved . and as a result , she wore an " i heart my vagina " button to her high school in minnesota .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she was basically threatened to be expelled from school .
they told her she could n't love her vagina in high school , that it was not a legal thing , that it was not a moral thing , that it was not a good thing .
so she really struggled with this , what to do , because she was a senior and she was doing well in her school and she was threatened expulsion . so what she did is she got all her friends together - i believe it was 100 , 150 students all wore " i love my vagina " t-shirts , and the boys wore " i love her vagina " t-shirts to school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this seems like a fairly , you know , frivolous , but what happened as a result of that , is that that school now is forming a sex education class . it 's beginning to talk about sex , it 's beginning to look at why it would be wrong for a young high school girl to talk about her vagina publicly or to say that she loved her vagina publicly .
i know i 've talked about agnes here before , but i want to give you an update on agnes .
i met agnes three years ago in the rift valley .
when she was a young girl , she had been mutilated against her will .
that mutilation of her clitoris had actually obviously impacted her life and changed it in a way that was devastating .
she made a decision not to go and get a razor or a glass shard , but to devote her life to stopping that happening to other girls .
for eight years , she walked through the rift valley .
she had this amazing box that she carried and it had a torso of a woman 's body in it , a half a torso , and she would teach people , everywhere she went , what a healthy vagina looked like and what a mutilated vagina looked like .
in the years that she walked , she educated parents , mothers , fathers .
she saved 1,500 girls from being cut .
when v-day met her , we asked her how we could support her and she said , " well , if you got me a jeep , i could get around a lot faster . " so , we bought her a jeep .
in the year she had the jeep , she saved 4,500 girls from being cut .
so , we said , what else could we do ?
she said , " if you help me get money , i could open a house . "
three years ago , agnes opened a safe house in africa to stop mutilation .
when she began her mission eight years ago , she was reviled , she was detested , she was completely slandered in her community .
i am proud to tell you that six months ago , she was elected the deputy mayor of narok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think what i 'm trying to say here is that if your end goal is security , and if that 's all you 're focusing on , what ends up happening is that you create not only more insecurity in other people , but you make yourself far more insecure .
real security is contemplating death , not pretending it does n't exist .
not running from loss , but entering grief , surrendering to sorrow .
real security is not knowing something , when you do n't know it .
real security is hungering for connection rather than power .
it can not be bought or arranged or made with bombs .
it is deeper , it is a process , it is acute awareness that we are all utterly inter-bended , and one action by one being in one tiny town has consequences everywhere .
real security is not only being able to tolerate mystery , complexity , ambiguity , but hungering for them and only trusting a situation when they are present .
something happened when i began traveling in v-day , eight years ago . i got lost .
i remember being on a plane going from kenya to south africa , and i had no idea where i was .
i did n't know where i was going , where i 'd come from , and i panicked . i had a total anxiety attack .
and then i suddenly realized that it absolutely did n't matter where i was going , or where i had come from because we are all essentially permanently displaced people .
all of us are refugees .
we come from somewhere and we are hopefully traveling all the time , moving towards a new place .
freedom means i may not be identified as any one group , but that i can visit and find myself in every group .
it does not mean that i do n't have values or beliefs , but it does mean i am not hardened around them .
i do not use them as weapons .
in the shared future , it will be just that , shared .
the end goal will -lsb- be -rsb- becoming vulnerable , realizing the place of our connection to one another , rather than becoming secure , in control and alone .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : and how are you doing ? are you exhausted ?
on a typical day , do you wake up with hope or gloom ?
eve ensler : you know , i think carl jung once said that in order to survive the twentieth century , we have to live with two existing thoughts , opposite thoughts , at the same time .
and i think part of what i 'm learning in this process is that one must allow oneself to feel grief .
and i think as long as i keep grieving , and weeping , and then moving on , i 'm fine .
when i start to pretend that what i 'm seeing is n't impacting me , and is n't changing my heart , then i get in trouble .
because when you spend a lot of time going from place to place , country to country , and city to city , the degree to which women , for example , are violated , and the epidemic of it , and the kind of ordinariness of it , is so devastating to one 's soul that you have to take the time , or i have to take the time now , to process that .
ca : there are a lot of causes out there in the world that have been talked about , you know , poverty , sickness and so on . you spent eight years on this one .
why this one ?
ee : i think that if you think about women , women are the primary resource of the planet . they give birth , we come from them , they are mothers , they are visionaries , they are the future . if you think that the u.n. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime , we 're talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet , we 're talking about the place where we come from , we 're talking about parenting .
imagine that you 've been raped and you 're bringing up a boy child .
how does it impact your ability to work , or envision a future , or thrive , as opposed to just survive ? what i believe is if we could figure out how to make women safe and honor women , it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself .
i 'm a neuroscientist .
and in neuroscience , we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain .
but i want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life , because it 's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function .
and that is , why do we and other animals have brains ?
not all species on our planet have brains , so if we want to know what the brain is for , let 's think about why we evolved one .
now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think , and that 's completely wrong .
if you think about this question for any length of time , it 's blindingly obvious why we have a brain .
we have a brain for one reason and one reason only , and that 's to produce adaptable and complex movements .
there is no other reason to have a brain .
think about it .
movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you .
now that 's not quite true . there 's one other way , and that 's through sweating .
but apart from that , everything else goes through contractions of muscles .
so think about communication - speech , gestures , writing , sign language - they 're all mediated through contractions of your muscles .
so it 's really important to remember that sensory , memory and cognitive processes are all important , but they 're only important to either drive or suppress future movements .
there can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it does n't affect the way you 're going to move later in life .
now for those who do n't believe this argument , we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain , but the clinching evidence is this animal here - the humble sea squirt .
rudimentary animal , has a nervous system , swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life .
and at some point of its life , it implants on a rock .
and the first thing it does in implanting on that rock , which it never leaves , is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food .
so once you do n't need to move , you do n't need the luxury of that brain .
and this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure , but that 's a different subject .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i am a movement chauvinist .
i believe movement is the most important function of the brain - do n't let anyone tell you that it 's not true .
now if movement is so important , how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement ?
and the answer is we 're doing extremely poorly ; it 's a very hard problem .
but we can look at how well we 're doing by thinking about how well we 're doing building machines which can do what humans can do .
think about the game of chess .
how well are we doing determining what piece to move where ?
if you pit garry kasparov here , when he 's not in jail , against ibm 's deep blue , well the answer is ibm 's deep blue will occasionally win .
and i think if ibm 's deep blue played anyone in this room , it would win every time .
that problem is solved .
what about the problem of picking up a chess piece , dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board ?
if you put a five year-old child 's dexterity against the best robots of today , the answer is simple : the child wins easily .
there 's no competition at all .
now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard ?
one reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem - look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win .
so it 's a very simple algorithm .
now of course there are other moves , but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution .
when it comes to being dexterous , it 's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous .
and we 'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world , which has a lot of problems .
but let me show you cutting-edge robotics .
now a lot of robotics is very impressive , but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages .
so this is the end of a ph.d. project from one of the best robotics institutes .
and the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass .
it 's a hard problem because the water sloshes about , but it can do it .
but it does n't do it with anything like the agility of a human .
now if you want this robot to do a different task , that 's another three-year ph.d. program .
there is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics .
now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance .
so what i 'm going to show you is emily fox winning the world record for cup stacking .
now the americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking .
it 's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order .
and this is her getting the world record in real time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and she 's pretty happy .
we have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that , and that 's what we 'd like to know .
so in my group , what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement .
and it sounds like an easy problem .
you send a command down , it causes muscles to contract .
your arm or body moves , and you get sensory feedback from vision , from skin , from muscles and so on .
the trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be .
so one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is , for example , sensory feedback is extremely noisy .
now by noise , i do not mean sound .
we use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal .
so the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard " crrcckkk " on the station you wanted to hear , that was the noise .
but more generally , this noise is something that corrupts the signal .
so for example , if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand , you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback .
similarly , when you put motor output on movement output , it 's extremely noisy .
forget about trying to hit the bull 's eye in darts , just aim for the same spot over and over again .
you have a huge spread due to movement variability .
and more than that , the outside world , or task , is both ambiguous and variable .
the teapot could be full , it could be empty .
it changes over time .
so we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise .
now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise .
so if you 're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick , our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars .
now what i want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability .
and to do that , i 'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called bayesian decision theory .
and it 's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty .
and the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions .
so let 's think about the inference .
you want to generate beliefs about the world .
so what are beliefs ?
beliefs could be : where are my arms in space ?
am i looking at a cat or a fox ?
but we 're going to represent beliefs with probabilities .
so we 're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one - zero meaning i do n't believe it at all , one means i 'm absolutely certain .
and numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty .
and the key idea to bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference .
you have data , and data in neuroscience is sensory input .
so i have sensory input , which i can take in to make beliefs .
but there 's another source of information , and that 's effectively prior knowledge .
you accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories .
and the point about bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs .
and i 've put the formula up there .
i 'm not going to explain what that formula is , but it 's very beautiful .
and it has real beauty and real explanatory power .
and what it really says , and what you want to estimate , is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input .
so let me give you an intuitive example .
imagine you 're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you .
there are two sources of information bayes ' rule tells you .
there 's sensory evidence - you can use visual information auditory information , and that might tell you it 's going to land in that red spot .
but you know that your senses are not perfect , and therefore there 's some variability of where it 's going to land shown by that cloud of red , representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1 .
that information is available in the current shot , but there 's another source of information not available on the current shot , but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis , and that 's that the ball does n't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match .
if you 're playing against a very good opponent , they may distribute it in that green area , which is the prior distribution , making it hard for you to return .
now both these sources of information carry important information .
and what bayes ' rule says is that i should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow , which have the ellipses , and that 's my belief .
so it 's the optimal way of combining information .
now i would n't tell you all this if it was n't that a few years ago , we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills .
and what it means is we really are bayesian inference machines .
as we go around , we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down , but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is , and then combine those in a real bayesian way .
now a key part to the bayesian is this part of the formula .
and what this part really says is i have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs .
so that really means i have to make predictions of the future .
and i want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it 's going to get .
and moreover , it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do .
and to do that , i 'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input .
so you send a command out , you get sensory feedback back , and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus .
but you can imagine looking inside the brain .
and here 's inside the brain .
you might have a little predictor , a neural simulator , of the physics of your body and your senses .
so as you send a movement command down , you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions .
so as i shake this ketchup bottle , i get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row .
and if i 've got a good predictor , it predicts the same thing .
well why would i bother doing that ?
i 'm going to get the same feedback anyway .
well there 's good reasons .
imagine , as i shake the ketchup bottle , someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me .
now i get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act .
so i get two sources .
i get you tapping on it , and i get me shaking it , but from my senses ' point of view , that is combined together into one source of information .
now there 's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events .
because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that 's going on inside my body .
so one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction - which is only based on your movement commands - with the reality .
any discrepancy should hopefully be external .
so as i go around the world , i 'm making predictions of what i should get , subtracting them off .
everything left over is external to me .
what evidence is there for this ?
well there 's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person .
and so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling .
it 's been known for a long time , you ca n't tickle yourself as well as other people can .
but it has n't really been shown , it 's because you have a neural simulator , simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense .
so we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem .
and in effect , what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot , and they 're going to move that back and forward .
and then we 're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot , which is going to tickle their palm with another stick .
and then we 're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness .
i 'll show you just one part of our study .
and here i 've taken away the robots , but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward .
and we replay that to the other hand with a time delay .
either no time delay , in which case light would just tickle your palm , or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second .
so the important point here is the right hand always does the same things - sinusoidal movement .
the left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle .
all we 're playing with is a tempo causality .
and as we go from naught to 0.1 second , it becomes more ticklish .
as you go from 0.1 to 0.2 , it becomes more ticklish at the end .
and by 0.2 of a second , it 's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything .
so whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality .
and based on this illustration , we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain 's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations .
now i have to admit , these are the worst studies my lab has ever run .
because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes , you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant .
so we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena .
and in the intervening years i had two daughters .
and one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys , they get into fights - which started with one of them doing something to the other , the other retaliating .
it quickly escalates .
and children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force .
now when i screamed at my children to stop , sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder .
now i happen to know my children do n't lie , so i thought , as a neuroscientist , it was important how i could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths .
and we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another , they generate the movement command .
they predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off .
so they actually think they 've hit the person less hard than they have - rather like the tickling .
whereas the passive recipient does n't make the prediction , feels the full blow .
so if they retaliate with the same force , the first person will think it 's been escalated .
so we decided to test this in the lab .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now we do n't work with children , we do n't work with hitting , but the concept is identical .
we bring in two adults . we tell them they 're going to play a game .
and so here 's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other .
and the game is very simple .
we started with a motor with a little lever , a little force transfuser .
and we use this motor to apply force down to player one 's fingers for three seconds and then it stops .
and that player 's been told , remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject 's finger through a force transfuser - and they do that .
and player two 's been told , remember the experience of that force .
use your other hand to apply the force back down .
and so they take it in turns to apply the force they 've just experienced back and forward .
but critically , they 're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms .
so they do n't know the rules the other person 's playing by .
and what we 've measured is the force as a function of terms .
and if we look at what we start with , a quarter of a newton there , a number of turns , perfect would be that red line .
and what we see in all pairs of subjects is this - a 70 percent escalation in force on each go .
so it really suggests , when you 're doing this - based on this study and others we 've done - that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it 's producing .
so it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts .
so we 've made inferences , we 've done predictions , now we have to generate actions .
and what bayes ' rule says is , given my beliefs , the action should in some sense be optimal .
but we 've got a problem .
tasks are symbolic - i want to drink , i want to dance - but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence .
and there 's a big gap between the task and the movement system .
so it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways .
so think about just a point to point movement .
i could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths .
having chosen a particular path , i can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations .
and i can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed .
so i have a huge amount of choice to make .
now it turns out , we are extremely stereotypical .
we all move the same way pretty much .
and so it turns out we 're so stereotypical , our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping .
so if i take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion , your brain 's circuitry would understand instantly what 's going on .
now this is a bunch of dots moving .
you will know what this person is doing , whether happy , sad , old , young - a huge amount of information .
if these dots were cars going on a racing circuit , you would have absolutely no idea what 's going on .
so why is it that we move the particular ways we do ?
well let 's think about what really happens .
maybe we do n't all quite move the same way .
maybe there 's variation in the population .
and maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation .
so in evolutionary scales , movements get better .
and perhaps in life , movements get better through learning .
so what is it about a movement which is good or bad ?
imagine i want to intercept this ball .
here are two possible paths to that ball .
well if i choose the left-hand path , i can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time .
but there 's noise added to this .
so what i actually get , based on this lovely , smooth , desired force , is a very noisy version .
so if i pick the same command through many times , i will get a different noisy version each time , because noise changes each time .
so what i can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if i choose that way .
if i choose a different way of moving - on the right for example - then i 'll have a different command , different noise , playing through a noisy system , very complicated .
all we can be sure of is the variability will be different .
if i move in this particular way , i end up with a smaller variability across many movements .
so if i have to choose between those two , i would choose the right one because it 's less variable .
and the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise .
and one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability i show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger .
so you want to avoid big forces as one principle .
so we 've shown that using this , we can explain a huge amount of data - that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise .
so i hope i 've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement .
and it 's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that .
but it 's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation .
there are many diseases which effect movement .
and hopefully if we understand how we control movement , we can apply that to robotic technology .
and finally , i want to remind you , when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks , the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : quick question for you , dan .
so you 're a movement - -lrb- dw : chauvinist . -rrb- - chauvinist .
does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about - the dreaming , the yearning , the falling in love and all these things - are a kind of side show , an accident ?
dw : no , no , actually i think they 're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end .
so i think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you 're laying down memories of childhood .
the fact that we forget most of our childhood , for example , is probably fine , because it does n't effect our movements later in life .
you only need to store things which are really going to effect movement .
ca : so you think that people thinking about the brain , and consciousness generally , could get real insight by saying , where does movement play in this game ?
dw : so people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake .
you have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision .
and it uses it very differently once you think about it that way .
ca : well that was quite fascinating . thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a world-changing invention .
the smoke alarm has saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives , worldwide .
but smoke alarms do n't prevent fires .
every year in the usa , over 20,000 are killed or injured with 350,000 home fires .
and one of the main causes of all these fires is electricity .
what if we could prevent electrical fires before they start ?
well , a couple of friends and i figured out how to do this .
so how does electricity ignite residential fires ?
well it turns out that the main causes are faulty and misused appliances and electrical wiring .
our invention had to address all of these issues .
so what about circuit breakers ?
well , thomas edison invented the circuit breaker in 1879 .
this is 130-year-old technology , and this is a problem , because over 80 percent of all home electrical fires start below the safety threshold of circuit breakers .
hmmm ...
so we considered all of this . and we realized that electrical appliances must be able to communicate directly with the power receptacle itself .
any electrical device - an appliance , an extension cord , whatever - must be able to tell the power outlet , " hey , power outlet , i 'm drawing too much current . shut me off now , before i start a fire . "
and the power outlet needs to be smart enough to do it .
so here is what we did . we put a 10-cent digital transponder , a data tag , in the appliance plug .
and we put an inexpensive , wireless data reader inside the receptacle so they could communicate .
now , every home electrical system becomes an intelligent network .
the appliance 's safe operating parameters are embedded into its plug .
if too much current is flowing , the intelligent receptacle turns itself off , and prevents another fire from starting .
we call this technology efci , electrical fault circuit interrupter .
okay , two more points . every year in the usa , roughly 2,500 children are admitted to emergency rooms for shock and burn injuries related to electrical receptacles . and this is crazy .
an intelligent receptacle prevents injuries because the power is always off , until an intelligent plug is detected . simple .
now , besides saving lives , perhaps the greatest benefit of intelligent power is in its energy savings .
this invention will reduce global energy consumption by allowing remote control and automation of every outlet in every home and business .
now you can choose to reduce your home energy bill by automatically cycling heavy loads like air conditioners and heaters .
hotels and businesses can shut down unused rooms from a central location , or even a cell phone .
there are 10 billion electrical outlets in north america alone .
the potential energy savings is very , very significant .
so far we 've applied for 414 patent claims .
of those , 186 have been granted : 228 are in process .
and i 'm pleased to announce that just three weeks ago we received our first international recognition , the 2009 ces innovation award .
so , to conclude , intelligent power can , globally , save thousands of lives , prevent tens of thousands of injuries , and eliminate tens of billions of dollars in property damage every single year , while significantly reducing global energy consumption .
in the spirit of this year 's ted conference , we think this is a powerful , world-changing invention .
and i 'd like to thank chris for this opportunity to unveil our technology with you , and soon the world .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk to you today about the design of medical technology for low resource settings .
i study health systems in these countries .
and one of the major gaps in care , almost across the board , is access to safe surgery .
now one of the major bottlenecks that we 've found that 's sort of preventing both the access in the first place and the safety of those surgeries that do happen is anesthesia .
and actually , it 's the model that we expect to work for delivering anesthesia in these environments .
here we have a scene that you would find in any operating room across the u.s. or any other developed country .
in the background there is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine .
and this machine is able to enable surgery and save lives because it was designed with this environment in mind .
in order to operate , this machine needs a number of things that this hospital has to offer .
it needs an extremely well-trained anesthesiologist with years of training with complex machines to help her monitor the flows of the gas and keep her patients safe and anesthetized throughout the surgery .
it 's a delicate machine running on computer algorithms , and it needs special care , tlc , to keep it up and running , and it 's going to break pretty easily .
and when it does , it needs a team of biomedical engineers who understand its complexities , can fix it , can source the parts and keep it saving lives .
it 's a pretty expensive machine .
it needs a hospital whose budget can allow it to support one machine costing upwards of 50 or $ 100,000 .
and perhaps most obviously , and perhaps most importantly - and the path to concepts that we 've heard about kind of illustrate this - it needs infrastructure that can supply an uninterrupted source of electricity , of compressed oxygen and other medical supplies that are so critical to the functioning of this machine .
in other words , this machine requires a lot of stuff that this hospital can not offer .
this is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural malawi .
in this hospital , there is one person qualified to deliver anesthesia , and she 's qualified because she has 12 , maybe 18 months of training in anesthesia .
in the hospital and in the entire region there 's not a single biomedical engineer .
so when this machine breaks , the machines they have to work with break , they 've got to try and figure it out , but most of the time , that 's the end of the road .
those machines go the proverbial junkyard .
and the price tag of the machine that i mentioned could represent maybe a quarter or a third of the annual operating budget for this hospital .
and finally , i think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong .
this hospital is connected to a very weak power grid , one that goes down frequently .
so it runs frequently , the entire hospital , just on a generator .
and you can imagine , the generator breaks down or runs out of fuel .
and the world bank sees this and estimates that a hospital in this setting in a low-income country can expect up to 18 power outages per month .
similarly compressed oxygen and other medical supplies are really a luxury and can often be out of stock for months or even a year .
so it seems crazy , but the model that we have right now is taking those machines that were designed for that first environment that i showed you and donating or selling them to hospitals in this environment .
it 's not just inappropriate , it becomes really unsafe .
one of our partners at johns hopkins was observing surgeries in sierra leone about a year ago .
and the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case .
a woman came in , she needed an emergency c-section to save her life and the life of her baby .
and everything began pretty auspiciously .
the surgeon was on call and scrubbed in .
the nurse was there .
she was able to anesthetize her quickly , and it was important because of the emergency nature of the situation .
and everything began well until the power went out .
and now in the middle of this surgery , the surgeon is racing against the clock to finish his case , which he can do - he 's got a headlamp .
but the nurse is literally running around a darkened operating theater trying to find anything she can use to anesthetize her patient , to keep her patient asleep .
because her machine does n't work when there 's no power .
and now this routine surgery that many of you have probably experienced , and others are probably the product of , has now become a tragedy .
and what 's so frustrating is this is not a singular event ; this happens across the developing world .
35 million surgeries are attempted every year without safe anesthesia .
my colleague , dr. paul fenton , was living this reality .
he was the chief of anesthesiology in a hospital in malawi , a teaching hospital .
he went to work every day in an operating theater like this one , trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so using that same equipment that became so unreliable , and frankly unsafe , in his hospital .
and after umpteen surgeries and , you can imagine , really unspeakable tragedy , he just said , " that 's it . i 'm done . that 's enough .
there has to be something better . "
so he took a walk down the hall to where they threw all those machines that had just crapped out on them - i think that 's the scientific term - and he just started tinkering .
he took one part from here and another from there , and he tried to come up with a machine that would work in the reality that he was facing .
and what he came up with was this guy , the prototype for the universal anesthesia machine - a machine that would work and anesthetize his patients no matter the circumstances that his hospital had to offer .
here it is back at home at that same hospital , developed a little further , 12 years later , working on patients from pediatrics to geriatrics .
now let me show you a little bit about how this machine works .
voila !
here she is .
when you have electricity , everything in this machine begins in the base .
there 's a built-in oxygen concentrator down there .
now you 've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point .
essentially , to deliver anesthesia , you want as pure oxygen as possible , because eventually you 're going to dilute it essentially with the gas .
and the mixture that the patient inhales needs to be at least a certain percentage oxygen or else it can become dangerous .
but so in here when there 's electricity , the oxygen concentrator takes in room air .
now we know room air is gloriously free , it is abundant , and it 's already 21 percent oxygen .
so all this concentrator does is take that room air in , filter it and send 95 percent pure oxygen up and across here where it mixes with the anesthetic agent .
now before that mixture hits the patient 's lungs , it 's going to pass by here - you ca n't see it , but there 's an oxygen sensor here - that 's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered .
now if you do n't have power , or , god forbid , the power cuts out in the middle of surgery , this machine transitions automatically , without even having to touch it , to drawing in room air from this inlet .
everything else is the same .
the only difference is that now you 're only working with 21 percent oxygen .
now that used to be a dangerous guessing game , because you only knew if you had given too little oxygen once something bad happened .
but we 've put a long-life battery backup on here .
this is the only part that 's battery backed up .
but this gives control to the provider , whether there 's power or not , because they can adjust the flow based on the percentage of oxygen they see that they 're giving their patient .
in both cases , whether you have power or not , sometimes the patient needs help breathing .
it 's just a reality of anesthesia . the lungs can be paralyzed .
and so we 've just added this manual bellows .
we 've seen surgeries for three or four hours to ventilate the patient on this .
so it 's a straightforward machine .
i shudder to say simple ; it 's straightforward .
and it 's by design .
and you do not need to be a highly trained , specialized anesthesiologist to use this machine , which is good because , in these rural district hospitals , you 're not going to get that level of training .
it 's also designed for the environment that it will be used in .
this is an incredibly rugged machine .
it has to stand up to the heat and the wear and tear that happens in hospitals in these rural districts .
and so it 's not going to break very easily , but if it does , virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver .
and finally , it 's affordable .
this machine comes in at an eighth of the cost of the conventional machine that i showed you earlier .
so in other words , what we have here is a machine that can enable surgery and save lives because it was designed for its environment , just like the first machine i showed you .
but we 're not content to stop there .
is it working ?
is this the design that 's going to work in place ?
well we 've seen good results so far .
this is in 13 hospitals in four countries , and since 2010 , we 've done well over 2,000 surgeries with no clinically adverse events .
so we 're thrilled .
this really seems like a cost-effective , scalable solution to a problem that 's really pervasive .
but we still want to be sure that this is the most effective and safe device that we can be putting into hospitals .
so to do that we 've launched a number of partnerships with ngos and universities to gather data on the user interface , on the types of surgeries it 's appropriate for and ways we can enhance the device itself .
one of those partnerships is with johns hopkins just here in baltimore .
they have a really cool anesthesia simulation lab out in baltimore .
so we 're taking this machine and recreating some of the operating theater crises that this machine might face in one of the hospitals that it 's intended for , and in a contained , safe environment , evaluating its effectiveness .
we 're then able to compare the results from that study with real world experience , because we 're putting two of these in hospitals that johns hopkins works with in sierra leone , including the hospital where that emergency c-section happened .
so i 've talked a lot about anesthesia , and i tend to do that .
i think it is incredibly fascinating and an important component of health .
and it really seems peripheral , we never think about it , until we do n't have access to it , and then it becomes a gatekeeper .
who gets surgery and who does n't ?
who gets safe surgery and who does n't ?
but you know , it 's just one of so many ways that design , appropriate design , can have an impact on health outcomes .
if more people in the health delivery space really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries could start their design process , their solution search , from outside of that proverbial box and inside of the hospital - in other words , if we could design for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world , rather than the one that we wished existed - we might just save a lot of lives .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you 're faced with a complex problem ?
well , i hope to change that in less than three minutes .
so , i hope to convince you that complex does n't always equal complicated .
so for me , a well-crafted baguette , fresh out of the oven , is complex , but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated .
i 'm an ecologist , and i study complexity . i love complexity .
and i study that in the natural world , the interconnectedness of species .
so here 's a food web , or a map of feeding links between species that live in alpine lakes in the mountains of california .
and this is what happens to that food web when it 's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before .
all the grayed-out species disappear .
some are actually on the brink of extinction .
and lakes with fish have more mosquitos , even though they eat them .
these effects were all unanticipated , and yet we 're discovering they 're predictable .
so i want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we 're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems .
first is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you did n't think of before .
for example , you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem , or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in yosemite national park .
the next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another , if you focus only on that link , and then you black box the rest , it 's actually less predictable than if you step back , consider the entire system - all the species , all the links - and from that place , hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most .
and we 're discovering , with our research , that 's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees .
so the more you step back , embrace complexity , the better chance you have of finding simple answers , and it 's often different than the simple answer that you started with .
so let 's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the u.s. government .
this is a diagram of the u.s. counterinsurgency strategy in afghanistan .
it was front page of the new york times a couple months ago .
instantly ridiculed by the media for being so crazy complicated .
and the stated goal was to increase popular support for the afghan government .
clearly a complex problem , but is it complicated ?
well , when i saw this in the front page of the times , i thought , " great . finally something i can relate to .
i can sink my teeth into this . "
so let 's do it . so here we go for the first time ever , a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network .
the circled node is the one we 're trying to influence - popular support for the government .
and so now we can look one degrees , two degrees , three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence .
within that sphere , most of those nodes are not actionable , like the harshness of the terrain , and a very small minority are actual military actions .
most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories : active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair , transparent economic development and provisioning of services .
i do n't know about this , but this is what i can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds .
when you see a diagram like this , i do n't want you to be afraid .
i want you to be excited . i want you to be relieved .
because simple answers may emerge .
we 're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity .
so for any problem , the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity , the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- democracy is in trouble , no question about that , and it comes in part from a deep dilemma in which it is embedded .
it 's increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of decisions we face that have to do with global pandemics , a cross-border problem ; with hiv , a transnational problem ; with markets and immigration , something that goes beyond national borders ; with terrorism , with war , all now cross-border problems .
in fact , we live in a 21st-century world of interdependence , and brutal interdependent problems , and when we look for solutions in politics and in democracy , we are faced with political institutions designed 400 years ago , autonomous , sovereign nation-states with jurisdictions and territories separate from one another , each claiming to be able to solve the problem of its own people .
twenty-first-century , transnational world of problems and challenges , 17th-century world of political institutions .
in that dilemma lies the central problem of democracy .
and like many others , i 've been thinking about what can one do about this , this asymmetry between 21st-century challenges and archaic and increasingly dysfunctional political institutions like nation-states .
and my suggestion is that we change the subject , that we stop talking about nations , about bordered states , and we start talking about cities .
because i think you will find , when we talk about cities , we are talking about the political institutions in which civilization and culture were born .
we are talking about the cradle of democracy .
we are talking about the venues in which those public spaces where we come together to create democracy , and at the same time protest those who would take our freedom , take place .
think of some great names : the place de la bastille , zuccotti park , tahrir square , taksim square in today 's headlines in istanbul , or , yes , tiananmen square in beijing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- those are the public spaces where we announce ourselves as citizens , as participants , as people with the right to write our own narratives .
cities are not only the oldest of institutions , they 're the most enduring .
if you think about it , constantinople , istanbul , much older than turkey .
alexandria , much older than egypt .
rome , far older than italy .
cities endure the ages .
they are the places where we are born , grow up , are educated , work , marry , pray , play , get old , and in time , die .
they are home .
very different than nation-states , which are abstractions .
we pay taxes , we vote occasionally , we watch the men and women we choose rule rule more or less without us .
not so in those homes known as our towns and cities where we live .
moreover , today , more than half of the world 's population live in cities .
in the developed world , it 's about 78 percent .
more than three out of four people live in urban institutions , urban places , in cities today .
so cities are where the action is .
cities are us . aristotle said in the ancient world , man is a political animal .
i say we are an urban animal .
we are an urban species , at home in our cities .
so to come back to the dilemma , if the dilemma is we have old-fashioned political nation-states unable to govern the world , respond to the global challenges that we face like climate change , then maybe it 's time for mayors to rule the world , for mayors and the citizens and the peoples they represent to engage in global governance .
when i say if mayors ruled the world , when i first came up with that phrase , it occurred to me that actually , they already do .
there are scores of international , inter-city , cross-border institutions , networks of cities in which cities are already , quite quietly , below the horizon , working together to deal with climate change , to deal with security , to deal with immigration , to deal with all of those tough , interdependent problems that we face .
they have strange names : uclg , united cities and local governments ; iclei , the international council for local environmental issues .
and the list goes on : citynet in asia ; city protocol , a new organization out of barcelona that is using the web to share best practices among countries .
and then all the things we know a little better , the u.s. conference of mayors , the mexican conference of mayors , the european conference of mayors .
mayors are where this is happening .
and so the question is , how can we create a world in which mayors and the citizens they represent play a more prominent role ?
well , to understand that , we need to understand why cities are special , why mayors are so different than prime ministers and presidents , because my premise is that a mayor and a prime minister are at the opposite ends of a political spectrum .
to be a prime minister or a president , you have to have an ideology , you have to have a meta-narrative , you have to have a theory of how things work , you have to belong to a party .
independents , on the whole , do n't get elected to office .
but mayors are just the opposite .
mayors are pragmatists , they 're problem-solvers .
their job is to get things done , and if they do n't , they 're out of a job .
mayor nutter of philadelphia said , we could never get away here in philadelphia with the stuff that goes on in washington , the paralysis , the non-action , the inaction .
why ? because potholes have to get filled , because the trains have to run , because kids have to be able to get to school .
and that 's what we have to do , and to do that is about pragmatism in that deep , american sense , reaching outcomes .
washington , beijing , paris , as world capitals , are anything but pragmatic , but real city mayors have to be pragmatists .
they have to get things done , they have to put ideology and religion and ethnicity aside and draw their cities together .
we saw this a couple of decades ago when teddy kollek , the great mayor of jerusalem in the ' 80s and the ' 90s , was besieged one day in his office by religious leaders from all of the backgrounds , christian prelates , rabbis , imams .
they were arguing with one another about access to the holy sites .
and the squabble went on and on , and kollek listened and listened , and he finally said , " gentlemen , spare me your sermons , and i will fix your sewers . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's what mayors do .
they fix sewers , they get the trains running .
there is n't a left or a right way of doing .
boris johnson in london calls himself an anarcho-tory .
strange term , but in some ways , he is .
he 's a libertarian . he 's an anarchist .
he rides to work on a bike , but at the same time , he 's in some ways a conservative .
bloomberg in new york was a democrat , then he was a republican , and finally he was an independent , and said the party label just gets in the way .
luzhkov , 20 years mayor in moscow , though he helped found a party , united party with putin , in fact refused to be defined by the party and finally , in fact , lost his job not under brezhnev , not under gorbachev , but under putin , who wanted a more faithful party follower .
so mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers .
they get things done .
but the second thing about mayors is they are also what i like to call homeboys , or to include the women mayors , homies .
they 're from the neighborhood .
they 're part of the neighborhood . they 're known .
ed koch used to wander around new york city saying , " how am i doing ? "
imagine david cameron wandering around the united kingdom asking , " how am i doing ? " he would n't like the answer .
or putin . or any national leader .
he could ask that because he knew new yorkers and they knew him .
mayors are usually from the places they govern .
it 's pretty hard to be a carpetbagger and be a mayor .
you can run for the senate out of a different state , but it 's hard to do that as a mayor .
and as a result , mayors and city councillors and local authorities have a much higher trust level , and this is the third feature about mayors , than national governing officials .
in the united states , we know the pathetic figures : 18 percent of americans approve of congress and what they do .
and even with a relatively popular president like obama , the figures for the presidency run about 40 , 45 , sometimes 50 percent at best .
the supreme court has fallen way down from what it used to be .
but when you ask , " do you trust your city councillor , do you trust your mayor ? "
the rates shoot up to 70 , 75 , even 80 percent , because they 're from the neighborhood , because the people they work with are their neighbors , because , like mayor booker in newark , and go in and pull people out of a burning building - that happened to mayor booker - or intervene in a mugging in the street as he goes to work because he sees it .
no head of state would be permitted by their security details to do it , nor be in a position to do it .
that 's the difference , and the difference has to do with the character of cities themselves , because cities are profoundly multicultural , open , participatory , democratic , able to work with one another .
when states face each other , china and the u.s. , they face each other like this .
when cities interact , they interact like this .
china and the u.s. , despite the recent meta-meeting in california , are locked in all kinds of anger , resentment , and rivalry for number one .
we heard more about who will be number one .
cities do n't worry about number one .
they have to work together , and they do work together .
they work together in climate change , for example .
organizations like the c40 , like iclei , which i mentioned , have been working together many , many years before copenhagen .
in copenhagen , four or five years ago , 184 nations came together to explain to one another why their sovereignty did n't permit them to deal with the grave , grave crisis of climate change , but the mayor of copenhagen had invited 200 mayors to attend .
they came , they stayed , and they found ways and are still finding ways to work together , city-to-city , and through inter-city organizations .
eighty percent of carbon emissions come from cities , which means cities are in a position to solve the carbon problem , or most of it , whether or not the states of which they are a part make agreements with one another .
and they are doing it .
los angeles cleaned up its port , which was 40 percent of carbon emissions , and as a result got rid of about 20 percent of carbon .
new york has a program to upgrade its old buildings , make them better insulated in the winter , to not leak energy in the summer , not leak air conditioning . that 's having an impact .
bogota , where mayor mockus , when he was mayor , he introduced a transportation system that saved energy , that allowed surface buses to run in effect like subways , express buses with corridors .
it helped unemployment , because people could get across town , and it had a profound impact on climate as well as many other things there .
singapore , as it developed its high-rises and its remarkable public housing , also developed an island of parks , and if you go there , you 'll see how much of it is green land and park land .
cities are doing this , but not just one by one .
they are doing it together .
they are sharing what they do , and they are making a difference by shared best practices .
bike shares , many of you have heard of it , started 20 or 30 years ago in latin america .
now it 's in hundreds of cities around the world .
pedestrian zones , congestion fees , emission limits in cities like california cities have , there 's lots and lots that cities can do even when opaque , stubborn nations refuse to act .
so what 's the bottom line here ?
the bottom line is , we still live politically in a world of borders , a world of boundaries , a world of walls , a world where states refuse to act together .
yet we know that the reality we experience day to day is a world without borders , a world of diseases without borders and doctors without borders , maladies sans frontières , médecins sans frontières , of economics and technology without borders , of education without borders , of terrorism and war without borders .
that is the real world , and unless we find a way to globalize democracy or democratize globalization , we will increasingly not only risk the failure to address all of these transnational problems , but we will risk losing democracy itself , locked up in the old nation-state box , unable to address global problems democratically .
so where does that leave us ?
i 'll tell you . the road to global democracy does n't run through states .
it runs through cities .
democracy was born in the ancient polis .
i believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis .
in that journey from polis to cosmopolis , we can rediscover the power of democracy on a global level .
we can create not a league of nations , which failed , but a league of cities , not a united or a dis-united nations , but united cities of the world .
we can create a global parliament of mayors .
that 's an idea . it 's in my conception of the coming world , but it 's also on the table in city halls in seoul , korea , in amsterdam , in hamburg , and in new york .
mayors are considering that idea of how you can actually constitute a global parliament of mayors , and i love that idea , because a parliament of mayors is a parliament of citizens and a parliament of citizens is a parliament of us , of you and of me .
if ever there were citizens without borders , i think it 's the citizens of ted who show the promise to be those citizens without borders .
i am ready to reach out and embrace a new global democracy , to take back our democracy .
and the only question is , are you ?
thank you so much , my fellow citizens .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's really quite an honor to be here tonight , and i 'm really glad that i stayed here and listened because i 've really been inspired .
and i 'm going to play some songs for you tonight that are , literally , world premieres .
i 've been working on my new record and i 've never played these songs for anybody except the microphone .
this is a song that i wrote about the meaning of technology , which goes perfectly with this gathering .
i started thinking about - when i was in college , especially as a blind person , doing a research paper was a major undertaking .
you had to go to the library , see if you could get them to find the books for you , you know , footnotes and all that .
now you can just go on google . just look it up .
i wish i had that when i was in college .
anyway , this is a song about : we have all this , but what are we going to do with it ?
it 's called " all the answers . "
♫ what is the weather in cincinnati ? ♫ ♫ what is the time in tokyo ? ♫ ♫ who is this little child 's daddy ? ♫ ♫ and who the hell needs to know ? ♫ ♫ why do memories of you linger ♫ ♫ when i 'm trying to reach my goal ? ♫ ♫ and why must i move my fingers ♫ ♫ to the music in my soul ? ♫ ♫ i do n't know . ♫ ♫ i do n't have to know . ♫ ♫ ' cause here i go ... ♫ ♫ and i got all the answers ♫ ♫ right here in my hand . ♫
♫ and i got all the answers ♫ ♫ and i do n't have to understand ♫ ♫ ' cause i got all the answers . ♫ ♫ think i 'll rummage through the century ♫ ♫ while i listen to the sea . ♫ ♫ oh , it 's good to be so free , ♫ ♫ so free . ♫ ♫ who was mayor of chicago ♫ ♫ back in 1964 ? ♫ ♫ and why did shakespeare create iago ♫ ♫ to tear apart a love so pure ? ♫ ♫ how can my dreams be so vivid ♫ ♫ in a psychosonic way ? ♫ ♫ why must i become so livid ♫
♫ about the news i hear today ? ♫ ♫ i do n't know . ♫ ♫ i do n't have to know . ♫ ♫ and here i go ... ♫ ♫ ' cause i got all the answers ♫ ♫ right here in my hand . ♫ ♫ and i got all the answers . ♫ ♫ see , i do n't have to understand ♫ ♫ ' cause i got all the answers . ♫ ♫ i think i 'll browse on through ♫ ♫ the tabloid news ♫ ♫ while i sip my tea . ♫ ♫ mm , it 's good to be so free . ♫ -lrb- trumpet sounds -rrb- ♫ i never ever have to be alone . ♫
♫ i can do it all right here in my home . ♫ ♫ yeah , mm-hmm ... ♫ ♫ everything that 's ever been known , ♫ ♫ i can punch it up right here on my phone . ♫ ♫ freedom train , coming soon ♫ ♫ right here in my living room ♫ ♫ from baton rouge to saskatoon ♫ ♫ and all points in between . ♫ ♫ ' cause i got all the answers ♫ ♫ right here on my screen . ♫ ♫ and i got all the answers , yeah . ♫ ♫ i got every book and magazine . ♫ ♫ i got all , i got all , i got all ... ♫
♫ i got all the answers , ♫ ♫ all the answers , oh yeah . ♫ ♫ uh-huh ... ♫ ♫ but i tell you what i 'm going to do : ♫ ♫ i 'm going to find the capitol of peru ♫ ♫ or the latitude of kathmandu . ♫ ♫ i 'm gonna google it ♫ ♫ ' cause everybody 's doing it . ♫ ♫ and then i 'll rummage through the century . ♫ ♫ i got all , i got all , i got all ... ♫ ♫ i got all the answers . ♫ ♫ yeah , yeah ♫ ♫ i got all the answers . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
whew ! it 's a miracle i did n't make any mistakes on that song .
that 's the first time i 've ever played it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a " feel the fear and do it anyway " kind of thing .
this next song is a song that started out as a dream - a childhood dream .
it was one of the titles that i was sort of thinking about calling my record , except there 's a couple of problems .
one thing is , it 's unpronounceable .
and it 's a made-up word .
it 's called " tembererana . "
and the song is based on what i think was my first childhood attempts to think about invisible forces .
so " tembererana " was these dreams , in which i would be running away from bad feelings - is the only way i can put it .
so this is called " tembererana . "
it 's based on an argentinian rhythm called " carnivalito . "
♫ a dream within a dream , ♫ ♫ a world within a world , ♫ ♫ the sound of a primal scream ♫ ♫ travels out across the land . ♫ ♫ images flickering , ♫ ♫ the sound of the war machine , ♫ ♫ a procession of limousines ♫ ♫ travels slowly across the land . ♫ ♫ another child could use a hand . ♫ ♫ reaching out from within ♫ ♫ tembererana , hey , tembererana ... ♫ ♫ annihilation moves . ♫ ♫ the earth is an open tomb . ♫ ♫ the sound of the final boom ♫ ♫ rumbles fiercely across the land . ♫
♫ fear , you 're the enemy . ♫ ♫ obliterating all but thee . ♫ ♫ you see what you want to see . ♫ ♫ before i 'm blinded , i will toast ♫ ♫ the shade of power that i love most , ♫ ♫ the power of creation . ♫ ♫ tembererana , hey , tembererana ... ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da ♫ ♫ as a child , alone and afraid , ♫ ♫ escaping the impressions every feeling made , ♫ ♫ i would run , run away ♫ ♫ into a world where the good was the aim of the game ♫
♫ and the sum of invisible power ♫ ♫ had a name . ♫ ♫ it 's the same name . ♫ ♫ tembererana , hey , tembererana ... ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da ♫ ♫ tembere , tembere , tembere , tembererana ♫ ♫ tembere , tembere , tembere , tembererana , hey ♫ ♫ tembererana , hey ♫ ♫ tembererana ... ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- so , 120 years ago , dr. röntgen x-rayed his wife 's hand .
quite why he had to pin her fingers to the floor with her brooch , i 'm not sure . it seems a bit extreme to me .
that image was the start of the x-ray technology .
and i 'm still fundamentally using the same principles today .
i 'm interpreting it in a more contemporary manner .
the first shot i ever did was of a soda can , which was to promote a brand that we all know , so i 'm not going to do them any favors by showing you it .
but the second shot i did was my shoes i was wearing on the day .
and i do really like this shot , because it shows all the detritus that 's sort of embedded in the sole of the sneakers .
it was just one of those pot-luck things where you get it right first time .
moving on to something a bit larger , this is an x-ray of a bus .
and the bus is full of people .
it 's actually the same person . it 's just one skeleton .
and back in the ' 60s , they used to teach student radiographers to take x-rays , thankfully not on you and i , but on dead people .
so , i 've still got access to one of these dead people called frieda ; she 's falling apart , i 'm afraid , because she 's very old and fragile .
but everyone on that bus is frieda .
and the bus is taken with a cargo-scanning x-ray , which is the sort of machine you have on borders , which checks for contraband and drugs and bombs and things .
fairly obvious what that is .
so , using large-scale objects does sort of create drama because you just do n't see x-rays of big things that often .
technology is moving ahead , and these large cargo scanner x-rays that work with the digital system are getting better and better and better .
again though , to make it come alive you need , somehow , to add the human element .
and i think the reason this image works , again , is because frieda is driving the bulldozer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- quite a difficult brief , make a pair of men 's pants look beautiful .
but i think the process , in itself , shows how exquisite they are .
fashion - now , i 'm sort of anti-fashion because i do n't show the surface , i show what 's within .
so , the fashionistas do n't really like me because it does n't matter if kate moss is wearing it or if i 'm wearing it , it looks the same .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we all look the same inside , believe me .
the creases in the material and the sort of nuances .
and i show things for really what they are , what they 're made of .
i peel back the layers and expose it .
and if it 's well made i show it , if it 's badly made i show it .
and i 'm sure ross can associate that with design .
the design comes from within .
it 's not just topshop , i get some strange looks when i go out getting my props .
here i was fumbling around in the ladies ' underwear department of a department store , almost got escorted from the premises .
i live opposite a farm . and this was the runt of the litter , a piglet that died .
and what 's really interesting is , if you look at the legs , you 'll notice that the bones have n't fused .
and should that pig have grown , unfortunately it was dead , it would have certainly been dead after i x-rayed it , with the amount of radiation i used anyway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but once the bones had fused together it would have been healthy .
so , that 's an empty parka jacket .
but i quite love the way it 's posed .
nature is my greatest inspiration .
and to carry on with a theme that we 've already touched with is how nature is related to architecture .
if you look at the roof of the eden project , or the british library , it 's all this honeycomb structure .
and i 'm sure those architects are inspired , as i am , by what surrounds us , by nature .
this , in fact , is a victoria water lily leaf that floats on the top of a pond .
an amaryllis flower looking really three-dimensional .
seaweed , ebbing in the tide .
now , how do i do this , and where do i do this , and all of that sort of thing .
this is my new , purpose-built , x-ray shed .
and the door to my x-ray room is made of lead and steel .
it weighs 1,250 kilograms and the only exercise i get is opening and closing it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the walls are 700 millimeters thick of solid dense concrete .
so , i 'm using quite a lot of radiation .
a lot more than you 'd get in a hospital or a vet 's .
and there i am . this is a quite high-powered x-ray machine .
what 's interesting really about x-ray really is , if you think about it , is that that technology is used for looking for cancer or looking for drugs , or looking for contraband or whatever .
and i use that sort of technology to create things that are quite beautiful .
so , still working with film , i 'm afraid .
technology in x-ray where it 's life-size processed , apart from these large cargo-scanning machines , has n't moved on enough for the quality of the image and the resolution to be good enough for what i want to do with it , which is show my pictures big .
so , i have to use a 1980s drum scanner , which was designed in the days when everyone shot photographs on film .
they scan each individual x-ray .
and this shows how i do my process of same-size x-rays .
so , this is , again , my daughter 's dress .
still has the tag in it from me buying it , so i can take it back to the shop if she did n't like it .
but there are four x-ray plates .
you can see them overlapping .
so , when you move forward from something fairly small , a dress which is this size , onto something like that which is done in exactly the same process , you can see that that is a lot of work .
in fact , that is three months solid x-raying .
there is over 500 separate components .
boeing sent me a 747 in containers .
and i sent them back an x-ray .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i kid you not .
okay , so frieda is my dead skeleton .
this , unfortunately , is basically two pictures .
one on the extreme right is a photograph of an american footballer .
the one on the left is an x-ray .
but this time i had to use a real body .
because i needed all the skin tissue to make it look real , to make it look like it was a real athlete .
so , here i had to use a recently deceased body .
and getting a hold of that was extremely difficult and laborious .
but people do donate their bodies to art and science .
and when they do , i 'm in the queue .
so , i like to use them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the coloring , so coloring adds another level to the x-rays .
it makes it more organic , more natural .
it 's whatever takes my fancy , really .
it 's not accurately colored to how it is in real life .
that flower does n't come in bright orange , i do n't think .
but i just like it in bright orange .
and also with something technical , like these are dj decks , it sort of adds another level .
it makes a two dimensional image look more three dimensional .
the most difficult things to x-ray , the most technically challenging things to x-ray are the lightest things , the most delicate things .
to get the detail in a feather , believe me , if there is anyone out here who knows anything about x-rays , that 's quite a challenge .
i 'm now going to show you a short film , i 'll step to the side .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- the thing in there is very dangerous .
if you touch that , you could possibly die through radiation poisoning .
in my career i 've had two exposures to radiation , which is two too many , because it stays with you for life .
it 's cumulative .
-lrb- music -rrb- it has human connotations .
the fact that it 's a child 's toy that we all recognize , but also it looks like it 's a robot , and it comes from a sci-fi genus .
it 's a surprise that it has humanity , but also man-made , future , alien associations .
and it 's just a bit spooky .
-lrb- music -rrb- the bus was done with a cargo-scanning x-ray machine , which is used on the borders between countries , looking for contraband and illegal immigrants .
the lorry goes in front of it . and it takes slices of x-rays through the lorry .
and that 's how this was done . it 's actually slice , slice .
it 's a bit like a ct scanner in a hospital . slices .
and then if you look carefully , there is all little things .
he 's got headphones on , reading the newspaper , got a hat on , glasses , got a bag .
so , these little details help to make it work , make it real .
-lrb- music -rrb- the problem with using living people is that to take an x-ray , if i x-ray you , you get exposed to radiation .
so , to avoid that - i have to avoid it somehow - is i use dead people .
now , that 's a variety of things , from recently deceased bodies , to a skeleton that was used by student radiographers to train in taking x-rays of the human body , at different densities .
-lrb- music -rrb- i have very high-tech equipment of gloves , scissors and a bucket .
-lrb- music -rrb- i will show how the capillary action works , how it feeds , i 'll be able to get all the cells inside that stem .
because it transfers food from its roots to its leaves .
look at this monster .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's so basic . it just grows wild .
that 's what i really like about it , the fact that i have n't got to go and buy it , and it has n't been genetically modified at all .
it 's just happening .
and the x-ray shows how beautiful nature can be .
not that that is particularly beautiful when you look at it with the human eye , the way the leaves form . they 're curling back on each other .
so the x-ray will show the overlaps in these little corners .
the thicker the object , the more radiation it needs , and the more time it needs .
the lighter the object , the less radiation .
sometimes you keep the time up , because the time gives you detail .
the longer the exposure goes on for , the more detail you get .
-lrb- music -rrb- if you look at this , just the tube , it is quite bright .
but i could get a bit darker in the tube , but everything else would suffer .
so , these leaves at the edge would start to disappear .
what i like is how hard the edges are , how sharp .
yeah , i 'm quite pleased with it .
-lrb- music -rrb- i travel beyond the surface and show something for what it 's worth , for what it 's really made of , how it really works .
but also i find that i 've got the benefit of taking away all the surface , which is things that people are used to seeing .
and that 's the sort of thing i 've been doing .
i 've got the opportunity now to show you what i 'm going to be doing in the future .
this is a commercial application of my most recent work .
and what 's good about this , i think , is that it 's like a moment in time , like you 've turned around , you 've got x-ray vision and you 've taken a picture with the x-ray camera .
unfortunately i have n't got x-ray vision .
i do dream in x-ray . i see my projects in my sleep .
and i know what they 're going to look like in x-ray and i 'm not far off .
so , what am i doing in the future ?
well , this year is the 50th anniversary of issigonis 's mini , which is one of my favorite cars .
so , i 've taken it apart , component by component , months and months and months of work .
and with this image , i 'm going to be displaying it in the victoria and albert museum as a light box , which is actually attached to the car .
so , i 've got to saw the car in half , down the middle , not an easy task , in itself .
and then , so you can get in the driver 's side , sit down , and up against you is a wall .
and if you get out and walk around to the other side of the car , you see a life-sized light box of the car showing you how it works .
and i 'm going to take that idea and apply it to other sort of iconic things from my life .
like , my first computer was a big movement in my life .
and i had a mac classic . and it 's a little box .
and i think that would look quite neat as an x-ray .
i 'm also looking to take my work from the two-dimensional form to a more three-dimensional form .
and this is quite a good way of doing it .
i 'm also working now with x-ray video .
so , if you can imagine , some of these flowers , and they 're actually moving and growing and you can film that in x-ray , should be quite stunning .
but that 's it . i 'm done . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is ursus wehrli , and i would like to talk to you this morning about my project , tidying up art .
first of all - any questions so far ?
first of all , i have to say i 'm not from around here .
i 'm from a completely different cultural area , maybe you noticed ?
i mean , i 'm wearing a tie , first . and then secondly , i 'm a little bit nervous because i 'm speaking in a foreign language , and i want to apologize in advance , for any mistakes i might make .
because i 'm from switzerland , and i just do n't hope you think this is swiss german i 'm speaking now here . this is just what it sounds like if we swiss try to speak american .
but do n't worry - i do n't have trouble with english , as such .
i mean , it 's not my problem , it 's your language after all .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i am fine . after this presentation here at ted , i can simply go back to switzerland , and you have to go on talking like this all the time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 've been asked by the organizers to read from my book .
it 's called " tidying up art " and it 's , as you can see , it 's more or less a picture book .
so the reading would be over very quickly .
but since i 'm here at ted , i decided to hold my talk here in a more modern way , in the spirit of ted here , and i managed to do some slides here for you .
i 'd like to show them around so we can just , you know - -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , i managed to prepare for you some enlarged pictures - even better .
so tidying up art , i mean , i have to say , that 's a relatively new term .
you wo n't be familiar with it .
i mean , it 's a hobby of mine that i 've been indulging in for the last few years , and it all started out with this picture of the american artist , donald baechler i had hanging at home . i had to look at it every day and after a while i just could n't stand the mess anymore this guy was looking at all day long .
yeah , i kind of felt sorry for him .
and it seemed to me even he felt really bad facing these unorganized red squares day after day .
so i decided to give him a little support , and brought some order into neatly stacking the blocks on top of each other .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . and i think he looks now less miserable .
and it was great . with this experience , i started to look more closely at modern art . then i realized how , you know , the world of modern art is particularly topsy-turvy .
and i can show here a very good example .
it 's actually a simple one , but it 's a good one to start with .
it 's a picture by paul klee .
and we can see here very clearly , it 's a confusion of color .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . the artist does n't really seem to know where to put the different colors .
the various pictures here of the various elements of the picture - the whole thing is unstructured .
we do n't know , maybe mr. klee was probably in a hurry , i mean - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - maybe he had to catch a plane , or something .
we can see here he started out with orange , and then he already ran out of orange , and here we can see he decided to take a break for a square .
and i would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we can see now what was barely recognizable in the original : 17 red and orange squares are juxtaposed with just two green squares .
yeah , that 's great .
so i mean , that 's just tidying up for beginners .
i would like to show you here a picture which is a bit more advanced .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what can you say ? what a mess .
i mean , you see , everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space .
if my room back home had looked like this , my mother would have grounded me for three days .
so i 'd like to - i wanted to reintroduce some structure into that picture .
and that 's really advanced tidying up .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , you 're right . sometimes people clap at this point , but that 's actually more in switzerland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we swiss are famous for chocolate and cheese . our trains run on time .
we are only happy when things are in order .
but to go on , here is a very good example to see .
this is a picture by joan miro .
and yeah , we can see the artist has drawn a few lines and shapes and dropped them any old way onto a yellow background .
and yeah , it 's the sort of thing you produce when you 're doodling on the phone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is my - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you can see now the whole thing takes up far less space .
it 's more economical and also more efficient .
with this method mr. miro could have saved canvas for another picture .
but i can see in your faces that you 're still a little bit skeptical .
so that you can just appreciate how serious i am about all this , i brought along the patents , the specifications for some of these works , because i 've had my working methods patented at the eidgenössische amt für geistiges eigentum in bern , switzerland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll just quote from the specification .
" laut den kunstprüfer dr. albrecht - " it 's not finished yet .
" laut den kunstprüfer dr. albrecht götz von ohlenhusen wird die verfahrensweise rechtlich geschützt welche die kunst durch spezifisch aufgeräumte regelmässigkeiten des allgemeinen formenschatzes neue wirkungen zu erzielen möglich wird . "
ja , well i could have translated that , but you would have been none the wiser .
i 'm not sure myself what it means but it sounds good anyway .
i just realized it 's important how one introduces new ideas to people , that 's why these patents are sometimes necessary .
i would like to do a short test with you .
everyone is sitting in quite an orderly fashion here this morning .
so i would like to ask you all to raise your right hand . yeah .
the right hand is the one we write with , apart from the left-handers .
and now , i 'll count to three . i mean , it still looks very orderly to me .
now , i 'll count to three , and on the count of three i 'd like you all to shake hands with the person behind you . ok ?
one , two , three .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can see now , that 's a good example : even behaving in an orderly , systematic way can sometimes lead to complete chaos .
so we can also see that very clearly in this next painting .
this is a painting by the artist , niki de saint phalle .
and i mean , in the original it 's completely unclear to see what this tangle of colors and shapes is supposed to depict .
but in the tidied up version , it 's plain to see that it 's a sunburnt woman playing volleyball .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , it 's a - this one here , that 's much better .
that 's a picture by keith haring .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think it does n't matter .
so , i mean , this picture has not even got a proper title .
it 's called " untitled " and i think that 's appropriate .
so , in the tidied-up version we have a sort of keith haring spare parts shop .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is keith haring looked at statistically .
one can see here quite clearly , you can see we have 25 pale green elements , of which one is in the form of a circle .
or here , for example , we have 27 pink squares with only one pink curve .
i mean , that 's interesting . one could extend this sort of statistical analysis to cover all mr. haring 's various works , in order to establish in which period the artist favored pale green circles or pink squares .
and the artist himself could also benefit from this sort of listing procedure by using it to estimate how many pots of paint he 's likely to need in the future .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one can obviously also make combinations .
for example , with the keith haring circles and kandinsky 's dots .
you can add them to all the squares of paul klee .
in the end , one has a list with which one then can arrange .
then you categorize it , then you file it , put that file in a filing cabinet , put it in your office and you can make a living doing it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , from my own experience . so i 'm - -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , i mean , here we have some artists that are a bit more structured . it 's not too bad .
this is jasper johns . we can see here he was practicing with his ruler .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i think it could still benefit from more discipline .
and i think the whole thing adds up much better if you do it like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and here , that 's one of my favorites .
tidying up rene magritte - this is really fun .
you know , there is a - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm always being asked what inspired me to embark on all this .
it goes back to a time when i was very often staying in hotels .
so once i had the opportunity to stay in a ritzy , five-star hotel .
and you know , there you had this little sign - i put this little sign outside the door every morning that read , " please tidy room . " i do n't know if you have them over here .
so actually , my room there has n't been tidied once daily , but three times a day .
so after a while i decided to have a little fun , and before leaving the room each day i 'd scatter a few things around the space .
like books , clothes , toothbrush , etc . and it was great .
by the time i returned everything had always been neatly returned to its place .
but then one morning , i hang the same little sign onto that picture by vincent van gogh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you have to say this room had n't been tidied up since 1888 .
and when i returned it looked like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , at least it is now possible to do some vacuuming .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok , i mean , i can see there are always people that like reacting that one or another picture has n't been properly tidied up . so we can make a short test with you .
this is a picture by rene magritte , and i 'd like you all to inwardly - like in your head , that is - to tidy that up . so it 's possible that some of you would make it like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah ? i would actually prefer to do it more this way .
some people would make apple pie out of it .
but it 's a very good example to see that the whole work was more of a handicraft endeavor that involved the very time-consuming job of cutting out the various elements and sticking them back in new arrangements .
and it 's not done , as many people imagine , with the computer , otherwise it would look like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i 've been able to tidy up pictures that i 've wanted to tidy up for a long time .
here is a very good example . take jackson pollock , for example .
it 's - oh , no , it 's - that 's a really hard one .
but after a while , i just decided here to go all the way and put the paint back into the cans .
-lrb- applause -rrb- or you could go into three-dimensional art .
here we have the fur cup by meret oppenheim .
here i just brought it back to its original state .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but yeah , and it 's great , you can even go , you know - or we have this pointillist movement for those of you who are into art .
the pointillist movement is that kind of paintings where everything is broken down into dots and pixels .
and then i - this sort of thing is ideal for tidying up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i once applied myself to the work of the inventor of that method , georges seurat , and i collected together all his dots .
and now they 're all in here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can count them afterwards , if you like .
you see , that 's the wonderful thing about the tidy up art idea : it 's new . so there is no existing tradition in it .
there is no textbooks , i mean , not yet , anyway .
i mean , it 's " the future we will create . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but to round things up i would like to show you just one more .
this is the village square by pieter bruegel .
that 's how it looks like when you send everyone home .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , maybe you 're asking yourselves where old bruegel 's people went ?
of course , they 're not gone . they 're all here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just piled them up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'm - yeah , actually i 'm kind of finished at that moment .
and for those who want to see more , i 've got my book downstairs in the bookshop .
and i 'm happy to sign it for you with any name of any artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but before leaving i would like to show you , i 'm working right now on another - in a related field with my tidying up art method . i 'm working in a related field .
and i started to bring some order into some flags .
here - that 's just my new proposal here for the union jack .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then maybe before i leave you ...
yeah , i think , after you have seen that i have to leave anyway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , that was a hard one . i could n't find a way to tidy that up properly , so i just decided to make it a little bit more simpler .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm an american , which means , generally , i ignore football unless it involves guys my size or bruno 's size running into each other at extremely high speeds .
that said , it 's been really hard to ignore football for the last couple of weeks .
i go onto twitter , there are all these strange words that i 've never heard before : fifa , vuvuzela , weird jokes about octopi .
but the one that 's really been sort of stressing me out , that i have n't been able to figure out , is this phrase " cala a boca , galvao . "
if you 've gone onto twitter in the last couple of weeks , you 've probably seen this .
it 's been a major trending topic .
being a monolingual american , i obviously do n't know what the phrase means .
so i went onto twitter , and i asked some people if they could explain to me " cala a boca , galvao . "
and fortunately , my brazilian friends were more than ready to help .
they explained that the galvao bird is a rare and endangered parrot that 's in terrible , terrible danger .
in fact , i 'll let them tell you a bit more about it .
narrator : a word about galvao , a very rare kind of bird native to brazil .
every year , more than 300,000 galvao birds are killed during carnival parades .
ethan zuckerman : obviously , this is a tragic situation , and it actually gets worse .
it turns out that , not only is the galvao parrot very attractive , useful for headdresses , it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties , which means that there 's a terrible problem with galvao abuse .
some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting galvao .
and it 's terribly endangered .
the good news about this is that the global community - again , my brazilian friends tell me - is pitching in to help out .
it turns out that lady gaga has released a new single - actually five or six new singles , as near as i can tell - titled " cala a boca , galvao . "
and my brazilian friends tell me that if i just tweet the phrase " cala a boca , galvao , " 10 cents will be given to a global campaign to save this rare and beautiful bird .
now , most of you have figured out that this was a prank , and actually a very , very good one .
" cala a boca , galvao " actually means something very different .
in portugese , it means " shut your mouth , galvao . "
and it specifically refers to this guy , galvao bueno , who 's the lead soccer commentator for rede globo .
and what i understand from my brazilian friends is that this guy is just a cliche machine .
he can ruin the most interesting match by just spouting cliche again and again and again .
so brazilians went to that first match against north korea , put up this banner , started a twitter campaign and tried to convince the rest of us to tweet the phrase : " cala a boca , galvao . "
and in fact , were so successful at this that it topped twitter for two weeks .
now there 's a couple - there 's a couple of lessons that you can take from this .
and the first lesson , which i think is a worthwhile one , is that you can not go wrong asking people to be active online , so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase .
so as long as activism is that simple , it 's pretty easy to get away with .
the other thing you can take from this , by the way , is that there are a lot of brazilians on twitter .
there 's more than five million of them .
as far as national representation , 11 percent of brazilian internet users are on twitter .
that 's a much higher number than in the u.s. or u.k.
next to japan , it 's the second most represented by population .
now if you 're using twitter or other social networks , and you did n't realize this was a space with a lot of brazilians in it , you 're like most of us .
because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with .
and if you are like me , a big , geeky , white , american guy , you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky , white , american guys .
and you do n't necessarily have the sense that twitter is in fact a very heavily brazilian space .
it 's also extremely surprising to many americans , a heavily african-american space .
twitter recently did some research .
they looked at their local population .
they believe that 24 percent of american twitter users are african-american .
that 's about twice as high as african-americans are represented in the population .
and again , that was very shocking to many twitter users , but it should n't be .
and the reason it should n't be is that on any day you can go into trending topics .
and you tend to find topics that are almost entirely african-american conversations .
this was a visualization done by fernando viegas and martin wattenberg , two amazing visualization designers , who looked at a weekend 's worth of twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations - and in ways that you would n't expect .
it turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation , that cookout is a mostly black conversation .
and what 's crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on twitter , it 's literally a quick click away .
you click on that cookout tag , there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it .
but generally speaking , most of us do n't .
we end up within these filter bubbles , as my friend eli pariser calls them , where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know .
and we tend not to see that wider picture .
now for me , i 'm surprised by this , because this was n't how the internet was supposed to be .
if you go back into the early days of the internet , when cyber-utopians like nick negroponte were writing big books like " being digital , " the prediction was that the internet was going to be an incredibly powerful force to smooth out cultural differences , to put us all on a common field of one fashion or another .
negroponte started his book with a story about how hard it is to build connections in the world of atoms .
he 's at a technology conference in florida .
and he 's looking at something really , truly absurd , which is bottles of evian water on the table .
and negroponte says this is crazy .
this is the old economy .
it 's the economy of moving these heavy , slow atoms over long distances that 's very difficult to do .
we 're heading to the future of bits , where everything is speedy , it 's weightless .
it can be anywhere in the world at any time .
and it 's going to change the world as we know it .
now , negroponte has been right about a lot of things .
he 's totally wrong about this one .
it turns out that in many cases atoms are much more mobile than bits .
if i walk into a store in the united states , it 's very , very easy for me to buy water that 's bottled in fiji , shipped at great expense to the united states .
it 's actually surprisingly hard for me to see a fijian feature film .
it 's really difficult for me to listen to fijian music .
it 's extremely difficult for me to get fijian news , which is strange , because actually there 's an enormous amount going on in fiji .
there 's a coup government . there 's a military government .
there 's crackdowns on the press .
it 's actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment .
here 's what i think is going on .
i think that we tend to look a lot at the infrastructure of globalization .
we look at the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world .
and that 's a framework that includes things like airline routes .
it includes things like the internet cables .
we look at a map like this one , and it looks like the entire world is flat because everything is a hop or two away .
you can get on a flight in london , you can end up in bangalore later today .
two hops , you 're in suva , the capitol of fiji .
it 's all right there .
when you start looking at what actually flows on top of these networks , you get a very different picture .
you start looking at how the global plane flights move , and you suddenly discover that the world is n't even close to flat .
it 's extremely lumpy .
there are parts of the world that are very , very well connected .
there 's basically a giant pathway in the sky between london and new york .
but look at this map , and you can watch this for , you know , two or three minutes .
you wo n't see very many planes go from south america to africa .
and you 'll discover that there are parts of the globe that are systematically cut off .
when we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible , and we look at what actually happens , we start realizing that the world does n't work quite the same way that we think it does .
so here 's the problem that i 've been interested in in the last decade or so .
the world is , in fact , getting more global .
it 's getting more connected .
more of problems are global in scale .
more of our economics is global in scale .
and our media is less global by the day .
if you watched a television broadcast in the united states in the 1970s , 35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news on a nightly new broadcast .
that 's down to about 12 to 15 percent .
and this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world .
here 's a slide that alisa miller showed at a previous ted talk .
alisa 's the president of public radio international .
and she made a cartogram , which is basically a distorted map based on what american television news casts looked at for a month .
and you see that when you distort a map based on attention , the world within american television news is basically reduced to this giant bloated u.s.
and a couple of other countries which we 've invaded .
and that 's basically what our media is about .
and before you conclude that this is just a function of american tv news - which is dreadful , and i agree that it 's dreadful - i 've been mapping elite media like the new york times , and i get the same thing .
when you look at the new york times , you look at other elite media , what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we 've invaded .
it turns out that new media is n't necessarily helping us all that much .
here 's a map made by mark graham who 's down the street at the oxford internet institute .
a this is a map of articles in wikipedia that have been geo-coded .
and you 'll notice that there 's a very heavy bias towards north america and western europe .
even within wikipedias , where we 're creating their own content online , there 's a heavy bias towards the place where a lot of the wikipedia authors are based , rather than to the rest of the world .
in the u.k. , you can get up , you can pick up your computer when you get out of this session , you could read a newspaper from india or from australia , from canada , god forbid from the u.s.
you probably wo n't .
if you look at online media consumption - in this case , in the top 10 users of the internet - more than 95 percent of the news readership is on domestic news sites .
it 's one of these rare cases where the u.s. is actually slightly better than -lsb- the u.k. -rsb- , because we actually like reading your media , rather than vice versa .
so all of this starts leading me to think that we 're in a state that i refer to as imaginary cosmopolitanism .
we look at the internet .
we think we 're getting this wide view of the globe .
we occasionally stumble onto a page in chinese , and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world .
and we forget that most of the time we 're checking boston red sox scores .
so this is a real problem - not just because the red sox are having a bad year - but it 's a real problem because , as we 're discussing here at ted , the real problems in the world the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope , they require global conversations to get to global solutions .
this is a problem we have to solve .
so here 's the good news .
for six years , i 've been hanging out with these guys .
this is a group called global voices .
this is a team of bloggers from around the world .
our mission was to fix the world 's media .
we started in 2004 .
you might have noticed , we have n't done all that well so far .
nor do i think we are by ourselves , actually going to solve the problem .
but the more that i think about it , the more that i think that a few things that we have learned along the way are interesting lessons for how we would rewire if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world .
the first thing you have to consider is that there are parts of the world that are dark spots in terms of attention .
in this case - the map of the world at night by nasa - they 're dark literally because of lack of electricity .
and i used to think that a dark spot on this map basically meant you 're not going to get media from there because there are more basic needs .
what i 'm starting to realize is that you can get media , it 's just an enormous amount of work , and you need an enormous amount of encouragement .
one of those dark spots is madagascar , a country which is generally better known for the dreamworks film than it is actually known for the lovely people who live there .
and so the people who founded foko club in madagascar were n't actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country .
they were doing something much simpler .
it was a club to learn english and to learn computers and the internet .
but what happened was that madagascar went through a violent coup .
most independent media was shut down .
and the high school students who were learning to blog through foko club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations , the violence , everything that was going on within this country .
so a very , very small program designed to get people in front of computers , publishing their own thoughts , publishing independent media , ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country .
now the trick with this is that i 'm guessing most people here do n't speak malagasy .
i 'm also guessing that most of you do n't even speak chinese - which is sort of sad if you think about it , as it 's now the most represented language on the internet .
fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this .
if you 're using google chrome and you go to a chinese language site , you notice this really cute box at the top , which automatically detects that the page is in chinese and very quickly at a mouse click will give you a translation of the page .
unfortunately , it 's a machine translation of the page .
and while google is very , very good with some languages , it 's actually pretty dreadful with chinese .
and the results can be pretty funny .
what you really want - what i really want , is eventually the ability to push a button and have this queued so a human being can translate this .
and if you think this is absurd , it 's not .
there 's a group right now in china called yeeyan .
and yeeyan is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day .
they look for the most interesting content in the english language .
they translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers , major websites .
they put it online for free .
it 's the project of a guy named zhang lei , who was living in the united states during the lhasa riots and who could n't believe how biased american media coverage was .
and he said , " if there 's one thing i can do , i can start translating , so that people between these countries start understanding each other a little bit better . "
and my question to you is : if yeeyan can line up 150,000 people to translate the english internet into chinese , where 's the english language yeeyan ?
who 's going after chinese , which now has 400 million internet users out there ?
my guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say .
so even if we can find a way to translate from chinese , there 's no guarantee that we 're going to find it .
when we look for information online , we basically have two strategies .
we use a lot of search .
and search is terrific if you know what you 're looking for .
but if what you 're looking for is serendipity , if you want to stumble onto something that you did n't know you needed , our main philosophy is to look to our social networks , to look for our friends .
what are they looking at ? maybe we should be looking at it .
the problem with this is that essentially what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock .
you end up flocking with a lot of people who are probably similar to you , who have similar interests .
and it 's very , very hard to get information from the other flocks , from the other parts of the world where people getting together and talking about their own interests .
to do this , at a certain point , you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock .
you need a guide .
so this is amira al hussaini . she is the middle east editor for global voices .
she has one of the hardest jobs in the world .
not only does she have to keep our israeli and palestinian contributors from killing each other , she has to figure out what is going to interest you about the middle east .
and in that sense of trying to get you out of your normal orbit , and to try to get you to pay attention to a story about someone who 's given up smoking for the month of ramadan , she has to know something about a global audience .
she has to know something about what stories are available .
basically , she 's a deejay .
she 's a skilled human curator who knows what material is available to her , who 's able to listen to the audience , and who 's able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another .
i do n't think this is necessarily an algorithmic process .
i think what 's great about the internet is that it actually makes it much easier for deejays to reach a wider audience .
i know amira .
i can ask her what to read .
but with the internet , she 's in a position where she can tell a lot of people what to read .
and you can listen to her as well , if this is a way that you 're interested in having your web widened .
so once you start widening like this , once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots , once you start translating , once you start curating , you end up in some really weird places .
this is an image from pretty much my favorite blog , which is afrigadget .
and afrigadget is a blog that looks at technology in an africa context .
and specifically , it 's looking at a blacksmith in kibera in nairobi , who is turning the shaft of a landrover into a cold chisel .
and when you look at this image , you might find yourself going , " why would i conceivably care about this ? "
and the truth is , this guy can probably explain this to you .
this is erik hersman . you guys may have seen him around the conference .
he goes by the moniker white african .
he 's both a very well known american geek , but he 's also kenyan ; he was born in sudan , grew up in kenya .
he is a bridge figure .
he is someone who literally has feet in both worlds - one in the world of the african technology community , one in the world of the american technology community .
and so he 's able to tell a story about this blacksmith in kibera and turn it into a story about repurposing technology , about innovating from constraint , about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials .
he knows one world , and he 's finding a way to communicate it to another world , both of which he has deep connections to .
these bridge figures , i 'm pretty well convinced , are the future of how we try to make the world wider through using the web .
but the trick with bridges is , ultimately , you need someone to cross them .
and that 's where we start talking about xenophiles .
so if i found myself in the nfl , i suspect i would spend my off-season nursing my wounds , enjoying my house , so on and so forth - possibly recording a hip-hop album .
dhani jones , who is the middle linebacker for the cincinnati bengals , has a slightly different approach to the off-season .
dhani has a television show .
it 's called " dhani tackles the globe . "
and every week on this television show , dhani travels to a different nation of the world .
he finds a local sporting team .
he trains with them for a week , and he plays a match with them .
and his reason for this is not just that he wants to master muay thai boxing .
it 's because , for him , sport is the language that allows him to encounter the full width and wonder of the world .
for some of us it might be music . for some of us it might be food .
for a lot of us it might be literature or writing .
but there are all these different techniques that allow you to go out and look at the world and find your place within it .
the goal of my talk here is not to persuade the people in this room to embrace your xenophilia .
my guess - given that you 're at a conference called tedglobal - is that most of you are xenophiles , whether or not you use that term .
my challenge instead is this .
it 's not enough to make the personal decision that you want a wider world .
we have to figure out how to rewire the systems that we have .
we have to fix our media .
we have to fix the internet . we have to fix our education .
we have to fix our immigration policy .
we need to look at ways of creating serendipity , of making translation pervasive , and we need to find ways to embrace and celebrate these bridge figures .
and we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles .
that 's what i 'm trying to do . i need your help .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness , so if it was one , two , three , four , it 's you , sir .
you . yeah . -lrb- laughter -rrb- with the weird teeth . and you next to him . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you know who you are .
actually , that whole row is n't right . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's not good . hi . yeah . real bad . do n't even look at me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i am one of the one in four . thank you .
i think i inherit it from my mother , who , used to crawl around the house on all fours .
she had two sponges in her hand , and then she had two tied to her knees . my mother was completely absorbent . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and she would crawl around behind me going , " who brings footprints into a building ? ! "
so that was kind of a clue that things were n't right .
so before i start , i would like to thank the makers of lamotrigine , sertraline , and reboxetine , because without those few simple chemicals , i would not be vertical today .
so how did it start ?
my mental illness - well , i 'm not even going to talk about my mental illness .
what am i going to talk about ? okay .
i always dreamt that , when i had my final breakdown , it would be because i had a deep kafkaesque existentialist revelation , or that maybe cate blanchett would play me and she would win an oscar for it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but that 's not what happened . i had my breakdown during my daughter 's sports day .
there were all the parents sitting in a parking lot eating food out of the back of their car - only the english - eating their sausages . they loved their sausages . -lrb- laughter -rrb- lord and lady rigor mortis were nibbling on the tarmac , and then the gun went off and all the girlies started running , and all the mummies went , " run ! run chlamydia ! run ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " run like the wind , veruca ! run ! "
and all the girlies , girlies running , running , running , everybody except for my daughter , who was just standing at the starting line , just waving , because she did n't know she was supposed to run .
so i took to my bed for about a month , and when i woke up i found i was institutionalized , and when i saw the other inmates , i realized that i had found my people , my tribe . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because they became my only friends , they became my friends , because very few people that i knew - well , i was n't sent a lot of cards or flowers . i mean , if i had had a broken leg or i was with child i would have been inundated , but all i got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up .
perk up .
because i did n't think of that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- because , you know , the one thing , one thing that you get with this disease , this one comes with a package , is you get a real sense of shame , because your friends go , " oh come on , show me the lump , show me the x-rays , " and of course you 've got nothing to show , so you 're , like , really disgusted with yourself because you 're thinking , " i 'm not being carpet-bombed . i do n't live in a township . "
so you start to hear these abusive voices , but you do n't hear one abusive voice , you hear about a thousand - 100,000 abusive voices , like if the devil had tourette 's , that 's what it would sound like .
but we all know in here , you know , there is no devil , there are no voices in your head .
you know that when you have those abusive voices , all those little neurons get together and in that little gap you get a real toxic " i want to kill myself " kind of chemical , and if you have that over and over again on a loop tape , you might have yourself depression .
oh , and that 's not even the tip of the iceberg .
if you get a little baby , and you abuse it verbally , its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just does n't grow , so you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic .
if a soldier sees his friend blown up , his brain goes into such high alarm that he ca n't actually put the experience into words , so he just feels the horror over and over again .
so here 's my question . my question is , how come when people have mental damage , it 's always an active imagination ?
how come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy , except the brain ?
i 'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain , because i know you like that here at ted , so if you just give me a minute here , okay .
okay , let me just say , there 's some good news .
there is some good news . first of all , let me say , we 've come a long , long way .
we started off as a teeny , teeny little one-celled amoeba , tiny , just sticking onto a rock , and now , voila , the brain .
here we go . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this little baby has a lot of horsepower .
it comes completely conscious . it 's got state-of-the-art lobes .
we 've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world .
we got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world .
here we 've got a little bit of long-term memory , so , you know that night you want to forget , when you got really drunk ? bye-bye ! gone . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so actually , it 's filled with 100 billion neurons just zizzing away , electrically transmitting information , zizzing , zizzing . i 'm going to give you a little side view here .
i do n't know if you can get that here . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , zizzing away , and so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and for every one - i know , i drew this myself . thank you .
for every one single neuron , you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it , and every time you learn something , or you have an experience , that bush grows , you know , that bush of information .
can you imagine , every human being is carrying that equipment , even paris hilton ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- go figure .
but i got a little bad news for you folks . i got some bad news .
this is n't for the one in four . this is for the four in four .
we are not equipped for the 21st century .
evolution did not prepare us for this . we just do n't have the bandwidth , and for people who say , oh , they 're having a nice day , they 're perfectly fine , they 're more insane than the rest of us .
because i 'll show you where there might be a few glitches in evolution . okay , let me just explain this to you .
when we were ancient man - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - millions of years ago , and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator , okay ? - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we would - thank you . i drew these myself . -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much . thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . anyway , we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol , and then we 'd kill or be killed , we 'd eat or we 'd be eaten , and then suddenly we 'd de-fuel , and we 'd go back to normal . okay .
so the problem is , nowadays , with modern man - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - when we feel in danger , we still fill up with our own chemical but because we ca n't kill traffic wardens - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - or eat estate agents , the fuel just stays in our body over and over , so we 're in a constant state of alarm , a constant state . and here 's another thing that happened .
about 150,000 years ago , when language came online , we started to put words to this constant emergency , so it was n't just , " oh my god , there 's a saber-toothed tiger , " which could be , it was suddenly , " oh my god , i did n't send the email . oh my god , my thighs are too fat .
oh my god , everybody can see i 'm stupid . i did n't get invited to the christmas party ! "
so you 've got this nagging loop tape that goes over and over again that drives you insane , so , you see what the problem is ? what once made you safe now drives you insane .
i 'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news , but somebody has to be .
your pets are happier than you are . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so kitty cat , meow , happy happy happy , human beings , screwed . -lrb- laughter -rrb- completely and utterly - so , screwed .
but my point is , if we do n't talk about this stuff , and we do n't learn how to deal with our lives , it 's not going to be one in four . it 's going to be four in four who are really , really going to get ill in the upstairs department .
and while we 're at it , can we please stop the stigma ?
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
" iran is israel 's best friend , and we do not intend to change our position in relation to tehran . "
believe it or not , this is a quote from an israeli prime minister , but it 's not ben-gurion or golda meir from the era of the shah .
it 's actually from yitzhak rabin .
the year is 1987 .
ayatollah khomeini is still alive , and much like ahmadinejad today , he 's using the worst rhetoric against israel .
yet , rabin referred to iran as a geostrategic friend .
today , when we hear the threats of war and the high rhetoric , we 're oftentimes led to believe that this is yet another one of those unsolvable middle eastern conflicts with roots as old as the region itself .
nothing could be further from the truth , and i hope today to show you why that is .
the relations between the iranian and the jewish people throughout history has actually been quite positive , starting in 539 b.c. , when king cyrus the great of persia liberated the jewish people from their babylonian captivity .
a third of the jewish population stayed in babylonia .
they 're today 's iraqi jews .
a third migrated to persia .
they 're today 's iranian jews , still 25,000 of them living in iran , making them the largest jewish community in the middle east outside of israel itself .
and a third returned to historic palestine , did the second rebuilding of the temple in jerusalem , financed , incidentally , by persian tax money .
but even in modern times , relations have been close at times .
rabin 's statement was a reflection of decades of security and intelligence collaboration between the two , which in turn was born out of perception of common threats .
both states feared the soviet union and strong arab states such as egypt and iraq .
and , in addition , the israeli doctrine of the periphery , the idea that israel 's security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-arab states in the periphery of the region in order to balance the arab states in its vicinity .
now , from the shah 's perspective , though , he wanted to keep this as secret as possible , so when yitzhak rabin , for instance , traveled to iran in the ' 70s , he usually wore a wig so that no one would recognize him .
the iranians built a special tarmac at the airport in tehran , far away from the central terminal , so that no one would notice the large number of israeli planes shuttling between tel aviv and tehran .
now , did all of this end with the islamic revolution in 1979 ?
in spite of the very clear anti-israeli ideology of the new regime , the geopolitical logic for their collaboration lived on , because they still had common threats .
and when iraq invaded iran in 1980 , israel feared an iraqi victory and actively helped iran by selling it arms and providing it with spare parts for iran 's american weaponry at a moment when iran was very vulnerable because of an american arms embargo that israel was more than happy to violate .
in fact , back in the 1980s , it was israel that lobbied washington to talk to iran , to sell arms to iran , and not pay attention to iran 's anti-israeli ideology .
and this , of course , climaxed in the iran-contra scandal of the 1980s .
but with the end of the cold war came also the end of the israeli-iranian cold peace .
suddenly , the two common threats that had pushed them closer together throughout decades , more or less evaporated .
the soviet union collapsed , iraq was defeated , and a new environment was created in the region in which both of them felt more secure , but they were also now left unchecked .
without iraq balancing iran , iran could now become a threat , some in israel argued .
in fact , the current dynamic that you see between iran and israel has its roots more so in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the region after the cold war than in the events of 1979 , because at this point , iran and israel emerge as two of the most powerful states in the region , and rather than viewing each other as potential security partners , they increasingly came to view each other as rivals and competitors .
so israel , who in the 1980s lobbied for and improved u.s.-iran relations now feared a u.s.-iran rapprochement , thinking that it would come at israel 's security interests ' expense , and instead sought to put iran in increased isolation .
ironically , this was happening at a time when iran was more interested in peacemaking with washington than to see to israel 's destruction .
iran had put itself in isolation because of its radicalism , and after having helped the united states indirectly in the war against iraq in 1991 , the iranians were hoping in the post-war security architecture of the region .
but washington chose to ignore iran 's outreach , as it would a decade later in afghanistan , and instead moved to intensify iran 's isolation , and it is at this point , around 1993 , ' 94 , that iran begins to translate its anti-israeli ideology into operational policy .
the iranians believed that whatever they did , even if they moderated their policies , the u.s. would continue to seek iran 's isolation , and the only way iran could compel washington to change its position was by imposing a cost on the u.s. if it did n't .
the easiest target was the peace process , and now the iranian ideological bark was to be accompanied by a nonconventional bite , and iran began supporting extensively palestinian islamist groups that it previously had shunned .
in some ways , this sounds paradoxical , but according to martin indyk of the clinton administration , the iranians had not gotten it entirely wrong , because the more peace there would be between israel and palestine , the u.s. believed , the more iran would get isolated .
the more iran got isolated , the more peace there would be .
so according to indyk , and these are his words , the iranians had an interest to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment .
to defeat our policy of containment , not about ideology .
but throughout even the worst times of their entanglement , all sides have reached out to each other .
netanyahu , when he got elected in 1996 , reached out to the iranians to see if there were any ways that the doctrine of the periphery could be resurrected .
tehran was not interested .
a few years later , the iranians sent a comprehensive negotiation proposal to the bush administration , a proposal that revealed that there was some potential of getting iran and israel back on terms again .
the bush administration did not even respond .
all sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity .
but this is not an ancient conflict .
this is not even an ideological conflict .
the ebbs and flows of hostility have not shifted with ideological zeal , but rather with changes in the geopolitical landscape .
when iran and israel 's security imperatives dictated collaboration , they did so in spite of lethal ideological opposition to each other .
when iran 's ideological impulses collided with its strategic interests , the strategic interests always prevailed .
this is good news , because it means that neither war nor enmity is a foregone conclusion .
but some want war .
some believe or say that it 's 1938 , iran is germany , and ahmadinejad is hitler .
if we accept this to be true , that indeed it is 1938 , iran is germany , ahmadinejad is hitler , then the question we have to ask ourself is , who wishes to play the role of neville chamberlain ?
who will risk peace ?
this is an analogy that is deliberately aimed at eliminating diplomacy , and when you eliminate diplomacy , you make war inevitable .
in an ideological conflict , there can be no truce , no draw , no compromise , only victory or defeat .
but rather than making war inevitable by viewing this as ideological , we would be wise to seek ways to make peace possible .
iran and israel 's conflict is a new phenomenon , only a few decades old in a history of 2,500 years , and precisely because its roots are geopolitical , it means that solutions can be found , compromises can be struck , however difficult it yet may be .
after all , it was yitzhak rabin himself who said , " you do n't make peace with your friends .
you make it with your enemies . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the first question is , why do we need to even worry about a pandemic threat ?
what is it that we 're concerned about ?
when i say " we , " i 'm at the council on foreign relations .
we 're concerned in the national security community , and of course in the biology community and the public health community .
while globalization has increased travel , it 's made it necessary that everybody be everywhere , all the time , all over the world .
and that means that your microbial hitchhikers are moving with you .
so a plague outbreak in surat , india becomes not an obscure event , but a globalized event - a globalized concern that has changed the risk equation .
katrina showed us that we can not completely depend on government to have readiness in hand , to be capable of handling things .
indeed , an outbreak would be multiple katrinas at once .
our big concern at the moment is a virus called h5n1 flu - some of you call it bird flu - which first emerged in southern china , in the mid-1990s , but we did n't know about it until 1997 .
at the end of last christmas only 13 countries had seen h5n1 .
but we 're now up to 55 countries in the world , have had this virus emerge , in either birds , or people or both .
in the bird outbreaks we now can see that pretty much the whole world has seen this virus except the americas .
and i 'll get into why we 've so far been spared in a moment .
in domestic birds , especially chickens , it 's 100 percent lethal .
it 's one of the most lethal things we 've seen in circulation in the world in any recent centuries .
and we 've dealt with it by killing off lots and lots and lots of chickens , and unfortunately often not reimbursing the peasant farmers with the result that there 's cover-up .
it 's also carried on migration patterns of wild migratory aquatic birds .
there has been this centralized event in a place called lake chenghai , china .
two years ago the migrating birds had a multiple event where thousands died because of a mutation occurring in the virus , which made the species range broaden dramatically .
so that birds going to siberia , to europe , and to africa carried the virus , which had not previously been possible .
we 're now seeing outbreaks in human populations - so far , fortunately , small events , tiny outbreaks , occasional clusters .
the virus has mutated dramatically in the last two years to form two distinct families , if you will , of the h5n1 viral tree with branches in them , and with different attributes that are worrying .
so what 's concerning us ? well , first of all , at no time in history have we succeeded in making in a timely fashion , a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people .
it 's not going to do us very much good in a global pandemic .
you 've heard about the vaccine we 're stockpiling .
but nobody believes it will actually be particularly effective if we have a real outbreak .
so one thought is : after 9/11 , when the airports closed , our flu season was delayed by two weeks .
so the thought is , hey , maybe what we should do is just immediately - we hear there is h5n1 spreading from human to human , the virus has mutated to be a human-to-human transmitter - let 's shut down the airports .
however , huge supercomputer analyses , done of the likely effectiveness of this , show that it wo n't buy us much time at all .
and of course it will be hugely disruptive in preparation plans .
for example , all masks are made in china .
how do you get them mobilized around the world if you 've shut all the airports down ?
how do you get the vaccines moved around the world and the drugs moved , and whatever may or not be available that would work .
so it turns out that shutting down the airports is counterproductive .
we 're worried because this virus , unlike any other flu we 've ever studied , can be transmitted by eating raw meat of the infected animals .
we 've seen transmission to wild cats and domestic cats , and now also domestic pet dogs .
and in experimental feedings to rodents and ferrets , we found that the animals exhibit symptoms never seen with flu : seizures , central nervous system disorders , partial paralysis .
this is not your normal garden-variety flu .
it mimics what we now understand about reconstructing the 1918 flu virus , the last great pandemic , in that it also jumped directly from birds to people .
we had evolution over time , and this unbelievable mortality rate in human beings : 55 percent of people who have become infected with h5n1 have , in fact , succumbed .
and we do n't have a huge number of people who got infected and never developed disease .
in experimental feeding in monkeys you can see that it actually downregulates a specific immune system modulator .
the result is that what kills you is not the virus directly , but your own immune system overreacting , saying , " whatever this is so foreign i 'm going berserk . "
the result : most of the deaths have been in people under 30 years of age , robustly healthy young adults .
we have seen human-to-human transmission in at least three clusters - fortunately involving very intimate contact , still not putting the world at large at any kind of risk .
alright , so i 've got you nervous .
now you probably assume , well the governments are going to do something .
and we have spent a lot of money .
most of the spending in the bush administration has actually been more related to the anthrax results and bio-terrorism threat .
but a lot of money has been thrown out at the local level and at the federal level to look at infectious diseases .
end result : only 15 states have been certified to be able to do mass distribution of vaccine and drugs in a pandemic .
half the states would run out of hospital beds in the first week , maybe two weeks .
and 40 states already have an acute nursing shortage .
add on pandemic threat , you 're in big trouble .
so what have people been doing with this money ?
exercises , drills , all over the world .
let 's pretend there 's a pandemic .
let 's everybody run around and play your role .
main result is that there is tremendous confusion .
most of these people do n't actually know what their job will be .
and the bottom line , major thing that has come through in every single drill : nobody knows who 's in charge .
nobody knows the chain of command .
if it were los angeles , is it the mayor , the governor , the president of the united states , the head of homeland security ?
in fact , the federal government says it 's a guy called the principle federal officer , who happens to be with tsa .
the government says the federal responsibility will basically be about trying to keep the virus out , which we all know is impossible , and then to mitigate the impact primarily on our economy .
the rest is up to your local community .
everything is about your town , where you live .
well how good a city council you have , how good a mayor you have - that 's who 's going to be in charge .
most local facilities would all be competing to try and get their hands on their piece of the federal stockpile of a drug called tamiflu , which may or may not be helpful - i 'll get into that - of available vaccines , and any other treatments , and masks , and anything that 's been stockpiled .
and you 'll have massive competition .
now we did purchase a vaccine , you 've probably all heard about it , made by sanofi-aventis .
unfortunately it 's made against the current form of h5n1 .
we know the virus will mutate . it will be a different virus .
the vaccine will probably be useless .
so here 's where the decisions come in .
you 're the mayor of your local town .
let 's see , should we order that all pets be kept indoors ?
germany did that when h5n1 appeared in germany last year , in order to minimize the spread between households by household cats , dogs and so on .
what do we do when we do n't have any containment rooms with reverse air that will allow the healthcare workers to take care of patients ?
these are in hong kong ; we have nothing like that here .
what about quarantine ?
during the sars epidemic in beijing quarantine did seem to help .
we have no uniform policies regarding quarantine across the united states .
and some states have differential policies , county by county .
but what about the no-brainer things ? should we close all the schools ?
well then what about all the workers ? they wo n't go to work if their kids are n't in school .
encouraging telecommuting ? what works ?
well the british government did a model of telecommuting .
six weeks they had all people in the banking industry pretend a pandemic was underway .
what they found was , the core functions - you know you still sort of had banks , but you could n't get people to put money in the atm machines .
nobody was processing the credit cards .
your insurance payments did n't go through .
and basically the economy would be in a disaster state of affairs .
and that 's just office workers , bankers .
we do n't know how important hand washing is for flu - shocking . one assumes it 's a good idea to wash your hands a lot .
but actually in scientific community there is great debate about what percentage of flu transmission between people is from sneezing and coughing and what percentage is on your hands .
the institute of medicine tried to look at the masking question .
can we figure out a way , since we know we wo n't have enough masks because we do n't make them in america anymore , they 're all made in china - do we need n95 ? a state-of-the-art , top-of-the-line , must-be-fitted-to-your-face mask ?
or can we get away with some different kinds of masks ?
in the sars epidemic , we learned in hong kong that most of transmission was because people were removing their masks improperly .
and their hand got contaminated with the outside of the mask , and then they rubbed their nose . bingo ! they got sars .
it was n't flying microbes .
if you go online right now , you 'll get so much phony-baloney information .
you 'll end up buying - this is called an n95 mask . ridiculous .
we do n't actually have a standard for what should be the protective gear for the first responders , the people who will actually be there on the front lines .
and tamiflu . you 've probably heard of this drug , made by hoffmann-la roche , patented drug .
there is some indication that it may buy you some time in the midst of an outbreak .
should you take tamiflu for a long period of time , well , one of the side effects is suicidal ideations .
a public health survey analyzed the effect that large-scale tamiflu use would have , actually shows it counteractive to public health measures , making matters worse .
and here is the other interesting thing : when a human being ingests tamiflu , only 20 percent is metabolized appropriately to be an active compound in the human being .
the rest turns into a stable compound , which survives filtration into the water systems , thereby exposing the very aquatic birds that would carry flu and providing them a chance to breed resistant strains .
and we now have seen tamiflu-resistant strains in both vietnam in person-to-person transmission , and in egypt in person-to-person transmission .
so i personally think that our life expectancy for tamiflu as an effective drug is very limited - very limited indeed .
nevertheless most of the governments have based their whole flu policies on building stockpiles of tamiflu .
russia has actually stockpiled enough for 95 percent of all russians .
we 've stockpiled enough for 30 percent .
when i say enough , that 's two weeks worth .
and then you 're on your own because the pandemic is going to last for 18 to 24 months .
some of the poorer countries that have had the most experience with h5n1 have built up stockpiles ; they 're already expired . they are already out of date .
what do we know from 1918 , the last great pandemic ?
the federal government abdicated most responsibility .
and so we ended up with this wild patchwork of regulations all over america .
every city , county , state did their own thing .
and the rules and the belief systems were wildly disparate .
in some cases all schools , all churches , all public venues were closed .
the pandemic circulated three times in 18 months in the absence of commercial air travel .
the second wave was the mutated , super-killer wave .
and in the first wave we had enough healthcare workers .
but by the time the second wave hit it took such a toll among the healthcare workers that we lost most of our doctors and nurses that were on the front lines .
overall we lost 700,000 people .
the virus was 100 percent lethal to pregnant women and we do n't actually know why .
most of the death toll was 15 to 40 year-olds - robustly healthy young adults .
it was likened to the plague .
we do n't actually know how many people died .
the low-ball estimate is 35 million .
this was based on european and north american data .
a new study by chris murray at harvard shows that if you look at the databases that were kept by the brits in india , there was a 31-fold greater death rate among the indians .
so there is a strong belief that in places of poverty the death toll was far higher .
and that a more likely toll is somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 million people before we had commercial air travel .
so are we ready ?
as a nation , no we 're not .
and i think even those in the leadership would say that is the case , that we still have a long ways to go .
so what does that mean for you ? well the first thing is , i would n't start building up personal stockpiles of anything - for yourself , your family , or your employees - unless you 've really done your homework .
what mask works , what mask does n't work .
how many masks do you need ?
the institute of medicine study felt that you could not recycle masks .
well if you think it 's going to last 18 months , are you going to buy 18 months worth of masks for every single person in your family ?
we do n't know - again with tamiflu , the number one side effect of tamiflu is flu-like symptoms .
so then how can you tell who in your family has the flu if everybody is taking tamiflu ?
if you expand that out to think of a whole community , or all your employees in your company , you begin to realize how limited the tamiflu option might be .
everybody has come up to me and said , well i 'll stockpile water or , i 'll stockpile food , or what have you .
but really ? do you really have a place to stockpile 18 months worth of food ? twenty-four months worth of food ?
do you want to view the pandemic threat the way back in the 1950s people viewed the civil defense issue , and build your own little bomb shelter for pandemic flu ?
i do n't think that 's rational .
i think it 's about having to be prepared as communities , not as individuals - being prepared as nation , being prepared as state , being prepared as town .
and right now most of the preparedness is deeply flawed .
and i hope i 've convinced you of that , which means that the real job is go out and say to your local leaders , and your national leaders , " why have n't you solved these problems ?
why are you still thinking that the lessons of katrina do not apply to flu ? "
and put the pressure where the pressure needs to be put .
but i guess the other thing to add is , if you do have employees , and you do have a company , i think you have certain responsibilities to demonstrate that you are thinking ahead for them , and you are trying to plan .
at a minimum the british banking plan showed that telecommuting can be helpful .
it probably does reduce exposure because people are not coming into the office and coughing on each other , or touching common objects and sharing things via their hands .
but can you sustain your company that way ?
well if you have a dot-com , maybe you can .
otherwise you 're in trouble .
happy to take your questions .
-lrb- applause -rrb- audience member : what factors determine the duration of a pandemic ?
laurie garret : what factors determine the duration of a pandemic , we do n't really know .
i could give you a bunch of flip , this , that , and the other .
but i would say that honestly we do n't know .
clearly the bottom line is the virus eventually attenuates , and ceases to be a lethal virus to humanity , and finds other hosts .
but we do n't really know how and why that happens .
it 's a very complicated ecology .
audience member : what kind of triggers are you looking for ?
you know way more than any of us .
to say ahh , if this happens then we are going to have a pandemic ?
lg : the moment that you see any evidence of serious human-to-human to transmission .
not just intimately between family members who took care of an ailing sister or brother , but a community infected - spread within a school , spread within a dormitory , something of that nature .
then i think that there is universal agreement now , at who all the way down : send out the alert .
audience member : some research has indicated that statins can be helpful .
can you talk about that ?
lg : yeah . there is some evidence that taking lipitor and other common statins for cholesterol control may decrease your vulnerability to influenza .
but we do not completely understand why .
the mechanism is n't clear .
and i do n't know that there is any way responsibly for someone to start medicating their children with their personal supply of lipitor or something of that nature .
we have absolutely no idea what that would do .
you might be causing some very dangerous outcomes in your children , doing such a thing .
audience member : how far along are we in being able to determine whether someone is actually carrying , whether somebody has this before the symptoms are full-blown ?
lg : right . so i have for a long time said that what we really needed was a rapid diagnostic .
and our centers for disease control has labeled a test they developed a rapid diagnostic .
it takes 24 hours in a very highly developed laboratory , in highly skilled hands .
i 'm thinking dipstick .
you could do it to your own kid . it changes color .
it tells you if you have h5n1 .
in terms of where we are in science with dna identification capacities and so on , it 's not that far off .
but we 're not there . and there has n't been the kind of investment to get us there .
audience member : in the 1918 flu i understand that they theorized that there was some attenuation of the virus when it made the leap into humans .
is that likely , do you think , here ?
i mean 100 percent death rate is pretty severe .
lg : um yeah . so we do n't actually know what the lethality was of the 1918 strain to wild birds before it jumped from birds to humans .
it 's curious that there is no evidence of mass die-offs of chickens or household birds across america before the human pandemic happened .
that may be because those events were occurring on the other side of the world where nobody was paying attention .
but the virus clearly went through one round around the world in a mild enough form that the british army in world war i actually certified that it was not a threat and would not affect the outcome of the war .
and after circulating around the world came back in a form that was tremendously lethal .
what percentage of infected people were killed by it ?
again we do n't really know for sure .
it 's clear that if you were malnourished to begin with , you had a weakened immune system , you lived in poverty in india or africa , your likelihood of dying was far greater .
but we do n't really know .
audience member : one of the things i 've heard is that the real death cause when you get a flu is the associated pneumonia , and that a pneumonia vaccine may offer you 50 percent better chance of survival .
lg : for a long time , researchers in emerging diseases were kind of dismissive of the pandemic flu threat on the grounds that back in 1918 they did n't have antibiotics .
and that most people who die of regular flu - which in regular flu years is about 360,000 people worldwide , most of them senior citizens - and they die not of the flu but because the flu gives an assault to their immune system .
and along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria , streptococcus and boom , they get a bacterial pneumonia .
but it turns out that in 1918 that was not the case at all .
and so far in the h5n1 cases in people , similarly bacterial infection has not been an issue at all .
it 's this absolutely phenomenal disruption of the immune system that is the key to why people die of this virus .
and i would just add we saw the same thing with sars .
so what 's going on here is your body says , your immune system sends out all its sentinels and says , " i do n't know what the heck this is .
we 've never seen anything even remotely like this before . "
it wo n't do any good to bring in the sharpshooters because those antibodies are n't here .
and it wo n't do any good to bring in the tanks and the artillery because those t-cells do n't recognize it either .
so we 're going to have to go all-out thermonuclear response , stimulate the total cytokine cascade .
the whole immune system swarms into the lungs .
and yes they die , drowning in their own fluids , of pneumonia .
but it 's not bacterial pneumonia .
and it 's not a pneumonia that would respond to a vaccine .
and i think my time is up . i thank you all for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well we all know the world wide web has absolutely transformed publishing , broadcasting , commerce and social connectivity , but where did it all come from ?
and i 'll quote three people : vannevar bush , doug engelbart and tim berners-lee .
so let 's just run through these guys .
this is vannevar bush .
vannevar bush was the u.s. government 's chief scientific adviser during the war .
and in 1945 , he published an article in a magazine called atlantic monthly .
and the article was called " as we may think . "
and what vannevar bush was saying was the way we use information is broken .
we do n't work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth .
the brain works by association .
with one item in its thought , it snaps instantly to the next item .
and the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process .
and so he suggested a machine , and he called it the memex .
and the memex would link information , one piece of information to a related piece of information and so forth .
now this was in 1945 .
a computer in those days was something the secret services used to use for code breaking .
and nobody knew anything about it .
so this was before the computer was invented .
and he proposed this machine called the memex .
and he had a platform where you linked information to other information , and then you could call it up at will .
so spinning forward , one of the guys who read this article was a guy called doug engelbart , and he was a u.s. air force officer .
and he was reading it in their library in the far east .
and he was so inspired by this article , it kind of directed the rest of his life .
and by the mid-60s , he was able to put this into action when he worked at the stanford research lab in california .
he built a system .
the system was designed to augment human intelligence , it was called .
and in a premonition of today 's world of cloud computing and softwares of service , his system was called nls for on-line system .
and this is doug engelbart .
he was giving a presentation at the fall joint computer conference in 1968 .
what he showed - he sat on a stage like this , and he demonstrated this system .
he had his head mic like i 've got .
and he works this system .
and you can see , he 's working between documents and graphics and so forth .
and he 's driving it all with this platform here , with a five-finger keyboard and the world 's first computer mouse , which he specially designed in order to do this system .
so this is where the mouse came from as well .
so this is doug engelbart .
the trouble with doug engelbart 's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds .
so for a personal computer , a few million pounds was like having a personal jet plane ; it was n't really very practical .
but spin on to the 80s when personal computers did arrive , then there was room for this kind of system on personal computers .
and my company , owl built a system called guide for the apple macintosh .
and we delivered the world 's first hypertext system .
and this began to get a head of steam .
apple introduced a thing called hypercard , and they made a bit of a fuss about it .
they had a 12-page supplement in the wall street journal the day it launched .
the magazines started to cover it .
byte magazine and communications at the acm had special issues covering hypertext .
we developed a pc version of this product as well as the macintosh version .
and our pc version became quite mature .
these are some examples of this system in action in the late 80s .
you were able to deliver documents , were able to do it over networks .
we developed a system such that it had a markup language based on html .
we called it hml : hypertext markup language .
and the system was capable of doing very , very large documentation systems over computer networks .
so i took this system to a trade show in versailles near paris in late november 1990 .
and i was approached by a nice young man called tim berners-lee who said , " are you ian ritchie ? " and i said , " yeah . "
and he said , " i need to talk to you . "
and he told me about his proposed system called the world wide web .
and i thought , well , that 's got a pretentious name , especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office .
but he was completely convinced that his world wide web would take over the world one day .
and he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it , because his system did n't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything ; it was just plain text .
i thought , well , you know , interesting , but a guy from cern , he 's not going to do this .
so we did n't do it .
in the next couple of years , the hypertext community did n't recognize him either .
in 1992 , his paper was rejected for the hypertext conference .
in 1993 , there was a table at the conference in seattle , and a guy called marc andreessen was demonstrating his little browser for the world wide web .
and i saw it , and i thought , yep , that 's it .
and the very next year , in 1994 , we had the conference here in edinburgh , and i had no opposition in having tim berners-lee as the keynote speaker .
so that puts me in pretty illustrious company .
there was a guy called dick rowe who was at decca records and turned down the beatles .
there was a guy called gary kildall who went flying his plane when ibm came looking for an operating system for the ibm pc , and he was n't there , so they went back to see bill gates .
and the 12 publishers who turned down j.k. rowling 's harry potter , i guess .
on the other hand , there 's marc andreessen who wrote the world 's first browser for the world wide web .
and according to fortune magazine , he 's worth 700 million dollars .
but is he happy ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well , i learned a lot of things about ballooning , especially at the end of these balloon flights around the world i did with brian jones .
when i took this picture , the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night .
and on the other side there was a rising sun .
so , you see that on the other side of ice you have the unknown , you have the non-obvious , you have the non-seen , for the people who do n't dare to go through the ice .
there are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side .
and i think that 's one of the main problems of our society .
we learn , maybe not the famous ted audience , but so many other people learn , that the unknown , the doubts , the question marks are dangerous .
and we have to resist to the changes .
we have to keep everything under control .
well , the unknown is part of life .
and in that sense , ballooning is a beautiful metaphor .
because in the balloon , like in life , we go very well in unforeseen directions .
we want to go in a direction , but the winds push us in another direction , like in life .
and as long as we fight horizontally , against life , against the winds , against what 's happening to us , life is a nightmare .
how do we steer a balloon ?
by understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction .
so , then , we understand that if we want to change our trajectory , in life , or in the balloon , we have to change altitude .
changing altitude , in life , that means raising to another psychological , philosophical , spiritual level .
but how do we do that ?
in ballooning , or in life , how do we change altitude ?
how do we go from the metaphor to something more practical that we can really use every day ?
well , in a balloon it 's easy , we have ballast .
and when we drop the ballast overboard we climb .
sand , water , all the equipment we do n't need anymore .
and i think in life it should be exactly like this .
you know , when people speak about pioneering spirit , very often they believe that pioneers are the ones who have new ideas .
it 's not true .
the pioneers are not the ones who have new ideas , because new ideas are so easy to have .
we just close our eyes for a minute we all come back with a lot of new ideas .
no , the pioneer is the one who allows himself to throw overboard a lot of ballast .
habits , certainties , convictions , exclamation marks , paradigms , dogmas .
and when we are able to do that , what happens ?
life is not anymore just one line going in one direction in one dimension . no .
life is going to be made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in three dimensions .
and pioneering spirit will be each time we allow ourselves to explore this vertical axis .
of course not just like the atmosphere in the balloon , but in life itself .
explore this vertical axis , that means explore all the different ways to do , all the different ways to behave , all the different ways to think , before we find the one that goes in the direction we wish .
this is very practical .
this can be in politics .
this can be in spirituality .
this can be in environment , in finance , in education of children .
i deeply believe that life is a much greater adventure if we manage to do politics without the trench between the left and the right wing .
because we will throw away these political dogmas .
i deeply believe that we can make much more protection of the environment if we get rid - if we throw overboard this fundamentalism that some of the greens have showed in the past .
and that we can aim for much higher spirituality if we get rid of the religious dogmas .
throwing overboard , as ballast , to change our direction .
well , these basically are things i believed in such a long time .
but actually i had to go around the world in a balloon to be invited to talk about it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's clear that it 's not easy to know which ballast to drop and which altitude to take . sometime we need friends , family members or a psychiatrist .
well , in balloons we need weather men , the one who calculate the direction of each layer of wind , at which altitude , in order to help the balloonist .
but sometimes it 's very paradoxical .
when brian jones and i were flying around the world , the weather man asked us , one day , to fly quite low , and very slow .
and when we calculated we thought we 're never going to make it around the world at that speed .
so , we disobeyed . we flew much higher , and double the speed .
and i was so proud to have found that jetstream that i called the weather man , and i told him , " hey , guy , do n't you think we 're good pilots up there ?
we fly twice the speed you predicted . "
and he told me , " do n't do that . go down immediately in order to slow down . "
and i started to argue . i said , " i 'm not going to do that .
we do n't have enough gas to fly so slow . "
and he told me , " yes , but with the low pressure you have on your left if you fly too fast , in a couple of hours you will turn left and end up at the north pole .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then he asked me - and this is something i will never forget in my life - he just asked me , " you 're the good pilot up there .
what do you really want ? you want to go very fast in the wrong direction , or slowly in the good direction ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and this is why you need weathermen .
this is why you need people with long-term vision .
and this is precisely what fails in the political visions we have now , in the political governments .
we are burning , as you heard , so much energy , not understanding that such an unsustainable way of life can not last for long .
so , we went down actually .
we slowed down . and we went through moments of fears because we had no idea how the little amount of gas we had in the balloon could allow us to travel 45,000 kilometers .
but we were expected to have doubts ; we 're expected to have fears .
and actually this is where the adventure really started .
when we were flying over the sahara and india it was nice holidays .
we could land anytime and fly back home with an airplane .
in the middle of the pacific , when you do n't have the good winds , you can not land , you can not go back .
that 's a crisis .
that 's the moment when you have to wake up from the automatic way of thinking .
that 's the moment when you have to motivate your inner potential , your creativity .
that 's when you throw out all the ballast , all the certainties , in order to adapt to the new situation .
and actually , we changed completely our flight plan .
we changed completely our strategy .
and after 20 days we landed successfully in egypt .
but if i show you this picture it 's not to tell you how happy we were .
it 's to show you how much gas was left in the last bottles .
we took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane .
we landed with 40 kilos .
when i saw that , i made a promise to myself .
i made a promise that the next time i would fly around the world , it would be with no fuel , independent from fossil energies , in order to be safe , not to be threatened by the fuel gauge .
i had no idea how it was possible .
i just thought it 's a dream and i want to do it .
and when the capsule of my balloon was introduced officially in the air and space museum in washington , together with the airplane of charles lindbergh , with apollo 11 , with the wright brothers ' flyer , with chuck yeager 's 61 , i had really a thought then .
i thought , well , the 20th century , that was brilliant .
it allowed to do all those things there .
but it will not be possible in the future any more .
it takes too much energy . it will cost too much .
it will be prohibited because we 'll have to save our natural resources in a few decades from now .
so how can we perpetuate this pioneering spirit with something that will be independent from fossil energy ?
and this is when the project solar impulse really started to turn in my head .
and i think it 's a nice metaphor also for the 21st century .
pioneering spirit should continue , but on another level .
not to conquer the planet or space , not anymore , it has been done , but rather to improve the quality of life .
how can we go through the ice of certainty in order to make the most incredible a possible thing ?
what is today completely impossible - get rid of our dependency on fossil energy .
if you tell to people , we want to be independent from fossil energy in our world , people will laugh at you , except here , where crazy people are invited to speak .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the idea is that if we fly around the world in a solar powered airplane , using absolutely no fuel , nobody ever could say in the future that it 's impossible to do it for cars , for heating systems , for computers , and so on and so on .
well , solar power airplanes are not new .
they have flown in the past , but without saving capabilities , without batteries .
which means that they have more proven the limits of renewable energies than the potential of it .
if we want to show the potential , we have to fly day and night .
that means to load the batteries during the flight , in order to spend the night on the batteries , and fly the next day again .
it has been made , already , on remote controlled little airplane models , without pilots .
but it stays an anecdote because the public could n't identify to it .
i think you need a pilot in the plane that can talk to the universities , that can talk to students , talk to politicians during the flight , and really make it a human adventure .
for that , unfortunately , four meters wingspan is not enough .
you need 64 meter wingspan .
64 meter wingspan to carry one pilot , the batteries , flies slowly enough with the aerodynamic efficiency .
why that ? because fuel is not easy to replace .
that 's for sure .
and with 200 square meters of solar power on our plane , we can produce the same energy than 200 little lightbulbs .
that means a christmas tree , a big christmas tree .
so the question is , how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big christmas tree ?
people will tell you it 's impossible , and that 's exactly why we try to do it .
we launched the project with my colleague andre borschberg six years ago .
we have now 70 people in the team working on it .
we have gone through the stages of simulation , design , computing , preparing the construction of the first prototype .
that has been achieved after two years of work .
cockpit , propeller , engine .
just the fuselage here , it 's so light .
it 's not designed by an artist , but it could be .
50 kilos for the entire fuselage .
couple of kilos more for the wing spars .
this is the complete structure of the airplane .
and one month ago we have unveiled it .
you can not imagine how it is for a team who has been working six years on it to show that it 's not only a dream and a vision , it 's a real airplane .
a real airplane that we could finally present .
and what 's the goal now ?
the goal is to take off , end of this year for the first test , but mainly next year , spring or summer , take off , on our own power , without additional help , without being towed , climb to 9,000 meters altitude .
the same time we load the batteries , we run the engines , and when we get at the maximum height , we arrive at the beginning of the night .
and there , there will be just one goal , just one : reach the next sunrise before the batteries are empty .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is exactly the symbol of our world .
if our airplane is too heavy , if the pilot wastes energy , we 'll never make it through the night .
and in our world , if we keep on spoiling , wasting our energy resources , if we keep on building things that consume so much energy that most of the companies now go bankrupt , it 's clear that we 'll never give the planet to the next generation without a major problem .
so , you see that this airplane is more a symbol .
i do n't think it will transport 200 people in the next years .
but when lindbergh crossed the atlantic , the payload was also just sufficient for one person and some fuel .
and 20 years later there were 200 people in every airplane crossing the atlantic .
so , we have to start , and show the example .
a little bit like on this picture here .
this is a painting from magritte , in the museum in holland that i love so much .
it 's a pipe , and it 's written , " this is not a pipe . "
this is not an airplane .
this is a symbol of what we can achieve when we believe in the impossible , when we have a team , when we have pioneering spirit , and especially when we understand that all the certainties we have should be thrown overboard .
what pleases me very much is that in the beginning i thought that we would have to fly around the world with no fuel in order to have our message been understood .
and more and more , we 're invited around the world with andre to talk about that project , to talk about the symbol of it , invited by politicians , invited in energy forums , in order to show that it 's not anymore completely stupid to think about getting rid of the dependency on fossil energies .
so , through speeches like this one today , through interviews , through meetings , our goal is to get as many people possible on the team .
the success will not come if we " just , " quote , unquote , fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane .
no , the success will come if enough people are motivated to do exactly the same in their daily life , save energy , go to renewables .
and this is possible . you know , with the technologies we have today , we can save between 30 and 50 percent of the energy of a country in europe , and we can solve half of the rest with renewables .
it leaves 25 or 30 percent for oil , gas , coal , nuclear , or whatever .
this is acceptable .
this is why all the people who believe in this type of spirit are welcome to be on that team .
you can just go on solarimpulse.com , subscribe to just be informed of what we 're doing .
but much more , to get advices , to give your comments , to spread the word that if it 's possible in the air , of course it 's possible in the ground .
and each time we have some ice in the future , we have to know that life will be great , and the success will be brilliant if we dare to overcome our fear of the ice , to go through the obstacle , to go through the problem , in order to see what there is on the other side .
so , you see , this is what we 're doing on our side .
everyone has his goal , has his dreams , has his visions .
the question i leave you with now is which is the ballast you would like to throw overboard ?
which will be the altitude at which you would like to fly in your life , to get to the success that you wish to have , to get to the point that really belongs to you , with the potential you have , and the one you can really fulfill ?
because the most renewable energy we have is our own potential , and our own passion .
so , let 's go for it , and i wish you an excellent adventure in the wings of the future . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as you pointed out , every time you come here , you learn something .
this morning , the world 's experts from i guess three or four different companies on building seats , i think concluded that ultimately , the solution is , people should n't sit down .
i could have told them that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yesterday , the automotive guys gave us some new insights .
they pointed out that , i believe it was between 30 and 50 years from today , they will be steering cars by wire , without all that mechanical stuff .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's reassuring .
-lrb- applause -rrb- they then pointed out that there 'd be , sort of , the other controls by wire , to get rid of all that mechanical stuff .
that 's pretty good , but why not get rid of the wires ?
then you do n't need anything to control the car , except thinking about it .
i would love to talk about the technology , and sometime , in what 's past the 15 minutes , i 'll be happy to talk to all the techno-geeks around here about what 's in here .
but if i had one thing to say about this , before we get to first , it would be that from the time we started building this , the big idea was n't the technology .
it really was a big idea in technology when we started applying it in the ibot for the disabled community .
the big idea here is , i think , a new piece of a solution to a fairly big problem in transportation .
and maybe to put that in perspective : there 's so much data on this , i 'll be happy to give it to you in different forms .
you never know what strikes the fancy of whom , but everybody is perfectly willing to believe the car changed the world .
and henry ford , just about 100 years ago , started cranking out model ts .
what i do n't think most people think about is the context of how technology is applied .
for instance , in that time , 91 percent of america lived either on farms or in small towns .
so , the car - the horseless carriage that replaced the horse and carriage - was a big deal ; it went twice as fast as a horse and carriage .
it was half as long .
and it was an environmental improvement , because , for instance , in 1903 they outlawed horses and buggies in downtown manhattan , because you can imagine what the roads look like when you have a million horses , and a million of them urinating and doing other things , and the typhoid and other problems created were almost unimaginable .
so the car was the clean environmental alternative to a horse and buggy .
it also was a way for people to get from their farm to a farm , or their farm to a town , or from a town to a city .
it all made sense , with 91 percent of the people living there .
by the 1950s , we started connecting all the towns together with what a lot of people claim is the eighth wonder of the world , the highway system .
and it is certainly a wonder .
and by the way , as i take shots at old technologies , i want to assure everybody , and particularly the automotive industry - who 's been very supportive of us - that i do n't think this in any way competes with airplanes , or cars .
but think about where the world is today .
50 percent of the global population now lives in cities .
that 's 3.2 billion people .
we 've solved all the transportation problems that have changed the world to get it to where we are today .
500 years ago , sailing ships started getting reliable enough ; we found a new continent .
150 years ago , locomotives got efficient enough , steam power , that we turned the continent into a country .
over the last hundred years , we started building cars , and then over the 50 years we 've connected every city to every other city in an extraordinarily efficient way , and we have a very high standard of living as a consequence of that .
but during that entire process , more and more people have been born , and more and more people are moving to cities .
china alone is going to move four to six hundred million people into cities in the next decade and a half .
and so , nobody , i think , would argue that airplanes , in the last 50 years , have turned the continent and the country now into a neighborhood .
and if you just look at how technology has been applied , we 've solved all the long-range , high-speed , high-volume , large-weight problems of moving things around .
nobody would want to give them up .
and i certainly would n't want to give up my airplane , or my helicopter , or my humvee , or my porsche .
i love them all . i do n't keep any of them in my living room .
the fact is , the last mile is the problem , and half the world now lives in dense cities .
and people spend , depending on who they are , between 90 and 95 percent of their energy getting around on foot .
i think there 's - i do n't know what data would impress you , but how about , 43 percent of the refined fuel produced in the world is consumed by cars in metropolitan areas in the united states .
three million people die every year in cities due to bad air , and almost all particulate pollution on this planet is produced by transportation devices , particularly sitting in cities .
and again , i say that not to attack any industry , i think - i really do - i love my airplane , and cars on highways moving 60 miles an hour are extraordinarily efficient , both from an engineering point of view , an energy consumption point of view , and a utility point of view .
and we all love our cars , and i do .
the problem is , you get into the city and you want to go four blocks , it 's neither fun nor efficient nor productive .
it 's not sustainable .
if - in china , in the year 1998 , 417 million people used bicycles ; 1.7 million people used cars .
if five percent of that population became , quote , middle class , and wanted to go the way we 've gone in the last hundred years at the same time that 50 percent of their population are moving into cities of the size and density of manhattan , every six weeks - it is n't sustainable environmentally ; it is n't sustainable economically - there just ai n't enough oil - and it 's not sustainable politically .
i mean , what are we fighting over right now ?
we can make it complicated , but what 's the world fighting over right now ?
so it seemed to me that somebody had to work on that last mile , and it was dumb luck . we were working on ibots , but once we made this , we instantly decided it could be a great alternative to jet skis . you do n't need the water .
or snowmobiles . you do n't need the snow .
or skiing . it 's just fun , and people love to move around doing fun things .
and every one of those industries , by the way - just golf carts alone is a multi-billion-dollar industry .
but rather than go license this off , which is what we normally do , it seemed to me that if we put all our effort not into the technology , but into an understanding of a world that 's solved all its other problems , but has somehow come to accept that cities - which , right back from ancient greece on , were meant to walk around , cities that were architected and built for people - now have a footprint that , while we 've solved every other transportation problem - and it 's like moore 's law .
i mean , look at the time it took to cross a continent in a conestoga wagon , then on a railroad , then an airplane .
every other form of transportation 's been improved .
in 5,000 years , we 've gone backwards in getting around cities .
they 've gotten bigger ; they 're spread out .
the most expensive real estate on this planet in every city - wilshire boulevard , or fifth avenue , or tokyo , or paris - the most expensive real estate is their downtowns .
65 percent of the landmass of our cities are parked cars .
the 20 largest cities in the world .
so you wonder , what if cities could give to their pedestrians what we take for granted as we now go between cities ?
what if you could make them fun , attractive , clean , environmentally friendly ?
what if it would make it a little bit more palatable to have access via this , as that last link to mass transit , to get out to your cars so we can all live in the suburbs and use our cars the way we want , and then have our cities energized again ?
we thought it would be really neat to do that , and one of the problems we really were worried about is : how do we get legal on the sidewalk ?
because technically i 've got motors ; i 've got wheels - i 'm a motor vehicle .
i do n't look like a motor vehicle .
i have the same footprint as a pedestrian ; i have the same unique capability to deal with other pedestrians in a crowded space .
i took this down to ground zero , and knocked my way through crowds for an hour .
i 'm a pedestrian . but the law typically lags technology by a generation or two , and if we get told we do n't belong on the sidewalk , we have two choices .
we 're a recreational vehicle that does n't really matter , and i do n't spend my time doing that kind of stuff .
or maybe we should be out in the street in front of a greyhound bus or a vehicle .
we 've been so concerned about that , we went to the postmaster general of the united states , as the first person we ever showed on the outside , and said , " put your people on it . everybody trusts their postman .
and they belong on the sidewalks , and they 'll use it seriously . "
he agreed . we went to a number of police departments that want their police officers back in the neighborhood on the beat , carrying 70 pounds of stuff . they love it .
and i ca n't believe a policeman is going to give themselves a ticket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 've been working really , really hard , but we knew that the technology would not be as hard to develop as an attitude about what 's important , and how to apply the technology .
we went out and we found some visionary people with enough money to let us design and build these things , and in hopefully enough time to get them accepted .
so , i 'm happy , really , i am happy to talk about this technology as much as you want .
and yes , it 's really fun , and yes , you should all go out and try it .
but if i could ask you to do one thing , it 's not to think about it as a piece of technology , but just imagine that , although we all understand somehow that it 's reasonable that we use our 4,000-pound machine , which can go 60 miles an hour , that can bring you everywhere you want to go , and somehow it 's also what we used for the last mile , and it 's broken , and it does n't work .
one of the more exciting things that occurred to us about why it might get accepted , happened out here in california .
a few weeks ago , after we launched it , we were here with a news crew on venice beach , zipping up and back , and he 's marveling at the technology , and meanwhile bicycles are zipping by , and skateboarders are zipping by , and a little old lady - i mean , if you looked in the dictionary , a little old lady - came by me - and now that i 'm on this , i 'm the height of a normal adult now - and she just stops , and the camera is there , and she looks up at me and says , " can i try that ? "
and what was i - you know , how are you going to say anything ?
and so i said , " sure . "
so i get off , and she gets on , and with a little bit of the usual , ah , then she turns around , and she goes about 20 feet , and she turns back around , and she 's all smiles .
and she comes back to me and she stops , and she says , " finally , they made something for us . "
and the camera is looking down at her .
i 'm thinking , " wow , that was great - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - please lady , do n't say another word . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the camera is down at her , and this guy has to put the microphone in her face , said , " what do you mean by that ? "
and i figured , " it 's all over now , " and she looks up and she says , " well , " she 's still watching these guys go ; she says , " i ca n't ride a bike , " no , she says , " i ca n't use a skateboard , and i 've never used roller blades , " she knew them by name ; she says , " and it 's been 50 years since i rode a bicycle . "
then she looks up , she 's looking up , and she says , " and i 'm 81 years old , and i do n't drive a car anymore .
i still have to get to the store , and i ca n't carry a lot of things . "
and it suddenly occurred to me , that among my many fears , were not just that the bureaucracy and the regulators and the legislators might not get it - it was that , fundamentally , you believe there 's pressure among the people not to invade the most precious little bit of space left , the sidewalks in these cities .
when you look at the 36 inches of legal requirement for sidewalk , then the eight foot for the parked car , then the three lanes , and then the other eight feet - it 's - that little piece is all that 's there .
but she looks up and says this , and it occurs to me , well , kids are n't going to mind these things , and they do n't vote , and business people and then young adults are n't going to mind these things - they 're pretty cool - so i guess subliminally i was worried that it 's the older population that 's going to worry .
so , having seen this , and having worried about it for eight years , the first thing i do is pick up my phone and ask our marketing and regulatory guys , call aarp , get an appointment right away .
we 've got to show them this thing .
and they took it to washington ; they showed them ; and they 're going to be involved now , watching how these things get absorbed in a number of cities , like atlanta , where we 're doing trials to see if it really can , in fact , help re-energize their downtown .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the bottom line is , whether you believe the united nations , or any of the other think tanks - in the next 20 years , all human population growth on this planet will be in cities .
in asia alone , it will be over a billion people .
they learned to start with cell phones .
they did n't have to take the 100-year trip we took .
they start at the top of the technology food chain .
we 've got to start building cities and human environments where a 150-pound person can go a couple of miles in a dense , rich , green-space environment , without being in a 4,000-pound machine to do it .
cars were not meant for parallel parking ; they 're wonderful machines to go between cities , but just think about it : we 've solved all the long-range , high-speed problems .
the greeks went from the theater of dionysus to the parthenon in their sandals .
you do it in your sneakers .
not much has changed .
if this thing goes only three times as fast as walking - three times - a 30-minute walk becomes 10 minutes .
your choice , when living in a city , if it 's now 10 minutes - because at 30 minutes you want an alternative , whether it 's a bus , a train - we 've got to build an infrastructure - a light rail - or you 're going to keep parking those cars .
but if you could put a pin in most cities , and imagine how far you could , if you had the time , walk in one half-hour , it 's the city .
if you could make it fun , and make it eight or 10 minutes , you ca n't find your car , un-park your car , move your car , re-park your car and go somewhere ; you ca n't get to a cab or a subway .
we could change the way people allocate their resources , the way this planet uses its energy , make it more fun .
and we 're hoping to some extent history will say we were right .
that 's segway . this is a stirling cycle engine ; this had been confused by a lot of things we 're doing .
this little beast , right now , is producing a few hundred watts of electricity .
yes , it could be attached to this , and yes , on a kilogram of propane , you could drive from new york to boston if you so choose .
perhaps more interesting about this little engine is it 'll burn any fuel , because some of you might be skeptical about the capability of this to have an impact , where most of the world you ca n't simply plug into your 120-volt outlet .
we 've been working on this , actually , as an alternative energy source , starting way back with johnson & johnson , to run an ibot , because the best batteries you could get - 10 watt-hours per kilogram in lead , 20 watt-hours per kilogram nickel-cadmium , 40 watt-hours per kilogram in nickel-metal hydride , 60 watt-hours per kilogram in lithium , 8,750 watt-hours of energy in every kilogram of propane or gasoline - which is why nobody drives electric cars .
but , in any event , if you can burn it with the same efficiency - because it 's external combustion - as your kitchen stove , if you can burn any fuel , it turns out to be pretty neat .
it makes just enough electricity to , for instance , do this , which at night is enough electricity , in the rest of the world , as mr. holly - dr. holly - pointed out , can run computers and a light bulb .
but more interestingly , the thermodynamics of this say , you 're never going to get more than 20 percent efficiency .
it does n't matter much - it says if you get 200 watts of electricity , you 'll get 700 or 800 watts of heat .
if you wanted to boil water and re-condense it at a rate of 10 gallons an hour , it takes about 25 , a little over 25.3 kilowatt - 25,000 watts of continuous power - to do it .
that 's so much energy , you could n't afford to desalinate or clean water in this country that way .
certainly , in the rest of the world , your choice is to devastate the place , turning everything that will burn into heat , or drink the water that 's available .
the number one cause of death on this planet among humans is bad water .
depending on whose numbers you believe , it 's between 60 and 85,000 people per day .
we do n't need sophisticated heart transplants around the world .
we need water .
and women should n't have to spend four hours a day looking for it , or watching their kids die .
we figured out how to put a vapor-compression distiller on this thing , with a counter-flow heat exchanger to take the waste heat , then using a little bit of the electricity control that process , and for 450 watts , which is a little more than half of its waste heat , it will make 10 gallons an hour of distilled water from anything that comes into it to cool it .
so if we put this box on here in a few years , could we have a solution to transportation , electricity , and communication , and maybe drinkable water in a sustainable package that weighs 60 pounds ?
i do n't know , but we 'll try it .
i better shut up .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so last year , on the fourth of july , experiments at the large hadron collider discovered the higgs boson .
it was a historical day .
there 's no doubt that from now on , the fourth of july will be remembered not as the day of the declaration of independence , but as the day of the discovery of the higgs boson .
well , at least , here at cern .
but for me , the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise .
in the eye of a theoretical physicist , the higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass , but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution .
too many questions are left unanswered .
the higgs boson does not share the beauty , the symmetry , the elegance , of the rest of the elementary particle world .
for this reason , the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the higgs boson could not be the full story .
we were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the higgs boson .
instead , so far , the measurements coming from the lhc show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena .
of course , the verdict is not definitive .
in 2015 , the lhc will almost double the energy of the colliding protons , and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world , and we will certainly learn much more .
but for the moment , since we have found no evidence for new phenomena , let us suppose that the particles that we know today , including the higgs boson , are the only elementary particles in nature , even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far .
let 's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us .
we will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe , and to explain my point , let me first tell you what the higgs is about , and to do so , we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the big bang .
and according to the higgs theory , at that instant , a dramatic event took place in the universe .
space-time underwent a phase transition .
it was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees .
but in our case , the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material , but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time .
during this phase transition , empty space became filled with a substance that we now call higgs field .
and this substance may seem invisible to us , but it has a physical reality .
it surrounds us all the time , just like the air we breathe in this room .
and some elementary particles interact with this substance , gaining energy in the process .
and this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle , and by discovering the higgs boson , the lhc has conclusively proved that this substance is real , because it is the stuff the higgs bosons are made of .
and this , in a nutshell , is the essence of the higgs story .
but this story is far more interesting than that .
by studying the higgs theory , theoretical physicists discovered , not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics , that the higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today .
just like matter can exist as liquid or solid , so the higgs field , the substance that fills all space-time , could exist in two states .
besides the known higgs state , there could be a second state in which the higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today , and the mere existence of another state of the higgs field poses a potential problem .
this is because , according to the laws of quantum mechanics , it is possible to have transitions between two states , even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states , and the phenomenon is called , quite appropriately , quantum tunneling .
because of quantum tunneling , i could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room , practically penetrating the wall .
but do n't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes , because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small .
you would have to wait a really long time before it happens , but believe me , quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon , and it has been observed in many systems .
for instance , the tunnel diode , a component used in electronics , works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling .
but let 's go back to the higgs field .
if the ultra-dense higgs state existed , then , because of quantum tunneling , a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time , and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water .
bubbles of vapor form inside the water , then they expand , turning liquid into gas .
in the same way , a bubble of the ultra-dense higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling .
the bubble would then expand at the speed of light , invading all space , and turning the higgs field from the familiar state into a new state .
is this a problem ? yes , it 's a big a problem .
we may not realize it in ordinary life , but the intensity of the higgs field is critical for the structure of matter .
if the higgs field were only a few times more intense , we would see atoms shrinking , neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei , nuclei disintegrating , and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe .
and the higgs field , in the ultra-dense higgs state , is not just a few times more intense than today , but billions of times , and if space-time were filled by this higgs state , all atomic matter would collapse .
no molecular structures would be possible , no life .
so , i wonder , is it possible that in the future , the higgs field will undergo a phase transition and , through quantum tunneling , will be transformed into this nasty , ultra-dense state ?
in other words , i ask myself , what is the fate of the higgs field in our universe ?
and the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the higgs boson mass .
and experiments at the lhc found that the mass of the higgs boson is about 126 gev .
this is tiny when expressed in familiar units , because it 's equal to something like 10 to the minus 22 grams , but it is large in particle physics units , because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a dna constituent .
so armed with this information from the lhc , together with some colleagues here at cern , we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense higgs state , and we found a very intriguing result .
our calculations showed that the measured value of the higgs boson mass is very special .
it has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation .
the higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse .
so according to these calculations , we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff .
and eventually , the higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself .
so is this how humanity is going to disappear ?
i do n't think so .
our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10 to the 100 years , and this is a very long time .
it 's even longer than the time it takes for italy to form a stable government .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even so , we will be long gone by then .
in about five billion years , our sun will become a red giant , as large as the earth 's orbit , and our earth will be kaput , and in a thousand billion years , if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate , you will not even be able to see as far as your toes , because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light .
so it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the higgs field collapse .
but the reason why i am interested in the transition of the higgs field is because i want to address the question , why is the higgs boson mass so special ?
why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition ?
theoretical physicists always ask " why " questions .
more than how a phenomenon works , theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works .
we think that this these " why " questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature .
and indeed , a possible answer to my question opens up new universes , literally .
it has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles , and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws .
and in this context , you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the higgs mass .
then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse .
it would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach .
in principle , you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach , and yet , the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 30 , 35 degrees .
and the reason is simple : because wind builds up the sand , gravity makes it fall .
as a result , the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value , near to collapse .
and something similar could happen for the higgs boson mass in the multiverse .
in the majority of bubble universes , the higgs mass could be around the critical value , near to a cosmic collapse of the higgs field , because of two competing effects , just as in the case of sand .
my story does not have an end , because we still do n't know the end of the story .
this is science in progress , and to solve the mystery , we need more data , and hopefully , the lhc will soon add new clues to this story .
just one number , the higgs boson mass , and yet , out of this number we learn so much .
i started from a hypothesis , that the known particles are all there is in the universe , even beyond the domain explored so far .
from this , we discovered that the higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge , ready for cosmic collapse , and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach , the multiverse .
but i do n't know if my hypothesis is right .
that 's how physics works : a single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley .
but whichever it turns out to be , there is one thing i 'm sure of : the journey will be full of surprises .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there was a time in my life when everything seemed perfect .
everywhere i went , i felt at home .
everyone i met , i felt i knew them for as long as i could remember .
and i want to share with you how i came to that place and what i 've learned since i left it .
this is where it began .
and it raises an existential question , which is , if i 'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness , why am i not visible in the photograph , and where is this time and place ?
this is los angeles , california , where i live .
this is a police photo . that 's actually my car .
we 're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in los angeles , called cedars-sinai .
and the situation is that a car full of paramedics on their way home from the hospital after work have run across the wreckage , and they 've advised the police that there were no survivors inside the car , that the driver 's dead , that i 'm dead .
and the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver .
and when they do , they find that behind the glass , they find me .
and my skull 's crushed and my collar bone is crushed ; all but two of my ribs , my pelvis and both arms - they 're all crushed , but there is still a pulse .
and they get me to that nearby hospital , cedars-sinai , where that night i receive , because of my internal bleeding , 45 units of blood - which means full replacements of all the blood in me - before they 're able to staunch the flow .
i 'm put on full life support , and i have a massive stroke , and my brain drops into a coma .
now comas are measured on a scale from 15 down to three .
fifteen is a mild coma . three is the deepest .
and if you look , you 'll see that there 's only one way you can score three .
it 's essentially there 's no sign of life from outside at all .
i spent more than a month in a glasgow coma scale three , and it is inside that deepest level of coma , on the rim between my life and my death , that i 'm experiencing the full connection and full consciousness of inner space .
from my family looking in from outside , what they 're trying to figure out is a different kind of existential question , which is , how far is it going to be possible to bridge from the comatose potential mind that they 're looking at to an actual mind , which i define simply as the functioning of the brain that is remaining inside my head .
now to put this into a broader context , i want you to imagine that you are an eternal alien watching the earth from outer space , and your favorite show on intergalactic satellite television is the earth channel , and your favorite show is the human show .
and the reason i think it would be so interesting to you is because consciousness is so interesting .
it 's so unpredictable and so fragile .
and this is how we began .
we all began in the awash valley in ethiopia .
the show began with tremendous special effects , because there were catastrophic climate shifts - which sort of sounds interesting as a parallel to today .
because of the earth tilting on its axis and those catastrophic climate shifts , we had to figure out how to find better food , and we had to learn - there 's lucy ; that 's how we all began - we had to learn how to crack open animal bones , use tools to do that , to feed on the marrow , to grow our brains more .
so we actually grew our consciousness in response to this global threat .
now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in india , in madhya pradesh , there 's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found .
it 's a cupule that took 40 to 50,000 blows with a stone tool to create , and it 's the first known expression of art on the planet .
and the reason it connects us with consciousness today is that all of us still today , the very first shape we draw as a child is a circle .
and then the next thing we do is we put a dot in the center of the circle .
we create an eye - and the eye that evolves through all of our history .
there 's the egyptian god horus , which symbolizes prosperity , wisdom and health .
and that comes down right way to the present with the dollar bill in the united states , which has on it an eye of providence .
so watching all of this show from outer space , you think we get it , we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness .
because it 's the first thing we draw ; we surround ourselves with images of it ; it 's probably the most common image on the planet .
but we do n't . we take our consciousness for granted .
while i was producing in los angeles , i never thought about it for a second .
until it was stripped from me , i never thought about it .
and what i 've learned since that event and during my recovery is that consciousness is under threat on this planet in ways it 's never been under threat before .
these are just some examples .
and the reason i 'm so honored to be here to talk today in india is because india has the sad distinction of being the head injury capital of the world .
that statistic is so sad .
there is no more drastic and sudden gap created between potential and actual mind than a severe head injury .
each one can entail up to a decade of rehabilitation , which means that india , unless something changes , is accumulating a need for millennia of rehabilitation .
what you find in the united states is an injury every 20 seconds - that 's one and a half million every year - stroke every 40 seconds , alzheimer 's disease , every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that .
all of these represent gaps between potential mind and actual mind .
and here are some of the other categories , if you look at the whole planet .
the world health organization tells us that depression is the number one disease on earth in terms of years lived with disability .
we find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44 .
our children are becoming depressed at an alarming rate .
i discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide .
if you look at some of these other items - concussions .
half of e.r. admissions from adolescents are for concussions .
if i talk about migraine , 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches .
fifteen percent suffer migraines that wipe them out for days on end .
all of this is leading - computer addiction , just to cover that : the most frequent thing we do is use digital devices .
the average teenager sends 3,300 texts every -lsb- month -rsb- .
we 're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift .
so what you 'd be wondering , watching the human show , is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness , or are we going to continue to retreat ?
and that then might lead you to watch an episode one day of cedars-sinai medical center and a consideration of the difference between potential mind and actual mind .
this is a dense array eeg mri tracking 156 channels of information .
it 's not my eeg at cedars ; it 's your eeg tonight and last night .
it 's the what our minds do every night to digest the day and to prepare to bridge from the potential mind when we 're asleep to the actual mind when we awaken the following morning .
this is how i was when i returned from the hospital after nearly four months .
the horseshoe shape you can see on my skull is where they operated and went inside my brain to do the surgeries they needed to do to rescue my life .
but if you look into the eye of consciousness , that single eye you can see , i 'm looking down , but let me tell you how i felt at that point .
i did n't feel empty ; i felt everything simultaneously .
i felt empty and full , hot and cold , euphoric and depressed because the brain is the world 's first fully functional quantum computer ; it can occupy multiple states at the same time .
and with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged , i felt everything simultaneously .
but let 's swivel around and look at me frontally .
this is now flash-forward to the point in time where i 've been discharged by the health system .
look into those eyes . i 'm not able to focus those eyes .
i 'm not able to follow a line of text in a book .
but the system has moved me on because , as my family started to discover , there is no long-term concept in the health care system .
neurological damage , 10 years of rehab , requires a long-term perspective .
but let 's take a look behind my eyes .
this is a gamma radiation spec scan that uses gamma radiation to map three-dimensional function within the brain .
it requires a laboratory to see it in three dimension , but in two dimensions i think you can see the beautiful symmetry and illumination of a normal mind at work .
here 's my brain .
that is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke .
so my family , as we moved forward and discovered that the health care system had moved us by , had to try to find solutions and answers .
and during that process - it took many years - one of the doctors said that my recovery , my degree of advance , since the amount of head injury i 'd suffered , was miraculous .
and that was when i started to write a book , because i did n't think it was miraculous .
i thought there were miraculous elements , but i also did n't think it was right that one should have to struggle and search for answers when this is a pandemic within our society .
so from this experience of my recovery , i want to share four particular aspects - i call them the four c 's of consciousness - that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that i work with every day .
the first c is cognitive training .
unlike the smashed glass of my car , plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility , with treatment , to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness .
plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason - hope for our ability to rebuild that function .
indeed , the mind can redefine itself , and this is demonstrated by two specialists called hagen and silva back in the 1970 's .
the global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting , but with appropriate treatment , they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure .
but what i discovered is it 's almost impossible to find anyone who provides that treatment or care .
here 's what my neuropsychologist provided for me when i actually found somebody who could apply it .
i 'm not a doctor , so i 'm not going to talk about the various subtests .
let 's just talk about full-scale i.q.
full-scale i.q. is the mental processing - how fast you can acquire information , retain it and retrieve it - that is essential for success in life today .
and you can see here there are three columns .
untestable - that 's when i 'm in my coma .
and then i creep up to the point that i get a score of 79 , which is just below average .
in the health care system , if you touch average , you 're done .
that 's when i was discharged from the system .
what does average i.q. really mean ?
it meant that when i was given two and a half hours to take a test that anyone here would take in 50 minutes , i might score an f.
this is a very , very low level in order to be kicked out of the health care system .
then i underwent cognitive training .
and let me show you what happened to the right-hand column when i did my cognitive training over a period of time .
this is not supposed to occur .
i.q. is supposed to stabilize and solidify at the age of eight .
now the journal of the national medical association gave my memoir a full clinical review , which is very unusual .
i 'm not a doctor . i have no medical background whatsoever .
but they felt the evidences that there was important , valuable information in the book , and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it .
but they asked one question . they said , " is this repeatable ? "
that was a fair question because my memoir was simply how i found solutions that worked for me .
the answer is yes , and for the first time , it 's my pleasure to be able to share two examples .
here 's somebody , what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11 .
and here 's another person in , call it , high school and college .
and this person is particularly interesting .
i wo n't go into the intrascatter that 's in the subtests , but they still had a neurologic issue .
but that person could be identified as having a learning disability .
and with accommodation , they went on to college and had a full life in terms of their opportunities .
second aspect : i still had crushing migraine headaches .
two elements that worked for me here are - the first is 90 percent , i learned , of head and neck pain is through muscular-skeletal imbalance .
the craniomandibular system is critical to that .
and when i underwent it and found solutions , this is the interrelationship between the tmj and the teeth .
up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder , disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body .
i was fortunate to find a dentist who applied this entire universe of technology you 're about to see to establish that if he repositioned my jaw , the headaches pretty much resolved , but that then my teeth were n't in the right place .
he then held my jaw in the right position while orthodontically he put my teeth into correct alignment .
so my teeth actually hold my jaw in the correct position .
this affected my entire body .
if that sounds like a very , very strange thing to say and rather a bold statement - how can the jaw affect the entire body ? - let me simply point out to you , if i ask you tomorrow to put one grain of sand between your teeth and go for a nice long walk , how far would you last before you had to remove that grain of sand ?
that tiny misalignment .
bear in mind , there are no nerves in the teeth .
that 's why the same between the before and after that this shows , it 's hard to see the difference .
now just trying putting a few grains of sand between your teeth and see the difference it makes .
i still had migraine headaches .
the next issue that resolved was that , if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance , the other 10 percent , largely - if you set aside aneurysms , brain cancer and hormonal issues - is the circulation .
imagine the blood flowing through your body - i was told at ucla medical center - as one sealed system .
there 's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it , and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood .
that 's basically it .
if you press on a hose pipe in a sealed system , it bulges someplace else .
if that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body , your brain , you get a vascular migraine .
this is a level of pain that 's only known to other people who suffer vascular migraines .
using this technology , this is mapping in three dimensions .
this is an mri mra mrv , a volumetric mri .
using this technology , the specialists at ucla medical center were able to identify where that compression in the hose pipe was occurring .
a vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body .
and in the following months and years , i felt the neurological flow of life itself returning .
communication , the next c. this is critical .
all consciousness is about communication .
and here , by great fortune , one of my father 's clients had a husband who worked at the alfred mann foundation for scientific research .
alfred mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who 's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness , whether to restore hearing to the deaf , vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed .
and i 'm just going to give you an example today of movement to the paralyzed .
i 've brought with me , from southern california , the fm device .
this is it being held in the hand .
it weighs less than a gram .
so two of them implanted in the body would weigh less than a dime .
five of them would still weigh less than a rupee coin .
where does it go inside the body ?
it has been simulated and tested to endure in the body corrosion-free for over 80 years .
so it goes in and it stays there .
here are the implantation sites .
the concept that they 're working towards - and they have working prototypes - is that we placed it throughout the motor points of the body where they 're needed .
the main unit will then go inside the brain .
an fm device in the cortex of the brain , the motor cortex , will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm , let 's say , in real time , if they 've lost control of their arm .
and other fm devices implanted in fingertips , on contacting a surface , will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain , so that the person feels a sense of touch .
is this science fiction ? no , because i 'm wearing the first application of this technology .
i do n't have the ability to control my left foot .
a radio device is controlling every step i take , and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time i walk .
and in closing , i want to share the personal reason why this meant so much to me and changed the direction of my life .
in my coma , one of the presences i sensed was someone i felt was a protector .
and when i came out of my coma , i recognized my family , but i did n't remember my own past .
gradually , i remembered the protector was my wife .
and i whispered the good news through my broken jaw , which was wired shut , to my night nurse .
and the following morning , my mother came to explain that i 'd not always been in this bed , in this room , that i 'd been working in film and television and that i had been in a crash and that , yes , i was married , but marcy had been killed instantly in the crash .
and during my time in coma , she had been laid to rest in her hometown of phoenix .
now in the dark years that followed , i had to work out what remained for me if everything that made today special was gone .
and as i discovered these threats to consciousness and how they are surrounding the world and enveloping the lives of more and more people every day , i discovered what truly remained .
i believe that we can overcome the threats to our consciousness , that the human show can stay on the air for millennia to come .
i believe that we can all rise and shine .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- lakshmi pratury : just stay for a second . just stay here for a second .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , when i heard simon 's - please sit down ; i just want to talk to him for a second - when i read his book , i went to la to meet him .
and so i was sitting in this restaurant , waiting for a man to come by who obviously would have some difficulty ...
i do n't know what i had in my mind .
and he was walking around .
i did n't expect that person that i was going to meet to be him .
and then we met and we talked , and i 'm like , he does n't look like somebody who was built out of nothing .
and then i was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery .
and we have his book outside in the bookshop .
the thing that amazed me is the painstaking detail with which he has written every hospital he has been to , every treatment he got , every near-miss he had , and how accidentally he stumbled upon innovations .
so i think this one detail went past people really quick .
tell a little bit about what you 're wearing on your leg .
simon lewis : i knew when i was timing this that there would n't be time for me to do anything about - well this is it . this is the control unit .
and this records every single step i 've taken for , ooh , five or six years now .
and if i do this , probably the mic wo n't hear it .
that little chirp followed by two chirps is now switched on .
when i press it again , it 'll chirp three times , and that 'll mean that it 's armed and ready to go .
and that 's my friend . i mean , i charge it every night .
and it works . it works .
and what i would love to add because i did n't have time ...
what does it do ? well actually , i 'll show you down here .
this down here , if the camera can see that , that is a small antenna .
underneath my heel , there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground - what 's called the heel lift .
this thing blinks all the time ; i 'll leave it out , so you might be able to see it .
but this is blinking all the time . it 's sending signals in real time .
and if you walk faster , if i walk faster , it detects what 's called the time interval , which is the interval between each heel lift .
and it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation .
the other things they 've worked on - i did n't have time to say this in my talk - is they 've restored functional hearing to thousands of deaf people .
i could tell you the story : this was going to be an abandoned technology , but alfred mann met the doctor who was going to retire , -lsb- dr. schindler . -rsb- and he was going to retire - all the technology was going to be lost , because not a single medical manufacturer would take it on because it was a small issue .
but there 's millions of deaf people in the world , and the cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now .
it works .
and the other thing is they 're working on artificial retinas for the blind .
and this , this is the implantable generation .
because what i did n't say in my talk is this is actually exoskeletal .
i should clarify that .
because the first generation is exoskeletal , it 's wrapped around the leg , around the affected limb .
i must tell you , they 're an amazing - there 's a hundred people who work in that building - engineers , scientists , and other team members - all the time .
alfred mann has set up this foundation to advance this research because he saw there 's no way venture capital would come in for something like this .
the audience is too small .
you 'd think , there 's plenty of paralyzed people in the world , but the audience is too small , and the amount of research , the time it takes , the fda clearances , the payback time is too long for v.c. to be interested .
so he saw a need and he stepped in .
he 's a very , very remarkable man .
he 's done a lot of very cutting-edge science .
lp : so when you get a chance , spend some time with simon .
thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm a doctor , but i kind of slipped sideways into research , and now i 'm an epidemiologist .
and nobody really knows what epidemiology is .
epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you .
and it 's best understood through example as the science of those crazy , wacky newspaper headlines .
and these are just some of the examples .
these are from the daily mail . every country in the world has a newspaper like this .
it has this bizarre , ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer .
so here are some of the things they said cause cancer recently : divorce , wi-fi , toiletries and coffee .
here are some of the things they say prevents cancer : crusts , red pepper , licorice and coffee .
so already you can see there are contradictions .
coffee both causes and prevents cancer .
and as you start to read on , you can see that maybe there 's some kind of political valence behind some of this .
so for women , housework prevents breast cancer , but for men , shopping could make you impotent .
so we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this .
and what i hope to show is that unpicking dodgy claims , unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims , is n't a kind of nasty carping activity ; it 's socially useful , but it 's also an extremely valuable explanatory tool .
because real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else 's position .
that 's what happens in academic journals .
that 's what happens at academic conferences .
the q & a session after a post-op presents data is often a blood bath .
and nobody minds that . we actively welcome it .
it 's like a consenting intellectual s & m activity .
so what i 'm going to show you is all of the main things , all of the main features of my discipline - evidence-based medicine .
and i will talk you through all of these and demonstrate how they work , exclusively using examples of people getting stuff wrong .
so we 'll start with the absolute weakest form of evidence known to man , and that is authority .
in science , we do n't care how many letters you have after your name .
in science , we want to know what your reasons are for believing something .
how do you know that something is good for us or bad for us ?
but we 're also unimpressed by authority , because it 's so easy to contrive .
this is somebody called dr. gillian mckeith ph.d , or , to give her full medical title , gillian mckeith .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- again , every country has somebody like this .
she is our tv diet guru .
she has massive five series of prime-time television , giving out very lavish and exotic health advice .
she , it turns out , has a non-accredited correspondence course ph.d.
from somewhere in america .
she also boasts that she 's a certified professional member of the american association of nutritional consultants , which sounds very glamorous and exciting .
you get a certificate and everything .
this one belongs to my dead cat hetti . she was a horrible cat .
you just go to the website , fill out the form , give them $ 60 , and it arrives in the post .
now that 's not the only reason that we think this person is an idiot .
she also goes and says things like , you should eat lots of dark green leaves , because they contain lots of chlorophyll , and that will really oxygenate your blood .
and anybody who 's done school biology remembers that chlorophyll and chloroplasts only make oxygen in sunlight , and it 's quite dark in your bowels after you 've eaten spinach .
next , we need proper science , proper evidence .
so , " red wine can help prevent breast cancer . "
this is a headline from the daily telegraph in the u.k.
" a glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer . "
so you go and find this paper , and what you find is it is a real piece of science .
it is a description of the changes in one enzyme when you drip a chemical extracted from some red grape skin onto some cancer cells in a dish on a bench in a laboratory somewhere .
and that 's a really useful thing to describe in a scientific paper , but on the question of your own personal risk of getting breast cancer if you drink red wine , it tells you absolutely bugger all .
actually , it turns out that your risk of breast cancer actually increases slightly with every amount of alcohol that you drink .
so what we want is studies in real human people .
and here 's another example .
this is from britain 's leading diet and nutritionist in the daily mirror , which is our second biggest selling newspaper .
" an australian study in 2001 found that olive oil in combination with fruits , vegetables and pulses offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings . "
and then they give you advice : " if you eat olive oil and vegetables , you 'll have fewer skin wrinkles . "
and they very helpfully tell you how to go and find the paper .
so you go and find the paper , and what you find is an observational study .
obviously nobody has been able to go back to 1930 , get all the people born in one maternity unit , and half of them eat lots of fruit and veg and olive oil , and then half of them eat mcdonald 's , and then we see how many wrinkles you 've got later .
you have to take a snapshot of how people are now .
and what you find is , of course , people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer skin wrinkles .
but that 's because people who eat fruit and veg and olive oil , they 're freaks , they 're not normal , they 're like you ; they come to events like this .
they are posh , they 're wealthy , they 're less likely to have outdoor jobs , they 're less likely to do manual labor , they have better social support , they 're less likely to smoke - so for a whole host of fascinating , interlocking social , political and cultural reasons , they are less likely to have skin wrinkles .
that does n't mean that it 's the vegetables or the olive oil .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so ideally what you want to do is a trial .
and everybody thinks they 're very familiar with the idea of a trial .
trials are very old . the first trial was in the bible - daniel 1:12 .
it 's very straightforward - you take a bunch of people , you split them in half , you treat one group one way , you treat the other group the other way , and a little while later , you follow them up and see what happened to each of them .
so i 'm going to tell you about one trial , which is probably the most well-reported trial in the u.k. news media over the past decade .
and this is the trial of fish oil pills .
and the claim was fish oil pills improve school performance and behavior in mainstream children .
and they said , " we 've done a trial .
all the previous trials were positive , and we know this one 's gonna be too . "
that should always ring alarm bells .
because if you already know the answer to your trial , you should n't be doing one .
either you 've rigged it by design , or you 've got enough data so there 's no need to randomize people anymore .
so this is what they were going to do in their trial .
they were taking 3,000 children , they were going to give them all these huge fish oil pills , six of them a day , and then a year later , they were going to measure their school exam performance and compare their school exam performance against what they predicted their exam performance would have been if they had n't had the pills .
now can anybody spot a flaw in this design ?
and no professors of clinical trial methodology are allowed to answer this question .
so there 's no control ; there 's no control group .
but that sounds really techie .
that 's a technical term .
the kids got the pills , and then their performance improved .
what else could it possibly be if it was n't the pills ?
they got older . we all develop over time .
and of course , also there 's the placebo effect .
the placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine .
it 's not just about taking a pill , and your performance and your pain getting better .
it 's about our beliefs and expectations .
it 's about the cultural meaning of a treatment .
and this has been demonstrated in a whole raft of fascinating studies comparing one kind of placebo against another .
so we know , for example , that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for getting rid of gastric ulcers than one sugar pill .
two sugar pills a day beats one sugar pill a day .
and that 's an outrageous and ridiculous finding , but it 's true .
we know from three different studies on three different types of pain that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment for pain than taking a sugar pill , taking a dummy pill that has no medicine in it - not because the injection or the pills do anything physically to the body , but because an injection feels like a much more dramatic intervention .
so we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated , which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo - where one half of the people get the real treatment and the other half get placebo .
but that 's not enough .
what i 've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes .
what i find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices , but slightly more sophisticated versions of them , in order to distort the evidence that they give to doctors and patients , and which we use to make vitally important decisions .
so firstly , trials against placebo : everybody thinks they know that a trial should be a comparison of your new drug against placebo .
but actually in a lot of situations that 's wrong .
because often we already have a very good treatment that is currently available , so we do n't want to know that your alternative new treatment is better than nothing .
we want to know that it 's better than the best currently available treatment that we have .
and yet , repeatedly , you consistently see people doing trials still against placebo .
and you can get license to bring your drug to market with only data showing that it 's better than nothing , which is useless for a doctor like me trying to make a decision .
but that 's not the only way you can rig your data .
you can also rig your data by making the thing you compare your new drug against really rubbish .
you can give the competing drug in too low a dose , so that people are n't properly treated .
you can give the competing drug in too high a dose , so that people get side effects .
and this is exactly what happened which antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia .
20 years ago , a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in and the promise was that they would have fewer side effects .
so people set about doing trials of these new drugs against the old drugs , but they gave the old drugs in ridiculously high doses - 20 milligrams a day of haloperidol .
and it 's a foregone conclusion , if you give a drug at that high a dose , that it will have more side effects and that your new drug will look better .
10 years ago , history repeated itself , interestingly , when risperidone , which was the first of the new-generation antipscyhotic drugs , came off copyright , so anybody could make copies .
everybody wanted to show that their drug was better than risperidone , so you see a bunch of trials comparing new antipsychotic drugs against risperidone at eight milligrams a day .
again , not an insane dose , not an illegal dose , but very much at the high end of normal .
and so you 're bound to make your new drug look better .
and so it 's no surprise that overall , industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials .
but - and it 's a big but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- it turns out , when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials , that they 're actually better than independently sponsored trials .
and yet , they always manage to to get the result that they want .
so how does this work ?
how can we explain this strange phenomenon ?
well it turns out that what happens is the negative data goes missing in action ; it 's withheld from doctors and patients .
and this is the most important aspect of the whole story .
it 's at the top of the pyramid of evidence .
we need to have all of the data on a particular treatment to know whether or not it really is effective .
and there are two different ways that you can spot whether some data has gone missing in action .
you can use statistics , or you can use stories .
i personally prefer statistics , so that 's what i 'm going to do first .
this is something called funnel plot .
and a funnel plot is a very clever way of spotting if small negative trials have disappeared , have gone missing in action .
so this is a graph of all of the trials that have been done on a particular treatment .
and as you go up towards the top of the graph , what you see is each dot is a trial .
and as you go up , those are the bigger trials , so they 've got less error in them .
so they 're less likely to be randomly false positives , randomly false negatives .
so they all cluster together .
the big trials are closer to the true answer .
then as you go further down at the bottom , what you can see is , over on this side , the spurious false negatives , and over on this side , the spurious false positives .
if there is publication bias , if small negative trials have gone missing in action , you can see it on one of these graphs .
so you can see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared .
this is a graph demonstrating the presence of publication bias in studies of publication bias .
and i think that 's the funniest epidemiology joke that you will ever hear .
that 's how you can prove it statistically , but what about stories ?
well they 're heinous , they really are .
this is a drug called reboxetine .
this is a drug that i myself have prescribed to patients .
and i 'm a very nerdy doctor .
i hope i try to go out of my way to try and read and understand all the literature .
i read the trials on this . they were all positive . they were all well-conducted .
i found no flaw .
unfortunately , it turned out , that many of these trials were withheld .
in fact , 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients .
now if you think about it , if i tossed a coin a hundred times , and i 'm allowed to withhold from you the answers half the times , then i can convince you that i have a coin with two heads .
if we remove half of the data , we can never know what the true effect size of these medicines is .
and this is not an isolated story .
around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld , but it goes way beyond that .
the nordic cochrane group were trying to get a hold of the data on that to bring it all together .
the cochrane groups are an international nonprofit collaboration that produce systematic reviews of all of the data that has ever been shown .
and they need to have access to all of the trial data .
but the companies withheld that data from them , and so did the european medicines agency for three years .
this is a problem that is currently lacking a solution .
and to show how big it goes , this is a drug called tamiflu , which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on .
and they spend that money on the promise that this is a drug which will reduce the rate of complications with flu .
we already have the data showing that it reduces the duration of your flu by a few hours .
but i do n't really care about that . governments do n't care about that .
i 'm very sorry if you have the flu , i know it 's horrible , but we 're not going to spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the duration of your flu symptoms by half a day .
we prescribe these drugs , we stockpile them for emergencies on the understanding that they will reduce the number of complications , which means pneumonia and which means death .
the infectious diseases cochrane group , which are based in italy , has been trying to get the full data in a usable form out of the drug companies so that they can make a full decision about whether this drug is effective or not , and they 've not been able to get that information .
this is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today .
we can not make decisions in the absence of all of the information .
so it 's a little bit difficult from there to spin in some kind of positive conclusion .
but i would say this : i think that sunlight is the best disinfectant .
all of these things are happening in plain sight , and they 're all protected by a force field of tediousness .
and i think , with all of the problems in science , one of the best things that we can do is to lift up the lid , finger around in the mechanics and peer in .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the 1980s in the communist eastern germany , if you owned a typewriter , you had to register it with the government .
you had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter .
and this was done so the government could track where text was coming from .
if they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought , they could track down who created that thought .
and we in the west could n't understand how anybody could do this , how much this would restrict freedom of speech .
we would never do that in our own countries .
but today in 2011 , if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page , that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer .
this is happening to us today .
and nobody seems to be making a fuss about it .
and this is an example of the ways that our own governments are using technology against us , the citizens .
and this is one of the main three sources of online problems today .
if we take a look at what 's really happening in the online world , we can group the attacks based on the attackers .
we have three main groups .
we have online criminals .
like here , we have mr. dimitry golubov from the city of kiev in ukraine .
and the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand .
these guys make money .
they use online attacks to make lots of money , and lots and lots of it .
we actually have several cases of millionaires online , multimillionaires , who made money with their attacks .
here 's vladimir tsastsin form tartu in estonia .
this is alfred gonzalez .
this is stephen watt .
this is bjorn sundin .
this is matthew anderson , tariq al-daour and so on and so on .
these guys make their fortunes online , but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking , or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer .
the u.s. secret service , two months ago , froze the swiss bank account of mr. sam jain right here , and that bank account had 14.9 million u.s. dollars on it when it was frozen .
mr. jain himself is on the loose ; nobody knows where he is .
and i claim it 's already today that it 's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world .
and it 's very obvious that this is only going to get worse .
in the future , the majority of crime will be happening online .
the second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money .
they 're motivated by something else - motivated by protests , motivated by an opinion , motivated by the laughs .
groups like anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks .
so those are the three main attackers : criminals who do it for the money , hacktivists like anonymous doing it for the protest , but then the last group are nation states , governments doing the attacks .
and then we look at cases like what happened in diginotar .
this is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens .
diginotar is a certificate authority from the netherlands - or actually , it was .
it was running into bankruptcy last fall because they were hacked into .
somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly .
and i asked last week in a meeting with dutch government representatives , i asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the diginotar hack .
and his answer was yes .
so how do people die as the result of a hack like this ?
well diginotar is a c.a.
they sell certificates .
what do you do with certificates ?
well you need a certificate if you have a website that has https , ssl encrypted services , services like gmail .
now we all , or a big part of us , use gmail or one of their competitors , but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like iran , where dissidents use foreign services like gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over ssl connections , so the local government ca n't snoop on their discussions .
except they can if they hack into a foreign c.a.
and issue rogue certificates .
and this is exactly what happened with the case of diginotar .
what about arab spring and things that have been happening , for example , in egypt ?
well in egypt , the rioters looted the headquarters of the egyptian secret police in april 2011 , and when they were looting the building they found lots of papers .
among those papers , was this binder entitled " finfisher . "
and within that binder were notes from a company based in germany which had sold the egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting - and in very large scale - all the communication of the citizens of the country .
they had sold this tool for 280,000 euros to the egyptian government .
the company headquarters are right here .
so western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens .
but western governments are doing it to themselves as well .
for example , in germany , just a couple of weeks ago the so-called state trojan was found , which was a trojan used by german government officials to investigate their own citizens .
if you are a suspect in a criminal case , well it 's pretty obvious , your phone will be tapped .
but today , it goes beyond that .
they will tap your internet connection .
they will even use tools like state trojan to infect your computer with a trojan , which enables them to watch all your communication , to listen to your online discussions , to collect your passwords .
now when we think deeper about things like these , the obvious response from people should be that , " okay , that sounds bad , but that does n't really affect me because i 'm a legal citizen .
why should i worry ?
because i have nothing to hide . "
and this is an argument , which does n't make sense .
privacy is implied .
privacy is not up for discussion .
this is not a question between privacy against security .
it 's a question of freedom against control .
and while we might trust our governments right now , right here in 2011 , any right we give away will be given away for good .
and do we trust , do we blindly trust , any future government , a government we might have 50 years from now ?
and these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years .
in the past several days , i heard people talking about china .
and also , i talked to friends about china and chinese internet .
something is very challenging to me .
i want to make my friends understand : china is complicated .
so i always want to tell the story , like , one hand it is that , the other hand is that .
you ca n't just tell a one sided story .
i 'll give an example . china is a bric country .
bric country means brazil , russia , india and china .
this emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy .
but at the same time , on the other hand , china is a sick country , the terminology coined by facebook ipo papers - file .
he said the sick country means syria , iran , china and north korea .
the four countries have no access to facebook .
so basically , china is a sick bric country .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another project was built up to watch china and chinese internet .
and now , today i want to tell you my personal observation in the past several years , from that wall .
so , if you are a fan of the game of thrones , you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom .
it prevents weird things from the north .
same was true for china .
in the north , there was a great wall , chang cheng .
it protected china from invaders for 2,000 years .
but china also has a great firewall .
that 's the biggest digital boundary in the whole world .
it 's not only to defend the chinese regime from overseas , from the universal values , but also to prevent china 's own citizens to access the global free internet , and even separate themselves into blocks , not united .
so , basically the " internet " has two internets .
one is the internet , the other is the chinanet .
but if you think the chinanet is something like a deadland , wasteland , i think it 's wrong .
but we also use a very simple metaphor , the cat and the mouse game , to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between chinese censorship , government censorship , the cat , and the chinese internet users . that means us , the mouse .
but sometimes this kind of a metaphor is too simple .
so today i want to upgrade it to 2.0 version .
in china , we have 500 million internet users .
that 's the biggest population of netizens , internet users , in the whole world .
so even though china 's is a totally censored internet , but still , chinese internet society is really booming .
how to make it ? it 's simple .
you have google , we have baidu .
you have twitter , we have weibo .
you have facebook , we have renren .
you have youtube , we have youku and tudou .
the chinese government blocked every single international web 2.0 service , and we chinese copycat every one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , that 's the kind of the thing i call smart censorship .
that 's not only to censor you .
sometimes this chinese national internet policy is very simple : block and clone .
on the one hand , he wants to satisfy people 's need of a social network , which is very important ; people really love social networking .
but on the other hand , they want to keep the server in beijing so they can access the data any time they want .
that 's also the reason google was pulled out from china , because they ca n't accept the fact that chinese government wants to keep the server .
sometimes the arab dictators did n't understand these two hands .
for example , mubarak , he shut down the internet .
he wanted to prevent the netizens -lsb- from criticizing -rsb- him .
but once netizens ca n't go online , they go in the street .
and now the result is very simple .
we all know mubarak is technically dead .
but also , ben ali , tunisian president , did n't follow the second rule .
that means keep the server in your hands .
he allowed facebook , a u.s.-based service , to continue to stay on inside of tunisia .
so he ca n't prevent it , his own citizens to post critical videos against his corruption .
the same thing happend . he was the first to topple during the arab spring .
but those two very smart international censorship policies did n't prevent chinese social media -lsb- from -rsb- becoming a really public sphere , a pathway of public opinion and the nightmare of chinese officials .
because we have 300 million microbloggers in china .
it 's the entire population of the united states .
so when these 300 million people , microbloggers , even they block the tweet in our censored platform .
but itself - the chinanet - but itself can create very powerful energy , which has never happened in the chinese history .
2011 , in july , two -lsb- unclear -rsb- trains crashed , in wenzhou , a southern city .
right after the train crash , authorities literally wanted to cover up the train , bury the train .
so it angered the chinese netizens .
the first five days after the train crash , there were 10 million criticisms of the posting on social media , which never happened in chinese history .
and later this year , the rail minister was sacked and sentenced to jail for 10 years .
and also , recently , very funny debate between the beijing environment ministry and the american embassy in beijing because the ministry blamed the american embassy for intervening in chinese internal politics by disclosing the air quality data of beijing .
so , the up is the embassy data , the pm 2.5 .
he showed 148 , they showed it 's dangerous for the sensitive group .
so a suggestion , it 's not good to go outside .
but that is the ministry 's data . he shows 50 .
he says it 's good . it 's good to go outside .
but 99 percent of chinese microbloggers stand firmly on the embassy 's side .
i live in beijing . every day , i just watch the american embassy 's data to decide whether i should open my window .
why is chinese social networking , even within the censorship , so booming ? part of the reason is chinese languages .
you know , twitter and twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters .
but in english it 's 20 words or a sentence with a short link .
maybe in germany , in german language , it may be just " aha ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in chinese language , it 's really about 140 characters , means a paragraph , a story .
you can almost have all the journalistic elements there .
for example , this is hamlet , of shakespeare .
it 's the same content . one , you can see exactly one chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 english tweets .
chinese is always cheating , right ?
so because of this , the chinese really regard this microblogging as a media , not only a headline to media .
and also , the clone , sina company is the guy who cloned twitter .
it even has its own name , with weibo .
" weibo " is the chinese translation for " microblog . "
it has its own innovation .
at the commenting area , -lsb- it makes -rsb- the chinese weibo more like facebook , rather than the original twitter .
so these innovations and clones , as the weibo and microblogging , when it came to china in 2009 , it immediately became a media platform itself .
it became the media platform of 300 million readers .
it became the media .
anything not mentioned in weibo , it does not appear to exist for the chinese public .
but also , chinese social media is really changing chinese mindsets and chinese life .
for example , they give the voiceless people a channel to make your voice heard .
we had a petition system . it 's a remedy outside the judicial system , because the chinese central government wants to keep a myth : the emperor is good . the old local officials are thugs .
so that 's why the petitioner , the victims , the peasants , want to take the train to beijing to petition to the central government , they want the emperor to settle the problem .
but when more and more people go to beijing , they also cause the risk of a revolution .
so they send them back in recent years .
and even some of them were put into black jails .
but now we have weibo , so i call it the weibo petition .
people just use their cell phones to tweet .
so your sad stories , by some chance your story will be picked up by reporters , professors or celebrities .
one of them is yao chen , she is the most popular microblogger in china , who has about 21 million followers .
they 're almost like a national tv station .
if you - so a sad story will be picked up by her .
so this weibo social media , even in the censorship , still gave the chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together , talking together .
it 's like a big ted , right ?
but also , it is like the first time a public sphere happened in china .
chinese people start to learn how to negotiate and talk to people .
but also , the cat , the censorship , is not sleeping .
it 's so hard to post some sensitive words on the chinese weibo .
for example , you ca n't post the name of the president , hu jintao , and also you ca n't post the city of chongqing , the name , and until recently , you ca n't search the surname of top leaders .
so , the chinese are very good at these puns and alternative wording and even memes .
they even name themselves - you know , use the name of this world-changing battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab .
the grass-mud horse is caoníma , is the phonogram for motherfucker , the netizens call themselves .
river crab is héxiè , is the phonogram for harmonization , for censorship .
so that 's kind of a caoníma versus the héxiè , that 's very good .
so , when some very political , exciting moments happened , you can see on weibo , you see a lot of very weird stories happened .
weird phrases and words , even if you have a phd of chinese language , you ca n't understand them .
but you ca n't even expand more , no , because chinese sina weibo , when it was founded was exactly one month after the official blocking of twitter.com.
that means from the very beginning , weibo has already convinced the chinese government , we will not become the stage for any kind of a threat to the regime .
for example , anything you want to post , like " get together " or " meet up " or " walk , " it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing .
even if you want to have some gathering , before you go there , the police are already waiting for you .
why ? because they have the data .
they have everything in their hands .
so they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident .
so the crackdown is very serious .
but i want you to notice a very funny thing during the process of the cat-and-mouse .
the cat is the censorship , but chinese is not only one cat , but also has local cats . central cat and local cats .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , the server is in the -lsb- central -rsb- cats ' hands , so even that - when the netizens criticize the local government , the local government has not any access to the data in beijing .
without bribing the central cats , he can do nothing , only apologize .
so these three years , in the past three years , social movements about microblogging really changed local government , became more and more transparent , because they ca n't access the data .
the server is in beijing .
the story about the train crash , maybe the question is not about why 10 million criticisms in five days , but why the chinese central government allowed the five days of freedom of speech online .
it 's never happened before .
and so it 's very simple , because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy , this independent kingdom .
so they want an excuse - public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him .
but also , the bo xilai case recently , very big news , he 's a princeling .
but from february to april this year , weibo really became a marketplace of rumors .
you can almost joke everything about these princelings , everything ! it 's almost like you 're living in the united states .
but if you dare to retweet or mention any fake coup about beijing , you definitely will be arrested .
so this kind of freedom is a targeted and precise window .
so chinese in china , censorship is normal .
something you find is , freedom is weird .
something will happen behind it .
because he was a very popular leftist leader , so the central government wanted to purge him , and he was very cute , he convinced all the chinese people , why he is so bad .
so weibo , the 300 million public sphere , became a very good , convenient tool for a political fight .
but this technology is very new , but technically is very old .
it was made famous by chairman mao , mao zedong , because he mobilized millions of chinese people in the cultural revolution to destroy every local government .
it 's very simple , because chinese central government does n't need to even lead the public opinion .
they just give them a target window to not censor people .
not censoring in china has become a political tool .
so that 's the update about this game , cat-and-mouse .
social media changed chinese mindset .
more and more chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright , not some imported american privilege .
but also , it gave the chinese a national public sphere for people to , it 's like a training of their citizenship , preparing for future democracy .
but it did n't change the chinese political system , and also the chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions .
so , what 's the future ?
after all , we are the mouse .
whatever the future is , we should fight against the -lsb- cat -rsb- .
there is not only in china , but also in the united states there are some very small , cute but bad cats .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sopa , pipa , acta , tpp and itu .
and also , like facebook and google , they claim they are friends of the mouse , but sometimes we see them dating the cats .
so my conclusion is very simple .
we chinese fight for our freedom , you just watch your bad cats .
do n't let them hook -lsb- up -rsb- with the chinese cats .
only in this way , in the future , we will achieve the dreams of the mouse : that we can tweet anytime , anywhere , without fear .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love a challenge , and saving the earth is probably a good one .
we all know the earth is in trouble .
we have now entered in the 6x , the sixth major extinction on this planet .
i often wondered , if there was a united organization of organisms - otherwise known as " uh-oh " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and every organism had a right to vote , would we be voted on the planet , or off the planet ?
i think that vote is occurring right now .
i want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions , using fungi , and these solutions are based on mycelium .
the mycelium infuses all landscapes , it holds soils together , it 's extremely tenacious .
this holds up to 30,000 times its mass .
they 're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature - the soil magicians .
they generate the humus soils across the landmasses of earth .
we have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants , mitigated by the mcyelium - so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks , cedars and douglas firs .
dusty and i , we like to say , on sunday , this is where we go to church .
i 'm in love with the old-growth forest , and i 'm a patriotic american because we have those .
most of you are familiar with portobello mushrooms .
and frankly , i face a big obstacle .
when i mention mushrooms to somebody , they immediately think portobellos or magic mushrooms , their eyes glaze over , and they think i 'm a little crazy .
so , i hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group .
we call it mycophobia , the irrational fear of the unknown , when it comes to fungi .
mushrooms are very fast in their growth .
day 21 , day 23 , day 25 .
mushrooms produce strong antibiotics .
in fact , we 're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom .
a group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta - a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together .
we share in common the same pathogens .
fungi do n't like to rot from bacteria , and so our best antibiotics come from fungi .
but here is a mushroom that 's past its prime .
after they sporulate , they do rot .
but i propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest .
they give rise to the trees , they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium .
and so we see a mushroom here sporulating .
and the spores are germinating , and the mycelium forms and goes underground .
in a single cubic inch of soil , there can be more than eight miles of these cells .
my foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium .
this is photomicrographs from nick read and patrick hickey .
and notice that as the mycelium grows , it conquers territory and then it begins the net .
i 've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years , i have thousands of electron micrographs , and when i 'm staring at the mycelium , i realize that they are microfiltration membranes .
we exhale carbon dioxide , so does mycelium .
it inhales oxygen , just like we do .
but these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs .
and i present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes .
and in these cavities , these micro-cavities form , and as they fuse soils , they absorb water .
these are little wells .
and inside these wells , then microbial communities begin to form .
and so the spongy soil not only resists erosion , but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms .
i first proposed , in the early 1990s , that mycelium is earth 's natural internet .
when you look at the mycelium , they 're highly branched .
and if there 's one branch that is broken , then very quickly , because of the nodes of crossing - internet engineers maybe call them hot points - there are alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information .
the mycelium is sentient .
it knows that you are there .
when you walk across landscapes , it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris .
so , i believe the invention of the computer internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven , biologically successful model .
the earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit , and we now , being the top organism on this planet , are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere .
going way out , dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype .
i believe matter begets life ; life becomes single cells ; single cells become strings ; strings become chains ; chains network .
and this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe .
most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land .
they came to land 1.3 billion years ago , and plants followed several hundred million years later .
how is that possible ?
it 's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids , and many other acids and enzymes , pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates .
makes the rocks crumble , and the first step in the generation of soil .
oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together .
so , fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates .
and all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix .
this was first discovered in 1859 .
this is a photograph by franz hueber .
this photograph 's taken 1950s in saudi arabia .
420 million years ago , this organism existed .
it was called prototaxites .
prototaxites , laying down , was about three feet tall .
the tallest plants on earth at that time were less than two feet .
dr. boyce , at the university of chicago , published an article in the journal of geology this past year determining that prototaxites was a giant fungus , a giant mushroom .
across the landscapes of earth were dotted these giant mushrooms .
all across most land masses .
and these existed for tens of millions of years .
now , we 've had several extinction events , and as we march forward - 65 million years ago - most of you know about it - we had an asteroid impact .
the earth was struck by an asteroid , a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere .
sunlight was cut off , and fungi inherited the earth .
those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded , because fungi do not need light .
more recently , at einstein university , they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy , much like plants use light .
so , the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere , i think , is a forgone conclusion , at least in my own mind .
the largest organism in the world is in eastern oregon .
i could n't miss it . it was 2,200 acres in size : 2,200 acres in size , 2,000 years old .
the largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat , one cell wall thick .
how is it that this organism can be so large , and yet be one cell wall thick , whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us ?
the mycelium , in the right conditions , produces a mushroom - it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt .
we were involved with several experiments .
i 'm going to show you six , if i can , solutions for helping to save the world .
battelle laboratories and i joined up in bellingham , washington .
there were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste : one was a control pile ; one pile was treated with enzymes ; one pile was treated with bacteria ; and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium .
the mycelium absorbs the oil .
the mycelium is producing enzymes - peroxidases - that break carbon-hydrogen bonds .
these are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together .
so , the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil , and then , when we returned six weeks later , all the tarps were removed , all the other piles were dead , dark and stinky .
we came back to our pile , it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms , and the color changed to a light form .
the enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates - fungal sugars .
some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms .
they 're very large .
they 're showing how much nutrition that they could 've obtained .
but something else happened , which was an epiphany in my life .
they sporulated , the spores attract insects , the insects laid eggs , eggs became larvae .
birds then came , bringing in seeds , and our pile became an oasis of life .
whereas the other three piles were dead , dark and stinky , and the pah 's - the aromatic hydrocarbons - went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks .
the last image we do n't have .
the entire pile was a green berm of life .
these are gateway species , vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities .
so i invented burlap sacks , bunker spawn - and putting the mycelium - using storm blown debris , you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that 's producing e. coli , or other wastes , or a factory with chemical toxins , and it leads to habitat restoration .
so , we set up a site in mason county , washington , and we 've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms .
and i 'll show you a graph here .
this is a logarithmic scale , 10 to the eighth power .
there 's more than a 100 million colonies per gram , and 10 to the third power is around 1,000 .
in 48 hours to 72 hours , these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times .
think of the implications .
this is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris - and we can guarantee that we will have storms every year .
so , this one mushroom , in particular , has drawn our interest over time .
this is my wife dusty , with a mushroom called fomitopsis officinalis - agarikon .
it 's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest that dioscorides first described in 65 a.d.
as a treatment against consumption .
this mushroom grows in washington state , oregon , northern california , british columbia , now thought to be extinct in europe .
may not seem that large - let 's get closer .
this is extremely rare fungus .
our team - and we have a team of experts that go out - we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year .
we found one sample to be able to get into culture .
preserving the genome of these fungi in the old-growth forest i think is absolutely critical for human health .
i 've been involved with the u.s. defense department bioshield program .
we submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water , and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites .
and a few years ago , we received these results .
we have three different strains of agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses .
dr. earl kern , who 's a smallpox expert of the u.s. defense department , states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active .
10 or greater are considered to be very active .
our mushroom strains were in the highly active range .
there 's a vetted press release that you can read - it 's vetted by dod - if you google " stamets " and " smallpox . "
or you can go to npr.org and listen to a live interview .
so , encouraged by this , naturally we went to flu viruses .
and so , for the first time , i am showing this .
we have three different strains of agarikon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses .
here 's the selectivity index numbers - against pox , you saw 10s and 20s - now against flu viruses , compared to the ribavirin controls , we have an extraordinarily high activity .
and we 're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical .
we tried it against flu a viruses - h1n1 , h3n2 - as well as flu b viruses .
so then we tried a blend , and in a blend combination we tried it against h5n1 , and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i became interested in entomopathogenic fungi - fungi that kill insects .
our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants .
so , i went to the epa homepage , and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants , as well as termites .
i did something that nobody else had done .
i actually chased the mycelium , when it stopped producing spores .
these are spores - this is in their spores .
i was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form .
and so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house .
but the insects are n't stupid , and they would avoid the spores when they came close , and so i morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form .
and i got my daughter 's barbie doll dish , i put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields , every day , in my house , and the ants were attracted to the mycelium , because there 's no spores .
they gave it to the queen .
one week later , i had no sawdust piles whatsoever .
and then - a delicate dance between dinner and death - the mycelium is consumed by the ants , they become mummified , and , boing , a mushroom pops out of their head .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now after sporulation , the spores repel .
so , the house is no longer suitable for invasion .
so , you have a near-permanent solution for reinvasion of termites .
and so my house came down , i received my first patent against carpenter ants , termites and fire ants .
then we tried extracts , and lo and behold , we can steer insects to different directions .
this has huge implications .
i then received my second patent - and this is a big one .
it 's been called an alexander graham bell patent .
it covers over 200,000 species .
this is the most disruptive technology - i 've been told by executives of the pesticide industry - that they have ever witnessed .
this could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world .
you could fly 100 ph.d. students under the umbrella of this concept , because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi , prior to sporulation , attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores .
and so i came up with a life box , because i needed a delivery system .
the life box - you 're gonna be getting a dvd of the ted conference - you add soil , you add water , you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores , like of the agarikon mushroom .
the seeds then are mothered by this mycelium .
and then you put tree seeds in here , and then you end up growing - potentially - an old-growth forest from a cardboard box .
i want to reinvent the delivery system , and the use of cardboard around the world , so they become ecological footprints .
if there 's a youtube-like site that you could put up , you could make it interactive , zip code specific - where people could join together , and through satellite imaging systems , through virtual earth or google earth , you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through life boxes .
you could take a cardboard box delivering shoes , you could add water - i developed this for the refugee community - corns , beans and squash and onions .
i took several containers - my wife said , if i could do this , anybody could - and i ended up growing a seed garden .
then you harvest the seeds - and thank you , eric rasmussen , for your help on this - and then you 're harvesting the seed garden .
then you can harvest the kernels , and then you just need a few kernels .
i add mycelium to it , and then i inoculate the corncobs .
now , three corncobs , no other grain - lots of mushrooms begin to form .
too many withdrawals from the carbon bank , and so this population will be shut down .
but watch what happens here .
the mushrooms then are harvested , but very importantly , the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars .
and so i thought , how could we address the energy crisis in this country ?
and we came up with econol .
generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary - and you gain all the benefits that i 've described to you already .
but to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent , and i think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels .
so , we build the carbon banks on the planet , renew the soils .
these are a species that we need to join with .
i think engaging mycelium can help save the world .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- fifty years ago , when i began exploring the ocean , no one - not jacques perrin , not jacques cousteau or rachel carson - imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or by what we took out of it .
it seemed , at that time , to be a sea of eden , but now we know , and now we are facing paradise lost .
i want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us , and to consider why it matters that in 50 years , we 've lost - actually , we 've taken , we 've eaten - more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea ; why you should care that nearly half of the coral reefs have disappeared ; why a mysterious depletion of oxygen in large areas of the pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying , but it really should concern you .
it does concern you , as well .
i 'm haunted by the thought of what ray anderson calls " tomorrow 's child , " asking why we did n't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time .
well , now is that time .
i hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and , in so doing , secure hope for humankind .
health to the ocean means health for us .
and i hope jill tarter 's wish to engage earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe .
and i hope , jill , that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- did i say that ? i guess i did .
for me , as a scientist , it all began in 1953 when i first tried scuba .
it 's when i first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter .
i actually love diving at night ; you see a lot of fish then that you do n't see in the daytime .
diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970 , when i led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time - at the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon .
in 1979 i had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal submersible called jim .
it was six miles offshore and 1,250 feet down .
it 's one of my favorite bathing suits .
since then , i 've used about 30 kinds of submarines and i 've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called deep search to design and build systems to access the deep sea .
i led a five-year national geographic expedition , the sustainable seas expeditions , using these little subs .
they 're so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it .
and i 'm living proof .
astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air , food , water , temperature - all the things you need to stay alive in space or under the sea .
i heard astronaut joe allen explain how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system ; and then he pointed to this and he said , " life support system . "
we need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it .
the poet auden said , " thousands have lived without love ; none without water . "
ninety-seven percent of earth 's water is ocean .
no blue , no green .
if you think the ocean is n't important , imagine earth without it .
mars comes to mind .
no ocean , no life support system .
i gave a talk not so long ago at the world bank and i showed this amazing image of earth and i said , " there it is ! the world bank ! "
that 's where all the assets are !
and we 've been trawling them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them .
tim worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment .
with every drop of water you drink , every breath you take , you 're connected to the sea .
no matter where on earth you live .
most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea .
over time , most of the planet 's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there , mostly by microbes .
the ocean drives climate and weather , stabilizes temperature , shapes earth 's chemistry .
water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain , sleet and snow , and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world , maybe in the universe .
no water , no life ; no blue , no green .
yet we have this idea , we humans , that the earth - all of it : the oceans , the skies - are so vast and so resilient it does n't matter what we do to it .
that may have been true 10,000 years ago , and maybe even 1,000 years ago but in the last 100 , especially in the last 50 , we 've drawn down the assets , the air , the water , the wildlife that make our lives possible .
new technologies are helping us to understand the nature of nature ; the nature of what 's happening , showing us our impact on the earth .
i mean , first you have to know that you 've got a problem .
and fortunately , in our time , we 've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history .
and with knowing comes caring .
and with caring , there 's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us .
but first we have to know .
three years ago , i met john hanke , who 's the head of google earth , and i told him how much i loved being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously .
but i asked him : " when are you going to finish it ?
you did a great job with the land , the dirt .
what about the water ? "
since then , i 've had the great pleasure of working with the googlers , with doer marine , with national geographic , with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world , ones that we could enlist , to put the ocean in google earth .
and as of just this week , last monday , google earth is now whole .
consider this : starting right here at the convention center , we can find the nearby aquarium , we can look at where we 're sitting , and then we can cruise up the coast to the big aquarium , the ocean , and california 's four national marine sanctuaries , and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets we can flit over to hawaii and see the real hawaiian islands : not just the little bit that pokes through the surface , but also what 's below .
to see - wait a minute , we can go kshhplash ! - right there , ha - under the ocean , see what the whales see .
we can go explore the other side of the hawaiian islands .
we can go actually and swim around on google earth and visit with humpback whales .
these are the gentle giants that i 've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater .
there 's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale .
we can pick up and fly to the deepest place : seven miles down , the mariana trench , where only two people have ever been .
imagine that . it 's only seven miles , but only two people have been there , 49 years ago .
one-way trips are easy .
we need new deep-diving submarines .
how about some x prizes for ocean exploration ?
we need to see deep trenches , the undersea mountains , and understand life in the deep sea .
we can now go to the arctic .
just ten years ago i stood on the ice at the north pole .
an ice-free arctic ocean may happen in this century .
that 's bad news for the polar bears .
that 's bad news for us too .
excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming , it 's also changing ocean chemistry , making the sea more acidic .
that 's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen-producing plankton .
also it 's bad news for us .
we 're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other trash into the sea .
millions of tons of discarded fishing nets , gear that continues to kill .
we 're clogging the ocean , poisoning the planet 's circulatory system , and we 're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife , all carbon-based units .
barbarically , we 're killing sharks for shark fin soup , undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle , the nitrogen cycle , the oxygen cycle , the water cycle - our life support system .
we 're still killing bluefin tuna ; truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead .
all of these parts are part of our life support system .
we kill using long lines , with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more .
industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers , taking everything in their path .
using google earth you can witness trawlers - in china , the north sea , the gulf of mexico - shaking the foundation of our life support system , leaving plumes of death in their path .
the next time you dine on sushi - or sashimi , or swordfish steak , or shrimp cocktail , whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean - think of the real cost .
for every pound that goes to market , more than 10 pounds , even 100 pounds , may be thrown away as bycatch .
this is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea .
this chart shows the decline in ocean wildlife from 1900 to 2000 .
the highest concentrations are in red .
in my lifetime , imagine , 90 percent of the big fish have been killed .
most of the turtles , sharks , tunas and whales are way down in numbers .
but , there is good news .
ten percent of the big fish still remain .
there are still some blue whales .
there are still some krill in antarctica .
there are a few oysters in chesapeake bay .
half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape , a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet .
there 's still time , but not a lot , to turn things around .
but business as usual means that in 50 years , there may be no coral reefs - and no commercial fishing , because the fish will simply be gone .
imagine the ocean without fish .
imagine what that means to our life support system .
natural systems on the land are in big trouble too , but the problems are more obvious , and some actions are being taken to protect trees , watersheds and wildlife .
and in 1872 , with yellowstone national park , the united states began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea america ever had .
about 12 percent of the land around the world is now protected : safeguarding biodiversity , providing a carbon sink , generating oxygen , protecting watersheds .
and , in 1972 , this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea , national marine sanctuaries .
that 's another great idea .
the good news is that there are now more than 4,000 places in the sea , around the world , that have some kind of protection .
and you can find them on google earth .
the bad news is that you have to look hard to find them .
in the last three years , for example , the u.s. protected 340,000 square miles of ocean as national monuments .
but it only increased from 0.6 of one percent to 0.8 of one percent of the ocean protected , globally .
protected areas do rebound , but it takes a long time to restore 50-year-old rockfish or monkfish , sharks or sea bass , or 200-year-old orange roughy .
we do n't consume 200-year-old cows or chickens .
protected areas provide hope that the creatures of ed wilson 's dream of an encyclopedia of life , or the census of marine life , will live not just as a list , a photograph , or a paragraph .
with scientists around the world , i 've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing - and mining , and drilling , and dumping , and whatever - to search out hope spots , and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future .
such as the arctic - we have one chance , right now , to get it right .
or the antarctic , where the continent is protected , but the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill , whales and fish .
sargasso sea 's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows .
97 percent of the land in the galapagos islands is protected , but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing .
it 's true too in argentina on the patagonian shelf , which is now in serious trouble .
the high seas , where whales , tuna and dolphins travel - the largest , least protected , ecosystem on earth , filled with luminous creatures , living in dark waters that average two miles deep .
they flash , and sparkle , and glow with their own living light .
there are still places in the sea as pristine as i knew as a child .
the next 10 years may be the most important , and the next 10,000 years the best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life .
to cope with climate change , we need new ways to generate power .
we need new ways , better ways , to cope with poverty , wars and disease .
we need many things to keep and maintain the world as a better place .
but , nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean .
our fate and the ocean 's are one .
we need to do for the ocean what al gore did for the skies above .
a global plan of action with a world conservation union , the iucn , is underway to protect biodiversity , to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change , on the high seas and in coastal areas , wherever we can identify critical places .
new technologies are needed to map , photograph and explore the 95 percent of the ocean that we have yet to see .
the goal is to protect biodiversity , to provide stability and resilience .
we need deep-diving subs , new technologies to explore the ocean .
we need , maybe , an expedition - a ted at sea - that could help figure out the next steps .
and so , i suppose you want to know what my wish is .
i wish you would use all means at your disposal - films , expeditions , the web , new submarines - and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas - hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean , the blue heart of the planet .
how much ?
some say 10 percent , some say 30 percent .
you decide : how much of your heart do you want to protect ?
whatever it is , a fraction of one percent is not enough .
my wish is a big wish , but if we can make it happen , it can truly change the world , and help ensure the survival of what actually - as it turns out - is my favorite species ; that would be us .
for the children of today , for tomorrow 's child : as never again , now is the time .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life .
but i want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man .
this is hermann goering .
goering was hitler 's second in command in world war ii , his designated successor .
and like hitler , goering fancied himself a collector of art .
he went through europe , through world war ii , stealing , extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection .
and what he really wanted was something by vermeer .
hitler had two of them , and he did n't have any .
so he finally found an art dealer , a dutch art dealer named han van meegeren , who sold him a wonderful vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars .
and it was his favorite artwork ever .
world war ii came to an end , and goering was captured , tried at nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death .
then the allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him .
and at some point the dutch police came into amsterdam and arrested van meegeren .
van meegeren was charged with the crime of treason , which is itself punishable by death .
six weeks into his prison sentence , van meegeren confessed .
but he did n't confess to treason .
he said , " i did not sell a great masterpiece to that nazi .
i painted it myself ; i 'm a forger . "
now nobody believed him .
and he said , " i 'll prove it .
bring me a canvas and some paint , and i will paint a vermeer much better than i sold that disgusting nazi .
i also need alcohol and morphine , because it 's the only way i can work . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they brought him in .
he painted a beautiful vermeer .
and then the charges of treason were dropped .
he had a lesser charge of forgery , got a year sentence and died a hero to the dutch people .
there 's a lot more to be said about van meegeren , but i want to turn now to goering , who 's pictured here being interrogated at nuremberg .
now goering was , by all accounts , a terrible man .
even for a nazi , he was a terrible man .
his american interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath .
but you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery .
according to his biographer , " he looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he killed himself soon afterwards .
he had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that .
it looked the same , but it had a different origin , it was a different artwork .
it was n't just him who was in for a shock .
once van meegeren was on trial , he could n't stop talking .
and he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists .
in particular , " the supper at emmaus " which was viewed as vermeer 's finest masterpiece , his best work - people would come -lsb- from -rsb- all over the world to see it - was actually a forgery .
it was not that painting , but that painting .
and when that was discovered , it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum .
why does this matter ?
i 'm a psychologists - why do origins matter so much ?
why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from ?
well there 's an answer that many people would give .
many sociologists like veblen and wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we 're snobs , because we 're focused on status .
among other things , if you want to show off how rich you are , how powerful you are , it 's always better to own an original than a forgery because there 's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries .
i do n't doubt that that plays some role , but what i want to convince you of today is that there 's something else going on .
i want to convince you that humans are , to some extent , natural born essentialists .
what i mean by this is we do n't just respond to things as we see them , or feel them , or hear them .
rather , our response is conditioned on our beliefs , about what they really are , what they came from , what they 're made of , what their hidden nature is .
i want to suggest that this is true , not just for how we think about things , but how we react to things .
so i want to suggest that pleasure is deep - and that this is n't true just for higher level pleasures like art , but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences .
so take food .
would you eat this ?
well , a good answer is , " it depends . what is it ? "
some of you would eat it if it 's pork , but not beef .
some of you would eat it if it 's beef , but not pork .
few of you would eat it if it 's a rat or a human .
some of you would eat it only if it 's a strangely colored piece of tofu .
that 's not so surprising .
but what 's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you 're eating .
so one demonstration of this was done with young children .
how do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk , but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk - to think they taste better ?
it 's simple , you tell them they 're from mcdonald 's .
they believe mcdonald 's food is tastier , and it leads them to experience it as tastier .
how do you get adults to really enjoy wine ?
it 's very simple : pour it from an expensive bottle .
there are now dozens , perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you 're drinking the expensive stuff , it tastes better to you .
this was recently done with a neuroscientific twist .
they get people into a fmri scanner , and while they 're lying there , through a tube , they get to sip wine .
in front of them on a screen is information about the wine .
everybody , of course , drinks exactly the same wine .
but if you believe you 're drinking expensive stuff , parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a christmas tree .
it 's not just that you say it 's more pleasurable , you say you like it more , you really experience it in a different way .
or take sex .
these are stimuli i 've used in some of my studies .
and if you simply show people these pictures , they 'll say these are fairly attractive people .
but how attractive you find them , how sexually or romantically moved you are by them , rests critically on who you think you 're looking at .
you probably think the picture on the left is male , the one on the right is female .
if that belief turns out to be mistaken , it will make a difference .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are .
it will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you 're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter , your mother or father .
knowing somebody 's your kin typically kills the libido .
maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there 's more to looking good than your physical appearance .
if you like somebody , they look better to you .
this is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as capgras syndrome .
so capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion .
sufferers of capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates .
now often , a result of capgras syndrome is tragic .
people have murdered those that they loved , believing that they were murdering an imposter .
but there 's at least one case where capgras syndrome had a happy ending .
this was recorded in 1931 .
" research described a woman with capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover . "
but that was before she got capgras syndrome .
after she got it , " she was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich , virile , handsome and aristocratic . "
of course , it was the same man , but she was seeing him in different ways .
as a third example , consider consumer products .
so one reason why you might like something is its utility .
you can put shoes on your feet ; you can play golf with golf clubs ; and chewed up bubble gum does n't do anything at all for you .
but each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history .
the golf clubs were owned by john f. kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction .
the bubble gum was chewed up by pop star britney spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars .
and in fact , there 's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all .
according to an unconfirmed report , a saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes .
they were the ones thrown at george bush at an iraqi press conference several years ago .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now this attraction to objects does n't just work for celebrity objects .
each one of us , most people , have something in our life that 's literally irreplaceable , in that it has value because of its history - maybe your wedding ring , maybe your child 's baby shoes - so that if it was lost , you could n't get it back .
you could get something that looked like it or felt like it , but you could n't get the same object back .
with my colleagues george newman and gil diesendruck , we 've looked to see what sort of factors , what sort of history , matters for the objects that people like .
so in one of our experiments , we asked people to name a famous person who they adored , a living person they adored .
so one answer was george clooney .
then we asked them , " how much would you pay for george clooney 's sweater ? "
and the answer is a fair amount - more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you did n't adore .
then we asked other groups of subjects - we gave them different restrictions and different conditions .
so for instance , we told some people , " look , you can buy the sweater , but you ca n't tell anybody you own it , and you ca n't resell it . "
that drops the value of it , suggesting that that 's one reason why we like it .
but what really causes an effect is you tell people , " look , you could resell it , you could boast about it , but before it gets to you , it 's thoroughly washed . "
that causes a huge drop in the value .
as my wife put it , " you 've washed away the clooney cooties . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so let 's go back to art .
i would love a chagall . i love the work of chagall .
if people want to get me something at the end of the conference , you could buy me a chagall .
but i do n't want a duplicate , even if i ca n't tell the difference .
that 's not because , or it 's not simply because , i 'm a snob and want to boast about having an original .
rather , it 's because i want something that has a specific history .
in the case of artwork , the history is special indeed .
the philosopher denis dutton in his wonderful book " the art instinct " makes the case that , " the value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation . "
and that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery .
they may look alike , but they have a different history .
the original is typically the product of a creative act , the forgery is n't .
i think this approach can explain differences in people 's taste in art .
this is a work by jackson pollock .
who here likes the work of jackson pollock ?
okay . who here , it does nothing for them ?
they just do n't like it .
i 'm not going to make a claim about who 's right , but i will make an empirical claim about people 's intuitions , which is that , if you like the work of jackson pollock , you 'll tend more so than the people who do n't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create , that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy .
i use jackson pollock on purpose as an example because there 's a young american artist who paints very much in the style of jackson pollock , and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars - in large part because she 's a very young artist .
this is marla olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old .
the interesting thing about marla olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 minutes ii into their house to film her painting .
and they then reported that her father was coaching her .
when this came out on television , the value of her art dropped to nothing .
it was the same art , physically , but the history had changed .
i 've been focusing now on the visual arts , but i want to give two examples from music .
this is joshua bell , a very famous violinist .
and the washington post reporter gene weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment .
the question is : how much would people like joshua bell , the music of joshua bell , if they did n't know they were listening to joshua bell ?
so he got joshua bell to take his million dollar violin down to a washington d.c. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make .
and here 's a brief clip of this .
-lrb- violin music -rrb- after being there for three-quarters of an hour , he made 32 dollars .
not bad . it 's also not good .
apparently to really enjoy the music of joshua bell , you have to know you 're listening to joshua bell .
he actually made 20 dollars more than that , but he did n't count it .
because this woman comes up - you see at the end of the video - she comes up .
she had heard him at the library of congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair .
so she 's stunned that he 's standing in a subway station .
so she 's struck with pity .
she reaches into her purse and hands him a 20 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the second example from music is from john cage 's modernist composition , " 4 ' 33 . " "
as many of you know , this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench , opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds - that period of silence .
and people have different views on this .
but what i want to point out is you can buy this from itunes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for a dollar 99 , you can listen to that silence , which is different than other forms of silence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i 've been talking so far about pleasure , but what i want to suggest is that everything i 've said applies as well to pain .
and how you think about what you 're experiencing , your beliefs about the essence of it , affect how it hurts .
one lovely experiment was done by kurt gray and dan wegner .
what they did was they hooked up harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine .
and they gave them a series of painful electric shocks .
so it was a series of five painful shocks .
half of them are told that they 're being given the shocks by somebody in another room , but the person in the other room does n't know they 're giving them shocks .
there 's no malevolence , they 're just pressing a button .
the first shock is recorded as very painful .
the second shock feels less painful , because you get a bit used to it .
the third drops , the fourth , the fifth .
the pain gets less .
in the other condition , they 're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose - knows they 're shocking them .
the first shock hurts like hell .
the second shock hurts just as much , and the third and the fourth and the fifth .
it hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose .
the most extreme example of this is that in some cases , pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure .
humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it - as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides .
the point was nicely summarized by the poet john milton who wrote , " the mind is its own place , and in itself can make a heaven of hell , a hell of heaven . "
and i 'll end with that . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i wanted to be a rock star .
i dreamed of it , and that 's all i dreamed of .
to be more accurate , i wanted to be a pop star .
this was in the late ' 80s .
and mostly i wanted to be the fifth member of depeche mode or duran duran .
they would n't have me .
i did n't read music , but i played synthesizers and drum machines .
and i grew up in this little farming town in northern nevada .
and i was certain that 's what my life would be .
and when i went to college at the university of nevada , las vegas when i was 18 , i was stunned to find that there was not a pop star 101 , or even a degree program for that interest .
and the choir conductor there knew that i sang and invited me to come and join the choir .
and i said , " yes , i would love to do that . it sounds great . "
and i left the room and said , " no way . "
the choir people in my high school were pretty geeky , and there was no way i was going to have anything to do with those people .
and about a week later , a friend of mine came to me and said , " listen , you 've got to join choir .
at the end of the semester , we 're taking a trip to mexico , all expenses paid .
and the soprano section is just full of hot girls . "
and so i figured for mexico and babes , i could do just about anything .
and i went to my first day in choir , and i sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing .
they opened their scores , the conductor gave the downbeat , and boom , they launched into the kyrie from the " requiem " by mozart .
in my entire life i had seen in black and white , and suddenly everything was in shocking technicolor .
the most transformative experience i 've ever had - in that single moment , hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing , people together , the shared vision .
and i felt for the first time in my life that i was part of something bigger than myself .
and there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section , as it turns out .
i decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life .
i had learned to read music by then , or slowly learning to read music .
and that piece was published , and then i wrote another piece , and that got published .
and then i started conducting , and i ended up doing my master 's degree at the juilliard school .
and i find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor .
well a couple of years ago , a friend of mine emailed me a link , a youtube link , and said , " you have got to see this . "
and it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me , singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called " sleep . "
-lrb- video -rrb- britlin losee : hi mr. eric whitacre .
my name is britlin losee , and this is a video that i 'd like to make for you .
here 's me singing " sleep . "
i 'm a little nervous , just to let you know .
♫ if there are noises ♫ ♫ in the night ♫ eric whitacre : i was thunderstruck .
britlin was so innocent and so sweet , and her voice was so pure .
and i even loved seeing behind her ; i could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room .
such an intimate video .
and i had this idea : if i could get 50 people to all do this same thing , sing their parts - soprano , alto , tenor and bass - wherever they were in the world , post their videos to youtube , we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir .
so i wrote on my blog , " omg omg . "
i actually wrote , " omg , " hopefully for the last time in public ever .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i sent out this call to singers .
and i made free the download of the music to a piece that i had written in the year 2000 called " lux aurumque , " which means " light and gold . "
and lo and behold , people started uploading their videos .
now i should say , before that , what i did is i posted a conductor track of myself conducting .
and it 's in complete silence when i filmed it , because i was only hearing the music in my head , imagining the choir that would one day come to be .
afterwards , i played a piano track underneath so that the singers would have something to listen to .
and then as the videos started to come in ...
-lrb- singing -rrb- this is cheryl ang from singapore .
-lrb- singing -rrb- this is evangelina etienne -lrb- singing -rrb- from massachusetts .
-lrb- singing -rrb- stephen hanson from sweden .
-lrb- singing -rrb- this is jamal walker from dallas , texas .
-lrb- singing -rrb- there was even a little soprano solo in the piece , and so i had auditions .
and a number of sopranos uploaded their parts .
i was told later , and also by lots of singers who were involved in this , that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take - they uploaded it .
here 's our winner of the soprano solo .
this is melody myers from tennessee .
-lrb- singing -rrb- i love the little smile she does right over the top of the note - like , " no problem , everything 's fine . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and from the crowd emerged this young man , scott haines .
and he said , " listen , this is the project i 've been looking for my whole life .
i 'd like to be the person to edit this all together . "
i said , " thank you , scott . i 'm so glad that you found me . "
and scott aggregated all of the videos .
he scrubbed the audio .
he made sure that everything lined up .
and then we posted this video to youtube about a year and a half ago .
this is " lux aurumque " sung by the virtual choir .
-lrb- singing -rrb- i 'll stop it there in the interest of time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so there 's more . there 's more .
thank you so much .
and i had the same reaction you did .
i actually was moved to tears when i first saw it .
i just could n't believe the poetry of all of it - these souls all on their own desert island , sending electronic messages in bottles to each other .
and the video went viral .
we had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it .
and because of that , then a lot of singers started saying , " all right , what 's virtual choir 2.0 ? "
and so i decided for virtual choir 2.0 that i would choose the same piece that britlin was singing , " sleep , " which is another work that i wrote in the year 2000 - poetry by my dear friend charles anthony silvestri .
and again , i posted a conductor video , and we started accepting submissions .
this time we got some more mature members .
-lrb- singing -rrb- and some younger members .
-lrb- video -rrb- soprano : ♫ upon my pillow ♫ ♫ safe in bed ♫ ew : that 's georgie from england . she 's only nine .
is n't that the sweetest thing you 've ever seen ?
someone did all eight videos - a bass even singing the soprano parts .
this is beau awtin .
-lrb- video -rrb- beau awtin : ♫ safe in bed ♫ ew : and our goal - it was sort of an arbitrary goal - there was an mtv video where they all sang " lollipop " and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody .
and there were 900 people involved in that .
so i told the singers , " that 's our goal .
that 's the number for us to beat . "
and we just closed submissions january 10th , and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- from malta , madagascar , thailand , vietnam , jordan , egypt , israel , as far north as alaska and as far south as new zealand .
and we also put a page on facebook for the singers to upload their testimonials , what it was like for them , their experience singing it .
and i 've just chosen a few of them here .
" my sister and i used to sing in choirs together constantly .
now she 's an airman in the air force constantly traveling .
it 's so wonderful to sing together again ! "
i love the idea that she 's singing with her sister .
" aside from the beautiful music , it 's great just to know i 'm part of a worldwide community of people i never met before , but who are connected anyway . "
and my personal favorite , " when i told my husband that i was going to be a part of this , he told me that i did not have the voice for it . "
yeah , i 'm sure a lot of you have heard that too .
me too .
" it hurt so much , and i shed some tears , but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words .
it is a dream come true to be part of this choir , as i 've never been part of one .
when i placed a marker on the google earth map , i had to go with the nearest city , which is about 400 miles away from where i live .
as i am in the great alaskan bush , satellite is my connection to the world . "
so two things struck me deeply about this .
the first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other .
it does n't matter the technology .
and the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection .
it was n't a virtual choir .
there are people now online that are friends ; they 've never met .
but , i know myself too , i feel this virtual esprit de corps , if you will , with all of them .
i feel a closeness to this choir - almost like a family .
what i 'd like to close with then today is the first look at " sleep " by virtual choir 2.0 .
this will be a premiere today .
we 're not finished with the video yet .
you can imagine , with 2,000 synchronized youtube videos , the render time is just atrocious .
but we do have the first three minutes .
and it 's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first .
you 're the very first people to see this .
this is " sleep , " the virtual choir .
-lrb- video -rrb- virtual choir : ♫ the evening hangs ♫ ♫ beneath the moon ♫ ♫ a silver thread on darkened dune ♫ ♫ with closing eyes and resting head ♫ ♫ i know that sleep is coming soon ♫ ♫ upon my pillow , ♫ ♫ safe in bed , ♫ ♫ a thousand pictures fill my head ♫ ♫ i can not sleep ♫ ♫ my mind 's aflight ♫ ♫ and yet my limbs seem made of lead ♫ ♫ if there are noises in the night ♫ eric whitacre : thank you very , very much . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- like many of you here , i am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in africa .
the question of transformation in africa really is a question of leadership .
africa can only be transformed by enlightened leaders .
and it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent .
i want to tell you some stories that explain my view .
we all heard about the importance of stories yesterday .
an american friend of mine this year volunteered as a nurse in ghana , and in a period of three months she came to a conclusion about the state of leadership in africa that had taken me over a decade to reach .
twice she was involved in surgeries where they lost power at the hospital .
the emergency generators did not start .
there was not a flashlight , not a lantern , not a candle - pitch black .
the patient 's cut open , twice .
the first time it was a c-section .
thankfully , baby was out - mother and child survived .
the second time was a procedure that involved local anesthesia .
anesthetic wears off . the patient feels pain .
he 's crying . he 's screaming . he 's praying .
pitch black . not a candle , not a flashlight .
and that hospital could have afforded flashlights .
they could have afforded to purchase these things , but they did n't .
and it happened twice .
another time , she watched in horror as nurses watched a patient die because they refused to give her oxygen that they had .
and so three months later , just before she returned to the united states , nurses in accra go on strike .
and her recommendation is take this opportunity to fire everyone , start all over again .
start all over again .
now what does this have to do with leadership ?
you see , the folks at the ministry of health , the hospital administrators , the doctors , the nurses - they are among just five percent of their peers who get an education after secondary school .
they are the elite . they are our leaders .
their decisions , their actions matter .
and when they fail , a nation literally suffers .
so when i speak of leadership , i 'm not talking about just political leaders .
we 've heard a lot about that .
i 'm talking about the elite .
those who 've been trained , whose job it is to be the guardians of their society .
the lawyers , the judges , the policemen , the doctors , the engineers , the civil servants - those are the leaders .
and we need to train them right .
now , my first pointed and memorable experience with leadership in ghana occurred when i was 16 years old .
we had just had a military coup , and soldiers were pervasive in our society .
they were a pervasive presence .
and one day i go to the airport to meet my father , and as i walk up this grassy slope from the car park to the terminal building , i 'm stopped by two soldiers wielding ak-47 assault weapons .
and they asked me to join a crowd of people that were running up and down this embankment .
why ? because the path i had taken was considered out of bounds .
no sign to this effect .
now , i was 16 . i was very worried about what my peers at school might think if they saw me running up and down this hill .
i was especially concerned of what the girls might think .
and so i started to argue with these men .
it was a little reckless , but you know , i was 16 .
i got lucky .
a ghana airways pilot falls into the same predicament .
because of his uniform they speak to him differently , and they explain to him that they 're just following orders .
so he takes their radio , talks to their boss , and gets us all released .
what lessons would you take from an experience like this ?
several , for me .
leadership matters . those men are following the orders of a superior officer .
i learned something about courage .
it was important not to look at those guns .
and i also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so a few years after this event , i leave ghana on a scholarship to go to swarthmore college for my education .
it was a breath of fresh air .
you know , the faculty there did n't want us to memorize information and repeat back to them as i was used to back in ghana .
they wanted us to think critically .
they wanted us to be analytical .
they wanted us to be concerned about social issues .
in my economics classes i got high marks for my understanding of basic economics .
but i learned something more profound than that , which is that the leaders - the managers of ghana 's economy - were making breathtakingly bad decisions that had brought our economy to the brink of collapse .
and so here was this lesson again - leadership matters .
it matters a great deal .
but i did n't really fully understand what had happened to me at swarthmore .
i had an inkling , but i did n't fully realize it until i went out into the workplace and i went to work at microsoft corporation .
and i was part of this team - this thinking , learning team whose job it was to design and implement new software that created value in the world .
and it was brilliant to be part of this team .
it was brilliant .
and i realized just what had happened to me at swarthmore , this transformation - the ability to confront problems , complex problems , and to design solutions to those problems .
the ability to create is the most empowering thing that can happen to an individual .
and i was part of that .
now , while i was at microsoft , the annual revenues of that company grew larger than the gdp of the republic of ghana .
and by the way , it 's continued to .
the gap has widened since i left .
now , i 've already spoken about one of the reasons why this has occurred .
i mean , it 's the people there who are so hardworking , persistent , creative , empowered .
but there were also some external factors : free markets , the rule of law , infrastructure .
these things were provided by institutions run by the people that i call leaders .
and those leaders did not emerge spontaneously .
somebody trained them to do the work that they do .
now , while i was at microsoft , this funny thing happened .
i became a parent .
and for the first time , africa mattered more to me than ever before .
because i realized that the state of the african continent would matter to my children and their children .
that the state of the world - the state of the world depends on what 's happening to africa , as far as my kids would be concerned .
and at this time , when i was going through what i call my " pre-mid-life crisis , " africa was a mess .
somalia had disintegrated into anarchy .
rwanda was in the throes of this genocidal war .
and it seemed to me that that was the wrong direction , and i needed to be back helping .
i could n't just stay in seattle and raise my kids in an upper-middle class neighborhood and feel good about it .
this was not the world that i 'd want my children to grow up in .
so i decided to get engaged , and the first thing that i did was to come back to ghana and talk with a lot of people and really try to understand what the real issues were .
and three things kept coming up for every problem : corruption , weak institutions and the people who run them - the leaders .
now , i was a little scared because when you see those three problems , they seem really hard to deal with .
and they might say , " look , do n't even try . "
but , for me , i asked the question , " well , where are these leaders coming from ?
what is it about ghana that produces leaders that are unethical or unable to solve problems ? "
so i went to look at what was happening in our educational system .
and it was the same - learning by rote - from primary school through graduate school .
very little emphasis on ethics , and the typical graduate from a university in ghana has a stronger sense of entitlement than a sense of responsibility .
this is wrong .
so i decided to engage this particular problem .
because it seems to me that every society , every society , must be very intentional about how it trains its leaders .
and ghana was not paying enough attention .
and this is true across sub-saharan africa , actually .
so this is what i 'm doing now .
i 'm trying to bring the experience that i had at swarthmore to africa .
i wish there was a liberal arts college in every african country .
i think it would make a huge difference .
and what ashesi university is trying to do is to train a new generation of ethical , entrepreneurial leaders .
we 're trying to train leaders of exceptional integrity , who have the ability to confront the complex problems , ask the right questions , and come up with workable solutions .
i 'll admit that there are times when it seems like " mission : impossible , " but we must believe that these kids are smart .
that if we involve them in their education , if we have them discuss the real issues that they confront - that our whole society confronts - and if we give them skills that enable them to engage the real world , that magic will happen .
now , a month into this project , we 'd just started classes .
and a month into it , i come to the office , and i have this email from one of our students .
and it said , very simply , " i am thinking now . "
and he signs off , " thank you . "
it 's such a simple statement .
but i was moved almost to tears because i understood what was happening to this young man .
and it is an awesome thing to be a part of empowering someone in this way .
i am thinking now .
this year we challenged our students to craft an honor code themselves .
there 's a very vibrant debate going on on campus now over whether they should have an honor code , and if so , what it should look like .
one of the students asked a question that just warmed my heart .
can we create a perfect society ?
her understanding that a student-crafted honor code constitutes a reach towards perfection is incredible .
now , we can not achieve perfection , but if we reach for it , then we can achieve excellence .
i do n't know ultimately what they will do .
i do n't know whether they will decide to have this honor code .
but the conversation they 're having now - about what their good society should look like , what their excellent society should look like , is a really good thing .
am i out of time ? ok .
now , i just wanted to leave that slide up because it 's important that we think about it .
i 'm very excited about the fact that every student at ashesi university does community service before they graduate .
that for many of them , it has been a life-altering experience .
these young future leaders are beginning to understand the real business of leadership , the real privilege of leadership , which is after all to serve humanity .
i am even more thrilled by the fact that least year our student body elected a woman to be the head of student government .
it 's the first time in the history of ghana that a woman has been elected head of student government at any university .
it says a lot about her .
it says a lot about the culture that 's forming on campus .
it says a lot about her peers who elected her .
she won with 75 percent of the vote .
and it gives me a lot of hope .
it turns out that corporate west africa also appreciates what 's happening with our students .
we 've graduated two classes of students to date .
and every single one of them has been placed .
and we 're getting great reports back from corporate ghana , corporate west africa , and the things that they 're most impressed about is work ethic .
you know , that passion for what they 're doing .
the persistence , their ability to deal with ambiguity , their ability to tackle problems that they have n't seen before .
this is good because over the past five years , there have been times when i 've felt this is " mission : impossible . "
and it 's just wonderful to see these glimmers of the promise of what can happen if we train our kids right .
i think that the current and future leaders of africa have an incredible opportunity to drive a major renaissance on the continent .
it 's an incredible opportunity .
there are n't very many more opportunities like this in the world .
i believe that africa has reached an inflection point with a march of democracy and free markets across the continent .
we have reached a moment from which can emerge a great society within one generation .
it will depend on inspired leadership .
and it is my contention that the manner in which we train our leaders will make all the difference .
thank you , and god bless .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one day in 1819 , 3,000 miles off the coast of chile , in one of the most remote regions of the pacific ocean , 20 american sailors watched their ship flood with seawater .
they 'd been struck by a sperm whale , which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship 's hull .
as their ship began to sink beneath the swells , the men huddled together in three small whaleboats .
these men were 10,000 miles from home , more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land .
in their small boats , they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water .
these were the men of the whaleship essex , whose story would later inspire parts of " moby dick . "
even in today 's world , their situation would be really dire , but think about how much worse it would have been then .
no one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong .
no search party was coming to look for these men .
so most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves , but we all know what it 's like to be afraid .
we know how fear feels , but i 'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean .
as we grow up , we 're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness , just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates .
and i think it 's no accident that we think this way .
neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists .
so maybe that 's why we think of fear , sometimes , as a danger in and of itself .
" do n't worry , " we like to say to one another . " do n't panic . "
in english , fear is something we conquer .
it 's something we fight . it 's something we overcome .
but what if we looked at fear in a fresh way ?
what if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination , something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself ?
it 's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children , whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid .
when i was a child , i lived in california , which is , you know , mostly a very nice place to live , but for me as a child , california could also be a little scary .
i remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake , and i sometimes could n't sleep at night , terrified that the big one might strike while we were sleeping .
and what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination .
but at a certain point , most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up .
we learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed , and not every earthquake brings buildings down .
but maybe it 's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults .
the same incredible imaginations that produced " the origin of species , " " jane eyre " and " the remembrance of things past , " also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of charles darwin , charlotte brontăť and marcel proust .
so the question is , what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children ?
well let 's return to the year 1819 for a moment , to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship essex .
let 's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the pacific .
twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship .
the time had come for the men to make a plan , but they had very few options .
in his fascinating account of the disaster , nathaniel philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on earth .
the men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the marquesas islands , 1,200 miles away .
but they 'd heard some frightening rumors .
they 'd been told that these islands , and several others nearby , were populated by cannibals .
so the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner .
another possible destination was hawaii , but given the season , the captain was afraid they 'd be struck by severe storms .
now the last option was the longest , and the most difficult : to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of south america .
but they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water .
to be eaten by cannibals , to be battered by storms , to starve to death before reaching land .
these were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men , and as it turned out , the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died .
now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name .
what if instead of calling them fears , we called them stories ?
because that 's really what fear is , if you think about it .
it 's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do .
and fears and storytelling have the same components .
they have the same architecture .
like all stories , fears have characters .
in our fears , the characters are us .
fears also have plots . they have beginnings and middles and ends .
you board the plane . the plane takes off . the engine fails .
our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel .
picture a cannibal , human teeth sinking into human skin , human flesh roasting over a fire .
fears also have suspense .
if i 've done my job as a storyteller today , you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship essex .
our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense .
just like all great stories , our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature : what will happen next ?
in other words , our fears make us think about the future .
and humans , by the way , are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way , of projecting ourselves forward in time , and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling .
as a writer , i can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events , and fear works in that same way .
in fear , just like in fiction , one thing always leads to another .
when i was writing my first novel , " the age of miracles , " i spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the earth suddenly began to slow down .
what would happen to our days ? what would happen to our crops ?
what would happen to our minds ?
and then it was only later that i realized how very similar these questions were to the ones i used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night .
if an earthquake strikes tonight , i used to worry , what will happen to our house ? what will happen to my family ?
and the answer to those questions always took the form of a story .
so if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories , we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories .
but just as importantly , we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears , and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives .
now , some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others .
i read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs , and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called " productive paranoia , " which meant that these people , instead of dismissing their fears , these people read them closely , they studied them , and then they translated that fear into preparation and action .
so that way , if their worst fears came true , their businesses were ready .
and sometimes , of course , our worst fears do come true .
that 's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear .
once in a while , our fears can predict the future .
but we ca n't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct .
so how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others ?
i think the end of the story of the whaleship essex offers an illuminating , if tragic , example .
after much deliberation , the men finally made a decision .
terrified of cannibals , they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to south america .
after more than two months at sea , the men ran out of food as they knew they might , and they were still quite far from land .
when the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships , less than half of the men were left alive , and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism .
herman melville , who used this story as research for " moby dick , " wrote years later , and from dry land , quote , " all the sufferings of these miserable men of the essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they , immediately after leaving the wreck , steered straight for tahiti .
but , " as melville put it , " they dreaded cannibals . "
so the question is , why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation ?
why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other ?
looked at from this angle , theirs becomes a story about reading .
the novelist vladimir nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments , the artistic and the scientific .
a good reader has an artist 's passion , a willingness to get caught up in the story , but just as importantly , the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist , which acts to temper and complicate the reader 's intuitive reactions to the story .
as we 've seen , the men of the essex had no trouble with the artistic part .
they dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios .
the problem was that they listened to the wrong story .
of all the narratives their fears wrote , they responded only to the most lurid , the most vivid , the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture : cannibals .
but perhaps if they 'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist , with more coolness of judgment , they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale , the story of starvation , and headed for tahiti , just as melville 's sad commentary suggests .
and maybe if we all tried to read our fears , we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them .
maybe then we 'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes , and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face : the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries , the gradual changes in our climate .
just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest , so too might our subtlest fears be the truest .
read in the right way , our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination , a kind of everyday clairvoyance , a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there 's still time to influence how that future will play out .
properly read , our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature : a little wisdom , a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing - the truth .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today to show my photographs of the lakota .
many of you may have heard of the lakota , or at least the larger group of tribes called the sioux .
the lakota are one of many tribes that were moved off their land to prisoner of war camps now called reservations .
the pine ridge reservation , the subject of today 's slide show , is located about 75 miles southeast of the black hills in south dakota .
it is sometimes referred to as prisoner of war camp number 334 , and it is where the lakota now live .
now , if any of you have ever heard of aim , the american indian movement , or of russell means , or leonard peltier , or of the stand-off at oglala , then you know that pine ridge is ground zero for native issues in the u.s.
so i 've been asked to talk a little bit today about my relationship with the lakota , and that 's a very difficult one for me .
because , if you have n't noticed from my skin color , i 'm white , and that is a huge barrier on a native reservation .
you 'll see a lot of people in my photographs today , and i 've become very close with them , and they 've welcomed me like family .
they 've called me " brother " and " uncle " and invited me again and again over five years .
but on pine ridge , i will always be what is called " wasichu , " and " wasichu " is a lakota word that means " non-indian , " but another version of this word means " the one who takes the best meat for himself . "
and that 's what i want to focus on - the one who takes the best part of the meat .
it means greedy .
so take a look around this auditorium today .
we are at a private school in the american west , sitting in red velvet chairs with money in our pockets .
and if we look at our lives , we have indeed taken the best part of the meat .
so let 's look today at a set of photographs of a people who lost so that we could gain , and know that when you see these people 's faces that these are not just images of the lakota ; they stand for all indigenous people .
on this piece of paper is the history the way i learned it from my lakota friends and family .
the following is a time-line of treaties made , treaties broken and massacres disguised as battles .
i 'll begin in 1824 .
what is known as the bureau of indian affairs was created within the war department , setting an early tone of aggression in our dealings with the native americans .
1851 : the first treaty of fort laramie was made , clearly marking the boundaries of the lakota nation .
according to the treaty , those lands are a sovereign nation .
if the boundaries of this treaty had held - and there is a legal basis that they should - then this is what the u.s. would look like today .
10 years later , the homestead act , signed by president lincoln , unleashed a flood of white settlers into native lands .
1863 : an uprising of santee sioux in minnesota ends with the hanging of 38 sioux men , the largest mass execution in u.s. history .
the execution was ordered by president lincoln only two days after he signed the emancipation proclamation .
1866 : the beginning of the transcontinental railroad - a new era .
we appropriated land for trails and trains to shortcut through the heart of the lakota nation .
the treaties were out the window .
in response , three tribes led by the lakota chief red cloud attacked and defeated the u.s. army many times over .
i want to repeat that part .
the lakota defeat the u.s. army .
1868 : the second fort laramie treaty clearly guarantees the sovereignty of the great sioux nation and the lakotas ' ownership of the sacred black hills .
the government also promises land and hunting rights in the surrounding states .
we promise that the powder river country will henceforth be closed to all whites .
the treaty seemed to be a complete victory for red cloud and the sioux .
in fact , this is the only war in american history in which the government negotiated a peace by conceding everything demanded by the enemy .
1869 : the transcontinental railroad was completed .
it began carrying , among other things , a large number of hunters who began the wholesale killing of buffalo , eliminating a source of food and clothing and shelter for the sioux .
1871 : the indian appropriation act makes all indians wards of the federal government .
in addition , the military issued orders forbidding western indians from leaving reservations .
all western indians at that point in time were now prisoners of war .
also in 1871 , we ended the time of treaty-making .
the problem with treaties is they allow tribes to exist as sovereign nations , and we ca n't have that .
we had plans .
1874 : general george custer announced the discovery of gold in lakota territory , specifically the black hills .
the news of gold creates a massive influx of white settlers into lakota nation .
custer recommends that congress find a way to end the treaties with the lakota as soon as possible .
1875 : the lakota war begins over the violation of the fort laramie treaty .
1876 : on july 26th on its way to attack a lakota village , custer 's 7th cavalry was crushed at the battle of little big horn .
1877 : the great lakota warrior and chief named crazy horse surrendered at fort robinson .
he was later killed while in custody .
1877 is also the year we found a way to get around the fort laramie treaties .
a new agreement was presented to sioux chiefs and their leading men under a campaign known as " sell or starve : " sign the paper , or no food for your tribe .
only 10 percent of the adult male population signed .
the fort laramie treaty called for at least three-quarters of the tribe to sign away land .
that clause was obviously ignored .
1887 : the dawes act .
communal ownership of reservation lands ends .
reservations are cut up into 160-acre sections and distributed to individual indians with the surplus disposed of .
tribes lost millions of acres .
the american dream of individual land ownership turned out to be a very clever way to divide the reservation until nothing was left .
the move destroyed the reservations , making it easier to further subdivide and to sell with every passing generation .
most of the surplus land and many of the plots within reservation boundaries are now in the hands of white ranchers .
once again , the fat of the land goes to wasichu .
1890 , a date i believe to be the most important in this slide show .
this is the year of the wounded knee massacre .
on december 29th , u.s. troops surrounded a sioux encampment at wounded knee creek and massacred chief big foot and 300 prisoners of war , using a new rapid-fire weapon that fired exploding shells called a hotchkiss gun .
for this so-called " battle , " 20 congressional medals of honor for valor were given to the 7th cavalry .
to this day , this is the most medals of honor ever awarded for a single battle .
more medals of honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in world war one , world war two , korea , vietnam , iraq or afghanistan .
the wounded knee massacre is considered the end of the indian wars .
whenever i visit the site of the mass grave at wounded knee , i see it not just as a grave for the lakota or for the sioux , but as a grave for all indigenous peoples .
the holy man , black elk , said , " i did not know then how much was ended .
when i look back now from this high hill of my old age , i can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when i saw them with eyes still young .
and i can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard : a people 's dream died there , and it was a beautiful dream . "
with this event , a new era in native american history began .
everything can be measured before wounded knee and after .
because it was in this moment with the fingers on the triggers of the hotchkiss guns that the u.s. government openly declared its position on native rights .
they were tired of treaties .
they were tired of sacred hills .
they were tired of ghost dances .
and they were tired of all the inconveniences of the sioux .
so they brought out their cannons .
" you want to be an indian now ? " they said , finger on the trigger .
1900 : the u.s. indian population reached its low point - less than 250,000 , compared to an estimated eight million in 1492 .
fast-forward .
1980 : the longest running court case in u.s. history , the sioux nation v. the united states , was ruled upon by the u.s. supreme court .
the court determined that , when the sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders , the terms of the second fort laramie treaty had been violated .
the court stated that the black hills were illegally taken and that the initial offering price plus interest should be paid to the sioux nation .
as payment for the black hills , the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the sioux nation .
the sioux refused the money with the rallying cry , " the black hills are not for sale . "
2010 : statistics about native population today , more than a century after the massacre at wounded knee , reveal the legacy of colonization , forced migration and treaty violations .
unemployment on the pine ridge indian reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90 percent .
the housing office is unable to build new structures , and existing structures are falling apart .
many are homeless , and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to five families .
39 percent of homes on pine ridge have no electricity .
at least 60 percent of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold .
more than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line .
the tuberculosis rate on pine ridge is approximately eight times higher than the u.s. national average .
the infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent and is about three times higher than the u.s. national average .
cervical cancer is five times higher than the u.s. national average .
school dropout rate is up to 70 percent .
teacher turnover is eight times higher than the u.s. national average .
frequently , grandparents are raising their grandchildren because parents , due to alcoholism , domestic violence and general apathy , can not raise them .
50 percent of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes .
the life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old - roughly the same as in afghanistan and somalia .
the last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say , " my god , what are these people doing to themselves ?
they 're killing each other .
they 're killing themselves while we watch them die . "
this is how we came to own these united states .
this is the legacy of manifest destiny .
prisoners are still born into prisoner-of-war camps long after the guards are gone .
these are the bones left after the best meat has been taken .
a long time ago , a series of events was set in motion by a people who look like me , by wasichu , eager to take the land and the water and the gold in the hills .
those events led to a domino effect that has yet to end .
as removed as we the dominant society may feel from a massacre in 1890 , or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago , i still have to ask you the question , how should you feel about the statistics of today ?
what is the connection between these images of suffering and the history that i just read to you ?
and how much of this history do you need to own , even ?
is any of this your responsibility today ?
i have been told that there must be something we can do .
there must be some call to action .
because for so long i 've been standing on the sidelines content to be a witness , just taking photographs .
because the solution seems so far in the past , i needed nothing short of a time machine to access them .
the suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix .
it 's not something everyone can get behind the way they get behind helping haiti , or ending aids , or fighting a famine .
the " fix , " as it 's called , may be much more difficult for the dominant society than , say , a $ 50 check or a church trip to paint some graffiti-covered houses , or a suburban family donating a box of clothes they do n't even want anymore .
so where does that leave us ?
shrugging our shoulders in the dark ?
the united states continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 fort laramie treaties with the lakota .
the call to action i offer today - my ted wish - is this : honor the treaties .
give back the black hills .
it 's not your business what they do with them .
-lrb- applause -rrb- restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world .
for every calorie of food that we consume here in britain today , 10 calories are taken to produce it .
that 's a lot .
i want to take something rather humble to discuss .
i found this in the farmers ' market today , and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later , you 're very welcome to .
the humble potato - and i 've spent a long time , 25 years , preparing these .
and it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime .
first of all , it 's planted , and that takes energy .
it grows and is nurtured .
it 's then harvested .
it 's then distributed , and distribution is a massive issue .
it 's then sold and bought , and it 's then delivered to me .
i basically take it , prepare it , and then people consume it - hopefully they enjoy it .
the last stage is basically waste , and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it .
there are different types of waste .
there 's a waste of time ; there 's a waste of space ; there 's a waste of energy ; and there 's a waste of waste .
and every business i 've been working on over the past five years , i 'm trying to lower each one of these elements .
okay , so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like .
basically a restaurant just like any other .
this is the restaurant , acorn house .
front and back .
so let me run you through a few ideas .
floor : sustainable , recyclable .
chairs : recycled and recyclable .
tables : forestry commission .
this is norwegian forestry commission wood .
this bench , although it was uncomfortable for my mom - she did n't like sitting on it , so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale - reusing , a job that was pretty good .
i hate waste , especially walls .
if they 're not working , put a shelf on it , which i did , and that shows all the customers my products .
the whole business is run on sustainable energy .
this is powered by wind . all of the lights are daylight bulbs .
paint is all low-volume chemical , which is very important when you 're working in the room all the time .
i was experimenting with these - i do n't know if you can see it - but there 's a work surface there .
and that 's a plastic polymer .
and i was thinking , well i 'm trying to think nature , nature , nature .
but i thought , no , no , experiment with resins , experiment with polymers .
will they outlive me ? they probably might .
right , here 's a reconditioned coffee machine .
it actually looks better than a brand new one - so looking good there .
now reusing is vital .
and we filter our own water .
we put them in bottles , refrigerate them , and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again .
here 's a great little example .
if you can see this orange tree , it 's actually growing in a car tire , which has been turned inside out and sewn up .
it 's got my compost in it , which is growing an orange tree , which is great .
this is the kitchen , which is in the same room .
i basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and volume of food that they wanted to consume .
rather than me putting a dish down , they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted .
okay , it 's a small kitchen . it 's about five square meters .
it serves 220 people a day .
we generate quite a lot of waste .
this is the waste room .
you ca n't get rid of waste .
but this story 's not about eliminating it , it 's about minimizing it .
in here , i have produce and boxes that are unavoidable .
i put my food waste into this dehydrating , desiccating macerator - turns food into an inner material , which i can store and then compost later .
i compost it in this garden .
all of the soil you can see there is basically my food , which is generated by the restaurant , and it 's growing in these tubs , which i made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things .
three compost bins - go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week - really good , makes fantastic compost .
a couple of wormeries in there too .
and actually one of the wormeries was a big wormery . i had a lot of worms in it .
and i tried taking the dried food waste , putting it to the worms , going , " there you go , dinner . "
it was like vegetable jerky , and killed all of them .
i do n't know how many worms -lsb- were -rsb- in there , but i 've got some heavy karma coming , i tell you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what you 're seeing here is a water filtration system .
this takes the water out of the restaurant , runs it through these stone beds - this is going to be mint in there - and i sort of water the garden with it .
and i ultimately want to recycle that , put it back into the loos , maybe wash hands with it , i do n't know .
so , water is a very important aspect .
i started meditating on that and created a restaurant called waterhouse .
if i could get waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with , that would be great .
i managed to do it .
this restaurant looks a little bit like acorn house - same chairs , same tables .
they 're all english and a little bit more sustainable .
but this is an electrical restaurant .
the whole thing is electric , the restaurant and the kitchen .
and it 's run on hydroelectricity , so i 've gone from air to water .
now it 's important to understand that this room is cooled by water , heated by water , filters its own water , and it 's powered by water .
it literally is waterhouse .
the air handling system inside it - i got rid of air-conditioning because i thought there was too much consumption going on there .
this is basically air-handling .
i 'm taking the temperature of the canal outside , pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism , it 's turning through these amazing sails on the roof , and that , in turn , is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant , cooling them , or heating them , as the need may be .
and this is an english willow air diffuser , and that 's softly moving that air current through the room .
very advanced , no air-conditioning - i love it .
in the canal , which is just outside the restaurant , there is hundreds of meters of coil piping .
this takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange .
i have no idea how it works , but i paid a lot of money for it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what 's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat - it 's off-grid ; it generates all its own power .
he 's growing all his own fruit , and that 's fantastic .
there 's no accident in names of these restaurants .
acorn house is the element of wood ; waterhouse is the element of water ; and i 'm thinking , well , i 'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five chinese medicine acupuncture specialities .
i 've got water and wood . i 'm just about to do fire .
i 've got metal and earth to come .
so you 've got to watch your space for that .
okay . so this is my next project .
five weeks old , it 's my baby , and it 's hurting real bad .
the people 's supermarket .
so basically , the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what i was doing anyway .
what i needed to do was get food out to a broader spectrum of people .
so people - i.e. , perhaps , more working-class - or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative .
this is a social enterprise , not-for-profit cooperative supermarket .
it really is about the social disconnect between food , communities in urban settings and their relationship to rural growers - connecting communities in london to rural growers .
really important .
so i 'm committing to potatoes ; i 'm committing to milk ; i 'm committing to leeks and broccoli - all very important stuff .
i 've kept the tiles ; i 've kept the floors ; i 've kept the trunking ; i 've got in some recycled fridges ; i 've got some recycled tills ; i 've got some recycled trolleys .
i mean , the whole thing is is super-sustainable .
in fact , i 'm trying and i 'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world .
that 's zero food waste .
and no one 's doing that just yet .
in fact , sainsbury 's , if you 're watching , let 's have a go . try it on .
i 'm going to get there before you .
so nature does n't create waste does n't create waste as such .
everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle with waste being the end of the beginning , and that 's been something that 's been nurturing me for some time , and it 's an important statement to understand .
if we do n't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food , think about the sustainable nature of it , then we may fail .
but , i wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we 're more responsible .
environmentally conscious businesses are doable .
they 're here . you can see i 've done three so far ; i 've got a few more to go .
the idea is embryonic .
i think it 's important .
i think that if we reduce , reuse , refuse and recycle - right at the end there - recycling is the last point i want to make ; but it 's the four r 's , rather than the three r 's - then i think we 're going to be on our way .
so these three are not perfect - they 're ideas .
i think that there are many problems to come , but with help , i 'm sure i 'm going to find solutions .
and i hope you all take part .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- one of my favorite cartoon characters is snoopy .
i love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life .
so when i thought about compassion , my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips , where he 's lying there and he says , " i really understand , and i really appreciate how one should love one 's neighbor as one love 's oneself .
the only trouble is the people next door ; i ca n't stand them . "
this , in a way , is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea .
we all , i think , believe in compassion .
if you look at all the world religions , all the main world religions , you 'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion .
so in judaism , we have , from our torah , that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself .
and within jewish teachings , the rabbinic teachings , we have hillel , who taught that you should n't do to others what you do n't like being done to yourself .
and all the main religions have similar teachings .
and again , within judaism , we have a teaching about god , who is called the compassionate one , ha-rachaman .
after all , how could the world exist without god being compassionate ?
and we , as taught within the torah that we are made in the image of god , so we too have to be compassionate .
but what does it mean ? how does it impact on our everyday life ?
sometimes , of course , being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control .
i know there are many times when i 've gone and conducted a funeral , or when i have been sitting with the bereaved , or with people who are dying , and i am overwhelmed by the sadness , by the difficulty , the challenge that is there for the family , for the person .
and i 'm touched , so that tears come to my eyes .
and yet , if i just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings , i would n't be doing my job - because i have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen , that practicalities are seen to .
and yet , on the other hand , if i did n't feel this compassion , then i feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi .
and these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world .
who can not be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war , or famine , or earthquakes , or tsunamis ?
i know some people who say " well , you know there 's just so much out there - i ca n't do anything , i 'm not going to even begin to try . "
and there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue .
there are others who feel they ca n't confront compassion anymore , and so they turn off the television and do n't watch .
in judaism , though , we tend to always say , there has to be a middle way .
you have to , of course , be aware of the needs of others , but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people .
so part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick .
and , of course , you ca n't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more .
and there 's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation , which says that when god created the world , god thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice .
because , after all , god is just .
therefore , there should be justice throughout the world .
and then god looked to the future and realized , if the world was created just with justice , the world could n't exist .
so , god thought , " nope , i 'm going to create the world just with compassion . "
and then god looked to the future and realized that , in fact , if the world were just filled with compassion , there would be anarchy and chaos .
there had to be limits to all things .
the rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful , fragile glass bowl .
if you put too much cold water in , it will shatter .
if you put boiling water in , it will shatter .
what do you have to do ? put in a mixture of the two .
and so god put both of these possibilities into the world .
there is something more though that has to be there .
and that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world , into action .
so , like snoopy , we ca n't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors .
we actually have to do something about it .
and so there is also , within judaism , this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important : " chesed . "
all these three things , then , have to be melded together .
the idea of justice , which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what 's right about life , what 's right about living , what should we be doing , social justice .
there has to be a willingness to do good deeds , but not , of course , at the expense of our own sanity .
you know , there 's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things .
and balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion , which has to be there , if you like , at our very roots .
this idea of compassion comes to us because we 're made in the image of god , who is ultimately the compassionate one .
what does this compassion entail ?
it entails understanding the pain of the other .
but even more than that , it means understanding one 's connection to the whole of creation : understanding that one is part of that creation , that there is a unity that underlies all that we see , all that we hear , all that we feel .
i call that unity god .
and that unity is something that connects all of creation .
and , of course , in the modern world , with the environmental movement , we 're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things , that something i do here actually does matter in africa , that if i use too much of my carbon allowance , it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern africa .
so there is a connectivity , and i have to understand that - as part of the creation , as part of me being made in the image of god .
and i have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs .
this " 18 minutes " business , i find quite fascinating .
because in judaism , the number 18 , in hebrew letters , stands for life - the word " life . "
so , in a sense , the 18 minutes is challenging me to say , " in life , this is what 's important in terms of compassion . "
but , something else as well : actually , 18 minutes is important .
because at passover , when we have to eat unleavened bread , the rabbis say , what is the difference between dough that is made into bread , and dough that is made into unleavened bread , or " matzah " ?
and they say " it 's 18 minutes . "
because that 's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven .
what does it mean , " dough becomes leaven " ?
it means it gets filled with hot air .
what 's matzah ? what 's unleavened bread ? you do n't get it .
symbolically , what the rabbis say is that at passover , what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air - our pride , our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world , and that everything should revolve round us .
so we try and get rid of those , and so doing , try to get rid of the habits , the emotions , the ideas that enslave us , that make our eyes closed , give us tunnel vision so we do n't see the needs of others - and free ourselves and free ourselves from that .
and that too is a basis for having compassion , for understanding our place in the world .
now there is , in judaism , a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day .
and , as many people do , he was dozing off during the sermon .
and as he was dozing off , they were reading from the book of leviticus in the torah .
and they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in jerusalem , the priests used to have bread , which they used to place into a special table in the temple in jerusalem .
the man was asleep , but he heard the words bread , temple , god , and he woke up .
he said , " god wants bread . that 's it . god wants bread . i know what god wants . "
and he rushed home . and after the sabbath , he made 12 loaves of bread , took them to the synagogue , went into the synagogue , opened the ark and said , " god , i do n't know why you want this bread , but here you are . "
and he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the torah .
then he went home .
the cleaner came into the synagogue .
" oh god , i 'm in such trouble . i 've got children to feed .
my wife 's ill . i 've got no money . what can i do ? "
he goes into the synagogue . " god , will you please help me ?
ah , what a wonderful smell . "
he goes to the ark . he opens the ark .
" there 's bread ! god , you 've answered my plea . you 've answered my question . "
takes the bread and goes home .
meanwhile , the rich man thinks to himself , " i 'm an idiot . god wants bread ?
god , the one who rules the entire universe , wants my bread ? "
he rushes to the synagogue . " i 'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it . "
he goes in there , and it 's not there .
and he says , " god , you really did want it . you wanted my bread .
next week , with raisins . "
this went on for years .
every week , the man would bring bread with raisins , with all sorts of good things , put it into the ark .
every week , the cleaner would come . " god you 've answered my plea again . "
take the bread . take it home .
went on until a new rabbi came . rabbis always spoil things .
the rabbi came in and saw what was going on .
and he called the two of them to his office .
and he said , you know , " this is what 's happening . "
and the rich man - oh , dear - crestfallen .
" you mean god did n't want my bread ? "
and the poor man said , " and you mean god did n't answer my pleas ? "
and the rabbi said , " you 've misunderstood me .
you 've misunderstood totally , " he said .
" of course , what you are doing , " he said to the rich man , " is answering god 's plea that we should be compassionate .
and god , " he said to the poor man , " is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give . "
he looked at the rich man . he held the rich man 's hands and said , " do n't you understand ? " he said , " these are the hands of god . "
so that is the way i feel : that i can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate , of understanding that there is a connectivity , that there is a unity in this world ; that i want to try and serve that unity , and that i can try and do that by understanding , i hope , trying to understand something of the pain of others ; but understanding that there are limits , that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them ; and that i have to understand that there are limits to my energy , to the giving i can give .
i have to reevaluate them , try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me , so that i can see the world clearly .
and then i have to try to see in what ways i can make these the hands of god .
and so try to bring compassion to life in this world .
sarge salman : all the way from los altos hills , california , mr. henry evans .
-lrb- applause -rrb- henry evans : hello .
my name is henry evans , and until august 29 , 2002 , i was living my version of the american dream .
i grew up in a typical american town near st. louis .
my dad was a lawyer .
my mom was a homemaker .
my six siblings and i were good kids , but caused our fair share of trouble .
after high school , i left home to study and learn more about the world .
i went to notre dame university and graduated with degrees in accounting and german , including spending a year of study in austria .
later on , i earned an mba at stanford .
i married my high school sweetheart , jane .
i am lucky to have her .
together , we raised four wonderful children .
i worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder , eventually becoming a chief financial officer in silicon valley , a job i really enjoyed .
my family and i bought our first and only home on december 13 , 2001 , a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of los altos hills , california , from where i am speaking to you now .
we were looking forward to rebuilding it , but eight months after we moved in , i suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect .
overnight , i became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 40 .
it took me several years , but with the help of an incredibly supportive family , i finally decided life was still worth living .
i became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled .
head tracking devices sold commercially by the company madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements , and enable my use of a regular computer .
i can surf the web , exchange email with people , and routinely destroy my friend steve cousins in online word games .
this technology allows me to remain engaged , mentally active , and feel like i am a part of the world .
one day , i was lying in bed watching cnn , when i was amazed by professor charlie kemp of the healthcare robotics lab at georgia tech demonstrating a pr2 robot .
i emailed charlie and steve cousins of willow garage , and we formed the robots for humanity project .
for about two years , robots for humanity developed ways for me to use the pr2 as my body surrogate .
i shaved myself for the first time in 10 years .
from my home in california , i shaved charlie in atlanta . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i handed out halloween candy .
i opened my refrigerator on my own .
i began doing tasks around the house .
i saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute , both for myself and others in my circumstance .
all of us have disabilities in one form or another .
for example , if either of us wants to go 60 miles an hour , both of us will need an assistive device called a car .
your disability does n't make you any less of a person , and neither does mine .
by the way , check out my sweet ride . -lrb- laughter -rrb- since birth , we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own .
last year , kaijen hsiao of willow garage connected with me chad jenkins .
chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones .
it was then i realized that i could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight , giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible .
using a mouse cursor i control with my head , these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser .
with a little practice , i became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own .
i could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing .
i inspected the solar panels on our roof . -lrb- laughter -rrb- one of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop .
i went even further by seeing if i could use a head-mounted display , the oculus rift , as modified by fighting walrus , to have an immersive experience controlling the drone .
with chad 's group at brown , i regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week , from my home 3,000 miles away .
all work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic , so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i never thought i would be able to casually move around a campus like brown on my own .
i just wish i could afford the tuition . -lrb- laughter -rrb- chad jenkins : henry , all joking aside , i bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in california 3,000 miles away .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , henry , have you been to d.c. lately ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- are you excited to be at tedxmidatlantic ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- can you show us how excited you are ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , big finish .
can you show us how good of a pilot you are ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right , we still have a little ways to go with that , but i think it shows the promise .
what makes henry 's story amazing is it 's about understanding henry 's needs , understanding what people in henry 's situation need from technology , and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide , and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way .
what we 're trying to do is democratize robotics , so that anybody can be a part of this .
we 're providing affordable , off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the a.r. drone , 300 dollars , the suitable technologies beam , only 17,000 dollars , along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we 're trying to do .
and our hope is that , by providing these tools , that you 'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled , to provide care for our aging population , to help better educate our children , to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future , to both monitor and protect our environment , and to explore the universe .
back to you , henry .
he : thank you , chad .
with this drone setup , we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world , and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination , where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else , and perhaps better , and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables .
one hundred years ago , i would have been treated like a vegetable .
actually , that 's not true .
i would have died .
it is up to us , all of us , to decide how robotics will be used , for good or for evil , for simply replacing people or for making people better , for allowing us to do and enjoy more .
our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone 's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe .
with the help of people like you , we can make this dream a reality .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up in europe , and world war ii caught me when i was between seven and 10 years old .
and i realized how few of the grown-ups that i knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them - how few of them could even resemble a normal , contented , satisfied , happy life once their job , their home , their security was destroyed by the war .
so i became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living .
and i tried , as a child , as a teenager , to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that i could see as a possible answer to that question .
and finally i ended up encountering psychology by chance .
i was at a ski resort in switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself , because the snow had melted and i did n't have money to go to a movie . but i found that on the - i read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that i 'd seen in the center of zurich , and it was about flying saucers -lsb- that -rsb- he was going to talk .
and i thought , well , since i ca n't go to the movies , at least i will go for free to listen to flying saucers .
and the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting .
instead of talking about little green men , he talked about how the psyche of the europeans had been traumatized by the war , and now they 're projecting flying saucers into the sky .
he talked about how the mandalas of ancient hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war .
and this seemed very interesting to me .
and i started reading his books after that lecture .
and that was carl jung , whose name or work i had no idea about .
then i came to this country to study psychology and i started trying to understand the roots of happiness .
this is a typical result that many people have presented , and there are many variations on it .
but this , for instance , shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the united states since 1956 say that their life is very happy .
and that has n't changed at all .
whereas the personal income , on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation , has more than doubled , almost tripled , in that period .
but you find essentially the same results , namely , that after a certain basic point - which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level - increases in material well-being do n't seem to affect how happy people are .
in fact , you can find that the lack of basic resources , material resources , contributes to unhappiness , but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness .
so my research has been focused more on - after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience , i tried to understand : where - in everyday life , in our normal experience - do we feel really happy ?
and to start those studies about 40 years ago , i began to look at creative people - first artists and scientists , and so forth - trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them did n't expect either fame or fortune , but which made their life meaningful and worth doing .
this was one of the leading composers of american music back in the ' 70s .
and the interview was 40 pages long .
but this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview .
and it describes how he feels when composing is going well .
and he says by describing it as an ecstatic state .
now , " ecstasy " in greek meant simply to stand to the side of something .
and then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines .
so ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality .
and it 's interesting , if you think about it , how , when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement - whether it 's china , greece , the hindu civilization , or the mayas , or egyptians - what we know about them is really about their ecstasies , not about their everyday life .
we know the temples they built , where people could come to experience a different reality .
we know about the circuses , the arenas , the theaters .
these are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated , more ordered form .
now , this man does n't need to go to a place like this , which is also - this place , this arena , which is built like a greek amphitheatre , is a place for ecstasy also .
we are participating in a reality that is different from that of the everyday life that we 're used to .
but this man does n't need to go there .
he needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks , and as he does that , he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination .
so once he gets to that point of beginning to create , like jennifer did in her improvisation , a new reality - that is , a moment of ecstasy - he enters that different reality .
now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he did n't exist .
and that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration .
but actually , our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second .
and in order to hear me and understand what i 'm saying , you need to process about 60 bits per second .
that 's why you ca n't hear more than two people .
you ca n't understand more than two people talking to you .
well , when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new , as this man is , he does n't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels , or his problems at home .
he ca n't feel even that he 's hungry or tired .
his body disappears , his identity disappears from his consciousness , because he does n't have enough attention , like none of us do , to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration , and at the same time to feel that he exists .
so existence is temporarily suspended .
and he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself .
now , i could look at my hand for two weeks , and i would n't feel any awe or wonder , because i ca n't compose . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so what it 's telling you here is that obviously this automatic , spontaneous process that he 's describing can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique .
and it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you ca n't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field .
whether it 's mathematics or music , it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it 's better than what was there before .
now , when that happens , he says the music just flows out .
and because all of these people i started interviewing - this was an interview which is over 30 years old - so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that i called this type of experience the " flow experience . "
and it happens in different realms .
for instance , a poet describes it in this form .
this is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the united states .
and it describes the same effortless , spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state .
this poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky - a very similar description to what albert einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity , when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked .
but it happens in other activities .
for instance , this is another student of mine , susan jackson from australia , who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world .
and you see here in this description of an olympic skater , the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person .
you do n't think ; it goes automatically , if you merge yourself with the music , and so forth .
it happens also , actually , in the most recent book i wrote , called " good business , " where i interviewed some of the ceos who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical , very socially responsible .
you see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it .
and like all of these successful and responsible ceos say , you ca n't have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job .
anita roddick is another one of these ceos we interviewed .
she is the founder of body shop , the natural cosmetics king .
it 's kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you 're working .
this is an interesting little quote from masaru ibuka , who was at that time starting out sony without any money , without a product - they did n't have a product , they did n't have anything , but they had an idea .
and the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation , be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart 's content .
i could n't improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace .
now , when we do studies - we have , with other colleagues around the world , done over 8,000 interviews of people - from dominican monks , to blind nuns , to himalayan climbers , to navajo shepherds - who enjoy their work .
and regardless of the culture , regardless of education or whatever , there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow .
there 's this focus that , once it becomes intense , leads to a sense of ecstasy , a sense of clarity : you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other ; you get immediate feedback .
you know that what you need to do is possible to do , even though difficult , and sense of time disappears , you forget yourself , you feel part of something larger .
and once the conditions are present , what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake .
in our studies , we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme .
and we can measure this very precisely , actually , because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day , and whenever they go off you say what you 're doing , how you feel , where you are , what you 're thinking about .
and two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skill that they feel they have at that moment .
so for each person we can establish an average , which is the center of the diagram .
that would be your mean level of challenge and skill , which will be different from that of anybody else .
but you have a kind of a set point there , which would be in the middle .
if we know what that set point is , we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow , and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average .
and you may be doing things very differently from other people , but for everyone that flow channel , that area there , will be when you are doing what you really like to do - play the piano , be with your best friend , perhaps work , if work is what provides flow for you .
and then the other areas become less and less positive .
arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there .
your skills are not quite as high as they should be , but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill .
so , arousal is the area where most people learn from , because that 's where they 're pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that - going back to flow - then they develop higher skills .
control is also a good place to be , because there you feel comfortable , but not very excited .
it 's not very challenging any more .
and if you want to enter flow from control , you have to increase the challenges .
so those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into .
the other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal .
relaxation is fine - you still feel ok .
boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative : you do n't feel that you 're doing anything , you do n't use your skills , there 's no challenge .
unfortunately , a lot of people 's experience is in apathy .
the largest single contributor to that experience is watching television ; the next one is being in the bathroom , sitting .
even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow , but that 's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it .
so the question we are trying to address - and i 'm way over time - is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel .
and that is the kind of challenge that we 're trying to understand .
and some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice , but unfortunately a lot of people do n't .
and that 's what our mandate is , in a way , to do .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you may want to take a closer look .
there 's more to this painting than meets the eye .
and yes , it 's an acrylic painting of a man , but i did n't paint it on canvas .
i painted it directly on top of the man .
what i do in my art is i skip the canvas altogether , and if i want to paint your portrait , i 'm painting it on you , physically on you .
that also means you 're probably going to end up with an earful of paint , because i need to paint your ear on your ear .
everything in this scene , the person , the clothes , chairs , wall , gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what 's directly below it , and in this way , i 'm able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting .
i can photograph it from any angle , and it will still look 2d .
there 's no photoshop here .
this is just a photo of one of my three-dimensional paintings .
you might be wondering how i came up with this idea of turning people into paintings .
but originally , this had nothing to do with either people or paint .
it was about shadows .
i was fascinated with the absence of light , and i wanted to find a way that i could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed .
i came up with the idea of painting shadows .
i loved that i could hide within this shadow my own painted version , and it would be almost invisible until the light changed , and all of a sudden my shadow would be brought to the light .
i wanted to think about what else i could put shadows on , and i thought of my friend bernie .
but i did n't just want to paint the shadows .
i also wanted to paint the highlights and create a mapping on his body in greyscale .
i had a very specific vision of what this would look like , and as i was painting him , i made sure to follow that very closely .
but something kept on flickering before my eyes .
i was n't quite sure what i was looking at .
and then when i took that moment to take a step back , magic .
i had turned my friend into a painting .
i could n't have foreseen that when i wanted to paint a shadow , i would pull out this whole other dimension , that i would collapse it , that i would take a painting and make it my friend and then bring him back to a painting .
i was a little conflicted though , because i was so excited about what i 'd found , but i was just about to graduate from college with a degree in political science , and i 'd always had this dream of going to washington , d.c. , and sitting at a desk and working in government .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- why did this have to get in the way of all that ?
i made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to capitol hill , but going down to my parents ' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint .
i had no idea where to begin .
the last time i 'd painted , i was 16 years old at summer camp , and i did n't want to teach myself how to paint by copying the old masters or stretching a canvas and practicing over and over again on that surface , because that 's not what this project was about for me .
it was about space and light .
my early canvases ended up being things that you would n't expect to be used as canvas , like fried food .
it 's nearly impossible to get paint to stick to the grease in an egg .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even harder was getting paint to stick to the acid in a grapefruit .
it just would erase my brush strokes like invisible ink .
i 'd put something down , and instantly it would be gone .
and if i wanted to paint on people , well , i was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that i spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast .
it just seemed like it made more sense to practice by painting on myself .
one of my favorite models actually ended up being a retired old man who not only did n't mind sitting still and getting the paint in his ears , but he also did n't really have much embarrassment about being taken out into very public places for exhibition , like the metro .
i was having so much fun with this process .
i was teaching myself how to paint in all these different styles , and i wanted to see what else i could do with it .
i came together with a collaborator , sheila vand , and we had the idea of creating paintings in a more unusual surface , and that was milk .
we got a pool . we filled it with milk .
we filled it with sheila . and i began painting .
and the images were always completely unexpected in the end , because i could have a very specific image about how it would turn out , i could paint it to match that , but the moment that sheila laid back into the milk , everything would change .
it was in constant flux , and we had to , rather than fight it , embrace it , see where the milk would take us and compensate to make it even better .
sometimes , when sheila would lay down in the milk , it would wash all the paint off of her arms , and it might seem a little bit clumsy , but our solution would be , okay , hide your arms .
and one time , she got so much milk in her hair that it just smeared all the paint off of her face .
all right , well , hide your face .
and we ended up with something far more elegant than we could have imagined , even though this is essentially the same solution that a frustrated kid uses when he ca n't draw hands , just hiding them in the pockets .
when we started out on the milk project , and when i started out , i could n't have foreseen that i would go from pursuing my dream in politics and working at a desk to tripping over a shadow and then turning people into paintings and painting on people in a pool of milk .
but then again , i guess it 's also not unforeseeable that you can find the strange in the familiar , as long as you 're willing to look beyond what 's already been brought to light , that you can see what 's below the surface , hiding in the shadows , and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's talk about billions .
let 's talk about past and future billions .
we know that about 106 billion people have ever lived .
and we know that most of them are dead .
and we also know that most of them live or lived in asia .
and we also know that most of them were or are very poor - did not live for very long .
let 's talk about billions .
let 's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today .
we know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800 .
and we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call westerners : europeans , north americans , australasians .
19 percent of the world 's population today , westerners own two-thirds of its wealth .
economic historians call this " the great divergence . "
and this slide here is the best simplification of the great divergence story i can offer you .
it 's basically two ratios of per capita gdp , per capita gross domestic product , so average income .
one , the red line , is the ratio of british to indian per capita income .
and the blue line is the ratio of american to chinese .
and this chart goes back to 1500 .
and you can see here that there 's an exponential great divergence .
they start off pretty close together .
in fact , in 1500 , the average chinese was richer than the average north american .
when you get to the 1970s , which is where this chart ends , the average briton is more than 10 times richer than the average indian .
and that 's allowing for differences in the cost of living .
it 's based on purchasing power parity .
the average american is nearly 20 times richer than the average chinese by the 1970s .
so why ?
this was n't just an economic story .
if you take the 10 countries that went on to become the western empires , in 1500 they were really quite tiny - five percent of the world 's land surface , 16 percent of its population , maybe 20 percent of its income .
by 1913 , these 10 countries , plus the united states , controlled vast global empires - 58 percent of the world 's territory , about the same percentage of its population , and a really huge , nearly three-quarters share of global economic output .
and notice , most of that went to the motherland , to the imperial metropoles , not to their colonial possessions .
now you ca n't just blame this on imperialism - though many people have tried to do so - for two reasons .
one , empire was the least original thing that the west did after 1500 .
everybody did empire .
they beat preexisting oriental empires like the mughals and the ottomans .
so it really does n't look like empire is a great explanation for the great divergence .
in any case , as you may remember , the great divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s , some considerable time after decolonization .
this is not a new question .
samuel johnson , the great lexicographer , -lsb- posed -rsb- it through his character rasselas in his novel " rasselas , prince of abissinia , " published in 1759 .
" by what means are the europeans thus powerful ; or why , since they can so easily visit asia and africa for trade or conquest , can not the asiaticks and africans invade their coasts , plant colonies in their ports , and give laws to their natural princes ?
the same wind that carries them back would bring us thither ? "
that 's a great question .
and you know what , it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the resterners - by the people in the rest of the world - like ibrahim muteferrika , an ottoman official , the man who introduced printing , very belatedly , to the ottoman empire - who said in a book published in 1731 , " why do christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious ottoman armies ? "
unlike rasselas , muteferrika had an answer to that question , which was correct .
he said it was " because they have laws and rules invented by reason . "
it 's not geography .
you may think we can explain the great divergence in terms of geography .
we know that 's wrong , because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions .
we took all the germans , we divided them roughly in two , and we gave the ones in the east communism , and you see the result .
within an incredibly short period of time , people living in the german democratic republic produced trabants , the trabbi , one of the world 's worst ever cars , while people in the west produced the mercedes benz .
if you still do n't believe me , we conducted the experiment also in the korean peninsula .
and we decided we 'd take koreans in roughly the same geographical place with , notice , the same basic traditional culture , and we divided them in two , and we gave the northerners communism .
and the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in germany .
not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly , but in almost every other respect , it 's a huge divergence .
which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character , popular explanations for this kind of thing , are really significant .
it 's the ideas .
it 's the institutions .
this must be true because a scotsman said it .
and i think i 'm the only scotsman here at the edinburgh ted .
so let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a scotsman .
he was adam smith - not billy connolly , not sean connery - though he is very smart indeed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- smith - and i want you to go and bow down before his statue in the royal mile ; it 's a wonderful statue - smith , in the " wealth of nations " published in 1776 - that 's the most important thing that happened that year ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you bet .
there was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies , but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " china seems to have been long stationary , and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions .
but this complement may be much inferior to what , with other laws and institutions , the nature of its soil , climate , and situation might admit of . "
that is so right and so cool .
and he said it such a long time ago .
but you know , this is a ted audience , and if i keep talking about institutions , you 're going to turn off .
so i 'm going to translate this into language that you can understand .
let 's call them the killer apps .
i want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the west apart from the rest .
and they 're kind of like the apps on your phone , in the sense that they look quite simple .
they 're just icons ; you click on them .
but behind the icon , there 's complex code .
it 's the same with institutions .
there are six which i think explain the great divergence .
one , competition .
two , the scientific revolution .
three , property rights .
four , modern medicine .
five , the consumer society .
and six , the work ethic .
you can play a game and try and think of one i 've missed at , or try and boil it down to just four , but you 'll lose .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- let me very briefly tell you what i mean by this , synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process .
competition means , not only were there a hundred different political units in europe in 1500 , but within each of these units , there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns .
the ancestor of the modern corporation , the city of london corporation , existed in the 12th century .
nothing like this existed in china , where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity , and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination , which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex confucian essay writing .
the scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the oriental world in a number of crucial ways , the most important being that , through the experimental method , it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before .
example : benjamin robins 's extraordinary application of newtonian physics to ballistics .
once you do that , your artillery becomes accurate .
think of what that means .
that really was a killer application .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- meanwhile , there 's no scientific revolution anywhere else .
the ottoman empire 's not that far from europe , but there 's no scientific revolution there .
in fact , they demolish taqi al-din 's observatory , because it 's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of god .
property rights : it 's not the democracy , folks ; it 's having the rule of law based on private property rights .
that 's what makes the difference between north america and south america .
you could turn up in north america having signed a deed of indenture saying , " i 'll work for nothing for five years .
you just have to feed me . "
but at the end of it , you 've got a hundred acres of land .
that 's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide .
that 's not possible in latin america where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors .
and you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between north and south .
most people in rural north america owned some land by 1900 .
hardly anyone in south america did .
that 's another killer app .
modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people .
and this was another killer app - the very opposite of a killer , because it doubled , and then more than doubled , human life expectancy .
it even did that in the european empires .
even in places like senegal , beginning in the early 20th century , there were major breakthroughs in public health , and life expectancy began to rise .
it does n't rise any faster after these countries become independent .
the empires were n't all bad .
the consumer society is what you need for the industrial revolution to have a point .
you need people to want to wear tons of clothes .
you 've all bought an article of clothing in the last month ; i guarantee it .
that 's the consumer society , and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself .
japan was the first non-western society to embrace it .
the alternative , which was proposed by mahatma gandhi , was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent .
very few indians today wish that india had gone down mahatma gandhi 's road .
finally , the work ethic .
max weber thought that was peculiarly protestant .
he was wrong .
any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work .
we know this because today the work ethic is no longer a protestant , western phenomenon .
in fact , the west has lost its work ethic .
today , the average korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average german - a thousand .
and this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon , and that is the end of the great divergence .
who 's got the work ethic now ?
take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds .
at the top of the international league table according to the latest pisa study , is the shanghai district of china .
the gap between shanghai and the united kingdom and the united states is as big as the gap between the u.k. and the u.s.
and albania and tunisia .
you probably assume that because the iphone was designed in california but assembled in china that the west still leads in terms of technological innovation .
you 're wrong .
in terms of patents , there 's no question that the east is ahead .
not only has japan been ahead for some time , south korea has gone into third place , and china is just about to overtake germany .
why ?
because the killer apps can be downloaded .
it 's open source .
any society can adopt these institutions , and when they do , they achieve what the west achieved after 1500 - only faster .
this is the great reconvergence , and it 's the biggest story of your lifetime .
because it 's on your watch that this is happening .
it 's our generation that is witnessing the end of western predominance .
the average american used to be more than 20 times richer than the average chinese .
now it 's just five times , and soon it will be 2.5 times .
so i want to end with three questions for the future billions , just ahead of 2016 , when the united states will lose its place as number one economy to china .
the first is , can you delete these apps , and are we in the process of doing so in the western world ?
the second question is , does the sequencing of the download matter ?
and could africa get that sequencing wrong ?
one obvious implication of modern economic history is that it 's quite hard to transition to democracy before you 've established secure private property rights .
warning : that may not work .
and third , can china do without killer app number three ?
that 's the one that john locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law .
that 's the basis for the western model of representative government .
now this picture shows the demolition of the chinese artist ai weiwei 's studio in shanghai earlier this year .
he 's now free again , having been detained , as you know , for some time .
but i do n't think his studio has been rebuilt .
winston churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938 .
and i think these words really nail it : " it means a society based upon the opinion of civilians .
it means that violence , the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs , the conditions of camps and warfare , of riot and tyranny , give place to parliaments where laws are made , and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained .
that is civilization - and in its soil grow continually freedom , comfort and culture , " what all tedsters care about most .
" when civilization reigns in any country , a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people . "
that 's so true .
i do n't think the decline of western civilization is inevitable , because i do n't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model , beautifully illustrated by thomas cole 's " course of empire " paintings .
that 's not the way history works .
that 's not the way the west rose , and i do n't think it 's the way the west will fall .
the west may collapse very suddenly .
complex civilizations do that , because they operate , most of the time , on the edge of chaos .
that 's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations .
no , we may hang on , despite the huge burdens of debt that we 've accumulated , despite the evidence that we 've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo .
but one thing is for sure , the great divergence is over , folks .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : niall , i am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that 's booming , which is latin america .
what 's your view on that ?
niall ferguson : well i really am not just talking about the rise of the east ; i 'm talking about the rise of the rest , and that includes south america .
i once asked one of my colleagues at harvard , " hey , is south america part of the west ? "
he was an expert in latin american history .
he said , " i do n't know ; i 'll have to think about that . "
that tells you something really important .
i think if you look at what is happening in brazil in particular , but also chile , which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life , there 's a very bright future indeed .
so my story really is as much about that convergence in the americas as it 's a convergence story in eurasia .
bg : and there is this impression that north america and europe are not really paying attention to these trends .
mostly they 're worried about each other .
the americans think that the european model is going to crumble tomorrow .
the europeans think that the american budget is going to explode tomorrow .
and that 's all we seem to be caring about recently .
nf : i think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed world right now - both sides of the atlantic - is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture .
and it 's a crisis that has its structural facet - it 's partly to do with demographics .
but it 's also , of course , to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage , excessive borrowing in the private sector .
that crisis , which has been the focus of so much attention , including by me , i think is an epiphenomenon .
the financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon , which has just accelerated this huge shift , which ends half a millennium of western ascendancy .
i think that 's its real importance .
bg : niall , thank you . -lrb- nf : thank you very much , bruno . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm not at all a cook .
so do n't fear , this is not going to be a cooking demonstration .
but i do want to talk to you about something that i think is dear to all of us .
and that is bread - something which is as simple as our basic , most fundamental human staple .
and i think few of us spend the day without eating bread in some form .
unless you 're on one of these californian low-carb diets , bread is standard .
bread is not only standard in the western diet .
as i will show to you , it is actually the mainstay of modern life .
so i 'm going to bake bread for you .
in the meantime i 'm also talking to you , so my life is going to be complicated . bear with me .
first of all , a little bit of audience participation .
i have two loaves of bread here .
one is a supermarket standard : white bread , pre-packaged , which i 'm told is called a wonderbread .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't know this word until i arrived .
and this is more or less , a whole-meal , handmade , small-bakery loaf of bread .
here we go . i want to see a show of hands .
who prefers the whole-meal bread ?
okay let me do this differently . is anybody preferring the wonderbread at all ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have two tentative male hands .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , now the question is really , why is this so ?
and i think it is because we feel that this kind of bread really is about authenticity .
it 's about a traditional way of living .
a way that is perhaps more real , more honest .
this is an image from tuscany , where we feel agriculture is still about beauty .
and life is really , too .
and this is about good taste , good traditions .
why do we have this image ?
why do we feel that this is more true than this ?
well i think it has a lot to do with our history .
in the 10,000 years since agriculture evolved , most of our ancestors have actually been agriculturalists or they were closely related to food production .
and we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past .
art has helped us to maintain that kind of image .
it was a mythical past .
of course , the reality is quite different .
these poor farmers working the land by hand or with their animals , had yield levels that are comparable to the poorest farmers today in west africa .
but we have , somehow , in the course of the last few centuries , or even decades , started to cultivate an image of a mythical , rural agricultural past .
it was only 200 years ago that we had the advent of the industrial revolution .
and while i 'm starting to make some bread for you here , it 's very important to understand what that revolution did to us .
it brought us power . it brought us mechanization , fertilizers .
and it actually drove up our yields .
and even sort of horrible things , like picking beans by hand , can now be done automatically .
all that is a real , great improvement , as we shall see .
of course we also , particularly in the last decade , managed to envelop the world in a dense chain of supermarkets , in a chain of global trade .
and it means that you now eat products , which can come from all around the world .
that is the reality of our modern life .
now you may prefer this loaf of bread .
excuse my hands but this is how it is .
but actually the real relevant bread , historically , is this white wonder loaf .
and do n't despise the white bread because it really , i think , symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all .
and that is a feat that we are not really conscious of that much .
but it has changed the world .
this tiny bread that is tasteless in some ways and has a lot of problems has changed the world .
so what is happening ?
well the best way to look at that is to do a tiny bit of simplistic statistics .
with the advent of the industrial revolution with modernization of agriculture in the last few decades , since the 1960s , food availability , per head , in this world , has increased by 25 percent .
and the world population in the meantime has doubled .
that means that we have now more food available than ever before in human history .
and that is the result , directly , of being so successful at increasing the scale and volume of our production .
and this is true , as you can see , for all countries , including the so-called developing countries .
what happened to our bread in the meantime ?
as food became plentiful here , it also meant that we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture to something like , on average , in the high income countries , five percent or less of the population .
in the u.s. only one percent of the people are actually farmers .
and it frees us all up to do other things - to sit at ted meetings and not to worry about our food .
that is , historically , a really unique situation .
never before has the responsibility to feed the world been in the hands of so few people .
and never before have so many people been oblivious of that fact .
so as food became more plentiful , bread became cheaper .
and as it became cheaper , bread manufacturers decided to add in all kinds of things .
we added in more sugar .
we add in raisins and oil and milk and all kinds of things to make bread , from a simple food into kind of a support for calories .
and today , bread now is associated with obesity , which is very strange .
it is the basic , most fundamental food that we 've had in the last ten thousand years .
wheat is the most important crop - the first crop we domesticated and the most important crop we still grow today .
but this is now this strange concoction of high calories .
and that 's not only true in this country , it is true all over the world .
bread has migrated to tropical countries , where the middle classes now eat french rolls and hamburgers and where the commuters find bread much more handy to use than rice or cassava .
so bread has become from a main staple , a source of calories associated with obesity and also a source of modernity , of modern life .
and the whiter the bread , in many countries , the better it is .
so this is the story of bread as we know it now .
but of course the price of mass production has been that we moved large-scale .
and large-scale has meant destruction of many of our landscapes , destruction of biodiversity - still a lonely emu here in the brazilian cerrado soybean fields .
the costs have been tremendous - water pollution , all the things you know about , destruction of our habitats .
what we need to do is to go back to understanding what our food is about .
and this is where i have to query all of you .
how many of you can actually tell wheat apart from other cereals ?
how many of you actually can make a bread in this way , without starting with a bread machine or just some kind of packaged flavor ?
can you actually bake bread ? do you know how much a loaf of bread actually costs ?
we have become very removed from what our bread really is , which , again , evolutionarily speaking , is very strange .
in fact not many of you know that our bread , of course , was not a european invention .
it was invented by farmers in iraq and syria in particular .
the tiny spike on the left to the center is actually the forefather of wheat .
this is where it all comes from , and where these farmers who actually , ten thousand years ago , put us on the road of bread .
now it is not surprising that with this massification and large-scale production , there is a counter-movement that emerged - very much also here in california .
the counter-movement says , " let 's go back to this .
let 's go back to traditional farming .
let 's go back to small-scale , to farmers ' markets , small bakeries and all that . " wonderful .
do n't we all agree ? i certainly agree .
i would love to go back to tuscany to this kind of traditional setting , gastronomy , good food .
but this is a fallacy .
and the fallacy comes from idealizing a past that we have forgotten about .
if we do this , if we want to stay with traditional small-scale farming we are going , actually , to relegate these poor farmers and their husbands - among whom i have lived for many years , working without electricity and water , to try to improve their food production - we relegate them to poverty .
what they want are implements to increase their production : something to fertilize the soil , something to protect their crop and to bring it to a market .
we can not just think that small-scale is the solution to the world food problem .
it 's a luxury solution for us who can afford it , if you want to afford it .
in fact we do not want this poor woman to work the land like this .
if we say just small-scale production , as is the tendency here , to go back to local food means that a poor man like hans rosling can not even eat oranges anymore because in scandinavia we do n't have oranges .
so local food production is out .
but also we do not want to relegate to poverty in the rural areas .
and we do not want to relegate the urban poor to starvation .
so we must find other solutions .
one of our problems is that world food production needs to increase very rapidly - doubling by about 2030 .
the main driver of that is actually meat .
and meat consumption in southeast asia and china in particular is what drives the prices of cereals .
that need for animal protein is going to continue .
we can discuss alternatives in another talk , perhaps one day , but this is our driving force .
so what can we do ?
can we find a solution to produce more ?
yes . but we need mechanization .
and i 'm making a real plea here .
i feel so strongly that you can not ask a small farmer to work the land and bend over to grow a hectare of rice , 150,000 times , just to plant a crop and weed it .
you can not ask people to work under these conditions .
we need clever low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of the large-scale mechanization that we 've had .
so what can we do ?
we must feed three billion people in cities .
we will not do that through small farmers ' markets because these people have no small farmers ' markets at their disposal .
they have low incomes . and they benefit from cheap , affordable , safe and diverse food .
that 's what we must aim for in the next 20 to 30 years .
but yes there are some solutions .
and let me just do one simple conceptual thing : if i plot science as a proxy for control of the production process and scale .
what you see is that we 've started in the left-hand corner with traditional agriculture , which was sort of small-scale and low-control .
we 've moved towards large-scale and very high control .
what i want us to do is to keep up the science and even get more science in there but go to a kind of regional scale - not just in terms of the scale of the fields , but in terms of the entire food network .
that 's where we should move .
and the ultimate may be , but it does n't apply to cereals , that we have entirely closed ecosystems - the horticultural systems right at the top left-hand corner .
so we need to think differently about agriculture science .
agriculture science for most people - and there are not many farmers among you here - has this name of being bad , of being about pollution , about large-scale , about the destruction of the environment .
that is not necessary .
we need more science and not less . and we need good science .
so what kind of science can we have ?
well first of all i think we can do much better on the existing technologies .
use biotechnology where useful , particularly in pest and disease resistance .
there are also robots , for example , who can recognize weeds with a resolution of half an inch .
we have much cleverer irrigation .
we do not need to spill the water if we do n't want to .
and we need to think very dispassionately about the comparative advantages of small-scale and large-scale .
we need to think that land is multi-functional .
it has different functions .
there are different ways in which we must use it - for residential , for nature , for agriculture purposes .
and we also need to re-examine livestock .
go regional and go to urban food systems .
i want to see fish ponds in parking lots and basements .
i want to have horticulture and greenhouses on top of residential areas .
and i want to use the energy that comes from those greenhouses and from the fermentation of crops to heat our residential areas .
there are all kinds of ways we can do it .
we can not solve the world food problem by using biological agriculture .
but we can do a lot more .
and the main thing that i would really ask all of you as you go back to your countries , or as you stay here : ask your government for an integrated food policy .
food is as important as energy , as security , as the environment .
everything is linked together .
so we can do that . in fact in a densely populated country like the river delta , where i live in the netherlands , we have combined these functions .
so this is not science fiction . we can combine things even in a social sense of making the rural areas more accessible to people - to house , for example , the chronically sick .
there is all kinds of things we can do .
but there is something you must do . it 's not enough for me to say , " let 's get more bold science into agriculture . "
you must go back and think about your own food chain .
talk to farmers . when was the last time you went to a farm and talked to a farmer ?
talk to people in restaurants .
understand where you are in the food chain , where your food comes from .
understand that you are part of this enormous chain of events .
and that frees you up to do other things .
and above all , to me , food is about respect .
it 's about understanding , when you eat , that there are also many people who are still in this situation , who are still struggling for their daily food .
and the kind of simplistic solutions that we sometimes have , to think that doing everything by hand is going to be the solution , is really not morally justified .
we need to help to lift them out of poverty .
we need to make them proud of being a farmer because they allow us to survive .
never before , as i said , has the responsibility for food been in the hands of so few .
and never before have we had the luxury of taking it for granted because it is now so cheap .
and i think there is nobody else who has expressed better , to me , the idea that food , in the end , in our own tradition , is something holy .
it 's not about nutrients and calories .
it 's about sharing . it 's about honesty . it 's about identity .
who said this so beautifully was mahatma gandhi , 75 years ago , when he spoke about bread .
he did not speak about rice , in india . he said , " to those who have to go without two meals a day , god can only appear as bread . "
and so as i 'm finishing my bread here - and i 've been baking it , and i 'll try not to burn my hands .
let me share with those of you here in the first row .
let me share some of the food with you .
take some of my bread .
and as you eat it , and as you try it - please come and stand up .
have some of it .
i want you to think that every bite connects you to the past and the future : to these anonymous farmers , that first bred the first wheat varieties ; and to the farmers of today , who 've been making this . and you do n't even know who they are .
every meal you eat contains ingredients from all across the world .
everything makes us so privileged , that we can eat this food , that we do n't struggle every day .
and that , i think , evolutionarily-speaking is unique .
we 've never had that before .
so enjoy your bread .
eat it , and feel privileged .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- across europe and central asia , approximately one million children live in large residential institutions , usually known as orphanages .
most people imagine orphanages as a benign environment that care for children .
others know more about the living conditions there , but still think they 're a necessary evil .
after all , where else would we put all of those children who do n't have any parents ?
but 60 years of research has demonstrated that separating children from their families and placing them in large institutions seriously harms their health and development , and this is particularly true for young babies .
as we know , babies are born without their full muscle development , and that includes the brain .
during the first three years of life , the brain grows to its full size , with most of that growth taking place in the first six months . the brain develops in response to experience and to stimulation .
every time a young baby learns something new - to focus its eyes , to mimic a movement or a facial expression , to pick something up , to form a word or to sit up - new synaptic connections are being built in the brain .
new parents are astonished by the rapidity of this learning .
they are quite rightly amazed and delighted by their children 's cleverness .
they communicate their delight to their children , who respond with smiles , and a desire to achieve more and to learn more .
this forming of the powerful attachment between child and parent provides the building blocks for physical , social , language , cognitive and psychomotor development .
it is the model for all future relationships with friends , with partners and with their own children .
it happens so naturally in most families that we do n't even notice it . most of us are unaware of its importance to human development and , by extension , to the development of a healthy society .
and it 's only when it goes wrong that we start to realize the importance of families to children .
in august , 1993 , i had my first opportunity to witness on a massive scale the impact on children of institutionalization and the absence of parenting .
those of us who remember the newspaper reports that came out of romania after the 1989 revolution will recall the horrors of the conditions in some of those institutions .
i was asked to help the director of a large institution to help prevent the separation of children from their families .
housing 550 babies , this was ceausescu 's show orphanage , and so i 'd been told the conditions were much better .
having worked with lots of young children , i expected the institution to be a riot of noise , but it was as silent as a convent .
it was hard to believe there were any children there at all , yet the director showed me into room after room , each containing row upon row of cots , in each of which lay a child staring into space .
in a room of 40 newborns , not one of them was crying .
yet i could see soiled nappies , and i could see that some of the children were distressed , but the only noise was a low , continuous moan .
the head nurse told me proudly , " you see , our children are very well-behaved . "
over the next few days , i began to realize that this quietness was not exceptional .
the newly admitted babies would cry for the first few hours , but their demands were not met , and so eventually they learned not to bother . within a few days , they were listless , lethargic , and staring into space like all the others .
over the years , many people and news reports have blamed the personnel in the institutions for the harm caused to the children , but often , one member of staff is caring for 10 , 20 , and even 40 children .
hence they have no option but to implement a regimented program .
the children must be woken at 7 and fed at 7:30 .
at 8 , their nappies must be changed , so a staff member may have only 30 minutes to feed 10 or 20 children .
if a child soils its nappy at 8:30 , he will have to wait several hours before it can be changed again .
the child 's daily contact with another human being is reduced to a few hurried minutes of feeding and changing , and otherwise their only stimulation is the ceiling , the walls or the bars of their cots .
since my first visit to ceausescu 's institution , i 've seen hundreds of such places across 18 countries , from the czech republic to sudan .
across all of these diverse lands and cultures , the institutions , and the child 's journey through them , is depressingly similar .
lack of stimulation often leads to self-stimulating behaviors like hand-flapping , rocking back and forth , or aggression , and in some institutions , psychiatric drugs are used to control the behavior of these children , whilst in others , children are tied up to prevent them from harming themselves or others .
these children are quickly labeled as having disabilities and transferred to another institution for children with disabilities .
most of these children will never leave the institution again .
for those without disabilities , at age three , they 're transferred to another institution , and at age seven , to yet another . segregated according to age and gender , they are arbitrarily separated from their siblings , often without even a chance to say goodbye .
there 's rarely enough to eat . they are often hungry .
the older children bully the little ones . they learn to survive . they learn to defend themselves , or they go under .
when they leave the institution , they find it really difficult to cope and to integrate into society .
in moldova , young women raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to be trafficked than their peers , and a russian study found that two years after leaving institutions , young adults , 20 percent of them had a criminal record , 14 percent were involved in prostitution , and 10 percent had taken their own lives .
but why are there so many orphans in europe when there has n't been a great deal of war or disaster in recent years ?
in fact , more than 95 percent of these children have living parents , and societies tend to blame these parents for abandoning these children , but research shows that most parents want their children , and that the primary drivers behind institutionalization are poverty , disability and ethnicity .
many countries have not developed inclusive schools , and so even children with a very mild disability are sent away to a residential special school , at age six or seven .
the institution may be hundreds of miles away from the family home .
if the family 's poor , they find it difficult to visit , and gradually the relationship breaks down .
behind each of the million children in institutions , there is usually a story of parents who are desperate and feel they 've run out of options , like natalia in moldova , who only had enough money to feed her baby , and so had to send her older son to the institution ; or desi , in bulgaria , who looked after her four children at home until her husband died , but then she had to go out to work full time , and with no support , felt she had no option but to place a child with disabilities in an institution ; or the countless young girls too terrified to tell their parents
they 're pregnant , who leave their babies in a hospital ; or the new parents , the young couple who have just found out that their firstborn child has a disability , and instead of being provided with positive messages about their child 's potential , are told by the doctors , " forget her , leave her in the institution , go home and make a healthy one . "
this state of affairs is neither necessary nor is it inevitable .
every child has the right to a family , deserves and needs a family , and children are amazingly resilient .
we find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on , they recover their developmental delays , and go on to lead normal , happy lives .
it 's also much cheaper to provide support to families than it is to provide institutions .
one study suggests that a family support service costs 10 percent of an institutional placement , whilst good quality foster care costs usually about 30 percent .
if we spend less on these children but on the right services , we can take the savings and reinvest them in high quality residential care for those few children with extremely complex needs .
across europe , a movement is growing to shift the focus and transfer the resources from large institutions that provide poor quality care to community-based services that protect children from harm and allow them to develop to their full potential . when i first started to work in romania nearly 20 years ago , there were 200,000 children living in institutions , and more entering every day .
now , there are less than 10,000 , and family support services are provided across the country .
in moldova , despite extreme poverty and the terrible effects of the global financial crisis , the numbers of children in institutions has reduced by more than 50 percent in the last five years , and the resources are being redistributed to family support services and inclusive schools .
many countries have developed national action plans for change .
the european commission and other major donors are finding ways to divert money from institutions towards family support , empowering communities to look after their own children .
but there is still much to be done to end the systematic institutionalization of children .
awareness-raising is required at every level of society .
people need to know the harm that institutions cause to children , and the better alternatives that exist .
if we know people who are planning to support orphanages , we should convince them to support family services instead .
together , this is the one form of child abuse that we could eradicate in our lifetime .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you know , we wake up in the morning , you get dressed , put on your shoes , you head out into the world .
you plan on coming back , getting undressed , going to bed , waking up , doing it again , and that anticipation , that rhythm , helps give us a structure to how we organize ourselves and our lives , and gives it a measure of predictability .
living in new york city , as i do , it 's almost as if , with so many people doing so many things at the same time in such close quarters , it 's almost like life is dealing you extra hands out of that deck .
you 're never , there 's just , juxtapositions are possible that just are n't , you do n't think they 're going to happen .
and you never think you 're going to be the guy who 's walking down the street and , because you choose to go down one side or the other , the rest of your life is changed forever .
and one night , i 'm riding the uptown local train .
i get on . i tend to be a little bit vigilant when i get on the subway .
i 'm not one of the people zoning out with headphones or a book .
and i get on the car , and i look , and i notice this couple , college-aged , student-looking kids , a guy and a girl , and they 're sitting next to each other , and she 's got her leg draped over his knee , and they 're doing - they have this little contraption , and they 're tying these knots , and they 're doing it with one hand , they 're doing it left-handed and right-handed very quickly , and then she 'll hand the thing to him and he 'll do it .
i 've never seen anything like this .
it 's almost like they 're practicing magic tricks .
and at the next stop , a guy gets on the car , and he has this sort of visiting professor look to him .
he 's got the overstuffed leather satchel and the rectangular file case and a laptop bag and the tweed jacket with the leather patches , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - he looks at them , and then in a blink of an eye , he kneels down in front of them , and he starts to say , " you know , listen , here 's how you can do it . look , if you do this - " and he takes the laces out of their hand , and instantly , he starts tying these knots , and even better than they were doing it , remarkably .
and it turns out they are medical students on their way to a lecture about the latest suturing techniques , and he 's the guy giving the lecture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he starts to tell them , and he 's like , " no , this is very important here . you know , when you 're needing these knots , it 's going to be , you know , everything 's going to be happening at the same time , it 's going to be - you 're going to have all this information coming at you , there 's going to be organs getting in the way , it 's going to be slippery , and it 's just very important that you be able to do these beyond second nature , each hand , left hand , right hand , you have to be able to do them without seeing your fingers . "
and at that moment , when i heard that , i just got catapulted out of the subway car into a night when i had been getting a ride in an ambulance from the sidewalk where i had been stabbed to the trauma room of st. vincent 's hospital in manhattan , and what had happened was a gang had come in from brooklyn .
as part of an initiation for three of their members , they had to kill somebody , and i happened to be the guy walking down bleecker street that night , and they jumped on me without a word .
one of the very lucky things , when i was at notre dame , i was on the boxing team , so i put my hands up right away , instinctively .
the guy on the right had a knife with a 10-inch blade , and he went in under my elbow , and it went up and cut my inferior vena cava .
if you know anything about anatomy , that 's not a good thing to get cut , and everything , of course , on the way up , and then - i still had my hands up - he pulled it out and went for my neck , and sunk it in up to the hilt in my neck , and i got one straight right punch and knocked the middle guy out .
the other guy was still working on me , collapsing my other lung , and i managed to , by hitting that guy , to get a minute .
i ran down the street and collapsed , and the ambulance guys intubated me on the sidewalk and let the trauma room know they had an incoming .
and one of the side effects of having major massive blood loss is you get tunnel vision , so i remember being on the stretcher and having a little nickel-sized cone of vision , and i was moving my head around and we got to st. vincent 's , and we 're racing down this hallway , and i see the lights going , and it 's a peculiar effect of memories like that .
they do n't really go to the usual place that memories go .
they kind of have this vault where they 're stored in high-def , and george lucas did all the sound effects . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so sometimes , remembering them , it 's like , it 's not like any other kind of memories .
and i get into the trauma room , and they 're waiting for me , and the lights are there , and i 'd been able to breathe a little more now , because the blood has left , had been filling up my lungs and i was having a very hard time breathing , but now it 's kind of gone into the stretcher .
and i said , " is there anything i can do to help ? "
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the nurse kind of had a hysterical laugh , and i 'm turning my head trying to see everybody , and i had this weird memory of being in college and raising , raising money for the flood victims of bangladesh , and then i look over and my anesthesiologist is clamping the mask on me , and i think , " he looks bangladeshi , " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and i just have those two facts , and i just think , " this could work somehow . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i go out , and they work on me for the rest of the night , and i needed about 40 units of blood to keep me there
while they did their work , and the surgeon took out about a third of my intestines , my cecum , organs i did n't know that i had , and he later told me one of the last things he did while he was in there was to remove my appendix for me , which i thought was great , you know , just a little tidy thing there at the end . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i came to in the morning .
out of anesthetic , he had let them know that he wanted to be there , and he had given me about a two percent chance of living .
so he was there when i woke up , and it was , waking up was like breaking through the ice into a frozen lake of pain .
it was that enveloping , and there was only one spot that did n't hurt worse than anything i 'd ever felt , and it was my instep , and he was holding the arch of my foot and rubbing the instep with his thumb .
and i looked up , and he 's like , " good to see you , " and i was trying to remember what had happened and trying to get my head around everything , and the pain was just overwhelming , and he said , " you know , we did n't cut your hair . i thought you might have gotten strength from your hair like samson , and you 're going to need all the strength you can get . "
and in those days , my hair was down to my waist , i drove a motorcycle , i was unmarried , i owned a bar , so those were different times . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but i had three days of life support , and everybody was expecting , due to just the massive amount of what they had had to do that i was n't going to make it , so it was three days of everybody was either waiting for me to die or poop , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - when i finally pooped , then that somehow , surgically speaking , that 's like you crossed some good line , and , um - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -
on that day , the surgeon came in and whipped the sheet off of me .
he had three or four friends with him , and he does that , and they all look , and there was no infection , and they bend over me and they 're poking and prodding , and they 're like , " there 's no hematomas , blah blah , look at the color , " and they 're talking amongst themselves and i 'm , like , this restored automobile that he 's just going , " yeah , i did that . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it was just , it was amazing , because these guys are high-fiving him over how good i turned out , you know ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's my zipper , and i 've still got the staples in and everything .
and later on , when i got out and the flashbacks and the nightmares were giving me a hard time , i went back to him and i was sort of asking him , you know , what am i gonna do ?
and i think , kind of , as a surgeon , he basically said , " kid , i saved your life .
like , now you can do whatever you want , like , you gotta get on with that .
it 's like i gave you a new car and you 're complaining about not finding parking .
like , just , go out , and , you know , do your best .
but you 're alive . that 's what it 's about . "
and then i hear , " bing-bong , " and the subway doors are closing , and my stop is next , and i look at these kids , and i go , i think to myself , " i 'm going to lift my shirt up and show them , " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and then i think , " no , this is the new york city subway , that 's going to lead to other things . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i just think , they got their lecture to go to .
i step off , i 'm standing on the platform , and i feel my index finger in the first scar that i ever got , from my umbilical cord , and then around that , is traced the last scar that i got from my surgeon , and i think that , that chance encounter with those kids on the street with their knives led me to my surgical team , and their training and their skill and , always , a little bit of luck pushed back against chaos .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . very lucky to be here . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'll just take you to bangladesh for a minute .
before i tell that story , we should ask ourselves the question : why does poverty exist ?
i mean , there is plenty of knowledge and scientific breakthroughs .
we all live in the same planet , but there 's still a great deal of poverty in the world .
and i think - so i want to throw a perspective that i have , so that we can assess this project , or any other project , for that matter , to see whether it 's contributing or - contributing to poverty or trying to alleviate it .
rich countries have been sending aid to poor countries for the last 60 years .
and by and large , this has failed .
and you can see this book , written by someone who worked in the world bank for 20 years , and he finds economic growth in this country to be elusive .
by and large , it did not work .
so the question is , why is that ?
in my mind , there is something to learn from the history of europe .
i mean , even here , yesterday i was walking across the street , and they showed three bishops were executed 500 years ago , right across the street from here .
so my point is , there 's a lot of struggle has gone in europe , where citizens were empowered by technologies .
and they demanded authorities from - to come down from their high horses .
and in the end , there 's better bargaining between the authorities and citizens , and democracies , capitalism - everything else flourished .
and so you can see , the real process of - and this is backed up by this 500-page book - that the authorities came down and citizens got up .
but if you look , if you have that perspective , then you can see what happened in the last 60 years .
aid actually did the opposite .
it empowered authorities , and , as a result , marginalized citizens .
the authorities did not have the reason to make economic growth happen so that they could tax people and make more money for to run their business .
because they were getting it from abroad .
and in fact , if you see oil-rich countries , where citizens are not yet empowered , the same thing goes - nigeria , saudi arabia , all sorts of countries .
because the aid and oil or mineral money acts the same way .
it empowers authorities , without activating the citizens - their hands , legs , brains , what have you .
and if you agree with that , then i think the best way to improve these countries is to recognize that economic development is of the people , by the people , for the people .
and that is the real network effect .
if citizens can network and make themselves more organized and productive , so that their voices are heard , so then things would improve .
and to contrast that , you can see the most important institution in the world , the world bank , is an organization of the government , by the government , for the governments .
just see the contrast .
and that is the perspective i have , and then i can start my story .
of course , how would you empower citizens ?
there could be all sorts of technologies . and one is cell phones .
recently " the economist " recognized this , but i stumbled upon the idea 12 years ago , and that 's what i 've been working on .
so 12 years ago , i was trying to be an investment banker in new york .
we had - quite a few our colleagues were connected by a computer network .
and we got more productive because we did n't have to exchange floppy disks ; we could update each other more often .
but one time it broke down .
and it reminded me of a day in 1971 .
there was a war going on in my country .
and my family moved out of an urban place , where we used to live , to a remote rural area where it was safer .
and one time my mother asked me to get some medicine for a younger sibling .
and i walked 10 miles or so , all morning , to get there , to the medicine man .
and he was n't there , so i walked all afternoon back .
so i had another unproductive day .
so while i was sitting in a tall building in new york , i put those two experiences together side by side , and basically concluded that connectivity is productivity - whether it 's in a modern office or an underdeveloped village .
so naturally , i - the implication of that is that the telephone is a weapon against poverty .
and if that 's the case , then the question is how many telephones did we have at that time ?
and it turns out , that there was one telephone in bangladesh for every 500 people .
and all those phones were in the few urban places .
the vast rural areas , where 100 million people lived , there were no telephones .
so just imagine how many man-months or man-years are wasted , just like i wasted a day .
if you just multiply by 100 million people , let 's say losing one day a month , whatever , and you see a vast amount of resource wasted .
and after all , poor countries , like rich countries , one thing we 've got equal , is their days are the same length : 24 hours .
so if you lose that precious resource , where you are somewhat equal to the richer countries , that 's a huge waste .
so i started looking for any evidence that - does connectivity really increase productivity ?
and i could n't find much , really , but i found this graph produced by the itu , which is the international telecommunication union , based in geneva .
they show an interesting thing .
that you see , the horizontal axis is where you place your country .
so the united states or the uk would be here , outside .
and so the impact of one new telephone , which is on the vertical axis , is very little .
but if you come back to a poorer country , where the gnp per capita is , let 's say , 500 dollars , or 300 dollars , then the impact is huge : 6,000 dollars . or 5,000 dollars .
the question was , how much did it cost to install a new telephone in bangladesh ?
it turns out : 2,000 dollars .
so if you spend 2,000 dollars , and let 's say the telephone lasts 10 years , and if 5,000 dollars every year - so that 's 50,000 dollars .
so obviously this was a gadget to have .
and of course , if the cost of installing a telephone is going down , because there 's a digital revolution going on , then it would be even more dramatic .
and i knew a little economics by then - it says adam smith taught us that specialization leads to productivity .
but how would you specialize ?
let 's say i 'm a fisherman and a farmer .
and chris is a fisherman farmer . both are generalists .
so the point is that we could only - the only way we could depend on each other , is if we can connect with each other .
and if we are neighbors , i could just walk over to his house .
but then we are limiting our economic sphere to something very small area .
but in order to expand that , you need a river , or you need a highway , or you need telephone lines .
but in any event , it 's connectivity that leads to dependability .
and that leads to specialization .
that leads to productivity .
so the question was , i started looking at this issue , and going back and forth between bangladesh and new york .
there were a lot of reasons people told me why we do n't have enough telephones .
and one of them is the lacking buying power .
poor people apparently do n't have the power to buy .
but the point is , if it 's a production tool , why do we have to worry about that ?
i mean , in america , people buy cars , and they put very little money down .
they get a car , and they go to work .
the work pays them a salary ; the salary allows them to pay for the car over time .
the car pays for itself .
so if the telephone is a production tool , then we do n't quite have to worry about the purchasing power .
and of course , even if that 's true , then what about initial buying power ?
so then the question is , why ca n't we have some kind of shared access ?
in the united states , we have - everybody needs a banking service , but very few of us are trying to buy a bank .
so it 's - a bank tends to serve a whole community .
so we could do that for telephones .
and also people told me that we have a lot of important primary needs to meet : food , clothing , shelter , whatever .
but again , it 's very paternalistic .
you should be raising income and let people decide what they want to do with their money .
but the real problem is the lack of other infrastructures .
see , you need some kind of infrastructure to bring a new thing .
for instance , the internet was booming in the u.s.
because there were - there were people who had computers .
they had modems .
they had telephone lines , so it 's very easy to bring in a new idea , like the internet .
but that 's what 's lacking in a poor country .
so for example , we did n't have ways to have credit checks , few banks to collect bills , etc .
but that 's why i noticed grameen bank , which is a bank for poor people , and had 1,100 branches , 12,000 employees , 2.3 million borrowers .
and they had these branches .
i thought i could put cell towers and create a network .
and anyway , to cut the time short - so i started - i first went to them and said , " you know , perhaps i could connect all your branches and make you more efficient . "
but you know , they have , after all , evolved in a country without telephones , so they are decentralized . i mean , of course there might be other good reasons , but this was one of the reasons - they had to be .
and so they were not that interested to connect all their branches , and then to be - and rock the boat .
so i started focusing . what is it that they really do ?
so what happens is that somebody borrows money from the bank .
she typically buys a cow . the cow gives milk .
and she sells the milk to the villagers , and pays off the loan .
and this is a business for her , but it 's milk for everybody else .
and suddenly i realized that a cell phone could be a cow .
because some way she could borrow 200 dollars from the bank , get a phone and have the phone for everybody .
and it 's a business for her .
so i wrote to the bank , and they thought for a while , and they said , " it 's a little crazy , but logical .
if you think it can be done , come and make it happen . "
so i quit my job ; i went back to bangladesh .
i created a company in america called gonofone , which in bengali means " people 's phone . "
and angel investors in america put in money into that .
i flew around the world .
after about a million - i mean , i got rejected from lots of places , because i was not only trying to go to a poor country , i was trying to go to the poor of the poor country .
after about a million miles , and a meaningful - a substantial loss of hair , i eventually put together a consortium , and - which involved the norwegian telephone company , which provided the know-how , and the grameen bank provided the infrastructure to spread the service .
to make the story short , here is the coverage of the country .
you can see it 's pretty much covered .
even in bangladesh , there are some empty places .
but we are also investing around another 300 million dollars this year to extend that coverage .
now , about that cow model i talked about .
there are about 115,000 people who are retailing telephone services in their neighborhoods .
and it 's serving 52,000 villages , which represent about 80 million people .
and these phones are generating about 100 million dollars for the company .
and two dollars profit per entrepreneur per day , which is like 700 dollars per year .
and of course , it 's very beneficial in a lot of ways .
it increases income , improves welfare , etc .
and the result is , right now , this company is the largest telephone company , with 3.5 million subscribers , 115,000 of these phones i talked about - that produces about a third of the traffic in the network .
and 2004 , the net profit , after taxes - very serious taxes - was 120 million dollars .
and the company contributed about 190 million dollars to the government coffers .
and again , here are some of the lessons .
" the government needs to provide economically viable services . "
actually , this is an instance where private companies can provide that .
" governments need to subsidize private companies . "
this is what some people think .
and actually , private companies help governments with taxes .
" poor people are recipients . "
poor people are a resource .
" services cost too much for the poor . "
their involvement reduces the cost .
" the poor are uneducated and can not do much . "
they are very eager learners and very capable survivors .
i 've been very surprised .
most of them learn how to operate a telephone within a day .
" poor countries need aid . "
businesses - this one company has raised the - if the ideal figures are even five percent true , this one company is raising the gnp of the country much more than the aid the country receives .
and as i was trying to show you , as far as i 'm concerned , aid does damages because it removes the government from its citizens .
and this is a new project i have with dean kamen , the famous inventor in america .
he has produced some power generators , which we are now doing an experiment in bangladesh , in two villages where cow manure is producing biogas , which is running these generators .
and each of these generators is selling electricity to 20 houses each .
it 's just an experiment .
we do n't know how far it will go , but it 's going on .
thank you .
well , as chris pointed out , i study the human brain , the functions and structure of the human brain .
and i just want you to think for a minute about what this entails .
here is this mass of jelly , three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand , and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space .
it can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity .
and this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness , which i think is the holy grail of neuroscience , of neurology , and hopefully , someday , we 'll understand how that happens .
ok , so how do you study this mysterious organ ?
i mean , you have 100 billion nerve cells , little wisps of protoplasm , interacting with each other , and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness .
how does this happen ?
well , there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain .
one approach , the one we use mainly , is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain , where there 's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain .
what then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities , a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability .
what you get is a highly selective loss of one function , with other functions being preserved intact , and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function .
so you can then map function onto structure , and then find out what the circuitry 's doing to generate that particular function .
so that 's what we 're trying to do .
so let me give you a few striking examples of this .
in fact , i 'm giving you three examples , six minutes each , during this talk .
the first example is an extraordinary syndrome called capgras syndrome .
if you look at the first slide there , that 's the temporal lobes , frontal lobes , parietal lobes , ok - the lobes that constitute the brain .
and if you look , tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes - you ca n't see it there - is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus .
and that 's been called the face area in the brain , because when it 's damaged , you can no longer recognize people 's faces .
you can still recognize them from their voice and say , " oh yeah , that 's joe , " but you ca n't look at their face and know who it is , right ?
you ca n't even recognize yourself in the mirror .
i mean , you know it 's you because you wink and it winks , and you know it 's a mirror , but you do n't really recognize yourself as yourself .
ok . now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus .
but there 's another rare syndrome , so rare , in fact , that very few physicians have heard about it , not even neurologists .
this is called the capgras delusion , and that is a patient , who 's otherwise completely normal , has had a head injury , comes out of coma , otherwise completely normal , he looks at his mother and says , " this looks exactly like my mother , this woman , but she 's an impostor .
she 's some other woman pretending to be my mother . "
now , why does this happen ?
why would somebody - and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects , but when he sees his mother , his delusion kicks in and says , it 's not mother .
now , the most common interpretation of this , which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks , is a freudian view , and that is that this chap - and the same argument applies to women , by the way , but i 'll just talk about guys .
when you 're a little baby , a young baby , you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother .
this is the so-called oedipus complex of freud .
i 'm not saying i believe this , but this is the standard freudian view .
and then , as you grow up , the cortex develops , and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother .
thank god , or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother .
and then what happens is , there 's a blow to your head , damaging the cortex , allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge , flaming to the surface , and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother .
and you say , " my god , if this is my mom , how come i 'm being sexually turned on ?
she 's some other woman . she 's an impostor . "
it 's the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain .
this has never made much sense to me , this argument .
it 's very ingenious , as all freudian arguments are - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - but did n't make much sense because i have seen the same delusion , a patient having the same delusion , about his pet poodle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he 'll say , " doctor , this is not fifi . it looks exactly like fifi , but it 's some other dog . " right ?
now , you try using the freudian explanation there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 'll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans , or some such thing , which is quite absurd , of course .
now , what 's really going on ?
so , to explain this curious disorder , we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain .
normally , visual signals come in , into the eyeballs , go to the visual areas in the brain .
there are , in fact , 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision , and after processing all that , the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus , where you perceive faces .
there are neurons there that are sensitive to faces .
you can call it the face area of the brain , right ?
i talked about that earlier .
now , when that area 's damaged , you lose the ability to see faces , right ?
but from that area , the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system , the emotional core of the brain , and that structure , called the amygdala , gauges the emotional significance of what you 're looking at .
is it prey ? is it predator ? is it mate ?
or is it something absolutely trivial , like a piece of lint , or a piece of chalk , or a - i do n't want to point to that , but - or a shoe , or something like that ? ok ?
which you can completely ignore .
so if the amygdala is excited , and this is something important , the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system .
your heart starts beating faster .
you start sweating to dissipate the heat that you 're going to create from muscular exertion .
and that 's fortunate , because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating .
so i can determine , when you 're looking at something , whether you 're excited or whether you 're aroused , or not , ok ?
and i 'll get to that in a minute .
so my idea was , when this chap looks at an object , when he looks at his - any object for that matter , it goes to the visual areas and , however , and it 's processed in the fusiform gyrus , and you recognize it as a pea plant , or a table , or your mother , for that matter , ok ?
and then the message cascades into the amygdala , and then goes down the autonomic nervous system .
but maybe , in this chap , that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system , the emotional core of the brain , is cut by the accident .
so because the fusiform is intact , the chap can still recognize his mother , and says , " oh yeah , this looks like my mother . "
but because the wire is cut to the emotional centers , he says , " but how come , if it 's my mother , i do n't experience a warmth ? "
or terror , as the case may be ? right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and therefore , he says , " how do i account for this inexplicable lack of emotions ?
this ca n't be my mother .
it 's some strange woman pretending to be my mother . "
how do you test this ?
well , what you do is , if you take any one of you here , and put you in front of a screen , and measure your galvanic skin response , and show pictures on the screen , i can measure how you sweat when you see an object , like a table or an umbrella . of course , you do n't sweat .
if i show you a picture of a lion , or a tiger , or a pinup , you start sweating , right ?
and , believe it or not , if i show you a picture of your mother - i 'm talking about normal people - you start sweating .
you do n't even have to be jewish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , what happens if you show this patient ?
you take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response .
tables and chairs and lint , nothing happens , as in normal people , but when you show him a picture of his mother , the galvanic skin response is flat .
there 's no emotional reaction to his mother , because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut .
so his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal , his emotions are normal - he 'll laugh , he 'll cry , so on and so forth - but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor .
it 's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do : take a bizarre , seemingly incomprehensible , neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard freudian view is wrong , that , in fact , you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain .
by the way , if this patient then goes , and mother phones from an adjacent room - phones him - and he picks up the phone , and he says , " wow , mom , how are you ? where are you ? "
there 's no delusion through the phone .
then , she approaches him after an hour , he says , " who are you ?
you look just like my mother . " ok ?
the reason is there 's a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers , and that 's not been cut by the accident .
so this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother , no problem .
when he sees her in person , he says it 's an impostor .
ok , how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain ?
is it nature , genes , or is it nurture ?
and we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb .
and you all know what a phantom limb is .
when an arm is amputated , or a leg is amputated , for gangrene , or you lose it in war - for example , in the iraq war , it 's now a serious problem - you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm , and that 's called a phantom arm or a phantom leg .
in fact , you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body .
believe it or not , even with internal viscera .
i 've had patients with the uterus removed - hysterectomy - who have a phantom uterus , including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month .
and in fact , one student asked me the other day , " do they get phantom pms ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a subject ripe for scientific enquiry , but we have n't pursued that .
ok , now the next question is , what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments ?
one of the things we 've found was , about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom .
it 'll pat his brother on the shoulder , it 'll answer the phone when it rings , it 'll wave goodbye .
these are very compelling , vivid sensations .
the patient 's not delusional .
he knows that the arm is not there , but , nevertheless , it 's a compelling sensory experience for the patient .
but however , about half the patients , this does n't happen .
the phantom limb - they 'll say , " but doctor , the phantom limb is paralyzed .
it 's fixed in a clenched spasm and it 's excruciatingly painful .
if only i could move it , maybe the pain will be relieved . "
now , why would a phantom limb be paralyzed ?
it sounds like an oxymoron .
but when we were looking at the case sheets , what we found was , these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs , the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury .
the actual nerve supplying the arm was severed , was cut , by say , a motorcycle accident .
so the patient had an actual arm , which is painful , in a sling for a few months or a year , and then , in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm , the surgeon amputates the arm , and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains , right ?
and this is a serious clinical problem .
patients become depressed .
some of them are driven to suicide , ok ?
so , how do you treat this syndrome ?
now , why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb ?
when i looked at the case sheet , i found that they had an actual arm , and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut , and the actual arm had been paralyzed , and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation , and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself .
why does this happen ?
when the arm was intact , but paralyzed , the brain sends commands to the arm , the front of the brain , saying , " move , " but it 's getting visual feedback saying , " no . "
move . no . move . no . move . no .
and this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain , and we call this learned paralysis , ok ?
the brain learns , because of this hebbian , associative link , that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm .
and then , when you 've amputated the arm , this learned paralysis carries over into your body image and into your phantom , ok ?
now , how do you help these patients ?
how do you unlearn the learned paralysis , so you can relieve him of this excruciating , clenching spasm of the phantom arm ?
well , we said , what if you now send the command to the phantom , but give him visual feedback that it 's obeying his command , right ?
maybe you can relieve the phantom pain , the phantom cramp .
how do you do that ? well , virtual reality .
but that costs millions of dollars .
so , i hit on a way of doing this for three dollars , but do n't tell my funding agencies .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok ? what you do is you create what i call a mirror box .
you have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle , and then you put the phantom - so my first patient , derek , came in .
he had his arm amputated 10 years ago .
he had a brachial avulsion , so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed , lying in a sling for a year , and then the arm was amputated .
he had a phantom arm , excruciatingly painful , and he could n't move it .
it was a paralyzed phantom arm .
so he came there , and i gave him a mirror like that , in a box , which i call a mirror box , right ?
and the patient puts his phantom left arm , which is clenched and in spasm , on the left side of the mirror , and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror , and makes the same posture , the clenched posture , and looks inside the mirror . and what does he experience ?
he looks at the phantom being resurrected , because he 's looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror , and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected .
" now , " i said , " now , look , wiggle your phantom - your real fingers , or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror . "
he 's going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving , right ?
that 's obvious , but the astonishing thing is , the patient then says , " oh my god , my phantom is moving again , and the pain , the clenching spasm , is relieved . "
and remember , my first patient who came in - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- my first patient came in , and he looked in the mirror , and i said , " look at your reflection of your phantom . "
and he started giggling , he says , " i can see my phantom . "
but he 's not stupid . he knows it 's not real .
he knows it 's a mirror reflection , but it 's a vivid sensory experience .
now , i said , " move your normal hand and phantom . "
he said , " oh , i ca n't move my phantom . you know that . it 's painful . "
i said , " move your normal hand . "
and he says , " oh my god , my phantom is moving again . i do n't believe this !
and my pain is being relieved . " ok ?
and then i said , " close your eyes . "
he closes his eyes .
" and move your normal hand . "
" oh , nothing . it 's clenched again . "
" ok , open your eyes . "
" oh my god , oh my god , it 's moving again ! "
so , he was like a kid in a candy store .
so , i said , ok , this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input , but i 'm not going to get a nobel prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a completely useless ability , if you think about it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then i started realizing , maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology , like stroke , focal dystonias - there may be a learned component to this , which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror .
so , i said , " look , derek " - well , first of all , the guy ca n't just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain - i said , " look , derek , take it home and practice with it for a week or two .
maybe , after a period of practice , you can dispense with the mirror , unlearn the paralysis , and start moving your paralyzed arm , and then , relieve yourself of pain . "
so he said ok , and he took it home .
i said , " look , it 's , after all , two dollars . take it home . "
so , he took it home , and after two weeks , he phones me , and he said , " doctor , you 're not going to believe this . "
i said , " what ? "
he said , " it 's gone . "
i said , " what 's gone ? "
i thought maybe the mirror box was gone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " no , no , no , you know this phantom i 've had for the last 10 years ?
it 's disappeared . "
and i said - i got worried , i said , my god , i mean i 've changed this guy 's body image , what about human subjects , ethics and all of that ?
and i said , " derek , does this bother you ? "
he said , " no , last three days , i 've not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain , no clenching , no phantom forearm pain , all those pains are gone away .
but the problem is i still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder , and your box does n't reach . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " so , can you change the design and put it on my forehead , so i can , you know , do this and eliminate my phantom fingers ? "
he thought i was some kind of magician .
now , why does this happen ?
it 's because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict .
it 's getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back .
on the other hand , there 's no proprioception , muscle signals saying that there is no arm , right ?
and your motor command saying there is an arm , and , because of this conflict , the brain says , to hell with it , there is no phantom , there is no arm , right ?
it goes into a sort of denial - it gates the signals .
and when the arm disappears , the bonus is , the pain disappears because you ca n't have disembodied pain floating out there , in space .
so , that 's the bonus .
now , this technique has been tried on dozens of patients by other groups in helsinki , so it may prove to be valuable as a treatment for phantom pain , and indeed , people have tried it for stroke rehabilitation .
stroke you normally think of as damage to the fibers , nothing you can do about it .
but , it turns out some component of stroke paralysis is also learned paralysis , and maybe that component can be overcome using mirrors .
this has also gone through clinical trials , helping lots and lots of patients .
ok , let me switch gears now to the third part of my talk , which is about another curious phenomenon called synesthesia .
this was discovered by francis galton in the nineteenth century .
he was a cousin of charles darwin .
he pointed out that certain people in the population , who are otherwise completely normal , had the following peculiarity : every time they see a number , it 's colored .
five is blue , seven is yellow , eight is chartreuse , nine is indigo , ok ?
bear in mind , these people are completely normal in other respects .
or c sharp - sometimes , tones evoke color .
c sharp is blue , f sharp is green , another tone might be yellow , right ?
why does this happen ?
this is called synesthesia . galton called it synesthesia , a mingling of the senses .
in us , all the senses are distinct .
these people muddle up their senses .
why does this happen ?
one of the two aspects of this problem are very intriguing .
synesthesia runs in families , so galton said this is a hereditary basis , a genetic basis .
secondly , synesthesia is about - and this is what gets me to my point about the main theme of this lecture , which is about creativity - synesthesia is eight times more common among artists , poets , novelists and other creative people than in the general population .
why would that be ?
i 'm going to answer that question .
it 's never been answered before .
ok , what is synesthesia ? what causes it ?
well , there are many theories .
one theory is they 're just crazy .
now , that 's not really a scientific theory , so we can forget about it .
another theory is they are acid junkies and potheads , right ?
now , there may be some truth to this , because it 's much more common here in the bay area than in san diego .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . now , the third theory is that - well , let 's ask ourselves what 's really going on in synesthesia . all right ?
so , we found that the color area and the number area are right next to each other in the brain , in the fusiform gyrus .
so we said , there 's some accidental cross wiring between color and numbers in the brain .
so , every time you see a number , you see a corresponding color , and that 's why you get synesthesia .
now remember - why does this happen ?
why would there be crossed wires in some people ?
remember i said it runs in families ?
that gives you the clue .
and that is , there is an abnormal gene , a mutation in the gene that causes this abnormal cross wiring .
in all of us , it turns out we are born with everything wired to everything else .
so , every brain region is wired to every other region , and these are trimmed down to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain .
so , if there 's a gene causing this trimming and if that gene mutates , then you get deficient trimming between adjacent brain areas .
and if it 's between number and color , you get number-color synesthesia .
if it 's between tone and color , you get tone-color synesthesia .
so far , so good .
now , what if this gene is expressed everywhere in the brain , so everything is cross-connected ?
well , think about what artists , novelists and poets have in common , the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking , linking seemingly unrelated ideas , such as , " it is the east , and juliet is the sun . "
well , you do n't say , juliet is the sun , does that mean she 's a glowing ball of fire ?
i mean , schizophrenics do that , but it 's a different story , right ?
normal people say , she 's warm like the sun , she 's radiant like the sun , she 's nurturing like the sun .
instantly , you 've found the links .
now , if you assume that this greater cross wiring and concepts are also in different parts of the brain , then it 's going to create a greater propensity towards metaphorical thinking and creativity in people with synesthesia .
and , hence , the eight times more common incidence of synesthesia among poets , artists and novelists .
ok , it 's a very phrenological view of synesthesia .
the last demonstration - can i take one minute ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- ok . i 'm going to show you that you 're all synesthetes , but you 're in denial about it .
here 's what i call martian alphabet . just like your alphabet , a is a , b is b , c is c.
different shapes for different phonemes , right ?
here , you 've got martian alphabet .
one of them is kiki , one of them is buba .
which one is kiki and which one is buba ?
how many of you think that 's kiki and that 's buba ? raise your hands .
well , it 's one or two mutants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how many of you think that 's buba , that 's kiki ? raise your hands .
ninety-nine percent of you .
now , none of you is a martian . how did you do that ?
it 's because you 're all doing a cross-model synesthetic abstraction , meaning you 're saying that that sharp inflection - ki-ki , in your auditory cortex , the hair cells being excited - kiki , mimics the visual inflection , sudden inflection of that jagged shape .
now , this is very important , because what it 's telling you is your brain is engaging in a primitive - it 's just - it looks like a silly illusion , but these photons in your eye are doing this shape , and hair cells in your ear are exciting the auditory pattern , but the brain is able to extract the common denominator .
it 's a primitive form of abstraction , and we now know this happens in the fusiform gyrus of the brain , because when that 's damaged , these people lose the ability to engage in buba kiki , but they also lose the ability to engage in metaphor .
if you ask this guy , what - " all that glitters is not gold , " the patient says , " well , if it 's metallic and shiny , it does n't mean it 's gold .
you have to measure its specific gravity , ok ? "
so , they completely miss the metaphorical meaning .
so , this area is about eight times the size in higher - especially in humans - as in lower primates .
something very interesting is going on here in the angular gyrus , because it 's the crossroads between hearing , vision and touch , and it became enormous in humans . and something very interesting is going on .
and i think it 's a basis of many uniquely human abilities like abstraction , metaphor and creativity .
all of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia , we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging , and by studying patients and asking the right questions .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sorry about that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , first of all , let me thank emeka - as a matter of fact , ted global - for putting this conference together .
this conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century .
think african governments will put together a conference like this ?
you think the a.u. will put together a conference like this ?
even before they do that they will ask for foreign aid .
i would also like to pay homage and honor to the ted fellows june arunga , james shikwati , andrew , and the other ted fellows .
i call them the cheetah generation .
the cheetah generation is a new breed of africans who brook no nonsense about corruption .
they understand what accountability and democracy is .
they 're not going to wait for government to do things for them .
that 's the cheetah generation , and africa 's salvation rests on the backs of these cheetahs .
in contrast , of course , we have the hippo generation .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the hippo generation are the ruling elites .
they are stuck in their intellectual patch .
complaining about colonialism and imperialism , they would n't move one foot .
if you ask them to reform the economies , they 're not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo .
now , there are a lot of africans who are very angry , angry at the condition of africa .
now , we 're talking about a continent that is not poor .
it is rich in mineral resources , natural mineral resources .
but the mineral wealth of africa is not being utilized to lift its people out of poverty .
that 's what makes a lot of africans very angry .
and in a way , africa is more than a tragedy , in more ways than one .
there 's another enduring tragedy , and that tragedy is that there are so many people , so many governments , so many organizations who want to help the people in africa .
they do n't understand .
now , we 're not saying do n't help africa .
helping africa is noble .
but helping africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd .
it 's like the blind leading the clueless .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are certain things that we need to recognize .
africa 's begging-bowl leaks .
did you know that 40 percent of the wealth created in africa is not invested here in africa ?
it 's taken out of africa .
that 's what the world bank says .
look at africa 's begging-bowl .
it leaks horribly .
there are people who think that we should pour more money , more aid into this bowl which leaks .
what are the leakages ?
corruption alone costs africa 148 billion dollars a year .
yes , put that aside .
capital flight out of africa , 80 billion a year .
put that aside .
let 's take food imports .
every year africa spends 20 billion dollars to import food .
just add that up , all these leakages .
that 's far more than the 50 billion tony blair wants to raise for africa .
now , back in the 1960s africa not only fed itself , it also exported food .
not anymore .
we know that something has gone fundamentally wrong .
you know it , i know it , but let 's not waste our time talking about these mistakes because we 'll spend all day here .
let 's move on , and flip over to the next chapter , and that 's what this conference is all about - the next chapter .
the next chapter begins with first of all , asking ourselves this fundamental question , " whom do we want to help in africa ? "
there is the people , and then there is the government or leaders .
now , the previous speaker before me , idris mohammed , indicated that we 've had abysmal leadership in africa .
that characterization , in my view , is even more charitable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i belong to an internet discussion forum , an african internet discussion forum , and i asked them , i said , " since 1960 , we 've had exactly 204 african heads of state , since 1960 . "
and i asked them to name me just 20 good leaders , just 20 good leaders - you may want to take this leadership challenge yourself .
i asked them to name me just 20 .
everybody mentioned nelson mandela , of course .
kwame nkrumah , nyerere , kenyatta - somebody mentioned idi amin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i let that pass .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my point is , they could n't go beyond 15 .
even if they had been able to name me 20 , what does that tell you ?
20 out of 204 means that the vast majority of the african leaders failed their people .
and if you look at them , the slate of the post-colonial leaders - an assortment of military fufu heads , swiss-bank socialists , crocodile liberators , vampire elites , quack revolutionaries .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that africans have known for centuries .
the second false premise that we make when we 're trying to help africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in africa that cares about its people , serves the interests of the people , and represents the people .
there is one particular quote - a lesotho chief once said that " here in lesotho , we 've got two problems : rats and the government . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what you and i understand as a government does n't exist in many african countries .
in fact , what we call our governments are vampire states .
vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people .
government is the problem in africa .
a vampire state is the government - -lrb- applause -rrb- - which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves , their cronies , and tribesmen and exclude everybody else .
the richest people in africa are heads-of-state and ministers , and quite often the chief bandit is the head-of-state himself .
where do they get their money ?
by creating wealth ?
no .
by raking it off the backs of their suffering people .
that 's not wealth creation . it 's wealth redistribution .
the third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the african people , we must know where the african people are .
take any african economy .
an african economy can be broken up into three sectors .
there is the modern sector , there is the informal sector and the traditional sector .
the modern sector is the abode of the elites .
it 's the seat of government .
in many african countries the modern sector is lost .
it 's dysfunctional .
it is a meretricious fandango of imported systems , which the elites themselves do n't understand .
that is the source of many of africa 's problems where the struggles for political power emanate and then spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector , claiming innocent lives .
now the modern sector , of course , is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into .
more than 80 percent of ivory coast 's development went into the modern sector .
the other sectors , the informal and the traditional sectors , are where you find the majority of the african people , the real people in africa . that 's where you find them .
now , obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people , you go where the people are .
but that 's not what we did .
as a matter of fact , we neglected the informal and the traditional sectors .
now , traditional sector is where africa produces its agriculture , which is one of the reasons why africa ca n't feed itself , and that 's why it must import food .
all right , you can not develop africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors .
and you ca n't develop the informal and the traditional sectors without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work .
these two sectors , let me describe to you , have their own indigenous institutions .
first one is the political system .
traditionally , africans hate governments . they hate tyranny .
if you look into their traditional systems , africans organize their states in two types .
the first one belongs to those ethnic societies who believe that the state was necessarily tyrannous , so they did n't want to have anything to do with any centralized authority .
these societies are the ibo , the somali , the kikuyus , for example . they have no chiefs .
the other ethnic groups , which did have chiefs , made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power .
in ashanti tradition , for example , the chief can not make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders .
without the council the chief ca n't pass any law , and if the chief does n't govern according to the will of the people he will be removed .
if not , the people will abandon the chief , go somewhere else and set up a new settlement .
and even if you look in ancient african empires , they were all organized around one particular principle - the confederacy principle , which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority , decentralization of power .
now , this is what i have described to you .
this is part of africa 's indigenous political heritage .
now , compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established on africa .
it is a total far cry .
in the economic system in traditional africa , the means of production is privately owned .
it 's owned by extended families .
you see , in the west , the basic economic and social unit is the individual .
the american will say , " i am because i am , and i can damn well do anything i want , anytime . "
the accent is on the " i. "
in africa , the africans say , " i am , because we are . "
the " we " connotes community - the extended family system .
the extended family system pools its resources together .
they own farms . they decide what to do , what to produce .
they do n't take any orders from their chiefs .
they decide what to do .
and when they produce their crops , they sell the surplus on marketplaces .
when they make a profit it is theirs to keep , not for the chief to sequester it from them .
so , in a nutshell , what we had in traditional africa was a free-market system .
there were markets in africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent .
timbuktu was one great big market town .
kano , salaga - they were all there .
even if you go to west africa , you notice that market activity in west africa has always been dominated by women .
so , it 's quite appropriate that this section is called a marketplace .
the market is not alien to africa .
what africans practiced was a different form of capitalism , but then after independence , all of a sudden , markets , capitalism became a western institution , and the leaders said africans were ready for socialism .
nonsense .
and even then , what kind of socialism did they practice ?
the socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of swiss-bank socialism , which allowed the heads of states and the ministers to rape and plunder africa 's treasuries for deposit in switzerland .
that is not the kind of system africans had known for centuries .
what do we do now ?
go back to africa 's indigenous institutions , and this is where we charge the cheetahs to go into the informal sectors , the traditional sectors .
that 's where you find the african people .
and i 'd like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector , about the boat-building that i , myself , tried to mobilize africans in the diaspora to invest in .
could you please show that ?
the men are going fishing in these small boats .
yes , it 's an enterprise .
this is by a local ghanaian entrepreneur , using his own capital .
he 's getting no assistance from the government , and he 's building a second , bigger boat .
a bigger boat will mean more fish will be caught and landed .
it means that he will be able to employ more ghanaians .
it also means that he will be able to generate wealth .
and then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy .
all that you need to do , all that the elites need to do , is to move this operation into something that is enclosed so that the operation can be made more efficient .
now , it is not just this informal sector .
there is also traditional medicine .
80 percent of africans still rely on traditional medicine .
the modern healthcare sector has totally collapsed .
now , this is an area - i mean , there is a treasure trove of wealth in the traditional medicine area .
this is where we need to mobilize africans , in the diaspora especially , to invest in this .
we also need to mobilize africans in the diaspora , not only to go into the traditional sectors , but to go into agriculture and also to instigate change from within .
we were able to mobilize ghanaians in the diaspora to instigate change in ghana and bring about democracy in ghana .
and i know that with the cheetahs , we can take africa back one village at a time .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ♪ you with the sad eyes ♪ ♪ do n't be discouraged ♪ ♪ oh , i realize ♪ ♪ it 's hard to take courage ♪ ♪ in a world full of people ♪ ♪ you can lose sight of it all ♪ ♪ and the darkness inside you ♪ ♪ can make you feel so small ♪ ♪ but i see your true colors ♪ ♪ shining through ♪ ♪ i see your true colors ♪ ♪ and that 's why i love you ♪ ♪ so do n't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ your true colors ♪ ♪ true colors are beautiful ♪
♪ like a rainbow ♪ ♪ show me a smile , then ♪ ♪ do n't be unhappy ♪ ♪ ca n't remember when ♪ ♪ i last saw you laughing ♪ ♪ if this world makes you crazy ♪ ♪ and you 've taken all you can bear ♪ ♪ you can call me up ♪ ♪ because you know i 'll be there ♪ ♪ and i 'll see your true colors ♪ ♪ shining through ♪ ♪ i see your true colors ♪ ♪ and that 's why i love you ♪ ♪ so do n't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ your true colors ♪
♪ true colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ like a rainbow ♪ ♪ if this world makes you crazy ♪ ♪ and you 've taken all you can bear ♪ ♪ you can call me up ♪ ♪ because you know i 'll be there ♪ ♪ and i 'll see your true colors ♪ ♪ shining through ♪ ♪ i see your true colors ♪ ♪ and that 's why i love you ♪ ♪ so do n't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ your true colors ♪ ♪ true colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ like a rainbow ♪ ♪ so do n't be afraid to let them show ♪
♪ true colors ♪ ♪ true colors ♪ ♪ true colors ♪ ♪ true colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ like a rainbow ♪ -lrb- applause -rrb- i would be willing to bet that i 'm the dumbest guy in the room because i could n't get through school . i struggled with school .
but what i knew at a very early age was that i loved money and i loved business and i loved this entrepreneurial thing , and i was raised to be an entrepreneur , and what i 've been really passionate about ever since - and i 've never spoken about this ever , until now - so this is the first time anyone 's ever heard it , except my wife three days ago , because she said , " what are you talking about ? " and i told her - is that i think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits , and to groom them or show them
that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing .
it 's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified , which is what happens in a lot of society .
kids , when we grow up , have dreams , and we have passions , and we have visions , and somehow we get those things crushed .
we get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor .
my parents got me a tutor in french , and i still suck in french .
two years ago , i was the highest-rated lecturer at mit 's entrepreneurial master 's program .
and it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world .
when i was in grade two , i won a city-wide speaking competition , but nobody had ever said , " hey , this kid 's a good speaker .
he ca n't focus , but he loves walking around and getting people energized . "
no one said , " get him a coach in speaking . "
they said , get me a tutor in what i suck at .
so as kids show these traits - and we need to start looking for them - i think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers .
unfortunately the school system is grooming this world to say , " hey , let 's be a lawyer or let 's be a doctor , " and we 're missing that opportunity because no one ever says , " hey , be an entrepreneur . "
entrepreneurs are people - because we have a lot of them in this room - who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world and we decide to stand up and do it .
and we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen .
we have the ability to get those groups of people around us that want to kind of build that dream with us , and i think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial , we could change everything in the world that is a problem today .
every problem that 's out there , somebody has the idea for .
and as a young kid , nobody can say it ca n't happen because you 're too dumb to realize that you could n't figure it out .
i think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish - the old parable : " if you give a man a fish , you feed him for a day .
if you teach a man to fish , you feed him for a lifetime . "
if we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial - the ones that show those traits to be - like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science , what if we saw the ones who had entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs ?
we could actually have all these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts .
what we do is we sit and teach our kids all the things they should n't do : do n't hit ; do n't bite ; do n't swear .
right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs , you know , and the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot .
and the media says that it 's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like luongo , crosby .
our mba programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs .
the reason that i avoided an mba program - other than the fact that i could n't get into any because i had a 61 percent average out of high school and then 61 percent average at the only school in canada that accepted me , carlton - but our mba programs do n't teach kids to be entrepreneurs .
they teach them to go work in corporations .
so who 's starting these companies ? it 's these random few people .
even in popular literature , the only book i 've ever found - and this should be on all of your reading lists - the only book i 've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is " atlas shrugged . "
everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we 're bad people .
i look at even my family .
both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs . my dad was an entrepreneur .
both my brother and sister and i , all three of us own companies as well .
and we all decided to start these things because it 's really the only place we fit .
we did n't fit in the normal work . we could n't work for somebody else because we 're too stubborn and we have all these other traits .
but kids could be entrepreneurs as well .
i 'm a big part of a couple organizations globally called the entrepreneurs ' organization and the young presidents ' organization .
i just came back from speaking in barcelona at the ypo global conference , and everyone that i met over there who 's an entrepreneur struggled with school .
i have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed .
so this thing right here is freaking me out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's probably why i 'm a little bit panicked right now - other than all the caffeine that i 've had and the sugar - but this is really creepy for an entrepreneur .
attention deficit disorder , bipolar disorder .
do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the ceo disease ?
ted turner 's got it . steve jobs has it .
all three of the founders of netscape had it .
i could go on and on .
kids - you can see these signs in kids .
and what we 're doing is we 're giving them ritalin and saying , " do n't be an entrepreneurial type .
fit into this other system and try to become a student . "
sorry , entrepreneurs are n't students .
we fast-track . we figure out the game .
i stole essays . i cheated on exams .
i hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments .
but as an entrepreneur you do n't do accounting , you hire accountants .
so i just figured that out earlier .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- at least i can admit i cheated in university ; most of you wo n't .
i 'm also quoted - and i told the person who wrote the textbook - i 'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every canadian university and college studies .
in managerial accounting , i 'm chapter eight .
i open up chapter eight talking about budgeting .
and i told the author , after they did my interview , that i cheated in that same course .
and she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway .
but kids , you can see these signs in them .
the definition of an entrepreneur is " a person who organizes , operates and assumes the risk of a business venture . "
that does n't mean you have to go to an mba program .
it does n't mean you have to get through school .
it just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut .
and we 've heard those things about " is it nurture or is it nature , " right ?
is it thing one or thing two ? what is it ?
well , i do n't think it 's either . i think it can be both .
i was groomed as an entrepreneur .
when i was growing up as a young kid , i had no choice , because i was taught at a very early , young age - when my dad realized i was n't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school - that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age .
he groomed us , the three of us , to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people .
my first little business venture : i was seven years old , i was in winnipeg , and i was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords .
and i was calling all the dry cleaners in winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers .
and my mom came into the room and she said , " where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners ? "
and i said , " let 's go and look in the basement . "
and we went down to the basement . and i opened up this cupboard .
and there was about a thousand coat hangers that i 'd collected .
because , when i told her i was going out to play with the kids , i was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in the basement to sell .
because i saw her a few weeks before that - you could get paid . they used to pay you two cents per coat hanger .
so i was just like , well there 's all kinds of coat hangers .
and so i 'll just go get them .
and i knew she would n't want me to go get them , so i just did it anyway .
and i learned that you could actually negotiate with people .
this one person offered me three cents and i got him up to three and a half .
i even knew at a seven-year-old age that i could actually get a fractional percent of a cent , and people would pay that because it multiplied up .
at seven years old i figured it out . i got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers .
i sold license plate protectors door to door .
my dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale .
and at nine years old , i walked around in the city of sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses .
and i remember this one customer so vividly because i also did some other stuff with these clients .
i sold newspapers .
and he would n't buy a newspaper from me ever .
but i was convinced i was going to get him to buy a license plate protector .
and he 's like , " well , we do n't need one . "
and i said , " but you 've got two cars ... " - i 'm nine years old .
i 'm like , " but you have two cars and they do n't have license plate protectors . "
and he said , " i know . "
and i said , " this car here 's got one license plate that 's all crumpled up . "
and he said , " yes , that 's my wife 's car . " and i said , " why do n't we just test one on the front of your wife 's car and see if it lasts longer . "
so i knew there were two cars with two license plates on each .
if i could n't sell all four , i could at least get one .
i learned that at a young age .
i did comic book arbitrage .
when i was about 10 years old , i sold comic books out of our cottage on georgian bay .
and i would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids .
and then i would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids .
but it was obvious to me , right ? buy low , sell high .
you 've got this demand over here that has money .
do n't try to sell to the poor kids ; they do n't have cash . the rich people do . go get some .
so that 's obvious , right .
it 's like a recession . so , there 's a recession .
there 's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the u.s. economy .
go get some of that . and i learned that at a young age .
i also learned , do n't reveal your source , because i got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where i was buying my comics from , and he did n't like the fact that he was paying a lot more .
i was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old .
i did n't really want a paper route , but at 10 , my dad said , " that 's going to be your next business . "
so not only would he get me one , but i had to get two , and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers , which i did , and then i realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money .
so i would collect the tips and get payment .
so i would go and collect for all the papers .
he could just deliver them .
because then i realized i could make the money .
by this point , i was definitely not going to be an employee .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop .
he had all these old automotive parts lying around .
they had this old brass and copper .
i asked him what he did with it , and he said he just throws it out .
i said , " but would n't somebody pay you for that ? " and he goes , " maybe . "
remember at 10 years old - so 34 years ago i saw opportunity in this stuff .
i saw there was money in garbage .
and i was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle .
and then my dad would drive me on saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where i got paid .
and i thought that was kind of cool .
strangely enough , 30 years later , we 're building 1-800-got-junk ?
and making money off that too .
i built these little pincushions when i was 11 years old in cubs , and we made these pin cushions for our moms for mother 's day .
and you made these pincushions out of wooden clothespins - when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside .
and you 'd make these chairs .
and i had these little pillows that i would sew up .
and you could stuff pins in them .
because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion .
but what i realized was that you had to have options .
so i actually spray painted a whole bunch of them brown .
and then when i went to the door , it was n't , " do you want to buy one ? "
it was , " which color would you like ? "
like i 'm 10 years old ; you 're not going to say no to me , especially if you have two options - you have the brown one or the clear one .
so i learned that lesson at a young age .
i learned that manual labor really sucks .
right , like cutting lawns is brutal .
but because i had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that , i realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing .
that if i land this client once , and every week i get paid by that person , that 's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person .
because you ca n't sell them more .
so i love that recurring revenue model i started to learn at a young age .
remember , i was being groomed to do this . i was not allowed to have jobs .
i would caddy , i would go to the golf course and caddy for people .
but i realized that there was this one hill on our golf course , the 13th hole that had this huge hill .
and people could never get their bags up it .
so i would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who did n't have caddies .
i would carry their golf bags up to the top , and they 'd pay me a dollar .
meanwhile , my friends were working for five hours to haul some guy 's bag around and get paid 10 bucks .
i 'm like , " that 's stupid because you have to work for five hours .
that does n't make any sense . " you just figure out a way to make more money faster .
every week , i would go to the corner store and buy all these pops .
then i would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge .
and they 'd give me their orders for the following week .
and then i 'd just deliver pop and i 'd just charge twice .
and i had this captured market . you did n't need contracts .
you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you .
these women were n't going to go to anybody else because they liked me , and i kind of figured it out .
i went and got golf balls from golf courses .
but everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls .
i 'm like , screw that . they 're all in the pond and nobody 's going into the pond .
so i would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes .
you just pick them up with both feet .
you ca n't do it on stage .
you get the golf balls , and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you 're done you 've got a couple hundred of them .
but the problem is that people all did n't want all the golf balls .
so i just packaged them . i 'm like 12 , right ?
i packaged them up three ways .
i had the pinnacles and ddhs and the really cool ones back then .
those sold for two dollars each .
and then i had all the good ones that did n't look crappy . they were 50 cents each .
and then i 'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones .
and they could use those for practice balls .
i sold sunglasses , when i was in school , to all the kids in high school .
this is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you 're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time .
but it paid the bills .
so i sold lots and lots of sunglasses .
then when the school shut me down - the school actually called me into the office and told me i could n't do it - so i went to the gas stations and i sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers .
that was cool because then i had retail outlets .
and i think i was 14 .
then i paid my entire way through first year university at carlton by selling wine skins door to door .
you know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin ? so what , right ?
yeah , but you know what ? you stuff that down your shorts , when you go into a football game you can get booze in for free , everybody bought them .
supply , demand , big opportunity .
i also branded it , so i sold them for five times the normal cost .
it had our university logo on it .
you know we teach our kids and we buy them games , but why do n't we get them games , if they 're entrepreneurial kids , that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs ?
why do n't you teach them not to waste money ?
i remember being told to walk out in the middle of a street in banff , alberta because i 'd thrown a penny out in the street , and my dad said , " go pick it up . "
he said , " i work too damn hard for my money . i 'm not going to see you ever waste a penny . "
and i remember that lesson to this day .
allowances teach kids the wrong habits .
allowances , by nature , are teaching kids to think about a job .
an entrepreneur does n't expect a regular paycheck .
allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck .
that 's wrong , for me , if you want to raise entrepreneurs .
what i do with my kids now - i 've got two , nine and seven - is i teach them to walk around the house and the yard , looking for stuff that needs to get done .
come to me and tell me what it is .
or i 'll come to them and say , " here 's what i need done . "
and then you know what we do ? we negotiate .
they go around looking for what it is .
but then we negotiate on what they 're going to get paid .
and then they do n't have a regular check , but they have more opportunities to find more stuff , and they learn the skill of negotiating , and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well .
you breed that kind of stuff . each of my kids has two piggy banks .
fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted , 50 percent goes in their house account , 50 percent goes in their toy account .
anything in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want .
the 50 percent that goes in their house account , every six months , goes to the bank .
they walk up with me . every year all the money in the bank goes to their broker .
both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stock broker already .
but i 'm teaching them to force that savings habit .
it drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying , " maybe i 'll start contributing to my rsp now . "
shit , you 've missed 25 years .
you can teach those habits to young kids when they do n't even feel the pain yet .
do n't read them bedtime stories every night .
maybe four nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week have them tell stories .
why do n't you sit down with kids and give them four items , a red shirt , a blue tie , a kangaroo and a laptop , and have them tell a story about those four things ?
my kids do that all the time .
it teaches them to sell ; it teaches them creativity ; it teaches them to think on their feet .
just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it .
get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk , even if it 's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and have speeches .
those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing .
show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like .
show them the grumpy employees .
when you see grumpy customer service , point that out to them .
say , " by the way , that guy 's a crappy employee . "
and say , " these ones are good ones . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service , show them what bad customer service looks like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have all these lessons in front of us , but we do n't take those opportunities ; we teach kids to go get a tutor .
imagine if you actually took all the kids ' junk that 's in the house right now , all the toys that they 've outgrown two years ago and said , " why do n't we start selling some of this on craigslist and kijiji ? "
and they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in .
they can come into your account or a sub account or whatever .
but teach them how to fix the price , guess the price , pull up the photos .
teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money .
then the money they get , 50 percent goes in their house account , 50 percent goes in their toy account .
my kids love this stuff .
some of the entrepreneurial traits that you 've got to nurture in kids : attainment , tenacity , leadership , introspection , interdependence , values .
all these traits you can find in young kids , and you can help nurture them .
look for that kind of stuff .
there 's two traits that i want you to also look out for that we do n't kind of get out of their system .
do n't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really , really freaking bad .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression , unless it is so clinically brutal , man .
bipolar disorder is nicknamed the ceo disease .
when steve jurvetson and jim clark and jim barksdale have all got it , and they built netscape - imagine if they were given ritalin .
we would n't have have that stuff , right ?
al gore really would have had to invented the internet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these skills are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else .
i 'm not saying do n't get kids to want to be lawyers .
but how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well ?
because there 's huge opportunities in that .
i want to close with a quick little video .
it 's a video that was done by one of the companies that i mentor .
these guys , grasshopper .
it 's about kids . it 's about entrepreneurship .
hopefully this inspires you to take what you 've heard from me and do something with it to change the world .
-lsb- kid ... " and you thought you could do anything ? " -rsb- -lsb- you still can . -rsb- -lsb- because a lot of what we consider impossible ... -rsb- -lsb- ... is easy to overcome -rsb- -lsb- because in case you have n't noticed , we live in a place where -rsb- -lsb- one individual can make a difference -rsb- -lsb- want proof ? -rsb- -lsb- just look at the people who built our country ; -rsb- -lsb- our parents , grandparents , our aunts , uncles ... -rsb- -lsb- they were immigrants , newcomers ready to make their mark -rsb- -lsb- maybe they came with very little -rsb- -lsb- or perhaps they did n't own anything except for ... -rsb- -lsb- ... a single brilliant idea -rsb- -lsb- these people were thinkers , doers ... -rsb- -lsb- ... innovators ... -rsb- -lsb- ... until they came up with the name ... -rsb-
-lsb- ... entrepreneurs ! -rsb- -lsb- they change the way we think about what is possible . -rsb- -lsb- they have a clear vision of how life can be better -rsb- -lsb- for all of us , even when times are tough . -rsb- -lsb- right now , it 's hard to see ... -rsb- -lsb- ... when our view is cluttered with obstacles . -rsb- -lsb- but turbulence creates opportunities -rsb- -lsb- for success , achievement , and pushes us ... -rsb- -lsb- to discover new ways of doing things -rsb- -lsb- so what opportunities will you go after and why ? -rsb- -lsb- if you 're an entrepreneur -rsb- -lsb- you know that risk is n't the reward . -rsb- -lsb- no . the rewards are driving innovation ... -rsb-
-lsb- ... changing people 's lives . creating jobs . -rsb- -lsb- fueling growth . -rsb- -lsb- and making a better world . -rsb- -lsb- entrepreneurs are everywhere . -rsb- -lsb- they run small businesses that support our economy , -rsb- -lsb- design tools to help you ... -rsb- -lsb- ... stay connected with friends , family and colleagues around the world . -rsb- -lsb- and they 're finding new ways of helping to solve society 's oldest problems . -rsb- -lsb- do you know an entrepreneur ? -rsb- -lsb- entrepreneurs can be anyone ... -rsb- -lsb- even ... you ! -rsb- -lsb- so seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted -rsb- -lsb- help heal the economy -rsb- -lsb- make a difference . -rsb- -lsb- take your business to new heights . -rsb-
-lsb- but most importantly , -rsb- -lsb- remember when you were a kid ... -rsb- -lsb- when everything was within you reach , -rsb- -lsb- and then say to yourself quietly , but with determination : -rsb- -lsb- " it still is . " -rsb- thank you very much for having me .
when i was considering a career in the art world , i took a course in london , and one of my supervisors was this irascible italian called pietro , who drank too much , smoked too much and swore much too much .
but he was a passionate teacher , and i remember one of our earlier classes with him , he was projecting images on the wall , asking us to think about them , and he put up an image of a painting .
it was a landscape with figures , semi-dressed , drinking wine . there was a nude woman in the lower foreground , and on the hillside in the back , there was a figure of the mythological god bacchus , and he said , " what is this ? "
and i - no one else did , so i put up my hand , and i said , " it 's a bacchanal by titian . "
he said , " it 's a what ? "
i thought maybe i 'd pronounced it wrong .
" it 's a bacchanal by titian . "
he said , " it 's a what ? "
i said , " it 's a bacchanal by titian . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " you boneless bookworm !
it 's a fucking orgy ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as i said , he swore too much .
there was an important lesson for me in that .
pietro was suspicious of formal art training , art history training , because he feared that it filled people up with jargon , and then they just classified things rather than looking at them , and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary , and he wanted us to use our eyes , and he was especially evangelical about this message , because he was losing his sight .
he wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects .
what is it ? how is it made ? why was it made ?
how is it used ?
and these were important lessons to me when i subsequently became a professional art historian .
my kind of eureka moment came a few years later , when i was studying the art of the courts of northern europe , and of course it was very much discussed in terms of the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture of the day .
but as i began to read historical documents and contemporary descriptions , i found there was a kind of a missing component , for everywhere i came across descriptions of tapestries .
tapestries were ubiquitous between the middle ages and , really , well into the 18th century , and it was pretty apparent why .
tapestries were portable . you could roll them up , send them ahead of you , and in the time it took to hang them up , you could transform a cold , dank interior into a richly colored setting .
tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be associated , or even themselves , and in addition to that , tapestries were hugely expensive .
they required scores of highly skilled weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials - the wools , the silks , even gold and silver thread .
so , all in all , in an age when the visual image of any kind was rare , tapestries were an incredibly potent form of propaganda .
well , i became a tapestry historian .
in due course , i ended up as a curator at the metropolitan museum , because i saw the met as one of the few places where i could organize really big exhibitions about the subject i cared so passionately about .
and in about 1997 , the then-director philippe de montebello gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition for 2002 . we normally have these very long lead-in times .
it was n't straightforward . it 's no longer a question of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car .
they have to be wound on huge rollers , shipped in oversized freighters .
some of them are so big we had , to get them into the museum , we had to take them up the great steps at the front .
we thought very hard about how to present this unknown subject to a modern audience : the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded ; the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread ; the labeling .
you know , we live in an age where we are so used to television images and photographs , a one-hit image . these were big , complex things , almost like cartoons with multiple narratives .
we had to draw our audience in , get them to slow down , to explore the objects .
there was a lot of skepticism . on the opening night , i overheard one of the senior members of staff saying , " this is going to be a bomb . "
but in reality , in the course of the coming weeks and months , hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show .
the exhibition was designed to be an experience , and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs .
so i want you to use your imaginations , thinking of these wall-high objects , some of them 10 meters wide , depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today , thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boars and deer , violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism .
i remember taking my son 's school class . he was eight at the time , and all the little boys , they kind of - you know , they were little boys , and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist .
and you can just imagine them .
but it brought it alive to them . i think they suddenly saw that these were n't just old faded tapestries .
these were images of the world in the past , and that it was the same for our audience .
and for me as a curator , i felt proud . i felt i 'd shifted the needle a little .
through this experience that could only be created in a museum , i 'd opened up the eyes of my audience - historians , artists , press , the general public - to the beauty of this lost medium .
a few years later , i was invited to be the director of the museum , and after i got over that - " who , me ? the tapestry geek ? i do n't wear a tie ! " - i realized the fact : i believe passionately in that curated museum experience .
we live in an age of ubiquitous information , and sort of " just add water " expertise , but there 's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative , what the curator does , the interpretation of a complex , esoteric subject , in a way that retains the integrity of the subject , that makes it - unpacks it for a general audience .
and that , to me , today , is now the challenge and the fun of my job , supporting the vision of my curators , whether it 's an exhibition of samurai swords , early byzantine artifacts , renaissance portraits , or the show we heard mentioned earlier , the mcqueen show , with which we enjoyed so much success last summer .
that was an interesting case .
in the late spring , early summer of 2010 , shortly after mcqueen 's suicide , our curator of costume , andrew bolton , came to see me , and said , " i 've been thinking of doing a show on mcqueen , and now is the moment . we have to , we have to do it fast . "
it was n't easy . mcqueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy , but andrew went to london and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence , and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows , which were works of performance art in their own right , and we proceeded to do something at the museum , i think , we 've never done before .
it was n't just your standard installation .
in fact , we ripped down the galleries to recreate entirely different settings , a recreation of his first studio , a hall of mirrors , a curiosity box , a sunken ship , a burned-out interior , with videos and soundtracks that ranged from operatic arias to pigs fornicating .
and in this extraordinary setting , the costumes were like actors and actresses , or living sculptures .
it could have been a train wreck .
it could have looked like shop windows on fifth avenue at christmas , but because of the way that andrew connected with the mcqueen team , he was channeling the rawness and the brilliance of mcqueen , and the show was quite transcendant , and it became a phenomenon in its own right .
by the end of the show , we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show , but no one really complained .
i heard over and over again , " wow , that was worth it .
it was a such a visceral , emotive experience . "
now , i 've described two very immersive exhibitions , but i also believe that collections , individual objects , can also have that same power .
the met was set up not as a museum of american art , but of an encyclopedic museum , and today , 140 years later , that vision is as prescient as ever , because , of course , we live in a world of crisis , of challenge , and we 're exposed to it through the 24/7 newsreels .
it 's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations , the cultures , that we 're seeing the current manifestation of .
whether it 's libya , egypt , syria , it 's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding .
i mean , our new islamic galleries are a case in point , opened 10 years , almost to the week , after 9/11 .
i think for most americans , knowledge of the islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11 , and then it was thrust upon us in one of america 's darkest hours , and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event .
now , in our galleries , we show 14 centuries of the development of different islamic cultures across a vast geographic spread , and , again , hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last october .
i 'm often asked , " is digital media replacing the museum ? "
and i think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion . i mean , do n't get me wrong , i 'm a huge advocate of the web .
it gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe , but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship .
bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time , across space , whose lives may have been very different to our own , but who , like us , had hopes and dreams , frustrations and achievements in their lives . and i think this is a process that helps us better understand ourselves , helps us make better decisions about where we 're going .
the great hall at the met is one of the great portals of the world , awe-inspiring , like a medieval cathedral .
from there , you can walk in any direction to almost any culture .
i frequently go out into the hall and the galleries and i watch our visitors coming in .
some of them are comfortable . they feel at home .
they know what they 're looking for .
others are very uneasy . it 's an intimidating place .
they feel that the institution is elitist .
i 'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism .
i want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind , where they 're prepared to be a little bit lost , to explore , to see the unfamiliar in the familiar , or to try the unknown .
because for us , it 's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art , capturing them at that moment of discomfort , when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iphone , your blackberry , but to create a zone where their curiosity can expand .
and whether it 's in the expression of a greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend , or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry , or , to bring it back to my tutor pietro , those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine , and that nude figure in the left foreground .
wow . she is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality .
in that moment , our scholarship can tell you that this is a bacchanal , but if we 're doing our job right , and you 've checked the jargon at the front door , trust your instinct .
you know it 's an orgy .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in december of 2010 , the city of apatzingán in the coastal state of michoacán , in mexico , awoke to gunfire .
for two straight days , the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group , presumably from the local criminal organization , la familia michoacana , or the michoacán family .
the citizens did n't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city , so truly like a battlefield .
after these two days , and during a particularly intense encounter , it was presumed that the leader of la familia michoacana , nazario moreno , was killed .
in response to this terrifying violence , the mayor of apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace .
the idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state .
and so , the day of the scheduled procession , thousands of people showed up .
as the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march , his team noticed that , while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white , and bearing banners asking for peace , the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader .
shocked , the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime .
and so his team stepped aside .
the two marches joined together , and they continued their path towards the state capital .
this story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society , who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization , is a perfect metaphor for what 's happening in mexico today , where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete .
if you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what 's going on with drug violence in mexico by , say , just researching online , the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all mexican citizens are equal , there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others , because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence .
to put these numbers in perspective , this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the iraq and afghanistan wars combined .
it 's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the syrian civil war , which is an active civil war .
this is happening just south of the border .
now as you 're reading , however , you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths , because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless , nameless dead people .
implicitly or explicitly , there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade , and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner , or , most likely , both .
and so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died .
and so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved .
they were part of the bad guys .
and that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people .
however , while it 's easier to think of us , the citizens , the police , the army , as the good guys , and them , the narcos , the carteles , as the bad guys , if you think about it , the latter are only providing a service to the former .
whether we like it or not , the u.s. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world , accounting for more than half of global demand .
it shares thousands of miles of border with mexico that is its only route of access from the south , and so , as the former dictator of mexico , porfirio diaz , used to say , " poor mexico , so far from god and so close to the united states . "
the u.n. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the united states .
using very , very conservative assumptions , this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars .
if we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part , which we know is false , that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars .
to put these numbers in perspective , microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars .
and it so happens that this is a product that , because of its nature , a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed .
and the only way to do this , because it 's illegal , is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs .
hence the violence .
if you look at a map of cartel influence and violence , you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north .
is that they 're trying to protect their business .
it 's not only a multi-billion dollar market , but it 's also a complex one .
for example , the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes , and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized , international production , that by the way needs to have good quality control , because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it .
and so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south , and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed .
i urge you , but only a little bit , because i do n't want to get you in trouble , to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want , wherever you want it , whenever you want it , anywhere in the u.s. , and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message , they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less .
think about this for a second .
think about the complexity of the distribution network that i just described .
it 's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless , ignorant goons that are just shooting each other , very difficult to reconcile .
now , as a business professor , and as any business professor would tell you , an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure , good incentives , a solid identity and good brand management .
this leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in mexico .
because you would quickly realize , and maybe be confused by the fact , that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles .
you will hear about los zetas , the knights templar , which is the new brand for the familia michoacana that i spoke about at the beginning , and the sinaloa federation .
you will read that los zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press , and this is somewhat true , or mostly true .
but this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy .
you see , los zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals , but was actually created by another criminal organization , the gulf cartel , that used to control the eastern corridor of mexico .
when that corridor became contested , they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm .
so they recruited los zetas : an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the mexican army .
they were incredibly effective as enforcers for the gulf cartel , so much so that at some point , they decided to just take over the operations , which is why i ask you to never keep tigers as pets , because they grow up .
because the zetas organization was founded in treason , they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine , but what they did have , and this is again based on their military origin , was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many , many markets very effectively , which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do .
and so because they did n't have access to the more profitable drug markets , this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime .
that includes kidnapping , prostitution , local drug dealing and human trafficking , including of migrants that go from the south to the u.s.
so what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business .
they focus most of their recruiting on the army , and they very openly advertise for better salaries , better benefits , better promotion paths , not to mention much better food , than what the army can deliver .
the way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality , they let people know that they are there , and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say , " i offer you to be the local representative of the zeta brand . "
if they agree - and you do n't want to know what happens if they do n't - they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town , in exchange for royalties .
this kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear , and so los zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature , especially when they arrive first in a city , but again , that 's just a brand strategy .
i 'm not saying they 're not violent , but what i am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all , when you count , when you do the body count , they 're actually all the same .
in contrast to them , the knights templar that arose in michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the zetas into the state of michoacán .
michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in mexico , and it has very direct routes to the center of mexico , which then gives you direct access to the u.s.
the knights templar realized very quickly that they could n't face the zetas on violence alone , and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise .
they brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of michoacán against organized crime .
their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement , so they invest heavily in providing local services , like dealing with home violence , going after petty criminals , treating addicts , and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are , and , of course , protecting people from other criminal organizations .
now , they kill a lot of people too , but when they kill them , they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them , through newspaper insertions , youtube videos , and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us , as an organization , of course , but to you , as citizens .
and so we 're actually here to protect you .
they , as social enterprises do , have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around , and they have very strict recruiting practices .
and here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions .
they have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade , but the way they do it is , because they control all of michoacán , and they control the port of lázaro cárdenas , they leverage that to , for example , trade copper from michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from china which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce , and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the sinaloa federation that place their products in the u.s.
finally , the sinaloa federation .
when you read about them , you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration , because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the mexican organizations , and , many people argue , the world .
they started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the u.s.
and the mexican borders , but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet .
they have cultivated a brand of professionalism , business acumen and innovation .
they have designed new drug products and new drug processes .
they have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border , and you can see that these are not " the shawshank redemption " types .
they have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar .
they have invented drones to transport drugs , catapults , you name it .
one of the leaders of the sinaloa federation actually made it to the forbes list .
-lsb- # 701 joaquin guzman loera -rsb- like any multinational would , they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business , which is high-margin drugs like cocaine , heroine , methamphetamines .
like any traditional latin american multinational would , the way they control their operations is through family ties .
when they 're entering a new market , they send or , if they 're partnering with a new organization , they create a family tie , either through marriages or other types of ties .
like any other multinational would , they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model , like for example , when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations , they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them , and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this .
to further strengthen their brand , they actually have professional p.r. firms that shape how the press talks about them .
they have professional videographers on staff .
they have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border .
and so , differences aside , what these three organizations share is on the one hand , a very clear understanding that institutions can not be imposed from the top , but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time .
they have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies .
and so what i want you to remember from this talk are three things .
is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes .
the second thing i want you to remember is that these are sophisticated , coherent organizations and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach .
the third thing i want you to remember is that even though we 're more comfortable with this idea of " them , " a set of bad guys separated from us , we are actually accomplices to them , either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption .
these organizations service , recruit from , and operate within our communities , so necessarily , they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging .
and so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have .
we see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will .
the question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn , blissful , voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i started juggling a long time ago , but long before that , i was a golfer , and that 's what i was , a golfer .
and as a golfer and as a kid , one of the things that really sort of seeped into my pores , that i sort of lived my whole life , is process .
and it 's the process of learning things .
one of the great things was that my father was an avid golfer , but he was lefty .
and he had a real passion for golf , and he also created this whole mythology about ben hogan and various things .
well , i learned a lot about interesting things that i knew nothing about at the time , but grew to know stuff about .
and that was the mythology of skill .
so , one of the things that i love to do is to explore skill .
and since richard put me on this whole thing with music - i 'm supposed to actually be doing a project with tod machover with the mit media lab - it relates a lot to music .
but tod could n't come and the project is sort of somewhere , i 'm not sure whether it 's happening the way we thought , or not .
but i 'm going to explore skill , and juggling , and basically visual music , i guess .
ok , you can start the music , thanks .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . thank you . now , juggling can be a lot of fun ; play with skill and play with space , play with rhythm .
and you can turn the mike on now . i 'm going to do a couple of pieces .
i do a big piece in a triangle and these are three sections from it .
part of the challenge was to try to understand rhythm and space using not just my hands - because a lot of juggling is hand-oriented - but using the rhythm of my body and feet , and controlling the balls with my feet .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . now , this next section was an attempt to explore space .
you see , i think richard said something about people that are against something .
well , a lot of people think jugglers defy gravity or do stuff .
well , i kind of , from my childhood and golf and all that , it 's a process of joining with forces .
and so what i 'd like to do is try to figure out how to join with the space through the technique .
so juggling gravity - up , down .
if you figure out what up and down really are , it 's a complex physical set of skills to be able to throw a ball down and up and everything , but then you add in sideways .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , i look at it somewhat as a way - when you learn juggling what you learn is how to feel with your eyes , and see with your hands because you 're not looking at your hands , you 're looking at where the balls are or you 're looking at the audience .
so this next part is really a way of understanding space and rhythm , with the obvious reference to the feet , but it 's also time - where the feet were , where the balls were .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . so , visual music : rhythm and complexity .
i 'm going to build towards complexity now .
juggling three balls is simple and normal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- excuse me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're jugglers , ok . and remember , you 're transposing , you 're getting into a subculture here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and juggling - the balls cross and all that .
ok , if you keep them in their assigned paths you get parallel lines of different heights , but then hopefully even rhythm .
and you can change the rhythm - good , michael .
you can change the rhythm , if you get out of the lights .
ok ? change the rhythm , so it 's even .
or you can go back and change the height . now , skill .
but you 're boxed in , if you can only do it up and down that way .
so , you 've got to go after the space down there .
ok , then you 've got to combine them , because then you have the whole spatial palette in front of you .
and then you get crazy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , i 'm actually going to ask you to try something , so you 've got to pay attention . complexity : if you spend enough time doing something , time slows down or your skill increases , so your perceptions change .
it 's learning skills - like being in a high-speed car crash .
things slow down as you learn , as you learn , as you learn .
you may not be able to affect it , it almost drifts on you . it goes .
but that 's the closest approximation i can have to it .
so , complexity . now , how many here are jugglers ?
ok , so most of you are going to have a similar reaction to this .
ok ? and whoever laughed there - you understood it completely , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , it looks like a mess . it looks like a mess with a guy there , who 's got his hands around that mess , ok .
well , that 's what juggling is about , right ?
it 's being able to do something that other people ca n't do or ca n't understand .
all right . so , that 's one way of doing it , which is five balls down .
ok ? another way is the outside .
and you could play with the rhythm .
same pattern .
make it faster and smaller .
make it wider .
make it narrower .
bring it back up .
ok . it 's done . thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , what i wanted to get to is that you 're all very bright , very tactile .
i have no idea how computer-oriented or three-dimensionally-oriented you are , but let 's try something .
ok , so since you all do n't understand what the five-ball pattern is , i 'm going to give you a little clue .
enough of a clue ? so , you get the pattern , right ? ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're not getting off that easy . all right ?
now , do me a favor : follow the ball that i ask you to follow .
green .
yellow .
pink .
white .
ok , you can do that ? yeah ? ok .
now , let 's actually learn something .
actually , let me put you in that area of learning , which is very insecure .
you want to do it ? yeah ? ok .
hands out in front of you . palms up , together .
what you 're going to learn is this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok ? so what i want you to do is just listen to me and do it .
index finger , middle finger , ring , little .
little , ring , middle , index . and then open .
finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger .
a little bit faster .
finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger .
finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right . a lot of different learning processes going on in here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one learning process that i see is this - -lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . another learning process that i see is this - -lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . so , everybody take a deep breath in , breath out . ok .
now , one more time , and - finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger . open .
finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger . ok .
shake your hands out .
now , i assume a lot of you spend a lot of time at a computer .
ok ? so , what you 're doing is , you 're going la , la , la , and you 're getting this . ok ?
so that 's exactly what i 'm going to ask you to do , but in a slightly different way . you 're going to combine it .
so what i want you to do is - fingers .
i 'll tell you what to do with your fingers , same thing .
but i want you to do is also , with your eyes , is follow the colored ball that i ask you to follow .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok ? here we go .
so , we 're going to start off looking at the white ball - and i 'm going to tell you which color , and i 'm also going to tell you to go with your fingers . ok ?
so white ball and - finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger . pink .
finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger . green .
finger , finger , finger , finger . yellow .
finger , finger , finger , pink or finger .
pink , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger , finger .
all right .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how did you do ? well ? ok . the reason i wanted you to do this is because that 's actually what most people face throughout their lives , a moment of learning , a moment of challenge .
it 's a moment that you ca n't make sense of .
why the hell should i learn this ? ok ?
does it really have anything to do with anything in my life ?
you know , i ca n't decipher - is it fun ? is it challenging ? am i supposed to cheat ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , what are you supposed to do ?
you 've got somebody up here who is the operative principle of doing that for his whole life . ok ?
trying to figure that stuff out . but is it going to get you anywhere ?
it 's just a moment . that 's all it is , a moment . ok ?
i 'm going to change the script for one second . just let me do this .
i do n't need music for it . talking about time in a moment .
there 's a piece that i recently developed which was all about that , a moment . and what i do as a creative artist is i develop vocabularies or languages of moving objects .
what i 've done for you here , i developed a lot of those tricks and i put the choreography together , but they 're not original techniques .
now , i 'm going to start showing you some original techniques that come from the work that i 've developed . ok ?
so , a moment , how would you define a moment ?
well , as a juggler , what i wanted to do was create something that was representational of a moment .
ahhh .
all right , i 'm going to get on my knees and do it .
so , a moment .
-lrb- rattling -rrb- ok ? and then , what i did as a juggler was say , ok , what can i do to make that something that is dependent on something else , another dynamic .
-lrb- rattling -rrb- so , a moment .
-lrb- rattling -rrb- another moment .
-lrb- rattling -rrb- excuse me , still getting there . a moment that travels .
-lrb- rattling -rrb- a moment - no , we 'll try that again . it separates , and comes back together .
time . how can you look at time ?
and what do you dedicate it to , in exploring a particular thing ?
well , obviously , there 's something in here , and you can all have a guess as to what it is .
there 's a mystery . there 's a mystery in the moment .
and it has to settle . and then it 's dependent on something else .
and then it comes to rest . just a little thing about time .
now , this has expanded into a much bigger piece , because i use ramps of different parabolas that i roll the balls on while i 'm keeping time with this .
but i just thought i 'd talk about a moment .
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right . ok . can we show the video of the triangle ?
are we ready to do that ? yes ?
this is the piece that i told you about .
it 's a much bigger piece that i do exploring the space of a geometric triangle .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . the only thing i 'll say about the last session is , you ever try juggling and driving the car with your knees at 120 miles an hour ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the only other thing is , it was a real shock .
i always drove motorcycles . and when i bought my first car , it shocked me that it cost three times more than my parents ' house . interesting .
anyway , balance : constant movement to find an approach to stillness .
cheating .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- balance : making up the rules so you ca n't cheat , so you learn to approach stillness with different parts of your body .
to have a conversation with it . to speak . to listen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hup . now , it 's dependent on rhythm , and keeping a center of balance . when it falls , going underneath .
so , there 's a rhythm to it .
the rhythm can get much smaller .
as your skill increases , you learn to find those tinier spaces , those tinier movements . thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , i 'm going to show you the beginnings of a piece that is about balance in some ways , and also - oh , actually , if you 're bored , not here , here 's one use for it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can go with the " sticks one " music .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . that has a certain kind of balance to it , which is all about plumb .
i apprenticed with a carpenter and learned about plumb , square and level .
and they influenced that , and this next piece , which i 'll do a little segment of .
" two sticks , " you can go with it . thanks .
which is again exploring space , or the lines in space .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- working with space and the lines in space in a different way .
oh , let 's see here .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'll come back to that in a second . but working with one ball , now , what if you attach something to it , or change it .
this is a little thing that i made because i really like the idea of curves and balls together .
and then creating space and the rhythm of space , using the surface of the balls , the surface of the arms .
just a little toy . which leads me to the next thing , which is - what have i got here ? ok . all right .
i 'm actually leading up to something , the newest thing that i 'm working on . this is not it .
this is exploring geometry and the rhythm of shape .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , what i just did was i worked with the mathematics - the diameter and the circumference .
sometimes these pieces are mathematical , in that way that i look at a shape and say , what about if i use this and this and this .
sometimes what happens in life affects my choice of objects that i try to work with .
the next piece that i 'm going to do - which is the cylinders piece , if you want to get that up - it has to do with cylinder seals from about 5,000 years ago , which were stones with designs that were used to roll over wet clay with all sorts of great designs . i love ceramics and all of that .
it 's a combination of that , the beauty of that , the shape , and the stories that were involved in it , as well as the fact that they protected the contents .
the second influence on this piece came from recycling and looking into a tin can recycling bin and seeing all that beautiful emptiness .
so , if you want to go with the music for cylinders .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- talking about geometry and everything , if you take the circle and you split it in half - can you run " s-curve music ? "
i 'm going to do just a short version of it .
circles split in half and rotated , and mythology .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- anyway , that piece also has a kinetic sculpture in the middle of it , and i dance around a small stage so - two minutes , just to end ? the latest piece that i 'm working on - what i love is that i never know what i 'm working on , why i 'm working on it .
they 're not ideas , they 're instincts .
and the latest thing that i 'm working on - -lrb- clattering -rrb- - is something really - i do n't know what it is yet .
and that 's good . i like not to know for as long as possible .
well , because then it tells me the truth , instead of me imposing the truth .
and what it is , is working with both positive and negative space but also with these curves .
and what it involves , and i do n't know if my hands are too beaten up to do it or not , but i 'll do a little bit of it .
it initially started off with me stacking these things , bunches of them , and then playing with the sense of space , of filling in the space . and then it started changing , and become folding on themselves .
and then changing levels .
because my attempt is to make visual instruments , not to just make - i 'll try one other thing .
for work in three dimensions , with your perceptions of space and time .
now , i do n't know exactly where it 's going , but i 've got a bit of effort involved in this thing .
and it 's going to change as i go through it .
but i really like it , it feels right .
this may not be the right shape , and - look at this shape , and then i 'll show you the first design i ever put to it , just to see , just to play , because i love all different kinds of things to play with .
let 's see here .
to work with the positive and negative in a different way .
and to change , and to change .
so , i 'm off in my new direction with this to explore rhythm and space .
we 'll see what i come up with . thanks for having me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- our face is hugely important because it 's the external , visual part that everybody else sees .
let 's not forget it 's a functional entity .
we have strong skull bones that protect the most important organ in our body : the brain .
it 's where our senses are located , our special senses - our vision , our speech , our hearing , our smell , our taste .
and this bone is peppered , as you can see , with the light shining through the skull with cavities , the sinuses , which warm and moisten the air we breathe .
but also imagine if they were filled with solid bone - our head would be dead weight , we would n't be able to hold it erect , we would n't be able to look at the world around us .
this woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she ca n't breathe and eat .
attached to the facial bones that define our face 's structure are the muscles that deliver our facial expression , our universal language of expression , our social-signaling system .
and overlying this is the skin drape , which is a hugely complex three-dimensional structure - taking right-angled bends here and there , having thin areas like the eyelids , thick areas like the cheek , different colors .
and then we have the sensual factor of the face .
where do we like to kiss people ?
on the lips . nibble the ears maybe .
it 's the face where we 're attracted to with that .
but let 's not forget the hair .
you 're looking at the image on your left-hand side - that 's my son with his eyebrows present .
look how odd he looks with the eyebrows missing .
there 's a definite difference .
and imagine if he had hair sprouting from the middle of his nose , he 'd look even odder still .
dysmorphophobia is an extreme version of the fact that we do n't see ourselves as others see us .
it 's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves , and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live .
dysmorphophobia is a perversion of this where people who may be very good looking regard themselves as hideously ugly and are constantly seeking surgery to correct their facial appearance .
they do n't need this . they need psychiatric help .
max has kindly donated his photograph to me .
he does n't have dysmorphophobia , but i 'm using his photograph to illustrate the fact that he looks exactly like a dysmorphophobic .
in other words , he looks entirely normal .
age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes .
so children judge themselves , learn to judge themselves , by the behavior of adults around them .
here 's a classic example : rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that 's growing out through her skull , has obliterated her nose , and she 's having difficulty seeing .
as you can see , it 's blocking her vision .
she 's also in danger , when she damages this , of bleeding profusely .
our research has shown that the parents and close loved ones of these children adore them .
they 've grown used to their face ; they think they 're special .
actually , sometimes the parents argue about whether these children should have the lesion removed .
and occasionally they suffer intense grief reactions because the child they 've grown to love has changed so dramatically and they do n't recognize them .
but other adults say incredibly painful things .
they say , " how dare you take this child out of the house and terrify other people .
should n't you be doing something about this ? why have n't you had it removed ? "
and other children in curiosity come up and poke the lesion , because - a natural curiosity .
and that obviously alerts the child to their unusual nature .
after surgery , everything normalizes .
the adults behave more naturally , and the children play more readily with other children .
as teenagers - just think back to your teenage years - we 're going through a dramatic and often disproportionate change in our facial appearance .
we 're trying to struggle to find our identity .
we crave the approval of our peers .
so our facial appearance is vital to us as we 're trying to project ourselves to the world .
just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days .
how long did you spend looking in the mirror every day , practicing your sardonic look , practicing your serious look , trying to look like sean connery , as i did , trying to raise one eyebrow ?
it 's a crippling time .
i 've chosen to show this profile view of sue because what it shows is her lower jaw jutting forward and her lower lip jutting forward .
i 'd like you all in the audience now to push your lower jaw forward .
turn to the person next to you , push your lower jaws forward . turn to the person next to you and look at them - they look miserable .
that 's exactly what people used to say to sue .
she was n't miserable at all .
but people used to say to her , " why are you so miserable ? "
people were making misjudgments all the time on her mood .
teachers and peers were underestimating her ; she was teased at school .
so she chose to have facial surgery .
after the facial surgery , she said , " my face now reflects my personality .
people know now that i 'm enthusiastic , that i 'm a happy person . "
and that 's the change that can be achieved for teenagers .
is this change , though , a real change , or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves ?
well we studied teenagers ' attitudes to photographs of patients having this corrective facial surgery .
and what we found was - we jumbled up the photographs so they could n't recognize the before and after - what we found was that the patients were regarded as being more attractive after the surgery .
well that 's not surprising , but we also asked them to judge them on honesty , intelligence , friendliness , violence .
they were all perceived as being less than normal in all those characteristics - more violent , etc . - before the surgery .
after the surgery , more friendly , more honest , less violent - and yet we had n't operated on their intellect or their character .
when people get older , they do n't necessarily choose to follow this kind of surgery .
their presence in the consultation suite is a result of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .
what happens to them is that they may have suffered cancer or trauma .
so this is a photograph of henry , two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face - his cheekbone , his upper jaw , his eye-socket .
he looks pretty good at this stage .
but over the course of the next 15 years he had 14 more operations , as the disease ravaged his face and destroyed my reconstruction regularly .
i learned a huge amount from henry .
henry taught me that you can carry on working .
he worked as an advocate . he continued to play cricket .
he enjoyed life to the full , and this was probably because he had a successful , fulfilling job and a caring family and was able to participate socially .
he maintained a calm insouciance .
i do n't say he overcame this ; he did n't overcome it .
this was something more than that . he ignored it .
he ignored the disfigurement that was happening in his life and carried on oblivious to it .
and that 's what these people can do .
henriapi illustrates this phenomenon as well .
this is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the united kingdom to have operated on .
it was my longest operation .
it took 23 hours . i did it with my neurosurgeon .
we removed all the bones at the right side of his face - his eye , his nose , the skull bones , the facial skin - and reconstructed him with tissue from the back .
he continued to work as a psychiatric nurse .
he got married . he had a son called jeremiah .
and again , he said , " this painting of me with my son jeremiah shows me as the successful man that i feel that i am . "
his facial disfigurement did not affect him because he had the support of a family ; he had a successful , fulfilling job .
so we 've seen that we can change people 's faces .
but when we change people 's faces , are we changing their identity - for better or for worse ?
for instance , there are two different types of facial surgery .
we can categorize it like that .
we can say there are patients who choose to have facial surgery - like sue .
when they have facial surgery , they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people .
they do n't feel different .
they feel that they 've actually gained what they never had , that their face now reflects their personality .
and actually that 's probably the difference between cosmetic surgery and this kind of surgery .
because you might say , " well , this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic . "
if you do cosmetic surgery , patients are often less happy .
they 're trying to achieve difference in their lives .
sue was n't trying to achieve difference in her life .
she was just trying to achieve the face that matched her personality .
but then we have other people who do n't choose to have facial surgery .
they 're people who have their face shot off .
i 'll move it off , and we 'll have a blank slide for those who are squeamish amongst you .
they have it forced upon them .
and again , as i told you , if they have a caring family and good work life , then they can lead normal and fulfilled lives .
their identity does n't change .
is this business about appearance and preoccupation with it a western phenomenon ?
muzetta 's family give the lie to this .
this is a little bangladeshi girl from the east end of london who 's got a huge malignant tumor on the right side of her face , which has already made her blind and which is rapidly growing and is going to kill her shortly .
after she had surgery to remove the tumor , her parents dressed her in this beautiful green velvet dress , a pink ribbon in her hair , and they wanted the painting to be shown around the world , despite the fact that they were orthodox muslims and the mother wore a full burqa .
so it 's not simply a western phenomenon .
we make judgments on people 's faces all the time .
it 's been going on since we can think of lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces .
he said you could see criminal faces , judging them just on the photographs that were showed .
good-looking people are always judged as being more friendly .
we look at o.j. - he 's a good-looking guy .
we 'd like to spend time with him . he looks friendly .
now we know that he 's a convicted wife-batterer , and actually he 's not the good guy .
and beauty does n't equate to goodness , and certainly does n't equate to contentment .
so we 've talked about the static face and judging the static face , but actually , we 're more comfortable with judging the moving face .
we think we can judge people on their expressions .
u.k. jurors in the u.k. justice system like to see a live witness to see whether they can pick up the telltale signs of mendacity - the blink , the hesitation .
and so they want to see live witnesses .
todorov tells us that , in a tenth of a second , we can make a judgment on somebody 's face .
are we uncomfortable with this image ? yes , we are .
would we be happy if our doctor 's face , our lawyer 's face , our financial adviser 's face was covered ?
we 'd be pretty uncomfortable .
but are we good at making the judgments on facial appearance and movement ?
the truth is that there 's a five-minute rule , not the tenth-of-a-second rule like todorov , but a five-minute rule .
if you spend five minutes with somebody , you start looking beyond their facial appearance , and the people who you 're initially attracted to may seem boring and you lose interest in them , and the people who you did n't immediately seek out , because you did n't find them particularly attractive , become attractive people because of their personality .
so we 've talked a lot about facial appearance .
i now want to share a little bit of the surgery that we do - where we 're at and where we 're going .
this is an image of ann who 's had her right jaw removed and the base of her skull removed .
and you can see in the images afterward , we 've managed to reconstruct her successfully .
but that 's not good enough .
this is what ann wants . she wants to be out kayaking , she wants to be out climbing mountains .
and that 's what she achieved , and that 's what we have to get to .
this is a horrific image , so i 'm putting my hand up now .
this is a photograph of adi , a nigerian bank manager who had his face shot off in an armed robbery .
and he lost his lower jaw , his lip , his chin and his upper jaw and teeth .
this is the bar that he set for us .
" i want to look like this . this is how i looked before . "
so with modern technology , we used computers to make models .
we made a model of the jaw without bone in it .
we then bent a plate up to it .
we put it in place so we knew it was an accurate position .
we then put bone and tissue from the back .
here you can see the plate holding it , and you can see the implants being put in - so that in one operation we achieve this and this .
so the patient 's life is restored .
that 's the good news .
however , his chin skin does n't look the same as it did before .
it 's skin from his back .
it 's thicker , it 's darker , it 's coarser , it does n't have the contours .
and that 's where we 're failing , and that 's where we need the face transplant .
the face transplant has a role probably in burns patients to replace the skin .
we can replace the underlying skeletal structure , but we 're still not good at replacing the facial skin .
so it 's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium .
but the patients are going to have to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives .
what does that mean ?
they have an increased risk of infection , an increased risk of malignancy .
this is not a life-saving transplant - like a heart , or liver , or lung transplant - it is a quality-of-life transplant , and as a result , are the patients going to say , if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on , " i wish i 'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because i 'm now dying of a malignant cancer " ? we do n't know yet .
we also do n't know what they feel about recognition and identity .
bernard devauchelle and sylvie testelin , who did the first operation , are studying that .
donors are going to be short on the ground , because how many people want to have their loved one 's face removed at the point of death ?
so there are going to be problems with face transplantation .
so the better news is the future 's almost here - and the future is tissue engineering .
just imagine , i can make a biologically-degradable template .
i can put it in place where it 's meant to be .
i can sprinkle a few cells , stem cells from the patient 's own hip , a little bit of genetically engineered protein , and lo and behold , leave it for four months and the face is grown .
this is a bit like a julia child recipe .
but we 've still got problems .
we 've got mouth cancer to solve .
we 're still not curing enough patients - it 's the most disfiguring cancer .
we 're still not reconstructing them well enough .
in the u.k. we have an epidemic of facial injuries among young people .
we still ca n't get rid of scars .
we need to do research .
and the best news of all is that surgeons know that we need to do research .
and we 've set up charities that will help us fund the clinical research to determine the best treatment practice now and better treatment into the future , so we do n't just sit on our laurels and say , " okay , we 're doing okay .
let 's leave it as it is . "
thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- frank gehry : i listened to this scientist this morning .
dr. mullis was talking about his experiments , and i realized that i almost became a scientist .
when i was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and i decided to make water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i made a hydrogen generator and i made an oxygen generator , and i had the two pipes leading into a beaker and i threw a match in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the glass - luckily i turned around - i had it all in my back and i was about 15 feet away .
the wall was covered with ...
i had an explosion .
richard saul wurman : really ?
fg : people on the street came and knocked on the door to see if i was okay .
rsw : ... huh . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd like to start this session again .
the gentleman to my left is the very famous , perhaps overly famous , frank gehry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and frank , you 've come to a place in your life , which is astonishing .
i mean it is astonishing for an artist , for an architect , to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time .
i mean you have become , whether you can giggle at it because it 's a funny ... you know , it 's a strange thought , but your building is an icon - you can draw a little picture of that building , it can be used in ads - and you 've had not rock star status , but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life .
and i know the road was extremely difficult .
and it did n't seem , at least , that your sell outs , whatever they were , were very big .
you kept moving ahead in a life where you 're dependent on working for somebody .
but that 's an interesting thing for a creative person .
a lot of us work for people ; we 're in the hands of other people .
and that 's one of the great dilemmas - we 're in a creativity session - it 's one of the great dilemmas in creativity : how to do work that 's big enough and not sell out .
and you 've achieved that and that makes your win doubly big , triply big .
it 's not quite a question but you can comment on it .
it 's a big issue .
fg : well , i 've always just ...
i 've never really gone out looking for work .
i always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head .
and when i started out , i thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff .
and i realized when i 'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff , and people would just look at me like i 'd just landed from mars .
but i could n't do anything else .
that was my response to the people in the time .
and actually , it was responding to clients that i had who did n't have very much money , so they could n't afford very much .
i think it was circumstantial .
until i got to my house , where the client was my wife .
we bought this tiny little bungalow in santa monica and for like 50 grand i built a house around it .
and a few people got excited about it .
i was visiting with an artist , michael heizer , out in the desert near las vegas somewhere .
he 's building this huge concrete place .
and it was late in the evening . we 'd had a lot to drink .
we were standing out in the desert all alone and , thinking about my house , he said , " did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent , somewhere in 2000 years somebody 's going to like it ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i thought , " yeah , that 's probably a good idea . "
luckily i started to get some clients that had a little more money , so the stuff was a little more permanent .
but i just found out the world ai n't going to last that long , this guy was telling us the other day .
so where do we go now ?
back to - everything 's so temporary .
i do n't see it the way you characterized it .
for me , every day is a new thing .
i approach each project with a new insecurity , almost like the first project i ever did , and i get the sweats , i go in and start working , i 'm not sure where i 'm going - if i knew where i was going , i would n't do it .
when i can predict or plan it , i do n't do it .
i discard it .
so i approach it with the same trepidation .
obviously , over time i have a lot more confidence that it 's going to be ok .
i do run a kind of a business - i 've got 120 people and you 've got to pay them , so there 's a lot of responsibility involved - but the actual work on the project is with , i think , a healthy insecurity .
and like the playwright said the other day - i could relate to him : you 're not sure .
when bilbao was finished and i looked at it , i saw all the mistakes , i saw ...
they were n't mistakes ; i saw everything that i would have changed and i was embarrassed by it .
i felt an embarrassment - " how could i have done that ?
how could i have made shapes like that or done stuff like that ? "
it 's taken several years to now look at it detached and say - as you walk around the corner and a piece of it works with the road and the street , and it appears to have a relationship - that i started to like it .
rsw : what 's the status of the new york project ?
fg : i do n't really know .
tom krens came to me with bilbao and explained it all to me , and i thought he was nuts .
i did n't think he knew what he was doing , and he pulled it off .
so , i think he 's icarus and phoenix all in one guy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he gets up there and then he ... comes back up .
they 're still talking about it .
september 11 generated some interest in moving it over to ground zero , and i 'm totally against that .
i just feel uncomfortable talking about or building anything on ground zero i think for a long time .
rsw : the picture on the screen , is that disney ?
fg : yeah .
rsw : how much further along is it than that , and when will that be finished ?
fg : that will be finished in 2003 - september , october - and i 'm hoping kyu , and herbie , and yo-yo and all those guys come play with us at that place .
luckily , today most of the people i 'm working with are people i really like .
richard koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that disney hall came to me .
he 's been a cheerleader for quite a long time .
there are n't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients .
if you think about the world , and even just in this audience , most of us are involved with buildings .
nothing that you would call architecture , right ?
and so to find one , a guy like that , you hang on to him .
he 's become the head of art center , and there 's a building by craig ellwood there .
i knew craig and respected him .
they want to add to it and it 's hard to add to a building like that - it 's a beautiful , minimalist , black steel building - and richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it 's a lot of acreage .
i convinced him to let me bring in another architect from portugal : alvaro siza .
rsw : why did you want that ?
fg : i knew you 'd ask that question .
it was intuitive .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- alvaro siza grew up and lived in portugal and is probably considered the portuguese main guy in architecture .
i visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work , and his early work had a resemblance to my early work .
when i came out of college , i started to try to do things contextually in southern california , and you got into the logic of spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that .
i tried to understand that language as a beginning , as a place to jump off , and there was so much of it being done by spec builders and it was trivialized so much that it was n't ...
i just stopped .
i mean , charlie moore did a bunch of it , but it did n't feel good to me .
siza , on the other hand , continued in portugal where the real stuff was and evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language .
and i always felt that he should come to southern california and do a building .
i tried to get him a couple of jobs and they did n't pan out .
i like the idea of collaboration with people like that because it pushes you .
i 've done it with claes oldenburg and with richard serra , who does n't think architecture is art .
did you see that thing ?
rsw : no . what did he say ?
fg : he calls architecture " plumbing . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- fg : anyway , the siza thing .
it 's a richer experience .
it must be like that for kyu doing things with musicians - it 's similar to that i would imagine - where you ... huh ?
audience : liquid architecture .
fg : liquid architecture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- where you ... it 's like jazz : you improvise , you work together , you play off each other , you make something , they make something .
and i think for me , it 's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city .
rsw : is it going to be near the current campus ?
or is it going to be down near ...
fg : no , it 's near the current campus .
anyway , he 's that kind of patron .
it 's not his money , of course .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rsw : what 's his schedule on that ?
fg : i do n't know .
what 's the schedule , richard ?
richard koshalek : -lsb- unclear -rsb- starts from 2004 .
fg : 2004 .
you can come to the opening . i 'll invite you .
no , but the issue of city building in democracy is interesting because it creates chaos , right ?
everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment , and if you can figure out how to work off each other - if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other 's work and play off each other , you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect .
like the rockefeller center model , which is kind of from another era .
rsw : i found the most remarkable thing .
my preconception of bilbao was this wonderful building , you go inside and there 'd be extraordinary spaces .
i 'd seen drawings you had presented here at ted .
the surprise of bilbao was in its context to the city .
that was the surprise of going across the river , of going on the highway around it , of walking down the street and finding it .
that was the real surprise of bilbao .
fg : but you know , richard , most architects when they present their work - most of the people we know , you get up and you talk about your work , and it 's almost like you tell everybody you 're a good guy by saying , " look , i 'm worried about the context , i 'm worried about the city , i 'm worried about my client , i worry about budget , that i 'm on time . "
blah , blah , blah and all that stuff .
and it 's like cleansing yourself so that you can ...
by saying all that , it means your work is good somehow .
and i think everybody - i mean that should be a matter of fact , like gravity .
you 're not going to defy gravity .
you 've got to work with the building department .
if you do n't meet the budgets , you 're not going to get much work .
if it leaks - bilbao did not leak .
i was so proud .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the mit project - they were interviewing me for mit and they sent their facilities people to bilbao .
i met them in bilbao .
they came for three days .
rsw : this is the computer building ?
fg : yeah , the computer building .
they were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around - i noticed they were looking under things and looking for things , and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden , you know ?
people put buckets out ...
i was clean . there was n't a bloody leak in the place , it was just fantastic .
but you 've got to - yeah , well up until then every building leaked , so this ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rsw : frank had a sort of ...
fg : ask miriam !
rw : ... sort of had a fame . his fame was built on that in l.a. for a while .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- fg : you 've all heard the frank lloyd wright story , when the woman called and said , " mr. wright , i 'm sitting on the couch and the water 's pouring in on my head . "
and he said , " madam , move your chair . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , some years later i was doing a building , a little house on the beach for norton simon , and his secretary , who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady , called me and said , " mr. simon 's sitting at his desk and the water 's coming in on his head . "
and i told her the frank lloyd wright story .
rsw : did n't get a laugh .
fg : no . not now either .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but my point is that ... and i call it the " then what ? "
ok , you solved all the problems , you did all the stuff , you made nice , you loved your clients , you loved the city , you 're a good guy , you 're a good person ...
and then what ?
what do you bring to it ?
and i think that 's what i 've always been interested in , is that - which is a personal kind of expression .
bilbao , i think , shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city .
that 's what reminded me of it .
and i think that 's the issue , you know ; it 's the " then what " that most clients who hire architects - most clients are n't hiring architects for that .
they 're hiring them to get it done , get it on budget , be polite , and they 're missing out on the real value of an architect .
rsw : at a certain point a number of years ago , people - when michael graves was a fashion , before teapots ...
fg : i did a teapot and nobody bought it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rsw : did it leak ?
fg : no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rsw : ... people wanted a michael graves building .
is that a curse , that people want a bilbao building ?
fg : yeah .
since bilbao opened , which is now four , five years , both krens and i have been called with at least 100 opportunities - china , brazil , other parts of spain - to come in and do the bilbao effect .
and i 've met with some of these people .
usually i say no right away , but some of them come with pedigree and they sound well-intentioned and they get you for at least one or two meetings .
in one case , i flew all the way to malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city , and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port .
i asked them what kind of building it was .
" when you get here we 'll explain it . " blah , blah , blah .
so four of us went .
and they took us - they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay , and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor .
each one was more beautiful than the other .
and then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in malaga .
just before going to lunch with the mayor , we went to the harbor commissioner .
it was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here , and i was here , and my guys .
we sat down , and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet .
and the guy looked at me and said , " now what can i do for you , mr. gehry ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rsw : oh , my god .
fg : so , i got up .
i said to my team , " let 's get out of here . "
we stood up , we walked out .
they followed - the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said , " you mean you 're not going to have lunch with the mayor ? "
i said , " nope . "
" you 're not going to have dinner at all ? "
they just brought us there to hustle this group , you know , to create a project .
and we get a lot of that .
luckily , i 'm old enough that i can complain i ca n't travel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't have my own plane yet .
rsw : well , i 'm going to wind this up and wind up the meeting because it 's been very long .
but let me just say a couple words .
fg : can i say something ?
are you going to talk about me or you ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- rsw : once a shit , always a shit !
fg : because i want to get a standing ovation like everybody , so ...
rsw : you 're going to get one ! you 're going to get one !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm going to make it for you !
fg : no , no . wait a minute !
-lrb- applause -rrb- welcome to africa ! or rather , i should say , welcome home .
because this is where it all really began , is n't it ?
looking at fossils dating back several millions of years - it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here .
we are on an amazing journey the next four days .
you 're going to hear stories of " africa : the next chapter . "
fantastic tales , anecdotes from speakers .
but i want to turn that upside down for a moment , and get something out on the table and clear the air so to say .
what 's the worst thing you 've ever heard about africa ?
and this is not a rhetorical question .
i actually want answers from you .
go for it ! the worst .
famine .
corruption .
more .
genocide .
aids .
slavery .
that 's enough .
we 've all heard these things .
but this is about africa , the story we have not heard .
the stories that we want to know , and the stories that do exist about positive tales .
a part of my talk is going to be about investment opportunities that exist on this continent , to separate the rhetoric from the reality , the fact from the fiction .
to go to the actual data and statistics that exist about the actual things that are happening on the ground that make africa a realistic investment opportunity and option for you .
so let 's get going because africa , to some degree , is on a turnaround .
a turnaround in terms of how it manages its image , and how it takes control of its own destiny .
and turnarounds are part and parcel of what i have focused on for most of my professional career .
and it all started almost a decade ago , as a young consultant at mckinsey & company at their first african office in johannesburg .
and there we worked with leading ceos on african issues , and african companies on turnarounds , making the companies not just the best in africa but the best globally .
but i really formalized this focus on turnarounds when i was completing my mba in the united states .
it all began with a fantastic phone call .
it was from rosabeth moss kanter , harvard business school guru and a professor of mine .
and she said , " i want to write a case , euvin - a case on a public-sector leader that has lessons for the corporate world . "
and the leader that came to mind was nelson mandela .
because nelson mandela , as he took over power as the first democratically-elected president of south africa , faced a situation of a country that could have slid into the abyss of chaos .
but he started the country on a path of a positive cycle .
now the case , " nelson mandela : change leader , " became part of the research base for a chapter in rosabeth 's new book called " confidence . "
and " confidence " became a new york times bestseller and topped business week 's hardcover bestseller list .
and why i tell you this story is because later , when i was interviewed on sabc africa , on a pan-african broadcast , they asked , " what is your key lesson , or the key thing you enjoy the most ? " - because it was a huge privilege to be part of such a project .
the lesson from that was that it was africa - an african story - that was used to share news with the rest of the world of what the benchmark can be for corporate turnarounds .
africa was being used as a success story !
so i want to share with you a personal story about a turnaround or a transformation .
and that has to do with me because in 1994 , i packed a few things into a backpack and headed off for a year of travel in the middle of my university career .
you should have seen my parents ' reaction !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but very soon , i found myself from the southern part of africa , in south africa - at the very north , in egypt .
and i sought out the most remote places .
i went to the siwa oasis . that was one of my stops .
and the siwa oasis is famous for several things , but the key thing is that it was the place that alexander the great went to when he wanted to find out what his destiny had in store for him .
and legend has it that alexander trekked through this desert .
half his battalion was wiped out in the sandstorm .
and myth says that he had an audience with the oracle , and it foretold his destiny of greatness .
this was 300 bc .
so africa had long been seen as a place to go to for answers .
now , the thing i remember about siwa was the magical view of the sky at night .
with no natural light source , siva is one of these amazing places that when you look up you see a perfect tapestry .
fast forward to 2002 .
i 'm sitting in cambridge , massachusetts at the healthcare development conference .
and i see the same picture , but from the opposite side .
a satellite picture looking down at the earth .
and it was that picture that made such a profound impact on me because i 'll never forget it . i remember the very moment .
and i wanted to share that image with you of what i saw at that point .
the first thing that i saw was north america at night - glowing , in all its glory . a warm feeling . light .
and then i saw it - africa . quite literally the " dark continent . "
and while africa may be dark , the thing that brought the message home to me was that this is the challenge we are facing , but it 's also the opportunity .
because whilst africa may be dark - other than the few specks that exist north and in the south and other areas - it 's aglow with the light in the hearts of the millions of people that are there .
entrepreneurs , dynamic people , people with hope .
it was george kimble , the geographer , who said that , " the only thing dark about africa is our ignorance of it . "
so let 's start shedding light on this amazing eclectic continent that has so much to offer .
let 's start unpacking it .
africa is the second-largest continent , a landmass second from asia .
it also is the second most populated continent , with 900 million people .
in fact - coming back to the land mass - africa is so big that you could fit in the continental united states , china , and the entire europe into africa , and still have space .
africa is home to over 1,000 languages - 2,000 is another estimate that 's out there - with over 2,000 languages and dialects .
but you could say , " invest in africa in over 1,000 languages , and it would n't make a difference . "
what does the data say ?
as an investment banker , i 'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets .
so i want to share with you some of these bellwether signals , or signs , and winds of change that are sweeping this continent .
so let 's start on that .
and let 's start at the high level , on the macro-factors .
inflation , in general , is coming down across africa - that 's the first sign - in many countries reaching double-digit figures .
so let 's start looking at some of those .
i call it my z.e.n. cluster .
zambia : from 2004 to 2006 , moves from the 18 percent in inflation to the nine percent .
egypt : from the 16 percent to about 8.4 percent .
nigeria : a similar situation , from the 16 percent to the eight percent . single digits .
more fascinating , you have other countries - south africa , mauritius , namibia - all in single digits .
but that 's just part of the story . you have a similar trend with currencies - currencies going through an extreme time of stability .
but that 's looking at the big picture .
and the first myth to dispel is that africa is not a country .
it 's made up - -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's made up of 53 different countries .
so the very definition - to say " invest in africa " is a no-go .
it 's meaningless .
each country has a unique value proposition .
you can make money , you can lose money in africa .
but opportunities , boy oh boy , they exist .
and this is what today is about - it 's about discussing those very opportunities .
so let 's start getting into the countries and into the specific material and data .
i was recently elected , as emeka mentioned , as the president of the south african chamber of commerce in america .
and i 'm very proud and happy to be in that role because it is a fascinating position to be in .
to hear this dialogue that 's just increasing in tenor and velocity , of decisions about trade and companies wanting to come .
so the first port of call : let 's talk a little bit about south africa .
but not the south africa we always talk about - the gold , the minerals , the first world infrastructure - a bit about the other side of it .
for example , south africa was recently voted as the top destination for the top 1,000 uk companies for offshore call-centers .
same language , timeline , et cetera . makes sense .
other headlines that have recently reached south africa were bain capital and kkr , the big boys of private equity .
headline in south africa : " they have landed . " quite ominous .
but what were they there for ? to acquire assets .
bing capital 's acquisition of edcon , a large retailer , is testimony to the confidence they are starting to place in the economy .
because it is actually a long-term play .
being a retailer , it is a play on the belief that this middle-class that 's growing will continue to grow , that the boom and the confidence in consumer spending will continue .
but the story of africa , and my focus , is beyond south africa because there 's so much happening .
undoubtedly , nigeria is clearly a hot spot .
challenges - and we will hear a lot about nigeria in these four days .
but looking at goldman sachs ' work - we had the famous bric report .
the new report , " the next eleven , " highlights that by 2020 nigeria is going to be amongst the top 10 economies in the world .
it 's an investment opportunity . think about that .
is anyone - our banks , our investors - seriously thinking about going to nigeria ?
if you have n't , why not ?
what 's going on in nigeria ? a couple of things .
i want to talk about it from the perspective of capital markets .
bellwether signs again .
guarantee trust bank recently issued the first euro bond out of africa , and this excludes south africa .
but the first eurobond , the raising of international capital offshore , off its own balance sheet , without any sovereign backing - that is an indication of the confidence that is taking place in that economy .
without any sovereign backing , a nigerian company raising capital offshore .
it 's just a sign of things to come .
looking at the oil industry , africa provides 18 percent of the u.s. 's oil supply , with the middle east just 16 percent .
it 's an important strategic partner .
let 's put nigeria in perspective .
2.2 to 2.4 million barrels of oil a day - the same league as kuwait , the same league as venezuela .
but with africa , let 's start being careful about this .
and emeka and i have had these discussions .
we have to move away from what 's called " the curse of the commodities . "
because it 's not about oil , it 's not about commodities .
for africa to truly be sustainable , we have to move beyond to other industries .
so let 's unpack those very quickly , and i 'm going to move through these very , very , very fast because i can see that clock counting down .
what else is going on there ? egypt .
egypt is launching a first large industrial zone - 2.8 billion investment .
the announcement just came out the last few weeks .
close to the mediterranean , near alexandria - textiles , petrochemicals .
it 's being managed by a singaporean-based management company .
so they want to emerge as an industrial powerhouse across the industries - away from oil .
let 's look at agriculture . let 's look at forestry .
what 's going on there ?
in tanzania last week , we had the launch of the east african organic produce standard .
again , gathering together farmers , gathering together stakeholders in east africa to get standards for organic produce . better prices .
it ties in with small-scale farmers in terms of no pesticides , no fertilizers .
again , opportunity to tackle markets to get that higher price .
uganda : the new forest company , replanting and redeveloping their forests . why is that important ?
as the energy needs are met and electricity is needed -lsb- we will need -rsb- poles for rolling out electricity .
but here is the sweetener in the deal .
they 're going to be tapping into carbon credits .
let 's go back to nigeria .
the banking sector has undergone tremendous transformation , from over 80 banks to 25 banks . strengthening of the system .
but what 's going on there ? only 10 percent of the country is banked .
the largest population in africa is in nigeria .
135 million-plus people . think about that .
there are only 700 atms in the country . opportunity .
the same for telecoms across the country .
now let 's look at the continent as a whole .
people look at the roads , for example , and they 'd say , " angola : 90 percent of roads are untarred . ah , problem ! "
it 's more expensive to transport goods . prices of goods go up , inflation is affected .
nigeria : 70 percent of roads are untarred . zambia : 80 percent .
in general , more than 50 percent of roads are untarred .
this is an opportunity ! energy needs - it 's an opportunity .
so what are the signs that things are fundamentally changing ?
let 's look at the stock markets in africa .
if i had to ask you , " in 2005 what was the best performing stock market or stock exchange in the world ? " would egypt come to mind ?
in 2005 , the egyptian stock exchange returned over 145 percent .
what 's going on in some of the other countries ?
let 's look at some 2006 numbers . kenya : over 60 percent . nigeria : over 40 percent .
south africa : in the 20 percents . high ones .
these are the trends that are taking place .
but in any investment decision , the key question is , " what is my alternative investment ? "
because in africa today , we are competing globally for capital .
and global capital is agnostic - it has no loyalties .
there 's an overhang of capital in the u.s. , and the key is yield pickup .
what africa is providing is a diversification play , and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that 's aware of what he or she is doing .
now , when looking at africa vis-a-vis other things , and countries in africa vis-a-vis other things , comparisons become important .
10 years ago there , were very few countries that received sovereign ratings from the standard & poors , moody 's and fitch 's .
today , 16 african countries and growing have sovereign country ratings . what does this mean ?
take nigeria again : double b-minus - in the league of ukraine and turkey . immediately we have a comparison .
the backbone of making investment decisions for global holders of capital .
some other figures . south africa : triple b-plus . botswana : a-plus .
bakino faso : b-minus . and so on .
in fact , one of the big agencies is setting up an office in africa .
why are they doing that ? because they expect investment to follow .
so one of the big bellwethers , and one of my final points i want to mention , is the interesting thing i read is that cnbc has launched their first african channel . why is cnbc doing this ?
it 's the 24-hour rolling african news channel .
they 're doing it because they are expecting things to happen .
me and you , the investments we are going to be making , the investments the world is going to be making - that 's the 24-hour news channel dedicated to africa .
so that 's the change that 's coming down the pipeline .
so in conclusion , i want to turn back to that very slide that made such a deep impact on me all those years ago .
this time -lsb- i 'll -rsb- give you the entire picture that i saw in 2002 , and ask you that when you think about what your role can be in africa , think about your journey in terms of bringing light to this continent .
because there are amazing opportunities available .
and think about the concept of transformation in the back of your mind because things can be turned around rather quickly .
in 1899 , joseph conrad released " the heart of darkness , " a tale of grim horror along the congo river .
if one looks carefully , on the congo river is one of those bright lights . and that 's the very congo river generating light - the old heart of darkness now generating light with hydro-electric power .
that is a transformation in power of ideas .
so the next step , over the next four days , is us exploring more of these ideas .
and perchance , if you can always keep this picture in your mind , that when we convene maybe in the distant future , in 2020 , that picture will look very different .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . i have two missions here today .
the first is to tell you something about pollen , i hope , and to convince you that it 's more than just something that gets up your nose .
and , secondly , to convince you that every home really ought to have a scanning electron microscope .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pollen is a flower 's way of making more flowers .
it carries male sex cells from one flower to another .
this gives us genetic diversity , or at least it gives the plants genetic diversity .
and it 's really rather better not to mate with yourself .
that 's probably true of humans as well , mostly .
pollen is produced by the anthers of flowers .
each anther can carry up to 100,000 grains of pollen , so , it 's quite prolific stuff .
and it is n't just bright flowers that have pollen ; it 's also trees and grasses .
and remember that all our cereal crops are grasses as well .
here is a scanning electron micrograph of a grain of pollen .
the little hole in the middle , we 'll come to a bit later , but that 's for the pollen tube to come out later on . a very tiny tube .
so , that 's 20 micrometers across , that pollen grain there .
that 's about a 50th of a millimeter .
but not all pollen is quite so simple looking .
this is morina . this is a plant - which i 've always thought to be rather tedious - named after morin , who was an enterprising french gardener , who issued the first seed catalog in 1621 .
but anyway , take a look at its pollen .
this is amazing , i think .
that little hole in the middle there is for the pollen tube , and when the pollen finds its special female spot in another morina flower , just on the right species , what happens ?
like i said , pollen carries the male sex cells .
if you actually did n't realize that plants have sex , they have rampant , promiscuous and really quite interesting and curious sex . really .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a lot .
my story is actually not about plant propagation , but about pollen itself .
" so , what are pollen 's properties ? " i hear you ask .
first of all , pollen is tiny . yes we know that .
it 's also very biologically active , as anyone with hay fever will understand .
now , pollen from plants , which are wind-dispersed - like trees and grasses and so on - tend to cause the most hay fever .
and the reason for that is they 've got to chuck out masses and masses of pollen to have any chance of the pollen reaching another plant of the same species .
here are some examples - they 're very smooth if you look at them - of tree pollen that is meant to be carried by the wind .
again - this time , sycamore - wind-dispersed .
so , trees : very boring flowers , not really trying to attract insects .
cool pollen , though .
this one i particularly like .
this is the monterey pine , which has little air sacks to make the pollen carry even further .
remember , that thing is just about 30 micrometers across .
now , it 's much more efficient if you can get insects to do your bidding .
this is a bee 's leg with the pollen glommed onto it from a mallow plant .
and this is the outrageous and beautiful flower of the mangrove palm .
very showy , to attract lots of insects to do its bidding .
the pollen has little barbs on it , if we look .
now , those little barbs obviously stick to the insects well , but there is something else that we can tell from this photograph , and that is that you might be able to see a fracture line across what would be the equator of this , if it was the earth .
that tells me that it 's actually been fossilized , this pollen .
and i 'm rather proud to say that this was found just near london , and that 55 million years ago london was full of mangroves .
is n't that cool ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so this is another species evolved to be dispersed by insects .
you can tell that from the little barbs on there .
all these pictures were taken with a scanning electron microscope , actually in the lab at kew laboratories .
no coincidence that these were taken by rob kesseler , who is an artist , and i think it 's someone with a design and artistic eye like him that has managed to bring out the best in pollen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , all this diversity means that you can look at a pollen grain and tell what species it came from , and that 's actually quite handy if you maybe have a sample and you want to see where it came from .
so , different species of plants grow in different places , and some pollen carries further than others .
so , if you have a pollen sample , then in principle , you should be able to tell where that sample came from .
and this is where it gets interesting for forensics .
pollen is tiny . it gets on to things , and it sticks to them .
so , not only does each type of pollen look different , but each habitat has a different combination of plants .
a different pollen signature , if you like , or a different pollen fingerprint .
by looking at the proportions and combinations of different kinds of pollen in a sample , you can tell very precisely where it came from .
this is some pollen embedded in a cotton shirt , similar to the one that i 'm wearing now .
now , much of the pollen will still be there after repeated washings .
where has it been ?
four very different habitats might look similar , but they 've got very different pollen signatures .
actually this one is particularly easy , these pictures were all taken in different countries .
but pollen forensics can be very subtle .
it 's being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made , where banknotes have come from , to look at the provenance of antiques and see that they really did come from the place the seller said they did .
and murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing , certainly in the u.k. , to within an area that 's small enough that you can send in tracker dogs to find the murder victim .
so , you can tell from a piece of clothing to within about a kilometer or so , where that piece of clothing has been recently and then send in dogs .
and finally , in a rather grizzly way , the bosnia war crimes ; some of the people brought to trial were brought to trial because of the evidence from pollen , which showed that bodies had been buried , exhumed and then reburied somewhere else .
i hope i 've opened your eyes , if you 'll excuse the visual pun , -lrb- laughter -rrb- to some of pollen 's secrets .
this is a horse chestnut .
there is an invisible beauty all around us , each grain with a story to tell ...
each of us , in fact , with a story to tell from the pollen fingerprint that 's upon us .
thank you to the colleagues at kew , and thank you to palynologists everywhere .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , this is about state budgets .
this is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning .
but i want to tell you , i think it 's an important topic that we need to care about .
state budgets are big , big money - i 'll show you the numbers - and they get very little scrutiny .
the understanding is very low .
many of the people involved have special interests or short-term interests that get them not thinking about what the implications of the trends are .
and these budgets are the key for our future ; they 're the key for our kids .
most education funding - whether it 's k through 12 , or the great universities or community colleges - most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets .
but we have a problem .
here 's the overall picture .
u.s. economy is big - 14.7 trillion .
now out of that pie , the government spends 36 percent .
so this is combining the federal level , which is the largest , the state level and the local level .
and it 's really in this combined way that you get an overall sense of what 's going on , because there 's a lot of complex things like medicaid and research money that flow across those boundaries .
but we 're spending 36 percent .
well what are we taking in ?
simple business question .
answer is 26 percent .
now this leaves 10 percent deficit , sort of a mind-blowing number .
and some of that , in fact , is due to the fact that we 've had an economic recession .
receipts go down , some spending programs go up , but most of it is not because of that .
most of it is because of ways that the liabilities are building up and the trends , and that creates a huge challenge .
in fact , this is the forecast picture .
there are various things in here : i could say we might raise more revenue , or medical innovation will make the spending even higher .
it is an increasingly difficult picture , even assuming the economy does quite well - probably better than it will do .
this is what you see at this overall level .
now how did we get here ?
how could you have a problem like this ?
after all , at least on paper , there 's this notion that these state budgets are balanced .
only one state says they do n't have to balance the budget .
but what this means actually is that there 's a pretense .
there 's no real , true balancing going on , and in a sense , the games they play to hide that actually obscure the topic so much that people do n't see things that are actually pretty straight-forward challenges .
when jerry brown was elected , this was the challenge that was put to him .
that is , through various gimmicks and things , a so-called balanced budget had led him to have 25 billion missing out of the 76 billion in proposed spending .
now he 's put together some thoughts : about half of that he 'll cut , another half , perhaps in a very complex set of steps , taxes will be approved .
but even so , as you go out into those future years , various pension costs , health costs go up enough , and the revenue does not go up enough .
so you get a big squeeze .
what were those things that allowed us to hide this ?
well , some really nice little tricks .
and these were somewhat noticed .
the paper said , " it 's not really balanced .
it 's got holes .
it perpetuates deficit spending .
it 's riddled with gimmicks . "
and really when you get down to it , the guys at enron never would have done this .
this is so blatant , so extreme .
is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do ?
they borrow money .
they 're not supposed to , but they figure out a way .
they make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out .
they sell off the assets .
they defer the payments .
they sell off the revenues from tobacco .
and california 's not unique .
in fact , there 's about five states that are worse and only really four states that do n't face this big challenge .
so it 's systemic across the entire country .
it really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations - health care , where innovation makes it more expensive , early retirement and pension , where the age structure gets worse for you , and just generosity - that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time , that you 've got a problem .
this is the retiree health care benefits .
three million set aside , 62 billion dollar liability - much worse than the car companies .
and everybody looked at that and knew that that was headed toward a huge problem .
the forecast for the medical piece alone is to go from 26 percent of the budget to 42 percent .
well what 's going to give ?
well in order to accommodate that , you would have to cut education spending in half .
it really is this young versus the old to some degree .
if you do n't change that revenue picture , if you do n't solve what you 're doing in health care , you 're going to be deinvesting in the young .
the great university of california university system , the great things that have gone on , wo n't happen .
so far it 's meant layoffs , increased class sizes .
within the education community there 's this discussion of , " should it just be the young teachers who get laid off , or the less good teachers who get laid off ? "
and there 's a discussion : if you 're going to increase class sizes , where do you do that ? how much effect does that have ?
and unfortunately , as you get into that , people get confused and think , well maybe you think that 's okay .
in fact , no , education spending should not be cut .
there 's ways , if it 's temporary , to minimize the impact , but it 's a problem .
it 's also really a problem for where we need to go .
technology has a role to play .
well we need money to experiment with that , to get those tools in there .
there 's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness , measuring them , giving them feedback , taking videos in the classroom .
that 's something i think is very , very important .
well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay .
in a situation where you have growth , you put the new money into this .
or even if you 're flat , you might shift money into it .
but with the type of cuts we 're talking about , it will be far , far harder to get these incentives for excellence , or to move over to use technology in the new way .
so what 's going on ?
where 's the brain trust that 's in error here ?
well there really is no brain trust .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's sort of the voters . it 's sort of us showing up .
just look at this spending .
california will spend over 100 billion , microsoft , 38 , google , about 19 .
the amount of iq in good numeric analysis , both inside google and microsoft and outside , with analysts and people of various opinions - should they have spent on that ?
no , they wasted their money on this . what about this thing ? - it really is quite phenomenal .
everybody has an opinion .
there 's great feedback .
and the numbers are used to make decisions .
if you go over the education spending and the health care spending - particularly these long-term trends - you do n't have that type of involvement on a number that 's more important in terms of equity , in terms of learning .
so what do we need to do ?
we need better tools .
we can get some things out on the internet .
i 'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture .
we need lots more .
there 's a few good books , one about school spending and where the money comes from - how that 's changed over time , and the challenge .
we need better accounting .
we need to take the fact that the current employees , the future liabilities they create , that should come out of the current budget .
we need to understand why they 've done the pension accounting the way they have .
it should be more like private accounting .
it 's the gold standard .
and finally , we need to really reward politicians .
whenever they say there 's these long-term problems , we ca n't say , " oh , you 're the messenger with bad news ?
we just shot you . "
in fact , there are some like these : erskine bowles , alan simpson and others , who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem .
but in fact , their work was sort of pushed off .
in fact , the week afterwards , some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions .
so we need these pieces .
now i think this is a solvable problem .
it 's a great country with lots of people .
but we have to draw those people in , because this is about education .
and just look at what happened with the tuitions with the university of california and project that out for another three , four , five years - it 's unaffordable .
and that 's the kind of thing - the investment in the young - that makes us great , allows us to contribute .
it allows us to do the art , the biotechnology , the software and all those magic things .
and so the bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they 're critical for our kids and our future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 're here today to announce the first synthetic cell , a cell made by starting with the digital code in the computer , building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals , assembling that chromosome in yeast , transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell and transforming that cell into a new bacterial species .
so this is the first self-replicating species that we 've had on the planet whose parent is a computer .
it also is the first species to have its own website encoded in its genetic code .
but we 'll talk more about the watermarks in a minute .
this is a project that had its inception 15 years ago when our team then - we called the institute tigr - was involved in sequencing the first two genomes in history .
we did haemophilus influenzae and then the smallest genome of a self-replicating organism , that of mycoplasma genitalium .
and as soon as we had these two sequences we thought , if this is supposed to be the smallest genome of a self-replicating species , could there be even a smaller genome ?
could we understand the basis of cellular life at the genetic level ?
it 's been a 15-year quest just to get to the starting point now to be able to answer those questions , because it 's very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell .
you can only do them one at a time .
we decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route , even though nobody had been there before , to see if we could synthesize a bacterial chromosome so we could actually vary the gene content to understand the essential genes for life .
that started our 15-year quest to get here .
but before we did the first experiments , we actually asked art caplan 's team at the university of pennsylvania to undertake a review of what the risks , the challenges , the ethics around creating new species in the laboratory were because it had n't been done before .
they spent about two years reviewing that independently and published their results in science in 1999 .
ham and i took two years off as a side project to sequence the human genome , but as soon as that was done we got back to the task at hand .
in 2002 , we started a new institute , the institute for biological energy alternatives , where we set out two goals : one , to understand the impact of our technology on the environment , and how to understand the environment better , and two , to start down this process of making synthetic life to understand basic life .
in 2003 , we published our first success .
so ham smith and clyde hutchison developed some new methods for making error-free dna at a small level .
our first task was a 5,000-letter code bacteriophage , a virus that attacks only e. coli .
so that was the phage phi x 174 , which was chosen for historical reasons .
it was the first dna phage , dna virus , dna genome that was actually sequenced .
so once we realized that we could make 5,000-base pair viral-sized pieces , we thought , we at least have the means then to try and make serially lots of these pieces to be able to eventually assemble them together to make this mega base chromosome .
so , substantially larger than we even thought we would go initially .
there were several steps to this . there were two sides : we had to solve the chemistry for making large dna molecules , and we had to solve the biological side of how , if we had this new chemical entity , how would we boot it up , activate it in a recipient cell .
we had two teams working in parallel : one team on the chemistry , and the other on trying to be able to transplant entire chromosomes to get new cells .
when we started this out , we thought the synthesis would be the biggest problem , which is why we chose the smallest genome .
and some of you have noticed that we switched from the smallest genome to a much larger one .
and we can walk through the reasons for that , but basically the small cell took on the order of one to two months to get results from , whereas the larger , faster-growing cell takes only two days .
so there 's only so many cycles we could go through in a year at six weeks per cycle .
and you should know that basically 99 , probably 99 percent plus of our experiments failed .
so this was a debugging , problem-solving scenario from the beginning because there was no recipe of how to get there .
so , one of the most important publications we had was in 2007 .
carole lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another .
i think philosophically , that was one of the most important papers that we 've ever done because it showed how dynamic life was .
and we knew , once that worked , that we actually had a chance if we could make the synthetic chromosomes to do the same with those .
we did n't know that it was going to take us several years more to get there .
in 2008 , we reported the complete synthesis of the mycoplasma genitalium genome , a little over 500,000 letters of genetic code , but we have not yet succeeded in booting up that chromosome .
we think in part , because of its slow growth and , in part , cells have all kinds of unique defense mechanisms to keep these events from happening .
it turned out the cell that we were trying to transplant into had a nuclease , an enzyme that chews up dna on its surface , and was happy to eat the synthetic dna that we gave it and never got transplantations .
but at the time , that was the largest molecule of a defined structure that had been made .
and so both sides were progressing , but part of the synthesis had to be accomplished or was able to be accomplished using yeast , putting the fragments in yeast and yeast would assemble these for us .
it 's an amazing step forward , but we had a problem because now we had the bacterial chromosomes growing in yeast .
so in addition to doing the transplant , we had to find out how to get a bacterial chromosome out of the eukaryotic yeast into a form where we could transplant it into a recipient cell .
so our team developed new techniques for actually growing , cloning entire bacterial chromosomes in yeast .
so we took the same mycoides genome that carole had initially transplanted , and we grew that in yeast as an artificial chromosome .
and we thought this would be a great test bed for learning how to get chromosomes out of yeast and transplant them .
when we did these experiments , though , we could get the chromosome out of yeast but it would n't transplant and boot up a cell .
that little issue took the team two years to solve .
it turns out , the dna in the bacterial cell was actually methylated , and the methylation protects it from the restriction enzyme , from digesting the dna .
so what we found is if we took the chromosome out of yeast and methylated it , we could then transplant it .
further advances came when the team removed the restriction enzyme genes from the recipient capricolum cell .
and once we had done that , now we can take naked dna out of yeast and transplant it .
so last fall when we published the results of that work in science , we all became overconfident and were sure we were only a few weeks away from being able to now boot up a chromosome out of yeast .
because of the problems with mycoplasma genitalium and its slow growth about a year and a half ago , we decided to synthesize the much larger chromosome , the mycoides chromosome , knowing that we had the biology worked out on that for transplantation .
and dan led the team for the synthesis of this over one-million-base pair chromosome .
but it turned out it was n't going to be as simple in the end , and it set us back three months because we had one error out of over a million base pairs in that sequence .
so the team developed new debugging software , where we could test each synthetic fragment to see if it would grow in a background of wild type dna .
and we found that 10 out of the 11 100,000-base pair pieces we synthesized were completely accurate and compatible with a life-forming sequence .
we narrowed it down to one fragment ; we sequenced it and found just one base pair had been deleted in an essential gene .
so accuracy is essential .
there 's parts of the genome where it can not tolerate even a single error , and then there 's parts of the genome where we can put in large blocks of dna , as we did with the watermarks , and it can tolerate all kinds of errors .
so it took about three months to find that error and repair it .
and then early one morning , at 6 a.m.
we got a text from dan saying that , now , the first blue colonies existed .
so , it 's been a long route to get here : 15 years from the beginning .
we felt one of the tenets of this field was to make absolutely certain we could distinguish synthetic dna from natural dna .
early on , when you 're working in a new area of science , you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you had n't , and , even worse , leading others to believe it .
so , we thought the worst problem would be a single molecule contamination of the native chromosome , leading us to believe that we actually had created a synthetic cell , when it would have been just a contaminant .
so early on , we developed the notion of putting in watermarks in the dna to absolutely make clear that the dna was synthetic .
and the first chromosome we built in 2008 - the 500,000-base pair one - we simply assigned the names of the authors of the chromosome into the genetic code , but it was using just amino acid single letter translations , which leaves out certain letters of the alphabet .
so the team actually developed a new code within the code within the code .
so it 's a new code for interpreting and writing messages in dna .
now , mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time , but it 's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because , if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed , it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions .
so the code that mike montague and the team developed actually puts frequent stop codons , so it 's a different alphabet but allows us to use the entire english alphabet with punctuation and numbers .
so , there are four major watermarks all over 1,000 base pairs of genetic code .
the first one actually contains within it this code for interpreting the rest of the genetic code .
so in the remaining information , in the watermarks , contain the names of , i think it 's 46 different authors and key contributors to getting the project to this stage .
and we also built in a website address so that if somebody decodes the code within the code within the code , they can send an email to that address .
so it 's clearly distinguishable from any other species , having 46 names in it , its own web address .
and we added three quotations , because with the first genome we were criticized for not trying to say something more profound than just signing the work .
so we wo n't give the rest of the code , but we will give the three quotations .
the first is , " to live , to err , to fall , to triumph and to recreate life out of life . "
it 's a james joyce quote .
the second quotation is , " see things not as they are , but as they might be . "
it 's a quote from the " american prometheus " book on robert oppenheimer .
and the last one is a richard feynman quote : " what i can not build , i can not understand . "
so , because this is as much a philosophical advance as a technical advance in science , we tried to deal with both the philosophical and the technical side .
the last thing i want to say before turning it over to questions is that the extensive work that we 've done - asking for ethical review , pushing the envelope on that side as well as the technical side - this has been broadly discussed in the scientific community , in the policy community and at the highest levels of the federal government .
even with this announcement , as we did in 2003 - that work was funded by the department of energy , so the work was reviewed at the level of the white house , trying to decide whether to classify the work or publish it .
and they came down on the side of open publication , which is the right approach - we 've briefed the white house , we 've briefed members of congress , we 've tried to take and push the policy issues in parallel with the scientific advances .
so with that , i would like to open it first to the floor for questions .
yes , in the back .
reporter : could you explain , in layman 's terms , how significant a breakthrough this is please ?
craig venter : can we explain how significant this is ?
i 'm not sure we 're the ones that should be explaining how significant it is .
it 's significant to us .
perhaps it 's a giant philosophical change in how we view life .
we actually view it as a baby step in terms of , it 's taken us 15 years to be able to do the experiment we wanted to do 15 years ago on understanding life at its basic level .
but we actually believe this is going to be a very powerful set of tools and we 're already starting in numerous avenues we have , at the institute , ongoing funding now from nih in a program with novartis to try and use these new synthetic dna tools to perhaps make the flu vaccine that you might get next year .
because instead of taking weeks to months to make these , dan 's team can now make these in less than 24 hours .
so when you see how long it took to get an h1n1 vaccine out , we think we can shorten that process quite substantially .
in the vaccine area , synthetic genomics and the institute are forming a new vaccine company because we think these tools can affect vaccines to diseases that have n't been possible to date , things where the viruses rapidly evolve , such with rhinovirus .
would n't it be nice to have something that actually blocked common colds ?
or , more importantly , hiv , where the virus evolves so quickly the vaccines that are made today ca n't keep up with those evolutionary changes .
also , at synthetic genomics , we 've been working on major environmental issues .
i think this latest oil spill in the gulf is a reminder .
we ca n't see co2 - we depend on scientific measurements for it and we see the beginning results of having too much of it - but we can see pre-co2 now floating on the waters and contaminating the beaches in the gulf .
we need some alternatives for oil .
we have a program with exxon mobile to try and develop new strains of algae that can efficiently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from concentrated sources , make new hydrocarbons that can go into their refineries to make normal gasoline and diesel fuel out of co2 .
those are just a couple of the approaches and directions that we 're taking .
-lrb- applause -rrb- roy gould : less than a year from now , the world is going to celebrate the international year of astronomy , which marks the 400th anniversary of galileo 's first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope .
in a few months , the world is also going to celebrate the launch of a new invention from microsoft research , which i think is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as galileo did four centuries ago .
it 's called the worldwide telescope , and i want to thank ted and microsoft for allowing me to bring it to your attention .
and i want to urge you , when you get a chance , to give it a closer look at the ted lab downstairs .
the worldwide telescope takes the best images from the world 's greatest telescopes on earth and in space , and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe .
it 's going to change the way we do astronomy , it 's going to change the way we teach astronomy and i think most importantly it 's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe .
if we were having this ted meeting in our grandparents ' day , that might not be so big a claim .
in 1920 , for example , you were n't allowed to drink ; if you were a woman , you were n't allowed to vote ; and if you looked up at the stars and the milky way on a summer night , what you saw was thought to be the entire universe .
in fact , the head of harvard 's observatory back then gave a great debate in which he argued that the milky way galaxy was the entire universe .
harvard was wrong , big time . -lrb- laughter -rrb- of course , we know today that galaxies extend far beyond our own galaxy .
we can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe , all the way back in time , almost to the moment of the big bang itself .
we can see across the entire spectrum of light , revealing worlds that had previously been invisible .
we see these magnificent star nurseries , where nature has somehow arranged for just the right numbers and just the right sizes of stars to be born for life to arise .
we see alien worlds , we see alien solar systems - 300 now , and still counting - and they 're not like us .
we see black holes at the heart of our galaxy , in the milky way , and elsewhere in the universe , where time itself seems to stand still .
but until now , our view of the universe has been disconnected and fragmented , and i think that many of the marvelous stories that nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks . and that 's changing .
i want to just briefly mention three reasons why my colleagues and i , in astronomy and in education , are so excited about the worldwide telescope and why we think it 's truly transformative .
first , it enables you to experience the universe : the worldwide telescope , for me , is a kind of magic carpet that lets you navigate through the universe where you want to go .
second : you can tour the universe with astronomers as your guides .
and i 'm not talking here about just experts who are telling you what you 're seeing , but really people who are passionate about the various nooks and crannies of the universe , who can share their enthusiasm and can make the universe a welcoming place .
and third , you can create your own tours - you can share them with friends , you can create them with friends - and that 's the part that i think i 'm most excited about because i think that at heart , we are all storytellers .
and in telling stories , each of us is going to understand the universe in our own way .
we 're going to have a personal universe .
i think we 're going to see a community of storytellers evolve and emerge .
before i introduce the person responsible for the worldwide telescope , i just want to leave you with this brief thought : when i ask people , " how does the night sky make you feel ? "
they often say , " oh , tiny . i feel tiny and insignificant . "
well , our gaze fills the universe .
and thanks to the creators of the worldwide telescope , we can now start to have a dialogue with the universe .
i think the worldwide telescope will convince you that we may be tiny , but we are truly , wonderfully significant .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i ca n't tell you what a privilege it is to introduce curtis wong from microsoft . -lrb- applause -rrb- curtis wong : thank you , roy .
so , what you 're seeing here is a wonderful presentation , but it 's one of the tours .
and actually this tour is one that was created earlier .
and the tours are all totally interactive , so that if i were to go somewhere ...
you may be watching a tour and you can pause anywhere along the way , pull up other information - there are lots of web and information sources about places you might want to go - you can zoom in , you can pull back out .
the whole resources are there available for you .
so , microsoft - this is a project that - worldwide telescope is dedicated to jim gray , who 's our colleague , and a lot of his work that he did is really what makes this project possible .
it 's a labor of love for us and our small team , and we really hope it will inspire kids to explore and learn about the universe .
so basically , kids of all ages , like us .
and so worldwide telescope will be available this spring .
it 'll be a free download - thank you , craig mundie - and it 'll be available at the website worldwidetelescope.org , which is something new .
and so , what you 've seen today is less than a fraction of one percent of what is in here , and in the ted lab , we have a tour that was created by a six-year-old named benjamin that will knock your socks off . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 'll see you there . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have had the distinct pleasure of living inside two biospheres .
of course we all here in this room live in biosphere 1 .
i 've also lived in biosphere 2 .
and the wonderful thing about that is that i get to compare biospheres .
and hopefully from that i get to learn something .
so what did i learn ? well , here i am inside biosphere 2 , making a pizza .
so i am harvesting the wheat , in order to make the dough .
and then of course i have to milk the goats and feed the goats in order to make the cheese .
it took me four months in biosphere 2 to make a pizza .
here in biosphere 1 , well it takes me about two minutes , because i pick up the phone and i call and say , " hey , can you deliver the pizza ? "
so biosphere 2 was essentially a three-acre , entirely sealed , miniature world that i lived in for two years and 20 minutes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- over the top it was sealed with steel and glass , underneath it was sealed with a pan of steel - essentially entirely sealed .
so we had our own miniature rainforest , a private beach with a coral reef .
we had a savanna , a marsh , a desert .
we had our own half-acre farm that we had to grow everything .
and of course we had our human habitat , where we lived .
back in the mid- ' 80s when we were designing biosphere 2 , we had to ask ourselves some pretty basic questions .
i mean , what is a biosphere ?
back then , yes , i guess we all know now that it is essentially the sphere of life around the earth , right ?
well , you have to get a little more specific than that if you 're going to build one .
and so we decided that what it really is is that it is entirely materially closed - that is , nothing goes in or out at all , no material - and energetically open , which is essentially what planet earth is .
this is a chamber that was 1/400th the size of biosphere 2 that we called our test module .
and the very first day that this fellow , john allen , walked in , to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we 'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive , the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin , or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something , fungus .
but of course none of that happened .
and over the ensuing few years , there were great sagas about designing biosphere 2 .
but by 1991 we finally had this thing built .
and it was time for us to go in and give it a go .
we needed to know , is life this malleable ?
can you take this biosphere , that has evolved on a planetary scale , and jam it into a little bottle , and will it survive ?
big questions .
and we wanted to know this both for being able to go somewhere else in the universe - if we were going to go to mars , for instance , would we take a biosphere with us , to live in it ?
we also wanted to know so we can understand more about the earth that we all live in .
well , in 1991 it was finally time for us to go in and try out this baby .
let 's take it on a maiden voyage .
will it work ? or will something happen that we ca n't understand and we ca n't fix , thereby negating the concept of man-made biospheres ?
so eight of us went in : four men and four women .
more on that later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is the world that we lived in .
so , on the top , we had these beautiful rainforests and an ocean , and underneath we had all this technosphere , we called it , which is where all the pumps and the valves and the water tanks and the air handlers , and all of that .
one of the biospherians called it " garden of eden on top of an aircraft carrier . "
and then also we had the human habitat of course , with the laboratories , and all of that .
this is the agriculture .
it was essentially an organic farm .
the day i walked into biosphere 2 , i was , for the first time , breathing a completely different atmosphere than everybody else in the world , except seven other people .
at that moment i became part of that biosphere .
and i do n't mean that in an abstract sense ; i mean it rather literally .
when i breathed out , my co2 fed the sweet potatoes that i was growing .
and we ate an awful lot of the sweet potatoes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and those sweet potatoes became part of me .
in fact , we ate so many sweet potatoes i became orange with sweet potato .
i literally was eating the same carbon over and over again .
i was eating myself in some strange sort of bizarre way .
when it came to our atmosphere , however , it was n't that much of a joke over the long term , because it turned out that we were losing oxygen , quite a lot of oxygen .
and we knew that we were losing co2 .
and so we were working to sequester carbon .
good lord - we know that term now .
we were growing plants like crazy .
we were taking their biomass , storing them in the basement , growing plants , going around , around , around , trying to take all of that carbon out of the atmosphere .
we were trying to stop carbon from going into the atmosphere .
we stopped irrigating our soil , as much as we could .
we stopped tilling , so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air .
but our oxygen was going down faster than our co2 was going up , which was quite unexpected , because we had seen them going in tandem in the test module .
and it was like playing atomic hide-and-seek .
we had lost seven tons of oxygen .
and we had no clue where it was .
and i tell you , when you lose a lot of oxygen - and our oxygen went down quite far ; it went from 21 percent down to 14.2 percent - my goodness , do you feel dreadful .
i mean we were dragging ourselves around the biosphere .
and we had sleep apnea at night .
so you 'd wake up gasping with breath , because your blood chemistry has changed .
and that you literally do that . you stop breathing and then you - -lrb- gasps -rrb- - take a breath and it wakes you up . and it 's very irritating .
and everybody outside thought we were dying .
i mean , the media was making it sound like were were dying .
and i had to call up my mother every other day saying , " no , mum , it 's fine , fine .
we 're not dead . we 're fine . we 're fine . "
and the doctor was , in fact , checking us to make sure we were , in fact , fine .
but in fact he was the person who was most susceptible to the oxygen .
and one day he could n't add up a line of figures .
and it was time for us to put oxygen in .
and you might think , well , " boy , your life support system was failing you . was n't that dreadful ? "
yes . in a sense it was terrifying .
except that i knew i could walk out the airlock door at any time , if it really got bad , though who was going to say , " i ca n't take it anymore ! " ?
not me , that was for sure .
but on the other hand , it was the scientific gold of the project , because we could really crank this baby up , as a scientific tool , and see if we could , in fact , find where those seven tons of oxygen had gone .
and we did indeed find it .
and we found it in the concrete .
essentially it had done something very simple .
we had put too much carbon in the soil in the form of compost .
it broke down ; it took oxygen out of the air ; it put co2 into the air ; and it went into the concrete .
pretty straightforward really .
so at the end of the two years when we came out , we were elated , because , in fact , although you might say we had discovered something that was quite " uhh , " when your oxygen is going down , stopped working , essentially , in your life support system , that 's a very bad failure .
except that we knew what it was . and we knew how to fix it .
and nothing else emerged that really was as serious as that .
and we proved the concept , more or less .
people , on the other hand , was a different subject .
we were - yeah i do n't know that we were fixable .
we all went quite nuts , i will say .
and the day i came out of biosphere 2 , i was thrilled i was going to see all my family and my friends .
for two years i 'd been seeing people through the glass .
and everybody ran up to me .
and i recoiled . they stank !
people stink !
we stink of hairspray and underarm deodorant , and all kinds of stuff .
now we had stuff inside biosphere to keep ourselves clean , but nothing with perfume .
and boy do we stink out here .
not only that , but i lost touch of where my food came from .
i had been growing all my own food .
i had no idea what was in my food , where it came from .
i did n't even recognize half the names in most of the food that i was eating .
in fact , i would stand for hours in the aisles of shops , reading all the names on all of the things .
people must have thought i was nuts .
it was really quite astonishing .
and i slowly lost track of where i was in this big biosphere , in this big biosphere that we all live in .
in biosphere 2 i totally understood that i had a huge impact on my biosphere , everyday , and it had an impact on me , very viscerally , very literally .
so i went about my business : paragon space development corporation , a little firm i started with people while i was in the biosphere , because i had nothing else to do .
and one of the things we did was try to figure out : how small can you make these biospheres , and what can you do with them ?
and so we sent one onto the mir space station .
we had one on the shuttle and one on the international space station , for 16 months , where we managed to produce the first organisms to go through complete multiple life cycles in space - really pushing the envelope of understanding how malleable our life systems are .
and i 'm also proud to announce that you 're getting a sneak preview - on friday we 're going to announce that we 're actually forming a team to develop a system to grow plants on the moon , which is going to be pretty fun .
and the legacy of that is a system that we were designing : an entirely sealed system to grow plants to grow on mars .
and part of that is that we had to model very rapid circulation of co2 and oxygen and water through this plant system .
as a result of that modeling i ended up in all places , in eritrea , in the horn of africa .
eritrea , formerly part of ethiopia , is one of those places that is astonishingly beautiful , incredibly stark , and i have no understanding of how people eke out a living there .
it is so dry .
this is what i saw .
but this is also what i saw .
i saw a company that had taken seawater and sand , and they were growing a kind of crop that will grow on pure salt water without having to treat it .
and it will produce a food crop .
in this case it was oilseed .
it was astonishing . they were also producing mangroves in a plantation .
and the mangroves were providing wood and honey and leaves for the animals , so that they could produce milk and whatnot , like we had in the biosphere .
and all of it was coming from this : shrimp farms .
shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth , frankly , from an environmental point of view .
they pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean .
they also pollute their next-door neighbors .
so they 're all shitting each other 's ponds , quite literally .
and what this project was doing was taking the effluent of these , and turning them into all of this food .
they were literally turning pollution into abundance for a desert people .
they had created an industrial ecosystem , of a sense .
i was there because i was actually modeling the mangrove portion for a carbon credit program , under the u.n.
kyoto protocol system .
and as i was modeling this mangrove swamp , i was thinking to myself , " how do you put a box around this ? "
when i 'm modeling a plant in a box , literally , i know where to draw the boundary .
in a mangrove forest like this i have no idea .
well , of course you have to draw the boundary around the whole of the earth .
and understand its interactions with the entire earth .
and put your project in that context .
around the world today we 're seeing an incredible transformation , from what i would call a biocidal species , one that - whether we intentionally or unintentionally - have designed our systems to kill life , a lot of the time .
this is in fact , this beautiful photograph , is in fact over the amazon .
and here the light green are areas of massive deforestation .
and those beautiful wispy clouds are , in fact , fires , human-made fires .
we 're in the process of transforming from this , to what i would call a biophilic society , one where we learn to nurture society .
now it may not seem like it , but we are .
it is happening all across the world , in every kind of walk of life , and every kind of career and industry that you can think of .
and i think often times people get lost in that .
they go , " but how can i possibly find my way in that ?
it 's such a huge subject . "
and i would say that the small stuff counts . it really does .
this is the story of a rake in my backyard .
this was my backyard , very early on , when i bought my property .
and in arizona , of course , everybody puts gravel down .
and they like to keep everything beautifully raked . and they keep all the leaves away .
and on sunday morning the neighbors leaf blower comes out , and i want to throttle them .
it 's a certain type of aesthetic .
we 're very uncomfortable with untidiness .
and i threw away my rake .
and i let all of the leaves fall from the trees that i have on my property .
and over time , essentially what have i been doing ?
i 've been building topsoil .
and so now all the birds come in . and i have hawks .
and i have an oasis .
this is what happens every spring . for six weeks , six to eight weeks , i have this flush of green oasis .
this is actually in a riparian area .
and all of tucson could be like this if everybody would just revolt and throw away the rake .
the small stuff counts .
the industrial revolution - and prometheus - has given us this , the ability to light up the world .
it has also given us this , the ability to look at the world from the outside .
now we may not all have another biosphere that we can run to , and compare it to this biosphere .
but we can look at the world , and try to understand where we are in its context , and how we choose to interact with it .
and if you lose where you are in your biosphere , or are perhaps having a difficulty connecting with where you are in the biosphere , i would say to you , take a deep breath .
the yogis had it right .
breath does , in fact , connect us all in a very literal way .
take a breath now .
and as you breathe , think about what is in your breath .
there perhaps is the co2 from the person sitting next-door to you .
maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here .
it also connects us in time .
there may be some carbon in your breath from the dinosaurs .
there could also be carbon that you are exhaling now that will be in the breath of your great-great-great-grandchildren .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you about something kind of big .
we 'll start here .
65 million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a chunk of rock six miles across , moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet , slammed into the earth .
it released its energy all at once , and it was an explosion that was mind-numbing .
if you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the cold war , lumped them together and blew them up at the same time , that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment .
the dinosaurs had a really bad day .
okay ?
now , a six-mile-wide rock is very large .
we all live here in boulder .
if you look out your window and you can see long 's peak , you 're probably familiar with it .
now , scoop up long 's peak , and put it out in space .
take meeker , mt . meeker . lump that in there , and put that in space as well , and mt . everest , and k2 , and the indian peaks .
then you 're starting to get an idea of how much rock we 're talking about , okay ?
we know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left .
it hit in what we now know as yucatan , the gulf of mexico .
you can see here , there 's the yucatan peninsula , if you recognize cozumel off the east coast there .
here is how big of a crater was left .
it was huge . to give you a sense of the scale , okay , there you go . the scale here is 50 miles on top , a hundred kilometers on the bottom . this thing was 300 kilometers across - 200 miles - an enormous crater that excavated out vast amounts of earth that splashed around the globe and set fires all over the planet , threw up enough dust to block out the sun .
it wiped out 75 percent of all species on earth .
now , not all asteroids are that big .
some of them are smaller .
here is one that came in over the united states in october of 1992 .
it came in on a friday night .
why is that important ?
because back then , video cameras were just starting to become popular , and people would bring them , parents would bring them , to their kids ' football games to film their kids play football . and since this came in on a friday , they were able to get this great footage of this thing breaking up as it came in over west virgina , maryland , pennsylvania and new jersey until it did that to a car in new york .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this is not a 200-mile-wide crater , but then again you can see the rock which is sitting right here , about the size of a football , that hit that car and did that damage .
now this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in .
it broke up through atmospheric pressure , it crumbled , and then the pieces fell apart and did some damage .
now , you would n't want that falling on your foot or your head , because it would do that to it .
that would be bad .
but it wo n't wipe out , you know , all life on earth , so that 's fine . but it turns out , you do n't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage .
there is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock , and in fact , if any of you have ever been to near winslow , arizona , there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called meteor crater .
to give you a sense of scale , this is about a mile wide .
if you look up at the top , that 's a parking lot , and those are recreational vehicles right there .
so it 's about a mile across , 600 feet deep .
the object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across , so roughly the size of mackey auditorium here .
it came in at speeds that were tremendous , slammed into the ground , blew up , and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb - a very hefty bomb .
this was 50,000 years ago , so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope , or something like that out in the desert , but it probably would not have caused global devastation .
it turns out that these things do n't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage .
now , in 1908 , over siberia , near the tunguska region - for those of you who are dan aykroyd fans and saw " ghostbusters , " when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the siberia blast of 1909 , where he got the date wrong , but that 's okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was 1908 . that 's fine . i can live with that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another rock came into the earth 's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground , several miles up above the surface of the earth .
the heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it , and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles , okay ?
this did a huge amount of damage .
and again , this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we 're sitting in .
in meteor crater it was made of metal , and metal is much tougher , so it made it to the ground .
the one over tunguska was probably made blew up in the air . either way , these are tremendous explosions , 20 megatons .
now , when these things blow up , they 're not going to do global ecological damage .
they 're not going to do something like the dinosaur-killer did .
they 're just not big enough .
but they will do global economic damage , because they do n't have to hit , necessarily , to do this kind of damage .
they do n't have to do global devastation .
if one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere , it would cause a panic .
but if it came over a city , an important city - not that any city is more important than others , but some of them we depend on them more on the global economic basis - that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization .
so , now that i 've scared the crap out of you ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what can we do about this ? all right ?
this is a potential threat .
let me note that we have not had a giant impact like the dinosaur-killer for 65 million years . they 're very rare .
the smaller ones happen more often , but probably on the order of a millennium , every few centuries or every few thousand years , but it 's still something to be aware of .
well , what do we do about them ?
the first thing we have to do is find them .
this is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009 .
it 's right here .
but you can see that it 's extremely faint .
i do n't even know if you can see that in the back row . these are just stars .
this is a rock that was about 30 yards across , so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over tunguska and hit arizona 50,000 years ago .
these things are faint .
they 're hard to see , and the sky is really big .
we have to find these things first .
well the good news is , we 're looking for them .
nasa has devoted money to this .
the national science foundation , other countries are very interested in doing this .
we 're building telescopes that are looking for the threat . that 's a great first step , but what 's the second step ? the second step is that we see one heading toward us , we have to stop it . what do we do ?
you 've probably heard about the asteroid apophis . if you have n't yet , you will .
if you 've heard about the mayan 2012 apocalypse , you 're going to hear about apophis , because you 're keyed in to all the doomsday networks anyway .
apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004 .
it 's roughly 250 yards across , so it 's pretty big - big size , you know , bigger than a football stadium - and it 's going to pass by the earth in april of 2029 .
and it 's going to pass us so close that it 's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites .
the earth 's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it 's just right , if it passes through this region of space , this kidney bean-shaped region called the keyhole , the earth 's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later on april 13 , which is a friday , i 'll note , in the year 2036 ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- - you ca n't plan that kind of stuff - apophis is going to hit us . and it 's 250 meters across , so it would do unbelievable damage .
now the good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million , roughly - very , very low odds , so i personally am not lying awake at night worrying about this at all .
i do n't think apophis is a problem .
in fact , apophis is a blessing in disguise , because it woke us up to the dangers of these things .
this thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now .
it wo n't , but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids . we did n't really necessarily understand these keyholes , and now we do and it turns out that 's really important , because how do you stop an asteroid like this ?
well , let me ask you , what happens if you 're standing in the middle of the road and a car 's headed for you ? what do you do ? you do this .
right ? move . the car goes past you .
but we ca n't move the earth , at least not easily , but we can move a small asteroid .
and it turns out , we 've even done it .
in the year 2005 , nasa launched a probe called deep impact , which slammed into - slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet .
comets are very much like asteroids .
the purpose was n't to push it out of the way .
the purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet , which we learned quite a bit about .
we did move the comet a little tiny bit , not very much , but that was n't the point .
however , think about this .
this thing is orbiting the sun at 10 miles per second , 20 miles per second .
we shot a space probe at it and hit it . okay ?
imagine how hard that must be , and we did it .
that means we can do it again .
if we need , if we see an asteroid that 's coming toward us , and it 's headed right for us , and we have two years to go , boom ! we hit it .
you can try to - you know , if you watch the movies , you might think about , why do n't we use a nuclear weapon ?
it 's like , well , you can try that , but the problem is timing .
you shoot a nuclear weapon at this thing , you have to blow it up within a few milliseconds of tolerance or else you 'll just miss it .
and there are a lot of other problems with that . it 's very hard to do .
but just hitting something ? that 's pretty easy .
i think even nasa can do that , and they proved that they can . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the problem is , what happens if you hit this asteroid , you 've changed the orbit , you measure the orbit and then you find out , oh , yeah , we just pushed it into a keyhole , and now it 's going to hit us in three years .
well , my opinion is , fine . okay ?
it 's not hitting us in six months . that 's good .
now we have three years to do something else .
and you can hit it again . that 's kind of ham-fisted . you might just push it into a third keyhole or whatever , so you do n't do that .
and this is the part , it 's the part i just love .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after the big macho " rrrrrrr bam ! we 're gonna hit this thing in the face , " then we bring in the velvet gloves .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts and they call themselves the b612 foundation . for those of you who 've read " the little prince , " you understand that reference , i hope . the little prince who lived on an asteroid , it was called b612 .
these are smart guys - men and women - astronauts , like i said , engineers .
rusty schweickart , who was an apollo 9 astronaut , is on this . dan durda , my friend who made this image , works here at southwest research institute in boulder , on walnut street . he created this image for this , and he 's actually one of the astronomers who works for them . if we see an asteroid that 's going to hit the earth and we have enough time , we can hit it to move it into a better orbit . but then what we do is we launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two .
it does n't have to be huge - couple of tons , not that big - and you park it near the asteroid .
you do n't land on it , because these things are tumbling end over end . it 's very hard to land on them .
instead you get near it .
the gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe , and the probe has a couple of tons of mass .
it has a little tiny bit of gravity , but it 's enough that it can pull the asteroid , and you have your rockets set up , so you can - oh , you can barely see it here , but there 's rocket plumes - and you basically , these guys are connected by their own gravity , and if you move the probe very slowly , very , very gently , you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit .
you can even put in orbit around the earth where we could mine it , although that 's a whole other thing . i wo n't go into that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we 'd be rich !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so think about this , right ?
there are these giant rocks flying out there , and they 're hitting us , and they 're doing damage to us , but we 've figured out how to do this , and all the pieces are in place to do this .
we have astronomers in place with telescopes looking for them . we have smart people , very , very smart people , who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem , and we have the technology to do this .
this probe actually ca n't use chemical rockets .
chemical rockets provide too much thrust , too much push . the probe would just shoot away .
we invented something called an ion drive , which is a very , very , very low-thrust engine .
it generates the force a piece of paper would have on your hand , incredibly light , but it can run for months and years , providing that very gentle push .
if anybody here is a fan of the original " star trek , " they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive , and spock said , " they 're very technically sophisticated .
they 're a hundred years ahead of us with this drive . "
yeah , we have an ion drive now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we do n't have the enterprise , but we 've got an ion drive now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- spock .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so ...
that 's the difference , that 's the difference between us and the dinosaurs .
this happened to them .
it does n't have to happen to us .
the difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote , and so we can change our future .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have the ability to change our future .
65 million years from now , we do n't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- every presentation needs this slide in it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's beautiful , is n't it ?
do you see ?
all the points , all the lines - it 's incredible .
it is the network ; and in my case , the network has been important in media , because i get to connect to people .
is n't it amazing ?
through that , i connect to people .
and the way that i 've been doing it has been multifaceted .
for example , i get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i put together projects like earth sandwich , where i ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the earth .
and people started laying bread in tribute , and eventually a team was able to do it between new zealand and spain .
it 's pretty incredible - the video 's online .
connecting to people in projects like youngmenowme for example .
in youngmenowme , the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the same person - top photo , james , bottom photo , -lsb- jennifer -rsb- .
poignant .
this was a mother 's day gift .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- particularly creepy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- my favorite of these photos , which i could n't find , is there 's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so with a little baby on her lap , and the next photo is a 220-lb man with a tiny , little old lady peaking over his shoulder .
but this project changed the way that i thought about connecting to people .
this is project called ray .
and what happened was i was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio .
somebody said , " you have to listen to this . "
and this is what came to me .
recording : hi , my name is ray , and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair .
being quite disturbed , she called for comfort , and i did n't really know what to tell her , because we have to deal with so much mess in our society .
so i was led to write this song just for her , just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job .
and i figured i 'd put it on the internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you 're going through on your job .
here 's how the song goes .
♫ i 'm about to whip somebody 's ass ♫ ♫ oh , i 'm about to whip somebody 's ass ♫ ♫ oh , if you do n't leave me alone , ♫ ♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫ ♫ ' cause i 'm about to whip somebody 's ass ♫ now you might not be able to sing that out loud , but you can hum it to yourself , and you know what the words are .
and let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job .
all right . stay strong . peace .
ze frank : so - yeah .
no , no , no , shush . we 've got to go quickly .
so i was so moved by this - this is incredible . this was connecting , right .
this was , at a distance , realizing that someone was feeling something , wanting to affect them in a particular way , using media to do it , putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact .
this was incredible ; this is what i wanted to do .
so the first thing i thought of is we have to thank him .
and i asked my audience , i said , " listen to this piece of audio .
we have to remix it . he 's got a great voice .
it 's actually in the key of b flat .
and have to do something with it . "
hundreds of remixes came back - lots of different attempts .
one stood out in particular .
it was done by a guy named goose .
remix : ♫ i 'm about to whip somebody 's ass ♫ ♫ oh , i 'm about to whip somebody 's ass ♫ ♫ oh , if you do n't leave me alone , ♫ ♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫ ♫ cuz i 'm about to whip somebody 's ass ♫ ♫ i 'm about to whip some ♫ - zf : great , so it was incredible .
that song - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so that song , somebody told me that it was at a baseball game in kansas city .
in the end , it was one of the top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services .
and so i said , " let 's put this together in an album . "
and the audience came together , and they designed an album cover .
and i said , " if you put it all on this , i 'm going to deliver it to him , if you can figure out who this person is , " because all i had was his name - ray - and this little piece of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset .
in two weeks , they found him .
i received and email and it said , " hi , i 'm ray .
i heard you were looking for me . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was like , " yeah , ray .
it 's been an interesting two weeks . "
and so i flew to st. louis and met ray , and he 's a preacher - -lrb- laughter -rrb- among other things .
so but anyways , here 's the thing - is it reminds me of this , which is a sign that you see in amsterdam on every street corner .
and it 's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world .
i look at this photo , and he seems really interested in what 's going on with that button , but it does n't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it makes me think of this .
on street corners everywhere , people are looking at their cell phones , and it 's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture .
but the truth is life is being lived there .
when they smile - right , you 've seen people stop - all of a sudden , life is being lived there , somewhere up in that weird , dense network .
and this is it , right , to feel and be felt .
it 's the fundamental force that we 're all after .
we can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier , but ultimately , what we 're trying to do is really connect with one other person .
and that 's not always going to happen in physical spaces .
it 's also going to now happen in virtual spaces , and we have to get better at figuring that out .
i think , of the people that build all this technology in the network , a lot of them are n't very good at connecting with people .
this is kind of like something i used to do in third grade .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here 's a series of projects over the last few years where i 've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection .
sometimes they 're very , very simple things .
a childhood walk , which is a project where i ask people to remember a walk that they used to take as a child over and over again that was sort of meaningless - like on the route to the bus stop , to a neighbor 's house , and take it inside of google streetview .
and i promise you , if you take that walk inside google streetview , you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face .
and i collected those moments - the photos inside google streetview and the memories , specifically .
" our conversation started with me saying , ' i 'm bored , ' and her replying , ' when i 'm bored i eat pretzels . ' i remember this distinctly because it came up a lot . "
" right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom , i remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola . "
" they used some of the morbidly artist footage , a close-up of chad 's shoes in the middle of the highway .
i guess the shoes came off when he was hit .
he slept over at my house once , and he left his pillow .
it had ' chad ' written in magic marker on it .
he died long after he left the pillow at my house , but we never got around to returning it . "
sometimes they 're a little bit more abstract .
this is pain pack .
right after september 11th , last year , i was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it , the way that we excise it from our bodies .
so what i did is i opened up a hotline - a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain , not necessarily related to that event .
and people called in and left messages like this .
recording : okay , here 's something .
i 'm not alone , and i am loved .
i 'm really fortunate .
but sometimes i feel really lonely .
and when i feel that way even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry .
like even people in convenience stores saying , " have a nice day , " when they 're accidentally looking me in the eye .
zf : so what i did was i took those voicemails , and with their permission , converted them to mp3s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just those voicemails .
and those were then distributed to djs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material .
-lrb- music -rrb- we do n't have time to play much of it .
you can look at it online .
" from 52 to 48 with love " was a project around the time of the last election cycle , where mccain and obama both , in their speeches after the election , talked about reconciliation , and i was like , " what the hell does that look like ? "
so i thought , " well let 's just give it a try .
let 's have people hold up signs about reconciliation . "
and so some really nice things came together .
" i voted blue . i voted red .
together , for our future . "
these are very , very cute little things right .
some came from the winning party .
" dear 48 , i promise to listen to you , to fight for you , to respect you always . "
some came from the party who had just lost .
" from a 48 to a 52 , may your party 's leadership be as classy as you , but i doubt it . "
but the truth was that as this start becoming popular , a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing , which i could also see .
and so i started getting amazing amounts of hate mail , death threats even .
and one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages , and he was dressed as batman .
and he said , " i 'm dressed as batman to hide my identity . "
just in case i thought the real batman was coming after me ; which actually made me feel a little better - like , " phew , it 's not him . "
so what i did - unfortunately , i was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of me , and it started to eat away at my psyche .
and i was protecting the project from it , i realized . i was protecting it - i did n't want this special , little group of photographs to get sullied in some way .
so what i did , i took all those emails , and i put them together into something called angrigami , which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff .
and i asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the angrigami .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this was the emotional moment .
one of my viewer 's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate .
it 's amazing .
the last thing i 'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called songs you already know , where the idea was , i was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions with group projects .
so one of them was fairly straightforward .
a guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could i write a song for her , his daughter .
and i said , " oh yeah , i 'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep . "
and this was " scared . "
-lrb- video -rrb- ♫ this is a song that i sing when i 'm scared of something ♫ ♫ i do n't know why but it helps me get over it ♫ ♫ the words of the song just move me along ♫ ♫ and somehow i get over it ♫ ♫ at least i do n't suck at life ♫ ♫ i keep on trying despite ♫ ♫ at least i do n't suck at life ♫ ♫ i keep on trying despite ♫ ♫ this is a song that i sing when i 'm scared of something ♫ okay , so i wrote that song , right . thank you .
so the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter 's room at some point , and she actually was singing that song to herself .
so i was like , " awesome . this is great . "
and then i got this email . and there 's a little bit of a back story to this .
and i do n't have much time .
but the idea was that at one point i did a project called facebook me equals you , where i wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person .
so i asked for people 's usernames and passwords to be sent to me .
and i got a lot , like 30 in a half an hour .
and i shut that part down .
and i chose two people to be , and i asked them to send me descriptions of how to act as them on facebook .
one person sent me a very detailed description ; the other person did n't .
and the person who did n't , it turned out , had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job .
so , you know , people were writing me and saying , " how 's your new job ? "
i was like , " i do n't know .
did n't know i had one . "
but anyway , this same person , laura , ended up emailing me a little bit after that project .
and i felt badly for not having done a good job .
and she said , " i 'm really anxious , i just moved to a new town , i have this new job , and i 've just had this incredible amount of anxiety . "
so she had seen the " scared " song and wondered if i could do something .
so i asked her , " what does it feel like when you feel this way ? "
and she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety .
and so what i decided to do .
i said , " okay , i 'll think about it . "
and so quietly in the background , i started sending people this .
-lrb- audio -rrb- ♫ hey ♫ ♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ so i asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities , just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on , so i could just get their voices back .
and this is the kind of thing that i got back .
recording : ♫ hey ♫ ♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ zf : so that 's one of the better ones , really .
but what 's awesome is , as i started getting more and more and more of them , all of a sudden i had 30 , 40 voices from around the world .
and when you put them together , something magical happens , something absolutely incredible happens , and all of a sudden i get a chorus from around the world .
and what was really great is , i 'm putting all this work together in the background , and laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by .
and she said , " i know you 've forgotten about me .
i just want to say thanks for even considering it . "
and then a few days later i sent her this .
-lrb- audio -rrb- ♫ right now , it feels like i forgot to turn the light on ♫ ♫ and things that looked so good yesterday ♫ ♫ are now shades of gray ♫ ♫ and it seems like the world is spinning ♫ ♫ while i 'm standing still ♫ ♫ or maybe i am spinning i ca n't tell ♫ ♫ and then you say ♫ ♫ hey ♫ ♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ ♫ just breathe ♫ ♫ and now the words sing ♫ ♫ hey ♫
♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ ♫ just breathe ♫ ♫ now everybody sings ♫ ♫ hey ♫ ♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ ♫ just breathe ♫ ♫ hey ♫ ♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ ♫ just breathe ♫ ♫ hey ♫ ♫ you 're okay ♫ ♫ you 'll be fine ♫ ♫ just breathe ♫ thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i was about 16 years old i can remember flipping through channels at home during summer vacation , looking for a movie to watch on hbo - and how many of you remember " ferris bueller 's day off " ?
oh yeah , great movie , right ? - well , i saw matthew broderick on the screen , and so i thought , " sweet ! ferris bueller . i 'll watch this ! "
it was n't ferris bueller . and forgive me matthew broderick , i know you 've done other movies besides ferris bueller , but that 's how i remember you ; you 're ferris .
but you were n't doing ferris-y things at the time ; you were doing gay things at the time .
he was in a movie called " torch song trilogy . "
and " torch song trilogy " was based on a play about this drag queen who essentially was looking for love .
love and respect - that 's what the whole film was about .
and as i 'm watching it , i 'm realizing that they 're talking about me .
not the drag queen part - i am not shaving my hair for anyone - but the gay part .
the finding love and respect , the part about trying to find your place in the world .
so as i 'm watching this , i see this powerful scene that brought me to tears , and it stuck with me for the past 25 years .
and there 's this quote that the main character , arnold , tells his mother as they 're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives .
" there 's one thing more - there 's just one more thing you better understand .
i 've taught myself to sew , cook , fix plumbing , build furniture , i can even pat myself on the back when necessary , all so i do n't have to ask anyone for anything .
there 's nothing i need from anyone except for love and respect , and anyone who ca n't give me those two things has no place in my life . "
i remember that scene like it was yesterday ; i was 16 , i was in tears , i was in the closet , and i 'm looking at these two people , ferris bueller and some guy i 'd never seen before , fighting for love .
when i finally got to a place in my life where i came out and accepted who i was , and was really quite happy , to tell you the truth , i was happily gay and i guess that 's supposed to be right because gay means happy too .
i realized there were a lot of people who were n't as gay as i was - gay being happy , not gay being attracted to the same sex .
in fact , i heard that there was a lot of hate and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear about who i was and the gay lifestyle .
now , i 'm sitting here trying to figure out " the gay lifestyle , " " the gay lifestyle , " and i keep hearing this word over and over and over again : lifestyle , lifestyle , lifestyle .
i 've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism .
that 's when i got scared .
because i 'm thinking , if i 'm gay and i 'm doing something that 's going to destroy civilization , i need to figure out what this stuff is , and i need to stop doing it right now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i took a look at my life , a hard look at my life , and i saw some things very disturbing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i want to begin sharing these evil things that i 've been doing with you , starting with my mornings .
i drink coffee .
not only do i drink coffee , i know other gay people who drink coffee .
i get stuck in traffic - evil , evil traffic .
sometimes i get stuck in lines at airports .
i look around , and i go , " my god , look at all these gay people !
we 're all trapped in these lines ! these long lines trying to get on an airplane !
my god , this lifestyle that i 'm living is so freaking evil ! "
i clean up . this is not an actual photograph of my son 's room ; his is messier .
and because i have a 15-year-old , all i do is cook and cook and cook .
any parents out there of teenagers ? all we do is cook for these people - they eat two , three , four dinners a night - it 's ridiculous !
this is the gay lifestyle .
and after i 'm done cooking and cleaning and standing in line and getting stuck in traffic , my partner and i , we get together and we decide that we 're gonna go and have some wild and crazy fun .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're usually in bed before we find out who 's eliminated on " american idol . "
we have to wake up and find out the next day who 's still on because we 're too freaking tired to hear who stays on .
this is the super duper evil gay lifestyle .
run for your heterosexual lives , people .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when my partner , steve , and i first started dating , he told me this story about penguins .
and i did n't know where he was going with it at first .
he was kind of a little bit nervous when he was sharing it with me , but he told me that when a penguin finds a mate that they want to spend the rest of their life with , they present them with a pebble - the perfect pebble .
and then he reaches into his pocket , and he brings this out to me .
and i looked at it , and i was like , this is really cool .
and he says , " i want to spend the rest of my life with you . "
so i wear this whenever i have to do something that makes me a little nervous , like , i do n't know , a tedx talk .
i wear this when i am apart from him for a long period of time .
and sometimes i just wear it just because .
how many people out there are in love ? anyone in love out there ?
you might be gay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i , too , am in love , and apparently that 's part of the gay lifestyle that i warned you about .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you may want to tell your spouse . who , if they 're in love , might be gay as well .
how many of you are single ? any single people out there ?
you too might be gay ! because i know some gay people who are also single .
it 's really scary , this gay lifestyle thing ; it 's super duper evil and there 's no end to it !
it goes and goes and engulfs !
it 's really quite silly , is n't it ?
that 's why i 'm so happy to finally hear president obama come out and say -lrb- applause -rrb- that he supports - -lrb- applause -rrb- that he supports marriage equality .
it 's a wonderful day in our country 's history ; it 's a wonderful day in the globe 's history to be able to have an actual sitting president say , enough of this - first to himself , and then to the rest of the world .
it 's wonderful .
but there 's something that 's been disturbing me since he made that remark just a short time ago .
and that is , apparently , this is just another move by the gay activists that 's on the gay agenda .
and i 'm disturbed by this because i 've been openly gay now for quite some time .
i 've been to all of the functions , i 've been to fundraisers , i 've written about the topic , and i have yet to receive my copy of this gay agenda .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've paid my dues on time , -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine , and i 've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda .
it 's very , very frustrating , and i was feeling left out , like i was n't quite gay enough .
but then something wonderful happened : i was out shopping , as i tend to do , and i came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda .
and i said to myself , " lz , for so long , you have been denied this .
when you get in front of this crowd , you 're gonna share the news .
you 're gonna spread the gay agenda so no one else has to wonder , what exactly is in the gay agenda ?
what are these gays up to ?
what do they want ? "
so , without further ado , i will present to you , ladies and gentlemen - now be careful , ' cause it 's evil - a copy , the official copy , of the gay agenda .
-lrb- music -rrb- the gay agenda , people !
-lrb- applause -rrb- there it is !
did you soak it all in ? the gay agenda .
some of you may be calling it , what , the constitution of the united states , is that what you call it too ?
the u.s. constitution is the gay agenda .
these gays , people like me , want to be treated like full citizens and it 's all written down in plain sight .
i was blown away when i saw it . i was like , wait , this is the gay agenda ?
why did n't you just call it the constitution so i knew what you were talking about ?
i would n't have been so confused ; i would n't have been so upset .
but there it is . the gay agenda .
run for your heterosexual lives .
did you know that in all the states where there is no shading that people who are gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered can be kicked out of their apartments for being gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered ?
that 's the only reason that a landlord needs to have them removed , because there 's no protection from discrimination of glbt people .
did you know in the states where there 's no shading that you can be fired for being gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered ?
not based upon the quality of your work , how long you 've been there , if you stink , just if you 're gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered .
all of which flies in the face of the gay agenda , also known as the u.s. constitution .
specifically , this little amendment right here : " no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united states . "
i 'm looking at you , north carolina .
but you 're not looking at the u.s. constitution .
this is the gay agenda : equality . not special rights , but the rights that were already written by these people - these elitists , if you will .
educated , well-dressed , -lrb- laughter -rrb- some would dare say questionably dressed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nonetheless , our forefathers , right ?
the people that , we say , knew what they were doing when they wrote the constitution - the gay agenda , if you will .
all of that flies in the face of what they did .
that is the reason why i felt it was imperative that i presented you with this copy of the gay agenda .
because i figured if i made it funny , you would n't be as threatened .
i figured if i was a bit irreverent , you would n't find it serious .
but when you see the map , and you see our state of michigan - it 's legal to fire someone for being gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered , that it 's legal to remove someone from their home because they 're gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered , then you realize that this whole conversation about marriage equality is not about stripping someone 's rights away , it 's about granting them the rights that -lsb- have -rsb- already been stated .
and we 're just trying to walk in those rights that have already been stated , that we 've already agreed upon .
there are people living in fear of losing their jobs so they do n't show anyone who they really are right here at home . this is n't just about north carolina ; all those states that were clear , it 's legal .
if i could brag for a second , i have a 15-year-old son from my marriage .
he has a 4.0 .
he is starting a new club at school , policy debate .
he 's a budding track star ; he has almost every single record in middle school for every event that he competed in .
he volunteers .
he prays before he eats .
i would like to think , as his father - and he lives with me primarily - that i had a little something to do with all of that .
i would like to think that he 's a good boy , a respectful young man . i would like to think that i 've proven to be a capable father .
but if i were to go to the state of michigan today , and try to adopt a young person who is in an orphanage , i would be disqualified for only one reason : because i 'm gay .
it does n't matter what i 've already proven , what i can do with my heart .
it 's because of what the state of michigan says that i am that i am disqualified for any sort of adoption .
and that 's not just about me , that 's about so many other michiganders , u.s. citizens , who do n't understand why what they are is so much more significant than who they are .
this story just keeps playing over and over and over again in our country 's history .
there was a time in which , i do n't know , people who were black could n't have the same rights .
people who happened to be women did n't have the same rights , could n't vote .
there was a point in our history in which , if you were considered disabled , that an employer could just fire you , before the americans with disabilities act .
we keep doing this over and over again .
and so here we are , 2012 , gay agenda , gay lifestyle , and i 'm not a good dad and people do n't deserve to be able to protect their families because of what they are , not who they are .
so when you hear the words " gay lifestyle " and " gay agenda " in the future , i encourage you to do two things : one , remember the u.s. constitution , and then two , if you would n't mind looking to your left , please .
look to your right .
that person next to you is a brother , is a sister .
and they should be treated with love and respect .
thank you .
cholera was reported in haiti for the first time in over 50 years last october .
there was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get .
and not knowing where help was needed always ensured that help was in short supply in the areas that needed it most .
we 've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage , but we still ca n't do that with water , and here 's why .
right now , if you want to test water in the field , you need a trained technician , expensive equipment like this , and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results .
it 's too slow to get a picture of conditions on the ground before they change , too expensive to implement in all the places that require testing .
and it ignores the fact that , in the meanwhile , people still need to drink water .
most of the information that we collected on the cholera outbreak did n't come from testing water ; it came from forms like this , which documented all the people we failed to help .
countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines - a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they 're safe .
i 've been inspired by that simplicity as i 've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people i 've ever known .
we think there 's a simpler solution to this problem - one that can be used by people who face conditions like this everyday .
it 's in its early stages , but this is what it looks like right now .
we call it the water canary .
it 's a fast , cheap device that answers an important question : is this water contaminated ?
it does n't require any special training .
and instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place , it uses light .
that means there 's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place , no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information .
to test water , you simply insert a sample and , within seconds , it either displays a red light , indicating contaminated water , or a green light , indicating the sample is safe .
this will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold .
we 're also , on top of that , integrating wireless networking into an affordable device with gps and gsm .
what that means is that each reading can be automatically transmitted to servers to be mapped in real time .
with enough users , maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action , containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from .
and then , instead of taking days to disseminate this information to the people who need it most , it can happen automatically .
we 've seen how distributed networks , big data and information can transform society .
i think it 's time for us to apply them to water .
our goal over the next year is to get water canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation , so we can tackle this problem together .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a few months ago , a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where i live , and she was brought in confused .
her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170 .
within a few minutes , she went into cardiac collapse .
she was resuscitated , stabilized , whisked over to a cat scan suite right next to the emergency room , because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung .
and the cat scan revealed no blood clots in the lung , but it showed bilateral , visible , palpable breast masses , breast tumors , that had metastasized widely all over the body .
and the real tragedy was , if you look through her records , she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years .
four or five opportunities to see the breast masses , touch the breast mass , intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her .
ladies and gentlemen , that is not an unusual story .
unfortunately , it happens all the time .
i joke , but i only half joke , that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb , no one will believe you till they get a cat scan , mri or orthopedic consult .
i am not a luddite .
i teach at stanford .
i 'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology .
but i 'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam , when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient , we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable , early stage , but we 're losing much more than that .
we 're losing a ritual .
we 're losing a ritual that i believe is transformative , transcendent , and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship .
this may actually be heresy to say this at ted , but i 'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation , i think , in medicine to come in the next 10 years , and that is the power of the human hand - to touch , to comfort , to diagnose and to bring about treatment .
i 'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize .
this is sir arthur conan doyle .
since we 're in edinburgh , i 'm a big fan of conan doyle .
you might not know that conan doyle went to medical school here in edinburgh , and his character , sherlock holmes , was inspired by sir joseph bell .
joseph bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts .
and conan doyle , writing about bell , described the following exchange between bell and his students .
so picture bell sitting in the outpatient department , students all around him , patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in .
and a woman comes in with a child , and conan doyle describes the following exchange .
the woman says , " good morning . "
bell says , " what sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from burntisland ? "
she says , " it was good . "
and he says , " what did you do with the other child ? "
she says , " i left him with my sister at leith . "
and he says , " and did you take the shortcut down inverleith row to get here to the infirmary ? "
she says , " i did . "
and he says , " would you still be working at the linoleum factory ? "
and she says , " i am . "
and bell then goes on to explain to the students .
he says , " you see , when she said , ' good morning , ' i picked up her fife accent .
and the nearest ferry crossing from fife is from burntisland .
and so she must have taken the ferry over .
you notice that the coat she 's carrying is too small for the child who is with her , and therefore , she started out the journey with two children , but dropped one off along the way .
you notice the clay on the soles of her feet .
such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of edinburgh , except in the botanical gardens .
and therefore , she took a short cut down inverleith row to arrive here .
and finally , she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand , a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in burntisland . "
and when bell actually strips the patient , begins to examine the patient , you can only imagine how much more he would discern .
and as a teacher of medicine , as a student myself , i was so inspired by that story .
but you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way , using our senses , is quite recent .
the picture i 'm showing you is of leopold auenbrugger who , in the late 1700s , discovered percussion .
and the story is that leopold auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper .
and his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder .
and so when auenbrugger became a physician , he began to do the same thing .
he began to tap on the chests of his patients , on their abdomens .
and basically everything we know about percussion , which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day - organ enlargement , fluid around the heart , fluid in the lungs , abdominal changes - all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript " inventum novum , " " new invention , " which would have disappeared into obscurity , except for the fact that this physician , corvisart , a famous french physician - famous only because he was physician to this gentleman - corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work .
and it was followed a year or two later by laennec discovering the stethoscope .
laennec , it is said , was walking in the streets of paris and saw two children playing with a stick .
one was scratching at the end of the stick , another child listened at the other end .
and laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called " the cylinder . "
later he renamed it the stethoscope .
and that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born .
so within a few years , in the late 1800s , early 1900s , all of a sudden , the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis .
if you 'll recall , prior to that time , no matter what ailed you , you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you , bleeding you , purging you .
and , oh yes , if you wanted , he would give you a haircut - short on the sides , long in the back - and pull your tooth while he was at it .
he made no attempt at diagnosis .
in fact , some of you might well know that the barber pole , the red and white stripes , represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon , and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected .
but the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change , a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body .
and this particular painting , i think , represents the pinnacle , the peak , of that clinical era .
this is a very famous painting : " the doctor " by luke fildes .
luke fildes was commissioned to paint this by tate , who then established the tate gallery .
and tate asked fildes to paint a painting of social importance .
and it 's interesting that fildes picked this topic .
fildes ' oldest son , philip , died at the age of nine on christmas eve after a brief illness .
and fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two , three nights , that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time - almost a tribute to this physician .
and hence the painting " the doctor , " a very famous painting .
it 's been on calendars , postage stamps in many different countries .
i 've often wondered , what would fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era , in the year 2011 ?
would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient ?
i 've gotten into some trouble in silicon valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who 's in the computer .
i 've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer .
i call it the ipatient .
the ipatient is getting wonderful care all across america .
the real patient often wonders , where is everyone ?
when are they going to come by and explain things to me ?
who 's in charge ?
there 's a real disjunction between the patient 's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care .
i want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when i was in training .
the focus was around the patient .
we went from bed to bed . the attending physician was in charge .
too often these days , rounds look very much like this , where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient .
the discussion is all about images on the computer , data .
and the one critical piece missing is that of the patient .
now i 've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that i want to share with you .
one had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer , had a small breast cancer detected - had her lumpectomy in the town in which i lived .
this is when i was in texas .
and she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care .
and she found the place and decided to go there , went there .
which is why i was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town , getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist .
and i pressed her , and i asked her , " why did you come back and get your care here ? "
and she was reluctant to tell me .
she said , " the cancer center was wonderful .
it had a beautiful facility , giant atrium , valet parking , a piano that played itself , a concierge that took you around from here to there .
but , " she said , " but they did not touch my breasts . "
now you and i could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts .
they had her scanned inside out .
they understood her breast cancer at the molecular level ; they had no need to touch her breasts .
but to her , it mattered deeply .
it was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who , every time she went , examined both breasts including the axillary tail , examined her axilla carefully , examined her cervical region , her inguinal region , did a thorough exam .
and to her , that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed .
i was very influenced by that anecdote .
i was also influenced by another experience that i had , again , when i was in texas , before i moved to stanford .
i had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue .
this is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy .
i say that because these are difficult patients .
they have often been rejected by their families , have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who 's about to disappoint them .
and i learned very early on with my first patient that i could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes .
there was just no way .
and if i tried , i 'd disappoint them .
and so i hit on this method where i invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit , and i tried not to interrupt them .
we know the average american physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds .
and if i ever get to heaven , it will be because i held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient .
i then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence , and when the patient came for the physical , i was able to do a thorough physical , because i had nothing else to do .
i like to think that i do a thorough physical exam , but because the whole visit was now about the physical , i could do an extraordinarily thorough exam .
and i remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit .
and i began my ritual .
i always begin with the pulse , then i examine the hands , then i look at the nail beds , then i slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node , and i was into my ritual .
and when my ritual began , this very voluble patient began to quiet down .
and i remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and i had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which i had a role and the patient had a role .
and when i was done , the patient said to me with some awe , " i have never been examined like this before . "
now if that were true , it 's a true condemnation of our health care system , because they had been seen in other places .
i then proceeded to tell the patient , once the patient was dressed , the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions , which is , " this is not in your head .
this is real .
the good news , it 's not cancer , it 's not tuberculosis , it 's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection .
the bad news is we do n't know exactly what 's causing this , but here 's what you should do , here 's what we should do . "
and i would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere .
and i always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor , the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness , it was because i had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination .
something of importance had transpired in the exchange .
i took this to my colleagues at stanford in anthropology and told them the same story .
and they immediately said to me , " well you are describing a classic ritual . "
and they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation .
we marry , for example , with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss .
i 'm not sure why you 're laughing .
that was the original intent , was it not ?
we signal transitions of power with rituals .
we signal the passage of a life with rituals .
rituals are terribly important .
they 're all about transformation .
well i would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi , and then , incredibly on top of that , disrobing and allowing touch - i would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance .
and if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient , by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown , by not doing a complete exam , you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship .
i am a writer , and i want to close by reading you a short passage that i wrote that has to do very much with this scene .
i 'm an infectious disease physician , and in the early days of hiv , before we had our medications , i presided over so many scenes like this .
i remember , every time i went to a patient 's deathbed , whether in the hospital or at home , i remember my sense of failure - the feeling of i do n't know what i have to say ; i do n't know what i can say ; i do n't know what i 'm supposed to do .
and out of that sense of failure , i remember , i would always examine the patient .
i would pull down the eyelids .
i would look at the tongue .
i would percuss the chest . i would listen to the heart .
i would feel the abdomen .
i remember so many patients , their names still vivid on my tongue , their faces still so clear .
i remember so many huge , hollowed out , haunted eyes staring up at me as i performed this ritual .
and then the next day , i would come , and i would do it again .
and i wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient .
" i recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin , unable to speak , his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications .
when he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth , his hands moved as if in slow motion .
and as i wondered what he was up to , his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt , fumbling with his buttons .
i realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me .
it was an offering , an invitation .
i did not decline .
i percussed . i palpated . i listened to the chest .
i think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him .
neither of us could skip this ritual , which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung , or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure .
no , this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients .
although , god knows , of late , in our hubris , we seem to have drifted away .
we seem to have forgotten - as though , with the explosion of knowledge , the whole human genome mapped out at our feet , we are lulled into inattention , forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician , necessary for the patient - forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient .
and the message , which i did n't fully understand then , even as i delivered it , and which i understand better now is this : i will always , always , always be there .
i will see you through this .
i will never abandon you .
i will be with you through the end . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm just going to play a brief video clip .
video : on the fifth of december 1985 , a bottle of 1787 lafitte was sold for 105,000 pounds - nine times the previous world record .
the buyer was kip forbes , son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century .
the original owner of the bottle turned out to be one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century .
château lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world , the prince of any wine cellar .
benjamin wallace : now , that 's about all the videotape that remains of an event that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world .
and the mystery existed because of a gentleman named hardy rodenstock .
in 1985 , he announced to his friends in the wine world that he had made this incredible discovery .
some workmen in paris had broken through a brick wall , and happened upon this hidden cache of wines - apparently the property of thomas jefferson . 1787 , 1784 .
he would n't reveal the exact number of bottles , he would not reveal exactly where the building was and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building .
the mystery persisted for about 20 years .
it finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy .
bill koch is a florida billionaire who owns four of the jefferson bottles , and he became suspicious .
and he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-fbi and ex-scotland yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this .
there 's now ample evidence that hardy rodenstock is a con man , and that the jefferson bottles were fakes .
but for those 20 years , an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles .
i think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world , must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world .
i became increasingly , kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of you know , why do people spend these crazy amounts of money , not only on wine but on lots of things , and are they living a better life than me ?
so , i decided to embark on a quest .
with the generous backing of a magazine i write for sometimes , i decided to sample the very best , or most expensive , or most coveted item in about a dozen categories , which was a very grueling quest , as you can imagine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was the first one .
a lot of the kobe beef that you see in the u.s. is not the real thing .
it may come from wagyu cattle , but it 's not from the original , appalachian hyogo prefecture in japan .
there are very few places in the u.s. where you can try real kobe , and one of them is wolfgang puck 's restaurant , cut , in los angeles .
i went there , and i ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars .
and it arrived , and it was tiny .
and i was outraged .
it was like , 160 dollars for this ?
and then i took a bite , and i wished that it was tinier , because kobe beef is so rich .
it 's like foie gras - it 's not even like steak .
i almost could n't finish it .
i was really happy when i was done .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the photographer who took the pictures for this project for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them , so that 's why you 're going to see this recurring character .
which , i guess , you know , communicates to you that i did not think that one was really worth the price .
white truffles .
one of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world .
to try this , i went to a mario batali restaurant in manhattan - del posto .
the waiter , you know , came out with the white truffle knob and his shaver , and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said , you know , " would signore like the truffles ? "
and the charm of white truffles is in their aroma .
it 's not in their taste , really . it 's not in their texture .
it 's in the smell .
these white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles , this haunting , wonderful , nutty , mushroomy smell wafted up .
10 seconds passed and it was gone .
and then i was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that , you know , their purpose had been served , and so i 'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me .
there were several - several of these items were disappointments .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah .
the magazine would n't pay for me to go there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they did give me a tour , though .
and this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet .
it has 360-degree views .
it has four balconies .
it was designed by the architect i.m. pei .
it comes with its own rolls royce and driver .
it comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from .
when i took the tour , it actually included some opus one , i was glad to see .
30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel .
this is soap that 's made from silver nanoparticles , which have antibacterial properties .
i washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this .
and it , you know , tickled a little bit and it smelled good , but i have to say that nobody here has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then again , nobody has complimented me on the jeans i 'm wearing .
these ones gq did spring for - i own these - but i will tell you , not only did i not get a compliment from any of you , i have not gotten a compliment from anybody in the months that i have owned and worn these .
i do n't think that whether or not you 're getting a compliment should be the test of something 's value , but i think in the case of a fashion item , an article of clothing , that 's a reasonable benchmark .
that said , a lot of work goes into these .
they are made from handpicked organic zimbabwean cotton that has been shuttle loomed and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times .
but no compliments .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you .
armando manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil from an olive that grows on a single slope in tuscany .
and he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light .
he uses tiny bottles , the glass is tinted , he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas .
and he actually - once he releases a batch of it , he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online , so you can go online and look at your batch number and see how the phenolics are developing , and , you know , gauge its freshness .
i did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils .
it tasted fine . it tasted interesting .
it was very green , it was very peppery .
but in the blind taste test , it came in last .
the olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of whole foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove for six months .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from japan - you 'll start to notice .
i do n't play golf , so i could n't actually road test these , but i did interview a guy who owns them .
even the people who market these clubs - i mean , they 'll say these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed and thereby drive the ball farther - but they 'll say , look , you know , you 're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs .
you 're paying for the bling , that they 're encrusted with gold and platinum .
the guy who i interviewed who owns them did say that he 's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them , so ...
oh , yeah , you know this one ?
this is a coffee made from a very unusual process .
the luwak is an asian palm civet .
it 's a cat that lives in trees , and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations .
and apparently it 's a very picky eater and it , you know , hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries .
and then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans , and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats ' leavings then go through the forest collecting the , you know , results and processing it into coffee - although you actually can buy it in the unprocessed form .
that 's right .
unrelatedly - -lrb- laughter -rrb- japan is doing crazy things with toilets .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there is now a toilet that has an mp3 player in it .
there 's one with a fragrance dispenser .
there 's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl and transmits the results via email to your doctor .
it 's almost like a home medical center - and that is the direction that japanese toilet technology is heading in .
this one does not have those bells and whistles , but for pure functionality it 's pretty much the best - the neorest 600 .
and to try this - i could n't get a loaner , but i did go into the manhattan showroom of the manufacturer , toto , and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use , which i used .
it 's fully automated - you walk towards it , and the seat lifts .
the seat is preheated .
there 's a water jet that cleans you .
there 's an air jet that dries you .
you get up , it flushes by itself .
the lid closes , it self-cleans .
not only is it a technological leap forward , but i really do believe it 's a bit of a cultural leap forward .
i mean , a no hands , no toilet paper toilet .
and i want to get one of these .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was another one i could not get a loaner of .
tom cruise supposedly owns this bed .
there 's a little plaque on the end that , you know , each buyer gets their name engraved on it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- to try this one , the maker of it let me and my wife spend the night in the manhattan showroom .
lights glaring in off the street , and we had to hire a security guard and all these things .
but anyway , we had a great night 's sleep .
and you spend a third of your life in bed .
i do n't think it 's that bad of a deal .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was a fun one .
this is the fastest street-legal car in the world and the most expensive production car .
i got to drive this with a chaperone from the company , a professional race car driver , and we drove around the canyons outside of los angeles and down on the pacific coast highway .
and , you know , when we pulled up to a stoplight the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods .
and it was really amazing .
it was such a smooth ride .
most of the cars that i drive , if i get up to 80 they start to rattle .
i switched lanes on the highway and the driver , this chaperone , said , " you know , you were just going 110 miles an hour . "
and i had no idea that i was one of those obnoxious people you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic , because it was just that smooth .
and if i was a billionaire , i would get one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a completely gratuitous video i 'm just going to show of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology .
this is tom cruise arriving at the " mission : impossible iii " premiere .
when he tries to open the door , you could call it " mission : impossible iv . "
there was one object that i could not get my hands on , and that was the 1947 cheval blanc .
the ' 47 cheval blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century .
and cheval blanc is kind of an unusual wine for bordeaux in having a significant percentage of the cabernet franc grape .
and 1947 was a legendary vintage , especially in the right bank of bordeaux .
and just together , that vintage and that chateau took on this aura that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following .
but it 's 60 years old .
there 's not much of it left .
what there is of it left you do n't know if it 's real - it 's considered to be the most faked wine in the world .
not that many people are looking to pop open their one remaining bottle for a journalist .
so , i 'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these .
i 'd put out feelers to retailers , to auctioneers , and it was coming up empty .
and then i got an email from a guy named bipin desai .
bipin desai is a u.c. riverside theoretical physicist who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings , and he said , " i 've got a tasting coming up where we 're going to serve the ' 47 cheval blanc . "
and it was going to be a double vertical - it was going to be 30 vintages of cheval blanc , and 30 vintages of yquem .
and it was an invitation you do not refuse .
i went .
it was three days , four meals .
and at lunch on saturday , we opened the ' 47 .
and you know , it had this fragrant softness , and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil .
and then i tasted it , and it , you know , had this kind of unctuous , porty richness , which is characteristic of that wine - that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways .
there were people at my table who thought it was , you know , fantastic .
there were some people who were a little less impressed .
and i was n't that impressed .
and i do n't - call my palate a philistine palate - so it does n't necessarily mean something that i was n't impressed , but i was not the only one there who had that reaction .
and it was n't just to that wine .
any one of the wines served at this tasting , if i 'd been served it at a dinner party , it would have been , you know , the wine experience of my lifetime , and incredibly memorable .
but drinking 60 great wines over three days , they all just blurred together , and it became almost a grueling experience .
and i just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study which came out earlier this year from some researchers at stanford and caltech .
and they gave subjects the same wine , labeled with different price tags .
a lot of people , you know , said that they liked the more expensive wine more - it was the same wine , but they thought it was a different one that was more expensive .
but what was unexpected was that these researchers did mri brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine , and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more - their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag .
thank you .
well , that 's kind of an obvious statement up there .
i started with that sentence about 12 years ago , and i started in the context of developing countries , but you 're sitting here from every corner of the world .
so if you think of a map of your country , i think you 'll realize that for every country on earth , you could draw little circles to say , " these are places where good teachers wo n't go . "
on top of that , those are the places from where trouble comes .
so we have an ironic problem - good teachers do n't want to go to just those places where they 're needed the most .
i started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment , which was a very simple experiment in new delhi .
i basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in new delhi .
the children barely went to school , they did n't know any english - they 'd never seen a computer before , and they did n't know what the internet was .
i connected high speed internet to it - it 's about three feet off the ground - turned it on and left it there .
after this , we noticed a couple of interesting things , which you 'll see .
but i repeated this all over india and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do .
this is the first experiment that we did - eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student , a six year-old girl , and he was teaching her how to browse .
this boy here in the middle of central india - this is in a rajasthan village , where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process , they 've enjoyed themselves thoroughly .
they did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time .
in another south indian village , these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee .
they downloaded it from disney.com , or one of these websites , 14 days after putting the computer in their village .
so at the end of it , we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own , irrespective of who or where they were .
at that point , i became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer .
we started off with an experiment in hyderabad , india , where i gave a group of children - they spoke english with a very strong telugu accent .
i gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface , which you now get free with windows , and asked them to speak into it .
so when they spoke into it , the computer typed out gibberish , so they said , " well , it does n't understand anything of what we are saying . "
so i said , " yeah , i 'll leave it here for two months .
make yourself understood to the computer . "
so the children said , " how do we do that . "
and i said , " i do n't know , actually . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i left .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- two months later - and this is now documented in the information technology for international development journal - that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral british accent in which i had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer .
in other words , they were all speaking like james tooley .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they could do that on their own .
after that , i started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own .
i got an interesting phone call once from columbo , from the late arthur c. clarke , who said , " i want to see what 's going on . "
and he could n't travel , so i went over there .
he said two interesting things , " a teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the second thing he said was that , " if children have interest , then education happens . "
and i was doing that in the field , so every time i would watch it and think of him .
-lrb- video -rrb- arthur c. clarke : and they can definitely help people , because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them .
and when you 've got interest , then you have education .
sugata mitra : i took the experiment to south africa .
this is a 15 year-old boy .
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : ... just mention , i play games like animals , and i listen to music .
sm : and i asked him , " do you send emails ? "
and he said , " yes , and they hop across the ocean . "
this is in cambodia , rural cambodia - a fairly silly arithmetic game , which no child would play inside the classroom or at home .
they would , you know , throw it back at you .
they 'd say , " this is very boring . "
if you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away , then they will show off with each other about what they can do .
this is what these children are doing .
they are trying to multiply , i think .
and all over india , at the end of about two years , children were beginning to google their homework .
as a result , the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their english - -lrb- laughter -rrb- rapid improvement and all sorts of things .
they said , " they have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and indeed they had .
i mean , if there 's stuff on google , why would you need to stuff it into your head ?
so at the end of the next four years , i decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own .
at that time , a large amount of money had come into newcastle university to improve schooling in india .
so newcastle gave me a call . i said , " i 'll do it from delhi . "
they said , " there 's no way you 're going to handle a million pounds-worth of university money sitting in delhi . "
so in 2006 , i bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to newcastle .
i wanted to test the limits of the system .
the first experiment i did out of newcastle was actually done in india .
and i set myself and impossible target : can tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a south indian village teach themselves biotechnology in english on their own ?
and i thought , i 'll test them , they 'll get a zero - i 'll give the materials , i 'll come back and test them - they get another zero , i 'll go back and say , " yes , we need teachers for certain things . "
i called in 26 children .
they all came in there , and i told them that there 's some really difficult stuff on this computer .
i would n't be surprised if you did n't understand anything .
it 's all in english , and i 'm going .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i left them with it .
i came back after two months , and the 26 children marched in looking very , very quiet .
i said , " well , did you look at any of the stuff ? "
they said , " yes , we did . "
" did you understand anything ? " " no , nothing . "
so i said , " well , how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing ? "
they said , " we look at it every day . "
so i said , " for two months , you were looking at stuff you did n't understand ? "
so a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says , literally , " apart from the fact that improper replication of the dna molecule causes genetic disease , we 've understood nothing else . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it took me three years to publish that .
it 's just been published in the british journal of educational technology .
one of the referees who refereed the paper said , " it 's too good to be true , " which was not very nice .
well , one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher .
and then that 's her over there .
remember , they do n't study english .
i edited out the last bit when i asked , " where is the neuron ? "
and she says , " the neuron ? the neuron , " and then she looked and did this .
whatever the expression , it was not very nice .
so their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent , which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances .
but 30 percent is not a pass .
so i found that they had a friend , a local accountant , a young girl , and they played football with her .
i asked that girl , " would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass ? "
and she said , " how would i do that ? i do n't know the subject . "
i said , " no , use the method of the grandmother . "
she said , " what 's that ? "
i said , " well , what you 've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time .
just say to them , ' that 's cool . that 's fantastic .
what is that ? can you do that again ? can you show me some more ? " ' she did that for two months .
the scores went up to 50 , which is what the posh schools of new delhi , with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting .
so i came back to newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious .
so , having experimented in all sorts of remote places , i came to the most remote place that i could think of .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- approximately 5,000 miles from delhi is the little town of gateshead .
in gateshead , i took 32 children and i started to fine-tune the method .
i made them into groups of four .
i said , " you make your own groups of four .
each group of four can use one computer and not four computers . "
remember , from the hole in the wall .
" you can exchange groups .
you can walk across to another group , if you do n't like your group , etc .
you can go to another group , peer over their shoulders , see what they 're doing , come back to you own group and claim it as your own work . "
and i explained to them that , you know , a lot of scientific research is done using that method .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the children enthusiastically got after me and said , " now , what do you want us to do ? "
i gave them six gcse questions .
the first group - the best one - solved everything in 20 minutes .
the worst , in 45 .
they used everything that they knew - news groups , google , wikipedia , ask jeeves , etc .
the teachers said , " is this deep learning ? "
i said , " well , let 's try it .
i 'll come back after two months .
we 'll give them a paper test - no computers , no talking to each other , etc . "
the average score when i 'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent .
when i did the experiment , when i did the test , after two months , the score was 76 percent .
there was photographic recall inside the children , i suspect because they 're discussing with each other .
a single child in front of a single computer will not do that .
i have further results , which are almost unbelievable , of scores which go up with time .
because their teachers say that after the session is over , the children continue to google further .
here in britain , i put out a call for british grandmothers , after my kuppam experiment .
well , you know , they 're very vigorous people , british grandmothers .
200 of them volunteered immediately .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time , sitting in their homes , one day in a week .
so they did that , and over the last two years , over 600 hours of instruction has happened over skype , using what my students call the granny cloud .
the granny cloud sits over there .
i can beam them to whichever school i want to .
-lrb- video -rrb- teacher : you ca n't catch me .
you say it .
you ca n't catch me .
children : you ca n't catch me .
teacher : i 'm the gingerbread man .
children : i 'm the gingerbread man .
teacher : well done . very good ...
sm : back at gateshead , a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of hinduism in 15 minutes .
you know , stuff which i do n't know anything about .
two children watch a tedtalk .
they wanted to be footballers before .
after watching eight tedtalks , he wants to become leonardo da vinci .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's pretty simple stuff .
this is what i 'm building now - they 're called soles : self organized learning environments .
the furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big , powerful screens , big broadband connections , but in groups .
if they want , they can call the granny cloud .
this is a sole in newcastle .
the mediator is from pune , india .
so how far can we go ? one last little bit and i 'll stop .
i went to turin in may .
i sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students .
i speak only english , they speak only italian , so we had no way to communicate .
i started writing english questions on the blackboard .
the children looked at it and said , " what ? "
i said , " well , do it . "
they typed it into google , translated it into italian , went back into italian google .
fifteen minutes later - next question : where is calcutta ?
this one , they took only 10 minutes .
i tried a really hard one then .
who was pythagoras , and what did he do ?
there was silence for a while , then they said , " you 've spelled it wrong .
it 's pitagora . "
and then , in 20 minutes , the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens .
this sent shivers up my spine .
these are 10 year-olds .
text : in another 30 minutes they would reach the theory of relativity . and then ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- sm : so you know what 's happened ?
i think we 've just stumbled across a self-organizing system .
a self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside .
self-organizing systems also always show emergence , which is that the system starts to do things , which it was never designed for .
which is why you react the way you do , because it looks impossible .
i think i can make a guess now - education is self-organizing system , where learning is an emergent phenomenon .
it 'll take a few years to prove it , experimentally , but i 'm going to try .
but in the meanwhile , there is a method available .
one billion children , we need 100 million mediators - there are many more than that on the planet - 10 million soles , 180 billion dollars and 10 years .
we could change everything .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ninety-nine percent of us have the dream of listeners .
not being the musicians - the listeners , right ?
and we crave one thing , even though we kind of do n't know it all the time .
we crave to be in the room with the musician the day it was recorded , the day it was played .
and we go to live concerts , and we get that as much as we can .
but then we listen to the other 99 percent of our stuff recorded .
and it turns out the further back you go in history , the little rougher it sounds .
and so we said , there 's a solution to this .
let 's separate the performance , as a thing , out from the recording , which was how it was made .
you know , the thing with microphones in the room and all that day .
but the performance itself was how the musicians worked their fingers , and what instruments they were using .
and it 's the data hidden inside the recording .
in order to do this , it 's a lot of hardware and software that runs in a very high resolution .
and yamaha makes an incredible thing called the disklavier pro that looks like a nice grand piano there .
and you probably did n't realize it 's going to do all these things - but full of solenoids , and fiber optics , and computers and all this kind of stuff . the highest resolution out of japan .
and this just did n't work until we could cross this line that says high-definition .
and we were able to cross this line , called the uncanny valley , in terms of - artificial intelligence terms .
we have a process where we , you know , kind of put it into the computer and digitize it , and then a whole lot of analysis .
and we look at every single note , and all the attributes of those notes : how hard they were struck , and how they were held down , and how you move the fingers .
so we had to develop a whole new science of how you move your fingers .
and , you know , it 's a thing your piano teacher teaches you , but we never had a science behind these kinds of things .
i 'm going to start with glenn gould .
he died 25 years ago this year , and was born 75 years ago this year .
was a beloved pianist , maybe the great cult pianist of the twentieth century .
he just got tired of being in front of an audience , and felt like - a performing monkey was , in fact , his term .
so he stepped back , and did nothing but the crafting of his work .
and gould 's specialty was playing bach .
his maybe most famous recording was something called " the goldberg variations . "
bach only wrote themes and variations one time .
he wrote some early pieces , but late in his life , in his mature period , he said , " here 's a theme - 30 variations . "
in fact , the theme is n't even the melody , it 's the bass line .
and gould recorded it in two major recordings that you may know about , one in mono , and one in stereo .
and the one in mono , by the way , he used the pedal , and as he got older , he said , " no , no , wait a minute .
i 'm going to get very scientific about this , and not use the pedal . "
what i 'd like you to hear live is the 1955 version , and we 'll play the first couple pieces of it .
glenn gould , 1955 .
-lrb- music -rrb- how about that ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so let me tell you a little bit how this was done .
first of all , let me get you to the end step .
this is - we have a fairly complex process that , you know , software and musicians and so on , but when we 're all done , we know that the ear is the final arbiter .
we can play the original in one ear , and a new recording in the other .
so i 'm going to do this for you right now , what you just heard .
and in the right speaker is going to be the original recording , and the left speaker is going to be the new recording , actually of an instrument just like that one , and i 'm going to play them together at the same time .
-lrb- music -rrb- that 's the original . -lsb- unclear -rsb- that 's the two together .
-lrb- music -rrb- before " jurassic park , " there was no science for how skin hung off of muscle , right ?
so , in the video world , we 've been able to invent , in our lifetimes , natural behavior .
and this is kind of another example of putting a science behind natural behavior .
and then you heard the original .
ultimately , i started with the experience .
and the experience is : i want to be in the room and hear the musicians .
lots of you can afford to buy one of these .
but , if not , there is now high-definition surround sound .
and i got to tell you , if you have n't heard high-definition surround , go down to your audio dealer , your audiophile dealer .
it 's so involving compared to regular stereo .
but if you do n't have that , maybe you can listen on your headphones .
and so on the same disk we have five recordings - sony has five recordings .
and you could listen in headphones with this thing called binaural recording .
and it 's a dummy head that sits in front of the instrument , and it 's got microphones where the ears are .
and when you put on headphones , and you listen to this , you 're inside of glenn gould 's body .
and it is a chuckle until , you know , the musicians , who are musicians who play the piano , listen to this , say , " i ca n't believe it ! it 's just what it 's like to play the piano . "
except now you 're inside glenn gould 's body playing the piano , and it feels like your fingers are making the decisions and moving through the whole process .
it 's a game changer .
here 's now something we know in spectacular quality .
the whole process is very sensitive to temperature and humidity .
what you heard today was not perfect .
it 's an amalgam of wood , and cast iron , and felt , and steel strings , and all these , and they 're all amazingly sensitive to temperature and humidity .
so when you go into the recording session , you get to stop after every piece and rebuild the piano if you need to .
there 's the whole action there , sitting , kind of , on the side , and the dummy head and our recording engineers standing around while we rebuild the piano .
without putting dates next to these things , step-by-step music will be turned into data , like every field that 's occurred in the past 35 or 40 years .
audio has come very late to this game - i 'm not talking about digitizing , and bits , and re-mastering .
i 'm talking about turn it into the data that it was made from , which is how it was performed .
and audio came very late because our ears are so hard to fool - they 're high-resolution , and they 're wired straight to our emotions , and you ca n't trick them very easily .
your eyes are pretty happy with some color and movement , you know .
all right , there 's this episode of " star trek . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i get it - it was all just laid in for me yesterday there .
the episode of " star trek " for me was james daly played methuselah - remember this one ?
and at some point he 's dancing with his - and i wo n't ruin the episode for you , from 1967 .
right , do you know where i 'm going ?
and nimoy , i 'm sorry , spock sits down at the piano , and he starts playing this brahms waltz , and they all dance to it .
and then spock turns round , he goes , " james , i know all of the brahms waltzes , and i do n't believe this is one of them in the category . "
that 's where i 'm at .
i want to hear the waltzes brahms did n't write .
i want to hear the pieces that horowitz did n't play .
but i believe we 're on a path now , when we get to data , that we can distill styles , and templates , and formulas , and all these kinds of things , again , that you 've seen happen in the computer graphics world .
it 's now coming in this world .
the transition will be this one .
it says right now , we think music is notes and how they 're played .
and i believe this is coming .
because what you 've just heard was a computer playing data - no glenn gould in the room .
but yet , it was human .
and i believe you 'll get to the next step , the real dream of listeners .
every time you listen to a recording today , every time you take out your ipod and whatever , every time you listen to it , it 's the same thing - it 's frozen .
would n't it be cool if every time you listened , it could be different ?
this morning , you 're sadder , you want to hear your song , the same song , played sadder than you did yesterday .
you want to hear it played by different musicians .
you want to hear it in different rooms and whatever .
we 've seen all these " star treks , " and they 're all holodeck episodes as well .
every time i listen to that , i get goose bumps .
it 's so amazing , it 's so exciting .
every time i listen to that recording it 's like , " oh my god , i ca n't believe i 'm in the same room . i ca n't believe this is happening . "
it 's a way better experience than whatever you 're used to listening to , in whatever form .
and lastly , i will wrap up with one minute of art tatum .
so i 've really overshot my budget here .
we made a new recording of him playing in the shrine auditorium in september .
it was a concert he recorded in the shrine auditorium in 1949 .
and i 've got to tell you , we have this lab where we build and measure everything , back in raleigh , north carolina , and we flew out to los angeles .
and as the president of the company , i did n't feel real comfortable about where we were .
that 's a real uncomfortable feeling , when all the equipment 's come out and a whole sony team , and people are going to be sitting there in the audience .
and we put the piano on the sweet spot of the stage in the shrine , which has not changed since 1949 , still seats 6,000 people .
and on the sweet spot on the stage , tatum starts playing ...
and every note , every beat , every slur , every accent , every pedal was perfect , because he played it for that room on that day .
and we captured all that data all over again .
and i want you to hear that right now .
and fortunately , it 's right in here .
this is an encore he used to do .
it 's one minute long .
it 's an irish jig , and i want you to hear his humor .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's just what the live audience did .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so thank you very much , michael , thank you for the opportunity .
so , here we go : a flyby of play .
it 's got to be serious if the new york times puts a cover story of their february 17th sunday magazine about play .
at the bottom of this , it says , " it 's deeper than gender .
seriously , but dangerously fun .
and a sandbox for new ideas about evolution . "
not bad , except if you look at that cover , what 's missing ?
you see any adults ?
well , lets go back to the 15th century .
this is a courtyard in europe , and a mixture of 124 different kinds of play .
all ages , solo play , body play , games , taunting .
and there it is . and i think this is a typical picture of what it was like in a courtyard then .
i think we may have lost something in our culture .
so i 'm gonna take you through what i think is a remarkable sequence .
north of churchill , manitoba , in october and november , there 's no ice on hudson bay .
and this polar bear that you see , this 1200-pound male , he 's wild and fairly hungry .
and norbert rosing , a german photographer , is there on scene , making a series of photos of these huskies , who are tethered .
and from out of stage left comes this wild , male polar bear , with a predatory gaze .
any of you who 've been to africa or had a junkyard dog come after you , there is a fixed kind of predatory gaze that you know you 're in trouble .
but on the other side of that predatory gaze is a female husky in a play bow , wagging her tail .
and something very unusual happens .
that fixed behavior - which is rigid and stereotyped and ends up with a meal - changes .
and this polar bear stands over the husky , no claws extended , no fangs taking a look .
and they begin an incredible ballet .
a play ballet .
this is in nature : it overrides a carnivorous nature and what otherwise would have been a short fight to the death .
and if you 'll begin to look closely at the husky that 's bearing her throat to the polar bear , and look a little more closely , they 're in an altered state .
they 're in a state of play .
and it 's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible .
they are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals .
and it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that 's within all of us .
now how did i get involved in this ?
john mentioned that i 've done some work with murderers , and i have .
the texas tower murderer opened my eyes , in retrospect , when we studied his tragic mass murder , to the importance of play , in that that individual , by deep study , was found to have severe play deprivation .
charles whitman was his name .
and our committee , which consisted of a lot of hard scientists , did feel at the end of that study that the absence of play and a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play led him to be more vulnerable to the tragedy that he perpetrated .
and that finding has stood the test of time - unfortunately even into more recent times , at virginia tech .
and other studies of populations at risk sensitized me to the importance of play , but i did n't really understand what it was .
and it was many years in taking play histories of individuals before i really began to recognize that i did n't really have a full understanding of it .
and i do n't think any of us has a full understanding of it , by any means .
but there are ways of looking at it that i think can give you - give us all a taxonomy , a way of thinking about it .
and this image is , for humans , the beginning point of play .
when that mother and infant lock eyes , and the infant 's old enough to have a social smile , what happens - spontaneously - is the eruption of joy on the part of the mother .
and she begins to babble and coo and smile , and so does the baby .
if we 've got them wired up with an electroencephalogram , the right brain of each of them becomes attuned , so that the joyful emergence of this earliest of play scenes and the physiology of that is something we 're beginning to get a handle on .
and i 'd like you to think that every bit of more complex play builds on this base for us humans .
and so now i 'm going to take you through sort of a way of looking at play , but it 's never just singularly one thing .
we 're going to look at body play , which is a spontaneous desire to get ourselves out of gravity .
this is a mountain goat .
if you 're having a bad day , try this : jump up and down , wiggle around - you 're going to feel better .
and you may feel like this character , who is also just doing it for its own sake .
it does n't have a particular purpose , and that 's what 's great about play .
if its purpose is more important than the act of doing it , it 's probably not play .
and there 's a whole other type of play , which is object play .
and this japanese macaque has made a snowball , and he or she 's going to roll down a hill .
and - they do n't throw it at each other , but this is a fundamental part of being playful .
the human hand , in manipulation of objects , is the hand in search of a brain ; the brain is in search of a hand ; and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way .
jpl we heard this morning - jpl is an incredible place .
they have located two consultants , frank wilson and nate johnson , who are - frank wilson is a neurologist , nate johnson is a mechanic .
he taught mechanics in a high school in long beach , and found that his students were no longer able to solve problems .
and he tried to figure out why . and he came to the conclusion , quite on his own , that the students who could no longer solve problems , such as fixing cars , had n't worked with their hands .
frank wilson had written a book called " the hand . "
they got together - jpl hired them .
now jpl , nasa and boeing , before they will hire a research and development problem solver - even if they 're summa cum laude from harvard or cal tech - if they have n't fixed cars , have n't done stuff with their hands early in life , played with their hands , they ca n't problem-solve as well .
so play is practical , and it 's very important .
now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it has to be safe exploration .
this happens to be ok - he 's an anatomically interested little boy and that 's his mom . other situations would n't be quite so good .
but curiosity , exploration , are part of the play scene .
if you want to belong , you need social play .
and social play is part of what we 're about here today , and is a byproduct of the play scene .
these lionesses , seen from a distance , looked like they were fighting .
but if you look closely , they 're kind of like the polar bear and husky : no claws , flat fur , soft eyes , open mouth with no fangs , balletic movements , curvilinear movements - all specific to play .
and rough-and-tumble play is a great learning medium for all of us .
preschool kids , for example , should be allowed to dive , hit , whistle , scream , be chaotic , and develop through that a lot of emotional regulation and a lot of the other social byproducts - cognitive , emotional and physical - that come as a part of rough and tumble play .
spectator play , ritual play - we 're involved in some of that .
those of you who are from boston know that this was the moment - rare - where the red sox won the world series .
but take a look at the face and the body language of everybody in this fuzzy picture , and you can get a sense that they 're all at play .
imaginative play .
i love this picture because my daughter , who 's now almost 40 , is in this picture , but it reminds me of her storytelling and her imagination , her ability to spin yarns at this age - preschool .
a really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play .
and i love this one , because it 's also what we 're about .
we all have an internal narrative that 's our own inner story .
the unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story .
i 'm telling you a story today about play .
well , this bushman , i think , is talking about the fish that got away that was that long , but it 's a fundamental part of the play scene .
so what does play do for the brain ?
well , a lot .
we do n't know a whole lot about what it does for the human brain , because funding has not been exactly heavy for research on play .
i walked into the carnegie asking for a grant .
they 'd given me a large grant when i was an academician for the study of felony drunken drivers , and i thought i had a pretty good track record , and by the time i had spent half an hour talking about play , it was obvious that they were not - did not feel that play was serious .
i think that - that 's a few years back - i think that wave is past , and the play wave is cresting , because there is some good science .
nothing lights up the brain like play .
three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum , puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe - the executive portion - helps contextual memory be developed , and - and , and , and .
so it 's - for me , its been an extremely nourishing scholarly adventure to look at the neuroscience that 's associated with play , and to bring together people who in their individual disciplines had n't really thought of it that way .
and that 's part of what the national institute for play is all about .
and this is one of the ways you can study play - is to get a 256-lead electroencephalogram .
i 'm sorry i do n't have a playful-looking subject , but it allows mobility , which has limited the actual study of play .
and we 've got a mother-infant play scenario that we 're hoping to complete underway at the moment .
the reason i put this here is also to queue up my thoughts about objectifying what play does .
the animal world has objectified it .
in the animal world , if you take rats , who are hardwired to play at a certain period of their juvenile years and you suppress play - they squeak , they wrestle , they pin each other , that 's part of their play .
if you stop that behavior on one group that you 're experimenting with , and you allow it in another group that you 're experimenting with , and then you present those rats with a cat odor-saturated collar , they 're hardwired to flee and hide .
pretty smart - they do n't want to get killed by a cat .
so what happens ?
they both hide out .
the non-players never come out - they die .
the players slowly explore the environment , and begin again to test things out .
that says to me , at least in rats - and i think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture - that play may be pretty important for our survival .
and , and , and - there are a lot more animal studies that i could talk about .
now , this is a consequence of play deprivation . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this took a long time - i had to get homer down and put him through the fmri and the spect and multiple eegs , but as a couch potato , his brain has shrunk .
and we do know that in domestic animals and others , when they 're play deprived , they do n't - and rats also - they do n't develop a brain that is normal .
now , the program says that the opposite of play is not work , it 's depression .
and i think if you think about life without play - no humor , no flirtation , no movies , no games , no fantasy and , and , and .
try and imagine a culture or a life , adult or otherwise without play .
and the thing that 's so unique about our species is that we 're really designed to play through our whole lifetime .
and we all have capacity to play signal .
nobody misses that dog i took a picture of on a carmel beach a couple of weeks ago .
what 's going to follow from that behavior is play .
and you can trust it .
the basis of human trust is established through play signals .
and we begin to lose those signals , culturally and otherwise , as adults .
that 's a shame .
i think we 've got a lot of learning to do .
now , jane goodall has here a play face along with one of her favorite chimps .
so part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal , facial , body , gestural .
you know , you can tell - and i think when we 're getting into collective play , its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals .
you may not know this word , but it should be your biological first name and last name .
because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood .
and we are , by physical anthropologists , by many , many studies , the most neotenous , the most youthful , the most flexible , the most plastic of all creatures .
and therefore , the most playful .
and this gives us a leg up on adaptability .
now , there is a way of looking at play that i also want to emphasize here , which is the play history .
your own personal play history is unique , and often is not something we think about particularly .
this is a book written by a consummate player by the name of kevin carroll .
kevin carroll came from extremely deprived circumstances : alcoholic mother , absent father , inner-city philadelphia , black , had to take care of a younger brother .
found that when he looked at a playground out of a window into which he had been confined , he felt something different .
and so he followed up on it .
and his life - the transformation of his life from deprivation and what one would expect - potentially prison or death - he become a linguist , a trainer for the 76ers and now is a motivational speaker .
and he gives play as a transformative force over his entire life .
now there 's another play history that i think is a work in progress .
those of you who remember al gore , during the first term and then during his successful but unelected run for the presidency , may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person , at least in public .
and looking at his history , which is common in the press , it seems to me , at least - looking at it from a shrink 's point of view - that a lot of his life was programmed .
summers were hard , hard work , in the heat of tennessee summers .
he had the expectations of his senatorial father and washington , d.c.
and although i think he certainly had the capacity for play - because i do know something about that - he was n't as empowered , i think , as he now is by paying attention to what is his own passion and his own inner drive , which i think has its basis in all of us in our play history .
so what i would encourage on an individual level to do , is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear , joyful , playful image that you have , whether it 's with a toy , on a birthday or on a vacation .
and begin to build to build from the emotion of that into how that connects with your life now .
and you 'll find , you may change jobs - which has happened to a number people when i 've had them do this - in order to be more empowered through their play .
or you 'll be able to enrich your life by prioritizing it and paying attention to it .
most of us work with groups , and i put this up because the d.school , the design school at stanford , thanks to david kelley and a lot of others who have been visionary about its establishment , has allowed a group of us to get together and create a course called " from play to innovation . "
and you 'll see this course is to investigate the human state of play , which is kind of like the polar bear-husky state and its importance to creative thinking : " to explore play behavior , its development and its biological basis ; to apply those principles , through design thinking , to promote innovation in the corporate world ; and the students will work with real-world partners on design projects with widespread application . "
this is our maiden voyage in this .
we 're about two and a half , three months into it , and it 's really been fun .
there is our star pupil , this labrador , who taught a lot of us what a state of play is , and an extremely aged and decrepit professor in charge there .
and brendan boyle , rich crandall - and on the far right is , i think , a person who will be in cahoots with george smoot for a nobel prize - stuart thompson , in neuroscience .
so we 've had brendan , who 's from ideo , and the rest of us sitting aside and watching these students as they put play principles into practice in the classroom .
and one of their projects was to see what makes meetings boring , and to try and do something about it .
so what will follow is a student-made film about just that .
narrator : flow is the mental state of apparition in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing .
characterized by a feeling of energized focus , full involvement and success in the process of the activity .
an important key insight that we learned about meetings is that people pack them in one after another , disruptive to the day .
attendees at meetings do n't know when they 'll get back to the task that they left at their desk .
but it does n't have to be that way .
-lrb- music -rrb- some sage and repeatedly furry monks at this place called the d.school designed a meeting that you can literally step out of when it 's over .
take the meeting off , and have peace of mind that you can come back to me .
because when you need it again , the meeting is literally hanging in your closet .
the wearable meeting .
because when you put it on , you immediately get everything you need to have a fun and productive and useful meeting .
but when you take it off - that 's when the real action happens .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- stuart brown : so i would encourage you all to engage not in the work-play differential - where you set aside time to play - but where your life becomes infused minute by minute , hour by hour , with body , object , social , fantasy , transformational kinds of play .
and i think you 'll have a better and more empowered life .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- john hockenberry : so it sounds to me like what you 're saying is that there may be some temptation on the part of people to look at your work and go - i think i 've heard this , in my kind of pop psychological understanding of play , that somehow , the way animals and humans deal with play , is that it 's some sort of rehearsal for adult activity .
your work seems to suggest that that is powerfully wrong .
sb : yeah , i do n't think that 's accurate , and i think probably because animals have taught us that .
if you stop a cat from playing - which you can do , and we 've all seen how cats bat around stuff - they 're just as good predators as they would be if they had n't played .
and if you imagine a kid pretending to be king kong , or a race car driver , or a fireman , they do n't all become race car drivers or firemen , you know .
so there 's a disconnect between preparation for the future - which is what most people are comfortable in thinking about play as - and thinking of it as a separate biological entity .
and this is where my chasing animals for four , five years really changed my perspective from a clinician to what i am now , which is that play has a biological place , just like sleep and dreams do .
and if you look at sleep and dreams biologically , animals sleep and dream , and they rehearse and they do some other things that help memory and that are a very important part of sleep and dreams .
the next step of evolution in mammals and creatures with divinely superfluous neurons will be to play .
and the fact that the polar bear and husky or magpie and a bear or you and i and our dogs can crossover and have that experience sets play aside as something separate .
and its hugely important in learning and crafting the brain .
so it 's not just something you do in your spare time .
jh : how do you keep - and i know you 're part of the scientific research community , and you have to justify your existence with grants and proposals like everyone else - how do you prevent - and some of the data that you 've produced , the good science that you 're talking about you 've produced , is hot to handle .
how do you prevent either the media 's interpretation of your work or the scientific community 's interpretation of the implications of your work , kind of like the mozart metaphor , where , " oh , mris show that play enhances your intelligence .
well , let 's round these kids up , put them in pens and make them play for months at a time ; they 'll all be geniuses and go to harvard . "
how do you prevent people from taking that sort of action on the data that you 're developing ?
sb : well , i think the only way i know to do it is to have accumulated the advisers that i have who go from practitioners - who can establish through improvisational play or clowning or whatever - a state of play .
so people know that it 's there .
and then you get an fmri specialist , and you get frank wilson , and you get other kinds of hard scientists , including neuroendocrinologists .
and you get them into a group together focused on play , and it 's pretty hard not to take it seriously .
unfortunately , that has n't been done sufficiently for the national science foundation , national institute of mental health or anybody else to really look at it in this way seriously .
i mean you do n't hear about anything that 's like cancer or heart disease associated with play .
and yet i see it as something that 's just as basic for survival - long term - as learning some of the basic things about public health .
jh : stuart brown , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us .
this perfect storm is mounting a grim reality , increasingly grim reality , and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology , and that 's very understandable .
now , this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population , rising towards 10 billion people , land that is turning to desert , and , of course , climate change .
now there 's no question about it at all : we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology .
but fossil fuels , carbon - coal and gas - are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change .
desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert , and this happens only when we create too much bare ground .
there 's no other cause .
and i intend to focus on most of the world 's land that is turning to desert .
but i have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine .
we have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year .
on those , it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground .
no matter what you do , nature covers it up so quickly .
and we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness , and that is where desertification is occurring .
fortunately , with space technology now , we can look at it from space , and when we do , you can see the proportions fairly well .
generally , what you see in green is not desertifying , and what you see in brown is , and these are by far the greatest areas of the earth .
about two thirds , i would guess , of the world is desertifying .
i took this picture in the tihamah desert while 25 millimeters - that 's an inch of rain - was falling .
think of it in terms of drums of water , each containing 200 liters .
over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day .
the next day , the land looked like this .
where had that water gone ?
some of it ran off as flooding , but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again , exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered .
now , because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter , when we damage soils , you give off carbon .
carbon goes back to the atmosphere .
now you 're told over and over , repeatedly , that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world , and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence .
but if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them , you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you 've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae , leading to increased runoff and evaporation .
that is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form .
now we know that desertification is caused by livestock , mostly cattle , sheep and goats , overgrazing the plants , leaving the soil bare and giving off methane .
almost everybody knows this , from nobel laureates to golf caddies , or was taught it , as i was .
now , the environments like you see here , dusty environments in africa where i grew up , and i loved wildlife , and so i grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing .
and then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs .
well , i have news for you .
we were once just as certain that the world was flat .
we were wrong then , and we are wrong again .
and i want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery .
when i was a young man , a young biologist in africa , i was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks .
now no sooner - this was in the 1950s - and no sooner did we remove the hunting , drum-beating people to protect the animals , than the land began to deteriorate , as you see in this park that we formed .
now , no livestock were involved , but suspecting that we had too many elephants now , i did the research and i proved we had too many , and i recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain .
now , that was a terrible decision for me to have to make , and it was political dynamite , frankly .
so our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research .
they did . they agreed with me , and over the following years , we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage .
and it got worse , not better .
loving elephants as i do , that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life , and i will carry that to my grave .
one good thing did come out of it .
it made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions .
when i came to the united states , i got a shock , to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in africa .
and there 'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years .
and i found that american scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural .
so i then began looking at all the research plots i could over the whole of the western united states where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification , but i found the opposite , as we see on this research station , where this grassland that was green in 1961 , by 2002 had changed to that situation .
and the authors of the position paper on climate change from which i obtained these pictures attribute this change to " unknown processes . "
clearly , we have never understood what is causing desertification , which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally .
we have never understood it .
take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here , and i promise you , you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it 's just covered with litter , plant litter .
you have changed the microclimate .
now , by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world 's land , you are changing macroclimate .
but we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago ?
why has it accelerated lately ?
we had no understanding of that .
what we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world , the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals , and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators .
now , the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds , and the larger the herd , the safer the individuals .
now , large herds dung and urinate all over their own food , and they have to keep moving , and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants , while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil , as we see where a herd has passed .
this picture is a typical seasonal grassland .
it has just come through four months of rain , and it 's now going into eight months of dry season .
and watch the change as it goes into this long dry season .
now , all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season , and if it does n't , the grassland and the soil begin to die .
now , if it does not decay biologically , it shifts to oxidation , which is a very slow process , and this smothers and kills grasses , leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil , releasing carbon .
to prevent that , we have traditionally used fire .
but fire also leaves the soil bare , releasing carbon , and worse than that , burning one hectare of grassland gives off more , and more damaging , pollutants than 6,000 cars .
and we are burning in africa , every single year , more than one billion hectares of grasslands , and almost nobody is talking about it .
we justify the burning , as scientists , because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow .
now , looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry , what could we do to keep that healthy ?
and bear in mind , i 'm talking of most of the world 's land now .
okay ? we can not reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change .
we can not burn it without causing desertification and climate change .
what are we going to do ?
there is only one option , i 'll repeat to you , only one option left to climatologists and scientists , and that is to do the unthinkable , and to use livestock , bunched and moving , as a proxy for former herds and predators , and mimic nature .
there is no other alternative left to mankind .
so let 's do that .
so on this bit of grassland , we 'll do it , but just in the foreground .
we 'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature , and we 've done so , and look at that .
all of that grass is now covering the soil as dung , urine and litter or mulch , as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand , and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain , to store carbon , and to break down methane .
and we did that , without using fire to damage the soil , and the plants are free to grow .
when i first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification , i was faced with a real dilemma .
how were we to do it ?
we 'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals , but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world .
then we 'd had 100 years of modern rain science , and that had accelerated desertification , as we first discovered in africa and then confirmed in the united states , and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government .
clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals , and humans , over thousands of years , had never been able to deal with nature 's complexity .
but we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this .
so rather than reinvent the wheel , i began studying other professions to see if anybody had .
and i found there were planning techniques that i could take and adapt to our biological need , and from those i developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing , a planning process , and that does address all of nature 's complexity and our social , environmental , economic complexity .
today , we have young women like this one teaching villages in africa how to put their animals together into larger herds , plan their grazing to mimic nature , and where we have them hold their animals overnight - we run them in a predator-friendly manner , because we have a lot of lands , and so on - and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields , we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well .
let 's look at some results .
this is land close to land that we manage in zimbabwe .
it has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year , and it 's going into the long dry season .
but as you can see , all of that rain , almost of all it , has evaporated from the soil surface .
their river is dry despite the rain just having ended , and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid .
now let 's go to our land nearby on the same day , with the same rainfall , and look at that .
our river is flowing and healthy and clean .
it 's fine .
the production of grass , shrubs , trees , wildlife , everything is now more productive , and we have virtually no fear of dry years .
and we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent , planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants , buffalo , giraffe and other animals that we have .
but before we began , our land looked like that .
this site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got .
okay ? watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature .
this was another site where it had been bare and eroding , and at the base of the marked small tree , we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil . okay ?
and again , watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature .
and there are fallen trees in there now , because the better land is now attracting elephants , etc .
this land in mexico was in terrible condition , and i 've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i began helping a family in the karoo desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland , and thankfully , now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future .
and look at the amazing change in this one , where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature , and once more , we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying .
the vast grasslands of patagonia are turning to desert as you see here .
the man in the middle is an argentinian researcher , and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers .
they put 25,000 sheep in one flock , really mimicking nature now with planned grazing , and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year .
we now have in the violent horn of africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture .
ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals .
i remind you that i am talking about most of the world 's land here that controls our fate , including the most violent region of the world , where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land .
what we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as , i believe , fossil fuels , and maybe more than fossil fuels .
but worse than that , it is causing hunger , poverty , violence , social breakdown and war , and as i am talking to you , millions of men , women and children are suffering and dying .
and if this continues , we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing , even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels .
i believe i 've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this .
we are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents , and people who understand far more about carbon than i do calculate that , for illustrative purposes , if we do what i am showing you here , we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years , and if we just do that on about half the world 's grasslands that i 've shown you , we can take us back to pre-industrial levels , while feeding people .
i can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet , for your children , and their children , and all of humanity .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you , chris .
chris anderson : thank you . i have , and i 'm sure everyone here has , a -rrb- a hundred questions , b -rrb- wants to hug you .
i 'm just going to ask you one quick question .
when you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals , it 's desert . what do they eat ? how does that part work ?
how do you start ?
allan savory : well , we have done this for a long time , and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation , where it 's 100 percent bare .
but many years ago , we took the worst land in zimbabwe , where i offered a £ 5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive , and on that , we trebled the stocking rate , the number of animals , in the first year with no feeding , just by the movement , mimicking nature , and using a sigmoid curve , that principle .
it 's a little bit technical to explain here , but just that .
ca : well , i would love to - i mean , this such an interesting and important idea .
the best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and - i want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.as : wonderful .
ca : that is an astonishing talk , truly an astonishing talk , and i think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way .
thank you so much.as : well , thank you . thank you . thank you , chris .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if i can leave you with one big idea today , it 's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts , and instead of thinking about information overload , what i 'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible .
so what we 're looking at right here is a typical mortality chart organized by age .
this tool that i 'm using here is a little experiment .
it 's called pivot , and with pivot what i can do is i can choose to filter in one particular cause of deaths - say , accidents .
and , right away , i see there 's a different pattern that emerges .
this is because , in the mid-area here , people are at their most active , and over here they 're at their most frail .
we can step back out again and then reorganize the data by cause of death , seeing that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects , but not for everyone .
if we go ahead and we filter by age - say 40 years or less - we see that accidents are actually the greatest cause that people have to be worried about .
and if you drill into that , it 's especially the case for men .
so you get the idea that viewing information , viewing data in this way , is a lot like swimming in a living information info-graphic .
and if we can do this for raw data , why not do it for content as well ?
so what we have right here is the cover of every single sports illustrated ever produced .
it 's all here ; it 's all on the web .
you can go back to your rooms and try this after my talk .
with pivot , you can drill into a decade .
you can drill into a particular year .
you can jump right into a specific issue .
so i 'm looking at this ; i see the athletes that have appeared in this issue , the sports .
i 'm a lance armstrong fan , so i 'll go ahead and i 'll click on that , which reveals , for me , all the issues in which lance armstrong 's been a part of .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , if i want to just kind of take a peek at these , i might think , " well , what about taking a look at all of cycling ? "
so i can step back , and expand on that .
and i see greg lemond now .
and so you get the idea that when you navigate over information this way - going narrower , broader , backing in , backing out - you 're not searching , you 're not browsing .
you 're doing something that 's actually a little bit different .
it 's in between , and we think it changes the way information can be used .
so i want to extrapolate on this idea a bit with something that 's a little bit crazy .
what we 're done here is we 've taken every single wikipedia page and we reduced it down to a little summary .
so the summary consists of just a little synopsis and an icon to indicate the topical area that it comes from .
i 'm only showing the top 500 most popular wikipedia pages right here .
but even in this limited view , we can do a lot of things .
right away , we get a sense of what are the topical domains that are most popular on wikipedia .
i 'm going to go ahead and select government .
now , having selected government , i can now see that the wikipedia categories that most frequently correspond to that are time magazine people of the year .
so this is really important because this is an insight that was not contained within any one wikipedia page .
it 's only possible to see that insight when you step back and look at all of them .
looking at one of these particular summaries , i can then drill into the concept of time magazine person of the year , bringing up all of them .
so looking at these people , i can see that the majority come from government ; some have come from natural sciences ; some , fewer still , have come from business - there 's my boss - and one has come from music .
and interestingly enough , bono is also a ted prize winner .
so we can go , jump , and take a look at all the ted prize winners .
so you see , we 're navigating the web for the first time as if it 's actually a web , not from page-to-page , but at a higher level of abstraction .
and so i want to show you one other thing that may catch you a little bit by surprise .
i 'm just showing the new york times website here .
so pivot , this application - i do n't want to call it a browser ; it 's really not a browser , but you can view web pages with it - and we bring that zoomable technology to every single web page like this .
so i can step back , pop right back into a specific section .
now the reason why this is important is because , by virtue of just viewing web pages in this way , i can look at my entire browsing history in the exact same way .
so i can drill into what i 've done over specific time frames .
here , in fact , is the state of all the demo that i just gave .
and i can sort of replay some stuff that i was looking at earlier today .
and , if i want to step back and look at everything , i can slice and dice my history , perhaps by my search history - here , i was doing some nepotistic searching , looking for bing , over here for live labs pivot .
and from these , i can drill into the web page and just launch them again .
it 's one metaphor repurposed multiple times , and in each case it makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts with the data .
so right now , in this world , we think about data as being this curse .
we talk about the curse of information overload .
we talk about drowning in data .
what if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down , so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next , we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things , and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden ?
if we can do that , then instead of being trapped in data , we might actually extract information .
and , instead of dealing just with information , we can tease out knowledge .
and if we get the knowledge , then maybe even there 's wisdom to be found .
so with that , i thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do n't know why , but i 'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world 's population can go online to learn , to create and to share .
and the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow .
a recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online .
as the parent of a nine-year-old girl , that number seems awfully low .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but just as the internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us , it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world .
and increasingly , the price we 're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy .
today , what many of us would love to believe is that the internet is a private place ; it 's not .
and with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen , we are like hansel and gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods .
we are leaving our birthdays , our places of residence , our interests and preferences , our relationships , our financial histories , and on and on it goes .
now do n't get me wrong , i 'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing .
in fact , when i know the data that 's being shared and i 'm asked explicitly for my consent , i want some sites to understand my habits .
it helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with .
but when i do n't know and when i have n't been asked , that 's when the problem arises .
it 's a phenomenon on the internet today called behavioral tracking , and it is very big business .
in fact , there 's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us .
and when all of that data is held , they can do almost whatever they want with it .
this is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules .
except for some of the recent announcements here in the united states and in europe , it 's an area of consumer protection that 's almost entirely naked .
so let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further .
the visualization you see forming behind me is called collusion and it 's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your firefox browser that helps you see where your web data is going and who 's tracking you .
the red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that i have not navigated to , but are following me .
the blue dots are the sites that i 've actually navigated directly to .
and the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me , but i have no idea who they are .
all of them are connected , as you can see , to form a picture of me on the web .
and this is my profile .
so let me go from an example to something very specific and personal .
i installed collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and i let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day .
now like most of you , i actually start my day going online and checking email .
i then go to a news site , look for some headlines .
and in this particular case i happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and i shared it over a social network .
our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table , and i asked her , " is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school ? "
and she , of course , naturally as a nine-year-old , looked at me and said quizzically , " what 's literacy ? "
so i sent her online , of course , to look it up .
now let me stop here .
we are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me .
i have navigated to a total of four .
so let me fast-forward through the rest of my day .
i go to work , i check email , i log onto a few more social sites , i blog , i check more news reports , i share some of those news reports , i go look at some videos , pretty typical day - in this case , actually fairly pedantic - and at the end of the day , as my day winds down , look at my profile .
the red dots have exploded .
the gray dots have grown exponentially .
all in all , there 's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information , most all of them without my consent .
i look at this picture and it freaks me out .
this is nothing . i am being stalked across the web .
and why is this happening ?
pretty simple - it 's huge business .
the revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today .
and as adults , we 're certainly not alone .
at the same time i installed my own collusion profile , i installed one for my daughter .
and on one single saturday morning , over two hours on the internet , here 's her collusion profile .
this is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children 's sites .
i move from this , from freaked out to enraged .
this is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate ; this is me being a parent .
imagine in the physical world if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement .
i can tell you , there is n't a person in this room that would sit idly by .
we 'd take action . it may not be good action , but we would take action .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we ca n't sit idly by here either .
this is happening today .
privacy is not an option , and it should n't be the price we accept for just getting on the internet .
our voices matter and our actions matter even more .
today we 've launched collusion .
you can download it , install it in firefox , to see who is tracking you across the web and following you through the digital woods .
going forward , all of our voices need to be heard .
because what we do n't know can actually hurt us .
because the memory of the internet is forever .
we are being watched .
it 's now time for us to watch the watchers .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i , like many of you , am one of the two billion people on earth who live in cities .
and there are days - i do n't know about the rest of you guys - but there are days when i palpably feel how much i rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life .
and some days , that can even be a little scary .
but what i 'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues , if we apply open source collaboration .
a couple of years ago , i read an article by new york times writer michael pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment .
now at the time that i was reading this , it was the middle of the winter and i definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my new york city apartment .
so i was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future .
but that was actually exactly the point that michael pollan was making in this article - was it 's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system .
so , i happen to know a little bit from my own work about how nasa has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space .
and you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants ' root systems .
now to a vegetable plant , my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space .
but i can offer some natural light and year-round climate control .
fast-forward two years later : we now have window farms , which are vertical , hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors .
and the way it works is that there 's a pump at the bottom , which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top , which then trickles down through plants ' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets - so there 's no dirt involved .
now light and temperature vary with each window 's microclimate , so a window farm requires a farmer , and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm , and whether she is going to feed her food organically .
back at the time , a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing .
and i really wanted it to be an open project , because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the united states right now and could possibly become another area like monsanto , where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people 's food .
so i decided that , instead of creating a product , what i was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers .
the first few systems that we created , they kind of worked .
we were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical new york city apartment window .
and we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers , all kinds of stuff .
but the first few systems were these leaky , loud power-guzzlers that martha stewart would definitely never have approved .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so to bring on more co-developers , what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs , we explained how they worked , and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems .
and then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us .
so actually now on this website , we have 18,000 people .
and we have window farms all over the world .
what we 're doing is what nasa or a large corporation would call r & d , or research and development .
but what we call it is r & d-i-y , or research and develop it yourself .
so for example , jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps .
it took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right , but once we did , we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half .
tony in chicago has been taking on growing experiments , like lots of other window farmers , and he 's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients .
and window farmers in finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the finnish winters by outfitting them with led grow lights that they 're now making open source and part of the project .
so window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software .
and with every open source project , the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns and the universal concerns .
so my core team and i are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone .
and we 're able to look out for the needs of newcomers .
so for do-it-yourselfers , we provide free , very well-tested instructions so that anyone , anywhere around the world , can build one of these systems for free .
and there 's a patent pending on these systems as well that 's held by the community .
and to fund the project , we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who do n't have time to build their own systems .
now within our community , a certain culture has appeared .
in our culture , it is better to be a tester who supports someone else 's idea than it is to be just the idea guy .
what we get out of this project is we get support for our own work , as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs .
but i think that eileen expresses best what we really get out of this , which is the actual joy of collaboration .
so she expresses here what it 's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea , built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing .
if we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we 're all talking about as environmentalists and food people , maybe we just need to ditch the term " consumer " and get behind the people who are doing stuff .
open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own .
and what we 're seeing is that r & d-i-y has moved beyond just window farms and leds into solar panels and aquaponic systems .
and we 're building upon innovations of generations who went before us .
and we 're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now .
so we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united , and to declare that we are all still pioneers .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everyone is both a learner and a teacher .
this is me being inspired by my first tutor , my mom , and this is me teaching introduction to artificial intelligence to 200 students at stanford university .
now the students and i enjoyed the class , but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern , the teaching technology is n't .
in fact , i use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom .
note the textbook , the sage on the stage , and the sleeping guy in the back . -lrb- laughter -rrb- just like today .
so my co-teacher , sebastian thrun , and i thought , there must be a better way .
we challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our stanford class , but to bring it to anyone in the world for free .
we announced the class on july 29th , and within two weeks , 50,000 people had signed up for it .
and that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries .
we were thrilled to have that kind of audience , and just a bit terrified that we had n't finished preparing the class yet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we got to work .
we studied what others had done , what we could copy and what we could change .
benjamin bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best , so that 's what we tried to emulate , like with me and my mom , even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands .
here , an overhead video camera is recording me as i 'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper .
a student said , " this class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who 's explaining something you have n't grasped , but are about to . "
and that 's exactly what we were aiming for .
now , from khan academy , we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen .
we decided to go even shorter and more interactive .
our typical video is two minutes , sometimes shorter , never more than six , and then we pause for a quiz question , to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring .
here , i 'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of english to parse sentences , and here , there 's a pause and the student has to reflect , understand what 's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue .
students learn best when they 're actively practicing .
we wanted to engage them , to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves .
we mostly avoid questions like , " here 's a formula , now tell me the value of y when x is equal to two . "
we preferred open-ended questions .
one student wrote , " now i 'm seeing bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere i look . "
and i like that kind of response .
that 's just what we were going for .
we did n't want students to memorize the formulas ; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world .
and we succeeded .
or , i should say , the students succeeded .
and it 's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education , and in doing so , we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes .
most online classes , the videos are always available .
you can watch them any time you want .
but if you can do it any time , that means you can do it tomorrow , and if you can do it tomorrow , well , you may not ever get around to it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we brought back the innovation of having due dates . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week , but at the end of the week , you had to get the homework done .
this motivated the students to keep going , and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time , so if you went into a discussion forum , you could get an answer from a peer within minutes .
now , i 'll show you some of the forums , most of which were self-organized by the students themselves .
from daphne koller and andrew ng , we learned the concept of " flipping " the classroom .
students watched the videos on their own , and then they come together to discuss them .
from eric mazur , i learned about peer instruction , that peers can be the best teachers , because they 're the ones that remember what it 's like to not understand .
sebastian and i have forgotten some of that .
of course , we could n't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students , so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums .
and finally , from teach for america , i learned that a class is not primarily about information .
more important is motivation and determination .
it was crucial that the students see that we 're working hard for them and they 're all supporting each other .
now , the class ran 10 weeks , and in the end , about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week , and over 20,000 finished all the homework , putting in 50 to 100 hours .
they got this statement of accomplishment .
so what have we learned ?
well , we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together , but there are more ideas to try .
sebastian 's teaching another class now .
i 'll do one in the fall .
stanford coursera , udacity , mitx and others have more classes coming .
it 's a really exciting time .
but to me , the most exciting part of it is the data that we 're gathering .
we 're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class , billions of interactions altogether , and now we can start analyzing that , and when we learn from that , do experimentations , that 's when the real revolution will come .
and you 'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 2007 , i decided that we needed to reconceptualize how we thought about economic development .
our new goal should be that when every family thinks about where they want to live and work , they should be able to choose between at least a handful of different cities that were all competing to attract new residents .
now we 're a long way away from that goal right now .
there are billions of people in developing countries who do n't have even a single city that would be willing to welcome them .
but the amazing thing about cities is they 're worth so much more than it costs to build them .
so we could easily supply the world with dozens , maybe hundreds , of new cities .
now this might sound preposterous to you if you 've never thought about new cities .
but just substitute apartment building for cities .
imagine half the people who wanted to be in apartments already had them ; the other half are n't there yet .
you could try and expand the capacity by doing additions on all the existing apartments .
but you know what you 'd run into is those apartments and the surrounding areas have rules to avoid discomfort and the distractions of construction .
so it 's extremely hard to do all of those additions .
but you could go out someplace brand new , build a brand new apartment building , as long as the rules there were ones that facilitated construction rather than getting in the way .
so i proposed that governments create new reform zones big enough to hold cities and gave them a name : charter cities .
later i learned that at about this same time , javier and octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in honduras .
they knew that about 75,000 hondurans every year would leave to go to the united states , and they wanted to ask , what could they do to make sure that those people could stay and do the same things in honduras .
at one point , javier said to octavio , " what if we took some of our empty land - what if we just gave it to an embassy - give some to the u.s. embassy ; give some to the canadian embassy - and then if people want to go work under the rules of canada or under the rules of the united states , they can go get jobs , do everything they do on those embassy grounds that they would otherwise have to go to canada or the u.s. to do ? "
in the summer of 2009 , honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis .
at the next regularly scheduled election , pepe lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform , but reconciliation as well .
he asked octavio to be his chief of staff .
meanwhile , i was getting ready to give a talk at tedglobal .
through a process of refinement , trial and error , a lot of user testing , i tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials .
the first point was the importance of rules , like those rules that say you ca n't come in and disturb all the existing apartment holders .
we pay a lot of attention to new technologies , but it takes technologies and rules to get progress , and it 's usually the rules that hold us back .
in the fall of 2010 , a friend from guatemala sent octavio a link to the tedtalk .
he showed it to javier .
they called me .
they said , " let 's present this to the leaders of our country . "
so in december we met in miami , in a hotel conference room .
i tried to explain this point about how valuable cities are , how much more valuable they are than they cost .
and i used this slide showing how valuable the raw land is in a place like new york city : notice , land that 's worth thousands of dollars , in some cases , per square meter .
but it was a fairly abstract discussion , and at some point when there was a pause , octavio said , " paul , maybe we could watch the tedtalk . "
-lrb- laughing -rrb- so the tedtalk laid out in very simple terms , a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land , a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in , to go live under those rules or not .
so i was asked by the president of honduras who said that we need to do this project , this is important , this could be the way forward for our country .
i was asked to come to tegucigalpa and talk again on january fourth and fifth .
so i presented another fact-filled lecture that included a slide like this , which tried to make the point that , if you want to create a lot of value in a city , it has to be very big .
this is a picture of denver , and the outline is the new airport that was built in denver .
this airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers .
so i was trying to persuade the hondurans , if you build a new city , you 've got to start with a site that 's at least 1,000 square kilometers .
that 's more than 250 hundred-thousand acres .
everybody applauded politely .
the faces in the audience were very serious and attentive .
the leader of the congress came up on stage and said , " professor romer , thank you very much for your lecture , but maybe we could watch the tedtalk .
i 've got it here on my laptop . "
so i sat down , and they played the tedtalk .
and it got to the essence , which is that a new city could offer new choices for people .
there would be a choice of a city which you could go to which could be in honduras , instead of hundreds of miles away in the north .
and it also involved new choices for leaders .
because the leaders in the government there in honduras would need help from partner countries , who could benefit from partner countries who help them set up the rules in this charter and the enforcement , so everybody can trust that the charter really will be enforced .
and the insight of president lobo was that that assurance of enforcement that i was thinking about as a way to get the foreign investors to come in and build the city could be equally important for all the different parties in honduras who had suffered for so many years from fear and distrust .
we went and looked at a site .
this picture 's from there .
it easily could hold a thousand square kilometers .
and shortly thereafter , on january 19th , they voted in the congress to amend their constitution to have a constitutional provision that allows for special development regions .
in a country which had just gone through this wrenching crisis , the vote in the congress in favor of this constitutional amendment was 124 to one .
all parties , all factions in society , backed this .
to be part of the constitution , you actually have to pass it twice in the congress .
on february 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one .
immediately after that vote , on february 21st to the 24th , a delegation of about 30 hondurans went to the two places in the world that are most interested in getting into the city building business .
one is south korea .
this is a picture of a big , new city center that 's being built in south korea - bigger than downtown boston .
everything you see there was built in four years , after they spent four years getting the permits .
the other place that 's very interested in city building is singapore .
they 've actually built two cities already in china and are preparing the third .
so if you think about this practically , here 's where we are .
they 've got a site ; they 're already thinking about this site for the second city .
they 're putting in place a legal system that could allow for managers to come in , and also an external legal system .
one country has already volunteered to let its supreme court be the court of final appeal for the new judicial system there .
there 's designers and builders of cities who are very interested .
they even can bring with them some financing .
but the one thing you know they 've already solved is that there 's lots of tenants .
there 's lots of businesses that would like to locate in the americas , especially in a place with a free trade zone , and there 's lots of people who 'd like to go there .
around the world , there 's 700 million people who say they 'd like to move permanently someplace else right now .
there 's a million a year who leave latin america to go to the united states .
many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job - sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing .
sadly , sometimes there are even children who are trying to get reunited with their parents that they have n't seen , in some cases , for a decade .
so what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in honduras ?
or to build a dozen of these , or a hundred of these , around the world ?
what kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents ?
this is an idea worth spreading .
and my friends from honduras asked me to say thank you , ted .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to dedicate this next song to carmelo , who was put to sleep a couple of days ago , because he got too old .
but apparently he was a very nice dog and he always let the cat sleep in the dog bed .
♫ -lrb- dog panting noise -rrb- heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh . ♫ ♫ i 'm just a 'walking my dog , singing my song , strolling along . ♫ ♫ yeah , it 's just me and my dog , catching some sun . we ca n't go wrong . ♫ ♫ my life was lonely and blue . ♫ ♫ yeah , i was sad as a sailor , ♫ ♫ i was an angry ' un too . ♫ ♫ then there was you - appeared when i was entangled with youth and fear , ♫ ♫ and nerves jingle jangled , vermouth and beer were getting me mangled up . ♫ ♫ but then i looked in your eyes ♫
♫ and i was no more a failure . ♫ ♫ you looked so wacky and wise . ♫ ♫ and i said , " lord , i 'm happy , ' cause i 'm just a 'walking my dog , ♫ ♫ catching some sun . we ca n't go wrong . " ♫ ♫ yeah , it 's just me and my dog , singing our song , strolling along . ♫ ♫ ' cause i do n't care about your hating and your doubt , ♫ ♫ and i do n't care what the politicians spout . ♫ ♫ if you need a companion , why , just go out to the pound , ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound , and make that doggie proud , ♫
♫ ' cause that 's what it 's all about . ♫ ♫ -lrb- dog panting noise -rrb- heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh . ♫ ♫ my life was tragic and sad . ♫ ♫ i was the archetypal loser . ♫ ♫ i was a pageant gone bad . ♫ ♫ and then there was you - on time , and wagging your tail ♫ ♫ in the cutest mime that you was in jail . ♫ ♫ i said , " woof , be mine ! " and you gave a wail and then ♫ ♫ i was no longer alone . ♫ ♫ and i was no more a boozer . ♫
♫ we 'll make the happiest home . ♫ ♫ and i said , " lord , i 'm happy , ' cause i 'm just a 'walking my dog , ♫ ♫ singing my song , strolling along . " ♫ ♫ yeah , it 's just me and my dog , catching some sun . we ca n't go wrong , ♫ ♫ ' cause i do n't care about your hating and your doubt , ♫ ♫ and i do n't care what the politicians spout . ♫ ♫ if you need a companion , why , just go out to the pound , ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound , and make that doggie proud , ♫ ♫ ' cause that 's what it 's all about , ♫ ♫ that 's what it 's all about , ♫
♫ that 's what it 's all abou-bow-wow-wow-wow ♫ ♫ that 's what it 's all about . ♫ ♫ -lrb- dog panting noise -rrb- heh , heh , heh , heh , heh . ♫ good dog !
thank you .
you all know this story .
in the summer of 1950 , enrico fermi , the italian-american physicist and atomic-pile builder , went to lunch at los alamos national laboratory and joined some colleagues there , and asked them a question : " where is everybody ? "
this confused his colleagues , obviously , because they were sitting right there with him .
and then he had to clarify that he was n't talking about them .
he was talking about the space aliens .
you see , this was only a few years after the supposed flying saucer crash at roswell , new mexico .
and even though that turned out to be nothing , nothing at all - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - merely a downed weather balloon piloted by small hairless men with slits for mouths ...
still , america had gone saucer-mad , even famous scientists who were eating lunch .
fermi 's reasoning , if i may paraphrase badly , is that the universe is so vast that it stands to reason , there should be other intelligent life out there .
and the universe is so old that unless we were the very first civilization ever to evolve , we should have some evidence of their existence by now .
and yet , to the best of our knowledge , we are alone .
" where is everybody ? " asked fermi , and his colleagues had no answer .
fermi then went on with the same blunt logic to disprove fairies , sasquatch , god , the possibility of love - and thereafter , as you know , enrico fermi ate alone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i am not a scientist .
i have never built an atomic pile .
although , i might argue that , technically , every pile is atomic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- however , with respect , i might point out two possibilities that enrico fermi perhaps did not consider .
one is that the aliens might be very far away .
perhaps , i dare say , even on other planets .
the other possibility - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - is , perhaps , enrico fermi himself was an alien .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- think about it .
is n't it a little convenient that in the midst of the world war , out of nowhere , suddenly an italian scientist showed up with an amazing new technology that would transform everything in the world and darken the history of the human species forever after ?
and is n't it a little strange that he required no payment for this ?
that he asked for only one thing - a gift of two healthy sperm whales ?
that 's - that 's not true .
but it is strange .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if enrico fermi were indeed a space alien , would n't he be the first to have tried to convince his fellow scientists that the space aliens are not already here ?
for it is given in certain ufo-ology or ufology circles , that the aliens are already here and have been for millennia ; that they have walked among us in disguise , observing us , guiding our evolution from ape to man - if you believe in that sort of thing - and , occasionally , kidnapping us in their flying saucers and taking us away to have sex with us in pyramids .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a difficult theory to discount , i think you 'll agree .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for even in my own life , there are memories i have that are difficult to explain - happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird , that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life .
for how else will you explain the amazing and absolutely true close encounters that i had and will describe to you now ?
encounter one : ocean city , new jersey , 1980 .
this was the summer when the special edition of " close encounters of the third kind " was released .
and i went on vacation with my parents to the jersey shore .
within 12 hours , i was horribly sunburned , just like richard dreyfuss in the movie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i spent the rest of the vacation largely sitting outside our little rental house at night , the sidewalk still warm from the sun , watching the skies for ufos .
what did i see ? stars , satellites , blinking airplanes - typical sky junk .
occasionally , kids would come and join me and watch , but their necks soon got sore , and they would go off to the boardwalk to play video games and mingle with humans .
i was pretty good at the video games . i was not very good at the other part , so i stayed alone with the cosmos .
and that 's when it happened .
an elderly couple came walking down the street .
i would say they were in their late seventies , and i would say that they were on a date , because he was wearing a very neat little suit with a yellow tie - a brown suit .
and she was wearing a cardigan , because it was now fully night and a chill was coming in off the ocean .
i remember , for some reason , that they were exactly the same height .
and then they stopped , and the man turned to me and said , " what are you looking for , flying saucers ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you have to admit , that 's a pretty boss piece of detective work for an old man on a date .
but what was stranger still - and even i realized it at the time , as a nine-year-old child - was that they stopped at all .
that this old man would interrupt his moonlight stroll with his sweetheart with the precise reason of making fun of a child .
" oh , " he said , " little green men . "
and then his girlfriend joined in , too .
" there 's no such thing as space men , " she said .
" there 's no such thing . "
and then they both laughed . " ha , ha , ha . "
i looked around .
the street was entirely empty .
i had stopped hearing the sound of the ocean .
it was as though time had stopped .
i did not know why they were teasing me .
i looked into their strangely angry faces , and i remember wondering , are they wearing rubber masks ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what would be behind those rubber masks , if they were ?
giant , almond-shaped , unblinking eyes ?
slits for mouths ?
the old man crooked his finger as though he were firing a gun , and then he made laser sounds .
" kew , kew , kew - watch out . "
and they turned at once and walked away .
the old man reached out his knobbly claw for the woman 's hand , and found it , and left me alone .
now , you could describe this as a simple misunderstanding - a strange encounter among humans .
maybe it was swamp gas , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i know what i saw .
close encounter two : brookline , massachusetts , 1984 .
i went to see the movie " dune , " and a girl talked to me . now , on its face - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - this is impossible on its face , i realize - but it is absolutely true .
it was opening night , naturally .
i went with my friend tim mcgonigal , who sat on my left .
on my right was the girl in question .
she had long , curly black hair , a blue jean jacket .
i remember , she had some sort of injury to her ankle , an ace bandage , and she had crutches .
she was very tall , i would say .
i was starting high school at the time . i would say she was a junior , but i had never seen her before . she did n't go to my school .
i did n't know her name , and i never will .
she was sitting with someone who i presume was her mother , and they were talking about the novel , " dune . "
they were both big fans , mother and daughter - very unusual .
they were talking about how their favorite characters were the giant sandworms .
and then it got stranger .
that 's when she turned to me and said , " are you looking forward to seeing the movie ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- first of all , i was embarrassed because i had not read the novel " dune " at that time .
i was merely a connoisseur of movies featuring desert planets , as i still am .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it was also the tone of how she asked the question : apropos of nothing , like she did n't even care about the answer , as though she just wanted to talk to me .
i did not know what to say . i said , " yes . "
i did not even turn my head .
the movie began .
i need not remind you that this was david lynch 's version of " dune , " in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there was a character called the third-stage guild navigator , which was a kind of giant , floating fetus-creature that lived in a giant tank with this orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him , allowing him to bend space and time .
he could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world .
he had become , in his isolation , so deformed and so sexy , that he had to talk through a kind of old-timey radio to the outside world , and could never touch them .
i mean , i liked him a lot better than the sandworms .
the sandworms were fine , but your favorite character ?
please .
when the movie ended , everyone seemed very happy to get up and get out of the theatre as soon as possible .
except for the girl .
as i walked out , her pace slowed .
perhaps it was the crutches , but it seemed - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it seemed as though she might want to talk to me again .
when i say it out loud , it sounds so ridiculous , but i can only come to the conclusion that it was what , in the alien abductee community , they call a " screen memory " : a ridiculous false recollection designed by their brain to cover up some trauma - say , of being kidnapped and flown off to a sex pyramid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i sure am glad i did not slow down to talk to her .
i sure am glad i never saw her again .
close encounter three : philadelphia , pennsylvania , 1989 .
in the mid-to-late ' 80s , the novelist whitley strieber wrote a book called " communion , " in which he described his own lifelong experiences being abducted by aliens .
and he also described the phenomenon known in this community as " lost time , " where whitley strieber would suddenly become aware that he could not remember the previous ten minutes , or the previous ten hours , or the previous ten days .
and would come to the conclusion that that was when the aliens were taking him and giving him rectal probes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this book became , naturally , an enormous best-seller .
this image by ted joseph was from that book , and was his , sort of , police sketch of what the creatures looked like that whitley strieber had described to him .
and it was so successful that they made it into a movie .
and in 1989 , the way i remember it , i was in philadelphia visiting my girlfriend , and we decided , apropos of nothing , to go see this movie .
and the way i remember it , the movie featured these details .
one : whitley strieber was played by christopher walken .
two : the alien was played by a rubber puppet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- three : there was a surprisingly long sequence of the film in which the rubber puppet gives christopher walken a rectal probe .
four : this was being shown in a regular movie theater in center city , philadelphia .
five : all of which is to say , they made a movie out of the book , " communion , " and it starred christopher walken .
does something seem strange about this to you ?
something odd ? something off ? something wrong with this picture ?
think about it . yes . the answer is : i had a girlfriend . what ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how did this happen ? when did this happen ?
i remember walking out of the theater and becoming suddenly aware of this fact , as we walked hand in hand , and pondering these very same questions .
and to this day , i have no answer for you .
close encounter four : the algarve , portugal , 1991 .
some years later , i and this woman - we 'll call her " catherine fletcher " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - went traveling through the south of portugal together .
we stayed in old , crumbling , walled cities , in tiny little hotels , and we would climb up to the roof and drink vinho verde and watch the sun set and play checkers .
what ? did we do this ? really ? does anyone do this ?
we went to some topless beaches .
excuse me ? no , not in my life .
for what it 's worth , we went to sagres , which was considered , at the time , to be the end of the world .
and there i was chased by a pack of feral dogs on the dock , and the lead dog bit me on the ass , requiring me to go to a strange portuguese clinic and receive an ass shot .
make of that what you will .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- our last day in portugal , we were in the district capital of faro , and catherine decided that she wanted to go to the beach one last time .
now , faro is a bustling little city , and to get to the beach , she explained , you would have to take a bus and then a boat .
and did i want to come with ?
but i was exhausted and dog-bitten , and so i said , " no . "
i remember what she looked like before she left .
the freckles had grown and multiplied on her face and shoulders , clustering into a kind of a tan .
a tan , we were both tan - is this true ?
her eyes were extra bright and extra blue , as a result .
she was smiling .
she was a single woman about to go alone into a country , not even speaking the language , to travel alone by bus and boat to go to a beach she did not know or had never seen .
i loved her , and then she went out into that strange , alien land .
it took me some time to come to my senses .
i had my own " lost time " moment , where i woke up and suddenly realized it was very late in the day , almost dinnertime , and she had not come back .
nervous , i went down to the street to look for her .
now , i did not speak portuguese .
i did not know where the beach was .
i could not call her on a cell phone because this was 1991 , and the aliens had not given us that technology yet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i realized that the day would only have two possible outcomes : either catherine would come back to the hotel , or she would never come back to the hotel .
and so i sat down to wait .
i did not watch the skies , but the very end of the street where the buses and cars and pedestrians and little scooters were moving along .
and i watched those constellations shift , hoping that they would part and i would see her face .
it was at that moment , in that very small town of 30,000 or so , that i truly appreciated the vastness of the universe and the searching we might do in it .
and that 's when the liberians came along .
five young men - all laughing , happy , traveling together , coming back to this hotel where they were staying .
one of them was named joseph , and he asked me what was i doing , and i explained .
and he said , " do n't worry . " he was sure that catherine would be safe .
but he did not seem so very sure , for he sat down to wait with me .
and for the next two hours , they all waited with me : taking turns , going up to their room , coming back , telling me jokes , distracting me .
two hours , they gave me a message .
we are not alone .
and then , in the middle of a sentence , at the very birth of twilight , i turned and looked down the street .
the stars aligned , and she came back .
she was smiling . she did not understand why i was so worried .
neither did the liberians , although there was a huge amount of relief in their laughter as they clapped us on the back , and went back up to their room and left us alone in the street , holding hands .
an event like this leaves a scar on the memory , much like a piece of alien technology that has been inserted into your buttocks by a " portuguese doctor . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and even now , a decade and a half later , even now that we are married , i look for her still , whenever she is not in the room .
and even though , i think you 'll agree , it is probable that during the time she was away , she was kidnapped and replaced by an alien clone , i love her and wait for her still .
thank you for your kind attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we live on a human-dominated planet , putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on earth .
this is bad news , but perhaps surprising to you , it 's also part of the good news .
we 're the first generation - thanks to science - to be informed that we may be undermining the stability and the ability of planet earth to support human development as we know it .
it 's also good news , because the planetary risks we 're facing are so large , that business as usual is not an option .
in fact , we 're in a phase where transformative change is necessary , which opens the window for innovation , for new ideas and new paradigms .
this is a scientific journey on the challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability .
on this journey , i 'd like to bring , apart from yourselves , a good friend , a stakeholder , who 's always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues , a stakeholder who refuses to compromise - planet earth .
so i thought i 'd bring her with me today on stage , to have her as a witness of a remarkable journey , which humbly reminds us of the period of grace we 've had over the past 10,000 years .
this is the living conditions on the planet over the last 100,000 years .
it 's a very important period - it 's roughly half the period when we 've been fully modern humans on the planet .
we 've had the same , roughly , abilities that developed civilizations as we know it .
this is the environmental conditions on the planet .
here , used as a proxy , temperature variability .
it was a jumpy ride . 80,000 years back in a crisis , we leave africa , we colonize australia in another crisis , 60,000 years back , we leave asia for europe in another crisis , 40,000 years back , and then we enter the remarkably stable holocene phase , the only period in the whole history of the planet , that we know of , that can support human development .
a thousand years into this period , we abandon our hunting and gathering patterns .
we go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are today .
the mesopotamian culture : we invent agriculture , we domesticate animals and plants .
you have the roman , the greek and the story as you know it .
the only phase , as we know it that can support humanity .
the trouble is we 're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet , a quadruple sqeeze , which , as its first squeeze , has population growth of course .
now , this is not only about numbers ; this is not only about the fact that we 're seven billion people committed to nine billion people , it 's an equity issue as well .
the majority of the environmental impacts on the planet have been caused by the rich minority , the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial bandwagon in the mid-18th century .
the majority of the planet , aspiring for development , having the right for development , are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle , a momentous pressure .
the second pressure on the planet is , of course the climate agenda - the big issue - where the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at 450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees , to avoid the risk that we may be destabilizing the west antarctic ice sheet , holding six meters - level rising , the risk of destabilizing the greenland ice sheet , holding another seven meters - sea level rising .
now , you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet , a resilient planet , but unfortunately , the third pressure is the ecosystem decline .
never have we seen , in the past 50 years , such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet , one of them being the ability to regulate climate on the long term , in our forests , land and biodiversity .
the forth pressure is surprise , the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old paradigm , that ecosystems behave linearly , predictably , controllably in our - so to say - linear systems , and that in fact , surprise is universal , as systems tip over very rapidly , abruptly and often irreversibly .
this , dear friends , poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous scale .
we may , in fact , have entered a new geological era - the anthropocene , where humans are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level .
now , as a scientist , what 's the evidence for this ?
well , the evidence is , unfortunately , ample .
it 's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated change .
you can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being - nitrous oxide , methane , deforestation , overfishing land degredation , loss of species - they all show the same pattern over the past 200 years .
simultaneously , they branch off in the mid-50s , 10 years after the second world war , showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human enterprise starts in the mid-50s .
you see , for the first time , an imprint on the global level .
and i can tell you , you enter the disciplinary research in each of these , you find something remarkably important , the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to bend the curves , that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the history humanity on the planet , the decade when we have to bend the curves .
now , as if this was not enough - to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated pressure on the planet - we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple stable states , separated by thresholds - illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram , where the depth of the cup is the resilience of the system .
now , the system may gradually - under pressure of climate change , erosion , biodiversity loss - lose the depth of the cup , the resilience , but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly , under a threshold , be tipping over . upff .
sorry . changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation , where new biophysical logic takes over , new species take over , and the system gets locked .
do we have evidence of this ? yes , coral reef systems .
biodiverse , low-nutrient , hard coral systems under multiple pressures of overfishing , unsustainable tourism , climate change .
a trigger and the system tips over , loses its resilience , soft corals take over , and we get undesired systems that can not support economic and social development .
the arctic - a beautiful system - a regulating biome at the planetary level , taking the knock after knock on climate change , appearing to be in a good state .
no scientist could predict that in 2007 , suddenly , what could be crossing a threshold .
the system suddenly , very surprisingly , loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover .
and the drama is , of course , that when the system does this , the logic may change .
it may get locked in an undesired state , because it changes color , absorbs more energy , and the system may get stuck .
in my mind , the largest red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation .
as a sideline , you know that the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted a red flag at the bottom of the arctic to be able to control the oil resources .
now , if we have evidence , which we now have , that wetlands , forests , -lsb- unclear -rsb- monsoon system , the rainforests , behave in this nonlinear way .
30 or so scientists around the world gathered and asked a question for the first time , " do we have to put the planet into the the pot ? "
so we have to ask ourselves : are we threatening this extraordinarily stable holocene state ?
are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we 're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired , if now catastrophic , change for human development ?
you know , you do n't want to stand there .
in fact , you 're not even allowed to stand where this gentleman is standing , at the foaming , slippery waters at the threshold .
in fact , there 's a fence quite upstream of this threshold , beyond which you are in a danger zone .
and this is the new paradigm , which we gathered two , three years back , recognizing that our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future , aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts , is of the past .
now we to ask ourselves : which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the holocene ?
and could we even , thanks to major advancements in earth systems science , identify the thresholds , the points where we may expect nonlinear change ?
and could we even define a planetary boundary , a fence , within which we then have a safe operating space for humanity ?
this work , which was published in " nature , " late 2009 , after a number of years of analysis , led to the final proposition that we can only find nine planetary boundaries with which , under active stewardship , would allow ourselves to have a safe operating space .
these include , of course , climate .
it may surprise you that it 's not only climate .
but it shows that we are interconnected , among many systems on the planet , with the three big systems , climate change , stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification being the three big systems , where the scientific evidence of large-scale thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet .
but we also include , what we call , the slow variables , the systems that , under the hood , regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet - the interference of the big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet , land use change , rate of biodiversity loss , freshwater use , functions which regulate biomass on the planet , carbon sequestration , diversity .
and then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify - air pollution , including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates , but also chemical pollution .
together , these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the anthropocene , understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system .
in fact , most evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three musketeers , " one for all . all for one . "
you degrade forests , you go beyond the boundary on land , you undermine the ability of the climate system to stay stable .
the drama here is , in fact , that it may show that the climate challenge is the easy one , if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development .
now this is the big bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries .
what you see here in black line is the safe operating space , the quantified boundaries , as suggested by this analysis .
the yellow dot in the middle here is our starting point , the pre-industrial point , where we 're very safely in the safe operating space .
in the ' 50s , we start branching out .
in the ' 60s already , through the green revolution and the haber-bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere - you know , human 's today take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a whole .
we do n't transgress the climate boundary until the early ' 90s , actually , right after rio .
and today , we are in a situation where we estimate that we 've transgressed three boundaries , the rate of biodiversity loss , which is the sixth extinction period in the history of humanity - one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs - nitrogen and climate change .
but we still have some degrees of freedom on the others , but we are approaching fast on land , water , phosphorus and oceans .
but this gives a new paradigm to guide humanity , to put the light on our , so far overpowered industrial vehicle , which operates as if we 're only on a dark , straight highway .
now the question then is : how gloomy is this ?
is then sustainable development utopia ?
well , there 's no science to suggest .
in fact , there is ample science to indicate that we can do this transformative change , that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative , a transformative gear , across scales .
the drama is , of course , is that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction .
but it changes fundamentally our governance and management paradigm , from the current linear , command and control thinking , looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible , a much more adaptive approach , where we recognize that redundancy , both in social and environmental systems , is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change .
we have to invest in persistence , in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and still remain in that desired cup .
we have to invest in transformations capability , moving from crisis into innovation and the ability to rise after a crisis , and of course to adapt to unavoidable change .
this is a new paradigm .
we 're not doing that at any scale on governance .
but is it happening anywhere ?
do we have any examples of success on this mind shift being applied at the local level ?
well , yes , in fact we do and the list can start becoming longer and longer .
there 's good news here , for example , from latin america , where plow-based farming systems of the ' 50s and ' 60s led farming basically to a dead-end , with lower and lower yields , degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in paraguay , uruguay and a number of countries , brazil , leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies , which today , for example , in some countries , have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch , zero till farming which , not only produces more food ,
but also sequesters carbon .
the australian great barrier reef is another success story .
under the realization from tourist operators , fishermen , the australian great barrier reef authority and scientists that the great barrier reef is doomed under the current governance regime .
global change , beautification rack culture , overfishing and unsustainable tourism , all together placing this system in the realization of crisis .
but the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset , which today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience , acknowledge redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole , and then allow for much more redundancy in the system .
sweden , the country i come from , has other examples , where wetlands in southern sweden were seen as - as in many countries - as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban regions .
but again , a crisis , new partnerships , actors locally , transforming these into a key component of sustainable urban planning .
so crisis leading into opportunities .
now , what about the future ?
well , the future , of course , has one massive challenge , which is feeding a world of nine billion people .
we need nothing less than a new green revolution , and the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a sink .
it has to basically do this on current land .
we can not expand anymore , because it erodes the planetary boundaries .
we can not continue consuming water as we do today , with 25 percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean .
and we need a transformation .
well , interestingly , and based on my work and others in africa , for example , we 've shown that even the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems , with innovations and supplementary irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts , sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on nutrients from toilets back to farmers ' fields , and innovations in tillage systems , we can triple , quadruple , yield levels on current land .
elinor ostrom , the latest nobel laureate of economics , clearly shows empirically across the world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust , local , action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations , where local actors , together , can deal with the global commons at a large scale .
but even on the hard policy area we have innovations .
we know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a low-carbon economy in record time .
and what shall we do ?
everybody talks about carbon taxes - it wo n't work - emission schemes , but for example , one policy measure , feed-in tariffs on the energy system , which is already applied , from china doing it on offshore wind systems , all the way to the u.s.
where you give the guaranteed price for investment in renewable energy , but you can subsidize electricity to poor people .
you get people out of poverty .
you solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector , while at the same time , stimulating innovation - examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary level .
so there is - no doubt - opportunity here , and we can list many , many examples of transformative opportunities around the planet .
the key though in all of these , the red thread , is the shift in mindset , moving away from a situation where we simply are pushing ourselves into a dark future , where we instead backcast our future , and we say , " what is the playing field on the planet ?
what are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate ? "
and then backtrack innovations within that .
but of course , the drama is , it clearly shows that incremental change is not an option .
so , there is scientific evidence .
they sort of say the harsh news , that we are facing the largest transformative development since the industrialization .
in fact , what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved into the situation we 're in today .
now , science indicates that , yes , we can achieve a prosperous future within the safe operating space , if we move simultaneously , collaborating on a global level , from local to global scale , in transformative options , which build resilience on a finite planet .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
hi , everybody .
ban-gap-seum-ni-da .
i 'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life .
i might look successful and happy being in front of you today , but i once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair .
the violin , which meant everything to me , became a grave burden on me .
although many people tried to comfort and encourage me , their words sounded like meaningless noise .
when i was just about to give everything up after years of suffering , i started to rediscover the true power of music .
-lrb- music -rrb- in the midst of hardship , it was the music that gave me - that restored my soul .
the comfort the music gave me was just indescribable , and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too , and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist .
do you feel like you are all alone ?
i hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart , as it did for me .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
now , i use my music to reach people 's hearts and have found there are no boundaries .
my audience is anyone who is here to listen , even those who are not familiar with classical music .
i not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like carnegie hall and kennedy center , but also hospitals , churches , prisons , and restricted facilities for leprosy patients , just to mention a few .
now , with my last piece , i 'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun , exciting , and that it can rock you .
let me introduce you to my brand new project , " baroque in rock , " which became a golden disc most recently .
it 's such an honor for me .
i think , while i 'm enjoying my life as a happy musician , i 'm earning a lot more recognition than i 've ever imagined .
but it 's now your turn .
changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world .
just play your life with all you have , and share it with the world .
i really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you , tedsters .
play your life , and stay tuned .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- most people do n't know that when i went to high school in this country - i applied for university at a time when i was convinced i was going to be an artist and be a sculptor .
and i came from a very privileged background . i was very lucky .
my family was wealthy , and my father believed in one thing , and that was to give us all as much education as we wanted .
and i announced i wanted to be a sculptor in paris .
and he was a clever man . he sort of said , " well , that 's ok , but you 've done very well in your math sats . "
in fact , i 'd got an 800 . and he thought i did very well - and i did , too - in the arts : this was my passion .
and he said " if you go to mit , " to which i had been given early admission , " i will pay for every year you 're at mit , in graduate or undergraduate - as much as you want - i will pay for an equal number of years for you to live in paris . "
and i thought that was the best deal in town , so i accepted it immediately .
and i decided that if i was good in art , and i was good in mathematics , i 'd study architecture , which was the blending of the two .
i went and told my headmaster that , at prep school .
and i said to him what i was doing , that i was going to go study architecture because it was art and mathematics put together .
he said to me something that just went completely over my head .
he said , " you know , i like grey suits , and i like pin-striped suits , but i do n't like grey pin-striped suits . "
and i thought , " what a turkey this guy is , " and i went off to mit .
i studied architecture , then did a second degree in architecture , and then actually quickly realized that it was n't architecture .
that really , the mixing of art and science was computers , and that that really was the place to bring both , and enjoyed a career doing that .
and probably , if i were to fill out jim citrin 's scale , i 'd put 100 percent on the side of the equation where you spend time making it possible for others to be creative .
and after doing this for a long time , and the media lab passing the baton on , i thought , " well , maybe it 's time for me to do a project .
something that would be important , but also something that would take advantage of all of these privileges that one had . "
and in the case of the media lab , knowing a lot of people , knowing people who were either executives or wealthy , and also not having , in my own case , a career to worry about anymore .
my career , i mean , i 'd done my career .
did n't have to worry about earning money .
did n't have to worry about what people thought about me .
and i said , " boy , let 's really do something that takes advantage of all these features , " and thought that if we could address education , by leveraging the children , and bringing to the world the access of the computers , that that was really the thing we should do .
never shown this picture before , and probably going to be sued for it .
it 's taken at three o 'clock in the morning , without the permission of the company .
it 's about two weeks old . there they are , folks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you look at the picture , you 'll see they 're stacked up .
those are conveyor belts that go around .
this is one of the conveyor belts with the thing going by , but then you 'll see the ones up above .
what happens is , they burn into flash memory the software , and then test them for a few hours .
but you 've got to have the thing moving on the assembly line , because it 's constant .
so they go around in this loop , which is why you see them up there .
so this was great for us because it was a real turning point . but it goes back .
this picture was taken in 1982 , just before the ibm pc was even announced .
seymour papert and i were bringing computers to schools and developing nations at a time when it was way ahead of itself .
but one thing we learned was that these kids can absolutely jump into it just the same way as our kids do here .
and when people tell me , " who 's going to teach the teachers to teach the kids ? "
i say to myself , " what planet do you come from ? "
okay , there 's not a person in this room - i do n't care how techie you are - there 's not a person in this room that does n't give their laptop or cell phone to a kid to help them debug it . ok ?
we all need help , even those of us who are very seasoned .
this picture of seymour - 25 years ago . seymour made a very simple observation in 1968 , and then basically presented it in 1970 - april 11 to be precise - called " teaching children thinking . "
what he observed was that kids who write computer programs understand things differently , and when they debug the programs , they come the closest to learning about learning .
that was very important , and in some sense , we 've lost that .
kids do n't program enough and boy , if there 's anything i hope this brings back , it 's programming to kids .
it 's really important . using applications is ok , but programming is absolutely fundamental .
this is being launched with three languages in it : squeak , logo , and a third , that i 've never even seen before .
the point being , this is going to be very , very intensive on the programming side .
this photograph is very important because it 's much later .
this is in the early 2000s . my son , dimitri - who 's here , many of you know dimitri - went to cambodia , set up this school that we had built , just as the school connected it to the internet .
and these kids had their laptops . but it was really what spirited this , plus the influence of joe and others . we started one laptop per child .
this is the same village in cambodia , just a couple of months ago .
these kids are real pros . there were just 7,000 machines out there being tested by kids . being a nonprofit is absolutely fundamental .
everybody advised me not to be a nonprofit , but they were all wrong .
and the reason being a nonprofit is important is actually twofold .
there are many reasons , but the two that merit the little bit of time is : one , the clarity of purpose is there . the moral purpose is clear .
i can see any head of state , any executive i want , at any time , because i 'm not selling laptops . ok ? i have no shareholders .
whether we sell , it does n't make any difference whatsoever .
the clarity of purpose is absolutely critical . and the second is very counterintuitive - you can get the best people in the world .
if you look at our professional services , including search firms , including communications , including legal services , including banking , they 're all pro bono . and it 's not to save money .
we 've got money in the bank . it 's because you get the best people .
you get the people who are doing it because they believe in the mission , and they 're the best people .
we could n't afford to hire a cfo . we put out a job description for a cfo at zero salary , and we had a queue of people .
it allows you to team up with people . the u.n. 's not going to be our partner if we 're profit making . so announcing this with kofi annan was very important , and the u.n. allowed us to basically reach all the countries . and this was the machine we were showing before i met yves behar .
and while this machine in some sense is silly , in retrospect , it actually served a very important purpose .
that pencil-yellow crank was remembered by everybody .
everybody remembered the pencil-yellow crank . it 's different .
it was getting its power in a different way . it 's kind of childlike .
even though this was n't the direction we went because the crank - it really is stupid to have it on board , by the way .
in spite of what some people in the press do n't get it , did n't understand it , we did n't take it off because we did n't want to do - having it on the laptop itself is really not what you want .
you want a separate thing , like the ac adaptor .
i did n't bring one with me , but they really work much better off-board .
and then , i could tell you lots about the laptop , but i decided on just four things .
just keep in mind - because there are other people , including bill gates , who said , " gee , you 've got a real computer . "
that computer is unlike anything you 've had , and does things - there are four of them - that you do n't come close to . and it 's very important to be low power , and i hope that 's picked up more by the industry .
that the reason that you want to be below two watts is that 's roughly what you can generate with your upper body .
dual-mode display - that sunlight display 's fantastic .
we were using it at lunch today in the sunlight , and the more sunlight the better .
and that was really critical . the mesh network , it 'll become commonplace .
and of course , " rugged " goes without saying .
and the reason i think design matters is n't because i wanted to go to art school .
and by the way , when i graduated from mit , i thought the worst and silliest thing to do would be to go to paris for six years . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i did n't do that . but design matters for a number of reasons .
the most important being that it is the best way to make an inexpensive product .
most people make inexpensive products by taking cheap design , cheap labor , cheap components , and making a cheap laptop .
and , in english , the word " cheap " has a double meaning , which is really appropriate , because it 's cheap , in the pejorative sense , as well as inexpensive .
but if you take a different approach , and you think of very large-scale integration , very advanced materials , very advanced manufacturing - so you 're pouring chemicals in one end , ipods are spewing out the other - and really cool design , that 's what we wanted to do .
and i can race through these and save a lot of time because yves and i obviously did n't compare notes .
these are his slides , and so i do n't have to talk about them .
but it was really , to us , very important as a strategy .
it was n't just to kind of make it cute , because somebody - you know , good design is very important .
yves showed one of the power-generating devices .
the mesh network , the reason i - and i wo n't go into it in great detail - but when we deliver laptops to kids in the remotest and poorest parts of the world , they 're connected . there 's not just laptops .
and so , we have to drop in satellite dishes . we put in generators .
it 's a lot of stuff that goes behind these . these can talk to each other .
if you 're in a desert , they can talk to each other about two kilometers apart .
if you 're in the jungle , it 's about 500 meters . so if a kid bicycles home , or walks a few miles , they 're going to be off the grid , so to speak .
they 're not going to be near another laptop , so you have to nail these onto a tree , and sort of , get it .
you do n't call verizon or sprint . you build your own network .
and that 's very important , the user interface .
we are launching with 18 keyboards . english is by far the minority .
latin is relatively rare , too . you just look at some of the languages .
i 'm willing to suspect some of you had n't even heard of them before .
is there anybody in the room , one person , unless you work with olpc , is there anybody in the room that can tell me what language the keyboard is that 's on the screen ? there 's only one hand - so you get it .
yes , you 're right . he 's right . it 's amharic , it 's ethiopian . in ethiopia , there 's never been a keyboard .
there is no keyboard standard because there 's no market .
and this is the big difference .
again , when you 're a nonprofit , you look at children as a mission , not as a market .
so we went to ethiopia , and we helped them make a keyboard .
and this will become the standard ethiopian keyboard .
so what i want to end with is sort of what we 're doing to roll it out .
and we changed strategy completely . i decided at the beginning - it was a pretty good thing to decide in the beginning , it 's not what we 're doing now - is to go to six countries .
big countries , one of them is not so big , but it 's rich .
here 's the six . we went to the six , and in each case the head of state said he would do it , he 'd do a million .
in the case of gaddafi , he 'd do 1.2 million , and that they would launch it .
we thought , this is exactly the right strategy , get it out , and then the little countries could sort of piggyback on these big countries .
and so i went to each of those countries at least six times , met with the head of state probably two or three times .
in each case , got the ministers , went through a lot of the stuff .
this was a period in my life where i was traveling 330 days per year .
not something you 'd envy or want to do .
in the case of libya , it was a lot of fun meeting gaddafi in his tent .
the camel smells were unbelievable .
and it was 45 degrees c. i mean , this was not what you 'd call a cool experience . and former countries - i say former , because none of them really came through this summer - there was a big difference between getting a head of state to have a photo opportunity , make a press release .
so we went to smaller ones . uruguay , bless their hearts .
small country , not so rich . president said he 'd do it , and guess what ?
he did do it . the tender had nothing in it that related to us , nothing specific about sunlight-readable , mesh-network , low-power , but just a vanilla laptop proposal .
and guess what ? we won it hands down .
when it was announced that they were going to do every child in uruguay , the first 100,000 , boom , went to olpc .
the next day - the next day , not even 24 hours had passed - in peru , the president of peru said , " we 'll do 250 . " and boom , a little domino effect .
the president of rwanda stepped in and said he would do it .
the president of ethiopia said he would do it .
and boom , boom , boom . the president of mongolia .
and so what happens is , these things start to happen with these countries - still not enough .
add up all those countries , it did n't quite get to thing , so we said , " let 's start a program in the united states . " so , end of august , early september , we decide to do this . we announced it near the middle , end - just when the clinton initiative was taking place .
we thought that was a good time to announce it .
launched it on the 12 of november .
we said it would be just for a short period until the 26 . we 've extended it until the 31 .
and the " give one , get one " program is really important because it got a lot of people absolutely interested .
the first day it was just wild . and then we said , " well , let 's get people to give many . not just one , and get one , but maybe give 100 , give 1,000 . " and that 's where you come in .
and that 's where i think it 's very important . i do n't want you all to go out and buy 400 dollars worth of laptops . okay ? do it , but that 's not going to help . okay ?
if everybody in this room goes out tonight and orders one of these things for 400 dollars , whatever it is , 300 people in the room doing it - yeah , great .
i want you do something else .
and it 's not to go out and buy 100 or 1,000 , though , i invite you to do that , and 10,000 would be even better .
tell people about it ! it 's got to become viral , ok ?
use your mailing lists . people in this room have extraordinary mailing lists .
get your friends to give one , get one .
and if each one of you sends it to 300 or 400 people , that would be fantastic .
i wo n't dwell on the pricing at all .
just to say that when you do the " give one , get one , " a lot of press is a bit about , " they did n't make it , it 's 188 dollars , it 's not 100 . "
it will be 100 in two years . it will go below 100 .
we 've pledged not to add features , but to bring that price down .
but it was the countries that wanted it to go up , and we let them push it up for all sorts of reasons . so what you can do - i 've just said it . do n't just give one , get one .
i just want to end with one last one . this one is not even 24-hours old , or maybe it 's 24-hours .
the first kids got their laptops . they got them by ship , and i 'm talking now about 7,000 , 8,000 at a time went out this week .
they went to uruguay , peru , mexico .
and it 's been slow coming , and we 're only making about 5,000 a week , but we hope , we hope , sometime in next year , maybe by the middle of the year , to hit a million a month . now put that number , and a million is n't so much . it 's not a big number .
we 're selling a billion cell phones worldwide this year .
but a million a month in laptop-land is a big number .
and the world production today , everybody combined , making laptops , is five million a month . so i 'm standing here telling you that sometime next year , we 're going to make 20 percent of the world production .
and if we do that , there are going to be a lot of lucky kids out there .
and we hope if you have eg two years from now , or whenever you have it again , i wo n't have bad breath , and i will be invited back , and will have , hopefully by then , maybe 100 million out there to children .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are losing our listening .
we spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening , but we 're not very good at it .
we retain just 25 percent of what we hear .
now not you , not this talk , but that is generally true .
let 's define listening as making meaning from sound .
it 's a mental process , and it 's a process of extraction .
we use some pretty cool techniques to do this .
one of them is pattern recognition .
-lrb- crowd noise -rrb- so in a cocktail party like this , if i say , " david , sara , pay attention , " some of you just sat up .
we recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal , and especially our name .
differencing is another technique we use .
if i left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes , you would literally cease to hear it .
we listen to differences , we discount sounds that remain the same .
and then there is a whole range of filters .
these filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to .
most people are entirely unconscious of these filters .
but they actually create our reality in a way , because they tell us what we 're paying attention to right now .
give you one example of that : intention is very important in sound , in listening .
when i married my wife , i promised her that i would listen to her every day as if for the first time .
now that 's something i fall short of on a daily basis .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's a great intention to have in a relationship .
but that 's not all .
sound places us in space and in time .
if you close your eyes right now in this room , you 're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces .
and you 're aware of how many people are around you because of the micro-noises you 're receiving .
and sound places us in time as well , because sound always has time embedded in it .
in fact , i would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future .
so , " sonority is time and meaning " - a great quote .
i said at the beginning , we 're losing our listening .
why did i say that ?
well there are a lot of reasons for this .
first of all , we invented ways of recording - first writing , then audio recording and now video recording as well .
the premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared .
secondly , the world is now so noisy , -lrb- noise -rrb- with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily , it 's just hard to listen ; it 's tiring to listen .
many people take refuge in headphones , but they turn big , public spaces like this , shared soundscapes , into millions of tiny , little personal sound bubbles .
in this scenario , nobody 's listening to anybody .
we 're becoming impatient .
we do n't want oratory anymore , we want sound bites .
and the art of conversation is being replaced - dangerously , i think - by personal broadcasting .
i do n't know how much listening there is in this conversation , which is sadly very common , especially in the u.k.
we 're becoming desensitized .
our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention .
and that means it 's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet , the subtle , the understated .
this is a serious problem that we 're losing our listening .
this is not trivial .
because listening is our access to understanding .
conscious listening always creates understanding .
and only without conscious listening can these things happen - a world where we do n't listen to each other at all , is a very scary place indeed .
so i 'd like to share with you five simple exercises , tools you can take away with you , to improve your own conscious listening .
would you like that ?
-lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- good .
the first one is silence .
just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again .
if you ca n't get absolute silence , go for quiet , that 's absolutely fine .
second , i call this the mixer .
-lrb- noise -rrb- so even if you 're in a noisy environment like this - and we all spend a lot of time in places like this - listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can i hear ?
how many individual channels in that mix am i listening to ?
you can do it in a beautiful place as well , like in a lake .
how many birds am i hearing ?
where are they ? where are those ripples ?
it 's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening .
third , this exercise i call savoring , and this is a beautiful exercise .
it 's about enjoying mundane sounds .
this , for example , is my tumble dryer .
-lrb- dryer -rrb- it 's a waltz .
one , two , three . one , two , three . one , two , three .
i love it .
or just try this one on for size .
-lrb- coffee grinder -rrb- wow !
so mundane sounds can be really interesting if you pay attention .
i call that the hidden choir .
it 's around us all the time .
the next exercise is probably the most important of all of these , if you just take one thing away .
this is listening positions - the idea that you can move your listening position to what 's appropriate to what you 're listening to .
this is playing with those filters .
do you remember , i gave you those filters at the beginning .
it 's starting to play with them as levers , to get conscious about them and to move to different places .
these are just some of the listening positions , or scales of listening positions , that you can use .
there are many .
have fun with that . it 's very exciting .
and finally , an acronym .
you can use this in listening , in communication .
if you 're in any one of those roles - and i think that probably is everybody who 's listening to this talk - the acronym is rasa , which is the sanskrit word for juice or essence .
and rasa stands for receive , which means pay attention to the person ; appreciate , making little noises like " hmm , " " oh , " " okay " ; summarize , the word " so " is very important in communication ; and ask , ask questions afterward .
now sound is my passion , it 's my life .
i wrote a whole book about it . so i live to listen .
that 's too much to ask from most people .
but i believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully - connected in space and in time to the physical world around us , connected in understanding to each other , not to mention spiritually connected , because every spiritual path i know of has listening and contemplation at its heart .
that 's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill .
why is it not taught ? it 's crazy .
and if we can teach listening in our schools , we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous , scary world that i talked about and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time - or at least capable of doing it .
now i do n't know how to do that , but this is ted , and i think the ted community is capable of anything .
so i invite you to connect with me , connect with each other , take this mission out and let 's get listening taught in schools , and transform the world in one generation to a conscious listening world - a world of connection , a world of understanding and a world of peace .
thank you for listening to me today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to begin this song i wrote about ceaseless yearning and never-ending want with a poem of popular petrarchan paradoxes by sir thomas wyatt the elder : " i find no peace , and all my war is done ; i fear and hope , i burn and freeze like ice ; i fly above the wind , and yet i can not arise ; and naught i have , and all the world i seize upon . "
♫ i want what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫
♫ have but i do n't have ♫ ♫ it feels like all i got is loss on a bad back ♫ ♫ gone with the last train , honey do n't you fret ♫ ♫ every cloud has a silver lining ♫ ♫ just a little rain , just a little rain , just a little rain ♫ ♫ i want what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have but i do n't have ♫ ♫ my mind wo n't stop , and my heart says go ♫
♫ nobody knows how to hold me ♫ ♫ my mind wo n't stop , and my heart says , ♫ ♫ " good things come to those who wait " ♫ ♫ and i ca n't stand in ... ♫ ♫ i ca n't stand in line forever ♫ ♫ stand the cold air ♫ ♫ glad-handed ♫ ♫ sick and tired of the " later , maybe " ♫ ♫ take it , fake it , take it , take-it-or-leave-it life ♫ ♫ and i gotta just tame it ♫ ♫ i gotta just name it ♫ ♫ i gotta just seize , so please , oh please , oh please , oh please ♫
♫ oh please me right , ' cause ♫ ♫ my mind wo n't stop ♫ ♫ and my heart says go ♫ ♫ nobody knows how to hold me ♫ ♫ my mind wo n't stop - and my heart says go-ooooo ... ♫ ♫ good things must be here - yes , right here ♫ ♫ here , right here , right here ♫ ♫ i wo n't live this life forever ♫ ♫ one time round is all the offer is ♫ ♫ sick and tired of the " later , maybe " ♫ ♫ take it , fake it , make it , leave it life ♫
♫ and i gotta just name it , i gotta just claim it ♫ ♫ i gotta just seize ♫ ♫ oh please , oh please , oh please me right ♫ ♫ i want what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have but i do n't have - you know that ♫ ♫ my mind wo n't stop , and my heart says go ♫ ♫ nobody knows how to hold me , no ♫ ♫ my mind wo n't stop , and my heart says go ♫
♫ ' cause i want what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have but i - have what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have but i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have what i do n't have , what i want ♫ ♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have but i do n't have , what i want ♫
♫ what i ca n't have , need what i ca n't want ♫ ♫ have but i do n't have what i want ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's monday morning .
in washington , the president of the united states is sitting in the oval office , assessing whether or not to strike al qaeda in yemen .
at number 10 downing street , david cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession .
in madrid , maria gonzalez is standing at the door , listening to her baby crying and crying , trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it .
and i am sitting by my father 's bedside in hospital , trying to work out whether i should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said , " you must make him drink today , " - my father 's been nil by mouth for a week - or whether , by giving him this bottle , i might actually kill him .
we face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives , and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions .
we talk things over with our friends , we scour the internet , we search through books .
but still , even in this age of google and tripadvisor and amazon recommends , it 's still experts that we rely upon most - especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters .
because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity , we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can - that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own .
and in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing , we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and can not do .
but i believe that this is a big problem , a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society , as a culture and as individuals .
it 's not that experts have not massively contributed to the world - of course they have .
the problem lies with us : we 've become addicted to experts .
we 've become addicted to their certainty , their assuredness , their definitiveness , and in the process , we have ceded our responsibility , substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom .
we 've surrendered our power , trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide .
this is no exaggeration .
in a recent experiment , a group of adults had their brains scanned in an mri machine as they were listening to experts speak .
the results were quite extraordinary .
as they listened to the experts ' voices , the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off .
it literally flat-lined .
and they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice , however right or wrong .
but experts do get things wrong .
did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10 ?
did you know that if you file your tax returns yourself , you 're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you ?
and then there 's , of course , the example that we 're all too aware of : financial experts getting it so wrong that we 're living through the worst recession since the 1930s .
for the sake of our health , our wealth and our collective security , it 's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on .
and i 'm saying this as an economist who , over the past few years , has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why , but also - and i 'm aware of the irony here - as an expert myself , as a professor , as somebody who advises prime ministers , heads of big companies , international organizations , but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change , that we need to become more open-minded , more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view .
so in order to help you understand where i 'm coming from , let me bring you into my world , the world of experts .
now there are , of course , exceptions , wonderful , civilization-enhancing exceptions .
but what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps , that within these camps , a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition , that experts move with the prevailing winds , often hero-worshipping their own gurus .
alan greenspan 's proclamations that the years of economic growth would go on and on , not challenged by his peers , until after the crisis , of course .
you see , we also learn that experts are located , are governed , by the social and cultural norms of their times - whether it be the doctors in victorian england , say , who sent women to asylums for expressing sexual desire , or the psychiatrists in the united states who , up until 1973 , were still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness .
and what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift , that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks - because we 've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects , or studies funded by food companies of their new products , massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they 're about to bring by market .
the study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study .
and we 've also got to be aware that experts , of course , also make mistakes .
they make mistakes every single day - mistakes born out of carelessness .
a recent study in the archives of surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries , operating on the wrong side of the brain , carrying out procedures on the wrong hand , elbow , eye , foot , and also mistakes born out of thinking errors .
a common thinking error of radiologists , for example - when they look at ct scans - is that they 're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient 's problem to be .
so if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia , say , what happens is that , if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan , they literally stop looking at it - thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient 's lungs .
i 've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts .
these are , of course , not the only insights i could share , but i hope they give you a clear sense at least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them , why we need to rebel and why we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on .
but how can we do this ?
well for the sake of time , i want to focus on just three strategies .
first , we 've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles .
this does n't mean having to get a ph.d.
in every single subject , you 'll be relieved to hear .
but it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when , for example , we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand .
why was it that , when i had an operation , " beware , ms. hertz , of hyperpyrexia , " when he could have just as easily said , " watch out for a high fever . "
you see , being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs , their equations , their forecasts , their prophecies , and being armed with the questions to do that - questions like : what are the assumptions that underpin this ?
what is the evidence upon which this is based ?
what has your investigation focused on ?
and what has it ignored ?
it recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first , primarily on male animals and then , primarily on men .
it seems that they 've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world 's population are women .
and women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs do n't work nearly as well on women as they do on men - and the drugs that do work well work so well that they 're actively harmful for women to take .
being a rebel is about recognizing that experts ' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed .
second , we need to create the space for what i call " managed dissent . "
if we are to shift paradigms , if we are to make breakthroughs , if we are to destroy myths , we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out , in which we 're bringing in new , diverse , discordant , heretical views into the discussion , fearlessly , in the knowledge that progress comes about , not only from the creation of ideas , but also from their destruction - and also from the knowledge that , by surrounding ourselves by divergent , discordant , heretical views .
all the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter .
encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts , which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true .
and that 's why i talk about the need to actively manage dissent .
google ceo eric schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy .
in meetings , he looks out for the person in the room - arms crossed , looking a bit bemused - and draws them into the discussion , trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion , so that they have dissent within the room .
managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement , discord and difference .
but we need to go even further .
we need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are .
the conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced degrees , fancy titles , diplomas , best-selling books - high-status individuals .
but just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise - whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and ceo 's , but also shop-girls - yeah .
best buy , the consumer electronics company , gets all its employees - the cleaners , the shop assistants , the people in the back office , not just its forecasting team - to place bets , yes bets , on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before christmas , on whether customers ' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company , on whether a project will come in on time .
by leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company , best buy was able to discover , for example , that the store that it was going to open in china - its big , grand store - was not going to open on time .
because when it asked its staff , all its staff , to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not , a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening .
it turned out that they were aware , as no one else within the company was , of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts , nor the experts on the ground in china , were even aware of .
the strategies that i have discussed this evening - embracing dissent , taking experts on , democratizing expertise , rebellious strategies - are strategies that i think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing , complex , difficult times .
for if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on , if we challenge experts , if we 're skeptical , if we devolve authority , if we are rebellious , but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance , uncertainty and doubt , and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too , we will set ourselves up much better for now , more than ever , is not the time to be blindly following , blindly accepting , blindly trusting .
now is the time to face the world with eyes wide open - yes , using experts to help us figure things out , for sure - i do n't want to completely do myself out of a job here - but being aware of their limitations and , of course , also our own .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am very , very happy to be amidst some of the most - the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they 're reflecting on my glasses .
i am very happy and honored to be amidst very , very innovative and intelligent people .
i have listened to the three previous speakers , and guess what happened ?
every single thing i planned to say , they have said it here , and it looks and sounds like i have nothing else to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something , that bud is a young one .
so , i will - since i am not young and am very old , i still will say something .
we are hosting this conference at a very opportune moment , because another conference is taking place in berlin .
it is the g8 summit .
the g8 summit proposes that the solution to africa 's problems should be a massive increase in aid , something akin to the marshall plan .
unfortunately , i personally do not believe in the marshall plan .
one , because the benefits of the marshall plan have been overstated .
its largest recipients were germany and france , and it was only 2.5 percent of their gdp .
an average african country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13 , 15 percent of its gdp , and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries .
but i want to say that there are two things we need to connect .
how the media covers africa in the west , and the consequences of that .
by displaying despair , helplessness and hopelessness , the media is telling the truth about africa , and nothing but the truth .
however , the media is not telling us the whole truth .
because despair , civil war , hunger and famine , although they 're part and parcel of our african reality , they are not the only reality .
and secondly , they are the smallest reality .
africa has 53 nations .
we have civil wars only in six countries , which means that the media are covering only six countries .
africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the western media largely presents to its audience .
but the effect of that presentation is , it appeals to sympathy .
it appeals to pity . it appeals to something called charity .
and , as a consequence , the western view of africa 's economic dilemma is framed wrongly .
the wrong framing is a product of thinking that africa is a place of despair .
what should we do with it ? we should give food to the hungry .
we should deliver medicines to those who are ill .
we should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war .
and in the process , africa has been stripped of self-initiative .
i want to say that it is important to recognize that africa has fundamental weaknesses .
but equally , it has opportunities and a lot of potential .
we need to reframe the challenge that is facing africa , from a challenge of despair , which is called poverty reduction , to a challenge of hope .
we frame it as a challenge of hope , and that is worth creation .
the challenge facing all those who are interested in africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty .
it should be a challenge of creating wealth .
once we change those two things - if you say the africans are poor and they need poverty reduction , you have the international cartel of good intentions moving onto the continent , with what ?
medicines for the poor , food relief for those who are hungry , and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war .
and in the process , none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms , not the causes of africa 's fundamental problems .
sending somebody to school and giving them medicines , ladies and gentlemen , does not create wealth for them .
wealth is a function of income , and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job .
now , once we begin to talk about wealth creation in africa , our second challenge will be , who are the wealth-creating agents in any society ?
they are entrepreneurs . -lsb- unclear -rsb- told us they are always about four percent of the population , but 16 percent are imitators .
but they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship .
so , where should we be putting the money ?
we need to put money where it can productively grow .
support private investment in africa , both domestic and foreign .
support research institutions , because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation .
but what is the international aid community doing with africa today ?
they are throwing large sums of money for primary health , for primary education , for food relief .
the entire continent has been turned into a place of despair , in need of charity .
ladies and gentlemen , can any one of you tell me a neighbor , a friend , a relative that you know , who became rich by receiving charity ?
by holding the begging bowl and receiving alms ?
does any one of you in the audience have that person ?
does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another ?
well , since i 'm not seeing the hand , it appears that what i 'm stating is true .
-lrb- bono : yes ! -rrb- andrew mwenda : i can see bono says he knows the country .
which country is that ?
-lrb- bono : it 's an irish land . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- bono : -lsb- unclear -rsb- -rrb- am : thank you very much . but let me tell you this .
external actors can only present to you an opportunity .
the ability to utilize that opportunity and turn it into an advantage depends on your internal capacity .
africa has received many opportunities .
many of them we have n't benefited much .
why ? because we lack the internal , institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations . i 'll give you an example .
under the cotonou agreement , formerly known as the lome convention , african countries have been given an opportunity by europe to export goods , duty-free , to the european union market .
my own country , uganda , has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the european union market .
we have n't exported one kilogram yet .
we import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from brazil and cuba .
secondly , under the beef protocol of that agreement , african countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the european union market .
none of those countries , including africa 's most successful nation , botswana , has ever met its quota .
so , i want to argue today that the fundamental source of africa 's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework .
and all forms of intervention need support , the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth , the kinds of institutions that increase productivity .
how do we begin to do that , and why is aid the bad instrument ?
aid is the bad instrument , and do you know why ?
because all governments across the world need money to survive .
money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order .
you have to pay the army and the police to show law and order .
and because many of our governments are quite dictatorial , they need really to have the army clobber the opposition .
the second thing you need to do is pay your political hangers-on .
why should people support their government ?
well , because it gives them good , paying jobs , or , in many african countries , unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption .
the fact is no government in the world , with the exception of a few , like that of idi amin , can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule .
many countries in the -lsb- unclear -rsb- , they need legitimacy .
to get legitimacy , governments often need to deliver things like primary education , primary health , roads , build hospitals and clinics .
if the government 's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people , such a government is driven by self-interest to govern in a more enlightened fashion .
it will sit with those who create wealth .
talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them .
the problem with the african continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in africa .
the productive margin in our governments ' search for revenue does not lie in the domestic economy , it lies with international donors .
rather than sit with ugandan - -lrb- applause -rrb- - rather than sit with ugandan entrepreneurs , ghanaian businessmen , south african enterprising leaders , our governments find it more productive to talk to the imf and the world bank .
i can tell you , even if you have ten ph.ds. , you can never beat bill gates in understanding the computer industry .
why ? because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business - it requires that you listen to the people , the private sector actors in that industry .
governments in africa have therefore been given an opportunity , by the international community , to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens , and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the imf and the world bank , and then it is the imf and the world bank that tell them what its citizens need .
in the process , we , the african people , have been sidelined from the policy-making , policy-orientation , and policy- implementation process in our countries .
we have limited input , because he who pays the piper calls the tune .
the imf , the world bank , and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens , and therefore what our governments are doing , because they depend on aid , is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens .
but i want to put a caveat on my argument , and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive .
some aid may have built a hospital , fed a hungry village .
it may have built a road , and that road may have served a very good role .
the mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success , generalize them , pour billions and trillions of dollars into them , and then spread them across the whole world , ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village , the skills , the practices , the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed - like in sauri village , in kenya , where jeffrey sachs is working - and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody .
aid increases the resources available to governments , and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have , as a person in africa seeking a career .
by increasing the political attractiveness of the state , especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in africa , aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie .
ladies and gentlemen , the most enterprising people in africa can not find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business .
governments are not changing it . why ?
because they do n't need to talk to their own citizens .
they talk to international donors .
so , the most enterprising africans end up going to work for government , and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid .
i also want to say that it is important for us to note that , over the last 50 years , africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community , in the form of technical assistance , and financial aid , and all other forms of aid .
between 1960 and 2003 , our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid , and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in africa .
where has all the aid gone ?
i want to use the example of my own country , called uganda , and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there .
in the 2006-2007 budget , expected revenue : 2.5 trillion shillings .
the expected foreign aid : 1.9 trillion .
uganda 's recurrent expenditure - by recurrent what do i mean ?
hand-to-mouth is 2.6 trillion .
why does the government of uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue ?
it 's because there 's somebody there called foreign aid , who contributes for it .
but this shows you that the government of uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments , but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure .
public administration , which is largely patronage , takes 690 billion .
the military , 380 billion .
agriculture , which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens , takes only 18 billion .
trade and industry takes 43 billion .
and let me show you , what does public expenditure - rather , public administration expenditure - in uganda constitute ?
there you go . 70 cabinet ministers , 114 presidential advisers , by the way , who never see the president , except on television .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and when they see him physically , it is at public functions like this , and even there , it is him who advises them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have 81 units of local government .
each local government is organized like the central government - a bureaucracy , a cabinet , a parliament , and so many jobs for the political hangers-on .
there were 56 , and when our president wanted to amend the constitution and remove term limits , he had to create 25 new districts , and now there are 81 .
you need wembley stadium to host our parliament .
one hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies , all of which have directors and the cars . and the final thing , this is addressed to mr. bono . in his work , he may help us on this .
a recent government of uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the minister of health headquarters .
uganda has 961 sub-counties , each of them with a dispensary , none of which has an ambulance .
so , the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers , the permanent secretaries , the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects , while the poor die without ambulances and medicine .
finally , i want to say that before i came to speak here , i was told that the principle of tedglobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt .
it should be short enough to arouse interest , but long enough to cover the subject .
i hope i have achieved that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation , hopefully for a good cause , which is self-improvement .
and i 've done this in three parts .
so first i started with the mind .
and i decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire encyclopedia britannica from a to z - or , more precisely , from " a-ak " to " zywiec . "
and here 's a little image of that .
and this was an amazing year .
it was really a fascinating journey .
it was painful at times , especially for those around me .
my wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact i inserted into conversation .
so it had its downsides .
but after that , i decided to work on the spirit .
as i mentioned last year , i grew up with no religion at all .
i 'm jewish , but i 'm jewish in the same way the olive garden is italian .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not really .
but i decided to learn about the bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it .
so i decided to follow all the rules of the bible .
and from the ten commandments to growing my beard - because leviticus says you can not shave .
so this is what i looked like by the end .
thank you for that reaction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i look a little like moses , or ted kaczynski .
i got both of them .
so there was the topiary there .
and there 's the sheep .
now the final part of the trilogy was i wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person i could be , the healthiest person alive .
so that 's what i 've been doing the last couple of years .
and i just finished a couple of months ago .
and i have to say , thank god .
because living so healthily was killing me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was so overwhelming , because the amount of things you have to do , it 's just mind-boggling .
i was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers .
and they were telling me all the things i had to do .
i had to eat right , exercise , meditate , pet dogs , because that lowers the blood pressure .
i wrote the book on a treadmill , and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book .
i had to put on sunscreen .
this was no small feat , because if you listen to dermatologists , they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen .
and you have to reapply it every two to four hours .
so i think half of my book advance went into sunscreen .
i was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year .
i had to do that properly .
and my immunologist told me that i should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iphones in my house , because those are just orgies of germs .
so that took a lot of time .
i also tried to be the safest person i could be , because that 's a part of health .
i was inspired by the danish safety council .
they started a public campaign that says , " a walking helmet is a good helmet . "
so they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking , but also for walking around .
and you can see there they 're shopping with their helmets .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well yeah , i tried that .
now it 's a little extreme , i admit .
but if you think about this , this is actually - the " freakonomics " authors wrote about this - that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving .
so something to think about tonight if you 've had a couple .
so i finished , and it was a success in a sense .
all of the markers went in the right direction .
my cholesterol went down , i lost weight , my wife stopped telling me that i looked pregnant .
so that was nice .
and it was successful overall .
but i also learned that i was too healthy , and that was unhealthy .
i was so focused on doing all these things that i was neglecting my friends and family .
and as dan buettner can tell you , having a strong social network is so crucial to our health .
so i finished .
and i kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over .
i went to the dark side , and i just indulged myself .
it was like something out of caligula .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- without the sex part .
because i have three young kids , so that was n't happening .
but the over-eating and over-drinking , definitely .
and i finally have stabilized .
so now i 'm back to adopting many - not all ; i do n't wear a helmet anymore - but dozens of healthy behaviors that i adopted during my year .
it was really a life-changing project .
and i , of course , do n't have time to go into all of them .
let me just tell you two really quickly .
the first is - and this was surprising to me ; i did n't expect this to come out - but i live a much quieter life now .
because we live in such a noisy world .
there 's trains and planes and cars and bill o 'reilly , he 's very noisy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is a real underestimated , under-appreciated health hazard - not just because it harms our hearing , which it obviously does , but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response .
a loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going .
and this , over the years , can cause real damage , cardiovascular damage .
the world health organization just did a big study that they published this year .
and it was done in europe .
and they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in europe because of noise pollution .
so they think it 's actually very deadly .
and by the way , it really impairs cognition .
and our founding fathers knew about this .
when they wrote the constitution , they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate .
so without noise reduction technology , our country would not exist .
so as a patriot , i felt it was important to - i wear all the earplugs and the earphones , and it 's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way .
is that - and it 's actually been a theme of tedmed - that joy is so important to your health , that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there 's some sense of pleasure and joy in them .
and just to give you one instance of this : food .
the junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what 's the most pleasurable .
but i think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food .
we love crunchiness , mouthfeel .
so i basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes - throw in some sunflower seeds .
and you can almost trick yourself into thinking you 're eating doritos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it has made me a healthier person .
so that is it .
the book about it comes out in april .
it 's called " drop dead healthy . "
and i hope that i do n't get sick during the book tour .
that 's my greatest hope .
so thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a wheat bread , a whole wheat bread , and it 's made with a new technique that i 've been playing around with , and developing and writing about which , for lack of a better name , we call the epoxy method .
and i call it an epoxy method because - it 's not very appetizing . i understand that - but - but if you think about epoxy , what 's epoxy ?
it 's two resins that are , sort of , in and of themselves - neither of which can make glue , but when you put the two together , something happens . a bond takes place , and you get this very strong , powerful adhesive .
well , in this technique , what i 've tried to do is kind of gather all of the knowledge that the bread-baking world , the artisan bread-baking community , has been trying to accumulate over the last 20 years or so - since we 've been engaged in a bread renaissance in america - and put it together to come up with a method that would help to take whole-grain breads .
and let 's face it , everyone 's trying to move towards whole grains .
we finally , after 40 years of knowing that wholegrain was a healthier option , we 're finally getting to the point where we actually are tipping over and attempting to actually eat them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the challenge , though , for a wholegrain baker is , you know , how do you make it taste good ?
because whole grain - it 's easy with white flour to make a good-tasting bread . white flour is sweet .
it 's mainly starch , and starch , when you break it down - what is starch ? it 's - thank you - sugar , yes .
so a baker , and a good baker , knows how to pull or draw forth the inherent sugar trapped in the starch .
with whole grain bread , you have other obstacles .
you 've got bran , which is probably the healthiest part of the bread for us , or the fiber for us because it is just loaded with fiber , for the bran is fiber .
it 's got germ . those are the good things , but those are n't the tastiest parts of the wheat .
so whole grain breads historically have had sort of this onus of being health food breads , and people do n't like to eat , quote , health food . they like to eat healthy and healthily , but when we think of something as a health food , we think of it as something we eat out of obligation , not out of passion and love for the flavor .
and ultimately , the challenge of the baker , the challenge of every culinary student , of every chef , is to deliver flavor .
flavor is king . flavor rules .
i call it the flavor rule . flavor rules .
and - and you can get somebody to eat something that 's good for them once , but they wo n't eat it again if they do n't like it , right ?
so , this is the challenge for this bread .
we 're going to try this at lunch , and i 'll explain a bit more about it , but it 's made not only with two types of pre-doughs - this attempt , again , at bringing out flavor is to make a piece of dough the day before that is not leavened .
it 's just dough that is wet .
it 's hydrated dough we call " the soaker " - that helps to start enzyme activity .
and enzymes are the secret , kind of , ingredient in dough that brings out flavor .
it starts to release the sugars trapped in the starch .
that 's what enzymes are doing .
and so , if we can release some of those , they become accessible to us in our palate .
they become accessible to the yeast as food .
they become accessible to the oven for caramelization to give us a beautiful crust .
the other pre-dough that we make is fermented - our pre-ferment .
and it 's made - it can be a sourdough starter , or what we call a " biga " or any other kind of pre-fermented dough with a little yeast in it , and that starts to develop flavor also .
and on day two , we put those two pieces together . that 's the epoxy .
and we 're hoping that , sort of , the enzyme piece of dough becomes the fuel pack for the leavened piece of dough , and when we put them together and add the final ingredients , we can create a bread that does evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain .
that 's the challenge . okay , so , now , what we - in the journey of wheat , let 's go back and look at these 12 stages .
i 'm going to go through them very quickly and then revisit them .
okay , we 're going to start with the first stage .
and this is what every student has to begin with .
everyone who works in the culinary world knows that the first stage of cooking is " mise en place , " which is just a french way of saying , " get organized . "
everything in its place . first stage .
so in baking we call it scaling - weighing out the ingredients .
stage two is mixing . we take the ingredients and we mix them .
we have to develop the gluten .
there 's no gluten in flour . there 's only the potential for gluten .
here 's another kind of prefiguring of epoxy because we 've got glutenin and gliadin , neither of which are strong enough to make a good bread .
but when they get hydrated and they bond to each other , they create a stronger molecule , a stronger protein we call gluten .
and so we , in the mixing process , have to develop the gluten , we have to activate the leaven or the yeast , and we have to essentially distribute all the ingredients evenly .
then we get into fermentation , the third stage , which is really where the flavor develops .
the yeast comes alive and starts eating the sugars , creating carbon dioxide and alcohol - essentially it 's burping and sweating , which is what bread is .
it 's yeast burps and sweat .
and somehow , this is transformed - the yeast burps and sweats are later transformed - and this is really getting to the heart of what makes bread so special is that it is a transformational food , and we 're going to explore that in a minute .
but then , quickly through the next few stages .
we , after it 's fermented and it 's developed , started to develop flavor and character , we divide it into smaller units .
and then we take those units and we shape them . we give them a little pre-shape , usually a round or a little torpedo shape , sometimes .
that 's called " rounding . "
and there 's a short rest period . it can be for a few seconds .
it can be for 20 or 30 minutes . we call that resting or benching .
then we go into final shaping , " panning " - which means putting the shaped loaf on a pan .
this takes a second , but it 's a distinctive stage .
it can be in a basket . it can be in a loaf pan , but we pan it .
and then , stage nine .
the fermentation which started at stage three is continuing through all these other stages . again , developing more flavor .
the final fermentation takes place in stage nine .
we call it " proofing . "
proofing means to prove that the dough is alive .
and at stage nine we get the dough to the final shape , and it goes into the oven - stage 10 .
three transformations take place in the oven .
the sugars in the dough caramelize in the crust .
they give us that beautiful brown crust .
only the crust can caramelize . it 's the only place that gets hot enough .
inside , the proteins - this gluten - coagulates .
when it gets to about 160 degrees , the proteins all line up and they create structure , the gluten structure - what ultimately we will call the crumb of the bread .
and the starches , when they reach about 180 degrees , gelatinize .
and gelatinization is yet another oven transformation .
coagulation , caramelization and gelatinization - when the starch is thick and they absorb all the moisture that 's around them , they - they kind of swell , and then they burst .
and they burst , and they spill their guts into the bread .
so basically now we 're eating yeast sweats - sweat , burps and starch guts .
again , transformed in stage 10 in the oven because what went into the oven as dough comes out in stage 11 as bread .
and stage 11 , we call it cooling - because we never really eat the bread right away .
there 's a little carry-over baking .
the proteins have to set up , strengthen and firm up .
and then we have stage 12 , which the textbooks call " packaging , " but my students call " eating . "
and so , we 're going to be on our own journey today from wheat to eat , and in a few minutes we will try this , and see if we have succeeded in fulfilling this baker 's mission of pulling out flavor .
but i want to go back now and revisit these steps , and talk about it from the standpoint of transformation , because i really believe that all things can be understood - and this is not my own idea . this goes back to the scholastics and to the ancients - that all things can be understood on four levels : the literal , the metaphoric or poetic level , the political or ethical level .
and ultimately , the mystical or sometimes called the " anagogical " level .
it 's hard to get to those levels unless you go through the literal .
in fact , dante says you ca n't understand the three deeper levels unless you first understand the literal level , so that 's why we 're talking literally about bread .
but let 's kind of look at these stages again from the standpoint of connections to possibly a deeper level - all in my quest for answering the question , " what is it about bread that 's so special ? "
and fulfilling this mission of evoking the full potential of flavor .
because what happens is , bread begins as wheat or any other grain .
but what 's wheat ? wheat is a grass that grows in the field .
and , like all grasses , at a certain point it puts out seeds .
and we harvest those seeds , and those are the wheat kernels .
now , in order to harvest it - i mean , what 's harvesting ?
it 's just a euphemism for killing , right ?
i mean , that 's what 's harvest - we say we harvest the pig , you know ?
yes , we slaughter , you know . yes , that 's life .
we harvest the wheat , and in harvesting it , we kill it .
now , wheat is alive , and as we harvest it , it gives up its seeds .
now , at least with seeds we have the potential for future life .
we can plant those in the ground .
and we save some of those for the next generation .
but most of those seeds get crushed and turned into flour .
and at that point , the wheat has suffered the ultimate indignity .
it 's not only been killed , but it 's been denied any potential for creating future life .
so we turn it into flour .
so as i said , i think bread is a transformational food .
the first transformation - and , by the way , the definition of transformation for me is a radical change from one thing into something else .
o.k. ? radical , not subtle .
not like hot water made cold , or cold water turned hot , but water boiled off and becoming steam .
that 's a transformation , two different things .
well , in this case , the first transformation is alive to dead .
i 'd call that radical .
so , we 've got now this flour .
and what do we do ? we add some water .
in stage one , we weigh it .
in stage two , we add water and salt to it , mix it together , and we create something that we call " clay . "
it 's like clay .
and we infuse that clay with an ingredient that we call " leaven . "
in this case , it 's yeast , but yeast is leaven . what does leaven mean ?
leaven comes from the root word that means enliven - to vivify , to bring to life .
by the way , what 's the hebrew word for clay ? adam .
you see , the baker , in this moment , has become , in a sense , sort of , the god of his dough , you know , and his dough , well , while it 's not an intelligent life form , is now alive .
and we know it 's alive because in stage three , it grows . growth is the proof of life .
and while it 's growing , all these literal transformations are taking place .
enzymes are breaking forth sugars .
yeast is eating sugar and turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol .
bacteria is in there , eating the same sugars , turning them into acids .
in other words , personality and character 's being developed in this dough under the watchful gaze of the baker .
and the baker 's choices all along the way determine the outcome of the product .
a subtle change in temperature - a subtle change in time - it 's all about a balancing act between time , temperature and ingredients . that 's the art of baking .
so all these things are determined by the baker , and the bread goes through some stages , and characters develop .
and then we divide it , and this one big piece of dough is divided into smaller units , and each of those units are given shape by the baker .
and as they 're shaped , they 're raised again , all along proving that they 're alive , and developing character .
and at stage 10 , we take it to the oven .
it 's still dough . nobody eats bread dough - a few people do , i think , but not too many .
i 've met some dough eaters , but - it 's not the staff of life , right ? bread is the staff of life .
but dough is what we 're working with , and we take that dough to the oven , and it goes into the oven . as soon as the interior temperature of that dough crosses the threshold of 140 degrees , it passes what we call the " thermal death point . "
students love that tdp . they think it 's the name of a video game .
but it 's the thermal death point - all life ceases there .
the yeast , whose mission it has been up till now to raise the dough , to enliven it , to vivify it , in order to complete its mission , which is also to turn this dough into bread , has to give up its life .
so you see the symbolism at work ? it 's starting to come forth a little bit , you know .
it 's starting to make sense to me - what goes in is dough , what comes out is bread - or it goes in alive , comes out dead .
third transformation . first transformation , alive to dead .
second transformation , dead brought back to life .
third transformation , alive to dead - but dough to bread .
or another analogy would be , a caterpillar has been turned into a butterfly .
and it 's what comes out of the oven that is what we call the staff of life .
this is the product that everyone in the world eats , that is so difficult to give up .
it 's so deeply embedded in our psyches that bread is used as a symbol for life .
it 's used as a symbol for transformation .
and so , as we get to stage 12 and we partake of that , again completing the life cycle , you know , we have a chance to essentially ingest that - it nurtures us , and we continue to carry on and have opportunities to ponder things like this .
so this is what i 've learned from bread .
this is what bread has taught me in my journey .
and what we 're going to attempt to do with this bread here , again , is to use , in addition to everything we talked about , this bread we 're going to call " spent grain bread " because , as you know , bread-making is very similar to beer-making .
beer is basically liquid bread , or bread is solid beer .
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- they - they 're invented around the same time . i think beer came first .
and the egyptian who was tending the beer fell asleep in the hot , egyptian sun , and it turned into bread .
but we 've got this bread , and what i did here is to try to , again , evoke even more flavor from this grain , was we 've added into it the spent grain from beer-making .
and if you make this bread , you can use any kind of spent grain from any type of beer .
i like dark spent grain . today we 're using a light spent grain that 's actually from , like , some kind of a lager of some sort - a light lager or an ale - that is wheat and barley that 's been toasted .
in other words , the beer-maker knows also how to evoke flavor from the grains by using sprouting and malting and roasting .
we 're going to take some of that , and put it into the bread .
so now we not only have a high-fiber bread , but now fiber on top of fiber .
and so this is , again , hopefully not only a healthy bread , but a bread that you will enjoy .
so , if i , kind of , break this bread , maybe we can share this now a little bit here .
we 'll start a little piece here , and i 'm going to take a little piece here - i think i 'd better taste it myself before you have it at lunch .
i 'll leave you with what i call the baker 's blessing .
may your crust be crisp , and your bread always rise .
thank you .
for a moment , what i need to do is project something on the screen of your imagination .
we 're in 17th century japan on the west coast , and a little , wizened monk is hurrying along , near midnight , to the crest of a small hill .
he arrives on the small hill , dripping with water .
he stands there , and he looks across at the island , sado .
and he scans across the ocean , and he looks at the sky .
then he says to himself , very quietly , " -lsb- turbulent the sea , -rsb- -lsb- stretching across to sado -rsb- -lsb- the milky way -rsb- . "
basho was a brilliant man .
he said more with less than any human that i have ever read or talked to .
basho , in 17 syllables , juxtaposed a turbulent ocean driven by a storm now past , and captured the almost impossible beauty of our home galaxy with millions of stars , probably hundreds and hundreds of - who knows how many - planets , maybe even an ocean that we will probably call sylvia in time .
as he was nearing his death , his disciples and followers kept asking him , " what 's the secret ?
how can you make haiku poems so beautiful so easily ? "
and toward the end , he said , " if you would know the pine tree , go to the pine tree . "
that was it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sylvia has said we must use every capacity we have in order to know the oceans .
if we would know the oceans , we must go to the oceans .
and what i 'd like to talk to you today about , a little bit , is really transforming the relationship , or the interplay , between humans and oceans with a new capability that is not at all routine yet .
i hope it will be .
there are a few key points .
one of them is the oceans are central to the quality of life on earth .
another is that there are bold , new ways of studying oceans that we have not used well yet .
and the last is that these bold , new ways that we are exploring as a community will transform the way we look at our planet , our oceans , and eventually how we manage probably the entire planet , for what it 's worth .
so what scientists do when they begin is to start with the system .
they define what the system is .
the system is n't chesapeake bay .
it 's not the kuril arc . it 's not even the entire pacific .
it 's the whole planet , the entire planet , continents and oceans together .
that 's the system .
and basically , our challenge is to optimize the benefits and mitigate the risks of living on a planet that 's driven by only two processes , two sources of energy , one of which is solar , that drives the winds , the waves , the clouds , the storms and photosynthesis .
the second one is internal energy .
and these two war against one another almost continuously .
mountain ranges , plate tectonics , moves the continents around , forms ore deposits .
volcanoes erupt .
that 's the planet that we live on .
it 's immensely complex .
now i do n't expect all of you to see all the details here , but what i want you to see is this is about 10 percent of the processes that operate within the oceans almost continuously , and have for the last 4 billion years .
this is a system that 's been around a very long time .
and these have all co-evolved .
what do i mean by that ?
they interact with one another constantly .
all of them interact with one another .
so the complexity of this system that we 're looking at , the one driven by the sun - upper portion , mostly - and the lower portion is partly driven by the input from heat below and by other processes .
this is very , very important because this is the system , this is the crucible , out of which life on the planet came , and it 's now time for us to understand it .
we must understand it .
that 's one of the themes that sylvia reminds us about : understand this ocean of ours , this basic life support system , the dominant life support system on the planet .
look at this complexity here .
this is only one variable .
if you can see the complexity , you can see how tiny , little eddies and large eddies and the motion - this is just sea surface temperature , but it 's immensely complicated .
now a layer in , the other two or three hundred processes that are all interacting , partly as a function of temperature , partly as a function of all the other factors , and you 've got a really complicated system .
that 's our challenge , is to understand , understand this system in new and phenomenal ways .
and there 's an urgency to this .
part of the urgency comes from the fact that , of order , a billion people on the planet currently are undernourished or starving .
and part of the issue is for cody - who 's here , 16 years old - and i have permission to relay this number .
when he , 40 years from now , is the age of nancy brown , there are going to be another two and a half billion people on the planet .
we ca n't solve all the problems by looking only at the oceans , but if we do n't understand the fundamental life support system of this planet much more thoroughly than we do now , then the stresses that we will face , and that cody will face , and even nancy , who 's going to live till she 's 98 , will have really problems coping .
all right , let 's talk about another perspective on the importance of the oceans .
look at this diagram , which is showing warm waters in red , cool waters in blue , and on the continents , what you 're seeing in bright green , is the growth of vegetation , and in olive green , the dieback of vegetation .
and in the lower left hand corner there 's a clock ticking away from 1982 to 1998 and then cycling again .
what you 'll see is that the rhythms of growth , of vegetation - a subset of which is food on the continents - is directly tied to the rhythms of the sea surface temperatures .
the oceans control , or at least significantly influence , correlate with , the growth patterns and the drought patterns and the rain patterns on the continents .
so people in kansas , in a wheat field in kansas , need to understand that the oceans are central to them as well .
another complexity : this is the age of the oceans .
i 'm going to layer in on top of this the tectonic plates .
the age of the ocean , the tectonic plates , gives rise to a totally new phenomenon that we have heard about in this conference .
and i share with you some very high-definition video that we collected in real time .
seconds after this video was taken , people in beijing , people in sydney , people in amsterdam , people in washington d.c. were watching this .
now you 've heard of hydrothermal vents , but the other discovery is that deep below the sea floor , there is vast reservoir of microbial activity , which we have only just discovered and we have almost no way to study .
some people have estimated that the biomass tied up in these microbes living in the pours and the cracks of the sea floor and below rival the total amount of living biomass at the surface of the planet .
it 's an astonishing insight , and we have only found out about this recently .
this is very , very exciting .
it may be the next rainforest , in terms of pharmaceuticals .
we know little or nothing about it .
well , marcel proust has this wonderful saying that , " the real voyage of discovery consists not so much in seeking new territory , but possibly in having new sets of eyes , " new ways of seeing things , a new mindset .
and many of you remember the early stages of oceanography , when we had to use what we had at our fingertips .
and it was n't easy . it was n't easy in those days .
some of you remember this , i 'm sure .
and now , we have an entire suite of tools that are really pretty powerful - ships , satellites , moorings .
but they do n't quite cut it . they do n't quite give us what we need .
and the program that i wanted to talk to you about just a little bit here , was funded , and it involves autonomous vehicles like the one running across the base of this image .
modeling : on the right hand side , there 's a very complex computational model .
on the left hand side , there 's a new type of mooring , which i 'll show you in just a second .
and on the basis of several points , the oceans are complex , and they 're central to the life on earth .
they are changing rapidly , but not predictably .
and the models that we need to predict the future do not have enough data to refine them .
the computational power is amazing .
but without data , those models will never ever be predicted .
and that 's what we really need .
for a variety of reasons they 're dangerous , but we feel that ooi , this ocean observatory initiative , which the national science foundation has begun to fund , has the potential to really transform things .
and the goal of the program is to launch an era of scientific discovery and understanding across and within the ocean basins , utilizing widely accessible , interactive telepresence .
it 's a new world .
we will be present throughout the volume of the ocean , at will , communicating in real time .
and this is what the system involves , a number of sites in the southern hemisphere , shown in those circles .
and in the northern hemisphere there are four sites .
i wo n't talk a lot about most of them right here , but the one on the west coast , that 's in the box , is called the regional scale nodes .
it was once called neptune .
and let me show you what 's behind it .
fiber : next-generation way of communicating .
you can see the copper tips on these things .
you can transmit power , but the bandwidth is in those tiny , little threads smaller than the hair on your head in diameter .
and this particular set here can transmit something of the order of three to five terabits per second .
this is phenomenal bandwidth .
and this is what the planet looks like .
we are already laced up as if we 're in a fiber optic corset , if you like .
this is what it looks like .
and the cables go really continent to continent .
it 's a very powerful system , and most of our communications consist of it .
so this is the system that i 'm talking about , off the west coast . it 's coincident with the tectonic plate , the juan de fuca tectonic plate .
and it 's going to deliver abundant power and unprecedented bandwidth across this entire volume - in the overlying ocean , on the sea floor and below the sea floor .
bandwidth and power and a wide variety of processes that will be operating .
this is what one of those primary nodes looks like , and it 's like a sub station with power and bandwidth that can spread out over an area the size of seattle .
and the kind of science that can be done will be determined by a variety of scientists who want to be involved and can bring the instrumentation to the table .
they will bring it and link it in .
it 'll be , in a sense , like having time on a telescope , except you 'll have your own port .
climate change , ocean acidification , dissolved oxygen , carbon cycle , coastal upwelling , fishing dynamics - the full spectrum of earth science and ocean science simultaneously in the same volume .
so anyone coming along later simply accesses the database and can draw down the information they need about anything that has taken place .
and this is just the first of these .
in conjunction with our canadian colleagues , we 've set this up .
now i want to take you into the caldera .
on the left hand side there is a large volcano called axial seamount .
and we 're going to go down into the axial seamount using animation .
here 's what this system is going to look like that we are funded to build at this point .
very powerful .
that 's an elevator that 's constantly moving up and down , but it can be controlled by the folks on land who are responsible for it .
or they can transfer control to someone in india or china who can take over for a while , because it 's all going to be directly connected through the internet .
there will be massive amounts of data flowing ashore , all available to anyone who has any interest in using it .
this is going to be much more powerful than having a single ship in a single location , then move to a new location .
we 're flying across the caldera floor .
there is a number of robotic systems .
there 's cameras that can be turned on and off at your will , if those are your experiments .
the kinds of systems that will be down there , the kinds of instruments that will be on the sea floor , consist of - if you can read them there - there 's cameras , there 's pressure sensors , fluorometers , there 's seismometers .
it 's a full spectrum of tools .
now , that mound right there actually looks like this .
this is what it actually looks like .
and this is the kind of activity that we can see with high-definition video , because the bandwidth of these cables is so huge that we could have five to 10 stereo hd systems running continuously and , again , directed through robotic techniques from land .
very , very powerful .
and these are the things that we 're funded to do today .
so what can we actually do tomorrow ?
we 're about to ride the wave of technological opportunity .
there are emerging technologies throughout the field around oceanography , which we will incorporate into oceanography , and through that convergence , we will transform oceanography into something even more magical .
robotics systems are just incredible these days , absolutely incredible .
and we will be bringing robotics of all sorts into the ocean .
nanotechnology : this is a small generator .
it 's smaller than a postage stamp , and it can generate power just by being attached to your shirt as you move .
just as you move , it generates power .
there are many kinds of things that can be used in the ocean , continuously .
imaging : many of you know a good deal more about this type of thing than i , but stereo imaging at four times the definition that we have in hd will be routine within five years .
and this is the magic one .
as a result of the human genome process , we are in a situation where events that take place in the ocean - like an erupting volcano , or something of that sort - can actually be sampled .
we pump the fluid through one of these systems , and we press the button , and it 's analyzed for the genomic character .
and that 's transmitted back to land immediately .
so in the volume of the ocean , we will know , not just the physics and the chemistry , but the base of the food chain will be transparent to us with data on a continuous basis .
grid computing : the power of grid computers is going to be just amazing here .
we will soon be using grid computing to do pretty much everything , like adjust the data and everything that goes with the data .
the power generation will come from the ocean itself .
and the next generation fiber will be simply magic .
it 's far beyond what we currently have .
so the presence of the power and the bandwidth in the environment will allow all of these new technologies to converge in a manner that is just unprecedented .
so within five to seven years , i see us having a capacity to be completely present throughout the ocean and have all of that connected to the internet , so we can reach many , many folks .
delivering the power and the bandwidth into the ocean will dramatically accelerate adaptation .
here 's an example .
when earthquakes take place , massive amounts of these new microbes we 've never seen before come out of the sea floor .
we have a way of addressing that , a new way of addressing that .
we 've determined from the earthquake activity that you 're seeing here that the top of that volcano is erupting , so we deploy the troops .
what are the troops ? the troops are the autonomous vehicles , of course .
and they fly into the erupting volcano .
they sample the fluids coming out of the sea floor during an eruption , which have the microbes that have never been to the surface of the planet before .
they eject it to the surface where it floats , and it is picked up by an autonomous airplane , and it 's brought back to the laboratory within 24 hours of the eruption .
this is doable . all the pieces are there .
a laboratory : many of you heard what happened on 9/7 .
some doctors in new york city removed the gallbladder of a woman in france .
we could do work on the sea floor that would be stunning , and it would be on live tv , if we have interesting things to show .
so we can bring an entirely new telepresence to the world , throughout the ocean .
this - i 've shown you sea floor - but so the goal here is real time interaction with the oceans from anywhere on earth .
it 's going to be amazing .
and as i go here , i just want to show you what we can bring into classrooms , and indeed , what we can bring into your pocket .
many of you do n't think of this yet , but the ocean will be in your pocket .
it wo n't be long . it wo n't be long .
so let me leave you then with a few words from another poet , if you 'll forgive me .
in 1943 , t.s. eliot wrote the " four quartets . "
he won the nobel prize for literature in 1948 .
in " little gidding " he says - speaking i think for the human race , but certainly for the ted conference and sylvia - " we shall not cease from exploration , and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time , arrive through the unknown remembered gate where the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning .
at the source of the longest river the voice of a hidden waterfall not known because not looked for , but heard , half heard in the stillness beneath the waves of the sea . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start my story in germany , in 1877 , with a mathematician named georg cantor .
and cantor decided he was going to take a line and erase the middle third of the line , and then take those two resulting lines and bring them back into the same process , a recursive process .
so he starts out with one line , and then two , and then four , and then 16 , and so on .
and if he does this an infinite number of times , which you can do in mathematics , he ends up with an infinite number of lines , each of which has an infinite number of points in it .
so he realized he had a set whose number of elements was larger than infinity .
and this blew his mind . literally . he checked into a sanitarium . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and when he came out of the sanitarium , he was convinced that he had been put on earth to found transfinite set theory because the largest set of infinity would be god himself .
he was a very religious man .
he was a mathematician on a mission .
and other mathematicians did the same sort of thing .
a swedish mathematician , von koch , decided that instead of subtracting lines , he would add them .
and so he came up with this beautiful curve .
and there 's no particular reason why we have to start with this seed shape ; we can use any seed shape we like .
and i 'll rearrange this and i 'll stick this somewhere - down there , ok - and now upon iteration , that seed shape sort of unfolds into a very different looking structure .
so these all have the property of self-similarity : the part looks like the whole .
it 's the same pattern at many different scales .
now , mathematicians thought this was very strange because as you shrink a ruler down , you measure a longer and longer length .
and since they went through the iterations an infinite number of times , as the ruler shrinks down to infinity , the length goes to infinity .
so they consigned these curves to the back of the math books .
they said these are pathological curves , and we do n't have to discuss them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that worked for a hundred years .
and then in 1977 , benoit mandelbrot , a french mathematician , realized that if you do computer graphics and used these shapes he called fractals , you get the shapes of nature .
you get the human lungs , you get acacia trees , you get ferns , you get these beautiful natural forms .
if you take your thumb and your index finger and look right where they meet - go ahead and do that now - - and relax your hand , you 'll see a crinkle , and then a wrinkle within the crinkle , and a crinkle within the wrinkle . right ?
your body is covered with fractals .
the mathematicians who were saying these were pathologically useless shapes ?
they were breathing those words with fractal lungs .
it 's very ironic . and i 'll show you a little natural recursion here .
again , we just take these lines and recursively replace them with the whole shape .
so here 's the second iteration , and the third , fourth and so on .
so nature has this self-similar structure .
nature uses self-organizing systems .
now in the 1980s , i happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an african village , you see fractals .
and i thought , " this is fabulous ! i wonder why ? "
and of course i had to go to africa and ask folks why .
so i got a fulbright scholarship to just travel around africa for a year asking people why they were building fractals , which is a great job if you can get it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i finally got to this city , and i 'd done a little fractal model for the city just to see how it would sort of unfold - but when i got there , i got to the palace of the chief , and my french is not very good ; i said something like , " i am a mathematician and i would like to stand on your roof . "
but he was really cool about it , and he took me up there , and we talked about fractals .
and he said , " oh yeah , yeah ! we knew about a rectangle within a rectangle , we know all about that . "
and it turns out the royal insignia has a rectangle within a rectangle within a rectangle , and the path through that palace is actually this spiral here .
and as you go through the path , you have to get more and more polite .
so they 're mapping the social scaling onto the geometric scaling ; it 's a conscious pattern . it is not unconscious like a termite mound fractal .
this is a village in southern zambia .
the ba-ila built this village about 400 meters in diameter .
you have a huge ring .
the rings that represent the family enclosures get larger and larger as you go towards the back , and then you have the chief 's ring here towards the back and then the chief 's immediate family in that ring .
so here 's a little fractal model for it .
here 's one house with the sacred altar , here 's the house of houses , the family enclosure , with the humans here where the sacred altar would be , and then here 's the village as a whole - a ring of ring of rings with the chief 's extended family here , the chief 's immediate family here , and here there 's a tiny village only this big .
now you might wonder , how can people fit in a tiny village only this big ?
that 's because they 're spirit people . it 's the ancestors .
and of course the spirit people have a little miniature village in their village , right ?
so it 's just like georg cantor said , the recursion continues forever .
this is in the mandara mountains , near the nigerian border in cameroon , mokoulek .
i saw this diagram drawn by a french architect , and i thought , " wow ! what a beautiful fractal ! "
so i tried to come up with a seed shape , which , upon iteration , would unfold into this thing .
i came up with this structure here .
let 's see , first iteration , second , third , fourth .
now , after i did the simulation , i realized the whole village kind of spirals around , just like this , and here 's that replicating line - a self-replicating line that unfolds into the fractal .
well , i noticed that line is about where the only square building in the village is at .
so , when i got to the village , i said , " can you take me to the square building ?
i think something 's going on there . "
and they said , " well , we can take you there , but you ca n't go inside because that 's the sacred altar , where we do sacrifices every year to keep up those annual cycles of fertility for the fields . "
and i started to realize that the cycles of fertility were just like the recursive cycles in the geometric algorithm that builds this .
and the recursion in some of these villages continues down into very tiny scales .
so here 's a nankani village in mali .
and you can see , you go inside the family enclosure - you go inside and here 's pots in the fireplace , stacked recursively .
here 's calabashes that issa was just showing us , and they 're stacked recursively .
now , the tiniest calabash in here keeps the woman 's soul .
and when she dies , they have a ceremony where they break this stack called the zalanga and her soul goes off to eternity .
once again , infinity is important .
now , you might ask yourself three questions at this point .
are n't these scaling patterns just universal to all indigenous architecture ?
and that was actually my original hypothesis .
when i first saw those african fractals , i thought , " wow , so any indigenous group that does n't have a state society , that sort of hierarchy , must have a kind of bottom-up architecture . "
but that turns out not to be true .
i started collecting aerial photographs of native american and south pacific architecture ; only the african ones were fractal .
and if you think about it , all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use .
so native americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry .
you can see on the pottery and the baskets .
here 's an aerial photograph of one of the anasazi ruins ; you can see it 's circular at the largest scale , but it 's rectangular at the smaller scale , right ?
it is not the same pattern at two different scales .
second , you might ask , " well , dr. eglash , are n't you ignoring the diversity of african cultures ? "
and three times , the answer is no .
first of all , i agree with mudimbe 's wonderful book , " the invention of africa , " that africa is an artificial invention of first colonialism , and then oppositional movements .
no , because a widely shared design practice does n't necessarily give you a unity of culture - and it definitely is not " in the dna . "
and finally , the fractals have self-similarity - so they 're similar to themselves , but they 're not necessarily similar to each other - you see very different uses for fractals .
it 's a shared technology in africa .
and finally , well , is n't this just intuition ?
it 's not really mathematical knowledge .
africans ca n't possibly really be using fractal geometry , right ?
it was n't invented until the 1970s .
well , it 's true that some african fractals are , as far as i 'm concerned , just pure intuition .
so some of these things , i 'd wander around the streets of dakar asking people , " what 's the algorithm ? what 's the rule for making this ? "
and they 'd say , " well , we just make it that way because it looks pretty , stupid . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- but sometimes , that 's not the case .
in some cases , there would actually be algorithms , and very sophisticated algorithms .
so in manghetu sculpture , you 'd see this recursive geometry .
in ethiopian crosses , you see this wonderful unfolding of the shape .
in angola , the chokwe people draw lines in the sand , and it 's what the german mathematician euler called a graph ; we now call it an eulerian path - you can never lift your stylus from the surface and you can never go over the same line twice .
but they do it recursively , and they do it with an age-grade system , so the little kids learn this one , and then the older kids learn this one , then the next age-grade initiation , you learn this one .
and with each iteration of that algorithm , you learn the iterations of the myth .
you learn the next level of knowledge .
and finally , all over africa , you see this board game .
it 's called owari in ghana , where i studied it ; it 's called mancala here on the east coast , bao in kenya , sogo elsewhere .
well , you see self-organizing patterns that spontaneously occur in this board game .
and the folks in ghana knew about these self-organizing patterns and would use them strategically .
so this is very conscious knowledge .
here 's a wonderful fractal .
anywhere you go in the sahel , you 'll see this windscreen .
and of course fences around the world are all cartesian , all strictly linear .
but here in africa , you 've got these nonlinear scaling fences .
so i tracked down one of the folks who makes these things , this guy in mali just outside of bamako , and i asked him , " how come you 're making fractal fences ? because nobody else is . "
and his answer was very interesting .
he said , " well , if i lived in the jungle , i would only use the long rows of straw because they 're very quick and they 're very cheap .
it does n't take much time , does n't take much straw . "
he said , " but wind and dust goes through pretty easily .
now , the tight rows up at the very top , they really hold out the wind and dust .
but it takes a lot of time , and it takes a lot of straw because they 're really tight . "
" now , " he said , " we know from experience that the farther up from the ground you go , the stronger the wind blows . "
right ? it 's just like a cost-benefit analysis .
and i measured out the lengths of straw , put it on a log-log plot , got the scaling exponent , and it almost exactly matches the scaling exponent for the relationship between wind speed and height in the wind engineering handbook .
so these guys are right on target for a practical use of scaling technology .
the most complex example of an algorithmic approach to fractals that i found was actually not in geometry , it was in a symbolic code , and this was bamana sand divination .
and the same divination system is found all over africa .
you can find it on the east coast as well as the west coast , and often the symbols are very well preserved , so each of these symbols has four bits - it 's a four-bit binary word - you draw these lines in the sand randomly , and then you count off , and if it 's an odd number , you put down one stroke , and if it 's an even number , you put down two strokes .
and they did this very rapidly , and i could n't understand where they were getting - they only did the randomness four times - i could n't understand where they were getting the other 12 symbols .
and they would n't tell me .
they said , " no , no , i ca n't tell you about this . "
and i said , " well look , i 'll pay you , you can be my teacher , and i 'll come each day and pay you . "
they said , " it 's not a matter of money . this is a religious matter . "
and finally , out of desperation , i said , " well , let me explain georg cantor in 1877 . "
and i started explaining why i was there in africa , and they got very excited when they saw the cantor set .
and one of them said , " come here . i think i can help you out here . "
and so he took me through the initiation ritual for a bamana priest .
and of course , i was only interested in the math , so the whole time , he kept shaking his head going , " you know , i did n't learn it this way . "
but i had to sleep with a kola nut next to my bed , buried in sand , and give seven coins to seven lepers and so on .
and finally , he revealed the truth of the matter .
and it turns out it 's a pseudo-random number generator using deterministic chaos .
when you have a four-bit symbol , you then put it together with another one sideways .
so even plus odd gives you odd .
odd plus even gives you odd .
even plus even gives you even . odd plus odd gives you even .
it 's addition modulo 2 , just like in the parity bit check on your computer .
and then you take this symbol , and you put it back in so it 's a self-generating diversity of symbols .
they 're truly using a kind of deterministic chaos in doing this .
now , because it 's a binary code , you can actually implement this in hardware - what a fantastic teaching tool that should be in african engineering schools .
and the most interesting thing i found out about it was historical .
in the 12th century , hugo of santalla brought it from islamic mystics into spain .
and there it entered into the alchemy community as geomancy : divination through the earth .
this is a geomantic chart drawn for king richard ii in 1390 .
leibniz , the german mathematician , talked about geomancy in his dissertation called " de combinatoria . "
and he said , " well , instead of using one stroke and two strokes , let 's use a one and a zero , and we can count by powers of two . "
right ? ones and zeros , the binary code .
george boole took leibniz 's binary code and created boolean algebra , and john von neumann took boolean algebra and created the digital computer .
so all these little pdas and laptops - every digital circuit in the world - started in africa .
and i know brian eno says there 's not enough africa in computers , but you know , i do n't think there 's enough african history in brian eno .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so let me end with just a few words about applications that we 've found for this .
and you can go to our website , the applets are all free ; they just run in the browser .
anybody in the world can use them .
the national science foundation 's broadening participation in computing program recently awarded us a grant to make a programmable version of these design tools , so hopefully in three years , anybody 'll be able to go on the web and create their own simulations and their own artifacts .
we 've focused in the u.s. on african-american students as well as native american and latino .
we 've found statistically significant improvement with children using this software in a mathematics class in comparison with a control group that did not have the software .
so it 's really very successful teaching children that they have a heritage that 's about mathematics , that it 's not just about singing and dancing .
we 've started a pilot program in ghana .
we got a small seed grant , just to see if folks would be willing to work with us on this ; we 're very excited about the future possibilities for that .
we 've also been working in design .
i did n't put his name up here - my colleague , kerry , in kenya , has come up with this great idea for using fractal structure for postal address in villages that have fractal structure , because if you try to impose a grid structure postal system on a fractal village , it does n't quite fit .
bernard tschumi at columbia university has finished using this in a design for a museum of african art .
david hughes at ohio state university has written a primer on afrocentric architecture in which he 's used some of these fractal structures .
and finally , i just wanted to point out that this idea of self-organization , as we heard earlier , it 's in the brain .
it 's in the - it 's in google 's search engine .
actually , the reason that google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web .
it 's in ecological sustainability .
it 's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship , the ethical power of democracy .
it 's also in some bad things .
self-organization is why the aids virus is spreading so fast .
and if you do n't think that capitalism , which is self-organizing , can have destructive effects , you have n't opened your eyes enough .
so we need to think about , as was spoken earlier , the traditional african methods for doing self-organization .
these are robust algorithms .
these are ways of doing self-organization - of doing entrepreneurship - that are gentle , that are egalitarian .
so if we want to find a better way of doing that kind of work , we need look only no farther than africa to find these robust self-organizing algorithms .
thank you .
this is the first of two rather extraordinary photographs i 'm going to show you today .
it was taken 18 years ago .
i was 19 years old at the time .
i had just returned from one of the deepest dives i 'd ever made at that time , - a little over 200 feet - and , i had caught this little fish here .
it turns out that that particular one was the first live one of that ever taken alive .
i 'm not just an ichthyologist , i 'm a bona fide fish nerd .
and to a fish nerd , this is some pretty exciting stuff .
and more exciting was the fact that the person who took this photo was a guy named jack randall , the greatest living ichthyologist on earth , the grand poobah of fish nerds , if you will .
and so , it was really exciting to me to have this moment in time , it really set the course for the rest of my life .
but really the most significant thing , the most profound thing about this picture is that it was taken two days before i was completely paralyzed from the neck down .
i made a really stupid kind of mistake that most 19-year-old males do when they think they 're immortal , and i got a bad case of the bends , and was paralyzed , and had to be flown back for treatment .
i learned two really important things that day .
the first thing i learned - well , i 'm mortal , that 's a really big one .
and the second thing i learned was that i knew , with profound certainty , that this is exactly what i was going to do for the rest of my life .
i had to focus all my energies towards going to find new species of things down on deep coral reefs .
now , when you think of a coral reef , this is what most people think of : all these big , hard , elaborate corals and lots of bright , colorful fishes and things .
but , this is really just the tip of the iceberg .
if you look at this diagram of a coral reef , we know a lot about that part up near the top , and the reason we know so much about it is scuba divers can very easily go down there and access it .
there is a problem with scuba though , in that it imposes some limitations on how deep you can go , and it turns out that depth is about 200 feet .
i 'll get into why that is in just a minute .
but , the point is that scuba divers generally stay less than 100 feet deep , and very rarely go much below this , at least , not with any kind of sanity .
so , to go deeper , most biologists have turned to submersibles .
now , submersibles are great , wonderful things , but if you 're going to spend 30,000 dollars a day to use one of these things , and it 's capable of going 2,000 feet , you 're sure not going to go farting around up here in a couple of hundred feet , you 're going to go way , way , way , down deep .
so , the bottom line is that almost all research using submersibles has taken place well below 500 feet .
now , it 's pretty obvious at this point that there 's this zone here in the middle and that 's the zone that really centers around my own personal pursuit of happiness .
i want to find out what 's in this zone .
we know almost nothing about it .
scuba divers ca n't get there , submarines go right on past it .
it took me a year to learn how to walk again after i had my diving accident in palau and during that year i spent a lot of time learning about the physics and physiology of diving and figuring out how to overcome these limitations .
so , i 'm just going to show you a basic idea .
we 're all breathing air right now . air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen , about 20 percent oxygen . about 80 percent nitrogen is in our lungs .
and there 's a phenomenon called henry 's law that says that gases will dissolve into a fluid in proportion to the partial pressures which you 're exposing them to .
so , basically the gas dissolves into our body .
the oxygen is bound by metabolism , we use it for energy .
the nitrogen just sort of floats around in our blood and tissues , and that 's all fine , that 's how we 're designed .
the problem happens when you start to go underwater .
now , the deeper you go underwater , the higher the pressure is .
if you were to go down to a depth of about 130 feet , which is the recommended limit for most scuba divers , you get this pressure effect .
and the effect of that pressure is that you have an increased density of gas molecules in every breath you take .
over time , those gas molecules dissolve into your blood and tissues and start to fill you up .
now , if you were to go down to , say , 300 feet , you do n't have five times as many gas molecules in your lungs - you 've got 10 times as many gas molecules in your lungs .
and , sure enough , they dissolve into your blood , and into your tissues as well .
and of course , if you were to down to where there 's 15 times as much - the deeper you go , the more exacerbating the problem becomes .
and the problem , the limitation of diving with air is all those dots in your body - all the nitrogen and all the oxygen .
there 're three basic limitations of scuba diving .
the first limitation is the oxygen - oxygen toxicity .
now , we all know the song : " love is like oxygen . / you get too much , you get too high . / not enough , and you 're going to die . "
well , in the context of diving , you get too much , you die also .
you die also because oxygen toxicity can cause a seizure - makes you convulse underwater , not a good thing to happen underwater .
it happens because there 's too much concentration of oxygen in your body .
the nitrogen has two problems .
one of them is what jacques cousteau called " rapture of the deep . "
it makes you loopy .
the deeper you go , the loopier you get .
you do n't want to drive drunk , you do n't want to dive drunk , so that 's a real big problem .
and of course , the third problem is the one i found out the hard way in palau , which is the bends .
now the one thing that i forgot to mention , is that to obviate the problem of the nitrogen narcosis - all of those blue dots in our body - you remove the nitrogen and you replace it with helium .
now helium 's a gas , there 're a lot of reasons why helium 's good , it 's a tiny molecule , it 's inert , it does n't give you narcosis .
so that 's the basic concept that we use .
but , the theory 's relatively easy .
the tricky part is the implementation .
so , this is how i began , about 15 years ago .
i 'll admit , it was n't exactly the smartest of starts , but , you know , you got to start somewhere .
at the time , i was n't the only one who did n't know what i was doing - almost nobody did .
and this rig was actually used for a dive of 300 feet .
over time we got a little bit better at it , and we came up with this really sophisticated-looking rig with four scuba tanks and five regulators and all the right gas mixtures and all that good stuff .
and it was fine and dandy , and it allowed us to go down and find new species .
this picture was taken 300 feet deep , catching new species of fish .
but , the problem was that it did n't allow us much time .
for all its bulk and size , it only gave us about 15 minutes at most down at those sorts of depths .
we needed more time .
there had to be a better way .
and , indeed , there is a better way .
in 1994 , i was fortunate enough to get access to these prototype closed-circuit rebreathers .
alright , closed-circuit rebreather - what is it about it that makes it different from scuba , and why is it better ?
well , there are three main advantages to a rebreather .
one , they 're quiet , they do n't make any noise .
two , they allow you to stay underwater longer .
three , they allow you to go deeper .
how is it that they do that ?
well , in order to really understand how they do that you have to take off the hood , and look underneath and see what 's going on .
there are three basic systems to a closed- circuit rebreather .
the most fundamental of these is called the breathing loop .
it 's a breathing loop because you breathe off of it , and it 's a closed loop , and you breathe the same gas around and around and around .
so there 's a mouthpiece that you put in your mouth , and there 's also a counterlung , or in this case , two counterlungs .
now , the counterlungs are n't high-tech , they 're just simply flexible bags .
they allow you to mechanically breathe , or mechanically ventilate .
when you exhale your breath , it goes in the exhale counterlung : when you inhale a breath , it comes from the inhale counterlung .
it 's just pure mechanics , allowing you to cycle air through this breathing loop .
and , the other component on a breathing loop is the carbon dioxide absorbent canister .
now , as we breathe , we produce carbon dioxide , and that carbon dioxide needs to be scrubbed out of the system .
there 's a chemical filter in there that pulls the carbon dioxide out of the breathing gas - so that , when it comes back to us to breathe again , it 's safe to breathe again .
so that 's the breathing loop in a nutshell .
the second main component of a closed-circuit rebreather is the gas system .
the primary purpose of the gas system is to provide oxygen , to replenish the oxygen that your body consumes .
so the main tank , the main critical thing , is this oxygen gas supply cylinder we have here .
but , if we only had an oxygen gas supply cylinder we would n't be able to go very deep , because we 'd run into oxygen toxicity very , very quickly .
so we need another gas , something to dilute the oxygen with .
and that , fittingly enough , is called the diluent gas supply .
in our applications , we generally put air inside this diluent gas supply , because it 's a very cheap and easy source of nitrogen .
so that 's where we get our nitrogen from .
but , if we want to go deeper , of course , we need another gas supply .
we need helium , and the helium is what we really need to go deep .
and usually we 'll have a slightly larger cylinder mounted exterior on the rebreather , like this .
and that 's what we use to inject , as we start to do our deep dives .
we also have a second oxygen cylinder , that 's solely as a back-up in case there 's a problem with our first oxygen supply we can continue to breathe .
and the way you manage all these different gases and all these different gas supplies is this really high-tech , sophisticated gas block up on the front here , where it 's easy to reach .
it 's got all the valves and knobs and things you need to do to inject the right gases at the right time .
now , normally you do n't have to do that because all of it 's done automatically for you with the electronics , the third system of a rebreather .
the most critical part of a rebreather is the oxygen sensors .
you need three of them , so that if one of them goes bad , you know which one it is .
you need voting logic .
you also have three microprocessors .
any one of those computers can run the entire system , so if you have to lose two of them , there 's also back-up power supplies .
and of course there 're multiple displays , to get the information to the diver .
this is the high-tech gadgetry that allows us to do what we do on these kinds of deep dives .
and i can talk about it all day - just ask my wife - but i want to move on to something that 's kind of much more interesting .
i 'm going to take you on a deep dive .
i 'm going to show you what it 's like to do one of these dives that we do .
we start up here on the boat , and for all this high-tech , expensive equipment , this is still the best way to get in the water - just pfft ! - flop over the side of the boat .
now , as i showed you in the earlier diagram , these reefs that we dive on start out near the surface and they go almost vertically , completely straight down .
so , we drop in the water , and we just sort of go over the edge of this cliff , and then we just start dropping , dropping , dropping .
people have asked me , " it must take a long time to get there ? "
no , it only takes a couple of minutes to get all the way down to three or four hundred feet , which is where we 're aiming for .
it 's kind of like skydiving in slow motion .
it 's really a very interesting - you ever see " the abyss " where ed harris , you know , he 's sinking down along the side of the wall ?
that 's kind of what it feels like . it 's pretty amazing .
also , when you get down there , you find that the water is very , very clear .
it 's extremely clear water , because there 's hardly any plankton .
but , when you turn on your light , you look around at the caves , and all of a sudden you 're confronted with a tremendous amount of diversity , much more than anyone used to believe .
now not all of it is new species - like that fish you see with the white stripe , that 's a known species .
but , if you look carefully into the cracks and crevices , you 'll see little things scurrying all over the place .
there 's a just-unbelievable diversity .
it 's not just fish , either .
these are crinoids , sponges , black corals . there 're some more fishes .
and those fishes that you see right now are new species .
they 're still new species because i had a video camera on this dive instead of my net , so they 're still waiting down there for someone to go find them .
but this is what it looks like , and this kind of habitat just goes on and on and on for miles .
this is papua , new guinea .
now little fishes and invertebrates are n't the only things we see down there .
we also see sharks , much more regularly than i would have expected to .
and we 're not quite sure why .
but what i want you to do right now is imagine yourself 400 feet underwater , with all this high-tech gear on your back , you 're in a remote reef off papua , new guinea , thousands of miles from the nearest recompression chamber , and you 're completely surrounded by sharks .
video : look at those ...
uh-oh ... uh-oh !
i think we have their attention . -lrb- laughter -rrb- richard pyle : when you start talking like donald duck , there 's no situation in the world that can seem tense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , we 're down there , and this is at 400 feet - that 's looking straight up , by the way , so you can get a sense of how far away the surface is .
and if you 're a biologist and you know about sharks , and you want to assess , you know , how much jeopardy am i really in here , there 's one question that sort of jumps to the forefront of your mind immediately which is - diver 1 -lrb- video -rrb- : what kind of sharks ?
diver 2 : uh , silvertip sharks .
diver 1 : oh .
rp : silvertip sharks - they 're actually three species of sharks here .
the silvertips are the one with the white edges on the fin , and there 're also gray reef sharks and some hammerheads off in the distance .
and yes , it 's a little nerve-wracking .
diver 2 -lrb- video -rrb- : hoo !
that little guy is frisky ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you 've seen video like this on tv a lot , and it 's very intimidating , and i think it gives the wrong impression about sharks .
sharks are actually not very dangerous animals and that 's why we were n't worried much , why we were joking around down there .
more people are killed by pigs , more people are killed by lightning strikes , more people are killed at soccer games in england .
there 's a lot of other ways you can die .
and i 'm not making that stuff up .
coconuts ! you can get killed by a coconut more likely than killed by a shark .
so sharks are n't quite as dangerous as most people make them out to be .
now , i do n't know if any of you get u.s. news and world report - i got the recent issue .
there 's a cover story all about the great explorers of our time .
the last article is an article entitled " no new frontiers . "
it questions whether or not there really are any new frontiers out there , whether there are any real , true , hardcore discoveries that can still be made .
and this is my favorite line from the article .
as a fish nerd , i have to laugh , because you know they do n't call us fish nerds for nothing - we actually do get excited about finding a new dorsal spine in a guppy .
but , it 's much more than that .
and , i want to show you a few of the guppies we 've found over the years .
this one 's - you know , you can see how ugly it is .
even if you ignore the scientific value of this thing , just look at the monetary value of this thing .
a couple of these ended up getting sold through the aquarium trade to japan , where they sold for 15,000 dollars apiece .
that 's half-a-million dollars per pound .
here 's another new angelfish we discovered .
this one we actually first discovered back in the air days - the bad old air days , as we used to say - when we were doing these kind of dives with air .
we were at 360 feet .
and i remember coming up from one of these deep dives , and i had this fog , and the narcosis takes a little while to , you know , fade away .
it 's sort of like sobering up .
and i had this vague recollection of seeing these yellow fish with a black spot , and i thought , " aw , damn . i should have caught one .
i think that 's a new species . "
and then , eventually , i got around to looking in my bucket .
sure enough , i had caught one - i just completely forgot that i had caught one . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this one we decided to give the name centropyge narcosis to .
so that 's it 's official scientific name , in reference to its deep-dwelling habits .
and this is another neat one .
when we first found it , we were n't even sure what family this thing belonged to , so we just called it the dr. seuss fish , because it looked like something out of one of those books .
now , this one 's pretty cool .
if you go to papua , new guinea , and go down 300 feet , you 're going to see these big mounds .
and this may be kind of hard to see , but they 're about - oh , a couple meters in diameter .
if you look closely , you 'll see there 's a little white fish and gray fish that hangs out near them .
well , it turns out this little white fish builds these giant mounds , one pebble at a time .
it 's really extraordinary to find something like this .
it 's not just new species : it 's new behavior , it 's new ecology it 's all kind of new things .
so , what i 'm going to show you right now , very quickly , is just a sampling of a few of the new species we 've discovered .
what 's extraordinary about this is not just the sheer number of species we 're finding - although as you can see that 's pretty amazing , this is only half of what we 've found - what 's extraordinary is how quickly we find them .
we 're up to seven new species per hour of time we spend at that depth .
now , if you go to an amazon jungle and fog a tree , you may get a lot of bugs , but for fishes , there 's nowhere in the world you can get seven new species per hour of time .
now , we 've done some back of the envelope calculations , and we 're predicting that there are probably on the order of 2,000 to 2,500 new species in the indo-pacific alone .
there are only five to six thousand known species .
so a very large percentage of what is out there is n't really known .
we thought we had a handle on all the reef fish diversity - evidently not .
and i 'm going to just close on a very somber note .
at the beginning i told you that i was going to show you two extraordinary photographs .
this is the second extraordinary photograph i 'm going to show you .
this one was taken at the exact moment i was down there filming those sharks .
this was taken exactly 300 feet above my head .
and the reason this photograph is extraordinary is because it captures a moment in the very last minute of a person 's life .
less than 60 seconds after this picture was taken , this guy was dead .
when we recovered his body , we figured out what had gone wrong .
he had made a very simple mistake .
he turned the wrong valve when he filled his cylinder - he had 80 percent oxygen in his tank when he should have had 40 .
he had an oxygen toxicity seizure and he drowned .
the reason i show this - not to put a downer on everything - but i just want to use it to key off my philosophy of life in general , which is that we all have two goals .
the first goal we share with every other living thing on this planet , which is to survive . i call it perpetuation : the survival of the species and survival of ourselves , because they 're both about perpetuating the genome .
and the second goal , for those of us who have mastered that first goal , is to - you know , you call it spiritual fulfillment , you can call it financial success , you can call it any number of different things .
i call it seeking joy - this pursuit of happiness .
so , i guess my theme on this is this guy lived his life to the fullest , he absolutely did .
you have to balance those two goals .
if you live your whole life in fear - i mean , life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100 percent mortality .
so , you ca n't live your life in fear .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought that was an old one .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but , at the same time you do n't want to get so focused on rule number two , or goal number two , that you neglect goal number one .
because once you 're dead , you really ca n't enjoy anything after that .
i wish you all the best of luck in maintaining that balance in your future endeavors .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i just heard the best joke about bond emeruwa .
i was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago , and a nigerian journalist comes - and this will only make sense if you 've ever watched a james bond movie - and a nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes , " aha , we meet again , mr. bond ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was great .
so , i 've got a little sheet of paper here , mostly because i 'm nigerian and if you leave me alone , i 'll talk for like two hours .
i just want to say good afternoon , good evening .
it 's been an incredible few days .
it 's downhill from now on . i wanted to thank emeka and chris .
but also , most importantly , all the invisible people behind ted that you just see flitting around the whole place that have made sort of this space for such a diverse and robust conversation .
it 's really amazing .
i 've been in the audience .
i 'm a writer , and i 've been watching people with the slide shows and scientists and bankers , and i 've been feeling a bit like a gangsta rapper at a bar mitzvah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like , what have i got to say about all this ?
and i was watching jane -lsb- goodall -rsb- yesterday , and i thought it was really great , and i was watching those incredible slides of the chimpanzees , and i thought , " wow . what if a chimpanzee could talk , you know ? what would it say ? "
my first thought was , " well , you know , there 's george bush . "
but then i thought , " why be rude to chimpanzees ? "
i guess there goes my green card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's been a lot of talk about narrative in africa .
and what 's become increasingly clear to me is that we 're talking about news stories about africa ; we 're not really talking about african narratives .
and it 's important to make a distinction , because if the news is anything to go by , 40 percent of americans ca n't - either ca n't afford health insurance or have the most inadequate health insurance , and have a president who , despite the protest of millions of his citizens - even his own congress - continues to prosecute a senseless war .
so if news is anything to go by , the u.s. is right there with zimbabwe , right ?
which it is n't really , is it ?
and talking about war , my girlfriend has this great t-shirt that says , " bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity . "
it 's amazing , is n't it ?
the truth is , everything we know about america , everything americans come to know about being american , is n't from the news .
i live there .
we do n't go home at the end of the day and think , " well , i really know who i am now because the wall street journal says that the stock exchange closed at this many points . "
what we know about how to be who we are comes from stories .
it comes from the novels , the movies , the fashion magazines .
it comes from popular culture .
in other words , it 's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are . and this is important to remember , because in africa the complicated questions we want to ask about what all of this means has been asked from the rock paintings of the san people , through the sundiata epics of mali , to modern contemporary literature .
if you want to know about africa , read our literature - and not just " things fall apart , " because that would be like saying , " i 've read ' gone with the wind ' and so i know everything about america . "
that 's very important .
there 's a poem by jack gilbert called " the forgotten dialect of the heart . "
he says , " when the sumerian tablets were first translated , they were thought to be business records .
but what if they were poems and psalms ?
my love is like twelve ethiopian goats standing still in the morning light .
shiploads of thuja are what my body wants to say to your body .
giraffes are this desire in the dark . "
this is important .
it 's important because misreading is really the chance for complication and opportunity .
the first igbo bible was translated from english in about the 1800s by bishop crowther , who was a yoruba .
and it 's important to know igbo is a tonal language , and so they 'll say the word " igwe " and " igwe " : same spelling , one means " sky " or " heaven , " and one means " bicycle " or " iron . "
so " god is in heaven surrounded by his angels " was translated as - -lsb- igbo -rsb- .
and for some reason , in cameroon , when they tried to translate the bible into cameroonian patois , they chose the igbo version .
and i 'm not going to give you the patois translation ; i 'm going to make it standard english .
basically , it ends up as " god is on a bicycle with his angels . "
this is good , because language complicates things .
you know , we often think that language mirrors the world in which we live , and i find that 's not true .
the language actually makes the world in which we live .
language is not - i mean , things do n't have any mutable value by themselves ; we ascribe them a value .
and language ca n't be understood in its abstraction .
it can only be understood in the context of story , and everything , all of this is story .
and it 's important to remember that , because if we do n't , then we become ahistorical .
we 've had a lot of - a parade of amazing ideas here .
but these are not new to africa .
nigeria got its independence in 1960 .
the first time the possibility for independence was discussed was in 1922 , following the aba women 's market riots .
in 1967 , in the middle of the biafran-nigerian civil war , dr. njoku-obi invented the cholera vaccine .
so , you know , the thing is to remember that because otherwise , 10 years from now , we 'll be back here trying to tell this story again .
so , what it says to me then is that it 's not really - the problem is n't really the stories that are being told or which stories are being told , the problem really is the terms of humanity that we 're willing to bring to complicate every story , and that 's really what it 's all about .
let me tell you a nigerian joke .
well , it 's just a joke , anyway .
so there 's tom , dick and harry and they 're working construction .
and tom opens up his lunch box and there 's rice in it , and he goes on this rant about , " twenty years , my wife has been packing rice for lunch .
if she does it again tomorrow , i 'm going to throw myself off this building and kill myself . "
and dick and harry repeat this .
the next day , tom opens his lunchbox , there 's rice , so he throws himself off and kills himself , and tom , dick and harry follow .
and now the inquest - you know , tom 's wife and dick 's wife are distraught .
they wished they 'd not packed rice .
but harry 's wife is confused , because she said , " you know , harry had been packing his own lunch for 20 years . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this seemingly innocent joke , when i heard it as a child in nigeria , was told about igbo , yoruba and hausa , with the hausa being harry .
so what seems like an eccentric if tragic joke about harry becomes a way to spread ethnic hatred .
my father was educated in cork , in the university of cork , in the ' 50s .
in fact , every time i read in ireland , people get me all mistaken and they say , " oh , this is chris o 'barney from cork . "
but he was also in oxford in the ' 50s , and yet growing up as a child in nigeria , my father used to say to me , " you must never eat or drink in a yoruba person 's house because they will poison you . "
it makes sense now when i think about it , because if you 'd known my father , you would 've wanted to poison him too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was born in 1966 , at the beginning of the biafran-nigerian civil war , and the war ended after three years .
and i was growing up in school and the federal government did n't want us taught about the history of the war , because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels .
so i had a very inventive teacher , a pakistani muslim , who wanted to teach us about this .
so what he did was to teach us jewish holocaust history , and so huddled around books with photographs of people in auschwitz , i learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people .
i mean , picture this - really picture this .
a pakistani muslim teaching jewish holocaust history to young igbo children .
story is powerful .
story is fluid and it belongs to nobody .
and it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about neo-nazis taking over nigeria to institute the fourth reich .
it makes perfect sense .
and they were to blow up strategic targets and take over the country , and they were foiled by a nigerian james bond called coyote williams , and a jewish nazi hunter .
and it happened over four continents .
and when the book came out , i was heralded as africa 's answer to frederick forsyth , which is a dubious honor at best .
but also , the book was launched in time for me to be accused of constructing the blueprint for a foiled coup attempt .
so at 18 , i was bonded off to prison in nigeria .
i grew up very privileged , and it 's important to talk about privilege , because we do n't talk about it here .
a lot of us are very privileged .
i grew up - servants , cars , televisions , all that stuff .
my story of nigeria growing up was very different from the story i encountered in prison , and i had no language for it .
i was completely terrified , completely broken , and kept trying to find a new language , a new way to make sense of all of this .
six months after that , with no explanation , they let me go .
now for those of you who have seen me at the buffet tables know that it was because it was costing them too much to feed me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i mean , i grew up with this incredible privilege , and not just me - millions of nigerians grew up with books and libraries .
in fact , we were talking last night about how all of the steamy novels of harold robbins had done more for sex education of horny teenage boys in africa than any sex education programs ever had .
all of those are gone .
we are squandering the most valuable resource we have on this continent : the valuable resource of the imagination .
in the film , " sometimes in april " by raoul peck , idris elba is poised in a scene with his machete raised , and he 's being forced by a crowd to chop up his best friend - fellow rwandan army officer , albeit a tutsi - played by fraser james .
and fraser 's on his knees , arms tied behind his back , and he 's crying .
he 's sniveling .
it 's a pitiful sight .
and as we watch it , we are ashamed .
and we want to say to idris , " chop him up .
shut him up . "
and as idris moves , fraser screams , " stop !
please stop ! "
idris pauses , then he moves again , and fraser says , " please !
please stop ! "
and it 's not the look of horror and terror on fraser 's face that stops idris or us ; it 's the look in fraser 's eyes .
it 's one that says , " do n't do this .
and i 'm not saying this to save myself , although this would be nice . i 'm doing it to save you , because if you do this , you will be lost . "
to be so afraid that you 're standing in the face of a death you ca n't escape and that you 're soiling yourself and crying , but to say in that moment , as fraser says to idris , " tell my girlfriend i love her . "
in that moment , fraser says , " i am lost already , but not you ... not you . "
this is a redemption we can all aspire to .
african narratives in the west , they proliferate .
i really do n't care anymore .
i 'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how as a writer , i find that african writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent .
the question is , how do i balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing ?
and this is the difficulty that i face .
i am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning .
i am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation of what is possible .
as a young middle-class nigerian activist , i launched myself along with a whole generation of us into the campaign to stop the government .
and i asked millions of people , without questioning my right to do so , to go up against the government .
and i watched them being locked up in prison and tear gassed .
i justified it , and i said , " this is the cost of revolution .
have i not myself been imprisoned ?
have i not myself been beaten ? "
it was n't until later , when i was imprisoned again , that i understood the real meaning of torture , and how easy your humanity can be taken from you , for the time i was engaged in war , righteous , righteous war .
excuse me .
sometimes i can stand before the world - and when i say this , transformation is a difficult and slow process - sometimes i can stand before the world and say , " my name is chris abani .
i have been human six days , but only sometimes . "
but this is a good thing .
it 's never going to be easy .
there are no answers .
as i was telling rachel from google earth , that i had challenged my students in america - i said , " you do n't know anything about africa , you 're all idiots . "
and so they said , " tell me about africa , professor abani . "
so i went to google earth and learned about africa .
and the truth be told , this is it , is n't it ?
there are no essential africans , and most of us are as completely ignorant as everyone else about the continent we come from , and yet we want to make profound statements about it .
and i think if we can just admit that we 're all trying to approximate the truth of our own communities , it will make for a much more nuanced and a much more interesting conversation .
i want to believe that we can be agnostic about this , that we can rise above all of this .
when i was 10 , i read james baldwin 's " another country , " and that book broke me .
not because i was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time , but because the way james wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it .
" here , " jimmy said .
" here is love , all of it . "
the fact that it happens in " another country " takes you quite by surprise .
my friend ronald gottesman says there are three kinds of people in the world : those who can count , and those who ca n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he also says that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential , pure identity : religious , ethnic , historical , ideological .
i want to leave you with a poem by yusef komunyakaa that speaks to transformation .
it 's called " ode to the drum , " and i 'll try and read it the way yusef would be proud to hear it read .
" gazelle , i killed you for your skin 's exquisite touch , for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper .
last night i heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet .
you know it was n't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell .
weeks ago , you broke me as a woman once shattered me into a song beneath her weight , before you slouched into that grassy hush .
and now i 'm tightening lashes , shaped in hide as if around a ribcage , shaped like five bowstrings .
ghosts can not slip back inside the body 's drum .
you 've been seasoned by wind , dusk and sunlight .
pressure can make everything whole again .
brass nails tacked into the ebony wood , your face has been carved five times .
i have to drive trouble in the hills .
trouble in the valley , and trouble by the river too .
there is no palm wine , fish , salt , or calabash .
kadoom . kadoom . kadoom .
ka-doooom .
now i have beaten a song back into you .
rise and walk away like a panther . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . it 's a distinct privilege to be here .
a few weeks ago , i saw a video on youtube of congresswoman gabrielle giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets .
this one entered her left hemisphere , and knocked out her broca 's area , the speech center of her brain .
and in this session , gabby 's working with a speech therapist , and she 's struggling to produce some of the most basic words , and you can see her growing more and more devastated , until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears , and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist .
and after a few moments , her therapist tries a new tack , and they start singing together , and gabby starts to sing through her tears , and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels , and she sings , in one descending scale , she sings , " let it shine , let it shine , let it shine . "
and it 's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail , in this case literally speak .
seeing this video of gabby giffords reminded me of the work of dr. gottfried schlaug , one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at harvard , and schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called melodic intonation therapy , which has become very popular in music therapy now .
schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic , could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences , but they could still sing the lyrics to a song , whether it was " happy birthday to you " or their favorite song by the eagles or the rolling stones .
and after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons , he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere 's damage .
when i was 17 , i visited dr. schlaug 's lab , and in one afternoon he walked me through some of the leading research on music and the brain - how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians , how music , and listening to music , could just light up the entire brain , from our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum , how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality to help children with autism , to help people struggling with stress and anxiety and depression , how deeply parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music ,
and how late-stage alzheimer 's patients , whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family , could still pick out a tune by chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children .
but i had an ulterior motive of visiting gottfried schlaug , and it was this : that i was at a crossroads in my life , trying to choose between music and medicine .
i had just completed my undergraduate , and i was working as a research assistant at the lab of dennis selkoe , studying parkinson 's disease at harvard , and i had fallen in love with neuroscience . i wanted to become a surgeon .
i wanted to become a doctor like paul farmer or rick hodes , these kind of fearless men who go into places like haiti or ethiopia and work with aids patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis , or with children with disfiguring cancers .
i wanted to become that kind of red cross doctor , that doctor without borders .
on the other hand , i had played the violin my entire life .
music for me was more than a passion . it was obsession .
it was oxygen . i was lucky enough to have studied at the juilliard school in manhattan , and to have played my debut with zubin mehta and the israeli philharmonic orchestra in tel aviv , and it turned out that gottfried schlaug had studied as an organist at the vienna conservatory , but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine . and that afternoon , i had to ask him , " how was it for you making that decision ? "
and he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to , and that for me , medical school could wait , but that the violin simply would not .
and after two more years of studying music , i decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the mcat and applying to medical school like a good indian son to become the next dr. gupta . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i decided to shoot for the impossible and i took an audition for the esteemed los angeles philharmonic .
it was my first audition , and after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week , i was offered the position .
and it was a dream . it was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra , to perform in the iconic walt disney concert hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous gustavo dudamel , but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family , my new musical home .
but a year later , i met another musician who had also studied at juilliard , one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician .
nathaniel ayers was a double bassist at juilliard , but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s , was treated with thorazine at bellevue , and ended up living homeless on the streets of skid row in downtown los angeles 30 years later .
nathaniel 's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the united states , as told through the book and the movie " the soloist , " but i became his friend , and i became his violin teacher , and i told him that wherever he had his violin , and wherever i had mine , i would play a lesson with him .
and on the many times i saw nathaniel on skid row , i witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments , from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode .
playing for nathaniel , the music took on a deeper meaning , because now it was about communication , a communication where words failed , a communication of a message that went deeper than words , that registered at a fundamentally primal level in nathaniel 's psyche , yet came as a true musical offering from me .
i found myself growing outraged that someone like nathaniel could have ever been homeless on skid row because of his mental illness , yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out there on skid row alone who had stories as tragic as his , but were never going to have a book or a movie made about them that got them off the streets ?
and at the very core of this crisis of mine , i felt somehow the life of music had chosen me , where somehow , perhaps possibly in a very naive sense , i felt what skid row really needed was somebody like paul farmer and not another classical musician playing on bunker hill .
but in the end , it was nathaniel who showed me that if i was truly passionate about change , if i wanted to make a difference , i already had the perfect instrument to do it , that music was the bridge that connected my world and his .
there 's a beautiful quote by the romantic german composer robert schumann , who said , " to send light into the darkness of men 's hearts , such is the duty of the artist . "
and this is a particularly poignant quote because schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum .
and inspired by what i learned from nathaniel , i started an organization on skid row of musicians called street symphony , bringing the light of music into the very darkest places , performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on skid row , performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder , and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane .
after one of our events at the patton state hospital in san bernardino , a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face , and she had a palsy , she was shaking , and she had this gorgeous smile , and she said that she had never heard classical music before , she did n't think she was going to like it , she had never heard a violin before , but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine , and that nobody ever came to visit them , and that for the first time in six years , when she heard us play , she stopped shaking without medication .
suddenly , what we 're finding with these concerts , away from the stage , away from the footlights , out of the tuxedo tails , the musicians become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room , would never have access to the kind of music that we make .
just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone , the power and beauty of music transcends the " e " in the middle of our beloved acronym .
music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone .
the synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by wagner , or a symphony by brahms , or chamber music by beethoven , compels us to remember our shared , common humanity , the deeply communal connected consciousness , the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist iain mcgilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain 's right hemisphere .
and for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration , the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them , to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them .
and the spark of that beauty , the spark of that humanity transforms into hope , and we know , whether we choose the path of music or of medicine , that 's the very first thing we must instill within our communities , within our audiences , if we want to inspire healing from within .
i 'd like to end with a quote by john keats , the romantic english poet , a very famous quote that i 'm sure all of you know .
keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry , but he died when he was a year older than me .
and keats said , " beauty is truth , and truth beauty .
that is all ye know on earth , and all ye need to know . "
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've always had a fascination for computers and technology , and i made a few apps for the iphone , ipod touch , and ipad .
i 'd like to share a couple with you today .
my first app was a unique fortune teller called earth fortune that would display different colors of earth depending on what your fortune was .
i created it because a lot of people at school disliked justin bieber a little bit , so i decided to make the app .
so i went to work programming it , and i released it just before the holidays in 2010 .
a lot of people ask me , how did i make these ?
a lot of times it 's because the person who asked the question wants to make an app also .
a lot of kids these days like to play games , but now they want to make them , and it 's difficult , because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program .
i mean , for soccer , you could go to a soccer team .
for violin , you could get lessons for a violin .
but what if you want to make an app ?
and their parents , the kid 's parents might have done some of these things when they were young , but not many parents have written apps . -lrb- laughter -rrb- where do you go to find out how to make an app ?
well , this is how i approached it . this is what i did .
first of all , i 've been programming in multiple other programming languages to get the basics down , such as python , c , java , etc .
and then apple released the iphone , and with it , the iphone software development kit , and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iphone app .
this opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me , and after playing with the software development kit a little bit , i made a couple apps , i made some test apps .
one of them happened to be earth fortune , and i was ready to put earth fortune on the app store , and so i persuaded my parents to pay the 99 dollar fee to be able to put my apps on the app store .
they agreed , and now i have apps on the app store .
i 've gotten a lot of interest and encouragement from my family , friends , teachers and even people at the apple store , and that 's been a huge help to me .
i 've gotten a lot of inspiration from steve jobs , and i 've started an app club at school , and a teacher at my school is kindly sponsoring my app club .
any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app .
this is so i can share my experiences with others .
there 's these programs called the ipad pilot program , and some districts have them .
i 'm fortunate enough to be part of one .
a big challenge is , how should the ipads be used , and what apps should we put on the ipads ?
so we 're getting feedback from teachers at the school to see what kind of apps they 'd like .
when we design the app and we sell it , it will be free to local districts and other districts that we sell to , all the money from that will go into the local ed foundations .
these days , students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sorry - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so this is a resource to teachers , and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it .
i 'd like to finish up by saying what i 'd like to do in the future .
first of all , i 'd like to create more apps , more games .
i 'm working with a third party company to make an app .
i 'd like to get into android programming and development , and i 'd like to continue my app club , and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to talk today about money and happiness , which are two things that a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about , either trying to earn them or trying to increase them .
and a lot of us resonate with this phrase .
so we see it in religions and self-help books , that money ca n't buy happiness .
and i want to suggest today that , in fact , that 's wrong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm at a business school , so that 's what we do .
so that 's wrong , and , in fact , if you think that , you 're actually just not spending it right .
so that instead of spending it the way you usually spend it , maybe if you spent it differently , that might work a little bit better .
and before i tell you the ways that you can spend it that will make you happier , let 's think about the ways we usually spend it that do n't , in fact , make us happier .
we had a little natural experiment .
so cnn , a little while ago , wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery .
it turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives are going to be amazing .
this article 's about how their lives get ruined .
so what happens when people win the lottery is , number one , they spend all the money and go into debt , and number two , all of their friends and everyone they 've ever met find them and bug them for money .
and it ruins their social relationships , in fact .
so they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery .
what was interesting about the article was people started commenting on the article , readers of the thing .
and instead of talking about how it had made them realize that money does n't lead to happiness , everyone instantly started saying , " you know what i would do if i won the lottery ... ? "
and fantasizing about what they 'd do .
and here 's just two of the ones we saw that are just really interesting to think about .
one person wrote in , " when i win , i 'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and another person wrote , " i would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne . "
this is even worse now : " then i 'd have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made .
anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so many of the comments were exactly of this type , where people got money and , in fact , it made them antisocial .
so i told you that it ruins people 's lives and that their friends bug them .
it also , money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves .
well maybe the reason that money does n't make us happy is that we 're always spending it on the wrong things , and in particular , that we 're always spending it on ourselves .
and we thought , i wonder what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on other people .
so instead of being antisocial with your money , what if you were a little more prosocial with your money ?
and we thought , let 's make people do it and see what happens .
so let 's have some people do what they usually do and spend money on themselves , and let 's make some people give money away , and measure their happiness and see if , in fact , they get happier .
so the first way that we did this .
on one vancouver morning , we went out on the campus at university of british columbia and we approached people and said , " do you want to be in an experiment ? "
they said , " yes . "
we asked them how happy they were , and then we gave them an envelope .
and one of the envelopes had things in it that said , " by 5:00 pm today , spend this money on yourself . "
so we gave some examples of what you could spend it on .
other people , in the morning , got a slip of paper that said , " by 5:00 pm today , spend this money on somebody else . "
also inside the envelope was money .
and we manipulated how much money we gave them .
so some people got this slip of paper and five dollars .
some people got this slip of paper and 20 dollars .
we let them go about their day . they did whatever they wanted to do .
we found out that they did in fact spend it in the way that we asked them to .
we called them up at night and asked them , " what 'd you spend it on , and how happy do you feel now ? "
what did they spend it on ?
well these are college undergrads , so a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup .
one woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece .
people gave money to homeless people .
huge effect here of starbucks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so if you give undergraduates five dollars , it looks like coffee to them and they run over to starbucks and spend it as fast as they can .
but some people bought a coffee for themselves , the way they usually would , but other people said that they bought a coffee for somebody else .
so the very same purchase , just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else .
what did we find when we called them back at the end of the day ?
people who spent money on other people got happier .
people who spent money on themselves , nothing happened .
it did n't make them less happy , it just did n't do much for them .
and the other thing we saw is the amount of money does n't matter that much .
so people thought that 20 dollars would be way better than five dollars .
in fact , it does n't matter how much money you spent .
what really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself .
we see this again and again when we give people money to spend on other people instead of on themselves .
of course , these are undergraduates in canada - not the world 's most representative population .
they 're also fairly wealthy and affluent and all these other sorts of things .
we wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries .
so we went , in fact , to uganda and ran a very similar experiment .
so imagine , instead of just people in canada , we said , " name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people .
describe it . how happy did it make you ? "
or in uganda , " name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people and describe that . "
and then we asked them how happy they are again .
and what we see is sort of amazing because there 's human universals on what you do with your money and then real cultural differences on what you do as well .
so for example , one guy from uganda says this .
he said , " i called a girl i wished to love . "
they basically went out on a date , and he says at the end that he did n't " achieve " her up till now .
here 's a guy from canada .
very similar thing .
" i took my girlfriend out for dinner .
we went to a movie , we left early , and then went back to her room for ... " only cake - just a piece of cake .
human universal - so you spend money on other people , you 're being nice to them .
maybe you have something in mind , maybe not .
but then we see extraordinary differences .
so look at these two .
this is a woman from canada .
we say , " name a time you spent money on somebody else . "
she says , " i bought a present for my mom .
i drove to the mall in my car , bought a present , gave it to my mom . "
perfectly nice thing to do .
it 's good to get gifts for people that you know .
compare that to this woman from uganda .
" i was walking and met a long-time friend whose son was sick with malaria .
they had no money , they went to a clinic and i gave her this money . "
this is n't $ 10,000 , it 's the local currency .
so it 's a very small amount of money , in fact .
but enormously different motivations here .
this is a real medical need , literally a life-saving donation .
above , it 's just kind of , i bought a gift for my mother .
what we see again though is that the specific way that you spend on other people is n't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy , which is really quite important .
so you do n't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy .
you can do small , trivial things and yet still get these benefits from doing this .
these are only two countries .
we also wanted to go even broader and look at every country in the world if we could to see what the relationship is between money and happiness .
we got data from the gallup organization , which you know from all the political polls that have been happening lately .
they ask people , " did you donate money to charity recently ? "
and they ask them , " how happy are you with your life in general ? "
and we can see what the relationship is between those two things .
are they positively correlated ? giving money makes you happy .
or are they negatively correlated ?
on this map , green will mean they 're positively correlated and red means they 're negatively correlated .
and you can see , the world is crazily green .
so in almost every country in the world where we have this data , people who give money to charity are happier people that people who do n't give money to charity .
i know you 're all looking at that red country in the middle .
i would be a jerk and not tell you what it is , but in fact , it 's central african republic .
you can make up stories . maybe it 's different there for some reason or another .
just below that to the right is rwanda though , which is amazingly green .
so almost everywhere we look we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself .
what about your work life , which is where we spend all the rest of our time when we 're not with the people we know .
we decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing .
so these are sales teams in belgium .
they work in teams ; they go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs .
so we can look and see how well they sell things as a function of being a member of a team .
some teams , we give people on the team some money for themselves and say , " spend it however you want on yourself , " just like we did with the undergrads in canada .
but other teams we say , " here 's 15 euro .
spend it on one of your teammates this week .
buy them something as a gift or a present and give it to them .
and then we can see , well now we 've got teams that spend on themselves and we 've got these prosocial teams who we give money to make the team a little bit better .
the reason i have a ridiculous pinata there is one of the teams pooled their money and bought a pinata , and they all got around and smashed the pinata and all the candy fell out and things like that .
a very silly , trivial thing to do , but think of the difference on a team that did n't do that at all , that got 15 euro , put it in their pocket , maybe bought themselves a coffee , or teams that had this prosocial experience where they all bonded together to buy something and do a group activity .
what we see is that , in fact , the teams that are prosocial sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves .
and one way to think about it is for every 15 euro you give people for themselves , they put it in their pocket , they do n't do anything different than they did before .
you do n't get any money from that .
you actually lose money because it does n't motivate them to perform any better .
but when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates , they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money .
and i realize that you 're probably thinking to yourselves , this is all fine , but there 's a context that 's incredibly important for public policy and i ca n't imagine it would work there .
and basically that if he does n't show me that it works here , i do n't believe anything he said .
and i know what you 're all thinking about are dodgeball teams .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was a huge criticism that we got to say , if you ca n't show it with dodgeball teams , this is all stupid .
so we went out and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them .
and we did the exact same thing as before .
so some teams , we give people on the team money , they spend it on themselves .
other teams , we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates .
the teams that spend money on themselves are just the same winning percentages as they were before .
the teams that we give the money to spend on each other , they become different teams and , in fact , they dominate the league by the time they 're done .
across all of these different contexts - your personal life , you work life , even silly things like intramural sports - we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself .
and so i 'll just say , i think if you think money ca n't buy happiness you 're not spending it right .
the implication is not you should buy this product instead of that product and that 's the way to make yourself happier .
it 's in fact , that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself and try giving some of it to other people instead .
and we luckily have an opportunity for you .
donorschoose.org is a non-profit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools .
they post projects , so they say , " i want to teach huckleberry finn to my class and we do n't have the books , " or " i want a microscope to teach my students science and we do n't have a microscope . "
you and i can go on and buy it for them .
the teacher writes you a thank you note . the kids write you a thank you note .
sometimes they send you pictures of them using the microscope .
it 's an extraordinary thing .
go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking , again , less about " how can i spend money on myself ? "
and more about " if i 've got five dollars or 15 dollars , what can i do to benefit other people ? "
because ultimately when you do that , you 'll find that you 'll benefit yourself much more .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i just want to say my name is emmanuel jal .
and i come from a long way .
i 've been telling a story that has been so painful for me .
it 's been a tough journey for me , traveling the world , telling my story in form of a book .
and also telling it like now .
and also , the easiest one was when i was doing it in form of a music .
so i have branded myself as a war child .
i 'm doing this because of an old lady in my village now , who have lost her children .
there is no newspaper to cover her pain , and what she wants to change in this society .
and i 'm doing it for a young man who want to create a change and has no way to project his voice because he ca n't write .
or there is no internet , like facebook , myspace , youtube , for them to talk .
also one thing that kept me pushing this story , this painful stories out , the dreams i have , sometimes , is like the voices of the dead , that i have seen would tell me , " do n't give up . keep on going . "
because sometime i feel like stopping and not doing it , because i did n't know what i was putting myself into .
well i was born in the most difficult time , when my country was at war .
i saw my village burned down .
the world that meant a lot to me , i saw it vanish in my face .
i saw my aunt in rape when i was only five .
my mother was claimed by the war .
my brothers and sisters were scattered .
and up to now , me and my father were detached and i still have issues with him .
seeing people die every day , my mother crying , it 's like i was raised in a violence .
and that made me call myself a war child .
and not only that , when i was eight i became a child soldier .
i did n't know what was the war for .
but one thing i knew was an image that i saw that stuck in my head .
when i went to the training camp i say , " i want to kill as many muslims , and as many arabs , as possible . "
the training was n't easy , but that was the driving force , because i wanted to revenge for my family .
i wanted to revenge for my village .
luckily now things have changed because i came to discover the truth .
what was actually killing us was n't the muslims , was n't the arabs .
it was somebody sitting somewhere manipulating the system , and using religion to get what they want to get out of us , which is the oil , the diamond , the gold and the land .
so realizing the truth gave me a position to choose : should i continue to hate , or let it go ?
so i happened to forgive . now i sing music with the muslims . i dance with them .
i even had a movie out called " war child , " funded by muslim people .
so that pain has gone out .
but my story is huge .
so i 'm just going to go into a different step now , which is easier for me .
i 'm going to give you poem called " forced to sin , " which is from my album " war child . "
i talk about my story .
one of the journey that i tread when i was tempted to eat my friend because we had no food and we were like around 400 .
and only 16 people survived that journey .
so i hope you 're going to hear this .
my dreams are like torment .
my every moment .
voices in my brain , of friends that was slain .
friends like lual who died by my side , of starvation .
in the burning jungle , and the desert plain .
next was i , but jesus heard my cry .
as i was tempted to eat the rotten flesh of my comrade , he gave me comfort .
we used to raid villages , stealing chickens , goats and sheeps , anything we could eat .
i knew it was rude , but we needed food .
and therefore i was forced to sin , forced to sin to make a living , forced to sin to make a living .
sometimes you gotta lose to win .
never give up . never give in .
left home at the age of seven .
one year later , live with an ak-47 by my side .
slept with one eye open wide .
run , duck , play dead and hide .
i 've seen my people die like flies .
but i 've never seen a dead body , at least one that i 've killed .
but still as i wonder , i wo n't go under .
guns barking like lightning and thunder .
as a child so young and tender , words i ca n't forget i still remember .
i saw sergeant command raising his hand , no retreat , no surrender .
i carry the banner of the trauma .
war child , child without a mama , still fighting in the saga .
yet as i wage this new war i 'm not alone in this drama .
no sit or stop , as i reach for the top i 'm fully dedicated like a patriotic cop .
i 'm on a fight , day and night .
sometime i do wrong in order to make things right .
it 's like i 'm living a dream .
first time i 'm feeling like a human being .
ah ! the children of darfur .
your empty bellies on the telly and now it 's you that i 'm fighting for .
left home .
do n't even know the day i 'll ever return .
my country is war-torn .
music i used to hear was bombs and fire of guns .
so many people die that i do n't even cry no more .
ask god question , what am i here for .
and why are my people poor .
and why , why when the rest of the children were learning how to read and write , i was learning how to fight .
i ate snails , vultures , rabbits , snakes , and anything that had life .
i was ready to eat .
i know it 's a shame . but who is to be blamed ?
that 's my story shared in the form of a lesson .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what energized me and kept me going is the music i do .
i never saw anybody to tell my story to them so they could advise me or do therapy .
so the music had been my therapy for me .
it 's been where i actually see heaven , where i can be happy , where i can be a child again , in dances , through music .
so one thing i know about music : music is the only thing that has power to enter your cell system , your mind , your heart , influence your soul and your spirit , and can even influence the way you live without even you knowing .
music is the only thing that can make you want to wake up your bed and shake your leg , without even wanting to do it .
and so the power music has i normally compare to the power love when love does n't see a color .
you know , if you fall in love with a frog , that 's it .
one testimony about how i find music is powerful is when i was still a soldier back then .
i hated the people in the north .
but i do n't know why i do n't hate their music .
so we party and dance to their music .
and one thing that shocked me is one day they brought an arab musician to come and entertain the soldiers .
and i almost broke my leg dancing to his music .
but i had this question .
so now i 'm doing music so i know what the power of music is .
so what 's happening here ?
i 've been in a painful journey .
today is day number 233 in which i only eat dinner .
i do n't eat breakfast . no lunch .
and i 've done a campaign called lose to win .
where i 'm losing so that i could win the battle that i 'm fighting now .
so my breakfast , my lunch , i donate it to a charity that i founded because we want to build a school in sudan .
and i 'm doing this because also it 's a normal thing in my home , people eat one meal a day .
here i am in the west . i choose not to .
so in my village now , kids there , they normally listen to bbc , or any radio , and they are waiting to know , the day emmanuel will eat his breakfast it means he got the money to build our school .
and so i made a commitment . i say , " i 'm gonna not eat my breakfast . "
i thought i was famous enough that i would raise the money within one month , but i 've been humbled .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's taken me 232 days .
and i said , " no stop until we get it . "
and like it 's been done on facebook , myspace .
the people are giving three dollars .
the lowest amount we ever got was 20 cents .
somebody donated 20 cents online .
i do n't know how they did it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that moved me .
and so , the importance of education to me is what i 'm willing to die for .
i 'm willing to die for this , because i know what it can do to my people .
education enlighten your brain , give you so many chances , and you 're able to survive .
as a nation we have been crippled .
for so many years we have fed on aid .
you see a 20-years-old , 30-years-old families in a refugee camps .
they only get the food that drops from the sky , from the u.n.
so these people , you 're killing a whole generation if you just give them aid .
if anybody want to help us this is what we need .
give us tools . give the farmers tools .
it 's rain . africa is fertile . they can grow the crops .
-lrb- applause -rrb- invest in education .
education so that we have strong institution that can create a revolution to change everything .
because we have all those old men that are creating wars in africa . they will die soon .
but if you invest in education then we 'll be able to change africa .
that 's what i 'm asking .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in order to do that , i founded a charter called gua africa , where we put kids in school .
and now we have a couple in university .
we have like 40 kids , ex-child soldiers mixed with anybody that we feel like we want to support .
and i said " i 'm going to put it in practice . "
and with the people that are going to follow me and help me do things .
that 's what i want to do to change , to make a difference in the world .
well now , my time is going , so i want to sing a song .
but i 'll ask you guys to stand up so we celebrate the life of a british aid worker called emma mccune that made it possible for me to be here .
i 'm gonna sing this song , just to inspire you how this woman has made a difference .
she came to my country and saw the importance of education .
she said the only way to help sudan is to invest in the women , educating them , educating the children , so that they could come and create a revolution in this complex society .
so she even ended up marrying a commander from the spla .
and she rescued over 150 child soldiers .
one of them happened to be me now .
and so at this moment i want to ask to celebrate emma with me .
are you guys ready to celebrate emma ?
audience : yes !
emmanuel jal : all right .
♫ this one goes to emma mccune ♫ ♫ angel to rescue came one afternoon ♫ ♫ i 'm here because you rescued me ♫ ♫ i 'm proud to carry your legacy ♫ ♫ thank you . bless you . r.i.p. ♫ ♫ what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? what would i be ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ another starving refugee ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? yeah ! ♫ ♫ yeah ! yeah ! ♫
♫ you would have seen my face on the telly ♫ ♫ fat hungry belly ♫ ♫ flies in my eyes , head too big for my size ♫ ♫ just another little starving child ♫ ♫ running around in africa , born to be wild ♫ ♫ praise god , praise the almighty ♫ ♫ for sending an angel to rescue me ♫ ♫ i got a reason for being on this earth ♫ ♫ ' cause i know more than many what a life is worth ♫ ♫ now that i got a chance to stand my ground ♫ ♫ i 'm gonna run over mountains , leaps and bounds ♫
♫ i ai n't an angel , hope i 'll be one soon ♫ ♫ and if i am , i wanna be like emma mccune ♫ ♫ me ! what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ another starving refugee ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? yeah ! yeah ! ♫ ♫ yeah , yeah ! ♫ ♫ i would have probably died from starvation ♫ ♫ or some other wretched disease ♫ ♫ i would have grown up with no education ♫
♫ just another refugee ♫ ♫ i stand here because somebody cared ♫ ♫ i stand here because somebody dared ♫ ♫ i know there is a lot of emmas out there ♫ ♫ who is willing and trying to save a life of a child ♫ ♫ what would i be ? me ! ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ another starving refugee ♫ ♫ i remember the time when i was small ♫ ♫ when i could n't read or write at all ♫ ♫ now i 'm all grown up , i got my education ♫
♫ the sky is the limit and i ca n't be stopped by no one ♫ ♫ how i prayed for this day to come ♫ ♫ and i pray that the world find wisdom ♫ ♫ to give the poor in need some assistance ♫ ♫ instead of putting up resistance , yeah ♫ ♫ sitting and waiting for the politics to fix this ♫ ♫ it ai n't gonna happen ♫ ♫ they 're all sitting on they asses ♫ ♫ popping champagne and sponging off the masses ♫ ♫ coming from a refugee boy-soldier ♫ ♫ but i still got my dignity ♫
♫ i gotta say it again ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ♫ ♫ i 'd be a corpse on the african plain ♫ is there anybody who 's here in the back , some love .
big scream for emma everybody .
yeah ! i 'm gonna get crazy now .
♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ another starving refugee ♫ ♫ what would i be ? ♫ ♫ if emma never rescued me ? ♫ ♫ yeah , yeah ♫ ♫ yeah , i would have probably died from starvation ♫ ♫ or some other wretched disease ♫ ♫ i would have grown up with no education ♫ ♫ just another refugee ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- go save a life of a child .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to show you how terrorism actually interacts with our daily life .
15 years ago i received a phone call from a friend .
at the time he was looking after the rights of political prisoners in italian jails .
he asked me if i wanted to interview the red brigades .
now , as many of you may remember , the red brigades was a terrorist , marxist organization which was very active in italy from the 1960s until the mid-1980s .
as part of their strategy the red brigades never spoke with anybody , not even with their lawyers .
they sat in silence through their trails , waving occasionally at family and friends .
in 1993 they declared the end of the armed struggle .
and they drew a list of people with whom they would talk , and tell their story .
and i was one of those people .
when i asked my friend why the red brigades want to talk to me , he said that the female members of the organization had actually supported my name .
in particular , one person had put it forward .
she was my childhood friend .
she had joined the red brigades and became a leader of the organization .
naturally , i did n't know that until the day she was arrested .
in fact , i read it in the newspaper .
at the time of the phone call i just had a baby , i successfully completed a management buyout to the company i was working with , and the last thing i wanted to do was to go back home and touring the high-security prisons .
but this is exactly what i did because i wanted to know what had turned my best friend into a terrorist , and why she 'd never tried to recruit me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , this is exactly what i did .
now , i found the answer very quickly .
i actually had failed the psychological profiling of a terrorist .
the center committee of the red brigades had judged me too single-minded and too opinionated to become a good terrorist .
my friend , on the other hand , she was a good terrorist because she was very good at following orders .
she also embraced violence .
because she believed that the only way to unblock what , at the time , was known as a blocked democracy , italy , a country run by the same party for 35 years was the arms struggle .
at the same time , while i was interviewing the red brigades , i also discovered that their life was not ruled by politics or ideology , but actually was ruled by economics .
they were constantly short of cash .
they were constantly searching for cash .
now , contrary to what many people believe , terrorism is actually a very expensive business .
i 'll give you an idea .
in the 1970s , the turnover of the red brigades was seven million dollars .
this is roughly between 100 and 150 million , today .
now , you know , if you live underground it 's really hard to produce this amount of money .
but this also explains why , when i was interviewing the red brigades , and then , later on , other arms organizations , including members of al-zarqawi group in the middle east , everybody was extremely reluctant to talk about ideology , or politics .
because they had no idea .
the political vision of a terrorist organization is decided by the leadership , which , generally , is never more than five to seven people .
all the others do , day in and day out , is search for money .
once , for example , i was interviewing this part-timer from the red brigades .
it was a psychiatrist . he loved sailing .
he was a really keen sailor . and he had this beautiful boat .
and he told me that the best time of his life was when he was a member of the red brigades and he went sailing , every summer , back and forth from lebanon , where he would pick up soviet weapons from the plo , and then carry them all the way to sardinia where the other arms organization from europe would go and take their share of the arms .
for that service the red brigades were actually paid a fee , which went to fund their organization .
so , because i am a trained economist and i think in economic terms , all of the sudden i thought , maybe there is something here .
maybe there is a link , a commercial link , between one organization and another one .
but it was only when i interviewed mario moretti , the head of the red brigades , the man who kidnapped and killed aldo moro , italian former prime minister , that i finally realized that terrorism is actually business .
i was having lunch with him in a high-security prison in italy .
and as we were eating , i had the distinct feeling that i was back in the city of london , having lunch with a fellow banker or an economist .
this guy thought in the same way i did .
so , i decided that i wanted to investigate the economics of terrorism .
naturally , nobody wanted to fund my research .
in fact , i think many people thought that i was a bit crazy .
you know , that woman that goes around to foundations asking for money , thinking about the economics of terrorism .
so , in the end , i took a decision that , in retrospect , did change my life .
i sold my company , and funded the research myself .
and what i discovered is this parallel reality , another international economic system , which runs parallel to our own , which has been created by arms organizations since the end of world war ii .
and what is even more shocking is that this system has followed , step by step , the evolution of our own system , of our western capitalism .
and there are three main stages .
the first one is the state sponsor of terrorism .
the second one is the privatization of terrorism .
and the third , of course , is the globalization of terrorism .
so , state sponsor of terrorism , feature of the cold war .
this is when the two superpowers were fighting a war by proxy , along the periphery of the sphere of influence , fully funding arms organizations .
a mix of legal and illegal activities is used .
so , the link between crime and terror is established very early on .
and here is the best example , the contras in nicaragua , created by the cia , legally funded by the u.s. congress , illegally funded by the reagan administration via covert operation , for example , the iran-contra affair .
then comes the late 1970s , early ' 80s , and some groups successfully carry out the privatization of terrorism .
so , they gain independence from the sponsor , and start funding themselves .
now , again we see a mix of legal and illegal activities .
so , arafat used to get a percentage of the smuggling of hashish from bekáa valley , which is the valley between lebanon and syria .
and the ira , which control the private transportation system in northern ireland , did exactly the same thing .
so , every single time that somebody got into a taxi in belfast without knowing , actually , was funding the ira .
but the great change came , of course , with globalization and deregulation .
this is when arms organization were able to link up , also financially , with each other .
but above all , they started to do serious business with the world of crime .
and together they money-laundered their dirty business through the same channel .
this is when we see the birth of the transnational arms organization al qaeda .
this is an organization that can raise money across border .
but also that is able to carry out attacks in more than one country .
now , deregulation also brought back rogue economics .
so what is rogue economics ?
rogue economics is a force which is constantly lurking in the background of history .
it comes back at times of great transformation , globalization being one of those transformations .
it is at this times in which politics actually loses control of the economy , and the economy becomes a rogue force working against us .
it has happened before in history .
it has happened with the fall of the roman empire .
it has happened with industrial revolution .
and it actually happened again , with the fall of the berlin wall .
now , i calculated how big was this international economic system composed by crime , terror , and illegal economy , before 9-11 .
and it is a staggering 1.5 trillion dollars .
it is trillions , it 's not billions .
this is about twice the gdp of the united kingdom , soon will be more , considering where this country is going .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , until 9-11 , the bulk of all this money flew into the u.s. economy because the bulk of the money was denominated in u.s. dollars and the money laundering was taking place inside the united states .
the entry point , of course , of most of this money were the off-shore facilities .
so , this was a vital injection of cash into the u.s. economy .
now , when i went to look at the figures of the u.s. money supply , the u.s. money supply is the amount of dollars that the federal reserve prints every year in order to satisfy which , of course , reflects the growth of the economy .
so , when i went to look at those figures , i noted that since the late 1960s a growing number of these dollars was actually leaving the united states , never to come back .
these were money taken out in suitcases or in containers , in cash of course .
these were money taken out by criminals and money launderers .
these were money taken out to fund the growth of the terror , illegal and criminal economy .
so , you see , what is the relationship ?
the united states actually is a country that is the reserve currency of the world .
what does it mean ? that means that it has a privilege that other countries do not have .
it can borrow against the total amount of dollars in circulation in the world .
this privilege is called seigniorage .
no other country can do that .
all the other countries , for example the united kingdom , can borrow only against the amount of money in circulation inside its own borders .
so , here is the implication of the relationship between the worlds of crime , terror , and illegal economy , and our economy .
the u.s. in the 1990s was borrowing against the growth of the terror , illegal and criminal economy .
this is how close we are with this world .
now , this situation changed , of course , after 9-11 , because george bush launched the war on terror .
part of the war on terror was the introduction of the patriot act .
now , many of you know that the patriot act is a legislation that greatly reduces the liberties of americans in order to protect them against terrorism .
but there is a section of the patriot act which refers specifically to finance .
and it is , in fact , an anti-money-laundering legislation .
what the patriot act did was to prohibit u.s. bank , and u.s.-registered foreign banks from doing any businesses with off-shore facilities .
it closed that door between the money laundering in dollars , and the u.s. economy .
it also gave the u.s. monetary authorities the right to monitor any dollar transaction taking place anywhere in the world .
now , you can imagine what was the reaction of the international finance and banking .
all the bankers said to their clients , " get out of the dollars and go and invest somewhere else . "
now , the euro was a newly born currency of great opportunity for business , and , of course , for investment .
and this is what people did .
nobody wants the u.s. monetary authority to check their relationship , to monitor their relationship with their clientele .
the same thing happened , of course , in the world of crime and terror .
people simply moved their money-laundering activities away from the united states into europe .
why did this happen ? this happened because the patriot act was a unilateral legislation .
it was introduced only in the united states .
and it was introduced only for the u.s. dollars .
in europe , a similar legislation was not introduced .
so , within six months europe became the epicenter of the money-laundering activities of the world .
so , this is how incredible are the relationship between the world of crime and the world of terror , and our own life .
so , why did i tell you this story ?
i told you this story because you must understand that there is a world that goes well beyond the headlines of the newspapers , including the personal relationship that you have with friends and family .
you got to question everything that is told to you , including what i just told you today .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the only way for you to step into the dark side , and have a look at it .
and believe me , it 's going to be scary .
it 's going to be frightful , but it 's going to enlighten you .
and , above all , it 's not going to be boring .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to speak to you today about architectural agency .
what i mean by that is that it 's time for architecture to do things again , not just represent things .
this is a construction helmet that i received two years ago at the groundbreaking of the largest project i , and my firm , have ever been involved in .
i was thrilled to get it . i was thrilled to be the only person standing on the stage with a shiny silver helmet .
i thought it represented the importance of the architect .
i stayed thrilled until i got home , threw the helmet onto my bed , fell down onto my bed and realized inside there was an inscription .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i think that this is a great metaphor for the state of architecture and architects today .
we are for decorative purposes only .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , who do we have to blame ?
we can only blame ourselves . over the last 50 years the design and construction industry has gotten much more complex and has gotten much more litigious .
and we architects are cowards .
so , as we have faced liability , we have stepped back and back , and unfortunately , where there is liability , guess what there is : power .
so , eventually we have found ourselves in a totally marginalized position , way over here .
now , what did we do ? we 're cowards , but we 're smart cowards .
and so we redefined this marginalized position as the place of architecture .
and we announced , " hey , architecture , it 's over here , in this autonomous language we 're going to seed control of processes . "
and we were going to do something that was horrible for the profession .
we actually created an artificial schism between creation and execution , as if you could actually create without knowing how to execute and as if you could actually execute without knowing how to create .
now , something else happened .
and that 's when we began to sell the world that architecture was created by individuals creating genius sketches .
and that the incredible amount of effort to deliver those sketches for years and years and years is not only something to be derided , but we would merely write it off as merely execution .
now i 'd argue that that is as absurd as stating that 30 minutes of copulation is the creative act , and nine months of gestation , and , god forbid , 24 hours of child labor is merely execution .
so , what do we architects need to do ? we need to stitch back creation and execution .
and we need to start authoring processes again instead of authoring objects .
now , if we do this , i believe we can go back 50 years and start reinjecting agency , social engineering , back into architecture .
now , there are all kinds of things that we architects need to learn how to do , like managing contracts , learning how to write contracts , understanding procurement processes , understanding the time value of money and cost estimation .
but i 'm going to reduce this to the beginning of the process , into three very pedantic statements .
the first is : take core positions with your client .
i know it 's shocking , right , that architecture would actually say that .
the second position is : actually take positions .
take joint positions with your client .
this is the moment in which you as the architect and your client can begin to inject vision and agency .
but it has to be done together .
and then only after this is done are you allowed to do this , begin to put forward architectural manifestations that manifest those positions .
and both owner and architect alike are empowered to critique those manifestations based on the positions that you 've taken .
now , i believe that one really amazing thing will happen if you do this .
i 'd like to call it the lost art of productively losing control .
you do not know what the end result is .
but i promise you , with enough brain power and enough passion and enough commitment , you will arrive at conclusions that will transcend convention , and will simply be something that you could not have initially or individually conceived of .
alright , now i 'm going to reduce all of this to a series of simple dumb sketches .
this is the modus operandi that we have today .
we roll 120-foot spartan , i.e. our vision , up to our clients ' gates of troy .
and we do n't understand why they wo n't let us in . right ?
well , how about instead of doing that , we roll up to the gates something they want .
now this is a little bit of a dangerous metaphor , because of course we all know that inside of the trojan horse were a bunch of people with spears .
so , we can change the metaphor . let 's call the trojan horse the vessel by which you get through the gate , get through the constraints of a project .
at which point , you and your client have the ability to start considering what the agency , the vision .
and if you do that , you do that responsibly , i believe that instead of delivering spartans , you can deliver maidens .
and if i could summarize that all up into one single sketch it would be this .
if we are so good at our craft should n't we be able to conceive of an architectural manifestation that slides seamlessly through the project 's and the client 's constraints ?
now , with that in mind , i 'm going to show a project that 's very dear to many people in this room - well , maybe not dear , but certainly close to many people in this room .
and that 's a project that is just about to open next week , the new home for the dallas theater center , the dee and charles wyly theatre .
now , i 'm going to present it on the same terms : issue , position and architectural manifestation .
now , the first issue that we faced was that the dallas theater center had a notoriety that was beyond what you would expect of some place outside of the triumvirate of new york , chicago and seattle .
and this had to do with the ambitions of the leadership .
but it also had to do with something rather unusual , and that was this horrible little building that they 'd been performing in .
why was this horrible little building so important to their renown and their innovation ?
because they could do whatever they wanted to to this building .
when you 're on broadway , you can not tear the proscenium down .
this building , when an artistic director wanted to do a " cherry orchard " and wanted people and wanted people to come out of a well on the stage , they brought a backhoe in , and they simply dug the hole .
well , that 's exciting .
and you can start to get the best artistic directors , scenic designers and actors from around the country to come to perform here because you can do things you ca n't do elsewhere .
so , the first position we took was , " hey , we as architects had better not show up and do a pristine building that does n't engender the same freedoms that this old dilapidated shed provided the company . "
the second issue is a nuance of the first .
and that 's that the company and the building was multiform .
that meant that they were able to perform , as long as they had labor they were able to go between proscenium , thrust , flat floor , arena , traverse , you name it .
all they needed was labor .
well , something happened . in fact something happened to all institutions around the world .
it started to become hard to raise operational costs , operational budgets .
so , they stopped having inexpensive labor .
and eventually they had to freeze their organization into something called a bastardized thruscenium .
so , the second position we took is that the freedoms that we provided , the ability to move between stage configurations , had better be able to be done without relying on operational costs . alright ? affordably .
the architectural manifestation was frankly just dumb .
it was to take all the things that are known as front of house and back of house and redefine them as above house and below house .
at first blush you think , " hey it 's crazy , what could you possibly gain ? "
we created what we like to call superfly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , superfly , the concept is you take all the freedoms you normally associate with the flytower , and you smear them across flytower and auditorium .
suddenly the artistic director can move between different stage and audience configurations .
and because that flytower has the ability to pick up all the pristine elements , suddenly the rest of the environment can be provisional . and you can drill , cut , nail , screw paint and replace , with a minimum of cost .
but there was a third advantage that we got by doing this move that was unexpected .
and that was that it freed up the perimeter of the auditorium in a most unusual way .
and that provided the artistic director suddenly the ability to define suspension of disbelief .
so , the building affords artistic directors the freedom to conceive of almost any kind of activity underneath this floating object .
but also to challenge the notion of suspension of disbelief such that in the last act of macbeth , if he or she wants you to associate the parable that you 're seeing with dallas , with your real life , he or she can do so .
now , in order to do this we and the clients had to do something fairly remarkable .
in fact it really was the clients who had to do it .
they had to make a decision , based on the positions we took to redefine the budget being from two thirds capital-a architecture and one-third infrastructure , to actually the inverse , two-thirds infrastructure and one-third capital-a architecture .
that 's a lot for a client to commit to before you actually see the fruition of the concept .
but based on the positions , they took the educated leap of faith to do so .
and effectively we created what we like to call a theater machine .
now , that theater machine has ability to move between a whole series of configurations at the push of a button and a few stagehands in a short amount of time .
but it also has the potential to not only provide multiform but multi-processional sequences .
meaning : the artistic director does n't necessarily need to go through our lobby .
one of the things that we learned when we visited various theaters is they hate us architects , because they say the first thing they have to do , the first five minutes of any show , is they have to get our architecture out of the mind of their patron .
well now there are potentials of this building to allow the artistic director to actually move into the building without using our architecture .
so , in fact , there is the building , there is what we call the draw .
you 're going down into our lobby , go through the lobby with our own little dangly bits , whether you like them or not , up through the stair that leads you into the auditorium .
but there is also the potential to allow people to move directly from the outside , in this case suggesting kind of wagnerian entrance , into the interior of the auditorium .
and here is the fruition of that in actuality .
these are the two large pivoting doors that allow people to move directly from the outside , in or from the inside , out , performers or audience alike .
now , imagine what that could be . i have to say honestly this is not something yet the building can do because it takes too long .
but imagine the freedoms if you could take this further , that in fact you could consider a wagnerian entry , a first act in thrust , an intermission in greek , a second act in arena , and you leave through our lobby with dangly bits .
now that , i would say , is architecture performing .
it is taking the hand of the architect to actually remove the hand of the architect in favor of the hand of the artistic director .
i 'll go through the three basic configurations .
this is the flat floor configuration .
you notice that there is no proscenium , the balconies have been raised up , there are no seats , the floor in the auditorium is flat .
the first configuration is easy to understand .
the balconies come down , you see that the orchestra begins to have a rake that 's frontal towards the end stage , and the seats come in .
the third configuration is a little harder to understand .
here you see that the balconies actually have to move out of the way in order to bring a thrust into the space .
and some of the seats need to actually change their direction , and change their rake , to allow that to happen .
i 'll do it again so you can see it .
there you see it 's the side balconies for the proscenium .
and there it is in the thrust configuration .
in order to do that , again , we needed a client who was willing to take educational risks .
and they told us one important thing : " you shall not beta-test . "
meaning , nothing that we do can we be the first ones to do it .
but they were willing for us to apply technologies from other areas that already had failsafe mechanisms to this building .
and the solution in terms of the balconies was to use something that we all know as a scoreboard lift .
now , if you were to take a scoreboard and drop it on dirt and whiskey , that would be bad .
if you were not able to take the scoreboard out of the arena and be able to do the ice capades the next night , that would also be bad .
and so this technology already had all the failsafe mechanisms and allowed the theater and our client to actually do this with confidence that they would be able to change over their configurations at will .
the second technology that we applied was actually using things that you know from the stage side of an opera house .
in this case what we 're doing is we 're taking the orchestra floor , lifting it up , spinning it , changing the rake , taking it back to flat floor , changing the rake again . in essence , you can begin to define rakes and viewing angles of people in the orchestra seating , at will .
here you see the chairs being spun around to go from proscenium or end stage to thrust configuration .
the proscenium , also . as far as we know this is the first building in the world in which the proscenium can entirely fly out of the space .
here you see the various acoustic baffles as well as the flying mechanisms and catwalks over the auditorium .
and ultimately , up in the flytower , the scene sets that allow the transformations to occur .
as i said , all that was in service of creating a flexible yet affordable configuration .
but we got this other benefit , and that was the ability of the perimeter to suddenly engage dallas on the outside .
here you see the building in its current state with blinds closed . this is a trompe l 'oeil .
actually this is not a curtain . these are vinyl blinds that are integrated into the windows themselves , again with failsafe mechanisms that can be lifted such that you can completely demystify , if you chose , the operations of the theater going on behind , rehearsals and so forth .
but you also have the ability to allow the audience to see dallas , to perform with dallas as the backdrop of your performance .
now , if i 'll take you through - this is an early concept sketch - take you through kind of a mixture of all these things together .
effectively you would have something like this .
you would be allowed to bring objects or performers into the performing chamber : " aida , " their elephants , you can bring the elephants in .
you would be able to expose the auditorium to dallas or vice versa , dallas to the auditorium .
you 'd be able to open portions in order to change the procession , allow people to come in and out for an intermission , or to enter for the beginning or the end of a performance .
as i said , all the balconies can move , but they can also be disappeared completely .
the proscenium can fly .
you can bring large objects into the chamber itself .
but most convincingly when we had to confront the idea of changing costs from architecture to infrastructure , is something that is represented by this .
and again , this is not all the flexibilities of the building that is actually built , but at least suggests the ideas .
this building has the ability , in short order , to go back to a flat floor organization such that they can rent it out .
now , if there is anyone here from american airlines , please consider doing your christmas party here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that allows the company to raise operational budgets without having to compete with other venues with much larger auditoriums .
that 's an enormous benefit .
so , the theater company has the ability to do totally hermetic , light-controlled , sound-controlled , great acoustics , great intimacy shakespeare , but can also do beckett with the skyline of dallas sitting behind it .
here it is in a flat floor configuration .
the theater has been going through its kind of paces .
here it is in an end stage configuration .
it 's actually beautiful . there was a rock band .
we stood outside trying to see if the acoustics worked , and you could see the guys doing this but you could n't hear them .
it was very unusual .
here it is in a thrust configuration .
and last but not least , you see this already has the ability to create events in order to generate operational budgets to overcome the building in fact performing to allow the company to overcome their biggest problem .
i 'm going to show you a brief time lapse .
as i said , this can be done with only two people , and with a minimum amount of time .
this is the first time that actually the changeover was done and so there is literally thousands of people because everyone was excited and wanted to be a part of it .
so , in a way try to disregard all the thousands of ants running around .
and think of it being done with just a few people .
again , just a couple people are required .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i promise .
et voila .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , just in conclusion , a few shots .
this is the at & t performing arts center 's dee and charles wyly theater .
there it is at night .
and last but not least the entire at & t performing arts center .
you can see the winspear opera house on the right and the dee and charles wyly theater on the left .
and to remind you that here is an example in which architecture actually did something .
but we got to that conclusion without understanding where we were going , what we knew were a series of issues that the company and the client was confronted with .
and we took positions with them , and it was through those positions that we began to take architectural manifestations and we arrived at a conclusion that none of us , really none of us could ever have conceived of initially or individually .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- about a year and a half ago , stephen lawler , who also gave a talk here at ted in 2007 on virtual earth , brought me over to become the architect of bing maps , which is microsoft 's online-mapping effort .
in the past two and a half , we 've been very hard at work on redefining the way maps work online .
and we really are seeing this in very different terms from the kind of mapping and direction site that one is used to .
so , the first thing that you might notice about the mapping site is just the fluidity of the zooming and the panning , which , if you 're familiar at all with seadragon , that 's where it comes from .
mapping is , of course , not just about cartography , it 's also about imagery .
so , as we zoom-in beyond a certain level this resolves into a kind of sim city-like virtual view at 45 degrees .
this can be viewed from any of the cardinal directions to show you the 3d structure of the city , all the facades .
now , we see this space , this three-dimensional environment , as being a canvas on which all sorts of applications can play out , and map 's directions are really just one of them .
if you click on this , you 'll see some of the ones that we 've put out , just in the past couple of months since we 've launched .
so , for example , a couple of days after the disaster in haiti , before and after pictures from the sky .
this wonderful one which i do n't have time to show you is taking hyper-local blogs in real time and mapping those stories , those entries to the places that are referred to on the blogs .
it 's wonderful .
but i 'm going to show you some more candy sort of stuff .
so , we see the imagery , of course , not stopping at the sky .
these little green bubbles represent photosynths that users have made .
i 'm not going to dive into them either , but photosynths are integrated into the map .
everything that 's cased in blue is an area where we 've taken imagery on the ground as well .
and so , when you fly down - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . when you fly down to the ground , and you see this kind of panoramic imagery , the first thing that you might notice is that it 's not just a picture , there 's just as much three-dimensional understanding of this environment as there is of the three-dimensional city from above , so if i click on something to get a closer view of it , then , the fact that that transition looks as it does , is a function of all of that geometry , all of that 3d understanding behind this model .
now , i 'll show you a fun app that - we 've been working on a collaboration with our friends at flickr .
this takes flickr , georegistered imagery and uses photosynth-like processes to connect that imagery to our imagery , so - i 'm not sure if that 's the one i actually meant to pull up , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but notice - this is , of course , a popular tourist site , and there are lots of photos around here , and these photos are all taken at different times .
so this one was taken around five .
so that 's the flickr photo , that 's our imagery .
so you really see how this kind of crowd-sourced imagery is integrating , in a very deep way , into the map itself .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there are several reasons why this is interesting and one of them , of course , is time travel .
and i 'm not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here , but there are some with horses and carriages and so on as well .
but what 's cool about this is that , not only is it augmenting this visual representation of the world with things that are coming in from users , but it also is the foundation for augmented reality , and that 's something that i 'll be showing you more of in just a moment .
now i just made a transition indoors . that 's also interesting .
ok , notice there 's now a roof above us .
we 're inside the pike place market .
and this is something that we 're able to do with a backpack camera , so , we 're now not only imaging in the street with this camera on tops of cars , but we 're also imaging inside .
and from here , we 're able to do the same sorts of registration , not only of still images , but also of video .
so this is something that we 're now going to try for the first time , live , and this is really , truly , very frightening .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
-lrb- ringing -rrb- all right , guys , are you there ?
-lrb- noise -rrb- all right . i 'm hitting it . i 'm punching play .
i 'm live . all right . there we go .
so , these are our friends in pike place market , the lab .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so they 're broadcasting this live .
ok , george , can you pan back over to the corner market ?
because i want to show points of interest .
no , no . the other way .
yeah , yeah , back to the corner , back to the corner .
i do n't want to see you guys yet .
ok , ok , back to the corner , back to the corner , back to the corner .
ok , never mind .
what i wanted to show you was these points of interest over here on top of the image because what that gives you a sense of is the way , if you 're actually on the spot , you can think about this - this is taking a step in addition to augmented reality .
what the hell are you guys - oh , sorry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're doing two different - ok , i 'm hanging up now .
we 're doing two different things here .
one of them is to take that real ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , let me just take a moment and thank the team .
they 've done a fantastic job of pulling this together .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to abandon them now and walk back outside .
and while i walk outside , i 'll just mention that here we 're using this for telepresence , but you can equally well use this on the spot , for augmented reality .
when you use it on the spot , it means that you 're able to bring all of that metadata and information about the world to you .
so here , we 're taking the extra step of also broadcasting it .
that was being broadcast , by the way , on a 4g network from the market .
all right , and now there 's one last ted talk that microsoft has given in the past several years .
and that 's curtis wong , worldwide telescope .
so , we 're going to head over to the dumpsters , where it 's traditional , after a long day at the market , to go out for a break , but also stare up at the sky .
this is the integration of worldwide telescope into our maps .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is the current - thank you - this is the current time . if we scrub the time , then we can see how the sky will look at different times , and we can get all of this very detailed information about different times , different dates : let 's move the moon a little higher in the sky , maybe change the date .
i would like to kind of zoom in on the moon .
so , this is an astronomically complete representation of the sky integrated right into the earth .
all right now , i 've overrun my time , so i 've got to stop .
thank you all very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love trees , and i 'm very lucky , because we live near a wonderful arboretum , and sundays , usually , i 'd go there with my wife and now , with my four-year-old , and we 'd climb in the trees , we 'd play hide and seek .
the second school i was at had big trees too , had a fantastic tulip tree , i think it was the biggest in the country , and it also had a lot of wonderful bushes and vegetation around it , around the playing fields .
one day i was grabbed by some of my classmates , and taken in the bushes - i was stripped ; i was attacked ; i was abused ; and this came out of the blue .
now , the reason i say that , because , afterwards , i was thinking - well , i went back into the school - i felt dirty ; i felt betrayed ; i felt ashamed , but mainly - mainly , i felt powerless .
and 30 years later i was sitting in an airplane , next to a lady called veronica , who came from chile , and we were on a human rights tour , and she was starting to tell me what it was like to be tortured , and , from my very privileged position , this was the only reference point that i had .
and it was an amazing learning experience because , for me , human rights have been something in which i had , you know , a part-time interest , but , mainly , it was something that happened to other people over there .
but i got a phone call from bono in 1985 and , as you know , he 's a great singer , but he 's a magnificent hustler , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - a very hard guy to say no to , and he was saying , you know , just after i 'd done the biko song , we 're going to do a tour for amnesty , you have to be on it , and really that was the first time that i 'd been out and started meeting people who 'd watched their family being shot in front of them , who 'd had a partner thrown out of an airplane into an ocean , and suddenly this world of human rights arrived in my world ,
and i could n't really walk away in quite the same way as before .
so i got involved with this tour , which was for amnesty , and then in ' 88 i took over bono 's job trying to learn how to hustle .
i did n't do it as well , but we managed to get youssou n 'dour , sting , tracy chapman , and bruce springsteen to go ' round the world for amnesty , and it was an amazing experience .
and , once again , i got an extraordinary education , and it was the first time , really , that i 'd met a lot of these people in the different countries , and these human rights stories became very physical , and , again , i could n't really walk away quite so comfortably .
but the thing that really amazed me , that i had no idea , was that you could suffer in this way and then have your whole experience , your story , denied , buried and forgotten .
and it seemed that whenever there was a camera around , or a video or film camera , it was a great deal harder to do - for those in power to bury the story .
and reebok set up a foundation after these human rights now tours and there was a decision then - well , we made a proposal , for a couple of years , about trying to set up a division that was going to give cameras to human rights activists .
it did n't really get anywhere , and then the rodney king incident happened , and people thought , ok , if you have a camera in the right place at the right time , or , perhaps , the wrong time , depending who you are , then you can actually start doing something , and campaigning , and being heard , and telling people about what 's going on .
so , witness was started in ' 92 and it 's since given cameras out in over 60 countries .
and we campaign with activist groups and help them tell their story and , in fact , i will show you in a moment one of the most recent campaigns , and i 'm afraid it 's a story from uganda , and , although we had a wonderful story from uganda yesterday , this one is n't quite so good .
in the north of uganda , there are something like 1.5 million internally displaced people , people who are not refugees in another country , but because of the civil war , which has been going on for about 20 years , they have nowhere to live .
and 20,000 kids have been taken away to become child soldiers , and the international criminal court is going after five of the leaders of the - now , what 's it called ?
i forget the name of the of the army - it 's lord 's resistance army , i believe - but the government , also , does n't have a clean sheet , so if we could run the first video .
-lrb- music -rrb- woman : life in the camp is never simple . even today life is difficult .
we stay because of the fear that what pushed us into the camp ...
still exists back home .
text : " between two fires : torture and displacement in northern uganda " man : when we were at home , it was kony 's -lsb- rebel -rsb- soldiers disturbing us .
at first , we were safe in the camp .
but later the government soldiers began mistreating us a lot .
-lrb- chanting -rrb- jennifer : a soldier walked onto the road , asking where we 'd been .
evelyn and i hid behind my mother .
evelyn : he ordered us to sit down , so we sat down .
the other soldier also came .
jennifer : the man came and started undressing me .
the other one carried evelyn aside .
the one who was defiling me then left me and went to rape evelyn .
and the one who was raping evelyn came and defiled me also .
man : the soldiers with clubs this long beat us to get a confession .
they kept telling us , " tell the truth ! " as they beat us .
woman : they insisted that i was lying .
at that moment , they fired and shot off my fingers .
i fell . they ran to join the others ... leaving me for dead .
-lrb- music -rrb- text : uganda ratified the convention against torture in 1986 .
torture is defined as any act by which severe pain of suffering , whether physical or mental , is intentionally inflicted by a person acting in an official capacity to obtain information or a confession , to punish , coerce or intimidate .
peter gabriel : so torture is not something that always happens on other soil .
in my country , it was - we had been looking at pictures of british soldiers beating up young iraqis ; we 've got abu ghraib ; we 've got guantanamo bay .
i had a driver on my way to newark airport , and he told me a story that , in the middle of the night , 4 a.m. , he 'd been taken out of his home in queens - taken to a place in the midwest , that he was interrogated and tortured and returned to the street four weeks later , because he had the same - he was middle eastern , and he had the same name as one of the 9/11 pilots , and that may or may not be true - i did n't think he was a liar , though .
and , i think , if we look around the world , as well as the polar ice caps melting , human rights , which have been fought for , for many hundreds of years in some cases , are , also , eroding very fast , and that is something that we need to take a look at and , maybe , start campaigning for .
i mean , here , too , one of our partners was at van jones and the books not bars project - they have managed , with their footage in california to change the youth correction systems employed , and it 's much - much - i think , more humane methods are being looked at , how you should lock up young kids , and that 's questionable to start off .
and as the story of mr. morales , just down the road , excuse me , mr. gabriel , would you mind if we delayed your execution a little bit ?
no , not at all , no problem , take your time .
but this , surely , whoever that man is , whatever he 's done , this is cruel and unusual punishment .
anyway , witness has been trying to arm the brave people who often put their lives at risk around the world , with cameras , and i 'd like to show you just a little more of that . thank you .
-lrb- thunder -rrb- text : you can say a story is fabricated .
-lrb- music -rrb- text : you can say a jury is corrupt .
you can say a person is lying .
you can say you do n't trust newspapers .
but you ca n't say what you just saw never happened .
help witness give cameras to the world .
shoot a video ; expose injustice ; reveal the truth ; show us what 's wrong with the world ; and maybe we can help make it right .
witness .
all the video you have just seen was recorded by human rights groups working with witness .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pg : witness was born of technological innovation - in a sense the small , portable , dv cam was really what allowed it to come into being .
and we 've also been trying to get computers out to the world , so that groups can communicate much more effectively , campaign much more effectively , but now we have the wonderful possibility , which is given to us from the mobile phone with the camera in it , because that is cheap ; it 's ubiquitous ; and it 's moving fast all around the world - and it 's very exciting for us .
and so , the dream is that we could have a world in which anyone who has anything bad happen to them of this sort has a chance of getting their story uploaded , being seen , being watched , that they really know that they can be heard , that there would be a giant website , maybe , a little like google earth , and you could fly over and find out the realities of what 's going , for the world 's inhabitants . in a way what this technology is allowing is , really , that a lot of the problems of the world can have a human face , that we can actually see who 's dying of aids
or who 's being beaten up , for the first time , and we can hear their stories in a way that the blogger culture - if we can move that into these sort of fields , i think we can really transform the world in all sorts of ways .
there could be a new movement growing up , rising from the ground , reaching for the light , and growing strong , just like a tree . thank you .
my journey to become a polar specialist , photographing , specializing in the polar regions , began when i was four years old , when my family moved from southern canada to northern baffin island , up by greenland .
there we lived with the inuit in the tiny inuit community of 200 inuit people , where -lsb- we -rsb- were one of three non-inuit families .
and in this community , we did n't have a television ; we did n't have computers , obviously , radio .
we did n't even have a telephone .
all of my time was spent outside with the inuit , playing .
the snow and the ice were my sandbox , and the inuit were my teachers .
and that 's where i became truly obsessed with this polar realm .
and i knew someday that i was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it .
i 'd like to share with you , for just two minutes only , some images , a cross-section of my work , to the beautiful music by brandi carlile , " have you ever . "
i do n't know why national geographic has done this , they 've never done this before , but they 're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that i 've just completed that is not published yet .
national geographic does n't do this , so i 'm very excited to be able to share this with you .
and what these images are - you 'll see them at the start of the slide show - there 's only about four images - but it 's of a little bear that lives in the great bear rainforest .
it 's pure white , but it 's not a polar bear .
it 's a spirit bear , or a kermode bear .
there are only 200 of these bears left .
they 're more rare than the panda bear .
i sat there on the river for two months without seeing one .
i thought , my career 's over .
i proposed this stupid story to national geographic .
what in the heck was i thinking ?
so i had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what i was going to do in my next life , after i was a photographer , because they were going to fire me .
because national geographic is a magazine ; they remind us all the time : they publish pictures , not excuses .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and after two months of sitting there - one day , thinking that it was all over , this incredible big white male came down , right beside me , three feet away from me , and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it .
and then i spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest .
he went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep .
and i actually got to sleep within three feet of him , just in the forest , and photograph him .
so i 'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that i 've done on the polar regions .
please enjoy .
-lrb- music -rrb- brandi carlile : ♫ have you ever wandered lonely through the woods ? ♫ ♫ and everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ you 're part of the life there ♫ ♫ you 're part of something good ♫ ♫ if you 've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh ♫ ♫ if you 've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ have you ever stared into a starry sky ? ♫ ♫ lying on your back , you 're asking why ♫ ♫ what 's the purpose ? ♫ ♫ i wonder , who am i ? ♫
♫ if you 've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh ♫ ♫ aah , ah , aah ♫ ♫ ah , oh , oh , ah , ah , oh , oh ♫ ♫ have you ever stared into a starry sky ? ♫ ♫ have you ever been out walking in the snow ? ♫ ♫ tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ you always end up ♫ ♫ not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ if you 've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh ♫ ♫ aah , ah , aah , ah , aah ♫ ♫ ah , ah , oh , ah , ah , oh , ah ♫
♫ oh , ah , ah , ah ♫ ♫ ah , ah , oh , ah , ah , oh , oh ♫ ♫ if you 'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- paul nicklen : thank you very much . the show 's not over .
my clock is ticking . ok , let 's stop .
thank you very much . i appreciate it .
we 're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it 's at its lowest level .
and in fact , scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years , then they said 50 years .
now they 're saying the sea ice in the arctic , the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years .
and what does that mean ?
after a while of reading this in the news , it just becomes news .
you glaze over with it .
and what i 'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this .
and i want people to understand and get the concept that , if we lose ice , we stand to lose an entire ecosystem .
projections are that we could lose polar bears , they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years .
and there 's no better , sexier , more beautiful , charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on .
polar bears are amazing hunters .
this was a bear i sat with for a while on the shores .
there was no ice around .
but this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it .
and this bear swam out to that seal - 800 lb. bearded seal - grabbed it , swam back and ate it .
and he was so full , he was so happy and so fat eating this seal , that , as i approached him - about 20 feet away - to get this picture , his only defense was to keep eating more seal .
and as he ate , he was so full - he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly - and as he ate inside one side of his mouth , he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth .
so as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive , but it 's the ice that 's disappearing .
we 're finding more and more dead bears in the arctic .
when i worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago , we never found dead bears .
and in the last four or five years , we 're finding dead bears popping up all over the place .
we 're seeing them in the beaufort sea , floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out .
i found a couple in norway last year . we 're seeing them on the ice .
these bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice .
here 's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere , and they 're riding on this big piece of glacier ice , which is great for them ; they 're safe at this point .
they 're not going to die of hypothermia .
they 're going to get to land .
but unfortunately , 95 percent of the glaciers in the arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem .
these ringed seals , these are the " fatsicles " of the arctic .
these little , fat dumplings , 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear .
and they 're not like the harbor seals that you have here .
these ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice .
they give birth inside the ice , and they feed on the arctic cod that live under the ice .
and here 's a picture of sick ice .
this is a piece of multi-year ice that 's 12 years old .
and what scientists did n't predict is that , as this ice melts , these big pockets of black water are forming and they 're grabbing the sun 's energy and accelerating the melting process .
and here we are diving in the beaufort sea .
the visibility 's 600 ft . ; we 're on our safety lines ; the ice is moving all over the place .
i wish i could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive .
but what 's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice , that big chunk of ice up in the corner .
in that one single piece of ice , you have 300 species of microorganisms .
and in the spring , when the sun returns to the ice , it forms the phytoplankton , grows under that ice , and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed , and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life .
so really what the ice does is it acts like a garden .
it acts like the soil in a garden . it 's an inverted garden .
losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden .
here 's me in my office .
i hope you appreciate yours .
this is after an hour under the ice .
i ca n't feel my lips ; my face is frozen ; i ca n't feel my hands ; i ca n't feel my feet .
and i 've come up , and all i wanted to do was get out of the water .
after an hour in these conditions , it 's so extreme that , when i go down , almost every dive i vomit into my regulator because my body ca n't deal with the stress of the cold on my head .
and so i 'm just so happy that the dive is over .
i get to hand my camera to my assistant , and i 'm looking up at him , and i 'm going , " woo . woo . woo . "
which means , " take my camera . "
and he thinks i 'm saying , " take my picture . "
so we had this little communication breakdown .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's worth it .
i 'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales , bowhead whales , and narwhals , and polar bears , and leopard seals today , but this picture right here means more to me than any other i 've ever made .
i dropped down in this ice hole , just through that hole that you just saw , and i looked up under the underside of the ice , and i was dizzy ; i thought i had vertigo .
i got very nervous - no rope , no safety line , the whole world is moving around me - and i thought , " i 'm in trouble . "
but what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice , giving birth and living out their entire life cycle .
this is the foundation of the whole food chain in the arctic , right here .
and when you have low productivity in this , in ice , the productivity in copepods go down .
this is a bowhead whale .
supposedly , science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now .
this very whale right here could be over 250 years old .
this whale could have been born around the start of the industrial revolution .
it could have survived 150 years of whaling .
and now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the north because of the lives that we 're leading in the south .
narwhals , these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks , do n't have to be here ; they could be out on the open water .
but they 're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe , catch a breath , because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod .
and the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods .
alright , my favorite part .
when i 'm on my deathbed , i 'm going to remember one story more than any other .
even though that spirit bear moment was powerful , i do n't think i 'll ever have another experience like i did with these leopard seals .
leopard seals , since the time of shackleton , have had a bad reputation .
they 've got that wryly smile on their mouth .
they 've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body .
they look positively prehistoric and a bit scary .
and tragically in -lsb- 2003 -rsb- , a scientist was taken down and drowned , and she was being consumed by a leopard seal .
and people were like , " we knew they were vicious . we knew they were . "
and so people love to form their opinions .
and that 's when i got a story idea : i want to go to antarctica , get in the water with as many leopard seals as i possibly can and give them a fair shake - find out if they really are these vicious animals , or if they 're misunderstood .
so this is that story .
oh , and they also happen to eat happy feet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as a species , as humans , we like to say penguins are really cute , therefore , leopard seals eat them , so leopard seals are ugly and bad .
it does n't work that way .
the penguin does n't know it 's cute , and the leopard seal does n't know it 's kind of big and monstrous .
this is just the food chain unfolding .
they 're also big .
they 're not these little harbor seals .
they are 12 ft. long , a thousand pounds .
and they 're also curiously aggressive .
you get 12 tourists packed into a zodiac , floating in these icy waters , and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon .
the boat starts to sink , they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked .
all the leopard seal was doing - it 's just biting a balloon .
it just sees this big balloon in the ocean - it does n't have hands - it 's going to take a little bite , the boat pops , and off they go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so after five days of crossing the drake passage - is n't that beautiful - after five days of crossing the drake passage , we have finally arrived at antarctica .
i 'm with my swedish assistant and guide .
his name is goran ehlme from sweden - goran .
and he has a lot of experience with leopard seals . i have never seen one .
so we come around the cove in our little zodiac boat , and there 's this monstrous leopard seal .
and even in his voice , he goes , " that 's a bloody big seal , ya . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this seal is taking this penguin by the head , and it 's flipping it back and forth .
and what it 's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out , so it can eat the meat off the bones , and then it goes off and gets another one .
and so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin , came under the boat , the zodiac , starting hitting the hull of the boat .
and we 're trying to not fall in the water .
and we sit down , and that 's when goran said to me , " this is a good seal , ya .
it 's time for you to get in the water . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i looked at goran , and i said to him , " forget that . "
but i think i probably used a different word starting with the letter " f. "
but he was right .
he scolded me out , and said , " this is why we 're here .
and you purposed this stupid story to national geographic .
and now you 've got to deliver .
and you ca n't publish excuses . "
so i had such dry mouth - probably not as bad as now - but i had such , such dry mouth .
and my legs were just trembling . i could n't feel my legs .
i put my flippers on . i could barely part my lips .
i put my snorkel in my mouth , and i rolled over the side of the zodiac into the water .
and this was the first thing she did .
she came racing up to me , engulfed my whole camera - and her teeth are up here and down here - but goran , before i had gotten in the water , had given me amazing advice .
he said , " if you get scared , you close your eyes , ya , and she 'll go away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's all i had to work with at that point .
but i just started to shoot these pictures .
so she did this threat display for a few minutes , and then the most amazing thing happened - she totally relaxed .
she went off , she got a penguin .
she stopped about 10 feet away from me , and she sat there with this penguin , the penguin 's flapping , and she let 's it go .
the penguin swims toward me , takes off .
she grabs another one . she does this over and over .
and it dawned on me that she 's trying to feed me a penguin .
why else would she release these penguins at me ?
and after she did this four or five times , she swam by me with this dejected look on her face .
you do n't want to be too anthropomorphic , but i swear that she looked at me like , " this useless predator 's going to starve in my ocean . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so realizing i could n't catch swimming penguins , she 'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me , bobbing like this , and she 'd let them go .
this did n't work .
i was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding , because i was crying underwater , just because it was so amazing .
and so that did n't work .
so then she 'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me .
this went on for four days .
this just did n't happen a couple of times .
and then so she realized i could n't catch live ones , so she brought me dead penguins .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i 've got four or five penguins floating around my head , and i 'm just sitting there shooting away .
and she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like , " are you for real ? "
because she ca n't believe i ca n't eat this penguin .
because in her world , you 're either breeding or you 're eating - and i 'm not breeding , so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then that was n't enough ; she started to flip penguins onto my head .
she was trying to force-feed me . she 's pushing me around .
she 's trying to force-feed my camera , which is every photographer 's dream .
and she would get frustrated ; she 'd blow bubbles in my face .
she would , i think , let me know that i was going to starve .
but yet she did n't stop .
she would not stop trying to feed me penguins .
and on the last day with this female where i thought i had pushed her too far , i got nervous because she came up to me , she rolled over on her back , and she did this deep , guttural jackhammer sound , this gok-gok-gok-gok .
and i thought , she 's about to bite .
she 's about to let me know she 's too frustrated with me .
what had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me , and she did that to threat display .
she chased that big seal away , went and got its penguin and brought it to me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that was n't the only seal i got in the water with .
i got in the water with 30 other leopard seals , and i never once had a scary encounter .
they are the most remarkable animals i 've ever worked with , and the same with polar bears .
and just like the polar bears , these animals depend on an icy environment .
i get emotional . sorry .
it 's a story that lives deep in my heart , and i 'm proud to share this with you .
and i 'm so passionate about it .
anybody want to come with me to antarctica or the arctic , i 'll take you ; let 's go .
we 've got to get the story out now . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " do n't talk to strangers . "
you have heard that phrase uttered by your friends , family , schools and the media for decades .
it 's a norm . it 's a social norm .
but it 's a special kind of social norm , because it 's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we should n't relate to .
" do n't talk to strangers " says , " stay from anyone who 's not familiar to you .
stick with the people you know .
stick with people like you . "
how appealing is that ?
it 's not really what we do , is it , when we 're at our best ?
when we 're at our best , we reach out to people who are not like us , because when we do that , we learn from people who are not like us .
my phrase for this value of being with " not like us " is " strangeness , " and my point is that in today 's digitally intensive world , strangers are quite frankly not the point .
the point that we should be worried about is , how much strangeness are we getting ?
why strangeness ? because our social relations are increasingly mediated by data , and data turns our social relations into digital relations , and that means that our digital relations now depend extraordinarily on technology to bring to them a sense of robustness , a sense of discovery , a sense of surprise and unpredictability .
why not strangers ?
because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries .
they belong to a world of people i know versus people i do n't know , and in the context of my digital relations , i 'm already doing things with people i do n't know .
the question is n't whether or not i know you .
the question is , what can i do with you ?
what can i learn with you ?
what can we do together that benefits us both ?
i spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing , how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people .
the most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future .
the economies of the future depend on that .
our social lives in the future depend on that .
the threat to worry about is n't strangers .
the threat to worry about is whether or not we 're getting our fair share of strangeness .
now , 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers , but they were n't thinking so dynamically about human relations , and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices .
stanley milgram from the ' 60s and ' 70s , the creator of the small-world experiments , which became later popularized as six degrees of separation , made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps .
his point was that strangers are out there .
we can reach them . there are paths that enable us to reach them .
mark granovetter , stanford sociologist , in 1973 in his seminal essay " the strength of weak ties , " made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks , these strangers , are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties , the people closest to us .
he makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us , these strong ties in our lives , actually have a homogenizing effect on us .
they produce sameness .
my colleagues and i at intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives , what kinds of new routines are possible .
of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions , those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses , and to make them available to people we do n't know .
whether it 's our clothes , whether it 's our cars , whether it 's our bikes , whether it 's our books or music , we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we 've never met .
and we concluded a very important insight , which was that as people 's relationships to the things in their lives change , so do their relations with other people .
and yet recommendation system after recommendation system continues to miss the boat .
it continues to try to predict what i need based on some past characterization of who i am , of what i 've already done .
security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks , keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations .
categories like " friends " and " family " and " contacts " and " colleagues " do n't tell me anything about my actual relations .
a more effective way to think about my relations might be in terms of closeness and distance , where at any given point in time , with any single person , i am both close and distant from that individual , all as a function of what i need to do right now .
people are n't close or distant .
people are always a combination of the two , and that combination is constantly changing .
what if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships ?
what if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that i need right now ?
strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that i need right now , that enables me to find the sources of intimacy , of discovery , and of inspiration that i need right now .
strangeness is not about meeting strangers .
it simply makes the point that we need to disrupt our zones of familiarity .
so jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness , and it 's a problem faced not just by individuals today , but also by organizations , organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities .
whether you 're a political party insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion of who belongs and who does not , whether you 're the government protecting social institutions like marriage and restricting access of those institutions to the few , whether you 're a teenager in her bedroom who 's trying to jostle her relations with her parents , strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way to new kinds of relations .
we have to change the norms .
we have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses .
what interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers ?
how might we think differently about our relations with people ?
how might we think differently about our relations with distributed groups of people ?
how might we think differently about our relations with technologies , things that effectively become social participants in their own right ?
the range of digital relations is extraordinary .
in the context of this broad range of digital relations , safely seeking strangeness might very well be a new basis for that innovation .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for a long time , there was me , and my body .
me was composed of stories , of cravings , of strivings , of desires of the future .
me was trying not to be an outcome of my violent past , but the separation that had already occurred between me and my body was a pretty significant outcome .
me was always trying to become something , somebody .
me only existed in the trying .
my body was often in the way .
me was a floating head .
for years , i actually only wore hats .
it was a way of keeping my head attached .
it was a way of locating myself .
i worried that -lsb- if -rsb- i took my hat off i would n't be here anymore .
i actually had a therapist who once said to me , " eve , you 've been coming here for two years , and , to be honest , it never occurred to me that you had a body . "
all this time i lived in the city because , to be honest , i was afraid of trees .
i never had babies because heads can not give birth .
babies actually do n't come out of your mouth .
as i had no reference point for my body , i began to ask other women about their bodies - in particular , their vaginas , because i thought vaginas were kind of important .
this led to me writing " the vagina monologues , " which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere i could .
i did this in front of many strangers .
one night on stage , i actually entered my vagina .
it was an ecstatic experience .
it scared me , it energized me , and then i became a driven person , a driven vagina .
i began to see my body like a thing , a thing that could move fast , like a thing that could accomplish other things , many things , all at once .
i began to see my body like an ipad or a car .
i would drive it and demand things from it .
it had no limits . it was invincible .
it was to be conquered and mastered like the earth herself .
i did n't heed it ; no , i organized it and i directed it .
i did n't have patience for my body ; i snapped it into shape .
i was greedy .
i took more than my body had to offer .
if i was tired , i drank more espressos .
if i was afraid , i went to more dangerous places .
oh sure , sure , i had moments of appreciation of my body , the way an abusive parent can sometimes have a moment of kindness .
my father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday , for example .
i heard people murmur from time to time that i should love my body , so i learned how to do this .
i was a vegetarian , i was sober , i did n't smoke .
but all that was just a more sophisticated way to manipulate my body - a further disassociation , like planting a vegetable field on a freeway .
as a result of me talking so much about my vagina , many women started to tell me about theirs - their stories about their bodies .
actually , these stories compelled me around the world , and i 've been to over 60 countries .
i heard thousands of stories , and i have to tell you , there was always this moment where the women shared with me that particular moment when she separated from her body - when she left home .
i heard about women being molested in their beds , flogged in their burqas , left for dead in parking lots , acid burned in their kitchens .
some women became quiet and disappeared .
other women became mad , driven machines like me .
in the middle of my traveling , i turned 40 and i began to hate my body , which was actually progress , because at least my body existed enough to hate it .
well my stomach - it was my stomach i hated .
it was proof that i had not measured up , that i was old and not fabulous and not perfect or able to fit into the predetermined corporate image in shape .
my stomach was proof that i had failed , that it had failed me , that it was broken .
my life became about getting rid of it and obsessing about getting rid of it .
in fact , it became so extreme i wrote a play about it .
but the more i talked about it , the more objectified and fragmented my body became .
it became entertainment ; it became a new kind of commodity , something i was selling .
then i went somewhere else .
i went outside what i thought i knew .
i went to the democratic republic of congo .
and i heard stories that shattered all the other stories .
i heard stories that got inside my body .
i heard about a little girl who could n't stop peeing on herself because so many grown soldiers had shoved themselves inside her .
i heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that .
there are thousands of these stories , and many of the women had holes in their bodies - holes , fistula - that were the violation of war - holes in the fabric of their souls .
these stories saturated my cells and nerves , and to be honest , i stopped sleeping for three years .
all the stories began to bleed together .
the raping of the earth , the pillaging of minerals , the destruction of vaginas - none of these were separate anymore from each other or me .
militias were raping six-month-old babies so that countries far away could get access to gold and coltan for their iphones and computers .
my body had not only become a driven machine , but it was responsible now for destroying other women 's bodies in its mad quest to make more machines to support the speed and efficiency of my machine .
then i got cancer - or i found out i had cancer .
it arrived like a speeding bird smashing into a windowpane .
suddenly , i had a body , a body that was pricked and poked and punctured , a body that was cut wide open , a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged and reconstructed , a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it , a body that was burning from chemicals .
cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection .
i suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world , and it was n't happening later , it was happening now .
suddenly , my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere , the cancer of cruelty , the cancer of greed , the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants - and they 're usually poor - the cancer inside the coal miner 's lungs , the cancer of stress for not achieving enough , the cancer of buried trauma , the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish , the cancer in women 's uteruses from being raped , the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness .
in his new and visionary book , " new self , new world , " the writer philip shepherd says , " if you are divided from your body , you are also divided from the body of the world , which then appears to be other than you or separate from you , rather than the living continuum to which you belong . "
before cancer , the world was something other .
it was as if i was living in a stagnant pool and cancer dynamited the boulder that was separating me from the larger sea .
now i am swimming in it .
now i lay down in the grass and i rub my body in it , and i love the mud on my legs and feet .
now i make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the seine , and i hunger for the green fields in the bush outside bukavu .
and when it rains hard rain , i scream and i run in circles .
i know that everything is connected , and the scar that runs the length of my torso is the markings of the earthquake .
and i am there with the three million in the streets of port-au-prince .
and the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world .
i know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation , the 16 ounces of puss , is the contaminated gulf of mexico , and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish .
and the catheters they shoved into me without proper medication made me scream out the way the earth cries out from the drilling .
in my second chemo , my mother got very sick and i went to see her .
and in the name of connectedness , the only thing she wanted before she died was to be brought home by her beloved gulf of mexico .
so we brought her home , and i prayed that the oil would n't wash up on her beach before she died .
and gratefully , it did n't .
and she died quietly in her favorite place .
and a few weeks later , i was in new orleans , and this beautiful , spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me .
and i was honored .
and i went to her house , and it was morning , and the morning new orleans sun was filtering through the curtains .
and my friend was preparing this big bowl , and i said , " what is it ? "
and she said , " it 's for you .
the flowers make it beautiful , and the honey makes it sweet . "
and i said , " but what 's the water part ? "
and in the name of connectedness , she said , " oh , it 's the gulf of mexico . "
and i said , " of course it is . "
and the other women arrived and they sat in a circle , and michaela bathed my head with the sacred water .
and she sang - i mean her whole body sang .
and the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother .
and as the warm gulf washed over my naked head , i realized that it held the best and the worst of us .
it was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion .
it was all the lies that got told before and after .
it was the honey in the water that made it sweet , it was the oil that made it sick .
it was my head that was bald - and comfortable now without a hat .
it was my whole self melting into michaela 's lap .
it was the tears that were indistinguishable from the gulf that were falling down my cheek .
it was finally being in my body .
it was the sorrow that 's taken so long .
it was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection .
it was the continuing devastating war in the congo and the indifference of the world .
it was the congolese women who are now rising up .
it was my mother leaving , just at the moment that i was being born .
it was the realization that i had come very close to dying - in the same way that the earth , our mother , is barely holding on , in the same way that 75 percent of the planet are hardly scraping by , in the same way that there is a recipe for survival .
what i learned is it has to do with attention and resources that everybody deserves .
it was advocating friends and a doting sister .
it was wise doctors and advanced medicine and surgeons who knew what to do with their hands .
it was underpaid and really loving nurses .
it was magic healers and aromatic oils .
it was people who came with spells and rituals .
it was having a vision of the future and something to fight for , because i know this struggle is n't my own .
it was a million prayers .
it was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms .
it was a lot of anger , insane humor , a lot of attention , outrage .
it was energy , love and joy .
it was all these things .
it was all these things .
it was all these things in the water , in the world , in my body .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what 's happening in genomics , and how this revolution is about to change everything we know about the world , life , ourselves , and how we think about them .
if you saw 2001 : a space odyssey , and you heard the boom , boom , boom , boom , and you saw the monolith , you know , that was arthur c. clarke 's representation that we were at a seminal moment in the evolution of our species .
in this case , it was picking up bones and creating a tool , using it as a tool , which meant that apes just , sort of , running around and eating and doing each other figured out they can make things if they used a tool .
and that moved us to the next level .
and , you know , we in the last 30 years in particular have seen this acceleration in knowledge and technology , and technology has bred more knowledge and given us tools .
and we 've seen many seminal moments .
we 've seen the creation of small computers in the ' 70s and early ' 80s , and who would have thought back then that every single person would not have just one computer but probably 20 , in your home , and in not just your p.c. but in every device - in your washing machine , your cell phone .
you 're walking around ; your car has 12 microprocessors .
then we go along and create the internet and connect the world together ; we flatten the world .
we 've seen so much change , and we 've given ourselves these tools now - these high-powered tools - that are allowing us to turn the lens inward into something that is common to all of us , and that is a genome .
how 's your genome today ? have you thought about it lately ?
heard about it , at least ? you probably hear about genomes these days .
i thought i 'd take a moment to tell you what a genome is .
it 's , sort of , like if you ask people , well , what is a megabyte or megabit ? and what is broadband ?
people never want to say , i really do n't understand .
so , i will tell you right off of the bat .
you 've heard of dna ; you probably studied a little bit in biology .
a genome is really a description for all of the dna that is in a living organism .
and one thing that is common to all of life is dna .
it does n't matter whether you 're a yeast ; it does n't matter whether you 're a mouse ; does n't matter whether you 're a fly ; we all have dna .
the dna is organized in words , call them : genes and chromosomes .
and when watson and crick in the ' 50s first decoded this beautiful double helix that we know as the dna molecule - very long , complicated molecule - we then started on this journey to understand that inside of that dna is a language that determines the characteristics , our traits , what we inherit , what diseases we may get .
we 've also along the way discovered that this is a very old molecule , that all of the dna in your body has been around forever , since the beginning of us , of us as creatures .
there is a historical archive .
living in your genome is the history of our species , and you as an individual human being , where you 're from , going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years , and that 's now starting to be understood .
but also , the genome is really the instruction manual .
it is the program . it is the code of life .
it is what makes you function ; it is what makes every organism function .
dna is a very elegant molecule .
it 's long and it 's complicated .
really all you have to know about it is that there 's four letters : a , t , c , g ; they represent the name of a chemical .
and with these four letters , you can create a language : a language that can describe anything , and very complicated things .
you know , they are generally put together in pairs , creating a word or what we call base pairs .
and you would , you know , when you think about it , four letters , or the representation of four things , makes us work .
and that may not sound very intuitive , but let me flip over to something else you know about , and that 's computers .
look at this screen here and , you know , you see pictures and you see words , but really all there are are ones and zeros .
the language of technology is binary ; you 've probably heard that at some point in time .
everything that happens in digital is converted , or a representation , of a one and a zero .
so , when you 're listening to itunes and your favorite music , that 's really just a bunch of ones and zeros playing very quickly .
when you 're seeing these pictures , it 's all ones and zeros , and when you 're talking on your telephone , your cell phone , and it 's going over the network , your voice is all being turned into ones and zeros and magically whizzed around .
and look at all the complex things and wonderful things we 've been able to create with just a one and a zero .
well , now you ramp that up to four , and you have a lot of complexity , a lot of ways to describe mechanisms .
so , let 's talk about what that means .
so , if you look at a human genome , they consist of 3.2 billion of these base pairs . that 's a lot .
and they mix up in all different fashions , and that makes you a human being .
if you convert that to binary , just to give you a little bit of sizing , we 're actually smaller than the program microsoft office .
it 's not really all that much data .
i will also tell you we 're at least as buggy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this here is a bug in my genome that i have struggled with for a long , long time .
when you get sick , it is a bug in your genome .
in fact , many , many diseases we have struggled with for a long time , like cancer , we have n't been able to cure because we just do n't understand how it works at the genomic level .
we are starting to understand that .
so , up to this point we tried to fix it by using what i call shit-against-the-wall pharmacology , which means , well , let 's just throw chemicals at it , and maybe it 's going to make it work .
but if you really understand why does a cell go from normal cell to cancer ?
what is the code ?
what are the exact instructions that are making it do that ?
then you can go about the process of trying to fix it and figure it out .
so , for your next dinner over a great bottle of wine , here 's a few factoids for you .
we actually have about 24,000 genes that do things .
we have about a hundred , 120,000 others that do n't appear to function every day , but represent this archival history of how we used to work as a species going back tens of thousands of years .
you might also be interested in knowing that a mouse has about the same amount of genes .
they recently sequenced pinot noir , and it also has about 30,000 genes , so the number of genes you have may not necessarily represent the complexity or the evolutionary order of any particular species .
now , look around : just look next to your neighbor , look forward , look backward . we all look pretty different .
a lot of very handsome and pretty people here , skinny , chubby , different races , cultures . we are all 99.9 % genetically equal .
it is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us .
that 's a tiny amount of material , but the way that ultimately expresses itself is what makes changes in humans and in all species .
so , we are now able to read genomes .
the first human genome took 10 years , three billion dollars .
it was done by dr. craig venter .
and then james watson 's - one of the co-founders of dna - genome was done for two million dollars , and in just two months .
and if you think about the computer industry and how we 've gone from big computers to little ones and how they get more powerful and faster all the time , the same thing is happening with gene sequencing now : we are on the cusp of being able to sequence human genomes for about 5,000 dollars in about an hour or a half-hour ; you will see that happen in the next five years .
and what that means is , you are going to walk around with your own personal genome on a smart card . it will be here .
and when you buy medicine , you wo n't be buying a drug that 's used for everybody .
you will give your genome to the pharmacist , and your drug will be made for you and it will work much better than the ones that were - you wo n't have side effects .
all those side effects , you know , oily residue and , you know , whatever they say in those commercials : forget about that .
they 're going to make all that stuff go away .
what does a genome look like ?
well , there it is . it is a long , long series of these base pairs .
if you saw the genome for a mouse or for a human it would look no different than this , but what scientists are doing now is they 're understanding what these do and what they mean .
because what nature is doing is double-clicking all the time .
in other words , the first couple of sentences here , assuming this is a grape plant : make a root , make a branch , create a blossom .
in a human being , down in here it could be : make blood cells , start cancer .
for me it may be : every calorie you consume , you conserve , because i come from a very cold climate .
for my wife : eat three times as much and you never put on any weight .
it 's all hidden in this code , and it 's starting to be understood at breakneck pace .
so , what can we do with genomes now that we can read them , now that we 're starting to have the book of life ?
well , there 's many things . some are exciting .
some people will find very scary . i will tell you a couple of things that will probably make you want to projectile puke on me , but that 's okay .
so , you know , we now can learn the history of organisms .
you can do a very simple test : scrape your cheek ; send it off .
you can find out where your relatives come from ; you can do your genealogy going back thousands of years .
we can understand functionality . this is really important .
we can understand , for example , why we create plaque in our arteries , what creates the starchiness inside of a grain , why does yeast metabolize sugar and produce carbon dioxide .
we can also look at , at a grander scale , what creates problems , what creates disease , and how we may be able to fix them .
because we can understand this , we can fix them , make better organisms .
most importantly , what we 're learning is that nature has provided us a spectacular toolbox .
the toolbox exists .
an architect far better and smarter than us has given us that toolbox , and we now have the ability to use it .
we are now not just reading genomes ; we are writing them .
this company , synthetic genomics , i 'm involved with , created the first full synthetic genome for a little bug , a very primitive creature called mycoplasma genitalium .
if you have a uti , you 've probably - or ever had a uti - you 've come in contact with this little bug .
very simple - only has about 246 genes - but we were able to completely synthesize that genome .
now , you have the genome and you say to yourself , so , if i plug this synthetic genome - if i pull the old one out and plug it in - does it just boot up and live ?
well , guess what . it does .
not only does it do that ; if you took the genome - that synthetic genome - and you plugged it into a different critter , like yeast , you now turn that yeast into mycoplasma .
it 's , sort of , like booting up a pc with a mac o.s. software .
well , actually , you could do it the other way .
so , you know , by being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism , the software , if you will , changes the hardware .
and this is extremely profound .
so , last year the french and italians announced they got together and they went ahead and they sequenced pinot noir .
the genomic sequence now exists for the entire pinot noir organism , and they identified , once again , about 29,000 genes .
they have discovered pathways that create flavors , although it 's very important to understand that those compounds that it 's cranking out have to match a receptor in our genome , in our tongue , for us to understand and interpret those flavors .
they 've also discovered that there 's a heck of a lot of activity going on producing aroma as well .
they 've identified areas of vulnerability to disease .
they now are understanding , and the work is going on , exactly how this plant works , and we have the capability to know , to read that entire code and understand how it ticks .
so , then what do you do ?
knowing that we can read it , knowing that we can write it , change it , maybe write its genome from scratch . so , what do you do ?
well , one thing you could do is what some people might call franken-noir .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we can build a better vine .
by the way , just so you know : you get stressed out about genetically modified organisms ; there is not one single vine in this valley or anywhere that is not genetically modified .
they 're not grown from seeds ; they 're grafted into root stock ; they would not exist in nature on their own .
so , do n't worry about , do n't stress about that stuff . we 've been doing this forever .
so , we could , you know , focus on disease resistance ; we can go for higher yields without necessarily having dramatic farming techniques to do it , or costs .
we could conceivably expand the climate window : we could make pinot noir grow maybe in long island , god forbid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we could produce better flavors and aromas .
you want a little more raspberry , a little more chocolate here or there ?
all of these things could conceivably be done , and i will tell you i 'd pretty much bet that it will be done .
but there 's an ecosystem here .
in other words , we 're not , sort of , unique little organisms running around ; we are part of a big ecosystem .
in fact - i 'm sorry to inform you - that inside of your digestive tract is about 10 pounds of microbes which you 're circulating through your body quite a bit .
our ocean 's teaming with microbes ; in fact , when craig venter went and sequenced the microbes in the ocean , in the first three months tripled the known species on the planet by discovering all-new microbes in the first 20 feet of water .
we now understand that those microbes have more impact on our climate and regulating co2 and oxygen than plants do , which we always thought oxygenate the atmosphere .
we find microbial life in every part of the planet : in ice , in coal , in rocks , in volcanic vents ; it 's an amazing thing .
but we 've also discovered , when it comes to plants , in plants , as much as we understand and are starting to understand their genomes , it is the ecosystem around them , it is the microbes that live in their root systems , that have just as much impact on the character of those plants as the metabolic pathways of the plants themselves .
if you take a closer look at a root system , you will find there are many , many , many diverse microbial colonies .
this is not big news to viticulturists ; they have been , you know , concerned with water and fertilization .
and , again , this is , sort of , my notion of shit-against-the-wall pharmacology : you know certain fertilizers make the plant more healthy so you put more in .
you do n't necessarily know with granularity exactly what organisms are providing what flavors and what characteristics .
we can start to figure that out .
we all talk about terroir ; we worship terroir ; we say , wow , is my terroir great ! it 's so special .
i 've got this piece of land and it creates terroir like you would n't believe .
well , you know , we really , we argue and debate about it - we say it 's climate , it 's soil , it 's this . well , guess what ?
we can figure out what the heck terroir is .
it 's in there , waiting to be sequenced .
there are thousands of microbes there .
they 're easy to sequence : unlike a human , they , you know , have a thousand , two thousand genes ; we can figure out what they are .
all we have to do is go around and sample , dig into the ground , find those bugs , sequence them , correlate them to the kinds of characteristics we like and do n't like - that 's just a big database - and then fertilize .
and then we understand what is terroir .
so , some people will say , oh , my god , are we playing god ?
are we now , if we engineer organisms , are we playing god ?
and , you know , people would always ask james watson - he 's not always the most politically correct guy ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ... and they would say , " are , you know , are you playing god ? "
and he had the best answer i ever heard to this question : " well , somebody has to . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i consider myself a very spiritual person , and without , you know , the organized religion part , and i will tell you : i do n't believe there 's anything unnatural .
i do n't believe that chemicals are unnatural .
i told you i 'm going to make some of you puke .
it 's very simple : we do n't invent molecules , compounds .
they 're here . they 're in the universe .
we reorganize things , we change them around , but we do n't make anything unnatural .
now , we can create bad impacts - we can poison ourselves ; we can poison the earth - but that 's just a natural outcome of a mistake we made .
so , what 's happening today is , nature is presenting us with a toolbox , and we find that this toolbox is very extensive .
there are microbes out there that actually make gasoline , believe it or not .
there are microbes , you know - go back to yeast .
these are chemical factories ; the most sophisticated chemical factories are provided by nature , and we now can use those .
there also is a set of rules .
nature will not allow you to - we could engineer a grape plant , but guess what .
we ca n't make the grape plant produce babies .
nature has put a set of rules out there .
we can work within the rules ; we ca n't break the rules ; we 're just learning what the rules are .
i just ask the question , if you could cure all disease - if you could make disease go away , because we understand how it actually works , if we could end hunger by being able to create nutritious , healthy plants that grow in very hard-to-grow environments , if we could create clean and plentiful energy - we , right in the labs at synthetic genomics , have single-celled organisms that are taking carbon dioxide and producing a molecule very similar to gasoline .
so , carbon dioxide - the stuff we want to get rid of - not sugar , not anything .
carbon dioxide , a little bit of sunlight , you end up with a lipid that is highly refined .
we could solve our energy problems ; we can reduce co2 , ; we could clean up our oceans ; we could make better wine .
if we could , would we ?
well , you know , i think the answer is very simple : working with nature , working with this tool set that we now understand , is the next step in humankind 's evolution .
and all i can tell you is , stay healthy for 20 years .
if you can stay healthy for 20 years , you 'll see 150 , maybe 300 .
thank you .
the old story about climate protection is that it 's costly , or it would have been done already .
so government needs to make us do something painful to fix it .
the new story about climate protection is that it 's not costly , but profitable .
this was a simple sign error , because it 's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel , as is well known to companies that do it all the time - for example , dupont , sd micro electronics .
many other firms - ibm - are reducing their energy intensity routinely six percent a year by fixing up their plants , and they get their money back in two or three years .
that 's called a profit .
now , similarly , the old story about oil is that if we wanted to save very much of it , it would be expensive , or we would have done it already , because markets are essentially perfect .
if , of course , that were true , there would be no innovation , and nobody could make any money .
but the new story about oil is the government does n't have to force us to do painful things to get off oil - not just incrementally , but completely - quite the contrary . the united states , for example , can completely eliminate its use of oil and rejuvenate the economy at the same time , led by business for profit , because it 's so much cheaper to save and substitute for the oil than to keep on buying it .
this process will also be catalyzed by the military for its own reasons of combat effectiveness and preventing conflict , particularly over oil .
this thesis is set out in a book called " winning the oil endgame " that four colleagues and i wrote and have posted for free at oilendgame.com - about 170,000 downloads so far .
and it was co-sponsored by the pentagon - it 's independent , it 's peer-reviewed and all of the backup calculations are transparently posted for your perusal .
now , a bit of economic history , i think , may be helpful here .
around 1850 , one of the biggest u.s. industries was whaling .
and whale oil lit practically every building .
but in the nine years before drake struck oil , in 1859 , at least five-sixths of that whale oil-illuminating market disappeared , thanks to fatal competitors , chiefly oil and gas made from coal , to which the whalers had not been paying attention .
so , very unexpectedly , they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales .
the remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's funny - it feels a bit like this now for oil .
we 've been spending the last few decades accumulating a very powerful backlog of technologies for saving and substituting for oil , and no one had bothered to add them up before .
so when we did , we found some very surprising things .
now , there are two big reasons to be concerned about oil .
both national competitiveness and national security are at risk .
on the competitiveness front , we all know that toyota has more market cap than the big three put together .
and serious competition from europe , from korea , and next is china , which will soon be a major net exporter of cars .
how long do you think it will take before you can drive home your new wally-badged shanghai automotive super-efficient car ?
maybe a decade , according to my friends in detroit .
china has an energy policy based on radical energy efficiency and leap-frog technology .
they 're not going to export your uncle 's buick .
and after that comes india .
the point here is , these cars are going to be made super efficient .
the question is , who will make them ?
will we in the united states continue to import efficient cars to replace foreign oil , or will we make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the cars ?
that seems to make more sense .
the more we keep on using the oil , particularly the imported oil , the more we face a very obvious array of problems .
our analysis assumes that they all cost nothing , but nothing is not the right number .
it could well be enough to double the oil price , for example .
and one of the worst of these is what it does to our standing in the world if other countries think that everything we do is about oil , if we have to treat countries that have oil differently than countries that do n't have oil .
and our military get quite unhappy with having to stand guard on pipelines in far-off-istan when what they actually signed up for was to protect american citizens .
they do n't like fighting over oil , they do n't like being in the sands and they do n't like where the oil money goes and what sort of instability it creates .
now , in order to avoid these problems , whatever you think they 're worth , it 's actually not that complicated .
we can save half the oil by using it more efficiently , at a cost of 12 dollars per saved barrel .
and then we can replace the other half with a combination of advanced bio-fuels and safe natural gas .
and that costs on average under 18 dollars a barrel .
and compared with the official forecast , that oil will cost 26 dollars a barrel in 2025 , which is half of what we 've been paying lately , that will save 70 billion dollars a year , starting quite soon .
now , in order to do this we need to invest about 180 billion dollars : half of it to retool the car , truck and plane industries ; half of it to build the advanced bio-fuel industry .
in the process , we will gain about a million good jobs , mainly rural .
and protect another million jobs now at risk , mainly in auto-making .
and we 'll also get returns over 150 billion dollars a year .
so that 's a very handsome return .
it 's financeable in the private capital market .
but if you want it for the reasons i just mentioned , to happen sooner and with higher confidence , then - and also to expand choice and manage risk - then you might like some light-handed public policies that support rather than distorting or opposing the business logic .
and these policies work fine without taxes , subsidies or mandates .
they make a little net money for the treasury .
they have a broad trans-ideological appeal , and because we want them actually to happen , we figured out ways to do them that do not require much , if any , federal legislation , and can , indeed , be done administratively or at a state level .
just to illustrate what to do about the nub of the problem , namely , light vehicles , here are four ultra-light carbon-composite concept cars with low drag , and all but the one at the upper left have hybrid drive .
you can sort of have it all with these things .
for example , this opel two-seater does 155 miles an hour at 94 miles a gallon .
this muscle car from toyota : 408 horsepower in an ultra-light that does zero to 60 in well under four seconds , and still gets 32 miles a gallon . i 'll say more later about this .
and in the upper left , a pioneering effort 14 years ago by gm - 84 miles a gallon without even using a hybrid , in a four-seater .
well , saving that fuel , 69 percent of the fuel in light vehicles costs about 57 cents per saved gallon .
but it 's even a better deal for heavy trucks , where you save a similar amount at 25 cents a gallon , with better aerodynamics and tires and engines , and so on , and taking out weight so you can put it into payload .
so you can double efficiency with a 60 percent internal rate of return .
then you can go even further , almost tripling efficiency with some operational improvements , double the big haulers ' margins .
and we intend to use those numbers to create demand pull , and flip the market .
in the airplane business , it 's again a similar story where the first 20 percent fuel saving is free , as boeing is now demonstrating in its new dreamliner .
but then the next generation of planes saves about half .
again , much cheaper than buying the fuel .
and if you go over the next 15 years or so to a blended-wing body , kind of a flying wing with internal engines , then you get about a factor three efficiency improvement at comparable or lower cost .
let me focus a minute on the light vehicles , the cars and light trucks , because we all know the most about those ; probably everybody here drives one .
and yet we may not realize that in a standard sedan , of all the fuel energy you feed into the car , seven-eighths never gets to the wheels ; it 's lost first in the engine , idling at zero miles a gallon , the power train and accessories .
so then of the energy that does get to the wheels , only an eighth of it , half of that , goes to heat the tires on the road , or to heat the air the car pushes aside .
and only this little bit , only six percent actually ends up accelerating the car and then heating the brakes when you stop .
in fact , since 95 percent of the weight you 're moving is the car not the driver , less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver .
this is not very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- moreover , three-fourths of the fuel use is caused by the weight of the car .
and it 's obvious from the diagram that every unit of energy you save at the wheels is going to avoid wasting another seven units of energy getting that energy to the wheels .
so there 's huge leverage for making the car a lot lighter .
and the reason this has not been very seriously examined before is there was a common assumption in the industry that - well , then it might not be safe if you got whacked by a heavy car , and it would cost a lot more to make , because the only way we know how to make cars much lighter was to use expensive light metals like aluminum and magnesium .
but these objections are now vanishing through advances in materials .
for example , we use a lot of carbon-fiber composites in sporting goods .
and it turns out that these are quite remarkable for safety .
here 's a handmade mclaren slr carbon car that got t-boned by a golf .
the golf was totaled .
the mclaren just popped off and scratched the side panel .
they 'll pop it back on and fix the scratch later .
but if this mclaren were to run into a wall at 65 miles an hour , the entire crash energy would be absorbed by a couple of woven carbon-fiber composite cones , weighing a total of 15 pounds , hidden in the front end .
because these materials could actually absorb six to 12 times as much energy per pound as steel , and do so a lot more smoothly .
and this means we 've just cracked the conundrum of safety and weight .
we could make cars bigger , which is protective , but make them light .
whereas if we made them heavy , they 'd be both hostile and inefficient .
and when you make them light in the right way , that can be simpler and cheaper to make .
you can end up saving money , and lives , and oil , all at the same time .
i showed here two years ago a little bit about a design of your basic , uncompromised , quintupled-efficiency suburban-assault vehicle - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and this is a complete virtual design that is production-costed manufacturable .
and the process needed to make it is actually coming toward the market quite nicely .
we figured out a kind of a digital inkjet printer for this very stiff , strong , carbon-composite material , and then ways to thermoform it , because it 's a combination of carbon and nylon , into whatever complex shapes you want , like the one just shown at the auto show by one of the tier-one suppliers .
and the manufacturing you can do this way gets radically simplified .
because the auto body has only , say , 14 parts , instead of 100 , 150 .
each one is formed by one fairly cheap die set , instead of four expensive ones for stamping steel .
each of the parts can be easily lifted with no hoist .
they snap together like a kid 's toy .
so you got rid of the body shop .
and if you want , you can lay color in the mold , and get rid of the paint shop .
those are the two hardest and costliest parts of making a car .
so you end up with at least two-fifths lower capital intensity than the leanest plant in the industry , which gm has in lansing .
the plant also gets smaller .
now , when you go through a similar analysis for every way we use oil , including buildings , industry , feedstocks and so on , you find that of the 28 million barrels a day the government says we will need in 2025 , well , about eight of that can be removed by efficiency by then , with another seven still being saved as the vehicle stocks turn over , at an average cost of only 12 bucks a barrel , instead of 26 for buying the oil .
and then another six can be made robustly , competitively , from cellulosic ethanol and a little bio-diesel , without interfering at all with the water or land needs of crop production .
there is a huge amount of gas to be saved , about half the projected gas at about an eighth of its price .
and here are some no-brainer substitutions of it , with lots left over .
so much , in fact , that after you 've handled the domestic oil forecast from areas already approved , you have only this little bit left , and let 's see how we can meet that , because there 's a pretty flexible menu of ways .
we could , of course , buy more efficiency .
maybe you ought to buy efficiency at 26 bucks instead of 12 .
or wait to capture the second half of it .
or we could , of course , just get this little bit by continuing to import some canadian and mexican oil , or the ethanol the brazilians would love to sell us .
but they 'll sell it to japan and china instead , because we have tariff barriers to protect our corn farmers , and they do n't .
or we could use the saved gas directly to cover all of this balance , or if we used it as hydrogen , which is more profitable and efficient , we 'd get rid of the domestic oil too .
and that does n't even count , for example , that available land in the dakotas can cost effectively make enough wind power to run every highway vehicle in the country .
so we have lots of options .
and the choice of menu and timing is quite flexible .
now , to make this happen quicker and with higher confidence , there is a few ways government could help .
for example , fee-bates , a combination of a fee and a rebate in any size class of vehicle you want , can increase the price of inefficient vehicles and correspondingly pay you a rebate for efficient vehicles .
you 're not paid to change size class .
you are paid to pick efficiency within a size class , in a way equivalent to looking at all fourteen years of life-cycle fuel savings rather than just the first two or three .
this expands choice rapidly in the market , and actually makes more money for automakers as well .
i 'd like to deal with the lack of affordable personal mobility in this country by making it very cheaply possible for low-income families to get efficient , reliable , warranted new cars that they could otherwise never get .
and for each car so financed , scrap almost one clunker , preferably the dirtiest ones .
this creates a new million-car-a-year market for detroit from customers they were n't going to get otherwise , because they were n't creditworthy and could never afford a new car .
and detroit will make money on every unit .
it turns out that if , say , african-american and white households had the same car ownership , it would cut employment disparity about in half by providing better access to job opportunities .
so this is a huge social win , too .
governments buy hundreds of thousands of cars a year .
there are smart ways to buy them and to aggregate that purchasing power to bring very efficient vehicles into the market faster .
and we could even do an x prize-style golden carrot that 's worth stretching further for .
for example , a billion-dollar prize for the first u.s. automaker to sell 200,000 really advanced vehicles , like some you saw earlier .
then the legacy airlines ca n't afford to buy the efficient new planes they desperately need to cut their fuel bills , but if you felt philosophically you wanted to do anything about that , there are ways to finance it .
and at the same time to scrap inefficient old planes , so that if they were otherwise to come back in the air , they would waste more oil , and block the uptake of efficient , new planes .
those part inefficient planes are worth more to society dead than alive .
we ought to take them out back and shoot them , and put bounty hunters after them .
then there 's an important military role .
that in creating the move to high-volume , low-cost commercial production of these kinds of materials , or for that matter , ultra-light steels that are a good backup technology , the military can do the trick it did in turning darpanet into the internet .
just turn it over to the private sector , and we have an internet .
the same for gps .
the same for the modern semi-conductor industry .
that is , military science and technology that they need can create the advanced materials-industrial cluster that transforms its civilian economy and gets the country off oil , which would be a huge contribution to eliminating conflict over oil and advancing national and global security .
then we need to retool the car industry and do retraining , and shift the convergence of the energy and ag-value chains to shift faster from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates , and get out of our own way in other ways .
and make the transition to more efficient vehicles go faster .
but here 's how the whole thing fits together .
instead of official forecasts of oil use and oil imports going forever up , they can turn down with the 12 dollars a barrel efficiency , down steeply by adding the supply-side substitutions at 18 bucks , all implemented at slower rates than we 've done before when we paid attention .
and if we start adding tranches of hydrogen in there , we are rapidly off imports and completely off oil in the 2040s .
and the one thing i 'd like to point out here is that we 've done this before .
in this eight-year period , 1977 to 85 , when we last paid attention , the economy grew 27 percent , oil use fell 17 percent , oil imports fell 50 percent , oil imports from the persian gulf fell 87 percent .
they would have been gone if we 'd kept that up one more year .
well , that was with very old technologies and delivery methods .
we could rerun that play a lot better now .
and yet what we proved then is the u.s. has more market power than opec .
ours is on the demand side .
we are the saudi arabia of " nega-barrels . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- we can use less oil faster than they can conveniently sell less oil .
-lrb- applause -rrb- whatever your reason for wanting to do this , whether you 're concerned about national security or price volatility - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - or jobs , or the planet , or your grand-kids , it seems to me that this is an oil endgame that we should all be playing to win .
please download your copy , and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , stepping down out of the bus , i headed back to the corner to head west en route to a braille training session .
it was the winter of 2009 , and i had been blind for about a year .
things were going pretty well .
safely reaching the other side , i turned to the left , pushed the auto-button for the audible pedestrian signal , and waited my turn .
as it went off , i took off and safely got to the other side .
stepping onto the sidewalk , i then heard the sound of a steel chair slide across the concrete sidewalk in front of me .
i know there 's a cafe on the corner , and they have chairs out in front , so i just adjusted to the left to get closer to the street .
as i did , so slid the chair .
i just figured i 'd made a mistake , and went back to the right , and so slid the chair in perfect synchronicity .
now i was getting a little anxious .
i went back to the left , and so slid the chair , blocking my path of travel .
now , i was officially freaking out .
so i yelled , " who the hell 's out there ? what 's going on ? "
just then , over my shout , i heard something else , a familiar rattle .
it sounded familiar , and i quickly considered another possibility , and i reached out with my left hand , as my fingers brushed against something fuzzy , and i came across an ear , the ear of a dog , perhaps a golden retriever .
its leash had been tied to the chair as her master went in for coffee , and she was just persistent in her efforts to greet me , perhaps get a scratch behind the ear .
who knows , maybe she was volunteering for service .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that little story is really about the fears and misconceptions that come along with the idea of moving through the city without sight , seemingly oblivious to the environment and the people around you .
so let me step back and set the stage a little bit .
on st. patrick 's day of 2008 , i reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor .
the surgery was successful .
two days later , my sight started to fail .
on the third day , it was gone .
immediately , i was struck by an incredible sense of fear , of confusion , of vulnerability , like anybody would .
but as i had time to stop and think , i actually started to realize i had a lot to be grateful for .
in particular , i thought about my dad , who had passed away from complications from brain surgery .
he was 36 . i was seven at the time .
so although i had every reason to be fearful of what was ahead , and had no clue quite what was going to happen , i was alive .
my son still had his dad .
and besides , it 's not like i was the first person ever to lose their sight .
i knew there had to be all sorts of systems and techniques and training to have to live a full and meaningful , active life without sight .
so by the time i was discharged from the hospital a few days later , i left with a mission , a mission to get out and get the best training as quickly as i could and get on to rebuilding my life .
within six months , i had returned to work .
my training had started .
i even started riding a tandem bike with my old cycling buddies , and was commuting to work on my own , walking through town and taking the bus .
it was a lot of hard work .
but what i did n't anticipate through that rapid transition was the incredible experience of the juxtaposition of my sighted experience up against my unsighted experience of the same places and the same people within such a short period of time .
from that came a lot of insights , or outsights , as i called them , things that i learned since losing my sight .
these outsights ranged from the trival to the profound , from the mundane to the humorous .
as an architect , that stark juxtaposition of my sighted and unsighted experience of the same places and the same cities within such a short period of time has given me all sorts of wonderful outsights of the city itself .
paramount amongst those was the realization that , actually , cities are fantastic places for the blind .
and then i was also surprised by the city 's propensity for kindness and care as opposed to indifference or worse .
and then i started to realize that it seemed like the blind seemed to have a positive influence on the city itself .
that was a little curious to me .
let me step back and take a look at why the city is so good for the blind .
inherent with the training for recovery from sight loss is learning to rely on all your non-visual senses , things that you would otherwise maybe ignore .
it 's like a whole new world of sensory information opens up to you .
i was really struck by the symphony of subtle sounds all around me in the city that you can hear and work with to understand where you are , how you need to move , and where you need to go .
similarly , just through the grip of the cane , you can feel contrasting textures in the floor below , and over time you build a pattern of where you are and where you 're headed .
similarly , just the sun warming one side of your face or the wind at your neck gives you clues about your alignment and your progression through a block and your movement through time and space .
but also , the sense of smell .
some districts and cities have their own smell , as do places and things around you , and if you 're lucky , you can even follow your nose to that new bakery that you 've been looking for .
all this really surprised me , because i started to realize that my unsighted experienced was so far more multi-sensory than my sighted experience ever was .
what struck me also was how much the city was changing around me .
when you 're sighted , everybody kind of sticks to themselves , you mind your own business .
lose your sight , though , and it 's a whole other story .
and i do n't know who 's watching who , but i have a suspicion that a lot of people are watching me .
and i 'm not paranoid , but everywhere i go , i 'm getting all sorts of advice : go here , move there , watch out for this .
a lot of the information is good .
some of it 's helpful . a lot of it 's kind of reversed .
you 've got to figure out what they actually meant .
some of it 's kind of wrong and not helpful .
but it 's all good in the grand scheme of things .
but one time i was in oakland walking along broadway , and came to a corner .
i was waiting for an audible pedestrian signal , and as it went off , i was just about to step out into the street , when all of a sudden , my right hand was just gripped by this guy , and he yanked my arm and pulled me out into the crosswalk and was dragging me out across the street , speaking to me in mandarin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's like , there was no escape from this man 's death grip , but he got me safely there .
what could i do ?
but believe me , there are more polite ways to offer assistance .
we do n't know you 're there , so it 's kind of nice to say " hello " first .
" would you like some help ? "
but while in oakland , i 've really been struck by how much the city of oakland changed as i lost my sight .
i liked it sighted . it was fine .
it 's a perfectly great city .
but once i lost my sight and was walking along broadway , i was blessed every block of the way .
" bless you , man . "
" go for it , brother . "
" god bless you . "
i did n't get that sighted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and even without sight , i do n't get that in san francisco .
and i know it bothers some of my blind friends , it 's not just me .
often it 's thought that that 's an emotion that comes up out of pity .
i tend to think that it comes out of our shared humanity , out of our togetherness , and i think it 's pretty cool .
in fact , if i 'm feeling down , i just go to broadway in downtown oakland , in no time at all .
but also that it illustrates how disability and blindness sort of cuts across ethnic , social , racial , economic lines .
disability is an equal-opportunity provider .
everybody 's welcome .
in fact , i 've heard it said in the disability community that there are really only two types of people : there are those with disabilities , and there are those that have n't quite found theirs yet .
it 's a different way of thinking about it , but i think it 's kind of beautiful , because it is certainly far more inclusive than the us-versus-them or the abled-versus-the-disabled , and it 's a lot more honest and respectful of the fragility of life .
so my final takeaway for you is that not only is the city good for the blind , but the city needs us .
and i 'm so sure of that that i want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities , and not the people that are thought about after the mold has already been cast .
it 's too late then .
so if you design a city with the blind in mind , you 'll have a rich , walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of options and choices all available at the street level .
if you design a city with the blind in mind , sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous .
the space between buildings will be well-balanced between people and cars .
in fact , cars , who needs them ?
if you 're blind , you do n't drive . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they do n't like it when you drive . -lrb- laughter -rrb- if you design a city with the blind in mind , you design a city with a robust , accessible , well-connected mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around .
if you design a city with the blind in mind , there 'll be jobs , lots of jobs .
blind people want to work too .
they want to earn a living .
so , in designing a city for the blind , i hope you start to realize that it actually would be a more inclusive , a more equitable , a more just city for all .
and based on my prior sighted experience , it sounds like a pretty cool city , whether you 're blind , whether you have a disability , or you have n't quite found yours yet .
so thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am going to talk about myself , which i rarely do , because i - well for one thing , i prefer to talk about things i know nothing about .
and secondly , i 'm a recovering narcissist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i did n't know i was a narcissist actually .
i thought narcissism meant you loved yourself .
and then someone told me there is a flip side to it .
so it 's actually drearier than self-love ; it 's unrequited self-love .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't feel i can afford a relapse .
but i want to , though , explain how i came to design my own particular brand of comedy because i 've been through so many different forms of it .
i started with improvisation , in a particular form of improvisation called theater games , which had one rule , which i always thought was a great rule for an ethic for a society .
and the rule was , you could n't deny the other person 's reality , you could only build on it .
and of course we live in a society that 's all about contradicting other peoples ' reality .
it 's all about contradiction , which i think is why i 'm so sensitive to contradiction in general .
i see it everywhere .
like polls . you know , it 's always curious to me that in public opinion polls the percentage of americans who do n't know the answer to any given question is always two percent .
75 percent of americans think alaska is part of canada .
but only two percent do n't know the effect that the debacle in argentina will have on the imf 's monetary policy - -lrb- laughter -rrb- seems a contradiction .
or this ad that i read in the new york times : " wearing a fine watch speaks loudly of your rank in society .
buying it from us screams good taste . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or this that i found in a magazine called california lawyer , in an article that is surely meant for the lawyers at enron .
" surviving the slammer : do 's and do n'ts . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " do n't use big words . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " learn the lingua franca . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . " lingua this , frankie . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i suppose it 's a contradiction that i talk about science when i do n't know math .
you know , because - and by the way to i was so grateful to dean kamen for pointing out that one of the reasons , that there are cultural reasons that women and minorities do n't enter the fields of science and technology - because for instance , the reason i do n't do math is , i was taught to do math and read at the same time .
so you 're six years old , you 're reading snow white and the seven dwarves , and it becomes rapidly obvious that there are only two kinds of men in the world : dwarves and prince charmings .
and the odds are seven to one against your finding the prince .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's why little girls do n't do math . it 's too depressing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- of course , by talking about science i also may , as i did the other night , incur the violent wrath of some scientists who were very upset with me .
i used the word postmodern as if it were ok .
and they got very upset .
one of them , to his credit , i think really just wanted to engage me in a serious argument .
but i do n't engage in serious arguments .
i do n't approve of them because arguments , of course , are all about contradiction , and they 're shaped by the values that i have questions with .
i have questions with the values of newtonian science , like rationality . you 're supposed to be rational in an argument .
well rationality is constructed by what christie hefner was talking about today , that mind-body split , you know ?
the head is good , body bad .
head is ego , body id .
when we say " i , " - as when rene descartes said , " i think therefore i am , " - we mean the head .
and as david lee roth sang in " just a gigolo , " " i ai n't got no body . "
that 's how you get rationality .
and that 's why so much of humor is the body asserting itself against the head .
that 's why you have toilet humor and sexual humor .
that 's why you have the raspyni brothers whacking richard in the genital area .
and we 're laughing doubly then because he 's the body , but it 's also - voice offstage : richard .
emily levine : richard . what did i say ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- richard . yes but it 's also the head , the head of the conference .
that 's the other way that humor - like art buchwald takes shots at the heads of state .
it does n't make quite as much money as body humor i 'm sure - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but nevertheless , what makes us treasure you and adore you .
there 's also a contradiction in rationality in this country though , which is , as much as we revere the head , we are very anti-intellectual .
i know this because i read in the new york times , the ayn rand foundation took out a full-page ad after september 11 , in which they said , " the problem is not iraq or iran , the problem in this country , facing this country is the university professors and their spawn . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i went back and re-read " the fountainhead . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know how many of you have read it .
and i 'm not an expert on sadomasochism .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but let me just read you a couple of random passages from page 217 .
" the act of a master taking painful contemptuous possession of her , was the kind of rapture she wanted .
when they lay together in bed it was , as it had to be , as the nature of the act demanded , an act of violence .
it was an act of clenched teeth and hatred . it was the unendurable .
not a caress , but a wave of pain .
the agony as an act of passion . "
so you can imagine my surprise on reading in the new yorker that alan greenspan , chairman of the federal reserve , claims ayn rand as his intellectual mentor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's like finding out your nanny is a dominatrix .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bad enough we had to see j. edgar hoover in a dress .
now we have to picture alan greenspan in a black leather corset , with a butt tattoo that says , " whip inflation now . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and ayn rand of course , ayn rand is famous for a philosophy called objectivism , which reflects another value of newtonian physics , which is objectivity .
objectivity basically is constructed in that same s & m way .
it 's the subject subjugating the object .
that 's how you assert yourself .
you make yourself the active voice .
and the object is the passive no-voice .
i was so fascinated by that oxygen commercial .
i do n't know if you know this but - maybe it 's different now , or maybe you were making a statement - but in many hospital nurseries across the country , until very recently anyway , according to a book by jessica benjamin , the signs over the little boys cribs read , " i 'm a boy , " and the signs over the little girls cribs read , " it 's a girl . " yeah .
so the passivity was culturally projected onto the little girls .
and this still goes on as i think i told you last year .
there 's a poll that proves - there was a poll that was given by time magazine , in which only men were asked , " have you ever had sex with a woman you actively disliked ? "
and well , yeah .
well , 58 percent said yes , which i think is overinflated though because so many men if you just say , " have you ever had sex ... " " yes ! "
they do n't even wait for the rest of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course two percent did not know whether they 'd had - -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the first callback , of my attempted quadruple .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this subject-object thing , is part of something i 'm very interested in because this is why , frankly , i believe in political correctness .
i do . i think it can go too far .
i think ringling brothers may have gone too far with an ad they took out in the new york times magazine .
" we have a lifelong emotional and financial commitment to our asian elephant partners . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- maybe too far . but you know - i do n't think that a person of color making fun of white people is the same thing as a white person making fun of people of color .
or women making fun of men is the same as men making fun of women .
or poor people making fun of rich people , the same as rich people .
i think you can make fun of the have but not the have-nots , which is why you do n't see me making fun of kenneth lay and his charming wife .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what 's funny about being down to four houses ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i really learned this lesson during the sex scandals of the clinton administration or , or as i call them , the good ol ' days .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when people i knew , you know , people who considered themselves liberal , and everything else , were making fun of jennifer flowers and paula jones .
basically , they were making fun of them for being trailer trash or white trash .
it seems , i suppose , a harmless prejudice and that you 're not really hurting anybody .
until you read , as i did , an ad in the los angeles times .
" for sale : white trash compactor . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this whole subject-object thing has relevance to humor in this way .
i read a book by a woman named amy richlin , who is the chair of the classics department at usc .
and the book is called " the garden of priapus . "
and she says that roman humor mirrors the construction of roman society .
so that roman society was very top / bottom , as ours is to some degree .
and so was humor .
there always had to be the butt of a joke .
so it was always the satirist , like juvenal or martial , represented the audience , and he was going to make fun of the outsider , the person who did n't share that subject status .
and in stand-up of course , the stand-up comedian is supposed to dominate the audience .
a lot of heckling is the tension of trying to make sure that the comedian is going to be able to dominate , and overcome the heckler .
and i got good at that when i was in stand up .
but i always hated it because they were dictating the terms of the interaction , in the same way that engaging in a serious argument determines the content , to some degree , of what you 're talking about .
and i was looking for a form that did n't have that .
and so i wanted something that was more interactive .
i know that word is so debased now by the use of it by internet marketers .
i really miss the old telemarketers now , i 'll tell you that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do , because at least there you stood a chance . you know ?
i used to actually hang up on them .
but then i read in " dear abby " that that was rude .
so the next time that one called i let him get halfway through his spiel and then i said , " you sound sexy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he hung up on me !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the interactivity allows the audience to shape what you 're going to do as much as you shape their experience of the world .
and that 's really what i 'm looking for .
and i was sort of , as i was starting to analyze what exactly it is that i do , i read a book called " trickster makes this world , " by lewis hyde .
and it was like being psychoanalyzed .
i mean he had laid it all out .
and then coming to this conference , i realized that most everybody here shared those same qualities because really what trickster is is an agent of change .
trickster is a change agent .
and the qualities that i 'm about to describe are the qualities that make it possible to make change happen .
and one of these is boundary crossing .
i think this is what so , in fact , infuriated the scientists .
but i like to cross boundaries .
i like to , as i said , talk about things i know nothing about .
-lrb- phone ringing -rrb- i hope that 's my agent , because you are n't paying me anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think it 's good to talk about things i know nothing about because i bring a fresh viewpoint to it , you know ?
i 'm able to see the contradiction that you may not be able to see .
like for instance a mime once - or a meme as he called himself .
he was a very selfish meme .
and he said that i had to show more respect because it took up to 18 years to learn how to do mime properly .
and i said , " well , that 's how you know only stupid people go into it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it only takes two years to learn how to talk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and you know people , this is the problem with quote , objectivity , unquote .
when you 're only surrounded by people who speak the same vocabulary as you , or share the same set of assumptions as you , you start to think that that 's reality .
like economists , you know , their definition of rational , that we all act out of our own economic self-interest .
well , look at michael hawley , or look at dean kamen , or look at my grandmother .
my grandmother always acted in other people 's interests , whether they wanted her to or not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if they had had an olympics in martyrdom , my grandmother would have lost on purpose .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " no , you take the prize .
you 're young . i 'm old . who 's going to see it ?
where am i going ? i 'm going to die soon . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's one - this boundary crossing , this go-between which - fritz lanting , is that his name , actually said that he was a go-between .
that 's an actual quality of the trickster .
and another is , non-oppositional strategies .
and this is instead of contradiction .
where you deny the other person 's reality , you have paradox where you allow more than one reality to coexist , i think there 's another philosophical construction .
i 'm not sure what it 's called .
but my example of it is a sign that i saw in a jewelry store .
it said , " ears pierced while you wait . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there the alternative just boggles the imagination .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " oh no . thanks though , i 'll leave them here . thanks very much .
i have some errands to run . so i 'll be back to pick them up around five , if that 's ok with you .
huh ? huh ? what ? ca n't hear you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and another attribute of the trickster is smart luck .
that accidents , that louis kahn , who talked about accidents , this is another quality of the trickster .
the trickster has a mind that is prepared for the unprepared .
that , and i will say this to the scientists , that the trickster has the ability to hold his ideas lightly so that he can let room in for new ideas or to see the contradictions or the hidden problems with his ideas .
i had no joke for that .
i just wanted to put the scientists in their place .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but here 's how i think i like to make change , and that is in making connections .
this is what i tend to see almost more than contradictions .
like the , what do you call those toes of the gecko ?
you know , the toes of the gecko , curling and uncurling like the fingers of michael moschen .
i love connections .
like i 'll read that one of the two attributes of matter in the newtonian universe - there are two attributes of matter in the newtonian universe - one is space occupancy . matter takes up space .
i guess the more you matter the more space you take up , which explains the whole suv phenomenon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the other one though is impenetrability .
well , in ancient rome , impenetrability was the criterion of masculinity .
masculinity depended on you being the active penetrator .
and then , in economics , there 's an active producer and a passive consumer , which explains why business always has to penetrate new markets .
well yeah , i mean why we forced china to open her markets .
and did n't that feel good ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now we 're being penetrated .
you know the biotech companies are actually going inside us and planting their little flags on our genes .
you know we 're being penetrated .
and i suspect , by someone who actively dislikes us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the second of the quadruple .
yes of course you got that . thank you very much .
i still have a way to go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what i hope to do , when i make these connections , is short circuit people 's thinking .
you know , make you not follow your usual train of association , but make you rewire .
it literally - when people say about the shock of recognition , it 's literally re-cognition , rewiring how you think - i had a joke to go with this and i forgot it .
i 'm so sorry . i 'm getting like the woman in that joke about - have you heard this joke about the woman driving with her mother ?
and the mother is elderly .
and the mother goes right through a red light .
and the daughter does n't want to say anything .
she does n't want to be like , " you 're too old to drive . "
and the mother goes through a second red light .
and the daughter says , as tactfully as possible , " mom , are you aware that you just went through two red lights ? "
and the mother says , " oh ! am i driving ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's the shock of recognition at the shock of recognition .
that completes the quadruple .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just want to say two more things .
one is , another characteristic of trickster is that the trickster has to walk this fine line .
he has to have poise .
and you know the biggest hurdle for me , in doing what i do , is constructing my performance so that it 's prepared and unprepared .
finding the balance between those things is always dangerous because you might tip off too much in the direction of unprepared .
but being too prepared does n't leave room for the accidents to happen .
i was thinking about what moshe safdie said yesterday about beauty because in his book , hyde says that sometimes trickster can tip over into beauty .
but to do that you have to lose all the other qualities because once you 're into beauty you 're into a finished thing .
you 're into something that occupies space and inhabits time .
it 's an actual thing .
and it is always extraordinary to see a thing of beauty .
but if you do n't do that , if you allow for the accident to keep on happening , you have the possibility of getting on a wavelength .
i like to think of what i do as a probability wave .
when you go into beauty the probability wave collapses into one possibility .
and i like to explore all the possibilities in the hope that you 'll be on the wavelength of your audience .
and the one final quality i want to say about trickster is that he does n't have a home .
he 's always on the road .
i want to say to you richard , in closing , that in ted you 've created a home .
and thank you for inviting me into it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle , that you can carry with you anywhere , that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes , and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity .
but when i say the word electric vehicle , people think about vehicles . they think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles , and the vehicles that you use every day .
but if you come about it from a different perspective , you can create some more interesting , more novel concepts .
so we built something .
i 've got some of the pieces in my pocket here .
so this is the motor .
this motor has enough power to take you up the hills of san francisco at about 20 miles per hour , about 30 kilometers an hour , and this battery , this battery right here has about six miles of range , or 10 kilometers , which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the u.s. alone .
but the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store .
these are from remote control airplanes .
and the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently , you can really change things .
so today we 're going to show you one example of how you can use this .
pay attention to not only how fun this thing is , but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like san francisco .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- 6 mile range -rsb- -lsb- top speed near 20mph -rsb- -lsb- uphill climbing -rsb- -lsb- regenerative braking -rsb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- cheers -rrb- so we 're going to show you what this thing can do .
it 's really maneuverable . you have a hand-held remote , so you can pretty easily control acceleration , braking , go in reverse if you like , also have braking .
it 's incredible just how light this thing is .
i mean , this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go .
so i 'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles .
this uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car , which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build , but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation .
so instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city , now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation .
so next time you think about a vehicle , i hope , like us , you 're thinking about something new .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ah yes , those university days , a heady mix of ph.d-level pure mathematics and world debating championships , or , as i like to say , " hello , ladies . oh yeah . "
did n't get much sexier than the spence at university , let me tell you .
it is such a thrill for a humble breakfast radio announcer from sydney , australia , to be here on the ted stage literally on the other side of the world .
and i wanted to let you know , a lot of the things you 've heard about australians are true .
from the youngest of ages , we display a prodigious sporting talent .
on the field of battle , we are brave and noble warriors .
what you 've heard is true .
australians , we do n't mind a bit of a drink , sometimes to excess , leading to embarrassing social situations . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is my father 's work christmas party , december 1973 .
i 'm almost five years old . fair to say , i 'm enjoying the day a lot more than santa was .
but i stand before you today not as a breakfast radio host , not as a comedian , but as someone who was , is , and always will be a mathematician .
and anyone who 's been bitten by the numbers bug knows that it bites early and it bites deep .
i cast my mind back when i was in second grade at a beautiful little government-run school called boronia park in the suburbs of sydney , and as we came up towards lunchtime , our teacher , ms. russell , said to the class , " hey , year two . what do you want to do after lunch ?
i 've got no plans . "
it was an exercise in democratic schooling , and i am all for democratic schooling , but we were only seven .
so some of the suggestions we made as to what we might want to do after lunch were a little bit impractical , and after a while , someone made a particularly silly suggestion and ms. russell patted them down with that gentle aphorism , " that would n't work .
that 'd be like trying to put a square peg through a round hole . "
now i was n't trying to be smart .
i was n't trying to be funny .
i just politely raised my hand , and when ms. russell acknowledged me , i said , in front of my year two classmates , and i quote , " but miss , surely if the diagonal of the square is less than the diameter of the circle , well , the square peg will pass quite easily through the round hole . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it 'd be like putting a piece of toast through a basketball hoop , would n't it ? "
and there was that same awkward silence from most of my classmates , until sitting next to me , one of my friends , one of the cool kids in class , steven , leaned across and punched me really hard in the head .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now what steven was saying was , " look , adam , you are at a critical juncture in your life here , my friend .
you can keep sitting here with us .
any more of that sort of talk , you 've got to go and sit over there with them . "
i thought about it for a nanosecond .
i took one look at the road map of life , and i ran off down the street marked " geek " as fast as my chubby , asthmatic little legs would carry me .
i fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of ages .
i explained it to all my friends . maths is beautiful .
it 's natural . it 's everywhere .
numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written .
the great descartes said something quite similar .
the universe " is written in the mathematical language . "
and today , i want to show you one of those musical notes , a number so beautiful , so massive , i think it will blow your mind .
today we 're going to talk about prime numbers .
most of you i 'm sure remember that six is not prime because it 's 2 x 3 .
seven is prime because it 's 1 x 7 , but we ca n't break it down into any smaller chunks , or as we call them , factors .
now a few things you might like to know about prime numbers .
one is not prime .
the proof of that is a great party trick that admittedly only works at certain parties .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another thing about primes , there is no final biggest prime number .
they keep going on forever .
we know there are an infinite number of primes due to the brilliant mathematician euclid .
over thousands of years ago , he proved that for us .
but the third thing about prime numbers , mathematicians have always wondered , well at any given moment in time , what is the biggest prime that we know about ?
today we 're going to hunt for that massive prime .
do n't freak out .
all you need to know , of all the mathematics you 've ever learned , unlearned , crammed , forgotten , never understood in the first place , when i say 2 ^ 5 , i 'm talking about five little number twos next to each other all multiplied together , 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 .
so 2 ^ 5 is 2 x 2 = 4 , 8 , 16 , 32 .
if you 've got that , you 're with me for the entire journey . okay ?
so 2 ^ 5 , those five little twos multiplied together .
-lrb- 2 ^ 5 -rrb- - 1 = 31 .
31 is a prime number , and that five in the power is also a prime number .
and the vast bulk of massive primes we 've ever found are of that form : two to a prime number , take away one .
i wo n't go into great detail as to why , because most of your eyes will bleed out of your head if i do , but suffice to say , a number of that form is fairly easy to test for primacy .
a random odd number is a lot harder to test .
but as soon as we go hunting for massive primes , we realize it 's not enough just to put in any prime number in the power .
-lrb- 2 ^ 11 -rrb- - 1 = 2,047 , and you do n't need me to tell you that 's 23 x 89 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but -lrb- 2 ^ 13 -rrb- - 1 , -lrb- 2 ^ 17 -rrb- - 1 -lrb- 2 ^ 19 -rrb- - 1 , are all prime numbers .
after that point , they thin out a lot .
and one of the things about the search for massive primes that i love so much is some of the great mathematical minds of all time have gone on this search .
this is the great swiss mathematician leonhard euler .
in the 1700s , other mathematicians said he is simply the master of us all .
he was so respected , they put him on european currency back when that was a compliment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- euler discovered at the time the world 's biggest prime : -lrb- 2 ^ 31 -rrb- - 1 .
it 's over two billion .
he proved it was prime with nothing more than a quill , ink , paper and his mind .
you think that 's big .
we know that -lrb- 2 ^ 127 -rrb- - 1 is a prime number .
it 's an absolute brute .
look at it here : 39 digits long , proven to be prime in 1876 by a mathematician called lucas .
word up , l-dog .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but one of the great things about the search for massive primes , it 's not just finding the primes .
sometimes proving another number not to be prime is just as exciting .
lucas again , in 1876 , showed us -lrb- 2 ^ 67 -rrb- - 1 , 21 digits long , was not prime .
but he did n't know what the factors were .
we knew it was like six , but we did n't know what are the 2 x 3 that multiply together to give us that massive number .
we did n't know for almost 40 years until frank nelson cole came along .
and at a gathering of prestigious american mathematicians , he walked to the board , took up a piece of chalk , and started writing out the powers of two : two , four , eight , 16 - come on , join in with me , you know how it goes - 32 , 64 , 128 , 256 , 512 , 1,024 , 2,048 .
i 'm in geek heaven . we 'll stop it there for a second .
frank nelson cole did not stop there .
he went on and on and calculated 67 powers of two .
he took away one and wrote that number on the board .
a frisson of excitement went around the room .
it got even more exciting when he then wrote down these two large prime numbers in your standard multiplication format - and for the rest of the hour of his talk frank nelson cole busted that out .
he had found the prime factors of -lrb- 2 ^ 67 -rrb- - 1 .
the room went berserk - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - as frank nelson cole sat down , having delivered the only talk in the history of mathematics with no words .
he admitted afterwards it was n't that hard to do .
it took focus . it took dedication .
it took him , by his estimate , " three years of sundays . "
but then in the field of mathematics , as in so many of the fields that we 've heard from in this ted , the age of the computer goes along and things explode .
these are the largest prime numbers we knew decade by decade , each one dwarfing the one before as computers took over and our power to calculate just grew and grew .
this is the largest prime number we knew in 1996 , a very emotional year for me .
it was the year i left university .
i was torn between mathematics and media .
it was a tough decision . i loved university .
my arts degree was the best nine and a half years of my life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i came to a realization about my own ability .
put simply , in a room full of randomly selected people , i 'm a maths genius .
in a roomful of maths ph.ds , i 'm as dumb as a box of hammers .
my skill is not in the mathematics .
it is in telling the story of the mathematics .
and during that time , since i 've left university , these numbers have got bigger and bigger , each one dwarfing the last , until along came this man , dr. curtis cooper , who a few years ago held the record for the largest ever prime , only to see it snatched away by a rival university .
and then curtis cooper got it back .
not years ago , not months ago , days ago .
in an amazing moment of serendipity , i had to send ted a new slide to show you what this guy had done .
i still remember - -lrb- applause -rrb- - i still remember when it happened .
i was doing my breakfast radio show .
i looked down on twitter . there was a tweet : " adam , have you seen the new largest prime number ? "
i shivered - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - contacted the women who produced my radio show out in the other room , and said " girls , hold the front page .
we 're not talking politics today .
we 're not talking sport today .
they found another megaprime . "
the girls just shook their heads , put them in their hands , and let me go my own way .
it 's because of curtis cooper that we know , currently the largest prime number we know , is 2 ^ 57,885,161 .
do n't forget to subtract the one .
this number is almost 17 and a half million digits long .
if you typed it out on a computer and saved it as a text file , that 's 22 meg .
for the slightly less geeky of you , think about the harry potter novels , okay ?
this is the first harry potter novel .
this is all seven harry potter novels , because she did tend to faff on a bit near the end .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- written out as a book , this number would run the length of the harry potter novels and half again .
here 's a slide of the first 1,000 digits of this prime .
if , when ted had begun , at 11 o 'clock on tuesday , we 'd walked out and simply hit one slide every second , it would have taken five hours to show you that number .
i was keen to do it , could not convince bono .
that 's the way it goes .
this number is 17 and a half thousand slides long , and we know it is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime .
that fills me with almost sexual excitement .
and who am i kidding when i say almost ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i know what you 're thinking : adam , we 're happy that you 're happy , but why should we care ?
let me give you just three reasons why this is so beautiful .
first of all , as i explained , to ask a computer " is that number prime ? " to type it in its abbreviated form , and then only about six lines of code is the test for primacy , is a remarkably simple question to ask .
it 's got a remarkably clear yes / no answer , and just requires phenomenal grunt .
large prime numbers are a great way of testing the speed and accuracy of computer chips .
but secondly , as curtis cooper was looking for that monster prime , he was n't the only guy searching .
my laptop at home was looking through four potential candidate primes myself as part of a networked computer hunt around the world for these large numbers .
the discovery of that prime is similar to the work people are doing in unraveling rna sequences , in searching through data from seti and other astronomical projects .
we live in an age where some of the great breakthroughs are not going to happen in the labs or the halls of academia but on laptops , desktops , in the palms of people 's hands who are simply helping out for the search .
but for me it 's amazing because it 's a metaphor for the time in which we live , when human minds and machines can conquer together .
we 've heard a lot about robots in this ted .
we 've heard a lot about what they can and ca n't do .
it is true , you can now download onto your smartphone an app that would beat most grandmasters at chess .
you think that 's cool .
here 's a machine doing something cool .
this is the cubestormer ii .
it can take a randomly shuffled rubik 's cube .
using the power of the smartphone , it can examine the cube and solve the cube in five seconds .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that scares some people . that excites me .
how lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together ?
i was asked in an interview last year in my capacity as a lower-case " c " celebrity in australia , " what was your highlight of 2012 ? "
people were expecting me to talk about my beloved sydney swans football team .
in our beautiful , indigenous sport of australian football , they won the equivalent of the super bowl .
i was there . it was the most emotional , exciting day .
it was n't my highlight of 2012 .
people thought it might have been an interview i 'd done on my show .
it might have been a politician . it might have been a breakthrough .
it might have been a book i read , the arts . no , no , no .
it might have been something my two gorgeous daughters had done .
no , it was n't . the highlight of 2012 , so clearly , was the discovery of the higgs boson .
give it up for the fundamental particle that bequeaths all other fundamental particles their mass .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and what was so gorgeous about this discovery was 50 years ago peter higgs and his team considered one of the deepest of all questions : how is it that the things that make us up have no mass ?
i 've clearly got mass . where does it come from ?
and he postulated a suggestion that there 's this infinite , incredibly small field stretching throughout the universe , and as other particles go through those particles and interact , that 's where they get their mass .
the rest of the scientific community said , " great idea , higgsy .
we 've got no idea if we could ever prove it .
it 's beyond our reach . "
and within just 50 years , in his lifetime , with him sitting in the audience , we had designed the greatest machine ever to prove this incredible idea that originated just in a human mind .
that 's what is so exciting for me about this prime number .
we thought it might be there , and we went and found it .
that is the essence of being human .
that is what we are all about .
or as my friend descartes might put it , we think , therefore we are .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- america 's public energy conversation boils down to this question : would you rather die of a -rrb- oil wars , or b -rrb- climate change , or c -rrb- nuclear holocaust , or d -rrb- all of the above ?
oh , i missed one : or e -rrb- none of the above ?
that 's the one we 're not normally offered .
what if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing ?
could we have fuel without fear ?
could we reinvent fire ?
you see , fire made us human ; fossil fuels made us modern .
but now we need a new fire that makes us safe , secure , healthy and durable .
let 's see how .
four-fifths of the world 's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo .
those fossil fuels have built our civilization .
they 've created our wealth .
they 've enriched the lives of billions .
but they also have rising costs to our security , economy , health and environment that are starting to erode , if not outweigh their benefits .
so we need a new fire .
and switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity , each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air .
but they 're really quite distinct .
less than one percent of our electricity is made from oil - although almost half is made from coal .
their uses are quite concentrated .
three-fourths of our oil fuel is transportation .
three-fourths of our electricity powers buildings .
and the rest of both runs factories .
so very efficient vehicles , buildings and factories save oil and coal , and also natural gas that can displace both of them .
but today 's energy system is not just inefficient , it is also disconnected , aging , dirty and insecure .
so it needs refurbishment .
by 2050 though , it could become efficient , connected and distributed with elegantly frugal autos , factories and buildings all relying on a modern , secure and resilient electricity system .
we can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal by 2050 and use one-third less natural gas while switching to efficient use and renewable supply .
this could cost , by 2050 , five trillion dollars less in net present value , that is expressed as a lump sum today , than business as usual - assuming that carbon emissions and all other hidden or external costs are worth zero - a conservatively low estimate .
yet this cheaper energy system could support 158 percent bigger u.s. economy all without needing oil or coal , or for that matter nuclear energy .
moreover , this transition needs no new inventions and no acts of congress and no new federal taxes , mandate subsidies or laws and running washington gridlock .
let me say that again .
i 'm going to tell you how to get the united states completely off oil and coal , five trillion dollars cheaper with no act of congress led by business for profit .
in other words , we 're going to use our most effective institutions - private enterprise co-evolving with civil society and sped by military innovation to go around our least effective institutions .
and whether you care most about profits and jobs and competitive advantage or national security , or environmental stewardship and climate protection and public health , reinventing fire makes sense and makes money .
general eisenhower reputedly said that enlarging the boundaries of a tough problem makes it soluble by encompassing more options and more synergies .
so in reinventing fire , we integrated all four sectors that use energy - transportation , buildings , industry and electricity - and we integrated four kinds of innovation , not just technology and policy , but also design and business strategy .
those combinations yield very much more than the sum of the parts , especially in creating deeply disruptive business opportunities .
oil costs our economy two billion dollars a day , plus another four billion dollars a day in hidden economic and military costs , raising its total cost to over a sixth of gdp .
our mobility fuel goes three-fifths to automobiles .
so let 's start by making autos oil free .
two-thirds of the energy it takes to move a typical car is caused by its weight .
and every unit of energy you save at the wheels , by taking out weight or drag , saves seven units in the tank , because you do n't have to waste six units getting the energy to the wheels .
unfortunately , over the past quarter century , epidemic obesity has made our two-ton steel cars gain weight twice as fast as we have .
but today , ultralight , ultrastrong materials , like carbon fiber composites , can make dramatic weight savings snowball and can make cars simpler and cheaper to build .
lighter and more slippery autos need less force to move them , so their engines get smaller .
indeed , that sort of vehicle fitness then makes electric propulsion affordable because the batteries or fuel cells also get smaller and lighter and cheaper .
so sticker prices will ultimately fall to about the same as today , while the driving cost , even from the start , is very much lower .
so these innovations together can transform automakers from wringing tiny savings out of victorian engine and seal-stamping technologies to the steeply falling costs of three linked innovations that strongly reenforce each other - namely ultralight materials , making them into structures and electric propulsion .
the sales can grow and the prices fall even faster with temporary feebates , that is rebates for efficient new autos paid for by fees on inefficient ones .
and just in the first two years the biggest of europe 's five feebate programs has tripled the speed of improving automotive efficiency .
the resulting shift to electric autos is going to be as game-changing as shifting from typewriters to the gains in computers .
of course , computers and electronics are now america 's biggest industry , while typewriter makers have vanished .
so vehicle fitness opens a new automotive competitive strategy that can double the oil savings over the next 40 years , but then also make electrification affordable , and that displaces the rest of the oil .
america could lead this next automotive revolution .
currently the leader is germany .
last year , volkswagen announced that by next year they 'll be producing this carbon fiber plugin hybrid getting 230 miles a gallon .
also last year , bmw announced this carbon fiber electric car , they said that its carbon fiber is paid for by needing fewer batteries .
and they said , " we do not intend to be a typewriter maker . "
audi claimed it 's going to beat them both by a year .
seven years ago , an even faster and cheaper american manufacturing technology was used to make this little carbon fiber test part , which doubles as a carbon cap .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in one minute - and you can tell from the sound how immensely stiff and strong it is .
do n't worry about dropping it , it 's tougher than titanium .
tom friedman actually whacked it as hard as he could with a sledgehammer without even scuffing it .
but such manufacturing techniques can scale to automotive speed and cost with aerospace performance .
they can save four-fifths of the capital needed to make autos .
they can save lives because this stuff can absorb up to 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel .
if we made all of our autos this way , it would save oil equivalent to finding one and a half saudi arabias , or half an opec , by drilling in the detroit formation , a very prospective play .
and all those mega-barrels under detroit cost an average of 18 bucks a barrel .
they are all-american , carbon-free and inexhaustible .
the same physics and the same business logic also apply to big vehicles .
in the five years ending with 2010 , walmart saved 60 percent of the fuel per ton-mile in its giant fleet of heavy trucks through better logistics and design .
but just the technological savings in heavy trucks can get to two-thirds .
and combined with triple to quintuple efficiency airplanes , now on the drawing board , can save close to a trillion dollars .
also today 's military revolution in energy efficiency is going to speed up all of these civilian advances in much the same way that military r & d has given us the internet , the global positioning system and the jet engine and microchip industries .
as we design and build vehicles better , we can also use them smarter by harnessing four powerful techniques for eliminating needless driving .
instead of just seeing the travel grow , we can use innovative pricing , charging for road infrastructure by the mile , not by the gallon .
we can use some smart it to enhance transit and enable car sharing and ride sharing .
we can allow smart and lucrative growth models that help people already be near where they want to be , so they do n't need to go somewhere else .
and we can use smart it to make traffic free-flowing .
together , those things can give us the same or better access with 46 to 84 percent less driving , saving another 0.4 trillion dollars , plus 0.3 trillion dollars from using trucks more productively .
so 40 years hence , when you add it all up , a far more mobile u.s. economy can use no oil .
saving or displacing barrels for 25 bucks rather than buying them for over a hundred , adds up to a $ 4 trillion net saving counting all the hidden costs at zero .
so to get mobility without oil , to phase out the oil , we can get efficient and then switch fuels .
those 125 to 240 mile-per-gallon-equivalent autos can use any mixture of hydrogen fuel cells , electricity and advanced biofuels .
the trucks and planes can realistically use hydrogen or advanced biofuels .
the trucks could even use natural gas .
but no vehicles will need oil .
and the most biofuel we might need , just three million barrels a day , can be made two-thirds from waste without displacing any cropland and without harming soil or climate .
our team speeds up these kinds of oil savings by what we call " institutional acupuncture . "
we figure out where the business logic is congested and not flowing properly , we stick little needles in it to get it flowing , working with partners like ford and walmart and the pentagon .
and the long transition is already well under way .
in fact , three years ago mainstream analysts were starting to see peak oil , not in supply , but in demand .
and deutsche bank even said world oil use could peak around 2016 .
in other words , oil is getting uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices .
but the electrified vehicles do n't need to burden the electricity grid .
rather , when smart autos exchange electricity and information through smart buildings with smart grids , they 're adding to the grid valuable flexibility and storage that help the grid integrate varying solar and wind power .
so the electrified autos make the auto and electricity problems easier to solve together than separately .
and they also converge the oil story with our second big story , saving electricity and then making it differently .
and those twin revolutions in electricity will bring to that sector more numerous and profound and diverse disruptions than any other sector , because we 've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions , rules and cultures .
changing how we make electricity gets easier if we need less of it .
most of it now is wasted and the technologies for saving it keep improving faster than we 're installing them .
so the unbought efficiency resource keeps getting ever bigger and cheaper .
but as efficiency in buildings and industry starts to grow faster than the economy , america 's electricity use could actually shrink , even with the little extra use required for those efficient electrified autos .
and we can do this just by reasonably accelerating existing trends .
over the next 40 years , buildings , which use three-quarters of the electricity , can triple or quadruple their energy productivity , saving 1.4 trillion dollars , net present value , with a 33 percent internal rate of return or in english , the savings are worth four times what they cost .
and industry can accelerate too , doubling its energy productivity with a 21 percent internal rate of return .
the key is a disruptive innovation that we call integrative design that often makes very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings .
that is , it can give you expanding returns , not diminishing returns .
that is how our 2010 retrofit is saving over two-fifths of the energy in the empire state building - remanufacturing those six and a half thousand windows on site into super windows that pass light , but reflect heat .
plus better lights and office equipment and such cut the maximum cooling load by a third .
and then renovating smaller chillers instead of adding bigger ones saved 17 million dollars of capital cost , which helped pay for the other improvements and reduce the payback to just three years .
integrative design can also increase energy savings in industry .
dow 's billion-dollar efficiency investment has already returned nine billion dollars .
but industry as a whole has another half-trillion dollars of energy still to save .
for example , three-fifths of the world 's electricity runs motors .
half of that runs pumps and fans .
and those can all be made more efficient , and the motors that turn them can have their system efficiency roughly doubled by integrating 35 improvements , paying back in about a year .
but first we ought to be capturing bigger , cheaper savings that are normally ignored and are not in the textbooks .
for example , pumps , the biggest use of motors , move liquid through pipes .
but a standard industrial pumping loop was redesigned to use at least 86 percent less energy , not by getting better pumps , but just by replacing long , thin , crooked pipes with fat , short , straight pipes .
this is not about new technology , it 's just rearranging our metal furniture .
of course , it also shrinks the pumping equipment and its capital costs .
so what do such savings mean for the electricity that is three-fifths used in motors ?
well , from the coal burned at the power plant through all these compounding losses , only a tenth of the fuel energy actually ends up coming out the pipe as flow .
but now let 's turn those compounding losses around backwards , and every unit of flow or friction that we save in the pipe saves 10 units of fuel cost , pollution and what hunter lovins calls " global weirding " back at the power plant .
and of course , as you go back upstream , the components get smaller and therefore cheaper .
our team has lately found such snowballing energy savings in more than 30 billion dollars worth of industrial redesigns - everything from data centers and chip fabs to mines and refineries .
typically our retrofit designs save about 30 to 60 percent of the energy and pay back in a few years , while the new facility designs save 40 to 90-odd percent with generally lower capital cost .
now needing less electricity would ease and speed the shift to new sources of electricity , chiefly renewables .
china leads their explosive growth and their plummeting cost .
in fact , these solar power module costs have just fallen off the bottom of the chart .
and germany now has more solar workers than america has steel workers .
already in about 20 states private installers will come put those cheap solar cells on your roof with no money down and beat your utility bill .
such unregulated products could ultimately add up to a virtual utility that bypasses your electric company just as your cellphone bypassed your wireline phone company .
and this sort of thing gives utility executives the heebee-jeebees and it gives venture capitalists sweet dreams .
renewables are no longer a fringe activity .
for each of the past four years half of the world 's new generating capacity has been renewable , mainly lately in developing countries .
in 2010 , renewables other than big hydro , particularly wind and solar cells , got 151 billion dollars of private investment , and they actually surpassed the total installed capacity of nuclear power in the world by adding 60 billion watts in that one year .
that happens to be the same amount of solar cell capacity that the world can now make every year - a number that goes up 60 or 70 percent a year .
in contrast , the net additions of nuclear capacity and coal capacity and the orders behind those keep fading because they cost too much and they have too much financial risk .
in fact in this country , no new nuclear power plant has been able to raise any private construction capital , despite seven years of 100-plus percent subsidies .
so how else could we replace the coal-fired power plants ?
well efficiency and gas can displace them all at just below their operating cost and , combined with renewables , can displace them more than 23 times at less than their replacement cost .
but we only need to replace them once .
we 're often told though that only coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on , because they 're 24/7 , whereas wind and solar power are variable , and hence supposedly unreliable .
actually no generator is 24/7 . they all break .
and when a big plant goes down , you lose a thousand megawatts in milliseconds , often for weeks or months , often without warning .
that is exactly why we 've designed the grid to back up failed plants with working plants .
and in exactly the same way , the grid can handle wind and solar power 's forecastable variations .
hourly simulations show that largely or wholly renewable grids can deliver highly reliable power when they 're forecasted , integrated and diversified by both type and location .
and that 's true both for continental areas like the u.s. or europe and for smaller areas embedded within a larger grid .
that is how , for example , four german states in 2010 were 43 to 52 percent wind powered .
portugal was 45 percent renewable powered , denmark 36 .
and it 's how all of europe can shift to renewable electricity .
in america , our aging , dirty and insecure power system has to be replaced anyway by 2050 .
and whatever we replace it with is going to cost about the same , about six trillion dollars at present value - whether we buy more of what we 've got or new nuclear and so-called clean coal , or renewables that are more or less centralized .
but those four futures at the same cost differ profoundly in their risks , around national security , fuel , water , finance , technology , climate and health .
for example , our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack .
but that blackout risk disappears , and all of the other risks are best managed , with distributed renewables organized into local micro-grids that normally interconnect , but can stand alone at need .
that is , they can disconnect fractally and then reconnect seamlessly .
that approach is exactly what the pentagon is adopting for its own power supply .
they think they need that ; how about the rest of us that they 're defending ?
we want our stuff to work too .
at about the same cost as business as usual , this would maximize national security , customer choice , entrepreneurial opportunity and innovation .
together , efficient use and diverse dispersed renewable supply are starting to transform the whole electricity sector .
traditionally utilities build a lot of giant coal and nuclear plants and a bunch of big gas plants and maybe a little bit of efficiency renewables .
and those utilities were rewarded , as they still are in 34 states , for selling you more electricity .
however , especially where regulators are now instead rewarding cutting your bills , the investments are shifting radically toward efficiency , demand response , cogeneration , renewables and ways to knit them all together reliably with less transmission and little or no bulk electricity storage .
so our energy future is not fate , but choice , and that choice is very flexible .
in 1976 , for example , government and industry insisted that the amount of energy needed to make a dollar of gdp could never go down .
and i heretically suggested it could go down several-fold .
well that 's what 's actually happened so far .
it 's fallen by half .
but with today 's much better technologies , more mature delivery channels and integrative design , we can do far more and even cheaper .
so to solve the energy problem , we just needed to enlarge it .
and the results may at first seem incredible , but as marshall mcluhan said , " only puny secrets need protection .
big discoveries are protected by public incredulity . "
now combine the electricity and oil revolutions , both driven by modern efficiency , and you get the really big story : reinventing fire , where business enabled and sped by smart policies in mindful markets can lead the united states completely off oil and coal by 2050 , saving 5 trillion dollars , growing the economy 2.6-fold , strengthening out national security , oh , and by the way , by getting rid of the oil and coal , reducing the fossil carbon emissions by 82 to 86 percent .
now if you like any of those outcomes , you can support reinventing fire without needing to like all of them and without needing to agree about which of them is most important .
so focusing on outcomes , not motives , can turn gridlock and conflict into a unifying solution to america 's energy challenge .
this also turns out to be the best way to cope with global challenges - climate change , nuclear proliferation , energy insecurity , energy poverty - all of which make us less safe .
now our team at rmi helps smart companies to get unstuck and speed this journey via six sectoral initiatives , with some more hatching .
of course there 's still a lot of old thinking out there too .
former oil man maurice strong said , " not all the fossils are in the fuel . "
but as edgar woolard , who used to chair dupont , reminds us , " companies hampered by old thinking wo n't be a problem because , " he said , " they simply wo n't be around long-term . "
i 've described not just a once-in-a-civilization business opportunity , but one of the most profound transitions in the history of our species .
we humans are inventing a new fire , not dug from below , but flowing from above ; not scarce , but bountiful ; not local , but everywhere ; not transient , but permanent ; not costly , but free .
and but for a little transitional tail of natural gas and a bit of biofuel grown in ways that sustain and endure , this new fire is flameless .
efficiently used , it really can do our work without working our undoing .
each of you owns a piece of that $ 5 trillion prize .
and our new book " reinventing fire " describes how you can capture it .
so with the conversation just begun at reinventingfire.com , let me invite you each to engage with us and with each other , with everyone around you , to help make the world richer , fairer , cooler and safer by together reinventing fire .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you have n't ordered yet , i generally find the rigatoni with the spicy tomato sauce goes best with diseases of the small intestine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , sorry - it just feels like i should be doing stand-up up here because of the setting .
no , what i want to do is take you back to 1854 in london for the next few minutes , and tell the story - in brief - of this outbreak , which in many ways , i think , helped create the world that we live in today , and particularly the kind of city that we live in today .
this period in 1854 , in the middle part of the 19th century , in london 's history , is incredibly interesting for a number of reasons .
but i think the most important one is that london was this city of 2.5 million people , and it was the largest city on the face of the planet at that point .
but it was also the largest city that had ever been built .
and so the victorians were trying to live through and simultaneously invent a whole new scale of living : this scale of living that we , you know , now call " metropolitan living . "
and it was in many ways , at this point in the mid-1850s , a complete disaster .
they were basically a city living with a modern kind of industrial metropolis with an elizabethan public infrastructure .
so people , for instance , just to gross you out for a second , had cesspools of human waste in their basement . like , a foot to two feet deep .
and they would just kind of throw the buckets down there and hope that it would somehow go away , and of course it never really would go away .
and all of this stuff , basically , had accumulated to the point where the city was incredibly offensive to just walk around in .
it was an amazingly smelly city . not just because of the cesspools , but also the sheer number of livestock in the city would shock people .
not just the horses , but people had cows in their attics that they would use for milk , that they would hoist up there and keep them in the attic until literally their milk ran out and they died , and then they would drag them off to the bone boilers down the street .
so , you would just walk around london at this point and just be overwhelmed with this stench .
and what ended up happening is that an entire emerging public health system became convinced that it was the smell that was killing everybody , that was creating these diseases that would wipe through the city every three or four years .
and cholera was really the great killer of this period .
it arrived in london in 1832 , and every four or five years another epidemic would take 10,000 , 20,000 people in london and throughout the u.k.
and so the authorities became convinced that this smell was this problem .
we had to get rid of the smell .
and so , in fact , they concocted a couple of early , you know , founding public-health interventions in the system of the city , one of which was called the " nuisances act , " which they got everybody as far as they could to empty out their cesspools and just pour all that waste into the river .
because if we get it out of the streets , it 'll smell much better , and - oh right , we drink from the river .
so what ended up happening , actually , is they ended up increasing the outbreaks of cholera because , as we now know , cholera is actually in the water .
it 's a waterborne disease , not something that 's in the air .
it 's not something you smell or inhale ; it 's something you ingest .
and so one of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of london much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing .
so this was the state of london in 1854 , and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions , and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people , it was a very talented classic 19th century multi-disciplinarian named john snow , who was a local doctor in soho in london , who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was , in fact , a waterborne disease , and had basically convinced nobody of this .
the public health authorities had largely ignored what he had to say .
and he 'd made the case in a number of papers and done a number of studies , but nothing had really stuck .
and part of - what 's so interesting about this story to me is that in some ways , it 's a great case study in how cultural change happens , how a good idea eventually comes to win out over much worse ideas .
and snow labored for a long time with this great insight that everybody ignored .
and then on one day , august 28th of 1854 , a young child , a five-month-old girl whose first name we do n't know , we know her only as baby lewis , somehow contracted cholera , came down with cholera at 40 broad street .
you ca n't really see it in this map , but this is the map that becomes the central focus in the second half of my book .
it 's in the middle of soho , in this working class neighborhood , this little girl becomes sick and it turns out that the cesspool , that they still continue to have , despite the nuisances act , bordered on an extremely popular water pump , local watering hole that was well known for the best water in all of soho , that all the residents from soho and the surrounding neighborhoods would go to .
and so this little girl inadvertently ended up contaminating the water in this popular pump , and one of the most terrifying outbreaks in the history of england erupted about two or three days later .
literally , 10 percent of the neighborhood died in seven days , and much more would have died if people had n't fled after the initial outbreak kicked in .
so it was this incredibly terrifying event .
you had these scenes of entire families dying over the course of 48 hours of cholera , alone in their one-room apartments , in their little flats .
just an extraordinary , terrifying scene .
snow lived near there , heard about the outbreak , and in this amazing act of courage went directly into the belly of the beast because he thought an outbreak that concentrated could actually potentially end up convincing people that , in fact , the real menace of cholera was in the water supply and not in the air .
he suspected an outbreak that concentrated would probably involve a single point source .
one single thing that everybody was going to because it did n't have the traditional slower path of infections that you might expect .
and so he went right in there and started interviewing people .
he eventually enlisted the help of this amazing other figure , who 's kind of the other protagonist of the book - this guy , henry whitehead , who was a local minister , who was not at all a man of science , but was incredibly socially connected ; he knew everybody in the neighborhood .
and he managed to track down , whitehead did , many of the cases of people who had drunk water from the pump , or who had n't drunk water from the pump .
and eventually snow made a map of the outbreak .
he found increasingly that people who drank from the pump were getting sick .
people who had n't drunk from the pump were not getting sick .
and he thought about representing that as a kind of a table of statistics of people living in different neighborhoods , but eventually he hit upon the idea that what he needed was something that you could see .
something that would take in a sense a higher-level view of all this activity that had been happening in the neighborhood .
and so he created this map , which basically ended up representing all the deaths in the neighborhoods as black bars at each address .
and you can see in this map , the pump right at the center of it and you can see that one of the residences down the way had about 15 people dead .
and the map is actually a little bit bigger .
as you get further and further away from the pump , the deaths begin to grow less and less frequent .
and so you can see this something poisonous emanating out of this pump that you could see in a glance .
and so , with the help of this map , and with the help of more evangelizing that he did over the next few years and that whitehead did , eventually , actually , the authorities slowly started to come around .
it took much longer than sometimes we like to think in this story , but by 1866 , when the next big cholera outbreak came to london , the authorities had been convinced - in part because of this story , in part because of this map - that in fact the water was the problem .
and they had already started building the sewers in london , and they immediately went to this outbreak and they told everybody to start boiling their water .
and that was the last time that london has seen a cholera outbreak since .
so , part of this story , i think - well , it 's a terrifying story , that continues on in many of the developing cities of the world .
it 's also a story really that is fundamentally optimistic , which is to say that it 's possible to solve these problems if we listen to reason , if we listen to the kind of wisdom of these kinds of maps , if we listen to people like snow and whitehead , if we listen to the locals who understand what 's going on in these kinds of situations .
and what it ended up doing is making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one .
when people were looking at 10 percent of their neighborhoods dying in the space of seven days , there was a widespread consensus that this could n't go on , that people were n't meant to live in cities of 2.5 million people .
but because of what snow did , because of this map , because of the whole series of reforms we now take for granted that cities have 10 million people , cities like this one are in fact sustainable things .
we do n't worry that new york city is going to collapse in on itself quite the way that , you know , rome did , and be 10 percent of its size in 100 years or 200 years .
and so that in a way is the ultimate legacy of this map .
it 's a map of deaths that ended up creating a whole new way of life , the life that we 're enjoying here today . thank you very much .
i learned about the haiti earthquake by skype .
my wife sent me a message , " whoa , earthquake , " and then disappeared for 25 minutes .
it was 25 minutes of absolute terror that thousands of people across the u.s. felt .
i was afraid of a tsunami ; what i did n't realize was there was a greater terror in haiti , and that was building collapse .
we 've all seen the photos of the collapsed buildings in haiti .
these are shots my wife took a couple days after the quake , while i was making my way through the d.r. into the country .
this is the national palace - the equivalent of the white house .
this is the largest supermarket in the caribbean at peak shopping time .
this is a nurses ' college - there are 300 nurses studying .
the general hospital right next door emerged largely unscathed .
this is the ministry of economics and finance .
we have all heard about the tremendous human loss in the earthquake in haiti , but we have n't heard enough about why all those lives were lost .
we have n't heard about why the buildings failed .
after all , it was the buildings , not the earthquake , that killed 220,000 people , that injured 330,000 , that displaced 1.3 million people , that cut off food and water and supplies for an entire nation .
this is the largest metropolitan-area disaster in decades , and it was not a natural disaster - it was a disaster of engineering .
aidg has worked in haiti since 2007 , providing engineering and business support to small businesses .
and after the quake , we started bringing in earthquake engineers to figure out why the buildings collapsed , to examine what was safe and what was n't .
working with minustah , which is the u.n. mission in haiti , with the ministry of public works , with different ngos , we inspected over 1,500 buildings .
we inspected schools and private residencies .
we inspected medical centers and food warehouses .
we inspected government buildings .
this is the ministry of justice .
behind that door is the national judicial archives .
the fellow in the door , andre filitrault - who 's the director of the center for interdisciplinary earthquake engineering research at the university of buffalo - was examining it to see if it was safe to recover the archives .
andre told me , after seeing these buildings fail again and again in the same way , that there is no new research here .
there is nothing here that we do n't know .
the failure points were the same : walls and slabs not tied properly into columns - that 's a roof slab hanging off the building - cantilevered structures , or structures that were asymmetric , that shook violently and came down , poor building materials , not enough concrete , not enough compression in the blocks , rebar that was smooth , rebar that was exposed to the weather and had rusted away .
now there 's a solution to all these problems .
and we know how to build properly .
the proof of this came in chile , almost a month later , when 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit chile .
that is 500 times the power of the 7.0 that hit port-au-prince - 500 times the power , yet only under a thousand casualties .
adjusted for population density , that is less than one percent of the impact of the haitian quake .
what was the difference between chile and haiti ?
seismic standards and confined masonry , where the building acts as a whole - walls and columns and roofs and slabs tied together to support each other - instead of breaking off into separate members and failing .
if you look at this building in chile , it 's ripped in half , but it 's not a pile of rubble .
chileans have been building with confined masonry for decades .
right now , aidg is working with kpff consulting engineers , architecture for humanity , to bring more confined masonry training into haiti .
this is xantus daniel ; he 's a mason , just a general construction worker , not a foreman , who took one of our trainings .
on his last job he was working with his boss , and they started pouring the columns wrong .
he took his boss aside , and he showed him the materials on confined masonry .
he showed him , " you know , we do n't have to do this wrong .
it wo n't cost us any more to do it the right way . "
and they redid that building .
they tied the rebar right , they poured the columns right , and that building will be safe .
and every building that they build going forward will be safe .
to make sure these buildings are safe , it 's not going to take policy - it 's going to take reaching out to the masons on the ground and helping them learn the proper techniques .
now there are many groups doing this .
and the fellow in the vest there , craig toten , he has pushed forward to get documentation out to all the groups that are doing this .
through haiti rewired , through build change , architecture for humanity , aidg , there is the possibility to reach out to 30,000 - 40,000 masons across the country and create a movement of proper building .
if you reach out to the people on the ground in this collaborative way it 's extremely affordable .
for the billions spent on reconstruction , you can train masons for dollars on every house that they end up building over their lifetime .
ultimately , there are two ways that you can rebuild haiti ; the way at the top is the way that haiti 's been building for decades .
the way at the top is a poorly constructed building that will fail .
the way at the bottom is a confined masonry building , where the walls are tied together , the building is symmetric , and it will stand up to an earthquake .
for all the disaster , there is an opportunity here to build better houses for the next generation , so that when the next earthquake hits , it is a disaster - but not a tragedy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to take you to another world .
and i 'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor , living on less than one dollar a day .
i went to a very elitist , snobbish , expensive education in india , and that almost destroyed me .
i was all set to be a diplomat , teacher , doctor - all laid out .
then , i do n't look it , but i was the indian national squash champion for three years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the whole world was laid out for me .
everything was at my feet .
i could do nothing wrong .
and then i thought out of curiosity i 'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like .
so in 1965 , i went to what was called the worst bihar famine in india , and i saw starvation , death , people dying of hunger , for the first time .
it changed my life .
i came back home , told my mother , " i 'd like to live and work in a village . "
mother went into a coma .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " what is this ?
the whole world is laid out for you , the best jobs are laid out for you , and you want to go and work in a village ?
i mean , is there something wrong with you ? "
i said , " no , i 've got the best eduction .
it made me think .
and i wanted to give something back in my own way . "
" what do you want to do in a village ?
no job , no money , no security , no prospect . "
i said , " i want to live and dig wells for five years . "
" dig wells for five years ?
you went to the most expensive school and college in india , and you want to dig wells for five years ? "
she did n't speak to me for a very long time , because she thought i 'd let my family down .
but then , i was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have , which are never brought into the mainstream - which is never identified , respected , applied on a large scale .
and i thought i 'd start a barefoot college - college only for the poor .
what the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college .
i went to this village for the first time .
elders came to me and said , " are you running from the police ? "
i said , " no . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you failed in your exam ? "
i said , " no . "
" you did n't get a government job ? " i said , " no . "
" what are you doing here ?
why are you here ?
the education system in india makes you look at paris and new delhi and zurich ; what are you doing in this village ?
is there something wrong with you you 're not telling us ? "
i said , " no , i want to actually start a college only for the poor .
what the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college . "
so the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice .
they said , " please , do n't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college . "
so it 's the only college in india where , if you should have a ph.d. or a master 's , you are disqualified to come .
you have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college .
you have to work with your hands .
you have to have a dignity of labor .
you have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community .
so we started the barefoot college , and we redefined professionalism .
who is a professional ?
a professional is someone who has a combination of competence , confidence and belief .
a water diviner is a professional .
a traditional midwife is a professional .
a traditional bone setter is a professional .
these are professionals all over the world .
you find them in any inaccessible village around the world .
and we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal .
it needs to be used , needs to be applied , needs to be shown to the world outside - that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today .
so the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of mahatma gandhi .
you eat on the floor , you sleep on the floor , you work on the floor .
there are no contracts , no written contracts .
you can stay with me for 20 years , go tomorrow .
and no one can get more than $ 100 a month .
you come for the money , you do n't come to barefoot college .
you come for the work and the challenge , you 'll come to the barefoot college .
that is where we want you to try crazy ideas .
whatever idea you have , come and try it .
it does n't matter if you fail .
battered , bruised , you start again .
it 's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher .
and it 's the only college where we do n't give a certificate .
you are certified by the community you serve .
you do n't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer .
so when i said that , they said , " well show us what is possible . what are you doing ?
this is all mumbo-jumbo if you ca n't show it on the ground . "
so we built the first barefoot college in 1986 .
it was built by 12 barefoot architects who ca n't read and write , built on $ 1.50 a sq. ft .
150 people lived there , worked there .
they got the aga khan award for architecture in 2002 .
but then they suspected , they thought there was an architect behind it .
i said , " yes , they made the blueprints , but the barefoot architects actually constructed the college . "
we are the only ones who actually returned the award for $ 50,000 , because they did n't believe us , and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the barefoot architects of tilonia .
i asked a forester - high-powered , paper-qualified expert - i said , " what can you build in this place ? "
he had one look at the soil and said , " forget it . no way .
not even worth it .
no water , rocky soil . "
i was in a bit of a spot .
and i said , " okay , i 'll go to the old man in village and say , ' what should i grow in this spot ? " ' he looked quietly at me and said , " you build this , you build this , you put this , and it 'll work . "
this is what it looks like today .
went to the roof , and all the women said , " clear out .
the men should clear out because we do n't want to share this technology with the men .
this is waterproofing the roof . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is a bit of jaggery , a bit of urens and a bit of other things i do n't know .
but it actually does n't leak .
since 1986 , it has n't leaked .
this technology , the women will not share with the men .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's the only college which is fully solar-electrified .
all the power comes from the sun .
45 kilowatts of panels on the roof .
and everything works off the sun for the next 25 years .
so long as the sun shines , we 'll have no problem with power .
but the beauty is that is was installed by a priest , a hindu priest , who 's only done eight years of primary schooling - never been to school , never been to college .
he knows more about solar than anyone i know anywhere in the world guaranteed .
food , if you come to the barefoot college , is solar cooked .
but the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women , illiterate women , who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker .
it 's a parabolic scheffler solar cooker .
unfortunately , they 're almost half german , they 're so precise .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 'll never find indian women so precise .
absolutely to the last inch , they can make that cooker .
and we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking .
we have a dentist - she 's a grandmother , illiterate , who 's a dentist .
she actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children .
barefoot technology : this was 1986 - no engineer , no architect thought of it - but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs .
very little water is wasted .
all the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank , and no water is wasted .
if we have four years of drought , we still have water on the campus , because we collect rainwater .
60 percent of children do n't go to school , because they have to look after animals - sheep , goats - domestic chores .
so we thought of starting a school at night for the children .
because the night schools of tilonia , over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools .
because it 's for the convenience of the child ; it 's not for the convenience of the teacher .
and what do we teach in these schools ?
democracy , citizenship , how you should measure your land , what you should do if you 're arrested , what you should do if your animal is sick .
this is what we teach in the night schools .
but all the schools are solar-lit .
every five years we have an election .
between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process , and they elect a prime minister .
the prime minister is 12 years old .
she looks after 20 goats in the morning , but she 's prime minister in the evening .
she has a cabinet , a minister of education , a minister for energy , a minister for health .
and they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children .
she got the world 's children 's prize five years ago , and she went to sweden .
first time ever going out of her village .
never seen sweden .
was n't dazzled at all by what was happening .
and the queen of sweden , who 's there , turned to me and said , " can you ask this child where she got her confidence from ?
she 's only 12 years old , and she 's not dazzled by anything . "
and the girl , who 's on her left , turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said , " please tell her i 'm the prime minister . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- where the percentage of illiteracy is very high , we use puppetry .
puppets is the way we communicate .
you have jokhim chacha who is 300 years old .
he is my psychoanalyst . he is my teacher .
he 's my doctor . he 's my lawyer .
he 's my donor .
he actually raises money , solves my disputes .
he solves my problems in the village .
if there 's tension in the village , if attendance at the schools goes down and there 's a friction between the teacher and the parent , the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says , " shake hands .
the attendance must not drop . "
these puppets are made out of recycled world bank reports .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this decentralized , demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages , we 've covered all over india from ladakh up to bhutan - all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained .
and we went to ladakh , and we asked this woman - this , at minus 40 , you have to come out of the roof , because there 's no place , it was all snowed up on both sides - and we asked this woman , " what was the benefit you had from solar electricity ? "
and she thought for a minute and said , " it 's the first time i can see my husband 's face in winter . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- went to afghanistan .
one lesson we learned in india was men are untrainable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- men are restless , men are ambitious , men are compulsively mobile , and they all want a certificate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all across the globe , you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate .
why ? because they want to leave the village and go to a city , looking for a job .
so we came up with a great solution : train grandmothers .
what 's the best way of communicating in the world today ?
television ? no .
telegraph ? no .
telephone ? no .
tell a woman .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so we went to afghanistan for the first time , and we picked three women and said , " we want to take them to india . "
they said , " impossible . they do n't even go out of their rooms , and you want to take them to india . "
i said , " i 'll make a concession . i 'll take the husbands along as well . "
so i took the husbands along .
of course , the women were much more intelligent than the men .
in six months , how do we train these women ?
sign language .
you do n't choose the written word .
you do n't choose the spoken word .
you use sign language .
and in six months they can become solar engineers .
they go back and solar-electrify their own village .
this woman went back and solar-electrified the first village , set up a workshop - the first village ever to be solar-electrified in afghanistan -lsb- was -rsb- by the three women .
this woman is an extraordinary grandmother .
55 years old , and she 's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in afghanistan .
and they have n't collapsed .
she actually went and spoke to an engineering department in afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between ac and dc .
he did n't know .
those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in afghanistan .
we went to africa , and we did the same thing .
all these women sitting at one table from eight , nine countries , all chatting to each other , not understanding a word , because they 're all speaking a different language .
but their body language is great .
they 're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers .
i went to sierra leone , and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night - comes across this village .
comes back , goes into the village , says , " well what 's the story ? "
they said , " these two grandmothers ... " " grandmothers ? " the minister could n't believe what was happening .
" where did they go ? " " went to india and back . "
went straight to the president .
he said , " do you know there 's a solar-electrified village in sierra leone ? "
he said , " no . " half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day .
" what 's the story . "
so he summoned me and said , " can you train me 150 grandmothers ? "
i said , " i ca n't , mr. president .
but they will . the grandmothers will . "
so he built me the first barefoot training center in sierra leone .
and 150 grandmothers have been trained in sierra leone .
gambia : we went to select a grandmother in gambia .
went to this village .
i knew which woman i would like to take .
the community got together and said , " take these two women . "
i said , " no , i want to take this woman . "
they said , " why ? she does n't know the language . you do n't know her . "
i said , " i like the body language . i like the way she speaks . "
" difficult husband ; not possible . "
called the husband , the husband came , swaggering , politician , mobile in his hand . " not possible . "
" why not ? " " the woman , look how beautiful she is . "
i said , " yeah , she is very beautiful . "
" what happens if she runs off with an indian man ? "
that was his biggest fear .
i said , " she 'll be happy . she 'll ring you up on the mobile . "
she went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger .
she walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran .
she handled the national press , and she was a star .
and when i went back six months later , i said , " where 's your husband ? "
" oh , somewhere . it does n't matter . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- success story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'll just wind up by saying that i think you do n't have to look for solutions outside .
look for solutions within .
and listen to people . they have the solutions in front of you .
they 're all over the world .
do n't even worry .
do n't listen to the world bank , listen to the people on the ground .
they have all the solutions in the world .
i 'll end with a quotation by mahatma gandhi .
" first they ignore you , then they laugh at you , then they fight you , and then you win . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is poo , and what i want to do today is share my passion for poo with you , which might be quite difficult , but i think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo .
so this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice , and yet it can do things that you and i could n't possibly entertain the idea of doing .
and basically it 's all evolved to handle its food source , which is dung .
so the question is , where do we start this story ?
and it seems appropriate to start at the end , because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals , but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living , and so dung beetles eat dung , and their larvae are also dung-feeders .
they are grown completely in a ball of dung .
within south africa , we 've got about 800 species of dung beetles , in africa we 've got 2,000 species of dung beetles , and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles .
so , according to dung beetles , dung is pretty good .
unless you 're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself , you 'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species , because they go directly into the dung , straight down below it , and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground .
so the question is , how do they deal with this material ?
and most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort .
ten percent of the species actually make a ball , and this ball they roll away from the dung source , usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source , and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls .
so this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball .
you can see it 's a male because he 's got a little hair on the back of his legs there , and he 's clearly very pleased about what he 's sitting on there .
and then he 's about to become a victim of a vicious smash-and-grab . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is a clear indication that this is a valuable resource .
and so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way , and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this , because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung .
so this dung pat was actually - well , it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken , and we think it 's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well-adapted to rolling balls of dung .
so what you 've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the african veld .
its head is down . it 's walking backwards .
it 's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction , and at the same time it 's got to deal with the heat .
this is africa . it 's hot .
so what i want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems .
so watch this beetle , and there 's two things that i would like you to be aware of .
the first is how it deals with this obstacle that we 've put in its way . see , look , it does a little dance , and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place .
a little dance , and then heads off in a particular direction .
so clearly this animal knows where it 's going and it knows where it wants to go , and that 's a very , very important thing , because if you think about it , you 're at the dung pile , you 've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else , and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line .
so we gave them some more tasks to deal with , and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet . and watch its response .
so this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet . it 's turned by 90 degrees .
but it does n't flinch . it knows exactly where it wants to go , and it heads off in that particular direction .
so our next question then was , how are they doing this ?
what are they doing ? and there was a cue that was available to us .
it was that every now and then they 'd climb on top of the ball and they 'd take a look at the world around them .
and what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball ?
what are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement ? and the most obvious one is to look at the sky , and so we thought , now what could they be looking at in the sky ?
and the obvious thing to look at is the sun .
so a classic experiment here , in that what we did was we moved the sun .
what we 're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position .
and look at what the beetle does .
it does a little double dance , and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place .
what happens now ? so clearly they 're looking at the sun .
the sun is a very important cue in the sky for them .
the thing is the sun is not always available to you , because at sunset it disappears below the horizon .
what is happening in the sky here is that there 's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and i ca n't see . it 's the way our eyes are built .
but the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon , say it 's over on this side , there is a north-south , a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we ca n't see that the beetles can see .
so how do we test that ? well , that 's easy .
what we do is we get a great big polarization filter , pop the beetle underneath it , and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky .
the beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn , because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in .
so obviously beetles can see polarized light .
okay , so what we 've got so far is , what are beetles doing ? they 're rolling balls .
how are they doing it ? well , they 're rolling them in a straight line .
how are they maintaining it in a particular straight line ?
well , they 're looking at celestial cues in the sky , some of which you and i ca n't see .
but how do they pick up those celestial cues ?
that was what was of interest to us next .
and it was this particular little behavior , the dance , that we thought was important , because look , it takes a pause every now and then , and then heads off in the direction that it wants to go in .
so what are they doing when they do this dance ?
how far can we push them before they will reorientate themselves ?
and in this experiment here , what we did was we forced them into a channel , and you can see he was n't particularly forced into this particular channel , and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in , in the first place .
and let 's see what his reaction is as he 's headed through 90 degrees here , and now he 's going to - when he ends up down here , he 's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction .
and see what his response is .
he does a little dance , he turns around , and heads back in this . he knows exactly where he 's going .
he knows exactly what the problem is , and he knows exactly how to deal with it , and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves .
so that 's the dance , but after spending many years sitting in the african bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days , we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior .
every now and then , when they climb on top of the ball , they wipe their face .
and you see him do it again .
now we thought , now what could be going on here ?
clearly the ground is very hot , and when the ground is hot , they dance more often , and when they do this particular dance , they wipe the bottom of their face .
and we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior .
get off the hot soil and also spitting onto their face to cool their head down .
so what we did was design a couple of arenas .
one was hot , one was cold .
we shaded this one . we left that one hot .
and then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera .
so what you 're looking at here is a heat image of the system , and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball .
so the truth is , if you look at the temperature over here , dung is cool . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so all we 're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background .
so the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade .
the beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade , so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld .
it is n't climbing . it is n't dancing , because its body temperature is actually relatively low .
it 's about the same as yours and mine .
and what 's of interest here is that little brain is quite cool .
but if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment , look at the temperature of the soil .
it 's up around 55 to 60 degrees centigrade .
watch how often the beetle dances .
and look at its front legs . they 're roaringly hot .
so the ball leaves a little thermal shadow , and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face , and all the time it 's trying to cool itself down , we think , and avoid the hot sand that it 's walking across .
and what we did then was put little boots on these legs , because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil .
and if you look over here , with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on .
so we described these as cool boots .
it was a dental compound that we used to make these boots .
and we also cooled down the dung ball , so we were able to put the ball in the fridge , gave them a nice cool dung ball , and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball .
so this is called stilting . it 's a thermal behavior that you and i do if we cross the beach , we jump onto a towel , somebody has this towel - " sorry , i 've jumped onto your towel . " - and then you scuttle across onto somebody else 's towel , and that way you do n't burn your feet .
and that 's exactly what the beetles are doing here .
however , there 's one more story i 'd like to share with you , and that 's this particular species .
it 's from a genus called pachysoma .
there are 13 species in the genus , and they have a particular behavior that i think you will find interesting .
this is a dung beetle . watch what he 's doing .
can you spot the difference ?
they do n't normally go this slowly . it 's in slow motion .
but it 's walking forwards , and it 's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it .
this is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior .
there 's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle 's behavior that we found quite fascinating , and that 's that it forages and provisions a nest .
so watch this individual here , and what he 's trying to do is set up a nest .
and he does n't like this first position , but he comes up with a second position , and about 50 minutes later , that nest is finished , and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets .
and what i want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path , and compare the two .
and by and large , you 'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path .
on the outward path , he 's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung .
on the way home , he knows where home is , and he wants to go straight to it .
the important thing here is that this is not a one-way trip , as in most dung beetles . the trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site .
and watch , you 're going to see another south african crime taking place right now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets .
so what we 're looking at here is a behavior called path integration .
and what 's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot , it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food , and then when it finds food , it heads straight home . it knows exactly where its home is .
now there 's two ways it could be doing that , and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it 's at the foraging site .
if it 's using landmarks , it will find its home .
if it is using something called path integration , it will not find its home . it will arrive at the wrong spot , and what it 's doing here if it 's using path integration is it 's counting its steps or measuring the distance out in this direction .
it knows the bearing home , and it knows it should be in that direction .
if you displace it , it ends up in the wrong place .
so let 's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment .
so here 's our cunning experimenter .
he displaces the beetle , and now we have to see what is going to take place .
what we 've got is a burrow . that 's where the forage was .
the forage has been displaced to a new position .
if he 's using landmark orientation , he should be able to find the burrow , because he 'll be able to recognize the landmarks around it .
if he 's using path integration , then it should end up in the wrong spot over here .
so let 's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test .
so there he is there .
he 's about to head home , and look what happens .
shame .
it has n't a clue .
it starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food , but it is clearly completely lost .
so we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around , and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so what we 're looking at here are a group of animals to find their way around , and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance , and we know that these species here actually count the steps . that 's what they use as an odometer , a step-counting system , to find their way back home .
we do n't know yet what dung beetles use .
so what have we learned from these animals with a brain that 's the size of a grain of rice ?
well , we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues .
we know that the dance behavior is an orientation behavior and it 's also a thermoregulation behavior , and we also know that they use a path integration system for finding their way home .
so for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and i could n't possibly do .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother , mamar , in our four-family home in brooklyn , new york .
her apartment was an oasis .
it was a place where i could sneak a cup of coffee , which was really warm milk with just a touch of caffeine .
she loved life .
and although she worked in a factory , she saved her pennies and she traveled to europe .
and i remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music .
and then , when i was eight and she was 60 , something changed .
she no longer worked or traveled .
she no longer danced .
there were no more coffee times .
my mother missed work and took her to doctors who could n't make a diagnosis .
and my father , who worked at night , would spend every afternoon with her , just to make sure she ate .
her care became all-consuming for our family .
and by the time a diagnosis was made , she was in a deep spiral .
now many of you will recognize her symptoms .
my grandmother had depression .
a deep , life-altering depression , from which she never recovered .
and back then , so little was known about depression .
but even today , 50 years later , there 's still so much more to learn .
today , we know that women are 70 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men .
and even with this high prevalence , women are misdiagnosed between 30 and 50 percent of the time .
now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms of fatigue , sleep disturbance , pain and anxiety compared with men .
and these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression .
and it is n't only depression in which these sex differences occur , but they occur across so many diseases .
so it 's my grandmother 's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest .
and today , i lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women .
today , we know that every cell has a sex .
now , that 's a term coined by the institute of medicine .
and what it means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels .
it means that we 're different across all of our organs .
from our brains to our hearts , our lungs , our joints .
now , it was only 20 years ago that we hardly had any data on women 's health beyond our reproductive functions .
but then in 1993 , the nih revitalization act was signed into law .
and what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical trials that were funded by the national institutes of health .
and in many ways , the law has worked .
women are now routinely included in clinical studies , and we 've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease .
but remarkably , what we have learned about these differences is often overlooked .
so , we have to ask ourselves the question : why leave women 's health to chance ?
and we 're leaving it to chance in two ways .
the first is that there is so much more to learn and we 're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent of these sex differences .
and the second is that we are n't taking what we have learned , and routinely applying it in clinical care .
we are just not doing enough .
so , i 'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have impacted the health of women , and where we need to do more .
let 's start with heart disease .
it 's the number one killer of women in the united states today .
this is the face of heart disease .
linda is a middle-aged woman , who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart .
when she had recurring symptoms she went back to her doctor .
her doctor did the gold standard test : a cardiac catheterization .
it showed no blockages .
linda 's symptoms continued .
she had to stop working .
and that 's when she found us .
when linda came to us , we did another cardiac catheterization and this time , we found clues .
but we needed another test to make the diagnosis .
so we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound , where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out .
and what we found was that linda 's disease did n't look like the typical male disease .
the typical male disease looks like this .
there 's a discrete blockage or stenosis .
linda 's disease , like the disease of so many women , looks like this .
the plaque is laid down more evenly , more diffusely along the artery , and it 's harder to see .
so for linda , and for so many women , the gold standard test was n't gold .
now , linda received the right treatment .
she went back to her life and , fortunately , today she is doing well .
but linda was lucky .
she found us , we found her disease .
but for too many women , that 's not the case .
we have the tools .
we have the technology to make the diagnosis .
but it 's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked .
so what about treatment ?
a landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question : what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women ?
the authors looked at papers written over a 10-year period , and hundreds had to be thrown out .
and what they found out was that of those that were tossed out , 65 percent were excluded because even though women were included in the studies , the analysis did n't differentiate between women and men .
what a lost opportunity .
the money had been spent and we did n't learn how women fared .
and these studies could not contribute one iota to the very , very important question , what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women ?
i want to introduce you to hortense , my godmother , hung wei , a relative of a colleague , and somebody you may recognize - dana , christopher reeve 's wife .
all three women have something very important in common .
all three were diagnosed with lung cancer , the number one cancer killer of women in the united states today .
all three were nonsmokers .
sadly , dana and hung wei died of their disease .
today , what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers .
now interestingly , when women are diagnosed with lung cancer , their survival tends to be better than that of men .
now , here are some clues .
our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor cells of both women and men .
and these genes are activated mainly by estrogen .
and when these genes are over-expressed , it 's associated with improved survival only in young women .
now this is a very early finding and we do n't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care .
but it 's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men .
now , let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences , it can drive the science .
several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated , and when the authors looked at whose tumors shrank , they found that 82 percent were women .
this led them to ask the question : well , why ?
and what they found was that the genetic mutations that the drug targeted were far more common in women .
and what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer that also includes sex .
this is what we can accomplish when we do n't leave women 's health to chance .
we know that when you invest in research , you get results .
take a look at the death rate from breast cancer over time .
and now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time .
now let 's look at the dollars invested in breast cancer - these are the dollars invested per death - and the dollars invested in lung cancer .
now , it 's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results .
they may not be fast enough , but it has produced results .
we can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease .
so let 's go back to depression .
depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today .
our investigators have found of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood .
and when you put men and women in a functional mri scanner - that 's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it 's activated - so you put them in the scanner and you expose them to stress .
you can actually see the difference .
and it 's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression .
but even though we know that these differences occur , 66 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified .
so , i think we have to ask again the question : why leave women 's health to chance ?
and this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge of being able to dramatically improve the health of women .
we know that every cell has a sex .
we know that these differences are often overlooked .
and therefore we know that women are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today .
we have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum .
women 's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay .
and it 's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research .
or if we analyzed our data by sex .
so , people often ask me : what can i do ?
and here 's what i suggest : first , i suggest that you think about women 's health in the same way that you think and care about other causes that are important to you .
and second , and equally as important , that as a woman , you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring for those who you love : is this disease or treatment different in women ?
now , this is a profound question because the answer is likely yes , but your doctor may not know the answer , at least not yet .
but if you ask the question , your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer .
and this is so important , not only for ourselves , but for all of those whom we love .
whether it be a mother , a daughter , a sister , a friend or a grandmother .
it was my grandmother 's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women .
that 's her legacy .
our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good afternoon .
i am not a farmer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm not . i 'm a parent , i 'm a resident and i 'm a teacher .
and this is my world .
and along the way i 've started noticing - i 'm on my third generation of kids - that they 're getting bigger .
they 're getting sicker .
in addition to these complexities , i just learned that 70 percent of the kids that i see who are labeled learning disabled would not have been had they had proper prenatal nutrition .
the realities of my community are simple . they look like this .
kids should not have to grow up and look at things like this .
and as jobs continue to leave my community , and energy continues to come in , be exported in , it 's no wonder that really some people refer to the south bronx as a desert .
but i 'm the oldest sixth grader you 'll ever meet , so i get up every day with this tremendous amount of enthusiasm that i 'm hoping to share with you all today .
and with that note , i come to you with this belief that kids should not have to leave their communities to live , learn and earn in a better one .
so i 'm here to tell you a story about me and this wall that i met outside , which i 'm now bringing inside .
and it starts with three people .
the crazy teacher - that 's me on the left , i dress up pretty , thank you , my wife , i love you for getting a good suit - my passionate borough president and a guy named george irwin from green living technologies who helped me with my class and helped me get involved with this patented technology .
but it all starts with seeds in classrooms , in my place , which looks like this .
and i 'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp .
and that 's really what this is all about .
and it starts with incredible kids like this , who come early and stay late .
all of my kids are either iep or ell learners , most come with a lot of handicaps , most are homeless and many are in foster care .
almost all of my kids live below poverty .
but with those seeds , from day one , we are growing in my classroom , and this is what it looks like in my classroom .
and you see how attentive these kids are to these seeds .
and then you notice that those seeds become farms across the bronx that look like this .
but again , i am not a farmer . i 'm a teacher .
and i do n't like weeding , and i do n't like back-breaking labor .
so i wanted to figure out how i could get this kind of success into something small , like this , and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it , kids who did n't want to be outside could do it , and everyone could have access .
so i called george irwin , and what do you know ?
he came to my class and we built an indoor edible wall .
and what we do is we partner it with authentic learning experiences , private-based learning .
and lo and behold , we gave birth to the first edible wall in new york city .
so if you 're hungry , get up and eat .
you can do it right now . my kids play cow all the time .
okay ? but we were just getting started , the kids loved the technology , so we called up george and we said , " we gotta learn more ! "
now , mayor bloomberg , thank you very much , we no longer need work permits , which comes with slices and bonded contractors - we 're available for you - we decided to go to boston .
and my kids , from the poorest congressional district in america , became the first to install a green wall , designed by a computer , with real-live learning tools , 21 stories up - if you 're going to go visit it , it 's on top of the john hancock building .
but closer to home , we started installing these walls in schools that look like this with lighting like that , real led stuff , 21st-century technology .
and what do you know ? we made 21st century money , and that was groundbreaking . wow !
this is my harvest , people .
and what do you do with this food ? you cook it !
and those are my heirloom students making heirloom sauce , with plastic forks , and we get it into the cafeteria , and we grow stuff and we feed our teachers .
and that is the youngest nationally certified workforce in america with our bronx borough president .
and what 'd we do then ? well , i met nice people like you , and they invited us to the hamptons .
so i call this " from south bronx to southampton . "
and we started putting in roofs that look like this , and we came in from destitute neighborhoods to start building landscape like this , wow ! people noticed .
and so we got invited back this past summer , and we actually moved into the hamptons , payed 3,500 dollars a week for a house , and we learned how to surf .
and when you can do stuff like this - these are my kids putting in this technology , and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this , this is the new green graffiti .
so , you may wonder what does a wall like this really do for kids , besides changing landscapes and mindsets ?
okay , i 'm going to tell you what it does .
it gets me to meet incredible contractors like this , jim ellenberger from ellenberger services .
and this is where it becomes true triple bottom line .
because jim realized that these kids , my future farmers , really had the skills he needed to build affordable housing for new yorkers , right in their own neighborhood .
and this is what my kids are doing , making living wage .
now , if you 're like me , you live in a building , there are seven guys out of work looking to manage a million dollars .
i do n't have it . but if you need a toilet fixed or , you know , some shelving , i gotta wait six months for an appointment with someone who drives a much nicer car than me .
that 's the beauty of this economy .
but my kids are now licensed and bonded in trade .
and that 's my first student to open up , the first in his family to have a bank account .
this immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an atm .
and this is the true triple bottom line , because we can take neighborhoods that were abandoned and destitute and turn them into something like this with interiors like this .
wow ! people noticed . and notice they did .
so cnn called , and we were delighted to have them come to our farmer 's market .
and then when rockefeller center said , nbc , could you put this thing up on the walls ? we were delighted .
but this , i show you , when kids from the poorest congressional district in america can build a 30-foot by 15-foot wall , design it , plant it and install it in the heart of new york city , that 's a true " sí se puede " moment .
really scholastic , if you ask me .
but this is not a getty image .
that 's a picture i took of my bronx borough president , addressing my kids in his house , not the jailhouse , making them feel a part of it .
that 's our state senator gustavo rivera and bob bieder , coming to my classroom to make my kids feel important .
and when the bronx borough president shows up and the state senator comes to our class , believe you me , the bronx can change attitudes now .
we are poised , ready , willing and able to export our talent and diversity in ways we 've never even imagined .
and when the local senator gets on the scale in public and says he 's got to lose weight , so do i !
and i tell you what , i 'm doing it and so are the kids .
okay ? and then celebrities started .
produce pete ca n't believe what we grow .
lorna sass came and donated books .
okay ? we 're feeding seniors .
and when we realized that we were growing for food justice in the south bronx , so did the international community .
and my kids in the south bronx were repped in the first international green roof conference .
and that 's just great .
except what about locally ?
well , we met this woman , avis richards , with the ground up campaign .
unbelievable ! through her , my kids , the most disenfranchised and marginalized , were able to roll out 100 gardens to new york city public schools .
that 's triple bottom line ! okay ?
a year ago today , i was invited to the new york academy of medicine .
i thought this concept of designing a strong and healthy new york made sense , especially when the resources were free .
so thank you all and i love them .
they introduced me to the new york city strategic alliance for health , again , free resources , do n't waste them .
and what do you know ? six months later , my school and my kids were awarded the first ever high school award of excellence for creating a healthy school environment .
the greenest class in new york city .
but more importantly is my kids learned to get , they learned to give .
and we took the money that we made from our farmer 's market , and started buying gifts for the homeless and for needy around the world .
so we started giving back .
and that 's when i realized that the greening of america starts first with the pockets , then with the heart and then with the mind .
so we were onto something , and we 're still onto something .
and thank god trinity wall street noticed , because they gave us the birth of green bronx machine .
we 're 3,000 strong right now .
and what does it really do ?
it teaches kids to re-vision their communities , so when they grow up in places like this , they can imagine it like this .
and my kids , trained and certified - ma , you get the tax abatement . thank you , mayor bloomberg - can take communities that look like this and convert them into things that look like that , and that to me , people , is another true " sí se puede " moment .
now , how does it start ? it starts in schools .
no more little knicks and little nets .
group by broccoli , group by your favorite vegetable , something you can aspire to .
okay ? and these are my future farmers of america , growing up in brook park on 141st street , the most migrant community in america .
when tenacious little ones learn how to garden like this , it 's no wonder we get fruit like that .
and i love it ! and so do they .
and we 're building teepees in neighborhoods that were burning down .
and that 's a true " sí se puede " moment .
and again , brook park feeds hundreds of people without a food stamp or a fingerprint .
the poorest congressional district in america , the most migratory community in america , we can do this .
bissel gardens is cranking out food in epic proportions , moving kids into an economy they never imagined .
now , somewhere over the rainbow , my friends , is the south bronx of america . and we 're doing it .
how does it start ? well , look at jose 's attention to detail .
thank god omar knows that carrots come from the ground , and not aisle 9 at the supermarket or through a bullet-proof window or through a piece of styrofoam .
and when henry knows that green is good , so do i.
and when you expand their palates , you expand their vocabulary .
and most importantly , when you put big kids together with little kids , you get the big fat white guy out of the middle , which is cool , and you create this kind of accountability amongst peers , which is incredible .
god , i 'm going to run out of time , so i 've gotta keep it moving .
but this is my weekly paycheck for kids ; that 's our green graffiti .
this is what we 're doing .
and behold the glory and bounty that is bronx county .
nothing thrills me more than to see kids pollinating plants instead of each other .
i gotta tell you , i 'm a protective parent .
but those kids are the kids who are now putting pumpkin patches on top of trains .
we 're also designing coin ponds for the rich and affluent .
we 're also becoming children of the corn , creating farms in the middle of fordham road for awareness and window bottles out of garbage .
now i do n't expect every kid to be a farmer , but i expect you to read about it , write about it , blog about it , offer outstanding customer service .
i expect them to be engaged , and man , are they !
so that 's my incredible classroom , that 's the food .
where does it go ? zero miles to plate , right down into the cafeteria .
or more importantly , to local shelters , where most of our kids are getting one to two meals a day .
and we 're stepping it up .
no air jordans were ever ruined on my farm .
and in his day , a million dollar gardens and incredible installations .
let me tell you something , people .
this is a beautiful moment .
black field , brown field , toxic waste field , battlefield - we 're proving in the bronx that you can grow anywhere , on cement .
and we take orders for flowers . i 'm putting the bake sale to shame .
we take orders now . i 'm booking for the spring .
and these were all grown from seeds . we 're learning everything .
and again , when you can take kids from backgrounds as diverse as this to do something as special as this , we 're really creating a moment .
now , you may ask about these kids .
forty percent attendance to 93 percent attendance .
all start overage and under-credit .
they are now , my first cohort is all in college , earning a living wage .
the rest are scheduled to graduate this june .
happy kids , happy families , happy colleagues .
amazed people . the glory and bounty that is bronx county .
let 's talk about mint . where is my mint ?
i grow seven kinds of mint in my class .
mojitos , anybody ? i 'll be at telepan later .
but , understand this is my intellectual viagra .
ladies and gentlemen , i gotta move quick , but understand this : the borough that gave us baggy pants and funky fresh beats is becoming home to the organic ones .
my green -lsb- unclear -rsb- 25,000 pounds of vegetables , i 'm growing organic citizens , engaged kids .
so help us go from this to this .
self-sustaining entities , 18 months return on investment , plus we 're paying people living wage and health benefits , while feeding people for pennies on the dollar .
martin luther king said that people need to be uplifted with dignity .
so here in new york , i urge you , my fellow americans , to help us make america great again .
it 's simple . share your passion .
it 's real easy . go see these two videos , please .
one got us invited to the white house , one 's a recent incarnation .
and most importantly , get the biggest bully out of schools .
this has got to go tomorrow .
people , you can all do that .
keep kids out of stores that look like this .
make them a healthy plate , especially if you can pick it off the wall in your own classroom - delicioso !
model good behavior . get them to a green cart .
big kids love strawberries and bananas .
teach them entrepreneurship . thank god for grownyc .
let them cook . great lunch today , let them do culinary things .
but most importantly , just love them .
nothing works like unconditional love .
so , my good friend kermit said it 's not easy being green .
it 's not . i come from a place where kids can buy 35 flavors of blunt wrap at any day of the moment , where ice cream freezers are filled with slushy malt liquor .
okay ? my dear friend majora carter once told me , we have everything to gain and nothing to lose .
so here , and at a time when we 've gone from the audacity to hope to hope for some audacity , i urge you to do something .
i urge you to do something .
right now , we 're all tadpoles , but i urge you to become a big frog and take that big , green leap .
i do n't care if you 're on the left , on the right , up the middle , wherever .
join me . use - i 've got a lot of energy . help me use it .
we can do something here .
and along the way , please take time to smell the flowers , especially if you and your students grew them .
i 'm steve ritz , this is green bronx machine .
i 've got to say thank you to my wife and family , for my kids , thank you for coming every day , and for my colleagues , believing and supporting me .
we are growing our way into a new economy .
thank you , god bless you and enjoy the day . i 'm steve ritz .
sí se puede !
-lrb- applause -rrb- some of you have heard the story before , but , in fact , there 's somebody in the audience who 's never heard this story - in front of an audience - before , so i 'm a little more nervous than i normally am telling this story .
i used to be a photographer for many years .
in 1978 , i was working for time magazine , and i was given a three-day assignment to photograph amerasian children , children who had been fathered by american gis all over southeast asia , and then abandoned - 40,000 children all over asia .
i had never heard the word amerasian before .
i spent a few days photographing children in different countries , and like a lot of photographers and a lot of journalists , i always hope that when my pictures were published , they might actually have an effect on a situation , instead of just documenting it .
so , i was so disturbed by what i saw , and i was so unhappy with the article that ran afterwards , that i decided i would take six months off .
i was 28 years old .
i decided i would find six children in different countries , and actually go spend some time with the kids , and try to tell their story a little bit better than i thought i had done for time magazine .
in the course of doing the story , i was looking for children who had n't been photographed before , and the pearl buck foundation told me that they worked with a lot of americans who were donating money to help some of these kids .
and a man told me , who ran the pearl buck foundation in korea , that there was a young girl , who was 11 years old , being raised by her grandmother .
and the grandmother had never let any westerners ever see her .
every time any westerners came to the village , she hid the girl .
and of course , i was immediately intrigued .
i saw photographs of her , and i thought i wanted to go .
and the guy just told me , " there 's no way . this grandmother wo n't even - you know , there 's no way she 's ever going to let you meet this girl that 's she 's raising . "
i took a translator with me , and went to this village , found the grandmother , sat down with her .
and to my astonishment , she agreed to let me photograph her granddaughter .
and i was paying for this myself , so i asked the translator if it would be ok if i stayed for the week .
i had a sleeping bag .
the family had a small shed on the side of the house , so i said , " could i sleep in my sleeping bag in the evenings ? "
and i just told the little girl , whose name was hyun-sook lee , that if i ever did anything to embarrass her - she did n't speak a word of english , although she looked very american - she could just put up her hand and say , " stop , " and i would stop taking pictures .
and then , my translator left .
so there i was , i could n't speak a word of korean , and this is the first night i met hyun-sook .
her mother was still alive .
her mother was not raising her , her grandmother was raising her .
and what struck me immediately was how in love the two of these people were .
the grandmother was incredibly fond , deeply in love with this little girl .
they slept on the floor at night .
the way they heat their homes in korea is to put bricks under the floors , so the heat actually radiates from underneath the floor .
hyun-sook was 11 years old .
i had photographed , as i said , a lot of these kids .
hyun-sook was in fact the fifth child that i found to photograph .
and almost universally , amongst all the kids , they were really psychologically damaged by having been made fun of , ridiculed , picked on and been rejected .
and korea was probably the place i found to be the worst for these kids .
and what struck me immediately in meeting hyun-sook was how confident she appeared to be , how happy she seemed to be in her own skin .
and remember this picture , because i 'm going to show you another picture later , but you can see how much she looks like her grandmother , although she looks so western .
i decided to follow her to school .
this is the first morning i stayed with her .
this is on the way to school .
this is the morning assembly outside her school .
and i noticed that she was clowning around .
when the teachers would ask questions , she 'd be the first person to raise her hand .
again , not at all shy or withdrawn , or anything like the other children that i 'd photographed .
again , the first one to go to the blackboard to answer questions .
getting in trouble for whispering into her best friend 's ears in the middle of class .
and one of the other things that i said to her through the translator - again , this thing about saying stop - was to not pay attention to me .
and so , she really just completely ignored me most of the time .
i noticed that at recess , she was the girl who picked the other girls to be on her team .
it was very obvious , from the very beginning , that she was a leader .
this is on the way home .
and that 's north korea up along the hill .
this is up along the dmz .
they would actually cover the windows every night , so that light could n't be seen , because the south korean government has said for years that the north koreans may invade at any time .
so there 's always this - the closer you were to north korea , the more terrifying it was .
very often at school , i 'd be taking pictures , and she would whisper into her girlfriends ' ears , and then look at me and say , " stop . "
and i would stand at attention , and all the girls would crack up , and it was sort of a little joke .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the end of the week came and my translator came back , because i 'd asked her to come back , so i could formally thank the grandmother and hyun-sook .
and in the course of the grandmother talking to the translator , the grandmother started crying .
and i said to my translator , " what 's going on , why is she crying ? "
and she spoke to the grandmother for a moment , and then she started getting tears in her eyes .
and i said , " ok , what did i do ? what 's going on ?
why is everyone crying ? "
and the translator said , " the grandmother says that she thinks she 's dying , and she wants to know if you would take hyun-sook to america with you . "
and i said , " i 'm 28 years old , and i live in hotels , and i 'm not married . "
i mean i had fallen in love with this girl , but i - you know , it was , like , emotionally i was about 12 years old .
if you know of photographers , the joke is it 's the finest form of delayed adolescence ever invented .
" sorry , i have to go on an assignment , i 'll be back " - and then you never come back .
so , i asked the translator why she thought she was dying .
can i get her to a hospital ? could i pay to get her a doctor ?
and she refused any help at all .
and so , when i got outside , i actually gave the translator some money and said , " please go back and see if you can do something . "
and i gave the grandmother my business card .
and i said , " if you 're serious , i will try to find a family for her . "
and i immediately wrote a letter to my best friends in atlanta , georgia , who had an 11-year-old son .
and my best friend had mistakenly one day said something about wishing he had another child .
so here my friends gene and gail had not heard from me in about a year , and suddenly i was calling , saying " i 'm in korea , and i 've met this extraordinary girl . "
and i said , " the grandmother thinks she 's sick , but i think maybe we would have to bring the grandmother over also . "
and i said , " i 'll pay for the ... " i mean , i had this whole sort of picture .
so anyway , i left .
and my friends actually said they were very interested in adopting her .
and i said , " look , i think i 'll scare the grandmother to death , if i actually write to her and tell her that you 're willing to adopt her , i want to go back and talk to her . "
but i was off on assignment .
i figured i 'd come back in a couple of weeks and talk to the grandmother .
and on christmas day , i was in bangkok with a group of photographers and got a telegram - back in those days , you got telegrams - from time magazine saying someone in korea had died , and left their child in a will to me .
did i know anything about this ?
because i had n't told them what i was doing , because i was so upset with the story they 'd run .
so , i went back to korea , and i went back to hyun-sook 's village , and she was gone .
and the house that i had spent time in was empty .
it was incredibly cold .
no one in the village would tell me where hyun-sook was , because the grandmother had always hidden her from westerners .
and they had no idea about this request that she 'd made of me .
so i finally found myung sung , her best friend that she used to play with after school every day .
and myung sung , under some pressure from me and the translator , gave us an address on the outside of seoul .
and i went to that address and knocked on the door , and a man answered the door .
it was not a very nice area of seoul , as there were mud streets outside of it .
and i knocked on the door , and hyun-sook answered the door , and her eyes were bloodshot , and she seemed to be in shock .
she did n't recognize me - there was no recognition whatsoever .
and this man came to the door and kind of barked something in korean .
and i said to the translator , " what did he say ? "
and she said , " he wants to know who you are . "
and i said , " well , tell him that i am a photographer . "
i started explaining who i was , and he interrupted .
and she said , " he says he knows who you are , what do you want ? "
i said , " well , tell him that i was asked by this little girl 's grandmother to find a family for her . "
and he said , " i 'm her uncle , she 's fine , you can leave now . "
so i was - you know , the door was being slammed in my face , it 's incredibly cold , and i 'm trying to think , " what would the hero do in a movie , if i was writing this as a movie script ? "
so i said , " listen , it 's really cold , i 've come a very long way , do you mind if i just come in for a minute ? i 'm freezing . "
so the guy kind of reluctantly let us in and we sat down on the floor .
and as we started talking , i saw him yell something , and hyun-sook came and brought us some food .
and i had this whole mental picture of , sort of like cinderella .
i sort of had this picture of this incredibly wonderful , bright , happy little child , who now appeared to be very withdrawn , being enslaved by this family .
and i was really appalled , and i could n't figure out what to do .
and the more i tried talking to him , the less friendly he was getting .
so i finally decided , i said " look , " - this is all through the translator , because , this is all , you know , i do n't speak a word of korean - and i said , " look , i 'm really glad that hyun-sook has a family to live with .
i was very worried about her .
i made a promise to her grandmother , your mother , that i would find a family , and now i 'm so happy that you 're going to take care of her . "
i said , " but you know , i bought an airline ticket , and i 'm stuck here for a week . "
and i said , " i 'm staying in a hotel downtown .
would you like to come and have lunch tomorrow ?
and you can practice your english . " because he told me - i was trying to ask him questions about himself .
and so i went to the hotel , and i found two older amerasians .
a girl whose mother had been a prostitute , and she was a prostitute , and a boy who 'd been in and out of jail .
and i said to them , " look , there 's a little girl who has a tiny chance of getting out of here and going to america . "
i said , " i do n't know if it 's the right decision or not , but i would like you to come to lunch tomorrow and tell the uncle what it 's like to walk down the street , what people say to you , what you do for a living .
and just - i want him to understand what happens if she stays here .
and i could be wrong , i do n't know , but i wish you would come tomorrow . "
so , these two came to lunch , and we got thrown out of the restaurant .
they were yelling at him , they were - it got to be really ugly .
and we went outside , and he was just furious .
and i knew i had totally blown this whole thing .
here i was again , trying to figure out what to do .
and he started yelling at me , and i said to the translator , " ok , tell him to calm down , what is he saying ? "
and she said , " well , he 's saying , ' who the hell are you to walk into my house , some rich american with your cameras around your neck , accusing me of enslaving my niece ?
this is my niece , i love her , she 's my sister 's daughter .
who the hell are you to accuse me of something like this ? " ' and i said , you know , " look , " i said , " you 're absolutely right .
i do n't pretend to understand what 's going on here . "
i said , " all i know is , i 've been photographing a lot of these children . "
i said , " i 'm in love with your niece , i think she 's an incredibly special child . "
and i said , " look , i will fly my friends over here from the united states if you want to meet them , to see if you approve of them .
i just think that - what little i know about the situation , she has very little chance here of having the kind of life that you probably would like her to have . "
so , everyone told me afterwards that inviting the prospective parents over was , again , the stupidest thing i could have possibly done , because who 's ever good enough for your relative ?
but he invited me to come to a ceremony they were having that day for her grandmother .
and they actually take items of clothing and photographs , and they burn them as part of the ritual .
and you can see how different she looks just in three months .
this was now , i think , february , early february .
and the pictures before were taken in september .
well , there was an american marine priest that i had met in the course of doing the story , who had 75 children living in his house .
he had three women helping him take care of these kids .
and so i suggested to the uncle that we go down and meet father keene , to find out how the adoption process worked .
because i wanted him to feel like this was all being done very much above board .
so , this is on the way down to the orphanage .
this is father keene . he 's just a wonderful guy .
he had kids from all over korea living there , and he would find families for these kids .
this is a social worker interviewing hyun-sook .
now , i had always thought she was completely untouched by all of this , because the grandmother , to me , appeared to be sort of the village wise woman , and the person everybody - throughout the day , i noticed people kept coming to visit her grandmother .
and i always had this mental picture that even though they may have been one of the poorer families in the village , they were one of the most respected families in the village .
and i always felt that the grandmother had kind of demanded , and insisted , that the villagers treat hyun-sook with the same respect they treated her .
hyun-sook stayed at father keene 's , and her uncle agreed to let her stay there until the adoption went through .
he actually agreed to the adoption .
and i went off on assignment and came back a week later , and father keene said , " i 've got to talk to you about hyun-sook . "
i kind of said , " oh god , now what ? "
and he takes me into this room , and he closes the door , and he says , " i have 75 children here in the orphanage , and it 's total bedlam . "
and there 's clothes , and there 's kids , and , you know , there 's three adults and 75 kids - you can imagine .
and he said , " the second day she was here she made up a list of all of the names of the older kids and the younger kids .
and she assigned one of the older kids to each of the younger kids .
and then she set up a work detail list of who cleaned the orphanage on what day . "
and he said , " she 's telling me that i 'm messy , and i have to clean up my room . "
and he said , " i do n't know who raised her , but , " he said , " she 's running the orphanage , and she 's been here three days . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was movie day - that she organized - where all the kids went to the movies .
a lot of the kids who had been adopted actually wrote back to the other kids , telling them about what their life was like with their new families .
so , it was a really big deal when the letters showed up .
this is a woman who is now working at the orphanage , whose son had been adopted .
gene and gail started studying korean the moment they had gotten my first letter .
they really wanted to be able to welcome hyun-sook into their family .
and one of the things father keene told me when i came back from one of these trips - hyun-sook had chosen the name natasha , which i understood was from her watching a " rocky and bullwinkle " cartoon on the american air force station .
this may be one of those myth-buster things that we 'll have to clear up here , in a minute .
so , my friend gene flew over with his son , tim .
gail could n't come .
and they spent a lot of time huddled over a dictionary .
and this was gene showing the uncle where atlanta was on the map , where he lived .
this is the uncle signing the adoption papers .
now , we went out to dinner that night to celebrate .
the uncle went back to his family , and natasha and tim and gene and i went out to dinner .
and gene was showing natasha how to use a knife and fork , and then natasha was returning the utensil lessons .
we went back to our hotel room , and gene was showing natasha also where atlanta was .
this is the third night we were in korea .
the first night we 'd gotten a room for the kids right next to us .
now , i 'd been staying in this room for about three months - it was a little 15-story korean hotel .
so , the second night , we did n't keep the kids ' room , because we went down and slept on the floor with all the kids at the orphanage .
and the third night , we came back , we 'd just gone out to dinner , where you saw the pictures , and we got to the front desk and the guy at the front desk said , " there 's no other free rooms on your floor tonight , so if you want to put the kids five floors below you , there 's a room there . "
and gene and i looked at each other and said , " no , we do n't want two 11-year-olds five floors away . "
so , his son said , " dad , i have a sleeping bag , i 'll sleep on the floor . "
and i said , " yeah , i have one too . "
so , tim and i slept on the floor , natasha got one bed , gene got the other - kids pass out , it 's been very exciting for three days .
we 're lying in bed , and gene and i are talking about how cool we are .
we said , " that was so great , we saved this little girl 's life . "
we were just like , you know , ah , just full of ourselves .
and we fall asleep - and i 've been in this room , you know , for a couple of months now .
and they always overheat the hotels in korea terribly , so during the day i always left the window open .
and then , at night , about midnight , they turn the heat off in the hotel .
so at about 1 a.m. , the whole room would be like 20 below zero , and i 'd get up .
i 'd been doing this every night i 'd been there .
so , sure enough , it 's one o 'clock , room 's freezing , i go to close the window , and i hear people shouting outside , and i thought , " oh , the bars must have just gotten out . "
and i do n't speak korean , but i 'm hearing these voices , and i 'm not hearing anger , i 'm hearing terror .
so , i open the window , and i look out , and there 's flames coming up the side of our hotel , and the hotel 's on fire .
so , i run over to gene , and i wake him up , and i say , " gene , do n't freak out , i think the hotel 's on fire . "
and now there 's smoke and flames coming by our windows - we 're on the eleventh floor .
so , the two of us were just like , " oh my god , oh my god . "
so , we 're trying to get natasha up , and we ca n't talk to her .
and you know what kids are like when they 've been asleep for like an hour , it 's like they took five valiums - you know , they 're all over the place .
and we ca n't talk to her .
i remember his son had the l.l. bean bootlaces , and we 're trying to do up his laces .
and we open the door and it 's like walking into a blast furnace .
there 's people screaming , there 's the sound of glass breaking , there 's these weird thumps .
and the whole room filled with smoke in about two seconds .
and gene turns around and says , " we 're not going to make it . "
and he closes the door , and the whole room is now filled with smoke .
we 're all choking , and there 's smoke pouring through the vents , under the doors . there 's people screaming .
i just remember this unbelievable , just utter chaos .
i remember sitting near the bed , and i was just so - i had two overwhelming feelings .
one was absolute terror - it 's like , " oh , please god , i just want to wake up .
this has got to be a nightmare , this ca n't be happening .
please , i just want to wake up , it 's got to be a nightmare . "
and the other is unbelievable guilt .
here i 've been , playing god with my friends ' lives , my friends ' son , with natasha 's life , and this what you get when you try playing god , is you hurt people .
i remember just being so frightened and terrified .
and gene , who 's lying on the floor , says , " man , we 've got to soak towels . " i said , " what ? "
he says , " we 've got to soak towels . we 're going to die from the smoke . "
so , we ran to the bathroom , and got towels , and put them over our faces , and the kids faces .
then he said , " do you have gaffer 's tape ? "
i said , " what ? " he said , " do you have gaffer 's tape ? "
i said , " yeah , somewhere in my halliburton . "
he says , " we 've got to stop the smoke . "
he said , " that 's all we can do , we 've got to stop the smoke . "
i mean , gene - thank god for gene .
so , we put the room service menus over the vents in the wall , we put blankets at the bottom of the door , we put the kids on the windowsill to try to get some air .
and there was a building , a new building , going up , that was being built right outside , across the street from our hotel .
and there , in the building were photographers waiting for people to jump .
eleven people ended up dying in the fire .
five people jumped and died , other people were killed by the smoke .
and there 's this loud thumping on the door after about 45 minutes in all this , and people were shouting in korean .
and i remember , natasha did n't want us opening the door - sorry , i was trying not to open the door , because we 'd spent so much time barricading the room .
i did n't know who it was , i did n't know what they wanted , and natasha could tell they were firemen trying to get us out .
i remember a sort of a tussle at the door , trying to get the door open .
in any case , 12 hours later , i mean , they put us in the lobby .
gene ended up using his coat , and his fist in the coat , to break open a liquor cabinet .
people were lying on the floor .
it was one of just the most horrifying nights .
and then 12 hours later , we rented a car , as we had planned to , and drove back to natasha 's village .
and we kept saying , " do you realize we were dying in a hotel fire , like eight hours ago ? "
it 's so weird how life just goes on .
natasha wanted to introduce her brother and father to all the villagers , and the day we showed up turned out to be a 60-year-old man 's birthday .
this guy 's 60 years old .
so it turned into a dual celebration , because natasha was the first person from this village ever to go to the united states .
so , these are the greenhouse tents .
this is the elders teaching gene their dances .
we drank a lot of rice wine . we were both so drunk , i could n't believe it .
this is the last picture before gene and tim headed back .
the adoption people told us it was going to take a year for the adoption to go through .
like , what could you do for a year ?
so i found out the name of every official on both the korean and american side , and i photographed them , and told them how famous they were going to be when this book was done .
and four months later , the adoption papers came through .
this is saying goodbye to everybody at the orphanage .
this is father keene with natasha at the bus stop .
her great aunt at the airport .
i had a wonderful deal with cathay pacific airlines for many years , where they gave me free passes on all their airlines in return for photography .
it was like the ultimate perk .
and the pilot , i actually knew - because they used to let me sit in the jump seat , to tell you how long ago this was .
this is a tri-star , and so they let natasha actually sit in the jump seat .
and the pilot , jeff cowley , actually went back and adopted one of the other kids at the orphanage after meeting natasha .
this is 28 hours later in atlanta . it 's a very long flight .
just to make things even crazier , gail , natasha 's new mom , was three days away from giving birth to her own daughter .
so you know , if you were writing this , you 'd say , " no , we 've got to write the script differently . "
this is the first night showing natasha her new cousins and uncles and aunts .
gene and gail know everyone in atlanta - they 're the most social couple imaginable .
so , at this point , natasha does n't speak a word of english , other than what little father keene taught her .
this is kylie , her sister , who 's now a doctor , on the right .
this is a deal i had with natasha , which is that when we got to atlanta she could take - she could cut off my beard .
she never liked it very much .
she learned english in three months .
she entered seventh grade at her own age level .
pledge of allegiance for the first time .
this is her cooking teacher .
natasha told me that a lot of the kids thought she was stuck up , because they would talk to her and she would n't answer , and they did n't realize she did n't actually speak english very well , in the beginning .
but what i noticed , again as an observer , was she was choosing who was going to be on her team , and seemed to be very popular very , very quickly .
now , remember the picture , how much she looked like her grandmother , at the beginning ?
people were always telling natasha how much she looks like her mother , gail .
this is a tense moment in the first football game , i think .
and kylie - i mean , it was almost like kylie was her own child .
she 's being baptized .
now , a lot of parents , when they adopt , actually want to erase their children 's history .
and gail and gene did the complete opposite .
they were studying korean ; they bought korean clothes .
gene even did a little tile work in the kitchen , which was that , " once upon a time , there was a beautiful girl that came from hills of korea to live happily ever after in atlanta . "
she hates this picture - it was her first job .
she bought a bright red karmann ghia with the money she made working at burger king .
the captain of the cheerleaders .
beauty pageant .
used to do their christmas card every year .
gene 's been restoring this car for a million years .
kodak hired natasha to be a translator for them at the olympics in korea .
her future husband , jeff , was working for canon cameras , and met natasha at the olympic village .
this is her first trip back to korea , so there 's her uncle .
this is her half-sister .
she went back to the village . that 's her best friend 's mother .
and i always thought that was a very annie hall kind of outfit .
it 's just , you know , it was just so interesting , just to watch - this is her mother in the background there .
this is natasha 's wedding day .
gene is looking a little older .
this is sydney , who 's going to be three years old in a couple of days .
and there 's evan .
natasha , would you just come up , for a second , just maybe to say hello to everybody ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- natasha 's actually never heard me tell the story .
i mean , she - you know , we 've looked at the pictures together .
natasha : i 've seen pictures millions of times , but today was the first time i 'm actually seeing him give the whole presentation .
i started crying .
rick smolan : i 'm sure there 's about 40 things she 's going to tell me , " that was n't what happened , that was n't what you said . "
natasha : later , i 'll do that later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rs : anyway , thank you , mike and richard , so much for letting us tell the story .
thank you all of you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- basking sharks are awesome creatures . they are just magnificent .
they grow 10 meters long .
some say bigger .
they might weigh up to two tons .
some say up to five tons .
they 're the second largest fish in the world .
they 're also harmless plankton-feeding animals .
and they are thought to be able to filter a cubic kilometer of water every hour and can feed on 30 kilos of zoo plankton a day to survive .
they 're fantastic creatures .
and we 're very lucky in ireland , we have plenty of basking sharks and plenty of opportunities to study them .
they were also very important to coast communities going back hundreds of years , especially the around the claddagh , duff , connemara region where subsistence farmers used to sail out on their hookers and open boats sometimes way off shore , sometimes to a place called the sunfish bank , which is about 30 miles west of achill island , to kill the basking sharks .
this is an old woodcut from the 17 , 1800s .
so they were very important , and they were important for the oil out of their liver .
a third of the size of the basking shark is their liver , and it 's full of oil .
you get gallons of oil from their liver .
and that oil was used especially for lighting , but also for dressing wounds and other things .
in fact , the streetlights in 1742 of galway , dublin and waterford were linked with sunfish oil .
and " sunfish " is one of the words for basking sharks .
so they were incredibly important animals .
they 've been around a long time , have been very important to coast communities .
probably the best documented basking shark fishery in the world is that from achill island .
this is keem bay up in achill island .
and sharks used to come into the bay .
and the fishermen would tie a net off the headland , string it out along the other net .
and as the shark came round , it would hit the net , the net would collapse on it .
it would often drown and suffocate .
or at times , they would row out in their small currachs and kill it with a lance through the back of the neck .
and then they 'd tow the sharks back to purteen harbor , boil them up , use the oil .
they used to use the flesh as well for fertilizer and also would fin the sharks .
this is probably the biggest threat to sharks worldwide - it is the finning of sharks .
we 're often all frightened of sharks thanks to " jaws . "
maybe five or six people get killed by sharks every year .
there was someone recently , was n't there ? just a couple weeks ago .
we kill about 100 million sharks a year .
so i do n't know what the balance is , but i think sharks have got more right to be fearful of us than we have of them .
it was a well-documented fishery , and as you can see here , it peaked in the 50s where they were killing 1,500 sharks a year .
and it declined very fast - a classic boom and bust fishery , which suggests that a stock has been depleted or there 's low reproductive rates .
and they killed about 12,000 sharks in this period , literally just by stringing a manila rope off the tip of keem bay at achill island .
sharks were still killed up into the mid-80s , especially after places like dunmore east in county waterford .
and about two and a half , 3,000 sharks were killed up till ' 85 , many by norwegian vessels .
the black , you ca n't really see this , but these are norwegian basking shark hunting vessels , and the black line in the crow 's nest signifies this is a shark vessel rather than a whaling vessel .
the importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language .
now i do n't pretend to have any irish , but in kerry they were often known as " ainmhide na seolta , " the monster with the sails .
and another title would be " liop an da lapa , " the unwieldy beast with two fins .
" liabhan mor , " suggesting a big animal .
or my favorite , " liabhan chor greine , " the great fish of the sun .
and that 's a lovely , evocative name .
on tory island , which is a strange place anyway , they were known as muldoons , and no one seems to know why .
hope there 's no one from tory here ; lovely place .
but more commonly all around the island , they were known as the sunfish .
and this represents their habit of basking on the surface when the sun is out .
there 's great concern that basking sharks are depleted all throughout the world .
some people say it 's not population decline .
it might be a change in the distribution of plankton .
and it 's been suggested that basking sharks would make fantastic indicators of climate change , because they 're basically continuous plankton recorders swimming around with their mouth open .
they 're now listed as vulnerable under the iucn .
there 's also moves in europe to try and stop catching them .
there 's now a ban on catching them and even landing them and even landing ones that are caught accidentally .
they 're not protected in ireland .
in fact , they have no legislative status in ireland whatsoever , despite our importance for the species and also the historical context within which basking sharks reside .
we know very little about them .
and most of what we do know is based on their habit of coming to the surface .
and we try to guess what they 're doing from their behavior on the surface .
i only found out last year , at a conference on the isle of man , just how unusual it is to live somewhere where basking sharks regularly , frequently and predictably come to the surface to " bask . "
and it 's a fantastic opportunity in science to see and experience basking sharks , and they are awesome creatures .
and it gives us a fantastic opportunity to actually study them , to get access to them .
so what we 've been doing a couple of years - but last year was a big year - is we started tagging sharks so we could try to get some idea of sight fidelity and movements and things like that .
so we concentrated mainly in north donegal and west kerry as the two areas where i was mainly active .
and we tagged them very simply , not very hi-tech , with a big , long pole .
this is a beachcaster rod with a tag on the end .
go up in your boat and tag the shark .
and we were very effective .
we tagged 105 sharks last summer .
we got 50 in three days off inishowen peninsula .
half the challenge is to get access , is to be in the right place at the right time .
but it 's a very simple and easy technique .
i 'll show you what they look like .
we use a pole camera on the boat to actually film shark .
one is to try and work out the gender of the shark .
we also deployed a couple of satellite tags , so we did use hi-tech stuff as well .
these are archival tags .
so what they do is they store the data .
a satellite tag only works when the air is clear of the water and can send a signal to the satellite .
and of course , sharks , fish , are underwater most of the time .
so this tag actually works out the locations of shark depending on the timing and the setting of the sun , plus water temperature and depth .
and you have to kind of reconstruct the path .
what happens is that you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period , in this case it was eight months , and literally to the day the tag popped off , drifted up , said hello to the satellite and sent , not all the data , but enough data for us to use .
and this is the only way to really work out the behavior and the movements when they 're under water .
and here 's a couple of maps that we 've done .
that one , you can see that we tagged both off kerry .
and basically it spent all its time , the last eight months , in irish waters .
christmas day it was out on the shelf edge .
and here 's one that we have n't ground-truthed it yet with sea surface temperature and water depth , but again , the second shark kind of spent most of its time in and around the irish sea .
colleagues from the isle of man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the isle of man all the way out to nova scotia in about 90 days .
that 's nine and a half thousand kilometers . we never thought that happened .
another colleague in the states tagged about 20 sharks off massachusetts , and his tags did n't really work .
all he knows is where he tagged them and he knows where they popped off .
and his tags popped off in the caribbean and even in brazil .
and we thought that basking sharks were temperate animals and only lived in our latitude .
but in actual fact , they 're obviously crossing the equator as well .
so very simple things like that , we 're trying to learn about basking sharks .
one thing that i think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks are .
now i 'm not a geneticist , so i 'm not going to pretend to understand the genetics .
and that 's why it 's great to have collaboration .
whereas i 'm a field person , i get panic attacks if i have to spend too many hours in a lab with a white coat on - take me away .
so we can work with geneticists who understand that .
so when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks , they found that the diversity was incredibly low .
if you look at the first line really , you can see that all these different shark species are all quite similar .
i think this means basically that they 're all sharks and they 've come from a common ancestry .
if you look at nucleotide diversity , which is more genetics that are passed on through parents , you can see that basking sharks , if you look at the first study , was an order of magnitude less diversity than other shark species .
and you see that this work was done in 2006 .
before 2006 , we had no idea of the genetic variability of basking sharks .
we had no idea , did they distinguish into different populations ?
were there subpopulations ?
and of course , that 's very important if you want to know what the population size is and the status of the animals .
so les noble in aberdeen kind of found this a bit unbelievable really .
so he did another study using microsatellites , which are much more expensive , much more time consuming , and , to his surprise , came up with almost identical results .
so it does seem to be that basking sharks , for some reason , have incredibly low diversity .
and it 's thought maybe it was a bottleneck , a genetic bottleneck thought to be 12,000 years ago , and this has caused a very low diversity .
and yet , if you look at whale sharks , which is the other plankton eating large shark , its diversity is much greater .
so it does n't really make sense at all .
they found that there was no genetic differentiation between any of the world 's oceans of basking sharks .
so even though basking sharks are found throughout the world , you could n't tell the difference genetically from one from the pacific , the atlantic , new zealand , or from ireland , south africa .
they all basically seem the same .
but again , it 's kind of surprising . you would n't really expect that .
i do n't understand this . i do n't pretend to understand this .
and i suspect most geneticists do n't understand it either , but they produce the numbers .
so you can actually estimate the population size based on the diversity of the genetics .
and rus hoelzel came up with an effective population size : 8,200 animals .
that 's it .
8,000 animals in the world .
you 're thinking , " that 's just ridiculous . no way . "
so les did a finer study and he found out it came out about 9,000 .
and using different microsatellites gave the different results .
but the average of all these studies came out - the mean is about 5,000 , which i personally do n't believe , but then i am a skeptic .
but even if you toss a few numbers around , you 're probably talking of an effective population of about 20,000 animals .
do you remember how many they killed off achill there in the 70s and the 50s ?
so what it tells us actually is that there 's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small .
in fact , of those 20,000 , 8,000 were thought to be females .
there 's only 8,000 basking shark females in the world ?
i do n't know . i do n't believe it .
the problem with this is they were constrained with samples .
they did n't get enough samples to really explore the genetics in enough detail .
so where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis ?
well one obvious source is dead sharks , dead sharks washed up .
we might get two or three dead sharks washed up in ireland a year , if we 're kind of lucky .
another source would be fisheries bycatch .
we were getting quite a few caught in surface drift nets .
that 's banned now , and that 'll be good news for the sharks .
and some are caught in nets , in trawls .
this is a shark that was actually landed in howth just before christmas , illegally , because you 're not allowed to do that under e.u. law , and was actually sold for eight euros a kilo as shark steak .
they even put a recipe up on the wall , until they were told this was illegal .
and they actually did get a fine for that .
so if you look at all those studies i showed you , the total number of samples worldwide is 86 at present .
so it 's very important work , and they can ask some really good questions , and they can tell us about population size and subpopulations and structure , but they 're constrained by lack of samples .
now when we were out tagging our sharks , this is how we tagged them on the front of a rib - get in there fast - occasionally the sharks do react .
and on one occasion when we were up in malin head up in donegal , a shark smacked the side of the boat with his tail , more , i think , in startle to the fact that a boat came near it , rather than the tag going in .
and that was fine . we got wet . no problem .
and then when myself and emmett got back to malin head , to the pier , i noticed some black slime on the front of the boat .
and i remembered - i used to spend a lot of time out on commercial fishing boats - i remember fishermen telling me they can always tell when a basking shark 's been caught in the net because it leaves this black slime behind .
so i was thinking that must have come from the shark .
now we had an interest in getting tissue samples for genetics because we knew they were very valuable .
and we would use conventional methods - i have a crossbow , you see the crossbow in my hand there , which we use to sample whales and dolphins for genetic studies as well .
so i tried that , i tried many techniques .
all it was doing was breaking my arrows because the shark skin is just so strong .
there was no way we were going to get a sample from that .
so that was n't going to work .
so when i saw the black slime on the bow of the boat , i thought , " if you take what you 're given in this world ... "
so i scraped it off .
and i had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists .
so i scraped the slime off and i sent it off to aberdeen .
and i said , " you might try that . "
and they sat on it for months actually .
it was only because we had a conference on the isle of man .
but i kept emailing , saying , " have you had a chance to look at my slime yet ? "
and he was like , " yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . later , later , later . "
anyway he thought he 'd better do it , because i never met him before and he might lose face if he had n't done the thing i sent him .
and he was amazed that they actually got dna from the slime .
and they amplified it and they tested it and they found , yes , this was actually basking shark dna , which was got from the slime .
and so he was all very excited .
it became known as simon 's shark slime .
and i thought , " hey , you know , i can build on this . "
so we thought , okay , we 're going to try to get out and get some slime .
so having spent three and a half thousand on satellite tags , i then thought i 'd invest 7.95 - the price is still on it - in my local hardware store in kilrush for a mop handle and even less money on some oven cleaners .
and i wrapped the oven cleaner around the end of the mop handle and was desperate , desperate to have an opportunity to get some sharks .
now this was into august now , and normally sharks peak at june , july .
and you rarely see them .
you can only rarely be in the right place to find sharks into august .
so we were desperate .
so we rushed out to blasket as soon as we heard there were sharks there and managed to find some sharks .
so by just rubbing the mop handle down the shark as it swam under the boat - you see , here 's a shark that 's running under the boat here - we managed to collect slime .
and here it is .
look at that lovely , black shark slime .
and in about half an hour , we got five samples , five individual sharks , were sampled using simon 's shark slime sampling system .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been working on whales and dolphins in ireland for 20 years now , and they 're kind of a bit more dramatic .
you probably saw the humpback whale footage that we got there a month or two ago off county wexford .
and you always think you might have some legacy you can leave the world behind .
and i was thinking of humpback whales breaching and dolphins .
but hey , sometimes these things are sent to you and you just have to take them when they come .
so this is possibly going to be my legacy - simon 's shark slime .
so we got more money this year to carry on collecting more and more samples .
and one thing that is kind of very useful is that we use a pole cameras - this is my colleague joanne with a pole camera - where you can actually look underneath the shark .
and what you 're trying to look at is the males have claspers , which kind of dangle out behind the back of the shark .
so you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark .
so if we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it , we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female .
because at the moment , they actually have no way genetically of telling the difference between a male and a female , which i found absolutely staggering , because they do n't know what primers to look for .
and being able to tell the gender of a shark has got very important for things like policing the trade in basking shark and other species through societies , because it is illegal to trade any sharks .
and they are caught and they are on the market .
so as a field biologist , you just want to get encounters with these animals .
you want to learn as much as you can .
they 're often quite brief . they 're often very seasonally constrained .
and you just want to learn as much as you can as soon as you can .
but is n't it fantastic that you can then offer these samples and opportunities to other disciplines , such as geneticists , who can gain so much more from that .
so as i said , these things are sent to you in strange ways . grab them while you can .
i 'll take that as my scientific legacy .
hopefully i might get something a bit more dramatic and romantic before i die .
but for the time being , thank you for that .
and keep an eye out for sharks .
if you 're more interested , we have a basking shark website now just set up .
so thank you and thank you for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- erez lieberman aiden : everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words .
but we at harvard were wondering if this was really true .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we assembled a team of experts , spanning harvard , mit , the american heritage dictionary , the encyclopedia britannica and even our proud sponsors , the google .
and we cogitated about this for about four years .
and we came to a startling conclusion .
ladies and gentlemen , a picture is not worth a thousand words .
in fact , we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words .
jean-baptiste michel : so how did we get to this conclusion ?
so erez and i were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history : change over time .
so many books actually have been written over the years .
so we were thinking , well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books .
now of course , if there 's a scale for how awesome that is , that has to rank extremely , extremely high .
now the problem is there 's an x-axis for that , which is the practical axis .
this is very , very low .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now people tend to use an alternative approach , which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully .
this is extremely practical , but not so awesome .
what you really want to do is to get to the awesome yet practical part of this space .
so it turns out there was a company across the river called google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach .
they have digitized millions of books .
so what that means is , one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button .
that 's very practical and extremely awesome .
ela : let me tell you a little bit about where books come from .
since time immemorial , there have been authors .
these authors have been striving to write books .
and this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago .
since then , the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions , publishing books .
now if those books are not lost to history , then they are somewhere in a library , and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by google , which has scanned 15 million books to date .
now when google digitizes a book , they put it into a really nice format .
now we 've got the data , plus we have metadata .
we have information about things like where was it published , who was the author , when was it published .
and what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that 's not the highest quality data .
what we 're left with is a collection of five million books , 500 billion words , a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome - a text which , when written out , would stretch from here to the moon and back 10 times over - a veritable shard of our cultural genome .
of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- was what any self-respecting researchers would have done .
we took a page out of xkcd , and we said , " stand back .
we 're going to try science . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jm : now of course , we were thinking , well let 's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it .
now we 're thinking , what data can we release ?
well of course , you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books .
now google , and jon orwant in particular , told us a little equation that we should learn .
so you have five million , that is , five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit .
so , although that would be really , really awesome , again , that 's extremely , extremely impractical .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now again , we kind of caved in , and we did the very practical approach , which was a bit less awesome .
we said , well instead of releasing the full text , we 're going to release statistics about the books .
so take for instance " a gleam of happiness . "
it 's four words ; we call that a four-gram .
we 're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801 , 1802 , 1803 , all the way up to 2008 .
that gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time .
we do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books , and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing .
ela : so those two billion lines , we call them two billion n-grams .
what do they tell us ?
well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends .
let me give you an example .
let 's suppose that i am thriving , then tomorrow i want to tell you about how well i did .
and so i might say , " yesterday , i throve . "
alternatively , i could say , " yesterday , i thrived . "
well which one should i use ?
how to know ?
as of about six months ago , the state of the art in this field is that you would , for instance , go up to the following psychologist with fabulous hair , and you 'd say , " steve , you 're an expert on the irregular verbs .
what should i do ? "
and he 'd tell you , " well most people say thrived , but some people say throve . "
and you also knew , more or less , that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair , -lrb- laughter -rrb- " tom , what should i say ? "
he 'd say , " well , in my day , most people throve , but some thrived . "
so now what i 'm just going to show you is raw data .
two rows from this table of two billion entries .
what you 're seeing is year by year frequency of " thrived " and " throve " over time .
now this is just two out of two billion rows .
so the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- jm : now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words .
for instance , this one .
if you just take influenza , you will see peaks at the time where you knew big flu epidemics were killing people around the globe .
ela : if you were not yet convinced , sea levels are rising , so is atmospheric co2 and global temperature .
jm : you might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram , and that 's to tell nietzsche that god is not dead , although you might agree that he might need a better publicist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ela : you can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing .
for instance , let me tell you the history of the year 1950 .
pretty much for the vast majority of history , no one gave a damn about 1950 .
in 1700 , in 1800 , in 1900 , no one cared .
through the 30s and 40s , no one cared .
suddenly , in the mid-40s , there started to be a buzz .
people realized that 1950 was going to happen , and it could be big .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people were walking around obsessed .
they could n't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950 , all the things they were planning to do in 1950 , all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950 .
in fact , 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter , people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened , in ' 51 , ' 52 , ' 53 .
finally in 1954 , someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and just like that , the bubble burst .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record , with a little twist , because now we 've got these nice charts .
and because we have these nice charts , we can measure things .
we can say , " well how fast does the bubble burst ? "
and it turns out that we can measure that very precisely .
equations were derived , graphs were produced , and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year .
we are losing interest in the past more rapidly .
jm : now a little piece of career advice .
so for those of you who seek to be famous , we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures , authors , actors and so on .
so if you want to become famous early on , you should be an actor , because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s - you 're still young , it 's really great .
now if you can wait a little bit , you should be an author , because then you rise to very great heights , like mark twain , for instance : extremely famous .
but if you want to reach the very top , you should delay gratification and , of course , become a politician .
so here you will become famous by the end of your 50s , and become very , very famous afterward .
so scientists also tend to get famous when they 're much older .
like for instance , biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors .
one mistake you should not do is become a mathematician .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you do that , you might think , " oh great . i 'm going to do my best work when i 'm in my 20s . "
but guess what , nobody will really care .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ela : there are more sobering notes among the n-grams .
for instance , here 's the trajectory of marc chagall , an artist born in 1887 .
and this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person .
he gets more and more and more famous , except if you look in german .
if you look in german , you see something completely bizarre , something you pretty much never see , which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets , going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945 , before rebounding afterward .
and of course , what we 're seeing is the fact marc chagall was a jewish artist in nazi germany .
now these signals are actually so strong that we do n't need to know that someone was censored .
we can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing .
here 's a simple way to do it .
well , a reasonable expectation is that somebody 's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after .
so that 's sort of what we expect .
and we compare that to the fame that we observe .
and we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index .
if the suppression index is very , very , very small , then you very well might be being suppressed .
if it 's very large , maybe you 're benefiting from propaganda .
jm : now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations .
so for instance , here - this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in english books where there 's no known suppression - it would be like this , basically tightly centered on one .
what you expect is basically what you observe .
this is distribution as seen in germany - very different , it 's shifted to the left .
people talked about it twice less as it should have been .
but much more importantly , the distribution is much wider .
there are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been .
but then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda .
this picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record .
ela : so culturomics is what we call this method .
it 's kind of like genomics .
except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome .
culturomics is similar .
it 's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture .
here , instead of through the lens of a genome , through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record .
the great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it .
why can everyone do it ?
everyone can do it because three guys , jon orwant , matt gray and will brockman over at google , saw the prototype of the ngram viewer , and they said , " this is so fun .
we have to make this available for people . "
so in two weeks flat - the two weeks before our paper came out - they coded up a version of the ngram viewer for the general public .
and so you too can type in any word or phrase that you 're interested in and see its n-gram immediately - also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears .
jm : now this was used over a million times on the first day , and this is really the best of all the queries .
so people want to be their best , put their best foot forward .
but it turns out in the 18th century , people did n't really care about that at all .
they did n't want to be their best , they wanted to be their beft .
so what happened is , of course , this is just a mistake .
it 's not that strove for mediocrity , it 's just that the s used to be written differently , kind of like an f.
now of course , google did n't pick this up at the time , so we reported this in the science article that we wrote .
but it turns out this is just a reminder that , although this is a lot of fun , when you interpret these graphs , you have to be very careful , and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences .
ela : people have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , we 're not going to have to talk , we 're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent .
this person was interested in the history of frustration .
there 's various types of frustration .
if you stub your toe , that 's a one a " argh . "
if the planet earth is annihilated by the vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass , that 's an eight a " aaaaaaaargh . "
this person studies all the " arghs , " from one through eight a 's .
and it turns out that the less-frequent " arghs " are , of course , the ones that correspond to things that are more frustrating - except , oddly , in the early 80s .
we think that might have something to do with reagan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jm : there are many usages of this data , but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized .
google has started to digitize 15 million books .
that 's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published .
it 's a sizable chunk of human culture .
there 's much more in culture : there 's manuscripts , there newspapers , there 's things that are not text , like art and paintings .
these all happen to be on our computers , on computers across the world .
and when that happens , that will transform the way we have to understand our past , our present and human culture .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am going to speak about corruption , but i would like to juxtapose two different things .
one is the large global economy , the large globalized economy , and the other one is the small , and very limited , capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern , to shape , this economy .
because there is this asymmetry , which creates , basically , failing governance .
failing governance in many areas : in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment , in the area of exploitation of women and children , in the area of climate change , in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy , which is operating in a worldwide arena .
and i think corruption , and the fight against corruption , and the impact of corruption , is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what i mean with this failure of governance .
let me talk about my own experience .
i used to work as the director of the world bank office in nairobi for east africa .
at that time , i noticed that corruption , that grand corruption , that systematic corruption , was undermining everything we were trying to do .
and therefore , i began to not only try to protect the work of the world bank , our own projects , our own programs against corruption , but in general , i thought , " we need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption . "
and as soon as i started this work , i received a memorandum from the world bank , from the legal department first , in which they said , " you are not allowed to do this .
you are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries .
this is forbidden by the charter of the world bank , so i want you to stop your doings . "
in the meantime , i was chairing donor meetings , for instance , in which the various donors , and many of them like to be in nairobi - it is true , it is one of the unsafest cities of the world , but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable .
and in these donor meetings , i noticed that many of the worst projects - which were put forward by our clients , by the governments , by promoters , many of them representing suppliers from the north - that the worst projects were realized first .
let me give you an example : a huge power project , 300 million dollars , to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable , and one of the most beautiful , areas of western kenya .
and we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits : it had no clients , nobody would buy the electricity there , nobody was interested in irrigation projects .
to the contrary , we knew that this project would destroy the environment : it would destroy riparian forests , which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups , the samburu and the turkana in this area .
so everybody knew this is a , not a useless project , this is an absolute damaging , a terrible project - not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars , and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools , like hospitals and so on .
and yet , we all rejected this project , none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it , and it was the first project to be implemented .
the good projects , which we as a donor community would take under our wings , they took years , you know , you had too many studies , and very often they did n't succeed .
but these bad projects , which were absolutely damaging - for the economy for many generations , for the environment , for thousands of families who had to be resettled - they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks , of supplier agencies , of insurance agencies - like in germany , hermes , and so on - and they came back very , very quickly , driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the north .
now , these suppliers were our big companies .
they were the actors of this global market , which i mentioned in the beginning .
they were the siemenses of this world , coming from france , from the uk , from japan , from canada , from germany , and they were systematically driven by systematic , large-scale corruption .
we are not talking about 50,000 dollars here , or 100,000 dollars there , or one million dollars there .
no , we are talking about 10 million , 20 million dollars on the swiss bank accounts , on the bank accounts of liechtenstein , of the president 's ministers , the high officials in the para-statal sectors .
this was the reality which i saw , and not only one project like that : i saw , i would say , over the years i worked in africa , i saw hundreds of projects like this .
and so , i became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries , which is the main reason for the misery , for the poverty , for the conflicts , for the violence , for the desperation in many of these countries .
that we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line , that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world , twice that number , more than two billion people without sanitation and so on , and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children , still , child mortality of more than 10 million people every year , children dying before they are five years old : the cause of this is , to a large extent , grand corruption .
now , why did the world bank not let me do this work ?
i found out afterwards , after i left , under a big fight , the world bank .
the reason was that the members of the world bank thought that foreign bribery was okay , including germany .
in germany , foreign bribery was allowed .
it was even tax-deductible .
no wonder that most of the most important international operators in germany , but also in france and the uk and scandinavia , everywhere , systematically bribed .
not all of them , but most of them .
and this is the phenomenon which i call failing governance , because when i then came to germany and started this little ngo here in berlin , at the villa borsig , we were told , " you can not stop our german exporters from bribing , because we will lose our contracts .
we will lose to the french , we will lose to the swedes , we 'll lose to the japanese . "
and therefore , there was a indeed a prisoner 's dilemma , which made it very difficult for an individual company , an individual exporting country to say , " we are not going to continue this deadly , disastrous habit of large companies to bribe . "
so this is what i mean with a failing governance structure , because even the powerful government , which we have in germany , comparatively , was not able to say , " we will not allow our companies to bribe abroad . "
they needed help , and the large companies themselves have this dilemma .
many of them did n't want to bribe .
many of the german companies , for instance , believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price , so they are very competitive .
they are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are , but they were not allowed to show their strengths , because the world was eaten up by grand corruption .
and this is why i 'm telling you this : civil society rose to the occasion .
we had this small ngo , transparency international .
they began to think of an escape route from this prisoner 's dilemma , and we developed concepts of collective action , basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table , explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing , and to make a long story short , we managed to eventually get germany to sign together with the other oecd countries and a few other exporters .
in 1997 , a convention , under the auspices of the oecd , which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , thank you . i mean , it 's interesting , in doing this , we had to sit together with the companies .
we had here in berlin , at the aspen institute on the wannsee , we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry , and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery .
in the first session - we had three sessions over the course of two years .
and president von weizsäcker , by the way , chaired one of the sessions , the first one , to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs , who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations .
and in the first session , they all said , " this is not bribery , what we are doing . " this is customary there .
this is what these other cultures demand .
they even applaud it .
in fact , -lsb- unclear -rsb- still says this today .
and so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing .
but in the second session , they admitted already that they would never do this , what they are doing in these other countries , here in germany , or in the u.k. , and so on .
cabinet ministers would admit this .
and in the final session , at the aspen institute , we had them all sign an open letter to the kohl government , at the time , requesting that they participate in the oecd convention .
and this is , in my opinion , an example of soft power , because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us .
we had a longer-term time perspective .
we had a broader , geographically much wider , constituency we were trying to defend .
and that 's why the law has changed .
that 's why siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that 's why min is in the trouble they are in .
in some other countries , the oecd convention is not yet properly enforced .
and , again , civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment .
in london , for instance , where the bae got away with a huge corruption case , which the serious fraud office tried to prosecute , 100 million british pounds , every year for ten years , to one particular official of one particular friendly country , who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment .
this case , they are not prosecuting in the uk .
why ? because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of great britain .
civil society is pushing , civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem , also in the u.k. , and also in japan , which is not properly enforcing , and so on .
in germany , we are pushing the ratification of the un convention , which is a subsequent convention .
we are , germany , is not ratifying .
why ? because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies .
in germany , we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant , but you are allowed to bribe a deputy .
this is , under german law , allowed , and the members of our parliament do n't want to change this , and this is why they ca n't sign the u.n. convention against foreign bribery - one of they very , very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world , but not able to ratify the convention , which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world .
i see my time is ticking .
let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened .
i believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption , one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance .
by now , the united nations is totally on our side .
the world bank has turned from saulus to paulus ; under wolfensohn , they became , i would say , the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world .
most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on .
and this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem , in the development of remedies , in the implementation of reforms , and then later , in the monitoring of reforms .
of course , if civil society organizations want to play that role , they have to grow into this responsibility .
not all civil society organizations are good .
the ku klux klan is an ngo .
so , we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself .
they have to have a much more transparent financial governance .
they have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations .
we also need much more competence of civil society leaders .
this is why we have set up the governance school and the center for civil society here in berlin , because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in germany and continental europe in general , do not focus enough , yet , on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society .
but what i 'm saying from my very practical experience : if civil society does it right and joins the other actors - in particular , governments , governments and their international institutions , but also large international actors , in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility - then in this magical triangle between civil society , government and private sector , there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up on a steady diet of science fiction .
in high school , i took a bus to school an hour each way every day .
and i was always absorbed in a book , science fiction book , which took my mind to other worlds , and satisfied , in a narrative form , this insatiable sense of curiosity that i had .
and you know , that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever i was n't in school i was out in the woods , hiking and taking " samples " - frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water - and bringing it back , looking at it under the microscope .
you know , i was a real science geek .
but it was all about trying to understand the world , understand the limits of possibility .
and my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me , because what was happening , this was in the late ' 60s , we were going to the moon , we were exploring the deep oceans .
jacques cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined .
so , that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it .
and i was an artist .
i could draw . i could paint .
and i found that because there were n't video games and this saturation of cg movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape , i had to create these images in my head .
you know , we all did , as kids having to read a book , and through the author 's description , put something on the movie screen in our heads .
and so , my response to this was to paint , to draw alien creatures , alien worlds , robots , spaceships , all that stuff .
i was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook .
that was - the creativity had to find its outlet somehow .
and an interesting thing happened : the jacques cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on earth .
i might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday - that seemed pretty darn unlikely .
but that was a world i could really go to , right here on earth , that was as rich and exotic as anything that i had imagined from reading these books .
so , i decided i was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15 .
and the only problem with that was that i lived in a little village in canada , 600 miles from the nearest ocean .
but i did n't let that daunt me .
i pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in buffalo , new york , right across the border from where we live .
and i actually got certified in a pool at a ymca in the dead of winter in buffalo , new york .
and i did n't see the ocean , a real ocean , for another two years , until we moved to california .
since then , in the intervening 40 years , i 've spent about 3,000 hours underwater , and 500 hours of that was in submersibles .
and i 've learned that that deep-ocean environment , and even the shallow oceans , are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination .
nature 's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination .
i still , to this day , stand in absolute awe of what i see when i make these dives .
and my love affair with the ocean is ongoing , and just as strong as it ever was .
but when i chose a career as an adult , it was filmmaking .
and that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge i had to tell stories with my urges to create images .
and i was , as a kid , constantly drawing comic books , and so on .
so , filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together , and that made sense .
and of course the stories that i chose to tell were science fiction stories : " terminator , " " aliens " and " the abyss . "
and with " the abyss , " i was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking .
so , you know , merging the two passions .
something interesting came out of " the abyss , " which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film , which was to create this kind of liquid water creature , we actually embraced computer generated animation , cg .
and this resulted in the first soft-surface character , cg animation that was ever in a movie .
and even though the film did n't make any money - barely broke even , i should say - i witnessed something amazing , which is that the audience , the global audience , was mesmerized by this apparent magic .
you know , it 's arthur clarke 's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic .
they were seeing something magical .
and so that got me very excited .
and i thought , " wow , this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art . "
so , with " terminator 2 , " which was my next film , we took that much farther .
working with ilm , we created the liquid metal dude in that film . the success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work .
and it did , and we created magic again , and we had the same result with an audience - although we did make a little more money on that one .
so , drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to , " this is going to be a whole new world , " this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists .
so , i started a company with stan winston , my good friend stan winston , who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time , and it was called digital domain .
and the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on , and we would go right to digital production .
and we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while .
but we found ourselves lagging in the mid ' 90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do .
so , i wrote this piece called " avatar , " which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects , of cg effects , beyond , with realistic human emotive characters generated in cg , and the main characters would all be in cg , and the world would be in cg .
and the envelope pushed back , and i was told by the folks at my company that we were n't going to be able to do this for a while .
so , i shelved it , and i made this other movie about a big ship that sinks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , i went and pitched it to the studio as " ' romeo and juliet ' on a ship : " it 's going to be this epic romance , passionate film . "
secretly , what i wanted to do was i wanted to dive to the real wreck of " titanic . "
and that 's why i made the movie .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's the truth . now , the studio did n't know that .
but i convinced them . i said , " we 're going to dive to the wreck . we 're going to film it for real .
we 'll be using it in the opening of the film .
it will be really important . it will be a great marketing hook . "
and i talked them into funding an expedition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sounds crazy . but this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality .
because we actually created a reality where six months later , i find myself in a russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north atlantic , looking at the real titanic through a view port .
not a movie , not hd - for real .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , that blew my mind .
and it took a lot of preparation , we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things .
but , it struck me how much this dive , these deep dives , was like a space mission .
you know , where it was highly technical , and it required enormous planning .
you get in this capsule , you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you ca n't get back by yourself .
and i thought like , " wow . i 'm like , living in a science fiction movie .
this is really cool . "
and so , i really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration .
of course , the curiosity , the science component of it - it was everything . it was adventure , it was curiosity , it was imagination .
and it was an experience that hollywood could n't give me .
because , you know , i could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it . but i could n't imagine what i was seeing out that window .
as we did some of our subsequent expeditions , i was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that i had never seen before , sometimes things that no one had seen before , that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them .
so , i was completely smitten by this , and had to do more .
and so , i actually made a kind of curious decision .
after the success of " titanic , " i said , " ok , i 'm going to park my day job as a hollywood movie maker , and i 'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while . "
and so , we started planning these expeditions .
and we wound up going to the bismark , and exploring it with robotic vehicles .
we went back to the titanic wreck .
we took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic .
and the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship , which had never been done .
nobody had ever looked inside the wreck . they did n't have the means to do it , so we created technology to do it .
so , you know , here i am now , on the deck of titanic , sitting in a submersible , and looking out at planks that look much like this , where i knew that the band had played .
and i 'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship .
when i say , " i 'm operating it , " but my mind is in the vehicle .
i felt like i was physically present inside the shipwreck of titanic .
and it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience i 've ever had , because i would know before i turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it , because i had walked the set for months when we were making the movie .
and the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship .
so , it was this absolutely remarkable experience .
and it really made me realize that the telepresence experience - that you actually can have these robotic avatars , then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle , into this other form of existence .
it was really , really quite profound .
and it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that i can imagine , as a science fiction fan .
so , having done these expeditions , and really beginning to appreciate what was down there , such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing , amazing animals - they 're basically aliens right here on earth .
they live in an environment of chemosynthesis .
they do n't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do .
and so , you 're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-centigrade water plumes .
you think they ca n't possibly exist .
at the same time i was getting very interested in space science as well - again , it 's the science fiction influence , as a kid .
and i wound up getting involved with the space community , really involved with nasa , sitting on the nasa advisory board , planning actual space missions , going to russia , going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols , and all these sorts of things , to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3d camera systems .
and this was fascinating .
but what i wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep .
and taking them down so that they had access - astrobiologists , planetary scientists , people who were interested in these extreme environments - taking them down to the vents , and letting them see , and take samples and test instruments , and so on .
so , here we were making documentary films , but actually doing science , and actually doing space science .
i 'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan , you know , as a kid , and doing this stuff for real .
and you know , along the way in this journey of discovery , i learned a lot .
i learned a lot about science . but i also learned a lot about leadership .
now you think director has got to be a leader , leader of , captain of the ship , and all that sort of thing .
i did n't really learn about leadership until i did these expeditions .
because i had to , at a certain point , say , " what am i doing out here ?
why am i doing this ? what do i get out of it ? "
we do n't make money at these damn shows .
we barely break even . there is no fame in it .
people sort of think i went away between " titanic " and " avatar " and was buffing my nails someplace , sitting at the beach .
made all these films , made all these documentary films for a very limited audience .
no fame , no glory , no money . what are you doing ?
you 're doing it for the task itself , for the challenge - and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is - for the thrill of discovery , and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team .
because we would do these things with 10 , 12 people , working for years at a time , sometimes at sea for two , three months at a time .
and in that bond , you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you , that you 've done a task that you ca n't explain to someone else .
when you come back to the shore and you say , " we had to do this , and the fiber optic , and the attentuation , and the this and the that , all the technology of it , and the difficulty , the human-performance aspects of working at sea , " you ca n't explain it to people . it 's that thing that maybe cops have , or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it .
creates a bond , creates a bond of respect .
so , when i came back to make my next movie , which was " avatar , " i tried to apply that same principle of leadership , which is that you respect your team , and you earn their respect in return .
and it really changed the dynamic .
so , here i was again with a small team , in uncharted territory , doing " avatar , " coming up with new technology that did n't exist before .
tremendously exciting .
tremendously challenging .
and we became a family , over a four-and-half year period .
and it completely changed how i do movies .
so , people have commented on how , " well , you know , you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of pandora . "
to me , it was more of a fundamental way of doing business , the process itself , that changed as a result of that .
so , what can we synthesize out of all this ?
you know , what are the lessons learned ?
well , i think number one is curiosity .
it 's the most powerful thing you own .
imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality .
and the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world .
i have young filmmakers come up to me and say , " give me some advice for doing this . "
and i say , " do n't put limitations on yourself .
other people will do that for you - do n't do it to yourself , do n't bet against yourself , and take risks . "
nasa has this phrase that they like : " failure is not an option . "
but failure has to be an option in art and in exploration , because it 's a leap of faith .
and no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk .
you have to be willing to take those risks .
so , that 's the thought i would leave you with , is that in whatever you 're doing , failure is an option , but fear is not . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was walking in the market one day with my wife , and somebody stuck a cage in my face .
and in between those slits were the saddest eyes i 've ever seen .
there was a very sick orangutan baby , my first encounter .
that evening i came back to the market in the dark and i heard " uhh , uhh , " and sure enough i found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap .
of course , the cage was salvaged .
i took up the little baby , massaged her , forced her to drink until she finally started breathing normally .
this is uce .
she 's now living in the jungle of sungai wain , and this is matahari , her second son , which , by the way , is also the son of the second orangutan i rescued , dodoy .
that changed my life quite dramatically , and as of today , i have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers .
-lrb- applause -rrb- no . no . no . wrong .
it 's horrible . it 's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild .
it 's not good .
this is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing .
having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together , just now like victims for every baby , six have disappeared from the forest .
the deforestation , especially for oil palm , to provide biofuel for western countries is what 's causing these problems .
and those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat , the largest accumulation of organic material in the world .
when you open this for growing oil palms you 're creating co2 volcanoes that are emitting so much co2 that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world , after china and the united states .
and we do n't have any industry at all - it 's only because of this deforestation .
and these are horrible images .
i 'm not going to talk too long about it , but there are so many of the family of uce , which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest , that still have to go through that process .
and i do n't know anymore where to put them .
so i decided that i had to come up with a solution for her but also a solution that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests , to get their hands on the last timber and that are causing , in that way , the loss of habitat and all those victims .
so i created the place samboja lestari , and the idea was , if i can do this on the worst possible place that i can think of where there is really nothing left , no one will have an excuse to say , " yeah , but ... "
no . everyone should be able to follow this .
so we 're in east borneo . this is the place where i started .
as you can see there 's only yellow terrain .
there 's nothing left - just a bit of grass there .
in 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there .
there was a huge amount of crime .
people spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water .
there was no agricultural productivity left .
this was the poorest district in the whole province and it was a total extinction of wildlife .
this was like a biological desert .
when i stood there in the grass , it 's hot - not even the sound of insects - just this waving grass .
still , four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people .
the climate has changed . i will show you : no more flooding , no more fires .
it 's no longer the poorest district , and there is a huge development of biodiversity .
we 've got over 1,000 species . we have 137 bird species as of today .
we have 30 species of reptiles .
so what happened here ? we created a huge economic failure in this forest .
so basically the whole process of destruction had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm .
but we saw the same thing .
we had slash and burn agriculture ; people can not afford the fertilizer , so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there ; the fires become more frequent , and after a while you 're stuck with an area of land where there is no fertility left .
there are no trees left .
still , in this place , in this grassland where you can see our very first office there on that hill , four years later , there is this one green blop on the earth 's surface ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- and there are all these animals , and all these people happy , and there 's this economic value .
so how 's this possible ?
it was quite simple . if you 'll look at the steps : we bought the land , we dealt with the fire , and then only , we started doing the reforestation by combining agriculture with forestry .
only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary .
but we made sure that in every step of the way the local people were going to be fully involved so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that .
the people would become the defenders of that forest .
so we do the " people , profit , planet " principles , but we do it in addition to a sure legal status - because if the forest belongs to the state , people say , " it belongs to me , it belongs to everyone . "
and then we apply all these other principles like transparency , professional management , measurable results , scalability , -lsb- unclear -rsb- , etc .
what we did was we formulated recipes - how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing to a target situation .
you formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control , whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice .
and then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out .
now in this recipe you also have the cost .
you also know how much labor is needed .
if you can drop this recipe on the map on a sandy soil , on a clay soil , on a steep slope , on flat soil , you put those different recipes ; if you combine them , out of that comes a business plan , comes a work plan , and you can optimize it for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have , and you can do it .
this is how it looks like in practice . we have this grass we want to get rid of .
it exudes -lsb- unclear -rsb- -like compounds from the roots .
the acacia trees are of a very low value but we need them to restore the micro-climate , to protect the soil and to shake out the grasses .
and after eight years they might actually yield some timber - that is , if you can preserve it in the right way , which we can do with bamboo peels .
it 's an old temple-building technique from japan but bamboo is very fire-susceptible .
so if we would plant that in the beginning we would have a very high risk of losing everything again .
so we plant it later , along the waterways to filter the water , provide the raw products just in time for when the timber becomes available .
so the idea is : how to integrate these flows in space , over time and with the limited means you have .
so we plant the trees , we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between , to reduce the competition for the trees , the crop fertilizer . organic material is useful for the agricultural crops , for the people , but also helps the trees . the farmers have free land , the system yields early income , the orangutans get healthy food and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration while even saving some money .
so beautiful . what a theory .
but is it really that easy ?
not really , because if you looked at what happened in 1998 , the fire started .
this is an area of about 50 million hectares .
january .
february .
march .
april .
may .
we lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months .
this is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires that you also have in pennsylvania here in the united states .
and once the soil gets dried , you 're in a dry season - you get cracks , oxygen goes in , flames come out and the problem starts all over again .
so how to break that cycle ?
fire is the biggest problem .
this is what it looked like for three months .
for three months , the automatic lights outside did not go off because it was that dark .
we lost all the crops . no children gained weight for over a year ; they lost 12 iq points . it was a disaster for orangutans and people .
so these fires are really the first things to work on .
that was why i put it as a single point up there .
and you need the local people for that because these grasslands , once they start burning ... it goes through it like a windstorm and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients to the first rainfall - going to the sea killing off the coral reefs there .
so you have to do it with the local people .
that is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution .
so what we did is , we created a ring of sugar palms around the area .
these sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant - also flood-resistant , by the way - and they provide a lot of income for local people .
this is what it looks like : the people have to tap them twice a day - just a millimeter slice - and the only thing you harvest is sugar water , carbon dioxide , rain fall and a little bit of sunshine .
in principle , you make those trees into biological photovoltaic cells .
and you can create so much energy from this - they produce three times more energy per hectare per year , because you can tap them on a daily basis .
you do n't need to harvest -lsb- unclear -rsb- or any other of the crops .
so this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics , which is still unexploited , and doing it in combination with technology .
but also your legal side needs to be in very good order .
so we bought that land , and here is where we started our project - in the middle of nowhere .
and if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area is divided into strips that go over different types of soil , and we were actually monitoring , measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares , 5,000 acres .
and this forest is quite different .
what i really did was i just followed nature , and nature does n't know monocultures , but a natural forest is multilayered .
that means that both in the ground and above the ground it can make better use of the available light , it can store more carbon in the system , it can provide more functions .
but , it 's more complicated . it 's not that simple , and you have to work with the people .
so , just like nature , we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that , we grow the slower growing , primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity that can optimally use that light . then , what is just as important : get the right fungi in there that will grow into those leaves , bring back the nutrients to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours .
and they become like nutrient pumps .
you need the bacteria to fix nitrogen , and without those microorganisms , you wo n't have any performance at all .
and then we started planting - only 1,000 trees a day .
we could have planted many , many more , but we did n't want to because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable .
we did n't want to lose the people that are going to work in that plantation .
and we do a lot of work here .
we use indicator plants to look at what soil types , or what vegetables will grow , or what trees will grow here .
and we have monitored every single one of those trees from space .
this is what it looks like in reality ; you have this irregular ring around it , with strips of 100 meters wide , with sugar palms that can provide income for 648 families .
it 's only a small part of the area .
the nursery , in here , is quite different .
if you look at the number of tree species we have in europe , for instance , from the urals up to england , you know how many ?
165 .
in this nursery , we 're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species .
can you imagine ?
you do need to know what you are working with , but it 's that diversity which makes it work .
that you can go from this zero situation , by planting the vegetables and the trees , or directly , the trees in the lines in that grass there , putting up the buffer zone , producing your compost , and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used .
in the beginning , maybe pineapples and beans and corn ; in the second phase , there will be bananas and papayas ; later on , there will be chocolate and chilies .
and then slowly , the trees start taking over , bringing in produce from the fruits , from the timber , from the fuel wood .
and finally , the sugar palm forest takes over and provides the people with permanent income .
on the top left , underneath those green stripes , you see some white dots - those are actually individual pineapple plants that you can see from space .
and in that area we started growing some acacia trees that you just saw before .
so this is after one year .
and this is after two years .
and that 's green . if you look from the tower - this is when we start attacking the grass .
we plant in the seedlings mixed with the bananas , the papayas , all the crops for the local people , but the trees are growing up fast in between as well .
and three years later , 137 species of birds are living here .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we lowered air temperature three to five degrees celsius .
air humidity is up 10 percent .
cloud cover - i 'm going to show it to you - is up .
rainfall is up .
and all these species and income .
this ecolodge that i built here , three years before , was an empty , yellow field .
this transponder that we operate with the european space agency - it gives us the benefit that every satellite that comes over to calibrate itself is taking a picture .
those pictures we use to analyze how much carbon , how the forest is developing , and we can monitor every tree using satellite images through our cooperation .
we can use these data now to provide other regions with recipes and the same technology .
we actually have it already with google earth .
if you would use a little bit of your technology to put tracking devices in trucks , and use google earth in combination with that , you could directly tell what palm oil has been sustainably produced , which company is stealing the timber , and you could save so much more carbon than with any measure of saving energy here .
so this is the samboja lestari area .
you measure how the trees grow back , but you can also measure the biodiversity coming back .
and biodiversity is an indicator of how much water can be balanced , how many medicines can be kept here .
and finally i made it into the rain machine because this forest is now creating its own rain .
this nearby city of balikpapan has a big problem with water ; it 's 80 percent surrounded by seawater , and we have now a lot of intrusion there .
now we looked at the clouds above this forest ; we looked at the reforestation area , the semi-open area and the open area .
and look at these images .
i 'll just run them very quickly through .
in the tropics , raindrops are not formed from ice crystals , which is the case in the temperate zones , you need the trees with -lsb- unclear -rsb- , chemicals that come out of the leaves of the trees that initiate the raindrops .
so you create a cool place where clouds can accumulate , and you have the trees to initiate the rain .
and look , there 's now 11.2 percent more clouds - already , after three years .
if you look at rainfall , it was already up 20 percent at that time .
let 's look at the next year , and you can see that that trend is continuing .
where at first we had a small cap of higher rainfall , that cap is now widening and getting higher .
and if we look at the rainfall pattern above samboja lestari , it used to be the driest place , but now you see consistently see a peak of rain forming there .
so you can actually change the climate .
when there are trade winds of course the effect disappears , but afterwards , as soon as the wind stabilizes , you see again that the rainfall peaks come back above this area .
so to say it is hopeless is not the right thing to do , because we actually can make that difference if you integrate the various technologies .
and it 's nice to have the science , but it still depends mostly upon the people , on your education .
we have our farmer schools .
but the real success of course , is our band - because if a baby is born , we will play , so everyone 's our family and you do n't make trouble with your family .
this is how it looks .
we have this road going around the area , which brings the people electricity and water from our own area .
we have the zone with the sugar palms , and then we have this fence with very thorny palms to keep the orangutans - that we provide with a place to live in the middle - and the people apart .
and inside , we have this area for reforestation as a gene bank to keep all that material alive , because for the last 12 years not a single seedling of the tropical hardwood trees has grown up because the climatic triggers have disappeared .
all the seeds get eaten .
so now we do the monitoring on the inside - from towers , satellites , ultralights .
each of the families that have sold their land now get a piece of land back .
and it has two nice fences of tropical hardwood trees - you have the shade trees planted in year one , then you underplanted with the sugar palms , and you plant this thorny fence .
and after a few years , you can remove some of those shade trees .
the people get that acacia timber which we have preserved with the bamboo peel , and they can build a house , they have some fuel wood to cook with .
and they can start producing from the trees as many as they like .
they have enough income for three families .
but whatever you do in that program , it has to be fully supported by the people , meaning that you also have to adjust it to the local , cultural values .
there is no simple one recipe for one place .
you also have to make sure that it is very difficult to corrupt - that it 's transparent .
like here , in samboja lestari , we divide that ring in groups of 20 families .
if one member trespasses the agreement , and does cut down trees , the other 19 members have to decide what 's going to happen to him .
if the group does n't take action , the other 33 groups have to decide what is going to happen to the group that does n't comply with those great deals that we are offering them .
in north sulawesi it is the cooperative - they have a democratic culture there , so there you can use the local justice system to protect your system .
in summary , if you look at it , in year one the people can sell their land to get income , but they get jobs back in the construction and the reforestation , the working with the orangutans , and they can use the waste wood to make handicraft .
they also get free land in between the trees , where they can grow their crops .
they can now sell part of those fruits to the orangutan project .
they get building material for houses , a contract for selling the sugar , so we can produce huge amounts of ethanol and energy locally .
they get all these other benefits : environmentally , money , they get education - it 's a great deal .
and everything is based upon that one thing - make sure that forest remains there .
so if we want to help the orangutans - what i actually set out to do - we must make sure that the local people are the ones that benefit .
now i think the real key to doing it , to give a simple answer , is integration .
i hope - if you want to know more , you can read more .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i work with a species called " bonobo . "
and i 'm happy most of the time , because i think this is the happiest species on the planet .
it 's kind of a well-kept secret .
this species lives only in the congo .
and they 're not in too many zoos , because of their sexual behavior .
their sexual behavior is too human-like for most of us to be comfortable with .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , we have a lot to learn from them , because they 're a very egalitarian society and they 're a very empathetic society .
and sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they sort of set aside .
it permeates their entire life .
and it 's used for communication .
and it 's used for conflict resolution .
and i think perhaps somewhere in our history we sort of , divided our lives up into lots of parts .
we divided our world up with lots of categories .
and so everything sort of has a place that it has to fit .
but i do n't think that we were that way initially .
there are many people who think that the animal world is hard-wired and that there 's something very , very special about man .
maybe it 's his ability to have causal thought .
maybe it 's something special in his brain that allows him to have language .
maybe it 's something special in his brain that allows him to make tools or to have mathematics .
well , i do n't know . there were tasmanians who were discovered around the 1600s and they had no fire .
they had no stone tools .
to our knowledge they had no music .
so when you compare them to the bonobo , the bonobo is a little hairier .
he does n't stand quite as upright .
but there are a lot of similarities .
and i think that as we look at culture , we kind of come to understand how we got to where we are .
and i do n't really think it 's in our biology ; i think we 've attributed it to our biology , but i do n't really think it 's there .
so what i want to do now is introduce you to a species called the bonobo .
this is kanzi .
he 's a bonobo .
right now , he 's in a forest in georgia .
his mother originally came from a forest in africa .
and she came to us when she was just at puberty , about six or seven years of age .
now this shows a bonobo on your right , and a chimpanzee on your left .
clearly , the chimpanzee has a little bit harder time of walking .
the bonobo , although shorter than us and their arms still longer , is more upright , just as we are .
this shows the bonobo compared to an australopithecine like lucy .
as you can see , there 's not a lot of difference between the way a bonobo walks and the way an early australopithecine would have walked .
as they turn toward us you 'll see that the pelvic area of early australopithecines is a little flatter and does n't have to rotate quite so much from side to side .
so the - the bipedal gait is a little easier .
and now we see all four .
video : narrator : the wild bonobo lives in central africa , in the jungle encircled by the congo river .
canopied trees as tall as 40 meters , 130 feet , grow densely in the area .
it was a japanese scientist who first undertook serious field studies of the bonobo , almost three decades ago .
bonobos are built slightly smaller than the chimpanzee .
slim-bodied , bonobos are by nature very gentle creatures .
long and careful studies have reported many new findings on them .
one discovery was that wild bonobos often walk bidpedally .
what 's more , they are able to walk upright for long distances .
susan savage-rumbaugh -lrb- video -rrb- : let 's go say hello to austin first and then go to the a frame .
ss : this is kanzi and i , in the forest .
none of the things you will see in this particular video are trained .
none of them are tricks .
they all happened to be captured on film spontaneously , by nhk of japan .
we have eight bonobos .
video : look at all this stuff that 's here for our campfire .
ss : an entire family at our research centre .
video : you going to help get some sticks ?
good .
we need more sticks , too .
i have a lighter in my pocket if you need one .
that 's a wasps ' nest .
you can get it out .
i hope i have a lighter .
you can use the lighter to start the fire .
ss : so kanzi is very interested in fire .
he does n't do it yet without a lighter , but i think if he saw someone do it , he might be able to do - make a fire without a lighter .
he 's learning about how to keep a fire going .
he 's learning the uses for a fire , just by watching what we do with fire .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a smile on the face of a bonobo .
these are happy vocalizations .
video : you 're happy .
you 're very happy about this part .
you 've got to put some water on the fire . you see the water ?
good job .
ss : forgot to zip up the back half of his backpack .
but he likes to carry things from place to place .
video : austin , i hear you saying " austin . "
ss : he talks to other bonobos at the lab , long-distance , farther than we can hear .
this is his sister .
this is her first time to try to drive a golf cart .
video : goodbye .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ss : she 's got the pedals down , but not the wheel .
she switches from reverse to forward and she holds onto the wheel , rather than turns it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like us , she knows that that individual in the mirror is her .
-lrb- music -rrb- video : narrator : by raising bonobos in a culture that is both bonobo and human , and documenting their development across two decades , scientists are exploring how cultural forces -lrb- laughter -rrb- may have operated during human evolution .
his name is nyota .
it means " star " in swahili .
-lrb- music -rrb- panbanisha is trying to give nyota a haircut with a pair of scissors .
in the wild , the parent bonobo is known to groom its offspring .
here panbanisha uses scissors , instead of her hands , to groom nyota .
very impressive .
subtle maneuvering of the hands is required to perform delicate tasks like this .
nyota tries to imitate panbanisha by using the scissors himself .
realizing that nyota might get hurt , panbanisha , like any human mother , carefully tugs to get the scissors back .
he can now cut through tough animal hide .
ss : kanzi 's learned to make stone tools .
video : kanzi now makes his tools , just as our ancestors may have made them , two-and-a-half million years ago - by holding the rocks in both hands , to strike one against the other .
he has learned that by using both hands and aiming his glancing blows , he can make much larger , sharper flakes .
kanzi chooses a flake he thinks is sharp enough .
the tough hide is difficult to cut , even with a knife .
the rock that kanzi is using is extremely hard and ideal for stone tool making , but difficult to handle , requiring great skill .
kanzi 's rock is from gona , ethiopia and is identical to that used by our african ancestors two-and-a-half million years ago .
these are the rocks kanzi used and these are the flakes he made .
the flat sharp edges are like knife blades .
compare them to the tools our ancestors used ; they bear a striking resemblance to kanzi 's .
panbanisha is longing to go for a walk in the woods .
she keeps staring out the window .
ss : this is - let me show you something we did n't think they would do .
video : for several days now , panbanisha has not been outside .
ss : i normally talk about language .
video : then panbanisha does something unexpected .
ss : but since i 'm advised not to do what i normally do , i have n't told you that these apes have language .
it 's a geometric language .
video : she takes a piece of chalk and begins writing something on the floor .
what is she writing ?
ss : she 's also saying the name of that , with her voice .
video : now she comes up to dr. sue and starts writing again .
ss : these are her symbols on her keyboard .
-lrb- music -rrb- they speak when she touches them .
video : panbanisha is communicating to dr. sue where she wants to go .
" a frame " represents a hut in the woods .
compare the chalk writing with the lexigram on the keyboard .
panbanisha began writing the lexigrams on the forest floor .
ss -lrb- video -rrb- : very nice . beautiful , panbanisha .
ss : at first we did n't really realize what she was doing , until we stood back and looked at it and rotated it .
video : this lexigram also refers to a place in the woods .
the curved line is very similar to the lexigram .
the next symbol panbanisha writes represents " collar . "
it indicates the collar that panbanisha must wear when she goes out .
ss : that 's an institutional requirement .
video : this symbol is not as clear as the others , but one can see panbanisha is trying to produce a curved line and several straight lines .
researchers began to record what panbanisha said , by writing lexigrams on the floor with chalk .
panbanisha watched .
soon she began to write as well .
the bonobo 's abilities have stunned scientists around the world .
how did they develop ?
ss -lrb- video -rrb- : we found that the most important thing for permitting bonobos to acquire language is not to teach them .
it 's simply to use language around them , because the driving force in language acquisition is to understand what others , that are important to you , are saying to you .
once you have that capacity , the ability to produce language comes rather naturally and rather freely .
so we want to create an environment in which bonobos , like all of the individuals with whom they are interacting - we want to create an environment in which they have fun , and an environment in which the others are meaningful individuals for them .
narrator : this environment brings out unexpected potential in kanzi and panbanisha .
panbanisha is enjoying playing her harmonica , until nyota , now one year old , steals it .
then he peers eagerly into his mother 's mouth .
is he looking for where the sound came from ?
dr. sue thinks it 's important to allow such curiosity to flourish .
this time panbanisha is playing the electric piano .
she was n't forced to learn the piano ; she saw a researcher play the instrument and took an interest .
researcher : go ahead . go ahead . i 'm listening .
do that real fast part that you did . yeah , that part .
narrator : kanzi plays the xylophone ; using both hands he enthusiastically accompanies dr. sue 's singing .
kanzi and panbanisha are stimulated by this fun-filled environment , which promotes the emergence of these cultural capabilities .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- researcher : ok , now get the monsters . get them .
take the cherries too .
now watch out , stay away from them now .
now you can chase them again . time to chase them .
now you have to stay away . get away .
run away . run .
now we can chase them again . go get them .
oh no !
good kanzi . very good . thank you so much .
narrator : none of us , bonobo or human , can possibly even imagine ?
ss : so we have a bi-species environment , we call it a " panhomoculture . "
we 're learning how to become like them .
we 're learning how to communicate with them , in really high-pitched tones .
we 're learning that they probably have a language in the wild .
and they 're learning to become like us .
because we believe that it 's not biology ; it 's culture .
so we 're sharing tools and technology and language with another species .
thank you .
i 'm going to talk about a technology that we 're developing at oxford now , that we think is going to change the way that computer games and hollywood movies are being made .
that technology is simulating humans .
it 's simulated humans with a simulated body and a simulated nervous system to control that body .
now , before i talk more about that technology , let 's have a quick look at what human characters look like at the moment in computer games .
this is a clip from a game called " grand theft auto 3 . "
we already saw that briefly yesterday .
and what you can see is - it is actually a very good game .
it 's one of the most successful games of all time .
but what you 'll see is that all the animations in this game are very repetitive .
they pretty much look the same .
i 've made him run into a wall here , over and over again .
and you can see he looks always the same .
the reason for that is that these characters are actually not real characters .
they are a graphical visualization of a character .
to produce these animations , an animator at a studio has to anticipate what 's going to happen in the actual game , and then has to animate that particular sequence .
so , he or she sits down , animates it , and tries to anticipate what 's going to happen , and then these particular animations are just played back at appropriate times in the computer game .
now , the result of that is that you ca n't have real interactivity .
all you have is animations that are played back at more or less the appropriate times .
it also means that games are n't really going to be as surprising as they could be , because you only get out of it , at least in terms of the character , what you actually put into it .
there 's no real emergence there .
and thirdly , as i said , most of the animations are very repetitive because of that .
now , the only way to get around that is to actually simulate the human body and to simulate that bit of the nervous system of the brain that controls that body .
and maybe , if i could have you for a quick demonstration to show what the difference is - because , i mean , it 's very , very trivial .
if i push chris a bit , like this , for example , he 'll react to it .
if i push him from a different angle , he 'll react to it differently , and that 's because he has a physical body , and because he has the motor skills to control that body .
it 's a very trivial thing .
it 's not something you get in computer games at the moment , at all .
thank you very much . chris anderson : that 's it ?
torsten reil : that 's it , yes .
so , that 's what we 're trying to simulate - not chris specifically , i should say , but humans in general .
now , we started working on this a while ago at oxford university , and we tried to start very simply .
what we tried to do was teach a stick figure how to walk .
that stick figure is physically stimulated . you can see it here on the screen .
so , it 's subject to gravity , has joints , etc .
if you just run the simulation , it will just collapse , like this .
the tricky bit is now to put an ai controller in it that actually makes it work .
and for that , we use the neural network , which we based on that part of the nervous system that we have in our spine that controls walking in humans .
it 's called the central pattern generator .
so , we simulated that as well , and then the really tricky bit is to teach that network how to walk .
for that we used artificial evolution - genetic algorithms .
we heard about those already yesterday , and i suppose that most of you are familiar with that already .
but , just briefly , the concept is that you create a large number of different individuals - neural networks , in this case - all of which are random at the beginning .
you hook these up - in this case , to the virtual muscles of that two-legged creature here - and hope that it does something interesting .
at the beginning , they 're all going to be very boring .
most of them wo n't move at all , but some of them might make a tiny step .
those are then selected by the algorithm , reproduced with mutation and recombinations to introduce sex as well .
and you repeat that process over and over again , until you have something that walks - in this case , in a straight line , like this .
so that was the idea behind this .
when we started this , i set up the simulation one evening .
it took about three to four hours to run the simulation .
i got up the next morning , went to the computer and looked at the results , and was hoping for something that walked in a straight line , like i 've just demonstrated , and this is what i got instead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it was back to the drawing board for us .
we did get it to work eventually , after tweaking a bit here and there .
and this is an example of a successful evolutionary run .
so , what you 'll see in a moment is a very simple biped that 's learning how to walk using artificial evolution .
at the beginning , it ca n't walk at all , but it will get better and better over time .
so , this is the one that ca n't walk at all .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , after five generations of applying evolutionary process , the genetic algorithm is getting a tiny bit better .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- generation 10 and it 'll take a few steps more - still not quite there .
but now , after generation 20 , it actually walks in a straight line without falling over .
that was the real breakthrough for us .
it was , academically , quite a challenging project , and once we had reached that stage , we were quite confident that we could try and do other things as well with this approach - actually simulating the body and simulating that part of the nervous system that controls it .
now , at this stage , it also became clear that this could be very exciting for things like computer games or online worlds .
what you see here is the character standing there , and there 's an obstacle that we put in its way .
and what you see is , it 's going to fall over the obstacle .
now , the interesting bit is , if i move the obstacle a tiny bit to the right , which is what i 'm doing now , here , it will fall over it in a completely different way .
and again , if you move the obstacle a tiny bit , it 'll again fall differently .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , what you see , by the way , at the top there , are some of the neural activations being fed into the virtual muscles .
okay . that 's the video . thanks .
now , this might look kind of trivial , but it 's actually very important because this is not something you get at the moment in any interactive or any virtual worlds .
now , at this stage , we decided to start a company and move this further , because obviously this was just a very simple , blocky biped .
what we really wanted was a full human body .
so we started the company .
we hired a team of physicists , software engineers and biologists to work on this , and the first thing we had to work on was to create the human body , basically .
it 's got to be relatively fast , so you can run it on a normal machine , but it 's got to be accurate enough , so it looks good enough , basically .
so we put quite a bit of biomechanical knowledge into this thing , and tried to make it as realistic as possible .
what you see here on the screen right now is a very simple visualization of that body .
i should add that it 's very simple to add things like hair , clothes , etc . , but what we 've done here is use a very simple visualization , so you can concentrate on the movement .
now , what i 'm going to do right now , in a moment , is just push this character a tiny bit and we 'll see what happens .
nothing really interesting , basically .
it falls over , but it falls over like a rag doll , basically .
the reason for that is that there 's no intelligence in it .
it becomes interesting when you put artificial intelligence into it .
so , this character now has motor skills in the upper body - nothing in the legs yet , in this particular one .
but what it will do - i 'm going to push it again .
it will realize autonomously that it 's being pushed .
it 's going to stick out its hands .
it 's going to turn around into the fall , and try and catch the fall .
so that 's what you see here .
now , it gets really interesting if you then add the ai for the lower part of the body as well .
so here , we 've got the same character .
i 'm going to push it a bit harder now , harder than i just pushed chris .
but what you 'll see is - it 's going to receive a push now from the left .
what you see is it takes steps backwards , it tries to counter-balance , it tries to look at the place where it thinks it 's going to land .
i 'll show you this again .
and then , finally hits the floor .
now , this becomes really exciting when you push that character in different directions , again , just as i 've done .
that 's something that you can not do right now .
at the moment , you only have empty computer graphics in games .
what this is now is a real simulation . that 's what i want to show you now .
so , here 's the same character with the same behavior i 've just shown you , but now i 'm just going to push it from different directions .
first , starting with a push from the right .
this is all slow motion , by the way , so we can see what 's going on .
now , the angle will have changed a tiny bit , so you can see that the reaction is different .
again , a push , now this time from the front .
and you see it falls differently .
and now from the left - and it falls differently .
that was really exciting for us to see that .
that was the first time we 've seen that .
this is the first time the public sees this as well , because we have been in stealth mode .
i have n't shown this to anybody yet .
now , just a fun thing : what happens if you put that character - this is now a wooden version of it , but it 's got the same ai in it - but if you put that character on a slippery surface , like ice .
we just did that for a laugh , just to see what happens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is what happens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's nothing we had to do about this .
we just took this character that i just talked about , put it on a slippery surface , and this is what you get out of it .
and that 's a really fascinating thing about this approach .
now , when we went to film studios and games developers and showed them that technology , we got a very good response .
and what they said was , the first thing they need immediately is virtual stuntmen .
because stunts are obviously very dangerous , they 're very expensive , and there are a lot of stunt scenes that you can not do , obviously , because you ca n't really allow the stuntman to be seriously hurt .
so , they wanted to have a digital version of a stuntman and that 's what we 've been working on for the past few months .
and that 's our first product that we 're going to release in a couple of weeks .
so , here are just a few very simple scenes of the guy just being kicked .
that 's what people want . that 's what we 're giving them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can see , it 's always reacting .
this is not a dead body . this is a body who basically , in this particular case , feels the force and tries to protect its head .
only , i think it 's quite a big blow again .
you feel kind of sorry for that thing , and we 've seen it so many times now that we do n't really care any more .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are much worse videos than this , by the way , which i have taken out , but ...
now , here 's another one .
what people wanted as a behavior was to have an explosion , a strong force applied to the character , and have the character react to it in midair .
so that you do n't have a character that looks limp , but actually a character that you can use in an action film straight away , that looks kind of alive in midair as well .
so this character is going to be hit by a force , it 's going to realize it 's in the air , and it 's going to try and , well , stick out its arm in the direction where it 's landing .
that 's one angle ; here 's another angle .
we now think that the realism we 're achieving with this is good enough to be used in films .
and let 's just have a look at a slightly different visualization .
this is something i just got last night from an animation studio in london , who are using our software and experimenting with it right now .
so this is exactly the same behavior that you saw , but in a slightly better rendered version .
so if you look at the character carefully , you see there are lots of body movements going on , none of which you have to animate like in the old days .
animators had to actually animate them .
this is all happening automatically in the simulation .
this is a slightly different angle , and again a slow motion version of this .
this is incredibly quick . this is happening in real time .
you can run this simulation in real time , in front of your eyes , change it , if you want to , and you get the animation straight out of it .
at the moment , doing something like this by hand would take you probably a couple of days .
this is another behavior they requested .
i 'm not quite sure why , but we 've done it anyway .
it 's a very simple behavior that shows you the power of this approach .
in this case , the character 's hands are fixed to a particular point in space , and all we 've told the character to do is to struggle .
and it looks organic . it looks realistic .
you feel kind of sorry for the guy .
it 's even worse - and that is another video i just got last night - if you render that a bit more realistically .
now , i 'm showing this to you just to show you how organic it actually can feel , how realistic it can look .
and this is all a physical simulation of the body , using ai to drive virtual muscles in that body .
now , one thing which we did for a laugh was to create a slightly more complex stunt scene , and one of the most famous stunts is the one where james bond jumps off a dam in switzerland and then is caught by a bungee .
got a very short clip here .
yes , you can just about see it here .
in this case , they were using a real stunt man . it was a very dangerous stunt .
it was just voted , i think in the sunday times , as one of the most impressive stunts .
now , we 've just tried and - looked at our character and asked ourselves , " can we do that ourselves as well ? "
can we use the physical simulation of the character , use artificial intelligence , put that artificial intelligence into the character , drive virtual muscles , simulate the way he jumps off the dam , and then skydive afterwards , and have him caught by a bungee afterwards ?
we did that . it took about altogether just two hours , pretty much , to create the simulation .
and that 's what it looks like , here .
now , this could do with a bit more work . it 's still very early stages , and we pretty much just did this for a laugh , just to see what we 'd get out of it .
but what we found over the past few months is that this approach - that we 're pretty much standard upon - is incredibly powerful .
we are ourselves surprised what you actually get out of the simulations .
there 's very often very surprising behavior that you did n't predict before .
there 's so many things we can do with this right now .
the first thing , as i said , is going to be virtual stuntmen .
several studios are using this software now to produce virtual stuntmen , and they 're going to hit the screen quite soon , actually , for some major productions .
the second thing is video games .
with this technology , video games will look different and they will feel very different .
for the first time , you 'll have actors that really feel very interactive , that have real bodies that really react .
i think that 's going to be incredibly exciting .
probably starting with sports games , which are going to become much more interactive .
but i particularly am really excited about using this technology in online worlds , like there , for example , that tom melcher has shown us .
the degree of interactivity you 're going to get is totally different , i think , from what you 're getting right now .
a third thing we are looking at and very interested in is simulation .
we 've been approached by several simulation companies , but one project we 're particularly excited about , which we 're starting next month , is to use our technology - and in particular , the walking technology - to help aid surgeons who work on children with cerebral palsy , to predict the outcome of operations on these children .
as you probably know , it 's very difficult to predict what the outcome of an operation is if you try and correct the gait .
the classic quote is , i think , it 's unpredictable at best , is what people think right now , is the outcome .
now , what we want to do with our software is allow our surgeons to have a tool .
we 're going to simulate the gait of a particular child and the surgeon can then work on that simulation and try out different ways to improve that gait , before he actually commits to an actual surgery .
that 's one project we 're particularly excited about , and that 's going to start next month .
just finally , this is only just the beginning .
we can only do several behaviors right now .
the ai is n't good enough to simulate a full human body .
the body yes , but not all the motor skills that we have .
and , i think , we 're only there if we can have something like ballet dancing .
right now , we do n't have that but i 'm very sure that we will be able to do that at some stage .
we do have one unintentional dancer actually , the last thing i 'm going to show you .
this was an ai contour that was produced and evolved - half-evolved , i should say - to produce balance , basically .
so , you kick the guy and the guy 's supposed to counter-balance .
that 's what we thought was going to come out of this .
but this is what emerged out of it , in the end .
-lrb- music -rrb- bizarrely , this thing does n't have a head . i 'm not quite sure why .
so , this was not something we actually put in there .
he just started to create that dance himself .
he 's actually a better dancer than i am , i have to say .
and what you see after a while - i think he even goes into a climax right at the end .
and i think - there you go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , that all happened automatically . we did n't put that in there .
that 's just the simulation creating this itself , basically .
so it 's just - -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
not quite john travolta yet , but we 're working on that as well , so thanks very much for your time .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : incredible . that was really incredible .
tr : thanks .
it 's great being here at ted .
you know , i think there might be some presentations that will go over my head , but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet .
the little things in life , sometimes that we forget about , like pollination , that we take for granted .
and you ca n't tell the story about pollinators - bees , bats , hummingbirds , butterflies - without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years .
i 've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day , seven days a week , for over 35 years .
to watch them move is a dance i 'm never going to get tired of .
it fills me with wonder , and it opens my heart .
beauty and seduction , i believe , is nature 's tool for survival , because we will protect what we fall in love with .
their relationship is a love story that feeds the earth .
it reminds us that we are a part of nature , and we 're not separate from it .
when i heard about the vanishing bees , colony collapse disorder , it motivated me to take action .
we depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat .
and many scientists believe it 's the most serious issue facing mankind .
it 's like the canary in the coalmine .
if they disappear , so do we .
it reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it .
what motivated me to film their behavior was something that i asked my scientific advisers : " what motivates the pollinators ? "
well , their answer was , " it 's all about risk and reward . "
like a wide-eyed kid , i 'd say , " why is that ? "
and they 'd say , " well , because they want to survive . "
i go , " why ? "
" well , in order to reproduce . "
" well , why ? "
and i thought that they 'd probably say , " well , it 's all about sex . "
and chip taylor , our monarch butterfly expert , he replied , " nothing lasts forever .
everything in the universe wears out . "
and that blew my mind .
because i realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward , as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life .
rarely seen by the naked eye , this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment .
it 's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself , over and over again .
so here is some nectar from my film .
i hope you 'll drink , tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden .
and always take time to smell the flowers , and let it fill you with beauty , and rediscover that sense of wonder .
here are some images from the film .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this cell phone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the eastern congo .
it 's mined by armed gangs using slaves , child slaves , what the u.n. security council calls " blood minerals , " then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in shinjin in china .
that factory - over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year .
one man died after working a 36-hour shift .
we all love chocolate .
we buy it for our kids .
eighty percent of the cocoa comes from cote d 'ivoire and ghana and it 's harvested by children .
cote d 'ivoire , we have a huge problem of child slaves .
children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations .
heparin - a blood thinner , a pharmaceutical product - starts out in artisanal workshops like this in china , because the active ingredient comes from pigs ' intestines .
your diamond - you 've all heard , probably seen the movie " blood diamond . "
this is a mine in zimbabwe right now .
cotton : uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on earth .
every year when it comes to the cotton harvest , the government shuts down the schools , puts the kids in buses , buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton .
it 's forced child labor and all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in manila .
these places , these origins , represent governance gaps .
that 's the politest description i have for them .
these are the dark pools where global supply chains begin - the global supply chains , which bring us our favorite brand name products .
some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states .
some of them are not states anymore at all .
they 're failed states .
some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment , promote trade .
either way , they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma .
i know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact in a global supply chain .
but right now , most of the companies involved in these supply chains do n't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future , nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product .
now , i did n't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain .
we need a reality check .
we need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have .
this is an independent republic , probably a failed state .
it 's definitely not a democratic state .
and right now , that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us , that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption .
now , that 's not a new story .
you 've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world , even in developed countries .
you want to see the classic sweatshop , meet me at madison square garden , i 'll take you down the street , and i 'll show you a chinese sweatshop .
but take the example of heparin .
it 's a pharmaceutical product .
you expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital , probably squeaky clean .
the problem is that the active ingredient in there - as i mentioned earlier - comes from pigs .
the main american manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to china because it 's the world 's biggest supplier of pigs .
and their factory in china - which probably is pretty clean - is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs , where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient .
so a couple of years ago , we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world , because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain .
worse , some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests .
this substitute cost nine dollars a pound , whereas real heparin , the real ingredient , cost 900 dollars a pound .
a no-brainer .
the problem was that it killed more people .
and so you 're asking yourself , " how come the u.s. food and drug administration allowed this to happen ?
how did the chinese state agency for food and drugs allow this to happen ? "
and the answer is quite simple : the chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities , not pharmaceutical facilities , so they do n't audit them .
and the usfda has a jurisdictional problem .
this is offshore .
they actually do conduct a few investigations overseas - about a dozen a year - maybe 20 in a good year .
there are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in china alone .
in fact , about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore , particularly china and india , and we do n't have a governance system .
able to ensure that that production is safe .
we do n't have a system to ensure that human rights , basic dignity , are ensured .
so at a national level - and we work in about 60 different countries - at a national level we 've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil .
and the real problem with the global supply chain is that it 's supranational .
so governments who are failing , who are dropping the ball at a national level , have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level .
and you can just look at the headlines .
take copenhagen last year - complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge .
take the g20 meeting a couple of weeks ago - stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago .
you can take any one of the major global challenges we 've discussed this week and ask yourself , where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions , responses , to those international problems ?
and the simple answer is they ca n't . they 're national .
their voters are local .
they have parochial interests .
they ca n't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good .
so , if we 're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level - in this case , in the global supply chain - we have to come up with a different mechanism .
we need a different machine .
fortunately , we have some examples .
in the 1990s , there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the u.s. - child labor , forced labor , serious health and safety abuses .
and eventually president clinton , in 1996 , convened a meeting at the white house , invited industry , human rights ngos , trade unions , the department of labor , got them all in a room and said , " look , i do n't want globalization to be a race to the bottom .
i do n't know how to prevent that , but i 'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response . "
so they formed a white house task force , and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain .
companies did n't feel it was their responsibility .
they do n't own those facilities .
they do n't employ those workers .
they 're not legally liable .
everybody else at the table said , " folks , that does n't cut it .
you have a custodial duty , a duty of care , to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it , without fear of our safety , or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product . "
so they agreed , " okay , what we 'll do is we agree on a common set of standards , code of conduct .
we 'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control .
we 'll make it part of the contract . "
and that was a stroke of absolute genius , because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract , private power , to deliver public goods .
and let 's face it , the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in india or china has much more persuasive value than the local labor law , the local environmental regulations , the local human rights standards .
those factories will probably never see an inspector .
if the inspector did come along , it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe .
even if they did their jobs , and they cited those facilities for their violations , the fine would be derisory .
but you lose that contract for a major brand name , that 's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt .
that makes a difference .
so what we 've been able to do is we 've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain , that of the multinational company , and get them to do the right thing , get them to use that power for good , to deliver the key public goods .
now of course , this does n't come naturally to multinational companies .
they were n't set up to do this . they 're set up to make money .
but they are extremely efficient organizations .
they have resources , and if we can add the will , the commitment , they know how to deliver that product .
now , getting there is not easy .
those supply chains i put up on the screen earlier , they 're not there .
you need a safe space .
you need a place where people can come together , sit down without fear of judgment , without recrimination , to actually face the problem , agree on the problem and come up with solutions .
we can do it . the technical solutions are there .
the problem is the lack of trust , the lack of confidence , the lack of partnership between ngos , campaign groups , civil society organizations and multinational companies .
if we can put those two together in a safe space , get them to work together , we can deliver public goods right now , or in extremely short supply .
this is a radical proposition , and it 's crazy to think that if you 're a 15-year-old bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in dhaka - 22 , 23 , 24 dollars a month - your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract .
it 's crazy .
multinationals are protecting human rights .
i know there 's going to be disbelief .
you 'll say , " how can we trust them ? "
well , we do n't .
it 's the old arms control phrase : " trust , but verify . "
so we audit .
we take their supply chain , we take all the factory names , we do a random sample , we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities , and then we publish the results .
transparency is absolutely critical to this .
you can call yourself responsible , but responsibility without accountability often does n't work .
so what we 're doing is , we 're not only enlisting the multinationals , we 're giving them the tools to deliver this public good - respect for human rights - and we 're checking .
you do n't need to believe me . you should n't believe me .
go to the website . look at the audit results .
ask yourself , is this company behaving in a socially responsible way ?
can i buy that product without compromising my ethics ?
that 's the way the system works .
i hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world .
i hate the idea that governments have dropped this ball and i ca n't get used to the idea that somehow we ca n't get them to do their jobs .
i 've been at this for 30 years , and in that time i 've seen the ability , the commitment , the will of government to do this decline , and i do n't see them making a comeback right now .
so we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure .
we 're now thinking that , in fact , this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges .
call it network governance . call it what you will .
the private actors , companies and ngos , are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face .
just look at pandemics - swine flu , bird flu , h1n1 .
look at the health systems in so many countries .
do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic ?
no .
could the private sector and ngos get together and marshal a response ?
absolutely .
what they lack is that safe space to come together , agree and move to action .
that 's what we 're trying to provide .
i know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume .
" you want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain .
there are thousands of suppliers in there . "
it seems too daunting , too dangerous , for any company to take on .
but there are companies .
we have 4,000 companies who are members .
some of them are very , very large companies .
the sporting goods industry , in particular , stepped up to the plate and have done it .
the example , the role model , is there .
and whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address - child labor in cottonseed farms in india - this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in india .
it seems overwhelming .
the numbers just make you want to zone out .
but we break it down to some basic realities .
and human rights comes down to a very simple proposition : can i give this person their dignity back ?
poor people , people whose human rights have been violated - the crux of that is the loss of dignity , the lack of dignity .
it starts with just giving people back their dignity .
i was sitting in a slum outside gurgaon just next to delhi , one of the flashiest , brightest new cities popping up in india right now , and i was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road , and i asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands .
they did n't say money .
they said , " the people who employ us treat us like we are less than human , like we do n't exist .
please ask them to treat us like human beings . "
that 's my simple understanding of human rights .
that 's my simple proposition to you , my simple plea to every decision-maker in this room , everybody out there .
we can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped .
if we do n't do it , we 're abandoning hope , we 're abandoning our essential humanity , and i know that 's not a place we want to be , and we do n't have to be there .
so i appeal to you .
join us , come into that safe space , and let 's start to make this happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is me . my name is ben saunders .
i specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places .
on may 11th last year , i stood alone at the north geographic pole .
i was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of america , five-and-a-half thousand square miles .
more than 2,000 people have climbed everest .
12 people have stood on the moon .
including me , only four people have skied solo to the north pole .
and i think the reason for that - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you - i think the reason for that is that it 's - it 's - well , it 's as chris said , bonkers .
it 's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability .
i skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back . 800 miles in 10 weeks .
and i was dragging all the food i needed , the supplies , the equipment , sleeping bag , one change of underwear - everything i needed for nearly three months .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what we 're going to try and do today , in the 16 and a bit minutes i 've got left , is to try and answer three questions . the first one is , why ?
the second one is , how do you go to the loo at minus 40 ?
" ben , i 've read somewhere that at minus 40 , exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute , so how do you answer the call of nature ? "
i do n't want to answer these now . i 'll come on to them at the end .
third one : how do you top that ? what 's next ?
it all started back in 2001 .
my first expedition was with a guy called pen hadow - enormously experienced chap .
this was like my polar apprenticeship .
we were trying to ski from this group of islands up here , severnaya zemlya , to the north pole .
and the thing that fascinates me about the north pole , geographic north pole , is that it 's slap bang in the middle of the sea .
this is about as good as maps get , and to reach it you 've got to ski literally over the frozen crust , the floating skin of ice on the artic ocean .
i 'd spoken to all the experts .
i 'd read lots of books . i studied maps and charts .
but i realized on the morning of day one that i had no idea exactly what i 'd let myself in for .
i was 23 years old . no one my age had attempted anything like this , and pretty quickly , almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong .
we were attacked by a polar bear on day two .
i had frostbite in my left big toe .
we started running very low on food . we were both pretty hungry , losing lots of weight .
some very unusual weather conditions , very difficult ice conditions .
we had decidedly low-tech communications .
we could n't afford a satellite phone , so we had hf radio .
you can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent .
there 's a wire dangling down either side .
that was our hf radio antenna .
we had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months .
ultimately , we ran out of time .
we 'd skied 400 miles . we were just over 200 miles left to go to the pole , and we 'd run out of time .
we were too late into the summer ; the ice was starting to melt ; we spoke to the russian helicopter pilots on the radio , and they said , " look boys , you 've run out of time .
we 've got to pick you up . "
and i felt that i had failed , wholeheartedly .
i was a failure .
the one goal , the one dream i 'd had for as long as i could remember - i had n't even come close .
and skiing along that first trip , i had two imaginary video clips that i 'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough , just to keep my motivation going .
the first one was reaching the pole itself .
i could see vividly , i suppose , being filmed out of the door of a helicopter , there was , kind of , rock music playing in the background , and i had a ski pole with a union jack , you know , flying in the wind .
i could see myself sticking the flag in a pole , you know - ah , glorious moment - the music kind of reaching a crescendo .
the second video clip that i imagined was getting back to heathrow airport , and i could see again , vividly , the camera flashbulbs going off , the paparazzi , the autograph hunters , the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal .
and of course , neither of these things happened .
we did n't get to the pole , and we did n't have any money to pay anyone to do the pr , so no one had heard of this expedition .
and i got back to heathrow . my mum was there ; my brother was there ; my granddad was there - had a little union jack - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and that was about it . i went back to live with my mum .
i was physically exhausted , mentally an absolute wreck , considered myself a failure .
in a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition , and lying on my mum 's sofa , day in day out , watching daytime tv .
my brother sent me a text message , an sms - it was a quote from the " simpsons . " it said , " you tried your hardest and failed miserably .
the lesson is : do n't even try . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- fast forward three years . i did eventually get off the sofa , and start planning another expedition . this time , i wanted to go right across , on my own this time , from russia , at the top of the map , to the north pole , where the sort of kink in the middle is , and then on to canada .
no one has made a complete crossing of the arctic ocean on their own .
two norwegians did it as a team in 2000 . no one 's done it solo .
very famous , very accomplished italian mountaineer , reinhold messner , tried it in 1995 , and he was rescued after a week .
he described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as everest .
so for some reason , this was what i wanted to have a crack at , but i knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece , let alone make it across to canada , i had to take a radical approach .
this meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off , sub-two-gram toothbrush , to working with one of the world 's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new , revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch : 6,000 calories a day .
and the expedition started in february last year .
big support team . we had a film crew , a couple of logistics people with us , my girlfriend , a photographer .
at first it was pretty sensible . we flew british airways to moscow .
the next bit in siberia to krasnoyarsk , on a russian internal airline called krasair , spelled k-r-a-s .
the next bit , we 'd chartered a pretty elderly russian plane to fly us up to a town called khatanga , which was the sort of last bit of civilization .
our cameraman , who it turned out was a pretty nervous flier at the best of times , actually asked the pilot , before we got on the plane , how long this flight would take , and the pilot - russian pilot - completely deadpan , replied , " six hours - if we live . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we got to khatanga .
i think the joke is that khatanga is n't the end of the world , but you can see it from there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was supposed to be an overnight stay . we were stuck there for 10 days .
there was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter , so we were stuck . we could n't move .
finally , morning of day 11 , we got the all-clear , loaded up the helicopters - two helicopters flying in tandem - dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice .
we had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming , photography ; while the helicopter was still there , i did an interview on the satellite phone ; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter , wham , the door closed , and i was alone .
and i do n't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice .
all i could think about was running back up to the door , banging on the door , and saying , " look guys , i have n't quite thought this through . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- to make things worse , you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen ; that 's a full moon .
because we 'd been held up in russia , of course , the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides ; when you 're standing on the frozen surface of the sea , high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen - the ice is going to start moving around a bit .
i was , you can see there , pulling two sledges .
grand total in all , 95 days of food and fuel , 180 kilos - that 's almost exactly 400 pounds .
when the ice was flat or flattish , i could just about pull both .
when the ice was n't flat , i did n't have a hope in hell .
i had to pull one , leave it , and go back and get the other one .
literally scrambling through what 's called pressure ice - the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean , the wind and the tides .
nasa described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began .
and it 's always drifting . the pack ice is always drifting .
i was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks i was alone last year , and i was drifting backwards most of the time .
my record was minus 2.5 miles .
i got up in the morning , took the tent down , skied north for seven-and-a-half hours , put the tent up , and i was two and a half miles further back than when i 'd started .
i literally could n't keep up with the drift of the ice .
-lrb- video -rrb- : so it 's day 22 .
i 'm lying in the tent , getting ready to go .
the weather is just appalling - oh , drifted back about five miles in the last - last night .
later in the expedition , the problem was no longer the ice .
it was a lack of ice - open water .
i knew this was happening . i knew the artic was warming .
i knew there was more open water . and i had a secret weapon up my sleeve .
this was my little bit of bio-mimicry .
polar bears on the artic ocean move in dead straight lines .
if they come to water , they 'll climb in , swim across it .
so we had a dry suit developed - i worked with a team in norway - based on a sort of survival suit - i suppose , that helicopter pilots would wear - that i could climb into . it would go on over my boots , over my mittens , it would pull up around my face , and seal pretty tightly around my face .
and this meant i could ski over very thin ice , and if i fell through , it was n't the end of the world .
it also meant , if the worst came to the worst , i could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me .
some pretty radical technology , a radical approach - but it worked perfectly .
another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology .
in 1912 , shackleton 's endurance expedition - there was - one of his crew , a guy called thomas orde-lees .
he said , " the explorers of 2012 , if there is anything left to explore , will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes . "
well , orde-lees guessed wrong by about eight years . this is my pocket wireless telephone , iridium satellite phone .
the wireless telescope was a digital camera i had tucked in my pocket .
and every single day of the 72 days i was alone on the ice , i was blogging live from my tent , sending back a little diary piece , sending back information on the distance i 'd covered - the ice conditions , the temperature - and a daily photo .
remember , 2001 , we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world .
last year , blogging live from an expedition that 's been described as 10 times as dangerous as everest .
it was n't all high-tech . this is navigating in what 's called a whiteout .
when you get lots of mist , low cloud , the wind starts blowing the snow up .
you ca n't see an awful lot . you can just see , there 's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles .
i 'd navigate using the direction of the wind .
so , kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech .
i got to the pole on the 11th of may .
it took me 68 days to get there from russia , and there is nothing there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
there is n't even a pole at the pole . there 's nothing there , purely because it 's sea ice . it 's drifting .
stick a flag there , leave it there , pretty soon it will drift off , usually towards canada or greenland .
i knew this , but i was expecting something .
strange mixture of feelings : it was extremely warm by this stage , a lot of open water around , and of course , elated that i 'd got there under my own steam , but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to canada , which was still 400 miles away , were slim at best .
the only proof i 've got that i was there is a blurry photo of my gps , the little satellite navigation gadget .
you can just see - there 's a nine and a string of zeros here .
ninety degrees north - that is slap bang in the north pole .
i took a photo of that . sat down on my sledge . did a sort of video diary piece .
took a few photos . i got my satellite phone out .
i warmed the battery up in my armpit .
i dialed three numbers . i dialed my mum .
i dialed my girlfriend . i dialed the ceo of my sponsor .
and i got three voicemails .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- : ninety .
it 's a special feeling .
the entire planet is rotating beneath my feet .
the - the whole world underneath me .
i finally got through to my mum . she was at the queue of the supermarket .
she started crying . she asked me to call her back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i skied on for a week past the pole .
i wanted to get as close to canada as i could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue .
this was the last day i had on the ice .
when i spoke to the - my project management team , they said , " look , ben , conditions are getting too dangerous .
there are huge areas of open water just south of your position .
we 'd like to pick you up .
ben , could you please look for an airstrip ? "
this was the view outside my tent when i had this fateful phone call .
i 'd never tried to build an airstrip before . tony , the expedition manager , he said , " look ben , you 've got to find 500 meters of flat , thick safe ice . "
the only bit of ice i could find - it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip - was exactly 473 meters . i could measure it with my skis .
i did n't tell tony that . i did n't tell the pilots that .
i thought , it 'll have to do .
-lrb- video -rrb- : oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh .
it just about worked . a pretty dramatic landing - the plane actually passed over four times , and i was a bit worried it was n't going to land at all .
the pilot , i knew , was called troy . i was expecting someone called troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy .
i was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed - a pretty emotional moment .
so i thought , i 've got to compose myself for troy .
i 'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type .
the plane taxied up to where i was standing .
the door opened . this guy jumped out . he 's about that tall . he said , " hi , my name is troy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
the co-pilot was a lady called monica .
she sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper .
they were the least macho people i 've ever met , but they made my day .
troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice ; we took a few photos . he climbed up the ladder . he said , " just - just get in the back . "
he threw his cigarette out as he got on the front , and i climbed in the back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- taxied up and down the runway a few times , just to flatten it out a bit , and he said , " right , i 'm going to - i 'm going to give it a go . " and he - i 've now learned that this is standard practice , but it had me worried at the time .
he put his hand on the throttle .
you can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit .
it 's that little bar there . he put his hand on the throttle .
monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his .
i thought , " god , here we go . we 're , we 're - this is all or nothing . "
rammed it forwards . bounced down the runway . just took off .
one of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway , banking . i could see into the cockpit , troy battling the controls , and he just took one hand off , reached back , flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit , and it was the " fasten seat belt " sign you can see on the wall .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and only from the air did i see the big picture .
of course , when you 're on the ice , you only ever see one obstacle at a time , whether it 's a pressure ridge or there 's a bit of water .
this is probably why i did n't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip .
i mean , it really was starting to break up .
why ? i 'm not an explorer in the traditional sense .
i 'm not skiing along drawing maps ; everyone knows where the north pole is .
at the south pole there 's a big scientific base . there 's an airstrip .
there 's a cafe and there 's a tourist shop .
for me , this is about exploring human limits , about exploring the limits of physiology , of psychology and of technology . they 're the things that excite me .
and it 's also about potential , on a personal level .
this , for me , is a chance to explore the limits - really push the limits of my own potential , see how far they stretch .
and on a wider scale , it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential , just doing three or four or five percent of what they 're truly capable of . so , on a wider scale , i hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential , and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet .
that 's as close as i can come to summing that up .
the next question is , how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40 ?
the answer , of course , to which is a trade secret - and the last question , what 's next ? as quickly as possible , if i have a minute left at the end , i 'll go into more detail .
what 's next : antarctica .
it 's the coldest , highest , windiest and driest continent on earth .
late 1911 , early 1912 , there was a race to be the first to the south pole : the heart of the antarctic continent .
if you include the coastal ice shelves , you can see that the ross ice shelf - it 's the big one down here - the ross ice shelf is the size of france .
antarctica , if you include the ice shelves , is twice the size of australia - it 's a big place .
and there 's a race to get to the pole between amundsen , the norwegian - amundsen had dog sleds and huskies - and scott , the british guy , captain scott .
scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs , all of which went wrong , and scott and his team of four people ended up on foot .
they got to the pole late january 1912 to find a norwegian flag already there .
there was a tent , a letter to the norwegian king .
and they turned around , headed back to the coast , and all five of them died on the return journey .
since then , no one has ever skied - this was 93 years ago - since then , no one has ever skied from the coast of antarctica to the pole and back .
every south pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing - no one has ever made a return journey . so that 's the plan .
two of us are doing it .
that 's pretty much it .
one final thought before i get to the toilet bit , is - is , i have a - and i meant to scan this and i 've forgotten - but i have a - i have a school report . i was 13 years old , and it 's framed above my desk at home . it says , " ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i think if i 've learned anything , it 's this : that no one else is the authority on your potential .
you 're the only person that decides how far you go and what you 're capable of .
ladies and gentlemen , that 's my story .
thank you very much .
so since i was here last in ' 06 , we discovered that global climate change is turning out to be a pretty serious issue , so we covered that fairly extensively in skeptic magazine .
we investigate all kinds of scientific and quasi-scientific controversies , but it turns out we do n't have to worry about any of this because the world 's going to end in 2012 .
another update : you will recall i introduced you guys to the quadro tracker .
it 's like a water dowsing device .
it 's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around .
and you walk around , and it points to things .
like if you 're looking for marijuana in students ' lockers , it 'll point right to somebody .
oh , sorry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this particular one that was given to me finds golf balls , especially if you 're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes .
well , under the category of " what 's the harm of silly stuff like this ? "
this device , the ade 651 , was sold to the iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece .
it 's just like this one , completely worthless , in which it allegedly worked by " electrostatic magnetic ion attraction , " which translates to " pseudoscientific baloney " - would be the nice word - in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good , but it does absolutely nothing .
in this case , at trespass points , allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay , actually cost lives .
so there is a danger to pseudoscience , in believing in this sort of thing .
so what i want to talk about today is belief .
i want to believe , and you do too .
and in fact , i think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things .
it is the default option . we just believe .
we believe all sorts of things .
belief is natural ; disbelief , skepticism , science , is not natural .
it 's more difficult .
it 's uncomfortable to not believe things .
so like fox mulder on " x-files , " who wants to believe in ufos ? well , we all do , and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains .
essentially , we are pattern-seeking primates .
we connect the dots : a is connected to b ; b is connected to c.
and sometimes a really is connected to b , and that 's called association learning .
we find patterns , we make those connections , whether it 's pavlov 's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food , and then he salivates to the sound of the bell , or whether it 's a skinnerian rat , in which he 's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it , and therefore he repeats the behavior .
in fact , what skinner discovered is that , if you put a pigeon in a box like this , and he has to press one of these two keys , and he tries to figure out what the pattern is , and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there - if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern , they will figure out any kind of pattern .
and whatever they were doing just before they got the reward , they repeat that particular pattern .
sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise , once clockwise and peck the key twice .
and that 's called superstition , and that , i 'm afraid , we will always have with us .
i call this process " patternicity " - that is , the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise .
when we do this process , we make two types of errors .
a type i error , or false positive , is believing a pattern is real when it 's not .
our second type of error is a false negative .
a type ii error is not believing a pattern is real when it is .
so let 's do a thought experiment .
you are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of africa .
your name is lucy , okay ?
and you hear a rustle in the grass .
is it a dangerous predator , or is it just the wind ?
your next decision could be the most important one of your life .
well , if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it 's just the wind , you 've made an error in cognition , made a type i error , false positive .
but no harm . you just move away .
you 're more cautious . you 're more vigilant .
on the other hand , if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind , and it turns out it 's a dangerous predator , you 're lunch .
you 've just won a darwin award .
you 've been taken out of the gene pool .
now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a type i error is less than the cost of making a type ii error .
this is the only equation in the talk by the way .
we have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a type i and a type ii error is highly problematic , especially in split-second , life-and-death situations .
so the default position is just : believe all patterns are real - all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind .
and so i think that we evolved ...
there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines , our pattern-seeking brain processes , to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that i 'll come back to .
so for example , what do you see here ?
it 's a horse head , that 's right .
it looks like a horse . it must be a horse .
that 's a pattern .
and is it really a horse ?
or is it more like a frog ?
see , our pattern detection device , which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex - it 's our little detection device there - can be easily fooled , and this is the problem .
for example , what do you see here ?
yes , of course , it 's a cow .
once i prime the brain - it 's called cognitive priming - once i prime the brain to see it , it pops back out again even without the pattern that i 've imposed on it .
and what do you see here ?
some people see a dalmatian dog .
yes , there it is . and there 's the prime .
so when i go back without the prime , your brain already has the model so you can see it again .
what do you see here ?
planet saturn . yes , that 's good .
how about here ?
just shout out anything you see .
that 's a good audience , chris .
because there 's nothing in this . well , allegedly there 's nothing .
this is an experiment done by jennifer whitson at u.t. austin on corporate environments and whether feelings of uncertainty and out of control makes people see illusory patterns .
that is , almost everybody sees the planet saturn .
people that are put in a condition of feeling out of control are more likely to see something in this , which is allegedly patternless .
in other words , the propensity to find these patterns goes up when there 's a lack of control .
for example , baseball players are notoriously superstitious when they 're batting , but not so much when they 're fielding .
because fielders are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time .
the best batters fail seven out of 10 times .
so their superstitions , their patternicities , are all associated with feelings of lack of control and so forth .
what do you see in this particular one here , in this field ?
anybody see an object there ?
there actually is something here , but it 's degraded .
while you 're thinking about that , this was an experiment done by susan blackmore , a psychologist in england , who showed subjects this degraded image and then ran a correlation between their scores on an esp test : how much did they believe in the paranormal , supernatural , angels and so forth .
and those who scored high on the esp scale , tended to not only see more patterns in the degraded images but incorrect patterns .
here is what you show subjects .
the fish is degraded 20 percent , 50 percent and then the one i showed you , 70 percent .
a similar experiment was done by another -lsb- swiss -rsb- psychologist named peter brugger , who found significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere , via the left visual field , than the left hemisphere .
so if you present subjects the images such that it 's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left , then they 're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere .
our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity occurs .
so what we 're trying to do is bore into the brain to see where all this happens .
brugger and his colleague , christine mohr , gave subjects l-dopa .
l-dopa 's a drug , as you know , given for treating parkinson 's disease , which is related to a decrease in dopamine .
l-dopa increases dopamine .
an increase of dopamine caused subjects to see more patterns than those that did not receive the dopamine .
so dopamine appears to be the drug associated with patternicity .
in fact , neuroleptic drugs that are used to eliminate psychotic behavior , things like paranoia , delusions and hallucinations , these are patternicities .
they 're incorrect patterns . they 're false positives . they 're type i errors .
and if you give them drugs that are dopamine antagonists , they go away .
that is , you decrease the amount of dopamine , and their tendency to see patterns like that decreases .
on the other hand , amphetamines like cocaine are dopamine agonists .
they increase the amount of dopamine .
so you 're more likely to feel in a euphoric state , creativity , find more patterns .
in fact , i saw robin williams recently talk about how he thought he was much funnier when he was doing cocaine , when he had that issue , than now .
so perhaps more dopamine is related to more creativity .
dopamine , i think , changes our signal-to-noise ratio .
that is , how accurate we are in finding patterns .
if it 's too low , you 're more likely to make too many type ii errors .
you miss the real patterns . you do n't want to be too skeptical .
if you 're too skeptical , you 'll miss the really interesting good ideas .
just right , you 're creative , and yet you do n't fall for too much baloney .
too high and maybe you see patterns everywhere .
every time somebody looks at you , you think people are staring at you .
you think people are talking about you .
and if you go too far on that , that 's just simply labeled as madness .
it 's a distinction perhaps we might make between two nobel laureates , richard feynman and john nash .
one sees maybe just the right number of patterns to win a nobel prize .
the other one also , but maybe too many patterns .
and we then call that schizophrenia .
so the signal-to-noise ratio then presents us with a pattern-detection problem .
and of course you all know exactly what this is , right ?
and what pattern do you see here ?
again , i 'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here , causing you conflicting pattern detections .
you know , of course , this is via uno shoes .
these are sandals .
pretty sexy feet , i must say .
maybe a little photoshopped .
and of course , the ambiguous figures that seem to flip-flop back and forth .
it turns out what you 're thinking about a lot influences what you tend to see .
and you see the lamp here , i know .
because the lights on here .
of course , thanks to the environmentalist movement we 're all sensitive to the plight of marine mammals .
so what you see in this particular ambiguous figure is , of course , the dolphins , right ?
you see a dolphin here , and there 's a dolphin , and there 's a dolphin .
that 's a dolphin tail there , guys .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if we can give you conflicting data , again , your acc is going to be going into hyperdrive .
if you look down here , it 's fine . if you look up here , then you get conflicting data .
and then we have to flip the image for you to see that it 's a set up .
the impossible crate illusion .
it 's easy to fool the brain in 2d .
so you say , " aw , come on shermer , anybody can do that in a psych 101 text with an illusion like that . "
well here 's the late , great jerry andrus ' " impossible crate " illusion in 3d , in which jerry is standing inside the impossible crate .
and he was kind enough to post this and give us the reveal .
of course , camera angle is everything . the photographer is over there , and this board appears to overlap with this one , and this one with that one , and so on .
but even when i take it away , the illusion is so powerful because of how are brains are wired to find those certain kinds of patterns .
this is a fairly new one that throws us off because of the conflicting patterns of comparing this angle with that angle .
in fact , it 's the exact same picture side by side .
so what you 're doing is comparing that angle instead of with this one , but with that one .
and so your brain is fooled .
yet again , your pattern detection devices are fooled .
faces are easy to see because we have an additional evolved facial recognition software in our temporal lobes .
here 's some faces on the side of a rock .
i 'm actually not even sure if this is - this might be photoshopped .
but anyway , the point is still made .
now which one of these looks odd to you ?
in a quick reaction , which one looks odd ?
the one on the left . okay . so i 'll rotate it so it 'll be the one on the right .
and you are correct .
a fairly famous illusion - it was first done with margaret thatcher .
now , they trade up the politicians every time .
well , why is this happening ?
well , we know exactly where it happens , in the temporal lobe , right across , sort of above your ear there , in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus .
and there 's two types of cells that do this , that record facial features either globally , or specifically these large , rapid-firing cells , first look at the general face .
so you recognize obama immediately .
and then you notice something quite a little bit odd about the eyes and the mouth .
especially when they 're upside down , you 're engaging that general facial recognition software there .
now i said back in our little thought experiment , you 're a hominid walking on the plains of africa .
is it just the wind or a dangerous predator ?
what 's the difference between those ?
well , the wind is inanimate ; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent .
and i call this process agenticity .
that is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning , intention and agency , often invisible beings from the top down .
this is an idea that we got from a fellow tedster here , dan dennett , who talked about taking the intentional stance .
so it 's a type of that expanded to explain , i think , a lot of different things : souls , spirits , ghosts , gods , demons , angels , aliens , intelligent designers , government conspiracists and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention , are believed to haunt our world and control our lives .
i think it 's the basis of animism and polytheism and monotheism .
it 's the belief that aliens are somehow more advanced than us , more moral than us , and the narratives always are that they 're coming here to save us and rescue us from on high .
the intelligent designer 's always portrayed as this super intelligent , moral being that comes down to design life .
even the idea that government can rescue us - that 's no longer the wave of the future , but that is , i think , a type of agenticity : projecting somebody up there , big and powerful , will come rescue us .
and this is also , i think , the basis of conspiracy theories .
there 's somebody hiding behind there pulling the strings , whether it 's the illuminati or the bilderbergers .
but this is a pattern detection problem , is n't it ?
some patterns are real and some are not .
was jfk assassinated by a conspiracy or by a lone assassin ?
well , if you go there - there 's people there on any given day - like when i went there , here - showing me where the different shooters were .
my favorite one was he was in the manhole .
and he popped out at the last second , took that shot .
but of course , lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy .
so we ca n't just uniformly dismiss all patterns like that .
because , let 's face it , some patterns are real .
some conspiracies really are true .
explains a lot , maybe .
and 9/11 has a conspiracy theory . it is a conspiracy .
we did a whole issue on it .
nineteen members of al queda plotting to fly planes into buildings constitutes a conspiracy .
but that 's not what the " 9/11 truthers " think .
they think it was an inside job by the bush administration .
well , that 's a whole other lecture .
you know how we know that 9/11 was not orchestrated by the bush administration ?
because it worked .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so we are natural-born dualists .
our agenticity process comes from the fact that we can enjoy movies like these .
because we can imagine , in essence , continuing on .
we know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe , you can produce a feeling of out-of-body experiences , near-death experiences , which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there .
or you can do it through loss of consciousness , by accelerating in a centrifuge .
you get a hypoxia , or a lower oxygen .
and the brain then senses that there 's an out-of-body experience .
you can use - which i did , went out and did - michael persinger 's god helmet , that bombards your temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves .
and you get a sense of out-of-body experience .
so i 'm going to end here with a short video clip that sort of brings all this together .
it 's just a minute and a half .
it ties together all this into the power of expectation and the power of belief .
go ahead and roll it .
narrator : this is the venue they chose for their fake auditions for an advert for lip balm .
woman : we 're hoping we can use part of this in a national commercial , right ?
and this is test on some lip balms that we have over here .
and these are our models who are going to help us , roger and matt .
and we have our own lip balm , and we have a leading brand .
would you have any problem kissing our models to test it ?
girl : no .
woman : you would n't ? -lrb- girl : no . -rrb- woman : you 'd think that was fine .
girl : that would be fine . -lrb- woman : okay . -rrb- so this is a blind test .
i 'm going to ask you to go ahead and put a blindfold on .
kay , now can you see anything ? -lrb- girl : no . -rrb- pull it so you ca n't even see down . -lrb- girl : okay . -rrb- woman : it 's completely blind now , right ?
girl : yes . -lrb- woman : okay . -rrb- now , what i 'm going to be looking for in this test is how it protects your lips , the texture , right , and maybe if you can discern any flavor or not .
girl : okay . -lrb- woman : have you ever done a kissing test before ? -rrb- girl : no .
woman : take a step here .
okay , now i 'm going to ask you to pucker up .
pucker up big and lean in just a little bit , okay ?
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- woman : okay .
and , jennifer , how did that feel ?
jennifer : good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- girl : oh my god !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- michael shermer : thank you very much . thank you . thanks .
most of the time , art and science stare at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension .
there is great confusion when the two look at each other .
art , of course , looks at the world through the psyche , the emotions - the unconscious at times - and of course the aesthetic .
science tends to look at the world through the rational , the quantitative - things that can be measured and described - but it gives art a terrific context of understanding .
in the extreme ice survey , we 're dedicated to bringing those two parts of human understanding together , to merging the art and science to the end of helping us understand nature and humanity 's relationship with nature better .
specifically , i as a person who 's been a professional nature photographer my whole adult life , am firmly of the belief that photography , video , film have tremendous powers for helping us understand and shape the way we think about nature and about ourselves in relationship to nature .
in this project , we 're specifically interested , of course , in ice .
i 'm fascinated by the beauty of it , the mutability of it , the malleability of it , and the fabulous shapes in which it can carve itself .
these first images are from greenland .
but ice has another meaning .
ice is the canary in the global coal mine .
it 's the place where we can see and touch and hear and feel climate change in action .
climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world .
whether or not you believe in it is based on your sense of is it raining more or is it raining less ?
is it getting hotter or is it getting colder ?
what do the computer models say about this , that and the other thing ?
all of that , strip it away . in the world of the arctic and alpine environments , where the ice is , it 's real and it 's present .
the changes are happening . they 're very visible .
they 're photographable . they 're measurable .
95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking .
that 's outside antarctica .
95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking , and that 's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing .
there is no significant scientific dispute about that .
it 's been observed , it 's measured , it 's bomb-proof information .
and the great irony and tragedy of our time is that a lot of the general public thinks that science is still arguing about that .
science is not arguing about that .
in these images we see ice from enormous glaciers , ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks , and chunk by chunk by chunk , iceberg by iceberg , turning into global sea level rise .
so , having seen all of this in the course of a 30-year career , i was still a skeptic about climate change until about 10 years ago , because i thought the story of climate change was based on computer models .
i had n't realized it was based on concrete measurements of what the paleoclimates - the ancient climates - were , as recorded in the ice sheets , as recorded in deep ocean sediments , as recorded in lake sediments , tree rings , and a lot of other ways of measuring temperature .
when i realized that climate change was real , and it was not based on computer models , i decided that one day i would do a project looking at trying to manifest climate change photographically .
and that led me to this project .
initially , i was working on a national geographic assignment - conventional , single frame , still photography .
and one crazy day , i got the idea that i should - after that assignment was finished - i got the idea that i should shoot in time-lapse photography , that i should station a camera or two at a glacier and let it shoot every 15 minutes , or every hour or whatever and watch the progression of the landscape over time .
well , within about three weeks , i incautiously turned that idea of a couple of time-lapse cameras into 25 time-lapse cameras .
and the next six months of my life were the hardest time in my career , trying to design , build and deploy out in the field these 25 time-lapse cameras .
they are powered by the sun . solar panels power them .
power goes into a battery . there is a custom made computer that tells the camera when to fire .
and these cameras are positioned on rocks on the sides of the glaciers , and they look in on the glacier from permanent , bedrock positions , and they watch the evolution of the landscape .
we just had a number of cameras out on the greenland ice sheet .
we actually drilled holes into the ice , way deep down below the thawing level , and had some cameras out there for the past month and a half or so .
actually , there 's still a camera out there right now .
in any case , the cameras shoot roughly every hour .
some of them shoot every half hour , every 15 minutes , every five minutes .
here 's a time lapse of one of the time-lapse units being made .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i personally obsessed about every nut , bolt and washer in these crazy things .
i spent half my life at our local hardware store during the months when we built these units originally .
we 're working in most of the major glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere .
our time-lapse units are in alaska , the rockies , greenland and iceland , and we have repeat photography positions , that is places we just visit on an annual basis , in british columbia , the alps and bolivia .
it 's a big undertaking . i stand here before you tonight as an ambassador for my whole team .
there 's a lot of people working on this right now .
we 've got 33 cameras out this moment .
we just had 33 cameras shoot about half an hour ago all across the northern hemisphere , watching what 's happened .
and we 've spent a lot of time in the field . it 's been a fantastic amount of work .
we 've been out for two and a half years , and we 've got about another two and a half years yet to go .
that 's only half our job .
the other half of our job is to tell the story to the global public .
you know , scientists have collected this kind of information off and on over the years , but a lot of it stays within the science community .
similarly , a lot of art projects stay in the art community , and i feel very much a responsibility through mechanisms like ted , and like our relationship with the obama white house , with the senate , with john kerry , to influence policy as much as possible with these pictures as well .
we 've done films . we 've done books . we have more coming .
we have a site on google earth that google earth was generous enough to give us , and so forth , because we feel very much the need to tell this story , because it is such an immediate evidence of ongoing climate change right now .
now , one bit of science before we get into the visuals .
if everybody in the developed world understood this graph , and emblazoned it on the inside of their foreheads , there would be no further societal argument about climate change because this is the story that counts .
everything else you hear is just propaganda and confusion .
key issues : this is a 400,000 year record .
this exact same pattern is seen going back now almost a million years before our current time .
and several things are important .
number one : temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere go up and down basically in sync .
you can see that from the orange line and the blue line .
nature naturally has allowed carbon dioxide to go up to 280 parts per million .
that 's the natural cycle .
goes up to 280 and then drops for various reasons that are n't important to discuss right here .
but 280 is the peak .
right now , if you look at the top right part of that graph , we 're at 385 parts per million .
we are way , way outside the normal , natural variability .
earth is having a fever .
in the past hundred years , the temperature of the earth has gone up 1.3 degrees fahrenheit , .75 degrees celsius , and it 's going to keep going up because we keep dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere .
at the rate of about two and a half parts per million per year .
it 's been a remorseless , steady increase .
we have to turn that around .
that 's the crux , and someday i hope to emblazon that across times square in new york and a lot of other places .
but anyway , off to the world of ice .
we 're now at the columbia glacier in alaska .
this is a view of what 's called the calving face .
this is what one of our cameras saw over the course of a few months .
you see the glacier flowing in from the right , dropping off into the sea , camera shooting every hour .
if you look in the middle background , you can see the calving face bobbing up and down like a yo-yo .
that means that glacier 's floating and it 's unstable , and you 're about to see the consequences of that floating .
to give you a little bit of a sense of scale , that calving face in this picture is about 325 feet tall . that 's 32 stories .
this is not a little cliff . this is like a major office building in an urban center .
the calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off , but in fact , it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet .
so there 's a wall of ice a couple thousand feet deep going down to bedrock if the glacier 's grounded on bedrock , and floating if it is n't .
here 's what columbia 's done . this is in south central alaska .
this was an aerial picture i did one day in june three years ago .
this is an aerial picture we did this year .
that 's the retreat of this glacier .
the main stem , the main flow of the glacier is coming from the right and it 's going very rapidly up that stem .
we 're going to be up there in just a few more weeks , and we expect that it 's probably retreated another half a mile , but if i got there and discovered that it had collapsed and it was five miles further back , i would n't be the least bit surprised .
now it 's really hard to grasp the scale of these places , because as the glaciers - one of the things is that places like alaska and greenland are huge , they 're not normal landscapes - but as the glaciers are retreating , they 're also deflating , like air is being let out of a balloon .
and so , there are features on this landscape .
there 's a ridge right in the middle of the picture , up above where that arrow comes in , that shows you that a little bit .
there 's a marker line called the trim line above our little red illustration there .
this is something no self-respecting photographer would ever do - you put some cheesy illustration on your shot , right ? - and yet you have to do it sometimes to narrate these points .
but , in any case , the deflation of this glacier since 1984 has been higher than the eiffel tower , higher than the empire state building .
a tremendous amount of ice has been let out of these valleys as it 's retreated and deflated , gone back up valley .
these changes in the alpine world are accelerating .
it 's not static .
particularly in the world of sea ice , the rate of natural change is outstripping predictions of just a few years ago , and the processes either are accelerating or the predictions were too low to begin with .
but in any case , there are big , big changes happening as we speak .
so , here 's another time-lapse shot of columbia .
and you see where it ended in these various spring days , june , may , then october .
now we turn on our time lapse .
this camera was shooting every hour .
geologic process in action here .
and everybody says , well do n't they advance in the winter time ?
no . it was retreating through the winter because it 's an unhealthy glacier .
finally catches up to itself , it advances .
and you can look at these pictures over and over again because there 's such a strange , bizarre fascination in seeing these things you do n't normally get to see come alive .
we 've been talking about " seeing is believing " and seeing the unseen at ted global .
that 's what you see with these cameras .
the images make the invisible visible .
these huge crevasses open up .
these great ice islands break off - and now watch this .
this has been the springtime this year - a huge collapse . that happened in about a month , the loss of all that ice .
so that 's where we started three years ago , way out on the left , and that 's where we were a few months ago , the last time we went into columbia .
to give you a feeling for the scale of the retreat , we did another cheesy illustration , with british double-decker buses .
if you line up 295 of those nose to tail , that 's about how far back that was .
it 's a long way .
on up to iceland .
one of my favorite glaciers , the sólheimajökull .
and here , if you watch , you can see the terminus retreating .
you can see this river being formed .
you can see it deflating .
without the photographic process , you would never see this . this is invisible .
you can stand up there your whole life and you would never see this , but the camera records it .
so we wind time backwards now .
that 's where it started .
that 's where it ended a few months ago .
and on up to greenland .
the smaller the ice mass , the faster it responds to climate .
greenland took a little while to start reacting to the warming climate of the past century , but it really started galloping along about 20 years ago .
and there 's been a tremendous increase in the temperature up there .
it 's a big place . that 's all ice .
all those colors are ice and it goes up to about two miles thick , just a gigantic dome that comes in from the coast and rises in the middle .
the one glacier up in greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the ilulissat glacier .
we have some cameras on the south edge of the ilulissat , watching the calving face as it goes through this dramatic retreat .
here 's a two-year record of what that looks like .
helicopter in front of the calving face for scale , quickly dwarfed .
the calving face is four and a half miles across , and in this shot , as we pull back , you 're only seeing about a mile and a half .
so , imagine how big this is and how much ice is charging out .
the interior of greenland is to the right .
it 's flowing out to the atlantic ocean on the left .
icebergs , many , many , many , many times the size of this building , are roaring out to sea .
we just downloaded these pictures a couple weeks ago , as you can see . june 25th , monster calving events happened .
i 'll show you one of those in a second .
this glacier has doubled its flow speed in the past 15 years .
it now goes at 125 feet a day , dumping all this ice into the ocean .
it tends to go in these pulses , about every three days , but on average , 125 feet a day , twice the rate it did 20 years ago .
okay . we had a team out watching this glacier , and we recorded the biggest calving event that 's ever been put on film .
we had nine cameras going .
this is what a couple of the cameras saw .
a 400-foot-tall calving face breaking off .
huge icebergs rolling over .
okay , how big was that ? it 's hard to get it .
so an illustration again , gives you a feeling for scale .
a mile of retreat in 75 minutes across the calving face , in that particular event , three miles wide .
the block was three-fifths of a mile deep , and if you compare the expanse of the calving face to the tower bridge in london , about 20 bridges wide .
or if you take an american reference , to the u.s. capitol building and you pack 3,000 capitol buildings into that block , it would be equivalent to how large that block was .
75 minutes .
now i 've come to the conclusion after spending a lot of time in this climate change world that we do n't have a problem of economics , technology and public policy .
we have a problem of perception .
the policy and the economics and the technology are serious enough issues , but we actually can deal with them .
i 'm certain that we can .
but what we have is a perception problem because not enough people really get it yet .
you 're an elite audience . you get it .
fortunately , a lot of the political leaders in the major countries of the world are an elite audience that for the most part gets it now .
but we still need to bring a lot of people along with us .
and that 's where i think organizations like ted , like the extreme ice survey can have a terrific impact on human perception and bring us along .
because i believe we have an opportunity right now .
we are nearly on the edge of a crisis , but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge of our generation and , in fact , of our century .
this is a terrific , terrific call to arms to do the right thing for ourselves and for the future .
i hope that we have the wisdom to let the angels of our better nature rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when most people think about the beginnings of aids , they 're gonna think back to the 1980s .
and certainly , this was the decade in which we discovered aids and the virus that causes it , hiv .
but in fact this virus crossed over into humans many decades before , from chimpanzees , where the virus originated , into humans who hunt these apes .
this photo was taken before the great depression in brazzaville , congo .
at this time , there were thousands of individuals , we think , that were infected with hiv .
so i have a couple of really important questions for you .
if this virus was in thousands of individuals at this point , why was it the case that it took us until 1984 to be able to discover this virus ?
ok now , more importantly , had we been there in the ' 40s and ' 50s , ' 60s , had we seen this disease , had we understood exactly what was going on with it , how might that have changed and completely transformed the nature of the way this pandemic moved ?
in fact , this is not unique to hiv . the vast majority of viruses come from animals .
and you can kind of think of this as a pyramid of this bubbling up of viruses from animals into human populations .
but only at the very top of this pyramid do these things become completely human .
nevertheless , we spend the vast majority of our energy focused on this level of the pyramid , trying to tackle things that are already completely adapted to human beings , that are going to be very very difficult to address - as we 've seen in the case of hiv .
so during the last 15 years , i 've been working to actually study the earlier interface here - what i 've labeled " viral chatter , " which was a term coined by my mentor don burke .
this is the idea that we can study the sort of pinging of these viruses into human populations , the movement of these agents over into humans ; and by capturing this moment , we might be able to move to a situation where we can catch them early .
ok , so this is a picture , and i 'm going to show you some pictures now from the field .
this is a picture of a central african hunter .
it 's actually a fairly common picture .
one of the things i want you to note from it is blood - that you see a tremendous amount of blood contact .
this was absolutely key for us . this is a very intimate form of connection .
so if we 're going to study viral chatter , we need to get to these populations who have intensive contact with wild animals .
and so we 've been studying people like this individual .
we collect blood from them , other specimens .
we look at the diseases , which are in the animals as well as the humans .
and ideally , this is going to allow us to catch these things early on , as they 're moving over into human populations .
and the basic objective of this work is not to just go out once and look at these individuals , but to establish thousands of individuals in these populations that we would monitor continuously on a regular basis .
when they were sick , we would collect specimens from them .
we would actually enlist them - which we 've done now - to collect specimens from animals .
we give them these little pieces of filter paper .
when they sample from animals , they collect the blood on the filter paper and this allows us to identify yet-unknown viruses from exactly the right animals - the ones that are actually being hunted .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : deep in a remote region of cameroon , two hunters stalk their prey .
their names are patrice and patee .
they 're searching for bush meat ; forest animals they can kill to feed their families .
patrice and patee set out most days to go out hunting in the forest around their homes .
they have a series of traps , of snares that they 've set up to catch wild pigs , snakes , monkeys , rodents - anything they can , really .
patrice and patee have been out for hours but found nothing .
the animals are simply gone .
we stop for a drink of water .
then there is a rustle in the brush .
a group of hunters approach , their packs loaded with wild game .
there 's at least three viruses that you know about , which are in this particular monkey .
nathan wolfe : this species , yeah . and there 's many many more pathogens that are present in these animals .
these individuals are at specific risk , particularly if there 's blood contact , they 're at risk for transmission and possibly infection with novel viruses .
narrator : as the hunters display their kills , something surprising happens .
they show us filter paper they 've used to collect the animals ' blood .
the blood will be tested for zoonotic viruses , part of a program dr. wolfe has spent years setting up .
nw : so this is from this animal right here , greater spot-nosed guenon .
every person who has one of those filter papers has at least , at a minimum , been through our basic health education about the risks associated with these activities , which presumably , from our perspective , gives them the ability to decrease their own risk , and then obviously the risk to their families , the village , the country , and the world .
nw : ok , before i continue , i think it 's important to take just a moment to talk about bush meat . bush meat is the hunting of wild game .
ok ? and you can consider all sorts of different bush meat .
i 'm going to be talking about this .
when your children and grandchildren sort of pose questions to you about this period of time , one of the things they 're gonna ask you , is how it was they we allowed some of our closest living relatives , some of the most valuable and endangered species on our planet , to go extinct because we were n't able to address some of the issues of poverty in these parts of the world .
but in fact that 's not the only question they 're going to ask you about this .
they 're also going to ask you the question that when we knew that this was the way that hiv entered into the human population , and that other diseases had the potential to enter like this , why did we let these behaviors continue ?
why did we not find some other solution to this ?
they 're going to say , in regions of profound instability throughout the world , where you have intense poverty , where populations are growing and you do n't have sustainable resources like this , this is going to lead to food insecurity .
but they 're also going to ask you probably a different question .
it 's one that i think we all need to ask ourselves , which is , why we thought the responsibility rested with this individual here .
now this is the individual - you can see just right up over his right shoulder - this is the individual that hunted the monkey from the last picture that i showed you .
ok , take a look at his shirt .
you know , take a look at his face .
bush meat is one of the central crises , which is occurring in our population right now , in humanity , on this planet .
but it ca n't be the fault of somebody like this .
ok ? and solving it can not be his responsibility alone .
there 's no easy solutions , but what i 'm saying to you is that we neglect this problem at our own peril .
so , in 1998 , along with my mentors don burke and colonel mpoudi-ngole , we went to actually start this work in central africa , to work with hunters in this part of the world .
and my job - at that time i was a post-doctoral fellow , and i was really tasked with setting this up .
so i said to myself , " ok , great - we 're gonna collect all kinds of specimens . we 're gonna go to all these different locations . it 's going to be wonderful . "
you know , i looked at the map ; i picked out 17 sites ; i figured , no problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- needless to say , i was drastically wrong .
this is challenging work to do .
fortunately , i had and continue to have an absolutely wonderful team of colleagues and collaborators in my own team , and that 's the only way that this work can really occur .
we have a whole range of challenges about this work .
one of them is just obtaining trust from individuals that we work with in the field .
the person you see on the right hand side is paul delong-minutu .
he 's one of the best communicators that i 've really ever dealt with .
when i arrived i did n't speak a word of french , and i still seemed to understand what it was he was saying .
paul worked for years on the cameroonian national radio and television , and he spoke about health issues . he was a health correspondent .
so we figured we 'd hire this person - when we got there he could be a great communicator .
when we would get to these rural villages , though , what we found out is that no one had television , so they would n't recognize his face .
but - when he began to speak they would actually recognize his voice from the radio .
and this was somebody who had incredible potential to spread aspects of our message , whether it be with regards to wildlife conservation or health prevention .
often we run into obstacles . this is us coming back from one of these very rural sites , with specimens from 200 individuals that we needed to get back to the lab within 48 hours .
i like to show this shot - this is ubald tamoufe , who 's the lead investigator in our cameroon site .
ubald laughs at me when i show this photo because of course you ca n't see his face .
but the reason i like to show the shot is because you can see that he 's about to solve this problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which - which he did , which he did .
just a few quick before and after shots .
this was our laboratory before .
this is what it looks like now .
early on , in order to ship our specimens , we had to have dry ice . to get dry ice we had to go to the breweries - beg , borrow , steal to get these folks to give it to us .
now we have our own liquid nitrogen .
i like to call our laboratory the coldest place in central africa - it might be .
and here 's a shot of me , this is the before shot of me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no comment .
so what happened ? so during the 10 years that we 've been doing this work , we actually surprised ourselves .
we made a number of discoveries .
and what we 've found is that if you look in the right place , you can actually monitor the flow of these viruses into human populations .
that gave us a tremendous amount of hope .
what we 've found is a whole range of new viruses in these individuals , including new viruses in the same group as hiv - so , brand new retroviruses .
and let 's face it , any new retrovirus in the human population - it 's something we should be aware of .
it 's something we should be following . it 's not something that we should be surprised by .
needless to say in the past these viruses entering into these rural communities might very well have gone extinct .
that 's no longer the case . logging roads provide access to urban areas .
and critically , what happens in central africa does n't stay in central africa .
so , once we discovered that it was really possible that we could actually do this monitoring , we decided to move this from research , to really attempt to phase up to a global monitoring effort .
through generous support and partnership scientifically with google.org and the skoll foundation , we were able to start the global viral forecasting initiative and begin work in four different sites in africa and asia .
needless to say , different populations from different parts of the world have different sorts of contact .
so it 's not just hunters in central africa .
it 's also working in live animal markets - these wet markets - which is exactly the place where sars emerged in asia .
but really , this is just the beginning from our perspective .
our objective right now , in addition to deploying to these sites and getting everything moving , is to identify new partners because we feel like this effort needs to be extended to probably 20 or more sites throughout the world - to viral hotspots - because really the idea here is to cast an incredibly wide net so that we can catch these things , ideally , before they make it to blood banks , sexual networks , airplanes . and that 's really our objective .
there was a time not very long ago when the discovery of unknown organisms was something that held incredible awe for us .
it had potential to really change the way that we saw ourselves , and thought about ourselves .
many people , i think , on our planet right now despair , and they think we 've reached a point where we 've discovered most of the things .
i 'm going tell you right now : please do n't despair .
if an intelligent extra-terrestrial was taxed with writing the encyclopedia of life on our planet , 27 out of 30 of these volumes would be devoted to bacteria and virus , with just a few of the volumes left for plants , fungus and animals , humans being a footnote ; interesting footnote but a footnote nonetheless .
this is honestly the most exciting period ever for the study of unknown life forms on our planet .
the dominant things that exist here we know almost nothing about .
and yet finally , we have the tools , which will allow us to actually explore that world and understand them .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good morning . i think , as a grumpy eastern european , i was brought in to play the pessimist this morning . so bear with me .
well , i come from the former soviet republic of belarus , which , as some of you may know , is not exactly an oasis of liberal democracy .
so that 's why i 've always been fascinated with how technology could actually reshape and open up authoritarian societies like ours .
so , i 'm graduating college and , feeling very idealistic , i decided to join the ngo which actually was using new media to promote democracy and media reform in much of the former soviet union .
however , to my surprise , i discovered that dictatorships do not crumble so easily .
in fact , some of them actually survived the internet challenge , and some got even more repressive .
so this is when i ran out of my idealism and decided to quit my ngo job and actually study how the internet could impede democratization .
now , i must tell you that this was never a very popular argument , and it 's probably not very popular yet with some of you sitting in this audience .
it was never popular with many political leaders , especially those in the united states who somehow thought that new media would be able to do what missiles could n't .
that is , promote democracy in difficult places where everything else has already been tried and failed .
and i think by 2009 , this news has finally reached britain , so i should probably add gordon brown to this list as well .
however , there is an underlying argument about logistics , which has driven so much of this debate . right ?
so if you look at it close enough , you 'll actually see that much of this is about economics .
the cybertopians say , much like fax machines and xerox machines did in the ' 80s , blogs and social networks have radically transformed the economics of protest , so people would inevitably rebel .
to put it very simply , the assumption so far has been that if you give people enough connectivity , if you give them enough devices , democracy will inevitably follow .
and to tell you the truth , i never really bought into this argument , in part because i never saw three american presidents agree on anything else in the past .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , you know , even beyond that , if you think about the logic underlying it , is something i call ipod liberalism , where we assume that every single iranian or chinese who happens to have and love his ipod will also love liberal democracy .
and again , i think this is kind of false .
but i think a much bigger problem with this is that this logic - that we should be dropping ipods not bombs - i mean , it would make a fascinating title for thomas friedman 's new book .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this is rarely a good sign . right ?
so , the bigger problem with this logic is that it confuses the intended versus the actual uses of technology .
for those of you who think that new media of the internet could somehow help us avert genocide , should look no further than rwanda , where in the ' 90s it was actually two radio stations which were responsible for fueling much of the ethnic hatred in the first place .
but even beyond that , coming back to the internet , what you can actually see is that certain governments have mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes . right ?
and they are building what i call the spinternet .
the combination of spin , on the one hand , and the internet on the other .
so governments from russia to china to iran are actually hiring , training and paying bloggers in order to leave ideological comments and create a lot of ideological blog posts to comment on sensitive political issues . right ?
so you may wonder , why on earth are they doing it ?
why are they engaging with cyberspace ?
well my theory is that it 's happening because censorship actually is less effective than you think it is in many of those places .
the moment you put something critical in a blog , even if you manage to ban it immediately , it will still spread around thousands and thousands of other blogs .
so the more you block it , the more it emboldens people to actually avoid the censorship and thus win in this cat-and-mouse game .
so the only way to control this message is actually to try to spin it and accuse anyone who has written something critical of being , for example , a cia agent .
and , again , this is happening quite often .
just to give you an example of how it works in china , for example .
there was a big case in february 2009 called " elude the cat . "
and for those of you who did n't know , i 'll just give a little summary .
so what happened is that a 24-year-old man , a chinese man , died in prison custody .
and police said that it happened because he was playing hide and seek , which is " elude the cat " in chinese slang , with other inmates and hit his head against the wall , which was not an explanation which sat well with many chinese bloggers .
so they immediately began posting a lot of critical comments .
in fact , qq.com , which is a popular chinese website , had 35,000 comments on this issue within hours .
but then authorities did something very smart .
instead of trying to purge these comments , they instead went and reached out to the bloggers .
and they basically said , " look guys . we 'd like you to become netizen investigators . "
so 500 people applied , and four were selected to actually go and tour the facility in question , and thus inspect it and then blog about it .
within days the entire incident was forgotten , which would have never happened if they simply tried to block the content .
people would keep talking about it for weeks .
and this actually fits with another interesting theory about what 's happening in authoritarian states and in their cyberspace .
this is what political scientists call authoritarian deliberation , and it happens when governments are actually reaching out to their critics and letting them engage with each other online .
we tend to think that somehow this is going to harm these dictatorships , but in many cases it only strengthens them .
and you may wonder why .
i 'll just give you a very short list of reasons why authoritarian deliberation may actually help the dictators .
and first it 's quite simple .
most of them operate in a complete information vacuum .
they do n't really have the data they need in order to identify emerging threats facing the regime .
so encouraging people to actually go online and share information and data on blogs and wikis is great because otherwise , low level apparatchiks and bureaucrats will continue concealing what 's actually happening in the country , right ?
so from this perspective , having blogs and wikis produce knowledge has been great .
secondly , involving public in any decision making is also great because it helps you to share the blame for the policies which eventually fail .
because they say , " well look , we asked you , we consulted you , you voted on it .
you put it on the front page of your blog .
well , great . you are the one who is to blame . "
and finally , the purpose of any authoritarian deliberation efforts is usually to increase the legitimacy of the regimes , both at home and abroad .
so inviting people to all sorts of public forums , having them participate in decision making , it 's actually great .
because what happens is that then you can actually point to this initiative and say , " well , we are having a democracy . we are having a forum . "
just to give you an example , one of the russian regions , for example , now involves its citizens in planning its strategy up until year 2020 .
right ? so they can go online and contribute ideas on what that region would look like by the year 2020 .
i mean , anyone who has been to russia would know that there was no planning in russia for the next month .
so having people involved in planning for 2020 is not necessarily going to change anything , because the dictators are still the ones who control the agenda .
just to give you an example from iran , we all heard about the twitter revolution that happened there , but if you look close enough , you 'll actually see that many of the networks and blogs and twitter and facebook were actually operational .
they may have become slower , but the activists could still access it and actually argue that having access to them is actually great for many authoritarian states .
and it 's great simply because they can gather open source intelligence .
in the past it would take you weeks , if not months , to identify how iranian activists connect to each other .
now you actually know how they connect to each other by looking at their facebook page .
i mean kgb , and not just kgb , used to torture in order to actually get this data .
now it 's all available online .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cybertopians made is when it comes to digital natives , people who have grown up online .
we often hear about cyber activism , how people are getting more active because of the internet .
rarely hear about cyber hedonism , for example , how people are becoming passive .
why ? because they somehow assume that the internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets , while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography .
that 's not an option being considered too strongly .
so for every digital renegade that is revolting in the streets of tehran , there may as well be two digital captives who are actually rebelling only in the world of warcraft .
and this is realistic . and there is nothing wrong about it because the internet has greatly empowered many of these young people and it plays a completely different social role for them .
if you look at some of the surveys on how the young people actually benefit from the internet , you 'll see that the number of teenagers in china , for example , for whom the internet actually broadens their sex life , is three times more than in the united states .
so it does play a social role , however it may not necessarily lead to political engagement .
so the way i tend to think of it is like a hierarchy of cyber-needs in space , a total rip-off from abraham maslow .
but the point here is that when we get the remote russian village online , what will get people to the internet is not going to be the reports from human rights watch .
it 's going to be pornography , " sex and the city , " or maybe watching funny videos of cats .
so this is something you have to recognize .
so what should we do about it ?
well i say we have to stop thinking about the number of ipods per capita and start thinking about ways in which we can empower intellectuals , dissidents , ngos and then the members of civil society .
because even what has been happening up ' til now with the spinternet and authoritarian deliberation , there is a great chance that those voices will not be heard .
so i think we should shatter some of our utopian assumptions and actually start doing something about it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there 's an old saying , " just because you ca n't see something , does n't mean it 's not there . "
my work is - it 's a reflection of myself .
what i wanted to do is to show the world that the little things can be the biggest things .
we all seem to think that , you know , if we look down on the ground , there 's nothing there .
and we use the word " nothing . "
nothing does n't exist , because there is always something .
my mother told me that , when i was a child , that i should always respect the little things .
what made me do this work ? i shall go into my story .
this all started when i was age five .
what made me do it ? at school , i will admit this : academically , i could n't express myself .
so i was , more or less , classed as " nothing . "
my world was seen as less .
so i decided i did n't really want to be a part of that world .
i thought , i need to retreat into something else .
so when my mother used to take me to school , she thought i was at school , and i used to do a u-turn , when her back was turned , and run off and hide in the shed at the back of the garden .
now , the one time i was in the shed , and my mother suspected something , thinking i was at school .
my mother was like the woman in tom and jerry .
so you 'd just see her feet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was hiding in the shed , like that .
and all of a sudden ...
and then i saw her legs .
and then she said - grabbed me like that , because my mother was quite big - and she lifted me up and she says , " how come you 're not at school ? "
i told her i could n't face it because the way the teacher was treating me , ridiculing me , and using me as an example of failure .
so i told her .
at that age , obviously , i could n't express it that way , but i told her i did n't feel right .
and then she just said , " you 're going back to school tomorrow . "
and walked off . and i did n't expect that , because i expected one of these ...
but i did n't get it .
so i 'm sitting there thinking .
and as i looked down on the ground , i noticed there was some ants running around .
and i went into this little fantasy world .
and i thought , " these ants , are they looking for the queen ant ?
or do they need somewhere to live ? "
so i thought " perhaps , if i made these ants some apartments , they 'll move in . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i did .
and how i set about that , i got some splinters of wood .
and i sliced the little splinters of wood with a broken shard of glass , constructed this little apartment .
well it looked like a little shanty shed when i 'd finished .
but i thought , perhaps the ant wo n't know , it 'll probably move in .
and so they did .
that was a bit crude , at the time . and i made all these little apartments and little merry-go-rounds , seesaws and swings , little ladders .
and then i encouraged the ants to come ' round by putting sugar and things like that .
and then i sat down and all the ants came along .
and all i could hear was " is this for us ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i say , " yes , they 're all for you . "
and they moved in , and decided not to pay me any rent .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and from there i was watching this little world .
it became part of me .
when i discovered that i had this gift , i wanted to experiment with this world that we ca n't see .
so i realized that there was more to life than just everything that we see around us that 's huge .
so i started to educate myself on this molecular level .
and as i got older , i continued . i showed my mother .
my mother told me to take it smaller .
now i shall show you something here .
and i 'll explain .
as you can see , that 's a pinhead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now that is called the huf haus .
the gentleman who commissioned me to do this was a gentleman called peter huf .
and he says to me " willard , can you put my house on a pinhead ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i say , " how are you going to fit in there ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then he said to me , " i do n't believe you can do it . can you really do it ? "
and i says , " well , try me . "
and then he said , " but i do n't believe that you can do this . " so i said , " ok . "
so , to cut a long story short , i went home , went underneath the microscope , and i crushed up a piece of glass , crushed it up .
and underneath the microscope there were splinters of glass .
some of them were quite jagged .
so i was crushing up these pieces of glass , which , as you can see , that 's the actual frame of the house .
and the actual roof is made up of a fiber , which i found in my sister 's old teddy bear .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i got the teddy bear and i said , " do you mind if i pull out one of your fibers ? "
so i did .
and i looked at it beneath the microscope . and some of it was flat .
so i decided to slice these up with the tool that i make by - i sharpen the end of a needle into a blade .
and then i actually slow down my whole nervous system .
and then i work between my heartbeat , i have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move .
and at the same time i have to watch i do n't inhale my own work , at the same time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- because that has happened to me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what i did , like i said , come back to the glass .
i found these little bits of glass .
and i had to make them square .
so i 'm thinking " how can i do this ? "
so what i did , i got an oilstone . broke the edge of an oilstone off .
and what i did , i took pieces of glass . and i started to rub them .
i used a little tweezer which i made from a hair clip .
and i built rubber around the end of the tweezer so it would n't crush the glass .
and then i started rubbing , very very gently , till some of the edges were quite square . and then i constructed it .
and how i constructed it , is by making grooves in the top of the pinhead .
and then pushing the glass in with its own friction .
and as i was doing it , what happened ?
the instrument that i used turned into a catapult .
and it went like this ...
and then that was it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- gone .
so i 'm thinking , " mr. huf is n't going to be very happy when i told him his house has gone to another , into the atmosphere somewhere . "
so to cut the story short , i decided that i had to go back and do it .
so i found some more . and i decided to , sort of , construct it very , very slowly , holding my breath , working between my heartbeat , and making sure everything is leveled .
because it 's such a small sculpture , nothing can go wrong .
and i decided to build it up .
then i used fibers out of my jumper , which i held and stretched .
and made the beams going around the house .
and the actual windows and the balcony had to be sort of constructed .
i used a money spider 's web to actually attach certain things , which sent me insane .
but i managed to do it .
and when i finished it , i came back the next day .
i noticed that the house was occupied .
have we ever heard of a dust mite ?
darren dust mite and his family moved in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so basically i 'd completed the house .
and there you are .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- right . as you can see , bart simpson is having a little argument .
i think they 're arguing about the space on the pin .
there 's not enough room for the two of them .
so i did n't think he was going to throw bart off .
i think he was just warning him actually .
but this one was made out of a nylon tag out of my shirt .
what i did , i plucked the tag out and put it underneath the microscope .
i used the needle which has got a slight blade on the end .
can anybody see the blade on the end of that needle ?
audience : no .
ww : so what i did is the same process where i just kind of hold my breath and just work away very , very slowly , manipulating the plastic , cutting it , because it behaves different .
whenever you work on that level , things behave different .
because it 's on this molecular level things change and they act different .
and sometimes they turn into little catapults and things go up in the air .
and , you know , all different things happen .
but i had to make a little barrier , going around it , out of cellophane , to stop it moving .
then static electricity set in .
and it went ...
and i 'm trying to remove it . and the static is interfering with everything .
so there is sweat dripping off my head , because i have to carve homer simpson like that , in that position .
and after i 've cut out the shape , then i have to make sure that there is room for bart 's neck .
so after i 've done the same thing , then i have to paint it .
and after i 've actually sculpted them , i have to paint them .
i experimented with a - i found a dead fly .
and i plucked the hair off the fly 's head .
decided to make a paintbrush .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i would never do it to a living fly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i 've heard a fly in pain .
and they go " meow ! ow ! "
even though they get on our nerves , i would never kill an insect because , " all creatures great and small " - there is a hymn that says that .
so what i decided to do is to pluck fine hair out of my face .
and i looked at it underneath the microscope .
that was the paintbrush .
and whilst i 'm painting i have to be very careful , because the paint starts to turn into little blobs .
and it starts to dry very quickly .
so i have to be very quick .
if i 'm not , it will end up looking not like what it 's supposed to look like .
it could end up looking like humpty dumpty or somebody else .
so i have to be very very careful .
this one took me approximately , i would say , six to seven weeks .
my work , rough estimate , sometimes five , six to seven weeks ; you ca n't always anticipate .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as you can see , that 's charlton heston brought down to size .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he says to me , " willard " - you can see him saying , " why me ? "
i says , " i enjoyed your film . that 's why . "
as you can see , there 's an aphid fly there .
that 's just to show the scale and the actual size of the sculpture .
i would say it probably measures ...
a quarter of a millimeter .
in america they say a period stop .
so say if you cut a period stop in half , a full stop , that 's about the size of the whole thing .
it 's made - the chariot is made of gold .
and charlton heston is made of a floating fiber , which i took out of the air .
when the sunlight comes through the window you see these little fibers .
and what i normally do is walk ' round a room - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - trying to find one . and then i put it underneath the microscope .
i remember one time i was doing it , and the window was open .
and there was a lady standing by the bus stop .
and she saw me walking around like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then she looked at me .
and then i went ...
and then she went , " hmm , ok , he 's not mad . "
yeah , to actually do this thing - the actual chariot is made of gold .
i had a 24-karat gold ring .
and i cut off a little flake of gold .
and i bent it ' round , and made it into the chariot .
and the horse is made from nylon .
and the spider 's web is for the reins on the horse .
to get the symmetrical shape of the horse was very difficult , because i had to get the horse to rear up and look as though it was in some kind of action .
when i did this one , a gentleman seen it and said to me , " there 's no way you can do this , you must have used some kind of machine .
there 's no way a man can do that .
it must be a machine . "
so i says , " ok then , if you say it 's a machine ... "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- that one took me approximately six weeks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the most famous statue in the world .
this one , i would say , was a serious challenge .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i had to put the torch on the top .
that one is , more or less , the same type of process .
the bottom of it is carved from a grain of sand , because i wanted to get a bit of the stone effect .
i used a microscopic shard of diamond to actually carve the actual base .
well , i can look at this one and i can be very proud of this , because that statue has always sort of kept an image in my head of , you know , the beginning of people coming to america .
so it 's sort of ellis island , and seeing america for the first time .
and that 's the first thing they saw .
so i wanted to have that little image .
and this is it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we all know that is the hulk .
i wanted to create movement in the eye of a needle .
because we know we see needles , but people are n't familiar with the eye of a needle apart from putting a thread through it .
so i broke the needle .
and made a needle look like the hulk 's broken it .
it 's - i had to make little holes in the base of the needle , to shove his feet in .
so most of my work , i do n't use glue .
they go in with their own friction .
and that 's how i managed to do it .
as you can see , he 's looking at the moment . he 's got a little grimace on his face .
and his mouth must be probably about three microns .
so the eyes are probably about one micron or something .
that ship there , that 's made from 24-karat gold .
and i normally rig it with the web of a money spider .
but i had to rig it with strands of glue .
because the web of the spider , it was sending me insane , because i could n't get the web to move off .
and that 's 24-karat gold . and it 's constructed . i built it .
constructed each plank of gold .
and the whole thing is sort of symmetrical .
the flag had to be made out of little strands of gold .
it 's almost like doing a surgical operation to get this thing right .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as you can see , dressage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's something i wanted to do just to show how i could get the symmetrical shape .
the actual rigging on the reins on the horse are made from the same sort of thing .
and that was done with a particle from my shirt .
and the pinhead i 've made green around there by scraping the particles off a green shirt and then pressed onto the needle .
it 's very painstaking work , but the best things come in small packages .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bruno giussani : willard wigan !
-lrb- applause -rrb-